Pots are Boiling

Another busy day with very little to show for it. Just having to take care of other things and finding that my muse is abandoning me a little bit. The only way I know of to entice her back is to write my heart out over a long stretch - I generally get stronger by the end of such things as long as I have the endurance to last - but, well, I haven't had the time lately.

Been running a lot of tests on my developing card game. The process of taking something from conception through the stages of development is fascinating - I've sat in on enough people designing games and the like in one form or another but I've never really done it myself. But it's time-consuming as I find myself hunting for resources just as much as I'm experimenting with the rules. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going to wind up at this point but, well, I'm enjoying the ride. I'm not certain if what I'm building is anything other than a mess but that's the beauty of the NaNo ethos (Perhaps best summed up as: "write now, edit later") when you apply it elsewhere - I don't really care one way or the other. Just proving to myself that I can do this is what matters. And I'll worry about quality later on. It's wonderfully freeing.

There's also the roof situation which is reaching a crisis point. With the weather making a turn for the worse, it's time to make a decision because the work needs to get done now before any large snowfall damages things even worse. That means it's time to pick out a contractor which means estimates and offers and contracts and all other sorts of fun stuff that I'd rather not deal with if I didn't have to.

Then there's my next novel which I'm well in the planning stage for. I don't have much written for it but it's consuming me as I try and block things out. It's going to be massive, I know that, dwarfing the first ClotH novel (which is, itself, huuuuuge) so it's sucking up my words, apparently.

And, there's also Inkscape, an open-source version of Illustrator that I'm trying out. Oh, once I can get it humming then you'll see a thing or two, I'm sure. But, for the moment, I'm still playing around with it. I'm a sucker for those open-source projects, you know, like OpenOffice, Firefox and Linux and all the rest. Part of it is that I'm rapidly approaching flat broke, of course, but I also like the idea that just a bunch of dedicated people can turn out a better product than some corporation that's making millions of dollars off the work of their underpaid and overworked employees (I know, I know, sorry to get political on you and all. I'm crazy, obviously, to think that the world could work without people trying to get rich at the expense of others.). I'm not the most well technically versed so I'm not exactly the kind of person to rush out and get involved in something like that but I'm not adverse to doing a little bit of work to make a superior product do what I want it to, so I do try to snap things like that up.

Lots on my plate is what I'm trying to say. And plenty of half-finished posts I'd like to hack out one of these days. Oh well, that just means that when I don't have any ideas I can just reach into my ghost file and pull something out.

Auto Assault Update: Okay, here's the thing. Every time I try to zone the game freezes on me. I have no idea why it's happening and I really have no inclination to seek out just what the bug is. It's especially frustrating because to advance I need to get to a particular zone from where I am but every time I crash out of the game I start out about 5~10 minutes drive from where the border is. It's incredibly annoying and, were this a console, the sort of thing that would have my controller through the wall in an instant. So, I'm going to give it another chance or two, maybe check out some of the other classes, but I'm just about done with the game at this point. Upwards and onwards, I guess. I feel like I should make the most of my free trial (sooooo close to another level) but I also don't want to be making a mistake with my sunk costs, so to speak, which tell me I'm free to walk away if I don't like the way my investments are turning out.

Outlook: Tomorrow's going to be another day. I'm somewhat certain I might actually do something then.

[1] - 20 minutes give or take.