While I can sound out words in Cyrillic printing, I never learned how to read or write Cyrillic cursive. I honestly didn’t really want to – printing seemed good enough for me. My dad and I wrote letters back and forth to each other in printing, and the books I’ve encountered have generally been printed.
Though I do admit, I have seen a few places with stylized Cyrillic scripts which I wasn’t really able to read. Most notably, my aunt sent me a card with handwritten cursive. I have an old Ukrainian reader that has the printed Cyrillic alphabet next to the cursive one, so I was able to figure the letters out from that. Luckily the message was short so it wasn’t very hard to do.
But a little while ago, I got myself a book on learning Ukrainian, which, right from the beginning, stresses learning cursive. I still wasn’t really interested (and honestly haven’t done much work with that book yet), but I started wondering if maybe I should learn cursive? Then my mom gave me a book of my dad’s the other day with a handwritten Ukrainian note in the front. And for the first time, I found myself actually wanting to be able to read cursive. I want to know who the note is from and what it says. And who knows what other messages like this we might stumble on?
So the other day, I went looking for some books on learning Ukrainian cursive. I was going to buy a book from Ukrainian Lessons Podcast, but unfortunately they recently changed their pricing to Euros, so the book is expensive for people in Canada (their pricing used to be in USD, which was also expensive here, but less so than Euros). Instead I went looking on Amazon and found a couple of books. They’re geared a little more for kids, but I thought they would be helpful all the same. After they arrived, I flipped through them, and decided I’m going to work my way first through chatty parrot’s Ukrainian Handwriting Workbook (if you’re wondering, it’s the book in the picture that says says Ukrainian Handwriting Worksheets on the cover). I’ve gotten myself a few other chatty parrot books (remember these?) and they’re really cute. This one seems more basic than Anna Young’s Ukrainian Handwriting Workbook (that’s the book with the bee on the cover), so I’ll work my way through that one next. 🙂
Please note: the links to the books in this blog post are for information purposes only; they are not affiliate links.
I started out this month on a pretty strong reading kick. Unfortunately I got bogged down with some nonfiction books that I haven’t actually finished yet. Though I have now started a fiction book too, which is making me feel better about my reading.
I honestly think that reading fiction is a key to my well-being and I need to remember to make a point of including some all the time. 😉
Nonfiction
The Ink That Bleeds: How to Play Immersive Journaling Games by Paul Czege (Zine)
Treat Ideas Like Cats and Other Creative Quotes to Inspire Creative People edited by Zachary Petit
Fiction
A Sky of Paper Stars by Susie Yi (graphic novel)
A Sky of Paper Stars hit me really hard when I read it. I didn’t realize what it was about – a young girl who feels too Korean to fit in with her friends goes back to Korea but feels to American for her family there. The issue was she was back in Korea because of a death in the family; that hit me hard while reading it. It was a good story, but I wasn’t ready for it. 😦
So how’s your month been, reading-wise? Have you read anything good? Or difficult? Let me know in the comments! 🙂
Now that my first journaling game, Searching for the Little Camera, is finished and available to play on itch.io, I wanted to write a postmortem for it.
What Went Right:
Finding the Carta system. It was very much serendipity that I encountered the Carta system a mere few days before starting work on Searching for the Little Camera. I had never really encountered journaling games before Dragon Dowser, and it was lucky that I noticed the information on the system while reading through the manual. I was curious and downloaded the Carta SRD toolkit, and ended up reading it the night I started developing the game. It’s a very easy system to use, and worked beautifully for the type of game I needed Searching for the Little Camera to be.
The theme of the game. The whole premise of the game, searching for a camera (or other object) works incredibly well with the Carta system. Also, because of my headspace and what has happened over the last six months, I was able to come up with the prompts for the deck of cards incredibly quickly: I think I had a working draft of the game within two or three days. And a lot of that was thanks to what has happened: I used both the good and the bad from the last few months, from people bringing gift cards and food to people saying some really insensitive things, to really flesh out the prompts, giving a glimpse of what the early struggle with grief is like (a friend of mine who playtested Searching for the Little Camera told me: “It’s a good window into that period when you first lose someone,” so I hope I succeeded in giving that glimpse for people who have not encountered such loss themselves).
Building the game. I managed to build the entire game from idea to release in about two and a half weeks. Honestly, everything just came together so well both in my head and translating it onto paper. I especially found it so surprising since I haven’t been working on much over the last few years. It felt good to be working on something, and even better to have it finished already, as many of my projects take a much longer time than this to complete! I am now actively excited to figure out “what’s next.” 🙂
What Went Wrong:
Mapping prompts to cards. While I was able to come up with prompts for the entire deck of cards easily, they didn’t map well onto the traditional suits. I was careful to have 12 people events, so they mapped alright onto the face cards. But the generic “you search a space” cards didn’t map to either one suit, or to the first x cards of each suit. It took some finagling to make everything fit. If I design another game with Carta in the future (which I would like to do!), I will be more cognizant of this, and try to create a better fit for the card deck as a whole.
Finding pictures for the game. I struggled a lot with what kind of visuals I wanted to include with the game. I knew I needed a title card (and title page), so first I struggled with what I wanted that to look like. I had the idea of commissioning art drawn kind of like Where’s Waldo books for the title page, but that was more expensive than I could afford. I didn’t think I could use pictures with the brand names of cameras, so I didn’t want to go and shoot my own pictures. I didn’t want to include pictures of my dad because ultimately that felt too personal and I was trying to make the game more open for other people. So in the end I decided to go hunting for some pictures through sites like Pixabay and Unsplash. I found some pictures I was really happy with, so it all worked out in the end.
Playtesting.Searching for the Little Camera is a journaling game. So ideally I should have tried it out as such. But because of the subject matter, I really didn’t want to. I ended up brute forcing the mechanics (I played game after game recording the change in stamina and testing out certain cards), which was fine for checking that part of the game. But I never actually played Searching for the Little Camera the way it was meant to be played. I did have some friends step up and give it a try, which was a great help. But the next time I design a journaling game, I’ll hopefully be in a better headspace (and it will be of a less personal matter) so I can give the game the proper testing it deserves.
Yesterday, I published my first journaling game! I called it Searching for the Little Camera, in honour of our quite literal search for one of my dad’s cameras after he passed. We knew he wanted to be inurned with a little Leica camera, but after he unexpectedly passed, we had a heck of a time finding it! We did, thankfully, find it eventually. Those events, along with other things that happened over the first few weeks and months after he passed, became the basis of Searching for the Little Camera.
All told, the game took about two and a half weeks from when I originally started working on it to publishing it on itch.io.
If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find it here on itch.io! I’ve made it free to download as I am hoping it will help other people in processing their grief as well.
This month I’m really excited – I finally finished the French novel I’ve been reading with my French tutor, Bonjour Tristesse! We started it over the summer and were reading one chapter a week (but we didn’t read it every week), so the book took some time to get through. I originally picked Bonjour Tristesse up because it was on a list of good books for people learning French. It ended up a much more difficult read than I expected – there were things that my French tutor wasn’t sure about. I was really glad I read it with her though, as she gave me a lot of insight into things I would have completely missed on my own.
So here’s the list of everything I read this month:
Nonfiction
Fiction
As Old as Time: a Twisted Tale by Liz Braswell
Leopard’s Hunt by Christine Feehan
Spider-man: Animals Assemble by Mike Maihack (graphic novel)
Spider-man: Quantum Quest by Mike Maihack (graphic novel)
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Dungeon of Dread by Rose Estes (game book/choose your own adventure)
And 4 Walleye magazines (pictured).
I read Dungeon of Dread because I have some old game books I wanted to check out. Unfortunately it’s more of a choose your own adventure-style book, and so not exactly what I was looking for (game books usually have you making a character, keeping track of stats, and possibly rolling dice; choose your own adventure books have you read and make choices without having to do anything more). But it was a cute little story, and I got what was probably the best ending, having bested the wizard and gotten the treasure (me and my halfling buddy are going to use it to train more adventurers to stamp out evil)! It’s been a long time since I read a choose your own adventure book, and it was a nice change of pace. 🙂
While I really enjoyed the Spider-Man graphic novels by Mark Maihack (especially Animals Assemble), I think my favourite book this month was As Old as Time, which tells the story of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast with some twists in the story (it was Belle’s mother who cursed the Beast). I was absolutely enchanted by the worldbuilding, and I loved how key events were hit from the original story but in different ways. The story also takes some drastically different turns that I wasn’t really expecting. All in all, I definitely recommend As Old as Time, and will be interested in reading some other Disney Twisted Tales.
I will say though, I absolutely do NOT recommend Leopard’s Hunt. It deals with some dark, triggering things, and I really should not have finished it. I only included it in this list because I read it this month.
So that was my March reading. How about you? Did you read anything good? Anything bad? Let me know in the comments! 🙂
Example of a Carta grid – this was the first half of my playthrough of Open Road.
As promised in my last post, I’m feeling a bit better and wanted to talk more about the Carta System for journaling games, as well as a few other games I have played since that post. I’m going to save talking about my game for another day. So let’s start with Carta itself. As I mentioned last time, Carta was created by Peach Garden Games, and is available on itch.io, which is where I found it. Carta uses a deck of cards, which you lay out in a facedown grid (a lot of the games I’ve played so far often use a 4 x 6 grid of cards, but the grid can be bigger or smaller, depending on the rules and what you as the player want to use). All of the cards have their own meanings (and usually journaling prompts), so as you move across the board, you flip the cards you encounter over, then look up their meaning in the game’s rulebook. Then you can create a story based off of those prompts.
I believe that, to date, I’ve played four Carta journaling games (plus the one I am working on): Dragon Dowser, Into the Glacier, Apex Predator (also by Peach Garden Games), and Open Road by Solo RPG Voyager.
Dragon Dowser was the first journaling game I’ve actually ever played. I didn’t realize they were a thing until I discovered it on Kickstarter last summer. Dragon Dowser is set in its own world where you are a Dowser who can locate dragon eggs. You’re trying to rescue an egg and bring it to safety before the evil Mecharch can stop you. I really liked the way the game was designed; the book provides lots of prompts to help you flesh out your story. This is definitely a game I will be coming back to!
Next I tried Into the Glacier. This was a little different from Dragon Dowser: at the beginning you pick one of four magical stories that you are searching out in Faerie land (Into the Glacier‘s Faerie land reminded me a lot of the one in Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver – it’s a land of winter). I did find the card prompts a little too detailed: they didn’t lend themselves as well towards creating my own story. But they did tell an interesting story on their own. They also easily lent themselves towards playing with more people; I played with my boyfriend, and we chose where to go together, then read the cards aloud.
Apex Predator was a lot of fun: you play a hunter who is trying to kill a giant monster. This was my first time playing a Carta game that is really geared towards exploration; you have to search for monster tracks before finding and confronting the monster at the end. Like Into the Glacier, the card prompts were a bit more heavily detailed and so didn’t leave me wanting to create my own story. But I was also easily able to play this one with my boyfriend, which was nice. 🙂
I really liked Open Road. The idea of the game is that you are road tripping across the country towards your destination, and running into random encounters with people and things along the way. The one thing that took me by surprise though was that there are fantastical elements in the game; I was expecting a much more mundane adventure, and wasn’t really prepared for a being to grant me a wish or the magical sinkhole that sent me back to the beginning of my trip. But I found Open Road to be really inspiring – I wrote seven story pages thanks to this game in a notebook, then (after the game sent me back to the beginning), another five pages.
So those are the Carta games I’ve tried so far. I’ve been having a great time playing them, and am excited both to find others, and to go back to these for another try. They’ve been a great help, both creatively, and in helping me process my grief a little (particularly thanks to the game I am working on). 🙂
Oh, and I also decided to document some of the stories I created through these and other games on a very old blog of mine called OUTSaga (OUT being short for Once Upon a Time). The blog was originally created as a place to record the absolutely ridiculous stories my friends and I created while playing Once Upon a Time, a “collaborative” storytelling game by Atlas Games where you try to wrest the story from your friends and steer it towards your own ending. The blog was originally only viewable to my friends and I, but I decided to open it up for anyone to see. So far I added my original Dragon Dowser story (which has a part 1 and 2 because I played it twice using the same character before I succeeded), as well as some stories from Forest of Fate, a card game a friend lent me, which is based off of game books; it was created by Cards of Fate. My Open Road story will also be posted there once I have a chance to type it up. I’m not going to record every story from these journaling and/or storytelling games there, but I thought it would be a great place to record select ones. 🙂
In the middle of last September, my father unexpectedly passed away. He’s now been gone for half a year, which is hard to wrap my head around. I’ve been struggling a lot this week, with both the milestone and I think because I went to a celebration of life for a friend of my family’s who passed unexpectedly under similar circumstances to my dad.
In the middle of a particularly sleepless night, I had the idea to write a journaling game that is based off of something that happened to my family after my dad passed. I recently received my (physical) copy of Dragon Dowser, a game I Kickstarted last summer because it sounded interesting: it is a solo journaling game. I’ve never heard of or tried such a thing, and thought it would be fun. I’ve had a .pdf copy of the game for some time, but wanted to wait for the physical book before giving it a try.
Dragon Dowser uses the Carta system (which was created by Peach Garden Games), and had information on the system in the manual. I really enjoyed playing Dragon Dowser, and set about researching other Carta games and the system itself. I’ve since played Into the Glacier (which was also created by Peach Garden Games), and have several others to try out. But even just between Dragon Dowser and Into the Glacier (and reading the Carta system), I have a better idea of things I like and don’t like, and what I might like to do in a game using this system (and more specifically, this game that I’ve started to create). I’ve also picked up a few other games to try, to see what else the system is capable of.
I’ll give a more detailed update and maybe talk more about the Carta system once I’m feeling a bit better and I’ve had some time to hash out more details for my game.
I started this month off by finishing one of the books I was reading last month, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding. It’s a big, fairly dense nonfiction book, so it took me most of January to read. But overall I thought it was well worth it! I learned some very interesting facts about how good exercise is for us.
Here’s the list of what I read this month:
Nonfiction
Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel E. Lieberman
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr
Fiction
The Cat from the Kimono by Nancy Peña (graphic novel)
As Old as Time: a Twisted Tale by Liz Braswell
Outside of Exercised, I really enjoyed As Old as Time. That one was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast told with a twist: what if Belle’s mother was the Enchantress who cursed the Beast? But along with the twisr came some very interesting worldbuilding, telling tales of les charmantes, the faerie people the Enchantress was part of and trying to protect. While a tad predictable (I knew who the bad guy was fairly early on in the story), it was still a lot of fun to see how everything would unfold.
Besides the books I listed, I also attempted to read The Sky Vault, the third book in Benjamin Percy’s Comet Cycle. But I wasn’t able to finish it (in no small part because part of the story dealt with a father passing away).
So how about you? Have you read anything interesting this month? 🙂
Here we are, the first Thursday Book Talk of 2024! I have a number of books on the go (I think I have 3 different nonfiction books, plus I started a book of short stories a little while ago), and was a little worried I wouldn’t finish anything. But then I got a hold of the new Murderbot Diaries book by Martha Wells, System Collapse, and was able to finish that (though I’ve been shying away from fiction lately because a lot of stories tend to involve families and I’m not ready for that right now, it was nice actually reading something more for fun). I also got through a Canadian Living magazine yesterday, which was fun to flip through for something different (I haven’t read a Canadian Living magazine in forever!)
What about you? Have you been reading anything interesting?
Happy New Year everyone! I am hoping that 2024 is a better year than 2023 was (though there was some good that happened in 2023, it was overshadowed when my father unexpectedly passed away in September). The grief has hit me hard, and at times it has been hard to function; I miss him terribly, and my whole family has keenly felt his absence during this first Christmas holiday season without him.
So normally in this post, I like to look back at and reflect on the goals I set for myself last year. But I know full well that I didn’t meet a single one (even my reading one – I only read 16 novel-length books this year). I wrote an update post in the summer where I planned how I would meet my goals by the end of the year. But everything completely fell apart, and that’s okay.
I’ve put a bit of thought into whether I even wanted to set goals for the year. I haven’t been reading much, and some days I’m just surviving, which is okay on this part of my grief journey. I have to learn to live without my dad being here to offer advice, to help me out, to go fishing, or just to hang out and have tea with. This is going to be a tough year as we get through a lot more firsts without him here.
I completed Jo Franco‘s 21 Day Self-Awareness Journaling Challenge in December. While many of the prompts were difficult, especially right now, I was able to start a journaling habit (I now journal every day before bed). And that gave me a bit of space to consider goals, as well as reflect a bit on the previous ones I have set. I believe the goals I have set have been too ambitious at the best of times. I need to slow things down, and aim a little smaller, especially when it comes to language learning (I am trying to tackle two languages at once). So I decided right there that I would only set one goal for Ukrainian, and no goal for French this year; I’ve been doing French for two hours once a week for quite awhile now, and my French has greatly improved as a result. We have been reading a book together in French for quite some time now which we will be finishing this year. So I see no need to add pressure to myself by adding more French than that right now.
So with everything that has happened, and where I’m at, I think I’m only going to set three goals for 2024:
Read 25 novel-length books. Reading helps make me happy. So if I can get back to reading for fun, that would be great. I’m not going to worry about where the books come from right now – as long as I am reading, that’s all that matters.
Continue journaling. Journaling has helped, and it has gotten me writing a bit again (it might not be creative writing, but it is still something). I want to continue with this practice through the year.
Read some Ukrainian every week. I’ve had a hard time with Ukrainian since my dad passed – we used to write letters to each other in Ukrainian. But I still love the language, and don’t want to lose what I have, especially now that he is gone. So I want to recommit to studying it, even if it’s just a little bit every week. I’d like to build my vocabulary, and the easiest way to do that is by reading. So I will read some Ukrainian every week and see where I get.
So that’s where I’m at. How about you? Have you set any goals for yourself this year?
An Acquaintance with Letters 