Yeah, I suck at keeping this blog regular. Bite me. I’m just downsizing posts until something interesting pops up, since apparently all my amazing ideas disappear the moment I sit at a computer. Coincidentally enough, that leads into the topic of the day.

It’s easy for me to come up with cool ideas for my stories… I get them all the time. Sometimes they’ll be simple places to use, characters I might like to include, scenes that could be fun to write, or whole plot ideas that show up out of nowhere and require some thought to include properly. I get these ideas just about everywhere… sometimes at work, in transit while on trains, or just walking to places. Actually, walking is the best time for brainstorming – I have twenty minutes to walk to get to somewhere and I have music in my earphones blocking out the world, so my mind starts to wander. I’m usually quite excited to come up with all these and can’t wait until I get home to write them all down.

Sadly, it doesn’t usually get to that point. Sometimes I jot the ideas down, or other times the ideas are interesting enough for me to recall when they’re needed, but usually the result is the same – I get home, and all inspiration and ideas wither away the moment I get behind the computer.

I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps it’s merely a mindset thing… once I’m at home and not moving anymore, my mind just automatically goes into relaxation mode and stops trying to do anything useful or productive. Part of that is the presence of so many distractions, but even that’s not the full reason – there are plenty of times when I otherwise want to write and kill off anything drawing my focus away from it, but I’ll still just end up staring at a black document for a while. It’s incredibly irritating.

Unfortunately, I’m at a point in my life where things around me are stable and solid for a while… but in contrast, I’m really not. I don’t work very much, but I’m unsuccessful in all my job hunts to fill the hours (and I’ve been trying on and off for years now). I’ve completed the study I want to complete, but ended up doing a pretty poor attempt as an editor so I’ve run out of contracts and can’t seem to find any more right now. My health is about as adequate as it’s ever going to get, yet I keep getting sick and go through repeated stretches of time where my already crippling sleep problems get even worse. Seriously, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep by my standards (which isn’t very good to most people) in about a week now, and my exhaustion is mounting. I’ve even had sleep paralysis in the morning twice now, because I’m so restless my body can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep and gets stuck halfway.

Yeeesh, that sounds depressing in hindsight. I’ll just go out here and say that despite all that, I’m doing alright. I feel okay, I’m staying positive, and I’m managing as best I can. But anyway.

Point of this rant is that with so little actual productive activity in my life, I spend a lot of time doing other pursuits that really aren’t going to get me far. Sure, I can say that my reading books is expanding my repertoire for my writing and editing skills, but there’s only so many novels I can chew through before that excuse wears thin. And there’s no excuse for all the video games I play, but hey, that’s yet another form of escapism and outlet of creativity that I capitalise on. All this means that I should be writing more – a day where I get no writing done and don’t have a rare shift at my existing job feels like a wasted day. Ergo, my problem… if the inspiration and ideas go kaput the moment I reach my writing instruments, then clearly something needs to change.

The last few days have been experiments in such change. For a start, I’m jotting down as many notes as I can on notepads and things that I can scribble on really quickly. Problems with handwriting make that process slower than I’d like, but it’s usually a good stepping stone to writing – transcribing things usually has me expanding on them as I go, which in turn sees me continuing the scene I’d noted almost without any conscious effort. If a notepad isn’t handy or is otherwise difficult to manage, like when I’m walking, I substitute my phone’s notepad instead. I guess those smart phones are good for something, huh?

Then there’s the location change. My laptop is almost always set up on my desk in my room, and this room is (again) where all my relaxation and time wasting goes on. The atmosphere probably isn’t as conducive as I would like to writing, so I’ve been trying out taking the laptop elsewhere in the house – sitting on the couch in the living room or at the dining room table for example – and writing there. That also seems to be working, but it doesn’t quite do the trick.

Therefore, the most important step: I kill the internet. Seriously, I love my internet time, but it’s just so easy to find a distraction if your focus wanders for even a minute. When I move to a writing spot, I’m there to write, and I limit myself as such. The only things open are iTunes and my word processor… and even that sees me spending a little too much time trying to get a soundtrack in order, but at the end of the day I’m still getting to work and churning words out. Even if I lose my focus, the lack of anything else to go to quickly pulls me back in.

So far, it seems to be working. I’m writing a little more these days, and while I still haven’t quite reached my best like I did during the final days of writing Star City Scramble, I’m definitely seeing improvements. Perhaps not in the quality of my writing – the last few efforts have seen me struggling to be happy with the end result, not to mention continual negative feedback – but that will hopefully come once the quantity does. We’ll see.

Alright, that’s enough rambling for now. I think I might rant about target audiences sometime soon, assuming I keep this thing going.

Hi, I’m Kris, and I’m here today to tell you that you should really play Cthulhu Saves the World.

I first heard about the game when I stumbled upon the trailer on Youtube one day, along with the information that it would soon be getting ported to the PC. I vowed to keep an eye on it just because it looked pretty amusing, and then about a fortnight back I saw it pop up in the New Releases section of Steam. It was bundled with another RPG just like it by the same developers called Breath of Death VII (also really good) for the humble price of three measly bucks. Since I’m the king of impulse buys as far as Steam goes, I would have picked it up anyway, but that’s seriously good value.

Thing is, I probably would have paid twenty. I just finished the game now, and while it was only about six to seven hours long on a single Normal difficulty playthrough, it was easily one of the most fun JRPGs I’ve played in some time. The graphics and style is set up to be very retro, looking and playing a lot like the early NES/SNES era games of yore like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, but it’s incredibly bright and colourful and takes to the design well. Additionally, it incorporates a lot of the H.P. Lovecraft mythos into it as well – you’ll encounter numerous locations, bad guys, references, and so on all dating back to the original stories.

What really surprised me is that they seemed to have streamlined the whole genre better than any other game I’ve seen. Rather than having an inventory full of useless items, there are now only two healing items – Potions, which fully heal, revive, and cleanse a single character, and 1-Ups, which let you try a battle again if you happen to die miserably. Everything else you find is either equipment, gold to purchase more equipment, or something that gives a character(s) permanent stat increases. That means that it’s almost always worth hunting down the treasure chests in a dungeon. Additionally, the movement speed is incredibly fast, the battles zoom by if you keep tapping the buttons and get impatient, you fully heal after every battle but only gain a small amount of MP (which means that the every fight has the freedom to be challenging), and you can save ANYWHERE (instant purchase for me on that point alone). It’s just an incredibly smooth experience to play. You also have full control over your character development – every time they level up, you choose between two options, which is usually a spell, a passive ability, a special technique, or a stat increase of some kind. That means if you want to make Cthulhu a powerful sorceror, you can. Want your healer to be an absolute tank in battle? Can do. The customisation is really welcome.

The absolute highlight of the game, however, has to be the plot and the writing. The plot is simple enough – Cthulhu woke up intent on destroying the world, but was immediately beaten down by a mysterious sorceror who sealed his powers away completely. There’s a catch, however: if Cthulhu becomes a TRUE HERO, he’ll get his awesome and terrible powers back and can resume eating the whole world. So that’s what he sets out to do, accompanied by a weird and wonderful cast of groupies. The writing is absolutely hilarious, though. There are puns galore, making fun of both the story, the lack of fourth wall, the characters, genre tropes in general, and anything they can possibly think of. Every enemy in the game has a brief description which is usually worth reading just to get a laugh at. Seriously, the whole experience had me grinning like an idiot.

Seems like there’s a bunch of extra things to do after you beat the game, as well. There are four difficulty levels, a secret boss to take down, and a few special game modes such as Highlander (higher experience but only one character can fight per battle). But if none of that interests you, the main story is still good enough.

So yeah, that’s my Cthulhu Saves the World review. Seriously, people, three bucks. Totally worth it. I enjoyed the hell out of it and I’m quite sure most of you will too.

Why are you still here? Support the starving indie developers, dammit!

So I’ve had a new story idea simmering away in my mind for a couple of days. It stems from a few writing exercises I’ve done in the past, and it strikes me as the kind of project that I could really leave indefinitely and just come back to when the mood arises to add to it, rather than it being a constant and continuous process towards getting published.

The concept is quite simple – action. It’s commonly said to me that one of my strengths as a writer is the ability to write interesting and engaging action scenes, and they’re usually the ones that I have the most fun writing. A lot of the reason I end up putting aside or giving up certain story ideas is simply because I get bogged down trying to link the various interesting scenes together with necessary but comparatively bland scenes. In the end, it just becomes a chore to write… or if it doesn’t, I just don’t enjoy writing the stories and trying to get those particular scenes perfect constantly. It’s something I’m getting better with, but really? I’m turning to stories that either have less between the interesting scenes, or I just change things around so the scenes are consistently interesting. Harder to do, but it seems to be working – The Organization and What Fiction Doesn’t Tell You are the recent results of that. But I’d still like to try and push it further.

I pictured a scene where a young woman wakes up in a desert with no recollection of how she got there and several patches in her memory dealing with her short term situation. Moments later, a guy surfing on the back of a dragon proceeds to unleash crazy magic power in an attempt to kill her, and so she needs to fight back. I want it to be over the top and jacked up to 11. I want it to be the equivalent of watching Sucker Punch and 300 at the same time, only condensed down into written form. And since a lot of the impact of action movies such as those is the full combination of visual and aural input, that’ll be quite a challenge to accomplish… but that’s the challenge I set out to make. How far can I push written action scenes? Can I make a story composed of increasingly over the top and out there situations like that?

That’s not to say there won’t be any plot or character interaction and dynamism. When I say “interesting” scenes, there are plenty that don’t have actual “action” that are still more than interesting, and those will still be present in this story. But I intend to fly into this with nothing but the pictures I have in my head and just wing the entire story from start to finish. If I find a particular moment to be uninteresting, I’ll throw something in there to spice it up. I’ll try and take refuge in audacity if I must. It’ll just be a total experiment to see how much I can do it and if such a story turns out to be interesting and exciting to both write and read.

A lot of my inspiration comes from the series The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. Pretty much anyone who has spoken to me in the last couple of months would have heard me recommend them, but here it is again – these books are fantastic and you should read them as soon as you can. Part of what I love about the series, however, is that it all just seems to flow so wonderfully. There’s practically no wasted space – every story bounds from event to event in short order, all the details that are picked up end up being explained or utilised well, and it never feels like it gets slow or winds down in any way, shape, or form. It’s brilliant, and it’s easily my current motivation and inspiration for continuing the urban fantasy genre stories that I have been as of late. That’s the kind of feel I’m trying to achieve with this new project.

It’s not something I’m going to work on immediately, mind. But I’m not letting this one get too far from me and intend to give it a shot soon. How about you guys? Do you think I could pull something like this off? I’d love to hear your thoughts, but either way, look out for this project in the coming months.

Imagination is a dying art. That’s what I feel like every time I look at the up and coming movies that Hollywood is producing, or every time I browse the video game releases for something new.

More and more, I’m finding that there’s less in the way of new, interesting, original concepts in films and games. This has been going on for a while, granted, and I’m pretty sure there were some people who said the same thing two decades ago. It could also just be me making the full conversion from bitter, jaded, cynical young adult to bitter, jaded, cynical grown adult. But really… when every highlighted game at E3 is a sequel or a remake? When the movies are all just adaptations or rehashes of the same plot? For every Minecraft or Inception, there’s ten Call of Dutys or Transformers. It seems like it’s too difficult for the respective industries to take the time to develop something new and interesting, and instead take something boring or generic that’s been done to death and take the safe option for a quick buck.

Or worse… take a long dead franchise or highlight from people’s childhoods (which makes Transformers stand out even more as a culprit here) and then resurrect it for a generation who either doesn’t get it, or hates what you’ve done with it from the very moment it’s been announced. Like, say, Captain Planet. Or the Smurfs movie, the trailer of which made me want to kick puppies. Those two in particular are what drove me to write this post.

(Disclaimer: Not all adaptations or revivals are bad. I’m honestly looking forward to seeing the live action Tintin film, many of the comic book adaptations are thoroughly enjoyable, the Prince of Persia movie was actually quite watchable, and just because a game is a rehashed brand or idea doesn’t mean it’ll be instantly bad. But you know what I mean.)

Are we as a society really at the point where we cannot accept new ideas? Where we’re afraid to try something different or out there because people are so bland and shallow that they refuse to give it a shot? I know there are a lot of other reasons as to why this is, but a lot of them come down to money… development costs for entertainment are monstrously large, and the market is a crowd of people without imagination or jaded cynics like yours truly, meaning that it’s quite hard to make the money back.

But really, it seems like it’s getting worse and worse. Every year, that little spark of imagination seems to fade a little more. What are we going to be like when there’s really nothing original left? It really worries me to think about.

I suppose all I can do is continue what I do now – support those that are worthy of being supported, those people with the unique or the interesting ideas, by buying or approving of their works as best as I can. If anything, I guess I just have the pressure on me to try and create something as interesting and original as I can when it comes to my writing. Here’s hoping I can pull that off…

In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep sitting here and hoping that more movies like Inception or The Game are made and more games like Planescape: Torment or Shadow of the Colossus are developed. But somehow, I’m starting to doubt that’ll happen with much frequency. So what do you guys think? Are we losing our imaginations as time goes on?

I like blogging. It’s something I enjoy.

That said, anybody who has ever kept an eye on this place would know that I tend to be extremely sporadic with my blog posts. This is perhaps the first time I’m dusting this site off in months and months, and I took that dusting to extremes: the theme has been changed, the previous posts deleted, and everything is now in a position that I can start from scratch with.

See, I always feel like I have a lot to say. And even if it’s largely incoherent and pointless rambling or completely self-indulgent tripe, I still feel like I could say it and hope that maybe, just maybe, somebody is actually interested in hearing what I say. The more I try, though, the less likely it seems… but there’s no need to feel negatively about it. Even if nobody reads any of this, I’m saying it and writing it because I want to, and because I get enjoyment out of doing so. As for anybody else taking part? Well… we’ll see how that goes, won’t we?

So, I’m reopening this blog. All previous content has been, again, deleted. As part of an initiative I’m undertaking to further my writing and get more down on proverbial paper, I’m setting myself the task of trying to post something on this blog every day. More often than not, it’ll just be something about some kind of book, music, or video game that I’ve been exposed to at the time, but I do hope to get some of my writing related stuff up here… worldbuilding, plot brainstorming, character profiles and what have you.

Most importantly, I just need to write. Perhaps the act of writing a little bit here every day will push me to do a little more writing every day on my story projects, too. So that’s the aim of the game here.

If you’re actually reading this and not me, welcome to Blog With a K. I’m your host Kris, and I hope you find something in here that you find worth your time to read. Feel free to leave comments, and I’ll try to respond to them.