The Challenger

I haven't been writing anything recently. I bought Fable for my X-box a week ago and have been playing that almost constantly since. It's a good game... though many a person has been known to play bad games constantly. Me included. It sometimes get's to the point where you aren't willing to let a stupid game beat you. So you keep playing and playing. And playing.

And speakig of spending lots of time playing games...

When I was a kid, about 10 os so years old, I had a Commodore64 computer. I had a chess game on it that I just couldn't beat. I got within a move of checkmate on several occasions but the damn computer always managed to save itself. I wasn't a terrible player, but I was 10. This went on for years (not my being ten, that only lasted a year) and I just kept going back even though it frustrated me immensely. (That wasn't really the game's fault, but anyway.) Then, when I was about 20, I was going through all my old stuff and decided to set the computer up. I played a couple of the old games. Then I found the chess game, loaded it up (it took several minutes) and started to play. About 3 minutes later, I'd won. I knew this because the words "You Won" came up on the bottom of the screen in something like 12 point font. "You Won". That was it. After years and hundreds of games, all I got was two little words. I wanted fireworks and flashing colours and music and... I can tell you, that was a very strange expereince. I can remember sitting there staring at the screen and feeling very empty. What had appeared to be one of the big challenges of my childhood turned out to be nothing at all really.

I bought a mac laptop a few months ago and it has a chess game on it. It's a lot more advanced than the old C64 one. I can't beat it. I keep trying. If victory eventually comes, will it be any more satisfying than the last time? Probably not.

A few people from my writing group have decided to make short films. We haven't really started yet but it should be fun. Hopefully. Waste of time if it isn't. Nobody involved has really got any experience-- we're just going to make it up as we go along, which is the story of my life. :) The main problem at the moment is trying to organise a time when we can all get together for our first meeting to work out how we're going to organise things.

And of course, all that just takes time away from writing novels. It seems I haven't hit upon the right idea yet because I'm still trying the think up more stuff. I like the las idea I thought of, btu I've only done about 1200 words in about a month. I have a sci-fi thriller I'm thinking about now. I actually came up with the main concept about 20 years ago.

Or maybe I just need to get rid of my x-box.