Let Sleeping Dreads Lie

I'm writing this post in a Mac program called Focused. It's one of those 'no distraction' writing apps. It gives you a blank window with a nice large font, an obvious cursor, no icons, no sidebars, no title bar, no sidewindows, no sidebottoms, no grotesquely nested MS-Word ribbons of chaff.

When you turn it on, a random quote about writing sits in the middle of the blank page until you type something. My quote tonight was:

'Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.' – James Norman Hall

This was apt (they're usually pretty apt) as I was about to write about how I'm waiting for a really good idea for the most basic of my Inform CYOA extension examples to come to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about it in pockets of each day. It's taking a surprisingly long time to come, given that the ideas for the other five examples didn't cause me much struggle. They involve such entities as talking rats, a quiz show, ye olde Cloak of Darkness, a glass basket and a dragon.

After fiddling with other peripheral IF busywork – like updating my review tags on IFDB – I felt like playing something. I've been reading Mathbrush's nifty intfiction posts about past XYZZY Best Game winners, in which he often goes sideways to talk about the corresponding IFComps. I realise his posts have had the side-effect of engendering nostalgia in me for some of the games from the first two IFComps I participated in. So it seems it's taken me about five years to develop this particular nostalgia.

In terms of acting on nostalgia for 2010/2011 IFComp games, I find my typing fingers are restless for some of the one-shot games which had mixed receptions and whose authors didn't return. Things like 2011 game Awake The Mighty Dread, which has no reviews on IFDB. And that's why I'm going to replay and review Awake The Mighty Dread while I continue to wait for this idea I'm waiting for. Of course doing this review won't take as long as all that, and then I'll return to the waiting, but you can't force creativity all the time. Sometimes you must even deign to loaf.