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Many things to do...

5 years ago1,339 words

I need to work on Sindrel Song, I need to upload my old games to my websites again, and I have plans for something MARDEK-related as well that I need to find the time to properly focus on. And I'm tired, still. Here's a vague plan for where I'm going from here.

I'm still staying alone in a holiday cottage, which I mentioned in a recent post. I was supposed to be moving out on Friday, tomorrow, which is annoying because I've spent my whole time here trying to fix website stuff, and I haven't been able to do any of what I actually came here to do.

Thankfully, this place hadn't been booked for next week, so I've booked it myself. It's not cheap, but I think it'll be worth it; there are definitely benefits to my mental health from being here. Plus my mum knows the owner through work, so I'm getting at least a bit of a discount. Hopefully I'll be able to use this additional week to get back on track after this stressful diversion.

It feels like I've been dealing with the website issue for at least a week, but the dates on my posts suggest it hasn't been that long; interesting. It's been so exhausting, though... I pretty much just collapsed with fatigue yesterday and spent the whole evening barely functioning. So that's great.

I've done some work on Sindrel Song this morning just because it seemed a relatively easy way to get back into the swing of things, but there are a few other things I want to achieve in the near future, so I thought it might help to write about them.

Sindrel Song is nearing completion, though there's a lot to add and to fix. I'd like to start testing soon, but first I need to write all the dialogue and fix some issues that'll just cause frustration if they're present during people's first impressions. I've added a few things since I last posted properly about it, so I want to write a post about that, maybe comparing what it's become to my earliest ideas for it, since I always find that kind of visual progress quite interesting. I'll probably do that fairly soon.

There was another recent post that sparked a bit of interesting discussion about things like consciousness and the malleability of mental barriers, and I'd been writing a post to address some of the things that I and others said... I would have posted it already if not for this stupid website thing randomly coming up. So that's something I'd also like to post about soon. I'm never sure how many posts would be too many, too often; would it be a good or a bad thing to have multiple posts a day? Would any except the latest even be seen? I wonder. (Also, using the word 'post' that many times makes it feel weird. Post. Post the post in the post box on that post over there, post-haste.)

There's also something that's come up relating to MARDEK, and its future, which I'd really like to find the time and mental energy to properly focus on. Again, I would have written about that already if not for the website thing. Hopefully I will soon; I've been thinking about it a lot, and it might be the direction I head in after Sindrel Song. I need to finish that first though just so then I can know that I'm capable of finishing things. And because I've put too much time and effort into it to waste.

I haven't actually finished with website stuff, so I'd like to get around to that as well. I want to upload all my old games - even the ones I never properly released before - to either the fighunter.com or alorafane.com domains; the former for all my old stuff (output from the 'Pseudolonewolf era', you could say), and I'll reserve the latter for things specifically set in that world. I'm not sure if I'll include things like Alora Fane: Creation on the alorafane.com domain, or whether I'll put it on fighunter.com because it's old. Maybe alorafane.com will just be for new stuff, for this new era, starting with Sindrel Song. Not Flash games. I'm not sure yet.

So yes, it feels like I've got loads of stuff to do, and so little energy. I'm trying do what I can, but I'm still recovering from brain cancer. The neurosurgeon said it'd take me about 12 months to 'mostly' recover from the surgery I had in October (I just checked, and that's four months and 12 days ago... seems like more time, seems like less; everything's been surreal and fuzzy for a while, really), and the cancer doctor told me most people are bed-bound and absent from work for three months following radiotherapy, which I had in January. So that definitely slows me down more than I'd like.

I often wish I'd decided to just focus myself on one single thing... Art, music, web design, programming, writing, whatever. Then I'd devote most of myself to keeping up with the latest developments, honing my skills. As it is, I jump between skills so often that I never really master any of them, and things come up like this recent website palaver, where I realised that my coding knowledge was old-fashioned and in need of updating, and I really wanted to devote some proper time and focus to that, but couldn't, because I have so much else to do. But oh well. I suppose switching around keeps things fresh at least, and it means that when I get one skill's equivalent of writer's block, I can redirect my attention to another productive thing instead.


But yes, I wrote this mostly so then I could have a clearer plan of where to go from here. My priorities look something like this at the moment:

* I should get Sindrel Song to a point where it's suitable for testing. I need to make some additions and fixes before I get to that point. Writing all the dialogue is the main thing, which requires a relative absence of mental fog and clutter.

* Once people are testing it, I might have some down-time, which I can devote to uploading my old games.

* I'll also focus properly here on the MARDEK thing I hinted at, once I've got the games uploading out of the way.

* I need to sort out some other things like whether to add proper community features to my sites, and I need to fix up my Patreon account, which I've neglected for too long.

* Then, once everything's ready, I'll release Sindrel Song... which will be played like 200 people or something who won't even like it and I'll have a crisis and won't know what to do next.

* Then I'll totally make MARDEK 4 and a remake of Deliverance and I'll become a millionaire, definitely.


So yes. It'd make sense to post about Sindrel Song soon, then!!



Oh, and I mentioned in a previous post that my friend from university probably wouldn't be visiting me while I'm in this holiday place, but now that I'm staying another week, she probably will have the chance to. I can't say I'm excited about the thought of human company as such, just because I still feel so woozy and weird and frequently tired, but maybe it'll be a good thing. We'll see.

I'm actually getting quite used to being alone though. I mean, it's not new to me at all, but my perception of it has shifted from painful loneliness to calm solitude, and being truly alone rather than in a shared house or in my parents' house makes me feel free and unbothered, rather than trapped in a cage of anxieties. I wish I'd realised years ago that we don't really need anyone else to be content, but I suppose I had to go through years of failure and trauma to really, truly get that.

Now, back to work...