Twine, Stuff, Games, Stories, Nothing Much

I’ve successfully ported approximately a quarter of the StoryNexus version of Cryptic Stitching over to Twine. The occasional card gets pruned, the occasional card gets added (there will be words about all those hamsterhide towels!) but mostly it’s holding pretty similar. Achievements are now much fewer, since I don’t need those markers to keep track of variables. (God, hidden variables, best thing ever!)

Thank you, by the way, to everybody who’s said such nice things playing Cryptic Stitching! It’s so cool to have people like a game I’ve made–I mean, art, sure, writing, sure, but this is a whole new field for me and I went way overboard rather than starting small and establishing my skills and all the stuff you’re probably supposed to do. It means a lot to me that so many of you are enjoying it! (Also, in answer to an e-mail–yes, you can totally do fan-fic or fan art if you want, I’m not allowed to read the fic, but I’m delighted to see the art. Consider it a blanket permission, this is not at all a world I’m bothered by having people playing in!)

And I was thrilled to realize today that I do not actually have any art that I’m under deadline for! (There’s plenty of stuff I still need to DO, but at least I’m done with that book and can’t yet start the next one!) It was so liberating I sat down and finished a short story that’s been kicking around for a few weeks. This will undoubtedly end once I finish editing the Hamster Princess book (hopefully tomorrow) and send it in.

Finishing a short story–it’s going to get submitted somewhere, and then if they don’t bite, it’ll go into that anthology I keep threatening to do–I started trying to add up my various stories, just as my own particular metric…

12 short stories (Most which y’all have seen already, and not counting various little vignettes, like the one about Peter Pan and “Night is the longest running show in the universe” and so forth….)
3 adult novels (counting Black Dogs as two, and the one Beauty & the Beast thing out with my agent now)
2 novellas (Nine Goblins, and Boar & Apples, which is out for editing right now, and will form the backbone of said anthology.)
13 kid’s…ah…if I go by wordcount, they’d be considered “novelettes.” Actually, I kinda like that term. Lets them stand by themselves. A dozen novelettes sold, then, two forthcoming, one lurking and unsold. Give it time. (My agent swears we will someday be vindicated on the Battlesheep.)
2 kid’s novels (the witch book, which will be titled Castle Hangnail and the bread wizard one, which is currently in a weird limbo, but will hopefully come out of it in the next couple years.)
Digger, which I’m just leaving as its own thing, because hell. Digger.

That’s…not terrible, actually, in terms of completion. I’d like there to be more novels.

Then I go rummaging through my hard drive and there’s a bunch of things that have been lurking there for awhile, unfinished but which get pulled out and words piled on occasionally. Of those, there’s

1 short story
2 kid’s novelettes (the second Hamster Princess book, in progress, and the poor stalled sequel to Nurk)
6 adult novels
4 kid’s novels
5 novellas (including the next Goblin story)

not including:
2 novels which appeared permanently stalled out, although one never knows…
a couple of odds and ends that could turn into anything

Which seems like a lot of stuff unfinished, I realize–ten novels! Lord! That’s a huge number!–but I find it rather comforting, actually. If I get a mad urge to finish a book, I have stuff where I am finishing, not writing from scratch. And I can be pretty sure that most of those will get finished some day–I do finish things, fairly regularly, and that works primarily because I have nearly finished things lying around. (Next time I get an urge to work on the ninja accountant story, for example, it’ll probably be to finish it.)

So that’s nice.

I could totally be working on my big computer, but it is a cold gray day, so I am under the electric blanket with my laptop. It is lovely. I have tea. I believe will go port more Twine cards. And drink tea.

One thought on “Twine, Stuff, Games, Stories, Nothing Much

  1. C. S. P. Schofield says:

    Has anyone pointed you to the running-gag tea joke in Beyond The Fringe’s sketch about “The War”? It involves several segments of interview with a middle class British man who was always out in the garden (“putting in some deadly nightshade for the Boche” in one segment). Each segment but the last ends “Never you mind, I said to her; you put on the kettle. We’ll have a nice cup of tea.” The last one, which deals with rationing, ends “Never you mind, I said to her; you put on the kettle. We’ll have a nice cup of boiling hot water.”

    Speaking of tea….

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