Max Gladstone's Blog, page 21

Fairytale

A friend yesterday sent me a series of texts about some folks singing karaoke to Fairytale of New York.  I love the song.  Part of me says there’s no reason to post it here, because most of you out there have heard it before—but then, everyone has to learn about Fairytale of New York somewhere.  I learned about it from a Megatokyo strip; maybe someone will see it for the first time here.  Once in a while I catch myself assuming that everyone else has exactly the same set of knowledge as I do; of course folks know that FFVI was released as FFIII in the US, or that Starbuck was a dude in the original Galactica, or that A New Hope wasn’t originally tagged ‘Episode 4′ or that in early printings of the Hobbit, Bilbo wins the ring from Gollum in the riddle game rather than finding it in the dark, or that Loki’s bound under the earth with the entrails of his son.  (Huh, interesting list of examples upon review.  This tendency seems to be much more pronounced when dealing with pop culture and myth knowledge—I’m rarely  surprised when someone doesn’t know, for example, the structure of Journey to the West, or how the beginning of the Dao De Jing goes in Chinese, or how to do Deep Excel Magic.  But all this pop culture stuff, well, if I know it, doesn’t everyone?  Maybe a bit of impostor syndrome going on there…)  Anyway, in reality we’re all swimming through this wide and wonderful and weird sea of art and story, and we start from very different shores, and no matter how much we know there’s always more to discover.  I’m just reading James Tiptree Jr for the first time, for example.  So, after all that, here are the Pogues and Kristy MacColl:

And the boys of the NY-PD choir still singing Galway Bay… Um, wait, what?  Sorry, I was, er, distracted there for a second.

Oh, yes, writing.  Progress progresses.  One of the big ice lakes in the story is shattering.  Atomic batteries to power.  Turbines to speed.  And step up the reactor power three more triangles.  Visions of confrontation, double-climax, and societal transformation are dancing in my head.  Can’t wait to see what happens next.

Rock on.  Hope you’re all having a good holiday.

EDIT: Oh!  I almost forgot—my friend, the estimable Alana Joli Abbot, has just released a way cool cell phone game called Choice of Kung Fu, in which your adventures may be chosen from a number of kung-fu related options.  I started playing and was immediately given the option to either tiger-claw a bandit’s face, or choke him out (out of respect for his Buddha nature of course).  This bodes well.  Check it out: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/choice-of-kung-fu/id584710597?mt=8&uo=4

Making Progress

Not much new to report today.  Lousy weather kept me more confined to quarters than usual.  Good writing and good coffee this morning, a slightly more strained editorial process this afternoon.

I’ve been thinking a lot about conversations with friends about narrative energy in comedy, drama, and tragedy.  There’s a theory in dramatic criticism (I don’t know whose theory this is, this is just the kind of stuff I chat about on long walks to and from the gym) that developments in plot are ‘sold’ by the expenditure of narrative energy.  The more of a stretch the plot moment might be, the more narrative energy it requires.  Narrative energy is accumulated by the storyteller’s work—describing characters preparing to do things, or resolving emotional tensions, or creating new ones.  You can see this literally in scenes where the hero has to ‘believe in herself’ to jump across a chasm, or beat up a lion, or something like that.  Flashbacks, a swell of music, a sort of recap of the narrative energy accumulated so far—and then she jumps, and (if we’re in a drama) makes it.  Or (if we’re in a comedy or tragedy) something else happens–they fall, or get hit by a whale, or whatever.

This is similar to mechanics for story-driven games, as my friend Dan pointed out.  Think about the Spirit of the Century system, where you can spend points to use a character’s aspects (basically their story-handles) against them, or to their benefit.

I don’t know how useful this stuff could be to story writing.  At worst, seems like it could reduce some sensitive story architecture stuff to blunt calculus.  On the other hand, it could give us new questions to ask as we do our work…

A Very Nice Weekend

I don’t mean to boast, but…

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HO. HO. HO.

If you’re one of those unlucky folks out there who hasn’t read Hogfather, you’re in for a treat when you finally do get around to it.  Hogfather’s so much fun to read.  Terry Pratchett writing at the height of his powers produces a book that skewers and exults Christmas at the same time.  (As the Death books tend to do with their subject matter.)  Pratchett can do something few other writers dare to try: gutpunch you while you’re laughing, without spoiling the laughter.  At his best, he makes me want to laugh and cry and start a revolution all at the same time.

Lagavulin 16 is quite a nice single malt.  A reliable source (basically my friend Dan, who looks stuff like this up on Wikipedia) informs me that “Happy Christmas” came about as a phrase because Victorians thought “Merry Christmas” was too intemperate and promoted drunkenness.  Be merry responsibly, I suppose?

For all my joking above, Scotch-and-Pratchett was just the easiest-to-photograph part of an excellent weekend, that included, among other things, a wonderful Messiah Pt 1 performed by my wife’s choir, and a showing of the Hobbit, which I liked.

Writing and editing proceed well, though not remarkably on either front.  I have dinner in the oven so I’m going to sign off and do some more work before the alarm bell rings. That should put me well over threshold for the day.  Rock on, you crazy people.

Inexpressibility Topos

Inexpressibility topos: the claim that a particular experience, person, or object, is beyond verbal description…

(excerpted from A New Handbook of Literary Terms)

Yesterday

All my troubles seemed so far away…

(Conscience requires me to post this Cowboy Bebop video now, but please don’t watch it if you’re still watching the series.  Like I am.  Yes, yes, I know it came out in the 90s.  I watch some shows slowly, you know? Especially shows where one episode can be the fodder for a year or so of artistic reflection.  Other shows I haven’t finished yet: Korra, Samurai Champloo.)

Point of fact, yesterday was pretty great.  (Which I guess is also the message of the song.)  I returned from a holiday party with former coworkers a little before midnight, too tired to sleep.  I wonder why more companies don’t make a big deal out of their alumni—people leave, and change, and most importantly grow, and there’s no reason to banish former employees from the community just because they no longer happen to be receiving a paycheck.  Sure, some folks are happy to say ‘good riddance,’ but it seems to me like graduated talent is a great resource.

Though, of course, folks tend to build communities of friendship independent of the company, as a kind of support network—bonds with former classmates and coworkers and the like—so you have interlocking webs, a corporation composed of a number of people all of whom have their own network of guanxi.  And all those ties bind both ways, which makes for interesting conflict.

Outside of parties and ruminations, yesterday was a tight day, creative work stuck between meetings and other obligations.  Today, the Work Waits.  Let’s get back to it.

Slower

As prophecied, some days you feel like a nut, some days you don’t.  Or something like that!

Today was a slow day for writing; the morning was action-dense and I spent the entire afternoon ruminating on copy edits.  Editing is funny because while often there’s a linear relationship between time spent and output, sometimes that relationship breaks.  With writing, I have a pretty solid over-under range on the number of words I can produce during an hour’s work.  Editing, sometimes I stare at a paragraph, or even more often a line, pacing back and forth and wondering what’s wrong, why the words clash or the grammar doesn’t quite seem to line up.  Then I look at the clock and feel a little despair.

Of course, ten minutes later I fix whatever was bothering me and skip through three pages of smooth dialogue, good character development, uninterrupted story—before I hit the next mine.  Wonderful!

I’ve been playing Uncharted 2 to unwind recently.  Really fun game, smooth, exciting, but I can’t help but laugh when I compare Nate Drake’s Murder Per Second ratio to, say, Indiana Jones’s.  I don’t think they fall within an order of magnitude of one another.  At one point a little box popped up on my screen saying: “Congratulations!  You have shot 100 bad guys in the head!” which indicates that, since I have horrible aim, I have killed well over 100 people in this game.

I wonder if it’s possible to make a game that feels as engrossing as the Uncharted series, while retaining the Murder-per-second ratio of the Indiana Jones films (which isn’t, you know, the lowest thing in the world—Indy does for a bunch of Nazis & cultists over the course of his career).

In Which Some Books

Today I split my time between the two next books in the Craft Sequence.  All morning I drafted the third novel, which is taking shaky shape, and in the afternoon, after a brief period of recovery, I dove back into reviewing my publisher’s copy edits for Two Serpents.  I don’t want the copy edit review process to slow down proper writing, and it hasn’t so far.  I wrote as much as usual today, and edited as much as I needed to, and I hope I can keep up that pace.  We Shall See.  One day is hardly a pattern.

I’ve been avoiding reading fiction for the last week or so as I get deeper into the new book, which is an interesting experience, and might not be helpful.  I find myself salivating for new worlds.  I linger over descriptions of books, and run my hands down spines as I pass them.  Sometimes I peek, just a little line from somewhere in the middle.  I already have my Christmas reading list, which I plan to dive into once I put the next book to bed for the holidays.  Shall I share?

Hannu Rajaniemi’s  The Fractal Prince
Felix Gilman’s The Rise of Ransom City
David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Wallace isn’t fiction, sure, but he has such a strong voice I’m wary of reading his essays during the first-drafting process.  That’s what edits are for, I guess—belt-sanding away everyone else’s words from mine.

I noticed that the Wallace book has an essay on David Lynch.  I hope he’ll talk about the Dune movie.  I’m not all that optimistic, but who knows?  The spice may flow!

Bushed

I had a wonderful time this weekend at AnonyCon in Stamford, CT—very good games, including one based off Three Parts Dead!  I’d had a chance to play the module before (the developer’s a friend as well as a fan) but it was fun to see how people who have read the book, and those who haven’t, participated in the game in different ways.

All of which made me think about putting together something like a series bible for roleplaying purposes.  On the one hand, the world lends itself very well to roleplaying—lots of competing factions, potential danger, scheming, and adventure.  On the other hand, the basic mechanics of Craft aren’t precisely compatible with most magic rulesets I’m aware of.  The closest I can think of would be something like the old Changeling: the Dreaming system, where if you spent your points properly you could make deals with inanimate objects, forge binding compacts with the stars, and stuff like that.  For moment-to-moment magical needs, many systems can approximate the behavior of the Craft in the book, though that approach puts more pressure on the GM to establish flavor.  I like trusting the GM in principle, but in practice I worry that too much GM trust leads to decisions that look arbitrary from a player’s perspective.  We shall see!  Bible-writing is fun whatever the results end up being.  (Don’t quote me on that out of context, please.)

While the Con was fun, I didn’t get to sleep Sunday ’til well after midnight due to the kind of bus-related mishap that will be hilarious about a year from now.  That, plus a weekend’s worth of sleep debt, made for a day much more conducive to staring at walls than to putting fingers on keyboard.  Oddly, in spite of all that I crushed my wordcount goal.  The plot continues to accelerate.  Characters are running into other characters at escape velocity.  I’m intrigued by differences between this book and others I’ve written.  I feel like I’m writing a Smiley book as opposed to, say, a Bourne novel—though we’ll see whether any of that makes it into the final draft.

Whatever happens, after this (and finishing the weird epistolary novel project now steeping in the background) I will be in the mood for consuming, and writing, something lighthearted and wacky.  Anyone save the world from aliens lately?

Beware the Pseudo-Articulate Man!

Updates first!  Another solid day’s work, despite the colder weather keeping me from walking.  Back in November I worried that I’d run out of story too early.  I made my usual mistake: forgetting that even though sometimes you work through an entire paragraph of synopsis in one sitting, other times one line presents such a complicated moment that characters will take a few thousand words to carry it through, and more space to realize the implications of what they’ve done.

I had a hilarious idea for a Christmas story on a walk today.  I hope I’ll have time to write it.  Also, after that Buddha – Fantasy book a few days ago, I’m reading one of Not-Bob Thurman’s collections of Tibetan Buddhist texts.  Fascinating, and a lot more mystical.  I’d forgotten about Tibetan Buddhism’s wonderful opinion on gods, about which more later.

Something else happened today, says the internet: JJ Abrams and company released a trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness!  Now, I’m a big Trekkie from way back.  ’Darmok’ was the episode that convinced my parents to allow television into the house for occasions other than the Olympics.  I’ve seen giant chunks of every series up through Voyager, and all the movies—yes, all the movies.

I enjoyed the heck out of the Star Trek reboot!  I loved the actors they used to present the key characters, I liked the new vision of the Star Trek universe, I liked seeing a rougher, tumblier Starfleet than the very polished version the post-TNG series presented.  Harry S. Plinkett’s criticisms notwithstanding—and I think he is right that the Star Trek reboot movie was designed to be more accessible, flashy, and over-the-top than the television series—I saw the first Star Trek in cinemas three times (not all on my own dime, mind—there was / is a recession on).

And, also, I love me some Benedict Cumberbatch.  Sherlock, yes.  Also, if you have not seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy yet (with Gary Oldman as Smiley), my god, what are you waiting for?

So, in sum: excited for Star Trek Into Darkness (to be followed by Star Trek To The Future, Star Trek To Infinity And Beyond, Star Trek to the West, etc., no doubt), but watching the trailer, well…  Here, let me show you.

Compare this:

With this:

Notice anything?  The kinda articulate, vaguely threatening, bass-boosted intellectual serious actorvoice presenting a Threat to You Complacent Sheeple, maybe?  Remind you of anyone?

Not now, Bane!  I’m trying to make a point.

This is not me saying “zomg everyone point and laugh at Hollywood ripping Hollywood off.”  For one thing I never say zomg.  Okay, I rarely say zomg.  For another, I mean, these movies were all in production at the same time, so maybe that’s what happened, but I don’t care.  I’m much more interested in the fact that a bunch of different folks and their teams seem interested in correlating “people who critique a complacent society” with “people who blow your shit all to hell.”

Granted, the Batman trailers didn’t feature Bane talking much, but I think that was partly because they wanted to keep the voice special and a secret.  Selena Kyle, though, is happy to offer Bane’s critique for him:

And she even does it honestly, unlike the guy in the mask, who’s just running a super convoluted shell game with idealistic pretensions.  (Which guy in the mask, you ask?  That’s a good question, I reply.)  Anyway, it seems a little odd that this is our movie bad guy now.  Alyssa Rosenberg has cool thoughts on the subject.

Trying This Again

Today was a good day.  Writing went smoothly, and I actually remembered to alternate between working and taking long walks rather than banging my head against the brick wall expecting it to soften.  Crema in Harvard Square makes a delicious bright espresso, so light it almost tastes bubbly.  I’m working with a secondary character who’s a lot of fun; my main is a complicated and powerful woman, but limited by her social position and psychology, while this supporting character has different avenues available to her.  I can already tell she needs a bigger part in the story, and I’m looking forward to writing those scenes.

The Dharma / Fantasy book I linked yesterday has me trying to appreciate embodied time—its descriptions of Dogen’s concept of uji (being-time, which I don’t quite understand but is something like awareness of time as an element of beings and events rather than a container for them) remind me of good martial arts instruction, no big surprise there, and of Venkatesh Rao’s notions of tempo and narrative-driven decision making and agenda planning, which is a bit more of a shock.  (His book Tempo is an enlightening read, as is his blog Ribbonfarm.)   I’m trying to pay attention to writing as a process, a gerund—keystrokes and language and posture—which is wonderfully liberating, especially considering the unusual anxiety I’ve felt while working on this book.

A bit of explanation: I don’t usually feel worried as I write a book.  This is the, what, eighth-and-a-hafth book I’ve written (counting the one I’ve tabled until I’m finished with Current Project, which is marinating comfortably in the back of my mind at an act break around 70,000 words or so), so I have a sort of sense of the process now.  But, probably because I’ve spent so much of the last two months talking about writing and Why I Write Such Excellent Books and Why I Am So Clever (as Neitzsche would have it), I’m feeling self-conscious, like the caterpillar that kept tripping over his feet.  Have I done this before?  Is this impressive enough?  The more I can live in the time of writing words, the less that other stuff troubles me.  This is something like Keats’ Negative Capability, I guess, only approached from another cultural direction.  ([That property]… which Shakespeare possessed so immensely… the capacity for being in mysteries, & doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.)

Similarly, when I’m walking around, I’m trying to be aware of the walking-ness of the moment, rather than of other factors, like destination.  (Moving body as a process, not, or not just, a vehicle.)  I’ve been checking my smartphone less, and I’ve been absent from Twitter.  On the one hand, Twitter is an excellent platform, and contains fun people.  On the other hand, I don’t think I have quite the level of attainment required to participate cheerfully in the datastream, rather than viewing it as a distraction…

Wow, that ended up being a long read, and with no real point, other than: time is strange, and we always experience it stuck in bodies.  And I’ve been writing all day, and I’ll be writing most of tomorrow.  Good progress, good fun.  Hope you’re all well, and don’t mind a few rambly thoughts about metaphysics and simple Buddhism.  Ask a Max who spends most of his day wandering the city to keep you abreast of his thoughts, and you see what you get.  It’s all of our faults, really.

(On other notes, WordPress fullscreen + Chrome / Mac Presentation Mode produces one of the sleekest text editors I’ve ever had the fun to play with.  Fullscreen mode, where were you for me years ago!)