Interactive fiction and me, and IFComp 2022 launches

I’ve played and enjoyed traditional parser text adventure games since my first go in December 1980. My dad had borrowed an Apple II over Christmas, and one of the very first things I tried on it was Colossal Cave Adventure. Complete and utter instantaneous love. Oh and for computers too! I was only 8 then, but it’s not surprising I went on to study a computer science degree a decade later.

Growing up in Britain in the 1980s there was a vibrant home based computer coding scene, as youngsters tried to write games to emulate those they could buy, typically on cassette. Not just video games, but many text adventure games were coded. I never released anything commercially then, but was designing games from just a couple of years after that first Apple II try, coding in BASIC. In fact the book I had out on loan most often from Hawick public library was a book about programming text adventure games on the TRS-80 computer.

At university my love affair with text adventures continued. I played and coded in a multiplayer text based LPMUD game. And this was just the time that Graham Nelson was engineering Inform, allowing people to write their own Infocom style text adventures. His game Curses was a joy then. This era also saw the start of the IFComp, the annual competition for text adventure games, or as they were often called then interactive fiction. And this has continued ever since. Interactive fiction has since evolved to include different styles of game, including web based and choice. But remains a joy. I have also enjoyed writing and releasing my own games in Inform 7, as much as my health allows.

Anyway the original main point of this post was to say that the games for this year’s IFComp are out and available to play. Judges need only play and rate a minimum of 5 games for your votes to count. And judging runs through until mid November. 71 interactive fiction games I think this year, a mix of traditional parser text adventure games and web/choice ones. I playtested some of this year’s entries, which I enjoyed immensely. Looking forward to trying some of the others!

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Gather meeting software accessibility concerns re NarraScope 2022 interactive fiction conference

I was hoping to see some of this year’s online NarraScope interactive fiction conference in July. But I’ve just found out that it’s running on Gather this year, a meeting/conference system based largely on a virtual model of a conference area in the computer, top-down old-style graphics with little person avatars etc. Which all sounds fine and dandy, but I’ve known people struggle with it at large events. And for disability reasons I don’t think I could manage it successfully. It can also work very poorly sometimes on mobile devices, and I would be tuning in from bed. Luckily the talks will be recorded for later viewing, speaker permissions allowing. But I’m not signing up to attend this live. I have voiced my concerns about this software to the organisers, but it would be too late to change their plans now. Interactive fiction has a very large number of disabled users, many of whom might struggle to use Gather, for different reasons eg blind or partially sighted, hand control problems, cognitive issues re processing lots of info etc.

Gather meeting software in action

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Post-mortem for my Spring Thing IF parser game “Napier’s Cache” set in 1590s Scotland

In the 1590s my 12xg-grandfather Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig hired mathematician and occult practitioner John “Logarithms” Napier to hunt for hidden treasure in Fast Castle in Berwickshire.

I wrote a text adventure based on this true story, filling in the gaps in the record creatively, and entered it into the Spring Thing 2020 interactive fiction competition.

Today I wrote up some thoughts about the development of the game.

The game is freely available online to play via browser or download.

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Academic writing goals for 2018

Mainly as a prompt for myself, to encourage me to get it all done, I thought I’d blog about some writing projects I want to finish off in the next year.

First up is a rewrite of a conference talk, which I want to submit in print to a new academic journal. It’s almost finished. I just need to tidy up the last few bits. And some sections are time, or more pertinently date, critical. So I need to get on with it. That should be done soon.

Secondly I have a brand new journal paper combining urban history and book history, the topics of my PG Masters and PhD. It needs more work, but I’m really pleased with it as it stands. I think it’s one of the strongest pieces I’ve written, and it’s a topic that probably only I could do, given my combined background. The trickiest bits are sorting out illustrations for two case studies. For the first, a town, I can probably work from a published town plan, if I can pick a suitable one, and get permission to use it. The other case study, a regional case study, is possibly going to need a new map. I’m not good at drawing maps! So I’m still pondering what to do re that. It definitely needs some kind of cartographic illustration, to explain unfamiliar geography to the reader. But if I can crack the mapping issues I ought to be able to submit this journal paper in the first quarter of 2018.

Slightly more straightforward is developing an already accepted manuscript publishing proposal for the Scottish History Society. This concerns a poem from the 17th century, which I have transcribed, and will be published in annotated form. The key work to do is to add numerous annotations and expand the introductory essay. Annotations will be added for people’s names, places, events, anything else needing explaining. This should be largely straightforward, but will be somewhat time consuming, and may hit tricky patches. The introductory essay needs more on the possible provenance of the poem and its mystery writer. I may need to consult an academic specialist on poetry of this period for that. I expect that I can finish this by summer 2018, but have a much longer deadline option available if need be.

I also have a short journal paper in progress, concerning a 16th century poet ancestor of mine, a royal courtier, whose family history as published eg in DNB is very wrong. I thought I might write a note putting on record a corrected version, based on my research. This is in progress, in Scrivener on my iPad, but isn’t urgent to finish. It can wait until all the more important and heftier items are out of the way. So while it might be nice to submit it in 2018, in practice it may be done later. Not least because of how ill I am, with a severely disabling MS-like illness.

I have other academic writing projects in the air, but for most I need to do more research in primary source materials, i.e. documents, first.

As well as the academic writing projects I have two fun recreational things that I hope to submit in 2018. I am writing a number of interactive fiction (IF) or text adventure games in Inform 7. And I may be ready to submit two of them to IF competitions in 2018. One of my games, a 15th century set game about the Border Reivers, is about 80% finished at the moment. I need to add further refinements, and improve interactivity, and it still needs thoroughly playtesting. But that could easily be completed well in advance of the 2018 IFComp, the main annual competition for interactive fiction games that takes place each autumn. The other historical game I’m writing, about mathematician John Napier and a treasure hunt he was employed on for my ancestor Sir Robert Logan of Restalrig, around 1590 or so, is much earlier in development. But I expect I should be able to get an opening portion ready to submit for IntroComp, for the opening sections of games, if that competition runs again in 2018, most likely in the summer.

So those are my writing goals. Submit two journal papers, complete another already accepted publishing piece, and submit two interactive fiction games to competitions in 2018, all going well. Let’s see what happens!

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IF Comp 2017 final thoughts after judging

This year the annual Interactive Fiction competition has been running again, now into its 23rd year. I’ve played and judged the games in every year, and this year was no exception.

A major challenge this year was the sheer number of entries. 79 different games to play. Fortunately judges don’t have to play them all! Just 5 need to be rated for your scores to count towards the final ratings, and there is a month and a half to do this in. I aimed for more, and ultimately managed to judge 40 of the games, so just over half the entrants.

The games are a mix of more traditional parser-based text adventures (like Infocom etc. in the past) and web-based clickable interactive stories. The latter is a fairly recent addition to the interactive fiction scene, but growing in popularity, and fun to play. But parser games are still being written, and were present in sizeable numbers this year.

A wide variety of genres of game were present, ranging from ones set in the real world, through fantasy, sci-fi, horror and even more. There’s a particularly entertaining classification scheme online, which I recommend reading.

The games are also widely varied in terms of length. Some were very short, less than 15 minutes or so. But many were an hour or two, posing challenges for how to pick which games to play in the time available.

Fortunately the IF Comp website provided some help, generating an individual randomised list for each judge, as well as full random each time, and alphabetical. I used my personal random list to start working through the games. I started with the shorter games, quickly playing a dozen or so of these. Then I moved to longer ones. I played a mix of parser and clicky, and generally alternated between these. Over the nearly seven weeks of judging I probably put in about 30 hours of play. But it was spread over many weeks, and many play sessions. The key thing for me was to keep nibbling at the task, week after week.

The scoring scheme we are asked to use is to score between 1 and 10, but each judge can devise their own criteria. My ratings are grouped in pairs, e.g. rubbish; poor, some merit; good; promising; excellent. And for each of those I have 2 votes to choose from e.g. 7 or 8 for promising etc. Each judge uses their own scoring system, all entered as 1-10 in the site.

My votes in this year’s IF Comp

My spread of votes from 1-10

My overall impressions of the competition this year, based on 40 out of 79 games that I played, are generally positive. There was a wide variety of games to play, to suit all tastes, and a lot of creative works, in terms of writing, experiments with user interface, and implementation. Generally the games worked well. Though as a tablet user I found the Quest ones (a mix of parser and clicky interface) lost lots of the vital user interface on my iPad, in particular directions and object listings. But that wasn’t a fault of the entrants, and I worked around it.

I noticed a number of trends this year. There were several stat-based computer role playing games, especially fantasy ones, with randomised combat. Actually there were a lot of fantasy games generally, in particular involving magic. There seemed to be fewer sci-fi games than usual, but that may just be based on those I played. And there was nothing particularly Lovecraftian this year [correction: Measureless to Man, that I didn’t play during the judging period, is Lovecraftian]. Though Chandler Groover’s Eat Me was a dark Gormenghastian horror.

Four games particularly stood out for me, that I want to discuss in some detail. I expect that they will all do well in the final rankings when they are announced in a few days time.

Firstly Buster Hudson’s The Wizard Sniffer. This was a real hoot, a Monty Python esque parser game, with some of the most memorable characters I can remember seeing in IF for a long time (e.g. the clown!). Superb writing throughout combined with complex but flawless coding. Also a game that is very newbie friendly, in terms of a well-implemented in-game hints system. And just ridiculously good fun. I can’t recommend this highly enough.

As a complete contrast in terms of user interface the only other game I scored 10 was Stephen Granade’s Will Not Let Me Go. This was a Twine-based web game, where you clicked on links to move things forward and make choices. The central character has dementia, and it was a devastatingly well-observed piece. One sequence in particular stood out for me, but I won’t say more here, for risk of spoilers. Interestingly the author is a long-time parser IF writer, and former organiser of IF Comp. I don’t know if this is the first Twine game he’s written, trying a very different form of IF. But it is superbly done.

Another web-based game I particularly liked was Liza Daly’s Harmonia. In this one you are a teaching assistant at a university, and uncover strange goings on. It is a gorgeous design: presented as if you uncover scraps of information, and are scribbling your own notes on the text. The illustrations are also great. My one quibble, and it was a big one, is that it didn’t feel quite interactive enough for me. In particular I didn’t feel as though I had as much agency as a player as I need to feel properly invested in an interactive experience, and always use as one of my essential judging criteria in IF Comp. But in every other respect it was superb.

The fourth game that I want to highlight is Victor Ojuel’s 1958: Dancing With Fear. Another parser game, this was a heady mix of 50s Caribbean setting, plots and intrigue, and, yes, dancing! I loved the writing here, written in an episodic way, and thoroughly immersive. However there were areas where it needed more polish, or slips that should be picked up on before release. A little more time developing may have made the difference for me between scoring 9 and 10. But another strong game from an author who is now a regular IF Comp participant.

Against these good examples there were some bad things that stood out. I’m not going to name specific games here, but do want to comment on recurring issues that I encountered.

I’ve already mentioned the key issue of interactivity. A small number of the web-based clicky games were too much like “next”, “next” etc. without me making any significant choices. I also didn’t like games that were under implemented, e.g. those with objects mentioned in room descriptions not coded, or too sparse a sense of world building. This leads to a poor experience for the player. More playtesting should have helped correct these issues. I really did feel that quite a lot of games were under tested. More playtesting would also have identified the large number of typos that slipped through in some games. I certainly felt that some games were overly rushed, and a little bit more time, and particularly in testing, would have been beneficial.

But generally it was a good crop of games that I enjoyed playing. I’m also keen to play others that I didn’t get to, like The Owl Consults – I expect from other reviews that it will rate highly in the final rankings announced in a few days.

Playing the competition games was also inspiring for me as someone writing my own Inform 7 games. There were obviously lessons for what to avoid e.g. implement scenery properly, make sure you test enough, and prioritise player agency. But the competition also gave me more positive ideas, in particular ways to incorporate non player characters more, and how a limited set of locations can be used very effectively. I was also encouraged by games successfully employing a number of separate scenes, because that’s the approach I’m taking in a couple of the games I’m writing now. And as someone who may enter a game into a future competition it’s great to see what a dynamic context the IF Comp is again, with a real buzz on social media and the intfiction forum.

In closing, IF Comp is great, yet again! Huge thanks to all the authors, playtesters, judges, and not least the organisers. I very much enjoyed taking part as a judge. Having more games than usual is a good thing, even if most people can’t play them all. And I’m still hugely impressed by the variety of games present, e.g. in genre, user interface and length. Thank you!

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A year in recap: 2013

Just before the old year ends and a new one begins I thought I’d do a recap on how things have gone for me in the last year, particularly academically.

My honorary research fellowship was renewed again. This is from History in the School of Humanities at the University of Dundee. After I finished my PhD in 2010 I asked if I could get an honorary fellowship, to help me continue to access vital resources like electronic journals, which are typically only available to current staff and students of universities subscribing to them. This is particularly important as more and more university libraries switch from subscribing to print copies to e-journals, which, generally, are restricted in who can use them. I’m a life member of one local university library, and have another one nearby, but neither opens up their e-journals to people who aren’t staff or students. So this was important to allow me to keep up to speed with current research and new developments. And the fellowship has been renewed every year since. It’s also nice that when I give a conference paper or publish a new academic journal paper it provides some kudos to the department which has supported me so well.

Over the year I’ve submitted more journal papers. I learned early in January that another paper had been accepted. It’s derived from part of my PhD thesis, with new additional material, and will be published in Library & Information History in 2014. Another prize-winning paper is due to be published at some point in the Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society. And I was asked to do my first academic book review, for the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, and it was published in November 2013. Other papers are with editors, or at various stages of development. And I was pleased to see two of my past academic papers became freely available online, under open access rules.

I took part in four academic conferences this year. The first was a conference for archivists, where I gave a talk about my experiences as a disabled user of archives. This was held locally, in a hotel in Dundee, so was easy for me to get to, but I was very weak from the neurological disease that day, and it was something of a struggle. But I wanted to present this important view, and was glad to make it. I blogged about both my time there, and the topic I was talking about.

In the summer I attended one day of a conference about the Middle Ages in the Modern World. This was at St Andrews, my former university, actually very near to where I was once a science undergraduate and postgraduate student. This was much fun. Again my husband was with me on the day, to help me manage everything in my wheelchair, and I blogged about my time there.

The third conference was that of the Economic and Social History Society of Scotland. Their autumn conference, in September, was held in Inverness, and focused on the topic of Rural Scotland. I gave a talk about my postgraduate Masters dissertation research examining Melrose regality court records (local court records for Melrose and the surrounding area) in the late 17th century. I am currently looking to publish this as an academic paper, and got very good feedback and had a very rewarding time there.

The fourth conference was held in late October to celebrate the work of my PhD supervisor who died a month earlier. It had been planned long before he died, and was a conference of mixed emotions, but ultimately positive.

I also had another flying visit to the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August. Not academic at all, but a wonderful celebration of books and reading, and I was very glad to be able to go again.

In November I took part in Academic Writing Month again. My goals were more modest this time: resubmit a revised journal paper (done), and submit a paper to the SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) 2014 conference in Antwerp (also done). Whether my paper for SHARP is accepted or not I will be there. I’m also planning on going in 2014 to a book history conference at St Andrews in the summer, and will be flying down to London to attend the Worldcon World sci-fi/fantasy/etc. convention at the Docklands.

Another major interest of mine is genealogy. I run a Cavers one-name study, researching all families with this surname, particularly before 1900. Developments on this in 2013 included me starting a new Y-DNA study to use DNA to look for connections between different Cavers lines. I also gave a talk about my Cavers one-name study at a Guild of One-Name Studies regional meeting at Perth. A version of this is online, with PowerPoint slides and my audio delivery.

I also run two one-place studies, where I research two parishes in the past. Both of these have a particular focus, for practical reasons, before 1820. The two parishes are Coldingham in Berwickshire, and Melrose in Roxburghshire, both Scottish Borders parishes with family connections for me. I continue to transcribe and develop online resources for these studies, and in 2013 this included adding a person index of about 9000 names for Melrose court participants between 1657 and 1676. Likewise for Coldingham I put online a list of 19th century prisoners from the parish.

I’m a roleplayer, and play Call of Cthulhu online at Play@YSDC. This works well for my neurological disease, meaning I can play as and when I’m able to. It also means I get to play with people around the world. In 2013 I started a new game in our ongoing campaign of Doctor Who / Call of Cthulhu crossover games. And I also started a game set on the Bass Rock, hopefully the first of many games (if our characters survive!) set in Scotland. Sadly I also dropped out of a game for the very first time – it was proving too unreliable in terms of keeping going, with long periods of inactivity by the keeper which I couldn’t keep up with – but I hope that won’t happen again for a long time.

Continuing the roleplaying theme I’ve been writing more of a series of crossover history/roleplaying articles, which I plan to compile into a book, probably in digital format. This is slow-going, but I hope to make more progress in 2014. Likewise I have been continuing to develop my very long-standing interactive fiction (text adventure) work in progress – a whodunnit set in Hermitage Castle in the Scottish Borders, about 500 years ago. Again another thing to work on in 2014.

My neurological disease continues to be a problem, but is being a bit better behaved at the moment, and may have gone into remission or need less daily chemotherapy and steroids to control it. I’m still left with the legacy of brain damage from the past, and wide-ranging disability that this causes. But I hope for a bit of a break from too toxic a cocktail of daily drugs. And maybe I will be able to get more done in 2014 than I have for a number of years. It may be just a temporary respite, but I want to make the most of it.

Anyway I’m looking forward to 2014 in an optimistic manner. Hopefully it will be as productive and rewarding as 2013 was.

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Looking back on #AcWriMo 2013

It’s the last day of the month now, and my Academic Writing Month of 2013 is drawing to a close. I thought I’d reflect here on how it’s gone, and lessons I’m taking from it for the future.

This year I had fairly modest goals. Last year I had more goals, but this year I had two main ones: finish revising an academic journal paper that’s been lingering since the summer, and write and submit a conference paper proposal (CFP deadline 30th November 2013) for a book history conference next year. Although they were just two goals, they were big ones. The journal paper was about 10,000 words long, and needed quite significant revisions before resubmission, and that couldn’t be done in a hurry. Equally the conference paper proposal was slightly outside my comfort zone, so I needed to familiarise myself with existing research and writings, before selling my pitch.

I’m pleased to say that both goals were achieved. The conference paper proposal was submitted mid month, and the revised journal paper resubmitted towards the end of the month. I started tackling both of them as the month started, and nibbled away at them, working steadily, as and when I could, until both were finished. So that was really good, and a big result of AcWriMo for me.

Another goal that I added part way through the month was related to my Melrose one-place study, and this was to put a person index, about 9000 persons (names, occupations, addresses, any relatives recorded) who were involved with the Melrose regality (local) court between 1657 and 1676. Although this was primarily a genealogical index it arose from my MPhil dissertation research a decade ago. Again I’m pleased to say this was done, and I blogged about it here.

More minor goals included judging the IF Comp games this year (done, at least 10 of them played, judged and rated), and to move my own text adventure writing project onwards (done: lots of player interaction added and coded up). I also wanted to move on my urban history research, and immediately after I resubmitted my journal paper I started planning a new one, that develops considerably on just a couple of sentences in my PhD thesis, combining book history and urban history in rather a nice mixture. It’s early days, but I will be able to take this forward in the coming month or two.

One thing I didn’t manage was to write any more of my roleplaying / history crossover articles which I am building into a book. But that’s ok, this month was primarily for academic writing projects, and I can tackle that next month. In December I will also be doing another piece of less formal writing: analysing and reviewing the Sapphire & Steel annual for my third article for an upcoming fanzine about the series. Fun.

So overall it’s been a very successful month for me. Although I set myself slightly more modest goals than last year, at least in terms of number and quantity, they were individually ambitious and time consuming, and it’s a big achievement to have managed all the big ones. This helped me finish one project that had been hanging around for too long, finish another that was urgently time critical, and set myself up for the next research project and journal paper I’m working on. And starting working on the AcWriMo projects from the beginning of the month, and blogging my progress week by week, got things done. I never spent a huge amount of time in the week on any one project, but kept working steadily at it, and that way progress was made, and things finished.

All going well I definitely intend to take part in AcWriMo 2014. Looking forward to it. In the meantime I hope to continue the momentum I have built from this year.

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Progress report on #AcWriMo 2013 week 3

Checking in after another week of the month, and really pleased with progress in the last 7 days.

Conference paper proposal for the SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) 2014 conference in Antwerp has been finished and submitted online. Was really easy to do. They even asked for my Twitter handle in the submission process! My proposed talk is titled “Fanzines and British TV series Doctor Who, and their changing relationship over nearly 50 years”. I’ll find out by mid February if they’ve accepted my proposal, but I’m going whatever.

And I’ve almost finished my other big goal, revising and resubmitting an academic journal paper this month. I finished scribbling my many changes to the text a few days ago, and last night spent a very productive hour typing them into the Word document. When I originally submitted the paper it was 9999 words long – yes the journal did allow 10000! And I’m amazed that even with all my additions and clarifications the new version isn’t much over 9900 words. Though I did hack out quite a bit of text in one section, including a lengthy table the anonymous reviewer thought was superfluous. I’ll easily be able to finish and resubmit this paper by the end of November, which is superb.

IF Comp also finished in the last 7 days. In the end I played and judged 10 games out of the 35 total, which given my other time constraints I’m quite pleased about. And I now have all the other entrants, including the eventual winner, to look forward to playing more slowly.

I also resumed writing my own interactive fiction game. It’s a whodunnit / mystery, set in a Scottish Borders castle circa 1500. Much of the game involves talking to other characters, to try to figure out the clues. The other night I filled out more of the Inform 7 conversation tables for this, which is great progress, that I’m really pleased with.

So good progress. Alongside finishing my journal paper revisions in the next 7 days I’d like to do more urban history research / thinking, and also roleplaying / history crossover articles for my book in progress. Will see what happens!

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Progress report on #AcWriMo 2013 week 2

Another seven days down, and checking in once more on progress so far.

I’m really pleased with how the week has gone, though initially I moved away from the two main goals. For the conference paper proposal I was still waiting for some more academic textbooks on the subject to arrive, some bought, some borrowed from university libraries. They’re now all here, in house, so I’m going to have a good look through them over the coming week, and look at producing my final paper proposal, tweaking the first draft I produced earlier this month.

I also put the journal paper revising a little to one side, to give me more brain time to ruminate over things, before tackling it properly. I’d annotated the first submission PDF on my iPad, and printed that out 2-up with a blank side on the back for scribbling new versions / revisions. And I’ve been carrying that printout about with me, in an envelope in my bag, ever since. So when husband and I found ourselves in the Old Union Coffee Shop at the University of St Andrews yesterday, I was able to spend a good few minutes, with cup of tea on one side, working through my revisions.

I have 13 items on the revisions todo list. There are now just 2 left to do. In the last few minutes, sitting up with my printouts and a pen, I worked on the 4 hardest items that I’d been putting off until I’d figured out how to tackle them. Once I got my brain into gear it was really easy, and I wrote out new text for the relevant parts of the paper very quickly. I should definitely be able to finish this in the next week or two, and certainly resubmit the paper in November. Yay!

Another thing I’ve been doing this week is putting up a person index to participants in court cases in the Melrose area of the Scottish Borders between 1657 and 1676. This is a massive index, of nearly 9000 names, including often occupations, addresses, and names of relatives. I compiled this in the process of building a database of the local court records for this area. And I’d been meaning to put the index online for other genealogists and local historians to use. It’s now online, so massive I had to split the web pages for the name index into three sections, and I blogged about it here.

I’ve also been doing more IF Comp judging. Still not as much as I’d like, and judging closes tomorrow. But I’ve now raised the number of games I’ve judged and rated from 5 to 9, which is quite an improvement. Still a bit of a drop in the ocean out of 35 games total, but I’m happy. I may manage another couple between now and tomorrow night.

Something else that’s been good this week is that two of my old academic journal papers have gone freely online, under green open access rules. Green open access is very rare in humanities, so I was very pleased to get confirmation from Edinburgh University Press that I could put the final as-published PDFs of both papers in my personal website. I blogged about this. It also gave me a bit of a boost while I’m preparing more journal papers for submission, not least that one I’m currently revising.

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Progress report on #AcWriMo 2013 week 1

Well it’s a week in, and as is normal with Academic Writing Month I’m reflecting on how things have gone so far.

It’s been a great start. Neither main goal is fully achieved yet, but both are well on the way. The conference paper proposal has a first draft written, which came in at almost perfect length even before tweaking/editing. I need to check a few more academic books, and give it a couple of weeks distance for final editing, but I should definitely have a proposal ready in time. I still have to decide whether to submit it, but that’s a separate decision. Main thing is I can if I want to.

My other main goal was to revise and resubmit a journal paper. I’d been quite ill and weak for several months after getting the response from the editors, which caused a delay. But it also helped because the reviewer’s comments were quite harsh, and a bit of distance helps deal with that positively! But a few weeks ago I turned the editors’ requests and the reviewer’s critique into a to-do list of improvements to be getting on with, and I made a proper start on that last night. There were 13 items on my to-do list, and I completed 6 of them in about an hour. The tweaks are all quite surgical, not too lengthy (which is good, because I’d need to cut other words if I add any more), but needed that bit of distance and focus. And Academic Writing Month has encouraged me to finally bring this to completion. I’ll be working on the remaining items over the coming week or so, but am confident I will have it ready to resubmit this month.

On the downside I haven’t done much more IF Comp judging. I have reached the 5 game threshold, i.e. 5 games judged and rated, which means that my votes will count towards the final ranking. But with over 30 games entered in the competition that’s only a very small minority of games judged, and I would like to judge more. The deadline for judging and voting is 15th November, but I am confident, given how my other goals are going, that I should manage some more.

No more work yet on my own text adventure game, but I finished reading After Flodden, which gave me lots of ideas. And in my urban history research I’ve already started looking through and assessing the late 18th century Scottish shop tax lists, to see which would be suitable for further more detailed analysis. So that is a good start in itself.

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