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Writing; science writing; science

2010-06-01 - 11:01 p.m.

Despite the [literal 10 second pause] setbacks twirled around two of my prospective manuscript publications, I've gotten back into writing for the project.

My co-director, who is in charge of scripting, gameplay mechanics, and basically anything technical, has taken a more nuanced stance re: collaboration on writing and implementing skill tutorials. These all occur at the beginning of the game and involve decently complicated things like cooking food, skinning animals, mining ore, smithing, and other such things. What's been problematic is trying to get instructions about how you do a specific skill step-by-step and then reveal that to the player in a useful narrative.

It's frankly a pain in the ass. Even so, big Z and I have reached an understanding. So for the time being as he finalizes some gameplay dynamics and scripting, I'll continue writing some Non-Playable Characters for Ch. 3. Granted, I've written up through the equivalent of Ch. 40 to the tune of ~450,000 words (which was admittedly started in 2003), but I'd left out stuff like:

*We need a provisioner in this location

*That party member who you've written thousands of words about does need an introduction

*Are you sure a level 2-3 player can take on an army of orcs? I mean, really? Really?

And shit like that. In my defense, I wrote from beginning to end, and so I'm revisiting dialogue I wrote about 4-5 years ago. Anyone who semi-seriously writes knows that revisiting yourself is painful. It hasn't been too bad. I'd do some stuff differently, but considering how little experience I had with an epic, almost bloatedly ambitious project back then, I'm not sick when engaged in the act of editing and re-re^reading it.

Which all sounds like pammy bullocks unless you grind words.

- - -

I'm still having the issue with resting. I'll go to bed around 1am, either have racing thoughts or semi-sleep until 2:30-4:00, get up to unwind somehow, take a various amount of time doing just that, and get back to sleep.

I'm hung up on something, but hell if I know what precisely.

- - -

Today I technically began my appointment as a post-doctoral researcher. Granted it's doing exactly what I did before, but for twice as much money. I'm not digging these setbacks. I really want to start working with human data because that's what Barb is paying me to do. We were supposed to meet today to hammer out details about some analyses she'd like me to do on the at-risk Alzheimer's disease cohort. I look forward to it. Granted, I wish I could just be done with all of this old monkey manuscript stuff, but that's how it goes in my profession: three feet in the past, present, and future.

So to try and catch up I've been doing 9-8 slags on my non-gym days, then 9-6:30 times when I need to train with weights, run, and then dutifully unwind with some R&R. I know I'm supposed to be finding new people to hang out with in addition to old friends and acquaintances, but the amount of work has made that slightly unrealistic for the time being. I keep telling myself I can put it off, anyway. And I keep thinking that I just don't know of public collective activities that really work for making actual new friends. Sports and my schedule don't work. And hanging around at bars without at least one steadfast companion seems all like '40 something guy with bad hair and weird diction chatting me up for 20 minutes' kind of strange.

Anyway, I should get back to writing for the project.

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