Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Lost in the Shadows of Time


When I stop and think about it, I’ve loved reading ever since the first Harry Potter book came out.  It took a couple of years, but I finally picked it up.  A hundred pages later, I was hooked.  I discovered that reading can be…well, fun!  And I’ve loved writing since I was thirteen, when I discovered Brian Jacques’ masterful series, Redwall.  Granted, I had some elaborate, premature plans of sending Mr. Jacques the script for a new character and that he’d be so blown away by the masterful writing that he would immediately have me co-author the next book in the series…so I was thirteen.  Didn’t you ever want to be an astronaut?  Actually…that was plan B for the writing thing.  Anyway, such are childhood dreams.

          While I never got to write with Brian Jacques and I probably never will get my Hogwarts letter in the fireplace, I did discover a myriad of worlds bouncing around in my overactive imagination.  Long books, short books, plays, songs, poems, stories, characters and scripts—I lost myself in writing.  Now that I’m twenty-one and over halfway to my Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, I find that I have about fifteen beginnings toward novels lurking in the darker recesses of Word and three completed books that stare glumly at me every time I think about editing.  With this many ideas bobbing around in my brain, I am never sure which one to work on or read or re-write.  It’s maddening.  Bad idea to start more than one book at a time…bad, bad Kristen.

          So when I discovered ‘text-based adventure games’ online, it was like a light bulb went on.  They are a way to explore my ideas in a quicker, more interactive fashion that does not actually require a literary agent, an editor, a publisher and one very flustered, slightly overzealous writer with a hectic imagination.  After downloading the software behind this system, I also discovered that computers are much more complicated than I originally gave them credit for and that I know painfully little about the language (a.k.a. coding) they use.  It caused more than a few headaches, but I have finally created my first text adventure game through Quest.  If you are interested it out, you can play it for free at http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/hgr8xdshe0_crqkkfbiwbw/lost-in-the-shadows-of-time.

          Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, it’s back to Ely so that I can help move hay and donate blood to the mosquitoes.  I’m hoping that the water will be warm enough for snorkeling soon.  If not, the blueberries are coming in full swing and Ely’s famous Blueberry Arts Festival is starting up this Friday…so stay tuned!  Minnesota is just getting warmed up!  (Literally…I just got the tank tops back out from our Colorado trip.)

          Peace!

          ~K

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