Four Games a Week, and Still Writing

 

August 30, 2026

There are weeks when I look at my schedule and wonder whether I have accidentally turned imagination into a full-time occupation.

At the moment I am running four roleplaying games every week while continuing to work on my fiction, and the combination has created a strange kind of creative rhythm. Traveller, Star Trek Adventures, Dune, and Conan each demand something different from me as a Game Master, while the novels demand something else again. None of them exists in isolation. They overlap, compete for attention, feed one another, and occasionally leave me staring at the computer late in the evening wondering exactly how much imagination one person is supposed to have available in a single day.

The answer, apparently, is whatever I can find.

Running four games sounds simple when reduced to a sentence. It is only four evenings, after all, but anyone who has spent much time behind a Game Master's screen knows that the session itself is only the visible part of the work. The real preparation begins earlier, when I am thinking about where the players left off, what consequences are already moving in the background, which NPCs matter now, what information the players have forgotten, what I need to remind them of without simply giving them the answer, and what might happen if they decide to go somewhere I never expected.

That last part is inevitable.

It is also part of the pleasure.

Traveller remains particularly close to my writing because I am running it inside the same broad universe I have spent years building for my fiction. Every time the players enter another system, I have to think about that place not merely as an entry on a map but as somewhere people actually live. The starport has a history. The government has problems. The neighboring worlds matter. Trade routes have consequences. Somebody remembers what happened twenty years ago, and somebody else has a completely different version of the same event.

That sort of preparation inevitably leaks back into the novels.

Then Star Trek Adventures asks for an entirely different discipline. Star Trek moves quickly, and the players can change the direction of an episode in a matter of minutes because competent Starfleet officers have so many possible ways to approach a problem. Running it has taught me to prepare situations rather than chains of scenes, because there is little point spending hours deciding precisely how the crew will solve something when the players are perfectly capable of inventing a better solution before I finish describing the bridge.

Dune slows the process down in another direction. A conversation can be an action scene. A polite remark can contain a threat, an alliance, and a lie simultaneously. It makes me think about motive and consequence, about what people want and what they are willing to conceal in order to obtain it.

Conan reminds me not to disappear entirely into analysis.

Sometimes somebody needs to kick open the door.

That is useful advice for a novelist too.

With four different games running, I find myself moving between modes of storytelling throughout the week. One day I am thinking about interstellar economics and frontier politics, another about the responsibilities of command aboard a starship, another about intrigue among powerful houses, and another about dangerous ruins, desperate men, and the edge of a sword. The genres are different, but the underlying exercise is the same: people make choices, and choices create consequences.

Then I sit down to write fiction.

The interesting thing is that I no longer see the games and the writing as competing creative lives. They certainly compete for time, but creatively they have become part of the same process. Running games keeps me improvising. Writing novels forces me to slow down and make decisions permanent. At the table I can discover an idea in thirty seconds because a player has asked a question I never anticipated. In a manuscript I have the luxury, and the burden, of deciding whether that idea deserves to survive revision.

The games are laboratories.

The books are architecture.

One allows me to experiment with people and situations in motion, while the other requires me to decide which walls are going to remain standing.

There is also something enormously valuable about having an audience every week. Writers can spend months alone with a manuscript before another human being experiences the story. A Game Master receives feedback immediately, whether anyone intends to give it or not. Players lean forward when something interests them. They become quiet when the energy disappears. They argue enthusiastically about decisions that matter to them and barely acknowledge things that seemed fascinating when I wrote the notes.

That can be humbling.

It is also useful.

I have had sessions recently that worked extremely well and others that taught me painful lessons about what happens when I become too clever for my own good. That experience has made me think more seriously about the difference between complexity and depth. Complexity gives the audience more things to keep track of. Depth gives those things meaning.

I want more depth.

That applies equally to the books.

The danger of loving worldbuilding as much as I do is that the machinery can become fascinating enough that I forget the reason I built it. I can spend hours working out the chronology of a subsector, the founding dates of colonies, the orbital characteristics of a binary system, or the political history behind a border dispute, and all of that makes the universe stronger. I genuinely believe that.

But eventually somebody has to walk onto the page and want something.

The maps are there so someone can travel across them.

The history exists so characters can inherit it.

The starships exist because someone has somewhere to go.

Running games four times a week provides a very effective reminder of that, because players have very little patience for a universe that simply wants to admire itself. They want to touch things. They want to make decisions. They want the setting to react.

Readers deserve the same thing.

So the work continues.

I am still trying to maintain a steady writing pace while preparing and running the games, and there are days when the schedule is not elegant. Sometimes game preparation takes longer than expected. Sometimes the writing goes badly. Sometimes I discover that a supposedly minor piece of worldbuilding has opened another historical question that I cannot resist following.

That is the life at the moment.

It is busy.

It is tiring.

It is also remarkably close to the life I wanted.

There is a temptation when pursuing any long creative ambition to imagine that the real work begins later, after the schedule improves, after the family obligations become easier, after there is more money, more time, more space, more confidence, or some magical future morning when everything finally lines up properly.

I no longer believe much in that morning.

The work is happening now.

The games I am running now are part of the creative life. The pages I write today are part of the books I hope people will read later. The maps I am correcting, the characters I am discovering, and even the mistakes I am making are not preliminary to the real thing.

This is the real thing.

That realization is strangely comforting.

I do not need every week to be extraordinary. I need enough good weeks, enough finished pages, enough successful sessions, and enough lessons learned from the unsuccessful ones that the whole body of work continues moving forward.

Four games a week may be a lot.

Writing on top of them may be a lot.

Perhaps I am asking a great deal of myself.

But when I look at what all of this activity is producing, I am not particularly interested in slowing the imagination down. I would rather become better at directing it.

There are worlds I still want to map, books I still want to finish, characters I want to know better, and campaigns whose endings none of us can see yet.

For now, that is enough.

Tomorrow there will be another manuscript waiting, another game approaching, another problem to solve, and probably another player decision that destroys half a page of preparation.

Good.

That means the stories are still alive.