Category: Writing

Vocabulary Words We Learned by Playing Dungeons & Dragons.

As I ponder this, I have to share a simple fact — for all that I rarely play DnD (and honestly liked the original redbox rules more than the 3rd edition), that game and others written by Gary led me to some of the most enjoyable moments in my life, bar none. He was an inspiration and a muse and someone who, if nothing else, encouraged my creativity and imagination and gave me a space in which to dream.
Every day (and for the last twenty-seven years), I play games directly descended from his creations, or play around with them in my mind; he was to gaming what Tolkien was to fantasy: a recreation of the genre, a defining touchstone to which all descendants are, favorably or not, either compared or contrasted.
My family has always very supportive of whatever kind of creative activities I wanted to dive into (even when it involved hours and hours of tinkering with ‘that damn game’ in high school), but Gary was family too, of a sort; a kind of great-uncle I only spoke to via wordy, typed letters — gruff and sometimes off-putting, but the sole adult who went beyond ‘supportive’ said ‘let me show you how *I* create things.’
Appropriately, he will be mourned and missed.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the back end of this site, and while it feels to ME as though I’ve been doing my due diligence on the entry-writing front, I realized today that from everyone else’s point of view, I’ve been disappointingly silent. Let me fix that.
I’d like to talk about happiness, and just to be doubly pedantic, I’ll start with a quote

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.
– Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, verse 29

A couple years ago, I found myself in a hell of a situation; at the bottom of a pretty deep hole I’d both dug and climbed into, and most of the trouble came from one bad habit that affected most everything I did —
I was expending tremendous effort avoiding things that (as I saw it) were taking time away from the ‘good’ and ‘fun’ things I wanted to do instead.
The abject stupidity of the situation was that these distractions were, in fact, core parts of my life; not only that, but elements that I’d actually gone to great lengths to include in my life. Shopping for groceries, working on the lawn, shampooing the carpet, walking the dogs, doing dishes, doing laundry, just straightening up and dusting — what I realized (slowly) is that these aren’t chores to be avoided — they’re some of the many ways you get to spend time with your family and friends. They are how you take care of the life you tried so hard to build in the first place; push them away and and you’re pushing your life away.
I’d like to think I’m getting to a point where I remember that you have to embrace the things to which you have, over the course of your life, committed your time — take them on, take them over, and find the good in them. From pushing your (possibly screaming) child in a grocery cart, cooking a messy breakfast on a Sunday morning, to re-sodding your sodding yard…
That’s you. That’s the life you built. That’s where your happiness is.

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Now, am I happy all the time? Of course not. Kate will confirm that, if nothing else, I’m a real bear to be around when I first get home from work in the afternoon; I don’t know if it’s low blood sugar or bad traffic or what, but when I walk in the door it’s all I can do not to actually growl at people. (I’m much better after I’ve had dinner, though, so maybe it is partly a diet thing. Hmm.)
BUT, I’ve improved my mood in a more general way by taking that attitude of ’embrace the life you’ve made’ and expanding it to sort of accept the things that happen, even if you didn’t expect them to happen.
And by “accept” I mean “roll with it” not “lie down and take it”; I’m not suggesting that if someone steals you car, you should smile and say “Oh, I’m sure whoever took it needed it more than me.” By all means you should contact police, file reports, and do everything you can to get your car back, but do it with a smile. If you can’t manage that, try a smirk. If you can’t manage that, at least do everything you can not to be a twisted ball of impotent rage.
Twisted balls of impotent rage get headaches and have back problems. They don’t sleep well. Avoid that.

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” – Lao Tzu

Here’s an example from my current day-to-day.
I’m in the market for a new job. I’m employed, but it’s a contract situation and the company I’m with has a set limit on how long a contract employee can stay with them before we have to spend some quality time apart, and I’ll pass that limit in a month or so. So I’ve got my little feelers out, and sending out resumes, and having phone calls with various recruiters and what have you. It’s not a great job market right now, but it’s not exactly a wasteland, either.
This would be (and sometimes still is) a typical time for me to get stressed and depressed and angry. I mean, look at the timing: it’s all going to come to a head right around the time of the wedding, where I should really and truly have OTHER THINGS ON MY MIND, right?
Then I get a conversation like the one this morning:
Recruiter: “Hi Doyce, we have a job for you. These are the requirements.”
Me: “Wow. If you reformat it, that could be my resume.”
Recruiter: “Really? You have experience with all these platforms and products?”
Me: “Yep. And then some.”
Recruiter: “Great. How about you send me your payscale and current location and a few other things?”
Me: [Does so. The job is in Michigan, so I note in my location that relocation is not an option. I boldface that part, and note that I can travel back and forth a bit, depending on pay, to meet with people who need to meet me, but again, relocation is not an option.]
[phone rings a few minutes later]
Recruiter: “Hi Doyce. We think your perfect for the job, and the payscale is definitely doable.”
Me: “Great.”
Recruiter: “Your start time is very good for us. The position is 8 to 5 out in [Location], Michican.”
Me: “If you check the message I sent you a few minutes ago, you notice that I mentioned that relocating is not an option.”
Recruiter: “You can’t work out there for five days a week and fly home on the weekends?”
Me: “No. I don’t normally like getting into personal details of this nature, but I’m a parent and I have obligations that don’t allow me to be gone that long on a regular basis.”
Recruiter: [Insert a number of suggestions that amount to “but can’t you do it anyway?”]
Me: “No. Sorry, it sounds like a great position, but no.”
(The poor recruiter is, I think, so used to people who are so desperate to find a job that they will agree to anything that they truly do not know what to say when someone says “sorry, that won’t work for me.” They should babysit a toddler a few nights a week — that would help.)
[About an hour passes.]
[Phone rings.]
Recruiter: “Hi Doyce. I talked with my manager…”
Me: “Yes?”
Recruiter: “We decided it would be possible for us to raise the pay rate to [20% increase], if you can work full time, on site.”
Me: “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought you might be calling to tell me that an remote work arrangement was possible. The pay you’re offering is…”
Recruiter: “Tempting?”
Me: “No… I’m sorry, it’s not at all tempting, because what you’re asking for is simply impossible. I was going to say it was a very kind compliment.”
Recruiter: “… Doyce, can you help me understand how we can make a remote working arrangement function?”
Me: “Actually, I’m going to turn that question around a bit. I’ve looked at the job requirements and know the work well enough to know I can do it from here. The job itself mentions working with ‘virtually no supervision’ in — and this is an interesting choice of words — ‘an ambiguous environment.’ Can you tell me anything about the job that really requires the applicant work on-site, full-time, other than ‘that’s what is normally done?'”
No. No they couldn’t.
We said our goodbyes. They’ve called back twice to raise their offer. It’s getting more and more difficult to keep the chuckle out of my voice when I tell them that the pay is not the problem, nor is it the solution. (Though it does annoy me that they were clearly low-balling the initial offer by a considerable sum.)
The thing is, I think you have to find this kind of thing funny. You have to breathe through it when the conversation gets to be too repetitive. You have to accept that this is the way that life is going right now, and if you are going to live your life, than this is it — this is your life, good or bad, difficult or easy.
And if everything went exactly the way you planned, you wouldn’t have anything to write about.

Having made it over a major hurdle on the track to getting your work published, I thought I’d send a secret communication out to let people know what it’s like working on your book with an agent.
That was the idea, anyway — problem is, I’m not sure that I have that much to tell.
Yes, I’m working with my agent on my book, but I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion…
… wait for it …
I’m starting to think they all do things differently.
Now, the (wonderful) person I’m working with does a lot of the sorts of things that I had compartmentalized as “editor stuff.” Some of her feedback is along the ‘agenty’ lines of “the scene on page 8 feels kind of off” or “would Joe really ask her that?”, but just as many of her notes are detail-things like “you’re missing a ‘the’ on page 48” and “you switch to the wrong verb tense in the scene with the giant chicken.”
Now, I might begin to believe that I’d simply misunderstood what it is that an agent does for their author — I’m a tyro in many things literary; it wouldn’t be that big of a surprise — except for the fact that I work around (if not with) another agent, and her approach involves feedback like:
“What if the main character were japanese instead of romanian?” or…
“What if they were in high school instead of the CIA?”
Big picture stuff, if you see what I mean. Agenty-stuff.
I’m told that another agent I know doesn’t do either of those things, and approaches her job as something between a therapist and a legal representative the mentally unfit.
Are any of them wrong? Are any of them, in some strange way, not agents?
I don’t know. I don’t know if I ever will. I’m glad I found the one I did, and I think that will have to be enough.

I apologize, because this is going to be a bit long, and it really should be about a play I performed in high school, and it isn’t.

When someone asks me what I’m writing, now that I’ve had some time (and years) to actually think about it, I call it magical realism (except that it isn’t magical realism by some literary grognard’s definition of the term — it doesn’t obey the ‘rules’ of the official definition, but more the mindset). I don’t think of it as a genre as much as mode of writing — creating a story with two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the supernatural. Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys – with Fat Charlie and Spider representing the two views – is a really easy example, but there are many others.

Writing that kind of story — trying to — has a ‘gotcha’ that causes me a fair bit of stress during rewrites. I’m not going to be able to sum this up in a very tidy package, but here goes:

There are two ways you can approach the Fantastic in a story, regardless of the setting: there’s the ‘magical’ way and the ‘fantasy’ way.

The fantasy way is the most common, I think; especially in any book series where you learn more and more about the world in which the story is set. Basically, there is magic or something supernatural in the world, and as we spend more time in that place, more and more of the ‘system’ behind the magic is explained, until we know all the rules. There are lots and lots of examples of this, but Tolkien started it, and it’s carried into any number of series. Laurel K. Hamilton is one. Tamora Pierce. Harry Potter, certainly. Charles de Lint, sadly. George R. R. Martin, happily. In short, it’s a world with special rules, but once those rules are understood, the world works in predictable ways; what I think of as the Arthur C. Clarke version of magic. (To my mind, this often takes the ‘fantastic’ out of the fantasy, but that’s my own problem with some writers, and only really a problem when they mean not to do it and do it anyway.)

The magical way doesn’t quite explain how things work. Fairy tales are like this. Things aren’t predictable, and the magic isn’t ever quite explained. Some things are the way they are because that’s how they are. You don’t question it; it just is. There is a kind of childlike acceptance of the unreal here; ‘superstitious peasant’ reasoning. Neil Gaiman does this very well, as does Holly Black some of the time.
That kind of magical thinking is what I strive for.

Please understand: I love a good fantasy. Nothing wrong with them at all… unless that isn’t what you wanted to write. Fantasy for the sake of fantasy is great fun. Fantasy masquerading as a magical tale is going to feel flat and technical and lifeless.

And that’s the danger of the magical mode. You must be very true and accurate to the reader. Stuff has to be clear (more importantly, it has to be true, but right after that, it has to be clear), but you can’t explain everything, or you ruin it.

What happens and why it happens has to crystalline and solid, but at the same time you have to abide by the rule of magical thinking which is that sometimes, things are the way they are just because, and if you show someone all the gears and connections, the magic goes away.
Said from the point of view of the writer.: If you reveal too much of the wrong stuff, it’s not magical anymore – it’s just a fantasy.

That’s the balancing act I’m performing — there are some things in the story that aren’t clear, and I don’t want to alienate or confuse the reader (at least not unintentionally), but I am loathe to explain too much, because I do not. want. to. write. a. fantasy.