Week 735

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 I worked my ass off to get a new draft of De verdwijners out the door. I was done on Sunday, a little after midnight, and submitted it to my editor. In early March, I will have one additional week to tweak. After that it’s mostly out of my hands. Finishing a book is not spectacular: it’s stretched out and even before you’re completely done, there are regrets about not having more time, not being a better writer. Instead of a ‘Holy cow, I’m done!’, it’s an ‘I guess that’s it’.

There was other stuff, too, but not a lot.

On Monday morning I finished my retro column for the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine, about two classic, bar-raising PlayStation 2 games, Ico and Rez. The column will appear in the last issue my friend Youri Loedts worked on. He’s moving on to hopefully better and brighter ventures, on which we might even cooperate.

That afternoon, at Two Tribes, I continued tweaking the script for the upcoming trailer of puzzle adventure game Toki Tori 2. I also wrote a marketing blog post for them. Still feels a bit weird to do, but fun and educational too.

On Tuesday, I met with Sigfrid van Driel of Little Makuzu, and his new partner in crime, Michiel Koorn. I worked with Sigfrid a decade ago on n3 Nintendo Magazine, and now he asked me to write and edit the copy for his upcoming kids’ app about cars.

On Wednesday, I met with Robin Klaassen to discuss a possible game videoblog project. It was a little bit to soon, probably, as I was still busy tweaking my book. Now that I’m done, I’m going to take a hard look at all the stuff I’ve been thinking and talking about to see what stays and what will have to go.

That same day, I published my first contribution to Recess!, a correspondence series with Alper Çuğun and Kars Alfrink. Each week, one of us will publish some ‘personal ruminations’ about games. My first entry was about Ni No Kuni.

On Thursday, I wrote a short review of that same game, which appeared in nrc.next on Friday. It was my first game review for the redesigned version of the paper. The good news is that we’ll publish game reviews more often: two each week, on average. The bad news is they’ll be less than half the old word count. This means it’s no longer worth it to crosspublish them on this site, though I might do extended versions from time to time.