Week 843

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 was rather nerve-wrecking, with three major events I’d been wanting or planning to do for a while and now suddenly became reality.

The first was my story workshop at the HU, on Tuesday. I told a group of students about my plans for the Geometry Girl app novel and about my concept of iterative story development. I then described the storyline to them, and introduced six characters using drawings by Tim Hengeveld; they then developed the characters by thinking, talking and writing about them in small groups. It was an interesting experience that helped me to look at the characters more objectively, and also gave me a couple of new ideas. I hope to do it again, and develop the format further.

Geometry Girl characters

The second was another classroom situation: starting last Thursday, I’m teaching a practical writing class to Games & Interaction students at the HKU. I’ve done a bunch of talks, but this was my first real teaching experience; I can’t say it comes natural yet, but I can see the fun of it and I think it went well enough. My classes are every other week, so I have some time to recover.

The third was my interview with Arnon Grunberg. If he’s not the most famous currently living Dutch writer, he’s surely the most interesting, with a unique perspective on nearly everything, a humongous production and fun side projects like brain scanning himself and his readers. We met in the bar of the Hilton in Amsterdam on Friday afternoon, and talked for more than an hour. I’ll share the recording soon, which’ll mark the start of a new (monthly instead of weekly) Hybrid Writer’s Podcast series.

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

Average step count per day: 8.116
Average staircase count per day: 12
Average weight: 89,6 kg