In Memoriam: K. D. Wentworth

As an unpublished writer and later a writer of meager credentials, I often looked at the Writers of the Future contest as opening to get into the business of a storytelling professional. Unsurprisingly, I didn't win on my first attempt.

I didn't win on my second or third attempts either. They were all flat rejections letters, and at the time I had no idea there was such a thing as a coordinating judge or that there was just one dedicated soul reading through all the submissions. But I was stubborn and kept trying.

Eventually, on my sixth attempt, the unimaginable happened. I won. And by then I knew there was a name attached to the early judging.

It was K.D. Wentworth, but I didn't know much about her besides her name and the brief bio on the WotF site.

That would change.

At the workshop that all winners go to, I got to meet K.D., who as coordinating judge read all the submissions for any given quarter before passing on the top eight to the panel of judges who then pick out the first, second, and third place winners of the quarter.

I can only imagine how many boxes of manuscripts that used to be (the year after my win, they started allowing electronic submissions). Those of us at the workshop asked K.D.: How could she do it? How come she didn't ask for any help?

And she said she didn't want to spread out the reading because she wanted to make sure it was a consistent mind that was doing all the rejections. The contest entries were getting so much better and she wanted to cultivate that. She would answer questions on her newsgroup about the contest on her own time and encourage writers to keep submitting.

Sometimes a writer would thank her on her newsgroup for being a finalist or a semi-finalist, and since she judged all the stories blind, she would ask for the name of the story they wrote. And she would remember that story. Sometimes she might comment on a scene she liked, or a theme the writer ran with.

K.D. had faith in a lot of us, many of whom hadn't managed a single professional writing credit. She said that the contest was getting better and better entries every year and she didn't want it to lose that momentum.

We had a lot of instructors our workshop week, but K.D. was always there to quietly offer her advice. I remember sitting next to her at my first bookstore signing (which was part of the workshop then) and how she told me a story about a small prank she'd done to Tim Powers at a con. The story was tied into the greater lesson that every writer has a different opinion on how things should be done and each writer needs to decide for themselves what is the right thing to do, but the silliness of the story is what made it memorable.

One of my most significant memories about K.D. was the night of the award ceremony itself.

My family and I were having dinner at the banquet when K.D. came up to meet them. After the pleasantries were exchanged, she told me, "Remember, I loved your story first."

At the time I didn't understand what she'd meant. Of course she had liked my story before the other judges. She was the coordinating judge.

Then, perhaps two hours later, I won the Gold Award.

K.D. had plucked my story "Living Rooms" out of the thousands of stories she must have received that quarter and sent it on to be a finalist, where it eventually was awarded first place, and then later still the grand prize. It was a dream come true. I could hardly believe it as I walked down the aisle to the stage where K.D. was there to present me with my award.



She set me on my path, and the win has done so much for my motivation as a writer. Everyone wants validation that what they are doing means something to someone, and every year she gave validation to dozens of writers.

She was the sweetest person, and it meant to lot to her to pay it forward.

An author once told me that he could never pay back the people who'd helped him, because now that he was successful they were no longer around, so he does his best to pay it forward.

I can't pay back K.D., except by being the writer she knew I could be, and to in turn pay it forward for writers still to come.

Hotel Dusk: Room 125 Playthrough

I got a hankering to read a book. And I'm a binge reader, so I can't just start a book and read a half hour a day until it's done, let alone put it down for weeks only to finish up months later.

So I didn't want to start a book. But I really wanted something with a plot.

I looked at one of my bookshelves, which does double duty holding not only the majority of my books, but also all my Nintendo DS games, and I spied Hotel Dusk: Room 215. I first played through Hotel Dusk three years ago as something to do while on a long car trip to an out of town wedding.

I liked the game, if you could call it that. It was 80% reading text and 20% running around doing everything else. If you hate text in a video game you'll hate Hotel Dusk, with its gobs of dialogue and complicated chronology of events, but if you love mysteries, if you can keep a good internal checklist of what you know and don't know and where you still need to investigate, then Hotel Dusk is a basket of candy with your favorite treats (and probably a few of the bad ones mixed in for those moments where you get stumped).

I decided to play Hotel Dusk again because I didn't get the best ending last time and there are a few new scenes when playing a starred game (basically New Game+ when you continue off your old end game save). I still remembered a lot of the plot and the hardest of the puzzles, so my most recent playthrough took me about ten hours versus the seventeen the first time.

Arguably the most fun in playing or reading a mystery is that you don't know everything. When I first played through Hotel Dusk I wasn't sure if there were any supernatural elements to the game (there's a rumor about a ghost haunting the hotel) or what the whole story was.

All I knew was the premise. The main character Kyle Hyde was an NYPD detective three years before the start of the game, and his undercover partner went turnout and sold out the police to the smuggling ring they were investigating. Now Kyle works as a door-to-door salesman for a friend of his deceased father, with an illicit side job of finding objects that don't want to be found.

It's the side job that takes him to Hotel Dusk, a rundown hotel on the outskirts of Los Angeles on December 28, 1979 (yes, this is a period piece).

Hotel Dusk takes place over the course of a single evening and, barring the opening and ending scenes, entirely within the confines of the hotel. It makes for a hugely condensed plot, which is divided into ten chapters which last anywhere from a half hour to two hours of plot time.

As a writer, I love the story for its structure, because it is so contained by the nature of being a single night in a hotel. All the information and the back story has to come through the characters (the staff and the other guests) and the few noteworthy items that Kyle finds, and it really is enough to unravel the mystery of Hotel Dusk, his partner's defection, and still provide a realistically satisfying conclusion.

Playing through a second time made things a little interesting as there were times where I knew I needed to do something before I would actually be able to do it. Initially Kyle can only visit the public areas of the hotel and his own room, but as the game progresses more and more of the hotel becomes accessible.

Kyle is a fantastic character and I certainly did not mind sticking with him for another go around. It's not often the main character is a down-on-his-luck ex-cop driving a shabby car and traveling with a battered suitcase handed down from his dad. But it really fits the noir-ish feel to the game.

The characters frequently talk in hardboiled crime slang, with Kyle referring to money as "cabbage" or "scratch" depending on context. A character wasn't just murdered, but "plugged." A gun is a "piece."

The translation team did a marvelous job with the dialogue (despite the game being set in L.A., the game was originally released in Japan), with multiple characters exhibiting their own speech patterns. You can practically hear Dunning Smith's cranky old voice and it fits perfectly for a man that Kyle describes as an "piece of leather."

Depending on how the player goes through the game, there are two extra scenes in the end, with one of the extras being a little longer if things are done correctly on a second playthrough. I had gotten one of the extra scenes my first time playing through the game, but missed the second because I had gotten several Game Overs. (Let's just say that my first time through the game, Kyle Hyde was very clumsy and got himself thrown out of the hotel a lot.)

This time around I got both the scenes and the extension. I'm not sure they alone were worth the second playthrough, but as I probably would have played through again anyway they were a nice bonus.

The no Game Over bonus scene, by the way, is unrealistic. The writer in me has some trouble with suspension of disbelief, but because this is the bonus scene for doing everything perfectly I'm a little more forgiving and it does allow for something closer to a happy ending for one of the characters.

Unfortunately the developer behind Hotel Dusk, Cing, has closed up shop, but the game itself is still easy to find for purchase online, and the price is low since it's now an older game.

Happy Chinese New Year

Gong Hey Fat Choy! It's now the Year of the Water Dragon.

The Chinese zodiac is decently well known in Western parts of the world. I know in the US if I go into the right type of Chinese restaurant I might even find the zodiac printed on the tablemat. Since the zodiac runs on a twelve year cycle, most of my friends from high school and college fit within a three year span.

We're all dragons, snakes, and horses. I admit, I'm just a bit sad that I was born a snake rather than a dragon, just because the dragon by virtue of what it is, is the coolest animal in the zodiac.

A little less commonly known is that the Chinese calendar also cycles through the five elements. So it's not just the Year of the Dragon this year, but the year of the Water Dragon. (How appropriate that it's raining for me today.)

Five elements, you say?

The Chinese have a five element system which is slightly different from the Western version of Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water. We use Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water, which move in a cycle. Wood feeds Fire, which turns into Earth, which yields Metal, which carries Water. (The last one is a little harder to picture, but Wikipedia suggests thinking of how water condenses on metal.)

I'm actually playing a bit with the five elements in a new story I'm squeezing in on the weekends when I'm not working on the current novel. It's very easy to write a character who uses magic based on the Western elements because we've seen it done so much. Using metal-based magic, that's a little trickier.

Farewell, Anne McCaffrey

Most writers start writing because because he or she was inspired by something she’d read. There was another storyteller who’d left an impression and became who they wanted to be.

I didn’t think about such things when I was a kid. I generally consider my starting point as a writer to be when I was twelve, and because I wanted to write an adventure story set in my favorite video game. But at about that same age I really got into reading. My dad encouraged my brother and I to read, and agreed to pay half of any book we purchased, which made books affordable entertainment in comparison to video games.

Not that it stopped my love of video games, but I read, a lot.

My first Anne McCaffrey book was actually Dinosaur Planet, chosen because it was quite obviously a science fiction story involving a planet full of dinosaurs, and how could you go wrong with that? I still remember the day I bought the book. A brand new bookstore had opened in town and my dad took me there for a look around. It wasn’t a very large paperback, and there were tons of books on the shelves, but I picked that one. I still have it at home.

Then, when I was a little older in high school, I discovered the school library had an amazing selection of science fiction and fantasy. It had volumes upon volumes of these dragon books by Anne McCaffrey. I liked dragons, so it wasn’t a hard sell. The problem was which one to start with.

I figured the one called Dragonsdawn was a good place to start, given the title, and fell in love with the genetically engineered dragons and their riders. I was disappointed to discover that the rest of the books in print at that time (the Chronicles of Pern collection would later revisit the First Pass) took place centuries if not millenia later, and I had to adjust to a new cast of characters, but I read nearly every Pern book in the school library (skipping only Nerilka’s Story).

After I graduated I continued to read all the way up to 2001’s The Skies of Pern. I read her other books too; The Rowan and Damia, The Ship Who Sang, Decision at Doona.

One of the reasons I thought Writers of the Future was the awesomest contest ever was because Anne McCaffrey was a judge, and the thought that she might one day read my writing was amazing.

Though I won the contest in the biggest way possible, she was not one of my judges, and by then her health no longer permitted her to travel the distance it would take for her to get from Ireland to California for the award ceremony. I wish I had met her.

But she remained an inspiration to me. There is no other author I’ve read more, and I have no doubt that a part of what makes me a writer today came from her.

Farewell, Dragonlady of Pern. And thank you.

Solaris Rising Now Out in Stores

The anthology Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction is now in stores (Amazon, B&N, Mysterious Galaxy)! Thanks go to my fellow WotF winner Adam Colston for giving me a photo of the copy he found in the wild. I haven't been in a bookstore since my local Borders closed so it was a pleasant surprise to know the book's out.

I've been a bit hermit-like the past couple weeks, working on writing in between weekend events (took some time off from the day job), but I have good news. I've been contracted to do another story for Story Portals, this time for their upcoming Qi Lin property. Just got the signed paperwork back a few days ago.

And my previous Story Portals story, "The Nightmare Beast," has been collected into the ebook anthology of Katya, Lady Assassin stories: The Taste of Waterfruit and Other Stories.

I had a fantastic time at Blizzcon last weekend, and it turned out more useful from a writing standpoint than I thought. Richard Knaak and Christie Golden, who I read while I was in high school, were both there doing book signings as well as on a panel discussing their tie-in work with Blizzard.

Upcoming Travels

October's a busy month for me. Fortunately the day job is winding down so I should be able to take a vacation soon. First up is a wedding, second is BlizzCon, and third is the World Fantasy Convention.

BlizzCon is purely for fun since I'm a World of warcraft player and I'll be attending with a few of my guildies. If you happen to going and would like to meet up, I'd be happy to do so, though I'm not there in any writerly capacity (though if Blizzard is looking for another writer for their books I'd be happy to talk about it!).

I mostly plan on being a fan that weekend and soak up all the WoW and Diablo III news I can. Oh, and attend the Foo Fighters concert that closes out the con. I just hope my ears will be able to take the screaming.

WFC will be my first major spec fic convention and I hope to meet a lot of fellow writers I've only met on forums up until this point, as well as a few familiar faces from Writers of the Future. Again, I'll be happy to meet up sometime. From my understanding, WFC is on the small side since the number of attendees is restricted, so it shouldn't be difficult for find people.

After that, in November I plan to be at LosCon, the local LA convention, again. I'm really more of a stay-at-home type, so this is mind-bogglingly busy for me.

Writing "The Nightmare Beast"

My first work-for-hire story, "The Nightmare Beast," is available now to the general public at Story Portals. This is not the first time I've written in someone else's universe (my story "By Whatever Means Necessary" was an Honorable Mention in the first of Blizzard's annual writing contests for their Starcraft/Warcraft/Diablo properties), but happily enough, it's the first time I've been paid to do so.

"The Nightmare Beast" stars an assassin named Katya, the lead franchise character over at Story Portals. One of the best, Katya finds herself on a variety of dangerous jobs over the course of the series. In "The Nightmare Beast" she finds herself meeting an old acquaintance who hires her unaware of who she really is. She's asked to assassinate a man and steal package he neglected to deliver to her client, but the job can't be that simple, can it?

Doing work-for-hire can be fun since a lot of the world-building is already done, I can just cut loose and write, and I was able to write the first draft much more quickly than I could my original work.

"The Nightmare Beast" was also my trial run using Scrivner. I don't normally do first drafts on computer anymore, since I find the lure of the internet to be too distracting, but I didn't want to write "The Nightmare Beast" in longhand in my notebook because it would end up getting mixed in with the novel project I was working on at the time.

Scrivner has a feature though that allows the entire screen to be covered with nothing but a big white sheet, reminiscent of a typewriter, that hides everything else in the background. At first I thought it was a silly feature, but when I used it, I found it really did do a good job of blocking out distractions. The only problem was that the "typewriter" didn't advance with every new line (I was using the Beta) so I was usually writing at the bottom of the screen instead of the middle.

I’m not a complete convert, but the program might be used another time in the future if I need to avoid getting my notebook cluttered with multiple projects again.

I listened to several songs to get into the mood for writing Katya. Songs used for "The Nightmare Beast" were "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry, "According to You" by Orianthi, and "Who Knew" and "Please Don't Leave Me" by Pink.