This is a little hard to write, but blogging about this is the easiest way to reach the largest amount of people all at once.

Last night, I got a call from my mom as we were starting our D&D game. It turns out that my uncle, who has been struggling with alcoholism for years now, is now dead. She gave me a few details, but to be honest I was pretty numb for the rest of the evening, so I don’t remember them all, and I didn’t want to push my mom while she was having a calm moment  Sadly, this kind of death is nothing new for my family.

I have purchased airplane tickets back to Ohio, and I will be there for a few days. I’ll have my iPad with me, so I may be online as wireless connections permit, but don’t expect a lot out of me for a little while; I am giving myself permission to check out mentally for a few days while I help my mom. I’m not sure how I’ll be after seeing my mom again — I’m looking forward to it, mind you, but grief hits everyone differently — so while I’ll be back in Atlanta by Tuesday, I may or may not be fully up to speed by then.

Also, now would be a really bad time to complain to me about your copy of V20 or bitch about something I posted or whatever.

Tales of the Far West

While I’m waiting for the other formats for Slices of Fate to drop, another project I’ve worked on has arrived. Tales of the Far West is available in Kindle format, as well as through DriveThruRPG – I contributed the story “In The Name Of The Empire,” where a sheriff is charged with the murder of an Imperial Magistrate.

Imagine: A fantasy world, but not one based on Medieval/Dark Ages European culture and myth, but rather on the tropes of the Spaghetti Western and Chinese Wuxia. Add steampunk elements. Mix well.

A fantasy world that mixes the inspirations of Django and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon… The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and House of Flying Daggers… Fistful of Dollars and Fist of Legend.

A fantasy world that’s explored through a book series, a constantly-updated website, a tabletop role-playing game, comics, artwork, webseries and much, much, more.

This is FAR WEST.

If you’re curious to learn a little of the process I used while writing the story, you can read this series of posts:

• To The Far West: Research and Outlining
• To The Far West: By Any Means Necessary
• To The Far West: Writing is Rewriting

Go! Buy Tales of the Far West! Spread the word! It’s a dozen stories of wuxia-western-steampunk-fantasy awesomeness!

In many ways, I am an ideal customer. If I find an artist or a company that I really like, I tend to latch on to them. Back in the day I would play anything by LucasArts or Sierra. I’ve played many games just because they had the BioWare label. Last year I became a convert to Wadjet Eye Games. I am prone to loyalty.

Over the holiday I had an itch to play a classic CRPG, but for some reason Planescape Torment and Baldur’s Gate weren’t scratching that itch. Then I stumbled across the Geneforge Saga on Steam. At the time, it was $10, which was a ridiculously good price for five games, so I snapped them up. Within a week or so, I bought Avadon: The Black Fortress as well.

Just now I did a little math. Assuming my Steam account is accurate, I’ve put in 150 hours into these games. It’s probably more than that — Steam has a habit of not tracking the occasional session of gameplay, and I’ve also put a few hours in on the demo of Avernum VI. I’ve finished Avadon, I’ve essentially finished Geneforge 1, ¹ and I’m starting on Geneforge 4. From there, I’m planning on trying Geneforge 5 again, and then hopefully Avernum: Escape From The Pit will be out for Windows.

This is a bit odd for me. Granted, I am prone to mild obsession. I’ll spend a few days watching an entire season of a TV series, or listen through hours of an audio drama I like. Once I reread the first ten books of the Dresden Files all in a row, just so I could remember the context for the eleventh novel. But it’s only now, over a month later, that I’m feeling the grip of Spiderweb games letting me go enough that I can think a bit more rationally on why these particular games have snagged my attention.

If you’re not familiar with this company (and I certainly wasn’t), it’s very small. In fact, it’s more or less one man — Jeff Vogel — who runs everything. Wikipedia tells me the company’s been around since 1994, back when shareware was a thing. The games he makes aren’t particularly pretty, and have little to no music. They don’t have voiceovers, and often the assets are reused between games. The games have small, incremental improvements within the series. They are games in a very specific genre — turn-based, isometric RPGs — catering to a very specific audience.

And yet, I think these are strengths, in a way. It’s like playing D&D 3rd edition, and then moving to another D20 game — you recognize a lot of the parts of the game, and it’s easier to drop in. The assets and lack of music score starts to become a voice, something noteworthy and distinct. The parts that are new and distinct stand out more, and can be appreciated more.

I’m planning to dig into more details about the games I’ve actually played in future. But for now, I’m continuing to enjoy the feeling of finding a new company to obsess over.

Permission to use granted by OWbN Girls and Meredith Gerber

No, it’s not a game. It’s an organization. But I still learned a lot about game design from OWbN Girls.

Over the past few days, I’ve been getting a trickle of drama in my various social networks around the group. For those not in the know, OWbN Girls is an advocacy group within the organization One World by Night that strives ”to play fair in the gaming community, educate those that believe in the stereotype [of unempowered female gamers], and engage non-gamers in joining the community.” I admit that I’m not entirely sure what the drama is,¹ but it brought me back to a particular thing I keep picking at: sexism (and really, many different “isms”) in gaming.

The conflict for me is that the extremes are disagreeable. It seems like whenever things like sexism comes up, the two options float to “suck it up and deal with it” or “turn into a politically correct wasteland.” I don’t agree with either option, so I keep picking at it because it’s important to me as an artist and a game designer. It’s a more complex problem than it appears on the surface, which is true of any important problem, and there isn’t a simple, tweet-sized answer. In talking on Twitter to the OWbN Girls account and admitting that it’s a bigger problem, I came up with some ideas on how to extract some of these threads.

Controversial content is okay. I may personally hate the ideas that games like F.A.T.A.L.² espouse, but the alternative of someone deciding whether I can consume it or not is a million times worse. Further, controversial content often gets conversations going about important topics. This is something that entertainment and art does, and interactive entertainment does on an even more important level. We need games that challenge us, make us think, and put us in uncomfortable situation. If someone doesn’t like the content, they can (and should) exercise their rights to refuse to buy or consume it.

So let’s assume that’s a given: controversy is not inherently bad.

Forcing me to act in uncomfortable ways may not be okay. But there’s a flip side. It’s one thing to have a game where, say, you can choose to have random sex with women to get something. It’s another to force me to do that to proceed. It’s okay to have characters that are terrible to each other, but it’s not okay to require players to be terrible to each other (and especially if they have no idea that they need to be terrible to each other to succeed). And this is a tricky line, and probably more than a little subjective, but for me I think the choice needs to be there.

Let me pick differently controversial example. In the game Geneforge,³ you play a character that can choose between three factions (or, indeed, can ignore them all). For brevity, all of the factions are composed of magically-created slaves, and you are one of the magicians that can create such creatures. One faction wants to work together with the magicians (called “Shapers”), while another faction wants to be led and treated like cattle. And yet, the faction that wants to be led has more resources which you can really use to help you. The third faction that wants to murder all the Shapers is even more powerful.

In this example, there’s a choice. I can go with the morally safe route and accept the increase in difficulty in progression, or I can choose a less moral road and get a benefit. I can be a good person or a terrible person (or, more likely, something in the middle), but the game doesn’t force me to enslave a race or commit genocide. I can feel bad all on my own, because of what I decided to do. And better, the thoughts and ideas this game generates are more powerful to me because I am the one who choose a particular path, instead of having it force-fed to me.

What does this have to do with LARP? Let me loop back around a bit with another example. In 2005, I made a character for the Camarilla Vampire: The Requiem game that was sexist. He was a sneaky bastard that frequently used women to get what he wanted.⁴ I went to a number of female players I knew and said I wanted to create a collection of background ties with their characters to represent this. I also made a commitment to myself that I would never even hint at this kind of sexually-exploitative roleplay until I cleared it with the player outside the game first, even if a female player started it. Really, the whole idea could have gone horribly, horribly wrong, and I was prepared to scrap it all on a moment’s notice.

Every single female player I approached was okay with it. I even refused some people who came to me about it, because a couple of times it got a little weird for me. And I played the character for years before he was murdered.

I’ve often gone back and tried to reconstruct why that worked so well. Quite a lot of it was likely due to the women I approached (who were all people I’d gamed with before and built up a measure of trust with), but perhaps the biggest, I think, is that the roleplay was never forced. The fact that the character was perceived to be sexually exploitative was enough — I didn’t have to say or do anything to prove that. Many times I would say “And they go off and have a good time” and leave it there, or I would drop out of character and mention that my PC would then proceed to make lewd suggestions instead of actually saying them. Granted, a lot of that was because I am a married man and was frankly uncomfortable with the details much of the time, but I think that had the benefit of making it clear that I wasn’t doing this for my own personal titillation. The whole point was to portray a character for the other players to enjoy (or, more accurately, hate enough to plot to murder him).

I do not recommend this path for most players. I’m not even sure I would try to do something that ambitious again — as I said, it could have been really bad. But it does show that it can be done.

Conclusion: “Isms” are important in interactive art, but only at a remove. I think it’s okay if content is controversial, but I don’t think design should be. If I as a player know that I have control, I’m willing to give up a little bit of it to see where things are going. I’m willing to risk making myself uncomfortable if it means I can walk away at any time. For a movie or a book, this is binary — you’re consuming the content or you’re not. In a game, however, there are shades of interacting with the content. That switch, that ability to walk away from what’s uncomfortable needs to be part of the game somehow, so that someone can walk away with only a little consequence and continue with the game.

This is a big topic. I’m under no delusion that this blog post is anywhere close to answering the problems that come with controversial games. But I absolutely believe that it’s important that organizations like OWbN Girls continue to ask the question.

Oh man, do I have opinions on this.

Politics in RPGs (and indeed, in fiction as a whole) are not the same as politics in real life. Without getting into a political debate about what is best, I’ll only say that in the real world, it’s often desirable when politicians are calm and productive and work together to accomplish something. In games, the opposite is true. In fact, I have often said that politics in LARPs should be more about throwing chairs than making policy. So, if you’re designing a political system, you need to think less about a functional political system and instead worry about making an interesting one. There are a few things to keep in mind with this.

Avoid Dictators. There’s a reason why the Prince in Masquerade went from the all-powerful elder in First Edition to being a toady largely at the control of a Primogen Council in Revised — dictators are boring on both sides of the equation. Sure, it’s fun for ten minutes to do whatever the hell you want, and there’s some narrative juice you can get from trying to overthrow a heartless bastard to prop up the next idealistic utopia that will ultimately fall to real-world pressures, blah blah blah, but the reality is that playing in that state is binary: you can do nothing or you can do whatever you want. The more people you can spread the power around to, the more interesting your political dynamic will become.

Power Needs To Mean Something. On the other hand, “dictator” has to seem like an attractive option. Playing in a town council that only has the authority to change school names or decide on the color of flower arrangements isn’t as exciting as playing a board of organized crime bosses who have the power of life and death. If political power means something, then people will hold on to it harder and work to get more of it, and so will everyone else. This means that those people will constantly clash against each other, which continues to generate entertaining situations. If you’re designing a game, this power has to matter to the mechanics at some level (which goes back to my thoughts on mechanics and setting — it all applies here as well).

There’s Not Quite Enough To Go Around. Part of that meaning has to revolve around resources, and specifically resources that are a little short of being enough for everyone. If there’s a game where all powers require a gem to use and there’s more than enough gems for everyone, there will be liberal sharing. Make the game where there’s enough gems to give to half of the players, and things get interesting. If you’re playing a group of vampires fighting over land, that land has to be small enough that not everyone can have a slice. (And yes, that land has to have a mechanic behind it.)

Politics are Player Vs. Player. I have run heavy political games both with players taking on all the political roles and with NPCs taking up most (or all) of those roles. In general, when the political choices are in the hands of the players, it’s a political game. When they’re in the hands of NPCs, it’s window dressing to a different game. It is certainly possible to have a strong political game where the players are all a coordinated group working against other factions to do something amazing or whatever, but on a basic level it’s no different than fighting a bunch of monsters. There’s a certain dynamic that comes only from players going all-out to screw each other over. The game Diplomacy is pure player vs. player politics, and I have heard more stories of people who won’t speak to each other after playing that game than in any other openly competitive game.

Decide What Politics Means For Your Game. In the end, you have to decide why politics are important.

For most mission-based or adventure-based games, all that matters is that there’s a guy that gives you orders or that you have to overthrow. In that case, prop up a king under whatever name you choose and point the players at him.

If you want a game where politics offers a flavor or spice to your game but isn’t the main thrust, consider a structure where power is divided between a few people or groups. You can define some groups as “bad” and others as “good” or paint them all with a uniform coat of gray, but in the end the players will likely side with one (or form their own faction). The act of picking and choosing a side feels political, but from there the game becomes a slightly more complicated version of “kill the bastard with the crown” again.

If you want a game where politics are the point of the game, you have to give that power to the players, and that power has to have teeth. There have to be reasons to work together as well as be at odds with each other. The right balance is where compromise is the only attractive option because it stops the fighting.

What political systems in games have you really enjoyed?

Starting on Friday, I have 11 days of vacation set up. Of course, I’ll still be doing a little White Wolf work during that time (because “vacation” really means “a chance to catch up on work”), but I really do want to try and relax. So, the first announcement is that I’m planning to be less available on the Internet during that time. I have vacation responders set up for both of my email accounts, I won’t be on social networks as much, I won’t be updating this blog, and so on. I’m not going to be completely off the grid, but I do need some time away and live in my own head for a bit.

Part of the reason I’m doing that is that I want to finish off my Hamlet short story, and then roll right into revising and expanding my book of Tour de Holmes essays. Aside from comments on each of the stories, I also have in mind a discussion of Smart Watson vs. Dumb Watson, the popularity of Moriarty over the other (and sometimes more visible) villains in the canon, Holmes’ cocaine use, Watson’s wives, and (if I hate myself enough) the chronology of the cases.

So, faithful audience, what topics of the Sherlock Holmes canon would you like me to discuss/rant about in such a manuscript?

Michael Cunliffe

And I obey.

I’ve had an informal maxim in my head for years now as a game designer, and with every year that passes and every design I work on, I’m more and more certain it’s the right one. I’ve never really written it down before, but it goes something like this:

Mechanics drive player behavior.

On the surface, this sounds simple – a game about westerns should have rules about gunfights if it wants to have dramatic gunfights, and so on. But it goes deeper than that, I feel. Games feel different depending on what mechanics they use. This is more explicit with board games, card games, video games, and less flexible genres of game, but even the flavor and tenor of role-playing games are impacted by their choice of mechanics.

Take games of a similar genre, such as Boot Hill and Dust Devils.¹ Both are Western games, but each is focusing on something different, whether the design is intended or not, and as a result you get different games. While there is a tried-and-true tradition of hacking or drifting rules in RPGs, what the game focuses on in terms of mechanics will consciously and subconsciously impact how the game is played. While some players can (and will) resist against the tide of mechanics, most will gladly be swept right along, and will indulge in the gameplay the mechanics present and reinforce. And a chunk of the feel and setting for an RPG is created by how the players act within it.

So yes, mechanics should help establish the setting in RPGs. But as a designer, how can you do that?

First, you have to know on a very real level what your setting needs to have enshrined in a mechanic. I believe every version of Dungeons & Dragons has alignment, even if the actual system has gone through various changes. The reason, though, is simple: the difference between "good" and "evil" matters in that game. Even if it doesn’t often come up in the game (and in my experience, it doesn’t come up much at all, aside from the odd "Detect Evil" spell), the fact that it exists and that there are parts of the game that work differently depending on that choice means that in D&D being good or evil is meaningful to the game, and therefore to the setting.

Next, you have to make sure those mechanics matter. Every version of Vampire has had Humanity as a mechanic. And not only a little mechanic, a small number tucked away on a character sheet, but a large ladder of dots. It generally takes up a fair amount of real-estate on a character sheet, and many fans of the game will remark on it being a core element of the game. The actual mechanic isn’t used that often compared to other parts of the game, but when it is, it’s often a significant moment. You can literally lose your character on a bad dice roll, so you’re encouraged to take actions that keep you from having to make that roll. If you make that mechanic matter to the player on a fundamental level, it will impact their game.

(As a side note, I once was in a chronicle of Dark Ages Vampire while I was also playing in a different campaign of D&D. There was a fair amount of overlap in some setting elements, such as "medieval hero uses unusual powers to deal with problems," but each game felt very different at their base because of the different emphasis in mechanics. Similarly, I’ve played an Exalted game under the same Storyteller who ran Dark Ages Vampire, and again they were very different feeling games because of the mechanics.)

Finally, the rest of the game needs to reinforce this mechanic. Paranoia is good at this. Although different editions emphasize different parts of the setting,² the setting always reinforced and encourages the kind of player-against-player backstabbing and treachery that the rules encouraged. Everything about the game – even the name – backs up and supports this player dynamic.

This is why, I think, small games with a few mechanics and a strong direction are doing well these days – if you have a good vision for the game and everything else supports that vision, the game is stronger as a result.

I call myself a writer. I’ve had a number of titles over the course of my life, including “developer” and “designer.” I’ve worked on video games, role-playing games, fiction, non-fiction, television, podcasting, and I’ve even written a few programs in my day.¹ But if someone were to ask me who I am or what I do, I inevitably say I am a writer.

But here and now, in 2011, “writer” is about as specific as “human being” as a label. So much goes into my work as a writer these days that has very little to do with prose. Granted, I do a fair amount of activities that comprise “proper writing.” I have kept bound journals for years, and I use them quite often to keep track of notes and write down ideas. Every computer I have ever owned has had some kind of word processor on it, and these days even my phone has one. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about grammar, word choice, story construction, or something else related to the craft of writing. But there are so many things that have changed.

• “Writers are loners who need solitude.” That’s always been an unfortunate stereotype, I’ve found (even notorious loners like H. P. Lovecraft had a thriving community of correspondents), but it’s increasingly untrue across the board. Whether you self-publish, are traditionally published, or work full-time for a company as a writer, the need to be engage in a community (of fans, of other writers, or just other people) isn’t just easier, but necessary. You can call it “networking” or “monetizing a community” or “coming with tribe” or whatever buzzword you want, but it comes down to the fact that being a writer means you need to talk to other people. Period.
• “Writers write.” Well, sure. But they also market. They research. They learn how social networks work (because of the previous point). They make a website. They teach themselves new software. They support and promote the work of their friends and peers. They struggle with Kickstarter or find an agent or file their taxes. Writers still write, but writers also need to be businesspeople, because the days in which someone else being able to take care of everything are gone.
• “I’ll focus on the writing, and someone else will make it look good.” More and more, understanding of the aesthetics of the final product is important. What would look good on a cover? What font is best to use? How should things be formatted? In a world where a few mouse-clicks can change the entire formatting of a document, people are less likely to struggle through an ugly manuscript even if the words are strong and powerful. Writers have to think about the visual context of their work more and more, and many times have to create or modify that context themselves.
• “Writers drink.” Well, that’s still true.

It feels like professional writers are increasingly required to be jacks-of-all-trades, learning a little about a lot of skills and using those to apply back to the craft of writing. While it sounds daunting, it really isn’t. It’s balanced by the fact that it’s easier than ever to get people to read (and buy) your work. Before it could have only happened through a publisher, but now you can upload a document to Amazon and start selling it. The fight isn’t to get it out there — the fight is to get it noticed. And more and more the only person who is going to help you get noticed is you.

I think this is a good trend, over all. We need to get out more, lest we become feral wordmonkeys stewing in our cages and snapping at passersby.  We need to learn a little more about what it takes to get our beautiful work into the hands of others, lest we think that all other disciplines are easy compared to the weighty work of crafting worlds. We need to realize that there’s a whole world out there, lest we come to believe that sitting at a desk and waiting for people to throw money at us is a sound business plan.

I still think of myself as a writer. I just define “writing” a little more broadly than I used to.

First off, I should mention that I generally write first drafts in plain text, either using WriteMonkey on the PC, or PlainText on my iPad. I do this because both work well with DropBox (so I can move between software packages as needed), both have just enough features to be useful, and both lack a particular feature — easy ability to jump around in the manuscript. If it’s irritating to scroll back a few pages and check something, I’m more likely to just push forward, which is what I want for the first draft.

At this stage, though, I need to jump around and edit, so I saved the whole thing as a Word document.¹ The second draft was very simple — I took the comments I made to myself in square brackets and turned them into Word comments (getting them out of my text), and did a quick readthrough to get rid of grammatical errors and insert styles. Again, this is where the plain text draft helps me — since I can’t bold or italicize in plain text, I have to do this pass to make sure my formatting is accurate. I also found a few more notes of things to correct, and culled a couple of notes that were redundant.

I then broke my notes up into two categories: local and global. Local comments related to a particular scene or chunk of the manuscript (like “make sure to reference the detective’s bag here”), while global comments were things I needed to check against the whole manuscript (like “avoid an over-reliance on eyes,” which is a tell² of mine). Draft three then was taking on the local comments, and draft four was taking on the global comments. Finally, draft five was an overall polish and revision. Sometimes I do additional polish and revision drafts, but time was running out and I was getting a bit sick of looking at it, so I kept it to one pass.

It might seem counter-intuitive to change small things before large things, but it actually makes sense to me. If there’s a large thing that really needs to change first (like the character’s name I mentioned), odds are I’ve already decided that it needs to change, and I’ll do that in the second draft as I’m working my way through. If it’s really big, I have scrapped part (or all) of a first draft to address the problem, because usually if it’s that huge, I’ve written myself into some kind of corner. Either way, those kinds of problems never make it past draft two, so by starting small and working my way up, I’m fixing more urgent problems, and then making sure that it all fits together nicely later. If I went the other way around, it’s possible that my small fixes would break something larger in the manuscript, and I wouldn’t notice it.

Also, a trick I’ve picked up from when I was podcasting Whitechapel: for my polish pass, I read the story out loud to myself. I have caught so many errors and style flubs through this one technique that I simple cannot imagine writing fiction anymore without doing this step. It takes longer (and in my case, makes your wife look at you a bit strangely), but it really does work.

And so, five drafts later, I have the first draft for the editor. In the past editors have either taken my first draft entirely or made minor edits without needing my input, but I never assume that. I always expect that I will have to do even more revisions based on editorial feedback, which might include going back to draft one.

Writing is rewriting. Lots and lots of rewriting.

Cover for Slices of Fate

I’ll have more (likely a lot more) to talk about with this once it’s live, but for now I just wanted to pass along this press release. Thanks to Monica Valentinelli, Matt McElroy, and Jason Blair for helping me with this!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FR Press Announces Slices of Fate, the Collected Works of Author Eddy Webb

 December 2011, Madison, Wisconsin — Matt M McElroy, Publisher of FR Press, announced today that Slices of Fate, the collected works of author Eddy Webb, will debut early December 2011.

“Slices of Fate is a collection that spans the depth and breadth of Webb’s work,” said editor Monica Valentinelli. “Arranged chronologically, this is a beautiful representation of the stories and voices Webb has to offer his readers.”

Stories range from the author’s nod to literary tales like “A Sheepish Trip to Yorkshire” to more speculative works like “The Battlefield.” Essays include a series on two of Webb’s loves: wrestling and Sherlock Holmes. Combined with several pieces of microfiction, the collection is an in-depth representation of the author’s work thus far.

Both digital and print editions of the collection will be available through online retailers like DriveThruFiction.com in early December 2011.

About Eddy Webb: Eddy Webb (with a “y,” thank you) is a writer, podcaster, game designer, and transmedia developer. Hired on with CCP/White Wolf in late 2007, he currently designs content for the World of Darkness MMO. He lives a sitcom life with his wife, his roommate, a supervillain cat, and two pug dogs.

On the web: http://eddyfate.com

Twitter: @eddyfate

About Monica Valentinelli: Monica Valentinelli is an author and game designer who lurks in the dark. Her work has been published by several companies ranging from Crackle.com to Eden Studios. Her editing credits include Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror and Ninja Burger 2nd Edition.

On the web: http://www.mlvwrites.com

Twitter: @mlvalentine

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Monica-Valentinelli/209618519050005

About FR Press: FR Press is the publishing arm of popular horror and dark fantasy webzine FlamesRising.com. FR Press’s recent releases include Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror and Conventions for the Aspiring Game Professional.

On the web: http://www.flamesrising.com

Press Contact: Monica Valentinelli

Email Address: monica@mlvwrites.com

To be clear, I intentionally call this a shitty first draft. That first draft is paralyzing — the act of pure creation is terrifying, and many potential writers have crumbled under the gaze of that empty screen or that blank paper. For a while, I called it a “zero draft” so I wouldn’t even think about it as a draft, but I think that discounts the work that goes into it. Rather, I embrace the shitty first draft, because I have one goal and one goal only with this draft.

Finish it, by any means necessary.

There are lots and lots (and lots) of strategies for finishing that draft, and not only are they often unique to the writer, but they can be unique to the project as well. I generally find that I need a wordcount budget — some figure that I tell myself I will hit to qualify as success. In the past, I have used weekly budgets that I can allocate as time permits, but it had been a while since I hammered on a project with a timeline, so I decided that I needed a small but daily goal: 500 words a day.

This is where the vague, bullet-point list works well for me. With just 500 words, I don’t really have room to mess around. If I want to keep interested in what I’m working on, I have to feel a sense of progression. With the bullet-point outline, though, the small units work in my favor. It’s easy to go “Today, I’m going to write to this bullet-point in the story.” Since I’ve done the outline, I don’t have to worry too much about how it all hangs together or how this part connects to that part — I only have one point of focus. Get to the next signpost. Write to the next stopping point. Get 500 words down.

Finish it, by any means necessary.

If it’s a rough day, that’s all I need. But on days when it’s going well, I sometimes do a bit more, and that’s okay. Over the weekend, in fact, I pounded out over 2,000 words, because I was in the flow and wanted to get to the end. But the flow is also a trap, because I’ll find myself thinking about the story and wanting to make changes. A few times I wrote something in a later section of the story that changed or improved on something earlier, and I was convinced that I needed to go back and correct the earlier material.

But this is wrong. This is not forward progress. Instead, I left notes for myself in the draft in square brackets and all caps — something I can’t easily miss, and which will irritate the hell out of me when I go back to read it again. Here’s an example (which I’m sure makes no sense without context):

[WHAT DOES FLASH POWDER SMELL LIKE? ADD OTHER SENSES. ALSO MOVE THIS TO CORPSE SCENE (OR REPEAT IT THERE), TO ESTABLISH THAT SHE DOES THIS TO DOCUMENT EVIDENCE.]

Some writers point out that if you outline, there’s no surprise in the writing. Personally, I consider it more accurate to say that there’s no problem to solve in the writing, which sometimes makes it boring, but the point is much the same. However, a thin outline leaves a lot of room for problem-solving during the draft. In this story, I had no idea what the murder method was — only who was killed, by whom, and why. I actually had the victim hanged for half the story before I decided to have him shot instead (one of the many things I have to go back and rewrite). A couple of times I intentionally wrote myself into a cliffhanger, so when I picked it up the next day I would be ready to solve the problem before me. Each day meant I had something to think about, as well as a goal to accomplish.

Now I have a shitty first draft. The hard part — finishing it — is over. Now comes the fun part — tearing it all apart and putting it back together again.

This is my contribution to Tales of the Far West, an anthology for the Far West franchise. I’ve written for a number of franchises in the past (everything from Vampire: The Masquerade to Red Dwarf), and one of the key things of writing for someone else’s universe is that you have to research. You don’t have to just research the specific property in question (although for some established franchises, that can be a massive undertaking in itself), but you also have to look into ancillary research that relates to the property.

For example, Far West. Since this is a property that’s still being developed, Gareth was able to get me a short bible, and made himself available for questions. If I don’t know the franchise to start, I try to go into it relatively blind, so that I don’t form an idea for a story and then become disappointed. In this case, one particular paragraph grabbed my attention:

Our analogue of the Pinkerton Detectives, mixed with a bit of Detective Dee and more than a smidge of James West from Wild Wild West. Our “citified dandies” who use gadgets and tech.

I immediately pitched the idea of a detective story in this setting, and Gareth gave me the green light. This led to more specific research, including a lot of questions about the legal and political structures of this franchise.

But remember how I mentioned ancillary research? Far West is a kind of Wild West/steampunk setting with Asian influences, so I had to also look into criminal investigations and technology from the 19th century. Luckily, my Sherlock Holmes project meant that I had most of the resources on hand and fresh in my mind (part of the reason I made the pitch, if I’m being honest), but the point was that I had to do a fair bit of reading before the rough shape of the story took shape in my mind.

At a certain point, I had enough details in my head that I needed to start writing them down and banging them into an outline. I am a writer that lives by outlines. I have tried to write without an outline, but every time I end up getting lost half-way through the story and giving up. Every time I outline, I can finish the project. The down side is that sometimes it takes me weeks to get an outline strong enough for me to start writing, and some projects have died in the outline phase. Still, it’s better to have it die after a few pages rather than a few dozen (or hundred).

In this case, I did spend a few weeks just working on the outline. People who have worked with me as a developer have remarked on my clear, thorough outlines, but the ones I write for myself aren’t so clear. The first pass is usually just a hand-written list of details. I try to put them into some form of shape, and notice gaps which I then try to fill. For this story, I knew I was looking at a story of at least 5,000 words, and using the Lester Dent formula, I wanted to have a couple of twists and a couple of conflicts before the end.¹ In my notebook, I literally drew four boxes and scribbled facts, twists, and conflicts in each one to make sure I had the right balance. I immediately noticed a very soggy middle and a weak ending, so over the course of a week I wrote it a few different ways. At one point a key piece (the reason behind the murder) popped into my head, and the whole outline fell into place. I created a new SpringPad note (something I can easily get to on my computer, phone, or iPad for refeerence) and write a list of bullet points, covering the key facts of the backstory (since the murder happens before the story starts, I had to make sure those facts are straight as I introduce them), and the three or four things I needed to do each 1,500 words or so.

Then I started writing my first shitty draft, which I’ll get to in another post.

There’s been a lot of talk about how publishing has been radically changing over the past few years. The past couple of days, though, I’ve been thinking about how reading have been changing as well.

For a few years now, I’ve been using a site called GoodReads to track the books I read, and a number of my acquaintances online do as well. Before, I used to post a yearly list of books I was reading on LiveJournal, but I like the more social experience of GoodReads. As I’m reading a book, people will often comment on their own experiences on it or ask my opinion, and it becomes a reading club that goes at my own pace. But as I use the site and share my experiences, a couple of things have been rolling around in the back of my head.

First, GoodReads doesn’t really track rereading books really well. I mean, it’s possible to do it, but the site is really geared around reading a book once and calling it a day. As a perfect example, I’m rereading a lot of my Sherlock Holmes pastiches after going through the original canon, but I could really only track the books I hadn’t put into the site previously, or new books that I picked up between volumes. And in general, I’m not seeing a whole lot of people talking about picking up old favorites, but rather talking about the newest and greatest books in their collections.

Second, you can’t really tell how big a book is on the site,¹ and it seems the trend in book length is reversing. As reading moves more and more to devices and ebooks, it seems (to me at least) that a long book I would have worked through in a physical book I find difficult to slog through on my iPad. Further, as writers find that having more books for customers to buy means more than having one big book, self-published ebooks are getting shorter and shorter.

Between the two, it feels a bit like reading books are like unlocking achievements in video games. Since it’s harder to track progress by page count, books themselves track progress. Reading five novellas feels like more reading than one compilation of the same five novellas. I’ve actually caught myself tempted to track the individual novels in a compilation such as The Chronicles of Amber, because I want to feel like I’m reading more, even though it’s the exact same words.

Don’t get me wrong – anything that gets people reading more is awesome. This isn’t a screed against how things were better before that damned Kindle, or how things are more awesome because I can read books in an afternoon. But it is different, and when assumptions about how people read starts to change, writers have to pay attention to it and keep those new patterns in mind as they create.

See, Mark’s company (Magpie Games) is working on a Shakespearean role-playing game called The Play’s The Thing. They have a Kickstarter up right now, and I highly encourage you to check it out. Since the project is doing amazingly well in terms of funding (at the time I’m posting this, it’s just passed the 300% mark), Mark wants to put together a little anthology of “what if” stories — ways that Shakespeare might have taken a different turn, or the original stories placed in new settings. He approached me last weekend about doing one, and almost immediately I had a ton of ideas for it. Surprisingly, no one had yet claimed Hamlet, so I snagged it and sent Mark off a short pitch for a hard-boiled retelling of Hamlet tentatively titled “I Knew Him.”

Danny Hamlet is approached by his friend, Vincent Horatio, and gives Hamlet a recording from the deathbed of his father, Don Hamlet. The Don was the head of the Elsinore mob and implicates his advisor, Claudius, as the one who killed him. He demands that Danny avenge him.

Once I get my Far West story done, I’ll be diving into this one. If you’re interested in supporting the anthology and the game, head over to the Kickstarter and give it some love. And by “love,” I mean “cash.”

This is a special bonus, to celebrate the end of the “Tour de Holmes.”

In 1924, Doyle wrote a special miniaturized book to be placed with in the Queens’ Dolls’ House, which he titled “How Watson Learned The Trick.” It is one of five known extracanonical works of Doyle, and one of the few that is complete. Special thanks to Sherlockian.net for the text.

And thank you, my dear and patient readers, for going with me through these seventy-five essays.

Watson had been watching his companion intently ever since he had sat down to the breakfast table. Holmes happened to look up and catch his eye.

“Well, Watson, what are you thinking about?” he asked.

“About you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Holmes. I was thinking how superficial are these tricks of yours, and how wonderful it is that the public should continue to show interest in them.”

“I quite agree,” said Holmes. “In fact, I have a recollection that I have myself made a similar remark.”

“Your methods,” said Watson severely, “are really easily acquired.”

“No doubt,” Holmes answered with a smile. “Perhaps you will yourself give an example of this method of reasoning.”

“With pleasure,” said Watson. “I am able to say that you were greatly preoccupied when you got up this morning.”

“Excellent!” said Holmes. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because you are usually a very tidy man and yet you have forgotten to shave.”

“Dear me! How very clever!” said Holmes. “I had no idea, Watson, that you were so apt a pupil. Has your eagle eye detected anything more?”

“Yes, Holmes. You have a client named Barlow, and you have not been successful with his case.”

“Dear me, how could you know that?”

“I saw the name outside his envelope. When you opened it you gave a groan and thrust it into your pocket with a frown on your face.”

“Admirable! You are indeed observant. Any other points?”

“I fear, Holmes, that you have taken to financial speculation.”

“How could you tell that, Watson?”

“You opened the paper, turned to the financial page, and gave a loud exclamation of interest.”

“Well, that is very clever of you, Watson. Any more?”

“Yes, Holmes, you have put on your black coat, instead of your dressing gown, which proves that your are expecting some important visitor at once.”

“Anything more?”

“I have no doubt that I could find other points, Holmes, but I only give you these few, in order to show you that there are other people in the world who can be as clever as you.”

“And some not so clever,” said Holmes. “I admit that they are few, but I am afraid, my dear Watson, that I must count you among them.”

“What do you mean, Holmes?”

“Well, my dear fellow, I fear your deductions have not been so happy as I should have wished.”

“You mean that I was mistaken.”

“Just a little that way, I fear. Let us take the points in their order: I did not shave because I have sent my razor to be sharpened. I put on my coat because I have, worse luck, an early meeting with my dentist. His name is Barlow, and the letter was to confirm the appointment. The cricket page is beside the financial one, and I turned to it to find if Surrey was holding its own against Kent. But go on, Watson, go on! It ‘s a very superficial trick, and no doubt you will soon acquire it.”

Well, in 1927, Doyle himself selected that he thought were the best of his short stories in an essay for Strand Magazine. He picked twelve stories and ordered them from most to least favorite. Later he then added seven more, for a total of ninteen:

1. “The Speckled Band”
2. “The Red-Headed League”
3. “The Dancing Men”
4. “The Final Problem”
5. “A Scandal in Bohemia”
6. “The Empty House”
7. “The Five Orange Pips”
8. “The Second Stain”
9. “The Devil’s Foot”
10. “The Priory School”
11. “The Musgrave Ritual”
12. “The Reigate Squires”
13. “Silver Blaze”
14. “The Bruce-Partington Plans”
15. “The Crooked Man”
16. “The Man with the Twisted Lip”
17. “The Greek Interpreter”
18. “The Resident Patient”
19. “The Naval Treaty”

As for me, let’s say that I disagree with some of Doyle’s choices. I have my own list of favorites.

Of the novels, the best is far and away The Hound of the Baskervilles. There’s a reason why it’s the book most people know of when they think of Holmes, and why the deerstalker hat is so well known (even if it only shows up in this book and one or two other places).

Of the short stories, I’ve narrowed it down to my top ten (and let me tell you, I shuffled these around for the past twelve months). These aren’t necessarily the stories I would encourage a new reader to pick up, but rather the ones that I find myself reading over and over:

1. “A Scandal in Bohemia”: Although the first two novels predate this story, I feel this is where Doyle really finds his feet with Holmes.
2. “The Final Problem”/”The Empty House”: Yes, I’m cheating here, but I really feel these are both one connected story, and they also comprise most of the canonical references to Moriarty. Absolutely gripping stories.
3. “The Blue Carbuncle”: The first place where I deviate from Doyle, but for purely personal reasons. This story is such a part of my childhood that I can’t possibly be rational about it.
4. “The Red-Headed League”: Doyle uses this plot a few times throughout the canon, but the first time is, to me, the best.
5. “The Musgrave Ritual”: The actual ritual is used in various Sherlockian societies, and it’s very likely the seed for the cliche of “the butler did it.”
6. “Charles Augustus Milverton”: The other place where I disagree with Doyle. Milverton is probably the second-best villain in the canon.
7. “The Second Stain”: Probably the best example of the Lestrade/Holmes dynamic.
8. “The Bruce-Partington Plans”: Big use of Mycroft, a great spy story, and a good companion to “The Second Stain.”
9. “The Devil’s Foot”: The story isn’t always the best, but the powerful exploration of the friendship between Holmes and Watson is just too good.
10. “Silver Blaze”: I had a tough time between this and “The Five Orange Pips,” but the tracking scene and some of the dialogue just manages to put this into the top ten for me.

Shoscombe Old Place

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

So, here we are, the last story ever written for the canon. It has been a long tour with a lot of bumps and delays, but we end on… well, a fairly ambiguous note. At least it isn’t “The Mazarin Stone.”

We find another Yard detective — this time, Merivale. Merivale is the only policeman Holmes calls friend, and only one of three men that he considered a friend in the entire canon (the others are Charlie Peace and, of course, Watson). Holmes uses more card-playing references, but seems to have forgotten all that he knew about horse-racing from “Silver Blaze,” enough though this story is dates after that one (roughly around 1902). However, we finally get confirmation of Watson’s gambling habit, which previously had only been eluded to:

“By the way, Watson, you know something of racing?”

“I ought to. I pay for it with about half my wound pension.”

We see Holmes observing dogs, praising microscopes, and waxing poetic about fishing, and we get another reference to “Queer Street” (the previous one was in “The Second Stain”). He does not, however, take the law into his own hands, and seems positively against the idea, claiming that it “was my duty to bring the facts to light, and there I must leave it. As to the morality or decency of your conduct, it is not for me to express an opinion.” Perhaps even more unusual, Watson becomes surprisingly snobbish. His reluctance to accept Sir Robert as a murderer is at odds with not only his previous comments about Sir Robert nearly murdering someone, but also at odds with the line of upper class villains he’d encountered previously (including Moriarty!)

There are a couple of references to “Jews” in this story, but it’s really Victorian slang for “moneylender,” although it was still quite likely that the moneylenders in question were actually Jewish. Oh, casual racism.

The Veiled Lodger

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

This is the shortest of the stories, so there’s not a lot to say. It’s also not a mystery at all. Not in the “it was a pretty simple problem” sense, but in the “Holmes and Watson do nothing but listen to other people” sense. Holmes does nothing, because there is nothing to do.

Granted, there are some cool bits. I love the return to vague references that imply a word outside the stories, as when Watson talks about the attempts to destroy his papers. I enjoy Holmes’ blatent sarcasm as he says “Mrs. Merrilow does not object to tobacco, Watson, if you wish to indulge your filthy habits.”

As I make my way through the canon, I’ve largely abandoned any sane attempt to date the stories. However, there’s a problem in this story that I just can’t let slip past. In the story, Watson claims that Holmes was in active practice for 23 years, and that Watson was taking notes for only 17 of them. Holmes’ part of this is simple: Assuming you don’t count the three years of the Great Hiatus as being “active practice,” and you add 26 to the retirement year of 1903, you get 1877. This coincides with “The Musgrave Ritual,” which many chronologists set at 1879. However, Watson joined Holmes in 1881 or 1882, which only accounts for four or five years. There are a lot of theories to account for the missing year or two (the most plausible of which being that Watson didn’t actually take notes of the cases for a while, although this does contract “A Study in Scarlet”), but at the end of the day I have to accept that it’s just an error and be irritated by it.

Which is fine. The whole story irritates me. It’s not terrible, but it certainly isn’t good.

The Retired Colourman

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

“Tour de Holmes” week begins!

After two stories told from Holmes’ perspective, we’re back to a first-person story told by Watson. The classic formula is fully on display in this story, and there are some great moments between the two friends. For example, Watson is sent off as an “understudy” to collect evidence (an act that is retold later for good effect — it not only helps pacing, but also allows Holmes to comments on Watson’s efforts). Watson starts to explain what he’s found:

“… Right in the middle of them, a little island of ancient culture and comfort, lies this old home, surrounded by a high sun-baked wall mottled with lichens and topped with moss, the sort of wall —”

“Cut out the poetry, Watson,” said Holmes severely. “I note that it was a high brick wall.”

Holmes again chides Watson for missing details (like in “The Solitary Cyclist”), but at least this time he is more moderate, and often praises Watson’s observations, if not his deductions: “No one else would have done better. Some possibly not so well. But clearly you have missed some vital points.”

We see Holmes lamenting his relationship with the Yard (and how they send “incurables” to him), his preferences for city life (and “the horrors of a country inn” — quite at odds with his eventual retirement), and the fact that he considered burglery as an alternative profession. He remarks on Watson’s abilities to sway women, and the fact that there’s a telephone in Baker Street (previously mentioned in “The Illustrious Client” and “The Three Garridebs”). We also learn of a supposed rival to Holmes — Barker in Surrey — that we haven’t heard of before (or since). Many scholars have tried to link him to other characters in the canon; most notably the detective in “coloured glasses” noticed by Watson in “The Empty House.”

Historically, there’s a reference to Watson’s old school number. In boarding schools, each pupil was given an identification number, which is kept throughout the student’s career at that school. There’s also a passing mention of “Broadmoor,” which was a prison specifically for criminal lunatics (and is now a psychiatric hospital).

One thing that irritates me is that I’ve seen multiple references in my research that the story is set in 1898, but I can’t find anything in my version of the text that explicitly says that. Baring Gould seems to confirm it, though, so I’m not inclined to argue the point. However, this again brings up one of the irritations of Holmes scholarship. There are three different “official” versions of the text: the version published in the Strand magazine, the version eventually compiled into the British publications, and the version that was edited for the American publications. For casual reading the differences are largely negligable, but as you dive more and more into the study of Holmes and try to reconcile or even just track facts, time and again you’ll run into some flavor of “oh, that was mentioned in some other version of the text.” I swear, sometimes studying the different translations of the Bible is easier.

Tour de Holmes

Whew.

After fifteen months of reading, writing, and research, I’ve finally finished all of my “Tour de Holmes” essays — seventy-five in all. The last four are done, so I decided to spend all next week (Monday through Friday) putting them out. Friday will also have a special bonus — a rarely seen Holmes story by Doyle!

Now that the essays are done, what happens next? Well, as I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m going to compile all of them into one manuscript. Part of the reason to get these done now is that I want to use November to get my Far West short story done for Gareth, and to just take a break from writing about Holmes for a while. In December or January, I’ll pull up the manuscript up and start revising it. I already have a few places I want to add some more material, and there are a number of essays where I quickly hammered through to hit the deadline rather than digging into the text or the history as much as I could have. Once the manuscript is nicely polished and expanded upon, I’ll start shopping it around — I already have a couple of publishers who have expressed interest, and I want to explore that route before I consider self-publishing it.

In the meantime, if my fearless readers have had new thoughts or opinions on any of the stories, please feel free to go back and add more comments on the appropriate entries on my blog or LiveJournal. There wasn’t very much discussion during the Tour (although many people told me that they were enjoying reading the essays), but additional thoughts can illuminate places where I beef up or expand on my thoughts on particular topics.