Alec Austin

11:05 pm: Late Mythcon post
Attended Mythcon last weekend, and had a good time meeting & talking to people, whether I'd met them before (voidmonster & kirizal), was meeting them in person for the first time (sartorias), or for the first time ever, online or off (shweta_narayan, elsmi, and emily_jiang). I then lapsed into a semi-zombified state that lasted all week, due to chronically insufficient sleep, and only now, at the end of the week with no need to wake up early tomorrow, have I started feeling vaguely human again. So even if I was even remotely prone to being the kind of person who writes full con reports, this would not be one. I will, however, mention a few things that stood out.

* The Khazad-Dum book toss was a fairly small-scale affair, with only about half a dozen people throwing books, but the ones I'd read thoroughly deserved being denounced and thrown against a wall. (Orphans of Chaos can go die in a fire.) Also, it introduced me to a book that may possibly be worse than The Eye of Argon - Cynthia Leitich Smith's Eternal. The premise (guardian angel screws up, allows charge to be turned into a vampire) boded poorly for its chances, but the vampire princess's daddy has a coffin with a Nascar logo on it which he bought off the internet for 75% off (a *totally* relevant detail), and the guardian angel's archangel supervisor sends him a memo indicating they should meet with the addendum "see attached Yahoo Map", and the introduction is seriously skeezy and makes the angel sound like a stalker, and I know all of this from having heard about 100 words quoted from the book. I've done a fair amount of thinking about how to parody the excesses of the vampire & urban fantasy genre in my time (see: Blood Valley High), but Eternal goes far beyond anything I could have imagined in terms of genre parody, despite apparently being intended completely seriously. I'm not usually one for the public mockery/pillorying of books, but in this case I think it would be well-deserved.

* I played Once Upon A Time again for the first time in, um, 5 years? And discovered that while the stories the game produces will inherently have a certain incoherence to them, that the game as a whole tends to go better when players are willingly using or introducing traditional fairy tale elements so that other players may have a chance to actually play their cards. (Versus, y'know, introducing space aliens as a means of not being interrupted.) Also, shweta_narayan's custom cards were a wonderful addition to the game, and I'm not just saying that because I won the first game via the use of the card 'Divine Intervention'.

* It is possible that I have yet to learn how to be a good panelist, but I appear to have a singular talent for being put on panels where I am the sole representative of the video game industry, and as such have pretty much nothing to say, because all the other panelists are artists/contributors to Shadow Unit/telepathic squid people, and the panel rapidly becomes a conversation about topics on which I have little or nothing to contribute. I guess I need to maybe get better about asking questions? I vaguely recall something about that from a panel at Fourth Street.

* Farah Mendelsohn (fjm) was amazing at the YA fantasy roundtable that Shweta and Emily moderated, and while I haven't read the copy of A Short History of Fantasy that I picked up (co-written with Edward James), I'm really looking forward to it. I do rather hope that the inscription she left with her autograph was meant to be "loves with great grace" rather than "loses with great grace", though - the cursive is rather ambiguous.

Anyway, I hope that no one who I met at Mythcon will feel slighted that I've taken this long to get around to saying anything. I really did have a good time, despite departing before the banquet on Sunday; it's never bad to spend time with people who take books seriously.

Addendum 1: As I mentioned to people at the con, I am looking for an LA area writer's group, and while I live on the West Side, I'm willing to drive a fair distance if needs be.

Addendum 2: Shweta put up a very interesting post about the difference between prose and poetry earlier this week which I highly recommend. Just saying.

Tags: books, conventions, writing

10:19 pm: Writing Post
Progress: 6 pages/~1500 words.

Subject Matter: Nazgul apologia + naked theological exposition

Prognosis: Theological exposition perhaps a little too baldly expository/vernacular in tone (I blame all the Glen Cook I've been reading). Nazgul apologia seems good enough for the moment, though I suspect one of my characters will be protesting that he was blinded by science before too long.

Also, I get the feeling the I use the same reserves of mental energy to write as I do to figure out what I should be working on next at work. Which would serve as a partial explanation of why I haven't really been doing much writing lately.

Tags: writing

05:02 pm: Also:
An 8 page Darko Macan-penned comic that's well worth reading. (Macan wrote the Eisner-nominated Grendel Tales: Devils & Deaths in 1994.)

Tags: comic books, writing

12:15 pm: [Nine Rings] Progress
Agonizingly slow progress on Chapter 10 of Nine Rings this weekend. I thought I had more material in my notebooks, but that was really only enough for a couple of pages, and after beating my head against the wall for most of yesterday, I've got 7.5 pages done.

Oh, well. At least I'm writing fiction again, however slowly.

Tags: nine rings, writing

11:13 pm: Fanfic vs. 'Original' Work
So sartorias was asking for topics for post-Bittercon discussions, and I brought up the question of what the differences (in motivation & content) were between fanfic and writing that isn't fanfic but is still responding to/in dialogue with prior works. One thing led to another, and here I am trying to write up a conversation-starter.

So you know where I'm coming from: I don't write fanfic any more. This isn't a value judgment, just a statement of fact. The last time I wrote/composed fanfic was when I was... six, I think? My parents still have notebooks which have me continuing the adventures of Jason January & the Space Cadets, as well as even older notebooks containing my great-aunt's transcription and illustrations of stories I dictated to her about generals of the Three Kingdoms period when I was very young. When I did write fanfic, it was motivated by the feeling that there wasn't enough of a particular kind of story - not enough stories in which Jason January foiled Hercules Canute, or in which Tsao Tsao was the hero instead of the much-maligned villain. This seems to be one motivation for writing fanfic. Others - perhaps more common - include the subversion & reinterpretation of the surface message or meanings of a text, 'correcting' perceived errors or failures on the part of the source text's creator(s), and personal gratification, aesthetic or otherwise. This list is probably far from complete.

The reasons I listed for why authors might write fanfic could also drive authors to compose 'original' works that respond to or are in dialogue with a pre-existing text, of course. (Most, if not all, of my fiction is driven by the twin desires to revisit or reinterpret works that I love or to subvert genre tropes that annoy me.) Essentially, my question is: Aside from legal, monetary, and hierarchy of taste issues (i.e. the perception that 'real fiction' > fanfic), why do writers choose to write some stories as fanfic as other stories as independent works? When and why is playing with someone else's toys more appealing than creating/copying your own, and when is the reverse true?

Inquiring Alecs would like to know.

Tags: fanfic, hierarchies of taste, writing

01:59 am: Let's Play Dark Crusade!
So I tend to oscillate between focusing on games and fiction/writing in my free time, but lately I've been skewing pretty heavily towards the games, or at least writing about games.

Should you want to see me pick apart someone else's real-time strategy game (one that I really enjoy, mind you), look no further than this thread.

Tags: strategy, video games, writing

06:25 pm: Um. Puppets? Really?
Uh, so can anyone explain to me what this post actually means? I can't tell if I've just internalized the message so completely that the idea that it needs to be explicitly stated boggles me, or what.

Tags: confusion, fantasy, theory, writing

10:49 pm: Intimacy doesn't scale
So I've been reading Shadow Unit (which I recommend, by the way, though I imagine that viewers of Criminal Minds will enjoy it a tad more than those who've never watched the show) and reflecting on the various discussions on 21st century storytelling that were had at Fourth Street, and I keep on coming back to the fact that intimacy - particularly the kind of meta-narrative complicity required to make something like cvillette's (fictional character) 'date' with txanne (real person) work - doesn't scale well. This is one of the many reasons that I prefer tabletop RPGs to live action ones, to say nothing of preferring small parties & reasonably sized conversation groups to larger ones: The nature of the interaction you're having with the people around you changes when you scale beyond a certain point. When you're with a group of around 4-6 friends, you can all participate in the same conversation, while at 8-10, things tend to break down, particularly if you're physically spread out.

( More media theory than it would be wise to shake a stick at )

Tags: fourth street, gaming, theory, writing

09:21 pm: Fourth Street [Part I]
So, then. Let's talk about Fourth Street.

To start with, it was the smallest - and most reasonably sized - con I've ever been to. Everyone could conceivably have talked to everyone else at one point or another, if they'd wanted to, and the fact there was only one programming track meant that it felt like everyone was engaged in a single continuing conversation, rather than the dozen+ intertwining conversations more typical of a Wiscon or a Boskone. You also didn't have to have everyone attending all of the panels to get this effect - I missed both of the morning panels, for instance. Both the scale of the conversation (~100 people at its largest) and the quality and level of discourse (in which a certain baseline knowledge of the genre and of critical theory was assumed) felt just about right, and though of course not every thread could be followed to its conclusion, the ones that were left dangling should provide the jumping-off points for next year's discussions.

One of the great pleasure of Fourth Street, of course, was seeing mrissa and timprov and markgritter, who I hadn't seen in person in a little under 6 years. In addition to being reunited with old friends and acquaintances (I had the pleasure of being on several panels with matociquala, 2 of which she moderated), I also met a great number of interesting people, including several writers whose work I've admired for years, people I'd only known as editors, or through the internet, and people who were entirely new to me (but nonetheless proved to be great interlocutors). The fact that most of the meals that weren't at chain or hotel restaurants were excellent (the less said about the hotel's restaurant the better) only enhanced an already pleasant experience.

I was taken by surprise by both the sheer number of panels I ended up on (4 out of 10), and the positive response to my contributions on those panels. The 21st century Storytelling panel ended focusing mostly on Shadow Unit, so my contribution there were minimal, but I had a enough different people tell me that they'd enjoyed what I'd said on the other panels that I didn't feel like a total fraud for sitting up in front of a room of people with nothing but unpublished work and academic qualifications (having gone to Clarion pales a little when your fellow panelists have a list of published novels/stories as long as your arm). Hopefully Steven Brust & his co-conspirators will keep on letting me run my mouth off on panels if I can make it next year.

...and now, useful quotes, concepts and phrases:

* Victorian Party Death Syndrome!
* The Toxic Muse
* Using the children's nonfiction section as the starting point for research
* "Gene Wolfe writes books where the basic unit of construction is the trap-door." -TNH
* "The opposite of serious isn't funny. The opposite of both is 'sordid'." -R. A. Lafferty
* Works in progress as quantum waveforms

Other people undoubtedly took better notes than I did, and will have more comprehensive descriptions and lists.

Next Time: Stuff I forgot to say about how I translate ideas to stories, messages vs. themes/questions, micro- & macro-structures, good academic books on structure in screenwriting, and Chekov's bomb.

Tags: conventions, criticism, writing

01:31 am: Darling du jour
"...aspired to mediocrity - and generally achieved it."

I'm starting to get the feeling that the implied narrator of my novel is a bit of a snob.

Tags: nine rings, writing

05:35 pm: So, mrissa has a reading post up in which she notes that she's tired of books having different titles in the US & the UK. The explanation that I've heard for this phenomenon is that the US marketers feel that a book won't sell with its UK title, and impose a new title on it. While I'm not going to go into the specifics of my feelings on this (short version: Sometimes marketing knows what it's doing, but often the changes seem arbitrary and even harmful), this got me thinking about how my taste in titles seems to be at odds with what appears to be the standard in genre publishing.

( Book Titles! )

( Self-indulgent book titling discussion )

Comments? Thoughts? Anyone? ...Bueller?

Tags: titles, writing

10:09 pm: Nine Rings update
I just made it past the stumbling block that's kept me from getting anything done on Nine Rings for the past few months.

( Blah Blah Blah )

Tags: nine rings, writing

07:46 pm: Been Busy...
...as you might surmise from the complete lack of posting. Or writing. Or, in fact, online activity of any kind.

I picked up Arcana Heart last week, which I'm sure I posted about at some point in the past (though I can't find the post) as yet another 2d fighting game I was sure would never make it to the US. Atlus, however, seems to be determined to continue to release games targetted at my exact demographic, or at least a demographic that has significant overlap with me.

The less said about the characters and the story the better, of course - one doesn't really play fighting games for coherent narrative, or at least one *shouldn't*, as the only possible result is misery & disappointment. What's really notable about Arcana Heart (at least to me) is that it actually makes fairly hardcore techniques like chain combos and canceling out of moves accessible, or at least more accessible than games like Guilty Gear or KoF. Even so, though, I think I'm past the point in my life where spending hours playing a 2D fighter and trying to master a character seems like a worthwhile pasttime. I still play Dawn of War for an hour or so most nights, but that's partly professional interest and partly my Dan Abnett-derived fascination with the Warhammer universe acting up.

Sadly, I have determined through thorough statistical sampling that Dan Abnett & Sandy Mitchell are the only writers working for the Black Library who I would actually describe as "good". I say "sadly" both because I'm rapidly running out of books that I can (or want to) read while tired or exercising, and because, well, I'm a technique snob. It's not that some of the other authors I've read don't tell interesting stories, as much as that their prose makes me want to fling their books across the room while screaming "That is NOT a sentence!" at the top of my lungs.

Commas and semicolons, people. Run-on sentences are not your friends.

Anyway, now that I've got that off my chest... Would anyone be interested in reading an essay about serial narrative that digs into the Gaunt's Ghosts books? Or the interesting contrast between the Flashman books & Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novels? I keep toying with the idea of writing these, but if none of you want to read another word about Warhammer 40k novels, I'd rather not bother.

Also, if there's anything else trivial and frivolous (i.e. non-academic) you'd be interested in a mini-essay on, let me know. Or you could just recommend books. Like I said, I'm running out of things to read.

Tags: books, video games, writing

10:34 pm: Um, wow. (Or is that Wao?)
So, uh, Junot Diaz, for whom I TA'd while I was a graduate student at MIT, just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I'm both stunned and incredibly happy for him, as well as kind of astonished that the Pulitzer committee was willing to acknowledge the excellence of a book that's as, well, *geeky* as The Brief Wondrous Life is, given that it starts out with a prologue that references both Darkseid's Omega Effect and Morgoth's Bane. I guess sometimes the stars align and good things do happen to good people (and Junot is definitely good people).

Well done, sir. Well done.

Tags: pulitzer, writing

08:07 pm: A little about work, a lot about Warhammer 40K [Long]
So. All the evidence suggests that the writing and other forms of intellectual exertion I engage in at work draw on the same reserves of energy that I use for fiction, despite the two kinds of writing bearing almost no resemblance to one another. This is especially true when I work overtime, as I come home exhausted and in no mood to strain my brain for exactly the right phrasing - or even a phrasing that will serve as a placeholder and allow me to get on to the next cool bit.

Being too tired to write good fiction doesn't mean I'm too tired to read or play games though (at least not usually), so I'm going to talk about two kinds of Warhammer 40K spin-offs: Dawn of War (the Warhammer 40K Real-Time Strategy game), and Sandy Mitchell & Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40K novels.

( Gaming Geekery )

( Elves... in Space! And why they don't ruin Warhammer 40k. )

I wrote a bit about Sandy Mitchell (aka Alex Stewart) and the Ciaphas Cain books a while back, so I won't repeat myself except to note that while Stewart uses Cain to point out the many absurdities of the Warhammer 40k universe, the Cain books also contain a great deal of the universe's darkness as well. The books that really surprised me, though, were Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novels, the first seven volumes of which are available in two omnibus editions (The Founding and The Saint). I picked up The Founding because the Ciaphas Cain books had put me in the mood for Warhammer-styled war stories and because it was cheap, and plowed through the first two books fairly quickly, though I noticed that the first book (First and Only) had, as Abnett notes in the introduction, an unusually ambitious structure. The third book, though - Necropolis - woke me up. The first two books had wandered a bit, due to either changes in locale (First and Only) or the lack of a unifying through-line (Ghostmaker, which was stitched together from short stories), but Necropolis started and ended in a single locale, and as a result, its narrative was significantly more powerful and unified than that of the previous books. While still inconsistent, the flashes of brilliance that ran through Necropolis were enough to make me pick up The Saint, which while it slipped a bit towards the pedestrian in places, showed remarkable improvements in the use of structure and technique to create suspense and emotional engagement.

At this point, I was enjoying the series enough to go out and buy the next two books (Traitor General & His Last Command) in paperback. When I read Traitor General, though, it surprised me - because it was *good*. I'm not talking "good for a gaming tie-in", or "good for a military SF novel", mind you. Traitor General had evocative worldbuilding, a good structure, precise and striking characterization - in short, it was a genuinely well-written book, which went from merely enjoyable to genuinely moving if the reader had read the books that preceded it. Instead of going the David Weber route (where each installment in a military SF series becomes more self-indulgent and bloated than the one before), Abnett seemed to be improving with each installment in his series. While His Last Command felt a little light to me (probably because of its length - its suspense structure was betrayed by the fact that once there were only a few dozen pages left, the answers to certain questions became structurally obvious), the good bits of The Armour of Contempt were very, very good indeed.

What's really striking to me about the Gaunt's Ghosts books, incidentally, is how Abnett uses the episodic form for the purposes of characterization. Characters are usually pretty flat and arche/stereotypical for the first three or four books they appear in, but once a baseline has been established, even little breaks from the pattern can become powerfully suggestive and evocative. There are exceptions to this rule, but they tend to appear late in the series - Criid in the Armour of Contempt, for example, or the pheguth in Traitor General. This might just be a side effect of Abnett improving as the series goes along, but it suggests a technique that seems like it could profitably be applied to other serial forms (such as TV, comics, etc.). You don't necessarily have to spend a great deal of time developing a secondary character when depicting them as an embodiment of an archetype and then disrupting the assumptions which that archetype carries with it can be just as powerful.

Tags: books, video games, warhammer 40k, work, writing

10:44 pm: Caveat Emptor
Because economists can be (are by definition?) big geeks too, I give you Paul Krugman's Theory of Interstellar Trade. Which in addition to being a mock economics paper dealing with the implications of general relativity and time-dilation on interstellar trade (the example planets used in the equations are Earth and Trantor), contains some Paarfi-esque wordplay.

Anyway, I was amused.

Tags: nerdery, writing

11:53 pm: A New (and potentially foolish) Policy
So, as I'm obliged to exercise for the better part of an hour most days, I've decided to try to turn what would otherwise be a largely wasted chunk of time to my advantage: To wit, I'm attempting to write while on the treadmill. This obviously isn't something you can do while walking at high speeds, but it seems quite possible at ~3 mph, for values of "quite possible" that involve covering both sides of a sheet of paper with a scrawl that's falls somewhere between shorthand and an illegible scribble.

This is very much an experiment, as writing in longhand with the pad braced in weird positions may not be the best idea, but since this seems to be the only way I'm going to get myself to write anything at the moment, I'm willing to give it a go. If nothing else, having the pad handy will be good for the all the times when I start imagining a scene to keep from staring at the walls.

Also: Talked myself hoarse on the phone tonight. I haven't done that since... high school? Sounds about right.

Tags: exercise, writing

07:39 pm: PTSD
Via just about everybody:

rachelmanija has an excellent series of posts about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that's partly aimed at writers which she's just finished:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Tags: ptsd, writing

01:56 am: Tired Now
So, I've established that I can write fiction and hold down a job at the same time.

It just eats up *all* my free time. Because getting my head into a place where I can write down ~1000 consecutive words of readable prose after spending a day working on [redacted design-related stuff] apparently takes a Herculean effort.

Sorry, pats_quinade. One of these days I'm going to get back to playing Mass Effect, I promise.

Tags: so damn tired, writing

11:22 pm: Darling du jour
"Most landlords in this district can't turn their tenants into ferrets."

Tags: dark danky doom, ning rings, writing