Week 745

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 got some semi-disappointing news. On Wednesday, I visited publishing house Atlas Contact to talk to my editor Inger Boxsem, who asked me for some new tweaks to my upcoming novel De verdwijners. The bad news is that this will delay the book until June at the earliest. The good news, of course, is that the final product will be even better.

It’s hard (or actually: impossible) to determine whether it’s worth it. At this point in the process, how does one quantify the amount of extra ‘literary quality’ that the extra effort generates? And more importantly, how does one know whether this allows the book to cross the magic threshold between ‘good’ and ‘great’, and between ‘unexceptional’ and ‘noteworthy’?

To console myself, I got around to putting together a teaser page for the book (in Dutch, obviously), including the book cover and some info on the main characters. There’s even the option to subscribe to a newly invented newsletter, so I can just send you an email when the books comes out, instead of recommending you to keep checking these weeknotes. (Although that’s a totally valid thing to do!)

After that, in theoretically unrelated news, I fell ill, which lasted pretty much all the way into the weekend. Among other things, I had to postpone my weekly Victory Boogie Woogie installment, while ‘my’ character, artist Godfried de Ridder, kept being pulled into other authors’ contributions. This week, I’ll have to dive deep into the story again and tell the world what Godfried is really thinking.

That wasn’t all for the week, luckily. nrc.next published my short review of Fire Emblem for Nintendo 3DS, and my short announcement of last Friday’s edition of chiptunes dance fest Eindbaas. I also wrote a short review of the GPS game Strut, which didn’t appear until this week.

Importantly, I helped finish the pilot of Ripple Effect, which is the process safety game Hubbub is making for Shell. This and next week, nearly a hundred test players are taking it for a ride, and based on their feedback, we’ll be creating the final version.

Finally, I had dinner with Rob Smit, my game journalism mentor from back in the day. He’s doing totally different things now, and it’s always a pleasure to hear what he’s up to.