Finally

I’m making decent editing progress again. Chapter 4, the menace of my existence, is behind me. The new version will probably be chapters 4, 5, and 6, just because it’s so long.

Original word count: 13303
Revised word count: 9320

Down by almost 4000 words in just one chapter!

And the total has gone from 22274 to 16286. Nearly 6000. That says something about where the most bloat was.

Of my intended cuts, I have about 14000 left to trim out. If I can manage even just an average of 500 words cut per chapter remaining, that’s 13000, VERY close to my goal. 6000 per 4 the rest of the way would be 39000, and would put my 160k novel at 115k. I don’t expect it will be that dramatic a cut. Probably somewhere between 120k and 140k. Hopefully in a range where agents will no longer flinch when I tell them the word count.

So it’s been a while…

But since I’m once again making a serious effort to live up to my calling and actually be a writer, it seemed like a good time to return to the ol’ barely-used blog. ^_^

So, what I’ve discovered in my time away:  a handful of query attempts and discussions with agents have assured me my novel is too long. A couple editing passes trimmed it by about 12k words, but it’s still too long.

In a dramatic attempt to fix that, I’ve started over. Sort of. In a new Word document, I’m retyping the whole darn thing, trimming, tightening, and intensifying as I go.

Here is a baseline report on where the revisions currently stand:

Original total word count: approximately 160,300
Original count to revised point: 4,930
Revised count: 4,098
Completed chapters: 2 of 30

My objective is fewer than 140k words, preferably closer to 130k. Thus far, the novel has lost nothing in terms of content, and actually contains more information than the original version. It’s more concise, and, I think, a bit more intense. Intensity and maintaining a sense of conflict are things I have some difficulty with. But we’ll see how it goes! I’m determined to get this book out there!

Five Years of RPG

My gaming group – one of these days, I’ll insist we name ourselves, although what they might come up with is a somewhat scary prospect – has been meeting for about five years or so.  It started as a Borders-run event at least a year before.  One of the booksellers was a gamer and convinced the managers to let him run a monthly Dungeons & Dragons campaign on their time, along with yearly D&D day.  People came and went, including our original Game Master, and eventually we settled down to a core group of seven, with a couple others who would drop in for certain settings.  I still think of us as the Borders group (to differentiate from the SVC – St. Vincent College – group, that played concurrently, though exceedingly rarely nowadays), even though we met for the longest span at various King’s Restaurants and are now exclusively at players’ homes.

We started with 3.5 D&D, though the initial campaign fell apart when 4.0 released and Borders no longer sold 3.5 books.  Can’t sponsor events with product the store doesn’t carry, right?  We also played a couple rounds of World of Darkness – Mage: The Awakening and Changeling: The Lost – before our original GM left.  Somewhere in that time-span, another couple GMs volunteered, one to run Legend of the Five Rings and Star Wars, and another, fill-in D&D games when one GM or another couldn’t make it.  He wound up running permanently after a while.  Presently, we have four GMs, each running his own game.  Yep, all guys in the drivers seats.  Actually, now that I think about it, all the guys in the group GM some game or another, even though there are more women in the core group.  Well, none of us has ever run a game before, and though I, being a writer, would love the experience, there is no way I’m going to try to wrangle the attention spans of – oddly enough – the other GMs.  It’s not even like herding cats.  It’s more like…like…I don’t even know what it’s like.  Other than damn near impossible.  I have a hard enough time making myself heard as a player.

But we have played a lot during these five years, considering most of us have full-time jobs and each campaign only runs – at best – once a month.  So what is my part in all these settings?  Here’s the list, as chronologically as I can recall.

• D&D 3.5 – Kaija Ilmarinen, a Half-elven  Bard.  She was something of a darker character, rather depressed by the events of the campaign.  I forget the exact campaign setting, now.
• Mage: The Awakening – Twyla, an itinerant storyteller – an Acanthus of the Hollow Ones.  We had little time in Mage, and I missed a session.  I do remember she lived in self-storage.
• Changeling: The Lost – Kettu Duskrunner, a Runnerswift Beast.  A fox, based on the concept of quarry.  The first character I just fell right into when role-playing.  She was twitchy and terrified of everything, absurdly fast, and spoke more with the set of her ears than her voice.  Again, we only got to play a few sessions, but I loved this one.
• L5R – Utaku Xiang-Zhi, an Utaku Battle Maiden.  Her horse is Raimei, and, due to the taint-removal process, is now one of the meanest horses in Rokugan.  Xiang was fun to play, very laid-back for a samurai and often mildly amused – unless her twin sister was involved.  Michiko vanished during the Blood Rain, and when she turned up again, was just as tainted as one might expect.  They eventually fought, and Xiang killed her, though she had a rough time of the battle.
• D&D 3.0 – Rasa Frianafriel, a Drow Bard/Fighter.  She was supposed to be a sword dancer, but between the Drow level adjustment and the multiclassing, she was downright useless.  I’d like to rebuild her in Pathfinder as a Dervish Dancer.  The campaign setting was a world of that particular GMs creation.  I have about five characters in it, by now.
• D&D 3.0 – Ceri Kimbra, a Human Fighter.  (Rasa’s replacement.)  She’s 4’6″, 89lbs, with an 18 strength.  High intelligence, low wisdom – at 17, she acts more like a very chipper 10 year old.  Her scythe – which is bigger than she is – is named Pukah.  I absolutely love playing her.  It’s restful, a chance to turn my brain off and just have fun.  She’s since been rebuilt in Pathfinder.
• D&D 3.0, Forgotten Realms – Mikhail Greystrider, a Human Cleric of Shaundakul with a travel focus.  I was the first in our group to cross-play – to RP the opposite gender.  He was true neutral, and hated getting stuck healing the party.  In his mind, he should be helping kill things, so the party could more quickly be on their way.
• L5R – Kakita Hayato, a Crane hostage among the Scorpion, who studied as both a Kakita duelist and a Shosuro shinobi.  He’s based on a character from my novel – a clumsy, but deadly, hedonistic assassin.  Hayato is a bishounen, a pretty boy, and pretends to be a frivolous idiot so people don’t realize just how dangerous he really is.
• Pathfinder, Tales of Symphonia – Amaranth Torverr, a Half-elven Magus.  She and the setting are a story in and of themselves, so I’ll spare details for another day.  For now, she’s a soldier of Sylvarant who would much rather use her sword than magic.  Call her “Amaranth” at your peril.  It’s “Maran,” thank you very much.
• D&D 3.0, Forgotten Realms, Sigil – Rillian, a Tuladhara Monk.  She’s very androgynous, and being raised by her father, a neutral cleric, didn’t help her at all with gender identity.  It took the party several sessions to figure out she was female.  Being an entity of neutrality, she’s hard to get a handle on, and Monk is a new class for me.
• L5R – Daidoji Shizuka, a Kakita Bushi.  Her original calling was music and painting, but after being nearly killed by her (now dead) betrothed, she had little voice and took up the sword.  As her name implies, she rarely speaks.  She’s a bodyguard, terrified of men, but still paints, as it lets her forget what she’s become.  She’s actually a reverse build of another character.
• Pathfinder – Kyr, a Kitsune Dervish Dancer.  The setting allowed us to take characters from any world and have them drawn into this campaign.  Kyr is going to find her way into my novel, eventually, since that’s her world.  Although, considering we have a Half-orc in the party, I almost wish I’d built an Elf of Middle Earth.

That brings us up to date, I think.  My other characters, for the SVC group, which is a D&D 3.o campaign in my friend’s world, are Kierian (‘Rin) Greyhawk, a Bard/Rogue, and Astri Rhiannon, a Fighter/Sorceress who wears no armor and has a higher armor class than the group’s fighter in full plate.  Astri was the original on whom I based Shizuka.  Both were assaulted by men early in their training – Astri castrated her assailant, Shizuka was raped.  Both are duelists, but while Astri has an AC of up to 32, if she’s paying attention, Shizuka’s defense suffers from the Doubt disadvantage.  Shizuka was an experiment, for the most part, and I’m looking forward to seeing her grow beyond her fears.

That’s a lot of characters, and I haven’t even participated in all the campaigns the group has run.  I completely avoided Star Wars, for example, due to unfamiliarity with the setting.  I’ve seen the movies, but that’s about the extent of it.  One of our GMs is planning to start another setting in the relatively near future, a Pathfinder game based on the Ogre Battle franchise.  He’s something of a compulsive GM, and has, over the course of all of this, run five other games for various subsets of our group.  He’s insane.  ^_^

At the moment, the current campaigns (with Ceri, Shizuka, and Kyr), are just beginning to crawl forward after something of a standstill – one couple in our group just had twins, and are still searching for some semblance of balance.  It will be a while.  The twins are adorable, though.

One of these days, I’ll screencap my custom characters from Soul Calibur and share what these folks might actually look like.  ^_~

Simic With a Side of Savage

So, yesterday I was given the opportunity to booster draft Magic: The Gathering’s Gatecrash expansion.  I’ve only tried this format once before, for Innistrad or one of its expansions, and it was a dismal experience I was loath to repeat.  But, a friend I haven’t seen in months was in town for the weekend, and if I wanted to visit and catch up, Magic was on the menu.

Hmm, I suppose this requires some background.  I’m a casual gamer, and a very casual Magic player.  Tournament play is too intense and competitive, and, aside from draft formats, favors those with a slightly more disposable income.  It’s been several years since I decided Magic was just too expensive for me to keep abreast of.  After Alara, I bought one Zendikar pack and fell off the wagon.  To be fair, price was only half the reason.  The other half was how much I, as a writer and world builder, simply adored the concept of the Alara shards.  The evolution of worlds without two of the “essential” primal forces fascinated me.  Even the Alara expansions just couldn’t inspire the same awe as that first block, and I lost interest.  My best deck, however, is an elemental monstrosity from Lorwyn.  This is another reason I avoid tournaments.  A twofold reason.  First, all my decks are older, and until relatively recently, fell pretty quickly off the legal list.  Second, because my gaming group is rather large, they’re all built to handle multiplayer.  The final reason I remain a casual gamer is because of my competitive mindset.

I suffer rather badly from what I refer to as “girl gamer syndrome.”  Now, to the other female gamers out there, I mean no offense.  I’ve seen other women suffering the same problem, though, so this is how I explain it to myself.  I play MTG with the same guys who taught me the rules seven or eight years ago.  They were very nice about it, and I rarely got the impression they were humoring me.  However, they did have one bad habit: they went easy on me, even after I reached a decent level of competence.  Or so I felt.  I love these guys to pieces, mind you, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t always intentional, but a by-product of my style of play our large group.  I have a tendency to build decks with a strong late game.  So while they’re struggling against each other in the early game, I may be defenseless, but I’m also no threat.  Or I quietly cast my creatures, but don’t do anything with them, content to defend until, next thing everyone knows, I have a massive army and start knocking heads.  But regardless, they probably let me get farther than they should before they start trying to do something about me.  Anyway…  They’ve been playing far longer than I have, and at least one does do tournament drafts and keeps pace with all the new sets.  From an experiential and financial standpoint, I cannot keep up with them.  Logically, I know this.  Emotionally, I feel like it’s necessary, in order to be taken seriously.  And this leads me to the primary reason I don’t play Magic in public.  Unless I’m going toe to toe with the boys and not only holding my own, but winning my fair share, I feel like a hanger-on, a tag-along.  My play style doesn’t often lend itself to comboing – lacking the experience to make the cards play nicely with one another – so when I do something stupid with a simple mechanic, I start feeling like people will think I have no reason to be there.  I get annoyed and angry – it’s no fun to play with someone who’s pissed off – and my lack of self-control makes me even more annoyed and angry with myself.  Downward spiral.  Best I stay out of competitive play.

That brings us to yesterday.  Booster draft of a game I haven’t played in over a year, with new mechanics I’ve never seen, and a person in the mix I’d never met.  Oh boy.  I expected chaos, and was praying for a functional brain that I might be on my best behavior.  And, y’know…play well.

This was in the first pack I opened.  Mana balance tends to be a problem for me, so I said, “Okay, fine.  Green/Blue it is.”  Turns out drafting with guilds is a heck of a lot easier for me than without.  Rather than trying to stay on one color, I had the freedom of two that I knew would work together, and when I started seeing strong Gruul (Red/Green) creatures, I branched out eagerly, instead of feeling forced.  It was like building in Alara again.  It was not only fun, but I was finally able to see how disparate cards and mechanics could make for really scary combinations.  Gruul’s large creatures do wonders for Simic’s evolve mechanic, and Simic has some clever enchantments that can let the Gruul monstrosities hit where they otherwise couldn’t.  The first deck I ever learned was green, and I still understand it best; but blue gives it cunning and red makes it more fierce.  The deck was a threat right out of the gate, ignored only because one player was extorting everyone to death, and needed to be dealt with quickly.  Extort is evil.  In multiplayer, it’s worse.  By the time he was out, I had my evolved army that no one could quite deal with.  The evening was split pretty evenly between my Simic/Gruul amalgam and Boros, run by my friend who plays tournaments.  It took me four games to do something stupid enough to make me angry, which gave that game to a third player, who was running all five colors and is smart enough never to play to win.  He just likes to make things as difficult as possible for everyone else.  The stupid-out-of-nowhere threw me badly enough that I did it again, at the start of the next game.  I’m glad there was a stranger at the table; it helped me keep a rein on my frustration.  I recovered, kept my head for the rest of the game, and finished it by putting wings on the Simic guild leader and knocking the ground-based players in the teeth.

Other than just being a good day for me personally, I learned a few things, primarily that I really can put a plug in the cycle of stupid->frustration->anger->stupid that makes Magic so difficult for me to play.  Maybe I’ll take a chance and get working on a Simic deck of my own – or Simic/Gruul, since they play so nicely together (which is philosophically bizarre) – and find out if it was just a fluke.

What, you may ask…

…is an interdimensional historian?

Speaking to the definition, it is simply one who chronicles events of worlds beyond our own.  More specifically, for my own purposes, it is my philosophy on storytelling and writing.  In my experience, the stories I tell already exist; their characters have their own lives they may or may not be willing to discuss.  The process of writing their stories is one of interview and research, cajoling them into giving me the information required to proceed.  (And occasionally bribing them with chocolate.  Or, in the case of one of my RPG characters, new shoes.)

That doesn’t mean a story is what it is, a plot cannot change, or characters will not turn into someone else entirely somewhere down the road as the story progresses.  Quite the contrary.  Characters can lie as well as anyone, and even an unbiased history is still recorded from a certain perspective.  Everything you learn is up for debate, and every once in a while, events need a little tweaking, just to keep things moving and interesting.  Consider a story, then, more a historical drama than something you’d find in a textbook.

As you’ve probably guessed by this point, I am a writer.  I’m also a gamer – console, PC, and tabletop, with RPGs preferred all around – a cosplayer, and the owner of a very spoiled, very loveable Pembroke Welsh Corgi named Pippin.  Welcome to my little corner of the internet.