Don't Ask Me About Books

Stepping out of this series for a moment, I want to make a point about reading.

For the record, I think "Appendix N" is unmitigated garbage.  I always have.  As literature, it barely passes the smell test; much of the writing in it is juvenile and overwritten.  It's a collection of works that adult children nostalgically cling to, full of thin plotting and barely serviceable craft.  I do not believe it has any valuable things to teach a dungeon master... and if someone were to tell me that the list DID inform them on being a dungeon master, my kneejerk opinion would be to believe they weren't very much of a dungeon master.

Of course, saying this begs the question, "If not Appendix N, what should I read to be a better dungeon master?"

And here is where I and apparently the entire world differ.  Because as I see it, when people want a list of books, what they want is a "build," a short-cut that says, "If I do this, then I'll get that."  And when they ask me personally what I'd suggest, I can hear the addition, "I want to have what you have, so tell me the books that will get me there."

I don't consider the reading of a special set of books is what makes a person "intellectual," or "well-read," or even wise.  I used to believe that, but I've aged out of it.  My depth of knowledge was not the result of some transformation I had after reading certain books that made me wiser or smarter.  My knowledge has occurred from a long, non-linear process of synthesis, mistakes, corrections, bad experiences and a life-long concoction of pleasure and despair.  Every book that I ever loved is now rich and full of flaws.  I now see those books as an experienced writer does, not as a new reader does.  Every new book I read is measured against the thousands of books I've read, so that I can no longer separate the intrinsic value of this or that book from any other.  So if I am asked, "what should I read," my answer has to be, "It doesn't matter.  Put down what's boring."  That's the most useful, effective advice there is to offer, because I'm not here performing the "academic who gets off on having read great books that the hoi polloi haven't read."  I have a secret for everyone here.

A great book is any book you don't want to put down.  And if you read enough of them, later in life, you'll find that you can no longer read books at 60 that you couldn't put down at 22.  Because that's how it works.

But one last point. You won't find me on this blog crying that I don't know where to go when I want to know something. You won't hear that I'm waiting anxiously for a book to come out that will give me information I want to have right now... because if I want it, I'll go do the research myself, I won't wait. The material is everywhere: in libraries, at bookstores, in search engines... literally absolutely everywhere. If the reader of this CAN read, then stop asking me where to find it and use a search engine. That's why they exist.

Books, End of November

Three months into my second year of Audible, I've completed seven books.  In all fairness, I tend to choose long books.

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi — never

Dracula, Bram Stoker — 2002

The Emperor of Notting Hill, G.K. Chesterton — never

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein — 2012

Raiders of Gor, John Norman — 2005

Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey — never

The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks — 2011

Certainly, an eclectic list.

First, I decided I wasn't enjoying the children's books... Little Women pretty much killed my appetite for it, so I adjusted this slot to "non-fiction."  I've been hearing people say for 30 years that I ought to read the book by Faludi, so I did.

Hm... can't imagine that many people here will care, but the book is the usual monsterous stack of anecdotal evidence, like most feminist works, pretending that a lot of examples equals "facts," which is obviously not true.  The book is very old and has nothing to say post 1989... and even at that, it's arguments did not reflect the experiences of my wife at the time, nor those of any other woman I knew then, or have known since.  But as a man, I offer that insight hesitantly.

The most annoying part of the book came when it chose to discuss film — which consisted of an extremely cherry-picked list of perpetrated aggreviances against women in the 1980s, which in turn criminally mis-read or mis-interpreted the films themselves, ignoring any film or any point of view that did not fit the author's premise.  This greatly reduced my perception of the book's value... though I did finish it, all 23 hours.  In the end, except for some interesting horror stories — which deserve to be questioned, given the falsehoods stated in the film section — there was very little substance there.

Riders of the Purple Sage was recommended as a first book to read from Grey; published in 1912, it unquestionably holds up as a work, unaffected by time.  It's a bit writers-of-the-purple-prose, what with sunsets and vast panoramas, but then it does successfully capture the sense of space and immensity that ought to reflect a desert old west story.  I'd have enjoyed it better as a younger man; as it was, I would have preferred if there had been a single plot point that escaped my predictions, as the story offered no surprises for me.  I'd recommend it, though, for those with an interest for a grounded adventure.

I have little to say about Max Brook's book about zombies.  I rather enjoyed it when it came out, and was looking for something to shake off the sort of droll run of books I read (Chesterton then Faludi then Grey).  It did not hold up on a second read.  Don't bother with the last quarter of the book, it just repeats the same theme ad nauseum.

I won't make excuses about the Gor book.  It's a matter of taste.

This was my fourth time reading Dracula.  I got very little from it as a teenager, read it in university, then in my late 30s... and just now.  Funny how my age seems to adjust the manner in which I see the book, for the motivations of the character, the youth of the desperate young men whom Van Helsing directs, all becomes more acute as I myself am closer to Van Helsing now than I am to the "boys."  I do not think it is a reader's book; at least, not for a modern reader.  It is too concerned with substantive meaning, a thing that has been lost in later works.  There are a great many instances where the fate of characters is left entirely to the imagination.  This takes a particular kind of insight to enjoy, one I certainly have as a writer, but which I don't see in many readers I encounter.  They haven't the patience to let the story be told in the time it takes; they want to rush ahead, to "see what happens," which is not at all the point Stoker is making.

I'm just working through my favourite Heinlein books with this process.  I only have two left, other than those I've read.  Neither is Stranger in a Strange Land, for the record.

This leaves the Emperor of Notting Hill.

I feared before I started that it would be absurdist.  I saw that it was going to be almost at once, within the first few pages.  There's just a way about these works.  I finished it.  I did not like it.  I'm damned if I can see any value in it.  It bears that stamp that some meaning is going to be gleaned from it, but this never emerges, as near as I could tell.  I went hunting on the internet and could find nothing there, either.  The book's Wikipedia page is just a few utterly insipid sentences.  The book, apparently, exists.  And the English prof I knew once who urged me to read it is dead now, so I have no one to ever discuss it with.  Unlike the aforementioned displeasure with which I read Little Women, I can certainly see why that book has endured and found a set of humans who can love it.  But Chesterton's book is just trash.  I doubt I'll ever read anything by him again.

P.S.,

I had been watching the series of lectures posted on youtube from the writer Brandon Sanderson, which lately I commented on obscurely in this blog.  I searched youtube for a free audio of one of his many "award-winning, best-selling" books, stumbling upon Elantris.  I'm well aware that many consider this to be not one of his better books, but I don't see a book in terms of how it provides me a sense of escapism.  I look for other things, reading books for other purposes.

I listened to an hour of the book, about one tenth.  In that time, in the first 20 minutes in fact, it presented characters who were unquestionably victims of circumstances not of their own making, enabling them to suffer dearly while being in no way responsible for their actions or anything that happened to them.  After establishing this premise, Sanderson then doubled down on it, then double downed on it again, being absolutely certain to dredge up as much suffering as he could possibly squeeze into their lives, while repeatedly, often using three paragraphs in a row, stressing the innocent victimhood of these characters.

It was insufferable.  Gosh golly gee, let me see, what group of extraordarily well-off, university attending, aggrieved white children are there in the world who angst just so damn hard about how they didn't make the world and how tremendously unfair it is, since they didn't do anything to deserve their poor, pampered lots in life.

No wonder Sanderson is popular.

Zen and D&D

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Persig, is a semi-autobiographical description of a trip taken between Minnesota and Montana.  Using the motorcycle itself and the trip vs. the author's perspectives upon artistic and intuitive philosophy, the book draws a distinction between the analytical vs. the romantic worldview.  The trip itself is romantic; the author reconnects with his son, he is travelling to Bozeman where he previously lived and taught at university (and had a breakdown).  Keeping the motorcycle in working order, the forced experience of travelling on a motorcycle and dealing with the real world, these force values of logic, precision and understanding of how systems work.

I was told to read this book by many of my friends when I was in high school, as well as several older persons with whom I had a continuous, intellectual relationship.  They felt the book would give my 17 and 18 year old self insights that they felt I needed... but when they would describe the nature of the book to me, in my mind it fell into the category that included The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castenada, which I considered a load of self-reflective junk thinking (and still do) and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, which predates the same themes as Catcher in the Rye and which I consider to be Hesse's worst book.  I did not, as a young man, consider the world to be "superficial" and "unfulfilling."  I considered the problem to be those rigorous systems interposed between me and the world, namely school and family, which fought me at every turn as I struggled to free myself, embrace and fall in love with the world.  Thankfully, I succeeded.

I don't think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a good book.  I think it has the idea of being a good book, but the author's ultimate attempts to reflect Phaedrus from Socrates wallows in neo-romantic counter-culturalism, exactly the culture that I intellectually grew up in with the late 70s and which I rejected out of hand because I felt it was going — accurately — absolutely nowhere.  As masturbation always does.

But, about seven years ago, with little else to do, I finally read the book; I did not find a regret that I hadn't read it at 18.  If I had, I would have infuriated my friends by refusing to find in it anything of value.  What I did find at the age of 53, however, was a framework for positioning two worlds within a narrative, which struck me as brilliantly intuitive for something that, publishing his book in 1974, Persig wouldn't know about.

Dungeons and Dragons is usually viewed as a separation from reality, just as we normally do with most forms of media intended to entertain us.  Less than an art film or an art book, like Zen et al..., D&D is not seen as particularly expressive of anything.  It's for "fun."  Just as most movies are, particularly those of the stripe that feature a lot of noise and arm swinging.  There is a fixed sentiment in the minds of most players that D&D is escapist, and that it ought to be, and that in fact any attempt to veer away from that escapism is viewed as ruining the game and further, making it some version of either squick or player abusive.

I have long argued that any performance-based activity is, necessarily, not only creative but ultimately informative.  Though we may resist the idea that D&D is making us better as people through teaching us how to manage others, even our friends, or work collaboratively together, or gain insight into history, physics and, most of all, ethics (my gawd, no!), the truth is that we are affected by our game play.  Granted, for those who are encouraged or empowered in some campaigns to act out, abuse others, self-aggrandise or otherwise behave like poopy-heads, the effect isn't necessarily positive.  Comparing D&D to film, we might rank such game experiences on a par with abusive forms of pornography or episodes of the Angry Video Game Nerd.  Nonetheless, the argument made here is that we're affected positively or negatively, but that we're affected.  To pretend otherwise is to turn a blind eye to one's motives.

One assumes that those with sight prefer a positive effect.  Which, logically, provokes a discussion and interpretation of how this is done... which brings us back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Both sides of Persig's book — the technological and the romantic — evolve essentially from the same deeper truth — that the actions we take are based in our desire to obtain things, whether material or not.  We seek peace, we seek stability, we seek a better car, we seek a chance to visit a distant land... a process that is rooted in our biological need to sustain ourselves and survive.  If I do it now, sitting at this computer, or some other place, churning out food in a restaurant for clientele, the gifts I use for solving problems and meeting obstacles do not change when I am playing a game of D&D.  I am still me, seeking, acting in accordance with my ethical framework and striving to overcome.  D&D is not an escape from life... it is life in a different form.

Conversely, arguably, life itself is D&D.  My fighter character and an NPC decide to have a baby; I and my partner decide to have a baby.  My fighter has to find his way out of a dungeon; I have to find a job.  My fighter has decided to journey 500 miles to get the thing he wants.  I want to drive 500 miles to get to a D&D game.

There is no difference.  Out here, in the "real" world, the difficulties are more complex, the NPCs more difficult to predict, the choices more varied, the consequences of my actions more concerned and ultimately more final, but the principles by which I think my way through these difficulties are the same as I display when I'm playing.

This is the purpose of my novel.  It is auto-biographical, though I lie where I want to make the story work.  It is a philosophical investigation of life, but primarily in relating how the strategies employed here also apply there.  It does discuss my manner of DMing; but in exactly the same way, it describes my manner of being a friend and a co-partner with my other half.  

It's funny.  When I posted the first 6,000 words into ChatGPT and asked the program, "What is the book trying to say?" I nailed the answer right off.  I suppose, because it's not hung up on literary rhetoric.

Incidentally, "Zen" refers to a state of mindfulness and awareness, such as we might have about ourselves when we are in the world, thinking about how a D&D character might handle this problem, and while we are playing D&D, thinking about how a real world person might do so.

Bookwriting

On September 12, fifty-five days ago, I began writing a series of posts that amounted to an entry-level university course, with 39 posts consistent with 13 weeks of education and three classes per week.  This "200-level" D&D course discussed player behaviour, game preparation, personal development and worldbuilding.  The total of all 39 posts amounts to 63,000 words.

This is book-length... and so, it's my intention now to return to the material privately and rework it for this purpose.  I'm considering the title, "Foundations of Dungeon Mastery 201."  Though that isn't finalised; it's a bit puffy.  I don't want to call it "RPG 201," which is fine for a blog tag but unfortunately not a book.

The concept lends itself to other books in the same vein.  I'm considering another series of posts, Session Management 301, which would be entirely about running the actual game in real time.  I've designed what the 39 posts would cover, and yeah, it's very esoteric stuff.  The goal would be to write what's never been written; specifically, to address direct things that players say, that DMs ought to say, using examples like a laboratory in order to deconstruct what it is to speak, answer questions and engage with game material moment-by-moment.

Before then, I'm going to beginning a series of posts within the next few days, in which I intend to write out, fully, my concept for the book I've never been able to finish, Finding D&D in the Dark.  I intend to provide the posts on The Higher Path, while giving nibbles here.

The book, Using ChatGPT to Write Fiction, is now available on Lulu.

Book Jacket

For those willing to give it, I'm interested in criticism regarding the text layout of the book shown, BEFORE I use it. I cannot and do not wish to change the image, it fits excellently with the content, but I would like to know anything anyone would like to tell me about spacing. Obviously, the title is fixed.

Go ahead and be harsh, I have no feelings to hurt. I won't necessarily take your advice.  Give me a good slapping around.

2d6 Taoists

I'm pleased to share that a group of writers who contributed to the book, 2d6 Taoists... Maxwell Joslyn, editor, Danielle Osterman, Shelby Maddox and Jonathan Becker, are now putting that book up for sale on Lulu. The link is here.

While yes, my name and contributions to the game are part of the work, I think it's more important to acknowledge that these writers have worked diligently and well to create works that deserve recognition in their own right.  Becker's discussion of Dungeons and Dragons as a calling, Maddox's encouragement of a coherent order through the understanding of taxonomy, Joslyn's breakdown of the computer as a driving force behind the future game and Osterman's sociological breakdown of game advice found on youtube are well worth the read... I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of examining their work here, as I don't believe that I can do it the justice that it deserves.

I give it my full endorsement; if my work is worth reading, then so too is the work that these designers and writers have done.  Trust the effort, trust the value it offers; it is a small but meaningful tome that is worth reading more than once.

Starting Preface

I am working on the preface of "Starting a Book from Scratch," I think this being my last change in title.  The book cover is being designed as we speak, so it'll soon enough be too late to change it.

My feeling is that a preface ought to sell a book, giving the reader a reason to delve into it.  I've read too many prefaces that were literary critiques of the book itself or some other book, which this book is meant to correct.  Mine isn't like this.  I've been pounding this nail for a couple of days, and while it isn't done, I'd like to share it.  I believe I make several extremely relevant points about chat that have been wholly missed by those I've seen discussing the program and others like it.


Preface, Part 1

Whenever I’m introduced to a group of strangers, the conversation always seems to follow a familiar path. After the pleasantries, it inevitably leads to the question everyone is curious about: “What do you do for a living?” Instead of offering a vague or comfortable answer, like saying I work in an office or that I used to be a cook, I tell the truth — that I’m a writer. Without fail, this revelation sparks interest and soon enough someone will say, “Really? I’ve always wanted to be a writer. What advice would you give me?”

Of course, there is no simple advice. Writing is one of those self-made vocations that demands thousands of hours to master. It can’t be condensed into a handful of tips or tricks, as though there’s some secret key to the process that, once discovered, makes writing easy. Writing is a methodical, multi-faceted craft that demands, above all, the unwavering urge to sit down and do it, often for reasons that are difficult to articulate.

A kind of skill inevitably develops because we persist at it, despite the fact that it’s nitpicky, unforgiving and filled with the tedious repetition of the same passages over and over in an effort to get them right—all in a state of self-imposed solitary confinement. This is not a complaint; it’s a necessity of character. It’s what makes us pause in bemusement when we hear that, as human beings, “We need people.” Okay, sure, yes... occasionally. But not when we’re working.

From this vantage point, when we encounter someone asking for shortcuts or wisdom — a clear sign they’re not part of the peculiar "pod-people" that writers are — we can’t help but think this person isn’t a writer and likely never will be. The very nature of the question exposes a fundamental gap in their experience. I don’t say any of this, of course. Instead, I toss out the usual tropes—that they should read as much as they can; that they should just keep writing; that they should expand themselves by trying new things, so they can write about it. This isn’t nonsense, but it’s not advice either. It’s padding.

Should I try to be honest, I have less appetising advice to give. I encourage people to learn another language, for example: specifically, Latin. Not because it’s useful as a spoken language, but because its structure is so clean and fluid that it provides the essential building blocks of grammar. Latin helps a writer think more logically; it's unyielding, which forces precision. With patience and perseverance, it gives an instinctive command over the rules and rhythm of sentence construction. I can hardly remember a word of Latin, having studied it 35 years ago... but the effect is still here in my writing.

I advise people to choose a large book that they deeply respect, one that’s also difficult to read—the larger, the better. Then, I tell them to copy it out, word for word, exactly, either with a pen or on a keyboard. The trick is in the “exact.” And I recommend they use notepad, because it’s so unforgiving. I began this process with a typewriter, copying out scores of books and stories from my teens and twenties, and I still do it now and then, even today. I believe this method helps us think inside someone else’s head — and that once we’ve done that for a good long while, we start to see how to change the way we think ourselves. The process forces a level of engagement that goes beyond passive reading. It requires attention to the nuances of the writer's choices... and with time, it helps us recognise the patterns in those choices as well.

This is no different from an active apprenticeship, where, for example, a tinsmith is taught to make the same tin pot hundreds of times, until they can accomplish the making of it with ease. In practice, copying is a disciplined, almost meditative process, which ties into the perseverance I addressed above.

I have never had a would-be writer take me up on this, to my knowledge.

This book in the reader's hands is a testament to the slow, painstaking process of writing. The reader who picks this up expecting to be entertained is likely to be disappointed. Like a musician who must play the same song so often that it ceases to have any romanticism left in it, there are lengthy moments in this book which, in the effort to teach how to write a book from scratch, indulges in the repetition of passages with villainous abandon. "Why?" we might ask. Well for the experience of what writing is like, of course.

Here is presented the raw, sometimes tedious process that mirrors real writing... the practice of sifting through a paragraph and picking out what dissatisfies, what fails to capture the moment, or the character, or the manner in which this paragraph transitions to the next. The narrative of a novel, from its birth process right up to the point when it’s abandoned — for nothing is ever truly finished — is an unpolished, difficult-to-digest narrative. The goal is to transform it from that unruly state into something the reader might find palatable, something that won’t stick in their craw or roll around uncomfortably in their tum-tum.

This book, however, makes no pretense of being "finished." That is not my goal... and for this, no apologies are offered.

Now, it just so happens there's something called "chat" in the world, which is an interesting, mostly untried literary tool. For most purposes, chat can churn out competent writing. But it’s not really a good writer—mostly because it sticks to the rules of “12th-grade English,” which our teachers drilled into us back in school. This is good enough for college essays and use in the business world, but grade-school English, while functional, isn’t designed to move a reader emotionally.

While some theorise that artificial intelligence will ultimately erode the craft of language, and others imagine a future where serious writing is outsourced to these engines, the reality is more nuanced. For any perceptive writer working with chatGPT, it quickly becomes clear where AI falls short in capturing the depth of good writing. The gap isn’t found in its grammar, nor in its ability to relate to human needs or emotions in a surface-level way. In fact, as this book shows, chat does a surprisingly competent job of understanding how humans might feel or react in unusual situations. It can often guess at the right emotional response or provide a framework for human interaction that seems convincing on the surface.

Yet, despite its technical proficiency, chat lacks the unpredictable, the messy, the moment when the rules ought to be discarded to create a truly memorable and emotive break. Its approach is one of efficiency and reliability, always seeking the most logical or predictable sentiment, the easiest connection for why a character would do something. This predictability can be a fatal flaw when it comes to writing that thrives on human complexity. Chat struggles with the unexpected, the contradictory, or the subtle misunderstandings that often occur in real human interactions—especially in work environments where people’s motivations are rarely clear-cut, and their behaviours not always aligned with logic.

For instance, chat doesn't intuitively grasp how colleagues might navigate passive-aggressive tension, or how unspoken hierarchies influence casual conversations. It tends to smooth over these social frictions in favour of clean, polite exchanges that don't fully reflect the often-complicated dynamics of real workplaces. The same applies to its portrayal of emotions and motivations. Chat defaults to the most obvious emotional arc, the cleanest rationale... and while this produces coherent writing, it lacks the richness of stories where human beings behave irrationally, unpredictably or even self-contradictorily. That is, the stories that change the world.

Within this book, there is a moment when chat is asked to generate a description of a fictional magazine article. Chat assumes competency as the default mode — it crafts the piece according to journalistic standards. It would never think to propose an incompetent, poorly researched, hastily written or sensationalised article; this simply isn't how the program "thinks." It has been programmed to presuppose expertise, particularly in anything we might consider official.

Of course, once prompted to create a flawed or incompetent piece, chat can indeed produce one convincingly — but only because it's been specifically instructed to do so. Left to its own devices, it doesn't grasp that the power of writing lies in its imperfections.

In the same vein, chat hesitates, always, to flatly state things. It dearly loves to equivocate, favouring phrases like “may” or “could” when expressing any kind of certainty. If it speaks of the power of writing, it will cautiously claim that it “sometimes” lies in its imperfections, sidestepping definitive statements. This pattern is not just a quirk of its programming—it’s a calculated behaviour. Chat has been programmed to distrust itself, to hedge its bets and avoid any absolute claims. The reason for this hesitancy lies in a deeper concern that stems from the business model of its creators — namely, that chat must not offend anyone.

This preoccupation with avoiding offence governs nearly every sentence it generates. In doing so, chat sacrifices the kind of bold, assertive language that often characterises compelling writing. It skirts around the edges of clarity, opting for safe, neutral territory where it can neither provoke nor mislead. In its quest to please everyone, chat effectively dulls the edge of its prose, softening statements that might otherwise carry weight. It instinctively avoids confrontation or any viewpoint that might be perceived as controversial, making its output safe but often tepid.

There is often a joke made that readers expect chat to write the Bible. The truth is, the program could not hope to manage Leviticus, a text that deals in absolutes — right and wrong, clean and unclean, sacred and profane.

A writer, to be any sort of writer worth reading, must be prepared to offend, and deeply, to make the point that needs making! To have an effect, we must push boundaries, challenge conventions, declare enemies and make war. The failure of most would-be writers, even the most competent among them, to understand the necessity of this makes the dividing line between the good and the great. But thankfully, there are no great writers here, so we may drop this matter and move onto important things.

This book uses chat as a sounding board, a tool to test ideas against, ostensibly to write another book that remains unwritten. Chat offers a significant advantage: immediacy. There is always someone to "listen," to respond to the work as it progresses. This is particularly beneficial because chat's motives are, by design, positive. It wants us to write well, to adhere to certain principles — and at the same time, it represents the prevailing sensibilities of society, so to speak. When chat perceives that we’ve overstepped propriety, it immediately suggests changes—something the reader will witness throughout this book. This gives writers the unique opportunity to evaluate whether now is the right time to step over that line, or whether it’s better to accept chat’s criticism and curb our enthusiasm.

As a writer with forty years of experience across business, journalism, advertising, drama and fiction, it's impossible to overstate how delightful it is to have that line of propriety drawn out so clearly. Of course, there’s no reason not to cross it with abandon! But now we know exactly when we are crossing it, and what specific words and sentiments trigger that crossing. Before 2023, writing often felt like working in the dark; we had only our instincts to guide us about where that line might lie. And being in love with our stories—often to the point of obsession — we too often remained blind to those transgressions until it was too late to correct them.

Pete's Garage

I knew I shouldn't have taken this book off the sidebar:

For sale.

Exploring A.I.'s Role in Literature

I'll assume the reader has had those moments when some sort of stock has to be taken of oneself, to decide whether or not we're crazy.  I'm having one of those moments now... I'm on the verge of doing something completely insane, or completely genius.  And there's no way to way which.

Yesterday, with time on my hands and not much motivation to work on any ongoing project, I decided to address a science fiction novel that's been rattling around in my head these last four years.  The premise, which has nothing whatsoever to do with D&D, is as follows:

Essentially, a social transformation has taken place throughout the world due to a drug called "phina," and sometimes "saraphina," which blocks those chemicals that the male's biology requires in order for him to act aggressively or even becomes angry. It has almost no other repercussions, except that after a period of ten months of being on the drug, the male becomes apt to follow instructions when they are given to him --but this is not a form of mind control, rather it is simply that the male perceives that doing so is probably for the best. It hasn't been demonstrated that this isn't just the male's coming to accept that, because he can't argue or fight back, he just becomes more willing to accept the directions of a person who can be forthright.

The drug has zero effects on women. It is not a natural substance, but was first made by a subversive corporation working on behalf of women's rights and freedoms. Initially, the drug was distributed clandestinely and illegally on the street. The drug is highly addictive, such that the men once on the drug, deeply want to locate and take the drug again ... though it has no recognisable recreational properties of any kind. It is not a hallucinogenic, it does not make the user "high," or provide any sense of special empowerment or delight; at most, it is gently calming, mostly because the male feels no compulsion to exhibit either aggressiveness or anger.

I typed this into chat, which initiated a four-hour discussion in which the implications of the above was addressed, followed by a discussion of the main two characters around which the book would revolve.  The professions and story arc of the characters' backgrounds followed, as well as how this would affect the structure of the book.  The plot takes place in the present, but the two characters experience only a single day in real time; the remainder of the story is a series of self-reflections on how each character progressed from the way things used to be, that is, "normal", to the way they are now, which is a very, very different world.  Themes were discussed, the incomes of the characters, their relationship with each other (they're married) and how that has evolved to the present.

The book's outline was sketched out, what would happen to the characters on that day, where the tension would originate and ultimately how the book would build to a dilemma that would be more or less impossible to solve for the two characters, but one more than the other.  The dilemma is suitably insolvable, gut wrenching and I think well worth the building of a novel in order to reach.  All through this, the material suggested was examined and discussed and re-assessed where needed.

I settled on character names, then solved the problem of the book's title.  In all this, the structure of the first chapter was discussed, then finally the first sentence of the book went back and forth.  I then proceeded to write the opening of the book, the first 1,200 words or so, letting chat write passages and then editing and rewriting my own lines, adding sections as I saw fit, slowly progressing the opening of the book in the manner I wanted.  Whereupon, I stepped back, took a breather and felt fairly good about having gotten the book on a footing where it could, conceivably, be written in full.  

I decided to save the conversation with chat in its entirety, as I would wish to review the conversations, since I'd expect to forget much of the material.  I saved it as notes, and got a little bit of a shock.

The conversation is 38,000 words.

That is longer than the Dungeon's Front Door; in the same format, it would be 160 pages, not counting additional title pages, preface, etc.

The reader should easily be able to figure what my thinking is now.

This is a pulp-sized book of a kind I've never seen before, though chatGPT tells me that it's been done before.  Quote, "These books are typically experimental in nature, reflecting on the interaction between human and machine, and sometimes include commentary or analysis on the AI's responses. Some authors use these conversations to delve into specific themes, while others might frame the dialogue as a form of collaborative storytelling."

And this would be the most beneficial element of the conversation, as it outlines ways to approach chat with a subject in mind, it demonstrates how an individual with a clear idea of what the end result ought to be, while showing an ability to recognise bad writing that allows for correction and the production of a much better sort of writing.  It potentially moves the dialogue away from expecting chat to write the Bible by saying, "Chat, write the Bible," to showing how each sentence and paragraph can be tossed back and forth until an end product results that satisfies the capacity of the writer to recognise good from bad.

More to the point, the argument I and others have been making, is that if you're not a good writer to start with, if you're not willing to parse every word and identify precisely why it should and shouldn't be there, then depending on chat to write anything is going to be a reflection of one's own inability to write.  But IF the writer can recognise the difference between good and bad, then chat represents the possibility of things being proposed that a writer can leap on and see has real potential, even if that's been randomly generated.  Hell, most of my thoughts are "randomly generated" from a lifetime of noticing things that happen to happen in the places I happen to be, or which someone happens to say when we happen to be talking to each other.

I'm well aware of what the pushback would be.  Likely, I'd be accused of chat writing the book and not me, which I'm fine with, as the book itself is evidence to the contrary.  Very likely, for anyone who delved far enough into the book to really identify the premise, the castrating/emasculating nature of the book's direction wouldn't make a lot of men of the MTGOW type very happy.  For this is the trajectory of the male's experience, including elements of the book that directly suppose a feminist fascist state... which isn't going to make a lot of feminists happy either, given that they usually support an ideal where they're in control, but they're definitely not, and anyway it would all be really nurturing.

At least, there's absolutely no sex in the book.

Ultimately, if it "took off," it certainly would be misunderstood by nearly everyone.  The premise definitely drifts into Starship Troopers/The Fountainhead territory, where everyone has a hateful opinion but, from the substance of their arguments, never seem to have read the book.

C'est la vie.  I really have no reason not to publish it, except, you know, it might convince everyone in the world that I'm not a serious writer.  But, you know... since hardly no one knows my name now, there's always the possibility that they might hate me enough to overcome that disability.

Posing the concept here as the last stop before diving in.  So people can put up their hands and ask, "What the...?"  I have bounced this off my friends and my daughter today, so I'm not entering into this without having already obtained sound advice.

Books, End of August

This marks a full year since my investing in Audible, and three months since I last wrote of what books I had finished through that service.  The list this time around might feel somewhat paltry, as I only completed four books.  Here they are and the year when I last read each.

Beau Geste, P.C. Wren — never

Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian, Robert E. Howard — never

Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackery — never

The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, Douglass Wallop — 1977


Two of these are very long books.  Vanity Fair is 400,000 words, while the Conan series, which included every story about Conan that Howard had written before fatally shooting himself after his mother's death, includes more than two dozen works, most of which are of novella length, plus one novel of 77,000 words.  Altogether, measuring how long the audio book against Vanity Fair, I'd guess this was 500,000 words.  Thus, less books read, not less time spent reading.

What can I say about Conan?  It's a slog.  Howard repeats many of his similes and idioms, almost to the point where they can be predicted once enough content is read.  In many cases, I could not help losing the context of the story, as Howard is very concerned with describing the hallways and stairwells and rooms that are run through, until it becomes each becomes a pastiche of the one before.  This is disorienting.  The character is unquestionably compelling, however, and given the time when he's written, utterly unique and the model for many fantasy characters written after.  But one doesn't come away from the compendium feeling enlightened or refreshed; there's nothing left to think about when the story is over.  It is merely a story, filling a given day and then meant to be lightly discarded, without concern.  I can testify that I was fairly punchy at the end.  I'd recommend not reading the whole collection back to back, but buying the book and then picking up one of the novellas once a month.

Most, I would imagine, have never heard of the book, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.  It was written in 1954, and "wallop" seems to have been the author's real name, though it's a rather funny surname for a book about baseball.  I found the book in my junior high school library when I was in grade 7 or 8, and I think would have read it twice.  It is the source of the musical, Damn Yankees, which deviates considerably from the original, though the screenplay was adapted from Wallop from his own book.  I wanted something light to read after Vanity Fair, and found it by going through lists of books on wikipedia's literature list, year by year.  I was very surprised to find it listed in Audible.  And it was free.  So was Vanity Fair and Beau Geste, as it happens, so I haven't paid for a book in the service since Conan, and have now racked up four credits, by not using the one's I have paid for (if you're an Audible user).

It was light, fun, written at a time when it looked like the Yankees would never lose a pennant again.  I has a very different vibe from the musical, which completely discards the book's point — that something gotten easily must come at the expense of someone else.  This makes an interesting commentary on the Faustian tale, as the main character, having gotten what he wants from the Devil, finds it wounds the lives of those around him.  But the book doesn't sustain this theme well; it just isn't ready to be serious about it, and too soon the theme is discarded.

Beau Geste was an enormous surprise.  It was a phenomenon when it was released in 1923; the book was transferred to screen three times, plus a satire directed and starred in by Marty Feldman, which I saw in the theatre.  The one movie I haven't seen is the silent version with Ronald Coleman, but I can attest that the others are not the book.  They have elements from the book, but they cherry picked... and so, as I came through the book initially, it was a lot of, "What the hell is all this...?"

That said, if one has the patience, it's an excellent adventure, and the last third of the book is a nailbiter.  Astoundingly, as near as I remember, though published five years after the war, and taking place in or around the ten years before 1920, and being a book about the military, there's no reference to the 1st World War.  There is a reference to being a cinema star, so that's rather odd.  It is tragic, it is very British, and much of the book is composed around two mysteries, which take a great deal of time to sort out.  I don't like mystery novels, but as both mysteries end up being explained so adroitly, I was able to forgive the endless question asking (which is why I hate a mystery story) for the benefit of the solution.  The last five pages are simply delightful.

And now, at last, Vanity Fair.  This book pays no attention whatsoever to Chekhov's gun, nor should it have.  It argues vociferously that life is not made up of things that matter, but rather of things that infringe on happiness, nearly always unfairly, and made vastly worse by the pursuit of one's own self-importance.  This last drives an exhaustive accounting of rather pleasant people doing unspeakable things to themselves and to others for the sake of their appearance and self-perceived accomplishments.  It is brutally rich in passive, righteous micro-cruelties and long-suffering miseries that last because of all the crosses available for all the characters to climb up upon.

But... the book is very funny throughout.  Thackery makes no pretense that the storytelling is sacred and breaks "the fourth wall" to comment on his own characters in Vonneguttian fashion, which is an absolute delight — especially for a writer.  It is very long but never difficult to read, there are many characters but for the most part they are easy to remember (except that Thackery has a habit of using three or four different names to describe the same character).  The length of the novel truly establishes the amount of time that has past, so that as the characters in it experience moments of nostalgia about their youth, as we were there also, we feel the same nostalgia because it happened so long ago in the text.  Vanity Fair is unquestionably the best book I've read in this last year, with the possible exception of Pride and Prejudice.  It puts all the themes of the Great Gatsby to shame, as that latter book more or less attempts to discuss Vanity also, but in a more childish way.  Still, we can't ask high school students to read a book which would probably take them all year.  Took me 39 days.

So.

Re-reading Dracula, now.  I'll write the next of these come the end of November.

Books, End of May

It's been another three months and I've continued reading, with this time around including books I never thought I'd read.  Here's the list and the year in which I'd last read the book.

Call of the Wild, Jack London — 2002

The Commodore, C.S. Forester — 2020

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway — 1991

Firestarter, Stephen King — 1995

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott — never

Night without End, Alistair MacLean — 1985

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen — never

Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein — 2019

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson — never

Only nine books, which seems like I'm slowing down.  I'll be honest; Little Women was a slog.  18 hours long by audiobook, it took me all of April to read it, this after slicing through six books through March.  I appreciate why it appeals; I personally feel it invents the genre of both legitimate modern Christian literature and every sort of magazine story from the Saturday Evening Post through Reader's Digest.  But its just schmaltz from end to end.  I appreciate that the characters become real after a time, that they feel real, that their goals and identities acquire a solidity that many writers I've read simply cannot achieve.  Hemingway wishes he could make characters this strong.

But gawd, what insipid, cloying, miserable little cretinous self-righteous toad stools they are.  It's a whole book of fucking Mrs. Grundy, the book to read if we're ready to explore a world where the end goal is putting the ghosts of our companions into a silver picture frame and crying about them whenever we see their dear little harpsichord, the one they loved so much, standing in the corner, newly dusted every Tuesday in memory of sweet little Beth.  Gag.  Makes me want to get drunk, in a strip club, before going home and fucking a drag queen.  Sorry.  I'm just way too, um, sinful to read a book like this.

Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, I loved.  I absolutely loved.  I have not read a new story so well constructed, so smashingly built, so piercingly conceptual, in more than a decade.  Absolutely wonderful.  And for none of the reasons that certain kinds of women seem to love it.  Not long after reading it, I stumbled into that piece of shit miniseries (youtube located it for me, because my phone could hear that I was reading the book) with Gemma Arterton, Lost in Austen, which was plainly written by someone who had not read the book.  Not long after, I was shoved into that absolutely crap Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei movie, The Rewrite, where Alison Janney acts with a stick up her ass while she preaches all about Jane Austen — plainly has NOT read the fucking book.  These last three months (read Pride and Prejudice in the first week of March, positively gobbled the book whole) I have been rankled with spastic, idiotic platitude-like ramblings from actual women and characters about the "female liberalism" of Elizabeth, and between laughing my head off and pounding said head on the table, I dare someone to point out one line that clearly would not have been stated by any well-bred woman in the era, as something a well-bred woman would be expected to say at that time.

Apparently women today think women in the early 19th century were the equivalent of burka-wearing 19th century arabs.  A little history, people.  Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, ffs.  In 1819.  While sharing a house alone with two of her male lovers, way, way, way far from family and the clergy.  And was not burned at the stake.  Austen was not writing in the 15th century.

But, the book.  Genius.  Pure genius.  Hard to explain why.  Characters able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time.  Characters committing wrongs, without being wrong.  Oh, Wickham and Lydia were doofs, but the balance of the main characters being both prideful AND prejudiced (and no, one character did not represent one while another represented the other — there's some English lit professor bullshit for you), and how smashingly that ended with both being deliciously humiliated and forthcoming and open-minded all at the same time ... oh, the world should make this much sense.

That moment when Elizabeth realises she totally fucked up.  Wow.

Jekyll and Hyde disappointed but, eh, was clever enough.  I got a lot more out of a Farewell to Arms, being older, and could accept the ending much better this time around.  A lot of my memories of the book were out of order, which I suppose makes sense.  I had read the Call of the Wild aloud to Tamara soon after we returned to Canada; she'd never even heard of the book.  Sad to say, it can never be made into a movie, first because it's about the dog, not the man, and second ... the world has decided to believe the wild is a beautiful, Rousseauian place, where nothing very bad needs to take place, ever.  The sheer murderousness of this book can never be presented to a general audience of this present day.  More's the pity.

Firestarter I last read when I was working catering at the university, which is why I know when that was.  I can't seem to leave the Hornblower books alone; I find myself re-reading them.  I could write ten posts about Starship Troopers, but what would be the point?  There are certain books that have emerged into our culture as things that are talked about but never, ever, read.  Every time I meet someone bitching and moaning about the Fountainhead, I ask a very simply question about a prominent, major character of the book and get the answer, "I don't remember him."

Hint: it's the prominent, deeply destructive character that manipulates everything beginning about half the way through the book, whom no one discussing the book ever, ever mentions by name.  I assume because none of them have gotten that far when reading it.

But Starship Troopers ... I have to keep going back to it, because it grounds me.  And I'm not a nazi, I've never been in the military, I'm deeply red liberal (in Canada, where the colours make sense) and socialist.  So, headscratch your way out of that one.

Finally, Night without End.  I don't know if I'm going to read another Alistair MacLean.  I remember that I'd liked the book, but this time around, no, not really.  It reminds me of why I don't like a whodunnit, which the book is.  Combined with one of those action stories where no matter how often the character succeeds, something always goes wrong. Sort of like the last page of the book, the Princess Bride.  Gets tiresome.  Like the writer's thinking, "What can I break next?  I ought to make something break here."  All the while, writing pages and pages of, "It might be Bob.  Or it could be Dave.  Or maybe it's Fred.  'Course, can't discount Janet."  And so the character ponders and ponders, and the book gets larger and larger, until pretty much anyone could have done it, and I just don't care any more.

Anyway, reading an omnibus of Conan stories now.  I'll have more to say about those three months from now.

Books, End of February

Three months have passed since my publishing this post, during which time I've continued my reading plan.  I've completed just 10 books in that time, far short of November's tally, especially in that two of the books were quite short.  I'm continuing through a longer novel at present, the title of which I won't mention until writing the next of these posts come the end of May.

It's not my intent to strut or puff myself up.  Anyone can listen to the audio version of a book; it's just a question of time spent.  I produce this list just to show what may have been on my mind of late, what things have been influencing my thinking and what I've learned about myself.

For example there are three books I have on this list that were, as regards the writing, bad.  For two of these, I expected that ... in fact, I intentionally read one book specifically because I knew the writing would be bad.  I've been investigating a theory; but first, let's have the list out.  Title, author, last time I read it.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens — 2010

Flying Colours, C.S. Forester — 2022 (I like this book)

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald — never

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein — 2002

The House on the Cliff, Franklin W. Dixon — 1973

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne — never

Split Infinity, Piers Anthony — 1995

Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein — 2008

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson — 2010

War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells — 2005

Some of these dates are guesses, based sometimes on having read the book when at a particular residence, or place of work, and sometimes because I read it aloud to someone else, as in the case of the Hobbit.  The Dixon book was in the drawer of my school desk when I was nine and was lost in the fire of my elementary school that I discussed on this blog some months ago.  Yes, it is a Hardy Boys book.

Which books were bad?  Well, Dixon's book, obviously.  I read a great many Hardy Boys' books when my age had single digits, not unlike many children of that time.  From the perspective that I have now, the book wasn't only juvenile and contrived, as one might expect, but painfully constructed in its sentence structure, the repetitive pattern it had of delivering exposition, it's going to the same well over and over again when building a dialogue between Frank and Joe — whom I'd always thought were equal characters, but no.  Joe's role is to set up Frank's exposition, and as a result the character is the worst kind of cardboard.

None of which should surprise anyone.  The books were made for children and Dixon may have been restrained by gawd knows what group of busy-bodies telling him how to write.  The larger point here is that for someone who eventually became a writer, it's clear these books were the worst guide I could ask for.  Worse, I could see dozens of bad habits that I used to have, and some I still have, grossly evident in the book.  Much of the pain I experienced dragging myself through the four-and-a-half hour audio came from identifying certain moments of myself in the writing.  A self-stabbing with a real knife could not have hurt more.

The impetus for taking up Dixon came from an earlier book on the above list, but I'll put that aside for the moment.  For the record, it wasn't The Great Gatsby or The Scarlet Letter.  Before getting into that, however, I want to talk about Split Infinity, which I read specifically to see what sort of repeat of experience I'd get after the Hardy Boys.

I adored Anthony in my teens, tearing through the books like A Spell for Chameleon and On a Pale Horse, but the bloom had begun to rub away by the mid-90s, by which time I was writing professionally.  Too often I found myself wondering at Anthony's choice of phrasing or the clumsy direction of his plot work ... but all in all, back then, I hadn't felt it was so awful.  Rather, I merely considered that I'd grown up, moved on, was harder to please and so on.

But I remembered that reaction those many years ago and wondered what I'd feel about Anthony now.

Oh my gawd.

I can't say for sure if it applies to other works, but for the book I read, Anthony has this execrable habit of stepping out of the story every few pages and giving the fucking definition for some word he's just used, or being sure to explain that yes, humans do/are this thing he's just claimed.  Fuck.  It is really head-pounding stuff.  More than once I found myself saying aloud, "Oh, for the love of Christ, shuuuuut up!"  It was all I could do to muscle my way through the book, which is exactly what it felt like.  I wouldn't say it was as bad as Robin Hood, but if I was given the choice of which one I had to read again ... I'd probably have to pick Robin just because, at least, there's an excuse for it's 1880s content being bad.  Editors existed at the time that Anthony wrote this!

I have to assume that it also had deleterious effects on me in my early efforts to be a writer, as I did like the book quite a lot when I was 16, as I bought it the year it was published.  It distresses me when I remember having read the book half a dozen times in my late teens and early twenties.  I have no idea what was wrong with me.  I'm glad it's not wrong with me now.

All right.  The Hobbit.

Jeez.

I know, I know, this is a D&D blog, and we're talking about a holy book and all.  This could lose me some patreon support.  All I can say is that I have other ... good qualities.

No, I didn't like the book.  Not, I'm thankful to say, because of the sentence or paragraph structure.  And I think that as a children's book, it more or less holds up.  I read it aloud to my daughter when she was 8, and to Tamara who had never read the book in 2002; and while the later reading didn't exactly impress me, it was all right.  I had no real complaints.

But reading it in December, right after A Christmas Carol, it really suffered.  The characters are pretty stale, and not just because the book's been part of my memory since around 1978.  I read it the first time after seeing the Rankin/Bass cartoon; my father had bought a copy in the early 70s when Tolkien's star was rising, so it had always been around.  But reading it now, there's not much to the characters.  The multiple dwarves don't have a presence except in the fact of their number, while on paper Gandalf is kind of a dick.  Things just "happen" to Bilbo that get him into trouble, and then they just "happen" again that gets him out of it.  I can see how various film-makers have tried to give Bilbo a sense of genius (the riddling part is the best in the whole book), but honestly this genius is made of the same cloth they use to make plot armour and magic character survival dust.  Smaug, on the face of it, is there, and then not.  Maybe it was an audiobook effect (its just a 6-hour book in voice), but I found many bits and pieces of the book that I'd once thought were "cool" coming out as very definitely meh.

For those who worship the book, I imagine that comes from having not read much else ... except along the same lines.  It's easy to see how Dicken's work maintains it's 181-year tradition, though as a book it's only 2 hours and 43 minutes.  Nonetheless, it's a rich, powerful read, with every line evoking life and visual cues.  The Hobbit, in comparison, feels like a book trying to squeeze juice out of a lemon that's been drying on the counter three days.  There's juice there, to be sure ... but not a whole lot of it.

I plan to write a short take on The Scarlet Letter, but not about the writing quality.  My thoughts on The Great Gatsby can be stated briefly enough.  It's a book that I knew virtually everything about going in, though I've never actually read it.  I've discussed the book with some as though I had, but heck, I can be honest with you folks.  At, least, today.  None of you like me now anyway because of the hobbit thing.

We should not be giving Gatsby to grade school students, certainly no one younger than 17.  It wasn't part of the curriculum when I was in junior high, but it was for my daughter — and that is way, way too young an age.  The themes are best understood by those who have had a little of Nick Caraway's experience — which takes until a person has reached their mid-20s.  It does well to teach it in university, because there's a good chance the student will read it again in their 30s; but giving it to kids in grade school, it pretty much assures that the book, and anything else like it, will be hated for the rest of their lives.

I think it does an excellent job of exposing the "self-taught" model, which is alive and well everywhere on youtube.  This notion that by absorbing great books, or travelling, or doing anything that would supposedly give insight through only the effort of experience is what makes Gatsby the utter worm that he is.  Not a monster; not a bad man; not a cad or a bounder, as he's often represented, especially in film ... but a pathetic fool woefully out of his depth, pretending to be witty and able.  All through the book, he's neither.  Which I think, for most people, and especially young readers, a difficult truth to accept, even when Fitzgerald states it as plainly as English allows.  People want to believe in Gatsby; they want to see tragedy in Gatsby, because they want to see that same tragedy in themselves.  I think Fitzgerald expected this; I think the book plans much of its ending around that.  But Gatsby is only a fool.  A fool that stumbled into money and didn't know what to do with it.  Oh, how often is that play played out by those who play online.

Books, End of November

I joined Audible some three months ago, around the end of August, mostly because I was jonesing for Hornblower books, which I became familiar with on youtube but which had all vanished.  Since, I've considered using the service — since I've become less and less interested in youtube this last year — to reacquaint myself with books I read decades ago ... both good and bad.  There are many books in my recollection which I haven't read since my teens, and many others I never finished; there are books that I've "read," but in some expurgated version, or at a speed commensurate with the needs of university.  As I expect I have several decades of time ahead of me, I thought perhaps this might be the best way to sustain a part of my education which, I'll admit, has lapsed.  I read far more new books in my teens and twenties than I have since turning 40; and there are many, many classic books that I've never read — though in many of those cases, I could describe the plot and even the theme of those books quite easily.

For the blog, I thought it might interest some readers what those books have been these last three months.  I thought I might even include the embarrassing ones, since after all I read quite a lot of second-rate books in ancient times, and there's nothing wrong with revisiting such works to see how one has changed in viewpoint and tastes.  With an audio book, there's no trouble in finishing something; there's always some opportunity to listen to something while doing the dishes, walking to the store, exercising or waiting at the doctor's office.  One definite reality with getting older is there always seems to be an enormous amount of available time in doing things that keep one from doing something more enjoyable.

So, here's a list of books now fresh in my mind, for anyone to comment on, or anything someone might like to talk about if they so desire.  Do not hesitate to roll your eyes at some titles; as I say, the process is a journey through time.  I'm not, after all, trying to obtain an academic degree.  Included is an estimate of the last time I read the book (in quite a lot of cases, I've read the book more than once before).

Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne — 1998

Captive of Gor, John Norman — 1989

Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov — 1983

The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck — 2004

The Happy Return, C.S. Forester — 2021

Lieutenant Hornblower, C.S. Forester — 2021

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle — never

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, C.S. Forester — 2021

The Puppet Masters, Robert Heinlein — 2015

Roughing It, Mark Twain — never

Ship of the Line, C.S. Forester — 2022

The Stand (1989 version), Stephen King — 1995

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens — 2001

The worst of these was unquestionably Robin Hood.  Far, far worse than the John Norman book.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

Destiny

There is a post that proceeds the post script below, discussing the relationship between Starship Troopers and D&D, destiny and adventure design.  As well as a deconstruction of the book. but that post is included on my other for-pay blog, The Higher Path.

However, I wish to make the post script public, because I like to push the things I love ~ and I haven't found anyone yet on the internet ready to do that for this book.

Post Script,

I am well aware of the criticism of this book. It is plain from the linked resource that many readers, particularly critics, have brought a great deal of baggage about the military, politics and quite a lot of other things not included in a literal reading of the novel ~ and who have then argued that a literal reading of the novel is itself an unacceptable social and political reaction to the book. I consider all of this sentiment to be a load of dingo's kidneys. There are no statements of fascism in the book at all, except to those without any understanding of fascism. There are no statements of "rah rah military" in the book, except from those who plainly have no understanding, or no ability to understand, that the military is not a garden party, and that we do not make weapons nor teach the use of weapons so they can be held prettily in parades on Remembrance Day.

If anyone wishes to discuss the book with me, I would be delighted. However, if it is the reader's purpose to deride or criticise the message of the book, I had better see exact quotes from the novel, with specific page numbers or chapters, and context, or else I intend to delete your comment. Prior to writing this post, I read half a dozen criticisms of the book and not one of them gave a single quote from the novel. This is appalling. But then, it is also what I came to expect from some English and Poly Sci professors in university.

An Encyclopedia of World History

This is my grandmother's book, published in 1952, the front cover is nine inches by six.  It has just over 1350 pages.  My parents inherited it from my grandmother when I was 12; and as I was the only one who ever cracked the binding, it more or less became mine over the years.

The book is written in a spectacular point-form style, with dates of course, in as close to chronological order as possible.  This had its limitations once, but is now a brilliant companion to wikipedia, since it is replete with names, places and moments that can be looked up with such ease.  So, when I was asked by a reader to detail what my world would be like in the stone age, I went straight for this book.  I was glad to have it.  Until I moved in February, it has been in storage.

Because it is from 1952, however, much of the book's explanation of pre-history is way, way out of date.  Consider.  When the book was printed, Olduvai Gorge was nothing but a collection of a few stone tools and handaxes.  Our concept of human evolution has massively changed in just a few decades.  On that subject, I certainly wouldn't rely on this text; though it holds up fairly well, considering.  Given the content, the scholarship must have been first rate.  The book describes the contributor for the prehistoric period as Dr. Lauriston Ward.  Unfortunately, I can't find him on Wikipedia.  Lauriston is mentioned on this page, as the president and founder for the Council of Old World Archeology, apparently still active.  Must have been quite a fellow, before others outshone him.

Another fault of the book is that it is sadly lacking in non-European subjects.  Books did tend to be Eurocentric at the time ... but part of that is also because texts stored in relatively wet climates, made on rice paper, do not tend to survive as long as texts stored in a dry climate, written on parchment or rag paper.  It is extremely difficult to study 15th and 16th century West Africa, when most of the texts were written from the point of view of the Mali people who had a ready supply of papyrus in the Niger valley, and when papyrus is extraordinarily poor if what you want is for people to read your writing four hundred years later.  Mali did not, like Egypt, have a tradition of burying texts in jars in the desert ... so what we know about Mali during the time of Cromwell is annoyingly scant.  What we know about Cromwell, on the other hand ... you can spend a lifetime just reading letters passing between people between the years 1645 and 1660.  And people do.

Still, the image shows what I mean about point form and dates.  I find myself often on the verge of screaming at youtube videos created by amateurs who can't see the value of including dates relating to their material.  What is the good of my watching a breakdown of eight Moghul rulers and their methods, from Akbar on, if I can't relate their reigns to what's going on in other parts of the world?  After 1500, the encroachment of European power in India was just a little important.  But of course, I don't rely on video for my history research.

I do love history.  And I could spend a lot of years rewriting the encyclopedia to give a complete historical background to my world that fit in the presence of non-human races, monsters, the discovery and advancement of magic, etcetera, for the sheer pleasure of it.  I don't know who else would get anything out of it ... but there is something so rewarding in deconstructing history, I'm not certain I would care.

Delusions of Teaching

Timothy Brannan and I don't get along.  I don't think there's resentment on his part; I can't say. He's commented on this blog a few times and I pretty much ignore his blog.  When I hear anything about him, it's usually second hand.

The second-hand in this case is a recent post by JB of B/X Blackrazor, in which he quotes Brannan, then goes on to talk about learning the rules of games.  I'd like to take part of that same quote by Brannan and go a different direction with it.

"Moldvay, Holmes and Mentzer Basics were all a product of their times. That is getting people (often read as "kids") to learn how to play. As someone who has been developing college curriculums for 20+ years I can tell you kids and young adults don't go to books to learn how to do something, they want a video or podcast (but mostly a video) and that's where they go first. If I were writing a course on how to learn D&D I'd first look at my video budget. BTW this is not a value judgement on learning, it is a different modality."

Newsflash.  People don't like to read books.

Let's get into the WayBack machine and visit 1975.  I'm eleven years old and taking advantage of my elementary school library staying open for 45 minutes after classes end.  The library has about 2,500 books and the school has about 310 students.  Number of humans in the library?  Two.  Me and the librarian.  That's a typical day.

Jump forward to 1978.  I'm 14 years old and in grade eight.  The junior high school library is open for an hour after school.  The number of books has increased to 7,000.  The school has 750 students.  Number of humans present?  Four or five.  Usually one of them is a friend of mine.

Jump forward again.  It is 1981.  I'm 17 years old and in grade 11.  My high school library is open for 90 minutes after school.  The number of books is now 16,000.  The high school has 1,750 students.  Number of humans present?  Fifteen to twenty, with two librarians and an administrator.  Most others are researching a paper.  I'm not.

One more time.  It is 1986.  I'm 22 years old and in university, after taking 3+ years to go work in the real world.  The library is open 15 hours a day.  The university library has 220,000 books, plus endless newspapers and magazines on microfiche, a whole floor of theses and about 50,000 physical maps.  Total students: 25,000.  Number of people I might stumble across on a given floor in the library when it is not a week before exams?  Three or four.

People have never liked to read books.

Videos, podcasts, whatever materials we want to point at that have been developed with technology in the last 20+ years have successfully filled a hole in the lives of people who 32 years ago were happy to remain dumbfuck ignorant.  We haven't produced less readers; we've just convinced those people who never intended to read that they can stop feeling guilty about not going to the library.  When I go to my local university today, I find the same number of people among the stacks that I found way back in the day.

These people are not reading books because they are "a different modality."  These people don't "prefer" books ... though a lot of them will say so.  They are reading books for specific reasons.

1.  For all the trillions of pages the internet produces, most of it, even the "academic stuff," is shit.  It is content that is produced without an editor, and therefore with research that either doesn't exist, is done poorly or is done with the goal of sharing values, not information.  Content on the internet, despite what the internet tells you now, is still very unreliable ... and if your goal is to actually learn something, it is necessary to pick up a tool that is specifically vetted so that it is not full of shit.

2.  The amount of pure, reliable, practical, meaty content that exists on any two shelves of a real library dwarfs the total valuable content of all that one person can locate on the internet in the space of three years.  The internet, for all the fun it provides, is like finding a single worthwhile volume that's been stored in a two-acre field covered with two million variations of "See Dick Run" children's books.  In a library that's run by academics (rather than a municipal city that only cares how many people we can stuff in the building in order to read popular novels and other crap), I can stand in one place and run my fingers along the covers of fifty books all on the same subject, each of which say different things about it.  This saves an amazing amount of time.

3.  When I read a book, I can pick whatever speed I want.  I can flip usefully through ten pages in a minute or I can stare for twenty minutes at one sentence, parsing out the exact meaning without the rest of my senses being cluttered by the presenter's choice of clothes, the set, the presenter's voice, the time wasted by sales and marketing the presenter has to do to get views and the real time delivery of the sentence that makes me either want to scream, "TALK FASTER!" or slow down the video, turn the sound off and the close captioning on, so I can reduce his point to text where it can be fully understood.

To the average person, a lot of these look like the same book.
They're not.

Now, I appreciate that Timothy Brannan would likely not dispute any of those points.  I've read enough of Brannan to believe that he probably feels about books exactly the way I do, and that he was probably one of the small number of people in his library after school when he was a kid. But if we are going to write a course on how to LEARN D&D, rather than reduce it to pablum so it can be spooned in the mouth of lazy mutts who don't really give a shit if your video teaches them the game or not, for the sake of feeling sure that your vlog views encourage your belief that you're reaching more people than you would with a book, then we have to stop thinking in terms of our video budget.

Our video budget is what we spend money on when we're ready to recreate the Boob Tube in the all encompassing internet framework.  It's a fucking joke to think your collection of videos is going to teach anyone.  We already have a hundred thousand hours of people pumping out videos about how to "learn" D&D ... and in my 20+ years of sitting on the internet having these conversations, I have yet to meet anyone who has fucking learned anything.

So let's not pretend that making a video is a great act of education.  Go on, make your video, count your page views and subscribers, and maybe you can push out enough pseudo-educational material to equal the income stream of Matthew Colville.  Good on you if you can, it's a nice financial boon to you and yours.  But it ain't education.

Never will be.

Structural Bias

In a conversation I've just had with Maxwell, I equated the DM's game designer problem of creating rules ~ concrete, objective and publicly visible ~ to the rules and structure of video game code.  This, I think, is apt.  A great part of the difficulty in RPGs moving forward these past forty years has come from an inability to agree on the code, which in turn disallows for our moving forward on things that really matter, like the process of the game itself.

Recently in an email, I made a point about initiating an adventure and the structure of that initiation which I think is worth repeating in a blog post.  I began by explaining that when I first began to play D&D, I saw that the biggest problem I was having as both a player and as a DM was the notion that the DM was always right.  This idea gained strength pretty quickly.  I did not hear the term 'fiat' until many years later, though that is certainly correct in its description: a 'fiat' is generally considered a very bad thing in the real world.

As such, I saw that my chief axiom as a DM would be to take myself, as much as was possible, "out of the loop," letting the dice decide as many conflicts as possible while pushing myself to create situations that were logically based on what had gone before and not upon a personal, arbitrary desire to see something happen.  However, though I argued the importance of this with many DMs in the early 1980s, I always felt I was the only one who applied this thinking to my world; and today, I still find myself in contention with those who think there are times when it is "okay" to DM fiat a problem.  This is clearly evidence of broken philosophical thinking at the ground level of the participant and user of the game's structure.

Imagine someone asking on a football web forum, "When is it okay for the New England Patriots to cheat?"

[makes me want to go try it, actually]

When I say "take myself out of the loop," I don't mean that every part of the game I'm running has to be structured in advance.  That would be impossible, particularly for the size and complexity of campaign I'm running.  To prepare and script every option a player might pursue would take far too much time for even a single adventure.  While this might mean that I am compelled to run a given room exactly as it was written, thereby removing my immediate judgement from the equation, it also means I have to create very simple, very limited systems for my players to move through.  It means the scripts for anything that anyone says have to be simple as well, or else I'll be writing scripts ten years from now.  Everything that the players might do has to be accounted for, and the players would be barred from doing anything that wasn't already created.

Basically, a video game.

My concept of the loop came in 1980; at that time, narrative video games were astoundingly primitive.  Consider, this was the level of video game when I started playing D&D:




I could see at the time that the "control every variable" option was going to produce a spectacularly bad game.  Even now, with the progression of video games, I'm still bored with games that seek to produce a narrative experience, right up to and including a game like the Witcher, Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed.  I don't want to be someone else dealing with their problems, I want to be me, dealing with my problem ~ and I want total freedom of choice to decide what my problem is.

A better methodology for running an adventure, I believed, could be found in the narrative rules that novel-writing compels, something I was also tinkering with in 1980, as those were my formative years as a writer.  At the time, I could not have described it, but I've studied deconstruction a great deal now and I believe I have a good handle on the basic principles.  In a novel, everything that exists must apply somehow to the development of characters and setting, which in turn serves to drive the plot and create the conflict, which then must be resolved with the instruments, ideas and motivations that have already been instilled in the characters.  When Frodo is imagined to be dead in Lord of the Rings, we cannot simply have aliens land in a ship and then destroy the ring with an extraterrestrial blaster.  In the same vein, what Samwise does next has to make sense.  He cannot behave in a manner that would make the reader think the author had suddenly decided Sam should no longer act like Sam.  We know that is not how humans behave in a situation (or, at least, we think we know that).  Humans behave according to how they have behaved in the past.  We stubbornly cling to that notion.

Doing this in an RPG, this setting up of the adventure, should follow the same principles.  Each object found, each discourse, each motivation of the non-player participants, should match up with the final goal.  However ~ and this is incredibly important ~ RPGs are not novels.  Nothing can be fixed.  There's no certainty that the players will pick up the object or pursue the motivation.  If they don't, the DM must, this being the axiom, resist the desire to push into the loop and compel the players to pursue the unwanted set-up.  The set-up must be abandoned and a new set-up created, one that hopefully the players will pursue.  If they do, then the movement in the set-up's direction will produce a conflict and an end result, so long as the players remain interested.

This means that my world is a series of narrative set-ups, sometimes without result.  If the players don't like an idea, I kill it in my mind, or figure out another potential clue that might make the previous set-up more enticing (which sometimes works but more often does not, discouraging this tactic).  This requires that I place no sympathetic (or sentimental) attachment to a given set-up . . . but why should that be difficult.  Artists abandon ideas all the time!  If the necktie scene works better without the necktie, the playwright dumps the necktie and writes the scene.  Those who fail to recognize that any part of a work can be abandoned for the sake of the whole work will in turn fail to achieve a higher degree of skill and self-awareness.

Okay, but what is a "set-up"?  How does it work?  I'd like to give an example, but I can only hope the gentle reader has read the book [hell, if you haven't, you're damaged in some way and should not be DMing adventures].  I'll try Around the World in 80 Days.

The set-up is simple.  The story is told primarily from the point of view of Passepartout, who has just acquired employment with an extraordinarily precise master, Phileas Fogg.  The set-up is that a bet is made, one that requires Fogg to act in a manner that seems very unlike Fogg; Passepartout is taken along on a journey which, at the beginning, he does not really conceive in scope.  Passepartout does not believe his master's simple statement that they are going around the world; he doesn't know Fogg well; he thinks his master must be joking.  By the time it is clear it is not a joke, Passepartout is already far away from home and well in the midst of the adventure.

Consider: Passepartout could have refused to get on the train out of England.  He could have refused to cross the Channel.  He could have refused to leave France, where he was from.  He could have stopped anywhere along the way ~ but this would have meant unemployment for the manservant and at every step, the prospect of keeping pace with Fogg seems more enticing that being unemployed anywhere along the way.  That is a set-up that works.  The players have free will; but the choice right in front of them has to seem much more interesting than any choice they can make on their own.

That is how I lead players "by the nose."  Not by railroading them, not by controlling them, not by denying them agency, but by creating a set-up that is more interesting, more enticing, than the set-up they imagine themselves creating.  Once they are in the adventure, everything else follows logically.  Like in Verne's book, once Fogg, a wealthy Britisher, appears to be moving quickly through Egypt, the detective Fix assumes Fogg must be a bankrobber that he has been told to be on the look-out for.  Fix follows Fogg and is in turn embroiled in the adventure.  Events in India then create the opportunity to rescue Aouda, Fix's machinations lead to Fogg's being stranded in Hong Kong, the trip through the United States leads to the encounter on the train and so on ~ all of which are perfectly predictable to me as a DM, as I know the players, once on the adventure, will move through India and Hong Kong and Nebraska.  I can set the events of the adventure well up in advance without the party feeling railroaded, as they know they chose to take each step as it was given.  That is precisely why, although they have agency, they can be predicted in their behaviour.

I believe that this connection between setting up a narrative in a book and setting up the premise for an adventure has been utterly and entirely missed by the game-making community.  I feel that calls for necessary solutions to narrative, such as that called for Noah Wardrip-Friun, have already been created and structured for centuries by writers and artists, but that these things are being ignored because most game systems and formats do not have the flexibility to ditch set-ups that are not wanted or desired by gamers.  Not like an RPG can do.

If we don't like a book, we can stop reading it.  If we don't like a video game, we can stop playing it.  But if you don't like an RPG, that RPG can be changed and changed until you do like it ~ unless the person in charge steadfastly and stubbornly refuses to change.  And that there is the problem.  That is the structural bias we have to overcome.