Guild Master – The Climb #227

Tuesday 5^th September 2017

So I appear to have a new World of Warcraft guild. And by that I don’t mean I’ve joined a new guild.
You see, I joined my guild back in the days of Wrath of the Lich King when Ulduar was the current raid. We had some great times, including 9-manning Morchok on opening week, but by the time it came to the Warlords of Dreanor expansion, our server was dead.
So we decided to move. We changed faction as well. Most moved their characters over, but given that my Death Knight main’s race is part of their identity and I’d also spent many years moving all my horde characters (and one alliance character I faction changed) to that same server, I decided to roll a new character.
This I did, but as much as I liked my Worgen Death Knight… it really didn’t have the same appeal. Some people dropped off as we got into the Legio expansion last year, and I became Guild master of the alliance guild
We didn’t have enough people to get a raid team together for Legion and soon most people stopped playing. I was a bit irregular, given the swordfighting and the edits, but I was online fairly often. So with no-one around I went back to my horde characters.
With my alts, I made a load of guilds so I could amass a ton of auction mats and make my millions. I’m currently about 25k gold off my first million, even though I’ve not played a whole bunch this year.
But I kept my main in the old guild, simply because of nostalgia.
This week, the few that do still play have said they’ve gone off and joined other raiding guilds. I can’t blame them. I’ve been around but I’ve not been on the alliance server, and other people have come on to say that they are probably taking a break. It’s a shame, but totally understandable.
But I’d hate to lose the old Horde guild and mentioned this to find out that I’ve already been made guild master of that too.
And so I’ve become guild master of the guild I joined 8 years ago. I’ll be honest and say that if I lost the Alliance guild I wouldn’t worry that much, but the horde guild has a lot of nostalgia for me. So there’s part of me that would like to rebuild it. Although, I tried that with the alliance guild and didn’t get far.
But still…
I’m sad to see so many old friends drop out the game. We still chat on Facebook, and who knows, perhaps they might come back. Yet, I’m glad that we haven’t lost the old horde guild in the process.
I spent this evening editing / critting a story for Kate. She wanted the full “Russian Feedback” so I really went to town, taking the skills I’ve picked up over the last few months and applying them to her short story.
My aim, isn’t to be ultra harsh, or try and prove any point. I just want to use my experience to make it the best short it can be. That means, calling out characters and plot points that don’t seem to work as well as tightening the prose.
I’ll be interested to see her reaction, as I ended up deleting a third of her prose, and making some 300+ changes / comments. And the frightening thing, is that as short stories go, I think it’s pretty good. Six months ago, I’d write something of the same quality and feel very proud about it.
It actually shows me how far I’ve come as a writer, especially in the last few months. I re-read the changed version just to make sure I wasn’t just being stupid, but it does read tighter and I was quite proud of the work I did. Of course, the writer is free to agree / disagree with those changes as they see fit, but it does make me excited to start to go over some short stories and see what I can craft.
My problem with short stories is always plot. All the plots I ever come up with are novel length, and trying to come up with one for a short story is the hardest thing for me in terms of short stories.
But I enjoyed doing critting Kate’s story. I promised her I would do a deep edit, and I think I definitely did that.
So all-in-all I feel like I’ve had quite a productive day today. Even though I still feel like I have a ton more things to do!
If you want to follow more of my journey, then be sure to check me on my social channels. Likewise, if you’d like me to expand on any point mentioned above, please say so in the comments.