I’ve got some events to plug, before we get into the meat of things.
First up: if you’re in the Bristol area this Saturday (4th October), I will be selling some games at PRSC’s Bizarre Bazaar! Details can be found here.
Next: I will be running a workshop at Peckham Digital on Sunday 19th October! We'll go through the basics of making interactive fiction with the Ink Narrative Scripting Language, a simple but versatile tool that I think more people should know about. You can sign up for it here.
It’s been a while since I last wrote here - by which I mean both ‘Patreon’ and ‘my blog’, because this will be appearing in both places. It seemed counterintuitive to paywall my updates and process notes, so here we are, cross-posting. Some hybridity, some porousness, some slippage - all concepts I feel a deep affinity for. There will still be things in either place that you cannot find in the other, most likely, but now there is a path between them. Maybe travel down it, when you have a moment?
August was spent resting and recovering from July. Welcome to My Home Page was a fantastic experience, but it meant I spent a full month working at more-or-less break-neck speed, in addition to traveling and socialising. I have always worked in ‘crunch and crash’ cycles (a fact I often find frustrating), and August was very much crash. September has found me slowly easing back into the work, resisting the urge to spend all my energy right after getting it back.
The main thing I’ve been doing is Couch to 80k - and it’s been great so far. I’ve been feeling for a while now that my prose is too stiff, too polished. I keep coming across writing that flows swift and easily, that feels so playful in its spontaneity, and it always leaves me with envy.
This is a stylistic choice, but it’s also a craft thing. One of my strengths as a writer is my ability to make a sentence interesting. I love a satisfying sequence of sounds, I love an unusual syntax, I love playing with voice and ambiguity and seeming objective while being anything but. The downside is that my prose tends to be overworked as a result. It’s tiring to read, and it means that nothing stands out because EVERYTHING is a rhetorical flourish. Long-form prose needs to spend most of its time being a good, sturdy cross-country horse, and I’m doing non-stop dressage.
It’s also stifling. I write a sentence; I do not like the sentence; I spend at least ten minutes revising the sentence. This is not something I should be doing at the early stage of a piece. How on earth am I supposed to revise a sentence when I don’t know what its job is in the context of the wider piece? Why have I spent so long working like this?!
So Couch to 80k - which consists mostly of little ten-minute free-writing exercises - has been really effective at shaking me out of that mould. For a while now, I’ve been nursing an idea for a blog post about prose style and effusiveness/spontaneity and how gendered it is. Maybe it’s time to have a shake at that.
I’ve also been doing little pieces of pixel art and coding for my next major IF project: Shackle and Crown. Or, as I like to call it, the ‘complex feelings about Oxford’ game. Less to report on this front; I’m just letting it all coalesce.
I finished Courttia Newland’s Cosmogramma! Anyone who read July’s Patreon update will know that it was not wowing me - boy, did that change! I had the experience I often get with poetry collections, where it takes me between half and three-quarters of the book to mentally sync up with what the writer is doing, and then everything clicks. I wonder sometimes whether this is just because most collections are structured such that the best work is towards the end, but it does feel like I’m tangibly picking up on a writer’s rhythms and quirks. My favourite stories were ‘The Sankofa Principle’, ‘Link’, ‘You Meets You’, ‘Nommo’, and ‘Dark Matters’.
I also read Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica and… I did not like it. It had its moments! Some pleasingly fucked up plot beats, and I respect how uncomprising it was in its violence - but it all felt a bit gratuitously nasty. Also, the world-building did not convince me. I simply do not think that if all animals contracted a deadly plague, people would start torturing dogs and defacing sculptures of animals. The book was written pre-COVID, and it really shows; we know from experience that people very much will not be overzealous in their safety measures, it is in fact the opposite problem.