 I hear things at night. Strange things. Dark things. Chocolate things. Sea-salt-y chocolate things that roar and coo and add inches to my thighs. Send milk to drink. Dear whomever made a month ~30 days: Why do you hate me? Why do you force me to transcend productivity to become an eighty-limbed Typhon-like creature of eternal doing-ness? Why didn't you just give me the cloning machine I asked for, Santa? What. A. Month. The grand rotation of projects spun right round, baby, right round until a ride-operating carny had to pull the plug. Then, I fired him for pulling the plug and shouted "ONE MORE TIME!" Let's dive right in from general worst news to best: Grandma is delayed - again. The demo, everything. Despite all those times I totally said I found the vibe and was landing this plane, I may have forgotten that it needs to be (pulls out dictionary to find word) presentable. The demo will be done by the end of the year, but its release status is a little up in the air. I've (finally) done a good job of cutting away the creeped features to find the original golden seed in the core concept, and I want to take my time to make that feel good/uneasy to play. Grandma deserves nothing less. If I seem unenthused by the news, well, you can read me like a book. It's at the numbing stage right now where it's just better to push forward and live with it. You understand, right, Grandma?  Next up the bad ladder is that I've started 2 other video-game-ish projects - AND BEFORE YOU EVEN START....they're small. Like, done by November small. Well, "done". But you'll notice there are no quotations around the word small. One is just a very simple app I'm working on for a local, blue-collar project. How hard could that be? Do those people even use phones!? The other is the starting block for a project I've been looking for since I first cracked open Unreal Engine. So it's been in line for a while and probably has to pee pretty badly by now. I shall give it relief - and you with a write up prooobbbbably in October. Now we enter the middle, sorta neutral zone where I just point out that Last Avatar and Panoramic are sizing down from Sound Cloud. They'll still be available pretty much everywhere else I can think they'd get some clicks, but absolutely no one cared at all about them on Sound Cloud, and no one cared less about them than Sound Cloud themselves. So no big loss there, numerically speaking, which leads into the first goodie-good thing...  YouTubes are comin' back with a less...odd twist. Using the radio show sound files, I've put together three "black screen" stories I'll be posting throughout the coming months. Current idea is two a month, and they're meant to just be a nice playlist listen for night, or while you're multi-tasking. The initial run of people that engaged with the Pan shorts gives me hope that there's new life for that story in particular there. Last Avatar has been a very-bouncy ball with just its first episode, and with episode two coming next Monday (hint hint), the goal here is just to keep moving up. Step up and take a bow, writing stuff as I close in on a full 8 months of wiring and/or editing every single day. I was a little worried that this goal would water everything down, but it's actually led to some of my tightest work because I'm looping through rough draft to revision to second draft much faster. What it has revealed to me is that I think I found a downside to how my brain works when it comes to writing: My "A to B" can be a little vanilla. I have some wild, interesting hooks, I can write dialogue really well, I can't describe a scene succinctly to save my life (that's a positive thanks to brain rot, right?), BUT I've noticed that I lack a little bit of that sizzle when moving through the plot. Lots of scenes take place in the same place, or I think a little too "of course she would go home after x" instead of "she tries to x, but y happens, and that leads to epsilon!"  I'll nip that in the bud - er, the fully-grown tree trunk. Whatever. It's important to notice things about your own writing/creative exports that you don't want to exist anymore and change it. That doesn't mean you take the uniqueness out of your creation, but I'm a simple, country lawyer who says change the thing you don't like when you find it.
And here we are - at the top of the ladder with a sheet-covered mystery just waiting to be unveiled. What could it be? *Sound of sheet being removed* The greatest prize is the friends we made along the way, silly. What? I haven't made a new friend in three years? Well, that's sad...hm, alright, let's go with this instead: I'm both sleeping like the absolute dead again and waking up early most mornings to write. I do hear things in the night, and they're ideas - fresh, wonderful ideas for writing and other creations that still truly excite me to now have on my ever-lasting conveyor belt. Balance is something you Need in your life, and it's something I willingly let go of a little too often. For now, my brain agrees that these things need to live AND I need to live to make them real, so it's a rare, beautiful time that will last about 2 more weeks. September is going to be one rubber band snap after another, so I'm not optimistic that I'll have quite such a positive update in (grumbles) 30-ish days. That means you all will have to pick up the slack for me. Everyone that fails me will report to my lemon mines for back-breaking labor and delicious lemonade. Sugar costs extra.
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