Of Angels & Men - A Glimpse Of A Draft

It's funny how once I decide to truly commit to something, everything happens at once and delays the process. I've lost track by now of how many projects I've started and abandoned over the years. But there are a few, who never really leave my mind; projects that I connect especially with, and though months pass by without anything being done, they are always in my mind. One of those is the project I'm recently using as my kind of 'relaxation' project: the text game I'm developing during April's Camp Nanowrimo. It goes under the project name, "Of Angels & Men". Most of the material is from previous Nanowrimo novels, that I've already written tons about on this blog (the concept being to write a novel in 30 days). Writing a novel in such a short time has its benefits, like forcing you to forget your inner editor, and coming up with vast amounts of material for later editing and polishing. But it has its downfalls too - like losing track of the main story, writing various passages that have no purpose or are written poorly. The process I'm focusing on now right now is finetuning some of that old material into a new and modernized format - the text game.

For anyone who hasn't already tried it, the narration tool Twine is a true gem for experimental writers. It doesn't matter if you're an author or a game developer, if you know how to write text and move around blocks of it, you can make a narrative with Twine. Some people have made advanced narratives like RPG's, yet others have made their first attempts at creating interactive narratives. As for me, I find the tool convenient for the modernization of my old texts that I have in mind. The result of my work will hopefully be a text-based game told in 2nd person (a terrible choice for someone who's never done it before, I've found), allowing for player choices and at the same time including more traditional passages.

To help with my process, I decided to do two things at once when pursuing this project (surprised? I'm not. Even when I tell myself to keep it simple my ambitions overshadow my performance) and joined Camp Nanowrimo for the first draft of the massive text material I will need to compile. For the first few days I did well and wrote ahead of my schedule, but then the everyday life got the better of me. I kind of crashed, hit the wall, call it what you will. It has been tearing on my mind to be unemployed and the uncertainty about whether I will ever have a future has made it difficult to find my muse. I'm hoping throwing this blog post together will help me get started again after a week or so of no writing. It can be hard to get back into the game. I've deserted too many stories not to know this. But there is a key point to writing during a Nanowrimo event, such as Camp Nano - you write, even if you fall behind; you push on, so that on the last allotted day of writing you can look back and be amazed. I remember what it felt like when I finished those novels that I'm now trying to cleanse and refine - I want to go there again, experience what it's like to pull something off. Something of a greater scope than just the short stories I usually entertain myself with.

So, without further ado, I'll throw myself back in the game, no matter what it takes - I am not waiting another year to join another Camp Nano, even if I don't have any time limit on my game project. This will take time, blood, sweat and tears - and it will be beautiful.

That is the nature of writing.

Yours truly,
POET IN THE JAR OF METAPHORICAL INK