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A small update

19-6-2017 17:15

Lately I’ve been thinking about the way my website is set up: the separate islands with clearly defined projects that, if they aren’t mine, I have at least made a significant creative contribution to. So far, it has worked nicely as a showcase of my work, but I do sometimes run into its limitations. Because what do I do with work that I would like to show but that, despite my contribution, isn’t “mine”, such as Peter Varg’s books (yes, plural soon) that I did the editing for? And projects that don’t have a clear end result, like my upcoming internship?

I have some ideas, but I won’t get much further than thinking about it for the time being. After all, doing all those things will always come first. So for now I will stick to an update of what I’ve done in the past month and what is coming up.

Editing

In my previous news post I already mentioned Peter Varg’s De Jaguarkrijger, for which I fixed the last mistakes in the manuscript and helped to finetune some last details. For Peter’s newest writing project, which I will tell more about when it gets nearer to publication, I’ve worked with him more thoroughly from the beginning of the editing process. It’s great to be able, with a critical eye and some advice, to help an author make his stories even better in his own opinion as well as mine.

Speaking of writing advice: next week I’m starting an internship with the big Dutch writing website Schrijven Online! Not related to any school (there’s no internship included with my course at the Schrijversacademie), but to my own objective of getting acquainted with the world of editors and publishers.

Stories

Of course I’m still writing, too. I’ve continued work on rewriting Thaoryn, and have finished more than 25.000 words in the new version, more than a quarter of the total I had written before. Now the question arises: continue rewriting, or pick up the story where I left off and see how I can get to the end of the book?

Furthermore, I wrote a short story for a contest in a fantasy authors’ group on Facebook, that ended up ranking exactly in the middle of the 7 submitted stories. More important than the votes was the feedback from other participants and group members, and I plan to use that to improve the story. Any impatient people that want to read it now (and can read Dutch) can find it here.

Escape room

Does that mean writing and editing is all I’m doing? No: yesterday I was a host for Bijlmerbajes Ontgrendeld (“Bijlmer Gaol Unlocked”), the escape room in the former Amsterdam prison, and it looks like it won’t be the last time I welcomed players, explained the game’s rules, operated cameras and doors, and watched the players attempt to escape. My experience with LARPs like Xenophobia is very useful, although escape rooms turn out to have some challenges of their own as well.

Website

Even though there’s no time yet for large additions, sometimes I run into something small on my website that I can fix in a moment between other work. Because I want to put it somewhere, here is a list of recent improvements:

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