Despite having come down with the plague that’s been going around the lab, this evening I successfully cleared the halfway mark for NaNoWriMo with room to spare. Yesterday I turned in 2,446 words and today I turned in another 3,540 to bring me up to 27,196. I need to be stockpiling some for next weekend, since I’m going to be booked almost completely with the Futures of Entertainment conference, but right now I’m feeling pretty good about things. I’m acutely aware that the novel so far is really dialogue-heavy and needs some more action-y setpieces, but the couple that I have in so far (especially the two chase scenes) I’m pretty proud of. This evening I had another one of those wonderful “Ah, so that’s why I wrote that fifty pages ago!” moments, which are always fun – they’re like little reassuring messages from your creative subconscious that say “Relax, I really do know what I’m doing here”.
Nothing new to report on DrawMo, alas – maybe I’ll have some catch-up stuff done tomorrow. For now, to sleep, perchance to dream… And get back up again tomorrow to hit this project again before tucking into some freelance work and some academic writing. Onward!
PS: So far the biggest concern that I had about BotA is finally being addressed in CoW² (which, by the by, is a greatly preferable shorthand for the title in my mind than CoW, CoW or CoWCoW) – the main characters are really taking on differentiated personalities. Callie always stood on her own, ever since she first showed up on the page (and in so doing completely obliterated my early character sketch in which Caliban Davies was a seventy-year-old man) but Michael and Pi kind of blurred together a little more than I was comfortable with in the first one and Vicky all too often stumbled into ‘damsel in distress’ mode, which was, well, distressing. In this one Pi is a lot more well-defined, and Michael (what little of the book he’s in so far) is coming into his own too. Vicky still needs some tightening, character mechanics-wise, but we’ll see. Part of the trouble there is that she still hasn’t completely found her voice in my head so she’s still a little too one-dimensional, but I suspect she’ll get there soon enough. I hope.
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.
