Author: chadwickbaldwin

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About chadwickbaldwin

A Canadian teacher in China

Languages

I have been writing a story for a while, and it is a Next generation kind of story based upon works my friends and I wrote back in college. The problem was those stories were often fan-fiction based with OCs added. So of course I had to go back and see what was salvageable for a publishable story.

As I reread the first story, and tweaked it to remove what I could of the copyrighted material, I got to see my old notes on language. You see the first story was actually trilingual. I had the characters speaking English, Japanese and Atlantean.

I had to go back and correct the Japanese, because it was poorly written, and mostly what a teenager could do with a rudimentary understanding of Japanese grammar and a dictionary. It wasn’t incomprehensible, but it didn’t sound natural.

But the other was my own Atlantean with its own grammar and vocabulary. Now my original notes on this language are locked away in a storage space in another country. So I went back over it, and realized that the notes I had in that storage had added a lot from Mark Okrand’s language created for Disney, BUT my story had not gotten that far, and the entire grammar structure and lexicon were 100% mine.

So I reviewed the language the last few days and made tweaks to make it clearer, and recreated my dictionary and grammar notes. I really enjoyed it. And to make my language noticeably different from Disney’s Atlantean language, I spent a moment thinking about what the locals would call their own language and named it Muirmet. (from the ocean).

No I have not compiled the writing system yet but my notes are available on my Patreon. (free)

Please enjoy.

Writing & Creativity.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. I have lost so many things that I remember writing as a child, and would love to revisit, but alas I cannot.

Unfortunately there was a 15~20 year break where I didn’t really produce much as adult life got in the way. I don’t mean I didn’t write, I mean I didn’t write much. a lot of what I wrote during that time is currently locked away in a storage room while I live abroad.

So When I started to pick up the pen (figuratively), a few years ago it was fantastic. I had a blog for years, but didn’t really use it for much. (Like most on Livejournal, I used it for griping about how unfair life was) I set us a few different blog sites. I have this obsession with keeping different streams of thought separate, so I had a blog for Board games, a Blog for life, and a blog for cultural observations as I traveled. I eventually moved my life blog into the observations blog, as they were closey ties, and I probably have’t logged into my Livejournal in 10 years or more.

About 5 years ago I started playing D&D with some coworkers, and I created a journal of an NPC with a whole year of filled notes, for my Players to get and read. They loved that, and One even complimented me on my writing style. So for the rest of that game, after every 2 sessions or So I would have that NPC update their journal, with what happened form their perspective. I kept this on one of the blogs I mentioned earlier. My players enjoyed reading those.

Then 3 years ago I turned the original part of that journal into a novel. It went up on Amazon, and My father was the first person to buy a copy. I worked on the 2nd novel in the series off and on, but when my father passed last year, I stopped writing. For almost a year I didn’t post on my blog, I didn’t work on my novels (I have 2 in the works), nothing.

I don’t know If I will finish the sequel to “The Sisak Tower“, I hope so. but it is still on the back burners. It’s hard to get into it right now, but the fact that my father, who only read military novels, bought and read my fantasy novel had a good positive impact. and I want to make sure the sequel is one that he would have appreciated as well.

So for the time being I am working on a different novel. Gateways. (Working title).

Every week I will post a chapter from one of these two novels on my new Patreon, or some other side project I am working on / have worked on, for you to enjoy.

Writing desk with open notebook, pen, tea, books, lamp, and handwritten pages

Plucking away again.

I know I shouldn’t, but I have been using one of my AI systems for Therapy. I have not prompted it to react in a therapist way, but instead told it that I needed to just express somethings without getting solutions.
I was not expecting much but it did help to get things off my mind. I know I should have checked if my Insurance covered therapy, but when your in a slump, you really don’t want to call and check these things. And you really don’t want to go out to do more, it’s exhausting as it is.

I am not back to 100%, maybe not even 75%, but it has been good to get my mind moving again.

I have started (and stopped) writing again multiple times. Sometimes I want to work on my second Sisak book, and sometimes I want to work on my Gateways Book. For a couple of months I found some mindless numeric work to do, readjusting monsters for a game I am making. It all depended on how much energy and focus I was able to muster up at the time.

I reread and rewrote certain chapters multiple times. Because now it can be harder to focus on reading without editing. Most days I can’t just look at text and stay awake. I have to be actively editing something to keep the focus.

Good news is I am writing again. Slowly but surely, and this should help a bit. Hopefully I will become more regular about this.

For those not in the know my Writing projects include:

  • Second Sisak book (Temporarily named “The Wax Seal“) a direct sequel to The Sisak Tower, my first book.
  • Gateways, a complete rewrite of something I wrote when I was in Highschool. It involves an autistic protagonist, and deals with mental health in a modern fantasy setting.
  • This Blog
  • Baldwin Games; My blog on historical and fantasy tabletop and board games.
  • My School newspaper, the SAIS Bullseye. This year I have some student journalists to help alleviate the workload.

And, yes all of them went on hiatus due to both my arm and my own mental health after my father’s passing.

What I have been feeling:

I wouldn’t describe it as depression so much. In my mind depression is very negative and self-depreciating. “I hate myself, and the world would be better without me” kind of thoughts. I have never felt that, though I know in my youth my mother feared I did.

I used to get sad about things alot. Mostly about why I was different, saw things differently, or didn’t understand other kids. But never really depressed.

What I have been feeling lately is more numbness. I know I should be having strong feelings, and they do pop up, but mostly, I just needed to stare at something and shut off my brain for weeks at a time. Which can be hard to do when you are responsible for the mental and physical wellbeing of four other human beings under your roof.

So I would find ways to vegetate. My Youtube feed became quite political, which made things harder to deal with. I tried to fight back by searching up religion, or old style cartoon shows or really anything but politics. I failed to replace the algorithms choices completely, there is still a lot of negativity showing up there (A lot of hate towards D&D lately, and still American politics)

So I am going to continue to pluck away at what is helping, even if it is slow.