Apparently, back when Vampire developer Russell Bailey’s writing career felt new to him, I told him to “Be Fucking Mamet.” That meant something different to me back then than it would mean now, but I don’t doubt that I said it. I said a lot of things. Rusty’s quoting that line in his post, today, about how crime novelists don’t get women, and it’s a good one — very Russell Bailey. (The post is notable, too, because of what it says, and doesn’t say, about the canceled EVE RPG.)

Rusty’s absolutely right that Vampire must be, on some level, crime fiction. And, of course, that can mean a lot of things. Earlier today, Chuck Wendig was saying that The Wire is a model Vampire: The Requiem chronicle (or set of chronicles), and he’s right, too. I used to tell people that The Shield was an archetypal Vampire game, what with its layers of loyalties, its constant lies, and its underlying involvement in the illicit trade of something illegal — in The Shield it was often drugs or prostitution, in Vampire it was the Blood.

So, yeah, as much as Requiem is gothic — and that’s a theme easily circumvented by the individual Storyteller — it’s definitely crime-fiction-style storytelling. It’s a game about monsters that commit crimes to survive. Their very existence defies one of the only strict laws of living: Thou Shalt Die.

Anyway.

Rusty’s post also reminds me: The naming of the clan books may be the best work I did at White Wolf. It’s something I remember being proud of, at any rate, for whatever pride is worth.

So maybe you’ve been following my updates on Twitter or Facebook. Maybe you just read that bit about my blood a few days ago. Maybe this is news to you. Whatever. The short version.

Some doctors took some of my blood to check it, to see if some weird bruising on my toes was symptomatic of something else. Something worse. They ran some tests, and everything came back fine, except… it turns out they didn’t run the right tests to rule out some stuff we thought we’d ruled out. So, one biopsy later, we’re checking with my blood again. This time we’re asking it more pointed questions, I guess, to see what it knows.

That was a week ago. They told me we might have answers by last Thursday. No call. Friday comes and goes. No call.

So now my brain has come up with this notion that it must be bad news, because why else would they wait? “Let’s give him the weekend,” the doctor says to her nurse, “and call on Monday.” Or the nurse says, “The doctor’s back from vacation on Tuesday; we’ll let her make that phone call.” Because, the nurse, she hates making the bad phone calls.

Or maybe the tests came back so weird that they can’t make sense of them. Maybe they keep turning the results form around and around, trying to figure out which way is up. “Ever seen anything like this?” asks the nurse. The form is like an ink-blot test. It shows a raven eating a turnip or an octopus riding a bicycle, depending on how you turn it. “No,” the doctor replies, “never. Never.”

They’ll call just as soon as they can make sense of the image. The doctor posts it to Flickr, maybe, and asks people what they see. DarthDavid1985 says he sees biplanes flying a double helix around the Eiffel Tower. HipKitty99 is sure it’s Brandywine Syndrome, because of the platelets. Something about the platelets. A case hasn’t been reported since 1922, and it was thought to have been discredited, but there it is. Look at the platelets.

So, truth is, it’s probably nothing, but now this would-be call has become like balloon in my peripheral vision. Every day it gets a little bigger, swells a little more, and I know it’s going to pop. It’s going to pop. I just don’t. Know. When.

Music: The Bravery, “Unconditional”

Somewhere, my blood and my skin are being scrutinized. Strangers I don’t know and will probably never meet are handling a little piece of my flesh. They put it under the lens of a microscope to see what I’m made of. They hold it up to their ears to see what my flesh says about me.

They’re looking for poison in my cells. They’re looking to see if I’m as broken in my feet as I sometimes am in my head. They’re looking for good news or bad news.

By now, it’s possible that they’ve already found what they’re going to find. The news is its own thing now, moving on papers, through phone calls, from the strangers in the lab to the doctor I met one time, when she cut a tiny piece of me off. “Good to see you,” she said. The news is moving now.

Someone, somewhere, may already know if I should breathe out or breathe in when I get the call. Someone, somewhere, may already know if I should be looking forward to the call or relishing these days of uncertainty as the last before my diagnosis. Someone, somewhere, knows more about me than I do, right now.

I picture the doctor, getting the news and thinking it’s no big deal — laughing, even, because I got worked up over nothing. I picture the doctor putting off the call, because she hates giving bad news — saying, even, “I’ll let him have the day before I tell him.” I picture the paper with my test results sitting on her desk, forgotten.

It’s probably nothing.

Yesterday, John Hodgman, in all his @hodgman-liness, cunningly broke apart the word meh, practically pantsing it in front of the whole school. Waxy.org has his multi-tweet sermon up for you in not-reverse order. Go there if you want the links to work — I reproduce it here just to show off my coffee ring in there. (Update: And now BoingBoing’s got it too: “John Hodgman explains whats wrong with ‘meh’”)

He calls meh “a rejection of joy” and that’s the killing blow, to my mind. Too much joy gets rejected. I like joy. I like to celebrate things. Let’s.

I’m guilty of using meh, for sure, because this language is the only language I have. We may want to virginize her, but she’s a universal whore in the meantime. So with meh in reach, I’m going to grab it now and again. But with visibility being the treasure of the Internet — where dropping a name can be like dropping coins in its guitar case — every post or comment spent on a meh is time that could be spent promoting a friend’s work or offering actual criticism somewhere else. Meh is so often the whiff of a passionless bore.

But Hodgman put it better in a couple of tweets that didn’t get caught up in the Waxy or BoingBoing posts:

Honestly, the idea that there is a smart, passionate person out there who can’t be bothered is far scarier [...] …than knowing the actual Internet handle of one malcontent jerk who took the time to write “meh.”

Anti-meh to that, @hodgman.

I dig them Bourne movies. How much? All of it. I dig them all of the digging there is.

So I’m predisposed to be excited about a continent-hopping thriller like Traitor. The marketing has been, uh, light — near as I can tell — and this late-August release date doesn’t show a lot of confidence in the picture. Or, more accurately, it doesn’t show a lot of confidence in the picture’s ability to make money. I suppose it’s true that Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce don’t exactly have the bank-making power that a summertime movie calls for on opening weekend. Guy Pearce’s character is hardly a factor in the film’s marketing, even.

These are sterling actors, though. They’d get me to rent a direct-to-DVD title, no problem, and this weekend they’re going to get my $8 for Traitor. I’m not waiting for DVD. To be honest, what made up my mind was, unusually, the Traitor website.

On its face, it’s a simple trailer-and-poster page, so if you don’t want busy Flash-based shenanigans, you can avoid them. Nice. Click through, though, and you get a character-centric tour of the movie’s style and atmosphere — not a bunch of spoilers and not a list of the movie’s explosions. For one thing, the site reveals that the movie, in some fashion, pits Cheadle against Pearce, promising a kind of conflict that the trailer doesn’t really get at. Now they’ve got my attention. Explore the character-based “experiences,” though, and you get enough on-location action and new-style espionage ambiance to get my money.

One page opens up with this bit of dialogue:

“You got dragged into a street fight.”

“Nobody gets dragged into a street fight.”

Nice.

Listen to how well the music plays along with the button-pushing sound effects, and see how smoothly the whole thing offers you shallow factoids and video clips without killing us with overwrought Flash effects. It’s understated, a little classy, and I find that refreshing. Ultimately, though, the movie promises foreign countries, running and punching, a manhunt, and people waxing philosophic about what they do for a living. Sold.

Music: John Powell, “Assets and Targets” (from The Bourne Ultimatum)

For three days, the clocks flashed twelve. The computers shut down. The line was dead.

For a while, there, the power went out when there was lightning in the sky. Or if there was rain. Or if the Earth orbited the Sun.

Sometimes, now, the power drops out in the middle of the day, maybe for a minute, maybe for a few hours. Sometimes it flickers, you know, on and off, waffling before settling finally on darkness. It’s base, it’s primitive, it’s a drop into simple fecklessness.

Sometimes, the electricity goes out, too. This week it’s gone out three or four times, rapid enough that I stopped resetting the clocks until at least a day went by without an outage. It went out one night when I needed the Internet, and stayed out long enough that my cell phone battery withered away. No electricity, no power, no alarm.

It was happenstance, but there was a message in it, I think.

I’m home, hundreds of miles from an annual party, because I haven’t done what I wanted to this year. I didn’t pay the dues I set for myself. By the metrics of the evening, though, I can say with pride that I have stood behind wonderful people with talent and skills worthy of admiration.

These people flew through the air on fuel-burning engines. They sat in a room buzzing with nerves and handshakes. They got lubed up on well drinks. They got injected with medals and meaningful looks. The place hummed with electricity, I imagine.

Noise: The Faint, “The Geeks Were Right”

I washed bile and ire out of this and I think I regret it.

Yesterday, I got mail from GlaxoSmithKline. That’s never happened before. I’m not sure where they got my address.

// Click for a critique of pharmaceutical literature

For the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to write a memorial and failing.

Thus, all commentary about writing and endings is blown up to twice its size for me lately. It’s all swollen with injected poignancy and bent out of proportion by a lens of fish-eyed grief between me and the subject. So, for me, from over here, the following comment by writer Matt Fraction has double meaning. Both meanings—the practical and the dramatic—are good:

I’m not leaving anyone behind. I’ve stopped writing a comic book. I write lots more. If people reading it liked what I did, they can come read other comics I write. If they like the character, the character is still there. [The] implication that leaving a book is tantamount to abandonment is melodramatic at best and completely ridiculous at worst. Did Dickens abandon you at the end of GREAT EXPECTATIONS? Did Welles at the end of CITIZEN KANE? Picasso, at the far right edge of GUERNICA? No. Stuff ends. Really IMPORTANT stuff ends, not just goofy little comics. It’s what stuff does.

[From Warren Ellis' White Chapel Forums]

This author’s note is in no way endorsed or approved by White Wolf Publishing and is in no way “official.” This is self-involved stuff, but you can scroll to the end if you want behind-the-scenes trivia. Go to the official Vampire forums if you want to discuss the book with White Wolf staff.

I was unsure whether or not to post this. It’s a very personal bit of writing, this note. But smarter people than I reminded me that writing is about honesty, and about reporting what you see. So here you go.

My last Vampire book is here.

Even though I wrote the design document for it and what I think is safe to call the vast majority of the actual text, this is a confounding book for me. This is a heavy book for me, too, full of messy feelings. The copy you’re going to get is going to be gorgeous because it’s simply a gorgeous book, but mine will always be some mysterious thing, warped and funny-smelling, like it was someone else’s waterlogged magazine.

For one, it was transmuted from manuscript to book after I left White Wolf Game Studio in October of 2007. For another, everything that I didn’t write was written after my material, without my help or input. Not that it would matter.

>> Click to read the Author’s Note