TRON 1982 TrailerPosted by dhoffman on March 31st, 2010
Yeah, this is awesome. It’s a fan-made trailer for the original Tron.
An Update as March Prepares to Breathe its LastPosted by dhoffman on March 30th, 2010
March has been a hell of a month, with a gaming convention, a funeral, flights hither and thither. Easter is this weekend and we have a wedding next weekend but once we’re through all that (and Jessy’s birthday, which tends to be a low-key sort of thing) I suspect life will settle back into it’s semi-normal, slightly-not-so-frenzied pace.
I like to try and write each and every night. Some nights (like last night, or all weekend) that doesn’t happen.
When I don’t get to write, I like to steal time — sometimes only moments — to think about some story or other. To puzzle over an idea, or an assumption I’d made and see if I might like to reconsider it.
Something I’ve been tossing around in my mind has to do with the most recent chapter. It’s one I’ve been looking forward to rewriting for some time now (it has a bundle of my favorite moments in it, including Galen acting like a comic book character, blue and possibly pink hair, tattoos and now, oddly, birthday cake).
It should be a fun chapter to write.
Tonight is another busy night — gaming night — but after tonight, it should be smooth sailing right through to Easter for me. I’m hoping this chapter goes smoothly and I’m excited about seeing where it’s going to take me.
In a lot of ways, I’m fascinated by the process I’m going through in writing Animals. I’m not sure if I’ll ever write another book this way again. In essence, I’ve written this book, in one form or another, so many times that there’s a veritable mountain of story that won’t ever make it into the finished version. Which is to say, it will all be there — the good bits, the rejected bits, the characters that didn’t make the cut — but in only the tiniest of ways.
So, someone might show up at a backyard barbecue for a second, utter a single line, then disappear for all eternity. Gone as if they’d never been.
But they were there; I know they were there.
It’s on their shoulders this book is built. The draft which details a drive from New York to Pittsburgh to Wisconsin which may only appear in the finished version as a footnote, an afterthought . . . I know it was there. I remember writing it.
The story is still there, too. All those things still happen, understand. It’s just that you don’t need to see them to know they’re there.
Sometimes it feels like I capitalize Weird ThingsPosted by dhoffman on March 21st, 2010
Good night of writing after a good day of writing; I was a good little writer today (even if I’ve been a terrible blogger all this week.
What to say?
I (believe I) finished Chapter Seven today. Animals is a pinch under 30,000 words and, I figure by the time I get through Chapter Eight (which should be one of the longer chapters, by design), we may well be around 35,000 words, give or take.
Which is nice, and right on track. That should put us about half-way through the second draft.
Things are going nicely, so far. Everyone’s behaving and (more or less) doing their jobs. It feels like things are moving at the correct pace. I’ll need to do a hearty bit of editing and cleaning up once this draft is finished but it’s my hope that this pass should be the last major revision of the story.
Which is also nice.
I need to do some homework before I can officially get started on the next chapter. Which is to say, I feel it’s another chapter that should move, more or less intact, from the First to the Second Draft. The basic action beats are all there, the character beats, too. Not to say I won’t have to do a lot of rewriting, but what’s been slowing things down hasn’t been the smaller details, no. It’s been hemming and hawing over necessary changes and how things should come together on a macro level.
The micro stuff, for this story, hasn’t been so rough, to date.
I’m fighting a rising temptation to print out these first seven or eight chapters and let Jessy take a look at them. What’s holding me back is, though I know they’re about as solid as they could be, this far into the process, they all need some reworking. Some of it is just catching typos (if I gave them to her as-is, she’d get a paragraph in and be marking things up with a red pen, which would be counter to the whole, “tell me what you think of it” reason I’d be giving the pages to her).
A bonus, though, would be I think I’d be less likely to make broad, sweeping changes to the story if I knew someone else had read what’d come before. If she’s read Chapter Two, I think I’d be more likely to stick with things than to commit to redoing an entire chapter.
The question is, which way works best?
Up until now, I’ve held off on sharing what I’ve got. And, ultimately, I figure I can hold off a few months longer. If it takes until June or July before I’ve got something — even if it needs editing — I feel good sharing, maybe something with a magical THE END on the final page, I really feel it’d be worth the wait.
Half-way home (give or take). It’s a great feeling.
A Waterfall of TextPosted by dhoffman on March 4th, 2010
As an aspiring author and one who’d dearly love to see his words and stories in print someday, I’d be lying if I said the current state of the publishing industry (or, say, the very fact that we have words like “publishing industry” for what in my humble opinion is actually a very intimate act: storytelling) doesn’t give me pause.
More and more, it seems to be harder and harder to make it as a writer of fiction. More and more, I hear and read stories of people who just can’t crack it, or if they do, find themselves pounding their heads on a door that just won’t open more than that crack (and, frequently, is slammed in their faces).
But then I’ll read the story of some heroic, self-promoting author making their bones in some awesome, creative way. Like hooking up with a self-publishing outfit that has its hooks in with Amazon and coordinating an online effort of your fans to NOT buy your books until a specific time and a specific date — thus rocketing your book to the top of Amazon’s charts and netting you both an agent and a contract with one of the big houses.
The world is changing, is what I’m saying. These changes are both good and bad.
And what I’ve got for you here is an interesting read about the implications of some of those changes:
It’s worth your time, too. The author, Craig Mod, looks at how ebooks and devices like Apple’s forthcoming iPad (which I can’t seem to decide if I’m going to buy or not, dammit) affect the presentation of books and stories.
He talks about the difference between Formless Content (content without well-defined form) and Definite Content (content with well-defined form) and what something like the iPad means for both.
It’s very interesting and reading it, my head filled with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ways to use an interactive storytelling medium so that it’s more than just an e-reader.
My favorite bit:
When Danielle Steele sits at her computer, she doesn’t think much about how the text will look printed. She thinks about the story as a waterfall of text, as something that can be poured into any container.
And that really sums up how I think about stories as they’re growing. Sure, I track word count (to make sure I’m approximately as far along, story-wise, as I feel I want to be, length-wise, if that makes sense) and page count (totally arbitrary, as I type with such a small font, and I’d never make someone actually read a story the way I have it laid out on the screen as I write it) but that’s so I can feel that little bit of progress each night when I finish.
“I’m on page 62? Wasn’t I on page 58 when I started? Hmmm, how many words was that . . . ?”
The idea of text and story existing outside the bounds of the printed page is rather nice and exciting. I like thinking of text that flows and flows and flows. That’s its little job, after all, isn’t it? To start and grab you and hold you until it’s done — and if it’s working then you don’t even know it’s there until it’s all over and done with.
Serendipitous WritingPosted by dhoffman on March 4th, 2010
I wrote this, out of the blue, about a week ago. It had nothing to do with what I was actively working on, but it popped in there and, like a squirrel saving up nuts, I gave myself a few hard-returns, typed it up, hit SAVE and got back to what I was doing:
“I think Joe’s hitting on Jeff’s wife.”
“Jeff’s wife?” Kara says. “I thought he had a girlfriend.”
“Jeff has a girlfriend?”
“If he’s got a girlfriend, it’s only fair that Joe hits on his wife.” Drew’s laughing as she says this.
“Not Jeff, Joe.”
“Joe has a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know, does he?”
“Well, what about Jeff? Does he have a girlfriend?”
“No idea. I guess anything’s possible.”
“So wait, hold on . . . when has Joe having a girlfriend ever stopped him from hitting on someone’s wife?”
And, last night, while trying to sort out just what I was going to do with Chapter Seven, that little bit of conversation (which I’d found a home for in the previous chapter) tapped me on the shoulder and said, “hey, what about this?”
It was a nice moment.
And now a bit of difficulty I was having with Chapter Seven suddenly works amazingly within the greater context of the story.
This is one of the things that always amazes me about writing. Well, writing, reading . . . any sort of long-form storytelling. In my own work I see how the process works and I marvel at it. An idea I had two years ago? A note I jotted down, half-awake, apropos of nothing? Just what I needed.
When I read something or watch something and I see another writer doing that, I wonder how they did it. Was it on purpose? Was a moment in a book they wrote a decade ago purposely intended to fit into this new moment? Did they see the old thing, feel that CLICK and turn it into the new thing? It’s one of the most fascinating things, to me, about storytelling, and one of the great joys of my life, spotting things like that.
Playing Steam and Not Getting MurderedPosted by dhoffman on March 3rd, 2010
Last night was gaming night; I didn’t expect to fear for my life.
Okay, it’s a bit of an exaggeration. The way gaming night works is this: a bunch of us get together at someone’s house and we play boardgames. Simple enough, right? The sessions are coordinated through an external web-site, which is great because it lets us meet new people but is also terrible because . . . it lets us meet new people.
Last night was a thin night. Only three of us regulars showed up, plus one new guy. Let’s just call him Frank.
When Frank walked into the room, my first thought was; “this guy’s going to murder us all.” No idea why. Just something in his demeanor, the way he introduced himself; the dried blood on his boots and under his fingernails.
I keed, I keed.
Side Note: I find it interesting that, in today’s society, if you get an I’m going to kill you vibe from someone, you’d be the bad guy if you screamed and ran for it.
Well, that wasn’t really an option. So, we picked a game (the great Steam from Martin Wallace, one of my favorite game designers), set it up and played.
The thing was, Frank wasn’t really up for Steam. As I was unloading track tiles (Steam is a train-game, where the players work to build up networks and deliver goods for money and victory points), he told us all of another gaming session he’d gone to. They’d tried to play Uno but he couldn’t work out the rules.
Oy.
Now, I’m sure I’m sounding a bit snotty here. A year ago, I doubt I could have played something like Steam. Hell, I still play games where I feel lost and confused and get my arse roundly handed to me because the game just isn’t clicking.
But at least I try.
Frank wasn’t interested in trying. Frank looked at the game board (a cross-section of the Northeastern United States, with a pinch of Canada tossed in for good measure), the pile of hex-tiles (representing different kinds of tracks) and the goods cubes (in different colors) as we put them out on the table and very clearly shut his brain off.
Goody.
Steam with four players takes place over eight rounds. Over those eight rounds you do the following:
- Select a special action.
- Build 3 hexes of track.
- Move 2 goods and/or improve your locomotive’s strength.
- Collect income/victory points.
There’s some nuance to it, but that’s Steam in a nutshell. Here’s what Frank saw as his actions for each step:
- “I get points now?” — moved his counter up 20 points.
- “I get points now?” — moved his counter up 20 points.
- “I get points now?” — moved his counter up 20 points.
- “I get points now?” — moved his counter up 20 points.
Now, Frank did wind up getting some points during the course of the game — because I and the two other regulars had to play his game for him. The only thing he did seem able to do was pick a special action card — though all he really seemed to be doing is picking one at random so he could fiddle with it in his hands that turn (which screwed other people over more than once as he randomly snagged something one of us wanted).
Now, I try to be nice when we’re gaming. Sometimes someone will take a long time, or I’ll be in a rotten mood (Tuesday nights I come from work, and that sets me back about five steps from “good mood”), but I try — I really try — to reign in my inner douche. Oh, I know it’s there, and I can feel it rising, like bile, but I do what I can.
And the thing is, as frustrating as it was playing with Frank, I felt like I was doing alright. At first. The problem is, when you have to tell someone, “no, you don’t get points yet” and move his counter down 20 points almost thirty times over the course of three hours . . . eventually it doesn’t matter how nicely you’re saying it.
You’re a douche.
In the end, Frank didn’t murder anyone. Well, he didn’t murder us (who knows what he did after he left?). The other regulars liked the game, which is great because it’s one of my favorites and I’ve been trying to get it on the table for months. So, I think they’ll play again. For my part, I got my arse completely handed to me — I spent the first 1/3 of the game sorting out everyone else and didn’t realize I’d managed to put myself almost into bankruptcy. If it weren’t for a generous move by one of the other players — an intentionally generous move — I would have been eliminated (no income, no victory points — poof!)
As it was, I came in dead last, though I did feel like, once I started actually looking at the board, I did alright (it didn’t help that at least once, possibly twice, when I made deliveries-for-points, the guy adjusting the points track “accidentally” gave my points to Frank). I improved my crappy network, made deliveries and had a small but positive income, as well as a reasonable pile of victory points at game’s end.
I was a little keyed up when I got home to write last night, but I did get my head together enough to get some work done; so that’s a nice thing, too. And, now that some folks other than me know how to play Steam, I figure I’ll get to play it a bit more. Which is sort of the whole point.
And hey, if Frank isn’t pulled over with a trunk full of heads, who knows? Maybe his curiosity was piqued and he’ll go online and learn more about these types of games. And next time — if I didn’t scare him off — he’ll actually pay attention and try to play the game on the table.
Hey, you never know, right?
Being Snowed In is Good for Writing (but bad for blogging)Posted by dhoffman on March 1st, 2010
I was a bad blogger but a good writer this weekend; I figure it works out alright for me in the end.
Let’s see. I think I mentioned that we finally got what I would call legitimate snowfall over here. The drifts were up to my hips and the front door would have been blocked if it opened out instead of in.
I was quite happy. I love snow.
But, all things must pass and the snow is melting nicely.
I worked from home on Friday, then spent the afternoon Saturday on Chapter Six. It’s been a vexing chapter, but I finally cracked it and that means last night I was able to start in on Chapter Seven.
It’s been a fun chapter so far. I’m getting to write for a character that’s different from someone I’ve written for before.
Animals is about 4,000 pages heavier today than it was on Thursday. I wouldn’t want to think about how many actual words I wrote, then got rid of, but 4,000 is a pretty good place to be.
This week is threatening to be quieter than last week, an Official Good Thing. I may revisit Six for some minor tweaking, and I’d love to push through Seven and get to Eight; not entirely sure what Eight’s going to be — if it’s one type of chapter or another — and I’m excited to find out.
Past that, I should have another chunk from the First Draft which will survive somewhat intact. And then we’ll be past the half-way mark and that’s also quite exciting.