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.

NaNoWriMo continues. might post some of it later. Maybe.

I’m halfway through NaNoWriMo so I barely have any words left. With the laws of word supply and demand so totally out of wack these are the most expensive words I’ll write all year. That’s why there are so few of them here. They are just worth more.

For the past week I have been doing NaNoWriMo. In that time I have written a little over 12000 words. The challenge is to reach 50000 by the end of the month. As long as I don’t suddenly lose my fingers or suffer some sort of mental paralysis, it looks like I am on track to hit that target. After day one, I wasn’t very hopeful.

Best Games - Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat is a bait and switch. I have talked about Mortal Kombat here a lot. I bring it up when referencing other fighting games. I mention it in passing when talking about controls or graphics or violence. Mortal Kombat is probably my second favourite fighting game series, second to Street Fighter. I love a round or three of Tekken or Samurai Shodown or Fatal Fury or Soulcalibur or Dark Stalkers or… you get it. I like fighting games. Mortal Kombat sits near the top of that list. I think I got into it for the same reasons that most people did, for the same reasons that most people think you would get into Mortal Kombat, but I keep playing games in the series for the same reasons that other fighting game fans do.

So this past week I sold a story. It’s pretty exciting. I’m going to do something here that I haven’t done in over 450 posts. I’m going to ‘reprint’ an old post from 2014. You see, there is a reason that I wanted to publish a story. It’s the same reason that I started writing it. It’s the same reason that I wrote any of the stories I have. It’s why I will keep writing.

I’m gonna try to write a novel. Probably a bad one. I definitely won’t be doing any editing. It won’t be polished. It might not make sense. I’m gonna try anyway.

For the past few months I have been trying to sell stories. Sell is a bit of a stretch I suppose. All the outlets that I have been sending them too would not have paid me much for them. In terms of per hour wages, I would be making less than pennies off these stories. That’s not really what I’m trying to do though is it? I’m not looking to get wealthy off these stories. I want people to read them.

This is a picture. I made this picture. This picture gives me anxiety. There is a state that all drawings and paintings go through that can be best classified as “unfortunate”. It’s the state that makes an artist want to cover the paper so people looking over your shoulder can’t see your mess. People who are not the artist might, rightly, think that this is as good as it will get and walk away disappointed. I have worked very long and very hard on myself to break the impulse to cover my paper. I’ve been here before. Every time I draw, paint, write, model, texture, light, or animate anything, there is a point where the honest impulse would be to cover the paper. Hide the shame of a picture that is in that halfway and unfortunate state. Every time I hit that point, I feel it too. I think this picture, or story, or whatever, is always going to look like this and it will be terrible, and I am terrible, and why did I even try doing this thing in the first place.

I played a game that reinforced an opinion I have. I know, super scientific. I have, and will, substitute this opinion for actual research. It’s a simple thing, but since this is more or less a notebook to my future self (who won’t go back and read it) I’ll jot it down here.

Best Games - SSX 3 The first SSX game was a banger right out of the gate. It could easily be in the running for a ‘best games’ write up. It had a solid but sort of complicated trick system. It felt fast and smooth. It looked and sounded great. It was fun to play. All good. I think though, the third entry in the series is really something special.

I have been writing here for over ten years. Something like eight years of that has been once a week. Almost all of it I have done alone. Like, of course all the typing was done by me. That shouldn’t be too surprising. It is, after all, very difficult for two or more people to use one keyboard. What I mean by writing alone is, I don’t run any of this by an editor or second set of eyes. I just type it out and post it up. Including most of the stories. This is sort of a problem.