eddyfate

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

For those who have followed my Twitter and LiveJournal for the past few weeks, I’ve made a few cryptic remarks about an upcoming fiction project (which, by the way, is totally unrelated to my work at my day job with CCP/White Wolf Publishing). After a while, I dropped the name “Whitechapel.” After weeks of messing around with a variety of things and seeing what works and what doesn’t, I’m now at the point where I can make a formal announcement about what the hell I’ve been working on.

Whitechapel is an interactive serialized horror novella published both in text and as an audio podcast (read by me, the author). It’ll be primarily hosted on this website (whitechapelproject.com), but I have a lot of avenues to get it in front of your eyes and into your ears as time goes on. Every two weeks, a new episode will be released, which will end with a plot point unresolved and a poll in which readers can vote on how they want the story to proceed. After a week of voting, the most popular option is used to help write the next episode.

The first episode is written, and I’m hoping to have it recorded in time for release on Wednesday, August 5th, but that’s just a hopeful target, not a firm release date.

I tried to predict a lot of potential questions, which I’ve placed below the cut. There will also be an evolving FAQ on the main site.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

If you've been seeing a lot of posts appearing and disappearing from my LiveJournal, you're not missing anything. I'm testing some new software and how it interacts with LiveJournal, which means dozens of posts that last a couple of minutes as I review how they look before I delete them. Nothing to see here -- move along.

I originally debated just not talking about this, but I need to get my head wrapped around it, and I do that best when I write things down for other people to read (which explains why I'm a writer, I guess). I then debated being very casual and flip about it, but I'm not there yet. So I'm just going to lay it out straight.

( Cut for those who have no interest in my family's problems. )

To start, my grandfather was in the Air Force, and garchangel was in the Air Force. As such, most of my experience of the US military comes from that area. And while I don't have any interest in discussing the pros and cons of the US military or the Air Force, it did mean that my ears perked up a bit when I heard about this about a year ago: an Air Force Blog Assessment flowchart.

( Air Force Blog Assessment )

I really liked it, so I printed it out and hung it in my office at work. And I have to tell you, this thing has saved my ass more times than I can count anymore. It has really helped me to prioritize Internet responses.

See, last night we had an impromptu (but very nice) evening hanging out with an old friend of mine, Lisa. (Like, one of the few people who has known me for more than a decade that I still talk to.) She was lamenting about how she keeps getting dragged into stupid Internet fights because, like me, it's sometimes hard to not respond to utterly stupid comments and allegations. As my job has increased my exposure on the Internet, I was finding it hard to stay productive and focus on fans who had legitimate questions over fans who just wanted to throw a fit and make a scene.

And that chart has worked for me, every time.

As I start to compose a response and I'm finding that I'm getting angry, I look at the chart. Is this a troll dedicated to bashing others, or a rager who is just ranting and angry? Then don't engage. Is this person misguided? Then fix the facts. Is this person an unhappy customer (which could also be an unhappy reader or an unhappy friend)? Then rectify the situation, or explain what you can do if the situation can't be fixed.

While I can get into an Internet scrap with the best of them (and I've certainly been in my fair share), I'm really at a point in my life where I'd rather dedicate my time to talking to awesome people instead of fighting with lame people.

So, a much-delayed new entry to the Eddy Owner's Manual: I'm okay with arguing, and I'm okay with disagreeing, but being an asshole is the best way to end the conversation.

(Caveat: If I'm being an asshole, obviously the argument will continue until I stop being an asshole. Yeah, it's not fair, and I'm trying to be better about not being an asshole at all, but sometimes I get angry and stubborn. Usually I feel like shit afterwards and will apologize a lot, though. I will be the first to admit that I am a flawed and angry creature.)

So on Sunday I got a weird idea to make a small computer game. There are tons of free options to make a variety of computer games, and I figure since I work for a video game company, I should learn something about the process. However, I'm not a programmer nor an artist, so my options quickly got whittled down. I was about to toss out the idea as just a lark when I stumbled across Inform 7.

Now, I'm no stranger to text adventures (or as they're known as now, "interactive fiction"), both when they originally popular and the resurgence of innovation in the medium in the 90s and early 21st century. I fell out of touch with it around the time I started seriously freelancing, so I missed the release of software that lets you program IF games in English.

PROGRAM IN ENGLISH.

I have been obsessed with this ever since. As I dig into it, it's not nearly as magical as it first seemed -- getting the software to do things like combat requires some heavy coding (or "rules creation" in Inform terms) -- but there's also an active community of people who create extensions Firefox-style that you can plug into a game. The only downside so far is that they're usually pretty hefty (for a word game -- 256k is actually a meaningful amount of space), but for what I'm doing, that's fine for now.

After going from pointless and random noodling to wanting to making something cohesive, I decided that a wacky pulp story would work well with an unambitious text adventure, so I dusted off my old friend Agent Patriot and started working on an actual adventure. In three days, he hasn't left his office, but I'm building a lot of the infrastructure.

I can't entirely explain why this appeals to me so much. I've written a bit for EVE Online, as well as another MMO project, and I've learned that writing for a video game is very different from both fiction and RPG writing. Playing with Inform 7, I'm getting a lot of that same vibe that I did working on those projects. The big difference for me is that I can compile the program and see my results right away, so I can modify and stretch the story as needed based on the limitations of my software or my knowledge.

But this does lead to situations like last night, when I stayed up until past midnight trying to keep a character from continuing to clean Agent Patriot's office after he died. I finally figured it out, only to realize that it didn't matter -- the game probably shouldn't continue if that character died anyhow. But that work isn't thrown out, because I learned a LOT about how to construct similar situations in future, and I've increased my options for later story development.

(I admit that I just cheated and got a combat plug-in. It works almost exactly how I wanted it to, so it was a LOT of work I just didn't need to do.)

I've always liked writing fiction to tell a certain story, and I've always liked writing and running RPGs to let others tell a story as well. But somewhere in the middle there's a range of collaboration between writer and audience that I want to explore more. This is one avenue -- I have another one kicking around as well (the elusive "Whitechapel" idea I've mentioned) that I want to wait until we've moved before I pursue further. And emprint has shown me a third avenue that I like as well. Maybe we should collaborate on a project at some point.

This does mean that my original idea of trying to get back and committing to daily wordcounts is kind of shot, but I think this is all valuable work to improve my skills as a writer overall. As technology continues to evolve, I think there's going to be new ways to close the gap between writer and audience, and I can't see how that kind of interaction will do anything but help me to become a better writer overall.

I've been trying to force myself to write 2,500 words of personal writing a week (approximately 500 words a weeknight). It took a while to get back into the groove, but this week I managed to take some serious swings at "Gloomy Sunday," a short story I'm working on for possible inclusion in an upcoming anthology. I think I'll probably have to end up rewriting some of it to get it closer to the proposed theme of the anthology, but at this stage I'm just writing to get to the end.

I've also been laying the groundwork for another fiction project called The Whitechapel Project, of which I'll have more information once we get moved and settled.

Finally, I got an older story ("Bete Noire") workshopped by oakthorne and emprint, and there's only a couple minor things I need to tweak before I can consider that done and start shopping it around.

Interestingly, my writing process has evolved again. I started "Gloomy Sunday" as I usually do, by putting down the rough plot skeleton and doing the major research before I started with word one. (I also waited until I had a good opening before I started, which is a terrible habit, but I'm still working on that one.) As I started writing, though, the story started to deviate off course. Rather than force it back on track, I'm just following it to see where it goes. I think in the end the beginning and the end will be mostly the same -- only the middle will be significantly different. It's weird writing off of an outline, but it's always good to push yourself.

It's possible that part of my frustration to Transformers 2 is because of the drama we've been having over our condo. Let's cut out the problems with our house in St. Louis still not being sold after two years and being threatened with a lawsuit over it (long story) and focus on the current situation.

( The past three months of condo drama )

A few years ago, when I was working on personal projects as well as freelance writing, I found that I needed to write out a zero draft in a journal before I could compose my thoughts into Word. Then I got the job to work on Mind's Eye Theatre: The Awakening, and from there I got hired by CCP, so I haven't had time to use a journal to compose drafts (though I do use it for taking notes and initial brainstorming a lot).

As I started working on a short story, I did some initial writing in a journal, but it ended up not working out -- it's just too slow after years of doing everything with a computer now. But using Microsoft Word is firmly equated with "work" in my mind now, so I was looking for something that was had a few more features than Notepad, but got out of the way more than Word.

I tried using OpenOffice, partially because it's very Word-like, partially because I'm familiar with it, partially because it's free, and partially because there's a plug-in that allows you to quickly upload and download to Google Docs for backup. But as I started getting ideas for "Get Over," I wasn't at my home laptop, so I composed my initial ideas in Google Docs with the intention of importing them later into OpenOffice. And next thing I knew, I had written most of the first essay in it. I quickly plowed through the next two over the course of the week. I also found it was easy to dump footnotes into the essays as people brought up other pieces of information.

Then I started dumping information for the nextWAVE game into a Google Doc. And now I've continued working on the short story in Google Docs directly, as well as starting to do some initial planning for another project in a Google Doc. And I discovered that it works with Google Gears, so I don't have to be online to access my latest work (at least on my home laptop).

For some reason, Google Docs hits a sweet spot with me in terms of the creative process. I'm expecting that once I get to the heavy rewrite phase I'll pull it into OpenOffice or Word, which not only helps me to see it a little differently, but also is more full-featured and fits into the "editor" space in my head better. I still expect I'll use notebooks to jot down short scenes, brainstorming, ideas and plotting ideas, but I'm moving more and more toward working entirely within my computer creatively.

This might seem like a "duh" moment to some (I know emprint, for example, has been using Google Docs this way for years), but it was an interesting revelation for me as someone who used to really worship paper and journals to find that I'm getting more comfortable with creating inside a computer environment as I grow older.

Of course, between this and moving many of my RSS feeds to Google Reader, this means that Google owns more of my soul.

After our Scion game wrapped up last night (write-up pending), the idea of running Nextwave: Rookies of H.A.T.E. came up again. I'm still kicking around ideas, but the one thing I need is data. And I figure I have a lot of comic book fans that read my LiveJournal, so I thought I would ask here. What I'm looking for are:

* Supervillains primarily. Heroes are good, too, as ideas to throw my players and to use as cameos, but mainly I need villain fodder.

* Characters that never had a series (or appeared in a series) for more than twelve issues.

* Characters that should probably never have a series.

Inspirations include not only Nextwave, but also The Great Lakes Avengers, Deadpool, The Tick and Brave and the Bold.

If I could get links to webpage references (such as to the Marvel Comics Database), I'd appreciate it.

You can get all the "Get Over" essays to date here.

( Returning The Gold Watch )

I was interviewed on Tuesday by some of our fans in Costa Rica who are starting the Portal de Alternative website. It's here (in English):

http://alternative.informe.com/blog/2009/06/19/1-on-1-with-eddy-webb/

The latest chapter of "For the Free" is now up. Tonight is what looks to be the final chapter of the cycle.

I had originally envisioned this to be a eight to ten chapter cycle, but the players are very on the ball, and a lot of the curves I threw at them they dodged really well (in fact, I expected this final story would take two chapters, but since that's been consistently wrong thus far, I'm planning for one). They even managed to completely bypass a couple of the fights I put together. Chapter five is the only chapter thus far where the player characters went too far off my radar for any length of time (the entire party scene), although it ended up being probably my favorite part of the session -- even if I was totally making it up on the fly.

While I originally had plans for a Demigod and God cycle for the game, I think I need to take a break after this cycle wraps up. One of my co-workers is considering a game of In A Wicked Age, and I have a couple of ideas for much lower-prep games I could run. But this has been a really fun experience for the past six months, and I think six months is about the right amount of time to get a good amount of gaming in without burning me out.

As an FYI, once I wrap up "Get Over" to my satisfaction and decide if there's enough material to consider doing a short manuscript of it, I have another project in mind. It might be very small scale, or it might end up being multi-media, but it will be interactive, so keep an eye on this space.

(And it's kind of Mosaic related, and kind of not.)

Today is a special day, a day to celebrate the birth of the most wonderful woman in the world, my wife Michelle (greebotrill).

I have previously gone on at length about the awesomeness of being able to marry my best friend, the woman that completes me. We have been together for over a decade and married for over eight, and while the relationship has naturally changed as we've gotten older, I still simply cannot envision a life without her.

Michelle, you are my partner, my strength, my fantasy, my support, my cheerleader, my protector, my fury, and I love you. I am so proud of what you've accomplished, and I eager await how far you can go. I know how much you've brought into my life, and I can only hope that the world can appreciate a fraction of that.

Many happy returns.

Author's Note

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last essay. This one is more controversial and involves some factual information, so opinions and fact-checking are appreciated. You can find all current "Get Over" essays here.

( Did We Kill Benoit? )

This topic came up on Twitter, so now I'm kicking around a very informal poll. Feel free to cross-post this link wherever relevant.

As an RPG writer/designer, how much of your RPG collection is JUST for research and reference?

http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1710788/

Prologue

I just got back from watching one of my best friends wrestle his last match to about 50 people in Aberdeen, Ohio. Just ten weeks before, I was watching Wrestlemania 25 with tens of thousands of people in Houston, Texas. Over the past few years, wrestling has gotten a lot of attention (admittedly mostly negative), and more and more of my acquaintances want to talk to me about professional wrestling, so it's been on my mind off and on for a while. I decided to try to encapsulate some of my thoughts into an essay, which quickly became a series of essays that I'm calling "Get Over." Consider these all to be works in progress.

( Wrestling Is For Idiots )

Author Note

As a note, I have this article in a few places, and I'm compiling a lot of information and data (as well as some corrections). At some point once all the articles are done, I'll give them a final rewrite and put them somewhere for consumption. Just wanted to make a note that I am certainly taking comments and critiques into consideration, even if you don't see them in this version of the article.

So today I found via Twitter that Marvel is doing a few different mini-series collectively called Marvel Noir, which are a reimagining of various Marvel characters in a film noir setting...

... which sounds very, very similar to my own ideas on doing Marvel Noir nearly four years ago.

Clearly I need to send my resume to Marvel.

Friday morning I am heading up to Cincinnati (by car) to go see monkeegoth (aka Ric Byrne) wrestle his last match. It'll be nice to see the Old Country(tm) again, as well as monkeegoth and his family. Plus, some of the guys on the card I remember from when they were training in HWA, so it'll be cool to possibly reconnect with them.

It's hard to believe that it's been eight years. Crazy.