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Midwestern Rules

All right, nanowrimo people: it’s that time again.

The first five days were kind of wild and crazy — you didn’t really know what was going on in the story — the characters were sort of running around going “Look what I can do! No, me! Look!” and you let them have their head and run it out.

The next seven or so days, we got a sense of what was going on and where the thing would take us, and that sense of purpose and vision imparted a lot of fire and motivation to the writing. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to ride that right down to the point in a few days when you realize that a bunch of your favorite people need to die.

However, that’s if you’re lucky. In other cases, you’re at this point where… well, things are happening, but you’re not sure if they’re going anywhere. In fact, you’re not sure if the story is going anywhere. Your loved one comes into the room where you’re sitting and looks at you for a few seconds and then says “how’s the story coming, hon?” And you’re like:

You sit down at your desk to get another couple scenes down, read the last line you wrote, think about what should happen next, and:

Pretty soon, it’s time to go pick up the kids and you’ve written all of a forty word paragraph in which the main character sits around thinking about how he doesn’t know what to do next.

Doubts start to creep in. Maybe 50 thousand in 30 days is just too much. Maybe you already told the one good story you’re going to tell. Maybe you’re brain is broken. Maybe this thing is going to be no good. Maybe it’ll be actively bad — the kind of bad where you give the finished draft to some friends to read and their feedback is basically:

I’m not going to make you feel better about that. It’s (theoretically) possible that all those doubts you have are grounded in indisputable fact — maybe one of your friends is one read-through away from a horrible disfigurement — I just can’t say.

But here’s the thing: none of that matters.

I’m going to have to get a little Midwestern on you now; that’s just who I am.

When I was growing up and going through junior high and high school, I was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities. A lot. First chair in band. Marching band. Jazz band. Choir. Swing choir (yeah, glee, whatever. shut up). Oratory/Debate. Drama. Newspaper. Yearbook. Football. Basketball. Wrestling. Track. Was there more? I think there was, but it’s all kind of a whirling haze.

In the parlance of the region, I “kept busy”.

You might say I dabbled in a lot of things, and you’d be right: with the exception of the music stuff, everything just kind of came and went with its appropriate season. My folks had a very simple rule for any of these projects: I could try anything I wanted, but if I decided (after the first serious introduction) to keep going with it, I had to finish it. Period. No exceptions. Every time I signed up for something, it meant rearranging schedules, figuring out who was going to get the car when, and generally bending everyone into pretzels to make it work. You want to do wrestling? Fine; you’re in it til the end of this season. Yearbook? No problem – but you’re not done til this year’s edition goes out the door. It didn’t matter if I lost every fucking match I ever competed in (I did), or if my particular style of prose was often very wrong for the yearbook (it was) — I was in, by god, and I wasn’t getting out til the bell rang.

So let me lay this out for you now: you’re in til the bell rings. It doesn’t matter if the story stinks, or you can’t think of an ending, or everything seems to be coming apart at the seams; you’ve asked your friends and family to bend around your schedule for the last three weeks, and if you quit now, you’re basically giving them a silent but nonetheless profound “fuck you” and walking off down the street, whistling a carefree tune. In short, you’re an asshole.

And, come on, you’re not an asshole. You’re tougher than a little bit of story ennui. You’re the kind of person who wants to finish up a story and set it in front of all those people who helped you get through the rough parts and say “This is for you. Thank you. It’s a little busted in places, but I think it’s a good start, and I can fix the rest.”

You can’t fix something you never finish.

You don’t really know if you like the game unless you stay in a full season.

A Few Tricks

All these “hoo-rah, you can do it” speeches are fine, but how about some actual concrete stuff to try?

If you’re feeling like you don’t like what you’re writing or where things are going, there’s things you can do.

  • If things are sort of sans direction, make something happen that your protag has to make a decision about — not just react to, but actually make a tough decision about: do I save the bus full of children or my sister? Stuff like that. Hard decisions, preferably ones you don’t already know the answer to.
  • Are you over-describing stuff? Stop. Switch to nothing but dialog for awhile. If you’re protag doesn’t have anyone to talk to, FIX THAT RIGHT NOW.
  • Is the scene boring you? Drop it and skip to the next. Flag it with a [finish this later] and move on.
  • Are you stuck on how to get through the current scene, but you’re writing a solution anyway? STOP. Go write some other scene — that reluctance is your brain telling you that you’re writing something stupid and that it will give you something not-stupid LATER. Write some other bit, and maybe that’ll even explain how to fix the other scene. Hindsight is actually useful when you can jump back and forth in time.
  • If all else fails, attack the scene with genre-appropriate ninjas. I am totally not kidding. You’re writing a romance? Then genre-appropriate ninjas (GAN) might be an unexpected kiss from an unexpected person. Boom. Ninjas. Every genre has ninjas.
  • Finally, every scene has conflict.

Get back in the game.

Don’t worry about falling down.

The best smile in the world is the grin on the player who’s covered in mud.

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The Life of a Furtive Writer

You know what’s a funny sounding word, no matter what the context? Furtive.

Furtive. Furrtive. FURTive. FURT. Heh.

Yeah. I’m twelve.

ANYWAY. Over on terribleminds, Chuck dropped some great advice on how he fights the distraction monkey of himself. As I mentioned yesterday, we are our own worst enemy when it comes to getting anything done, and Chuck takes my vague directives and supplants them with some concrete-solid examples of what focus looks like. I totally recommend you go read it.

Okay? All caught up? Good.

Now, Chuck’s post is awesome for a number of reasons; the most valuable bit of advice is simply that we need to trick ourselves into paying attention. It might be as simple as putting “the internet” on another computer from the one you’re doing your writing on, or in another room. It might be something like Scrivener’s “writing mode” or WriteMonkey’s… umm… entire interface — that blanks out the rest of the screen and reduces the chance you’ll be distracted. Those are all good tricks.

There’s only one problem, and it’s a relatively tiny one: Chuck’s a full-time writer — man’s a pro (in more ways than one) and as such, there’s the teensiest possibility that some of his tricks aren’t things a part-time writer will find applicable.

So let’s go through the day of a Furtive Writer and add a few things to Chuck’s list of focus-tricks.

Morning

Wake up 30 minutes before you need to be at work. Snoozebar got a workout this morning, didn’t it? Send spousal unit to get The Child dressed, and throw yourself into the bathroom, shower, and closet, hopefully in that order.

Thank god for Oatmeal Squares.

Arrive at work only five minutes late.

Check email for all your accounts (work and personal). Catch up on Twitter and Newsreader. Do work stuff. Maybe get 300 words down in a 15 minute sprint, but probably not.

Lunch

Go back out to your car, hit the nearest drive-through or pull out your brownbag and wolf a sandwich and soda. This leaves you 45 minutes. Pull out your laptop and get typing. You should be able to get roughly 650 words out in this time, assuming you don’t fuck around. Don’t fuck around.

If there’s some kind of wifi near where your car is parked, hook up to it ONLY in the last five minutes of your lunch break — just long enough to save your WIP and let Dropbox sync.

Back to the office. If you were using your work laptop to do your writing (not recommended if you have any alternative), reconnect it to the network and let Dropbox sync up.

Afternoon

During your entirely legitimate 15 minute afternoon break, knock out another 215 words. Otherwise, use your time-wasting allotment to look up stuff you needed to know at lunch, but couldn’t look up then.

After work

Pick up The Child. Arrive home. Make supper.

If you’re a super-parent, do nothing but hang out with the child until bedtime.

If you’re a pretty-good-to-all-right parent, alternate between some quality child/spouse time and pasting that stuff you looked up this afternoon into the spots in your WIP where you left text like [GDP OF SLOVAKIA HERE]. This will add about 100 words.

If you’re going to make up for some bad parenting at Christmas, drop your kid in front of Backyardigans, hand them a sandwich, and disappear til bedtime.

The Child’s Bedtime

Read to your kid. Steal ideas from their chapter book.

Blessed Silence of Night

You have gotten anywhere from 600 to 1300 words down. Assume it’s 600. Also assume you want about 2000 for the day, so you need about 1400. That’s two 700 word (roughly 3-page) scenes. Get to work. If you’re lucky and the words are flowing, you’ll be done by about 10 pm. If you aren’t, you’ll be done around 12:30 am.

1 am

Stagger to bed. Set the alarm for an hour before you have to get ready for work, so you can get some writing in. (This will never work, but it can’t hurt to try.)

GOTO: MORNING

—

Sound familiar? I expect it does.

So here’s a few extra tips I’d suggest.

Good Batteries

Make sure whatever laptop you’re using has them. Nothing sucks more than really getting on a roll and having your laptop go dead.

Good WiFi

This seems really counterintuitive, but you probably want to make sure that any ‘out of the house’ writing you do is somewhere with a decent internet connection. You don’t want to have it on all the time, but WHEN you need it, you want it to connect easily, quickly, painlessly, and you want it to be super-snappy-fast.

Why?

Simple: if it fails to be any of those things, you will fuck around with it, which will waste a lot of  time. A lot. I’m just saying.

Good Notebook

Have analog means of writing available. Sometimes the laptop isn’t an option. Sometimes you just want to write something down for later. Sometimes you’re someplace where people will look over your shoulder at your screen, but would never DREAM of looking at your longhand notes — society is a weird like that.

Back up early and often
I use Dropbox. Use whatever you want, so long as you use something. This is not. fucking. optional.

Don’t bring an external mouse with you

The harder it is to use your laptop to browse the internet, play Farmville or Torchlight, or scroll back to correct your previous work, the more likely you are to focus on writing. You. Keyboard. Screen. That’s it.

—

Personally, I do almost all of my writing on my little “triple e” — a netbook I bought awhile back as an award for meeting a tough goal. It’s comfortable to type on for long periods, has about a six to seven hour battery life for writing purposes, and when I combine it with a Logitech lapdesk, I can use it damn near anywhere (I mention this because the netbook itself is too small and too top heavy to really ‘work’ on your lap for more than the most desultory use, in my opinion). The netbook technically has all the same distractions available to it as my desktop (which, if I’m honest, is 90% a gaming rig), but they aren’t as easily accessible, aren’t as fun to use on the netbook, and generally just aren’t worth the effort — I don’t even like using my newsreader on the smallish screen. When I sit down with the netbook, I’m working; one keystroke disables the wifi, another opens either Word (for revisions) or WriteMonkey (for first drafts), a third shuts down my touchpad (so I don’t do something stupid by accident) and off I go.

For whatever reason, I’m shit at writing in the morning — I seem to have engineered my life so that interruptions occur in the A.M. — even when I try to get shut of distractions before lunch, stuff just happens that I HAVE to deal with. I’d RATHER write in the morning, and maybe eventually I will shift things around so it’s possible, but right now? No. That’s me. Your mileage may vary.

How about you? What tricks do you use to leave yourself NO OPTION but to write? Give me something I can steal.

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November 2nd: Things I Don’t Like

It’s November 2nd. Here’s a few things I don’t like about November 2nd. Just a few.

First: the Internet. Yes, you, Internet. This is you:

Didja vote yet? Didja vote yet? Didja vote yet?

I voted days ago, Internet. STFU. Seriously.

Second: the folks who are trying to help you stay motivated for NaNoWriMo.

They’re like: “How’s it going on that, umm… Nah No Wree Mo thing? All done?”

And you’re like:

Something important is missing.
...

Seriously. You got six thousand words done on your first day — what did they do?

(Also: if you seriously got six thousand words done yesterday, I hate you a little bit — just a little. I’m still doing revisions, so I haven’t actually started NaNoWriMo yet. Soon. Soooon…)

The final thing on my short little list-of-dislikes today?

Ideas.

WHY is it that I always get a pile of good ideas for new stories when I’m already working on one two three other things?

OMG! Bakelite-punk! Awesome!

If you’re having this problem (and I’m going to guess that you either are, or will very shortly), get a notebook and keep it handy by your writing desk. Or writing space. Or wherever you do your thing. Writing Jacuzzi. Whatever. Keep a notebook handy, and when you get a shiny, new, distracting idea for a story, open up your notebook, write the idea down…

… and then slam that notebook shut as hard as you can. Punish those little bastards. They are not your friends right now: they’re like those exes who ignore you until they hear you’re dating someone new, then suddenly call you up and want to hook up for drinks. They have ulterior motives, is what I’m saying; do not trust them.

You know what I love, though? Two things.

1. Biting off more than I can chew.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?
Me.

Seriously, I think that’s my second favorite part of November: the insanity of it. De wrote a few weeks back about how we should always challenge ourselves to do more than we did the last time — I was pretty busy last November, but I do have a pretty good idea for what I’m going to accomplish this year; we’ll see how that turns out. I think that she really nailed one of the best things about NaNoWriMo: the opportunity to really push yourself. That’s good stuff.

2. Hanging out in the madhouse.
Kate said to me once “You’re really good at November,” by which I think she meant that I’m super productive during this month and often really struggle to stay focused a lot of the rest of the time. She’s right, and I think the reason for that is the simple fact that I’m like some kind of vampire creature who feeds off the collective creative energy oozing out of every tube on the internet this month.

Also me.

It’s heady stuff.

How about you? What do you love/hate about this time of year?

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On Seeing the Inevitable

I have nothing against Joe Konrath.

Those of you familiar with the ins and outs of publishing might be aware of Konrath as a mystery/suspense writer who’s become something of an evangelist for independent epublishing via markets like Amazon where an ‘unsupported’ author can play on a more level field with the Big Six of publishing. His arguments swivel on the dual pivots of sales numbers for his not-inconsiderable backlist and regular pillorying of the publishing industry for its poor choices.

(Which, to be fair, is pretty goddamn easy to manage when publishers make the decisions they do.)

Now, Joe makes a lot of good arguments. His analysis — both of his own numbers and the sales for other independent authors selling through Amazon — is usually pretty solid. And based on that analysis (and what I can only call common sense) it’s not hard for him to point out mistakes being made by big publishing simply by pointing out the stuff that individuals are doing that works, and the stuff that publishers are doing that yeilds less profit for their authors and more ill-will from consumers.

But with that said, Konrath’s points (or the tone they’re delivered in) do have a tendency to grate after awhile, and I say that as someone who thinks he’s ultimately correct; someone who’s predisposed toward ebooks and the technology behind it; someone who’s currently reading The Stand for the first time (finally), on his phone, unabridged.

I think he’s arguing the wrong point.

Yeah, he’s making good money selling his books at $2.99, at least in part because the lowered price means more people will buy his stuff; the simple fact is that a reader will buy five three-dollar ebooks in a clump, but balk at paying fifteen for one… and even if they ‘only’ buy one or two of those three-dollar books, that’s still more money spent than the fifteen-dollar non-sale.

But who cares? Those are just numbers, and (in my opinion) there are only a few numbers that big publishers care about:

24.
99.

“We sell hardbacks for 24.99, and readers have to pay that price for at least a year before they get a cheaper option. Our industry is built on that model, and we will cut a child before we accept anything that substantively affects that.”

You can find individuals in publishing who don’t feel or act that way, yes. But I tend to think actions speak a lot louder than words (especially when those words are muttered over drinks after work, where their bosses won’t hear). Look at the actual moves the big fish are making, and I don’t think you’ll see strong evidence against my assessment.

“Fine. You think he’s arguing the wrong point,” you say. “So what’s the right argument, smarty?”

In a word: History.

All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

Unless everyone in the publishing industry was born after 1990 (I’ve met quite a few of them — they weren’t), none of them actually need to crack a history book or dig into the wayback machine to recall a historical precedent for every single thing that’s happening in publishing today — they’ve lived through them.

I’m not the first person to point out the similarities between what’s going on today in publishing and what happened to the music, movie, and even television industries when digital formats became commonplace enough to penetrate the market. But I don’t think it would hurt anyone if I mention it again, because I will be fucking gobsmacked if anyone making decisions for the big publishers are paying attention.

And I’m not saying “there are a few indicators and patterns you can find in the painful (and painfully mismanaged) changes to, say, the music industry that might work as a kind of vague oracle for some of the stuff happening in publishing.”

I’m saying the changes are identical; each of those ‘predecessor’ industries provides flawless mimeographed blueprints in which we can see big companies working themselves into an obsolescence matched only by… mimeographs.

So here’s my call to everyone in publishing — not just publishers, but agents and writers and most of all readers:

Forget the numbers. Forget the price points and distribution methods and however things have been done in the past. Also, give up on arguing for change based on the numbers — no one other than the converted are listening.

Instead, look at your predecessors. Think back to the time when the music industry howled about cassette tapes and the fact it let kids tape music off the radio… and then howled about burnable CDs… and then unencrypted MP3s. Or think back to television broadcasters howling about VCR tapes… then DVRs.

Did it do any good? What happened?

Think back to the format wars in [pick your industry here]. 8-track. Cassette. Betamax. HDDVD. The fifty file formats mp3 annihilated. Did the money spent by companies trying to introduce their own, brand-specific, copy-protected, file format turn out to be money well-spent?

Think back to the birth of independent artists working without Big Industry Backing in those industries. Were people convinced that there was no way they could make a living — hell, even that there was no way they wouldn’t end up going bankrupt? Was industry backing touted as the only way to be seen as ‘legitimate’? Was electronic distribution seen as a fad? Was pirating of unprotected electronic copies seen as the Ultimate Poison Pill?

What happened in those industries? What continues to happen? Were the big boys ever right? Ever?

I’m going to make some predictions about publishing now, and since I think they’re pretty damned obvious, I will present them as absolutes. Some of them are negative, and some of them are positive, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which. I’m basing every single one of these predictions not on publishing, but on the industries that have already gone through what publishing is facing today, while publishing was snickering into its sleeve and making jokes like “How many formats does PAPER have? Heh heh heh.”

  • Most publishers aren’t going to change much. Most — almost all — of their money will be spent on their superstars, and their midlist creators will be seen as (and treated like) dead weight, despite the fact that they make up 99% of authors and most of their revenue. The big names will increasingly become known as vapid pop-culture hit machines.
  • At least one — probably several — big publishers will try to introduce their own ebook reader or ebook format that only works and is only distributed for their products, despite the fact that popular formats exist and are already being whittled down to a few survivors. These specialized formats and branded readers will suck huge amounts of money that could have been spent partnering with existing solution providers and solving the problem with already-adopted tech.
  • A very few traditional publishers will figure out what’s going on and adapt to new models.
  • New publishers will spring up. Almost all of these publishers will be boutique-type studios (sorry, I mean publishers), founded by AUTHORS or AGENTS who figured out how to do everything that needed doing with the new technology, and who decided to turn around and provide those services to a select group of fellow artists they chose to work with… often while teaching them all the same stuff they’ve learned.
  • Artists will continue to produce their own stuff and distribute it through increasingly easier-to-use and easier-to-access avenues. Ninety percept of it will be crap (for each consumer’s own values of crap), but those with enough drive and (obviously) talent will reach their audience and grow a really devoted group of supporters. The writer-equivalents of Jonathan Coulton or Julia Nunes or Pomplamoose are out there.
  • Fans will continue to not give a damn whether someone is promoted by some big publisher or if they did all their own stuff on a Macbook in their basement, because readers don’t give a fuck about publishers and infer no added quality from a pub’s stamp on the spine — most of them don’t know who the ‘big six’ are anyway.
  • As electronic distribution (and web-based shopping) becomes more and more prevalent, and the percentage of electronic vs. analog versions of the same products continues to move toward electronic, brick-and-mortar stores will become progressively obsolete. Physical bookstores already account for less than a third of all book sales — in ten years Barnes and Noble will be the publishing equivalent of Sam Goody and Blockbuster.

Generally, all of this will be better for both the author and the reader.

For everyone else, it depends on how willing they are to see the clear and (as far as I can see) utterly unvarying patterns that came before, and how able they are to do something about it.

What I’m saying is this:

If you’re a reader looking at the options out there for ebooks, worried that the whole thing may be a flash in the pan, don’t — the growth of digital format text is inevitable. Unless you have a stunningly bad track record for selecting new technologies to back, it’s probably okay to jump in the pool now.

If you’re an author looking at the possibility of independently producing your stuff, don’t worry about Joe Konrath’s math. Look at one (or all) of these other industries that have been here already and see what kind of artists make independence work for them. Ask yourself if you can be that kind of artist. If you think the answer’s yes, then that should be answer enough.

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Transmedia: Dirty Commie Creativity

A few weeks ago, I finally caved in and picked up StarCraft 2, motivated in no way by the promised playability or fun of the game (which it delivers), but by a heartfelt desire to blow up some internet-friends (still an unrealized goal).

(Has anyone munged “internet friends” into some kind of cool portmanteau yet? Something like frenemies? Frienternets? Interiends? Podbudsters? Hmm.)

Anyway, playing Starcraft again (it feels a lot more like ‘again’, rather than ‘a whole new game’) produced an interesting effect about four or five evenings in.

It made both me and Kate start up Mass Effect 2.

Now, I was going to write about Mass Effect 2 a little bit, but I’ve done that before, more than a few times.

And anyway, I got distracted by some folks on twitter (Tweeps. Why isn’t there a generic-internet version of “tweeps”?) talking about transmedia.

This happens fairly regularly. Every few months, someone who is metallurgically balanced so as to ping my radar will throw out some thoughts on transmedia and stir that particular brain-turtle up. I’m going to take the opportunity to write about the subject while said turtle is still awake and munching on lettuce.

Trasmediwhat?

So: transmedia and transmedia storytelling. The idea is that the gestalt product of a creative project (hereafter, “the content”) grows into some kind of all-permeating thing that sort of wraps up, envelopes, soaks into, saturates, and generally penetrates the content audience’s lifestyle from multiple directions and via multiple media platforms. There are some pornography analogies I could draw, but that specific image isn’t really the goal of a transmedia product (unless a corporation gets hold of it); and I don’t think transmedia creators actually want to engender some kind of unhealthy obsession with their content beyond what one might see from the typical Whedonite or a Beiber fan.

Basically, a transmedia project (theoretically) develops its story across multiple media platforms in order to provide different entry points into the story. For example, one transmedia project might include books, blogs, ‘in-fiction’ twitter feeds, movies, youtube videos from fan-turned-creators, interactive text adventures, RPGs, and shared-author stuff like the Mongoliad or a storyball. Each one of these entry-points (and each piece of content within a particular platform) has a role in the big picture of the whole project, and a set ‘lifespan’ in which it is allowed to affect the big picture.

Did you pick up on the fact that some of those content-affecting inputs would be ‘fan’-created? I hoped you might — it’s an exciting and interesting concept, because if Twitter has taught us anything at all, it’s that all writers are also readers, and most readers are also writers, and everyone’s a fan/geek/nerd about something, so why not harness that awesome creative power and make it into something bigger than any one person? Coordinated storytelling across multiple platforms (even assuming that ninety percent of it is crap) cannot help but make the whole story more compelling.

The “coordinated” part is important, obviously; hence the need for set lifespans in which different elements can affect the core content.

Is this even a new thing?

It’s a fair question. When you talk about transmedia, you quickly start talking about activities that fall under the (shiny, new, plastic) umbrella of “transmedial play”, which. . . well, let’s just quote wikipedia on this one.

The viewer/user/player (VUP) transforms the story via his or her own abilities, and enables the Artwork to surpass the medium. It is in transmedial play that the ultimate story agency and decentralized authorship can be realized. Thus the VUP becomes the true producer of the Artwork. The Artist-authored transmedia elements act a story guide for the inherently narratological nature of the human mind to become thought, both conscious and subconscious, in the imagination of the VUP.

To which I respond “Oh. RPGs. But fancy.”

And what about Harry Potter?

It’s easy to look at a lot of the big-paycheck intellectual properties and think “but seriously: this is already being done.” Harry Potter is out there in books, movies, video games, slashfiction, web comics, youtube parodies, fan created vignettes, and hundreds of other things I’d probably rather not know about.

But that’s not really what this transmedia thing is aiming for.

To which you say: “What?”

See, an example like Harry Potter isn’t (as the jargon surrounding this discussion dictates) transmedia, it’s “crossmedia” — in crossmedia, the IP crosses over to new media platforms only to spread out the original content as far as it can — the stuff beyond the books isn’t delivering new content or growing the ‘canon content’, they’re just new delivery vectors for the original content, and as for the other stuff? The slashfic and youtube fanvids aren’t acknowledged at any point in the cycle as being a ‘real’ part of of the Harry Potter collective creative product in the first place. Conversely, transmedia is designed for multi-platform multi-author hacking.

And again, that’s some pretty heady stuff — there’s no more fertile ground for innovation than a diversity of experience.

But… no one’s really doing this yet?

Here’s the thing: I think it’s being done by accident right now, and largely by people who don’t realize they’re doing it.

To take Mass Effect 2 as a (bad) example, even as I play the game I’m making up stories about the characters or other background elements in my head, because as much as there is going on in that game already (dozens of stories above and beyond the main arc), there’s tons of stuff that only gets alluded to, and those are places my mind likes to go play. I’m also wearing an N7 sweatshirt when the house gets a little chilly in the evening, and I’ve read or at least considered reading the novels/comics/whatever set in the ME2 universe that have nothing at all to do with the storyline of the games, but which add more depth and meaning to the game by thier inclusion in the net product. I’m saturated. Permeated.

But as I said, that’s not a great example. None of my head-stories have an access point by which they can be incorporated into the creative whole. I’m saturated in this content only insofar as I want to become so (heck, even when I wear the sweatshirt, it’s at least somewhat ironically).

Dragon Age (also by Bioware) gets closer in this regard simply because you’ve got the game, the extra content for the game, the flash-based spin-offs, the expansions, novels and comics that provide some intertextual depth to the setting without rehashing anything from the game itself, AND a tabletop RPG (and supporting forum) that lets you play around in the setting sandbox and create your own stories and hacks and narrative, then share it with your fellow fans in that context.

No: that’s not a perfect realization of the ideal, but I believe it’s moving in the right direction; it has a lot of the ingredients in the bowl. And if it’s not right (not yet), that’s not the point — even the failure has value. I don’t think lightning is suddenly going to strike and someone will magically produce a perfect transmedia product/template. Most great ideas don’t come as flashes of insight following brilliant successes — they come after a series of epic fuck-ups and spectacularly useless failures.

(Like, say, Google Wave; the ultimate solution-in-search-of-a-problem. Ten years from now, someone will turn that “wasted” software development and make something pretty goddamn amazing out of it. You watch.)

Why do you keep using examples from gaming?

Lots of people who get excited about Transmedia seem to want to start from books and work out from there. Those same people ask things like “how can publishers take on the author’s work to help it become truly transmedia?”

I think that’s… adorable. Also? Woefully myopic. How is a publisher supposed to help someone writing books expand their creative content into an arena neither they nor (presumably) the author knows anything about? What the fuck does Knopf know about creating a flash-based game or ARG meant to share a linearly independent story spun off from the Book they just put out in hardback?

Jesus, most of them can’t even get their heads around ebooks with anything better than 1996 cognition, and those are kind of the same thing (for now).

No, if you want to jump platforms, you need people who get that OTHER platform as well as you get the platform you’re starting with.

(And there should also be people keeping an eye out for new platforms that don’t currently look like platforms. Some of the best ‘inventions’ come from people repurposing something in a smart way. (GPS technology was originally created to help us bomb the fuck out of other people, for example.))

My point: all the platforms need to be treated with equal care, and if all the platforms are equally important, than it doesn’t matter which one you start on. Gaming (in my opinion) has always done a lot more stuff related to multi-platform creative content and “audience as author” creation, so I tend to start there (but I can be wrong, too).

Again, there’s that chime: audience as author. Author as audience. Innovation via a diverse group of creators.

I’ve been reading Where Good Ideas Come From on my Droid, and there’s a lot in there about co-mutual creation that touches on the potential power of transmedia — the creative output of many people, provided that all those people have access to the “stuff” — the gears and parts that make up a transmedia product. Leave all that stuff lying around, mix in interested and excited people with different experience, give them a reliable means to share good ideas or good notions or even half-baked half-ideas, and let it all simmer someplace that doesn’t punish failed experiments or cockblock anyone messing with the Holy Writ of the Original Content Creator, and you might get something pretty damned special.

Someplace. Someplayce.

Play. Excited, energized creation-as-play.

Now ask again why I keep using gaming examples.

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Working Like a Rockstar (The October Forecast)

My short-term contract job came to an unhappy/happy end on Friday. And while you might assume ‘unhappy for me’, I’d have to say that the real unhappiness was felt by my now-ex-employers, who really wanted me to stay and really liked me; they just ran out of budget.

They liked me so much that my boss basically wrote the new update to my resume, bragging me up even more than I usually do myself. Contract jobs are actually pretty good in that way — you can come in like a superhero, smash the crap out of problems, gird yourself in accolades, and leave before office politics sully your fancy spandex costume.

The big trick is making sure you’ve got somewhere to land when you leap over the next tall building in a single bound. (Freelance writers will find this kind of thing very familiar; it’s a kind of rockstar lifestyle, assuming one reads that to mean “striving to see the difference between homelessness and living out of a tour van.”)

I may have a new gig lined up pretty soon — another -opolis that needs saving from an Atomic Menance — but to be perfectly honest I’ll be happy if there’s a bit of a lag before the next corporate thing.

I am ready to do some other things.

Let’s review what’s on the to-do list.

New cub.

There’s a new kid on the way to the Casa, so there are more than a few home projects going on. The kid’s room is actually pretty much ready to go, but in the meantime we’ve been working on other rooms in the house.

We’ve painted our bedroom and the front greatroom, and of course Kaylee’s new bedroom needs to be framed in and painted and carpeted and all that cool stuff, but we’re letting some professionals handle that, even though I’m pretty sure I could nail (heh) the framing part.

Then there’s painting the house itself. The outside. We must — absolutely must — paint the whole thing before winter, or we’ll need to replace all the siding next summer, and if I’ve got some time before the next gig, I’ll probably be doing that myself and saving us mumble-hundreds of dollars.

The main problem with this cunning plan is that there are three spots where the siding needs to be replaced, and of course the problem spots aren’t anywhere a mook like me could handle it — they’re complicated places like where the chimney meets the house, right under the eaves.

By the way: if you’re in the market for a house, or planning to build one? Fuck chimneys. I don’t care how much you want a fireplace; don’t do it. Embed a firepit in your deck or something. Chimneys are to houses what a bad smoking habit is to an otherwise healthy person.

Anyway. I am pretty much ready to go with the painting thing, but we’re going to have to wait until we can get these sections fixed by someone competent experienced.

Why isn't it ever simple?

NaNoWriMo is on the horizon, and the prepatory murmurs are audible even at this great distance. Some folks have asked if I’m ‘doing’ it again this year which… c’mon. Of course.

But I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do first. A publisher handed me some revision requests which — damn them — are actually really good, so I want to get those done and handed back to my awesome agent before October is dead and gone.

What will I be writing?

Actually, I have a story to finish that needs at least another 50k (well, two, actually, but I’m picking one over the other), so I’ll be getting it down. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to do that with NaNoWriMo, but at this point, I think I’ve done it legit often enough to pfff those kinds of restrictions.

But that’s just me; if you’re trying to finish NaNoWriMo for the first time, BY ALL MEANS OBSERVE THE RULES. Doing it my way (picking up an unfinished story) is actually making the whole thing harder; I’m just stupid self-challenging that way.

What would I write if I weren’t working on something extant? I dunno.

I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t suggest, though: steampunk.

I love the stuff currently lumped in under the heading of ‘steampunk’. Love it. But steampunk is kind of like vampires right now; something people mix in because it’s cool, not because the elements are being used in any kind of meaningful way. I’m getting sick of it.

You want to use the trappings? Fine. Call it whatever it really is, though — zeppelin fantasy, gogglerotica, or whatever.

Punk anything requires class struggle, the social effects of technological revolution, and people with no influence and power rebelling against a monolithic Authority.

Slapping goggles on your protagonist doesn’t make it steampunk.

Ahem. Anyway. Rant over. There’s my advice for NaNoWriMo. At least for today.

Hey, that reminds me.

Last year, I wrote a bunch of NaNoWriMo advice, broken down for day-by-day consumption. People seemed to dig it (and I’ll probably repost them to twitter as appropriate), but would there be any interest in seeing all those posts brought together into some kind of ebook-like thing prior to the start of the madness?

Not to buy, obviously — I’m not wondering if there’s money in it — I’m wondering if there’s enough interest to justify the work of putting it together before 11.01.10.

Is that it? I think that’s it. Damn but I’m out of practice writing these things — this post was all over the place — I’ve got blog-rust all over the keyboard now. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Nothing like being blocked from your own site during the day for the last two months to make you really pine to get some blogging done.

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All Stuff is Nerd Stuff to Somebody

Yesterday, I had the very great pleasure of attending the wedding of two friends of mine.

I also got kind of shanghai’d (in a good way) into live-Tweeting the ceremony, because live-Tweeting something automatically takes the Nerd level of an event and doubles it, and this thing was going to be pretty Nerdy.

Super-nerdy. Full-frontal Nerdity.

It was so nerdy that there were whole sections of the evening that referenced nerd stuff I knew nothing about, and I think it’s fair to say I keep up to date on such things. Until yesterday morning, talking with MJ, I had no idea who Parry Gripp was (aside from the guy who wrote the awesome processional for the wedding). I quoted the “shark week” vow in my live-tweets, but I didn’t know it was originally a bit from 30 Rock. I didn’t recognize the recessional music, because I don’t watch Venture Brothers. Most of the boutonnieres at the wedding were made by Paula; I didn’t even know Paula could knit.

Then someone told me they were actually crocheted. Cuz there’s a difference between the two.

Then they explained the difference.

In detail.

That’s actually what I remember most fondly about the dinner after the wedding; the pure nerd-grade enthusiasm I saw over and over again from the people at the party. I passed one table where people discussed the various reasons an Aboleth Slime Mage would ultimately destroy (or subjugate) the (far more impressive looking) Cyclops Warlord that decorated another table. Elsewhere, folks were working out the recipe for a delicious curry soup we were having — reverse-engineering the recipe from scratch.

The thing you love may frighten others.

Kate gave one of our friends a crash course in SLR terminology and some advice on aperture and ISO settings as the afternoon light changed, and a few hours later jumped into a discussion with me and the best man discussing the relative strengths of various MMOs and the fact that Bioware could pretty much take a monthly tithe from our paychecks and just ship us whatever game they released, and we’d be happy.

Maybe this is your nerd thing.

Nerds get categorized and pigeonholed and stereotyped and – broadly speaking – limited by the perceptions of others, but here’s the truth of the matter:

Almost everyone is a nerd about something; passionate, intelligent, enthusiastic, and more than willing to share all that with anyone who asks.

Let me tell you about the Battle of Five Armies, and why it mattered so much to the success of the War of the Ring...

Heck yeah, we’re nerds. Of course we are. We care about stuff.

Like this thing...

Are you nerding out about the idea of a walking/rolling post-apoc town, or the idea of building something that cool in Lego?

Does it matter?

And anyway, those are just the easy-to-define nerd things — the archetypes (or sterotypes).

There’s so much more stuff out there; so much more passion.

“All stuff is Nerd Stuff to Somebody.” — me

Maybe it's this...
There's this...
Or this.
That...
Or one of these.

What I meant by that quote is just that you can find someone who’s passionate and excited about virtually any topic you can think of.

And that’s excellent.

Yesterday, I watched two of my friends get married — vow to always try to be passionate and excited and ready to share — to add one more thing to the list of Stuff they’re Total Nerds about: each other.

I cannot think of a finer promise to make another person, and I am unaccountably blessed to have been a part of it.

Thanks guys.

Now let’s go play some games.

Photo by Chuck Wendig.

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Constraints: Tie me up, Tie me down

You may find yourself in a situation where someone you’re working with just doesn’t want to be constrained with guidelines on their creative output. Maybe you’re that person. Maybe it’s deadlines. Maybe it’s a specific word count you need to hit, or can’t go over. Maybe it’s some topic for a short story anthology you’re working on.

“What? I have to write something about a kid without any parents? So we’re going to have a book full of orphan stories? What kind of stupid requirement is that? And it’s a paranormal collection? Paranormal is so last year. What’s the point?”

Okay, precious, let’s talk about constraints.

These are for your own good.

“The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way.”

We’ve probably all heard (or thought) that a blank sheet of paper is terrifying – the point being, too much freedom is just that: too much. Artists love to wax rhapsodic about complete creative freedom, but a lot of the time, having total freedom to do or create anything at all tends to paralyze. I don’t have time to be an artist; craftsmen need guidelines.

“Write whatever you want — anything you do will be great.” That’s a terrible set of instructions, right there. It’ll take me months to get you anything, assuming I ever get you anything.

“I’m going to need something presentable in two weeks.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

“I need it in two weeks and it needs to involve two bishops from Papau New Guinea and their pet llama.” Excellent. Man, I can work with that.

But oh the horror — these constraints have taken things away from me! They’ve robbed me of choices! What if I wanted monks instead of bishops, and a surly binturong instead of a llama? How can my life as an arteest go on?

Surly Binturong is very Hurt that you have excluded him as an option.

Okay… yes, every detail and requirement that is added to a set of guidelines takes away options, but having obstacles to deal with means you’re more likely to take some path you might never have otherwise explored. Obstacles are a gift. The biggest secret to being a creative and productive person is embracing constraints instead of running from them. Small spaces lead to cool innovations. Walls in your way just mean you have something to grab when you need to climb higher.

The other big benefit of constraints is that they focus your energy into a smaller space. A completely blank sheet of paper is like an open, featureless plain — it doesn’t matter how much you have, there’s very little chance you’re going to be able to fill that vast space up with energy. The best thing you can possibly do is compress your energy into a smaller space. Any amount of energy delivers more power when it is controlled, compressed, and directed. Start with an open plain, then keep pressing inward until you’ve squeezed all that down into the smallest package possible. A building. A room. A box. A bullet.

Boom.

Maybe you’re floundering with your current project. See if there’s a way you can make the scope smaller. Compress it. Constrain it.

Think inside the box. See what happens.