Trying to craft a novel is tricky business at the best of times (unless you're Dickens - then even the worst of times rock). For a dedicated gamer and ex-internet junkie with obligatory attention-span deficit issues, it can be downright painful.

The only true key to progress is a systematic, comprehensive and gut-wrenching purge of all tempting distractions. So... I've sworn off foruming (ah, how I miss you guys!), put aside my modding projects and started listing my beloved game collection on eBay (having painstakingly copied each disc beforehand... which I realize is technically going lukewarm turkey, but hey - at least it's a start).

Now to the business of creating a universe in which the characters carry no sidearms and where zombies hardly ever feature - with the possible exception of the odd civil servant.

Tsk. Who am I kidding? I'll find a way to slip a zombie or two into English literature - you see if I don't.

A ludicrous idea, trying to keep an online journal whilst already juggling the roles of mama, modder, writer and wife (forget "gamer" - my beast-blasting is now limited to throwing balled-up socks at the cat whenever she tries to squeeze herself into the printer). But here is my first entry, nonetheless; I'll try to keep it brief.

A handful of weeks ago I was scribbling recommendations for an upcoming games development website called GamesFrontier. The Frontier belongs to some good friends of mine and they had recruited my services as staff writer and Agony Auntie (these are people who know my cracked sense of humour all too well). At the top of my recommendations list was the superb No One Lives Forever series by Monolith - a 60's-spy themed FPS, for anyone unfamiliar with the title - and having a foxy nose for the justification of hours spent playing, I reasoned with my husband that in order to do NOLF justice, I really should replay the series.

One element of NOLF I had always overlooked was the modification toolkit available to those intrepid and imaginative enough to try their hand at home-grown games design. I had always figured that

a) NOLF was so tremendously well done that anything I could add would be garnish at best, and

b) to add modding to my already overstocked repertoire of impractical distractions would only bring disaster and chaos to my household.

But revisiting the NOLF universe, with all its suspense, good humour and crackling dialogue, combined with the gorgeous graphics of the two most recent titles, just rekindled all my old enthusiasm tenfold. And in order to present a really thorough recommendation, I supposed I would have to investigate the potential and worth of those modding tools.

Which is how I came to be immersed in the strange but immensely enjoyable experience of plotting the downfall of H.A.R.M. and stalking about in the thigh-high boots of a vengeful sixties' Kunoichi named Isako. It's a far cry from preschool music appreciation classes and the concerns of how best to prepare a vegetarian Thanksgiving roast. It's even further removed from the serious and historically accurate epic novel I'm supposed to be writing about American Indians and the Revolutionary War. But it's fun, begod. And I think I'm doing rather well at this level-design business, for a Psych-major second year dropout whose knowledge of DEdit stems entirely from the Monolith team's how-to manual and a few pointers gleaned from a bloke called SpyDave.

But enough of these ramblings - I have Things To Do this afternoon: prepare lunch for my three year old, haul away the branches scattered about our lawn by Hurricane Ivan, de-flea the cat... and figure out how best to kill a man with Shurikens.