Pages

Sunday, November 28, 2010

What's your writing goal?

I'm not talking about word count per day of letters here.  I want to know what your ultimate fantasy goal is with your writing career.

We spend so much time fretting about sentence structure and daily word count (or at least I do) that sometimes the 'big picture' gets lost under all those details. Lose track of it completely, and you risk losing some of the motivation that got you started in the first place!

For me, I want to make a living doing what I love.  Yeah, that's a little vague.  Ok, I want to write fun, engaging horror and fantasy stories that take people on a little ride away from their daily lives for a while.  I want to create worlds for people to get lost in.  I want to write so well that some person I've never met forgets their problems for a little while.

And I want to write scenes and dialogue for video games.  I'll be dating myself a little bit here - I remember when Nintendo came out.  It was cool for a while, then I could take it or leave it.  Sorry Mario.

One day, I bought this game called Myst.  I'm pretty sure that I lost at least a week of my life to that game.  The world was immersive.  It was the first 'sand box' style game I'd ever seen, where you could go where you wanted, and do what you wanted, in pretty much any order.  And the puzzles!  Oh, the puzzles.

There weren't all that many characters to talk to at the time, but technology has evolved since then.  There are more open style games with engaging characters, layers of mystery.  And I love the way the storytelling became built up, through unreliable characters, books, tapes, or diaries left on computers.  The player is left to build the story of what happened based upon the information received from various sources and the objects in front of them.

To me, that's the perfect form of gaming - and I want so badly to contribute to it, to help create these incredible alternate worlds populated with realistic people, and littered with their own complete and distinct histories.

So I guess, that what I really want to do is to be able to play pretend with the whole world.


What is it that you want to do with your art?

Saturday, November 20, 2010

dan


dan
Originally uploaded by digitalis_vitae
Hey guys! It's been a kind of crazy season, which means not a lot of time for meaningful blogging.

What it does mean though, is new toys!! Such as the 50mm prime lens that came in the mail this week.

I hadn't had a chance to bust it out until this afternoon, and my darling SO was playing with some prop flavored items that we have kicking around the place. As a bonus, he happened to be in front of my new black backdrop!

The lighting is overhead bounce from our ceiling light, and the glow of the computer monitor he's sitting in front of :).

For some reason, all of my photos of humans tend to look much more posed than they really are - he didn't even know I had the camera out until I said 'HEY!'

I'm not sure why, as most (like this one) are completely unplanned.