Where is the Editrix?

At the moment, your faithful Editrix is buried in a mountain of editing for Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition (which is great, considering it's been over 100 for over a week here in the great midwest and I'm happy to be inside at my computer). Yes, that does mean that W20 will get another full-service, obsessively-created index. I'll be posting a request for fan input later in the process, since I don't know WtA as well as I know Vampire.

I'm also pleased to note that I had my first complete party wipe in a tabletop game - my poor Tiefling Runepriest, Julian, made it only one and a half sessions before being defeated by exploding poisonous wolves, of all things. Happily, I and my party may be reborn on another plane of existence for a later campaign.

Expect some posts in the next few weeks about sentence diagramming, research techniques  (when Wikipedia isn't what you're looking for), and effective use of linguistics in world-building.

Happy summer, everyone!

Spring Hoarding

Ahh, spring. When a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of...acquiring out-of-print gaming materials?

Probably not. But it's certainly what mine turns to.

Over the weekend I visited the strange and delightful Dizzy Dugout for the first time since returning to St. Louis. Because they carry a large variety of (used and new) out of print gaming materials (along with current stuff), it was my favorite place to shop for books and ideas when I was running a Changeling: the Dreaming LARP. Once every month or two, a handful of us would trek across the river to buy Changeling books, dice, ooh and ahh over the 1st and 2nd edition D&D stuff, and flip through games none of us had ever heard of.

This weekend's trip resulted in a couple of packs of Jyhad (now V:TES) cards and two AD&D Planescape modules  (Something Wild and The Eternal Boundary, for those following along at home).

I then posted to Google+ about my exciting CCG find and because of THAT will soon have a gift of VTES cards in my mailbox.

This is all well and good, except for the fact that I don't play any of these.

You see, folks, I have a problem with game hoarding. My almost-complete set of original Changeling books is sort of understandable; I can't get rid of them until I've finished the set (or finally resigned myself to giving up on collecting). My X-Files Trading Card Game decks... less understandable. My copies of games even I admit are just awful (and no, I'm not naming names, but let's just say I picked them up in a fit of enthusiasm at a gaming con) make no sense at all. Yet somehow I just can't let them go. (Divvying up the gaming books in breakups is the worst part of the process, right?)

Some, like these Planescape modules, I really do intend to use at some point (soon?) when I have a gaming group again. I already have plans to teach a friend how to play VTES so I can put those to use.

Some, like the Changeling books, are nostalgia for good games gone by. It's unlikely that I'll ever run or play that game again, but I loved the game I had, and sometimes you need to go back to the well for inspiration.

Some are obviously badges of honor: comp copies from my editing work.

Most, however, are byproducts of a weird kind of gamer optimism. I really believe that someday I WILL run or play an In Nomine campaign, despite the fact that no one I know has ever expressed any interest in such a thing. I believe that I'll totally throw together a one-shot Saturday afternoon Summerland game despite the fact that I work Saturdays. I believe that my little brother's 15-year-old copy of GURPS will come in handy... even though I can't even come up with a plausible scenario for it.

In the end, I just can't bear the thought of parting with the innate possibility of each book. So maybe it's an appropriate spring urge after all - build new worlds, start new games, and get those characters growing and flourishing.

In Memoriam

Just before Christmas, Sister Mary Denis Curran (just Sr. Denis to her Rosati girls), one of the two women who helped make me into the editrix I am, passed away after a long and productive life. Because of her insistence on our learning the structures of language and of literature, I and my fellow students were given a head start in a world that once again places emphasis on the written word.  Though we groaned about it at the time, her policy of an hour and a half of required independent grammar drills for every freshman made it practically impossible for any of us to fail to learn the material.

Like other college prep freshman English classes, we moved on from grammar basics to the structures of literature, drama, and composition.  We learned the basics of storytelling arcs, and how to drill down to the core ideas of a literary work. We learned how to structure an argumentative essay, and how to edit your own work. (Best technique ever: record yourself reading it aloud, then listen to it. Hearing it will very quickly expose its weaknesses.)

Sr. Denis was a tiny powerhouse, both terrifying and inspiring. She (rightfully) reined me in with a poor grade when I turned in an entire essay test with British spellings, but allowed me the freedom to stretch my literary horizons when I’d already read the assigned book for that unit. She challenged us with Dickens and Homer, but rewarded us with Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles movies.

She’s part of the reason I am where I am today, and I hope I haven’t done her too much disservice with my writing here. If you’re so moved, take a moment today to say thanks for a teacher that got YOU where you are today. I think she’d appreciate it.

Wherein your Editrix wears a lovely sandwichboard

Yesterday I watched a NOVA episode about Stonehenge just for some background research for my Dark Ages/De Profundis game.

I'm not going to say that's the nerdiest thing I've ever done*, but it's up there.

Since moving to St. Louis and embarking on the thrill of the full-time job hunt, I've edited two game manuscripts, geeked out over Skyrim despite not actually being an Elder Scrolls fan, read dozens of blogs about games and feminism, showed off my V20 index at a party, worked on research for a novel, and recruited more people for that DA game.

Now I need more nerdery to fill my time, so...

Editrix for Hire! Come one, come all!

I'd love to edit your novel, game manuscript, NaNoWriMo chapter, or academic paper. If it's the first editing gig I've done for you, introductory rates apply, just like a terrible cell phone contract. I'm fluent in WoD, D&D 3d ed/3.5/Pathfinder, and conversant with FATE, thanks to the very cool Spirit of the Century. I learn obnoxiously fast, so if you've got some strange homebrew or other non-strange ruleset, I'm perfectly capable of learning it before I start the editing process.


*(Probably the nerdiest thing I've ever done was also NOVA related. After watching an episode of the program about the Alton (IL) Super Bridge, my friends and I piled in the car to go see it in person. At 3 a.m.)

Hallowhat?

Where have I been, gentle readers? I have been on a lengthy sojourn in the Cardinals Nation, and I apologize for abandoning you while I gorged myself on sports fandom. (For the record, making sports-watching parties also costume parties renders them unusually appealing to non-sportsfans. Helpful!)


Since it's now Halloween (or Hallowe'en, or All Hallows' Eve - note the possessive plural, folks), I thought I'd bring you some horror writing pointers to keep your spooky story from turning dull and dreary.


We remember writers like Poe and Lovecraft because they had a distinctive style to their prose. Lovecraft in particular was so over the top that, if you try to emulate his writing now, you'll sound ridiculous. Do you think you can get away with a passage like this? "They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots." ¹ You can't. Rein in² your adjective abuse and concentrate on tight, focused sentences. You can keep the imagery and some of the fun adjectives, but remove the redundancies and the not-quite-real words. Unless you're dealing in pastiche, work to emulate the unique visions of the great horror writers, not their bombastic prose. 


Once you've got that rule firmly in mind, branch out in your research. Much of our current horror landscape comes from Victorian novels and 19th century fairy tales. Horror ideas inspired by Southeast Asian folklore also seems to have a small if persistent place in the modern canon. Look beyond this and find something that inspires you to either come up with entirely new ideas or to reinterpret tropes in new ways. What did the ancient Egyptians fear? What did monsters look like in the Middle Ages?³ What does cognitive science have to say about how we get scared, or the things we see when we are? Consider delving into the background of whatever scared you as a child. (In my case, it was the bunyip from the Australian "Dot" movies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtrYO-Mog60 - as cheesy as this thing is, it still creeps me out.) 



Most of all, try to remember that horror has a wide spectrum of styles within it, from horror-comedy to psychological thriller. Think about what effect you're trying to evoke in your readers. Do you want them to get a pleasant shiver, or to not be able to sleep? Do you want to explore the deeper meaning of werewolves in modern culture, or just indulge in a gory romp? It's easy to project our own assumptions onto horror tropes, but not everyone will expect the same thing from what you're pitching as a "classic vampire story." Horror allows us to deal in allegory and dark metaphor, and for that reason will remain one of the most useful genres of fiction. Give it its due. 

---

1. From H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour out of Space," archived at http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/library/stacks/literature/lovecraft/novellas/colouro.htm
2. Yes, "rein" in. It's a horse metaphor - you're pulling up the reins of the horse that's trying to carry you away at a gallop. I know you want to talk about exerting control or rule, and therefore are inclined to use "reign," but that would be incorrect.
3. See Jeffrey Cohen's fascinating work on monster studies for more on this: http://www.gwresearchblog.com/2011/10/31/understanding-monsters-fear-desire-and-culture/

Let's Talk about Parallelism

Do you remember the old Sesame Street song "One of These Things is Not Like the Other"? (If you've forgotten, you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ect-kgxBb4M).  In this song,  kids are asked to pick out the one thing in a group of four that "doesn't belong." Sometimes the outlier is a plate with an extra cookie, or a number in a group of letters, or a bird surrounded by dogs.

People are good at spotting differences. What seems to be trickier is creating similarities. Look at the last sentence of the previous paragraph. I set up my sentence with a simple subject (the outlier), and then gave three examples that could each finish the sentence. The three examples had the same structure: simple noun + explanatory phrase. Like this:

[plate] {with an extra cookie}
[number] {in a group of letters}
[bird] {surrounded by dogs}

This is called parallelism, and it's crucial for making readable sentences that use multiple examples  -- a necessity in game writing.

A common error I see is one like this:

Jane the vampire is sexy, with flowing red hair, and people love to be seen with her. 

None of those things are WRONG. We can presume that all of those phrases do accurately describe Jane. To make the sentence neat, however, we need to beat those phrases into submission so they'll look nicer next to one another. (Think of it as grammatical Vicissitude.) Like this:

Jane the vampire has a gorgeous body, a head of flowing red hair, and a knack for being seen with the right people.

 OR

Jane the vampire is sexy, gorgeous, and popular.

(Jane may actually be an unpopular troll, but at least her sentence is pretty.)

This gets more complicated as sentences get longer and more complicated clauses are introduced. For instance, I wanted to end the previous sentence with "and we want to introduce more complicated clauses." That would have broken the parallel structure and given the predicate two mismatched phrases joined with an overtaxed, straining conjunction. (Poor thing.)

Parallelism errors can happen in the subject of a sentence, too:

Gangrel, the Garou, and what we know as skinriders can all change into animal shapes.

If you use "the Garou," you need to use "The Gangrel." To clean this up, I'd probably strike both the article and the phrase "what we know as." Now my sentence is neat:

Gangrel, Garou, and skinriders can all change into animal shapes.

This isn't rocket science, but it's not just fussy nitpicking either. The more organized your sentences are, the easier it is to get to the ideas inside. Good writing is invisible; bad writing is distracting. Enforcing parallelism helps streamline diverse ideas into matching forms, and allows more chances to pare dead weight in your prose.

For more help with parallel structure, see Purdue University's excellent online writing lab, the OWL, or this article at Writer's Relief.

Editing for Awareness - Everyone's A Little Bit Racist Edition

So you’re a game developer and it’s time to populate your vibrant world with people. Exciting people! Interesting and easily-differentiated people! Great! How are you going to do that?

If you’re like many of us, you’re going to emphasize their idiosyncrasies: are they short, tall, fat, skinny? Do they have nasal or sonorous voices? Do they wear funny hats?

Are they white?

Italian, German, redneck... Elf, Dwarf, Gnome... I bet your NPCs would be considered “white” in the US.1 If you’re not specifying the ethnicity of the people you’re talking about, there’s a good chance your readers are going to assume that they’re white. Is that a problem? Maybe, maybe not. Does it run the risk of making your product less inclusive and potentially less appealing to people who don’t identify as white? Probably.

There are two problems to be addressed in trying to make your manuscripts less racist: one, how to ensure that your world isn't whitewashed, and two, how to include characters of color without being stereotypical.

The first of these is in some ways harder. Which cultural markers do you emphasize to make sure that you’re presenting a wide range of people? If you’re writing in a version of the real world, names can be a marker, but they can also be misleading. Do you emphasize skin color? Hair? Noses? That’s a technique that slides into overt racism pretty quickly. For instance, while it’s not racist to say “this Asian person has almond-shaped eyes,” it might be racist to imply that because this person has almond-shaped eyes, he’s Asian.2 

What if you’re writing in a high-fantasy world — are your magical races all fancypants versions of Western European ethnicities? You know how it goes — hard-drinking Scottish Dwarves, industrious German Gnomes, etc. And Elves? Elves are usually Magical White People. Except when they’re the super-enlightened brown-skinned Native American corollaries that are pretty much just archetypical noble savages.

The best way to fix this is to approach the subject with awareness of your own biases and a thought for what your NPCs might look like to someone of the race or ethnicity you’re presenting. Go Make Me a Sandwich’s post on making the effort not to be a racist in her fantasy novel does a great job of explaining all the things that have to be considered, including "have non-white people" and "don't make all the brown people bad guys."

The White Wolf supplement World of Darkness: Gypsies is an infamous example of this kind of racism. It presented Gypsies as a homogenous subset of the human race with magic literally bred in their blood. Because people don’t know a lot about the Romani people, the writers could (more or less) get away with it. But imagine if someone wrote World of Darkness: Jews. You know, a whole book about people with maybe-sometimes-identifying physical features and weird traditions and folklore about magical creatures! That would be totally cool, right?

No?

Oh, because you’re Jewish — or your good friend is — and it’s not like that. Well, what if you were Romani? Or Native American? Or Japanese? Wouldn’t you get tired of people reducing centuries of history and culture to a couple of lame stereotypes3 based on what they saw in the movies?

This is called “Orientalism,” or romantic racism and it’s the tradition of presenting cultures different from yours as magical, exotic, and/or incomprehensible to outsiders. On the larger scale, it’s called ethnocentrism, and it stems from a (hopefully unconscious) belief that all other cultures or peoples are to be judged or presented based on your own culture. It’s easier to define groups based on what they’re not rather than what they are, after all — and “not like us” is the easiest way of all.

The second problem is one I actually see far more often: including NPCs of various races but reducing them to lazy stereotypes. I edited a manuscript once that included both a lying, thieving Gypsy and a spear-wielding, silent African bodyguard in thrall to a privileged Englishman. Another gave us a Latina character that was pretty much an exact copy of Michelle Rodriguez’s character in The Fast and the Furious.

This is so easy to fix: If you have a character of a given ethnicity, don’t make him a copy of any character from a movie or another book unless you’ve got a damned good reason. I’m tired of bad-ass Yakuza and snooty Frenchmen and scrappy Boston Irish. I’m tired of Magical Black Men and wise, enigmatic Indians. Make your mobsters Polish. Make your cops Iranian. Make your scientists Brazilian4 — or whatever works for you.

A recent manuscript I worked on included a Hungarian character that was written in such a way that his ethnicity was a genuine part of his identity. He lived in an ethnically-diverse part of town, he spoke Hungarian, and his knowledge was partially based on his upbringing. He was interesting not because he was of an ethnicity you don't see often, but because that ethnicity had been tied to a stronger sense of who he was and what his history was. Just as in real life a person's ethnicity is only part of what makes her who she is, this character's Hungarian origins served only as a jumping-off point for a rich backstory.

In the end, this isn’t just about not being a racist. This is about not being a lazy writer. This is about coming up with creative ways to present your world’s vibrant and varied population. It's about filling that world with people with believable backgrounds and problems, with compelling motivations and relationships.

It’s ALSO about not being a racist, but after all, everyone’s a little bit racist.5

 

---

1. Race is closely tied to the politics and history of the culture it occurs in. Though I’ve certainly studied race issues in other countries, I know the US the best, so I’m speaking from that perspective.  
2. Or to describe him in the immortal words of the Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, “all slitty-eyed”  
3. I'm half Polish. I know all about lame stereotypes.  
4. But you don’t have to overdo it, either. I recently listened to an (otherwise great) audiobook of a Doctor Who novel and David Tennant gave every. single. character. a different accent. In these situations, I start to think “wait, how did all these people end up in the same place?”  
5. I’m a white girl. Moreover, I’m a middle-class, educated, pompously liberal white girl. Of *course* I’m kind of a racist. But I try my damnedest to get over it, although as Sean Johnson at the Stranger put it, I’m at best going to talk awkwardly about race.