I wrote today!

I have had a couple of very demanding months at my job and had not had enough energy to either work on my novel or update this blog since November.

I took the time to do some writing today, and used a number of things I realized were completely missing from my initial draft idea to create a new first chapter (mostly moving the initial first chapter to the second chapter of the book).

What I had not understood was all related to mystery. I realized, by reading Order of the Phoenix once again, how horribly I handled mystery in all situations (both in gaming and writing). I used to think mystery was all about the unkown: everything the reader does not know is a mystery.

But here is a very simple truth that would have greatly enhanced all roleplaying games I have ever run, and that will make my novel a 100 times more interesting to read: Players and readers cannot care about any unkown fact unless they realize that there is something they do not know, and realize the importance of that unkown. They don't want to understand what will occur later in the story, they want to understand what they have already read, and see how it unfurls.

It may sound very obvious, but fully grasping this concept of mystery and being able to apply it efficiently in any kind of story is a major challenge.

To help you fully grasp what I mean, I will summarize my novel in the initial plan and my more recent draft attempt:

Initial plan:

In the dystopian city of Seopolis, Askata Suna is aggressed by a policeman, gets religious visions she does not understand, sparks a revolution, is used by those who would manipulate the revolution, realizes that her vision were due to poisoning, sees her comrades and her brother be killed by the state, witnesses an unfair trial to frame innocents for the mass killings, and leads the workers in a final revolutionary push to overthrow the state, and finally realizes that she is not fully in control, that the religion which used her is now in control and will limit the liberties of the people just as the previous state did.

Modified plan:

In the dystopian city of Seopolis, Askata Suna has gone to pray over her mother's grave, in a cemetery for the Enemies of the State, but has to hide when a man comes in, put the thorny stem of a rose (a symbol of vengeance) on her mother's grave and walk away.

Who is this man? Why is Askata's mother branded an Enemy of the State? Why does this man want vengeance, and against whom?

All of what was written above will still take place afterwards, with foreshadpwing similar to what I just cited above. Don't you want to read this a lot more now?

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.