Brilliant Rooks Change Lives
Brilliant Rooks Change Lives is a tiny LARP1 about a rook who wants to be read to. If you like you can get it from itch.io.
After I finished Two Weeks One Summer I didn't want to lose momentum so I was looking around for other ideas. I've got something sort of large I've been thinking about but I'm really not feeling it at the moment for various reasons so I wanted to start a small project.
I do a lot of the thinking part of writing while I'm out and about with the baby getting him to nap at the moment. The town I live in has some really great independent shops and as I was walking up the high street passed The Bookery it occurred to me what if this next game could fit on a bookmark? The Bookery is one of my all time favourite shops, it's cozy and comforting and the staff are all so lovely. They say Brilliant Books Change Lives and they really mean it, their outreach programmes and community events are inspirational. As soon as I thought of it I knew I'd hit on a small way that I could give back to that community.
I live with depression and anxiety which have an impact on basically every element of my life, but their impact on my sleep has been particularly problematic over the years. I’m trying to build a habit of reading and mindfulness practice before bed at the moment so the idea of gamifying something I was already doing seemed like a fun place to start. I was also interested in the avenue because it tied into the idea positivity and also of a bookmark and how it would be used as an object. Once I'd got that far the idea for this little game came very easily and the first draft was surprisingly similar to the final version as well.
Text wise the published version is tighter, obviously, thanks to my family and friends who helped edit it. The only major change from the first version was referring to the rook as they rather than it, I wanted them to have a personality which 'it' didn't help draw out.
On the layout side the NSR Discord were an amazing help2. I did mess it up and make the template I was working on 3cm too tall which caused me a few evening cursing and reformatting but I'm really happy with how it came together. The image on the cover is from the charmingly titled “Caw! Caw! or, the chronicle of crows”3. I isolated it and did a little work on it to have it echo the image The Bookery use on their bookmarks to solidify the homage.
Now to work out what the next thing is…
Live Action Role-playing Game↩
In particular a conversation with AwkwardTurtle and David Blandy, thanks so much!↩
I’d looked at probably hundreds of public domain corvid illustrations and took to the NSR Discord to ask for help finding good Rooks when The Bearded Belgian found this one.↩