It Is Time!

Well kids, tonight at 12:00, NaNoWriMo 2006 begins, and for the first time in my life, I'm actually going to finish a novel I start.

I've spent the last few days mopping up first drafts of a bunch of short stories that were in mid-completion, and sent out a few final drafts to some niche magazines. I've drawn up a general outline, and worked on some character breakdowns. I've told my girlfriend that I may mysteriously vanish for long periods of time, and talk about people that don't exist.

As for the novel itself... It begins with a base of Blackwood, combined with generous portions of Barker, garnished with some dashes of King and Gaiman for that extra nostalgic, heartfelt flavor.

Obviously, updates here will be more spotty than usual, but at the end of the month I'll probably be sending around free PDFs of the book, which will hopefully be worth reading. I'll also be posting excerpts throughout the month, so please check out my profile on the NaNoWriMo site. Best wishes to any of you who are also participating; add me as a writing buddy and we'll encourage each other. As for the uncreative louts, I'll see you in a month!

Pacing Quandaries

This month's issue of The New Yorker features an article about a man who needs no introduction: Charles Darwin. Of course, these days it's a breath of fresh air to read anything about the man that isn't tinged with the sour taste of the scool board debates, so I plunged in eagerly.

The interesting thing about this article, though, is that it deals only nominally with Darwin's scientific achievements, and instead focuses on the man as an author. The writer Adam Gopnik describes the major plot arcs developed throughout The Origin of Species, and describes with obviously loving care the deliberate specificity with which Darwin builds to a climax as earth-shaking and original as any in fiction.

On to The Descent of Man, where Gopnik lauds Darwin's restraint in filling page after page with seemingly unconnected data- everything from the sizes of elephants' tusks to the mating rituals of birds-before dropping on us his infamous conclusion:

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

Of course, all these chapters of meticulously-researched lab data add up to a climax that emerged out of the woodwork, almost while the reader wasn't looking. "Look! Up in that tree! It's your great-grandfather!" All along the ride we've been with him, until at last we arrive at the destination and realize we aren't so sure about staying there. Do I even need to specify which Lovecraft quote applies here? I believe I will:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Though Darwin would probably disagree with the final clause there, the conclusion remains a valid one: when a man ventures beyond the veils to which he's grown accustomed, what he finds outside will, like the haunted Scottish mountain Ben MacDhui, either drive him insane or turn him into a brilliant writer. Luckily, we've had some truly excellent examples of the latter in the past two centuries.

Thus far, we're all in agreement; Darwin was a surprisingly talented sculptor of plot and revelation, which we'd never much considered before. The article took on a further dimension, however, when I realized what Gopnik seemed to be implying: that slow builds and miniscule facts, accumulated over vast lengths of pages, are a major factor in the quality of a piece of literature.

This was soon confirmed by his praise of Elliot and Trollope, in which he emphasizes both authors' talents for causing us to focus on the minutae of their worlds, to dwell in the "small pastures" and "cozy kennels" for innumerable chapters, until at last we are granted the boon of insight into the story, and perhaps a surprising twist on occasion.

Last I checked, these were all hallmarks of the realist and naturalist movements, and their related trends in 19th century literature, including the dreaded three-volume novel. As Clive Barker said in this marvelous impromptu speech, those trends, so highly venerated today, are little more than a hiccup in the timeline of all literature in history.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not lobbying for two-hundred-page breakneck adventure novels to supplant Dickens and Tolstoy. Just remember that a great deal of the raw power of Lovecraft, Bloch, and their ilk lies in the unrelenting constancy with which they pour in the unsettling, the shocking, and at last, the revelatory.

Hence the title of this article: there are a great many 19th century authors whose work I truly value, and I understand the dramatic force that can be generated by the gradual unfolding of a tale. I also own a great many books of weird tales that are special to me because of their efficiency and baldness in revealing their secrets.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that if you're writing to prove a point, as Darwin was, steady accumulation of evidence is likely the best way to go about it. For my money, though, I'll take rocketing flights of bizarre imagery over a chapter on the consistency of soup any day.

I'm An Expert!

At least, according to EZineArticles.com, that is:



Under the encouragement of a reader/fellow blogger named Cornealius, I submitted four of my best articles to that site, and now hopefully I'll be featured on a few more blogs in need of good writers.

In other news, is everyone getting ready for NaNoWriMo? I'm still trying to develop a concept; I ought to get on that, since there are only two weeks left!

Me in 2004

Shameless plug for no discernable reason: I accidentally signed into my old blog the other day, and started reading a few of the posts, which I remembered having a hilarious time writing (it was ostensibly a comedy blog, in the vein of SomethingAwful). As a matter of fact, I once had yet another, even earlier blog, which I started in 2001, but even I'm not so desperate for attention that I'll inflict that on you.

To my surprise, I discovered the seeds of a lot of my current beliefs and practices between the lines in a huge number of posts. This post dovetails into my soon-to-emerge obsession with nihilistic horror writing, while this one showcases my first tentative stabs at an anti-religion stance, coming straight out of a religious university. I also seemed head-over-heels in love with my new girlfriend (currently of over two years), but in that nonchalant "I'm not committing to anything yet" manner of a brash man-of-the-world.

Well, now I feel overwhelmingly self-indulgent, but if that isn't the point of a blog, what is? Blogger long ago took down all of my old blog's images, but the essential structure is still there. It's also a lot funnier than this blog.

Anyway, if you've read all your RSS feeds for today, my inexplicably named "Mirabilis Blog" will hopefully entertain you.

On Being the Little Guy

Nearly every time I feel I've developed some sort of unified life theory, some brilliant philosopher (or whiny pundit) marches in and muddies the waters. At least, that's how I felt this morning after reading this column by my current love/hate target, Wired Magazine's Tony Long (also known as The Luddite).

Let me provide a bit of background, and perhaps some narcissism. I've lately been weighing the virtues and difficulties of moving somewhere quieter, such as Maine or Oregon, to focus more on my writing (which is, incidentally, one of the main reasons my updates here have become less frequent). I'm shopping various short stories to magazines, I have a novel whose first act is nearly completed, and I've got loads of other ideas pouring out of my ears.

So what on earth (I thought to myself) am I doing in a tiny apartment in the city, when I could live at a similar standard by working a part-time job in the boondocks? The only apparent problems were the potential frustration of limited access to new books, and distance from the country's great publishing centers.

A revelation smacked my in the face: I realized that even in this urban hub, I buy ninety percent of my books via Amazon and Froogle, and most magazines and agencies accept submissions by email. These days, I even do much of my writing via Google Docs, for the simple reason that it prevents me from losing files, and I don't have to constantly email documents to myself, which was a longtime frustration of mine.

Enter Tony Long, and his musings:

OK, maybe it's more convenient and a little bit cheaper to do your book shopping at Amazon. But at what cost to your quality of life? We're at our best, and probably our happiest, when social intercourse takes place outside, in town and city alike. You know your local merchant, you see your neighbors on the street. Is saving five bucks off the latest best seller by buying it online really worth another boarded-up storefront on your local commercial thoroughfare?

Damn! You had me throughout your lambasting of Wal-Mart and Costco, but this is outrageous! Here I am, all proud of myself for being an early adopter, having negotiated my mental way through the labyrinth of planning my immediate future, when without warning, the legitimacy of my culural and technological preferences is called to the stand.

His main complaint seems to be that our encapsulated culture is making each of us smaller and smaller, while causing us to feel as though we're taking on greater and greater power. Maybe that's why his point had never occured to me: I'm what you might call aggressively introverted; social networking rarely factors into my choices, except as it applies to my closest friends.

I can see where Long is coming from; I agree heartily that nothing digital can compare to the smell of brittle paper, or to the bountiful disorder of shelves overloaded with paperback novels. Amazon's recommendations can't hope to live up to those of a knoledgeable bookseller who also happens to revere the early works of Clive Barker.

How often do we actually have such meaningful experiences via random encounters? Perhaps people like me favor the web 2.0 because it imposes some measure of control over the probability mechanics of living, doing its best to assure meaningful, productive encounters. That, though, is a topic for another article.

In this sense, I embody the Little Guy, but frankly, I seem to get closer to my goals by playing that role. Yes, there are innumerable used bookstores in my city, and I often can't help wandering into those I stumble across. But I've also received some surprisingly excellent recommendations on book sites, and my writing has picked up its pace significantly since I started saving my stories online.

This is the paradox of living in a transitional period (aren't they all?). We're forced to sort ideas into bins marked "Irrelevent Residue of an Obsolete Philosphy" or "Significant Reminder of an Important Aspect of Life." What are us little guys to do?

The Rut

If we were to compare the state of computer entertainment with an analogous stage of development in film, it would undoubtedly be most appropriate to compare the vast majority of video games, even the best, to the sci-fi and western serials of the 1930s. Occasionally a memorable character will emerge (and no, this does not mean a graphically-recognizeable chracter, but a relatable one). Once in a while a non-linear plot will be written. But by and large, characters, such as they are, exist to drive the action, and the action is blowing stuff the hell up.

From the elaborate streets of Grand Theft Auto, to the sprawling fantasy world of Oblivion, to the claustrophobic hallways of Splinter Cell, each experience ultimately maintains a porn-like fixation on a unified goal: to take out the enemy, save the world, and score the loot. This, needless to say, is the same essential structure of the vast majority of games since Space Invaders. Thopugh graphics and physics keep getting better, the narrative structure of games is in a gigantic rut.

This month, The Atlantic magazine ran an article describing the development of a game called Façade (or Facade for those of you with different character encoding). The game was written this year by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, formerly an AI scientist and a virtual pet developer, respectively. They set to work on a verbal scripting language, built on a more powerful series of algorithms, for developing a game in which it would be possible to subtly communicate with human-like characters.

The result was a twenty-minute non-linear experience in which the player is invited to the house of a feuding couple in the midst of some sort of argument (what sort, exactly, varies each time). The player then types responses to various questions, insults, and goadings thrown around, make comments on a statement made by the husband, for example, and receiving a snide comeback in return. There is no dialogue tree; the player can say whatever he or she chooses, and expect a cogent reply.

So far, the response has been that it works...most of the time. Outside of certain limits, the couple will not discuss everything the player might bring up; a query concerning the epistemic certainty of the existence of God will likely produce only unsure laughs from the couple. But the fact that they can laugh in an unsure manner, or "feel" awkward at all, is a fantastic leap forward.

The next project for Mateas and Stern will be a $2 million commercial game called The Party. Essentially Façade on a much larger scale, it will allow the player to maneuver through a high-society dinner party, flirting, betraying, or coercing the other guests into various forms of (hopefully) dramatic behavior.

But then there are the ambitious ideas: after a few more iterations of this basic concept, Mateas and Stern aim to write software that will generate an entirely functional dramatic world based on a few criteria input by the player. Want to be a Victorian detective and solve a murder mystery? If their concept gets off the ground, the software will write an original mystery, replete with deep, complex characters, and drop you in medias res.

Their timeline claims that this will be a reality in twenty years, but we all know that in the world of technology, the future catches up to us rapidly. In articles from the early 1980s, programmers were speculating that by the year 2000, we might be able to render still paintings on the screen to accompany their text adventures. That happened by 1985; by 2000 we had Ocarina of Time. In short: with the application of the right minds, this sort of software will arrive sooner than we think.

Now it ought to be time for me to play the Devil's Advocate, and complain about the likelihood that such algorithms may someday replace writers altogether. Actually, it seems rather unlikely, at least within my lifetime. Twenty years brought us from Asteroids to Wing Commander, but better graphics and sound do not a Star Wars experience make. It's intimidating to think of engineered narratives, but if anything, I would hope it'll push human writers to greater levels of skill.

If you're competing with a cheaper, faster mechanical author, you'll be much more pressured to exceed expectations. And both Hollywood and Silicon Valley could use more of that these days.