Allowing for Grace in the Midst of Change

I’m currently working on a post about creative limitations, why I love them, and how they have benefited certain projects (both mine and others). However, I’m currently moving to a new apartment in another city — and the process is both physically and mentally exhausting.

I’m trying to give myself grace through this transition. The move is a good thing. For the first time, I’ll have a space that is fully my own, and I’m excited about what that will open up for me. I’ll share more about all of that in the future.

But at the moment, I don’t have much mental space left over to do any in-depth creative work. I’m having a hard time even setting down to read a book. Instead, I find myself turning to horror movies (in honor of spooky season) and video games (I’m loving God of War) in order to relax.

What I’ve Been Working On

Monochrome Heights is now available! It has, in fact, been available for a week, and I’ve been delighted by the positive reviews (including some kind words about the story, which I helped work on). If you love challenging platformers, then you should definitely check this out — and there’s a demo you can try before purchasing (if you want to try it out first).

I downloaded Scrivner, a word processing system that has a immense amount tools to help organize the process of writing novels, screenplays, or nonfiction. I specifically wanted to give it a try because I’m drafting and organizing a new book of poetry, which I previously was working on as a single, long, unorganized file in Google Docs. I currently have around 50+ poems for the project, most of which are first drafts, and I’m hoping the program will help make it more simple to track which poems need more work, which have been published, and which are ready to send out for submission. I’m excited to see if this helps me to move forward with the project and plan to try it out with one or all of my various novels-in-progress.

I created a Patreon. I’m not actively promoting it yet, but wanted to have it set up for some of my future projects. I’d love if you checked it out, and you can sign up for free to get general updates.

Good Reads

Leon Barillaro published a postmortem on their fantastic text game, “For Gregg,” or as they describe it, “How it Took Five Years to Make Five Minutes of Gameplay.” The game explores an interaction between an AI and a human, whose job is being replaced by that very same AI. It explores grief, the soullessness of AI, and its inability to accurately support humans through their emotional experience. Barillaro notes: