Hello everyone, and welcome to year two of Little Mouse Letters. Thanks for subscribing.
1. Retreat
Well, I said I was aiming for one big project, and you all delivered! The response to Koriko was incredible, humbling, and a little daunting. I'm looking at producing 7000+ books for backers next year—what a wild world!
So wild, in fact, that I had to have a little lie down. Turns out, running a big campaign for a month is exhausting. The volume of email and comments and messages is overwhelming, and while I did my best to mitigate the worst effects of crowdfunding (blocking everything on my phone, forcing me to only check in on the campaign in the morning on my laptop) I still felt utterly drained by the end of it all. Obviously this is a good problem to have! But a break was required. Sorry about the missing newsletter last month.
As I reengage my writing brain, I'm reflecting on my process. This time around, I'm really, really going to try not to write Koriko in InDesign. We all know, in principle, that writing directly into layout software is a Bad Idea. It can make your game brittle, resistant to change, as you finesse the position and spacing of your words before they've been tested and edited. It's easy for me, as I do both writing and layout, to burn time fiddling with borders and fonts as a form of procrastination. But there's something about seeing my words in the form of a game book that helps my brain conceptualise them—it lets me visualise how it fits together in a way that an endlessly-scrolling google doc does not.
So, this time I'm using Ulysses, a purpose-built writing app, to try and bridge that gap. It lets me write in little notes, splitting up chapters or sections into discrete documents, and then at any point I can hit a button and see it all formatted as a simple book. Once I'm done writing, I can then transfer it to InDesign to lay out. I might even take the plunge and try out the Affinity suite again.
I'll let you know how it goes.
2. Emerge
While games writing has taken a back seat this month, I've enjoyed being out in the world—getting soaked cycling our eldest to school, walking through the woods in cold sunlight, and even spending a child-free night in a spa beneath the stars.
3. Good stuff
I’ve not really been online much this month! One of the few downsides of being off social media is that you miss out on them hot links. It’s a small price to pay, but I might retire this section as I’m finding it harder to fill every month. I’m sure you’ll survive.
Thanks for sticking with me :)
J