Audiobooks, NaNoWriMo, and other Miscellany

This is one of those rambling posts about everything and nothing, because I don’t have much to say. Just writing for the sake of writing because I was bored at work.

I’ve been listening to audiobooks again, trying to use up my credits. I recently finished Stephen King’s 11.22.63, which was beautifully read by Craig Wasson. He’s the actor who played the lead in that weird 80s movie Body Double. Now I’m listening to Stephen King’s End of Watch, which is beautifully read by Will Patton. Later I might listen to Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, the beauty of which I know nothing. [Editor’s note: I spent a lot of time wording and re-wording that last sentence, and I still don’t think it’s right.]

Unfortunately audiobooks (and regular books) eat into my gaming time. I can’t play any game that requires attention while listening to an audiobook, so the only productive gaming I’ve done is playing through Dark Souls 3 again so I’ll have a character ready for the upcoming Ashes of Ariandel DLC. (My five or six existing characters from my old PC apparently cannot be transferred to my new PC.)

Where I’ve been in Rift for the last 50 days.

I try to log into Rift every day to pick up my Starfall Prophecy pre-order token thingy. I spent 20 tokens already on a massive bag, and I have another 30 or so tokens now, but I discovered to my annoyance that you can only buy one bag per character. So now I guess I’ll try to collect 50 tokens so I can buy the silly squirrel mount that I’ll probably never use. That means I’m actually rooting for them to delay the expansion as much as possible. More delay means more tokens for me!

As Eri alluded to in her post, there isn’t much to write about in the news either. One Tamriel sounds cool, but unfortunately ESO is one of those MMORPGs that requires my full attention to play it (others in this category are The Secret World and SWTOR). At least I finally installed it on my new PC. The FFXIV Bloodstorm (or was it Stormblood?) expansion was announced by showing a Street Fighter video, but as yet there’s not many details to talk about. Mostly the announcement only reminded me of how far behind I am in that game.

I never played Red Dead Redemption, so the collective Internet freak-out over Red Dead Redemption 2 means nothing to me. Since they aren’t making a PC version, I probably won’t ever see it. (Although I still plan to buy a PS4 someday.)

So let’s talk about politics! Wait, no, let’s not. But I feel it’s my duty to remind everyone to stock up on batteries and water for the post-election riots.

How about that Westworld? After three episodes I’m prepared to say: I’m losing interest. I have a hard time getting invested in a story when it’s not clear what the objectives of the main characters are. It’s not even clear whether a story is taking place. Stories typically have a beginning, and I haven’t seen a beginning yet. All I’ve seen is backstory. Remember the good old days when every episode of a series had a beginning, a middle, and an end? Now every episode is a middle.

NaNoWriMo? I’m preparing for it, in my usual disorganized fashion. I happened to see a tweet from Alternative Chat mentioning she had both a book cover and a tag line for her project already:

That boggles my mind. I have nothing whatsoever, except the vague idea that I want to set the book in Belgium in the first year of World War I, and I want one of the characters to be an American war correspondent, and I want a plot reminiscent of the adventures of E. Alexander Powell and photographer Donald Thompson in Fighting In Flanders. I don’t know if I’m going to write in first person or third person, past or present tense, or what the story might be, or who’s going to be in it, or who’s going to win in the end, or who’s going to live or die, or how I’m going to deal with the fact that I don’t know German, French, or Flemish, or anything about military operations or occupations or relief efforts, or much of anything about life in 1914. The only real goal I have is to avoid getting too bogged down in the general horror of World War I. Unless it works better to do so. At this point I’m trusting that a story will reveal itself as I’m writing.