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.

On Squirreling

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Today I’m trying to get into the summer closeout rhythm, which is always a challenge given the overall jankiness of life. It’s been a solid summer on several fronts, and the past week has been especially lovely because a) I finalized arrangements for the cover of the game I’m writing to crowdfund next year, b) I received page proofs for “Tiny,” a short story that will soon appear in NewMyths, and c) I defeated the final boss in Shadow of the Erdtree, which made for a pretty intense gaming experience.

Seriously, though, just look at this beauty:

I’ll surely have a superpro graphic artist fiddle with the text, but the art is just what I’d hoped for when I commissioned André Simões, who is an absolute delight to work with.

That’s part of the challenge of summering, however–progress comes intermittently, and the writing life in general involves planting many seeds that take a long time to sprout. Chancers will be ready to crowdfund in the summer of 2025, but until then the folks at Backerkit will be periodically nudging me to build up my mailing list, which of course is not really in my control. All I can do is post the link to my peeps and hope that they’ll repost it to get it in front of more eyes. I’m working on revising my first novel, The Patch, which has taken/will take a couple of months. I intend to touch up a manuscript that has already been out in the world, a novella called The Shack, and I still need to draft another novella and hammer out the narrative logic of another novel project. This all assumes that I’m well behaved and a) don’t find myself inspired and enchanted by an editorial call for short story submissions, and b) don’t get swept up in some of the nonsense that academic flesh is heir to. Today’s tweak of the nose cone comes courtesy of yet another university asking me to do a bit of free work, evaluating the research portfolio of a professor at their school going up for promotion. For the low, low price of several hours of summer work I can add a sentence to my CV when it comes time to submit my own application for promotion a couple years down the road.

But what brings me here today are the two syllabi I’m working up for special topics courses down the road, one on romance fiction and one on fanfiction. I’m going against the grain of our recent attempts to recruit folks to our classes and the major, as we’ve spent a couple of years devising classes (Literature and Science, The Literary Interpretation of Sport) to appeal to one-and-done students who use our basic classes to check off a requirement and never set foot in an English classroom again. My preference is to try to catch the eye of folks who are already habitual readers and see if one glimpse of what our major has to offer will invite another. If all goes well, our special topics classes now (slotted in at the 300 level for the first go-round) will become 100- and 200-level intro courses a little ways down the road.

The catch, alas, is that the courses I’m pitching can be offered in 2026-27 at the earliest, since we’ve already got some folks hopping on the special topics train next year and the year after. Life these days is replete with such wanton acts of squirreling: planting acorns here and there, forgetting that I did, and seeing them sprout a long ways down the road.

Engineering Ecstasies

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Like most red-blooded oversized ogrefolk, I spend a great deal of time thinking about Bridgerton. Not long ago I paid homage to the very fine writing of the recent revision of Planet of the Apes, and today I’ll offer my regards to the excellent writing bullpen of Bridgerton, especially Geetika Tandon Lizardi and Daniel Robinson, who were entrusted with bringing it all home this season.

Spoilers will follow, so avert your eyes, dear reader, if you would like an unsullied viewing experience.

I won’t dwell on the whole of the current season overmuch. Suffice it to say that the first four-episode segment delivers on some of the critical preliminaries. Our heroine, Penelope Featherington, has all but given up on landing her longtime friend/infatuation, Colin Bridgerton, following an insult she overheard at the end of the prior season. In response, however, she decides to engage with the marriage market earnestly, giving herself a makeover funded in part by the monies she’s earned as the obscenely popular Lady Whistledown.

Penelope confronts Colin with the stinging remarks she overheard, and he apologizes and offers to help her negotiate the market to find a suitable match. We get a glimpse of his sincere regret–a precondition of all that follows–and a gradual elaboration of his increasing regard for her. By the end of the first four episodes she’s entertained and rejected an excellent offer of marriage from Lord Debling. The cleverness of the situation is threefold. At one level it reveals the attractiveness of Penelope, which even the folly of Eloise (who revealed her odd arrangement with Colin to Cressida Cowper, the season’s second-place villain) can’t mess up. It introduces Lord Debling as a genuine prospect, a decent man who really sees Penelope and holds her in high regard, but who also comes with an unusual period defect (he’s a natural philosopher who won’t often be around for Penelope if they wed). And it allows Penelope to confess that someone else holds a place in her heart. And what’s key here is that we, as the reader, love Penelope enough to want what she wants, even though we know Colin, the man she would choose, can be kind of a knucklehead. He’s been on the Grand Tour of the Continent, however, and thinks himself pretty worldly. The first segment ends with Colin all but foisting a marriage offer on Penelope, which she happily accepts after a steamy encounter in a carriage. All seems to be well.

But hovering over it all is Penelope’s secret: that she has been Lady Whistledown all along, an author who has sometimes written teasingly (but always tactfully) of the Bridgerton family. Colin makes it clear that he hates this Whistledown character, and he looks forward to seeing her exposed and disgraced.

The first two episodes of the second segment circle around the issue, with Eloise in particular insisting that Penelope reveal her secret to Colin before they wed. Penelope tries her best, but circumstances intervene again and again, right up until Eloise gives Penelope a midnight deadline to come clean. (For those not in the know, the chief sticking point in this situation is that Penelope was obliged to spill some honest gossip about Eloise, noting that she was spending a little unseemly time in the business district, though in truth she was trying her best to put Queen Charlotte, who suspected Eloise of being Whistledown, off the scent.)

And the Queen emerges as the primary villain in the second half. Though we’ve been given a prequel miniseries to make her seem sympathetic, in Season Three we see her bored and petulant, angry that she hasn’t been able to identify Whistledown so far and that her newly anointed “diamond” bachelorette, Francesca Bridgerton, does not seem at all interested in the vapid marquess she’s picked out for her. (She prefers a fellow named John Stirling, even though he’s not prone to the dramatic course of courtship the Bridgertons usually follow.) Confronted with the insuperable problem of Lady Whistledown, she throws money at it–she promises £5000 (about $100,000 in modern dollars) to whoever reveals the secret to her.

So we’re in a pickle, but one that the mores of the time easily accommodates. Colin, having made the offer of marriage (and having engaged in sexytimes with Penelope) considers it his duty to follow through as a man of honor, even though he’s angry about Penelope’s double identity. Penelope, alas, exposes her secret by rushing to the press to send out a new edition of Lady Whistledown’s hottest gossip. The poor timing, however, is an issue forced by Cressida, who confessed that she was Lady Whistledown in order to avoid a horrid arranged marriage to the repellent Lord Toolbox. She writes a hasty column because she knows that Cressida will be forced to publish her own as proof that she deserves the £5000 bounty, and both she and Eloise (whose cold shoulder has begun to thaw) realize that Cressida-as-Whistledown could do a lot of damage.

The plotting on the whole is pretty complex and neatly managed, but what impresses most about the close of the season is the stretch I like to call the Shondaland Showcase, which involves a set of conventions that ends most seasons of the show. In the Showcase each of the featured players is given a chance to shine, to show themselves off in their most authentic light. It’s a tricksy bit of narrative engineering, in that (per the romance genre) the writers have to know what they can withhold till the end. A good example is the sincerity of Colin’s love. Penelope’s mother, Lady Featherington, asks Penelope if Colin actually said he loved her, and she is thunderstruck, because at that point he hadn’t. About two scenes later, however, he owns up to that love fully–tells her he loves her as a dear friend, as a delightful mind, and as a superhot sex bomb. Deferring that admission for a full four episodes would be a bridge too far, so the writers give us what we need and then add the complication of Penelope’s secret.

In the showcase, however, we get what we want to hear beautifully expressed. Penelope’s mother admits that she neglected Penelope for too long, and that she always wanted her daughters to fare better than she did. Penelope, in marrying a Bridgerton that she dearly loves, is the first of her three daughters to fulfill that wish. Queen Charlotte barges in to the marriage morning breakfast of Penelope and Colin like the Kool-Aid man, sending everyone home and insisting that she’s nearly figured out who Whistledown is because the issue defending the Bridgerton family was so neatly timed. (Cressida, helped by her mom, indeed produced an issue, but it featured nothing but the toxic “I’m just asking questions” rhetoric we’ve all come to identify with bad actors. Cressida wonder aloud why the engagements of the Bridgertons were so short, suggesting that they might just be a bunch of trollops. Compared to Penelope’s edition, which was quite gentle to Cressida, it was instantly recognized as a fake.)

Along the way Cressida tries to blackmail Penelope with the threat of revealing her secret, demanding twice the Queen’s bounty. Colin, being Manful McManley, tries to talk sense to her but botches the effort; she demands a full £20,000 to keep the secret. But Penelope has already written Lady Bridgerton and the Queen with her confession, and she promises the Queen a full explanation for her to judge at the ball her sisters are throwing (and which Penelope has secretly funded with her Whistledown earnings). Penelope delivers her speech, and the Queen (via several reaction shots) is duly swayed. It’s a brilliantly-staged set piece, made up primarily of truths about a woman’s situation in society and a promise to write even more responsibly. Colin (who in a prior scene all but pounced on Penelope in public despite refusing to sleep with her on their wedding night and the night after) recognizes and admits that he loves all aspects of Penelope, even the Whistledown thing, and not just because the Queen has all but insisted that she keep writing. So we get what we want, which is simply what Penelope wants, and we get to see her more beautiful and brave than ever.

Even John Stirling gets his own moments in the showcase, first dancing with Francesca at the wedding breakfast to help countenance Penelope’s choice to do so and to prove to Francesca that he can do the unexpected) and later delivering a toast to the whole Bridgerton family, which has accepted him despite his cold brew mode of courtship, so unlike the hot and frothy Bridgerton standard.

The MVPs of the season are, to my thinking, Eloise Bridgerton, who has to subdue her usual sparkle in order to play the devoted daughter and aggrieved friend from whom Penelope kept her secret. For us to be happy with the Showcase we need to see her and Penelope reconciled, and we finally get that reconciliation at the eleventh hour. And Lady Danbury, who scores a rare romance hat trick by a) reconciling with her brother; b) allowing him to pitch woo to Lady Bridgerton, her bestie; and c) by gently prodding the Queen, wondering if she has any plan for what she’ll do after Whistledown is exposed, wondering how she’ll live without all the town gossip Whistledown provides. And of course Penelope, who hits all the notes in her transformation over the course of the season. She was always charming and lovely, but we get to see her ravishing, despondent, and fearless as well, running us through the full array of emotions that come with the travails of the romance heroine.

And the writers stick the landing, not only teaching us what to want but delivering what we want in precisely the way we want it.

Remnants and Residue

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

This week, in addition to another sizable project I plan to tackle, I intend to write a short historical preface to introduce the Drifting Kingdoms, the setting for my game Chancers. It’s a tricksy kind of writing, in that it can quickly become labored, dense, and stale. Because it will inform play directly and indirectly, however, I need to get at least the basics down on paper.

In broad terms, there’s not much to it. There is an Old World era, which shares much with our common property Classical mythology of Greece and Rome. I can shorthand much of what that world looked like, since folks who play high fantasy games will have at least some of that content in their brainpans. I’m less interested in the big-picture efforts to make sense of the world (in the way that a Poseidon embodies fears about capricious oceans, for example); I just want to get down some sense of how those premises operated at the human level.

Recorded history in Chancers begins with a figure named Hereson who was, to his own thinking, a pretty dang important feller. He rose to become king of the main island in the game world, and he felt that many of his doings and decisions deserved recording. That chronicle, of course, is a partial, biased one, and it’s one that will become more and more pressurized in the rule of his heirs. There’s also a prophecy in the mix–belief that, if the line of succession lasted long enough, his progeny would rule and be remembered forever. But when the game begins his line has effectively ended, and a new line of rulers, the Orians, have replaced the Sonians. They’ve ruled for about sixty years and made plenty of changes, devising some new things, preserving some old things, and repairing much of the damage Hereson caused.

As you can see, there’s not much to the skeleton of it. I’ve got a wee bible of names to mix in, a few events sketched out, and some bits and bobs that will add color to it all. The most important thing is to pin down for players and GMs why the chancers themselves–practitioners of chancing magic–were persecuted by Hereson and his line for about 250 years. And why those chancers saw fit to bail on the Kingdoms near the end of Hereson’s life, severing the game world from everything else through the power of their magic.

In my mind the whole shebang will take about 3-4 pages of the core book, but I think it’s important to keep in mind the game within a game that most designers and writers are playing–a game players themselves are encouraged to play, too. Christian Donlan remarked on this phenomenon just the other day, reflecting on From Software and Shadow of the Erdtree. He offers a pretty vivid discussion of the piecemeal and partial experience of history we all have, which in Elden Ring is an elaborate bit of business.

As I’ve mentioned before, the outlook of Chancers is positive, optimistic, hopepunk. That means players will arrive in a world that’s functional, that isn’t in the midst of some ongoing dystopian calamity. (But there will be low-key evidence of past tribulations just about everywhere.) I’ve noticed that in most games of that grimdark nature questions about what players actually want are tabled. They can fight against injustice in limited ways, strive, and survive–they might even amass a little power of their own with which to resist the sordid prevailing order of things–but not much thought or time goes into realizing ambitions beyond that. Is there villainy in the Drifting Kingdoms? You betcha. But it’s not of a systemic, institutional kind, not a foregone conclusion, nor is it presented to players as a totalizing vision of violence. Think of the Daleks in Doctor Who, the Borg in Star Trek, or Zod in Superman; once you have those cards on the table, the kinds of stories you can tell are at least circumscribed, if not overdetermined. Hereson was maybe that kind of king, but Chancers plays out what happens when people have a chance to build stuff (or try to) instead of trying to keep it all from being razed to the ground.

In some ways the prospect is daunting, as murder is a time-honored mode of everyday problem-solving in many fantasy games. I’m not sure how folks are going to respond to a game world where they can think about a future that involves more than fending off death one day at a time, where the game within a game is tracking rations and water. I’d like to think, however, that there are gamers out there looking for precisely that kind of design. With a little luck they’ll give Chancers a look.