First of all, I must convey this message from Mother Mayhem :

Hello, my beautiful children. It’s your Mother Mayhem. And I’m here to tell you that while NaNoWriMo has ended, our stories have not. There are many more tales to tell of life in the System, and rest assured, more will be told. Until then, remember that I love you, I’m proud of you, and you are truly beautiful. 

I’m still working out what, exactly, I am going to be doing with my time now that I am not, technically, obliged to write 2000 words of prose a day,.

I want the energy to keep going. I’ve been a happier person than usual in the last month. Having such a potent outlet for all those words in my head has been good for me. I feel like some of the messy fog in my head has gone away, perhaps because it was no longer needed. The word-pressure in my mind has slackened and I really do not want it to return to pre-November levels.

And there are so many questions I have not yet answered. Who won, the Black Star or Sun Pony? What’s the family that forgot to arm their alarm before going on vacation doing during this big old orgy?^[1] What’s up with the Barnacled Hermit? What was his homecoming like?  Was he overjoyed or did he get freaked out and hide again?

Amd for Shor’s sake, how the hell does a genderless robot get laid?

I said everyone had amazing sex, and he’s definitely one of the 217, so he had amazing sex too. But how?

I don’t know yet but it will involve the word “dongle”. Of this, I am certain.

And so forth and so on. I need – on a personal level – to write satisfying conclusions to all the dramatic threads I have left dangling.

And besides, I have grown quite fond of many of my characters. Even poor Eegee. It’s not his fault that he’s insane with a particularly nasty form of Borderline Personality Disorder. And with help from Eric and Bumper, he will get better.

As long as I write it that way. And I will.

And what happened to Tiny, Slipper, and Wembley after they got rich and famous? What did they do with the money? How did they handle being a seven day sensation and then being forgotten?

And what do robots spend their money on, anyway? They don’t need food, water, or rest. They do not need homes as humans would define them. They have almost none of the passions that drive human beings to do what they do every day.

So what would they spend it on?

Very fancy metal polish?

And what of the Four Cool People Who Travel Together? Did Tammy react with horror when she learned about what a bitch her “friend” had been when she was playing Tammy’s character? Did it make things “weird” with the other players?

And what does one do with several tons of dead dragon, anyhow?

And so forth and so on.

So I refuse to abandon my pet universe. I will add conclusions to all the storylines eventually. And of course, in a world made of fictions, there are an infinite number of possible stories to be told.

As shared universes go, it’s a rather flexible one.

By design, of course,

And I promise that I will provide an explanation for how the System came to be and what happened to it after the operator died and so forth and so on.

But not for a long time. There’s too much fun to be had before then.

As for the nature of the project itself, I feel that I did succeed in writing only the sorts of things I enjoyed writing.

That didn’t magically turn it from “work” into “play”, of course. That’s a myth peddled by big corporations and greedy universities and desperate guidance counselors.

Life is work. There is no escaping it. Life takes effort and focus and doing things you would rather not be doing. You have to invest your energies in life with no gaurantee of a solid return on your investment.

The real mistake in modern culture is that people think that “work” is the opposite of “fun”. As if having fun was something the universe owed them and therefore it’s some kind of injustice that they should have to do anything in order to get it.

It’s school that does it. The modern North American model of education is so poorly designed that it teaches people to divide their lives into the good part, where you can do as you please, and the bad part, where you have to do things whether you want to do them are not.

And anyone who actually wants to do those things society deems to be “work” is told by society that they must be some kind of brown-nosing pathetic geek with no life.

This thoughtless division of life into the good part and the bad part is very injurious to people because it excludes the possibility of working very hard and having a lot of fun at the same time.

And it’s totally doable if you only open your mind up to it.

In fact, I am pretty sure that it’s the best of all possible ways to live.

Aaaaanyhow, my point – I think – was that writing is always work. It takes sweat and toil and sacrifice and commitment, just like everything else in life that’s worth doing.

But I also had a lot of fun while working hard at the writing. I wrote a lot of stuff that I think is pretty good for a first draft, and it feels good to have something that I can hold up and say “See? I did something with my life!”.

The question now is whether I can take the next step and actually do something with all the good stuff I have written. It will require a great deal of proofreading and polishing before it is presentable, and that will require a lot of work that I do not find fun at all.

But I can’t let go off all my new people.

So I guess I will have to do it.

I’ve missed talking to you nice people. This was good. And of course…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.