#i had no idea people were into discworld on this site

[fictional-god-poll]

[nyxshadowhawk]

A Retrospective on Harry Potter

Why did I like it in the first place? What about it worked? Where do I go from here?

I have decided to give up Harry Potter.

J.K. Rowling’s reputation now stinks to high heaven. At this point, she is quite indefensible. And even if that weren’t the case, she is not someone that I would want to associate with anyway. Meanwhile, the internet has not only turned against her, but against Harry Potter itself. An innocent question on Reddit, about which Hogwarts Houses the ATLA characters would be in, got downvoted to oblivion. Innumerable Tumblr threads insist that fantasy fans should get into literally anything else (suggestions include Discworld, Earthsea, The Wheel of Time, and Percy Jackson). And now that Harry Potter is no longer a sacred cow, there has been a recent slew of video essays that rip it to shreds, attacking it for its poor worldbuilding, unoriginality, and the problematic ideas baked into the original books (like the whole SPEW thing), etc. Those criticisms always existed, but now they’re getting thrown into the limelight.

It pains me to see such an ignoble downfall of Harry Potter’s reputation. If Rowling had just kept her damn mouth shut, Harry Potter would have aged gracefully, becoming a beloved children’s classic. I'd still plan to introduce it to my own kids one day (after Rowling dies and the dust settles). It’s not surprising that not all aspects of it have aged well, since it’s been more than twenty years since its original publishing date, and everything starts to show its age after that long. I acknowledge that most of the criticisms of the series that I’ve seen lately are valid, and I’ve read plenty of better books. And yet, when I return to the books themselves, even with the knowledge of who JKR really is inside my head, I still really enjoy reading them! There’s still a lot about them that I think works!

None of the other things I’ve read have had as collossal of an impact upon my identity, my values, and my own writing as Harry Potter. It’s hard to move on from it, not just because it’s something I enjoy, but because I have to literally extract my identity from it. I don’t know who I’d be without Harry Potter. I don’t know what my work would look like without Harry Potter. I don’t know how to carry it with me as just another piece of media that I like, as opposed to a filter for who I am as a person. So, with all that in mind, I have to ask myself why I liked Harry Potter so much in the first place. If I’m going to move on from it, then I have to be able to define and isolate the things about it that I want to keep with me. Something about it obviously worked, on a massive scale. So what was it?

It’s not the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is objectively quite terrible, especially in comparison to that of other fantasy writers who knew what they were doing. At best, it’s inconsistent and poorly thought-out, and at worst it’s insensitive or even racist. Is it the characters? The characters are, in my opinion, one of the stronger parts of the story. But I felt very called-out by one of the many online commentators, who said that anyone who identifies with Harry is too cowardly to write self-insert fic. (I do not remember who said it or even which site it was on, but I distinctly remember the phrase, “Reject Harry Potter, embrace Y/N.”) The reason why people get so invested in Harry Potter’s characters is because they’re easy to project upon, and it’s possible that my love of Harry comes more from over a decade’s worth of projection than anything else. The incessant arguments over characters like Snape, Dumbledore, and James Potter ultimately stem from the fact that these characters do not always come across the way Rowling wanted them to. As for the writing itself, it’s decent, but not spectacular. Harry Potter is something of a sandbox world, with less substance than it appears to have and a crapton of missed opportunities, making it ripe for fanfic. For more than ten years, I’ve been doing precisely that — using Harry Potter as a jumping-off point to fill in the gaps and develop my own ideas, some of which became my original projects.

So what does Harry Potter actually have that sets it apart? Why are people so desperate to be part of Harry Potter’s world if the worldbuilding is bad? What, specifically, is so compelling about it? I think that there’s one answer, one thing that is at the center of Potter-mania, and that has been the underlying drive of my love of it for the past decade and a half: the vibe.

Harry Potter’s vibe is immaculate.

You know what I mean, right? It’s not actually a product of any specific trope, but rather a series of aesthetic elements: The wizarding school in a grand castle, with its pointed windows and torches and suits of armor, ghosts and talking portraits and moving staircases, its Great Hall with floating candles and a ceiling that looks like the night sky, its hundreds of magically-concealed secret doorways. Dumbledore’s Office, behind the gryphon statue, with armillary spheres in every single shot. Deliberate archaisms that evoke the Middle Ages without going as far as a Ren Faire: characters wearing heavy robes, writing with quills and ink on parchment instead of paper, drinking from goblets, decorating with tapestries. Owls, cats, toads. Cauldrons simmering in a dungeon laboratory. Shelves piled with dusty tomes, scrolls, glass vials, crystal balls, hourglasses. Magical candy shaped like insects and amphibians. A library with a restricted section. A forbidden forest full of unicorns and werewolves. That is the Vibe.

There are five armillary spheres just in this shot. They are unequivocally the most Wizard of tabletop decor.

There’s more to it than just the aesthetic, though. The vibe is present in something that writers call soft worldbuilding.

There’s a phrase that writers use to describe magic systems, coined by Brandon Sanderson: hard magic and soft magic. Sanderson’s first law of magic is, “An author’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” A hard magic system has clearly-defined rules — you know where magic comes from, how it works and under which conditions, how the characters can use it, and what its limitations are. Examples of really good hard magic systems include Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist. If the audience doesn’t understand the conditions under which magic can work, then using magic to get out of any kind of scrape risks feeling like the writer pulled something out of their ass. It begs the question, “Well, if they could do that, then why didn’t they do that before?”

You may come away from that thinking that having clearly-defined rules is always better worldbuilding than not having them, but this isn’t the case. Soft magic isn’t fully explained to the audience, but that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t trying to solve problems — its purpose is to be evocative. Soft magic enhances the atmosphere of a world by creating a sense of wonder. If your everyman protagonist is constantly running into cool magical shit that they don’t understand, then the world feels like it teems with magic, magic that is greater and more powerful than they know, leaving lots of secrets to uncover. Harry Potter, at least in the early books, excels at this. The soft magic in Harry Potter is what got me hooked, and I think it’s what a lot of other people liked about it, too.

The essence of soft magic is best summed up by this scene in the fourth film, in which Harry enters the Weasleys’ tiny tent at the Quidditch World Cup, only to find that it’s much bigger on the inside. His reaction is to smile and say, “I love magic.”

That’s it. That’s the essence of it. You don’t need to know the exact spell that makes the tent bigger on the inside. You don’t need to know how Dumbledore can make the food appear on the table with a flick of a wand, or how he can make a bunch of poofy sleeping bags appear with another flick. You don’t need to know how and why the portraits or wizard cards move. You don’t need to know how wizards can appear and disappear on a whim, or what the Deluminator is, or where the Sword of Gryffindor came from. You don’t need to know how the Room of Requirement works. Knowing these things defeats the purpose. It kills the vibe, that vibe being that there is a large and wondrous magical world around you that will always have more to discover.

One of the best “soft magic” moments in the books comes early in Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry is trying to navigate Hogwarts for the first time:

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk. —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 8

Many of these details don’t come back later in the series, which is a shame, because this one paragraph is super evocative! It establishes Hogwarts as an inherently magical place, in which the very architecture doesn’t conform to normal rules. Hogwarts seems like it would be exciting to explore (assuming you weren’t late for class), and it gets even better when you learn about all the secret rooms and passages. The games capitalized on this by building all the secret rooms behind bookcases, mirrors, illusory walls, etc. into the game world, and rewarding you for finding them. The utter fascination that produces is hard to overstate.

Another one of the most evocative moments in the first book is when Harry sees Diagon Alley for the first time, after passing through the magically sealed brick wall (the mechanics of which, again, are never explained). This is your first proper glimpse at the wizarding world and what it has to offer:

Harry wished he had about eight more eyes. He turned his head in every direction as they walked up the street, trying to look at everything at once: the shops, the things outside them, the people doing their shopping. A plump woman outside an Apothecary was shaking her head as they passed, saying, “Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad....” A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eeylops Owl Emporium — Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy. Several boys of about Harry's age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it. "Look," Harry heard one of them say, "the new Nimbus Two Thousand — fastest ever —" There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels' eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon.... —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 5

What works so well here is the magical weirdness of wizardishness juxtaposed against normalcy. Eeylops Owl Emporium is just a pet shop to wizards. A woman makes a very mundane complaint about the price of goods, but the goods happen to be dragon liver. Broomsticks are treated like cars. All of these small moments contribute to the feeling of the wizarding world being alive, inhabited, and also magical. It gets you to ask the question of what your life would be like if you were a wizard. What do wizards wear? What do they eat? What do they haggle over and complain about? What do they do for fun?

In Book 3, Harry enjoys Diagon Alley for a few weeks when he suddenly has free time, and we get to experience the wizarding world in a state of “normalcy,” when he isn’t trying to save the world. He gets free ice creams from Florean Fortescue, gazes longingly at the Firebolt, and engages with delightfully weird people. He’s a wizard, living a (briefly) normal wizard life among other wizards in wizard-land. And that is fun. It’s so fun, that people want that experience for themselves, enough for there to be several theme parks and other immersive experiences dedicated to recreating the world of Harry Potter.

One of the greatest things about Universal was its phenomenal attention to detail. You can hear Moaning Myrtle’s voice in the women’s bathroom, and only the women’s bathroom. The walls of the Three Broomsticks have shadows of a broom sweeping by itself and an owl flying projected against the wall, so convincingly that you’ll do a double take when you see it. Knockturn Alley is down a little secret tunnel off of the main street, and that’s where you have to go to buy Dark Arts-themed stuff. It’s really well done.

Another thing that contributes to the vibe, in my opinion, is that the wizarding world is slightly macabre. They eat candy shaped like frogs, flies, mice, and so forth, and they have gross-tasting jellybeans. In the film’s version of the Diagon Alley sequence above, there’s a random shot of a pet bat available for purchase. In the third film, when Harry is practicing the Patronus Charm with Lupin, the candles are shaped like human spines. In the first book, this is Petunia’s description of Lily’s behavior after she became a witch:

Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that-that school, and came home every holiday with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was — a freak! —Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 4

I remember reading this for the first time, and it just kind of made intuitive sense to me. I suppose it fits into the “eye of newt and toe of frog” association between magical people and gross things, but somehow it works. Unfortunately, this is retconned later with the knowledge that wizards can’t use magic outside school, but before that limitation gets imposed, the idea of Lily amusing herself by turning teacups into rats seems like an inherently witchy thing to do.

That association between magic and the macabre shows up elsewhere, as well. In The Owl House, Luz’s interest in gross things is one of the things that marks her as a “weirdo” in the real world. When she goes to the magical world of the Boiling Isles, weird and gross stuff is absolutely everywhere. That world’s vibe leans more towards the macabre than the whimsical, but it works because you sort of expect the gross stuff to exist alongside the concept of witches, and that they would be an intrinsic part of the world they inhabit. You don’t question it, because it’s part of the vibe.

(The Owl House is one of the few things I’ve encountered that has a similar vibe to Harry Potter, but it’s still not the same vibe. In fact, The Owl House outright mocks the expectation that magical worlds be whimsical, and directly mocks Harry Potter more than once. The overall vibe is much closer to Gravity Falls.)

The Harry Potter films utilize a lot of similar soft worldbuilding with the background details, especially in the early films that were still brightly-colored and whimsical. For example, the scene in Flourish and Blotts in the second film has impossibly-stacked piles of books and old-timey looking signs describing their subjects, which include things like “Celestial Studies” and “Unicorns.” When Harry arrives in the Burrow in the same film, one of the first things he sees is dishes washing themselves and knitting needles working by themselves, taking completely mundane things and instantly establishing them as magical. In that Patronus scene with Harry and Lupin, the spine-candles and a bunch of random orbs (and the obligatory giant armillary sphere) float around in the background. One small detail that I personally appreciate is the designs on the walls above the teacher’s table in the Great Hall, which are from an alchemical manuscript called the Ripley Scroll:

It’s all these little things that add up to produce The Vibe.

Obviously, much of the vibe is expressed very well in John Williams’ score for the first three Harry Potter films. The mystical minor key of the main theme, the tinkly glockenspiel, the strings, the rising and falling notes that mimic the fluttering of an owl, the flight of a broomstick, or the waving of a wand. That initial shot of the castle across the lake as the orchestra swells, as the children arrive at their wizarding school:

If you grew up with Harry Potter, just looking at this image gives you The Vibe. The nostalgia hit is definitely part of it, but The Vibe was already there, back when you were a child and you didn’t have nostalgia yet.

In my opinion, only Williams’ score captures this vibe — the later films, though their scores are very good, do not. But the soundtrack of the first two video games, by Jeremy Soule (the same person who did Skyrim) absolutely nails it. This, right here, is Harry Potter’s vibe, condensed and distilled:

This is why I feel invalidated by the common advice “just read another book.” I have read other books. I’ve read plenty of other books, many of which are wonderfully written and have left an impact on me. But there’s still only one Harry Potter. To date, there’s only other book that has filled me with a similarly intense longing for a fictional place, and that is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. That book deliberately prioritized atmosphere over everything else in the story, and actually lampshades this in-universe. The Night Circus has a plot and it has characters, but it’s not about its plot or characters. It’s about the setting and its atmosphere. It swallows you up and transports you to a fictional place that is so evocative and so magical that you just have to be part of it or you’ll die. And even then, The Night Circus has a different kind of vibe from Harry Potter. In this particular capacity, there’s nothing else like Harry Potter.

The thing is, I don’t think Rowling was being as deliberate as Erin Morgenstern. (In fact, given many of Rowling’s recent statements, I question how many of her creative choices were deliberated at all.) She was throwing random magical stuff into the background without thinking too hard about it, which works when you’re writing a kids’ story, but stops working when you try to age it up. Actually, scratch that — soft worldbuilding is definitely not just for kids! The Lord of the Rings has a soft magic system, for crying out loud, and Tolkien is the original archmage of worldbuilding. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that prioritizing atmosphere over meticulousness is bad worldbuilding. That is a valid way to worldbuild! Not everything needs to be clearly explained, not everything needs to make sense. The problem is that Harry Potter doesn’t balance it well. Certain things do have to be explained in order for the magic to play an active role in the story (and the setting of a magic school lends itself to that kind of explanation), but no rules are ever established for the kinds of magic that need rules. When you begin thinking about the rules, you’re no longer just enjoying the magic for what it is. At worst, you begin running up against the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

It wasn’t actually the “aging up” of the story that did it in, per se, but rather, the introduction of realism. The early books were heavily stylized, and the later books were less so. A heavily stylized story can more easily maintain the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. That’s why, for example, you don’t ask why the characters are singing in a musical — you just sort of accept the story’s outlandish internal logic, and the inherent melodrama of it doesn’t take you out of the story. Stylized stories are more concerned with being emotionally consistent over being logically consistent. The later Harry Potter books changed their emotional tone, but without changing the worldbuilding style to compensate.

In addition to the more mature themes and darker tone, Harry Potter introduced more realism as it went, but Rowling did not have the worldbuilding chops to pull this off. There’s the basic magic system stuff: When you begin thinking about it too hard, something like a Time-Turner stops being a fun magical device, and starts threatening to break the entire story. Then there’s the characters: Dumbledore leaving Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the first book is an age-old fairy tale trope that goes unquestioned, but with the introduction of realism in the later books, it suddenly becomes abandonment of a child to an abusive family. The exaggerated stereotypes of characters like the Dursleys become tone-deaf. The fun school rivalry of the House system is suddenly lacking in nuance. And then there’s the shift in tone: The wizarding world that we were introduced to as a marvellous place is revealed to be dystopian. You start thinking about how impractical things like owl messengers are, you start wondering if Slytherin is being unjustly punished, the bad history appears glaringly obvious, the quaint archaisms become dangerously regressive. Oh, and the grand feasts are made through slave labor! The wizarding world suddenly feels small and backward instead of grand and marvellous. J.K. Rowling’s bigotry throws it all into an even harsher light.

This is why I’ve always preferred the early books and films to the later ones. There’s a lot of things I like about the later ones, but they’re not as stylized — they don’t have The Vibe. Thinking about things too hard is just a necessary condition of adulthood, but it’s still possible to tell a dark, mature story that is highly stylized. I really think JKR could have better pulled off that shift if she was a more competent worldbuilder. But it is painfully obvious that she did not think things through, and probably didn’t understand why she had to. In her defense, she did not know that her story would end up being one of the most scrutinized of all time. As it stands, her strength in worldbuilding was in the softer, smaller, deliberately unexplained moments of magic that were there just to provide atmosphere. And there were less and less of those as the books went along.

Pretty much all the Harry Potter-related content released since the last film — including Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts, Hogwarts Mystery, Hogwarts Legacy, Magic Awakened, and that short-lived Pokemon Go thing — have been unsuccessful attempts at recreating The Vibe. In fact, the only piece of supplemental Potter content that I think had that Vibe down pat was the original Pottermore, back when it was more of an interactive game. And of course that got axed. That was right around the time things started going downhill.

Some of the art from Pottermore’s original Sorting quiz.

So what now? Well, that’s the question.

I think I can safely say that The Vibe was the reason I liked Harry Potter. It’s the thing I still like the most about it. I’ve spent years chasing it, like an elusive Patronus through a dark wood. If I can capture and distill that Vibe, and use drops of it in my own work, then perhaps I won’t need Harry Potter anymore.

I'm gonna write the story that I wish Harry Potter was, and when I'm a famous author, I won't become a bigot. I'll see you on the other side.

[tiredelirium]

D.7

I haven’t read nearly as many books in my life so far as I should’ve. When I was a kid I used to consume them like kindling. One time I read an entire two hundred page book in the backseat of my mum’s car while she was shopping. She was only gone for maybe half an hour, but the words out of that book flowed pretty easily to me. My memory is bad, so all I remember of that particular book is that it was an Ursula Le Guin one, though I couldn’t tell you which cause I read so many different things back then.

As I got older I stopped reading books as much, only because I found the reading elsewhere. RPG games had so much reading, as did online games like Runescape and WOW with their forums. I started reading more comics and manga, in a wide range of stuff, from Cardcaptor Sakura and Bleach to the likes of Death Note and Berserk. Though I never really watched Anime as much, I think that was partly because I always liked the art in the manga better and, like with most media, lots of content gets cut from the pages to the screen.

I still read from time to time, two of my favourite writers, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett being books I always picked up when I could. I reread a lot of old stuff too with fresh eyes after movies and tv shows came out, like the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series.

Harry Potter was always a weird one to me even before a reread. While I could enjoy the magical concepts of the world, so much was nonsensical that it just drew you out of the story. Like, why would a magical world such as this be so afeared and secluded from the rest of the world that they’d need a underfunded department to *study* non-magicians?

However, I still enjoyed it when I first read it, because I was a kid at the time of the first book, and could envision myself as a wizard in that world without being able to truly conceptualise all the wrongs present, and the writer’s own opinions and hidden thoughts plastered throughout.

Between the ages of 10 and 13 I was fairly active on an avatar website, forums built largely for teens to talk and talk to others about hobbies and interests. Here was the first place, and arguably last, that I actively wrote with others. The reason why I mentioned Harry Potter, despite the superior Discworld franchise or the funner Sandman works, is because one of the first interactive role plays I took part in was a Harry Potter one.

Each person involved -after sending in a forum application with their character idea with name, personality, history, goals highlighted- wrote a single post, often a paragraph or two in length. Others would work on their own responses, and so the story was written by the parts of many influences.

It was my first foray in role play writing, and I enjoyed it immensely. But, like all internet activities, I practiced safety. Never sharing my real name, pictures or information with the people I wrote with, even months into that experience.

A part of me regrets that. Especially now so long after that account has been buried and forgotten alongside the website it was on. I think if I had’ve I likely would still be friends with those people today, maybe even still writing. All I know about that first group is that one of them was French and another Filipino, I think most of the others were American, and I was the only English.

It was fun to write those back and forths, effortlessly engaging, and likely the driving reason why a handful of years after I stopped using that site I’d find myself watching a lot of TTRPG content. I didn’t have the confidence to do anything in person, and despite living in the city finding a place where one could even play ttrpgs was a task. So I watched. I consumed. I read some more.

The original series I saw was Roll Play, by ItMeJP, who ran many different liveplay dnd shows before they became the more mainstream option like they are now, where everybody and their mum has a dungeons and dragon’s podcast with their own spin on it. It was a good series, full of enjoyable creators working together and having a blast, and I got to have a blast in tandem listening to them.

Sadly that series ultimately ended due to a slew of reasons that I won’t get into, but it gave me inspiration and made me want to play too.

At the end of university I finally got round to having courage enough to ask some people if they wanted to try it out. These people were my housemates in my third year and I liked them all, as they were all pretty fun and nerdy in their own ways. I think if I was a more driven person I likely would’ve been able to maintain friendships with them after uni, but alas.

The first game I ran took into account the groups love of the Walking Dead, and was a simple setup. Not classic dnd stuff really, not even a module. This was largely because every liveplay I’d listened to or watched over the years had never been based on an existing module but a homebrewed setting instead. Though my setting for those games wasn’t something built entirely, it was a basic fantasy.

The party awoke in the woods where they were camping for the night, having been disturbed by noises in the bushes, after having a run-in on the road with some silk merchants, two men and a boy, who they helped out by fending off some wolves. Surrounding them in the woods were hundreds of corpses slowly wading through the bushes toward the camp clearing. As they looked on in terror, some spell came over them, rendering them asleep. The one who rolled the highest on their save got to notice two things before they fainted: that all the corpses had a marked etching on their forehead, and that there was someone else in the woods beside the corpses.

When the party awoke they were trapped in a cell underground. They broke out handily, and began to head up the stairs, finding themselves within a sealed tower, no sign of the silk merchants. With the door sealed in a way they couldn’t open it they were forced to head up the tower to seek exit or means to unlock the door and find freedom.

In the tower the party encountered a handful of living dead guards, a lab with notes of strange experiments, and living quarters. One of them was able to recognise a corpse that attacked them as being one of the two silk merchants, while another found the body of the other silk merchant, left a cadaver on a slab as an object of study. As they finally reached the apex of the tower, having found no means of escape as yet, they encounter a large undead creature whose body radiates death.

They find the boy who worked for the silk merchants, now mutated to anything but a boy.

This was their first boss, and they handled it well. Around the boys neck was an arcane key that unlocked the tower, while the room held an altar with a book bound in flesh, marked with the same symbol the party saw on the boy’s head.

This marked the end of that game, that had taken place over the course of two sessions, several months apart. The first session had been in person, as I’d travelled to their house in their fourth year to play, and had used a roll out gridded matt to make maps on. The second session had taken place over a skype call while using Roll20.

That was the last time that I ran a game for them. Not because I didn’t want to run more, or because they didn’t want to play anymore, but because times had changed and we all were doing different things. University had ended, with some of them doing master’s degrees at that uni, while others had went elsewhere. I’d went home, and, like always terrible at communication, began to message less and less. The straw that broke the camels back there was when I lost access to my facebook account due to email issues I kind of lost my ability to reach out to them as well.

I could probably try, and I think they’d probably answer, but it’s been so long now that I don’t think I have the guts to even attempt the reach. Who knows where they are now or what they’re doing, especially with the way things in the world have changed and altered so much.

It was fun though. That was the first game I ever ran, and it was by no means the last.

[starrypawz]

Under a cut as this is a bit morbid and relates to funerals, death etc and i’m basically just processing some feelings involves both pet death and parental death

But I saw this post earlier today (funnily enough via the discworld reddit as someone found it quite pratchettesque)

and yeah it got me thinking about what happened around my mum’s death last summer. (I think most people whove been following me for a while know about this? But short version my mum passed last summer from cancer)

And yeah how like it really did sort of feel I was pulled into a ritual that I didn’t really want to participate in but I still had to.

For me I found like her funeral felt more like it was for ‘other people’ and I didn’t really ‘need it’ and tbh I think it would’ve served me better if i hadn’t have gone. I think for me it was part my brain sort of hit a point somewhere in 2020 that kind of went ‘you know what fuck this im out im not emotionally processing anything more ciao’ so I’ve been probably more numb than is wise at times and also the fact I think due to the nature of her passing which was fairly sudden but like also not as although I wasn’t directly told it was terminal (Actually quite a lot about her prognosis was kept from me for better or worse)

I think I’d sort of connected dots and like especially in the last few weeks it was pretty obvious and she was to me sort of uh... gone before she was gone? (idk if that sounds insensitive but you know?) and made peace with the idea and so by the time she did pass I’d sort of processed a lot of it already. (also probably my own personal feelings on death and mortality etc) also i’d dealt with a lesser but also painful loss early 2020 when my dog Barney passed fairly suddenly (he’d been ill for a little while but was... holding in there then suddenly got worse, he had to be rushed to the vet one night and had to be overnight and he seemed somewhat ok, but then whilst sedated for an xray our vet found a large (probably not cancer) mass in his chest that was causing the problems so it was decided not to bring him around and put him to sleep whilst he was still under so in a way I didn’t really get to say goodbye to him properly. And it’s oddly similar to what happened to my childhood cat who was rushed to the vet one morning with a heart attack but she passed just before my parents could get her to the vet, as in they were at the last set of lights before the vets

And yeah it was like I was pulled into this weird ritual, I was despite the fact it was my mother who died still expected to act a certain way, do certain things and shoulder other people’s stuff. And like I had people around me and for me I actually found it very suffocating as like people were very much deciding for me what I needed when actually what I needed/wanted was space alone but I wasn’t allowed that I had to participate in this instead.

(I also had another lesser loss in this time, like about a week before my mum was brought home to be put into end of life home hospice care I was very suddenly informed that my volunteering role that I had at a local zoo (that yet again if you’ve been with me a while you’ll know about) was terminated and I wasn’t needed like I’d been there for about 8ish years? and then just boom nothing gone )

(weirdly i’ve just realised sort of sudden, closureless endings are quite a common theme in my life of varying degrees, the way i ‘lost’ a childhood friend of mine in primary school as she started hanging around with my bullies,  the online friend I had when I was around 12 who one day I sent my usual greetings too and she just told me straight blank that the fact I always opened our conversations like ‘hi, how are you, what you doing?’ was boring and then... yeah friendship over boom in an instant, the way the volunteering role i’d had for a few years at an animal rescue ended pretty abruptly because higher ups decided to close the site, the time i was fired from a job the day after i graduated with my masters degree and a few other motments)

Like I really felt during that period and also the last month or so when things were nearing the end I sort of just... lost a lot of my autonomy I think and it was a weird experience. Because of course my mum’s needs were greater than mine and I had a role to play  but it was sort of pushed on me at the expense of everything else where I had to shoulder and manage other people’s emotional expectations and have pressure put on me that I 1. didn’t ask for 2. couldn’t really cope with. And yeah it sort of felt like suddenly I wasn’t a person for a while as my needs straight up didn’t matter for a while.

And yeah just... idk how to conclude this but that’s just how it felt I was just pulled out of everything and pushed into a ritual i wasn’t prepared for and didn’t want to be in but it Had To Be Done and it was a weird time.

[betweentheheavesofstorm]

i keep thinking i’m done beating this dead horse but no, because i’ve now read an interview with Kester Grant that explains, Well, a Lot.

 I’m also pissing myself because on her Agent’s site bio, she’s listed as being born on December 5, “alongside notorious British rebel Guy Fawkes” which strongly suggests that SOMEONE involved thought Guy Fawkes was born on November 5.

I then looked at her About page on her own website, where the note is “Death-day of notorious British rebel Guy Fawkes celebrated annually in the UK by giant morbidly ironic bonfire's & firework displays” which is ALSO wrong because he wasn’t even brought to trial till the following January ?? the fireworks commemorate the gunpowder plot aka the actual thing that happened on the 5th of november ohh my god  kester grant use wikipedia challenge 

Anyway, this is gonna be a Long Post, so I’m gonna put the quotes + commentary under the cut:

Firstly, Marius DID appear in an initial draft, only to be deleted later:

He was present in the first draft of the book when I sold it to the publishing house and I just struggled every time I had to write a scene with him. All the scenes with Marius and Enjolras St. Juste (it was Marius originally as well as St. Juste, and St. Juste was just a secondary character) and I was saying to my husband ‘if only I could write this scene with just St. Juste it would be 3 million times better’ [...] So I said to my editor, “listen, could I cut Marius?” and she said “absolutely!” and everything was just three million times better and now we just have St. Juste who became the amazing star that he is and I love him.

so we did get Marjolas, just the other way round than we normally do. 

On her writing process:

I had the idea for The Court Of Miracles and I wrote it in six weeks to apply for a competition called Pitch Wars where you get mentored by two published authors and then at the end of the mentorship of two months they help you edit it.

Really? Written in six weeks? you certainly couldn’t tell...

Then, when asked about research:

I started to do research on a 48 hour flight from the States to where I live now in Mauritius [...] So I had this raging fever and I had a million tabs open on my computer and I was just eating the history of Paris, from this origin all the way through to Napoleon’s fall. And taking notes and getting ideas.

honestly her having a fever while doing the research suddenly means EVERYTHING makes sense 

On how she came up with the Guilds:

Then I went online to see what kinds of crimes there are and I looked up laws. I had a whole list of different crimes and said ‘okay, we can split these into guilds’ and then I thought if you’re two young girls living in a criminal world, who is the most terrifying criminal?’ and obviously it would be the human trafficker. So automatically I was like ‘okay that’s your big bad guy. That’s your Shere Khan’.

what kind of crimes there are

Being in the first person is interesting because I don’t normally write in the first person. Being of a certain age, I’m 35, everything I’ve ever read in England was written in the third person, but I knew I was writing a young adult book, or at least one bordering on young adult, so I had been advised to write in the first person, which I hated. It was completely unnatural to me but I think it’s worked very well for Nina. [bolding mine]

once again, you definitely can’t tell that she hates the first person !! not at all!! also that’s definitely not the sort of thing you should say in an interview?!

I have since been told, from my best friend and all of my siblings, that Nina is actually like me and of course it was easy to write her because she does what I would do.

ohoho it’s self-insert o’clock! and, as Briar pointed out, it’s just a wild coincidence that her self-insert is also universally beloved by the Hot Young Men of the novel. (Not that in fic I’m against self-inserts - but once again, this is published !) 

There’s going to be two sequels [to The Court Of Miracles] so there might *hint hint*, be a bit of jealousy or triangles or things between [Ettie and Nina]

personally i’m delighted by this! we already have a love square, what is it gonna become? a tetrahedron? is the dauphin gonna suddenly fall for Cosette? or Montparnasse, or Enjolras St. Juste????

Nina, if pushed a certain way, if she allowed herself to go a certain way, could easily become very similar to [Kaplan, the villain]. I’m not saying she would become a human trafficker but Nina is basically a walking PTSD case. She’s like Batman! She’s like Samuel Vimes in Ankh-Morpork [in Discworld]!

nina is like batman. right, got it.

Originally the book had the history of Paris by the Dead Lord in between every single chapter and I think it was a bit too weighty and a bit boring in places. So my editor said ‘let’s scrap that’ and I said ‘okay but then I’m going to put the short stories in’. 

you know, her editor dropped the ball in a lot of places, but at least they got rid of that, because I was skim reading the folk story bits as it was

I have another book coming out next year, it’s basically like The Jungle Book but on speed.

this is the bit that made me almost spit peppermint tea everywhere because who the fuck describes their own work like that

and finally, last but not at all least, here’s her overview of the French Revolution:

I mean the nobles [in The Court Of Miracles] were always monstrous in a way but they have become 100 times worse because they saw what the people of France were about to do to them. Which historically, the people of France, the revolutionaries, led the terror – they murdered everyone right left and centre! Then of course the revolutionaries famously turned on their own.

There was terrible suffering that led to the revolution but the revolutionaries were all mental. They literally murdered each other because they were so paranoid! Robespierre got rid of the Roman Catholic Religion entirely and then invented his own religion! Look it up its called the Cult Of The Supreme Being!

Then there were three guys who had joint power who were supposed to form an equal government. One of them rose to power and his name was Napoleon and he became a dictator. Although he was a dictator who took over almost all of the world, the people of France loved him. [Then] the people of France themselves in a strange turn of events turned on him in the end and betrayed him. Otherwise, he might still have been in power for years and years. And Napoleon is a big feature in Books Two and Three… just saying…

napoleon!! we’re getting NAPOLEON in the next two i am so genuinely excited because I have no fucking idea what she’s gonna do 

[stareyedshesh]

Even @pmseymourva (except for their OCs)?

Also, the reasons i joined tumblr included a guy called Karl [i think] who made compilations Daily, which helped me go through some tough times (it used to be every morning in my timezone, and is the reason i actually started liking YouTube videos. I "left" Instagram and missed tumblr posts from there too). Tumblr Central (i think the channel is called) had one community post recently, and i had major flashbacks (he stopped for reasons..)

@gayarsonist, you aren't wrong, but the humour tax is not a good idea (according to me).

Tumblr is the site (atleast for me) where all those who feel left out may come in the end, regardless of whichever point of life they come from, for whichever purposes they want to.

As a design student, i once asked some of my peers if i should also add some of my stuff here.

They ALL said no. That the platforms for that were Instagram (which is one of the reasons why i joined there in the 1st place), and Pinterest, and Behance.

This is the site For the outsiders, to showcase their thoughts and ideas. Are you in the fringes, or want to escape the usual, crowded, "popular", and explore the fringes, just to find something more genuine or relatable? This is the place for that.

You can consider YouTube videos/comments or WhatsApp messages false, and so dismiss them. Here, if you are [likely to be] wrong, You will be corrected by others, who have an equal voice, if they want it, in the reblogs. Else, you are considered truthful

Best idea i can think of is (for YouTubers), if OPs have patreon, Seriously consider investing there if you are getting stuff from them for use in other videos.

My first actual experience here was, i searched for #death, and ****ing tumblr @staff responded, asking if i needed help (of the mental health form).

Me, i have a fascination with characters who are personifications, or otherwise represent Death. Be it Discworld, DC comics, Darksiders, or any other representation. I often enjoy them. You how hard it is to discuss with other people about this?

Tumblr can allow this, safely, and with relative anonymity.

How many posts, blogs, ideas, and thoughts, are buried in here?

But this is still a haven for others. Where your relative anonymity often protects you. How many companies' HR, when scouring the Net while searching for something they won't like about you, also look here? [i do not really know, but i do not think most do]

Tumblr users join simply because of the humour and freedom. They stay for the community. Posts can make a comeback. They do not always get buried by the fandom. Real-world celebrities get treated here Exactly like "Tumblr" celebrities.

(this is simply based on my experience, others' may vary)

i know we're all broadly against monetization on this website but i think if tiktok users want to use tumblr posts in their little videos they should have to pay the OP royalties

[iyarpage]

The Witches’ Guide to Design

No, no. I didn’t go researching modern-day witchcraft or anything like I did with Taoism. No, I’m taking web design lessons from a set of entirely fictional witches who live on a flat, circular world which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a turtle that swims through space.

It’s called the Discworld, and it is the subject of forty-one of the best darned books I’ve ever read in my life. The witches of the kingdom of Lancre are the protagonists of several of these books. They’re a cross between village doctors, local magistrates, and (on relatively rare occasions) magical troubleshooters.

If they were designers, they’d be the scariest and probably the best designers in the business. Here’s what I’ve learned from them:

[Note: All illustrations are by Paul Kidby.]

Trust Yourself

If you want to change the world around you, you first have to know who you are. And then, you have to have absolute confidence in who you are, knowing both your capabilities and your limits. Esmeralda Weatherwax defines this trait. It is her nearly unshakable confidence and her will, which make her the most powerful witch known. Officially, the witches don’t have leaders, and Granny Weatherwax is the leader that they definitely don’t have.

Designers, of course, have to learn how to be wrong, and then deal with it. Granny does, too. The problem is, if you get too used to thinking you’re wrong all the time, it can become a hard habit to break. You can’t do your best work by second-guessing yourself at every turn. You have to see if you’re actually right or wrong first, and go from there.

Granny trusts her knowledge and experience, and when she is proven wrong, she trusts the new knowledge and experience. Eventually.

Granny Weatherwax

Enjoy Yourself

What’s the point of any of this if you can’t enjoy yourself? Looking after a whole community isn’t easy, but Gytha “Nanny” Ogg finds the time to eat and drink rather heavily, dance whenever she feels like it, and sing loudly enough to send her entire village literally running for cover. She’s been married three times, has fifteen children, and still she checks under her bed for strange men at night because “you never know your luck”. She takes full advantage of everything she can get from being the village witch, and matriarch to half the people in the village besides.

In learning about (and selling) the importance of our work as designers, it’s easy to get lost in all of the grand ideas. We’re trying to make sites that are accessible, usable, beautiful, and hopefully profitable, and each of these is almost a discipline unto itself. It’s worth taking the time to just sit there and marvel at all the cool stuff the web can do, and enjoy being a part of it.

Nanny Ogg

People Want Magic…

The witches of the Discworld very rarely use “actual” magic, beyond their flying brooms. They can. Granny Weatherwax in particular is terrifyingly powerful. Mostly, though, they practice a generalist sort of medicine, and a whole lot of what they call “Headology”. People are always coming and asking for magical solutions to things that can be fixed by far more practical means. Headology is mostly a means of making people think something magical is going on, leaving the witches free to do what’s necessary in peace.

For most users, everything we do seems magical. The very act of making a static web page seems mystical to them, especially if you do it with [gasp] a text editor. And the simple truth is that like the villagers in Lancre, they don’t want that illusion broken most of the time. They want something to magically fix their problem. If you can help them to solve their problems, but make it feel like them was magic, you’ve got a winning formula.

… But People Have to Work Things Out For Themselves

The younger witches often ask questions like, “But why can’t we just use magic to solve all of these problems?” The answer, of course, is that magic can cause as many problems as it solves. Magic is a blunt instrument, and most situations with people need something more like a scalpel, a screwdriver, or even a small paintbrush.

Ask any therapist. Lasting change comes when you guide people to the solutions, and let them do the rest. Trying to force your solutions on them basically always backfires. For example, I could point at the many ways algorithms are going horribly wrong in the world of social media. You can do your best as a designer to make things easier for your users, but you can’t do everything for them, and you shouldn’t try.

Know When to Go For Help

Over the course of the books, there are a few witches in training, including Magrat Garlick, Agnes Knitt, and Tiffany Aching. While they all have amazing story arcs that I just don’t have space for in this article, there was one thing they all had to learn: when to ask for help. The witches of Lancre are fiercely independent, and they are mostly expected to handle problems—even the big ones—for themselves, but occasionally they run into problems too big for any one witch.

Designers are going to run into those sorts of problems a lot more often, frankly. There’s so much to learn out there, and it’s rare that any one designer will come up with perfect solutions all on their own. Everything we do is built on the work of thousands who came before, and keeping all of that in one head just isn’t going to happen. You have to stand on your own as a designer, and take responsibility for what you build, but you can’t do everything alone.

When in doubt, try to get at least two outside opinions. Remember: you need three witches for a coven; two witches is just an argument.

  Featured image via DepositPhotos.

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

Source p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;} .alignleft {float:left;} p.showcase {clear:both;} body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;} The Witches’ Guide to Design published first on https://medium.com/@koresol

[prinzenhasserin]

Dear Worldbuilder!

This is just a general thing to tell you what I like/don’t like. I’ll be super thrilled if you find something adjacent you want to make instead! Most of my prompts are for writing, but art is also very welcome.

For all my requests there’s a potential to set them in canon, but also pre-canon or post-canon, and I don’t have a preference. 

Likes:

competence porn

people not realizing they’re the most competent at their job/hobby

people failing their way to success

epistolary, journal entries, encyclopaedia entries, textbook articles

outsider POV

people not usually found in law enforcement solving crimes

dragons, fairy tales, magical realism

I kind of don’t dare to put politics here after what has happened and is happening right now, but I love the kind of pragmatic politics with idealistic background, and I’m a sucker for idealistic pragmatism, but I would totally understand not touching that with a pitchfork.

moral conflicts, orange and blue morality

people coming together to solve problems

noodle incidents

convoluted backstories you wouldn’t expect

Dislikes/DNW:

grimdark endings

rape, especially rape as backstory

hopeless, crapsack worlds

melodrama (stuff that takes itself too serious)

sex in a library

Leverage

This perfect show hits all of my weak spots and I may or may not have rewatched it more than ten times. Do not worry about getting facts wrong, though -- my memory is a sieve.

My favourite character is Jim Sterling. There is absolutely no need for including him in your story. I focused less on the requested characters and more on the worldbuilding prompts, but if you rather want to focus on any of the other characters, I love each of them on their own, too! (And together! And I love that Sterling is so eminently hateable.)

Characters: Jim Sterling, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Parker, Sophie Deveraux

Prompts:

WB: Aliases and their imaginary lives

It is known that one of Parker’s aliases had to go do jury duty. Are all of the aliases Hardison creates registered to vote? Do they get parking tickets? Do they all have jobs? How deep does this go?! Do they have housing, are they paying taxes -- do they have student debt?

Is Hardison creating aliases as some sort of cathartic response -- does he do it for fun? Does he ship them with each other? (Is he secretly a writer...)

WB: Interpol

RL Interpol doesn’t have field agents, does Leverage Interpol have agents, or is Jim Sterling just overly awesome at pretending to be an upstanding citizen?

If it is in fact, a real criminal enforcement agency, what are some of his reports like? Maybe he actually isn’t there to investigate Leverage Consulting, but is instead taking down the politicians they are after? 

Is Interpol’s relationship with the Leverage team sort of a running joke in the intelligence community? Or like, the go-to-excuse for derailing an operation? 

WB: Criminal Files

Oh man, I would love to peak into what kind of criminal files the various characters have (if they even have one), on different criminal databases

Maybe Parker’s fingerprints are at so many crime sights at once, people think the finger print is a statistical error

WB: RPF fanfiction in-universe

That weird thief in “A Girl’s Night Out” is definitely a Parker stan, and stalks all her crimes across a variety of message boards.

Lots of fans start out with just one of them; Parker, Hardison and Sophie are kind of infamous, and they probably had a following before teaming up, but it really starts getting intense when there are rumours of them working together (!!) to take down even worse criminals (!!) That’s when Hardison organises the first con

There are probably volunteers for identity theft

(oh god. ship wars.)

tumblr-sites dedicated to finding out if what Parker can do is actually humanly possible

the desperate hunt to find out which WoW avatar Hardison is playing

in-universe fanfiction, in-universe meta, chat-streams, twitter messages

WB: Contacts of Leverage Consulting

How do they find clients?

Do they get clients via submission based websites? How do they check their information?

Queen’s Thief

My prompts focus more on pre-, or during canon time periods, but if you want to play in the future, that’s also great! 

Characters: Original Pirate Character, Original Female Characters, Original Thief Character, Eugenides the God

Prompts:

WB: Diplomatic Relations

There is probably trade happening outside the for main countries. How does that happen? Is Ornon part of a larger battalion of cousin-diplomats? Do they speak different languages, or dialects? Where there misunderstandings based on changed language?

Where is the University of Ferria and why can Eugenides send someone there for exile? Are there other places people can be send to because of political turmoil?

Are any of them send back because they had been exiled by different kings?

How do the other countries react to the Sophos method of negotiation? 

Or the fact that the Sovereign of Attolia, Eddis and Sounis is a Thief/Eugenides?

WB: Island States

How do the Island States keep their independence from both Sounis, Attolia, and the Mede for so long?

The answer might definitely be: Pirates. How does it work? Is it like a law-free zone, or do they have strict policies in place? Do they buy their lumber for the boats from Eddis, like all the rest of the countries? Or does their entire fleet contain ships other people built.

What makes them different from Attolia, Eddis, or Sounis? Is there a difference? (Ocean traditions, gods, system of government)

WB: Engineers

Who built all the passageways through Eddis? Are there lifts working with water displacement?

How about those clocks. How does a vaguely Byzantine Empire get clocks. Or guns. 

Where do they go to study? Is there an engineering section in Eugenides’ library in Eddis? Who do they read? What kind of subject do they fail -- Euclidean algebra?

WB: University of Ferria

Does it have a library?

How about the History Department. Do they have questions about the change in power re:Attolia? Is Erondite the Younger helpful?

What’s the relationship to the country Attolia?

Do all the children of the higher echelons go to university?

WB: myths

How do normal thieves interact with their god? Maybe Eugenides isn’t such an aberration, and Eugenides the God comes to all his thieves and tells them to stop whining, or iterations thereof.

What’s up with that falling stuff? Myth, or myth busted? Did the Queen Thief really fall of dancing on a roof, or did she intentionally kill herself?

How did Eugenides become the god of thieves? Is he just responsible for thieves, or also for other things?

Discworld

Look, I obviously have a soft spot for competent despots. Also, I find it a shame that Susan Sto Helit, Sam Vimes and Lord Vetinari never met in canon, because they are all sort of nobility. Any of these characters would be great! So would different characters.

Characters: Lord Vetinari, Susan Sto Helit, Sam Vimes, Rufus Drumknot, Original Characters

Prompts:

WB: Patrician’s Palace

I would love to see how the architecture looks like, anywhere among at least six floors, plus cellars, sub-cellars, and liveable attics. Floorplans! Secret tunnels! Who all lives here? Is there a visitor’s log? 

We know there’s no orang utans in the menagerie, but what lives there?

How about those dungeons? The cells look from the inside, there’s a pit Reacher Gilt fell into, and Moist von Lipwig obviously didn’t -- are there more ways towards “escape”? Where are all the secret tunnels?

The  gardens were designed by “Bloody Stupid” Johnson. Anything else he made better?

What about the axe Sam Vimes buried in the middle of the table in one of the palace chambers? It’s still there as a conversation piece. What kind of conversations happen around it? Is there a feature about it in the newspaper? Does it start a trend in interior decorating?

WB: Children’s Literature

Susan Sto Helit likes to edit fairytales. Does she ever publish a revised edition? In the first edition of Grimm’s fairytale there is a story called “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” and it’s exactly what you would expect. Does Susan tell this story? Does she get protesting parents, and how does she deal with them?

There are some children’s books with barely changed villains based on real politicians. Is there one with Lord Vetinari featuring as the bad guy (or maybe the hero)?

How about “Where’s my cow?” -- does the story change when Sam’s son grows older? It got reviewed by the Ankh-Morpork Times -- does the newspaper have a regular children’s literature page? Is the version Sam Vimes tells his son the one that Rob Anybody reads in the chalk? Does that book have a fan community (what would that even look like?)

WB: Newspaper Articles

Page Six -- Ankh-Morpork style: Do they report on what kind of beer upstanding citizens drink? Is there a column for where Sam Vimes is expected to be today?

It’s not technically a newspaper, but Twurp’s peerage lists nobility without judgement, and I would love to read an entry for any of the people nominated.

Does the Times report on itself sometimes? What about reporting on the new tax system? Do they ever have to deal with computers and the Internet?

Are there other newspapers? Do they report about the same events differently? Are there opinion pieces from weird people? Do they get letters to the editor?

Obituaries: Is there an upcoming deaths section for wizards and witches? Do they invite people to their death celebrations? How do they deal with the Undead?

Rivers of London

This book series is so rich with details, and it’s amazing. If there’s any of my ideas you absolutely disagree with, feel free to ignore them and focus on something else instead! 

Characters: No characters, Original Characters

Prompts:

WB: The White Library (Rivers of London)

Bibliotheca Alba

I’m not really sold on the location of Meckenheim. Convince me? To explain: Peter and the Professor talk about it being in the city of Cologne (the capital city back then) until the French invaded, then moved it to Weimar (the capital city of the Weimar Republic and also the Third Reich), upon which it was moved to Bonn (the capital of West Germany). That is utterly ridiculous. Weimar was under occupation by the Russians at that time, and like hell they would have given up that kind of power, and the capital city of people’s mind remained in Berlin. Bonn was a rather puny city, and only became the capital because Konrad Adenauer (the first head of state) happened to be born there. There is a library housing every work in german language published since 1918, and it’s split into two locations: one in Frankfurt am Main, the other in Leipzig. But maybe it’s different for the magical part? Still, who in his right mind would want to have a magical library in Bonn? Nobody, that’s who. Also, a strong contender for where a magical library could be housed: Bielefeld, the city that doesn’t exist

this leads me quite nicely to, how did they move a large amount of magical books from Weimar to Meckenheim during the post-war confusion? were other magical being involved?

also would love a library catalogue, how a magical library looks, a non-human librarian

WB: the London Underground

Is the Underground sentient, and if so does it eat other things besides people? 

What kind of traditions, stories do the pale people have? are they human? do they know?

WB: Magical Trade

I’m sure there’s plenty of clothing and accessories needed to ensure the masquerade works, and the magical population isn’t outed as such. Where do they go buy clothes? Is there advertisement?

Did the Folly police magical markets, back when there were more of them? Are there anti-fraud spells, or artefacts? If the Folly didn’t regulate this kind of stuff who did/does? 

Do people trade with the fae? How does that work - does it ever work out in favour of the human?

Do the Rivers sometimes trade on their territory?

WB: Demi Monde

what other strange people are there? What about genii locorum of bridges, streets, buildings

do places with a lot of magic gain sentience? How about the Folly? Skygarden?

there are hedge wizards, what about hedge witches? are there sirens? People who see the future? what about that marketplace where Zach Palmer was found, are all of them magical? how do they blend in? (Do they blend in?) 

Are there like, Werewolves of London? (around in Chinatown, hungering for some chinese food)

What about magical tourists. Do they get a pamphlet on where to find like-minded people? Is there a magical tourism bureau, staffed by idk, the River Crane?

[inkshares]

Q&A with Space Tripping author Patrick Edwards, winner of the Nerdist Space Opera Contest

Patrick Edwards is the author of Space Tripping, one of the top three winners in last year’s Nerdist Space Opera Contest. His debut sci-fi comedy hits bookstores (real brick-and-mortar ones) March 7th. In the following Q&A, Patrick’s reveals the secrets to his creative method, his inspiration for writing the most hilarious and absurd sci-fi comedy this side of the universe, and his upcoming projects.

Patrick was born and raised in Chicago, went to Augustana College in IL, where he majored in business studies, with a minor in amateur libation studies (“mostly of the beer variety”). He currently lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Katie, and new baby, Gabriella Rose, who was born in the midst of the Nerdist Space Opera Contest.

Inkshares: To start, please describe your book in one haiku.

Patrick:

Surviving in space

Much easier when sober

But that's not much fun

Inkshares: OK, now let’s get serious: which Hogwarts house do you belong to?

Patrick: Hang on a sec. Let me finish this online quiz. Oh! Oh dear… It says Slytherin.

I’m going to try a different one… and here we go, clicking “submit” and...Hufflepuff?! What?! No, that can’t be right.

Let’s try one more. Okay, this one says I’m a Lumberjack from District 7… I don’t even think that’s the right literary universe.

I’m just going to create my own. I am a member of House… Chucklesworth.

Inkshares: That must be at Ilvermorny. At Hogwarts, I’d say you’re a SlytherPuff. Where were you when you thought of this book idea?

Patrick:  Physically? Planet Earth.

Mentally? Three glasses deep into a cheap bottle of wine.  

Inkshares: Would you tell us about your writing process? Are you the binge-writing type? Caffeine addict? Coffee shop writer?

Patrick:  Ha, calling it a "process" is giving me way too much credit. I'm an "anytime, anywhere" writer. Those picturesque writing scenarios where you have three hours to yourself, a quiet room, and a cup of coffee don't happen in my life. I realized early on that if I only write under "ideal" settings, I'd never finish the book. I probably wrote at least half of Space Tripping on my phone. I'd have fifteen or twenty minutes, and hammer out a few sentences in an email to myself. Later, I'd piece it all together and clean it up. It wasn't something that came naturally, but I was determined to finish the book, so I found a way.

Inkshares: How long did you work on this book from forming the idea to finishing the manuscript?

Patrick:  It was about fifteen months from the day I wrote the first line, to the day I wrote "The End" on my first draft. Funnily enough, I was on my honeymoon when I finished... but don't judge me! My wife likes to sleep in. I'm an early riser. So for once, I actually had a few of those mythical "picturesque writing scenarios" I mentioned in the previous question.

Inkshares: Do you believe in aliens?

Patrick: There's a conspicuous gentleman in a black suit and sunglasses looming over me, so let's just say that I don't not believe in aliens.

Inkshares: Writing is hard. Why do you do it? Is there a piece of literature that inspired you to become an author?

Patrick: It's so eye-rollingly cliché, but it just feels like what I'm supposed to be doing. Trust me, I want to punch myself in the face for that answer too. I've been interested in creative matters (art, writing, etc.) since childhood. I actually started college with the intention of majoring in art and literature. I even convinced one of my freshman professors to let me write a short story for my final essay instead of the research paper he'd assigned.

But somewhere along the line, I got it in my head that it'd be more reasonable and realistic to go into business. So, that's what I did. Then through most of my twenties, I never felt fully together. When I got back into writing... brace yourself for another lame cliché... it felt like I was myself again.

Regarding books that inspired me, anyone who's read Space Tripping could guess I'm big fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Additionally, I absolutely cherish Terry Pratchett's (R.I.P.) Discworld series. I love anything that dumps the tropes and clichés of an established genre into a sandbox and plays around with them in a humorous manner.

My biggest childhood influences were the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip —so much fun re-reading those as an adult and picking up the stuff I missed as a kid—and Bruce Coville's Aliens Ate My Homework series.

Inkshares: What was the first thing you ever wrote?

Patrick: In 5th Grade, I wrote a comic that was a shameless Wolverine knockoff. I'm pretty sure the hero's name was "Razor" and his nemesis was "Doomcla."

Inkshares: A little alien told me that you are an illustrator as well. How does your love for comics influence your writing?

Patrick: That little alien needs to keep his three mouths shut. But yes, I am a huge comics fan. Most of what I write starts with me visualizing the scene, as if it were a comic. Then I try to write out what I'm picturing. A lot of my ideas start as comics, but illustrating takes more time than I have these days.

So, if you're reading this and you're an illustrator, hit me up. Let's make something weird and cool.

Inkshares: What advice would you give to writers trying to hit a funding goal on Inkshares?

Patrick: It is not a passive endeavor. You are going to have to work as hard, if not harder, than you worked on the actual book. Slick cover art and a gripping synopsis won't cut it. You need to get out there and spread the word. It's like having another job.

Inkshares: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

Patrick: A stomachache from laughing too much. Seriously. I'm not looking to achieve any literary breakthroughs here. I just like writing things that make people smile.

Inkshares: What are you reading right now?

Patrick: The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, because he has a great first name. And I guess it's also because, you know, he's an exceptional writer... or whatever.

Inkshares: If your story was made into a TV show or movie, who would be cast to play Chuck and Jopp?

Patrick: While they'd each bring a distinctly different vibe to Chuck, my first thoughts went to either Elijah Wood or Dave Franco. I'd also be interested to see what Riz Ahmed from HBO's The Night Of could do in the role.

For Jopp, my first choice would be Kevin Hart. Though I could also see Adam Devine from Workaholics play him as well.

Inkshares: Was there a particular moment or event that was harder to write than the rest of the story?

Patrick: Action sequences. They were definitely the hardest. There's a lot of moving parts to a big fight or chase scene. You want to clearly describe what is happening without writing so much text that it slows down the pace of the scene. It was a tricky balance to find.

Inkshares: What surprised you about the publishing process?

Patrick: The amount of time and number of steps involved. Space Tripping’s publishing date is March 7th. The Space Opera contest ended last year on March 14th, and I already had a finished manuscript at that point. I found it to be a pleasant surprise. It was comforting to see how much professionalism and effort Inkshares puts into the process.

(So...uh... when do I get my fifty bucks for that shameless promotion?)

Inkshares: Haha you can take that up with the boss. What would you like to say to your Inkshares backers?

Patrick: Thank you. A million times, thank you.

Also, your next round of drinks is on me.

Inkshares: Would you like to tell us about any upcoming projects?

Patrick: Well, of course I'm working on a Space Tripping sequel, but we have quite a while until that could conceivably be released. There are a number of events/conventions later this year that I'll be attending, some in a professional capacity, some as simply a fan. If you want updates on all that, by all means, feel free to follow me on Twitter @RamblingWaffle, or check out my sites: ramblingwaffle.com & spacetrippingbook.com

And before you ask, that Twitter handle has a long and uninteresting back story. Please trust me, it is not worth the time it takes to explain it. Ok, fine, you twisted my arm. Here's the story:

So there I was, trapped in the Syrup Swamps of the Lost Peninsula. I had a half-drunk bottle of maple rum in one hand, and the ancient book of Blessed Recipes in the other. The Great Pancake loomed over me... his rows of teeth glistening in the early morning light. I knew if I didn't stop him here and now, he would consume every innocent resident of the nearby village, Breakfast Bluffs. So, without a moment's hesitation, I took a swig of rum, held the sacred book high, and-

Oh, would you look at the time? I gotta run. We'll have to finish this story later.

A big thanks to Patrick Edwards for putting up with these hard-hitting questions! Interested in his work? Space Tripping is available March 7th.

To pre-order, visit: https://www.inkshares.com/books/space-tripping, or find a paperback copy anywhere books are sold.

[strangecollectorcloudus-blog]

Turn back aging? Exactly what a Laugh!

In combination with all of the potions and lotions and creams that happen to be foisted upon us at fantastic charge, we. we're informed, need to take accounts of toxins and ageing. To begin with my other 1 / 2 realized in the strategy, he thought our druggist companion was using a chuckle. It got quite some time to convince him with the efficacy of tomato plants, blueberries and more. Now, there's no parting him from them!

Notwithstanding the benefits, nevertheless, do you actually feel there presently exists situations in your life once your entire body is trying to convince you that it's even closer lighting out than it is to reveille? You don't, basically, need to be inside your dotage to feel as though this. Not perform the indicators should be the topic of catastrophe. It's all reliant on belief.

That is the content of David Lodge's newest innovative Deaf Phrase, that the protagonist, a sixty-something year-old, is losing his listening to. In accordance with an overview by Michiko Kakutani's in the New York Occasions, there is certainly tragedy: "deafness is a type of loss - a characteristic of fatality, a continuing, shameful memory of his aging body system and diminishing hopes." There is however also, humour - as Desmond, the most important persona within the publication, observes, "deafness is comic, as blindness is heartbreaking."

Growing older has always been a subject for wit and satire, from your pathos and revulsion evoked by Steptoe's dad in Steptoe and Son; towards the 'aha!' events of detection portrayed by Victor Meldrew's grumpy older male in a single Feet In The Grave; as well as the totally amusing in a lot of Julie Walter's comic roles.  Buy Purtier

The comedic elements of older-grow older may be delivered on anytime of existence from a uncomplicated difference in situations. As a result it was i always tottered forth, just one nighttime a few weeks before - my first day out following a bout of woman flu virus. I used to be seriously dosed! Paracetamol in order to alleviate the anguish of needing made my ankle joint when larking all around with my several-twelve months-old twin grand kids. A non-drowsy coughing blend, in an effort to upright-shirt the attempts of my respiratory system to eject their selves from my pectoral. And my regular glucosamine and condroitin to manage a continuing, family, rheumatoid arthritis of the knee. Limping and spluttering, I had been aware I minimize a comic body.

We had been taking close friends into the college to find out Lyndon Bowring converse about the job staying carried out by Care and attention - an organisation which, among other things, lobbies the British Parliament on such dubious problems as bioethics (human cloning, euthanasia and many more.); our trafficking; and children's privileges. When I hobbled in the auto car park to the creating in which the wedding party was to happen, I couldn't assist remarking to my buddy how easily perhaps the most common freezing and also a minor personal injury could switch you into sensing and similar to an older gal. I realize from my families that you just feel instantly robbed of the freedom in old age.

There have been more youthful people in the crowd, but virtually all us were actually in doing what Lyndon revealing termed 'the 2nd half' of our own day-to-day lives. A 'child-bride' I had been wedded in addition to a mommy when my contemporaries - element of the undergraduate mobility in the sixties - regarded as marching and protesting as a regular portion of daily life. And So I couldn't guide believing that that energy and excitement to have an impact on and right the wrongs for the day appeared, largely, to own been wrung out of today's children via the mangle from the principle that there's "no this kind of matter as society". But Lyndon's message seemed to be that we were to rouse our selves in the apathy into that he certainly dreadful we got sunk. He was intent on enthusing us with renewed energy and zeal.

Lyndon is actually a Welshman, so obviously much of the lingo he utilised was rugby encouraged! Fighting to restrain my cough, ankle joint and leg suffering, it was actually all just a little more than my pharmaceutical-filled up travel, however the idea of it was this. Talking about the job of Maintenance, he informed us of their own feeling of having played the very first half this game with vim and vigour. And then owning eliminated within the modifying room and had a middle-everyday life uncertainty. Every thing he'd been actively playing for could possibly have seemed to be unachievable. This online game of life - socially and politically - got worsened to such an scope it seemed to be further than redemption. Feelings of helplessness threatened to pervade everything he'd worked well for.

And after that arrived a meeting along with other leaders, in very similar perform. No less than a pair of them spoke of 'going into additional time' and this also spurred him on (reason the varying metaphors, mine not his). The effect was that he observed themselves planning quite in different ways. The 2nd half the sport, it transpires, is a time to get dangers.

So it is for people. What's the purpose of reading about reversing growing older except when we apply it to good outcome? Why must we aspire to have longer except the lifespan we survive will probably be of some worth? If it's simply just about me, then doesn't that indicate, by extension, that we would each of us turn out to be separated and by itself? But if we could confirm some experience of community, the idea turns into about us. Inclusive. Rather then outstanding.

A number of people go atmosphere-diving, study a new terminology, or are inclined an allotment. Nothing wrong because. They're all commendable activities. But others, like Terry Pratchett (writer of the extremely preferred Discworld collection) who setup an understanding marketing campaign on Alzheimer's, or Linda Tomlinson, whose terminal health issues with cancers encouraged her to improve income for children's cancer charitable organizations, use their own individual experience to succeed the likes and dislikes of many others.

Although not within that league, paying your money to setup this web site had been a chance which my mindful hubby urged me to look at thoroughly. Finding out about blogging and site-building, and social network (continue to mostly a hazy unknown as far as I'm involved) experienced a equivalent risk about the subject. But most likely making me "apparent" and, consequently, vulnerable, to be able to swimming pool my expertise in everyday life in the hope of being able to help some others in equivalent situation, has become the biggest part of my possibility-getting tactic. As well as the best likelihood of all was in publishing my creative An Unpleasant Publish Mortem. Due to the fact it's stimulated by my daughter's lifestyle and fatality, it's meant exposing a chunk of my personal which however not any longer raw, remains to be sensitive and insecure.

[webbygraphic001]

The Witches’ Guide to Design

No, no. I didn’t go researching modern-day witchcraft or anything like I did with Taoism. No, I’m taking web design lessons from a set of entirely fictional witches who live on a flat, circular world which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a turtle that swims through space.

It’s called the Discworld, and it is the subject of forty-one of the best darned books I’ve ever read in my life. The witches of the kingdom of Lancre are the protagonists of several of these books. They’re a cross between village doctors, local magistrates, and (on relatively rare occasions) magical troubleshooters.

If they were designers, they’d be the scariest and probably the best designers in the business. Here’s what I’ve learned from them:

[Note: All illustrations are by Paul Kidby.]

Trust Yourself

If you want to change the world around you, you first have to know who you are. And then, you have to have absolute confidence in who you are, knowing both your capabilities and your limits. Esmeralda Weatherwax defines this trait. It is her nearly unshakable confidence and her will, which make her the most powerful witch known. Officially, the witches don’t have leaders, and Granny Weatherwax is the leader that they definitely don’t have.

Designers, of course, have to learn how to be wrong, and then deal with it. Granny does, too. The problem is, if you get too used to thinking you’re wrong all the time, it can become a hard habit to break. You can’t do your best work by second-guessing yourself at every turn. You have to see if you’re actually right or wrong first, and go from there.

Granny trusts her knowledge and experience, and when she is proven wrong, she trusts the new knowledge and experience. Eventually.

Granny Weatherwax

Enjoy Yourself

What’s the point of any of this if you can’t enjoy yourself? Looking after a whole community isn’t easy, but Gytha “Nanny” Ogg finds the time to eat and drink rather heavily, dance whenever she feels like it, and sing loudly enough to send her entire village literally running for cover. She’s been married three times, has fifteen children, and still she checks under her bed for strange men at night because “you never know your luck”. She takes full advantage of everything she can get from being the village witch, and matriarch to half the people in the village besides.

In learning about (and selling) the importance of our work as designers, it’s easy to get lost in all of the grand ideas. We’re trying to make sites that are accessible, usable, beautiful, and hopefully profitable, and each of these is almost a discipline unto itself. It’s worth taking the time to just sit there and marvel at all the cool stuff the web can do, and enjoy being a part of it.

Nanny Ogg

People Want Magic…

The witches of the Discworld very rarely use “actual” magic, beyond their flying brooms. They can. Granny Weatherwax in particular is terrifyingly powerful. Mostly, though, they practice a generalist sort of medicine, and a whole lot of what they call “Headology”. People are always coming and asking for magical solutions to things that can be fixed by far more practical means. Headology is mostly a means of making people think something magical is going on, leaving the witches free to do what’s necessary in peace.

For most users, everything we do seems magical. The very act of making a static web page seems mystical to them, especially if you do it with [gasp] a text editor. And the simple truth is that like the villagers in Lancre, they don’t want that illusion broken most of the time. They want something to magically fix their problem. If you can help them to solve their problems, but make it feel like them was magic, you’ve got a winning formula.

… But People Have to Work Things Out For Themselves

The younger witches often ask questions like, “But why can’t we just use magic to solve all of these problems?” The answer, of course, is that magic can cause as many problems as it solves. Magic is a blunt instrument, and most situations with people need something more like a scalpel, a screwdriver, or even a small paintbrush.

Ask any therapist. Lasting change comes when you guide people to the solutions, and let them do the rest. Trying to force your solutions on them basically always backfires. For example, I could point at the many ways algorithms are going horribly wrong in the world of social media. You can do your best as a designer to make things easier for your users, but you can’t do everything for them, and you shouldn’t try.

Know When to Go For Help

Over the course of the books, there are a few witches in training, including Magrat Garlick, Agnes Knitt, and Tiffany Aching. While they all have amazing story arcs that I just don’t have space for in this article, there was one thing they all had to learn: when to ask for help. The witches of Lancre are fiercely independent, and they are mostly expected to handle problems—even the big ones—for themselves, but occasionally they run into problems too big for any one witch.

Designers are going to run into those sorts of problems a lot more often, frankly. There’s so much to learn out there, and it’s rare that any one designer will come up with perfect solutions all on their own. Everything we do is built on the work of thousands who came before, and keeping all of that in one head just isn’t going to happen. You have to stand on your own as a designer, and take responsibility for what you build, but you can’t do everything alone.

When in doubt, try to get at least two outside opinions. Remember: you need three witches for a coven; two witches is just an argument.

  Featured image via DepositPhotos.

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[ghostsonabiketonowhere]

Ghostman: The council calamity retrospective

Well christ, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I know literally nobody follows this blog, but as of this writing, i’m waiting on the steam direct fee i paid to be fully processed (Basically, in a week i’ll be able to publish the game)

I’d like to take a second and stroll down memory lane for a little bit, and why it took so fucking long to make this game, this is basically going to be a list of every time i tried and failed to make a game, so strap in, these aren’t in chronological order either, and i’ve kinda forgotten the proper order.

Bill’s excellent adventure:

There’s incredibly little to say on this one, after reading a 4chan thread on games development i downloaded GM:S, tried making a platformer, saw my art, didn’t see any progress after trying a little bit, and gave up.

Mugman:

Mugman was the first time i tried making an adventure game, other than the main character, i had no ideas for the game and dropped it like a rock.

Radiation Seat:

Radiation Seat, for the more dedicated gamers in the audience, is just a synonym for nuclear throne, i tried messing around with random generation in GM:S, realised i’m not very good at coding and gave up, the game actually kinda works though, so theoretically if i’m a moron/psychopath i could try working on it again.

Asterodis:

First real game i ever made, it’s an asteroids clone, but with a bunch of the stuff i saw in Vlambeer’s game feel talks crammed in, it’s essentially idenitcal to a tutorial on youtube except shooting takes away points and there’s a limit to the number of bullets on screen.

Poltergeist (Aka: Ghostman when he was a person)

I posted a lot about Poltergeist (the version of ghostman with good art and a completely different setting), the secret to this was having a good artist, Robert Thomas helping me out, we never finished it, and Bobby got caught up in school work, but that’s almost over so if he’s willing to pick up the pen again, i’m willing to do the coding and fix the reall weird bugs (randomly the game would massively lag for a reason i never figured out, i assume it had something to do with the way AGS handles characters over non walkable areas)

Grall and Foegart goto whitecastle:

I’d had the idea of wanting to make a high fantasy adventure game after reading a couple of discworld novels, these games didn’t get far, but it did have an interesting character switching mechnic similar to DOTT, this also appeared in a couple of other half finished games i’d made, why i thought it’d be funny to make a game based on it when i’d never seen Harold and Kumar go to whitecastle? Iunno.

H.E.L.L:

H.E.L.L (Hyper Energetive Love Lab) was a shot at making a VN, i’m probably going to still do this, so i don’t know if putting here’s sensible but eh, fuck it, i’d had the idea of a reality show crossed with a death game for ages, and tried writing a short story about it, which went nowhere.

Gender Girl:

Gender Girl was the first video game i ever made, it was a scratch program with the cat repainted to be pink, moving left killed you by a spike, moving right displayed a message that gender girl had liberated herself (Hohoho, very ludonarratively insync, 12 year old me), i uploaded it to the scratch website, and it, containing swear words(such a rebel was i) it was deleted 5 seconds after publication, truly, a light gone from the world, what did it have to do with gender? If i remember literally nothing, or you were supposed to cut your dick off with the spikes.

Yeah.

PAGAN:

Pagan was a pokemon rip off i was making, i didn’t get far beyond changing sprites and types, world design is hard, as of writing it’s still on my site, i ought to take it down buti just don’t have the heart, poor Pagan.

BORB (Ghostman 1)

Borb, as it’s affectionatly called in the files, is ghostman 1, it’s the source of the Alien King sprite, and the Ghostman sprite used in Ghostman: The council calamity, and was distributed amongst my friends for like, 5 seconds, it’s 4 screens and one “Puzzle”, which doesn’t actually work because the last time i did work on it, it’s fun to see how my humour changed, in GM1 we’ve got the classic line “It’s locked up tighter than a jewish bank” and a character named Snil, whose ribbing snarky asshole persona was basically every persona i used to write until i started playing dnd with my friends, and had to make more than 1 character, i don’t really like anything about GM1, but i find it oddly charming, it’s terrible perspective and total lack of story or theme (You’re kidnapped by bandits and the game ends in leaving on a spaceship having never seen a single bandit.) just makes it like lenny from of mice and men, it probably should die, but i can’t help shooting a game that thought the way to add taste was to remove the words “Fuck off” from a wall.

Rebet:

Rebet’s the first time we see the actual character “Rebut” appear, in some weird tron like backround, i remember wanting to make something that looked like tron, and failing, other than that Rebet remains a total mystery, even to me, andi made the fucking thing, looking at the code, i remember a little bit more about the game, the main gimmick was having a variety of ray guns that could effect peoples emotion, the example in the tutorial was a “calming ray” to prevent a drill seargeant from screaming at you, this didn’t go anywhere.

Wing Wang:

This is literally an empty ags game, there’s nothing in it, i don’t know why i haven’t deleted it.

Ye Men of Valour:

Ye Men of Valour was a weird idea, i’d read a book called “The decline and fall of the British Empire” (Based upon the work, the decline and fall of the roman empire) and decided to make a game based upon a variety of British figures from across time entering into a house they must escape, only to be killed by Aliens, the goal of the game was to get players to reload the game with the knowledge that following the puzzles as they were laid out would kill them, and use a different method to escape, Ye Men of Valour really ended up going nowhere because i was in a pretty dark place and wasn’t motivated, like at all, i’m gonna put this in the “Might come back to it” pile.

Ghostman 2:

Ghostman 2, like Grall and Foegart, had a character switching thing, this ended up breaking the game, so i scrapped it, Ghostman 2 was when the idea of Ghostman being a space adventure comes from, following from Ghostman 1, where you leave on a ufo with an alien, it’s what i thought would happen next, if i remember there was literally no story, just the characters, and switching gimmick.

I.A.C.M

I.A.C.M was a project i worked on with Bobby very breifly, the idea was to make an adventure game set inside a mentally disturbed girls mind, this basically didn’t pan out due to AGS engine limitations, the sprites sent in were too big and ended up looking kind of lame squashed down.

You cannot name this file, insect.:

This wasn’t a game, this was shit poetry at a time in my life where i knew my poetry was godawful, there was no story here, just a Shodan like figure who’d insult me, like personally, i’d write insults about myself into a script and then play it.

Robot Initation:

Adventure game, starring “some random guy named mike”, drew the first character sprites, hated them, didn’t want to improve them, gave up.

Assault and Battery/BatteryMan:

This was a go at 3d platformers made in unity, fell apart because the models i’d made in blender weren’t done properly at all, breaking practically everything.

PirateTextAdventure(ActualTitle):

Sounds exactly like what it is, never got a single line down for this.

Shield Slide:

A rip off of free ski based on the idea of riding a shield i think i saw i a lotr movie? Never got to prototype.

AAAH!

AAAH (Aimless aeronautical adveture, huzzah!) was an experiment i wanted to make, an adventure game that was procedudrely generated, every game would involve a one minute timer, which upon reaching zero, would result in the player dying, the story was the player had just survived a plane colliding with another plane in midair, and had to find a way to live without a parachute just using debris, lessons learned: Random generation is hard, i also ripped off the title from AAAAAAAAAAAAh for the awesome.

Sweet Goodnight:

Sweet goodnight was an rpg i planned to make about dying alone in a spaceship, it never got far beyond idle doodles and some game design docs that i’ve since lost, may go back to this in future.

Spaceman and Woodboy:

A mario and luigi superstar saga ripoff, never got to properly playable state, GM:S is hard.

Quest of Halden:

Shit rpg.

Ghostman: CNC :

Ghostman: CNC (Caverns and creatures) was a weird idea, i wanted to make an Rpg based on my dnd campaign, but for some reason i felt the need to justify it with a weird ghostman shell, may go back to this one.

Legend of Negro:

I don’t know why the fuck this is on my computer, i tried pissing around with a legend of zelda game maker thing.

Generic Units:

Supposed to be an xcom like, fell apart.

Airman/Pacifist run:

Something i still want to do, an fps with non violent weapons and stage hazards that you have to use to defeat enemies, got as far as modeling a single gun.

Sepsis man:

A 3d platformer starring a drinks machine, modeled main character, gave up.

Slime Game (actual title, again.)

Slime game (Or Slime Quest) was going to be an incredibly clever subversive take on the Rpg genre by having the grand villain actually be a low level mook, think cave rats and dungeon bosses, that kind of thing, stopped making it because i thought “Woah, that’s dumb, and lame, and i really don’t like making art for ideas that are dumb and lame!”

Zug’s Glorious road trip for the glory of the party and wealth of the nation:

ZGRTFTGOTPAWOTN for short, this was a text adventure based on wormhole shenanigans and Soviet propaganda films, never really got that far, fun little fact, Zug’s the name of the alien in my twitter profile pic.

Ghostman: The council calamity:

I didn’t quit, i made the game.

THANK GOD FOR THAT.

[wxat]

S11E25 - Elemental Mystery is Everywhere

Mary: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.com. If you would like to support this podcast and start a 30-day trial membership, visit AudiblePodcast.com/excuse.

Season 11, Episode 25.

Brandon: This is Writing Excuses! Mystery as Subgenre.

Mary: 15 minutes long! Dan: Because you’re in a hurry, Howard: and we’re not that smart. Brandon: I’m Brandon. Mary: I’m Mary. Dan: I’m Dan. Howard: I’m Howard.

Brandon: And let’s keep talking about mysteries! Mary: Yay! Brandon: So the question I want to ask you is why do people turn the page in a mystery story?

Howard: To see if they’re right? [Dan and Mary laugh]

Mary: Well yeah, I think that that’s actually true. I think that there is a question and people want the answer to it and they want to solve it. So I think that in a lot of cases—as opposed to Idea stories, which we’ll talk about later—in a mystery story it’s not just that the character has a question.

The reader has a question and they’re trying to solve it.

Brandon: Right. Now, I will say that there are a lot of readers I know that don’t want to try and figure out the mysteries. That for them the fun is just seeing how it unfolds. I’ve met a number of these who just want to go along for the ride.

Howard: Those are the people who are not following or participating in the Schlock Mercenary Facebook group. [others laugh] Brandon: That is true. Howard: As I watch that group I think, “Oh! Okay. Yes. You guys have identified all of the red herrings that I identified, and there is no way for me to make all of you be wrong... so I’m not going to try.” But I can tell what they are loving.

Brandon: This is an interesting thing just to bring up. We get a skewed perspective sometimes as popular writers interacting with fans. The fans who interact with us are a self-selecting crowd. The fans that go on internet forums and talk about these things are a self-selecting crowd.

And when I’ve gone to signings and ask questions along these lines, a lot of people don’t want to know, don’t want to guess—a large number of people. But the hardcore fans are all trying to figure it out, because they are the people who talk to their friends and say, “What do you think about this?”

Dan: Even people who are not playing along at home, they’re still reading the mystery because they want to know the answer to it—even if they’re not the one actively trying to solve it on their own.

Brandon: I just want to point out that there is this sense of, “I want to see how this plays out.” In the same way that Adventure (the Adventure Subgenre) was, “I want to see what cool things they do,” this is, “I want to read along because I know something is coming, and it’s going to blow my mind when it happens. And I am so excited to have my expectations rocked in that way.”

Howard: We’ve covered this over and over and over and over and over again in your critique groups. It’s incredibly useful to have readers who are readers. We talk about the “true fans” who we get feedback from. And yes, excuse our perspective, having our reader in your writing group who loves to read mysteries but who doesn’t hang out on the fan sites... that person is the one who’s going to tell you if you’re getting it right.

Brandon: The Alpha and Beta readers are even more valuable for that sense, because the writing group people will be tainted by everyone else’s guessing. Mary: Yeah, I use my dad for Beta testing, because if there is a plot-hole he will find it. He’s an engineer. [Dan chuckles]

Mary: So I think one of the things that I was answering when I was saying “why do we keep turning the pages?” is this is why I keep turning the pages in a mystery. 

Because when I am reading and I’m not reading science-fiction and fantasy, the two genres that I go to are romance or mystery. And usually mystery. I am turning the pages because I’m intrigued. I want to know what...

Brandon: Curiosity. Mary: Curiosity. Brandon:

Curiosity is the king right here.

Brandon: Even if you’re not trying to figure it out yourself, you’re still curious. And this actually is important for this discussion of Mystery as a subgenre. Because a lot of times you will be as a writer embedding mysteries that don’t look like mysteries to the reader.

They’re not presented as “Here is a body!” or “Here is a big problem!” It is the characters working on something, gaining information in some way. And that’s a mystery even if the outline the reader would put for it doesn’t make a mystery for this book.

Dan: Especially as we’re talking about using them as sub-genres inside of a larger work. That can be so effective in a thriller or in a horror story, when suddenly something weird happens and you can’t figure it out. And it will build tension for your larger story. But it also gives you a little chapter-long or scene-long “Let’s figure out why all the lights suddenly went out.” That kind of thing.

Mary: Romance also has a mystery that’s very common embedded in it, and that is the hero’s dark past. Brandon: Yes! Action movies, too! Mary: Yeah! Brandon: What is the hero’s dark past?

Brandon: I just came up with something that really sounded right to me. I’d just never thought of it.

The mystery is really the journey.

Brandon: The reveal at the end of the mystery is going to define the subgenre being blended with it.

For instance, if you are feeling like “When this gets revealed I am going to find out the dark Eldritch horrors that will break my brain,” you’re a Horror and a Mystery. But if the reveal is that “We are going to discover what’s hidden underneath the city, and it turns out to be a city of gold,” then you’re in Wonder.

We have discovered the thing. And so the emotion that immediately falls to curiosity, is your blended emotion. Mary: Oh, that’s interesting. Howard: That’s a really good way of looking at it.

Howard: One of the things that I have puzzled over for quite some time now in thinking about these elements as sub-genres, “What’s the element that gets used most often as a subgenre?” And I’m leaning towards Mystery, because it just gets used so often. Second place is probably Relationship, because that is so important.

I don’t know, but what you just said kind of sums it up. Sometimes the reveal is so powerfully Sense of Wonder, or Horror, that I forget that Mystery was there and I’m not counting it.

Brandon: Here’s what it is: curiosity sustains the reader until you hit the reveal. And as you’re going you want to foreshadow that reveal. You will foreshadow that this discovery is going to be terrible and frightening in a different way than you foreshadow this discovery is going to change the way that the magic works and makes you really think in awe about wizards in a new way or whatever. You’re going to foreshadow those differences, but curiosity is what’s sustaining you during that.

Mary: And that’s a really good way to point at how these genres, these elemental things blend together. Because you have to be doing both at the same time. You have to be bringing in the elements of whatever your other genre is while you’re bringing that curiosity all the way through.

Brandon: And I think that might be the difference between mystery as a genre and as a subgenre. In mystery as a genre, the reveal is information. Information that you’ve been thirsting after all along so that the puzzle locks closed. “Ah! I am done now with this puzzle. I have had the reveal.” Whereas in another genre the reveal adds to your major genre, whatever it is.

Howard: With Mystery as the principal element, the reveal is “Aha!” But in science-fiction it’s “Wow!” And in Horror it’s “Oh noooo!” Brandon: [laughs] I wish I could have a book so that when I open the last page you give one of those reactions in your voice. [others laugh] Dan: Like a little greeting card: “Oooh nooo!” [laughs] Brandon: Let’s have our book of the week.

Dan, you were going to have our Book of the Week this week.

Book of the Week

Dan: Our Book of the Week is “Thud,” by Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett writes fantasy comedies. He’s combining Wonder and Humour. And people who pass him off as “Just a funny guy” are really discounting the incredible work he does as a fantasy author.

He has, for example in Thud, his dwarves are the first truly original take on dwarves I have read since Tolkien. They’re incredibly new and fascinating. And what’s great about Thud is that it is a murder mystery. Someone has killed the leader of the dwarves in the city. And good old Vimes, this world-weary city watch commander, has to figure it out before the uprising comes and people go nuts.

Absolutely wonderful book. Hilarious and brilliant and very intelligently constructed as a mystery.

Brandon: I would say that almost all the Vimes stories are mysteries. Pratchett uses a couple of different things across his various subseries in Discworld, but mystery is his most common one. They really are fantasy-mystery-humour all completely hybridised. Dan: It’s hard to say which is the sub-genre of the other one, because he blends them so thoroughly.

Brandon: Well, you can start a trial at Audible by going to AudiblePodcast.com/excuse. Pick up a copy of Thud by Terry Pratchett, read by Stephen Briggs to start off your trial.

Mystery Subplot

Brandon: So let’s go into how you approach creating a subplot that is a mystery plot for one of your stories. Anything specific you do? If you know you’re writing this big horror story or this fantasy, this historical fantasy... how do you insert your mysteries?

Dan: One of the places that I start is when I look at the information that the reader needs to know. And I decide, “Would this be best explained through some kind of expository scene, or for the characters figure it out on-screen?” And if the latter, then I’m putting some form of mystery into the book.

Howard: If you go to WritingExcuses.com and look at the tag cloud on the website, the largest word in that cloud is “Characters.” And that is because we drill down on that so often.

For mystery as a sub-genre, if you ask yourself what the characters are asking themselves, what is it that they are curious about? Why are they curious about it? What is driving them to find the answer? Then that’s what’s going to engage the reader because that’s whose shoes we’re standing in.

I find that when I do that with Schlock Mercenary, what I will often do is—I change points of view a lot in the strip—I look for the character who is the most puzzled and the best able to articulate the puzzle, and that’s where I switch to because for me that’s what engages it the best.

Brandon: When I was building the Stormlight Archive, I did something very similar to what you’re saying here. I said, “I want each of my five main characters to have a mystery hook to them. When you read that character, after a few chapters you’re just like, 'I want to know what happened to this person,’” to bring them to this point where the book starts.

And that was one of my main hooks to get people through the first five books—is each one would take a character and delve into their past. So I needed something really intriguing. I needed a question that by the end of the book if readers came to me and said, “What happened to such-and-such that caused this?” I knew I was doing it right. If they could put their fingers on it and say, “Oh, I want to know what happened there.”

And that’s part of how I design these. What question is the reader going to ask me? If they’re halfway through the book, or if they’re done with the book, what are they going to come and say? “Oh, Brandon! There’s one thing I want to know, and it is...” this—which would be a huge spoiler for the next book [Dan chuckles] Brandon: —then I’ve done my job right.

Mary: One of the things that I’ll do sometimes—and I don’t do this every time, but it’s a useful hack—is I figure out what it is my character needs or wants, and what it is they need to do to achieve that. And then I look at what piece of information do they lack that would allow them to accomplish the thing that they need to do. And that search for that piece of information then becomes a mystery within the larger plot.

Brandon: I’ve said many times before that when I build a plot I do this thing where I say, “What are all my subplots? What are all my emotions?” And then I build each one backward. I don’t build a huge outline., I build a bunch of little outlines. And a lot of them are mysteries. And it will be... sometimes they’re whodunnits. “Hey, somebody got killed. The characters don’t know how. Let’s lead them on a journey discovering this.” Sometimes it’ll be a piece of information, a true mystery of, “We don’t know why the magic is doing what it is doing,” like a classic Isaac Asimov mystery like we mentioned. Let’s lead them and the reader slowly as clues are gathered.

And sometimes it’s not even the characters wanting to gather the clues. It’s just during their normal plot cycle they’re running across things that are pieces so that you can earn you ending this way.

Dan: You know, in the first draft of “I Am Not a Serial Killer” the mystery was, “Who is the bad guy? Who is the monster who is killing everyone in the town?” And I realised in our writing group that that was the wrong mystery, because the character was not interacting with that mystery as effectively a he could have been. The right mystery was, “I know who the bad guy is, and it’s a monster. How do I kill it?”

And that’s what all the rest of the series has turned into, and that’s the first question that I come up with as I sit down to write a new book is, “How does this monster work? How can John kill it?” and then build the mystery backwards from there.

Mary: Which is again, looking at what it is the character needs to do and what is the information that they lack to be able to pull it off. Dan: And John Cleaver specifically, his entire character journey is, “Should I kill this thing?” And the books would not be as interesting if he weren’t constantly grappling with that question.

Mary: One of the other things when you’re using it as a subgenre is that it’s very easy to raise the question when you’ve got a dead body on the floor and that’s your main genre. But with it as a subgenre, a lot of times you have to raise the question for the reader by planting stuff, and...

Calling attention to it.

Like in “Of Noble Family” there’s a mystery subplot that’s pretty significant. And one of the things that I had my main character do is notice, “So-and-so reacted very strangely when I just said that. I wonder why.” And then I moved on.

Brandon: Right. The “Hanging a Lantern On It” is really important. “Hey! This was a clue!” Even though you don’t notice it’s a clue right now, there’s enough of a stop a moment in the prose so that you’ll remember this moment.

Howard: It’s worth taking just a moment to put a pin in something here. When we’re talking about elemental mystery as a subgenre, it’s not the same as mystery a subplot. You are kind of doing that if you have mystery as a subplot. But mystery as a subplot is easy to pick out.

“Oh, well I’m in this romance story and they are detectives, and they are solving a murder,” versus, John Cleaver needing to figure out how to kill the monster.

Dan: My new series, Bluescreen, is primarily a thriller. But what I tried to do with that is create a mystery in it that you don’t realise is there until you’ve already gotten several clues. Because you’re in this thriller plot, and “Here’s a weird thing. Here’s a weird thing.” Eventually they’ve built up to the point where there are so many weird things, the characters go, “Wait a minute. Let’s figure this out before we move on.”

Brandon: Alright! let’s go ahead and give you guys some homework.

Homework

Mary: So what we’re going to have you do is insert a mystery into whatever it is that you’re currently working on—short story, novel, whatever it is. All I’m going to ask you to do is to look at what it is that your character needs. You’ve probably already got the solution already in there. Take the solution out. And then build it in so that the character has to figure out the solution. So essentially you have just created a mystery within your story.

Brandon: Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go solve some mysteries.

Mary: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.Patreon.com/WritingExcuses.

Writing Excuses is a Dragonsteel Production, jointly hosted by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler. This episode was mastered by Alex Jackson.