Work/Progress

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

I’m still doing my best to practice optimism, though the world is going out of its way to make optimism difficult these days. Progress on Chancers proceeds apace, however, and I thought I’d hang out the chapter on player safety for folks to take a look at. I’ve got a monstrous amount of prose drafted, so this post will serve as a prose sample and do double duty for me, allowing prospective players to see where I’m headed. I can also mix in links here, so folks can find their way to some digital resources and to the launch page itself.

Here be the working draft of Chapter Two, any which way:


On Safety in Chancers

Before you tuck into your first session of Chancers, it’s a good idea to have a discussion about safety for both players and the GM in your gaming group. Happily, there many highly-regarded safety tools out there in the world of gaming these days, and if your group has already found a set that works well for you, don’t hesitate to apply it to Chancers. (Bloggery note–a goodly set can be found over here.)

I’ll speak candidly as Bill Wandless, longtime gamer, for a few paragraphs to lay some cards on the table. I’m not as conversant with the modern safety tools in circulation as I could be, largely because I’ve had the great good fortune to play with the same group of friends since about 2017. One of the group’s regular GMs was kind enough to invite me to take part in his RuneQuest campaign back in the day, and that invitation was seconded by players already in the group. Over time we’ve had the chance to try on many games and iron out many of the wrinkles in our interpersonal gaming dynamics, and those adjustments have all been made amicably, given our collective intent to do right by our friends.

Three other things are worth knowing about me, at least in terms of player safety. The first is that my day job involves teaching. As a result, I’m steeped in the idea of best practices, even if the notion often feels elusive at an academic institution. If there are strategies for doing better—for making people feel more welcome and more willing to engage with an experience—I’m on board. Most classes I teach involve diverse groups of 20-35 writers, so establishing a preserve for creativity and self-expression is vital. It’s tough to take risks of any kind if you don’t feel safe doing so. No one wants to be teased or laughed at for verbalizing aspects of their identities, convictions, thoughts, or values, and gaming deals with such acts of self-articulation regularly.

The second thing, oddly enough, is that I’m a hypnotist, a sidelong extension of my work with language. There are two vivid takeaways at the place where hypnosis and gaming meet. The big one is that imaginative experience is profound. The same capacities that allow us to get lost for hours in role-playing escapades also leave us vulnerable to tensions that can arise when our in-game personae encounter forms of victimization or harassment we might know from lived experience. (And I take for granted that experience is wildly various, that my own frames of reference can’t fully equip me to conceive of what anyone else has been or could be going through.) The second is that these effects register on the body, bearing on heart rate, blood pressure, the release of neurochemicals, and several other autonomic processes. I’ve seen a great deal of online chatter dismissive of the need for safety tools in role-playing games, hinting that they speak to some failure to distinguish between real life and the realm of imaginative play. When I conceive of safety at the gaming table, however, I think about actual hurt and harm, about how what happens in the mind can work on the body in unwelcome ways.

The third and final thing is the integrity of the fiction, an idea that appears in the section on “GM Best Practices” in John Harper’s excellent Blades in the Dark and which I dwell on often when I work on worldbuilding. You and your players have a vast array of games to choose from, so there must be something about Chancers that appeals to you in prospect. Given how I’ve promoted the project, I’ve got some suspicions about what that something must be. When we play Blades, for instance, we plug into the history, culture, and vibe of Doskvol; we adapt to the locale and abide by the operant conditions within those lightning barriers. When I write on the Rainy City game setting for Superhero Necromancer Press, I go in knowing the rain is a feature, not a glitch, that what’s wondrous and fun about that world arises from embracing the rain as a constant. In Chancers I proceeded in a similar way, keeping broadmindedness, inclusivity, and humanity in focus from the very beginning—both to help players determine how they might inhabit the Drifting Kingdoms and to help GMs craft exciting adventures arising from a coordinated set of fictional commitments.

*                      *                      *

When you start up a Chancers campaign, consider beginning with a Session Zero, an open session in which the players can introduce themselves to one another while trying on the roles they intend to play and the GM can set the scene in Euphyria. Session Zero thinking is cooked into “The First Chance,” the introductory adventure presented in Chapter XX, which can be expanded to help everyone at the table feel at ease. Such sessions can serve as vital opportunities to lay down ground rules concerning thorny subjects, especially those areas that people at the table personally find disquieting. Also be sure to let players know they can draw attention to any in-game distress they experience without fear of judgment. That is a critical premise to get out on the table openly and early.

Chancers is flexible enough to accommodate just about any content exclusions, boundaries, and tonal choices your group settles on. Most games wisely set aside child abuse, animal cruelty, and sexualized violence altogether, and many games acknowledge problematic social practices indirectly or subtly, reminding players that they exist in the game cultures without dwelling on them. Conversational consent—talking things through and agreeing on the right terms of engagement—will help your group dial in the details.

As a broad content warning, however, it’s well worth acknowledging that Chancers deals with cultural bias. The word “Chancer” itself echoes with this prejudice. At bottom the word refers only to someone who takes chances and assumes things will work out. In modern British English, however, it’s taken on a few negative connotations and associations. In the Drifting Kingdoms, usage of the word partly captures the fact that early uses of Chancing magic were alarmingly unpredictable, which led observers to associate good results with dumb luck. Players will begin their adventures in a far more enlightened time, but some hints of those outdated attitudes might occasionally surface.

Those attitudes, however, have little traction in the societies of the Kingdom. They have been challenged and scuttled in most every dimension of culture. In terms of player safety and solace, GMs might find it beneficial to highlight the constructive dimensions of culture on the islands rather than emphasizing those glimpses of intolerance. “The First Chance” adventure captures the typical tenor of the game setting, which emphasizes mutual regard, community, and the belief that good things might be made even better. In the two days prior to the Muster, when the PCs will be formally installed in the social structures of Euphyria, they are sure to see folks of every human race and ethnicity and a host of the ogres, orcs, goblins, gnomes, elves, and more exotic humanoids one would hope to find in a fantastical setting. They’ll encounter citizens of many different body types and capabilities. They’ll also see a wide variety of gender expressions and relationships of all kinds, as well as the prevailing attitude that this state of affairs is what the Kingdoms themselves want—a notion that extends to the emergence and reception of Chancers, too. Beyond simple tolerance, the PCs will find wholehearted acceptance of all kinds of lifeways.

At the end of a session, especially if it coincides with the end of an expedition or similar foray, some safety guides recommend taking time for a debriefing.  That’s solid advice, especially if the group grappled with sensitive subject matter. In most cases, however, I think it can be more beneficial to affirm what everyone at the table thinks went well in the latest stretch of the game. If time permits, the session can profitably segue into an Interlude, which assumes life goes on in the Kingdoms even though gaming at the table has paused. The plans the Chancers have in mind—intelligence they would like to gather, for example, or the things they would like to build, or the connections they would like to forge—can often be set in motion in brief exchanges that give the GM help with their game preparation and the players encounters to look forward to. Experience and Reputation awards can be handled during these junctures as well, and Reputation will be an excellent guide for GMs, allowing them to sow adventure seeds for the future.

Whether the group decides to formalize regular debriefings or not, it’s wise to keep lines of communication open between sessions. GMs can also make themselves accessible in the event issues arose, especially if the issues concerned matters of tone or problematic content. Most players will recognize when they’ve made interactive missteps, but the GM might from time to time opt to help players appreciate moments when they unwittingly gave offense. The GM should not be expected to serve as the arbiter of disputes, nor should they be asked to police behavior personally; their primary responsibility is to support the integrity of the fiction, which will account for what the PCs altered in the Kingdoms and set the stage for the next batch of happenings.

Player safety will typically involve the regular revision and refreshment of conversational consent, as the dynamic of the group evolves and as new considerations make their way onto the table. Latching on to the ethos of Chancers, however, should help everyone get a feel for the best approaches to engaging with the fiction before long.

The Discipline Dilemma

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

In prospect, this sounds like it might be a terribly sexy post. I regret to inform you, alas, that this will actually involve a bit of my conventional noodling and navel-gazing, though I hope the result is of some value.

As I’ve surely established by now, I have a deep and abiding fetish for metacognition. I love me some thinking about thinking. Today, at least, I’m thinking about generative, positive, and even optimistic thinking, which is not my usual wheelhouse.

Long ago I remarked on the comfort I take in focusing my thought and behavior on what actually falls to me, personally, as a critter. I think about that ethos quite a bit at the end of a semester, since I will spend several days reaching out to and awaiting response from students who need a little nudge to remember something they’ve forgotten. Most of the time I dread The Day After, since that’s often the day when those students finally open up their email or else realize (with their final grades in hand) that they could have changed outcomes to some extent. It’s a sort of worry I’m prone to, though it does me no good. I try not to think of myself as a worrier, but by golly, I’m one of those worriers.

Worry, as it turns out, is a pretty simple imaginative expedition. Because I have a fair amount of experience with stuff going badly in the past, it’s not too tough to imagine other things might go the same way. It’s thought on easy mode, though it’s not easy on the old noggin. It doesn’t require much self-discipline to lapse into a default mode when doing otherwise requires energy and what can be a significant expenditure of cognitive energy.

I am pleased to report, however, that it’s possible. It just requires a lot of revision, both the American and British senses of the word.

For example, early this year I fainted and took a spill. As with most such occurrences, I was bewildered and really didn’t know what had happened. I wound up with a smashed toe and a respectable bonk on the head, and a subsequent visit to my primary-care doctor concluded that a smashening and a bonkening were about the extent of it. He sent me in for some blood work as well, though it turned up nothing actionable. The good/bad follow-up news is that I had a full-blown episode of syncope (which is the fancy name I prefer) a month later, sitting down and playing a Rainy City game on Friday night with my friends.

It’s super-easy to focus on the mediocrity of my doctor, the crunchiness of my toe, the cavalcade of tests that annoyed me for all of March and April, etc. It’s harder but wiser to accentuate the positive instead, which requires a more significant reconfiguration of my habits of mind. For example, the two episodes yielded relatively injury, which tends to be the most significant side effect of the whole business. Better still, the process of diagnosis yielded a benign outcome and an excellent new cardiologist. I went into my follow-up meeting with him to analyze my test results, though they seemed to me conclusive, and he sent me back into the wild with solid recommendations and answers to all my questions about managing the whole deal.

The trick is to recall that mode of conceiving of things and to persist in it, to keep redirecting my noggin whenever is starts heading down Dejection Street. With the new cardiologist’s advice in my pocket I returned to the gym this week, for example, and I was disheartened for a bit by the retirement of the old stair climber I’ve used most every summer. I freely concede it was old and due to be sent to the auction block, but it was still a bit of a letdown. But I can still go to the gym without restriction–save to be mindful of all the run-up symptoms that prefigure a spill. I normally focus on losing weight over the summer, but I can always work on building muscle instead. And I’ve got a pretty open summer in which to work it all out, with exercise in the morning and writing in the afternoons. It’s an enviable schedule, though my mind is natively wired to think about how much printing and shipping hard copies of Chancers is going to cost, about how I’m going to fill in the last few blanks I’ve got in the artwork column, etc. When my brain sets out in those directions, it generally takes an act of will to turn down a side corridor or to turn entirely around.

I think it’s something of a byproduct of our doomscrolling debauchery, since its easy to get caught up in the latest revolution in sociopolitical strangeness and dwell on it all the livelong day. But going against the grain of that tendency can feel a lot like optimism. A good example occurred last evening, when a scene in a show I was watching put me in mind of some new sociopolitical thing I’d encountered earlier in the day. Rather than revisiting it and fretting about it, however, I instead asked myself why I ought to bother and then spent fifteen minutes or so challenging my own penchant for such nonsense. I’m plenty informed, so the need to gather more info about some troublesome subject is small, and in a rare turn I managed to talk myself out of a deep dive into arbitrary woe. I won’t say I’ve logged enough practice to do it on a regular basis, but I can say I’m getting into the habit of practicing. And that, when you’re as well-versed in the ways of woe as I generally am, is a heckuva thing to carry into the summer months.

A 5/17 addendum:

A decent case in point: a storm rolled through late on the 15th, and we lost electricity in our neighborhood thanks to a power line downed by a fallen tree. When all is said and done we probably tossed out about $250 in groceries this morning. But they’ll be easy enough to replace, none of the trees I fret about fell, the outage aftermath chanced to fall on a day that was mild, weatherwise, and most of the perplexities we faced took about an hour to remedy. I am in point of fact terribly stressed by disruption, but it’s easy enough to round the corner from such episodes when you look at them rightly.

Trials, Errors

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Before I dig in, let’s take a look at this beauty:

That be the map for Chancers (by the patient and kindly Ti Munro over at Feed the Multiverse), which is still slated for a crowdfunding launch this summer. If you’d like to hop on this train, your ticket to ride is right over here.

While I’m here, let me remind you that learning is terrible. Having learned is fantastic, and makes one feel like some sort of wizard, but the process is all about confronting discomfort, ignorance, and difference and coming out the better for it. Which is at least tricksy and is often brutal. It is, of course, critically necessary stuff, and often unavoidable. And in many cases it takes a few extra errors to determine that something was not, in fact, originally an error.

Lately, for instance, I’ve been revising a novella. More news on that before long. While I hope to turn the revision around quickly and get it back into the hands of a publisher, I had to wrangle with a snag: an early reader felt that my protagonist took a little too long to get on with the business of telling their story, as he lays out the causes of his reluctance to do the telling exhaustively. It took me about four variations on condensation to determine that the original hemming and hawing was probably just the right amount. He’s presented as an inexperienced storyteller dealing with slippery personal stuff, so it seems fitting to me that he’s going to dawdle a little before getting underway. I also happen to think his dawdling is engaging, and it speaks a great deal to the place he’s writing from. So in the midst of all my concessions to the wisdom of that early reader, I have tried to explain why I stuck to my guns.

I am, as it turns out, exceedingly sensitive to wasting time. When I write out hypnosis scripts, for instance, I am terribly reluctant to commit all the preliminaries to print, even though they’re critical. The needfuls generally come in during my last drafts. But I should also acknowledge my intolerance for reading and/or watching too much of a bad thing. Even after all these years I can’t handle Miss Bates in Emma all that well (the overly talkative character with little to say will always be one of my bêtes noire), and while screening The Residence this past week I bristled at The Drunk Who Keeps Changing Their Story, a comedic type that belongs to the roster of liars in most detective fiction but is always hard to read or watch. Detective fiction presupposes some level of competence in the culprit most of the time, so when a story establishes that a character was discernibly drunk for most of the night when the crime went down, it’s hard to take the candidacy of that problem type seriously.

So part of me feels like I spent more time than necessary on those trial revisions, but at day’s end having a bit of evidence to suggest my narrator’s dawdling was sufficient but not excessive is a valuable thing. And the more mature parts of my brain understand that efforts to minimize errors of excess in the first draft tends to bog down the writing process and makes the prose much stiffer. That stiffness, too, is remediable, but it’s a hindrance in the first draft that also requires extra time spent in revision, a lose-lose proposition.

That’s where we’re at today, at any rate. With luck I’ll be able to put another chapter in the Completed Drafts folder for Chancers today, so it’s time to point my forehead in that direction before the deluge of grading arrives to end the spring semester.

The Feast of Feeling

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

One commonality at the bottom of most hegemonic structures is a love of monotony. Folks who hunger for certain forms of normativity also seem to hanker for sameness–so long as it’s the sort of uniformity that suits their existing tastes. Growth (intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and otherwise), alas, only emerges in contexts of richness and complexity. It’s the challenge, the friction, the tension that prompts us to examine our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

I’m not going to dwell on politics on this fine Sunday morning, though it might seem as if I’m trending in that direction. What’s caught my attention these days instead are two shows I’ve been binging with my fiancee: one called Alan Cummings’ Paradise Homes and another called The Restoration Man. The premise of the former is simple: Alan Cummings roams around the globe, visiting folks who think they’ve landed on their version of paradise, at least in architectural terms. And the latter is equally straightforward: a feller by the name of George Clarke visits with folks who have acquired listed (read: historic) properties in Great Britain and chronicles their efforts to turn these distinctive choices into livable homes.

The palette of Paradise Homes is not expansive–one gets the feeling, based on both geography and luxury, that paradise, at least in earthly terms, costs a bundle. What’s delightful about the show, however, is the host’s receptivity to the vagaries of experience. Cummings is a showman, first and foremost, and he’s at his merriest when he’s allowed to poke around these domestic spaces unattended. In some private moments, however, the viewer is allowed to see him wrestling with the choices the homeowners have made, many of which don’t agree with his sensibilities. He can ooh and aah at a gorgeous view with the best of them, but I enjoy watching him most when he’s faced with the minimalism of a couple that purchased a French chateau or built a big, boxy house with great views in the middle of nowhere. It feels to me like the showrunners are sending him in blind, more often than not, and while he can’t personally come around to the aesthetics he meets with, he has enough natural empathy and sensitivity to appreciate that these slices of paradise are just right for the folks who inhabit them. In some ways that feels like an enormous concession, especially in our current historical moment, when so many folks are invested in trying to order the world around their own short-sighted sensibilities.

The Restoration Man has a much broader emotional and ethical range, I’d say, perhaps because the episodes unfold over months or even years. Clarke is an affable host, and he adapts to situations as he finds them, with a wide variety of humane skills and approaches. His abilities are most vividly on display in the second and third episode, as he engages with a) a couple that spent their life savings on a church they hoped to renovate (a hope that could be utterly upended by any number of considerations) and b) a couple that bought a windmill they hope will become a home in which the wife, stricken with cancer, can convalesce.

The former finds George bewildered, as the husband of the couple, Gareth, with virtually no building experience, tries to achieve the dream while his wife cares for their kids and takes on two jobs. It’s a high-risk proposition, as the couple spent their entire nest egg on a property that (if bodies are actually buried underneath it) might not be amenable to any kind of renovation whatsoever. As their story unfolds, George has to watch as the reckless, seemingly clueless Gareth tries to renovate on the cheap, an effort that nearly costs him his marriage along the way as his exasperated, overworked wife becomes more and more isolated. He’s often bemused, but he’s always supportive, and when Gareth manages to pull the rabbit out of the hat and arrives at a solid approximation of the family dream, George is effusive in his praise.

The latter episode is considerably more taxing, as an experienced builder is faced with a renovation of a property with a curious architectural footprint and a number of situational challenges. The builder, Clive, hopes to finish the renovation as quickly as possible, but as the episode unfolds we learn he’s fighting a losing battle–his wife, Jane, suffers several reversals over the course of her treatment, and Clive spends an equal amount of time on the reno site and at home, seeing to her care and well-being. I won’t spoil the episode for you, but I will note that it ends in tears, both for Clive and for George as well, who cannot help but sympathize with a man who so earnestly and wholeheartedly pursued a dream with someone else in mind. Taken together, the two episodes reveal a wide range of responses, with George exasperated and at times troubled by Gareth and more soulfully invested in Clive’s quest.

On the whole it’s a curiously rich diversion, with a wide range of human prospects, from the dogged builder who suffers a heart attack and gets back to work perhaps too quickly, to the dreamers who spent bundles on their properties and have been worn down by the effort to gain planning permission to renovate them (the low-key villains of the series are city planners and planning committees, who are exceedingly precious about these buildings that have been neglected for decades and are falling into ruin, who are content to set hurdle after hurdle before folks who are willing to sink tens of thousand of pounds into these restoration projects). Clarke is an altogether amiable host, though it took me a little time to warm to him. In the early going he’s seemingly focused on preserving the architectural souls of these historic homes, but by the end of his encounter with Clive seems equally intent on seeing to the welfare of the intrepid homeowners.

In a world that’s currently developing programs to determine if a given reader will like a new book based on its similarity to books they’ve already enjoyed, seeing two worldly and capable gents encounter and come to terms with life in all its involved, chaotic, and even nonsensical messiness is invigorating. It’s reassuring to see sophisticated, experienced folks sift through their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs intelligently, candidly, and circumspectly and concede to the realities of these situations rather than fixate on the expectations and ambitions they’d like to impose upon them. We’re still eagerly awaiting the return of the Juniors Edition of the Great British Baking Show, but this is heartening human fare in the interim.

The Art of Failing

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Astute, even obsessive readers might realize that yesterday’s post has vanished altogether, that my musings of a dreary Thursday afternoon have been lost to the aether.

Let me be candid, friends: said musings sucked, and were largely inspired by my wish to be out of the living room and in the office, as my boo was dealing with the onset of a migraine that she thought she could avoid with a little quiet, darkness, and solitude.

There was the germ of an interesting takeaway in that post–that it’s not unwise to plan for the prospect of success now and then–but it was mired in the cobwebbery of less pointed noodling. Let us think now of a web made of noodles and move on.

One of the great gifts that comes with something like maturity is the ability to recognize when something hasn’t worked, isn’t working, or will not work. The turning of the year is a decent time to think about such matters meta-existentially, but yesterday’s writing made for a respectable specimen of a Modest Mistake.

What does one do with a Modest Mistake? In this case, deletion seemed like an ideal option. One of the perils of the modern era is the tendency to double down, to commit to errors more vehemently instead of owning up to them, dealing with them, and moving on. Doubling down is how more Major Mistakes are born in many cases.

It’s a good thing to think about as I prepare to make space for a few new shirts in my dresser and decide what I want to do with some fiction currently in circulation. Half of the Art of Failure is Letting Go, which is one of the harder things we have to do in this life. The other Half is Being Honest, which is generally a little bit harder.

In the case of the dresser, it will be a minor thing. There are tee shirts I have not worn in all of 2024, and which might in fact not even fit any longer. Weeding through them should be easy, all matters of nostalgic attachment notwithstanding. I’ll need to weed through my Fiction Submission Tracking File, too, however, which will involve a little more existential investment.

In one case, for instance, I must face the terror of Follow-Up Messages, which will oblige me to pester a couple of publishers who have held on to manuscripts for a good, long time. It’s a tricksy epistolary genre, as one tends to be about 15% politely inquiring and 85% apologetic, but it can be a needful one in terms of planning for the future.

The more fraught element of Tracking File spelunking is deciding which stories need to be rewritten and which ones might need to be retired. One story, for instance, was written specifically for an anthology focused on clowns, and the editor kindly wrote to inform me that they’d already accepted a similar story for that collection. That’s one I can file away and tinker with over time. Another story of mine called “Leavings” has a zesty cosmic horror premise, so I’ll need to stow away the idea and mull over ways I might execute it better. And a couple stories have been rejected a dozen times apiece for reasons unknown. That’s not an especially high number in the realm of writing, but it’s one that gives a critter cause for pause.

With writing, happily, one can always delete or revise. Sunk costs tend to bedevil most writers, and it’s tough to know when to give up when subjective matters of “fit” are on the table. I try not to make the same mistake too often, but Being Honest about the quality of one’s own writing involves fairly rare frames of mind. I’m not in that frame this very second, but I might be after I shower, or after I visit the grocery store.

And that’s how one attempts to remedy a bland, noodlesome blog post, at any rate. I also need to reach out to my BackerKit followers this weekend with a Chancers update as well, so let’s hope this confessional post has worked the tedium out of my system a bit.

The Arts of Work

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

The past week has been a tricksy one, in part due to the stress of the election and in part due to my boo’s pivot from Halloween mode to holiday mode, but one must trudge on nevertheless. In some ways my days have become a little simpler–I really don’t need a steady diet of lukewarm takes in my survey of the news each morning–so I’ve plunged headlong into work to keep my melon busy.

Writing is, of course, often a balm. While I was working up the History section of the core rulebook for Chancers or plotting out the beats of a short screenplay I didn’t have much brainspace for other stuff. My coping mechanisms are not the greatest, but my line of work affords me something like consolation or even comfort more often than not.

The catch, alas, is that the heartline of my vocation is seeing to the needs of my students, many of whom are understandably apprehensive about the implications of the election. I have about a half dozen transgender students in my classes this term, all of whom were keenly aware of the ways in which the President-elect’s campaign leaned heavily on anti-transgender messaging in its closing days, and I have a goodly number of young women who’ve found themselves bombarded with some appalling misogynistic messaging of late in public forums.

My critical focus in English Studies is narrative ethics, which yields equivocal comforts at best. At one level there are existing tools for shaming and shunning bad actors at the localized level, which often makes for a strong if limited proof of the power of consequential ethics, but virtue and deontological ethics are a train wreck these days.

I’m inclined toward the ethics of care, which comes with a host of complications all its own. I think it’s a first resort for many folks, as we can seek out the solace of our friends and loved ones to take some initial steps toward recuperation, but it also reminds me of my own limits, given my subject position and limited abilities as a prospective caregiver.

I feel like I can offer a bit of support in terms of my own cranial health, which is a dicey star to steer by. In the suspenseful run-up to the election I spent a great deal of time using brainwave entrainment sessions to keep myself more or less mellow–which takes some doing on under the best of circumstances. I’d like to think some folks would benefit from that practice as well, so here it be.

My entrainment tech is pretty fancy, but I know folks in the hypnosis community who lean heavily on binaural beats to approximate the effects I’m after. All I do is set my device for a descent into theta waves and fix in my memory a simple three-word mantra that describes how I’d like my brain to be. As I run the program I keep repeating the words or phrase I want to stick; one of the fascinating phenomena of the process is hearing my own inner voice fade out and fade back in. Spotify and YouTube both have pretty sizable arrays of theta wave entrainment files, some of which span 10-12 hours. I experience good effects from a couple repetitions of 30-minute files, so perhaps the folk out there who could use a little relief will find the prospect and a date with their earbuds worth a go.

A Quantum of Care

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Today is off to a rollicking start. I woke around 5:00, sipped my caffeinated pre-workout drink for 45 minutes, got showered and dressed, and headed in to the gym promptly at 7:00, only to learn that the activity center is on its late-start schedule. And lo! upon returning home I learned that our Fall Wellness Break (which I normally imagine as a single Monday off, a long weekend meant to sort out some imbalance in the Monday/Wednesday and Tuesday/Thursday class calendar) actually includes today as well. So I’m either going to make excellent use of this day off to work on Chancers like a rabid bandicoot, or I’m going to fritter the day away like an irresponsible lout.

The good news for me is that I mapped out a lesson plan for the day already, so I can just slide it over to Thursday and create a little extra leisure time for myself. The plan involves an extended meditation on the ethics of care in light of Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, though I’m going to need to backtrack a little bit to lay the groundwork for Olde Skool Ethics as well. This intersects with Chancers as well, so the tributaries ought to converge nicely in the Big River of Wandlessian philosophy. But let’s not get too far ahead of things because it’s a Zany Day Off.

In some ways I suspect that the ethics of care would gain more traction if folks didn’t so often stumble at the first step – attentiveness. It’s not colossal in the abstract, just a bit of preliminary recognition en route to response, but for many folks it’s A Whole Thing. It involves paying enough attention to catch what’s important to various folks in our wee spheres of activity and (and this is often the catch) remembering what it was we attended to. And memory tends to be chancy, inflected with all sorts of strangeness. Until we’ve burned a pattern in, it involves fresh acts of processing that we have to bring to bear on our thoughts and behavior time after time.

Three quick examples. When I first learned hypnosis, much of that education involved small gestural indications of suggestibility. Much of the language comes across as a simple formulation. “Can you imagine that?” or “Could you do that for me?”, and the hypnotist normally asks the hypnotee for some visible confirmation, often a smile. Out in the world, however, it doesn’t take long for most folks to recognize that a bit of sexism can affect that response set (as in “You’d be prettier if you smiled more,” which is something women hear on the semi-regular). So remembering to switch to nodding for confirmation that some direction has been heard and accepted in a hypnosis session can be huge.

The same premise also applies to names, deadnames, and pronouns, which can be colossal for how people conceive of themselves. One of my many intellectual defects is context-specific thinking, which generally means I’ll remember the most important details automatically in my usual spheres of operation but struggle with them in the wild. (Pronouns are seldom a stumbling block for most folks, since we seldom speak to others in the third person and can lean on I and You, but chosen names can be.) I ran into one of my transgender student at the pharmacy last week, for example, and I happily have several transgender and gender-fluid students in my classes this fall. For that reason it took me a moment to dredge up Casey’s name, though on campus, especially given the persistence of seating patterns, the act comes naturally. For me it’s a tiny thing, but for folks in the throes of identity work, it can be major. Every now and again I’ll come across a young man with what was once a gender-neutral name (a Leslie, a Robin, a Sidney), and in class they’ll often go by their middle names. Remembering it and using it in public contexts can be a crucial kind of affirmation for them, though I’m burning a brain cell to do it.

And that leads me to spooky season, which involves a generalized kind of memory. Part of it comes from the world of memes, which annually remind us that not every child comes equipped with the verbal, motor, or social skills to do Halloween in the traditional way. When the season rolls around I try to retrieve the memories that respond to that knowledge. In addition to candy we usually try to get treats with various tactile qualities here at the Abbey (gummy erasers, or sticky hands, or fuzzy little critters), and among them we’ll normally have some popular past favorites (fidget spinners and self-stimming bits go over very well, as it turns out). It’s only memory I have to call up once a year, though I know for some kids it might mean a lot more than it does to me. This fall I purposely/accidentally got a lot more Halloween loot than I intended, but it tends to keep well, and lord knows we’ve got plenty of hidey-holes here at Wrackwell.

The real trick of the day will likely involve pumpkin management. We’re not mad for pumpkins here, but my boo does love to have them around, especially as a kind of enrichment for her adoptive squirrels. The catch, alas, is that I want to make sure we have them on hand but don’t want to intrude on her quest to pick the perfect pumpkin. We’ll see how well I manage that balancing act in the next episode of Bill Tries to Do a Thing! In the meantime, however, let’s get back to building the Reputation chart for Chancers.

The Dopamine Design

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

At times it’s helpful to remember that the mind is an incredibly sophisticated instrument that routinely falls for simple tricks. Neuroscience bears the point out more often than not.

Though I am a certified hypnotist, I am garbage at self-hypnosis. I am, however, perfectly capable of tricking myself by capitalizing on the gullibility of my inner jackass.

To wit, let’s take this summer’s weight loss plan, which had both salutary and cosmetic ambitions rolled into it. I started tracking my exercise and caloric intake in a document called Summer 2024 Fitness Plan, and it worked fairly well, especially in term of diagnosing patterns I am prone to. Most weeks I start out strong, but by Friday I am overtired and binge on snacks at game night. For most of September, however, I’ve fallen prey to a two-up/two-down pattern, regaining a couple pounds, losing them again, etc., which is a classic plateau pattern. While I lost 25 pounds all told, I’d like to lose another 25. So I needed a way to press past the current sticking point.

The trick, as it turns out? Filing away Summer 2024 Fitness Plan and creating a new document. That little trick has been aided and abetted by another layer of change. After losing 25 pounds, I realized my jeans no longer fit especially well. I ordered new jeans in a smaller waist size but, thanks to the competence for which Levi’s sales fulfillment is known, I received only one of four new pairs of jeans after a month-long wait. My monkey brain decided that my waist size must be the right size for the moment, given my continued commitment to my older jeans, which I think contributed to the plateau. I tightened my old belt to the seventh notch and settled into the fall semester with fairly baggy pants.

The trick for getting around that cognitive roadblock? Buying a new belt. In the new belt I find myself gradually shrinking, going from the second notch to the point at which the fourth is in reach in the span of about two weeks. It’s the sort of thing that can make me feel foolish if I think about it the wrong way.

I’ve been keeping that in mind in terms of plotting out my day-to-day agenda and designing Chancers (which, as always, can be found over here). In terms of my agenda, I try to map out only those tasks that will give me a wee jolt of dopamine to complete–tasks that are not routine or ongoing. Significantly, I know I must list them out in advance. While crossing out a completed task is satisfying, my monkey brain is not so simian as to be fooled by adding an item only to cross it off. Yesterday I submitted three stories for publication, which had been haunting my to-do list for a month, and I drafted a letter of recommendation for a student, which was an item added only last Wednesday. Crossing those items off my list gave me a wee dose of dopamine, but adding “Write the Chair about the Thing” only to cross it off an hour later was not enough to deceive me into feeling good.

I’ve been thinking out this particularly in terms of game design, given the tension I’m experiencing with two games these days. One is an ongoing phone game I play with my fiancee, and evidence that the game has begun to circle the drain is pretty compelling. It’s a puzzle-solving game, nothing too special, all told, but they’ve recently started making the puzzles purposely harder to solve in order to prompt players to spend a little money for extra moves and tools in order to get the dopamine payoff. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the Reddit board dedicated to the game is currently inundated with complaints about the dwindling player base.

On the other side of the continuum we have Elden Ring, which is the gold standard for dopamine dispensation in a dozen ways. We begin with the game’s notorious difficulty, which means that players can get a goodly dose of dopamine by defeating a significant boss monster. Additionally, there are routine rewards offered for casual success–runes, primarily, but also the chance to access new areas. Some of the rewards are predictable, with many significant enemies guaranteeing the player access to powerful rewards at the safe haven of the game, but the game also offers scads of random rewards, some with minuscule drop rates as low as .50%. I have played the game through multiple times, but it’s become a comfort game, since I know an hour spent with it will likely yield some new discovery or reward for decent play. I’m doing my best to implement the same design principle in Chancers, so that players have a bunch of different kinds of incentives to set out on adventures and take meaningful risks.

Today, alas, involves some drudgery, since I have to complete a couple of routine tasks to set me up to succeed tomorrow and Thursday, which will involve appointments with my doctor and my dentist for negligible bits of business (a follow-up on late summer bloodwork and a cleaning). I’m none too enthused about either prospect, but you can bet I’ll be glad to check them off my list as we head toward September’s end.

Vibe Chex

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

We just fired up the fall semester here at CMU, so we’re in that segment of the term when students and professors alike try to get a feel for their classes. Those vibes, however, are incredibly elusive in the first few days, as we’re all trying to get our sea legs.

One of the reasons I’m terribly fond of teaching textual and rhetorical analysis is that vibes can make for fairly reliable guides. As a genre, rhetorical analysis generally assumes that we are eminently rational creatures and think our way through every case logically, but most of us start with how things feel and then work our way toward articulating our thoughts about a thing. It can be a kind of deceptive, self-reflexive sort of processing, but it’s illuminating nevertheless.

Tuesday nights are Horror Movie Nights here at the Abbey, as my fiancee heads out to spend time with her friends and I’m left to amuse myself with a Panera salad and some delicacy that Shudder has on offer. Last night I double dipped, starting with I Am Lisa and then moving over to Black Friday to cap off the evening. In I Am Lisa, the vibes felt a bit off, so I fast-forwarded through a bunch of atmospheric aerial shots (one even-handed critique of the movie I might offer is that it felt a little padded, like content had been stretched here and there to reach an attractive runtime). The film is founded in a broad tropic pattern I tend to enjoy–the revenge flick in which the victims get what they deserve–so I was favorably disposed toward the movie from the preview. Alas, the vibes were off, and it took me a little processing time to reason my way toward that feeling.

The genre tends to have catharsis built in, so I often think of it as a lay-up. The screenplay I’ve been chipping away at for the past few months shares some of the same DNA. The catch with Lisa, however, is that the protagonist and her allies experience qualms about the revenge process that feel out of keeping with the spirit of the plot. In short, Lisa (and by implication, her family) is horribly wronged by a corrupt sheriff and her equally corrupt family; the sheriff’s daughter is a small-town drug dealer and a bully, and her son is the deputy and a bully himself. We get a clear sense that a pattern of obvious corruption has long been established and accepted in this little community; when Lisa falls prey to the sheriff and her friends, we start hankering for overdue retribution.

The movie, however, never seems to commit fully to letting the viewer enjoy it. Lisa is beaten, bloodied, and literally hauled out into the woods to be left for the wolves. Because genre, however, she manages to fend off a special sort of wolf before being rescued by a friendly woman who happens to be the sheriff’s sister–who susses out pretty quickly what happened to Lisa. At that point our feelings are already aligned; we know what we want to happen, and we kind of want to enjoy the justice of it. But Lisa and her bestie instead wrestle in very human ways with their ethical reservations about revenge. The patterning is reasonable–her vengeance plays out in about the order we’d expect, with the sheriff saved for last–and there are hints that the writer and director get it. Lisa, for example, defers her vengeance on the sheriff’s daughter, who catalyzed all the events in the film, because she’s in a drugged stupor and would not be able to appreciate what was happening to her. What eventually becomes of the sheriff is fitting but not quite satisfying. Lisa overplays her hand and winds up being an accomplice to the sheriff’s demise rather than the prime mover. We get what we want at the level of plot, but the vibes aren’t entirely satisfying. It’s not quite cathartic.

Black Friday is something of a puzzle, but it seems to know the overall vibe it’s after and eventually get there. In some ways it’s a riff on Slither, an alien zombie invasion coinciding with a Black Friday sale at a toy store. The cast includes horror heavyweights Bruce Campbell and Devon Sawa, both of whom turn in winning performances, and the supporting cast is better than serviceable. The zombie content is fine fun, with good special effects and brisk pacing, but right in the middle of the movie there’s a pause that calls into question a great deal of the surrounding activity. Campbell, as the regional manager, makes clear that he loves his job largely because of the feeling of consequence it affords him. One of the newer employees, Chris, is finally able to unload on the store manager and his colleagues in a fairly sustained critique of corporate culture. Special invective, however, is slung at Sawa, who plays Ken, the coolest guy in the store and the devoted father of two cute kids introduced at the start of the film–his motive for trying desperately to survive the zombie attack, unsurprisingly. At the end of the midsection Sawa gets leveled: Chris mocks him for his seeming commitment to being the coolest guy, the woman he apparently flirts with, Marnie, admits she doesn’t know him well enough to take his flirtation seriously, and even his commitment to his daughters is put under the microscope–as if Ken has some special claim to survival that the others don’t have. The idea of coworkers as family is detonated, and we had into the culmination of the zombie attack with a much clearer sense of what we want–the just victimization of the managerial set, the escape of Marnie (who the workers generally agree is too kindly for the store, and for whom the viewer receives enough evidence to arrive at the same judgment), and the redemption of Ken, who seemingly suffers a zombie bite and opts to fend for himself while his coworkers escape. The tone of the movie is nicely balanced, in that the ironic/comedic beats never undercut the imminent threat posed by the alien zombie horde. And we eventually get what we want and a hasty conclusion thereafter.

I generally start any given semester with a good feeling about how my classes are going to go, well before the classroom dynamics actually emerge. The semester feels really promising in prospect, with a goodly gaggle of new and familiar faces as well as an ongoing project, Chancers, to keep me reliably busy all term, so part of my job is to bring that vibe with me to the classroom and sustain it as well as I can.

The Fibber’s Club

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Taking a wee break from work this morning to reflect on, well, work.

One of the fascinating dynamics that invariably emerges in writing fiction is the sense that some events and behaviors–all of them squarely in the Land of Make-Believe, mind you–will feel untrue. It’s not just a question of representational verisimilitude, it’s a question of epistemology, of thinking about what we believe and why we believe it.

I am deep in the woods in the revision of my novel manuscript. I went over it once not long after it was drafted, and this summer, having identified a dreamy prospective publisher, I decided to go over it again. I finished a full revision of the text just a couple days ago, and it occurred to me that only one element was awry. Without getting too spoilery or gory, let’s say I needed to be more explicit about what happened to a particular corpse, which had vanished from the site of its corpsification.

Normally I wouldn’t reckon that detail as an especially big deal; it’s the sort of blank any reader might reasonably fill in. But in this case the detail, as I’d first rendered it, involved an untruth–not just a bit of deception, but an outright lie. And that character, in the relationship as I envision and depict it, would simply not lie to the person she lied to.

So today and tomorrow, rather than writing the synopsis I’ll need to send the piece off to my dream publisher, I’m going to go to need to go back over about 300 pages of prose to make sure every instance when that subject comes up aligns with a more truthful reckoning of the event.

It’s a pain in the butt, but it’s also, I think, as sign that I’m approaching the narrative properly. There are plenty of games one has to play in fiction, when secrets, deception, and lies are all human behaviors on the exam table, but by story’s end, readers need to come away with the feeling that the writer has played the games fairly.

I know the two primary areas I’ll need to address–two accounts of the same event by different characters–but revisiting the story as a whole will give me a little more peace of mind. (This morning I recalled, for example, a minor timeline discrepancy that will need to be sorted along the way.) It’s hard not to be obsessive about the little things this late in the game. As a reader I like the experience to be immersive, with no disruptions to break the spell of a story, so going a few extra miles to make sure the reader stays within the fiction. seems like a very small price to pay for a story I love.