Word War Wednesday

Posted on 18 February 2015 by Jade

It’s here: Word War Wednesday. Today, set your timer for one hour and write as many words as you can during that time. Write your current project; write a new project; write a discarded project. Forget about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Don’t worry about if what you write makes sense. Just get down as many words as you can, then post that number in the “Comments” section below before midnight tonight. Winner is the person with the most words and gets a shout-out from me about whatever pet project (cause, etc.) they want. here as well as on the group’s Facebook page. Oh, yeah, and you get bragging rights.

You’re on your honor here. The Word Police aren’t going to come and take you away if you cheat. The idea is to write for two continuous hours on one project. It’s intended to get the creativity juices flowing and possibly help get over a writing block. No judgement here. You’re not obligated to join in and you don’t have to do it every week. But I suggest giving it a try at least once. That’s what I’m going to be doing, so y’all going to have to listen to me about what I get done anyway. My goal is to do every week.

Anyone joining me?

[Photo courtesy of Terry Johnston via Flickr Creative Commons].

New Facebook Group

Posted on 17 February 2015 by Jade

I’ve made a Facebook group to go along with this blog. It’s private group, so the public will know the group exists, but won’t be able to read posts without joining. I had to add people when I created the group, so I just added a couple of people I felt would probably want to join. I’ll be sharing my posts here on the group’s page and people can comment here or there, whichever they feel more comfortable with.

The group is called “rpg+fiction=?” and I’m extending the offer to join to anyone who reads this blog. If you want to be part of the group, leave a comment below or email me at jade(at)rpggm(dot)com. Reference this post, either in the subject or body of the email so I know you’re not a bot.

Theme Days

Posted on 17 February 2015 by Jade

Just for fun, I’m creating two “theme” days per week:

Word War Wednesdays: Set your timer for two hours and just put out as many words as you can on your current project. Then post the count; the person with the highest word count gets a special “shout-out” on the blog here and bragging rights. You pick which two hours. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. Just get as many words as you possibly can.
Get-Fit Fridays: Writing fit, that is. Just as you can do exercises to help you get physically fit, you can do writing exercises to help get the words flowing on your project. I’ll post a writing exercise Friday morning. That way, those of you who write on weekdays either still have all of Friday to get it done or can think about it over the weekend. Those of you who write on weekends have a day to mull over what you want to do with it. Post your results and/or what you got out of the exercise.

That’s it. If anyone has favorite writing exercises, let me know. I’ll need all the ideas I can get. I’ll be participating in theses challenges myself, so I’ll be posting about them, even if I’m the only one doing it. Challenges start this week. I’ll be posting my results here and on this group’s Facebook page.

Characters and Plot

Posted on 4 February 2015 by Jade

My books always start with a character or character(s). I create or find a cool character and I want to know more about them. I want to share them with other people and hope they find my character(s) as cool as I do. So far, I have three writing projects, each of them started because I wanted to know more about a particular character:

Poison in the Mind started with a character I played in a game. I know, I know. Stories based on games are almost always bad, however I couldn’t get the character, Galen Gerhardt, out of my head. Galen is a mindbender, someone who can control other people’s thoughts. He both hates and is addicted to the use of this power. He’s an escaped slave…maybe. There’s a lot of evidence that his memories have been tampered with, so even he doesn’t know what is true and what is not. And now he has to face down an ancient Death God and with the help of some companions (each with stories of their own), who claims it’s Galen’s fate to serve him. And he may just be right. Here I’m letting the characters drive the plot, not the game they played in. Right now, all game events except two have been thrown out the window and one of them’s trying to scootch away from the frame. Plus, I’ve had requests from other players to write their character’s story. I might do it too, if I can finish my own.

Lucifer’s Godchild also started with a game character who grew from a PC into an NPC and now into a fiction character. With each iteration, Rafe Fraizer, has mutated and changed to fit the demands of the current story. Starting as a street punk mage just out of his apprenticeship, he’s grown into a thousand-year-old jaded wizard, exiled to the mortal world by his faery consort and desperate to regain her good graces and return to Faery. But the kicker for me was when I realized that Rafe couldn’t be the viewpoint character for his own story. Because it turned out, it wasn’t his story to tell, it was that of his unwanted assistant, a transwoman named Sally Neighbors. NaNoWriMo 2013 project.

His Very Jewel was an exception for me, as the character who inspired me was an actual, historical person. I began an obsessive research binge on anything Tudor, especially the wives of Henry VIII. Plus, I liked the idea about writing a book that my mother (who loves historical fiction) might like to read. And I have a tendency to take maligned characters and give them a human face. In this case, it was Henry’s reviled fifth wife, Katherine Howard, that took my fancy. I wanted to try a hand at historical fiction; I wanted to portray a female character; I wanted to write about someone who’s life is pretty well known so that I didn’t have to make up a lot of “filler” events. Since my primary historical interest is Anglo-Saxon, I’ve been continuing my Tudor research binge. NaNoWriMo 2014 project.

So I’ve got these great characters with interesting and rich histories, who seem to go absolutely nowhere, plot-wise. Why? Because in each case, I’ve realized I have no antagonists. It tend to define their antagonists in general terms. Actually, in two of them, I have an antagonist: Galen has the Ancient Death God (cue booming voice here) and Katherine’s life has a perfect man to villainize. But my problem seems to be I don’t know how to make use of antagonists; I have a terrible time figuring out exactly they do to become the villains that they are. And what my protagonists do to counter them.

If I were GMing any of these stories as a game, I throw the situation out to my players and watch them run with it. As a GM, all I have to do is think of a great character, think of an impossible situation and throw my PCs into, then just react to what they do. But it doesn’t seem to work so well when I get to fiction. When I throw them into my situation, they just sit there on the page. I’ve got great books on writing character, on writing plot, scenes, dialogue…. But I’ve yet to see a book on creating great antagonists.

What about you? What comes first for you: character or plot? Or something else? How do you create antagonists and then how do you use them to create your story and then your plot?

Humbledrag

Posted on 28 January 2015 by Jade

Today I received a mailing list email from one of my favorite authors, Mur Lafferty, where she talks about “humbledrag.”¹ In essence, humbledrag is the act of dragging down your efforts, talents, abilities, whatever, to appear humble. Now, she wasn’t talking about false humility, but genuine beliefs that your work isn’t as good as anyone else’s, simply because it was your own work. Not exclude the men in my audience, this is something we, as women, particularly need to become aware of. Men can humbledrag, but girls and women receive messages that this is the proper way to think about their work. Hell, I was raised by a feminist but I humbledrag with the best of them. If we appraise our work correctly, then we lose. We lose the raise, the house, the fiance, the book deal, whatever, because we’re “pushy” or “bossy” or “have unrealistic expectations”.

We need to be aware of our humbledragging. We need to notice when we do it verbally and we need to edit it out of our written work. I’m thinking about creating a reward system for myself: every time I notice myself humbledragging, I get a reward. Just a small one. Two hours of guilt free reading, for example, or an episode or two of my current favorite show. We should also help each other. Keep an ear out for your friends’ humbledragging. Agree between friends that you will point out each other’s humbledragging in a friendly way, such as saying “Humbledrag!” (or simply “Hb!”) whenever you notice them doing it. Make it a game between you; the last thing we want here is meanness, since that will just reinforce the humbledragging behavior.

I’m going to make a definite effort to avoid humbledragging from now on. Anyone with me?

¹Shambling Guide to New York, Ghost Train to New Orleans, as well as numerous short works, many available for free. Just check out her website at http://murverse.com.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons. I give credit to the actual photographer, if Flickr hadn’t dandified it’s site to point that I can’t tell who it was. But the link there should get you to the original photo]

RPG + story=?

Posted on 27 January 2015 by Jade

So what does happen when you combine RPGs and story? (And I’m talking about the tabletop kind here where you are all physically located in the same room and can see the other people you’re playing with.) I don’t know either. That’s something I’m wanting to explore with this blog.

I’ve been playing and GMing RPGs since 1980. I’m married to an RPG gamer. My child is a third generation RPG gamer. As you can guess, RPGs are a huge part of my life. When I don’t get to play, I get twitchy and nervous unless I have some other way to channel that energy. Writing fiction is one way.

I’ve always wanted to write fiction. As a teenager, I imagined myself as a Writer (cue deep voice echo audio effect). Everything I wrote was going to have Meaning. It would be emotionally powerful and an accurate depiction of the dark side of human nature and people would realize that SF/F could have Depth and be worth reading (this was during the late 70’s and early 80’s: SF/F was not accepted by the mainstream). And I would help lead the vanguard by writing the breakthrough novel that appealed both to the (Intellectual) general public as well as the SF/F crowd. That that novel would be a grand opus, a sweeping work of….do you want to strangle me yet?

As I went through college I discovered that far from wanting to write the greatest watershed novel, I wanted to get paid for what I wrote. So began the “hack” period of my life. I wrote RPG-related articles and booklets¹ and submerged my desire to write fiction completely into my games.

My problem has always been plot: I came up with great characters and situations, but what the characters did after that was a complete mystery to me. So I would make my characters NPCs, throw my PCs into the situation I had in mind, and stood back to watch them go. Each time, the PCs did things I had never even conceived of. This helped keep the fiction bugs at bay for awhile.

But a couple of years ago, my gaming life started into a dry spell. At that time I had a character, Galen Gerhardt, in one of our games that intrigued me. The GM had hinted at a more unusual background than even I’d given him and the game was grinding to a halt due to Real Life considerations. But I wanted to find out more. I decided that I would use Galen to learn to write fiction. Yes, I was going to write a story “based on a game I played.”² Commence eye rolling now.

So that’s what I want to focus on in this blog. If you look at the Venn Diagram above, I want this blog to sit in the “green zone” at the intersection of RPGs and fiction. As I said in my first post, I’m not really interested in syndicated game fiction. What I’m more interested in is the how-to and experiments you get when you combine the yellow and blue zones. I’ll talk about narrative in RPGs and how I’m using it (or not) in the AD&D game I’m running, about how players insert narratives into games, how you can use game events in your fiction writing, and anything else I can find that relates even remotely to my theme.

And I’d love to hear from you. Where do you draw the line between game and fiction or not? How does your writing inspire your games and how do your games influence your writing? I would love to have guest posts (even if you’ve never written anything before) or just opinions in the comments.

¹ You can see some of my work at DriveThruRPG and RPGN0w
2 Line is from filk song called “Fantasy Writer” by the LA Filkharmonics. It’s on the album In Space No One Can Hear You Sing. It’s definitely worth a listen, if you can get hold of a copy.

Hello World

Posted on 14 January 2015 by Jade

Image Courtesy of Windell Oskay
via Flickr Creative Commons

Let me introduce myself: I’m Jade. I’m an RPG writer and (most recently) a novelist. Some of you have probably come here via a link from my old sites: rpgGM.com and Evil Machinations. And you’re wondering why I would start a new blog when I’ve got two that haven’t been updated in a long time. That’s because this blog will be an entirely different animal from my earlier ones.

I got burned out on gaming. Well, not on gaming itself, but on writing about it. I ran out of ideas and got to the point where I felt like I was doing more idea rehashing than solid game writing. Most of my focus was going to learning to write a novel. Well, three years later and I’m still trying to write a novel. But I’m learning a lot along the way and I thought I might share the journey as I move from struggling writer to (I hope) published author. That’s not to say there won’t be any RPG content here; gaming has been a big part of my life since I was twelve and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I really want to explore the border between tabletop RPGs and fiction writing. I’m not interested in syndicated game fiction (at least not right now). My focus will be more on the writing tools for each, how they’re same and how they differ.

This is going to be a much more personal blog than any of my previous blogs have been. This will be much like my style of cooking: open the mental refrigerator, see what’s there and then throw things at the pot until it tastes good. I plan to post about how my writing is going, as well as what I discover about writing itself along the way. There’ll be game-related posts, probably about the 1st edition AD&D game I’m running. There will be posts about the craft of fiction writing and my current writing projects. And if all goes well, there will be–dare I say it?–show notes from my podcast. Because that’s my two main goals this year: finally finish the first draft of my novel(s?) and start a podcast.

I’m hoping to be able to get interviews with both tabletop RPG writers and SF/F writers, particularly those who self-publish. If anyone is doing a blog tour for their book, please email me at jade(at)rpggm(dot)com. I’d be very interested in hosting you here. There’s going to be no set posting schedule: I’ll post when I have something to say. That may be twice a day, twice a week, twice a year. In addition, you’ll be treated to other things I’m interested, especially where they meet with RPGs and SF/F. I’m an avid knitter and crocheter (so, yes, I’ll publish a link to your crochet Dalek pattern), as well has having an interest in costume history and, well, history in general. So anything might turn up here. You’ll just have to keep checking back to find out. 😉