3-2, one game all.
I don't remember if that's the actual quote or not. Shameful! I had it memorized just a month and ten-ish days ago!
(Suggestion for a drinking game: take a drink every time I use the word "really" in this entry. If you play with milk, it will give you stronger bones.)
So one of the things I did today was play that free MMORPG for about two hours. I know because I timed how long it took me to level up once: "almost but not quite two hours," and then I played a bit more before eating lunch. This is to contrast with the first day I played, in which I averaged about two levels an hour for the first 13 levels.
The level I reached today was level 20. Not significant in the game (I'm still pretty darn weak, though I am solo-ing a dungeon meant for big groups of lower-level people), but I've been trained by too many D&D-related things to think of 20 as a very important level. So I was pretty happy. And because of that landmark, I might as well reveal the game itself: it's called "Shaiya," and I'm too lazy to link to it.
I also discovered today that the game world is a lot bigger than I thought it was, though I am effectively trapped in the small area I knew because there's a bit of a balance issue--in that there's not much buffer between the "Kill everything right and left, except for a few pockets of PAIN" thing I've got going on where I am and the horrible screaming death I'd get elsewhere. (Believe me, I tried.) It'd be like, in SWG, heading out of a city and killing womp rats, only to wander too far and encounter a krayt dragon. Except with somewhat less excessive distances between them. Not once has it ever taken me fifteen minutes to reach my location. (Ah, but I do have some pretty fond memories of Fort Tusken...)
Er, I'm rambling now.
It occurs to me that I'm not very good at getting things done during days off. Not that I'm annoyed by it--the alternative would be like junior year, in which "day off" simply meant "more opportunity to fry my brain with schoolwork." My days off are days off, and I'm going to enjoy them, darnit! ...So yeah. I'm not very good at getting things done during days off.
But! During one of my frees on Friday, I did start to edit Reality Check, though by "edit" I mean that I removed episode 1 from the file (saved as a new file, don't worry) and read through and tweaked a few sentences in episode 2, miraculously transforming it into chapter 2. No, there is not currently a chapter 1, unless you count the note I left in brackets saying I need a new chapter 1. I was about to start "editing" episode three, but I got kicked out of the computer lab 'cause a teacher needed it for a class. I found myself wondering why I hadn't then been kicked out at the start of the period, but hey. Teachers can run late too.
It is my intention, however, that in any future significant free time at school, I will focus at least partly on "editing," so maybe I can end up with a draft that won't be painful for others to read. This would just be the cut-out-bad-things-and-make-notes-that-new-good-things-need-to-be-added edit... I can worry about how my plot graph looks not like a mountain but like five little hills later. And maybe just maybe I can figure out what genre it is...
In other writerly news, I have (for reasons I know but don't feel like explaining) recently begun to consider restarting work on an old story--not that old, one I developed in July and wrote for a few days in early August. It has a wonderful premise, really it does, and if I didn't have to make up so much of the science it could really be science fiction. And it's got time travel, which I've always really wanted to do, because I can't help but look at other people's attempts and think "That's so cool!" or "Come on, I could do better!" as appropriate, and I want to know if I could, in fact, do better. And I think I could, at least in terms of the mechanics of it. I just reread my two-page plan for the story, and the vast majority of that is spent on travel between dimensions (except I really need[ed] something else to call them, because "dimensions" is too '60s-comic-book) and through time. That and the two main characters. In fact, so much is spent on premise and then on resolution that the actual stuff in between is squished into one phrase: "So they adventure through the dimensions"... Yeah, that's why I gave up on it last time. I realized "Uh, I have no idea what to do," and I was lazy and didn't feel like figuring it out.
Well, I kind of feel like figuring it out now, but of course now I've also decided to work on "editing." And the "editing" has priority. But I can't decide whether I should try to work on both at the same time, or if I should put off the "new" story until after "editing." On one side, I have never successfully worked on two stories at the same time before. One of them has always beaten out the other, leaving the loser abandoned. On the other, if I put it off, I may forget/decide against it later, and that would be sad, because I really love the premise and the set-up and I really want to come up with a good plot to go with it.
Decisions, decisions...
Well hey, school tomorrow. I'd better get some sleep. (Drinking game--drink the whole glass whenever I end an entry with a reference to sleep! Do it!)
(Suggestion for a drinking game: take a drink every time I use the word "really" in this entry. If you play with milk, it will give you stronger bones.)
So one of the things I did today was play that free MMORPG for about two hours. I know because I timed how long it took me to level up once: "almost but not quite two hours," and then I played a bit more before eating lunch. This is to contrast with the first day I played, in which I averaged about two levels an hour for the first 13 levels.
The level I reached today was level 20. Not significant in the game (I'm still pretty darn weak, though I am solo-ing a dungeon meant for big groups of lower-level people), but I've been trained by too many D&D-related things to think of 20 as a very important level. So I was pretty happy. And because of that landmark, I might as well reveal the game itself: it's called "Shaiya," and I'm too lazy to link to it.
I also discovered today that the game world is a lot bigger than I thought it was, though I am effectively trapped in the small area I knew because there's a bit of a balance issue--in that there's not much buffer between the "Kill everything right and left, except for a few pockets of PAIN" thing I've got going on where I am and the horrible screaming death I'd get elsewhere. (Believe me, I tried.) It'd be like, in SWG, heading out of a city and killing womp rats, only to wander too far and encounter a krayt dragon. Except with somewhat less excessive distances between them. Not once has it ever taken me fifteen minutes to reach my location. (Ah, but I do have some pretty fond memories of Fort Tusken...)
Er, I'm rambling now.
It occurs to me that I'm not very good at getting things done during days off. Not that I'm annoyed by it--the alternative would be like junior year, in which "day off" simply meant "more opportunity to fry my brain with schoolwork." My days off are days off, and I'm going to enjoy them, darnit! ...So yeah. I'm not very good at getting things done during days off.
But! During one of my frees on Friday, I did start to edit Reality Check, though by "edit" I mean that I removed episode 1 from the file (saved as a new file, don't worry) and read through and tweaked a few sentences in episode 2, miraculously transforming it into chapter 2. No, there is not currently a chapter 1, unless you count the note I left in brackets saying I need a new chapter 1. I was about to start "editing" episode three, but I got kicked out of the computer lab 'cause a teacher needed it for a class. I found myself wondering why I hadn't then been kicked out at the start of the period, but hey. Teachers can run late too.
It is my intention, however, that in any future significant free time at school, I will focus at least partly on "editing," so maybe I can end up with a draft that won't be painful for others to read. This would just be the cut-out-bad-things-and-make-notes-that-new-good-things-need-to-be-added edit... I can worry about how my plot graph looks not like a mountain but like five little hills later. And maybe just maybe I can figure out what genre it is...
In other writerly news, I have (for reasons I know but don't feel like explaining) recently begun to consider restarting work on an old story--not that old, one I developed in July and wrote for a few days in early August. It has a wonderful premise, really it does, and if I didn't have to make up so much of the science it could really be science fiction. And it's got time travel, which I've always really wanted to do, because I can't help but look at other people's attempts and think "That's so cool!" or "Come on, I could do better!" as appropriate, and I want to know if I could, in fact, do better. And I think I could, at least in terms of the mechanics of it. I just reread my two-page plan for the story, and the vast majority of that is spent on travel between dimensions (except I really need[ed] something else to call them, because "dimensions" is too '60s-comic-book) and through time. That and the two main characters. In fact, so much is spent on premise and then on resolution that the actual stuff in between is squished into one phrase: "So they adventure through the dimensions"... Yeah, that's why I gave up on it last time. I realized "Uh, I have no idea what to do," and I was lazy and didn't feel like figuring it out.
Well, I kind of feel like figuring it out now, but of course now I've also decided to work on "editing." And the "editing" has priority. But I can't decide whether I should try to work on both at the same time, or if I should put off the "new" story until after "editing." On one side, I have never successfully worked on two stories at the same time before. One of them has always beaten out the other, leaving the loser abandoned. On the other, if I put it off, I may forget/decide against it later, and that would be sad, because I really love the premise and the set-up and I really want to come up with a good plot to go with it.
Decisions, decisions...
Well hey, school tomorrow. I'd better get some sleep. (Drinking game--drink the whole glass whenever I end an entry with a reference to sleep! Do it!)