L.J. McLean

Ever had moments when you planned two eventful weekends, but somehow they coincided with the busiest days at your day job, all extrovert energy from your body escapes into the void?

Pretty much me for the last few months. Now that I’m recharged and just turned thirty-two years old, I can write again. Hello, all, I’m back. I have a lot to talk about.

So to start off, the recent events were quite big for me. I knew they were happening in March, the busiest month of the year, so February was a time processing it. A military base visit. A camping/road trip. A comic convention (the obvious one but wanted to do different things). Three separate weekends, taking up all my mental and physical energy. So yeah, no writing time, even in between my day job.

Let’s start with NASA. Last February I received an email from NASA Socials. I mentioned this before but to those first reading this, NASA Socials is a program that invites social media influencers and journalists and space nerds to unique events at well-known NASA facilities and partners. I nearly puked at work reading it. It was for Moon to Mars, the NASA program detailing plans to establish installations at the moon, becoming a midway point between Earth and future Mars missions, taking place at Neil A Armstrong Flight Research Center, within Edwards AFB. Yeah.

Driving there early Monday morning, seeing the NASA logo on the buildings and road sign, was a definite “slap me” moment.

Normally I’d take a lot of pictures, but this was an active base. I had to respect the rules of privacy and confidentiality. Plus I was too into taking in the experience. But there were a few.

Below, the first was taken in one of the aircraft hangars housing repurposed fighter jets for scientific purposes. The rest are taken at Mojave Air and Space Systems: first at Masten Space Systems showing a unique lunar lander for a future mission, and the second was, well, Virgin Galactic, standing in front of White Knight.

The following week was the biggest bucket list checkoff ever for me. Months ago my roommate and I decided to take a road trip to Sequoia and Yosemite National Park for the weekend. Oh, yeah, I loaded up on pictures, half were in RAW format to capture every detail.

Started out camping the first night in Sequoia near the southern entrance. The campground was by a raging river from the rain and snow storms higher up the mountain. Oh man, everything was green. Living in a desert climate near the beach, and the city no doubt, seeing it was welcoming. Made want to think of moving there, for a second. Those two days we drove up and down the mountain twice to see the giant sequoia trees, including General Sherman. You stand under them and be marveled at their size and history.

We drove through the park, visited Kings Canyon National Park for a sequoia tree grove, then traveled to Clovis to sleep at my roommate’s cousin’s home. This was needed because we wanted to arrive in Yosemite early in the morning, like the crack of dawn. And this is why.

When you see the valley in person, it hits you. Emotions are wild. You can search Yosemite and see a multitude of pictures of the same vantage point with their own character. This was mine. After entering Tunnel View, within the slope of the granite mountain, and coming out, it’s… a loss of words. I think I spent a few minutes in the car crying and calming down, knowing that I arrived at my own accord. If you read From the Den, Tyler Ingert camped near Yosemite, for a year, learning healer magic.

The weekend after that was WonderCon for three days. This time I changed it up by attending Comic Creator Connection, just to see if I can find artists for comic projects. It doesn’t mean there’s a Mana Pool graphic novel, but it is a pipe dream. I even drummed up a comic sample from the short story, The Job. Not the best work and there’s still work to be done, but it helped me understand the script format.

Then from April to now, I had to just hunker down, recover, and catch up on day job stuff. And thinking. A lot of thinking.

Decided a while ago to uninstall all social media from my phone. I needed a break from it. There were days were I just scrolled endlessly for hours, not soaking in any info from the posts, but get lost in the stream. Talk about feeding boredom instead of boredom fostering creativity. Occasionally I had to reinstall them to post pics, but they were removed afterwards.

So with that, here’s what I’m thinking to bring some life to this blog.

See those books? I bought those last year when my coworker sparked my interest. There was a period of reading how to play, played a couple sessions at a comic book store (got pummeled by a stone gargoyle in Straud’s castle screaming like a girl), and read everything about being a DM. Unfortunately, my D&D game never happened for reasons, but I kept the books, still on the shelf, collecting dust.

So here’s my idea: since I’m not playing, or have any interest using Roll20, how about I build a D&D world and post my characters of each D&D class on this website? It could be fun so I want to hear from you all your input.

Ghost Factor is still being written. Nothing else new from that. There is a What Do We Know post in the works. This is still in between book one and two and fills in more vents around the world, but I want to introduce a new character you barely know about it. Keep an eye out for that.

Now that I’ve updated you all, back to work for me.

Later.