Week 721

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.

Another week of rewriting my upcoming novel De verdwijners: it’s going well, but far too slow. If I don’t get a lot more done during the coming week, I’ll get really worried.

One of the fun things that happened to this book (well, my idea of fun) is that I started it with an extremely clean setup. There were four characters, with one chapter for each of three settings each, plus a bonus chapter to wrap things up: 13 chapters in all.

While writing the first draft, though, I found that so much had to happen in each chapter, that I split them up into three parts, structured like a tiny dramatic arc. So, as the bonus chapter was still one bonus chapter, the first draft had 37 chapters.

And now, to granularize the rewriting process, I’m splitting my chapters into three parts each, again, with even tinier dramatic arcs. It’s like fractal writing! (I don’t think I’ll number them up ’till 117, though there will be line breaks.)

Other than that, on Monday I visited Two Tribes and played through the first chunk of Toki Tori 2 as a regular player would. The puzzle platformer I helped create, that will come to Wii U soon, is quickly starting to feel like a real game.

I spent most of Tuesday to finish, tweak and practice the talk that I gave at the Nationale Uitgeefdag 2012 on Wednesday (which I might publish here at a later date).

On Tuesday afternoon, I met with Carola Houtekamer, one of my editors at nrc.next. We talked about the previous week’s drama and totally cleared the air. I’d seen Carola before, but not really, I guess: apparently we frequent the same coffee shop, so I run into her all the time now.

On Thursday morning, I rewrote my article on history games, which appeared on Friday’s Tech spread in the paper. As predicted, it turned out much better than the previous versions. I’ve uploaded it on this site for your (Dutch) reading pleasure: Aanstekelijker dan een boek: Assassin’s Creed en de potentie van geschiedenisgames.

Finally, on Sunday I finished transcribing, translating and editing my interview with Jonathan Mak and Shaw-Han Liem, the Toronto, Canada based creators of the wonderful Sound Shapes, for the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine.