Free Time

When I'm not spending time with family, working on my writing projects, or sleeping (which is overrated by the way), these are a couple of the 'free-time' things I've been up to lately...

Currently, I'm reading House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. I'm a little more than halfway through the book, and I have to say this is probably the creepiest book I have ever read. I'll admit that aside from the Han Solo trilogy - which is my all-time favorite book series, I consider Stephen King's Dark Tower series to be my second favorite.

Until I started reading House of Leaves.

This book's premise is a bit too confusing to sum up outside of a full-blown book review (which I will definitely be doing once I'm done reading it), so I'll just leave you with this Goodreads link, and you can check out a description and reviews of the book yourself - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337907.House_of_Leaves. To say the least, I absolutely love this book. It does lean heavily at times into some heavy sexual content, but other than that, the book does a tremendous job of pulling you into its multiple layers.


When I'm not reading, I am usually gaming. I grew up with video games (my dad introduced me to the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64 when I was growing up), and it is by far my favorite past time now. The only problem is that I can be very ADD with video games, playing them halfway through and then moving on to others, sometimes playing three or four at a time, but never really fully appreciating any particular one because the plots, controls, characters and other aspects get lost in the confusion.

I've been consciously making an effort as of late to focus on one or two games and stick with them until they are beat or mastered. The only exception is Half Life 2: Deathmatch, which I play everyday on my lunch break. The two games I'm currently playing right now are Guild Wars 2 (which I'm always constantly jumping into anyway, even though my computer has to push itself to the max just to run it at all in lowest graphic settings), and....

Dead Island. Dead Island is a game I picked up about a year ago and promptly returned a few days later. I just couldn't get into the game for some reason, but I found it at a bargain price a couple of weeks ago and decided to give it another try. I sure am glad I did. Once you have the mechanics of the game down, it's a fun and satisfying zombie slashing adventure. It also has a lot of collection elements to it, and a decent loot system, which makes it an all-around favorite for me.