Rani’s Favorite People: Like no other

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. This week, if you’ll have looked at a calendar, is the last week of our series! Which means it’s the last week of my birthday month… which is a little sad, but also means that we’re one step closer to Autumn, which makes me happy. Summer is just too hot, all around.

All month long, we’ve been talking about some of my favorite things, all through the lens of my writing. We’ve discussed everything from my favorite books to my favorite games, all while talking about how those things have impacted my life as a writer—and impacted my writing as a whole. And this week, I’ve come to the most important ones.

Rani’s Favorite People: My mum

There always people out there who greatly impact or inspire our writing. Always. We, as writers, pull inspiration from everything around us. We even pull that inspiration from people, whether that means writing those people into our stories or allowing those people to inspire us and help us along the way, in our writing career.

For me, the number one person I get my inspiration from is my mother. She’s my best friend, and she has been for years. She’s the person I go to when I’ve written a great scene and I need to tell someone about it, or when it’s taken me two weeks to write a scene and it finally came out the way I wanted it to. She’s the person who’s celebrated with me when I’ve finished a novel, and the person who cried with me when I finished a series. She’s the person who asks about my writing, even when no one else thinks to do so. And she’s the person I love to go to, with my writing ideas.

I think we all need a person like this. We all need someone we can talk to about our writing, someone we can open up to about every little thing about our writing. We need a person who inspires us to write amazing things, only to see that person’s eyes light up when they finally get to read those amazing things. We need a person who loves our writing as much as we do, and who’s always ready to talk about it, no matter what.

My mum is the person I spend the most time with. She’s the person I first went on an overseas trip with, and the person I’ll be going with next time. She’s the person I first want to share with, when I’ve written something new or come up with a new idea I think might translate well into novel form. She’s… well. She’s my best friend. And we all need one of those, don’t we?

So when I was writing a list of my favorite things, I knew she had to be on it. I knew she needed to be one of the very last things I talked about, because she’s I always save the best for last.

I know a lot of people don’t have this kind of relationship with their mothers. I know a lot of people wish their mothers were still around, so they could have this type of relationship. And I know a lot of people never knew their mother, and so they’ll never know this sort of relationship. But that only makes me gladder, that I do know my mother. That she’s my very best of friends. And that she always will be.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Rani's Favorite Games: That farming life

Hi guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by again, for the next portion in our series about my favorite things. As you’ll know if you’ve been hanging out with us this month, the month of July has been devoted to some of my favorite things, and the ways in which they’ve molded me as a person and as a writer. It’s something that I hadn’t really thought about talking about in this way, but I think it’s been a great growing lesson for me, to look at my life and flesh out how the things I love have affected the way I write. If you haven’t started doing so for yourself, I highly recommend it—I’ve learned a great deal about myself, along the way.

This week, I wanted to talk about something I don’t generally talk about at all: games. I like games. I like games a lot. I used to like games a lot more, but a few friends of mine are getting me back into it, slowly but surely. And the game I’m going to talk about today… it’s a bit of a gateway, for really getting back into gaming.

Rani’s Favorite Games: Stardew Valley

I’m sure some of you saw that one coming. I mean really, who doesn’t love Stardew Valley? It’s just so much fun, it’s relaxing, and it’s really fun to play at the end of the day when your brain doesn’t want to do anything else.

Which is what I use it for, in a way.

Just like Terraforming Mars is a game I play to get my brain thinking in a different way, a logical way, Stardew Valley is a game I play to keep myself creative, but keep myself thinking along the way. There’s something about Stardew, about having a farm all your own and arranging it just the way you want, something about calculating how much money you have each season for how many crops, about saving certain crops so you can give them to certain people… it’s a little bit like an extremely simple version of life, and for me, that makes it a lot of fun.

It’s the game I like to play after I’m done writing for the day, because it’s just creative enough that it keeps those juices flowing in the hours before I go to sleep, and it’s relaxing enough that I won’t be kept up thinking about it.

For me, playing Stardew Valley is a little bit like a reward for getting my writing done for the day, for a hard day’s work of editing, or even a pick-me-up after an especially trying or difficult day. And that’s something we all need. It’s the game I go to if I have to kill off a character and I just don’t want to do it, the place I can get a little relief and release some tension if I’ve had to write in the POV of the villain most of the day, and for that, it’ll probably always be one of my favorites.

And yeah, it’s a bit of a gateway. I’m getting a gaming computer so I’ll be able to play some others. I’ll let you know what they are!

For the record, I thought about basing today’s post off Halcyon 6, but though that game was a lot of fun and really did help me keep my thoughts straight while I was writing, it also kept me up at night… and so Stardew won the competition. ;-)

Be sure to stop back in next week for the emotional end to my series of favorites!

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Rani's Favorite Games: Let's build on Mars!

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by! All month long, we’ve been talking about some of my favorite things, and how they relate to my writing. Why? Because I couldn’t decide what to talk about, it’s my birth month, and I thought this would be a really fun way to show you how everything in your life can somehow relate back to your writing, even if you didn’t think it could.

Thus far in the series, we’ve talked about my favorite book series’ and how those books shaped me into the writer I am today, television shows and movies, and how those things have inspired the things I write, and the music I listen to—whether for while I’m writing, or the things I listen to in order to get myself moving when I’m not writing. What, then, do we have left to talk about? Well, I have two weeks’ worth of things to say. ;-)

Rani’s Favorite Games: Terraforming Mars

I’m turning into a board game person. I just really enjoy them. I used to play a lot of board games when I was younger, but they never really played into anything I did as an adult—until recently. Lately, the biggest game that’s been of use to me in my writing life is one that really has nothing to do with my writing life: Terraforming Mars.

It’s a board game unlike any other, and I’m not just saying that. There are a lot of components in this game that I’m pretty sure are only in this game. And I think that’s pretty darn neat! But the biggest draw, for me, is that it gets me thinking. Terraforming Mars forces me to think, to rethink, to plan, to rehash, to calculate, and do a whole lot of other things that I wouldn’t normally be doing in my day to day life. For me, that’s what makes it one of the most pivotal games I’ve ever played.

I’ve talked about this before, and I’m sure I’ll talk about it again, but it’s highly important for writers to at least do some things other than writing. Writing is great. I love writing. I would love to be able to just sit and write all day long. But I also have a day job. I have family and friends. And it’s important to me, as it should be to you, that you have other things you do, other things you think about, than just your writing.

That’s where games like Terraforming Mars come in, because it forces me to think, to think hard, and to think hard about something other than my writing. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought about my writing at all, when I’m playing this game. It’s far too engrossing for that.

Because of that, I think Terraforming Mars will always be one of my favorite games, just because I’ve used it so many times to get my brain out of a rut, to get myself thinking about something completely different, and to challenge myself to do something I’m not so accustomed to doing. After all, like I said, until I really started playing this game, I hadn’t honestly played a lot of games since I was a kid.

But don’t think I’ll stop here. Oh no, I have friends who are determined to make a gamer out of me yet. It’ll happen, I’m sure.

[love]

{Rani Divine}