eddyfate

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

After lots of intense negotiations (okay, after I asked nicely), Rob Justice of the BearSwarm podcast has agreed to host a question and answer podcast with me about Act I of Whitechapel! If you have questions about the story, the writing process, the podcast production, or even just personal questions about me, you can email Rob at whitechapel@bearswarm.com over the course of the next week, and he’ll pepper me with them while I try to answer them with some sort of logic and sanity. We’ll record sometime next week, and it’ll be posted both here and on the BearSwarm podcast sometime in early December.

Looking forward to answering your questions!

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

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Previously on Whitechapel

Mister Rich revealed some tantalizing information about Six’s past, although he was wary of Six’s true intentions. After Six had some food, a shower, and some new clothes, Mister Rich was followed by two police officers to the run-down motel that they were staying at. The situation escalated, and Six killed one of the officers with his mind while Mister Rich was wounded in a gunfire exchange with the second officer. Six realized that the cops were fake, but just as he was pulling Mister Rich’s car around to get him to a hospital, a black van showed up at the other end of the motel parking lot.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Author’s Commentary

This episode was initially pretty tough — I kind of knew where I wanted to go, but the first time I sat down to write this, it just didn’t come out. I barely got 500 words in before I called it a day. Then I watched some television and movies, just trying to find the vibe of Whitechapel again. The next day, I sat down and banged out the entire episode in pretty much one shot. That’s just how writing is, sometimes.

Anyhow, I came into this with two goals: write Mister Rich out (even for a short time), and kill someone else. The former was for a couple of reasons — to give David (the voice talent for Mister Rich) a break from recording dozens of lines every episode, and because this serial is really about Six, and I wanted to keep the focus there. The latter was because it was a good time to cash in the winner of the second Agent Mission, and the appearance of two unnamed cops was a good opportunity for that.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

What happens when a game designer gets an itch to play with some house rules and loses complete control over his ideas?

This:

Marvelous Superheroes (Playtest Version 0.1)

From the Introduction:

I have always loved the Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR, and over the years I have often considered it to be a good superhero game for my style of gaming. However, while many of the mechanics have held up as a decent RPG-light system, there are weird sub-rules and needlessly complex systems built into the game that are just too quirky for my tastes nowadays. Meanwhile, I’ve been familiar with Fudge for a decade now and liked the idea of it, but it also had some weirdly complex areas that seemed unnecessary and kept me from really trying out the system. A couple of years back, a public domain game called 4C was released. It was a more streamlined version of my favorite superhero system, but it went in a different direction, focusing more on the numbers than the words which made Marvel Super Heroes so cool to me.

One day, in thinking over some house rules for a new superhero campaign I wanted to run, I considered converting 4C and Fudge into a new game close to Marvel Super Heroes, so I would have more flexibility in terms of rules hacking down the road. I found a great article by Steve Kenson on the “Superlative System,” which was his start on a conversion attempt between Marvel and Fudge, and that started me on the road to what eventually became Marvelous Superheroes.

This document is rewritten from the Fudge and 4C SRD documents for use in my personal games. I do provide a simple conversion page to go from Marvel Super Heroes to Marvelous Superheroes, but it isn’t intended as a challenge to anyone’s intellectual property. Right now, this is just a fun system that I hope will finally hit my sweet spot of superhero gaming.


I stopped poking at it a while ago, but I kept forgetting to post it online. If people want to run some playtests or just read it over, that would be cool.

It's been a while since I've done this, and I'm getting ready for a LARP in a few minutes, so let's get to this.

• 30 Rock: I admit, when I first caught a couple of episodes of this show, I didn't find it all that funny. But we kept hearing lots of good things about the show, so on a lark we started watching season 2 through Netflix Streaming. We got so hooked that we went back and watching the first season, and now we're catching up on the latest season on Hulu. It's a surprisingly entertaining show with a dose of weirdness that keeps it entertaining.
• Uncharted 2: I wasn't a big fan of Uncharted, so I wasn't all that excited about Uncharted 2. But David picked it up and started playing it, and one night after getting frustrated with Brutal Legend, I decided to give it a try. The best summary I can give is that this game reminded me of the excitement I had when I first watched the Indiana Jones movies. It's more Indiana Jones than any Indiana Jones game I've played.
• Star Guard: On the completely opposite end of graphics quality and price, Star Guard is a free Flash run and gun platformer that just shouldn't be as much fun as it is. The way the story unfolds adds an interesting layer to "green guy kills all the red guys." There's also a checkpoint system and infinite lives, but the corpses of your previous incarnations litter the battlefield as you work through the game.

More as I get a chance.

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

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Previously on Whitechapel

Six was picked up from the Whitechapel Project by Mister Rich, a man who knew Six before his memory loss. Mister Rich confronted Six about his disguise as Dr. Tucci, but after Six told Mister Rich the truth, he decided to trust Six for now. They went to a run-down motel, where Mister Rich revealed that Six was found in London, England, and that his powers are as dangerous to Six as they are to everyone around him. After Mister Rich went to get new clothes for Six, he came back saying he was followed. Six leaves the motel, and notices two police officers asking questions of the other motel patrons.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

I've been kicking around the idea of doing an irregular column of writing advice called "Head To Keyboard" (or HTK for short), basically talking about things that annoy me about being a writer or an editor. I wasn't sure if it would be part of the blogcast or part of this blog, but more and more my blog is about writing anyhow, so I decided to start doing it here.

After two years of handling the White Wolf slush pile, as well as several more years submitting my work to various publishers, I keep running into five things that people keep doing that doesn't help them one bit in getting published. This isn't secret knowledge, arcane information or even sage advice, but people keep screwing it up over and over and over again, so I thought it's stuff probably worth repeating.

Five Things To Avoid

1. Ignoring submission guidelines. The company you want to write for has them there for a reason. Not only does not following the guidelines automatically irritate the slush pile reader (which won't incline him to regard your submission with any particular sympathy), but there may also be legal aspects that need to be followed before your submission can be considered. Even if you get bored and stop reading this blog now, take this piece of advice with you: follow the damned submission guidelines.

2. Talking shit on the Internet. More and more editors will do a Google search on your name to find out more about you. If they find your forum posts and tweets and blogs about how stupid the editor's company is and what horrible products they produce, you'll get a form rejection. Further, editors do talk to each other, and word gets around. You don't have to be in love with everything that a company produces, but posting it for public view on the Internet won't help your long-term prospects.

3. Having special needs. Love it or hate it, Microsoft Word is the standard -- I have run into few companies that don't assume it as the default format (though RTF is a close second), and never met a company that won't accept it at all. If you want to make money as a writer, get Microsoft Word. If you simply can't, get some software that can convert your documents to Microsoft Word and read Word comments and markup (OpenOffice 3 is good, usable on all three main OS formats, and is free). If you absolutely insist on submitting your magnum opus in Microsoft Works or WordPerfect, I hope you enjoy being rejected unread.

4. Using generic submissions. Take a few minutes before you submit and read up on the company you're submitting to. Get the editor's name right. Specify what product you're submitting for. Make sure the company you're submitting to is even accepting submissions for your kind of manuscript. If you don't care enough about the publisher to get a few details right, odds are they won't care enough to publish you.

5. Plagiarizing your material. Seriously, don't do this. Again, one Google search will find you out. If you need to quote, quote and give credit. But that shit didn't fly in high school, and it won't fly now. And as more and more people read your work, eventually someone's going to notice something odd and out you.

I'm not kidding when I say that simply not doing these five things will get you much further in the slush pile.

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Author’s Commentary

This was a weird episode to write in a couple of ways. The first half was really simple, because it was essentially the exposition I expected to get to in episode five, more or less. When that ran out, I also got to address a point that got cut from the last episode — that Six needs a shower.

Once he was in the shower, though, I wasn’t sure what to do with him. I started with him reviewing the information and putting it all together (something I’ve done a lot in previous episodes), but I realized about halfway through that this has got to be wearing on him. I scrapped my original paragraph and starting writing it more emotionally, and I learned a lot about Six. I went back and added in the bit about Six seeing himself in the mirror, and the whole thing ended up being a really nice set-piece in which we all learn more about Six. (The fact that it was episode six I actually didn’t notice until the final draft — also a cool touch.)

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Here's the short version: I'm dropping out of NaNoWriMo to avoid burnout. Yes, after only five days. But I'm still writing.

The long version is that I'm only dropping out on a technicality, and here's why.

See, I've written one day on NaNoWriMo thus far. Sunday, I was physically exhausted from ICC -- no worries, it happens. Monday, I wrote a really solid 2,500 (and hated most everything I wrote, but that's part of the process, I think). Tuesday, I was out for several hours entertaining guests from Ireland, and got back late. Wednesday, I was mentally exhausted, so I gave myself a pass. Today, I was charged up for writing at work (which I've been doing pretty much every day this week), but I realized that I was dreading going back to my novel.

( Read more... )

At the end of this, nothing has really changed, except that I'm not holding myself to an artificial expectation. Instead, I'm holding myself to a completely different artificial expectation, one that makes more sense for me.

There are a number of open positions at for our various video game projects at CCP (where I work). Right now, the fastest way to be considered is to apply online at  www.ccpgames.com . Descriptions can be found on our website for these openings, but some links are below.

(Note: I'm just forwarding this on from Human Resources. If you have questions, go to the website and send them there -- I'm just a writer monkey.)

 

Senior Programmer	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Programmer	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Concept Artists	Reykjavik, Iceland	Art
Animator	Atlanta, USA	Art
English Game Master	Shanghai, China	Game Masters
Database Administrator	Reykjavik, Iceland	Operations
Senior Game Designer	Shanghai, China	Content & Game Design
Senior Web Developer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Web Development
Senior QA Engineer	Atlanta, USA	Quality Assurance
German speaking Game Master	Reykjavik, Iceland	Game Masters
QA Engineer	Atlanta, USA	Quality Assurance
Senior Graphics Programmer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Programmers
Graphics Programmer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Programmers
IT Manager	Shanghai, China	Operations
QA Engineer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Quality Assurance
Programmer	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Programmer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Programmers
Action Script Programmer	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Artist / Graphic Designer	Reykjavik, Iceland	Art
QA Tester	Reykjavik, Iceland	Quality Assurance
Customer Acquisition Manager	Atlanta, USA	Marketing
Senior Game Engineer	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Game Designer	Atlanta, USA	Content & Game Design
Senior Animation Programmer	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Technical Director	Atlanta, USA	Programmers
Associate Content Developer	Atlanta, USA	Content & Game Design
QA Tech Lead	Reykjavik, Iceland	Quality Assurance
Content Manager	Atlanta, USA	Content & Game Design
Engineering Manager	Shanghai, China	Programmers
Senior/Lead Character Modeler	Reykjavik, Iceland	Art
Quality Assurance Engineer	Shanghai, China	Quality Assurance

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

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Previously on Whitechapel

Six escaped from his cell at the Whitechapel Project, only to be picked up by a black car driven by a man known only as Mister Rich. The mysterious driver seemed to play into Six’s disguise as Dr. Tucci, one of the employees of the Whitechapel Project, but when they arrived at their pre-arranged meeting place of Eden Park, both Six and Mister Rich found a wreck with the skinned body of Dr. Tucci inside. Six confessed to everything that happened, and Mister Rich admitted to knowing Six previously. They drove to a run-down motel, where Mister Rich offered to answer a couple of questions in order to satisfy Six’s curiosity.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

This weekend I finally took all of the brainstorming I've done for Night Fall and starting turning it into an outline.

I used a modified version of the Snowflake Method for plotting. Last week I started with a one-sentence "elevator pitch" for the book, and expanded that into a paragraph of five sentences, making sure that most of them ended with some sort of complication. Today I took that paragraph and expanded each sentence into its own paragraph, detailing the progression from start to finish in more detail. I then broke out each sentence of those paragraphs and numbered them. These were the building blocks for each chapter.

I then spent a couple of hours putting everything into yWriter. (For those of you familiar with yWriter, I have one "scene" per "chapter" -- I want lots of short chapters for this, so it makes the most sense structurally in the software.) I used the sentence I wrote for the chapter as the chapter's description. Each scene also asked for a goal, a conflict, and a resolution, which I filled out based on what I had in mind. This lead to some restructuring of my chapters, which I did on the fly as it made sense (and I fully expect I'll do again as the book comes along). yWriter also asks which characters are in which scenes, which forced me to start fleshing out which characters+ I'll need for the story.

I approached the novel as a straight-forward adventure story. Most of the comedy I like usually comes from entertaining writing and scenes, not from a zany plot, so I wrangled my plotting as if I were writing a legitimate vampire hunter story. Besides, by plotting "straight," I don't have to worry about whether the premise is funny (since it isn't), and I think I can find some organic humor from the plot tropes of the genre as well.

In the end, I have 29 chapters roughed out. Even if I assume about two thousand words for each chapter (which would make each chapter very short), that's 58,000 words, which is well over my NaNoWriMo goal. I think it's likely the book will end up being longer than that, though, so expect I'll be talking about this well into December. Part of what leads me into thinking this will go long is because I have 13 named characters at this point (although, to be fair, one is a pug dog).

If I have time later this week, I'll start fleshing out details on the characters to make them all unique and interesting (and funny, of course). In the meantime, I'm excited about working on this!

First off, I decided to write Night Fall, the parody novel of female vampire hunter "bad girl" protagonists, featuring Katrina Night. I even mocked up a fake book cover last week and posted it on Flickr, to help me visualize the book itself more clearly. I covered the various reasons why I didn't pick the other novel options a while back. I spent some of my post-surgery recovery time brainstorming and jotting down random ideas that have come to me, and man, I have tons of ideas for this. I'm actually having difficulty narrowing them all down, which is a good sign, I think.

One thing that came up over the past week or so, however, is the question "Why do NaNoWriMo at all?" Chuck Wendig actually did a good job playing devil's advocate over on his blog (which, if you are not reading, you should be), and I think it's good to spell out my specific reasons for doing this.

( Why I'm Doing This )</div>

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Thanks to everyone for being patient with the extra week. If you’ve been interested in what’s being going on with my health, you can check out the “health”-tagged entries on my LiveJournal. Otherwise, let’s dive into this.

Author’s Commentary

This episode poured out pretty easily. I had envisioned Mr. Rich acting in some advisory capacity to Six back before I started episode four, and this was a case where the voting just bore out where I was inclined to go anyway. I tried to keep this episode from being a bunch of exposition, but the inherent distrust between the two characters made that pretty easy — so easy, in fact, that I actually never really got to the exposition at all.

This actually ended up working in my favor, because I got to try something I’ve been wanting to do since I saw it on some other serial fiction sites — a poll with multiple options. Selecting what questions to ask Mr. Rich seemed like a natural use of that.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

The check-up with the surgeon's office was very short -- mostly it was a cleaning of the extraction sites and a quick lesson in how to do it myself (twice a day). The nurse told me that actually I'm doing really well -- many patients can't really even open their mouths at this point, and nearly all of them are still on constant pain meds (I'm on one pain pill in the morning and the rest of the day on ibuprofin for the past couple of days). The pain, numbness and nausea are all common, especially with the number of extractions I had (apparently I had twelve novocaine injections for this surgery). I asked if I would be able to eat and talk around this time next week, and the nurse said that shouldn't be a problem, and if it is a problem, I should probably come in for another (free) post-op check-up.

I asked because next week is ICC. I also found out that I'm going to be working in the office for parts of ICC weekend -- probably all of Wednesday, and likely at least part of Thursday and Friday. That may also mean coming home Wednesday and Thursday night to make sure our pets are handled and fed, and so I can get up and go to work without bothering Michelle and David by waking up insanely early (by convention standards). So, I'm not going to be around as much as I've been at previous ICCs -- in fact, I think this ICC I'll be positively scarce until Friday evening. This does mean I don't have to rush Whitechapel, though, and I might even fudge my NaNoWriMo wordcount to start late next week instead of trying to cram it in on the Sunday of ICC.

Which reminds me -- I need to post about my NaNoWriMo plans. But first, I need to do the Whitechapel Post-Mortem.

Tuesday night, while I was playing Brutal Legend, I was struck with sudden and massive nausea. I went to lie down for a bit. I ate a little, and that seemed to help, but I went to bed very early. I woke up nearly 12 hours later, still nauseous and still exhausted, so I took another sick day from work and stayed home.

Today I'm feeling about where I was Tuesday morning (maybe a bit better, since I'm managing my pain with only ibuprofin). I have some nausea medication with me at work, just in case, and I have a follow-up with my surgeon this afternoon. I'm hoping to catch up on my Whitechapel post-mortem tonight, as well as catching up on some work today.

For some reason I thought this recovery would be a slam-dunk because I've been through so many surgeries, but I'm just moving back to an old coping mechanism -- taking it one day at a time.

I realized that while I mentioned this obliquely, I haven't actually talked about my recent surgery, or why I needed to have it. Let me correct that oversight now.

About a month ago, I went to a new dentist for a (long overdue) checkup. She took some X-rays, and said that all four of my wisdom teeth are sideways in my gums, and the lower two were pushing against my roots. She suggested that I get those two removed, and referred to me an oral surgeon. After I worked out the best time at work to take a few days off, I talked to said surgeon, and we decided to just go ahead and get all four removed so I don't have to do this again in a year or so.

The surgery was Friday. As far as I know, it went well -- I went to sleep and woke up with a sore throat and gauze in my mouth (which sounds much more interesting than it really was). Michelle drove me home, and I stayed in bed all day watching videos on my laptop and trying to find ways to swallow pills without opening my mouth too much. The next three days were an exercise in relearning how to chew, talk, and play video games while under the influence of pain meds. (Note: I have no idea how good it is while sober, but Brutal Legend is hella fun while on pain pills.)

Today I'm back at work. I'm mentally and physically exhausted, and I'm still not too far beyond eating soft foods, but I'm able to do more than sit on the couch and try not to accidentally bite my tongue. It might be another day or two before I do much more than get up, go to work, go home and lie on the couch for several hours, but I'm slowly ramping up to something approximating "normal." I'm going to have a post-op follow-up Thursday afternoon.

I looked over the poll results, and I did a lot of thinking about what I really want to write. (I even added a novel idea that I forgot about, got attached to it for a while, and then ultimately cut it.) Ultimately, I told myself that there's a decent chance that all of those will get written at some point, so I just had to decide what I really wanted to live with right now for a month straight.

The Bureau wasn't particularly popular, and I just spent a couple of weeks working on a superhero RPG anyway, so I cut that pretty quickly.

Writing two projects at the same time means I should probably diversify, or else I'll get sick of writing horror/mystery after November, which isn't fair to Whitechapel. That meant cutting As The Devil Drives and Do The Job (which was the professional wrestling/murder mystery idea I remembered after I posted last night).

Thy Kingdom Come was surprisingly popular (both in the poll and to me personally), but references to steampunk actually decided it for me. TKC was an idea I had long before the steampunk craze came along, because I love 19th century literature. However, I'm kind of sick of steampunk right now, and a check of my gut made me go "blech" when thinking about it. I do want to write that book at some point (maybe even next year), but I'm just not in the brainspace to do that now. If I were freelancing, I'd suck it up and deal with it, but since I'm primarily writing this for me, I gave myself a pass.

Besides -- I think I really want to stretch my skills and try comedy. And that pretty much narrowed the field to Terrifying Disappointment and Night Fall.

Both have some characters I'm intrigued by. Both have some rough basics of the background sketched out. Both have some vague plots in my head. And both have huge gaps of personal knowledge that terrify me. It's a balance of comfort and fear that's probably good for me.

Thanks to everyone who gave me their thoughts on this. Now I have to push this to the back of my head, read up on a couple of things, and lay the groundwork for next week, so I can make a decision and (if I decide I'm crazy enough to do this), start outlining and researching after my surgery.

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

A few quick things that Whitechapel readers might be interested in.

• Shadow Freak is the sorry bastard lucky winner of the Agent Mission contest. He (or someone with his name, at least) will be dying in a future episode of Whitechapel. Congrats, Freak!
• I recorded a short Whitechapel promotional piece for The Podge Cast, episode 60. It’s intentionally done in a slightly raw style (similar to my White Wolf Blogcast), but it’s around fifty-eight and a half minutes into the episode, if you’re interested. It was fun and easy to do, so I might send them more “hodges” in future. Many thanks to David Pinilla and the rest for letting me babble a bit about my baby!
• Finally, I’m seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year. However, I’m not entirely sure which novel I’m going to write. If you want to help me out, you can sneak over to my LiveJournal and vote on any options you like.

As a reminder, voting will be two weeks long for Episode 5, so get some friends to come over and vote on which questions Six should ask!