Life Happens
filed under site on 21 Dec 2024
tagged site and meta
2023 was the year of journaling games; I created Silent, Heard, and an unreleased version I don’t know will ever get finished. I am proud of them all.
2024 was a year of lying fallow, of mourning changes, and grieving losses. I finished Remix, a bittersweet final word on a chapter of my creative life I had hoped, though I knew it was impossible, would never be closed. I have no more play-by-posts active.
On September 1st, 2024, for no real reason, I began writing a novel. It took a couple of days to write up some notes, to lay out a skeletal structure and briefly plot it out. I set a goal; 70k words in 90 days, with a aim to hit it at 70 days instead.
Before I knew it, I had a second, whimsical WIP going concurrently, same preparation, same general structure, but more meat to it. And then a third, because it was November! I have to do a 30 day project! That was built on a custom narrative structure I wrote up during prep, before the month started.
December 1st, I took a break. Just kidding, I used the first week to write a new custom narrative structure built on emotional intensity inspired by kishotenketsu, and incorporating the narrative beats of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. I plotted a new story using it.
On the 7th I applied it to a shelved project that was originally structured with Save the Cat (which is fine, I guess). I was hoping to pour out some self-indulgent prose to soothe my holiday stress, with little expectation and zero discipline; I just let the story carry me. 50k+ words later, it’s today.
Stats since September 1st. Over 1000 pages of prep, notes, prose, and narrative structures. 840 of those are prose pages. 3 novels complete from an “opening” to a “the end”. A fourth novel that’s three or four chapters from it. A few pages of ttrpg design.
I don’t know how sustainable this is, and I expect “not at all”; I intended to do no more than two at a time, using the 70k in 70 days model, but wasn’t disciplined enough to do it.
Other random stuff:
- I removed the artbreeder placeholder images (from like 2021?); it wasn’t generative llm content (it used an older model) but time has proven I don’t want any of that stuff near my creative works, even if it was neat before we understood the harm of it.
- I probably won’t blog regularly but who knows, I also didn’t think I could write 1000 words a day of prose.
- I am still doing game design, just more slowly; a lot of the heart went out of me when my group ended. I still have a handful of projects I want to see through.
- I’m on Bluesky now, using this website’s domain, feel free to say hi!
