RECOVER

Hell of time getting this one out, folks.

I went to Italy earlier in the month - lovely time, Bologna is a gorgeous city, I ate far too much pizza and several Italian game designers gave me free hashish, which is really all I could have asked for. (Strange business, hashish. Haven't smoked it since I was seventeen. I like how little it smells of drug in your pocket, I'll give it that.)

While I was in Bologna, after finishing up at PLAY, I decided to start working on this month's one-page game. Please enjoy a unique insight into my creative process via the medium of notes I wrote in and outside a bar:

Eventually, as you will see, I settled on a game called THE DEVIL MAKES HIS OWN MISFORTUNE. Don't be fooled: I didn't write any of the stuff in pen when I was in Italy. That's the output of about three showers and eight cumulative cigarettes where I baffed about the idea of a game where success and failure didn't matter at all in my head like a cat with a half-dead mouse.

(The reason I was using a pencil - a hotel pencil, no less - is because the single pen I brought with me exploded in my jacket pocket on the flight in. Very professional.)

Anyway. I spent most of Friday kicking that concept around. I figured that it would be interesting to do a Southern Gothic theme, and also to limit the number of players to two and a GM, coz that's interesting, isn't it? That's something?

But I couldn't make it work. I couldn't come up with a way to make the player care about the things they were losing in exchange for their incredible luck. Maybe you'll see THE DEVIL MAKES HIS OWN MISFORTUNE somewhere down the road; maybe not.

So, Friday afternoon, I'm staring down the barrel of a blank page with only a couple of days to fill it. But I started something in January called RECOVER, which is the sequel to FETCH, and I pulled that out of the archives and set to work.

I've been in therapy again, recently. I was getting sadder than I'd like, more desperate than I'd like, and I needed some help dealing with it for a bit. Over the last few years, in part thanks to the sadness and desperation, I have taken to severing friendships and not actively pursuing new ones, so I don't have a lot of people to talk to about this sort of thing. I have a professional I speak to once a week instead - his name is Richard, he's very nice and calm, and he reminds me to take care of myself. It's going well.

I wrote FETCH after making my first big breakthrough with Richard last time we worked together. If you're not familiar with it, FETCH is a game about killing yourself in a violent and disruptive way so to take revenge on the world that made you. (There's some arm's reach bells-and-whistles stuff about being a changeling monster who doesn't fit in with everyone else, but, you know. It's about suicide.) It is a horrible thing. If you play it rules-as-written, and I really can't recommend that you do, it gives you repetitive strain injury.

I couldn't have written FETCH when I was in the midst of my worst depressive episodes. (I was too depressed!) And I think there's something fascinating about the deathwish that occupied a good quarter of my brain for about five years of my life, on and off: it was all-consuming, intoxicating, almost comforting in its familiarity. It was the fantasy that I kept coming back to, when left unattended: death, sudden and instant, violent and decisive, and being able to Stop.

But: I kicked the habit. I no longer spend hours a day wishing to get smashed apart by a bus, and I felt it was a good idea to celebrate that.

RECOVER is even less of a game than FETCH was. It's a solo game in which expressly ban the player from writing anything down. It has, what, seven prompts? There's no fun little RSI mechanics, even. But it's about getting better. It's about finding your place in the world and in your head. And it's about making yourself, because you can, and you can be who you need to be.

(On the subject of making yourself: the anti-trans legislation in the UK has been fuckin exhausting. I'm not trans - quite the opposite really, I've got BOY written through me like a stick of particularly gendered rock - but so many of my friends are, and folks in the office are, and my partner is, and it's disgusting to see these hateful TERF wretches get their way. We should just let people go for a piss in toilets. The doors lock. You aren't gonna see anything. What, you're scared of a trans woman putting on her makeup in the same mirror as you? You hideous creature. You vile smear of a human. Grow up)

This is the second (third?) draft of RECOVER: I printed it out, cut it up, laid it out and then realised that I didn't like some of my turns of phrase, it should be in a two-column layout, and the hands on the background were the wrong way up. So I did it all again. I hope you appreciate the clunky, maybe even slightly sentimental, words I chucked out and replaced with mysticism instead.

It's self-indulgent, perhaps. It's another sequel, too, just like TONIGHT, TONIGHT and A VERY HONEY HEIST XMAS: as I stumble towards one hundred of these games, there's a desire to re-examine and re-evaluate my previous work. But I'm proud of it, and it's about something. Hopefully that's enough.

I'm sure we'll have some daft shit about criminal ocelots or similar next month.

Love and fury,

• Grant