This is another in my continuing series of Saturday night D&D posts, though it was written on Saturday morning and contains no Dungeons and Dragons information whatsoever.
The Space Bear was a travelling space ship/school.
You see, in the early 1980’s, I got in trouble with Baptists for playing Dungeons and Dragons with kids from school because… well, demons and dragons are evil, right? Apparently even the imaginary ones in games and illustrations. So I turned my attention to science fiction games. Traveller was my rule system, and all science fiction was my campaign. And then in 1986 Ronald Reagan and NASA decided to blow up the first teacher in space aboard the Challenger shuttle mission. So, my Traveller game became less about “explore and conquer” and more about “teachers in space”.
Ged Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids. He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings. He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal. He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good. The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.
Junior Aero, a former student and the adopted son of Ged’s deceased brother Hamfast, grew up and became a player character himself. He taught psionics, being a telepath who could talk to computers and robots that were self-aware. His wife, Sarah Smith Aero, also became a teacher. She and Junior had twins, a boy and a girl, both genetically Nebulons, and both destined to be students aboard the Space Bear.
Of course, you may have noticed a K’ung Fu sort of thing going on in the illustrations I am showing you. That was because one time as Ged was in dinosaur form and fighting with a ninja swordmaster, he won the fight by eating the ninja. His shape-changing power then absorbed all the muscle memories and martial arts training of the ninja he ate. So, his students would not only become psionic masters of mind manipulations, but ninja warriors as well.
So, whether they liked it or not, my Traveller players had to learn to teach their skills to others, lead students through complex adventures and problem=solving situations, and basically do themselves a lot of the same things they saw me doing in school all as part of a role-playing game. You see, that was one of the main dangers of playing role-playing games on Saturdays with that kooky English teacher in South Texas. The danger was, you might actually have to learn something. Although, most of them probably didn’t realize that that was precisely what they were doing. They thought we were just playing games, or junk like that.
But that, of course, is not how it works in real life… even without the nuclear physics which was an exaggeration for humorous effect.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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