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Ah, hell. I just realised what the time is! It's five-friggin'-thirty in the morning! Time for coffee.
[...]
Okay, that's better, I have the all-important morning pick-me-up. Now I just need to figure out where all the time went. As far as I can tell, I've just spent half the night writing and the other half reading Paul Auster's The Book Of Illusions.
The first part, the writing part, is difficult at the moment; I'm getting the words down but when I read them back a couple of days later they need some serious work. I've managed to slim my projects down to just three for the time-being; my novel, my RPG and short-stories. All of my other projects, including the novel I'm collaborating on, have been pushed to the back for now, and if I have any ideas for other projects I make a note and add them to the pile.
The reading is something relatively new. I'm not saying I've never read before; I used to read all the time, regularly devouring a novel a day. I've covered the classics, classical, gothic horror, gothic romance, sci-fi, fantasy, cyberpunk, post-modern, travel-writing, satire, romantic poetry, metaphysical poetry, magical fantasy, children's lit, American lit, Japanese lit; the list goes on. I've probably spent more time with my nose in a book than glued to a TV screen, which is something of an achievement these days, as far as I can tell. But somewhere along the way, I forgot how to read.
It started at college, I'm sure it did. I decided to study English Lit, and part of the course was to analyse a number of set texts and a handful of personal choices. By the end of that two years I'd really learned how to take a book apart, literally speaking; so much so that I couldn't read a book without doing it instinctively. I'd forgotten how to enjoy a book for its own sake.
That was back in the early nineties, about the same time I started to write seriously (hmmm, odd that). Since then I've gone through short spats of reading, separated by huge seas of not-reading. I've still stayed relatively wide-read, adding a lot of reference texts to the list, but I've probably read less in the last ten years than in any single year of my childhood.
Just recently, a friend convinced me to read The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's an excellent book, incredibly well-written and paced, but most importantly, it's a book that can be read purely for the enjoyment of it. I'd forgotten how good that felt.
The Book Of Illusions, mentioned earlier, is another one like that. It's a book that can be read as a work of literature, with subtexts, hidden-meanings, character-arcs and all the other workings of EngLit, but at the same time it can be read just as a story. It literally has kept me enthralled for the last couple of hours, and now it's too late to go to bed.
I've got a long list of books here to read; mainly titles recommended by friends, but also books I'd quite like to read out of curiosity. I've even already decided what the next on the list is going to be. Now I just need to figure out how to cram eight hours of reading, eight hours of writing, eight hours of quality time, eight hours of contemplation time and eight hours of sleep into each day.
Good morning, Sleepsville. I hope you slept better than I did.
I have a challenge for computer game developers. I want you, the game developers, to produce the ultimate computer game.
It's a concept that a few friends and I originally came up with when we were kids. I know that the chances are that every computer-gaming kid in the world has designed their own version of the ultimate game, and that ours was probably nothing special, but that's not a problem. That just means it's an immediate best-seller.
When we first came up with the idea, the game of favour was Elite. For those who don't know this timeless classic, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN??? But seriously, Elite was a space combat/trading simulation, where the player piloted a cargo ship between worlds trading, bounty-hunting, turning to piracy, or whatever else took your fancy. It had a goal; to become Elite (not to be confused with Elite, which was the name of the game). Your ranking increased the longer you played (based on how many other ships you destroyed) until one day, every kid who owned a copy finally reached the vaunted rank of Elite! What made it even better was that it didn't end there. There was no end. There were eight galaxies to explore, each with hundreds of planets. Okay, most of them were uninhabited and you couldn't dock at them, but that wasn't the point. The point was you could go where you wanted, when you wanted, how you wanted. It was dynamic gaming in its infancy.
We though that Elite was the coolest game under the sun. We all had our own copies (this was before game piracy was an organised industry) and we would all play it until our eyes bled. We competed to see who could become Elite the quickest, or who could make the most money, or who could keep the cleanest record. But to our fevered, adolescent geek minds, it wasn't enough. We wanted more freedom. We wanted more scope.
When rumours of Elite II (or was it Elite 2?) started to circulate, we all added our own "I heard that..." to the story, until eventually we had designed The Ultimate Game!
The Ultimate Game is a role-playing game. It can be played in 1st- or 3rd-person, and comes as a core game-engine, with customisable skin-like model-sets. In other words, the consumer buys the game engine as one piece of software, then buys whichever skin-sets he wants; fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, WWII, etc. The player can then choose their genre (or possibly even cross-genre) every time they log on to the game.
The game itself is a fully customisable engine. The game scale can be fixed at 1st-person shooter (ie: the player is one person in an arena-style game, sometimes with a goal or objective), at role-play level (ie: the player is one character in a massively multi-player online RPG), or at strategic level (ie: the player commands an army, or governs a state or city). Other options would allow the player to use dynamic scaling, dynamic control systems and dynamic networking to play a fully immersive game. Each player could choose what type of game they play every time they log on.
With modern advances in internet gaming the game engine could also talk to other active systems so that players could play against each other or as part of a collective. Ultima-style communities could be developed, and events at every scale could impact the entire structure of the game world, regardless of the genre-settings of the individual players. Intelligent cross-matching would allow all players to be connected through a distributed network at all times, in much the same way as a P2P network operates. Filtering algorithms would only send out the data necessary to update the other players in the vicinity, keeping bandwidth down.
A game like this would be awesome. You wouldn't need to buy another game ever, because The Ultimate Game would be any game you ever wanted it to be. You want to play in a Soccer Management Sim? Fine, just turn on the Sports/Europe/Soccer option, set the scale to Management, then log on to any available league. If you're really lucky you might even be able to hire some human players to play in your team. You want to defend the Earth against alien invaders? Easy; set the Simulators/Flight/Space option to on, set the scale to Single Operator and join the tens, hundreds or even thousands of other players all fighting to defend or invade the Earth accordingly. Who cares if some of them are flying WWII aircraft, or dragons? As far as you can tell, they're all flying spaceplanes. It'd be cool.
What would make it even cooler is if you could play with dynamic scaling. How about a fantasy RPG where you've got so powerful that it would take a small army to slow you down? That's no problem; the scale switches to Strategic and you build your own army. Or you're playing at Strategic level and you get curious about what happens to those scouts when you send them into the cities, so why not take control of one of those scouts? Enter the game at the 1st-person level and do the mission yourself. Or be the scout in somebody else's RTS. Or a soldier. The possibilities would be endless.
So why don't we have games like this? Why are there so many different game engines out there? Why can't games all talk to each other so that players of Doom 10 can battle players of Quake 5,000 while Baldur's Nights players barter in the market place and Prince Ferdinand of Moldavia leads his army of ten thousand dragonmen against the gates of the not-Jedi Academy? Come on game developers, give us what we want!
G'nite, Sleepsville. Keep on gaming!
[Disclaimer: For the record, I do have a lot of respect for game developers. I know that if they could, they'd give us all The Ultimate Game, and wish us a whole bucket of fun. The real bad guys are the Publishers; the Big Corporations who suck up all the money and work the developers on their treadmills of pain. Curse you, Publishers. Curse you and your blackened little hearts!]
I was reading an article about blogger-burnout a few weeks ago, and looking at the frequency of my own posts on here I wouldn't blame a lot of people for thinking I've hit the burnout already. Lots of activity when I first started posting, quickly becoming a slow trickle. The thing is, I've not had much to say; no rants for a while, no pearls of philosophical wisdom, no quirky little confessions. I've been too busy working on other things.
That's a bit of a cop-out excuse for being lazy, usually. How often do we all say, "I've been busy," when we need an off-the-cuff excuse for not doing something? It's such a common lie that we barely even acknowledge it anymore. We just accept it and get on with life. Is this good or bad?
Not that I'm saying I've been lazy. I have actually been really busy for the last week or two. I've done a lot of work on my role-playing game and on my novel. I've started flat-hunting. I've done some work on a short story series. I've re-arranged the house. I've barely seen the news this week and didn't even know the G8 Summit was coming to Sheffield until the day before it arrived.
I'm hoping that I can stay in this frame of mind for a few more weeks. If I can then I'll definitely be talking to agents in a few weeks, and may even be in a position to start touting the game. Carl, I haven't forgotten that you're wanting a copy. Same goes for you Gareth, if you're reading. I'm happy to e-mail a copy to anybody who wants one, assuming I have a good enough connection once it's finished (going to be saying adios to Blueyonder soon. They're a good cableco, if you're covered by them; I'd recommend them to anyone).
While I think about it, I am looking for a lot of artwork for the rulebook. At the moment I'm using downloaded images as placeholders but I don't want to get into any copyright issues so if there are any artists reading who would like to discuss contributing, please leave a comment. I can't offer to pay as I'm not going to be charging for the rules, but I will credit all artists who contribute. In the meantime, I guess I'd better dig out the old pencil box.
Anyhew, it's late ... or early ... I never could figure out how that worked. I'm going to bed.
Pleasant dreams Sleepsville.
I really hate shaving. In fact, there are a lot of things that take up time in my day that I hate. Mostly it's things that make no sense, like shaving. I mean, why on earth do I shave? The only reason for shaving is to look "presentable." WTF does that mean? I'm a mammal; I grow hair. I'm a male human; I grow hair on my face. It's a natural part of who I am. Why the fuck does society think that by mutilating myself I'm making myself more "presentable?" It's the same with a lot of the so-called necessary grooming habits we've adopted as a society. There is no need for them other than to acquiesce to the mores of society.
Now, don't get me wrong. I understand very well the need for cleanliness and appropriate grooming. But since when did it become so imperative that everybody should have baby-soft skin and perfectly manicured fingernails? Why, by the sacred jockstrap of Robert E Howard, does wearing a suit and tie make someone a better telephone salesperson? Ooh, sorry - sales-MAN. No, I'm not being sexist; I'm being accurate. In most office environments the dress code for female employees is less restrictive than for male employees. I've worked in a few offices, I speak from experience.
But that's not the point. I'm not here to rant about the continuing battle between the sexes; that's a rant for another day. I'm talking about the pointless things that we all do, day-in, day-out. Like going to work. For most people, work is a four-letter word. You get up at some stupid time in the morning to hurriedly shower, bolt down breakfast and drive to a traffic jam. You then sit in the traffic jam for a while, before finally reaching work, where you spend eight hours earning money for somebody else, in a job that doesn't motivate you, to earn next-to-nothing (most of which is taken off of you by the government) and get home too tired to do anything more than desperately channel hop from the couch. Work, for most people, is a pointless waste of time.
One of the things that I get told a lot is that I have too much time on my hands, and I guess when I actually think about all of the things I have my attention on at once I do seem to have a lot going on. But then I think about all the pointless things that I don't do; things that everyone else does seem to do. I think that could be where I get all the extra time from.
Anyhew, time for bed. Unfortunately I've not yet found a way to turn sleep into one of those pointless things so until then I must recuperate every so often.
Take care Sleepsville. Time's a-wastin'.
Time to unwind a little; time to bare a bit of soul over the internet.
The last couple of days have been pretty weird. Friday afternoon Julie, my ex-wife, finally moved out of the house that's been our home for the last three years. In a few weeks I should be doing the same; saying goodbye to the old and stepping into the new. It's a change I've been waiting for and building to for a long time now, and it feels good to be where I am now. I also said goodbye to the cat, and that was a little sad. He was an annoying pain in the arse most of the time but I'm still going to miss the critter.
Since Julie moved out, a friend and I have effectively re-arranged the entire house. Even though we're both only staying here for a short while longer, we've made the place more accessible for ourselves and our friends. It's also given us a chance to start boxing things for when we both move out, decide what's junk and what's being kept, tidy the house from top to bottom and so on. It's been a lot of fun.
The down-side is that lots of moving of furniture, tidying, sorting and networking have left me physically drained. I've got work to do on my upcoming role-playing game, as well as writing, and while I'm doing all of this moving around I'm not getting time to sit and write. What's even more frustrating is that now I have the time to sit and relax, my body's screaming for sleep. I'm torn between going to bed or getting down all of the ideas I've stored up in thirty-six hours. Aaargh. At least I have my music to listen to...
It's puzzling to realise that I feel happier now than I have for a long time. I'm not blaming Julie for any of the problems we went through. I know that I could have been a much better husband to her, and I admit that I made a few mistakes. That's not to say that I'm taking all of the blame, either. I don't know if we'll still remain friends after this, though I'd like to hope that we do. And speaking of friends, I'm pleasantly surprised that all of our mutual friends have remained close to both of us through all of this.
...
It's times like this that I feel like a talk-radio DJ, like Chris in the Morning on Northern Exposure. I'm listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall and getting introspective; it's all very mellow. I was surprised to realise that for the last few months I've barely looked back. Almost all of my introspection, all of my daydreams, all of my musings have been about the future; about what I can do and where I can go. What's even more surprising is that most of the time I feel optimistic about things, which definitely isn't the way I normally think.
Will the future be as positive as I imagine? Who knows? If it's true that you can make your own destiny then maybe I can't fail. I have maybe three months of freedom before I need to get a job. In that time I intend to set myself to a-writing and having fun. And that's my cue to say goodnight Sleepsville. I'm going to get some work done before I hit the hay.
Take care.
I'm in a bit of a transitional period at the moment. For those who don't know me, here's a little background.
In the last year, I've gone through a lot of changes. I'm separating from my wife of eight years, we've just sold our house so I need to find a place to live, I'm a hop, skip and jump away from finishing two major projects that have been in my life for over a decade, I've jumped head-first off the career ladder and I've set myself some new goals. Almost perversely, in that same period my creative output, especially in terms of writing, has soared. In the first five months of this year, January to May, I have finished more short-stories and completed more of my novel than in the previous fifteen years. I know where I'd like to be, but I'm not there yet.
My original plan, when this whole transmutation began, was to head down to Australia for six months, to make friends, have fun, and relax in the sun, writing. As time dragged on the dream of Australia was blocked by mounting costs, etc, and I had to let that one go. The destination changed; I would spend a few months travelling around the South coast, with the same objectives in mind. But even this plan proved ambitious. Time has since dragged on further, and while the end of the struggle is in sight it will arrive too late for any of that. So I've finally decided to stay in Sheffield for a while longer, find a flat and do some writing. I can afford to take a few months out, take a holiday and then search for gainful employment in September-October. I'm incredibly comfortable with this downgrading of dreams.
There are a lot of reasons that I’ve had to forestall my big adventure, some outside my control, some due to bad calls on my part and some that simply made it “the right thing to do”. I’ve not let go of that antipodean dream; I’ve simply realised that it’s not quite in reach yet. My goals are still the same; make friends, have fun and relax in the sun, writing. I can do those things anywhere.
Yep, I’m in a bit of a transitional period at the moment. I’m just coming out of the wood, and it feels good to finally be able to see where I’m going.
WTF is organic food? Or more importantly, WTF is inorganic food?
It’s a simple enough question, but one which seems to confuse a lot of people. Most food that we humans eat is made from things that grow and live, such as apples, potatoes, soya protein, animal bits, etc. Aren’t these organic? Let’s check.
Dictionary.com does a good job of providing definitions, and when we search for organic we get a nice long list. It’s the first one that interests me:
Organic: Of, relating to, or derived from living organisms.
Surely by this definition, all of the food that we eat is in some way organic? It's the first (and therefore most commonly accepted) definition of the word. Okay, I know that technically food labelled as “organic” in the markets and malls of the world is food which is free from chemical agents, such as pesticides, but that’s the point I’m making.
It’s the same with GE (or GM) food. If you’re one of these people who refuses to eat genetically modified food because of “the danger of Frankenstein foods” then I suggest you stop eating altogether. Yeah, you read that right – stop eating because almost everything you will ever eat in the course of your life comes from a GM source. We’ve been doing it as a race for millennia, and it’s only in the last few decades that it’s become a problem.
Here’s how it works. Farmers and horticulturists have been studying and growing crops pretty much since humanity stopped being a migratory hunter-gathering species and became a settled, tribal society. In that time, we have spliced and hybridised pretty much everything that we put on our plates in terms of vegetable matter. There are huge catalogues of plants, both decorative and practical, that have been created by selective cross-breeding between several different species, in some cases from totally different floral groups. This process encourages a new breed of rose, tulip, tomato or whatever to grow and that new plant will, by it’s very existence, have a different genetic structure to the original plants involved. It’s a genetically modified plant.
And it’s not just plants that we’ve played god with. Most of the contemporary breeds of dog, cat, budgie, hamster, rat, pig and other domestic animals have been specifically bred over the ages to become the animal you now see. At one time breeding dogs to specific requirements was a respectable occupation; the forerunners of our very own genetic scientists in their labs. You see? As a race we’re constantly tampering with nature.
I think the biggest problem isn’t the science or the moral indignation, but instead stems from language. If somebody offered you a meal containing a cut from a hand-reared, selectively bred free-range spring lamb, surrounded by an arrangement of the finest hybridised seasonal vegetables, most people would tuck in and spend their entire meal saying how tasty it was, often to the point of not actually having the time to taste the damned food. If, however, you got handed a plate of GM lamb and GM veg, your heart would freeze and you’d spend the entire meal wondering if tampering with genes could lead to nasty mutations and death. The thing is this; there is no difference.
Organic food is one of the biggest cons we’ve ever played on ourselves. All food, by it’s very nature, is organic. The modern use of the word is deliberately misleading and thanks to very careful PR on the part of the food providers has been used to trick you into spending more of your hard-earned cash. Nowadays organic means good, wholesome and clean, free of any of those pesky chemicals that farmers use on their crops. It doesn’t matter that those chemicals are usually tested and approved before the farmer buys them. It matters even less that farmers have been using chemicals to keep away insects for almost the entire history of the human race. The only difference is that these days the corporations want to scare us into buying their good, wholesome, safe food, not the cheaper, natural-looking, natural-tasting, non-shaped, non-aesthetically-approved fare that the local farmers’ market has to offer.
So next time you’re in the supermarket picking out a couple of hybridised tomatoes and selectively-bred potatoes for tea, ask an assistant what “organic” means. I’ll be very surprised if they give you the right answer.
Bon appetit, Sleepsville.
I’ve had a strange day today. Not strange as in weird things happening; just strange. It’s been one of those disconnected days, where things happen simply, without overlapping. A none-story arc day.
I’ve added a few hundred more words to my current story, tidied up a bit more of my novel, been for lunch with a friend, paid the rent and ambled along through life quite sub-consciously today. I’ve even been doing some more work on my role-playing game. Oh yeah, for those who don’t already know, I’m writing a role-playing game. It’s the one I’ve been working on for about fifteen years now. If anybody wants a .pdf of the rules as they stand, let me know and I’ll try and sort it out.
The eventual plan with the game is to release it on the internet, for free download and distribution. The game world is the same world I’m setting my novels in, a dark fantasy world that I’ve been developing for about ten years. Sometimes I have trouble remembering which came first; the role-playing setting or the novel setting. The rules themselves started out as the basis of a cyberpunk-esque game that I wrote to address the big problems with CP2020. I still have a lot of my original notes from that system, including my own thoughts on why CP2020 didn’t work as a system. I know that two of the original playtesters for that game read this feed from time-to-time. Thanks Carl and Tony; it always was interesting running games for you guys.
Now, I have a fully realised game system, with a rich, varied background, and all that’s left is to design the rulebook. It’s going to take a while – I need to work on overall design, flow, accessibility, which rules to include and which to leave out, how to explain the different magic systems in less than two hundred pages, how much of the background to reveal in the rulebook; there’s still a lot of work to do. Then I need to collect about two-to-three hundred illustrations to put in the book, along with maps, tables and charts. I think at the rate I’m working on it, it should be finished within a year.
Even if the novel doesn’t get published, I’m still going to release the game. Both of these projects have been a part of my life for over a decade. I need to finish them both, to do the best that I can with them. I have a feeling that that’re going to be with me for quite a while longer.
Sometimes, it’s nice just to be able to wander around in my own world for a while.
G’nite Sleepsville.
Most writers have to deal with it at some point; getting a letter through the post attached to the barely mauled copy of your bestest writing ever that simply says, "sorry, not good enough." It's probably one of the most damning reactions a writer can ever receive. Yet every single one of us has to put up with it, and usually quite often (the reason you hear about the writers who've never faced rejection is because they're so uncommon).
I've had a mixture of success as a professional writer (ie: paid writer). The first MS I submitted to a magazine was accepted without any edits. I was young enough to not question that moment of validation and I felt like I'd arrived. I was a Writer! Over the course of six months I had two more stories accepted, one rejected, and one won me a prize in a competition. I truly felt as though I would be able to really make it as a successful author. That was twelve years ago. That was when I made my fifteen-year plan.
Since then, I've kind of lost sight of the goal. I stopped writing, stopped wanting to tell my stories. I'd only had a total of two rejections, compared to four validations, so why did I not want to try any more? Was the small success I had enough to prove to myself I was a story-teller? There are a number of reasons why I stopped writing, and part of it was the sudden understanding that I was not ready to be a writer. The three stories I had published all appeared in a very small circulation magazine in Sheffield. The radio story (The Love Of Jarvey Quince) was, I think, a fluke. The two rejections had both been from my true target; an internationally recognised authoritative magazine in my chosen genre. I didn't just want to be a writer; I wanted to be a good, respected writer.
It's a lofty goal, I know. I don't see it as arrogance, or pipe-dreaming. Is it any different from wanting to be like Christina Aguillera, or David Beckham? People often wish they were more like the mega-celebrities, with their wealth,nice clothes, fine homes and fancy lifestyles. So why is it any different for me to want to emulate my own heroes; Heinlein, Feist, Dunsany, Lewis, Byron?
I started submitting stories again recently. Friends started to be more genuine with their responses and I knew that I was ready to try again. I've produced more completed stories in the first five months of 2005 than I did in the whole of the previous ten years. My novel, which was only two-thirds drafted at this time last year, despite nine years of work on it, is now a complete thing. I've scribbled and scrawled and moulded and crafted so much in the last twelve months than at any other time, and I truly feel that I have reached an acceptable level. I have been hopeful.
Yesterday I received a response to one of the two stories I've been waiting on. It was a rejection. Admittedly, I hadn't been fully expecting acceptance for this one, but it still said, "not good enough." The great authority doesn't deem it good enough to be shown to the world. Woe is me...
In fact, that's not how I reacted at all. Within fifteen minutes of reading the rejection I was writing again, working on my latest short story. I didn't ignore the rejection; instead, I used it to push myself harder. I have two years left on my fifteen year plan. That's two years to become a professional author. The only way I get there is to keep trying.
It also helps that I have friends who care enough to encourage and support me, but who respect me enough to tell me the truth about my writing. Thanks guys.
Okay, I'm going to try and finish this story. I'm enjoying writing it, and that's most of the point. I know that if I don't make it as a writer then it's not the end of the world. I'll just get a nine-to-five and carry on telling stories through the internet, and to my friends. I'll not be totally upset if I don't have the same respect as Heinlein et al. I'll just accept my place on the ladder and turn to something else. But I'll never stop trying.
Keep trying, Sleepsville.
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