I’m beginning to suspect something strange is brewing within me. In trying to figure out why it is that I wish to write ‘book reviews’, I’ve been doing some thinking. After I had sworn it off quite quickly almost a year ago, I have a great need to do it again. But not even a need to do it well, but simply a need to do it, and I think that I may have narrowed it down.

In university, everything was about writing. If you didn’t write it out in neat paragraph form, you needed to do it again. Now that I’m in college, there’s no writing at all. Even in the communications course, it’s all individual words and phrases. No paragraphs. When I write something out in paragraph form, they tell me to rewrite it in point form, and it makes me cringe. Even though I’m sure I had the opposite feeling at some point 7 or 8 years ago. And so the need builds. I have to write a paper. Otherwise, I haven’t accomplished anything. All these numbers and equations and circuit diagrams, what do they really mean anyway? I need something in paragraph form!

This began to dawn on me after I had spent very little time and a small degree of paranoia in developing my latest book ‘review’. Even though it wasn’t very good, and quite possibly preposterous, I felt a greater degree of accomplishment from completing it than I did from completing my 30 page circuits assignment a few days before. I had words on paper (or computer, so to speak), and they meant something. Not just a stack of looseleaf filled with unintelligible symbols and equations.

I believe this is also the reason I have now delved into not only starting a new campaign, but developing an entire player’s handbook to go along with it. Finishing up the chapters in that feel so much more satisfying than solving a quadratic equation.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do find what I’m learning in college all terribly interesting. But I’ve just gotta write something!