What creative projects have you been working on?

I'll bite. For years I've been wanting to write a parser text game. For those who aren't familiar, parser text games are the sort of games where you type in commands and the game tells you what happens. They were a big part of my childhood (Zork, Wishbringer, Enchanter) and I have always secretly wanted to try my hand at making one.

Well, I decided this year was the year and I set out to write a parser game. In truth, this proved to be a lot more difficult than I expected. What was worse, a lot of the friends I hoped would play it couldn't really be bothered to try and understand the mechanics of how to play a text game. I don't fault them. I'm about ten years older than most of them and if you don't have the nostalgia for stuff like this it's hard to want to dig into it now.

Then I discovered a very cool coding engine that allowed me to make a parser-like game but have it be completely mouse driven. This makes it so much easier for my friends to play. The engine/library is called Gruescript and I absolutely loved working with it. So, I knuckled down, sent the pdf manual to a printer to get a wire-bound copy of it, and got to work making a silly game based on one of my novels.

I'm super happy to report that I finally finished it and put it in a text game competition!

It's my first game, so I realize it's not going to win any awards, but I'm just proud of myself or not giving up and for doing something I always wanted to do. I think my younger self would be amazed to know he'd end up making a game himself one day.

I am very slowly putting together a hard rock/heavy metal album exploring some of the feelings and experiences I've had in my transition so far. The intention is to write about 8 songs, of which 2 are very nearly almost finished, just polishing lyrics and instrumentation left to do. The remaining 6 are in varied states from "instrumentation pretty much written, and in need of lyrics" and "haven't even begun to conceptualise what this is going to sound like yet." I'm finding it hard to generate space for writing music at the moment. I swing wildly from my day job into parenting and housework, so I'm invariably knackered by the time it's 9pm and unable to find the energy to pick up a guitar, much less write. Despite those setbacks, and a nasty bit of writer's block, I'm enjoying the process of writing music just for my own amusement, and I'm looking forward to the recording process very much.

I am mapping out a cozy mystery series

I finished producing one of my favourite scenes from my novel:

https://youtu.be/EbFEm15RD7Q

Beta readers wanted!

I don't know if that counts, but I've been working on a review of Clive Barker's Books of Blood: Volume 1 for almost two weeks now. The idea was to write 600 words. I hit 1500 today, and I am not sure how long it will be. Talking about that book can be challenging. It is hard to talk about the mind-bending stuff in a way that is both expressive and spoiler-free (or at least with minimal spoilers).

I am now wondering if I should also talk about translation at length, since I've read large parts of the book on another translation before. That sounds like a whole can of worms, though. Maybe enough for a separate article. I have lots of opinions about literary translation.

Maybe I should make that into a video at some point.

I recently helped clean out my childhood home's garage that was essentially a hoarders paradise. Decades-to-centuries old stuff just sitting around, and we finally started going through it. I collected a bunch of my childhood toys and some art pieces and wanted to make a video about it for Glomble. I've been organizing different item groups together and am working on a rough outline so I can record myself going through a bunch of my old items and talk about them. I... being the apparent masochist that I am, decided to switch to linux halfway through this process, which has put an absolute snag in the process, but I'm excited to talk about the stuff I found eventually!