Dissecting World Building

            The creation of just about any fictional works – be it book, short story, movie, or game – begins with the world building. Certainly, some need less than others; a real world setting requires less than a fantasy setting, but world building still needs to be done to create a convincing world for any story to take place in. A world is a huge thing though – and the idea of building one can be daunting.

            So, how do you tackle building a world without investing years in it? Well, the first part is to remember that you don’t actually need to create a whole world – you just need to make enough of it to make it look like you have. Like the two-dimensional facades stereotypically used for movie sets, all you need is what the audience will see – plus a little bit extra to hint at so they think more had been done.

            Take characters, for example. Each character you intend to present needs to be well thought-out and designed to be realistic, but you only need to make the characters that will be part of the story. Creating the entire population of a city would be tedious an exhausting, so how do you make it seem like the rest of the world still exists? Throw in a few names, and references to events that take place outside the story. It could be as simple as a character commenting on a paper written by someone notable – you don’t have to worry about the identity of the person, or what the paper says, beyond what the commenter needs for their line. The details don’t matter – the fact that someone was given a name and did something noteworthy that has nothing to do with the story makes the world feel more real.

            The same works for places, and is even easier. Just make up a place name, like Drexa’s. The characters a talking, and someone comments on something that happened at Drexa’s, or perhaps suggest it as part of a list of places to go. The reader has no idea what the place it. A restaurant? A club? It doesn’t matter, because the characters know, and it makes the world feel bigger than it is.

            When world building, it’s important to keep to the essentials. What’s important to the story? What do you, as the writer, need to know to maintain consistency within the story? If you aren’t going to use it, don’t worrying about making it – all you need is a hint; enough to make the world seem like it has more depth.

            Of course, if you enjoy building the world and want to go ahead and flesh out every little detail, go ahead and do that, too! Just keep in mind that, if you start to get overwhelmed by the size of your creation, you can always step back and do less. There’s a reason for the saying, “Less is more.” If you ever find out you don’t have enough, you can always add more later – just make it one little piece at a time and, before you know it, you’ll have a healthy little world of your very own, ready for whatever use you put it to.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Simulating Public Opinion

            Understanding the nuances of public opinion is a challenge for me, as it is so hard to pin down what it actually is. Yet, for someone like me – who writes books and runs games where I need to know what entire societies are thinking – it’s important for me to continue striving to understand what they are, where they come from, and how they can be portrayed.

            Through my explorations, I have discovered two key points to understanding the currents of public opinion: the source of information, and how much the person receiving said information trusts the source. For example, one day I read two articles on the same political gathering – one from a right-wing source, and the other from a left-wing source. Due to my own leanings, I instinctively distrusted what was said in one of them, and wanted to believe what was in the other. However, being the type of person I am, the opinion I ended up with was that the truth was partway between the two – though I still favored the one I wanted to believe.

            Another factor that needs to be considered is how readily people will change their opinions. We see a lot of it these days, where one piece of information that goes viral on the internet can take people from thinking someone is amazing to hating them – or vise versa, though this seems to be less common. In many cases, it’s remarkable how easily people will flip their opinions – and they won’t even bother checking into the information before changing their opinions, which is remarkable in this age of satirical news sites and deliberately misleading article titles.

            It appears from this that people are quite fickle, but this isn’t entirely true. While there are some people who will change their opinions at the drop of a hat, there are others who will dig in their heels and refuse to change, and still others who will carefully consider before keeping or altering their opinion. However, the important thing to note about public opinion is that it isn’t really made up of all the opinions of the people who make up the public, and it isn’t even made up of the majority. It is defined by those who speak the loudest, and those who are heard the most. Since the people who refuse to change say the same thing all the time, they tend to blend into the background, and the people who take time to formulate their opinions aren’t there to be vocal at the beginning, this means the bulk of public opinion is formed by those who are fickle. And since having more people supporting an idea puts pressure on others to agree with them, the fickle masses drive and shift the overall perception of the world.

            So, as it turns out, public opinion is simply the opinions of the loudest, most easily swayed individuals in a society. People’s actual opinions can be pushed and swayed by public opinion – because it is within human nature to try to fit in – whereas other people can’t be swayed at all. From a governing perspective, this is a very useful tool – because if you can control the perceived public opinion, you can quiet the people with opposing views – but it isn’t so helpful for my purposes. Yes, it gives me an overall view to present, but it doesn’t help with narrowing down what an individual character thinks.

            For that, it’s important to go back to those two points I mentioned before: where did the person get the information from, and how much do they trust that source? Public opinion can sway them of, of course, but how much of the information has reached them? How diluted has the information become trough the telephone-game? What are their own opinions before receiving the new information? People are more likely to believe something if they want it to be true or if they’re afraid it is true, so how does that impact them?

            That’s all very complicated, though, and while it’s sometimes necessary to go that deep, often it can be simplified into 3 basic views: in favor, neutral, or opposed to any given concept. Sometimes a few more complicated options need to be added, but even with a few more added, it’s fairly simple to define those basic perspectives. From there, one can be designated as the public opinion, and then the others can be assigned to characters as it seems appropriate, and they can even be tweaked from there to personalize them to the character.

            And that is how it becomes possible to realistically simulate the currents of public opinion, based off of my own observations and experience. All opinions are my own.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

2018

            Another year has come and gone. Can you believe that I started this blog back in 2013, and it’s still here six years later? Six whole years of a new blog every week – plus the bonus stories of my D&D games, for those who read them. I never thought I could keep it going this long.

            While 2018 may not have been the best year globally, it was a pretty good one for me. I mean, for starters, we didn’t have any rats in the house, which was fantastic. Aside from that, though, it seemed to be a year of growth and change.

            One of the biggest changes is that this was the first year since it started Ringcrafts, my chainmaille business, didn’t attend any conventions or festivals. While we were sad to miss out on the events and seeing the friends we made there, we stand by the decision we made – with the increased success of Colleen’s Green Door Life Coaching, there was no way she could commit to the shows, and the set-up and tear-down of the shows couldn’t be done by me alone. Apart from freeing up a great deal of time, the lack of shows has also greatly reduced stress, making for a more relaxed year.

            For me, that extra time has been divided between a number of enterprises. The first, and by far most obvious of those, is Dungeons & Dragons. Last November, I switched from playing D&D weekly at the Devil’s Bench to running it, and I’m keeping a record of the ongoing adventure. That campaign has been running for over a year now, and has also led to me being invited to several other games. Not only that, but come the New Year, I’ll be starting a second campaign at the Bench! Crazy, I know.

            Apart from that, I’m still teaching myself computer programming and steadily advancing my skills. It’s both fun and useful, and I’m slowly understanding more about how these machines work (they could have run by magic, for all I knew). The stories I could tell you... but I won’t, because I know that if you’re as interested in the subject as I am, you’ll go and learn for yourself! (It’s easier than you think!)

            My writing projects, on the other hand, have slowed down drastically. I’m still working on them, of course, but the pace has slowed to a crawl. Why is that, you ask? I really don’t know. My best guess is that with all the creative energy I’m pouring into D&D (and the time spent recording the story) and the brainpower being absorbed by coding, my mind just doesn’t have enough juice left for my previous writing productivity. That’s alright with me, though, because I’m still quite happy with my other projects.

            Over the summer, I discovered what promises to be an amazing game, and got involved with a community awaiting its arrival. I could talk your ear off about it, but I’ll spare you by simply saying go check out Chronicles of Elyria – you won’t regret it. Your wallet might, if you get obsessed with the game, but you won’t.

            Right now, the most interesting thing is to look back over the year and see what I can best describe as a steady improvement in life. I couldn’t point at specific things and say, “That! That is better now!” but, when viewed as a whole, the world (at least my little corner of it) is just a little better than it was before, with promises of a continuing trend.

            Now it’s time to look forwards into 2019. As with all years, it’s certain to have its ups and downs, but I have high hopes for it.

            To you and yours, I wish a happy New Year. May it be full of joy and wonder, empty of sorrow, and an experience worth remembering.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Choose Your Story

            It’s easy to think of stories as universal concepts, because a story is a story. Isn’t it? But it really isn’t that simple – because it’s become clear, as we’ve developed more mediums for telling stories, that the enjoyment we get out of any particular story varies depending on the platform used to deliver it.

            Pick a book that’s been turned into a movie. Any book. With very few exceptions, the book s always considered to be better than the movie. This generally comes about in one of two ways: either the movie as accurate to the book, and just doesn’t measure up, or the movie is actually quite good, but is rife with inaccuracies that make a well-read viewer furious.

            The same can be said while translating into other mediums. Audiobooks are common now, but even still, there are some stories that are preferable to be heard aloud – in particular, those told skilled storytellers. Video games also need to have the story adapted for them to be enjoyable – and even within that sphere, there’s variety in what the story needs to be like based on the type of game delivery.

            This means that those who create stories must be aware of the needs of the delivery they intend. A book can be extremely detailed and complex – with an added depth granted from being able to see characters’ thoughts. A story designed to be told aloud requires simplification and a pacing designed to hold the audience captive, because they can’t go back to re-read details they missed. A movie can have much of the complexity of the book, but it needs to be paced faster – and the depth of knowing what characters think is limited to what can be shown in facial expressions. Video games need a story that is simple and interactive, as the focus is more on the journey through the story than the details themselves.

            For each medium, the story must be crafted carefully to meet the requirements of the audience. Does this mean you can’t present the same story on different platforms? Not at all. However, it does mean that you can’t pull a story from one medium and plug it into another and expect it to work – it needs to be altered and adapted to fit the appropriate style of storytelling.

            Keep this in mind whenever you are crafting a story. If you find it isn’t working out the way you thought it would, consider switching the medium before scrapping it.

            As for when you’re enjoying an adaptation of a story you love, remember that sometimes changes are necessary for the sake of entertainment. Besides, you already know the story – isn’t it better to have a new story? Sit back and enjoy the entertainment without the expectation that it be exactly the same as the story you already know; treat it as a new story and you may find yourself more satisfied with your entertainment.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Constructing Family Trees

You know what’s a crazy project to work on? Fictional family trees. It’s extremely time-consuming, but also fascinating and educational. In many ways, it changes how you think about generations and time.

Take the tree I’m working on right now, for example. It’s for a character who is the 9^th individual in their line of succession – although they are only the 7^th of their name. So, I figured I needed at least 9 generations, and that it would be somewhere in the range of 400-500 year time-span. Boy was I wrong.

After building out the main family line – oh, and by the way, family trees just keep getting bigger and bigger as they branch off! – I started putting in the years, and tracking the line of succession, and I ran into a massive snag. If a parent lived a long and full life, their child wouldn’t be ruling until they were seniors! Not only that, but there was the potential that the seat of leadership could pass over an entire generation. On the flip-side, a shorter-lived ruler with no heir could result in their sibling inheriting – meaning that two people in the same generation could hold power, meaning that – unless I rebuilt the family tree – I had to steal that position from a whole other generation.

Well, I eventually sorted the whole mess out, balancing the leadership and generations, and was amazed to find that my 9 generations all fit snugly in a blanket of 200 years. Only 200! Through this, I learned that generations squeeze far closer together than I had ever anticipated – if only because I didn’t sit down to do the math ahead of time.

And remember how I said the family tree just grows and grows? I was erring on the side of keeping family sizes small, even going so far as to end entire branches. Yet, over the span of 200 years, a family that started with one couple grew to have 63 individuals in it (including spouses)!

So, naturally, now I’m off to finish naming 63 people, and giving them all birth and death dates. And all I can say is, thank goodness for noble households who like to pass on names through the family.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Change in the Air

            During my last read-through of The Hobbit, at one point I turned to Colleen and said, “You know, if it’s really sad to think that the current publishing industry wouldn’t have published this book.” I went on to point out the many things deemed ‘wrong’ in it that I’ve learned about during my journey towards getting published. Use of adjectives, writing style, and the overall structure of the story are all things that would currently earn the book a rejection – which is a tragedy, because it is a wonderful book.

            Getting anything published has become difficult in modern times for two very big reasons. The first, and more major of the two, is that there are so many more people out there trying to get published. Between growing populations, increased education, and technology making it easier to contact the publishing companies (you no longer have to print off an entire book), literally anyone can try to get published – meaning there’s a lot more to sift through, making it a lot harder to get noticed.

            The other is that we have examined, studied, and refined what it is that makes a good story, and there are now expectations that specific patterns are followed. Yes, there are still plenty of variations available, but in order to get through submissions faster, publishing professionals look for these key points that have proven to make the most appealing stories – and without those proper plot arcs, it’s very difficult for a book to get published.

            It seems like that’s a good thing. In theory, it provides readers with the best stories possible. However, while this is true, it has also backfired a little. It has made stories far more predictable. When people who read a lot of books pick up something new, they always have a good idea of how things will turn out in the end.

            This isn’t just limited to books, either – it’s the same across all story-telling platforms. For years and years we’ve been refining the perfect story structure – and now we all know it extremely well. Sure, there are plot twists that we didn’t see coming, but by the time the end shows up we already know how it will turn out.

            That said, creators are becoming aware of this now. Some bold writers are looking at these patterns that we expect, and they are taking advantage of it to subvert our expectations. If you’ve seen some of the new Star Wars, or Avengers: Infinity War, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a risk for creators to leave the well-worn paths and to traipse away from the perfect story arc, but it’s paying off. People aren’t getting what they expected and, for the most part, they like it.

            You see, while there’s a lot of comfort in the familiar, we also have a craving for something new. After being fed the same story arcs for so long, we’re ready for something new. To me, this is an exciting time. It’s time for change, and there’s no telling what will come out of it. We may even get some stories that are truly surprising.

            We might even be moving into a time when a book like The Hobbit, were it not already published and famous, would get published again.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Foreshadowing

            My wife once told me that, when she was young, it used to amaze her how writers could put all that foreshadowing in their books and have all the loose threads come together at the end. It blew her mind – not to mention, disappointed her – when she got older and realized that writers could go back and add foreshadowing earlier in the book after writing the end.

            I think that foreshadowing is one of the most complicated aspects of writing, yet is one of the most important ones. How would you feel about reading a book where the masked villain is revealed at the end and... it’s someone you never even heard of before? What if you were reading along and got to the end of a book, only to discover that there was a whole other plot going on in the background that had nothing to do with the rest of the book, and that was never even hinted at? You’d probably be pretty disappointed. Surprised – but disappointed.

            I think the best-known use of foreshadowing is in the Harry Potter series. You know what I’m talking about. Or, if you don’t, go read the series and find out. If you read the series a second time (or have a very good memory), you’ll start seeing things from all the way back in book one that hint at the great reveal – and it’s truly amazing how much there is that connects.

            But, wait... there are 7 Harry Potter books (well, in the main series, at any rate) and the big reveal is in the last one – J.K. Rowling certainly didn’t have all the books completely written when the first was published. She didn’t have the option of going back to add those bits in. So, how did she do it?

            Well, it’s because there is more than one way to foreshadow. In this case, it was excellent planning. This big reveal was practically the whole point of the entire series – it was something that was planned from the beginning and, as such, it was easy for Rowling to put in. In this case, the hard part was keeping it subtle enough to not alert the readers.

            Of course, not all foreshadowing can be planned in advance. Sure, writers generally know how their books will end, but they don’t know all the separate elements – those are discovered along the way. Then, if needed, the writer can always go back and add them later, after completing the manuscript (but before publishing it).

            Yet, there is still another way to foreshadow, something that is almost a combination of the previous two. Writers can often foreshadow as they go. How? There are two ways. The first is simply having an idea of what’s going to happen in the story’s future, and spotting opportunities to drop little hints (usually accompanied by snickering behind a hand and statements like, “They’ll never catch this!”). The other is to link ideas backwards as you go along. A book being written is almost a living thing – it expands and grows as the author writes it, sometimes turning into something entirely different than was initially intended. A writer can keep in mind things they wrote previously in the book and be just as amazed as the reader when it turns out to be a hint later in the book. This is done much like guessing at what will happen next when you’re reading – only, as the writer, you get to decide what actually does happen. The writer writes something, uses it to make a prediction of what it could mean for the future, then makes it happen.

            So, Young Colleen wasn’t entirely wrong – sometimes writers do put the foreshadowing in as they go, and it can be very impressive. But, as with all skills, it’s important to remember that there’s more than one way of doing everything, and none of them is better than the other. The important part isn’t how you create the foreshadowing – what matters is having enough foreshadowing that when the reveal comes, the reader can put together all the pieces and feel like the story is plausible.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Stories We Tell

            When I was six or so, my family was sitting around the breakfast table telling stories of the dreams we’d had. This wasn’t an irregular occurrence, but something different happened this time: my dad had a dream to share. Normally he only commented on how he didn’t dream, so when he commented that last night, he had a dream, he had our rapt attention.

            It was an extraordinary and hilarious tale about his encounter with an aggressive pink rhino, which he had eventually befriended. To this day I don’t know for sure if he made it up on the spot and wrote it down later, or if he’d prepared it in advance. It doesn’t really matter – what matters is that it was the start of something wonderful.

            I honestly don’t know how it happened, but it led to my dad coming into the grades 1-3 my brother and I both were in to tell the story of the Pink Rhino again, and the story was loved by the whole class – so much so that it became a regular thing. My dad began producing more Robert Munch-esque stories and telling them for my class. It wasn’t just the incredible stories themselves – it was the way he told them, which I would love to describe to you, but in truth it’s something you’d have to experience.

Some of the stories involved members of the class, like Pictures, a story about a talented artist in the class named Mallory whose pictures came to life when put on the refrigerator (causing no end of problems), or The Scratch – a story about the fight I had with Rotten Rosco, the most fearsome pirate to sail the Canadian highways, that he wrote over the weekend as an explanation for a huge scratch I’d gotten on my face from running into a tree. Others grew into massive class projects, like the Ordinary Story, a rhyming story about a boy and a girl who wander into the woods and befriend a troll – after this story, our class worked together to create an enchanted forest from plasticine.

            Looking back on that time, I find it incredible how many engaging and humorous stories he wrote, memorized, and told over the short three years I was in that classroom. It led to him joining the local storytellers’ guild and telling stories at a number of other venues as well – including an event for my wife’s homeschool group, before I even met her.

            Looking back on that, it’s no wonder that, with that in my background, I grew up with a passion for telling stories. However, there’s one conversation I had with my dad several years ago that has stuck with me ever since – it was the day he told me how impressed he was that I could write full length books. I looked at him in astonishment and told him that he could easily write a novel as well. I, myself, was (and am) still impressed with all his shorter stories. I’ve only written a few short stories in my time, and almost all of them leave an opening for more to happen – making them more like first chapters than short stories. Writing something novel-length is far easier to me.

            I think that was the first day I came to appreciate a key element of human nature: our tendency to be blind to that which makes us extraordinary because it comes easily to us. We think that, because we find it easy, everyone must find it easy, and that the things we find hard and that other people find easy means that those people are more extraordinary than us.

            We teach kids that everyone is unique and special, but we don’t go on to tell them what that actually means. It means that everyone has their own skills and talents, and those are what make them extraordinary. If something comes easily to you, that’s probably one of the things that makes you special. And those things you wish you could do that other people seem so good at, but that they seem to think it’s no big deal that they can do it? That’s what makes them special, and they just might admire you for the things you find to be easy.

            Sure, I’ll never be able to sit at the front of a room and captivate an audience with the way I tell a story – at least, not like my dad can – but I have my own ways of telling stories that are just as good. Not to mention, requiring far less energy to present. And quieter. Much quieter.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Writing Life

Sometimes the words go down one sentence at a time,

Sometimes they go in leaps and bounds.

Sometimes you drag the words from the depths of a chasm,

Sometimes you wonder where they’re coming from and if they’ll ever end.

But the words keep on coming.

There are times when the words are good,

There are times when the words are bad.

There are times when you think the words are the best you’ll ever write,

Only to come back later and hate them.

But the words keep on coming.

A time will come when you must read the words,

You must judge their merit and change them.

A time will come when you must destroy the words,

When you must give up on rearranging them.

But the words keep on coming.

After an eternity the words will be complete,

The pages filled and grammar thrice-checked.

After an eternity you can see the end,

At last, perhaps, you can rest.

But the words will keep on coming.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

2017

            Egadz, is it that time again already? The years certainly seem to be getting faster as they rush past. And what an eventful year it’s been.

            The year started off with rats, then went on to form new friendships, have lots of Dungeons & Dragons (including a 12 hour marathon for Cystic Fibrosis), and drew to an exciting close as I started a YouTube channel.

            Alongside all of that, I started a project – well, more of a system of goals, really – at the beginning of last year, and it has lasted all the way until now. While I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ve hinted at parts of it.

            Essentially, I noticed that the best way to get myself to do something is to do it every single day. It’s part challenge and part... well, part that once I get on a streak, I really don’t want to break it. For example, I have written every single day for coming up of seven years now. Imagine how horrible it would be if I missed a day and had to start over again!

            And now I’ve expanded that list. Since the beginning of last year, I have also read and exercised every day. On top of that, I’ve also worked every day on learning two new skills: drawing and coding – both with fair success. And I’ve been practicing piano as well, which more along the lines of continuing learning a skill I’d given up on several years ago (because I’d never worked hard enough at it. To be fair, this one I didn’t do every day, but only because a piano wasn’t available on my vacation).

            To keep track of all of this, I’ve made a spreadsheet with Google Sheets with little boxes that I check off every day when I complete a task. I even have a colour-code for “rating” how well I felt I performed on that task for the day. Pretty neat, I think, and overall a huge success! So, as a New Year’s gift to all those out there seeking to set goals for 2018, I’m giving you this idea, that you might do with it as you see fit.

            With that, I wish you all a Happy New Year! May this one be better than the last.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

The Art of Writing

            All you need to start is one word. Just one. In fact, you don’t even need that – you could start with a single letter, although that is much more difficult if you don’t know what to follow it with.

            You take that one word – or letter, as the case may be – and follow it with another, stretching it out onto a sentence. If you want to get fancy, you can even add some punctuation, making it a compound sentence.

            Then, you do it again, adding a second sentence, then a third. (It is always a good idea to vary the sentence length.) Before you know it, you have a paragraph and you’re ready to do it all over again.

            Except, this time, the words and ideas are different. Just as the paragraph after that – and after that – are different.

            It doesn’t have to be perfect. The words can be changed later; the grammar fixed; the ideas altered. The act of writing is the important part. You aren’t chiseling it into stone – the details can always be changed.

            Just take it one step at a time – one word at a time. It happens faster than you think. You have a blog post. A chapter. A short story. A book.

            Writing is more than a skill. It is an art. It takes practice. It takes time. But when you’re finished, you have something you can be proud of – because, if you aren’t proud of it, that just means it isn’t finished yet.

            All it takes to start is one letter. One word. One sentence. From there, it grows and builds momentum until it is complete.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Different Ideas

            This week I came across a list of things writers are afraid of that they shouldn’t be, and at the top of the list was: other people stealing their ideas. And it’s true – I have yet to meet an author who wasn’t trepidatious about sharing their work because they were afraid of their ideas being stolen. It’s not just that someone could copy our work – it’s the fear that someone else might take our ideas and produce something with them before we do. Even worse, what if they produce something better than we do?

            There were to incredible arguments about why writers don’t need to fear their ideas being stolen. The first was that, quite simply, authors have so many ideas of their own, they aren’t about to go around stealing someone else’s. It’s true. Every writer I have ever met has had more ideas for what to write than they could ever write in their lifetime. I know from personal experience that for every book I write, I end up with two more book ideas – I’ll certainly never need to steal from someone else!

            I found the second argument even more compelling. Even when you share an idea with someone, their vision of that idea will be completely different from your own. We all view the world differently and, as a result, the way we flesh out ideas are all completely different.

            The reason I found that argument more compelling was because I have personal experience proving it true. Many years ago, a friend shared an idea with me. She said she wanted to write a story about a haunted piano. I thought this was brilliant! A ghost haunting a piano sounded absolutely fantastic to me and I was very excited to read the story.

            Once she had written it, however, I was very disappointed. The story was very well written, but it didn’t come close to what I had envisioned from the idea. It was a tale (as near as I can remember) of someone who acquired an old piano, and then the piano had possessed them and they proceeded to waste away their lives playing the piano – writing music and reaching for an impossible imperfection.

            I was so disappointed in the results that I wrote up a story of my own so I could share my take on the story of a haunted piano. This was a piano in a secluded alcove that could play itself. A person, coming upon the piano but not knowing how to play, played a few random notes. When they went to leave, the piano played the notes back – and then proceeded to build a marvellous song around those notes, to the awe of its audience. To me, it was such a compelling scene that I built it into the first novel I ever wrote.

            Both stories stemmed from a single idea, yet that idea took on extremely different shapes for each writer. How would a third person interpret the idea? A fourth? I couldn’t say, but I do know that I’m no longer as worried about people stealing my ideas.

            What about you?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

What Is It Good For?

            I recently heard a quote that said, in essence, that the natural state of any two nations is to be at war – and that if there is peace, it is only because there is someone working very hard to keep the peace. Nations are always working to further their own agendas – be it that they want to spread their ideology or that they need resources – and so, without effort to prevent it, they will clash with others.

            This was a bit of a revelation for me. My thought process prior to hearing this was that war needed a reason to occur. However, this reversed way of looking at things made everything about global politics make a bit more sense – at least when it comes to looking at history.

            It makes sense that, back in the eras of survival, people went to war over resources. That’s how they survived, after all. As for ideology, well... people tend to believe that they are right and that it is their duty to enlighten others.

            Nowadays, lots of effort is put into keeping peace. It doesn’t always work, but it’s become important for survival with our destructive capabilities. Lots of people work very hard at keeping the peace – it certainly doesn’t come naturally.

            This bit of insight may not seem very important, but as a writer it has completely changed my perspective. When working on building a world, and stringing together plotlines, I no longer have to ask myself, “Why is there a war?” Instead I ask, “Why is there peace? Who is behind the peace?”

            And, if I’m in a particularly destructive mood, I’ll add, “How will the world change if something happens to the peace keeper?”

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Building a Playable World

            This week, I managed to get my nose to the grindstone working on a big project I started back in June. This is a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons.

            Back when I was in the planning stages for the D&D marathon for Cystic Fibrosis, I was talking with the Dungeon Master of the weekly game I play in and the idea was floated that I could eventually start running a second game at the board game cafe. I liked the idea, but at the same time I prefer to be a player rather than a DM. At the same time, I knew that there was a waiting list and it would be great for the gaming community.

            So, naturally, I began thinking about the possibilities for games I could run. What did I want to see in a game? What would be fun for me to run, and fun for players to play? And that’s when a seed took root in my mind.

            One of the things that makes D&D such a great game is its versatility. You can do absolutely anything with it. Even in the most complex video game, there is a limit to the decisions a player can make – they can be given a great amount of freedom, and still be chained down by the limited options. In D&D, there are no limitations – yet the games frequently take on the same shape of “Here is your quest”, go to the dungeon, get the reward. There’s often plotlines and political situations woven in, but it doesn’t take advantage of D&D’s true ability to do anything. I feel that this is largely due to the players, having been trained by video games and society’s expectations, don’t necessarily understand how much freedom they have – and they don’t necessarily understand the depth of the world they’ve been thrown into.

            And so, I came up with an idea for a world that will (hopefully) open the players’ minds to all they can do: a world where the players are colonizing a “new world”. So, rather than being thrown into a world where there are kingdoms and empires and complex political structures that they know nothing about, the players will be put into a world that is as strange to the non-player-characters around them as it is to them. This puts the players at the centre of everything as a new society is established, and it gives them the freedom to do absolutely whatever they want. Do they want to help establish a settlement? Do they want to go off and explore the new world? The world is entirely open for them to choose what to do.

            Now, obviously, from a DM’s perspective, a world like that is a bit challenging to run. There needs to be plots to keep the players engaged, and in a world so free and open, it is hard to know what to prepare for the game. So, I started writing up the campaign setting – which is, essentially, a description of the world, everything in it, and guidelines for making the world easier for the DM to run. It is an immense task, but hey – I’m part of the Alliance of Worldbuilders; building worlds is what we do.

            So far, it is coming along well. I’ve outlined the world, its history, and the basics for how the game functions. The functions need a lot of work, but I’ll get them done eventually.

            This week, however, I was focusing on a very fun task: monsters. Even though this world lacks civilization (and, largely, because of that), this world is crawling with monsters. So, I combed through D&D’s monster manual and cherry picked monsters to have established societies in this world. Then I created those societies and figured out what politics they had, both within themselves and with all the others.

            It was so much fun and, let me tell you, I can’t wait until I’ve completed this setting and I get to see it in action. Who knows? I may even decide it’s good enough to publish through the Dungeon Masters’ Guild.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Unstoppable Creativity

            You’d think I would have learned by now. Because I haven’t, I’ve now broken my cardinal rule. That’s right, I’m working on more than one book at a time.

            It may not seem like such an important rule. Loads of people work on more than one book at once, so why is it such a big problem? Well, it’s a problem because it gives the writer an excuse to not finish a project. The Dark Lord of the Alliance of Worldbuilders is a prime example – he’d written 100,000 words or more in a single month (wow!) and yet, to my knowledge, he had never completed a book (we all give him a hard time about it).

            Now, in my case, I couldn’t help starting a second project. As I mentioned a few blogs back, I’m currently working on rewriting a project. Apparently, after seven years of writing every day, rewriting isn’t enough of a creative outlet for my brain. After a while, an idea surfaced that I couldn’t resist – so now, here I am, splitting my writing time between two projects when I should be focusing on one.

            It just goes to show that creativity is a habit. Once you get into it, you just have to keep going.

            Feel free to take that as encouragement to build a creative habit – or a warning to avoid doing so. Whichever suits you best.

            Either way, know that you can’t stop the creativity. Creators must create.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Timeless Fantasy

            I’ve often pondered over why I enjoy the fantasy genre so much. The reasons I find are numerous, but there is one aspect that stands out: Timelessness. Fantasy, well written, has the potential to last forever.

            Before I continue, I’ll add a disclaimer saying that this is a blog based on my particular reading preferences and – in spite of what it may seem like – I am not saying other genres are horrible; I’m merely using them as a basis for comparison.

            Books come and go, and part of the reason when a book goes is how well people can understand and relate to it. This means that within sixty or so years of having been written, books based in modern times are out of date – because society and technology changes so incredibly fast. If my parents were to write a book about their teenage years, I would be able to understand it, but everything was so much different by my teens that I wouldn’t relate. Likewise, if a modern day teenager (in a generation where everyone has a smartphone) read a book I wrote based on my teen years (around the time when only about half the teens had cell phones – flip or slide, rather than smart), they would find they had a very different life experience. Most of them wouldn’t have a chance with my parents’ book containing record players, cassette tapes and stuff I don’t even understand.

            Science fiction, on the other hand, is based in the future. It teaches people about a possible view of the future and other worlds. It’s fun and awesome, up until we pass the story in time, culture, or technology. Look at Back to the Future – now out of date because we passed the time when we were supposed to have hover boards and flying cars (yes, we have some reasonable facsimiles, but not what we were expecting). On the other hand, there’s the early Star Trek which, while doing very well for when it was made, had a culture that we have advanced beyond.

            Fantasy differs from other genres in one major aspect: it is deliberately taking people to another world, and therefore assumes that people need to be taught about that world. A lot of time and effort is put into teaching about the fresh world and cultures, without making any assumptions. As such, it never goes out of date – assuming, of course, that the writer hasn’t allowed too much of their culture to leak into their work.

            Historical fiction, of course, comes close to fantasy for timelessness. Once again, it is taking people to a place that it’s assumes they don’t know much about and, as such, it teaches them. Of course, with a subject much closer to home, it is easier to make assumptions that the readers will know certain things, which could cause the story to get out of date.

            So, as you can see, fantasy has the best ability to last forever. Will The Hobbit ever go out of date? I think not. That said, it’s still possible for books from other genres to last throughout the ages. Perhaps more of them could do so if they were created with the specific intent to do so; written in a way that taught about the world without making assumptions. However, I believe that fantasy is the only genre to which timelessness comes naturally.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Rewriting

            Whenever you write a book, it’s always a good idea to have beta readers. After all, you need other people to read the book and tell you what they liked and disliked about it. More than that, they can help you edit. No one can catch every error, after all, so the more eyes, the better.

            Then, of course, you occasionally have a beta reader who makes a suggestion that drives you to do a complete rewrite of your book – such as the rewrite I’m working on right now.

            Rewriting is an interesting process. This is actually the first time I’ve done a full rewrite of a novel – several years ago I did rewrite the first chapter of the first book I wrote (it subsequently became two chapters), but nothing as big as this.

            When you rewrite, you basically have two options: you can start from scratch and hope anything worth keeping stuck in your head well enough to find its way into the new version, or you can constantly reference the old version to make sure you’re keeping everything you want.

            Oddly enough, what I’m doing sort of combines the two. The suggestion leading to this rewrite was based around the idea that I should split the book into two (or even three!) full novels – one for each of the main characters I was working with. The idea intrigued me, but it also drastically altered sections of the plot. However, the more I thought about it, the more I liked what I could do with it.

            And so, I began the rewrite, which involved mixing whole new scenes with some of the old ones. As such, when I’m able, I reference what was happening before to ensure I get the important details and my favorite wordings, yet there’s a lot of time spent writing entirely new content. So far, the results are good – although, it seems I may have a tendency to expand each chapter into two when I’m rewriting.

            It is a tedious process – it’s like writing a whole book over again, when you already wrote it once. Yet, even a short ways in, I could already tell that the new one was an improvement over the old. So, with that alone, I can say rewriting is worth the trouble. By the time a book gets published, you want it to be the best it can be. If that involves writing the same book multiple times, so be it. The end result will be worth it.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Artistic Judgement

            One of the fun (here, fun means “horrible”) things about being an artist – no matter the medium – is an inability to judge the quality of your own work. Or, rather, we can judge our own work, but we do so on a scale of Dreadful to I Guess It’s Kinda Okay.

            When I was just out of high school, and still fairly new to making chainmaille, I made a project that was my then-crowning achievement. It was a chainmaille vest made using a pattern known as elf-weave – one of the most complicated chainmaille weaves in existence. The shirt has over 100 hours of work in it, and looks great. But it has a flaw in it. Somehow, while I was making it, I managed to combine two rows into one, losing half a row.

            Even though the flaw isn’t visible to anyone not looking for it – and someone without excellent pattern recognition skills is unlikely to spot it – it is very hard to see. But to me, the creator, that tiny flaw is a horrible oversight, all but ruining the shirt.

            Talk to any artist and they’ll tell you similar tales. Ask them about a specific project and they’ll be able to tell you every flaw in minute detail. This line is out of place, that note was performed slightly off, and that part that goes in should have gone out but it couldn’t be fixed without destroying the whole thing.

            Each new created piece of artwork that manages to meet the artist’s approval is the best piece they’ve made to date – in fact, it’s so good, it makes all the previous pieces rubbish. Not that it’s any good....

            I think that this harsh self-judgement is part of what pushes artists forward, encouraging them to strive to improve their craft and make more projects. But, at the same time it’s disheartening, because nothing is ever good enough. People may shower our work with praise, but can’t they see that flaw right there? They must be lying.

            What is it that makes a creator so hard on their work? Seeing all the minute details that they had to be aware of in order to create it. An outside observer – even other artists – didn’t painstakingly draw each line, write each word, or link each ring together. As such, they look at the whole – the completed project. They don’t see the mistakes, because they have no idea that they are mistakes. They’re too busy being distracted by everything that was done right to notice what was done wrong.

            A valuable lesson that all artists should learn is how to step back from the project and observe it without their artistic lens. It is true that we must always strive to better our art, but sometimes we need to step back, look at the whole, and appreciate what we’ve accomplished. Otherwise we may forget how well we’re doing and give up.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Evil Vegetarian Elves

            Of late, I’ve been reading the Inheritance Cycle (by Christopher Paolini) to Colleen. As a result, you now get to hear about one of my biggest pet peeves in fantasy: vegetarian elves.

            To start off with, I should probably say that this is in no way an attack on vegetarianism or veganism – it is merely my opinion relating to an aspect of world building.

            Now, I completely understand the concept of elves being vegetarian – from a certain perspective, it makes complete sense. Elves revere nature and life, so wouldn’t they be opposed to killing animals?

            However, I can very easily refute that argument by saying: take a close look at nature. In nature, it is kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. Yes, some animals eat only plants, but that’s because they lack the ability to eat meat. Elves are one with nature and, as such, would partake in the natural cycle of life. To abstain from eating meat would be to elevate themselves above nature.

            That said, it is also important to go back to the roots of modern fantasy. Tolkien. This is where we start, because prior to Tolkien, elves were all short sprites like the ones who help Santa. Tolkien reinvented the race into what is used in most stories.

            So, were Tolkien’s elves vegetarians? No. Thanks to the movies, this isn’t common knowledge because the idea that elves are vegetarians is so widespread that it managed to get into Peter Jackson’s interpretation. However, in The Hobbit, when Bilbo and the dwarves are in Mirkwood, they find themselves on the outskirts of a hunt – involving elves hunting a white elk. Later they come upon the elves feasting and, yes, meat is mentioned.

            This is the point where we reach why this becomes a pet peeve of mine. It can easily be argued that each writer is at complete liberty to make their world whatever they want it to be, which is entirely true. So what’s wrong with vegetarian elves? Internal consistency.

            When aspects of a world are created, even a fantasy world, they have to make sense. For that, let’s look at the common traits elves always have. Pointed ears. Graceful bodies. Keen eyesight and hearing. Exceptional archery skills.

            This last one is the problem. Exceptional archery skills. Why are elves exceptional archers? They are generally a peaceful race, so they would have no need of weapons unless threatened – at which point, they’d have to learn pretty fast to be that good at archery. There are easier weapons to use. No, they aren’t exceptional archers for the purposes of war – it is because they are hunters. And as they are so attuned to nature, they would not hunt for sport – only for food. Thus, for elves to have archery skills (and tracking skills, for that matter), they must eat meat.

            All of that said, it is possible for elves to be vegetarian – the world building just has to match. And, while it was his books that inspired this post, Paolini actually did a good job on the world building end of making his elves vegetarians – they have a reason for their choice and instead of exceptional archery, they’re simply very good at all forms of fighting due to their age, magic, and super-strength (making them more like Vulcans than traditional elves).

            So, in conclusion, elves can eat whatever they want – but the world and their abilities had better support their food choice.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Language and Code

            So, back in the fall I decided I wanted to learn programming. It wasn’t the first time I decided this – I’ve long had an interest in making my own video games and such – but this time I actually went ahead and did it.

            I started with a few free phone apps, but quickly came across a slight problem – most of the apps were teaching me a programming language without really explain how to code. It all seemed to assume I had a pre-existing knowledge of coding and programming terminology and, as such, I had to extrapolate a lot of information from context.

            When I came to the end of the free lessons in the best of these apps (it didn’t even tell me which programming language I was learning – I believe it was either Java or Javascript), I decided to look for something that taught a bit better. To refine my search, I decided to look for a specific language tutorial rather than casting my line out and seeing what I caught – my thought being that if I could find something that taught well enough, the terminology and skills could transfer to other programming languages.

            I decided to lean C programming, as my research revealed it to be one of the core programming languages. My search soon popped up with this site for C++, an upgraded form of C. Within the first few lessons, I knew I’d come to the right place. Rather than just telling me how to code, it goes into detail about how programming works, so I actually understand what I’m being taught to do. There’s even a review from a university professor saying this free online textbook is the best programming textbook he’s ever seen.

            So, now I’m buzzing along, learning to code and loving it – it comes naturally to me and feels like one of the things my brain was designed for. I’m not very advanced yet, mind you, but I’m getting there and making a list of programs to write once I have the skill.

            For now, though, I thought I’d share with you one of the things I find the most interesting about programming. It’s one of the things that inspired the thought process of, oh, three blog posts ago – how everything is broken into smaller pieces.

            You see, a programming language is just that – a language. It has certain words you use to combine together that tell the computer to do something. A line of code is like a sentence – only it ends with a semi-colon rather than a period. Code is broken into paragraphs called functions that look something like this:

Type of function and its name()

{

            Lines of code that give the computer its instructions;

            Just for appearances, we should have multiple lines;

            After all, a single sentence paragraph is boring;

            Also, there are usually more numbers;

}

            A program as made up of a bunch of functions (among other things) and they work together through logical progressions to make whatever the program is for happen. Just like how words, sentences and paragraphs fit together to tell a story.

            It makes so much sense, yet it never occurred to me that that was how it would work. When you think about it, the familiar structure makes it easier for programmers learn the new language. Plus, as with everything else in life, it means that if something is too big to accomplish, it can be done by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable, pieces.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.