The Roost

I’m the sort of person that consistently sets goals for themselves and tries to meet them. Most of the time, I fail spectacularly, but over time, I’ve gotten good enough at the whole thing to assign self-improvement tasks without swamping out all the other things that I need in life: Time to cultivate my relationships, time to myself, time to work. I used to set stupidly big goals, now my goals are all tiny and incremental. But whether it’s a maintenance goal (like how I review Japanese vocabulary and kanji every day), or an objective (such as finishing a reading list by the end of Business Quarter 1), in the end, it’s still harder to do it than NOT to do it.

And let’s face it. No matter how ambitious (or unambitious) my goals are, no matter how many people that I tell, the only person with any skin in the game is me. This is terrible, demoralizing, and causes the death of almost every ambitious self-improvement program.

So why improve? Well, hopefully these goals matter. Actually matter. Otherwise, it’ll stick like a New Years’ Resolution. But the second part is a little tougher. The second part is turning that care into execution. Quit thinking and start doing. Thinkers don’t get an awful lot done.

This is hell for me, personally. I’m a thinker by temperament. How many times have I thought something that I should have just said? This lack of assertiveness is common enough, and it holds me up in every facet of my life. Every time something’s improved for me, it’s because I’ve spat that thought out as words, or been proactive in some other way. And most of all, since I’ve started the whole self-improvement kick, I’ve never let the fact that I don’t believe any of this will actually improve me to stop me from trying. That’s right. About half the time that I’m doing all of this stuff, I’m just going through the motions, but eventually, I’ll truly believe that this stuff can truly change my life. Actually, when I look back on it since I’ve started this program, it has changed me. Drastically.

Just today, I realized that my writing style drastically changes because of something seemingly arbitrary: Whether I write in Microsoft Word, or in some sort of Blog Software? You can imagine my confusion, but when I looked at the stories I’ve written in Word or an essay or just a rant, in MS Word, my writing turns much more towards clinical and academic. So why the difference?

I guess it’s easy enough to rationalize away, given my writing history. When I first got heavy into fiction writing, I wrote blogs as my MMORPG characters. There were a few underlying assumptions: I was writing for other fans, my writing wouldn’t undergo much critical scrutiny, and anything really could go. I’d come in from a crappy day of studying Physics or Computer Science, open up the blog software and hammer on the keyboard until I’d forgotten how much I hated the Modernist, beehive architecture of my dorm room. Once I was finished, I’d press “Publish” and away it went, off for other people to see. I’d get comments back sometimes within the day, driving me to write more, driving me to grow even more comfortable typing into a web-browser. My editing was looser and I wouldn’t overthink my words. I had fluidity on my side.

Even during this same period of time, I’d use MS Word for my academic writing. Then I started writing fiction for the academic crowd. For better or for worse, a writer will catch much, much more fire in a college Creative Writing class than on an MMO’s roleplaying community forums. Even my fiction became more abstract, more intellectual, more artsy. For me at least, that made it less fun to read.

I haven’t written into a browser window since I quit playing World of Warcraft. All of my recent works have been done in Word, and I think it shows. “Jalt’s Tooth” and “Elfsbane Tea” are intellectual and rather bare of meaningful action. They’re both pieces that show much better to a college writing crowd than to SF/F fans. Even though I posted them here, the entire writing and editing process was carried out in Word.

It seems odd to worry about such a hang-up, but there’s a really easy solution, I figure. So I want to recapture that passionate writing of the past? Write it up here with Visibility set to Private. I still get that nifty rush of clicking the Publish button, it’s easy to track daily progress, and if I want to publish it elsewhere, I haven’t already put it up here for all to behold.

And if I publish it here, then that’s fine too. My writerly goal isn’t financial gain; It’s creating something that people will want to read, and then having them actually read it. That’s the meaning of getting published elsewhere, the possibility of providing enjoyment to people whom I may never have met, but that might identify, just a little, with something I’ve written.

In my previous entry, I touched incidentally on my aversion to stories set in the “real world”. I didn’t have this problem growing up — although I preferred fantasy and science fiction stories, I consumed far more contemporary realism, mystery, and suspense stories growing up.

I started to become a staunch Science Fiction and Fantasy “reader” around the same time that I went to college. I put “reader” in quotes because it was around that time that I stopped reading all but my favorite writers, and even then, only the works of my favorite writers’ favorite series. I spent much more time watching anime with a paranormal bent, and most of my time playing fantasy MMORPGs. It was during this time that I solidly decided that I wanted to be a writer, but as time went on, I knew less and less what that meant.

I became even more entrenched in my reading habits when forced to read the writing of such literary “greats” as Stein, Hemingway and Joyce, authors who, although skilled, brought no joy to me in the reading. So it’s realistic! Big deal. It’s dry and academic and stands diametrically opposed to my notion that reading should be fun.

So what did I do? I criticized it. I criticized unrealism where I found it, I criticized how boring it was, and I criticized anything else I could find. In the meantime, I’d avoid the obvious fact that fantasy and science fictions are oftentimes hundreds or thousands of times more unrealistic than the “real world” stories I’d criticize. My defense was easy. Those worlds are not the real world. My chosen genres do not attempt to imitate the real world. It’s not a fair meter to say that The Hobbit is unrealistic — of course it is. It’s Heroic Fantasy!

So a month ago when my girlfriend asks me to watch Dexter, I spent more time analyzing how it didn’t align to the real world than I did enjoying the show, never realizing that every story  is a fantasy world. Some just look more like this one than others do.

During my group’s New Years’ Eve party, one of my friends since before High School and I got to discussing what we’d been watching lately.

“I’ve been enjoying Shakugan no Shana,” I said. I am, as usual, late to the scene, but to my surprise my friend, with much more free time on his hands, had just finished watching the second season, so I was only one behind.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s fine, and all, it’s just…” He paused and then continued exactly as I expected, “They could have done so much more with it.”

He says this a lot, this friend of mine, and I’d always just nodded. It had always gone without saying that we could have done it better ourselves. But this time, when I heard it, it tugged on a recent memory, a memory brought up watching the first season of Dexter with my girlfriend.

It had only been two weeks before this conversation (Yes, again, late to the show). She’d been a long-time watcher, but I have a lot of trouble getting into shows that are set in the “real” world. (More on that later, maybe.)

“Come on, just watch the first season, it’s fully encapsulated,” she had said.

“Fine, just the first season.”

We sat down, we watched, I paused at any slight jarring inconsistency. I complained loudly at them. Never mind that it was actually a pretty good show, never mind that I actually saw a kernel of something I might enjoy in it, I’m a creator, damn it, and as a result, I must for the sake of my craft find flaws in the craft of others!

Flash forward back to the New Years’ party. My friend’s incredibly vague comment about how a show ‘could have been better’. I’d gotten more skilled since High School at articulating a show’s flaws. If I’d wanted to.

James Joyce’s epiphanies are a convenient work of fiction. Any decent epiphany is brewing in a person’s gut long before the incident that tips the scale. Over the previous month, I’d read a work of pulpy high fantasy and genuinely enjoyed it (despite its editorial flaws), I’d read a suspense thriller set in a horse racing circuit, I’d watched a show about a serial killer, and I’d watched an anime about a tiny girl who fights to protect the balance of this world. What do they all have in common? Two things stick out to me.

1) Someone wrote them.
2) They are all flawed, in one way or another.

Why does that matter? Because my friend hasn’t written in half a decade, and I haven’t in three months. After the finish of my first novel, I briefly entertained finding an agent and getting it published. After one form rejection letter, I dug back into my hole to nurse my wounds. My friend never even tried to get that far.

These works are out there because someone believed in them. Because they resonated with many people. And because someone finished writing, and then finished the submission process. Compared to that, being a critic is easy:

1) Watch someone else’s show/Read someone else’s book.
2) Find a reason why it sucks.
3) Repeat until ego is sufficiently stoked.

As a writer, it’s undignified for me to tear apart a good show, or a good book, and say why it fell short. If I watch a show, or read a book, I should enjoy it like a reader or a watcher, and then get back to work finishing my story. If I thought there were flaws: Great. That’s fuel for me to do a better job on mine. Nothing more.

Things have been kind of hectic over the past few months. In April, I took a break from updating this blog in order to just finish out a manuscript. It has been completed, and it’s called Snowraven. It sits at 80,000 words, which may fluctuate in the ongoing flurry of edits. In July, I began work at Wizards of the Coast as a Software Test Engineer. As a gamer, I’d never thought I’d be working for Wizards, but I’d always kind of hoped…

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Snowraven is a Dark Fantasy novel in the tradition of George R.R. Martin. A princess is caught between two warring kingdoms even as she is pursued by her family, who wants her dead.

Citizens in Quen’Sathis have until the age of twenty to prove that they can use magic, or they are executed. When Mierin Ranxo-Fai fails the Soul-test on her twentieth birthday, she flees her homeland to escape her sentence, but she is pursued. She settles in Hrothden, where she struggles to fit into her new home and reconcile her own self-worth. But Hrothden is on the brink of war with the neighboring kingdom of Brilsturm. Pursued by her family’s agents, she journeys south to broker peace on behalf of her new friends.

The stone pillars to each side of the dirt road had been overgrown with moss, and lichen covered the fenceposts. The old farmstead had fallen apart once he’d left it. The sheds where the sheep wintered lay in shambles, and the animals grazed in overgrown flowerbeds. Ol’ Mag, the cow that had been ancient before Barrett had left, gazed at his carriage as it rolled up to the entryway and bellowed before returning to her grass.

Barrett stared forlornly out of the curtains. When the carriage stopped, he made no move to leave it. Why would his old home look like this? Surely the farmhands were coming out to work the land in exchange for their share. He shook his head and stood to leave the wagon before the coachman decided to encourage him. His cases greeted him at ground-level, and the shiny gold piece he flicked into the man’s hand was more than enough to pay for a bumpy, dusty ride with barely two hours of peace each day for sleep.

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Wil huddled on his cot, peering through a crack in the wall that admitted starlight and rooftops. The straw mattress couldn’t hide the hardwood underneath from his bruises. He tried to ignore the tearing sackcloth sounds his Father’s snores made. He tried not to think about the old drunk at all.

Curling tighter to keep out the cold only drew his mind to the aches. His hands clenched around a normal looking tooth strung onto a necklace. To him, the tooth seemed to shine through his fingers, but he knew that it didn’t.

The tooth was no bigger than one of Wil’s, and the same yellow hue. Nor was it sharp. Much less sharp than an alley mongrel’s fangs.

He smiled thinking about it. The man who’d given him this necklace had torn the tooth from a wild jalt’s mouth. No one in Oakbrook had anything like it.

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No seriously, buy this game:

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is a great gift for anyone that you know who like ludicrous amounts of gore.  This game is a fast-paced, action-packed side-scroller, but with so many vertical scrolls that it almost feels like it’d better be called just a scroller.  The story is zany and over-the-top while still keeping the gamer hooked, and the art style, especially in the cut scenes, is haunting.

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Just before the turn of the New Year, I was promoted from Tester to Senior Tester.  Since then, I’ve been conquering the learning curve of being relatable while maintaining some semblance of authority.  In the Gaming Industry, a historically hip and edgy field, it’s as hard as week-old biscuits.

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