P.F. Thomése got lost

With these weeknotes I track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on. They’re public so you can keep me in check.

Early last week I continued hammering out the big Geometry Girl plan, but didn’t get to wrap it up as planned, as the week got busier towards the end. I’ll finish the thing this week though. Yes I will!

So what gobbled up my time and energy? First of all, it was last-minute tweaking to get the current Home Rule (working title) beta ready for playtest with Tim and the folks at Hubbub, rewriting and adding copy in my case. And then actually taking the train to Oosterbeek on Wednesday, to let three pairs of children (aged 8 to 14) play the game at the Airborne Museum.

It was gratifying to see some things working well, and educational to see what needs work. I also liked just visiting the museum, which I hadn’t been to yet, including a quite visceral warzone experience in the basement, and a touching temporary exhibition featuring personal WW2 memories. Afterwards, walking back to the railway station alone, through lanes that were the backdrop to the Battle of Arnhem just seventy years ago, it was hard not to feel something.

Secondly, I was caught up in preparation for Saturday’s Future of Publishing Summit during the Nieuwe Types festival, also in Arnhem, serendipitously. I’d been asked to talk about what literary authors can learn from game makers, which I’d prefaced with a blog post early this month.

Tangentially, I was invited to discuss the supposed death of the novel on national radio; the recording is online with the item starting at the 41 minutes mark. It was rather tense as fellow guest P.F. Thomése got lost near the studio, and one of the show’s employees managed to guide him there just in time.

The summit on Saturday was interesting, and my talk went well, I think. I managed not to drift into self-reflective mode too much, staying in-narrative; the room responded well; and I felt intense and sweaty by the end. Also, I was namedropped a lot in panel that wrapped up the afternoon. I wasn’t very talkative afterwards, but felt at ease, enjoyed seeing familiar faces and meeting new people, and at night, attended the presentation of the first wave of ArtEZ Creative Writing graduates.

Finally, in the ‘random’ category, I…

• Wrote a new technology column for KIJK, and provided my editor with some new input for the 3D games graphics report I wrote in March, which will appear in the next issue.
• Put together a short blog post for the Dutch Games Association platform that I contribute to: Dutch games at E3: Horizon and more.
• #hobbydevved with Hessel on Wednesday night, mostly cleaning up the comments in the code of my Game Maker prototype and sorting out my notes on what I want to do next.
• Visited Two Tribes on Friday afternoon, checking out some new RIVE levels. I also looked at Toki Tori (the original) for 3DS, for which I’ll do some copy tinkering, and finished up my writing for Toki Tori 2+ on PlayStation 4, which is now off to the translators.

Average step count per day: 7.654
Average staircase count per day: 12
Average sleep per night: 6:29
Average weight: 90,4 kg