geardrops [blog]

Other M is coming out, and it looks to be quite a polarizing game. Reviews trickling down the line are consistently panning it for its story, which, if you’ve been listening to the developers, is the reason for the game’s existence in the first place. Thankfully, it seems to be front- and end-loaded, with the middle left blissfully free of unskippable cutscenes.

(Unskippable cutscenes? Ballsy. They better be good.)

Before I get into that though, I have a rant. It’s related.

Seriously guys. One of the first things we tell people who are learning to write is to avoid the infodump. Show. Don’t tell. You think because you’re dealing with button-mashers it’s okay to break cardinal rules of Good Writing? Well, if someone said it was, it wasn’t. So stop it.

I sat for twenty fucking minutes during Super Paper Mario last night, wading through goddamn useless exposition of WHY it was so important I had to save Princess Peach. I know it’s important! This is Mario! That’s all I’m supposed to do! I save the princess and catch a game of golf or tennis on the side. Maybe some go-kart racing. I don’t need dimension-encompassing, apocalypse-inducing storylines to make me want to jump on Goombas and gather coins. You’ve trained me from a tender age to do this.

MrMike thought it was important I play Paper Mario 2. It was a platformer, he claimed, not an RPG like those other smelly Paper Marios were (note: the “smelly” comment may be my addition). Someone didn’t tell the writers that, apparently, but hey, the 2D/3D mechanic was pretty awesome once I got there, after about five-thousand tendinitis-inducing button presses to skip the dialogue. (Also why did Luigi keep calling Mario “bro”? I spent the entire opening scene waiting for him to lift his shirt and point out The Situation.)

Thank you for your time.

Games like Metroid have a particular need to avoid delving into backstory, in my opinion. Here, we have a character whose life story has been alluded to in previous games, whether subtly (hey guess what, she’s an orphan raised by the Chozo, which is why she gets this badass suit) or more overtly (see: Fusion). She has never said a word. Hell, until the end of the first game, no one even knew she was a she.

We have been given wisps and ghosts of her past. So what did we do? We filled in the blanks. And you will never fill in the blanks as good as we did. No one can make a story as powerful as the story a person can make for themselves.

Is everybody familiar with Plato’s Theory of Forms? Summary: There is the Idea of the thing, and then the Form of the thing. The Idea sits above all things, above our minds, pure and perfect. Then we sad little mortals pull it down into reality, for us to see, cutting imperfections into it as we do. The statue Donatello carved is never going to be as flawless as the statue he saw in his mind.

In case my point isn’t obvious, this is a potential problem with Other M. We’ve made our own history for Samus, piled the seductive flesh on the skeleton we were handed. And in doing so, we set the bar so goddamn high, you may never be able to reach it, let alone pass it. No matter how much of a badass you write her as, she was always a better badass in our minds. No matter how emotionally powerful or tender those moments you made are, they were more powerful and tender in our minds.

(Related: Anakin’s Fall To The Dark Side.)

We, as fans, were granted the unique ability to make these things for her, without having to write them down, make them concrete. They can live in their little ephemeral nests, perfect and untouched, and always better than what you give us. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try. But for fuck’s sake, be careful. You have to try.

And when Kotaku describes your storytelling as containing primarily “… those tired themes of protagonist immaturity, weapons of mass destruction, and possible government conspiracy that have been strip-mined by the makers of Metal Gear and Resident Evil” and then goes on to say “Thankfully, the cut-scenes involving these themes are mostly placed near the beginning and end of the game” ?

That shows me you didn’t try at all.

Apparently SF Signal picked up the guest post I wrote for Jeff’s blog and decided to signal-boost it. This makes me double-plus glad, being as that was the first Guest Post Blag I’ve ever done and I was very nervous about its quality.

Perhaps I should do a series on this. Object oriented design paradigms as they pertain to characters? Compilers, Editing, And You? I already have the Five Things Algorithms Has Taught Me About Writing post.

Since I’ve been unemployed, I’ve taken to trying to be a full-time writer. Though I think I’m stretching past the full-time mark, being that I wake up, toddle straight to my laptop, begin editing, take breaks to eat and remind MrMike that I am, in fact, still alive, and then toddle to bed sometime after Unreasonable O’Clock. Though to be fair, coming off working full-time and school part-time to… nothing? I’m used to a 14-hour day. And I took two weeks off to relax (only to watch unfathomable quantities of HGTV). My brain is upset with my laziness.

Good news is The Novel will be off to betas today, and then I can begin studying for my interviews.

I suspect this is something unique to the sciences: we have to study for interviews. It’s been two years since I’ve thought about operating systems in any significant way, or compilers for that matter, and even though I’m competent at TCP/IP and the OSI model and many other things you can ask about the intarwebz, there are many terms and details and I’m not so great with words. I’m also easily confused by acronyms, which I realized when I interned in the aerospace industry. It’s hard enough when I’m dealing with a series of illogically-arranged letters, but that place often had the same set of letters translating into multiple things, requiring me to parse them in a context-sensitive way. Ugh.

And of course, there’s always the nervousness hanging over my head of “Hai guise I totes am doing this second-career thing with writing, but I promise I’m 4srs about the tech stuff too. Pie?”

So I’ve been offline for about two weeks now. This is due to the fact that I received a “suggestion” from the higher-ups that I delay my two-week vacation to Greece, due to our scheduling problems. Well, I put my vacation on the calendar in January, so I offered my own “suggestion,” that perhaps these were not our problems, but perhaps their problems, which is most certainly not my problem. This has resulted in my working very, very hard.

Life has been frantic-busy lately. Last weekend I was in NYC for a friend-of-Boy’s wedding, which resulted in my walking around Harlem at one in the morning in four-inch stilettos, none of which I recommend. (Maybe that’s a little strong. The stilettos were Guess, and rather comfortable, though they certainly slowed my roll.) All of which was excellent timing on my part due to simultaneous Mad Crazy Head Cold and the incoming Posturemoll visit, wherein she was rolling through San Jose in a janky cab playing eyebrow-raising music, right about when I was walking down 127th. (These scheduling problems totally belonged to me. Couldn’t shirk that one off on someone else, not without lies, trickery, and a Jedi mind trick or two.)

Then there was MUSE on Wednesday. My sixth time seeing them live. Some say I have a problem. I tell them No, Sir, I Have A Solution.

The Mad Tea Party is tomorrow. I have plotted three cupcake varieties. Last night I constructed a hat. Photos to come.

And as for the novel, I’m on draft four of editing. Let me tell you, I love writing, I hate rewriting. And that’s what the last 25% of the book required. But it’s currently a lean mean 80K and likely to stay that way. I do hope there’s a market for science fiction that isn’t about science, with a strong socio-political thread and male main character who likes to swear a lot. (No, a lot.)

The lovely Miss Rose Lemberg has had announced a sale at Strange Horizons (which for those unawares is really epic and awesome and I love this market).

Also, Christie Yant has made a pro sale! I cannae say the market, because it is a sekrit at the moment, but let it be known that it is Truly Legitimately Awesome.

And last but biggest is that Wendy Wagner has gone and sold a novel! When I see her, I’m going to throw glitter square in her face.

There have been two recent events that contribute to this blog post.

One of the events, which becomes two events if you slice it right, is the creation of a “self-publishing branch” by two professional publishers, Harlequin and Thomas Nelson. These events have caused a lot of drama (warning: epic thread is epic, and massive timesink of external linking). To sum: RWA, MWA, and SFWA have dropped both publishers from their lists of acceptable publishing credits. The well-respected publishing watchdog Writer Beware has relatively scathing posts about these two moves. WB is definitely not an alarmist blog, and is very careful about the language used concerning publishers, due to living under persistent threat of lawsuit. So if WB calls you out in unequivocal language, son, you done fucked up.

The other is that I rediscovered this article. Which is a lot less to read than the above.

If you ever hit up any of these “self-publishing” sites for testimonials (more on the scare quotes later) you’ll see hearts like cups filled with effervescence, spilling over in their joy of having Their Story in book form, surrounded by stock photos of Not The Actual Author Because They Can’t Smile Quite As Disarmingly As This Soft-Focused Photo Of A Woman Done In Pastels.

These publishers, in their efforts to entice you, will engage in a persuasive speech of the downtrodden author, kept down by “the man” as embodied by traditional publishing, mocked openly by the gatekeepers who presume to call themselves literary agents, the verysame agents who go on to demand a sizable portion of your hard-won advance for doing something so simple as passing your manuscript to an editor. Their arguments are propped up by strawmen at best, and like all modern persuasive speeches, they’re going to net only Kool-Aid drinkers and the uninformed. The rest of us know better.

But I’m not really interested in persuading the Kool-Aid drinkers to change their ways. I’ve said it before, I’m saying it again, and I’ll keep saying it: I’m selfish, my time is valuable, and I’m not going to waste it. If anyone should be enticed by dreamily-painted arguments instead of numbers and fact, then I don’t mind seeing their wallet molested because they feel Night Travels of the Elven Vampire “deserves to be read.”

As far as convincing those who are unaware of this world? There are many other places that can help them far better than I can. WB as listed above, AbsoluteWrite, and the still-useful Snarkives do this and I’m not a fan of doubling work.

Aside: Before I get into what I wanted to discuss, I’ll clarify those scare quotes. Self-publishing and Vanity Publishing are two different things. Self-publishing is where the author owns the ISBN and the product. Vanity publishing is where the author does not. They both require out-of-pocket expenditure to have the final product of a sheaf of paper with a glossy page on either end, both will not likely land in bookstores, and both require authors to bust their asses to get people other than close kith and kin to buy the books. But self-publishing tends not to lie about what it is. Vanity does. Especially on the points I listed.

Aside, continued: Legitimate self-publishing is, in my opinion, pretty awesome. It lets you bind your family history in a book. It lets you collect grandma’s recipes to hand to your kids and their kids. It helps make your niche paper on the parallels of microorganism reproduction and Internet memes accessible to the public. It doesn’t get your book mentioned on Oprah, but it gets your work out to interested audiences. And, you own said book. Not so with Vanity, which targets a different audience (hopeful novelists) with a different goal (you might get discovered this way and become all super-famous and shit).

Anywhoozle.

For those who didn’t want to read the article I linked (that’s okay, it’s six pages for a small point) I’ll summarize it here, sloppily: people with self-control do better in life. For those of you who did read the article (good job): yes, a lot more than that happened in the article, but that’s all I care about, and I’d be very happy if you went along with me on that one point, thanks.

The Marshmallow Experiment. You set a marshmallow in front of a child. Tell them if they don’t eat it for fifteen minutes, then they get a second marshmallow. Some children are able to resist. Others are not. The children who said no to the marshmallow in favor of two marshmallows have, across the board, done better in life, because they were able to weigh short-term gain and long-term gain.

You see where I’m going with this.

Vanity presses are the now-marshmallow. It’s the one sitting on your desk, teasing you. Give in and you’ll have that book in your hands tomorrow! Professional, traditional publishing is the later-marshmallow. Why wasn’t your novel published? Well, because it sucks and you need to work on that. Maybe your characters are flat. Maybe your prose is dead on the page. Maybe your story isn’t compelling. You’re trying to sell your book to people who love books, both pre- and post-publication. The masses who pick up DaVinci Code are not your audience. The people who just “pop in to have a quick look” and walk out with an armful of new titles because omg I didn’t know he’d just released a new book, and I’ve heard a lot about this series I should check it out, and I totally love her medical mysteries and she blurbed this other author’s medical mystery so I want to read that, and… you get the idea. This is your audience. And these people? They’ve read a lot. A lot. They’re going to be harder to convince of how awesome your book is.

Writing is hard. Your first draft needs work. Your first novel isn’t likely to get published (but zomg it took a year to write!). But if you work at your craft with your eye on the distant prize of being a Professional Author instead of just a hobbyist and ignore the temptation of just having a book in your hands with your name on it, you’re going to be a fair sight better off.

This is the metacognition part. Think about how you think about publishing. Do you think being published is a human right, alongside clean water and a Louis Vuitton bag? Well, it’s not. Never was. It is the result of hard work, diligence, and a creative streak, and in this like all things the world owes you nothing. If the temptation of Vanity presses prove overwhelming, play metacognative tricks. Ignore the low-hanging fruit which is rotted at the core. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Play with your stories, worlds, characters. Read more. Go to conventions. Blog. When a Vanity press creeps into your periphery, turn your head and focus.

And if you honestly hate working at the craft of writing, find something better to do. Painting, interior design, blacksmithing, I don’t care. If you really want to write stories but don’t want to deal with serious publication, I suggest posting online and pursuing fanfiction. Scratches the writing itch, you get to share your work, and there’s no cost out of pocket. Just don’t waste your time doing something for the wrong reasons that makes you unhappy. You time is as precious as mine is.

Say no to the Now Marshmallow. Find your Later Marshmallow and go get it.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m currently working towards my master’s degree in computer engineering. This is among other things which consume my time, such as the working, the boy, the writing, the baking, the video games, the fire stuff, the pretending I’m normal so my family doesn’t cut me from the will. I am spinning many plates on sticks. Good thing most of it is Corningware.

Algorithms has taught me many debatably useful things. Such as:

– patience (I will not walk out of this class to get ice cream, yes it is boring and ice cream is delicious but I must not fail this course)

– restraint (don’t throw pens at the back of that one guy’s head despite how irritating he is, despite how useless his blurted-out and incorrect responses are, despite how obnoxiously nasal his voice is, seriously guy, can you talk through your mouth, or is it just a sound-shaping peripheral?)

– and which foods not to eat in closed spaces (cafeteria chili)

But in thinking about it, many things I learned in algorithms apply to writing, so I’ve decided to list them. Don’t worry if you’re not technical, everything is explained.

Fun aside: Writing really shares many parallels with coding. For instance, style. There are some writers whose styles are so distinct that you can be handed an unlabeled page of fiction and name the author. There are programmers on my team at work whose programming styles are so unique, I can instantly pick out who wrote what.

(1) “Brute Force will be your first answer. It should not be your only answer.”

You will find a Solution to a problem. And it will be quite good and efficient, in your eyes. This will be your first Solution. But then you look further and say, well, perhaps a vector was not my best choice. And oh, look, I can actually run these two operations simultaneously. And wouldn’t it be better if I could spawn this off as a separate process and let the rest of the app continue working. Et cetera. This will be your first Solution. It better not be your only solution.

You will compose a Story. And it will be quite good and lovely, in your eyes. (Or perhaps not, depending on your particular mental configuration.) This will be your first solution to the problem of writing down your Story. But even though you really wanted a specific character to play a specific role in the ending, maybe it’s not his job. Maybe it’s her job. Maybe it’s their job together. Maybe you have to cut him entirely from the story. This is your first solution. It better not be your only. No matter how lovely you think it is, it can be more lovely.

(2) “The problem will be NP-Hard, but not too hard.”

There is a vast, gaping difference between describing a problem and solving it. Certain problems are very easy to describe. For example, the Travelling Salesman problem. You have a salesman. He is, as the name denotes, travelling. He has to fly to a bunch of cities the area he’s covering, and each city is connected by a flight, and each flight has a cost. What is the cheapest way to fly to every city, stopping at each city only once?

Sounds easy, non? If you find the solution, please let me know. I’d love to get in on that sweet multi-million-dollar action. (No, seriously. There’s heavy money on the line if you solve that in under O(n²) time.)

This is not unlike a good book. The IDEA is easy (”It’s AS I LAY DYING as a comedy set in space!”). But writing? Well that’s where the work really comes in. And the right execution will make or break it.

(3) “One problem can have infinite solutions.”

There’s the oft-said adage that there are only ten sitcom plots, and somehow these manage to get recycled into twenty seasons of the Simpsons, eleven seasons of Married With Children, and far too many seasons of Friends, seriously people, it took far too long to stop paying them. And though we’ve figured this out, it still seems fresh to viewers.

This is because while there are ten plots, or “problems” to solve, there are infinite variations on the parameters entering, and on the specific ways you can treat them to still come to the same conclusion. And if there wasn’t, we’d all have the ancient Greek plays memorized by now.

(4) “Divide and conquer.”

One of the methods of attacking a problem is to divide it into smaller, related problems. For instance, say you want to sort a list of names. One method might be to pick a random name in the list and sort the list so if the name comes before your picked name, you put it before your picked name, and if it goes after, sort it after. Then sort each remaining chunk in the same way, on and on and on, until you have a sorted list. (AKA quicksort)

Treat your novel like this. Writing a novel is a big problem. Having a huge plot is a difficult thing. So break it down into smaller bits. Your main character has to get the MacGuffin at the end and destroy it. Divide it into sub-problems: How does he find out about the MacGuffin? Who’s hiding it? How must he destroy it? Is he going to hurt anyone in the process? Divide each of those into smaller problems.

It seems like a lot, but if you tackle them one by one, you’ll have a story at the end.

(5) “Sometimes, brute force is the answer.”

You can have a lot of tricks to help you get through a problem, fun things to try, paths to go down. But at the end of the day, sometimes you have to set your ass down and just write, even though it isn’t working, even though you hate what’s on the page.

Because writers write, especially when it’s hard.

Before I open with this post, I would like to recommend against using the Add an Image button in Wordpress admin if you’re running Chrome. The whole process crashed, and something has been fractured on a very basic level. I cannot type in web addresses anymore. It attempts to search for everything. Getting back to the Add New Post page was a hassle on its own.

That said, I had an image to post for the goings-on this Saturday. You’ll have to wait until my memory kicks in outside of work. Probability of this happening is low.

Emily and I trekked on up to the city for SF in SF, primarily because Jeff was going to be reading from FINCH (which he did wonderfully, and I need to go read it already, because I’m terrible). (Also, that’s a lot of links.) Wound up also liking Scott Browne’s book BREATHERS enough to trust his suggestion that I read more Palahniuk (I’m not linking Palahniuk, he doesn’t need my help, and there’s enough links up there anyway).

Briefly…

FINCH is the fifth and “last” novel in the Ambergris series. Finch is a detective working to solve a double-murder in the true fashion of a noir novel, but set in an Ambergris now ruled by the sinister Greycaps, a completely foreign species who subjugate the people, their actions driven by misunderstanding and malice. Would appeal to fans of noir looking for something with an edge of horror (memory spores?) and the fantastic, or to fans of urban fantasy who miss the genre when it wasn’t paranormal romance rebranded.

BREATHERS is a novel about zombies and their plight as sentient beings in the unaccepting world of the living, the narrator a zombie with a persistently detached dry humor. Would appeal to fans of Palahniuk who want the guy to take himself less seriously.

Here’s my tip to you: don’t show up to these things late. Emily and I scooted in t-minus one minute before the reading proper was to begin, and we stood in the doorway awkwardly. Then we were informed “There are seats in the front.” Rows upon rows of plush seats not unlike a movie theatre were packed full, but we trusted the words whispered to us and shot off for the front row.

And yes, there were seats. On folding chairs set maybe a foot back from the authors’ table. I could have set my water on there. Instead I just leaned in awkwardly and stared at Jeff.

Another tip to you: don’t do that. The awkward-lean thing. You get branded, poorly.

Afterwards a good lot of us toddled up to The View for drinks, and if you haven’t been there, it’s not unlike standing on the viewing deck of the Death Star, overlooking the San Francisco skyline on either side. The booze is overpriced and underpoured (I asked for a Jameson sour and got a twelve-dollar lemonade) but you’re there for the view and I was driving back to south bay anyway. And if that was the cover charge, totally worth it to hang out with Emily, Jeff, Jean (EIC of SF/SF ezine), and new friend Espana.

No music post today. I’m just tapping my toes to some Mountain Goats. I’ve mentioned their song Lovecraft in Brooklyn before (link is actually a remix by Aesop Rock). Today it’s This Year.

This is a fantastic thing to read when crawling out of the secure lab.

Hunger Mountain announces the winners of the first Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing!–September 2009

…

Emily Jiang of Palo Alto, California has also won an honorable mention for her young adult novel excerpt “Paper Daughter,” which begins on August 12, 1940 when “sixteen-year-old Jing-Mei must lie through her final Angel Island interrogation before escorting her two cousins to America.”

link

Hooray to Emily!!

So last night I finished my novel, which currently has no title. I’m looking for a good symbol for metamorphosis that isn’t sissy like a butterfly. Chrysalis is on the table, but it’s a bit of a mouthful.

Anyway, I do a lot in my life. People keep calling me out on it, telling me I do too much. And between working a 40+hours a week job, getting a master’s degree in engineering, being in a relationship, having some vague form of a social life and the scattered interests therein (fire play, kendo/iaido, gaming), well, perhaps they’re right.

In all that, I manage to write novels. I wrote one, rewrote it, then wrote a completely different one. Each has taken approximately five months to handle. And there are two things that drive my ability to write: aggressive time management skills, and fierce multitasking.

Here are some of the times/places I’ve written:

In classes, splitting my pages down the middle, half a page for notes, half a page for novel.

In lines at ComicCon, in the sun of the Hall H line, in the shade of the room 6BCDF line, surrounded by persistent noise and chaos. Thank God for earbuds.

In cafes. Hydration. Red Rock. Bean Scene. Others.

Libraries. Bookstores. Devhouse. Hacker Dojo.

On the CalTrain, MUNI, and VTA. Any flight I took anywhere.

In my study. On the floor in the middle of my condo, everything splayed out around me. Friend’s houses. Car rides. Movie theatres. On the backs of flyers at concerts.

I write anywhere I have a sliver of time. There’s no other way.

Isaac Espriu has gone and made a sale to Electric Velocipede. He was taking bets on how many rejections it would take for him to sell. The end result? Forty-one.

I like the contest idea. It take an otherwise tough thing and gives it a little more excitement. Double thumbs-up for Isaac, one for making the sale (and to such a solid market, no less), and one for being just so awesome about the path.