Mind Journeys and Age of Wonders 3

Well, I have been on a journey my friends. A journey to the centre of my mind and such wonders that I have to share with you. Or I would have if they were shareable.

Thing about this great internal odysseys is that they are intensely personal but I'll find a way to share them, probably. That's what my writing has always been, looking back, I just didn't even understand what I was trying to share at the time!

Anyway, enough of all that bollocks. I need to talk about games because it's happened, I've finally got into another one and what's more I think I'm actually enjoying this one, it's called Age of Wonders 3.

So, why is it good. Well, you build guys like, elves, elves on horses. BEETLE RIDERS, all that sort of shit. BUT, that's not the fun part.

You see, first time I played this a couple of years ago I thought the fun was to be had on the little tactical battles where you move your little dudes into their little dudes one by one. After a few hours of playing over the weekend however something clicked.

Cos there's a thing called auto combat in this game. Not, auto-resolve, auto-combat. You can basically get the AI to play for you and can intervene at any time. Cue me, laying back on my couch watching my carefully or not so carefully composed forces unleash hell upon the enemy.

And it feels good, you build a tonne of archers and then you get to watch your little commander lead them into battle. Not really concerned if you lose the lot. Then you start building better units, elementals, giants, dragons.

And it FEELS badass! It feels like a fantasy epic playing out in front of me and if I like I can intervene but most of the time I don't have to. I can focus on the army positioning and economy, all the bollocks. I think this is the first time that I've ever really been able to choose how involved the game needed me to be and it really is a testament to the AI and unit balancing that it actually feels so good.

I'll cover some mental healthy stuff here in time but in the mean time it's just great to be able to escape to the fantasy world of Age of Wonders 3 and chill out. Also, I hate pirates now but love dark stalkers.

One Weekend - Three Gamey Surprises

Sometimes, a weekend can be spent looking for something that sparks our interest even just a little bit. A weekend can find us returning to our tried and tested activities just to pass the time.

This weekend however I got to spend with three new games that were an absolute blast to play and I'd like to take a moment to write about them.

1. Banner Saga 2

This inspired my gaming weekend really, I had enjoyed the first one a lot and despite not really remembering any of the story I was excited to return to the beautiful and interesting world of Banner Sage.

I was not disappointed, this is a sequel in the sense that it's just more of the first game. The first game had me power through the whole experience in about 8 hours, not reloading even once. If I lost the game seemed to fit into the narrative just fine and it never falls into that trap a lot of turn based strategies do where you are forced to play the same scenario over and over.

The Banner Saga 2 just like the first game has a load of boring characters beat the crap out of each other in a world full of lore and brought to life with breath taking art.

Roll on Banner Saga 3!

2. Pathfinder Card Game : Android

This one caught me by surprise. I had tried other android versions of card games such as Sentinels of the Multiverse but had found them a little hollow. I think the difference here is that the Pathfinder Card Game is very well designed and has a lot of depth and automating the whole experience neutralises the biggest drawback, the need to set it all up.

It's tough too, just tough enough and if you lose you get to keep the cards you picked up during the game for each character so it always feels like you are improving. Even the story here comes across much better than in the physical version and I was able to pick up all of the available content for 25 euro which feels reasonable.

This will be one I will be dipping into for a while.

3. Offworld Trading Company

Another surprise, if anything even more surprising than finding a decent Android game.

I've long had an itch but was unable to find a game that scratched it, this was the need for a trading game where I make lots of money and get to manage a supply chain. I remember picking up capitalism from gog.com in desperation but found it a little dry.

This game does not have that problem, the graphics and music pull you into life on mars. Not only that but the gameplay is sublime. The systems here are the best I've ever seen in an economic game, there is a lot to do here when it comes to manipulating prices and boning your competitors but what it nails is that it's always fun. You are never staring at a spreadsheet or moving resources around piecemeal.

This game has you thinking "hmm, the price of steel is looking really good", then analysing the production capacity of your opponents and sizing up the cost of entering and hopefully cornering that market. The point is that it gets you into that cutthroat CEO mindset and it's wonderful.



And that was it, I spent so much time lying on my coach like a slug that I pinched a nerve in my arm and spent the night in agony. Worth it.

Cyclists - Get off the footpaths

So, I've returned to my pleasant walk to work. Very glad to see the back of the Luas and the improvement in weather lately has been an extremely welcome change.

I do have an issue with these cyclists however. Now, not all of them, the vast majority of cyclists are upstanding citizens. They travel at reasonable speeds and only encroach on the footpath when its necessary for them and when they do they either walk their bike or go at a very slow pace. I have no beef with them.

Every so often though, I encounter the other type of cyclist. Often, even as other bikes fill the road these cyclists will decide that they are in some way special and that they belong on the footpath with me and my fellow pedestrians. Sometimes they even presume to urge me to get out of their way.

Well, first of all I will not get out of your way. Secondly, get off the footpath. Get off the footpath now, all of you.

I really wish I could scream at these people and I do wonder if a polite way exists to nudge them towards correct road usage. I did see a man explain to an errant cyclist how in this country bicycles belong on the road, such restraint, such maturity, such, well, condescension.

Which is really what it all comes down to, relying on people knowing better. If they're on the footpath when they clearly don't need to be you are probably dealing with a criminal, somebody who doesn't care for ANY rules of our society.

In summation, would it be wrong to kick them off their bikes? The answer is yes but much like a cyclist who uses a footpath, I want to do it anyway.

Luas - Get Off (My Case)

As a preface to this I should mention that I always pay for luas tickets, even if I'm only going one stop. I like to support it because hey, at least it's not Dublin Bus.

This morning, I push my hard earned change into the luas machine and snatched the resultant piece of cardboard as I turned to force my way into the grimacing throng. So far so normal, just another day where my route to work is dicated by the pulsing pain from my sprained ankle.

I near my destination, one stop away from Spencer dock and I spot a ticket inspector. The first one I'd seen in over a week of using the service, fine, I thought and slipped the ticket from my wallet.

Only it wasn't a ticket. The damn ticket machine had decided to dispense a previous customers debit card receipt instead of a valid ticket. Deaf to my protests the inspector took my details and slapped a 45e fine on me. "You can appeal." He said to shut me up.

Well, I was going to appeal but isn't it funny that while I can go online and pay the ticket in moments completely painlessly appealing requires that I purchase an ENVELOPE and other paraphernalia and do everything in writing. It's messed up. That combined with a countdown where the fine doubles in a number of days! Well, let's just say I coughed up the cash.

It was an honest mistake which wouldn't have happened if their machine hadn't messed up but they took my money all the same. Thankfully 45e is not the end of the world for me but for many I could see being treated like this would be a big deal.

Allow people to appeal online at least! I can't wait to going back to walking 45 minutes to work every morning instead of using Irish public transportation.

Game of Thrones

It's a little embarrassing to say for somebody who's an aspiring writer but I had kind of fallen out of the reading habit for a while when I first came across Game of Thrones.  I think the largest thing I had read around that time had been Count Zero which I actually took a really long time to get through.  (After coming from Neuromancer it felt like broken glass in my ice-cream)

It was actually watching the HBO show that got me into it, right at the start of the build up of the final act.  The show had me actually excited about what was going to happen and if the tv adaptation could have that effect I had to find out what the books would do.

I wasn't disappointed, those things blew me away.  I was shying away from books half the side of a single volume before but with a combination of blasting through books in a week, long plane trips and finally of my current routine which is to take a chapter a day I am already at the latest set of books, Dance of Dragons.

So, what is it about these books that's reignited writing for me and the rest of the world.  The answer of course is that it does everything right, slow burns with completely satisfying resolutions.  Compelling characters that inspire hate and love.  A consistent writing style which occasionally takes the piss out of itself.

It has much personality at every level, I find.  I always through these big epics always became kind of robotic by the end but in this series the opposite somehow happened, as time went on the author seemed to enjoy it more and the ideas just keep coming.

Anyway, I'm inspired.  I know, like everybody else in the english speaking world and probably beyond, but this is just the thing to remind me what writing can be.  Something to aspire to and be inspired by.

Direction

I have resolved to get back into writing, get into game making, get into anything creative.  I need it, I realise, need it worse than I even thought before.

I always thought writing was something I would have to work very hard to hold onto, that the light might go out if I didn't find time every weekend to get some words down.  That it was a weight on me.

It's not so, writing, or anything creative really but for me it's writing, is a link to a greater power.  It's a link to a sustaining force that we don't just want in our lives, we need it.  For a long time I sought it in work, love, other people but those things we have little control over when it comes down to it.  They can be solving all our problems one moment and then casting us into a chasm the next.

Something creative is a key to an enduring force.  And really, more than anything it will get you through, which is one of the best things you can say about anything really.  It's something we return to as a refugee, time and time again.

There's something really reassuring about that.

Concepts

In the long hiatus from this blog I've kind of came across two "sticky" concepts that might be worth sharing.

The first, I don't really have a name for yet but it's something like.  "Even if you feel something isn't permanent it's usually best to continue on as if it is".  So, an example might be if you feel a friendship is kind of wavering and a great part of you wants to avoid being hurt by being the one that kills it.  In that case it might be best to just carry on as normal and see what happens.  If that makes sense.  Getting that down on paper worded like that makes it sound a bit like common sense but I know I can't be the only one to be terrorised by the spectre of impermanence.  I think I've just come to understand the phrase "cheer up, it may never happen."

The second is a little cheesy in the way most of my ideas are.  There are two parts, or even three.  Here it goes, a mind should be wielded, a wielded mind must cut and and a wielded mind must cut until it meets steel.  This one's probably more of a reflection of my personality really, like once you take something seriously (wielding your mind in this case).  Let's say you get geared up for your job, you've decided to kick ass or at least do your best well, you have to cleave work, change it, cut it.  You need to make your mark on it.

And the final part, acting like this you will either cut forever (I'm sure some people manage this some degree as nobody is willing to stand in their way) or you meet steel.  Something that stops you in your tracks.  And that's the end of the cycle really.

Just two morsels from the kitchen of my mind.  In other news I've been reading quite a cool book called Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, it's a great follow up from Down and Out in Paris and London as it shows that the modern kitchen hasn't changed so much from that in Orwell's days.  Also full of hot tips on when to order fish!  Not so useful to a Vegetarian like myself but still interesting reading, highly recommended.

Fire Walk With Me

Watched the Twin Peaks prequel, Fire Walk With Me last night.  Really glad I didn't see it before watching Twin Peaks as it would have completely ruined one of the major plot points but it fit nicely into Twin Peaks itself.

As David Lynch films go it wouldn't be my favourites but it was good to see all the characters again, before things got really weird and it had some nice moments.  Like that thing with the surveillance camera.

It's a little strange writing on here after so long, it hardly feels the same at all.  Sadly I don't have much of a story to share from what happened because that is all depressingly private but I can tell you that I had the experience of the past repeating itself but not being quite the same.  In fact, that past repeated itself and was decidedly better.

Recently I've been to Canada three times, Hong Kong once, I've made close friends from different corners of the earth.  I've felt exhausted, vilified and chosen.  Heartbroken and rejuvenated.  I've moved to an amazing apartment.  I've become addicted to nicotine and dipped my toes into the waters of alcoholism.  I've drawn it all back behind my eyes so well that I've forgotten who I ever was.

Things have been good.  Feel kind of like a man that finally pulls his trousers up after a decade of waddling and wondering why everyone else was move so much faster than him.  But the only certain thing now is that I'm going to have to do it all over again.

Orwell!

For some reason I've never read any Orwell up to now.  I suppose part of the reason is all the film versions of Animal Farm I've seen and the way that 1984 has infiltrated so many forms of media, I felt like I'd been overexposed to both without ever even turning a single page.

So it was one of his lesser known works, a book called Down and Out in Paris and London that get me to finally try one of his works.  Down and Out, bizarrely, reminded me a lot of Gordon Ramsay's kitchen nightmares.  The obvious comparison is when Orwell details the military style hierarchy of a large hotel's kitchen staff, the less obvious one is the morality of his work.  He details events but then he gives an opinion on them and what human and interesting opinions he has, reminding me of when Gordon goes beyond being an observer and calls people on their bullshit.

After enjoying Down and Out so much it made sense to dive into 1984, something about the gritty reality Orwell clearly experienced in his life gave me faith that there would be an authenticity to 1984 that I hadn't previously had cause to expect.  I was not disappointed, 1984 is beautiful, a work of art and felt to real to me.  It's funny because it's been aped constantly for decades but even having been exposed to countless facsimiles the power of the original article had remained untouched, perhaps it was even enhanced.

1984 got me thinking a lot, about my own politics and thought patterns.  I suppose the point is there is a little authoritarian apologist in us all but more than that it underlined something that I've really been taking for granted lately.  The power to have my own thoughts, my own mind and my own life.

Next on my list is coming up for air!

Delivery Systems for Talent

I've recently been getting into a bit of a Matter Berry Overload.  It started by my discovery of his latest album Kill the Wolf which I legitimately think is amazing.  Opium was good but felt more like a comedy album and Witchhazel had some excellent moments but was a little inconsistent but Kill the Wold is a world beater and I've listened to it a little a too much lately.  Devil Inside Me, Solstice, so many great tracks and that of course brought me back onto Snuff Box, a show I hadn't watched in a long time so was due another run through.

Snuff Box is so front loaded, the first episode hits you with wave upon wave of energy and originality making those thirty minutes feel like a sort of mini film.  It then hits a cool stride, building on the framework laid down and following an absurd plot where Matt Berry proceeds to steal all of Fulcher's numerous and glamorous girlfriends.

It's got me thinking though, about the written word.  That an article I read during the week that espoused the opinion that had many literary journals had a way to determine if people were actually reading them most would not have continued to be published.  These markets might have just existed in wealthy benefactors heads and there was no way at the time to prove them right or wrong.  Sure, people bought them but maybe they read one or two articles threw the rest away.  I'm not sure what the scenario is, the point is.  I'd like to be a writer, I'd like to get people reading my stuff, how do I make that happen.

The track the fits best still in my mind is novels because while its extremely difficult to become published if I did somehow achieve that goal it would open a longer term path.  Success with short stories and message boards, even if I did somehow achieve it probably wouldn't lead anywhere significant.

But there are of course other forms of writing.  Screen Plays are very popular of course maybe even more so than novels, Text Adventure games can actually get some following though very limited of course.  Radio Plays, that's something that my mind wandered onto yesterday.  In a time of podcasts and such is there room for a radio play.  I can do some pretty pretty amusing voices, all I'd need would be some software and soft effects.  What about, a kindle enabled text adventure.  That's a new one I've just had now.

In any case my point is that Matt Berry is a magnificent bastard.  His (albeit significant) talents lie in Comedy and Music, two premier Delivery Systems of our time.  And there is a very valid question, when is the last time that the written word thrilled me.  When is the last time the written word did something, anything at all for me.

My last major thrill?  The closing sentence of the Great Gatsby.  A book written by a man born one hundred and ten years before I was.  What am I even reading right now?  I'll tell you, Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel.  Published 1953.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle

I recently reread an old text on weight loss titled Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.  It's something I hadn't read in most of a decade so it was almost like reading it again for the first time. The material has this nice way of having a great deal of depth while still being extremely accessible to people like myself.

Eight or so years ago it was one among a number of training resources that I read through in search of the answer to having a better body. I based my weight training at the time, aiming characteristically a little too high, on the westside program but it was the principles in BTFFTM that I was counting on for weight loss. It had contained inside of it that dream of all lazy people, burning loads of calories while sitting inert on a couch.  Lots of fun weight lifting and less boring cardio.

All that time ago I merely glanced through it but this time I read it in depth both jogging my memory and learning some new things entirely. For example, I somehow missed the section of fats last time and realised suddenly that I'm completely missing them from my vegetarian diet in anything but saturated form. That's the issue with a vegetarian diet, we don't get to turn to fish and automatically get loaded up in omega-3. So I grabbed a bottle of flaxseed oil.

Quick note on the flaxseed oil, I genuinely feel it's had a positive effect on my mood. It wasn't listed in BTFFTM as a benefit so I went looking elsewhere and yes, it does seem like lack of omega-3 can be a cause of depression, who knew!  I'll definitely keep taking my tablespoon of it every morning.

Ultimately BTFFTM does enter a realm of extreme workouts and very complicated meal design but the principles and excellent way they're described and backed up makes it recommended reading for anybody interested in their health in any way.  

Android Horror Stories

Right so I got around to “fixing” my phone. It had been freezing and restarting itself constantly so after a bit of research the obvious solution seemed to be to flash it with a more recent firmware and it would obviously work perfectly from there. Well, the result was that though the flash worked perfectly and everything seemed super fine I ended up with a warped IMEI number. This basically means that the phone can no longer connect to any network because it's got a bollocks identification number. Changing IMEI is a complete pain because it's technically an illegal act. I'd need some kind of custom hardware to do it, it seems.

Worst thing was that there is a method of setting the IMEI but I only discovered half way through it only works for the US version of the S3 as the International version doesn't seem to support RMNET + DM + MODEM USB mode.  Agony.

All in all, I might as well have dumped my phone in the liffey. It's pretty much borked now. Still, the positives are that I learned a lot about how android phones work and I had yet another lesson in backing up everything. (Not just with zip tools either, because they often lie.)  A tip for everybody out there, do not do anything with your EFS folder lightly, it's not restored when flashing.

Anyway, I can pick up a cheap samsung phone from argos until such time comes that I can either buy a new smart phone or have the IMEI corrected. Pity, because otherwise my flashing it seems to have corrected all the problems I was experiencing. Biggest thing I'll miss is definitely the tethering mode which was really handy when working in coffee shops that didn't have wifi. 

Pity I screwed the pooch but again it's yet another lesson that you shouldn't rush into things without due diligence.  

Working on the Rail Road

Ever feel like you're being guided into something.  It's not quite against your will but it's like your will is absent and you've been given this single direction to go in.  It seems like the only choices are to stay still or move in a direction that's being offered to you.

It's not much of a choice, especially when you know that once you start down that track there won't be any stopping for quite a while.  It's the question of what is real freedom, how much choice is allowed to us in our lives.

I watched Into the Wild last night, a film about a guy who went out on his own.  He basically lives like a bum in the film and has lots of great adventures and makes lots of really deep connections with people.  As usual these days I had trouble simplifying the film into a single point but what I took away from it was that running isn't really an option.  Well, it is an option but in the end it just takes us away from what's really important.

The character in the story ends up alone and though when he's strong he's happy, finding that he could survive the wilds gives him a rush I suppose.  Things go sour on the food front and then things get worse from there.  Maybe he realises somewhere that there isn't too much for him in the wilderness alone and like any passion taken too far he locked himself away from everybody around him.

I guess, he could have returned after that realisation and been a different person.  Maybe he could have listened to anybody along the way who offered him advice but I guess there is a sense to film that he wasn't really looking for anything out in the wilds but to escape himself and who he was.

How does all that relate to being rail roaded?  Well, I guess my current thinking is that we all need a track but you might be best off playing the game and building your own over time rather than walking the rough road.

Year of Trying

Been out on my ass for two months now.  That's kind of hard for me to believe, two months out of an entire year spent with no real income to speak of.  Two months where I didn't go anywhere five days a week to crank code and kick ass.

I haven't been without work for so long for about four years and it feels weird.  My feeling of weirdness is compounded by the fact I'm being dragged into some kind of mandatory presentation by the welfare office on the range of training opportunities available.

I've been doing lots of interviews and all have gone well, everything is just moving like molasses and now I need to be patronised by a service I've funded through PRSI contributions over the last six years.  I'm a little peeved by that.

My time has not been spent faffing about though, I'm glad to say.  A lot of progress has been made on my new book which has recently acquired the working title "Moderately Delerious" and I've even made huge progress on a new project that's also enhanced my tech skills somewhat.

I've also found some time to look into the ideas of lucid dreaming and meditation.  Can't really do either consistently yet but it's been great to have some time to play with the exercises and research that these things require.

One major issue has been that I've found it really difficult to find a rhythm and despite my best efforts have found myself having trouble sleeping and waking up at specific times.  The rigour of work definitely helps when it comes to setting up a routine.    This is probably more a factor of my personality, consistency has never been one of my strong points.

Also, I'm 28 today and of course that triggers a lot of retrospect for me.  Looking back on the things I've done and didn't do, the same old bag.  You'd think my current situation would factor into that a lot but it turns out it doesn't, unemployment is part of the same chain as employment.  The same course, it's no better or worse metaphysically speaking.

28 is a big number, I started this blog when I was 22 and it is kind of terrifying looking back.  It's been six years of gradual improvement, mind widening and change.  I suppose that's the nature of the 20's, kicked out of the protections of adolescence you gotta face up to who you are.  The sooner you do that, the easier the whole thing is.

Well, here's to another year of trying.

Why I found Broken Age so Disappointing

This is something I need to write about, mainly because I backed this game and I feel I got a bad deal out of it. Yes, if I went back in time right now I would not throw ten dollars at this game. Not necessarily because of how bad it turned out to be but more because the direction it took from the very beginning was not what was sold to me.

Now, I've already used the word bad and maybe that's going to be a charged word for some people. I say it's bad because the sections I played didn't have what I look for in an adventure game. It didn't have any witty dialogue and it didn't have any interesting puzzles, so it's uninteresting and therefore bad to me. I'm sure a lot of people might have got some enjoyment out of it and I say power to those people but it doesn't diminish my ire in the slightest.

Again, it's the misleading part that really got to me. I think the best way to illustrate where I believe it went wrong by comparing it to another successful adventure game kickstart, that of Broken Sword. Broken Sword 5 was a similar case to Broken Age, successful kickstarter driven by nostalgia for an old adventure game series which also ran out of money and decided to deliver the first half of the game only for the time being. Those are the similarities, nearly every other aspect of the two differed.

Let's tackle my subjectivity, did I love Lucas Arts adventure games? The answer is yes, Monkey Island 1 is one of my all time favorite games and is joined in that pantheon by day of the tentacle, the monkey Island sequels and of course Grim Fandango. I did enjoy later Lucasarts games a little less however, The Dig for example didn't do it for me in the slightest. Broken Sword is a little different as there was only really one Broken Sword game that did it for me, that being the first one. The rest left me a little cold, however the characters the writing and the puzzles of the original stuck with me to this day and I feel it even influenced me as a writer. I loved them both.

Turning our sights on the latest iterations we have Broken Age which discarded the complex puzzles, interesting characters and irreverent witty humour for cutesy graphics and kid friendly themes thus betraying what I feel typifies the classic Lucasarts adventure game archetype. Broken Sword 5 instead did exactly what every true blooded fan wanted and went right back to how things were in the original, back to realistic artifact hunting with slight hints to the supernatural, back to brilliant hilarious characters. Back to a less vacuous and more relatable Nico and beautiful painted backdrops of real world land marks. I'm gushing, Broken Sword 5 is a master class in how to improve and evolve a brilliant game perhaps only failing when it came to the puzzles which despite often being really interesting were a little too straight forward.

The point is I feel that Broken Sword 5, while being indisputably new and modern was true to its roots and thereby to its fans. It didn't hide from trying something new but it successfully identified what made the original great and so much loved and incorporated those elements. Broken Age instead took those fan loved elements and incinerated them, leaving behind an empty student art project. Indeed Broken Age might be what you'd expect from a companies first Adventure Game if it was built in an absolute vacuum, with no lessons learned or inspiration to draw from. You could argue that's exactly what it was as Double Fine haven't really produced one before, well, Schafer kind of made me feel like I was getting something else and for that I am more than a little peeved.

It's been a long time since I've updated this blog and a lot has changed.  My current project progresses a little more slowly than I had hoped but still has managed to make the 10,000 word mark so it's not all bad news.

Work life has had an impact on my work, culminating in my recently being made redundant.  Of course, being redundant is horrible in many ways but I can't help think back to the last time this happened and it actually propelled me to write half a novel in a very short amount of time.  Additionally, a short story I penned during that time turned into a full novel of the following two years.  So, I suppose experience teaches me to treat this more like an opportunity and less like a disaster.

I've developed a new schedule, rearranged my living room and am set for breaking the writing barrier once and for all.

New Writing Technique

Right, so the rumours are in fact true. Despite my incredible silence on this blog my new novel has been started and stands at a nicely confirming 7500 fully revised words. I won't go into the plot too much as it's early days in that respect but I think the process I've taken this time is worth chronicling in some way.

First of all, when I started work on my novel it wasn't this novel. It was a similar book that shared a lot of the same characters but was from the perspective of what is now a minor character. I went over each of my planned “introduce X character” sequence and wrote them out, around 2000 words a piece. I did this for each of the would-be central characters. What was interesting about this is that it highlighted very quickly some aspects that were “wrong” in my original plan.

The biggest one of these revelations was that the person I had earmarked for antagonist was far too boring to fill that role, I say boring and that sounds a little mean. It was more like it was a character that aligned with me too well, it raised no questions for me and certainly didn't promise any answers. Similarly it emerged that some of those supporting characters were too plain, too fixture like in my world. As I wrote about them it felt like I had written it all out before, that's no good.

And the big surprise was that one of those supporting characters was challenging, interesting.Something I hadn't really touched on in my writing before so they got promoted to antagonist.

This approach didn't just highlight my errors to me either, it prepared some of the hardest part of the track, something like sending out scout parties to verify your assumptions. I'll still add characters and situations as I go, I'll remain fluid as I need to but there is ground prepared in places and that provides a lot more confidence than I'd usually have access to. It's proved to be an interesting approach even if it did emerge organically.

This Must be the Place

It's funny how we persist with patterns. Though our locations, jobs, responsibilities and so on can change we revert to our most basic modus operandi over time. Sometimes this can be unpleasant as we return to habits that are in some way self destructive but more often times I find it's reassuring. These patterns and activities form our core, the thing we can always have to fall back to. Not dependent on how well off we are or where we are in our lives, just on who we are.

For me the big constant that I've returned to again and again since beginning was writing, nothing makes me feel the same way and I always return to it, finding some project to work on. It's amusing at the same time because I have experienced failure in writing to an extent I haven't seen elsewhere but it's funny, any success I see, no matter how tiny becomes so ridiculously magnified that it eclipses all else I've ever achieved.

Recently, it was just somebody saying they enjoyed my book. And that sentence set flame to countless rejection letters, deleted all the zeroes I've had to endure. That's enough at this stage to stick at it for another novel.

And what a novel it will be!

My Kingdom for a Cheese Roll

I've been neglecting the writing lately, my latest project kind of collapsed in on itself.  I had spent a good deal of time developing each character and on finally sitting down to start the narrative itself I found that there just wasn't much to write.  This goal of mine to build realistic, people based story lines proves really difficult.  People sitting down in the room is just of very limited interest, something has to be going on.

Not only that but the core of my story, an artist whose work would reflect the goings on between the main character just does not provide wordcount.  I can only describe a painting for so long I found before it's time to move on.

I've been criticized before for writing with too much pace, never giving the reader a chance to settle themselves into a particular scene and I acknowledge that and attribute it to my own reading habits.  I like to be propelled through a story, I like to wonder where I'll be taken next and all of my favorite books achieve that in one way or another.

I will rework my current project and then reboot it soon.  Until then, I've redesigned the cover of Moderately Adventurous which you can see above.  I also set up this weekend as a free period to see if the new art can attract a few sales!

The annoying thing about doing anything creative

All week I dragged myself into the coffee shop, pulled out my laptop and attempted to do some writing. I wrote bits and pieces for my new novel but ultimately spent the vast majority of my time on writing code. (More on that later.)

So, drips and drabs of content got written but hardly a weeks holiday's worth. Today, Sunday, the very end of my holiday and a day off I would have had anyway I wander in and bang out 3100 words worth of sitcom material. Now, I have no idea why it was sitcom material I wrote but 3100 words, wow! How did that happen, I'm still in shock.

Now, quick note before I begin my rant. I did go for a run this morning. This obviously activated by brain in ways I can't explain and really, it's clear that my week of poor results is truly a product of my own laziness. I mean, staying up late and doing fuck all sounds like good holiday material on paper but really it's not. If there's one thing this week of utter aimlessness has taught me is that running is the real ice-cream. Yes, all those fluffy delicious mental messages they put on the ice-cream label, everything they want you to think that icecream will do for you, running does all that for free. Oh yeah, and instead of leaving you a total land whale it makes you trim, oxygenated, powerful.

Now, that was worth writing because the truth always is but I did have a point about the fickle nature of anything creative. It's utterly unpredictable, utterly. Coding is like this too which is why I severely disagree with the assembly line style of management that I always see no matter where I work. If I was writing for money this week I would have had to jump off a bridge I got so little done, if I was coding for money maybe I would have done a little better. The point is that when it's good, it's hyper good and when it's bad a brick does a similar job.

So, let the developers frolic with the writers. They produce not because you tell them to, but because they need to. The alternative is horrible.

Final point, I love writing, yes I do. I'm really happy that I got a good amount done today and I think it's a promising signal that good days lie ahead! Node.js is also fantastic. (But coding is a banned subject on this blog so whatever. I will be starting a new blog soon for that sort of thing though I think.)