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…

Heirloom shooting

So, today was a bit of an interesting day for me.

Quite some time ago, my father had inherited an airsoft gun, which had been left to him by his grandfather (that being, my great-grandfather). It had been in our possession for a while, mostly because we couldn’t (legally) do anything. Dutch law states that you can’t use firearms in public areas, but our backyard is, unfortunately, quite a bit too small to actually fire a rifle it at any range.

So, back in July, my father took my brother out (I was, unfortunately, otherwise occupied) to illegally go into the forest and shoot the gun at a couple of empty cans. The full story about that can be read (in Dutch) HERE.

Fast-forward a month or so, and my father admits to me that he was getting rather itchy to go and try the gun out again. We still had ammo for it, so there was no reason not to go out and perform more delicious can homicide. Needless to say, after hearing stories from both my father and my brother, and hearing how enthusiastic they were about the whole experience, I was quite interested in going out shooting, too.

So, today, we went back to the spot that my father and brother had spent a good hour of shooting and set up some cans for me there. The first thing I noticed as I held the rifle was that the thing was a lot heavier than I had thought, but I had also forgotten about the heavy wooden stock that probably added a lot to that weight.

After painstakingly learning how to load it (I already shot an air rifle, dad, I know how these things work), and having set up a can, all I could really do was start aiming…

It was nothing like the videogames, that’s one thing. It took me a few moments to get the hang of the sights, which were a lot less intuitive than I had imagined it to be. More on good faith and the whole belief that ‘not shooting is never a hit’, I pulled the trigger…

 

BAM, was about all I could think. After this great success, we decided to take a couple of steps back and shoot again. This all was pretty successful, but the fork in the tree soon didn’t fit anymore. There were unfortunate plants in the way that prevented us from walking back, so we placed a plank that we had taken with us on the ground and started placing the cans on there…

 

 

I’m absolutely no marksman, but especially that last shot made me feel pretty damn awesome. After that, we just started taking potshots from different angles, places and distances, until my brother arrived from his work to also join us for a bit. It was great fun, but we quickly started to notice our aim was declining. We were obviously growing tired, so after an hour or so, we packed up and headed back home.

The cans were utterly destroyed, so I didn’t even regret it.