Week 733

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.

Things moved fast with my upcoming novel De verdwijners last week. I sent the 2.1 draft (second draft with some continuity tweaks applied) to a handful of second readers and already got comments from two of them. If you’re not among that group, really want to read and think you’re good at the feedback thing, this is the time to let me know!

On Friday, I met with my editor, who shared her extensive feedback with me: lots of good stuff that shouldn’t be too hard to implement.

She also gave me an update on the planning. The next two weeks I’ll be applying feedback and processing my remaining stack of notes. After that, the manuscript will go to the ‘persklaarmaker’, a specific type of proofreader. Literally: the person who readies the text for the press. This guy or gal will work on my book for another two weeks.

Then, I’ll have one final week, to apply the persklaarmakers’ feedback and do what I call the Jan Wolkers Phase: reading your book aloud to your wife, making minor tweaks to make sure everything sounds just right. After that it’s mostly out of my hands, although I get to OK the work of the corrector and the typesetter.

The rest of the week was spent cleaning up backlog and doing some well-deserved itch-scratching.

For example, I drafted a piece about the spirit of the Global Game Jam, in the context of my judging the Hilversum edition during the previous week. I don’t know if I’ll have the time to finish it though.

I also started a concept document for a game that’s been brewing in my mind for a while. It’s a playable sequel to De verdwijners. Seriously! I will be pitching this to game companies when the time is right.

Finally, some loose ends: on Tuesday I met with Carola Houtekamer, my editor at nrc.next, to discuss future ideas for articles in the paper. In the rush to finish my book, I neglected other gigs a little bit. High time to get back into the groove!

That night I met with Geert Nellen to talk about his next game.

On Wednesday, I visited Two Tribes. For the first time in a while, I played puzzle adventure game Toki Tori 2 (which I collaborate on) from the beginning to somewhere around the halfway point, and was delighted by how well it’s shaping up. Don’t take my word for it, I’m totally biased, but: this game is going to be quite something.

That night, I worked on quarterly tax stuff. Yes, that was also in my backlog.

During the week, I played more Ni No Kuni and on Saturday morning finished a smallish piece about the Level-5/Ghibli game, that should appear in this week’s NRC Handelsblad film appendix.

Finally, the latest issue of the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine came out. Besides my regular retro column, it contains my four-page interview with Richard ‘ibb & obb‘ Boeser, which turned out pretty well. You should check it out.