A.R. Knight's Blog, page 6

The Last Cycle and The Next Thing

It’s out there. Book six, and the last one of THE SKYWARD SAGA. Paperback, ebook, you know the drill. It’s an adventure for Kaishi and Sax, and one that sets the galaxy up for what comes next. What that’ll be, I don’t know, because I’m sure not thinking about it now.

Honestly, it’s pretty darn difficult to keep going on a series one book after another. I could have kept this one rolling, because once you have characters and a world, manufacturing plots isn’t the most difficult thing. Character development, though, is far harder. Kaishi and Sax? After six books? They still have plenty of growth to experience, but that growth may not make for compelling, galactic-stake novels.

So I’m giving them some time off. I’d say they’ve earned it.

However, to the detriment of my free time, I’m well in the throes of what’s coming next. It’s science fiction, of a sort, though less concerned with space and more concerned with, well, Earth. I’ll have more to share soon.

And, in the interest of keeping things interesting, stay tuned for some other bits and pieces. Stories, say. Ones that may appear on this very blog before too long.

If you’re lucky, they might even be good.

Doom and Organic Storytelling

Yes. You’re reading that correctly.

First, a definition: Organic storytelling is, essentially, the opposite of plotting. It’s what happens if you throw a bunch of ingredients together and sit back to see what they do. A rowdy bunch of dwarves into a crowded tavern, say, or a terrifying disease released into a sealed, populated space station. You don’t need to have pre-planned plot beats to get interesting stuff from those scenarios: just let the situations cook and you’ll get a tasty story meal.

When you’re writing a book or a screenplay, it’s possible to play with organic storytelling, and if you have good characters they’ll make their own imprints on your nefarious plot designs whether you want to or not.

Games, and board games in particular, tend to be best when the players get drawn into their own narratives. Even simpler ones, like Candyland, are made better when the quest to get through the gumdrop forest or the sugar swamp (I’m making these up – my knowledge of Candyland’s er, lands is lacking) goes from the turning of a double-red card in action to a gallant, rope-swinging dash in description.

Someone, after a game of Risk, is much more likely to describe their victory as a sweeping conquest of Asia culminating in long, hard struggle to wrest Austraila from the clutches of the blue player than as a series of dice rolls that moved plastic figures around a piece of cardboard.

DOOM: The Boardgame provides an optimal environment for this sort of story-telling. Each player has their own avatar, a grizzled space marine, with the last, and most villainous, player controlling the endless hordes of Hell. Missions abound, but the plot for each one goes only as far as necessary to set the stakes: gather a piece of information, escape the crumbling station, or simply survive.

Within these loose confines, the players get to create their own maverick moments. In our last game, with a large monster bearing down on him, my brother grabbed a chainsaw from the corner and barely managed to bring it around in time to make a buzzing end of the demon. That would have been enough, except with his remaining options, Jon managed to string together a series of moves and plays that sent him whirling through most of the horde in a wild slashing maneuver that saved a pair of other players.

This wasn’t a pre-designed moment. It emerged through a long series of prior choices (Jon went right, other players went left, doors were left closed, funneling demons into a tight corridor, etc.). The chainsaw, too, doesn’t always end in a massacre of demons – it just so happened that Jon saw the potential and had the cards to make it happen.

Still, as my demon army lay in tatters, we were all laughing, enjoying the ridiculous moment. When the mission wrapped up, we were already thinking about the next chance we’d have to pit the marines against the hellspawn, and I’d wager most of that enthusiasm came from the fact that every one of those marines had their shining moments, their escapes from the clutches of defeat and their crackshot rescues of friends and objectives.

And we planned none of them.

Shoveling the Driveway: A Review

Let’s get this out of the way first: shoveling the driveway offers an immediate, satisfying payoff that’s hamstrung by inconvenient timing and poor conditions.

That might sound damning, but as with most things, it’s about perspective. I’ve been experiencing this activity for going on 25 years now – since I was old enough to hold a shovel and have some idea of what to do with it – and in that time, the mechanics have largely stayed the same. You push the snow onto your shovel, lift it, and launch it into the yard or, preferably, onto an unsuspecting significant other.

This level of consistency over multiple decades might spell the death of many other things, but shoveling admirably sticks to its strengths year after year. What are those strengths? You may ask as you’re standing in your driveway long before the sun comes up or long after its come down, every breath leaving icicles on your chin.

Namely, shoveling boasts the necessary advantage of being able to leave your house. Few other activities can argue such a direct benefit, as leaving the house gives rise to a host of other options, like avoiding starvation, cabin fever, and evicting guests that have overstayed their welcome.

Departures are just one of shoveling’s strengths, though. Like many activities, shoveling boasts exercise as a secondary benefit, and building up a sweat when the thermometer’s on the wrong side of zero adds some visceral thrill, as though you’re defying an angry god.

Shoveling also clears your driveway and sidewalk for passers-by, reducing the odds that one of these random walking lawsuits will happen on your property. There’s also, apparently, laws against leaving month’s worth of snow and ice on these pathways as a barrier to pedestrians, like a Winter moat.

So shoveling’s not all bad, but it does bear with it some significant drawbacks, ones that may make the whole experience worth avoiding if you can.

The first, and worst, is that shoveling refuses to conform to a schedule. Unlike the gym, or calling in sick for the company potluck, snow comes at random during Winter’s hold on the world. You’ll often be coerced to shovel at times wrong for existing, much less for actual activity. Worse, you may not have any choice in the matter – even hiring a service may not guarantee the snow’s removal when you need it gone.

When the snow comes, you gotta shovel. That’s it.

The other major drawback, depending on your bone structure and ability to properly wield a shovel, is the dreaded back pain. Like a menacing demon haunting your every waking moment, the soreness from an extended shoveling session makes the hours and days following your victorious conquest of the driveway a long moan of regret.

Still, what’re you gonna do?

The aforementioned service option can be unpredictable – if you’re flexible, throwing money at an onslaught of people to commit war crimes against the powdery stuff on your walk is an option.

Another alternative is the mythical snowblower, a beastly thing that engulfs the fluff and launches it on neighbors with magnificent force. However, this beast is hungry, requiring both preparation with gasoline and the space from your driveway to actually launch the snow. This also removes that sweaty sub-benefit of a workout, along with its evil twin, the dreaded back pain.

Ultimately, I plan to continue shoveling for the foreseeable future. Our driveway lacks the wide plains necessary to feed the snowblower beast, and services have proven undependable in their execution, especially with the wife’s need for witching-hour workout sessions at distant studios. In such a situation, shoveling’s constant presence is a comfort – an unchanging solution in a changing world.

Hereditary – Two Parts Drama, One Part Demons

Horror tends to be the most polarizing of genres – either you like it, even love it, or you can’t stand it. Those in the latter camp have the potential to be lulled in by Hereditary, which keeps its scary cards slipped up its sleeves throughout most of the film. Like a magician’s flourish, you’ll see a spook or an eerie moment here and there to remind you of what you’re watching, but by the time the real scares start, you’re liable to think you’ve fallen into a family drama.

Plot recaps are dull, so suffice it to say that Heredity uses fascination to draw us into this family and their odd lives. There’s an attention to character here that more horror movies, so often content to make their cast a series of cardboard cutouts waiting to be torn to shreds, ought to take note of. Each and every one of this story’s stars come with scars, or showcase some inner torments that manifest to make themselves unique. Memorable.

You don’t miss the monsters because the characters fill the void.

Hereditary spends the bulk of its non-scary time meditating on grief, loss, and the general concepts so common in depressing dramas that, without these characters, I’d want to call the film derivative. There’s the death of a relative that kicks off the whole thing, and the family copes with that loss in different ways, all of which come around to the choices they’ve made in their own lives that they regret.

Tinting all of this soul-searching are bits and pieces of mystery, the hooks that gradually seep into you as you watch, posing smoky questions that linger at the edges until… well, until the film decides it’s done playing around.

The latter part of Hereditary gets so out of control where it would, without the steady, introspective start, inspire laughter. Characters less fleshed-out, less interesting than these thrown into such sudden fantasies would cause other films to fall apart. You’d lose your suspension of disbelief because the things you’re seeing are so unbelievable, and the film hasn’t set that up to be the case.

But here you’re curious to see what happens. You know these characters now, and it’s engaging to watch their various ends, even if some of those ends feel cheap or too out there for the movie. And by the end you might feel compelled to look up the references, to dig deeper into the mythos Hereditary builds around.

When a movie leaves you asking questions, leaves you talking about it when the credits roll, that’s usually a good sign. At the end of it, I enjoyed the movie, though I think its first half deserved a finish more in the grounded realm in which the movie began. Given all the buzz, I had high expectations, and the characters in Hereditary met them, even if the plot didn’t get there.

Which, I suppose, reinforces that common point for all good stories – quality characters can cover for just about anything.

One more thing: Hereditary is streaming now on Amazon Prime, so if you’re looking to add a bit of creepy fun to your night, you can check it out for ‘free’ if you’ve already got Amazon’s ubiquitous service. 

That’s a Lot of World to Build: Lessons from Writing a Six-Book Series (Part One)

My main writing project last year become THE SKYWARD SAGA, a six novel + two short story adventure starring a young woman and a murderous alien. You know, the kind of story that comes along all the time.

As we’re coming near the close of the story, I’m taking a look at what I’ve learned writing it (6 books is twice as long as my prior trilogies), including the challenges, the fun, and why writing longer series is so satisfying.

Constructing a Galaxy takes time, but it’s a lot of fun
This might seem obvious, but choosing to set a story in a wholly ‘new’ world means you have to, well, create that world. So far as I know , Amazon doesn’t offer worlds on two-day delivery, yet.

With a longer series, world-building requires more than a trilogy, and far more than a standalone, even ones of huge length. Because every book ought to have a complete story, you need that many more places for characters to go, that many more things to interact with and explore. With Science Fiction, too, the setting itself is part of that story, so it’d better be an interesting one.

Every planet, species and space station offers a chance to let the imagination run wild and chase an idea to it’s over-the-top conclusions – given the genre, there’s no reason not to follow a thought to it’s most amazing. A real-world thriller might not want eyeless monsters roaming the caves, but a sci-fi/fantasy series? Absolutely.

You’d better like your characters, because you’ll be in their heads for a long time
This is one I underestimated – spending a book or two, or even three in the heads of a couple characters is fun; you get to see them grow, see them adapt to challenges, fail and eventually succeed.

When the series goes longer, however, the track to success takes longer. Their flaws have to stick a little more, and as the stakes rise and rise, you have to stay with them when it would be easier to jump to a new, fresh soul.

In part, that’s what makes writing a creature like Sax so fun – the alien’s drive is different than a humans, and the way he reacts to situations is vastly apart from Kaishi, giving not just a different POV, but a wholly different frame for story-telling.

The other part of this, too, is that having complex antagonists is a must. Villains-of-the-week are going to get too repetitive for reader and writer alike during a long series – it’s more fun challenging characters in different ways than just having them charge into battle again and again.

Leave room to tell the other stories
I wrote 2 shortish stories set in THE SKYWARD SAGA’s universe, largely because I wanted to spent some time with side characters that didn’t get the main stage. Neither one is necessary to enjoy the full scope of the core story, but the point of writing is to, well, write what you want, and I wanted to see what these two would do if set out on their own journeys.

While the core story of THE SKYWARD SAGA ends after six books, there’s plenty more universe there to explore. I’d like to go back to it someday and tell some of those other stories, because, well, all that world-building noted above leads to a lot of things that wind up getting cut from the main story.

Just like Star Wars has dozens of spin-offs, and Harry Potter has its Fantastic Beasts movies, there are stories worth telling that’ll take place in parts of the galaxy not seen during these books. Viera, especially, deserves a starring turn, and I’d love to see what trouble she gets up to after the end of the series.I

I’ll stop the post here for now and continue next time, looking a little more closely at the plotting, and the challenges involved in planning a longer series. Because there are many, and they’re worth defeating so you can wander a long path in a world you like, with characters you love.

The First Haunt in Betrayal: Legacy is a Perfect Introduction

Board games as a medium compete for our entertainment time and dollars against the whiz-bang effects of movies and video games, the melodrama and binge-worthy serials on TV, and offer up as a hazard the general adult difficulty of getting people physically together in a room to do something other than gripe about their jobs or the weather.

What most board games try to offer as compensation is the promise of organic, communal storytelling. Even with something like Poker, or Chess, being able to look across the table into the eyes of your opponent is unique to the physical space. When you win, your victim (or, if it’s a cooperative experience) is right there, in prime position for a well-earned gloat. When you lose, it’s easy to declare that so-and-so cheated, the game’s rigged, and bluster about with an audience that consists of more than a skeptical pet.

Betrayal: Legacy steps into this magical space offering a couple of additional perks:

It’s a legacy game, meaning it comes with a campaign loaded with one-time experiences that literally change how the game itself works from one play to the next.Betrayal is a haunted house game where your friends might turn out to be your enemies, and spooky moments abound, which are ripe for face-to-face play.

What Betrayal lacks, though is a simple objective. It’s not about acquiring the most points, winning a bet, or conquering the board. It’s as much about role-playing your way through the creaky, mysterious corridors of a crumbling mansion as it is about rolling dice and drawing cards.

Therefore, if you’re proposing to take people on a 13+ mission tour over generations in this space, you have to do something to make commit. You have to show the players that this ride is going to be worth the time instead of another round of, say, Catan.

And Betrayal‘s prologue, which I won’t spoil, does this beautifully. It’s a short, powerful showcase of the game’s mechanisms that turns what most people expect from a tutorial into a demonstration of why you’ll want to keep playing this game.

More importantly, the prologue gets the whole group involved, weaving a story with the actions of the players, so that, like the very best role-playing games do, each person feels as though they’re telling their own separate story with their characters. You are your old man searching for a family heirloom. You are the lost daughter trying to figure out what happened to her family. Or the young upstarts just hunting down some treasure to make a name for themselves.

No matter who you want to be, you’ll find a reason to walk through these eerie doors, and Betrayal will make sure you want to explore the next chapter, even if your character didn’t survive the last one.

Some Tips to Survive an endless Flight Delay

The inspiration for this post comes from a roughly 17 hour travel day I had this last week that began in a powerless Madison airport and continued through the icy, windy runways at Boston Logan. It was miserable, but would have been far worse without some of the knowledge I’ve pieced together from nearly a decade of constant flying for work and pleasure.

Consider the Lounge or Sky Club

If you’re facing a two hour plus delay, this is the first thing I’d recommend. Most airports of significant size, including just about anywhere you’re going to connect through, will have lounges either sponsored through airlines (like Delta’s Sky Club) or companies (like Priority Pass).

Many of these will sell you day passes for varying prices, and at first paying $30-50 might sound like a lot, but when faced with the prospect of throwing punches and/or bribing equally desperate travelers for a spot on the floor near an outlet, is it really all that much?

Lounges generally guarantee a few crucial things for riding out a long delay – access to stable Wi-Fi, a space to set your things (and yourself) down, access to non-swarmed restrooms, and some sort of ‘free’ food and drink. Depending on the lounge and the length of your delay, the latter might pay for itself considering the more expensive airport food.

I spent roughly seven exhausted hours in Sky Clubs on Monday, and every one of those hours would’ve been like wading through Hell’s own swamp had I needed to scramble for outlets or a glass of ice water with the teeming masses of other delayed passengers.

Bring Mixed Media

In our phone- and laptop- driven age, things like paper books might seem quaint, but there’s a reason these pop-up stores exist in all the airports. After melting my eyes staring at screens for a few hours, switching over to a magazine or a paperback novel that’s easy to pack away makes for a nice break.

Don’t discount e-readers either – the e-ink display plays nice with your eyes, and when you’re sitting in a dark airport because someone blew the transformer, it’s nice to have something with a backlight that you can read.

Free outlets, too, are diamonds in the airport strip mine. They’re hard to find and quickly gobbled up, especially when catastrophes happen and airports fill up with glassy-eyed zombie travelers. Gadgets with long battery life, or that don’t need any at all, are great options to see you through an endless day.

Don’t Skimp on Basic Nutrition

Long travel days already feel like waking nightmares, and the longer they go, the more your body’s going to realize something’s wrong and start to panic. If you respond to that panic by sending one bloody mary after another into your stomach, what started as a long day is going to turn into a disastrous one.

Consider the potential length of your layover before diving into the crap pile of appetizers and booze – you won’t want to be stuck in an airport when the consequences of that decision arrives.

Instead, if the lounge you’re in doesn’t have decently decent options, consider taking a brief journey to find something not fried into oblivion and that, maybe, has a vitamin somewhere in its nutrition contents. Most lounges, if you bought a pass, will let you come and go for the duration of your airport purgatory, so don’t worry about taking a dash for a bite of something salubrious.

Beware the Checked Bag

The last tip I’ve got for today – you’ll often here announcements from desperate gate agents calling for passengers to check their carry-ons to save overhead bin space. You can make your own choice on this, but if it’s looking like flights might change or if you’re going to miss your connection, checking your bag early is inviting a late night staring at an empty baggage carousel.

Airlines will often shuffle you around to get you to your destination, or even another airport near it, to help avoid long delays. If you’ve checked your bag and you have to tweak your flights, you’re making a big dice roll if you assume it’s going to wind up where you’re going at the same time you get there. I’ve dodged delays by walking off a flight and, randomly, walking right onto a soon-departing flight across the hall that took me to LaGuardia instead of my initial, heavily delayed destination. I made it to my hotel for dinner, rather than the projected past-midnight arrival I was destined for. That wouldn’t have been possible, or would have some sort of bag-man shuffle to get my luggage to me if I’d checked it.

Sometimes you won’t have a choice, but if you do, keeping your bags with you as you enter the flying maelstrom will help you bob and weave along with those winds, and let you land with your outfits intact, even if your sanity’s long gone.

Why I Love The Cold

When you live in a state like Wisconsin, there’s a presumption that you’re some sort of norseman. That your blood runs thick, you spend six months of the year wearing the furs of creatures you’ve trapped, and that every night passes in front of a roaring fire with a tankard of dark beer in your hand.

And I’m here to say that’s true. Every word of it.

At least in my dreams. And possibly if you traveled a few hundred years into the past.

Even with the more manageable comforts of today, though, I find myself looking forward to Winter. There’s a delightful edge to the morning when you get out of the covers and your body starts an immediate freakout when the cool air hits you. Step outside, especially without much covering, and you’ll wake up in a hurry as the bone-deep survival instincts jump to life.

Wisconsin, though, isn’t Hoth. It’s not Antarctica, and it’s not even Canada. Most Winter days can be conquered by an adequate jacket and a pair of decent driving gloves. Maybe a scarf, if you’re a scarf person.

With that ease in mind, taking a walk to the coffee shop, or jotting down a chapter while looking onto a snow crystal wonderland turns from a frosted, bitter nightmare to the sort of enchanted moments so often popping up in holiday rom-coms. It’s a pleasant shift from the sweaty, sun-soaked summers that have me tangling with resident wasps over the right to enjoy my own yard.

Cold, too, is a feature in most of the books that I write. Not that all of them take place on ice planets, but most do feature space, and those hulking blocks of metal that fly around in it. Spaceships are, generally, cold objects. Made of inorganic alloys designed to keep out radiation and keep in air, these craft are the opposite of bicycles or convertibles meant to coast by sea-swept beaches on perfect days. Having a fondness for chillier weather might make it easier to write characters comfortable in those same confines.

Most stories, too, need a cold element. A thing that makes the protagonists uncomfortable, that forces interaction and reaction. Whether that’s the, uh, weather or something scarier, it’s hard to get a compelling narrative if everyone’s feeling happy and content all the time.

So I say bring on the snow, bring on the mornings where your breath curls into misty life, and where your first look outside catches a sneaky ray of sunshine darting into a world of gray. It’s beautiful, and it’s worth looking forward to every year.

Sidereal Confluence: Alien Shoutfest

Say the name. Speak it aloud. The very syllables conjure up digital armies of robots in a technocratic future where Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Terminator all beam themselves into your every dream.

In today’s world, however, Sidereal Confluence is only a board game. And I use the word “Board” loosely here – as outside from your player mats, there’s no board to deal with. Only cards. Many, many, many cards.

At its core, this game is about colored cubes and changing those cubes into different colors. It’s an engine-building game that takes the solitaire elements of building your own magical machine and throws them into a black hole. No, S.C. says, if you want to be efficient, you’re going to have to use your words.

Because S.C. is kinda like playing Space U.N. – every player gets a species, either by choice or by the more-appropriate random deal, like the evolution of life on a planet. When I played, it was as a swarm of wasp-like creatures that, unfortunately, couldn’t use their massive stingers to simply eliminate anyone that didn’t agree to my terms.

Each of these species have unique quirks that generally amount to being able to efficiently produce y by transforming x but they really want z. You’ve got to hope someone really wants that y and is willing to give you that z or you’re toast. Even if those desires exist, if you’ve got a table crowded with competing species yelling at each other over every 10 minute trading session, it’s hard to know what’s going on and agreements often become a matter of whip-cracking instinct rather than thought-out deals.

It’s thrilling, and it’s always satisfying to mesh a bunch of cubes together and produce profit.

It’s very much not clear, though, who’s winning or why. I was on the end of the (rectangular) table and had little clue what was going on down at the other end, much less any real chance to make deals with those species. When the game ended, nearly everyone was surprised at their own score relative to anyone else. Everyone agreed they’d play better next time, now that they understood.

But S.C. took us nearly 3 hours to stumble through a game, and I’m not convinced you’d have any better bead on your competition the next time around. For a game so bent on wheeling and dealing, it helps to know if the person demanding your beautiful gray wild cube is in the lead or far behind.

It’s also a matter of knowing how the other species work – you’ll know to charge more when selling a planet if the species buying it devours them to survive.

The one plus to all the obfuscation? You won’t know if you’re really losing till you’ve lost, which can help keep the chase interesting.

S.C.’s structure also lends itself to larger groups, as there’s very little downtime and the majority of the game happens simultaneously for everyone, keeping the action going. It’ll take you hours, but you’ll be doing things for the majority of those hours, even with a group like our 8-person monster.

So if bartering and running economic engines drenched in science fiction sounds like a win for your group, I’d give S.C. a chance. I would recommend, though, playing around a circular table and, especially for the first game, making clear that folks shouldn’t expect to have a hundred-percent grasp of everything that’s going on.

And make sure everyone has something to drink – you’ll be talking a lot, saying strange names, and if you’re any good at all, bringing the space wasps to their much-deserved galactic dominance.

Failing the First Mission in Gloomhaven

The tutorial: a gloved hand that guides you through the systems of anything reasonably complex. Some come in the form of step-by-step written guides, others arrive via talking, animated paper clips. Still more attempt to throw you directly into the situation, gradually escalating the complexity and hoping you catch on.

Gloomhaven, a massive board game, attempts the third option, presumably under the impression that you’ll have the capacity to thwart the motley crew of bandits the game throws at you.

These bandits come charging with knives, shooting with arrows, and generally assault with a level of lethality that makes mockery of a newcomer’s hapless play.

We, however, weren’t newcomers. We were, while not experienced dungeon-divers, somewhat savvy. We knew how the game worked – its mechanisms of card drawing, hand and deck control and how both relate to keeping one’s hero alive under constant threat.

We didn’t know our heroes worked, such as how a spellweaver’s world-beating abilities quickly drain their already meager deck. Or how my scoundrel’s piddly daggers do so little against anything with the slightest defense.

Our daring duo tore through the early opposition with whirling knives and lightning storms, but when it came time to hit the final room and achieve our grand victory… well, the spellweaver ran out of magic, out of cards entirely and sat there, waiting to be massacred. My scoundrel pulled some tricks, threw some daggers, and caused precisely zero casualties as the attacks bounced off our foe’s cackling skulls.

Gloomhaven isn’t afraid to throw failure in your face, but it’s fair about it. We know what we did wrong, and while our characters mesh with each other about as well as oil and wine, we’ll give it another crack, and, next time, hold off on brutalizing the easy enemies to save our best for the harder ones.

In that sense, yes, I suppose Gloomhaven’s tutorial mission taught us one thing: it’s tough, fair, and fun. And absolutely worth playing if you’re into this sort of adventure.