Pink Elephant

So in the interest of talking writing, let’s dredge out the old chestnut of scene descriptions. Specifically, let’s talk about something that’s real easy to overlook because we’re so used to seeing it, but that can be used to really sell the realism of a scene. Take a look at that picture, the glowing pink neon of the Elephant Car Wash. That sign is a landmark in Seattle. Most cities have something like that–several, in fact–roadside beacons designed to get butts in the door or sell product. Sure, anyone can toss in the Space Needle to show their story takes place in Seattle. But that doesn’t necessarily make it feel more real. Throw in the slowly-spinning Pink Elephant sign and you achieve two things–you’ve sold locals with your insider savvy, and for those who don’t know the sign, you’ve added a concrete detail that makes the place feel more real.

This works for Sci-fi and fantasy (though to a lesser degree, or at least different degree in primarily illiterate cultures). My story “Odd Jobs” in the Space Tramps anthology took place entirely upon a space station. Even so, there were commercial districts, and at one point, our protagonist books a hotel room. The name had changed since the last time he had been there, the old name painted over in color that was a close–but not exact–match to the surrounding walls, with the new hotel name in neon above it. Was any of this important to the story? Not really. But it was important in setting the sense of place.

Signs say a lot–not just their design, but their condition. Old brick buildings used to have signs painted on the sides, and many of these are now long out of date. A mention gives a place a sense of history–the faded name of a hotel that’s no longer there, the space now turned over to offices or apartments, a 24-hr coffee shop that’s been gone for decades and is now a small bar or boutique shop.

Different communities have exhaustive rules for what kind of signage is allowed, so give that a thought because it says a lot about the place. Are the signs lit from behind or carved or painted on? Are the list signs brightly colored or more muted? Huge and gaudy or small and tasteful. To you have the Bavarian-themed signs of Leavenworth, or Seattle neon?

Placement is important, too. Seattle has this huge Pepsi sign that’s somewhat of a landmark on Aurora. Thing is, it was built back when Aurora was known primarily as U.S. Route 99, the chief means of travel up the coast until the 60′s. Filled with neon tubing, it was a sight to behold. Though it’s still there, I don’t recall the last time the sign was lit up. It’s a poignant reminder of how people move on and patterns shift when big interstates connected the country.

For homework, I want you to look up next time you’re out and about. Pick out three distinctive signs/landmarks in your town. And for extra credit, what is one thing that the sign implies other than the name of the business or product?

Class dismissed.

Authorial Essentials

Edits on Ink Calls to Ink are officially at the halfway point, which was my goal. I hope to finish edits in February.

Part of the push to get edits done was to get a submission in to Clarion West. That was completed mid-month, including a synopsis of the novel (which was less painful than I anticipated).

I’m doing the Write One/Sub One challenge, but only on the monthly level. I’m going to count this one as a victory also. I rewrote an older story and cut it down from over 6,500 words to a lean submission-quality 5,000 words and got that sent out over the weekend. I also did a decent first draft of a new story last night and I hope to get an edit/rewrite on that before going to bed. I could sub it out tonight also, but I’d really rather take a little time with it to polish it up. Hopefully that will hit the mail next week.

I got one rejection and one sale this month off two different stories. The one that got rejected is going to get a slight rewrite and another polish before sending out in the next two weeks. The sale was to a newer publication called Bette Noire. “The Last Horse Out” will appear in their October issue.

All of this was done without making myself too sick, though the weather helped balance that out with a few work-from-home days to counter the days I was too sick to write.

Goals met.
Final Grade: B- (The story that got rejected could have benefited from an extra scene to make it less straight-forward. I rushed it, and the result was a rejection. Lesson learned.)

Now, to the disclaimer mentioned in the subject line.

I am going to let you down. No, really. I’m going to disappoint you. Probably not many of you, but enough merit a warning. I’m not proud of it–far from it. But the fact remains that the closer you get to my gooey marshmallow center, the better the chances are that I’m going to fail you somewhere down the road. If your interaction with me is on a fairly superficial level, you should get out unscathed.

I’ve had two voices arguing in my head about this for a while recently, both about what to say and about whether I should address it at all. See, the thing is that I gave my writing and related writerly things priority over, well, damn near everything else in my life last year. When my head started poking out of the shell this last few weeks, I realized that some pretty important relationships had paid the price. The going got tough, and I disengaged.

The cynic in me says that things change, people change, and situations change. It doesn’t look too closely at my fairly dismal track record at maintaining deep personal relationships for longer than five years. The cynic points out that the relationships that grew in the past year are a better fit for where I am in my life right now. And yes, I suppose there’s truth to that. But the sentimentalist in me is still sad for the changes and things lost. And I feel regret that there were times when I should have been there for people who I cared about, and I just wasn’t. I let them down and it’s as simple as that.

So in another few hours, I soldier on into February. Hopefully my eyes will be a little more open. I’m still a writer. I’m still planning on being productive. I don’t know how to change that, or even if I want to. Maybe I could stand to be a little less obsessive.

And I’ll try not to disappoint you.

I’m not certain how it happened, but my writing group all writes speculative fiction. But within that, there’s a pretty wide range of styles. The other day, one of my friends in the group posted about an interest in writing horror. Up until that point, I knew that Nicole did sci-fi and urban fantasy. But despite her quite-practiced evil laugh, I didn’t see horror as something that held much interest for her.

Then she posted asking for advice on writing horror. (I’ve included the link to her blog for the completeists among you.) And I figured, “Hey, I write horror. I should be able to answer that.”

What I discovered, much to my surprise, is that a lot of what I do when I write horror isn’t entirely conscious. Digging that out and finding a way to articulate it became more difficult than I expected. I’m not going to duplicate that advice here–for that you’ll have to click the link and read it on Nicole’s blog. I’ll touch on it a bit here, but because I’ve taken more time to think about it, this is going to be a bigger discussion.

Horror and I kind of came of age around the same time. I was 5 when Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was published. He published over 25 more before I graduated high school. At the same time, horror cinema went through a golden age, starting with Halloween in 1978. While I was still too young to watch a lot of those films, I picked up Fangoria Magazine ever time I was in the bookstore and read all about the horrifying things waiting for me on video and late-night cable television. There were also several fantastic horror comics in those days, perfect for the developing weirdo–Creepy, House of Secrets, The Unexpected, The Witching Hour.

So it’s not a huge surprise that when I started writing short fiction, I wanted to write horror.

Except I wasn’t any good at it.

Oh, I tried. Every piece I turned out for about 5 years was some kind of horror story. And looking back, of course they weren’t very good. I was still learning how to write. Those were all practice. But I also know that the premise alone for most of those just didn’t work because they weren’t scary.

And I’ll be honest with you. I gave up trying to be scary. I still wrote stories with ghosts in them from time to time, but they were urban fantasy. And with the exception of one co-written screenplay, I didn’t try to write horror again until I was in my mid-thirties.

Even without working consciously on horror in that time, something about how horror works had sunk in. It didn’t hurt that I had been working on my writing in that time so the building blocks were in place. The two other keys were that I had been ingesting a lot of horror media, so I had an intuitive idea of what scared me and how, and that I had been running Role-Playing Games with horror elements in that time. (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now–running story-centered games was crucial for my development as a writer.)

If you made it this far, maybe you’re hoping for some kind of bullet-point list on how to write horror. Even if you were thinking nothing of the sort, here are my hints, short and sweet, for things to think about when writing horror.

• Monsters, in and of themselves, aren’t scary. What makes them scary is what they do, and what they represent.
• This is no story for heroes. Protagonists, yes. But no one is scared when a heroic figure is put in danger. Make him someone ordinary that the reader can relate to, and you’re golden.
• A slow burn is the only way to cook. Take a page from Ridley Scott’s Gothic sci-fi masterpiece Alien. If you blow your wad showing the monster on the front page, you better have something bigger and scarier on the last one. Otherwise it’s a let down.
• Curiosity is the killer. If your protagonist (and reader) have no idea what’s going on at first, imagine the horror when they figure out what’s been causing that strange sound in the closet?
• Mind your pacing. When things get tense, try for shorter sentences. It might sound goofy, but it works.
• Use your words. Don’t say something’s scary (or gory, or horrible, etc.) Get descriptive. Get into the character’s heads and understand why what they’re seeing is so frightening. Likewise for horror. If you’re going to do gore, you’re already treading in the Dark Lord’s domain. Don’t puss out. Get descriptive and creative. It’s what you’re here for.
• Start small, make it big, the bring it home. Think of a small, personal fear (like ghosts). Think of what makes them scary (not a fear of death so much as a fear that even after death you’ll still be stuck in this loop of misery and pain). Now find a way to articulate that bigger concept on a personal level that the reader and maybe even protagonist can relate to.

There we go class. Hopefully some of this was useful.
Again, check out Nicole’s page for the full discussion. There was a lot of good advice that ended up getting posted by a variety of smart writerly types.

My Seattle, the Colosseum Theater

There’s an argument made about the rise of police powers, that you only have to worry about it if you’re breaking the law. I can understand why people would want to believe that. The idea that we live in constant threat of unfair persecution from powers far beyond our control is a terrifying one. But the un-nuanced view that only the guilty are punished and the innocent have nothing to fear is, at best, naive.

To say that government doesn’t have your best interest at heart isn’t paranoid, nor is it unfair. I’d do believe that government in general has what it thinks are your best interests at heart. And they’re going to miss the mark occasionally. And, in several proven incidents throughout history, our government, which is supposed to protect us all equally, has done some really unconscionable things “for the greater good.”

So why do I fear that Stop Online Piracy Act? I’m a creative content provider, after all, right? Don’t I want to stop piracy? Sure. But I think there are much, much better ways of doing it than resorting to jack-booted thuggery.

Surely our nation can do better, right?

I mean, it’s not like we nuked our own country 210 times over the period of 17 years, then tried to cover it up. (Yes, in fact, we did. It might have been at least partially responsible for the cancer that killed John Wayne, the most American of cowboys.)

At least we never secretly conducted experiments on the effect of mind-controlling drugs on civilians. (We did that too, actually. It was called MK-ULTRA.)

So, giving drugs to people, that’s kind of bad. Thankfully we didn’t actively withhold medical treatment by way of experiment. (Holy doodle, we did that too. In Macon County, Alabama, the U.S. Government participated in a 40 year study of syphilis in a poor black community without their knowledge.)

We also imprisoned a large ethnic group for a period of time because we were at war with their native country. But the internment camps weren’t exactly secret. We just don’t like to think about them. Maybe because we don’t want to consider that it could happen again. (While this could be the height of paranoia, the REX 84 plan has been heavily researched and documented. Sure, it might never happen, but it at least looks like it’s been considered as an option.)

And let’s say nothing about the irony of our country waging a war on drugs while flooding L.A. with crack cocaine. Because using drugs to undermine threats has been a proven tactic since Britain did it to China in 1817 through Canton (starting the First Opium War), if not sooner.

So we dabbled in drugs. These things happen. It’s not like we killed or deoposed world leaders to create more favorable diplomatic conditions. (Sigh. Of course we did. The Church Commission uncovered it while looking into the Watergate mess and put together a quite damning report.)

So, the Stop Internet Piracy Act is harmless. As long as we don’t pirate anything we’re fine, right? There are safeguards in place. Not exactly. If someone else posts a link on your site (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that infringes on copyright, your site can be shut down from afar. This doesn’t affect real pirates, because the site is taken down by domain name, not IP address, and pirates don’t give a shit about that. Even if it’s not something you’d recognize as piracy, like you singing the latest Metallica song and it gets put up on your site (or again, just linked to your site), you could have 5 comfortable years in prison for the infringement.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In even the most optimistic reading of the bill, SOPA sucks out loud. In the more paranoid reading, we’re all one bad link away from being bent over the counter by some entertainment lawyer in a Mickey Mouse mask while the government that’s supposed to be here to protect us watches with polite golf claps.

I’m not paranoid.I love my country. I really do. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn near the best game in town. But I know my history, too. And I know better than to trust them blindly.

So my site will be going dark on Wednesday the 18th in protest. I know I don’t get enough views for anyone to care. But that doesn’t excuse me from doing nothing.

My dressing up as an alien monster days are far behind me.

If your fingers are on the pulse of the RPG circuit, you’ve probably heard that a new, 5th edition of D&D is on the way. Heck, even the New York Times is talking about it. Most of the world will only blink and take no notice. I mean, this game gets revised time to time, right? What’s the big deal?

I’ll wait for the cries of outrage to die down a bit before I continue.

My reason for the post isn’t that I’m outraged. Maybe I’m too cynical for outrage. Or maybe I’ve been involved in the hobby for long enough to be familiar with the evolution of the industry. Let’s take a very quick look at this in a historical context, shall we?

Don’t worry. This won’t be long or detailed. Grab a Mt. Dew and stay with me here.

D&D started in 1974, was revised into Advanced D&D in 1978, and then split into the mutant hydra of Basic, Advanced, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals over a period from 1981-86. It was a goddamned mess. That got us AD&D 2nd edition in 1989 which cleaned everything up and more-or-less became the standard for eleven years.

During those eleven years, things weren’t always milk and honey. TSR, the company that created the game, and most would argue, the hobby of Role-Playing, had been struggling. They sold the whole shebang to Wizards of the Coast in 1997, who I would suspect, got about revising the game as soon as the check cleared.

3rd edition came out in 2000, and it felt like a betrayal to a certain core of the players. After all, they had boxes of material that was now useless, and a whole new rule system to learn. I worked at a game store at the time and saw my share of “They’ll get my 2nd edition when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers!” But for every one of those, there were five people excited about the new start.

And why wouldn’t they be? The 2nd edition rules were a nightmare. It wasn’t entirely their fault, I suppose. TSR needed to make money, and they did that by selling product. And over the years they published a glut of new races, monsters, places, and yes, rules. 3rd edition was a great way for new people to jump in. Let’s put a pin in this paragraph. We’ll come back to it, because the economics of the game is important in understanding the hobby from a meta level.

And it worked. It worked so well that Wizards (now owned by Hasbro) revised the rules again, rolling out 4th edition eight years later. Where 3rd edition was divisive for revising old core mechanics, 4th edition was vilified for taking several of the sacred cows of the system and tossing them out entirely. While they tried to keep the spirit of the game the same, key play mechanics reminded people too much of video and tactical gaming. A lot of what they had come to love had changed significantly.

Personally, I was fine with the new additions. Yeah, it meant buying more books, but I was never the collector who had to have every book that came out. There was some genuinely fun stuff in 4th addition. Sure, the rules were different, but at the heart, it was still D&D.

And I’m sure that 5th edition will be much the same.

But I’ll admit I’m surprised and a bit confused over the open playtesting model that they’re doing this time around. It makes me think they’re trying for some kind of collaborative effort, seeking input from the gamers themselves over what they want in the game.

Best of luck. Try getting six people to agree on what kind of pizza they want. My people are fickle and opinionated. I was once part of a game session that fought for seven hours over whether we should turn left or right at a juncture. Now imagine getting hundreds if not thousands of gamers to have input on what is best for their hobby.

Either the input is going to be on the level of “Check these boxes” or “Rate the experience from 1-10,” or it’s going to be a nightmare. But that’s just my thoughts on it.

But why a 5th edition? Surely 4th edition couldn’t have failed so completely to justify that in such a short amount of time, right? Well, yes and no.

See, the dirty secret is, once you have the three core books (Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and a Monster Manual), you really never have to buy another product from them again. Back in the old days, D&D wasn’t much more than going door to door in some forgotten place, killing things, and taking their stuff. A person with graph paper could put together their own map, but most people bought adventure modules. And that was the bread and butter.

Get a bunch of seasoned gamers together and ask them what their favorite modules were, I can pretty much guarantee they won’t name a single one from 3rd or 4th edition. Because the game changed more than just with rule tweaks. Dungeon crawling wasn’t enough. Players wanted a big world to stomp around in. They wanted towns and cities and intrigue. They wanted the campaign, a world that centered around them.

But for that, you’re looking at a whole other kind of product–less of an inexpensive adventure, more of a setting book. And the problem is, once you have that setting in place, the characters have an investment in that place, those people, and they aren’t as likely to move on to another. You didn’t have that with dungeon modules. Once you cleaned out the Demonweb Pits, you didn’t buy a pie shop and invest in the community–you went to another dungeon.

For the economic model to work, the publisher needs to keep people coming back buying product that, on a fundamental level, everyone recognizes that they don’t actually need to play the game.

And that’s a dangerous place to run a business from. You need to be able to provide compelling content that makes players want to come back.

And from the get-go, I think they realized that with 4th ed. Last time I checked there were three Player Handbooks, and certain player favorites weren’t available in the first one, nor in the second one. Want to play a Barbarian or Druid? Guess what, Chuckles, you have to buy the second book. But they made it worth it. They put all kinds of useful and fun play info in the books. Likewise with the books detailing powers and features for other classes (Martial Powers, Divine Powers, etc).  From that perspective, they did a great job of monetizing the game.

So, where did they go wrong, and again, why the 5th edition?

While I heard a lot of people bitch and whine about 3rd edition, they didn’t really change core game mechanics that much. Sure, they cleaned it up a lot and got rid of some anachronisms, but it was still the same game–just better presented. But 4th edition took a game that played just fine and made it, from a rules perspective, a different game. (And let us not speak of how they shut the door on 3rd party developers in the process–the genie in the bottle that 3rd edition let out.)

I know several games still running in 3rd (technically 3.5) edition. I can’t say that about 2nd edition. These are games that are doing just fine without ever having to buy another D&D product again (except dice, which Wizards doesn’t make, or minis, which they only do random blister packs for.) To add insult to injury, Paizo, one of the aforementioned  (but not spoken of) 3rd party developers who got screwed in the move to 4th edition, did their own retooling of the 3.5 rules and called it Pathfinder (though it’s essentially D&D 3.75). They’re doing pretty well for themselves.

If I had any advise for Wizards/Hasbro in their time of need, it would be this: go digital, and revitalize your fiction line.

I know you’re worried about piracy, but let’s face it–if you put out a print book, some dick with a scanner is going to make a digital version available for free to anyone with a bit of time on their hands to look for it. If you make reasonably priced digital versions available, people will buy them from you to a) support your product, and b) for convenience.

I may not need every damn book you publish, and I certainly can’t lug that library around from game to game. But if I can pick them up for $10-$15 each for my tablet as a searchable file, I would buy a whole hell of a lot more of them. Heck, sell a digital subscription service to download the books (and I’m not talking D&D Insider–that was some weak bullshit and we all know it.)

And you guys remember the Dragonlance Chronicles? My third wife wrote her college entrance essay about one of those books. Hello Notre Dame! Now, while you do still publish books (and a few damn fine ones–you need look no further than Eric Scott de Bie’s Shadowbane books and Rosemary Jones’ novels for proof of that), it’s almost an afterthought. Editorial staff turns over faster than, well, anywhere I can think of. And I understand, Hasbro, that you’re not in the business of publishing novels. But novels, well marketed and flooding the market, make people aware of the product and the world, and that in turn brings in new players. So I’d suggest you start taking it seriously because it could be money in your pockets.

And I’ll be watching the development of 5th edition. I won’t stop playing in my 3.5 game, and will continue running my 4th edition games. Because the pressure is on you, now. You have to show the gamer community that 5th edition is going to be an improvement to the game–not just an improvement in how you monetize it.

The least terrifying bear ever

The entire chapter was one scene–a street brawl between one of the three primary POV characters and someone posing a threat to his client. The chapter had originally been written from his perspective. But for logistical reasons, it made more sense to have the scene told from the viewpoint of one of the other primary characters. I rewrote it last year, changing the POV from that of a mature, one-legged former soldier named Franklin, to that of a young teen/failed suicide named Juliet. Then I moved on to the next chapter.

But when I got to the chapter in my massive fine-tuning project, the chapter read flat. The action was all there, and it was, for the most part, clearly narrated. I cleaned up the few confusing bits of action, and did some general tightening up, but it still didn’t sit right with me. That night, when it I was turning it around and around in my head (and, at least in theory, trying to sleep), it hit me. I had removed Franklin’s voice, but Juliet’s was nowhere to be found.

What I had was a relatively cold and distant description of physical activity. It was mechanical. That doesn’t work for sex scenes and it doesn’t work for action either–at least not for long stretches. So I tore the chapter apart again and asked the hard questions.

It wasn’t enough to describe what she saw. She had grown up seeing street brawls. She had an emotional connection to the fight, even if she didn’t have one to the people involved in this particular fight. But these characters will become important to each other later, so by letting her make observations and interpret them through the lens of her own experiences, I got to build that foundation.

It meant taking out sentences where she was too much in the fighter’s heads, second-guessing their motives. Instead, I had to focus on what she saw, what she thought it meant, and why. Every theory she had needed to be backed up with justification–not just simple statements.

The chapter went from showing Franklin overcoming a threat, to Juliet seeing how competently he dealt with the threat. Franklin started off as hero material. But it took Juliet seeing that and understanding why for him to actually reach towards that heroic potential.

The chapter started off as competent.

And competent just isn’t good enough for me anymore. Not when I know I can do better. And I can do better.

And now it’s a hell of a lot better. I might go so far as to say it’s pretty damn good.

Another two or three passes, it might even be great.

After all, isn’t that the whole point of rewrites?

On that cheery note, let me spin you a tale and share what I’m working on for the first part of the year.

Years ago, I had this idea of “What would happen if fictional characters got stuck here in this world and just had to find jobs and fit in?” Would Christopher Robin get his skinny ass killed by a bear in the London Zoo? Would Mary Poppins become a super-spy? You know…the questions of the ages, right?

Somehow, I spun that out into a story called “Ink Calls to Ink,” which I was thrilled to get published in both print and audio format by Wily Writers in February 2009. (It’s also available in their print collection, Night Mantled: Best of Wily Writers Year One. You know, hint hint.) It was a not-surprisingly twisted little tale about the Steadfast Tin Soldier, Goldilocks, and a little bit of ursine vengeance. And reading it for the audio podcast recording, Wily majordomo Angel Leigh McCoy suggested that it would make a great novel.

She’s going down in history as the person that made me write the resulting novel. Especially since it took a long time to wrestle that first draft out and I’m inordinately proud of it. The first draft was done at the end of November, 2010. It’s been sitting for a year. It went out to beta readers, I work-shopped the first chapter, and I got some great feedback. But for the most part, it’s been largely untouched for over a year while I did other things.

Now here, cats and kittens, is the decidedly un-sexy part of being an author. This is the part in the trenches, up on the front lines trying to bring order to the beast with rifle, bayonet, and your very teeth if that’s what it takes. I’m talking about the REVISION STAGE!

And I don’t care how good of an author you are. There is no first draft that wouldn’t benefit from a revision stage. Unless you’re that total freak statistical bit outlying of data who craps gold, you have to revise your novel.

That’s the thing you learn when you mature as a writer. You finish that first draft, aglow with accomplishment. Maybe you even dare to share a chapter with someone. Then you READ it and all you can see are the flaws, the blemishes, the things that NEED to be fixed. Or maybe even just DONE BETTER. That’s a good instinct. It means you’ve grown as an author. It means you take pride in your work.

It means that writing a novel includes a whole metric crap-load more than writing a first draft. Because if you want to DO anything with that novel (short of dumping it out on the internet as an poorly written curiosity for which you will pay, oh yes you will pay), it needs another pass. Then another. Then maybe one more, just to be sure.

I realized when I finished NaNo this year that I’ve written ten novels. TEN. And the last few were just written then set aside. If I were writing just to write, that would be one thing. I could print it up and set it in a drawer and say, “There you go. Get comfy, because you’re never coming out.” But a novel is a big time commitment, even just a first draft. I don’t want to spend that kind of time on something that, if I knuckle down and rewrite, I can actually sell.

And honestly, Ink Calls to Ink is an contemporary urban fantasy that I could sell in the current market. If, and only if, I take the time all books need to get it cleaned up.

So that’s what I’m doing for 2012.

I’m doing the edits and rewrites that Ink Calls to Ink needs, that it’s needed for a year. I’m glad I’ve taken the time to let it sit. I’ve grown as a writer and editor in that year, and those skills will be handy. Plus, I’m not as sentimental about it as if it were new.

Once that’s done, it’s on to either the rough first draft I turned over to a publisher last month for a first look, or to the mystery novel I wrote in 2010. Both will get the rewrites they need this year. It’s just a question of when.

I’m going to try and knock out a short story here and there–hopefully one a month–just to feed that creative need. But from here on out, we can’t stop now–it’s editing country!

The good news, I’m off a strong start. I did a hard two chapter edit already today, and hope to get in another chapter tonight. That will take me one-tenth of the way there.

Speaking of which, time to put on the coffee and get back to it.

The novel is waiting.

So it is with that cheery thought that I present my planned convention schedule for 2012. Plan to adjust your stalking accordingly.

• March 30-April 1st — Emerald City Comic Con, Seattle, WA — Timid Pirate Publishing will have a table here, and we’ll be in full pimpage mode. Should be fun. And it’s downtown Seattle, so great after-con food and drink options for people visiting.
• April 5th-8th –Norwescon, SeaTac, WA — Right after Emerald City, I get to roll into Norwescon, one of the conventions I never miss. I promise to be tired, a bit punch-drunk, and who knows if I’ll be on any panels. But I plan on being there, and staying either at the hotel or nearby.
• September 21-23rd — Foolscap, Redmond, WA — A nice, quiet convention that feels like a 3 day writer’s coffee klatch. I never miss this one either, and might be taking part in putting together some writing workshop content. The novel outlining workshop I ran last year was a lot of fun for me, and I like to think useful for at least a few people.
• November 1-4th — World Fantasy Con, Toronto, Ontario — This is the big one, ladies and gentlemen! My biggest convention ever. Come join me for exploring the city that Forever Knight made moderately famous. Land of poutine and maple leaves.

Hopefully I’ll see some of y’all there. I’m very approachable. And I promise to keep the dick jokes to a minimum. I am a professional, after all.

"Nut up or get off my damn ship!"

Here it is Christmas Eve. I’ve got a roast elf cooling on the stove top and a candy cane bourbon smoothie in the blender. Let’s take a moment to talk about games. And by that, I mean Role Playing Games (or RPG to my geeky brethren)

Earlier this year I worked on a role-playing game supplement for Galileo Games. It was pitched and written for their outstanding Bulldogs! RPG (Really, the reviews have been excellent and I’ve played the game myself. Damn good stuff!) Called Ports of Call, this source-book is a plug-and-play accessory that provides info on port cities, new playable species, NPC’s, and plot hooks suitable for any Bulldogs! game.

I’m not the best rules mechanic, but thankfully the system was easy enough to work with that it didn’t break me. Plus, Brennan Taylor and staff really know their stuff. It’s deep in editing last I heard, and they’re acquiring art for the book as I type this. My understanding is that the book is expected out in March of 2012.

You might ask me, (or you might not…you might have tuned out with mention of role playing), “Why write a source-book for an RPG? Aren’t you like a novelist or something?”

My response to that is, “You’ll have to take that up with my Dwarven Barbarian, Oskar.” And I mean it. Oskar is a feisty one.

See, for as long as I’ve been a writer, if not longer, I’ve been a gamer. And in my case at least, I’ve learned that to do something well in one arena pays off dividends in the other. I’m a better writer because I’m a better gamer, and vice-versa.

For instance, I can’t stress how important coherent world-building is when you’re working with really speculative fiction. If you’re not setting your story/game on earth in a recognizable time-frame, you’ve got to create a credible world for characters to go tromping around in. With fiction, it’s easy to just plot out the parts you need for your outline.

In a game, that can get you into trouble, because players are unpredictable. Don’t know what’s beyond that castle wall because you didn’t think you’d need it? Guess what, bucko? Your players are going over the wall, and you can either improvise and hope to make it cohesive, or you can build a world that accounts for these detours and makes sense. And guess what? Doing the same for your novel, while not strictly necessary for that outline, will save problems and questions if things get off track, and will make for4 a richer story even if things don’t derail.

With sci-fi such as Bulldogs!, world building is its own kind of nightmare. If the characters are on a ship that traverses the galaxy, you’re having to create a new world, culture, civilization every session or so. The options are to either do a ton of work every session, limit travel, recycle like crazy, or risk every planet looking just like the last one.

Ports of Call is meant to be a useful tool to help game masters out in this regard. Each entry is only a few pages, and gives them the essentials for a quick stop. It lets a game master throw together a game with very little preparation.

If I’m running the game, it’s exactly the kind of thing I’d love to have. And since I tend to write the stuff I’d want to read, this really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. And something that helps me keep a game fresh is always welcome.

Speaking of keeping games fresh, a bit of a digression.

I’ve run several games over the years. Some last for a few years, some are one-night affairs. I’ve run space opera, spy, conspiracy, epic fantasy, horror, urban fantasy, pulp, and super-hero games. The common thread seems to be that they all end up somewhere dark and a little twisted. Even the epic fantasy has a darker element to it. While part of this is a result of my players, I’m still responsible for setting tone and plotting out the stories.

I was challenged today to consider a game of a different flavor. It got me thinking. Could I put together a game that focused on the lyrical beauty of a fantasy setting rather than the darkness? Could I run a game that was more unicorn than dragon? A lot of that will come down to players, but I think it’s possible. As I sit down to my Christmas feast of roast elf, I’ll turn my mind to the puzzle. And maybe there will be a Christmas miracle and I’ll figure out how to do this.

In the meantime, have a happy holiday. Oh, and baby Jesus called and said he wanted you to get a copy of Bulldogs! for his birthday. Might as well get one for everyone else you know while you’re at it. Heck. As a last minute gift, you can pick it up as a PDF instantly for cheaper than a damned CD!

Beware the wonders you are about to behold!

It’s been a hell of a year. If feels like I barely slowed down, and there were legitimate concerns that I was overworking myself. So let’s break it down and see what I got done in 2011.

Short Fiction: I had five stories published this year. Among those, one was a dark little clown noir story in a market I’ve been wanting to crack for a few years. One was the first non-Timid Pirate appearance of a Cobalt City character. One was the lead-off story in an anthology with a great table of contents. While five stories doesn’t feel like a lot, each individual story meant a lot to me. And I honestly didn’t spend much time sending out stories this year, so percentage wise, it felt great.

Novels: I finished my 10th novel last month. That leaves me with three books that I need to do rewrites and polishes on in the coming months. One is for a specific publisher, one is my mystery novel Murder Frontera which I need to polish and get on the agent hunt, and the third is the one I’m taking to World Fantasy in Toronto next year. That’s a lot of editing, rewriting, and polishing. But I have the tools I need and a good start, and I’m anxious to get underway.

Podcasts: We had three six-episode scripts that I wrote for the Cobalt City Adventures Unlimited audio drama podcast get recorded and produced (the third is in production now). And we won the Parsec Award for Best New Speculative Fiction Podcast or Team for 2011, so that’s something to be proud of. I also did several readings for the Wily Writers podcast and had some lovely thanks from two of the authors I recorded.

Publishing: Timid Pirate put out three original fiction anthologies this year. The third one, Finding Home, is not only the largest one we’ve done yet–it’s also got a ton of great stories! I’m super proud of what we’ve been able to do in just our first year, and of the authors for whom we were among their first publications.

RPG Work: I guess this is semi-official because I’ve seen the publisher Tweet about it. I wrote a role-playing game sourcebook for the Bulldogs! RPG earlier this year called Ports of Call. It’s deep in the editing process now, and I don’t know much more than that. But as gamer for the past 30 years, getting to do a sourcebook is kind of living the dream. Even better, it’s for a great game that’s incredibly well reviewed, and published by some genuinely awesome people. If you’re a gamer who likes their sci-fi with a side of blaster pistol, this is the game for you.

Community: Our little writing group that was homeless after a fire late last year at our main venue not only survived but blossomed. We added several new, talented, and dedicated writers to the table, and just expanded to a weekly group rather than meeting every-other week. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Writing can be a shitty, miserable, lonely way to pass the time. But having people around to share that journey makes it all worthwhile.

Personal: I’ve made some good friends this past year, both here in Seattle and around the world. If a person’s wealth is measured by the quality of the company he keeps, then I’m the richest man in Bedford Falls. (Apologies to Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra.) My health hasn’t been the greatest, but compared to the scare I had last year, I’m in doing great! I’ll take a bout of the flu or a bad cold any day over a massive sub-dermal infection! I’m still gainfully employed and I haven’t been arrested for lewd behavior or being drunk in public, or anything else for that matter.

Now it’s just tying up some loose ends and clearing the decks.

2012 is right around the corner!