A Little Extra

Over this past weekend, I got a new board game called Forbidden Desert. It’s a cooperative game in which the players attempt to escape a desert that covers the remains of an ancient civilization with incredible technology. Each foray into the game feels like something I might read by Frank Herbert. As good as the game is, it’s made great by the inclusion of the actual airship that you are escaping on. Not only is the airship that you have to find real, so are the parts that you have to gather to make it move. This makes it necessary to assemble the pieces together and gives each player a physical object to find and move. It’s a small detail that makes the whole thing all the more immersive.

Forbidden Desert‘s extra immersive detail is fairly obvious, if ingenious. What, then, is the immersive quality of literature? What sits us down to finish a book? It isn’t just the story, though good plot is necessary for a good book. It isn’t just the structure, though that can be key to keeping interest up. I think it has more to do with well placed detail. The kind of detail that catches the eye, the things we all would notice.

There is a difference between good detail and too much detail. If Forbidden Desert had a a bunch of miniatures to place on every excavated tile, then the detail would be almost worthless. The beauty of the pieces that you find and gather is that they are rare to find. They take effort and are a reward because of it. What makes detail rewarding in a book is keeping the details to things a normal person would notice. You can slip some extraneous details that a specific character might notice into the picture, but putting emphasis on something the character wouldn’t notice will only frustrate the reader as they struggle to stay patient with a character who hasn’t had the evidence presented to him. Inversely, if the reader is presented with too much information, they will struggle to figure out what is actually important and what is padding out your page run. Find a good median.

Now I’m off to play another round of Forbidden Desert. Maybe my group can actually beat it this time.

Stealing Home

Last night, I was playing Dungeons & Dragons with some friends. Most of them are fairly new to the game, with this being their first campaign. As such, previous games have been fairly quiet affairs with most of them only saying something when called upon. Not this game. This game they worked together. They talked to each other. They played their characters in a way to create a story with each other, and that was what I was wanting all along.

During the game they were forced to steal their ship back from a terrible gang of hobgoblin pirates. Their biggest issue was catching up with their ship, and boarding it. Several players ended up in the water. Finally, the group collaborated, shouting to each other in character. The half-elf sorceress turned the gnome assassin invisible as he poisoned his short sword. The elf barbarian put him into the mounted ballista as the dragonborn Barbarian aimed it. The human paladin navigated the ship closer and held them steady. The gnome was airborne. He made it to the other ship, to go around wreaking havoc and cutting off hands.

Each character put in their efforts as their characters would. Leading the charge, offering aid, working towards safety. They worked through a puzzle beautifully. In doing so, they created a story separate from the one I had created as the dungeon master. They collaborated in a magical bit of improvisation that couldn’t help but succeed. It’s these moments, these instances, that show why I truly love Dungeons & Dragons. The story always comes through when people start to work together.

If you’re out there struggling to get the next thing written down. To find the next words or actions to make a character seem genuine, find someone you trust and have them read through it, take their criticism as far as you’re willing while remembering they too are fallible, and, like my players, might be falling back in the water after sending you flying to your goal.

Now to plan for the next game. Maybe I’ll kill someone off.

Unfinished

Who’s up for a challenge today? I want everyone who reads this to find a book they started but never finished and commit to finishing the book. I know so many people who will start a book and get distracted by life they set the book down and don’t pick it back up. I can say I intimately know one of these people because I am one of these people. As such, it’s surprising how difficult it can be to find time to read, when it’s so easy to find something to read.

Every time I step into my local library I pick up at least one book. Not because I’m done with the books I own, but because it looks incredible. How could I not read this novel about a far future jail break that leaves the body behind and only transports the consciousness? What about this one about a man who has no memories but lives in a state between life and death protecting the dead from intervention by the living? Oh boy! They have a dictionary! Can’t ever seem to put that down. It makes me feel all sagacious inside. So, if you need to avoid distractions from other books like I do, don’t go to the library. I won’t be.

At least, not until I finish Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I picked this one out of the multitude of half finished books I own because my girlfriend is reading it. I always find that having someone else reading along with me can help. Partially because I can discuss the book in some detail and have an external source of encouragement. No one wants to be the person behind in the book. Maybe it’s a sense of competition. Maybe it’s a desire to be spoiler free. Whatever the reason, I’ve always found it easier to read with others.

Now go forth and read! If you have any challenges for me, feel free to post them as comments on this post, or bottle them up deep inside for years until they become a sagging gray pit of regret. I’m cool with whatever.

Just a Bad Dream

The other night, my girlfriend had a bad dream. Not a nightmare, exactly, but a bad dream. In the dream, she was watching a twelve year-old girl and her younger brother dangling in a truck off a cliff. The truck fell into the water. The truck plummeted nose first to the bottom of a river below. They escaped, but the rapids were pulling them down and away, so she tried to push him back into the cab through the back window. A desperate effort to save his life. The back window had been broken into a gaping maw. The truck itself was pushed over and over into the riverbed. The little boy was chewed to bits while his sister watched in horror. My girlfriend found this upsetting, but not frightening.

It’s not that her dreams don’t ever scare her. A while back, she had a dream that she was in a city at night. The city was made up of rundown brownstones. Streetlights glinted off of puddles from recent rain. Each building was spaced by an alley way. As she walked along the street, she began to whistle a tune. From across the street, her whistling was returned with humming. She looked over to see who was there. She saw a young girl, no more than 7 or 8,  in full Victorian dress with a hat pulled down low, hiding her eyes. My girlfriend stopped whistling. A sense of foreboding came over her and she hurried along. The humming of the ethereal song continued. It was like her scent had been caught. The next alleyway she saw the girl again. The girl stood perfectly still but was noticeably closer. My girlfriend suddenly knew that the girl wanted to hurt her, torture her, draw her death out over years. She began to run. In each alleyway on both sides of the street the girl came ever closer. More and more desperately my girlfriend ran, until the girl was at the entrance of the alleyway across the street, and the alleyway right in front of her loomed. Then she awoke, frigid and sweating.

The big difference between these dreams is that she felt more involved in the story of the girl, because it was her that was there. The river was strangers that she didn’t know. She felt like she was just watching a movie with the strangers. This is an advantage novelists have over filmmakers in creating horror. The visceral gore only goes so far in creating emotions. So often it never goes far enough to create horror, just trigger our gag reflexes. Film does try to emulate the protagonist of some horror, by focusing on a single character as the story progresses, but written fiction can put them even further inside their head, into the primordial pockets of fear that reside there.

Always make sure that when you write horror, it scares the shit out of you too. I have to go change my underwear now.

Recuperation

What an incredibly exhausting and fun weekend I’ve had. It has been incredible. I’ve spent the weekend writing and playing various forms of games with friends I rarely see. At the end of the day I can only take one thing away from the experience. Well, besides the grab bags and various fun items purchased at the convention, and that is exhaustion. I’ve never been quite so tired as that. Between the heat, the constant movement, the mental strain put on me by some of the games, I can’t say I’ve ever been quite this tired or happy. And now for a brief bit of recuperation.

Perhaps I’m a bit of a homebody, but I always feel a day spent sleeping in and lounging around at home is the way to fill your sails. Turn on the television and ignore it while I fall asleep trying to read a good book. Such is a day that dreams are made of. Then, when waking from the nap, I go out and set up the sequel on the hammock. Afterwards, I go inside and cuddle a puppy or two and fall asleep, fully prepared to be productive the next day.

That’s merely a dream that never seems to fully come true. I get to be too much of a busy body, thinking of all the things I need to do after recuperating that I can’t quite recuperate. Of late, I’ve started doing them, once started I go back to my dream of recuperation until I nag myself back out of it. It’s quite the frustrating bit of neurotic behavior, but it makes me a productive member of the household. My only recourse is to sleep in, because if I don’t wake up, I can’t nag myself into being responsible.

On the other hand that is how I wind up posting almost an hour late on a daily blog. How awful of me. Do forgive me.

Socializing Writing

Over this past weekend, I’ve been cavorting in the incredible madness that is a comic convention. People will be swarming all around me today, on the last day of the convention. It’s been a blast. More than that, it has been a reminder that I feel most inspired to write when I’ve been around people.

There are two common images of the writer that I’ve seen in modern depictions. The stereotypical coffee house writer on their mac book pro, looking around smugly, secure in their elitism as they sip their specialty drink and make the occasional peck at the keyboard. Who is that guy kidding? They just want to talk about what they’re writing and have their ego stroked. Me too for that matter. The second depiction is of a person completely isolating themselves as they desperately type out their great American novel. I could never be the second. In spite of my most productive writing being writing I do while isolated, if I don’t regularly interact with people I feel I lose a couple of edges.

The first edge I lose is voice. It’s so much easier to write dialogue when I’ve been talking to people. It isn’t that their dialect embeds itself into my writing, but rather that their word choice makes me subconsciously aware of the way their background influences their speech. I start to associate the way real people talk with certain occupations, social classes, and regions of the country. Those differences in tone give a rich atmosphere to any dialogue. It can keep up pace and intrigue fairly well by itself. It can elevate dry moments and turn necessary exposition into a fun bit of character development.

The second edge is inspiration. There is something incredibly intriguing to me about crowds. Little snippets of conversation overheard. A person furiously arguing about something and calling a person a “cunt-waffle” in a most serious tone of voice. A young woman looking like she’s on the verge of tears as she runs past, but makes sure to force a smile on the way back. A mother scolding her son after catching him stare at a scantily clad cosplaying young woman. Each is a little bit of flavor and background that have their own unique stories. Sometimes these become enrichment for the background of other stories, sometimes they will become the inspiration for their own stories.

Now I’m off to immerse myself in the last day of fun, insanity, and the occasional whiff of unwashed neckbeard.

Flexing My Plans

I’ve never been great at sticking to plans. Something about the rigidity of plans always made me skittish, if not outright rebellious. It can be a real problem. When I dislocated both of my knees while practicing Tae Kwon Do when I was younger, I was given an exercise plan. Each day I was supposed to use a stationary bike for at least sixty minutes. Every other day I was supposed to do three sets of twelve reps on a leg press machine. I stuck to this for a week. The next week I went three times. The week after that I went once. Then I stopped going for a month.

My problem with the plan was self-enforced rigidity. I set out a specific time to go to the gym every day, but that time was right in the middle of a bunch of mentally exhausting classes, so I often didn’t go. Instead, I would watch videos on my phone until the next class. The problem wasn’t the plan that I was given but the plan that I made. I locked myself into a time period that was infeasible which lead me to missing the crucial point of the plan: exercising. Had I remained flexible about the times I worked on restrengthening my knees, then I wouldn’t have to worry about my knees hurting whenever the barometric pressure changes now. Of course, that’s not the only reason I didn’t stick to the plan.

It’s hard for me to stick to a plan that isn’t mine or that didn’t have my influence in it’s creation. I would make a terrible soldier. With my physical therapy regimen, I didn’t feel like I could comfortably keep up the pace. I was constantly sore in the worst ways. I didn’t have the drive to keep going after working out. I was exhausted from doing too much and overexerting myself. Instead of throttling it back a notch I pushed myself full force. The candle burned from both ends and was quickly snuffed out. Another example of this is an extracurricular online writing course I took suggested I write at least 2000 words a day outside of any curricular writing I was doing. I tried as hard as I could but I could not pump out those 2000 words and keep afloat of everything else. So what ultimately gave, I’m ashamed to say, was my personal writing.

Clearly, my writing hasn’t stopped. I write this blog as a personal experience every day. It varies in length but I make sure to have a completed blog by noon every day. I try to write before bed, but if I’m too tired I write before breakfast. Afterwards, I work on fiction projects. I keep pushing forward to make sure my writing is put out there in one form or another.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m starving this morning.

Judging Issues

There’s a song on the radio that I don’t like. This isn’t unusual for most people. I think most people have disliked a popular song at one time or another. The song I dislike is Issues by Julia Michaels. I have several issues with this song. The idea that judgment on a personal level is something that is inherently negative, or okay to threaten people with is ridiculous. It’s the kind of thinking that prevents the growth of healthy relationships.

Judgement has come to have this inherently negative connotation in modern diction that it doesn’t completely deserve. Certainly, things like criminal cases are judged, just as products are judged by critics, even in day to day lingo one might jokingly suggest they are judging a friend after that friend has made a fool of himself. The problem is there are aspects of judging that aren’t inherently negative, like not guilty sentences, good products, or at chili competitions. Besides even that, judging someone you’re in a relationship with, be it romantic or platonic, is important as it tells you whether or not this is a healthy relationship. No one should ever tell someone to not judge their abusive spouse just because the abuser abuses without passing judgement on the abused. Nor should the realization that a relationship isn’t maturing in a way that’s true to who you are be suppressed because you don’t want to be thought cruel.

The painful truth is that some judgement is needed, but please keep in mind one simple rule: don’t be a dick about it. Sure, you should put in some effort to judge people, but let’s be honest, most judgements require no effort at all. You should avoid these kinds of judgements, because they aren’t looking at facts, just the shallowest of feelings. If you think, my girlfriend doesn’t put away dishes, you shouldn’t immediately jump to breaking up, or think her an unclean heathen who should be thrown to the pigs for her obscene filth. Instead, take into consideration the other things that she does to clean, to take care of things, outside responsibilities and the fact that you are also a fallible human who will sometimes need a break just like she does. If after all consideration you still think the same thing, I’d recommend reexamining your life. Seriously, how does a relationship get that bad? Furthermore, if someone isn’t effecting your actual life, then don’t judge them. The homeless guy you see when you drive to work isn’t necessarily a crack head, and even if he is, you don’t know why.

A politician threatening to take out internet neutrality laws is definitely in the category of judgable, though. Let them know you think that here.

Birthdays

Today is my mother’s birthday. For those of you looking to steal my identity, please take note. Her maiden name was Wellington, first name Julia. Her favorite color is chartreuse. Now that we have that out of the way, happy birthday, mom, and everyone else who’s birthday it happens to be. Now let’s talk about birthdays.

As a kid, I hated birthdays. I always felt awkward at them. I never felt like I reacted in exactly the right way to the presents I was given. It wasn’t that they weren’t surprising or that I didn’t enjoy them, I just didn’t know how to express them. It didn’t help that, being the middle child, I wasn’t accustomed to being the center of attention, so at my birthdays it always just felt wrong. Children’s birthdays are weird when I was growing up. I either invited the entire class to my party or it was just my family that lived within driving distance. Neither of these were options that I wanted to explore but often did.

Eventually, I grew out of the anxiety ridden experiences of birthdays, but realized that I kind of liked birthdays, just not my own. I began to go to every birthday to which I was invited. I once met a guy who was up in my town for the summer and discovered his birthday was that day. I told this perfect stranger to wait in this park with my group of friends for about an hour then tore around town buying a cake, prominently featuring Winnie the Pooh, the book Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi, and an assortment of random nicknacks. We were all a bunch of happy teenagers that day being ridiculous party goers.

More recently, I’ve been asking everyone I know when their birthday is and trying to give everyone I consider a close friend a present. It’s hard work, especially when I have to budget out everything, but it’s honestly been rewarding. I’ve looked out and got little things for many people. It’s always rewarding to see someone’s expression when they get something, and we’re finally at the age where getting anything is a big deal. The cost of every item is measured and calculated in to our expenses and some small luxuries are forced to the wayside. Seeing someone cares enough to give you that small luxury and show that they know you well enough to know you want it is a feeling I’ve rarely felt matched in my life.

If you’re trying to steal my identity, start with the gift giving in my name.

Working It Out

Yesterday, I worked out with a good friend of mine for the first time and it was kind of awful. We come from two very different exercise backgrounds. I’m from a background of casual exercise done with friends and family. He’s an athlete who has played sports for more years than I’ve been alive, it seems. This has lead to two very different philosophies when it comes to exercise. His more traditional view of exercise needing to be a place where you push yourself to your extremes, and my more relaxed view that doing it is the most important part and that you should be able to have fun with it at the same time. Both views are valid. His will certainly get faster results, but mine will keep me going strong and able to function in other ways.

To be completely fair, the two aren’t even mutually exclusive. I can push myself to the limit and still have fun. I do believe that he has fun working out as intensely as he does and pushing himself harder and farther. It just happens that we have two very different sets of abilities and ideas as to what makes that workout enjoyable. He has the idea that proving capability past what was believed possible is the pinnacle of achievement. My idea is that pushing myself to the point that I feel sore but somewhat energized is the best kind of exercise. It’s a difference of going all out versus pushing the limit more gradually.

It may seem fair to some that I don’t go workout with my friend again. After all, I did nearly pass out due to instructions he gave me on the leg press, which was terrifying. The first experience helped me realize something. I can say no. It felt intense and I was somewhat in awe of my friend’s extensive experience in exercise, but he doesn’t know what my body is saying. I realized that I’m much more in tune with my body than I had realized previously, and need to listen to the voice inside my head that tells me that I can’t do something once I’ve tried. I won’t let that stop me from trying to get better. Instead it will help me set goals for myself, milestones to show my progress until I get to my destination.

Anyways, the nurse is here with my full body ice pack, so I should go.