Last night I was sitting here thinking about time--not temporal anomalies, not the abstract concept of time, but my time.

I was thinking that I spend more time per week on the forum here than in any other single task, and that most of that is in running games for people who either have already purchased the books and started running games or who have already decided whether or not they are going to do so. I was wondering whether there was any way I could gracefully eliminate my involvement in all the games--except two, those of my sons, for whom gaming is a very real part of the connection between us which I on my part intend to maintain and nurture.

Today I find three private messages, all of which appear to be (I have not yet read them) forum posters complaining about each other. There are several points to having forum members run games for each other. Certainly one of them is to unlock the creative potential of more people in devising interesting worlds and adventures. One of them is to train referees in how to run the game. However, one of them certainly is supposed to be that it saves me time by reducing the number of posts I have to answer each day. If the interactions of these forum members cannot run smoothly without my intervention, then part of the purpose is defeated.

I should immediately caveat all this. This is, after all, Tuesday, the heaviest day on my Internet work schedule thanks in part to the fact that the Lutheran forum was relegated to this day. It is complicated by the fact that I will also have to make a trip of between five and seven hours to take a son's girlfriend home--not that I begrudge him this, as it is a joy to see the happiness she brings into his life. It also bothers me that somewhere I have misplaced a stack of notes that represented many hours of work on The Third Book of Worlds, and I have not found the time to look for those notes. I should be pushing projects forward, and to some degree I feel as if everything is more pressing than that which matters.

Yet individually an argument can be made for me to continue running games for each person for whom I am currently doing so. I cannot say that you all matter to me as much as my own sons (and I hope none of you would take offense at that distinction), but you all do matter to me.

I have a bit of time before I have to drive my wife to work, and after that things will be insane, but let me see how many things I can answer before that happens.

--M. J. Young