First, if you haven’t read Robin Laws’ Hamlet’s Hit Points and played Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco, do so immediately.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can explain what went through my head on my morning jog. One of Robin’s theses in HHP is that in most narrative media, it’s rare for the protagonist to enjoy a string of unmitigated successes. The key to effective narrative is modulating the pass/fail (or hope/fear) cycle. The book offers some pretty compelling evidence for this, and for the sake of this post, I’m going to accept it.1

So in Fiasco, after the Tilt, you know whether or not success or failure is good for your character in the long run. The game encourages you to push for your character to have the same fortune throughout.2 In the Vegas game at GenCon, for example, I had two black dice at the Tilt, so the “best” thing for my character was to keep losing.3

What I ended up doing in our LA 1936 game, however, was pulling a reverse. My burlesque dancer, Holly, had been dominant in her early scenes, especially against other player characters, like when she faced down Will’s nightclub owner. The game told me that I needed to play for white dice. But Will, sitting to my left, also needed them, and by the time it got to my third scene, there was only one left. Will had just done a great, possibly redemptive scene with his character, and I wanted him to win. So I decided to take a dive, and played my next scene to fail, leaving the white dice for him to take.4 I ended up with a fantastic bit of drama involving the revelation of my impossible love for Ryan’s corrupt liquor licensing commissioner, resulting in what Robin would call a dramatic down arrow. And it worked. I felt great about it, and the rest of the people around the table clearly responded to it.

What this game and Robin’s book made me realize is that I love pulling these sorts of reversals5, both because they make the character deeper and more complex and because they make the story more interesting. So thank you, Robin, for seeding these ideas in my head, and thank you, Jason, for making me wrestle with them.

1 The book had such an effect on me that after I finished reading it, I started doing beat analysis on the in-flight movie on the plane I was on at the time.6

2 Excepting that the consequences of your first two scenes don’t play into this, but I’m going to ignore that for now.

3 And boy did I.

4 Which didn't work, because Ryan took it, but I had to try.

5 What I realized this morning is that I’ve done exactly the same thing before, like in the game of Shooting the Moon at Dreamation in 2008, where made my scumbag business unit manager turn a volte face in the final scene to make his wife’s decision to leave him that much more poignant.

6 Which in this case was Shrek 4.

For a guy who claims to like spending time at home, I sure haven’t been doing it a lot lately.

It’s not that I don’t like to travel. I love to travel. I love to meet people, to eat local foods, to try to puzzle out the local culture and badly mangle the language. I love to visit places I haven’t been before, soaking in the sense of place about a destination, experiencing the folding together of topography and architecture that descriptions never quite convey. Whenever I travel for work, I try to extend my trips for a few days, taking the opportunity to see and do things I can’t normally at home.

When I’m not at home much, there is no sense of normal, and those breaks in routine become chaos to manage instead of enjoy. This is the lesson I forget every time I’m at home for a while. When I spend three weekends in a row in the house, I forget how exhausting having three weekends away is. And so I plot my own demise.

I found steps towards a solution. I’ve cut back on my project load, focusing more on day-to-day maintenance, reducing the need for weekends to keep myself, the house, and my relationships in good working order. I try to focus on using weekends for things that I can’t do during the week, and I’ve discovered there are lot more things that I can do on weekdays than I used to think.

So I’m trying to strike a balance. I love the trips I take and the things they let me do. I just don’t want to define myself by what I do when I’m not at home.1

1 That I wrote this on an airplane is not lost on me.

When I find a new idea, I see the world with new eyes. I can't help it; it's everywhere I look. Take cumulative syntax, for example. I just finished Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft from the Teaching Company1, which has as its core the idea that cumulative grammar is an under-taught tool in composition classes. Cumulative sentences are those that have a (generally) short base clause and (often numerous) free modifying phrases hung off of it. Here's a fun cumulative sentence, taken (more or less) straight from the course:

He drove carefully, the wind whipping his shaggy blonde hair, the wrap-around sunglasses shielding his eyes, a grim smile crossing his face, a .38 Police Special on the passenger seat beside him, the corpse stuffed in the trunk.

Or another:

They sat, he with his dour expression, the one reserved for funerals and government officials, she with her smile, the one that never left her face, both of them taking their places at the heavy wooden table, the mounds of paperwork all around them.

The course instructor likes these types of sentences because they start with something simple, something the audience can easily grasp. Then they start adding details, piling on descriptions and modifiers, building something more complex, something that if you tried to build with bound modifiers would collapse under its own weight before you ever found the verb.2

So of course, having been exposed to this idea, I'm now seeing analogues of cumulative syntax everywhere. That first example shows how you can start a story in one place and end in quite a different one, one that is still obviously connected to the beginning but whose conclusion, or even subject, you could not have predicted from its opening. I'm noticing that some of my favorite bloggers/essayists3 use this style, and it's something I want to do more of in my own writing. The second example shows how you can layer on detail without much forward motion, detail that forces the reader to keep going back to re-evaluate and re-envision the simple idea they started with. When I first encountered these sort of sentences in the course, I found them hard to follow. Once I got used to them, however, I found them much richer and nuanced than their non-cumulative counterparts. I keep seeing a parallel here with the Dresden Files RPG, in the way the commentary on the main text forces you to continually stop and re-evaluate it. It was confusing at first, but ultimately provided me with a more satisfying experience.

Like I said, when I find a new idea, I see it everywhere.

1 I've to listened and enjoyed several of their audio courses, including their excellent pair on the history of Western music and the history of opera.

2 And yes, I'm having fun using cumulative syntax in this post.

3 Notably Rands and Susan Schorn.



One of the things I learned at Origins this year was how much I needed to get back to blogging. So here I am. I'm going to be rusty for a little while, so I'm going to warm up with a series of posts about who I am and what I do right now.1

1 This is partly motivated by needing to update the About Me section of the site, so you can expect that some of the stuff I talk about in these posts will eventually appear over there.



In the first two posts of this series, I talked about my desire to limit my work to my capacity and how I set about gathering the data to do it. That leaves the question of how I processed that data and what I did with it.

An important step was to define buckets for my measured chunks of time to drop into. Remember how I said that I was going to measure tasks that I did for some sort of reason? The obvious way to group them was by those reasons. It turned out that there were two broad categories that these reasons fell into. The first was projects, which were things like the podcast, reading The Civil War: A Narrative, working on the Origins Awards, and the like. These were easy to identify, because the tasks were clearly oriented toward the completion of a specific goal. There were other tasks, however, that didn't fall into obvious projects but that I was still doing for a reason. This is where Roles came in handy.

I first encountered the idea of Roles in First Things First. They are, in a sense, the ways we define ourselves. For example, I see my major Roles right now as Husband, Software Professional, and Creative Artist.1 I do things that aren't directed towards specific project goals but are aimed at helping me cultivate and be fulfilled in those parts of my life.2 Sure enough, almost all of the rest of the chunks of time I had recorded fell into the Role-defined categories.

Once I had categorized my chunks of time, the final step was to add up how much time I was spending in each category and average out per week. I discovered that for the first quarter of 2010, I had an average of 25 hours per week available for "intentional work." About 15 hours a week was taken up by Role-based tasks, leaving 10 hours a week for projects. That meant that if I needed to spend at least half an hour a day on each project3, I could only have three at a time.4

So there it is. My capacity is three projects at a time, each of which gets about three hours a week. I've played with this enough to know that it is a real limit; if I try to do more, my mental well-being suffers and I get less done. Now that I know that, I can plan appropriately.

One of those plans, however, is going to impact this blog. Blogging is number three on my project priority list. Numbers one (personal fitness) and two (running the Origins Awards) need to expand beyond three hours a week, at least for the next month (or possibly two). That means I need to give up the three hours a week I've been using to write posts like this one. I'll write when I can, but don't be surprised if it's a lot of fortune cookie quotes until July.

1 I say "right now" because this list has shrunk since I first started, as I've learned more about myself.

2 This is related to Rands' Trickle List, but that’s a different post.

3 Half an hour a day, remember?

4 There are a several reasons to have no more than three active projects at a time, but this is the most telling.