Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 38

Oracle Gretel

Originally posted by asakiyume at Oracle GretelJulia Rios has written a charming, funny, beautiful retelling of Oracle Gretel, with Hansel-the-Cat and tarot cards and a ouija board and silver shoes to take you where you need to go. It's lovely! AND, she has gotten Erik Amundsen to illustrate it. His stylized figures convey so much--I love his art style (he did this icon of M--, from my pen pal novel).

And then, on top of writing a wonderful story and getting great illustrations for it, she picked out beautiful end papers and covers for it--no two the same--and hand bound each chapbook. She read from this at WisCon, and the chapbooks were available for sale there. I don't know how many she has left, but if you know her, and if you don't have a copy, you might like to enquire! She may have them available at Readercon next month, if they're not all gone by then.

Piracy Explored

So I need to re-outline and do some world building for MFP.  I figured I could set down what I have for the latter right now and see where that gets me.

1) This is not our world.  This frees me from all the history I would otherwise have to research, and while I might miss the Norwegian Black Metal jokes, I promise, you won't.  Anyway, I'm not including those guys anymore.  

2) Instead, I am stealing from a gaming world I never got enough buy-in to use for game.  I called it Csjetha, but I am no more attached to the name than I can pronounce it.  Here's the basic gist:  It's got a little in common with the Star Wars galaxy.  In fact, it is an ocean the size of a galaxy with one sun and one moon that do the things suns and moons normally do for us and on the same schedule.  I know this is totally impossible.  I don't care.  I choose this because a) I would like to weed out anyone who is going to get hung up on shit like that right the fuck away.  These people will be missing the point of the story.  b) I want to be able to do the whole islands=planets, island chains=star systems.  The ocean has no end or bottom.  You can hide anything in there.  Whales have FTL capabilities, and people have been able to copy that into the hulls of Blue Water ships.  How does that work?  It works shut the fuck up and thank you very much.  This isn't going to be heavily foregrounded.  It may be mentioned, but that's about it.  Because I do not want to explain *how* it works, I am going to go with something so patently impossible that no one will ask.  Or no one has to ask, they will just assume that they are the superior intellect and I am just a tosspot, and they will be at least half right!

3) The practical aspects of living on an ocean full of archipelagos and not much else:  well, land is really important, since there is comparatively very little of it.  I assume that any political body is going to be a really loose affiliation that is really spread out and therefore really vulnerable to pirates.  Red Hull is probably the closest thing this world has to an actual empire.

4) This story is not qualified to spend a lot of time taking on the hideous realities of historical age-of-sail.  I feel like it shouldn't be so, but I do not know the time well, and I am not good enough a writer to make a stupid fluff adventure story into incisive satire.

5) This is a stupid, fluff adventure story.  It eats the paste.

6) The sea has no end, no depth and no beginning.  It just was.  

7) There are gods, but even the most powerful only have a certain scope and area of influence.  There are many levels of gods, perhaps even bigger ones than the gods who aren't too big to talk to us know about.  

8) Where did Gem come from?  I know, but I am not telling.  It's not that mysterious.  Your first guess is probably right.

9) Where does Qualm's magic come from?  That's a good question.  I think that magic is a patchwork of all sorts of different things in the Pirate world.  The problem with that is that in the original story, Qualm sort of picked it up all at once.  I think, in this draft, he had the inborn healing powers and maybe some others, he's just blocked them for the reason that he knows, instinctively, where embracing the power leads.

Does this sound stupid?

Lilith St. Crow asked What my Anthem was Today.

Here, We Cross - the Queer Chapbook

Originally posted by rose_lemberg at Here, We Cross - the Queer ChapbookDear Friends of Stone Telling,

We've both been under the weather for a long time, which explains my utter failure to post about this to the community. But: "Here, We Cross," a chapbook of queer poetry from issues 1-7 of Stone Telling, is real and in the world. I am used to calling it a chapbook, but it's more than a chapbook - Here, We Cross is a beautiful perfect-bound book, all 94 pages of it lovingly put together by dormouse_in_tea and myself.

It really is gorgeous (trust me, I am a perfectionist). It is available for purchase from Amazon for the momentous sum of $10.  Depending on how well this one does, there might be others in the future.



The lineup!

Alex Dally MacFarlane – Sung Around Alsar-Scented Fires
Nancy Sheng – Inner Workings
Michele Bannister – Seamstress
Jack H. Marr – Lunectomy
Shira Lipkin – The Changeling’s Lament
Dominik Parisien – In His Eighty-Second Year
Bogi Takács – The Handcrafted Motions of Flight
Hel Gurney – Hair
Mary Alexandra Agner – Tertiary
Amal El-Mohtar – Asteres Planetai
Jeannelle Ferreira – Ardat-Lilî
Mari Ness – Encantada
Lisa Bradley – we come together we fall apart
Samantha Henderson – The Gabriel Hound
Alexandra Seidel – A Masquerade in Four Voices
Sonya Taaffe – Persephone in Hel
Sergio Ortiz – Rain and Sound
Sonya Taaffe – The Clock House
Peter Milne Greiner – The Earth Has Rings
Adrienne J. Odasso – Parallax
Tori Truslow – Terrunform
Peer G. Dudda – Sister Dragons

Submissions Don't Matter

And off again.

It's not as though I expected any better.

"Courage" bounced again.  As expected.   I know, at this point, that the market in question plain does not like my work, but I keep sending so I can say that I have.  I have.  And on to the next.

C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER

Okay, so, you, whoever the fuck you are, making the new Tomb Raider, I see what you're doing there.  I see what you want to do.  I saw the concept art and saw right through it.  Kind of waifish (by Croftian standards) young woman covered in blood and carrying a bow.  I get it.  I got it.  It's the mockingjay in the room that no one I have seen so far is talking about.  And I sort of sympathize here.  I don't know if you guys wanted to do your requel of Tomb Raider or you wanted to do Hunger Games, but at some point, some suit from the publisher came in with the smell of death upon him and told you... I don't know whether it was a copy of one of Collins' books or if it was the license to Tomb Raider, but you got the directive.  Make Lara more like Katniss or your Katniss-expy into Lara.  

You may have noticed that your methods have come under fire.  I have some more fire for you, but I also have some advice.


0) Adding rape or the specter of rape to a game or story or whatever does not add grit, it does not add realism, it does not add anything but rape.  That's all it adds.  You can make a story about a rape and have it be a powerful story.  You could, hypothetically make a game about a rape and have it be a powerful game.  Understand, though, when I say you, I mean someone way more qualified, mature and better at narrative than you.  You cannot.  You should not.  You should stay away from rape.  It is not an arrow in your narrative quiver.  It is a grenade with the pin already pulled.  Don't feel bad that you are unqualified.  I am also unqualified.  However, unlike you, I know that I am unqualified.  You can feel bad about that part.

1) Degradation, humiliation, getting captured, possibly (almost?) rape, and doing a lot of things wrong, which you are giving as selling points of your game, these do not make Lara Croft into Katniss Everdeen.  I'm not sure where you got the notion to take that road to that destination.  What it does do is ruin what people seem to like about the existing character in the franchise.  It's basically saying "Lara Croft sucks now!  Chicks, man.  Amirite?"

2) Adding all the experience of seeing your character fuck up in a cutscene or get beaten up, or have something bad happen to them or get (almost?) possibly raped (?) as rewards for good play (as I am certain that emotionally non-resonant death at good old Jagged Rock Junction is still a core part of the TR experience) IS SHIT DESIGN.  I know that walking on broken glass barefoot made Bruce Willis an action star, AND YOU WANT THAT, but that is movies, this is games.  If a player makes it through a particularly tricky bit of platforming or worse, a grueling gun battle only to watch their character get shat upon in a cut scene, my non-scientific sampling of data (but statistically significant numbers) says they either get pissed or don't give a shit about your shitty cut scenes.  So when our success state is failure, your success state is bored indifference.  This strikes me as being bad for all of us. 

3) Your spokesman (whose speaking privileges are revoked, BTW) made it pretty clear that this Tomb Raider requel was not made for existing fans of the franchise.  I was not one, but your requel is not reaching out to my demographic, either (probably a good call on your part, there aren't many middle aged gamers of foul mouth and high moral dudgeon out there).  I see who you are courting, and I see how you are courting them, and while the spectacle of seeing Lara Croft taken down a peg is probably going to net you a couple of sales from the mouth-breathingest of the dudebro market, I don't think those guys are into single player action games.  Not a lot of opportunity to be a douchebag to other people online, except in defending your rapey story choices.  Maybe you are cleverer than I thought...

3a) But these idiots who rush to your defense online are not guaranteed sales, no matter what they tell you.  $60 is kind of a lot to spend on pure spite, and, even if you are selling the degradation of Lara Croft to the dudebro market, even if you were, you are not selling the core gameplay.  I read the Kotaku article with you claiming that characters will want to "protect" and "help" Lara Croft, that she needs your sweaty hands to save her from the bad guys and the jagged, jagged rocks.  Let us leave aside the fact that Ezio Auditore da Firenze or Batman do not need your "help" to take on the Borgias or the Joker, but Lara Croft, who predates both of them in video games, does.  I don't have the sales figures on chivalry, but I don't, again, think that they are what you think they are.  The Prince of fucking Persia was never sold as needing your help.  I understand it's an old license, Tomb Raider, with a lot of kind of lackluster recent outings, but you don't sell an action-adventure game on those points.

3b) This point annoys me more than it should, only because I was going to talk up the direct player involvement with the purpose of protecting the protagonist of a game as a good thing.  Just in an entirely different genre, where protective instincts heighten the experience - survival horror.  There have been three characters in all of video gaming I felt the chivalrous desire to protect and they were, in order of meeting them, Seto, James Sunderland and Heather Mason.  Of those, one is female, two are young.  One's a dude about my age with serious emotional problems.  I was going to write something about how more recent survival horror is falling flat because they don't work this angle.  Your protagonist is either set up to be too badass, given a spunky sidekick (in survival horror, it should be you being the spunky sidekick) or switching back and forth between points of view so you never bond with any one character.  I would argue that your desire as a player to help and defend the protagonist, and to get a sense of your protagonist's vulnerability is key to a good survival horror game.  But no, you had to use this tack to tie it to misogyny to sell an action-adventure pretty much makes it impossible for me to speak of that experience at all as a good thing.  So fuck you.

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy

1) I can send "Courage" off to Market a and have an answer pretty quickly.  It has thus far, always been "no," but it's usually a slush-bounce, so the worst of it is I lose 24-48 hours before I get to send it to market b.  The best is that market a pays a little better.  There is also market c, which pays a little better than market b, but I don't remember what I sent to them last and when - I think this is the thing.  Anyway: Courage A then B.  DONE.

2) Looking at Malus, I notice I got the first draft out three days before market d closed (again).  There was no way that I could do a second salable draft for that story in 3 days.  I know my limitations.  But I can do one this week and send it to market e, though I recently missed there with "Golden Stringed Guitar," thinking it was right for them, only I learned I missed kind of hard with that one.  Oh well.

3) Speaking of which, I do not know what to do with "Golden Stringed Guitar."  No clue.  Cut the mythos shout-out and the Kacias and try, try again.  Where?  No clue.

4) The Mars story is going to follow up the first thing I get back (probably Courage since I just sent that).  I need to redraft that this week, too.

5) I need to have something ready to send to market f, if they reject Hermaion, or if they don't reject Hermaion.  Either way.

So new drafts: Malus, True Mars (new title needed), King of Pine.
First complete draft: The Ukelele Story, The Peryton Story.
Polishes: Golden Stringed Guitar.

To say nothing of the pirates.

BEE CHARMERS! PATTY TEMPLETON! PSEUDOPOD!!!

Originally posted by csecooney at BEE CHARMERS! PATTY TEMPLETON! PSEUDOPOD!!!

I LOVE THIS STORY!!!

ANOTHER PATTY TEMPLETON STORY! 

Bee charmers! Dustbowl circuses! Mad scientists! TRAGEDY! HILARITY! 

You must LISTEN!!! 


Originally posted by pattytempleton at Bee Charming PseudoPodness

Yo!

Big news!

BIG!

One of my favorite stories ever, "The Bee Charmer of Beckett Falls," is up on PseudoPod today.

Press here for story:
















In about January of 2013, it will be printed in the badass Chicago journal, Criminal Class Review.

WORMHOLE TECHNOLOGY ACQUIRED

"Live Arcade" got picked up by Strange Horizons!  Should be appearing in early 2013, assuming we read the Mayans all wrong.

Which, by the way, we did. 

That's no guarantee the world will still be here.

But what the hell.