Today has been rough so far. That’s because of the bad sleep.

You know what I’m talking about.. The dream-packed sleep where I wake up sweaty and disoriented and feeling like I have been running a marathon underwater. The tortured sleep that leaves me drained instead of refreshed. The sleep that wears me out and leaves me so tired that, despite how bad the previous sleep was, I need to sleep even more.

That’s where I am now. I have slept for around nine hours so far, and yet, I really want to crawl back into bed and sleep even more.

It’s almost like an addiction.

But I have things to do, and so I must resist. At the very least, I have to get my blogging done. That’s non-negotiable. If I have the strength, I want to finish my DDD as well. I have two categories left to do : Weapons and Gadgets, and Locations.

Locations will require some (gasp!) research. I have set my game on the island of Manhattan, which in the game is practically a ghost town with only 67,000 residents. It’s also the seat of power for the Christian Fascist government that are the bad guys of my game. And seeing as I am using a real place as my setting, and I insist upon accuracy in that kind of thing, that means I will have to study a map of Manhattan and get an idea of where my adventure will take my protagonist.

This is why I normally make everything up. You don’t have to research make-believe places and things. They are exactly how you say they are. All you have to worry about is making sure everything is internally consistent.

But my game is about a worst-case nightmare America, and as that happens to be a real place, I have to get it right. And it has to be someplace iconic because my game has very strong political underpinnings and that requires equally strong symbols.

The other possibility is setting it in Washington, DC. There are plenty of iconic monuments there. And it has the sort of privilege versus poverty thing going on that I want for my game. But I dunno… seems a little too on the nose for me.

Plus I really want to explore just how eerie a ghost town version of Manhattan could be. Vast apartment complexes with nobody living in them. Silent streets with no cars and no people, just the sound of the wind. Piles of rubble where there used to be homes. Everything left to rot and decay.

Urban decay is a powerful symbol. It both frightens and soothes us. It frightens our civilized side, which knows how important it is that people remain civilized and just how dependent we are on modern society, and how horrible it would be if it all fell apart.

But it’s soothing to our untamed side because it shows nature triumphing over the artificial constructs of humanity. There is a part of us, buried deep, that rebels against the thousand tiny suppressions of modern life, and when we see the natural world win over it, it makes this side of us very happy.

Finally, this side of us say, things are getting back to normal.

So I would like to get that done. It’s not due till Wednesday, and to be honest, the full thing isn’t due for two weeks after that, but I have the damned thing nearly done and once I am finished with it, I I can move on to other assignments.

For one thing, I have a buttload of work to do for Career Launch class. None of it is due till the very last class, technically, but I want to be able to submit it to Kat ASAP so she can tell me what I have done wrong.

This is important stuff that will represent me in the future, when I am looking for work. I want to get it as close to perfect as I can.

Plus I have a rewrite of my pilot and second episodes to do, and of course notes to generate on my classmates’ stuff.

I am always dissatisfied with my notes. I am always pointing out small language and logic issues when my classmates are talking about the deeper and more important issues. It makes me feel like my notes just plain suck.

I think the problem is that I read their work and make notes at the same time. And that means I only notice the small stuff because I don’t have the big picture yet. If I was more energetic, I would read the whole thing once, then do something else while I am processing it, then read it again while making notes.

Oh well, I can only try harder in the future.

It feels like graduation is coming on like an out of control freight train. This upcoming week will be Week 5 of 8 in the term. Imagine that. I am beginning to worry about the nitty gritty issues of what my life will be like after I graduate. The whole notion of it freaks me out sometimes because it looms so large in my mind. And there are so many possibilities.

I worry that I will sink back into the depressed state I was in before I went to Kwantlen without some external source of structure. I have plenty of ideas on how I will stay busy even after graduation, but ideas alone won’t keep me out of the doldrums.

There were always tons of things I could have been doing in the pre-Kwantlen years. I didn’t do any of them. All I did was play video games and chat online and surf the Web and read. For twenty fucking years, that was my entire life.

The worst illnesses are the ones that keep you from seeking treatment. Depression was that kind of illness for me. I was too timid and passive and unmotivated to demand the kind of therapy I needed for a very long time.

Hell, for a big chunk of that time, I didn’t even know I was sick in a way that could be treated. I just knew there was something terribly wrong with me.

But at least now I have gone quite a long ways down the road to recovery. I am hoping that the sort of life I led before Kwantlen will now leave me bored, frustrated, and dissatisfied with my life.

It will be up to be to act on and thus reinforce those feelings instead of doing what I did before, which was to passively wait for the feelings to go away.

Once I graduate I will be in a state of constant peril.

It will do me good to remember that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.

I have had such fun today.

See, today, my task was to do a first draft of the detailed design document I am writing for my Writing For Video Games 2 course.

A DDD is basically a blueprint for the game from the writer’s point of view. A full one would include every script in the game, but we don’t have to go that deep.

Instead, I got to create the characters, setting, story, and everything else. And that kind of detailed creation is something I love to do.

So I spent four and a half hours pouring myself into the thing. And I was in deep. I wasn’t doing anything but writing. I wasn’t even listening to music.

When I am really deep into writing, even music is an annoying distraction.

That’s the joy of being a deep focus person rather than a multitasker. We deep focus types can get thoroughly absorbed in what we are doing. To a fault, sometimes. I would hate there to be a fire when I was in The Zone, because I might not notice until I am physically being consumed by fire.

For a multitasker to achieve that state, I assume they would have to have their optimal number of plates in the air. When their task space is full, then they feel peace.

It all sounds like too much work for me. Then again, to some, writing for four and a half hours and creating a six page document (which is not yet complete) would be way too much work for them.

Well, the only difference between work and play is whether or not you want to do it. And that has a lot to do with whether or not you find it personally rewarding.

I found doing all that writing to be personally rewarding as hell.

In fact, it was hard to pull myself away from it. That’s how deep I got. It was like it had a magnetic grip on me and I had to overcome that magnetic force to pull myself out of the hole I had fallen into.

Like I had been digging for so long that I couldn’t get out of the hole I had dug.

In fact, I didn’t really escape. I just reached the point where I ran out of stuff that was, as it were, pre-written in my head. That’s how my creativity works. I get an idea and a whole bunch of other ideas crystallize from that starting point.

I like to think that this is what keeps my writing logically coherent. Or at least plausible. If one thing didn’t connect to the other, how did I come up with it in the first place?

Anyhoo, eventually I ran out of gas, and stopped writing. Only then was I able to order some Chinese food, and I pointedly did not do any writing while waiting for it to come.

Instead, I tried a new CCG style game I downloaded called Star Crusade. Verdict : it contains nothing that you do not find in lots of other games. But I don’t demand that my CCG games be original,,just that they be fun to play.

Plus, the fact that it is sci fi themed and not fantasy themed is such a welcome and refreshing change. I am so sick of endlessly rehashing Tolkien! At least science fiction tries to be original.

Oh, and the makers of the game, or at least their voice actors, have a cheeky sense of humour and are not above stealing from sci fi properties. Like, there’s a Heavy Gravity Ship card and when you play it, it says “I have a strong effect on mass!”.

That’s a reference to the Mass Effect series.

And when you play a Terminator, it says “Come with me if you want to live. ”

Cute. So I can see me playing that for a while.

Which is good, because I beat the game I had been playing, Dishonored. Fun game. You get to be a deadly assassin going up against the bastards that killed your beloved Empress, kidnapped the heir (a 12 year old girl it was your job to protect), and then framed you for the crime.

And you do it. But then you are betrayed by the group of loyalists that had been supporting you, and then you have to hunt them down and kill their sorry asses.

Still, they had something I enjoyed very much in the first half of the game : when you finally get close to the Lord Regent (head bastard of those who framed you), you have two choice : either kill the motherfucker outright, OR send his recorded confession out to the whole island kingdom, resulting in him being arrested, thrown in jail, and loathed.

I of course chose the latter. Not out of mercy, though. Quite the opposite.

If I had killed him, his suffering would have been brief. But by ruining him instead, I ensured that he would suffer for the rest of his natural life.

That’s what you get for fucking with me.

And I totally saw being betrayed coming. From the third mission with the loyalists onwards I was looking at them and thinking “I wonder when they are going to decide I have outliced my usefulness and must be killed so I can never tell anyone what they have done.”

See, the loyalists were led by an aristocrat and a retired general. Both people way, way above a hired killer like me. And I make a policy to never, ever trust anyone who is more powerful than me.

Because we the lowly are not people to them, and therefore they have no qualms about lying to you to get you to do what they want then throwing you away like a used diaper the minute you become a liability.

Even otherwise good people can’t help but feel like those of a lower social status are not real people. Just props so they can show off what good people they are.

So yeah. I knew they would betray me. But I had to watch my character accept a drink from those bastards while saying “Don’t drink it! It’s poisoned. ”

And I was right.

Anyhow, it has been a productive day, but I think I may have overdone it because I now have a splitting headache and I feel sort of dazed and dumb.

So if you don’t mind, I am going to go take an Aleve and lay down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow, homework permitting.