I haven’t been playing the big, flashy, new Fromsoft game. I probably won’t play it for a while. I mean, it seems great and all. I really do like their games. I think that they are tough, but not more so than old 8bit games. I will probably get around to the huge, open world spectacle that is Elden Ring, but right now I’m still enjoying Sekiro. A more than two year old game that I only just got around to playing recently.

I have been writing a story, in bits and pieces, for the last two weeks or so. Earlier this week, I had started working on this post. I was going to write about how I took a very meandering route. How I had started the story from one characters perspective, and then changed it to be from another, and then changed it again to be from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, and how none of that was working. How I eventually changed it to a less conventional, but much more appropriate perspective.

Best Games - Mass Effect (1, 2, and 3) Games are games and movies are movie and books are books. They all work themselves into you. They all occupy different pockets of memory. Just like a song will bring me back to some specific moment, recalling a passage in a book or a sequence in a movie will set my feet in the past. Games are usually a little different, though.

I would rather be writing something else. I have a handful of unfinished shorts stories and a couple of finished ones that need edits. I would rather be writing those, but this is what I’m writing right now.

I’m watching women’s Olympic Hockey as I write this. Earlier today, I watched Slopestyle snowboarding. Before that, we watched some Super-G skiing, and some Big Air Skiing. I like sports. I know a lot of people don’t, even a lot of people who like games. I think maybe they should try watching the Olympics.

Best Games - Puzz Loop / Zuma This is a tough one. I think Zuma is one of the best games of all time, but its core concept is also lifted from another game, Puzz Loop.

Quite a few years ago, I decided to write something and post it up here at least once a week. So every week for at least four hundred and eighty-two weeks, I wrote (and occasionally drew or painted) something and posted it. At first, none of it was fiction. I didn’t know how to write fiction.

After I did NanoWriMo I took a bit of time off. I put the files away and didn’t look at any of the words I wrote for a good couple of weeks.

Best Games - Aliens TC Doom Mod I realize this isn’t a game. No. I’m not going to go that far. It is a game. It is a fully formed game. Not a wholly original work, but that’s not important, is it?.

I’m almost done editing up one story, and I have another that is about fifty percent done. I don’t know if they will find homes anywhere, but I think at least one of them is pretty ‘marketable’. It’s short, concise, but presents a sense of place and time that is the sort of thing people look for in short stories. At least it’s the sort of thing that I look for, and last I checked, I was people.

tap and twitch long past time and money frantic spent gone without regret ​

I finished a game this week. I was glad to have played it, but I was sad to have finished it. The DLC for the original Outer Wilds, Echoes of the Eye. It’s a DLC that is so substantial that it’s almost an entire game on its own.

Best Games - NHL 96 I don’t play a lot of sports games. I have definitely dabbled. The odd baseball or football game. Maybe a basketball game or two. Many car racing games. I have always preferred video games that were fantasies. Things I could never do in real life. I have a ball glove and a baseball. I don’t have a rocket pack or a sword. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to use it. Playing a game of catch wouldn’t get anyone to look twice, but I really couldn’t walk down my back path with a katana.

So I did it. I wrote a little over 50000 words in one month. Here is the postmortem. I guess I’ll answer the two main questions that I had going in. The first question I had was simple. Could I do it? And if I could, how hard would it be? So the answer to the first was obviously, yes. I wrote around 1700 words every single day for 30 days. Some days I wrote slightly less, some days slightly more. There was one day that I wrote 3000. So the answer to the first question was, yep. I absolutely can write 50000 words in a month. The second question is a little more difficult. Was it hard? Well, yes and no. Simply typing 2000 or even 3000 words in a day, or really in a few hours, isn’t that hard. Making up 1700 words of new story every day is a little more difficult. The main problem was that I didn’t have a super clear idea where the story was going sometimes, and I sort of had to make it up on the fly. Usually I would make some sort of plan for what I was going to write the next day and then try as hard as I could to follow that plan. Sometimes it went off the rails and I would have to backtrack to fix it. The next things that I think people would want to know about taking on a challenge like this is, does it make you faster at writing? Does it make you a better writer? To answer the first question, for me at least, it didn’t make me a faster writer. It took me anywhere from two to four hours every day to finish those words. Without fail. I never got faster. While I can type relatively quickly, I don’t think I’m a very fast writer. I make mistakes and I backtrack, and I have trouble finding the exact words I want sometimes. I did notice that my writing got much more intricate as I went on. I started to take a wider view while still working on the sentence to sentence beats of a scene. I started to plan setups and reveals that would be pages or chapters away. While I don’t think that what I wrote is very good yet, it needs a lot of editing and scene changes to make the characters consistent and more fully featured. I started to work on the long arcs of the plot. I set up mysteries that I know how to pay off later (and some that I don’t yet). So far, for as thin as it is, the story functions. It does the things it needs to do to make a reader turn the page. It will take a lot of work to finish it, but it’s on its way. Would I do it again? I don’t know. Maybe. It is a good way to kick-start a book. And it shows you how much work writing a whole book might be. I suppose you could write a novella in that time, but I scoped a story that will take between one hundred thousand and one hundred twenty thousand to tell. I only really got close to the middle of the book. I think if I did it again, I would come with more planning. I had a short story and a handful of notes, but no real plan, so I had to make it up as I went. While that can work well, I wouldn’t recommend it as a method of creating very polished writing. What I have right now points me in a direction, but there is no way I could sell it. It’s just too messy. What all of this did prove to me was, if you worked full time as a writer, you could write at least a book a year by typing up around 2000 words a day. It would take a few hours, and then you would have to spend the rest of the day fixing those words to make them something someone would want to read. It would be a full time job, but not an easy one. 

I’m in the home stretch. Only a couple thousand words until I hit 50000 for NaNoWriMo. I don’t know if what I have written can be made into something good, but, right now, it seems likely. There is enough here that I think the final book will be around 100,000-120,000 words… which falls right in line with average book length. I have no intention, or desire, at this point to turn it into a sprawling trilogy or grandiose expanded universe. It’s a single, contained story. A modern fantasy, semi-romantic comedy, with some darker real world themes. Mostly though, it’s an adventure story. It’s meant to be fun. So far I think it is.