Fifteen minutes, that’s all I’m allotted to blog with. It sets a time limit so blogging doesn’t eat up other time, and also constrains me so I don’t waste time thinking about what I should be writing. I have so much to tell you all, but really, it’ll come out eventually, so I’ll start with the fact that I’m doing NaNoWriMo again. Yes, I’m still crazy. 
I’ve finally gotten the go-ahead to register for classes, and signing up for them was simplicity itself. But it was a bit of a rocky road to get here!
Ordinarily, I’d cue the meta-whining about not writing. Instead of that, however, I wish to express gratitude for this recent season of my life. It has been unproductive in the sense that I have written relatively few words on this here blog or in the novels that I have floating around, but I have nevertheless been tilling soil and laying down fertilizer. Or maybe chopping wood and carrying water. I have the inestimable Freya West to thank for reminding me of the seasons of life. Instead of struggling against the fact that I haven’t been writing, I can look back and see that I have been living and doing. Which is, of course, necessary for writing.
My sky is full of them. I steer by them each in turn, drifting this way and that, sailing over familiar waters again and again as my guides change. What matters shifts like the winds in spring, first blowing west and next blasting east or south or north, heedless of my need.
I need a reason.
Is it ironic, or merely fitting, that a man who has dedicated himself to living in the light of reason should find that it is beyond his grasp?
I applied to the MAT program at UNC. I was rejected. It’s easy to look at external factors, but ultimately I am to blame. Same problem as before, four years ago when I applied to graduate programs: not enough Latin on my transcript.
It doesn’t matter that I know Latin, or that I have been reading Latin despite an exhausting 40-hour job, or that I had plenty of non-curricular Latin during my undergraduate studies. I am holding back all my bitterness, because I don’t want to say unkind things on the Internet. But I am bitter. I meet the bar, but they set it, and they get to say I don’t meet it.
I am driven by this against my will, really. It’s the thing closest to a calling that I can see. So I’m not giving up, but it is a hard thing to bear. I have little choice, though. Endure a completely disparate field of employment indefinitely, or keep trying to bust out of my oubliette. I choose to strive for freedom.
I have not been idle these last few months. Instead of being expressive in the verbal domain, I have been learning how to express via another sense: taste. As in the taste of sweet, delicious beer! May this open the floodgates to more regular writing.
So, beer! My friend Clinton (AKA the unknown lamer) has plenty of experience brewing. He used to run batches in Baltimore, MD, and when I moved down to NC I discovered that he had moved here too! Many good times have been had among our circle of friends here over the last few years, and I had occasionally pestered him to pick it back up so that the good times may acquire a new dimension. Well, he acquired steadier work, and the four of us agreed to start brewing. It took some initial outlay on Clinton’s part for equipment, as he knew what materials would be best to invest in after his Baltimore operation. One 100,000 BTU propane burner, an 7.5 gallon steel kettle, a few fermentation vessels, and some very quick education later, we were in business.
I am throwing in the towel on NaNoWriMo a day early. I’m not stopping the writing, but I am officially too far behind to win thanks to a fat-fingered backup attempt. I lost 7k worth of words, putting me at roughly 31k. I managed 12k on November 30 last year, so I was pumped to be at a feasible place, but the idea of rewriting that much on top of an already burdensome deficit took the wind completely out of my sails.
On the plus side, I’m not as broken in spirit as last year despite not winning. In ramping up to the 50k mark, I expended a disproportionate amount of energy, leaving me spent enough to set writing aside. And a couple days’ break turned into a couple weeks’, and then the guilt set in to make it a couple months’… Not this year. I am only just now getting a feel for my characters, and I have been writing fairly consistently. So I don’t lack for material, and I no longer have a deadline to panic about. Which means writing becomes fun again–something it hasn’t been for years.
Last year, I saw from a mountain and promptly fell to the bottom. This year I got a good look at the valleys around me, but I wasn’t so far ahead of myself that I was afraid to look down. Here’s the top ten lessons I have learned from NaNoWriMo this year.
1. Writing anything, even just 100 words, is better than writing nothing.
2. Back up in multiple places.
3. There’s always going to be more in your mind than your fingers can write in any given instant–just write what seems most important. Sometimes that means completely switching scenes.
4. Make time to write.
5. Don’t ignore living.
6. Back up in multiple places.
7. Plot is not something that comes overnight. Allow time to stew. In the meantime, keep writing.
8. Create characters. Ideas are boring.
9. Set a minimum wordcount that is not trivial, but easy enough to just bang out if you’re exhausted. Honor it consistently. Usually you’ll have wet your gullet by the end and be thirsty for more. Usually. (300 seems good so far.)
10. Don’t talk about writing in person unless asked.
I’m sure I could add more, but these seem to be my major take-aways this year. I end November in far less crazy-eyes fashion, and in doing so give myself permission to be a shitty writer on a daily basis rather than to put off writing because it’s not good enough or I’m too tired or any other number of excuses that fall flat against the ideal of the infinite songs and visions bursting at my seams to be let out.
Additional props go to those Raleigh WriMos without whom I would just be bored and sad out here, away from the glow of Chapel Hill. Write-ins were had, and much encouragement also on Twitter. Finally, I must thank you, dear reader, for listening to me whine.
I am a being reborn in defeat. Fjear!
So it’s now almost November, and I was going to write about how my novel planning has been coming along, but it isn’t. Instead I’ve been bound to the siren song of Minecraft. The developer set an update freeze when I bought my copy of the game, so I have no cool new features to talk about, but as I mentioned before, that’s not really why I’m playing it. Instead, let me share with you why I must set it aside during NaNoWriMo: Minecraft is captivating.
It’s not enthralling in the same way that certains MMOs have garnered a following; there are no “achievements” or even formal quests, and in the (very) alpha multiplayer survival mode, monsters can’t even attack you. This leaves only one possible lure, and this is the most powerful one of all. It’s captivating for its lack of creative constraints, ironically enough. With the only objective in the game being to survive the nights, your own imagination becomes the steering force, guided only by some extremely basic physics. And we’re talking basic! Sand and gravel fall, leading to a few gruesome deaths by suffocation early in my career as a minecrafter, but dirt and stone of other varieties do not. Nor do other objects once placed, even if the blocks they were placed atop are removed. This allows you to construct all manner of seemingly impossible architectural feats–floating cities, cavernous subterranean sculptures, and even arboreal citadels:
The sheer potency of the sorts of things you can build with your virtual hands comes from the fact that it’s coming from you. Even in virtual realms, little greater joy is found than the act of creation. This isn’t about doing things that give your character bigger numbers which you pit against other numbers, or about pulling levers to watch a pre-written story (or even multiple possible stories) unfold. This is about the process of invention. This is about raw creativity.
If there is another side to this coin, it is fear. The night brings creatures, and they try to kill you. Most succeed unless you prepare. When you die in the course of exploring your world–be it through a climbing accident or a vicious spider-riding skeleton–you are returned to the point you originally appeared. The gear you had on you remains at the place you died. If this place is a very long way from your spawn point, you can kiss it goodbye; it doesn’t stay there forever. So built into the game already is a sustainable scarcity. To do the things you want to do, you must build in a way that mitigates risk. Risk of losing your stuff by building storage vessels and cooking food. Risk of getting caught by that creeper you didn’t see by crafting armor and designing secure, light-filled structures. Risk of losing track of where your safehouses are by leaving breadcrumb trails. (The landscape is procedurally generated as you explore further, potentially covering a surface area eight times larger than the Earth’s.)
This element of the game adds something to the sandbox that no game I have ever played brings forth: a sense of ownership. I find I want to tend to my growing network of safety, to preserve it against nothing else but the raw forces of entropy that the engine brings to bear: creeper explosions, underground water and lava spouts, and the random distribution of the minerals I need to continue bringing forth my vision into a semblance of being. This world, as lonely as it is, is mine. My choices determine what sort of environment I live in. It’s easy to read into the game a very environmentally-conscious design, but I think it might just be a side effect of playing in a simulation of the forces we are subject to here in the real world.
The one dimension of the game I haven’t begun exploring is the set of activatable items and their power source, redstone. This material allows you to create complex circuits to effect programmatic control over the workings of your operation. You can set up automated minecart delivery systems, trap doors for catching intruding monsters, airlocks for stopping an unexpected flood of water or lava from destroying your work, and so much more. I hesitate even to begin, just because it adds a whole new layer of complexity. Some guy even built a working computer with it. After NaNoWriMo I shall tinker around with it. Until then I must content myself to getting a feel for good building technique, and maybe even start to learn more aesthetically pleasing ways to shape structures.
But because of the sheer open-endedness of the game, as I have hopefully described in better detail this time, I must set it aside for NaNoWriMo, or at most put very hard limits on the time I spend at it. Otherwise you won’t get a novel out of me, just excuses.
Part of my creative process–that part which hasn’t yet been stifled and made limp from oxygen deprivation and routine exhaustion–is to put an ear to the ground. I have been listening since the beginning of October when NaNoWriMo came back on my radar. Sometimes it comes to me more or less unbidden, but this time I had to fish it out of the morass of disappointment and unfinished thoughts that I left stewing from last year. One of the great difficulties of even approaching completing last year’s novel was the raw, undeveloped state I had started it in; I found myself wrestling not only with the words but the form of it.
Excuses!
This year I have some lead time, so I have begun outlining what I want to write about. And the course of listening to the turmoil in my head brought me to the realization that I have been mulling over the nature of “magic” in this world for the last year. I wrote (hinted at, really) the various fates of the actual characters in the story, but the underpinnings of their strengths and weaknesses were vague and ambiguous. It was the part of the story that I didn’t have time to both create from whole cloth and still make sense of the characters’ actions, so I just handwaved it. (A great deal of handwaving occurred that month, but never you mind )
This is the best part, though! I imagine that any fantasy author must at some point, even if it’s only in his or her head, address the nature of the magic in the created world. I’m not speaking of strict philosophical treatises–though such are the foundation of the archetypical wizard–but like time travel and other devices, there must be a minimum of inconsistency at some level. Even if that only means that magic is consistently inconsistent.
OMG. First axiom of wizardry. I’m already getting somewhere…so yeah, basically I’m writing about the discovery of magic. Whee!
Anyway, the point of this post was that the process of arriving at a solid kernel of an idea to expand into a story with people and things happening can sometimes be simple and inevitable once you give up waiting for the flash! of new ideas. Sometimes you’ve been having the idea with you all along, but only just now does it strike you as something to take to the prom.
Being a video gamer, for me, is about anthropology. I don’t play just to be stimulated by all the flashy lights and enticing sounds, though those aspects certainly are a strong part of the allure. I decide which games to play based on which ones seem to uncover the most insight about the human condition. So I tend not to be an early adopter. Instead, I wait. I read reviews. I peruse image galleries, looking for that ineffable key to understanding humanity. I try to acquire the cream of the crop–usually in the second-hand market, and rarely for more than $15 or so. This is different than waiting to buy the most popular games used, though. Sometimes the gems are hidden by a short production run, or by being released on older systems. But they all point to the vital things we humans share.
Minecraft is all the buzz these days if you follow tech news. It’s not even out of its infancy. But the growing buzz isn’t about its killer graphics engine (it’s very retro) or amazing storyline (there isn’t one). It’s ultimately one of those games that taps into very base urges in us: to explore, to create, to define our own parameters. Against a blocky display, your task as a player is simple. Survive.
It’s harder than it seems! Your first day in the Alpha version, which you can plink for relatively ch33p at €9.99 (~$13.99US), seems bright and cozy. You spawn with the sun shining and farm animals nearby, and around you are trees and dirt and maybe some hills, or maybe you’re on an island. In any event, the game invites you to just diddle around. Sun is warm, grass is green. You can craft things–first basic stuff like sticks and planks, but soon proper tools like picks and shovels and hoes–and build to your heart’s content. But when night falls, you had better be prepared. Because the freaks come out.
And they want to kill you.
The first time you die is a wakeup. Probably it was a creeper, so you never heard it coming until a “ssssssssssssssBOOM!” And then the game over screen. And then you’re back at your spawn point, realizing that that cool cliff you were exploring (and the loot and ores and tools you managed to acquire) is half a day’s walk. Or swim. “This time,” you vow, “this time I will be prepared.” And so the madness begins. You find you need light to keep the monsters from spawning in your home. But there’s no coal nearby! And then you use your last pick, and you’re out of wood to make more handles. And on, and on, and on.
But there comes a time, many hours later, when you have established mastery over your domain. And it is then that you have the true game in hand, that game that we play in the real world: answering the ageless question, “What in the world do I do now??” Except your answers aren’t bounded by socioeconomic status or what-have-you. Or even physics.
It’s time to build.
