The Red Box that Sealed my Doom

When I was 13 years old, my parents opted out of giving me the traditional chocolate egg [1] for Easter and instead decided to give me a gift that - without being melodramatic - changed my life.

What I received was a red box which, at first glance, appeared to have as its main content a collection of mysterious geometric solids.  On closer inspection, this box was my own personal Black Monolith. [2]

This was my formal introduction to role-playing, via the glossy new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and it was the beginning of the end. Or, rather, the end of the beginning.

Role-playing is by no means limited to obscure games played with strange-looking dice by spotty teenagers fueled mainly by chips and soda.  The reality is that we are all role-playing all the time, taking on different characters and functions throughout the day - the persona you use at home isn't the one you use at work, isn't the one you use when out with friends, isn't the one you project online.  They're all you but like the characters in Flatland not all of you can be projected into the world at the same time, so we pick and choose.  The result is that each aspect of our lives is populated by dramatis personae that are, by some standards, fictional.

With this in mind, it's easy to see why children love to act out tales of drama and adventure from a very early age: playing games like house or doctor is a natural way for them to practice for everyday life, and since the characters they encounter in fiction are often every bit as important to them as regular people it's hardly surprising that their role-play would extend to Tarzan rushing to find medicine to save someone from spider bite, royal tea parties with the king of the bears, and jedi fighting off an army of ogres, dragons and robots. [3] The benefit of games like D&D and the enormous range of RPG variants that have sprung up over the decades is two-fold:

First, while children [4] are quite happy to play out fantasies according to ad hoc rules [5] this can cause difficulties unless the child is playing alone (or with an indulgent [6] adult) - disputes over the rules are almost certain to arise. [7] Formal games have formal rules, however, which automatically provides third-party arbitration [8] even if the rule is as simple as "winner of rock-paper-scissors gets to decide the outcome."  The great thing about this is that it's good practice for the real world: no matter what we do, we're always forced to operate in environments made up of rules.  In some cases, the rules are inviolable so we have to think of ways to work with them [9] and in other cases we have to learn when we can break the rules and how to go about it. [10]

Second, by their very nature role-playing games practically force children to meet new people and to engage them in cooperative endeavours. [11] Learning social skills is tough, as we all know from being teenagers, so trying them out in a small, safe(ish) group of friends under conditions that encourage - nay, require! - that we practice putting on different roles and personalities is the introvert equivalent of pumping iron.  And on top of helping us try out new and exciting ways to interact with our friends in ways that don't cause them to ostracize us, gaming even offers a structured environment in which to meet new friends.

I have met people I consider to be friends through work, studies, and even by chance through random coincidences.  But many of the people in my circle of friends are there either because of a shared interest in gaming or because we have actually gamed together.  Indeed, I have met people who seemed interesting and then gamed with them, and through gaming learned enough about them to know that I didn't really want to be friends [12] - and the context of the game made it easy for me to disengage and move on without anyone feeling bad about it, because the short-term semi-regular gaming session served as a buffer!  During a session, it's pretty easy to get some personal distance and unless the problem is that one of you is actively an asshole [13] you can probably keep playing for a while at least without difficulty, then bow out of the game at a logical juncture.

So role-playing games are great for kids, but they're also good for adults.  For adults, they offer ways to get away from it all into a world of fantasy.  They offer opportunities to meet people, structured excuses to get together with friends or to meet potential new friends.  They offer relatively safe spaces in which to let parts of yourself out of the bag without needing to worry too much about them, which is a desperately important thing for adults in a world where we can sometimes feel like all our actions are constantly under surveillance.  And last, but not least in my opinion, they offer mental exercise and stimulation very different from the demands of every day life - and that's not even considering the added benefit that at least a few of your fellow gamers will almost certainly share your brain-hobby interests. [14]

For myself, except for a brief interlude when I had opportunity to return to my old stomping grounds from 2003 to 2007, and not counting 3 (count em) one-off sessions I've had since then, I haven't gamed since 1997.  This fact sometimes makes me dreadfully sad.

Gaming was very, very important to me as a teen and well into my twenties.  As a teen, gaming helped me get through some pretty rough social patches and as mentioned, many of my good friends I met specifically through gaming.  I don't think I will ever be able to devote the hours and days to gaming that I did when I was younger, but I miss that dimension of my life.  I miss the feeling of getting together with a small group of like-minded people and building something together, even if it could never be anything other than ephemeral - actually, maybe because it would be ephemeral, because the universes you build with other gamers are such personal things, in comparison to the other sorts of cooperative projects people work on in everyday life.

That part of me isn't gone, of course.  I still world-build, I just do it by myself, either by writing or just fantasizing.  And the gaming world hasn't been standing still while other things consumed my time: there are always new games, new versions of old games, new discussions and new gaming blogs.  I can't spend as much time exploring as I would like, but I refuse to give it up.

After all, if I don't keep going I'll never reach name level.

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1. Which, in any case, I usually received from other relatives as well. One more iteration was by no means missed.

2. And yes, I both jumped up and down hooting and murmured under my breath: "My god...it's full of stars..." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/?ref_=nv_sr_3

3.All games I have played with actual children. No ogres were harmed in the making of these fantasies.

4. Let's be honest - adults too.

5. As discussed in games, these rules can actually be quite rigorous.

6. And obviously favourite.

7. "Bang! you're dead!" - "No I'm not, I dodged." - "You can't dodge!" - "Can too." "Can't either!" Repeat as necessary until a ruling is agreed on.

8. At least until the players grow jaded enough to employ sophistry to manipulate the written rules into saying whatever they want them to.

9. Hello gravity!

10. In other words, we need to learn how to boldly split infinitives no one has split before.

11. Something I suspect my parents had in mind when they bought me that box.

12. I'm pretty sure that in every case the feeling was mutual. We've all experienced it: meeting someone who at first blush seems to be pretty cool, but on longer acquaintance turns out either to have pretty incompatible ideas or only seemed cool because of that one single point of congruence.  But in many situations, the two of you choosing no longer to waste time interacting (because you know you're not going to enjoy it, even if you don't actively despise it) can sometimes get weird.

13. Experienced that one for sure.

14. Even if no one in your gaming group shares your interest in reading about [X], the nature of the hobby is such that - provided you're not hijacking the game itself - they'll be quite happy to riff on the idea with you and provide an entertaining conversation about a topic you love.

Writing Tribulations

Like many others, I read the Dragonlance novels back in the day and as a spotty gamer teen I enjoyed them. For that matter, they retain a guilty pleasure sort of reread status even now, though I doubt it would occur to me to buy them new these days. And thus my confusion over an article I came across recently which reported on an interview with Tracy Hickman in which he lamented the state of the industry.[1]

I am a bit saddened to hear that Tracy Hickman is finding it ever more difficult to make a living as a writer, but I have to wonder if the problem is really the disappearing bookstores and the market. 

There certainly are both new- and old-guard fantasy and science fiction writers who seem able to make a living.  And there are some, like Robert Jordan[2], came to their peak after Hickman was practically invisible on the shelves and far surpassed him in popularity writing much the same kind of fiction.  While I doubt Jordan ever rode around town in a gold-plated Humvee drinking champagne and snorting coke[3], my impression is that he made a decent living.  

Here's the thing: Hickman has had some very interesting ideas over the years, particularly when he was working with Margaret Weis[4], and while some of the early work was rough around the edges in my opinion I know he was working under odd conditions, particularly with the TSR stuff [5], and I think that later he caught his stride and produced some pretty good work. 

Pretty good, though. Not great.  Not for my tastes anyway - I know there are people who live and breathe his worlds.

My impression of Hickman is that he's firmly a pulp fantasy author, though a better than average pulp fantasy author.  And there's nothing wrong with that at all - full disclosure: I love pulp - but:

If that's your market, then you have to understand two very important things:

Thing the First:
Tastes shift, and they shift fairly quickly in pulp.  Take a look at the pulp (whether it be fantasy, SF, crime, or what have you) being produced now vs what was being written in the 50s, and the 60s, and the 70s, and the 80s.  
Every decade seems to have its own distinctive flavour. Unless you really are one of the greats of the era such as Robert E Howard[6] it's vanishingly unlikely that your work will enjoy steady sales.  In other words, it's not that readers can't find his older books - it's that marketers feel can't sell them.  There's a very limited nostalgia value market after all.  

To make it in pulp, you need to shift what you're writing very quickly to match what is in vogue.  A sad truth, but important, and an explanation for why he needs to write so much: if the older books aren't selling, you need new books that match the modern market to take its place.  Even the favoured genre of pulp customers changes over time, after all [7] - but very little of what he writes isn't fantasy, so he's limited to whatever the current fashion for fantasy pulp is.

Thing the Second:
The way the market works is different now than it was when he started in with Dragonlance.  Back then, pulp paperbacks where everywhere in book stores, drug stores, airports, supermarkets etc. They were in your face and easy to find. 

In the e-book era (which to his credit he seems to have embraced) you're not as visible. With so many authors, booksellers can't have everyone on the shelves.  And anyway, there's more profit to be had selling something else in that space for any shop that isn't specifically a bookstore.  

There are lots of great marketing opportunities available to drive people to your books and I don't see him doing any of them other than getting out to fan events.  Where are his stories in podcasts? Where are the audiobooks? Where are his appearances on high profile webcasts such as with Wil Wheaton and his gang?  Self promotion is critical now that books aren't automatically thrust into readers' hands and you have to compete with Amazon's whole library.

I'm sad that such a long contributor to the genre feels it's getting harder for him to make a living, but to be blunt I think the message he offered in this interview [8] is less "it's hard to be a writer and getting harder" but more this one:

Writers can no longer rely on the big publishing houses and the basic dynamics of mass-market retail to put their names and their books in front of potential buyers.  Writers need to actively cultivate their public personas and court their readers, keeping themselves always on the edge of memory.

Is this worse than in the past?

In some ways, maybe - the reduced involvement of the publishers (or rather the reduced impact) is certainly unfortunate for a certain type of personality, and that personality seems disproportionately represented in writing. [9]  But in other ways, I think it's positive.  

It has opened the door to a wider range of writers, which certainly makes competition fierce, but honestly speaking the proportion of people who are really writing well is just the same as it was - it just means that now those who want to self-publish have options beyond the PR machinery of the big publishers to draw on.  And since self-promotion is such a major aspect of the market these days, there's more opportunity for even middle-range writers to cultivate a population of loyal readers.

In the article, Hickman is quoted as saying that he has 6 million followers and yet has to struggle to write enough to keep afloat.  I think he misunderstands the numbers though: he has 6 million readers, I'm sure.  But to have followers, you have to cultivate them.  

Perhaps if he were to spend a bit more time marketing himself and cultivating a rich public persona he could generate a smaller but more rewarding community of followers who would buy more of his books and actively promote him to their friends.

Or maybe he's been misrepresented and in fact things aren't as rough as this article makes it seem - but even so, thinking about the message that has been put in his mouth is an interesting study for an aspiring writer:

Is it really possible to just write something and rely on interest to sell it?

For that matter, was it ever possible?

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1. Noted that one of the people actually present for the session actually commented on the article that it presents Tracey's comments as being more pessimistic than it seemed at the time.

2. The Robert Jordan of Wheel of Time fame. Sadly, he passed away in 2007 before completing this epic series.

3. Being more inclined to smoke a pipe and take communion multiple times a week.

4. Which appears to have been most of the time.

5. Very tight deadlines and huge volumes.  Some reports say that they put together as many as 30 novels in one year, though obviously not all of them were published on that schedule.

6. Think about it: how many authors also popular during Howard's peak are common names in the pulp genres?

7. My impression right now is that horror is the main one, with sci fi making a strong come back at the moment.  I'm not seeing much fantasy, but if anyone knows of some good fantasy pulp authors please don't hesitate!

8. As noted, it may not be quite an accurate representation of what he meant to say...

9. I suspect if I tried to make my living writing I'd be living in a cardboard box within a week.