Tomorrow night I run the last session of the current playtest campaign I’ve had going for Razed. The game is still in active development, but I’m moving cities and sadly leaving this play group behind, so I’m trying to wrap things up in a way that is halfway satisfying.
Anonymous asked:How do you balance between exploring what you want to do and what your audience expects from you?
Great question. For me, lately, it’s not one I have to actively deal with—I don’t think I have an audience that expects things from me, per se. (For me, the balance is between the projects I want to do and the projects that pay the bills, and it always tips towards those that pay.) One of my goals for the back half of 2010 is building my rapport with an audience and expanding the definition of “what I do” for those who are paying attention.
When I was running Vampire, though, I dealt with this problem every day—what I wanted and what the audience expected were not the same, I think—and, honestly, I’m not all that happy with how I balanced it. Truth be told, the issue was balancing what we could do on our timeline with what the audience expected with what the audience needed with what I thought would meet with the approval of people in-house. On Vampire, I was concerned with getting nods of approval from other in-house developers and they just weren’t coming, for a variety of reasons. But my need for validation helped me to make some bad calls, and if I had it to do again, I’d just design the most aggressive mix of wish fulfillment and utility I could muster for the end user. I wouldn’t defy expectations in hopes of surprising people into admiring me, because the truth is that for most creatives, the work is what gets the attention, not the creator. Which is to say, I don’t think I would balance what I want and what the audience expects—I’d favor what the audience wants. Sometimes (often?), that’s to be surprised.
Did you read this thing I posted on my tumblelog? I may be wholly foolish to even write this out loud, this call for perspective on the subject of mediocre stories, but it just sort of fell out of my head onto the page this way, and I’m not afraid to be wrong for a little while if it’ll help me be right in the future.
We’ve had very little luck selling RPG books on eBay lately. Rather than go slowly through my back catalog, I’m dumping box after box of books onto the Internet for quick liquidation. The goal is to get these books out of my house. If they can go to good homes, so much the better. If they have to be donated or recycled, then so be it. I’m selling most for just a smidgen over shipping costs, just to make sure I don’t actually lose money getting rid of these. This is a sad part of a book’s life cycle, but it’s the way things go, I guess.
Here’s the complete list of books for sale. It’s a doozy. (You can also click on “Books For Sale” above.)
This sale will go on for about three weeks. Then I’ve got to donate, recycle, or pulp whatever’s left. We’re leaving our house and I can’t pay to move all these things again.
If you want a bundle of books, I’ll cut you a good deal. Remember, please, that even with USPS Media Mail books can be pricey to ship, and you’re paying shipping.
Open your eyes. Here we are.
Like you, I imagine, I’ve been ruminating on this episode for days now. I’ve been wondering how to cover what we’ve been given here. With so many people writing about the episode, what is there left to say? That I have come to bury Lost, not to praise it?
The truth is, I’m not interested in arguing with the Internet about whether the finale did what it was supposed to. I’m not sure the writers entered into a contract with us viewers whenever they raised a question on the show. I am sure that many of the show’s questions can be answered by applying information that we have available to us, mixing in a bit of our own imagination, and tempering the resulting theories against the themes and tropes of the show.
Want to know where that air-dropped cargo came from, full of Dharma Initiative foodstuffs, back when? Maybe it’s the result of passing over the Island without the proper heading—it was flown in and dropped in the 1970s or 1980s and landed in the early 2000s because of the Island’s time-bending properties. Maybe that time-bend was specifically the work of Jacob, trying to help out the castaways, and maybe it was just chance. We may never know for sure, and that’s fair play.
I don’t personally subscribe to the notion that an ending must tie off everything in order to classify as a proper ending. The show didn’t need a singular message to be effective. It didn’t have to come here to tell us exactly one thing. It’s hundreds of hours of storytelling; it’s allowed to meander and sprawl. It’s told over many years, with a huge cast and crew; it’s allowed to reach out and explore. It’s subject to the interruptions of a sometimes uncooperative reality, where actors grow up and fans rebel against new characters; it’s allowed a few missteps and unfulfilled promises. Given the many factors, both practical and philosophical, which Lost chose to put into play, I choose to admire its ambition.
I think it’s good to ask questions, even if you don’t have the answers. I think it’s good to get an audience wondering. I think it’s good to provoke imaginations.
You’ve all seen the College Humor list of questions by now, yes?
That said, the finale is what it is. What happened, happened. If your take on it is more negative than mine, that’s valid. As you’ll see below, I have some practical issues with the finale, myself. So it goes.
If you want a recap, this isn’t it. You’ll find a great recap at Lostpedia, of course. Also, if you want to see what is apparently a take on the episode from someone behind the scenes at Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams’ production company, I’ve reblogged that piece that’s going around, over on my tumblelog.
This, instead, is my stream-of-conscious reflection on what happened, and how, and what it means. On with it, then.
Spoilers believe in you, dude.
I found a million old photos of mine in a forgotten folder here, and I’m going to go through them and reminisce instead of doing any more work tonight. I’ll leave you with one of them now, and more, probably, later on.
Good night, you nefarious skinbags, and thank you for tuning into the Gist. Enjoy this orangutan.
This experiment, blogging a few times per day with little updates, didn’t go like I expected. I anticipated doing something a little more like what Warren Ellis does, obviously, but I never blogged the little doses of links and news that he does, for a couple of reasons. Some of them are better than others, but off the top of my head, here they are:
You’re connected. You read the Internet. What am I going to do, hit you with a dollop of entertainment news I got from CHUD or something I was alerted to via Google news? (I have a Google alert set up for the words “Tracy Jordan +ridiculous +disaster,” as you know.) You read all that stuff already, if you want to. I simply don’t think of myself on being on the cutting edge of Internet news, so I’m slow to share with you things that I find online because, more often than not, I figure if I’ve seen it, you have, too. I’ll post it when I have something more to comment on about it. Which is maybe less likely than it used to be, because…
It’s tricky to do lately, but I’m trying not to add muck to the Internet political landscape. I don’t see how me mouthing off about politics is going to do anything but cut away at my number of readers, so I politely keep my mouth shut. It’s not like I’m so informed, anyway. I’d rather not contribute to that background noise and I’m not sure my message constitutes a signal. For what it’s worth, my politics are in flux, anyway — I’m constantly reforming my opinions based on the newest tomfoolery.
A lot of the funny gags and things I get sent to me in emails and junk aren’t attributed, so I don’t post them here. (Warren Ellis has things sent directly to him by a friendly orbiting host of creative types, so his pictures tend to come with attributions already.) On Tumblr, where the de facto truth is that images will circulate, I sometimes bend this rule, but I prefer to aim credit where it’s due.
(By the way, I may try this broadcasting experiment over on Tumblr in a future week. You check that thing now and again, right?)
A lot of my time and headspace is dedicated to projects that do not belong to me, leaving me unable to talk much about the work I’m doing. Warren Ellis works often (mostly?) on creator-owned projects, so he can share teasers and allude to what he’s working on or even share the things that are currently inspiring him. I often can’t do that because it might hint at this or that NDA’d project that doesn’t belong to me. So a lot of things I would blog about, I don’t. So it goes.
Since I’m trying to write for a living (and I have an update on that, maybe, in the future), I have to consider every piece of writing that I give away. If I think I might be able to get a magazine article or paying essay out of a post, I shelve it. If I think it might fit better at Gameplaywright, where I post my general and specific gaming material, that’s where it ends up. It’s not that what I post here is worth gold, but it is true that the time I spend posting here is time I’m not spending working on something else. I’d like to post more of substance here, but when I’m writing without a chance of pay, I feel guilty — like I should be working. When I finish my novel and am trying to promote myself more as a writer, then I’ll have good reason to post more here, and write more like Chuck Wendig does, with daily updates.
I didn’t net many extra hits or readers this week, near as I can tell. (Some metrics aren’t in yet.) Worse, I don’t think the extra posting volume did much to entertain anyone, which means it was probably time wasted. Live and learn. Perhaps I’ll try a few more broadcast weeks in the future, to see if there’s a change over time, but for the next few weeks I’ll just be too busy to keep this up.
I imagine it’s easier for Mr. Ellis to blog throughout the day because he has a steady feed of compelling, surprising, alarming material coming into his inbox — I also imagine it’s hard for him to get anything done with that steady feed of distractions coming into his inbox. I certainly don’t want to make it sound like he’s got it easy. I can only imagine how taxing it must be for him to juggle so many projects and maintain momentum. I have, as counted last night, eight live projects — including the likes of The Bones, Razed and Eternal Lies — right now and they are, collectively, a handful. Cheers to Mr. Ellis for juggling and blogging at the same time.
So. There that is. Be seeing you.
You’re reading The Gist, a blog of troll markets and other underground magic bazaars.
Earlier this week, a stranger on Flickr wrote me to ask about using this photo of Borough Market, which I took during last year’s trip to London. She wanted to draw it for her art class and was looking for a version bigger than the default Flickr size. Of course I said yes — it’s nice just to know that a photo of mine has reverberated with a stranger somewhere. Hopefully she’ll send along her sketches or finished drawing when she’s done.
This is the second time someone has found a photo of mine on Flickr and asked to used it for a project. (The first time I was invited to be the album cover for a local band, but I couldn’t find a big enough version of the image for print.) In both cases, I’ve tried to say yes as happily and as quickly as possible, if only because it’s what I would want if I was in their shoes. It’s nice to know that someone actually is seeing and enjoying some of the material we leave behind us as we meander across the Internet, and that it’s not always being mocked or derided by mean-spirited anonymites.
I’m trying to put out what I want to get back, more and more. And, yes, I fail at it sometimes, but I’m trying to do more good than harm.
Thanks for tuning in this week.
Photo © Will Hindmarch
Here is some musing I did on the role and quantity of research necessary to write, as posted in this Story Games thread:
What’s the going rate for research-to-writing. How much do you have to read before you’re allowed to write about a place, and how much are you allowed to write per page read? How valid is a public, international notion of a place, compared to a place as locals view it? How fictional is fictional — if your characters aren’t real people, then they presumably come with fictional apartments and houses and fictional relatives and fictional histories? Once you start telling a story set anywhere, you start lying a little bit, and you start getting things technically wrong. How much verisimilitude is necessary to offset what’s fictional? Where do you find the truth that makes for realism, and how much of that is truth as opposed to accuracy?
I pose these as troublesome, vaguely snide questions, rather than answers, because I think fiction answers these questions, each in different ways, by having the gall to come into existence, for better or worse.
Or, alternately, sometimes a city is just a city — sometimes a city is not a character but just a collection of tree flavors and weather selected to be the painted backdrop to a tale. Sometimes a city is just an adjective.
Am I crazy?
You’re reading the Gist, a cutting-edge antique from the golden era of state-of-the-art tech.
This photo is from Birmingham, Alabama’s Sloss furnace, which is now something of a free-standing unchaperoned museum, or an artifact big enough to walk around in. Great place for textures and photos, especially if you like old brick and metal. Birmingham is, itself, sort of like that, too.
Photo © Will Hindmarch
Will Hindmarch is a freelance writer and designer.
It rhymes with "blind march."
Email: word(at)wordstudio(dot)net.
Twitter: @wordwill
LinkedIn: profile
Co-Founder: Gameplaywright.net
