Building.

 I really am going to get around  to writing one final post about Enigmarch - which has now finished - at some point. It was brilliant, and I learned so much from doing it, and there are still about 10 puzzles I haven't done a 'behind the scenes' piece for yet, so plenty to write about. But this is not that post.

This is a different post.

Because it occurred to me that, having accidentally used this blog (more than a few years ago now, and in a very round about sort of a way) to document the utter sadness of a deep deep heartbreak, I should probably take the opportunity to document the complete opposite of that.  The giddy, glorious and unbridled joy of realising you might be... Yes. That. For now, let's just call it 'meeting someone new.'

( I'm not quite sure yet if I'm going to publish all of this post, or an edited version of this post, and even if I'm going to publish it at all. But either way, I've been going back and forth on exactly what language to use here. If I'm really honest with myself, I think I know what is happening, and that thought is scary and terrifying and wonderful and exciting all at once. And despite all of that, or maybe even because all of that,  I should take this opportunity to capture it in writing, or try to at least, even if I'm not quite ready to give it a label just yet.)

Except...I'm not going to write about it. 

Usually writing about things is a way of getting them out of my head. But it has occurred  to me that maybe I don't want this to be out of my head. Not just yet. Maybe I want to grab this feeling which keeps bubbling up and spilling out - by way of the permanent, ridiculous grin plastered all over my face, a compulsion to read and re-read WhatsApp conversations every few seconds, and a complete inability to focus on anything else for more than about five seconds -  and hold onto it for a while. Because as inconvenient as all of that is, it is also rather lovely.  And it has been a long, long time since I've felt it. In fact, I'm not quite sure I've ever felt it. At least not quite like this - so quickly, or so easily or so convincingly.  And now that I do, and I realise how rarely, if ever, in life you do get to feel this way, I'd kind of like to keep feeling it for a little while longer. 

And then there's another reason I'm not sure I want to write about it. On the one hand I want to shout from the rooftops about this rare, beautiful wonderful and extraordinary thing which has arrived completely out of nowhere, and taken me by utter surprise. But on the other hand, I want to keep it, for now, as something which belongs to just the two of us. Over the past little while (and it's a ridiculously short little while, in the grand scheme of things) we have somehow managed to build an  entire little world of our own to play in, full of  jokes and references and new discoveries and call-backs.  (We have our own shorthand, and running gags, and there's a whole supporting cast of characters. We even have a house band. Seriously. It's been... busy.)  I love being in that world so much. It already feels like a second home, of sorts. An escape from the rest of the world, at the very least.  And that little playground is ours. Just ours. I don't think I want to share it with anyone else just yet.

Anyway. While we're building and playing in that gloriously silly little imaginary world, at the same time, we're also building something else, here in the real one. I don't quite knows what it is yet - I don't think either of us does - but as we frolic together in this wonderland we have co-created - quite by accident, it sometimes seems -  I picture the two of us surrounded by bags of  cement and planks of wood and, ropes and nails and um...whatever else it is you build things out of (I'm no expert). Standing side by side, and both gently exploring the idea of building.  Nailing planks of wood, and gluing things, and tying one pole to another with bits of string, and untying them again.  Tinkering with things, and seeing what fits together, and what doesn't, and working out what it looks like when they do. Imagining what this exciting creation that we are gradually building might be, without making any sorts of decisions about that just yet. 

Maybe this is a treehouse we're building. Maybe it's a raft, or a sailing boat. A fort?  How about a space-ship. I've always wanted a space-ship. No, a time-machine!  Wait.. a TIME TRAVELLING SPACE SHIP. The possibilities are endless. And it's fun, but also a little scary sometimes, to imagine them. 

Because this thing we are building - well, perhaps it will become a circus tent. Something which will stand strong and tall and proud for a period of time, and be bright and bold and full of joy and  excitement and adventure while it's there, but will eventually need to be taken down again one day, and packed away. Or who knows - maybe (and again it's only a maybe) it could even  end up being a more permanent structure. One to invite other people into, and fill with memories and stories and happy moments. And some sad moments, and all the million other moments in between. Or, you know. Maybe we'll just keep telling ourselves it's a time travelling space ship. With lasers, and a whole lot of other cool stuff. 

It could be any of those things, it could be all of those things. It could start as one of them and turn into something else. It might end up being something else entirely.  We just don't know. Not yet. And I don't think we need to know. Not for now.  For now, I keep reminding myself, we're both just building. And for the first time in a long time, I'm remembering just how nice building alongside somebody else can be. Occasionally I get the feeling that one or the other of us - or both -  has stopped for a moment to stand back and squint at it and try and work out if we know what it is yet. And that's when it can get a bit scary, when faintest glimmers of what it might look like gradually come into focus, then fade away again. It's hard to say whether the knowing or the not knowing is the scariest part. 

It's inevitable of course that any building project, no matter how careful you are, might involve a few accidental scrapes and bruises along the way. But we both seem quite mindful of that, and are looking out for each other as we go, to try and avoid too many of them. We're building this thing - whatever it is -  out of conversations and new discoveries, shared interests, and common values; curiosity and small moments of vulnerability, and patience and honesty and care; serious moments and silly moments and  laughter (SO much laughter).  And mostly, I think, with kindness, and trust, and hope, and a willingness, sometimes, to take a few risks. Because what else do you build a relationship - any sort of relationship - out of, other than that? 

We're building quietly and slowly, and carefully, with no particular agenda, or outcome in mind, other than, maybe, that no-one gets hurt or too badly injured in the process. (And so far so good, on that front). We're simply enjoying this process, of mucking around with some building materials. Building simply for the sake of building, with no rush, and no pressure - just gradually discovering what this joint construction project is going to turn into.  

So, yes. This is me, writing about not writing about this extraordinary, unexpected, scary-but-by-god-it's-worth-it, pinch-yourself-to-make-sure-its-really happening, one in a million chance process of... meeting someone new. That's what I'm still going with, I think. 

( I'm not sure it's any more useful  to read, for anyone else, than those 'being brave' posts were. But like those, it has certainly helped me to write about it. Or more to the point, not to write about it.)

Postscript. 

And now I'm really glad I wrote about it. Because, as it turns out, what we were building became something more akin to  a pop-up tent - it provided a temporary shelter to play in on a rainy day (or in this case, during the course of a particularly rainy few weeks.) But rather than pack it down again properly, my co-builder decided, in the heat of a moment, to lob a hand grenade at it from a distance (the day before we were supposed to take it on its first proper outing) and then swiftly ran away to hide from the fall-out.

(Now, if you've ever tried to pack an actual pop-up tent away I know what you're thinking and yes, you're absolutely right - throwing a hand-grenade at it would be a perfectly acceptable thing to do, to avoid facing the horrendous, breaks-all-the-laws-of-physics near-impossible process of attempting to pack it away again after you've used it.  It's a lot less acceptable to do that if the pop-up tent is a metaphorical one, and there are other people still inside it, though.)

Anyway, it was a pretty cool tent. One which deserved to be at least packed down properly - so that perhaps it could  have been brought out again at some better time, or at the very least some of the pieces  salvaged and re-used to make something else. Sadly, hand-grenades don't leave a lot of room for that, and sometimes no matter how hard you try, and how wrong you know their reasons for throwing them are, you just can't stop other people throwing hand grenades. 

I couldn't have written about it now the way I wrote about while we were still building it, so like I say, I'm really glad I did write about it when I did. It helps to have managed to capture it to hold on to, and look back on eventually. Because as sad and frustrating and completely unfair as that final outcome might have been... there was also, and will always be, the building part. And that part? Well. That part really was quite something.  

Additional Postscript.

It turns out, building something with the *right* person is even better still, and a whole lot less scary.

Enigmarch (most of) week 3

Here we go again.. an Enigmarch Week 3 round-up! Or at least, most of week 3 - it seemed to make more sense to write this on a Sunday, rather than wait for the whole week to be over.  

As with previous weeks, this post will inevitably contain spoilers for the puzzles mentioned; if you want to try solving them first, they can all be found here, but this week I've also linked to each puzzle separately (something I really should have thought of weeks ago!) in its header.

Day 15
Prompt - bug

I keep a list of ideas for puzzle themes and mechanics in the front of my notebook, which is where this one came from. Very handy, as it turns out, because I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to come up with something otherwise!

I'm not sure if there's an official name for this particular puzzle format, where matching pairs are joined with straight lines that cross a specific letter, but it's one I've used before; it's also something I considered using for the 'dots' theme on account of the circles, but I'm now rather relieved that I didn't given how useful it was here! I've realised why that was -  unlike other extraction methods, such as indexing, the final answer  doesn't need to rely on their being specific letters in the clue words. And that was exactly the problem I had with this puzzle - the very limited choice of clue words. Although there are plenty of words which contain the right letter strings - RAT, FLEA, ANT etc - not many of them leave recognisable words or abbreviations once those strings are removed. I was never going to find one which included an X, for example, and yet I knew the word I wanted to use as a solution contained one. Matching-pairs-joined-with-straight-lines-that-cross-a-specific letter to the rescue! (There really should be a better name for  that format...) 

Day 16
Prompt - hex

I do like the look and concept of hex grids in puzzles, but I'm not a great fan of solving them - mainly because I tend to do most of my solving on screen, and they are hard to replicate in Excel in order to be able to do that - I usually end up copying them into something else and using paint tools, which is fiddly, or begrudgingly print them out and solve the old fashioned way. (I hasten to add, there were several hex grids I saw in other people's Enigmarch contributions today which I did thoroughly enjoy solving, mostly because they were small and simple enough to be able to manage easily on screen, without needing to mark the grids in any way.) 

So I was even less of a fan of the idea of creating one (have I mentioned my non-existent design skills?) and although I did do a quick search online for tools which might help - because I assume those must exist? - I soon abandoned plans and went with something else instead.  Turning  the colour names  into hex codes will, I imagine,  be fairly obvious to anyone who already knows what today's theme is, but one thing I've been conscious of throughout this challenge is wanting the puzzles to be accessible and solvable for people who don't have any idea of the theme. Which is why the colour samples are hexagons, and also why I included cyan among the colours - hoping it might help people to make the connection. 'In the end' is a gentle hint to guide people towards the last characters of the hex codes, which I thought would be a little less obvious than using the first one.

Day 17
Prompt - rainbow

This isn't the first time I've created the perfect puzzle for a theme, just a day early! As I've mentioned before, I'm trying not to repeat any ideas or formats through the challenge, so hex codes were out of contention for this one, but colour names were fair game. I was actually a little worried this might be too difficult, so was quite relieved when I heard from the first person who told me they'd solved it. The format (partial anagrams, with the start and end letter being one of a selection) was largely driven by the rainbow graphic I happened to find, with a cloud at each end, but I quite like it as a variation on a straightforward set of anagrams. 

Day 18
Prompt - spell

This was another one of those puzzles, a bit like the dominoes for 'spot'  which felt a bit 'meh' - there's nothing wrong with it, particularly, but nothing felt particularly exciting about it, either.  I toyed with the idea of magic spells for a while, and also thought about scores on a spelling test (maybe bringing back Miss Wilson and her class) before settling on a fairly simple idea. 

Day 19
Prompt - hidden

Hidden answers are one of my favourite formats of cryptic crossword clues, so this was an easy decision to make. I did actually think about making a crossword, but I'm not sure how exciting it would have been to solve, once the penny had dropped that the clues were all using the same format! So I went for this instead. Animals seemed like things which might hide, and a zoo felt like a good place for them to be hiding. 

I had to make a small adjustment to this puzzle after I published it, as it contained a rouge bee (where's Bob and his pest control service when you need him?!)  The original text said 'phantom animals have not BEEn seen in any locations' but was easy enough to fix - thanks to Jake who noticed this.  

Speaking of Bob, he does seem to have become a bit of a reoccurring character throughout these puzzles. Which I hadn't intended, but do quite like. 

Day 20
Prompt - tracks

Well, this is quite possibly one of the most ridiculous things I've ever done.

(I know I gave a spoiler warning at the top, but it's probably worth another mention here, because this puzzle, while it may look large and complicated at first glance, is actually pretty simple - in that there is only one thing you need to work out in order to get to the solution. And I will definitely need to give away that One Thing to be able to talk about it.) 

 I said a while ago I wanted to try and use more outside resources in puzzles, and I've had vague thoughts for a long time about making a puzzle themed around the events in this particular song. And so, well... here we are. I wasn't sure when I started if it would even be possible to find a song for every single event or person name-checked by Billy Joel, but I figured it was worth a try. And for the most part it was fairly easy to find something - either a direct reference in the title or the artist's name, or a slightly more obscure reference in terms of lyrics or subject matter. So a couple of verses in I realised it was probably do-able, if a little time-consuming, and strapped in for the ride. 

Somewhere around the half way mark,  I hit a bit of a stumbling block with Syngman Rhee who, strangely enough, no-one seems to have written a song about. Realising I still had a LONG way to go, I did nearly throw in the towel at that point, convinced that there were more than enough references by that point for people to be able to work out what was going on, and thinking I could change the flavour text to reflect the fact that this was the start of a playlist, not the whole thing.  But it seemed a shame in the end not to keep going, so I threw in the same 'South Korea' song I'd used before, and kept plodding on. 

And he turned out to be the only real stumbling block, in the end - some of the connections are more obscure than others, but I promise they are all there. A few of the more obscure ones were out of desperation (hypodermic needles being washed up on a beach could be described as "Flotsam and Jetsam", technically, but I'm aware that a Disney song about animated moray eels doesn't quite capture the seriousness of that particular event...). Others were more of a choice and are really just there for my own enjoyment (I'm not expecting anyone who isn't me to remember that Movin' Right Along from the Muppet Movie features a Studebaker, for instance), but that's the joy of a puzzle like this - there was enough room to slip a few of those ones in, without affecting the ability to solve it.  

A few disclaimers. Many of the songs I know, but some I didn't, and I haven't listened all the way through to them. I avoided anything marked as having explicit lyrics, and I don't think anything slipped through, but can't be 100% sure. A lot of the references in the song are to political events, and so songs which name check those, or some of the people involved in them, tend to have a political bent as well; again, I haven't listened carefully to absolutely all of them, so while I don't think there's anything in there which is particularly problematic, I should make it clear that they were chosen simply because there was some sort of link between the title, lyrics or artist and the Billy Joel lyric, and aren't necessarily a reflection of my own views. (And also, of course....Spotify. Yes, I know. I've been looking for an alternative streaming service for a while now, and especially one which will let you share playlists like this, but haven't managed to find one I'm happy with yet.)

All in all, I like this puzzle and am glad I saw it through to the end, even though the ratio of 'time spent making it' to 'actual puzzle solving required' is completely out of whack. I'm conscious that, as I mentioned in the spoiler warning at the start, from a solver's point of view it's really just about identifying the gimmick; hopefully for most people that will take long enough for the experience to still feel satisfying, and maybe (also hopefully) there's also some enjoyment to be gained from working out some of those slightly more obscure references, for those who feel inclined. Apologies in advance for 'hottest tracks', which will, of course, make perfect sense once you've seen the connection (and so I couldn't resist!), but I'm sure will have been no help at all, in terms of getting there. 

And there's (most of) week three! It has been nice to hear people say they like reading these; it's the kind of thing I always really enjoy hearing about, but when I first decided to start writing them I had no idea if that would be the case for anyone else. I'll write one more  after next week, and then come back for a final wrap-up and to pick up on the last few puzzles.

Enigmarch Week 2

 Just like I did last week, I've written a little bit about the puzzles I designed during the second week of  #Enigmarch.

This post will, by its nature, almost certainly contain spoilers for the puzzles mentioned. If you'd like to try solving them first, they can all be found here.

Day 8
Prompt - sharp

I've written a few music puzzles before - they always remind me of the many music theory classes I sat through at school, although thankfully technology makes it a lot easier to write scores these days! I use the free version  Noteflight, which seems to have all of the functionality I need. The biggest challenge is to find something to do other than simply 'here are some notes, now read them', and of course when doing that, only having the letters A-G to work with is somewhat limiting.  So I was quite pleased with the work around I found here; although I felt it needed something to hint towards the fact that more than just these letters were being used, so I added the grid at the last minute.

Day 9
Prompt - trick

As well as making puzzles I write fiction and often draw on folklore, fairytale, myths and legends as source material. So it didn't take very long for my brain to make the connection between 'tricks' and the various 'trickster' archetypes from various stories and mythologies - Loki is perhaps the best known one, but there are plenty of others - and certainly (as I soon discovered) more than enough of them to theme a puzzle around.  Not all of these characters were familiar to me, and I enjoyed doing the research to find out about them. The important thing was to make sure the ones I chose weren't so obscure that it would be impossible for solvers to identify them even once they had recognised the theme - all of the names I've included should be easy enough to find by searching for 'trickster characters', or something similar.

Day 10 
Prompt - dots

It took me a while to come up with an idea for this one - other things I thought about included morse code and dot-to-dot drawings, and given that 'dots' is sometimes how musicians colloquially refer to sheet music I found myself annoyed that I'd already made that music puzzle a few days ago!  I'm trying not to repeat puzzle formats (and yes I know, I've already bent that rule with word searches, although I like to think I used them for two quite different purposes it's probably OK) and so that was off limits here. In the end, dominoes sprang to mind and I fairly hastily put something together. I wasn't particularly thrilled with it, to be honest - it felt a little too straight forward, and I would have liked to have found a way to make more of a connection between the solution word and the puzzle itself, or at least connect the solution to the flavour text somehow, but I couldn't find a way to do it. And I'm still annoyed that the dominoes don't make one single chain! But despite my misgivings I had a lovely message from someone saying how much they'd enjoyed it, which today of all days was particularly welcome. 

Day 11
Prompt - blank

Perhaps somewhat appropriately, I can't actually remember a lot about making this one! I think it was  straightforward enough though, I think  - not surprisingly, 'fill in the blanks' was a phrase which pretty instantly came to mind, and once I had that, the idea of filling those blanks with words made from the letters in 'BLANK' (plus one extra each time, for the extraction) came fairly quickly. 

Day 12
Prompt - branches.

This prompt really made me laugh. It's another one I saw when it was first posted because I was up late - this time because I was taking part in the Glyph2 puzzle hunt.  My team finished the first round of puzzles some time past midnight, and so it made sense to stay up a little longer and wait for the prompt to arrive. As it happens, one of the last puzzles we'd been working on involved doing all sorts of convoluted things with names of trees, and co-ordinates, and the London Tree Map (which I didn't know was a thing, but now I know very well.) So just when I thought I was finally done with trees...

I went to sleep with a few ideas including hidden names of trees, family trees, and branching databases rattling around in my head. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I thought about was branching narratives, and whether I could create something based on an interactive text adventure. I've experimented with Twine, an open source tool for making them, before, but not in a long while, and my main memory of using it is that it's very easy for branching story lines to get unwieldy and out of hand.

"Don't be ridiculous," I told myself. "It's a lovely idea. But you can't learn re-learn  how to use Twine and use it to write an entire text-based adventure, all in one morning, just for the sake of making a puzzle."

And then, well...I kind of did do EXACTLY that. Twine is  actually very intuitive and easy to use; as it turns out the tricky part was working out how to share a finished twine project in a way which lets other people play it - for that I had to set up and itch.io account, so on the bright side at least now I have one of those.

One of the joys of Enigmarch has been that the time constraints and volume of puzzles required forces you to keep things relatively small and simple. In this case to be able to make a puzzle out of the story or, in other words, for solvers to be able to extract some sort of solution, I needed them to be able to get to all possible endings.  So I mapped out a nice small story with 8 possible paths, all of which lead to your untimely death (sorry about that, if you've played it). 

The dashes on the puzzle document indicating the format of the answer (2 words - 5 letters and 3 letters) was a last minute addition, but was definitely needed, I think - I wanted to make sure it was very clear that there was more to do than simply work through the various storylines; hopefully solvers will notice that there are 8 possible endings, matching the number of letters required, and also that  the first letters of these endings are A, B, C and so on. This provides a way to order the endings, and from there it's just a case of  noticing that one word in each of them has been italicised - the initial letters of the words in italics spell the final solution. 

I had SO much fun writing this. It's very tongue in cheek and a love letter, of sorts, to the text games  and choose your own adventure books I enjoyed as a kid.  The opening choice involving a decision about climbing a tree was partly inspired by the 'branch' prompt, of course, but also by the text adventure game  Zork.  And of course, once I'd made  one Zork reference, there was absolutely no way I could have anyone wander around a dark cave without being eaten by a grue. 

This is  the first puzzle I've written which uses an outside resource, rather than just being a simple print-and-play, or solve on screen affair, and it's definitely something I'd like to start doing more of. 

Day 13 
Prompt - nostalgia

If yesterday's prompt made me laugh, this one REALLY made me laugh... if only I'd known it was coming, I might have held off writing that text adventure game for one more day! On the bright side, needing to find something else to do  gave me a chance to dive into the world of 80s movies. I was very pleased with the drive-in sign generator I found online - I was actually imagining a standard movie marquee when I went looking for something to use, but I think the drive-in aspect adds to the retro feel. 

Day 14 
Prompt - irrational

It's Pi day, which (according to the organisers) was the reason for this prompt - I did toy briefly with doing something more maths based, but eventually settled on the idea of 'irrational' behaviour having to do with working outside of logical rules. I think four examples is just enough to work with to identify a pattern, which is why they are in groups of five; in my head, 'Miss Wilson' is a primary school teacher and these are her students, which is why some names are repeated. (It was originally going to be a parent yelling at their kids, but then I realised it was going to be way too difficult to use exactly the same names each time and have each of them be the exception to a different rule.)  I'd already come up with the solution word before I gave her a name, and having caught some of the the BAFTA awards on TV the night before, it felt like a nice little easter-egg to throw in. 

So there we have it - week two done and dusted! It's hard to believe we are almost half way through the challenge already - I'm still really loving it, although it's fair to say the prompts are definitely getting  a little trickier! Am looking forward to seeing what week three will bring. 

Enigmarch - Week 1

 As mentioned in my previous post, during March I am taking part in #Enigmarch, a daily puzzle creation challenge.

Each day there is a new prompt, and each day the challenge is to create a puzzle in response to it. At the time of writing, we are three days in (although by the time I actually post this, we'll be a lot further) and I am already LOVING it.

I have been making puzzles for about a year or so now. I've always quite enjoyed solving them, and during Covid lockdowns I found myself getting involved in several quite separate online events and communities which, for various reasons, reminded me just how much fun that can be. So I decided to have a go at making them too, and it turns out that's also quite a lot of fun. In the past year or so I've published four themed puzzle hunts - collections of puzzles which, once solved, give a set of answers which themselves feed into one final 'meta-puzzle'.  I'm currently working on the next one, but for now, thanks to #EnigMarch, I'm getting plenty of extra puzzle-writing  practice.  

I plan to write one of these posts every week or so, for anyone who is interested (which I am fully aware may be no-one!) explaining a little bit about the process of creating the the puzzles and the prompts which inspired them.  These posts will, by their nature, almost certainly contain spoilers for the puzzles mentioned. If you'd like to try solving them first, they can all be found here.

Day 1  
Prompt:  initials

I was super curious about what the first prompt was going to be, and have to admit I gave a big sigh of a relief when I saw this was it.  Initials are nice and puzzle-y; often it's first letters of a set of answers which need to be extracted for a final solution, for instance, and so this felt like a fairly gentle way in. I hadn't realised just how nervous I'd been about the potential to see a prompt and draw a complete blank, but apparently I was.  

Book titles and their authors came as an idea fairly quickly (they are the kind of punny jokes I live for ), so I set about coming up with a few potential names, and then realised I should probably make sure that the initials  I was choosing did actually form a word, or words. I also knew I wanted to put the titles onto images of books, so went off searching for free  clip art, and realised that the final solution would also be driven, to a certain extent, by the image I found and how many books were in it. So I established it was going to be two five letter words, played around with the letters I already had to try and make something, and then filled in the gaps with more names. The last step was then creating the titles, which was the silly fun part. 

This puzzle actually went through two iterations - something I almost certainly won't  have time to do every day, but on this occasion the change felt important enough to make. The early version  involved matching surnames and first initials to make the authors, but then  I realised that by doing this  I was taking away the opportunity to have an 'a-ha!' moment. Those moments when  the penny finally drops (and in this case, the penny is the  realisation that it's only the initials, and not the full first names of the authors which needed to be used) are often the best part of solving a puzzle, and it seemed a shame not to let solvers experience that for themselves. So I swapped initials for full first names.  I think this updated version is much stronger; both can be seen in the folder, for anyone who is really interested.

Day 2
Prompt: rhymes

This  felt like another nice, safe, puzzle-friendly topic. Rhyme makes things predictable, and pattern spotting and making predictions is often what sits at the heart of being able to solve a puzzle. My puzzle was fairly straight forward to make; I generated lots of pairs of rhyming words and chose one pair to be the final answer I wanted. I liked the idea of doing what you've just been doing, again, to get this final answer, so I knew I wanted the clues to generate another riddle or definition, rather than directly give solvers the rhyming pair directly. This meant that it needed to be something obvious - there's nothing worse than doing all of the groundwork to solve a puzzle and then falling at the last hurdle thanks to a slightly too obscure reference or riddle.

Some of the other clues did feel a little difficult, but I felt confident enough that the hidden message was long enough  for it to be easy to be able to guess some of the letters if needed, and then work back from those to fill in any missing rhyming pairs.

Day 3 
Prompt: shadow

This one worried me a little bit, because to me 'shadows' instantly made me think of physical puzzles or, at the very least, the kinds of puzzles which involve visual reasoning and spatial awareness - which are very much not my strong point. Wordplay, logic, lateral thinking and codes are all much more in my wheel-house, and although more visual puzzles are something I should probably try and get better at, my design skills are also fairly non-existent, so I settled this time for a word puzzle instead.  And who knew just how many words and phrases involving shadows there are! As other people's responses to the prompt started to appear it was fun to notice some of those words and phrases - eye shadow, shadow puppets, etc - being used as themes.  

Day 4
Prompt: locks. 

It's fair to say this one got a little out of hand!  I'm a big fan of both Escape this Podcast and The Infinite Escape Room, two podcasts where the hosts create and play through virtual escape rooms. I've had a few attempts at designing these myself, and have come quite close to finishing a couple, but never quite managed to tie together all of the loose ends.  When I saw 'locks' as a prompt escape rooms were the first thing which came to mind - for the simple reason that they are places where you inevitably find lots of them. And thinking about other meanings of 'locks' led me fairly quickly to a decision about the setting - it was going to have to be a hairdressing salon. 

Normally I see the prompt first thing in the morning - they are posted at about 1am in my local time -  but as it happens I was up late the night before and saw this one as soon as it appeared. I had a day off the next day, so I knew I'd have a bit of time. Which is how I ended up finding myself at 3 in the morning having accidentally written half of a virtual escape room.

 Escape this podcast have done a couple of episodes on room and puzzle design (which can be found here, in the list of bonus episodes)  and can tell you a lot more than I can about the process; they also publish write-ups of all of their rooms and I used their format as a model for writing mine. 

But basically, the process was to come up with a chain of events - getting into the store room lets you get into the cash register, getting into the cash register lets you unlock the store room cupboard, and getting into the store room cupboard gives you what you need to make your final escape.  Essentially this means  there are three puzzles to be solved - the directional lock (combining the post-its and the sign to get a series of directions), the  shelves/cash register (working out how product codes are created, and applying this) and the final door lock (working out the top selling products from the inventory data). 

All of these were fairly straight forward - I had to do a bit of research to find names of hairstyles and products, and the inventory puzzle, which was the last thing I wrote, caused me more problems than it should have done, but otherwise they were fairly easy to create. 

And then it was just a case of writing everything up, thinking through all of the objects and possible interactions with them.

 I'm really proud of it and was thrilled to hear from a few people over the course of the day who had enjoyed playing through it and managed to escape. It has definitely made me want to go back and try and finish some of the longer, more complex rooms I've previously tried to design.

Day 5
Prompt: present

I do love a logic puzzle - I have just realised there is at least one (and sometimes more than one!) in every puzzle hunt I've published so far. So using logic to work out who gave which gift to who in a Secret Santa seemed like a fairly easy way to use this prompt.  I don't really have any advice to give on constructing a puzzle like this, other than to say that they do get a little easier with practice! The first few I made were really hard work, and I could feel myself getting tied up in knots - this time around it felt a little more manageable. 

My working document has three grids on it, with columns labelled 'giver', 'recipient' and 'gift'.  The first grid contains  the full solution, so I had it to work backwards from. The second one started out blank, and as I wrote clues* which revealed bits of information, I filled that information in, until the whole grid had been filled. The third grid also started out blank, and is the one I used as a final check - once I had what I thought was a complete set of clues, I worked through them and used them to fill in the grid, to make sure it was in fact solvable.

*The only real way I know how to create these clues is just to write a bunch of stuff down, and worry about whether or not it is actually useful afterwards. So I just keep coming  up with true statements which could be made about the scenario (Ashley didn't buy a present for Bob, Chris was given the play station, neither Don nor Ed bought the fondue set, etc.)  and then go back and combine some, delete others, and fill in any gaps. I'm not sure it's the most efficient process, but it's the one which works for me and, as I said, with practice is getting slightly easier to manage.

Day 6
Prompt: island

I've actually written an island-themed puzzle before, as part of  a puzzle hunt which was was inspired by the most recent series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Program One of the characters, Patrick Nightingale, makes a somewhat memorable appearance on Desert Island Discs, and so as an homage to that, for his puzzle I created a word search full of hidden islands; the crux of that puzzle, really, is simply working out that it's islands you should be looking for, and that they all intersect with numbers, to give you a order to put them in. 

Wanting to do something a little different this time, I played around for a while with the idea of of mine-sweeper type grid featuring islands (the numbered squares) and having to find sharks (the mines) in the water around them, but I couldn't quite make it work, so I found myself abandoning plans and going back to look at names of islands again.   I liked the idea of creating general knowledge clues ( (although I did also think about making them cryptic clues, for a while) pointing to specific islands, and then flags being used to put them in the correct order.  But I didn't want it to feel too much like a straight trivia quiz, and so in the end another word search seemed like the best option - it's a handy way to provide a set of answers, so it's essentially a case of matching the clue to the correct island, but doing that in a less obvious way. I much prefer this puzzle to the Patrick Nightingale one, but probably needed to have made that earlier puzzle for this one to exist. 

Day 7
Prompt: translate

This was a tricky one. To me 'translate' meant one of two options - something language based, or something which involving moving shapes in a straight line. And the latter, for reasons I've already mentioned, wasn't a very viable option. 

But language translation also posed some problems. I'm very conscious that being a native English speaker carries with it no small amount of privilege, and I didn't feel particularly comfortable with the idea of treating a real, non-English language as a puzzle to be solved. I toyed with ideas around trying to work out and apply the rules of an invented language (something I've seen done to great effect in various puzzle hunts, as well, of course, in the game Heaven's Vault but on a much greater scale than I had time for); in hindsight doing something with spelling or word  variations between  US  and UK English would have made perfect sense, but isn't something which occurred to me at the time.

Eventually I settled on mistranslations - looking at what happens when Google Translate takes a phrase (in this case a song title - I actually started out with proverbs, but soon realised songs worked a lot better), puts it into a different language, then converts it back to English again. It took a little bit of experimenting to find titles and languages where the difference between the 'before' and 'after'  was enough to present some degree of challenge but didn't make it too impossible to recognise the original. 

I like it as a puzzle, but still have some mixed feelings about it as an idea. Hopefully it's clear that the target of the joke, if there is one, is Google translate and the limitations of auto-translate technology, rather than the languages themselves, which would feel a bit icky.  (Incidentally, I saw lots of great puzzles submitted on this theme which worked around the issue perfectly well; it's a fine line to tread, is my point, but most people seemed to tread it carefully and respectfully.) 

The other thing to say about this puzzle, of course, is that my choice of artists tells you everything you need to know, I think, about my cutting-edge knowledge of the current music scene... 

And that was week one!  We're now well into week two (I've been writing this over the course of a few days) which has already thrown up some equally interesting challenges - but more on those next time. If you'd like to see more puzzles I can recommend searching the #EnigMarch hashtag on Twitter, where you'll find all sorts of entries. And if you want to have a go at making a few yourself, follow @EnigmarchHQ for the daily prompts. 

Hooray!

 I have finally found something to use this blog for! 

Actually, I did also think of something to use it for a couple of weeks ago, and started writing what turned into quite a long post, but then changed my mind. 

Last time I was here I described this blog - or at least, what this blog used to be -  as 'a miscellaneous collection of links and music videos and quotes from books and things I felt like writing about, or had been distracted by, or thought were worth sharing.' What I really meant, I  now realise, were things which I found interesting or funny or uplifting - things which made me feel curious, or joyful, or inspired a sense of joy. 

 And then a couple of weeks ago, I found myself about to use it, not for any of those things, but instead to write about a thing which had made me cross. Maybe that's just the inevitable outcome of being ten years older than I was back then?  I don't know.  But it did make me stop and think. 

(The think I was cross about, incidentally, is something I'm still quite cross about, and that doesn't look like it will go away any time soon - so maybe I will get around to finishing writing about it eventually.) 

Anyway. I have a new plan. 

This month I'm taking part in EnigMarch - a daily puzzle design challenge, where each day a prompt is provided (prompts so far have included 'lock', 'rhyme', and 'sharp', among others) and anyone who wants to comes up with some sort of puzzle on that theme, and shares it.  It has been great so far - I've been writing puzzles for about a year or so now, and the  prompts are perfect inspiration. It is fascinating to see what everyone else comes up with, and how differently or similarly our minds work -  there is always a really wide range of ideas. And those fellow designers act as built in community of solvers too, which means getting plenty of feedback, which is really nice. I'm loving ever moment of it, and am already a little sad at the thought that at some point the month will be over. 

Something else I really love is when writers or other creators share a little bit of their creative process - whether through  photos of their notebooks, directors' commentaries on DVDS (are those still even a thing?!) or speaking at events and so on. So, I thought I might do a little series of 'behind the scenes' posts capturing my EnigMarch experience, and more specifically talking a little bit about how the puzzles I'm creating for it were made. 

I have no idea how interesting that will be to anyone, but... let's find out, shall we? ( And let's face it, it has to be better than listening to me moan about an interview with Tony Blair from a few weeks ago, which really did make me VERY CROSS.)

I am so sorry, Gary Usleman

 I'm thinking about starting up this blog again.  

When I first launched it, back in... 2009? Gosh. When I first launched it THE DECADE BEFORE LAST,  I was just about to give up what would turn out to be my last full time permanent job and start freelancing.  It was a slightly scary move - I was walking away from a secure job, working with people I really liked and who had come to feel a little like surrogate family (which, when your actual family live half way across the world, is a useful thing to feel.) While I was quite sure it *was* the right decision, I couldn't explain to anyone, let alone to myself, how I knew that, and I realised that, on paper at least, it seemed like... an odd choice, to say the least. Hence the original blog title (and also, although it came a few months later, the ship quote, which I think captures slightly more accurately the essence of what this blog was, and hopefully still is.) 

My plans for this new freelance lifestyle were, apparently, to "write, work and study in equal measures" - I say 'apparently' because I have no idea what I thought I might be studying for. (Seriously - no recollection WHATSOEVER that this was even part of the plan. But there it is, in black and white, in an early post. It's super weird.)  I definitely was going to try and write things, though. I remember that much. And I was going to have to find some paid work to keep me solvent while I did it. 

A blog, I thought, would keep me accountable, and would be a place to capture some of my worries and successes and adventures as I went about trying this new freelancing malarky.  And that was how it used it, to begin with. But pretty quickly it morphed into something else entirely - a miscellaneous collection of links and music videos and quotes from books and things I felt like writing about, or had been distracted by, or thought were worth sharing. 

Recently, for various reasons, I've started to think it would be nice to have that kind of place again. Or more to the point,  the kind of place to put some of the other things I also - less frequently - sometimes used to put here. Stories, and recaps of things, and whatnot. Basically, I've finally (after quite a long hiatus) started to remember what it feels like to be the kind of person who likes to make and write and think about stuff, purely for the sake of making and writing and thinking about it. Which is a nice way to be feeling again. 

Do people even still write blogs? Back in 2009, it seemed like something everyone was doing - now not nearly as many people do or, at least, not nearly as often or regularly as they used to. But there definitely  still are some of them still kicking around, and maybe this blog will join them again.

Or  - let's be honest - maybe it won't. I have, after all, made several attempts to resurrect this blog before. All of which have helpfully, um...  been fully documented. Sometimes accountability isn't all its cracked up to be.

Here, for instance is  I how began my most recent post in November 2017, after a gap of almost 18 months:

"Been a while since I posted here...  Sorry about the dust and tumbleweed. I'll have a good clean up at some point. " 

So, yeah. That aged well.

And before that, way back in April 2015 there was this, in a post I optimistically titled 'I'm Back. Maybe': 

Gosh. It HAS been a while. I didn't make a deliberate decision to stop writing this blog. But that's sort of what seems  to have  happened....

And of course it's easy, once you've stopped doing something, to keep not doing it.  A few days of not doing something turn into a week, and weeks turn into months, and suddenly it's a year between blog posts, and you're not entirely sure how it happened. So this is me trying not to stop. Or, more to the point, trying to start again.  Let's see how it goes.

Which brings me to the apology I need to make. Because, in response to that April 2015 post, someone called Gary Usleman wrote this in the comments:

Now I don't know Gary Usleman in real life, but the fact that I don't - or more to the point, that he doesn't know me -  is sort of the important bit.  It strikes me, in hindsight, that this was an incredibly kind thing to do - to offer a bit of moral support to a complete stranger, who he had stumbled across by accident. 

And how did I repay him? 

Well, things started well. Just three days later, I had fulfilled my promise and started blogging again. But let's see how things did go, from there, shall we?

Swimmingly, it seems. After that promised 'fresh start' in April 2015 I managed to produce a grand total of nine more posts.  Just under one a month for the rest of that year, and then one a year for the couple of years after that, and then nothing. Until now. 

 (It's also worth mentioning too, at this point, that they weren't even good posts. Or at least, not the sorts of posts he might have been expecting to see. The three from September and November 2015, which formed an accidental trifecta I  ended up naming 'The Bravery Trilogy', were written in the lead up to and aftermath of, having had my heart pretty spectacularly broken. (I am now, I hasten to add, absolutely fine - my heart survived and life moved on, as it inevitably does. It's all good, I promise.) It happened  in a  slightly weird (but no less painful for that) and complicated way which I didn't - and still don't - really want to go into the details of, but which I  did still want to write about. And so I did write about it, but not, I suspect, in a way which was specific enough to make what I was saying useful for, or even interesting to, anybody else.  

I still can't quite decide how I feel about those posts. In  a weird sort of way I'm actually quite fond of them - or bits of them, at least -  but I do also think it's safe to say that they were at the very least, a little self-indulgent. And  probably not quite what some poor, kind person who was simply a little  curious about Ohio and mackerel,  thought they were signing up for. 

So yes - sorry, Garry. I don't know if you're still here, or will ever see this, but if you do then please know how much I genuinely mean that, and also how genuinely I meant it when I said thank you, and how much I still mean that now.  I'm going to try to do better. 

Trying to decide how I feel about the Bravery Trilogy brought up a more general dilemma - a lot of what is written here is now very old, and none of it is perfect.  While I definitely remember and recognise the younger version of myself who wrote and thought all of those things, I'm also very aware that there are some big differences between the ways I used to view and interact with the world in 2009 (or even in  2017) and the ways I view and interact with it now. It's very easy to look back with a critical eye, and focus on what I could have done differently (I wish I'd been a little kinder when describing my downstairs neighbour, for one thing). And given how much time has passed, and how much the world has changed in that time, part of me did wonder whether it would be wiser just to start again from scratch. But then I remembered that failure and messiness and being human is all part of the creative process, and aren't we all just works in progress, anyway?  So maybe I shouldn't worry so much about any of that.  

And besides, I'd have a lot more to worry about if my views, opinions, and interests hadn't changed at all over the last decade or so, wouldn't I? 

So yes, some of my opinions have changed - of course they have - and so have some of my interests (I'd definitely forgotten how into learning about wine I once was - it seems to come up a LOT) but my core values haven't. And the people and stories which interested me enough to write about them all those years ago are, for the most part, the kinds of people and stories I still find interesting now. But a lot of other, slightly less frivolous things interest me too, these days, and I suspect I'll find myself writing about some of those as well. 

Or you know, maybe I won't. We'll see. 

if there is anyone reading this who remembers those very early days of this blog (which seems unlikely, to be honest, but who knows?) they might have guessed by now that there is only one thing missing from this post.  And so to finish, here's a quote from - who else? -  good old Jules Renard. 

We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, 

but we know it and admit it.

It's good to be back. Let's see how it goes this time, shall we? 

NaNoWriMo

Been a while since I posted here, but I wanted to write something abut NaNoWriMo, and this seems the best place to put it. So here I am. Hello! Sorry about the dust and tumbleweed. I’ll have a good clean up at some point.

Right.

NaNoWriMo season is upon us once again and so the Nano-haters have begun crawling out of the woodwork, stretching their legs and wielding their snarky comments. It’s something I notice every year, and which drives me crazy every year, and so this year I’ve finally decided to say something.

Because I just don’t get it.  I don’t understand how writers, of all people  – who in my experience are, on the whole, a largely supportive community, and who by definition are natural empathisers because getting inside other people’s heads and understanding things from that point of view is literally WHAT THEY DO AS A JOB, find it necessary to pour scorn on people who decide to take on the NaNoWriMo challenge.

(By ‘writers’, of course, I mean ‘some writers’. Many wonderful writers are entirely supportive of NaNoWriMo. But not everyone is, and the people who are most vocal in their disdain for the process, as far as I can tell, tend to be professional, or partly-professional, writers. They are the people this is aimed at.)

There seems to be some sort of belief among these haters that NaNoWriMo  makes novel writing seem ‘easy’, or somehow devalues the process. That it undermines their own status as writers. And if this were true, I’d understand why some writers react the way they do. Making a living as a writer is hard. REALLY hard. I know that. And it’s natural to want to lash out at something which you feel threatened by.  What I don’t understand is why they perceive NaNoWriMo in this way. Because I’m pretty sure that’s not how anyone taking part sees it.

The arguments I hear reminds me of, and makes about as much sense as, some of the arguments which are used against gay marriage. No-one is going to think less of you as a professional writer because every November a whole bunch of other people have decided to have a go. They’re not doing it to undermine you, or to make a mockery of the profession, or to prove that anyone can do it. They just want to write. More specifically, they just want, for one month of the year,  to join in with the crazy circus which is NaNoWriMo.

I’ve made four attempts at NaNoWriMo over the years, and succeeded with three of them. By 'succeeded' I mean I managed, over the course of 30 days in November,  to get 50,000 words worth of brand new story down on  the page. (Or, if we’re being pedantic about it, into my laptop.)  And that’s all I mean. I don’t claim to have written the next great novel.  I don’t even claim to have written a novel. But each time, I wrote down 50,000 words which I wouldn’t have written down otherwise, and which all told part of the same story.  What I had, at the end of the month was an incomplete, very rough and ready first draft of a story I wanted to tell.

That’s all. And that’s all  I – and most people who take part – mean when I say I have ‘finished’ NaNoWriMo.

Sure we might go on about it a lot, and there are badges and t-shirts and all that jazz, for those who want them. But that’s not because we think we’ve written the Next Big Thing. It's because this watered-down version of ‘finishing’ (or ‘winning’, as some NaNoWriMo-ers refer to it)  is an achievement in itself. We’re celebrating the process, not the product.

No-one takes on NaNoWriMo and finds it easy. The message boards and forums are full of people tearing their hair out, wondering how on earth they are going to find time to meet that day’s quota of words, or stressing out about how behind they are, or wondering how they’re ever going to get out of the cul-de-sac they managed to write themselves into yesterday. For many people who take part, the month is a real roller-coaster of emotions. The challenge becomes crazy and all-encompassing, but that sense of achievement, when you do reach the end, or just ht a particular milestone along the way, is real. Very real.

One of the most galling comments I heard a writer once make about NaNoWriMo was “well, if people need that sort of external structure or motivation to be able to write, they’re clearly not cut out to be a proper writer. Perhaps they shouldn’t be doing it.”

The arrogance of that statement just floors me, every time. Almost every writer I know relies on some sort of structure – external or self-imposed – to force themselves to write.  They have  routines, where they sit at their desk for at the same time each day, or daily and weekly word-count targets, or they rely on deadlines, whether for the completion of a first draft or the next chapter. Many of them belong to writing groups, or have friends who are writers, or rely on the support of a critical friend to give feedback or to talk ideas through during the process. Needing that sort of help doesn’t make you less of a writer, or less ‘proper’. It makes you human.

Perhaps I’m biased, because I owe an awful lot to NaNoWriMo.  It was taking part in my first NaNoWriMo made me fall in love with writing. It was ‘winning’ in that first year which gave me the confidence to give up my safe, permanent job and try and make a living as a freelancer.  NOT because I thought I had suddenly turned into a brilliant writer who could earn money from it (I don’t, or at least not very often), but because I proved something to myself that month. I genuinely didn’t believe that I would finish, but it turned out that I had a great deal more self-discipline than I thought I did.  Discovering that gave me a sense of self-belief, and enough trust in myself to make the leap. Eight years on, I’m still freelancing, and it remains one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I'm not sure it's one I would have made if I hadn't discovered NaNoWriMo.

And it’s not just me. There are seventeen year olds writing alone in their bedrooms, who, for the month of November, get to be part of a giant, crazy, welcoming  community. There are people of all ages who have incredible stories to tell, and this is the event which inspires them to do just that. For the month of November, NaNoWriMo brings joy (and frustration, and pain, and sleep deprivation…but mainly joy) to thousands of people.  It affects them in ways you or I will never know, and in some cases, can’t even begin to imagine.

Maybe NaNoWriMo is not your thing, and that’s OK. It’s not for everyone. What’s not OK is to sneer at other people who have decided that it is their thing. Or if you’re going to sneer at them, at least do it inside your own head.  Because while yes, everyone is entitled to express their opinion, and that includes the NaNoWriMo haters, I also think it’s important to think about why you’re expressing that opinion, and whether it is going to help anyone. 

My favourite piece of writing advice, which is pinned above my desk, comes from Dave Eggers, who says: “No one can read the thoughts which are in your head. They can only read the words which put down, with great love and care, on the page.”

It’s a simple, but powerful statement. And you know where he made it? In a NaNoWriMo pep talk.

I’m not tackling NaNoWriMo myself this year. I’ve got too much other stuff  going on, with a bunch of short stories to finish, and a podcast I’m trying to get off the ground, and at some point I need to remember to do some work I actually get paid to do. But I’ll be watching from the sidelines, cheering them all on. Whether they ‘finish’ or not, whether it’s their first NaNoWriMo or they’re old hands, they are all in for a glorious ride. Let’s just let them get on with it in peace, shall we? Because by taking part, they're not going to harm anyone, or devalue the profession, or undermine anyone else's position. 

You know what might just do that? Getting all snarky about it.