Santa Monica by Night

Check this out: some dude in the UK has started a blog for his Vampire: the Requiem game set in Santa Monica. In addition to the hilarious mistakes he's likely to make (Some Dude in the UK, if you're reading this, I mean it with all fondness - I'm sure my games set in England are equally absurd), this blog affords us with a rare opportunity to observe someone else's game from the ground up, watching it grow, shrink, evolve, and overcome challenges. I'm not going to add it to my blogroll - it's a little too focused for that - but I'm certainly going to keep an eye on it.

Sooner or later I'm going to have to stop tiny little linkposts. They're fun and easy, which is sometimes all I can manage, but I have to admit that they're a little boring. Hopefully I'll be able to scare up the time and energy to deliver more original content soon.

A is For Awesome

This just made my day. Thanks Jon and the Abigail!

A is probably my favorite.

If You Won't Be You

I've had a scene living in my head for a while now. The context doesn't matter - the details of the story refuse to be resolved into anything coherent - but the moment remains the same:

One character is a shape shifter with identity issues. Over the course of the story so far, he's lost track of a great deal of who he is. The other is his last friend, and he's dying slowly - wounded, poisoned, sick, or all three - behind enemy lines. The shapeshifter turns to his friend and says "if you won't be you anymore, can I be you?" The dying friend chokes out a final yes, and the shapechanger takes his friend's form, his memories, and a portion of his loves and passions and builds a new self out of them.

I don't know what comes before this moment. Why is the shapechanger blessed and cursed with his power? Why is the friend dying? What is the larger shape of the plot, and how does it relate to the friend's death and the shapeshifter's situation? I also don't know what comes after, but I can imagine the amusing complications, as the shapeshifter deals with his friends family and lovers and no one knows how to deal with anyone else anymore, all against the backdrop of whatever else is going on.

It would be pretty cool... but I don't know what to do with it. The rest of the story - if there is a rest - is buried under some piece of inner detritus.

Well, they say if you love something set it free, so I'm finally cutting this scene loose. Go free into the internet, little idea. If it's meant to be, you'll come back to me some day.

Also, if you folks have any comments I'd love to hear them. Treat this as a creative prompt: what do you think comes before and after?

Room For One More

Russ Bailey, Livejournal's Emprint, RPGnet's Baileywolf, and White Wolf developer extraordinaire has just started Fantasy Heartbreaker: Games For People Who Care Too Much. The blog will bounce around gaming topics. We can expect house rules for D&D one day, tales from the heady days of Vampire: the Masquerade on another, and snippets of Bailey's own design projects on a third. In a few of the small posts already up, Bailey has opined on such varied topics as TSR's code of ethics, the nature of a core class, and why despite the push for streamlined games and perfect systems, the most "broken" games are the ones that have brought in the most new players over the years, among others.

So give Fantasy Heartbreaker a look, a read, and maybe a follow. I will.

Link Orgy! On Fire! In a Zeppelin!

On his blog, author Joshua Palmatier (creator of The Skewed Throne and its sequels) has just hosted a post by Juliet McKenna, author of Blood in the Water. Juliet takes advantage of her sudden rise to blogdom (or perhaps it's not a rise - I can't actually get to her website through my school's firewall, so for all I know she's got blogs in her blogs so she can blog while she blogs - for all I know, it's a descent; maybe she podcasts) to talk about girls - and feminism - in fantasy.

I'm really not proud of that last sentence. Not the sentiment - that's ok - it's just a big, ugly sentence. I'd never let myself get away with crap like that in a story.

Anyway, I like girls in fantasy, I like feminism in fantasy, and I like the way Juliet McKenna puts it. So, if you won't take it from me, take it from someone who's actually published and follow the link to Juliet's post.

Evil Mermaids Fuck Yeah!

The Mermaid's Tea Party by Samantha Henderson, the latest PodCastle was absolutely brilliant. It had everything it needed and more: pirates, mermaids, evil, stories, and most of all, a heaping dose of fuck yeah. I won't say anything else to spoil the wonder except this: listen to this story before it's too late.

I'm not sure what too late would actually look like. Maybe before you forget? Before you die? I'll get back to you on that.

In the meantime, listen.

The Plitone Zeppelin Experience

I just finished The Plitone Revisionist, a science fiction podcast novel by Paul S. Jenkins, and finally - more than a year after the first time I listened to the first episode - I'm ready to review it. This review is a long time coming and, I hope, will interest my audience as much as it interests me.

In the final arithmetic, I give The Plitone Revisionist two out of five possible stars. It definitely had its moments of true and genuine enjoyability, but towards the I end I found myself listening more out of a grudging desire to find out what happened next and a writerly fascination with the author's errors. This was a story in deep need of editing. There's definitely a good novel inside The Plitone Revisionist, but unfortunately it's not the novel I listened to.

Well, we're all writers here. Where did Jenkins go wrong?

I feel that his first mistake was in not having - or at least communicating - a clear idea of what kind of novel he wanted to write. On the one hand, we have a kind of trashy, kind of glitzy, kind of sexy over-the-top cyberpunk space opera. There are villains named Garter Grudnt (pronounced "grunt") and unwitting accomplices named Joley Jordan, and horny pansexual teenage suburbanites just itching to get swept up in the action. In the first scene, the main character is arrested, impounded, and rescued by a man who uses super technology to temporarily mind-control her into his willing sex slave, at least until she heroically (and hillariously escapes).

Now, this is all well and good. I have no problem with glitzy, trashy, over-the-top cyperpunk flavored space opera with silly names and improbable plots. The pulp is strong with this one, and that's great.

The problem is that Jenkins turns around and expects us to take other parts of the story very seriously. The main drive of the plot is a murderous and economically complex conspiracy and the characters deal with some very real emotional fallout of their choices. Unfortunately, it all rings a little hollow.

Now, this kind of thing can be done well. I... um... can't think of any examples off the top of my head (if you can, tell me in comments), but I'm sure it's true. You can start with something glitzy and trashy and over-the-top and take it somewhere the audience doesn't expect, dragging them sideways into a story far more serious than they realized they were signing on for. Jenkins doesn't quite pull it off, though. Every time I was just about to get sucked back into the emotional reality of the story, the reflexively dastardly Garter Grudnt showed up and twirled his (proverbial) mustache and threw me right back into pulpland again.

The second problem is far more serious. The Plitone Revisionist is infected by a bad case of tell-don't-show. The characters spend long scenes contemplating their emotional problems rather than acting on them - or at least talking about them with other people, which is less exciting but still dynamic. As a result, the story seems extremely slow, especially the latter chapters. I make it a point to give every one of my characters someone they can talk to about their feelings so that when I have an emotion that can't be acted on it can at least be talked out.

Would I listen to The Plitone Revisionist again? Certainly not. Would I listen to it the first time if I knew what it was like? Probably not. Do I regret the time I spent listening to it? No, I don't think I do. There were some awesome moments, some thrilling plot twists, and some really neat, sexy scenes, and I definitely don't want the time I spent on it back.

But I'm back in the market for a podcast novel again - preferably something either finished or with a huge archive - and I'm hoping for something better this time.