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Fiasco at PAX East

Busy weekend!  When PAX comes to town, so do friends and long-lost comrades; there are exhibits to see, costumes at which to gape, and dice to buy.  This year added a nice touch: an open gaming table with GMs on hand to run a range of indie RPGs.  I’m rarely in the mood to drop $40 on an RPG I’ve never played, and even if I do, it’s hard to read a book and know instantly how the rules translate into play.  We pretend, sometimes, as gamers, that the gaming experience resides in sourcebooks and tables and charts, but gaming’s really an oral tradition, with books as a fallback.  We draw ideas off games we’ve played in before, we learn the fine art of timing from all those times we’ve sat around a table waiting for the wizard to figure out which spell she’ll cast; we tune our expectations and desires based on stories our friends have told us about their games, what they liked, what they hated.  At the same time, a tabletop RPG at a con like Pax often feels like a waste of time for me, since there’s so much to see and a tabletop session tends to hover around 4 hours.  Fortunately, the open gaming section had two-hour modules available, so I was sold.

The game we played was called Fiasco, and it’s halfway between a structured improv game and a traditional RPG.  A Fiasco game feels like a small-time caper flick–ranging from the Coen Brothers to Quentin Tarantino.  Starting from a suggestive setting, you and your group build a number of characters, their relationships, and their (often contradictory) goals.  Play proceeds by building tight, dramatic scenes in which these characters strive, struggle, sometimes succeed, and more probably fail.  In about two and a half hours, my play group told an interweaving tale of animal smuggling, bombing, and betrayal at a small town zoo run by a shotgun-happy poacher.  We had a wonderful time–no surprise.

What was a surprise, though, was the amount of fun we all had with inter-party conflict.  Generally I steer away from real party conflict in games–partly on principal, and partly because I have personal issues with betrayal, even in games.  That’s part of the reason I don’t play Diplomacy any more.  But in our Fiasco run, the group was invested in the story more than in our particular characters.  One player spent the entire story working on an elaborate double-cross on his partner’s mink-smuggling operation, and we loved it.  When another character turned out to be planning to bomb the zoo my hapless animal-lover had been fighting to defend all session, I was amazed, and impressed, and didn’t feel even a little of that frustration you get when the thief steals half the boss’s loot and doesn’t tell anyone about it.

The Usual Suspects could be a story told in a Fiasco game.  That by itself isn’t such a surprise–you could tell the story of The Usual Suspects in D20 Modern, if you wanted to.  But I feel that a D20 Modern retelling would lead to players frustrated by the final reveal, while the Fiasco retelling would leave players telling tall tales about the game for years.  They’d feel that all of them had been in some way a part of Keyser Soze’s creation; that the scheme, and the resolution, were something they’d done together, rather than a lie they’d been told by a fellow player.

Now, I’m thinking about writing playsets to go with my books…

Three Parts Dead Pre-Orders Live!


Lo, on the horizon!  It burns, like the sun!  As of two days ago, you can pre-order Three Parts Dead from most major online retailers.  Look, I’ve assembled a list of handy links:

Given this, you can probably pre-order the novel from your local brick-and-mortar bookstore, too–I’ll investigate and confirm.  On this very blog I’ve assembled a bunch of book-related info into a dedicated Three Parts Dead page, including the cover, the back-cover summary, and some thoughts on the book by John Crowley, Jerry Pournelle, Carrie Vaughan, and Maggie Ronald that, when I read them, made my head swell up three times its normal size.  I’ve since consulted a doctor and gone through extensive treatment.  Check the page out at the link above, or at the top right.

Author Sites

I’m thinking about redesigning the ol’ webpage here.  Do any of you know of an author site you love?  I’m not talking about sites you just happen to like, or that don’t offend you when you visit them, but sites that make you eager to return.  If some site springs to mind, what about it entrances you?  Design?  Content?  Do you know and like the person on the other side of the site, or does that matter at all?

The Crowd is the Medici

I really like Molly Crabapple’s essay about the power of crowd-funding for art, and her use of Kickstarter in specific as a means for gathering support for artistic projects.  Other successes like the Order of the Stick Kickstarter ($1.25 million) and the DoubleFine Kickstarter ($3.3 million) show the sheer quantity of financial support that’s available–for artists at the top of their game, with a broad network of folks who care about their success.

I don’t know how well this model would work for people just starting out, but maybe it doesn’t matter.  A Kickstarter campaign is sort of like a promise: “Give me money and I’ll do something awesome.”  It’s easier to believe that promise when it’s made by an artist who has already done awesome things (even if they’re of limited scope).

On a different tangent: since this is all crowd-funding in the cloud, are we living in the crowd-cloud now?  Or are we part of the cloud-crowd?  Or something in between–Clrowd?

Last Week Overview

My pen did not explode on the airplane, but my bottle of ink did.  Somehow, the cap remained intact and most of the ink remained in the bottle, but the ziploc bag around the bottle was ink-soaked anyway.

After five days, I managed to reduce a childhood’s full of books to six medium-sized boxes that will reach Boston sometime in the next few weeks.  Making choices sometimes felt like tearing off a limb, but it was also a good exercise in letting go, and in life editing.  Which of this box of classic SF novels do you keep?  Which do you pass on to the next generation?  Some of my choices were sentimental, but for the most part I feel better knowing that I’ve released books that helped me out into the world where they can help other people.

Only a few pages of writing done last week, but progress made nonetheless.  Goals for this week: ship thank-you gifts, submit a story that’s been on my shelf for too long, and get back to ~1000 words a day.

 

Pen

Packing for my trip to Tennessee, I had a brilliant idea: bring an empty fountain pen, and a bottle of ink.  The pressure change on an airplane makes filled fountain pens spurt ink, ruining pants and pockets and suitcases.  Packing pen and ink separately (I thought) would shortcut this problem.

Unpacking after the flight, I discover that the pen made it through fine, but the (sealed) bottle of ink vented ink all over the (sealed) ziplock bag I packed it in.  My clothes are safe, but that’s another theory sent back to the drawing board.

Fitting Pieces Together

The surge of excitement over the cover release has receded a bit, like a tide, leaving a strange geography of problems to solve–a book to edit, a book to write, and a number of supplemental tasks for Three Parts Dead that I’ve been putting off for a while, many of which involve bugging artists I know.  For the greater good, I promise.  Pay no attention to the mad cackling behind the curtain.

Three Parts Dead : The Cover!

I’m thrilled to be able to share the final cover for Three Parts Dead—which you’ll see on shelves at your local book shop on October 2!

 I cannot say enough good things about this cover.  I love the painting (by Chris McGrath, who does covers for the Dresden Files books!), the design, the quote (from Jerry Pournelle!), the city, the color scheme…  Tara’s almost exactly as I pictured her; she’s gorgeous, but she also looks human (and her pose is a pose  human beings can adopt).  Even the glowing glyphs, more like circuits than runes, fit perfectly with my vision (and descriptions) of the world.  I went into this process with a “well, let’s see what happens” approach, and I’m so happy about the results.  The team at Tor rocks!

There’s another piece of new information in the log line of this post: I have a release date!  Three Parts Dead debuts on October 2.  Mark your calendars!  Start your engines!  Rev up your time machines!  (Note: if you have a time machine, can you give me a lift to the 22nd century?  I need to pick up some Future Milk.  Thanks for the help—I owe you one.)

That’s all for now, but watch this space for further developments about Three Parts Dead, my other books, and general insanity!

Spy Novel Remix

The New Yorker posted a long read on the Quentin Rowan / QR Markham plagarism scandal, which some of you may remember back from November.  Basically, this guy wrote a spy novel the way kidnappers in Dick Tracy comics wrote ransom notes: by cutting words, phrases, images out of other books and pasting them together, with a little bit of added connective tissue.

The funny thing about this is (as Rob Beschizza  noted at the time, and as the New Yorker piece observes) that if Rowan had been honest about what he was doing, he might have been hailed for his formal invention.  I can imagine devotees of spy fiction devouring such a book-of-books, trying to hunt down the source for every passage.  It would have been a legal nightmare to produce (maybe), but imagine the possibilities–a contest, say, for whoever caught the most allusions.  The book could have been a salute to spy novels everywhere.

I feel there’s a deeper level of oddity to the whole case, though: I don’t know a single writer who isn’t also an avid reader.  Most people write stories based off the ones they read.  Sure, SFF people write mysteries or spy novels, and vice versa, but in general, if you read a lot of fantasy or science fiction, your will be more likely to think of interesting combinations of language, imagery, and story in an SFF context.  Same with any genre, including literary fiction.  We’re all internalizing language and ideas, recombining them, and using them to build.

There’s a difference, to be sure, between a storyteller who glues together pre-existing bits and pieces, like building a popsicle stick man in grade school, and one who cuts up and recombines existing work, as with papier mache.  Even at that stage, influences (and even sources) are recognizable.  I used to make papier mache monster masks, and one of the coolest thing about them (outside of their realism) was the fact that you could still read the newspaper clippings on the inside of the mask.

We tend to want our writers to go a step beyond popsicle sticks or masks: to build wasps’ nests, in which the original materials have been so broken down and remade that we can’t identify them any more.  Of course uproar ensues when someone attempts to pass off a stick man as a wasp’s nest, but I wonder if there’s a place for stick men, or papier mache masks, in the world of fiction, the same way we’ve come to embrace sampling in music.