Today’s post is brought to you by Night Verses’ “Glitching Prisms,” which I stumbled across this morning as I tumbled down a rabbit hole.

We’re closing out spring break here in Central Michigan, and the past few days have been a little rocky. I had one of my bouts of typewriter vision just yesterday (it’s like the room is spinning, but it keeps resetting and starting back from the initial point of the spin), and I also had a double-rejection Friday as well. This follows on the heels of a dentist appointment and some scheduling lapses on my part that kept me from attending my first yoga class this week. These Wandlessian travails were amplified by the woes of my lovely fiancee, who has worked heroically all week to get herself set up to thrive this spring but kept encountering reversal after reversal.

The catch, of course, is that she didn’t exactly see it that way, which I’ve found instructive, and which spurred me to think about my own stress in a different way. The most vivid example is probably The Laser, which is pivotal because my fiancee works with a laser cutter/engraver most days. Her ambition down the road is to work primarily with ADA signage, but until she’s eligible to be a rider on governmental contracts (as contractors normally postpone hiring folks, no matter how attractive their bids and how extensive their know-how, until they’ve been in the industry for two years) she’s been using her machines for other projects. My boo, she has all that hustle.

Early in the week she spent several days aligning the optics on her machine, as she hoped it would allow her to achieve higher speeds and greater power, but at day’s end she decided to invest in a new laser tube. The scrambling to get everything sorted was of course stressful, but she was able to round her way back to an optimistic philosophical position in a matter of hours. Doing all the alignment work was not wasted, as it’s work her business will benefit from in the long run, and today she went in to the office excited to see what her newly punchy laser will be able to do at full speed. She also had foresight enough to save for the replacement, so the only real cost was a bit of time. Along the way she’s kept getting calls, including a nibble from one of the biggest contractors in the state. The wheels continue to turn for her, and that turning is aided and abetted by her ability to keep reorienting her own way of seeing in a mature and hopeful way.

In retrospect, was the past week really an Ordeal? Reader, it was not. I’ve cleared out all the items in my grading queue, for example, and I finished drafting my submission for the anthology I mentioned last time around with plenty of room to move in the revisions I attempt. Additionally, I had distinguished presses in mind for the next submissions for both of yesterday’s rejections, and this week I also read Susanna Clarke’s excellent Piranesi, which should fit perfectly into a recent sequence in my graduate class. I have great friends to play games with and great colleagues to work with, and the typewriter vision did not bog me down, as it sometimes does when I’m feeling overwhelmed and just want to take a series of interlocking naps.

I shan’t indulge on the political too much, but it’s an experience rather like the State of the Union address. I wasn’t much inclined to watch the speech on the whole, but I knew my news feed would be dominated by coverage the morning after. And from what I could tell the material was very much reflective of glitches in vision. Overall reviews tended in roughly the same direction (though the take on that direction hinged on who was offering the coverage), but plenty of people were totally fixated on about fifteen total seconds in a talk that lasted more than an hour. It’s rather like walking through an orchard and obsessing over one bruised, worm-riddled apple. It’s part of the picture, not the whole of it.

Not the freshest insight under the sun, I know, but when I run into something heartening I’d rather focus on it than dwell on the stressors that are always at hand. I also wanted to kick out an entry before embarking on this, what seems like my first uncommitted writing afternoon in 46 million years.

Right now, with a level of desire that verges on becoming a problem, I really, really want to work on my TTRPG and my submission for the Kanghas Khan Fear of Clowns anthology. Alas, I’ve got a bit more grading to do before spring break arrives and presents me with some sizable chunks of time, so today I’m spending my semi-free lunchtime minutes to add to the blog instead.

Today I’m thinking particularly about Academic Time, which is a peculiar thing. It tends to sprawl in odd and unexpected ways, though perhaps not odd to those folks who’ve chosen to be parents and raise kids., for whom the odd and unexpected can be the norm. Quite a lot of time is invested in students, and I view that as a pleasure and a privilege. Could I live without responding to a few of the “Did we do anything important in class today?” emails I receive each week? I suspect I could, but the fact that I get to field them speaks to a certain kind of existential pleasure.

It’s worth noting that, in terms of the administrative imagination, most professors where I work are subdivided into four units of human. Three of those units each semester are committed to teaching, and the fourth is reserved for all those scholarly and creative activities that contribute to the mission (and greater glory) of the university. The STEM folk will notice that the 3/4 + 1/4 gets us to 4/4, which means that anything else I’m asked to do must be reckoned in some more imaginative way.

The blobular time I tend to resent is academic service time, in part because it more often feels like a self-inflicted cut that’s become infected. The grodiest wounds come from spontaneous delegation, when a critter who is very well paid to take on a job decides to offload some of their responsibilities to parties who signed on for some other adjacent gig. Similarly, we experience subcommittee proliferation, when a group entrusted with some smallish responsibility decides that responsibility could be handled better by divvying up the work between several even smaller groups at their own ad hoc meetings distributed over the course of the week outside the regularly-scheduled time. Perhaps the vilest time sink, at least in terms of feel, comes from higher-order administrative tasks one has chosen to take on but which might benefit from collaboration or delegation (which is on my mind because I know a kind, skillful adminacritter who takes on oodles of work herself because the alternative is pairing up with someone who will require a great deal of management and handling). It’s often easier to do the thing oneself than beg for a collaborator to do the thing properly and on time, but that comes with a cost.

All told, this has taken me about 3/4 of a bowl of jambalaya to write, which I think is time reasonably well spent. I say this, of course, knowing full well that my WordPress host is currently in talks to sell user prose to some large language model engine to churn up and squeeze out some word sausage down the line. I win today, in that I keep the promise I made when I posted the last entry and get to tick off a box on the day’s to-do list, but I’ll probably cut my losses on the blog if I learn that I can’t opt-out of the slaughter prior to the sausage-making process. A little bittersweet, that, but rather than dwell on it I’ll think about gameplay mechanics and sweet, sweet murder-clowns.

A proper post is on the horizon, but whilst there’s still time on the calendar I thought I’d point y’all toward The Lesser Key of the Sandestin, another zesty zine collaboration with the fine wizardfolk over at SuperheroNecromancer to round out ZineQuest at Kickstarter. The project is already funded, but there’s still time enough to climb aboard if you’re so inclined. We’ll see you over in The Rainy City!

It’s December 31st, which must mean we’re at the magical interval between Taking Stock and Resolution O’Clock. Though I’m not an especially Christmassy critter, I’m terribly fond of the prospect of annual revision and reinvention. I’d imagined that I might get a bit of a head start, as the folks we imagined we’d spend the Eve with have fallen ill, but it looks like we’ll be a bit social after all, so the rejiggering will have to wait.

I’m not fond, however, of doing year in review exercises, largely because my imagination tends to fix on What Might Have Been. It’s not an especially rueful exercise in the abstract, but it tends to get me thinking about things I might have done differently. For instance, since I often think in terms of the academic year and professional progress, I’ve published six short stories in the AY 2022-23 frame, which is life-affirming in a number of ways–not only because my university views four publications as sufficient for meeting our standards for tenure and promotion. I also have a story on the publication slate for New Myths in Fall 2024, so the wheels are still a-turning. Right now in the social mediasphere, however, I’m seeing quite a few folks tout their award-eligible work, and I’ve not yet mastered that knack. It’s not, to my thinking, a major omission on my part, but one of those matters I might want to rethink in 2024.

As a teacher, I often mull over the famous Socratic dictum on the Corruption of The Youth around this time of year: ”The unexamined life is not worth living.” Self-examination is, I know, a difficult bit of business, especially since the tactics that got us this far will undoubtedly get us at least a little further. It feels to me a little tragic when I see it from the outside–when you see folk so committed to the Truths they’ve dreamed up or borrowed from others that any other prospect seems untenable, if not ridiculous–but it also seems tragic to make change blindly and reactively, without a little due diligence to suss out the advantages that might attend A New Way, whatever that way might be. January tends to be a good month for Trial-Size Truths, with the feelings we get from abiding by those short-term commitments helping us to decide if we’d like to fold those truths into out lives. 

The end of the year is also Garbagetime for Purity Testing, as plenty of folks will try to get us to commit more fully and less mindfully to the Truths they think we ought to share–often indirectly, by criticizing public figures who are not pure enough. Because I poke around the edges of the web to look at the latest news in neuroscience, I get plenty of pop psychology to do with the business-minded Growth Mindset, citing several very rich people as proof of the virtues of that way of thinking. It’s also the time of year when folks will tell us that we need to cultivate a daily writing habit (we don’t), that we need to announce our position on several key issues (we don’t), &c. If we fail to do so vocally and determinedly, the theory goes, then we must be bad people. (I say this having just skimmed past bitter criticisms of Selena Gomez, Neil Gaiman, and Lynda Carter, all of whom have failed in the arena of public opinion, according to a few vitriolic folk, by not weighing in on international matters with sufficient vehemence.) It is, I think, Much Too Much of a Muchness, but it gives us a sense of how folk conceive of themselves in relation to weighty matters.

(Sidelong fact: one of the reasons I prefer to teach ENG 101, centered on expository writing, rather than ENG 201, a course on research and argumentation, is that it’s a great place to practice one of the most essential writing skills–convincing readers why they should care at all about what you think. We’re in a weird place as far as expertise goes, I know, but at bottom I think it’s sort of important to establish how experience has equipped us to weigh in on various matters of cultural import.)

To my thinking, preconstruction involves a bit of self-reflexive scrutiny, the gentle reconsideration of patterns and habits that clearly work but might be worth revisiting. For much of the past year, for instance, given the persistence of the Never-Ending Headache, my daily routine has begun with five pills–Vitamin D, a multivitamin, and a krill oil capsule as basics and a couple of NSAIDs to ease the dull discomfort of my skull. For the past few weeks, however, I’ve been exploring the possibility that my gut health might be linked to my brain pain in some material ways, and I’ve adjusted my startup routine accordingly. Yet today is the first day I’ve dispensed with the NSAIDs, which I suspect on some days I’ve taken merely out of habit rather than need. It’s a little thing, but a foundational one, and probably indicative of a few dozen things I do every day without really thinking about them.

For the same reason I’m thinking about reconstructing my daily docket, which has had the same top twelve items since around Thanksgiving. I’ve churned through 13-27 with some regularity, but the stagnancy of those first few suggests that I’m probably conceiving of them wrongly. My plan this year is to get a bunch of new writing done, and I’ve lined up projects big and small to keep me awfully busy from now until May. I might need to get each project broken down into smaller, more manageable daily chunks to get in the habit of making steady progress, and that will probably entail thinking about them all a little differently. It’s all doable, but figuring out how I’d like to manage the doing is the tricksy bit of business. I’m happy to say it’s already underway–one project, for example, will involve putting together a sixteen-page zine, or about eight total entries, for Kickstarter by March, and I’ve drafted seven already, page by page–but I need to find ways to keep that forward momentum going.

I’m convinced there are big things on the horizon in 2024. I don’t think I need to reinvent the wheel to reach them, but it seems wise and worthwhile to consider how I’m moving toward them.

Today I’m taking a break from grading final exams to eat a little lunch and think a little thought. Exam week involves a classic Wandlessian paradox: I quite like grading them, as it turns out, since they usually give me a good glimpse of the sorts of learning that stick, but I also admittedly resent them a little bit, as the middle stretch of December is usually right around the time my mind starts fixating on other stuff.

What I think I like most about the style of exam I administer is the humane engagement it involves. I used to give finals that were a little mix-and-match at the level of objective knowledge and subjective questions, but all the adjustments we made in academics to maximize opportunity at the height of the COVID era have led to more venturesome essay-driven modes of response. I know some folks are terribly fretful about the prospect of LLM-generated responses, but to my thinking (and in my mode of evaluation) the risk seems smallish.

LLM stuff has no place at all in my creative life; I view it largely as a toy rather than anything verging on some simulation of genuine intelligence. I’ve used ChatGPT and a couple of image generators, all to results I more or less expected. The former offers useful pedagogical illustrations I can bring to my classes, and it helps to get a feel for the sort of prose it spits out. Were I a more adventurous professor I’d probably challenge one of my intro classes to a race, if only to see if an earnest essayist writing a first draft composes more quickly than an LLM user who has to revise the churned prose to make it sound almost human. My bet is that the original authorship goes much more quickly and smoothly, with far fewer vestiges of robotic lameness. I once asked the program to give me a jillion-dollar screenplay idea, and it gave me the plot of Needful Things, albeit with a 2500-word screed on ethics as a bonus. There’s a bit of tragicomedy to it all, but I’d like to think we’re beginning to figure out how little it’s actually good for. I have no doubt that there’s a certain kind of business mindset that imagines profits flying everywhere from all the time saved, but the fact that creative writers are in high demand to undo the silly things that LLM programs invariably do gives me some comfort regarding those bleak visions of the future.

The image generators make the prospects for LLM content even starker. I’ve not yet been brave enough to run a program live in a class, largely because my own experiments have been so wildly various (ask for a familiar figure in a party hat, for example, and the program might neglect to render any other clothing), but there are some vivid illustrations out there in the world already about what these models do, both by design and inadvertently. There’s some incidental racism and censorship cooked into most programs right out of the box, problems that can only be remedied by aggressively training a home model, never mind the creepy mutations and other errata. The images generated, at least for me, at best can inspire a bit of uncanny-valley fascination. There’s no art in them, no humanity–just strangeness.

At one level, I kindasorta get it. We value ease, or the appearance of ease, and the idea that a machine can produce images or writing at a high standard, allowing us to forgo decades of training and practice, is not without a certain kind of tantalizing interest. But I am, at bottom, an 18th-century scholar, and I’m often reminded of Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” when he writes: ”True ease in writing comes from art, not chance/as those move easiest who have learned to dance.”

Someday I’ll write on the ethics of all the copyright violation that has made LLM vaguely possible, but today, for the sake of my own humanity, I’d better get back to grading.

I’m taking the lion’s share of this summery Sunday to work on formally articulating the rules of a game I’ve been developing over the past few months. The mechanics, as is the case with most games, are none too exotic, but I think the inner workings of any game communicate two critical things about its design. The first is the designer’s essential sense of possibility, the sorts of stories their game should be equipped to tell, and the second is the designer’s attitude toward newer gamers.

It’s the second point that’s topmost in my noggin right now, since my partner is relatively new to TTRPGs and doesn’t know the ins and outs of some mechanics that veteran players will instantly recognize. In many ways I’m simply trying to articulate mechanics in a way that will be accessible and engaging for players like her. She’s got plenty of gaming under her belt–we’ve played D&D 5E, Blades in the Dark, and several homebrew games with our circle of friends–but putting together the complete picture, anticipating many of the questions and eventualities that are likely to occur as play unfolds, involves a strange bit of perspective adoption.

The game I’m working on in some ways goes against the grain of the TTRPGs I generally play, in that it involves working out narrative possibilities in a more or less functional polity. Trying to design a well-run kingdom or nation is a distinctive sort of challenge, as quite a lot of modern fare is dystopian and/or grimdark. Some of the more common motivational tropes of gaming–monstrosity, villainy, crime, and corruption–feel considerably different if they are exceptions rather than the rule. Conflict and complexity take on different shapes when wickedness isn’t centralized or explicitly authorized by those in power.

The other risk in this kind of navigation is the presentation of governmental and cultural structures that players will find facile. As a population role-playing gamers are notoriously unpredictable, which is, I think, the point. Games allow us to test out agency, so of course some stretching of essential premises is sure to happen. Some folks will defy an existing civic order simply because it’s not the one they would have chosen for themselves, or because it’s lacking in some way the designer overlooked, and some will try to take advantage of institutions that can be profitably bent in their favor.

I think newer and experienced players alike engage with a game more interesting ways when the terms and conditions are flexible, when they leave everyone with sufficient room to move, to flesh out their vision of their character persona. I’m trying very hard for that reason to avoid devising mechanics that yield a meta, an established set of systemic exploits and advantages that everyone knows to capitalize on. A meta makes it possible, even likely, for players to feel they are playing wrongly or badly, letting down their fellows at the table.

A good/bad example of the kind of tricksy game I have in mind is Destiny 2. At one level it’s a beautiful play environment, a space opera that installs the player as the main character in a galactic drama. I took a break from the game for almost a year, and getting back into the swing of things this summer has been pretty seamless. I also remembered, however, why I stopped playing in the first place. For all its many virtues, Destiny 2 depends on meta-gaming to a dispiriting degree. Beyond the basic rules of player engagement there is a metric ton of optimization information. Playing solo offers a limited array of satisfactions, but if one wants to play as part of a trio or team of six the tacit expectation is that all participants will know what to do and be fully optimized for the doing.

When our gaming group is in the throes of game testing, the designers usually take for granted that they’ve missed something essential in the design, that players will identify oversights that functionally “break the game.” I think I’m more comfortable with that possibility than with mechanics that are infinitely fiddly, that stand in the way of player self-expression, or that stand in the way of climbing aboard.

In some ways I suspect my writerly sensibilities are at odds with my design tendencies. In a good story, I find that there’s generally plenty of guidance but a little room left over for the play of the imagination. In my first drafts I almost always overwrite, trying to make sure I’ve offered all the plot bread crumbs I can think of, and in revisions I do my best to trust in readers a little more completely. As a designer I take for granted that players will do just what they like within the framework of a game, but I need to define in pretty granular terms how those possibilities ought to unfold at the mechanical level. When I write for games I generally write quite a lot and find I need to add more and more. When I write stories I move in the opposite direction, editing for clarity first and then cutting away hundreds or thousands of words.

Lately my partner and I have been watching Columbo reruns. From a narrative standpoint, especially in terms of a viewing culture that’s familiar with procedural drama, it’s fascinating.

Most of the fare we see these days involves intricate plotting that the agents of law and order have to unravel, expose, and then prosecute over the course of an episode, so the order of operations is well and truly established. In Columbo, the model is upended: the viewer gets to see the whole of the crime (give or take some concessions to 1970’s morality), gets to see the measures the culprit takes to cover their tracks, and then gets to see Peter Falk, who plays Detective Columbo, get at the truth through dogged persistence and strategic efforts to get the antagonist(s) to underestimate him until it’s too late.

All told, most episodes deliver a kind of olde-skool satisfaction. Columbo is decent, generally likable, and he embodies a mode of detection that anyone might rise to. His effectiveness stems from his humanity, his astute observation, and his experience. There are seldom forensic fireworks at play–just basic assumptions about how people act and a readiness to tease out the threads of discrepancy.

Most cases involve premeditation by some clever, privileged criminal, one who has a solid understanding of how the machinery of law and order works and the sorts of conclusions it usually produces. Quite a few of the culprits assume they can pin their crime on a less privileged suspect, ruses Columbo invariably sees through. The criminal’s plans usually begin to unravel when they either a) do something too clever by half to cover up what they’ve done (wiping away the fingerprints from a doorknob, for example, that should be covered with the victim’s), or b) when they volunteer explanations for some oddity that Columbo has observed that makes alternative solutions seem (at least to Columbo) even more unlikely. Most episodes are especially satisfying at that level. We get to see criminal masterminds with all sorts of advantages at their disposal brought low simply because they couldn’t shake free from the detective’s tenacity.

The magic of Columbo has aged strangely, in part because it’s vision of the world is somewhat romantic, at times even idealistic. More modern procedural shows tend to be predicated on the assumption that everyone has secrets to keep and will lie incessantly to keep them. The workman with the shaky alibi is often having an affair, for instance, a complication that will often find our detectives, however able, chasing down the wrong scent for 30-45 minutes. Columbo’s antagonists are always clever (and successful because they are so clever) and quick on their feet; the working class folks in their orbit are almost always decent, salt-of-the-earth folks. The culprits are always lying at the fundamental level of their commission of the crime, but they otherwise deal in plausible possibilities and half-truths. The episodes usually end when Columbo exposes one key element of their pattern of misdirection and the house of cards collapses so dramatically that the criminal has no choice but to concede that Columbo got them.

It’s a lovely, reassuring structure, especially since Columbo always arrives at the conclusions for the right reasons, unraveling every thread, reconstructing precisely the crime we’ve already witnessed, and laying it all out plainly. It’s a far cry from the fog of lies and denials we normally see, lies extended and compounded, amplified and echoing, judged and justified. And that’s just in our plotted fictions. Public discourse seems to me even wilder more often than not, the fog of fictions considerably thicker, with folks known for their integrity wittingly and unwittingly thickening the mist through various acts of critical self-promotion. Columbo, even with all the vicious premeditation, feels like a kind of cognitive comfort food, even with a modern acknowledgement that much of what he does would constitute harassment by modern standards. At times the overall design of the show feels contrived, which I think can be appropriate for the genre. Getting to the satisfactions of actual justice involves a kind of relentless engineering we don’t often see, given our own less clever but more brazen doers of wrong.

I have several bloggish/website items on my Big Summer Checklist, so I reckon I should knock off one of them. The past several weeks have been a great stretch for creative fermentation inside my melon, which means my partner has had to put up with me staring at the ceiling and the walls while characters and plot elements take shape. I’ve probably overshot the mark a little bit, since right now much of the mental heavy lifting involves sorting and sifting, trying to decide which imaginative critters belong to which project, but I’m pleased to report that I’m more than ready to tuck in to the vry srs bsns of turning premises into pixels.

I’m feeling especially good feels today because last night the 2022 Stoker Awards were handed out, which means that my media feeds are filled with more love and kindness than I typically come across. I still think of myself as a gawker at the candy-shop window when it comes to the Horror/Dark Fiction community, but on days like these one is bombarded with reminders that Horror Folk are, by and large, among the most sweet-natured and humane creatures one is apt to stumble across. Last night we were all celebrating one another and the year’s achievements, both locally (in Pittsburgh) and virtually, and it’s a real delight, especially as an academic, to see so much affection and admiration in circulation.

My partner and her friends went to the spa as a group yesterday, so there were plenty of good feels and chill vibes to be had at the Abbey. And, perhaps as a result of those ambient vibefeels, I started thinking about how much dark speculative fiction arises from visions of affections misdirected and love gone wrong. The story I’m currently working out involves a bit of small-town logic, in part because smaller towns often serve as fine hothouses for fraught relationships, dark secrets, and longstanding tensions and resentments. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the kids like to say, and there’s often a generational quality to those old grievances and grudges. Stephen King nails that feeling in quite a lot of his fiction, and I tend to look for that microcosmic malaise in lots of movies and stories. The Black Phone, one of last night’s award winners, really makes hay with those dynamics, as we get a little world that feels enclosed and pressurized, ready to boil over even before The Grabber starts plucking kids from the street. Abuse and toxicity are woven into the fabric of the little community the screenwriters depict, an effect that reminds me of Derry in It. To face The Grabber, the protagonist needs to take in–and believe in–a different kind of communal possibility. It’s an especially beautiful movie in that regard, as the ending hints at not just a limited resolution but the potential for something more restorative, more redemptive. It’s powerful coming-of-age stuff, a trajectory that horror handles better than almost any other genre.

Having that thought in my noggin has been a great help in terms of fleshing out characterization. No matter how odd or even pathological the cast of oddballs might be, most readers and viewers are going to go in to the fiction with the belief that people are the way they are for reasons. That’s a hand that writers sometimes overplay (I’m thinking particularly of the recent versions of Halloween right now, in which Michael Myers is thoroughly psychologized, as the viewer bears witness to scads of formative moments that make him something far more understandable–a troubled adult rather than a Big Box of Inexplicable Evil), and it takes plenty of practice to offer the sort of hints and intimations that deepen and complicate the reader’s sympathies without robbing the wickedness that follows, however eerie or gory, of its appalling force.

Every now and again I will dive into a story with only a few bits and pieces of a character in mind, but the story I’m about to embark on has quite a few moving parts meshing together at the level of character from the jump. I won’t commit many background details to the page, but I know these people reasonably well–where they’re coming from, where they’re going, and where they imagine they are going before things get grisly. When I’ve got that much material mapped out, I tend to write far more quickly and far less self-consciously.

Speaking of which, there’s a new bit o’ fiction of mine you can read over at Tales from the Moonlit Path. Hop on hither and see what befalls Janie when a stranger calls.