Matt Weber's Blog, page 3

For the TBR

“Petard,” by Cory Doctorow, serialized on Pluralistic: Part 1, Part 2.Mandy Brown of A Working Library recommends Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism with this summary: “In effect, he demonstrates that fascism is colonialism come home.”

Currently listening: A Court of Fey and Flowers S1E7, “The Masquerade Ball”

A Court of West and Marches

My older daughter is 13, and although she’s good at games, she’s resistant to D&D. It seems like it’s mostly to do with the game’s combat focus—and, fair enough, combat is indisputably the part of the game where there’s the most mechanical complexity, and where the characters’ abilities are mostly oriented. So I asked her what might get her interested in a D&D game, and she said “courtly intrigue.”

An independent but related fact: There’s a new game store in my area! If you’re in central New Jersey, please check out Round 2 Gaming; they’re a lovely addition to Quaker Bridge Mall and I want them to succeed. R2G runs TTRPG nights. It struck me that a game store could be a great place to run a West Marches campaign, a sandbox-style game that (in its ideal form) organically supports an ever-shifting cast, accommodating the sort of drop-ins and disappearances you might expect from a group organized around a store. Because I can’t not embroider an idea, I started noodling on variant settings for such a campaign. Zombie apocalypse? High seas adventure in a mysterious archipelago?

… courtly intrigue?

Understand, at this point, we’re no longer necessarily targeting my daughter; I don’t know if she’d want to do R2G TTRPG night. But there’s something about the idea of treating a royal court as an exploration sandbox that I keep coming back to. Instead of the territory, your map is the social web of the court; instead of fighting monsters for gold, you’re manipulating courtiers for status. There’s no reason such a campaign couldn’t include combat—duels, assassinations, maybe some Duke will reward you if you scare off the barbarians pillaging his border? But there should be plenty of other stuff. (Which may highlight the mechanical weakness of D&D for a game like this.)

Most of the snags with this kind of game seen like they’re inherent in classic West Marches to begin with: How do you motivate characters, how do you ensure sessions end at a good stopping point (i.e., one where the active cast can change). The major one on my mind, perhaps because I’m currently watching Dimension 20’s A COURT OF FEY & FLOWERS, is the gravity of PvP in a courtly intrigue setting, which is intrinsically about one-upmanship—this feels like it could be fine in a conventional campaign but wouldn’t mix well with West Marches, where you have to roll with whoever’s at the table. In other discussions of courtly intrigue in RPGs, folks have suggested Court of Blades, which seems to solve the problem by binding the PCs’ fates together as retainers of an upstart house. Maybe that could work?

Anyway, I probably shouldn’t be DMing once a week for strangers in a campaign format I’m not familiar with, using a variation that might fall flat on its face. It’s a lot of commitment. But I can’t stop thinking about it.

Currently reading: THE CONTAINER VICTORY GARDEN, by Maggie Stuckey. (Speaking of overcommitting.)

“ideas that are single use, like the conversation on the plane in Fight Club”

I’m working my way through some early posts on Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol’s blog, Old Men Running the World. Rossignol has a post on “the RPG-mediated search for Experiential Validation” that I found resonant:

The act of playing, and of finding out what happens at the table, is a sort of creative multiplier. The equivalent of a jazz band. The basic riff might have been there, and even some of the cool hooks, but the improv is where the magic happens. Indeed, the stuff that RPGs produce can often not be rendered anywhere else. I have in mind here a moment, years past, of a collapsing pocket-dimension spraying naked dwarves over an apocalyptic battlefield and… well, it’s a long story, but you get the idea: that was a landmark for me, but typical of RPG sessions. More of that sort of thing, I thought.

That particular image immediately brought me to one of Brennan Lee Mulligan’s unhinged classics, the bit in Fantasy High: Sophomore Year about “225 adult babies,” which is of course a parable about the sexual power of rock music. You may have to watch it to see what I’m trying to get at here.

Earlier in the same video (it’s a clip compilation) there’s a bit from Freshman Year where Gilear, the always hapless divorced dad of one of the PCs, explains how he knows an order of garlic knots he found on the street were added to the corresponding pizza by accident (he checked the receipt). My own perhaps best example of this phenomenon is when my charmed ranger provoked five PvP attacks of opportunity trying to save the enemy who’d charmed him.

For contrast cases: There’s some heartwrenching stuff in Sophomore Year. Fabian accidentally exterminates the cult of warlocks whose patron is his dead father; Adaine has a brief moment of connection with her sister, a villain of Freshman Year whom she’s rescued from months of torture, only for the walls to come crashing down again. These are amazing moments, and I believe they’re largely improvised… but they’d be equally at home if Fantasy High had been written as a novel or a scripted series.

And perhaps those materials themselves are not what I am searching for, but are instead the medium in which I dig for a specific feeling, or a particular aesthetic and emotional response, or a distinct, rare vibe, like a connoisseur forever searching for that rumoured but as-yet-unexperienced flavour.

I’m not sure the flavor I’m talking about here is the flavor Rossignol is looking for. But maybe these little fragments are an existence proof of some kind—that such rare vibes exist, and that RPGs and the improvisation and chance that drive them really are the unique substrate of those vibes.

Currently listening: LAST CALL, by Tim Powers, read by Bronson Pinchot.

On generosity in reading: A worked example

There’s a bit of discourse on generosity in reading that my mind often comes back to when I don’t like something; the basic upshot is, “what if this is doing what it does on purpose, to satisfy an audience of people who like that kind of thing?” And the follow-on, “what if this is doing what it does on purpose, to evoke the thoughts you’re thinking right now, which are actually a waypoint in where this is going and not the final destination?”

That latter one is the tricky one; any given creator might be smarter than any given reader, but you can’t bet on that 100% of the time. But let the record show that it could be true of Parker Finn and SMILE, even though I’m gonna run my mouth anyway.

The basic premise is IT FOLLOWS, but make it murder; an invisible predator is “transferred” from victim to victim through showy suicides, appearing as a horribly smiling person in between (for reasons that aren’t 100% clear). One such victim, Rose Cotter, is a psychiatrist who sees this happen to a patient, becoming hunted herself. The predator seems to have unlimited influence over the current victim’s perceptions, so it tricks Rose into a terrible stunt at her nephew’s birthday that turns her fiancé and sister against her. With the help of her ex, a cop named Joel, she traces the line of victims far back enough to convince him this is actually happening, and find the one survivor of the predator, who reveals that you can transfer it via murder as well as suicide… but that’s it. If you won’t kill, you’re gonna die. Rose finally has the belated brain wave that if she isolates herself, it won’t have another victim, and goes back to the house where she watched her mother die to “face it.” There’s a predictably false showdown at the house—no, you can’t kill the inexorable supernatural predator by smashing it with a lantern—and then…

… we’ll get to then. Let me briefly talk about Chuck Tingle.

Chuck Tingle has a great book

called BURY YOUR GAYS. One of the plot beats in BURY YOUR GAYS is that Misha, a screenwriter, is targeted by his own characters, in particular a monster called The Smoker who kills you in five days if you refuse to give him a light. Like SMILE’s predator, he’ll haunt you every so often to remind you of your doom. There’s a period of denial, but of course by day 4 Misha understands this is really happening… and so when The Smoker shows up to do a haunting, Misha’s through being scared, he’s just fed up; and since he’s still got a day on the clock, fuck it! He punches The Smoker in the face. This throws the both of them for a loop, and the Smoker just awkwardly disappears, because what else is it gonna do? 

It’s a great moment for a number of reasons, some of which have to do with the very meta sorts of games you basically have to play in a story like BURY YOUR GAYS… but some of which are really just common sense. The speed at which scares move from menacing to tedious in these “ticking clock” scenarios is amazingly high; once you know the rules, you know when you can’t be killed, and the scares turn into background noise. Tingle’s Misha literally berates The Smoker with this complaint: “This is why I don’t write ghost stories any more!”

Contrariwise, Finn’s Rose, after she has learned the rules, is visited by her psychiatrist, who turns out to be the predator in disguise. And the predator puts on its creepy smile and backs her down into a corner, its mouth drooling…

… and then we cut hard to another scene! Because the predator can’t kill Rose now, because she’s alone in the house! And this would be fine, actually, if the penny had dropped… but the plot can’t let her have that realization then, when it makes sense, because she hasn’t yet grappled with the thought of murdering someone to save herself, and because it needs an APB on her car.

Which I guess brings us to talking about the end.

Rose has her false showdown. After she hallucinates killing the predator, she hallucinates driving to Joel’s and asking to crash. Joel says yes, then goes creepy; she runs, turns out she never left the house, she’s now out on the front lawn.

And the real Joel—the one other character who understands the rules, who’s traced the pattern back 20 victims—rolls up for no particular reason, having caught the APB on Rose’s car.

You’ve already written the rest. She tries to lock him out, the predator takes her, he breaks in, she kills herself before his eyes. The cycle of violence continues. Fade to black.

There’s a more economical version of this ending where the drive to Joel’s isn’t a hallucination, where her complacency is actually load-bearing instead of just another cruel dream—maybe one, even, where Joel is reluctant to let her in because he understands the rules and realizes it’s not safe. Maybe I’ll write it, just for grins. But maybe it’s more interesting, here, to come back to where I began:

On generosity in reading, and what it means if the things you don’t like were on purpose

I have not, myself, experienced mental illness. I don’t want to make pronouncements about what it’s like. But to someone naive to the first-person experience of mental illness, the idea that that experience might actually conform to certain widely deprecated horror movie tropes seems at least cromulent. The predator’s pointless malevolence (if it wants people around Rose when she dies, why is it manipulating her into driving her family away?), Rose’s persistent obtuseness about the rules, her persistent credulity about her own experiences even long after she knows to doubt them… these don’t work well when you consider the story from a rational standpoint. But maybe they work a little better as a rendition of a psychological breakdown—not caused by the monster, but represented by it.

I’m not sure I’m sold, to be honest. But I do feel like the effort to read generously was worth it. And maybe it’s that reading that makes the predator’s signature feature make sense. We smile to show love and friendship and enjoyment; it’s a gesture of comfort, of setting at ease. Pervert the gesture and you strip away the comfort, the ease. You can’t trust people any more. Even when people are around—especially when—you’re alone.

Currently reading: THE ELEMENT OF FIRE, by Martha Wells.

Hi again

I’m going to be on here a little more and on Bluesky a little less, I think. (Not that I wouldn’t love it if you followed me there). The news of the day, understandably, looms awfully large there, and while I don’t intend to hide from the news I’m discovering a need to meter it.

Also, paragraphs! I don’t appreciate paragraphs enough. I mean obviously the novels are made of paragraphs, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do more with them.

Little bit of sharing, as a warmup:

Statistical graphics and comics: Parallel histories of visual storytelling, by Susan Kruglinski and Andrew Gelman. Talk about chocolate and peanut butter—why haven’t I seen an article on this until now?7 Deadly Art Sins, by CJ the X. This is a YouTube video essay; my general tastes in this genre run toward Dan Olson and hbomberguy, if that helps orient you at all. The title makes it sound like seven weird tricks to monetize your art, but it’s very much not; despite the general affect and presentation of a chaos muppet, CJ has their head on extremely (sorry) straight.

Currently listening: ELATSOE, by Darcie Little Badger, read by Kinsale Hueston.

The work of publishing

I’ve been a self-published author for over a decade now, but I’ve only been particularly serious about it since 2022. By “serious” I don’t mean “making nontrivial revenue,” but I do mean I’m making an effort to write in a series, market in a basic way, and maintain some data about my books so I’m not relying on, e.g., logging into KDP to figure out what file’s currently published for a given book.

Heatstroke Heartbeat is coming out on 11/14. (You can preorder it!) It’s the third entry in Streets of Flame, so let’s set aside The Dandelion Knight and my short story collections and say I have three books.

They’re all available in ebook and print (no audio yet), so that’s kind of six books — certainly six ISBNs. I maintain them on four publishers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google) and a distributor (Draft2Digital) plus on IngramSpark for print and with Bowker for ISBNs. Amazon and Bowker have both formats on them, the others have one each, call it 27 rows of data. They have similar but not identical fields, maybe two dozen per platform. As I update manuscript files, I add rows; I’ve done this twice, once to add buy links for Heatstroke Heartbeat into Windburn Whiplash and once (just now) to add a temporary mention that the ebook of Windburn Whiplash is discounted to $0.99 for November. (That price should actually be live now; please, help yourself!) So that’s ten new rows of data, each with minor edits, ten uploads, and five price changes (which are actually about a dozen changes each, because you update each system with the new price in each supported currency). When Windburn Whiplash goes back up to $4.99 in December, that’ll be five reversions in the spreadsheet and five uploads.

Much of this yak-shaving comes about because I’m running a couple of newsletter promotions for Brimstone Slipstream (a free series starter novella; again, I implore you, help yourself!), so I’m hoping for a big influx of downloads. I’d like to make it as easy as possible for those folks to buy Windburn Whiplash, hence the price dip, and then hopefully that’ll give Heatstroke Heartbeat a shot in the arm during its first few weeks of life. It’s a nice theory.

And I just remembered I had a free preview of Heatstroke Heartbeat up for months on those five platforms. So that was five more rows of data, which are now inactive, as well as five uploads and five unpublishes on the different platforms. (That one at least didn’t have an ISBN or print version.)

In comparison to the work of writing, this stuff is not that time-consuming, I’ll admit. And it concentrates around releases and promotions; and I actually tend to be more proactive about it because the resistance is so much less. But it’s also easy to imagine this getting much more complex, and taking up much more of my “writing” time, as my catalog grows. I could hope my time to write will also grow… but that’s not up to me.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Currently listening: Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett.

I’ve never had more fun being completely useless in combat

Yeah, we’re talking D&D again.

Setup: The party is in a battle with lamias. They’ve gotten the drop on us with a clever disguise, so one of them has already taken the minute required to cast a geas on my character (Zebulon the dragonborn ranger, a desert nomad who longs to see the glaciers) to “defend us.”

Short-sightedly, they’ve also summoned a bunch of mephits and pretended that they’re being attacked by them. So Zebulon and his pet Komodo dragon Taki have been punching mephits for a couple rounds… but everyone knows that once the mephits are down, Zebulon is gonna be grappling his allies to keep them from attacking his new friends.

One lamia goes down. The Tempest cleric uses gust of wind to throw the other one into the river.

The last mephit goes down.

Zebulon’s an archer, he’s been hanging back the whole time. But his new friend is in the river, and she’s a cat: She can’t swim. He’s gotta save her. And to do it, he’s got to get though the whole party.

The route direct, to the barge she’s floating by, takes him past five party members. Five attacks of opportunity ensue, everyone trying to grapple my dumb idiot ranger so he doesn’t drag the man-eating horror back on shore and then start defending her.

The wizard goes first. Miss.

Then comes the bard. Zebulon’s got an AC of 17, this just isn’t happening.

Fighter #1 next. He tags me, but Zebulon just shreds him on the opposed Athletics check: The gauntlet’s down to two.

Now we’ve got the monk. He hits, and by now we’re counting down the rolls for the opposed Athletics check: 3! 2! 1! Zebulon rolls something mediocre; the monk rolls a 3. Zebulon shrugs off A FOURTH grapple and faces his final intervention.

Fighter #2, another dragonborn but much tankier, rolls to hit… and gets a hand on Zebulon. 3! 2! 1!

… it’s not quite a natural 20, but close enough. Howling and kicking, Zebulon goes down in a pile of scales, long enough for the team to take down the last lamia and break the geas.

I’ve never had more fun being completely useless in combat. What a moment.

(Sure, he technically could have taken the disengage action to avoid all that. But five nonlethal PVP attacks of opportunity was objectively the better choice.)

Currently reading: LET THIS RADICALIZE YOU, by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, read by Diana Blue.

One of the less unkinder cuts

CN: weight, diet, fitness, &c.

I’m about four weeks into what I’d tentatively call my first serious cut. I’ve barely missed a weigh-in (I only bother in the morning, right after I’ve gotten up) and I’ve tracked my food every single day. I’m down a smallish number of pounds, outside the noise threshold but fewer than I’d like; but this is sort of exciting in that the process feels like it’s working. I haven’t dropped much weight because I’ve eaten a little too much food, I can see what the patterns are in the too-muchness of the food, and I can see how to shift them to dial the deficit up a bit.

I’m setting this down not to launch a new career as any kind of fitness influencer, but maybe as just a sketch of an approach in case anyone’s interested in trying to do this in a way that’s relatively low-effort.

I do lift reasonably heavy three times a week.I do walk about 10,000 steps a day.I do prioritize protein, including supplementing with protein powder. I don’t know if it’s practical for me to consume the broscience consensus of a gram per pound of bodyweight every day; at 6’3″ and a bit above 230 pounds, a typical day is 160-180g of protein. I do weigh myself almost every day.I do try to track 95+% of what I eat. I’ve definitely spotted myself a couple of mouthfuls of things that are absolutely not calorie-free, but I don’t let too much of that stuff go untracked.I do evaluate everything based on seven-day trailing averages. Way easier to see trends through the day-to-day noise.I don’t sweat precision in food tracking. I don’t weigh food, I eyeball measurements, I quickly look for the closest analogue to what I’m eating in the MyFitnessPal database. Completeness > precision. I don’t sweat macros other than protein. This means I generally eat more fat and less carbohydrate than the fitness YouTubers recommend. So far this hasn’t resulted in a ton of hunger but has resulted in low energy; I’m not sure if nudging the macros toward carbs would improve things, but some folks certainly think it might.I don’t categorically avoid anything: carbs, fats, alcohol, dessert. (This would probably be working better if I did categorically avoid alcohol and dessert.) But I absolutely do check my day’s calories in making decisions about whether to eat or drink a given thing. I don’t always make the right decision, but way more often than I would if I weren’t checking.I don’t plan to do this for much more than 8 weeks straight, regardless of where I end up. The plan after that is to try to figure out what maintenance looks like and coast for a little while, then try another cut. I don’t have a six-pack, and I doubt I’ll achieve one at the level of effort I’m describing here. That’s fine. I have a goal weight, which I won’t hit by the end of this cut; also fine.

I can see myself tightening up various aspects of this business as the cut goes on. But most of what this is about is doing it at a level of seriousness that allows me to assess how much control I have over my weight. And the evidence appears to suggest that, at least for now, around my current weight range, I do have a good bit of control — conditional on knowing how much I’m eating and managing toward a moderate calorie deficit. Knowing that I have some control is honestly a huge step into actually putting more effort in, because I have some expectation of return.

If you’re a fantasy reader in the market for a different twist on dragons, have a look at BRIMSTONE SLIPSTREAM, the opening novella in the Streets of Flame series — free to download on all the major retailers.

The Tithe

I was rereading the Penny Arcade Eyrewood comics, and… I’m not sure this is the first time I’ve read “The Tithe” since I learned one of Jerry Holkins’ daughters is trans, but to me (a cis person and a parent) it suddenly hit super hard that this comic was written by the parent of a trans girl.

I feel like I’m right on, if not over, the edge of drawing a fairly dumb equivalence between coming-of-age narratives in general and transition stories; I’m not widely read in LGBTQ+ fiction or theory. But the piece of it that resonated most to me is the fact that Hanna has to leave her family and enter the Eyrewood to do what she is doing. (The name “Hanna” appears only when she is in the midst of her transformation, spoken in the wild, by the wild — by the only character in the story that claims her as a daughter. I could go on.) Hanna’s parents’ attitude toward her is ambiguous in the story — do they want her to stay home, or do they want her to become what she is? And I think the ambiguity is its own argument: It doesn’t matter what they think. One way or the other, she has to go.

“The Tithe” was published in 2013, which I’m pretty sure is a while before Holkins’ daughter transitioned. It seems pretty likely it’s not about her in particular. What this all is, from me, is just another wave of preemptively missing my kids: Of the certain knowledge that I won’t be there for some of the most important things they do and decisions they make, and that not only is that inevitable, it is almost certainly correct.

— this is reposted from a closed, artisanal social network, on which I am connected to a few trans folks. One of the interesting responses I got to this little observation was that the “dumb equivalence” between coming of age and transition is actually a way to think about transition that’s in opposition, at least in part, to a framework that’s more along the lines of “born this way.” Paraphrasing: My correspondents preferred the “coming of age” framing because it acknowledges the elements of active choice and contingency; their transition wasn’t inevitable, it was the product of circumstances and very painful effort, and it could have gone another way.

This sounds like I am patting myself on the back for being smart about trans matters, which is the opposite of my intention: This observation actually made me feel a little stupid, because I hadn’t really thought about how different concepts of transition might affect trans folks’ feelings of agency in and responsibility for their own transitions. (And to be clear, I’m not trying to canonize these couple of Internet friends of mine as the Good Concepts of Transition Deciders; the point is, again, to highlight a diversity of viewpoints among trans folks that I, a cis, was not really aware of.)

Currently reading: HORROR MOVIE, by Paul Tremblay.

If you’ve already read BRIMSTONE SLIPSTREAM and WINDBURN WHIPLASH, you should know that I’ve got a free preview up for the next book in the Streets of Flame series, HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT! This’ll only be around until the book is published, though, so pick it up now if you’re interested.

Fear of commitment: A defense

I’m going to give you some writing advice untainted by anything anyone could call “success” in the industry:

Don’t start off with a series.

This goes against what, e.g. the Alliance of Independent Authors will tell you, and they have a very solid argument: A series is the best way to monetize an audience. A fan of Book 1 in a series is likelier to read Book 2 than a fan of standalone Book A is to read unrelated Book B.

I don’t think this is incorrect. (OK actually, as a newish horror reader who eagerly follows, e.g., Stephen Graham Jones and Paul Tremblay from stand-alone to stand-alone, I’m starting to suspect it might be.) But I think it might be a case of confusing “be ready for success,” which you should do, with “bank on success,” which you shouldn’t.

If you’re not writing full-time—and as an early-career novelist, unless you have a sugar parent of some kind, you aren’t—you may be writing pretty slowly. One book a year, or slower—maybe you’re writing in a long genre, maybe you have kids or other obligations eating up your time off, maybe you’re a naturally slow writer. (By “you might be,” please understand that I additionally mean “I am.”) The trilogy that another author might be able to put out in a year could take you four or five.

Writing more slowly means a bunch of things in the context of a series, but I think the most important thing it means is: If your books don’t land, you’re committed to spending four or five years on a project that doesn’t land. When you could have spent that time writing different books that, maybe, would. A series is the best way to monetize an audience, but that requires an audience. Book 3 can only cash the checks that Book 1 can write.

And early-career you might not have the idea that writes the big checks! Early-career you is the least knowledgeable, least capable you. Paul Graham talks about the peril faced by people who know exactly what they want from life early, namely that they end up with a career chosen for them by an 18-year-old. (Or I could have sworn that was him; I can’t find the essay where he says it.) You’re always going to be a better writer later, of course, but maybe the time to make a big commitment isn’t when you know the actual least.

This is obviously a distillation of my own regrets. I actually started off trying to write a stand-alone book… and ended up, after a really long time at it, deciding to revise the first half to publication quality and publish it as the first half of a duology. I did—it’s called The Dandelion Knight, and you can read it!—but instead of finishing the second half, I started another series, hoping I might get an agent with it. The Eighth King got picked up by a small press called Curiosity Quills, and you can’t read it, because they exploded in a puff of blockchain circa 2018 and I haven’t republished it yet. While I was waiting to get the rights to The Eighth King back, I started Brimstone Slipstream, because I thought it would be a quick trilogy of like 60,000-word novels, and now I’m two 120K-novels in with an extra book planned, and…

… well, other than the sequel to The Eighth King that I wrote over the course of maybe 3 years after it got picked up, that’s my noveling history over the last 17 years. (Oh, and the fantasy Western that I actually did write in like 5 months… another fucking series starter.) In another 17 years, I’ll be 61. Not gonna lie, I’m feeling some pressure to use them better!

So. I don’t really mean “don’t write a series.” What I really mean is, do what you want, and finish what you start.

Something I’m realizing, though, is: Maybe it’s not such a good idea for me to keep The Eighth King and The Gale-Razed Rose in the trunk until I’m done with Streets of Flame. TEK has already had a professional edit, and every time I read TGRR it feels like the highest-quality first draft I’ve ever written. Publishing Heatstroke Heartbeat is absolutely my first priority until it’s done… but if I’m going to say in public that it’s smart not to pin your hopes on one series, maybe I should act like it?

Currently reading: Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, by Molly McGhee.