Couldn’t follow it well enough on Twitter (or, come to that, Facebook)?
Couldn’t follow it on a newsreader?
Couldn’t go to the website and read it one month at a time?
Fiiiiine.
Just for you (yes, you), I used my infinite internet powers and commanded Tweetbook to grab the whole “part one” one of the Adrift story and munge it into a single, somewhat ugly PDF. (Said document will, I should point out, effectively act as my outline for my NaNoWriMo project this year.)
The page numbering is screwed up, and it ain’t pretty, but it’s all in one place, all one story, in all it’s original Twitter-formatted glory, for your leisure scanning.
Adrift: Tweet-Book. Assume the CC license for this version is NC-SA-Attribution. Don’t be a dick.
The Frankfurt TOC (Tools of Change) conference took place today, as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair (going on this week). Like the TOC Conference earlier this year, FrankfurtTOC had a lot of folks there twittering the coolest ideas, giving a kind of stop-motion summary of the talks taking place.
What follows are the posts I saw that intrigued me in one way or another.
ON PUBLISHING
Think digital first, print maybe.
Focus on your verticals – the reason why genre fiction works in digital.
Digital change is completely changing the publishing industry. Nobody has THE RIGHT to survive.
Publishers/Writers should create a life-long URL for each work “don’t be fooled into allowing others control of your metadata”
ON DRM
DRM: “Retailers want to own the customer.”
The use of “unprotected” to describe DRM-free is very objectionable. Why not “unrestricted?” @doctorow
Any time someone mentions “interoperability” and “DRM” in the same breath, they’re engaged in wishful thinking. @doctorow
If DRM is always broken, in what sense does it “protect”? Restricts use, restricts interop, doesn’t protect.
ON AVAILABILITY
Let readers buy the book [as a bundle in all possible formats] & allow the reader to choose the format they want. (I just suggested that like… two weeks ago.)
…making “All books available to All”… one of the most ambitious ventures in the book industry. http://bit.ly/bIW1H
ON THE FUTURE
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. @v_clayssen
Substantial increase in Android Market. Looking at graph suggests in 2 years will have caught up with Apple app store
“Books: the fastest growing category in iTunes AppStore.” @innOva
My impression:
Publishing, at the moment, is stuck. There’s lots of talk about how publishers need to get with it, and where publishing is now, and what they don’t want to do to solve their problems, but there’s no grand solution proposed.
It seems that, like displaying Christmas decorations on prominent end-caps in grocery stores, people start talking about NaNoWriMo earlier and earlier every year. Not quite sure what’s up with that; wherefore art the joy of going in with no prep (no decision, in fact, about participation until the 11th hour)?
Anyway, all that chitter chatter got me thinking about it a little earlier than I might otherwise. (Read: before October 30th.) So, here’s what I’m planning:
I’m doing it. Obviously. Duh.
I believe I’m going to be working from an outline.
Kinda.
I’m actually going to take the twitter-posts for “Chapter 1” of Adrift, and write that as a full-blown story with, like, dialogue and stuff.
Interspersed with the action from Adrift, there will be a Princess Fairy Tale, I think.
This will let me flesh out a lot of stuff, and write some things that are going on my head with the story that I simply don’t have space to write out in once-a-day Twitter posts.
I avoids me wasting several hours every day figuring out what I should be writing that day.
If I write all of 500 words for each of the twitter posts that comprise Adrift Chapter One, that’s about 100k words.
I’m probably going to write it in WriteMonkey, because WriteMonkey is awesome.
I’ll be backing it up using Dropbox, so I can work on it pretty much anywhere. Might do weekly exports from WriteMonkey into OpenOffice as well, which is differently awesome.
I don’t know how/when/where I’ll be sharing this out for people to partake in during the month.
ONE idea I have it to read the daily output aloud and post said reading as a podcasty thing here on the blog. I’d like thoughts on that.
Somewhere*, sometime**, D was talking about writing things and said something like:
The only scene in a story with no conflict in it should be the epilogue at the end of the story.
I know that isn’t it exactly, but that’s the gist of it; when you’re telling a story, scenes should have conflicts in them, or they shouldn’t… you know… be scenes.
De also pointed out*** that you can cheat this a little bit in a scene without any obvious conflict by then revealing “Yeah, while it looked like Mom and Daughter were have a nice happy cup of tea for six pages, Mom had ACTUALLY CALLED THE INSANE ASYLUM TO TURN IN HER DAUGHTER!” DUN Dun dunnnn.
A good trick (one which I’ve used), but it doesn’t change the basic idea, which is (put into my own words):
Never stop fucking with the main character.
Yeah, yeah, “show, don’t tell” works, because if you are legitimately trying to “show” as you write a scene you’ll instinctively put in some kind of thing worth showing. A conflict. There you go. You’ve done it.
(Tangential thought I just had: This may be be a legitimate means of separating “porn” from “erotica”. Erotic has sex scenes with conflict. Porn just has scenes with people fucking. Maybe? Hmm.)
Now, none of this is particular epic storytelling trickery; people get this. People mention this kind of thing all the time.
What people are only slowly starting to get is how it applies to roleplaying games.
Let me tell you about this guy I know. Plays in my Wednesday game. Like most of the people who come in and out of the Wednesday game, he’s also runs games. As a person-who-runs-games, he has a bit of a reputation. A Nom-de-GM, even: people call him Weeda the Evil.
He’s earned this title and the attendant rep via a pretty simple means and method – he rakes his player’s characters over the coals. I’m pretty sure he used to give out certificates to anyone who died in a game he was running. There may have even been t-shirts.
He is, without a doubt, one of the most popular GMs in the Denver area. Probably, if you’re a gamer (or a reader, or an author) I don’t need to explain why.
…*crickets*…
BUT JUST IN CASE I DO, it goes something like this: no one ever gets the feeling from this guy that he’s screwing with you just to screw with you — he’s screwing with you because you’re the Big Cheese, the Main Character, the Hero. He believes you can take it, and he’ll Test to Destruction to prove his point.
He has a similar rule to the one I blocked up above. It is (not surprisingly) more concise.
Heroes Suffer.
Sometimes, your heroes will not appreciate your exciting plot twists.
Yeah.
The thing with RPGs is that, for a really really long time, the only tool that GMs had at their disposal was their own sense of drama and their desire to make sure the Hero Suffers. Take another guy without that sense and you have a lot of dead, boring fights. Take a different guy who only gets that you’re screwing with the characters, and not where that motivation comes from, and you just have some dick GM that everyone hates playing with.
(Take a writer who misinterprets this sort of guideline, or misreads what it is about one of their successful stories that makes people happy, and you get someone who thinks “the key to a successful story is doing horrible shit to my main character”, which somewhat misses the difference between ‘introducing conflict’ and ‘torture’. I’m looking at you, Vorkosigan series!)
Sometimes you just have to punch your favorite character right in the junk. That's fine. But it's way more interesting when you give a character a choice between junk-punching and something else, and they CHOOSE junk-punching.
Luckily, there’s a lot of great games out there that are figuring this out and helping GMs find that sweet spot between “I want to be fair and impartial” and “I need to put you through the wringer or you’re going to be bored.” It started in the good old days with GURPS and Champions and their Dependent NPC (8), but that sort of thing never really worked they way it should. Sorcerer figured it out and introduced “bangs” that pretty much made all of the GMs prep a process of building a list of tough questions the players had to answer. That was good. Primetime Adventures actually breaks if you don’t throw tough conflicts at the main characters and get the Fan Mail flowing.
And it’s gotten better. Fate/Spirit of the Century has the whole Fate Point/Aspect compels that give you a great Devil’s Deal kind of thing to use, but for my money, the best stuff out there right now that does this is Mouse Guard and Danger Patrol. I won’t get into they “whys” of this right now, because this is not the gaming blog, but MG pretty much builds an entire game around “Heroes Suffer”, and Danger Patrol is built around the idea that the only way you can help your fellow players out is by making the situation they’re in more and more Dangerous (potentially creating new dangers everyone has to deal with).
GM: “Okay, Tim is going to jump from one flying car to the other. That’s super dangerous, and worth some extra dice, but what other dangers are out there he doesn’t know about?”
Kate: “There’s a school bus coming the other way, and he’s going to force it to swerve into oncoming traffic.”
GM: “Okay… bonus dice.”
Chris: “And it’s full of kids.”
GM: “Another bonus die.”
Tim: “Umm…”
Kate: “And puppies! It’s ‘bring your puppy to school day!”
GM: “Bonus dice!”
Tim: *Groans*
NOTE: This conversation actually happened in a Danger Patrol game, just not mine – it was Brennan! (Thank you Brennan for helping me find that lost bit of info.
The result of a escalating series of Dangers in Danger patrol.
For the longest time, I had to remember to bring what I knew about conflicts from writing, and try to apply that to games I ran.
Now? I borrow tricks from the games I play and use them when I’m writing.
* – On her blog.
** – I couldn’t find the post.
*** – I couldn’t find this post, either.
