Loquacious of Borg

No research, hah.

Doing a modern Indiana Jones gives you the worst of two worlds. You have to research the historical side as if you were doing a historical novel. And you have to research the modern world -- a multi-nation jaunt across the modern world and into awkward corners of it -- to try to avoid committing the "primitive natives and colorful spectacle" sin.

(It's a worse problem than, say, sending a character to Venice to discover life and love. Because your adventure archaeologist needs to go to places that are inherently dangerous -- conflict areas, disaster areas, resource-limited areas -- and there is controversy and recrimination swirling around these places and you really need to be sure of your facts.)

##

Not that it matters so much at the moment. I'm stalling and the words are lying lifeless on the page. Odd. I haven't had that for a while. Maybe the character hasn't gelled, maybe the voice isn't working, maybe it is just the plot has a slow start. But I really can't remember the last time I started a story and the words just sat there.

A good text is like a pop-up book. You start reading and fully dimensional phantoms arise from the page. This one is still sitting flat.

##

I'm also taking a step backwards on the trumpet. Glad I got the new mouthpiece. I was aware of the problem of jamming the trumpet back against your lips to hit the higher notes. Turns out there's a subtler form, which is forcing your lips up against the top edge of the mouthpiece. The 5C I'm practicing with is roomier and it makes the trick more obvious (and less effective).

So I'm back to long tones, trumpet laid flat on my palm to resist the urge to apply pressure to it. So I'm still not clean through the first two octaves up to the High C. And I'm having to put off working on tone. And working on reading from sheet music (a necessary approach as trying to memorize valve patterns for a song is not a good way to proceed).

And that means all the music I'm working on is on hold as well. I did pop the trumpet session from a few weeks back into Reaper but...not only isn't the trumpet ready, on coming back to it the bass isn't ready, either. I think that piece needs to go on back burner.

Really, the galaxy map song is a better match for my current skill as it is basically notes...no technical flourishes, no expressive lines, just stacks of ostinato/arpeggio-like figures.

Oh, except I really want to use the Baroquele for that and I am still paying off my Grecian vacation so haven't the cash to spare for that instrument.

Jim's Tried It

Oh, yeah, the fun part of discovery writing. When you have to stop a couple of times every sentence to finally nail down a name or location.

Most of this is stuff I glanced through previously, but it is still drilling back into the research and finding what actually works within the current state of the text.

Two Italians, one Greek, and a Sengalese to name. Which means looking at Italian forms of address (says one source, "the Italians love titles and will use them whenever they can"). Immigration patterns (if you want to pick a statistically average immigrant to Greece from 10-20 years back, they are going to be Albanian. Just so you know.) And by the way Greek surnames are gendered. Sort of. So, women sometimes take the name of their husband (says Wikipedia, "... (or) use it socially") but may just keep the name of their father. Which was at some point feminized but then became actually the genitive of the surname...but that's too simple, let's make the surname the Katharevousa form!

And of course this character it is a Belgian surname so who the heck knows what happens there. Then looking up opera companies in Athens (there is one, boringly called the National Opera of Athens) and the makeup of their board, the proper name of the "Sons of Herakles" who were famously promised to return and are sometimes conflated with those protean Dorians, (Professor Sharp's book is now officially titled The Return of the Heracleida), what Ermou Street looks like, and what to call a fedora if you don't want to say fedora. Or even if you do; it is not a terribly well defined hat name.

And yes they do make them both "camel" color and of actual camel hair and the latter is not, in my eyes, attractive.

My cast are still playing probability cloud, with whether they are at the reception in Athens, not seen until the dig in Germany, or not seen at all like proper criminal masterminds remaining undetermined until a critical paragraph is reached.

The one time I actually started writing at pace I made it half way through a nice little conversation with Dottore Guillo Manuzio before I realized I needed to set up their meeting later and in a very different way. (Or is that Il Dottore? Hardly matters...I don't think I'm using a title for him, not in Italian anyway.)

Thing is, this party scene is where they are going to be discussing the Dorian theory and there's also a comic bit with snippets of musical terms and Verdi operas. And some scene-setting description when poor Penny finally gets a chance to look around.

Oh, yeah. Currently on the list...her surname is no longer working for me. So now I'm staring at poetry meters because there is a bit I want to set up about "Penelope" being a good combination for the surname and "Penny" clashing with it.

What happened to the mouse?

The work file (the Scrivener document) for The Enceladus Calyx is over 48 thousand words. There's several thousand in notes files on the iPhone that I haven't bothered to transfer over (the smoothest way I've figured to do this is to email the note to myself. Apparently if you use DropBox you can synch Scrivener files between machines, but the IOS version of Scrivener is another twenty bucks).

A growing cast and I'm getting close to violating the One Steve Limit; there's already an Andrea, an Ariadne, and at least one Athena, and all three get mentioned in at least one conversation. About half the steadily growing cast still have place-holder names, though.

(I was tempted to go with Persephone for the antiquities dealer with a small gallery in a trendy shopping district of Athens. There was some possible dialog about her going through a real goth phase in high school and never grew out of it. But Ariadne lets me have her remark about both being weavers to my protagonist Penny...that is, Penelope. So I'd still be flirting with Steve limits.)

It's all about discovery writing right now. I'm simultaneously re-writing three different scenes. Some of that is closing in on character voice. Some of it is experimenting with pacing. And some of it is that endless juggle of when you drop information on the audience. I didn't think any of my previous drafts had really established Penny as a first-time traveler. She didn't even get a name in several of them. So I just did a new draft of the first dozen paragraphs that shifts the opening back twenty minutes or so and covers her meeting with Biro, the art student she's hired as a camera person. (Not a placeholder name, oddly enough.)

It's funny. When I first created him he was almost silent, speaking only reluctantly. In the latest draft he's driving the conversation. That's why I don't believe in getting too crazy with character bios and so forth before you've actually started to write. Not unless you are very experienced and know exactly what it is you are going to need those characters to have.

I don't have much hope of finishing a draft of the fourth scene before the weekend is over, though. Can blame being sick for two days but still...I'll be lucky to get the action to the archaeological dig in Germany before I have to go off and mix microphones for that children's show. Sigh.)

##

Picked up a 5C mouthpiece (got a cheap one...same maker as the trumpet, and the 7C that it shipped with.) It's different. Easier blow, oddly enough easier shifting, and a much richer tone especially in the bottom end. The pedal is coming nice and strong. A little harder to hit that high C on it, though. Which means I should probably keep using it; just like practicing with a practice mute, the resistance (or, in the case of the mouthpiece, lack of artificial support) means you grow the muscles faster. But I still like the 7C more.

##

I know the old joke about not having time to write a shorter letter. This post was done in haste as are most of mine today but I still deleted two words for every three I kept.

One people separated by an uncommon language

A friend asked why I'd never figured out my vocal range. I thought I was a light tenor as that's where my tessitura lies. Well, after a bit of a struggle finding middle C (see, on a piano it is easy. It's the one in the middle. For synthesized instruments it can be harder to determine the octave), I sung my highest comfortable note and my lowest comfortable note and they were exactly the notes identified as typical range for baritone. So I'm mildly disappointed at that, but at least I know now.

I'm also still struggling with the "high C" on the trumpet. That's the C above the treble clef. Trumpet players throw around the term "double C" and what they usually mean by that (unless they are very inexperienced) is the C an octave above that. No two can agree on whether a double F is below or above that double C.

##

Still struggling with the book. Still on a key scene that brings out and will largely define the inner and outer conflicts, all the way out to the meta level. I just dropped a major character from the scene along with all the stuff I was going to do with him. I think I may have added a new person, though. I'll have to see.

Reworked the first part of the first scene to make the camera guy a proper character and it helps. I'm going to take another crack at it, though; going to try doing their first meeting in-scene -- if for no other reason than it allows someone to say the name of my protagonist and allow her to have some conversation as herself before she gets into character for the video.

I'm also still on the fence about the scene where the goddess Athena shows up in disguise to drop some cryptic hints. I've spilled a lot of ink -- err, electrons -- pondering the many and varied pros and cons involved in the scene and what underlies it.

##

I'm trying not to do much free research now because I don't want new ideas. I'm tugged in too many directions already. But read about a private museum in Japan that may have bought up a whole hoard of looted artifacts over a short period. It was funded by a person close to the charismatic leader of a weird and controlling cult and it has a fancy modernist building that is described as including an entrance that wouldn't be out of place in a James Bond villain lair.

I was also looking up nothing more than a possible surname for a character. I looked for the author of Captain Michalis (famed Greek writer, but that was all I remembered at the time). One link later and there was the intriguing mention of the "accent wars." I think the editor flubbed that one, because what it actually was, was the struggle to define modern Greek.

And it is a fascinating read. Short form; when Greek Independence finally came, the elite (academics and politicians) saw the need for a national identity, particularly, one that was clearly linked to the classical past. They rejected what they saw as a "debased, shopkeeper's speech" and, like the French Academy, tried to define a proper grammatical language with a standard orthography that preserved as much as possible the classical heritage.

Not the first culture that has gone through this. I might venture a majority of nations have had something like this when they grappled with the idea of nationhood. The Chinese and Japanese both went through major orthographic reforms, English speakers fell in love with latinate grammar and tried to impose that on a hybrid germanic language, meaning even today almost no-one can explain who went to the shop with them without stopping to think about it).

The Greeks managed to get it worse than most, in part because they came up with a sort of hybrid, a language that was sort of a simplified classical greek combined with vaguely familiar "demotic" (the most common name for the Greek equivalent of vulgate) and a whole bunch of often-clumsy neologisms.

So the new language fought with not just language as she was spoke but also retrenched classicists, a battle made all the more confused by the fact that almost nobody actually understood the rules of classical Greek that they shouted at each other, and the Katharevousa was still very much a work in progress and nobody could agree on its rules. Oh, yes, and some people were fighting for demotic but it didn't have any standard written form and was split into far too many dialects.

It got so bad that generations of school children spent all their time being told all the words they already knew were wrong and being taught how to spell words that not even the adults could agree with; leading to generations that were nearly illiterate and an elite that was more and more divorced from the general populous.

Eventually, though, demotic won -- but it was a hard struggle, especially as the nationalistic aims of the Katharevousas (the language of a unified Greece versus the degraded polyglot of immigrants and modern metics) cross-bred with accusations of populism, communism, atheism, and of course class struggle. The identifications of language with political aims got so strong and so weird that when the Junta took over in the 60's they threw out the demotic textbooks and forced the poor students back to Katharevousa.

So it is a fascinating story of the process by which language can be used (and mis-used) to define common culture, common cause, and convenient or inconvenient divisions of class and politics and national identity.

Thing is; demotic wasn't a wonderful thing when it started. What is now standard Greek has borrowed some of the more structured grammar and more flowery terms from Katharevousa. It is itself a hybrid language, and stronger for it. But what the academists missed is that demotic remained connected to spoken, and common, language. People were able to (learn to) read a language that was similar enough to what they spoke to feel natural, they gained from what they read a wider vocabulary and more powerful grammatical forms that could, in turn, be used in speech. And that speech was the basis of further codifications of the language.

(And not to overstate; diglossia is a natural state of many languages, from those where the distinctions are difficult to draw -- spoken versus written English, for instance -- to places where there exist simultaneously a commonly used language and a more formal language used in special circumstances.)

Those who can't do...ponder methodology

Now I'm finally down to putting words on paper. And I'm struggling. That's the real gulf. It's the difference between knowing what you are supposed to be doing with the violin, and actually playing the violin. The later is using all of that knowledge and skill in real time. Simultaneously. And writing is no different.

So I'm wandering off into thoughts about processes and methods and constructing more elaborate models and analogies instead of, actually, writing. Of course.

Last week I was talking about a plotting problem. My Bronze Age novel is still stuck on basically a plotting problem. I just hit another plotting problem, having to do with one character needing to be what appeared to be two different, incompatible things. For all that I talked about Venn/Euler Diagrams, for all that I tried out a new piece of software to make a sort of Org Chart (a proper flowchart might have worked better), in the end I brute-forced it by following every branch of the decision tree that was open to me.

And I do this in text; I write out a statement on each branch, as clearly and unambiguously as I can, and then see where it branches below that, still being as concrete as I can. That's a lot of branches to explore.

The real trick is also asking up the hierarchy. Be like that annoying character on Animaniacs. "Honey, I need to get my car out of the garage." "Why?" asks the child. "Because I need to go to work." "Why?" "Because we need the money." "Why?" "Because our society doesn't provide food and shelter for free." "Why?" "Because our planet doesn't have infinite resources." "Why?" "Because the physics of our universe ensure entropic increase..."

As an aside, I still think that solving a problem is easier if you can first state the problem unambiguously. It isn't just language, it is the thought process involved in fixing what may be inchoate concerns into a statement that can be analyzed. Of course you are dropping important nuances in the process. But once you've tested and solved on this more abstract level, you can come back and see how it works.

That's where I am right now, by the way. I've charted what seems to be the way the character needs to be played, but now I have to actually write them like that and see if it actually works.

##

These characters are still too new to me. My latest character creation metaphor is that when you are first putting together a character it's like stitching together a body from random parts. You are borrowing the appearance of an actor, a background you read about in a book, the mannerisms of someone you met a long time ago.

Later in the process, a character is like meeting someone new. You already know their resume; their name, age, other details (including details so private they'd never intentionally write them down) but you don't have that experience of how they talk, how they move, how they feel as a fully fleshed out person standing in the room with you.

Right now my characters are at the twitching hand stage. The lightning has been sent down to the slab but the eyes aren't fully open yet.

##

Putting down words is of course a mechanical task in addition to being an artistic task. And there's a lot of process involved. I have evolved ways to manipulate within a strictly text environment. I append working notes at the back of whatever slice of text (usually scene-length) I'm working on at the time. As I revise, I shift blocks of no longer desired text into the bottom of the file. When I have to leave a note to come back to, I set out my comments within diagonals.

It could be prettier.  It could be faster. I'm looking at some of the possibilities within Scrivener again. You can color-code text in various ways, you can also identify blocks of text with attached comment or keyword.

What I think I would like at this point would be to switch to a different color to mark text that is going to be removed, text that is new and being tried out as an alternative, and text that is commenting on the process. And have the ability to automatically hide the comments and the deletions because I am very visual and I can't review a text properly unless the distractions are stripped out.

(Heck, I even have trouble when dealing with differences in font size and page width. My paragraphs have evolved to a certain visual size, and that sense is thrown off when I try to look at text on the tiny display of my iPhone.)

##

I figured out why reading parallel fanfic is so much fun. It exercises the same muscles when you are staring at multiple ways of handling a scene or a character development and trying to compare the strengths between them. A fanfic is, by definition, a story deriving from a specific source. Like a jazz standard, there are a lot of directions you can go in interpreting it but the original form is still under there.

You also read history the same way. I have six different books of Greek history open right now but that's because I'm reading preview chapters trying to decide which ones to buy. History done right is getting to the most primary sources you can and having multiple sources whenever possible; it is by comparing different accounts that the historian creates a sort of bit map of a plausible underlying truth.

(When I mean parallel, I do mean parallel. I'll read as little as a page of one before flipping to another. It is an interesting task. In reading any book you have a tally of things to keep track of; they haven't reached Amsterdam yet, Phil broke his leg three days ago. Reading six at once, you are trying to remember all the branching choices for each so you can continue to make sense of what is happening on the page.)

(Right, and this also happens when you read books out of order or watch episodes out of order. Interesting exercise!)

He sat upon a river-rock and turned into a toad

My morning writing session is stalling out on too much thinking.

That's the thing that Nanowrimo is supposed to address. The thing that a really complete outline could possibly provide. That is; the ability to put words on paper as fast as you can type them.

On the other hand, as was pointed out in a recent episode of the excellent Writing Excuses podcast, sometimes slowing down is a signal from the less conscious parts of your writing brain that something isn't right and you need to go back.

##

I still believe that a whole text is more than a sum of parts. I had a whole metaphor about tapestry weaving in my mind to illustrate this but when I stopped for a little research the metaphor doesn't really work.

Think of collage, or those things you do with kids when you cut shapes out of felt and stick them up on another piece of felt. That's when writing can be really fast; they are just shapes, complete in and of themselves, and you can stick them anywhere.

I'd think about calling this embroidery but while embroidery has the same advantage of a fixed surface to which patterns of arbitrary shape can be attached in arbitrary order, there's something about embroidery and all the special stitches and the looping patterns of application that just seems to bend the metaphor too much.

Tapestry is not really embroidery (unless it is the Bayeux), but the lack of continuous weft threads doesn't really help make it distinct as a metaphor. Really, weaving comes closer to what most writing is really like. You have multiple ideas which are visible in spots and invisible in others but are contiguous and parallel nonetheless. So you have to track all these elements whether they are in a particular block of text or not, and they have to be planned for all the way at the start even if you don't intend to introduce them until later.

And that I feel is how the majority works. The warp and weft are both part of the fabric of the story, not a neutral base as is true for embroidery, and you can't pull one thread without causing changes to ripple everywhere.

And I suppose writing can sometimes end up crossing threads in crazy patterns but I'm not crazy about using macrame as a metaphor so never mind.

##

So, yeah. Writers who are trying to just get a block of text on the page so they can start examining it to see how it works and whittling away at it where it doesn't talk about the "internal censor" or the "internal editor" for all those ways you stall in the middle of typing and get lost trying to think about the grammar or the spelling or whether this is really where you intended the scene to go.

Me, I call this the "inner researcher." Because it is really hard not to let the urge to look something up stop me in the middle of putting a line of words down. Because what should matter for first draft is the flow of the scene. You've got a moment where the safety clicks on a gun. You don't want to stop to look up whether that gun would have a safety at all. Or dive into the research materials trying to decide upon what's the perfect firearm for that time and place and that fits that character. Or start worrying about whether the click would even be audible in the test chamber and start reading up on the dB ratings of exhaust fans.

Because when you finish that draft and come around for a second pass you may find a knife is more dramatic for the scene or that nobody ends up being threatening at all or the entire scene doesn't work and needs to be cut.

Draft is draft. It's just a lengthier outline. Or so the people who slam down 1,667 words in every twenty four hours say....until they have to go back at the tangled mess they've created and try to figure out where the threads actually go....

As in all things, moderation. Sometimes you do have to and should stop and figure something out. The sketchiest draft is still a problem-solving exercise, and you can't solve every problem on the run. The trick, the real trick, is knowing when.

When outlines fail

1,600 words is actually pretty thin for an outline. Look; I did a story of over 100K words by seat-of pants. Actually came pretty close to classic three-act structure, although it got away from me at the end (it didn't feel like it was properly resolving and I had more stuff I wanted to explore, so I kinda went fourth act on it).

Nothing wrong with that either. Sondheim's Into the Woods is famously a musical that mixes multiple fairy tales, sending a host of characters out on their hero's journeys, bringing them home for Happy Ever After. Then comes Act II...

Some people do spread sheets. There are a lot of ways to try to map puzzle pieces, character arcs, story beats, character meetings, travel from location to location. People also fill out long forms of background, character biographies, more maps... I didn't feel this story needed or wanted that. It is an origin story wrapped in a mystery served with just a single POV character. It just isn't that complex, structurally speaking.

Yeah, I do have a Scrivener folder that puts together some research materials and has a page for each major character. Those pages are largely empty, however. I'm a fan of discovery writing because there are organic things that happen within the actual on-the-page interaction. When you try and construct a conversation between two fictional people, you discover questions you didn't realize needed to be asked. When you put a character into a realized world with all its complexities and warts, you stumble into situations you hadn't projected.

It is easy to write in your character bio, "He doesn't use money" but a lot tougher to actually navigate them through a modern city.

Which is all leading up to that I hit Chapter Four and stopped dead.

I love the kind of questions that open up for examination the unstated assumptions that created the problem. Sometimes up the chain, multiple times, until you have Carl Sagan'd yourself into asking questions about the origin of the universe itself.

My outline said of Chapter Four that Penny pretends to be an archaeologist. I started tackling that problem as I went into draft; what tools is she going to use to pull it off. Then I realized it was as much a question who she was trying to trick. Then I had to ask why she would do this in the first place -- a question my outline hadn't addressed. That in turn asked me to explore how she feels about archaeology, history, her own skills. And what her background is; turns out what was in the bio sheet wasn't enough to answer these questions.

The nice thing about an outline, though, is it gives you an overall structure. I know where I can bend, what is open to be explored, and where I have to stay within the envelop lest the plot fall apart.

So at the end of a couple of days of thinking about it during work and scribbling notes during my breaks I had come to a better understanding of the forces driving her character. I now know why and when she was in theatre and why she got out and what she does for a living now. I know how she feels about crowds and strange places and the when and where of when she has confidence in her physical and technical competencies (and what those are). In short, a more defined character and a better character voice.

And, sure, it is going to change a lot of what I wrote already but that's okay. I expected I'd have to go back and forth a little, especially in the early chapter. Besides, a draft is like an outline. Once it is there, you have an idea of the basic structure works and how far you can bend it before it breaks.

So, yeah. This is an outline "failure" if you think the point is to write continuously, never blotting a line, through all your daily goal word counts and out to the finish of something resembling a draft. But I'd say if the goal was making a story...it is still working pretty well.

I will expect your owl...

1,200 words today. Still falling short overall. Especially since I'm going to go back, particularly savaging the scene right after the tumble on the steps of the propylea. The camera guy is getting fleshed out and gets a proper speaking role.

I'm still worried about pacing. More than that; worried about setup. I've talked about the contract with the reader before. The first chapters are the place where this is ratified. And detailed. You read the first chapters of a novel, especially one by a new writer, with a lot of meta-questions; is this going to be serious? Is this going to be bloody? Will I like the protagonist? Is the language comfortable to read? Is the writer any good?"

First person POV has an advantage (if that is the word) in that it only takes a few lines for the reader to find out if they want to be around this person for the length of a book. The narrative voice is just that present. Many a book I've put down because I didn't want that person's voice in my ear for five hours.

In any case, because of the nature of some of the material I have to be rather careful to put in clues to the reader about what it will actually be like. Even when that interferes with developing the story proper. Specific example; in the prologue she mentions Atlantis. That gives me a fairly small number of pages before I have to tell the reader if Atlantis is going to be real within the world of the story.

##

Oh yeah. While I was still wrestling with the outline I took a day off to make a Mass Effect pastiche. See, there's this organization called "Cerberus" that figures in all three games. For no reason at all, I thought of putting "Cerebus" in its place. That being the barbarian aardvark created by independent comic book creator Dave Sim.

I marked it clearly as one-shot, done, finis, too silly an idea to be worth developing, and put it up on fanfic.net. It already has two story alerts on it. (Truth be told, those worlds don't mesh well. Lord Julius would quickly take over the Council, of course. But other than that? Well...I would very much like to see the fight between The Roach and Mass Effect 3's Kai Leng...)

##

More and more I seem to be running into "second question" problems. What I mean is, there are questions that a lot of people have. Assume you've already found that answer, though, and you have a follow-up. That's the hard part. It is hard to search for on the web, whether within a store or more generally.

Here's today's big example. There's a lot of software around now to emulate classic guitar amps, and of course a variety of effects boxes. So...has anyone made software that does similar sonic tricks to emulate a brass mute? That is, to do for the sound of a trumpet into a microphone what there is software to do for a guitar on a mic or direct box? Yamaha happens to make a so-called "Silent Brass" system which sticks a microphone into a practice mute. Which is cool enough, but then they add modeling software to make it sound (in headphones) like a trumpet without a mute at all.

But there's no easy way to search for this idea. The results pages for a mute emulator are swamped with hits for guitar emulators and, of course, Yamaha's Silent Brass. There seems to be no way of telling search engines, "I know that one already."

Really, the only thing to do is search for a trumpet and/or DAW forum, then start asking questions. And be prepared for yet another round of people telling you about the stuff you already know. Of course.

Air

Apparently the most common thing a trumpet instructor will advise is, "more air." Doesn't matter what the problem is, more air fixes it.

I read several articles and a paper and I still am not quite sure how embouchure works. Sure, pitch maps to volume fairly well, but you can sustain multiple volumes at various pitches. So it is probably a relationship between pressure and tension. A higher lip tension, the less pressure for the same pitch. The thing that makes me fairly sure about this is the more I practice and build my lip strength, the softer I'm able to play.

I still have a very long way to go before I can play the kind of things I'd like to.



Also on the subject of more air, I just finished another scene and the whole thing is feeling too compressed. Too breathless, too much being stuffed into every sentence. It needs breathing room. I'm also short on description, especially five-senses description, and character building, and interaction. (And I'm not sure first person is working for me but I don't see a way around using it.)

So I'm thinking I may need to try a completely fresh draft. Take longer, explain more. I have a sort of horror of saying anything more than once and that can be a problem if it is a plot-relevant something.

Sure, several of the hurried-sounding explanations are that way because I wanted to rough it in here and expand later in a different chapter. Thing is, another reason I may have been a little breezy is because I hadn't worked out all the details yet and I was hoping to keep the reader from noticing.

Point in case, the guy who is pointing the camera. He's there mostly because the camera needs someone to hold it (and he has a small secondary role that becomes clear later). But I don't know how he got hired, where he comes from (is he local?) any of that. So I've said almost nothing about him and it shows. There are places where my character would see more, ask more, want to know more, and I'm not letting her do this.

So, yeah. Maybe I should figure out this guy, and then instead of having a conversation with herself my protagonist can interact with him. And instead of jumping from her accident to being back at street level and glossing that transition with a handwave about her still being dizzy, I should flesh out into a full scene, take the random people who were in the accident with her and give them speaking roles, etc. etc.

And if I do that, maybe the scene I did today with the Mysterious Stranger won't feel quite so obvious.



(It's a thing known in game design as conservation of detail. If there has literally been no other conversation up to this point, then that conversation and that person is important. If she's met a bunch of interesting people on screen, that is in front of the reader, then this one won't stand out so much.)

Don't want clever conversation

Actually, I do.

Rough draft of the second scene is done, where my character almost exits the Propylea in a manner that would leave her in the Odeon if it wasn't a little too far to the South.

And I'm only at 3,000 words. I mean, it works, but it is worrying me a little that I may come up short at the end. I've been trying to decompress, but this is really a plotting mistake. This is a character that is built around interacting with people. With having conversations, with being persuasive, with being clever.

And what's my first three scenes? A clip from a student film in which she's exploring a ruin. Alone. A scene in which she gives a lecture about the Acropolis.  To a camera. And a fill-in-the-backstory scene that's got everything but the convenient mirror.

Essentially no conversations. I'm tempted...and this is very much going to go in the notes...to revise the second scene so it becomes about a conversation between her and a random tourist. Or between her and her camera person.

I mean, I had a long conversation at the Athenian Acropolis with an Australian who travels the world as a professional soccer referee. And similarly interesting conversations, usually started with a "Do you know if the northbound train stops here?"

Because, yeah. I revised the speech about the Acropolis six or seven times but each time it has been as much about leaving out as it has been about putting in. It would be easy to put so much more, so vastly much more. Even within the constraints I've set myself. You don't even need to open a book; I can think of half a dozen myths that would be fun to go into -- I put the one about the olive tree and the spring in the draft, but there's so much more to that one, even. Cecrops is one weird king.

I mean, what. Even staying within the Periclesian Acropolis, it was built as celebration of the end of hostilities with the Persian Empire (mostly), with money from the Delian League, and building went right through the Peleoponesian War. So if nothing else, you've got Sparta all over the story. And fabulous Athenians like Alcibiades. I could probably do twenty minutes myself, without having to open a reference book (as long as you didn't want exact dates or for me to spell anything....)

But that would be a crazy way to open a story. Heck, it would be too much almost anywhere in a book that's supposed to be a light-hearted and just slightly fantastical adventure.

At least the next scene is conversation.

Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle

1,900 words now. The first draft of Scene One that actually works for me. Stuck a lot of stuff in there that was supposed to be in the next scene, though, so that may come up a bit short.

Finished reading The Medici Conspiracy, Antiquities, Not all Dead White Men, and gotten up to the point in The Odyssey where all the massacre starts. Reading Indiana Jones in History now; more stuff about the context of archaeological artifacts and the antiquities trade. Browsing sample chapters for good books about the Roman presence in Germany and about the Ottoman occupation of Greece. And, yes, Tacitus is on the list for the former. Also been watching a lot of videos about all the stuff I missed when I was in Athens.

The third C is secure enough now I'm trying to push past it. Relatively comfortable going to D and E but I can only stay stable on them for a short time before my lip loses precision. The slots are way too close together up there. 

One of these days I should really practice all the other scales. But I want to move to sheet music first. It's sort of like the difference between early written languages and an alphabet. Right now when I learn a tune I have to learn the muscle memory for every note in sequence. Instead I should learn the alphabet, the muscle memory that goes with each of the notes the trumpet can reach. It's faster and more repeatable that way.

And it's less than six weeks before I have to go run board again. That's likely to suck up some time.

Around the World in 80 Days

Actually, just to Germany and back to Greece via a bit of Italy.

If I can do a thousand words a day I can complete a first draft in a months and a half...which is less time than I have before the next show starts. (It's a school tour thing. Be, what, the fourth time I've done this one?)

Nanowrimo participants aim for the magic 1,667. I'm finding I'm not a terribly rough draft kind of guy, though. I feel better doing the substantial revision as I go.

Which is also why I haven't moved past the first 1,500 words. But I'm not too concerned yet. These are the opening scenes. Scenes where I have to introduce the protagonist, find the narrative voice, describe the background, and set the plot in motion. Penny's lecture about the Acropolis is on the fourth or fifth draft by now.

And, yeah, I'm already having trouble with wanting to put too much in. I need to throw in some fun stuff because I need to sell that her lectures are clever and entertaining. But at the same time I have to keep remembering that she's had less time to cram than I have. I can riff about the way Pericles manipulated a political opponent into an ostracism, with all the side alleys like the ostracon themselves (pottery sherds) and Sparta's bizarre two-ruler system.

But even more than not wanting to show Penny being too knowledgeable (a big part of the plot is, after all, her figuring out stuff), and of course not wanting to overwhelm the audience, there are also specific omissions I want to make. Even, to be obvious I'm making them.

Penny dips briefly into the earlier Parthenon (burned by Xerxes) and certainly notices the restoration going on, but part of what I'm demonstrating in her lecture is a trapped-in-amber vision of Greek Antiquity; Pericles caused these great buildings to be raised. And here they are.

Nothing about the fact that the Parthenon spent longer as either a Greek Orthodox church or a Mosque (or a storage depot) than it did as a symbol of Athens, much less as a symbol of a Greek nation (a concept the Athenians would have struggled with, Delian League notwithstanding). Or the sheer artificiality in picking THIS Parthenon as the one to restore, when one can argue there's equal history in later...and earlier...parts of history. Or the welding of a connection when there is so much history between the time of Pericles and the time of Tsipras it is difficult to call them the same people.

So I want to stay away from the later history in this scene, from Lord Elgin and Venetian cannonballs and the two brave boys who struck the Nazi flag from the flagpole and so on. It is tough in all sorts of ways; the best place for her to stand when giving her introductory talk is on the belvedere, which is medieval.

And of course I'm sick today. And yesterday was at the pub getting an ear full about Doric vs Ionic verb forms from my classics pal. I'm not worried yet but I won't be happy if I hit the weekend and that opening scene still isn't done.

...with the verb between his teeth.

First draft of the first chapter -- a 500-word prologue. And 800 words into the next chapter, the one set on the Acropolis.

According to my calculations, each chapter in my outline should average 4.7 thousand words if I want to hit a target of 80K. They are going to vary quite a bit, though. Especially as my outline is more of a story beats than it is an absolute plan of chapter and scene breaks. Nice how the numbers work out, though. 4K was typical of the chapters in my last fanfic. So not only do I know what that looks like, I also know what fits in (One or two set-piece scenes, plus some Meanwhile Back in Ithaca.)

So, yeah. Best guess now is from the moment she arrives on the Acropolis to the moment she falls off will be somewhat over 3K. I do want to decompress, but decompressing in a place where all I can do is history factoids and pretty scenery is not the best. Save the page count for some longer conversations and other interactions.

(The way the plotting is working out, scenes like this are a first take, and almost every single bit of background information given ends up being expanded, explained, or repudiated later. Means unless I'm careful later scenes are going to become way too wordy).

Still too early to tell how it is going otherwise. I've been talking to Penny for a while in my head but this is the first time I've tried to write a full paragraph in her voice. I thought the prologue was going to be more over-the-top and also have move ludicrously bad history in it. Sure, she discovers Cycladic figurines in a tholos tomb as well as a Phaistos Disc she identifies as being written in Minoan before reading it, but that's...I think it is a wee bit subtle. It's even archaeologically defensible; there was a cross-over of burial practices and neolithic artworks, besides pretty much making it to that time anyhow, were collected by later ages.

And, yeah, it was tempting to do more about the language but it is too early, both for Penny and for the novel, to get into geeky depths about Linear A and Minoan Hieroglyphs and all that.

The rest of my time has been spent learning about cigarette smuggling out of Montenegro, the Roman presence in Germany, antiquities laws in multiple nations, and a host of other questions that keep coming up. And will keep coming up.

Whether I intend "no research" or go all-out, though, there remains an issue. I think the way research works best is when you read a whole bunch first. What you get out of that is a feel for the landscape. Unfortunately, perhaps, you also get a bunch of obscure stuff that turns out to be really annoying to track down again later.

Just two hundred words ago in the current draft, I remembered that I'd heard the term "Periclesian Parthenon" a couple of times. And I can't track it down. I can't even confirm the spelling. There was a Greek term for the desecration of the Hermes that I only heard from one place. Fortunately I could go back to him and get him to spell it. But I also heard an archaeologist on a program filmed in Greece use what appears to be the Greek equivalent of "tombarolli." That is, tomb robber. But I haven't been able to track it down (the original source was not captioned.)

Annoying process, that. The search engines are only giving me two options. One is to assume I meant some more common term and correct my spelling to that. The other is to take what I know is the wrong spelling, accept only those exact letters, and of course come up dry.

Back a decade ago my joke was if you tried to search for a famous european, especially a scientist, you'd be flooded with hits for some Anime girl that had been given that name. Now the problem is when you know damn well there are other acropoli than the Acropolis, the boolean logic permitted in the search engines is insufficient to keep it from trying to navigate you back to Athens. (Actually, that one's a bad example. But you get the idea). There's really no way of typing in, "Zeus, but not the one you're thinking of." Or "Valence, but not curtains or electrons."

Well, maybe my classics-prof buddy at the pub will know the Pericles one, too.

Oh, yeah. And I found a generator that will translate text into bad German accent. It doesn't add gratuitous German, but that's okay. I took a year of the stuff and some of it stayed.

Sorting Algorithm of Evil

YouTube is scaring me again. This time it isn't the comments. I've been looking at some game reviews, and I've been following Doctor Who, and there were a couple of skeptical videos there, mostly on Flat Earth nonsense.

And now my recommendations are stuffed to the gills with videos explaining why "SJW's" destroyed AAA games, science fiction, and science.

Okay, sure. Maybe I'm seeing all this because it is true. Maybe, somehow, the reason Mass Effect Andromeda failed as a game wasn't the bugs or the wonky animations or the crud story or lethargic voice acting, but because they just had to add some gay characters. Oh, sorry. The critics aren't saying that. They are saying something much more reasonable and smart. They are saying all of the above was the fault of some guy who was hired only because he was gay and black and a coptic Christian and was born on Tuva (efficiency, what?) rather than the competent, coincidentally-looks-just-like-us guy that would have done the job right.

Maybe the least organized conspiracy in the universe suddenly convinced a whole batch of different creators to lose their bonuses and, eventually, their jobs as studios went crashing down, by cramming in "Social Issues" (finger quotes not optional) where they didn't belong.

Yeah, no. Even if this bizarro world was actually real, is is a more attractive one than the one in which every time someone tries to slip in a protagonist who isn't a buff, unshaven cis-white dude with a flat American accent the howling mob descends on us all.

##

There are intersections. The skeptical and atheist communities have a surprising cross-over with, shall we say, a certain level of intolerance. I think this traces right back to the problem of Engineers; they have a toolset that is so good at solving one class of problems, and it deludes them into thinking they can as easily solve all problems. Seeing the logic errors of Flat Earth belief is one thing. It doesn't give you the understanding of sociology and anthropology to understand why standardized tests are a poor proxy for anything else, or what the term "rape culture" actually meant.

And there's the noise factor. YouTube has always demonstrated the anonymity effect of the internet; everyone is a troll in the dark. It doesn't take a majority of people to make the majority of videos, any more than the number of Wikipedia editors equals the number of Wikipedia readers. The other intersection here is that the kinds of people who get upset because society is evolving and market-sensitive creators are evolving along with them are also the kinds of people who have time, disposable income for recording hardware, a base aptitude with technology and an existing interest and participation in that particular conversation on that particular social channel.

##

So, no. I don't think it is a majority opinion that The Beeb randomly got a religion that demanded they base a Doctor Who episode around Rosa Parks. (How, exactly, is this more significant, much less more abhorrent, then basing an episode around Vincent van Gough?) Or that the end results are uniformly horrid and have murdered a wonderful thing.

I'm not even sure it is a majority of produced or circulated videos. I think this is largely a matter of the algorithms noticing that the echo chamber that wants their Science Fiction to go back to what they imagine was being written in the 50's is also interested in games and greco-roman history and in the popular pastime of skeptics making fun of Flat Earthers.

But it is annoying. It is even scary. I'm scared now whenever I click on a fresh channel, or something off the usual subject within a channel I'm already enjoying, I'm going to get treated to another white dude in his 30's ranting about Mary Sue characters.

And with each click, the algorithm hums softly to itself and zeroes in to the heart of that echo chamber of nonsense.

Owl be back

Oh, goody.

I have an outline, I have the basic research, I can start creating chapter and scene.

So what's up first?


Scene 1. I have to describe the Acropolis. And I don't mean an info-dump from Wikipedia. I mean show my protagonist, acting in character, giving an improvised lecture that is cogent and amusing but also contains both errors and omissions. And to write it in such a way so it is obvious the errors are not the author's, and that the omissions are there and are going to be important. And of course it is the first scene for the protagonist of the story which means I have to reveal two different people simultaneously; the character being filmed, and the actor behind the mask.

Scene 4. This is a reception at a trendy gallery where everyone has hidden layers and every conversation takes place on multiple levels -- culminating in a scene where my protagonist pulls a Danny Kaye and the Italian art dealer plays along for his own reasons, slipping in Verdi quotes in his replies -- that turn out later to be rather meaningful.

Oh, yeah, and the Prologue. It shows bits of an episode of the show my protagonist created back in college, where she plays a female Indiana Jones on the track of....Atlantis. Yeah; after all that time trying to come up with a historical fantasy that wasn't about Atlantis, my modern-day story of Athenian antiquities smuggling requires I figure out an Atlantis plot.




There's a little more here. I'm having a huge crisis of confidence now, about writing in the voice of a contemporary young person (well, younger than me). In one way I'm okay with that because my audience is probably closer to my age and the style of this thing means I can hang a lampshade on it and describe the High School of my era, and theirs, and get a nod and a smile and a tacit understanding that the world has moved past us. 

But that connects with the bigger problem I've been wrestling with. That I just don't know enough, that I'll never be comfortable that I know enough. What was the actual trade in the early Iron Age between Greece and Northern Europe? How do trains work in Italy? What are the options for live streaming or nearly-live journalism? 

How do people actually work? What is romance? What is the meaning of life? I really don't think I understand humanity well enough to write about "us." I feel like I just evolved off the spectrum within the past decade, and there's no way this lifetime is long enough to catch up.

So, yeah. It isn't going to be a fun weekend.

Benchmark! Nanonomowrimowhatevermo!

1,600 word outline. Done. All the major plot elements, locations, characters, key scenes.

Next step is to start putting down text, lock in the character voice and narrative style and see what the script-to-shot ratio is (that is, what the projected length will be based on the planned scenes).

(Of course there are still holes. The outline has plenty of "She does something clever and escapes" stuff in it. And there is research, unfortunately.)

But now I'm feeling good about this again and looking forward to writing it.

Sherds

Here's the "Murder wall" I worked up in Scapple.

This isn't the plot, per se. These are all the elements of a central problem I'm trying to solve. The names are shorthand if not stand-ins; Chandler, Scion, and Dumont are all Greeks (the latter handle because of a certain resemblance to the kind of Grand Dame so wonderfully portrayed by Margaret Dumont). Atlantis is an art gallery.

A lot of lines are missing because of lack of space, and there may be some missing characters. One thing I wish I could do is label the lines, because sometimes the connections are tenuous ones ("crashed a car in which the Carabinieri discovered a picture of..." for instance.) Making them different colors would only go so far.

##

It's all about the orphan. This is something that was done for various reasons by real-world antiquities rings, particularly the one centered around a certain Medici. This was partly for triangulation; washing an antiquity through various methods including putting it up for auction with Sotheby's then buying it back themselves. And partly as a marketing scheme. However, only the Getty really got into buying their antiquities piece by piece (the heart of the marketing scheme was, "I can sell you the last puzzle piece if you'll also agree to get these plates.")

I am still on the fence if this was ever intended in this case. In some documented cases a pot was partially restored for photographing (the old school traffickers really loved Polaroids. I'm not sure that flies as well today...getting pretty hard to find those self-developing packs.) Then it would be separated again and it might be years before full restoration was accomplished. In other cases, an intact piece was broken up to make sale-able bits (sometimes because the original was too large to move).

The backstory I'm going with now is this is a Cycladic workshop either in competition with the keramikos or a sort of off-shore workshop for the burgeoning Attic industry, and most of what is found on site is kiln misfires and other rejects. Which means the Enceladus Calyx might have been never whole but fractured in the kiln. One thing I haven't decided is if it was looted whole, or if the orphan was found separately. 

(One flaw with the intentional creation of orphans is they will have visibly fresh edges. They also tend to be broken conveniently between figures or other high-detail areas; both are things the Carabinieri Art Squad have learned to detect.)

So that's the Janus problem I'm having. Parts of the plot work best if the calyx is whole. Other parts work best if it is in pieces. And a whole lot of the string-and-photos above is trying to figure out when those pieces get separated and how that changes the rest of the plot. Perhaps it is Schrödinger's Pot.

Other questions are more an either-or. I'm thinking the material coming out of the Cycladic site is useful to the Dorian Invasion delusions of Professor Sharp and he could have seen, documented, and collected some of same through social connections to the rich dilettante who owns the land. Thing is, if it works for one Dorian, it works for another, and Atlantis Gallery would love to sell the stuff along with their Crystal Skulls and Ica Stones, but making that connection would make it too obvious that the good stuff in the Professor's collection came to him much later than the UNESCO cut-off year of 1970.

There are multiple other places where I'm trying to stretch the diagram to ask is it one branch of the decision tree, or another. So...maybe a better tool would be a programmers flow chart?

(Four hours of work later). And I've got it. It ain't neat, but it will work. Sharp picked up the orphan when the Scion had started on a new boathouse. He gave it to his protege Xander, who at a low spot in career decided to "find" it on a dig in Germany, announcing it on social media. The Atlantis gallery, who had acquired Sharp's collection towards the end of his life, saw a business opportunity and threw a lot more publicity at Xander than he had been expecting. Perhaps now the organization could move some of the low-grade stuff that had come out of the ground around the boathouse. What they didn't expect was to find a work of art and even partial restoration attracted the attention of some serious buyers. Unfortunately the pot had this one missing piece...)

My face is tired: Mass Effect Andromeda

Yes, the environments look nice.

In every other way, though, moving to the Frostbite engine failed the game. If for no other reason than it took too long to adjust to the new engine and construct the tools the engine doesn't include. Various insiders opine that what actually shipped was completed in less than a year, and that after many of the team had left.

The game shows over and over that there just wasn't time for the polishing steps. And this goes deeper than the bugs. Take the janky animations the interwebs treated with such derision. Those are partially the fault of an inadequate toolset and inadequate test time, but they expose something else specific.

Which is that they are canned. Sure, this is an open world, and it makes sense that the necessary interactions of the tens of sidequests are handled in-engine, but...there are key interactions, major story interactions, interactions happening early enough in the game to shape the player's perception of the experience, which never saw the touch of an animator.

In ninety five percent of the conversations my Ryder had, the camera snapped to a single over-the-shoulder two-shot and locked there while Mimic or whatever lipsynch engine they were using tried to match facial movements to recorded dialog. Poorly. So poorly does this automatic in-engine system work, my Ryder went through several conversations unable to see any of the people involved in it!

(There were also times the dialog wheel itself popped in and out, and even moments when Ryder would suddenly blurt out her reply five minutes later and five km down the road in the Nomad, but that's the kind of bugs the game is still saddled with despite multiple patches).

(And just to add insult to injury, every single conversation would exit with the cursor floating in the middle of my screen, in the way of everything. What kind of lame coding is it when you can't even keep a stray cursor from being left lying around?)

Doesn't help that this isn't the strongest writing or voice acting of the series, either. Or for the company, either; Fallout 4 uses a similar lock-camera plant-and-bellow approach, leading to what reviewer Yahtzee calls "The Bioware Stare," but at least there are hand-tweaks to the animation when the conversation is important.

Contrast this to Mass Effect 2 or 3. Conversations are hand-animated, with multiple camera angles, shot reverse shot, push-ins, props; each performance is carefully constructed and staged and will have unique actions. This is also true of The Witcher, of even the later Wolfenstien games -- which aren't even RPGs!

The point of this is not that this is bad, per se. Or that it is unforgivable, given that the toolset they were working with wasn't accommodating. There are plenty of games and not just older games where this kind of cinematic mini-cutscene conversation isn't in use or wouldn't even be appropriate. The point is that this is a Mass Effect game. Which have given us this kind of close-up of the people we are interacting with and given them a chance to be distinct characters not just in their voices but in the ways their bodies move.

As another reviewer points out, Mass Effect isn't a driving game (although Andromeda brings back the vehicle and the large explorable terrains). It isn't really a shooter (although the combat in ME3 and Andromeda is so good that in the later is is almost the best part of the game). What it is, is role-playing. About interacting with people, changing the world through your choices and defining yourself in the way you make them.

And it is not to say full metal cinematography and a full Serkis mocap is necessary to have this kind of interaction. Players were deeply moved when conversing with a sixteen-pixel sprite through a text window, back in the day.

No, what's really the issue (besides the failures of story, dialog, design, and acting that make few of the Mass Effect Andromeda conversations memorable) is that, particularly after the kind of intimacy you got in the previous games, there is a real lack of emotional connect here. This isn't interactive dialog, this is walking through the animatronic Hall of Presidents.

##

The scenery is lovely. It is also static. I will give kudos for tire tracks being persistent, but there's a similar lack of connection that makes it into more like watching an IMAX movie of the Mojave then actually feeling like you are in the Mojave.

The approach used in Skyrim (actually, in most of the Elder Scrolls series -- and as well in many of the Fallout series) is to make as much of the litter as possible into physics objects. This was brought out in interviews with the lead designer for Skyrim. They absolutely intended to forge that closer connection to the game world by making it possible to knock over stuff (the fact that Skyrim's physics model makes it nearly impossible for the player to actually pick up a cup and place it on a table is disappointing, but the idea is there.)

The reboot Tomb Raider games have, as a part of their hidden-rails philosophy, no such moveable objects. Instead they give this interaction to the avatar; Lara will noticeably push small branches aside if you send her through the shrubbery, feel along the wall of a cave, and otherwise react to the scenery around her. Which animates somewhat in response. It may seem a small thing, but it helps so very much.

The outdoor scenery in Mass Effect Andromeda is lovely, though some of it is a little busy. The interiors are ridiculously busy, every square inch of wall covered with boxes and consoles and pipes and blinkenlights -- it looks like the ISS in there -- and the floors are so cluttered her teammates are constantly struggling with their pathfinding. And, yes, there is a chair or two you can knock over, but for the most part it is not just a static environment, but it is an unnecessarily cluttered one. There's no sense to it, no aesthetic, no overall pattern. No flow. Just stuff, so much stuff you stop looking at it. Instead of actually enjoying the insides of buildings I got into the habit of just pressing the forward key and hoping Ryder would eventually stumble on a path through the clutter, while looking at nothing other than my HUD for the pop-up that would indicate there was something for me to interact with.

(Another failure -- though far from unique to Andromeda -- is that the "interact" popup is persistent. In Andromeda, even quest markers were persistent; as in, they'd continue to clutter up the map and HUD even after I'd finished the quest. And while we're on the subject, both the journey and the map are garbage, and the navigator part of the HUD is the worst I have seen in decades.)

I've talked about this before. I don't like the way we put a mass of detail that doesn't matter, and then put a giant glowing label on the only things we can actually get game points off of. It is just like the Quick-Time Event problem; the screen image and sound design might be showing something wonderful, but the game progresses when you press the right button in the right time or place. This kind of clutter-plus-HUD doesn't give you the feeling of searching a room for a weapon, it gives you a feeling of playing Simon Says while a movie is playing in the background.

Would it be possible to disconnect, or rather, reconnect? I've tried Skyrim with the HUD turned off. I found I could still locate medicinal plants and mineable ores. It just became more annoying trying to find the sweet spot where the "gather" animation would actually play. I bet this could be solved just by increasing the size of the interact area, though. Incidentally, every single conversation in Mass Effect Andromeda started with a clumsy dance of trying to get Ryder close enough to the NPC and facing in exactly the right direction to unlock the "interact" button with them.

Once again, you spend all your time looking at a glowing glyph on your HUD and not with the depicted world the game is pretending to simulate your immersion in.

##

These are just two aspects of the failure of Andromeda. They are in part philosophical. The team spoke of concentrating on making a better combat system and they succeeded. They prioritized free exploration in an open world knowing that this would harm the thrust and pacing of the more story-driven trilogy. And it has never really been a physics object world where you can pick up things like Skyrim or destroy scenery like Just Cause. And they made many, many changes and compromises in order to support multiplayer.

The real failure here is the adoption of a game engine that can't do many of the things that were strengths of the series. Worse, the limitations of the game engine impose its own aesthetic; one of a non-interactive landscape and equally conversations.

They dreamed of making a game where you seek out new lands and meet new peoples. What was shipped was a game where you look at static landscapes and are shown talking dolls.