gowerhardcastle

[gowerhardcastle]

How to not write a long piece of interactive fiction

This is some hard-won advice from someone whose fourth game has just hit the three millionth word.

My first game was about 200,000 words, my second 620,000, my third 1.2 million, and my fourth is 3 million (with 1.5 chapters to go). This is obviously an untenable trend, but there is nothing I can do about it. This seems to be the way I write interactive fiction.

I know that the title is sort of counter-intuitive as far as game writing advice goes, because the trend is towards longer games. "Long game" does not mean "good quality" but at the same time, in the absence of other information, a high wordcount is often taken as evidence of quality. Big numbers are impressive! But at the same time, in the absence of tight editing and quality control, it can also be indicative of sprawl, bloat, and a sort of looseness of pacing that makes people say "good god, that's just too long and I wish it had ended long ago."

This is why my games end up crazy long. If you want to maintain some form of control over your wordcount, take this advice. But if you want to wrestle with a behemoth--and that is what it feels like to deal with a game this long--then reverse my advice and be like me.

I do not advise this. But that is where my predilections lie. I can't help it.

Describe conversation instead of writing conversation. This is something that I started getting more and more interested as I moved from game 2 (Tally Ho) to game 3 (Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale) which is never having a choice that says, "I strongly protest and argue the point vigorously" and then describing the result with something like "You stick your finger in the air and shout your opinion in her face; she waves away your words and starts to walk away, but you follow her, repeating your objection."

Now, I would write,

"Nonsense, Amandrea, that is absolute rubbish. And it is unworthy of your schooling, your family, your club, and your...well, that is to say, your whole..." You wave your hands around vaguely to suggest the entire world. "You cannot really suggest that prime numbers are 'better' than other numbers."

"They are! They are!"

"That is nonsense. 'Better' is not a mathematical term."

"Well, seven is a prime number, and it is greater than six. And greater is better."

"Yes, but...dash it all, that is not what 'greater' means in that context. And you know it."

"Do I?" she says, walking away from you.

Look how many words I've just spilled on that scene! It's full of character and ridiculousness, but it takes a long time to craft! Because getting voices right is quite tricky.

2. This one is related to number one: omit little character moments, because they add up to a lot of words.

"Hm!" says Uncle Chum, smoothing his mustache with a little toothbrush. "Is that straight?"

"Your mustache?"

"Yes. I bought this new little brush. It is sterling silver, see?"

"Yes, it looks like a toothbrush."

"Not just regular silver, but sterling silver. That's...I don't know what 'sterling' silver means, but I assume it is better than regular silver. Because it's 'sterling,' you see?"

"Mmm. Listen, about the loan, I just need..."

"I brush the left side of my mustache every other day, and the right side the other every other day," Uncle Chum says dreamily. "Only I think I'm off schedule. I might have brushed just the left side for four days in a row."

That is sheer indulgence on my part. I am just having fun with that character. It's not leading up to a branchy choice. It's just letting you spend time with a character and letting you know about them, and setting a mood. But it's like writing a mini short story, and it gets you nowhere in an outline.

3. This one is huge. Do not have varying numbers of characters present in a scene. This one sneaks up on you. Case in point: in my current game, there is a cat that may or may not be with you throughout the chapter. Ever since I made that decision, every single moment that follows, I have to ask myself, "but what would the cat do here (if the cat is present)" and then write something appropriate and fun.

And cats don't even talk! Now imagine this with a person--two people, who may or may not be with you in a scene, and you see how the combinations and options get ridiculous.

Those are three bits of "advice" which I hope you see are written tongue-in-cheek, in the spirit of "I can't help it." I love writing long interactive fiction. I wouldn't have it any other way, even if I am in the fifth year of putting this game together (and while I see the end of the tunnel, I am still very much in the tunnel!)

If you'd like to read several more such pieces of "advice" to either help you avoid my lot in life or follow me blithely down the primrose path, check out the follow-up to this article here which is free for your perusal in the hopes that you will enjoy my particular style of game chit-chat.

Find that, and tons more (including a very long demo) at the Noble Gases Club. Essays on game design, character studies, writing diaries, progress reports, new fiction, and hundreds of thousands of words of demo to play!

[gowerhardcastle]

An Update to the Public Tea and Scones Demo!

There's a new adventure available in the Chapter One Public Demo of Tea and Scones--now, you may join Fitzie for an investigation into the Case of the Missing Bagpipes, and play that path all the way through to the end of Chapter One.

In the process, you can see my take on how to make a mystery and an investigation interesting in interactive narrative for all sort of characters, not only shrewd deductive sorts. In fact, the bumbling and unobservant may find a good deal to do here.

The free demo is right here.

If you like what you read, and you thirst for more such content, visit me at The Noble Gases Club, for a demo that is way, way, way longer and includes the whole of Chapter One and a massive chunk of Chapter Two, and dozens and dozens of essays, short fiction, game design rambles, and world-building in a comic, highly cultured, and heartfelt 1930s where you have more money than sense.

[gowerhardcastle]

A very interesting, at least in my opinion, has crossed my mind. For all that I’ve ever written, there has always been some underlying theme, or rather a point, or even multiple points, that I’ve wished for readers to get from my works. And so I was wondering, in all of your works, have they all been created that way as well? Do your stories have those underlying points, and also, do you think that stories can be created without some hidden meaning behind them? Some message, that authors wanted to portray in an artistic way?

I had to think about this one for quite a while.

My first impulse was to just say, "No, nothing in particular. I just want to write a funny story."

But then I thought a little more, and here is the actual answer.

Some of you probably know that I'm an English Professor and have been for quite a while. My whole life has been about the written word--about cultivating it, showing its value, teaching about it, and trying to create beautiful prose.

If my games are about anything, they are about how much I love language. I know my games are not for everyone: when I read articles about how the typical university student has trouble getting through thirty pages of literature in a *week* whereas it used to be more the norm to assign 100+ pages, that tracks with my experience as a professor. And I know that a game like mine, which is very, very long, has a very mannered writing style, has a highly literary sensibility, and asks a lot of time from the reader is never going to be a breakthrough hit the way some games are.

I'm okay with that, because I'm writing the kind of game that I love, and it's meant to appeal to people for whom reading millions and millions of words is not an intimidating thing, but a treat.

As a professor who also teaches first-year writing, and, alas, some online classes, I am also deeply, deeply in the trenches dealing with AI writing, and it makes me very sad for people who are depriving themselves of (what I think of) as one of the most beautiful and human things you can do, which is to write. I don't want to make it more of a thing than it is, but when I feel feelings like this, writing my game is the thing I can reliably turn to as the antidote.

The slow process of creation (I've been at this sequel now for five years) and a lot of attention to detail and to the beauty of the writing is how I resist. The essential innocence and joy of the world, delight in language, and the laughter it inspires is my small resistance to things.

When I sit down to write, practically every time, I hope that someone will read it and laugh. Whether that's a hidden meaning or an artistic theme, I doubt, but that's what I hope for.

If you would like to play a very long demo of most of the first two chapters, read stories, short essays on game design, and read various rambles on interactive fiction, and in the process, fight the system (?), why not visit The Noble Gases Club?

Here, you can find stuff like a discussion of frame narrative, a sample of a character design of Juniper, and a discussion of my "straight shot" approach to the current chapter I'm working on. All free (for free members)!

It's highly literary 1930s England, in a P.G. Wodehouse inspired world where all shall be well.

[gowerhardcastle]

Watch Someone Play Your Game

The single best alpha-testing technique for interactive fiction is to just sit someone in front of your game and don't say a word as they play.

Tell them to talk out their decision-making process and then take notes.

You will hear things like "ok, so if I steal the coin purse, my brother Marmaduke won't like that" (Marmaduke is not your brother).

Or, "But how do I get into the Noble Gases club?" (You are already in the Noble Gases club)

Or, "How am I supposed to know what Captain Redrock wants?" (Captain Redrock, as well as his butler, told you want he wants several times already, once in bold text.)

You will feel the urge to correct them verbally, and of course, what you are discovering where you need to make things more simple, or where you need to explain things one more time.

But also, if you have a certain sense of humor and it's that type of game, you can also just steal the confusion of your alpha-tester and give the main character the opportunity be confused too.

A choice where the main character is afforded the opportunity to say, "Now, how exactly do I get into the Noble Gases?" after the ceremony welcoming them would be amazing. Or one where you just cannot remember what you are supposed to open with that key your aunt gave you. Or one where you steal the silk handkerchief, not the coin purse as you were asked to.

Even better: let the player decide that their character is confused. Imagine a choice that looked like this:

#"I...seem to recall Aunt Matilda wanted to me to do something with that bank ledger. But I'm dashed if I remember what." (requires Intellect less than 30)

How tempted would you be to choose that, if you were certain the author were going to let you have fun with it and not penalize your character by zapping your stats and ending your adventure? What if you could have a chapter branch where you proudly swipe the bank ledger at great personal cost and scandal only to realize later that you were supposed to swap it with the replacement bank ledger?

If you can get the player to lean into the confusion, you are having fun with the player, and playing along with them. And that's what I'm here for.

Come visit The Noble Gases Club for lots of writing about interactive fiction, stories, frivolity, and an extra-long demo!

[gowerhardcastle]

Outlines and Ends

Although it is a good thing to outline and make a careful flow of events and dependencies when you're writing a complex Choice game, that's never been my style.

I mean, I *make* the outline, but I don't *listen* to the outline. I sort of discover it as I go, and figure out what's interesting me and what's boring me as I move through the narrative. I write a very, very long outline and then ignore a lot of it.

However--the thing that I do listen to--the thing that gets me unstuck more than anything else in writing these long, long games, is figuring out the end before I start. I don't mean that in a railroad-y way.

I mean, I think about an image. Something cool. Like--for Tally Ho, I imagined the main character finding themself living a life decadence and luxury in Monte Carlo surrounded by rich, leisured people. And I imagined the main character in a golden spotlight in Hollywood, on a set that looked vaguely like London. And I pictured the main character being served breakfast in bed by their employer.

Little things like that. Some of them I had zero context for. For example: the main character hanging outside a window doing some sort of intrigue.

When I get stuck, these are the images that propel me on: these are the images that sparked me, and these are the images that get me unstuck when the writing gets to feel tedious--and it does, and it will--and that's usually (to me) a sign that it's time to gently trash the current sign and try something else.

When I thought about that golden spotlight in Hollywood (for example), I thought about the incongruity of it all, about the pain of leaving England for America, about to what extent being a perfect servant and being a movie star have overlapping skill sets, and so forth, and very very often that got me unstuck. I thought about how I could move the character towards or away from one of those ends--plotwise, personality wise, in terms of how other characters felt about them.

To me, knowing the ends is so much more valuable than an outline. (Probably because I don't look at my outline.)

If you'd like to see more musing about interactive fiction and a very, very, very long demo of my game, visit The Noble Gases Club.

And while you're there, read a free snippet about first loves in interactive fiction!

[gowerhardcastle]

Making the Numbers Fade Away

If a character in, say, a classic tabletop role-playing game, has specialized in frost magic, they might be dishing out all kinds of crazy effects and damage such that the person running the game would be hard pressed to challenge them.

You can make the challenges harder and harder, with tougher and tougher monsters.  But there’s also the temptation to present them with an adventure all about ice giants who are immune to frost magic. I can easily imagine why someone might want to do that—“let’s see what happens when the thing you rely on is suddenly taken away!”

But that’s completely frustrating. 

The same thing happens in choice games, where you might have a story path that is going to be particularly attractive to a character with a very high Skullduggery—maybe the story is going to appeal to characters good at sneaking and thievery.  Possibly even very, very good.

So how do you create challenges for these characters?   I think the kneejerk response is “make all of the challenges quite hard.”  If I expect characters to waltz into a path with 40, 50, even 60 Skullduggery, should I make the challenge *if skullduggery >= 55?

Or do I throw a bunch of easy challenges at them and let them feel awesome?  

Something about just setting a number feels off, and this is of course the trouble with plain old skill tests.  If it’s too hard (which I’m setting high because I especial your skill to be high!) then it feels capricious and unfair.  If it’s too easy, then did I even bother training my roguish ways?

This is why skill challenges need to do things other than succeed/middle/fail, but have story ramifications to the extent possible.

If I give a very strong character a door that needs to be busted down , I think it’s interesting to do this for a bold test:

*selectable_if (bold >= 37) #I run at the door over and over again, making a terrible and repeated din during Lord Funtwich’s speech, and finally breaking the lock.

*selectable_if (bold >= 55) #With one massive strike from my giant hamfists, I punch down the door, splintering it in three pieces, which Aunt Matilda will certainly notice when she inspects the house.

*selectable_if (bold >= 27) #I take the sledgehammer from cousin Marmaduke’s room and break down the door, even though he expressly forbade me from entering his room.

*selectable_if (persuade >= 30) I tell Tabby in sheepish tones that she was right, that I humbly apologize, that I will give her back her diary, and to please, please, unlock the door.

#No, no, I can’t do it.  I don’t even want to get in that door.  I just sit down, cross my arms, and act petulant.

#I walk back into the party and pretend I got into the room, acting confident and suave.

This is related to the principle that for Choice games, “all endings should be awesome.”  This is a tenet of Choicescript games.  The logical extension is that all choices should be awesome, which obviously cannot always happen, but which is an ideal goal.  No choice should be “well, you failed, too bad.”  Neither should it simply be, “well, you succeeded, let’s move on past this speed bump.” 

Skill challenges’ whole purpose is to reward with story��to reward high, middle, and low scores with different stories, different paths, different angles on the narrative.

 If the player is thinking “is my number high enough” this is worse than if the player is thinking “is this going to be too loud?”  or “can I swallow my pride and just apologize to Tabby?”  Even a game as number-heavy as Jolly Good can make the numbers dissolve away if you’re willing to throw enough words at doing some serious consequence-branching.

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If you like this kind of design-ramble at great length, come join The Noble Gases Club!

Read more musing on interactive game design, Choicescript development conversation, a lengthy demo of Tea and Scones, a series on Another Story with Rory in which you watch it being designed before your eyes, and lots more right here.

[gowerhardcastle]

The Club Meeting!--Public Demo Update

I’ve updated the public demo of Jolly Good: Tea and Scones!

Here is the link.

Chapter One is now playable all the way through the club meeting, right up until four disasters strike the club simultaneously.

If you enjoy it, please consider joining The Noble Gases Club, where you can play a much longer version of the demo (including a "cheats" DLC), read lots of musings on interactive game design, and enjoy a bunch of fiction about these characters.

[gowerhardcastle]

My favorite classes during uni were my English electives. Romance, comics, and fantasy (all taught by the same professor, shoutout to her). In the comics class, we learned about how in comics, there's other dimensions of the story other than just the words. The illustrations, of course, but also the gaps between the panels, the fonts, the design of each text bubble, the space each panel takes up, etc.

Interactive fiction also has dimensions beyond words. The button to the next page doesn't always say 'next,' it could say 'three years later' as a time marker or 'good heavens!' as a placeholder for narration that doesn't quite fit on the next page. In IF, we may choose one option among a list, but the other options also serve to tell the story. The list of different elements goes on.

All this rambling to ask: If you taught an elective on IF, do you think you'd have enough material to fill a semester-long syllabus? What would be on there?

Funny you should ask!

That's my class! So, yeah, there's plenty to fill a semester. Actually, the class where I teach IF the most is my "Literature and Technology" class, which I've taught every semester for probably seven years now--I do a unit on Choice of Robots which is the most popular unit in the class.

And these are the assignments:

The funny thing is that by training and as far as my research goes, I'm actually a specialist in English medieval and Renaissance literature. But I just fell into teaching other stuff wholly based on my having started writing Choicescript games, and then it became part of my teaching portfolio.

I absolutely cannot divorce my literary/teaching self from my game-writing self. They are so tightly knotted up. I think about my games teaching things, and I think about creating games for my students--but more than that I want to give people something real and wholesome and nutritious to read/play. Slow reading with real content and real emotions, not a quick sugar high.

There is too much junk in the world for me to add to it. My mission in life is not to create content for quick consumption, but to write long-form things that take slow time to consume and make people want to return and return. I think this is 100% antithetical to best practices for writing online content, but I'm ok with that.

Here is a link to my Patreon. I write about interactive fiction, my own game, and other matters of interest to the elegant 1930s wealthy person who receives an allowance from their aunt. The contents may delight you.

[gowerhardcastle]

The Metal Part Under the Cart

I am going to badly misquote this, but there's a bit from a book that I think about all the time when I write. It's a little passage from the start of Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, which did not age well, but which I liked a lot as a kid.

When I'm spending a lot, and I mean a lot, of time ensuring that a character's outfit looks just right (and we're in a textual medium here, so "looks" means described) or that the bit of verse I'm composing for a character to speak scans as proper pentameter, I am asked why I am spending so much time on this tiny detail that basically nobody is going to notice, ever.

This is a particularly pronounced issue in interactive fiction where a vanishingly small percentage of readers might even see a particular scene.

But then I think about that moment from that book, where a blacksmith is asked why he spends so much time on a metal piece on the bottom of a cart when nobody is going to see it, ever, and the smith replies that he knows it's there, and it's important that it look right for him.

I have retained essentially nothing from that book after thirty-plus years, but I think about that one moment at least once a week when I write.

--

Do you crave deliciously detailed interactive fiction? What about noninteractive nonfiction? Look no further! Visit the Noble Gases Club, and read a tremendous amount of completely free chitchat about writing IF and writing in general.

Play a long demo about a cheerful 1930s London club and the foibles of the wealthy-but-not-very-clever, and perhaps you'll be moved to stick around at the Noble Gases club.

[gowerhardcastle]

I really do love them though. Been working for MC for a single week and they’re already so down bad that they’re forgetting they’re not supposed to be on a first name basis

[gowerhardcastle]

"After Story" by Poll Thoughts

So far, I'm on the third installment of my project of crafting an "After Story" as a serial, polling patrons and working on the branches that are selected. It's an interesting experience so far, working on Another Story With Rory.

I've been writing various branches, not just the ones that have been selected, because it's easy and fun and a nice break from the slightly heavier lifting of Tea and Scones. But what I find really interesting and not at all surprising is what direction the polls have been going in.

This is designed as an after story specifically for people who completed the romance path with Rory in Tally Ho, and therefore, the audience for it seems very likely to want a particular mood for the After Story.

So a choice that asks what you want to do when your love, Rory, is having trouble adjusting the temperature in the bath:

There is a "long-suffering" response (choice 2) and a choice that tries to be responsible about time (choice 4) and then the two choices that got much more attention: choice 1 is banter, and choice 3 (the one that won) is the one that treats Rory like a precious prized love to be saved from the horrors of tepid water.

No surprise that that one wins! Similarly, a choice about what to do during the bath:

This is the end of a romance path, so naturally, what do people most want? Romance. This is not a surprise, or rather, it shouldn't have been a surprise. Long-suffering, snark, and responsibility is not going to win against romance.

However--and this is the key point--I think those options are actually important, because their presence shows the reader what they are not choosing--they stand for paths that the reader is actively rejecting in favor of a softer, sweeter narrative. And to me, there's real value in creating options and paths that serve as signposts to some other possibility even if they aren't taken.

Because that--more than anything--makes a choice take on weight and meaning, knowing that you could very well have diverged, and that the relationship you are forging has a particular feel because you've chosen to give it that feel.

I'll be interested to see where this goes; we're only on the fourth real choice at this point, and this one might not lean in any obvious direction for someone who wants to play it sweet and romantic.

There's a banging at the door:

This has some of my favorite kind of choice-making--it makes the reader collaborate in the storytelling (is Snood going to be in this story or not); suggests some stakes (what happens if we get the door? but what happens if we don't?) and helps the player think about their character's personality, all in one choice.

I'll be very interested to see what gets chosen here. All in all, this is an amazing experience to see as a writer, how player are choosing, because usually I don't get that kind of feedback until way later in the process.

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If words are your favorite thing, and if they give you a cold thrill of delight down every bit of your spine, come read Another Story With Rory as it gets created, and also read the brand-new slice of Chapter Two of Tea and Scones that just came out today right here at the Noble Gases Club! And here's the first chunk of Another Story With Rory (for free) right here.

[gowerhardcastle]

Bones, Flesh, and Spirit

Forgive me if you've seen me write about this before on the Choice of Games Forum, but it's about my favorite thing to write about when it comes to writing interactive narrative, and I've never talked about it here:

I think about my writing days as "bones" days, "flesh" days, and "spirit" days.

"Bones" are when you are putting together the big mechanical parts--where you route players through paths, work out the stat or variable checks that govern the interactivity, and how the different characters are going to interact with the main character broadly.  I do this using "xxx" for the prose, so that when I am done with the bones, you can actually play through the chapter or the vignette, with all the mechanical parts in play, but no story.

The "flesh" is where I add story.  This is where I transform the "xxx" into story, which is a lot of fun, because the hard work of figuring out how the stats are getting bumped and how the routing goes is done, and all I have to do is write something funny.  So I might sit down and say, all right, I have 12 "xxx" in this part.  I now have to write twelve funny paragraphs about decorating (or failing to) decorate a cake and what Gilberto would have to say about that, for example.  Or I might have to--as I did today, actually--write a description of some cocktails being served at a party and precisely how they are either served or destroyed by your actions.  That's the flesh.  

I used to write the bones and the flesh together, but I'm converted utterly to a first bones, then flesh process.

The "spirit" is the last step.  That's where I do another pass and add a lot of reactivity--even after the bones and flesh are there.  I play through and ask myself what this chapter should look like if you have a character with very low Observe.  Or someone who had previously insulted the servants.  Or someone who has spent time looking good and watching to make a splashy entrance.  Here I add little snippets of prose and stats to recognize your character's small choices or minor qualities.  Here is where I do call backs to previous chapters and games.  Here is where I make you feel like the game is listening to you and not being pushy about the direction of the plot or the character--it's where I work to make you feel like you have some ownership over the main character.  It's the spirit, because this is where the game starts living.

I would recommend this three-stage process to anyone who wants to write a long game.  It is very tempting to ignore the spirit, because the bones and flesh take so long to write, but I want my games to be lingered on, replayed many many times, and have a lot of nods to something the player chose.  The effect of doing that is for the player to be assured that *whatever you choose is right*.  We're telling this story together, and I, the writer, have your back, no matter what.

By the way, if you are interested in seeing the original pitch for Tally Ho, I put it here; there's also a snippet about writing very minor characters here. Both are wholly free--enjoy!

[gowerhardcastle]

Another Story with Rory

I'm trying something a bit new in between long sessions of working on Tea and Scones. I've been wanting to write some "After Story" games based on the love interests in Tally Ho, and I've started the process of working on Another Story with Rory.

You can read about it (and vote!) here in this free first snippet to see how I'm going to write this. I've never crafted interactive fiction this way, but it should be an interesting experiment.

My intention is that since these "After Stories" are going to be largely non-stat based and more like the Epilogue stories of Tally Ho, they would be a good candidate for lots of reader feedback and voting to see what direction the story goes in. I expect to post a good deal here about what I'm learning from the process.

If you'd like to read the first (short and free) installment, it's here.

[gowerhardcastle]

Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore, tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore, quoth the raven "Stop pining after a date with Pilcrow you cantankerous baleful fiend"

Will Pilcrow ever be an ro? I know she isn't in this book but like, future? Possibly? Or is the bartender just far too dedicated to the fine craft of servantry

Originally, I was going to have Buck and Juniper be full love interests in Tea and Scones, but I was (correctly) talked out of this on the grounds that there was no way I could give the love interests the attention and time I wanted to if I had seven of them. Therefore, they are what I would call characters who are not full-on love interests, but inhabit a realm between love interest and not-love-interest.

You can get closer to them, spend time with them, and they can open up to you emotionally.

Pilcrow falls very much in the same camp. She's someone you can deepen your relationship with, spend time with, even--if you thread a pretty narrow path--go on a date with of sorts in Tea and Scones, but she is not a love interest.

I have no idea what will happen in the third and final game in the series regarding this, though. I'm going to leave my options open there.

I want her to be, but at the same time, but work wise and time wise, it's hard for me to figure out how to do it in a way that makes sense in a finite lifetime (and in a world where I'm teaching a 4/4 courseload). And to do it right, to do Pilcrow justice, it would need a lot of time and attention to make it something really interesting and distinct and special.

I know this is not exactly an answer, and possibly I'll surprise myself. We'll see where it goes.

[gowerhardcastle]

Write Like You Write

One of the hardest things for my students to internalize is when I say "I don't want you to write like I write, I want you to write like you write."

This is not comforting to them. They want to be assured that if they play it safe and abide by guidelines and boundaries and rubrics that I give them, or copy a model, that they will succeed. Where "succeed" means "pass the class." I understand about the need to pass.

Still. What I try to tell them is that I don't want them to play it safe, and that I want them to think about how they want to break guidelines and boundaries and to suck the marrow out of the models and then throw them over their shoulders.

Read more musing about writing motivation and inspiration right here (it's a free article).

[gowerhardcastle]

Do you have any tattoos/what tattoo would you get if you had to choose one? And do you have a description of Haze’s autumn leaf tattoo lying around and what might be different about the tattoo from the jolly good protag’s potential one in your head?

Anyway, there is a non-zero chance that I get the ol’ autumn leaf behind the ear tattoo in real life 😆

This is an excellent question.

I do have a tattoo. I was sitting in my car, and I had left a very sharp pencil in a little nook on the door, pointing up. I leaned a weird way, and the point of the pencil lodged itself in my elbow. I pulled it out, uttering several curses at the pencil and its ancestors.

This was eighteen years ago. Since then, I have had a small graphite dot on my right elbow that I can only see when I place my hand on my shoulder. That is the tattoo that I have.

I don't believe that I ever describe Haze's (or the Jolly Good character's) tattoo other than "a small tattoo of an autumn leaf behind their ear," so you may feel free to take artistic license. Someone sent me a picture of an autumn leaf tattoo behind their ear many years ago, after Tally Ho came out, and it was a lovely gradient from bright green to red to orange to yellow, and I thought that was a really interesting interpretation.

Side note: three times--in three different years--after my Tolkien class, I have had students come up and show me tattoos of Lord of the Rings related tattoos that the class inspired them to get. I gave them extra credit if they could write a short explanation of what precisely inspired them and how the tattoo evoked that inspiration.

I am kind of pleased and humbled to be the provoker of tattoos in two completely separate spheres of my life.

[gowerhardcastle]

i’ve noticed similes are kind of at the heart of both Wodehouse’s stuff and yours. they’re always so colorful and unexpected. How do you come up with them? Any tips or tricks? I really struggle with making similes funny or just fresh, especially since English isn’t my first language. Would love to hear your thoughts!

I thought and thought about how I wanted to answer this, and I was about to answer, "well, I just do it."

But that seemed unsatisfying.

So I did a search in one chapter of Tea and Scones and picked out a random assortment of similes to see if I could identify how I write them.

Here is what I learned about my method of writing similes.

All emotions are over-the-top, felt at the highest possible pitch:

Uncle Preston Plops' words are quite literally boring, as in "boring like a drill or auger," directly into into the sulci of your brain and squirming around in there as if to devour it.

You focus your efforts, trying to bring to bear every last bit of social grace and training, but no, no, it is like a piece of tissue paper trying to hold back a raging river.

"I have seen his spirit, and it is beautiful.  Like a strong but tender oak sapling, pushing up its tendrils from the earth to bid good morning to the day."

You let it fall to the ground, your pulse pounding in your temples like an angry judge calling for order.

Animals are funny:

Rory jumps into the driver's seat, and you jump on top of her, thrashing like a fish flopping around on land.

In this position, with neck lifted high, she looks like a horse who is also an empress, cold and commanding, preparing to prove her worth on the field of battle or the racetrack.

She hisses at you like a territorial goose who has just staked out a claim on an entire pond.

Her lips meet yours, her mouth seeking yours like a fox seeking berries and small rodents.  You shake your head and try to focus.

Food is funny:

You try to force thoughts through your fevered brain.  It feels like attempting to push a cup of very hot tea through a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes.

She holds her teeth against your arm tightly, as if to let you know that she could take a generous bite of you like a celery stalk stuffed with crumbled gorgonzola cheese and sliced green olives.

I like similes that tell a little story, a story that extends the simile just a little too long and gives a little too much detail:

Then he makes a sound like a laugh, but one without any humor at all in it.  A gloating, wheezing whisper of a laugh, dry like a desiccated arm bone lying out in an uncared-for churchyard.

You feel something like a skydiver who has jumped from a plane, and then, and only then, begins to feel around in his pockets to see if he has remembered to pack his parachute.

You can tell that he is a bit uneasy about your words, like a person who has been handed a cup of coffee that they have been assured is decaffeinated by a distracted coffee-maker.

Above all else, I'm a student of Homer's when it comes to epic simile, and of Wodehouse's when it comes to bonkers comparisons. I find the well-wielded simile hilarious and evocative, and I reach for them very frequently as a way of adding extra jokes, and extra-lavish description into a situation.

Thank goodness, I don't have to know how to employ them in non-comic genres.

Why do I write at such length about simile and other fascinating elements of writing and interactive game design? It is solely to lure you to the Noble Gases Club, your sole destination for well-written prose, an unaccountably lengthy demo of Jolly Good: Tea and Scones, and a freely available discussion of pre-physical intimacy.