Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Sorry for the radio silence -- the hurricane had us off the air here for a few days, and I've been busy catching up from the lack of power. It's amazing how just a few days can set back your schedule!

With that out of the way, it's time for me to join the voices raised in celebration of the geek community. Writer/editor Monica Valentinelli posted over at Flames Rising about how the negative stereotypes of geekdom are continually perpetuated by the media. As Josh Jasper reported over at Genreville last year, the New York Times is one of the guilty outlets. So Monica suggested that we geeks unite a bit and share how proud we are of our various geeky hobbies.

My dear readers, you know a lot of the geek hobbies in which I indulge, just from reading bits and bobbins here at the blog. Here's a list of these things, in descending order from commonly known to possibly previously unknown online. If you partake -- or have partaken -- in any of these lesser known hobbies, I'd be glad to celebrate our mutual geekdom!

• Not only do I play RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, I'm a game writer. This makes me a professional geek in this sphere of geekdom.


• For a long time, I was also a card-carrying member of the RPGA. I really kept the card in my wallet.


• The same that went for RPGs goes for comics. I admit that I came to comics late in life -- after graduating college -- but I fell for them hard. And now I get to write and *review* comics! Best job ever.


• If geeks are pop culture related and nerds are academic (one of the breakdowns I've heard recently and have begun to use), I am both a geek and a nerd in general. I went to college after 10th grade and graduated at 20.


• More specifically, I'm a myth and history nerd. I have been known to geek out -- or even squee -- about archaeology news.


• I am not a serious videogamer, but I do drive a mean MarioKart. I grew up with a hand-me-down Nintendo (not even a Nintendo 64) and played computer games on our old Commedore 64. Currently, we have an Xbox at the Abbott house. Plants vs. Zombies lives on my desktop.


• I am completely tempted to play The Old Republic, not because I love Star Wars (even though I do), and not because I love MMORPGs (MMOs have the potential to eat my life), but because I am a huge BioWare fan. Love those guys!


• Speaking of Star Wars, I did used to read all the Extended Universe books. Being a lit major in college totally made me fall behind, but I do pick up a novel now and again if the continuity isn't too confusing. I also own several volumes of the Star Wars: Legacy comic.


• Clearly, you already knew I was a Browncoat. I also dig Star Trek and Eureka. I was super excited to find Earth2 and SeaQuest on Netflix.


• Before I was a gamer geek and a comic geek, I was a band and choir geek. I was in marching band and swing choir. After graduating college, I took my music geek self and performed with a semi-professional choir at Renaissance festivals across the state of Michigan. I have an awesome Italian Renaissance era costume which is, sadly, not as accurate as a member of the SCA would make it.


• Speaking of getting dressed up in costumes, I have LARPed and enjoyed it, and I have worked in True Dungeon at GenCon, playing a drow.

The list goes on, but while my geek side would love to put me back on a night-owl schedule, my mom side knows that Bug is going to be up at six, so I'd better get some rest between now and then. In the mean time, celebrate your geek! Check out the posts at Flames Rising and elsewhere around the internet, including Max Gladstone's over here. Join us on facebook or tweet whenever you see a geek post with the #speakgeek hash tag. Unite!

I wrote the subject of this post, then thought, "Wait, didn't I write something with that title before?" Took me a minute to remember, but yes -- an adventure for Living Forgotten Realms (Cormyr 1-3, to be exact). It's kind of fun to have written enough stuff that's out there in the world (albeit most of it modular adventures) that it takes me a second to place the title.

But that's neither here nor there. The title is intended to reflect what I've been doing lately -- as in, "Keeping my." Things never seem to slow down at Casa Abbott any more, and a couple of unfortunate events -- currently a cold, previously an epic saga I'll explain below -- have made things even more of a kaffuffle than usual. But, hopefully, I'll get back on top of the pile and start feeling just regularly-whelmed instead of over-.

• The saga: Editorial assistant Tollers decided on Sunday the 7th that he was going to go out for an afternoon walk and just forgot to come home. For three days. Monday morning it snowed here on the Shoreline, and we were worried something had happened to him. So, we put out posters and spread the word among local friends. Bug and I wandered out into the woods behind our house whistling for him (the Editorial Assistants are trained to respond to a whistle) and polled the neighbors to see if anyone had seen him. Then, three days later, he showed up at the door, meowing to be let in as though nothing had happened. Whew! We kept him in for a couple of days to remind him where home was, but since then, he's been back out on his regular afternoon walks and has checked in more frequently than usual, as if to say, "I know I worried you. I'm okay. Feed me?"



• I wrote a short story! "Shotgun Wedding" is out on submission for an anthology that will be edited by Matt McElroy, my editor at Flames Rising. Two of my crit buddies (Twostripe and niliphim) said that the biggest problem they had with it was that it ought to be a novel. Considering that it's urban fantasy, and Twostripe doesn't even really like UF, that made me very excited. So, I'm hoping to start a bigger project featuring those characters -- I wrote the short story with the idea that it might be a prequel to an urban fantasy series. While doing research for the story, I came across the Chinese saying "All that is needed is an East Wind" -- I think All We Need Is an East Wind would be a nifty title, so I'm going to use it (or just East Wind) as a place holder for now for the soon-to-be WIP.


• I had a wonderful and too-short visit with my mother, who flew out from Michigan. She reminded me again that the only reason she let me go off to college at sixteen was that I promised I'd develop a way to tesser (I'd planned on going into physics), and I still hadn't fulfilled my part of that bargain.


• The current set of autobiographies is coming to a close, which means I need to get a lot of editing done this week! I've got a fun bunch of writers as usual: I already have edits back from playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie (who teaches about writing and theater, meditation, and healing in the Berkshires, not too far from where I went to college) and friend of the blog Jeff Duntemann (who you should be reading over at jeff_duntemann if you're not already). If all goes well with the editorial process, I'll have five essays in this batch (instead of the usual four), which should be a plus for my in house editor.


• I'm also studying, through a correspondence course, fitness for pregnant and postpartum women, in hopes of a) passing a practicum in early December, and b) teaching for Dancing Thru Pregnancy, the group that I've been taking classes with to get back into shape after having Bug. The material is really fascinating, though I struggle with some of the information, since I never took anatomy in school -- it's a lot of new content to work through. I just need to get on top of the material before my test deadline!


• Lastly: more copyediting. Bread and butter keeps a person from starving, no?

And, of course, I want to keep up with blogging again. I've got a great guest blog coming up from Dylan Birtolo (eyezofwolf), and hopefully there will be some fun news on the Cowboys and Aliens front to share, since word on the street is that there's a movie trailer coming out soon...

I had the privilege yesterday of visiting Dona Cady's science fiction course at Middlesex Community College. The class sounds like something I would have loved to take as an undergrad: they study the hero's journey, talk about myth and literature, read a lot of really excellent books, watch some great movies, and are required to play Warhammer as part of the course, using that character as the voice for a travelogue that takes them through the hero's journey as a creative writing project. Amazing, right? Dona has a real passion for her course material, and is really dedicated to giving her students a really good picture, not only for what the academic/critical side look like, but also for what the industry looks like. That's where I came in. She has several other guests coming, including Christopher Golden, and all of the guests talk about their career and their writing.

For me, that meant telling the story of handing out business cards, getting my first gigs through EnWorld, and talking about Dungeons and Dragons. Most of the students weren't tabletop gamers, but a couple who were asked some really great questions. More of them were familiar with the Forgotten Realms through the fiction, so we talked a little bit about the way games and comics do ret-cons, and I discussed not only the Spellplague (more of a reboot than a ret-con), but also taking over Cowboys and Aliens II from a different team, and thinking about what details (sometimes culturally and historically incorrect) we felt we had to keep to prevent ourselves from doing a ret-con. It was overall a great experience, and there are things that I'll do differently when I return to the class next year, hoping to get a little more cross-talk instead of Q&A. But we'll see--I studied in a very conversation based environment for all of my undergrad classes, so I acknowledge I'm a little more on the everyone-talk-around-the-table side of things than the lecture side.

That said, sometimes Q&As are great on their own. devonmonk did a great Q&A on her blog the other day and addressed one of my questions about online presence (since I've been thinking about that since Monday). I loved her thoughts on the topic (and they reassert my opinion of her as a genuinely sweet individual). The online presence and how it impacts how people read your fiction is definitely I'll continue to explore--not only because it's relevant to me as a writer, but because there's something really interesting going on with virtual worlds and how we create ourselves. According to Professor Cady, there's a correlation between virtual worlds and Asian philosophy, and that's a paper I'd love to read once she has it published.

Thanks again to Shelley/Dawnsister, one of the original New England Browncoats, for the introduction and encouragement to come up. She's another person I'd only known virtually until yesterday, and it's lovely to put a face to her online identity. :)

So, here's the thing about me and conventions.

I go to them. I stay so busy that I have no internet the whole time I'm at them. I come home and I'm either sick or just very sleepy. A new addition to this is that I have some hundred facebook notifications to go through before I'm caught up. The result? It takes me awhile to get back to lj.

But back I am! Anonycon was a wonderful way to spend my weekend, and continues it's status as the most enjoyable convention I go to. It's small, which I think is part of the charm--since this is my third year, the majority of the faces are familiar, and that makes the whole convention feel like a gathering of friends more than a gathering of strangers.

I went expecting to play/run maybe three slots. I'd volunteered to work the desk on Friday and go up early to help unload, which was a great way to start out the convention. Being there early and seeing folks come in meant the crowd grew slowly--and also meant that I got to learn a new board game, Race for the Galaxy, and play a couple hands of Teachu with folks like emilymorgan, banana_pants, banana_plants, and niliphim. It also meant that when there weren't enough players for the first Living Forgotten Realms slot, I was more useful to everyone at a table than at the desk, and I got to bring out Urtog for the first slot of the convention.

Saturday, I expected to play or run maybe two slots, and I started out the day with another LFR game, happily with some of the same people I'd played with the day before, as well as folks who I don't get to game with often enough on the home front. When the second slot came around, I thought I'd be playing again, but it turned out that they were short a judge for LFR. I hadn't actually prepped any adventures, expecting instead to run the last of the Xen'drik modules, but I realized that "Gangs of Wheloon" (by Andrew Schneider) was running, which I'd had the opportunity to run as a playtest months before. Given a little time to prep (and some very patient players, who waited while I looked things over), I got to run that adventure in a completely different way than it had run during the playtest, which was delightful. Hopefully the players had as much fun as I did!

Now sleepy, I had every intention of going back to my room and crashing for the night. I called up Nat Rowe (one of my Dogs in the Vineyard buddies, who'd also been my train buddy and at two of my game tables) and asked where he was going to dinner. Since he and his dinner companions (including hellpossum and lyster, who you may remember from a guest blog entry here last July) were still waiting for a table, they graciously expanded their reservation for me. And so I found myself at dinner with very excellent people with whom I'd corresponded but not previously met, and they very quickly convinced me that I needed to play in a Mutants and Masterminds game with them that evening. Since the time over dinner had quickly convinced me that I would definitely enjoy further adventures among their company, I joined their number as a femme fatale in an Indiana Jones inspired quest for the Spear of Destiny (and had exactly the fun you'd expect from hearing just that much).

Receiving very little sleep that night, I have to confess that I was relieved when I had no players for the Xen'drik slot the next morning. I played some more Race for the Galaxy with banana_pants, had a bottle of Coke, had a coffee delivered to me by the other Indiana Jones gang (who had slept in but heard the sleepiness in my voice when I called to find out what they were up to), and brought Urtog to another table of LFR (happily accompanied by the coffee-bearers). (Yes, you're counting right, that is in fact five games in three days, which is probably a tie for the limits of my gaming stamina--and better yet, I had fun at every table, which is not something I can always report.)

I also had some really great roomies in the hotel, which impacts sleeping in a negative fashion, but definitely enhances the fun of the convention. *waves at emilymorgan, spyscribe, militiajim, and niliphim* So, convention assessment: definitely a fun convention, and I'm already looking forward to next year. In fact, I'm sad that it's already over, because every time someone says Anonycon, I think of this:



And how can you not smile with that in your head?

So, I got to play one of my favorite D&D characters today--a character who made a debut in 3.5 but never got to go much of anywhere. His name is Urtog Fight-Good, and he's seen more life outside of D&D than any of my other characters, simply because his shtick is so fun. I've probably introduced more students to D&D during the Ireland trip and the Greece and Turkey trip via Urtog than any mention of rules and dice.

Urtog used to be a half orc, but those don't exist any more, so he's a full orc now. He's not too bright (intentional understatement), which was the point in developing the character--playing someone not as smart as I am. To play Urtog, I use a very large, scratchy voice, because that voice coming out of me (I stand 5' nothing, for those of you who haven't met me in person) is part of the fun factor (for me, and I hope for others).

This leaves me, however, in the unenviable position of drinking hot tea on a warm night, because I have completely abused my vocal chords. But man, was it worth it.

Now off to bed, so I can get up early and accomplish more writing on the module before my library shift and DMing Xen'drik tomorrow.

---

Awhile ago, I talked about the learning curve I was experiencing with Meljean Brooks's paranormal romance series, because there was too much ongoing plot for a straight romance, but too much romance for a straight paranormal. Between then and now, I've been reading (somewhat voraciously) Nalini Singh's Psy/Changeling series, which has many of those same qualities, and, encouraged by how much I was enjoying those, I went back and got the first book in Brooks's series. This time, the series clicked for me. Whether it's because I started at the beginning or just hit my learning curve, I'm not sure. Whichever the case, however, I wanted to be sure to report that I have, in fact, gotten a better hang on how to read this side of the paranormal romance spectrum. (Many paranormals read more like urban fantasy or straight romance--but Singh's and Brooks's are smack in the middle.)

It occurs to me, having just read some really insightful entries from Erik Scott de Bie and Jim Hines on reading shared-world fantasy that paranormal romance isn't the only genre that requires learning how to read it. I suspect that if you don't start reading shared-world fiction before you realize it's a whole sub-genre all to itself, you bring to it some kinds of assumptions about what it means. The author hasn't created their own setting--so obviously they *couldn't* do so, and their writing is sub-par because the world isn't unique to them. This, of course, is not my opinion--but it's one that I've heard many times. Shared-world fantasy, particularly game fiction, has long been the looked-down-upon step-child of the fantasy genre.

But here's what I've observed, both as a reader and a writer in shared-world fiction. There are people who do it well and people who do it really badly. Some of those people who botch shared-world fiction are writers who do perfectly well in their own worlds, and even win awards and critical acclaim. But when it comes to writing in a shared-world setting, particularly one that requires use of the same characters, they miss the boat. Why? Because they're writing too much like themselves--and not enough like the characters. They change the world rather than enhancing it. Their work doesn't feel *genuine* the way a good shared-world writer's work does. The real challenge in shared-world fiction is writing something that makes that shared-world *more real* to an audience that carries a lot of expectations to every book it picks up.

If you're not keen on a setting, of course, you might be turned off by all the fiction, no matter how good it is. Despite my interest in the Living Forgotten Realms game, I've never been a huge fan of the Realms. There is way too much content to know--and as the best shared-world books have the setting deeply ingrained, from slang to deities to insults that only matter to people familiar with what's being insulted--so it's easy for me to get lost. I have enjoyed some Realms fiction, but the setting itself isn't enough to draw me. Some of the particular writers, like Erik, are the draw instead. I feel roughly the same way about the X-Men; I like them all right, but I bought the series written by Joss Whedon.

In settings that have a lot of appeal for me, I eagerly read the books due to the same things that frustrate me in settings I'm not keen on: they use slang, enhance my understanding of the world's deities, banter in ways that only make sense if you're in on the details of the setting. And then, there's more. Not only are these books marketing tools (and make no mistake, the companies that publish them are trying to sell their games and, in the case of Star Wars and other TV tie-ins, DVDs or other content, as much as they want to sell the novels). The books have the chance to also be great fantasy novels on their own. They can explore concepts like mortality, theology, ethics, and philosophy. They explore very human relationships between people who aren't always human. And they do all of this while maintaining a particular tone that reflects everything that has come before them.

Learning to read shared-world fiction and appreciate them for what they do may be the same kind of learning curve that I experienced with paranormal romances. Once you see what they're doing, not only in terms of story but in terms of enhancing a setting created by other authors, it's hard not to admire what these writers are doing. In my own work, I tried to think of the setting as a character in its own right, and I hope that when people read my novels, they see that as much as they see the characters and plot I created on my own.

Perhaps not so grand, but here I am, none the less!

It has been a busy four months or so, and though I'm not at a break between projects (I have plenty left to do on the adventure for Serenity Adventures, as well as some work for Rick Hershey on the Steampunk Musha RPG he has in the works), I am at a break between have-it-in-by-now-or-it's-late deadlines. The next "official" deadline (in red pen on my calendar) I have is in late May (when I will be away in Greece and Turkey, so I will certainly have it done early). It is such a nice feeling to be able to give myself permission to *not* work for one day. Then it's back with my nose to the grindstone the next!

I realize I didn't blog about DDXP and my experiences with 4th Edition, and this is in part because I am a bad blogger. It is more, however, due to my participation in the conversational reviews we're doing in an ongoing fashion on the current issue of Secret Identity Podcast. Max Saltonstall, Brian LeTendre, and I are better together as reviewers than we are apart (well, in my case, anyway), and if you don't mind listening to the audio version in 15 minute increments (that's the length of our segment, "Action Point Counter Point"), that's far better as far as gaming goes than what you'll see here on my blog.

In short: ( Read more... )

But there's more news here than just convention catch up. I should have posted this at the beginning of the month, since we're almost at the midway point: for the month of March, my story "The Valley" is being published/hosted on The Edge of Propinquity Web zine. (You may know them as t_e_o_p.) Mine is the guest story for the month: the rest of the zine is serial fiction from four dedicated authors who grow their worlds with each installment. It's a site well worth checking out--and of course, I'll be delighted to hear responses to the story.

Those seem like the major updates since I last posted. I expect to get back on track now that I'm back (and that the deadlines aren't hovering so closely around my neck as usual). I may even finally get to work on the novel I was supposed to have finished by... when did I commit to on this blog? The end of March? Heh, self-imposed deadlines don't have nearly the motivation factor they need....