How did I come to write Frozen Watch?
I created the story for a group of friends. But when they split up before I’d finished, I had to know how that story would have ended. So I turned it into a book.
One of my hobbies is playing Roleplaying Games (RPGs). And by RPG, I mean of the original ‘tabletop’ or ‘pen and paper’ variety.
When I first moved to Canada, I was a teenager and still in school. Not knowing anyone on the entire continent (and this being pre-internet) when my new school ran an event to publicise the various clubs available to join, I was drawn to the oddballs touting Dungeons and Dragons. I had no idea what they were going on about, but I was intrigued. So it was either D&D or the school curling team.
I discovered gamers in the ’80s were a very welcoming lot. Mostly geeks, but not all. Boys, girls, whites, non-whites, rich, poor, and some with disabilities … if you were a gamer, you were one of us.
Of course, back then, the hobby was controversial in some quarters. Some of the parents were complaining to the school that we were into something with satanic connections. (There’s irony in the fact that today I’m in a D&D group run by a Minister.) And when two students (not in our club) blew off all their classes for a week just to play, the school was quick to ban the game on school grounds. But the game attracts and teaches problem-solving. We realised that if we could memorise all the material and had some non-dice way to generate random numbers, they couldn’t stop us.
And it wasn’t just D&D. There were other RPGs: Star Trek, Space Opera, Gamma World, Boot Hill, Twilight:2000, … and my personal favourite, Traveller. During those halcyon days, our group grew and shrank and grew again. And each person chose a game to become expert with and to GM for the others. (I’m kind of glad I *didn’t* pick D&D for myself: 1st edition AD&D was pre-THAC0 … that’s a lot of tables to memorise.)
Fast forward, and today I’m well versed in Traveller. There have been multiple versions of the rules (some very different from each other) but only one true universe. I’ve also found my players tend to be too chaotic for published adventures; it’s best to create a situation and then riff off of the players’ reactions. Just as long as I know the background material well enough to improvise convincingly.
Now, a few years ago, I was back living in the UK and in another gaming group. We’d just finished a D&D campaign, and it was my turn to GM a game. Of course, I chose Traveller. Taking inspiration from Star Trek Voyager, Alien, and maybe Earth 2, I created an adventure around a group of Frozen Watch personal on an otherwise abandoned space cruiser. I detailed backstories that would foster alliances and antagonisms (much like Voyager with its Star Fleet vs Marquee vs others) and created other materials.
Two sessions in and disaster: Two of the players were husband and wife, gamers for many years, but suddenly they were getting a divorce.
I quietly wrote up a campaign journal, intending to shelve the whole thing. But we’d only just started; my head was still teaming with ideas. There were personal themes to explore. I wanted—no, needed to know what would have happened next. I’d put too much creative effort to abandon it. So I decided to rewrite the campaign journal as fanfic and see if I could continue the story.
By imagining each character being played by someone from TV or film, it was just like running a game in my head. I could see how each character would react to certain stimuli, and I refereed much as I had before. Bit by bit, the story seeped out. And by borrowing a literary device from another TV show, Lost, I could delve into those backstories a little more.
Eventually, it reached the point that I had to take it seriously. After moving to Canada for the second time, I sought feedback from others and made adjustments as necessary, and I taught myself the expected punctuation and grammar styles.
That’s pretty much the ‘it’. For me, RPGs symbolise diversity and acceptance (and problem-solving), and Frozen Watch is an RPG adventure and personal exploration that I couldn’t let die.