It’s been a while.
The good news is that I just finished my first readthrough of the Buried Instincts 2. It took more four months, yes, but I wasn’t just reading! There were several parts that felt wrong or incomplete and when I encountered them I spent a lot of time editing and re-writing so that it was more enjoyable and made more sense in the grander scheme of things.
But yes, the book is now in a state which I consider to be “Beta” to use a game developer term. To translate, the book is now what I consider to be content complete. Going forward I will try again to the find all the typos and try to resolve any issues that don’t make sense. (Like Blake running out of bullets and then on the next page he’s shooting his rifle again.) Also it’s time to send an email to see if my lovely graphic artist has time to do a new cover for me.
This also means I’ll be widening my test readers to people outside of my family. I’ll be in touch with you guys soon.
As to how life in general is going? I haven’t caught COVID yet, though I may have and just don’t know it. No symptoms so far. This is not to say I haven’t had health issues though. A couple months ago I found out I’m allergic to an anti-fungal called Clotrimazole. That wasn’t fun. Then like last week I developed a sore neck. After my internet research I came up with likely possibilities: West Nile, COVID, or maybe I slept on it wrong. I’m happy to report the soreness went away and I have yet to develop any other symptoms.
My try to stay at home as much as possible routine is now fully established. I have an endless amount of things that I do that completely occupies my time. My weight has stayed about the same, and while I could stand to lose several pounds, I’m happy to have not gotten fat by staying home and eating to kill time.
I’m still doing Ring Fit on Switch 3 times a week, and have cleared the advanced courses and am now working through the master courses. They’re just time same levels with adjusted difficulty, but the amazing feature you get at master is that they upgrade all of your exercises across the board so that they do the same damage output. This is something I discovered I wanted while clearing the advanced course, because I was only using exercises that did the most damage. So I put gave my gamer sense a back seat and started just rotating in different exercises so I could go a more balanced work out. Then I hit the master levels and they do it for me! Awesome! And even better, they ditched the cooldowns on the exercises. Meaning that if you want to do mountain climbers twice in a row, you can now. Anyway, I like it. I’m looking forward to a sequel.
I’ve also finally gotten a handle on how to play Midare. It took a couple of months, but now I can play the whole thing with ton of mistakes. Practice on that will continue…
So, no promises, but I think in a month I might have Buried Instincts 2 at a state that I can describe as being a Release Candidate. My next task is figuring out how to get my computer to read my book out loud. My hope is this will expose even more typos. I also anticipate my readthroughs to go faster now that I’m pleased with the content.
Stay safe out there!