Month: June 2010 (page 5 of 6)

The Home Stretch

June 10, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy Corner Balance

Maybe it’s just me, as I amble towards the end of my current project, doing my utmost to follow my own tenth rule of writing fiction. There’s something that I’ve noticed over the past week. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting into ‘conference’ mode, or maybe this is a side effect of continuing to get everything squared away with the new flat.

The impression I get, however, is that the sooner we get to that finish line, the more things crop up to grab us by the ankles and trip us up before we cross it. Like hitting the wall only with the goal in site.

I mentioned this last week but I might have given the impression that I see a large portion of the entertainment industry through a somewhat cynical lens. I occasionally have to remind myself that the same industry that produces The Human Centipede or Jumper also produces Schindler’s List and District 9. For every Twilight, there’s A Song of Ice and Fire. You might hear a bit of Nickleback on the radio, but there’s bound to be a little Muse right around the corner. I guess what I’m driving at is that I don’t hate the industry, and it’s unfair of me to paint it with a broad brush.

But there is mediocrity out there. There’s the kind of thinking that would have you subscribe to the notion that it’s okay just to get by. That being amazing is just wrapping up another client’s project, and exemplary work is the kind that brings in more business that’ll help maintain the Audi’s suspension for another six months. That’s the kind of thing I want to get away from. And as I get a bit closer to finishing a manuscript that feels like it’s got something behind it other than my hot air and swollen ego, a bit of fiction with a brain in its head and some characters that actually have a touch of depth to them, I can almost feel that mediocrity creeping up on me, trying to smother my enthusiasm and remind me that my place is not to shine among the stars but to look up at them and dream as I remain mired in the mud down in the foundations of somebody else’s palace.

It’s like spraining a toe in the last 5 meters of a 100 meter dash. Taking the last turn a bit too wide on a Formula 1 track. Being down at least one goal as the clock hits 90 minutes and there’s not a lot of stoppage time. The well-educated, reasonable, lazy, McDonalds-eating thing to do is stop. Quit. You’ve done a great deal, but now you’re just hurting yourself and you should be content in making a good effort. Pat yourself on the back, treat yourself to a rest, you’ve earned it.

Am I just beating a dead horse, here? Am I saying anything new? I’m not just talking about this post, either. What possible difference can my work make? Do I really have a shot at producing anything interesting, anything worth reading?

I’m certainly not going to find out if I quit.

This is the home stretch. The checkered flag is in sight. A few more steps, painful as they might be, and I’ll cross that finish line. And yes, my performance will get picked apart in post. There’ll be slow-motion replay of every little mistake. People with a lot more experience than me will be all too happy to point out what I could do better, what they’d have done differently and might even tell me that I should have quit long ago.

I know this is coming. I know it might not be comfortable for me, that it will feel like I’ve just caught my breath only to have somebody punch me in the gut. But I accept this. I have to. I need to be aware of the fact that what I’ve done is imperfect, that it needs help, that it’s a lump of carbon deep in the darkness of my imagination and to truly shine it needs to be placed under pressure from a lot of outside forces. It’s frightening, on a fundamental level, and potentially painful, which might be why the last couple of days have seen me putting very few words of any significance down.

I’m girding my loins. I’m seeing the Wave coming and I’m ready to catch it. I hope some of you will come along for the ride, even if it’s just to tell me how much I suck.

I’m not quitting. I’m pounding out those last 5 meters. I’m making that last turn. I’m staying ahead of the defenders and waiting to get that pass that’ll let me slip one past the keeper. And for right now, I’m done making lousy metaphors.

It would be a hell of a waste of a writer’s conference if I didn’t do any writing, after all.

Agents

June 9, 2010 / / 2 Comments

From the Matrix

No, silly, not those agents.

It’s been been over a year since I discussed The Fine Art of Selling Yourself. Other than being almost done with a novel that, while imperfect, might actually have a shot of getting some ink, very little has changed for me. I still think pitches should be simple, agents should be approached with confidence and that no amount of rejection should stop you (or me) from trying to hook one.

But there’s something else. Something I nearly forgot in the rush to finish the aforementioned manuscript.

Have something solid.

It’s very, very rare for a project in any sort of media to get picked up on pitch alone. Unless you know someone in the business, have perfect timing, and possess a supernatural awareness of what’s going to sell to a lucrative demographic, you might as well be throwing darts at a dart board. But a solid work? Something that’s been revised, edited and polished? That’s like approaching the same dart board with a shotgun.

That’s why I took the pressure of off myself to finish before the weekend. I might finish at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference, in addition to attending workshops and Tweeting to make sure all of my literary friends know what the place has to offer, but I realize just how bad of a first impression it’d be for me to run into a face-to-face with an agent, out of breath but happy to have a finished work to pitch. The last thing you want from someone you might be working with is to meet them when they sweat all over your shirt.

So I’m not going to embarrass myself – any more than I do normally, shut up. Clean clothes, nice hat, fresh battery in the pocket watch, business cards. I’ll meet people, network, get people interested. If I do approach an agent, it’d be to pick their brain, see how my genre is doing and what the demand is. Maybe a quick ‘elevator’ pitch as to what Citizen in the Wilds is all about, why it might sell and to whom it’d appeal. Maybe.

But I won’t be looking for an agent in earnest until Citizen is trimmed and pruned, which might be a while.

Speaking of, however, if anybody here has been using Google Wave for their project in terms of getting collaborative feedback, can you give me any tips on how to get started? I’m thinking once I get people on board, it’ll be best to release one chapter at a time, get it fixed up, and then move on.

Finally, if I do go that route, would anybody like to help tear my writing a structurally superfluous new behind? I’ll start a list. Then when the last word’s been banged out, I’ll start dangling nice meaty chops of potential fantasy-flavored fail for your minds to nom on.

Intellectual Indigestion

June 8, 2010 / / 0 Comments

To The Oatmeal

This was going to be the first of a few posts inspired by The Oatmeal,, but I have quite a bit of work to do if I want to get something tangible squared away by Thursday.

“First you do the work that feeds your belly,” someone very wise told me recently, “then you do the work that feeds your soul.”

It’s hard to do the work that feeds your belly when it makes you want to vomit, but only critics get paid for complaining.

DPS Delivery Man

June 7, 2010 / / 5 Comments

Courtesy SplitReason

So following yesterday’s WoW discussion and my request for advice, Rick Carroll said the following:

DPS is easy to find. DPS is everywhere. Good, smart dps is not. Any doofus with a computer and a connection can spam buttons at an enemy – smart dps knows what they are doing, how it works, and when to do what. That is really, really rare and very appreciated when it is found. If you like dps, ranged or melee, stick with it. Perfect it, own it. (…) Tanking is strategy. DPS is an adventure. Healing is forty-five minutes of boredom with fifteen minutes of brown undies time.

Like I said, feeling like I’m helping the group succeed, getting the last shot in on a boss and contributing to a great gaming experience for everybody is what keeps me going back into dungeons – well, that and the loot. And maybe it’s just me, but the few times I’ve tried melee DPS I’ve felt like I’m getting in the tank’s way. It’s just a personal thing, I don’t like to crowd other people if I can help it. Even when playing a medic in TF2, I try to keep my distance from the Heavy or Demoman or whomever I’m following. Of course, that’s due to me not wanted to get killed by splash damage, but I digress.

Ranged DPS seems to be where I do the best and have the most fun, and for me, that narrows things down to three classes: hunter, mage and warlock.

Hunter: Azeroth’s Very Own Sniper

Courtesy Valve

I have a lot of experience playing a hunter. More to the point, I had fun doing it. I know there are a lot of fans of a specialization called ‘Beast Mastery’ out there, and while I can’t deny the appeal of a big red kitty nomming on things that offend me, most of my participation in combat while I was a Beast Master involved spamming a particular macro over and over again. Anybody with a pulse and a spasm in their keyboard hand can do that.

So when I switched to Marksmanship, having to go from a macro spam to a shot rotation, something clicked for me. I was having more fun. I was becoming more involved in the process of combat and became more aware of my surroundings. Switching again to Survival sealed the deal, as I now had to pay attention to my abilities as well as everything else, waiting for the right circumstances to trigger for me to deal out my maximum potential damage. I have to admit, I look forward to doing this again, and since my hunter’s my one character at max level and I’m a lazy busy guy, I’m likely to spend a lot of time with him once again.

Mage: The Master of Sheep Magic

Courtesy Capcom/Kid Icarus

I have a soft spot for finger-wigglers. Maybe it’s because they’re the alpha-nerds of the fantasy genre, but wizards have always appealed to me. Mages in Warcraft have always had a bit of whimsy about them, what with their polymorphing spells turning would-be assailants into harmless sheep. They also, at later levels can turn them into turtles, kitties or piglets.

Oh, and there’s also the tossing of fireballs and hurling of ice lances.

This would be another class that would require me to pay attention, and not just to aggro & DPS meters. Being aware of possible incoming threats, the amount of time left on a particular polymorph and what enemies are vulnerable or resistant to fire & frost spells will be the difference between me shining as an example of magely might or getting kicked from the group for being made of fail. I’d probably have to learn the most about what spells to use when if I pick up this class, but it’d be a really interesting change of pace from the pet-using gear-oriented hunter. Of the three classes, this would be the one I’d be most likely to roll on the Alliance side of things.

Warlock: Proving Once Again That Evil Is Sexy

Courtesy Blizzard

I remember my days and nights in EverQuest. My character was a smooth-talking, intelligent and thoroughly devious dark elf necromancer. Unfortunately, “necromancer” is unavailable as a player class in World of Warcraft (as awesome as it would be) and the closest approximation would be the class called ‘warlock’. Functionally, it’s something of a hybrid of a hunter and mage, with the primary damage from the player being based on magic spells while the character uses a pet for a variety of purposes.

Besides the fun I’d have role-playing such a character, it’s difficult to say if I’d prefer this class to the other two I’ve mentioned. It’s a slightly different playstyle from the mage (unless I specialize in Destruction) but could be pretty rewarding, especially in PvP. The impression that I get is that warlocks do very well in battlegrounds and arenas, though not as well as rogues. But I’ll leave that sort of excellence to those better suited for it. My wife, for instance.

Any contributions you care to make in my decisions? Any experiences of your own you’d like to share? Hit up the comments section.

(and no, the fact that all three of these classes are available to the blood elves has nothing to do with it. At all.)

…

(I like being pretty, shut up.)

Starting Over Is Hard To Do

June 6, 2010 / / 6 Comments

Bloof Huntard

So my wife and I have returned to Azeroth. Kinda. Starting brand new characters on a brand new server is a great idea on paper. But there are a few issues with it that are making things, for my part, somewhat confused. Since this is a blog just as much about gaming as it is writing, here’s the latest haps in our Warcraftian lives. It’s this or a bunch of petulent whining in my LiveJournal about how all the energy I had yesterday for writing non-stop seems to have slithered away to hide under a couch in Burundi somewhere.

Highs and Lows

When we left World of Warcraft, we had top-level characters. We delved into dungeons, slugged it out in arenas, the whole nine yards. I participated in daily quests to earn some cash while she wondered why in hell anybody would bother role-playing with somebody who thinks being the bastard offspring of the Lich King and Sylvanas Windrunner is an innovative idea that’s bound to get them immortalized in the constellations of Azeroth, or maybe just some cyber-sex. Anyway, what I’m driving at is being maximum level in an MMO tends to spoil you.

Not just because it’s easier to find something to do that isn’t questing or grinding to the next level, but also you can help other characters you create in various ways. Gold, heirloom items, raw materials for crafting, you name it, a character with nothing to do but beat up boss monsters and pounce on unsuspecting members of the opposing faction is likely to have extra resources on their hands. Those resources can easily get funneled into an up-and-coming character that’ll play a different role in group endeavors, have a different story or just be a change of pace.

While starting over on a new server allows you to try a different play experience, find new people to play with or disassociate yourself with bad memories or people made of fail, it also means you’re starting literally from scratch. Doing things the hard way isn’t necessarily bad. I mean, my wife leveled her paladin on the Protection tree, so she seems to thrive on doing things the hard way. But spoiling characters on one server can leave the new one on another feeling like an unwanted step-child. Without a high-level character’s support, a low-level character can feel quite low indeed.

Pee Vee Pee

We rolled on an RP-PVP server. For the uninitiated, that’s “role-playing player-versus-player”. From what I understand, most of the servers of Aion fall into that mold. I’m going to paraphrase my wife’s take on the experience of being on those servers in that game.

Epix: I would be going along doing some kind of quest or gathering X amount of flower Y for NPC Z or some shit, when half a dozen Asmodians would pop out of nowhere and pound me into a quivering mass of bloody Elyos gibblets. That was so much fun! It was challenging and made it feel dangerous for me to even think about leaving camp! I miss that!

I suspect that being on an RP-PVP server, she’s looking for something closer to that experience, being interrupted in handing in a quest by some Alliance jerkoff stabbing the quest-giving NPC, laughing, and then stabbing her for good measure.

Yeah. Sounds like a real treat.

Epix: If you’re going to complain, why don’t you go fight Professor Coldheart with the rest of your Care Bear friends?

Grumpy Bear

She probably wouldn’t actually say that, as I said I’m paraphrasing, but it seemed funny at the time. I love you, darling.

The problem with this is that Blizzard has introduced a system that bypasses needing to quest out in the world pretty much altogether. The Random Dungeon Finder, or whatever it’s actually called, matches your character with a team of others from throughout the various servers clustered in what’s called a ‘battlegroup.’ You can stay in your home city, wait for the system to match you with a group, and work on your tradeskills or roleplay or go get yourself a snack in the meantime. You’re surrounded by high-level NPCs who will flatten any individual opponent looking to shank you on sight, and a concerted effort to break through the guards in order to down the boss-level administrative character means you’ll just get steamrolled while you’re waiting for your metal to smelt.

It seems to defeat the purpose somewhat.

What Is Your Quest?

The question I ultimately have to ask myself is, “What do I want out of playing WoW?” Getting my hunter to 80 was kind of a big deal for me. I worked hard to earn him titles, rewards and sometimes just the notion of “I survived this dungeon with the highest DPS output, and I wasn’t a dick to anybody in the group so they’re bound to invite me along for bigger challenges.” Do I just want to do that again, perhaps with a magical cloth-wearing finger-wiggling class like a mage or a warlock?

Maybe.

I mentioned in the Cataclysmic discussion that I’d be rolling a Forsaken mage, and that’s what I did. I’m liking it, but in the back of my mind I know I’m filling another DPS role. I get some great crowd control and everybody loves a mage’s conjured food & water, but how different will it ultimately be from a hunter, other than not having a furry friend to take all that nasty damage for me? Unless my wife’s playing a tauren or is in bear form.

I’d be waiting for Cataclysm to come out for my blood elf warrior spell breaker which I’d be aiming for a tanking role. Maybe I could roll a warrior on another server to learn the ropes in the meantime? I haven’t played a dedicated tank since before Burning Crusade came out – my first Horde character was a Forsaken warrior. The death knights I’ve played tended towards tanking, but I never got one to max level.

I’ve done a bit of healing in the past, and I’ve enjoyed it. Maybe I should give a hybrid class a fair shake, such as a paladin or druid. And there’s the question of where all of this would be taking place – which server, which environment, etc.

I guess my problem is I’d like to try a bit of everything. Doing that means not sticking with something long enough to get it to max level. And my max level character, whom I like playing both from a gameplay and roleplaying standpoint, has to wait until we decide to play on his server or we get enough disposable income (HA!) for a transfer.

I like contributing to the success of a group. I like getting the kill shot in on a nasty boss. I like people feeling like they can rely on me. And I like helping people not suck. Does that mean I’m better suited for a tanking role than sitting in the back dumping damage on things?

Help me, Intertweeps. I’m having trouble deciding, here.

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