Rethinking Villainy: What Snowden Taught Me About Storytelling

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How we look at good and evil is a real trip. In my never-ending search for meaning, I stumbled across Snowden’s presence at TED in Canadia recently. It’d be fair to say: much of the rhetoric in this talk seems to be seeking answers to whether Snowden is a hero or a criminal.  I really like the debate, because regardless of where you land on this one it really helps to cement my belief that good and evil are just points of view. I left the talk scratching my head as much about Internet security as I did about villainy and heroism.  I’d like to bake some of these concepts more into my writing.

Holy Shitballs, I Got Nominated (and Other Stories from the Silence)

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I get it.  It’s been a while. Lots of silence on the blog.  Tumbleweeds, if that’s your thing.  The reasons are numerous, some good, some bad.  Let’s get on to it. The Vogels The 8th of March was a day different to many others.  It was a Saturday — not in itself terribly unusual, but!  It’s the annual day for International Women’s Day, and this year’s theme was, “Equality for Women is Progress for All.”  It was the day that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing on its way to Beijing.  Winterwell, acclaimed creators of immersive parties, held a post-apocalyptic party in the depths of the tunnels and vaults of Waterloo — they called it Beyond the Thunderdome.  Also, I got this in my inbox: “On behalf of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand Inc. we write to Read More …

Fifty Thousand Words of Regret: My NaNoWriMo Rant

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I’ve had a chance to cool down.  It didn’t help much. Last month, as you’re probably aware in some form, was NaNoWriMo.  This post is all about that; you’ll get to read me rant a bit, and just for a bit of balance I’ve co-opted some of my writing homies to give their views on NaNo. Where it all began: I thought, “Hey, this’ll be fun, I’ll just hop on in, crank out 50,000 words, and get a lot farther ahead in Upgrade.”  What actually happened? Worse, I began to resent my writing.  This is not cool. Q U A L I T Y  Writing is all about the story.  The people in it, how it unfolds, and getting a reader interested in what you’re trying to tell.  The big problem (for me, and how my brain works) is that Read More …

Story Mode: Why Video Games Are Failing Half the Audience

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“Girls want superheroes, and the boys want superheroes.” Why is it that it takes a four year old girl to tell us this?  The answer of course is that it doesn’t, but you wouldn’t necessarily get that view by looking at one of the world’s premier entertainment – and storytelling – industries: video games.  Here’s Riley Maida, telling us how it is: I found Riley after she was mentioned in Polygon’s excellent editorial, No girls allowed.  I’d recommend you go read it; it’s an excellent piece.  The editorial got me thinking, because I love video games and the stories they can tell.  I was thinking recently that I’m playing less games despite this, and not just because of “life;” I’m playing less games because less of the stories being told are interesting to me.  War simulators and sports games don’t have great Read More …

I’d Like To Introduce You To…

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…Cassie Hart.  No, it’s not short for anything, it’s just Cassie. I first “met” Cassie when I joined a new Guild Wars guild.  She was one other random in guild chat, but after I posted the sort of about-me page on our guild forums, she mentioned that she was also a member of SpecFic NZ.  We’ve traded a few emails over the last few months, and I became quite interested in some of the similarities in the way we work. Don’t get me wrong.  She doesn’t have werewolves or a high body count.  Cassie writes no stories about megacorporations, or the people who live in the cracks between them.  But her stories have twist and style, and when I read them I’m left with a, “Huh.  She actually did that.” When I wrote Night’s Favour, I wanted to write something a Read More …

Looking For Something To Do?

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A friend of mine does amazing things. No, really.  I have a friend who is an actual stage hypnotist.  I’ve been to his shows – it’s one of those sorts of experiences where you laugh so much your face hurts.  I didn’t want to smile for two days afterwards. I don’t want to sound like some kind of corporate shill: I mention because around the office at this time of year, people are gearing up for the usual “what do we do for our Christmas function” type questions.  I don’t know about your work place, but the people around here have a fairly staid set of options: Do some kind of dress-up event around the office, like “soccer teams of the world.”  Usually it’s a social club member who wants to do this, the kind of person with a sticker on Read More …

How Men Die

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Violence is one of the lenses we use to measure the quality of a man. It’s easy for a person to be calm and measured if nothing’s going on.  But if you add in something spectacular, like the sun going nova, or a crazy aiming a plasma rifle at your head, or the Earth shaking from within because of the creatures living at the core – well, shit gets real.  I’m particularly fond of how Tolkein measures Boromir vs. Faramir, and I’d love to have the skill and elegance to pull something like that off. The trick with these kinds of scenarios is keeping them real.  I’m having more trouble with action scenes in Upgrade because they’re more, uh, creative.  The book is set in the future, so it’s not just dudes with guns.  It’s dudes with cybernetics, or uplinks Read More …

Inspiration from… Science?!

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Upgrade is more science-fiction than Night’s Favour, which had a contemporary, almost urban flavour. Because of this, there’s some advanced tech I need to do various things.  I’ve been research fusion and fission like a mofo for the past wee while, but a few things need to be plain made up.  One of these is a technology whereby I need to be able to teach a language (let’s say English, for argument’s sake) to someone who’s never heard English or seen it written.  In my mind’s eye, I thought that this could be achieved in some far future state by use of a clever engineered virus + some sort of mechanism for storing the memory, but that’s about as far as I’d got.  It was a necessary plot device, but didn’t have supporting science, and I just hate that kind of Read More …

He Said What? Writing Hate Without Owning It

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Sometimes you need to write characters that are just nasty. In Night’s Favour, there are two characters who started off as generally homophobic.  One is actually an asshole, and the other is a bit of a dudebro.  The benefits of exposing this to a set of beta readers early on was that I identified some interesting things – one of which was that people didn’t like the dudebro very much in that configuration. And said dudebro is one of the “good guys.”  I wanted him to be liked.  Thus, when editing the story, chapters from his perspective lost any of their anti-gay vibe.  Despite the original vision, it didn’t really hurt his character or placement for him to join the human race – and having edited him, he’s more likeable, although perhaps not as… what.  Realistic?  I don’t know – Read More …