Hello. C J here. First of all, happy Canada Day! I’m staying indoors to stay cool but I’ll maybe make something fun for dinner. Here are my plans going into the next month. Also it’s my birthday on the Summer Solstice later so that should be fun.
Heart of Glass
My light romance novel Heart of Glass has taken on a life of its own that I didn’t expect. Find the free chapters as they are released in the Novels download link. The first of these, and there will be more, started with an idea to show what my Ascala main characters do on their vacation time. It’s evolved into a process of learning about my own life that I didn’t expect. Ascala is the perfect location in the Legend Setting to explore modern day life even if I didn’t do that on purpose. I’ll get back to writing it when I have the plans laid out for the next chapter. I’m aiming for 10-12 chapters per book.
The second one has another learning based premise as one of the main character team’s friends decides to open a small college in their house. The education is between adults and he offers the main team a free course to try out the business model. They end up meeting people, dating and learning more than they expected from it. I’m still deciding what the course will be about.
This all brings up an unexpected problem for my other game lines. The games, in particular Quantum, are designed to help build stories in the Legend Setting. I want these story concepts for the novels on cards in Quantum but they’re too broad, and far too modular, to fit on a card or even a set of 10. This is another version of the game design task I have designing the social life cobalt quests for Dragon Engine, my main video game project.
Quantum Starter Set
I’m working on doing the character art and item images for the Quantum Starter Set. This is going well and after it’s done the process of making the game will speed up rapidly. Next is the food and real world climate science themed Expansion Lands of Creation. Next after that is the Expansion Roads to the Spirit World. Both will feature Food of the World cards with recipes on them.
GDevelop
I’m using GDevelop these days to design my video games. I’m working on a practice project or two before I get to doing Dragon Engine. I’ve picked the name and theme of my first of these and I’ll announce both later when I have a sample. It will be for Android to start off and will no matter what be a story based open world fantasy hack and slash.
Roads to the Spirit World
Okay, so this post was supposed to have the previous three points in it. I’m adding a fourth because one of the ideas I’ve been working with for a card mechanic worked so well I decided to document it here early. This idea was scheduled for Roads to the Spirit World. I’ll try to explain what it is because I don’t really have a grasp of it yet.
Meditation is being taken up by modern day culture as a healthy spiritual and health practice. This is good. Very good. I got into meditation when I was 12 and I’ve been waiting for you all to catch up but whatever. It’s good for you. There are some more refined versions of meditation that various faiths and internet cultures have that do additional cool things. Regardless of which version of meditation is being used it involves a calmer brain state that is measurable in brainwaves.
One of these uses is the New Age concept of Pathworking. This system involves reading or listening to a script that takes the user on a journey to a location in pursuit of knowledge or healing from an event. It’s a very healthy and well tested technique. The thing is most people find things on their journey that aren’t in the script and these things match up with other people they haven’t met who use different but similar scripts. Whatever Atlantis is, it’s somewhere to be found within the journeys that exist through Pathworking. I have yet to meet Atlantis.
I’ve done this or I wouldn’t be documenting it here. There are skilled practitioners of this system who can see visually and hear verbally the locations they visit. This was my goal for the last few days of meditation and visualization I’ve been doing. Real sight and hearing of an imagined landscape. I figured it would be a great way of meeting one of my characters and maybe going on a date. It’s not the traditional use for the practice but I’m sure it’s respectful to the New Age faith because it involves both knowledge and the expression of feelings of affection toward another.
Then the thing worked. I’m still figuring out how. I’ve been working on this for about 6 years now. There’s a gap between waking and sleeping that is easily found through meditation. I have several methods I’ve researched and memorized about how to get there. Typically is involves sleep paralysis. I also have a technique to break sleep paralysis in case I need it. The lungs never stop breathing and altering their rhythm on purpose will tell the brain that the soul it likes is awake and probably wants food for the brain to eat.
I’ve been making steady and slow progress with the intention of putting Pathworking in Roads to the Spirit World. Pathworking was its theme. Now the thing got real on me. The trick? Say the name of a chapter of a novel you have read and liked. Then I don’t know what happens but it’s a lot more vivid than imagination. The other trick is to keep yourself in the story by speaking to the other characters there frequently. Me and Benjamin Everwander had a nice chat on a couch. Dear All, what? Cool. More later. I need to take the day off typing at this point so I’ll go contemplate Canada Day food.
I’m happy about this, by the way.
C J Mcpherson
Hello. C J here. I read a lot of cookbooks. This is done mostly for fun. I’m currently reading a short but really interesting book about traditional Chinese cooking. The book was written by an Indian author who has clearly researched Chinese food very well but some of the translations of recipes or concepts get a bit strange. I’m currently done the soups and starters section and am onto the section labelled ‘food that is saucy.’ Cool? Is it also savvy? There’s a surprisingly large amount of ketchup in the recipes. No I don’t think I want a recipe for hot and sour soup that is thickened ketchup water with vinegar and a bit of cabbage. No I also don’t want to take a slice of white wonderbread, roll it into a tube, stuff it with canned corn, deep fry it and then top it with sesame seeds. What in God’s name do they eat in China? And why is it specifically an image of white wonderbread? China? Are you okay? I managed to take out the vinegar, water and corn starch that makes up most of the h...
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