Shores of Night

Photo by Luke Jones on Unsplash  Hi,  Welcome back to the Shores of Night, or welcome if you're new here. My name is Grim, I'm a nonbinary, autistic person, and I usually write about fantasy, writing, paganism, roleplaying games, and whatever else takes my fancy.  Today I want to swerve into my mental health journey and talk about some of the things I'm wrestling with. I've already talked about some changes, which I believe are deep work paying off.  I've been in therapy since 2022, and learned I'm autistic in 2024, so the past few years have really helped me learn to like, and possibly even love, myself. It's allowed me to reframe a lot of my experiences into something more manageable and encouraged me to have more self-compassion. I feel like a lot of the places I've struggled with sit in the space between what I feel I should have experienced and what actually happened, as well as the various double binds we humans are so good at creating. I guess it...

 Welcome back to the Shores of the Night, or welcome if you're new. My name is Grim, and I talk about more things on this blog than I probably should.  Today I'm thinking about friends. Specifically, the issues I have making them. One of my earliest memories is being shunned on the playground because I didn't watch He-Man after school. It didn't improve. Most of my childhood was spent learning that people I liked tolerated or downright disliked me, and that's also been a feature of my adult years. In most social settings, I feel locked out, either because my interests don't align with most people's or because the environment's too loud, too bright, or too crowded. I find myself more comfortable in quiet spaces, libraries, book clubs, roleplaying games, that sort of thing. The worst thing I can imagine is going to a nightclub or something like that - which isn't to say that I never went to nightclubs when I was younger and I didn't know I was auti...

 Hi,  Welcome back to the Shores of Night, or welcome if you're new. My name's Grim, and in this piece I'm going to talk about why I still call myself a Pagan.  When I moved to Bournemouth, I was still wobbling. I wasn't sure if I believed in anything, really, but at the same time I felt there had to be something. I was still drawn to the esoteric, but I wasn't sure what spoke to me any more. What I suppose was curious was that I wasn't tempted back to Christianity, and nor did I think about becoming a Muslim or joining any of the Western faiths.  One of the things I wanted to do when I moved down here was to reconnect with myself on an authentic level. That meant, for me, therapy and facing my trauma. As anyone who's gone through that knows, it's a slow process, not a wonder drug. There's no moment where you click your fingers, and everything's suddenly better. Even four years in, I struggle with the narratives other people had bestowed upon me,...

 Hi,  Welcome to the Shores of Night, or welcome back if you've trodden the black sands before. Today I want to talk about something quite personal: why I became a Pagan. I know I usually waffle on about a huge number of other subjects, but I wanted to see about putting something a bit more heartfelt out there, partly because it feels like the right time.  I was raised Christian, my family attended a Church of England broad church and for a long time I think I believed in Jesus. Admittedly, that wasn't a nuanced belief. It was childish and accepting, the sort of faith most of us start out with. Mum and Dad say this is true, society says it's true, so what else do you do? You go along with it, usually without thinking. It was just another part of life, or if I was to be cynical, another part of indoctrination into British society.  I was also terrified of witches and I still believe I saw a woman fly past my window one night, while on another I thought I heard a voice...

Hello, It's great to see you here, on the shore. The sun's sinking and the night's rushing in. If you're new to these parts, I'm Grim. I talk a bit too much about too many things, everything from comics, roleplaying, politics and even philosophy. I love history; I'm a nerd, though I fear I'm becoming that terrible thing, a nerd who's bored of a lot of the familiar nerd things.   This piece is a follow-up to a previous piece, in which I expressed discontent with the general gaming model of "jobs" - clearing out ruins, fetching MacGuffins from dangerous places, hunting down monsters and so on. Missions that PCs perform and then slip away into the night. One reason I dislike this model of gaming is that it can easily turn towards a hard-edged, cynical, and violent tone. Worse, it can do so without there being any real consequences. The last piece ( here)  focused on Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse  because for a long time the...

Hello,  Welcome to the Shores of Night, where I talk about too many things. Welcome back if you've walked this beach before; at least you know where the half buried skull is (be careful, it bites). To stretch the metaphor, you know what sort of flotsam and jetsam washes up here: comics, roleplaying games, a bit of politics, a bit of philosophy (though that seems too fine a word for what I talk about). Add in some interest in history, paganism, and religion in general, and whatever the tide drags in, and you know what litters the shore.  Or just life updates and complaining, which is all very much grist to the mill. Today's flotsam takes the form of something I'm rolling around in my mind: roleplaying. I've been involved in the hobby for a long time - over 30 years - and it's ebbed and flowed around me. There have been times when I've loved it and times I've hated it. I've never really felt indifferent towards it and ever since 1994, it's felt like a ...

Hello!  Welcome to Shores of Night, where I talk about probably far too many things for a blog, and where today we're talking about the character John Constantine. Last time I wrote about  My Issues With Superheroes , and why I'm moving away from reading their adventures. In that piece, I mentioned my love for John, though I admit it's a relationship that's had its wobbles over the decades.   The biographical bit is that I discovered John in 1994, in a one-shot written by Jamie Delano just after the Garth Ennis run had finished. I was hooked from page one. It felt different to everything else I'd read: raw, exciting, full of a deep, sarcastic voice. It chimed not only with who I was at the time, but also with the country I came from. More than that, the story was small, intimate even, worlds away from the superhero epics I was used to, in the best possible way. John was smart, and he had a sort of sleazy charm I wasn't used to seeing. He cared about people, not ...