zondag 25 augustus 2013

Responsibilities, books, and Kickstarters.

With my vacation ending soon, I find the recent developments quite interesting to observe, as well as participate in said developments.
My thesis, which has been in the works since January, is finally starting to near its epic conclusion. The last words are being typed, the last screenshots are being captured and I’m waiting for the last e-mails to arrive. I hope to be able to end the whole deal before university starts, in September, or at least finish it off within the first few weeks, so I don’t have to deal with the responsibilities of the thesis for the duration of my first class this year. That would be inconvenient.


At the same time, I’m also being reminded about November coming closer and closer, which means that NaNoWriMo is also nearing at an equally vast speed. My first NaNoWriMo was quickly followed by my first published book, even though it was with a print-on-demand publisher, and I enjoyed writing the year after that and the year after that, always succeeding in reaching the 50.000 word goal easily. So easily, in fact, that I usually already met the word goal on day ten and went on from there, writing at a steady pace of 5.000 to 7.000 words per day. Maybe more, if I had to make up for a lost day, but the average would be around 5.000 words per day.
What you generally don’t see while looking at the statistics of my userpage, though, is the amount of preparation that comes with writing a story. I like to write out the general outline of a story, which can differ from highly detailed (when I actually envision a certain scene) to terribly general (when I just want to make a point come across) and see where I end up. I recall my second NaNoWriMo being about five pages of notes, but the ideas started to pile up as I was writing and I started adding subplots and making changes as I went along, never really failing to keep up with these undocumented changes. The result was Physokinetic, a universe in which breaking the rules of physics was, for some people, not all that weird.
The year after that, I decided to write a sequel to Physokinetic, called Tamer. It followed a (in my mind) logical consequence to the reality-shaking climax of Physokinetic and how it caused several different kinds of creatures to invade Earth. It ended with (spoilers) only the dragons being left on Earth thanks to plot-related reasons, and I planned to end it with that.
Unfortunately, a couple of months ago, I started finding reasons to revisit this universe, with its dragons, its physics-denying humanoids, and its nearly indestructible creatures. With this story, I plan on ending it, though, which may or may not work, because I’ve already started editing and changing the notes I had been making to better suit a change of mind I’ve been having.
All things considered, though, I’m thoroughly enjoying this. Knowing that I’m willing and able to think about these things and start the creative engine that’s necessary to think about the changes I want to make and the repercussions they’ll have in my little universe means that I’ll probably be able to write with my usual style, making it up as I go along.

Thirdly, the Kickstarters. I continue to enjoy following and actually funding Kickstarter projects. Recently, I finally received a message about the Reaper Bones Kickstarter being sent out to me, almost a year after the actual funding ended and almost five months after the actually estimated time of delivery. I’ve been excited about this Kickstarter since the very start, especially since it basically introduced me to the basic concept of the system, and it was a huge rush to see the stretch goals passing by as time went on.
Another project was the Character Cards Kickstarter, which is basically an 80-card deck of personalities and basic ideas about NPC’s that I plan to use extensively if necessary. They also sent out the message that they had started to send out their rewards, which means that I’ll be able to start writing about these rewards very soon.

Finally, in a bit of an addendum, my dice collection has been expanded quite a bit since the last post about the dice. I guess I’ll spend a minute or two to take another picture and document that, in the near future…

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