December: Post Nano Plot Reflection

I realised that although I didn't manage 50,000 words in one month, I have managed over 40,000 words over October and November put together. Throughout October I spent some time trying to write a diary entry everyday, mostly of odd trains of thought I was having as I was having them, even the nonsense ones, just to see how many words I would do. I'd definitely like to see if I could combine parts of the two into any sort of entertaining novelish object.

NaNoWriMo has a list of things that you can do once you've recovered from thirty days of novel writing.
December's is all about sorting out the plot arc of the novel:

The Plot Whisperer -- Plot Writing Month (December). Goal: Refine the plot arc of your first draft.


And here are some others they've listed that go on throughout the year:

NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month (Year-Round). Goal: Post every day for a month.

SciFiWriMo – Science Fiction Writing Month (Year-Round). Goal: choose a target word count and reach it in a month, writing sci-fi or fantasy.

750 Words – (Year-Round). Goal: write 750 words a day. Includes month-long challenges.

Wriye – (Year-Round). Goal: Set a word-count goal for the year and work towards it between January 1 and December 31.

There are also 24 hour and 48 hour challenges that you can take part in if you don't fancy a month of writing tonnes of words:

24 Hour Comics Day – (Changes annually, lasts 24 hours). Goal: Draw a 24-page comic in one 24-hour period.

48 Hour Film Project – (Varies; operates via tours around the USA, lasts 48 hours). Goal: Create a short film in 48 hours.

Lots to be doing!

I really have no idea how my novel thing is going to go at the moment. There were some mentions of tea stained diaries being found in parks, so I really feel I have to transcribe those particular diary sections on paper and tea stain them. And then leave them in parks where they can be found. Especially after finding it so fun writing on my little 2x3 inch coptic bound book and singeing the edges with Sam's amazing rocket lighter of blue fire. It's pretty nice, the burned smell I get off it now.

I'm not a pyro.

NaNoWriMo: 2011

For the past month of November I've been a half busy / half not busy little bee, typing away at my very first novel.

It's not going as quickly as it should be. I began on 1st November 2011, like all the other NaNoWriMo participants. Unfortunately, I spent many days away from my laptop in that time and wrote not a word. I ended November with just over 17,000 words out of 50,000. Poor. But never mind. I'm carrying on, with a current word count of 19,458 and rising. If I really set myself on the task, I could definitely hit 50,000 before we reach 2012. Easy. Just so long as I keep typing! I've even begun to write in a little 100page 2x3inch book I made, just to make sure I can write something while I'm away from the laptop.

Novelist Gyseman, here I come.

I've also got another idea in the works. I'm going to spend 2012 making sure I write between 137 and 164 words every single day for a year. Maybe every night just describing my day. I could call it "My 2012", since I'm sure a lot of books are probably already called or are going to be called "2012", what with the universe ending and everything. Perhaps you can buy my first novel before Christmas next year for a loved one, just in case the universe does end. Then you can buy my other book after that, if it turns out the universe still exists and is doing fine with us still here? Best to cover your bases.

Also, I had a nice idea today. You may notice XXX has suddenly appeared as a page on my blog. I'll write more about that another time.

Let's get it started! *

I have really been lagging behind on this Business.. business. I've researched adequate packaging for shipping, checked out what other people are selling, had a few ideas, made some things... But I feel I haven't really gotten stuck in yet.

I haven't actually made any products for listing, and ArtFire's 45 Day Guide suggests having at least 100 products to list. So last night, I began to make a small 100 page notebook to fill with product ideas and material requirements and probable costs. I definitely don't have 100 ideas in mind yet, but it's okay. I have a few to get started with.

It just needs some holes and some stitching together. I could have stitched it simply last night, but I want to try something experimental with a macrame spine...



* Have you seen the movie Hot Tub Time Machine? I loved it. Check this out - although I reckon it's better in the context of the actual movie! :)

Where have you gone again my sweet?

Woah. I can't believe I actually missed out an entire month from writing on here. And I've had two hand-ins to write about.

Dissertation Draft

I handed in almost the required amount of words in time on Moodle [the online submission thing]. Except, I might have posted it on the wrong submission link and I didn't hand in a hard copy, so the other day when Rich emailed me asking for it, that may have been the first time any of the lecturers saw it. Woops.

Also, I've been staying away from it since the draft hand in on Jan 13th. On the plus side, I finally borrowed Raph Koster's Theory of Fun from the library. It was an interesting read and some of it might come in handy. I definitely should be focussing more time on the dissertation than I have been though. I guessed biggest problem is a lack of dedication. I should probably set myself some extra deadlines to meet to make sure I have something half decent to hand in.

Portfolio - Paper Production

Handed in a concept doc [or "Design Portfolio", I should say], dev. diary and 1500 word "post mortem" of the process. The hand-in itself was pretty easy going in the end. I wrote up my post-mortem on Sunday, the day before the hand-in deadline. Then because the deadline was at noon-ish the next day, I figured I'd hand it in via Moodle early, that Sunday night, so I could have a sleep in if I felt like it. I don't think I did sleep in, but I did keep on my pajamas.

In other news...

The 365 page-a-day Project

I wrote about this on my "business" blog [I'm not sure I can really call it that until I sell something]. Check out the post here [I also talk about sheep poo paper. And tiny houses].

It's been going okay, I've noticed after 3 weeks of doing it that I've started to attempt colour coding my days.. Standard sorts of emotional colours, adding random extras of yellow for happy, blue for sad and red for angry. The pages have also started to be less about drawing something artsy and more about recording what I was doing or focussing on that day.

Shown here are 28JAN, in which I accompanied Sam and Tom of the Irving and Booth varieties on their day off to Barry Island, and then drank wine, helped invent a new game, and went to a fairly empty Uni rave, and the 29JAN, which was when I spent part of the day catching up on five days worth of pages. Apparently I'm not very good at doing a page a day sometimes, especially when I spend a few days over at Camp Sausage.*

*Camp Sausage n. the house at which numerous friends of mine - of the male variety - live

And oh my! I totally forgot. According to page 25JAN, that was the day I died.

...Not for real. Dave of the Ware variety phoned me up and asked me if I could help him and Dan of the O'Hara variety with a teaser tape. I had to run around Caerleon for a bit and look scared and then relieved on camera and then - oh no! Turns out there was still a murderer nearby. I had to lie on the muddy pathway and pretend I'd been killed while they dripped fake blood on a real knife and tried not to drop either upon me. It was all quite fun actually. Still need to wipe the mud off that coat though.

And Claire's acting was really interesting to see. I say interesting; I should probably say awesome. It was really unnerving - in a good way - and as a result, half of my acting wasn't even acting. She really was behaving the whole time like the kind of person who was on the edge enough to kill me, and until she said "I'm back" and laughed her friendly laugh, I was slightly scared that she might actually kill me [I'd seen her around before but had only met her properly that night].

It was brilliant, and totally freaky. It was as if she'd put herself under hypnosis - she wasn't acting the character. In those few hours, she was living it. Dave told me later that when they filmed some other scenes at her house while she was back in character that it was even more intense and freaky, as she'd actually be talking back to and staring at them while being this on-the-edge and unstable, agitated character.

I know that story is not much to do with CGD but.. self induced hypnotic trances? The whole thing just fascinates me.

Calendar/Notebook

This week I've been working on this design:

Made from a sheet of white A4 paper cut into four, it has one station of four sheets and the covers are made of the same paper as the pages. There are enough pages for a page per month. The spine is decorated with four light blue metallic beads [these ones were cheap ones I bought from the local pound shop in Saundersfoot - unfortunately the metallic blue wears off quickly, but leaves a nice translucent white plastic underneath] with macrame square knots in between, and the excess thread from the knotting can be used as a book mark. Didn't follow any instructions for this one, it's a simple design I worked out myself.

Inside can be drawn a month calendar on each page, with space below each for notes. In mine I have written in the daily Chinese "earthly branches" and "heavenly stems" in pencil with the intention of painting the squares in a pattern using those colours as a guide. I'm not sure why I like that theme so much. Maybe it's the way the simplicity of the five elements and twelve animals can build up into something really complex when they interact.

And because it's winter, here's a pretty picture I took of the view outside my window before I left my Uni bedroom for the holidays:

I might draw this on the cover for decoration. I might not.

Coptic Stitch and Secret Belgium Bind

I have finished my first four books; three bound using Coptic stitching, and one using the Secret Belgium binding technique [using these instructions, but adapting the Coptic stitch to incorporate the stations].

These three were lightly tea stained after being stitched together. They are shown here drying on the radiator.

They measure 20mm across and 30mm tall, using cardboard from a cereal box for the covers.

Here are the materials used for the book bound using the Secret Belgium Binding technique. The carboard was taken from a box of Carlsberg.

I forgot to bring a ruler with me from uni [woops!] so I used lined paper from a notebook to measure out the cardboard and the spacing between holes, and punched the holes using an ordinary pin [seen on the cork].

Halfway through the cover binding process:

The book itself is just over four lines wide and five lines tall when closed, and I used the lined notebook paper for the inside pages; five stations of four sheets, because one notebook page divided nicely that way.

These have been nice little practice runs for my first book binding attempts. I expect making bigger versions is only a matter of using bigger sheets and longer lengths of thread. What I'm really looking forward to is decorating the covers of the bigger versions, and developing some styles :D

Ooh, hello there :)

My name is Charlotte Gyseman, and I'm currently in UWN studying a BA Hons in Computer Games Design.

Unfortunately, I seem to be a bit more into design than I am into computer games, so I'm not likely to be jumping into the games industry head-first when I leave uni... However, it's not all bad. I've learned lots of things here, much of which could come in handy sooner or later... such as making fancy banners for my ArtFire Studio...

But for now, I just love to make stuff... And that is what's going to happen when I leave university :) As you can see, it's happening already, and I haven't even left yet. Some urges just can't be stopped!

So here you will get to see lots of lovely pictures and read some descriptions of what I have been getting up to, as I prepare to set up shop and become my own boss.

Welcome to the CharGyse Designs blog!

Twilight: The Video Game?

Daemon made me aware of a link last night that Craig had put up on Facebook. Apparently there's been a little bit of chatter on the net regarding "Twilight MMO". Before anyone gets too excited/enraged at the thought, I should tell you that [at the moment], no, it's not actually happening.

From what I can tell, what seems to have happened is Twilight Source put up a news post stating that there would be a Twilight MMORPG, probably after reading about it on Artuji, who may have possibly come across the story first on The Examiner. I think. I kinda stopped halfway through writing that paragraph and lost my train of thought to watch an episode of Psychoville with my sister.

One look at the actual website of this game however, tells you everything you need to know:

- The game is being created for academic purposes.
- Brandon Gardner is the Game Director and Lead Programmer, Steven Danielson is the Concept Artist.
- The game is not going to be an MMO.
- They are going to surrender the game and all it's materials to Summit Entertainment once it is finished, and it's up to Summit Entertainment whether they want to actually publish it or not.

If you want to know more, I suggest heading over to the "actual website" link above and checking it out.



On a more personal note, I seem to still be living in a sheltered world.

I'm a fan of the books and the story, and all the girls I know who have read the books loved it [as well as a few mums and a couple of librarians who had been introduced to them too]. It seems to be a chickflick of the book world. So it's no wonder to me that it's became so popular, that they made movies for it, and that anyone would consider making a game for it.

What did surprise me was the reactions of most of the articles I read about it. Such as this one on Massively. To put it simply: They didn't like it. Some thought the books were rubbish, poorly written and/or lame. Some thought a Twilight MMO would be the end of the world.

At first, I thought that point was a bit dramatic to make, just because one is not into the idea of romance and videogames [and people wondered why there weren't enough women into games...]. But then, I thought about it. Maybe, they're scared of the idea of a Twilight MMO. Women everywhere could take such delight in it, that their other-halves and/or sons would have to fend for themselves. Oh, the horror.

Imagine playing on COD4, or WoW, or whatever your addiction is, and suddenly finding that you're absolutely starving because the lady who normally brings you food has disappeared from reality. The thought of it kinda makes me wanna laugh and say, "Get over it, and stop playing that game for two seconds, or you can eat pixels for dinner." But on the otherhand, the idea of a game as addictive to women as WoW seems to be to, um, people who can't seem to stop playing WoW, is understandably scary.

I think the only way I could condone such a game would be if it helped women develop personally as they played - rather than turned them into one of those people that sit around letting their reality fall into disrepair, while they get sucked into an imaginary fantasy world because their reality sucks, because they've let it fall into disrepair... And if you don't think games can help a person develop as an individual, stick around. It'll happen. If a person can come away from a film feeling like they've learned something or been enlightened, I really don't see why a game can't be capable of the same and still be entertaining.