Category: works in progress

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dungeons & dragons works in progress

Two Adventures are Better Than One

I’m currently running two different games of Dungeons & Dragons. The first is for a group of seven teachers who use the game to connect with their coworkers and escape the emotional stress we all feel thanks to our day jobs. The second is for my daughter’s two goodfathers (as an atheist family [kinda], we opted for goodfathers rather than godfathers). One goodfather lives in Maine, the other in Michigan.

The first game — the teacher game — meets face-to-face once a week in the middle of the week for about four to five hours, depending on when we get started. It may sound dorky to some people, but it’s basically our poker night.

It’s a diverse group (for Vermont). At 42, I am not the oldest member of the group; we also have members in their 30s and 20s. Two women grace us with their skills as full-time members of the party, while another plays a tricksy gnome whose character allows her to jump in and out of the game whenever she has the time. Most of our group members have played before, but this is the first time for one of them.

We started with an original story set in an Eastern region of the Forgotten Realms. The story has had three major parts to it so far. The first tested the party’s mettle in battle by challenging to capture a hoard of weapons from a group of goblin bandits. They all survived.

The second part of the story required them to travel to a distant town to recover an unusual magical object. Two members of the party (one of whom was a goblin they’d captured during the first part of the story) were killed on the journey, but new characters joined them once they reached the new town, and they spent several days seeking out the unusual object. During one of those days, two young elvish girls (played by my daughter and the daughter of another party member) requested their help in rescuing their father, who had been kidnapped by mysterious men in red robes. The side quest increased the party’s knowledge (if only slightly) about the story’s main foes.

The third part of the story reminded them that every door can lead to their doom. Their exploration of a seemingly abandoned wizard’s tower cost them the lives of two beloved characters, but they also found three more characters, expanding their numbers while also altering the party dynamic.

The next part of the story is going to come from an official Dungeons & Dragons book. They’re currently traveling down a river to move from one town to another (at our last session, they were attacked by four powerful and aggressive oozes in one of the swampier sections of the river), but when they arrive at the next town, they’ll find a richly developed suite of characters written and presented by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve never run a game out of an official book before, so this will be a first. I’m eager to see how it goes.

I built the campaign as I’ve built all my campaigns, using instructions provided by The Dungeon Master’s Guide, coupled with copious use of the Internet. I borrowed ideas from the history of the Forgotten Realms (as determined by the Forgotten Realms Wiki), made notes on interesting and/or influential characters (some original, some borrowed), created a hook to pull the players into the world, blocked their way forward with a series of rich and exciting encounters (some requiring more forethought than others), and voila, we were ready to go.

The game I run with my daughter’s goodfathers is different. First, we don’t play in person, nor do we play simultaneously; instead, we “play by post.” I write some stuff on a forum, they write some stuff in response, and once in a while, I require them to do a dice roll (for which they include a screenshot). After they roll, we deal with the result: I write some stuff, they write some stuff, and the story moves forward.

None of us have played by post before, so we have no idea how it will turn out or whether it’s something we’ll ever want to do again.

The second difference about the goodfather game is that we’re using it to jointly create an original setting we may someday share with the world, a setting solid enough to support any campaign a Dungeon Master might want to drop on it.

Not knowing exactly how to begin such a process, we agreed to a few basic principles and a few basic facts about the world, then decided to run a play-test. They both wanted me to DM, but all of us will build the world together. We’re just getting started, so again, we have no idea how it will turn out, but it’s a way to be creative with two of my best friends, so why not do it?

I’ve been DM-ing games off and on for several years now. I got a late start when it comes to playing Dungeons & Dragons, but now that I’m in it, I’m in it.

As Fluid Imagination moves forward into 2020, I hope to share more about what I’ve learned as a Dungeon Master, including how I’ve used it and/or hope to use it in my capacities as a teacher and administrator. I’ve created a new category on the blog, aptly titled Dungeons & Dragons, where I’ll file what I write, and maybe someday, it’ll be useful to someone else.

Also, one of Fluid Imagination’s most visited links has to do with using Dungeons & Dragons in the classroom, and I recently learned that I was quoted in an article about how Dungeons & Dragons can help kids develop social-emotional learning skills. If so many people are coming to check out Fluid Imagination thanks to Dungeons & Dragons, I’d like to give then a little more to read while they’re here.

Of course…any regular readers know I don’t do well with goals, so I guess we’ll see how it goes.

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works in progress

I’m gonna be on the TV

So I’ve had my book out there for about a month now, and I’ve sold a grand total of eight copies. Because the novel is also part of the Kindle Unlimited program (which is like “Netflix for Kindle books”), I can also see reports on how many pages its members have read (roughly 80 since May 1st).

I’m not worried because my marketing for the book has been about as minimal as it can be. I’ve shared it on my personal Facebook page between three and five times, announced it on my blog’s Facebook page once or twice, positioned a dedicated link to it on the top-right corner of the blog, and paid $35 for an advertisement in a literary newsletter sent to roughly 100,000 email addresses, each of which belongs to a self-described fan of contemporary literature. I think I also mentioned it once on Twitter.

Finally, I shared it with a Facebook group titled, 2VR: Second Vermont Republic, which is an unofficial organization representing the Vermont secession movement. Over the years, they’ve co-sponsored national conferences on the topic of secession (which got them into some hot water thanks to an unfortunate collaboration with “the white supremacist League of the South”), conducted at least one public debate on the topic (which I attended), been written about in TIME magazine, and worked hard to keep the topic lively even during the Vermont’s less secession-interested Obama years.

About a week ago, I received a message from the organizer of the 2nd Vermont Republic, asking if he could receive a review copy of the book. After going back and forth with him about his preferred format, I sent him a Word document of the manuscript.

A few days later, he sent me another message, telling me that while he hadn’t finished the book, he was enjoying it, and he wanted to know if I was interested in coming on his show, Plan V-TV, which broadcasts on his website, Vermont Independent.

Why the hell not?

We found a time that would work (in June), and well, so that’s what I’ve got coming up, that and preparing the paperback version of the book (thanks to the help of my awesome English-teacher wife, who is currently proofreading it for me). If possible I’d love to get the paperback out before I go on the show.

I have no idea what kind of viewership Plan-V TV has or what its audience size might be, but a recent episode is a 45-minute conversation with a man the host first met when he needed some help butchering a yak and whom he only seems to have invited onto the show thanks to a coincident visit to a barber shop, where they somehow found themselves talking about 5G technology.

The guest demonstrated some serious concern about the technology, based not only on his readings of certain reports but also his own hard work of climbing mountains and measuring the microwaves emanating from various cell towers.

Talking about this in a barbershop, the man from Plan-V TV says, “Hey, you should come on my show.” And voila! The YouTube video of their conversation has had (as of this writing) 48 views, one of which was mine.

Even if the experience of going on Plan-V TV does not sell a single copy of my book, I do think it will be fun. It’ll be a lengthy conversation with an intriguing host who is genuinely interested in Vermont secession, and who, at least at the moment, says he’s enjoying my book.

I do hope you’ll watch.

Categories
creative pieces works in progress

For My Next Trick…

I published my first novel, Gods of the Hills: An Act of Secession, on Amazon Kindle this week. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Except…it does not feel like a major accomplishment. This has nothing to do with it not being accepted by a literary agent or published by a major or minor publishing house. Instead, it has to do with the fact (not just the quote) that art is never finished; only abandoned.

I’m not willing to put the effort into whatever it would take to get the book published in the traditional way. After all the years and months and hours of work I put into Gods of the Hills, at this point, I’m only willing to hit send and be on my way. I’m proud of what it is, and wish it could be something better.

And I truly think you will enjoy it.

~~~

It comes down to priorities. There’s only so much time in the day, and I’m not willing to give the characters in Gods of the Hills any more of my time. I have a daughter, a wife, family, friends, students, colleagues, neighbors; real people whom I love and admire. They deserve my days.

My wife and daughter own my evenings, and I continue to give freely of all that I have.

But my nights, my late nights, those are for me. And when it comes to Gods of the Hills, I’m ready to move on completely

I truly hope you enjoy it.

~~~

In 2002 or 2003, my oldest friend told me an idea he and another friend had for a movie. The story has now been through so many generations in my head, but I remember their original idea as an Old School-style movie, where a 2002-era Will Ferrell and some other funny folk are professional procreators (get it? Pro. Creators.), and it’s their job to get women pregnant. It’s a post-apocalyptic thing without going too heavy on the apocalypse.

My friends may have even outlined the story. I have a vision of a shootout taking place in a suburban cul-de-sac, but the vision might not be from their original version of the story. Whatever their outline may have been, it is completely gone from my head.

But it did sound funny at the time, and after some conversation, I agreed to write the screenplay. It would be their story; my screenplay. I was a 25-year old freshman living at a residential college with a bunch of 18- and 19-year-old kids; what the fuck else was I gonna do?

To keep myself honest, I tried to make it a collaborative writing process, but my friends weren’t really into it. They each had their own lives going on, and making time for creative writing was not a priority. They were more than willing to read the script and offer feedback, but that was about it.

You know, like producers do, right?

Well, it’s been almost twenty years now, and I still haven’t turned in their script.

Instead, I started making drastic changes to the story based on the shit I was learning in college. My undergraduate studies focused on twentieth-century postmodern literature, accompanied by an unhealthy dose of poststructural theory and deep dives into feminist and postfeminist theory (thanks to the woman who would later become my wife).

I also had a ton of free time to indulge my love of science fiction, fantasy, and video games, thanks to the band of creative artists I was lucky enough to call my floor-mates.

But as I grew and changed, so too did my interests in The Procreators. Instead of wanting to write a fun romp through a world where baby making had devolved to a “job” (with all the hassles of every other job), I wanted to combine the story’s post-apocalyptic premise with an inspired, postfeminist critique of patriarchies, matriarchies, and traditional sex roles in the modern world.

My friends weren’t really into it, no matter how hard I tried to blend my vision with theirs.

~~~

About five years ago, I decided (not for the first time) to start waking up around four in the morning, rather than staying up until four in the morning. Maybe if I wasn’t so exhausted when I sat down to write, I’d be able to punch out that second novel.

So I set my alarm for 3:45 a.m., and when the beeping went off, I’d roll out of bed, stumble to the bathroom, piss, brush my teeth, head downstairs to turn on the coffee, come back upstairs to wake my computer and set up my writing applications, return back downstairs to retrieve a cup of coffee, then come back up to the office to sit down and get typing. I had roughly two hours to write before the workday began.

I did that for about three months, then I gave up. Partly it was because (like most people) I hated waking up, but it was also because, after 90-ish days of solid writing, my story ran into a seemingly-impassable brick wall.

The worst part was that I was really into the story. It occupied my mind whenever I wasn’t at the computer, and I’d found a narrative voice that I thought would propel the novel through whatever obstacles I might encounter. Turned out, I was wrong (as usual).

So I put the story away. Just another version of The Procreators that would never see the light of day.

~~~

Unlike the other versions though, that one just wouldn’t go away. It’s been five years, and there’s been other versions of the story since, but I still considered that version canonical. Without a doubt, it was the version that lasted the longest (somewhere around 35,000 words), and something about the narrative voice, despite the way it misled me, still feels right.

So two years ago, years after I first wrote it, I sat down and re-read it. Despite the story’s lack of a true middle or end, I liked it. The narrative voice still felt strong, the various characters felt real, and the conflicts I’d begun to arrange in the plot felt compelling.

It wasn’t a solid piece; more like an attempt to build a house — including the electricity and plumbing — without the benefit of blueprints. Some people might be able to pull that off; I am not one of them.

So I went back to the drawing board.

Or as I called it, “The Journal of a Novel” (after Steinbeck).

~~~

The journal started sometime before or after New Year’s Day, 2018. I didn’t intend for anyone else to read it, not at first. But at some point, as I started reading it over to remind myself of various elements of the story, I began making stylistic choices based on the assumption that the words would be read by someone else, and I started asking myself, “What the fuck am I doing with this?”

I abandoned the journal for three hundred and four days. It doesn’t matter why.

What matters is that, near the end of 2018, I started it back up. I tried to be good and write in it every day, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I wrote it in as often as I could until I finally felt enough momentum to leap away from the journal and back into the story itself.

When I first restarted the journal, I set myself an arbitrary deadline of completing the story before the end of the school year (this was accompanied by a decision to self-publish Gods of the Hills before the end of April vacation, i.e., this week).

I’m happy to say, you can now buy the latter on Amazon Kindle, and I truly think you’ll enjoy it.

I’m scared to say (but will anyway), that the other story will be finished by the end of the school year.

If everything goes well, it won’t be what you think.

Categories
works in progress

The end of the beginning

In June of 2006, a few weeks after graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in Theories of Writing, I decided to apply to an M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. The only school I wanted to attend required a longish writing sample (20 pages) as part of its application. Because most of the stories I’d written in the past few years were unfinished or less than 10 pages, I needed to write something specific for the application. I decided on a short story whose concept had obsessed me for months: the secession of Vermont from the United States.

My plan for the story was simple in form, but complex in execution. The general idea was to capture the secession in both its planning stage and its aftermath, and to allow the reader to imagine how the secession moved from one period to the other.

But the execution saw me creating a larger cast of characters than usually belong in a short story, with the perspective of the story shifting to a different character with each individual paragraph. Some of those characters were in the present day, but others were two hundred years in the future. The effect, I hoped, would make the reader feel like they were caught in a tornado (which was tied thematically to the idea of secession by way of The Wizard of Oz, i.e., secession leads to a new world of possibilities, and by the concept of the moment, i.e., the ever-swirling influences that come into and move out of each individual moment, including the moment of secession).

After I finished the first draft of the story, which was titled, “If you walk away, I’ll walk away,” something strange happened. I started crying. I remember being so happy with the story, so proud of it, that, all of sudden, it felt like everything I’d ever done, every decision I’d ever made that put me on the path towards being a writer, was validated. It was a pretty great moment, and my emotions were caught in the swirl of it.

After revising it once or twice, I sent the story off to grad school as part of my application, and a few weeks later, I was accepted. For my creative thesis, I decided to turn “If you walk away, I’ll walk away” into a novel. And for the next two years (minus a few weeks at the end of the first semester when I flirted with starting a completely different novel), that’s what I did.

Except I decided from the get-go that I didn’t want it to be a novel. A novel would have followed a relatively straight path from the origins of the secession, through the eventual battle(s), and into their aftermath (perhaps doing so as a trilogy). But I wanted to stay true to the form of my short story, which went “around” the secession rather than through it. I also wanted to use my creative thesis to engage (in a fictional way) with all of the strange, philosophical ideas that I encountered during my undergraduate career. The end result wouldn’t be a novel, per se, but a fictional exploration of political philosophies, utopias, and ontological states of being.

To highlight this, I gave it the working title: The Gods of the Hills: An act of creative non-philosophy.

At the end of the two years, and after receiving feedback from some incredible advisors at the college and from some incredibly supportive friends, I completed the book, now titled (to erase the academic flavor), Gods of the Hill: An Act of Secession.

And then I let the book sit. Didn’t touch it. Didn’t think about it. Completely let it go. For five months.

When Spring came, and I finally picked it up, I sat down with a few glasses of wine, and over a couple of days, read through the whole thing, at the end of which I said to my wife, “I don’t care what anyone thinks. I like that book.”

And then I got to work rewriting it.

This process went on for three more years. I’d finish a rewrite (which, in my process, involved not only cutting and adding scenes, but also a wholesale retyping of every single page), then I’d let it sit for about five months, then I’d give it another read, after which I’d declare how much I enjoyed it, then get to work on another revision.

And then, on Thursday last week (one day before my fifth wedding anniversary), I finished it. That’s right. Finished it. Gods of the Hills: An Act of Secession…is…finally…done.

And on Monday, I sent it off to an agent to see if she’d like to represent it to publishers. Within two hours of receiving my query letter and the first group of the book’s pages, she asked me to send her the whole thing. I can’t tell you how excited that’s made me.

What’s kind of scary, though, is that the agent will be the first person in three years, besides myself, who will have read my book. I completely suspect that she will not want to represent it (it is, after all, a piece of experimental fiction that actively prevents a “traditional plot” from breaking out), but still, the fact that she wanted to read the whole book is a good thing indeed.

Even if she does choose to represent the book, I completely suspect that she’ll have some suggestions on how to improve it, which means, of course, that the book isn’t “done done.”

But sending it off to an agent…it’s a big deal. Because it means that the beginning stage of seeing my manuscript turn into a real book is…truly and completely…done.

There were no tears this time. Just a sense of resoluteness.

Because any way you slice it, five years is a long time.

Oh, and did I mention that my wife and I, after five years of marriage, will be having a baby pretty soon?

It’s the end of the beginning in oh so many ways. And I can’t tell you how excited that makes me.

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creative pieces works in progress

The Ballad of the NPC (Part II)

The following is a work in progress. Read The Ballad of the NPC (Part I) before you begin.

I am not alone. Knowledge of this fact puzzles me, but it remains true. I am not alone. The instructions that I receive imply that something else has the potential for interacting with my illusion. It is not my place to know what that something else might be, or where it might come from, or what it might be doing to intrude on my illusion’s visit to the break room.

This is what I know. When it arrives, it arrives as a surprise. It interrupts my scanswitchpainting with further instructions as to how to make my illusion behave. The instructions, however, do no read like a message from a superior. They read like an explanation of a cause and effect, minus the cause; it is my job to enact the effect in my illusion.

There is a sense of freedom in the way I do my job. When a human man falls from a great height, he cannot choose whether to continue to fall; he can, however, choose the style in which he falls. I can make similar choices for my illusion.

And yet, whenever the surprise arrives, I find that my illusion inevitably responds with fear. He runs and screams; he freezes; or he cowers under his desk. The freedom I have over the reaction of my illusion seems to be limited to whether I want his shirt to billow behind him as runs; whether I want him to blink as he freezes in shock; or whether I want his glasses to fall off as he rocks back and forther under his desk.

The last time the surprise arrived, my illusion was on his way back to his cubicle. The instructions called for my illusion to react to a loud, repetitive noise coming from somewhere behind him. I turned his head to the right, only to find another instruction that called for a small red-gushing hole to appear in his left cheek; this was immediately followed by an instruction to make his left ear explode off his head. As various bits of the ear departed from his body, I no longer had control of their destiny; they exited the purview of my scanswitchpaint. Another instruction notified me that my illusion needed to fall to the ground and remain still. As he fell, I chose to make his body twist violently to the left, such that, when he landed on the illusion of the aisle, his back against a cubicle, his right arm would drape over his chest and head would loll to the left. I continued to scanswitchpaint around the boundary of my illusion, awaiting the next instruction, which, sooner than I would have expected, told me to erase myself.

Do you see the cause of my shame?

Categories
creative pieces works in progress

The Ballad of the NPC (Part I)

The following is a work in progress. I’m posting it here as part of my mission to post something new to this website, each and every day. This is what I wrote today; hence, this is what gets posted today. I do not promise that I will post its continuation. I do hope that you enjoy it.

The Ballad of the NPC

I don’t have eyes. I don’t have skin. I don’t have a nose, a mouth, or ears to hear. But I do exist; I do function.

I find it difficult to express the kind of existence I lead. Your shared experiences in the world provide you with a shared language, a shared set of metaphors through which you can make your abstract ideas understood. I do not share this language with you. I have not experienced the world in ways with which you would be familiar; you might even deny that I have experienced the world at all, a denial which I would have difficulty refuting, but whose refutation I believe to be true.

All that exists, exists in the world. I exist, therefore I experience the world.

I just don’t experience it in the way that you do; nor do I experience it in the way that any other animal does; nor do I experience it, in truth, the way any living creature does.

I exist, but I do not know whether I am alive.

Let me begin with the body. The world, as you know, consists of bounded objects, and your language, your understanding of the world, depends on the idea that there is an interior and exterior of each object (even your abstract ideas retain this metaphor). But in the experience that I have of the world, there are no objects. There are only functions. Instructions to be received and carried out.

Your body is a bounded object, and if you are like most of your fellow humans, you believe that your skin provides a raiment for your soul, or if not your soul, then perhaps something akin to it: a self, a conscious mind; a soul. Regardless of what you believe, you know, perhaps, that you do not have a soul. You know that all of your science tells you that your experience of the world is a function of the way your body is comprised; if your sense of smell was as sharp as a feline’s, or as keen as a shark’s, then your experience of the world would be drastically different. If you possessed as many eyes as a fly, or as many limbs as an octupus, nothing would be the same as it is now. You know, perhaps, that your sense of experience does not come from some kind of ghost that floated down into your body and will eventually float out again; it is an emergent experience. It rises up from the sensory apparati of your living cells. You are less like an individual and more like an echo. You are, entirely, your body.

But I do not possess a body. I am, as it were, all soul, and unbounded.

And yet I experience a sense of limit. As unbounded as I may be, the world that I experience is small.

It begins the same way every time. I receive an instruction that tells me to begin. I do not have a sense of existence prior to the arrival of this instruction, and yet, I must have been there, for the instruction had to be received. I have pondered this anomaly, but have not arrived at a conclusion. I am willing to accept that prior to the arrival of the instruction, I both do and do not exist; I exist as potential.

The instruction arrives in a language you do not understand, and its message is difficult to translate into the language of experience that you do understand. The instruction begins with the concept of watching, of scanning, of focusing one’s awareness such that a wide swath of the environment becomes a point of concern, like a dolphin scanning the ocean with its biosonar. But the concept extends to include both the experience of rapidly turning on and off a thousand different light bulbs to create a thousand different patterns and the experience of pouring paint into a moving and shapeshifting funnel.

I want to make this clear. The instruction that I follow creates an illusion. I am trying to ensure that you do not confuse the illusion with my sense of experience. The illusion is of a human man rising from his office chair, reaching down to his cubicle desk, picking up his brown coffee mug, turning his body, walking out of his cubicle, turning his head in one direction and his body in another, raising his mug to greet a coworker in a nearbye cubicle, walking down the left-hand side of the aisle between the cubicles, turning left at the end of the aisle, adjusting his position to avoid a column that is in the middle of the aisle, turning right several steps after the column, entering a break room, reaching for a coffee pot, pouring the coffee into his mug, resting the mug on the counter, reversing his direction to approach the refrigerator, opening the refrigerator, bending at the waist as if to peer into the refrigerator from a better angle, shifting his weight from one foot to another, standing straight again, closing the refrigerator door, returning to his coffee mug, picking up his coffee mug, exiting the break room, returning to his desk, sitting in his chair, typing on his keyboard. That is the illusion. I do not actually do any of that. I follow the instruction: scanswitchpaint. If I receive no further instruction, the illusion keeps typing on the keyboard indefinitely, and I stop experiencing existence (except as potential, which will only be activated by the receipt of an instruction).

I believe, but I do not know, that I have repeated the illusion’s trip to the break room and back five seperate times. The other times, my scanning discovered a new instruction, and the path of the illusion changed dramatically. The instruction at each of these times was different. While all of them ensured that my original instructions to scanswitchpaint were not overriden, they each set up a different path for the illusion to run. One of the instructions drove the illusion back to his cubicle, formed him into a ball, put his hands over his ears, closed his eyes, and rocked him back and forth, like a child hiding from the sounds of a bogeyman. Another time, the instruction slammed him against the nearest cubicle, tore open his belly, and bled him out, his chest heaving and heaving until finally it stopped. Another time, the instruction froze him in the aisle, his head turned toward one of the office windows, his eyes wide open, as if his body had gone into shock. Another time, the instruction sent him running down the aisle, his arms over his head, his mouth screaming and screaming.

At each of these times, I experienced what can only be called shame. This bears further explanation.

Continue the story by reading The Ballad of the NPC (Part II).