Monday 27 September 2010

Gears, Colossi and Tickets

Been recently spending my time fully immersed in a bunch of imaginary worlds on my gaming break, making a not inconsiderable dent into my Pile of Shame. I finally played through Final Fantasy 13, which was a cracking experience, if a little unwieldy. Quite why they decided to tell a 45+ hour story in such a cinematic way I don't know - Anything that you have to play through in so many sessions needs to be delivered episodically to a certain degree, but not FF13. The story seemed to unfold like it assumed you would be getting through it all in one long play session, with no breaks. It got a little confusing, having to read through the codex periodically for refreshers in what the hell was going on. I'll put it down to Square Enix being massively pretentious.

Less pretentious was Gears of War, but that's due to it being quite possibly the stupidest game I've ever played. Four large men the shape of oblongs with the intelligence of pack animals kill nasty monsters with chainsaw machine guns. It was so incredibly braindead I could scarcely believe it wasn't a parody.

Currently I'm just finishing off Shadow of The Colossus, a sublime and beautiful game the likes of which I've never experienced and probably never will again. Anyone who has played it will know just how breathtaking this game is without having to read another word. Anyone who hasn't experienced it needs to, right now. One of the best I've ever played.

Outside of my gaming habits, I've splashed out a few quid on my ticket to BICS on the 16th October and booked a seat on the morning train to get there nice and early. I'm hoping that this website will be completely done by then - I'm going to be informing the general public of its existence, so it's got to be dead pretty and full of information and all that. Looking forward to getting over to Birmingham. I haven't attended a comics show since last year's, and I'm planning on attending more of them over the next 12 months than I ever have before, in a desperate attempt to get myself out there as much as possible.

I figure it's time to pull my finger out and start plugging myself like there's no tomorrow.

Sunday 12 September 2010

Done and dusted

This weekend I finally delivered what I'm hoping is the final version of the script for Accent UK I mentioned in a previous entry. It's been a tough slog, this one, and it's taken me the best part of 18 months, on and off, to get to this stage. Numerous false starts and frustrations, too. Now it's finished, and I can happily draw a line under it and move onto something else.

I'm not sure why getting this script finished was giving me so much trouble. I'm putting it down to the fact that this script is one of the weightiest things I've written, and also one of the few that doesn't have anything of the fantastic about it. It's certainly quite unlike anything else I've written before. I'm hoping the publishers like it. Now that it's finished I'm actually quite proud of it.

But things chug along. I'm intending to take a week or two off from writing to doss around and play video games before having another look at the first couple of issues of 'Come and See'. After that, it'll finally be time to get cracking on my kids' book.

Now that's going to be a challenge...

Tuesday 7 September 2010

Public Humiliation

Spent a little time recently with Christian Jones, a good mate of mine who was kind enough to volunteer for the task of designing this website. He also volunteered to take a few photos of me for use on the site, which turned into a bit of a saga. Basically, he spent the best part of an afternoon dragging me around Chester, listening to me complain while taking photos of me, desperately trying to make me look vaguely presentable.

Easier said than done - I have a feeling he'll be exercising his Photoshop muscles on this venture. My part consisted of shaking off the trauma of being photographed in public and trying not to look like a dickhead. It was a struggle. I do not photograph well. You will be able to see the fruits of our labours shortly on these pages, so you can judge for yourselves how successful our efforts were.

Thursday 2 September 2010

Greetings and salutations, friends!

Whoo hoo!
First entry in the new website's diary - not sure what to write as the website is still being built as I type, but howdy to all. It may look a bit sparse now, but in the coming weeks and months there will be more and more content to look at and, hopefully, coo over. This diary section is where I'll be posting progress reports on my various projects, as well as the occasional bit of rambling nonsense, to the interest of nobody.

As you will soon be able to see from the 'Projects' page, I'm currently going through the last draft of the one-shot I've written for Accent UK - just adding another layer of polish, tightening up the dialogue and some of the pacing. Nothing major. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they like it.