I'm Ready to Sell

Very wise words coming from Tim of Maðelode yesterday:

"It [role-playing] really is an activity of isolation. The gaming clubs should be encouraging mixers! The conventions should have discussion panels on social interaction! There should be a dialogue, not a dogma!"

It is this sentiment that fires up my anger at entities like the WOTC or against individuals like Gygax and the rest.  The opportunity was there in the 1980s to set the tone for what conventions would be about and why people would attend them.  We needed a practical solution to the problem of not enough DMs for players who were dependent upon them for playing the game.  What we got instead were make-shift 'tournaments' that encouraged mediocrity and the blandest of adventuring models.  Instead of voices encouraging a unification between role-playing and other performance arts, we got pompous Jabba the Huts sitting at tables scribing out their signatures for sycophants.  We needed imagination - what we got was marketing.

From the moment the game became popular, the only people that mattered were the DMs, whose sole purpose in the social construct surrounding role-playing was as customers for the monopolistic market place.  And now that the market place has ceased to be monopolistic, we call this 'progress.'

Heh heh, I'm one to talk.  I've officially become one of the enemy.

Well, what the hell.  I would have much preferred a TED Talks venue.  Instead we get NASCAR.  It just fills my heart with pride.

I can't wait for FanExpo.  I've got my soul all neatly stuffed in a bottle and I'll be sitting at my table, waiting for Satan to show up. 

The Hole I'm In

Here it is, the 2nd of June, and I am writing like a demon.  My only frustration is that I feel a strong resistance to looking at the writing I've done in the last month, making final corrections, so that it can be sent to the editors.  I've been very lax in this.  I have tried to make a schedule, and keep it, but then I just put it off another day, then a second day, then a third and so on.  There's only a month left, I've got a ton of it in the bank and I'm beginning to worry.

As far as the third draft, I can see a dim light at the end of the tunnel.  I am writing, or rewriting, around 1,800 words a day, which doesn't include the stuff I'm writing and then throwing out.  I'll finish the third part of the book this week, probably Wednesday, which will leave me with nothing but the world-building segment to do.  Oh, and a conclusion I plan to write, that I haven't touched yet.  With the second draft, the worldbuilding passages went so much easier - I find it much easier to talk about how to create a world rather than how to manage people.  I will give a sigh of relief when I move onto that.

I'm telling you, the gentle reader, because like the man who slept with three supermodels at the same time, I am telling everyone.

This seems to be the only conversation about which I am truly capable.

Last week, for those who may have seen the Lulu page for How to Play a Character & Other Essays, I had some trouble with a troll who was leaving abusive spam there.  Lulu has been great in helping me manage it; they're terrific and understanding about these things.  I have to say, it is one kind of troll that harasses a blog, but it's another species entirely that seeks to undermine an independent author's efforts to self-publish a book. Self-publishing is hard enough.  I would think that a rational person would understand that failure in self-publishing is what we call normal.  I don't need help to fail.  The average troll should be able to sit back and let this one solve itself.

Naturally, I'd rather the opposite.  Towards that end, I'll try to explain my situation as it stands now.

My daughter is coming out to Toronto with me for the Fan Expo at the end of August, the 28-31st.  I'm paying for her airfare, because technically it is on me, so that's going to be about $1,500 total.  The table at the Fan Expo, which I still haven't been confirmed for, will be about $500.  The hotel and vittles for my daughter and I, which again I'll be paying for, should come out around $900.  The cost to produce the little book was $120, and the cost to produce the big book looks to be about $625.  This covers the editing and the artwork.  I have a fundraiser that is going on the 3rd of July, which needed $175 out of pocket so far for printing, the majority of the costs to be handled by the selling of tickets at the door.  Finally, I have a banner that I'm working on, and printing costs for that could run upwards of $400. There are other in sundry costs, but those aren't specified.

Altogether, this puts me about $4,220 in the hole.  From our estimates, we should make about half of that with ticket sales, t-shirt sales (for those who are wondering, the majority of young people actually like the t-shirt), book sales thus far (which are less than hoped for but making a fair profit right now over costs).  The table is paid for, half the art is paid for and the printing is covered.  I have contributions that have been most helpful.  Discounting the money raised from the event (for which we are selling tickets now, as I speak, for $15 each), I'm about $3,095 short.  I'm not worried.  Costs are covered one way or the other, as I have the bank credit to do it even if I make no money going forward.

This I am doing without a kick-starter or sponsors.  I am certainly grateful for those contributions.  I am not worried about making a profit; that only requires sales, and my daughter and I are both very experienced.

I should mention that I'm giving away as a door prize, July 3rd, a copy of the D&D Whitebox Set, about the same quality as the top two examples on the link.  I am GIVING it away.  At a later point, I will have the actual book launch for How to Run at the Sentry Box in Calgary (we have a hand-shake agreement at this point), mid-Julyish, we expect.  At that, I'll be auctioning off a copy of Chainmail, which upon research isn't the very expensive one after all.  Of course, we also hope to sell a lot of books.

What I don't need is a basement troll who feels that all this effort is abusive of the community, or that is somehow proves that I have a lot of baseless characteristics that make me a bad person.  I think what I'm trying to do is put on a couple of events, write a book that will help people run their games with a lot of sound advice and explanation, while starting a small business in the process.  Opposing that is, hell, it's unAmerican, isn't it?

UnCanadian, too.  Most of us do accept the virtues of capitalism, after all.  So for those who hate me, please continue to hate me.  But know that if you're pouring derision on my work, you're also doing it on all these fine people who have supported me, who have bought the small book, who have encouraged me to finish the large book and so on.  This is getting to be a larger and larger set of people that you've chosen to hate.

If at all possible, I think we should just keep it between us, hm?

Now that this is all written, let me finish by stating the very obvious. I need as much funding as I can get. If you can afford it - and you can, for it's only $9 to $10, depending - buy the little book.  Buy it because it helps me help others.  Buy it because you like to see people get ahead.  Buy it because you pity me.  Or buy it because my 25-year-old, married daughter really wants to show off her sweet cosplay Steampunk outfit in Toronto.  Buy it for any of those reasons . . . they all help me.

UPDATE:

There are three reviews on the recently published book, now, all of which give the book 5 stars.  Here is the newest one, copied, from James Clark:

"What Alexis Smolensk achieves as a writer offering advice on running and playing RPGs is to elevate the discussion. Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions or whether you find his style off-putting, I think the serious player is nontheless challenged by them both. If you're looking for a primer on RPGs, you need to start elsewhere. Perhaps the "D&D for Dummies" book recommended in another review [removed by lulu] is more your speed. If you've been looking for more, then read on. Those familiar with Alexis's blog will be familiar with these essays. These are the curated high-points of his views on playing. They have been tightened up, though, where tightening was needed and expanded upon where they were lacking. People new to the writer will have in their hands an excellent introduction to his ideas. Gone somewhat in this collection is the author's oft-mentioned acerbic tone, but make no mistake; this is still the writing of a smart, hard working student of the game who has the courage of his convictions and no time for fools. If you're the sort ready to dispense with the introductory and the unhelpful and get to the meat of things with a sharply written guide, then by all means give this little book a try."

Reflections on an Expo

Yesterday, I attended the Calgary Comix Expo.  No, I did not see Signourney.  I did see R.L. Stine.  I did not say hello, though I could have.  I was early, there was no one at his table and he was chatting with another writer whose name I didn't know.

I have not been to a fa-boy Expo in many years.  There have been some changes.  The cosplay is impressive to those people impressed by cosplay (not me, but that's not important).  There used to be a lot of arrogance at these things, a sort of we-are-the-table-masters sort of vibe, where the important people were those who hosted the tables and the visitors were expected to genuflect before speaking.  That's gone, and I think its gone because the cosplayers are the ones in control now.  And they're friendly.  They want you to get your picture taken with them (no, I have no pictures) and they want to be praised . . . so, overall, the atmosphere is much friendlier than my recollections.

The tables, and the displays, have become a sad cavalcade of mediocrity, productive after-thinking and neediness, powdered with depression and boredom.  It was possible to stand in one spot and see four or five solitary figures behind their tables, faces slack, eyes glassy, lost in their thoughts.  All one needed to do was pause at a table and meet the vendor's eyes to see a sick kind of gratefulness steal over their faces, which washed away the moment one moved on.  It isn't as though I did this intentionally; it was impossible to walk through the displays to see what was there, without occasionally catching the displayer's eye - making it hard to endure that disappointment over and over again as the time progressed.  There was little upon their tables to interest me.

On several occasions my partner Tamara and I stood against the wall where we could survey as much of the room as possible, to see what would appeal from a distance and thus compel us to be interested.  There was very little.  The signs and banners people posted were too small; many of them were pinned to the table skirts, where they were hidden by people's legs or bodies, rather than high up where they could be seen easily.  I was astounded by how little the vendors employed the verticality of their spaces - though it was clear from those few that did that this was an option.  Throughout, many of the vendors created displays two or three feet high that sat on top of the tables - obscuring the vendors themselves, so that they seemed like defenders behind fortresses designed to keep people out.

Perhaps, after I do this myself, setting out to sell my own book, I will hire out an expensive consultant to teach people how to market their wares in a public setting.  Much of what I saw was simply appalling.

The best display is the seller.  The seller's open, pleasing countenance, the sense of wishing to meet others, the encouragement of visitors themselves who want to talk and express themselves.  I could estimate there was easily twenty, thirty million dollars on the floor in the hands of the visitors flowing past the booths, like casting a line into a school of fish.

Once, when I was a boy about nine, I went fishing on a creek near Crimson Lake, west of Caroline Alberta, a river I wouldn't know where to find now.  On the river was a little twenty five foot waterfall, just a splatter of water dropping over a ledge from a watercourse that was ten-feet wide, that had made a deep hole at its base that was about 30 feet wide.  There were four of us who set to fish that hole, my father, my brother and I, and a friend of my father's named Jim Smith. That day, I had one of the best fishing memories I've ever had, as that hole was full of rainbow trout.  It only took three or four casts to hook one, so we caught and released for a couple hours, keeping six that over a pound for breakfast the next day, and about fifty more between the four of us we didn't keep.  Perhaps we caught fish we had caught before.

To me, that's what a convention would be like.

It was clear, however, that many of the vendors - particularly the artists - were painfully short of talent; the lack of any training was evident.  People displayed art on simple foolscap paper.  I talked to one such fellow, who claimed that this was his fifth expo; and it became clear after talking to him and his partner, affable as they were, that the table price was an excuse to be at the expo all weekend, and in order to have a chair to which they could return between sightseeing.  The 'art' was an excuse.  The artist wasn't serious about it at all.

I felt a boost of confidence from this.  I felt comfortable talking with the people, discussing their set-ups and motivations, and took an opportunity to sit with a friend behind one of the tables and pitch a little to the visitors on her behalf.  I have no doubt I will control the space in Toronto.  I have a dominant personality, a very friendly one when I wish to suppress my politics or my beliefs, and I have long known how to perform. Things should be very good come August.

Right Now

I don't have any fond memories of gaming.

That is because fundamentally I am technological.  I am reminded of George Carlin's comparisons between baseball and football:



Quoth the genius:

"Most sports, the team is run by a coach.  In baseball, the team is run by a manager.  And only in baseball does the manager or the coach have to wear the same uniform the players do. Can you picture Bill Parcells in his New York Giants uniform?

"Now baseball and football are different from one another in other kind of interesting ways, I think.  First of all, baseball is a 19th century pastoral game.  Football is a 20th century technological struggle.  Baseball is played on a diamond.  In a park.  The baseball park.  Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes call Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.  Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything is dying.   In football, you wear a helmet.  In baseball, you wear a cap!  Football is concerned with downs.  What down is it?  Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up, are you up?  I'm not up, he's up!  In football, the specialist comes in to kick.  In baseball, the specialist comes in to relieve someone.  In football, you receive a penalty.  In baseball, you make an error.  Whoops!  Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, blocking, piling on, late hitting, unnecessary roughness and personal fouls. Baseball has . . . the sacrifice.  Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, sleet, snow, hail, mud, can't read the numbers on the uniforms, can't read the yard markers, can't read the player's numbers, the struggle will continue.  In baseball, if it rains, we don't come out to play!  'I can't come out to play!  It's raining out!'

"Baseball has a seventh inning stretch.  Football has the two minute warning.  Baseball has no time limit - we don't know when it's going to end. We might have extra innings.  Football is rigidly timed and it will end even if we have to go to sudden death.

"Finally, the objectives of the game are totally different.  In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy, in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun.  With short bullet passes and long bombs he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing his aerial assault with sustained ground attack which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

"In baseball, the object is to go home.  And to be 'safe.'"


Hm.  I hadn't meant to copy all of that, but I love Carlin and this is one of my favorite bits.  Where was I? Oh yes, I was talking about how I'm technological.

I don't get weepy about the game.  I don't have any memories of how I set up some special club somewhere, or how we had the first tournament of a game that today makes people shudder.  I don't laugh and chuckle at what a silly goose I was with my first world, nor do I proudly describe the time me and my buddies got drunk and played D&D, pretending to be little girls or rubber ducks or whatever the hell drunk people role-play as.  I don't include blog posts with the words, "Hey, remember the time we did this, wasn't that a riot?" That is because I am far, far too methodological, occupational, mechanical and technical.  I don't feel 'healed' by gaming, I don't feel a great sense of 'belonging,' I don't get an oxytocin hit from listening to morons prattle on about MMOs and how the gaming community has saved them from their ADHD.  When someone says cheerfully, "I hope someday I can be an engineer," I think, then why aren't you talking seriously about your design?

If all goes well, in four months I'm going to be sitting at a table in Toronto watching the dweebs go by, and the total feeling I have for "Wow, I'm going to be at a game expo!" is zip. Nix. Nothing. I'm not taking any money to buy any games, miniatures, posters, books, t-shirts or any other merchandise.  If Bruce Campbell, Stan Lee or Michael Rooker happen to wander up to my table, I'll express my respect - but Nathan Fillion better just keep walking.  At any rate, I don't care that they're going to be in the building.  I am there to sell my book, in order to change the entire culture around role-playing towards an atmosphere of serious, seratonin-and-dopamine fueled play and artistic expression.  I will smile and shoot the shit and generally enjoy the hell out of talking to the intelligent people I meet . . . but don't expect me to come home and talk for post after post about how 'wonderful' it was to be there.  I'm going to hate that I can't work on my world. I'm going to hate that there will be little or no time to write.  I'm going to hate all the little dweebs who mutter, "What does 'Advanced' mean?" and "Does this tell me how to get better at DDO?"

Therefore, if the reader has come here to get a little 'togetherness' vibe, a bit of the old "gee, we're all one happy people" bullshit, the reader can eat dirt and shit rocks.  I'm in no one's key demographic because I think more like a machine than a person.

Fuck nostalgia.  What are we going to do right now?

More Good News

In other news, I have made an arrangement with a sponser.  It's the fellow, Spencer Estabrooks, for whom I did work last year as the technical advisor on his webisode project, One Hit Die.  He is willing to grant me high resolution images from the work for inclusion in our table banners for the Expo.  Good on you, Spencer.

Small Books

I received three good suggestions for a short book.  I'd like to go through them and give a few thoughts.

Create an Equipment List

It was suggested that this would be easy, given that I already have extensive lists and that they are fairly popular.  A different list could be created for different parts of the world, using my generator to create prices.

This sounds 'easy' but it really isn't.  I mean, it would be easy if I weren't concerened with old fashioned ideas like verisimilitude, continuity, context and so on.  For most people, however, I think that an Ethiopian equipment list would look odd and a bit concerning compared to, say, a Rheinish equipment list.  For one thing, prices for most things would be sky high in Ethiopia, given that it doesn't make anything that a growing party needs, meaning that it is either shipped in or people do without.  There's plenty of gold in Ethiopia, very little iron and even less traditional manufactures.  I have very little trouble explaining this to players in my world, but it wouldn't be easy setting it up for strangers.

That is not to say it couldn't be done.  In fact, I've pitched an idea to the artist I procured a couple of weeks ago, who is working on the Advanced Guide's cover, that was very much like this.  I'd like to produce a series of illustrated 8 by 10 books that covered parts of my world in the manner of this post I wrote last October.  This is a long range project, something I mean to do after How to Run and if I am on board with an artist willing to jazz up the book.  What with the world being a complicated, endlessly detailed place, I think I could produce such works as long as, well, I live.  Heck, one small part of the modern Czech Republic, Moravia, could be such a book.  Or Paraguay (Blackrazor could be helpful there).  Or the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua (the town of Bluefields was a pirate den in the 17th century).  The world offers plenty of inspiration.

I could add equipment lists to it.  For now, however, the idea is on the shelf.

Create a List of Essays from the Blog

Well, that's fairly easy.  There are some very popular posts, and they could stand a serious edit.  The post about the State of D&D, the old one about Mustard, one or two about Dungeon Mastering, definitely the humour pieces and so on.  I could dig out about thirty or forty and set up a poll, or just go with the ones I like.

I don't know how well this would sell to you folk, given that you know me and that you've already read those.  Some of you I know would purchase it just to support me (some of you beautiful people out there have cheerfully donated money to the cause from your own good coffers - thank you!).  I am sure, however, that with a good, lively cover, it would do fairly well at the Expo, as it would be another sales item sitting on the table, one more thing for someone to buy.  I think on some level whatever I do, I ought to put that book together just because it will pay for itself eventually.

If people have ideas on which posts to rework, shout those ideas out.  I think the How to DM post can be passed over, given the main book, but the other might serve as half such a book's content (20,000 words, 11 point font, 5x7 book ... would be a neat little 120 pager).

So probably, this one is being made anyway.

Write about How to Play

Well, I have covered this with the 10,000 word post, so I'm a little thin on what this would contain that the 10,000 word post does not.  Perhaps I could say something about total immersion involvement, or person-to-person conflict from the player's point of view.  The idea of having a book on the table (even a thin book, and it would have to be) that had the word PLAY in the title is mouth-watering.  I could use some suggestions on content.

It would definitely be an opinion book, which How to Run is not.  The latter is founded in principles that are not D&D, that have been translated to D&D in order to make you a better DM.  A suggested tag line from the press agent I spoke to yesterday was, "DMing is easy ... If you know how."  That comes out of my certainty that most DMs are wallowing.  They're unsure of what they're doing, and even when they are doing something right they don't know what it is right.  So DMing is definitely hard for most people.  I've heard that all my gaming life.

I'd like a similar perspective for the player.  Being a player isn't hard; but it is a combination of uncertainty and I think vulnerability.  I haven't played that much in the last couple of decades, and now when I do I feel so goddamned comfortable in that I can read the DM like a book.  Too damn comfortable to talk about the discomfort of a player without someone reminding me what that was like.  I've included a passage in How to Run about the importance of making players feel safe and secure, in order to encourage participation.  What would a player's angle on that be?

Pitch me something.  Don't worry if it ends up in right field.  The best ideas are sometimes thrown in - ie., highlighted - by the least experienced people.