Ah, a day of blissful laziness.  I slept until a shameful hour, finished playing my Lost game, and spent time working on my own game.  A large part of today’s work was actually just code cleanup – putting things in logical order, and fixing my headings (I had books inside of chapters, volumes inside of parts – it was a complete mess) which rendered the new “Contents” pane much more usable.

Fitted out a couple more rooms with scenery and objects, including a filing cabinet, which led to today’s triumph.  I wanted to have it so that only one drawer in the cabinet could be open at a time, without actually requiring the player to close one himself.  My first 15 attempts at coding it ended in run-time errors (and to think, I was so giddy when there were no compile-time errors!) so I started drafting a plea for help on raif.

It’s sort of amusing – I agonize over my  pleas for help because I’m always just slightly worried that someone will take one look at my bad code and laugh at me.  I know no one would; it’s just an irrational fear.  So in response to that fear, I kept flipping between my post and my code, trying to fix my code up in a way that at least got my intention across without looking woefully incompetent.

And wouldn’t you know it – in the process of making my code presentable, I ended up figuring it out for myself.  Ah, the sweet bliss of being able to cancel a post…

When I created this cabinet, I realized I needed to create a kind called “drawer” so that I could have 3 of them that acted in conjunction with each other.  I suppose there is some way to do it without creating the “drawer” kind, but I can’t imagine it would be more graceful than what I achieved (that’s not to say there’s not a more graceful way than the one I did use, of course).

So eventually, I made it so that any attempts to open a drawer would automatically close a drawer that was already open.  This also gave me a chance to really strengthen my understanding of “calling names”, which I think I finally really “get”.

Things are definitely getting easier and more intuitive.  Best of all, I’m really having fun.

Happily, I’m getting back into the swing of things. Most of my descriptions are done, in that they are written, which has made it possible for me to sort of move on. They’re still not quite complete, but I have at least overcome the obstacle of not being able to put anything down at all. Tweaking, for me, is far easier than the initial process of writing.

So in the process of creating a closet, I got (happily) sidetracked by creating a light. It’s a fairly simple and straightforward construction: a cord and an outlet; plug the first into the second and voila, there’s light. Took only two minutes to realize it wasn’t as straightforward as I initially thought. How do I keep people from plugging frogs into candles, for instance? So I set about defining what can be plugged in, what can be plugged into, and how to handle any deviations from that.

And I figured it out, without needing to turn to the documentation. *insert happy dance* Now, the fact that I did it on my own means it is probably the least graceful approach, but it works. It’s also good for the confidence; I’m really starting to feel like I have the makings of a game that will at least be passable, even if it falls short of being brilliant.

Next Challenge:

My next task is to figure out how to automatically supply the right second noun if someone says “plug cord”, or how to handle attempts at things like “plug in cord” instead. The question is: if I define an action as “applying to two things” how do I handle attempts that only apply to one thing? (Mostly rhetorical; I plan on posting the question to raif shortly. [UPDATE:  Got it working thanks to the kind and knowledgeable souls at raif.]

The fun part of today’s exercise has come in thinking of new ways to expand the story. The game isn’t puzzleless, but it also isn’t going to be very hard; I guess my aim is towards something that is really mostly an interactive story; all the player’s actions are geared towards developing the story. The trick is figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn’t feel too mundane or tedious, without bringing in arbitrary puzzles just to give the player something to do.

Three day weekend ahead – if I get my way, much of it will be spent working on the game.

I am looking for a good share- or freeware newsreader to replace Outlook Express.  I have tried a few different ones but they’re either too clunky, too cluttered or simply no better than Outlook.  Here are a few I have tried, with notes about what I didn’t like:

• Newz Crawler – Just too busy, and god help me if I can figure out how to get it to download more than the last 7 days’ worth of messages.  It does look nice though.
• Outlook Express – My main beef?  The fact that I can’t get it to use top-down (bottom-posting) formatting for my replies.  If anyone can tell me how to fix that, I guess the search can be called off.
• MAPILab NNTP Plugin in for Outlook 2003 – Nice because it integrates into Outlook, annoying because every time I leave the view, it reverts the placeholder to the very bottom of the list, forcing me to scroll all the way up to read new messages.  And I *want* my new messages at the top, dammit!

Any suggestions?  I just want a nice, easy, no-frills reader that makes reading and posting to the newsgroups comfortable and intuitive.  (I’m using Windows XP)

I consider myself to be a good writer, in the conventional sense.  I know that I enjoy reading what I write, and the fact that my words put a roof over my head and food on my table seems to be at least somewhat of an indication that I’m not bad at it.  So writing IF, a game form that I immensely enjoy playing, has always seemed like a natural fit.  The thing that has typically kept me from succeeding is the programming aspect of things.

Inform 7, of course, was the solution to that particular problem, and while I’m certainly not all that strong in it yet, it has definitely made the lack of programming knowledge less of an obstacle.  It also, unfortunately, makes clearer the specific challenges of writing for IF.

If you’ve read even two entries of this blog, you already know what I am about to tell you:  I am extraordinarily verbose in my writing.  I tend to think that this works for me, and is just my particular style.  However, verbosity doesn’t lend itself all that well to IF – as much as I love to read, I can’t stand huge info dumps in games.  If a game requires me to read a long entry in a book *coughs politely at Anchorhead* I’ll probably just skip the reading and hope that I can acquire any necessary information by skimming, or through some other means.  (I should note that I actually quite enjoyed Anchorhead, even if I never was able to get past the well on my own.)

Because I’ve lost momentum on my game, especially as far as the puzzles are concerned, I figured I’d get back into the groove by finishing up some room and object descriptions.  The benefits are twofold – I’ll have a fuller game world to weave the story and puzzles into, and I’ll burn off some of this excess creative energy.  Yet, after staring at the screen for an hour, and idly cleaning up some of the existing game text, I still can’t figure out how to write the living room’s description.

You know those horrible math puzzles (which are second only to sliding puzzles in my list of Ways to Torture Jules) where you are given a 3×3 grid and a set of numbers, and have to put the numbers into the grid in such a way that both the columns and rows add up to the same number?   The creative portion of IF writing feels a lot like that to me.  These are my ideas of the key components of good game text (feel free to disagree or expand):

• Quality
• Succinctness
• Relevancy to gameplay
• Relevancy to plot

As you might imagine, it’s the second point with which I have the most trouble.  For instance, I am currently trying to write the description for a dining room.  I have this very clear, wonderful image in my mind of how the dining room looks.  I know exactly where it is in relation to other rooms, and I know the role it plays in the story.  I just don’t know how to tell the player without taking four paragraphs to do it.  I’m also struggling with how to add in important information, such as “The kitchen is to the west, and the living room is to the south” while maintaining the narrative flow.  In my 3×3 puzzle analogy, the columns add up to descriptive, the rows add up to practical, but I’m supposed to be striving for “natural” in both.  I’m half (OK, only quarter) tempted to just stick my tongue out at the player and say “It’s a dining room.  People eat here.  People cook to the west and watch TV to south.  Get over it.”

Or, I could keep plugging away at it and try to hit the right balance.  I probably have a better chance of getting past the well in Anchorhead, though

So obviously, the pendulum of progress stopped swinging on my game.  As much as I tried to prevent it, pressing obligations just wouldn’t take a back seat (nor would the burglars who, a few weeks ago, stole 90% of my wardrobe and who last week stole my monitor).  So after a string of hectic weekends and even crazier weeks, this weekend has been pretty wide open for doing whatever I want to do.  And not a moment too soon!

So after doing all the other things I try to do with my weekends, I finally loaded up the ol’ Inform 7 IDE and started working on my game.  To get me back in the swing of things, so to speak, I started reading through what I’d already written.  It was an interesting experience.

Strangely, what impressed me most was stuff I had done that I have since forgotten I learned how to do.  Silly little things, like actions I defined that actually worked, that had I tried to write them today, probably would have had me stumped for a while.  Go me!  Except, erm, I seem to have forgotten more than I’ve retained.

I also realized the importance of commenting my own code.  For instance, there’s this snippet:

A thing can be attached or unattached. A thing is usually unattached. A thing that is a part of something is attached.

The problem is, I have no idea why I put it in there – it doesn’t seem relevant to anything already in the game, so I can only imagine that I had some stroke of genius that told me I was going to need it “shortly” (I probably figured I’d be writing the code the next night).  So now, there’s that lonely little line, just waiting for its purpose.  I’m sure I’ll come across it some day; for now, I’ve stuck in a comment to remind myself to stick in a comment when I do remember.

It reminds me of all the writing I did when I was younger.  I was just bursting with creativity when I was a kid, constantly writing the first few pages of what I was sure was going to be a killer story.  And then I’d misplace the notebook or get sidetracked by something else, or do any of the million other things that my easily distracted self tends to do.  Some time later, I’d come across the notebook, read the stuff I’d written and think, “Wow, this is great stuff!  Now… where was I going with it?”  And I’d never remember, or I’d remember and re-forget.  Either way, in my mother’s attic there are piles and piles of notebooks with half-formed thoughts that teem with potential never to be fulfilled.

This situation – that of wanting to resume progress but fumbling to pick up the threads of where I left off -  has me scouring my memory for a term I read in Jack London’s Call of the Wild.  There was a part in the book where Buck’s owner (it’s late, his name has escaped me) has been challenged to some sort of competition to see if Buck can get the sled moving from a dead stop.  I seem to remember that the runners were frozen to the ground.  I thought the term was “fast break” or “break fast” or something to that effect, but diligent (does 45 seconds count as diligent?) searching has not confirmed this or provided me with the right term.  Anyway, that’s how it feels tonight – I feel as if I’m trying to heave a frozen sled free from its moorings.

The upside is, I am still pleased with what I have so far.  That’s good because it means I’m very likely to continue, rather than scrap it altogether and pretend that I’ll come up with a new idea tomorrow.  In the meantime, I’ll be looking for some SnoMelt and a trusty St. Bernard to get things moving again.

So I didn’t get as much coding done over the weekend as I had hoped, mainly because the telephone company *finally* installed my DSL line, which meant I was up til 5:30 Saturday am catching up on the new episodes of Lost.  That, in turn, meant that most of the weekend was spent wishing I hadn’t stayed up until such an ungodly hour, and concentration just wasn’t in the cards.

However, I did get some stuff done, which is good.  Even the tiniest bit of progress counts as momentum, which is crucial for me.  If the pendulum stops swinging, it will be very hard for me to get it moving again.

So the other day, as I was going over the blog (which really is as much a tool for me as it is a way for me to share my thoughts with others), I realized I had overlooked a very basic thing when coding the whole “automatically return the frog to the fuschia” bit…

As the code stood, if the player managed to carry the frog to another room before searching it, the frog would get magically returned to the fuschia.  This was fairly simple to resolve, in the end – I just coded it so that the game moves (and reports) the frog back to fuschia before leaving the room.  I also decided to add in a different way of getting the key out of the frog – in essence, rewarding different approaches to the same problem with success.

Which brings me to the main thrust of today’s post.  I have such exacting standards for the games I play.  I love thorough implementation.  My favorite games are those that build me a cool gameworld and let me tinker and explore, poking at the shadows and pulling on the edges to see how well it holds up.  A sign of a good game is one that I will reopen not to actually play through again, but to just wander around the world, taking in my surroundings.  I’ve long lamented the fact that relatively few games make this a rewarding experience – even in the best games, even slight digging tends to turn up empty, unimplemented spots.

What I am coming to appreciate is just how much work is involved in the kind of implementation I look for.  Every time I pass through a room’s description, or add in scenery objects, I realize just how easy it is to find things to drill down into.  Where there’s a hanging plant, there’s a pot, dirt, leaves, stems, wires to hang from, hooks to hang on, etc.  Obviously, unless I had all the time in the world, I couldn’t implement each of these separately, so I take what I believe to be the accepted approach and have all of the refer to the same thing.  Which, in my opinion, is fine.  I don’t mind if a game has the same responses for the stems as it does for the plant as a whole, as long as it has some sort of relevant response.  Even so, this takes a lot of work.  It might be the obsessive part of me, but I can’t help but think “What else would a person think of when looking at a hanging plant?”

Or, as I’ve come to think of it:  WWBTD?

What Would Beta Testers Do?

I’ve taken to looking at a “fully” implemented room and wondering what a player might reasonably (and in some cases unreasonably) be expected to do.  This is a bit of a challenging process for me – I already know how my mind works, so trying to step outside of my viewpoint and see it from a blind eye is hard.   I should stop for a second to note that I fully intend to have my game beta tested once it reaches that point, but the fewer obvious things there are for testers to trip over, the more time and energy they’ll have for really digging in and trying to expose the weaknesses I can’t think of.

I’ve found one resource that is both entertaining and highly informative to me:  ClubFloyd transcripts.  ClubFloyd, for the uninitiated (a group among which I count myself, of course) is a sort of cooperative gaming experience — if anyone who knows better reads this and cares to correct what may well be a horrible description, by all means!– where people get together on the IFMud and play through an IF title.  The transcripts are both amusing and revealing.  I recently read the Lost Pig transcript and it was quite interesting.  The things people will attempt to do are both astonishing and eye-opening.  In the case of Lost Pig (which, fortunately, I had already played before reading the transcript), what was even more amazing was the depth of the game itself.  I mean, people were doing some crazy ass stuff – eating the pole, lighting pants on fire, and so on.  And it *worked*.  Not only did it work, it was reversible.  You obviously need the pole, so there’s a way to get it back if, in a fit of orc-like passion, you decide to shove it in down Grunk’s throat.

Anyway, my point is, the transcripts gave me a unique perspective on the things people will try, whether in an effort to actually play the game, to amuse themselves, or to amuse others.  Definitely good stuff to keep in mind when trying to decide, say, the different ways people will try to interact with my little porcelain frog.

Other Stuff I Accomplished

So I coded in an alternate way to deal with the frog that didn’t conflict with the “standard” approach.  I also implemented a few more scenery objects.  Over the course of the next few days, I’m going to try to at least finish the descriptions of the remaining rooms so that I can wander around a bit and start really getting to the meat of it all.  I also want to work on revising the intro text a bit.  In an effort to avoid the infodumps that I so passionately hate, I think I went a little too far and came away with something a bit too terse and uninformative.  But that’s the really fun part of all of this – writing and re-writing, polishing the prose and making it all come together.

Whattaya know.  Midnight again.  I think I’m picking up on a trend here.

Grrr… I’ve been so bogged down in work and client emergencies that progress on the game is at a temporary (no, really!  Only temporary) standstill.  I’ve managed to flesh out a few more room and scenery descriptions, but have not accomplished anything noteworthy in a few days.  Hopefully after this week most of the fires on the work front will be extinguished, and I’ll have time to dive into the game this weekend.

(She says to no one, since there’s been one hit on this blog since… it started.)

It’s funny the things I have taken for granted in my decades of playing text adventures.  Little things, like “look behind”, that I try in just about any game I play, and have always assumed were just standard commands.  Of course, when I decided to put something behind a painting, I quickly realized the folly of my ways.  I couldn’t just write a simple “Instead of looking behind” statement, I had to first explain to the thing what “looking behind” was in the first place.

The good news is, I managed to do this pretty quickly.  A couple of fairly intuitive lines telling the game what looking behind was, and voila, ’twas done.  Then because my painting had a couple of parts attached to it, I decided to treat the act of looking behind any of those parts as looking behind the painting itself.  Flying completely by the seat of my pants, I whipped out:

Instead of looking behind something that is part of something (called the parent): try looking behind the parent.

When it compiled, I whooped.  When it worked, I did a little dance.  It was a fairly easy and straightforward accomplishment, but it taught me a good and valuable lesson: even the seemingly simplest things require effort on the IF writer’s part.

This revelation could have been a bit daunting.  I do admit that part me of groaned inwardly, and thought “Is every little thing going to be like this?”  But actually, I was really quite pleased – one because this is exactly what I was looking for when I started this whole process: a learning and growing experience.  And two, because I actually managed to achieve it without spending 4 hours combing through the documentation.

Not to say that everything else went so smoothly…

Part of the problem is that because I actually have fleshed-out a fairly comprehensive idea of how I want things to go, I keep getting distracted.  For instance, I was writing a doorbell into the game, and thinking of likely ways that people would try to interact with it.  The most obvious choice, of course, was to “push doorbell”.  Easy enough.  But what if someone tried  to “ring” the doorbell? Writing an action for ringing something and defining things as ringable and unringable didn’t take me too long, and actually boosted my confidence  – the whole process is becoming a lot more intuitive; rather than trying to figure out what I want to do, now I just have to figure out exactly how to do it.  I know I need to write an action – so all I have to figure out is how to do so.

Anyway (there I go, getting distracted again) – as I allowed for ringing the doorbell, it occurred to me that at later parts in the game, when telephone conversations become involved, I might want to use “ring” in a different sense.  With the doorbell pretty much complete, I turned my attentions towards laying down the groundwork allowing for the whole telephone system.

Next big realization:  telephones are going to be hard.  I’m going to have to skip that part for now because it’s going to be a pretty major part of the game, so I’ll need to really plan it out properly.   That will probably be my Tables trial-by-fire.  I have yet to figure out exactly how to work with tables, but because I haven’t gotten to the point where they come into play, I haven’t really given them much thought, either.

I also realized that I am probably the world’s messiest coder.  Because of my flaky attention span, I tend to work on one thing, then bounce off in another direction, then back to something I was doing yesterday, and so on.  In an effort to clean up the code, I have been inserting headings/chapters/books and taking a more organized approach to things.  Today I tried taking more of a room by room, hierarchal approach.  I went back to the starting room, and wrote in all the scenery items.  Moved onto the “logical” next room and did the same.  Because some of the scenery items would actually be interactable in this room (like said doorbell), this took a little more work, but I think it paid off.

I’m a big fan of thorough implementation; the quickest way for a game to win points in my favor is to never say to me “You can’t see any such thing” or “You don’t have to worry about [some noun mentioned in the description]“.  If you (the game writer) tell me something is there, and I want to know more about it – tell me more!  Even a simple five word description is better than nothing in my book.

My question for myself is now whether it’s better to do all the low-level implementation for all the rooms involved (15) and then go back and tackle the grittier stuff, or to continue going room by room, working from low-level upwards.  Probably the former is the best approach, as once I start coding in some of the puzzles, things will start getting even messier. If I try to code part of a puzzle here today, and the rest of it there next week, I’m just going to get hopelessly lost.

Things I Learned Today

I’ve sharpened my “Instead” skills quite a bit.

I also managed to make the front door automatically if you try going through it after unlocking it, as that just seemed logical.  I suppose I could just code it to unlock automatically as well, but I haven’t decided whether I want to do that or not.  It’s the only locked door in the game, so unlocking it once shouldn’t be an issue.  This involved learning how to “try silently” in a specific location.

I created an thing called a concealer so that I could treat looking behind things that actually hide things differently from everything else.  This also brought into use “Check [action]” and “Carry out [action]” which I was pretty proud to figure out.

Time-triggered events.  To enhance the reality of the game world, I wanted things to happen like thoughts occurring to the PC from time to time – brief memories triggered a few turns after examining something, for instance.  That, of course, meant invoking the “In [x] turns from now, [something happens]” and “At the time when [something happens] [do something].  This turned out to be easier than I’d feared, and from my POV, is highly effective in the game.

Questions I Came Up With

Of course, the more I write, the more questions I find myself facing.

What’s the best way to describe a house that’s supposed to be familiar?  Saying “Your old bedroom is to the southeast” seems a little odd to me in the context of this game, because you obviously should know where your bedroom is.  Further, you’re unlikely to tell a guest that needs the toilet to “go down the hall and walk northwest”.  I have to give this some thought.  Immersion is important to me, so I’d like to create as realistic and intuitive a world as possible.

What’s the best way to clue someone into examining something twice?  I don’t want to be willfully evasive, but I do want to hint that some things are worth a closer look (a second examine, as it were).  I just don’t know what the most effective way to accomplish that is…

And, once again, it’s after midnight, so that’s where I’ll leave off for now.

Today marks the third day of effort on the game (titled, by the way, “The Things We Don’t” or TTWD), but the first day of real progress and achievement. First, some facts that I think are significant for putting this whole exercise in context:

I am not a programmer. The extent of my programming abilities lies in designing Access databases (which, I should say, I am pretty damn good at) and very basic HTML coding. I am using Inform7 because its natural language approach appeals to me – my first half hearted attempt was with Inform6, and I soon realized that unless I was going to be happy with a one room game that consisted of a look command and possibly a door that opened, I was never going to get anywhere.

I am a flake. I am what I call ODD, a blend of OCD and ADD. I get incredibly, hopelessly, horrendously obsessed with some new interest, then throw it all over my shoulder when I lose interest a few days later. It’s one of my more endearing features. I am also easily distracted, which explains why this part is so long when I really just want to get to the good stuff…

The Good Stuff

So in the first few days, I laid out the map of the house where the game takes place. Easy, even for me. I flitted between the I7 window and Firefox, reading bits on IF Theory here, laying out rooms there, reading reviews of games I’ll never play everywhere. This was not, surprisingly, a sign of yet another half-hearted attempt, but of an actual dedication to getting things right this time.

Last night, I laid out a basic flowchart of the way I want the game to progress, the paths to game end, and various notes and musings on things I wanted to happen along the way. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. No sooner would I plot out the perfect pathway through the game than some new idea would pop into my head, sending me back to the drawing board. Note to self: I need bigger paper. And a pencil. With an eraser.

So today, I set about putting things in action.

You know those little frogs that people put their keys in and cleverly hide in their flower gardens where no burglar would ever find them? I decided I had to have one of those. I tried not to be too cliche, and hid it in a hanging plant instead. At first, this seemed to be a fairly straightforward process. Put a key in a frog, stick the frog in the fuschia. Running through likely scenarios in my head, I realized a few things:

• The frog couldn’t be immediately visible, or else there was no point in sticking it in the fuschia.
• There should be clues hinting at the possibility of something hidden in the fuschia.
• I didn’t want the player to have to carry around the frog for the rest of the game, but also didn’t want to refuse to let the player to take it before the key had been found
• The frog’s description referred to a recess, so I needed to cover the possibility that someone would search the recess instead of searching the frog.

These seem, at face value, like fairly basic problems. Well, for anyone with even a brain cell more than I have, they probably are very basic and easy to solve. For me, they’re a day’s worth of effort.

First attempts at hiding the frog actually went well. I set it up so that frog only moved to the fuschia when the player searched the fuschia. Easy as pie.

Then I crafted the description to encourage the player to examine the fuschia more closely. I even managed to allow the player feel some hard thing in the plant (provided the frog had not been found) and adapted the plant’s description to include the frog after it had been found. Took a bit more doing, but still, I got it done.

The real challenge came in keeping the frog out of the inventory. If the key had been found, I wanted the frog to be returned to the fuschia, and future efforts to take the frog to be thwarted. Returning the frog was easy enough, but stopping the player from taking it again was harder than I expected.

First, I couldn’t stop it from taking the frog.

Then, I stopped it from taking the frog, but the game said I had taken it anyway.

Then the game stopped saying it had taken it, but actually did take it.

Then it didn’t say it took it, and didn’t take it, but… didn’t say anything at all.

Let me just say, much hair pulling ensued. As soon as I thought I had figured it out, the friggin frog would stick its tongue out at me and promptly hop into my inventory, or give the wrong response, or both. I was perilously close to just throwing my hands in the air and letting the player walk around with the $@%! thing, but I pressed on.

Finally I figured out, which anyone with even a minute’s more experience than me probably has already, that the problem lay in the order in which I constructed my Instead statement. A tinker here, a tinker there, and voila – a frog that obediently returned to the fuschia after offering up its hidden treasure; stayed there once it returned; and correctly reported all of this to the player as it happened. I took time out for a happy dance, a cup of coffee and a much needed cigarette.

As I smoked my cigarette (and answered email, did some work, chatted with clients, etc.) it occurred to me that someone might try searching the “recess” that was mentioned in the frog’s description. I wanted the game to treat “search recess” as “search frog”, allowing players to do whatever was natural to them. Once again, this seemed like it would be pretty straightforward – surely I could just say “Instead of searching recess: search frog.” But no. Life is not that kind. I tried different variations on the theme, searched the documentation, did some therapeutic swearing, and threatened to throw some of my favorite possessions out the window.

Finally, I decided on one last possible course of action: I just copied the code for searching the frog into an instead statement for searching the recess, and compiled the game. I was sure I’d see an error message telling me that I was nuts and was clearly better suited for writing games in AGT, but to my surprise, it compiled. To my even greater surprise, it appears to have worked!

And that marked the end of my first real day of serious writing. It was a definite battle, but in the end, I am really proud of what I managed to achieved, and I learned a buttload in the process.

Well, more like re-taking the leap.  I actually started an attempt a couple of years ago but quickly got caught up in the trials and tribulations of that dread “real world” and never got very far.  But here I am, determined to give it a real go this time, since my brain needs a challenge both creatively and intellectually.  I write for a living, but that’s far different from writing for myself.

Anyway, I thought that blogging my experiences might serve two purposes:  one, it would be interesting to look back on, and hopefully interesting for anyone that happens to come across it; and two, it may help keep me on track, since I am notoriously flaky and tend to get completely obsessed with things just to get bored a few days later.  So that’s that – this blog’s raison d’etre.

Enjoy.