Thinking, reading, thinking, reading.

Earlier today I sent off what will hopefully be the final take for the oddball gig I've been doing for the last few weeks. It was adding an English spin to a babelfish translation of a french videogame, which was much more work than I dreamed of and I wish I'd quoted at least twice as much for it. But still - a new "thing", which is what really attracted me to the gig and I'm hardly out of pocket. The actual in-game text conversion was mostly just making sure that they were in something approaching English, though I couldn't help but tart up some of the characters. The most creativity was put into the actual spoken word stuff, which I had to turn around ridiculously quickly mid-last month. While still a rewrite thing - meaning that I had to keep vaguely within the template the developers had laid down, leading to some gags that I really wouldn't have gone for - there's a lot more that may be visibly recognisable as a Gillenism. Or stolen Rossigags in a couple of cases.

Actually, I notice that the English demo came out last week. You can download it from all over the place, but I'll plug Eurogamer because I love them so. The game's called Chaos League, it's about orcs and goblins bashing the living shit out of each other while playing a pseudo-American Football and should be out in July at some point. Or so I understand anyway.

Dialogue is mine, but the text-prompts are still the direct conversions. Still: should be enough to have a decent look at the game.

Download, play, and tell me what you think.

But that's not really what I'm thinking or reading about.

Bristol prompts all manner of self-analysis (I just wrote "Self-analysiation", which doesn't bode well for continuing standards of literacy in this post), as it neatly marks another twelve months in my comics creative life - I hammered out my first rough script for HIT 1 (or plain HIT as it was known then) upon arriving home from a drunken Bristol where Jim and I just hung at the bar, talked to virtually no-one and glared sinisterly, plotting. What we didn't really know, but definitely some scheme in mind.

Unlike most of my peers, I entirely failed to get any decent networking done, because I'm rubbish, distractable, oddly reticent to approach people, even more rubbish and often find myself getting enthralled by just going somewhere and thinking really hard about something. Being around comics sharpens up your thinking. Sitting in a room for an hour and a half watching people publically humiliate themselves with remedial pitches of comic ideas has a way of focusing your mind on story structure and the actual pitching process. Seeing people make mistakes with such complete lack of ellegance has a way of underline more common errors people make. For example, seeing someone try and sell a story that was essentially Toy Story meets American Tabloid (without ever putting it in a way even that entertaining), without dealing with any of the subtext and purely describing a litany of child-abuse, rape, murder, suicide, incest and every other thing on the big list of obvious bad things... well, just made me hugely angry at such fucking lazy writing. I killed a little baby. Don't you feel bad now?

So I went home, read an e-mail from Charity and bounced one back agreeing entirely and making a major alteration to the ever-growing synopsis for this Busted Wonder thing we're working on - the lazy, melodramatic bit which was only included for the Nick Cave part of me that likes to see pretty girls lying dead on hills.

Which leads me back to the thinking and the readings. Wandered through Midsummer Night's Dream (Virtually nothing useful, to be honest) and Christabel (Pretty much the whole thing useful, to be honest) and discovered that pretty much everyone on the planet has a theory about Fairies. Have my Dictionary of Fairies - Cheers for the heads up, Nick - which I'd idly diving into. And I touch the Brewer's for luck whenever I wander into the bathroom.

Not true that one, but myths have to start somewhere, so it may as well be here.

So yes: Bristol alternated between a pulsing depression and moments of quiet optimism.

For the comics stuff, clearly. The V-roadshow was as entertaining as ever.