Yesterday, at the very beginning of my day, I was surprised to find that I was not on the schedule at the restaurant. “I have to make use of this time!” I thought to myself, and promptly posted on the Adventures in Aryest Facebook page that I’d be spending the day publishing EVERYTHING I HAVE WRITTEN on the site. Characteristically, I didn’t stop to think about all the little steps required to make that happen. The first stumbling block came when I transferred Chapter One directly from my Master working document. I keep track changes activated (because I’m terrified of leaving anything behind), and the document is laden with comments, all of which get copy/pasted into WordPress’s text box.
“Fine,” I thought. “I want a master document with none of those things anyway, so let’s go via that.” Copy, paste as plain text, and wouldn’t you know it; there’s no formatting anymore. Now, I need to re-italicize all of the narrator’s interjections and asides, I need to make the chapter headings actual headings again, and I needed to fix the margin indents as well. But wait, if I do the margin correction before copy/pasting it into WordPress, I’ll have to correct each paragraph over there…
It goes on. I only got five chapters done yesterday, but there are changes that I’ve made to those chapters since they were originally posted, so some of my more powerful self-deprecation urges are stifled, if not completely quelled. The very good thing is that after doing five full chapters yesterday, I have the procedure down fairly solidly. My plan has become to do a chapter or two on days when I don’t have other blog things to do. In theory, one chapter should take me around ten minutes to do now that I have the procedure established, so y’all can expect those to be trickling in over the next couple weeks.
I suppose I should officially tell you that I’ve resolved to begin recording my audiobook by the end of September. Ideally, I’ll finish the chapter and a half (plus the interlude endcap) left before the end of Part One of To Save What‘s Lost first. That will pave the way for a full developmental edit, as there are specific changes I want to make to the beginning and then reinforce throughout. Once I’ve begun that edit, I’ll be able to start recording.
Briefly, streaming seems to be going well; my copy of Skyward Sword HD will arrive later today. I have a couple of sessions left in Metroid Prime 3 before I start that LP, and I’m very excited to see exactly what changes they’ve made and how they affect the game. Back in 2012 when I originally beat it, I found I’d really enjoyed the story and visual design of it all (and the controls neither wowed nor offended me), but the hand-holdy nature of many games from that period—in my opinion—is contrary to the point of video games in the first place. Briefly, challenge is important to a game’s appeal, and while there’s nothing wrong with low difficulty, many of Fi’s interjections undermined what little challenge the game brought to bear.
Regardless, I’m excited for the immediate future of my creative endeavors. Thank you so much for all the likes on the new(ish) posts over at the Aryest website yesterday; they really helped me overcome my negative thoughts about how little I was able to transpose. More are coming! I’ll be on stream on Sunday around 4PM EDT to continue my Hollow Knight randomizer, so come hang out!
Thank you for reading; I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, I humbly ask you to consider tipping me or checking out my social media. Thank you again, and I hope you enjoy the next one!
Umbrella Terms 