Irritated and my good mood gone, I delivered the computer, went back to Bridgetown and bought Hackmaster, then returned to finish my defragging/maintenance job. Tired and in a poor mood, I drove back to the office, only to discover that I had left the district cell phone at the school out in the sticks, and also that there was an emergency printer job that I had to do in North Portland, way out of my way. Well, fortunately, a coworker went to get the phone, and I went all the way to the school, only to find that the "emergency" originated because the printer had not actually been hooked up to the computer. *sigh*. One last job -- I had to go make sure that a principal's docking station hadn't been damaged by a burst pipe, but by the time I got to this final school at around 4:20, everyone had gone. I hiked around looking for people, then finally gave up. It was after 4:30, and it would probably take me 45-60 minutes to get back to the office, and I was to go home at 6pm. I finally gave up and decided to just go home since I was not that far away. I got home, shaking with low blood sugar and finally ate, then instantly fell asleep for an hour.

And that was about 90 minutes ago. I did some cleanup on the fiction, rpg and Rie pages, and now I'm whining about my crappy day. And I need dinner. Anyway, at least it's over. I go to my diabetes class tomorrow. Wot fun... More later. Love to all...

New domain? Of course -- you're on it, right? I am now fully hosted with my own domain, bought and paid for. So even if I have to move again, wulfarchives.com will move with me, and we won't fall out of touch again. I hope that everyone who's reading this was with me at brainkick; if not, I hope you find me soon. I was able to salvage most of my old mailing list, so I hope everyone who needs to has heard about the new site and has come here to check it out.

I would say "what a long strange trip it's been," but that might make you think I was a Deadhead, and I don't really want that. Fact is, about three months ago, right after our triumphal webcam-chat nite with me and a naked Rie, my host forgot to pay his registration fee, and the whole site went down. He assured me that he would get things straightened out soon, but days stretched into weeks, and a month or so ago I finally decided that enough was enough. If you want to get anything done, you've got to do it yourself, so I paid for this new domain and put the old files back up. I even awarded myself the coveted e-mail address of wulf@wulfarchives.com. That's not to say that I compare myself to the guy TOO much, but I figure if anyone can steal that handle, it's me.

Well, that wasn't exactly perfect, as a bunch of graphics were missing, links were broken, and the whole site was only marginally functional. As a lot of work had accumulated (see below), I wasn't able to get to updating the site immediately and instead hoped that it would suffice until I found the time to do some html-ing.

Now I'm in the process of doing that, and in addition I'm bringing my journal up to date, so you all can know what a pain the last few months has been. Well, it's been enormously fun, too, so I shouldn't complain.

As you folks all should know, I had moved up to a pretty decent job fixing computers for the local school district. That remains a pretty sweet deal, but the fact is that I've added a second job to the resume, that of (wait for it...) Line Developer for Sword and Sorcery Studios! Now, I've mentioned this before, but I'll recap so you don't have to go back and look: SSS is an imprint of and distributed by White Wolf Games (the guys who make Vampire: the Rose Parade, Werewolf: the Porky Lips, Hunter: the Sickening and, of course, Noun: the Verb), and is their entry into the d20 (aka D&D the Open Source Game) sweepstakes. I am now the guy who oversees and, to some extent, controls the Scarred Lands campaign setting, a place of gods and monsters, barbarians and babes, big fighters and big fish, and an overall cool place to game (a bad place to live, mind you, but that's what makes it interesting).

Since we last spoke I have been engaged in developing several products, among them the upcoming Mithril: City of the Golem (is that a cool cover illo or what?), as well as Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers, Creature Collection II, Warrens of the Ratmen, the Wise and the Wicked and the first product that I have developed entirely on my own, The Divine and the Defeated. And believe me, this has been WORK. Over the past couple of months, I have worked 8-10 hours per day, then come home and worked another 2-4 hours, plus weekends and holidays. And that leaves precious little time for Wulf or Alex St. John. I have finally put one of the biggest projects behind me, and now have a couple of days to catch my breath, allowing me to get in touch with  you lot, and make a few long-overdue improvements to the website.

The other aspect of the new job is that I get to attend GenCon in Milwaukee this August, with WW picking up everything but my airfare (more than equitable, I would say). I get to hang out, work the booth, talk to fans, make contacts with other industry people, and get tons of swag before anyone else in the world. Sweet deal, huh? Just me and 30,000 unwashed, socially inept gamer geeks. These are my people, and verily I shall lead them to the promised land.

On the downside, I got some sobering news a month or so ago... It seems that a lifetime of bad eating habits coupled with my questionable genetics have combined to give me diabetes, an illness that (our international readers may not know) is currently epidemic in the US, a result of our bad diets and soft lifestyles. I have, however, determined to knock this thing on its sugar-coated ass, and have cut my blood sugar from over 300 to around 130 in just a month through diet alone, without resorting to insulin or glucophage (not that those are bad things, but I've set a personal goal to avoid them as long as possible).

The change in my life is phenomenal. I feel healthier, more awake, less irritable, and above all, less depressed. I had been sick for so long that I thought it was normal, and just took the weird behavior effects as my own weakness. Actually, it WAS my own weakness, but it was a physical weakness, not a moral one. And the many, many things that I said and did over the past 3-5 years are now a heluva lot easier to comprehend, especially when I'm told that I probably had this for a long time undiagnosed.

Of course, my first thoughts were of how much this had cost me. Fact is that at the few times when I've had crises over the last month -- extremely low or high blood sugar -- the sensations have been distressingly familiar... weakness, fatigue, ill-temper, depression. All of these I felt regularly, especially in the context of my marriage and my relationship with Clio and Devon. And as it had crept up on me gradually, I didn't realize how very sick I was. I kept hoping that a new job, a new home, a change of pace might "snap me out" of my doldrums, but it never happened. I even went on Prozac hoping to improve my mood, but it didn't help. I spent months popping happy pills when I really should have been cutting sugar out of my diet.

And yes, it cost me. Friendships, opportunities, and worst of all, my marriage. I am convinced now that at least half of the issues between me and Clio can be traced directly to my illness, and of the remainder, a further half were related indirectly. That leaves about a quarter of my original issues as mine and mine alone. A lot less daunting a task, when you think of it, but when taken in the context of an undiagnosed and potentially fatal chronic illness... well, the accumulated mountain of problems looked insurmountable. And in the end it was.

My best friend Dale told me about something that I'd said to him years ago, when he was feeling overwhelmed by all the different aspects of trying to be a writer... character and plot and outlines and story and theme and dialog and voice and grammar and punctuation, from the trivial to the critical. He felt blocked and unable to move forward, and I told him he was like a centipede who had suddenly become aware of all his legs.

I had forgotten that I'd told Dale that, and now I'm kind of impressed with myself.

And also kind of sad, since that's what I was like, too, for so long, feeling overwhelmed by everything around me, tripping over my feet and unable to move out of the way of an oncoming truck. Well, I got squashed, and now I can at least look back at things and see that perhaps I wasn't as much to blame as I thought I was. To use another analogy, I've spent the last year and a half playing 52-pickup with my life, and I feel as if I've finally gotten all the cards back.

Unfortunately, many of those cards are now missing, and I don't think there's anything I can do to get them back.

In a way, I might almost have preferred it if my marriage had ended because I was an asshole. That way I could have seen at least some karmic justice, looked myself in the mirror and said, "You deserved that." But now, though I can at least take some comfort in the notion that I didn't do anything wrong (or at least not AS wrong as I thought I had), I must also accept the fact that it all happened for nothing. It happened because I was sick and didn't know it.

Well, I suppose that it can't be helped now. That particular Rubicon was crossed some time ago, though I wasn't the one who crossed it.

There's much more to tell. Devon got smashing grades at school, and only made me fear for her life once this year (when she played hookey with several friends and I got a frantic call from the school at work). She'll be accompanying me to Orycon this November, her first SF convention (she'll be a geek yet, I swear). Rie and I will be attending the Womad festival at the end of this month in Seattle, and will hopefully be joined by Magen (drool, you bastards!) on Sunday when Peter Gabriel performs in North America for the first time in eight years (nyah! nyah! nyah!) with Afro-Celt Sound System. Clio will be attending as well, and Dev will probably end up shuttling back and forth between us.

And oh, yeah... I almost forgot... All you folks who kept telling me that I should be published... my first piece of real fiction is appearing in White Wolf's first Scarred Lands anthology coming out (I hope) this fall. No title or price yet, but it's probably going to happen (the story hasn't been officially accepted yet, but I'm reasonably confident). My tale deals with a sensitive and angst-ridden paladin (hell, it's White Wolf... how can you AVOID angst?), his disillusionment and ultimate redemption, his relationship with his slain father, his thoughts on the futility of mortal existence and the fight against an enemy who never seems to grow weaker... All in all a pretty decent story, if I do say so myself. It's called "In Sunlight and Shadow" and you HAVE to rush out and buy it :)

I think I've talked enough for now. But I'll close with one more thing.

As you might or might not know, I'm not the most religious person in the world (though Rie appears determined to bash me over the head until I finally acknowledge that I am indeed a spiritual creature who secretly believes in something greater than himself, reluctant as he is to admit it), but I reflect back on an incident that happened to me in 1979, an incident that given the route that the rest of my life has taken, might be seen as one of the few truly religious experiences in my life.

A long time ago, a funny-looking club-footed guy who limped up to me at a gaming convention early one morning, playing a bamboo flute and looking for a place to have breakfast told me all about science fiction cons, Rocky Horror Picture Show, how cool Dungeons and Dragons really was, and how easy it was to score with hot babes if you were intelligent and interesting. He also told me that in youth I was the Fool, but in old age I would be the Hermit, who he said was merely the Fool at the end of his journey, having made his mistakes and learned wisdom.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to that guy. And at other times I wonder if very old beings still wander around, possibly in the guise of gamers or science fiction geeks, imparting insights to those who will listen, explaining truths that only become manifest with the passing of years.

And I wonder if maybe that day, 22 years ago, I met one of them.