Weak II

36,135

The weak point? I figured it out. The POV character knew too much. I switched the scene to a character who actually knows the least, and there it is.

Oh, and happy New Year!

The Work Behind the Work

I note the current word-count for the main Dragonblade document on these posts, but there are more words that went into the project before I started on the actual narrative. Here is a look at word-counts from my notes and source-documents:

"Alchemy" 191
"Extended Character Notes" 4,298
"World Building" 6,158
"Dragonblade: Book One: Earth - Notes" 3,246
"Dragonblade Story Document" 7,220

Total Prep: 21,113 words

There they are in the order in which I last updated them in Google Docs. I'm going to need to expand some of them, Alchemy especially, in order to move forward. I tend to expand my notes when I hit a wall in writing, to the point where I know how to move forward, and I need to do that soon. I'm only going to count words from the actual manuscript, though. I can't let myself treat preparation as the same as actual writing, particularly since the preparation is by far the easiest part for me.

Weak

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I just hit a really weak patch - or at least, one that I realized was weak while writing it. I can see that I've sort of set things up to fizzle and not really grab your attention, and what should be a tense out-of-the-frying-pan and into-the-fire scene is already falling flat (and we're barely out of the frying pan).

So the question is: how to handle this? How do you handle it? Do you grind through, produce a crappy chunk, and move on, to later 'fix it in post'? Or kind of skip over it, sketch out what should happen in the scene, and move on to something you can do better?

I decided to do the second - I sketched out the points I wanted to hit in the scene, and am going to move on. In my case, it's too hard looking at that crappy text and just adding to it. It's like continuing to cook burned food. If nothing else, I need to go back and look at how it went wrong, and figure out whether and how I can fix it. But for me, since I am grinding through a first draft, it is important for me to keep on grinding.

Stealing from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire

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I just had an interesting idea that I thought I would put out there. Both WFRP and Edge of the Empire, by Fantasy Flight Games, use a custom dice mechanic that allows for an interesting result on top of fail/succeed. Each has a mechanic that governs fate - a special type of die that gives an overall "this goes well" or "this goes badly" result. What this means is that you can succeed on the die-roll, but then get the "this goes badly" result on top of that, so you succeed but in another way things escalate. On the other hand, you can fail, but get the "this goes well" result on the additional die-roll, meaning that you fail but you 'fail forward', or your failure opens up some new possibility.

The interpretation of both is up to the GM running the game, but I really like this idea. It also allows for something like "critical success" or "critical failure". When you succeed and get the "this goes well" result, it goes REALLY well. If you fail and get the "this goes badly"...well, you get the picture.

This mechanic struck me as a great way to tie story more deeply into die-results, or as a prompt for less-experienced GMs perhaps. It gives you a cue as to when you move the story forward - in a beneficial or challenging way, either of which is interesting. I like this mechanic a lot, but I don't want to have to have custom dice for every game I play.

What occurred to me is that there are a number of ways to solve this problem, and to add this overall 'fate' mechanic to any dice-driven game. One option is to roll a FUDGE die with every roll, where a + is beneficial, a - is a new difficulty, and the blank side is just blank. To make the benefit or difficulty less likely, you might roll two dFs, and require a ++ or -- result.

This could really be done with any die, though. You could roll a d8, and if it is a 1 you get the difficulty, and if it is the 8 you get the benefit. And so on.

(I'm currently poking around with a rough system for Dragonblade, and it uses a 2d8 mechanic. In the system, if you roll two 4s, that is 'bad luck', because in various dialects of Chinese, the number 4 sounds like the word "death", and as a result the number 4 is widely considered unlucky. If you roll two 8s, that's lucky, because 8 is a prominent number in Chinese philosophy, coming up in places like the I-Ching and the Eightfold Path. 8 is a lucky number in the way that 4 is unlucky. 6 is also a lucky number in Chinese culture, generally speaking, but I liked the parity between 4 and 8. Anyway, the two 4s vs two 8s mechanic is in part inspired by the cool mechanics I see in WFRP and Edge of the Empire.)

What I like about this is that it ports a mechanic that I think adds a lot to a game, which most games do not have, into any game in which you want to use it. Most games that come to mind could potentially benefit from this mechanic, especially 'traditional' task-resolution style games where you only roll to hit/miss, succeed/fail.

Not Another Damn Katana

Since the story that I am writing is in a fantasy-fied setting based on a mashup of various east and southeast Asian cultures and religions/mythologies, I had an important decision to make. Obviously, in pretty much every setting that has even a sliver of Japanese anything in it, you have the ubiquitous katana making an appearance. This nigh-magical blade, lifted entirely from history of physics, regularly cuts people in half, shears through armor, and is used in various impossible ways as a matter of genre convention.

I have at least one character who very well could be using a katana - he's a katana kind of guy, so to speak. So I had a decision to make. What I ultimately decided is to simply excise the word "katana", and likely even its little brother "wakazashi" from my lexicon of weaponry for this story. Certainly nothing so crass as a "ninjato" would be making an appearance. These are just things that have so much baggage that you have to dig your way out of expectations - like Elf and Dwarf and Wizard in your more traditional European mash-up settings - and I didn't want any of those expectations to be operating, if I could help it.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of terminology for swords, even just looking at Japanese history, apart from the over-utilized "daisho", and I will be drawing from these. I like using the specific terms for the various weapons, for those sword-geeks out there like me who can tell you the difference between a tachi, an odachi and a chokuto.

So far, so good. I'm also intentionally drawing heavily from non-Japanese, non-Chinese sources, so we have some Korean shapeshifters and one dude chopping up his foes with a khanda, not to mention two cultures drawn from the Mahabharata.  It's kind of fun, and after all that effort to avoid typing "katana", I hardly wanted to just fall back on presenting a warmed-over Legend of the Five Rings.

Experimenting

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Because it has been so long since I have attempted any kind of long-form fiction, everything I am doing is like an experiment. How will present-tense turn out? Am I showing and not telling too much, so that it won't make sense what is going on under the surface? Do I jump from point of view to point of view too often? Was that a point of view error?

It's a little daunting, but also freeing. I'm just stupid enough to not know many of the mistakes I am surely making.

Fortunately, I am still very invested in what is going on. Tonight I realized that the characters could have a full-on argument, and reveal their cross purposes, and ultimately make a bad decision about what to do next. I was excited about them getting angry at each other and making the wrong choice. So that's a good sign, I suppose.

There's also this odd sense that, since I have sketched out the whole story, I know that one of them is going to die, and another is going to be horribly injured. As a result, I want those two to be great characters - really good people, so that when horrible things happen to them, it hurts. Also maybe a good sign - of course, no idea whether I can pull any of this off in any meaningful way.

Probably not - that's why this is basically a practice novel.

Present Tense

31543 words, plus four or so hours in the last couple days editing chapters of Never Pray Again.

Just sitting down to write fiction, I find that present tense is what comes without me thinking about it. I'm not sure why this is. As I recall The Hunger Games was in present tense, but it is an unusual choice. In reading and getting advice, I am often told to avoid it, especially as a first-time fiction writer hoping to be published someday. On the other hand, I'm told to go with my gut and develop my own voice.

It may come from running roleplaying games for so long. Everything narrated in a game, either by players or the GM, is in present tense. Action takes place now. It's one of the things about roleplaying games that really engages me - I am not telling a story, I am vicariously living a story.

Maybe that's what I'm going for in fiction - that the reader would more directly live a story. This isn't because past-tense narratives bore me or shunt me out of the moment - quite the opposite. I have many favorite books, and I don' think any of them are present-tense.

I guess it's lucky that I don't have any intention to publish Dragonblade, whatever it turns out to be (novella, novel, series, etc.). Next time, I can try past tense. The present tense just keeps sneaking in, so for now I'm going for it.

Fiction

I've been trying my hand at some fiction lately, but I find that I am good at starting but terrible at finishing. For the past seven years or so, I have been working daily at nonfiction writing, and I have gotten to the point where I am writing publishable material (at least, according to Chalice Press and Jolly Roger Games). For most of this time, though, the only fiction I've been writing has been for roleplaying games - character backstories and that sort of thing. I love a game that fosters creativity in the group - Heroes of Karia Vitalus is the best example of that I've ever experienced - but beyond that, almost nothing.

I was invited to write for an anthology by friend and fellow writer Sarah Hans, but was not able to actually finish anything worth submitting. I had no quality back-log of stories, so I was starting from scratch, and realized I am just too far from being up to par with regard to fiction.

As a result, I've jumped into a long-form fiction project that has been rattling around in my head for along time. I have been going through boxes, and I actually found notes from years ago for a story somewhat like what I am writing now. The working title is Dragonblade, and I have broken the narrative into six small books, something like the original Lord of the Rings layout. It is sort of like Dragonlance meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon meets Avatar: the Last Airbender, only it is not as good as any of those things. I have no intent to publish it - this is the equivalent of hitting the heavy bag. I am seeing whether I can complete something long-form, knowing that it will not be very good, but also knowing that if I want to write stories, I have to write stories.

I just wrote word number 30,000 on the manuscript,  not counting a few thousan We'd words of notes, worldbuilding, character sketches and so on. For some reason it is coming easily right now, so I am making sure to set aside time most days to work on it. It still isn't great, but at least it's happening, and I know from hearing other authors talk about it that I will have to write at least a couple un-publishable novels before I can produce my first publishable one.

This blog has been languishing lately, but I thought I'd talk about writing here, when I get the chance and the inspiration. We'll see where this all leads. In the meantime, the toddler is still asleep, so time to write more.