It's Friday, yay! I've been working hard on Book 4, and am almost 1/4 of the way finished with the rough draft. Right now, I'm easily on schedule for a mid-May release! I also have some exciting news waiting in the wings about my next series! Stay tuned.
For fun, I decided to color my hair again. As you know, it was purple, then I went teal, and now, I've gone PINK! Here's a pic I took right after I finished this morning:
Sometimes, you just need a change. I love that I have the freedom to change my looks whenever I want to. Just another perk of being a writer without a full-time office job or desk job or teaching job or whatever. It makes me happy :)
Also, we have a house full of poodles. A friend of ours went to Vegas this weekend with his wife and parents, and his parents have three poodles. They don't do so well at the kennel, so they asked us if we could keep them for a few days. How could I resist? They are super cute! I love their little waddly bodies and their super curly hair. Here is a pic I took of them a few minutes ago, all tuckered out from playing with me for a little while.
I'm excited to have them here for a little while. Snickerdoodle, my pom, doesn't really know what to make of them. She's decided to stay in her own room upstairs most of the time, but she's being sweet when she says hello to them. No doggie fights or anything yet, which is good.
In other news, G and I are playing Everquest II again. <3 As anyone who's been following my blog for a while knows, G and I first met playing that game. It's an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) sort of like World of Warcraft. Only better. When we first met, G and I spent a lot of time playing together. Doing quests. Helping each other. Raiding and grouping. Etc. Then, we moved to a station exchange server where you can buy and sell money and characters for real world cash, and we kind of switched our focus to making money for a while. It helped us pay for our wedding big time! The downside there was that we were spending less time just playing together for fun.
Last fall, we stopped playing all together. Canceled our accounts and everything. Then, over Christmas break, we bought World of Warcraft and decided to give it a go. Well, G maxed out his character in less than a month. Due to me writing a lot and not having much time to play, I was still stuck in the 40's. That game doesn't make it really possible to group and quest together in low levels that way EQ2 does, so we weren't spending any time together playing, which sucked. Sooo, long story short, last weekend we decided to go back to Everquest II! This time we're playing on a regular, non-exchange server, and we're leveling up together. He's playing a tank, and I'm playing a healer. It's been fun. We're back to doing the things we used to do together when we first were long-distance dating. Only this time we're sitting next to each other. :) It's awesome.
I'm looking forward to a good weekend of poodles, gaming, and writing!
A Walk on the Pink Side
Everquest II: Sentinel's Fate Expansion Released Today
Is it crazy that I'm this excited about a game?
This is a question I've been asking myself for the past several years, really. I never saw myself as a gamer. Sure, we had the Nintendo when I was little, just like everyone else. And I definitely enjoyed playing it. But once I got a little bit older, then went off to college, there were so many other things I wanted to do with my time. I didn't have a PC in college, or a console, for that matter.
Several years later, however, I met my crazy ex-husband, who then introduced me to the world of gaming. Come to think of it, that may have been the only good thing about that entire relationship. One night when we were browsing through games at a closing CompuServe or some such store that had PC games but was going out of business (50% all games!), he picked up a copy of Everquest and said we should play. Indirectly, that moment changed my life - in ways I never could have imagined at the time.
Everquest - sometimes lovingly referred to in the gaming world as Ever-crack - became an addiction. I never really got that good at the first game, but I certainly had fun and enjoyed meeting people. After a year or two of playing, however, I was at a max level of something small like 40. I quit playing at the time, but by then I was a gamer for life. I moved on to console games and single player games on my PC, but I missed the MMORPG world (for those of you who don't know what that means - it stands for Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game).
When Everquest II came out in the fall of 2004, I knew I wanted to play. That was shortly after a house fire had me living in a hotel. True to form, of course, my ex-husband had a top notch laptop and played the game from release, while we couldn't afford for me to get a computer even though mine had been destroyed in the fire. But that's a dead issue at this point. The point is that when I got back on my feet and into my home a few months later, I bought a new computer and a copy of the then brand new EQ2. I fell in love with the game instantly. Little did I know the game would lead to the greatest love of my life - my amazing husband G.
G and I have both been playing Everquest II since about launch time in 2004/2005. Yes, that's a good 5 years of playing this game, with slight breaks in between to try other games. I owe a lot to this game, seeing how I met my husband while playing, and everytime a new expansion comes out, I get excited. Today is such a day. It's been almost a year and a half since the last expansion, The Shadow Odyssey, and this will be the first time in over two years that the level cap has raised - going up to lvl 90 this time. I love new expansions. Shiny new content and lots of new quests and armor and tradeskilling items.
I'm off to a Sony Chat about the expansion and then I'll be off to Gamestop to pick up our copies as soon as they open. Happy Day!
Mythical!
Last night was a big night for me! I know how silly it sounds to be excited about a game and to consider it a part of your life, but anyone who plays WoW or EQ2 or any other MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) understands that online gaming is more than just a game. It's a community. There is an economy, a social structure, goal-setting, teamwork, and so much more.
When most people turn to TV at night, sitting in front of the tube like a vegetable, stuffing their face with potato chips or soda, I turn to my computer and to Everquest 2. It's not something my parents did, because games like this simply didn't exist back when they were younger. And because of its new-ness, some people want to judge it or laugh at gaming. They don't understand it or consider it important.
But the way I see it is this. It's almost like belonging to a club. Let's say you joined a scrapbooking club with 23 other people from around the country, promising to get together on a nightly or weekly basis to put together photographs. Over the course of time, you would develop goals as a group, get to know and love each other, and you would look forward to going there to be with these people and do something you enjoy doing every night. Gaming online is like that, only in a virtual world.
Anyway, in Everquest 2, there is a long and difficult questline for a weapon that is 
"Mythical". Each class (guardian, templar, monk, swashbuckler,etc.) has their own Mythical weapon, and it is by far, the best weapon for you in the game. Mythical weapons were first introduced into the game with an expansion called Ruins of Kunark, that came out November of 2007. After all this time, I still haven't been able to get mine. Since then, I have changed servers, brought up a completely new character named "Fiahla" on the Crushbone server (she's a brigand). Last night, however, I finally got my mythical weapon!
What's so exciting about it for me is that 24 of us had to work really hard to get the update for me. It's taken weeks for us to work our way through these mobs in order to update the quest. It's simply not something you can do on your own, it takes teamwork. And while some of the people there last night were not the best players in the game, I think G and I have found a good core of people to play with in our newest guild.
THe other fun part was seeing my name go up across the screen. When someone gets their mythical weapon, a message goes up in orange across everyone's screen across the world who is logged in to that server saying "Norrath is still for a moment, as Fiahla of
I can't wait to get on later tonight and try out my new weapon in another raid or group. I know it will make my character even better, making the game more fun in the long run. :)
New Expansion for EQ2: The Shadow Odyssey
Once a year, Everquest II devotees like myself look forward to the release of a new expansion. This year, it happens next Tuesday... or maybe Wednesday. G and I went in to Game Stop to pre-order two copies and they told us to pick it up on the 19th. Officially, however, the game was supposed to come out on the 18th. So... it comes out on one or the other.
Anyway, the expansion is the fourth for EQ2 and is called "The Shadow Odyssey". For the first time, there is no character level increase included with the expansion and I am anxious to see how that plays out. I just hope there will be enough content to keep us all busy without the goal of getting new levels. Maybe they partially did that to give any newcomers to the game more of a chance to catch up. I heard that originally, the developers planned to take the character level cap all the way up to 200 eventually. Right now, the highest level you can get is 80, so we're a long way from that yet.
Everquest 2 also officially just celebrated its 4th year, and both G and I have been playing pretty much the whole time, with small breaks here and there. Of course, four years ago, we didn't know the other one existed. I remember very clearly that when this game came out, I was living in a Days Inn with my ex-husband because of a house fire. We didn't have enough money at the time to get two computers, and of course he insisted that he had to have one. How much work he ever did on that computer, I'll never know, but I have a feeling it was less work than it's taken me to write this entry. He certainly played a lot of EQ2 though. When we moved back into our house in December, I got a new computer and also started playing. If someone had told me back then that I would someday meet the true love of my life while playing that game, and that being with him would make me truly happy, I would have never believed them. Yet, four years later, here we are. It's amazing how life can change so much in such a short period of time.
