what I’m testing

Things I’m trying out right now — tools, workflows, and habits. Some will stick, most won’t. This note exists so I stop pretending the failed ones never happened.

in the writing§

• Drafting Salsabilbooks
  Salsabil: The Blue Gold novel — in progress In a near-future Arabian desert, fresh water has become the most valuable commodity on earth. A single liter sells for more than gold, guarded by the powerful and out of reach of everyone else. A water-factory janitor, locked alone in a sealed motel room, … scene-first, with no outline until the third pass.
• Simplified reader editionsBuilding the reader editions
  Started building the simplified reader editions of the manuscripts. Rewriting your own book in short sentences is a good way to find out which of your sentences were doing work and which were just standing there. as a test of whether a sentence was ever doing work.

in the studio§

• Karkabakarkaba
  Karkaba is a player-versus-player mobile game built in Arabic, for Arabic players — not translated into it after the fact. As far as I can tell, it’s the first of its kind. why Most games that reach the region arrive already finished, with Arabic bolted on at the end. The jokes don’t land, the rhyth…’s economy model — testing a shop with no timers at all.
• Shooting stills on one lens for a month, to see what the constraint does.

in the day§

• Publishing notes before they’re finished, on purpose.
• One long writing block in the morning instead of three scattered ones.

Results, when there are any, end up in scribblesscribbles
Unpolished by definition — most of these won’t survive to a final draft, and that’s the point of showing them. A fragment lives here — a line from the current draft that I’m still turning over. Another slot, for whichever sentence is currently refusing to behave. A line that arrived without a home y… or notesnotes
Click a title to open it as a new column. Playtesting Karkaba · A pass on Elixir 181 · Building the reader editions · Karkaba’s loop finally clicks · Reading about water rights Older notes archived..