Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 47

Writing in the dark

One particular piece of writing advice seems to be popping up in my Twitter stream over and over lately, and it’s starting to bug me. I think it, like most oft-spouted writing rules catchphrases, is based in something well-intentioned, but is in most hands somewhat meaningless. It’s like “Show, don’t tell,” or “Write with all five senses.” Sure, it sounds great, but if you go to the extreme on these bits of advice, dimes to doughnuts, you’re gonna get called purple by readers. Thus, I believe there is a time and place for the advice, but there is also a time and place for telling to get the story moving along, as well as a time to dispense with all the added sensory details and just cut to the chase with a bit of fast dialog.

But the advice bothering me is “Write from the darkest place inside you.” This, I think, is advice intended for sheltered writers, or for otherwise pampered people who have trouble imagining bad things and need a little shove to move into their dark side. It is not meant for people like me, who have lived in some very dark places and know exactly how evil good people can be. When a sheltered person writes from their dark side, that’s how we get black and white moralities where the bad guy is a puppy raping, baby eating psychopath, while the hero is rescuing kittens from burning buildings and falling in love with his ex-partner. (Who will of course be thin and pretty enough to be a model.) At best, some of these people make a dark “anti-hero” cop with an alcohol habit. (Vicodin addiction is now becoming an acceptable literary shorthand crutch for anti-heroes as well.)

But to someone like me, writing what I know from the darkest part of me means writing about kids who are abused by adults, even by adults who claim to be good while committing terrible deeds. It’s writing about kids who abuse each other, either out of sheer spite or for a desire to fit in with the cool kids. It means writing things that good people don’t believe in, that they will even deny as unrealistic. But these things happen, and what they’re really saying is, “I’ve never seen this before, ergo, it must not exist.”

Back when I first got started writing and trying to get published “the right way”, I may have had some illusions about one day installing my empathy into other people, or about starting a larger conversation about the insidiously deep roots of abuse in our societies. I no longer hold such illusions. Readers don’t want to learn how far down the rabbit hole goes in most cases. They want a neat and tidy lie about a hero who will save the day in the end. This isn’t how our world works, but people no longer want art to be reflective of their life and times. They want art to project an ideal that most sheltered people could never live up to. But most of all, they want the writer to lie to them and say, “But you could be the hero, under the right circumstances.”

Readers call this escapism, but I think it’s denial. It’s an active choice to remain willfully ignorant of how the other half lives. This is why it’s so hard to find anyone writing about real social problems. Instead, we’ve got “dystopias,” a bullshit genre of delusions which posits that no matter how bad things get, there can always be a chosen one to fix things and stop the unjust society from further decay. It’s not even close to realistic.

Look, it’s simple. We live in a dystopia right now, one where we don’t need a chosen one. We need everyone to make huge changes in their lives. We need civil engineers to stop working in urban sprawl plans and start localizing services around residential sections to reduce peoples’ need to drive. If we could do that, next, we’d need everyone to buy bikes and use them, or to start walking. We need people to make their own gardens, to share the food they grow with others, and to stop relying on “big box” stores like Wal-Mart. We need people to support local businesses even if it means taking more time out of each day to do shopping instead of buying everything in one centralized location.

This would go a long way to turning around our carbon footprint. It would make everyone a hero and help steer us our of our bleak present circumstances. But people are no more willing to walk to the store than they are to ride a bike to work. And gardening? No way, man, that takes away time from watching TV. They would assert that they have a god given right to waste their limited time on this planet, and how dare I or anyone else insinuate that they might be responsible for our world’s condition?

Time is money, and no chosen one is going to make these people accept their duty to be better people. Seen this way, the chosen one and the curable dystopia are nothing more than blatant lies to soothe the vanities of escapist readers. They do nothing to change our present dystopia other than to comfort readers with an ideal that will never exist.

I have on occasion tried to write from the darkest parts of me, and those books do not sell well. Which is why I’ve chosen for the most part to slag off that rule and write somewhere closer to the light. This pisses off my muse in the worst way. She typically laughs at my requests to give me stories that will sell, and she constantly offers ideas that stray far outside the comfort levels of readers.

But sometimes she hands me something from the darkest pit of my life, back in the days when I was a teenage monster with a couple of underage lovers, when I was running scams on the side to make cash. She hands me stories of abuse from my friends like Cherry, who was forced to be a child prostitute by her grandmother, and who somehow avoided any STDs until she got out of hooking, only to have a “bug chaser” intentionally infect her with HIV by convincing her he loved her. I write about friends like Jody, whose neglectful parents ignored him right up until he started killing their exotic fish by squeezing them to death in his bare hands and dropping their crushed remains back into the tank. They sent him off to military school, and they thought they’d solve the problem. But I ran into him in his twenties, and he was a crack junkie with bad teeth and an anorexic girlfriend who looked like she was on death’s door. His story didn’t end well, and no amount of discipline could save him.

This is the world I lived in for so long, and it’s miles removed from the safe suburban dream people cling to even as larger forces conspire to strip it from them. Where I lived, there was no black and white. There were moral shades of grey, means of survival and coping that descended down in gradual steps along a stairway into a pit. The stairs get steeper the lower we go, but some of us just skipped the middleman and dove to the bottom. Some of us get there and realize we don’t like it and have to climb back up to a place where we can feel human again. In my case, I think I’ve got myself most of the way back out of the pit, but I know what it’s like at the bottom, and my memories of life down there will always haunt me. They shape the person I am now, and even though I never want to be back down there, I do sometimes peer over the side and wonder about the people I was forced to leave behind. I feel guilt for not dragging them along with me, but there’s only so many burdens one person can bear before they are dragged back down into the hole by the same people they’re trying to rescue.

Most readers don’t want to know about that kind of life. They don’t even believe we exist. Or if they do, they complain “We see too much bad stuff on the news! Why do you have to write about such terrible things when all we want is an opiate to numb our senses to reality?”

Why? “Write what you know. Write with all five senses. Write from the darkest place inside you. Write the story you’d want to read, and don’t worry about markets.” Because of these rules, I can’t give always readers a comforting lie because it’s not what I believe, and it’s not what I know. My art is reflective of the ugly, brutal, and unsympathetic world I grew up in. It’s bit like drinking piss when you were expecting lemonade.

Which brings me at last to one story I wrote about child prostitutes and completed, and then I put it away. I tried briefly to publish it online as a web-serial, but I pulled it less than 12 chapters in because I was already catching hell for what I wrote in another story. I let fear and shame guide my decisions, and as an artist, I’ve felt constant regrets that I couldn’t be more brave and just shrug off criticism. Despite being told to develop thicker skin, I still react badly to complaints that my writing is unrealistic or intended solely to “promote a lifestyle.”

It isn’t the darkest aspects of that story that trouble me. It’s the way in which the story bounces from highs to lows so fast. But then, that’s the aspect of my life that I’m trying to capture, the aspect of all my old friends’ lives. We did not live as morose one-dimensional caricatures, and our lives were not tragic every single day. Like kids in a war zone, we reached a point where we had to go outside and play, where we had to shake off all the pain and anger or we would explode. Like everyone else, we need coping mechanisms to keep us from snapping and becoming too inhuman.

I remember one of my former friends had expressed skepticism that someone like me could have ongoing affairs and go back to “watching Smurfs.” But that’s exactly how it was. We were not like other kids in many ways, and yet we still played with toys and watched cartoons. We still went to school dances to hang out with other kids, or to the public pool, or to roller rinks. We had happy holidays and there were trips to amusement parks. Life was not one long tunnel of bleak and dark. We did kid stuff, even while we were growing up too fast in a world that didn’t have time to look at us and see us for what we were. We coped, and some of us survived to become scarred adults.

This is hard to convey in a story without the reader pulling back and denying our shared experiences. People want to believe in a black and white world, and to their minds, children cannot still be children after they’ve been corrupted. So my writing is not seen as realistic, but as a caricature of reality. It’s a world that people don’t want to believe in, because it might make them question their own comfortable place in life. Or worse, it might make them realize that they’ve done nothing to help, and they aren’t the good guys after all. It requires a hard look in the mirror when most folks want to settle for a passing glance at the surface details.

I’ve made compromises at times, writing stories that eased the focus away from the darker parts of me. And to me, those stories are still good. They sell a few copies, and sometimes they even get decent reviews. These acknowledgements feel good, and of course I want more sales and reviews. But I also still want to put out stories that don’t have a hope in hell of selling well because these are the kinds of stories that I don’t see others making. So I change my goals from book to book. I pick and choose what rules I want to apply to each book.

I don’t see a point to writing under pen names for one market or the other. I barely have the energy or mental capabilities to handle accounts for myself. I already spend so much time promoting me that I don’t have any energy left to create and promote another persona. Besides that, I recognize that one of my limitations is that I only have one narrative voice even if I’m writing in various perspectives from book to book. Once you’ve read enough of Zoe E. Whitten, you’d recognize me as Ozzy White within a few pages. Why wear a mask to fool you when I can just admit I’m a bit erratic in my writing goals?

It may be true that it’s easier than ever to publish a book, but selling any story in this kind of flooded market is tricky. I think a lot of writers end up going for the easy stories to improve their chances with attracting readers, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with playing it safe sometimes. I do it too. But there are times when I feel the need to write about broken and ugly people like me and the old friends who’d been an important part of my life. These don’t sell, and they won’t be popular. But they’re what I need to say, and they’re skeletons I need to take out of my closet and expose to the light. The alternative is hiding them and pretending I’m just like everyone else. That’s lying to try and fit in with the cool crowd, and I feel even more dirty for faking to be something I’m not. I’d rather you know I used to be a monster than to pretend I’m just a bland everyman.

It’s a tightrope act, always swaying between seeking sales and approval and seeking a greater truth than I can find in popular fiction. And maybe no one will believe people like me exist even after reading my stories. I will most likely anger readers by selling stories that no one wants to believe are possible in our world. But I write what I know, and I’ll keep doing that even if it means never being a best seller.

Book review: Little Star by John A. Lindqvist

What to say about Little Star without spoiling it? I feel a need to gush, and yet, I’m worried that gushing will lead me to spoilers. Screw it, let me just give a spoiler warning first. And then I will start this review off with a random tangent.

A couple years back, I wrote a book about a bard, a book with musical numbers and singing and dancing and magic spells composed in notes. After I finished it, I begged for others to please, please do the same thing. Some people said it was a neat idea, but nothing ever came of it.

Until now.

I’ve probably made it clear in past reviews of Lindqvist’s books that I’m deeply in love with his writing, with his objective narrators who can describe the most horrific details in a manner similar to a seasoned weatherman speaking of an approaching hurricane. I’ve loved every one of his books, and within pages, it became clear to me that Lindqvist wasn’t just writing a musical book. He was writing about a bard as a monster. I was elated, because the new literary love of my life was writing the very book that I had begged for someone, anyone to attempt.

Despite my love for his words, it took me the better part of three months to work my way through this massive tome. Early on in the book, there’s an act of domestic violence so brutal, I had to put the book down for two weeks to get over my loathing for a character. Many other scenes were just as hard for me to read, and I had to take chapters in stages and decompress over days or weeks before I could move on.

Once I passed the middle of the book, my need to know what happened overcame my need to decompress, and even if the book was churning my guts up and tearing open a lot of old emotional scars, I read even faster. I read two hundred pages in one night, and right before writing this review, I read the final hundred pages in a blur.

This story starts off with a man in the woods, Lennart, who happens upon an infant buried in a plastic bag and left to die. Lennart gives her mouth to mouth resuscitation, and with her first inhaled breath, the infant begins to sing.

Had anyone else found the child, this might have been a happy story. But Lennart is a bastard, and a wife abuser with a terrible secret. When that secret was revealed, I loathed him, and I almost threw the book down for good in my hatred of him. Lennart’s son Jerry is just as wretched at first, but in his case, it’s the result of living with an abusive father as his role model. So at the time, the only character who I could feel any sympathy for was Laila, Lennart’s long suffering wife. I wished for Lennart to die, but there was a tragic air around Laila that told me she would die first, and horribly.

Lennart becomes obsessed with this singing baby, who he calls Little One, and who Jerry names Theres. Lennart wants no one else to see this child and corrupt her pure musical gift with pop “poison.” He resolves to train her in music himself, and he even threatens to kill his wife if she should try to report the child to the authorities.

Over time, it becomes clear that Theres has a power to manipulate emotions, and Lennart changes from being a complete bastard into something of a smaller monster. He still fears giving up his chance at success, and so as Theres ages, he crafts a terrible lie about how the world is full of big people who want to eat his Little One. He tells her that he and Laila and Jerry are different, because they have love in their heads. While this very effectively convinces Theres to stay indoors, it also creates in her a psychotic understanding of other people, and of her own adoptive parents, who she eventually kills to find the love in their heads. Jerry stumbles into this literal mess, and he takes Theres to safety before reporting the crime.

And then…the story changes over to completely different girl, Teresa, who grows up in a normal home with a normal family. And yet, there is something very wrong with Teresa, and she is an outsider with only one real friend. Teresa’s life at school is unhappy, being that she is not attractive and cannot find a place among the cool kids. Over time, her distance and increasing weight leads to more and more torment from the other kids, and I wondered at what point she might snap and do something terribly violent. Then one night Teresa watches a young girl perform on Idol, and she begins to feel euphoria. A girl in search of an answer, Teresa has found it in the eyes of a singer not much younger than herself.

The story flips back to Theres and Jerry to explain how Jerry constructed a fake ID for Theres, giving her the name Tora Larson. And it is Theres who Teresa has fixated upon. By a stroke of dumb luck, Theres and Teresa are members of the same internet forum, and after Teresa defends Tora’s performance, Theres asks to arrange a meeting.

But Teresa is not alone in this fixation, and the magic power of Theres’ voice begins to draw in others, like Max Hansen, a “talent scout” who is more of a sexual predator using his job as an easy method of seducing young girls. Theres and Teresa meet, and Teresa writes songs for Theres. She films one of these songs as a simple video, and it goes viral. And soon, there are many other girls flocking to Theres, seeking her out as their guru and guide.

What follows beyond this point is a descent into madness, although I admit, it’s hard to spoil a book when the prologue tells the ending before getting into the actual story. In any case, Theres’ understanding of the world infects Teresa, and the two begin a killing spree, first starting with a random store owner, and ending in a mass murder that’s publicly televised.

This is not a book I’d say I enjoyed. This book tormented me, and it dragged me down into the darkest, worst parts of my own past. It stirred my inner animal, and it made me feel ill many times.

None of these are complaints. This is a horror book, and Lindqvist steps up and delivers a brutal story that’s worthy of the word horror. That’s why I’m giving Little Star 5 stars, and I would recommend it to any horror fan looking for something to push them into feelings of genuine discomfort. No, I can’t say I enjoyed this book. But I devoured it, and I know it’s going to stay with me for a long, long time.

Superior

Look at those people! They’re not the same as Us!

Let’s mock them!

Listen to their crap bands. Our music is better!

Aren’t we superior?

Look at what they read. It’s means nothing!

Our stories are better!

Look at the stupid things they watch on TV.

Our shows are better!

Aren’t we superior?

The world would be better if those losers died!

But, questions arise from the back of our minds:

How would we know we’re superior without them?

With no one to judge as unfit, who are we?

How do we know we’re at the top of our game

if there is no pile of losers to stand on?

Are we superior?

Or are we just cowards?

Arznstigation Days

Y’all may remember I did a favorable but short review for Michael A. Arznen’s horror poetry compilation, The Gorelets Omnibus. Well Michael’s got a neat creative project running on Kickstarter called Fridge of the Damned, and it’s a set of magnets with a selection of wicked words on them so you can make your own creepy poetry efforts. He’s already reached his minimum goal, but he’s got a stretch goal, and if he makes this goal, the kits will include a nice tin to keep all those loose words in.

I’ve already backed the project, but Heidi Ruby Miller of Raw Dog Screaming Press asked if I would post up something like a short story or an excerpt based on one of Michael twisted writing prompts. I looked through the list of “Arznstigations” and found “an everyday item used as a magic wand.” That’s lucky, because I’ve just finished writing a book where a wooden spoon is used twice as a magic wand. It seemed a perfect fit, and obviously I’m happy to help promote Michael’s project. (Especially since I also get to offer a quick preview of one of my own upcoming releases.)

The second scene happens much later and is perhaps a bit too spoilery, so here’s the first use of the spoon as a wand in Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition:

“I’m sorry,” Sandy said.

“Why are you apologizing?” Todd shook his head. “You don’t need to be sorry for bringing your work home with you. Besides, how much can these things possibly eat?”

Sandy opened her mouth, and then looked down at the table. “Oh, yes, good point.”

“What?”

“Queen Maben says the pixies will still have to go out to harvest their own food. I…hold on.” She stared at the table, so Todd looked at the table to try and sort out which dot was talking. He got nowhere with this hunt before Sandy went on. “Maben says she won’t stay with us long, but she needs at least a month here before she’ll be able to handle the weaving of another hive.”

“She’ll do the whole thing herself?” Todd asked.

Sandy looked down at the table again, and in the following silence, her expression became rapt with fascination. She nodded and looked up at Todd. “It’s one of the differences between queens and drone females, and it’s a result of the queens being submersed in pixie dew for almost a year. They don’t just drink it. They live inside it, like a secondary stage of development. All that exposure to the extra hormones found in female secretions turns on their ovaries and softens their exoskeletons. They absorb more liquid and take on a corpulent form, and that liquid is stored in her abdomen until she needs it for weaving.”

“So—” Todd stopped when Sandy held up her hand.

After a short pause, she said, “Maben says she will need to eat a lot to make a new hive, which will make her swell up. She’ll be more vulnerable then, but she’ll need to leave in secret and scout for a new hive location. With as few drone are left, she won’t have to make a very big hive, but the process will drain her and leave her in hibernation for a few weeks possibly longer. So her drones would still need to stay here even after she’s departed. Maben says that after she wakes up, she’ll return for her people and take them to their new home.”

“So what do pixies look like?”

Sandy opened her mouth, and then closed it, getting to her feet. “I’ll just be right back.”

When she returned, she carried a wooden spoon with the head curled in her hand. Leaning over the coffee table, she drew a circle in the air over and over. Steam gathered in the space under the spoon, and then condensed into a pool of water. The pool shifted, looking like it would drop onto Todd’s lap.

He backed up, dreading a cold splash, but the water remained levitating at an angle, and through the water, a cluster of enlarged black and yellow blurs stood waiting his inspection. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Yes, hold on,” Sandy said through gritted teeth, and then relaxed her jaw. “I have to get the shape of the water right, but this isn’t as easy as it looks to you.”

At last, Todd was brought face to face with his new roommates, and he made a tiny smile. “Those don’t look so bad.”

“Maben, please show him your mandibles,” Sandy said.

The corpulent pixie in the middle of the hive unfolded her false lips and splayed her mandibles out like taloned clutching fingers. Todd sat back and swallowed thickly, having to remind himself that the miniscule queen was not big enough to eat his head.

“Well, that’s…”

“Fascinating?” Sandy offered.

“Okay, that too,” Todd said. He looked at the queen through the pool, now easily able to tall her apart from her servants. For one thing, no one else had antennae like hers. It was like her version of a crown.

He watched her curl her mandibles back into her mouth cavity, and now that the probing talons were hidden, he could admit that there was something fascinating about the way the folded limbs approximated lips.

___

And there you have it. I hope you’ll contribute a few bucks to Fridge of the Damned, and that you’ve enjoyed this first peek at Sandy’s new story. =^)

Game review: Where Is My Heart?

Where is My Heart? is an indie platform/puzzle hybrid by Copenhagen Game Collective with a non-violent story and a platform hopping game play style. The story is about a family of monsters who visit a forest to picnic and instead end up lost. The father monster complains of the present and the mother laments the past, while the child monster simply wants his family to stop fighting and figure out a way home.

As the game opens, the first levels are very simple, allowing the player to get familiar with using all three monsters and their unique abilities. But soon the levels chop the screen up into a confusing mess of randomly sized square tiles.

In their untransformed states all three monster have exactly the same moves, but stacking the monsters on special tiles makes the monster of the right color change and accesses their secondary talents. Baby Brown turns into a white stag who can double jump, while Mother Orange turns into some kind of winged angel who can hop out of one tile and land in another, which all get rotated 45 degrees depending on which shoulder button you press after jumping. Father Black accesses a special bat-vision to see ledges and platforms that the others can’t, nor can they land on. But he can land on them, and his family can jump on him to progress farther.

All of this sounds great, but the biggest problem is, the game’s not fun. It’s slow and dull, and the choice to cut up levels and scatter them all over the screen means you’ll die a lot without knowing why. It doesn’t help that a lot of jumps have to be done “just so” in order to avoid traps that you can’t see.

The monsters emote with only one sound effect each, and by level 15, I was turning down the volume to avoid gritting my teeth over hearing “OY!” every ten seconds from Baby Brown. The background sound effects were nice enough, but again, it’s all kind of repetitive and tedious, even in early levels.

If I were to make a comparable book, the sentences would all be out of order, and I would haughtily explain that it’s up to you to decide what the proper order is. I’ll bet you wouldn’t make two pages into that book before you went, “Fuck, you, biatch, I’m outtie.”

Well that was something close to my response after level 20, when I gave up because the game seemed to be flaunting how high-minded it was, and how stupid I was for not grasping the point. At the point where I gave up, I was supposed to turn Baby Brown into a stag, which turns his parents into a pair of floating sprites. The sprites can pass through walls, and my goal was a ledge on the other side of the wall. But the process of shifting from one form to another meant that every single time, the sprites transformed back into monsters far, far away from the place they’d just been, and plunged to their deaths through an open pit. And, to make this level even more “amusing,” the entrance is over an open pit of spikes, resulting in 5-6 deaths EACH for both Mom and Pop just to get them back onto the starting platform.

If at any point you’ve read this and thought “That sounds fun,” then you are a masochist. (Which is fine and all, I don’t judge nobody for their kinks.) And if you are, before buying this game, you might just ask someone to beat you up. Because that might actually be more fun than this game.

Overall, I got the impression that a joke was being had at my expense, and not one of the levels made me smile or think “Hey, this is neat.” The whole thing is about as pretentious as a project from a first-year art student, and while I normally love puzzle games, the choice to cut up the screen feels more like a cheap tactic to kill the player, and only the most patient gamers should try this hot mess.

The game is a PS Mini, so the price isn’t wallet straining. I think I’d be a lot more pissed if I had to pay more for this, but as I’m only out 4 bucks, I just deleted it and went back to playing Project Diva f and Jetpack Joyride until some new releases come out.

So I give Where Is My Heart? two stars and would only suggest it to puzzle fans who don’t mind being abused and ridiculed by their games. Because you will get the feeling that the developer is sniggering at you behind their hand and muttering, “Look, the stupid gamer is confused by our clever trap.” Or, at least that’s how I felt after dying 20-40 times on the same levels before stumbling over an answer that made me go “What? But that doesn’t make any sense!”

So, this could be proof that I’m just too low brow for high minded concepts. But I’m choosing to interpret this another way. The game is pretentious and cheap, kind of like that crucifix in piss art that stirred everyone up a few decades back. Is the game art? Yes, probably in a cartoony 8-bit kind of way. But as a puzzle game, it’s about as fun as oral surgery with a stone drunk surgeon.

Guest blogging: An interview with Gabriel

My second Saving Gabriel guest post at Nerine Dorman’s blog is up now, and it’s an interview with the fallen angel himself, Gabriel. With surprisingly little prodding, Gabriel talks about his current ward, his job, and his estranged relationship with the archangel Michael.

So, go check out the interview, and if you haven’t already, check out the excerpt blog post from last week.

Since this is a really short post, I’ll also include a writing update. I’ve been cranking out some good word counts all this week, and I’m just about to wrap up the rough draft of Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition. No clue when I’ll have this one ready for prime time, but I’m sure you can expect it in the later part of this year.

So, that’s it for now. Hope y’all enjoy my interview with Gabriel.

Game review: Mark of the Ninja

This review is all spoilers, so I wanted to get that out of the way first and let you know to avoid this post if you’re wanting to play the game without knowing the full story.

I got introduced to Mark of the Ninja via a Twitter trailer, and I ranted about how much gore was on display for the full length of the trailer. I was contacted by one of the game designers who told me that I could play the game without killing anyone. I then decided to watch the reviews, and many folks also spoke of this option to not kill. Of course that intrigued me, so when I had some free funds, I downloaded a copy for my Xbox.

Well, let’s get this out of the way: that sales point about no killing is a lie. You can play the game without killing the guards, but there are a number of boss fights that you have to kill someone to progress to the next level. I found this out because during my first play, I wanted to know how to get past the first guard without killing him, and all the YouTube walkthroughs showing a no-kill run were based on playing the game after a successful first run. On the second play through, (which is called New Game+) all the tools and weapons you collected in the first game are available to you from the start, so what the players did to avoid the guards wouldn’t work for me, not having collected those items yet.

This led me to run a search asking whether any player had completed a no-kill game on the first try, and I found that it was simply impossible to have a no-kill game at all. Examples of the boss fights were given, where even going in unarmed doesn’t prevent you from making a killing blow. Ergo, the game makers blatantly lied to me to get a sale. We’re not talking a marketing claim or a misinterpreted review either. Someone working for Klei contacted me to tell me about the no-kill option. Nothing irks me worse than to buy something based on an ideal, only to find out that that “feature” is a lie.

Being so mad, I opted to YouTube the ending to see if I should bother playing at all, and I decided that okay, I could play this stupid game, and I’d just go through and kill as many people as possible. Guards, bosses, whatever.

And then the game started, and I became even more angry fast. Why? Because *SPOILER* the companion leading your ninja to his goals isn’t real. A first-time player wouldn’t know this because the game is trying to trick you into thinking she’s really there. But this recognition of the fact makes every level that much more ridiculous. The first game level opens with your ninja waking up, and this chick is telling him where to find enemies, items, or allies. She’s saying stuff like, “They kidnapped other ninja, and you must free them.” But, if she’s an extension of my awareness, and I was unconscious from being tattooed, how does she know anything that I don’t know already?

I could give a lot of gaping plot hole examples where her knowledge is impossible, but I want to move on to the “fog of war” effect that limits my ninja’s line of sight. On the one hand, this feature was kind of interesting, as it required me to sneak around open spaces and be wary of approaching footsteps. But the game frequently has my guide pan the camera far ahead and point out guards, traps, and goals that I shouldn’t be able to see. She “scouts ahead” for me, I guess. But even if the writers had taken this into account and claimed she was an out of body projection, the whole method of showing upcoming challenges ruins the point of having a fog of war.

This fog also becomes negated at closed doors, where if I lean against them, the whole next room is revealed. I can’t see a dude just over a ledge even if he’s five inches away, but I can see through a closed door? Maybe they could have said my ninja was peering through a keyhole and I would have believed that, even if it is a bit anachronistic. But I don’t buy my dude having super ninja senses to see through a door when he can’t see ten feet in front of himself.

And on a completely random tangent, if my companion is a delusional extension of myself, why does my dudely ninja project an inner hot chick? After mulling this over, I thought that a great ending plot twist could have been, “And after killing her treacherous master, she went to Thailand and had surgery, and she lived happily ever after.” That shit makes about as much sense as the real ending, and you know a whole bunch of straight male gamers would have their tiny minds blown if it turned out their buff ninja dude hero was really a repressed transsexual.

I digress, the guards all possess standard-fare AI for stealth games. Two guys may be guarding a room, and one suddenly vanishes while the other had his back turned. You’d think this would raise their alertness level when they turned back around and found an empty space where their buddy was, but no. They shrug, puff their cigarette and look the other way again, allowing me to kill them without even a hint of danger or tension for me. A single guard is watching a prisoner, but if I blow out the lights and make them turn their back, they don’t seem overly concerned that their prisoner is missing one second later.

Guards who are alone are worse, because their canned scripts still read from the same list as the guys working together. So you have guys alone who are emoting lines like, “Did you hear something?” or, “Better go check that out,” or “It’s nothing, let’s move on.” So I don’t think my ninja is the only one talking to invisible people. But my excuse is, I’m wearing poison tattoos to give me super-ninja powers. What’s the main bad guy’s excuse for only hiring the mentally ill to guard his bases?

This nonchalant dialogue bugged me a lot, so much so that I turned it into a drinking game. Seriously, your invading army is on a ninja base, and you’re hunting ninja. If all the lights in the room blow out at the same time, you ought to be more aware that it’s not just a light bulb in need of repair.

At certain point in the third level, my guide leads me to a pack of smoke bombs left behind by “one of our scouts.” This is bullshit. The whole reason I’m out in the field like this is because the game tells me the antagonists have all this technology to detect ninja. I had to go and get tattoos with toxic mind-altering ink to be able to access super-ninja powers because no one else could do this mission. And yet, Joe A. Ninja strolls right through all that security to leave a box of smoke bombs? Aaaand take another drink.

By level four, I realized that the biggest problem I had was, I hadn’t thought of anything in the game as fun. I was playing this as an obligation because I paid for it and had to get some use out of it. But having already spoiled the ending, I can’t really deal with the story’s inconsistencies without getting annoyed at how much of the game is flat out lying to the player. Yes, there is something to be said for the use of an unreliable narrator, but in this case, the narrator is a part of my character, making it impossible for them to know the things they do. So we have a lousy game, and a lousy story that doesn’t make any sense.

And I had little quibbles, like how my bamboo darts could break shatterproof glass and render metal fuse boxes into puffy sparks, and they could kill pigeons and ravens, but couldn’t take down guards or dogs. Then there’s the hint prompts for various moves can’t be gotten rid of even after turning off button prompts in the options. You’re never allowed to guess what to do, because the game will just tell you. And once you understand that the person telling you all of this is a delusional extension of yourself, none of their information in past levels makes any sense.

Beyond that, I really hate the tattoo storyline. The idea that well-trained ninja can’t defeat the equivalent of mall security guards without super powers is both insulting to ninja and it plays heavily on the mystical arts cliche. Even if you ignore all the lousy stereotypes, the punch line of the game is, at the end you have to do the honorable thing and kill yourself to keep your clan safe. But you know what? In every video I watched on YouTube, everyone chose to listen to the delusion and kill their ninja master. Why? Because the delusion is too pretty to kill. If the game makers were wanting to impart some deeper message in the game, watching other players talk through that scene has shown me how badly they failed at making their point.

(By the way, I have plans on killing myself at the end, whenever I get there, just so I can see what the difference in endings is.)

I suppose I might have been less judgmental if I’d bought the game expecting a sub-standard slaughter-fest, but I was told by people at the company directly that I could do something in the game, and that was a lie. Worse, the game maker who spoke to me talked about how their game was meant to make people think about the violence they were committing. I really didn’t get that impression at all. In fact, most of the game is straight out of a B grade ninja movie made by white filmmakers who think jiujitsu is a form of magic instead of a martial art.

But even if I hadn’t felt lied to, the game just isn’t that good. I’d be playing it nightly to finish it quicker and move on to something else, but it upset hubby when I drained a bottle of rum and coke in ten minutes playing a drinking game for all the stupid shit in this brain dead production. So I have to wait a few days at a time, play a chapter, and then sober up. The alternative is alcoholism, and hubby doesn’t want that.

I give Mark of the Ninja 2 stars, and I’d only recommend it to people looking for a distraction between bigger games. The stealth options touted by other reviewers are simplistic at best, and the constant praise over the no-kill option in reviews completely glosses over the mandatory killings in boss fights. Ultimately, I feel cheated again by the promise of an option for pacifism, only to end up slaying everything that moves for the bonus points, dogs included.

Chalk this up to another indie game with a compelling core premise marred by a lack of polish in the story, enemy AI, and overall presentation. As I said, I’ll finish this one eventually, but I can’t expect that I’ll have any fun with it. I’m just playing to make back the money I put into it, and for a game, that’s a lousy reason to keep playing.

Guest blogging for Gabriel…

For a change of pace, I have guest blogs out. I’m trying to spread the word about Saving Gabriel, and Rob at Reynard City and Nerine Dorman were both kind enough to invite me to their blogs. On Reynard City, I have an interview, and on Nerine’s blog, I have a short excerpt from Saving Gabriel. I believe this will soon be followed by another guest post on Nerine’s blog, in which I interview Gabriel a bit about his history.

You can find Saving Gabriel on Amazon, Amazon UK, Kobo, and on my blog bookstore. And if you wanted to add the book to your Goodreads to-read shelf, it’s already listed there too.

This is a little short, isn’t it? Good thing I also have an early review to show you over on Amazon, a five star review from one of the Wattpad beta readers. It’s a good review, and starting off with a 5 isn’t too shabby.

And speaking of Wattpad betas, the final two chapters go up on A Boy and His Dawg tonight. After this, I’ll leave up all the chapters for one month to let everyone who started it finish in a reasonable amount of time. It will be coming out in the latter half of February, but for sure, I’m getting enough typo hunters to comment that I’ll find most of my persnickety mistakes. I’m nowhere near the numbers of viewers I got with Saving Gabriel, but still sitting slightly above where I finished posting Sandy Morrison and the Pack of Pussies. (It’s since picked up a thousand more viewers thanks to people who showed up for my betas.)

What do I take away from this? That’s it’s damned hard to sell stories with furries. My gay zombies did better than my werecats or the werekin in Blind Rage. My bisexual vampires were a hit both times, and yet none of my werewolf stories seems to find an audience. The sexuality or lack thereof of my characters has little to do with it. Clearly, people are just anti-furry. *Sniffles*

Well, anyhow, maybe I’ll have better luck with fallen angels.

Sarcasm aside, I want to thank Rob and Nerine for hosting me, and thanks to my beta reader for posting an early review. It’s a good start to already have a review in the opening week. =^)

Game review: Dragon Age: Origins

Every once in a while, I’ll get involved with something that starts off really pushing all the right buttons for me, but then loses my interest the longer the creative effort plays out. A good book example is Shiver, which I loved right up until the middle when the questions of why kept getting answered in the worst and least interesting ways. Suddenly I go from smiling and being engaged to pissy and reading slower because I need to take time out for more rolling of my eyes.

This summary does not fully explain my disappointment with Dragon Age: Origins, but it is a good starting point to lead into this review of equal parts gushing and ranting. You see, I was ranting about shit stories in video games, and several followers told me to look into Dragon Age: Origins (and to ignore the second, because it’s poop.)

When the game got started, my introduction story was weak. I played as a city elf female, and thus my start up story is that I got kidnapped by a local royal rapist. After escaping with help, I confronted and killed the royal douche, who made me an offer of money to just ignore him raping a few of my cousins. This is not the weak part. The weak part is, as I’m facing arrest for murdering half a fucking castle of men, Duncan, the Grey Warden steps in and says “I’m taking her for our team.” And then everyone is all “Well golly gee willickers, she’s untouchable now.” No, I really, really don’t fucking think so. I’d buy a prison breakout, maybe, but this is just too convenient.

But okay, after the first missions set you up to be a grey warden, the game’s writing steps it up and turns this into a real role play game. I need to harp on this because I’ve tried playing most of the recent RPG titles, and most of them confuse stats management with RPG. Sure, you can choose where to drop skill points on a characters. But that’s not role play. That’s the backend of character development.

But here in this game, the dialogue options I was given always had a choice that sounded about right for my character. Note, I didn’t say right for me, but right for my character. Playing a female rogue from a lower class elf race, I was a lot colder in my decisions here than I’ve been in many previous games. It’s because I wasn’t trying to force me into the game. I was trying to play a character, and I rarely felt like I didn’t have the options I wanted.

There’s so much I want to gush about, from the dialogue options to the combat options. With the exception of a few scenes, your hero is usually teamed up with three others, and their skills can compliment yours, allowing you to create a balanced crew of rogue, mage, templar, and FREE space. For me this ended up being the bard Leliana. Sometimes I was given a new party member, and of all my options, the only other character who I relied on so heavily was the witch Morrigan.

Actually, I need to talk about Morrigan, because she’s a huge part of why this felt like a true role play game for me. When I first met her, I got the feeling she liked me. But with each moral dilemma we were presented, few of my choices could win her approval. I had an easier time aligning myself with Alistair and Leliana, but Morrigan seemed to hate everyone.

Twenty hours into the game, and Morrigan had a conversation with my dog, and I felt like that argument was actually the closest I’d heard to her being positive. Around sixty hours in, I had to go kill Morrigan’s evil mother, and that changed her a lot. Later conversations had less of an accusing tone, and Morrigan seemed to mellow out and accept that we were her friends and had no ulterior motives for helping her.

And I cared about all of this. I agonized over my choices because I cared how my teammates felt about me as their leader. I was so totally immersed in this story that I was able to go along with most of the ride without noticing any of the bugs or flaws until much, much later in the game.

Combat on the PC version was a joy to handle. Whack the space bar to pause the action, then direct the characters to decide which enemies they attack first. I’ve died plenty of times in this game, and I got used to reloading and trying a new strategy whenever baiting and ambushing failed. I loved trying to sort out the best way of dealing with 10-12 enemies when I’ve only got 4 people of nearly the same fighting level. Or even more confounding, dealing with a boss and eight minions, half of whom like to sit back and lob in area of effect spells with no concern for their allies.

During this whole time, hubby was playing the game as another rogue, but he’d chosen an outcast dwarf. His party and team looked nothing at all like mine. Hubby kept asking me, “Have you met this character yet?” and I had no idea who he was talking about. We both took different routes through the game, so what my game looked like was nothing at all like what he was seeing. Many times, I just paused my game and went to the living room to see hubby’s version of the story.

And so, before I get to my complaints, I want to say that it’s likely that I’ll go back through the game again as a Dalish elf mage, and then maybe as a dwarf fighter of some kind. I’ll do it because I’ll want to see how their paths in the game vary, and how their change in classes affects my strategy. This is the place I still want to heap praise on, because the fighting and the strategy are so fantastic. I loved how, even healed, characters could have persistent injuries, and how those wrenched limbs and fractured skulls affected their stats. I loved the role play aspect, and I loved listening to the banter of my teammates when they talked among themselves randomly.

But somewhere around hour 50, I started complaining to hubby about Loghain, the bad guy of the game. I keep getting told by other characters how he’s a respected man. But in the game, his every action is frankly pathetic. He retreats and betrays his post, and this somehow allows him to become regent. It’s no secret that he’s betrayed his people, and his every action in the game is to snarl and growl about everyone else acting suspicious toward him. Despite his EXTREMELY shaky claims to power, he compromises with no one, treats no ally with a modicum of respect, and comes off in every cut scene as a whiny little shit. Even his “powerful” speeches come across as middle manager bullshit, and I started wondering why the game had bothered talking about the blight at all if my enemy was this king wannabe.

Nevertheless, I spent another 30 hours tracking down every last side mission to prove all of Loghain’s crimes, and I arranged a marriage between the sitting queen, Anora, and Alistair, the legitimate heir to the throne. At the landsmeet, I laid out every last piece of evidence; how Loghain had betrayed the king and framed the wardens, how he’d poisoned arl Eamon, disrupted the circle of magi by inciting a mutiny, sold the city elves as slaves (against the law in Ferelden, according to two arls during the final debates), and tortured innocent men merely for disagreeing with him.

My character has coercion level four. I’ve walked past almost every major battle by persuading people to use their heads. So to me, laying out all the fucking evidence to a chorus of gasps and shouts is game, set, and fucking match. “Not so,” says Bioware, and Loghain says, “Guards, lock the queen up and arrest these traitors.”

Stop. I mean this too. I stopped the game, shut it down, and had to ask if I wanted to play through other rounds with other characters. I didn’t just present my Perry Mason case only to have a toady middle manager as my boss fight. The fucking guards should have said, “Wait, you want us to lock up the actual queen? Dude, go fucketh yourself.” I wanted to get this asshole deposed legally and then move on to finding the archdemon and having a proper final battle.

That’s what gets me, the sense of a bait and switch. When I started the game, I was gathering armies for the blight. I was having dreams of a giant demon/dragon, and THAT’S the kind of evil I wanted to fight. The best fight of the game for me was facing Flemeth as a dragon, because it challenged me, and it made me genuinely scared for my people. Yes, I had to reload and play that part over and over, and I LOVED it because I was oohing and awing every time the dragon picked up one of my people in a chomping attack. “Ooh,” was because “ooh, that’s not good,” and “aw,” because “Aw shit, this is gonna be fatal, isn’t it?”

But I really don’t care about the ending or the final battle, because it’s not a dragon or a demon/ogre combination. No, it’s a power hungry middle manager whose bid for the throne is so blatant and pathetic, he can’t even pretend to be a leader in public. His every speech sounds like “YOU SHUT UP, TRAITORS! ME, GOOD! YOU BAD! MEETING OVER!”

It’s a bit of a mixed bag of feelings for me at this point. I just spent 80 hours building up my team, making up my own story, and aside from two minor subplot points in the whole of the game, I was really liking the aspect of gathering armies for war. I bought into the need to help the dwarfs crown a new king, to help the magi regain control of their tower, to…I bought the story itself, but it’s because I though I’d be fighting the archdemon with all theses others at my side in a grand and glorious battle. Instead, I’m pushed into a palace to be arrested by the only dude who shouldn’t have any power of authority left after the queen rejected him.

What happens next is the game says “Fight Loghain for your freedom.” No, fuck that. Someone else can fight the middle manager, but this isn’t what I signed up for. If this were a fantasy book, this ending is so bad, I’m dropping the book with only six pages till the end. I just don’t care how it ends, because this isn’t the fight I thought I’d be in at the final hour of the game.

So last night, I went to bed thinking, “Fuck that game. I don’t even want to play as other characters if it’s all going to come down to a bullshit battle with a sniveling toady.”

But when I got up this morning, I thought about it, and yeah, I can see going through the other 80 hours with a new character. I just can’t see wanting to finish the game. Everything else about the presentation is so fantastic. I can’t say I have any complaints about the combat or the sense of immersion into my character and my world. Early on, when my cousin bids me a farewell from the home I’ve always known, I got a little moist-eyed. I got mad at certain characters, and I felt bad for others. Everything is so pitch perfect, right up until I have to deal with Loghain.

And you know why? Because I’m a motherfucking rogue, and I’ve killed human royalty over lesser crimes. But not once was I given the option of stabbing the fucker when we were together. Every encounter with him is an exercise in frustration, because it doesn’t matter what my character says, he always goes into the same mode. “ME GOOD! YOU BAD! MEETING OVER!”

And this really rubs me the wrong way because everyone else had so much thought put into them. Hell, even with Flemeth, I had trouble just running up and whacking her because she’d saved me from certain doom once. All the little mini-bosses had reasons for their madness or their evil. Everyone else had a decent fucking storyline. So why the fuck is Loghain a Mongoloid Fucktard who can’t emote anything without sounding like a whiny little shit? Couldn’t the writers at least give him some scene time where he’s placating to the queen, his fucking daughter? Couldn’t we be given a few scenes explaining his obsessions with wanting power? No, more than that, I wanted to see signs of this guy acting like a leader to explain why so many people could support him even knowing all his plots.

And, his plots fucking suck. None of them work. None of them are very secret, and pretty much everyone knows the score. Loghain is evil and can’t be trusted. But when watching cut scenes of Loghain, there’s this split; what other say about him, and the character as shown in the game. And these two people have nothing in fucking common with each other. So I’m sorry, but I needed some scene time of the big bad boss at least acting like he knew what he was doing. I never got it, even though I was given flashes of Loghain’s story in places, and without having the sense of being a real person, he yanks me out of the story on the very last battle.

So, what to do with this? At 60 hours in, I was ready to give this five stars. But the story ending… I tell you what, I’m going to give this four stars. I really do hate the ending, and I doubt I’ll ever finish the game with any character. But the game itself is fun and immersive, so I believe that after I’m through feeling betrayed by Bioware for the bad big boss bait and switch, I probably will go back with a new character to try another path. And really, anything I want to sink 80 hours into can’t be bad, even if the ending left a taste like piss in my mouth.

I’d still recommend this to RPG fans who want a computer game to really give you role play options. There’s so many story option, and for once, a game got me emotionally invested in the story. That rarely happens, and I suppose it’s why I got so disappointed at the end. Dragon Age: Origins started off so strong and compelling that I was ready to crown it the best RPG ever. But then it fumbled on the ending. It’s a tragedy, really.

Okay, I’ll shut up and you can decide if you want to sink 80-plus hours of your life into this time-sucker.

New book! Saving Gabriel

I now have my blog moved over to my new host with my settings intact, it seems. There were some problems getting the domain name transferred to the new host,but there were problems on both sides of the transfer, including my domain being locked for no particular reason.

But everything seems to have come back online with good timing, because today marks the release of my fallen angel dark fantasy tale, Saving Gabriel. You can find it for $3.99 on Amazon, Kobo, and on my blog bookstore.

Here is the final blurb:

Gabriel is a fallen guardian angel who assigns himself to hard luck cases despite being banned from heaven. When his current ward, Rosalinda Fernandez, is targeted for a soul harvest by another fallen angel, Gabriel is tasked by the archangels to investigate the real purpose behind the plot. All he has to do is keep his ward safe without falling in love with her. There’s just one small problem: after years of watching Rosalinda grow into a proud young woman, Gabriel is already deeply in love. Even if he can expose the plot surrounding Rosalinda, will Gabriel’s growing relationship with her lead to damnation for both of them?

And here again is the fantastic cover by Elena Helfrecht, who has a lot of great creepy cover art available for horror and dark fantasy stories.

Of all the stories I plan to publish this year, Saving Gabriel is my most accessible work. So while I love all my stories and want folks to read my other stuff, if a first time reader were asking which book I’d recommend, I’d have to point to this one. It’s got great characters, a mystery to solve, and an alternate history of angels and demons and their eroding relationship with the human race.

I’ll close this post out with a request for my beta readers. I need to get word out on this book in the worst way. Honest reviews would help a lot, no matter where you put them. You might post something on your blog, on Goodreads, or on Amazon. You already helped get my book up to the top 20 for paranormal over on Wattpad, and I really appreciate that. If you enjoyed the story and would like to help it succeed, a short review from you could help convince a few more folks to pick up a copy. It would also earn my gratitude, which feels vaguely like warm fuzzy towels just taken from the dryer.

Of course, buying gift copies is better. You could maybe put them on small USB memory keys and then press them upon friends. Then you could really help by saying, “You…must read…this book! It…will…change…your life! (The dramatic pauses are important, and let your victims know that you’re serious, and they had better read this book, or else.)

Okay, I’ll shut up now.