I'm driving up to San Marcos in a little bit to hear Dr. James Adavasio speak and to prove to myself that, little by little, I am coming back. Sunday I'll be going to Austin, to BookPeople and Greg Leitich-Smith's book launch.
On Veteran's Day, I took Moby out for a bit, to replace two dodgy tires and get the oil and coolant checked. I feel a lot of kinship with Moby at the moment, as bits of him stop working properly and are replaced - the driver's side seat belt, the interior door handle - or not - one of the door locks, that strip of chrome that the gas station ate when I parked a bit too close to the pump. Yet he keeps moving, and so do I.
And whereas, someday, inevitably, Moby will limp off to the junkyard to be stripped down for parts, or get donated to one of those charities that takes even cars that won't move anymore to generate money in some mysterious way (which presumably amounts to the same thing), I will someday cycle all the way up again, and transform all the mental coolant and oil I've been sucking down into - something. I don't know what. But I know I will. It's in there. Somewhere.
Gestating.
Whether I can transform whatever it is into income to justify my existence to the consumer society, I don't know. So I stick that consideration onto the shelf in my head marked "Stuff I can't do anything about right now" and keep gestating, and even occasionally driving to hear speakers and cheer other authors on.
Meanwhile, I'd better get some lunch. Because lunch is inevitable.
Showing posts with label my circle of friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my circle of friends. Show all posts
Friday, November 13, 2015
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Characters: Gaming, Fiction, Life
So there's this guy who used to game with us. He made himself persona non grata in our house and Damon and I don't play with him anymore, but he's still in a group with someone else we know. (And if you're reading this, A - your feelings are about to get hurt, but I'd advise you to pay attention, because sometimes the way to self-improvement is through hurt feelings. If you had ever shown any sign of actively listening to me I would've said all this to your face long ago.)
He gamed with us for a long time, and for most of that time we didn't understand why he was showing up. And though he has not done any of the specific things there that have made him unwelcome in my home, we are still regaled occasionally with tales of what A did, in the other gaming group, to demonstrate that he hasn't changed. He brings an electronic device and does things on it rather than paying attention to the game. He comes late. He deliberately builds suboptimal characters that don't accomplish things in the game.
I have often thought, and several times remarked, that if you gave A a high-level, fully-optimized character and ran him alongside, or in direct conflict with, a low-level, poorly-optimized character played by Damon, Damon's character would still be the effective one. Because Damon would (grumbling all the way at the unfairness of it all) milk every advantage he could out of the character he had, that character's surroundings, the game mechanics, and the dice. A wouldn't even use the advantages that were spelled out for him on his character sheet.
I wish to be clear about something: I build suboptimal gaming characters all the time. I get my stats (in systems derived from D&D, four-d6-drop-the-lowest-and-arrange-as-desired is the one true character generation method; all others are cheats and imitations), I get the specifics of the campaign setting, a backstory sparks, I create a character, and then I do all the fiddly skill-building, power-assigning, equipment-buying stuff - in character. When we play Pathfinder, a D&D derivative whose creators believe heavily in "the build" as the be-all and end-all of character creation and combat as the main focus of the game, I sometimes feel crushed under the weight of the decisions that have to be made, and if I don't get Damon (who is great at manipulating systems) to help me I generally have a character who would die if not surrounded by combat monsters and healers. Even in a rules-light game like the current Deadlands campaign I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I often find myself looking around for something Miss Cranthorp can do while the other characters are fighting. Put Miss Cranthorp into melee and she's at a loss.
But - and this is why people respond to Miss Cranthorp as an awesome character and to A's characters as bad jokes - if Miss Cranthorp can't fight she will volunteer to drive the train to free up the current driver for combat (and accidentally shake a bunch of mooks off the top of the passenger car before they can enter melee, suddenly putting the odds in our favor). A's characters, in a similar situation, will hide, or spend several rounds building up personal defenses while other party members are getting clobbered within arm's reach, or run away, or do nothing at all because A is watching cat videos or something on his laptop and the GM gets tired of trying to get his attention.
My characters are individuals who engage with other individuals in the game, with the setting, with the particular problem in hand. I inhabit them fully while I play them, and even if they die (which they tend not to, even in Pathfinder), people remember them fondly, and not as suboptimal at all. Being remembered well is a more important part of "winning" in RPGs - and in fiction - than is triumphing. Many a great gaming story ends in a Total Party Kill. Nor are Romeo and Juliet memorable for their ability to solve the conflicts presented to them by the plot!
A doesn't appear to inhabit his own character fully, much less the fictional ones under his control. He doesn't engage with the people around him enough to understand or even respect their points of view (which is how he got kicked out of my house). He doesn't understand the rules - of the game, of the story, of the society he lives in - well enough to use them, abuse them, or even effectually break them. He won't even engage his own problems, preferring to continue behaving in the same way endlessly amid people who don't know why he showed up and inevitably grow contemptuous of him.
Which is why I'm bringing him up. A no doubt has reasons for the behaviors he slouches along in. One reason we dealt with him as long as we did was that we assumed he had a lot of crap he was dealing with and that, as fellow borderline social-rejects, we were doing him some sort of good even though we couldn't see it, by providing a safe place to work through - whatever he was working through. But it's been more than 15 years and, if our friend in his current gaming group is to be believed (I have no reason to doubt him), he's still passively, stubbornly, even a little self-righteously, not doing the same old things he always never did. No meds, no therapy, no experimentation. No engagement.
An awful lot of life is just a matter of showing up and paying attention.
Maybe you don't understand the rules. You don't have to understand them to engage with them. To challenge them. To find your way through them. To bend them to your will.
But you require a will, first.
You have to have a character before you can create a character.
Are your characters flat and lifeless on the page? Are they boring? Are they whiny? Are they collections of quirks and flaws and virtues moving through the plot rather than people moving the plot around? Do they all sound like each other?
What about you? Are you showing up for your own life?
If you're not - it doesn't matter why you're not. Maybe your reason's good, maybe it's crappy; either way, it's preventing you from doing something you say you want to do, i.e. write well.
So what are you going to do about it?
He gamed with us for a long time, and for most of that time we didn't understand why he was showing up. And though he has not done any of the specific things there that have made him unwelcome in my home, we are still regaled occasionally with tales of what A did, in the other gaming group, to demonstrate that he hasn't changed. He brings an electronic device and does things on it rather than paying attention to the game. He comes late. He deliberately builds suboptimal characters that don't accomplish things in the game.
I have often thought, and several times remarked, that if you gave A a high-level, fully-optimized character and ran him alongside, or in direct conflict with, a low-level, poorly-optimized character played by Damon, Damon's character would still be the effective one. Because Damon would (grumbling all the way at the unfairness of it all) milk every advantage he could out of the character he had, that character's surroundings, the game mechanics, and the dice. A wouldn't even use the advantages that were spelled out for him on his character sheet.
I wish to be clear about something: I build suboptimal gaming characters all the time. I get my stats (in systems derived from D&D, four-d6-drop-the-lowest-and-arrange-as-desired is the one true character generation method; all others are cheats and imitations), I get the specifics of the campaign setting, a backstory sparks, I create a character, and then I do all the fiddly skill-building, power-assigning, equipment-buying stuff - in character. When we play Pathfinder, a D&D derivative whose creators believe heavily in "the build" as the be-all and end-all of character creation and combat as the main focus of the game, I sometimes feel crushed under the weight of the decisions that have to be made, and if I don't get Damon (who is great at manipulating systems) to help me I generally have a character who would die if not surrounded by combat monsters and healers. Even in a rules-light game like the current Deadlands campaign I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I often find myself looking around for something Miss Cranthorp can do while the other characters are fighting. Put Miss Cranthorp into melee and she's at a loss.
But - and this is why people respond to Miss Cranthorp as an awesome character and to A's characters as bad jokes - if Miss Cranthorp can't fight she will volunteer to drive the train to free up the current driver for combat (and accidentally shake a bunch of mooks off the top of the passenger car before they can enter melee, suddenly putting the odds in our favor). A's characters, in a similar situation, will hide, or spend several rounds building up personal defenses while other party members are getting clobbered within arm's reach, or run away, or do nothing at all because A is watching cat videos or something on his laptop and the GM gets tired of trying to get his attention.
My characters are individuals who engage with other individuals in the game, with the setting, with the particular problem in hand. I inhabit them fully while I play them, and even if they die (which they tend not to, even in Pathfinder), people remember them fondly, and not as suboptimal at all. Being remembered well is a more important part of "winning" in RPGs - and in fiction - than is triumphing. Many a great gaming story ends in a Total Party Kill. Nor are Romeo and Juliet memorable for their ability to solve the conflicts presented to them by the plot!
A doesn't appear to inhabit his own character fully, much less the fictional ones under his control. He doesn't engage with the people around him enough to understand or even respect their points of view (which is how he got kicked out of my house). He doesn't understand the rules - of the game, of the story, of the society he lives in - well enough to use them, abuse them, or even effectually break them. He won't even engage his own problems, preferring to continue behaving in the same way endlessly amid people who don't know why he showed up and inevitably grow contemptuous of him.
Which is why I'm bringing him up. A no doubt has reasons for the behaviors he slouches along in. One reason we dealt with him as long as we did was that we assumed he had a lot of crap he was dealing with and that, as fellow borderline social-rejects, we were doing him some sort of good even though we couldn't see it, by providing a safe place to work through - whatever he was working through. But it's been more than 15 years and, if our friend in his current gaming group is to be believed (I have no reason to doubt him), he's still passively, stubbornly, even a little self-righteously, not doing the same old things he always never did. No meds, no therapy, no experimentation. No engagement.
An awful lot of life is just a matter of showing up and paying attention.
Maybe you don't understand the rules. You don't have to understand them to engage with them. To challenge them. To find your way through them. To bend them to your will.
But you require a will, first.
You have to have a character before you can create a character.
Are your characters flat and lifeless on the page? Are they boring? Are they whiny? Are they collections of quirks and flaws and virtues moving through the plot rather than people moving the plot around? Do they all sound like each other?
What about you? Are you showing up for your own life?
If you're not - it doesn't matter why you're not. Maybe your reason's good, maybe it's crappy; either way, it's preventing you from doing something you say you want to do, i.e. write well.
So what are you going to do about it?
Friday, December 26, 2014
Ten Years After
My memory and my diary are both unreliable for this period, but at some point during the week between Christmas and New Year's, 2004, I left the soul-sucking day job; stopped across the street to help our friends, who had (with their baby) been evicted, pack; worked for an hour or so and went home to check on my husband, who had left work early, and make supper; and found Damon unresponsive and going into anaphylactic shock from an allergic reaction to the antibiotic he'd been given to combat the mysterious and unrelenting series of symptoms he'd been exhibiting for awhile.
I couldn't drive then. The friend who followed the ambulance to the hospital, brought me home, and stayed the night that night was, herself, hospitalized within days of this.
And thus began the Year from Hell, ten years ago this week.
And now - we are still here.
Not unscathed, not by any means. Some of us broke and had to rebuild ourselves from scratch. We are not the people that we were. But we are still here. And if we can do it, you can do it.
I don't celebrate Christmas. But I celebrate this.
Happy Survival Week.
Go us!
I couldn't drive then. The friend who followed the ambulance to the hospital, brought me home, and stayed the night that night was, herself, hospitalized within days of this.
And thus began the Year from Hell, ten years ago this week.
And now - we are still here.
Not unscathed, not by any means. Some of us broke and had to rebuild ourselves from scratch. We are not the people that we were. But we are still here. And if we can do it, you can do it.
I don't celebrate Christmas. But I celebrate this.
Happy Survival Week.
Go us!
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: On the Ridge
Guest idea today.
Last week, after the main event of the Deadlands RPG, we had some time left, so we broke out an oldish cardgame called "Bushwhackin' Varmints Out of Sergio's Butte," in which the players are rival filmmakers shooting three different B movies, all with the same title, and trying to put together the best film they can while sabotaging the other players. At one point, our friend B had been deprived of all the characters in his movie, leaving him with only a location - "On the Ridge."
He defended the concept as an "artsy" one, and even explained a vision for it, which had come to him one day when he was out hunting in West Texas. A great deal of hunting consists of finding a good vantage point and sitting waiting for a target to wander by, and on this occasion he was "on the ridge" overlooking a deep waterway, and noticed some unusually round pebbles on the ground. They were round shot from a nineteenth-century gun, which he recognized as the descendent and heir of gunsmiths, and caused him to think about the people who had used this vantage before him.
This sense of connection through artifacts is what archeology is all about, of course; but most activities don't leave much in the way of interpretable traces, and these are the things that a movie of this sort would be focused on. A lot of the action would consist of following the practices, problems, and small dramas of hunters through the ages, including animal as well as human hunters (coyotes need vantage points, too!) interspersed with time-lapse sequences showing geological processes making sometimes subtle changes in the location. Variety could be provided by the occasional high-tension sequence of interpersonal conflict, from Pleistocene war raiding parties to immigrants dodging INS; focus down into the grass for ant-level drama, or draw back to present a snippet from some grand Western epic. It'd take someone with a sure grasp of narrative and the way film, specifically, works in order to get the timing and pacing just right, so that the film is neither majestically dull nor choppily disorienting; and I for one wouldn't want anyone doing it who didn't grasp the reality of history as opposed to the mythic oversimplification that is generally the province of theater. But if all the stars lined up and everything went perfectly, such a movie could become classic. Or go down in history as a magnificent failure, which is still an interesting thing to be.
Coincidentally, this same week I learned about a graphic novel, called Here, by Richard McGuire, which is several millenia worth of drawings of a single location which is variously a living room, a forest, a glacier, underwater, etc. (The man's website is crap in terms of showcasing his artwork, unfortunately, and Random House's page for the book isn't any better; I did the best I could with those links, but if you want to see the art for yourself I guess you'll have to ask your local bookstore). The existence of this book doesn't mean the idea is "done," though. The difference in medium between the graphic novel and the movie, the choice of a different location, and a different mediating sensibility in terms of the dominant creator leave plenty of space for more than one work on this core concept to exist.
And this gives me a chance to explicitly point out the concept I myself wish to get across, posting these week after week: Anybody can have a good idea. You don't need to be a professional artist, or have a degree, or earn any sort of credentials to have a good idea. B is a computer programmer who, when he's looking for ideas, is generally looking for an adventure to run as a game; yet he independently, while out waiting for a deer to wander by, got an artistic idea that parallels a concept which an artist is executing, to critical acclaim. (Words like "game-changing" get used in the work's reviews.) If B had decided to put in the 15 years or so of hard work to execute his idea in some medium congenial to him, he would eventually produce something distinctly his own. Whether it would succeed in the marketplace - who knows? Nobody ever does know, when they start down a creative road.
We are all, each and every day, having ideas. We are human. Creativity is our natural state.
Last week, after the main event of the Deadlands RPG, we had some time left, so we broke out an oldish cardgame called "Bushwhackin' Varmints Out of Sergio's Butte," in which the players are rival filmmakers shooting three different B movies, all with the same title, and trying to put together the best film they can while sabotaging the other players. At one point, our friend B had been deprived of all the characters in his movie, leaving him with only a location - "On the Ridge."
He defended the concept as an "artsy" one, and even explained a vision for it, which had come to him one day when he was out hunting in West Texas. A great deal of hunting consists of finding a good vantage point and sitting waiting for a target to wander by, and on this occasion he was "on the ridge" overlooking a deep waterway, and noticed some unusually round pebbles on the ground. They were round shot from a nineteenth-century gun, which he recognized as the descendent and heir of gunsmiths, and caused him to think about the people who had used this vantage before him.
This sense of connection through artifacts is what archeology is all about, of course; but most activities don't leave much in the way of interpretable traces, and these are the things that a movie of this sort would be focused on. A lot of the action would consist of following the practices, problems, and small dramas of hunters through the ages, including animal as well as human hunters (coyotes need vantage points, too!) interspersed with time-lapse sequences showing geological processes making sometimes subtle changes in the location. Variety could be provided by the occasional high-tension sequence of interpersonal conflict, from Pleistocene war raiding parties to immigrants dodging INS; focus down into the grass for ant-level drama, or draw back to present a snippet from some grand Western epic. It'd take someone with a sure grasp of narrative and the way film, specifically, works in order to get the timing and pacing just right, so that the film is neither majestically dull nor choppily disorienting; and I for one wouldn't want anyone doing it who didn't grasp the reality of history as opposed to the mythic oversimplification that is generally the province of theater. But if all the stars lined up and everything went perfectly, such a movie could become classic. Or go down in history as a magnificent failure, which is still an interesting thing to be.
Coincidentally, this same week I learned about a graphic novel, called Here, by Richard McGuire, which is several millenia worth of drawings of a single location which is variously a living room, a forest, a glacier, underwater, etc. (The man's website is crap in terms of showcasing his artwork, unfortunately, and Random House's page for the book isn't any better; I did the best I could with those links, but if you want to see the art for yourself I guess you'll have to ask your local bookstore). The existence of this book doesn't mean the idea is "done," though. The difference in medium between the graphic novel and the movie, the choice of a different location, and a different mediating sensibility in terms of the dominant creator leave plenty of space for more than one work on this core concept to exist.
And this gives me a chance to explicitly point out the concept I myself wish to get across, posting these week after week: Anybody can have a good idea. You don't need to be a professional artist, or have a degree, or earn any sort of credentials to have a good idea. B is a computer programmer who, when he's looking for ideas, is generally looking for an adventure to run as a game; yet he independently, while out waiting for a deer to wander by, got an artistic idea that parallels a concept which an artist is executing, to critical acclaim. (Words like "game-changing" get used in the work's reviews.) If B had decided to put in the 15 years or so of hard work to execute his idea in some medium congenial to him, he would eventually produce something distinctly his own. Whether it would succeed in the marketplace - who knows? Nobody ever does know, when they start down a creative road.
We are all, each and every day, having ideas. We are human. Creativity is our natural state.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
The Optimist at the Gaming Table of Life
So the gaming group tried something different last Sunday: Deadlands, with the Savage Worlds system, with a GM who doesn't play with us very often, who is less mechanic-focused than about half our regular group. It was October 1879 in an American West overrun with magic and monsters, and the party we assembled to go looking for a missing railroad crew in Donner Pass consisted of war-weary Confederate veteran Captain William Palmer, bounty hunter Mina Winchester, frontiersman "Texas Jake" Johnson, Father Patrick O'Flannery (who one of us - not me, surprisingly - said should be named Connor), and - schoolmarm Miss Agnes Cranthorp.
I kept thinking, as I put Miss Cranthorp together, that she was going to die horribly, or at least be a drag on the party. All her attribute points went into Smarts, Spirit, and Vigor; her skills were things like Intimidate, Guts, Knowledge, and Persuasion; she was near-sighted, loyal, strong-willed, and charismatic - and she couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with any of the weapons the others were carrying. Even Father O'Flannery had a sidearm and a hunting rifle. Miss Cranthorp had a carpetbag full of books, a good black silk dress, and school supplies, and we were all joking about how her favored weapon was a ruler. But from the moment I heard "Weird West" I knew my character was a schoolmarm. I'm used to playing the character who's the Least Valuable Player in terms of damage dealt, whose main function is to keep other characters alive or to distract the GM while the strategists and game mechanics experts devise plans. I play to be somebody besides myself for a few hours, not to indulge power fantasies. So I put together Miss Cranthorp (you're not engaged or related, you don't get to even think of her as Agnes!) with the mental reservation that she'd probably be dead at the end of the day.
Instead, the DM was making jokes about everybody else hiding behind the schoolmarm and Texas Jake was promising to buy her a yardstick when we got back to civilization. For one thing, I was rolling pretty hot - our opponents, a wendigo and the victims of its curse of insatiable hunger (yes, I know wendigo is an Algonquian monster, not something you'd normally find in the Rockies, but I guess for purposes of the module they'd spread across the continent or something) - could not touch Miss Cranthrop, and she was nailing almost everything she tried. She shook off the curse, she dodged wolves and bullets and claws, she was unshaken by cannibalized corpses or being surrounded by hunger-crazed railroad workers or even the wendigo himself and the zombies he raised to oppose us.
Her shining moment, however, came when we were surrounded by the hunger-crazed railroad workers. Two had shotguns, four had clubs, and they were all clearly intent on eating us. Miss Cranthorp had borrowed a shotgun, but she had never used one before and had probably never struck a blow in anger in her life. Also, both Texas Jake and Captain Palmer were also affected by the curse, though they had so far fought off the urge to kill and eat the rest of us. Our working theory was that consuming human flesh would change a cursed person in a fundamental way, and we had ample reason to believe that our opponents had crossed that line. So when she happened to be the first to be able to act in the round, I as player knew that she probably needed to just pull the trigger, that we would be forced to kill them all. But I as Miss Cranthorp knew that she had to try to talk them down, that if she survived she would not be able to live with herself if she didn't. So I took an Intimidate, describing her as pointing the shotgun in her best imitation of Miss Winchester, drawing herself up as straight as she could, and using the Teacher Voice to address one of the men with shotguns, telling him that we would find the source of the curse and break it, freeing them all from this awful hunger, but right now he needed to put the gun down. And once again, she nailed it - not enough to make him actually put the gun down, not then, but enough that the GM decided he lowered it, looked confused, and held back from acting.
This successful Intimidation changed the whole tenor of the encounter. If the cursed could respond to the Teacher Voice they were still human and probably not responsible for their actions; so everyone in the party immediately switched modes. Captain Palmer, who had been about to aim for the head of the other shotgun-weilder, went for a disarm instead; Father O'Flannery helped Miss Cranthorp take the gun away from the one she'd intimidated; Texas Jake and Miss Winchester used their weapons as clubs; and we soon had them all tied up and stowed, in varying states of consciousness, in a ruined cabin with furs tucked around them so they wouldn't freeze while we tracked down the source of the curse. Instead of killing them, we freed them; and since we had explicitly come to Donner Pass to find out what had become of them and help them if we could, this was by far the most satisfactory outcome and a big win for humanity.
This sort of thing happens all the time in games. It happens in stories, too, but in that case the dice are all loaded - the author has a desired outcome and that outcome will happen. The reader may shove that knowledge down deep into her head where it can't interfere with her enjoyment, but she does know that. In games, though, you've got honest die rolls, implacable mechanics, and a player who is or is not determined to play the character to the hilt and not give in till the last roll of the dice.
And here's the thing - I am the only optimist in my gaming group. I have a biological tendency toward depression, and being an optimist has sometimes been the only way I could get out of bed in the morning. Everyone else at the table is saying "TPK time" and "OK, I may as well start rolling up my next character," or acting on the worst-case scenario assumption, and my not-exactly-optimized character is saying: "Okay, I do this then. No? I try this then. No? Oh, hush, we can still pull this out. I try this then. Yes! Okay, that's a start, now I'm gonna do this."
I am not a better player than the others, not by a long shot. We have players who can make a system dance; who can finesse a build or pull a huge advantage out of an innocuous mechanic or solve an intricate puzzle in ways I can't even follow, much less do myself. My strength is in playing my character flat out, to the hilt, and to the bitter end. That's why, when five out of six party members were captured by cannibals, my rogue got away and returned alone to free them from the larder. That's why this Deadlands party is not made up of murderers. That's also why I also occasionally get into situations in which my characters get into head-to-head confrontations with other characters, over how to treat prisoners or who's in charge (not something I normally fret about, but that was explicitly Sofia's mission, dammit, and not only did he flout her authority he damn near got everybody killed doing it) or how to handle some delicate situation; but that's the breaks. It makes for an interesting game, anyhow.
And it's because this works in games that, when push comes to shove, I never can quite give up on something there is any chance of doing, or that nobody else can do for me. And why I get so frustrated with people who quit before they begin; who assume failure as the default state, or that because they failed once that's the end of it.
It's not over till it's over. Stay on the ride. At least find out where it's going.
Do you want The Thing, or not?
I kept thinking, as I put Miss Cranthorp together, that she was going to die horribly, or at least be a drag on the party. All her attribute points went into Smarts, Spirit, and Vigor; her skills were things like Intimidate, Guts, Knowledge, and Persuasion; she was near-sighted, loyal, strong-willed, and charismatic - and she couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with any of the weapons the others were carrying. Even Father O'Flannery had a sidearm and a hunting rifle. Miss Cranthorp had a carpetbag full of books, a good black silk dress, and school supplies, and we were all joking about how her favored weapon was a ruler. But from the moment I heard "Weird West" I knew my character was a schoolmarm. I'm used to playing the character who's the Least Valuable Player in terms of damage dealt, whose main function is to keep other characters alive or to distract the GM while the strategists and game mechanics experts devise plans. I play to be somebody besides myself for a few hours, not to indulge power fantasies. So I put together Miss Cranthorp (you're not engaged or related, you don't get to even think of her as Agnes!) with the mental reservation that she'd probably be dead at the end of the day.
Instead, the DM was making jokes about everybody else hiding behind the schoolmarm and Texas Jake was promising to buy her a yardstick when we got back to civilization. For one thing, I was rolling pretty hot - our opponents, a wendigo and the victims of its curse of insatiable hunger (yes, I know wendigo is an Algonquian monster, not something you'd normally find in the Rockies, but I guess for purposes of the module they'd spread across the continent or something) - could not touch Miss Cranthrop, and she was nailing almost everything she tried. She shook off the curse, she dodged wolves and bullets and claws, she was unshaken by cannibalized corpses or being surrounded by hunger-crazed railroad workers or even the wendigo himself and the zombies he raised to oppose us.
Her shining moment, however, came when we were surrounded by the hunger-crazed railroad workers. Two had shotguns, four had clubs, and they were all clearly intent on eating us. Miss Cranthorp had borrowed a shotgun, but she had never used one before and had probably never struck a blow in anger in her life. Also, both Texas Jake and Captain Palmer were also affected by the curse, though they had so far fought off the urge to kill and eat the rest of us. Our working theory was that consuming human flesh would change a cursed person in a fundamental way, and we had ample reason to believe that our opponents had crossed that line. So when she happened to be the first to be able to act in the round, I as player knew that she probably needed to just pull the trigger, that we would be forced to kill them all. But I as Miss Cranthorp knew that she had to try to talk them down, that if she survived she would not be able to live with herself if she didn't. So I took an Intimidate, describing her as pointing the shotgun in her best imitation of Miss Winchester, drawing herself up as straight as she could, and using the Teacher Voice to address one of the men with shotguns, telling him that we would find the source of the curse and break it, freeing them all from this awful hunger, but right now he needed to put the gun down. And once again, she nailed it - not enough to make him actually put the gun down, not then, but enough that the GM decided he lowered it, looked confused, and held back from acting.
This successful Intimidation changed the whole tenor of the encounter. If the cursed could respond to the Teacher Voice they were still human and probably not responsible for their actions; so everyone in the party immediately switched modes. Captain Palmer, who had been about to aim for the head of the other shotgun-weilder, went for a disarm instead; Father O'Flannery helped Miss Cranthorp take the gun away from the one she'd intimidated; Texas Jake and Miss Winchester used their weapons as clubs; and we soon had them all tied up and stowed, in varying states of consciousness, in a ruined cabin with furs tucked around them so they wouldn't freeze while we tracked down the source of the curse. Instead of killing them, we freed them; and since we had explicitly come to Donner Pass to find out what had become of them and help them if we could, this was by far the most satisfactory outcome and a big win for humanity.
This sort of thing happens all the time in games. It happens in stories, too, but in that case the dice are all loaded - the author has a desired outcome and that outcome will happen. The reader may shove that knowledge down deep into her head where it can't interfere with her enjoyment, but she does know that. In games, though, you've got honest die rolls, implacable mechanics, and a player who is or is not determined to play the character to the hilt and not give in till the last roll of the dice.
And here's the thing - I am the only optimist in my gaming group. I have a biological tendency toward depression, and being an optimist has sometimes been the only way I could get out of bed in the morning. Everyone else at the table is saying "TPK time" and "OK, I may as well start rolling up my next character," or acting on the worst-case scenario assumption, and my not-exactly-optimized character is saying: "Okay, I do this then. No? I try this then. No? Oh, hush, we can still pull this out. I try this then. Yes! Okay, that's a start, now I'm gonna do this."
I am not a better player than the others, not by a long shot. We have players who can make a system dance; who can finesse a build or pull a huge advantage out of an innocuous mechanic or solve an intricate puzzle in ways I can't even follow, much less do myself. My strength is in playing my character flat out, to the hilt, and to the bitter end. That's why, when five out of six party members were captured by cannibals, my rogue got away and returned alone to free them from the larder. That's why this Deadlands party is not made up of murderers. That's also why I also occasionally get into situations in which my characters get into head-to-head confrontations with other characters, over how to treat prisoners or who's in charge (not something I normally fret about, but that was explicitly Sofia's mission, dammit, and not only did he flout her authority he damn near got everybody killed doing it) or how to handle some delicate situation; but that's the breaks. It makes for an interesting game, anyhow.
And it's because this works in games that, when push comes to shove, I never can quite give up on something there is any chance of doing, or that nobody else can do for me. And why I get so frustrated with people who quit before they begin; who assume failure as the default state, or that because they failed once that's the end of it.
It's not over till it's over. Stay on the ride. At least find out where it's going.
Do you want The Thing, or not?
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: The Friends We Do Not Know
This will take some time to drill down to the core, so bear with me.
So. One of the things that had my mouth too full of things to say to say anything, this past week, was the death of a person whose name I do not know.
Human beings are such intensely social animals that we are, for better or worse, constantly creating relationships with abstractions - from personal relationships with God or our cars, to loyalty to the public personae of politicians and entertainers, to fan crushes on characters in books and movies. Like everything else humans do, whether this tendency is a good thing or a bad thing depends on what we do with it. The more we let our egos control the transaction, the more likely we are to be fanatics rather than saints, or stalkers rather than supporters.
The advent of long-distance communication enabled a new kind of relationship, the correspondent. We think of the phenomenon of having friends we've never seen as being one peculiar to the internet age, but in fact it goes back much further than that. You only need to delve into the biographies of the major figures of the past, or the letter columns of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines, to see fruitful, even intense, friendships form between people who would never have met without a forum of common interest, and who might never have seen each other's faces. (Also, flamewars. Edgar Allan Poe's life was consumed by flamewars.) The internet has made this sort of relationship far more pervasive - anyone reading this is likely to have at least one, and probably many, friends who are known primarily through social media.
Elaine Marie Alphin was one such person, to me. I met her face-to-face once, when we were both up for an Edgar one year. Her books are important to me in ways that are difficult to articulate, and I mourn her unselfconsciously, and kick myself for not writing to her more (ever; what is the matter with me?) when she was locked in after her stroke. She is not mine to mourn in the same way that she is for her husband and family, but there is nothing problematic about it. I have an understandable relationship to her; one not too different from the relationship with the fellow X-phile (still living, thank goodness) I met on AOL, who taught me to birdwatch and provided a much-needed neutral sounding board with whom to work out certain matters during the Year from Hell, before I was ready to talk about them to anyone closer; and who eventually I met when she invited us to stay with her for a time during the recovery period; an invaluable break from the pressure of the familiar. You have internet friends like these, yourself. You know what I mean.
Similarly, I was able to mourn Robin Williams's death at the fan level. I admired his work and related to his condition; I knew his face and voice; at the same time, I understood that he did not know me from Adam's off ox and owed me nothing, which diminished my personal reaction to this death not one whit. This is a situation with which we are all familiar, in which we all participate. In a consumerist, celebrity culture much can become problematic about the fan relationship, but at its root we've got it sorted. In a way, public emotional involvement, whether celebration or mourning, for public figures even gives us important outlets for private feelings that are more difficult to share - for a person of my age, mourning Williams also allows us to mourn many things related to who we were the first time we saw Mork.
But then we come to Mootilda. That is the only name I know her by, though if I could bear to go poking around her profile and the news thread about her death enough I might be able to find out her real one. Maybe not. If she'd wanted me to know her name, I figure, I'd know it. The only face I have for her is her avatar, a cartoon cow. We never discussed personal things at all, but we were in a creative group together and I could not have created Widespot, or kept my original neighborhood going so long, without her advice and her work. She was a giant on the Mod the Sims newsgroup, because no one, anywhere, probably including the people who created it, understood the coding of the Sims2 game the way Mootilda did. She was constantly studying it, answering questions, running tests. She created tools that alleviated the tendency of the code to build up critical masses of corruption, discovered new sources of corruption and explained how to avoid them; sometimes even took other people's malfunctioning neighborhoods and looked through them herself (a major time sink) in order to understand what was going on and evolve strategies to deal with it. She helped me. She helped a lot of us. And all the time she had terminal cancer and now she is dead and I do not know her name and she's a cartoon cow.
The relationship was not personal. It was not professional, since it was rooted in a hobby. It was not entirely one-sided, since we had conversations. It wasn't exactly a fan relationship. What was it? How do I deal with it? The newsgroup's thread on the news is pages and page long, mostly people saying the same things over and over, and whether they only ever lurked and used her mods, or worked with her on something, to almost all of us, her name is Mootilda and she looks like a cartoon cow. How can we laugh when it's so sad? How can we cry when it's so absurd? We just can. There's no fighting it.
You have relationships like this, too.
So does your audience.
It is part of the writer's job to work out the ramifications of relationships, all kinds of relationships, through story. We structure our lives according to the stories we tell (which is why representation matters and the dominance of straight white male protagonists is a problem) - but we have no stories about this relationship.
And we need them.
But how do we start? How do we take a relationship that happens entirely in an abstract space, between abstractions of people (Mootilda knew my real name because I don't use handles, but presumably when she thought of me she saw the extreme close-up of my two favorite sims slow dancing that is my avatar on that newsgroup), and make that part of an interesting story? Obviously something else must be going on in the protagonist's life.
As it is in all our lives. If these abstract relationships are at the core of our stories, something's wrong. But if something's wrong, why - that's a story.
But I don't want to write a story in which the online relationships are the problem. Because that's BS. Though it's possible to run away from one's life into an online fantasy, you'll only do that if your real life is profoundly unsatisfactory. And it's not always true, especially for young people, especially for sick people, especially for people marginalized by the dominant narratives of modern society, that your real life is profoundly unsatisfactory because of anything you did or have control over.
I hate having this kind of idea, the one that presses itself to me as an obligation without coughing up any specifics. I need a character. I need a concrete problem. I need the online relationships to be part of the solution. And I need this to engage a reader, to have setting, movement, action, and suspense.
Stop turning to jelly in my hands every time I try to grapple you, Idea!
So. One of the things that had my mouth too full of things to say to say anything, this past week, was the death of a person whose name I do not know.
Human beings are such intensely social animals that we are, for better or worse, constantly creating relationships with abstractions - from personal relationships with God or our cars, to loyalty to the public personae of politicians and entertainers, to fan crushes on characters in books and movies. Like everything else humans do, whether this tendency is a good thing or a bad thing depends on what we do with it. The more we let our egos control the transaction, the more likely we are to be fanatics rather than saints, or stalkers rather than supporters.
The advent of long-distance communication enabled a new kind of relationship, the correspondent. We think of the phenomenon of having friends we've never seen as being one peculiar to the internet age, but in fact it goes back much further than that. You only need to delve into the biographies of the major figures of the past, or the letter columns of nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines, to see fruitful, even intense, friendships form between people who would never have met without a forum of common interest, and who might never have seen each other's faces. (Also, flamewars. Edgar Allan Poe's life was consumed by flamewars.) The internet has made this sort of relationship far more pervasive - anyone reading this is likely to have at least one, and probably many, friends who are known primarily through social media.
Elaine Marie Alphin was one such person, to me. I met her face-to-face once, when we were both up for an Edgar one year. Her books are important to me in ways that are difficult to articulate, and I mourn her unselfconsciously, and kick myself for not writing to her more (ever; what is the matter with me?) when she was locked in after her stroke. She is not mine to mourn in the same way that she is for her husband and family, but there is nothing problematic about it. I have an understandable relationship to her; one not too different from the relationship with the fellow X-phile (still living, thank goodness) I met on AOL, who taught me to birdwatch and provided a much-needed neutral sounding board with whom to work out certain matters during the Year from Hell, before I was ready to talk about them to anyone closer; and who eventually I met when she invited us to stay with her for a time during the recovery period; an invaluable break from the pressure of the familiar. You have internet friends like these, yourself. You know what I mean.
Similarly, I was able to mourn Robin Williams's death at the fan level. I admired his work and related to his condition; I knew his face and voice; at the same time, I understood that he did not know me from Adam's off ox and owed me nothing, which diminished my personal reaction to this death not one whit. This is a situation with which we are all familiar, in which we all participate. In a consumerist, celebrity culture much can become problematic about the fan relationship, but at its root we've got it sorted. In a way, public emotional involvement, whether celebration or mourning, for public figures even gives us important outlets for private feelings that are more difficult to share - for a person of my age, mourning Williams also allows us to mourn many things related to who we were the first time we saw Mork.
But then we come to Mootilda. That is the only name I know her by, though if I could bear to go poking around her profile and the news thread about her death enough I might be able to find out her real one. Maybe not. If she'd wanted me to know her name, I figure, I'd know it. The only face I have for her is her avatar, a cartoon cow. We never discussed personal things at all, but we were in a creative group together and I could not have created Widespot, or kept my original neighborhood going so long, without her advice and her work. She was a giant on the Mod the Sims newsgroup, because no one, anywhere, probably including the people who created it, understood the coding of the Sims2 game the way Mootilda did. She was constantly studying it, answering questions, running tests. She created tools that alleviated the tendency of the code to build up critical masses of corruption, discovered new sources of corruption and explained how to avoid them; sometimes even took other people's malfunctioning neighborhoods and looked through them herself (a major time sink) in order to understand what was going on and evolve strategies to deal with it. She helped me. She helped a lot of us. And all the time she had terminal cancer and now she is dead and I do not know her name and she's a cartoon cow.
The relationship was not personal. It was not professional, since it was rooted in a hobby. It was not entirely one-sided, since we had conversations. It wasn't exactly a fan relationship. What was it? How do I deal with it? The newsgroup's thread on the news is pages and page long, mostly people saying the same things over and over, and whether they only ever lurked and used her mods, or worked with her on something, to almost all of us, her name is Mootilda and she looks like a cartoon cow. How can we laugh when it's so sad? How can we cry when it's so absurd? We just can. There's no fighting it.
You have relationships like this, too.
So does your audience.
It is part of the writer's job to work out the ramifications of relationships, all kinds of relationships, through story. We structure our lives according to the stories we tell (which is why representation matters and the dominance of straight white male protagonists is a problem) - but we have no stories about this relationship.
And we need them.
But how do we start? How do we take a relationship that happens entirely in an abstract space, between abstractions of people (Mootilda knew my real name because I don't use handles, but presumably when she thought of me she saw the extreme close-up of my two favorite sims slow dancing that is my avatar on that newsgroup), and make that part of an interesting story? Obviously something else must be going on in the protagonist's life.
As it is in all our lives. If these abstract relationships are at the core of our stories, something's wrong. But if something's wrong, why - that's a story.
But I don't want to write a story in which the online relationships are the problem. Because that's BS. Though it's possible to run away from one's life into an online fantasy, you'll only do that if your real life is profoundly unsatisfactory. And it's not always true, especially for young people, especially for sick people, especially for people marginalized by the dominant narratives of modern society, that your real life is profoundly unsatisfactory because of anything you did or have control over.
I hate having this kind of idea, the one that presses itself to me as an obligation without coughing up any specifics. I need a character. I need a concrete problem. I need the online relationships to be part of the solution. And I need this to engage a reader, to have setting, movement, action, and suspense.
Stop turning to jelly in my hands every time I try to grapple you, Idea!
Thursday, August 21, 2014
I Should Write a Tribute.
I can't.
Elaine died.
Death sucks.
I am useless at this and shaky and I'm about to cry some more, so I direct you to the post I made when she had her stroke.
I'm afraid that's all I can do right now.
Elaine died.
Death sucks.
I am useless at this and shaky and I'm about to cry some more, so I direct you to the post I made when she had her stroke.
I'm afraid that's all I can do right now.
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Bad Week All Around
So today my tumblr dash, normally full of book discussion and history/archeology and the funny/moving/absurd adventures of pixel people, today is blowing up like a certain town in Missouri, to which the people of Gaza are sending helpful advice about how to cope when tear gassed.
And there's some personal stuff which isn't happening to me, but which is distinctly me-adjacent, about which I am extremely limited in what I can usefully do.
So I will now go and write about the imaginary problems of imaginary people, because we should all do what we're best at, even if it amounts to treading water. And it's nice to solve a problem, even if it's only a paper one.
And there's some personal stuff which isn't happening to me, but which is distinctly me-adjacent, about which I am extremely limited in what I can usefully do.
So I will now go and write about the imaginary problems of imaginary people, because we should all do what we're best at, even if it amounts to treading water. And it's nice to solve a problem, even if it's only a paper one.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Imperfection is Inspiration
So, we went with our friend W to see Knights of Badassdom, a horror comedy set at a LARP, last night, and on the whole liked it. Though far from perfect, it did capture a certain fannish feeling and left me missing my original gaming group, the guys I held hands with to keep from getting separated in the crowd at the first Star Trek movie, and hoping that they all got to see it, too. It was internally consistent and did not have me amusing myself with the desperate moviegoing games of "predict the upcoming plot development" or "predict the dialog." On the whole, it presents LARPers (at least, fantasy LARPers; the paintballers were dismissed as "rednecks" and shown as deliberate jackasses who were, in one case, even willing to abuse positions of public trust in order to ruin other people's fun) in a positive light. Most of the characters were more or less likeable. I don't think I've been in a movie during which the entire audience cheered wildly with one voice since the original Star Wars (which I saw when it came out), but it happened last night.
And may I just mention how awesome it is that one of the kings was in a wheel chair, the protagonist party's badass fighter was a little person, and one of the gamemaster's assistants was a practicing Jew never seen without his yarmulke; and that these things were all treated as ordinary and not worthy of remark or emphasis just like in real life?
Of course, this makes the movie's failure of the Bechdel Test even more annoying...
So now I settle in to another movie game - the Post-Viewing Rewrite. W stayed the night with us, so we spent a lot of breakfast discussing what would have been in the movie had we written it, and sorting out what bits probably were in it originally but got trimmed for length. (The movie is a good twenty minutes too short.) Don't worry, I don't intend to go on and on about it.
Suffice it to say that a movie W and I scripted on the same topic and with the same basic plot would have been structured very differently and had a much more interesting climactic battle set piece (without losing the Huge Moment of Awesome that prompted that all-audience cheer), by spending five minutes apiece earlier in the movie on establishing a small number of parties of secondary characters, showcasing their individual approaches to fantasy combat during the first day's quests, and then showing them using these same techniques - not to defeat the monster, but to slow it down and cover the escape of fellow-players who aren't equipped even to do that. A team which relies heavily on the use of shield-walls, for example, could bullrush it and knock it down (probably losing a man with each attack) or even pin it for a short period; while a party of wizards who have developed their aim, distance, and accuracy in throwing spell packets could annoy and distract it with hurled rocks and possibly other improvised weapons. Some rules lawyer would probably also start trying to work out what its weakness was, possibly raiding a well-stocked car or park maintenance facility in search of some suitable chemical vulnerability.
I have no doubt in my mind, by the way, that in real life this is indeed what would happen. Many LARPers are military or ex-military, and even among civilian LARPers the marine mentality is strong. An attacked LARP group would rapidly self-sort into "civilians" and "protectors," and the protectors would not think twice about risking their lives to fill that role.
The Post-Viewing Rewrite is, in my opinion, one of the benefits of the not-quite-successful work of art. I console myself with it sometimes when I feel I'm getting a little far from my areas of expertise. When I was researching The Music Thief, I was constantly conscious that I'm white as rice and had a lot of nerve writing a Hispanic protagonist, much less one interested in conjunto and Tejano music. But the book refused not to be written, the universe kept throwing research opportunities into my lap, the Hispanic people I discussed the work with ahead of time were all enthusiastic. And I figured, worst case scenario, some Hispanic child for whom "author" is an alien career goal thinks: "This is all wrong! When I write my book -"
And then write it. That would be well worth writing a flawed book in public. I would rather write a deeply imperfect book that prompts someone who might otherwise live and die without discovering her own creativity to write something better, than write a perfect book which leaves the audience feeling that there's no point trying, it's already been done, and done right.
And may I just mention how awesome it is that one of the kings was in a wheel chair, the protagonist party's badass fighter was a little person, and one of the gamemaster's assistants was a practicing Jew never seen without his yarmulke; and that these things were all treated as ordinary and not worthy of remark or emphasis just like in real life?
Of course, this makes the movie's failure of the Bechdel Test even more annoying...
So now I settle in to another movie game - the Post-Viewing Rewrite. W stayed the night with us, so we spent a lot of breakfast discussing what would have been in the movie had we written it, and sorting out what bits probably were in it originally but got trimmed for length. (The movie is a good twenty minutes too short.) Don't worry, I don't intend to go on and on about it.
Suffice it to say that a movie W and I scripted on the same topic and with the same basic plot would have been structured very differently and had a much more interesting climactic battle set piece (without losing the Huge Moment of Awesome that prompted that all-audience cheer), by spending five minutes apiece earlier in the movie on establishing a small number of parties of secondary characters, showcasing their individual approaches to fantasy combat during the first day's quests, and then showing them using these same techniques - not to defeat the monster, but to slow it down and cover the escape of fellow-players who aren't equipped even to do that. A team which relies heavily on the use of shield-walls, for example, could bullrush it and knock it down (probably losing a man with each attack) or even pin it for a short period; while a party of wizards who have developed their aim, distance, and accuracy in throwing spell packets could annoy and distract it with hurled rocks and possibly other improvised weapons. Some rules lawyer would probably also start trying to work out what its weakness was, possibly raiding a well-stocked car or park maintenance facility in search of some suitable chemical vulnerability.
I have no doubt in my mind, by the way, that in real life this is indeed what would happen. Many LARPers are military or ex-military, and even among civilian LARPers the marine mentality is strong. An attacked LARP group would rapidly self-sort into "civilians" and "protectors," and the protectors would not think twice about risking their lives to fill that role.
The Post-Viewing Rewrite is, in my opinion, one of the benefits of the not-quite-successful work of art. I console myself with it sometimes when I feel I'm getting a little far from my areas of expertise. When I was researching The Music Thief, I was constantly conscious that I'm white as rice and had a lot of nerve writing a Hispanic protagonist, much less one interested in conjunto and Tejano music. But the book refused not to be written, the universe kept throwing research opportunities into my lap, the Hispanic people I discussed the work with ahead of time were all enthusiastic. And I figured, worst case scenario, some Hispanic child for whom "author" is an alien career goal thinks: "This is all wrong! When I write my book -"
And then write it. That would be well worth writing a flawed book in public. I would rather write a deeply imperfect book that prompts someone who might otherwise live and die without discovering her own creativity to write something better, than write a perfect book which leaves the audience feeling that there's no point trying, it's already been done, and done right.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Cross-Fertilization
I'm finding Facebook a lot less intuitive than I expected. Therefore, there's nothing on it and I haven't invited anybody to be friends.
For the record, I will not be your neighbor on Farmville and if you invite me to play Sims Social I will explain to you exactly why it is Not Real Sims. So don't even go there.
So far this week all the social networking I've done involved going to the SCBWI conference in Austin. I drove up the night before, stayed overnight with friends, and as usual left not long after the raffle to come straight home. In between, though I had a good day. Especially compared to the last time I attended this conference at this place, when I had to simultaneously cope with Moby's brakes and steering letting me down pretty badly. I saw people I only see at conferences, met a person I only know from online, bought Cyn Smith's most recent book about the supernatural scene in Austin, Feral Nights (you'll never know how menacing a werearmadillo can be till you read this, I tell you what), attended panels and breakout sessions, bid at the silent auction, and all that good stuff.
I often say that I don't know anything about art, not even what I like; which is probably why my favorite parts of the conference involved listening to illustrator E.B. Lewis talk about the visual language used in picture books. Possibly because he was a teacher and a fine artist before he became an illustrator and was used to thinking and speaking analytically about art as well seeing and feeling analytically about it - these are separate skills for all the creative arts; many excellent artists can't explain why this or that work in their art does or doesn't succeed - he was able to discuss both the various pictures of his own that he used in his presentation, and the submitted portfolio pieces in the "First Impressions" panel in terms I could actually follow.
Make no mistake about it - the trained eye sees (and the trained ear hears) differently than the untrained one. I look at a picture with human figures and think that they're stiff; Lewis looks at it and says that the artist needs to decide whether his voice is stylized or realistic, because if the one then this is where to focus effort and if the other then that is.
It would never have occurred to me to think of an artistic voice in a visual medium, either; but once he started talking about it I started being able to hear it. And choosing between stylization and realism - writers have to do that, too, though I hadn't put it in those terms before. For all I know, so do musicians. It's certainly at the heart of the art of gaming.
I do not know how useful, in the long run, this sort of cross-medium enlightenment is, but I know it's refreshing, and I know it can't be useless. So I'm going to call that a weekend well-spent.
For the record, I will not be your neighbor on Farmville and if you invite me to play Sims Social I will explain to you exactly why it is Not Real Sims. So don't even go there.
So far this week all the social networking I've done involved going to the SCBWI conference in Austin. I drove up the night before, stayed overnight with friends, and as usual left not long after the raffle to come straight home. In between, though I had a good day. Especially compared to the last time I attended this conference at this place, when I had to simultaneously cope with Moby's brakes and steering letting me down pretty badly. I saw people I only see at conferences, met a person I only know from online, bought Cyn Smith's most recent book about the supernatural scene in Austin, Feral Nights (you'll never know how menacing a werearmadillo can be till you read this, I tell you what), attended panels and breakout sessions, bid at the silent auction, and all that good stuff.
I often say that I don't know anything about art, not even what I like; which is probably why my favorite parts of the conference involved listening to illustrator E.B. Lewis talk about the visual language used in picture books. Possibly because he was a teacher and a fine artist before he became an illustrator and was used to thinking and speaking analytically about art as well seeing and feeling analytically about it - these are separate skills for all the creative arts; many excellent artists can't explain why this or that work in their art does or doesn't succeed - he was able to discuss both the various pictures of his own that he used in his presentation, and the submitted portfolio pieces in the "First Impressions" panel in terms I could actually follow.
Make no mistake about it - the trained eye sees (and the trained ear hears) differently than the untrained one. I look at a picture with human figures and think that they're stiff; Lewis looks at it and says that the artist needs to decide whether his voice is stylized or realistic, because if the one then this is where to focus effort and if the other then that is.
It would never have occurred to me to think of an artistic voice in a visual medium, either; but once he started talking about it I started being able to hear it. And choosing between stylization and realism - writers have to do that, too, though I hadn't put it in those terms before. For all I know, so do musicians. It's certainly at the heart of the art of gaming.
I do not know how useful, in the long run, this sort of cross-medium enlightenment is, but I know it's refreshing, and I know it can't be useless. So I'm going to call that a weekend well-spent.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Hey, It Works!
No, not the zipper (though I have now put in three in a row on the first try - it pays to do it again before you forget how); the Garage Sale!
Andrew May took the Mechanical Gorilla notion, merged it with the hoax Bigfoot killed on the side of the road, and produced a funny, pulpy tale of mad science, appropriately called The Mechanical Gorilla. Available in electronic format. Check it out.
I'm, like, a literary godmother, or aunt, or something.
My very favorite sentence, from sane-sounding scientist Dr. Azuma: "That would violate Cambridge Town Council's strict regulations vis-a-vis the utilization of combat robots in a peacetime urban environment." That's a whole lotta world-building, right there.
Andrew May took the Mechanical Gorilla notion, merged it with the hoax Bigfoot killed on the side of the road, and produced a funny, pulpy tale of mad science, appropriately called The Mechanical Gorilla. Available in electronic format. Check it out.
I'm, like, a literary godmother, or aunt, or something.
My very favorite sentence, from sane-sounding scientist Dr. Azuma: "That would violate Cambridge Town Council's strict regulations vis-a-vis the utilization of combat robots in a peacetime urban environment." That's a whole lotta world-building, right there.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Revision Month
Nothing much in the way of new projects this month, but lots and lots of revision. I'm awaiting an editorial letter on Sullivan, always a fraught moment - especially with a new editor. Most of the editors I've worked with have been very good at their jobs, but one hears horror stories - editors who think they "get it" but don't, or who want you to rewrite it in a way that would make it theirs instead of yours, or who put you on improbably tight deadlines and then leave you hanging in the wind for weeks. But there's no point borrowing trouble, and while it stands to reason my luck'll run out sometime, it doesn't have to be this time and in any case worrying about it won't help. But I wish that e-mail'd get here!
Meanwhile, Andrew May sent me the story he wrote riffing off a couple of my garage sale ideas, and I got to read a novella with chapter headings like "Idol of the Apemen" during a period of severe Health Crap, which was a great help, because you always feel better when you laugh unless your ribs are broken. So I gave him some comments which I hope will be helpful.
Our gaming group is also taking a break from role-playing to assist in a playtest of a tradeable card version of a module set we recently played in its RPG incarnation. It's not the first playtest I've participated in, but it is the first one we've done as a group and the first one in which we made a major commitment. Playtesting is like playing, except instead of settling in to strategic thinking and focusing on the game experience, you're poking and testing the rules, uncovering ambiguities in the wording, and constantly responding to rules changes that get made during playtest. This is more fun for the game mechanics in the group than for me, but I don't think I'm cut out for tradeable card games anyway. My major contribution has been to be always slightly confused about the rules, highlighting shortcomings in the way they're written.
Widespot, the shareable Sims2 neighborhood I made as a project, reached the point where I felt I could ask interested parties to playtest for me. Most of the revisions I've done based on that feedback have related to the buildings - so far no one has a problem with how the characters play. Which is not too surprising, given that character and story are the elements I have lots of experience with, while as far as architecture goes I know it when I see it. However, I have noticed that people are tending to play the Hart and Mann families preferentially to the Weisses, Beeches, and Lands, which makes me wonder if I didn't give those families sufficient story interest. And I realize that the Hart family has a lot of internal conflict and intricate conflicting connections to every other household, and the Mann family has a strong conflict-creating connection to the Harts and Lands, but the connections among the Lands, Weisses, and Beeches are mostly harmonious. So I probably have some character and story revision to do there, after all.
Having a game property in playtest is unexpectedly different from having a manuscript in critique, because whereas critique partners are all business, playtesters are (if you've done your job at all) having fun, so you get a foretaste of the pleasure of publication. Otherwise, it uses the same mental muscles and requires the same degree of flexibility and willingness to set your ego aside, to learn new techniques and how to better use existing tools from the people who understand them better, and to alter your original vision when necessary. And, just like in revision, you have to be able to coolly assess conflicting opinions, like the scene/building that one person finds charming and the other person thinks looks "like you were tired when you did it."
Finally, we're in the final stage of the year, a time when lots of people assess their lives and think about how they want to change them. When we go into revision mode on our lives. I don't believe in New Year's resolutions, but I do believe in changing your life if you're not happy with it. Sure, you may have to back up a bit and unravel something that exists in order to do that, but - happiness is hard work. And happiness is worth it.
Too bad it's so hard to find playtesters, editors, and critique partners for that one!
Meanwhile, Andrew May sent me the story he wrote riffing off a couple of my garage sale ideas, and I got to read a novella with chapter headings like "Idol of the Apemen" during a period of severe Health Crap, which was a great help, because you always feel better when you laugh unless your ribs are broken. So I gave him some comments which I hope will be helpful.
Our gaming group is also taking a break from role-playing to assist in a playtest of a tradeable card version of a module set we recently played in its RPG incarnation. It's not the first playtest I've participated in, but it is the first one we've done as a group and the first one in which we made a major commitment. Playtesting is like playing, except instead of settling in to strategic thinking and focusing on the game experience, you're poking and testing the rules, uncovering ambiguities in the wording, and constantly responding to rules changes that get made during playtest. This is more fun for the game mechanics in the group than for me, but I don't think I'm cut out for tradeable card games anyway. My major contribution has been to be always slightly confused about the rules, highlighting shortcomings in the way they're written.
Widespot, the shareable Sims2 neighborhood I made as a project, reached the point where I felt I could ask interested parties to playtest for me. Most of the revisions I've done based on that feedback have related to the buildings - so far no one has a problem with how the characters play. Which is not too surprising, given that character and story are the elements I have lots of experience with, while as far as architecture goes I know it when I see it. However, I have noticed that people are tending to play the Hart and Mann families preferentially to the Weisses, Beeches, and Lands, which makes me wonder if I didn't give those families sufficient story interest. And I realize that the Hart family has a lot of internal conflict and intricate conflicting connections to every other household, and the Mann family has a strong conflict-creating connection to the Harts and Lands, but the connections among the Lands, Weisses, and Beeches are mostly harmonious. So I probably have some character and story revision to do there, after all.
Having a game property in playtest is unexpectedly different from having a manuscript in critique, because whereas critique partners are all business, playtesters are (if you've done your job at all) having fun, so you get a foretaste of the pleasure of publication. Otherwise, it uses the same mental muscles and requires the same degree of flexibility and willingness to set your ego aside, to learn new techniques and how to better use existing tools from the people who understand them better, and to alter your original vision when necessary. And, just like in revision, you have to be able to coolly assess conflicting opinions, like the scene/building that one person finds charming and the other person thinks looks "like you were tired when you did it."
Finally, we're in the final stage of the year, a time when lots of people assess their lives and think about how they want to change them. When we go into revision mode on our lives. I don't believe in New Year's resolutions, but I do believe in changing your life if you're not happy with it. Sure, you may have to back up a bit and unravel something that exists in order to do that, but - happiness is hard work. And happiness is worth it.
Too bad it's so hard to find playtesters, editors, and critique partners for that one!
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Game Balance
This weekend, a member of our gaming group, who is currently running a published adventure for us, complained about the endemic preference in the gaming community of "rule of cool" over either "common sense" or "attention to detail." A DM should not have to work out for himself how to sell a party of players like us on a cannibal tribe consisting of thirty or so able-bodied men, one old female witch, and no children, old men, teens, or women of breeding age at all; or answer questions concerning the function of various weapons labeled "exotic" by the system but "bizarre and impractical" by anyone who's ever hefted even a boffer weapon. (The LARP I participated in a few years ago had a couple of enthusiastic makers of exotic "cool looking" foam weapons, which were set out to lure in new players, but which no one ever attempted to use because they balanced like a rhino on a tightrope.)
This is true, and we are in full agreement on that point. However, I had, on my Sims2 newsgroup, been reading the questions, frustrations, and shared strategies of people who went to the opposite extreme - people who fuss endlessly with mods and hacks trying to ensure that all the sims in their neighborhood are all on the same day in the same season and that no individual sim ever has his time duplicated by, for example, coming home from work with five other playables on everybody's individual Mondays, or by spending five hours on a community lot and returning to a home where the clock has only advanced by an hour. Given that a sim's adult lifestage is only 29 days long, and that a sim pregnancy lasts three days, not to mention that vacation destinations and University subneighborhoods run on completely different clocks, it seems clear to me that a sim day is a stylized composite of a whole bunch of sim days and that what other people are calling "duplicate time" is a handy feature of the game that enables your sim to get more than 29 days worth of adult life experience.
Stylization is a necessary feature of games as opposed to real life. Different people require different levels of simulationism in their games - and for that matter, the same person probably requires different levels in different games. I doubt most rabid simulationists want an economic expansion for chess, or that most casual hand-wavers of details want to guesstimate the distance or direction the pieces can move. (Though, having said that, I'm probably going to discover, or be directed to, chess variants that do even more bizarre things.) This is why computer games get hacking and modding subcultures and tabletop games get house rules. Whether clearing away rules that are too fussy and slow down the game too much for individual taste, making new rules that create more structure and make the game more challenging, or expanding gameplay by adding new elements that require fresh new strategies, fiddling with the published rules can enhance the play experience and any corporation that objects to the practice is shooting itself in the foot.
This is not to say that counterproductive extremes do not exist. I've seen people working so hard to make their game - whether computer or tabletop - "perfect" that they kill their enjoyment, turning their games into work. If you don't enjoy it, there's no point to the game. So if you're someone who does that, knock it off. Go do something else - there's no shortage of stuff to do in this life. (May I suggest reading a book?)
On the other hand, some people (and they are usually, in this modern age, professionally involved with computer programming) love to fiddle with system mechanics for their own sake. If you play with such a person, you can't afford to let them kill your fun; but you shouldn't try to kill their fun by nagging them to stop before they reach the point of diminishing returns, either. You have to find some mutually acceptable compromise position.
If you can't, you can't play together. Our current gaming group, consisting of four regular players and two who join us when their schedules permit them to come in from out of town, is the refined core of the survivors of, literally, years of experimenting and seeking for compatible players whose comfort levels are close enough to each other that we never have stalemates because (for example) someone is insisting on running a Babylonian priest in a 17th-century French setting while everyone else argues with him. Believe me, if we ever have a 17th-century French campaign with a Babylonian priest in the middle of it, it will be logical within the context of the game. We don't have the same gaming styles by any means, but we do have compatible faults (says the member who, when DMing, makes her story and characters work and depends on her players to figure out on the fly how it all fits mechanically).
All these ideas have relevance to writing stories, too, but this post is already long enough, most people won't read it, so I'll talk about that on Thursday, God willing and the creek don't rise.
P.S. My eyes are futzing on me a bit and when I came to this page I read last post's title as "Who Ate the Clones?" Which is a whole different story...
This is true, and we are in full agreement on that point. However, I had, on my Sims2 newsgroup, been reading the questions, frustrations, and shared strategies of people who went to the opposite extreme - people who fuss endlessly with mods and hacks trying to ensure that all the sims in their neighborhood are all on the same day in the same season and that no individual sim ever has his time duplicated by, for example, coming home from work with five other playables on everybody's individual Mondays, or by spending five hours on a community lot and returning to a home where the clock has only advanced by an hour. Given that a sim's adult lifestage is only 29 days long, and that a sim pregnancy lasts three days, not to mention that vacation destinations and University subneighborhoods run on completely different clocks, it seems clear to me that a sim day is a stylized composite of a whole bunch of sim days and that what other people are calling "duplicate time" is a handy feature of the game that enables your sim to get more than 29 days worth of adult life experience.
Stylization is a necessary feature of games as opposed to real life. Different people require different levels of simulationism in their games - and for that matter, the same person probably requires different levels in different games. I doubt most rabid simulationists want an economic expansion for chess, or that most casual hand-wavers of details want to guesstimate the distance or direction the pieces can move. (Though, having said that, I'm probably going to discover, or be directed to, chess variants that do even more bizarre things.) This is why computer games get hacking and modding subcultures and tabletop games get house rules. Whether clearing away rules that are too fussy and slow down the game too much for individual taste, making new rules that create more structure and make the game more challenging, or expanding gameplay by adding new elements that require fresh new strategies, fiddling with the published rules can enhance the play experience and any corporation that objects to the practice is shooting itself in the foot.
This is not to say that counterproductive extremes do not exist. I've seen people working so hard to make their game - whether computer or tabletop - "perfect" that they kill their enjoyment, turning their games into work. If you don't enjoy it, there's no point to the game. So if you're someone who does that, knock it off. Go do something else - there's no shortage of stuff to do in this life. (May I suggest reading a book?)
On the other hand, some people (and they are usually, in this modern age, professionally involved with computer programming) love to fiddle with system mechanics for their own sake. If you play with such a person, you can't afford to let them kill your fun; but you shouldn't try to kill their fun by nagging them to stop before they reach the point of diminishing returns, either. You have to find some mutually acceptable compromise position.
If you can't, you can't play together. Our current gaming group, consisting of four regular players and two who join us when their schedules permit them to come in from out of town, is the refined core of the survivors of, literally, years of experimenting and seeking for compatible players whose comfort levels are close enough to each other that we never have stalemates because (for example) someone is insisting on running a Babylonian priest in a 17th-century French setting while everyone else argues with him. Believe me, if we ever have a 17th-century French campaign with a Babylonian priest in the middle of it, it will be logical within the context of the game. We don't have the same gaming styles by any means, but we do have compatible faults (says the member who, when DMing, makes her story and characters work and depends on her players to figure out on the fly how it all fits mechanically).
All these ideas have relevance to writing stories, too, but this post is already long enough, most people won't read it, so I'll talk about that on Thursday, God willing and the creek don't rise.
P.S. My eyes are futzing on me a bit and when I came to this page I read last post's title as "Who Ate the Clones?" Which is a whole different story...
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Schroedinger's Note
This one's from my husband, Damon. So you see it's not just writers who do this!
We both just read The Future of Us, by Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker, and he was thinking. You have one of those high school notes where the writer gives the recipient a multiple choice question and the recipient ticks one blank and passes the note back. The question is a typical high school one - go to homecoming with me yes/no, free for lunch yes/no, like the same person as me yes/no - but the answer has repercussions.
This note is in a box. Until the box is opened, both answers are ticked. The person whose job it is to open the box can't bear to do so, and will be living the repercussions of both answers alternately until the box is opened.
An advantage of making this a high school story is that certain events are locked in - the homecoming dance will occur on schedule, the protagonist is already committed to certain extracurriculars and classes, the parents' job and marital milestones and difficulties will not be changed by the protagonist's behavior - so that it's a simple matter to examine the different emotional repercussions of each answer and the ripple effect of each within the peer group within a locked-in framework. Sooner or later, though, a situation will arise in which the way a major decision is made, one that follows logically from the original note, and from that point the future is locked in - the protagonist can't have it both ways anymore. To be fully effective, both futures should have notable upsides and downsides and the decision should be a lot harder than the question posed by the original note.
The problem here is that the logical person to open the box is not the person on whom the decision depends, but the person who asked the question in the first place. Which is all kinds of messed up - by asking the question, he's deflected the decision onto someone else and having done that, he can't very well take the power away. You could change it so that the object in the box is a wish object, but this removes the core of the idea, the thing that makes it interesting. So that's no good.
I suggested that the protagonist could be so cripplingly indecisive that he makes all his urgent decisions based on a coin flip or dice toss, in which case you've got not a box, but a dice cup clamped down on top of the fateful roll; and as long as Indeterminate Teen doesn't lift the cup, both futures are happening. This spectacularly dysfunctional character quirk then becomes a major element in the story, though, and dictates the character arc.
One thing that occurs to me now is that the note could be intercepted by some third party with a stake in the communication, but it's hard to imagine what that stake could be or how it could justify holding onto the note.
Maybe this is soluble, but between us, we haven't cracked it yet.
We both just read The Future of Us, by Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker, and he was thinking. You have one of those high school notes where the writer gives the recipient a multiple choice question and the recipient ticks one blank and passes the note back. The question is a typical high school one - go to homecoming with me yes/no, free for lunch yes/no, like the same person as me yes/no - but the answer has repercussions.
This note is in a box. Until the box is opened, both answers are ticked. The person whose job it is to open the box can't bear to do so, and will be living the repercussions of both answers alternately until the box is opened.
An advantage of making this a high school story is that certain events are locked in - the homecoming dance will occur on schedule, the protagonist is already committed to certain extracurriculars and classes, the parents' job and marital milestones and difficulties will not be changed by the protagonist's behavior - so that it's a simple matter to examine the different emotional repercussions of each answer and the ripple effect of each within the peer group within a locked-in framework. Sooner or later, though, a situation will arise in which the way a major decision is made, one that follows logically from the original note, and from that point the future is locked in - the protagonist can't have it both ways anymore. To be fully effective, both futures should have notable upsides and downsides and the decision should be a lot harder than the question posed by the original note.
The problem here is that the logical person to open the box is not the person on whom the decision depends, but the person who asked the question in the first place. Which is all kinds of messed up - by asking the question, he's deflected the decision onto someone else and having done that, he can't very well take the power away. You could change it so that the object in the box is a wish object, but this removes the core of the idea, the thing that makes it interesting. So that's no good.
I suggested that the protagonist could be so cripplingly indecisive that he makes all his urgent decisions based on a coin flip or dice toss, in which case you've got not a box, but a dice cup clamped down on top of the fateful roll; and as long as Indeterminate Teen doesn't lift the cup, both futures are happening. This spectacularly dysfunctional character quirk then becomes a major element in the story, though, and dictates the character arc.
One thing that occurs to me now is that the note could be intercepted by some third party with a stake in the communication, but it's hard to imagine what that stake could be or how it could justify holding onto the note.
Maybe this is soluble, but between us, we haven't cracked it yet.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Father's Hands
A long time ago, the parent of a friend of mine was shot by police during the commission of a crime. He didn't die immediately (people seldom do; that's our visual media sugarcoating reality for us and for its own convenience) and my friend saw him before he died, but he was not conscious and my friend said he didn't look like himself, except for the hands.
My friend has a large family with a complicated dynamic. The father's role in it had dysfunctional elements, but even the family members least fond of him felt at the time that the crime came out of left field. It required considerable rewriting of personal history, with reshuffling of facts and interpretations of events so that different elements received different emphasis than formerly, in order for them to make sense of what happened. Some did this with greater ease than others. My friend was the one closest to the father, and has constructed his response to the event in such a way that the action was the result of a physical pathology. Other members of the family have constructed their life stories differently. The simplest description of what happened is, that the dead member became an easy scapegoat for a lot of things for a lot of people, and it is impossible for an outsider to judge how fair this is.
Me being who I am, my empathy for my friend, could not prevent my latching onto the story elements. First, the hands. Second, the unrecognizability of the person on life support. Third, the mystery of what prompted the crime. Fourth, the contradictory, simplified memories created to overlay upon the complex reality of an entire family's life in response to this single event.
Fifth: My friend travels a lot on business. Sometimes, inevitably, in the immediate wake of the event, these travels intersected the paths of someone who resembled the dead father so much as to require second or even third looks.
So I thought, what if, one time, the postmortem double kept reappearing? What if my friend started receiving communications, and became convinced that the father was not dead?
That's a thriller. That's a thriller with a lot of potential, actually, for good and ill. The father could be a hero or a villain or a victim, depending on the real reason for the crime and who that was lying in the hospital with the father's hands. It could be a straight mystery thriller, or a supernatural one, or science fiction; it wouldn't matter, as long as the storyteller didn't get so distracted by shiny McGuffins and bait-and-switch plot as to lose track of the core process of the survivors' continual need to rewrite their lives and their relationships based on events centering on this person.
As you can probably tell by the awkward, stilted way I've described the case, I'd as soon cut my hands off as write this, even after all this time. The potential for hurting my friend is too great. Even if I did everything right and the stars aligned and I got an Edgar and a major motion picture deal, if I followed the plot into a dark corner for which my friend couldn't forgive me, I'd be the loser by it.
Even now I'm really hoping I succeeded in stripping out every possible specific detail that could hack somebody off.
I had a conversation with my friend's SO that brought the subject back into the front of my mind. I trust now I can let it sink back into obscurity.
My friend has a large family with a complicated dynamic. The father's role in it had dysfunctional elements, but even the family members least fond of him felt at the time that the crime came out of left field. It required considerable rewriting of personal history, with reshuffling of facts and interpretations of events so that different elements received different emphasis than formerly, in order for them to make sense of what happened. Some did this with greater ease than others. My friend was the one closest to the father, and has constructed his response to the event in such a way that the action was the result of a physical pathology. Other members of the family have constructed their life stories differently. The simplest description of what happened is, that the dead member became an easy scapegoat for a lot of things for a lot of people, and it is impossible for an outsider to judge how fair this is.
Me being who I am, my empathy for my friend, could not prevent my latching onto the story elements. First, the hands. Second, the unrecognizability of the person on life support. Third, the mystery of what prompted the crime. Fourth, the contradictory, simplified memories created to overlay upon the complex reality of an entire family's life in response to this single event.
Fifth: My friend travels a lot on business. Sometimes, inevitably, in the immediate wake of the event, these travels intersected the paths of someone who resembled the dead father so much as to require second or even third looks.
So I thought, what if, one time, the postmortem double kept reappearing? What if my friend started receiving communications, and became convinced that the father was not dead?
That's a thriller. That's a thriller with a lot of potential, actually, for good and ill. The father could be a hero or a villain or a victim, depending on the real reason for the crime and who that was lying in the hospital with the father's hands. It could be a straight mystery thriller, or a supernatural one, or science fiction; it wouldn't matter, as long as the storyteller didn't get so distracted by shiny McGuffins and bait-and-switch plot as to lose track of the core process of the survivors' continual need to rewrite their lives and their relationships based on events centering on this person.
As you can probably tell by the awkward, stilted way I've described the case, I'd as soon cut my hands off as write this, even after all this time. The potential for hurting my friend is too great. Even if I did everything right and the stars aligned and I got an Edgar and a major motion picture deal, if I followed the plot into a dark corner for which my friend couldn't forgive me, I'd be the loser by it.
Even now I'm really hoping I succeeded in stripping out every possible specific detail that could hack somebody off.
I had a conversation with my friend's SO that brought the subject back into the front of my mind. I trust now I can let it sink back into obscurity.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
On Watching Hunger Games: Spoilers
So, Damon and I and our friend R all went to see the movie this week. Damon hasn't read the books; R and I have.
I cannot talk about a movie without giving spoilers, so if you have done neither, go away, do that, and you can come back afterward. It won't take you long. Reading this first book is like jumping out of an airplane - you don't stop till you land with a splat at the end.
Surprisingly, I have no major fault to find. I only had to explain a couple of things to Damon afterward (District 13 is referenced at the beginning, but its fate is not described; that kind of thing). When R and I went to the Harry Potter movies with him, we always tag-teamed filling in the blanks for him as the lights went up. The only big deviation from the original with which I have actual issues, as opposed to thinking I would have made a different creative choice had it been me, was also the only big place where they wimped out. I think they were quite right to reduce the gore as much as they could, but the impact of the chimerae at the end is nerfed by the removal of the ghastly detail that they were created out of the dead tributes. You think, when you're reading and when you're watching, that Rue's death has to be as bad as it gets for Katniss; and then, when you're reading, she has to fight off a Rue-faced dog! This is absolutely the worst thing the gamemasters did in this horrible event, and the movie chickened out of it.
Mind you, I was dreading it; but dread is an important part of the experience.
This is partly made up for by the increase in the discomfort factor that I got from watching the games as opposed to reading about them. There's a meta level of this story, which only increases as we get into the political theater of the later books, that implicates me, as audience, and which raises the level of the whole (for me, anyway) out of the gutter of the exploitative thriller and into the realm of literature. When you boil it down, after all, this is an exploitative thriller about the making of exploitative thrillers; the author, and the moviemaking team, openly and unapologetically use the exact same bag of tricks as the masters of the game to engage us emotionally and turn the agony of others into entertainment.
And we let them, which makes us active participants in the process.
Which made me feel even dirtier in the movie than it did in the book.
This is such a large feature of the experience of the story for me that, when I see Hunger Games merchandise, I feel physically ill and wonder how on earth the person who came up with that idea sleeps at night. Did this particular level of meaning fly right over his head? Did he set out to deliberately evoke it and increase the ick factor? Has he even read the books at all?
Answer C is of course the most likely.
I cannot talk about a movie without giving spoilers, so if you have done neither, go away, do that, and you can come back afterward. It won't take you long. Reading this first book is like jumping out of an airplane - you don't stop till you land with a splat at the end.
Surprisingly, I have no major fault to find. I only had to explain a couple of things to Damon afterward (District 13 is referenced at the beginning, but its fate is not described; that kind of thing). When R and I went to the Harry Potter movies with him, we always tag-teamed filling in the blanks for him as the lights went up. The only big deviation from the original with which I have actual issues, as opposed to thinking I would have made a different creative choice had it been me, was also the only big place where they wimped out. I think they were quite right to reduce the gore as much as they could, but the impact of the chimerae at the end is nerfed by the removal of the ghastly detail that they were created out of the dead tributes. You think, when you're reading and when you're watching, that Rue's death has to be as bad as it gets for Katniss; and then, when you're reading, she has to fight off a Rue-faced dog! This is absolutely the worst thing the gamemasters did in this horrible event, and the movie chickened out of it.
Mind you, I was dreading it; but dread is an important part of the experience.
This is partly made up for by the increase in the discomfort factor that I got from watching the games as opposed to reading about them. There's a meta level of this story, which only increases as we get into the political theater of the later books, that implicates me, as audience, and which raises the level of the whole (for me, anyway) out of the gutter of the exploitative thriller and into the realm of literature. When you boil it down, after all, this is an exploitative thriller about the making of exploitative thrillers; the author, and the moviemaking team, openly and unapologetically use the exact same bag of tricks as the masters of the game to engage us emotionally and turn the agony of others into entertainment.
And we let them, which makes us active participants in the process.
Which made me feel even dirtier in the movie than it did in the book.
This is such a large feature of the experience of the story for me that, when I see Hunger Games merchandise, I feel physically ill and wonder how on earth the person who came up with that idea sleeps at night. Did this particular level of meaning fly right over his head? Did he set out to deliberately evoke it and increase the ick factor? Has he even read the books at all?
Answer C is of course the most likely.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Just Go Read Simon Says
Elaine Marie Alphin has had a stroke.
It's too soon for retrospectives and tributes and things. That would just be self-tormenting. She's in ICU. I don't know anything, just what her husband posted to our online writers' list. I only met her in person once, when we were both up for an Edgar and neither of us got it. It's just -
Well, go read Simon Says. I don't care how much it hurts, go do it.
That's what my interior universe looks like. And I don't want her to die or survive in a twilit half-life with her interface to other people borked to hell and I'm going to stop now.
It's too soon for retrospectives and tributes and things. That would just be self-tormenting. She's in ICU. I don't know anything, just what her husband posted to our online writers' list. I only met her in person once, when we were both up for an Edgar and neither of us got it. It's just -
Well, go read Simon Says. I don't care how much it hurts, go do it.
That's what my interior universe looks like. And I don't want her to die or survive in a twilit half-life with her interface to other people borked to hell and I'm going to stop now.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Excuse Me While I Scream
I have a friend who has more than one publishable novel in her train. She keeps getting within a hair of publication, going through multiple rounds of extensive revision, serious negotiations with editors, the works, only to lose out at the last minute. Recently I and all her friends rejoiced over her finally getting a contract with a certain publisher - which has now folded.
She's being philosophical about this - after all, as she points out, she is not homeless in Haiti and she'd had a few doubts about this publisher to begin with. This is no doubt the correct attitude.
But I, as her friend, feel like I can rant about it a bit. So (apologies to my Christian friends, for the particular expression I am about to use):
JESUS H. CHRIST IN A BASKET, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THIS INDUSTRY?
There. I feel better now I've done that in public.
And of course I know the answer to my own question. Publishing is an industry. The quality of a work is only one of many, many variables in getting from author to public. Corporations working the way they do, it sometimes seems like a miracle that as much quality stuff gets published as does; and I know that a great many wonderful works will never see the light of day or reach their best audience, even with the e-book revolution that is gradually gathering momentum. It isn't fair, but if you expect fairness you're going to live a life of disappointment. She may never publish a novel; I may never publish another one. We accept that and move on, or we stand still and gnash our teeth for the rest of our lives.
At least she has an agent to help her maximize her chances. So excuse me again while I go back to trying to find one for me, too.
(It appears that laying tile involves a lot of pounding and razor blades. All occupations are mysterious to those outside them.)
She's being philosophical about this - after all, as she points out, she is not homeless in Haiti and she'd had a few doubts about this publisher to begin with. This is no doubt the correct attitude.
But I, as her friend, feel like I can rant about it a bit. So (apologies to my Christian friends, for the particular expression I am about to use):
JESUS H. CHRIST IN A BASKET, WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THIS INDUSTRY?
There. I feel better now I've done that in public.
And of course I know the answer to my own question. Publishing is an industry. The quality of a work is only one of many, many variables in getting from author to public. Corporations working the way they do, it sometimes seems like a miracle that as much quality stuff gets published as does; and I know that a great many wonderful works will never see the light of day or reach their best audience, even with the e-book revolution that is gradually gathering momentum. It isn't fair, but if you expect fairness you're going to live a life of disappointment. She may never publish a novel; I may never publish another one. We accept that and move on, or we stand still and gnash our teeth for the rest of our lives.
At least she has an agent to help her maximize her chances. So excuse me again while I go back to trying to find one for me, too.
(It appears that laying tile involves a lot of pounding and razor blades. All occupations are mysterious to those outside them.)
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
It Takes a Village to Research a Book
I took the scenes with guns, or mention of gun-related things in them, and copied them into a separate document, with page citations. It fit into a letter-sized folder. My expert, B, took it without comment, and I expect he'll be able to return it in a week or so with useful comments in the margin. It's a topic he's always eager to talk about and apply to games, so I don't feel out of line here.
I printed out all the scenes with horses anywhere in them, and the pages fit into a circuit-board box big enough to mail a manuscript in, assuming anybody still mailed complete manuscripts.
W, my horse expert,'s eyes got wide with dismay when she saw it. I assured her she'd be able to skim a lot of it, and that if she found I'd given her more than she could chew I'd use my writing contacts to find somebody else. I'm asking a lot of her and I know it. She may not get them back to me till May, and I have no business asking her to hurry.
It's always better to use your own experience, if you can get the experience to use it; but short of spending several months riding horseback around the Hill Country, getting the manuscript vetted for accuracy is the only thing I can do to ensure that my ignorance doesn't spoil the book for someone like W further down the road. W has herself complained that you can always tell when a fantasy was written by someone who had never ridden a horse, as the mounts all behave much like bicycles or cars. She agrees with Diana Wynne Jones's explanation in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland of why fantasy novel horses are, in fact, vegetables. She also always has two or three creative projects going herself, so she has the right mindset for critique. But it's still a massive job and she has a lot going on already.
It behooves authors to be generous to our friends and to cultivate those creative people we meet into friends, as we may have to call upon them for services such as these at any moment, and for non-writers, it's a hard and bewildering job to vet a manuscript intended for professional publication. I don't think that'll be a problem this time, but we'll see.
I printed out all the scenes with horses anywhere in them, and the pages fit into a circuit-board box big enough to mail a manuscript in, assuming anybody still mailed complete manuscripts.
W, my horse expert,'s eyes got wide with dismay when she saw it. I assured her she'd be able to skim a lot of it, and that if she found I'd given her more than she could chew I'd use my writing contacts to find somebody else. I'm asking a lot of her and I know it. She may not get them back to me till May, and I have no business asking her to hurry.
It's always better to use your own experience, if you can get the experience to use it; but short of spending several months riding horseback around the Hill Country, getting the manuscript vetted for accuracy is the only thing I can do to ensure that my ignorance doesn't spoil the book for someone like W further down the road. W has herself complained that you can always tell when a fantasy was written by someone who had never ridden a horse, as the mounts all behave much like bicycles or cars. She agrees with Diana Wynne Jones's explanation in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland of why fantasy novel horses are, in fact, vegetables. She also always has two or three creative projects going herself, so she has the right mindset for critique. But it's still a massive job and she has a lot going on already.
It behooves authors to be generous to our friends and to cultivate those creative people we meet into friends, as we may have to call upon them for services such as these at any moment, and for non-writers, it's a hard and bewildering job to vet a manuscript intended for professional publication. I don't think that'll be a problem this time, but we'll see.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Stranded
This post is dedicated to Lupe, Peggy, JoEllen, Kay, Ben, Jeremy at Brake Check on S. Lamar, Jose at the St. Edwards University Information desk, and all the people behind me on the road when Moby wouldn't stop turning; without whom my Austin trek would have been way too exciting.
Because of all these people, my story is not a candidate for a novel; but as I waited in Brake Check for the last adjustments so I could finally drive home I reflected on how a novel that started with a car that won't stop turning could develop. The driver/protagonist would need to either be cut off from the friends and sympathetic, professional strangers I was able to rely on, or opposed to relying on them for some reason. Since the show on the TV in the lobby at the time was America's Most Wanted, the first thing that occurred to me was that the driver had a body in the trunk; but that's an antagonist, not a protagonist.
(Or maybe not. A nimble thriller writer could keep you guessing on this subject, depending on the backstory of the body.)
Let's make the driver a teen. One of my difficulties was that I had no cell phone. (I suspect we're going to break down and get one shortly.) All modern teens have cells, so why would this one be without? I could make it a historical story, but this by itself suggests no plot. What if the teen is a runaway and has ditched her cell because she knew it could be traced?
That opens possibilities. Why isn't she afraid of the car being traced? Maybe she is. Maybe the car is stolen, so instead of proceeding on the assumption that she needs to take it straight to the garage, she proceeds on the assumption that she needs to risk driving it a little bit longer, at least till she can steal one that works better.
What is she running from? Or, more pertinently, who? Is she being actively sought? Does she have enough criminal savvy to rely on stealing a new car, or enough mechanical skill to diagnose and jerryrig a fix for the problem on this one? What are her skills and resources? What's in the car with her? Did the previous owner leave behind anything that would surprise her or affect her choices?
Is anyone with her? Does she, who has no one to rely on, feel responsible for someone else?
Where is she going once she gets mobile again?
I'm too tired to answer all these questions right now. But if I could, I'd have me a plot.
Because of all these people, my story is not a candidate for a novel; but as I waited in Brake Check for the last adjustments so I could finally drive home I reflected on how a novel that started with a car that won't stop turning could develop. The driver/protagonist would need to either be cut off from the friends and sympathetic, professional strangers I was able to rely on, or opposed to relying on them for some reason. Since the show on the TV in the lobby at the time was America's Most Wanted, the first thing that occurred to me was that the driver had a body in the trunk; but that's an antagonist, not a protagonist.
(Or maybe not. A nimble thriller writer could keep you guessing on this subject, depending on the backstory of the body.)
Let's make the driver a teen. One of my difficulties was that I had no cell phone. (I suspect we're going to break down and get one shortly.) All modern teens have cells, so why would this one be without? I could make it a historical story, but this by itself suggests no plot. What if the teen is a runaway and has ditched her cell because she knew it could be traced?
That opens possibilities. Why isn't she afraid of the car being traced? Maybe she is. Maybe the car is stolen, so instead of proceeding on the assumption that she needs to take it straight to the garage, she proceeds on the assumption that she needs to risk driving it a little bit longer, at least till she can steal one that works better.
What is she running from? Or, more pertinently, who? Is she being actively sought? Does she have enough criminal savvy to rely on stealing a new car, or enough mechanical skill to diagnose and jerryrig a fix for the problem on this one? What are her skills and resources? What's in the car with her? Did the previous owner leave behind anything that would surprise her or affect her choices?
Is anyone with her? Does she, who has no one to rely on, feel responsible for someone else?
Where is she going once she gets mobile again?
I'm too tired to answer all these questions right now. But if I could, I'd have me a plot.
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