This week was vacation! Okay, really this coming week probably feels more like vacation. I mean, I only had Friday off and next week I have Monday and Tuesday off. Either way, I was lazy, I got nothing accomplished this week in terms of regular writing work. Now I feel bad. Probably because there is now a history of everything and saying how much I have not written thus far in the last three weeks or so at least. Does that mean I’m still a writer? Probably.

Vacation! I went to Victoria. It was cheap. I took public transit the whole way. It took almost 6 hours. Bus, train, bus, ferry, bus, walking. The train and bus’s were too full and crowded to even try to pull out the laptop and attempt anything and I was too busy watching the scenery while on the ferry. The only goal I had for this trip was to do some editing. I have done nothing for this week. I did a lot of other things on my vacation – a timelapse, watched the second leg of Race to Alaska, ate fish and chips, walked on beaches, saw otters, did a lot of reading and learned a new thing. Have some pictures!

The new thing I put some time into learning.

I’ve recently found myself wondering about writing a choose-your-own-adventure style story (along with a comic-script for a webcomic, but that’s another story). Last weekend at the weekly Vancouver Nano writeup meeting, I was introduce to a program called Twine that does exactly this. I spent time on my vacation learning how to write a simple choose your own adventure. At the first level, it’s fairly easy to make a branching story, but that is just barely scratching the surface of what it can do.

I thought it would be pretty easy to take a story and see how it change it for a choose your own adventure. I was wrong. It was stupidly hard. I stared at it for a long time before I even was able to come up with a very, very simple idea. And then to figure out how to translate into the options and different texts needed, and then make sure that all the things worked and worked correctly and made sense, oh boy, it quickly spiraled out of control. And my little story only has three options! How crazy is that? It’s fascinating and now that I can do one, I have no idea how I would utilize this program effectively. The obvious solution is to make a dungeon crawler type story. Typical. Trying to come up with a story that is choose your own adventure suddenly got a lot harder then I thought it would be. But then, when is anything I ever pick to do… easy?

You can read my short little attempt here – ‘Colored Rooms‘. It publishes to a single contained html file so while it’s on the website, it is not part of this main site. You’ll need to come back to me to continue reading and comment. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

Have you read it? Read it again and take some different options 🙂 All in all this took about 3 to 4 hours to figure out and make sure I had all my little things set up properly. Like when going from the Red room into either the green or blue room or even into the backyard if you took the option of looking at the photograph first. Same with the blue room, if you went to the jacuzzi before continuing exploring, the text changes to fit what you took with you, the towel.

These words are not included into this week’s report as I don’t know how many words were actually written and I don’t feel like separating each of the passage nodes from the logic text to find out. I will have to explore this some more at some point, but in the meantime, I have to get cracking on my short stories.

Goals:

• E-publish MacSweeny’s Short stories before November.
• Get back on Track with Weavers, Book 1.

MacSweeny’s Maniacal Material Market: Short Stories of Employee Mayhem.

(it’s a working title)

• 2 / 26 edited
• 1/26 reviewed
• 0/26 final
• 1 in progress

Word Log:

• Story: 0
• Shorts: 0
• Other: 677
• Editing: 0
• Time: 4.5 hours