The Shadow: The Most Terrifying Monster is Ourselves

 I'll start this off by pointing out the total opposite: Cosmic Horror is predicated on the notion that the most horrifying thing is something so alien and beyond our understanding that we cannot really grasp its true form, and our attempts to understand it only lead to a kind of psychic dissonance that leads to madness and despair.

But I think the absence of sense within cosmic horror leaves a void for us to fill in the gap.

Happy Halloween, folks! It seems appropriate tonight (less than an hour left, but midnight's kind of the main event, isn't it?) to talk about horror.

The story I'm writing is what I'm describing as Weird Gothic Fantasy - the New Weird, and perhaps weird fiction in general, cannot help but influence my writing, and while at its core I'm writing a fantasy story, the main character is a dhampir living in a world that is like if fairy tales (the spooky, Irish kind) had given way to Gothic horror (having read Dracula, it's clear that the Irish author Bram Stoker was channeling a lot of the scarier aspects of Irish fairy tales, with the Count coming off almost as a kind of Fae creature when he's introduced). But, me being me, I can't leave well enough alone and have introduced elements involving other universes that practically run on different genre rules, including a lot more modern elements like parapsychology and Jungian theory and the sort of psionic stuff you might find in some of Stephen King's fiction or Stranger Things (which is of course heavily inspired by the former).

Gothic Horror is the subgenre of horror that most focuses on the Shadow. Its key monsters - vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other forms of undead - are all former humans. Often the terror of these monsters is not only that one might die if they attack you, but also that you might become the monster.

While Cosmic Horror's emphasis on the outer threat - often something alien, though the tropes of the "alien" as we usually think of it today wouldn't fully arise for a few decades after Lovecraft's works (though honestly if you imagine some of his creations like the Great Race of Yith or the Elder Things being made with 1950s special effects, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine them fitting into that B-Movie mold) - would seem to remove it from this idea of the Shadow, there's often an element in these stories of a more terrestrial threat. The Shadow Over Innsmouth has a protagonist who realizes, in the twist ending (spoilers, I guess? I feel like we're past the statute of limitations on this one) that he is a descendant of the bizarre hybrid fish-people of the town, and that as he approaches his 30s, he's starting to undergo his own transformation into an inhuman monster and will have to journey beneath the waves. Likewise, the actual threat of the Call of Cthulhu is not really the giant monstrous ancient being, but the living human cultists who are trying to keep their activities secret and murdering anyone who discovers them (this actually required me to read the story twice to understand that was what was happening).

Even stepping outside of horror - consider one of the most iconic villains in cinema history, Darth Vader. More or less the science-fantasy equivalent of a Death Knight (complete with a skeletal mask,) we discover in the second film (and again, spoilers... I guess?) that Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker, the protagonist Luke's father.

There's foreshadowing for this: in his training with Yoda, Luke descends into a kind of root-cavern in a place that Yoda says is strong with the Dark Side of the Force, and he has a confrontation with what he thinks is Vader, but is actually a kind of vision. When he cuts off the phantom Vader's head, the mask bursts open and reveals Luke's own face staring back at him - the potential for darkness is there within him. Vader is literally what happens when a Skywalker falls to the Dark Side, and Luke can see that as a potential path that he might walk down, even if it's a path he's determined not to walk.

We see this with Gollum as well, in Lord of the Rings. Frodo is a good person - and when we first meet him, he's living the kind of carefree, innocent life that is kind of the hobbit birthright. But as he is forced to carry the Ring - the object that holds an embodiment of darkness, reckless ambition, and hatred, he feels that weight bearing down on him. In Gollum, he sees the dark future of what he could become if he doesn't succeed in his mission - a broken, monstrous version of a hobbit (or technically a proto-hobbit if I'm remembering my Tolkien lore right). Indeed, the Ring seems to make Shadows of all who possess it. Isildur was a noble prince who became a conceited, cruel king once he took the ring. Galadriel would go from being a graceful, wise ruler to a tempestuous tyrant. Though we never see what Gandalf might be like with the ring, we get a hint at it from the depravities of Saruman, an angelic and wise being who was twisted into the vicious conqueror he is only because of his lapse in faith that the Ring could be opposed.

Returning to horror, and indeed cosmic horror, in strong contention for scariest movie ever made is John Carpenter's The Thing. Full disclosure: I haven't watched this movie in its entirety because I like being able to sleep. But while on paper the threat here is something utterly alien and incomprehensible, the form it takes is precisely those that are most familiar to the people around it. It both infects and mimics its prey, and there's even an implication that the people infected by it are not even aware that they are The Thing until their body twists into some horrific mockery of human anatomy.

To a certain extent, I think that humans have a unique source of fear: while plenty of other animals kill amongst themselves, most humans have other humans as the animals they have the most reason to fear. From interpersonal violence to wars between nations, it's humans who have the greatest capacity to destroy humans.

But internally, there are other factors at play.

While we generally experience our consciousness as a singular entity, there are some neurological and psychological theories that there are kind of multiple "thinking" systems within our own brains and nervous systems. This can range from the rather uncontroversial ideas like the idea that the complex nerve cluster in our stomachs has a fairly sophisticated capability to process information, or the idea that we have a subconsciousness that processes things in a way we aren't aware of, to more radical idea like that we have a kind of silent passenger mind that serves in direct subordination to the dominant mind - perhaps in the right or left brain split.

There's also the idea of an illusory Shadow.

One of the most fascinating hypotheses I've heard of is an attempt to explain the terrifying sensation of, well, a kind of form of death wish.

People will sometimes report, when they are near a precipice, that they have the strangest urge to jump, even knowing that doing so would be fatal. They don't do this, of course (at least the ones that report having the urge) but there's that kind of terrifying notion that a part of you wanted to jump. The hypothesis, though, is that it's a kind of miscommunication within the brain.

Essentially, standing near a ledge, some part of the mind says "whoa, step back,  you don't want to fall off that ledge," and then another part of the mind says "well, of course I don't want to fall off that ledge. But then why would I need to receive that warning? Is there a part of me that actually wants to jump off that ledge?" In this case, any actual desire to jump is a pure phantom, but the notion is introduced as if there is some dark, self-destructive part somewhere, exerting an influence on one's behavior.

Could this little mental blip lead to an actual journey into real darkness, somewhat like a traffic jam that starts for no more significant reason that someone breaking a little too hard miles ahead of the jam?

In Ancient Greece, the idea of free will was kind of a foreign concept. Thoughts that occurred within one's own mind were said to come from the gods. An act of artistic creation was when you allowed the Muses to speak or work through you. But you could imagine a corollary that if you allowed, say, Ares to work through you, you might commit acts of wanton violence and cruelty.

I think this reflects the multifaceted nature of human psychology - our conscious mind feels monolithic, but there are a number of elements beneath that surface that are always active, even if we aren't fully aware of them (and, well, in a sense by definition we aren't aware of them).

The Shadow, the dark side of us that might be externalized as a monster in a horror story, is what we fear might be at work there.

In my story, what a vampire is (and not necessarily only vampires, but that's the most important example) is when that Shadow replaces the person that once existed. As a dhampir (a half-vampire,) the protagonist's vampiric father is a twisted darkened version of the heroic figure he had been in life. The protagonist must not only grapple with the monster his father is, but also with the darkness that literally makes up a part of him.

In most stories, the Shadow is vanquished by slaying the externalized monster. That's the simplest way of dealing with it.

But psychologically, it's not really something we can do for the Shadow within.

So, while this is not my video game blog, I feel I need to bring up the game Alan Wake II, which came out on Friday and which I spent the past weekend playing through to its conclusion. The game is mainly psychological horror, with myriad genre influences, but at the core of it, the eponymous character is a writer who is trapped (after the events of the first game) in a nightmare-world known as the Dark Place. His greatest fear is that the entity that lives there, known as the Dark Presence, will escape and transform the real world into the same twisted shadow that is the Dark Place. And the avatar that the Dark Presence has chosen is a figure named Mr. Scratch, who is Alan's exact double, only in this case he's a deranged, sadistic, egomaniacal killer.

While I don't want to get into the specifics, as it's a new game that many likely haven't beaten or even played yet, it becomes very clear that simply killing Mr. Scratch is never going to actually get rid of him. It's not even clear if he can be defeated entirely.

The game's studio, Remedy, has embarked on creating a shared universe for its various games, and 2019's Control (which is probably my favorite of their titles I've played, even if I think Alan Wake II is a triumph) introduces the Federal Bureau of Control, which is aware of the Dark Presence, but refers to it as The Shadow - and given that the FBC more or less investigates and contains phenomena that are better explained by Jungian psychology than so-called "hard" sciences, that choice of name is, I'm sure, no accident.

The thing is, shutting the Shadow out doesn't really work. If we deny the darkness that dwells with us, we often let it work away at us. True, as Nietzsche says, (I may be paraphrasing here,) if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you. And obsessing over darkness can sometimes allow it to grow an outsized influence on you. But at the same time, acknowledging it, recognizing it, and even engaging with it can be an important tool in maintaining control over it.

And honestly, I think that's why horror is such a compelling genre of fiction. We are practicing our ability to confront the darkness within ourselves. Put the Shadow in front of you, and perhaps you can learn not to fear what hides within it.

Getting into the O.G. Vampire Novel

 Given that I'm writing (more slowly these past two weeks or so) my rather epic novel about a Dhampir and his quest to be free of the destiny laid out by his vampiric father, it seemed appropriate for me to visit the quintessential vampire, so I've been reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. (Funny how, given its marketing and how it was referred to, the Francis Ford Coppola movie from the early 90s tends to be what I think of when I put the words "Bram Stoker's Dracula" into that sequence).

I'm still only a quarter or so into the book, but it's that funny thing where the story is so familiar due to pop culture osmosis for now 126 years that many elements are instantly recognizable. Just this year, we had a comedy imagining Renfield as a young man (how long do I get to think of Nicolas Hoult, who is three years younger than I am, as a "young man?") with Dracula as a toxic and overbearing boss. Later this year, The Last Voyage of the Demeter takes a couple-page passage from the novel that, in its epistolary format, is minimalistic terror as we get the logs of the captain of the ship that takes Dracula to England as his crew begins to vanish one by one while the Count feeds on them one by one.

I think what's surprising about the novel is how modern it feels. I read Frankenstein in high school, which I'd argue is, outside of Poe's short fiction, the other most quintessential gothic horror story, but it's sometimes easy to forget that Frankenstein and Dracula came 79 years apart, in wildly different cultural and historical contexts.

Indeed, I'd argue that the two might even take opposite positions, culturally. Frankenstein is all about the cold, industrial future leading to alienation and a heartlessness that can only result in violence taking the place of familial love, while Dracula is very much about the rational, modern world needing to fight against the archaic, mystical past.

Because Dracula is not just a bloodsucker and a sexual libertine (the latter somewhat implied, though heavily). He's also a brutal autocratic noble. In what might be the most chilling part of the story, after Jonathan Harker has realized he's not so much a guest as a prisoner of Dracula and his three vampiric women (often portrayed as a sort of harem, though it's not clear that he has that relationship with them,) a woman comes to the castle to demand her child back - a baby that Dracula fed to the women. She knows the baby is dead, but she demands to at least have the body to bury, and in response, Dracula sics his wolves on her, having them tear her apart in an act of unmitigated cruelty.

England of course has its history of exploitation by nobles, but there is also a tradition (adopted as well by Americans) of civil liberties - protections that the common people should have against those in power. Given Stoker was Irish, I wonder to what extent he was being ironic about the English claim to liberal ideals, but at least on the surface, the evil of Dracula is the logical extreme of aristocratic entitlement.

The format is also somewhat unconventional - it's an epistolary novel, which means that it takes the form of journals, news articles, and letters, as if Bram Stoker had discovered and collated these into a coherent narrative (though conveniently, the characters often write like novelists.)

Dracula, from the start, is a force of nature, but there's also a great deal of weirdness - when Jonathan first shows up to come to the castle in Transylvania, the carriage driver is very transparently Dracula himself, in disguise. If there's any reason to find sympathy with the Count (and not really,) it's that the guy needs to work very hard to make it look like he's actually got people working for him. The grandeur of his nobility is a facade, and he's only living (well, un-living) off of gold that was buried around his domain by people fearing it would be stolen in the many wars that were fought over it.

Anyway, I know how this all goes down, for the most part, but it is a good read.

The Twist and the Telegraph

 In 2015, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. I leapt into the deep end, building a world to set my games and then running them for a group of friends. It's an amazing system for creative people to make a game out of telling fantasy adventure tales, and the role of Dungeon Master is something like an author, while the role of Player is somewhat like an actor. I'm a writer, and many of my players are actors, so this fits very well.

Anyway, during this original campaign (a 'campaign' is an ongoing story that follows the same player characters over a lengthy time, from their origins as wandering mercenaries to their climactic height as epic heroes, and can take years to complete) I had the players meet a friendly patron who gave them a headquarters and access to his airship so that they could travel easily around the world I had created.

The patron, and his family, were all vampires. They were good vampires, who abstained from drinking the blood of humanoids, only subsisting on the blood left over from the butcher's shop, but they had your standard vampiric qualities - agelessness, a great vulnerability to sunlight, and, well, the blood-drinking.

Still, I remember for years hinting at this fact - the players would only ever see them at night, usually having them come down for dinner just after sunset, and I described them as pale, and even had them pointedly eat their food with some sort of 'red sauce' rather than the garlic sauce the player characters had on their food.

Eventually, I had the patron take the group's paladin (a sort of holy warrior, most of whom are vehemently opposed to the undead) on a walk, where he showed the cart from the butcher's shop that brought his family their blood, and made his confession in the hopes that this character would recognize them as being the same good people, and not strike against them out of fear.

I was certain that the players had realized this about the character, and that only their own characters were ignorant of the fact. As it turned out, I was dead wrong. The players' minds were blown, and not a one had guessed at it.

I say this because I think that there's a logical glitch that writers sometimes run into: how to pull off a good twist.

Now, I've written about this before. But I've now hit a point in writing my novel where one of the largest twists has sort of become inevitable. I don't want to go into details, in part because it might change, and in part because if there is anyone who reads this blog and actually wants to read the book, it would be nice to allow that reveal to happen naturally.

But I hit a point where I had a character who understood enough about the world around him and knew enough about the history of one of its characters, that I could not logically keep him from putting two and two together.

Rather than simply have the character act more ignorant than he was, in my current draft of this segment of the story (I've been writing the novel in different parts, and am currently working on the fourth, though I don't know how many there will ultimately be - seven would be very fitting given its alchemical themes, but I don't want to hold myself to that until I have the story's shape) I simply have him come to this realization, or hypothesis at least, when it would make sense for him to do so.

I do worry, though, that this big reveal coming where it does undercuts the dramatic weight to it. This is where rewriting will come into play. I can limit certain information. I don't think I want to have the character acting on knowledge that the reader does not - I've been mostly using a George R. R. Martin-style viewpoint narrative, which is in the third person but still tends to (for the most part) stick to the perspective of one of three characters. As such, I think it would be playing kind of dirty to have one of these characters realize this but wait for a long time to have him reveal this, probably when he tells it to another of these characters.

Still, the basis for why I felt the need to reveal this fact at this point (I hope I'm not being too vague here) is that, to me, the pieces are too plain for the reader to see, and to avoid connecting the points would feel like an insult to their intelligence.

But an author knows all of the facts, or at least all the facts they've decided upon. To me, the answer is obvious, but that is because the answer came to me before I even laid the clues that hinted at this revelation.

A good twist, I think, should be detectable if one is paying close enough attention. But as an author, you can sometimes feel as if any evidence you lay in advance - any foreshadowing of that twist - is too bright and flashing and obvious, and that a reader will grow impatient for the reveal to happen so that they can move on. But the danger on the flip side is that a twist without good supporting evidence will feel unearned, and can wreck a narrative.

Sometimes, then, it can be fun to have your twist revealed early in a story, and to work through the ramifications of that twist as the meat of your narrative.

My story is undeniably an epic - so far, other than the brief vignettes of childhood life for its primary protagonist, it has taken place over the course of eight years, and in my perhaps irrational quest to avoid having the story labeled as "YA" material, I envision it seeing the protagonists into their 30s, which would make it take place over a minimum of fifteen years. (Honestly, I think my own deeply ingrained snobbery is the only reason I'd resist a YA label. The story does deal with young people navigating strong romantic emotions, rebellion against a corrupt older generation, and supernatural forces, so I think I may just have to accept that that is what it is. I hope that my integration of Jungian psychology and my genre-bending Weirdness will be enough to distinguish it from other ready-for-Netflix stories - though I should be so lucky that someone would like this story enough to make a screen adaptation).

Anyway, the fact that it is so large in scale means that this twist needs to land well before the end. But it also needs to be built to and feel like the grand reveal that it is. The fact that the main character is a dhampir and his absent father is an undead vampire are "first chapter" twists (though I think he technically doesn't learn these terms until a little later). We're operating in a world of fantasy and gothic horror here, and that's no twist. But there are twists that will come along the way to open that out - for instance, just how fantastical the world truly is, and also, where the borders of one world end and another's begin.

I'm so hopeful that I can finish this story, and not only write to the last page, but also have the stamina to go back and edit and rewrite it to the point where I feel ready to share it with the world. I'd also love to be able to get it published some day - I dream of being able to look at it on my own bookshelf. But for now, the focus has been on what I can write now, at any given now.

Keeping the Outside Worries Where They Belong

 Bizarrely, yes, this blog about being a writer is now starting to see actual posts about being a writer.

I've been hard at work on my novel, which I'm going to avoid being specific about for various reasons, one being that I fear writing too much in describing it will make it harder to actually write the damned thing.

The main thing now is page count. It's funny, when I was a kid in school, first writing essays in middle school English class, I remember how I'd struggle to expand my thoughts and ideas to fit the minimum length needed for a passing grade.

Now, of course, I have the opposite problem.

I've just done some outlining for an arc - not the full story, but just a fraction, albeit an important fraction, of my main character's overall arc. Think of it like the part of The Godfather where Michael goes to Italy for a bit (though my character is nothing like Michael Corleone).

I've been trying not to get too tied up in outlining - as a perfectionist, I often encounter a Zeno's Paradox issue, where I start writing a story, then decide I need to go back and do an outline, then get stuck on the outline because it's not as fun as actually writing the prose of the story, but also feeling like the outline has to be perfect before I can go back to writing the story, and then... you get the idea - you try to do everything with the proper level of planning and preparation and you wind up getting stuck on the planning and preparation.

 I wrote in the last post about how a big part of my process on this project has been to set aside the need to write and only write when I actually want to, and feel the creative juices flowing. That did mean a several-month pause in my progress, but one or two weeks ago I found myself ready to write the next part of it, and I've been plugging away joyfully.

Worries bombard me, though. And one of those worries is how long this creative burst can last.

But what I am telling myself is that I don't have to get it perfect on the first go. Hell, I don't have to get it perfect at all.

I currently have a total of 93,851 words written (to be fair, a few of these are like "Chapter Two: Such and such," but I don't think those are statistically significant. Now, according to the top Google results, the average novel length is 70k to 120k words. Which means that I'm actually really close to the midpoint of that average.

But I have a long way to go.

I will say that I do think I've well and truly finished the beginning of the story. The main protagonist and the two secondary protagonists are on their paths, past "Plot Point One" as we'd say in screenwriting terms.

It remains to be seen, though, how long this story is going to take to tell it. There's so much stuff I want to get to, and that's without doing a formal outline!

Now, I imagine that at some point in the future, I will need to go through and mercilessly cut things down. Who knows, maybe this entire plot arc I'm starting will wind up on the cutting room floor. But while I'm trying not to set any hard and fast rules for my process and just let the story happen, I think I'm going to hold off on cutting it down until I've gotten the full story out.

And hey, the last book in The Dark Tower series was 272,273 pages, so maybe I've got the room (that was the last book in a seven-book series, too, while my intention with this is to just be a single self-contained novel. But also, Stephen King by the time he wrote that one had enough clout to keep the editors at bay. If this book ever gets published, I'd prefer that I not break anyone's wrist with it.)

While I'm not outlining it, figuring that I want the characters as I write them to guide the plot, rather than feeling like they're on rails, I have been trying to take notes of good ideas I come up with. It's just that the most recent set of notes basically created a whole lot of story beats that add up to a plot for the arc.

Anyway, I'm writing the story in different parts, which I can edit and rewrite separately to keep myself sane (being careful to do my best to avoid continuity errors). I've sent the third draft of part one off to a number of friends, and I'm hoping they'll give me some feedback on that (and I also feel nervous, wanting them to enthusiastically love it so that I am reassured that I'm a decent writer but also want them to care enough about it to give me meaningful notes on how it can be improved, but also kind of desperately want them to love it and say it's already amazing because my self-esteem is too tied up in my talent as a writer).

Now, I've got a dream - a hope for this book. I want to get it published, and I can just imagine how much joy it would bring me to see it on the shelves of a book store, and to hear about people reading it and finding some meaning in it.

Again, I'm nervous too - exposing one's work is an invitation to criticism.

I'm not at that step yet. I think in the past that step has seemed so far, far in the future that it may as well be something mythical. But I would like to see that become reality.

Really, for now I just want the story to flow and let it find itself on the page. The process of sharing it, and actually putting it in the hands of those who would make decisions about whether it's worthy of publication, is something that I don't have to think about right now. And, much as my process of just letting the writing happen when it does has been a key to productivity (so far,) I think I'll need to take a similar approach to sharing and pitching it. (Man, even saying "pitching," not to speak of "selling," stresses me out a bit. I guess that tells me I shouldn't worry about it yet).

(But, like, make no mistake: there's a dream down the line that this book gets super popular and someone makes a gorgeous screen adaptation. I mean, the dream, ever since I was six, was to get to see my own stories realized so that I could be there in the audience.)

Making Progress By Letting Myself Not Make Progress

 I've never published any of my writing, unless you count my blog, Dispatches from Otherworld. That gives me a lot of doubt over my identification as a writer. Ever since I was a kid, I've been writing stories, and I even got a college degree in dramatic writing, but I've always had a huge amount of anxiety about actually putting my work out there in a way that forces me to let someone else tell me whether it's good enough or not.

And lest you respond "well, that's just what it means to be a writer, so tough it out," I'll tell you I've told myself that for the past fifteen years or so, and it hasn't helped me produce anything.

Two years ago, I started writing, of all things, the backstory for a Dungeons & Dragons character (I think the reason I became obsessed with this game when I started playing eight years ago is that it's basically improvisational collaborative novel writing). But after this story ballooned out to over ten pages - far beyond the length that I'd force a game master to read for context and to inform NPCs and other plot elements that they might want to incorporate into a campaign - I realized that I didn't really want this story to be just for a game that would ultimately be told collaboratively and with another person having the greatest hold on the reins of the plot (and, to be honest, the subclass that the character would most logically take is also one I don't have a lot of interest in playing).

So, I took the lengthy backstory and rewrote it, instead, as the beginning of a novel. This wasn't terribly hard - my preparation for playable characters usually lends itself to a novelistic writing style, so it was mostly about expanding upon important conversations and events in that backstory.

This true first draft of the first part of the story - which I considered a prologue until it reached nearly 40,000 words - I finished while waiting at Logan Airport for my flight back to California, after having spent some time on the east coast for a friend's wedding around Halloween (appropriate, given that the story has many gothic horror elements, not the least of which is that the main character is a dhampir, or half-vampire).

The feeling of accomplishment there was fantastic, but I decided that I should refine the draft, iterating on it, and feeling like I needed to polish it before I could begin the second part (I don't know how many parts the novel will have, but I'm beginning to suspect that it will be a long book).

That, as it turned out, had something of a chilling effect on my writing. I certainly made some changes to what I had written that I think improved it significantly - for one thing, I made the secondary protagonist's motivations easier to believe, and in so doing I think I also gave her a richer characterization. But I was gunshy about actually writing more, in part because I wasn't precisely sure how to continue.

But, about a week ago, I found myself writing again - the plot jumped forward two years, and the focus went from the primary protagonist to two secondary ones. Indeed, the main character of the story is absent for nearly the entirety of part 2, and this shift in perspective gave me a great deal of forward momentum.

Now, I do have some worries here - if part 1 was all about getting the main character on the path toward the meat of his story, part 2 is sort of doing the same for the other two characters, which means that I worry that a reader will need to get through 70,000 words before things truly get cooking. Certainly, editing will slim that down a bit, and I also need to recognize that it's not as if nothing happens in these first parts of the story - in fact, quite a lot of things do.

I also think, on a philosophical level, this is perhaps part and parcel with my own struggles with adulthood. As of last year, I've spent more time in my life as an adult than I ever did as a child, and there's a sort of anxiety about feeling that I'm still only just getting started - that I'm waiting for my life to begin.

Perhaps, then, the lesson to bear in mind both in the story I'm writing and in my own life is that we're constantly starting and getting going. That there is no solid state of being a full, functional person, at which point you get to simply relax and coast.

I have dreams that this book will be published, and that people will love it. In our social-media age, even if the platforms and their effect on us is probably toxic, I nevertheless dream of writing something that inspires someone to make fan art. I've never been particularly talented when it comes to visual art, and the idea that my words could inspire someone is truly a dream of mine.

And, of course, there's the hope that I'll get some glossy book, and find it with some staff recommendation card at a book store.

I want that external validation that my writing is good, that it means something to someone. But what I've needed to do for this is to just toss out those expectations. I've approached this in a very different way than I typically do.

I love worldbuilding, but when I started to write this D&D character backstory, I left the details vague so that I could plug him into whatever world in which a friend might want to run their game in. But now, this has actually given me a license to make up the world as I go along. The goal here has been to let the characters drive the story forward, and to let them go where they will.

Now, did that stop me from coming up with an absolutely crazy, genre-busting origin for the protagonist's vampire father, who serves as the chief villain (if such a thing really exists) of the story? Not at all. Worldbuilders gonna worldbuild.

But there's been some kind of taoist ethos I've tried to adopt where the writing happens when it's going to happen, and I try not to pressure myself to make it happen when it's not going to. And yeah, I just wrote like 40,000 words in the past week, so I think it's paying off.

Artificial Intelligence, Art, and Capitalism

 My father is a professor of computer science at a world-class university, a veteran of the field who has been teaching there since the mid-1970s. So, computers, and their applications like artificial intelligence, have always been something I know a little about, even if the actual science and engineering behind it is a little beyond my bachelors of fine arts education.

On a philosophical and even spiritual level, I've tended to think of the creation of artificial intelligence as a good thing. In Jewish folklore, there is the concept of the Golem, which is most famously explored in the story of the Golem of Prague, a defender of the ghetto created by Rabbi Loew (a real, historical figure). While the Golem story is, I believe, often given a Frankenstein-esque horror tone in which the creation of a new life is seen as an act of hubris punished by violence in re-tellings, there's another, possibly truer version that makes the golem an imperfect, but ultimately heroic figure. Indeed, as explored in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a direct line between the Golem and the American Superhero archetype is drawn (notably, most of America's most beloved superheroes were created by Jewish writers and artists, and during a time when Jews around the world really felt they could use a defender).

As I understand it, the act of creating the Golem was only possible by a sufficiently righteous man. There's an idea in both Judaism and Christianity that imitation of God is the way you live a righteous life, and so rather than an act of hubris, the creation of the Golem is an attempt to follow the example set by the divine - just as God did with Adam, the Rabbi creates the Golem from clay.

Furthermore, I grew up with a love of science fiction. And one of the most important and favorite characters to me was Data, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that came into the world not long after I did, premiering the year after I was born.

While there are certainly several episodes that see Data acting in alarming, unpredictable ways that endanger people, the overall attitude the show takes toward him is one of love and acceptance. His presence on the ship is a positive for everyone, and despite his profound, superhuman technical competence, he demonstrates no desire or will to take over the ship or the duties of others. Instead, he wants nothing more than to feel and be treated as part of the crew. And the environment that Captain Picard, as the sort of ideal paternal authority, creates, is one in which he is accepted as a friend and colleague.

It is a dream, I think, of humanity to create something like Data. If we could bring life to a new form of intelligence and teach it kindness, ethics, and responsibility, we would be all the richer for it. In a certain way, it would be like bringing about humanity's offspring. But we have anxieties about offspring, don't we? Greek myth has a pattern of the top, paternal god always being toppled by their son. Oranos' dominance is usurped by Cronus, and then Cronus' dominance is usurped by Zeus. Zeus, then, spends a great deal of effort trying to ensure that none of the absurd number of kids he's fathered will be the one to rise up and take him down.

We fear our creations, because they always result in unexpected consequences. In an epoch (one that, it can be easy to forget, has not yet lasted a century) where we have weapons that could turn our planet into an irradiated boneyard, there is a fear that any unpredictable intelligence could, and perhaps inevitably would, decide to exterminate us.

But the truth is that we really don't know where A.I. will go.

What I think we can see is the danger of how we're thinking of applying it.

In the past year, we've seen the rise of Chat-GPT, Dall-e, and other A.I. systems that take in vast amounts of sample data, which then allows them to produce text or images or music, or what-have-you that does a remarkable job of imitating the real thing. You plug the Complete Works of Shakespeare into one of these things and then ask it to write a sonnet about playing Fortnite, and you'll get some impressive mash-up of rhyming couplets and modern video games. (To be clear, that's not an example I've seen, so I'm not sure how successful it would be in this particular case).

Removed from the dire consequences of how it might be implemented, this is really interesting research material. My dad asked one of these (I think Chat-GPT) to produce a summary of his career, and what he got was a very well-written, plausibly professional short biography that just so happened to, with great authority, state that he was born two years before he actually was, claimed he got his PhD at Stanford (he went to Caltech,) and that he, the person who had made this request, had died in 2016.

What that demonstrates, as I understand it, is that this particular model has gotten really great at putting together sentences that seem sensible and plausible, with a flow of words and sentence structure that makes it seem very much like a professional writer is producing them. But that's it - it sort of guesses at the facts (and to be fair, the person described in that biography could be very similar to my dad - it got some of the details right) based not on a real understanding of them, but more that his name often finds itself in documents that also contain references to, for example, Stanford (when I was 3, and then when  was 11, we lived in Palo Alto for a year while my dad did a visiting professorship there on his sabbatical, but he was never a student there).

What's interesting about these models is that they learn by looking at other works - they study vast amounts of text, or in the case of Dall-E, vast numbers of images, and discern some sort of rule about the patterns that are most common within the medium. At no point to you sit down and teach Chat-GPT about grammatical structures like "subject-verb-object," instead it just notices that these words tend to come in this order, and therefore it will tend to put them that way.

Now, this feels, then, like the perfect example of the "Chinese Room" thought experiment, which argues that these A.I. models are not building intelligence, but rather the hollow illusion of intelligence. The Chinese Room was a rebuttal to the Turing Test (which more or less, as I understand it, says that if a computer talks to you in a way that is indistinguishable from a person, you must assume that it possesses real intelligence,) but counter-rebuttals have argued that we're actually overselling the uniqueness of human intelligence, and that we, ourselves, just figure out the right order for words over time and kind of "fake it 'til we make it."

Personally, I've always found myself more sympathetic to the Chinese Room argument, and that human minds are not just behavioralist input-output machines, though I recognize that when it comes to skepticism of artificial intelligence, it's easy to find oneself moving the goal posts. One of the best episodes of The Next Generation, The Measure of Man (rarer still that such a good episode comes in one of Next Gen's rather not-great first two seasons) has Picard forced to act as a lawyer for Data, arguing for his sentience and bodily autonomy, when a researcher from a prominent research institution believes that, being an android, Data's actually more of a piece of equipment that he has every right to requisition for research purposes (research that would involve disassembling him to see how he works). In the case of Data, whom the show clearly portrays as being not only likable, but also probably sentient and definitely intelligent, there's no question that our sympathies are meant to rest with Data and the argument to allow him to choose not to participate in this risky study.

And yet, certainly among any technology that has been developed as of the modern day, my tendency would be to treat it as simply machine, and assume that there is no inner life that would be threatened by dismantling it. I wonder if I will live to see a day when the line is actually blurred to the point where I'd find myself facing a Data-like figure whose rights I would feel the need to defend.

I certainly believe in human rights. In fact, despite not being a vegetarian, I also believe in animal rights (actually, as far as technology goes, I'd be very happy to see a way to grow meat that doesn't require an animal to die or suffer for us to eat it, if and when the technology to make it A: environmentally sustainable, B: safe to eat, and C: taste good, exists). I'm also agnostic on whether we live in a strictly material world or whether there's some transcendent aspect of reality where consciousness exists. In other words, I don't know if we have souls or not.

Ultimately, our brains are naturally evolved meat-computers. But whether the processing of information in these giant neural networks actually produces the experience of consciousness, or if we have some ethereal, extraplanar essence that the brain merely feeds input into... I don't know. I hope for the latter (largely because it could mean that one could truly persist as a conscious being beyond one's death), but at the same time, if that is the case, why should we be so sure that our organic meat-brains have attached souls but synthetic computers cannot?

These heady questions are going to continue to be some of the most fiercely debated ideas for as long as humanity will be around, I think.

What worries me, then, about A.I, is not really all that, but rather, capitalism.

And to be clear, let's make some definitions. I am no student of economics. I'm just someone who was born in the Reagan era and have basically seen a world built on the premise that unfettered pursuit of wealth is the right and proper structure of society, and seen how that structure seems to produce a collapsing, deteriorating world where comfort and security is becoming less and less attainable and future generations have things worse off than older ones.

When I say capitalism, I'm using this in the broad, political sense of the modern day, meaning a value system that considers perpetual growth, perpetual wealth accumulation, and maximizing short-term gain to be the highest goals, and where ethical considerations and social responsibility are an obstacle to overcome, or at best, an optional side-goal.

Dall-E, the image generating machine learning system, infamously sweeps the internet for images to train on, analyzing them and building a set of rules by which to create new images. The result, then, is that, often, fragments of artists' work can find its way into the system's output - hilariously and damningly, there are a number of images that have been produced that actually have a distorted, but sometimes still legible, Getty Images watermark, making it clear that the system trained on images hosted by the famous stock-photo website - photos that Dall-E did not pay one cent to use.

And therein lies one of the big dangers: many enthusiasts for these systems have touted them as a way to "democratize" the creation of art. That this will allow anyone to be able to produce the images in their heads, not having to find and pay artists to produce them. But not only does this argument seek to portray members of a profession that, famously, does not pay well for the vast majority of its practitioners as greedy misers - the "man" to which one can "stick it" - it also straight-up steals their work to produce its product.

Now, you could make the following argument: doesn't an artist learn to paint by looking at other paintings, imitating their styles and techniques, to produce something new? And I honestly don't have a well-formulated rebuttal.

Instead, where I think the problem lies is who is holding the reins.

We're in an era when companies, and certainly in the tech world, are trying to centralize and monopolize. It's actually part of that same capitalist impulse of wealth-accumulation. Just as the rich want to concentrate more and more wealth at the top, the equivalent companies want to accumulate business power and market share. When I was in middle school, there were a bunch of different search engines people used. Then, Google showed up and was much better, so people started using it. And its origins were humble - literally, my dad came home from work one day and told us that some Stanford grad students had put together a really clever, efficient search engine that we should start using. Two decades and change later, and Google is now synonymous with doing a search on the internet - goodbye Alta Vista, bye-bye Ask Jeeves, so-long Yahoo (wait, Yahoo, are you still there? Weird).

And the practices of Google have tended toward greater centralization. Hell, the website that hosts this blog is owned by them. But also, even within their searches, when you ask a question, rather than pointing you to a website that has the answer, it seeks to extract that answer from the website, which then has you only using Google (I looked up which season that Star Trek episode was, and looking to the next window of my browser - I never got used to using tabs - I just googled it and found a big summary of the episode next to all the search results, including its season and episode number, without clicking on any links).

Google and Microsoft want to use Chat-GPT-style language models to answer questions posed on their search engines (yes, MS is still trying to make Bing a thing). In other words, rather than extracting information from particular web pages, they want to have an AI extract information from the whole internet and present it in an easily-readable, professional-looking manner.

But, as my dad's inaccurate and premature obituary demonstrates, just because something reads well doesn't mean it's actually correct or useful.

And dear lord, it's bad enough with actual humans writing intentional disinformation to try to swing politics one way or another. We're in an era when confirming facts is very difficult, and now we want to make the authority for truth a bunch of thoughtlessly credulous language simulators?

But you can imagine why Google and Microsoft are racing to do this. There's money to be made, and a culture to dominate. You want to be the one who brings about the next big thing.

See, I don't think that A.I. will inevitably decide to launch all the world's nukes at once. But I do think that a race to be first, a race to dominate, and a race to embrace this new world without actually understanding it or even knowing what the tools we've built are useful for, is a genuine threat. In the case of nukes, I can only hope that sanity prevails and we never build an autonomous launch system (hell, I'd love it if we secretly created a system that didn't actually even let them launch in the first place, and that the only thing they can ever do is fool other people with nukes into thinking it would be too dangerous to attack us). But when it comes to less obviously dire, less obviously existential threats to humanity, I think it behooves us to think about what we're actually trying to get out of this.

If our goal is to create a sentient A.I. that can be like a second generation of humanity, to expand the diversity of life and intelligence, to go on a journey with us as we explore what it means to be human, then that's great, and I love it.

If the goal is to automate intellectual labor roles in order to eliminate the need to pay people much in the way that earlier automation has eliminated manual labor roles, all in the interest of further concentrating the benefits of innovation within the capital class that owns the means of production while letting the rest of humanity fall by the wayside, then we need to slam the fucking brakes.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Works Thanks to Fan Service Restraint

 We live in an era of franchises. And before we get started here, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is, I'm sure, meant to be a franchise-starter. But the pleasant truth is that the movie, which I just saw, actually manages to work by avoiding some of the pitfalls that the worst of the tentpole big-budget Hollywood fare does these days.

Since 2015, I've been a giant Dungeons & Dragons nerd, running games for my friends and occasionally getting to play in them as well. The game is set to celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, and the success of 2014's 5th Edition of the game's rules has seen it become more popular than ever before, so making another go at a movie was probably a logical step. We're in an age where movie studios are willing to commit to big, nerdy franchises - part of that is a positive, in that these once-sidelined styles of storytelling are getting a chance to have the budgets and wide release that they deserve, but another part is negative, in that a lot of studios simply want to capitalize on viewers' affection for an intellectual property and milk it for all it's worth.

And to be clear, I don't think that this movie isn't trying to do that. But whatever cynical motivations might be behind the executive decisions being made, the actual creative artists behind this movie have managed to make a genuinely fun movie with characters I liked and cared about.

For people who are unfamiliar with D&D, the game is not about any one character or story, or even world, but mainly a set of rules to make a game of telling a story with one's friends. Most players build a heroic fantasy character - a swashbuckling rogue, a nature-worshipping druid, a battle-raging barbarian - and can fill in as many biographical details they want to inform the way that they play the character. One player takes on the role of "Dungeon Master," and weaves these characters' stories into an overall narrative, along with, usually, some supernatural threat that must be faced. The rulebooks include ways in which the players can build their characters, as well monsters that the Dungeon Master can send up against them.

And because there's no singular story for D&D, Honor Among Thieves merely tries (and succeeds) to create the sort of plot you could imagine for a fun, quick "campaign," (the term used to refer to the story you tell with a particular group of characters, played over the course of months or years, typically).

While the movie, rightly, introduces us to new characters with their own original backstories and motivations, the setting is a familiar one. The Forgotten Realms is a world that serves as the "default" setting for D&D, filled with cities of intrigue, various supernatural threats, and a deep history. It is this setting, along with the memorable monsters found in D&D's "Monster Manual" (one of the three core rulebooks that the DM uses to find the creatures the player characters will fight against) that make up the pool from which references can be made.

What is refreshing is that the references never (as far as I can remember) call attention to themselves. D&D veterans will instantly recognize Intellect Devourers, Mimics, Owlbears, and Displacer Beasts, but their function in the movie translates to "weird monsters in a world filled with weird monsters." The references primarily function as easter eggs for those in the know to recognize, but when the villainous wizard vanishes in a hazy mist only to appear elsewhere, the layman can simply think "ok, yes, she's a wizard, and that was some kind of magic thing" while the D&D player knows precisely that this is the spell Misty Step, and knows what level of "spell slot" is expended to cast it.

At no point, I think, would someone who has not played the game feel a need to pause and say "hold on, why are we holding on this particular image or moment? Is this something I'm supposed to recognize?" - which is a trope that I see in a lot of franchise filmmaking (including the MCU, which I think has gotten more egregious with these practices in recent years). The only thing you might find here as a sequel hook is simply the existence of the greater villain who is behind the main villain of the movie, but the film seems content to consider the story complete - its post-credits scene (because those are just going to be a thing) is a joke and not a "now wait for the sequel" teaser.

Naturally, there's a difficult balance to strike with high fantasy, especially in an expansive world like this. It would be tempting to try to show everything, and Honor Among Thieves manages to avoid that temptation.

Structurally, the story works, though there are some plot developments that are fairly telegraphed. I generally prefer a telegraphed plot point over a nonsensical plot development, so I can't complain too much about this.

The casting is fantastic - just about everyone is right for their role. Chris Pine is excellent at putting his charisma to use in selling the fantasy with a movie star charm behind it. Michelle Rodriguez is pitch-perfect casting for the badass warrior. The other main members of the quartet, Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis are also good, though I think are not given as meaty arcs as their older party members (Lillis' tiefling druid, Doric, is one of the most visually exciting elements of the movie, bending the rules to let her endlessly shift between various animal forms, but her arc is left on the backburner).

As a character who is designed to steal the spotlight, Regé Jean-Page's paladin Xenk, thankfully, accomplishes his show-stealing purpose with aplomb, coming in as the far-more-powerful adventurer who helps our group of heroes on their quest while acting infuriatingly righteous and honorbound in a way that makes you and the characters want to hate him, but they can't because he ultimately backs it all up.

Hugh Grant dials up his slimy charms to perfect effect as the villainous Forge, which... could technically be considered a spoiler, but, you know, come on.

I'm going to watch the movie again at some point (in part because a friend who has various health issues felt nervous about watching the movie in a theater with many unmasked people) and I'll see whether my feelings toward the movie change.

Basically, the movie accomplishes exactly what I hoped it would, being a fun, often hilarious adventure.

Perhaps the most refreshing moment in the movie, though, and one that avoids a trope that seems so prevalent nowadays, is a moment in which Chris Pine's Edgin begins playing his lute and singing a song to cheer Michelle Rodriguez' Holga up. It would be so easy in so many popular movies to undercut this with some kind of irony and have everyone hate his singing because, you know, playing the lute and singing is lame, right? Well, here, instead, she starts singing along, and the warmth of their friendship and the value of that kind of creative expression as a way of forming a human connection is embraced without any irony.

Is The New Weird My Thing?

 I've often struggled with how to describe the aesthetic, tone, and ultimately genre of my fiction. My initial loves were primarily science fiction, and in that sense I really mean some of the titans of the genre - the first grown-up show I ever watched regularly was Star Trek: The Next Generation. It would be a bit later that I got into Star Wars, but when I was around nine I fell so in love with the movies (at the time it was only the original trilogy, which we had on laser disc) that I remember some period of time in 4th grade that I watched two movies a day - cycling through them over and over, popping in A New Hope (the home video at least by the mid-90s had that title added) soon after I'd seen the Ewoks celebrating at the end of Return of the Jedi.

The summer before I started high school, I read The Hobbit and then spent a good chunk of my freshman year reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The timing was perfect: the editions I had of the books (except the Two Towers, for which I had an older paperback version) advertised the upcoming new movie trilogy from New Line Cinema, and in the winter of the next school year, I went with my family to see the Fellowship of the Ring, and was totally blown away.

I would say that it was during that time that I became enamored with fantasy, though in truth, there were earlier influences. Actually, Magic: The Gathering was probably one of the most important of those, which I started playing about a year after its debut, buying primarily packs from the cheapest set, Fallen Empires, which was, I think, also the most recent when I first started. I'd also always been a fan of Greek Myth.

Indeed, while I'd had various ideas for movies and stories before (see the title of the blog,) it was actually in I believe 8th Grade that I first had the idea of a story where the protagonist was a Merlin-like figure whose role was to act as a magical advisor to the ruler of Atlantis, but was later forced to destroy the island after some evil force turned it into a gateway for a demonic invasion (honestly, that elevator pitch doesn't actually sound that bad, come to think of it). That story took on a lot of scattered ideas - I'd always been obsessed with time travel (again, see the title of the blog, which was my first movie idea, in which a kid had a jetpack that let him travel through time - maybe the most "this was dreamed up by a six-year-old" premise I could even come up with now) and so I had my Merlin-like figure actually be a modern person (actually, once again, I made him basically me).

The existence of this character: named John O'Connor (because I think I was trying to assert my matrilineal Irish heritage as part of my ongoing ethnic identity crisis - this character was half-Jewish as well, but with the parental heritages swapped - which, actually, would make this character with a profoundly white name accepted more as a Jew than I have been) but referred to by his more esoteric, wizardly name, was kind of the textbook example of wish-fulfillment fantasy writing. Here, I was imagining myself as the pinnacle of wisdom and power, where I had Jedi-like powers that were not even subject to the limitations of magic in a world filled with it.

I realized at some point that my ambitions to write his story were too grand to ever really accomplish, but he remains canonical. Part of the fantasy of that story was that at some point, he would become completely, irrevocably immortal (I've always been terrified of death, but it was particularly intense I would say from about age 6 through maybe 20) and, in the process of that moment (essentially being temporarily exiled from the universe at the moment he was fated to die, and thus permanently missing his appointment) his existence in a space that shouldn't have been able to allow anything to exist caused him to more or less accidentally create an entire separate universe.

This moment of apotheosis was meant to be a kind of "last major plot point before the climactic finale" of the epic tale I felt I was destined to write, but it never really came to fruition.

However, I still have a love for this figure. The "creating another universe" was, I think, also tacked on only after I had started writing a different story, called Sky. As is true of a lot of things I've struggled with, Sky hasn't really taken off despite spending nearly two decades with it rattling around in my brain, though in this case I did at least write a first draft when I was 17.

If you've read my fiction blog (which I haven't added to for years, sadly,) Dispatches from Otherworld, you're familiar with that world that my author avatar character created. And you're familiar with the setting for Sky, which is one and the same.

Sky had a number of influences - the eponymous protagonist was, at least in terms of look, inspired by the player character from the N64 game "Shadow Man" as well as Andre Braugher's Corporal Thomas Searles from the 1989 movie Glory. But I can't really talk about Sky without mentioning the most direct influence on it, which is Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

King has written that his own ambition when he was 19 (not much older than I was writing my first draft of Sky) was to basically do the American Lord of the Rings. (Funny, then, that Tolkien's ambition was to write the actually British foundational legend, rather than the legend of King Arthur, which he considered to really be a French import).

The Dark Tower is a glorious mess of a series - the last three books were written in haste after King was nearly killed by a reckless truck driver, and King feared he'd die before his grand opus was complete (eighteen years later he seems fine). And the tone and quality of the writing varies significantly - indeed, the series kind of meanders, and by even book three, the events of the first book take on a mythic sheen in part because it doesn't even really feel like the same author.

They say not to judge a book by its cover, but if not for the surreal image of three free-standing doors on a beach on the cover of the second book, The Drawing of the Three, I don't know that I would have picked up the first volume (my mother, a hopeless bibliophile, basically always bought me just about any book that piqued my interest - I think I also bought George Orwell's 1984 at the same time, but I never got around to that one).

Whatever flaws the series might have, I am nevertheless an unabashed fan and even champion of the Dark Tower series. When I saw that you could have an American cowboy treated with the same iconic reverence as an Arthurian knight, and put that character in a world with wizards and demons... and then also make that world one with robots and ancient, post-apocalyptic cities and a kind of hyperreal tower that stands at the center of all reality, whose existence is what allows the universe to persist...

It was surreal and enigmatic and strange and I loved it to death.

So, before the series was even over, I began writing my story about a gunslinger as well, who was in a post-apocalyptic world (later, I'd make it just an entirely different and decidedly non-apocalyptic world, the twist being that the eponymous Sky was actually from ours). The key, though, was fantasy that eschewed knights and castles and elves and wizards (at least in the classical white-beard and robe sense).

Now, this was still at a time in my life where the idea of lower stakes not necessarily making for a less interesting story didn't really compute. The villain of John O'Connor's story was basically an entity that was more or less the devil, but where malevolence was really the power of darkness and non-existence.

The villain of Sky (spoilers, I guess, should I ever actually write this damn thing) was originally going to be called The Dark Titan - I imagined that it was the being known as Cronos in Greek Myth, who had been corrupted by the void between universes (I'd also conflated Kronos and Chronos - and to be fair, the iconography is not entirely different) and thus replaced the Devil with the Grim Reaper as my main villain, but still sought the erasure of existence.

This idea evolved over time. In college I wrote a screenplay that was probably influenced by the release of Robert Rodriguez' Sin City, but I had a somewhat more optimistic and not even very noir-ish story about a ghost named Shade who got wrapped up in an effort to rescue a young woman's brother from an evil corporate force. The screenplay (of which a later draft became my senior thesis) for Arcane City mostly used familiar fantasy tropes and creatures despite being set in a modern, New York-like city (I went to NYU, so that was the environment I was thinking about at the time) save for one creation that has stuck with me like a recurring nightmare - the faceless man (lack of capitalization here is a stylistic choice).

I'd integrate the faceless men into the mythos of Sky, and if you've read Dispatches from Otherworld, you'll be familiar with them. I had them serve as the scariest monsters, and agents of what I changed from being called the Dark Titan to now being known as The White King.

(Truth be told, I've never been able to decide if the faceless men are agents of The White King or if they are, collectively, the closest the White King has to a physical form.)

If you have not read my Dispatches stories, the faceless men appear as essentially black-suited businessmen who have no face - they have hair (I usually imagine it slightly long, as if they're based on a kind of 1970s fashion) but there are no eyes, nose, mouth, or facial hair of any kind. I usually describe there being something like a ribcage-like ridge pattern you might be able to make out beneath the skin of their faces, resembling something like an old microphone, though only just barely. Furthermore (and this was not part of the Arcane City screenplay,) you don't notice you're looking at them unless you can somehow see in some non-physical way. They're not invisible, but unless you have vision that is magically empowered, or if, like both John and Sky, you have the Jedi-like powers that, at their most extreme degrees, allow you to shape reality around you, you'll look right at one and maybe wonder why you can't see what's behind them, but won't register that they're standing there.

I do want, here, to point out that I created these monsters before the debut of Slenderman or The Silence from Doctor Who, which both bear some similarities (in particular, the Silence, who don't have quite the same "you just don't notice them" thing, but whose instant-memory-wipe-when-you-look-away is pretty similar). DC Comics' The Question of course predates all of these, and while I wasn't consciously aware of that character, it's possible that I glanced at an illustration in a comic shop and unconsciously internalized it.

I guess we can also mention a key aesthetic influence: The computer game Myst, which came out in 1993. If you weren't alive or aware of it at the time, Myst was mind-blowing, because basically, video/computer games could either have illustrated sprites, or they could have blocky 3D polygons with monochromatic, smooth textures. Myst was the first game that looked realistic (at least for the time) and the creators chose to do so using profoundly surreal imagery, like a ship growing out of the side of an island.

And I think that kind of uncanniness stuck with me - it's probably part of the reason I was so drawn to The Drawing of the Three's free-standing doors. I've grown to adore the incongruous - particularly the human, man-made existing in a place that should only be natural forms.

Genre expectations can often be strangely narrow.

Though, oddly, there seem to be a lot of people who lump all speculative fiction together as simply science fiction.

But these impulses, both to narrow an expectation of certain tropes and aesthetics while also mislabeling or using too broad a label are kind of entwined in a way that limits genre potential.

My first genre love was sci-fi, but I'm also a little rankled when people imply that science fiction (and particularly "hard," "realistic" science fiction) is superior to fantasy. But the true thing that frustrates me is when people place arbitrary limits on either genre. One of the absurdities of the modern day is that conservative voices will complain about "woke" representation in works of fantasy - I believe that some bigots (who will claim not to be bigots and merely historical purists) complained about the existence of Black Targaryens in House of the Dragon, as if this wasn't a wholly separate world with an entirely different history of ethnic diaspora, and will say it's "not historically accurate," forgetting that the history of a fantasy world is pure fiction anyway (that's even before we get to the fact that, you know, Black people also existed in the real world's middle ages as well!)

But even setting aside these bad-faith arguments by people who don't want to be reminded that there are people who aren't totally like them, there do seem to be these kind of expectations that people fight hard to cling to. I don't know what George R. R. Martin plans for the actual end of his books, if he even thinks he'll get around to finishing them, but Game of Thrones' producers seemed to laugh at the idea that the story could end with the establishment of anything approaching a democracy to replace the clearly destructive and flawed absolute monarchies that had led to so much suffering. But it's fantasy! Why can't we have this civilization adopt something like that in the aftermath of a massive, world-changing crisis? (Hell, in the real world, democracy predates the medieval feudal system.)

But, getting back to Stephen King:

When King was coming of age (he's a year older than my father) the Western was a huge piece of American identity. The genre dominated film decades, and eventually went through its 1960s deconstruction through both Spaghetti Westerns and New Hollywood, eventually kind of petering out in the 80s and 90s (I think Heaven's Gate, which also kind of crashed New Hollywood, was a major culprit, though the 90s had a handful of popular Westerns like Unforgiven). Still, there was this era in America where the Western really was the epitome of the American self-image, and I think someone like Stephen King, seeing a movie like the Good the Bad and the Ugly, could easily glom onto that as the basis for his American Lord of the Rings - his American legend.

Perhaps ironically, or maybe inevitably, I think members of my generation (and a half or full step generation older) might see the era of King's youth as more emblematic of the American identity.

Post World War II, America took on a new identity. Following a near-apocalyptic war (never forget that this world has actually seen one nuclear war) America took on a role of global leadership - no longer the "independent nation far from the chaos of Europe," we made ourselves the center of the world, rather than a happily distant frontier.

Social transformation, along with industrial and technological transformation, were supercharged in the latter half of the 20th Century. But in a weird way, that early era of transformation took on its own iconic feel in and of itself.

To me, at least, there is something deeply appealing about that mid-to-late 20th Century aesthetic. The faceless men are products of it - they are the nightmare of the new conformity, where even as social change has seemed to free us to be whatever we want, the trudge of unfettered capitalistic wanting (not only for money, but for power and influence as well) creates a conforming pressure.

But it's also an aesthetic I associate with my parents - and while I don't think anyone has an uncomplicated relationship with one's parents, the kind of yellowed plastic and fuzzy speakers and the smell of old electronics that I associate with my dad's home office are beloved and familiar sensations that are linked to my affection for him.

I don't think I really realized when I first came up with the faceless men or the metaphors for my fears of literal death that it also applied to a kind of erasure of identity that could happen in the face of a conformist culture. The connection was there all along, but it took over a decade for my conscious mind to catch up with the unconscious mind.

The imagery I find so compelling and fascinating is the mundane made strange. A rotary phone sitting on a messy desk with contemporary papers and office supplies is, perhaps, a dated image, but not a terribly unusual one.

But that same phone, floating three feet above the ground in a massive desert, with a single sourceless spotlight shining down on it as it rings despite not being connected to anything, makes you reconsider what you're looking at. Is this even a phone at all? Or, in contrast, is it more a phone than any other phone you've ever seen before?

And do you answer it?

It was not until perhaps the last year that I discovered there might be a term for my genre of writing: The New Weird.

Now, as with all critical categories, there's open debate as to the exact nature of it. And it's a term that's been retroactively applied to previous works. As an avid (if late-blooming) player/DM of Dungeons & Dragons, I've seen the "Planescape" setting for that game described as a New Weird one, despite that term coming about ten years after the first sourcebooks were published. Unsurprisingly, of all the canonical settings, this one leaps out to me as the most "me."

I also think there's a question of whether the genre is defined by aesthetic or by structure.

Yesterday, in a feat that I haven't done many times, I bought and read the entirety of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihiation (book one of three of the Southern Reach trilogy, that was adapted into a movie a few years ago, though what I've heard of the movie makes it sound like it was a very loose adaptation).

I certainly recognized a familiar tone to "Old Weird" fiction, by which I mainly mean the H. P. Lovecraft stories I read as part of a collection (which included the most famous ones, like Call of Cthulhu, Shadow over Innsmouth, the Dunwich Horror, The Colour Out of Space, and The Shadow Out of Time, the last of which I never finished despite finding the premise interesting). I appreciated some of the ideas there - most compelling to me was the protagonist's discovery of a run-on sentence of vaguely scriptural words formed from some kind of fungal growth on the interior wall of a subterranean tower - an ambiguity as to whether the words had simply grown there on their own or been written, and then, whether the creature that might have written them even understood them to be words (I actually suspect that the ending implies a more direct human connection to the words, which I frankly found a little disappointing compared to the enigma).

But there's a sort of embrace of the anti-human or maybe post-human, or perhaps trans-human ending that I found myself kind of intellectually appreciating but not really liking (again, it's only the first book of a trilogy, so I should reserve some judgment).

I think one of my insecurities as a writer is that I aspire to literary greatness but I'm still looking for the happy ending, the triumphant hero, and the resolution of conflict that leaves the world of the story better than where it started. It seems as if a "serious author" eschews such conclusions, such pat and convenient tying up of loose ends. There's a sense that this is some flaw in my character - that I am too privileged (and hence want to retain an exploitative status quo that preserves my privilege) or that I am too immature (that only a childish mind would so desire such a comforting ending as good triumphing over evil).

And so, there's a kind of intimidation I feel when approaching a movement like this - even if, in fact, I should be recognizing that the very pretenses of what gets to call itself literary fiction versus genre fiction - the age-old false dichotomy of high and low art - are what the movement/genre was formed to rebel against.

When I was a kid, I thought I'd be the greatest writer of all time, at least from my perspective, because surely I would know to write the stories I wanted to read, see, or hear. It's definitely easier said than done, but I think the challenge of my adult life is to let myself feel that way again, at least until I've got the words down on the page.

The Legend of Vox Machina Season 2

 The popularity and success of The Legend of Vox Machina was a surprise. I started listening to Critical Role in podcast form in late 2017, and was able to hop in at the beginning of the group's second campaign (they're now a little over their year into their third). I'd gotten into the streamed D&D game after I had started running my own games in 2015, and while the early sessions of Critical Role were a little rough to get through (technical issues, a lack of experience making D&D as a performance, and one player who would leave the show whose spotlight-hogging was not conducive to making the show entertaining) in the long run, it was a remarkable creation of characters you cared about, and where the roll of the dice could lead to unexpected turns and moments.

The cast of Critical Role are all voice actors, many of whom you might recognize from animation and video games (as a World of Warcraft player, I initially knew it to be "that D&D game with the woman who plays Jaina Proudmoore in it") and so, of all the "actual play" shows that have cropped up (Critical Role was not the first, but it certainly helped popularize the genre) to blow up as a big hit and, on top of that, find life in adaptation as an animated series, this one makes the most sense, given that these are people already immersed in that facet of the entertainment industry.

Still, while I was a fan of the characters and story and world of Critical Role, I had no idea that the show would be such a smashing success. As much as I want to believe that its success is solely due to the passion and investment its creators have in it (how many voice actors get to play starring roles in a show as a character they themselves invented?) it also seems that the show must have something else that is really resonating with people.

With the show's second season, I actually think they've improved - which is funny, because the plot is, in a certain way, more formulaic.

In very game-like fashion, the plot of this season (and, spoilers, probably season 3 as well, though I suspect they can wrap up this arc and move on to the final one by season 4, assuming they get one) revolves around a quartet of dragons known as the Chroma Conclave who have allied to bring destruction and devastation to the world. The two-episode intro arc of the first season showed us this group's fifth member and his demise thanks to our heroes (in the streamed game, the blue dragon of the Chroma Conclave had already fallen by the time we met the characters) before skipping ahead to what most consider "where Critical Role got really good," namely the "Briarwood Arc."

Still, in this arc, the heroes are presented with a group of bad guys to slay, and a set of mythical artifacts to help them do so - a set of artifacts that conveniently allow each player to get one (actually, come to think of it, I think at least one of them gets two). This is a tried-and-true formula for video games that is sometimes called "plot coupons," and I was worried that it might not work as well in a series like this.

But I think that there were moments in the first season where I think the show was also trying too hard - to be edgy and adult, sexual and violent, as if to flash a warning beacon saying "yes, it's a cartoon, but no, it's not for kids." Maybe I'm just now better used to the look and feel of the show, but I also think that the team has developed a bit more restraint.

It is really exciting to see moments I remember being adjudicated via die rolls now written in big action sequences. Of course, there have been some wise adaptational changes (splitting the party is generally a bad idea in a game, but dramatically it allows for the story to give the proper focus on the relationships between pairs of characters) but also some faithful recreations of wonderfully memorable moments (the final moment of a fight with one of the characters' evil family members goes precisely as it did in the D&D game).

The announcement of another series adapting Critical Role's second campaign, "The Mighty Nein," has me very excited, because I think that almost all the players made bolder choices with their characters and the show's novelistic storytelling benefited from having gone through a whole campaign previously, not only allowing us to see these characters truly at the beginning of their journey together, but also giving us dramatically meaty stuff without the awkward growing pains that the animated show was forced to skip.

I do wonder what people who have never played D&D think of a show like this. I imagine a lot of people think that it (and other tabletop roleplaying games) is video-game like, but those who have tried it know that it can be a fantastic way to tell an improvised story among friends. The triumphs and heartbreaks all lend to the weight of drama.

Anyway, it's good to see this show hitting the mark even better than it did in the previous season, and I'm already excited for more.