I have entered into a period of vague dissatisfaction.
There are many exciting things on the horizon for Spell/Sword: final edits are almost done, designer is lined up for my cover, cover illustration is complete, entered into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest, should be ready to self-publish in February or March.
I’m very excited about these things. Every time I look at the cover art, my body begins to emit a
Artist – Rachelm
pearlescent light and strains of violin music can be heard by passersby.
But, you know, meh.
Nerd Concerns are also going well. I’m running two tabletop campaigns. Titan’s Wake, in Pathfinder, and Ocean of Not, in Legend of the Five Rings. Got a shiny new 3DS for Christmas from my beloved and have been playing with it more than I should. Beat the sublime Virtue’s Last Reward and am currently scratching the nostalgia itch with Legend of Zelda:OoT.
But still — grumble.
I even have ample TV fodder at the moment. Twin Peaks for my brain, and Bones for my stomach. We have a new dog that we’re fostering/becoming permanently attached to. My beloved is wonderful if over-busy.
Lately, I’ve been feeling the old, familiar desire to escape — to slip out of this reality for a while. An MMO would fit the bill nicely, but all of my computers are old clunkers that can’t handle it. Actually playing some tabletop would be nice as well, but I’m kind of booked with DM duties.
I guess it boils down to this: I just feel too damn ‘adult’ of late.
I’m ready for the book to be done and people to shower me with riches, so I can sit quietly in my apartment and play video games and work on the sequel. Buy a big house with a yard for the dogs, with a gigantic craft room for my beloved, and plenty of hammock space for all the burlesques. A swank kitchen for the Yellow Devil/Ladle to play in and a ton of guest rooms, so my family can come and stay whenever they want.
I’ve entered Spell/Sword into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest and Breakfast Buffet.
Fortunately, I still have right at a week to tweak my pitch, and fuss with the various parts of the entry forms. But I have officially entered, so I’ve got a slot, and I’ve got a chance.
If nothing else, the massive amount of editing I’ve done this week are suitable prize enough.
But I would not mind the $50,000 grand prize.
Or that plate of yum pictured above.
It’ll be nearly a month before I know if I even made it through the first round. So keep your fingers crossed for at least 5 weeks.
We haven’t spoken for years, probably not since college. Easily a decade. We were not particularly close, just in each others social circle. And now, of course, we are friends on Facebook.
I’m sure that, at most, I am a minor figure within your mental life. A blip on Facebook, just as you are to me. I’m sure you’ve seen my various status updates, the occasional rant or blog post. Or maybe not, you may have a lot more friends than I, so my thoughts are rarely noticed by you as you peruse the Internet Agora.
But I’ve been noticing your posts. More and more. They unsettle and confuse me. They make me realize how little I knew you in the past, and how little understanding I have of the person you are in the present. I am left with small crumbs of data – trying to extrapolate the person that writes the things that you do.
The person that I knew did not speak with such surety, such bone-certainty, such pure and righteous fervor. Did you believe these things when I first knew you? Are they beliefs that you have discovered as you have aged?
I have a belief of my own. A credo of sorts.
Do not argue with people, unless you have something to gain from it.
People with passionate beliefs are not going to abandon them due to a well-turned phrase or a cunning allusion. I can bring every drop of eloquence, and emotion, and craft that I possess; and at the end of the argument nothing has changed. I believe as I do, and you believe as you do. Most arguments – online most prominently – are simply exercises in each party shouting their beliefs louder and louder until everyone walks away in disgust. Points are tallied, victories are claimed, and nothing has changed. I believe as I do, and you believe as you do.
Since there is nothing to gain, there is no purpose in engaging in an argument.
So when people share their beliefs I listen and move on. They share them with cruelty, with derision, with simple faith, with arcane reason, with the tongues of angels, with the acumen of used car salesmen. I listen and move on. At least that is what I consider to be the course of wisdom.
I have nothing to gain, so there is no reason to argue.
If someone continues to display behavior or rhetoric that I find unpalatable, I simply choose to stop listening. Unfriend, unfollow, block — all terms for the act of ceasing to heed. I’ve done it in the past without a second thought. But with your words I find myself reluctant to do so. You have become a canker sore in my online consumption.
There is a temerity in certainty. There is an offense in self-righteousness. There is an arrogance in your words. And that is what galls me.
That your view is the only rational one, that the whole world is crumbling and only you can see it. That people who disagree with you are fools. Uneducated fools who make their own choices based on fear or ignorance or blind sin. If only they will listen, if only they will listen to the good sense that you humbly proffer.
You pick apart the words and thoughts and decisions of those who disagree with a manic glee and a permanent eye-roll. You are so happy to be right, holding each gem of your triumph high for all to see.
You take a very complicated issue and make it very, very simple. And not out of a sense of nobility, or a desire to correct the ills of the world. You just want to be right.
You need to be right.
At least that’s what I believe is the root of this. I’m a cynic. I am far too conversant with the human compulsion towards supremacy, that lizard-brain requirement to be right, right, right. To tear out the eyes of any who are wrong. The holy fire that fills our brains when we are just – smiting the blasphemers and bringing order to the universe. The smug confidence, the knowledge that the other tribe is comprised of simpletons and degenerates.
It’s an old flame in the human mind. The Other Tribe is Evil.
So, why am I writing this to you?
I do not name you, nor address the specific issue that fills me with distaste. As stated, there is nothing to gain from an argument, so I have no wish to engage in one.
I just want to know…what exactly? I want to know how you can be so sure. What do you gain? Do you truly believe that speaking the way that you do will change the hearts and minds of those who read? Is your belief so pure that you feel that you must speak out?
If this issue is truly important to you, why do you choose this method to promote it? Surely derision, arrogance, and wrath are not the most effective ways to share your thoughts?
What do you gain?
I am afraid that I know the answer. But I want to be wrong. I want to discover that you truly do not intend these words to filled with bile, that you truly care so deeply about this issue that your passion outpaces your reason.
But I don’t think that’s it.
I think you are empty and sad.
And that is not the fate I would wish for the person I knew long ago.
I don’t understand, and I don’t agree, and I fear that you are living a life of paranoia and don’t even know it. But I will listen, I will keep listening as long as I can and I will not argue.
To the person who I fear you are, I want to say this. Shut up. Shut the fuck up.
To the person who I thought you were long ago, I want to say this.
Editing on Spell/Sword continues this week. I’ve stalled long enough, picking at the edges, making the easy fixes. Time to get in there — not with the fire and sword — but with the spade and the watering can. I will be cutting a few sections – mainly when I combine two chapters into one. I come to raise Caesar, not to bury him. Time to make the good stuff — GOODER.
Most of my problems are with the first eight chapters. The story doesn’t really settle into a groove,
Artist Unknown
and “become good” until a third of the way through the book. That’s, you know, kind of a problem.
The first chapters aren’t bad, per se. Just a little unfocused. I need to clarify the positive, and beat back the connective tissue. It had to be there to get me far enough into the book to know what it was about, but now it disgusts me. DISGUST.
Now that I’m getting closer to actually publishing the thing, I find myself worrying about the classical forms. Stupid, I know, for a book that heavily features wyverns. All of the great tales are a circle, the heroes return to the beginning with the Elixir and the world is made anew. The full arc of Spell/Sword is a tragedy of course, but this first episode is tangentially heroic. Or faux-heroic?
Ha, do I even know anymore?
It’s a story about two people, two kids. Two people that are doing pretty shit-tastically on their own. They meet, become friends, and learn that together they can incrementally reduce their level of life pooch-screwing.
In classical terms: No Big Whoop.
Two characters, incomplete. Then two characters, complete.
With no romance. Moirails, to use the excellent term that Homestuck provided.
I made this! Deal with it. I dream of the day when readers anxiously wait for my next book, they check my blog, nut in GRRM NFL-fixation style I only post the current model I’m building. “Damn, Book Six is taking forever! But that Zaku is kind of sweet…”
I’ve been thinking about evil, lately. Or rather I’ve been thinking about Evil.
In Noctem, Audrey Benjaminsen
Mainly in a literary sense, but never just. The membrane that separates Fiction from Reality is quite porous, and I’ve never quite understood where one leaves off and the other begins — if there even is a clear demarcation. I don’t think they are binary, is what I’m saying. Our eyes, our hands, the senses five — all can lie, and the story of a hero can make pulses quick and move the heart blood of a nation. Things that aren’t Real still are. Certain ideas and stories and incarnate ideals have a weight, a presence. They matter. They have matter and mass, and gravity begins to bow at their approach.
Without dipping into too theological depths, allow me to elucidate. Superman, The Doctor, Jesus, Coyote, Heracles, the Monkey King, Shiva, Sam and Dean Winchester, Frodo, Katniss, Tyrion,Santa Claus, Odin, Horus. They aren’t just empty names — they have meaning, they have weight. They have a place in their own stories, but also in the stories of our own lives. As a symbol, a periodic element of courage, or grace, or love, or cunning — these names have wrought great change. Measurable, quantifiable change in the laboratory of Reality. I may be assuming a lot, but I know that in my own mind, my own psycho-chemistry these names have had their effect. I try to align myself with the good, and avoid the evil.
So, as I tell my own stories — I realize that I’m creating my own pantheon.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that the Evil Ones, the dark shadows to these heroes’ light, they matter too. Sauron, Shai’tan, Lucifer, the Master, Lex Luthor. If there must be an absolute negative pole in my view of the cosmos, what am I to name it?
Names matter too, maybe most of all.
Which is an even more roundabout way of saying, I’m calling it The Dark. Whatever it is, that quiet force of End, the blotter of sunny skies, the sideways laughter in empty halls. The Option serves The Dark, of that I’m reasonably certain.
So, no one asked, isn’t this just the Nothing and the Gmork all over again? Probably. But I like to think I’m reflecting a universal truth, a universal name. As a child I was afraid of the Nothing and it’s servant — and now when I write I am afraid of the Option and its master.
I’m honestly not sure what I’m getting at.
“It’s one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”
― Edward Albee, The American Dream & The Zoo Story
[This is what I do when I see a cow out the car window. Just replace ‘blog’ with ‘cow’ and it’s the same dialogue. It is incredibly endearing, and never annoys anyone else in the car.]
I know you can HEAR ME COW.
So, yeah — let’s shake some cobwebs off. My production of Pippin is finished, so now I can reroute those system resources back to all of the other plates I have spinning in the ether. Let’s list them! YAY, LISTS.
1. Spell/Sword Zeta Draft. This would be an amazing name for an anime. This is the big project, my main focus. Incorporating all the feedback from my Beta Readers, and working my way to the penultimate draft. I’m planning to add about 5000 words to the draft, so I’ll need to get one last set of eyes on the manuscript before I move forward to Self Publishing Ragnarok.
2. Self Publishing Ragnarok. Also an amazing anime title. My goal is to get the book into a buy-able format, through CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon. I’m researching all of the technical knowledge needed for doing that, so when I am ready to move forward it won’t be a giant learning curve clusterfuck.
IS THE JPEG OF YOUR COVER ART BELOW THE MAXIMUM PIXEL LIMIT???
3. Cover Art. I’ve seen some early sketches from Mike/Poopbird, and I can’t wait to see the finished product. Got to make sure I have all the specs for pixel limits, image size, etc. to make it easy and painless for him once the design is complete.
4. Titan’s Wake. My occasional Pathfinder campaign. Time to kick it in the shins and get the PC’s moving toward something approaching the plot. Scheduling has been an issue, leading to some signal loss — gotta get the players on some sort of regular game night schedule, or the campaign is just going to fizzle.
5. The Ocean of Not. New and shiny Legend of the Five Rings campaign! Meeting with the players in early January to make characters, and hopefully kick off the game shortly thereafter. I’m planning on having a forum component for this one, and most of the players are Lodestar alumni —very excited to get back in the trenches.
6. Shadeaux Bros. Christmas Album. Got to jump on this one with both feet, as it does have a built in deadline. Unfamiliar with our previous work? Take a listen and be forever changed.
7. A Few Good Men. I have a small part in the next Mainstage production at the theatre. I get to play an actual person, which is not my strong suit.
Broad physical comedy is what I do.
8. Regular Blogging. I need to get back on a regular update schedule, 3-5 times per week. Maybe I’ll bring back Story on Demand to prime the pump, but I’m hoping now that working on the book is moving back to my main creative focus, I’ll have more time and writerly thoughts to expound upon.
Lot of stuff. Lot of cows. I love the feeling of energy and mind-space coming online – really looking forward to all of these projects!
We work so hard to build this little world. A better world, a world of lights and shadows. The world we all want to live in. Our Twilight Kingdom.
And it is fleeting. From its birth, it begins to decay. To fall through the sand-glass. We pour energy into it, it shines. We dance, we sing, we appear. We wear the clothes of our better selves, or the masks of our hidden villains.
But then it ends. Fade, extinguish,explode. One way or another. We leave the Kingdom with nothing.
So be it.
Come and burn with me.
Come and fly.
But only for a little while.
spell-sword.com 