ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Busy Today

GenreCon looms like a big, awesome loomy thing, which means I’m alternating between YO, I’M CRAZY BUSY DUDES and flaking out on the couch in front of wrestling DVDS. In deference to my current state, I’m going to skip today’s post and point towards an awesome thing on the internet: THE LIZZIE BENNETT DIARIES About four months ago my flatmate wandered past and said words to the effect of “Hank, The Vlog Brother who isn’t not John Green, is doing a youtube recreation of Pride and Prejudice. You should really check it out.” Given that the last time he said this it led me to John Green’s Swindowntown Swiddleypoopers youtube videos, I flagged it as one of those things I should follow up on and immediately forgot about. Which is, like, utter damn stupid of me. ‘Cause, a) I really like Pride and Prejudice, b) I really like smart adaptations, and c) I’m fascinated by people doing smart things that play to the internet’s strength. The series is three for three on that respect, so it was really something I should have started watching right damn then. Eventually I did get my act together and check out the first episode, which immediately meant I spent the next two hours watching every episode currently available (which was a lot) and subscribing to the youtube channel (currently the only channel I actually subscribe too). The Lizzie Bennett diaries are many, many kinds of awesome and I encourage you to check ’em out.

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22/10/2012 2 Comments
Gaming

Running a Villain Audit

A lot of people have been offering advice since I admitted that the fights in my Mutants and Masterminds campaign, Shock & Awesome, haven’t exactly been up to snuff. I’m still in the process of compiling it all, since the conversation seems to have spread to multiple message-boards in addition to the blog, but it’s useful stuff (also, you guys rock). Hopefully, by the time I get around to posting the lessons I’ve learned after sixty sessions, things will have improved a whole bunch. ‘Course, given that we were on a three-week break from the game while one of the players is overseas, I’d already started tackling ways to fine-tune the campaign during the downtime. It’s one of the nice things about taking a break when you’re gaming weekly – it gives you the space to look back and reflect. In this instance I had a sneaking suspicion that my own habits were a  part of the dull-fight-scene problem, so over the last couple of weeks I’ve gathered up my campaign note and performed: THE VILLAIN AUDIT It’s easy to get stuck into a rut when it comes to bad guys. As GMs we have a natural inclination towards certain times of opposition, usually because they’re either statistically easy to prepare and run (in complex game systems) or the kind of antagonist who resonates with us in more traditional narratives. Either way, in the back of our brain, GMs have a short set of Ur-villain archetypes that they reach for out

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19/10/2012 5 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

On Writing In the Morning

Putting this one here as a kind of addendum to my last post: it’s time to start bringing the laptop to work and spending my morning writing-shift down in the State Library cafe. With everything being all NOW NOW NOW inside my head in the lead-up to GenreCon, it’s becoming increasingly easy to come into work early and start putting out fires (metaphorically speaking) related to the event. This isn’t why I come into work early every morning. Much as I like my job, I don’t like it enough that I’m willing to spend an extra hour a day working on it without getting paid (well, I am, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve stayed late to get some urgent stuff done a couple of times in the last month, but I’m not willing to give my job this particular writing hour).  The morning writing shift has become increasingly sacred to me over the last couple of months, which is weird, ’cause I’m not a morning writer by inclination. I keep having conversations with people who normally follow my progress on twitter and it’s interesting to see their perspectives too: To me it frequently feels like I’m just hanging in there – getting the bare minimum done in order to continue thinking of myself as a writer while working full-time. To others, apparently, the habit of banging out 500 to 700 words every morning makes it seem like I’m storming forward (less so, now that I don’t tweet my wordcount every morning, but

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17/10/2012 No Comments
Journal

What it’s like to be me at the moment

8:02 in the morning and I’ve snuck into work early to get some writing done. This has become a particularly well-worn part of my routine of late – so much so that I’ve come into work early on days when I wasn’t planning on writing, simply ’cause my morning habit is largely this: wake up, noodle around on the smart phone for a couple of minutes, shower, breakfast, drive to work, buy a cup of coffee, write 500 words. Most days, that 500 words is fiction. Today, its blogging stuff, ’cause I’m prepping for November when I run a genre writer’s convention in Parramatta. I seem very calm on the surface, but underneath I’m thrashing around like a shark that smells blood. Or I’m kidding myself about how calm I seem, ’cause the crazy is very close to the surface these days, and it doesn’t take much to let it out. I know this feeling. I’ve felt it a couple of times before, the month before a big event, and yet I forget it’s coming. It’s a heady mix of so-much- shit-to-do and what-if-it-all-goes-fucking-wrong, and everything feels urgent, regardless of how important it actually is. Getting program done? URGENT. Cooking dinner? URGENT. Washing your hands after using the bathroom? URGENT. Groceries? URGENT. Re-arranging all your furniture at two o’clock in the morning? URGENT. Clipping a hangnail? OMG, SO FUCKING URGENT. Mostly it means I nod and get done what I can get done, and try not to fret about the

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15/10/2012 1 Comment
Gaming

Campaign Resource Round-Up

So this is a heads up for the non-gamer folks – I’m dedicating my Friday blog post to the topics of Superhero RPGs for the next forseeable while, largely ’cause I’m a big ol’ gamer nerd who enjoys writing about games (and, lets be honest, I don’t have the time to spend on gaming messageboards that I once did). What this means, if you’re not a gamer, is pretty much this: I’m about to spend Fridays talking about things that’ll seem a little…well, esoteric. The rest of the week, on the other hand, will be my usual mix of ranting and writer-geekery. CAMPAIGN RESOURCE ROUND-UP I’m fairly system agnostic when it comes to superhero RPGs. I’ve run a lot of them, accumulated the rules for a whole bunch more, and while I’ve finally settled on a system that works for me in Mutants and Masterminds 3E, I’m always interested in seeing how new superhero systems work. This means that my campaigns tend to have a weird little grab-bag of influences from other systems, just ’cause solid advice for Superhero gaming tends to be that little harder to come by than it is for systems like D&D. As a follow up last weeks list of 13 lessons, I figured I’d spend some time looking at some of the essential campaign advice/resources I’ve accumulated over the years. The following are the five of the most commonly-referenced Superhero books in my collection (plus one I expect I’ll be using fairly often in the future), and together

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12/10/2012 1 Comment
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Things I would do if I were planning on becoming an indie publisher…

The title of this post is actually a little disingenuous: I already self-published back in 2005, when I first started self-publishing ebooks for roleplaying games, and I kept at it until 2007 or so when, for various reasons related to edition wars and the level of misogyny among gamers, writing fiction started to look more appealing. The interesting thing about the RPG field is that it went through it’s teething problems with ebooks a little earlier than the rest of the world, which means I frequently find myself frustrated when I get involved in conversations about indie publishing ’cause there’s a certain level of been-there-done-that-made-all-the-stupid-mistakes-already. I’d been around epublishing for a while before that, though, so I’m naturally interested in the ebook/indie publisher explosion that’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s only gotten worse since I started working for a forward-thinking writers centre with an electronic publishing think-tank attached to it. It also means that common phrases like I’m going to experiment with ebooks drive me crazy, since most of these experiments revolve around things RPG ebooks did six or seven years back. So after a couple of frustrating conversations, I sat down and put some serious thought into what I’d do if I were planning on starting an indie-publisher today, based on my own experiences and the data and resources I’ve come across at work. A caveat: this is mostly a thought experiment – I have no immediate plans to indie-publish anything, and I’d put significantly more thought into things if I did – and it shouldn’t

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10/10/2012 9 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

5 Short Story Recommendations in 1,012 Words or Less

Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally thrown a short-story link up on twitter, in that way that you do when you remember there are *fucking awesome short stories* out there and you want to share them with other people. Twitter is a horrible medium for recommending short fiction though – it has the kind of immediacy that makes it easy for people to go follow the link, but it lacks the real space to provide any kind of context beyond saying *awesome story here*. So I wrote a blog post. And threw in some stories I haven’t linked to on twitter so people who follow me there still have something to go read on this fine Monday. All of the stories are free to read online at the time of writing, so links are provided. And so, in no particular order, I give you… 5 SHORT STORY RECOMMENDATIONS IN 1,012 WORDS OR LESS 1) MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER by Howard Waldrop  This is a two-pack of firsts for more – it was the first Howard Waldrop I ever read and the first short-story I read over at Strange Horizons. It’s one of those stories that stuck with me for a long time. Long enough that I eventually started acquiring Waldrop short story collections, for which I can honestly say to Strange Horizons, thank you very damn much. I’m now, like, 90% convinced that Howard, Who? is one of those short-story collection everyone who claims to be a short story writer

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08/10/2012 No Comments
Gaming

13 Things Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions of Mutants and Masterminds

So Monday night we played the 30th session of Shock and Awesome, my formerly semi-regular and now pretty-much-weekly Mutants and Masterminds campaign. It represents about a year and a half of gaming, give or take, although I expect the 60th session will come around much faster than the 30th did. The session saw our intrepid teen heroes caught inside a demonically-possessed virtual reality game alongside a bunch of school-mates. Eventful things happened: one hero kissed her long-term crush after months of pining and putting her foot in her mouth every time they talked; the other heroes girlfriend turned evil (again) when a dormant personality emerged alongside her massive dangerous electro-magnetic abilities. They fought a bunch of demons, too, but the relationships were the interesting things. We’re now on a three-week hiatus while one of the players heads of the UK, but when we return we’ll pick up where we left off, trying to convince the evil girlfriend she really should turn back to normal before her unsociable behaviour loses her the journalism intern she’s been chasing for the last thirty sessions. Since I’m still in list-mode after all the dancing monkey posts, I figure I’d switch gears from writing to gaming and, in honour of the players that make Shock & Awesome so much fun, I put together the following. 13 THINGS LEARNED ABOUT SUPERHERO RPGS AFTER RUNNING 30 SESSIONS OF MUTANTS AND MASTERMINDS 1) PITCH MATTERS These days “Super Hero Comics” is a very broad genre to try and replicate. Even the

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05/10/2012 15 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Unfinished Stories are Toxic Waste

I’ve had a writing-advice heavy run of posts of late, largely ’cause people asked writing-advice type questions, so I figure I’m going to hitch this one to the end of the sequence ’cause it’s thematically appropriate. No-one actually asked about this, but I’ve been rocking the writing-before-work thing and this bit comes from personal observation. All the usual caveats about using a sample-size of one and your writing process being different from my writing process apply. Alright, here we go. There is, in writing circles, some advice that goes along the lines of this: JUST FINISH YOUR DAMN STORY, MAN This is one of the hardest damn things to do when you start out as a writer. Usually this is ’cause you’re not that good and you spend an awful lot of time flailing and flailing and flailing at the page, producing things you know aren’t good (’cause, let’s be honest, you wouldn’t be doing this writing thing if you didn’t have impeccable taste). When you’re in this mode it’s easy to be all “Woe! Despair! I shall abandon this story and start a new one, for it will be the brilliant in concept and form and the world shall award me with a pony.” But you don’t do that, ’cause some wise writer-type came along and said, well, just finish your damn story, man, and for all that my process isn’t your process etcetera and so forth, that’s still damn good advice. You want to get used to finishing

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03/10/2012 No Comments
Works in Progress

I’m Far To Easily Amused By The Phrase “ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL”

So my friend Nic, who scribbles a bit but doesn’t have a website, snuck a final question in on the end of the dancing monkey series: What do you do with an idea or story that just runs out of steam far too early? (Say many thousands of words short of what it needs) Well, much as I’d like to say I’ve experienced this one, I’m generally an up-against-the-word-limits-can-I-have-a-few-thousand-more-please-gov’ner kind of writer. I spend half my structural redrafts trying to cut things out of my manuscripts, so should a story come in several thousand words under my approach I’d probably sing hallelujahs and weep with goddamn joy. Writing shorter is one of my goals, not a problem. Assuming for the sake of argument (and blog post) that I did suddenly run into such a problem – say for whatever unlikely reason an editor really needed a 10k gap in an anthology filled and my pinch-hitting story only came in at 7k – I can think of a handful of things I’d try. 1) ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL Named for SF writer Nancy Kress, who first described this process on her blog back in 2011. Basically she was writing a story that didn’t quite work, so her method of coming up with an alternative ending went thusly: 1) Go back to the last place you’re excited about the story (in this case, 2/3 of the way through) and toss out everything after that. 2) Think of a different, but still logical, way

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01/10/2012 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

Crank up the organ grinder and gather around the popcorn, ’cause we’re almost at the end of the dancing monkey series. For our second-last entry, John Farrell asked: I have awful problems constructing a plot. How do you do that? Apparently you folks don’t want to go with the easy questions, huh? This is not a topic where I’m known to be *concise*, so I’m going to set myself a word-budget on this one and send you off into the wide world with some reading homework, ’cause really, plot is big. Here we go: EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS 1. PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST – FIGHT! Most plots hang off a pretty simple dynamic designed drive a story forward. It goes something like this: your protagonist wants something really badly; your antagonist denies your protagonist the thing they really want; delicious, awesome conflict ensues. Take Lord of the Rings as an example – Frodo wants to live a nice, ordinary life in the shire; Sauron will destroy the world if he does that; therefore there is a whole lot of walking and fighting and stuff. 2. CHARACTERS HAVE LAYERS If you’re reading this you’re probably an SF nerd, which means you read that last example and thought “now, wait, at the start of the story Frodo wants to go off and have adventures like his uncle?” Which is true, for what it’s worth; have yourself a reader cookie. This is the tricky thing about a well-written character

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28/09/2012 4 Comments
Gaming

Gaming is not Writing

Once again, I dance like a monkey for your amusement. This time around my friend Al asked via facebook: Why should writers never write RPG campaigns as stories, why on earth did you do just that, why isn’t it finished yet? Okay, we’re going to kick this one off with a list o’ reasons, some of which people are likely to disagree with. 1) EDITORS DON’T LIKE IT Let’s kick this off with the obvious – the best reason to avoid writing up RPG campaigns as stories is the fact that places that give you money for writing aren’t a big fan of things that are based on RPG campaigns. This warning from Strange Horizon’s List of Stories They See Too Often isn’t exactly uncommon, where they pretty much tell you to avoid anything where: Story is based in whole or part on a D&D game or world. a.       A party of D&D characters (usually including a fighter, a magic-user, and a thief, one of whom is a half-elf and one a dwarf) enters a dungeon (or the wilderness, or a town, or a tavern) and fights monsters (usually including orcs). b.      Story is the origin story of a D&D character, culminating in their hooking up with a party of adventurers. c.       A group of real-world humans who like roleplaying find themselves transported to D&D world. They’re not alone. I mean, I can think of at least one other well-paying fantasy magazine that has the same prohibition and I’m willing to bet that a

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26/09/2012 3 Comments

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