Got another novel rejection last night that resulted in some bummerment. I thought I had a good shot with this particular agent, but apparently not, based on the first three chapters.

It led to a good talk with the Damsel, who has read, well, just about everything I've done at both work and on my own time. She made the point that at work, I'm the guy who wrote a ton of dialog while other folks worked on the galaxy map. And, well, I will unapologetically refer to myself as the Michael Bay of the writing team -- I am all about the explosions.

And she said (very nicely) that my writing at work had more "Holy crap!" moments than my own personal writing, in her experience. Maybe not because my personal writing isn't good, but because most of the time, I'm writing in fantasyland, and when I do that, I have to spend a lot of time building the world, which is my least favorite part of writing. I like the dialog, the fight scenes, the twists and turns. I am not, as everyone who has read my stuff will attest, Setting Guy.

So I'm doing some thinking about what to do moving forward. I think that each novel I've written since going to Clarion has been more marketable than the last -- Courtship and Cutlery is fun, but has all kinds of weird government geekery and people riding on ostriches. Palace Job moves pretty quickly, but everyone is still doing crystal-fu that takes a lot of getting used to. With the new epic, I feel like I've got a real world that I can play in for a long time, but I'm still trying to convince people to read about a world where folks fly around on crystal gliders and then get out and have swordfights.

And I don't know. I really love the new epic. Once ME2 is done, I want to clean it up and then get to work on the next one. But as the Damsel noted, I'm getting a common theme in my agent rejections these days, and it goes all the way back to the dreaded Competent I got at Clarion from David Hartwell (and pretty much every other teacher) -- the rejection letters almost all say that my story is fine, but they just work up the enthusiasm that would make them want to represent it. If my big weakness is setting, and that weakness is stopping stuff from selling, then maybe I need to do something closer to what I was thinking of before, where I write in a modern setting so that, you know, I can hide my inability to make up new worlds by going with the familiar.

Or maybe, again, I'm never going to sell anything on my own. Maybe I'm pretty much always going to be a video-game writer. I can think of worse fates. Seeing what the guys in Art and CineDesign and Tech Design have done with the words I wrote, what the VO directors and actors have made out of the scenes I've written... it's humbling. And hell, Mass Effect has sold, what, several million copies? I could do worse.

This isn't a giant emo whinefest. I'm just doing some thinking about where to go from here. Play to my strengths and write more modern stuff, or try to build my setting-making ability and get the epic to a level where agents can actually work up enthusiasm for it. I don't know.

I started a new playthrough of Mass Effect 1 at home this weekend, with the blatantly metagamey plan of hammering AI Hacking with an engineer until it got unlocked as a bonus skill due to the achievement, and then starting an Infiltrator with AI Hacking. It's the first time in quite awhile that I've played the original Mass Effect, and it is fascinating.

The official forums are populated by people with concerns that the folks who made the game they love are going to screw up the sequel. This post? Not for them. I've made a few passionate and honest posts about how I think we're improving the gameplay by cutting what didn't work before, and some people are reassured, and others accuse me of being arrogant, selling out, or lying. At this point, I'll be on the official forums to answer questions, and I will get my general Mass Effect chat fix elsewhere. There's an awesome LJ community, and I've always enjoyed the Penny Arcade forums.

But anyway, I was talking about the original Mass Effect:

Holy sweet mother of heaven, that first couple of hours has too much talking. Great on the first playthrough, invulnerable to the magic X-X-X-X skip buttons on the seventh or eighth. I'm fully aware that as the guy who had to play this when there was no sound and only placeholder animation, I am a bit jaded when it comes to these groundbreaking cutscenes and dialogs. That said, I'm only on my second real playthrough, and I can only imagine what people on the tenth playthrough are doing. In Mass Effect 2, we can skip cutscenes, and there are far fewer non-skippable conversation lines, at least right now, and I hope we manage to keep that when we ship. Our big plot dialog is also a whole lot shorter, at least if you want it to be shorter. So there: win.

And then there's the loading. How many times have I run into a weird pause while we loaded a new area? How many elevators did I ride even on my quick-and-dirty playthrough to unlock and hammer AI Hacking as quickly as possible? It was a massive improvement on the clunks and crashes before we released ME1, as I remember, and still... I look at it now and can't imagine how we thought it was okay. What we have now, the clever layout of loading tunnels and carefully checked art and conversation assets -- it works. You run around seamlessly. People are going to pick up ME2 and, well, ideally, not even notice this, because what this is is the absence of something bad.

Much has been made of the removal of crouching in ME2. Right now, the removal of crouching is a big bonus. "Hey, there's some cover! Wait, why am I not going into the cover? Oh, I have to crouch?" Are these truly valuable things to think to oneself? In ME2, I run around, I hit cover, I hit "A", and then I move into a cover position appropriate to the height of whatever I'm next to. I think that people hearing about the loss of cover think that Shepard will be moving through the entire game standing fully erect (but enough about the romances), but in fact, ME2 Shepard is ducking and weaving and generally behaving intelligently because we built the game from the ground up with the new cover scheme in mind instead of moving through two or three different schemes before settling on what we shipped with last time.

I do not miss the reticle. I like it being assumed that my Shepard has maxed out the skill of whatever weapons I'm trained with, and letting me spend my points on something else. Like, ideally, AI Hacking.

I do not miss the health bar. I know that it seems less realistic to people, but I think that those people are doing a bit of a 3rd Edition D&D denial thing. Is it really more realistic to have non-regenerating health? To have those injuries be real injuries that are then magically instantaneously healed by medi-goop? In the new format, at least I can assume that an injury is just a momentary state of windedness, the result of shots knocking the wind out of me as they penetrate my armor, and that if a follower goes down, that's a "real" injury. (And then, slapping medigel on them is just pumping them full of drugs and giving them some quick synthetic skin, something that will just get them back to the ship so that they can get real medical treatment.) I don't see any real "this is less realistic" thing here, and the health bar is just one more thing to juggle.

The soundsets I am still enthusiastically kicking in the shins for ME2 are already worlds beyond what we had in ME1.

The faces on the NPCs are better in ME2 -- I see how much handwaving the CineDesigners had to do in ME1 now to fake the things that the system couldn't do, and those are things we can actually do for realsies now.

And the story? The story for ME1 is great... and I think what we're doing is a fantastic next chapter. Our ME2 dialog is a bit tighter, a bit more conversational, but for all the "It's darker" mentality, it's clearly the same world, with the same people. We're a little less shiny than ME1, which means that there's a bit less sense of wonder -- and I miss that, yeah. We make up for it with, I think, more humanity, more of a sense that these people you're clicking and talking to and killing are real people, and that's a combination of writing and CineDesign and Art and even the Level Designers giving us levels that support what we need to do to make that happen.

I loved ME1. I was proud of ME1. And we are going to make ME1 look ugly and clunky and dated when we throw ME2 out for public consumption.

There are so many things that I can't talk about right now, workwise, which is frustrating. I could talk about general CRPG theory some more, but any topic related to my current work would boil down to "Try to have fewer bugs on your list at the end of the day than you had at the beginning."

One of the few things I can mention is that my lovely editors, one of whom I am married to and the other of whom midwifed when the Damsel gave birth to the Bud, spent about half an afternoon a few days back squeeing because they'd gotten to pick a romanceable character's outfit -- like, what he was wearing in the final scene when he came up to get jiggy witchoo. The sheer amount of Girl being exuded down the hallway caused programmers and tech designers to poke their heads out of their offices in suspicion. So, when you get to the culmination of the romance with a guy who shows up with a bottle of wine and a nice outfit, you have the Damsel and Cookie to thank for it.

Meanwhile, I've got a submission back out to an agent. After years and years, I may finally be figuring out how to write a good novel outline -- or at least, I'm sucking less. Every agent and editor seems to have different preferences, and there doesn't seem to be a formalized process, like there is for Standard Manuscript Format (where even if everyone agrees that Courier 12 looks stupid and most agents are reading on their Kindles or Sony Readers anyway, you still submit it thatway). One editor wants a one-page summary -- and if you say "one page", I will give you something that does not go over one page, because even if you don't care, there's another editor out there who writes long blog entries about how failure to adhere to their simple rules means an automatic rejection, so I'm going to play it safe. Another editor wants a short synopsis, which kind of means anything. Another editor asks for a detailed outline.

At a novel workshop, the teacher suggested that an outline should be one fifth the length of the book. That would mean that for Palace Job, I'm writing a 20,000-word outline. No. It's... if I have somebody reading 20,000 words, I want them reading the first three chapters plus a two-page synopsis.

I ended up going with a four-pager this time -- one page per major story section for the novel. Palace Job is also, I'm realizing, a pain to outline because, as a heist caper, it's more plot driven than a normal fantasy novel. I found myself wanting to go into the details of each con or heist setup, and then I had to step back and just show that yes, there were cons, so that the agent knew that I had written something with cons in it, and hopefully the writing sample I included will show that those cons may, if the agent requests more, prove to be quite good. Who knows?

I also took an evening to browse through the big fat fantasy novel that I was supposed to start rewriting before crunching work and crunching arm combined to push me back a few months. The passage of time has been good. I can approach things with a lot less ego and a lot less proximity, which means that I'm more likely to go, "What the hell does this mean?" about an obtuse passage than to know it inside and out and assume the reader will also go to that special Patrick Place with me mentally. I read a version with a friend's comments, which was awesome, because said friend enjoyed the book and had many comments along the lines of "Woooo!" when something blew up.

So I'll start rewrites at some point here, and I will, as always, wait and see with the agent.

Back on work for one final thought: the biggest issue I've run into as a BioWare writer, and felt good when I've gotten past, is trust. When you're staring at red and blue text in the toolset, it's tough to remember that a Cinematic Designer who cares just as much as you do about this plot is going to be having people move around, changing camera positions and such, and that a VO team who live and die by their ability to get good dialog out of voice actors is down in Los Angeles busting their butts, and that the actors themselves very rarely actually want to phone in a role and would really like to have whatever they record be cool and memorable provided that they get the information they need to deliver the lines properly. I've written, and subsequently cut, a lot of dialog in which people spend too much time explaining what they feel, or doing old Knights of the Old Republic-style declarations of frustration when I should have trusted a CineDesigner to have the character turn around and walk away with an angry expression.

I wrote some dialog today. It's first-pass (well, second-pass, but first-pass really, because the old first-pass wasn't right, and I can say that, because it was my old first pass), and who knows if it will bear any resemblance to what ends up in the game. It's for Miranda, one of the two people in the background of our box cover, and as I tossed out most of what I'd written before, I realized that what I needed to do, counterintuitively, was write what someone doing what she was doing would actually say, you know, as though the Cinematic Designer dude would take the baton I passed his way and run with it to put in the turns, the walking, the stares, the shoulder-holding, the headshakes, and all of it. I put in a ton of comments, probably more comments than dialog, and talked with him a few times to get a sense of what would work.

And it still might not make it. Tomorrow I might wake up and see that my old nemesis, the Crap Fairy, turned my brilliant dialog into stupid stilted piles of cliche during the evening build.

But it's a step.

Islands in the Mist is off to my bold first readers. I can now write some more query letters and figure out where I want to send Conscience and Courtship, both of which have been sitting in limbo for long enough (multiple years, editor not responding to queries)  that I probably need to declare them dead and send them somewhere else.

I'm a bit concerned, in light of RaceFail and also in light of trying to write a novel with people of color in it prominently, that I didn't have a whole lot of chromaticism in my first reader list. Hopefully once revisions are done, I'll be able to get more viewpoints without having to be the skeevy white writer who goes around asking people to be THEIR BLACK FRIEND. And my first readers are a pretty awesome bunch, anyway, and will likely not be hesitant in telling me that I botched it.

And now I shall polish my query letters.

One of the fun and exciting parts of RaceFail for me has been the fact that I've got one novel (written by me, a white guy) in the slushpile with a PoC protagonist (in the movie in my mind, she was played by a young Angela Bassett) while working on another novel that also has a PoC protagonist. Unlike some, I'm not taking the anger from the fan community as a sign that I shouldn't include people of color in my stuff, only that I should try not to screw it up, and it would also probably be keen if I showed it to some people of color before sending it out to get published, so that my first clue to there being stuff I need to fix is not having a polite fan tell me that I am pants-challenged several years post publication.

So with that in mind, I have one question and one request. All are welcome, whether I know you or not.

Question:
In my mind, there's a difference between a novel featuring a person of color prominently and a novel that is about racism as it affects that character. It's not a hard line -- I imagine it's a fairly smooth gradient that runs from "character's skin color is mentioned the first time they're described, and that's all you ever hear about it" to "the entire book is about this character's struggle with racism" with a ton of room in between.

I am writing a book with heroes who happen to range across the color spectrum. I am very deliberately not writing about racial tension. These are heroes who just happen to have skin tones and names that aren't all European. I have two reasons for this:

1) I'm pretty sure I'd screw up the other kind of story. I'm a white guy. I don't know dick about racism. I mean, I know enough to write a bad afterschool special, but not enough to write a novel that anyone but another white guy is going to be impressed by. I respect these stories, and I don't think that they're mine to tell. That doesn't mean that race never comes up in my stuff, just that it's not the focal point.

2) When I come home from work, I play with the kids, make dinner, get the kids to eat dinner, play with them a bit more, get the kids bathed, get the kids into bed, do whatever keep-house-working chores need to be done, and then have about an hour to screw around with before I go to bed. When I use that precious time to read, I want to read something entertaining and escapist and fun. I don't want to write about the stuff I've been grappling with all day, and while I can imagine that a PoC might come home and read a book about racism and see someone appreciating what they've had to deal with all day, I'm assuming that there are also PoCs like me who get home from a long hard day and
don't feel like emotionally exploring the same crap they had to put up with at the bus station.

So, with that in mind, what are the most common pitfalls that you've seen people writing a PoC protagonist make? What plot points do you see well-intentioned white folks put their PoCs into to the frustration of fans of color?

(For people who have incredibly legitimate concerns about tokenism, this a fake-fantasy world, but the racial makeup of the group maps to:

Indian-American woman
Indian-American woman (again)
African-American woman
Chinese man
Japanese man
Eastern European man
Irish man

So, two white folks out of the core seven that would be on the cover of the book in a big happy team shot.)

Request:
I've seen some people coming through whose blogs have information about disabilities. One of the major characters above has had a transtibial amputation (leg removed below the knee) and walks with the aid of a prosthetic and a cane. I'd like to do this justice on the second pass, but my pre-first-pass research didn't turn up a ton. I've been reading fact sheets from the Amputee Coalition of America, and I've gotten some basic understanding, but I would really like for amputees or people with disabilities not to scream in frustration at another author getting it wrong in a bad attempt to be symbolic.

If anyone has links to something would, for lack of a better term, be "Transtibial Amputation for Dummies", I would be really appreciative. I'd like to show the character doing exercises, treatments, getting frustrated by the limitations, and, you know, actually acting like it's a real thing. The fact sheets at the ACA have been good, but when I hit the second pass, I need to know more than I know now if I'm going to do it right.

Thanks, and good luck out there.

(Also, I'm assuming that one gigantic fake news post is funny, and two becomes me not taking the situation seriously. If people want Radio Free RaceFail, I can do that. Until I run out of ideas. In which case I'll just steal from Asian mythology and see if anyone notices.)

(Breaking out of filter)

And now, lesbian sex!

This one is harder. (I wrote a straight love scene earlier.) I've read enough Nora Roberts to fairly easily write a love scene that is more graphic than a pan to the lamp without it turning into something from Alt.Sex.Stories, but I haven't read a whole lot of lesbian romance novels, so trying to do it tastefully and respectfully is difficult.

I may have to lose the cheerleader outfits.

At some point I may have to start reading lesbian romance novels. (I keep wanting to add "If there are any," but I have no doubt that there are. I just haven't read them.)

If anybody has good lesbian romance novels, ideally with a graphic nature at about the level of a normal Nora Roberts novel (so, you know, still something that feels more like romance than flat-out porn), I'm open to suggestions.

As I mentioned on the novel-in-progress filter, I just finished a chapter in which a lot of named characters die, and it made me think about how the deaths of the male characters were handled, and whether it was different from how I handled the deaths of the female characters, and whether that difference was justified by the plot, and whether the difference being justified by the plot actually mattered if the end result was that I was doing something that was going to hurt people.

And last but not least, whether authors can afford to worry about hurting people. (Not in the first draft, I know -- this is something I'm going to hit myself in the rewrite.) But the definition of Women in Refrigerator Syndrome, according to Wikipedia, is "...the use of the death or injury of a female comic book character as a plot device in a story starring a male comic book character." Technically, by that definition, I'm in the clear, since the novel has female protagonists. Realistically, though, I don't think my main character having boobs gets me off the hook. And I did quite deliberately kill a female character as a plot device to show the reader that I wasn't screwing around, that the bad guy was not an honorable antihero. This was a character made to be killed as a gut punch to the reader.

I don't know whether this matters, but I killed a male character in the same chapter, and at the time I wrote it, his death was as emotionally affecting as the woman's, and was just as much a plot device. The purpose of the supporting-cast woman's death was to show the character of the villain. The purpose of the supporting-cast man's death was to show the character of the hero. These deaths had been planned for months. Everything I write is a plot device to screw with the reader's emotions, make them love or hate or pity or swear or jump.

So I don't know. Maybe this is different from WiR Syndrome -- it's not like I've taken an existing character created by someone else and decided to kill her for ratings punch. Maybe that doesn't matter, if it's still going to piss off female readers sensitive to having female characters killed for ratings punch.

People who write, what do you do? Have you ever been disturbed by the way you wrote a character's death? What's justified? What's not?

Didn't link this when I meant to due to everyone in my personal circle of relationship getting sick, but: Ari Marmell (aka mouseferatu ) has a new novel, Agents of Artifice, up at Amazon. And if you're interested in seeing the style you'd be getting, Ari's novel Black Crusade is being serialized on the WotC website as well.

Both are definitely worth checking out!

Got a little writing done last night. Not an enormous dive-in, but a little time after the lads were asleep.

Chapter: 0 of 20
Words: 1322 of 100,000

Throat-clearing, at least from a voice perspective. I've got the first chapter pretty well structured, although whether the structure works is anybody's guess.

I'll give it a "what was I thinking?" touch-up pass in free moments today. I'd like to have the first chapter done by the end of the weekend.

(As always, all future progress notes will be behind the "People who care about reading this stuff" filter.)

Took a little time this evening and bundled all my market stuff for the old novels into a single page, for easy access. Okay, I just wrote "I got discouraged in 2008 and didn't push things as hard as I could have," but that's a damned lie, when I stop and think about it. Every novel is out somewhere, and I do not have the power to make agents or publishers respond to me faster.

For 2009, I may withdraw Conscience of the Demon, which has been at DAW since 2003 -- the folks at DAW are nice, but they've stopped responding to my yearly queries. The people at Baen, who've had Gilding the Apocalypse since 2004, reliably tell me it's on somebody's desk, and while I'm not in love with a five year turnaround, the communication is enough for me.

No idea what to do with Courtship and Cutlery. Anna Genoese got the full manuscript for Tor Paranormal Romance (per her request after reading the first 50) in 2005, and then she left Tor, and now Tor Paranormal Romance has a policy of not answering queries (which is fine; if the policy is there, at least I know it). I may have to pull this as a lost cause as well, since there's no guarantee that it actually made the transition to another editor at Tor.

The Palace Job has been at a small Canadian publisher for more than a year with no query response. No idea what to do there. I might withdraw it and fling the first 50 pages at Tor's normal fiction line. If I'm leaving the novel in limbo, I might as well leave it in limbo with a larger publisher.

It's tempting just to let this stuff sit, to avoid doing anything given the crappiness of the publishing world at the moment, but if I do that, then I'll just have a bunch of trunk novels. Some of these might be trunk novels anyway (I don't think that they are, but time may disagree with me), but I need to keep sending this stuff out.

Another option is to focus more diligently on agents, but agents have been only a little more responseful than publishers in 2008. I got several polite rejections, which is great, and a bunch of non-responses, which is less great. I'm also trying to figure out what to do in terms of these agents, because ideally, I get an agent and that's that -- which makes me feel odd about querying three agents simultaneously for three different books. If the books were different enough that an agent wouldn't handle some of it (a romance and a hard SF novel, for example), that'd be one thing, but it's all fantasy. Again, no idea what to do here.

But I need to keep doing something.

This was a fascinating read for me, mostly because this book refused to fit into my standard comfort zone. I apparently have a two by two matrix with "Liked, Didn't Like" on one axis and "Good Book, Bad Book" on the other, and I count myself very intelligent for being able to recognize as good books that I did not myself actually enjoy reading. And this book just doesn't fit.

I have minor ending quibbles, mostly because it felt like a lot of the tension was drained away before the climactic encounter, which I would have put about fifty or seventy-five pages earlier, back when the tension was at its peak. On the other hand, I really liked the emotional flow of the ending, so I'm forced to see it not as bad, but as a good version of a slightly different story from the one I thought I was reading. (Without going deeply into spoiler-land, I was thinking political intrigue, and then there's a hard left turn into quasi-Native American-feeling stuff near the end.)

Ultimately, though, I really really really liked the characters and the story being told. I liked the emotional struggles, I liked the world that was being built. I liked the Brotherhood (and the number of women in said Brotherhood who were not archers or healers or all the other "No, look, we let girls in, as long as they don't want to tank" roles). I liked the politics. I liked the magic, and the alien nature of the big bad.

And for the life of me, I could barely get through this book sentence by sentence. It was like reading Riddley Walker or something, where I needed about twenty minutes to be able to get into the voice every time I picked the book up. And I don't think this is because the individual voice was bad. I think that Violette Malan and I are at opposite ends of some communicative spectrum, somehow, and it's not good versus bad, it's just... how people think to put sentences together, what ideas they think are important, how they present them. I felt the way I felt reading C. J. Cherryh's Chanur Saga, where I respect the hell out of the ideas, and the writing itself isn't bad as far as I can tell, by an objective "are the verbs in the right place" standard, but somehow I have an incredibly hard time latching onto what is being said.

I almost put this book down but once I realized that I needed the adaptation time, and that I should only read when I had at least an hour to devote to it, I was fine. Ended up staying up way too late finishing it, and will be getting the sequel.

I just want to know why all the publishers and major bookstores can't get a couple billion apiece. I mean, I'd like a million myself to help provide a personal economic stimulus in these difficult times, and I'd promise to buy a car or two if I got that stimulus package. Hell, if I had a million, I'd even buy American. See, Reaganomics people? Trickle down!

More seriously, things are not looking wonderful for the writing and publishing industry at the moment. Taking a cue from people like Jim Hines and John Scalzi, I'm not planning any major changes. Currently, I sit in the esteemed and well-regarded position of being immune to the problems of the publishing world, in so much as I am currently a published short-story author with a couple of video-game credits, and will continue to be so next year even if the market implodes.

I'd love to say that I'm just writing for myself, but I'd love adoring throngs, so that's a giant filthy lie. And I'm going to keep writing, and submitting, and waiting, and generally doing what I'm doing, even as the market implodes.

I've had three chapters of a novel sitting with an agent for six months. I've had one book sitting with a publishing house for five years (and another for four, and another for three). Even if someone saw my book and loved it enough to buy it tomorrow, it'd be multiple years before it hit the shelves. Chances are strong that most agents are slowing down their acquisitions, so it's unlikely that I'll see any progress on the sales front before the market picks back up, the publishers ask for more new talent, and the agents suddenly find themselves scrambling for new folks.

And when that happens, my goofy banter-and-fight-scenes novels will be there waiting.

I am buying more damn books though, at least as many as will fit into the new-homeowner budget.

Currently reading a really really bad mystery, which will have to tide me over until payday come Friday, and then getting the stack o' books to tide me over during the holidays.

Now that that is out of my system...

I think it wasviking_cat who brought up the idea of the Fruit Basket problem, the issue in which the entirety of one's plot could have been avoided or drastically truncated by having one character send another character a fruit basket saying something like, "Hi, just so you know, I'm not a werewolf, I'm actually investigating them, so if you see me doing weird stuff, just ask me, and I'll be happy to explain it, so nobody has needless suspicions."

I'm working on that for the upcoming novel now. I'm going for politicking between several different power groups, and while I like the twists and turns and betrayals quite a bit, I have distant hopes for having those twists, turns, and betrayals hold up later on when someone thinks about whether what the individual power groups were doing made any kind of sense... or whether, as V-kitty would say, Country X should just have sent a fruit basket telling Country Y that they were concerned about potential invaders from Country Z working evil magic in the kingdom, so, you know, be on the lookout, and maybe we could form a committee or something?

I think that in general, this raises an interesting question. I'm quite happy to do the work to make sure that everybody's motives make sense, but honestly, there's a part of me that suspects I'm trying too hard. I'm not trying to write Ulysses. I'm trying to entertain people. If someone buys my book, reads my book, likes my book, and finds twelve plotholes later, is that really so bad? I mean, they liked it while they read it. They were entertained. Much as I don't advocate a ton of worldbuilding beyond what you know you need to write your work, I don't know if I should actually be that concerned. Shakespeare was happy to have Keanu -- er, Don John -- just declare that he was a villain, as he (Will the Thrill, not Keanu) did with Iago. And there are enough real news stories about people so caught up in emotion of some sort -- anger, lust, greed -- that they go through a ton of shenanigans, both comic and tragic, that could have been averted with the fruit basket.

A lot of it has to do with tension and pacing, I think. If you keep things moving quickly enough that the reader believes in the tension, believes that things are racing too quickly and that there's no time to think or pause or go on anything but instinct, then even if the reader has the fruit basket moment, they're still likely to be forgiving, because they can believe that the characters wouldn't have thought of the fruit basket, either. It's when the characters don't think of the fruit basket even though they go several days without seeing the person they are suspicious of and have plenty of time to send them an e-mail or messenger bird or cybersquirt or fruit basket, but inexplicably don't even though the tension is purely emotional and in no way related to any outside force that is actually hurrying them along, that my personal bullshit detector pings.

Mind you, I'm pretty forgiving. I read fast, and I also don't generally reread -- I don't have a ton of time, and there are always new books to try. So mileage may vary. And I should probably work out my plotholes just to be safe.

As always, anybody who wants onto the filter list, lemme know. Not a ton of regular activity, but more than I post publicly.

I hit this today in the context of work, but it's true in any kind of writing, for me, anyway.

For me, the sign that I've written a minor character well is when I find myself saying, "Okay, yes, he's technically only there for one plot, at the end of which he dies horribly, and that's the point of the plot, he's purely there to show that another character is really dangerous and powerful... but man, it'd be cool if I could figure out how to bring him back later."

I don't do it, because I only have so many Joss Whedon Death cards to spend, so I have to use them sparingly... but I really liked some of the tiny little characters I made in this plot.

Or maybe I just like minor characters in general. That seems to be what I consistently hear from my readers, anyway -- in first drafts, my major characters might have huge likability or motivation or consistency issues, but man, people would love to read more about Eponyme, the sidekick with unrequited love issues and a tendency to name things after herself.

Had approximately half a work week this week, given that the boys were sick, as was our daycare provider. That said, it was a good and productive week, and a lot of things began to come together for the project.

Without going into the kind of details that get me fired, one thing that I'm particularly jazzed about is the team getting over a major story hurdle. When you've got a lot of time to clean up the story while waiting for the engine to come together, people tend to fixate on things. One of the things we've spent the last year or so trying to do is avoid cliches.

(I will pause for the snarky people to say something about BioWare games and cliches.)

What's come about this week is a major shakedown in which everything is looked at with fresh eyes, and we've finally gotten some real buy-in with what some of us have been saying for awhile: that by trying so damn hard to avoid the cliches of the type of game we're trying to make, we're making a story so complex that it takes a crap-ton of time to explain the intricacies so that the player understands it... and as a result, even the tightest, coolest story gets bloated by infodumping. The reason we have cliches is because cliches are instantly understandable. The best way to deal with them in a game with limited resources isn't to avoid them, but to take advantage of them, let them fill in the details while you make a few critical tweaks that give the story the originality that people will remember.

(In football-western-land, you could, for example, tell a story about a team that went 7-9 last year and has a decent offense that crumbles in the red zone and a defense that is good at shutting down big plays but can't make turnovers or stop opposing offenses on third and short, in a setting with impending statehood resulting in people buying up land and causing friction with tribes that moved here under government treaties. That's a great, nuanced story, and if that's all you've got going, it could work just fine. If you're trying to work within a word-count budget, though, or you've got other story elements you want to explore, though, that's a whole lot explanation for the sake of originality. You could have a surface story of "Bad team last year, you're the new owner who's supposed to turn it around, and also, corrupt small-town sheriff whose thugs are running wild," and 1) the fact that you're combining two cliches makes it more original right off the bat, and 2) you can put most of the complex crap in the story anyway, but as background that's there for the people who look for it.)

Maybe I'm just jazzed about this because it's pretty much my own writing style. Take something familiar, tweak it.

And yes, I know that some folks would prefer that it be all-original. The problem with that is that it's hard to make that accessible to new gamers, and getting new gamers is vital in today's market. You can make that game as a small company, appealing to a niche market of people who already know all the tropes of the genre and are eager for something new. As a large company, though, that doesn't fly as an original product. If you're lucky, you can get the originality into a side plot, or downloadable content. Sometimes that stings, but that's the price of working at the company that makes the big games. (And there are enough benefits to working here that it's more than worth it for me.)

So that's where we're at. Time will tell, but it feels pretty darn good right now.

So apparently preparing to buy a house and move is time consuming. Who knew?

Work continues, although not in any capacity I can talk about. The boys continue to say adorable and inappropriate things. And in those few spare moments that come around, I am outlining the Overblown Fantasy Epic.

I think that I've discovered my ideal outlining method, which is to outline for five units, then cut one as completely unnecessary, and then merge another two. This is how The Palace Job went from a five-act novel to a three-act novel -- the completely unnecessary fourth act took a dive right before I was supposed to start writing it (at two in the morning, unable to sleep, I realized that it was filler, which is a great time to realize something like that), and then, in a rewrite, I merged what had been the fifth act with the third act, since the former had too much tension-drain time and the latter was decent but benefitted from a little punch-up.

I'm running into the same thing with the overblown epic. I had no idea how many books to plan for, so I started writing down everything that I wanted to have happen -- civil war, war with big evil nation, occupation by another big evil nation, betrayals, loves, returns from Joss-Whedon-esque simudeath, and all of that. It felt like about five books, which sounded pretty good as far as overblown epics went -- more than a trilogy, less than Martin or Jordan or Goodkind or anyone else who gets the "Just freaking end it!" club applied to them by the fans.

Then I realized that book four was filler. It was one line of "Yeah, war here," and while I'm sure that I could fill it up with some fight scenes and such, it wasn't absolutely necessary. There were about four cool bits that made me want the plots I was thinking of, and I could shove that plot into another book without too much trouble. And once I was down to four, the merger took all the slow breath-taking parts and lit them on fire, leaving only a series of increasingly large and colorful explosions.

So, three books. Classic trilogy. Working on areas now, figuring out which parts of the world I'm making are coolest and need some lovin' so that I actually buck tradition and have a freaking setting. Got some characters, need more, life continues.

I will probably have a specific filter for the overblown epic. Holler if you want on.

Ari (mouseferatu  on LJ) is changing some of his writing, and it made me take a step back and change some of mine. Or rather, it made me decide that I was writing something else. I'd been dutifully outlining the reincarnated saints novel, and it was going fine, but it was feeling like something I was doing to be smart, writing a standalone urban fantasy novel because, well, I don't have anything in an urban setting, and again, good to mix things up a bit until something hits.

Then, after taking with Ari, I had kind of a revelation. And the revelation is, "I'm doing okay." A couple million people have played Mass Effect, and even if they didn't all see any given plot, there's a good chance that they saw something I wrote. Maybe they laughed at the Elcor version of Hamlet, or the Big Stupid Jellyfish line, or maybe Samesh Bhatia made them think a little. Even if they didn't see any of my side stuff, even if they totally ignored the elevators, I feel like I made my mark on that game.

And if I never get an agent / sell a novel / hit it big with my personal after-work writing, I'm still attached to a game that sold a ton, a game that, almost a year after first shipping, still has people arguing and laughing and discussing it in forums all over the place.

All of which means that playing it safe and doing the more marketable thing is really not that important. And while it wasn't like I didn't want to write the reincarnated saints novel, it's not feeling like the awesomest thing ever at this point. I don't know why. Maybe it's because of work. Maybe it's because I'm feeling burnt-out on all urban fantasy save Harris, Butcher, and Briggs, and don't have any inclination to add another miniskirted heroine with a bare midriff and fishnets (not that I'd write her that way, but you know that's how she'd show up on the cover) to the bloated urban fantasy marketplace right now.

Whatever the reason, the thing pulling me right now is, as I have described it unflinchingly to friends, "a bigass overblown multi-book fantasy epic." I've always liked reading them. I want to write them. And while writing a book that doesn't end with all the characters neatly in their happily ever after places makes the book more dangerous for publication purposes (as I understand it, I have to convince the publisher to publish three books, not one), I... don't care. It's what I want to write. I don't care enough about the urban fantasy piece to make my wife care for the boys while I go downstairs and write. I do care enough about this overblown epic.

So get ready for authorial wandering. I'm keeping most of it in a private wiki, but I'm sure it'll spill over.

To those of you who read this blog and hate overblown fantasy epics, I am so sorry. I'd say something about how you're going to like mine, but really, I'm pretty sure you won't. I'm not just embracing the cliches, I'm grabbing them and jumping off a cliff while an ancient eldritch crystal blows up behind me. Here's hoping that it's a fun ride.

Say that someone wanted to write a fantasy piece that got people excited about character interactions in the same way that people
got excited about the various works of Joss Whedon. What form of written word would you say best captures that kind of episodic soap-opera feel?

Various ideas occurring to me include:
- Write a serial, a weekly or monthly short story or novelette in the 10,000-word range. (Then find out how to make money on a serial in this day and age.)
- Write a novel that has a built-in serial format, so that it feels more like reading a dozen novelettes than like reading a novel. (Then convince an editor that this is a viable novel concept.)
- Write a fantasy series like everyone else and just focus on character development. Don't worry about trying to capture the episodic feel. That isn't what grabs the Whedon crowd.

Part of this is actual writing thinking, and part of this is just having picked up the Buffy graphic novels. It's interesting looking at how attached people are to the characters, how they hand on the interplay between all the leads, how they look forward to the arrival of guest stars, all of that. I'd love to figure out how to replicate that kind of audience attachment (with the understood caveat that "write interesting characters well" is part of this, and if I can't do that, no amount of aping is going to help me).

Do any of the more historically or tactically minded readers have a link to an article on World War 2 dogfighting tactics? I read Clash of Wings years and years ago, and enjoyed what I understood of it, but I'm looking for something (preferably online) that is, not to put too fine a point on it, dumbed down enough for someone like me to understand it. Ideally, with football-style diagrams of where the planes go, complete with icons and arrows and suchlike.

I got something like this for warfare in ancient Greece, and it really helped.

(Note: This is for a potential someday novel, not for the potential someday game.)

Another obligatory attempt to broaden my reading horizons. Opinions on Kate Forsythe? I read the first 40 pages of Rhiannon's Ride in the bookstore and thought it might be worth picking up, but if I do, I'd rather start with something earlier she wrote in this world. I hate diving into a writer's world on book fifty and trying to figure out what the caer'bjeargh is.

For reference: Liked the first Kristen Britain book, was unwowed by Diana Pharaoh Francis's Path of ____ series (well, okay with the first, gave up after second), and I'm guessing Forsythe is somewhere in that realm?