Damage

August 30th, 2008Blog0 comments

Secrets of the Wild Child: The story of a girl who spent the first thirteen years of her life locked in a room.

Castle Crashers: X-Box Live Arcade keeps spewing out the hits! Castle Crashers is one of the few games that has made me laugh out loud with its weirdness and visual gags. It pays homage to its genre of beat ‘em ups — plays kind of like Bad Dudes and Knights of the Round with RPG elements and level grinding. It’s got so much wit and is so fun to play that it really gets under your skin.

I just started a brand new project. Writing something new is a great feeling because for the past couple of months I’ve been workshopping or rewriting other projects. You’re taking something that’s already there and modifying/augmenting it. It’s a completely different thought process than starting with a blank page and filling it.

My operating style is to already have a complete outline and blueprint, so when I’m writing I can free up my mind to develop individual beats and scenes. It’s literally like chugging along, running along a pre-determined route and painting the scenery as you go.

So I need a totally mindless, action-filled activity to serve as a rest activity after writing. Castle Crashers and games like it are perfect for that. They’re like coffee grounds at the perfume/cologne counter — they reset your palate.

I also make sure that while I’m writing, I’m reading something really, really good that I admire — a really good play if I’m writing a play, or a really good novel if I’m writing something else. Being exposed to really good work from someone else sets the bar in terms of quality for what I myself am writing daily. Kinda like watching really awesome football plays on TV while you practice and play.