Learning to Fall

Oh great. I'm not ready to record, not at all.

Not that I can't play the parts. I can. And not that I'm a stickler for doing things "the right way." And not even because I'm a respecter of idiomatic (if you aren't going to play a line the way a bass plays it, then why aren't you saving time and bother and just doing it on keyboard in the first place?)

Point being, technique does show. And this is a piece where it shows. The bass part, for instance, is just too exposed.

And it informs me just how much of a beginner I really am that I didn't even know how important muting is on the bass. How much it is an essential part of technique. So I'm trying to learn those finger tricks because I can totally hear the difference it makes in how the part sounds.

The trumpet is at a similar crisis. I've been blowing past little warbles in my tone, calling them a lapse of concentration or something that is unlikely to spoil the final take. Except they aren't. They are signals that my slotting is insecure, and basically my embouchure is wrong. And as I'm working on that, I'm more conscious of flaws in my tone.

(What really nailed it is falling exercises; basically, bending a held note up and down my whole range with either the half-valve technique or with the mouthpiece alone, no trumpet. And I've got spots where it burbles and breaks up. Not good.)

Again, this is stuff I didn't hear when practicing. I'd hope I would have heard it when trying to do the final mixdown. I'm pretty sure my listeners would have heard it in any case. So just as well I'm catching it now.

Just means I've got weeks more learning of basic technique before I can roll tape.

The Octave Key

I've on the edge of a breakthrough on trumpet. Was working on doits and falls, read a couple articles, ended up watching a batch of videos, and there's a whole bunch of related stuff in there.

Okay, simple stuff first. The key to the fall is the half-valve trick. I'd already learned half-valve as a way to slur between two valved notes. Well, if you hold the third valve at the right spot, you can gliss all the way up and down your range.

But the more important thing. I knew not to grind the trumpet against my lips to reach the higher pitches. I was consciously avoiding hauling back on the pinkie hook (what some wags have called the "octave key" on the trumpet for just that beginner playing fault.) But I was still pulling back, only with my support hand instead.

One of the sillier-looking exercises is to put the trumpet on a table (with a towel to protect it) and see how far up you can get without pushing it off the table. For me was better approach to continue playing as softly as possible, but being conscious of keeping the pressure as light as possible and the air flow high.

While doing this I stumbled on a nice controlled pedal tone. And that, too, is considered a good exercise; work from the pedal tone up through the slots, instead of starting with the usual "lowest note."

(Refresher here; the trumpet plays a harmonic series based on multiples of the physical length of the piping involved. The "Bb" of a Bb trumpet, usually considered the lowest open note, is actually the first harmonic of a series that starts an octave below. Or, putting it in standard nomenclature and transposing to C -- it is a transposing instrument after all -- the series goes CC, C, G, c, e, g. )

And, yeah, it worked. At the end of all this I could play longer with less fatigue and reach most of the slots with less effort. And snap between them faster as well.

(Oh, yeah. And after reading some technical stuff about adjusting mouthpieces, I tried changing the gap slightly with a bit of electrician's tape around the stem of my current 7C. It didn't hurt, and it actually feels like it may have helped.



Went to the practice room today. Looks like the pedal tone I've been discovering is with my lower lip -- also explaining the nasty sound I'm sometimes getting; it is actually a split tone, with each lip vibrating at a different pitch. The relaxation techniques have ended my left hand death-grip and made the first octave smoother and faster, but the upper range remains a difficult push.

When Pixies Growl

Got a Humes and Berg #112 in the mail. It isn't at all the sound I expected but it is a sound I'm sure I can use. Basically, it sounds like you are growling even when you aren't growling, and it seems to make it easier to growl when you do growl.

It's almost too much, though. With the #112 and the Home Depot plunger, I've got wah-wah, plunger vibrato, lip vibrato, growl, multiphonics, flutter tongue, slurs. And it starts with a dirty tone. Of course I'm not good enough yet to do "true" growl or shakes. But that's still a surfeit of options to ornament a melodic line.

And on the supporting hand; I'm all for ornaments and articulations and variations in tonal color. That's one of the things that's attracted me to live instruments over canned sampler patches.

But at the same time it is too easy to get lost in fancy techniques and not tend to basics. I have this nagging feeling that the great plunger mute players achieved their emotional power in part because when they landed on the note, they landed dead on.

Me? I'm not terribly on pitch even without a mute. All mutes drag you off pitch, and some mutes fight you as you are trying to slot. The #112 is no exception. Covering the bell completely with a plunger only adds to the difficulty. Seems to me it is going to be a couple more weeks of rehearsal before I can record this particular piece.

The only way to lose is not to play

(To paraphrase WOPR's dismissal of the underlying principle of MAD.)



Is it possible to lose a video game?

Say you are playing one of the original Mass Effect games. Your player-avatar can get caught in a crossfire at any time and die. And the game promptly restarts from the last save point. Contrast this to completing the game -- the major story points are wrapped up, the majority of the playable content has been played, and there is a nice little cutscene informing you the galaxy is saved (for the moment).

Point is the game doesn't stop until it reaches that planned ending. Failing at any moment just means going back and doing part of it over (there are certain purist players who refuse to use save games but, even then, that is an end of the game experience, not a completion). You can of course walk away at any time, but nothing changes in the game world because of this. The Reapers don't up and swarm Earth because Commander Shepard said, "The hell with it."

Now there are canonical "bad" endings you can work for. The most illustrative example I can think of at the moment is the Dawnguard expansion for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. You can join the Dawnguard and stop the vampire plot. Or you can make one simple choice and condemn the land to (literal) darkness. Thing is...you might be playing as a vampire yourself, in which case this is the good ending. It all depends on which lawn you are standing in.

Bioshock also had two endings. In the "good" ending, you die after saving some kids. In the "bad" ending, you take over the world in a reign of evil. Similarly ambiguous. KOTOR, also, you can defeat the Dark Lord or become the Dark Lord.

But these are all choices earned through completing the game. Where is the game where you can play badly enough that the Reapers win?



I'll throw out in passing there are also what are informally called "non-standard game overs." These are usually triggered when you do something unusually stupid. In Half-Life 2, if you drove the buggy over the side of a cliff you got a text screen complaining about destroying Resistance assets. And then you restarted.

There are also quicktime failures. Tomb Raider 2013 caused a bit of a stir with the graphic nature of the things (and the fact that the QTEs were so badly designed that even veteran players were triggering the death endings) To be fair, watching Lara ragdoll into a rock-strewn ravine was always part of the experience of that series. But again, these don't end the game; they just return you to the last save point.

The closest expression of what I'm talking about occurs in Batman: Arkham City in the Catwoman extra content. At one point you are playing Catwoman and are given a choice to take the door to the right and escape with your loot, leaving Batman under a pile of rocks. If you do this, Catwoman walks out of frame, the screen fades to black and the end titles play (over them, a desperate radio message explaining that with Bruce dead the Joker won). But it's a fake-out; the game rewinds -- reverses the animation, rewind noise and all -- and offers you a second chance to do it right.

Now, I cheerfully admit that a game can't render a whole new ending for every wrong door. But I'd like to see a, "you failed" ending that had as much attention as the actual game ending. Given, too, that many otherwise good games drop you out of the last boss fight to a simple still screen and a, "play again?" button.



Perhaps a better version of, "failed to play the game well" is the ending to Mass Effect 2. Thing is, what this game gives you is blink-and-you'll-miss it. To really get the full impact of your failures in Mass Effect 2 you have to play Mass Effect 3. Again, more in my upcoming review.

So this is how it works. After you've completed several key missions (about a third to one quarter of the play time for the game), you can chose to go on what seems likely to be a suicide mission. You'll actually get an in-game warning, though, if you haven't done what are called the Loyalty Missions. Basically, you have to seek out each of your team members and initiate a quest via dialog options. Then complete the quest (and it actually doesn't matter how you chose to complete it; as long as you don't walk away from the game you will "strengthen" that team member.)

So you can finish the main campaign in under eight hours. Or invest another eight hours in bonding with your crew and helping them settle any personal issues that might keep them from being totally focused during the final mission.

There is also a little bit of finesse during the actual Suicide Mission; who you assign to what task actually matters. Well; they will always succeed, and you will always succeed, regardless of whether you send the most fumble-fingered idiot in your squad to hack the computer and open the door. But...if you do so, within a scene or two someone else will die. You will lose, permanently, one of the characters you've spent hours with, conversations with, etc.

And at the end of the whole thing, the Collectors are stopped...but you can range from getting the entire team back alive to losing everyone...up to and including Commander Shepard, your own avatar (makes playing Mass Effect 3 a bit difficult, one would think).



Or perhaps this is just a problem for the subset of games that are generally described as first-person or third-person shooters, RPGs (Role Playing Games) and the like. The term sandbox game gets thrown around a lot and in the pure form there is no win or lose because there are no imposed goals, no over-arching story. In most modern hybrid RPGs there are numerous side quests and since these don't have the investment (on either Player or Developer side) it is quite possible to "lose" or otherwise achieve the bad outcome with no easy take-back.

And of course you can quite easily lose a campaign of any strategic, tactical game from Sim City to Civilization.

But a game where there is a story, a full story with an emotional arc and developed characters and where your expertise at all the elements of play, from making choices on a dialog wheel to how well you shoot, that offers the possibility that you will actually lose? That would be something different.

The Coconut Effect

A review of several of my books in an attempt to pin down the political situation on LBA Crete didn't get me that. Instead it surprised me with a travel plan.

A couple more rants on writing historical fiction first. Say someone figures out my Cretan weaver has a glimpse into the future. They can't call her a sibyl. Or a Cassandra. Probably! I mean, the term "sibyl" is documented from before Tarquinus purchased the surviving Sibylline Books. And Pythias goes back before that, too. It seems rather more likely the term was indigenous, like "Homer," before being appropriated for a later myth. And although there's several hundred years and a Dark Age to go before the Illiad, stories of Cassandra might have entered the oral tradition at any time prior (possibly prior to the semi-historical event she later gets attached to).

I'm also snarking that the Pythias might be one of the first documented cases of mansplaining. Women were the seers with a vision of the future, but war and conquest and profits are serious business, much too serious for a mere woman to understand. So everything the prophetess saw would have to be properly explained by a male handler. In honesty, though, how things were conducted at Delphi are unclear; the Pythias may have spoken for herself -- the whole story of the magic smoke seems to have been made up whole-cloth and doesn't occur in accounts from writers who were actually there.

Still, it is an ongoing problem I'm having with terms that exist in classical Greek. I could probably manipulate them to something that fits the orthography of Mycenaean Greek, but I don't see that helping. At best it slows the reader while they digest the unfamiliar, at worst it looks like I'm trying to be clever for clever's sake.

But what do you do? I was imagining a conversation (relating to the supervisory positions indicated in the Linear B records of textile workgroups) and the term "meritocracy" came up. Which to me is too obviously originating among the political thinkers and philosophers of Classical Greece, and something that is going to be making the reader stop and ask, "Did they have that yet?"

Well, I'm pretty sure the concept wasn't invented in Athens. There were certainly bronze age situations where it would have come up. Sorry, professors; you can think the thought without having to have the (later, Greek) term.

In any case, it is part and parcel of the Coconut Effect problem. And as I'm reviewing the history of the "Restorations" (or as Evans put it, "Reconstitutions") of Knossos and associated Minoan art and sculpture, I'm reminded forcefully that much of what the casual reader "knows" about the Minoans is unsupported and deeply suspect. (And, yes, one should see the Mycenaeans as a continuation and adaption of Minoan culture -- one with a more pronounced warrior slant, among other changes, but one that has a continuity of evolution from the earlier culture).

It is a difficult choice the writer or other creator has to make. Sometimes you fight the battles you can win; in Assassins Creed Origins, set in Ptolemaic era Egypt, the Pyramids are properly clad in their shining white complete with the gold cap on Cheops, and the buildings are painted. The statuary, however, is still an ahistorical marble-white. With this, I have to agree with them. Whether or not the player would accept the historical painted statues, even whether painted or unpainted is aesthetically more pleasing to the modern eye, in the end it is a fighting game and having what looked like a bunch more NPCs standing around the area would be visually confusing.

I'm making the same choice. I'm hitting the books to try to figure out which part of the Palace of Knossos are still standing at the time of the novel, but in the end I need material, I need material which is colorful and detailed and I'll take the reconstitutions of Evans' hired artists. And that the reader will probably have encountered the Dolphin "fresco" (almost certainly a floor decoration, historically) is only a bonus.

(The Coconut Effect is a phrase popularized on TVTropes, specifically referring to the way coconut halves were used to represent the sound of horse hooves for decades until audiences were finally trained to accept something more realistic.)

So back to migration patterns.

Allow for the moment the idea of a flow of invasion that is roughly North to South, starting in Greece, moving to or joining a wave starting from around the Bosphorus and moving sequentially down through Anatolia and the Levant before finally crashing into Egypt. Don't worry who is invading; that's a later problem.

So I start in Crete (and in simultaneous/back story, in Amarna) late in the rule of Merneptah or early in the reign of Rameses III. A time of growing tension but still generally peaceful. The coming-of-age story, the Weaver's Hall and saffron-gathering on the hills and all that, and a soft revolution that is more Summer of Love than Storming the Bastille. These chapters bring the clock forward, in stages, a decade or more; Kes is at least young teen when the dominos start.

First the Palace of Knossos is burned. But here's the thing; the archaeological burn layers of many of the sites cited aren't necessarily markers of change in occupation. Hattusha gives evidence of having been quietly evacuated years before. Occupation signs are present on top of burn layers in many palatial centers. So Mycenaean rule and some overall structure remains in Crete even though the palace is damaged and the population is migrating into the interior and the mountains.

Our characters leave Crete to discover cities on the Greek Mainland already destroyed. They head across the Aegean (possibly not by choice) and meet the third member of the party in Miletus -- which he has has finally reached in his long struggle back from Willusa. They head down the coast and pick up the fourth and final member of the party (depending on how you count Paneb) at Byblos and set sail for Ugarit -- arriving just in time for the final days of that city. They flee towards Egypt and there is some political skullduggery towards what will eventually be Rameses III's triumph at the Battle of the Delta.

And that's a plan. It tells me more-or-less what will be happening in two books or more, and tells me which places are going to need research.

It does leave undecided what exactly is happening in Crete, who the Black Ships are, what connections the Sea People have to all this, etc. There are some intriguing ideas, however. There's the Sherdana, who despite fighting on both sides at the Battle of Kadesh and the Battle of the Delta, may be largely mysterious to the insular Egyptians. Hence good reason for my Egyptian nobleman to be peering into the Amarna Letters and getting concerned.

And then there's the suggestion that some of the Sea Peoples may have originated on Crete. Unfortunately not the Sherdana -- that would be too convenient.

It's here

The outline came to me today. An illustrated book on the Sea Peoples arrived too, but the outline is what I mean.

Not the whole thing. Just the bones of what happens on Crete. Wanotreus is key (might be Wanotrias...I'm unclear yet on the correct masculine endings in Mycenaean Greek.) Oh, and Didalios. I'm still working on his name, too. Actually, might be telling he (like Kessandra) has a Mycenaean name, not a name with (presumed) Minoan forms (as is glimpsed in the Knossos tablets).

Anyhow, I've figured out the basic progression, the one that folds in physical location, evolving goals, evolution of understanding, useful shifts of perspective, etc. The inner and the outer plot as well as the thematic plot that sits over it. And it folds in the historical Palace of Knossos, un-repaired damage and Mycenaean redecoration and all, the Pylos-style workgroups, the Knossos style workgroups, the big festivals alluded to in some tablets, Scribal Hand 103, the vision of the Stone Birds, the Saffron Gatherers....

This means I can stop with generalized research. I can break down into a chapter plan and break out specific research questions. And as I find the answers, instead of trying to tuck them away against further use in a bramble-pile of general research, I can plug that data directly into chapter notes and character notes and setting notes. This just made the heap of research a heck of a lot more manageable.

Oh, and I'm going to redeem Paneb. But I'm getting ahead of myself. One of the big structural questions I still have to answer is if I'm interleaving episodes with the other characters during the Crete sequence. I don't want to do a lot of time jumping if I can help it, and the Deir el Medina stuff is too much fun to try to cram it into an epic flashback. I'm not against resetting the clock once at the top of Book Two but the Crete outline has some very convenient gaps/time skips in it anyhow where it would make sense to cut away from Kes for a while and return months or years later.




Also arrived is a new order for a Holocron or two, some metal-wound strings for my U-Bass, and a new prescription from my surgeon which is currently kicking my ass. So it is going to be a busy time here. Or I'll decide I need a break and play a little Mass Effect...

(Yeah, I'm starting to grasp harmonic analysis and reharmonization. The Hellboy theme I'm trying to re-arrange for U-Bass and trumpet seems to be alternating A minor with A Major...going up to an AM7 chord at the high note. But there's something else in the original recording, after the first statement of the theme...some further harmonic development I'm not quite grasping yet.)

Cow-Lifting

Time to step back and regroup.

I've seen what detailed research can turn up on daily life in Mycenaean Crete. The biggest things I've learned is that far too little is known (and those scraps are fought over far too much). And that it takes a lot of time and no little expense and I really don't have the kind of mind that can bring in, store, and organize all those little tantalizing clues.

Conan was created because at $.05 a word Howard couldn't keep doing that depth of historical research.

I'm not under the same financial pressures as Howard and I'm certainly not as creative, but where I am in my life I have to make the same choice. When all is said and done, it is fun to try to tease out the nuances of what might have actually been, but I'm a lot more interested in what is colorful and amusing. And I really don't mind if I get it a little wrong.

Sure, I can make a good argument that making fiction vivid should weigh more strongly than making it accurate. The tasks of historical fiction are to entertain, to teach, and to (when it is done very well) to illuminate. In all these cases, having a clear picture -- even if it is what Gene Roddenbury insightfully called, "a uniformity of error" -- is paramount.

What that boils down to is that I need to be working on what I want to say about the Mycenae and the end of the Aegean bronze age, how I want to portray them, and how to best support an interesting story around them and the other players of that time and place.

The original idea (from almost one year ago today) was a fast-moving adventure, taking a motley crew of heroes on a whirlwind tour of the Late Bronze Age. And that really hasn't changed. I've flirted with doing something more serious, and in a sense I am going in a more serious direction -- not so much more careful history: more like semi-deconstruction of some of the adventure tropes. But when it gets down to it, the basic conception of the characters -- heck, the essential conception that they are plural; that people from social circles and civilizations so far apart become stalwart friends -- requires that they be larger than life.

I love the challenge of trying to make the most authentic picture of a textile workgroup as depicted on the Linear B tablets, but to go through the length of a novel with my Cretan Weaver I also want her to be able to invent a new loom, fall in love, hang out with an Egyptian nobleman, join a revolution...yeah, and probably jump a bull or two while she's at it ("When in Crete..." as the saying goes.) So basically exceed historicity and the statistical likelihoods of her life.

In Greek Mythology, most of the heroes were born that way. They generally had a god or two in their parentage. There is certainly plenty of fiction in which a character is presented as hero qua hero; a few throw-away lines about "thrice-decorated ex-green beret with a doctorate in particle physics and an expertise in medieval weapons," so the reader won't be surprised when he emerges from his time machine into the Battle of Nicopolis and proceeds to kick Ottoman ass.

The other common mode, however, is the hero by circumstance, hero by experience; the ordinary man who rises to the challenge. Thing is, a novel is long. A series is even longer. And series inflation is totally a thing. Just by virtue of living, this once-ordinary protagonist becomes bigger than life. Just like Hercules* lifting a newborn calf above his head twice daily, and continuing the exercise until he is benching 1,600 lbs of beef, the well-done series character is never seen jumping the shark. Each challenge they face is just that little incremental bit tougher. Just that bit more exciting, with more at stake, and more and tougher enemies than the last time.

For the writer consciously trying to do this, you want to be able to drag the reader along on the journey, beginning from a point of identification, "Hey, I could do that. Or at least I think I could, if properly motivated," through to -- without ever losing the reader's investment -- "Of course he can do that! He's Indiana Jones!"

And, yeah. Where my Cretan Weaver -- where my Athenian Mercenary and my Egyptian Scholar-Magician and my Phoenician Merchant Adventurer -- are going character-wise is to something that doesn't work solo. By herself, Kessandra** would be seen as a Mary Sue. The reader needs to know the context is that of the Team Adventure. That this isn't a polite historical, but that it plays by a different set of ground rules.

Which suggest to me I may want to bring in the other characters early, in interleaved scenes or prologues or other material. Heck, I might go so far as to show Setna at Deir el-Medina at the moment he realizes Paneb is trying to kill him, and my as-yet unnamed mercenary somewhere in the Troad with Hittite chariots on his tail, all as prologue before we settle down to 30-40,000 words with the people of Knossos.

This may get a bit rambling. I'm drinking my first glass of Ouzo. A necessary experiment -- I have my flight tickets to Crete, and I need to be ready to down a friendly glass of Raki. (They don't, unfortunately, sell Cretan Raki at BevMo. Hence the Ouzo.)

So, basically, it is time to step back and orient on the larger plot, on what exactly this band of heroes is going to do in regards to the LBA Collapse. I'd like to do more than travelogue, but I also feel constrained to the realities of history. The Collapse had no single cause -- and is also what in NuWho gets referred to as a "Fixed Event." The heroes aren't going to stop it.

The best I've been able to figure so far is that their victories are local. And as for the fight, in general? I like having the narrative essentially walk through a para-historical overview of the collapse; that is, moving from potential cause to potential cause (although for them it is more like moving from perceived threat to perceived threat) and allowing the reader to experience some of the academic paradigms as they were considered and discarded.

At the heart of it, Kes has been given a prophesy. And there are signs and portents for those who wish to look for them (some real, some less so); earthquakes, famines, etc. And I still haven't decided, but the Red Tide could be a powerful portent and symbol as well. I also haven't decided how much of an end-of-an-era spirit to infect people with. How much of a 14th-century (AD), or for a more recent example, late Weimar Republic vibe to give it. There is certainly reason to be fearful for the future -- again, if you go looking. But at the same time, I want a spirit of hope on Crete, and in Byblos if I get there. And Egypt dreams of eternal stability.

Yeah, and apparently consensus now is there is nothing in the Pylos Linear B tablets suggesting that this was a time of panic and mass mobilization. Whether or not anyone was conscious of re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic the tedious documentation of ordinary grain disbursements and shrine donations and legal cases was business-as-usual up until no more than a week or two before the palace burned.

When it is obvious the known world is in trouble, my Egyptian can go on about ma-at, and my Athenian mutter about gods playing games with people's lives (he was at least near Troy so he had a front-row seat to that kind of behavior). Not that there are gods at play here in this story. I am still reserving a little magic but I've decided gods are out.


*Actually, Theseus. I asked a retired classics prof I know at the pub. Theseus of the Minotaur, appropriately enough, who left Ariadne at Naxos, fit Procrustes to his own bed, and kept his ship in better condition than did Jason (sorry...very classics in-joke there contrasting the philosophical Ship of Theseus -- a nautical version of George Washington's Hatchet -- with Jason's ignominious end, broke and alone and camped under the rotting remains of the Argo until the prow fell off and crushed him instantly.)

**It is a name from the Pylos tablets, of a woman with surprisingly large land holdings. I might have originally reached for it because of the clang association with another famous (and famously unlucky) prophetess, but it clicked for me when a shortened "Kes" (which I suspect is entirely un-idiomatic to Mycenaean speech patterns) seemed the perfect fit for my cheerful, geeky little goat girl. As Wanotreus is probably going to say (in a "how would you write my name?" scene); "That's too long a name for so short a girl."