Archives (page 340 of 466)

May 23, 2013 / 3 Comments

Ten Questions About Vaporware, By Rich Dansky

One of my favorite things is looking around and seeing the success of the people I’ve “come up with,” for lack of a better term. Folks I wrote with in various gaming industries: folks like Mur Lafferty or, drum roll please, Rich Dansky. Rich is a guy responsible for a lot of games you probably love, and he’s also a helluva fiction writer. Here he is emerging from the ones and zeros to tell you about Vaporware:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m the one who knocks, and then, if you don’t answer, leaves a note saying I was there and will be back another time, and if you want me to bring pick anything up for you, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Beyond that, I’m a 14 year veteran of the video game industry with Red Storm/Ubisoft, working mainly on the Tom Clancy’sseries and games like Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell. Before that I spent four years in-house at White Wolf as a line developer on games like Wraith and Mind’s Eye Theatre. I’ve published six novels and a short story collection, I’ve got a scotch collection that is the envy of beast and man, and I spend far more time watching Finding Bigfoot than any rational human being really should.

Also, I live in North Carolina, I’m married to the brilliant and lovely statistician Dr. Melinda Thielbar, and I once shoved my hands into a vat of liquid nitrogen. That about covers it.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

What happens when a video game refuses to be cancelled? Blue Lightning is back, and it wants something only its creator can give it.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

It comes from a lot of late nights and long hours. It comes from a lot of “no shit, there we were” war stories swapped with friends at other studios on other projects. It comes from a gamedev I know telling me “Don’t tell my wife, but if it was a choice between my family and doing something cool, I’d risk my family.” It comes from thinking to yourself, “good, my wife is going out of town so I can work later”, and from getting the call two days after you get married that you need to get back on the road again. And it comes from looking around at a roomful of coworkers late at night when no one wants to be the first one to go home.

At the same time, it comes from the passion of working in games – of banding together with a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other people to make something that is expressly designed to help people have fun. It comes from watching something go from a squiggle on a whiteboard through prototyping and development to the point where you see it in-game and it’s suddenly real. And it comes from seeing that creative vision manifested and real.

There are a lot of things I love about working in video game development – the projects I’ve worked on, the collaborations I’ve gotten to be a part of, the places I’ve gotten to go – but at the same time it asks an awful lot of you, and unless you draw and guard your boundaries, it’s going to keep asking for you to give more. I’ve lived that more than once, and I’ve had friends go through it at a dozen different studios, and it takes a toll on both the gamedevs and the people in their lives.

And yet we keep coming back for more. And that, I suppose, is where the story really came from.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

Two days after I got married, I got a phone call from work saying they needed me at a third party studio out of the country. And I went. I know the perils of work-life imbalance in the game industry pretty well, and I’m painfully aware how much of that can be self-authored. Between what I’ve seen and done, and the stories I’ve been told by friends and professional peers, I think I was perfectly situated at the intersection of skill and experience when Vaporware decided it needed to be written.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING VAPORWARE?

The hardest thing was, I think, being so attached to the material. So much of it felt fraught with significance. In a lot of ways, it felt like I was putting this out there for the gamedev community as a whole, and if I’d gotten it wrong it would have been like I was letting them down. That’s not to say that I’m claiming to speak for all gamedevs with this, but there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what we do. So this was a chance to show that, yeah, we do work hard and we do take what we do seriously as professionals. Maybe too seriously sometimes.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING VAPORWARE?

I learned to trust the material. The book went through a lot of versions, and I think for a long time I was over-cautious with it. Maybe I didn’t want to risk getting it wrong, maybe I wanted to show off too many of the nuts and bolts, but I did a lot of over-steering on the manuscript through about the first five or six drafts. Eventually I had to just trust myself that I knew the story I was trying to tell, step away from any externally imposed direction, and let myself write what I already knew I was going to. The story was always going to end this way. It just took a long time to come to grips with that, versus where I might have foolishly wished it to go instead.

As my wife says, the horror of my fiction is that people don’t change.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT VAPORWARE?

Vaporware is such a personal project – they say “write what you know”, not necessarily “write what you’ve been immersed in completely for a decade and a half ‘cause you may not have the best perspective on the thing when you’re done” – that in a lot of ways it was difficult for me to look at without attaching real-world associations to whatever I was looking at. I mean, it was definitely a labor of love, but so was Van Gogh hacking off his ear. It wasn’t until I put it in the hands of other game developers I knew for feedback and they told me that it felt it rang true that I was really able to relax around it and start enjoying it.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I broke one of my cardinal rules writing Vaporware, which is to say I started editing before I’d finished the full manuscript. And of course those edits changed other things, which changed other things, which necessitated more edits, and it was /this/ close to just sort of spiraling out of control into the land of “someday I’m gonna finish”.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said briskly, stepping toward the door. She stopped and looked at me over her shoulder. “You’re going to pretend that you didn’t tell me what you told me. I’m going to pretend that you were just working late, like you always do. We both can pretend that I’ve already nagged you about spending too much time at the office, and that will be the end of it. Because, honestly, a little more suspicion and resentment is going to do this relationship a lot less harm than you asking me to believe you saw one of your friends screwing a ghost.” She blew me a kiss. “Don’t forget to pay the Time Warner bill, OK?”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Well, J.C. Hay and I have wrapped up our sasquatch noir detective novel, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist is coming out in August. Beyond that, I’m working on a vampire novel and a raft of short stories, and trying to catch up with all the book reviews I owe PW and Sleeping Hedgehog and everyone else. Honestly, when it comes to writing projects, I’m like a cat with a laser pointer. Lots of pouncing, lots of slamming into walls and telling everyone I meant to do that.

Which, of course, I totally did.

Rich Dansky: Website / @RDansky

Vaporware: Amazon / B&N

May 22, 2013 / 23 Comments

Video: Freaky Flash Mob In Support Of Polish Edition Of Blackbirds

(Whoa.)

May 22, 2013 / 169 Comments

All Your Fanfiction Belong To Us: What The Fuck Is Kindle Worlds?

Amazon is now monetizing fan-fiction.

I mean, I guess?

The press release (with scads more detail) is right here.

I am of two minds on this. Maybe three minds. MAYBE A ZILLION MINDS.

I’m generally pro-fanfic. Like, I know some authors get their browneyes puckered over other people splashing around in their kiddie pools, and I understand that gut-level reaction — but me, I think if you have an audience willing to write fan-fiction about your work, you’re pretty fucking lucky. And it’s always half understood that fan-fiction is fan-fiction. Non-canonical. Utterly apocryphal. Yeah, whatever, sure, Spike and Angel can fly the Serenity through the Stargate and they can fight Darkseid and 69 each other on a bed of glittery vampire dust.

Woo! No problem. High-five.

And this appears to be a way to sanction fan-fiction — it’s not like, Amazon deciding to just allow people to sell it wantonly. It appears to have author (or at least publisher) approval behind it. And authors get paid! I like when authors get paid. Because mouths! To feed!

So, my concern here isn’t actually financial — like, this isn’t theoretically that different from someone licensing your work and your world to, say, the comic book space. Or to an RPG or video game. Or even to film or TV. (Though the percentage here seems likely far less.)

The weird thing is what happens to that comfortable space that separated canonical from non-canonical. Like, one assumes that the fan-fic remains officially non-canonical — and yet, people are paying for it. And getting paid in return. Which lends a kind of intellectual and emotional legitimacy to it. And allows for a very weird thing to happen: it lets the licensed fan-fiction to become, in theory, bigger than the material that spawned it.

And even if it doesn’t become bigger it still grants it a kind of territory in the canonical space. Someone might read Book 3 of the Miriam Black series, The Cormorant, and say, “But this doesn’t refer to that time when she time-traveled back to the Old West in that novella, Booby Nuthatch.” And you’re like, “That wasn’t real, though, someone else wrote that.” But then they say: “I PAID FOR IT SO IT FELT REAL TO ME” and then they sob into your shoulder and you wonder suddenly how they got that close and should you call the police? Probably.

That’s a pretty serious shift in authorship and authenticity.

Which is breaking my brain right now.

How much say does an author get?

How much veto power does Amazon or the publisher get?

Does this place too much power in Amazon’s hands (HAHA TOO LATE)?

Or does this put more power back in the original author’s hands?

Does this further remove legitimacy from unpaid fan-fic?

Do these pantaloons make my thighs look fat?

WUZZA WOOZA FUZZY BUZZY.

Like, if I had to make a judgment, I’m 51% this being a good thing, 49% this being a THING I CANNOT WRAP MY HEAD AROUND FUCK IT I DON’T KNOW

*detonates the Internet with the push of a comical red button*

Anyway. Interesting. Say what you want about Amazon, but they’re some crafty-ass trilobites.

What are your thoughts, Oh Goggle-Eyed Readership?

May 22, 2013 / 1 Comment

The Blue Blazes: Eyeless Gods Of The Sunless Realm

“I WILL WALK THIS SUNLESS REALM. I WILL START HERE IN THE UPPER PORTIONS, IN THE PLACE WE CALL THE SHALLOWS. THEN, INTO THE LABYRINTH CALLED THE FATHOMLESS TANGLE. THEN ONE DAY I SHALL FIND MY WAY TO THE RAVENOUS EXPANSE, WHERE THE EYELESS GODS OF THIS PLACE MOAN AND GNASH TEETH THE SIZE OF SKYSCRAPERS.”

The Blue Blazes

Coming May 28th, 2013.

Pre-order:

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

(text by Chuck Wendig)

May 22, 2013 / 76 Comments

The Underserved Population Of Readers

You’re going to go right now and read Kameron Hurley’s ‘We Have Always Fought:’ Challenging The ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative.'”

No, seriously, go read that right now. It is one of the finest essays I’ve read in a long time on challenging the expectations of women inside (and to some degree outside) of fiction.

It’s smart. It’s self-deprecating. It doesn’t point fingers while still making a clear case for how we need to adjust our thinking and ask questions precisely when other people think we should be quietly accepting answers. It’s great. Have I said that enough? No, really. It’s great.

Whenever I read something like this — something ostensibly targeted at writers and storytellers — I like to try to break it down and say, okay, what’s the takeaway? What’s the practical path forward after reading something like that (assuming, that is, one wants to course correct). I have a bucket of ill-formed thoughts on the subject which is usually the finest time to get onto a blog and start barfing up half-digested thought-nuggets (sarcasm duly expressed), but hey, that’s what I do here sometimes. Sometimes it takes talking through an idea in a public space.

So, that said, this is a warning: this post will contain none of the elegance or wit (or talk of llamas) put forth by Kameron in that wonderful essay. Her essay should win her an award for something. This post will win me nothing except maaaaaybe the quizzical stares of those who pass by my Plexiglas enclosure.

Anyway.

I used to work at the public library. Libraries are of course where the books live but that’s only a part of what they do and one of the things they do is a very important function called: serving the underserved population. (Note: underserved, not undeserved.) I specifically worked with a department whose goal was to find the folks the library Just Plain Wasn’t Talking To and then Talk To Them. Are we helping blind people? We’re helping children, but are we helping seniors? What about African-Americans? Or people trapped in low-income brackets? And so on.

This is largely antithetical to the way Capitalist Anything works, because unless you’re willing to excel within a very specific niche, aiming your services toward an underserved part of the population isn’t the way to a dragon’s hoard of gold coins. But that’s why public services are great (and why it’s a tragedy that library budgets are having their throats slashed in favor of Congress ordering more tanks for a military that expressly doesn’t want them). Public services ideally aim to serve all portions of the public: not just, say, rich white jizzballs who think such services are non-essential because they don’t use them.

All this is a bit circuitous, I’ll admit, but my point is that libraries being eager to serve the under- or not-at-all-served is a huge thing. Huge!

And I think that’s the practical takeaway from Kameron’s essay —

Writers could do more to serve the underserved.

We’re not talking to our entire audience.

Maybe we think we are. But one of the ways, I think, we serve the underserved and speak to the unspoken is to take those conventions and expectations Kameron talks about and purposefully challenge them in the pages of our work. This is true of how we present characters who are women, or who are gay and lesbian and transgender, or African-Americans and Africans and Asian-Americans and Asians and —

— well, basically, everybody who isn’t a fairly comfortable white dude.

Whether you believe in so-called “white male privilege” or not, it’s still pretty easy to take a quick look around the halls of pop culture and see that for every Katniss Everdeen there’s a fucking army of Luke Skywalkers and Neos and John McClanes and Smoldering Glittery Vampire Douchewangs. For every Black Widow and Nick Fury you get an Iron Man, a Thor, a Hawkeye, a Hulk, a Captain America. (And, okay, a Maria Hill. Cobie Smulders!)

White dudes are everywhere.

We’re like robins during spring.

Did you see Maureen Johnson’s Coverflip? Where she asked her fans and followers to reimagine the covers of books by flipping the author’s gender? It’s a helluva thing to see.

Point is, white dudes got it pretty sweet. Particularly middle-class-and-up white dudes.

And so it behooves us as authors of all shapes and designations and genital configurations (oh and I’m talking to you, too, publishers, if you’ll listen) to look deep into the hearts of our stories and to see if we’re leaning on lazy archetypes, stereotypes, conventions, historical myths or outright buckets of bullshit. I’m not saying that every book has to be some lectern-pounding exercise in social justice but damn, a little bit of social justice can’t hurt. Why can’t we talk to those we don’t normally talk to? Why can’t we serve the underserved and challenge the expectations of what has come before us? Ask questions instead of assuming answers. Why can’t we write books where we have complex and atypical female characters? Gay characters? Does your gay character have a keen fashion sense? Is your female character a mother figure or a rape victim? Is your African-American character a gangbanger? Is that Muslim character a cleric or worse, a terrorist? That’s not to say you can’t have these characters be complex and interesting — but take a long look and you might start to see some lazy, damaging, damning patterns.

I’ve often relied on that kind of thing myself. I do it without thinking. A too-easy crutch, a crummy shortcut — a confirmation of what seems like the status quo but is really just a muddy trench in which we’ve all mired our boots. We can all try to do better. I can do better.

And that’s the takeaway: do better.

Speak to those you haven’t yet spoken to.

Serve the underserved readers.

May 21, 2013 / 4 Comments