First Steps

I’ve been grappling with a fear this year, a fear that earlier years didn’t have to contend with. Core to my creative endeavours has been the notion that when I make a thing, there will be someone out there who looks at it and reacts to it in a way that’s a net positive. When I first wanted to become a writer for Starcity Games, I simply committed to write for them, wrote for them regularly, and to not stop applying until I had some change in my circumstances. I expected that resolution to take me the better part of a year; I didn’t expect my first article submissions to be accepted, and I really didn’t expect to attain Featured status in the first few months. That I did so quickly was, to say the least, disquieting.

This year, the work has been more… uncertain. I can say with some joy that my review of Hate Plus was, to say the least, appreciated by the author of the game, and maybe was useful to strangers. I flew by the seat of my pants this year, quite a lot, in fact – neither The Sixth Age of Sand nor my Nanowrimo were planned out ahead of time, I wasn’t planning on doing a particular number of Game Piles, and some ideas fell away to be forgotten (Remember when I was trying to do a piece on the currency of Australia?) while others became less relevant, in light of changes in my life.

For example, the If I Were Peter Molyneux series hit a very eerie wall when Fox told me to write the script for one of those games, because she wanted to make it. The purpose behind them was ridiculous game concepts that were meant to explore some idea I found interesting, like setting up a silly pun and seeing if an interesting idea could be built around it.

What then of the First Steps?

This year, I have written a single long, coherent story over the course of the year, missing no issues. I have written a novel in a week. As of yesterday, I wrote a videogame. A twine game, yes, but it was a game.

These are little steps. But this is the aim, these days, to always be creating.