Battling
Posted on 5 July 2011 | No responses
It has been my experience over the past few years that life is a series of battling. Battling poverty, battling heartache, battling fate. It seems to me that each person’s own battles consume their lives. Sometimes they lose, but more than often, they win. Truly, if we always found ourselves losers, the world would be in a much more dire state. Still, we sometimes find ourselves on the non-victorious side of the conflict, despite, or in spite of, our best efforts.
These past few months I have been in battle. Not against hordes of enemies or an ancient terror, but from stress. Stressed caused by money, as I’m sure many of my readers can relate. Stress from work. And, more, I find myself battling a dark depression.
For those who know me and interact with me regularly, this may come as a surprise. I endeavour to put on a positive affectation. I Laugh, I joke, I am conpanionable. But what is not seen is how very tired I am. How I live with pain both physical and mental. How the deep darkness hovers and threatens.
I find myself battleweary. Disgusted by the lack of communication between humans; between people who should be able to behave like adults. Tired of having to act as if everything is alright. Tired of the lonliness and the quiet and the noise. I feel as though the world spins while I remain the same. The world progresses while I stagnate. Others grow while I simply am.
I imagine this is one of the many facets that simply makes us human, these battles. But wouldn’t it be nice if that weren’t the case?
As I write this I sit in my local Five Guys, enjoying fries while thinking about the facts of my life. How it might change, how it might grow.
I am so very tired and I look to tomorrow as an old warrior might view a dark, desolate battle field.
Hiatusi
Posted on 24 May 2011 | 1 response
According to the data that I have available to my, I haven’t produced anything on my suite of sites for more than three months. That is LastMage, this blog, my podcast and my rant-blog are all in a state of hiatus. In addition, there are projects that have been getting underway that are now stalled, many of which I haven’t been working on publicly. I wonder at why every now and again I hit these periods of hiatus. I stop, reflect and look inside to find the answers. Then I realize the truth.
Videogames.
I swear to Bob on High, that videogames will be the death of my foundling career. I’m beginning to get some notice and just when I rope people in, when my metrics start to grow, my brain rebells and I’m back down to square one. Is it a fear of failure? I don’t know, but I do know that these videogame companies need to stop releasing these darn things and my friends need to stop roping me in to these things. These past three months are a graveyard of dead progress and won games. Let me share with you what I’ve been playing.
Team Fortress 2: I usually hop on this to decompress after I get home from work. Then I look up and it’s effing 11 pm.
Terraria: I lost two whole days with this beast.
Rift: Don’t get me started.
Fable 3: Just released by has already eaten a lot of my time.
I really need to just… stop playing games. I really need to get back on that horse. Help!
Frustration 2
Posted on 15 February 2011 | 1 response
We creatives, no matter what field we’re in, must think of ourselves as storytellers. Whether that story is about a man on a mission or simply telling the story of a product for sale, the whole general idea is two-fold: to tell a compelling, engaging story and to have the audience see, sympathize and internalize that story.
This two-fold perspective on storytelling is essential in the success of any creative’s career. We were easily able to sympathize with a plain-looking, scrawny boy living under a staircase. J.K. Rowling’s billion-dollar epic told the story of how this young boy grew up to fight against insurmountable odds. Who among us doesn’t dream about moving out of an oppressive situation into glory? Still, somehow this story is significantly more popular that, say, any Mary Sue story with similar properties. This is because readers reject the notion of “hidden perfection.”
That is to say, it’s the same reaction we as viewers have when watching a trailer for a movie in which the female lead is magically turned into a hot, smoldering temptress from a frump. “Shenanigans!” we cry because, frankly, the actress was hot in the first place. How are we, as an audience, supposed to suspend that sort of disbelief? And more, because of that disbelief, we are prevented from internalizing the story to elevate it above a simple “enjoyable” experience.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a great deal of money to be made out there by simply telling a story rather. But crafting an experience that enables the audience to participate or allows them to internalize the story marks the difference between those storytellers who will gain people who appreciate their work and those who will create rabid fans.
I think about this each time I sit down to write and begin to feel worried that I’m loosing the audience’s attention. Especially recently. I am having a blast writing the monstrosity but it’s not readily clear that, outside a few dedicated commenters, anyone else is enjoying my offerings.
So I become paralyzed. I sit there, not particularly experiencing writer’s block, but unwilling to type because I’m afraid I’m boring people.
Perceived Value and Embryonic Writing
Posted on 16 November 2010 | No responses
Are NaNo-novels any sort of ready for public consumption at the end of November? Absolutely not. But what makes this fact different than what it is I’m doing with LastMage? Why is it that I feel comfortable with “live-writing” such a large and intense tale as that which is unfolding each week in LastMage?
I’ll call it arrogance because, in all honesty, I can’t come up with another word for it. Confidence is not quite it, because it assumes a measure of surety in my work that derives from approval rather than arrogance which is surety in my work despite a lack of approval. That’s not to say that I don’t care about what my readers think about my work, I absolutely care. But it is to say that I am sure in my work. I love what I’m writing and I feel that, despite quirks and typos, the story is stellar.
So this requires me to ask myself if I feel that the work that I put up online is worth the time people take to read it when they could be doing other things. To that I answer yes — for the reason above. But am I willing to sell this story in a similar capacity to that of a published novel? Am I willing to try to monetize it and ask readers for donations or charge them for the privilege of reading this story? Absolutely not. Why, though, when I feel that the story is ready to be read even if incomplete?
That’s the thing, the product is not complete, so why would I ask anyone to pay for it? It’s like putting a videogame up for beta, really. What my readers see is the story unfolding, my thought processes progressing through the steps I take instinctively to pull a story together. It would be me asking for full price admission to a film and all the audience sees is the story-board.
From here, now, I must look towards the future. There are short stories set in the same world of LastMage that I’ve written and am currently writing. These are finished products that I intend to offer for a very reasonable price in various formats. But what must be done for the story of the Last Mage to become the sort of value that I know it to be? Well, I need to finish it first. Then edit, polish, edit again, re-write, re-plot, edit, polish and then layout.
That’s only the barest of exaggeration.
I write all of this to say that while I recognize that there are other writers on the internet who feel as though they need to hold everything to the vest to ensure that they get the maximum monetization from their work, I don’t feel that LastMage is quite there yet. I would be very disappointed if I got a rough, unpolished chair from a carpenter. I don’t want to inflict the same on my readers.
I love them too much for that.