Well, I'm writing!

Just not how I thought I'd be. I wanted to give The Honored its due. I wanted to get back into that story that I started in 1997 and write it. But I just couldn't get to where I felt the characters. I wasn't imagining. I wasn't writing

But I was playing XBox. I'd rather bemoaned the fact that Call of Duty games went away from World War II. I like World War II shoot-ems. Especially on the Wii. I'm a really good sniper on the Wii. Well, I'd played my husband's Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 and it was pretty good. And for Christmas last year, I got Call of Duty Ghosts. I didn't expect it to be any better or worse than the other Call of Duty games. In those games, I was just a faceless sniper, a part of a team I cared about only lightly.

I cared a lot more in Ghosts. It sucks you in more than other First Person Shooter games. You play most of the time as Logan Walker, brother to Hesh and son of Elias. They are there on the screen, going through the campaign with you. They care about you. And you find yourself really caring about them. When Logan is wounded and separated, you really want to find your way back to your dad. When Dad is being threatened, you really try hard to resist the bad guy and you're fairly traumatized when Dad is killed right in front of you by that bad guy. It mattered! So now, you just have your brother. And--

Note: There are spoilers beyond this sentence.

And you bravely go with your brother to take down that bad guy even if you die trying. You nearly do. Your brother is shot. The bad guy is dead. The train you are in is sinking. You drag your brother up out of the train, out of the water, and onto a beach. You rest against a rock and watch a huge defeat for the enemy. Recon is coming for you. All will be right in the world.

Then the credits come on and you get that sense of triumph at finishing a game. Then the credits stop. You're back on the beach. You look around. Bad guy is there. He kicks you in the face. You try to stab him with a knife and he breaks your arm. He tells you you would have been a great ghost but that isn't going to happen. Because "we're going to destroy them...together." And then you're dragged off into the jungle while the brother cries your name.

It was so disturbing. There are clues from what happened to the bad guy that let you know that those things are going to happen to Logan Walker. He may, in Ghosts 2, should they make it, be the bad guy. This is traumatizing stuff.

So how do I deal with a traumatizing story? How did I deal with the death of Doyle on Angel? I went nuts. For three months. In those three months, I wrote a story bringing him back from the dead. And not an easy story. A very difficult story. It wasn't easy for Doyle to get back to the regular world.

So I need that therapy again. Thus, I assigned a new story to Philippe de la Matraque. I've posted 3 chapters of More Than a Ghost to www.fanfiction.net.

Status of Stories
• Purgatory--still in purgatory
• The Honored--back on the back burner, simmering slowly
• More Than a Ghost by Philippe de la Matraque--progressing quickly