Over the weekend of June 14 you can find me at MIT attending Narrascope, a new conference about narrative games. Narrascope is a production of IFTF, the digital arts nonprofit that I help run. Happily, the conference itself rests entirely in the hands of more capable and less distracted people than me, and I know it’s gonna be pretty great.

Said organizers have posted its schedule, and I shall cop to my inevitable presence on the “Meet the IFTF Board” panel on Sunday morning. But, goodness, don’t come to see me — come for one of the Friday-night workshops on building or teaching with interactive fiction, or Natalia Martinsson’s keynote address on Saturday morning followed by two days of amazing presentations and conversation about adventure games, interactive narrative, and all that good stuff.

Registration is open only through Friday, May 17, so hop to it if you’d like to join me there. It costs less than $100 for a standard ticket, and we offer a lower-cost option for folks who need it.

On May 30, find me at AS220’s main stage in downtown Providence (115 Empire Street) as part of Stranger Stories, a bimonthly evening of true stories read by local writers. The theme of this month’s event is “Made It”, and I will read this 2016 Fogknife post about a sandwich. (I made the sandwich, you see.)

Admission is free! Doors open at 6 PM, and the readings begin at 6:30. (AS220’s restaurant is still closed for renovations, but the new bar’s open!)

Post-Narrascope, I intend to spend as much of 2019’s latter half as I can pursuing my own projects. I haven’t let myself have something like that in a long while. I can afford it now — and if I don’t do it now, I risk some gnarly burnout. So, it’s time.

I recently had reason to re-read my retrospective of 2014, and it really spun my head around; by some measures, that was surely the single most productive year of my life. I did all that stuff all while starting two new business-client relationships, traveling to Maine every other weekend to wind down a family crisis from the previous year, and moving house that autumn to Rhode Island. It’s also the year I got married, on my 40th birthday. What a year!

If I haven’t quite had such an impressive one-year hit-list since then, it’s largely due to tending open projects rather than launching new ones — and many of those projects have their roots in 2014. These include Fogknife, which I have somehow managed to keep updating more-or-less weekly ever since, and IFComp, whose software I continue to maintain. And my work on IFComp begat IFTF, which led in turn to my chairing a game-accessibility program whose final report to the community I am now writing, with a Narrascope due-date.

I’ve been working very hard on all these — and just as hard on client work, with a year-long project looking to wrap up at last next month. After all that, I feel the call to travel more, write more, and spend more time “in the lab”. Expect more from me in the IndieWeb sphere, especially; earlier this year, and with some difficulty, I put all my jumpy and distracting project ideas regarding Plerd and IndieWeb to one side so I can finish everything I need to do before Narrascope.

So, I’m very much looking forward to Narrascope, and I’m really looking forward to after-Narrascope.