Creative and Artistic

Reading through these pages, I am beginning to wonder what my strong points are, because this is another area in which I have to scrape around to find things to say.

Going right back to my youth again - I was asked to leave the drawing and painting classes at school, because the teacher said (with some justification) I drew like a 5 year old - this was when I was about 13 - so drawing has never been a strong point for me. However, I did have a couple of sculptures exhibited in local youth art exhibitions, - but was stopped from taking the any formal artistic qualifications because I couldn't draw what I was going to make. C'est la vie.

In my 20s I started to write poetry. It isn't of a very high quality, but it certainly represented the way I felt at the time. Now I write the occasional poem, more as an academic exercise than from any great need to express myself anymore. See what happens when you get older and settled? Don't do it! Stay young, angry and emotional ...

In 1995, I wrote a textbook, called 'Elementary Word-processing', which was published both on paper and electronically by First and Best in Education, of Peterborough, England. It includes a recommended schema for non-specialist teachers to follow when teaching word-processing and a series of exercises that would allow their students to develop the proper skills. In 2001 its still in print and I still get the occasional royalties cheque ...

Since about 1980, much of my creative work has gone into running Dungeons and Dragons games. Sounds strange? Well, let me explain. D&D is a game of the imagination, players take on the role of wizards, thieves, great warriors or emissaries of various mythological religions - and battle through a fantasy landscape to achieve their goals. Each player defines and plays their character against a backdrop  provided by the Dungeon Master. One easy way to think of it is that the players each control one of the principal characters in a book. However, the DM is the author of the book, constantly describing the background and location, giving the story feeling and ambience, and constantly setting puzzles for the player characters to resolve.

I have been developing my own game world, Hann, for over 20 years now, there are 4 A4 binders of maps and plans sitting over my desk and another box of story lines and plots that I have kept, although I have thrown even more away. You can see some of the material that I have put together for Hann, in other parts of this web site. The current game,  is called Galinia and is run at the www.rpol.net games site. Again, you will find lots of information about the Galinia game on other parts of this web site.

And I suppose I should count this web site as creative, if not artistic :)   I will let you make up your own mind about that.

Here is a link to the Earl Rivers site I wrote as well