Week 821

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week started with a guest lecture at the Hogeschool Utrecht. For two hours, I spoke about my new-found calling as a hybrid writer, writing De verdwijners, and testing it too. I’d also prepared a small deck on the Toiletten iPad app, but didn’t have time for that. I welcome every chance to tell this story!

Also on Monday, NRC Handelsblad published a short Nintendo piece I’d written, about the company’s current status. Some of the puzzle pieces: its 125th birthday, the release of Pokémon Trading Card Game on iOS and the New 3DS.

On Tuesday, I wrote my Alien Isolation review (short version: it’s scary as hell, until you discover how long the game is going to be) and edited two short reviews for nrc.next: Shadow of Mordor by Harry Hol and Heavy Bullets by Erwin Vogelaar, who wrote something for the paper for the first time. Unfortunately, they were not published last week (or this one), but should still be soon.

It was then decided that the short games reviews for the paper will come to an end. Instead, we’ll do longer games pieces on a roughly weekly basis. Sounds like it could be a slightly better compromise, if it all goes as planned.

On Tuesday morning, after a short hiatus I stopped by NOS op 3 to talk about my thinking (and drifting) so far. The client was rather enthusiastic about a couple of my ideas, which was just the confirmation I needed to take this one step further. The next phase is where I roll it all into a readable report.

On that same day, I published the second episode of my Hybrid Writer’s Podcast, this one with Peter Zantingh. I also spent some time getting the podcast player, RSS feed and iTunes page to work correctly; I think everything is fine now, so you should be able to subscribe. The next day, I visited Dirk van Weelden to record another episode; I also put some work into confirming the rest of the line-up of ten to twelve writers I want to interview during this run.

On Wednesday, I submitted my third grant proposal to the Creative Industries Fund NL, for my Hybrid Writer’s Toolkit project. Third time’s a charm, right? (I’m going to have to seriously reconsider my strategy if I they don’t embrace my project this time.)

By the end of the week, a lower back pain had developed and started somehow turning into a side pain. On Sunday, I managed to visit games event Firstlook, where I gave a short presentation on the development of robot hacking shooter RIVE together with Two Tribes intern Justin Zant. By the end, I was feeling tired and sore. I should start calling these my work and illness notes.