Blogging just seems to be one of those things that has got away from me this year. Whilst I’ve sometimes taken the lazy man’s option of posting an image to Instagram, I’ve not been as good as I was last year with monthly updates. Ironically, it’s because I’ve been so busy that I’ve not been [...]
I’ll be honest… the writing 2016 is off to a slow start. Part of it is simply being busy on other things but a significant chunk is that after writing 600,000 words in 2015, my brain needs to recharge. […]
http://fantasy-faction.com/2015/killing-ten-rats-why-a-writing-career-is-like-playing-an-mmo In case you missed it, I did a piece for Fantasy-Faction earlier this month where I talk about why a writing a career is a bit like playing a MMO. A lot of people have told me they liked this article so do be sure to check it out!
For the last couple of days I’ve been wondering whether I still have the time to raid in World of Warcraft and write as well. I’m behind schedule, I have a mountain of work to do and I’m starting to question whether the extra time gained by giving up my Tuesday and Thursday evenings would resolve my problems. Probably not. […]
Not all my characters lend themselves to MMO characters. Just trying to think of the character classes that suit them is enough to make my head explode. But sometimes it’s a lot clearer than it is for others, and you think to yourself… I really ought to go and make that character now! […]
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. […]
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.” “Oh, so you didn’t do anything then?” they say. This annoys me slightly. Just because I was playing videogames, doesn’t mean I wasn’t doing anything. In fact, I’d specifically taken the holiday then so I could play videogames, or rather one in particular- World of Warcraft. […]
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. […]
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. I’ve documented back in October just how crap we were when we started out. In that post, I marvelled at the fact that for the first time we were actually doing the current raiding tier’s content for the first time. Our improvement has continued and we were stoked when, come the release of the new Dragon Soul tier back in December, we tried it on a whim with only 9 out of 10 players and actually took down the first boss. […]
I’ve talked before how I love MMOs. There’s something about the depth of worldbuilding needed for the sheer number of quests that make them incredibly immersive games. My first MMO was Star Wars Galaxies and we had a great guild with our own city until the NGE came along and just wrecked everything we loved about the game. My friends and I migrated to World of Warcraft but it always seemed less immersive than Star Wars Galaxies. The crafting wasn’t so complex, there was no housing and so most of them dropped off, consigning their MMO experience to an enjoyable history. […]
