The end-of-year State of Play
Quite literally, where are we at with this “play”? As the year draws to a close, I want to explore what has been and what will be.
It’s been a while since I wrote an update on Medium. This is because I’ve been writing and coding and writing and coding on all sorts of other means. But all this work has been fruitful, so here is an end of the year review, or “state of play”, of my projects so far.
A new Home
I created my first personal website shortly after I started university in 2014. This year, I reckoned it could benefit from a face-lift to celebrate its 10th anniversary. So here it is! www.reaver.me. It’s simple to remember, entirely responsive, mobile-ready. It supports light or dark mode, and comes with with lots of pretty pictures, icons and new content as time goes on.
For the techies amongst you, it has a brand new depoyement pipeline, thanks to the wonderful, free and recently powered-up GitHub Pages. It’s built with NextJS and Tailwind CSS (probably worth an article of its own).
Soon, I’d like to add new sections for audiobooks, podcasts and radio shows. And potentially expand the section about Projects, with more pages that relate to my current and past coding endeavours.
The Lost Chapters
This year has been pretty special for me. Only three days into it, my dad sent me a very shouty email: he had found the lost book. What is this?
Let’s roll back 15 years, just like Harry with Tom Riddle’s diary. Back then I was twelve, yet I had already developed a keenness for writing. Many ideas were going through my head at the time, but in the summer of 2008, I was able to finish writing my first book. It was titled “Parenti in Concorso” (Competing Relatives), a children story inspired by the adventures of Geronimo Stilton. Mind you, I wouldn’t have mentioned Mr Stilton, had I not found out that it is sold outside of Italy too.
This little book had colourful fonts and a set of illustrations obtained from a little CD-ROM with over 50,000 clip arts which I had bought with my pocket money. Those were the days before the Internet, ladies and gents. No internet also meant no cloud, and no cloud meant no back-ups. When we threw away our old computer, we lost the file containing the book. There was also only a single printed copy, which I’ve been trying to find for over a decade without success.
You can see why dad was so excited to have found my first book, on his work computer (so much for file retention, eh?).
I spent the past few months re-editing and translating the book, which contains all the original artworks, and it is now available in English and Italian on the Amazon online stores of pretty much every country. This to me has been an incredible turn of events.
I would also like to publish the digital versions for Apple Books and Amazon Kindle, however it’s a little harder and time-consuming than you’d think. I’ll get there, I promise.
And the play?
This children’s book was but an unexpected — and most welcome — spin off from my current and most important writing ambition: a theatre play.
When lockdown struck in 2020, I began imagining various stories set in my favourite video game series of all time: Fable. With every passing week of home confinement, those stories began ever so intricate until I decided they were better written down. Eighteen months later, roughly at the end of 2021, I had developed a cohesive plot from start to end. This story sees characters from the game, as well as new ones, fight their own battles in an attempt to pursue whatever interests are most dear to their hearts and their morality. And so, “The Hero of Mistpeak” was born.
The play is a tragedy, although it certainly does not lack humorous retorts, and it comprises six acts, each made up of four to six scenes. Act I and Act II are a story by themselves, which is why I am hoping to publish them as Part One before the end of the year. The drama will then continue with Act III and Act IV of Part Two and end with Act V and Act VI of Part Three.
I am incredibly excited about this first step of mine in the world of play writing and I hope that other fans of the series will enjoy it as much as I do. I cannot wait to see the feedback as well, because I know it will only lead to better stories in the future.
This is all for now. Please stick around and follow me @jameshreaver on the various platforms to get updates on what and when will be released next.
