Despite the degree to which Formspring once exhausted me, I’ve experienced a temporary leave of my senses and opened my page up again. Fielding questions on there has let me know how much some of you miss having regular posts here at this blog, an occupation I’ve let lie since May of this year.

I stopped blogging here for a couple obvious reasons: I’ve been short on time, and now that I’m full-time freelance (editor-at-large at Gamasutra, and making contributions to other sites in the rest of my time) I need every last idea spark I can get to develop work across the platforms I serve. If it’s worth pestering you about here, it’s probably worth formalizing into something I can actually sell.

That never stopped me from blogging before, since I always thought it was important to have a one-stop repository that connects me to the people that read my work. But I’ve gotten so active on social media platforms that there’s always a home for people who want to follow me: I promote links and discussion on Twitter, have a Facebook page for people who prefer to get links and to comment there, and I even have a Google+ page if you hate Twitter and Facebook.

But a lot of people have been telling me they wish I still updated here, and if that’s what you want I’m gonna try to do that, at least until I get a proper website, an ambition I’ve kind of fruitlessly cultivated for a couple years now.

It was also nice of you guys to ask on Formspring about memep00l, sort of my first actual experiment into writing any kind of fiction in public. I’m into the social media format and am very pleased that some people care about the narrative so far. I’ll be catching up on that soon.

I’ve also been spending time with another first-for-me — I’ve always wanted to learn to do interactive fiction, since I’m such a big fan of it. I’m very slowly teaching myself Inform 7 using Aaron Reed’s excellent book, and in the meantime I thought I’d explore interactive writing using a simpler tool that lets me experiment with how to structure story and choices.

I have been enjoying playing with Inklewriter (thought I’d give it a try after writing about it here) — incidentally, it has a Future Voices competition closing in just a few days if anyone wants to try and slip an entry in under the wire. I seem to struggle with finishing large projects, but hopefully I will have a little “game” to show one of these days soon.

More recently, I’ve done an editorial on whether there’s a conflict between telling complex stories — that might not have neat or nice endings — and the player’s desire to win. Would love to know what you think. I also went in-depth with FarmVille 2‘s head designer on whether the game addresses some of the chronic and fricative design problems I’ve seen with Zynga games in the past.

Aside from that, I attended an art exhibit about cats with money, which sent me musing at Boing Boing on internet cat culture and classism.

I have loads going on in the coming weeks, as per usual, I guess, but I’ll give blogging more a shot. Thanks for everything, everyone!