Welcome back!
Recently, I’ve had the impression of constantly falling behind in my projects. Every time I manage to get some work done on one front, I seem to be falling behind somewhere else. This feeling hit me after realising this project started exactly a year ago. As I look back, I see the progress that was made, and wonder if more could have been achieved. So far, I have written 28 articles about writing, 16 updates on my progress, 12 book reviews, 10 writing exercises, 9 inspirational posts, 5 interviews and 2 short stories. All of this in between my family/personal life, working on my own book, my job as a copyright specialist and my duties as a writer at Missing Worlds Media.
Unfortunately, without anything or anyone to compare myself to, there is no real way for me to know if my progress should be considered normal or not. So 2015 will be my benchmark for 2016, with hopes of surpassing it.
February has arrived and the weather here is still way below freezing. Staying inside to hide from the cold is a great excuse to snuggle up on the couch with a loved one. This seems appropriate, since St-Valentine's day is just around the corner. In honor of the holiday, I decided to try and have all posts this month have a theme relating to love or relationships.
Love enduring the passing of time.
To start, I chose a special romance novel for this month’s book review. I have to admit, a love story is completely different from anything I have previously read. I am so used to horror, fantasy and sci-fi, that I was afraid a story focusing on romance would bore me. To make things easier on myself, I managed to find a book that mixed romance with some science fiction elements. The end result was a tear-jerker that had even a hardcore geek like me burning through the pages. I was so hooked, I even went to watch the movie (though the movie was nowhere near as good as the book). Needless to say, as a first venture into romance I was thoroughly pleased and look forward to sharing what I learned.
To further the Valentine day theme, this month’s research into writing will be about romance in storytelling. I think I will have a lot on the subject, mainly because I rarely read books in this genre. At this time I feel my abilities are not up to par to attempting to write a love story, so any information I can get would be useful.
My tasks at Missing Worlds Media took a different turn this month. As we are progressing with the creation of content for missions and storylines, we started working on elements called Plot Tokens. The purpose of these tokens, is to mark the players with certain information, such as decisions they have made or clues they have found, which will later affect their progress in the game.
For example, a player is faced with a decision between gathering information (option A), or arming himself (option B). The player progresses through the story until he reaches a room with a safe protected by an armed guard. Now, if the player chose option A, the Plot Token will tell the game that the player possesses the combination to the safe, but will have to risk fighting the guard unarmed. If he chose option B, the player will be able to overpower the guard easily, but the game will keep the safe closed, as the player will not have the token associated to the safe’s combination.
All of this may sound incredibly technical (and it is), but as the person who wrote the storyline, it is easier for me to identify the elements needed for the Technical department to write the appropriate code. In the end, this exercise made me appreciate the work done by the Tech Team even more.
As for progress with my own work, I began submitting some of my content for a first pass at editing. The material reviewed was still in the very early stages, and was mostly looked at for corrections involving vocabulary, syntax or grammar. A little feedback was given during the process, which was really insightful and helped me make modifications to certain characters. The questions she asked also made me realise I needed more content for certain scenes, so two new background characters were created. I am also near completion of another character chart for one of my main protagonists.
Happy St-Valentine's day!
That is all I have to report for this month. Thank you all for dropping by and keeping up with my progress. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my lovely wife Linda, for taking the time to review my material and give me her feedback.
Until next time!
Cheers,
Patrick Osborne
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