Eddy Webb's Original Blog

Vincent Is Gone

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 16:11:51 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb. You can comment here or there.

As I’m writing this, our eldest dog, Vincent, is having lots of treats and being pampered. But by the time you’re reading it, he will be gone. He has had a number of medical and mental problems over the past few months, which have been getting steadily worse. The vet has been seeing the change in him, and presented us with a realistic but very grim picture. Essentially, all of the options of what could be causing his problems are non-curable or the treatments would be very difficult for a dog his age to survive (such as surgery). Further, his quality of life has drastically decreased over the spring, and it is extremely unlikely that it will go back to an even keel, let alone improve. In a very emotional discussion, we decided that the best course was to euthanize him so that he doesn’t have to live in more pain and mental confusion.

Vincent hasn’t been in our lives long: we adopted him a year and a half ago and knew he had medical problems. We gave him a year and a half of love and health that he probably wouldn’t have had if he hadn’t been found wandering the streets by SEPRA. Michelle wasn’t sure he was the right guy for us, but David and I thought he needed to be a part of our family, and she quickly grew to see the love and character buried in this street tough. He got healthier and began to bark and run and play again under our care. He’s a fighter, our little tough guy, and he went through a lot of personal battles (including fighting a few demons in his sleep). But as much as we love him, at some point he had to lose the war.

I’m going to miss him so much. I’m going to miss how he always checked to make sure I was in my chair. I’m going to miss how the cat would hit him and he’d no-sell the attack. I’m going to miss how much he made us laugh.

Requiescat in pace, Vincent. Keep biting the hell out of demons wherever you end up, little buddy.

Review of “The House of Silk”

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:08:31 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb. You can comment here or there.

Being the Sherlock Holmes fan that I am, I wasn’t surprised when many people pointed me to the highly-publicized and officially-authorized pastiche The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz. Since I have a two hours of commuting every day to and from work, I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently. I’m in the middle of rereading and finishing the Song of Ice and Fire series, so I knew I wasn’t going to get to read this book anytime soon, but when I saw that Derek Jacobi did the audiobook version, I quickly snatched it up and put it into my listening queue.

Like with any Holmes pastiche, there’s a few different ways you can break it down: as a novel on its own, as a Sherlock Holmes novel in general, and as a purist.

As a novel: It’s really everything you would expect from an adventure/mystery novel — it’s entertaining, the mystery is engaging, the cast of characters are compelling, and it’s a fun read. The author seemed to play fair with the reader, ¹ as much as any Sherlock Holmes story does (which means he does pull clues from thin air from time to time). There are a couple of unlikely coincidences, and it’s a bit slow-paced from some modern thrillers, but given the subject matter, I don’t consider either to be a bad thing.

As a Sherlock Holmes story: Horowitz takes great pains to sound authentic, and to my mind it comes through. Granted, it may have been Jacobi’s performance, but I really felt this was a Watsonian narrative, complete with his digressions, amazement at Holmes’ abilities, and personal interludes about his life, as well as that of his best friend. Doyle’s style was always surprisingly modern (from Victorian standards), and Horowitz takes full advantage of it. This book genuinely feels like a Holmes story from beginning to end — the last pastiche that felt this accurate to me was The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr.

As a purist: That isn’t to say it’s a perfect pastiche, however. A couple of scenes are nearly note-for-note translations of canonical ones — most notably the scene where Holmes deduces Watson’s thoughts (The Cardboard Box) and when they meet the Baker Street Irregulars (A Study in Scarlet). They aren’t bad, and they certainly showcase the canon, but those specific examples always felt like unique moments in the canon, rather than commonplace situations, and since they both came at the start, I was concerned that the novel would just be a rehash of canonical elements.

The novel comes into its own in later chapters, but new problems arise. Horowitz (likely at the request of the Arthur Conan Doyle estate) works very hard to try and integrate the story into the canon. He chooses 1890, right before the Great Hiatus. However, as I’m pointed out in my “Tour de Holmes” essays, this is a notoriously fickle canon, and Horowitz defaults to some pretty unlikely circumstances to be accommodating. One example is below (spoilers!), but the short version is that it does have some details that will grate on the purist’s nerves.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Specifically, the introduction of Moriarty. The character gets Holmes out of jail through Dr. Watson, but then tells Watson he must act like he’s never heard of Moriarty before if he comes up (a reference to “The Valley of Fear”). Yet, earlier in the novel, we saw that Holmes knows Watson well enough that he can fucking read his thoughts. I expect that a novel such as this simply had to have Moriarty in it somewhere, but this was a bad way to go about it.

END SPOILERS

Conclusion: At the end of the day, I don’t consider myself an adamant purist. A few minor quibbles that don’t line up with an explicitly difficult canon weren’t enough to ruin my enjoyment of the book. Right now I’d consider it one of my top five pastiches.

For those not familiar with mystery novel lingo, “playing fair” means that the writer presents the clues to the reader, who could theoretically have figured it out on her own. ↩

What I Learned From Shooting Guns

Mon, 28 May 2012 17:12:56 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb. You can comment here or there.

Today I took advantage of the fact that I live in the southern United States and went to a firing range. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever fired a gun, and it was a pretty different experience than what I knew from movies and novels. I figured since there are probably other writers and designers and RPG fans who have also never fired a gun, I would share a few things I learned that are different from what you might expect.

(For reference, I shot two guns: a .22 caliber Luger and a 9mm Glock. I don’t remember the exact model numbers, however.)

They’re a little heavier than expected. The guns themselves are about what I expected, but putting the ammo into the ~~clip~~ magazine¹ added a bit of heft that was noticeable, even in these smaller guns, and I’m told it’s more noticeable for bigger guns. It’s not like carrying a bowling ball or anything, but it’s distinct.

The springs in magazines are really firm. Loading bullets into a magazine isn’t as simple as thumbing them in like candy into a Pez dispenser. There’s a spring in it that’s very firm, and it requires some pushing to get each bullet in. For the Glock you had the added difficulty of trying to push down on a round bullet with another round bullet to get it into the magazine, which resulted in the top bullet always sliding to the left or right before I could get it in. The Luger had a slide on the left side, but it was still hard to hold the slide down with your left thumb and chamber the round (I’m right-handed, and the other option was to try to load the bullets in with them pointing at my chest, which I’m sure qualifies as a Bad Idea.) It took me several minutes to fully load a magazine, but I expect even an experienced person would still have to take a few moments to fill one up.

Guns are much louder than expected. I have partial hearing loss. I was wearing those noise-cancelling headsets you see on every American cop show ever. They effectively made me deaf, to where I was taking instruction with sign language and visual cues, because I couldn’t hear anything. And the 9mm shots in the lane next to me still were loud enough to make me jump the first time. Really, it sounds like just what it is: an explosion.

Recoil is a real thing. The Luger had very little recoil — I barely felt it move when I fired. “Barely felt,” however, is not “did not feel.” The Glock was more noticeable — my first shot caused my hands to move up in the air a few inches. Holding the gun steady for successive shots took a moment to get used to, and it did make my right arm ache a little once we were done. And to note, while I am certainly not a muscular guy, I do weight training a couple times a week, so it’s noteworthy.

Also, people who shoot 9mm guns sideways are fucking idiots. The recoil would at best pull your gun way off with each shot, and probably slam into your opposite shoulder.

Shells go fucking everywhere. When we put on our eye protection, I really thought “Oh, this is in case something crazy happens — it’s just a liability thing.” Then I fired the Glock, and the first shot caused a shell to bounce off my safety glasses. After that, I’d say one in four or five flew near my face, and one hot shell landed on my arm. I’m told that it varies by gun, but certainly the Glock left shells just all over the place, and I certainly had to keep an eye out for them during my session.

Six yards is about right for reasonable accuracy for untrained people. I started out at ten yards, and was kind of all over the place. David suggested I try six, and I had better results. Twenty yards is just ridiculous: for an untrained person like me, I might as well just throw the bullets at the target.

That being said, training does matter: David has had some training, and at ten yards his first 9mm shot was right in the middle of the target’s head. I know who I want with me when the zombie apocalypse hits.

Dropping a gun doesn’t cause it to suddenly go off. I admit I didn’t actually try this, but when reading up on the safety guidelines, it turns out that most modern guns have a triple redundancy system of safeties, only one of which is the little safety switch on the side. The safety engages when the trigger isn’t depressed, and immediately after the firing pin strikes, so it’s very difficult to drop a gun and have it go off accidentally.

Guns do have a smell after you fire them, but it isn’t fucking cordite. When you fire a gun, there is a smell in the air. It isn’t unpleasant – it smells a bit like a campfire, actually. However, despite what some crime novels and TV shows keep insisting, that smell isn’t cordite. Cordite hasn’t been used since World War II. Most modern ammunition uses nitroglycerin (or so the Internet tells me). Further, it doesn’t linger in the air very long at all — with six people firing pretty regularly in a heavily sealed concrete room for half an hour, there was only a very minor smell which I certainly wouldn’t describe as “pungent.”

Anyone else with more experience with firearms have any other gun myths they can dispel?

I have been told that the correct word is “magazine,” not “clip.” The rest of the entry has been edited to reflect this. Like I said — first time with this stuff. ↩

Befriend Your Peers, But Don’t Hire Your Friends

Thu, 24 May 2012 21:52:53 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb. You can comment here or there.

A while ago, I read an interesting blog post by Monica Valentinelli. It was primarily interesting because it’s something I’ve known instinctually for a while, but I never actually thought about it in specific terms.

In case you’re like-adverse, the basic gist of her post is that Matt Forbeck told her the best way to “build a network” in this industry (or, really, any industry) isn’t to think of it as a business network at all, but a collection of friends. And I think that’s really true. While I certainly have a large number of acquaintances and people that I could theoretically pick out of a lineup as part of my social network, the people that I tend to think of when I do business are those that I could probably sit down with and not talk about business at all. I have been blessed to make a number of friends in the fields of fiction, video game development, and RPG design (and there’s a lot of overlap between the three of them).

However, this isn’t quite the same thing as “hire your friends.” Without going into details for a variety of professional and personal reasons, I have had distinctly mixed success with hiring people who were my friends before they were professional peers. It can be hard to keep a professional distance from your friends, especially when deadlines are tight and your friend is feeling the stress. Most of the time, either the friendship or the professional relationship gives way, and in particularly bad situations, it can be both. That being said, it can be done, as my work with such talented friends as Ric Connelly (on Wolfsheim) and Genevieve Podleski (on approximately one trillion projects) has shown.

Becoming friends with other professionals in your industry is different. They’ve been there, and they know what’s expected. You can explain your frustrations and anxieties, and they understand that it’s all under “personal NDA.”¹ Usually they find it easier to switch between the “friend” hat or the “professional” hat. I have certainly had frustrating business relationships with friends without changing my personal opinions of them.²

Back to Matt and Monica’s original point, though, there’s a certain “stickiness” to having a friend as a professional contact that no amount of hits on LinkedIn or Facebook can really replicate. Even if it’s someone you share a beer with every year at a con or trade the occasional email with, getting to know the person is the best business investment you can make. And it’s not something you can fake, either — geeks (even professional ones) can sense a faker a mile away. The frustrating part, I suppose, is that there isn’t an easy soundbite or tip to pull from this. It’s not as simple as “make friends with important people.” A lot of it just happens. But certainly things like being a genuine and nice person and thinking about people instead of business opportunities help.

What’s the best way to work with a friend who is also a professional? I’ve found that, like all human relationships, communication is key. If it’s not clear, spell it out. “Speaking as a friend” or “Let me put my business hat on” can save a lot of confusion and frustration later. Little bits like having two email addresses and specifically using one for business and one for personal work (and communicating that to people) can also help. Most of all, though, understand that people can’t 100% separate the two, and that all of the work of keeping each identity distinct is to help people understand how to slant their perceptions, but it doesn’t work in isolation. If my friend, say, takes some redlines badly and gets snarky, I’m going to be mad. I might have to walk away for a few hours and cool off, and trying to be my friend isn’t going to help. But knowing up front that you’re upset professionally and not personally helps me to cool down.

It’s not an exact science. Nothing involving people is. But I do think that being a good person can make you a better professional, and in time your peers might be some of the best friends you’ll ever have.

Or, as Joseph Carriker calls it, “FriendDA.” ↩
Theoretically the reverse is true, but I find the stress of trying to stay professional with someone whose friendship has soured can make even an easy-going project a chore. ↩

RPGs: The Anthology Session

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:01:52 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb. You can comment here or there.

Original Photo by Laura Desnoit

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a different kind of RPG session, something I called an “anthology” session. Since some people online were asking me how it went, and because I believe Gamemastering is best viewed as a shared education, I finally got some time to sit down and write up the experience.

Like most of the experiments I do at the table, this came from necessity. In this case, I had been running a series of The Dresden Files, and I was left with a few extraneous scenes that didn’t really warrant a full session. I debated doing them in downtime between sessions, but part of the Dresden Files mechanics is a bit where other players can jump in by spending a Fate Point. In fact, much of the design of the system involves the players as audience as well as participants, and running sessions without that audience cheapens that (have I mentioned that the FATE system is very, very clever?) I started thinking about the metaphor of the game as a series of connected novels (in this case, I’m shooting for a rough “trilogy” of novels), and I wondered if the metaphor would extend. What if I did the scenes as a collection of “short stories”?

I decided that if I was going to do this, each person should be the star of their own scene. This gave me a chance to dig into each character’s backstory (via Aspects and the various brainstormed materials from the City Creation session) and pull out one scene that made sense for each. I then realized that there was a bit of a progression between each scene, as there were connections and references to a particular plot thread — the introduction of a new drug — over and over. I tweaked a couple of things in my notes to take advantage of that.

Then it was just a matter of setting the stage. I gratefully stole an idea from Matt McFarland of having the characters meeting in a bar and trading stories of what happened to them over the course of the previous few weeks. I gave each player a notecard with a number on the back for the order of the stories, and the rough first sentence of their story. The first sentences were designed to get the interest of the characters (and the player holding it), so it was things like “Well, I almost died a few weeks back” or “That reminds me of the time I had to meet the dragon. Alone.” I explained this all to the players, set the scene, and let them go. When they worked the story opening in, I started the short story.

Things That Went Well

Showcasing characters: The session went really well for making sure each character got their moment to shine. Only one character didn’t really have a whole lot of character development, and he and I agreed that we needed to sit down and dig into his background a bit more.

The notecards: Handing out the notecards ahead of time was a good idea. It helped me to keep things moving, and the players seemed interested in finding ways to inject the snippets of information into the roleplay.

Teaching the system: I somewhat intentionally structured each scene to have a key conflict. Partially this was because of my years working on the Storytelling Adventure System and identifying the key mechanical conflict in each scene, and partially because I felt the group (myself included) still didn’t quite “get” the game mechanics, and it was a good way to push that issue. In that respect, it worked great, and I think we all understand how the game works a lot better.

Things That Could Have Gone Better

The notecards: At one point, I had to change the order of the scenes, which meant I had to put the current story on pause and start a new one. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have pre-determined the order of the scenes and went with something more organic. I don’t have an idea what that would be, though.

Forwards and backwards in time: Which led to another problem — the constantly time-shuffling led to some confusion. The previous example had three different timeframes happening at once, and a couple of times players were afraid to take actions lest it cause the scene in the bar where they were trading stories to be invalidated. I think next time I’ll use a different frame that doesn’t require any predetermined continuity.

All in all, it was a really good experience, and a couple of the players want to try it again at some point (probably between the second and third “novels” in the series).

“By No Means Vulgar” Now Available!

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:45:54 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb. You can comment here or there.

Just a quick note to let folks know that the anthology for The Play’s the Thing which I contributed to is now live. It’s called By No Means Vulgar, and it features stories from Greg Stolze, Filamena Young, Jess Hartley, Will Hindmarch, J.R. Blackwell, Crysa Leflar, and Jason Corley. I contributed a short story telling Hamlet as a hard-boiled noir story. It’s only $2.99, so go check it out!

Healers Must Heal

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:00:44 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

On the heels of my discussion of implicit rules, I finally got around to reading “Outside oneself in World of Warcraft: Gamers’ perception of the racial self-other”, which was co-written by my dear friend Amanda Barton McBrian. It’s written in academic-ese, but it’s a fascinating read, especially in light of “What I Learned from OWbN Girls.” But this part of the paper tied into my last post in a very interesting way (it’s in paragraph 3.11):

Another respondent indicated “I don’t Role Play in games, so generally what my character is like is dictated by the class and my personality” (emphasis added). Since the game’s programming rarely attributes a certain set of behaviors to the avatars directly, based on initial creation, the implication of this respondent is that gamers also project certain behavioral obligations to certain classes: healers must heal, and thus must produce an empathetic personality. However, behaviors produced by any given class will itself vary from player to player, thus indicating that while the player perceives a certain behavior-per-class expectation, no such standard exists objectively.

That right there is a perfect example of what I called unexpected confinement. More specifically, even people who don’t consider themselves “roleplayers” will confine their activities based on their perceptions of their avatar. Further, “no … standard exists objectively” to predict what kinds of behaviors players will project onto their avatar. Sure, you can make informed assumptions — healers must heal, after all — but you cannot accurately predict how players will confine their play based on their avatar.

So how do you find out how real players will react to your design? Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. Get real players in front of your game, shut the hell up, and watch them play it. Take notes. Don’t correct them or tell them how to play, but watch how they are playing. Playtesting in the design phase (or “internal playtesting”) is valuable, but playtesting with people outside of the design team (or “external playtesting”) is just as important for a new design.

Sadly, the timetables to get a game to market often allow for enough of the former, but not always enough of the latter (aside from fixes like bugs and rules corrections). In most cases, what happens is that designers learn from feedback from the past design to inform the next one.

If you have the time, I do suggest reading the paper. It has a number of fascinating little insights, and the team is very open about some of the conflicts and problems they had during the study, allowing you to put the data into the proper context. (Sadly, a lot of game design “science” doesn’t actually apply scientific rigor, so it’s refreshing to find a study that does.)

Meaningful Content, Coming Soon

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:41:54 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

Have Blaster, Will Travel

I know that for the past several weeks my blog’s been a bit devoid of content, aside from mentioning the slew of interesting things I’ve been involved in. Most of that has been due to working on the two anthologies that hit my desk, as well as a number of podcast interviews. Further, I wrapped up one tabletop game I was running (or at least, the first season of it) and started a second. I’ve also been increasing my time at the gym, as I’ll be working with a personal trainer two to three times a week in addition to my usual cardio. There’s other personal stuff in there as well, but the practical upshot of all of it is that whenever lots of things are changing in my life, the blog is always the first thing to go.

I always intended this space to be irregularly updated as I had time, but after working on Tour de Holmes, I got used to posting at least weekly, and I feel like I’ve fallen off of that wagon. Anyhow, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get back to more regular updates of actual content here soon. I’ve got another “What I Learned” in the back of my head, as well as another game design thought (this time about implicit rules). I also have a couple of topic requests from last year that I can get to. Finally, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a project with Meredith Gerber, but I don’t have any details to share yet.

In the meantime, one of the previously mentioned anthologies is getting a Kickstarter. This is the one for Bulldogs! called Have Blaster, Will Travel, which features some great writers like Greg Stolze, Gareth Skarka, Jared Axelrod, Christiana Ellis, and Mur Lafferty. The Kickstarter is to help fund the print run of the anthology. There’s all sorts of cool stretch goals, including hiring new writers, getting new artwork, and even (my personal favorite) getting me paid $100 more for my work! So, this is a really great way to support my work, as well as helping out Galileo Games, which is turning out to be a really smart company that puts out quality work.

Flagons and Vampires

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:59:10 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

My interview on the horror genre for the Flagons and Dragons podcast is now online. Carl was a wonderful host, and I had a great time talking about horror, therapy, why Werewolf is a different kind of awesome from Vampire, and my shameful appreciation of Stephen King.

You can listen for yourself at the Flagons and Dragons website: http://flagonsanddragons.com/interview-with-eddy-webb-game-designer-and-author/

Stuff I’m Doing

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:25:50 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been focused on work and writing a lot lately, so I haven’t had many chances to update. However, some things have broken loose that I can talk about.

The “not quite as big but still exciting” update is that Slices of Fate is now available in ePub and mobi (Kindle) formats, as well as print on demand. If you already bought the PDF, the other formats are now available for free from DriveThruFiction.com. And right now, it’s on sale! I actually get dividends from this, so please go buy a copy if you want to support my work.

The biggest is that one of the anthologies I’m slated for has been announced: Have Blaster, Will Travel, a fiction anthology for the Bulldogs! role-playing game. I’m looking forward to working on a sci-fi property, and especially excited to be working with J.R. Blackwell on the project!

It even has a book trailer!

Have Blaster, Will Travel from jrblackwell on Vimeo.

Peer Review: “City of the Lost” by Stephen Blackmoore

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:32:14 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

I hadn’t planned to do another Peer Review post so soon after the last one, but this entire weekend was a lot of things taking much longer than anticipated and me being stuck with my iPhone (and the nook app), so I ended up reading City of the Lost in a weekend. And it was totally worth it.

On the surface, it’s got a lot in common with Double Dead. It’s a premiere novel. The protagonist is undead and generally disreputable, and part of the plot revolves around the character coming to terms with a new state of being. Also, both authors don’t shy away from bad language and splatterpunk gore. Oh, and zombies show up in both. But that’s where the similarities end.

City of the Lost is, essentially, a modern-day crime novel. The protagonist, Joe Sunday, is a hitman for a local mobster who, through a variety of mishaps, ends up turned into a zombie. Because that’s just what happens in L.A. And yet, the supernatural elements don’t end up overpowering the plot — the story slips in and out of the mystical parts effortlessly, making them feel like a natural part of a story that is really about one man’s attempt to get what’s owed him, and maybe a little payback if he can get it. In truth, while I starting thinking Chuck Wendig when I started the book, towards the middle the book felt more like Seth Harwood‘s Jack Palms novels, and by the end I found myself in love with Stephen’s unique voice. You can point to a lot of things it’s kind of like, but it’s not exactly like any of them.

I am eager to see what Stephen Blackmoore does next in this world.

Peer Review: Double Dead, by Chuck Wendig

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 02:11:06 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

One of the disadvantages of having lots of talented writers and designers as friends is that I end up with more books to read or games to play than I have time to read or play them. I know that one of the best ways to help a fellow writer out is to write a review, and I sometimes regret that I don’t always have the time to do that.

When I saw that I had a couple of dozen ebooks in my Kindle app on my iPad that I hadn’t read yet, I decided to try and do something about it. So I’m starting a new feature on my blog called “Peer Review.” These are highly biased reviews, because they’ll be of the work of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but it’s a chance to help some friends out, and a chance to expose some great work to people who might not otherwise have heard of them.

Let me start off with a quick story. When I was visiting my mom a couple of weeks ago, I met my stepsister’s boyfriend for the first time for dinner, and we fell into talking about vampire and zombie movies. He pointed out that he didn’t know of any movie or book which featured both zombies and vampires. I pointed out that there is one book where this is true.

Thus: Double Dead.

Double Dead is Chuck Wendig‘s first published novel. That seems weird to me, since I’ve been working with Chuck for years, and I feel like he’s always been more prolific than the rest of reality considers him to be — something, I will note, that he’s been rapidly working to correct the past year or so. And this book showcases some of the best of Chuck’s technique and narrative voice. A number of people know Chuck for his intensely surreal and foul-mouthed patter, but I’ve always known Chuck as a very subtle storyteller. The profanity and scatological humor are like a magician’s flourish: a distraction to draw your attention away from the real magic, the engaging story that’s dragging you along and making you care about the characters and the world he’s creating.

A perfect example of this is the protagonist: Coburn the vampire. He wakes up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and is pissed off that blood has basically stopped falling into his mouth. He is, to put it mildly, the worst kind of self-entitled asshole. And yet, by the end, I was rooting for Coburn (and his dog), even during the worst parts of the zombie apocalypse. Sure, there’s a lot of pure fun in the story, the kind of enjoyable ass-kicking and crass humor that makes for a good action film. For 80% of the book I felt I knew exactly where the plot was going, and I was enjoying it like a good road trip — the journey meant more to me then the destination. And then, a number of twists hit me like rabbit punches to the gut, and it was all over. I was down for the count, staring at the words THE END and wondering how in the hell I ended up on the floor.

… I lost the metaphor a bit there. I’m still recovering from the end of the book.

Go get Double Dead.

A Garbage Bag of Bottles

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 02:55:35 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

I wrote a draft of this blog post last weekend, while sitting in an apartment in Lakewood, Ohio — the apartment my mom and my Uncle Tim rented. It was a beautiful two floor house with each floor divided into a separate living unit. The layout was surprisingly similar to the one Michelle and I had when we first moved to St. Louis nearly nine years ago. The place felt comfortable, and it felt natural to throw my coat over a chair and sit at the table to write, just like I did when I was starting as a freelance writer.

It was also the apartment my uncle’s corpse was found in, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, the carpet black with his own bloody vomit.

As Mom’s boyfriend, Bill, drove us back to his house from the plane, she told me what had happened. Uncle Tim had come home drunk again. “It’s like he’s two different people,” she said, “and I can’t stand the one that drinks.” She left to spend a few days with Bill, afraid of what she would say or do if she stayed and watched him drink again. By the time she came back, he was dead, face down on his bed. All of the empty bottles of alcohol around him filled a garbage bag by themselves.

Her voice was sad and a little shaken, but mostly she sounded resigned. This is an old story with our family. Uncle Tim once tried to commit suicide with pills while drunk. My Uncle Mike succeeded — the same Uncle Mike who encouraged me when I was very young to make art and follow my dreams. The same Uncle Mike who walked in on his father, my grandfather, after he had drunk himself to death. As my mom tells it, Grandpa picked up a bottle right after Grandma’s funeral, and proceeded to drink for the next two years until he was dead.

Bill’s a nice guy — I really like him, and I think he’s good for my mom. I haven’t seen my mom in years, and as we talked we fell back into old, comfortable rhythms. I’ve missed her, and she’s missed me. But she suggested quietly that I could stay at the apartment if I wanted, and I agreed. I needed some time alone, time to think things through, time to sweep my metaphorical bottles into a garbage bag.

Since I found out what happened last week, I’ve mostly just felt numb. I haven’t seen Uncle Tim in the flesh for 20 years, since I took a train with my mom to visit him in Colorado in 1992. He’s not a total stranger to me, but I have trouble calling his face to mind. I can’t say I feel a loss for something I barely had in my life. But I do remember all the phone calls from my mom over the past few years, all of the frustration and hurt and confusion of watching him drink himself to death. All of the lies about missed bills, all of the failed jobs, all of the fights with bosses and crushed fenders and empty bottles.

Really, I think I’m angry at him, at the men in my family, at the steady parade of death that comes one drink at a time. Three of the men in my family were plunged into depression, gripped by a dark mood that prompted them to kill themselves sip by sip. The Sweeney legacy: a garbage bag of bottles.

All that said, I’m generally at peace right now. I know I’m not them, not held in the same grip as they were. For all the darkness surrounding this, I think things will improve from here, for me and my mom. I certainly have the occasional moment when I’m not sure what to feel, when my mind is a little cloudy and I wonder what I’m really feeling. But all in all, I’m just relieved that my mom doesn’t have to go through any of this ever again.

Death in the Family

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:10:01 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

This is a little hard to write, but blogging about this is the easiest way to reach the largest amount of people all at once.

Last night, I got a call from my mom as we were starting our D&D game. It turns out that my uncle, who has been struggling with alcoholism for years now, is now dead. She gave me a few details, but to be honest I was pretty numb for the rest of the evening, so I don’t remember them all, and I didn’t want to push my mom while she was having a calm moment Sadly, this kind of death is nothing new for my family.

I have purchased airplane tickets back to Ohio, and I will be there for a few days. I’ll have my iPad with me, so I may be online as wireless connections permit, but don’t expect a lot out of me for a little while; I am giving myself permission to check out mentally for a few days while I help my mom. I’m not sure how I’ll be after seeing my mom again — I’m looking forward to it, mind you, but grief hits everyone differently — so while I’ll be back in Atlanta by Tuesday, I may or may not be fully up to speed by then.

Also, now would be a really bad time to complain to me about your copy of V20 or bitch about something I posted or whatever.

Buy My Stuff: Tales of the Far West

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:22:18 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

Tales of the Far West

While I’m waiting for the other formats for Slices of Fate to drop, another project I’ve worked on has arrived. Tales of the Far West is available in Kindle format, as well as through DriveThruRPG – I contributed the story “In The Name Of The Empire,” where a sheriff is charged with the murder of an Imperial Magistrate.

Imagine: A fantasy world, but not one based on Medieval/Dark Ages European culture and myth, but rather on the tropes of the Spaghetti Western and Chinese Wuxia. Add steampunk elements. Mix well.

A fantasy world that mixes the inspirations of Django and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon… The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and House of Flying Daggers… Fistful of Dollars and Fist of Legend.

A fantasy world that’s explored through a book series, a constantly-updated website, a tabletop role-playing game, comics, artwork, webseries and much, much, more.

This is FAR WEST.

If you’re curious to learn a little of the process I used while writing the story, you can read this series of posts:

Go! Buy Tales of the Far West! Spread the word! It’s a dozen stories of wuxia-western-steampunk-fantasy awesomeness!

Spiderweb Software Has Eaten My Soul

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:52:26 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

In many ways, I am an ideal customer. If I find an artist or a company that I really like, I tend to latch on to them. Back in the day I would play anything by LucasArts or Sierra. I’ve played many games just because they had the BioWare label. Last year I became a convert to Wadjet Eye Games. I am prone to loyalty.

Over the holiday I had an itch to play a classic CRPG, but for some reason Planescape Torment and Baldur’s Gate weren’t scratching that itch. Then I stumbled across the Geneforge Saga on Steam. At the time, it was $10, which was a ridiculously good price for five games, so I snapped them up. Within a week or so, I bought Avadon: The Black Fortress as well.

Just now I did a little math. Assuming my Steam account is accurate, I’ve put in 150 hours into these games. It’s probably more than that — Steam has a habit of not tracking the occasional session of gameplay, and I’ve also put a few hours in on the demo of Avernum VI. I’ve finished Avadon, I’ve essentially finished Geneforge 1, ¹ and I’m starting on Geneforge 4. From there, I’m planning on trying Geneforge 5 again, and then hopefully Avernum: Escape From The Pit will be out for Windows.

This is a bit odd for me. Granted, I am prone to mild obsession. I’ll spend a few days watching an entire season of a TV series, or listen through hours of an audio drama I like. Once I reread the first ten books of the Dresden Files all in a row, just so I could remember the context for the eleventh novel. But it’s only now, over a month later, that I’m feeling the grip of Spiderweb games letting me go enough that I can think a bit more rationally on why these particular games have snagged my attention.

If you’re not familiar with this company (and I certainly wasn’t), it’s very small. In fact, it’s more or less one man — Jeff Vogel — who runs everything. Wikipedia tells me the company’s been around since 1994, back when shareware was a thing. The games he makes aren’t particularly pretty, and have little to no music. They don’t have voiceovers, and often the assets are reused between games. The games have small, incremental improvements within the series. They are games in a very specific genre — turn-based, isometric RPGs — catering to a very specific audience.

And yet, I think these are strengths, in a way. It’s like playing D&D 3rd edition, and then moving to another D20 game — you recognize a lot of the parts of the game, and it’s easier to drop in. The assets and lack of music score starts to become a voice, something noteworthy and distinct. The parts that are new and distinct stand out more, and can be appreciated more.

I’m planning to dig into more details about the games I’ve actually played in future. But for now, I’m continuing to enjoy the feeling of finding a new company to obsess over.

I’m two maps from the end. I’m stuck, and don’t want to spend several hours figuring out yet another way to get to the Geneforge. So I did a YouTube search of the ending, and called it a day. ↩

Help Me Ruin My Vacation

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:59:54 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

Starting on Friday, I have 11 days of vacation set up. Of course, I’ll still be doing a little White Wolf work during that time (because “vacation” really means “a chance to catch up on work”), but I really do want to try and relax. So, the first announcement is that I’m planning to be less available on the Internet during that time. I have vacation responders set up for both of my email accounts, I won’t be on social networks as much, I won’t be updating this blog, and so on. I’m not going to be completely off the grid, but I do need some time away and live in my own head for a bit.

Part of the reason I’m doing that is that I want to finish off my Hamlet short story, and then roll right into revising and expanding my book of Tour de Holmes essays. Aside from comments on each of the stories, I also have in mind a discussion of Smart Watson vs. Dumb Watson, the popularity of Moriarty over the other (and sometimes more visible) villains in the canon, Holmes’ cocaine use, Watson’s wives, and (if I hate myself enough) the chronology of the cases.

So, faithful audience, what topics of the Sherlock Holmes canon would you like me to discuss/rant about in such a manuscript?

Mechanics and setting

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:11:01 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

Michael Cunliffe once said to me "I’d be very interested in a post about whether (or how to) use mechanics to suit setting in RPGs – how do you use dice rolls to provide not only dramatic, but thematic effect for players."

And I obey.

I’ve had an informal maxim in my head for years now as a game designer, and with every year that passes and every design I work on, I’m more and more certain it’s the right one. I’ve never really written it down before, but it goes something like this:

Mechanics drive player behavior.

On the surface, this sounds simple – a game about westerns should have rules about gunfights if it wants to have dramatic gunfights, and so on. But it goes deeper than that, I feel. Games feel different depending on what mechanics they use. This is more explicit with board games, card games, video games, and less flexible genres of game, but even the flavor and tenor of role-playing games are impacted by their choice of mechanics.

Take games of a similar genre, such as Boot Hill and Dust Devils.¹ Both are Western games, but each is focusing on something different, whether the design is intended or not, and as a result you get different games. While there is a tried-and-true tradition of hacking or drifting rules in RPGs, what the game focuses on in terms of mechanics will consciously and subconsciously impact how the game is played. While some players can (and will) resist against the tide of mechanics, most will gladly be swept right along, and will indulge in the gameplay the mechanics present and reinforce. And a chunk of the feel and setting for an RPG is created by how the players act within it.

So yes, mechanics should help establish the setting in RPGs. But as a designer, how can you do that?

First, you have to know on a very real level what your setting needs to have enshrined in a mechanic. I believe every version of Dungeons & Dragons has alignment, even if the actual system has gone through various changes. The reason, though, is simple: the difference between "good" and "evil" matters in that game. Even if it doesn’t often come up in the game (and in my experience, it doesn’t come up much at all, aside from the odd "Detect Evil" spell), the fact that it exists and that there are parts of the game that work differently depending on that choice means that in D&D being good or evil is meaningful to the game, and therefore to the setting.

Next, you have to make sure those mechanics matter. Every version of Vampire has had Humanity as a mechanic. And not only a little mechanic, a small number tucked away on a character sheet, but a large ladder of dots. It generally takes up a fair amount of real-estate on a character sheet, and many fans of the game will remark on it being a core element of the game. The actual mechanic isn’t used that often compared to other parts of the game, but when it is, it’s often a significant moment. You can literally lose your character on a bad dice roll, so you’re encouraged to take actions that keep you from having to make that roll. If you make that mechanic matter to the player on a fundamental level, it will impact their game.

(As a side note, I once was in a chronicle of Dark Ages Vampire while I was also playing in a different campaign of D&D. There was a fair amount of overlap in some setting elements, such as "medieval hero uses unusual powers to deal with problems," but each game felt very different at their base because of the different emphasis in mechanics. Similarly, I’ve played an Exalted game under the same Storyteller who ran Dark Ages Vampire, and again they were very different feeling games because of the mechanics.)

Finally, the rest of the game needs to reinforce this mechanic. Paranoia is good at this. Although different editions emphasize different parts of the setting,² the setting always reinforced and encourages the kind of player-against-player backstabbing and treachery that the rules encouraged. Everything about the game – even the name – backs up and supports this player dynamic.

This is why, I think, small games with a few mechanics and a strong direction are doing well these days – if you have a good vision for the game and everything else supports that vision, the game is stronger as a result.

I just finished up working on Tales of the Far West and I’m rereading The Gunslinger, so yeah, I’m on a Western kick right now. Shut up. ↩
And, I feel, end up making the game feel different each time, something that Paranoia XP explicitly drew on ↩

You Call That Writing?

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:49:24 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

(I’m finally dipping into my backlog of blog requests. This one is from Ryan Macklin.)

I call myself a writer. I’ve had a number of titles over the course of my life, including “developer” and “designer.” I’ve worked on video games, role-playing games, fiction, non-fiction, television, podcasting, and I’ve even written a few programs in my day.¹ But if someone were to ask me who I am or what I do, I inevitably say I am a writer.

But here and now, in 2011, “writer” is about as specific as “human being” as a label. So much goes into my work as a writer these days that has very little to do with prose. Granted, I do a fair amount of activities that comprise “proper writing.” I have kept bound journals for years, and I use them quite often to keep track of notes and write down ideas. Every computer I have ever owned has had some kind of word processor on it, and these days even my phone has one. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about grammar, word choice, story construction, or something else related to the craft of writing. But there are so many things that have changed.

“Writers are loners who need solitude.” That’s always been an unfortunate stereotype, I’ve found (even notorious loners like H. P. Lovecraft had a thriving community of correspondents), but it’s increasingly untrue across the board. Whether you self-publish, are traditionally published, or work full-time for a company as a writer, the need to be engage in a community (of fans, of other writers, or just other people) isn’t just easier, but necessary. You can call it “networking” or “monetizing a community” or “coming with tribe” or whatever buzzword you want, but it comes down to the fact that being a writer means you need to talk to other people. Period.
“Writers write.” Well, sure. But they also market. They research. They learn how social networks work (because of the previous point). They make a website. They teach themselves new software. They support and promote the work of their friends and peers. They struggle with Kickstarter or find an agent or file their taxes. Writers still write, but writers also need to be businesspeople, because the days in which someone else being able to take care of everything are gone.
“I’ll focus on the writing, and someone else will make it look good.” More and more, understanding of the aesthetics of the final product is important. What would look good on a cover? What font is best to use? How should things be formatted? In a world where a few mouse-clicks can change the entire formatting of a document, people are less likely to struggle through an ugly manuscript even if the words are strong and powerful. Writers have to think about the visual context of their work more and more, and many times have to create or modify that context themselves.
“Writers drink.” Well, that’s still true.

It feels like professional writers are increasingly required to be jacks-of-all-trades, learning a little about a lot of skills and using those to apply back to the craft of writing. While it sounds daunting, it really isn’t. It’s balanced by the fact that it’s easier than ever to get people to read (and buy) your work. Before it could have only happened through a publisher, but now you can upload a document to Amazon and start selling it. The fight isn’t to get it out there — the fight is to get it noticed. And more and more the only person who is going to help you get noticed is you.

I think this is a good trend, over all. We need to get out more, lest we become feral wordmonkeys stewing in our cages and snapping at passersby. We need to learn a little more about what it takes to get our beautiful work into the hands of others, lest we think that all other disciplines are easy compared to the weighty work of crafting worlds. We need to realize that there’s a whole world out there, lest we come to believe that sitting at a desk and waiting for people to throw money at us is a sound business plan.

I still think of myself as a writer. I just define “writing” a little more broadly than I used to.

That day was long ago, however — I’m in the process of learning how to program all over again. ↩

To the Far West: Writing is Rewriting

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:16:02 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

Last time I ended up with a shitty first draft. And it was shitty — I changed my mind in the middle of the story twice, I didn’t like the name of one of the characters after I typed it out a dozen times, and overall the whole thing was a mess. So now it was time to make it better.

First off, I should mention that I generally write first drafts in plain text, either using WriteMonkey on the PC, or PlainText on my iPad. I do this because both work well with DropBox (so I can move between software packages as needed), both have just enough features to be useful, and both lack a particular feature — easy ability to jump around in the manuscript. If it’s irritating to scroll back a few pages and check something, I’m more likely to just push forward, which is what I want for the first draft.

At this stage, though, I need to jump around and edit, so I saved the whole thing as a Word document.¹ The second draft was very simple — I took the comments I made to myself in square brackets and turned them into Word comments (getting them out of my text), and did a quick readthrough to get rid of grammatical errors and insert styles. Again, this is where the plain text draft helps me — since I can’t bold or italicize in plain text, I have to do this pass to make sure my formatting is accurate. I also found a few more notes of things to correct, and culled a couple of notes that were redundant.

I then broke my notes up into two categories: local and global. Local comments related to a particular scene or chunk of the manuscript (like “make sure to reference the detective’s bag here”), while global comments were things I needed to check against the whole manuscript (like “avoid an over-reliance on eyes,” which is a tell² of mine). Draft three then was taking on the local comments, and draft four was taking on the global comments. Finally, draft five was an overall polish and revision. Sometimes I do additional polish and revision drafts, but time was running out and I was getting a bit sick of looking at it, so I kept it to one pass.

It might seem counter-intuitive to change small things before large things, but it actually makes sense to me. If there’s a large thing that really needs to change first (like the character’s name I mentioned), odds are I’ve already decided that it needs to change, and I’ll do that in the second draft as I’m working my way through. If it’s really big, I have scrapped part (or all) of a first draft to address the problem, because usually if it’s that huge, I’ve written myself into some kind of corner. Either way, those kinds of problems never make it past draft two, so by starting small and working my way up, I’m fixing more urgent problems, and then making sure that it all fits together nicely later. If I went the other way around, it’s possible that my small fixes would break something larger in the manuscript, and I wouldn’t notice it.

Also, a trick I’ve picked up from when I was podcasting Whitechapel: for my polish pass, I read the story out loud to myself. I have caught so many errors and style flubs through this one technique that I simple cannot imagine writing fiction anymore without doing this step. It takes longer (and in my case, makes your wife look at you a bit strangely), but it really does work.

And so, five drafts later, I have the first draft for the editor. In the past editors have either taken my first draft entirely or made minor edits without needing my input, but I never assume that. I always expect that I will have to do even more revisions based on editorial feedback, which might include going back to draft one.

Writing is rewriting. Lots and lots of rewriting.

I have in the past used other software like OpenOffice for this stage, but I find myself coming back to Word time and again. ↩
A tell is what I call a quirk of style that comes up time and again. Once in a while it’s clever and interesting, but most of the time as a writer you want to reduce your tells as much as you would when playing poker. ↩

Press Release: Slices of Fate

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:51:30 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

Cover for Slices of Fate

I’ll have more (likely a lot more) to talk about with this once it’s live, but for now I just wanted to pass along this press release. Thanks to Monica Valentinelli, Matt McElroy, and Jason Blair for helping me with this!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FR Press Announces Slices of Fate, the Collected Works of Author Eddy Webb

December 2011, Madison, Wisconsin — Matt M McElroy, Publisher of FR Press, announced today that Slices of Fate, the collected works of author Eddy Webb, will debut early December 2011.

“Slices of Fate is a collection that spans the depth and breadth of Webb’s work,” said editor Monica Valentinelli. “Arranged chronologically, this is a beautiful representation of the stories and voices Webb has to offer his readers.”

Stories range from the author’s nod to literary tales like “A Sheepish Trip to Yorkshire” to more speculative works like “The Battlefield.” Essays include a series on two of Webb’s loves: wrestling and Sherlock Holmes. Combined with several pieces of microfiction, the collection is an in-depth representation of the author’s work thus far.

Both digital and print editions of the collection will be available through online retailers like DriveThruFiction.com in early December 2011.

About Eddy Webb: Eddy Webb (with a “y,” thank you) is a writer, podcaster, game designer, and transmedia developer. Hired on with CCP/White Wolf in late 2007, he currently designs content for the World of Darkness MMO. He lives a sitcom life with his wife, his roommate, a supervillain cat, and two pug dogs.

On the web: http://eddyfate.com

Twitter: @eddyfate

About Monica Valentinelli: Monica Valentinelli is an author and game designer who lurks in the dark. Her work has been published by several companies ranging from Crackle.com to Eden Studios. Her editing credits include Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror and Ninja Burger 2nd Edition.

On the web: http://www.mlvwrites.com

Twitter: @mlvalentine

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Monica-Valentinelli/209618519050005

About FR Press: FR Press is the publishing arm of popular horror and dark fantasy webzine FlamesRising.com. FR Press’s recent releases include Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror and Conventions for the Aspiring Game Professional.

On the web: http://www.flamesrising.com

Press Contact: Monica Valentinelli

Email Address: monica@mlvwrites.com

To The Far West: Research and Outlining

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:25:11 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

One thing I haven’t done on my blog is go through the process of creating fiction, from start to finish. Since I’m in the middle of a short story, I thought it would be a good time to correct that oversight.

This is my contribution to Tales of the Far West, an anthology for the Far West franchise. I’ve written for a number of franchises in the past (everything from Vampire: The Masquerade to Red Dwarf), and one of the key things of writing for someone else’s universe is that you have to research. You don’t have to just research the specific property in question (although for some established franchises, that can be a massive undertaking in itself), but you also have to look into ancillary research that relates to the property.

For example, Far West. Since this is a property that’s still being developed, Gareth was able to get me a short bible, and made himself available for questions. If I don’t know the franchise to start, I try to go into it relatively blind, so that I don’t form an idea for a story and then become disappointed. In this case, one particular paragraph grabbed my attention:

Our analogue of the Pinkerton Detectives, mixed with a bit of Detective Dee and more than a smidge of James West from Wild Wild West. Our “citified dandies” who use gadgets and tech.

I immediately pitched the idea of a detective story in this setting, and Gareth gave me the green light. This led to more specific research, including a lot of questions about the legal and political structures of this franchise.

But remember how I mentioned ancillary research? Far West is a kind of Wild West/steampunk setting with Asian influences, so I had to also look into criminal investigations and technology from the 19th century. Luckily, my Sherlock Holmes project meant that I had most of the resources on hand and fresh in my mind (part of the reason I made the pitch, if I’m being honest), but the point was that I had to do a fair bit of reading before the rough shape of the story took shape in my mind.

At a certain point, I had enough details in my head that I needed to start writing them down and banging them into an outline. I am a writer that lives by outlines. I have tried to write without an outline, but every time I end up getting lost half-way through the story and giving up. Every time I outline, I can finish the project. The down side is that sometimes it takes me weeks to get an outline strong enough for me to start writing, and some projects have died in the outline phase. Still, it’s better to have it die after a few pages rather than a few dozen (or hundred).

In this case, I did spend a few weeks just working on the outline. People who have worked with me as a developer have remarked on my clear, thorough outlines, but the ones I write for myself aren’t so clear. The first pass is usually just a hand-written list of details. I try to put them into some form of shape, and notice gaps which I then try to fill. For this story, I knew I was looking at a story of at least 5,000 words, and using the Lester Dent formula, I wanted to have a couple of twists and a couple of conflicts before the end.¹ In my notebook, I literally drew four boxes and scribbled facts, twists, and conflicts in each one to make sure I had the right balance. I immediately noticed a very soggy middle and a weak ending, so over the course of a week I wrote it a few different ways. At one point a key piece (the reason behind the murder) popped into my head, and the whole outline fell into place. I created a new SpringPad note (something I can easily get to on my computer, phone, or iPad for refeerence) and write a list of bullet points, covering the key facts of the backstory (since the murder happens before the story starts, I had to make sure those facts are straight as I introduce them), and the three or four things I needed to do each 1,500 words or so.

Then I started writing my first shitty draft, which I’ll get to in another post.

I have a different way of interpreting Lester’s formula — I should write a separate blog on that sometime. ↩

Reading Achievement Unlocked

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:58:56 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

There’s been a lot of talk about how publishing has been radically changing over the past few years. The past couple of days, though, I’ve been thinking about how reading have been changing as well.

For a few years now, I’ve been using a site called GoodReads to track the books I read, and a number of my acquaintances online do as well. Before, I used to post a yearly list of books I was reading on LiveJournal, but I like the more social experience of GoodReads. As I’m reading a book, people will often comment on their own experiences on it or ask my opinion, and it becomes a reading club that goes at my own pace. But as I use the site and share my experiences, a couple of things have been rolling around in the back of my head.

First, GoodReads doesn’t really track rereading books really well. I mean, it’s possible to do it, but the site is really geared around reading a book once and calling it a day. As a perfect example, I’m rereading a lot of my Sherlock Holmes pastiches after going through the original canon, but I could really only track the books I hadn’t put into the site previously, or new books that I picked up between volumes. And in general, I’m not seeing a whole lot of people talking about picking up old favorites, but rather talking about the newest and greatest books in their collections.

Second, you can’t really tell how big a book is on the site,¹ and it seems the trend in book length is reversing. As reading moves more and more to devices and ebooks, it seems (to me at least) that a long book I would have worked through in a physical book I find difficult to slog through on my iPad. Further, as writers find that having more books for customers to buy means more than having one big book, self-published ebooks are getting shorter and shorter.

Between the two, it feels a bit like reading books are like unlocking achievements in video games. Since it’s harder to track progress by page count, books themselves track progress. Reading five novellas feels like more reading than one compilation of the same five novellas. I’ve actually caught myself tempted to track the individual novels in a compilation such as The Chronicles of Amber, because I want to feel like I’m reading more, even though it’s the exact same words.

Don’t get me wrong – anything that gets people reading more is awesome. This isn’t a screed against how things were better before that damned Kindle, or how things are more awesome because I can read books in an afternoon. But it is different, and when assumptions about how people read starts to change, writers have to pay attention to it and keep those new patterns in mind as they create.

I mean, yes, many books have a page count, but as more and more ebooks don’t have specific page counts, percentages are more common than page numbers. ↩

I Knew Him, and The Play’s The Thing

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:15:55 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

It’s not often I get to work on a project and actually scoop the people I’m working with, but Mark Truman gave me permission to beat the drum ahead of time, so I’m doing so.

See, Mark’s company (Magpie Games) is working on a Shakespearean role-playing game called The Play’s The Thing. They have a Kickstarter up right now, and I highly encourage you to check it out. Since the project is doing amazingly well in terms of funding (at the time I’m posting this, it’s just passed the 300% mark), Mark wants to put together a little anthology of “what if” stories — ways that Shakespeare might have taken a different turn, or the original stories placed in new settings. He approached me last weekend about doing one, and almost immediately I had a ton of ideas for it. Surprisingly, no one had yet claimed Hamlet, so I snagged it and sent Mark off a short pitch for a hard-boiled retelling of Hamlet tentatively titled “I Knew Him.”

Danny Hamlet is approached by his friend, Vincent Horatio, and gives Hamlet a recording from the deathbed of his father, Don Hamlet. The Don was the head of the Elsinore mob and implicates his advisor, Claudius, as the one who killed him. He demands that Danny avenge him.

Once I get my Far West story done, I’ll be diving into this one. If you’re interested in supporting the anthology and the game, head over to the Kickstarter and give it some love. And by “love,” I mean “cash.”

How Watson Learned The Trick (1923)

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:01:54 GMT

Originally published at Eddy Webb: Writer. Gamer. Usually Not Dead. You can comment here or there.

This is a special bonus, to celebrate the end of the “Tour de Holmes.”

In 1924, Doyle wrote a special miniaturized book to be placed with in the Queens’ Dolls’ House, which he titled “How Watson Learned The Trick.” It is one of five known extracanonical works of Doyle, and one of the few that is complete. Special thanks to Sherlockian.net for the text.

And thank you, my dear and patient readers, for going with me through these seventy-five essays.

Watson had been watching his companion intently ever since he had sat down to the breakfast table. Holmes happened to look up and catch his eye.

“Well, Watson, what are you thinking about?” he asked.

“About you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Holmes. I was thinking how superficial are these tricks of yours, and how wonderful it is that the public should continue to show interest in them.”

“I quite agree,” said Holmes. “In fact, I have a recollection that I have myself made a similar remark.”

“Your methods,” said Watson severely, “are really easily acquired.”

“No doubt,” Holmes answered with a smile. “Perhaps you will yourself give an example of this method of reasoning.”

“With pleasure,” said Watson. “I am able to say that you were greatly preoccupied when you got up this morning.”

“Excellent!” said Holmes. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because you are usually a very tidy man and yet you have forgotten to shave.”

“Dear me! How very clever!” said Holmes. “I had no idea, Watson, that you were so apt a pupil. Has your eagle eye detected anything more?”

“Yes, Holmes. You have a client named Barlow, and you have not been successful with his case.”

“Dear me, how could you know that?”

“I saw the name outside his envelope. When you opened it you gave a groan and thrust it into your pocket with a frown on your face.”

“Admirable! You are indeed observant. Any other points?”

“I fear, Holmes, that you have taken to financial speculation.”

“How could you tell that, Watson?”

“You opened the paper, turned to the financial page, and gave a loud exclamation of interest.”

“Well, that is very clever of you, Watson. Any more?”

“Yes, Holmes, you have put on your black coat, instead of your dressing gown, which proves that your are expecting some important visitor at once.”

“Anything more?”

“I have no doubt that I could find other points, Holmes, but I only give you these few, in order to show you that there are other people in the world who can be as clever as you.”

“And some not so clever,” said Holmes. “I admit that they are few, but I am afraid, my dear Watson, that I must count you among them.”

“What do you mean, Holmes?”

“Well, my dear fellow, I fear your deductions have not been so happy as I should have wished.”

“You mean that I was mistaken.”

“Just a little that way, I fear. Let us take the points in their order: I did not shave because I have sent my razor to be sharpened. I put on my coat because I have, worse luck, an early meeting with my dentist. His name is Barlow, and the letter was to confirm the appointment. The cricket page is beside the financial one, and I turned to it to find if Surrey was holding its own against Kent. But go on, Watson, go on! It ‘s a very superficial trick, and no doubt you will soon acquire it.”