Babel Clash

I can hold my tongue no longer! It is bad enough that Mr.’s Butcher and Rothfuss keep hogging the New York Times list. Then a few weeks ago I went to sign a Sony Reader, only to discover both their signatures hogging up the entire back of it! I can not, however, let them go on about gaming and not leap into the conversation. For heaven’s sake, my author bio lists me as the “world’s most casual and controller smashing gamer”! That, and I had already got the Babel Clash gaming ball rolling when I was beating down Joe Abercrombie here just a few weeks ago…

My gaming world of choice was almost always the Forgotten Realms setting of D&D. I loved all the story seeds of that gaming world. I owned the atlas, I had the boxed city set. My walls were covered with the glorious full color maps. I spent my time as a PC journeying from major port metropolis Waterdeep all the way to the setting I usually put my own players down in, Shadowdale. It was a bit of a hick town off the beaten path, but Elminster the Sage lived there, and I really liked the idea of someone that powerful living in a bit of a dinkburg. Just seemed right to me, balanced in THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS.

Which is why, I suppose, I tend to write heroes with powers who seem to struggle in our everyday mundane world. How do they negotiate the day to day? How do they maintain their privacy? In Elminster’s case, one had better think twice before just walking up to his tower and rapping on his door. The amount of polymorphed toads sitting on piles of leftover human clothes should have been a clue to most adventurers…

But my love of that world didn’t end there! The Forgotten Realms also gave us the PC Baldur’s Gate games, which blended storytelling and leveling up adventuring into a tasty combo. Followed by the two more hack and slash Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games for the X-Box, which had their own flavor, all of which carried some of the flavor of the world that Ed Greenwood had created in the first place. There’s a man who knows how to spin a yarn, or at lest inspire people to spin yarns in the world he created! Think of writing your own campaigns in those worlds as glorified fan fic! I mean, let’s face it… all us writers are just writing fan fic, fiction based on a fandom of one, ourselves distilling our own stories out of everything we’ve ever experienced, played or accumulated in our minds.

But what happened to me while visiting the Forgotten Realms was that I started to pay attention to what makes a world interesting, and as a writer, that’s a primary focus. In the Forgotten Realms there were legends, lore, battles, a rich history… a tapestry of woven words that spoke to me, and despite the fact that I don’t actually write thick fantasy doorstops like Mr. Rothfuss, I do think my experience as a gamer sowed the seeds that would eventually grow into my own writing.

(Here’s where I suspect some people want me to confess that my urban fantasy books are based purely on a campaign I played in the Dresden Files RPG, but I SHALL ADMIT NO SUCH THING! At least, not with Jim standing over there in the corner glaring at me like that…)

Oh, the many chinks in my dear foe’s armor I have found so far!  Hoping to discover more, I shall move on to another of my gaming loves, one that I hold near and dear to my nerdly heart.

I love me some well designed video games.  I think they’re one of the most amazing things out there in our modern world, from Resident Evil to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to my latest gaming conquest, Dragon Age (Yes, I’m behind but I do have to write sometimes, you know!).

Despite the fact that Roger Ebert says that games are not art, he is dead wrong–tragically so.  To me, it’s a ludicrous statement and I’ve written about it at length elsewhere, but in short answer, he’s way off base.  Hell, I’ve seen more artistry put into gaming than in many of the movies he’s reviewed.  Games, like books, are an art form . The modern immersive game can be just as thick with story as any book, if not in fact more so at times… in further fact, I’m a little jealous of games some times, because of that ability to immerse a player in so many ways all at once. I mean, I’ve got words, but they’ve got not only words but sights and sounds and sometimes light sabers!

My jealousies run deep of those who make games.  First of all, they have a much larger team and budget than I do. They’ve got STAFF-writers, designers, artists, musicians, programmers, sales people, packagers… but me? It’s just ME in a book. That’s it!

Well, actually, that’s not true… I mean, I have a writer (me), artists (for the cover), editors, copy editors, type setters, a sales department, an ad/promo team, publicists… I suppose I do have a team, too, don’t I?

Yet at the end of the day, I think much of what a reader sees on the page and takes away are ultimately the words I put down there and I alone stand judged for them. Yes, editors and copy editors help refine those words, but it’s still my story.  That’s when I realize I’m lucky to have all the people at the publishing company, but it’s up to me to absorb all the other jobs that the game design teams do. It’s up to me to set the mood that their visuals, character models, and music do, with words alone at my disposal.

As a video gamer, there’s a reason I tend to write cinematically… that’s how I see things in my head, as if I’m playing a game with or watching a movie of my characters going through their trials and tribulations. That may come off as a bit crazy… it’s not like they’re instructing me to go commit crimes or anything (unless you count the crimes my reviewers sometimes say I perpetrate on the English language, that is).

It’s all up to me to get all those scenarios playing out in my head down on the page for you… sometimes it’s a frustrating process.  Sometimes I wish I had the power to simply project it straight from my brainmeats onto the page.  Hmmm… maybe my next book will be about a guy with THOSE powers… how do YOU imagine things when you are writing them?

My dire, dire Babel Clash enemy Joe Abercrombie closed his last post talking bout how he knew he was Neutral Evil, manipulating the outcome of dice rolls to turn the course of events, a mere hint of his twisted mind and his plan to do that to his future readers in his books.

While I can neither confirm or deny fudging the dice rolls at time for the sake of dramatic impact (cough cough cough), I would like to talk about the game that influenced much of my writing style in the Simon Canderous series.

There are a lot of modern influences in mediums other than games, to be sure, but the game that really influenced much of the Simon Canderous books was Call of Cthulhu. I mean, Simon does work out of a secret agency running out of the cover operation called The Lovecraft Cafe, after all!

Set up like a typical tabletop role playing game, you were sucked into the Lovecraft mythos and let me tell you, IT WAS SCARY! To me the most devilish part of it all was keeping track of your Sanity Points. You started with a hefty stack of them, but over time, exposure to the dark horrors of the Cthuhlian word chipped away at them. The more you actually saw and contended with, the more in jeopardy there were, and most importantly.. there was no way to recover them! So essentially game play came down to investigating, although not TOO closely, and praying to Hastur that you made your saving throw, but ultimately you were on a slow descent to madness.  It was simply a matter of time.

This made me a very nervous player. We were the type of gaming group where our game master was a right evil bastard, and we played with spooky music and usually be candlelight to enhance to BOO! factor. It worked… too well, some may say. While I did not actually wet myself in fear, I found I had a pretty good defense mechanism while skulking around Miskatonic University.

I made with the funny. Just like in real life, when I’m nervous, I tend to quip…. kinda in a Peter Parker fashion. Around the time we were hardcore gaming, Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade came out… so my cousin and I played as Henry Jones, Jr & Sr. I do a mean Sean Connery… it added a lighthearted element to an otherwise spooky gaming experience, and honestly got me through it all.

Cut to me searching for material for my urban fantasy Simon Canderous series. I wanted to write a paranormal series set against the backdrop of New York City, my then home. I love the city, still work there, and it’s easy to imagine the people shuffling blank faced past you with their 1,000-yard stare are truly zombies. I wanted all kinds of cool supernatural creatures, but I wanted the hero to be a bit of Joe Average… he wasn’t THE CHOSEN ONE, just a guy punching the clock and fighting evil under budget. How would an average guy contend with fighting all that?

The same way, I realized, that I played Call of Cthulhu, by laughing in the face of the night horrors to keep from going mad himself. I am convinced the choices I made psychological as a gamer back then heavily influenced writing the types of books that ultimately appealed to me, writing my series because no other books out there was telling stories quite the way I thought they should be told. I like they normal guy trying to survive.. it makes his life frail, vulnerable… it makes it mean MORE to him and the readers, I think.

But, much like that right bastard game master I had, I’ve embraced chipping away at poor Simon’s Sanity Points… and we know what a downhill slope that is. I’m not sure what I’m worried about more… Simon losing the last of his mind, or me actually running into one of my shambling creations in a dark back alley on the streets of New York before that.

I see that Nichole and Jaye left Babel Clash in the same state they leave our League of Reluctant Adults clubhouse, smelling of clove cigarettes, cheap cigars, plastic-bottled vodka, and broken dreams. Nicely done, ladies. *plugs in air freshener* Ahhh.. much better.

First, I’d like to thank Babel Clash once again for inviting me to hang out here for the next several weeks along with British fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie. For those playing the home game, I’ll be the monosyllabic one.

Those of you who know me, know I talk a lot about gaming. For those of you who don’t know me, I talk a lot about gaming. My author bio mentions I’m the world’s most casual and controller smashing video gamer, but my adoration of gaming goes way back to the late 70s, even before my love affair with electronic gaming began. We’re talking tabletop gaming, pen and paper, piles and piles of multi-colored, multi-sided dice. That was where I cut my teeth forming some of my most basic tools that would someday play out in my writing. Yes, true believers, I learned to write from playing Dungeons & Dragons.

I was introduced to the original “red box” Dungeons & Dragons set when I was 8 or 9 by a Brainiac friend of mine, and as a concept for a game, it blew my friggin’ mind. There was no game board, only pre-written modules filled with adventure details and the occasional maps. Oh, the maps! And most interesting of all, if I said something, it became part of the story. What I thought and said mattered to the structure of how the adventure played out, and this was my first real taste of creating content. And I LIKED it…a lot.

If what I said mattered in a game, that meant I had to plan it out a bit, didn’t I? So I created characters I found interesting to play. The Chaotic Neutral half-elf rogue (thief, back in that edition) was what I imprinted on most in the early days, but as time went by, I came up with more complex characters with more and more elaborate back stories, to the point where I had to have private sessions with the Dungeon Master to play some of that out. Moral ambiguity fascinated me, and I loved creating characters such as Lawful Good paladins who did despicable things, justifying their actions in the name of their gods. Fun stuff.

To this day, I spend much of my time trying to flesh out my characters in my series in much the same way. I do not, however, roll out their stats. Character was king to me as a tool I developed from D&D, but tabletop gaming gave me even more beyond that.

I became a Dungeon Master myself, and I did away with modules, creating my own content, which meant writing my own scenarios, controlling the flow of action, the dialogue of the non-player characters, and keeping the story moving for everyone playing. And I liked that, too… a lot.

And, really, as a writer, that’s what I’m doing, isn’t it? Those are the tricks of my trade. And you, as a reader, you become part of the story, too (especially since my stories tend to be first person narrative). I’m putting you behind the steering wheel. You get to be the player character, and like a Dungeon Master, I better keep the story and action flowing or else, like players in my campaign, you might drop out from the adventure, not showing up for the next week.. or in this case, for the next book.

I’ve been going to Gencon Indy, the Mecca for gamers, for the past decade now and this year I’m their Author Guest of Honor. I’m thrilled to add that to my resume, but I’m most thrilled to be back around 30,000 gamers for four days. It helps recharge my storytelling batteries and reminds me of my roots as a DM… torturing characters, making exciting adventures, and laying out a cohesive narrative. You know, writer stuff!

Now if I actually had time to fit in a D&D campaign around my writing schedule these days, I’d be all set…

So I’ve been thinking more and more about the whole reluctant adult thing, which got me in turn thinking about growing up geek.  What I realize is that being geek is a passion- one for obsessing over things that some find trivial or simply don’t get.  With passion, however, also comes great anxiety.

For instance:  First there was The X-Files, for which I had to tune in each and every week!  My mid 90s Saturday night consisted of settling in at the TV.  It was time for the Action Pack, which featured Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess for two hours.  When Herc went off the air, it became the Back2Back Action Hour with Xena, Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra 2525.  I watched, I obsessed, I met at conventions, I loved.  But, as the title of the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation implied, all good things must come to an end.  Shows (and also books tying in to all those properties) I was passionate about wrapped up.  What was I going to do with my geek time NOW?  Much anxiety ensued… as I think it does with most of those cut from my cloth. WHAT WAS GOING TO FILL MY VOID OH GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE  THEY ARE OVER??!

But then we got the new Star Wars series and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and, Jar Jar aside, part of the wound was closed.  Then came a little show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, followed by Angel, followed by Firefly(there are a billion more shows I could list, but I’d like to finish this post today).  For awhile, I was a happy boy, but we all know how those all ended to. AND SO THE ANXIETY RETURNED ALONG WITH THE VOID!

We are geek.  We are passionate.  We are always looking for that next fix.  I’m anxiously awaiting season three of True Blood and some more Iron Man.  Part of me cannot fathom what will fill the void that Lost wrapping up will leave.  I always panic, but there is always something to fill the void.  You think I’d calm down by now, but that is not the way of the geek.  Ours is to twitch and fret and drink up every drop, flame wars about deviation from books or comics in film and television be damned! I am curious about Amber’s perspective, having experienced it as a different part of the geekdom which hasn’t died down if I am to judge by the lengthy line at her New York Comic-con autograph session last year…

In a roundabout way this is my way of suggesting perhaps that the Back2Back Action Hour be reinvigorated as the Back2Back Urban Fantasy Hour with two one hour shows a week that chronicle the adventures of one Simon Canderous and the lovely Calliope Reaper-Jones.  That would raise my geekly twitching to a whole new level, have no doubt.

Following up on what it means to be a reluctant adult, Carolyn Crane asked:  Where exactly did the name of Reluctant Adults come from? Was it meant from the start as a counterpoint to serious literature?

My livejournal was where I had first used the name the League of Reluctant Adults, an obvious play on one of my fave graphic novels the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not so fave movie, tho).   When a group of us urban fantasy and paranormal romance writers invited me to join their group blog, I threw it out there as a title and voila!  It stuck.   There’s a sense of fun to the phrase… it’s inclusive, covering a growing expanse of us who think that toys and films about fighting robots and Neo Tokyo and ghosts and goblins aren’t just for kids.  Is there a need to grow beyond those things?  Not anymore.  Reluctant adults embrace them.  We don’t take things so seriously.

Speaking of taking thing seriously and going back to part of the theme of my last post, I remember Guy Gavriel Kay’s speech from the 2007 World Fantasy Awards, where he adressed the disparity between the two worlds.  Luckily I found it in whole thanks to the Interwebs.  He said:

There has always been a tension between writers who aspire to high art, enduring work, and those who pursue popular success, defining themselves as entertainers. The literati disdain the commercial while envying their bank accounts, and the bestsellers often regard the artistic as elitist and unreadable and the twain don’t do a lot of beer-drinking together.

It inspired a nervous laugh throughout the room, but it was true.  I think that in any community there’s a wish to stratify oneself, a desire to define.  Everyone tries to figure out if they are the cream of the crop or the cream of the crap.

Welcome to the Amber and Anton hour, err two week, at Babel Clash.  *slips Babel Fish in ear*  First and foremost, I’d like to thank Borders and Morgan for inviting us.  Amber promised this would be as good a place as any to harass me, but she’s such a sweetie, so I’m sure she was kidding.  At least, I hope she was.

So the first question that Morgan threw to us was:  Does reading science fiction and fantasy make you a “reluctant adult”?  What about the authors working in these genres?  Should these “reluctant adults” tackle “serious literature” instead?  How’s that for a loaded question?

As a founding member of The League of Reluctant Adults, I am clearly biased about this.  For years, most of us who engage in fandoms of any kind always got dirty looks from outsiders.  Even now people walk by my office, look at all my geek posters and fifty or so action figures on my desk like they are visiting the two-headed goat with the traveling carnival.

But I do think that thanks to the internet and the number of television channels on the dial these days, cultural awareness of our nerdly niches have become more mainstream.  Why?  I think much of it has to do with gaining understanding.  Outsiders can read up, ask questions, explore geekdom on their own, and at the end of all that, i think they find themselves able to identify with a lot of what they encounter.

Take True Blood or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Yeah, they have vampires and all that paranormal stuff, but at the heart of them, what drives them?  Relationships, trying to get through their daily lives, problems that people can identify with…

I mean, I’ve always dreamed of being a sexy Louisiana waitress that falls for vampires… but I digress.

As for should us reluctant adults tackle “serious literature” instead?  I’m going to go to food for this one.  Sometimes you want to go to Morimoto’s restaurant.  he’s an Iron Chef and the food is exquisite, pricey and worth every penny.  Sometimes I hanker for Chik-fil-A, which is fast food, not pricey and I have no idea who dropped my waffle fries in the oil.  Regardless, Chik-fil-A is exquisite in its own way.  It fills my need.  I don’t really wonder if the chefs at either restaurant should be changing roles. I’m just happy they excel at what they do and that it feeds me.

I see a lot of flame wars out there where the literary authors poo poo the mass market writers and the mass market authors poo poo them as well.  I don’t see the need for it.  I think the differences are what help to keep everyone fed out there, depending on their appetite.  I strive to write the best books I can, but are they literary?  Hell to the no.   I won’t pretend that I go there, but hopefully they are damn fine entertainment.