Perspective.

I do exactly what I want for a living.

I do it well.

No one has the power to make me change what I'm doing or how I'm doing.

The fact that I do know what I'm doing should be the thing that makes criticism on that score easy to take rather the thing that makes it intolerable.

It's Friday, and separately and irrespectively of the calendar, I'm in love.

News For Today

In order to inject a little excitement into the fundraiser going into the second half of the month, I'm going to try a little something called Fundraising Friday, where all contributions made today count double.

As an important psychological note, I've found from comments and emails that the close race over a long period is having the exact opposite effect it did over the short period: people are leery of donating because they're afraid of seeing the impact "erased". A double impact day doesn't necessarily address that but it does give an incentive to do it now instead of waiting until later.

All told, I don't think I'm going to do a month-long fundraiser again. I believe this one will match my expectations, but the disadvantages I'm perceiving seem to outweigh the advantages. It seems like to keep people aware of it for the whole month I'd have to flog it as much as I did the roommate derby... and the primary reason I decided to make it longer is so I wouldn't have to flog it as often for it to be effective.

Lessons learned.

Personal Assessment

Slept pretty well. Feeling okay.

Dreams From Last Night

I was at a (now, in real life, defunct) drive-in theater with my (now, in real life, ex) roommate, and we'd brought dinner from a midscale restaurant's curbside to-go service as we often had, but there was a massive spider crawling around on the windshield. I watched my roommate use the back of the spoon she was eating with to go after it, but instead of smashing it she kind of gently transferred it from the windshield with the intention of flicking it out the passenger door... i.e., the one on my side.

The spider had a string of spider web attached to it, though, and so she had to flick the spoon a bunch of times to get it loose. During one of these times it brushed my cheek and ended up grabbing one. I flicked it off and smashed it, but not before it bit me... before long my cheek was swollen up like a golf ball where it had bit.

Plans For Today

It's Friday, which means I'm not home alone today, but it's nice and cool upstairs in my room so I can "work from home". Getting chapter 5 ironed out and posted is priority #1. Getting the Mageterion story finished is priority #2, so I can have it up this weekend without violating my weekend policy. (Not that I'm not going to have to do work-related stuff this weekend, and considerably less pleasant than writing. Rendering unto Caesar, and all that.) Finishing up the chapter for Monday comes after that.

A more reflective, less ranty post about dramatic structures.

The more I think about the way I approach storytelling, the more I see a parallel between the way I write and the way my father (who likes to respond to discussion of gimmicky investment strategies with lines like, "So we've found something that works better than 'Buy low, sell high', then?") does his business.

The goal here is to tell an interesting story. You want to keep the audience engaged, you want to keep them coming back (in a venture like mine)... you want to keep them interested, so you want the story to be interesting.

There are tools that people have formulated for doing this, but these tools by themselves don't make the story interesting, and a story can be interesting in the absence of them.

I mean, nobody ever says, "You know what I'd love to read? A drama in five acts. Four would not be enough parts to adequately attract, sustain, and resolve my interest. Six would be a bit too much. Seven would just be right out. Yeah, a story with a dramatic arc that precisely encompasses exposition, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a denouement is exactly what I need right now."

People have put a book aside because it failed to keep them interested, but it takes a very rare and specialized breed of academically-minded reader to put a book aside saying, "Ugh! What was the writer thinking? This book doesn't have nearly enough motifs!"

I will admit there have likely been more people who've given up on a story because of a lack of conflict. Part of that is a matter of simple taste. Part of it is that in the absence of conflict there must be something else to keep the reader interested, and conflict is one of the easiest and most obvious ways to accomplish that. But I believe that part of it is that we have been trained, both implicitly and explicitly, to believe that story is drama is conflict.

These things can be valid analytical tools. They can be valid writing tools. But at the end of the day, the goal is to make the story interesting, not to make it a five-part dramatic arc or to give it enough conflict or sufficient themes.

Tell an interesting story. Build it around a five-act structure or a central motif or a protagonist/antagonist dynamic if you want to, if you need to, and/or if it fits. Just don't make mistake the tools that are available for the goal.

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Okay, I'm turning off comments on this one. I don't know who linked to this or where, but I've gotten three asshole comments already and only one is from someone I recognize.

Everybody who's getting ticked off by this post? If you literally judge books by counting motifs, with a straightforward thought process of "more motifs = better", then I apologize for doubting your existence and impugning your tastes.

On the other hand, if you just fancy yourself the sort of person who enjoys a complex book with thematic elements but you do not, in fact, rate your reading material by counting discrete dramatic acts and number of motifs, then relax... I did not actually insert a random two-paragraph strawman attack on you hyperbolically comparing your tastes to someone doing such arithmetic in the middle of this post.

Read it again with that understanding and see if you get it now.

Mid-day update.

I'm not "keeping score" today... I am writing (ish), but it's really more editing than anything else. I'm finishing up the OT story to go up this weekend, for instance, and the biggest chunk that I'm adding to the previous draft of it is lifted from the end of the Vera story. I just have to rework the material to be from his perspective.

There's going to be some actual writing for chapter 6 later, but not a lot.

All in all, the day's going pretty well. People are using the "hearts" on the TOMU site. That pleases me.

Advantage: Adams

Okay, this is kind of hilarious. So, Scott Adams has been caught sockpuppeting it up all over the interwebs.

You can see his sockpuppeteering here.

(Note: In a previous version of this post, I mistakenly believed his username had been edited to reflect his identity, but that was just a side effect of him always replying to threads that start with his name. "plannedchaos" is the user confirmed to be Adams.)

It's funny in a creepy kind of way to see him now blatantly referring to himself in the third person, but it gets downright hilarious when he (Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert) says this:

You're talking about Scott Adams. He's not talking about you. Advantage: Adams.

Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft.

...

On the plus side, watching Scott Adams's bitter and angry flailing at the internet (and all those nobodies that Scott Adams, certified genius, is certainly above caring about) is motivating me to get a better handle on how I deal with comments and questions that tick me off.

A "director's commentary" note on Chapter 5.

Writing about the whole thing with the wands was challenging.

I didn't want to stray too far from the standard and age-old D&D tradition of a magician's wand or staff being a piece of junk that stores "charges" of spells for later use, but the 4th edition version... a permanent implement that is as much part of a wizard's character as the weapon a warrior chooses to wield... just appeals to me on such an arcane primal level as being right that I hated to ignore it.

But ignore it I did, because there would be problems with suddenly introducing this facet of magic at the start of the second year. The charge-wands are just one more thing you can do with magic; implement-wands would be an integral part of using magic, and would have needed to be there from the beginning.

Also, there is another writer out there who did the "school of wizardry" thing with wands being a permanent and personal part of a wizard's channeling of magical power and she made them such an iconic part of her universe that I'd hesitate to tread on her robes.

(Hmmmm, tangent: now I'm wondering if that widespread and popular depiction of wands as tools didn't influence the direction of "implements" in 4E... one of the problems D&D has had through the ages is that it's gotten worse at depicting fantasy in general as it became better and better at giving us a simulation of D&D. With so much other fantasy stuff taking its cues from D&D, it's hard to imagine where else the "Wizards carry wands and use them to cast all their spells" rather than "Wizards carry wands because they can use them to cast the spell the wand is charged with" came from.)

As Mackenzie's education advances I will be getting into more wizardly tools like the powerstones, which some readers will no doubt identify as being an obvious GURPS influence. All of this is part of why I was eager to get to the second year, of course.