Autumn Winds

Some Art Stuff

2008-07-06T02:42:18Z

I had a moment so I changed out the existing versions of the Anima and Expexiant with the updated versions for the dA gallery, but they won't look much different to anyone (I added some necessary shading and texture. Nothing major or highly noticeable).

However, as I mentioned wanting to do a while back, I did come up with a couple possible layouts for WHS. You can see the two mock-ups created for public discussion/feedback here and here.

Dazed and Bored, plus Movies

2008-07-05T22:38:51Z

I don't know what it is, but I've been...tired and cranky today. Even before it started to become hot (low 80's), I did not want to be here at work. But I think it's more a feeling of restlessness than crankiness. I think I'd like to start another project, like the Neoplastic contract, because it kept me busy and engaged me creatively and I have nothing similar right now.

I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall last night before going to bed. Overall hilarious; loved it! There were some odd bits that didn't mesh and some weak points, but the funny parts hit the nail hard and that's what counts. I also like that the new boyfriend wasn't typecast as either some kind of completely transparent jackass or some clueless dumbass. He was portrayed as a both a jerk and a cool guy, and not the eternally over-cast bad guy and arch-enemy of the protagonist. It was very human.

We also went to Wanted a couple weekends ago. I was unimpressed. Yeah, the special effects were cool, but about halfway through I wanted to leave because it became clear the movie was nothing but violence porn strung together with the thinnest of plots*, and violence of the sort that left me with absolutely no empathy for the main characters. I couldn't have cared what happened to them. I didn't. I did care about the rats.

* Which made no fucking sense when they revealed what was "really" going on because apparently the greatest assassin in the world was also the world's greatest IDIOT.

It had a real "douchebag" ending, too: one of those "trying really hard to be badass" moments that was so full of blatantly illiterate testosterone that it made me roll my eyes (which was definitely the opposite of the intended effect).

Jerk: "What have you done lately?"
Me: "I've wasted my time and money on this over-hyped piece of crap you call a movie. Angelina Jolie's naked, tattooed ass was the best part of the whole thing, and that was only on screen for about two seconds. I wish I'd gone to the Incredible Hulk instead. That might have been worth the almost twenty-bucks we spent for tickets."

Three Scary Drawin's

2008-07-02T21:41:35Z

Final update on the Neoplastic contract for Dread. As I would have needed another week to hit the deadline (the week I lost to my damn computer crash), Rafael decided to cut the final three illos, for a total of nine. Again, the illustrations are on my dA account for public consumption, and you can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnails below to jump to each image directly.

Druthua

Keradhon

Aztec Warriors

Comments and critiques are welcome, as usual!

I hated the Druthua. The concept never seemed to work right no matter how I approached it and I didn't have enough time to throw some background elements in; it just didn't turn out the way I wanted, so I'm not happy with it at all. But I lurved the Aztec Warriors and the Keradhon. Both went down smooth and were fun to do and turned into efforts I'm proud of.

I also tweaked the Anima and the Expexiant based on Guy's feedback. I'll eventually put the fixed versions up, and I think they look better now. Thanks, Guy!

A Couple More Scary Things

2008-06-29T11:14:40Z

Another update on the Neoplastic contract for Dread, which I am now half-way through. Again, the illustrations are on my dA account for public consumption, and you can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnails below to jump to each image directly.

Anima

Aztec Priestess-Mummy

Comments and critiques are welcome, as usual!

You know, now that it's morning I'm not sure how happy I am with the Aztec mummy illo. Conceptually, I'm OK with it, but I'm either seeing some needed tweaks or the fact that I only had something less than four hours of sleep last night is affecting my perception and judgment.

My Annual Pilgrimage to Suckville

2008-06-26T16:09:55Z

Yep. RPG.net sucks as badly as I remember.

Troll-filled filth hole. Good-bye again. (Only took two posts this time for me to throw my hands up in disgust and walk away. I'm getting better.)

Maybe one of these days its "mods" (and my eyeballs are strained from rolling) will pull their heads out of their asses, but they're in so deep it's obviously taking a few years to work themselves out.

Maybe someday they'll engage in, you know, actual moderating...and not the shitty, half-assed, inconsistent moderation they have standardized, either...'cause right now it's like Usenet for the web.

More Scary Drawin'

2008-06-25T08:38:19Z

Again, for those keeping up with my work on the Neoplastic contract for Dread, here are the next couple in the set on my dA account. I'm 1/3rd of the way through the series!

You can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnails below to jump to each image directly. One note for my Christian friends: you may find part of the imagery used in The Keilow offensive. Forewarned.

Keilow

Uakast

Again, comments and critiques are welcome!

(And now I'd better get to bed before Jen decides to start removing my limbs...)

hubwah?

2008-06-23T03:33:04Z

Yay. Home.

Shift turned into a nearly 11-hour shift. With no braekfast or lunch.

Allow me to explain the situation: {collapse}

An Amurikan Edumakation

2008-06-22T20:11:06Z

Ok, so crazy fundamentalist grade-school teachers secretly baptizing kids against their parents' wishes^[1] and burning crosses into their arms is old news, right?

Thankfully our kids are being taught science and critical thinking by well-educated professionals certified by the educational system:

"A former superintendent, Jeff Maley, said he tried to find another position for Freshwater but couldn't because Freshwater was certified only in science...findings show that Freshwater taught that carbon dating was unreliable to argue against evolution."

Wait...what?

One of these statements doesn't belong with the other.

Clearly he wasn't certified in science, either, unless...none of us would be surprised that becoming a public educator in America apparently now only requires a degree pulled from a box of cracker-jacks, would we? At least in Oregon.

^[1] Some people think this is no big deal; I consider it an act of spiritual rape. As unenlightened as it might be, I think I would give serious consideration to the inclusion of a baseball bat in my response.

So Tired I Forgot The Title

2008-06-22T17:28:44Z

It's 7am and I can't sleep. Wasn't able to go to bed until 2am. Supposed to work in a couple hours. Having major stress attacks over this god-damned house situation. I should have listened to my intuition and said "no" when I saw that first damn leak and just been a bastard about them fixing it and everything else. I'm just too fucking nice, wanting to make everyone happy and needing a larger house.

I eventually managed to drag myself back to bed after about two hours. I crashed for a bit, had a mostly unrecalled dream that ended with my being an up-and-coming movie star supposedly dating some snobbish blonde starlet who, honestly, I didn't think was all that and wanted to change me into some materialistic prissy-boy.

I ended up, I think, walking off with Lindsay Lohan. Which was better than spending the morning tossing and turning thinking about the house issues and having unrecalled-but-vaguely-unsettling dreams. Then the kids started the usual morning's World War between themselves in the living room, which destroyed all further chances at either sleep or nailing Lohan ("he crudely suggested in a fit of rude humor and provocative pique meant to lighten his own weighty mood").

Unfortunately, I'm so messed up over this situation that -- er, the house situation, not the Lohan one -- despite intellectually knowing I was supposed to work at 11am today, I set my alarm for...11am. Yep. Luckily, Jen remembered at about a quarter-to and came in to wake me up. So I rushed about to get ready, didn't have time for breakfast, and made it to the station at about 5-after, which thankfully didn't cock-up the afternoon scheduling too badly.

But I'm hungry, tired and stressed, and I have a nine-hour shift ahead of me. Then another restless night before our realtor and lender are back in their offices and we hear more about what's going on and can make plans based on that.

Oh, and icing on all this: my XP install didn't last. I couldn't get any of my programs to install properly so I need to blow away the partition again and do a clean reinstall.

I Had The Most Terrifying Dream...

2008-06-21T05:49:05Z

Finally! After three days of being off-line, I'm back up and limping along.

My system drive went down hard on Wednesday -- I'm still not sure what happened. All my data is backed-up, and I was able to semi-restore the old XP set-up (with desktop, e-mail, passwords, bookmarks, autocomplete, preferences, contacts, blacklists, plug-ins), though most of my programs are still in limbo and half of my start-up programs need a complete reinstallation (I wasn't expecting as much to come back as did). I'll need to comb through the ruins to see how I can salvage all that for export and then do a complete, clean reinstall on the drive.

Luckily I seem to have put enough of the pieces back in the right order; the drive system and registry are still a mess, but at least it's working.

It took me three days to get this far, though. I reinstalled XP at least a dozen times: in more than half of those it simply didn't take and I'm still not sure why (in a few I simply had no post-POST activity, in two other cases it simply looped in a neverending Startup and Shutdown sequence that didn't do either). In all the others, except this install, I wasn't able coax any of my old set-up back to life.

This couldn't have come at a worse time, either. That's three days I haven't been able to work on the Neoplastic contract, right after I told Rafael he could expect one finalized illo each day from me. Goddamnit! I'm really upset about this. He's been pretty understanding so far, but with this now? What do I say without sounding like a whiner or a weasel?

And all this stress on top of the stress from the goddamn fucking sonofabitch housing situation and Jen's surgery and post-op. I've chewed my nails to the bloody quick. I find out that in addition to supposedly hiring a lawyer to try and sue us for attempting to withdraw our offer, the sellers' realtor has been harassing and attacking both our mortgage broker and our realtor personally and professionally with lies and complaints. Fucking bastard! I HATE scumbags.

Crazy Life Quick Update

2008-06-18T20:25:44Z

The week has barely started, and it's already crazy:

1) Staying up until 8am the other night to finish another final for Neoplastic left me crashing the following day, seeing as I only managed to squeak in around an hour of sleep. I'll put up a link to the new one piece soon.

2) Jen's surgery went well. It was originally scheduled for this autumn, but complications forced them to move it up. She's fine. She's recovering but tired and sore. She'll be out of work for two weeks and can't do any lifting or physical exertion, either (and note how we're trying to pack and clean so we can move).

3) We are now definitely NOT buying the house and withdrew our offer. The sellers' realtor threw a hissy-fit and threatened to sue (no, he can't, he's just being hotheaded and he doesn't like our realtor).

We withdrew because a) the plumbing went "boom" creating a huge hassle: they took out a ceiling and a wall to fix the pipes and want us to replace the surfaces (in addition to the other things we needed to fix) but our mortgage company wants them to replace it, but they won't replace the roof so we'd have to tear our whatever ceiling they put in (the whole thing is now a giant ball of hassle), b) the mortgage payment we were quoted increased significantly as did the property taxes on a more precise calculation, and c) we found out the house next door (literally no more than 10 feet away) is being turned into a group home for recovering drug-users and alcoholics.

We have four young kids. Nothing against folks trying to better their life, but a parade of strangers moving in-and-out who were and might still be involved with less-than-savory individuals and lifestyles living next door... No thanks.

AAAAAND to top off this part of our wonderful adventures in house-buying, our current landlords claim that since we already put our vacate notice in, we can't continue to stay here after the end of the month. Lawyers may need to be involved from our end. Arg.

4) I hate Microsoft's 4Gig memory address architecture. Damnit. Some of my shiny new RAM is being wasted! And why is it proving so hard to make a simple backup of 130Gigs of data?

5) Busybusybusywithahalfdozenotherthingsetc.

Can someone stop the world? I'd like to get off for a minute and relax.

Drawin' Scary Things

2008-06-16T20:20:35Z

For anyone keeping up with my work on the Neoplastic contract for Dread, or who just likes my art in general, with Rafael's blessing I've placed the first of the illustrations on my dA account for public consumption.

You can either click here to jump to my gallery or use the thumbnails below to jump to each image directly.

Avomiad

Expexiant

Comments and critiques are, as always, welcome!

Keene-ly Interested

2008-06-16T06:24:36Z

In an interesting development, Brian Keene deleted my comments critical of his rant on writers who don't write three books a year being lazy whiners, though I'm not quite certain why he did so.

You may be thinking I must have said something insulting in order for that to happen[*] (because that would be the only reason someone would ever delete someone's comments, right?) but I do promise that I behaved myself and kept what I said brief, polite, and as non-accusatory as possible.

Of course, I can't prove that because the comments are gone, so you're free to believe whatever you wish. Regardless, I think, perhaps, I'll fire off an e-mail and see what's what, though I suspect I will have to work up a good rant about human behavior appropriate to the situation. Well, hopefully I won't.

[*] Which, if you did think, would be an interesting reaction to note on your part, given that we're talking about judging the appropriateness of responses to a guy who called a bunch of other writers whiners and derided their work-ethic because they produce more slowly than he does.

Numbers, Monkeys, and You

2008-06-14T22:20:25Z

UPDATE: I cleaned this up a little (I hope) so it isn't so jumpy/disconnected after the mid-point. Also, some of this is follow-up reaction to a statement by Keene in the comments that he later deleted (see following entry), so it may seem baseless or overwrought given what is stated at the link now.

No, this isn't one of those awesomely dreadful grade school films we all watched in the 80's, though it totally could be. I was going to title it "Why Writers Are Not Statisticians" but that wasn't as fun. This is about a recent bit of method criticism that popped up on a blog I don't know when or why I started reading -- Robert may have had something to do with it -- but which set off my logic and tweaked my arrogance alarms.

Over on his writing blog, Brian Keene suggests full-time writers who can't put out as much work as he can -- something like 3500 words a day -- are lazy whiners and cry-babies who are just not making the most of their time. Because, mathematically, if you can write 500 words an hour, then you can write 3500 words in a full work day of seven hours (with an hour for lunch).

You heard correctly: there is absolutely no good reason if you're writing full-time that you can't write three or four 90k-word books a year (only taking a break for personal emergencies or vacations and such). Therefore, any writer complaining about the stress of trying to put out just one 90k-word novel in a year is a lazy whiner who probably spends their work-day playing the latest Flash-game craze from Slashdot.

Keene's math isn't wrong, but his conclusion is.

For some reason Keene (possibly because he is an apparent exception) seems not to grasp the idea that for many writers creative writing is simply not like counting pennies or painting a house. Yes, physically I could put 3500 words down on paper every day. I could. You could. Your grandmother could. This trained monkey I bought illegally from shifty-eyed Russian monkey-smugglers could.

In fact, if you check this past year's NaNoWriMo attempt, I attempted something just like that. No, not illegally purchasing a monkey from Russians and teaching it to type (as awesome as that might be)! What I attempted was to just write for two hours every day, to end up with 1300 words a day total, regardless of what I wrote.

And guess what?

The result sucked sweaty goat's balls. But not because I'm a bad writer.

Oh sure, there were some funny bits about editors and eldritch horrors and Steven Tyler, but as a complete thing it sucked because Keene's argument rests itself on two logical fallacies. The first is a fallacy of numbers.

You see, I can type 120 words a minute. Clearly, mathematically, I should thus be able to write 7200 words an hour and finish just over 50k words in about a day. I shouldn't take any longer than three days to pound out a completed 90k word novel...ahem. Afterall, isn't writing just like painting a fence or counting pennies, where mathematics shows that if you can perform X task in Y amount of time, you should be able to complete Z amount of tasks in T amount of time? That's true if we assume a task is completely procedural.

But it also ends up being Mythical Man Month reasoning: "If it takes one woman nine-months to have a baby, then it should take nine women working together one-month to have a baby."

Second, the idea that the artistic process and flow might work differently for different writers, who may only get a good hour of writing out of a full day because that's the way their process works, or who may only end up with an hour's worth of decent words on the page per day no matter how long they sit down and write for, with the rest being utter garbage, seems never to have occurred to Keene.

Now, there is wisdom in the idea that if you have seven hours during the day in which to write, and you make your living from writing, then you should probably spend around seven hours a day focusing on your craft. I'm not disputing that. That's good advice any aspiring writer needs to listen to especially if they find themselves making excuses about why they aren't writing.

But we're talking about creative writing and established authors, and it's the "creative" part that buggers things up and makes it messy and unclean and painfully kicks the 500-good-words-a-day idea in its dangly yahoo bits until it gasps for mommy.

The creative process, rather like the scientific process, isn't a smooth curve. It's a bumpy, jagged progression of sudden spikes and long plateaus.

That may surprise you regarding science, afterall, isn't that how science works? By procedure? Can't you just do X amount of lab work over time Y and increase your number of breakthrough moments by Z? Nope.

It shouldn't surprise you because science, at least the process of discovery, actually isn't procedural. You can't devote seven weeks to a project and assume that you'll make two breakthroughs in that time based on some simple formula of task-and-time. Because discovery -- the creative aspect of research and development -- doesn't work that way; there's a lot of undirected banging around in the dark involved.

Let's digress for a moment: I have a friend, Ran ~~Ackels~~ Valerhon, who is a relatively fast artist. He puts out work in a time-frame I would kill to be able to manage. I also know a number of other traditional artists who can polish off a blocked-out concept in a matter of hours, and a finished piece in under a day.

In contrast, I am a slow artist. I usually take a matter of days to settle on a good concept. I'm patient, thoughtful, full of second-guesses and long breaks between sessions to "refill the creative well". Sometimes I leave a piece sitting untouched for a week before I hear it call me back, ready to be fixed and/or finished.

Notably, if I do not do this -- if I "just sit down and draw" -- my work ends up shoddy. If I go back to an unfinished piece and sit for hours at a time just trying to fix or finish a painting that isn't "ready", I never manage to fix it or make it any better. I can't force my process.

These are facts proved by years of experience as an illustrator, and they may not, and do not, apply to everyone else. But I know I can't simply sit down and paint for five hours a day and pump out a half-dozen pieces a week like a machine.

Hopefully you see where I'm going, so to dovetail back to the topic at hand I will note whether I am engaged in illustration or wordcraft, I work slowly. Even when I'm in full-on writing mode, writing for a few hours a day every day, I can't simply put out a completely coherent and decent piece of craft on a set schedule because creativity doesn't work that way for me.

For me, as it is for many writers, the creative act requires gestation. Because you can't make a baby in one-month by adding more mothers, just like you can't craft a good novel simply by adding more words. The creative act is simply not a wholly procedural task governed by simplistic formulas.

One of the issues preventing creative writing from being a procedural task is the problem of creativity itself. Because of this problem, you can write and write and get nowhere. I regularly look at thousands of good words I've written for a piece and say, "You know what? This is good, but it's only OK-good. It's missing something. Something important. Something that will make it sing."

This is the problem of creativity, and it is why creative writing is like science: eureka moments change history. But just doing X amount of lab work over time Y will not increase your number of eureka moments. Eureka moments happen, if you will, as the planets align: you're soaking in a bathtub, or sitting under an apple tree, or filing papers in a patent office.

If your eureka moment is sparked by that article the group in Germany had published in this quarter's peer-reviewed Black Hole Physics Quarterly, or when you're washing dishes with grandpa and he tells you that story about those hookers he met during the war, or while you're playing toy-trains with your three-year old...well then, doing more labwork isn't going to get you any closer to that moment (heck, it might even get in the way of your seeing it because you're repeatedly indoctrinating yourself to facts and procedures that aren't leading anywhere. Or it might not).

What's happening is that you recognize there's a hole in what you're working on, and your brain is waiting to fill that hole with a piece it just doesn't have yet, or that your conscious mind can't see. Sometimes, neither the conscious or subconscious mind knows what's missing from a piece, only that something is. Even once it does know it, it may take a while for the subconscious mind to communicate what it knows through the noise of the conscious mind.

That's the creative process, and there's no real way to force it along in my experience. It starts with a question and ends with that point where you say, "Oh my god, that's good. That's really, really good. Holy crap! Thank you honey, you're a genius, you've just solved the Brown-Heisenberg paradox!" or when you walk down to the local gallery and browse the new exhibit until you come across a photograph that makes you run home to junk and rewrite your last three chapters.

Personally again, this is why The Children of Uru is taking so long: I'm filling in the holes as they're filled in for me. That isn't going to happen by just sitting down and putting more words on paper, because they're the wrong words and I don't know what the right ones are right now. I'm gathering them up as they arrive, and paying attention to where they might be and coaxing them out of their hiding places.

Meaning, yes, I could have put Uru out last year. Nevermind it would have been a mediocre effort that didn't match my vision of the story I wanted to tell. Yes, I could have put it out as it was: substandard and not quite the idea I had in my head. I could have just kept writing and put a whole bunch of words on paper and said, "Yep, done." But...well, why would I? Is that really a finished novel, just because I typed 3500 words of it a day?

The reality of this aspect of the creative process has been proven to me time-and-time again: a fantasy setting I was working on took years to successfully craft. Writing more wouldn't have taken the rough edges off (though it might have wasted my time creating more of them to sand down later). The forthcoming 3E supplements WHS has on its burners are another example as there were things missing, pieces of the vision that weren't there until they were, no matter how much I wrote.

And I actually did that: I would sit down and just write, knowing I was headed in the wrong direction, but thinking I HAD to write because "that's what good writers do", and I wouldn't be a "good writer" if I didn't. In the end, all that text I wrote because "good writers" write ended up on the cutting-room floor like the film of a badly mixed metaphor.

I even spent a couple of months last year sitting down and throwing words at the paper for Uru to see what stuck, but even with the good things that came out of it, I could feel the wind blowing through the holes and knew it was wrong. That I needed time, that it needed time; I needed to wait. I knew it wasn't coming together just right.

Yet Keene suggests instead that if you can't fill that hole with a piece you don't have, you're a whiny, lazy baby because if you just write, those holes will somehow fill themselves. Keene says "just write 500 words a day", and suggests the majority of them will somehow be magic.

As an apparent writing prodigy, for whom those creative holes rapidly fill in at his own whim, as someone for whom writing is apparently procedural and not fitful, if you are a slow writer, Keene's admonishment and judgment-of-effort is really just cracking open your skull and shitting on your brain.

I may be overstating his arrogance, though he is the one who used the "whiner" language, but Keene's attitude and claim about full-time writers simply needing to write more comes off little better than someone heading down to the local paraplegic activity center and running laps around the building while screaming, "Come on! You've got legs! Use them! Sissy!"

He seems to have an ability many writers don't. Keene can write a good three-or-four novels a year. Cool! And if you are also a fast writer -- you can write well fast -- congratulations! You have a wonderful gift and it's all well and good to be proud of the fact that you can pull it off; but it isn't so much a good thing to use that ability to demean or denigrate others. That's just running around the paraplegic activity center shouting "Catch me if you can!"

Meaning, unless you're some kind of god-awful prodigy of the craft with an amazing set of oddball wiring in your head, you can't expect to write a decent novel in under a year. Many writers can't, because most of the writers I know and have read about have to wait on gestation and moments of inspiration. They can't push that baby out in nine months just by increasing their daily hormone production.

It isn't just a game of numbers, of words on the page, of just sitting down to write. The quality and "rightness" of what is written matters, too.

You may be thinking because of this that I am advocating you only write when your muse seems available. That would be false. I do believe you should write every day if you are going to be a (full-time) professional writer. Of course, you should also be prepared to toss more than half of that writing as unusable or as a rough sketch. You're just exercising your writing muscles in preparation for the big race, which could start any minute. You don't know! (Which is another reason you need to write every day!)

This is the other problem of creativity I hint at above, beyond gestation and inspiration. This is why that simple formula doesn't work, because for many writers, those 500 words aren't going to be magic. They're going to be practice, they're going to be groping blindly in the dark for the magic. You can't bank finishing a book in a year on the success of groping in the dark. You certainly can't measure commitment or work or effort by how often that groping is successful based solely on the parameter of how much stuff was found.

This is basic logic:
"I spent five hours groping in the dark and found these four items."
"I spent two hours groping in the dark and found these fifteen items."

So who worked harder? What if you could only see the number of items they found, and did not know how long each individual spent in the dark? Who looks like they worked harder now?

This is Keene's error. He is not even using a comparably measurable metric: groping is luck, not skill, and items are not effort. 25k words that consist of groping in the dark, which the critic never sees because they're all the wrong words and eviscerated from the final attempt, is 25k words of work that make putting out a book that much harder. Does Keene, after all, know for a fact that these writers aren't writing seven hours a day, five days a week?

He doesn't provide any evidence of such. No evidence there is not more work being done than what we see in the end product.

Keene defends his argument's validity by claiming -- without proving -- that deviation from his X-words in Y-time rule, for established full-time writers, is due to "laziness" on the part of the writer. It seems he uses an unintentionally circular argument, where his premise is being used to prove itself. That he is thinking since anyone can write 500-words an hour, if someone who is physically capable of doing so does not do so they are being lazy, therefore anyone can write 500-words an hour and so failure to produce a book by such methods is due laziness.

You might thus note Keene and I don't actually disagree when it comes to the mantra of "sit down and write". Perhaps his argument aggravates me so because on analysis it works suspiciously similar to one of my pet bugaboos: the "bootstrap" arguments that come from the right-wing, built on the idea that since some limited and often-mythical set of the population can build wealth from poverty, absolutely anyone else can do it, too.

And all this quite regardless of the facts and percentages, which they wave away by calling nasty names and insisting anyone who isn't able to perform their miracle is simply too lazy or stupid to do so, rather than admitting the idea itself is fundamentally flawed. As they say, "If that were true, there would be a lot more rich lumberjacks."

Similarly, Keene's error is an assumptive error which fails to factor in all the relevant data, gets (a little) personally nasty, and presumes an accurate situational model based on a limited situation. His is an error of conflation, the failure to recognize procedure and quality exist on different axes -- like time spent in the dark and number of items found -- so they are not the same thing and can vary in relation to one another and a final product.

Creative writing is not like painting a fence whereby X number of brush-strokes per minute will result in Y amount of the fence painted in one hour (assuming no extenuating circumstances). So a simplistic rule of "500-words an hour will result in three finished books a year" fails to account for how the creative process works for many writers.

The thing writers need to remember, especially young writers who will likely start beating themselves up for not making some arbitrarily-determined-by-someone-else word count, is that it is and isn't about the number of words you put on paper every day. It's about this:

Write every day. Set aside time to do it without interruption.

You don't have to write during that time, but you can't do anything else.

You'll find an optimal amount of time and you'll figure out what this is on your own. Some writers can go for hours, some find they have fifteen minutes. Use them, they're your minutes.

Pick a minimum number of words to write per day. Meet it. That's what your optimal time is for.

You will have good days and bad days writing. You will have more bad days, but the good days will be really good.

You will not write every day. Do not judge yourself for this, just make sure to write tomorrow.

When you hit a wall, it's a signal to stop and do something else relaxing and creative for a bit: read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk, doodle, visit a museum or art gallery. Stuff is happening in your brain you aren't privy to.

Don't let doing other stuff take the place of writing.

Be realistic: Sturgeon's Law applies to everything and everyone.

In summary, I think my response can best be condensed as this: if you're a writer who works like I do, then trying to write a book in a year will not be as simple as just writing 500 words an hour because many of those words will end up being tossed at the end of the day as the wrong words. So even if I am writing 500 words an hour, I'm only effectively writing 50 an hour, and thus calling me (or anyone else) lazy because you can't see that process happening and understand the difficulties is an arrogant conjecture based on blind-elephant reasoning and therefore produces a faulty conclusion.

Monkey Business

2008-06-14T19:06:09Z

So I'm looking up information on how one would go about illegally purchasing and caring for a monkey (because I'm odd that way and bored) and I find this news story about a woman whose pet monkey was detained as an illegal immigrant.

Then it got weirder:

A state law that took effect Oct. 1 forbids importing, selling, breeding, or possessing a "nonhuman primate," including monkeys.

Wait...what?

A "nonhuman primate"? So does that mean you can import, sell, breed, and possess a "human primate"?

Well, I suppose...it IS Alabama...

Please commence with the FARK-like commentary.

Running From the Tiger

2008-06-14T08:35:52Z

Shutup! Why won't you just SHUTUP!

2008-06-14T04:56:30Z

No, it isn't the voices in my head again. It's the movie theater.

Specifically the gaggle of vapid teenage girls that sat behind us during The Happening in the movie theater.

I think it was a good movie.

I'm not sure.

I'll have to watch it without listening to the pointless non-stop commentary track someone mistakenly enabled (by procreating) that included such choice phrases as "Ooo! He's sooo cute! I totally want him!" and "Yeah right, there's no way that's true." and "Oh my god, I'm so scared! I don't like this movie!" (x4) and "Look out for the tree!"--"Why?"--"Because it's a tree!"--"Oh yeah!"

Worst overheard comment ever: "Oooh, I missed that part; I was busy texting! What happened?"

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU IN A MOVIE THEATER!!!!??

You Are a Viking

2008-06-12T23:08:32Z

Your Score: Gothi

You scored 40% leadership, 26% spirituality, 14% violence and 25% intelligence!

LEADER - SPIRITUAL - PEACEFUL - EDUCATED

Gothar were the priesthood of heathen Scandinavia. You are the spiritual backbone of your society. Only you can intrepret the gods' will for your jarl. You are the first person people will come to any time they want to do anything from building a new shed to invading Denmark. May the gods smile upon you.

Link: The Viking Age Persona Test written by fenrirgagootsi

Donjon Magic Hack

2008-06-08T15:35:39Z

Note: this is me, verbally throwing up ideas on the page. They aren't thought out. I'm writing as I go and will refine later. Some of them contradict themselves or other ideas expressed. Some of them are even really bad ideas or obvious misconceptions in retrospect. That said...

Back when we were playing our game of Dark Sun with Donjon's rules, one of the issues I ran into and never liked was the openness of magic and the number of Spell Dice one could roll for one-word spells.

Given it was Dark Sun and all characters traditionally have psychic abilities, everyone had at least one Magic Word which represented some minor psychic ability. Two of the characters were also straight-up psychics: one was a warrior-priestess and the other was a wandering monk of the Way (a philosophy-religion followed by the psychics of the setting).

The problem was having just one or two words made supernatural abilities...well, weird. One of my monk's words was "stone", and frankly, I could do a whole lot with just that word. I used it to throw rocks, bring the stone ceiling crashing down, mentally incapacitate opponents, increase my defense, create a giant stone hand to hold opponents, and turn things to stone.

This bothered me because the word is meaningless by itself and must be interpreted in order to work, and so you have to add other words in order to describe the actual effect (which always felt like cheating to me).

The other thing is that since you use Magic Words to base spells on, you spend more dice to add more Magic Words to a spell, but at a reduced number of dice. It seemed to me this was backwards because you always had more effectiveness with one-word spells than with multi-word spells, so why ever use multiple-word spells? It seemed multiple word spells should be more powerful and common, not less, and the more dice you should receive to roll for them.

On reflection, maybe it isn't so backwards, as you can cause more effects at once with more powerful (ie: multi-word) spells, forcing the opposition to roll multiple times against what is essentially one action on your part.

Still, the incredibly open nature of the Magic Words bothers me.

My hack is adding/codifying Magic Phrases and Spells.

A character still gains Magic Words, but instead of being able to use them for whatever you would like, you must clearly describe the general effects of that word (ie: a Spell). You get one described Spell per Magic Word. These described Spells must be tied to at least one Magic Word and must be based on a reasonable application of the word~~, but you don't have to make one Spell per Word. You can have Words without spells~~.

What if ~~you don't use a Spell to define a Magic Word or~~ you want to do something you haven't defined as a Spell with a Word or set of Words?

You can still make your Magic Words do other things than you've defined, but the opposition has three extra dice to roll against you in contests to resist the effects of that Word(s) -- or you roll three less dice, whichever is easiest.

Additionally, if the use of the Word is a real contextual stretch or the combination of Magic Words used do not generally and clearly describe the desired effect, the opposition gains another two bonus dice.

~~Note that combining Words to make new Spells is different from combining Words to create multiple effect Spells.~~

You can combine as many Words as you would like to cause a single effect and so avoid the die penalty for vague/indefined Word usage (ex: "Fiery" is vague, unless you add another word or two to describe exactly what the Word does), or you can combine Words for multi-effect results with the die penalty.

The more applicable the Words used from your list to the current situation, the more bonus dice you gain during a roll. For example, you could use "Mend", or you could use "Mend Sword" and gain a bonus die or "Mend Broken Sword" and gain two bonus dice.

I'd strikethrough all the following, but that's messy. Just pretend I did.

Some examples, because that's not at all clear:

Azar has the Words: Fiery, Cloud, Madness, Gnawing, Reversal.

He has defined the following Spells:

- Azar's Fiery Cascade: causes flames to rise around the target(s) and burn them, causing damage. (Fiery)
- Undeniable Racial Role Reversal: causes hostile target(s) to view and obey the caster as their leader. (Reversal)
- Hellish Fiery Cloud of Gnawing Madness: creates a fiery cloud around the target(s) that causes fire damage to the target(s), inspires a deep hunger for flesh, confuses the target(s) into attacking (and trying to eat) the first creature they see, and reduces the caster's chance of being the target. (Cloud)
- Fiery Reversal: removes the damage done by fire to any burned object or individual and restores it to its pre-burned condition. (Reversal)
- Some Other Spell: does something. (Madness)

As you can see, Azar has defined five Spells, but has not defined a Spell for Gnawing. If he uses Gnawing, he will always suffer the three die penalty for using an undefined Word until he uses Gnawing to define a Spell.

Additionally:
- Azar can add another Word to any Spell to either gain a situational bonus die (adding Cloud to Fiery Reversal to help affect an area rather than an object or set of objects), or add an additional effect at the cost of one Spell Die (or three dice if the Word use doesn't match a defined usage/is a stretch).
- Azar can use a Word instead of a Spell at a three die penalty (ex: using "Fiery" to create a campfire or light a torch) or a five die penalty if the Word use is a stretch (ex: using "Fiery" to inflame the spirits of his comrades; note that he could define a new Spell later that utilizes this meaning to thereafter avoid the two die penalty for non-defined Word use).
- Azar can (I forget where I was going with this).

End the ridiculous fake strikethrough here.

Obviously, this makes verbs the most valuable words for low-level casters: run, jump, hide, mend, break, etc. While nouns become more useful at higher levels when they can be combined to make new spells.

This means you aren't rolling ridiculous numbers of dice just for using a broadly-applicable single Magic Word like "Fiery" or "Stone", at least not without having a described spell or spending dice to add more Magic Words. It also means not using a one-trick word like "stone" to manage a variety of incredible and dangerous effects at high numbers of dice.

Comments? Problems? Clarifications?

More Adventures in House-buying

2008-06-07T07:23:52Z

Slow updates again, mainly because I'm on meds that are making me sick. Again. And the moving issue. And trying to find a second care assistant for the boy after the one we hired flaked out. And trying to fit in the work for Neoplastic amidst all this.

I just haven't had the energy or drive to write between the side-effects and the stress of (trying to) pack and move. I'm saving it all -- what I have left, what I can muster -- for the illustrations. I'll be done with those soon.

The new house, however...one thing after another. The closing date is being moved. Again. Supposed to be mid-month...now? We're not even sure when or if.

One of the pipes over the kitchen began leaking. The owners tore out the ceiling to get to it and fix the pipe. We already knew we had to tear off the old deck, also over the kitchen, and fix a leak in the roof under it, so we were content to just leave the ceiling open to dry it out and then replace the whole thing ourselves after the other work was finished.

In the process of this, our inspector discovered a junction box that wasn't up to code fifty years ago (much less now) and looks like a fire-hazard waiting to happen. This must also be fixed and replaced.

But the loan we're taking out has special provisions regarding the property it will pay for: meaning the issue was just forced and the sellers will have to repair all the damage themselves before we can close (which is, frankly, fine by me as it saves us money and time).

Assuming (and I'm not) they're willing to do all the repairs, they've dragged their feet on some minor pre-sale issues already (piping in the second-floor bathroom and a hole in the wall that needs to be paneled), so I just don't know how long they'll do so on major and more time-intensive issues. Or they might decide, if they're doing all these repairs, they want more for the house than we can afford.

Best-case scenario: we move next month instead and they do all the repairs, taking what's already been offered, given any offer is free money for them since they gained the house via estate.

Worst-case scenario: we might have to put in a new bid on another house with less space. There aren't a whole lot of options, as we're limited by our price-range, and finding a decent four-bedroom was a challenge as was.

In either case, I probably ought to un-pack the 360 and leave it out a while longer. Also, mini-wireless PS2 controllers are awesome. But Jen and Galen both kicking my ass at Crash Team Racing is not so awesome.

Also, I'm an uncle. Awesome!

The Vague Supposition of Complete Rules

2008-05-31T22:20:02Z

One of my favorite pieces of writing on game design is "We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work".

I like it because it is clever and clearly points out all the usual problems of logic found in the arguments of detractors of any given design, as well as in the arguments of those who believe that design-as-written isn't important or doesn't make a difference.

So, using it as a base, I'm going to try and write about design using the metaphor of baseball, and we'll all understand I'm talking about role-playing games.

I may write a number or I may only write one, but this following is about the notion of procedure and how players have been forced to create a sort of invisible framework of unwritten procedure to fill in what have become equally invisible gaps in the rules.

This stems from a conversation about a year ago where Ron Edwards and I were discussing procedure in RPGs as compared to other types of games, and Ron mentioned how procedure in RPGs tends to be fairly scattered and incomplete.

That is, there are rule gaps in how a game moves forwards, holes where the rules simply don't exist and everyone initially flails around trying to figure out what to do until they figure it out for themselves or someone tells them how this group they're playing in does it.

He then explained how those gaps are places where fiat and unspoken rules agreed to by silent group consensus or by the social understanding held by the table take over and that these can and do differ from group to group.

At the time, I wasn't sure exactly what he meant. I didn't get it. What holes? What did they look like? Where were they? I know when I played, games just seemed to move forward. You probably had the same experience, right?

Then I had a conversation about success and failure, stakes and consequences, and the role of fiat in all that on the RPG-Create list and things started to fall into place. And when I compared the way RPGs work as a collection of rules to the way baseball works as a collection of rules, the rest just fell into place.

I'll try to explain my epiphany here: let's imagine you are playing baseball. You're up to bat. You swing at the pitch, and you either hit the ball or miss it. What happens next?

If you've ever played baseball, you know. In baseball, if you hit the ball, you get a hit and are allowed to run for the base. If you miss the ball, you get a strike or are struck out. You might also hit it out of bounds and have to take a foul.

But regardless of what occurs, you know exactly how to proceed based on the result of your swing, what your options are, and exactly what the possibilities are for your next move. You can make plans at least one step in advance because of procedure as defined by the rules.

Despite the rules outlining the procedure, they also cover all other possibilities, giving you a significant freedom of choice despite procedure within those possibilities: you could run for the base as you're supposed to, but you could choose to walk to the base instead, or just stand there and be tagged out, and you'll always be reasonably sure of the consequences of those actions.

Now, imagine playing baseball, being up to bat, taking a swing and regardless of whether you hit or miss or foul, having to look at the umpire to see whether or not you can run for the base.

You miss...but you're allowed to run.
You hit a non-foul...but you aren't allowed to run.
You hit a line drive...but it is treated like a foul or strike.
You drive it over the fence...and they count it as a strike.

And so on.

In this case, the only thing you know is that you hit the ball or missed. You don't know what you get to do after that. You don't know the procedure to deal with the situation. Wouldn't that be weird? Wouldn't we think, "Hey, maybe there's something wrong with this..."

Or maybe -- maybe -- we wouldn't, given the Terraball effect: the way we've always done things seems to work just fine, even if it is illogical.

Yet this is exactly how RPGs work: there are these odd holes in the procedure that function, in play, like umpire-centered baseball. You can swing, and even if you hit the ball, the GM might decide you are not allowed to run for the base, call a foul or tell you it is a strike, and you can't guess ahead of time.

Your thief is quietly creeping through a goblin-infested dungeon, and makes a Move Silently roll successfully, but there's a magical trap on the floor the GM says he stepped on, so the goblins come rushing out anyways. (You hit the ball, and...strike!)

Wait, what? So why did you roll?

Procedure is replaced by GM fiat.

That's a pretty tame example, and might be argued as being fair (if you aren't the player who was just hosed), but it's just an example. There are certainly worse examples of this situation out there, places where, between all the rolling, how things should advanced or move or occur is completely opaque and relies solely on the GM's flight of fancy -- whether or not he makes good calls.

But this situation is far more common and complex in nearly any non-combat situation within the game. For example, your characters gather at a bar and...what next?

Well, you wait for the adventure to reveal itself!

Which isn't exactly how it works.

What a lot of play consists of during a game is the players moving around at random (or near-enough), interacting with various elements of the world waiting to see if the GM will move the game towards the next step in play. (Can I run for the base now?)

This means you engage in a guessing game to find what the GM wants you to do. There's no clear procedure established of movement from one part of play to the next, more akin to a mouse pushing levers and waiting to see if a treat falls out this time, with the levers randomly and regularly reset.

We don't notice this happening because it is ingrained into play as acceptable behavior, because most of us have never seen it done any other way in an RPG, so we can't imagine how else it might work and thus see the process as questionable.

And also because there is a certain level of perceptual sleight-of-hand occurring, where the way the game works masks itself in a black box we subconsciously accept as appearing-to-be procedural/planned without actually being so.

You may also notice we have noticed this situation before in gamerdom!

One of the cherished gamer myths also arose from it in a typically Terraball sort of defense; we forgive the situation by saying that's the way it has to be, or that's a good way to have it, or both (with the latter because of the former), for it is held as received truth by many gamers that "no set of rules can cover all possible actions a player might attempt".

And we nod our heads without challenging that notion, building castles on that foundation, or looking to see how either that notion or the notion's reality affects play.

Instead, when we do realize what is occurring, we simply try to understand the GM covers the holes in the rules with Fiat, and that is both OK and the way it must be (and is therefore also OK) and continue to ignore the existence of the holes.

"How" and "can we" make RPG rules more complete and procedural seems the obvious follow-up question here. I'd like to think certain designs have made strides towards such.

My own ORX, for example, tries to add more concrete procedure to the flow of play, so that one always knows "what to do next" without waiting for any other player to indicate what can now be done (except as a of function of procedure; ie: "Who's up to bat next?").

This provides a clearly more mechanically-oriented method to fill the procedural holes, but I seem to recall from a recent conversation indications there are also games that solve the problem of procedure from a narrative angle.

Freak Out

2008-05-25T14:47:51Z

Last week, one of the neighborhood kids saved a baby mouse from a cat and brought it to my wife to take care of. One of our friends named it Tobi and it was doing really well for that whole week, until it died just the other night for no reason we could ascertain.

During the time we were taking care of it, I was careful not to touch it out of concern it might be carrying a disease, but it somehow managed to poop on me nonetheless, so I'm currently freaking out about hantavirus.

38% mortality rate. No cure. On-set of respiratory failure happens in hours. That's some bad odds.

Of course, it's also incredibly rare. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning.

But what isn't helping is that I've developed a cold with a cough and sore throat. No fever. No vomiting. No diarrhea. No shortness of breath. So it's probably just a cold, and I think I might have developed it before we took the mouse in. Still, I'm freaking out about the possibility.

So...Much...Wanting!

2008-05-23T19:43:58Z

Anyone who really, truly loves me will find a way to get one of these for me, especially if they tell other people who really, truly love me who don't read my LJ and enlist them towards the effort as well. You keep saying I need a new watch anyways.

All the Action You Can Handle

2008-05-20T19:41:09Z

(Taken from a conversation with Jen outside.)

J: "Are you excited about tonight?"
Me: "For what?"
J: "It's time to watch David and David go head-to-head!"
Me: "...I don't think that's something I ever want to see."

(Think about it.)

Black or What?

2008-05-18T15:25:55Z

Ok, after waffling in confusion for far too long on the issue, I am officially striking the phrase "African American" from my general vocabulary.

Why? Because this is so true.