Doing Taxes

This is the first year that I did taxes on the earnings for my writing. It was hard not to, with the 1099-MISC staring me in the face from Writers of the Future. But aside from legal obligations, 2010 was the first year where I earned enough more to cover more than a couple of dinners or maybe a convention membership.

I don't expect 2011 will be better (it's hard to top the WotF grand prize), but I'm hoping for some decent pocket change.

What I did learn though, from doing my taxes, is being organized!

At the WotF workshop Tim Powers told us to start counting everything related to our work as expenses. Meals while traveling. Books for research. SFWA membership. I kept all my receipts. But keeping all my receipts didn't mean that I had them all in the same place.

Sadly enough, I had receipts inside of books (if I bought a book from a physical bookstore, I tended to use the receipt as a bookmark), receipts tucked off to the side on my computer desk, receipts still inside my wallet...

I found them all. I can't think of a one that's missing. But not only did I have to find them all, I had to organize them into different categories because they can't all be lumped together. (For instance, food expenses count differently.)

This year I plan to do better. I have my receipt drawer already prepared. Receipts aren't wandering away without a fight!

Good Writing, Dragon Age II

I recently finished playing Dragon Age II. What does this have to do with writing one could ask? It's a video game.

Well, I started writing because of video games.

I suppose if one goes back to the very first time I tired to write fiction it was really cartoons and toys, but when I was twelve, I played a particular video game and decided I wanted to write a story about it. It took me six months of on and off writing, but I finished that story, and decided then that I wanted to be a writer.

Video games have been a part of my storytelling consumption ever since. While I read books and watch the occasional movie, video games have always been one of my favorite methods of storytelling and probably always will be. Sometimes the quality isn't that good, not every game focuses on the plot, but a story adds something. It gives running through levels and fighting bad guys meaning.

I've watched storytelling in games rise from simple plot setups in the game manual, maybe in the game itself, to full fledged epics. I remember the first time I played a game and I felt my eyes water. I couldn't believe it. A game was moving me to tears.

Dragon Age II didn't make me cry, but it has been one of the best written games I've played in a long time and I attribute that to the excellent writing team at Bioware. There are moments I want to revisit again and again because they left such an impact on me.

In all role-playing games there is always a balance that has to be struck between player freedom and the need to serve the story. Some RPGs such as the Elder Scrolls series allow a great amount of player freedom, so much so that the story can be all but forgotten as the player roams a giant sandbox playing with whatever catches their interest. If there are other party members, they might simply be window dressing so the player has more people to control in battle.

On the other side are games such as the Final Fantasy series which are carefully scripted to the point where the player can only go to certain places and do things as dictated by the story. Choice is an illusion and the main character is quite likely a defined character on his or her own. There is only one way to save the world, one way to go through a cave, one destiny for a character to have, and the player will perform it in that fashion.

DA2 let me decide who I wanted my character to be within the confines dictated by the plot. While I could not make game-breaking decisions like pack up and move to another country, what choices were available did matter and I could not take the team of people I wanted to work together the most into my character's final battle because I had to make a choice.

DRAGON AGE II SPOILERS AHEAD

My version of Hawke, the main character, was played as a kind and helpful person; sympathetic to the oppression of mages. As an apostate (illegal) mage herself it made sense she would feel for those mages trapped within the Circle and managed by the templars, out of fear they could hurt themselves or others.

She met Anders, a fellow apostate with a kind heart working in a clinic for the poor; a healer. Anders had a problem, being possessed by a formerly well-meaning spirit that had been warped into a spirit of vengeance, but it was clear he was a good man. She liked him quite a bit.

At the same time, she met Sebastian, a former prince and brother in the chantry (church). He had lapsed in his vows to the chantry, but wanted to convince the grand cleric that he was ready to be committed again.

The way DA2 works, is that as the player and their party members roam around, the companion characters can talk to each other, so it's possible to hear what their views are, how they live, what they think of each other. Anders and Sebastian are only two of them, but they turned out to be favorites of mine so I had them in my party almost all the time. As the game progresses, there are special quests that are specifically assigned to each companion, allowing the player to find out more of that character's backstory and move their personal plot along.

The mechanics of the quest are the same for each player, but the dialogue changes depending on choices the player has made, giving the player something of a personal investment in how the story plays out.

For instance, Sebastian knew that my Hawke and Anders had entered a relationship with each other, so after I helped him with something he warned her that "He's a dangerous man. And selfish. Whatever he promised, don't believe that he will ever put your needs above his own."

And that bothered me as the player. At this point in the story I already knew that Anders was losing the battle keeping his own mind separate from that of the spirit inside of him, but Anders had been so kind earlier on that I couldn't put what Sebastian was saying together with the Anders I knew.

But then I did one of Anders's quests and found out that he lied about the reason he needed certain ingredients gathered, and he wanted Hawke to do something very shady for a reason he wouldn't tell her. He asked if she could simply trust him, and that what he was doing was for the good of all mages.

It was a very ominous thing, and suddenly I knew what Sebastian was warning Hawke about. But the order of the scenes, the way the dialogue came out, it wouldn't have been the same for every player. Not every player would even get the warning from Sebastian because not every player would have started a romance with Anders, not every player would become good enough friends with Sebastian, not every player would even meet Sebastian in the first place. While certainly there are a good deal of people who saw exactly what I did, it made what Anders was doing very personal.

The final straw came near the end of the game, when the mages of the city are arguing with the templars, and it looks like they will come to blows. There is a power vacuum in the city and the mages are sick of their templar overlords. In desperation, the mage leader says he will go to the grand cleric of the chantry to ask her to rein in the templars, and the templar knight-commander tries to stop him.

But the one who really stops them both is Anders. The chantry lights up in a magical explosion, an explosion Hawke unwittingly helped set up, because she agreed to trust him.

Anders had been slipping throughout the story. Particularly in the last third it had become apparent. He wasn't getting along with most of Hawke's companions, he was frequently irritable, and he was becoming more extreme in his belief that mages needed to be free of the templars. Was it really him, or the spirit inside of him? Hawke had been warned that getting involved with the possessed mage had been a bad idea, but he had been such a kind person, especially to Hawke when her mother had died.

Now an entire city block was destroyed and the grand cleric killed to remove any illusion of compromise. It was now war between the templars and the mages.

And I had to choose more than whether I would side with Knight-Commander Meredith or First Enchanter Orsino. I had to choose between Anders and Sebastian, both of whom were my dearest companions.

Anders expected to die for what he'd done, and Sebastian wanted him dead as punishment for killing the grand cleric and who knew how many innocent lives, but the choice is left to the player. It is possible to spare Anders.

I thought about it, and asked the other companion characters what they thought, and though the majority of them said he should die, one of them pointed out that if he lived he could work to put things right. After some deliberation, I decided this companion was right. Anders was clearly a tormented man who had done a horrible thing for what was probably in the grand scheme of things, the right reason. The mages would fight for their freedom now, because they had no choice. And there can be no redemption for Anders if he does not live.

Unfortunately Sebastian would have none of it, and he walked out on my party.

I can't say the choices I made throughout the game were in my favor, but they mattered. Would I have cared nearly as much about what happened to Anders if my character had not chosen to love him? Would Anders's betrayal have hurt as much if Hawke had merely been his friend? And then I lost Sebastian. It was an either/or with him and Anders. There was no way they could ever have come to common ground and gone into the final battle together.

A story, whether in a book or in a game, matters when the audience cares about what happens. It doesn't matter whether they are a player or a reader. I had become invested in these characters to the point where I wanted them to succeed. I wanted Anders to become whole again. I wanted Sebastian to find out for himself whether he should remain a chantry brother or reclaim his title as prince.

I looked on the Bioware forums and there is a thread over 300 posts long talking about Anders. Some players hate him. Some players love him. The fact that there is so much discussion about a character in a video game shows how much he moved us, one way or another.

A tip of the hat to Ms. Jennifer Hepler and rest of the Bioware writing team, for writing such a fascinating character. Traveling with Anders has been a painful journey, but a memorable one. Every now and then I meet a character who I consider an inspiration for what I hope to do in my own work. Anders is one of them.

My Arcadia

While I was browsing through my unsold science fiction stories, I happened across a story I'd forgotten about. I'd only written the first draft, and for one reason or another had never gotten around to revising it.

It was inspired by a favorite movie of mine, and rereading the story reminded me so strongly of its inspiration that I was motivated to dig it out. That movie was the 1982 anime Arcadia of My Youth.



I think most fiction writers were moved by something when they were young, a story that resonated with them and provided an inspiration to tell stories of their own. While Arcadia of My Youth did not provide the inspiration for me to write (I had already been writing for three, maybe even four, years by the time I saw it), it left a lasting impression on my teenage mind, and to this day I think of Captain Harlock as my favorite pirate of all time.

When I first saw the movie it was a partially censored version called Vengeance of the Space Pirate dubbed into English with 40 minutes removed and marketed as "Just for Kids." Never mind that the main character, Harlock, doesn't end up with much vengeance, that many of the characters die, and the reward for the main character for standing up for his convictions is a painful exile from Earth.

I was sixteen, and terribly moved by the story of a man who fought for what he believed in and was no longer welcome on his own homeworld. There is only way for a human to live on Earth, as part of a conquered and broken people subjugated by the aliens who'd won the war against them. Freedom means leaving Earth behind, never to return. Freedom means existing in a world where no one will help you. Freedom means hardship.

Harlock and his crew choose freedom.

I rewatched Arcadia of My Youth this weekend, my uncut, subtitled version, and was surprised by how much I was moved by the story. There are parts that have not aged well, largely because of things I now know are not scientifically possible or find unrealistic, but the core story, about a man and his beliefs is unchanged from my memory. Harlock is still an immensely strong, larger than life character who if he was a real person I would believe in without hesitation.

This time around though I was particularly moved by Maya, who is heavily implied to be Harlock's wife. It wasn't as though she had been removed from the cut version I'd seen as a teenager, but her messages to Harlock had been trimmed down and the moment of her death had been removed, as well as the grief Harlock shows when he realizes she's died.

Harlock and Maya's relationship is a little odd, which is why I only say it's implied they're married. We never see a ring and with the bleak world they exist in we never see the two side by side in a relaxed setting. They're hardly ever even in the same scene together, but it's obvious they know each other well and care about each other's safety.

I'd always watched Arcadia of My Youth with an eye on Harlock, but this time I found Maya to be a very strong character as well. Though Harlock is the captain and gets all the action oriented sequences, Maya is no less courageous a character for persisting in her underground broadcasts and encouraging the beaten people of Earth to aspire for more.

I'm at a loss what sort of category I'd file this movie under, which makes it difficult to recommend. It's a drama, but there are action sequences and certain moments of coolness that are more appropriate for a popcorn flick. There's just nothing else like it that I can think about off-hand.

I still like it for its message though; that even if it's hard and painful, it's worth fighting for what you believe in.

Arcadia's too close for me to go back and revise my short story now, but it was worth going back and reliving a couple hours with Harlock. It reminded me of just how important and influential a character can be for a young girl.

Chopping Up An Old Story

I needed a science fiction story for a particular project, so I looked back at the work I'd done before that I had yet to sell, and selected what I thought my most suitable piece. I liked the concept quite a bit, and the story had done well enough to be a quarterfinalist in Writers of the Future (quarterfinalists are now known as Honorable Mentions).

Having reread the story I found I still liked it, but there were obvious weaknesses; portions of the story told in summary instead of as an actual scene, an unsatisfying ending, and given advances in technology part of what happened in the last third didn't seem probable anymore.

So I took a hacksaw to it. In the process the opening scene was truncated, the conflict between the protagonist and her friend was enhanced with an additional scene and the summary expanded into an actual scene, the ending was revised, and in total an additional thousand words were added to what had been a 3400 word story.

I was pleased.

I also could not have done this kind of edit back when I originally wrote the story.

Back when I was a younger writer I would write a draft, and I might do a bit of editing while I write (bad behavior!), but on the whole of it what I wrote was what went out. In extreme circumstances I might cut a paragraph or two, but on the whole editing tended to be limited to clarifications and rewording things. Line edits.

I took a story to my first face-to-face workshop that was not a college creative writing class, and I remember my instructor, Mark London Williams, suggesting that I rewrite a scene I brought into class a different way. It may come as a shock to some, but my initial unvoiced reaction was: "But I already wrote it this way!"

What Mark had suggested was a drastic change that could not have been accomplished through a line edit. Paragraphs would have to change. Maybe even the plot. The scene would be different.

It took me about a year to realize he was right. When I took that same story back to the workshop a year later, it was much better, stronger for the revisions. It was the story was that really taught me that it's okay to throw away chunks of text. About two-fifths of it was removed and replaced. The scenes that did nothing were gone. New scenes were added to replace them and better move the story along. The story also grew.

It was after the revision of that story and "Living Rooms" (which also went through the same workshop) that I realized my revision process involved cutting out dead weight and expanding what I wrote earlier. My writing grows with revision.

This also taught me that if I have to write for a particular word length, that I need to undershoot it on the first draft because my second will be longer.

It's can be difficult to understand what needs to change and what doesn't, and I think that was part of my problem as a younger writer. That and inertia.

For the particular story I came back to this week, I realized that I needed to trim the opening where the protagonist gets out of bed, eats her breakfast, and heads out to work. Since she's not an ordinary human, her getting out of bed and eating breakfast is a little different from ours, but I decided the details were unnecessary and made it take longer to get to the interesting stuff.

The protagonist's time spent doing research was originally done purely through narration. Since weeks if not months were going by and this was a short story, it did not seem prudent to go into detail. I interspered bits of dialogue that happened over the course of the research just to break up the narration, but they were without context since they were more for flavor.

When I came back to do my revision I decided to break the research up into smaller scenes (now there are actually quite a few very short scenes) to showcase more of how the protagonist's society works and her relationship with her friend, who is also involved in the research. The disagreement that had originally been done in summary I fleshed out with actual dialogue. Finally, I added a completely new scene to emphasize what these people thought their heritage was as well as the growing disagreement between the protagonist and her friend.

And finally, I changed the ending. I remembered that I'd had a heck of a time finding a good note to end the story originally, and when I reread the story I didn't like it. I found it dry and unsatisfying, more like the story had ended because it was a good stopping point rather than a change had been made.

In the new draft the protagonist's discovery is more animated and there's more at stake for her personally than there was before (since her friendship may now be on the line, whereas the friendship had not been as defined before). While we still don't learn what the full outcome of her discovery will be, she has enough information that she can feel vindicated choosing the path she has.

Random Thought: Why don't books have remakes?

I have a certain fondness for RPGs, the kind that come on video game consoles with character statistics that usually contain something called HP and MP. At first I liked them because I was terrible at action games and RPGs allowed me to enjoy a game with minimal reflexes.

As time and technology progressed, I started to enjoy RPGs for a different reason. They had good stories.

While video games aren't generally thought of as literature, story-based RPGs (as opposed to the dungeon crawling variety) often strive to accomplish much the same goal as a novel of the same genre; transport the audience to a different time and place as a form of entertainment.

When I was in high school, one of my favorite video games was Lunar: The Silver Star, an RPG for the Sega CD. By today's standards the graphics are crude. The animated sequences which were then so stunning are now laughable. But the story is still good. The story wasn't affected by the technology at the time, only the manner of its delivery.

Last year a remake called Lunar: Silver Star Harmony was released, with the localization company XSEED billed it as the definitive version of the story.

Lunar, you see, is something of the Blade Runner of video games. Silver Star Harmony is the third remake, and thus fourth incarnation, of the same game.

But, I'm admittedly a fan of this story that has held my imagination since I was sixteen. I started playing Lunar: Silver Star Harmony recently and one thing I have liked about all the Lunar remakes is that they don't attempt to tell the story in exactly the same fashion. Though the second and third remakes tend to follow the first remake's general structure more so than the original game, every installment had added something of its own.

Lunar: Silver Star Story introduced new characters and had Luna join Alex on his trip to Meribia. Lunar Legend added to Alex and Luna's backstory and a neat little twist that introduced Nash even earlier in the game as a would-be Dragonmaster. Now Lunar: Silver Star Harmony comes in with more backstory to the Four Heroes, why they were fighting, and why the goddess Althena chose to become human. I daresay Ghaleon comes off better as a villain for the changes.

And this got me thinking... why don't we see this in books?

After all, I'm enjoying traveling with Alex and friends for a fourth time, seeing what's new and different on a journey that I know will end the same way. The voice actors are different, the graphics are better, the gameplay has changed but it's still turn-based.

I know this does happen in books sometimes. I can think of Raymond Feist's Magician novel as an example, where it was expanded for the 10th anniversary, but it's not common.

For one thing, the words on the page don't immediately jump out at a reader as being different from what was read before. There's no graphical upgrade. But then, there is no upgrade between the three Lunar remakes since they are all still very much a product of 2D art and by the Playstation era there was precious little to improve. Silver Star Harmony's anime cut scenes are the same ones from the first remake.

But it's not a port. There is new art. Lots of new art. New character portraits have been added, towns and enemies have been entirely redrawn. It's like rewriting the story from the same basic outline, but using different words and adding or subtracting scenes. Would a writer ever do that?

Probably not. Even though an author could probably tell the same story much better if they rewrote it with another ten years under their belt, I don't think most of them would be inclined to do that. (They'd rather write something new.) Commercially I'm not even sure there would be a market for that. Unlike games, a beloved book from my teenage years can stay on the shelves for years, or if it lapses out of print, it may come back later from another publisher or as an ebook. The book itself doesn't really change.

Games on the other hand have a window, and old product doesn't go back on the shelf unless it's part of a collection, a port to a different system, or a remake. Classic games might become downloadable through Playstation Network or Xbox Live, but the bulk of attention is still on what's newly available on current systems, not what the back catalogue has brought to bear. People don't talk about the back catalogue at work, whereas a remake on a console system might at least get a nod.

When I think about whether I would read a "remake" of a book I enjoyed, I'd say it would have to be of a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and would be inclined to read again. It would also have to be a book where the remake can flesh out or make better what had done before.

With the Lunar games, having Luna join Alex on the trip to Meribia was a fantastic decision, since it allowed all the party members except for Kyle to formally meet and get to know her; important since she needs to be rescued in the end and it helps if everyone knows who they are fighting for. But changes were also made in Silver Star Story that made Ghaleon a less sympathetic villain (since corrected in Silver Star Harmony). It's a question of what value is added if a remake is made.

Superstars Writing Seminar

I had the good fortune to attend the Superstars Writing Seminar earlier this month. I know the name may come off a little silly (apologies to the wonderful instructors involved!), but the content of the seminar is really unique.

I've spent a good many years writing and whether taking a class in college or participating in a critique group, the talk is nearly always about the craft of writing. How do you write a good piece of prose?

SWS doesn't pay attention to any of that. SWS assumes that you can write and that you're ready to get into the nitty-gritty of the business end of publishing. Sure, there is time spent discussing the ever problematic "getting butt in chair" disease many writers suffer from, and there's time spent discussing how to properly manage writing time vs. family time, but the real meat of the seminar is the business.

The most memorable topics of the seminar, for me, were:

• Listening to Eric Flint break down where all the money goes when a writer only gets X% of the cover price in royalties
• Getting to view an actual book contract as Eric went through it clause by clause
• Being able to ask Brandon Sanderson directly about things I didn't understand in his film contract
• Hearing David Farland totally break down how to work film rights when dealing with Hollywood
• Listening to Tracy Hickman's moving story about why we write (and his story can be listened to for free at the SWS site)

These are the things they don't teach you in college and that you'll likely only learn from someone who has been there before. In the case of SWS, there are five instructors, plus bonus guest instructors, who have been there before and can share their experiences.

I found all the instructors to be approachable. They are there to teach and often join the SWS attendees at mealtimes and sometimes even evenings out. It's hard to bend an author's ear when they don't know you, but they will listen here, and arguably the best part of the seminar isn't sitting at a table taking notes but talking directly to them. Once you make that connection, you stop being a face in the crowd.

I feel a lot wiser having attended, and at least for me, it was a chance to see Kevin, Rebecca, Eric, and David again. All are Writers of the Future judges and I originally met them back in August when I was still awestruck that I was even participating in an esteemed workshop. (Kevin J. Anderson's first impression of me was nervously giggling throughout a barbecue.)

Multiple writers have told me that conventions are their social functions. It's where they see each other, because most of the time they live scattered across the country each working on their own novels. After having meet the WotF judges again, I can see that. It's times like this that we meet, relationships are made or renewed, and I now look forward to a time when I'll see them again.

New Pulp Sci-Fi Market: Ray Gun Revival

A writer friend and editor passed along the news that Every Day Publishing will be relaunching Ray Gun Revival in February as a semi-pro online magazine. They're looking for some good old pulp science fiction; less about the science and more about the story.

In their words:

Ray Gun Revival (RGR) is an online magazine dedicated to fun stories, grand escapism, and good old sensawunda. RGRl provides just that, a throwback publication that revisits space opera and golden age sci-fi. Their stories focus more on character development than hard science and sail all the wide-open waters between science fantasy and harder SF. Think of the original Star Wars stories, Doc Smith's Lensman series, the Warlord of Mars tales from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Think of everything from John Carter and Gully Foyle to Kimball Kinnison and Han Solo. They are bringing out the deepest elements of what has traditionally been rather superficial fiction and updating them for a new generation of fiction enthusiasts.

It's always fun to find a new market, and especially for such an underserved niche.