Eschew Politics?

It seems this week might be more interesting than I thought.  When I asked Leela what she wanted to guest blog about this week she said, and I quote: "That white het male and his stupid southern folksy advice that people eschew politics."

"Um..." I said, "You know I'm writing about the exact same thing on Friday, except that I think he's got some pretty good ideas about what it means to be a writer in the modern world."

Leela's eyes narrowed.  "I've never kung fu fought my own boss before.  Could be interesting."

"Wait," I said.  "Before you kick my ass up and down the entire Writing About Writing complex, maybe we could put our heads together and see if our ideas don't sort of dovetail a little."

"You want to see if the idea of "Richard Bausch is full of shit" and "Richard Bausch is not full of shit" dovetail?"

I swallowed.  "Please.  I really don't want to kung-fu fight."

"I don't blame you," she said, sliding into a preying mantis stance.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell you how that conversation went, but what I will say is that it should be an interesting week, and I'm writing this on the way to the emergency room to be treated for internal bleeding from my spleen.

So here's the plan.  Leela lays out all the reasons Richard Bausch can suck an elf on Thursday, and on Friday I talk about the reasons I think he's got a point.  If Leela feels our ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive, she will present me with a "Proud-Sensei/Sifu nod" as I leave the building Friday night.  If she thinks I still need an ass-kicking, we set the W.A.W. amphitheater up in a Thunderdome configuration and the shit gets real.

Still...there's something open ended about the word "politics" that I think may keep me from taking a chainsaw to the pancreas come Saturday.  I hope.

Politics and Writing

Bear with me.  I know politics makes people squeamish when they don't agree.

Writing isn't a partisan activity, and even though I have my particular political leanings (which I don't scream from the rooftops of this blog, but you probably have an idea of if you're paying attention), I respect everyone else theirs as well.  So I don't want to drag politics into this blog--at least not directly. The point I'm trying to get at involves politics--IN GENERAL--rather than specifically to any particular brand, and is as applicable to writers who work "Yes we can!" into everything they write as it is to those with a picture of Ronald Reagan on their keychain.

A writer has to keep this stuff in check.

[Now...this is one of those times where I have to make sure I'm clear about how I'm using the term "writer."  Even though I mention this in my disclaimers, when it comes to advice like "keep politics in check," it is particularly important to make it clear that I'm speaking of fiction writers.  It would be extra inane with absurd sauce and a tall frothing glass of WTF for a political pundit blogger to keep their politics in check.]

This week on Writing About Writing, in honor of getting to see the commander in chief try to raise enough money to maintain that status, I will run a political theme.  Not MY politics or DNC politics or the "other's" politics, but a writer's relationship to politics in general.  An article on Richard Bausch's controversial advice "Eshew Politics," quotes from writers about politics, a political themed potpourri...my guest blogger this week, Leela Bruce, has even tossed her original plans to come up with a political themed beat down.  If I can write quickly, or I can write while I wait the hours between when we get to sit to when the program starts, I may even have the first of those articles up tonight.

Stay tuned!

Literary Review of Skyrim: Very Early Thoughts (Part 1 of ?)

[I can't really talk about this game without spoilers.  I will avoid walkthrough type spoilers that reveal answers to a puzzle or who to talk to, but it would be impossible for me to really mention the literary elements of Skyrim without some discussion of the unfolding story.  So if you haven't played through Skyrim, think you ever might, and don't like knowing ANYTHING about the game ahead of time, you might want to skip this review.]

I haven't really played enough Skyrim to do any kind of a proper write up, and what I have played, I've played through a couple of times.  Usually when I play a role playing game, I make a character play for a few hours, and when I start to realize how the mechanics are going to work and what I really want (plus how much exploring and side-questing I've missed out on by actually going where people tell me to), I go back and make the character I think I'll enjoy given the universe.  For example, I tend to like magic, but in some games its scope is so limited that doing comparable damage by swinging a sword without any loss of mana is far preferable.  (Of course in some games magic is so broken powerful, it's hard to imagine being anything else.)  I only like magic if it's going to be worth the loss of armor and combat prowess.

So I haven't had time to play much, and what I have played, has been split into two fairly-redundant halves of replaying the beginning again.  I found out that I really liked the magic system, and archery didn't suck the way it has in some of the past Elder Scrolls games, so I went back to make a High Elf sniper (archer and stealth) with magic for close combat, almost completely negating the need for stamina altogether.  Plus, I'm a raging altaholic, so I'm always going back to see what would be different in a game if I made different choices.

First of all, Skyrim is one of those games pushing the audio/visual envelope of excellence and since I recently upgraded my graphics card, my eyeballs just about popped out of my head.  This is one sexy, sexy looking game.  Interactive CGI isn't quite on par with Pixar animation, but it's getting pretty amazing.  I'm not a game designer, so I can't speak from the technical end, but when you're dealing with graphics this exquisite, it opens up the door to visual artistry, much like leaps in audio/visual recording have allowed filmmakers greater range of motion to create effect.  It's just easier to make a shot subtly reinforce a theme if you're not working with a square holding an arrow.

It's also a really amazing experience.  Proclivity to use redundant voice actors notwithstanding, Bethesda always goes the extra mile to make the experience realistic.  Accents are spot on.  The people watch you with what is (I'm sure) top of the line facial expression software.  Their A.I.'s are sophisticated and interesting.  I walked into the upstairs of a shopkeeper's store.  Usually this is the start of all kinds of nefarious mischief--you can only steal things successfully if you're out of sight.  Even games as recent as Fallout New Vegas, the act of going into the part of the house where the NPC isn't opens the door to stealing basically as much as your character can carry.  Not this time.  The dude followed me up, just to watch me, and make sure I stayed out of trouble.  Damn it!


But let me get on to story--even though I haven't experienced much of it.

A couple of things have jumped out at me already.

The Empire is very Roman.  The Empire in Elder Scrolls games has always been very Roman, but this time it's like extra Roman with Roman sauce.  The uniforms are straight out of the Imperial period including the signature curiass and the red and gold coloring.  They also start early by emphasizing their predilection towards lists.  (Romans were excellent record keepers.)  So right away, the game basically starts jumping up and down and screaming "These guys are the Roman empire!"

Which caught my attention because the very first scene puts you in a cart with a thief and the "one true king" about to be killed by Romans.  Subtle.  Subtle like a brick.

It's also interesting because you quickly realize you're in a Nordic land.  Tamriel has a lot of races, orcs and elves and kajit, and even four human races, but only two of them are obviously based on identifiable European cultures (the Bretons and the Nords).  There aren't really any "Redguards" in history (except for communist Fins).  The Redgaurds are sort of like Arabs, but more of a composite Middle Eastern, "other" sort of culture than discernibly from any particular group like Moors or Saracens.  I suppose "Imperials" could mean Romans, but they avoided a cultural name.  But the Nords in Skyrim are very Anglo Saxon in culture.  They have the Scandinavian accent, they have the sense of camaraderie outstripping friendship. (A guy says about you early on: "Not a comrade, but a friend.")  There is even a comitatus that you run into early on with a drinking hall and everything.  They like to sing songs.  I'm surprised they don't call the bards "scops."

Why is any of this important?  Well, for starters, I'm not sure that it is.  I'm only getting started, so this is just what I noticed and thought about.  The Bretons might culturally represent the historical Celts who knocked the expansion out the Romans, but the Nords...that's the Saxon culture from Scandinavia down into Germania that played a large part in the fall of the Empire.  So now we've set up the totally Saxons and the totally Empire.  And within five minutes you realize that they're in a grudge match.  The politics of Skyrim seem to be a powder keg of rebellion against the imperial rule.  (Something in which I'm sure my character will be the spark.)

Anglo Saxons are also the culture that basically brought us the dragon in the form we know it now.  There were poison breathing wurms and wyverns and stuff, but until Beowulf goes and slays the dragon in the third part of Beowulf, we don't really see the treasure hoarding winged lizard.  So when dragons show up basically immediately in the introduction of Skyrim, I draw connections to the more literary monsters.

I should explain that.  Some modern authors have used dragons basically because they're fun characters.  Big lizards who cast spells--what's not to love?  McCaffry would obviously be a prime example, and even the bad dragons in Dragonlance were generally thoughtful and motivated by complexity--to say nothing of the good dragons and their general apathy to the world burning until someone figures out where draconians come from and then it's "Oh no you DI' NT!"

But in literature, dragons tend to represent moral failings in the culture especially regarding corruption. If you read Beowulf, the description of the dragon is a decaying, corrupted creature that has grown huge and lazy on its hoard. The dragon represents age and decay, but more so, it represents the complacent greed that strikes at men when they get old and the fire of idealism no longer drives them and they begin to turn to materialism to live forever. Beowulf goes to fight the dragon when he's much older than the Grendel parts. HE is starting to be "that guy" in terms of getting comfy in his old age--which is probably why he can't defeat the dragon without Wiglaf.

And so there are often common threads when dragons show up in literature.

1- No one has ever seen one before. Whether they are thought to be myth or thought to have died out a long time ago, or they just got smaller and smaller until they stopped showing up like in The Song of Ice and Fire, basically everyone thinks they're gone...until they show up out of no where.

2-The society they plague somehow deserves it. While innocents certainly die to a dragon--even virginal sacrifices sometimes--something is always rotten in Denmark if a dragon cruises into town.

3- It takes someone extraordinary to defeat them, and often it is someone who represents the virtue that acts as foil to the corruption that the dragon represents.

If you think about this in context, it makes sense.  Our moral failings as a society are usually something we deny or say don't really exist or were part of our "ignorant past" until they are so big that they can destroy us. We don't know they're a problem until they show up and kill a (metaphorical) village. No one who claims a culture might be fallible is believed or taken seriously (just like no one who says they've seen a dragon). Our cultural failings harm us. And while they may claim innocents--often the naive--we mostly bring that destruction on ourselves. And it takes someone who can step outside of that continuing cycle of destruction (remember the first dragons always ate their own tail--perpetuating the cycle). Classically literary dragons are manifestations of these failings.

Along another line, there's a tradition in really really old literature of the "big" people leaving. The Bible calls them Nephlim, and in Beowulf they are people LIKE Beowulf who can swim underwater for hours and fight for weeks. But these big people are always on the way out.  Sometimes there are only a few left. Sometimes there's only one left. In Lord of the Rings Tolkin gave a nod to these early legends with the elves--vastly superior to humans in almost every way, but all going west. It's like a very important part of the story is that now man can't rely on legends--he's going to have to start making his own destiny. (Which is a good lesson--sitting around and waiting for Beowulf to come fix health care reform would probably not be a good plan.)

I mention this because it seems that in Skyrim (like its predecessors), I am such a hero. I have some dragonborn powers of Weirding way or some shit.  But mostly I can just kick ass and take names, even at level six. It's all very cool.

Dragons and "Nephlim-types" form an interesting chiasmus in many literary stories--notably Beowulf. They are foils. One is the great legends of the past that is leaving, the other is the sins of the past made manifest that has returned.

And in the end, they usually destroy each other.

Beowulf could not defeat the dragon alone. With all his power and his might, he wasn't enough. One of his men--Wiglaf--made the pivotal difference, and so that torch of cultural agency is passed from legend to mortal.

Anyway, I couldn't help but think of all this as I wander a countryside on the brink of a civil war that most innocents seem to think is a terrible idea, and the yoke of imperial rule has corrupted from something useful into religious dictates, and they don't even seem to be AWARE of the failings their culture has in governing Skyrim. Like Imperial Rome, the Imperials of Skyrim rule a people who do not want them there, have ignored their own moral failings as leaders, and have become corrupt. It all seems like fecund soil for the literary dragons to emerge, challenging Skyrim to pay for her sins. I wonder if my life's blood will be the final price to stop their rampage. Because THAT, would really go right back to the allusion of being with a thief and the "true king" on the way to be killed by Romans as the story opens...

As I played through the storyline, I wrote Part 2...

Tech Themed Potpourri

Quick State of the Blog- July continues to be a red-letter month.  We've already passed June's numbers, and it's looking like July might be in the neighborhood of the best month ever.  I'm sitting down this weekend with my iPad in one hand and Vera in the other and trying to transfer some of my fiction by hand (since the great Microsoft/Dropbox debacle of 12 has ensured I can't just cut and paste).  Hopefully by next week some of my short fiction should be up as well as a few other changes as I make the last changes on the "ground floor."


Potpourri Given all the talk of Kindles this week, I thought I'd do a potpourri with the theme of the changing industry, self publishing, technology, and where we go from here.

Here's a list of self published authors.  Some of the names on there might surprise you, and you you WILL recognize several.

Writers are necessary.  Publishers are not.  An article about legacy publishers (the big ones) and how they treat their authors, and what can be circumvented by self-publishing.

Here's a blogger who is, frankly, full of shit.  Self publishing costs nothing is a terrifying concept.  The idea that you can just run your book past an English teacher (and not pay them anything for their trouble) or get free editing off of twitter is terrifying.  This would lead to exactly the kind of horrifying train wreck that gives self-publishing an often deserved terrible reputation.  Anyone who wants to seriously pursue self-publishing should respect their work and themselves enough to hire an editor.  (At least a copy editor, but probably someone who can work on the higher order concerns as well.)

Here's a video on the pros and cons of self-publishing.  He actually hits on one thing that I think is huge in this presentation: "there is no respect for self published writers among traditionally published authors and publishers."   God, I really wish he would just talk and turn off that stupid drumbeat.

It's not a flash in the pan!  Or if it is, it's a very, very big flash.  The number of e-books doubled in 2011.

Here's a cool article about e-readers in the classroom.

Spam on Your Blog (A Nickle's Worth of Free Advice)

Most season bloggers almost certainly know this already, but if you are new to blogging or are considering taking it up, I want to make you aware of a trick that the spam-a-lots of the world are using to get you to visit their sites.

They will give you traffic.

See they know full well you are watching the traffic you get through analytics.  You can see what pages people come to your blog from, and they know that if you see an unfamiliar name, you might click on the link to see what's going on.  Maybe you've gotten a shout out on another blog or some social media hub (like Stumbleupon) has found one of your articles.  You have arrived!  Better click and find out who your new fan club consists of.

Many of these sites are basically spam.  They've auto-clicked your site to generate traffic knowing full well that you will wonder where the hits are coming from and click back to them.  Bingo.  They've figured out a way to get your eyeballs that's more reliable than putting their URL in a comment (and the fact that most spam filters will block such comments).

Be particularly wary though.  While most of these sites are just links to commercials about their service to get you more web traffic, some of them are pretty aggressive.  Several open up new windows and one set off my antivirus.  These aren't sites you're going to want to click just to see what's going on.

How can you tell?  Well, sometimes they have funny URL's (like "www4.whatever... instead of the regular "www.whatever".)  They also have similar behavior that can give you a clue.  They usually find you faster than anywhere else.  You can get traffic from them within just a minute or two of posting.  And they also have all their multiple hits land at exactly the same time.  So if you post at 10:07 and you see that you have three hits at 10:10 from the same site with a funny name, you probably don't want to check them out.

Blogging Toward the Singularity

Technology is changing the face of writing almost every day.  Some changes are monumental in scope,  and alter forever the landscape of what it means to be a writer, like not having to physically rewrite something in order to revise it.  (A change that is not always for the better.)  Others are minor:  having the old writer advice of "save news clippings of everything interesting you ever find in a file folder next to your desk," that so many old-school writers absolutely swear by, has become more of a file of bookmarks online.  Some are absolutely trivial: being able to carry around an iPod Touch with a voice recording app instead of a little pad of paper and a pencil or a tiny tape recorder.  Some aren't quite here yet, but are so close that we can taste them: voice recognition software that will mean a writer may no longer be on a countdown to arthritis.  But all are changing the ways in which a writer can interact with the world around them.

And many of them are scary to the old guard.

Perhaps the biggest change of all is happening right beneath our feet even as we struggle to string words together and dream of scratching out a living.  Computers are altering how a writer can monetize their efforts--and not just a little bit.  No longer must they face a gauntlet of gatekeepers to make money or even to achieve fame, and self-publication is now a tech savvy move that need not carry the stigma of vanity press.  The publishing industry hasn't altered so much since the Gutenberg printing press and the curmudgeons who think this is a flash in the pan are fooling themselves.  Everything is starting to defy hundreds of years of tradition...right now.

Control What People See When they Google You  (Part of my Mission Statement, but good advice.)
There's Gold in Them Thar E-Readers
The Choice No One Made Ever (E-readers vs. Books)
Three Bits of Insight from Mark Lawrence's Reddit Interview
Traditional vs Digital Publishing

Writers on Kindles (Thursday's Three)

In keeping with Monday's theme the battle of Falkirk NOT being reproduced with Kindles and no books running towards each other with giant claymores, Woad paint, and Celtic cries, as well as the conspicuous lack of a Kindle and a book sword fighting in a thunderstorm while screaming "There can be only one!" I have brought you a series of quotes from writers on Kindles and e-readers.

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

Stephen Fry

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing”. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

Charlie Brooker

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

Douglas Adams