I’m only a few hundred words away from completing the first draft of my current project, so my fear of finishing stuff has kicked in and I spent a lot of yesterday letting myself get distracted by stuff.

But it was good stuff, so I want to share it with you. Some of you will thank me, most of you will curse me.

First up is TV Tropes, a wiki dedicated to storytelling tricks and recurring themes, replete with examples not just from the telly but also from loads of other media. It’s dangerous, it sucks you in, with every page having multiple links you just have to follow deeper down the rabbit hole. I could claim that it was research, as there’s a page on slasher films, but I’d be lying. (And I went off to find that link 20 minutes ago and got sidetracked by multiple links.)

The other big distraction was Gratuitous Space Battles. GSB is a spacefleet building and fighting game. You design ships, form fleets based upon resource points and then go and do battle. Winning battles gets you rewards which you can trade in for more exotic and powerful weaponry. Unlike other Real Time Strategy games, once you’ve started a battle you can’t give any orders. You define your fleet’s tactics, down to the level of individual ships (or flights of fighters), and arrange their starting positions then hope you’ve got it right.

I recently added the Galactic Conquest, which makes the battles a little less gratuitous by giving you a whole galaxy to conquer and fleets and finances to manage. It also adds the ability to issue one order- Retreat- mid battle. I’m not a great tactician, by any means, I follow a more realistic battle plan- build the biggest fleet possible and hope it’s large enough to kick the opposition’s arse. It doesn’t work all the time, but it’s a good place to start.

Now, I must go and finish my novella.

Or maybe just one little battle……..