Why, Despite 250+ Steam Games, I’m Returning to Consoles Sunday, September 24, 2017

As I sit typing, I’m waiting to re-download Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. I’ve got another 11 minutes to go. You’ll notice that I’m RE-downloading KotOR from Steam.

Earlier this weekend, I finished another Mass Effect playthrough on Xbox 360 and decided that I should go back through my game library to play something else before attempting another Mass Effect run. I chose KotOR because of the acclaim and the fact that Drew Karpyshyn seemingly can do no wrong.

I’d bought KotOR for original Xbox eons ago and I, literally, dusted off the disk to see if it would even play on Xbox 360 years and years after the original backwards compatibility for the game was announced. Though the game doesn’t play in Widescreen, I began exploring Taris and was having some fun getting into the game until I died and decided to take a break.

The smaller screen was getting on my nerves, and it’s usually within that first game death that I find myself “taking breaks” in games, not to return for another five years. After research advised that there was no way to “stretch” the image on KotOR for Xbox, I recalled that I’d purchased the game on Steam during either a Steam sale or a Humble Bundle. Whichever it was, the fact that I had a physical copy of the game was not enough to combat some minimal price tag for PC (I have the game on iOS as well, but that’s for another post). I imagined that I could get the game to play in widescreen and play a lot better and also easier through Steam than through playing on Xbox. This is where troubles of epic gaming proportions began.

After 20 minutes of downloading the game through Steam, I started up the game with my Xbox for PC controller and tried to see what the game looked like. Not only did the game not appear in widescreen, it was instead a tiny box in the middle of my 1920×1200 resolution. If that was not bad enough, the game would not run. No matter what I did, none of the options would select, even though I could see the mouse moving.

I unplugged my Xbox controller, restarted my laptop, and tried again under the tried and true troubleshooting method of “turn it off and try again”. I restarted the game sans controller, and still nothing; tiny screen and nothing would click.

I think most people would have probably quit at this point and just returned to the game on the Xbox, but I refused to be daunted. Whether I spent $2 or $10 on the game through Steam, there was no way I’d have a game that I couldn’t play. Many, many, MANY searches later, I learned that the game would only run and register the mouse clicks by turning off Steam overlays and still running directly from the executable. To get the image to display at widescreen, I had to download Flawless Widescreen and then I still needed to finagle with the .ini file settings to make sure the mouse pointed correctly. I haven’t attempted to run the Xbox for PC controller yet, but that, too, requires Pinnacle Profiler, which I’d purchased years earlier for an equally irritating PC gaming adventure. About 72 hours after first sitting down with the intention to play the game, I think I’ve finally got the game moderately running the way I’d like.

With the Xbox One X coming in just a few months, I’ve been contemplating where my next steps with gaming will go. I’ve got 250 games in Steam (about 5 of those are probably games that are just Steam shortcuts), yet out of all those titles, I’ve only played 6% of those and even out of that 6%, the majority of the time in Steam has been spent in either Civilization 5 or Banished. It makes more sense for me to continue pursuing PC gaming as you can always do more with PC games than you ever could with console games (modding, textures, etc.), and I’ve also got 250 games waiting to be played. The massive library notwithstanding, the new Xbox is calling me for the simple fact that it is highly unlikely that I’ll need to go through all the above steps just to get a game to run.

With Xbox specifically offering backwards compatibility for Xbox, 360, and One games, my last major rationale for staying with PC gaming is slowly failing. With consoles, you put in the disc, download whatever is necessary, and off you go. With PC games, it’s a matter of ensuring both OS and graphics card updates haven’t disrupted the game, working all kinds of magic to make a console controller on the PC, and then using every digital gymnastics trick in the book to make the visuals what they ought to be.

I should have gone into PC gaming with a little better understanding. I’ve been playing The Sims 2 since 2004 and a fair bit of the “fun” of the game is troubleshooting why the game isn’t working. Obviously these problems are less likely to exist with newer games, but my gaming preferences keep pushing me towards consoles.

Outside of games like Civ 5 that are specifically made for PCs, I really prefer a console controller to trying to use a keyboard. WSAD is never going to connect in my mind; even my Minecraft controls are switched to FVDC instead of WSAD and that’s just not conducive to more complex gaming.

I’m also a “patient gamer” in that I like playing older games more than brand new games. Part of this is because most games these days are all about microtransactions and multiplayer, which is a completely different rant in itself, but with older games, the same problems I’ve experienced with KotOR, I’ll likely see in other older games as well. This is going to be ongoing problem as OSes and graphics cards get sporadic updates. Then…that Xbox One X starts to beckon me more and more.

I’ve got a decent 360 library that will all be playable on the One X and, though I’ve repurchased a fair amount of those games for Steam, I’m a little apprehensive about repeating my same KotOR experience.

The game has now downloaded and I’m ready to try again with KotOR for PC, but I still worry that there’s a good chance that I’ll slowly abandon all 250+ Steam games in favor of a system that just lets me sit down and play.

 

Addendum: I can’t decide on key bindings that fit my hands best. After keeping up the keyboard controls on another PC screen to reference as I play for several minutes, I’ve decided to give up and return to KotOR on Xbox…

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Dorienne, the gamer Saturday, July 22, 2017

From blog.doriennesmith.com/:

Something fascinating occurred over the last few months: I’ve finally decided to fully acknowledge that I’m a gamer, instead of someone who sometimes plays games.

Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes has taken up a huge part of my time lately. Not just the game itself, or my alt account, but planning for it and researching for it, interacting with my guild members, and recently, writing about it. I’m writing about it on Gaming-fans.com, which is one of the first times I’ve written for someone else. I really enjoy writing reviews and such for GoH on the whole, partly because I enjoy the game, but mainly because I love writing about the game.

My gaming is really disjointed, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying it from every aspect. I keep buying games like some people collect Lego sets. I had a somewhat sizeable Xbox 360 library, but then discovered Steam Sales and Humble Bundles and decided to switch to PC-gaming, which required re-purchasing (albeit for pennies on the dollar) a bunch of games and trying to play them in a different environment. That said, I’ve got 252 games in my Steam library and I’ve only played through 6% of them.

I usually end up restarting games half the time because I take such long breaks in-between them and tend to jump from game to game. Finishing Mass Effect for the first time really brought this home. Four years elapsed between the time I first attempted ME1 and eventually finished a complete playthrough, but once I got fully engaged in the game, I couldn’t stop until I’d finished. I loved every part of following my Shepard as she commanded the Normandy, befriended various aliens, and fell in love as she saved the galaxy and in playing Mass Effect and discovering its Reddit community, I finally realized that this is a media that I’ve long-since adored.

Regardless if I own a game and it’s just chilling in my Steam library or gathering dust beside the Xbox or I’m simply curious about it, I love reading reading reviews from professional critics and players alike and researching all the furor or glee about every release or console.

While every minute spent gaming is a minute not spent working on Flight or Damen or Anne or any of the other million projects I’ve got pending, with the way first-job has been stressing and depressing me, sometimes all I can do to keep my sanity is engage in interactive stories by playing, writing, or reading about them.

Whether it’s my 13-year-old Sims 2 game that still going and going until modders can’t get it to run on modern OSes anymore, or just discovering which of the latest games can hold my attention best, I’m a gamer. I’m involved.

Part of me wants to link this into all my other hobbies by thinking that eventually I’d like to write my own game, but I think it might be best to let gaming live on its own. Gaming can live beside writing and even occasionally intertwine, but there’s no need to force myself to start a new project like writing a game…at least not until I’ve made a dent in my Steam library.

My posts this year are analogous to 2016… Tuesday, December 27, 2016

…a barren wasteland of nothingness.

I could make a post just about Carrie Fisher…in fact, let’s start there.

Carrie Fisher passed away today. She had a heart attack on Friday, spent Christmas essentially on life support, and passed today at the age of 60. I’ve spent the last hour crying.

I didn’t know this woman. I didn’t know her friends, her family, favorite cities. I didn’t even know who her mother was until earlier this year. I have no reason to be in this much pain, but I am. Someone on reddit made me feel a tiny bit better. On the whole, however, my heart aches. It started aching on Friday, my whole body was tense across the weekend, and now the lacrimal floodgates have been opened.

Outside of Star Wars, I’d only seen her in When Harry Met Sally and, while at least one of her books has been on my To-Read list for ages, I’d never got around to it. I can’t say that I was some diehard Carrie Fisher fan, but still…I first watched Star Wars on VHS when I was about 11 and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life. What I loved most about was Princess Leia; a girl with big brown eyes and tons of sass, who carried the title of Princess. A young girl could hardly ask for more!

As I got older, I never found myself half-stalking her actions and film work the way I do with say, Gillian Anderson, but I knew she was writing and she was still there. This changed last year, when I got to experience the awe and wonder of watching a set of actors take up roles some 30 years after first portraying them. Offhand I can’t think of any other set of films or TV where this has occurred and I’ve spent much of this year intrigued by this and especially by Ms. Fisher. I don’t follow many celebrities on Twitter (I’ve followed Mark Hamill since Friday though because he’s good fun), but I was amused by her tweets that somehow found their way into my social media and I was wholly engrossed by how much of an advocate she has been for tearing down the stigmas of mental illness and also how she managed to take on all of her critics who complained about her looks, as if a woman is expected to look in her late 50s the way she did at 19. This year, especially, I had grown to really respect and admire Carrie Fisher, so hear that she had suffered a heart attack and then to hear that she had passed – my newly admired celebrity, my favorite princess since age 11 – this news is heartbreaking.

I think what aches the most is not just the loss of a celebrity I was gaining a newfound love for (seriously, not a month ago, I was thinking that I needed to follow more Twitter celebs and I should probably start with Carrie Fisher), but the fact that she was 60 years old. I understand that she had struggled with drug abuse her whole adult life and most abusers don’t usually live to a ripe old age, but I still see 60 as young. Perhaps, it’s because my parents are at this same age. Both dad and step-dad are 60 and mother isn’t far behind. Ms. Fisher leaves behind a daughter not much younger than myself. Her death, unlike that of David Bowie or Alan Rickman, hits home so much harder because she’s woman I felt I’d known since childhood and now she’s gone. The loss serves as a reminder that life is short and impermanent and that every moment must be cherished because we’ll never known which is our last.

This year has seemed so awful in so many respects, so I suppose this is a fitting way to close it. On a more personal level, I’ve allowed first-job to come before so many things that I’ve drifted from my church, regained all the weight I’d lost the previous year, I’ve watched my family suffer through medical setbacks and suffered through a couple of my own, and I have wallowed in a hole of depression so deep for so much of the year I half wonder if some of today’s tears aren’t just Ms. Fisher, but for just the year as a whole.

Next year will be better, I tell myself. I will write more, I will read more (starting with any Princess Leia-focused Star Wars book in creation, both canon and non, and then I’ll write one if I can’t find anything else that I want), I’ll attend church more, I’ll pray more, I’ll call relatives more. I’ll be a better daughter, cousin, niece, faux-sister, a better person. If I keep telling myself that next year will be better, maybe…just maybe, it will be.

And, so…some of Yoda’s words to help get me through the rest of this day, “Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not.”

May the Fourth Be with You, Always Saturday, May 4, 2013

Happy Star Wars Day!

Or Cinco de Mayo Eve, if that suits you better…

I got very little accomplished yesterday. I’d say that I’d needed a break, but given that I’ve been “breaking” for most of the year, I won’t give myself much credit.

I think I may have got about 4 lines done in my Chapter Details and made a tiny change to the actual text yesterday. Not a huge accomplishment, but as I’ve been saying here for years: Some is better than none at all.

I’m not sure if I’ll get much done since Sundays are usually difficult between church and working this night shift, but hopefully, I’ll have more to say tomorrow than half-garbled, half-asleep posts via Siri.

Onward and upward, and May the Fourth be with you!

May the 4th be with you…always Friday, May 4, 2012

It’s been May for four days now (Happy Star Wars Day, btw!) and I’ve started and deleted three different posts for this blog. This week has been the proverbial rollercoaster in terms of my writing moods and indecisiveness definitely clouded all of them.

Twice this week, I’ve come close to just giving up on the novel…if you can imagine that. It’s like running all but the last five steps of a marathon and the lying down to take a nap in the middle of street just in front of the finish line.

Fears of inadequacy have been plaguing me; What if this doesn’t make sense? What if no one finds this interesting? Is this interesting? What if I ruin the whole concept? What if I’m no good at writing? What if I can’t follow through on any of these ideas? What am I going to do with my life? What’s the purpose of this life? Have I really just wasted the last 4 years of my life with this? Am I pushing for nothing? Can I even sell a book like this? What if people hate me for it? What if people try to emulate what they read in it? What happens if nothing comes of it at all? What if I’ll never figure out how to make these last chapters work properly?

…this has been my week. Needless to say, it’s not been a very productive writing week as it’s difficult to create when all these questions and doubts are running through your mind at full speed.

I am better today though. Despite the upheavals at first-job, I am better and regardless of my fears, I will still write on this May the 4th. I’m beginning to think that all writers (would-be, aspiring or successful) go through these same thoughts…I just wish there was a list somewhere of how to counter all of this.

I know the bible says that worry is a sin itself, but it’s such an easy one and whether it’s just devil whispering in my ear or these troubles are unfounded, I still worry about my future.

The second week Sunday, May 22, 2011

This marks the second week I’ve not gone to church. I’m trying not to be troubled by the ease with which it has become so easy not to attend. To simply lay in the bed until 11 and then rise and say, “Oop…Well, I’ll never make it now. I guess I’ll just go next week…”

Anyway, I’ve done an obscene amount of gaming today; Green Day Rock Band and The Force Unleashed (again) to name the ones encompassing the majority of my time. It was speaking with someone the other day about games and how un-gamerlike I am by playing multiple games at one time and then never actually finishing them because I move between them so often that I can’t keep my attention on any specific one for any amount of time. One day, I’d very much like to complete a game to 100% of its achievements, but I’m really a terrible gamer since I’ve still not finished Final Fantasy X and seem forever stuck on the second round with Seymour.

All this gaming, however, has got me wondering for what I’m compensating when I play. There are a great many things I could have accomplished today, but didn’t because I was playing Rock Band and Star Wars games. I got to see my Bumby again, but outside of that, very little got accomplished. Oh well…I suppose I’ll complain about all this wasted time on my death bed…

I did manage to write 487 words tonight (her rhetorical question about his plane ticket) and I’ve decided that I’m not going to stress about word count any longer. If the first full draft of the novel is 300K words, then it is what it is and that’s why it’s called a first draft. If I try to pare down anything, I’ll end up telling my way through the novel when there is so many wonderful things I could show.

Uneventful Saturday, May 21, 2011

The world didn’t end today. Phoo…I was looking forward to a little looting, given that I didn’t make it to church last week, thus would not be fit for instant calling home.

Once again, I’ve got nothing significant to say other than I’m going to do everything in my power to start playing games all the way through to completion before I move onto another one. I haven’t got any games currently on pre-order so I think I can go another year before I buy another one and I now have a sizable pile of games that I’ve bought, but either haven’t started or in which I’ve only made a wee bit of headway. I’m thinking I may start with The Force Unleashed or Lego Star Wars Complete or maybe just continue with Green Day Rock Band since that is my latest purchase along with Lego Rock Band. Darn, these urges!

I wrote a measly 257 words tonight (if they could not keep quiet.), but considering I really didn’t have much to say tonight, I think I did quite well.

Day Two, feeling better Wednesday, May 4, 2011

I feel far better today than I did yesterday or the day previous and while I know I’m coming down with a full cold, I no longer feel as if I’m going to be crushed the weight of everything occurring in my life.

I haven’t much to say tonight since Frasier’s Season One has arrived from Netflix today and I’m anxious to continue watching since I’ve been playing Season Five repeatedly since I got my Frasier kick a couple months previous…still a little ticked that the show is not streaming yet, but that’s for another post.

I wrote 266 words tonight (something to relax her for the night) and I think I illuminated Damen very well even though I was telling a lot more than I normally like to do, but it’s for the best.

Overall, I’m just plain happy to be alive and feeling like myself again.

Oh…and a Happy Star Wars Day to all! 🙂

Sleep Schedule Tuesday, May 3, 2011

My sleep schedule is completely out of whack lately, to the point that I rarely know if I’m coming or going and have trouble functioning during the most important parts of the day. This, of course, does terrible things to my health as I eventually need a day or two to put myself back into orbit, which is part of why I stayed home today. I really need another day because I’m really not quite well yet, but we’ll see what the morning brings.

The worst part about it is that I really don’t have the time to be sick. I’ve timecards to approve, corrective action to give, feedback to provide and so forth, which brings me back to why I’ve had so much trouble sleeping lately.

I’m also in need of a creative outlet, one that has nothing to do with anything. Yesterday, I uploaded a Sims 2 hair retexture I did months earlier and just the act of taking the pictures within the game, making some slight edits in Photoshop and then editing the code of the new page was enough to light a creative fire in me that I’ve not felt in a long while.

It’s terribly ironic that I should need a creative outlet while I’ve been blogging every single day of 2011 and I’ve been writing every single day since February 1st, but along the way all this has become my second job: something that must be done no matter what. While there are no direct consequences other than my own disappointment, I still know I have to write and I have to post and since I have to do these things, they’ve taken on a significance of their own and whatever joy that came from purely creative nonsense (like sharing Sims 2 hair retextures) has been lost. I thought trying to learn the piano would be a great start, but the lessons haven’t been going well and quite frankly, I’m moving so slowly that I’m beginning to think this is all just a waste of time. I long to learn how to draw, but after what’s happened with the piano, I’m not sure I’ve got the discipline to really learn to do anything else. So I’m stumped on what to do. I can’t let things stay the way they are, but I’m also not able to take on any new endeavours. What to do…

I wrote 257 words tonight (he spent the night reading webcomics online) and am trying desperately not to fall into further depression at this point. The thought of my car so far has kept me elated at least twice a day, but worry about what will happen when the newness wears and it becomes just a method to get me from Point A to Point B.

This month’s goal was supposed to be to go to bed every night by 2am and actually go to bed rather than just fall wherever I happen to be sitting. So far I’m 0 and 3. Tomorrow/Today is May the 4th, so that will provide some hilarity as most Star Wars days do, but still…

I’ve just got to sort out this sleep and lack of creativity soon.

Save often! Tuesday, March 22, 2011

All 275 words I wrote last night were gone within twenty minutes of writing them. I’m not as livid as I normally would be, which just goes to show how tired I am over all that’s been happening with first-job.

I’m not even sure how it happened either; I closed the laptop and then everything was gone. All the Word docs, Firefox, the explorer windows, everything. I didn’t bother trying to rewrite anything though. I knew the moment I saw that the autosave doc hadn’t auto-saved that whatever I had written was lost forever and there was no use crying over lost words.

I wrote 667 words tonight (the floor was the only thing keeping the rest of her body on the sofa) with an initial plan to write 550 (275 to cover last night and another 275 for today) and since I’m at the cusp of going into perfect detail about how Damen has had to take care of his mother through all her addictions, I’ve got this mental drive to keep pressing and writing for the remainder of the night. But, I won’t.

I’ve got Lego Clone Wars staring at me from my TV, angry that it’s been set on pause for so long that the Xbox controller turned off itself, so I know how the majority of my night will be spent. 🙂

My Cheating Heart Thursday, March 17, 2011

I had to cheat a little to get this one in on time since I had a project to finish at first-job…which I didn’t finish. WordPress App saves all with drafts for the win! 🙂

My assistant at first-job left today, for good this time which is going to be a ton of work for me now. I’ll get through it but I know I’ll have a lot more of these close call nights than I did previously.

Why, oh why, didn’t I give myself some cushion yesterday??

I did make it to 264 words tonight (All bulls**t, I say.) though, it was a true race and clearly an exercise in allowing adrenaline to fuel creativity. Now, I’m so wired, I could almost finish the rest of the book on the same swig of energy…but, I’ll settle for a little bit of writing cushion and some Lego Star Wars instead.

Race to 100 Monday, February 21, 2011

I had originally intended on only writing to 100 words, but then I got into the groove a little despite all the pain running through my arms, legs and back and got to 271 words (not fond of my only child living an ocean away).

I played DDR today for more than an hour. I burned 500 calories on DDR Max and then another 500 on DDR Max 2, though I really struggled on the last 300. I haven’t had any real exercise in more than a month and the entire ordeal took a lot out of me, hence the pain I now feel ringing throughout my entire body.

I had to do something though; I ate an entire dish of mac and cheese on my own and I couldn’t not work out after that.

I’m much too tired to say much else other than that I’m tired and will be spending the rest of the night playing Force Unleashed and then drifting to sleep.

Time flies Monday, January 31, 2011

I noticed this evening how true time flies. In something as slow as a child growing up to something as simple as how I told myself I had “plenty of time” to finish another chapter on Lego Star Wars and still have time to write this evening. That said, time is passing me by at an ever increasing rate and I didn’t write anything today.

I think the worst part about not getting anything written today was that it was my day off from the first-job, but I didn’t feel well all day today and I’ll use that as an excuse for now.

Sometimes I really can’t believe how much time flies. Today is the 31st day of the first month in the second decade of the “new millennium.” It feels like just yesterday that people were freaking out about Y2K and hording food for the end of days. Luckily, there is always an end of days timeframe lurking just around the corner, so December 2012 will be an interesting time to be alive, assuming I don’t get hit by a bus or something by then.

Looking over this month, I still can’t believe I actually made it 31 days writing this blog without a break. I’ve had urges and goals like this previously, but they’ve always failed, no matter how badly I wanted them.

The key, I believe, is in having a real plan in place. My plan for January 2011 was no plan. That is, my only plan was just to do it. If I did it, I did it. If I didn’t, I didn’t. With no real pressure with a major plan in place, there was no sense of incoming failure lurking at all times and thus, I was able to naturally progress into a method of doing something daily that wasn’t a bodily function. Now, I think it’s time to up my proverbial ante.

I’ve got the method and the mindset in place; I’ve just got to make good use of them. For the next 28 days, I am going to write something in Damen. Every. Single. Day.

To keep with the guise of the “I really don’t care either way attitude” I’ll give myself an out, which will be I won’t have a word count limit at this point. Does this mean that I’ll probably see an increase in posts where I’ve written 500 words or less? Most definitely! But, I suppose I’ve got to start some place and this is as good as any.

With that said and my goal set, I think it’s time to waste the rest of this evening in the best way possible, so to Lego Star Wars, I return!

Defining nothing Monday, January 17, 2011

I’d like to say that I got absolutely nothing accomplished today, but that’s just plain incorrect.

I wrote somewhere between 300 and 1,000 words, but since I can’t remember where I ended when I last counted, I’m not entirely sure if that was before midnight, after midnight, or right as midnight was passing. Since I can’t pin it down, I get to claim nothing, though from here on out I’ll be including the last few words I wrote when I last counted (then managed to score on the freshman goalie.)

Aside from the writing that may or may not have occurred in the last 24 hours, I spent most of the day lying in bed, then discovering music and video games I’d like to buy. The music was the fun part (Janelle Monae!!), but the video games made me realize how much more earnestly I need to create and stick to a budget. All in all, I haven’t done “nothing,” but I just can’t call what I’ve done today “something.”

I suppose it feels that way when I spend more than half the day asleep and then most of the other half playing Lego Star Wars and Final Fantasy X, but outside of not taking down my hair, I don’t think I’ve missed all that much.

Anyhoo…whenever it was, last night or to-night, I tried facing the wall I’ve recently hit head on and ended up with the equivalent of a big bruise on my forehead. It’s just a mess, a muddled, convoluted mess!

Even after I manage to make sure that Damen doesn’t seem in love with Britiana, I’ve practically shot myself in the foot with the scene where Zach calls her the NP and Corey makes references to “those people.” Perhaps I’m putting too much of myself into Damen, but I really can’t see him continuing to befriend Corey if Corey comes out with the whole “bred like dogs” to be better athletes thing this early. So, I started into this whole drivel about Corey and Brit liking each other when they were kids, but the whole thing came out so laughable that had no choice but to make Damen crack up at the description, when I really need the scene to remain a bit dark. That’s when I quit for the night.

I doubt I’ll get anymore written tonight, tomorrow or whatever. Nothing significant, that is. I’ve got to sit down and just contemplate what’s going on and why these characters are behaving the way they are. I know it’s right in front of me. I just haven’t looked hard enough yet or, to quote “The X-Files” (because I saw Ms. Anderson in a bit of “Bleak House” this afternoon and I’m totally in the mood for an X-Fileathon): The answers are there, [I] just have to know where to look.

Progress in some areas Monday, January 3, 2011

I didn’t do too much other than watch “Seinfeld” all day today. I got my Kinect from the post office and got it set up, but I still don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything relevant today. Perhaps it’s just better to have had a day of rest before going back to reality and my first job tomorrow.

I wrote a total of 1720 words today, spanning from around midnight last night to just ten minutes ago. I definitely had the opportunity to do more, but…procrastination being what it is…

I’m beginning to “see” Corey a little better now and, as I continue with this chapter, it is easier to write his dialogue. I can even hear his voice clearly in my head now. I’m still dancing the fine line between hiding Corey’s major quirks and remaining true to the character, but I’m proud of what I’ve done with him today.

My favorite part of today, aside from setting up the Kinect, was having Brian and Damen talk about Star Wars EU books. Only a true Star Wars geek would be able to fully grasp the reference and I think it makes Damen seem more well-rounded and simultaneously more and less like me. Like me, Damen reads Star Wars lit, but Damen reads everything, so even sci-fi isn’t too far off for him. Star Wars EU is the only sci-fi I’ve read and, while I’d like to finish the books on my big list, I doubt I’ll venture too far into sci-fi…that is, until I get really started on Luka, but that could be years from now, and Luka‘s really more fantasy than sci-fi. Anyway…Having Damen read sci-fi books makes him truly seem like he reads everything that’s available, instead of just the same kinds of books that I would read, which makes him a little clearer to me.

I’m not sure if I’ll write too much more tonight (I’ve got at least 15 more Seinfelds waiting for me), but I think this sudden push on characterization will serve me well throughout the week.

Edit: I’ve got to start these posts earlier. I barely made it tonight!