As always, I’m taking on too much stuff. Aside from improving this website, I’m also trying to code my own game, finish the second draft of a sci-fi novel, plan a trilogy of pulp detective novels, finish an ambient album, and get famous with my band Personality. Plus, for a while I had a TikTok on which I’d talk about books, authors, and music I liked or disliked. Oh, and I’m trying to be a famous YouTube streamer as well, which entails streaming, which I never do, because when I game I’m always so tired from everything else I’m doing that I just want to chill out and don’t want to have to talk. Not to mention, most of the time, I’m talking to no-one.

I don’t mind taking on so many projects, though. I’m doing most of them for me - except the getting famous with my band and YouTube channel part, obviously - and I don’t expect anyone to care. That’s okay, though; I’ll care so you don’t have to.

The game

The game I’m coding is card-based interactive fiction. It’s set in a world where the gods abandoned humanity and took the moon with them as they did it. This led to pretty devastating environmental crises across the world. To solve their problems, everyone moved to the equator, and humans stole the sun as revenge. And by that I mean, developed a dyson sphere for their energy needs, in order to create the weapons needed to kill the gods in case they ever return.

The player finds themselves in this world without being told this explicitly. All you know is that you’ve moved away to Cambria, to the gigantic city-state of Caerdyf (New Cardiff, if you will), to start a new life in the habitable zone. The city is welcoming - there’s no dystopian, cyberpunk border guards, no walls up around it; you just arrive, and you go in, and you make it work. The opening scenes see you enter the city, get trapped in a protest by a far-left revolutionary group, and lose most of the luggage your brought with you, leaving you with just a rucksack, a bit of cash, and the clothes on your back.

From there, I haven’t quite decided where I’m going to take it, yet. And at the moment, it doesn’t look too pretty:

test video game

but UI design comes later. Right now, I’m working on getting the mechanics functioning how I want them to, and writing as much of the story as I can. By writing the story, it helps me figure out exactly which mechanics I need for the future, and when I add a new mechanic, I end up getting interesting ideas of how to use it.

As with this website, I’m using Claude to help me code. I took a course in Godot a few years ago, and I know some of the barebones basic; I’ve also made very, very simple games already, although I did it by following courses, not from scratch. Without Claude, I’d be totally lost. Honestly, for everything about AI I’m scared of, for all the bullshit, for OpenAI adding a fucking erotic AI companion, for projects like this, it’s a lifesaver. I know that without Claude, I would never have started working on this game. If I know myself - and I do - it’s likely it will never be finished; but I like starting new things anyway, and hey, we’re all going to die.

The novel

The novel I’m writing is a young adult/new adult philosophical science fiction dystopia. Bit of a mouthful, right? In essence, a bunch of 17-year-olds stumble across some in-stasis aliens who turn out be parasitic, latching on to their backs. Biologically, the wipe the host’s initial consciousness and take complete motor control over them. (Animorphs, anyone?) However, the protagonists have a certain gene which fights against the parasite as it might an illness, and they retain their own conciousness, while receiving some very minor enhancements to their bodies. The rest of the novel deals with them trying to stop these aliens from taking over the planet.

And right now, it fucking sucks. I’m suffering from ‘Act 2 bloat’, which is obviously the majority of my novel, where basically, not much happens. The kids think up plans, realise they don’t work, muse philosophically and ethically about their situation, and then decide just to react, not to act. And frankly, it doesn’t work whatsoever. There are probably twenty or thirty thousand words (of eighty) which need to go, and then I need to rewrite it so some stuff, you know, ACTUALLY HAPPENS. Because really, between the inciting incident and the shortish third act, sod all happens.

I like my characters, though, and I like my prose style, and I like the themes. I think they all work; I think my characters feel real, and are fleshed out, but I just don’t give them the opportunity to be themselves in meaningful situations. Currently, they’re just described well - they need to be shown to be the people I’m describing them to be.

But I have to tell you, writing a novel is hard. This is the second novel I’ve finished; the first was a crappy set-piece comedy of a young man’s first year at university. (Definitely not heavily based on my life.) I might upload it here, actually, for people to read. Why not? Aside from that, I’ve only ever finished novellas and short stories, which I’ll definitely be uploading here eventually, once I’ve proofed them. Nowhere else wants to publish them, so I’ll just fucking do it myself. But a novel - hoo, boy. Writing is editing; I’ve always known that. Getting to the end of the first draft feels great, but honestly, that’s where I have the least amount of issues. I can write - writing’s easy. Editing is hard, and editing is writing. Wait, that’s a contradiction…

The detective trilogy

Meet Detective Inspector William Blackwater, working for the South Wales Police. Based on the true events of three separate murders and scandals that happened in Cardiff from the mid-80s all the wayup to 2011, I plan on making a David-Peace-Red-Riding-style dark urban noir that looks at the nature of free will, the futility of fighting against corrupt institutions, and the general ACABness we should all be living our lives for. (Only half-joking) I love cop stories, but I kinda hate cops. Weird contradiction, right?

All I’ve done so far is write a crap draft of the first half of the first novel, and plan out the rest of it. The plan also doesn’t work, by the way, because the story is just boring. Writing exciting genre-fiction stories is honestly really difficult, and genre writers don’t get enough credit for that. If you write literary fiction, all you have to do is vaguely meditate on some grand theme, and write really nice prose. Whatever actually HAPPENS in your novel doesn’t matter whatsoever. If you write genre fiction, you can focus less on the prose, but you actually have to make stuff happen, and honestly, making stuff happen is fucking hard.

I recently read the first three books by Derek Raymond, the so-called ‘godfather of British noir’, though he referred to them as black novels rather than noir novels because, presumably, he hated the French. They’re more like studies of the bad guys rather than studies of the detective, though the third one, which is probably the best detective novel I’ve ever read, manages to combine the two in a very satisfying way. ‘How the Dead Live’ combines philosophical insights, social commentary, a banging plot, an extremely likeable protagonist, and a confusing but compelling setting. I urge you to read it.

Anyway, I bring them up because they’re a big inspiration for me in writing my detective series, along with Red Riding, which is the other best series of detective novels I’ve ever read.

The music

I’ve been making music for fifteen years now, and I’ve no plans of stopping any time soon. Personally, I’ve gone through singer-songwriter acoustic slop, James Blake-inspired electronic dubstep nonsense, Aphex Twin-inspired put-you-to-sleep ambient, Thomas Köner wanky pretentious noise/soundscape, and everything in between. I like all of it, and I like making all of it, and I don’t really do it for anyone but my, though getting a 7” on a trance label would be nice, so if anyone knows of one that might accept my stuff…

My band plays a mix of skate punk, post-hardcore, and contemporary (read: spoken-word) post-punk. A couple of years ago I realised I had a load of rock music I wanted to play, and nobody to play it with, so I turned to Vampyr, which is like Tinder for musicians, found a couple of people - after a couple of false starts - and we’ve been playing together ever since. In 2024, we played nearly a concert every two weeks, which is made more impressive because we only played our first gig in March. This year’s been quieter, but we’ve been recording and having some well-earned holiday breaks. If you’re interested, we’re playing at the B-Side in Berlin on Hallowe’en.

At a bar with some friends of friends a few years ago, someone asked me if I would sell out. I think, honestly, the answer would be yes. I’d sign on to a lucrative contract to make two albums of pop slop if I meant I was then financially set to make basically whatever music I wanted for the rest of time. Obviously the money would have to be right; the whole point would be to do a Scott Walker, where you make some trash for a bit and then suddenly turn into the best experimental artist the far side of Anthony Braxton when you realise you’ve got the funds to do it. That’s the dream, isn’t it?

There’s a certain romance in staying underground, but maybe that’s just what people say when they aren’t successful. My band has a pretty dedicated following of I’d say ten people, who are almost always at our concerts, and that’s a great feeling, and I’m extremely fucking grateful to those people. They aren’t even just there to support us as mates - some of them we didn’t even know before we started playing together - they genuinely like us and our music. And anyway, most of the punk bands who went on to be really influential started playing in small scenes in their local towns. Berlin isn’t a small town, obviously, but honestly, the punk scene here isn’t as big as I expected when I started this band. I guess we need to move to Bristol.

Well, time for dinner, and then I’m off to a concert later. Remember to wash your hands.