The Things
I started this newsletter way back midway through last year, mainly because I was pretty burned out on microblogging and was getting a bit nostalgic for the good ol days of maxiblogging.
Then suddenly it’s something unreasonable like 18 months later. Time truly is a slippery thing right now, I do not need to tell you that.
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The idea behind this newsletter was that I’d collect up the ‘things’ that I’d been up to into a fairly regular rundown and air them out. Maybe someone would find them interesting?
I picked up the url/handle thingsbydan way back in 2001 or so when I was at university and needed a website. At the time, I was doing some programming, some flash games, some video editing, some drawing, some (real bad) comics; a broad variety of ‘things’ so the thingsbydan handle felt appropriate; the things by Dan. Fast forward twenty or so years and it’s stuck. I’m still doing things.
So - the brief but high octane catchup over the past year or so is as follows:
Rivers, the book by David Gaffney and myself was published by Top Shelf at the end of 2021. Cool. It also got optioned by HBO Max, which was also cool. Then there was the Warner/Discovery merger that laid an added layer of complexity to that whole situation, so who really knows what’ll happen there. We’ve been to TV Town with a book before and nobody has ever watched a tv show based on one of our books, so I’m not going to buy a super-yacht and/or a jetpack just yet.
Over lockdown, I lost my mind a tiny amount and made a hobby of building/repairing/refurbishing electric guitars. I’ve been playing since I was about 12, and was in bands from the age of about 13 to 27 so it was nice to spend some time mooching about with guitars for a while. It did get out of hand though. There are seven of them in the room I’m typing this in right now, with a further nine? ten? hanging about the house and loaned out to family and friends, given as gifts etc. Honestly I’ve lost count now. I find it very satisfying to take a bunch of trashed parts and put them together into something nice. This one in particular was an awful bag of dog-chewed nonsense (literally) when I got it and now it’s a solid 7.5/10.
I started putting little snippets of this stuff on instagram but stopped that because I realised that no, this is all for me, not for you. So I’ve been secretly hoarding musical instruments away in the dark like a dirty secret. It feels fantastic to have a whole cake-slice of my creative life that is not curated for and scrutinised by the internet.
What do I do with these guitars? I write and record dumb songs that get sent to close friends. Will you ever hear any of these songs? No, probably not. Are they any good? No, probably not. Are they largely improvised and of questionable quality? YES. Do I enjoy this? More Than Anything. Do they enjoy this? I have no idea and do not care to find out. I will not be taking further questions at this time.
I’ve been mainly working this year for the game company Superbrothers A/V in a ‘multiple hat’ role, working on an upcoming expansion to their game JETT: The Far Shore which released at the end of last year. If the name Superbrothers rings a bell, it’s probably because they made the game Sword & Sworcery EP back in 2011 and you might have played it.
I’ve been asked a few times how I ended up working in the games industry. So here’s the few simple steps I took that literally anyone can follow;
I played Sworcery in a hotel room in Helsinki in early 2012, got smitten with the soundtrack, got in touch with Jim Guthrie to tell him I loved it, ended up making him a music video, also ended up using a song of his for the theme music for the Make It Then Tell Everybody podcast, then eventually meeting up with Jim and Craig D Adams (Mr. SuperBrother to you, although I’m sure Craig would insist that Mr. SuperBrother is his Dad’s name) at a TCAF in 2014 (?) where Craig got my book Carry Me, which influenced the opening chapter of JETT: The Far Shore, then when the game came out Craig came onto the Make It Then Tell Everybody podcast for a chat, I got signed up to playtest the expansion (which was in it’s very early days), gave feedback that was so profoundly useful and insightful that they kept asking for more. Hold my jacket, I said, as I elbowed everyone aside and basically landed the plane to riotous applause single handedly some feedback that they found useful, and then was asked to stick around to help out with story, dialogue, musical and design direction, a little sound work, some motion graphics, editing trailers; basically a lot of different hats.
A simple few steps.
It’s work that I enjoy, and good folks to work with. There’s a demo on steam that you can check out now if that’s the kind of thing that you think you might be into.
In ‘oh right, he does also draw stuff’ news, David Gaffney and I have been working on a new book. I probably can’t talk too much about it at the moment, as it’s still relatively early on, but it’s a heap of fun to draw. I’m drawing this one pretty much entirely in pencil with a grey ink wash, which is really fun, really loose stuff. The story is bananas, and I can’t wait for people to read it.
Well, now we are caught up, I’ll get into some weekly-ish detail now we’ve got the small-talk out of the way. I’ve got a fun story about my recent trip to Thought Bubble in Harrogate, UK involving a Close Call With Death and a Night-Time Ride in TWO TRUCKS that I might tell?
Will the relentless exhilaration never end? Probably, I’m off to do some drawing.
Dan, November 19 2022