Thoughts of Mearls

I have a strange, strange mind.

First of all, I write design games that draw heavily on fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Obviously, normal people do not sit around all day thinking up new and interesting drooling, blood-vomiting monsters that devour hapless travelers and level cities.

Wait... blood-vomiting, drooling, that gives me an idea.

See, I can't help myself. People sometimes ask me where I get my ideas from, and I'd have to say everywhere. I tend to find inspiration by viewing mundane situations from a different angle. It's somewhat hard to explain, but perhaps this story can give you an insight into what I'm talking about.

Once, while living in NYC I decided that I wanted to re-learn advanced math. I borrowed a roommate's college text to read on the subway. The first chapter, for some reason or another, covered the coordinate plane. Since my math was truly rusty, I decided to wade through it in case there was anything in there I missed. (No, I am not that incompetent with math.) At the end of the chapter, there were sample problems covering the material from the chapter. I forget the exact nature of the problem, but it involved taking a bunch of points and drawing some sort of relationship between them. The problems were rather easy, until the last one. I spent five minutes on it and had no clue how to solve it. And then, as I was staring at the book, the guy next to me jostled it so that I was looking at the coordinate plane as if it was a diamond rather than a square.

From that angle, the answer was obvious. I mentally re-drew the X and Y axes and figured out the problem in a few seconds.

And that's how I get most of my ideas.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll