Impostor Syndrome

 

The reason I was playing Subnautica this weekend (besides working a half-day on Saturday and being all tired at the end of it) was that, once again, I was feeling this ugly combination of inadequacy and embarrassment about putting my writing -- my fiction -- in front of people.

Fanfiction doesn't carry this. Maybe because it is more of a closed community, so you are sharing with people who are in the same boat as you. Put your work on Amazon or between covers and you are making a statement to the world that "This is a Real Book."

It isn't just writing from the POV of a female protagonist (although this is part of it -- and you bet I run scenes past my favorite sister when I wonder how they are going to come across). And not just feeling like an impostor at playing at being a writer.

No, this goes all the way to feeling like being an impostor at being human. We all go through this. There's a particular version that strikes in young adulthood, where you have a job and a car and you don't feel like an actual adult. Age imposes another one, where you start to feel like a gawky teen that for some weird reason now looks like an old man.

I'm possibly spectrum. I have focus issues, and I'm poorly socialized. I can use the former, but stories are generally about people in society. There are expectations, especially in genre fiction, that the general experience of workmates and romances, friends and relations, is going to exist in some recognizable form in that universe. Just like clothes and food and other things that are so basic that only the oddest stories change them up.

Well, fortunately I have a solution. All I have to do is get to the page. A method a number of writers use to ease into a writing session is to start back a couple scenes. Review what you wrote last so you sort of remember what you were doing in plot and in style. Fix a couple of obvious mistakes. Maybe tighten up a sentence or two. And, oh, looks like you've started writing...

Did you just use a mining drill on Cthulhu?

Finished a play-through of the Subnautica sequel, Sub Zero. Based on my previous experience, I used the play mode where you don't starve to death if you don't eat every five minutes. Not because it makes the game easier, per se. Because it makes the game less frustrating.

Games are always a balance between things things that are hard enough to give you a feeling of accomplishment, and things you have to do over and over again either because you keep failing and dying, or because of a game mechanic designed to make it actually feel like a task.

The Subnautica universe is on the cusp of a post-scarcity economy. Raw materials are one coinage, and the particular watery planet both games take place on is attractive because of the materials there. The other is intellectual property, of a kind. Power, and manufacturing, are non-issues.

Of course this is more-or-less so in any game with crafting. Give Lara Croft some metal scrap and a few sticks and she'll make hunting arrows...while running through a jungle! Subnautica just moves it into justified world-building. The "intellectual property" is a bit of a hand-wave. In the original game, your survival lifepod goes right out and tells you that it will provide the minimum blueprints for you to make a crude shelter. And it won't let you build weapons, not after a certain incident on a colony world a few years ago...

So a big part of the game is going around finding chunks of broken machinery to scan in order to be able to eventually duplicate slightly more useful stuff. Like the world's cutest mini-sub:

That hand-wave is a little harder to take in the sequel, because there is no good reason why Robin wouldn't have all the blueprints she needed.

The other legs of the gameplay loop are finding ever more difficult to find materials (usually difficult not because they are particularly rare, but because they are found in more remote, almost inevitably deeper, and more dangerous parts of the map.)

And finding secrets to progress through the plot (and eventually get off the world again.) And here is where the game makes an interesting choice. It is a hard game -- both hard because some of the steps take skill and luck to complete without getting killed, and frustrating because there is way too much searching every nook and cranny of a complex, twisty landscape looking for one tiny PDA entry or whatever.)

Yeah, that's the kind of stuff you are trying to search. You can't even map it (not that there is a map). And while you are spending hours swimming around lost in the weeds, at any point you might run out of oxygen, water, food (or in Sub Zero, freeze to death)... Or a Ghost Leviathan might find you.

It is hard, and frustrating, and takes about 40-50 hours to complete the story (for Sub Zero) -- with the help of guides.

Because as designed, there is no map, no waypoints, no objective markers, no render effects around quest items to help you pick them out, no quest objectives in your log. There are nothing but oblique hints as to what or where.

In Subnautica, as a for-instance, on one quest you only know that the aliens were working on a cure to the planetary plague and they have three facilities in various locations, the last known only to be near a thermal vent. 

Turns out...you go down to depths that take every upgrade of the Seamoth to reach and get past a bunch of Leviathans and Warpers in order to find a river of brine, follow that river below the depths the Seamoth can handle (I skipped the Cyclops, which handles like a garbage scow the size of a luxury liner and explodes into flames if you as much as brush against a bit of seaweed, and took the Prawn Suit instead), drop down a second tiny, almost invisible crevasse into a river of lava, follow the river of lava through a maze of flaming rocks patrolled by a Sea Dragon Leviathan...

Even with YouTube videos it took three tries. The ground was covered in chewed-up Prawn Suits by the time I was done. (On death, you are teleported all the way back to your starting base in the shallows, ship left deep underwater in a wreck and half your stuff gone missing. Talk about frustration!)

I had a plan to finish Sub Zero. I knew I had to get to another ultra-deep cavern, and there are two of the big blue dudes patrolling them. By that time I'd built a personal rescue teleport, though. So I parked the Sea Truck over the vent, dropped down in a Prawn Suit, managed to mostly avoid the Leviathans, found the facility, rescued the alien, stripped all the useful parts of my Prawn Suit prior to abandoning it...and it turned out the teleport receive chamber doesn't work when unhooked from the Sea Truck.

And the Prawn Suit doesn't swim. It only walks. I suppose I could have suicided at that point, but I managed to climb high enough to where I could make a desperate swim to the surface as the last of my batteries gave out.

And spent way too much time looking at the jaws of a Leviathan. Eventually when one got close I just used the grapple gun to yank the Prawn Suit into its mouth with Drill Arm whirring. It chewed on me until the pain of me chewing on him was too much. Find a corner to hide in while I ran the Repair Tool off my battered Prawn Suit. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Oh, yeah. The basic Reaper Leviathans from Subnautica? I started to Magritte Maida the things. The combo is a stasis gun and a dive knife. Takes 100-200 swings to kill it and the stasis effect only lasts thirty seconds but if you stay calm you can do it. Also helps to have really, really good oxygen tanks because you will be underwater for a while.

Killed five of the things. Some of the fear is definitely gone. But then, the last game with a survival horror element to it that I played was this one:

Cover Ideas

Hired a Fiverrrr artist I'd worked with before to brainstorm ideas for the Paris book. So many directions I could go with that one, but so far I've not had much luck roughing something up.

Last time, she had two ideas, one a variation of something I'd played with before (in fact it is the background on my Wordpress author's site). The other was new; I'd thought about a graphical treatment, but I hadn't thought of going literal with the "fox."

My other problem with graphics is the exception; I couldn't figure out a graphical style for the London book.

Well, here's my revisit. Instead of the protagonist, a literal fox. That makes for a lot more freedom in graphical styles.

The Fox Knows Many Things -- Athens, a Classical Greek focus, a pottery-centered plot. So that one is obvious. A fox, perhaps with grapes, in red-figure or even black-figure style.

A Fox's Wedding -- Japan, though runs across multiple periods. Sumi-e and the Edo-era prints are both referenced, as is Heian-period artwork (and this gets closest to the specific historical moment key in the plot. In any case they'd all work, and all identify as Japanese setting. And the fox as messenger for Inari is all over the plot, and the climax is in the snow with the motif of "blood upon the snow" so an Edo woodblock of a fox in a snowy landscape with red torii gate...

Sometimes a Fox -- Paris, with the specific period being 1900, although rather than Art Nuevo the artistic focus is Impressionists, going back to 1870 and also including the poster art. If there was a human figure I'd totally reference the poster of Aristide Bruant. There is also Steampunk, but the light focus of the "en l'an 2000" cigar boxes would be a better match. Still, for the fox, would be hard to beat the old sign for Le Chat Noir, with a fox in place of the black cat.

Fox and Hounds -- London, but the focus is very much the early part of the London Blitz. Which was puzzling me for a while; although there is some Blitz-related public-service stuff it isn't interesting enough as a distinct style. Thing is, although it is a minor thread Linnet (the writer of the Blitz Diary at the center of the plot) is a science fiction fan and period pulp magazines, including a name-drop of Frank R. Paul, is in the text. Still, this doesn't seem a direction that would be clear to the reader. Perhaps a very simple graphical treatment using the meme-able (also name-checked in the novel) "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster. With some obvious war-time touches.

After all that, the next book is probably 1950s, desert, Atomic tests and UFO craze, and '50s pulp or advertising look might be appropriate. Also state-side, I want to do something with Viking re-enactors and folk music circles, something with vintage warbirds and a lot of US-oriented W.W.II stuff, and maybe a noir-mystery-thing in SF but somehow also involving Boston...

***

When you are crawling through collections of design fonts you (well, I) have this reaction of wanting to write the book that goes with the font. Thinking about recognizable art styles gives me so many ideas, from Byzantine mosaic art to...

***

The other thing my Fiverrrr had suggested was maps. She had grabbed one of the generic "compass on top of old map" images but the terrible thought is to find appropriate maps. With possibly an appropriate artifact, though not all of the books have an obvious one.

"Knows" -- Okay, this one isn't obvious. A nautical chart of the waters to the south of the Attic Peninsula, given how much boat business there is in it. Or one of the modern maps created trying to track the voyages of Odysseus. However, since this is an introduction to a series about an archaeologist, a diagram of an archaeological dig might be the thing. Artifact-wise, could be a potsherd, but I like the idea of the clay Owl of Athena.

"Hounds" -- the London Underground map, or a period map of Bazalgette's sewers. And although there is a Roman coin that starts the adventure off, this is Penny in archaeological field school and the artifact on top of the map should be a dirt-encrusted archaeologist's trowel.

"Wedding" -- okay, maps falls down a little on this one. Possibly a floor plan of the Transcendence cult headquarters. Or a modern map of the Gion district of Kyoto. Or an old map of the straits where the naval battle that caused the Sword to go into the ocean. Artifact is absolutely a magatama bead.

"Sometimes" -- modern Paris with the clues marked. Or Montmartre in period. Or a map of the 1900 International Exposition. Artifact-wise...I dunno, maybe something steampunk.

But looking at this list, even with consistency in title layout (a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" swoosh?) and color-grading, it might be hard to get them to pull together as a single series. Probably better off with graphic styles.

I guess I've made it

I picked up some paleo vegan revolutionary muffins because I wanted a snack. Didn't even worry about the price.

I have a job with little prospect for climbing any (corporate) ladders (the other kind, alas, are still a go). But I have savings, 401K, health plan and a working car. Only thing I wish for is more consecutive hours to write in.

For writing, quantity has a quality of its own. One or two hours gets you just about started in. A session of four or five hours is idea. If all you are getting is a couple hours of work, all you are doing is treading water.

Oh, but I just had "that" conversation again. "Your problem is you do to much research. You need to just write without all of that."

"Most of the research is finding out what things I need to research; the rest of it goes into the bin. Like, I learned a bit about Fauvism, pointillism, surrealism, etc., before I was able to decide its all going to be about the Impressionists."

"Speaking of. I was reading a historical fiction story where they sent the characters to the Orsay to look at the Impressionists. They didn't have Impressionists at the Orsay then! I almost put the book down."

"..."

 But I'm still depressed about that. Steam had a sale on for the sequel to Subnautica. Maybe I'll just download that...

Dunno much about history

I saw this coming.

The "Hux-cam" worked too well. I tried it out in one scene and I loved what it did for the book. So now I am committed to having more scenes with his voice as he describes turn of the century Paris. The latest is when he goes to hang out with his pal, the "excitable little bullfighter from Barcelona" at the Bateau Lavoir.

That is obviously not from 1900 (Picasso didn't get a studio there until 1904, anyhow, several years after his friend Casamegas took a shot at his girlfriend then a better-aimed one at himself). But it gets the idea across. This is old Montmartre, a shanty that could give Sweethaven a run for its money.

Problem is, I don't know the history. And there is so damn much of it. And this is one of those bits, like Imperial Rome, that gets very well traveled. The chance is extremely my readers will know more than I do.

I am trying to duck this as much as I can but even cribbing and cheating can only get you so far. (Whew...and after searching all last night, I finally found a letter I was looking for in an entirely different, third book; the letter Casamegas wrote home to his family describing his first room in Paris;"...two green chairs, one green armchair, two non-green chairs...")