Almost every time I read a book, I feel the need to write my version of that book

Almost every time I read a book, I feel the need to write my version of that book.

Last year I read Neuromancer by William Gibson and throughout the whole book I kept thinking about how I should write a cyberpunk book with a hacker main character, and the trials and travails they'd have to face. When I first read a Haruki Murakami book (for the record it was Kafka on the Shore, and I wouldn't suggest starting there tbh) I wanted to write a story about a young man lost in the world who faced surreal and incomprehensible situations. When I read Brandon Sanderson I often want to write epic fantasy. Some of the fantasy worlds that I've spent the most amount of time world-building and plotting in have some direct inspirations from Brandon Sanderson.

To be clear, I don't intend to plagiarize anyone. I never want to tell the same story as someone else. I just couldn't stop thinking about writing a story about a hacker dude all the way through Neuromancer. The way my mind works, I suppose, I get inspired by these books and thus I want to write something along the same lines.

Some readers of this blog may know that relatively recently (wait it's been over two years, holy cow) I had a whole, whole bunch of stuff in a storage unit. Basically all my music and movies and media and computers, mementos from childhood, furniture, a large collection of vinyl records, and almost everything I owned was in this storage unit. And that storage facility burned to the ground, total loss on everything. Irreplaceable things. Pictures, videos, writings, notebooks. Out of print foreign movies. All destroyed.

I had a few, a handful of things that were overseas with me. About two suitcases worth of clothing and stuff that made the trip with me, and thus was obviously untouched by the ravaging fire that happened on the other side of the world.

One of those things I had brought with me was, out of all things in the world, the Sega Genesis Mini. I don't even have a particular love for the Genesis library. I absolutely do not like the 2D Sonic games (or most of the 3D ones for that matter). But somehow one of these was in my possession. And since I've been trying out some of these games, mostly to introduce my kids to retro-gaming and occupy them allowing me to occasionally get about two minutes of rest at a time, we've been going through and trying out some of these games. There's a game on it called Monster World IV. And I want to make it. I want to make my version of it. It's a 2D sidescrolling action platformer. Apparently it's a part of the Wonder Boy series, if you're familiar with that (I'm not lol). (Why is it called Monster World IV if it's a Wonder Boy game? Even wikipedia is confused.)

I want it to be... better, though. I like the female protagonist's design well enough. (Wait, Wonder Boy but female protag? Yeah, it's a side story. Oh is Monster World a side series? Yes, kind of, but it's the third MW release and not the fourth.) I want RPG mechanics. I want more dungeons. I want more gear. In essence I want to play Maple Story but have it not be bad.

This is kind of a problem though, isn't it? It's a part of my difficulty focusing on any one thing enough to actually get it finished. If I continually want to write X new thing or work on Y new project, I'll always be starting anew. The curse of the creative, I suppose.

This post is all over the place, I'm never posting this lol. 

Or that's what I thought when I wrote the first draft of this, when I was actually in the middle of reading Neuromancer (though I've updated the language to indicate that I have since finished it, obviously).

But in light of my continually renewed attempt to write here, this sort of short but pointless post may become more common.