Bob Defendi's Blog, page 4

Final Push

This blog post is going to be quick. I write these on Sunday and I need to write 2-3000 words today.

This week is my last writers' group before we go on hiatus for a month of conventions. So let me explain something called "The Slow Read Problem." When you're in a writers' group you tackle a submission a week, so a book is spread over something like four to nine months (or years, if you're George RR Martin). We typically read books much more quickly than that in our spare time. So a book might set something up in chapter one then pay it off five chapters later. In a writers group, that could be more than a month a part and everyone in the group might forget a setup that a normal reader would have experienced at most a night or two before.

So coming into this big hiatus, my group basically said, "break any submission rules necessary to finish submitting the book before the hiatus." Essentially, if I need to go over our normal word count caps a bit to get her done, I have their blessing. They didn't want to have the slow read problem blown up by adding a month of vacation right into the middle of the climax and falling action.

So. I have to fininsh the book. Like pronto. And I had Gaming Con. So I haven't slept much.

And this is a short post.

Toodles.

Post Convention Decompression

Salt Lake City Gaming Con is over, and I think it was a great success. Two days long, I was scheduled for nine panels, although due to a schedule change I missed, I only attended eight of them. I did two Choose Your Own Apocalypse Games, which means I also performed two musical numbers. I won the first, lost the second, although they told me after by only one vote (though it looked like more at the time).

Salt Lake Gaming Con is in its third year. This is the first where the Comic Con people came in as partners. It's my understanding that their numbers had been on a decline and they seemed to have climbed back up steadily this year. While the panel rooms weren't bursting with people (except for my panel on how to be a better GM), the attendance seemed healthy enough.

The first day we set up and got to know the space. It took a bit of time to get our table and badges sorted, but we arrived early so we were ready before the general crowd had entered the dealer room. My panel on MMOs went well (I moderated), and the first Choose Your Own Apocalypse, where I played Friend Computer from Paranoia, versus, Emperor Palpatine and Lolth. My musical number was a sing along to Still Alive from Portal. And between that and a dangerous political joke where I insulted everyone's candidate in the last election, I managed to pull a win. That last joke was risky. I knew that if I didn't have the room, I'd probably lose votes, but I might gain a few if I had the room on my side, and when I said it, I didn't know where I stood, but I knew that I would lose without it, so I gambled. I wrapped up the day with my panel on stories and RPGs.

The second day was more difficult. There are days at cons that are strange, where you feel completely alone, abandoned by all your friends. I don't admit that to many people, but again, I've promised that this blog will be completely honest. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing that stuff, and Saturday was my best day for both sales and panels. It's safe to say that it might be, professionally, the best day I've ever had at a convention in my life, even while it might have been in the top two worst, personally. Ironically, the other worst day, personally, was another spot on professional day, when I won my first Choose Your Own Apocalypse.

That day started with my panel on whether video games were as fun as they used to be. It moved into my CYOA where I played the Uber-Ethereal from XCom. That time my musical number was Come Sail Away from Styx, which involved a lot more belting than the first song, and my voice was pretty shot, but I made it to the chorus and then it was the audience's problem. I lost that one, but as I said, it was a narrow lost and I lost to a first-time player. I prefer to lose to first time players. Playing that game your first time is harrowing. Then we did a panel on the best video game movies never made, followed by the best panel on how to GM I've ever even seen, much less participated in. We ended with a panel on Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, which started with Jennifer Hale entering the room, declaring it her favorite panel on the citadel, then saying "I should go." and leaving with a mic drop. I'd been setting that up for thirty six hours (though in fairness all the heavy lifting was done by the head of the celebrity liasons, who had the original idea the day before at lunch.)

We ended with a very rushed pizza at my favorite pizza place in Salt Lake. Then I went home and just shook for about three hours.

It wasn't the biggest con, but it doesn't need to be. As I said on the private facebook group after, we give the same performance for five people that we give for five hundred.

Salt Lake Gaming Con and Working Conventions

This weekend I'll be appearing at Salt Lake Gaming Con on the 7th and 8th. My schedule is pretty full. Here it is:

Friday:

12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Playing MMORPGs While Having A Real Life
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm The Everything Playstation Panel
2:00 pm to 3:00 pm Choose Your Own Apocalypse RPGs: Lolth (D&D) vs Palpatine (Star
Wars) vs The Computer (Paranoia) (Me)
8:00 pm to 9:00 pm Which Came First, the Story or the RPG? The Relationship Between
Writing and Role Playing Games

Saturday:

11:00 am to 12:00 pm Are Video Games as Fun as They Used to Be?
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm Choose Your Own Apocalypse Video Games: The Reapers (Mass
Effect) vs The Uber Ethereal (X- Com) (Me) vs The Umbrella Corporation
(Resident Evil)
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm Hollywood Limbo: The Greatest Video Game Movies Never Made
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm Burning Down the Tavern to When the Dog Eats Your Adventure
Notes: The Ultimate Dungeon Master Guide for Dungeons and
Dragons
6:00 pm to 7:00 pm Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda: What Went Right, What Went Wrong?

While part of this post is to announce my upcoming schedule, let's talk a little bit about why I have that schedule. I've spoken before about how some cons know that they can put me on any panel and I'll either moderate or perform color commentary. Basically, I can make myself useful on any panel even when I don't have what you might traditionally call expertise in the subject matter. I've been placed on panels where military people speak about military sf (I've never served). I was once on a panel with two or three mathematicians speaking about cryptography, a subject I know enough about to write fiction around, but not about directly. Basically, they know that I'll rise to the challenge.

In this case, I'm a professional game designer with more than twenty years experience, so I told them to work me to death. I pitched at least a few of these panels myself (or ones that look enough like them that the planners likely built them out of my suggestion and someone else's), and if you look at the schedule, they have me moderating a great many of them. In fact, if you take out the game show panels, I moderate all but two. That's the trick here. If they didn't know my level of expertise in a subject, they made me the moderator. It's not the moderator's job to be an expert. It's the moderator's job to know the subject well enough to ask the right questions of the audience, and there isn't a subject in something called Gaming Con that I don't know at least that well.

So I have a table with an author's group. This is good because I will spend very little time at the table, and there will be someone to watch my books. (If you want one signed, buy one and find me at a panel). I don't intend to sell a lot at Gaming Con, at least not by my own hand. What I do intend to do, is to continue to make myself as valuable as possible to the people who run Gaming Con. That is a goal in and of itself, but that kind of reputation is what you need as an author in the con community. The fact that these are the same people who run Salt Lake Comic Con is just icing on the cake.

Learning Your Limits

When you work a full-time job and essentially write full time (or very close to it), you have to consider how you manage your schedule. I've decided to do these massive pushes, where during a 2-4 week period, I do enough work that I can take a little time off. And by time off, I mean that I only write seven to fourteen hours during a week, and I can spend the rest of the time decompressing on my own projects. Meaning playing games. Pursuing hobbies. Trying to get back into the headspace for the next big push.

The alternative is to keep a  constant 60-70 hours of work a week, without any breaks, and I can't do that. I'd burn out and go a little crazy. The work would almost certainly suffer.

When I was a game designer, I had a 100,000 word month (That didn't include edits, I had to produce 100,000 new words). It followed another big month of writing and at the end of it, I couldn't function as a writer any longer. My notes coming back from the editor amounted to "Are you okay? Do we need to send help? Do I need to hire Liam Neeson?" I learned at that point that I had limits. I can work hard in bursts, but drive too hard over too long a period, and I burn out entirely.

I don't have any great advice for learning your limits. For most people, the only way to do it is to exceed them and crash and burn. The best advice I can give you is that when you know it might be coming, have someone watching your back, ready to tell you when your text turns to pudding.

Otherwise, your editors might come to the conclusion that you've been kidnapped and your terrible writing is all an elaborate code. Either that or that you've just lost it and are no good to them any longer. But I'd shoot for the first one, you might get to meet Liam Neeson.

Connections

Here's a secret. Authors cheat. We cheat all the time. Constantly cheating. For instance, Damico's personal history is pretty much my personal history with a few exceptions. Lifting my backstory started as a joke and turned into a major cheat. Another cheat evolves out of the fact that you don't want to put a factual error in a book. If you write that people in Switzerland speak Swiss, it doesn't matter if all the characters involved would honestly think Swiss is a language. It isn't. You need to hang a lantern on that somehow. So Damico's memory is about 15% better than mine. If he's complaining about a Star Trek: TNG episode in book 4 of DbC, I have to go back and watch the episode to discover that, no, it wasn't Worf who said that line. It was O'Brien because Worf had left Starfleet in the season finale the episode before and O'Brien stood at his post for those 40 or so minutes of story. I'd forgotten that. A better ST:TNG fan would be offended by that error, especially coming from the mouth of someone tearing down the episode, and so I had to get all the other details right. So I cheat.

And there are other cheats, that are just good process. We call them editing. Most editing is just very creative cheating. Finding creative ways to get around abusing the words "just" and "turned" and "was". Finding that creative solution you had at the end of the book and rewriting the beginning of the book and pretending you had it all along. Stealing a good idea from Writers' Group (which isn't really stealing, since it was given freely, but the Writers' Group could be called one big cheat, couldn't it?) Cheating. You could make that argument that all good processes are really just cheating, codefied as best practices.

I just finished those 80-110 hour weeks I do when I'm editing a novel. In this case the second draft of DbC 4. The book turned out to be in better shape than I had any right to expect. In the end, it mainly boiled down to establishing connections.

When I started that book, I knew there would be a super weapon since it's based on Star Wars (or more directly Hidden Fortress, the movie that inspired Star Wars). But I didn't know what the weapon was until I'd made it about halfway through. I knew what it did, but not the actual Weapon itself, so I couldn't give clues to its identity. So at the halfway point, maybe a little further, I figured out what the Weapon would be, but I didn't have a lot of experience with the particular thing. Damico would, of course, after I edited his backstory (cheating!). So I brainstormed it at my game group, which had at least two people with a lot of experience with the thing in question and one of them came up with the connection to lemonade stands. I would use lemonade stands, in an absurdist manner, throughout the book to foreshadow the Weapon's real nature and a few real die hards out there would figure it out (or get close enough) and feel good about themselves.

Of course, I didn't have any lemonade stands in the first half of the book (because that would be pretty absurd), so I had to make sure I found places to add them on my way through, and I'd added <>> as a note at the beginning of the first chapter to cascade through my edits.

The other big problem the book had (and might still have, we'll see how the second round of critiques goes), has to do with the epigrams. Howard Tayler made a joke during the second book that spawned the running gag in the fourth book's epigrams, which turned them into one giant meta-joke/story that doesn't pay off until you've read both the chapter quotes and the novel all the way through. Around chapter 15, I started getting notes from critiquers where they'd say things like, "These are funny, but distracting, and I'll stop commenting on that now." Basically, they all gave up on pointing out the problems with them and trying to fix them right around a third of the way through. Then, around chapter 39, I have a line in there where they all said, "Wow. Okay, I'm interested now." Unfortunately, that's near the end of a 50 chapter book.

The secret of that line is that it intimately connected the epigrams to what happened in the main story of the novel in a way that didn't seem possible previously. And by the end, I think they all agreed that the payoff was worth it, but that they wouldn't have taken the whole journey with me if they hadn't been forced to by the nature of a critique group. I think the general attitude was, "I like what you're trying to do here. I hope you figure out some way to pull it off. Good luck."

So. What did I do? I cheated.

I stole a page from The Empire Strikes Back. Hopefully, I did it well enough to work. In The Empire Strikes Back you have two plots, one very exciting (Han and Leia being chased and almost captured or killed at every turn) and one very boring (Luke and Yoda talking philosophically about the nature of reality). The way the screenwriter pulls you through that second plot is by mirroring the first. Han and Leia almost die in a cave. Luke goes into a cave, etc. He borrows the tension and excitement from the first plot and you feel it in the second, even though that second plot, on it's own, hasn't earned it. I tried to do that when plotting the epigrams, but I just couldn't make the parallelism work (I wanted every epigram to hit the same story beat as the chapter itself, but that didn't happen and I see now that wouldn't have solved the problem anyway). So in the final edit, I went through and I foreshadowed that big line in Chapter 39. I found ten or so other lines in the epigrams and I purposely found places to mirror them in the text of the chapters themselves, although never in the same chapter as the quote. So even the least astute reader should see, by chapter four, that there is a direct connection between the two, and while they won't know what it is, I'm hoping the puzzle of trying to work it out will carry them through and keep them from giving up (or at least have them shrug and give me the benefit of the doubt, for those who don't enjoy cracking puzzles but would rather just watch them unfold).

And on the matter of Lemonade Stands? One final happy bit of happenstance?

The opening dialog, first bit of dialog that happens (chronologically, at least)? It's Lotianna in a desert, waxing poetic about the thing she misses most. The thing she misses most? Lemonade. I didn't even have to add that in. It was like I planned that to be a thematic thread from the very beginning.

So sometimes you cheat. Sometimes fate cheats for you.

Or maybe I just cheated by twisting everything in this post to be about cheating. Anyway you cut it:

Connections.

Fyrecon

I spent this weekend pouring my sweat, my energy, and several layers of my vocal cords into the Fyrecon. This was Fyrecon's first year and they made a fine showing. Most of the people involved are old pros at the con scene in one way or the other, but this is the first time they tried to start a con on their own, and a lot of us rooted for them quietly even as we kept our professional reserve. I can honestly say that I couldn't be more pleased.

There were bumps, not all of them their fault. The person before me in Plot a Novel in an Hour was under the impression that he could tear down his huge display of weapons after my presentation started. I don't know if this was his first conference or if he'd just gone over and this was an excuse, but it meant that my most time-sensitive presentation only had forty minutes instead of the normal fifty. It's the only time I've ever not actually finished it (although we were close enough to the end that the audience had all the nuts and bolt, I just didn't get that big finish moment that usually fires up the crowd). That made me sad.

I made new friends. I carpooled with my massage therapist and his wife. My massage therapist is an artist and his wife a writer, both professions had tracks at the conference. The first day we carpooled, only his wife wanted to wake up in time to go up together, so my massage therapist and a third guest rode up seperately, which was fine because I have this ritual. You see, my con personality, I've spoken of it before, takes a LOT of energy. I have to get into character. My current method of getting into character is to sing My Shot from Hamilton at the top of my lungs. I'm friends with Josh and Allison, we go to movies together every Tuesday night and we're about to start gaming together, so I knew that even if she hated that, she'd endure it. I was a little worried about the last day, however, when Josh and this third guest, Haley, would be in the car.

I met Haley that day and she came to Plot a Novel in an Hour. She seemed nice enough, but I was a little worried about the ride up the next day because subjecting someone to 7 minutes of loud, non-consensual hip-hop isn't always the best way to begin a relationship. Then, right before bed, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which made sense because we used messenger to coordinate all day and that would allow me to not ask "Is Haley with you?" In every new conversation before coordinating lunches and dinners and the like. But under job, there in the friend request were the words "Musical Theater Major." At that point, I suspected it would all be all right. I knew for sure, the next morning when I asked her, "How do you feel about Hamilton?" "I love Hamilton!" "Well, great. Then the next seven minutes aren't going to suck for you." So we sang My Shot. Then she told me that I had given her the Hamilton bug. Well, I could certainly do something about that, so I started the show from the beginning and had a UofU theater major sing to me the entire drive. Which is great when your throat is completely destroyed and you'd really just like to sit back and not have to entertain everyone else for a bit.

We had good classes, great debates. At one moment in the green room, actual tears tears flowed from all the sharing. More bonding related tears at other times, with other people. I got to sit and have a great conversation with Toni Weisskopf from Baen for almost two hours, which I can tell you doesn't happen nearly enough for my tastes. No shop talk. No agendas. Just people sharing their lives. We discussed homes and pets and giving blood and childhood stories and the little things that are trivial to everyone else but mean so much in the moment.

I hear the conference did well financially. They didn't have final numbers last I checked, but I think it did well enough for a second year. I look forward to it. They made a good space for the students. They made a good space for the presenters. All in all, I found it a great experience.

The Benefits of a Long Commute

My mother is disabled and lives with me, but for years before that, I'd drive to her house most every Sunday for dinner and a movie. I lived in Orem, UT. She lived in Salt Lake City. I hadn't discovered podcasts yet, so I spent most of that time listening to music. But more importantly, I spent those 45 minutes, both ways, twice a week, grinding on plot. Drilling down on story problems. Digesting the writing I'd done that week. Planning my writing for the next week. Just working through those mental cycles necessary to work out the issues.

I've joked before how there have been periods where I quit writing on my drive home every night after Writers' Group, only to recommit and figure out my way forward by the time I arrived at my door. Long commute. I have a 25-minute drive to work (35-minutes in good weather when construction starts). Long commute. There are times at work when I just can't stare at the screen anymore and I step into the big conference room and stare off at the big NSA complex off on the distant mountains (I've probably been flagged). Not a long commute, but a few minutes when my subconscious sits idle.

We talk a lot as writers about the importance of butt-in-chair time, and I don't want to discount that, but just as important is that time when you're not working on writing...when your brain can process what you've done and what you're going to do. For me, it's the commute. For you, it might be house cleaning, or yard work, or gardening, or building that shed out back, or pulling cable because your significant other has the same reaction to exposed cables as most people have to snakes. Maybe it's running errands. Maybe it's paying bills. Maybe it's organizing your sock drawer. I don't know, but your conscious mind frees up and can work on the product at hand and suddenly your realize, "Oh. Hey. My plan is super convoluted at the end because it needs to be for it to work out, but the person who made the plan didn't know it needed to be convoluted. She should have made it simple. I need to come up with an excuse for her to have foreseen all this. Dammit."
 
 I'm an outliner, a pantser only by necessity. Still, my favorite moments are when I walk into the climax and realize the hero's plan won't work and that my whole outline for the ending goes out the window, because I don't stop writing, I just start writing desperately, and I think it comes across in the character's desperation. But I don't recommend that for the weak of heart. I suggest figuring out that plan doesn't work about two months before you have to write it, so that you have two months of showers and drives and long meetings where that one guy (you know the guy) is talking for you to figure out what the real plan should be.
 
 I had my first gray hair at seventeen. I started writing in earnest at sixteen. You do the math.

War in Ficition

It's Memorial Day, and I'm thinking about war. This is the first Memorial Day in a long time that hasn't been a convention weekend for me, and I'm not used to using the day for it's intended purpose. This has me thinking some about war in novels.

War can be handled in different ways in different works, of course. It can even be handled differently for different characters. War changes some people. It probably changes most people. My grandfather carried the scars of the World War II until the day he died. His heritage was Italian and the first man he killed (at least the first he knew he killed), was an Italian soldier. The soldier spoke to him before he died. My grandfather never told a soul what the soldier said, but he had nightmares about it most every night for the rest of his life. Some people sacrificed life and limb for their countries. Others sacrificed their sanity and the souls.

But does that mean that all war stories have to be about intense mental scarring and post-traumatic stress? I don't think so. Some people seem built for war. The horrors roll off them. There are different theories as to why this might be, but it boils down to the fact that some percentage of the human population seems born to take human life, when necessary. They aren't serial killers. They don't necessarily enjoy it. They just don't have the switch that causes them unbearable guilt in war or violence when defending others. If you're writing adventure stories, you can certainly assume the characters in your stories are these people.

But I've been thinking about my grandfather, and what he sacrificed. What he endured. When I was young, I read a psychologist talking about mental illness. Unfortunately, I can't quote the source, but he said something like, "I can show you why any person in the world should have gone insane. I can't tell you how a single person, with everything they experienced, stayed sane."

You can tell different stories with the same character. People change. Situations change. My grandfather could have fought for months before that moment where he killed that soldier and exchanged those words (I actually don't know he didn't). Those nameless soldiers in the distance, would they have had the same effect on him? Maybe, maybe not, but if I were telling that story, I would feel justified making that a major turning point in his relationship with war. Most of the war stories he told me were comedies. Stories of adventure and drinking and bar fights. I could tell stories that seemed more like adventure stories before and darker explorations into the pain of trauma after. There was a stark demarcation in his life between the stories of war he told to entertain, and the twitching, horrifying torments that came in the middle of the night.

But we read stories to escape. We read stories to be affected. Sometimes we need the stories to be fantasies. Sometimes we need them to be painfully real. Sometimes we need them to edify the spirit. Sometimes we need to explore the pain we can't express ourselves. Sometimes we honor a person's outer deeds. Sometimes we honor their inner trials.

No one story can cover the full canvas of war. Pick your theme, and just do your best to do it justice.

Dealing With Rejection

This weekend, I watched a video about getting your head in the right place for sales or personal relations. I watch things like this sometimes as little character studies. For instance, I'm a terrible salesman. I do well socially, but when I try to convert those skills to a business setting, I often break down. So if I want to write a good salesman (or conman), I might watch videos of salesmen and conmen trying to teach people how to do their thing.

Anyway, this person was speaking on rejections as an obstacle for a sales call, and I started thinking about rejection as a fact of life in writing. One thing almost every successful writer has in common is that they've been told they aren't good enough far more often than they've been told that they are good, or great, or even competent. Listen to TV writers speak about pitching, for instance. They are lucky if they make one sale for every fifty rejected pitches.

Many of the most popular authors were thoroughly rejected, and I'm not just talking about the ones who's finished work is populist, but of questionable quality. I'm talking about universally beloved books. Dune. Harry Potter. Brandon Sanderson skipped a big part of that portion of his career by just accepting that he would write crap for his first several books and not submitting them.

I don't suggest you do that.

I suggest you take as role models people like Shannon Hale or Kevin J Anderson. Kevin announces how many times he's been rejected at Writers of the Future and often challenges people to show him more rejections than that. Shannon laminated her early rejections into a giant role that she unfurls down panel rooms and out the door in a spectacular object lesson.

Death by Cliché was rejected something like 28 times before I produced it as a podcast to modest success. Between my Writers of the Future contest win and my next big sale, I must have had 300+ rejections. I've never done the math. Rejections are a part of the business.

So how do you deal with rejection?

I celebrate every rejection. I make a point of it. Every rejection, you see, is a step forward in my career. It's a churn. If I don't get those manuscripts out there, and those rejections back, I don't learn and move forward. I listened to these people early in my career and thought, "What if my number is one thousand, and I won't really know success until I've been rejected one thousand times? I'd better get busy."

Or you could sit there and do nothing. Afraid. Stagnant.

Napoleon ordered trees planted along the major roads in France, his reasoning being he wanted the armies of his empire to march in the shade. When one of his advisors pointed out that it would take twenty years for the trees to grow tall enough to shade an army, Napoleon said something like, "Well then what are you waiting for?" Except, you know, it probably sounded smarter when he said it, because he said it in French.

I was just as afraid of rejection, when I started, as the next person. Each letter devastated me. But instead of getting depressed I forced myself to celebrate each one, in some small way. Literally. How depended on my churn rate. If you're getting three a week, you probably can't afford a fancy dinner each time.

At first, I'll admit, it's lip service, but you know what? After a year or so, the sting had faded a bit. It still hurts to this day, but only when I read the rejection. When I see the rejection has arrived, I often give a little "Whoo hoo!" And after the slap fades, I can celebrate honestly now. Not every time. Sometimes the demons still come calling, but usually. Most of the time.

And now, when my last rejection for a project comes in, I'm already plotting my next big move. I'm always thinking ahead.

It might take twenty years, so you better start now. Ask yourself: What are you waiting for?

Except, you know, ask it in French. You'll sound smarter.

Mothers and Writers

It's Mother's Day, or it was when I wrote this, and I don't have any big news, so I thought I'd speak a little about how we become writers. I've done those tours where you go to schools and speak to teachers about getting kids interested in reading, and they usually have me speak on the writing aspect of it. I usually start with something jokey and dismissive like "I can only speak for myself, but the best method seems to be to have your father obsess about writing a novel and then die before completing it, leaving a terrible scar on your eight-year-old psyche." If that doesn't sound very jokey, know that I say it with a great deal of charm.

But in my case, that's just the flashy answer. The more honest answer probably goes back to my mother, who not only read to me at an early age but realized that my appetite for books exceeded the amount of time she could dedicate to reading aloud. So she recorded herself reading to me, with herself making beep sounds to tell me to turn the pages, and gave me the tapes. That way I could have her read to me over and over again, as much as I want.

When I was young, I had two surgeries, one more invasive and more extreme (I don't mind talking about it, but I don't know if you want to read about it so I won't discuss the nature of the condition here), the second a simple tonsillectomy. She knew that I would likely be frightened by both experiences (I might have been two for the first one), so she wrote a picture book for each, called Bobby Goes to the Hospital detailing my completely mundane upcoming trip in such a way that it demystified it. I don't remember having the first one for long, I was way too young, and the fallout of that surgery lasted a long time, but we kept the tonsillectomy book for years, and I would read it and request it over and over. That moment, seeing myself as the main character in a book, with stick figures for all the characters, might have planted the first seeds of writing my own first person narratives.

After that, especially after the death of my father, she probably spent a whole lot of time ignoring my light being on well past my bed time, as I read well into the night. During the Satanic Panic, she didn't blink when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons. I never asked her why, but when concerned parents asked one of my best friends' mothers why she let her son play that "evil game," she said, "Evil game? I walked in the other day and he was trying to figure out how to managed the budget of a small city. I want him doing more stuff like that, not less." I suspect my mother's take was something similar, that the skills I built in the game, or the defense mechanism I gained from it, outweighed any dangers.

There's an old joke, I can't remember which comedian said it. Many have probably done some variation. It talks about how the young boy goes out every weekend with his dad and plays catch. Runs plays. Learns fundamentals. How the dad drives him to games. Shows up. Fights with the coach. Helps him analyze other teams. Watches endless professional games with him, dissecting the teams. Then the kid stands on the sidelines and the camera hits him for his first nationally televised game and he mouths very clearly, for all the world to see:

"Hi, Mom."

When I make that joke about my father, there is truth there. I'm sure his unfulfilled need to become a writer has a great deal to do with my drive to become a writer. But who made my first audiobook? Who made me the character in my first Marty Stu story? Who ignored endless nights of me reading my way through grief and boredom. Who ignored the Satanic Panic and trusted the judgment of an adolescent boy over Paul Harvey? Who was out there, every weekend, laying the fundamentals?

Hi, Mom.