Florida was great! The beach was lovely, the water cold but fun to swim in regardless, and there's a decent amount to see and do. After all the greasy spoons I ate at, I feel like I could render paper transparent just by looking at it.
Mike and I did have a chance to go over the stories, and without revealing too much, he's playfully intrigued. This means I'm not catastrophically screwing up, and that if I finish that's another person that would like to read it. I can only hope this is the first of what will be an army.
I also learned just what 12 hours of straight driving will do to a body. It's not great.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Travelling and Tribulations
If all goes well, I'll be driving to Florida within a couple of hours. This is my first time venturing into the deep South, and while I'm not expecting much in the way of culture shock, I'm sure I'll see a lot of curious stuff. This is also the biggest road trip I've attempted solo, and while I'm not worried per se, some of my family and co-workers are voicing concerns/ fears/ zany schemes that will be rendered useless should I become an impressionist art piece in the medium of fiery twisted metal, and I'm catching a bit of bleed off.
This trip started as going to a European folk music concert, when I was no big fan of European music, and my good friend Mike lives down there and didn't want to see it alone. The concert got canceled. Since I'd already started planning and setting aside dates, it seemed rude to let it all go to waste. Besides, I enjoy seeing places I haven't before, and Mike hasn't moved in the intervening weeks, so why not.
Something I just realized yesterday, and I feel ashamed and penitent in confessing this to you interwebs, is that I haven't done any substantial writing in almost two weeks. Birthdays, family events, work rushes, none of these things by themselves are enough to really distract me, but they haven't hit all at once like this for a long long time. It's depressing.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened, or maybe I was always this way and didn't know about it until adulthood, but I do get noticeably depressed when I haven't written for long periods. We all have something, I suppose, that we do to keep the glooms away, and as odd as it sounds I think we tend to build our lives around those things. Considering how much we each have to go through in our lives, when we find something that gets us to the next day it's worth that bit of effort to make sure we keep access to it.
Anyhoo, I'm hoping that I can at least go over some of my work with Mike, himself not unfamiliar with the intricacies of the writing arts, and get a new perspective. Those are refreshing, much like oceans, which I shall insist on visiting while I'm down there. If I were a kinder blog entity, I might open a twitter account just so I could provide continuous updates to all my concerned readers and regale them with my adventures and escapades. But I'm not.
This trip started as going to a European folk music concert, when I was no big fan of European music, and my good friend Mike lives down there and didn't want to see it alone. The concert got canceled. Since I'd already started planning and setting aside dates, it seemed rude to let it all go to waste. Besides, I enjoy seeing places I haven't before, and Mike hasn't moved in the intervening weeks, so why not.
Something I just realized yesterday, and I feel ashamed and penitent in confessing this to you interwebs, is that I haven't done any substantial writing in almost two weeks. Birthdays, family events, work rushes, none of these things by themselves are enough to really distract me, but they haven't hit all at once like this for a long long time. It's depressing.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened, or maybe I was always this way and didn't know about it until adulthood, but I do get noticeably depressed when I haven't written for long periods. We all have something, I suppose, that we do to keep the glooms away, and as odd as it sounds I think we tend to build our lives around those things. Considering how much we each have to go through in our lives, when we find something that gets us to the next day it's worth that bit of effort to make sure we keep access to it.
Anyhoo, I'm hoping that I can at least go over some of my work with Mike, himself not unfamiliar with the intricacies of the writing arts, and get a new perspective. Those are refreshing, much like oceans, which I shall insist on visiting while I'm down there. If I were a kinder blog entity, I might open a twitter account just so I could provide continuous updates to all my concerned readers and regale them with my adventures and escapades. But I'm not.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Adequately Laid Plans
So one of the purposes of this blog was to keep me honest about a writing schedule. I figured if hypothetical people were keeping track of how much I hypothetically wrote, it would motivate me to write more, hypothetically speaking. This is requiring, of course, that I update the blog on a regular basis.
Oops.
The past couple of weeks have been pretty dramatic, both at work and at home, and only some of that drama was useful for the short story I'm writing right now. Pacifying drama is a very necessary skill for a writer to have, but difficult to cultivate.
In real life, you want to calm things down first off, identify the source of the problem, and find a way to correct it that leaves all parties walking away sated, if not happy. In writing, especially fiction, this is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. Action movies would have muscle-bound guys speeding towards grocery stores before the last Cadbury egg was bought, political and medical dramas would be a bunch of smiling people agreeing with each other, and the soap opera genre would be dead. Dead. Without emotionally driven people devoid of empathy to take things out of proportion and mess things up for the maximum number of people involved or not, most fiction would read like a stereo insturction manual. I don't care if it's written in iambic pentameter from the perspective of God-King Xerses and penned in the blood of a dragon, an instruction manual is not the aspiration to shoot for.
It should not be surprising when you read about a writer or any artistically-thinking person acting like a moron and throwing away what appears to be a wonderful career. Odds are it's because of some clusterfuck of a personal situation that probably never would have happened if someone had said, "Well, I can maybe see you point..." six months prior. Drama sells. Drama has a wide audience. People love to see drama if for no other reason that to identify what they have successfully avoided in their lives. And if an artist is able to understand and present drama well enough to sell, the risks that they won't be able to handle real life drama responsibly go higher than Amy Winehouse locked in a hospital pharmacy. (Okay, that was a cheap shot well out of date, but you get the idea, right?)
This is not a confession to some grand error in judgment on my part that is leading me away from writing and to hermitage in Montana, though I understand that's a good place to go for such things. It's as much a reminder to myself as a warning to any hypothetical readers: there's a distinct difference between fiction drama and nonfiction drama, and handling both right is crucial to prosperity and very likely posteriors.
By the way, I'm 4,139 words into the story, and I could easily have enough written by the end of the day to start showing my test people. Occassionally I manage to do what I say.
Oops.
The past couple of weeks have been pretty dramatic, both at work and at home, and only some of that drama was useful for the short story I'm writing right now. Pacifying drama is a very necessary skill for a writer to have, but difficult to cultivate.
In real life, you want to calm things down first off, identify the source of the problem, and find a way to correct it that leaves all parties walking away sated, if not happy. In writing, especially fiction, this is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. Action movies would have muscle-bound guys speeding towards grocery stores before the last Cadbury egg was bought, political and medical dramas would be a bunch of smiling people agreeing with each other, and the soap opera genre would be dead. Dead. Without emotionally driven people devoid of empathy to take things out of proportion and mess things up for the maximum number of people involved or not, most fiction would read like a stereo insturction manual. I don't care if it's written in iambic pentameter from the perspective of God-King Xerses and penned in the blood of a dragon, an instruction manual is not the aspiration to shoot for.
It should not be surprising when you read about a writer or any artistically-thinking person acting like a moron and throwing away what appears to be a wonderful career. Odds are it's because of some clusterfuck of a personal situation that probably never would have happened if someone had said, "Well, I can maybe see you point..." six months prior. Drama sells. Drama has a wide audience. People love to see drama if for no other reason that to identify what they have successfully avoided in their lives. And if an artist is able to understand and present drama well enough to sell, the risks that they won't be able to handle real life drama responsibly go higher than Amy Winehouse locked in a hospital pharmacy. (Okay, that was a cheap shot well out of date, but you get the idea, right?)
This is not a confession to some grand error in judgment on my part that is leading me away from writing and to hermitage in Montana, though I understand that's a good place to go for such things. It's as much a reminder to myself as a warning to any hypothetical readers: there's a distinct difference between fiction drama and nonfiction drama, and handling both right is crucial to prosperity and very likely posteriors.
By the way, I'm 4,139 words into the story, and I could easily have enough written by the end of the day to start showing my test people. Occassionally I manage to do what I say.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Humility
The next time you find yourself marveling at the majestic faceted nature of humanity, consider this:
One of our ancestors looked behind him and remarked "Hey, food came out of my butt!"
One of our ancestors looked behind him and remarked "Hey, food came out of my butt!"
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Foul Things
As I write this, the temperature is -2 degrees F. I BELIEVE that's -10 C, but no matter how you measure it, humans weren't meant to survive those temps for very long. I love this time of year, even when the weather's like this, because it's pretty and it more or less forces you inside, huddled in covers or other people. Being out in it, though, is foul.
I promised you my take on foul language last post, so I might as well follow through with that shit. I like swearing, it's fun, but it's a flawed thing. Anytime you swear, people around you get the idea that you're probably upset about something, but it's not easy to tell what. A passerby may think you're swearing at him for wearing ugly pants, or accidentally bumping him as you were on your phone getting directions, and it would affect the rest of their day negatively because they didn't see the fresh dog poop you just stepped in. Swearing gets your idea across, but modern society's far too complex to say WHAT it is you're pissed off at and WHY using a few short words. I don't want to be ambiguous, and I'd like people to know what I'm talking about, so there'll be a cap on swearing. That only applies to the main body, in the comments it's a whole new game.
So WordWorld is still going strong, and I think I've come up with a couple of ideas for short stories in the same setting. This is something I was worried wouldn't happen - I wanted a couple of shorter things to work out the bugs and really get a feel for writing this piece. The ideas are fun, give love to a few conventions and challenge others, and make people laugh, so I'm going full-tilt.
Oh, by the way: Happy New Year!
I promised you my take on foul language last post, so I might as well follow through with that shit. I like swearing, it's fun, but it's a flawed thing. Anytime you swear, people around you get the idea that you're probably upset about something, but it's not easy to tell what. A passerby may think you're swearing at him for wearing ugly pants, or accidentally bumping him as you were on your phone getting directions, and it would affect the rest of their day negatively because they didn't see the fresh dog poop you just stepped in. Swearing gets your idea across, but modern society's far too complex to say WHAT it is you're pissed off at and WHY using a few short words. I don't want to be ambiguous, and I'd like people to know what I'm talking about, so there'll be a cap on swearing. That only applies to the main body, in the comments it's a whole new game.
So WordWorld is still going strong, and I think I've come up with a couple of ideas for short stories in the same setting. This is something I was worried wouldn't happen - I wanted a couple of shorter things to work out the bugs and really get a feel for writing this piece. The ideas are fun, give love to a few conventions and challenge others, and make people laugh, so I'm going full-tilt.
Oh, by the way: Happy New Year!
Friday, December 5, 2008
Digital Diversions
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, hasn’t it? I could bore you with details of my recent exploits, but I’d rather talk about narrative. A couple of things have crossed my palate recently, and it seems appropriate to share them here.
Video games are as much a medium for storytelling as they are for personal distraction or strategic exercise. Take the latest Ace Attorney game, Apollo Justice. This is the first game in the series starring young rookie defense attorney Apollo Justice, a young man still trying to find his precise fit in a cutthroat world or legal acumen and detective skills. For those unfamiliar, the Ace Attorney games make the player interview characters, examine scenes and evidence, and present their findings in a way that brings each case together to reveal the who-what-where-when-why, and this game delivers this gameplay.
It expands on the older series by including a wider variety of ways to interact with just about everything. This isn’t just about gameplay, it’s also about story. Story is incredibly important to this series of games in that with each case you take on, you’re thrown into a different story and have to piece everything together so that by the end, all those bits that made you scratch your head and wonder how the Japanese can be so fucked up ACTUALLY makes some sense.
And it is with story that Apollo Justice screws up. This is the second version of the Ace Attorney series of games; the first followed another rookie attorney, Phoenix Wright. Through three games players guided him as he lost his mentor, watched adversaries become friends, friends become murderers, murder victims become accomplices in framing their mother’s rival’s daughter for murder only to be foiled by her secret twin sister that is in love with you and oh sweet Jebus I am not making this up.
The point is, Phoenix Wright was an unforgettable series and the follow-up character had to be just as strong and tenacious to exist out of Phoenix’s shadow. Instead, Phoenix Wright is in the game. All the time. Literally taunting you. Where I can only imagine the production team intended his presence to act as a transition to guide the player into being comfortable with AJ, instead it only reminds us how much PW could do at the end of his series and how little AJ actually accomplishes for himself.
Narrative and gameplay don’t always exist separately. Take the latest Prince of Persia installment: no Sands of Time (something of a mercy for my own sake) and no goatee, a completely different set of characters, setting, everything. The gameplay’s different as well, in that instead of being able to, in essence, call a certain number of mulligans, you’ve got a partner ready to grab you when you do something wrong.
Here the narrative-gameplay dichotomy is a much trickier balance – in previous games, if you messed up too much (or in certain cases, just once), your character died and you had to reload the game to an earlier point. In Sands of Time, when this happened, your character ADDED context by telling you “No, that’s not right” after you died. The story they were telling had your character do everything right the first time because A) you’d be dead and unable to tell your story otherwise, B) the world would be gone and no one would hear your story otherwise, and C) your character was a muthaf*&^ing badass and didn’t need more than one chance to beat insurmountable odds, save the world, and woo the girl.
In this latest installment, you do not get mulligans. Instead, if you mess up, your partner covers for you, and you can try as many times as it takes to get it right. Does this make your character then fallible? Is he less capable, less deserving of your time and energy? Is this worth worrying about when the time and frustration of reloading after a grizzly death is done away with? Is playing the game and enjoying the interactive experience more or less important than the story’s main character truly risking life and limb? The game’s been out two days and I’ve already had debates over this, and the truth is I can’t bring myself to answer these questions definitively. I would like to see the character I’m playing experience some anxiety over whether or not he can make this next jump and live, but I’d also like to have to go through less frustration myself to see him make that jump.
If you couldn’t already tell, yes, I am using this blog to justify my recent playing activities. I publicly shrugged off video games a few years back to focus on writing. That didn’t work so well, in that instead of writing I found other ways to not write. Now I’m trying something different: I’m going to play video games and then write about it. So far, not bad.
I AM still writing the novel, tentatively called WordWorld (I hate the title, but I need a quick way to refer to it). The plot’s coming along okay, but I find my characters are coming off a bit flat, and I realized that for every other story I wrote with them, they’ve never grown within them. They didn’t have to, the stories were too short, but I can’t get away with that here, so I’m trying to figure out where I can make them change from beginning to end without losing them. I fully admit now, thinking I could write a 50,000 word draft of this in a month was really freaking stupid.
Next time – why I’m making an effort not to swear in this blog even though I really fucking want to.
Video games are as much a medium for storytelling as they are for personal distraction or strategic exercise. Take the latest Ace Attorney game, Apollo Justice. This is the first game in the series starring young rookie defense attorney Apollo Justice, a young man still trying to find his precise fit in a cutthroat world or legal acumen and detective skills. For those unfamiliar, the Ace Attorney games make the player interview characters, examine scenes and evidence, and present their findings in a way that brings each case together to reveal the who-what-where-when-why, and this game delivers this gameplay.
It expands on the older series by including a wider variety of ways to interact with just about everything. This isn’t just about gameplay, it’s also about story. Story is incredibly important to this series of games in that with each case you take on, you’re thrown into a different story and have to piece everything together so that by the end, all those bits that made you scratch your head and wonder how the Japanese can be so fucked up ACTUALLY makes some sense.
And it is with story that Apollo Justice screws up. This is the second version of the Ace Attorney series of games; the first followed another rookie attorney, Phoenix Wright. Through three games players guided him as he lost his mentor, watched adversaries become friends, friends become murderers, murder victims become accomplices in framing their mother’s rival’s daughter for murder only to be foiled by her secret twin sister that is in love with you and oh sweet Jebus I am not making this up.
The point is, Phoenix Wright was an unforgettable series and the follow-up character had to be just as strong and tenacious to exist out of Phoenix’s shadow. Instead, Phoenix Wright is in the game. All the time. Literally taunting you. Where I can only imagine the production team intended his presence to act as a transition to guide the player into being comfortable with AJ, instead it only reminds us how much PW could do at the end of his series and how little AJ actually accomplishes for himself.
Narrative and gameplay don’t always exist separately. Take the latest Prince of Persia installment: no Sands of Time (something of a mercy for my own sake) and no goatee, a completely different set of characters, setting, everything. The gameplay’s different as well, in that instead of being able to, in essence, call a certain number of mulligans, you’ve got a partner ready to grab you when you do something wrong.
Here the narrative-gameplay dichotomy is a much trickier balance – in previous games, if you messed up too much (or in certain cases, just once), your character died and you had to reload the game to an earlier point. In Sands of Time, when this happened, your character ADDED context by telling you “No, that’s not right” after you died. The story they were telling had your character do everything right the first time because A) you’d be dead and unable to tell your story otherwise, B) the world would be gone and no one would hear your story otherwise, and C) your character was a muthaf*&^ing badass and didn’t need more than one chance to beat insurmountable odds, save the world, and woo the girl.
In this latest installment, you do not get mulligans. Instead, if you mess up, your partner covers for you, and you can try as many times as it takes to get it right. Does this make your character then fallible? Is he less capable, less deserving of your time and energy? Is this worth worrying about when the time and frustration of reloading after a grizzly death is done away with? Is playing the game and enjoying the interactive experience more or less important than the story’s main character truly risking life and limb? The game’s been out two days and I’ve already had debates over this, and the truth is I can’t bring myself to answer these questions definitively. I would like to see the character I’m playing experience some anxiety over whether or not he can make this next jump and live, but I’d also like to have to go through less frustration myself to see him make that jump.
If you couldn’t already tell, yes, I am using this blog to justify my recent playing activities. I publicly shrugged off video games a few years back to focus on writing. That didn’t work so well, in that instead of writing I found other ways to not write. Now I’m trying something different: I’m going to play video games and then write about it. So far, not bad.
I AM still writing the novel, tentatively called WordWorld (I hate the title, but I need a quick way to refer to it). The plot’s coming along okay, but I find my characters are coming off a bit flat, and I realized that for every other story I wrote with them, they’ve never grown within them. They didn’t have to, the stories were too short, but I can’t get away with that here, so I’m trying to figure out where I can make them change from beginning to end without losing them. I fully admit now, thinking I could write a 50,000 word draft of this in a month was really freaking stupid.
Next time – why I’m making an effort not to swear in this blog even though I really fucking want to.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
If I Can Make It Here...
My attempts at writing a novel in a month are not very successful. I've got no shortage of material, but making prose out of it isn't going fast. Every time I get started I find I need to stop and figure another five things out.
My visit to New York has come and gone and went very well. I'll play around with getting photos from facebook to work here, but I'm a bit tired now. Me and Dunk did a lot of tourist stuff - we probably couldn't have done any more - but it's taking a while for my body to spin back up to speed.
My visit to New York has come and gone and went very well. I'll play around with getting photos from facebook to work here, but I'm a bit tired now. Me and Dunk did a lot of tourist stuff - we probably couldn't have done any more - but it's taking a while for my body to spin back up to speed.
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