Worldbuilding: Pure Bottom-Up Worldbuilding

Since I'm in the process of editing my draft of Thorn II and working on the rough of Murder of Mages II, I clearly don't have enough on my plate. 

At least, that's what part of my brain seems to think.

Because that part of my brain has become strangely obsessed with an idea of a brand-spanking-new-from-scratch worldbuilding project.  And by "from-scratch", I mean completely.

Whenever we do worldbuilding, there is typically some form of top-down idea guiding the process.  There's some underlying idea of what we want the world to be or have, the technology leer, the way the culture is.  We start from that concept and build down, forming the infrastructure to make that idea work. 

And there's nothing wrong with that.

But it tends to create limiting ideas-- secondary fantasy worlds that still are, in essence, England or Italy or Arabia or Japan in medieval or rennaisance times, or steampunked or otherwise tweaked.  The scent of the familiar stays with it. 

And, again, there's nothing wrong with that.  It makes it easy to define when it comes to writing stories.

But I've been thinking more and more about what really, truly working from the bottom-up would bring about.  That means starting with the land itself, building the details of geography and climate.  From there, decisions about flora and fauna-- especially the key domesticatible plants and animals, and then determining where the "cradle of life" where humans or other intelligent life emerges (indeed, if it's a fantasy world, the decision to have multiple intelligent species is crucial).  Once that cradle is determined, you would determine the pre-historic diaspora, as people spread across the world as hunter-gatherers before they start settling into agriculture.  And that's dependent on if settling into agriculture is even a viable option given their terrain and available possible crops.

From that point, the slow development of civilization and cultures as states and empires rise and fall, develop and regress.

Of course, the question is, would this be a valuable exercise?  Would the deliberate bottom-up process yield results that were significantly different than the more typical top-down one?  And more to the point, would it give a world that would be an interesting and dynamic setting for stories, or would it be little more than an intellectual exercise to its own end?

And is it a process a person can realistically do on their own?

I'm honestly not sure.  But I think it's worth exploring, and I'd love to hear other thoughts on the subject.

Oh Captain, My Captain

I've been spending the past few days re-watching choice scenes from Dead Poet Society.

I've never been a person who spends much time dwelling on celebrity deaths, and for the most part, I'm not really dwelling on Robin Williams.  I liked a lot of his work, though there was some I really couldn't stand.  He always struck me as the kind of performer who never phoned it in, though, even if the movie he was in was a hot mess.

Oh, but, Dead Poets Society.  That was my movie.  Which should surprise no one: a movie about embracing the power of words and breaking out of conformity, and teaching that to teenagers who are desperate for that message.  And it came out the summer I was 16.

Yeah, I might as well have had "TARGET AUDIENCE" tattooed on my chest, like Charlie with his lightning bolt.

("Damn it, Neal.  It's Nuwanda.")

Now, at the time I was quite fortunate that I didn't have parents like Neal's.  At all.  Mine were pretty indulgent of my various artistic ambitions, including going to college to study film.  So that aspect of the film-- of a voice being stifled-- didn't apply to me.

But that my voice could matter... that the powerful play goes on, and I might contribute a verse... 

Yeah, that hit home. 

So I've spent a bit of time revisiting that.  Oh me, oh life.  A powerful sentiment that Williams delivers with such quiet confidence, such honesty... that the soundbite itself lends weight to a commercial telling you that iPads will make you more creative.

I've already gotten started on my verse, but there's still plenty to do.  So off to work.

Perils of the Writer: Picking Your Battles

So the big news in writerly circles this weekend involved the current salvos in the Amazon/Hachette fracas, with writers remaining caught in the middle*.  I honestly haven't been talking about it mostly because I really don't have a dog in this fight, not directly, but also because people like John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig are saying the sort of thing I'm thinking, and saying it far better than I probably would.  And in the case of Chuck, with more profanity and bushier beard.

What I find fascinating about all this is how some people who don't have a dog in this fight are turning the whole thing on its edge to give themselves a dog.  To twist distribution contract negotiations into something about THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING: BIG 5 PUBLISHERS VS. INDIES.  And, you know, I tried to see it, and I looked at it sideways and squinted... and I still didn't see it.  Closest I could see to it was Indie writers-- who use Amazon to distribute their work, and may or may not have a beef with Big 5 publishing-- see this whole thing as a chance to take one of the Big 5 down a peg.  Or something.  If you want to see it that way, if you want to frame it as a David And Goliath Fight... that's your business.  Frankly, it's far more of an Ali/Frazier, as I see it.**   But how I see it doesn't really matter, because... I'm not really in it. 

Sooner or later, though, there will be one of these writerly rows in which you will firmly be on one side or another.  That might be because things are happening that affect you, or it's a situation you feel passionate about.  Or it might be because you hold one kind of politics and said something in favor of those politics, and people who hold another kind of politics have decided you are now a punching bag.  Sometimes you come to the fight; sometimes the fight comes to you.  Sometimes the fight is an angry mob; sometimes it's just a few mosquitoes.  Both don't require a flamethrower response. 

You've got to decide how you're going to handle it.  You've got to decide if you're going to handle it. 

Because not every fight is worth it.  Sometimes you should just focus on your own writing.  Which is, frankly, what I'm going to go do.

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*- Someday we'll all be grizzled old veterans.  "I was there for the Amazon/Hachette Wars!  Fought in the great Blog Battle of August 9th!"
**- I won't comment which is which, though.

Austin's One Minute Play Festival

I've had two pieces chosen for Austin's first One Minute Play Festival (which uses the hashtag #1MPF, if you're curious.)  It was a fun writing exercise for me, and given the talent involved, the whole thing should be pretty interesting.  Details below.

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The One-Minute Play Festival (#1MPF) & ScriptWorks, In Collaboration with Salvage Vanguard Theatre Present:

The 1^st Austin One-Minute Play Festival

Thursday Aug 28^th, Friday Aug 29^th, and Saturday Aug 30^th at 8PM

At Salvage Vanguard Theatre

2803 Manor RD

Austin, TX 78722

Tickets are $20 and available at: 

www.scriptworks.org

One-minute plays by 40 active Austin & Texas playwrights were commissioned for this special annual event, and developed with #1MPF’s playmaking process.

Featuring Brand New One-Minute Plays By

Katie Bender, Allison Orr Block, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, James Burnside, Monika Bustamante, Bastion Carboni, Katherine Catmull, Elizabeth Cobbe, Martha Lynn Coon, Adrienne Dawes, Trey Deason, Elizabeth Doss, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Raul Garza, Kirk German, Aimée Gonzalez, Meg Haley, Reina Hardy, Joanna Horowitz, Brian Kettler, Abe Koogler, Rhonda Kulhanek, Max Langert, Kirk Lynn, P. Paullette MacDougal, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Jennifer Margulies, Tegan McLeod, Briandaniel Oglesby, Jason Rainey, Candyce Rusk, Sarah Saltwick, Roxanne Schroeder-Arce, Hank Schwemmer, Diana Lynn Small, C. Denby Swanson, Lisa B. Thompson, Cyndi Williams, Anne Maria Wynter, & more

Directed by Christi Moore, Derek Kolluri, Ellie McBride, Jenny Lavery, Ken Webster, Linda Nenno, Will Hollis Snider, & Lily Wolff

Curated By #1MPF Producing Artistic Director, Dominic D’Andrea

SCRIPTWORKS

ScriptWorks (formerly Austin Script Works) is a playwright-driven organization that seeks to promote the craft of dramatic writing and protect the writer’s integrity by encouraging playwright initiative and harnessing collective potential. ScriptWorks is funded and supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future.  Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com. Find ScriptWorks on the web at www.scriptworks.org

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Editing

During ArmadilloCon I had the pleasure of talking with a woman who was in the enviable-but-frustrating position of having an agent, but her manuscripts were still being reviewed by publishers.  (Enviable because YOU HAVE AN AGENT, and that's awesome. Frustrating, especially at cons, because while you are on the path to success, you don't have that tangible commodity to show for it.  Talking up your agent-having alone just sounds strange.)  She was already worried about what might happen when an editor got a hold of it. What sort of crazy changes might be demanded?

Fortunately, I had just been through two editing processes, and I could reassure her that it wasn't likely to be as radical as the horror stories she had heard. 

In fact, I even wrote an article for Book Country on how my process was. 

Everyone's writing process and editing process are different, of course.  For example, I hear from a lot of writers that editing involves throwing a lot of words away and re-doing it.  I, personally, could never work that way... but at the same time, in my writing process, I cannot do the "just get it on the page and fix it later" method.  Not to say it's perfect when I first write it... not at all.  But if you were to compare the first draft of the first chapter of Murder of Mages to the one I submitted as a final version a few weeks ago, the fundamentals are more or less the same.  And almost all of my "major surgery" edits have been a matter of adding more to the manuscript, rather than throwing stuff away. 

Anyhow, being edited wasn't a scary process at all, thanks to having a fabulous, Hugo-nominated editor (fingers crossed for this year!)  Go and check out the article, and you can see the true finalized-cover of Thorn, including the DAW logo which identifies it as the 1681st book in their 30+ year history. 

Convention Panels and Expertise

So, this was a response I got to the last blog on ArmadilloCon, specifically in response to my self-admitted lack-of-expertise in the subject of the panel I was on:

I keep pushing the idea that participation in convention panels should be open to the public, and the panels pitched SXSW-style: that is, a group of panelists puts together a panel proposal, and then members vote on the panels they want to see. All too often people in the audience (at least some of them) know more about the subject than those on stage. 

It's an interesting idea, but for a volunteer organization to implement successfully... pretty challenging.  The sausage-making of coordinating the schedule of some several dozen programming participants into a cohesive set of panels, readings and events is an undertaking, especially when done almost entirely out of love.  Adding another layer of democracy to that undertaking is not something I would wish on anyone.

That said, the underlying complain has validity.  Lord knows that at the conventions I've attended, I've seen some panels where the members really didn't have much business being on it.  Hell, I've been on panels where I didn't have much business being on it.  At least this time around, my two more problematic panels were subjects I had an interest in, and had done some research on the subject beforehand. 

Even if you line up participants-to-panels perfectly, however, any panel that isn't just one person giving a set lecture (and thus... not really a panel) is going to be an organic thing.  Unless the moderator rules it with an iron fist, it's going to go where the people on it are going to take it. 

Not to mention, any given panel usually has its title and, perhaps, a sentences or two of extra description.  The programming coordinator might have had one idea of what a panel is going to be about, while the participants might-- each individually-- have another, and members of the audience something completely different from all of that.  Sometimes you just ride the wave where it takes you.

On top of that, when the context is a SF/F/Genre/Lit Convention, I don't think anyone in the audience is expecting or demanding of academic credentials from the panel.  They know that the panel consists of spec-fic writers who are mostly doing what they know best: speculating and story-telling.  Besides, in my Alcohol In Speculative Fiction panel, I don't think anyone wanted me to drone on about the history of development of beer, wine and distilled spirits. 

All that said, there's nothing wrong with just plain bowing out of a panel in which you would truly be out of your depth.  I was assigned one originally at ArmadilloCon that I was totally at a loss about, and immediately asked to be taken off it. 

Though, to a degree, if you're up on a panel, on some level you are presenting yourself as an "expert", and it's good to do your best to show yourself as one.  Or, if nothing else, be up front about your lack of expertise.  And be entertaining.  That's the thing I most want from a panel, after all.

ArmadilloCon Survival Report

So now ArmadilloCon is done, and it was a lovely time.

Friday was the Writers' Workshop, where we had plenty of good discussion in the morning sessions, and my critique students were an excellent group of people who are all on the verge of breaking through to the next level.  There were some administrative snafus (i.e., mistakes on my end of things), but our astounding volunteers Rebecca, Melissa and Beth helped keep things from flying off track. 

Plus I made sure Stina got a round of applause for all her years running the workshop.  Apparently next year, I'll be in charge.  Still contemplating that.

After the workshop, I swung home briefly* for dinner, and came back for my evening panels.  First was Protecting the Indigenous Tribes, which I had been a bit nervous about, but it went nicely, mostly because my panel-mates had interesting things to say, and we had a small-but-engaged audience.  Next was the raucous 40 Years of D&D, in which we mostly talked about our personal history with playing, favorite characters we played, and how it influenced our writing.  And we had to roll for initiative to talk.  Lots of fun, especially talking about how my love of playing thieves and mages influences the central character of Thorn, and the fun you can have role-playing a character with a terrible stat. (Namely, a Constitution of 5**)  After that, I ended up talking to Mark Finn and Mark Carroll more about gaming.  (Or, more correctly, listening to them, since I was starting to fade out.)

Saturday, I returned for another of my nervous-about-this panel on Aztec mythology in genre fiction.  Again, it went better than I had feared it would.  I didn't make too much of a fool of myself, though we had one audience member who consistently had a light shake of her head and an expression of No, wrong, wrong.  I found out after the fact that she was a PhD in Anthropology specializing in Mezoamerican cultures, so she probably had good reason.  If you're reading this: Sorry.  If I had known, I would have dragged you up with us.

Alcoholic Drinks in Fiction became Alcoholic Drinks in Writers, since a wonderful member of the audience bough drinks for the panel.  I may have prompted that a little.  But it was a very fun panel.   I hung around and did the BarCon thing for a while, mostly talking with Amanda Downum about each others work and alcohol, with Alex Renwick about the Olde Days of South Congress***, and becoming new Best Con Friends with Kat Richardson.  Who is awesome.  Plus many, many, many other people.

My reading went well, where I read the first chapters of both Thorn and Murder of Mages, and I was quite pleased.  And I can fill up an hour, apparently.  Good to know.  After a bit more BarConning, my wife arrived at midnight to sweep me off to her event in a different hotel.

Sunday's panels were early, which was a bit painful (see: swept off at midnight to a different event), but went well.  Best Cons in Genre Fiction was loose and free-form, but Don Webb and Jayme Blaschke are very smart guys to be sitting in a panel with, so it worked quite well.  The coffee had kicked in by the time I did Overhauling a Character, so I got to end my official con duties on a high note, as that was a good, vibrant discussion.

After some more Sunday-Afternoon-Decompression BarCon stuff, I stumbled home and fell down.  But now I'm feeling ready and vital, on the whole a successful con, in as much as one can measure "success".  Plenty of people seemed to be quite excited about Thorn and Murder, and one even said I had already earned a "fan for life".  I'll take that, thank you.   I'm ready to get moving on the rough draft of Murder of Mages II, editing Thorn II and projects beyond.**** 

Looking forward to next year.

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*- Personally, I loved having the hotel relatively close to the house this time around.
**- For those unversed in game-speak, that's essentially being quite out-of-shape or otherwise unhealthy.
***- By which I mean the 90s.
****- I actually got an offer for a small Project Beyond, so I need to think about what I might do for that.