Tag: video games

How Baldur’s Gate 3 Changed my Life

Laura Highcove

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an amazing game, I don’t think that’s really in debate within the gaming community. But I’ve played a lot of video games, and some of them were even very good. I mean I finished Tears of the Kingdom earlier this year and that was pretty wow. But for a video game, or any other source of media for that matter, to change my life is a high bar.

Talking just straight game-play, BG3 is a masterpiece that breaks new ground and then smashes it to bits with a hammer. The ability to play through the story basically any way you want to, to have your decisions have a lasting effect on events, people, and the world is just ‘mimics brain exploding complete with sound effects’.

None of which would matter if the story you were playing through wasn’t any good. I’m a writer. Story is important to me. I want my horizons stretched, I want surprising, yet inevitable, I want characters that I care about. That game gave me all of this. It also gave me something I didn’t know I wanted, which was to questions my choices, to agonize over decisions, to make mistakes. That is something that no other game has really ever let me experience, or at least not to nearly this extent.

The wildly divergent paths you can take also allows for another unique opportunity, besides just experiencing things differently, it also allows you to see, for the first time what a person’s response would be to different inputs in the exact same situation, allowing you to experience more story/reactions/emotion than would otherwise be possible.

It’s likely no surprise that I identify female and am head over heels for Astarion. But before my mind had really grocked the insane branching paths that were possible through different dialogue choices, I had gone through a good portion of my first play-through, choosing options and getting responses. On a second play through, I knew to dig deeper into the different options, and some of the responses gave such nuance to some of the things Astarion actually said.

As a writer it is impossible (and really, not advisable) to have a character to say everything they’re feeling. If they are even aware of all their feelings in the first place, it’s still just not efficient. But the ability to see deeper into dialogue and motivation by being able to look through the branching dialogue paths was just amazing. I’ve romanced Astarion in two different play-throughs, and both of them felt completely unique.

The branching story lines also allow each character to be that much more developed as a person, and not just a character in a particular story. Shadowheart can kill or spare the Nightsong. Astarion can complete the ritual or not. Lae’zel can remain brain-washed by her cult leader. Wyll can break from his patron. Gale can blow up the world. Karlach, well she’s a sweet cinnamon roll and would never do anything to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.

Normally we don’t get the chance to see characters go down these different paths, and it made the characters that much more real (as well as increasing the game’s re-playability) because there isn’t just one ‘right’ path. (Except making sure Karlach’s engine is fixed so she can touch people again.)
All this to say that my expectation of games is forever changed. There will always be something in the back of my head resenting the ‘movie’ style video game story. Whether or not anyone will ever hit anything close to it again, who knows? But now the meta has been changed.

In addition, because of this variability of people’s motivations and actions and such, I have a new appreciation for heroes who are not 100% good. I mean you get anti-heros in stories, but there’s still only that one path. I have been so inspired by the story and the characters in this game that I have written over 90k words of fan fiction, and by allowing myself to write around and be influenced by story and dialogue I did not write, I have felt myself stretching, growing, and changing as a writer.

And I will forever be a fan of this game and the people who put it together with such dedication and love.

My BG3 Characters

Laura Highcove

This is a quick introduction to my current Tavs and how their games went/are going. I have gotten credits, so there will be spoilers.

Avi

I started off my first play through with Avi. He comes from a different story, but I made him a warlock based on story-Avi ’s abilities. I also designed the Dream Visitor off his story-otp. Avi is a tiefling, fae-pact warlock with the criminal background. Since he was my first play through, I had no idea of the storyline, and role-played him as close to himself as I could get while still exploring the game.

Saved Arabella and the grove, killed all the goblins. Basically he did good, but was sarcastic and rude about it, and always asked for compensation. His party consisted of Astarion, Shadowheart, and Karlach.

I used tadpoles on him and Astarion, who he was romancing. Avi trusted the Dream Visitor and passed some hidden checks (with no clue what that even was) to be affectionate with the Dream Visitor.
When the Emperor revealed himself, Avi trusted him and took on becoming half-illithid, but when Astarion had such a visceral reaction against it, he didn’t have any of his companions take it on. Also romanced the Emperor. (eyebrow waggle)

I screwed up the Astarion romance at a critical time (again, didn’t know what I was looking for on a first play through), though still role-played a romantic relationship.

This is the only game I’ve gotten credits on, and I chose to save everyone from the Absolute. I ended up skipping a lot of content for various reasons, one was because I just wanted to get credits, but I still spent an amazing amount of hours on this game.

Annalisa

I started Annalisa, drow paladin oath of the ancients before I was done with Avi’s game.

She purposely does good and is kind to everyone, but on seeing the goblins, I role-played her once being a worshiper of Lolth and she told Minthara where the Grove was with the intention to save it all at once. This broke her oath but then I role played that killing the Hag and saving Mayrina allowed her to get her oath back.

Romanced Gale, who is just a super great guy, even if the romance is a little slow cause he has the whole orb thing going on.

Works with the dream visitor because he is a good ally, but refuses to eat any tadpoles or give any to her team of Gale, Karlach (ranger), and Wyll (bard).

Currently in Act 3 finding all kinds of things I never did with Avi. Plan is to still work with the Emperor, but perhaps trying to free Orpheus will ruin that. Might actually take the deal with Raphael, though that will ruin her oath, but if Raphael gets the crown Gale can’t be tempted, which she’s worried about.

Gabriel

My third game is the Dark Urge, which has its own little story-line baked in where you want to kill everything and take joy in it and you can either go with that or resist. I was gonna play it straight bad but realized that wasn’t fun for me, to I restarted with Gabriel, a Dragonborn storm sorcerer who is disgusted by his Urge.

He kills Gale on accident, but saves Arabella as kids and animals are a nono for violence. Then he starts to fear his violence more after killing Alfira without realizing.

He ends up being friends with Astarion through their similar undesirable urges, which turns into a romance. Gabriel is not against the evil option against those that deserve it, but is working really hard to not hurt any innocents.

He is all about the tadpoles and has convinced his companions to use them too. He was super against the Dream a visitor , but is coming around to trusting him.

Now in act 2 he’s learned more about himself, with scant memories about the ’before’ and his allies, Astarion, Lae’zel, and Shadowheart who all trust his judgement. The plan is to actually steal the hammer from Raphael. Though that might change when I see how the Emperor responds to freeing Orpheus in my paladin game. I, myself, love the Emperor and how he will stay loyal to you as long as you stay loyal to him, so I don’t want to piss him off.

And Beyond

I have a lot I still want to explore with this game, but now that we’re two months out from release and I’ve wracked up over 300 hours of play time and 81k words of fan fiction, my obsession has slowed down a bit. I still want to do an evil Durge play-through, another run of Avi where I actually know what I’m doing, a tactician run, and playing as Astarion. I’ll get to them eventually. I also want to get some pictures done of my three Tavs, and I’ve already started designing minis that I might get printed. This game has changed my life in so many ways that I feel like I need another post just to cover it all.

But here’s the briefest of overviews. I hope you enjoyed.

Pushing Through

Laura Highcove

After the last post, I feel like I should update you on the two big upheavals in my reality.
1) Supernatural’s final episode was complete and utter trash.
2) Trump is refusing to concede to Biden and he’s encouraging his ‘followers’ in the belief that he was cheated out of the election.

Neither of these come as a surprise, but I’m still very upset about both.

That being said, I had a great vacation in Williamsburg. Went to see family briefly, went to a number of nurseries, hung out and had great food with my husband, and got a new video game that I haven’t had time to play since I got back.

Writing has been rough. I kept up with my word count in Williamsburg, but I’m at the point where I have to wrap up everything beautifully. I have to tie up all the loose ends and make it satisfying and once again I’m stuck in the my dead zone, (from the halfway point of the book until the 3/4 mark). I suppose the only thing I can do now is just go write the ending in more detail and hope that at some point I’ll figure out how to get there. It’s already 6pm today and I only have half my words. I wanna put it off for tomorrow but I know it’ll just be worse. Sigh. Just have to keep pushing.

Finally Back to Productive

Laura Highcove


Got back from my vacation in Williamsburg and had a ton of fun. This was Argon’s first time going to the condo, but as expected he spent maybe an hour slinking around before he was perfectly fine. I played a lot of Hyrule Warriors, went to Busch Gardens, bought clothes, ate food, and ended up writing a decent amount while I was at it.

I also used the vacation as a reset point for my writing. I didn’t record how much writing I did while on vacation. I just ended up with 8k words written on my phone by the end of the week. But when I got home, I just accepted that I was back on schedule, and I split my time between two stories: Blessings of the Neriel, which I realized I needed to keep restarting from the beginning because my characters weren’t solid enough, and a new story I started during vacation that I ended up tossing aside because the idea isn’t developed enough yet. (Oddly enough, the characters are there, the story just isn’t.) And I ended up working more on a story I had started a while ago, with the working title: Kirin.

As such I’ve been getting work done while I’m waiting for my alpha readers on the Huntsman. I keep having an urge to work on it, but I’d like to 1) wait until the alpha feedback is back and 2) read the short stories my husband wrote in the Storyteller world for Nanowrimo, but we’re having some trouble getting that formatted right so I can read it. I might lose patience before July and start working on it anyway, but for now I’m just happy to be writing again.

Week 1 of March

Laura Highcove

I swear, I have the hardest time with titles for these posts…

Had a pretty great weekend and was rather productive. This past week’s goal was smoothing the Wizard. I realized I had gotten a little caught up in trying to get to a revision stage instead of straight up smoothing, so I pushed myself over the weekend to work just on smoothing and it went a bit better. I also played some Hyrule Warriors because I love that game.

According to the plan I made for myself, I was supposed to finish a rough draft of the Huntsman, smooth the beginning of the Wizard. I was unable to get done with the Huntsman. There was simply more to do than I originally thought. Rose is still giving me trouble as well. This led to some motivation problems and low level anxiety. As such, I shifted to the next thing on my goal list, which was smoothing the Wizard.

The next two weeks are now going to be writing 1.6k words a day on the Wizard. And I seem to be perfectly ready for that. I’ve already done a lot of rewriting while smoothing, which has been enjoyable. I’m also hoping that exploring Rose in the Wizard will help me with the problems he’s giving me in the Huntsman.

So the current goal is: Two weeks of 1.6k words a day, with smoothing as necessary. AND I’m going through the Huntsman again to figure out what is actually there, and aim toward an alpha read. Last time I had an alpha read of the Huntsman, just the feedback and straight up talking about it helped me move forward, so I’m hoping another push will get me to the finished draft I’m aiming for.

Review: Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

Laura Highcove

My Review of Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom

My summary: An RPG/Squad/Kingdom Builder/Idle Game blend about a young prince whose father is murdered, and is then saved by the President of the United States (not even kidding), and gathers a group of friends to create a new kingdom and unite the world in peace.

Why I picked up this game: Someone told me about the kingdom building aspect of it, and I was interested in that, plus I needed some sort of reward for finishing Camp Nanowrimo.

What I knew going in: Kingdom builder/RPG with Ghibli designs.

My response:

Positives:

This game is actually like three games in one.

There’s the RPG game, with free-moving combat a-la FFXV, only fighting felt easy and much more natural than FFXV. You level up, get new weapons and armor, and unlock and level up spells. There were also higglties. I didn’t use them the way they expected you to, but meh. My gear was so overpowered by late game that I didn’t need them.

There was also a …squad combat game, that you used to fight battles they they wanted to feel better than a party of three versus some monsters. You had four squads of people that would then fight other squads of people as you took territory and built structures. It was a ton of fun, but I don’t think I made it sound all that great.

And lastly, my main reason for purchasing the game, a kingdom-building idle game that I focused most of my attention on. The resource you needed in order to build up the kingdom was timing based. So even when I wasn’t playing the game proper, I would leave the game running and check back every half-hour or so to use the recources or finish research. You also recruit people from other kingdoms to yours in order to put them to work. I found out later that there were checkpoints in the main story where you were required to have your kingdom to have a certain amount of “reputation”. I wasn’t even aware of this because I was basically building up my kingdom as much as I could whenever I could. This is also why my gear was so boss by the end of the game.

An interesting feature was that every quest basically told you exactly where to go and who to talk to. There were even markers on your map telling you who had a quest for you. And when you were tracking a quest 90% of the quests showed you exactly where to go on the map. Part of me was annoyed that the game held your hand so tightly in this regard, but the other part of me was happy to not have to do much wandering around without purpose, or talking to everyone each time a major plot point resolved in order to find new quests. So in the end, I enjoyed it, but I could see some people being annoyed by the simplicity of it.

Overall, loved the game-play itself.

Negatives:

Not impressed with the dungeons or the so called “mazes”. Dungeons were stupidly linear (and bland looking), with no more than two paths at a time, one of which would either loop back in or end in short order. And then there were the Dimensional Mazes. I was terrified to go in the first time because they talked about how you couldn’t save, and there was no map, and over time the enemies would get stronger. They were stupid and not at all difficult, and the ones I found during the course of normal game-play didn’t even have good items in them.

Music: I started playing without sound on at all because the music in almost every place besides Evermore had this …urgency to it that made me tense. Like the kind of music that plays when you need to hurry up, only it was like that all the time. English voices weren’t bad.

The Story. Okay yes, there are spoilers from here on. You’ve been warned, but the story is so bad and literally nonsensical in places that I really have to make fun of it. Tuck yourself in, this is going to be a long one.

So the game starts in a motorcade in what appears to be the ‘real’ world. We zoom in on an older fellow in front of what is very obviously supposed to be the seal of the United States President. He is driving into “New York City” and a nuke goes off. Stay with me. The Potus, having survived, begins to glow.

Cut to Evan, the prince who’s father has just been killed because of course he has, with the bad guards are closing in and suddenly light! Out of nowhere, the Potus, Roland, who is now like 30 years younger (and hott for Ghibli), shows up, takes in the situation, and shoots the guards.

Eventually Roland gets decked out with swords and a weapon-holding magic armband that refills his gun with bullets … They escape, leaving Evan’s bad-ass nursemaid behind to fight a mouse centaur who looks awesome but who never shows up again!

We (the party) meet up with some air pirates, and then go find some unsettled land, fight off a few bandits, get their own Kingmaker (a magical animal you need in order to prove you’re a king) and establish Evanland. Okay, so now the Kingdom Building aspect finally starts.

Everyone goes to Dogland in order to have the leader sign our peace treaty to unite the world. (Evan is a cat from Cat/Mouseland) We discover a sinister snake-wearing man is controlling the Dogleader and using the country’s love of gambling to make things very uncomfortable (financially) for people. Snakeman steals the Dogland Kingmaker, but everything’s okay otherwise and we get the treaty signed. No problem with this story yet.

Then onto the water kingdom. We get there and there are all kinds of weird rules in place (like it’s illegal to fall in love and outsiders are shunned) and there is this creepy eye watching everything. We get the Waterqueen’s right hand man in our party, who swears the queen is good even though all evidence points to her being all sorts of insane.

After we finish this area’s dungeon, (and lose the Waterland Kingmaker to Snakeman) we learn that the Waterqueen’s rules are not insane. In fact this kingdom was blown up by a volcano some time ago, and she has been continually turning back time so the kingdom still exists, but for the spell to work the number of people on the island has to stay the same. So no one can move off or onto the island, nor can any new people be born. But it’s okay (and totally not insane) because she’s going to let the spell lapse since they’ve had enough time, but before that she wants to marry her right-hand man, but weddings take a while to plan so she tells him to stay in our party until the wedding is ready to take place, and of course she’ll sign our peace treaty. I’m not even making this up. This was literally the ending cut scene for this area. Not to mention immediately after this I started recruiting people from her kingdom to my own. The kingdom never blew up and the Waterqueen and her subjects helped in the final battle …

Next we headed to Techland, a kingdom where technology (and guns) exist. (So at least I have some sort of explanation for why the armband was able to create bullets.) Here, Techleader is working his workers literally to death, but turns out he’s also controlled by Snakeman who steals Blastoise, I mean the Techland Kingmaker. Once Techleader is no longer under Snakeman’s influence, he’s cool again. No matter those people who died. We’re all friends forever.

Brief interlude where Roland convinces Evan (and the rest of the party) that he’s betraying him so he can sneak into Mouseland and get an important artifact by buddying up to Mouseking. Only Mouseking was never fooled, Roland manages to get the artifact, and explains the convoluted plan to Evan after the fact …

Then we all go back to Mouseland, where the cats now live in the slums because they treated the mice horribly before. Was Evan’s father a bad guy? Turns out no, because we find his journal, which is holding his soul (or part of it?) and he was trying to fix the hatred between the cats and mice, but Snakeman messed things up. Oh, and Snakeman shows up and takes the Mouseland Kingmaker. But Mouseleader signs our treaty. Yay!

Now Snakeman has all four Kingmakers and brings back his lost kingdom, along with a huge Kingmaker, the Horned One, that starts sucking the souls out of everyone in the world (except Evanland, because we still have our Kingmaker)

All the kingdoms have united and go to fight this new threat. (All while Roland starts having dark energy fits.) We get to Snakeman who reveals his plan to us along with the fact that he is Roland’s soulmate! (!?? Literally the day before I got to this cut scene I was watching a speed run of Ni No Kuni the first, and found out a big part of that game is that there are two worlds and each person in one world has a soulmate (in that they share a soul, not they’re lovers) with someone from the other world. There was no mention or allusion to this in Ni No Kuni II until this reveal.)

Anyway, turns out this is why Roland was pulled to this world, and we can’t fight Snakeman because it will hurt Roland. We fight him anyway. Then we find out Snakeman is doing this because he fell in love with the Kingmaker of his own kingdom and the gods punished him by wiping out his kingdom, and turning the Kingmaker into the Horned One.

We eventually triumph only to find out Snakeman (and kingdom) was not cursed by the gods, but the Kingmaker chose to become human to love Snakeman. In doing so she released the energy that made her a Kingmaker, which then destroyed the kingdom, and (I think) in trying to stop the backlash of energy she released, got caught in it and turned into the Horned One? I kind of gave up on the story by this point. Either way, they can’t be together. But Snakeman is going to start over and build a new kingdom from scratch because Evan inspired him with 12-year-old wisdom.

Now at the end of each chapter, Evan has been meeting a “curious boy” in his dreams who often says something wise and/or hints at something that happens in the next chapter, leaving the player to wonder who he could possibly be! (Mostly I forgot about him until each chapter ended.) Well, turns out he is King Ferdinand, the king who, in the past, united the whole world. Only King Ferdinand is actually Evan’s son, from the future, but he has the ability to send his mind through time, and of course he wanted to go back and see his father as a child, because who wouldn’t? Oh, and why was Evan told King Ferdinand lived in the past? Obviously because the person who told us was a seer, but didn’t know she was a seer, so she thought King Ferdinand was from the past. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

/sigh

And then, of course, Roland gets pulled back home, ends up in his motorcade again, heading into “New York City” when fireworks go off instead of a nuke.

Thanks for playing!

Do I recommend this game?: I highly enjoyed the game and feel I got more than my money’s worth of enjoyment, I just had to ignore the story to do so.

Gryffins: In Solid Form

Laura Highcove

This is the third of a trio of posts showing off my gryffin collection.

Gryffins as Figures

A whole bunch of gryffin figures I have found in various places.

A rather typical looking gryffin (front left), a humanoid gryffin with a hammer (front right), and why yes, that is a humanoid gryffin riding a gryffin (back), thank you for asking.

Ignoring the little gold guy in front who should’ve been in the other picture, these are all pre-painted miniatures from Dungeons and Dragons. Flying gryffin (front left), stalking gryffin (front right), and lady riding sideways flying gryffin (back).



This guy is from Warhammer. Before and after pictures. I did all the modding to make it as High Elf as possible myself.

And this is Klesk, the mini for a D&D character from a 4th ED One Piece Campaign. This mini was modded pretty hard by a friend and painted by me.

I also got Sonic Boom from Skylanders. And Gilda, who was a character in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series.

I spotted these guys …I forget where, and while they remind me a bit more of a shisa with wings, I decided they were close enough to go in my gryffin collection.

This guy I bought a million years ago in 2003. He was meant to sit on top of your monitor. Yeah, remember when monitors wern’t flat? I do.

Gryffins in Stone

One Otakon there was a booth in the dealer’s room that sold jewelry, along with animals carved out of gemstones. I only picked up one at the time and later regretted it since the store wasn’t online anywhere for me to pick up more. It wasn’t until years later that I found them sold on ebay, so over time I collected a number of them.

I am very particular about the shape of the head. Sometimes there are ones for sale with huge bulbous heads, and I leave those ones alone. And the strawberry quartz one just ended up being bigger than the others. I didn’t realize it until it came in the mail.

And yes, that is just one more chunk of my collection. (You’re starting to think I’m crazy aren’t you? /cackles) Next post will show the rest of them.

Better Late than Never

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

So I had to work this weekend and I rewarded myself by playing some Terraria. As such I forgot to write my journal post for this week. On Monday I got hit by some depression and everything I tried to write came out sounding like I was a complete and utter failure, even though that certainly wasn’t true.

I made good progress these past two weeks, though it wasn’t all easy and smooth, and there’s nothing big in particular that I can point to and say ‘I accomplished that!’, so it’s hard to write a post about what I did accomplish.

Sometimes this is writing. It has nothing to do with how skilled you are as a writer and everything to do with whether or not you can keep going back to the page day after day. I know some people who, I believe, are far better storytellers than I am, but I’m the one putting in the work. And so there’s nothing exciting to tell you about except that I’m still going.

Though my husband did make this:

Review: Final Fantasy XV

Laura Highcove

Or as I liked to call it: Bromance: the Road Trip

Story:

The Crowned Prince Noctis heads out on a road-trip with his personal guard/best friends to meet his fiance in order to get married. His car breaks down on the way and while it’s getting fixed they find out that his father has been murdered, his city occupied/destroyed and his fiance has gone into hiding. Noctis then goes on a cross countries road trip to get all of the artifact weapons, get the blessings of the world’s gods, and find the ring that will allow him to use a magic crystal to save the world from encroaching darkness and demons.

The story was interesting but not mind-blowing. At least it was better than the storyline in FFXII, which I basically don’t remember. However, I was sufficiently invested in the characters throughout the story. I even felt regret whenever I would go back to ‘present’ time to advance the storyline, so now that I’ve beaten the game I can just hang out in the past forever.


Who needs responsibility when you’re beautiful and sleeping on a chocobo?

Characters:

I liked all of the characters. I am a sucker for bromance, so I loved the main four, and there was a colorful cast of side characters throughout the story.

Clothing put me in a weird mood. Remembering back to X-II (That’s ten-2, not 12) I feel like whenever there are outfits and girls, the variations are sexy, plentiful, and etc. When I found out there were outfits in this game I thought there would be a little more than: you start with two outfits with two variations each and the only other one you get is storyline based. Sure, I loved ‘dressing up’ the car as well, but not quite the same thing. I would’ve liked a little less cleavage on Cindy and the Dragoon or a little more shirtless action for the boys. Equal opportunity nudity please.

Gamyplay:

The combat was a little too spectacle fighter, and not enough rpg for my immediate liking. I got the hang of it over time, but I never actually liked it. I also found the ascension grid …well not exactly complicated, but annoying? I had to play for quite a while before I figured out which spheres were beneficial to my play style.

I was also pretty astonished by the number of items I needed to get through fights. I think Ignis kinda sorta turned into a healer at some point, but not really? I kept waiting to get some sort of healing spell for myself, but no, I ended up chugging potions and elixirs at an alarming pace. Now I doubt I was playing the game as intended because there was some kind of “crouch” mechanic, but most of the time when I tried to crouch during a battle I would either jump forward instead of crouching, or the monster would come over and eat my face, so I gave up on it pretty quick. I probably also should’ve used the point warping more, but it’s hard to find a point warp while avoiding the baddies and you can’t move the camera in wait mode.

But the one thing that I think caused me more annoyance than anything else were simply the load times. I mean I’m not entirely surprised because of the complexity of the world, but when driving around doing different quests, the downtime really added up.


I would go take bathroom breaks and come back and still have to wait.

Graphics:

This game is gorgeous to look at. Not just the characters and mob models, but the world itself is so seamlessly put together and…well just real-looking. I found myself in awe over and over again. Once I finally learned to put up with the camera being annoying to control (and way too close) and my disappointment over having to wait for Prompto to take pictures instead of being able to take them myself, I settled well into this world.

Overall, I enjoyed this game the most out of the Final Fantasies I’ve played, though I am really into the whole bromance thing and pretty graphics. I could take or leave the fighting system (though when I managed to get a link strike, that was rather cool) and the Ascension grid. The world was just so huge and interactive. It might even be that it feeling like it was just a step outside the real world really did a lot for it. We’ll just have to see if this is an upward tick in the Final Fantasy genre, or a dying gasp.


The graceful Prince Noctis

My Holiday Break

Laura Highcove

I travel for holidays. I got all my files in dropbox, added tons of chargers, my DS packed some reading books, and, of course, clothing. Everything I wanted or needed. Got to my mother’s and realized I had left my netbook on my desk while it was syncing with Dropbox as I finished packing.

I was three hours from home with NO LAPTOP. Yeah, it’s probably a first for me.
I don’t really care about being unplugged from social media. No, my real concern was that I had planned to write the rough draft of my newsletter, this journal post, and get some revision done. Instead I had only the scrivener app on my phone (which is great, but I use it more for notes or quick things than sitting down and writing, and it’s not connecting to my regular dropbox anyway for reasons.)

Then my husband reminded me that I’m on vacation. That writing those things was akin to him checking his work email (which I give him hassle for). While the writing itself is not really work for me, writing blog posts and such is. So I decided to listen to his advice and actually take a vacation. As such there was no post last Monday.

In the future, I would like to get far better about being prepared for blog posts and the like ahead of time. (I could’ve done a cute little Merry Christmas post). I just find myself in the same rut of “Oh, I’ll write up the blog post and post it while I’m traveling.” And yeah, that doesn’t really work for me. I need to stop telling myself I will do it when I very obviously will not.

I did plenty of writing in the week before taking my holiday break. I’m still moving forward on Law of the Prince Charming revision (almost done now!) and re-writing the beginning of the Huntsman. Once I’m done with LotPC, I’ll be hammering a bit harder on the Huntsman. According to my own planning, I am waiting to see where I am with that story by the end of January. If I am *still* having trouble it might be time to consider some different options. After reviewing this last year I realized I’ve been struggling with the Huntsman for almost the whole year, and that just doesn’t work. One possibility is throwing it at people who have read the LofPC and getting suggestions/feedback on the rough draft that I do have. I dunno, I’ll see at the end of the month.

My holiday was tons of fun. Got to see my siblings, their significant others, and offspring as well as my parents. Since I don’t live nearby I generally only see them for these holidays though we keep in touch some through the wonder of the Internet. I got some good presents, I got to talk about my writing with a few different people. (That’s always nerve-wracking. :p) I also played a lot of Story of Seasons. And now we’re back to the grind, which really isn’t that bad. I missed writing.