Revision Fun

Yesterday, my boyfriend introduced me to a beautiful, dark, and moody video game called "Limbo." I'm generally antagonistic toward video games, refusing to play one for more than 10 or 15 minutes. I quit "Portal" after a half-hour because it was giving me a headache. In "Limbo," you control a boy as he navigates a dark and dangerous environment. You can go forward and backward, jump, and pull and push things. Because there are so few options and because the action moves slowly, I played this game for almost an hour.

There's no music or dialogue, no moments of levity. But there are numerous opportunities to die: spikes, long falls, and giant piercing spiders (at least, I think they're spiders). I felt bad for killing the boy over and over again; luckily, each time he dies, the action rewinds to just before the unfortunate death. The death scenes can be gruesome, though there is an option in the menu: "no gore."

I was thinking how nice it would be to be able to go through life taking extreme risks, knowing that we could rewind if something goes wrong. How would that affect our behavior?

I'm in the process of revising my first draft. I'm going back to the beginning and trying to read it with fresh eyes. Today, I completely changed the beginning of the second chapter. I wasn't happy with it before--the writing was fine, maybe, but the content was off. I didn't realize how much until I reached the end. It's exciting, being able to edit with the knowledge that I can always go back to how it was; that the rest of the story and these characters' lives will still be in tact. This is one of the fun things about being puppet master to made-up people :)

(Picture from Limbo video game review, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/7902760/Limbo-video-game-review.html)