...

Updating things to be in past tense is a slightly disconcerting thing while you're still present.

I've been listening to an awful lot of Roo Panes again lately, which I can lovingly blame on the friend who introduced me to his music. It's sort of topical- I wouldn't have met that friend without bumbling around in interactive fiction spaces, and a lot has certainly grown from it- creative projects, friends, hobbies that still happily preoccupy my waking hours...

But I think I feel pretty okay in my decision at the moment. I've binned all of the files for previous works of interactive fiction in progress, and I don't feel nearly as strange or unsettled as I had imagined that I might about it. I don't really feel any particular need to return to them, or any sense of attachment that really goes beyond oh- I sure did spend a lot of time on this once upon a time, in trying to figure this or that out: a detached sort of comment I might make while examining old artwork where I was industriously mangling drawing hands from life. All of the writing, too- no more Rosebush articles simmering away on the back stove...

My favourite part had always been the writing. It was sort of interesting, challenging myself to cobbled together barely functioning, code that would crumble if you looked at it too hard, let alone a snowball's chance in hell of commenting it to make sense of at a later date: and the artistic element, I enjoyed that. I set out to make every project contain at least a little pink, somewhere, and I managed that, which is quite pleasing. But the writing was always the best part.

And it turns out, I don't really particularly need much of the medium to hold onto the bits I was best at. Sure, my fatigue and burn out contributed largely to the decline in experimentation and quality- (especially in covers, oh God, the covers- I haven't seriously sat down and indulged in painting something for what feels like forever, has at least been the better part of a year-) growing more and more tired of trying to customize things only for it to be dismissed or told that actually, this doesn't benefit at all from being written as a work of interactive fiction, and it's hardly so- and well, alright. Alright, then.

I'll need to get around to updating all sorts of blurbs and odds and ends, and frankly, I'm exhausted just thinking about it. I don't really want to do it, and I'm not in any rush to. The work still exists. It's a pain in the ass to have works removed from the database, so what ones have been put up can persist there- which is not ideal, but is, sort of fine, I suppose. The games will remain as they are. I didn't put literal years of my life into them to erase them all fitfully, at least not the ones I finished. Going through the ordeal of anonymizing my forum account also sounds like a headache and a half- it's easier to just let it rot into deadpixelspace.

It is slightly annoying I never did get around to wrangling all those authoring tools I thought might be interesting to learn, that I took stabs at- Ink and Inform never really amounted to anything polished enough to put forth. But then again, I already knew after my experiences with the formal competitions that I didn't really have any intent or interest in entering for the first time, or as of late, re-entering, any of them. So there's not much lost by way of any grand magnum opus, I suppose. I did make at least a few things I was pleased by, neither of them submitted to any of the big two, or three, or four...

I like writing. I've always liked writing. I'd go so far as to say I've always loved it, even- that it scratched a need, that it kept me steady- gave me something to both live for, and work on, chip away at slowly overtime to preoccupy my mind. Found joy in creating beauty, catharsis in delving deep, and so on. But I'm still a writer. I can still write. Just... perhaps a return to form, for myself, really.

It's comforting, in an abstract way. A blank slate, like a fresh notebook- inviting, for all of the possibility it represents: anything could happen from here on out. It's what you make of it. That's nice.

It's taken a great deal of self control to not destroy the result of the last two, almost three years. Oh, the temptation was there, of course it was- but nothing done in haste ever really turned out for the best. No, this was a well thought over, agonized and mulled upon decision, and it doesn't have to be for forever- but it is for now.

I can't see properly out of one bloodied eye. Open wounds are slowly, have been, slowly, for days, a week- healing from the inside out over my back and shoulders. My lips are still gouged in chunks. My hands are scarred for life, now, from the looks of it. Nothing unexpected. Nothing that I won't be able to handle...

It's all a bit much, really, you know. To deal with on top of everything else. The fever that took days to break, past when most people would scurry down to the emergency room after being rendered a writhing, sweating, useless thing in bed, coughing until your throat bled, choking on air you couldn't ease into your lungs without spasming and twitching, cautiously meted out pills to bring down the edge of fever. Being so tired you have to stop and sit on the ground midway through- being incapable of sitting up independently, even. Spells of dizziness that send you crashing to the floor. Splitting the seams of your mouth from the force and repetition of vomiting. The dizzying emotional surges, high and low. Hemorrhage after hemorrhage after hemorrhage. Do I even have all that much blood left, until bleeding out and dying? Gums as pale as my skin say not particularly. It's all a lot. It's been wretched. It's all been entirely too much.

So, a return to form- curling up alone, burying into the mindless, easy comforts: of writing something self indulgent, of spending hours laying down quietly in bed, knowing your absence is neither noted or felt- just being a quiet, small, little thing. Doing what you've always been able to, even while too exhausted to lift the drawing tablet's pen, or squint through tutorials and slapdash coding chunks stabbed into place like Kandii.

Maybe it isn't forever. Who am I to say? It's nearly unbearable to drag myself through a single day.

But for now, you know, it feels like the best thing to do for myself. Maybe it's the only thing I can do for myself. And I think it's about time I took that more seriously, selfishly, into consideration.

I'm done making games.

I'm going to write, again, I guess.