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September 8th, 2010
I’ll admit something about gaming – as much as I plan my novels to obsessive detail (down to POV for each scene) before I write them, I can be a bit of a pantser when it comes to running my games. Actually, I’m a lot of a pantser.
I have a couple of reasons for this. Primarily I have had the privilege of gaming with and running for some really great groups in my day. These are folks who define the concept of making their own gravy. I could quite literally sit down at the table and say “It’s a post-apocalyptic game, you’re all survivors from a hospital, go!” and we would have four or five good hours of game-play. But having great players who get into character and have lots of interplay at the table has its downsides too – specifically, they tend to go off on tangents, chase leads I never intended as significant, and generally go any direction that I hadn’t particularly planned for them to go.
So I started looking at things differently. I started making a list of things I wanted to happen, both over the course of the campaign and from game session to game session. For a Pulp Adventure game, this might look like:
- Players get attacked by dinosaurs.
- Players find crashed plane (German equipment?)
- Players find primitive tribe. (Enslaved? Need help?)
- Nazis Riding Dinosaurs!
In the book Save the Cat (which is about script-writing and a great resource) – Blake Snyder calls these the “Set Pieces” – the beats that drive the story forward. For me it’s more like a grocery list of things I have to include. I don’t worry about how to get from one to the other; I just keep track of what’s next and let the players give the direction of the story. If it’s a game that requires more organized encounter planning (like 4th edition D&D) I put down some possible encounters on cards and mix-n-match to make an appropriate encounter for the situation as it arises.
Obviously, this runs counter to everything I do in novel writing, but at the same time, it takes advantage of the creative power I have around my table. If the players try to get the plane working again I’m just as ready for what happens next as if they decide to ride the dinosaurs a la Valley of Gwangi. So, Gamer-writers (and writer-gamers) any differences between how you work on your fiction versus how you craft a game session?
Tags: gaming, my methods, Nazis on dinosaurs, nerdPride, save the cat
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September 6th, 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot about romance in science fiction lately, in case you couldn’t tell by the flavor of my writing posts. One of the things I’ve found myself doing is justifying to people the rightful place of romance as a part of science fiction. To that end, I’ve had a few films that I fall back on to say ‘Hah, there’s even a romance there!”
I’m not using the obvious films, though. That would be too easy. It’s tough to miss the romance in Avatar, for example (It’s the main plot after all), and Time after Time is easily one of the best time-travel romances out there (If you’ve not seen it? Do yourself a favor and go watch it, now.) Instead I’ve tried to pick films that people don’t think about as romances. So without further ado:
#3 – Wall-E (2008)
I can say a lot of things about Wall-E, and frankly I debated including it in my list because the romance is so blatant. At the same time, there is something absolutely heartwarming about two characters expressing their love for each other while only being able to express themselves by saying each others’ names. I get choked up in two places every time – the beautifully choreographed flying sequence (which is Miyazaki-esque in its gorgeousness) and another scene towards the end which I will not discuss for fear of spoiling it. Regardless, as SF and Romance go, I can’t say enough good about this.
#2 – The Empire Strike Back (1980)
The best of the Star Wars films (despite what Randal Graves thinks). It’s made even better by the shift from antagonism to romance between Han and Leia. There are a number of great scenes, but one of the high points is the two of them working together to fix the Millennium Falcon. I’m not too proud to say I didn’t riff that idea for my own scene in Hearts and Minds; it’s brilliant, and a classic. For all the great scenes together, and the excellent demonstration of their growing relationship, nothing tops the sardonic exchange of:
Leia: I love you!
Han: I know.
#1 – Aliens (1986)
James Cameron has a thing for tough-as-nails women who fall in love with Michael Biehn (see also 1984’s The Terminator) but I love how Ripley develops her relationship with Hicks, so Aliens won out. I love the scene where he’s teaching her how to use the pulse rifle, and the scene with the locator beacon (it’s the next best thing to an engagement ring). I could say a lot about the underlying motherhood themes that permeate this movie (especially the extended cut) but I’m going to keep to script and just deal with the romance. It’s a great one, with two characters who are perfectly fine on their own finding something in each other that gives them a reason to fight even harder.
Tags: Hearts and Minds, Movie Views, nerdPride, SF Romance, writing
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September 3rd, 2010
Welcome to another installment of the weekly link-dump known as Potpourri. It’s all comics and super-villainy this week, which is never a bad thing.
Tags: Lex Can't Get a Break, obsession, Potpourri, Supervillains, When I am a Billionaire
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September 1st, 2010
Welcome back to another thrilling discussion of my knitting, and the trails and frustrations involved there. This week, we’re going to talk about what I’ve been working on for oh, too damn long now.
I’m knitting a Clapotis scarf – referred to as ‘the Clap’ in my local knitter’s circle. If you’ve never had the pleasure, I can’t recommend them enough. It’s an easy pattern, and the end result is a nice beginner lacework, on the bias to make it extra flowy and soft. The pattern recommends a silk-wool blend, but as I can never follow a pattern 100%, I’ve been working mine in a lovely bamboo. The resulting red-orange-gold scarf is rather pretty, and has the added bonus of being earth-friendly as well as cuddly.
There’s only one problem – if you saw me knitting at RWA this year? It was the same scarf. I’m not this slow, normally. And yes, I’ve lost some of my normal knitting time to other events that weren’t entirely expected. But some of the time, I’ve just not picked up my needles even though my hands were free. I don’t hate the pattern. Quite the opposite in fact. But I finally am beginning to understand my friend who called it ‘tedious’. It’s a long row of knits or purls, with a few twisted stitched to force you to count (or, if you’re like me, employ everything from washers to twist ties as stitch markers). Every twelve rows you get to do something different, drop a stitch and rip it down. That’s it. The Clap in a nutshell.
So I haven’t finished it yet (though I am close to the end now – it’s narrowing back down so I can finish the far side.) It’s Hockey Season in another month, and ideally, I will have it done by then. It’s a reasonable goal to set for myself. Even if I have trouble early, as the pre-season games start I’ll be able to get a lot more done. Yes, I knit while I watch hockey. It’s the perfect combination for an evening, really.
Well, unless you’ve got the Clap – in which case you need the hockey to distract you.
Tags: boredboredbored, Clapotis, Hockey-Knitter, Knitter Pride, knitting, On The Needles
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August 30th, 2010
I’m terrible with names. I’ll come out and say that up front. If I meet you every day for a week, I’ll probably remember your name by the end of that time, assuming I’m not meeting a hundred other people at the same time. I may get close, and I may even get it right, but if I do, assume it’s a fluke rather than some particular skill on my part. Needless to say, this makes networking at conventions, where I’ll meet dozens of people in the course of three or four days, a bit difficult.
I’ve come up with some tricks over the years to make up for my shortcoming in the name-association department. First, I participate aggressively in what a friend once called the ‘almost Japanese obsession with business cards’ at conferences. I swap business cards with anyone I exchanged more than ten minutes with at a conference.
I can’t stop there though – If I do, I’ll come home with a stack of business cards that I won’t know as anything but names on cards. It’s tough for me to send a thank you to the people I met at conference, if I cannot remember the circumstances of our meeting. I have a trick, however that helps me keep this from happening. As soon as I get the chance (sometimes even sitting at the table with the person with whom I’ve swapped cards, but typically in my room before bed) I go through the business cards I’ve received. On the back of each one, I write where I met the person and the circumstances of our introduction. If we talked about something in particular, I write that on the card as well. When I come home from the conference, and it’s time to send e-mails to the people I’ve met, I have all the information needed to jog my memory written on the back of each business card.
Of course, saying this, I realized in the middle of RWA10 that I had prevented anyone from doing the same for me. My cards were black, and the back of the card was emblazoned with the cover for Hearts and Minds, making it impossible to take notes anywhere on the card. Ah, well. Point for me to remember in the future.
So, there’s my trick. Do you have any particular tricks you use to remember the people you meet in the swarm of conference faces? I’d love to hear about them. I’m never too old to learn new tricks.
Tags: Conferences, Hearts and Minds, my methods, Networking 101, RWA, writing
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August 27th, 2010
Potpourri this week is an eclectic mix of links. We’ve got Library Promotion and Anti-Objectivist screeds and Star Wars. At the end of it all, we have a sad good bye letter from a dying genius. In other words, it’s a typical potpourri. My favorite links of the week, distilled for your pleasure:
- It’s well known that I love the Old Spice Guy (despite assorted problems with the ideology that I try not to think about much) – that said, BYU’s riff on the commercial for their library? Borders on genius: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ArIj236UHs
- If you’ve seen Scott Pilgrim, you should see it again. If you haven’t, you need to go. Most importantly, you need to give the box office money for Scott Pilgrim, so we can continue to have nice things: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2010/08/go-and-pay-to-see-scott-pilgrim-right-now.html
- I’m sharing this because, despite my love of Rush, I generally dislike Randian Objectivists: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/8/12hague.html
- From our “Unexpected Genre Mashups” department – adorable Star Wars art in the style of A. A. Milne. http://blastr.com/2010/08/wookie-the-pooh-is-the-st.php
- Finally, let me say that the too-young death of Satoshi Kon this week hit me terribly hard. I have always enjoyed his work, and think his non-conventional ideas and storytelling style made him a unique, luminary voice in Anime and the world in general. If you’ve not seen “Millennium Actress” do yourself a favor and watch it. I could sum it up as ‘Sunset Boulevard as a love song’ but that genuinely doesn’t do it justice. In his final days, he wrote a letter to his friends, fans and family, which has been translated into English (for those of us who don’t read Japanese). It is tragic, sad and touching. Take tissues with you. You’ll want them: http://www.makikoitoh.com/journal/satoshi-kons-last-words
Tags: Movie Views, Potpourri, Satoshi Kon's Death Makes Me Cry, See Scott Pilgrim, Star Wars
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August 25th, 2010
Recently, Wizards of the Coast released the newest incarnation of their Dark Sun campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. I should preface this by saying – I am old. I was in college when Dark Sun first came out. I played a lot of other RPGs at the time, and D&D (then in its 2nd edition, for those keeping track) was ‘that other game’ that only a handful of die-hards played anymore.
When the first Dark Sun came out, the art (by Brom) drew me in almost immediately. This looked nothing like the Tolkein-esque generic fantasy realms to which I had become accustomed. Indeed, it looked like nothing else on the market. So I bought the box set, checked it out, and changed my world.
Dark Sun, more properly the world of Athas, was my first real exposure to the concept of post-apocalyptic fantasy. Magic has destroyed the land and rendered much of it to lifeless desert. A handful of city-states eke out an existence, ruled over by all-powerful sorcerer kings. The Gods themselves had turned their back on the world and no longer answered prayers. I had never thought of Fantasy in terms like these, and it shaped the way I would view fantasy and storytelling in the future – there are places in my stories to this day that I could point at and say “Without Dark Sun, I would never have thought of this”
Seeing Dark Sun on the shelves again brought back a great wave of nostalgia, and immediately set my mind churning for new ideas. I still love the setting, and am more excited than ever at the prospect of running a game set against its bleak, oppressive backdrop. I’ve talked to my group, and most of them are excited by the possibility. I only hope I can do it justice.
Tags: Dark Sun Rocks, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, gaming, nerdPride
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August 23rd, 2010
Heather Massey posted an interesting (by which I mean thought-provoking) article on The Galaxy Express the other day. Like most articles, it got me thinking about my approach and my little corner of the universe. The line that really got my juices rolling (and admittedly made me want to respond) was Lizzie Newell’s quote decrying the lack of SF in SFR today:
“It has romance books set in space but very few science fiction books containing romance. There is too much promotion of what I consider low quality books. These are low quality from a science fiction perspective.”
At first, I felt a little guilty. After all, I write Space Opera romance. I am part of the problem, as it were. I’ve got a background in the sciences, and certainly that informs many of the decisions I make when world-building, but I also grew up on Star Wars, Farscape and Firefly. These are shows that are science-fiction only by dint of being set in space. Lightsabers and giant, living starships are cool, but we don’t like to think too much about the practicality of them. Much as I love Hearts and Minds, I have to admit that when I wrote it I would occasionally handwave the science in favor of making a more exciting swashbuckler of a romance.
And that’s when it hit me – What is the story really about?
Am I writing a story about a hardened mercenary and her beta-to-the-core empathic boyfriend? Or am I writing a story about the trappings of science fiction? For me, the core of a good SFR story should be the romance. There needs to be emotional development between the characters, and I as reader need to believe that they can connect with each other and find a happily ever after somewhere. As much as I love science fiction, it’s not the part I’m as concerned about. I would not have liked Farscape as much, bluntly, had it not been for the romance between John Crichton and Aeryn Sun.
Do I still think that the Skiffy elements need to be thought about when writing an SFR? Absolutely. I would never argue otherwise. But I also think that good world-building should show through the characters rather than get in the way of them. I tried to think about the science in Hearts and Minds – it’s one of the reasons that, despite more lethal weapons being available, most shipboard firefights use weapons that fire ceramic flechettes. Hull-penetrating weapons would be dangerous to both sides in a conflict. I never talk about it in the course of the story, but it’s there.
I think this holds true of Science Fiction in general, but it holds doubly so for good SFR – the world in which the characters live should be the background, and their relationship to it and to each other should be the focus of the story. If not, you will lose the reader every time.
Tags: Galaxy Express, obsession, SF Romance, writing
2 Comments »
August 20th, 2010
Another week, and another round up of links from around the Web (Yes, I heard about AP’s decision. They’re wrong. Web is a proper noun when referring to the Internet, which should also be capitalized.) Anyway, there’s rampaging dinosaurs and cat safety and thieving magpies all hiding in today’s links. Enjoy!
Tags: Cats Have Sharp Parts, Potpourri, Sci-Fi Now, Social Media, Velociraptor Warning, Why Someone should start an anti-social media, writing
3 Comments »
August 18th, 2010
With my apologies to Robert Burns, it’s time for another knitting post. Today I need to talk about my terrible addiction to that most notorious drug of sweater and sock knitters – the cable.
I love cables. They are fun to knit, they look really impressive when you’ve done a long chain of them, and most importantly, they aren’t half as tricky as the rest of the knitting world would have you believe. (Actually that last secret is true of knitting as a whole. I shall have to do a post on breaking the great secret of knitting – that’s it’s all easy – open for all of you.) It’s not even math, like some elements of knitting, it’s just counting. I don’t even do the counting in my head – I have a stitch counter on my iPhone that I can set to count for me. I color code my cables on the needle, then label a row on my counter for each cable. When I increment the whole project one row, each of the cables increments on their own counting system, so I always know where I am. Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy.
There’s a problem to loving cables, though. Once you realize how easy they are, the tendency is to start putting them on everything. Like a flame paint-job on a car, cables work best with a little restraint. A thin line down the side of a kilt stocking is okay. A twenty-stitch wide knotwork probably doesn’t belong on a footie-slipper. It’s the knitting equivalent of getting a sweet flame paint scheme on your ’82 Omni. You can do it, but even ironically it looks a little off.
Okay, back to trying to figure out how to put triangular knotwork on the earflaps of a hat.
Tags: I can stop cabling any time I want, Knitter Pride, knitting, my methods, obsession
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