Excerpt #2 - a scene revisited

Hello everyone!

Yesterday I posted my 2 starter pages, of which I am very proud. Now, the real beginning of the novel takes place with the same scene from the point of view of Askata, the female victim.

This is an attempt to fully immerse my writing within one of the core principles of good fiction as explained by Will Greenway on his website: stories must be told from character point of views, and not statically as observed by a distant, all-knowing God or alien researcher. This has two purposes. The first is to fully immerse the reader in the story by making him feel part of the story as told by the character, and the other is to maintain some level of mystery by not divulging too much information that is unattainable by the Point of View character at the time.

I have tried, as much as possible, to play the same scene, as seen (and as would be retold) by Askata instead. Switching to a female point of view was pretty hard, and required a lot of work (significantly limiting my words-per-hour count), but I think the result is quite nice, and really not all that repetitive, despite the fact that it really is the same scene.

I would appreciate comments on this multiple point of view idea, which I intend to use quite a bit in my novel, and also on the female point of view, for anyone willing to help me make Askata a real woman, and not basically a man with breasts.

Here is the excerpt:

*********************

Askata felt her head lighten as her stomach gargled. Her bother Zueles had taken her whole meat ration for three days in a row, as he needed the energy for work more than she did, but she had not felt well in the morning either, so she had passed on breakfast also.

As she dragged her feet towards the butcher's stand in the 7^th market tunnel, she could only think about getting to her job and hopefully grabbing something to eat while her boss looked away. She barely heard the recriminations of the men as she crossed a crowd heckling some Union representative, and the smell of coal stiffening in the air did not deter her appetite, inappropriate as it may be.

Finally, after minutes of hustling through the crowd, she reached the other side, perhaps a little more light-headed than when she came in. She felt at this point where the feeling drove almost to a sense of happiness, where all the worries of the world scurried away, released from the sight of the human mind, as the stomach – or hunger, I should say – sat at the wheel and held tight. Things couldn't really be bad anymore. There was food to be had, shortly.

After leaving the protest, she barely had the time to cough up some of the workers' coal that had blocked her nose canals when a hand grasped her shoulder and forced her around.

Now in front of her was a man towering over 6 feet tall, sten black eyes looking down on her and a savage grin manifesting slightly towards the edges of his lips. He said something unintelligible as he looked down on her like he would a dead rat, a “tressaillement” of his mouth and cheeks showing his scorn unabated.

After a few seconds of silence, the chest of the man rose even more, clearly emphasizing his police badge, as he asked for her papers, mentioning something about the protest in passing.

Askata then looked towards the crowd, wondering how she came to pass as one of them, but saw only workers focused towards the front, uncaring or unaware of her plight. Slowly, her trembling pale hand reached for her Union Membership Card in her pants' left pocket. She was so nervous her hand was holding tight on the card as she brought it towards him, so he had to frustratingly snipe it from her hands. He was not going to like that.

It took less than a second for him to flung the card in her face. She tried to catch it as a reflex, and that is when the punches came in. The policeman threw 2, maybe 3 punches at her, and then she was on the floor, defenceless. The crowd was silent now – or was it her hearing that had gone – but the stillness in the air was left undisturbed. The workers did not move an inch. The man had her all to himself, and he had a crowd watching.

She could hear him breathing through his nose, and his grin had widened to what she would have called a smile under different circumstances. His gaze ran over her like a driver checking out a roadkill rat. His toe-steeled boot pressed hard against her stomach, and she had to repress her puking instinct. His face then lowered, and with lips almost closed he whispered:

–                    Do you like fireworks, little girl?

At that moment, the policeman took out a match in one hand and, with the other, pulled a string of small rods that reminded Askata of her brother's stock of miniature dynamite bars he used for his controlled mine expansions and demolitions.

She felt her arms and legs clumsily try to grab onto his leg more than she willed them to do so, but it was too little to late. With a smoker's gesture he lit the match and set the string on fire, then dropped the –

It burned! The firecrackers had landed on her torso and burst there, stinging her skin through her blouse and setting it on fire. The flames subsided right away and then she felt the air against her skin on many places and he was glaring at her now and no one else moved and he was going to see her body and he was getting lustful and nobody was stopping him and he was going to take her and nobody would mind and...

The thoughts flowed in Askata's mind faster than she could grasp them, and she could already see him, a savage beast like those of the tales outside where monsters of fur with the teeth of giants captured children and women and brought them in their caves for meals or worse. His eyes glowed an eery violet as strokes like the blue electricity jolts of a damaged bioarm danced around him.

Suddenly the feeling of sickness on her stomach left, and the pressure was released. Knowing not how she managed, Askata stumbled onto her feet and dragged away, the voices behind her booming as in a Game of Echoes gone wrong. The flashes of the fireworks still imprinted in her eyes, she struggled to find her way, the caves appearing ever larger until she reached the point where she could no longer walk upright.

Her vision began clearing a bit, and despite a massive headache, she tried to stop, calm down, and figure out what was going on.

Minutes passed. She was in a large cave. She faintly saw forms around her. They had to be people. The shadows she saw she tossed aside, for those people did not seem real, and their diffuse voice was devoid of life and meaning, like the promises of a pestering demon whispering in your hear in its language, a confusing set of whispers holding meaning only to the mad and prophets.

Behind those shadows of men was a waterfall, crystal clear in its beauty. As her headache turned into a migraine in an instant, she saw the water flow backwards, rushing from the ground towards its source in the ceiling. Within the clamour of the million of water droplets was a chant, so faint she could not make up the words.

The world had stopped making sense. Askata shut her eyes, and the visions subsided, the chant disappeared, and now she heard only the rush of running water through steel pipes, and her pounding heartbeat, inundating the voices of people who sounded gathered around her, gasping in shock at the sight of a pitiful mad woman, a victim of the contaminated waters from the Gamlors mines, surely. It took even a minute for her to realize she was that woman, and as she attempted a protest, her garbled words mixed up with the migraine taking over again, and when she opened her eyes anew, a terrifying creature, a strange white beast was shooting up towards her, 2 membranes made of feathers stretching on its sides in a manner that brought it aloft, 2 paws that resembled an vice cruelly stretching out to grasp at her, and a hard nose longer than any she'd imagined poised to strike, with its head stretched backwards as a snake ready to bite.

Askata's scream was lost in a rumbling noise reaching through a crescendo a volume that crushed everything else, and as the ground begun shaking, Askata fell to the floor and all fell still.

***

The following scene happens when Askata wakes up in the hospital.

NANoWriMo novel - the first two pages

Laifer cringed whenever his men hit their batons on their police shields. He knew intimidation was the appropriate method to assert crowd control, but mishandling the situation could result in a trample over his men. He could not allow for that. He sought furiously for a means to break the crowd, and then it hit him: there was a woman among the workers!

The tall, gaunt man speaking for the Agricultural Division of the Heimlein Labor Union had by now fully lost control of the situation. Laifer tried to ignore the recrimination yells that drowned out his hesitant excuses for the food rationing he had announced, as the man's lowered head was all but calling for a charge from the miners standing less than a hundred feet from his pedestal. The yells of the crowd reverberated throughout the cave walls and ceiling, increasing its intensity tenfold.

Turning a blank stare and avoiding the frowning gaze of the workers, Laifer passed through the right part of the line formed by his Coal and Iron Police force. The technique was dangerous, but as the protesters' eyes started to turn towards him, and grips on mining picks seemed to tighten, the Union representative made up a “limitation of our ability to provide cooked food due to a lowering of coal production in the mines during the previous quarters”. Really! These men mined so much coal just their smell was flammable!
At least the speech focused all attention back to that idiot up in front. It also started a wave of calls for his blood. Now where was that damned woman? Time was pressing!

The Police Manager's heart almost stopped when he crossed the crowd completely, thinking he had lost her. Just for a moment his blank stare was very real, until the movement just ahead caught his eye. The woman had crossed the crowd just as he had: she was not part of the indulgent, but she would have to do anyway.
A few feet away from the crowd he caught up with her. His gait suddenly changed, his back straight as a wall and his head bent to tower over the woman's miniature frame. He was almost on her when he hailed her.

– Hey!
– Y-yes? The girl turned around, her breath “haletant” from the surprise.
Laifer's eyes got hold not only on her youth, but also noticed her chest for a second. She looked like his kind of woman. Damn it! He'd have to be careful not to let his gaze stray.
– This is an illegal protest. Show me your papers!
– H... huh... wha... The woman stuttered, looking left towards the assembled protesters.
The police manager bent his head a little more, fixing her with a gaze from the top of her eyes. A rictus started forming in his visage.
– I said your papers!

The woman's lean shoulders lowered a bit more as she took her Union membership card from her left pocket and presented it to the scary man. Her head was still timidly looking left and right.

The card was in as poor a shape as any worker out there, really, but the red stains looked like dried blood. Laifer had to focus for a second just to read “butcher assistant” on the half-erased card.

– Participation in an illegal manifestation and destruction of Union Property! (he displayed the card high, catching more attention from the crowd, then looked at it again). Askata Suna, you are under arrest!

Now was a delicate moment. Laifer had to keep the crowd always in his peripheral vision, make sure they were watching, but not advancing on him. Just one direct look could provoke them into a frenzy.
He then threw the girl's card back at her. She raised her arms in fright, as he expected.

– You wanna have a fight!?!

The police manager's left hand took Askata by the throat, threw a jab right to her forehead. As she raised her hands higher to protect herself, he got an uppercut directly to her chin, throwing her on her back.
His grin by now was a manic smile, the kind you read in tales to frighten children. He moved around Askata and noted that the crowd had turned silent and watching. The girl still lay on the floor, almost motionless, her tears the only sign of movement and her gray eyes wide open in disbelief.

Laifer then placed his left foot on his victim's stomach, slowly, almost gently, enjoying the soft feeling of her belly under his steel toe boot. She had become limp now. He took a moment to appreciate her body, then bent over to her

– Do you like fireworks, little girl?

As he pronounced these words, he pulled on a string from his belt and drew out an ensemble of firecrackers. He was gleaming now, or so it seemed, as he lit the end of the string and lowered it to her face. When the first firecracker burst, flames sprouted from it, burning her forehead and left cheek. Then he dropped the rest on her chest, the explosions blackening her work uniform and tearing holes through it, the sent of fire expanding in the cave. She was a screaming mess then, waving her arms up and down like the puppet of a mad puppeteer.

Suddenly he let his foot off of her, and Askata tumbled out of the way, struggled to get up, and ran out crying like a dog that's been kicked.

Laifer, Manager of the Coal and Iron Police's 7th district, stood up tall, ignoring the girl now, catching a whole crowd in a staredown he just knew he would win. The fear of fire was written on their gruff faces, their eyes a little wider then before, the smell of smoke just now reaching their noses, and the silence of the men speaking for itself.

There would not be an outbreak of violence now.

No one, absolutely no one, threatened Laifer's men.

Writing your worst nightmare

One of the most difficult parts of writing is to split or gut, to lay out emotions out there in the open for everyone to see. In an effort to do so, I thought up one of my worst nightmares and wrote it down. If this were to happen, I am pretty sure my mind would break completely.

I have even kept my name and my fiancee's name in there, since it is a retelling of my personal nightmare, and not fiction per se.
Context: imagine reading this as a preface to a novel.

On January 14th, 2014, the author of this novel received my letter of acceptance for the publishing of his work.

Overtaken by emotion, His tears of joy flowing to the point he could barely see the sidewalk his feet landed upon, he ran towards the school his fiancee taught at.

His fiancee had already left work, so he saw her walk towards - 

Then a car cut her life short.

He did not hear the drunk drivers' ramblings as he raced past his murderous car, towards his fallen lover. He was stopped by the sight of her fractured skull. Pascale McDuff-Rousseau was no more. I imagine the following hours were a haze, a wailing of screams and cries of hopelessness where no one could reach to him.

There is one thing we know he heard, though.

When the doctor came out to confirm his fiancee's death to Alexandre, I believe his exact words were: “I am sorry, we could not save the mother or the child.”

On that very moment, Alexandre's mind fractured. The news that he was to have a son, a heir to hold with pride, now a lifeless husk marked as medical waste, was beyond his means to cope.

The following work is a testament to a mind now gone. In honour of this bygone man, we published his entire work without alteration. Not even his typos, though they be few and far between, have been touched.

We owed it to this man to show him our respect the only way we truly could. Heal well, Alexandre, heal well.

The world is holding on for you, waiting for the day that you will return. 

May there be such a day.

Jonathan Davies,
Editor for New York Times Press

It is very difficult, perhaps impossible to write engaging stories without spilling out your emotions. I know I tend to write in a very Cartesian manner, to keep my shell intact. This is an attempt to liberate myself from this shell.

Don’t stay true to your characters.

This articles concerns gamers just as it does authors.

I have heard countless times in my gaming life that one had to stay true to his character. A character is made with a certain mentality, and that should be respected. I have heard the same of readers of fiction, including many aspiring authors. Respecting the initial idea behind the character, and keeping him true to that vision through the whole story, is a crucial principle in the eyes of many.

This is pure hogwash. Good characters flow like water and bend like the willow. They should never be stuck in stasis, unchanging. If nothing in the story can affect them enough to make them evolve, then either the story is not worth being told, or the character is not worth portraying.

The most profound, but also the most subtle, failure of this static vision for characters occurs when people forget that the purpose of the characters is to awe, shock and enamor us. They exist not to be themselves, but to entertain people. Both as a gamer and as a player, when you realize a character, as written, breaks the flow of the story and becomes a hindrance, you have to make him change or evolve in such a way that will enhance the story instead.

In a game, if you or a player have made an all-powerful tyrant that prevents other players from truly participating, you can either make him too bored to bother and mess with the others, or create a number of flaws in him that give the other characters a fighting chance. If a character is beaten down and lost everything, give him something strong he can grab onto and fight back. It is especially important in games, since players who are stuck with nothing to do and nothing to work towards will grow bored fast. It is also most difficult there, because some players will fight you every step of the way to keep a problematic status quo that is advantageous to their characters.

Authors are not as limited as storytellers are concerning this. You control everything that happens in the story, and you don’t have to make sure every player has fun the whole time. However, as an author, you still have to be careful not letting too many “This character wouldn’t do that, even though the story wouldn’t work without it” moments ruin your work.  If you need your character to behave a certain way, try to find why he would do that, or how he might do something equivalent.

The other reason why characters must not be static is simply entertainment value. Many characters, especially primary and secondary characters, have to evolve, one way or another, to maintain the reader's interest. Many heroes will evolve by growing up, gathering their courage, learning to love, etc. Most good villains either develop a more and more dramatic bend, or you get to see their evolution, using flashbacks and old newspapers, in a way that justifies what they have become.

Tertiary characters tend to be much more stable throughout a story, mostly because they would derive too much attention away from the main characters if they changed too deeply or too often. Still, if you read Harry Potter, you will note that Neville and Ginny, who are clearly backbenchers throughout the series, evolve a lot, and that makes them much more endearing than Lupin, who remains pretty much the same from his introduction on. A large 7-novel series does grant an author the room to treat those subjects, while a beginner's 125 pages novella will not.

Professor Rogue, likewise, is not a static entity of established beliefs that cannot change. He is playing the middle against both sides throughout the series, for very personal reasons and aspirations. He seems to sway between those two poles. Also, he is far from the frightened child or the nerdy teenager he once was. That all participates to making the reader's hatred, love and passion for him that much stronger.

Let us face the facts here: people who do not change are boring. They are Autumn people, never progressing, never trying anything new, always the same. Nobody cares about their stories. Who would want to read about them? Who would enjoy playing them? I know I wouldn't.

Examples abound of characters keeping our interest through their evolution. If you want examples of stories solely focused on character evolution, I would suggest two very nice stories that revolve around that are "Spirited Away" by Hayao Miyazaki, or "Les Aimants" by Yves Pelletier. I believe it is not possible to watch those movies and not get the point I'm trying to make.

On thoughts woven against the fabric of the world: the birth of gods.

A Treatise on the Soul part 4.

The forms of ill intent that grew most prevalent over time were jealousy, xenophobia and, the ultimate downfall of the Apes, sloth. Apes wanted to dominate. They wanted everything else to be as they see it, and made sure to impose that way upon the world. Moreover, they wanted dominance to be their birthright, something so innate in them that the mere thought of having to work at it would be thought blasphemous.

Their modifications to the world they inhabited were so profound, with their roads and cities and farms that it was as though the world itself was taking as intent the domination of the Apes.

Then came an Ape known as Meraku, a warlord of the Apes born in the southern steppes where once a jungle lay, domain to the snakes and their primate servants. Meraku was a sight to behold, standing 10 feet at the shoulder and with a maw that could tear a horse's neck in a single bite. His black eyes glowed in the darkness and his roaring speeches could be heard for miles, or so the stories say. But beyond his powerful features and impressive standing, he was the most passionate Ape there ever had been, with Purpose so ingrained into his very fabric that his very steps clapped like thunder!

Meraku was the greatest force that the Apes ever offered to the world. He conquered all the lands from sea to sea, from the peaks of the Havermain to the subterrean refuges of the Allamanti! Meraku was the greatest Emperor the world has known, and the most capable. He led his People to greatness!

And yet, true force lies within, and Meraku's greatest asset was his mate Amuru. Amuru was a weaver of fortune, as were called those who forced Purpose into sigils and the shaping of the land. Meraku's very fur she traced into a symbol with chalk and coal, and this symbol no only bound within him the purpose of greatness for which he became known, but with locks of his hair she wrote the series of intents that formed, within the very being of her Emperor and mate, the first Woven Thought, which later peoples came to call spiritual hosts and then gods.

Every word of Meraku came to be spoken in tandem with his spirit, blooming with a force unbeknownst in that day or any that followed. This spirit, a sentient being woven from the many threads upon Meraku's fur, was as powerful as thought can be. Through the warlord of the steppes, he spoke of greatness! Every moment of the First Emperor, he pushed with strength!

It is said that when Meraku slept under the gaze of the full moon, one could see its ephemeral form lying so close to him as to occupy the non-space between his mate and him, whispering in his ear. Every move he made, every breath he took, Amuru's creation followed and empowered.

Within a decade Meraku was Emperor, and so Amuru wove other thoughts into the fabric of the world. The well at the center of the world's capitol, Haraket, was first given sentience. Its greater Purpose was to bring life and water to the world, and into its very Essence Amuru wove her timeless wisdom, to be parted to all who called for the well and sent it their wishes.

So it was that, whisper after whisper of mendicants wishing for money, power or happiness moved the very fabric of the Woven Thought of the Well of Haraket beyond its original design towards an infinitely complex spiritual host capable of thinking far beyond the wishes of Amuru...

Treatise on the Soul part 3

So it was that Purpose began manifold, reflecting in a myriad of ways the desires of those complex creatures who could will it into objectives varied but simple, such as Dominance, Freedom, Lust, Procreation, Feeding, Drinking, Health and physical fitness.

Farms, villages and cities were built as large canvases to bring forth Purpose into specific directions and objectives. Dominance, and the freedom from the tyranny of other predators, was the main theme guiding the conception of places that were carved larger and larger as the centuries passed.

On the local level, although the design of the farms themselves tamed the land, locals held into greater esteem the more concrete goals of the well, the home and the village gathering house where villagers gathered for support and comfort in a world still dreadful.

As the basic needs for survival were met, other inspirations grew within the minds of the Apes. Amongst them, one was born mostly in the dark corners of society: ill intent. Apes, like the men we know in the modern age, put survival and procreation beyond any other purpose, with Dominance the most marked source of survival in this and, really, any world. But when survival turned matter-of-fact, when thirst could be quenched by holes in the ground that never dried up, when walls staved off wolves and bears, Apes obtained free time.

And Ape, like Man, tends to brood when caught within the grasp of endless time to ponder. He turns to jealousy towards his neighbour. He turns to philosophy, losing his focus the village on the real world. Coming short on threats real, he turns upon threats imagined. He who does not share his taste for a meal, the color of his pelt or the village of his birth has to be hiding something, for nobody would choose so poorly as to differ from oneself.

People today view evil as a unique force of malice pervading and corrupting all it touches. The truth, especially in that time, is far more complex. A hundred billion objectives, most petty and unrelated, built up over decades and centuries of accumulating leisure time. All objectives of ill intent were so unique and unrefined that none could be given a proper name. Thus, no ill intent could be generalized, and only petty squabbles dimmed the prospects of a perfect future eternal for the Apes.

Then stroke the first Downfall of the Apes: conformity. For an Age hamlets grew into villages which grew into burgs which grew into towns which grew into cities. Tribes grew into nations which grew into empires. Families grew into households. Throughout the centuries whence it occurred, the Apes proudly became more powerful, more decisive, more dominant. The pride of the best amongst them swayed large swathes of land under their glory, and naught was seen in progress but unrelenting advancement!

Every time a family was taken into a household, an identity was lost at the profit of a larger entity. Every time a tribe joined a nation, or was beaten down by one, a portion of the Apes' variety and greatness vanished. In time, the Apes lost the unique techniques of thousands of skilled craftsmen, sigil workers and warriors in favor of the strongest technique of the time. In their unity was strength, but also their fallibility, for if one thing could overpower an Ape, than that thing could overpower all Apes.

And so it did.

To be continued in part 4.

NaNoWriMo

I subscribed to NaNoWriMo recently. 

For those who haven't heard about it yet, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo gives its participants a challenge: write a 50'000 words novel within a month. You have the right to research beforehand, but writing must take place wholly between Nov 1 and Nov 30. 

I am doing this because, now that I've started, I realized that with the full support of my fiancee whom I love with all my heart, I really want to become an author. In the last months, I have spent quite a bit of time preparing to write, attempting the beginning of a story that didn't pan out and taking what I assumed would be a boring novella to a level of preparation that I think I can make very good, in due time. I am devising what I believe to be a high-quality original mythology, which is so hard to do when comparing to the naturally-selected myths that survived to this day (http://les-chemins-obscurs.blogspot.com/2011/09/mythologie-passion-et-ecriture.html).

So now that I believe in myself fully, I've invested in a laptop (cannot do NaNoWriMo without a laptop), subscribed to the contest and decided I need to put out a first draft, if only to see what it feels like. It is very possible that I will reject the whole damned thing at one point and start over, but I'd rather do that now than later, with years of preparing stuff that just don't work once applied in a novel. 

If anybody wants to add me to their NaNoWriMo buddy list, my username is Gamashire.

Treatise on the Soul part 2

Let us continue with the Treatise on the Soul where we started last night.

I recommend reading the previous post before this one for new readers.

So the Apes became dominant, and free, and desirable. They found purpose aplenty, and grew to become a society, and later a host of societies.

So life passed on from generation to generation, until Magisters realized that not only could Purpose be directed using sigils, but it could also be made to manifest directly through matter and energy. As bits and pieces of the world could become rife with planned intent, the Apes thought, and that planned intent could be made to serve the Apes, domination of the world could become eternal, and never be flexed away from them like it was flexed away from the predators of old.

That was the idea anyway.

The Apes had a working knowledge of sigils and influence between matter and Purpose, but their theoretical understanding of such phenomena was scarce at best. The Apes understood that they could influence the intention and purpose of the land itself, and of all that dwelt on it, but something else had escaped their notice: Purpose brought with it thought. Once manifested into the world, the Purpose that the apes had summmoned began forming into full-fledged intelligences, almost beyond their control. These beings became known as spiritual hosts.

All of those intelligences were friendly to the apes, as they were made to be by their creators, but they were their own purpose, as is the way of such things. In a world defined by the apes and for the apes, the newly-formed spiritual hosts had no take on dominance. The cities, the farms and the countryside had all been designed as sigils to direct Purpose towards the dominance of the Apes, and as they were, even without the help of spiritual hosts, their mastery could not be challenged inside their domain.

Thus, the spiritual hosts concocted a plan, unknown to their masters, to bring their own Purpose of dominance in favor of themselves. Through millenia Purpose had been shaped into the concept of dominance, and thus the spiritual hosts were like avatars of dominance, and this shaped their actions.

In assistance to the Apes, they advised the construction of a Capitol at the centre of the world, with roads of brimstone converging towards the capitol, focusing a flow of aether towards it, as a means to bring the whole world even more under their control. Unbeknownst to the Apes, the treacherous spiritual hosts had another plan altogether with these constructions.

The brimstone roads and the cathedral built in the centre or the World Capitol were meant to reshape the Apes themselves into something else. When all constructions were done, the spiritual hosts began a chant which infused a bit of their Purpose straight into the Apes. The Apes became amalgams of beast and spirit. The Apes were twisted in a grotesque demeanor in the process, shedding all their skin and losing a lot of their strength. Ape had become Man. The world was still mostly theirs, but their age-old sigils ensured them not their dominance as they did the apes, allowing the will of the spiritual hosts to become dominant.

On this day, the traitorous hosts took on a new name so as to redefine their Purpose. They renamed themselves Gods.

Later aspects of this mythology will be revealed in later articles.

Author's note: I do realize that I have not named people, places or spirits yet, so the story is not yet personal. I have gone straight to the cosmology itself, because I was mostly worried about the originality of that part of my world. Personalizing this mythology can very well be performed afterwards.

Treatise on the soul

This is part 1 of my attempt at creating a cosmology that is both unique and interesting for the story I'm working on. My plan was to find a definition of the soul, and an origin for humanity, that differs from most fantasy novels, and rely on the logical consequences of these setting elements to remain original.

I would really like to know what you all think.

The world was once a planet ruled by purely physical forces, devoid of mysticism and purpose. Rocks roiled and tumbled, thunder crashed upon the hills, water flowed into the cracks of the world, plants covered the world and fire occurred where a spark would light it up. Their was magnificence only as a result of chance, and nothing in the world would recognize it.

Purpose itself existed as a presence in the world, that later scholars would call aether or ephemera, but without anything to define objectives, it was void of meaning and direction. It was the greatest dichotomy of all: purpose was pointless, in and of itself. Then, millenia before the coming of Man, predation moved the world in a glorious dance and stirred as the hunt became meant to feed, and meaning became intention. With intention, purpose was taking shape, a new force upon the world. Predators now desired.

So it was that the predators of the world drew to them Purpose like the twin moons draw upon them the waters of the world. Purpose, during these millenia, gathered in the concepts of dominance, as those predators that thrived were the ones who could dominate the others, and all lesser animals were either killed or weakened in spirit.

The world was dominated by prides of lions and packs of wolves, while the seas were the domain of sharks and orca, relentless predators all. The prey animals reigned supreme in a world seemingly made for them, and while they lacked fine object manipulation, they could use paw and claw to trace sigils and glyphs throughout the world that called upon the aether, protecting their havens from rivals and draining the will of prey and foe alike. Their preys became will-less animals bred only for slaughter.

A mistake of the jungle snakes turned around their world. The snakes were the dominant species in the jungles, and the apes were enthralled beneath them. Their dead skins would be left in the forms of the sigils which made the land theirs, and all that walked upon their jungles along with it. The snakes had discovered, however, that apes had the hands to use rocks and branches when needed, and left them enough freedom to use them in service to their reptilian masters.

Slowly, apes rebelled. No snake realized it, but very slowly, the apes started using those branches to move around the shed serpent skins just enough to disrupt their enthralling effect. As the sigils were disrupted, more and more apes became able to act under their own will, and the more autonomous they became.

When the First Revolt thundered throughout the jungles, the apes were already using sharp rocks tied to sticks, and the snakes could do nothing but hide or die. The desire for freedom sent a shock-wave through Purpose, severing its long-standing uniformity towards domination and breaking into a myriad of possible desires. This failure of the serpents ever branded them as traitors to the animal kingdom, a sobriquet even contemporary men remember.

Unable to react appropriately, the wolves and lions and crocodiles clung to the old ways of the hunt, but nothing could compare to the infinite desires of the apes, nor with their tools which became ever more sophisticated. Purpose grew into the complex web of possibilities that only men can fathom, taking myriad forms outside of the physical world's reach, mirroring, being, and feeding upon the intentions of the apes.

Those myriad intended purposes sometimes grew into larger currents of Purpose, but every ape also drew alongside it a mirrored set of desires in the aether. This set of desires is commonly referenced as a soul.

Just as sigils could control flows of Purpose in the old times, or animate forms of matter could turn pointless Purpose into a directed flow of desire that became souls, so did the apes manage to use patterns to direct the flows of aether in the other world. The drawing of a breeding pen or a city follows the same principles, an occult and oft-forgotten manner of controlling the flows of Purpose, and thus the very desires of people and animals, were penned according to the directions set in the stones and water channels. Apes made the land theirs in this way, every hamlet and every farm the mystical binding force turning the Purpose of the land into the service of the Ape.

So lived the land and Ape within it, for generations and centuries, ever expanding into the territory of the dominant predators of old.

Ape grew in abundance and power unabated, unchallenged and unsurprising, until Magisters learned that Purpose and Desire could be summoned into this world to inhabit, were a Magister skilled enough to bring him forth. But that is a story for another time.

Here it is folks, part 1 of the cosmology for the world I am creating.

What do you all think?

Uniqueness in mythology

Here comes a phrase too often heard in a host of works dubbed "medieval fantasy":

"This is inspired by Tolkien".

Here then comes the most common answer to demands of originality, from people fed up by Tolkien's mythology:

"This isn't Tolkien. We are copying Howard instead."

In the same way, every horror writer is inspired by either Wes Craven nowadays, with some Lovecraft thrown in the mix. Similarly, every vampire story takes its roots in Bram Stoker or Anne Rice's works, save perhaps Josh Whedon's series.

Why in the world are we unable to create new and compelling mythologies? Why can't we break from those molds? What is the process required to break away from those molds? Are there not myriads of possible mythologies that could inspire breakthroughs in storytelling? I'm stuck myself in this conundrum, for although the core of the story I'm writing is very promising, and the behind-the-scenes aspects of my mythology is somewhat rarely found in stories, the visual impact of my mythology reeks of "I've played too much WoW/D&D".

I want the world-beyond-the-world in my writings to be unique. I have to stare at Neil Gaiman's The Sandman for hours just to convince myself that it is possible.

The difficult part in this is that recipes, by definition, cannot create something wholly new.

So I ask all my readers: how do you manage to create newness and uniqueness in a mythology? Do you even attempt it? And as readers, do you care?

I will attempt originality in a new cosmology, which works within the world I am crafting for my stories. But before I write out my attempts here, I would love it if one of you could answer the questions above, for yourselves, without any bias interfering through my exposed attempts.

Why everybody slept with everybody.

Exhaustion and overtime work killed my creative juices for the last 2 months, so I took that time to read and watch good fiction instead.

Watching "A Game of Thrones" made me realize an unrealistic component of most good fiction: characters, even ones living halfway across the world, tend to have way more back-story to their relationship than they should realistically have. 

I wasn't doing that at all before, and I now realize that I was wrong. 

This back-story provides an essential part of the fiction you are writing: it makes the characters love or hate each other with unbridled passion. Spectators (and actors, for LARPs/Interactive Theater) will mostly care about characters if the characters themselves are passionate about each other. 

So, if you write a story about 2 war leaders trying to decimate each other's peoples, don't just make them hate each other because they're racist. Have the first protagonist's sister married to the other in the past, and then executed for adultery.

If you want protagonists to bond, they could discover they're brothers and sisters (like Kira and Cagalli from Gundam Seed) or fall in love with relatives (Harry Potter and Ginny, Ron and Hermione). Or maybe the grandfather of one of them had enslaved the other's grandmother, and although that is officially water under the bridge, the 2 protagonists will have a tension that will never let loose, and explode whenever you, as a writer, need it to.

Soaps have run on this stuff for decades, and Opera for centuries. 

If you need convincing, I offer this challenge: read Frank Herbert's Dune, then read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Notice how dry Asimov's writing is. It is purely intellectual, it is ripe with the ideas of a genius, it is prophetic in many ways (e.g. miniaturization), it is a masterpiece, yet it is extremely hard to give a damn about any of it. Characters don't really care about anyone, so we, as readers, don't either.

Our Big Bad Evil Guys lack in Grandeur

I've seen lots of evil lords and the like in LARPs and tabletop roleplay over the years, and I have since realized that most of them are villains because we put "villain" in their name.

The standard example is the necromancer who is evil because he raises the dead, although the player characters have killed countless more people (for reasons of racism and whatnot) than the supposed bad guy. Those bad guys are all you need in a strategic roleplaying game that is half miniature battle and half roleplaying session.

To truly impress on the theatrical level, you need someone ignominous, or someone whose methods and cleverness will awe the players/actors. In general, do not count on fiction for providing such villains; read real history, or heavy social criticism through fiction. Bad people are far worse in reality than in fiction.

In a political game, a real bad guy could be Stalin-like. The man is responsible for the deaths of more people than you will ever get to meet. You just need to read Animal Farm by George Orwell to portray a similar villain convincingly. Catherine de Médicis is a great example of a noblewoman who is ready to sacrifice most everything to remain on the throne (or to keep her sons there). A massacre of thousands was one of those things. The legend of Elizabeth Bathory makes for a great evil also (torture and killings followed by blood baths), or you could make a big bad evil guy who makes those crimes and frames than apparent serial killer.

In a supernatural setting, where the threat is supernatural by nature, the process to create a dangerous villain is a less difficult, and requires less reading. Once you know which player/actor characters you want to aim at, simply figure out the 4 following elements, at least 2 of which will come directly from the villain's supernatural template:

1- One thing that is the strength of the target characters
2- One thing that the target characters hold dear
3- One thing that the players or actors themselves hold dear
4- Something that sort of freaks out the players or actors themselves (without ever going into traumas)

Now, create a villain that should have the upper hand in the target characters' strength, who will turn against something that the characters hold dear, but also what the palyers hold dear, and have some aspect that will freak out your players a bit.

Make that villain of a level of competence that will seriously challenge the players, but that the players will probably going to be able to beat in the end after a few serious setbacks.

Voilà, you have your villain.

Lex Luthor gave the best description of a great villain in the movei Superman Returns. He said "Billions [will die]! Once again the media fails to see the bigger picture!"

Don't make your villains insignificant. Make them so that the actors will squirm at the first mention of his name!

Structure in writing LARPS and Interactive Theatre

One of the major faults of most, if not all, LARP organizers I have ever met is the lack of technique in the writing. I am guilty of this as well. I think it can be remedied with limited effort, if the proper resources are produced and distributed. The reasons for this is that we are not professionals, for the most part, and we have very few professionals to show us the way in the industry.

Technique comes in a variety of flavours. Character creation, meta-arc design, background designs, scene writing, prop creation, prop use...

Before I continue, let me make one point clear: technique feels formulaic, and many of you will hate it at first. Don't avoid it for that reason. Once you've mastered it enough, you can grow out of technique when necessary. I know the example is overused, but Picasso mastered realism and basic techniques long before his masterworks in Cubism were realized.

In this post, I will address technique in scene preparation.

Inner and outer turning points

The authoring of any scene must begin with its outer or inner turning points. The outer turning point is the major change that the scene throws on the character. It must either propel the characters further in their goal, or move them back a step, and it must be significant for the scene to be meaningful.

Examples: If the play is a street war against a megacorporation in a dystopia, finding out that the director's wife has been cheating on him in secret, or that the Head of Security has embezzled money from his boss and created a separate security force working only for him, would be outer turning points moving the characters forward. Receiving a phonecall from a character's wife in tears because the megacorporation has announced that they will cut the funding to redirect the money on "defense against terrorism" sets them back.

The inner turning point is the effect that the outer turning point will have in the characters' heads (and the mind of their actor/players). This is mostly out of your control, but usually pretty easy to foresee. Thus, it is your job to try and predict how the scene will affect your players, and to predict their possible reactions as a result.

Examples: If the director's wife mentioned above has been cheating on him, she can be blackmailed. This is a unique opportunity to get access to high-level information, and can be the ray of hope the characters have been praying for since the beginning of the chronicle. When the character gets a call from his wife, he realizes that it is a push from MegaCorps for him to stop his activities, and a reminder that they can get to his wife, too, and not just to him. A panicked wife will make for a panicked character, and that is inner conflict you want to create.

Introduction and Conclusion

Once you have defined the scene's outer and inner turning points, it is time to set up the introduction of the scene, and the most probable conclusions on paper.

The introduction of a scene is very important. In many scenes, it is ideal to be a little melodramatic about scene introductions, to show the participants that something is happening. The introduction for some scenes is very obvious, like for the call from the panicked wife above. Some others are much more difficult to pin down.

Making the players stumble on the scene works in a number of occasions, as it can throw them completely off-guard. Say your characters are raiding a hotel for some reason and one of them is performing camera surveillance downstairs or in a truck. Gunshots begin, and most people in this dystopia have the well-established reflex to lock their doors and stay inside their room. One woman, however, runs out with only a bedsheet around her body and runs away from a room just one floor above the shooting, running for the stairs.

The surveillance man looks at the woman for a moment, and suddenly realize that this is MegaCorps' director's wife running mostly naked through the hotel. She is definitely not supposed to be there. She escapes using a helicopter. One way or another, the characters will go find out who rented the room, and find her illegitimate lover's name. He is middle management of MegaCorps' Human Nutrience Division.

See how dramatic that was, compared to the age-old call from a contact who gives a player this information in exchange for a "future service"? The introduction sends the actors/players a shockwave, and the scene just got very juicy.

Another note about the introduction is that the characters must have a good reason to be there and get into the scene. They must have a goal, and not follow through simply because the actors portraying them realize that the play's organizer obviously wants them there.

Once you've written your introduction, and planned the most probable outcomes of the scene, you are ready to write the whole thing.

In conclusion

Remember, when you write, that everything in the scene has only 2 purposes: your inner and outer turning points. Everything in the scene must push those two turning points forward, from the introduction to the conclusions. This includes dialogues, props, non-player character actions, music...

Great scenes that deviate from this technique exist, obviously, but most often, the deviations from the technique that will enhance a scene will be visible on a case-by-case basis, when you will have mastered the technique enough. Using a technique does not tie you to it, and your brain's higher functions are developpped enough to enhance a scene beyond this when you have to.

Literature and Gaming

I'm finally finished setting into my new apartment. Back with the posts!

I have taken an interest in writing prose (short stories and maybe a novel) in the past few months, and for the first time in my life, my interest is not waning. One thing I figured was that, since I was competent in creating very involved and interesting game worlds, I ought to be ready to write literature with limited adaptation, right?

I've rarely been that wrong in my life.

For players to really be involved in either Interactive Theatre or Roleplaying Games, the setting is the basis for everything you will design, since the oh-so-interesting characters that your actors/players care about will be created by your players themselves, for the most part. If you create a sufficiently entertaining playground, you can give your actors/players thrills for months and years.

In literature, your audience won't create a character tailor-suited to their own interest. The author's job, then, is to create a single character that a large audience will feel for, and make his viewpoint the viewpoint that will be the most enjoyable for the widest of audiences. Your reader is mostly trapped within your choices.

I had read 18 pages of "The Fire in Fiction" before I threw out 80% of the material I had written beforehand to begin anew. I know now how long and hard the road will be to dedicated authorship.

Still, I decided to write, and am happy I did. My girlfriend gives me full support, which I know to be crucial in my situation.

Selling your event

There are multiple ways to sell an event. Most of all, I recommend using any and all networking resources at your disposal to hype your event. This networking is very dependent on your personal contacts and social skills, so it is very hard for me to write about.

The presentation of your event, however, can be helped.

The first thing you need to work on is knowing your audience. Think about the people you want playing your event and about what type of roles they enjoy. If all they want is to play is a game of modern-day heroes killing zombies with diamond-tipped chainsaws, don’t try and force a psychological drama play on them. It is not going to work. If you cannot find enough players that would fit your event, think about redefining the event in question.

The most common sorts of publicity for this kind of event are posters and websites. Websites will usually also contain information for your established players, but that is cause for another discussion.
The first thing that will grab your player’s eye is the graphic design. If you can get a talented artist to cook up something nice, use it. Make sure the theme of the event is well represented by the design. If you cannot find a talented artist to do it for you, go with a simpler design rather than use a bad one that draws too much attention to itself.

The next thing the audience will notice is the title and the introduction text. In a poster, 3 short lines is the maximum you should put to detail the setting. In a website, you can use the standard 6-line introduction used in most current-day novels. The best guide I ever found to write those introduction lines is available on Will Greenway’s website, The Ring Realms. I could never tell this as well as he does, so I suggest you just follow the link to his own description and examples. Will Greenway is awesome. http://www.ringrealms.com/rrmainindex.php?PAGE=inspiration&SUBPAGE=dfictech_07

At the bottom of the poster or website, you need to put the date, time and location of the event, and your contact information. Make sure that it is easy to read, but mostly out of the way. It’s not there to sell your event: just to inform potential participants who were sold by the rest of your publicity.

Julie: an antagonist you feel for

As I have said before, the best antagonists have to be human for players to care about them. When the players investigate their backstory, they should find torment that would make them think that they, too, could have wound up like the bad guy in similar circumstances.

Take, for example, Lug’s Clockwork, a Kafkaesque organization I created for a LARP where the players embody the rare humans fighting to be freed of the influence of an Orwellian society. If the main leaders of Lug’s Clockwork are just faceless men in black, the players are going to grow bored fast with them.

That is why I created Julie.

Julie was a bright kid. Her mother took good care of her until she started to go to school. Her mother taught her everything she knew, from home. Protected her from the local bully a few times. Then school started.

Julie wasn’t good with other kids. They bullied her pretty much from day one, and life soon got miserable for her. Her only respite was always with her mother. She came to learn that anything she did well was thanks to her mother, and everything she did wrong was because she tried anything by herself.

By the time she became a teenager, she was grounded most evenings for reasons that had become more and more pointless. Then her mother saw a boy try to flirt with her and, to protect her daughter, sequestered Julie in her basement. The imprisonment lasted a whole summer and ended in November when the school authorities alerted the police about Julie’s disappearance.

Julie was at first traumatized by these faceless policemen who came to take her mother away and send her to a foster home away from all she knew. With time and therapy, she ended up understanding how her mother wronged her, and how much society had failed in protecting her. She knew how much society needed to be more informed, and more in control, about the actions of its people.

Julie was indicted into Lug’s Clockwork because she believed that humans cannot hurt humans if society watches everything all the time, everywhere. “Freedom” is nothing but an excuse to let the bastards and criminals ruin the world for their own ends. The chaos that the players cause in their fight for freedom is nothing but a self-interested fight for anarchy and the world’s end.

This character is right to act as she does when she attacks those things that the players’ characters cherish the most. Some players will even agree with her. At that point, you get real conflict in your event. Dramatic conflicts like this one create the best stories.

A root in the real world part 2

I said in the past that I would like interactive theatre to exist as an activity by itself, independently of the gaming aspect of LARPs. Because the LARP community is a community of gamers, by definition, this seems like a very daunting task.

The idea of creating such a community from scratch is, indeed, daunting. Creating bridges with existing communities of simulationists is another story altogether.

Did you know of the Boys’ Work Movement of the YMCA and the numerous parliament simulations that have spanned from this for more than half a century?

Did you know about the numerous experiences of classical theatre troupes to make their plays more interactive?

Did you know that the term role-playing predates role-playing games by a decade?

I claim that creating a solid community of interactive theatre events that would span various themes and objectives is possible. A solid entrepreneur with significant networking resources could make a solid business out of this in any large city of a western world.  Interactive theater can be used to teach the inner workings of parliament, economics, entrepreneurship and a host of other professions. It can be used by a company to bolster confidence in its products and services. It can be used, and often already is, to teach history.

A root in the real world

Recently, the news have grabbed my whole attention. We just underwent an election in Canada that completely changed Canadian politics, by basically throwing out 2 political parties that have been entrenched in Canada’s parliament for decades and centuries, respectively. On an international level, Osama Bin Laden has been killed.

Look at the people who have gone to the streets in New-York to celebrate the American victory in Pakistan. Look at the NDP partisans celebrating the ascension of the party as official opposition, and how they are overjoyed even though they don’t even form the government. Look for similar events in your own local history. Find those events that people have cared about. Especially, find out what made them care!

Once you understand why people love this and that man, why they are overjoyed by this and that event, you will know what to put into your interactive plays to make them care. Look at what made Osama Bin Laden so hated, above and beyond anyone else in the world, by the American people. When you make an antagonist, look at such people whom people truly hate, and incorporate what makes them hate those people into those antagonists. 

How much an event impacts the world is irrelevant. How much people care about it is everything.

The news are a wonderful tool for an author of interactive plays. Look at the way the sensationalist media tug the emotions of people to grab their interest, how they take pains showing how this-and-that major fraud has left a poor widow without the money to keep feeding her young children anymore. If you want your players to care, use the same tricks the media use. Those tricks work.

How to make your participants care about your event

If you are a writer for a LARP or Interactive Theatre, you have probably tried dozens of different scenarios to try and reach your players, and get them interested in your plots. Some have failed, while others have succeeded. You might not have realized why yet.

Here is a wake-up call.

People care about people. They will also care about characters. Plots, concepts, organizations, objects and just about everything else only exist to serve the characters. Do not waste your time creating evil organizations; spend your time creating characters who run evil organizations. If you want to showcase a concept, do it as a relation to a character, and not in a vacuum.

A Stargate matters because it affects the life of O’Neil and Carter, not the other way around. Beating back evil organizations matter  because those organizations are run by, and affect very real characters in your setting. Gear matters because it enhances characters. Abilities work in the same way.

The reason behind this is very simple:

As a race, humans have survived only because we care about people more than we do about things and concepts. If trees had mattered to us more than people, all humans who experienced winters would have died off. If animals had mattered more to us than humans, our ancestors would have starved to death millennia ago.

We are genetically programmed to care about people. Everything that matters does so solely in that it affects people.

If you want your participants to care, base your events around characters, whether those portrayed by the participants themselves, those portrayed by your actors or, hopefully, both.

From Games to Art: the Evolution of Interactive Stories in the 21st Century

Interactive Theatre was born in the shape of Live Action Roleplaying Games, and it is still mostly limited to the gaming community. Dramatic, Anne Rice-like stories are played as a competition between players for success, and the mechanics of the game still rule most events.

There is nothing wrong with those events. LARPs are great things and satisfy their demographics.

Now, we need to conceive a parallel community for Interactive Theatre. The solution, I believe, is not in getting the LARP demographic to forgo the gaming aspect of their favored activity. They do not want to, and they do not have to either.

The solution is to get new people to try out Interactive Theatre. Some Broadway plays already have the audience interact with the actors or decide an outcome for the play. The Society for Creative Anachronism organizes many events for which participants are expected to dress and act as characters from a given era.

Bring together a crew that would like to act through a plot you'd expect from a Broadway play without scripted lines, dress as they would for the Society of Creative Anachronism, and resist the urge of competition present in the gaming aspect of LARPs, and you obtain a magnificient cultural event, one that would definitely be worthy of the name "Interactive Theatre".

 I hope I will see this one day.