general update (no news)

Hi! I continue to get very nice asks, and I feel bad responding to just one when I can’t respond to all of them. So here’s an update:

My health and job have stabilized. That’s not to say all my problems are fixed/cured, just that things are currently under control. I still have to do hours of physical therapy exercises each week, along with cooking a special diet, and limiting how much time I spend looking at screens. I had some treatments for my eyes that helped a lot, so they’re no longer inflamed, but I have to work to keep them that way. Staying healthy takes a lot of time and work! This is pretty much how things will be for the rest of my life, but I’m grateful that I’m no longer in a state of physical suffering or extreme stress.

So, with the number of hours I have in a day, I can pretty much do my job and all the health maintenance stuff, and that’s it. My job does pay well enough that I’m able to save almost half my income each month for early retirement, and I absolutely still plan to spend my retirement working on Guenevere and similar things. That’s still what gets me out of bed in the mornings.

As always, thank you to everyone who has sent messages, which I do read even though I can’t reply. Your kindness and support means everything!

my life these days…

jeantownsend:

…is, unfortunately, still pretty miserable – I work long and stressful hours for an organization that is falling apart, but I’m stuck with it because my partner and I need the health insurance (and I’m not really employable in any other job that comes with health insurance). Work takes all my mental energy and then some.

The only thing that keeps me going is dreaming about being able to work on Guenevere again. When I fantasize about my retirement (if this horrible job holds together, I can at least retire early), it’s all built around writing IF, and massively expanding the Guenverse, and learning graphic design. I still haven’t lost any interest; it’s the opposite – Guen is the only reason I’m still functioning at all.

I haven’t been able to look at my inbox for a long time, because I feel so bad about all the messages piling up. I looked yesterday, and there are a TON. On the one hand, I feel terrible about not having answered them, but on the other, it’s amazing to know that people are still discovering Guenevere and still enjoying it. If you sent me a message and I haven’t been able to reply, I’m really sorry. It’s not that I don’t care; I’m just extremely overwhelmed.

All that is to say, yes, I’m still alive, and no, I have not lost interest in writing or in Guenevere!

I’ve gotten some messages asking if I’m okay. The answer is “not really,” but I don’t know who is okay, these days. I do still have plenty of hope for the future.

That said, it’s been years since my life circumstances were conducive to writing, and the pandemic has only exacerbated my existing health and job issues (as it has for many people). I’m extremely lucky to have a job that can be done online, but not well or easily. The amount of screen time I’ve had to put in over the past few months has not been great for my eyes, even with computer glasses, frequent breaks, etc. So using a computer for anything other than work hasn’t been much of an option, lately.

Still, I have to believe that something will change eventually. I’ll be ready when it does. I’ve made handwritten to-do lists of exactly what still needs to happen for Guenevere, along with plans for related content and how I want to roll all of it out. I haven’t lost interest (quite the opposite, honestly). If I were to become independently wealthy tomorrow, the first thing I’d do is sit down and work on Guenevere.

I have no idea what will happen next, and it’s likely that I won’t announce anything Guen-related until I have actual content ready to share. Even if that doesn’t happen until some far-distant future when I’m retired from my job, I’ll announce it here.

In the meantime, everyone please take care of yourselves, and the people you’re close to, and the people you’re not close to. You matter, and even the smallest good thing you can do, for yourself or others, matters more than ever.

Still not dead, still haven’t abandoned Guenevere. I expect I’ll pick it back up again in the spring (as I generally do). If I don’t post anything between now and then, please don’t worry! I really do always come back to working on Guenevere.

Wishing everyone a happy and fulfilling 2020!

November

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This time last year, we were told that our dog had months (at best) to live. His blood toxins had spiked from kidney disease, and he was very sick. Against all odds, he bounced back in February and had a wonderful year. He got to travel all over, meet new people, play with lots of other dogs, and have adventures in all kinds of places. I’m grateful that we had that unexpected time with him, and that it was so good.

At the beginning of this November, he started to get sick again. We did everything we could, but by the end of last week, his kidneys had shut down completely, and we had to say goodbye to him last Saturday. It was all very peaceful. His life was short but full, and we will never forget him.

We miss him, but we’re doing okay. We’re fortunate to have supportive friends and family who will help us remember him. As far as writing goes, I’m going to keep working on some non-Guenevere stuff for now, but I know that the time will come when I’m ready to put the final pieces of Guen II in place, and deal with the game’s other issues (e.g. save system) that I haven’t had the mental energy to take care of while also taking care of my dog. As always, thank you to everyone for being so patient.

August

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(Sisyphus, having once again failed to roll that rock all the way up the mountain)

I’ve completely stalled out on rewriting the Camelot battle. At first I was excited to fix it, but I’m just so so so so so sick of rewriting the same stuff. One of my personal writing rules is that if something is tedious for me to write, it’s probably going to be tedious for people to read, and I should change what I’m doing. In this case, I don’t think it’s the battle scene itself that’s all that tedious; I’m just very tired of it.

I’m also feeling daunted by all the other stuff I’ll have to do before I feel ready to share more of the game, especially dealing with the issue of not being able to playtest without giving up the old save system. My heart is just not in figuring that out right now.

So I’ll probably do what I always do when I’m feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated, which is work on the backstory (of Ygraine, Uther, Merlin, etc). I may just let myself get absorbed in that for a while. I’m not going to pressure myself to finish the battle scene right now, as long as I’m doing something Guenevere-related.

I have a feeling I may be using the Sisyphus image again. Sigh.

Q:Hello Mr. Gaiman, I have a question about the costuming of Good Omens. In the Arthurian scene with Crowley and Aziraphale, set in the 10th century, they are wearing full suits of plate armor, which wasn’t developed until the 15th-16th centuries. I know it’s been said every element in the show is intentional, so what was the reason for this?

chlorr-no-face

neil-gaiman:

kiralamouse:

neil-gaiman:

Because people’s ideas of Arthurian Britain are as important as historical reality (whatever that might be). And in people’s minds it was a time of knights in shining armour.

This is, of course, the only way to do a truly historically accurate adaptation of the corpus of Arthurian literature, with its theoretical “real setting” being the sixth century with most of the trappings added in the mid- to late-medieval era, but it still makes me sad that we have a title text of 537 AD AND the plate armor. There’s no good solutions here, but I might have leaned to either

1) labeling it “Medieval England” and keeping the once-upon-a-time nonspecificity of the majority of Arthurian literature, or if the vague timestamp was too out of line with the other, highly specific dates, I’d go with

2) 963 AD, which is wildly historically inaccurate any way you cut it, but matches my favorite we’ll-ignore-everything-we-know-about-the-actual-history-unless-it’s-funny adaptation.

But I’m deeply grateful the show didn’t go all-in on 537 AD across the board. Then I’d have to be frustrated that the quintessentially *English* Aziraphale is fighting for King Arthur, the Romanized Celt fighting the ancestors of the English, without anyone finding it odd. Maybe Aziraphale would be the origin of Pope Gregory I declaring “non Angli sed Angeli”?

I think there are only two ways to do Arthurian fiction. You embrace it, or you historicise it. And the moment you historicise it, you lose the Arthurian magic, or more precisely you exchange it for a different kind of magic. If you embrace it you accept that there’s a world of sixth century people having adventures created and collected mostly by thirteenth and fourteenth century storytellers, who took the world that they lived in and extended it backwards, in the same way that Shakespeare did when he put a clock and English tradesmen into Julius Caesar. And that includes armour. (We know so much about Gawain’s armour and the Green Knight’s lack of armour in Gawain and the Green Knight, for example. That doesn’t mean it’d happened in the fourteenth century, or that you’d try and put it in the fourteenth century if you dramatised it.)

July progress

I’m plugging along, more or less, with the new Camelot battle scene. The wake-up-early-to-write plan lasted for a week before I got hit with a crunch project at work, and then just when that was calming down, they decided to cut our license for a software that I really really need, so now I’m frantically scrambling to get stuff done (badly) without the software, while also mounting a campaign to bring it back. Sigh. But I am still getting little bits of Guen done here and there.

Another setback was that the old version of ChoiceScript that I’m using no longer appears to work locally (i.e. offline) in any browser I try (and I’ve tried a lot). It will still work online, but if I can’t run it locally, playtesting/editing becomes so cumbersome that the game will never be finished. I’ve kept the old version of ChoiceScript because I can’t get the password-save system to work in the newer versions. I know a lot of my readers like being able to save games, even if that giant-password system is ridiculous.

I haven’t been able to deal with this issue directly yet; at some point I’ll probably ask around on the CoG forum and see if anyone has ideas. The worst-case scenario is that I’ll have to update to new ChoiceScript and lose the password save. (There is an alternative save system I can use, but I don’t like it as much.) But maybe someone can help me come up with a workaround.

And so it goes… all I can do is keep going, and so I will.

clarification (game has not been updated)

Hey everyone, sorry the wording in my last post was confusing. No, the game has not been updated online. Believe me, when that happens, there will be a much more dramatic announcement! It’s still going to be a while.

June progress

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There’s good news and less-good news.

Good news: All of the endings for Guen II are really truly complete, so I can now playtest the draft version from start to finish for all choices/endings, with no game-crashing bugs that I know of (though there are still plenty of continuity bugs, especially in the form of people who ought to be dead or absent popping up alive and present, but those are fixable).

The less-good news: Over the past three years I have spent probably hundreds of hours unsuccessfully trying to get the Camelot branch battle simulator to be fun to play. The simulator works, more or less, but no matter what I do, it’s just not satisfying to me. So I asked a friend who knows the game well to play it, and they agreed that the battle simulation in its present form is just… well, not up to the standards set by the rest of the game.

The battle simulator is based on a troop attrition mechanic, so you start with X number of British troops of different types, and X number of Frankish troops of different types, and each round they fight and have casualties. Guen’s choices affect the number of casualties on each side. The troop numbers keep counting down until one side has too few to continue, and the other side wins. This seemed like a really cool idea when I designed it, but in practice, it’s repetitive, a little frustrating, and kind of soulless.

So, after literally years of trying to make this work, I’m going to abandon the troop attrition mechanic and rewrite the entire battle with a simpler mechanic to make it more personal and more cohesive. This decision has made me feel SO much better about everything! I’m actually really excited to get to work on the new battle scene.

Not sure how long the rewrite will take (and then I’ll still need to do a ton of playtesting to catch undead character bugs etc.), but I think my goal for July is going to be to wake up early each morning and try to get in an hour of writing before the day starts. I look forward to letting you all know how that goes!

May update

I don’t have anything concrete to show for May, but I did a bunch of little things here and there: playtesting, editing (including the Frankmarch work I talked about last month), and some more work on the prequels and backstory which is adding substantially to the game world and future plot points.

Every year I think I’m going to get more time to myself in May (because my job usually eases off mid-month), and then I get slammed with a ton of exhausting family and social obligations. I tried so hard to stop that from happening this year, but it did anyway – a new baby, a surprise 65th birthday party, a graduation party, etc., all of which required road trips and multiple nights away. I’m so exhausted! But those things are almost finished, and while I’m not going to get total time off from my job like I did last year, I will at least have the usual summer slowdown, which I’ll try my best to put to good use.

April

I finally got a bit of breathing room in my work schedule! I sowed wildflower seeds around my house, and took some time to read books, which I hardly ever get to do any more.

For Christmas, my family members each got me a volume of the Lancelot-Grail Vulgate translations, so I have the whole series and am currently reading the Merlin volume. It’s helping me develop more details of the Guenverse backstory. I figured out what I want to do with Vortigern and his tower, and how that will fit into what I already had planned for the later Guen games.

I didn’t add anything new to the game this month, but I did play through the Frankmarch branch and do some editing. I was going to add more material to Frankmarch, but now I think maybe all I need to do is tighten up and enhance what I already have. It looks like this coming weekend is going to be blissfully free from work and social obligations, so I should be able to spend it doing just that.

Happy spring!

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