Buried Treasure
In High School, I kept a notebook for stuff related to the AnacondaSoftware title Spiral Island. This is a white notebook, with a sheet slid in the front with the Spiral Island logo printed on it. Judging by the fact that this paper has the words "AnacondaSoftware" printed in Kino MT font instead of Arial, which I changed it to long ago, I'm guessing this notebook was probably started somewhere in my Sophomore or early Junior year.
There's more than just that in there now. It's current contents are as follows: handwritten papers for the intro for another game, a printed copy of the original script for Spiral Island, up to the first town, printed copies of the first few entries of From the Computer of J. Millen and all the work so far done on it's sequel Dreams of Reality, a printed copy of a Pokemon fanfic I started, scrapped because it didn't work as a Pokemon fanfic, then merged into the Spiral Island storyline, some documents related to the mechanics and backstory of Spiral Island, a couple sheets of randomly generated names, a peice of triangle graph paper with Hexagons traced out on half the page, several handwritten pieces of the Ties to Infinity story, and the original handwritten work for Skewed.
But most interesting, and a most unexpected find, is a paper I found in the back of a divider sleeve. It is a fragment of my aforementioned English class, a writing test on the first two of the five sentence fragments, where I wrote a large peice of the Spiral Island storyline in the test and wrote a note on the side saying "I want a copy of this back, ok?"
These sentence fragments are called "brush strokes" by this material. The first two are Participles and Absolutes (for which I found no Wikipedia entry, sorry). On this test, we had to define these two, and this is the definition I have written on this paper:
"A participle is a phrase describing the closest noun. It starts with an active verbe with an 'ing' (or 'ed') ending. An absolute goes just a little bit further, by putting a noun that is part of the closest noun before the 'ing' word."
Using these two first "brush strokes", I have now found all five fragments, so I no longer need to look for that packet. The remaining three items are: Appositives, Adjectives Out of Order, and Active Verbs. I'll go into these in detail at a future time, but for now if you want some short examples you can look at this page on the Utah Educational Network.
This folder's got a lot of information that is valuable to me, as it contains much of my ideas that aren't written anywhere else. But finding an unexpected gem like that, made it even more valuable to me, as it now tells that things in this folder have lasted, whereas i have very little other things from my High School years. And there's some other interesting things here, like the word lugubrious written and defined randomly in the margin of one of my town maps, and this saying written in the back of it:
"I see a hitchhiking cloud. I want to pick it up, but I'm not sure how..."
Date posted: 27 June, 2007 Tags: anacondasoftware anecdote j_millen linguistic words writing
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