Book promotion is a busy time. It feels like since September I’ve been working my way through a list of things that needed to have been done yesterday, culminating in a couple of months of solid interviews, guest blogs and reviews. It’s been hectic but a lot of fun.
There’s still plenty of things ongoing: blog posts to write, articles that are due in, interview questions that need to be answered. But it’s not so frantic as it once was and inbetween the ongoing items I’ve found time to have a bit of R&R.
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I have recently returned from two weeks holiday from the day job. When asked whether I went anywhere, I replied that “No, I had just stayed home and played games.”
When I used to work as an IT contractor, you never got paid if you took a day off. As a result, even years later, I still need to be reminded that I get holiday with my day job, and reminded even more that I need to take it. So when I saw that the latest World of Warcraft expansion was coming out, I thought why not spend two weeks in the new continent of Pandaria? When I told my boss, he was just happy I was finally taking some time off.
I used to play a lot on the Xbox, but then I realised I was wasting tonnes of money on games I hardly played and so confined my gaming to predominantly World of Warcraft. There was the odd exception but in the majority the Xbox has been left to gather dust.
Games writing seems to be in the spotlight at the moment with complaints that it falls foul of sexism and genre tropes.
There’s a tendancy these days to say that World of Warcraft’s reign is over. But whilst I would agree with a lot of the criticisms, games like The Old Republic have yet to grow into something that might capture me away. So I continue to raid with my guild weekly and continue to have a lot of fun doing so.
It used to be that when I met up with my oldest group of friends, there would be beer. There would be beer, and gossip, and antics and sometimes, even dancing. But now we’re all old, there’s more tea than beer, gossip revolves around people’s children rather than the people themselves, and as for antics… well, they are slightly duller than of old. There is no dancing, and of that we are all relieved.
There were a lot of great games that came out in 2011. Whilst the majority of my gaming time was taken up with WoW, Star Wars: The Old Republic stole that crown for the month of December and seems like it will make huge demands of my time in 2012.
It’s typical when it comes to this time of year to look back, complain how shit the previous year has been and spout optimism for the one ahead.
I’m still unsure whether this really has an endgame or not, but I’m currently in the early access for the latest MMO; Star Wars The Old Republic.