Zak's Production Journal.

Back home.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:53:30 GMT

We made it back in late last night. I'm still exhausted, but in the really good way.

Now we're gonna pack up a much, much smaller subset of our stuff and head off to lunch and coffee shop. I may do some writing or revising, but most likely I'll do something more brainless like playing Torchlight or organizing my photos (not WFC photos, my regular ones, of which there are over 14000 poorly sorted, poorly organized pictures in need of love).

In which multiple cell phones are desirable.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:05:07 GMT

It made perfect sense for me to go to the Concord station. It made perfect sense for kirizal to pick me up at Walnut Creek station. Unfortunately, we only brought one cell phone with us and I had it.

Hilarity ensued.

Otherwise, a great night.

WFC so far.

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:37:04 GMT

We just kicked the remaining Viable Paradise folk out of our room, which became the spontaneous Room 50. Having 3 bottles of good mead and some awesome maple-yam beer helped entice them up.

The VP meetup was a rousing success. Down in the bar area we managed somewhere in the vicinity of 20 alums.

It would be completely boring for me to run down everything. Suffice to say we made a dent in our 'talk to people we must talk to' list, got to spring some fun surprises and generally had a fantastic time, both going to panels and generally hanging out.

This is some good stuff.

Time to hit the road 'till it bleeds.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:07:42 GMT

It's time to get in the car and drive hundreds of miles to see hundreds of billions of people. It's World Fantasy Convention time! If you're there, I'll be the guy with the beard.

Late to the game is better than no game.

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:21:52 GMT

Today's been an odd day. The weather here's shifted radically -- we got a bit of rain, and the cool-streak we'd been having has turned warm. There was a moment early this evening when I was walking between the bedroom and my office and everything was so blue it was like it'd been lit by neon. Even my office was blue, filtering in through the louvers over the window. The sky was the main thing illuminating everything. It was exquisitely lovely and nicely underscored the senseless unreality I've been feeling today. Nothing's happened, I feel fine, but I've just felt odd all day.

So what to do on a day like that?

In my case the answer has been to finally get serious about using an RSS reader. For now I'm just using Google's reader. (Behold! My shared items page in all its' absurdist glory!)

So I spent a couple of three hours cruising for delicious RSS things to stick into the reader. At this point I'm left with barely any web pages to visit. It all goes through the reader.

Do any of you use RSS readers? What sites are particularly interesting to you?

VP X Done Good!

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:15:29 GMT

The ever awesome Strange Horizons has just published my VP X classmate orogeny's first story sale, The Second Conquest of Earth.

The story is astonishing in its economy, cutting the neatest possible line through history, character and setting to tell a huge story in a tiny space. It's awesome to see how much can come out of such a tiny crucible.

Bravo, orogeny! Bravo!

Edited:

Facepalm. Corrected Linda's LJ handle. Orogeny, like the wine... And the geological process, not Orogony like some kind of broken portmanteau for the process (?) of golden genitals.

I must be feeling better...

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:45:13 GMT

Today we ran a bazillion errands. Despite feeling pretty thoroughgoingly awful yesterday, I was fine today until 'round 6:30, at which point I started to feel run down.

Of course we'd been all the way out to Escondido, back, then out for more errands after by that point. Still, it felt more like viral tired than physical exhaustion.

Things we did:

Had lunch at the Pizza Nova in San Marcos, right next door to...
Ryan Brothers coffee. They do a very fine job of roasting beans. Highly recommended. I don't know if I'd say they're better than La Costa Coffee Roasting -- I am very fond of my beans super-freshly roasted, and Ryan Bros. specifically lets them 'rest' for a couple of days -- but the coffee I had was awfully tasty.
Visited Holiday Wine Cellar to pick up enough of The Bruery's Autumn Maple beer to take with us to World Fantasy. Cheerfully, they've also got a great selection of interesting liquor in mini bottles, so we picked up a couple of things that seemed like they might be tasty (a ginger vodka and the uber-version of Grand Marnier, among others).
Went to Staples so kirizal could get index cards upon which to revise Hollow Boned Desire.
Went back out to Staples to get a carry-box for index cards.
Went to Bed, Bath & Beyond (casually known as Beth: Bad & Beyond 'round these parts) to get a new soup pot and a Brita water pitcher.
Went to Cost Plus to get a mason jar
Went to BevMo for super cheap vodka and more bottles of Stone Vertical Epic 090909 (mason jar+cheap vodka+water filter+ginger+cardamom+brown sugar+6 months = (hopefully) stupendous home-made liqueur.
Got dinner at Claim Jumper -- that's a ton of eating out for one day, but the kitchen is a bit gnarly and by the time dinner had rolled around, neither of us were much up to making food. Tomorrow there shall be Re:Souping, however.

And that was our day. I seem to have slightly recovered, but now I'm full of vertical epic and, well, when it comes in pints that's a lot of full.

What does Zak do when he feels lousy?

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:20:07 GMT

So, definitely got some kinda bug today. I've intermittently felt like refried roadkill. Painful sinuses, no energy, no appetite. Suspiciously swine-like, in truth (came on like a ton of bricks in my sleep last night -- made for a fun night!)

What did I do for comfort? I invited Nick Cave in to my head.

His new book The Death of Bunny Munro is available as a really neat iPod application. It has the full text of the book, read by Cave with incidental music by him and Warren Ellis (not the comic book one). At extra pointy moments in the story, you watch videos of him reading the book.

I'm not an enormous fan of audio books. For me, retention goes way down that way. However, this pairs his reading with the actual text of the book -- scrolling by in paragraph-sized hunks as he reads -- and the result is that it sticks in my head even better than simply reading.

Plus the man is a good reader with a performer's delivery and the smarts to not dramatize, but instead to engagingly read.

I'm about a third of the way through the book, and so far it's been exactly what I want. Some people want comfort when they're ill, I want deeper despair (the last time I was sick I watched The Return). This is providing in spades.

I read this at exactly the right time.

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:22:02 GMT

I had the opportunity to show David Vestal in-progress work on a personal project. At that point I had been intensely involved with photography for two-thirds of my life; I had been a working professional for a dozen years. David spent time with the pictures, and then, instead of talking about them directly, asked about my editing. "Do you look for mistakes, and get rid of them? Or do you look for good stuff to hold on to?"

I think I'm coming down with a cold. At the least, I woke up today feeling pretty crappy.

In any event, I've been slowly working on a new story. I think I successfully coddled it through the 'die on the vine' phase. We'll see. Carl Weese's entry over on The Online Photographer hit me in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. It's very short, and there's a good deal of argument in the comments, but I think it's worth reading at least his initial post.

I've been at the stage with writing lately where I have eyes only for flaws. The joy of good has been muted by my merciless pursuit of Getting It Right The First Time, and it's started coloring the way I read stuff by other people too. So that was a much needed corrective.

Predicting EA stupidity is officially too easy.

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:08:11 GMT

When you think of Jack the Ripper, you think of a psychopathic serial killer right? Well, what if everything we knew about Jack was wrong? What if Jack the Ripper was actually a good person, killing to save other people’s lives?

Read the comments on that article at the your own risk. I was only able to make it halfway through.

The frustrating thing about having an interest in games as art is that the field is not an unmitigated disaster, as things like this would lead you to believe. There are major, major game titles built by people who have a clue and care. There are loud gamers with sophisticated taste. There are gamers who appreciate art.

But man, sometimes it's really hard to keep in perspective.

That said this latest example got me thinking. I think it'd be really interesting to have a game where you play a prostitute in Victorian London, managing your cash, developing skill with clients (things like fooling them into thinking they're getting penetrative sex when it's actually frottage), avoiding police and the sick, staking out territory. That would be a potentially interesting game.

ETA

kirizal predicts that they'll make 'Jack' a woman. I think she's right.

What does the world need? Another Jack the Ripper story?

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:39:29 GMT

So, the rumor mill posits that the incredible super geniuses behind Dead Space and the upcoming Dante's Inferno game are gearing up to make a Jack the Ripper game. They've filed for trademarks for game and film on The Ripper.

I offer a prediction.

The game will put the player in the role of Jack the Ripper.

A secondary prediction.

There will be a thin excuse for why the mutilation of prostitutes is necessary and possibly even good.

Does this mean that at next year's ComiCon EA will run a promotion for who can murder the most women at the convention?

An experiment.

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:26:39 GMT

I'm doing my writer trick again and piling up research around me as I write. Today I've been teaching myself the history or ritual magic. I like small topics.

Some links I've mined, in no particular order:

Baubellum

Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis

Hymn To Pan

Lamashtu

Defixiones

Michael Psellus

Beautiful William

Cordoba

Strange Cargo

"Show me," William said.

Sitting in the lounge at the San Jose airport, Bergin hovered over an ashtray and a tumbler of nameless scotch. He hefted the logic board out of its box and set it on the table. To the truly untrained eye it looked like any other computer part -- better left hidden inside a beige box than put on display. To examine it though you would see that instead of the city-block tracings of your average computer, the silver lines on this formed circles and designs. There was no engineering efficacy. The overall design created sigils and seals into which parts could be mounted.

"The CPU goes here," he said, indicating the square socket in the center of the board. "Everything else radiates out around it. I've designed it so each component serves both an electronic and a ritual purpose. Wherever possible I went back to designs from the Liber Razielis rather than the script in the Lesser Key. The Kabbalistic designs lend themselves so nicely to circuit design. My engineers tore their hair out getting the traces right, and we should have filed patents on the double-sided design, but I think this is it."

William leaned forward and fingered the silver lines around the board, swooping and circling, crisscrossing and merging. "How did you get these traceovers to work?"

Bergin only smiled.

"Excellent. Excellent. Yes. Now, for my part, behold!" William opened his travel bag and withdrew an ornate copper cylinder, lacquered and layered like cloisonné jewelery and finned with a ridge that could slot into the logic board. "The hair. It's suspended inside. Rectifiers trace the name 'Dionysus Laphystius' facing the sample. If the hair belonged to a maenad, this will summon her energumen."

Bergin took another drag on his cigarette then gulped the last of his drink. "How do we go about a test run?"

William reached into his bag and brought out a small notebook.

"Local enthusiasts."

Game Review: The Path

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:55:06 GMT

The Path is the newest game from Belgian developer Tale of Tales. Their previous art-game The Graveyard caused a good deal of teeth-gnashing over the definitional boundaries of the word 'game'. That argument is well beyond the scope of this review, and I would be a poor participant since I find definition boundaries uninteresting.

Sold as a "short horror game", The Path uses variations of Little Red Riding Hood as its organizational metaphor. You begin in a red room. Sunlight and the sound of traffic come from a window on the right. Six girls occupy the room, each doing their own thing. You choose one of them, she's given a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine and driven far from the city and placed on a path where the road ends. Take the basket to grandmother's house. Do not leave the path.

Everything that happens after that depends on what you do and which girl you chose. You can simply follow the path to grandmother's house. I never did. Beyond the path are the deep woods. The woods, of course, is where the real meat is. It's in the woods that each girl meets her wolf, and it's the finding of that wolf that reveals the character of each of the girls.

The stories range a wide gamut, from the youngest sister -- Rose -- who is a complete innocent drawn by a very basic curiosity to the teenage Ruby, a goth in full bloom exploring every bit of gloom and danger she can find to the 19 year old Scarlet who's drawn in on herself in order to have the strength to be caretaker for her sisters.

The experience is more subjective than most games. Events, items and even sounds are frequently ambiguous. The things each character interacts with are different from game to game, as are the locations. Though the girls each have their own commentary on what's going on around them, a great deal of space is left for the player's own meaning to fill in the gaps. Sometimes this feels intentional, other times it feels like a constraint of the extremely limited budget and staff for the game.

Because it's all built around the gnarled roots of one particular fairytale, there is clear organization of ideas. Overwhelmingly it is a game that makes manifest the way stories and mythology shape the behavior of girls. The variations of the story that are used in the game (each girl represents a different version of the story), all orbit around the punishment of curiosity. Whether it's innocent, morbid, playful or sexual, all the girls meet their respective wolves because of an innate draw. This comes into the game at many levels, beginning with the actual interface mechanics. Movement around the environment is traditional mouse and/or keyboard, but to interact you are urged to "let go" of the controls (though there is a command to force interaction, if interaction is possible). By the time I had finished the game, the effect of the control mechanism made me seriously consider cultural expectations of girls and the internalized behavioral models that I'd never thought about. Since each girl experiences highly personalized danger, at first it feels like any random thing that looks interesting could lead to her demise. To keep them safe you have to learn about them as individuals and about cues in the environment. For instance, the sounds change and wolf tracks appear on the screen when you're near each girl's wolf. Boys do not learn, as a part of the culture of stories, that their attraction to girls will get them raped and killed. It was very interesting to experience that, even on the small scale of a small game.

For a small game it is intensely beautiful. Wife and husband designers Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn have achieved a remarkably lush environment with quite limited resources. That their background is art is apparent everywhere, from the presentation of text to the rigid control of color palette. The animation by Laura Raines Smith is superb and the character models and textures by Harvey are quite good. The soundtrack by Jarboe and Kris Force stands up to the visuals. Like many things about the game, it's difficult to find seams between sound effects and music.

Harvey and Samyn wear their inspirations on their sleeve, and in this game it works very nicely. My initial reaction on arriving at Ginger's version of grandmother's house was disappointment that the game was cribbing so obviously from the Silent Hill games, but as I played through the game with different girls and saw that each of them had a completely different experience in that part of the endgame, it became clear that I was intended to recognize Silent Hill, as much as I was supposed to recognize Twin Peaks or A Tale of Two Sisters. I don't mind when visual style is borrowed as part of commentary -- as it is here -- it's when creators borrow elements because they want a piece of the magic of the source that I'm offended. The Path consistently remains true to its chosen theme, and the metaphors used are very carefully chosen to heighten that theme.

That brings me to my central complaint. I dislike the didactic substitution scheme typically employed by allegory. Thing X equals Thing Y. Largely, The Path avoids that, but from time to time the writing or the sung words in the music are too on-the-nose, telling me precisely how to interpret what I was seeing. It's a difficult line to find -- sometimes you get the best effect by sneaking up and then plainly saying the thing -- but I did not need the music to explicitly describe a 'chamber of horrors'. Especially because the signing tends toward glossolalia, when identifiable words appear, I listened. There are a lot of ways that could have been handled better.

It's a game that clearly would have benefited a great deal by having a larger budget and crew to flesh out its world. At times the girls felt too generic to me, a fault that would have been easily fixed simply by having more for them to do. The writing could have been sharper, too. Though its rarely outright bad, the comments of the girls often sounded more like artists making a point than they did the opinions and observations of individuals. And yet, by the time I was done, I had a deep sense that these girls contained real truths of people I've known.

It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which The Path is a game about girls and women. As I played through and brought each of the girls to her personal sad fate, I became increasingly uncomfortable with that as a mechanic. Every time one story ends you're returned to the red room where the others wait. The room gets awfully empty by the end, and the game works to make the player feel their responsibility in that subtraction. Yet, through the entire game the Forest Girl flutters. If you've seen pictures of the developers, it's quite clear that the Forest Girl is a young version of Auriea Harvey. She never speaks in the game, but if you learn to interpret her actions she is helpful in a way. Mostly the Forest Girl acts like a psychopomp or tutelary spirit, guiding you to the things you need to make the transition to the other world.

Major spoilers from here forward.

Once you complete the game with all six sisters, you're returned to the red room and have only the Forest Girl, who has previously never been there. Choosing her you're free to explore the whole forest. At the very end, above grandmother's bed hangs a picture of the Forest Girl. When you return to the red room, she's there again, but now she's covered in blood. One by one the other girls come back into the room and then she leaves to let you start it all over again.

I read this to mean Harvey is saying that the responsibility for the deaths of these fictional girls is shared. She's invited us to participate and we've agreed. Agreed not only by buying the game and playing it, but by continuing to play it beyond the clear realization that it is trauma as entertainment, that it is participation in the culture of stories that exist to contain, diminish and prune the innate curiosity of girls. It's a microcosm that sheds light far beyond its limited borders.

I found the experience very rewarding. Both as an exercise in exploration and as a lens with which to view gender dynamics. Though the game has flaws, I recommend it to anyone that is intrigued by my description.

The Path is available for Mac OS and Windows from http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath/ and other digital distributors, including Steam.

Wanna hear somethin'?

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:45:13 GMT

Lately, I've taken to using this: http://www.simplifymedia.com as an easy way to listen to my complete selection of music when I'm out working. It lets me stream my whole library anywhere I've got net access.

Furthermore, if you go out and download the plugin and install it (and use iTunes), then post a comment here with the name you're using, I can invite you as a 'friend' who can then also listen to my entire library. There's even an iPhone version.

It'll take a little bit to initially download my library though -- I have 14,220 songs.

Adventures in hardware. Part 736 in an ongoing series.

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:28:41 GMT

We've been playing lots of Champions Online 'round these parts. It is good, yes. And fun, yes, yes.

But it also means that kirizal has had to put up with the leafblower drone of her stock ATI X1900 card. Mac's, y'see, get royally hosed on the graphics card front. She's been through one of these cards already because it overheated itself and died. It is normal for these things to run 80+ Celsius under load.

So, the fan on her card was becoming muey obnoxious. So I looked into aftermarket coolers. There are many of them, but I settled on ThermalTake's DUORB (two fans are orbs?). I knew it wouldn't automatically be easy, despite the Mac Pro case being a lovely thing to do routine work on. Seriously, replacing hard drives, adding ram or optical media -- dead simple.

Getting the new heatsink onto the card was easy enough, though the fact that it wanted to connect its fans via molex instead of a standard fan plug didn't inspire confidence. I needn't have worried about that yet, I had another problem first.

The 1st gen Intel MacPro has a nicely designed little wind-tunnel inside-which reside the CPUs and the ram daughter cards. It's designed so that the graphics card sits flush against the housing above the ram. Fine with the stock cooler, but the addon attached itself with overly long little nuts, like you'd normally use as motherboard risers. Long story short, I had to take out the housing around the ram, then do a hideous jury-rig to get power down from the optical bay. Ugly as hell, but it works and the machine is now way quieter and cooler. So, all kinds of win.

Stage review: Nevermore

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:36:59 GMT

After helping out a friend with some computer problems yesterday we went over to the Steve Allan theater to see Nevermore.

It's a one-man play starring Jeffrey Combs as Edgar Allan Poe, written by Dennis Paoli and directed by Stuart Gordon. If you have even a passing interest in Poe and are within travel distance, do yourself a favor and go see it. They announced last night that the run has been extended a second time, so it's now going 'till the end of October.

The conceit of the show is that Poe is on stage to read his most famous poem -- 'The Raven', but a good deal of other stuff gets read too. I gather the lineup of works he reads changes from night to night, with only one or two that are fixed as part of the loose narrative.
The play is a lot of things -- biography, literary history, character study, acting showcase -- but centrally it's about taking excellent examples of Poe's work and putting them into the context of his character and time. The effect was to massively deepen my appreciation for what he was doing on pretty much all levels. Jeffrey Combs is outstanding, the production is elegant, the tickets are incredibly cheap.

The only reason to not go is complete disinterest in the subject matter.

Film review: 9

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:40:31 GMT

So me and kirizal went to see 9 today.

I'm sure it will be popular. It's loud.

There are things to like here. In a media landscape dominated by material that's been shit out and re-eaten so many times it's a uniform gray color and tastes like clay, it's nice to have a film whose inspiration is wilder and less diluted. 9 pulls most of its visual aesthetic from the Brothers Quay.Or maybe from the Quay influenced The Secret Life of Tom Thumb. While it's not unheard of for indie, artsy stuff to steal liberally from them, they haven't so far made it much into the mainstream.

So I was pretty happy to see that aesthetic used to convey an entire world. And it's a world with some good little grace-notes scattered through it. Every now and again the characters give glimpses into a world with really different rules and emotional logic.

Unfortunately, it's also incredibly lazy. Money was spent on explosions and gigantic monsters to chase the heroes. Time was spent there, too. Where time wasn't spent was on attempting to understand the story it was telling. Things happen because those things happened in other movies, and therefore That's Just What Happens Next. Instead of elaborating on the story of the short film it's derived from, 9 is content to just use the same story except with bigger monsters and more opportunities to use the bass speakers. How do you pad a 10 minute short into an 80 minute movie? EXPLOSIONS! And while the explosions are occasionally exciting -- I am not made of stone, I like it when things blow up -- the action set pieces start to feel obligatory by the climactic battle between gormless good and handily-color-coded evil.

Where it really falls down is its attention to detail. I have two examples I'll use for synecdoche here. First up is the very, very beginning of the movie. Our gormless hero wakes up in the place where he was built. He's effectively brand new, yet when we're shown closeups of his hands the copper has wear patterns at all the joins, as though it's seen heavy use. The burlap he's made from is deeply embedded with grime around all the seams, again, as though he's heavily used -- but the movie makes crystal clear that was had just been made. Example number two comes later. The big lug manservant goes outside while the boss is away so he can get high by holding a magnet against his head. It makes static appear in his eyes. It's a halfway nice touch, but it's also a great example of how little thought went into the mechanics of the world. These little sack-people are alchemical creations. It's made quite clear. They've got souls, they're activated by a device which is plainly magic. The only reason for them to be affected by magnets is for a sight gag.

And I haven't even gotten into how shabbily rendered (in more than one way) the world is. Visually, I constantly felt like I was playing a very linear, low-budget game. The path the story (such as it is) goes through is passably detailed (except for those two shots which were inexplicably at half-resolution) but every thing outside the main play area is flat and poorly detailed. At times, characters are shown running across vast expanses of poorly scanned texture maps which haven't been given any depth. The 'newsreel' footage, which was given leader marks to appear as film is low-res enough to have visible pixels, thus hopelessly mixing its metaphors. Edges on bright objects shimmer and crawl due to poor anti-aliasing, the lighting tends to show off the crummy quality of the texture maps and the materials are, without exception, flat CGI with no use of translucency or transmissive scattering. It often looks like a CG student reel, except that the characters are usually pretty well animated.

And I'd forgive all of that if the story were good. But there's barely any story. See above. Ten minutes worth of story, and what it all boils down to is machines are evil because they don't have human souls. There was a time when that was pretty topical and cutting edge. That time was 1927. We ought to be a bit past Metropolis now.

And most frustrating of all, for me, was that when it got to the 'and here is why everything is the way it is' sequence, a much cooler ending presented itself. The reason why all this bad stuff happened is because the generous, very good scientist who just wanted to make the world a better place made a super robot brain, but the horrible, evil, cruel Hitlery dictator painted his jagged black and red flags on it and went to war, and so the good scientist realized the machine was evil because it didn't have a human soul, so he made a bunch of tiny sack people and put bits of his own soul into them so that... um... They could ... um... totally overthrow the horrible machine by stealing back the talisman ... that the machine didn't have until one of the sack people brought it there. Wait, what? So apparently, the scientist's plan was that his sack people would help the evil robot brain and then destroy it. Meanwhile, the evil robot brain is going around and sucking the soulbits out of the sack people. Personally, I would like to see the version where the answer to this problem is for all the sack people to let it suck their souls out so it's a whole person and can start rebuilding the world.

Oh well.

Back on the bike.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:01:26 GMT

While doing the final push on the novel, I let pretty much everything fall by the wayside. So I spent about a month not riding.

That means, of course, that today I thought as a first go out I'd try an untested route and take it good and easy.

Yeah, you should be laughing now.

The new route is a harsh mistress, but fair.

I got caught flatfooted by a serious grade on the other side of a hairpin curve. And when I say caught, I mean it came up so suddenly I didn't have a chance to downshift enough to make it up. I had to stop and lift the rear wheel in order to get onto the middle ring, and then trying to power up it I just bonked. It was the first time I've had to stop riding to let my HR drop in a long, long time. Still, once I made it to the top of the hill everything else was beautiful. It was a long swooping straightaway over quiet residential streets with nothing but the Pacific to look at.

It'll be a lot easier the second time around, I think, when I know it's coming. I think I prefer this route to the one along Jefferson. The highway overpass just doesn't feel safe on Jefferson. The bridge is kind of narrow, the grade is nasty and the traffic is impatient. The new route has a much wider bridge, less traffic (at least this morning) and is a very gentle incline.

Knocking on our front door.

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:20:30 GMT

In which the author interviews his novel.

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:16:16 GMT

Zak: So, I hear that you're done now. What was it like working with your author?

Lossless: Done? You gotta be kidding. He left three scenes unfinished. The last one, you know, the last scene in the novel he didn't even put a placeholder for. Nothing! You call that finished?

Z: I see your point. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself.

L: I was born April 5th, 2008 and finished September 1st, 2009. I contain 121,381 words across 26 chapters. Unlike normal people, my author numbered the chapters in hexadecimal. Who on earth is that supposed to impress? There are 30-40 named characters in there, and usually if they've got a name they get to talk. It takes place mostly in Kansas City (largely the Missouri side, but some in Kansas too), but there are numerous scenes across the LA metro area, Washington DC and Berlin.

Z: And doesn't it also cover two years of time?

L: Yes. The first 'half' (which is really more like 2/5ths) is in 1985 and the second happens over the course of a couple of months in 1987.

Z: So I assume you touch on a variety of issues current to the time?

L: Oh christ, yes. My author was stupidly precious that way. He even fit in the goddamned harmonic convergence. It was like he was trying to namedrop time.

Z: Speaking of time, didn't your author come up with some silly version of time for the story?

L: Oh yeah, and he barely used it too. There's a drawing and some sort of harebrained formula of time 'consumption', and he pretended that was useful for exactly one scene, then later brings it up again so a crazy person can sound more crazy, but it's really the TRuuuuUuuuUuUUuuuth. Spooky. Spooky like a corroded dime.

Z: I sense a little hostility.

L: We just broke up. Of course I'm hostile.

Z: That's absurd. How can a novel and an author break up?

L: He's done with me! Moved on to other projects.

Z: It couldn't go on forever, could it? I mean, these sort of affairs have to end, otherwise, what's the point?

L: Oh, trust me, it didn't have to end. He was telling people we'd be done by May. Hah!

Z: But he's got to come back, and he'll be thinking about you all the time.

L: <stares> Do you have any idea how lame that sounds? I mean really. Those words that you just typed, it's like every asshole's friend making excuses for him. Sure, he'll be thinking about me, while he's writing some other story! And of course he'll come back for the break-up sex, they always do, but it'll peter off and sooner or later he'll package me up and try to get rid of me. Strangers will stick their word processors in me, move around my guts, take pieces of me out. Once they publish me, it's over. Finito! They'll mount me on a plaque for everyone to see: The Novel. Pay the man in the tent and see the freakshow!

Z: I have it on good authority that he was thinking about his next novel a great deal by the time he finished you.

L: <points to its missing scenes> Finished? Hello? Also, are you trying to hurt my feelings, or do you always ask people questions that have knives in them?

Z: Moving on. Tell me about yWriter.

L: Well, right off the bat, it's just nowhere nearly as pretty Scrivener. However, it also allows heroic feats of data-management. He built lists of characters and locations, even the important items people use, so it's very easy to find scenes involving any given piece of gear (like that Indus GT disk drive that Dave has in the first part of the story). Using those features requires a little bit of work, and my author did completely give up writing actual chapter synopses at chapter 12 (that's 18 in decimal, for those of you not ridiculous enough to want to count in hex -- and NO, chapter zero is NOT a prologue!), and he kind of gave up on detailed scene descriptions and just used sentence long scene titles toward the end... And maybe forgot to make character pages for some of the later incidental people. But even my author was able to stay organized and on-top of things. Plus, the extremely complete backups saved his bacon a couple of times when his file-sync software overwrote things because some kind of brain damage had occurred.

Z: I think that may be the most positive thing you've said so far. Do you have any other positive things to say?

L: Sure. Sunshine makes the grass grow and puppies have soft fur. I guess my author gave most of his characters reasonably happy endings, but I'm a book with a freakin' ironic title. Lossless, so that means everybody loses somethin, gettit?

Z: How did your author work that theme into you? If you don't mind me asking.

L: Now you start asking if I mind. You are going to make a great interviewer. IN HELL. Anyway, my author was constantly rubbing his hands at all the precious wanking he did. "Oooh, these action setpieces are in abandoned places to represent the character's ongoing and ultimately futile battle against ENTROPY." Horseshit. He likes things that are rotting. Though the Union Station bit worked out well for actual plotting too, since it meant the NSA agents staying at the Westin didn't have far to go.

Z: Are you saying that you don't think your author did a good job of integrating his obsessions?

L: No, I'm saying that the stupid shit he said while writing me was stupid shit. Writing a novel is like a drug that makes writers crazy, stupid and prone to saying ridiculous things. It's best to ignore anything an author says about their work while they're in the middle of it.

Z: How do you think your author felt about the ingredients he used?

L: Ugh. Like a happy drunk that wants to hug everybody at the bar. It was sloppy and disgusting how he loved all this shit.

Z: But I see here that a lot of these things your author sloppily loved all over, he also did great violence to.

L: I believe the technical term for that is abuser. Wait a minute. Move that cardboard shield away. HEY! It's you, you asshole! First you 'finish' me with missing scenes, then you pretend to be someone else so I'll praise you? Well, fucker, see how well that worked. Go on. Get out of here! Go do your precious art! Write another novel. See if I care!

Z: I had a couple more questions though. Like how it came together and if you think he -- er, I -- would have done a better job if this weren't my first novel.

L: Screw off, buddy.

And so it ends.

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:32:12 GMT

The novel is complete. Not with a bang, but with an 'eh, I'll write the last scene of the denouement when I do the revision'.

Tomorrow I'll post in more detail about it. For now it feels like the book has finally died, and not a day too soon. Later I'll resurrect it and fix its parts and make it into the bionic book, able to leap tall buildings, wrestle sasquatches and make special sound effects when it runs. But for now, it's dead. So:

R.I.P.
LOSSLESS

Hallelujah.

Thanks for the many well wishes and posts of encouragement, they've been really helpful. I've done a really lousy job of staying in touch with people as the end of this thing has neared, and I hope to get back to living in the real world instead of my fictional 1980's. The fashion is a lot better in the real world.

Hello, darling!

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:23:52 GMT

Barring catastrophe, the novel ends today. Somewhere a bit north of 120k words, so scissors will be well and truly a part of my revision process.

All the same, a minor darling among the scattered denouement.

"Another lecture about muscle tone in the bedbound. Myo-myo-my. Geena yawned and started doodling in her notes."

Geena is an RN, working on certification for sports medicine PT. See? I can write a happy ending!

Left to do: Geena's wrapup, Matt's (yay thorazine!) and finally Zlata and Lindsay's.

Wrote 3k words yesterday, so 2ish today shouldn't be a big deal.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:30:57 GMT

It's taken a lot longer than I expected, partly because other things got in the way and partly because ... well, it's taken longer than I expected, but the end of my novel is in sight.

It's currently sitting a bit above 106k words. I'm guessing there's between 6-11k more, and that'll likely come out in 5-6 more writing sessions.

It has been, and continues to be, enormous fun. The next scene I write puts me full-on in the climax of the story. In the next scene, Dave will track down Matt's secret lair in the abandoned limestone mine. That'll bring down a host of heavily armed spooks. Matt'll be chased from there to the husk of Kansas City's Union Station (which, at the time of the story, was boarded up and left to wild dogs). Therein occurs the last confrontation which leaves my more protaggy characters to deal with the satellite. Coda, curtains and then the wheezy sound of a rapidly deflating writer.

I'm thinking that when I finish rough draft, I'm gonna cut off my beard and not start growing another one until I begin novel #2.

Printed on the side of a 18650 battery.

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:59:24 GMT

Blog Against Racism Week.

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:50:21 GMT

For Blog Against Racism week, I'm going to run an excerpt from letters that my great-great-uncle George Bent wrote about the Sand Creek Massacre. As a kid, my mom would take my brother and I to the museum to see the dress that our great-great-great-grandmother Owl Woman wore -- a full-length ceremonial dress of cowrie shells. When William Bent's house went up for sale, we went and toured it with the public. I was an undeniably white kid. My mother and my grandmother self-identified as Irish, despite the family having come over on the second goddamn boat. And yet there's also this other history of my family. George Bent and his brother Charles joined the Dog Soldiers after the massacre. Despite being part white, they dedicated themselves to running every white man off the continent.

This excerpt comes from the book Life of George Bent: Written From His Letters.

Pictured are Magpie and George bent.

At dawn on the morning of November 29 I was still in bed when I heard shouts and the noise of people running about the camp. I jumped up and ran out of my lodge. From down the creek a large body of troops was advancing at a rapid trot, some to the east of the camps, and others on the opposite side of the creek, to the west. More soldiers could be seen making for the Indian pony herds to the south of the camps; in the camps themselves all was confusion and noise -- men, women, and children rushing out of the lodges partly dressed; women and children screaming at sight of the troops; men running back into the lodges for their arms, other men, already armed, or with lassos and bridles in their hands, running for the herds to attempt to get some of the ponies before the troops could reach the animals and drive them off. I looked toward the chief's lodge and saw that Black Kettle had a large American flag tied to the end of a long lodgepole and was standing in front of his lodge, holding the pole with the flag fluttering in the grey light of the winter dawn. I heard him call to the people not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them; then the troops opened fire from two sides of the camps.
The Indians all began running, but they did not seem to know what to do or where to turn. The women and children were screaming and wailing, the men running to the lodges for their arms and shouting advice and directions to one another. I ran to my lodge and got my weapons, then rushed out and joined a passing group of middle-aged Cheyenne men. They ran toward the west, away from the creek, making for the sand hills. There we made a stand, but troops came up on the west side of the creek and opened a hot fire on us; so after a short time we broke and ran back toward the creek, jumping into the dry bed of the stream, above the camps. Hardly had we reached this shelter under the high bank of the creek when a company of cavalry rode up on the opposite bank and opened fire on us. We ran up the creek with the cavalry following us, one company on each bank, keeping right after us and firing all the time. Many of the people had preceded us up the creek, and the dry bed of the stream was now a terrible sight: men, women, and children lying thickly scattered on the sand, some dead and the rest too badly wounded to move. We ran about two miles up the creek, I think, and then came to a place where the banks were very high and steep. Here a large body of Indians had stopped under the shelter of the banks, and the older men and the women had dug holes or pits under the banks, in which the people were now hiding. Just as our party reached this point I was struck in the hip by a bullet and knocked down; but I managed to tumble into one of the holes and lay there among the warriors, women, and children. Here the troops kept us besieged until darkness came on. They had us surrounded and were firing in on us from both banks and from the bed of the creek above and below us; but we were pretty well sheltered in our holes and although the fire was very heavy few of us were hit.

When the fight opened, my friend Little Bear was in the thick of it. He tells the story in this way: "I got up before daylight to go out to where my brother-in-law Tomahawk had left our pony herd the evening before. He told me where he had left the ponies and said he did not think they would stray far from that place. As soon as I was dressed I went out of the lodge and crossed the creek; but as I was going up on the hill I saw Kingfisher running back toward the camp. He shouted to me that white men were driving off the herds. I looked toward the Fort Lyon Trail and saw a long line of little black objects to the south, moving toward the camp across the bare brown plain. There was some snow on the ground, but only in the hollows. I ran back to the camp as fast as I could, but soldiers had already come up on the other side of the creek and were firing in among the lodges. As I came into camp the people were running up the creek. As I passed Black Kettle's lodge I saw that he had a flag tied to the end of the pole and was standing there holding the pole. I ran to our lodge to get my bow, quiver, shield, and war bonnet. My father, Bear Tongue, had just recently given me these things. I was very young then and had just become a warrior.
"By this time the soldiers were shooting into the camp from two sides, and as I put on my war bonnet and took up my shield and weapons, the bullets were hitting the lodge cover with heavy thumps like big hailstones. When I went out again I ran behind the lodges, so that the troops could not get good shots at me. I jumped over the bank into the creek bed and found Big Head, Crow Neck, Cut-Lip-Bear, and Smoke standing there under the high bank. I joined these young men. The people were all running up the creek; the soldiers sat on their horses, lined up on both banks and firing into the camps, but they soon saw that the lodges were now nearly empty, so they began to advance up the creek, firing on the fleeing people. Our party Was at the west end of the camps, not one hundred yards from the lodges. At this point the creek made a bend, coming from the north and turning toward the southeast just at the upper end of the village. As the soldiers began to advance, we ran across to the west side of the creek to get under another high bank over there, but just as we reached this bank another body of cavalry came up and opened fire on us. We hardly knew what way to turn, but Big Head and the rest soon decided to go on. They ran on toward the west, but passing over a hill they ran into another body of troops just beyond and were surrounded and all killed.
"After leaving the others, I started to run up the creek bed in the direction taken by most of the fleeing people, but I had not gone far when a party of about twenty cavalrymen got into the dry bed of the stream behind me. They chased me up the creek for about two miles, very close behind me and firing on me all the time. Nearly all the feathers were shot out of my war bonnet, and some balls passed through my shield; but I was not touched. I passed many women and children, dead and dying, lying in the creek bed. The soldiers had not scalped them yet, as they were busy chasing those that were yet alive. After the fight I came back down the creek and saw these dead bodies all cut up, and even the wounded scalped and slashed. I saw one old woman wandering about; her whole scalp had been taken off and the blood was running down into her eyes so that she could not see where to go.
"I ran up the creek about two miles and came to the place where a large party of the people had taken refuge in holes dug in the sand up against the sides of the high banks. I stayed here until the soldiers withdrew. They were on both banks, firing down on us, but not many of us were killed. All who failed to reach these pits in the sand were shot down."
When the soldiers first appeared, Black Kettle and White Antelope, who had both been to Washington in 1863 and were firm friends of the whites, would not believe that an attack was about to be made on the camps. These two chiefs stood in front of their lodges and called to their people not to be afraid and not to run away; but while they were still trying to quiet the frightened women and children, the soldiers opened fire on the camps. Black Kettle still stood in front of his lodge, holding the lodgepole with the big American flag tied to its top. White Antelope, when he saw the soldiers shooting into the lodges, made up his mind not to live any longer. He had been telling the Cheyennes for months that the whites were good people and that peace was going to be made; he had induced many people to come to this camp, telling them that the camp was under the protection of Fort Lyon and that no harm could come to them; and now he saw the soldiers shooting the people, and he did not wish to live any longer. He stood in front of his lodge with his arms folded across his breast, singing the death-song:
"Nothing lives long,
"Only the earth and the mountains."
while everyone was fleeing from the camp. At length the soldiers shot him and he fell dead in front of his lodge. Black Kettle stood in his camp until nearly everyone had gone, then took his wife and started up the creek after the rest of the people. Soldiers kept firing at them, and after a while Black Kettle's wife fell. He turned and looked at her, but she seemed to be dead; so he left her and ran on up the creek until he came to the place where the people were hiding in the pits. After the soldiers had withdrawn about dark, the chief went back down the creek to find the body of his wife, but he found her still alive, although wounded in many places. He took her on his back and carried her up the creek to where the rest of us were waiting. Her story was that after she had fallen and her husband had left her, soldiers rode up and shot her several times as she lay helpless on the sand. At the peace council in 1865 her story was told to the peace commissioners and they counted her wounds, nine in all, I believe.
Most of us who were hiding in the pits had been wounded before we could reach this shelter; and there we lay all that bitter cold day from early in the morning until almost dark, with the soldiers all around us, keeping up a heavy fire most of the time. If they had been real soldiers they would have come in and finished it; but they were nothing but a mob, and anxious as they were to kill they did not dare to come in close. They finally withdrew, about 5 o'clock, and went back to spend the night in the Indian camp. As they retired down the creek they killed all the wounded they could find and scalped and mutilated the dead bodies which lay strewn all along the two miles of dry creek bed. Even this butchers' work did not satisfy them and when they reached the Indian camp they shot Jack Smith and wished to shoot my younger brother Charlie. These two young men (they were half Cheyenne and half white) had remained in the camp when the Indians fled and had later surrendered to some soldiers they knew. Old John Smith was trading in our camp and remained with his son when the Indians fled. When the whites came back to camp after dark, an officer came and told old John that some of the Denver roughs (one-hundred-day-volunteers) were talking of shooting his son Jack. Smith induced some officers of the Fort Lyon garrison who were his friends to go to Colonel Chivington and ask him to save Jack, but Chivington in the morning had given orders to take no prisoners, so when these officers came in and asked him to prevent the shooting of young Smith, he told them roughly that he had given his orders and had nothing further to say. Old John was sitting in his lodge, waiting for the return of the officers, when shots rang out close by. Then men came into the lodge and told him that his son was dead. The Denver men then wished to shoot my brother also, but Charlie had fallen into the hands of some New Mexican scouts belonging to the Fort Lyon garrison; men who knew all of us Bent boys and who had known our father for years; so when the Denver crowd wished to take Charlie out and shoot him as they had just shot young Jack Smith, the New Mexican men ordered them off and threatened to shoot any of them who attempted to touch Charlie.
After the troops withdrew to the Indian camp, we lay in our pits for some time, suspecting that the whites might come back; but they did not return, and at last we crawled out of the holes, stiff and sore, with the blood frozen on our wounded and half-naked bodies. Slowly and painfully we retreated up the creek, men, women, and children dragging themselves along, the women and children wailing and crying, but not too loudly, for they feared the return of the whites. After a long time we met Indians with horses. These men had gone out before dawn to see that the herds had not strayed, and reaching the herds just before the troops came up, they succeeded in getting away with some of the animals before the soldiers surrounded the rest of the herds. On seeing the soldiers coming, these Indians had thrown themselves upon the first ponies they could catch and had then rounded up as many more as they could and driven them up the creek. They went away up the creek and waited until the firing stopped after dark, then came cautiously back to see what they could learn, and this was how they happened to find us. They helped the wounded upon the ponies. One of my cousins was with them and gave me a pony to ride, but my hip was so stiff and sore that I could not mount and had to be lifted on the animal's back. After meeting these young men with the horses, our party went on up the creek a few miles farther, moving very slowly, and then, as the wounded and the women and children could go no farther, we all bivouacked on the open plain for the night.
That was the worst night I ever went through. There we were on that bleak, frozen plain, without any shelter whatever and not a stick of wood to build a fire with. Most of us were wounded and half naked; even those who had had time to dress when the attack came, had lost their buffalo robes and blankets during the fight. The men and women who were not wounded worked all through the night, trying to keep the children and the wounded from freezing to death. They gathered grass by the handful, feeding little fires around which the wounded and the children lay; they stripped off their own blankets and clothes to keep us warm, and some of the wounded who could not be provided with other covering were buried under piles of grass which their friends gathered, a handful at a time, and heaped up over them. That night will never be forgotten as long as any of us who went through it are alive. It was bitter cold, the wind had a full sweep over the ground on which we lay, and in spite of everything that was done, no one could keep warm. All through the night the Indians kept hallooing to attract the attention of those who had escaped from the village to the open plain and were wandering about in the dark, lost and freezing. Many who had lost wives, husbands, children, or friends, went back down the creek and crept over the battleground among the naked and mutilated bodies of the dead. Few were found alive, for the soldiers had done their work thoroughly; but now and then during that endless night some man or woman would stagger in among us, carrying some wounded person on their back.
At last we could stand the cold no longer, and although it was still pitch-dark and long before dawn, we left that place and started east, toward the headwaters of the Smoky Hill, where we knew Indians were encamped. It was fifty miles to the nearest of these camps, and we could go but slowly, most of the people, and even many of the wounded, being still on foot. Then we had to dread the pursuit which would probably begin as soon as the coming of day made it possible for the troops to follow our trail, and we knew that if the troops overtook us on the open plain, barely a handful of us could hope to escape. But luckily for us a few of the men who had escaped on their horses at the beginning of the attack had made straight for the nearest camps on the Smoky Hill, and riding all day they had reached these camps about dark with the news that our camp had been surprised by a thousand white men. Large numbers of men had at once set out from these camps on the Smoky Hill, bringing led ponies with them loaded with blankets, buffalo robes, and food; and soon after day broke these people began to join us in little groups and parties. Before long we were all mounted, clothed, and fed, and then we moved at a better pace and with revived hope; but it was late in the day when we reached the first camp on the Smoky. As we rode into that camp there was a terrible scene. Everyone was crying, even the warriors and the women and children screaming and wailing. Nearly everyone present had lost some relations or friends, and many of them in their grief were gashing themselves with their knives until the blood flowed in streams.