Week 8 Reading and Writing

I have had a great time reading this semester, and I've focused all my reading on the India side. Doing both classes at once makes that kind of weird, but it was an easy choice since I wanted/needed to do Ramayana reading for my 100-word Ramayana project. I listened to the audiobook of Devdutt's Sita and I read the book; I had read the book awhile ago, but I was way more in awe of it this time. The way he develops both the narrative structure and the themes is really brilliant, and I used this book as the jumping off point for acquiring different versions of the Ramayana in English to use for a future project with even more Ramayana legends. 

As for writing, I'm really happy with what I've been doing. For the Indian Epics project, I'm working on the 100-word stories, but I decided to do a Twine project for Myth-Folklore, and that's going to work out really nicely since it means working on each of those two projects feels really different.

I also wrote a traditional type of story for Week 2: Pygmalion and the Woman of Wax. I really prefer writing microfiction, but I don't want to get out practice with writing other kinds of stories too.

Going forward, the Ramayana Storybook is working great, and it will be easy to add the Hanuman and Rama pages. For the Myth-Folklore project, I want to do something complicated for the third story, writing an actual game about "outwitting Anansi" where I keep track of the points that someone scores based on their choices. I've never done a Twine game like that with keeping score, so that is something I'll need to plan out. In terms of the calendar, I'll work on the Ramayana project some more in Week 9 and Week 10 to finish that. 

Meanwhile, in Week 10 I'll do the Story Lab and teach myself how to do the Twine variables I'll need to build the game.

Then for Week 11, I'll collect the Anansi games I want to use and storyboard it without writing the Twine versions.

Then in Week 12, I'll turn it into an actual Twine game, learning some additional Twine tips as needed with the Story Lab that week.

Then in Week 13, I'll write up a little appendix for the project about how I used Twine to create the three different games.

With final revisions in Week 14 and Week 15 for each of the two projects. It will all fit really nicely!