baroque_mongoose | Entries tagged with writing

When I was able to travel easily, I used to go and see Porthos a fair bit. Porthos had parties now and again, and they were very much introvert parties; that sounds like a complete oxymoron, but in fact it worked. The key to a good introvert party (apart from the food, of course, but that's a constant across all decent parties) is that you have something for people to do, so that there are no awkward silences. And what Porthos would do would be to arrange readthroughs; he'd have several scripts on hand, including a lot of Round the Horne and Blackadder and other similar things that could easily be split up into short separate comic skits, plus a few interesting one-offs. I don't know whether he was the one who actually wrote the mashup between The Goon Show and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I would certainly not have put it past him; and I have very fond memories of singing the Ying-Tong Song, as Willow (who was using it to cast some sort of spell, I believe), as a result.

And, of course, there was The Old Grey Barn. I have mentioned before that Porthos is half Russian; I've no idea where he found this sketch, but it is a 1920s parody of all the gloomy Russian plays ever written, and consequently it is absolutely hilarious. We'd pretty nearly always finish with that, and just occasionally we'd even do it twice over the course of a party, as we all enjoyed it so much.

So, whenever the conversation flagged, Porthos would hand out some scripts. I have never seen Blackadder, but I rapidly got myself permanent dibs on the role of Nursie because apparently I nailed it just from reading the script; I did know Round the Horne pretty well, and I usually ended up being either Julian or Sandy, because, again, I could do the voice. (Side note: I have only ever known one gay man who actually talked like that, and when I first met him I couldn't entirely believe he was real. I'd always thought That Voice was a stereotype invented by straight people. Apparently not!)

I haven't been able to get to one of Porthos' parties for a good long time now, but when I started thinking about my 60th birthday, I decided that I should like a party. The only problems with that were that I have a tiny flat, and almost everyone I wanted to invite was a long way away - in fact, it was entirely likely that d'Artagnan would be on another continent at the time.

Then I had the idea. Why not do a readthrough... on Zoom?

Rather than having little snippets, I decided to go with a full script; and so I wrote Applied Draconics, a comic piece about a small and peaceful kingdom that needed to deal with an approaching dragon. It contained the inevitable royalty and knights errant, an evil Chancellor (basically the Evil Grand Vizier character transposed into a more western-style setting), a clever bard, a couple of women pretending to be men for reasons (one of them kept her knitting in her codpiece), and all that sort of stuff. I got a rough idea of who'd be attending and wrote it to suit, so that everyone would have either one major part or two or more smaller parts adding up to about the same length.

Of course, it didn't work quite as planned. Athos, having originally been very keen to play the evil Chancellor, bowed out; he loved the role but couldn't face the amount of peopling it was going to involve, which was very sad, because he and d'Artagnan have never actually met and I was hoping that would be the moment (quite apart from the fact that he'd have had tremendous fun playing the villainous Lord Mountpleasant). My brother-in-law heroically stepped into the breach, and in his case that really was heroic, because he's high-functioning autistic and he can't people any better than Athos can. (Athos is not autistic. He's just the sort of person who, if he likes you, really does like you, but he doesn't like most people, especially not in numbers.) One person, for some reason, never got any of the e-mails till it was too late, so he also had to be replaced; but we managed to re-jig using the existing cast. It went very well nonetheless, and much fun was had by all. The only thing was that I'd made it a little too long, so we didn't have as much time to chat afterwards as we'd have liked, but that could easily be fixed next time.

We had some good actors. Porthos is always excellent, and had a lot of fun playing the upper-class twit Prince Percival. One of my friends from church is brilliant at the kind of roles that really need to be hammed up to the maximum, so I gave him Glxpnx the Demon and he rose magnificently to the occasion. And d'Artagnan... well, he was very nearly playing himself as Oscar the Bard, but he did also have to fill in elsewhere, revealing a talent for voices at least equal to that of Porthos. (He was, as it turned out, on a different continent; he attended from Toronto.) But, being the modest soul he is, he was trying to disparage his own ability.

"Nonsense," I told him. "You're a very good actor."

"Oh... I'm not sure about that..." he demurred.

"Of course you are," I said. "Why else do you think I gave you an Oscar?"

Yes, indeed, d'Artagnan. I absolutely knew you were going to do that. :-D

Anyway, I wrote a sequel the following year, and once the current magnum opus is finished I'll be writing another one for this year's birthday party, because it is now a tradition. I wish I'd started it a lot sooner!

Current Mood: cheerful

There are D&D characters around who are inclined to solve most problems by killing someone. That type of character is known in gamer circles as a "murderhobo", and it's a mercilessly accurate description. While I have no problem with the term "murderhobo", I am more inclined to pigeonhole them in my own mind as "Clint Eastwood characters". Clint Eastwood was notorious for playing jerks in films who thought they were the hero; I was once induced to sit through The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which I did not enjoy, and my reaction at the end was "he's supposed to be the good one?!" I was told that, actually, pretty much all of Eastwood's protagonists were like that. He was a good actor. I just didn't like watching him.

The advantage that "Clint Eastwood character" has over "murderhobo" is that it's a little bit more specific. These D&D characters, generally speaking, have a good alignment. They don't kill simply for the sake of it (that's what evil characters do). They kill because they think they've got a good reason. If you're the hero, you obviously get to kill the villain... don't you?

D&D is a great game, but unfortunately it's rather easy to give it problematic ethics. (Of course, the game doesn't actually force you to do that. While it is quite black and white on the surface, there's enough wiggle room to allow you to play a much more nuanced and properly thought out ethical system.) So, for example, most of the races tend to certain alignments. I have no problem with undead being invariably evil; anyone who deliberately creates undead is going to be a pretty unpleasant character to start with, and so they're not going to make non-evil undead (although, having said that, the main plot driver in the book I'm currently writing is a vampire who inexplicably turned out not to be evil). I have rather more of a problem with "everyone from this [non-undead] race is evil", or indeed "good", for that matter. It seems to negate personal choice (and, again, undead don't tend to have that). Granted, if you look carefully, you can often find exceptions; drow (a subterranean race of elves) are normally considered evil, but then you find that there are some good ones who tend to escape to the surface to be safe from their evil kindred, and they usually worship a Chaotic Good goddess called Eilistraee. Gnomes are normally good, but according to one of the rule books "evil gnomes are as frightening as they are rare". But still, it's a little bit dispiriting to go through the Monster Manual and keep finding "Alignment: always [X]", whatever X may happen to be.

And then, to return to our Clint Eastwood characters, there's a big question mark over what it actually means to be "good" in this game. Generally speaking, evil characters are the most straightforward: they'll attack anyone they can for the sheer hell of it (possibly literally). That includes one another. Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil cannot stand each other, whereas Lawful Good and Chaotic Good can usually work pretty well together. The devils of the Nine Hells of Baator and the demons of the Infinite Layers of the Abyss are constantly at war. The only way those two types will work together is if it's for mutual advantage (my Chaotic Evil archlich has a powerful Lawful Evil vampire as second-in-command, which does work well for both of them, though they don't appear to like each other very much). Neutral characters will generally side with good characters when the chips are down, unless the evil ones can give them a good incentive not to do so, because neutral characters are more concerned about just getting on with their lives to best advantage, and they know the good characters won't randomly attack them. One of the major elements in my current story is both sides trying to pull in the neutrals as far as possible, which leads to some interesting times in the moral middle, as it were.

But good characters? In D&D, that's more complicated, and the way I see it, the bottom line is "do you kill evil characters just because they are evil, or do you not kill them unless they have actually done or are about to do something evil, and if so, how evil do their actions or intended actions have to be before you make the decision to kill them?" My personal opinion on this is that if you kill anyone just because they have an evil alignment, you're actually no better than they are; and this, obviously, has real-life ramifications. It's very easy to decide that you're the good guys and the other lot are the bad guys, so therefore anything goes; and it never even occurs to you that they've come to the equally valid conclusion that they're the good guys and you're the bad guys, so, again, anything goes.

Seriously. No, it doesn't.

In my story, the archlich and the vampire have taken over an abandoned tower in the middle of a wood; as the story goes on, the protagonists find out more and more about this tower in several different ways, and quite late on in the story they discover it has a lot more basement than anyone realised. And this basement is full of drow (as mentioned above) and duergar (who more or less are to dwarves what drow are to elves), who are all either creating or recording spells, forging armour and weapons, or doing military training. It seems very clear that the archlich is planning an attack against the nearby city. So some bright spark says "we could bore a shaft through from the river and flood out the basement levels, end of problem."

This is where your classic Clint Eastwood "good" D&D character goes "yay, perfect!". Mine are not cast in that mould. My characters go "ehhh... we may possibly have to do that as a last resort, but let's see if we can avoid killing well over a hundred people who haven't actually hurt anyone yet, though they're probably planning to". And then someone else points out that there is probably going to be another exit at some distance from the tower, because these folks aren't stupid. There is great relief all round. The exit is duly located, and only when the protagonists are satisfied that it does indeed exist do they go "right, yes, this is good, we'll flood them out, that'll get them out of the tower; then we'll shepherd them back to the entrance to the Underdark [the subterranean level whence they came], and when they're all home again we'll block it off". They will kill the archlich, but even for the vampire they have a plan that doesn't involve killing him. I was really delighted when I came up with that one. He's an arrogant blighter, like most vampires, but he's also a very interesting character.

As a GM, I absolutely will take advantage of all the flexibility I'm allowed (which is a great deal). I will mentally strike through that word "always" every time I see it following the word "alignment". At the moment I'm replacing it with "mostly", for cultural reasons: if orcs, as a culture, worship an evil god called Gruumsh, then evil traits will be valued in orc culture and so most orcs will tend to be evil, but not all of them. Some of them will rebel. Similarly, it's not hard to imagine a criminal dwarf who is outcast from their community (dwarves worship the Lawful Good god Moradin, and tend towards that alignment). People - well, living people, anyway - get the option to think for themselves. I'm thinking of having one of the goblins gradually change her alignment as she realises that it's better to work for someone who both cares and pays than to work for someone who - as she succinctly describes the vampire - doesn't care but does pay.

It's not all black and white. You don't always need to kill the villain. And if you think you do, maybe you should take a long hard look at whether perhaps you are the villain.

Current Mood: creative

I went to a Blake's 7 convention once. Only once, surprisingly. It was in Bedford, and I cosplayed Avon because of course I did; while I have to say it would be rather stressful to have a coffee with him, he was undoubtedly a brilliant character. I've always said, and I still maintain, that he was a tragic anti-hero worthy of Shakespeare. (I knew Paul Darrow, who played him, to a certain extent; he was a likeable old buffer with a beautiful speaking voice, a quirky sense of humour, and a fondness for dachshunds, carpet slippers, and - of all things - garden gnomes. Some of the fans at the convention found out about this and presented him with a gnome. I knew his wife Janet a lot better than I knew him, and she was, shall we say, less thrilled about the gnome... but she was very tolerant.)

I was there with a friend who was a published writer. She wrote pulp Westerns for libraries, and several of her characters were a nod to those in B7 - "Sheriff Darrow", in particular, was (obviously) quite a lot like Avon, in the more good-aligned interpretation. (One of the really fascinating things about Avon as a character was his ambiguity. He always claimed to be totally selfish, and he would explain his apparently good actions in terms of selfishness and pragmatism; well, he certainly wasn't a classic hero type, but the viewer was always left wondering if he was really quite as bad as he painted himself.) Neither of us could manage to get to things like this very often, so we had both decided we were going to do it properly, and we had bought tickets to the gala dinner. The way that worked was that each of the convention guests would be allocated a table seating maybe ten or a dozen people, and the rest of us would be shared round them, so everyone got a chance to have dinner with one of the guests.

My friend and I got Scott Fredericks. He had played Carnell, who was not a regular character but popped up in a few episodes. Carnell was full-on evil, and the way Scott played him was a real study in menacing understatement. There were quite a few fans who really liked the character although he was so unpleasant; I didn't, at all, though I did think he was beautifully acted. So when I found we'd got Scott, I really didn't know quite what to expect.

My friend landed up with the seat immediately to Scott's left, and I was sitting next to her on the other side. She was one of the people who liked Carnell, so she was already off to a flying start; and when she's chatty, she's very chatty, so soon she was telling him enthusiastically about all her books (she had about ten of them in print at that point) and I was hardly getting a word in edgeways.

Until Scott suddenly looked straight at me and said, "And what about you? What do you write?"

I blinked. "How did you know I write?" I asked, flabbergasted.

He grinned. "It's your turn of phrase!"

I think we ended up on the right table. :-)

Current Mood: nostalgic

A friend from church and I do a semi-regular Bible study on a Saturday evening via Zoom; this varies from fortnightly to monthly, depending on people's availability, so it's quite a low-key thing. This particular friend is fascinated by the life of King David and wanted someone to study it with, so it started out being her and another older lady in the church (there aren't many people over 50, let alone over 60), then I joined them, then the other lady had to drop out; and at the moment we have someone else interested so there are supposed to be three of us, but the third person has been struggling to make it, so in practice it seems to be just two.

Anyway, so we've been working through 1 and 2 Samuel, generally two chapters at a time. I have always enjoyed these particular books of the Bible because, even apart from theological considerations, they are just so well written. This is a writer from thousands of years ago who absolutely knew how to construct a gripping narrative, handle characterisation, and make his story flow (I'm going to say "his" because I suspect a woman writing it would have dealt with some of the recorded incidents rather differently) with a commendable economy of words. Let's face it, at the time, you couldn't just produce a huge word processor file (or set of files), or even use any number of sheets of paper. It'd be "here's your scroll, it's this big, fit the story into it to the best of your ability". The modern novel was not invented until very much later, but the writer of the books of Samuel would have had no trouble at all in writing one.

And so David, and the other characters who surround him, are very human and very relatable. It's not like the Egyptian inscriptions where you can read that such a pharaoh built this, conquered that, founded the other, but you have no idea what sort of person he was. David, however, is someone you know pretty well by the time you've finished reading the books of Samuel. He's a fair-minded man; he trusts God even when things seem impossible; he's capable of failing spectacularly, but when he does, he truly repents rather than trying to justify himself; he's a much better king than he is a father; and so on.

And then there's Joab son of Zeruiah. Now there's a character for you.

Joab is David's nephew, which is why, very unusually for an Old Testament character, he and his brothers have a matronymic rather than a patronymic. Zeruiah was David's sister, and that was more important than whoever her husband was (for once we never find that out, which is a tiny little bit of counterbalance to all the times someone's wife is mentioned in the Old Testament and you think "but what was her name?"). Joab is also David's number one general, and this isn't mere nepotism; he's earned it. He's a very clever man, a first-class strategic thinker, and a brave soldier, plus he is 100% loyal to David (even if that loyalty shows itself in some less than wonderful ways from time to time).

There's just one very big problem with Joab. He has, basically, no morals.

This is usually all right as long as he is directly doing what David (who does have morals, even if he occasionally fails to live up to them) has told him to do. However, Joab is probably brighter than his uncle, and he's certainly a great deal shrewder in worldly terms. He knows this very well. Therefore, he's quite prepared to go behind David's back and do something David wouldn't dream of doing, if he calculates that that will benefit David. So, for instance, fairly early in the story, not long after Saul and most of his sons have been killed in battle, the Israelites crown his remaining heir, whose name is Mephibosheth (actually it's Mephi-Baal, but that's another side track), and who is still alive because he's lame in both feet and therefore can't fight. Mephibosheth has inherited his father's top general, a man called Abner, who is also very good at what he does; but Mephibosheth manages to antagonise Abner, so Abner says "right, you don't trust me, so I can't work for you", and promptly defects to David. David welcomes him, rightly perceiving his value; but Joab isn't having this. There are probably several factors at play here. Abner killed Joab's brother Asahel (in battle, and very reluctantly), and revenge for that is the motivation given in the account; but I suspect Joab was also afraid that David might put Abner in charge of the army in his place, and also (as he himself says to David) he isn't inclined to trust a defector. Anyway, Joab murders Abner behind David's back, leaving David in a highly embarrassing situation - people are going to think he ordered Joab to do it, so he has to make it very clear that it was nothing to do with him and very much not what he wanted to happen.

An even clearer example of Joab bulldozing straight over David because he thinks David isn't acting in his own best interests comes later on, when David's son Absalom rebels and sets himself up as king. (One can easily argue that this was David's own fault, as he had never disciplined Absalom properly.) Obviously a pretender to the throne has to be dealt with in some way, and Joab didn't hesitate to deal with Absalom in an extremely final way, causing David to go into mourning (this was, after all, his beloved son, even if he had committed treason). At which point Joab tears a strip off David, and tells him he's going to lose the backing of the people if he carries on like this. There was a threat to his throne, that threat has been removed, so he ought to be glad, or at least act like it. Joab isn't in the least concerned about David's love for his son. He's interested in making sure he stays king, after all the trouble it took to get him on the throne in the first place.

I could go on; but it strikes me that Joab son of Zeruiah is, basically, Lawful Neutral. He has one "law", which is "be loyal to David at all costs, even if he himself gets in the way of that", and he obeys it come hell or high water, with no regard at all for any ethical considerations. It's what makes him a fascinating, if pretty dislikeable, character. I think he's more of a kind of antihero than an actual villain, while David, for all his flaws, is the actual hero.

Shortly after David's death, Joab meets an untimely end. It seems remarkably fitting, in the circumstances.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I learnt Italian specifically in order to translate poetry. Which is, perhaps, not the usual motivation; but hear me out.

When I was at university, someone pointed me to a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I'd never heard of it before, but they were quite right - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Summarising such a long book (it is a pretty hefty tome) is difficult, but I think the best description of it I can give is that it looks at cognitive science from a lot of different angles, together with a great deal of whimsy and humour. A lot of it is centred around Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, but the other two titular luminaries also get plenty of space. There is really nothing else quite like it.

So when I discovered, years later, that Hofstadter had also written a book called Le Ton Beau de Marot, I bought it sight unseen, thinking I was going to get more of the same. Well, I did, and I didn't. Yes, it's still about cognitive science; but this book approaches it first and foremost from the perspective of linguistics, which meant I actually enjoyed it even more than the previous book. It is a treasure trove of language-related delights, from ambiguous newspaper headlines such as "British Left Waffles On Falklands" (they've probably gone off by now!), to lipograms (texts written without the use of a particular letter or letters), to the longest palindrome I've ever seen ("Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."), to cute little computer models for building complex sentences.

But the motif that runs through the entire book is a late mediaeval poem by Jean Marot, the English title of which is "To a Sick Damsel". It's a charming little verse with very short (three-syllable) lines, in which the author wishes the damsel a speedy recovery. And the book contains something like 40 translations of that one poem: all of them are different, and the vast majority of them are brilliant.

Now, that blew my mind. I had always been of the opinion that poetry - well, rhyming and metrical poetry, anyway - couldn't be translated properly; in my defence, the only other translations I'd encountered so far had been terrible. But now I knew it could be done, I was eager to do it... and I felt there was no point in trying to create my own translation of the Marot poem, since that had been so comprehensively done in the book. So I immediately thought of Dante and Petrarch, and set myself to learning Italian.

However, while I was doing this, I found myself starting to think about the Marot poem again, and a translation began to take shape in my mind. I was astonished, but I ran with it, and after a little work I managed to produce a translation which was quite different from any of those in the book, but nonetheless a good translation. My mind was, once again, blown. Then Porthos got some kind of unpleasant lurgy, and, with renewed confidence, I revisited the Marot and did yet another translation, this time for a sick Porthos. That was it. I was convinced. The wells of translation never run dry.

Since then, I have indeed produced translations of poetry by Dante and Petrarch; I have not yet tackled any of the Divine Comedy, the rhyme scheme there being formidably tight, but it is definitely on my bucket list. (Sonnets are more forgiving. The rhyme scheme of the typical Petrarchan sonnet is ABBA ABBA CDE CDE; however, any given English word typically, on average, has fewer rhymes than its Italian counterpart, so I will often bend it slightly to take account of that, and produce a translation with a rhyme scheme ABBA CDDC EFG EFG - to use Hofstadter's own pun, one ABBA stanza is enough (abbastanza being "enough" in Italian)). It is nothing like as hard as most people think. You do, of course, have to be a competent poet in your own right; but beyond that, it's pretty much the linguistic equivalent of killer sudoku. You're just slotting things into places where they fit. And, of course, there is nothing forcing you to try to rhyme the same words in both languages. As long as the line conveys the same meaning, it's perfectly all right to rhyme on a different word, and indeed sometimes you couldn't rhyme on the same words even if you wanted to because of the language structure.

My spoken Italian, alas, is nothing very special. I have ended up tongue-tied in a shop in Rome because I could not just recall the word for the item I wanted; the trouble is I don't get nearly enough practice at speaking it. Being able to translate a sonnet by Petrarch is a wonderful thing, but sadly it doesn't help you when you're just trying to buy an extra layer because it's suddenly gone unseasonably chilly in Rome.

But it's fun!

Current Mood: tired

It happens. You haven't GM'd (or even played) for a while because circumstances happened, and all of a sudden you find you have an enthusiastic group who are all ready for you to write them an exciting adventure to get into. But you're rusty... really rusty, in fact. You can't even remember exactly how Damage Reduction works. What do you do?

I am not claiming any credit for the answer because I stumbled across it by sheer accident; but what you do is this. You write a story.

I mentioned a little while ago that I had started writing a D&D-based story with the Three Musketeers and myself as the adventuring party... wheelchairs and all, incidentally, though Athos' wheelchair and mine are both magically enhanced in the story. (They don't propel themselves around by magic because there is no canonical spell to do that, although it's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that one of the characters could devise one. They do, however, have inbuilt defensive capabilities.) Generally when I play D&D I play a character who doesn't have any significant disabilities, but I thought for the purposes of the story it would be intriguing to have everyone as the most faithful rendering of the original that works in the D&D world. So, for instance, the story version of me doesn't have a stoma because there's no way anyone in that world would; on the other hand, the story version of the friend with the alpha-gal allergy still can't eat red meat, but it's now because of a magical geas which prevents him from doing so, rather than an allergy (as allergies don't seem to be at all common in the D&D world). And then, of course, there's the fact that d'Artagnan's character is the bard, naturally, and bards tend to have travel spells, including interplanar ones; the D&D universe has a number of "planes", which are best described as interconnected parallel realities, each of which has its own particular features. In real life, d'Artagnan avoids air travel as much as he can for environmental reasons, so it was great fun to make his corresponding character have strong reservations about "plane travel"! (Again, the reasons are different in the story; the bard's reservations are due to the fact that it's genuinely dangerous. You can meet some seriously nasty things on alternative planes.)

I am having a huge amount of fun with this story, and it's definitely going to end up being a full-length novel; but the crucial thing is that I have to keep researching. At every turn, more or less. The party needs to get to Place X ahead of the people they're currently following, if possible? OK... let's go and see if there's a spell for that (ah, yes, there is), and if so, who's likely to have it (oh, the bard, that figures). The bard can bring the entire party with him as long as they're all touching him, but there's a problem with that because they're travelling in a cart. It's reasonable to assume that the cart will follow if he takes the horses with him, but what about the people in the cart? The books don't answer that question, so then I have to write a little section where he tests it out using the cat who is accompanying the party, because if the cat falls to the ground from the height of the cart's floor he won't take any harm, whereas two people in wheelchairs definitely would. The cat is successfully transported with the cart, so the bard returns and everyone gets back in the cart, including the stone golem, who normally walks alongside.

The party is now travelling extra fast relative to the Material Plane (which is the basic "world as we more or less know it" reality) because they are, despite the bard's serious misgivings, on the Plane of Shadows. I check the books again to see what they might encounter there. Aha - nightcrawler. That's pretty fearsomely unpleasant. What spells are they going to need? Check, check, check... ah, well, before they do anything else at all, the cleric (that would be me) is going to need to cast Consecrate over the entire area to neutralise the creature's massively evil aura, and that requires sprinkling the area with holy water and scattering powdered silver over it, and how do you do that when you're sitting in a wheelchair inside a cart with a worm-type thing the size of a respectable dwarf hall approaching at some speed and you know it can easily swallow you whole, wheelchair and all? Oh, right. You get the sorcerer, who's also in a wheelchair, to cast Mage Hand a couple of times to take care of the sprinkling and scattering side of things. Then the wizard can start throwing actual attack spells, but he gets blasted with... [check creature's abilities again]... oh, yes, Cone of Cold, pretty nasty from a creature as powerful as that, he'll need healing before he can try again. And so on, and so on. And by the time I've written four pages of gripping encounter, I know a great deal more than I did before.

It's not just encounters. Pretty much anything that happens raises questions like "is there a spell for that? If there is, who's casting it? Is it an expensive spell? (If it is, the characters will usually be looking for another way round, the exceptions being emergencies like the Consecrate spell mentioned above.) Is it possible that someone other than the characters may be casting a spell here?" And more; it isn't just spells, though, despite the fact that this particular party is heavily magic-biased (any melee fighting they need to do is done by constructs or summoned allies, because none of them is any good at it). It's all kinds of little bits and bobs about the D&D world. It's almost like learning a language by immersion, or, in this particular case, re-learning it.

And now I even know how Damage Reduction works.

Current Mood: creative

Today did not get off to a good start. How do I put this without being too gross?

OK, let's just say I'm inclined to retain water. On one side. To the extent that I own a couple of bra inserts, a larger one and a smaller one, and yesterday I needed the larger one. It augments the side which is not retaining the water by two cup sizes. And this morning, if I were going out (I don't bother with an insert if I'm not), I could pretty nearly get away with not wearing an insert at all. We're talking about maybe a couple of hundred millilitres of water which stopped being retained overnight, and that water, naturally, had to go somewhere.

Sibyl is a water hog. That's why, if I want to take in more liquid than usual, I have to diddle her by sipping it very slowly from a flask, so that she doesn't notice. Last night, she water-hogged in a pretty big way.

And now, there is unscheduled laundry. I really hate Sibyl sometimes.

Other than that, however, things aren't too bad. Yesterday was a pretty good day; I felt a bit woozy after lunch (I hadn't overeaten - I think it was just the excitement of finally being able to get to church which had caught up with me), but I wasn't too bad and I perked up later, which meant I could do a bit of knotwork practice and some knitting. And I have Ideas, courtesy of Ingvar.

Ingvar was the chap I mentioned a few posts ago who turned out to know Porthos; after a while it occurred to me that I probably knew where they knew each other from. It took me that time because I was around there too, but I don't recall Ingvar from those days (having said that, it was a long time ago now, so I can't remember everyone). We were all on the alt-fan-pratchett IRC chat, back in the day; that's how I first got to know both Athos and Porthos, and Porthos introduced me to d'Artagnan very shortly after that. (To my knowledge d'Artagnan was never on #afp, but he is a Pratchett fan too, nonetheless. It's the one thing, apart from very high intelligence, that all three of them have in common.) So Ingvar and I were talking about all that and trying to see who else we could recall that we both knew, and somewhere among all that he linked me to something called The Tale of Westala and Villtin, an epic comic fantasy tale about a pair of adventurers based on the two authors, with several characters in it based on other #afp-ers. Porthos is in there, with a sex change (it really can't be anyone else). Ingvar is in it too. I have not yet found anyone I recognise as being Athos, but I have come across a few other people I recognise, including Porthos' friend the tenor (who isn't d'Artagnan). It's perhaps telling that I think of him as "the tenor", but the writers of the tale thought of him as "the biologist" (he's both, of course); in the tale he appears as a mad doctor who does some fairly odd biological experiments.

I am enjoying this tale very much; and it is also making me think that I'd like to do a D&D-based fantasy story of a similar nature, with the adventuring party based on the Three Musketeers and myself. And, of course, if you're going to do D&D-based, then you need a race and a class for all your main characters. None of us is a natural fighter, but I thought of a way round that: I could have Athos be a cunning artificer who specialised in making fighting automata. That'd suit his technological bent. Obviously d'Artagnan has to be the bard, and if I'm not the bard I'm the cleric; that neatly left Porthos handling the magic, and I think he'd make a great wizard.

As for the races... there is no actual half-dwarf in D&D, but since there are half-elves, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be, and it would entirely suit Porthos; so that's what he'll be. Half-elves and gnomes make the best bards, so I was going to have d'Artagnan as one of those (there are good arguments both ways), until it occurred to me that Athos would really enjoy being a tiefling (half-infernal). And I thought... well, if we're going to have a tiefling, it'd be a lot of fun if we also had an aasimar (half-celestial) so that we could have some Aziraphale and Crowley vibes in the mix, and aasimar would very much suit d'Artagnan; which also means that I get to be the half-elf (yes, you can have more than one in a party, but it is fun to have a mixture). And I do like playing half-elves. They're great negotiators.

Having established the characters, the next question is: what exactly is this lot going to do? That was easy enough. I decided that Lord Smallpiece of Ashwood's great-uncle Algy had gone missing, and he was very keen to get him back, not merely because of the obvious family ties, but also because Uncle Algy did such a great job of guarding the manor house at night.

Lord Smallpiece is in his sixties.

Yup. You got it. Algernon Smallpiece is a vampire.

So I was already churning this stuff round in my head when I found a few people who were interested in an actual D&D campaign. I thought "oh no, I can't write two at once... oh, right, I'm being stupid, I don't have to!"

This is brilliant. The story will feed into the campaign. The campaign will feed into the story. Both, I think, will be better for it.

All I need now is for Sibyl to behave!

I was talking with Athos on the phone yesterday, as I generally do on a Sunday afternoon; and we got onto the subject of a mutual friend who is no longer with us, and hasn't been for quite a few years now. Athos was able to get to his funeral, but I wasn't; so Athos was telling me about the music, which was... quite suitably unusual, from the sound of it... and incidentally involved Mitch Benn on guitar, since our late friend was a dedicated and enthusiastic supporter of the club run by that worthy, the name of which I forget. And there was this one particular song Athos mentioned that he expected me to have at the very least heard of, and probably to know.

I hadn't. I can't even remember what the title was with enough confidence to record it here.

I am, I have to say, pretty much with Aziraphale from Good Omens on this one. While I don't have a blanket dislike of all pop music, it is nonetheless a pretty good bet that I will dislike (possibly even intensely dislike) any given pop song, because there are certain very common tropes in pop music that I really can't stand. One of them is shouty lyrics. I like my lyrics sung, not yelled into a microphone, and I also want to be able to hear them clearly, or else what are they even there for? And the other one is an over-dominant bass and/or percussion line. I generally tell people, as I told Athos, that my limit as far as that is concerned is Sultans of Swing (which I do, in fact, very much like, as I do most of Dire Straits). If the beat's any more intrusive than that, I'm out.

That does still leave a reasonable amount; but, of course, it's finding it, isn't it? I dislike the other stuff too much to want to bother wading through it to find something I do enjoy, especially when I know very well I can listen to practically any early music (or folk, or 1920s - 30s dance band music, or a few other reliable genres) and I'll enjoy all of it. I do know I like OMD, since my friend Robin tried them out on me at university (he had amazing parents who let him listen to whatever he liked when he was growing up, so he'd already got a very good idea of his own personal taste). Where they really excel is in building up a track layer by layer. He also played me the Human League (some of that I liked, some of it less so) and Kraftwerk (intriguing in small doses, but a bit repetitive at full length). I found Dire Straits via another friend, Wendy, who was convinced I'd like them and turned out (as usual) to be quite right. And I'll quite happily take any other personal recommendations and give them a whirl. My ex-lodger, incidentally, was into Genesis and Pink Floyd, both of which, again, I quite enjoyed in small doses; too much of either, though, had an oddly depressing effect. Especially the Pink Floyd.

As for Aziraphale... well, it may be worth putting in my two penn'orth on Good Omens fanfic, and, indeed, fanfic in general, at this point. My attitude to fanfic is "you do you, but if it contradicts the official canon I'm not going to write it, and that's particularly true for established characters". That does still give a huge amount of room for manoeuvre: you can always put the characters into a situation they haven't encountered before and see how they react. For my Girl Genius fanfic, in particular, I've done a vast amount of post-canon stuff, because apart from anything else I'm very interested in how the characters mature and develop as they get older. (My version of Ardsley Wooster continues to develop mentally and spiritually, though his health isn't so good in later life.) But I have an absolutely ironclad rule that you do not make anyone act out of character; if they're going to do something they wouldn't normally do, they'd better have a very good reason for doing it. I'll never forget writing a Blake's 7 fanfic in which I had to get Avon to back down over something. It took me three rewrites of the relevant section before I could get that to happen in a way that was still totally credible for the character.

I think you see where this is going. Everyone and their dog ships Aziraphale and Crowley. I do not. It specifically says in the book that Aziraphale (and, therefore, by implication, also Crowley) is not gay - he's just usually mistaken for it. And if he's canonically Not Gay, then he's not having a wild fling with Crowley. Stands to reason. I have not seen the TV series, but I understand that Neil Gaiman was heavily involved with that and rather went back on what was written in the book; well, fair enough, but if you're shipping those two you're doing it from the TV series and not the original book. I'm going by what I know; and, honestly, they're entirely fun enough as a pair of unlikely friends. Nothing more than that is needed. My one Good Omens fanfic (to date) can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72992726 You will notice I've rather pointedly not shipped them.

Obviously, many people differ. Which is fine. You want to write fanfic where the most unlikely pair of characters jump into bed, go on, knock yourself out. I won't be reading it, but I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who will. Nonetheless, I will not be able to stop myself from thinking: why not just write an original story?

Recovery really is three steps forward and two steps back. I was at least relatively chipper on Friday and managed to make banana loaf; yesterday I wasn't quite so good; and this morning it took me two attempts to sit up in bed. The overall trend is upwards, at least, but it is very frustrating at the moment. (I should say that once I do manage to get vertical I'm not quite so bad, but the initial push in the morning is always difficult just at the moment.)

So I'm going to talk about pens.

When I was a kid, there were some very strange ideas about writing. Children had to write with a pencil (not a ball point, because they "ruined your writing"), until they got to the upper years of primary school, at which point they would be not only allowed but expected to have a cartridge pen. Even at the time, I strongly suspected that "ball points ruin your writing" was one of those grown-up true things, and now I'm fully convinced that it was... which, if you missed the previous post about what "grown-up true" meant, means it was totally false. There's no way a ball point can ruin anyone's writing. However, obviously you wouldn't give a child a decent ball point, and the cheap ones were inclined to blot and make a mess; and it was much quicker for adults to lie to children than to explain that ball points needed a little extra care to avoid that. (I did, in fact, have one; I'm not sure how that managed to slip past the censors. It did not ruin my writing, but I used to keep a tissue by me when I was writing with it and use that to mop up any excess ink.)

My parents weren't very pleased that I had to have a cartridge pen at the age of 9 or 10. They really wanted me to go on using a pencil till I was deemed old enough to own a proper fountain pen. These two things were quite different at the time. Cartridge pens were cheap, not very good, and basically intended for children, because obviously you wouldn't give a child a decent fountain pen. It was an article of faith among adults in general that there were no dexterous children, at all, anywhere, and any child would automatically make a mess or break things up to the age of 18. (Well, that may be a slight exaggeration; but only a slight one.) Fountain pens, at the time, were for adults (though a teenager could be allowed one if given enough dire warnings); they all filled by means of a long narrow rubber bulb which you squeezed with the aid of a metal strip that ran alongside, and, in the fullness of time, the rubber would start to perish, and you'd get some leakage no matter how grown up you were. I was allowed one at secondary school, but I think only because my parents thought cartridge pens were an embarrassment that reflected on them personally; and, to be honest, given what cartridge pens tended to be like at the time, I do kind of get that.

As I went up through secondary school, cartridge pens started improving quite a lot, and it wasn't long before I started seeing advertisements for quite fancy ones which were clearly aimed at adults. Then when I got to university, I discovered the rollerball, and for many years after that I never looked back. You got a nice fine consistent line, it didn't leak or smudge, you could write really fast with it (great for taking lecture notes)... what wasn't to love?

Well, I still like rollerballs. I have the Uni-Ball Eye Micro ones, which are great for quick notes. But eventually I decided I needed a proper fountain pen in my life again, and went looking for one online... only to discover that everything that came up was, in fact, a cartridge pen.

I didn't want a cartridge pen. I wanted one I could fill with ink, preferably in an interesting colour, from a bottle. When I bemoaned online the fact that I couldn't find a fountain pen, everyone else (all much younger than I) was astonished. Fountain pens, they assured me, were easy to find. I said, no. Those are cartridge pens.

They said "those are fountain pens."

I said "no, they're not. Or at least, they weren't when I was growing up."

It appears that, while my back was turned, cartridge pens pretty much took over the entire fountain pen market; but I knew you could still get the other sort, because I'd seen bottled ink for sale. In the end, in some desperation, I e-mailed Cult Pens to explain my problem and ask what I should be looking for. I got a very nice e-mail back to say that pen terminology changed so fast that even they sometimes had trouble keeping up with it, and the search term I wanted at the moment was "piston filler".

Piston filler. OK. That actually sounded a lot better than "rubber bulb with metal strip".

And that was how I managed to get hold of an inexpensive but remarkably nice fountain pen. It literally is a piston filler, though they do still make the rubber-bulb ones and those are filed in the same category. Because there's no bulb, there's nothing to perish; moreover, the entire barrel holds ink, so you can get a lot more into it than you could with the bulb-fillers (I've used it quite a lot since I bought it, and it's still on its initial fill). I fill it with "Little Pip", a rather oddly-named ink which I could not like any better if I'd designed it to my own specifications; it's a dark purple - more or less to purple what Quink blue-black is to blue - with an extremely subtle gold shimmer which doesn't appear on every type of paper. It works best on the shinier types. Anyway, you can't get that in a cartridge.

It's a far cry from the Quink Washable Royal Blue we were made to use at school!

Current Mood: sick

I put a lot of stories on AO3. In fact, I've got 100 of them up there now; most of them are, of course, fanfic, but a few - especially the most recent - are original work. AO3 allows original work as long as it can be deemed to be fannish in some way, and, honestly, that's pretty much anything. You don't write in a particular genre unless you are, at least to some extent, a fan of that genre. Very few writers are so original as to be completely sui generis, and I'm certainly not one of them. I don't have a problem with that; it's entirely possible to have original ideas within a set context, and that's one of the reasons why I'm quite happy to write fanfic.

Anyway, my most recent story is about a woman who's had enough. She's not an especially nice woman, and a lot of the difficulty she's in is her own fault, but nonetheless she has been badly treated. Specifically, while she was still married to someone else, she had an affair with a certain man, and this man persuaded her to get her husband to divorce her so that they could marry. Her husband was reluctant to do that, but in the end she got him to divorce her by dint of permanently moving out. She then, naturally, expected her lover to marry her; but he delayed and made excuses, and then eventually dumped her in favour of a much younger woman, leaving her high and dry. In desperation she tried going back to her former husband, only to find he'd now married someone else and they were about to emigrate.

So she decides she's not taking this lying down, and she shows up at her ex-lover's wedding, fully determined to make a public scene... which she does. I won't tell you how the story ends; I'll just say it wasn't what I was originally expecting, which is often the way with stories. Characters are inclined to do their own thing, once they've been properly established, and what happened with this story was that someone who was originally intended to have an essential but minor role in the proceedings unexpectedly became the hero of the story. And, because of that, there's a very welcome note of hope I hadn't anticipated.

This story has gone down very well, and obviously I'm delighted about that. However, it also set off a chain of events I didn't quite expect. I got a comment from someone who said she had some creative ideas about some of my characters, and could she talk?

So, of course, I thought she was interested in a writing collaboration. I mean, you would. And I'm always happy to do those, as long as I'm satisfied that my co-writer and I are on the same wavelength, as was very much the case with Magda. It's frustrating for both parties when you're not, and one person writes a character and the other one then takes that character off in a totally wrong direction. I thought, OK, let's hear these creative ideas, and if they fit with the characters as they've been established we can take it from there.

As it turned out, she wasn't a writer at all. She was an artist. And, don't get me wrong, she was a good artist; she specialised in fantasy character drawing. If you need a D&D elf monk or a Shadowrun catgirl, I'd be delighted to put you in touch with her. But... and it is quite a big "but"... you'd better be very certain you want to commission her.

What she wanted to do, it turned out, was to illustrate a particular scene from my story; but she wanted me to commission her to do it. I said the idea was great, I liked her art style, and I'd be delighted to recommend her to other people, but... no, thanks. The thing is, if I were publishing a book, it'd be reasonable to pay an illustrator; but I'm not paying someone to do an illustration I don't need for a story I'm letting people read free of charge.

"Oh," she said. "Is there an issue?"

"No, there's no issue. I just don't want to commission an illustration. Thanks all the same."

"Ah, but my prices are probably a lot more affordable than you think. And I can do an easy payment plan. Let me show you my prices."

"No, thank you."

"The payment plan is in three stages. You won't even notice it."

By this stage I'm quite glad we're talking on the Internet and she can't see me rolling my eyes. This went on a bit longer, with her trying to insist and me very politely digging my heels in and refusing to move, until finally I said, "No. I really don't see how I can possibly make that any clearer."

To my enormous relief, that worked. The conversation closed on quite amicable terms, which means that, despite her best efforts to botch things up, I've still got a good fantasy artist I can contact if I need to.

But only if I need to.

Before I became disabled, I was in the St John Ambulance; and since I lived in Sheffield at the time, that meant I was usually covering a home match at the weekend, either at Bramall Lane or Hillsborough, and quite often also midweek. I enjoyed that a good deal. It was nice to be able to help people (we were primarily there for the crowd, not the players, though we might occasionally get drafted in to help stretcher someone off); there was a lot of camaraderie; and there was football, of course, though the standard of that did rather vary. I used to joke that the football was very much like the sandwiches. At Bramall Lane you'd get big no-nonsense Yorkshire cobs, with a choice of maybe four plain fillings; they were definitely not posh, but they were good, hearty, fresh sandwiches. At Hillsborough, on the other hand, you'd be handed a silver platter (or at any rate a decent imitation) with a whole selection of effete little sandwiches cut into triangles and with, for some reason, the crusts cut off. They'd be presented on a bed of cress, or something of the kind, and they always tasted as if they'd been made at least two days before the match.

Very similarly, you tended to get plain but pretty solid football from United, whereas Wednesday always gave the impression that they were trying a bit too hard for their actual ability. And then they bought Paolo Di Canio.

That bloke was undeniably good. So was his little friend Benito Carbone, who arrived at around the same time; but Di Canio had real star quality. He'd run the length of the pitch with the ball apparently glued to his foot, then execute a beautiful pass to a team-mate... who, as often as not, would fluff it. And, after a while, you could see Di Canio getting frustrated. After all, since he was Italian, his body language tended to be in unusually large print. Not only was he a first-rate player in a mostly rather third-rate team, but also if the team did badly he'd pick up more than his share of the blame, because the fans tended to think he should have done better, given how good he was. Well, no; he was doing his level best. But if you're used to passing to team-mates who are around your own level of ability, and then all of a sudden you're dealing with team-mates who just aren't that great at reading the game, then you're up a bit of a gum tree.

I felt sorry for him. So I decided to give him a comic fictional sidekick; and this sidekick was Mac the Cat. Mac, as he put it himself in the first story, "was born in a wheelie bin jist off o' Sauchiehall Street", latched on to Di Canio while he was at Celtic, and decided to follow him to Wednesday because he was enjoying the high life. He was a lovable but entirely disreputable alley cat, who got into all kinds of entertaining scrapes which he narrated in the first person. These stories were all very short, no more than about 1000 words a pop, and they were published in one of the Wednesday fanzines. I have no idea if Di Canio ever saw them, but if he did I hope they made him smile. He needed it.

The whole business ended rather sadly. After a while, I found myself sitting on the touchline at Hillsborough thinking "that man has depression"; since I'd had it so often myself, I knew very well what it looked like. I shared my opinion with the fanzine editor, who had not had depression and therefore didn't take it seriously (also, I think, he wasn't that great at reading people). Di Canio struggled for a few more matches and finally bowed out, unable to handle it, at which point all the fans got very annoyed with him. I kept telling anyone who would listen that he had depression, but nobody listened until, perhaps six weeks after I'd originally noticed, the news emerged from the club that he'd been diagnosed with depression. He didn't last too long there after that. And that, I'm afraid, is what you get when you stick a brilliant player into a so-so team.

I can't remember exactly where he went after that - somewhere in Italy, I believe. But I like to think Mac the Cat stowed away in his luggage.