Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 11

Cryptic Note to Self

All or Nothing
Breaking the World
Chasers
Norman
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Forest Hands
Sif's Jaw
Smell Trouble
Social Animal
What all the Howling's For
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Swords Replace July

Hey, I am not gone, just working on TCiHS, as I hope to have it ready to read by August 1st.  As such, I might be a little quieter than usual this and next week.

[Dork] Homeward Attributes

Those who live in the lands to which you have been exiled call you dirty paws.  This is to reference how you paint the backs of children's hands with pitch and pigeon's blood, how they stain and eventually, you tattoo.  This is a slur, but some of your young people wear the slur with pride.  Some do not.  You are young.  How do you feel about the name given your people?  What do the markings on the backs of your hands look like?  Do you have them, and are they permanent or still painted in pitch and pigeon's blood?  These marks can be uniform or individual, or individual within a uniform context, depending on what you all decide.


You are a hero, and one of the things you can do is a thing of legend.  Write down what it is.


This thing may be something that even 10000 hours of practice could accomplish without a superlative, inborn talent (trick archery in combat, perform acrobatics on the level of the most talented in history).

Beware of how you formulate this quality and how you write it.  There is a difference between I am (I am tough as a bear, I am the greatest swordsman in the nation) and any other verb (I hit my target every time I shoot.  I can leap like a salmon leaps from the water.)  The former is more likely to be broad in application, the latter is more powerful in its narrower aspect.

This might also be an explicitly supernatural power (Charm with song, conjure fire from the earth, see the spirits of the departed), but before you choose those, confer with the other players and the GM what sort and amount of supernatural content you want in the story.


There are also four other things you can do very well or qualities you possess for which you are well known.  Write these down.

These things are things that a human can learn to do or be with 10000 hours of practice (Track in the wilds, pick locks, fight with a sword, play a harp; Strong, Tough, Clever, Wise...).

As with the legendary quality above, how you formulate the statement is important.  Being is broader than doing; doing is more powerful than being.


There are 9 points you can spend after.  You don't have to spend any; what you do not spend becomes your Will, which stands for dice you will allocate to rolls during play.  It's an important resource, and you are running a high risk if you scout your home with less than 4.

Another legendary thing you can do costs 2 of these points.

Another heroic thing you can do costs 1 of these points.


Once you have decided what you will do and be, you may write down a weapon you would take on this mission, an item for each of your abilities written down, and a backpack full of rations, rope, torches, sacks, a blanket, tinder and a lantern.

Write down as many of those 9 points as you did not spend earlier as Will.

Choose 3 Keys (I'll get to those as soon as I can), and write those down.
[SAMPLE CHARACTERS IN THE COMMENTS.  FEEL FREE TO MAKE YOUR OWN.]

Another Set of Choices: Magical Goodies

Assuming magic is a thing in the setting, 3 to 5 of these are true (depending on how restrictive you want magic to be) and the remainder are false.

1) Magical aptitude is impossible to develop through desire and practice.  A person does or does not possess it.
2) Magical applications are a closed-ended set of powers, whose number is finite.
3) Magic is normative, and affects a magician's personality and actions in the context of those norms.
4) Magic relies on a measurable energy resource that is external to the magician.
5) Magic requires interaction with self-willed entities with their own motives and desires.
6) Magic requires scarce physical props and resources to use.
7) Magic requires time spent in ritual action to invoke one's powers.
8) Use of magic causes physical, psychic and other potentially dangerous side-effects in its users.

Take, for example, the Force from Star Wars:
1) Magical aptitude is impossible to develop through desire and practice.  A person does or does not possess it.  [Strictly hereditary, in this case, which is kind of problematic, but whatevs]
2) Magical applications are a closed-ended set of powers, whose number is finite. [Push, Move, Mind trick, LIGHTNING, etc.]
3) Magic is normative, and affects a magician's personality and actions in the context of those norms. [Once you start down the Dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.  Consume you it will!]
4) Magic relies on a measurable energy resource that is external to the magician. [Thanks to the prequels, now we even can! ]
5) Magic requires interaction with self-willed entities with their own motives and desires.  [Blue Ghosts notwithstanding.  They can be useful, but you don't need them]
6) Magic requires scarce physical props and resources to use.   [Light sabres are cool, but not strictly necessary]
7) Magic requires time spent in ritual action to invoke one's powers.  [The Handwave is more of a cue that they're using it]
8) Use of magic causes physical, psychic and other potentially dangerous side-effects in its users. [Kinda with the Dark Side, but that became less and less of a thing in the prequels, once it was clear that Vader and the Emperor's appearances were a result of their poor decision-making skills than anything].

Yay!

LJ Comments are not mailing out to me.  Again.  Oh well.  I'm sure they will all catch up soon.

O HAI

Anyone want to beta an 8052 word MONSTER short story?

Zimmerman reminds me why they used to call them the Kindly Ones.

May they hound you, and all those who contributed your unpunished act of murder to your scattered, separate, uncared-for graves. 

Also, Readercon

I DON'T WANT TO GO ON AND ON ABOUT IT, but I think handful_ofdust 's panel on writing what you know all too well should be a fixture with different authors every time.  I would love to hear more perspectives on that topic.

LOOKING BACK, Readercon remembers a little better than it ran for me, and I realize that that was all on me; me being stressed about who to transport where and when, me being stressed about money, me not exercising or sneaking off to be with myself and my thoughts for a little while when I needed it, me feeling like I needed to be there for everyone and not having a plan beforehand on how to do that, me still (and I am embarrassed about this) being a little butthurt about not being invited - especially now that I understand what was going on with the programming (next year, I'll lobby to do a reading, I think, if I've got something current, and I damned well better make sure I have something current).  If any of this rubbed off on any of you, dear readers, please accept my apologies.  Readercon was at its, in hindsight, best, and I was really not at mine.  Next year, I will make damned certain to bring more awesome.  The panels that I did make it to - the above mentioned and karnythia 's Civil War Myths panel, in particular, were stand-outs that have left me with a lot of grist for the old brain-mill.

Readercon

THANKS AGAIN to skogkatt and Moss for letting me stay with them and buying me lunch when my finances were low and listening to me stress on Friday night.  These things are huge to me.

ALSO HUGE TO ME in ways I am not quite sure I fully understand yet; Daniel Jose Older did quite a few readings that YOU ARE UNHAPPY IF YOU MISSED, and I am very happy I caught.  When the paycheck rolls in, I am putting some cash aside... WAIT I HAVE AMAZON POINTS!  Okay, anyway, I am buying Salsa Nocturna, and you should too.  I am because Gordo.  He's a fat bastard who has the same relationship with his body that I do, the same relationship with children that I do (they can tell me from a sucker on sight, and perhaps, even around a corner or two), and a suspiciously similar inner voice.  I doubt I am the person he had in mind when he wrote Gordo, seeing as how Gordo is Cuban and I am a pale and northerly shade of white people, BUT.
I always had the notion that I was all kinds of represented in media, cishet, able-bodied white dude, that I am, and that my failure to connect with characters that fall into those categories was on me.  And it's true, I can't dispute.  But listening to Gordo mixing his BP meds with bacon for balance, answering the childrens' questions of how he got so fat (BY EATING CHILDREN), holy shit, did my heart kick up a little (and I checked to make sure it wasn't THE BIG ONE) - culture not withstanding, I saw myself in Gordo, and it meant a fucking lot to me.  I know Gordo is not for me, but I am for Gordo.
I want to write protagonists for people who don't have many, or any, and I have for a while.  My dearest wish for "Live Arcade" is that some gamer kid who feels weird with gender roles assigned at birth reads the story and bonds with the Kid.  I want my next story... well, I won't spoil.  I wanted stories (along with others, I don't expect anyone to identify with a Byronic aristo-astronaut) like that because it looked like a good goal to shoot for to make me better at this silly hobby in which I tend to engage.  But I don't think I understood exactly how much it meant.  I probably don't, still, but I know how much it means to me, and that's amazing.

I NEED TO CALL MY DAD and thank him for the Christmas gift of 2010 that I just finally unboxed - a GPS, which was, in many ways, the hero of my Readercon, guiding me to and from the con itself, shadesong 's house, skogkatt 's house, Elayna's school and all.  I resisted the damned things for a long time (which is extremely foolish, given my abysmal sense of direction), but I have given up my pride and accepted that I live in an electronically assisted world.

THE GENDER NEUTRAL RESTROOM in the consuite was a nice touch.  The sparkly lanyards were a good idea.  I'm glad to see these things.

These are the Things I am on Fire to Do

SO I AM BACK FROM READERCON and exhausted, but on fire to do the things.  Yes, I realize the irony of doing this instead of doing the things, but there are so many, and I am so shit at prioritizing that I feel the need to write them down first so I can figure out which ones I am doing, in what order, and which ones I am letting percolate more.  These are the things.

THE CHILD IN HIS SWORD should be my top priority.  I have a notion about what was blocking me from continuing with the 2nd draft, thanks in no small part of handful_ofdust and company at the Write What You Know All Too Well panel.  It's old, boring psychological stuff, but it was in my way, invisible.  Now that it's visible, I can slip around it.  So I'm going to slip by it like a Very Slippery Thing.

FINISH "HOLD FAST TO ME." Almost there.  Going to shoot to have the first draft done tomorrow.  Got the chapel scene to rewrite, the trek out to the rock, Brother Fish and Pastor Steed's first meeting, the pool and the 3D printers, then the end.  No way this one is coming in under 5000 words, but so be it.

DO SOME RESEARCH on Acer platanoides and other local invasives.  I've a story seed that I hope is going to sprot.

RADIUM GIRLS story.  I am starting on research for it, and I hope to have it done by the end of the month for the Long Hidden anthology.

SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF MURR AND SOONEY-CROW.  Here's the problem: the thing behind it is a bit of a stolen idea, but I am interested to see where it goes.  There's no way it could be less than a novel and that's okay.  I am going to start sketching it and see where it goes.

I'M GOING TO REDO SOME POEMS.  Some of the old ones, that aren't quite right, as a regular thing.  There's a lot of them that I wrote back in the day and never touched again, and I've been writing less and less over the last few months and feeling a little estranged from the language, and it seems like a good way to do it is to tinker with the language in those ugly stepchildren to make them salable.

HOMEWARD/THE PAUPER KINGDOM, that thing I posted as a game setup that got a lot of notice and love, I am going to flesh out and possibly fold the Beast Fears Fire 2nd Draft into it.  Thing is, I have two competing setups for game settings and ideas (honestly, they are great inciting incidents for stories as well, if characters appear).
First one is what I already did, focusing on displaced people and their culture and negotiating the dangers of returning to one's homeland.
Second one is for kicking the lost cause myth over and setting it on fire, but I don't have an awful lot for that yet, but the desire to learn more and see how it maps to fantasy (ground rule on that one - only humans).

THISTLEDOWN is a game idea, that, again, would be a great space opera setting if I could do it (and I am dead certain it's been done, so I need to track down who did this already and read the shit out of them), wherein a colony settled by sleeper ships manages the trick of reliable space-opera level FTL and then goes out to see how the other human colonies are doing.  As a game, you'd be taking on the roles of the crews of the little explorer ships they send.  As a story, well, I'm not worried about that.

I NEED TO BARTER with csecooney for the stuff I missed when I missed her and sevenravens ' performance workshop.  Actually, I am really, really eager to learn how better to perform things, because the last few times I've performed has left me kind of cold.

AND! ALL! THE! THINGS! I! LEARNED!  Many things.  Still processing.