Lonesome Robot Press :: Science Fiction

After six weeks at the Clarion West writer’s workshop, it’s finally time for the eighteen of us to wrap things up and head home. While I’m ready to get back to that which we call “real life,” it’s sad, too. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with a really wonderful group of people this summer. There’s no life like the life of the mind, and being fully engaged in writing for six weeks has really cracked my head open. I’m leaving here with a new perspective on what I write and how I write it, and I’ve met great people along the way.

I’ve also got a batch of stories I’m proud of, along with some intelligent advice on how to make them better. I’d be revising them for submission right now if I weren’t so damned exhausted.

Here’s some of what I learned:

• During Michael Bishop’s week, I got back on the path of beautiful writing. The workshop format for this week was to submit a bunch of short assignments, which would then be read allowed by Mike and given blind critiques. This stirred a bit of competitive spirit in me (which is a confession; they tell you not to do this). It got me ready to run hard and fast, and it gave the people who weren’t used to being critiqued a gentle entry into something that can be pretty rough for some to handle — having one’s work ripped apart.
• During Maureen McHugh’s week, I had a blinding flash of insight about how to structure novel projects, how to think about designing them. It wasn’t anything she taught directly, but Maureen is one of those people who’s so damned smart that stuff she says offhandedly can accidentally rewire your thinking. On my own initiative, I chose this week as a time to get serious about one of my main goals for Clarion — getting better with plot, dramatic tension, and narrative structure. Looking back on the stuff I’ve produced, I think I achieved this goal. No longer will the Spacecrafts workshop have to complain about my plotless narrative experiments! Ha!
• During Nnedi Okoraor’s week, I attained the realization that I am never going back to academia. Yay!
• During Graham Joyce’s week, I worked even more on matters pertaining to plot. Graham is seriously awesome at teaching this stuff. He has a series of great little 30 minute lectures he does on narrative structure that would benefit just about any writer.
• During Ellen Datlow’s week, I learned how to channel Ellen Datlow. So did some of my classmates (and it showed in the following week’s critiquing!). By “channeling Ellen,” I mean developing the ability to question and poke at my own writing during the revision process as if I were an editor trying to make it comprehensible to a reader.
• During Ian McDonald’s week, I stepped back, recovered, and tried to make sense of all I’d learned — and I found that it was good! We were also treated to some of Ian’s thoughts on screen writing and how the rigorous formats of screen- and teleplays can inform narrative structure in fiction.

I’ll probably write more about my Clarion experiences down the road, but the quick summary is:

1. I’m really glad I went.
2. If you’re someone who’s thinking about going, maybe you should. But you need to do it with an open mind. You need to go full of questions. You need to go with confidence in your own work but with a willingness to experiment and change.

I’m glad that I went at the time that I did, when I was mature enough (finally, ha!) to take some of the knocks and roll with  the unexpected, but not yet so set in my ways that I couldn’t use the experience to change and grow. I found the experience really encouraging and absolutely worth taking the time out of my life for.

Now: off to Gen Con!

Eclipse Phase is up for an ENnie Award in four categories this year (Best Cover Art, Best Writing, Best Production Values & Product of the Year). The ENnies are one of the two big awards in the RPG field each year, and unlike the Origins Award, they’re based on fan voting. Unfortunately, this puts a product like Eclipse Phase at something of a disadvantage. We don’t have nearly the number of copies in circulation as, oh, say, Pathfinder. That said, I think we put out a superior game that deserves some recognition. If you have a few seconds (and it only takes that long, because there’s no registration), please cast a ballot for Eclipse phase at the ENnies web site. Voting runs until midnight on July 25 (i.e., you have until 11:59 pm on the 24th).

My colleagues Rob Boyle and Adam Jury have also posted some thoughts on voting for the ENnies this year.

Thanks to everyone who supported Eclipse Phase over its first year out on the market. Whether we bring home an ENnie or not, it’s been an excellent ride.

Augspace: making life larger

Today, Shareable.net ran Everything Is Clickable, part two of two guest posts I wrote on augmented reality. Part two (running today) speculates on applications we could see over the next two decades and includes a short (and very optimistic, for me) speculative piece on what kind of AR apps we might see in the next two decades. Part one focuses on present day AR applications.

These posts are part of a series called Shareable Futures. The other guest posters and interviewees include Corey Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Paolo Bacigalupi. I highly recommend checking out their posts, too.

Working on RPGs is not something you do for fame, and it definitely isn’t something you do for money, but… every so often, some recognition is nice.

So it was really cool to learn this morning that, hot on the heels of bringing home the 2010 Origins Award for Best RPG, Eclipse Phase earned four ENnie nods, including nominations for Best Writing and Product of the Year.

How cool. Ten year old me (who wanted nothing in the world more than to be a game designer at TSR — or an astronaut) would be pretty darn psyched. Heck, thirty-six year old me is happy about it, too.

Congratulations to my teammates. It’s sweet indeed when hard work gets a little recognition.

This is the track list of a playlist/CD I made to inspire my colleagues at Clarion West. The common thread in the songs is that they all have a strong, story-like narrative.

• Shore Leave, Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
• Black Jack Davey, The White Stripes, Seven Nation Army
• Turkish Song Of The Damned, The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God
• Fairytale Of New York, The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God
• Alcohol, The Murder City Devils, Give The People What They Want
• Frank’s Wild Years, Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
• Fall Of The Star High School Runing Back, The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas
• The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas
• Thursday, Morphine, Cure For Pain
• Hand Springs, The White Stripes, B-Side Collection
• Isis, The White Stripes, The Legendary Lost Tapes
• Hoodoo Bash, Holy Modal Rounders, Have Moicy!
• Sharin’ The Sherbert, Big Ass Truck, Big Ass Truck
• What’s He Building In There?, Tom Waits, Mule Variations

Left to right: Nancy Kress, Ursula LeGuin, Gary Wolfe, Walter John Williams, Connie Willis

I’ve been avoiding blogging during Clarion West, following the advice of our esteemed organizers to keep my eye on the ball. But here are some notes on a panel I went to at the Locus Awards today, which some might find interesting…

I’m at the Locus Awards, watching a panel with Nancy Kress, Ursula LeGuin, Walter John Williams, and Nancy Kress. The topic is researching for fiction.

Some interesting points that were brought up:

• Ursula: A lot of people think if they just do a ton of research, they’ve got a story. But that isn’t so.
• Walter: Travels a lot as research, but bemoans that it doesn’t impress anyone anymore because of the Net.
• Connie: One really important type of research is the way in which overheard conversations spawn story ideas.

The moderator, Gary Wolfe, asked: how do you keep your research transparent?

• Nancy: It’s okay to do an info dump (i.e., big expository section), if you earn it. Make the reader care, and then they’ll sit still for it.
• Ursula: Utopianist readers have greater patience for exposition, because they want to know how the utopia works. (Personally, I’d guess this could be extended to dystopianists, too).
• Connie: When you’re writing exposition, beware of writing beautifully. You might be indulging yourself.
• Ursula disagreed: You shouldn’t always kill your darlings. If a piece of exposition is beautiful, keep it.

On obsessive detail:

• Connie relates an irate letter she got from a fan who was upset that she’d mentioned the Molasses Swamp card in a Candyland game – a card that doesn’t exist in the game. This made her into an obsessive researcher. (There but for the grace of God go I? Oh, wait… I’m already this obsessive. Crap.)
• Walter: Nothing prompts nitpicking letters like getting a firearm wrong.

Inventive research:

• Ursula: Sometimes we invent things we can’t research. She mentions a marriage system she invented that was so complex it created continuity problems. Essentially, she had to research within her own writing. She takes Phillip Pullman to task for this – changing the metaphysical rules in the middle of his trilogy.
• This prompted a divertimento on magical/metaphysical systems and how they must have internally consistent rules.

On getting people right in a different time period or world:

• Connie: getting the mindset of people during the Blitz right was hard.

Maureen [McHugh, from audience]: do you ever put in the inexplicable?

• Ursula: Yes. In the last book of the Earthsea trilogy, she dealt with the fact that the wizards really had no idea what they were doing and hadn’t for some time.
• Kress: Got a lot of flak for Steel Across the Sky for combining genetic engineering with a metaphysical afterlife.
• Walter: Sci-fi readers have less tolerance for the inexplicable than fantasy readers. But it might also be that if someone thinks they’re reading a sci-fi novel, they’ll be annoyed if things go unexplained. Urban fantasy works when it plays on the tension between these two things.

Cool panel. And it’s pretty neat seeing sci fi’s grande dame still sharp as a tack!

This weekend I’m a redshirt at PAX East in Boston, and I’ll be running Eclipse Phase. If you’re coming to the show, I’m doing a two hour demo Saturday at 10 am & a full 4 hour game Sunday at 10 am. Check @EclipsePhase on Twitter for location info (as I’m not sure yet where the table will be).

More info here.

I’ve been obsessed with labyrinths for a long time. Some of this can be blamed on Jorge Luis Borges, but even without his writing, they pull me in, both visually and philosophically. Thinking about what I wanted to play in the D&D game I was recently invited to join, I decided to look at minotaurs and see if there was anything I could work with there.

I liked the material on minotaurs from the old D&D Taladas setting (the obscure opposite hemisphere of the Dragonlance world), and I also like Blizzard’s take on minotaurs (sorry, “Tauren”) in World of Warcraft. But both of these settings downplay what is to me the most fascinating aspect of minotaurs: their connection with mazes and labyrinths. (You knew mazes and labyrinths were two different things, right? Yep, sure are!).

So I’ve come up with my own take on civilized minotaurs for use in our as-yet-unnamed D&D world. Here’s what I send our DM on the character I developed, Jholi Narrh…

The minotaurs of Professor Lostcarriage’s World fall into two distinct populations: the Keepers and the Wanderers (sometimes called “Savages” by the Keepers). Wanderers are your typical D&D world minotaurs: unpleasant, savage humanoids feared by civilized races. Keepers are civilized. They dwell in enclaves bordering or in some cases completely surrounded by the nations of other races.

Keeper enclaves are called mazes. Each is a settlement completely enclosed by a maze, ranging in size from small hamlets up to minor city-states. The mazes are almost always magically grown hedge mazes, although in major settlements, some of the mazework may be of stone (particularly if strong fortifications are needed). Far-flung mazes may be of other materials, though these are less common. In places where plants won’t grow, such as the arctic, the maze might be of ice; in the underworld, of cave walls and dense fungal growths; in a jungle or desert, of vines or cacti. In some regions, the minotaurs cultivate fields or maintain pastures outside the maze; in others, they fish, hunt, or trade for food.

Minotaur life revolves around maintaining and enlarging their mazes (and the structures found within them), contemplation of the Labyrinthine Mysteries (see below), artisanry, and trade with the outside world and other minotaur enclaves. The organization of a minotaur community is somewhat monastic, which is why such a large, fearsome-looking people can co-exist among other races: their attentions and aspirations are focused inward. However, young minotaurs are encouraged to travel the outside world to hone their skills, learn the ways of other races, and if the opportunity arises, to convert the heathen Wanderers.

Minotaurs have two equally important spiritual traditions, a bit like the Japanese adherence to both Shinto and Buddhism. On one hand, druids are very important in their communities as representatives of the natural world (and to grow labyrinth walls). On the other, the minotaurs worship a human god, Parn, god of labyrinths. Parn has almost no human worshipers; the few who do exist treat minotaur mazes as holy sites and may visit them as pilgrims. The minotaurs believe that their ancestors were human, but were cursed for some now-forgotten sin to be part beast. They do not believe that their condition can ever be reversed (nor would they wish this), but they do believe that moderation and contemplation of the Labyrinthine Mysteries, as taught in Parn’s scriptures, keeps their lives in balance.

Jholi Narrh is the lowest-ranking warden of the Maze of Xiphin (pron. “ky-fin”), a small (village-sized) minotaur enclave not far from Haven (the main city in our game world). His elders have sent him out to wander, explore, and learn. Jholi’s maze is known locally for producing honey, mead, ink, and cloth dyes. Xiphin is nicknamed the Flower Maze by other races; the hedges themselves bloom riotously throughout the warm months and are the source of many of the town’s products. Couples of all races may visit in Spring to receive blessings of fertility from the local druids. The town’s standard is a stylized beehive set within a maze of hexagons (like a honeycomb).

I had fun with this character in the first session I played  him. There was some misunderstanding when he first joined the party; he naively translated “Warden” as “Beekeeper” because of his role back home in the maze. It was a good time playing a big, humanoid beastie with a contemplative side — without falling back on the now-too-familiar shamanism of WoW’s Taurens.

I want someone to do an infographic, proportional to population, of leading causes of death in the contemporary U.S. vs. Elizabethan England.

I’d like to see how auto accidents & heart disease stack up against sword fights, scurvy, and the Red Death.

Me: “Imagine if instead of being at the mercy of TV writers, you & your friends could control what happens in Lost.”

Her: “That’d be AWESOME.”