Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.

Fireborn: First Impressions - Character Creation

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:20:18 GMT

As I've mentioned several times in the last few weeks, I've talked my roleplaying group into starting up a campaign of Fireborn. It's a now out-of-print RPG in which the player characters are all reincarnated dragons. As you can imagine, as a dragon (and a gamer) myself, this is right up my alley; I'm sharing my experiences in an effort to help fellow gamers and/or dragons evaluate the system -- and, if they start a campaign themselves, to do so as smoothly as possible.

Before I start, I also need to strongly recommend the forums at fireborn.org, a fan site where a lot of third-party resources, downloads, and rule modifications are available. (You'll need to register to download files.)

Why Fireborn?

First of all: As surprising as it sounds, dragons are underrepresented in urban fantasy.

No, really. Name three books/series set in the modern/near-future era that have dragons as major protagonists. (TTU doesn't count, though I'm flattered you remembered.) And yes, if you're an old-school gamer, "Shadowrun" and "RIFTS" have dragons -- as shadowy, godlike background figures. Fireborn does genuinely appear to do something new and different: give players a chance to play as dragons.

Beyond this, though, Fireborn elegantly solves a few problems that most RPGs spend a lot of time struggling with:

All those crazy superpowers that most players never get to use because you only ever obtain them at high level? You get to play with them from the start, because the game regularly jumps into flashbacks to your fully-powered "Mythic Age" dragon form.

The pacing and participation problems that crop up when the players split up to accomplish different objectives? The tedious process of getting PCs who start out as total strangers to come up with in-game reasons to work together? Don't happen here, because all PCs have a built-in permanent telepathic link to each other.

Why not Fireborn?

That's the good news. The bad news is that Fireborn isn't for everyone. The casual gamer might be turned off by the difficulty of obtaining/printing the sourcebooks; the intricate actioncrafting required for combat; and the complexity of the recordkeeping, especially combat styles and "stances" (your current dice pools as you use your skills to shift your attributes). As with any new game, there are a lot of things to keep track of and a lot of information that somebody at the table needs to memorize.

It also doesn't help that the Player's Handbook (or "PHB", as they say in the biz) is full of inconsistencies and missing some crucial information. The publisher released a free 16-page PDF of errata and FAQs about the most confusing parts, and you will need to download it.

These problems can all be mitigated by a sufficiently dedicated GM. At least that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Character Creation

I assembled my core group of three players on Thursday, along with two Fireborn PHBs. (I also have a Gamemaster's Guide ["GMG"], but it is totally unused in character creation.)

A little bit about us: I'm going to run the game, and I've been both GMing and playing RPGs for literally two decades. (Feeling old now.) {A} is our group's other main GM, of long pedigree, and {S} is a longtime player with GM experience. {C} is relatively newer to gaming but still long in the tooth. Our previous, just-ended campaign was Mage: The Awakening.

My mental notes as we went through the process:

I'm glad I took the time to physically mark up my books with the errata. I would go so far as to call it a necessity. I had to call up the errata on my laptop since I didn't print it out beforehand; the things I had to cross-reference by hand in the errata (I didn't finish the job of book markup) ended up causing confusion and at least one mistake.
- I also added in the point-buy fix for attribute generation from the Fireborn forums. It worked much better than the stock method would have, but the score/point distinction still confused {C}.
This REALLY wants to be a White Wolf ("WW") game. Aside from the surface gritty-urban-fantasy thing, the mechanics of rolling for success are almost identical, Edges are simply renamed Merits, and {A} mentioned the similarity of background/sire buys to Werewolf's breed/auspice/tribe. Seriously, just call it "Dragon: the Burninating" already.
- This was actually good because the character mechanics were much more familiar to our group. I explained a number of core concepts by saying "It's like how Mage does X, but ..." Your mileage may vary if your players don't have prior WW experience.
- Additional observation: The stock Fireborn game is is almost GURPS-like in terms of character lethality. Christ, only two of our scion characters can survive a single shot from a rifle. (I'm looking for a bit more of a cinematic game, so I'm seriously going to have to boost armor availability and healing access.) So let's call it "GURPS Dragon: The Burninating."
There's no mechanism for crits/botches. This is a surprising omission; it's a powerful way to inject unexpected fate into storytelling. Granted, the WW-style "roll a bucket of dice and count any die over a specified threshold as a success" method doesn't make it easy, but they could at least have tried.
Unlike WW, you can also encounter circumstances where success is literally impossible. The number of successes you can achieve is hard-capped by (2 * attribute) + (skill) + (automatic successes from your powers). (Your ability to spend karma for extra successes is already counted above.)
- I added a house rule: Change the game's d6s (success: 4-6) into d10s (success: 7-0, reroll 0s as in WW). This results in a slight decrease in the overall success rate of rolls, but allows successes > dice, making "impossible" rolls into one-in-a-millions instead, and offering extra hooks with which to add crits or botches back in.
Things my experienced gamers still needed to have explained:
- "What does Karma do?" (I was unprepared on this; shame on me. For starting characters it only lets you spend to buy free successes in die rolls; but later, it powers all your most awesome abilities.)
- Which attributes ("aspects") do what. It's straightforward, but definitely a new concept.
- How spellcasting works. (The fact that it requires both a skill and an edge is a bit tweaky, "number of starting spells" is only in errata, "dragons get casting options automatically" is only in errata.
- Which skills do what. This would have been solved by more reading, but we spent a lot of time reading already.
- The health chart. They "got it" quickly when the similarity to WW's was explained, but the Water -> Wound Dice correspondence still took several passes. (Also n.b.: The character sheet in the book is wrong as per the errata. You WILL want custom sheets from the Fireborn forums.)
- *I* am still not clear on the "physical/mental" skill distinction. The character sheets put them in two clumps, but there are some physical skills in the mental section and vice versa. I'm taking the book's listings as gospel, but some skills are "Mental/Physical"; can you buy these with both mental and physical skill points, or is one of them "primary" like the book says?
The instant I explained that wizard classes are rare and hard because badly cast spells physically boil your brain, ALL of my players wanted to be mages. The same thing will happen to your players, because gamers are crazy. So do not walk into a Fireborn game without understanding the process of spellcasting well enough to be able to explain it.
Scion creation seemed to take forever, because everyone had to read the whole Edges chapter & large chunks of the book. Dragon went faster, even with non-mirrored, because it was so similar to what we'd already done. But, it added yet more reading. 1 PHB per person (or better access to it for me as GM) would have REALLY sped things up.
- Of course, when I say "forever" I mean "relative to the five-step process that looked like it should have taken 15 minutes". (You really want forever, design a car in GURPS Vehicles.) In hindsight, it actually was comparable to -- probably even easier than -- a starting Mage character. There's just a new system effect here because nobody had done this before.
- There are a lot of "character concept" questions we just totally glossed over. Are they necessary? We'll see. I prob. will insist on them for dragons, since it will help guide characters during flashbacks. I assume that scions, like most RPG characters, will find their personality during play - esp. since we're starting a new campaign with the characters just discovering they're dragons and kind of starting a new life.
- When we start the adventure I'm going to do brood bidding (from Secrets of Fire). Yet more reading for me.
I want a London tube map. (Later added:) I want a version of the "Guide to London" in the GMG that doesn't have the plot spoilers, so I can pass it out to the players. There's also a guide to British slang in the "Secrets of Fire" (free downloads the publisher once released; available via fireborn.org), and all the players were chuffed to get it. (n.b.: The word "chuffed" is not actually included in that slang guide.)
Narrative skills are easy: Roll dice equal to aspect + skill. Combat? Crunchy. I have still been too intimidated to sit down and run a sample combat, though I've read and re-read the section and I feel like I grok it. I know this is going to bite me in the ass come gameplay time.
- That "bite me in the ass" attack would be an "Eastern Small Dog Style" sequence of Roll + Ready + Jump + Bite Attack + Grab + Press, with a TH of 6 -- or higher depending on terrain THs -- and a Payoff of "Disadvantage (Mental): 3" [PR 3]. The sequence's damage is the usual Bite damage, probably 8(M), although the wound category it generates may be staged up or down depending on the size difference between combatants, and the Grab + Press results in a hold with an escape TH of 2, so to start my next action sequence I would have to make an Escape action (Fire + Quickness) or else take a 2-die penalty on that and all my subsequent actions.
- See what I mean?

Summary

When we finished for the night, everyone was excited and looking forward to the start of the game. Some of that is the usual New Campaign Energy, but my group of experienced gamers really did pick the system up over the course of the evening, enough so to look forward to putting their characters through their paces.

Everyone agreed that the ability to design two distinct but linked characters -- your mythic dragon and your modern scion -- was both novel and cool. My gamers all elected to custom-design their dragons, and while I expected that to take up a significant amount of additional time, it was really quite streamlined. If any of us have to create further new characters, it should be a much quicker process, since the vast majority of the design time was in figuring out the options available. The various packages you mix and match for character creation mean that a few simple choices get you through the majority of the process. (And then comes picking fighting styles ...)

There are a few minmax-ey fiddly bits (buying a single 1-point edge, "Fluid Fighter," doubles your effectiveness with a knife? ORLY?), but with the errata applied, the rules generally make sense, and house rules should be able to bring the rest in line.

Anyway, it took about five hours to generate three characters, so we're starting the adventure next week. I'm running them through the official adventure module released for the game, titled "The Fire Within," with a few custom tune-ups added in to provide plot hooks for my continuing campaign. Tune in next time when I offer first impressions of gameplay!

Readers Wanted: "The Time In Her Eye"

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:55:45 GMT

Earth as we know it is no more. It shattered like an eggshell into the darkness of unspace, and its surface fragments now float in a deadly void. The survivors huddled together, staying as far away from the edges as possible and rationing out their dwindling supplies of food. Then out from the void came a few people who had fallen in -- and instead of dying, gained a new form and the power to traverse the emptiness.

Dex* is a dragon, one of the lucky few to be transformed. For years he has kept the inhabitants of a small shard alive in the chaotic, unforgiving west. Then, one day, the helicopters arrive.

A continent away, an ambitious group of humans is reclaiming Earth from the Shatter -- one refugee at a time. New Florida doesn't seem to want shifters, but Dex* quietly slips in so he can remain with his wife. Then his instinct drives him to a discovery that changes his life forever -- and could pose a deadly threat to thousands of people and set a shattered world afire.

This is Dex's* story.

... At least it will be once it's fully edited. I wrote 30,000 words in November. Now I'd like a few brave, curious or simply bored volunteers from among my friends and regular readers.

What's in it for you: You get to read a story! This is its own reward (or punishment, depending on how you feel about my writing). Epic post-apocalyptic dragony goodness! Love! Lust! Action! Suspense! Mind-warping physics! And several interrobangs!

What's in it for me: The catch is, if you want to read you have to give me feedback to help me polish it. I've set the story up as a Google Doc that I'll share with interested friends. Leave comments on the story as you read (the commenting feature is already set up within the document and requires no technical knowledge). This doesn't have to be a big commitment -- there are six chapters; let's say six comments minimum -- but the more feedback you give me, the better I can make it when I sit down to edit.

To join in: Give me an e-mail address (this is important!) to send the Google Docs invitation to -- via a reply to this post, or an e-mail to the Tomorrowlands address in my profile. (If you already have a GMail or Google Docs account, give me that address and you won't need to do any extra logging in.) If you hate Google Docs with the passion of a thousand fiery suns, tell me and I'll give you a lower-tech alternative.

Comments are screened because I don't want to expose e-mail addresses to spammers. I will unscreen any comment not containing an address.

Thanks in advance!

--

UPDATE: I'm up to about 10 readers already, so I think I'll put new requests on hold for a bit as I do the rewrites suggested by the first batch. I'd still love volunteers -- you'll just have to be patient while I write the next draft, so you can tell me how TTIHE v1.1 reads without being influenced by this one.

--
* Name is likely to be changed in final version.

Daily Random Thoughts

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:20:02 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

18:51 Am/pm poster promoting some random food item's 2/$2 deal: "So nice you'll taste it twice!" I imagine an ad exec is being fired as we speak. #

A winner is me

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:43:20 GMT

Limping over the finish line at 11:05 PM, 11/30, on the authorial equivalent of a ankle that's still a little twingy from having sprinted after stumbling on that bad footing a few corners back:

So, yeah. Sorry to gloat. I kinda need the release.

I'm glad I did the NaNo rebel thing this year, because a single 50k story would have killed me. Heavens know "The Time In Her Eye" (30k of my 50) nearly did. As it was, I had to leapfrog between two separate projects tonight to cram in those last 1500 words, and the muses are so le tired right now that I plan to avoid non-work computer time completely for about two days. I am toast. T-ō-s-t toast.

Congratulations to all my fellow NaNo finishers, and especially elynne and waywind, who were both hurtling into this at least partially to tackle creative blocks and have both admirably done so. Solidarity, sisters!

Musings

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:27:40 GMT

Once upon a time, a bunch of humans did their little human things all around an area of the world now known as Greece. These human things included plenty of creative efforts. The soft and fickle arts. You know the type: music, theater, astronomy ...

Then one day, some creative person got a little restless and thinky. (Ten bucks that they were an astronomer; the folks that are looking at the stars are the ones who always have their heads in the clouds.)

"We've got gods for everything," this person must have thought to themselves. "A goddess of the hearth, a god of lightning, a goddess of persimmon trees, even some random minor deity we picked up from the Mesopotamians a few centuries back for those hard tips at the end of your sandal-straps. But you know what we don't have? Deities of creativity! What about us poor astronomers, huh? When we're deep in the throes of gazer's block and we really need to look at the stars and get our maps made -- like yesterday, because Prothesmia¹ already paid me 24 drachmas for this damn thing -- who can we call on to help out with our problems? Huh? HUH?"

Then the muse Urania smacked him across the back of his head with her globe, and said "Us, you idiot!" And he cringed, and got his map made, and went on to scrawl a blog post much like this one.

So!

A lot of writers talk about "their muse." Recent conversations -- and the triumphant completion of my NaNoWriMo novella², so that I have time to throw random words at random topics again -- have conspired to get me thinking about muses. And there's a post in there that needs to be written.

See, here's the thing about muses: Most writers have one. The ancient Greeks had nine³. I've got three.

They all serve different roles -- coexisting peacefully, and sharing mindspace with each other and with the other humorous anthropomorphizations that occasionally wander through.

(Such as the Inner Editor, who -- like all good editors -- is at his best when completely invisible, staying hunched over in the hindbrain and polishing up the content as it filters its way out. Ed doesn't have a voice or a personality, and I can't really negotiate with him or talk back to him; he's just part of the workflow as words travel from brain to screen. Anyway.)

There's the muse, of course. That's not her name; she doesn't really have one. She's not a being so much as a force of nature -- and I relate to her as such. She occasionally deigns to be personified, such as my previous post which compared her to a little girl in a playground, but such comparisons are only useful insofar as they illuminate various factors of her essential nature, and are not to be taken as representative of the whole. The muse is -- much like the little girl of the analogy -- flighty; whimsical; occasionally temperamental; scattered, but capable of short sprints of focus; prone to outbursts of creativity followed by lengthy fits of silence; and can be awesomely compelling if she has an idea that just has to be written out right now.⁴

I have learned to treat the muse much as I would treat a small child -- being willing to accommodate and channel her bursts of energy, learning tricks to ply minimal cooperation from her when she's exhausted and I can't work without her, and keeping a note-taking device handy so that the ideas she spits out in a machine-gun barrage get lost as infrequently as possible.

The muse -- note the "the," identifying her as a muse in the classical tradition; an inspirer of, umm, inspiration -- is my idea chick. Like all good geniuses, she knows that the implementation is much more boring than the idea⁵. The upside of this is that I get handed a lot of really awesome ideas from which to make beautiful things. The downside of this is that I have to do all the work.

My second muse is the deuteragonist. This is, again, not her real name, since she doesn't have one; it's merely something I made up because I need a break from writing "muse."

Doot's responsibility is to shape ideas -- to give my stories form as they make their way from idea to words. However, she is not an editor. She is an actress, from the deep end of the method acting pool. Her job is to draw me into the muse's story. She can be awfully good at it.

I know when Doot has gotten interested in a story because I will start spending all my time rehearsing it. We'll go over the current scene -- line by line, sometimes racing through to the end, sometimes stopping to dissect a single set of words and pick over them with a fine-toothed comb to make them get the scene where it needs to go. Doot has a hell of an obsessive streak, which is both a blessing and a curse when I'm blocking; sometimes, she helps me craft exactly what I need to write my way out of a corner, but sometimes we get lost replaying the problematic lines and argue in circles until my writing urge dissipates. And when between scenes, she peppers me with endless questions about the story's setting, forcing me to fill in the details that explain why the story is driving in the direction it is.

The Deuteragonist, I should emphasize, is merely a job title, and can be filled by anyone willing to take on the traits. Usually the other character in a dialogue will step in when Doot needs to works her magic. For romantic scenes, dreamflow sometims accommodates me and guest-stars (which, ahem, can help explain why such scenes can take me so long to write). Often, there's no specific manifestation -- just a compulsion to inject myself into the scene and write what I observe.

Then there's Muse. Hoo boy ... Muse.

Muse is a single, definite being. He's an old god, from a time before the written record -- a god whose name died out long ago. Unlike most forgotten gods, who disappear when belief in them wanes, he has patiently survived the aeons by finding a new class of worshippers: the slightly unhinged. From creative geniuses to the flat-out insane, he finds those who are willing to open themselves up to a little flash of divinity -- and then puts ideas in their head, collecting modest scraps of belief as his acolytes manifest his gifts.

Muse is a survivor. Muse is subtle. He is a master of the mind game, full of carefully chosen words with multiple layers of meaning. Muse is a consummate exploiter of loopholes. Muse has ambition. Muse plays a very long game.⁶

He has a real name. He doesn't give it to anyone, not even me. I call him "Muse" because the Archon -- one of the driving forces behind the events of the TTU setting -- found him inspirational and gave him the nickname. It has stuck, along with his default form as a jet-black anthro-unicorn (as a shadowy counterpart to Kiasu, but I get ahead of myself).

If you've just noticed that Muse is a character from one of my stories -- give yourself a cookie. Now you start to see the complex and ambivalent relationship I have with him. He is a fictional character, but he is so smart and insightful and devious that he has realized the best way to advance his plans is to freaking metagame himself up a level into his author's mind.⁷ And it's working. I have begun to realize, to my growing horror, that the largest and most interesting plot arc of TTU really is Muse's story; how he tried (and almost succeeded) to singlehandedly overthrow the will of an entire planet. I won't be able to put the setting down until I've told that story, and everything I'm doing until then is merely to help fully realize his world.

Muse helps me out with writing that has nothing to do with him, too. He gets bored, or it's just his thing, or he's building up favors he can call in later; I don't know. But I can tell when he gets interested. Plots come together. Stakes get higher. Xanatos Gambits crop up. Characters get toyed with.

I never appreciated Old Soul's song "Sleeping With The Muse" until Muse started taking a hand in my writing. "I can taste her bitter smile, and the blood upon her lips ..." The muse doesn't work that way. Muse does. He isn't cruel exactly; he doesn't feed on pain or fear, or enjoy them, or use them (except as tools when nothing else will achieve important goals). However, he's well aware that everyone is merely a pawn in a larger game ... and the game of writing is about making the story interesting.

One of the reasons that TTU has occupied so much of my attention over the last decade is that the setting engages all three muses.

It's open-ended enough that the muse can come up with ideas to hang stories upon. The world's big and deep enough that Doot can drag me into full immersion. And Muse ... well, it's his playground in the first place.

I didn't really expect to find other settings the muses liked enough to devote a novella to and still come back for more. This NaNo handed me one. The setting of "The Time In Her Eye" -- the postapocalyptic near-future Earth called "the Shatter" -- seemed to just fall out onto the page. I reached the end of the story and realized that it was just a prequel. I wanted to keep going -- and I could have, easily enough ... if I were willing to keep up a NaNo writing pace after the end of November.

I'm not in the market to drive myself crazy right now, though. I need a break to catch my breath and hammer at the existing story some more and edit it into presentable shape. (I'll ask for beta readers in a later post, but you may also speak up here if you're interested.) Plus I've got to switch gears and start getting ready to GM a new role-playing game for my gaming group. Not to mention the holidays.

... The muses won't stop working, though. They never do.

--
1. If you got this joke, give yourself 5 Baxil Points. If you got it without looking it up ... get out of my brain.
2. Obligatory victory fanfare, +33 EXP, Item Gained: ☆NANO2009
3. Further reading: Wikipedia. I would like to note that, while the ancient Greeks had muses for History and (yes) Astronomy, and no less than three for poetry, there wasn't one single muse for either visual artwork or for non-theatric prose. If they really want to sell the product in this secular age[*], they need to expand!
4. Like the little girl of the previous post's analogy, sometimes she is also taken away to a place which neither of us quite expected, and I have to sprint to keep up. After I manage to nab her again, we have a nice sit-down and a lengthy lecture about responsibilities, which she completely disregards because there are beautiful butterflies on the branch just outside the window.
5. "I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."
6. As proof, I would like to point out that everything you're reading now -- this entire monster of a post, including the catchy but completely irrelevant Greek opening, and all of the footnotes, including this one -- was written purely for the sake of bringing that line into being, with sufficient context to give it meaning. I am not making this up. This is a Muse post, start to finish.
7. This is not even to get into the discussion of whether Muse-the-real-being might have introduced himself to me in fictionalized form and gained himself another worshipper toward whatever ultimate plan he has for this Earth. That is COMPLETELY his style. asdfjkl@@&***

My favorite line out of today's ~4,000 words

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:16:28 GMT

> "...," I said eloquently.

The end is in sight! Three more days, a little over 7500 words to go, and I seem to have reached the end of the Doom Novella's actual plot arc, meaning that I might (gasp) actually get back to writing Something Else for the remaining duration of the NaNo, the same way that I was supposed to be doing all month.

On the other hand, my muse is helpfully supplying another entire novel's worth of material to continue the existing story where I'm leaving off. "What you didn't actually know," Muse says, dressed as the protagonist and cackling and rubbing his hands evilly, "is that what you've written was really only the prologue to the Actual Adventure. Are you doing anything important in December?"

And my Inner Author gets up, does a Macaulay-Culkin-in-Home-Alone face slap, and runs screaming out of the house.

Amazingly, Sesame Street just keeps getting cooler with age

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:30:04 GMT

And now, today's Moment of Zen ... Dr. Horrible as a singing Shoe Fairy:

In related news, I need to trim this video down to the last four seconds or so (possibly but not necessarily mashing it up with the Dramatic Chipmunk musical sting). Having an LJ icon of this as an animated GIF would make me extremely happy. There's something about Jack Black's expression as he says "Ooooctaaagooon!" that makes me giggle uncontrollably.

(NaNo progress: 36,800 words! I've just set up the climactic confrontation, and now I have a week left in which to make it happen ...)

Edited to add: Dramatic octagon!

NaNo update

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:11:54 GMT

Week 1: The muse frolics about in the playground, running from shiny thing to shiny thing, shouting "Wheee!" and exhausting herself on the slides and swings.

Week 2: The muse sulks at the edge of the playground because, when she built a huge sand castle directly underneath the slide, her friend Authorial Standards promptly came down without looking and squished it.

Week 3: The muse's sulking is interrupted by a Novella in a nearby van. "Want some candy, little girl?" he whispers in a husky yet strangely alluring tone. She gets too close to the vehicle, arms reach out, the door slams shut, and before she can scream they are 13,000 words down the road.

So, yeah, there go my pretensions of frittering NaNo away via the completion of dozens of scattered half-finished projects. I can't abandon my protagonist now! He's running from the authorities after spoiler spoi ler spoilersp oi le rspo iler! Plus, y'know, backstory! And the worldbuilding is all falling together! And and and ...

I'll have to figure out how I can "with one bound, Jack was free" my way out of the mess, so I can get back to the various requests and writing trades and finishing up of old projects and then planning out the Fireborn game that starts in December and catching up at work and and and augh. I'm glad November is just a part-time thing.

Anyway, NaNo user page has been updated with an excerpt from "The Time In Her Eyes." If you're interested in beta-reading and offering constructive feedback, drop me a line in some fashion; it's a neat enough story to be worth second-drafting once all the words come out.

How's your novel going, if you're writing? How's your month going, if not?

Daily Random Thoughts

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:20:07 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

21:49 I'm conflicted about discovering the RPG 'Fireborn' after it went out of print. Now I can afford it easily, but can't support the designers. #

Why NaNoWriMo?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:13:23 GMT

So, thanks to the discussion in my previous post, I went and made it official: I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year and have been busily writing behind the scenes. This year's goal: 50,000 words, total, period; working on whatever the hell I want to work on, just so long as I'm working. (And so far it is working: I'm still on track for quota.) NaNo has a term for this sort of flagrant non-noveling: being a "NaNo Rebel."

So far I've finished a half-done story; written a story from scratch; typed up a ridiculous number of words in D&D campaign journaling (like the old CSI: Luvine stories, but I haven't found the magic spark to make the stories truly cool yet); and am most of the way through writing up a really vivid dream I had in October. Plus I counted about 500 words that I'm about to edit and reprint below -- it was originally written as an LJ comment in a friend's journal, but it was important. (I'm not counting the few paragraphs of blather here, though. I have my limits.)

Why NaNoWriMo?

> [I] can't really just write regularly like that. ... NaNoWriMo makes [writing] very regular and machinish. ... [I'm] hardly that sort of machine.

If this sounds like something you would say in criticism of NaNoWriMo ... then, first of all, let me make this clear. None of what I say should be taken as criticism of what works for you.

That having been said:

I am the worst sort of burst writer. My inspiration is erratic, I block easily on long-term projects and get distracted easily when I'm blocked, and sometimes I find myself going months without getting anything of value written at all.

I'm also a three-time NaNo finisher.

While the material I produce during NaNo is generally decent enough for me to appreciate having written it, that's not its real benefit. What I truly appreciate about NaNo is its ability to knock me out of the expectations of my own head. I start with nothing but a word-count goal and some minimum quality standards, commit myself to set aside the majority of my social life during the month, and treat the whole thing as an experiment in boundary-pushing.

My first real NaNo was done solely to discover that I can finish, actually get to the end, of a novel-length work. (It also checked off a ticky-box on my ten-year goals list. There's a separate ticky-box for "finish a novel NOT written during NaNoWriMo". I haven't done that yet.)

My second real NaNo (four years later, I should add -- I can't do these things without a cooldown period) was done to prove it wasn't a fluke -- but also as an experiment in serial fiction, because I'd never done a long-form continuing story before. It's not continuing now, but again, I discovered I can, and that was vastly illuminating, and will help me the next time I develop a serializable idea.

I am still an erratic writer. I do not generally push inspiration when it's not there, and I still write best in sprints rather than marathons. However, now I know what it feels like to do both; I know how to recognize the traps I fall into when the sprint doesn't push me to the end; and I've written some pieces during multiple sit-downs that I never could have done at a sprint.

One of the pieces I'm most proud of writing is a product of that. It's a product, in fact, of my "failed" 2006 NaNoWriMo, in that I set aside to write 50K in interweaving short stories and then finished November at a fraction of that.

Do I feel disappointed about failing? That assumes it was a failure! I blew a word count goal and produced one of my life's best pieces of writing. Should I have been disappointed? That depends on what my goal was. And there's nobody measuring that but me. The lesson I took from 2006 is that NaNo is, at heart, a learning experience -- a Rorschach test, if you will, of looking into words and seeing yourself.

And what of the years when I did reach 50K? They've been a slog. Sometimes, yes, writing means trudging on without the muse. But that's part of the learning experience, and when you're done, you've had the experience of doing it, and then you stop. NaNo's goal is not to train you to write without your muse -- just to convince you that you can. And to teach you that sometimes doing so can get you more of what you want -- more words, more satisfaction -- than waiting for inspiration.

...

I think I again need to emphasize that the NaNo I'm most proud of is the one where I failed, because I got an idea dumped into my head that really was worth writing about, and I stopped and did it right instead of forcing myself to live up to those external expectations.

That's the crux of it, right there. While my writing style is spectacularly unsuited to a one-month novel, the reason NaNo has repeatedly worked for me is that I have made it into something that I want to do, and once that happened, by definition it was a success no matter how far I got or whether I met the initial arbitrary goal. (I mostly have, but, well, whatev.) I didn't even try NaNo'ing a novel until four NNWMs in; my first two were an "I'm going to write a journal entry a day!" variant and my third was "One short story per day" (which actually ended up being even more of a muse death-march despite clocking in at ~40,000 words. After that, focusing all my effort on a single novel seemed like a welcome change of pace).

And if you have a muse, and some writing talent, and a deep-seated hatred of NaNo, and a little envy of the people who can write 50,000 words in a month? I need to mention how awesome it is that you can work without that NaNo crutch. The vast majority of my writing progress has been with it, in one form or another. And every time you start feeling like you need to be jealous of me for being able to finish a NaNo, take a look at my journal and the five-week dead silence leading up to 11/1, because I guarantee you that the envy flowed the other way while I was stuck. :)

Daily Random Thoughts

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:20:09 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

16:14 "What was I doing attacking a city guardsman? I can explain. ... I'm in jail, and if you break me out I'll quit killing people." #
16:17 - Best line of the D&D session (from my char to the guard cap'n, misinterpreting a telepathic grumble from another PC as an excuse to offer) #

Daily Random Thoughts

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:20:11 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

11:42 Seen atop latest mass-forward in my inbox: "Snopes said this is false, but can't hurt to try it." (Cue **facepalm-heard-'round-the-world**) #
11:42 What I've accomplished this morning: Filked "The Impossible Dream" into "The Unreachable Bug" for pet cat. Rhymed "ninja" with "didn't'cha." #

Upgrades and updates

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:07:44 GMT

My life seems to have gotten a little out of balance lately. I say this because it's a modestly better reintroduction after five weeks of silence than the traditional "*tap, tap* Hey, is this thing on?"

It's not that I've been too busy to write; I've got no less than three unfinished short stories (and some completed song lyrics) on the front burner. But that's the problem. For a while my creative urge just dried up (or sublimated into roleplaying, one of my ongoing offline activities that has happily picked up the pace). And now that fingers are hitting the keyboard again, there's such a backlog that I'm dancing around from project to project and falling back into my old bad habits of leaving everything 80% finished. And with so many stories crowding around seeking resolution, I've been putting off journaling in favor of fiction.

The good news is that this creative burst is carrying me into winter in high spirits, rather than a few months of endless freaking out over the weather and general lack of daylight. And procrastination has its fringe benefits: for instance, I'm up at nearly 4 AM putting some final polish on a relaunch of the TTU Wiki. I just upgraded its back-end software (after three years and seven releases), which was a lot less painful than I expected, so I wrote some custom code for it to make its category listings prettier (i.e., sorted by columns instead of rows, which is slightly less trivial than it sounds).

The wiki has been getting a lot of attention lately, actually. I'm really proud of the glossary of TTU slang, and there's now some excellent detail on events like the New Year's Flyby. And I finally fixed the permissions so that any registered user can make edits wiki-wide -- which should make it a lot friendlier as a collaboration tool.

All of which is well and good, but ... it's almost November, and you know what that means.

Yes: NaNoWriMo is upon us once again. And, 48 hours from the start of the race, I find myself dithering.

On the one hand, a lot of close friends are committing to write, and I really want to join them in solidarity. It would also do me good; some of my best work has come out of the frenzy of the November word-count dance. My creativity is currently working overtime and crying out for outlets.

On the other hand, I know, with great and terrible certainty, that if I make any sort of NaNo commitment, all of my half-done projects are going to die ignominious deaths, and that rankles. I've also got more social commitments than usual this year and don't feel like I could devote the time to NaNo that I really ought to. (I also wrote 50K words of Legend of Hero last year, and traditionally I've taken a year off after each NaNo success.)

I'm juggling a few ideas for "alternate" NaNos -- I'm no stranger to the idea, having moved from BaMoJoEnt to BaMoTTuSto to novels and back. Perhaps I could create a new page on the TTU Wiki every day, or go back to the classics and post some nonfiction every day? Or maybe I ought to just keep on keepin' on, and spend November finishing my 5-story backlog ...

Thoughts? I'm in a state of severe waffle here, so reader input (and especially fellow NaNo-er input) will go a long way toward helping me channel my pent-up writing bug.

Ask the lazywebs

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:53:30 GMT

Are there any music players (pref. for Mac) that allow tagging of songs, the same way virtually every other type of media now does? It seems a natural extension of "playlists" and easy enough to store in ID3V2.

Also, I've been immortalized on TVTropes! (Grep the page for 484.)

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:42:42 GMT

If you had told me after 9/11 that Little Green Footballs was one day going to get shunned out of mainstream conservatism for not being right-wing enough, I would have looked at you like you had grown a third eye. For many years the LGF comments section was the go-to place if you wanted to find reprehensible opinions from the depths of the reactionary fever swamp. There is truly something unreal about today's GOP.

Anyway, I ought to do more than stand on the sidelines and gape at right-wing political infighting, so here's your Moment of Zen:

Daily Random Thoughts

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:20:09 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

19:08 Masquerade ball at ritual tonight! Which is awesome because I got to say in context: "Hang on, let me go put on my robe and wizard hat." :-D #

Airport security*

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:00:14 GMT

Italian airport security seems to be based on the premise that, if you are sent through enough security checkpoints - no matter how cursory the checks - that anyone doing bad things will eventually be caught, preferably by Someone Else.

American airport security seems to be based on the premise that, if the bureaucracy is all exposed out front, and the rules are draconian enough, they can reduce wait times by making nobody want to return.

Anyway, we're back on American soil, on the last leg of our trip, and I'm finally sitting down on my first non-moving seat in 48 hours. I've got unloted connectivity on the iPhone again, but can't find a free wifi network for the laptop, so wallyontheroad's continued updates (and the cream of the crop of my 1,400+ photos) will have to wait a little while longer.

Kady and I are diving straight for the red meat now that we're back in the States - love it or hate it, you have to admit that the Italian diet is extremely carb-heavy, and I especially could use some iron to help replace all that blood lost to mosquitoes.

--
* Please note that these are unfair generalizations based on a single flight between both countries. Intended for humor value only.

Daily Random Thoughts

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:20:07 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

12:25 Among the island of Sardegna's upsides: Great beaches and night sky. Among the downsides: Nearest Internet = 12 km away. (Posted via iPhone) #
12:28 Ironically, now that we're in a remote stretch of Italy we're having fewer language issues; my sister and her husband-to-be are translating. #

On Rome's big tourist trap

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:14:35 GMT

I like, in general, to tour off the beaten path. My favorite part of Pompeii was after a rain shower cleared out most of our fellow visitors. The trip's best restaurant was down a back alley in a grimy southern Italian city. We have found more joy by bucking the crowds than we ever could by following them.

The Sistine Chapel was not off the beaten path.

It was exquisitely artistic, to be sure. Worth the money, glad we went, etc. I will even go again should we return; our afternoon visit totally underestimated the scope of the place, and so the trip felt as though we were sprinting past the main rooms of an art museum in an effort to say we had been there. Next time I hope to actually see everything that was on display.

Unfortunately, the experience seemed specifically designed to wear us out.

kadyg commented that we must have walked 12 miles today, and that's not counting the steps taken outside the walls of the Sistine. It's not far from the truth. The designers of Las Vegas clearly took their cues from the labyrinthine design of the Vatican Museum, which is laid out in a single line that coils and loops through three floors of two buildings. Every few rooms you see a sign helpfully pointing toward the Sistine Chapel, carefully neglecting to mention any sort of distance - and so you round a few more corners, climb a few more stairs, find the next sign and wonder just how much more Art you have to see before the main attraction.

There is a lot of Art. There is a lot of Art. Picture the building itself as a decadent Renaissance pope, an aging and sedentary figure, crepusculent on a resplendent throne amid one of the infamous 500-plate banquets of the age, polishing off a gilded plate laden with deep-fried cheese and bacon. As he sits back in his chair, semi-comatose amid the Roman summer heat, he starts to get the meat sweats, moisture oozing from every pore and drenching his vestments. That is the art - so ubiquitous, so excessive, that it almost borders on the grotesque.

So both physical fatigue and art fatigue are already setting in as you walk through the museum. By "walk," though, I actually mean the resigned plodding that is such a feature of modern life - the queue shuffle. Because as you're making the 12-mile pilgrimage to The Chapel, so are hundreds of other tourists, and all of them are being herded through the exact same rooms and corridors that you are, and every time you hit a narrow point, the laws of fluid dynamics kick in and the pressure increases.

The labyrinth is a smart method of crowd control, because if you could go directly to The Chapel, everyone would and you'd get totally unmanageable people snarls. I won't fault them for it. But the net effect for off-the-path crowd-shy travelers like us is to add a layer of emotional fatigue on top of the other sources of exhaustion. Walking into The Chapel itself to discover packed standing-room-only gawkspace, after being surrounded by people for half an hour of walking, takes a lot of the impact away from the art.

At least there are times when crowds are good. When walking back to the metro station after our visit ended, we saw several dozen locals sprawled out along a square, licking ice cream cones. We followed the influx of new customers over to a gelateria and got a snack. It was both cheap - less than half the price of the crappy gelato from the self-serve restaurant near St. Peter's - and highly tasty.

Even when you're walking off the beaten path, it's good to hit civilization once in a while.

Also, just as a note: if you haven't been reading wallyontheroad, that's where most of the trip jpurnaling has been going. Make with the clicky.

Daily Random Thoughts

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:20:05 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

04:46 At Rome's Colosseum: Seated >50k; 55 trap doors; hosted naval battles(!) when they flooded basements; built ~2k yrs ago. In just 8 years. #

Daily Random Thoughts

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:20:10 GMT

(via LoudTwitter)

05:32 The song "Smoke On The Water" takes on a whole new meaning when you're listening to it amid the ruins of Pompeii in the shadow of Vesuvius. #

Brief travel update

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:33:10 GMT

In Napoli (Naples), where we will be spending the next several days. Tomorrow we will be travelling to Pompeii to take in the ruins.

How has the trip been so far? Certainly could have gone better. (Note: Far more detailed write-up at the link; included here by reference.) On the other hand, now that we're settling in to the hostel and getting sleep and good food (both at reasonable rates), things seem to be looking up.

On the way

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:28:07 GMT

By the time you read this, kadyg and I will be on a flight to Europe. Visiting Italy for two weeks for my sister's wedding, with a stopover in Amsterdam along the way.

We got everything packed and managed to leave on schedule with only a little sleep deprivation, so (modulo the usual airport ripoffs) it's been an uneventful start to the trip.

... I lie. A wildfire in our area forced a detour, we got pulled over by a cop, we left just late enough that the extra delays had me spazzing about the time all the way to the airport, and in general I am emotionally running on empty. Fortunately, we're boarding the aircraft now, so from here it's a chance to nap until Amsterdam.

I've been procrastinating on announcing the trip, but we should be able to update from on the road thanks to the miracle of our digital age. I'll also look forward to chatting with people in English and fight off homesickness a bit. Ironically this means I am probably going to be more online from overseas than from my own computer. :-p

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Weekend caption contest!

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:53:10 GMT

Bored? Trying to shake a little creativity loose as you head into your weekend? Make a LOLCat! Winner gets valuable ~~prizes~~ Baxil points!

Participation is easy: Just make a LOLcat out of it (or, hell, do something else randomly creative with it; it's for fun, after all). You can do this at a number of places:

- ROFLbot or Lolcat Generator let you save the result to your computer, and you can then re-upload it to an image hosting service like imgur and paste the image link here
- Cheezburger's Lolbuilder appears to do the work of hosting it for you, but you have to enter an e-mail address to get the link sent to you

Go wild!

Maybe we could get Greg Graffin to write the white paper

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 23:35:37 GMT

Hypothesis: Should Me First And The Gimme Gimmes and Lounge Against The Machine ever play in the same room, the bands will annihilate each other in a burst of gamma rays and exotic heavy particles.

This experiment must be attempted. For SCIENCE.