Brent Knowles's Blog, page 5

Enjoy the holidays!

Hello… just a quick update before I abandon the interwebs for the holiday season.

Hope everyone has something fun lined up for the holidays. I’m going to take my couple weeks off and just relax mostly… I’m digging through old writing and programming projects today for example. And I might build a table, we’ll see.

Neverwinter Nights

As I’m sure you already know, Beamdog is working on a Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition. Neverwinter certainly has a fond place in my heart… it was the second game I worked on and the first in which I had lead design responsibilities. It is really exciting that work is resuming on it.

If you’d like the latest details, just check out Beamdog’s blog: http://blog.beamdog.com/2017/12/december-22-livestream-recap.html

There’s weekly livestreams, a trello board for feature requests, and more.

Promotions

I’ve setup a few promotions for my books and collections in Amazon. All the deals will start on December 25th on Amazon.com

Lazy Designer 4 – Story and World
Lazy 5 – How to be a Lead Designer
Robot Game Example Design Document (free)
Mamas and Other Robot Stories
Feast War
The Pool

And for those who want all the Lazy Designer books in a single package you can buy that for $10 off at Gumroad

https://gum.co/suuj/2017

Hope everyone has an amazing holiday. See you next year.

A New Hobby: Woodworking

After I moved out of the condo I was living in during the “are we going to get divorced?” phase of the marriage breakdown, I setup the garage in my new house to become a woodworking shop. There were two main reasons for this.

The First Reason: I had no furniture! Obviously over fifteen years of marriage we had accumulated lots of furniture, but I left most of that behind (I had thought my leaving our home would be temporary). I didn’t want to fill my new place with junk stuff, so I started to learn to build my own.

The Second Reason: I needed a new hobby to kill time when I did not have the kids.

The first project was an entryway organizer for the kids to keep their coats/backpacks/gloves from spilling everywhere. It turned out to be slightly too large and took me the summer of 2016 to complete.

Since then, I’ve built a handful of pieces, and I’m still learning. Next time maybe I’ll post some newer work.

Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. Take care.

Also, if you are interested, my short-story collection, “Bone Dreaming”, will be on an Amazon countdown promotion starting on Monday, the 4th.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Bone-Dreaming-Callings-Brent-Knowles-ebook/dp/B00X1PXKRQ

Not Quite a Return… Yet…

So…

I have a blog. Not that I’ve forgotten about it. Obviously. I haven’t even forgotten to post to it. I just haven’t posted… anything… in quite some time. Because I haven’t felt like it.

While I was never prolifically active online, I was reasonably so at one point in my life. When I was trying to build a career as a writer. That came to a crashing halt a couple years ago when my then-wife left me. Between transmogrifying into a single dad (after 15+ years of marriage), reentering the workforce (after ‘retiring’ to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time writer), and spending time figuring myself out… I just haven’t had the energy. The main stumbling block is that I stopped writing. And if I wasn’t writing, then what was the point of the blog?

I still don’t have the answer to that question.

So, tonight, for whatever reason, I’ll just muse a bit about some stuff I’ve figured out the past couple years. This too may then end up being just a random, isolated post, a brief surfacing of myself before I dive back into the reality of my now-life.

…

A major (to me) revelation that has emerged from the separation-and-divorce is that I’ve always been severely depressed. Over the years, I’ve been very good at keeping busy and productive. So much so that I kept ahead of the depression, for the most part. It was only when I ‘retired’ from BioWare and found myself with a lot more free time, that it started really affecting me. Around that time my issues with anxiety intensified too, though I didn’t recognize that either.

After BioWare, I became increasingly withdrawn and excused it as “I need to take care of the house” or “the kids need me to do this” or “I have another novel to write… Need to focus on that.” I avoided most opportunities I had for social activities. The depression intensified and I responded by working harder at avoiding to deal with it. Striving towards a writing career during this time period was a truly bad idea. This career path has a very negative side — rejections. A few years into my retirement from BioWare, despite some successes, I had accumulated over two thousand rejections (mostly on short stories but with a reasonable backlog of written novels, I was also getting rejections for those… which hurt a lot more than the story rejections ever had).

And then my paternal grandfather died.

One day I’ll write more about him, and his influence on my writing, but for now I’ll just say this was a huge blow. And again, I avoided dealing with it. I kept on churning out stories and novels and not selling them. There were things I should have done during this time — perhaps becoming involved in the local writing community or finding other activities to get me out of the house but I never tried. Just kept on writing, tending house, and hanging out with the kids.

Near the end of the marriage, I tried self publishing a handful of story collections and novels. I don’t remember if I’ve spoken about any of these on the blog — I just wanted to see how well they did on their own, without any marketing push from me (plus, I didn’t have the energy). I had had them ready to go before I knew a divorce was eminent and I ended up releasing them, sort of on auto pilot as my personal life dissolved.

In hindsight, I squandered opportunities releasing them prematurely and without a marketing push. I should have also involved peers, both in reviewing them and helping me get them ready (I’m terrible for asking for help). I think some more effort on my part, and some help from others, and these novels/collections, would have had more impact.

Still, they are out there now, and I can’t do anything about that.

Maybe in another post I’ll even list them or something, but that seems dreadfully exhausting.

Anyways, that’s my ramble for the night.

Planescape Torment: Enhanced Edition

As many of you have probably already heard, Beamdog is on the verge of releasing an enhanced edition for Planescape: Torment.

I started in the games industry at BioWare, working on Baldur’s Gate 2. During that time Planescape: Torment was released — the first game that licensed the Infinity Engine from BioWare. It immediately drew well deserved praise for its story and characters.

I’m very pleased to have had the chance, many years later, to finally be involved with the Planescape franchise. This enhanced edition is fun to play. I thoroughly enjoyed the playthrus I made of the game during our testing phase. Improvements like being able to zoom the camera, tab highlighting, and an easier to use interface, reduces some frustrations I had with the original version.

If you are interested, check out: https://www.beamdog.com/products/planescape-torment-enhanced-edition

Planescape Torment: Enhanced Edition will be released April 11th.

Reprint of “Stone Eater”

A few years ago I sold my story “Stone Eater” to Abyss and Apex. I was very pleased when they recently decided to include it in their second “best of” anthology!

There are print and kindle versions of the anthology available.

I’m sharing a table of contents with some really amazing authors (from their blog):

“The Last Tower” – CJ Cherryh

“How Strange the Starship’s Shudder” – Michael R. Fosburg

“Socorro” – S. L. Knapp

“Thesaurus (Not a Prehistoric Animal)” – Robert Borski

“Emmett, Joey & the Beelz” – Ralph Servush

“Snatch Me Another” – Mercurio D. Rivera

“The Argument Box” – J. D. Fox

“Name Calling” – Celeste Rita Baker

“Oblivion” – Yilin Wang

“Anything Chocolate” – Caren Gusoff Sumpiton

“Sunlight” – Kelly Dwyer

“Humboldt Squid” – Linda Neuer

“Dreadnought Under Ice” – George S. Walker

“New Worlds” – Alexandra Seidel

“Stone Eater” – Brent Knowles

“The Wizard and the Sorceress” – Christopher Vera

“The Dwarf Femme and the Dragon” – Charie’ Craig

“Letter Found …” – Marie Brennan

“Mirror Girl” – Paul Carlson

“Coupling” – Ken Poyer

“Bots D’Amor” – Cat Rambo

“The Coin Whisperer” – Sarah Hendrix

“Bumbershoot” – Howard V Hendrix

“All the Wonder in the World” – Lavie Tidhar

‘The Specialist” – Andrew Kaye

“Prayer Causes Stars” – Greg Beatty

“The Halo Wave” – Lael Salaets

“In The Bag” – Tabitha St. Germain

“In the End, Basking in Love” – A. B. S. Dudevant

“To the End of Days” – Robert Silverberg

The end is near…

Last December I did not do a year-in-review about my writing, as I generally do. Mostly I avoided this because the holidays were a rough time for me — first Christmas without my kids, etc. But also, because I did not accomplish a lot in 2015. The past year and a half I have been in survival mode. When my ex and I initially separated, I moved out and established a new (much smaller household) and found work remotely (and a few weeks, on location in Florida). This alone was a huge adjustment, after several years of being the stay-at-home spouse. I also started volunteering a lot more, with my kid’s school, and becoming even more involved in their activities.

I was also busy trying to save the marriage… This took time. And when I did have free moments, I tended to try to be outside as much as possible. I struggled to write, to be honest, the few times I did attempt it.

When the separation period ended, and it was clear we were headed for divorce, I had another huge decision to make. Should I move?

Neither my ex or myself have family in the Edmonton area, or even particularly strong social connections here. Our families live quite a ways away and we’ve always been somewhat isolated in Edmonton. And I really enjoyed the time I spent in Florida, as well as shorter trips I took out to the west coast. There was also a lack of game dev opportunities in Edmonton, post-BioWare.

Luckily, Trent at Beamdog showed up with an opportunity locally. I decided to stick around and get through the whole separation process (actually, legally, dividing assets and moving ahead with the divorce). I assumed this would take a few months, then I would move back into a proper home that better suited the kids. I imagined I would start rebuilding my life. And at some imaginary point in the future I might return to writing, blogging, and the various other activities that had formed the foundation of my “professional life” since leaving BioWare.

This was back in September 2015. Since then my life has been on pause in many ways… but we finally signed the separation agreement this month and I feel the end of this period of my life is approaching. I’m excited to be building a home again, for my kids, and I’m starting to think about writing again, though it will probably have to compete with some of the “survival activities” I’ve embraced (i.e., walking, knitting, etc.)

And I’m enjoying my work with Beamdog. Lots of new challenges, new team mates (and some former colleagues from BioWare days). I also recently had the pleasure of evaluating a game design class, “interviewing” the students and providing feedback alongside a former coworker from BioWare. I’m hopeful that once I’m settled into my new place I’ll be better able to focus, both at work, and on my private projects.

There’s even a chance, perhaps over summer, that this blog might start becoming more active with both writing and game design goodness. But if I’m not around, feel free to use the comments or my contact page to send questions my way.

Siege of Dragonspear

I’ve been working at Beamdog for several months now and have been enjoying my time with the studio.

Last week the team hit a huge milestone — the release of Siege of Dragonspear, an expansion set between Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2. They’ve devoted significant time and energy to the expansion and I’ve had the privilege of playing through their new content a few times.

A huge congratulations to the team, for all their effort. Many of the team members are very long-term fans, some working in our office, others around the world. It has been very cool to watch this distributed team work — the same enthusiasm as I remember from the old BioWare days, but working together quite differently.

Anyways, if you are a fan of the BG series, I definitely encourage you to check out Siege of Dragonspear. And if you’ve never played any of these games now might be the time to finally try them.

http://www.siegeofdragonspear.com/

And there is this…

First, many apologies for the delay between posts. I am not yet ready to promise more regular postings but interesting things are afoot.

If you are even vaguely interested in game development you have probably already learned that I’ve joined Edmonton-based game developer Beamdog. I’ve been working for them for the past few months. I can not really speak towards what I’m currently doing but in general I’m hoping to provide direction and the benefit of my experiences to the talented crew at Beamdog — lessons learned from my years BioWare as well as my time freelancing.

Read the Beamdog announcement here: http://blog.beamdog.com/2016/02/beamd...

And for those interested in the writing side of my life, I am helping On Spec celebrate the release of their past couple issues at Variant Edition Comics tonight, at 7:00 pm!

Take care all and have a fantastic week.

Sword Coast Legends

During the last couple years I have been fortunate to have a consulting role on Sword Coast Legends, a new Dungeons & Dragons RPG from N-Space.

Today it went live on Steam… I encourage you to check it out!

https://swordcoast.com/

A huge congratulations to the team at N-Space who have been working very hard on this ambitious game. It was a pleasure to work with all of you… and I’ll make sure to stop by the office next month when I take the kids down to Orlando for a vacation!

Transitions

This is a post I had hoped I would not have to write. I’ve been avoiding it, out of fear that writing this out, will make it real. (And yes, this post is entirely personal and has nothing to do with game development or writing… but it explains my silence here.)

After eight months of separation my wife and I are divorcing.

I can’t explain how writing those words makes me feel. She’s been my best friend for sixteen years and I still wake up in the middle of night wanting to talk to her. And I know I can’t.

On the positive side, this has been a year of personal growth for me, confronting and managing my anxiety and depression. I’ve traveled extensively, spent several weeks in Orlando (which is truly a magical place), worked up the courage to attend support meetings with other men, each suffering their own unique brand of anguish. I’ve spent long nights driving through sleeping cities and thinking, I’ve reconnected with family and friends I have neglected for too long. And I’ve had some truly memorable experiences with my sons, bonding and growing with them.

Most important I’ve done some serious soul searching in regards to what I want to do. More on this later.

A huge thanks to the friends (both old and new), family, and past/present/future coworkers who have been so supportive. I’ve leaned on you all, heavily, and though I hope you never suffer such that you need my support, if you do, I’m here.