Fast and Simple

I'm beginning to wonder if fast and simple are antithetical.

People keep giving me trouble about "putting too much stuff in," and when I complain about how long it takes to write a book, they sigh and say, "maybe if you didn't put so much stuff in."

I think it might be the other way around. I'm doing all this research to try to find those singular characteristic emblematic things that can stand by themselves without any of that other stuff. And I'm far too conscious that I'm working on too tight a deadline, without enough time for research or planning to be able to discover then focus down on those single vivid bits.

If I was just doing an info dump, there would be no research at all. If I were to just "put in everything I know about Japan" I would fill a book easily and I wouldn't have to look up anything first.

But yet, I'm not even sure that the simple and clear actually exists, even if I spent all the time I wanted trying to find it.

***

I still don't know how to fill pages. When you get down to it, it is about filling pages. Things go on the page that are interesting enough for the reader to want to continue.

And, yes, you can't just have one thing. Nothing but plot would be a dry exercise indeed. Nothing but description would feel empty, nothing but action would feel trite, nothing but dialogue...you get the picture.

The London book ended up being dialog-intense. Well, the Athens book was largely a solo trip -- it's the reason I made her a first-person narrator, so someone could talk during the long journey. Both, too, I was conscious of the huge info-dump. Largely, the narrator explained in the Athens book. In the London book, people explained to the narrator. Hence so much dialog. I did try to slip some in through direct experience or demonstration, though.

The Japan book I'm trying not to have so much stuff to communicate. My intent was to fill the bulk of the pages with "raw" description. Not explanations, not info-dumps, not lists of things or Japanese names of things, just trees and rocks and clouds and sun.

Somehow.

The other idea was to fill a bunch of pages with description of physical activity, and again not so much technical details of climbing or info-dumps about physiology or names of exercise types but more than anything else the experiences -- physiological and psychological -- of exercise.

I just did a thousand-word scene which can be summed up with, "That morning I went for a run."

Well, okay, I cheated. First there's a conversation with her friend, via the magical bluetooth earpiece (it is only identified as "something special from a company Aki flew out to interview at" so it can do whatever I need it to do without worrying about real-world details). Then her friend cues up a workout soundtrack for her.

The original plan was to go 20,000 words worth of exercise, plus some shrines-and-temples-and-sushi Old Kyoto tourism stuff, plus some flirting with Ichiro. 

And so I'm up against it again. I have two scenes in my planning list right now. One is street food in a popular alley in Kyoto. Another is a small rock gym and a beginning climber to be a Watson for the scene.

So I could list and describe street foods for pages. I would have to look that up but it wouldn't take long. Could pretty much vomit the right Wikipedia page.

The climbing, too, I could go a thousand words just explaining drop-knee and dyno, crimps and buckets and pockets, and that's before getting into Cliffhanger jokes and T-Rex routes...

I still  don't have a feel for what the Japan book is going to do. And I still haven't quite worked out if there is a standard Athena Fox story, once she's finally accepted the role and gained the basic skills (a process she is still ongoing).

Sumimasen, Nihongo ga wakarimasen

And as Penny pointed out a book or two ago, saying "I do not speak your language" too well, with good grammar and pronunciation, sets up a cognitive dissonance. It is actually recommended in Japan to say, "So-ri, I do no-to su-pi-ko ja-pa-ni-su."

Which leads me back to what I didn't want to do in the current book. Sigh. I'm writing a world adventure series but my protagonist doesn't speak any of the local languages. That gives me nothing but awkward choices;

She can have no conversations with the locals at all. Nothing of culture, no character interactions. 

She can speak in halting pidgin. Besides dragging down the pace of the story, besides taking the more nuanced observations of society off the table (it's a bit to say "We belong to a socio-anarchist collective" in pidgin), it also risks filling the book with Funny Foreigners. That is...all the locals look like idiots because they can't speak correctly.

She can mysteriously run into fluent English speakers everywhere, and in regards to the funny foreigner problem above, nobody takes notice of it (because "You speak English well for a backwards tribesman" is not the way to go.)

And what really kills me is that Japanese is such an seemingly accessible language. The pronunciation appears regular (hint -- it actually isn't), the grammatical rules are exposed (and are a lot more difficult than they appear at first glance), etc.

Take the title above. If you know the "hello and thank you" words then you already know "sumimasen" is "I'm sorry." And you might remember "Nihon" is how you say "Japan" in Japanese, and that it like several nouns appears in noun-compounds; such as "Nihonjin" for "Japanese person." And lastly, if you have delved at all into grammar you know the "su" endings are "is" and the "masen" endings are "is not."

And that means you can reconstruct this as "Sorry, Japan-thing verb-isn't." Doesn't take much guesswork after that to make out Nihon-go is Japanese language, and Wakari is "To understand."

Ah, but understanding why the particle is "ga" and not "wa"...?

Eventually I'm going to send her to Central America and there her High School Spanish will mean she can converse near-normally. Except for all those intriguing little differences between dialects and idioms (as quoted in The Fruit Palace, "Does red make you fight?")

Next up, though, is Paris, and the running gag in that one is going to be the seeming failure of Penny's magical mimetic ability. No matter what she says, the Parisians will correct her. 

***

On another front -- and I almost started with this instead -- I've found myself writing historical fiction. When I did the Athens book I was extremely careful about describing actual places correctly for the would-be traveler. I didn't want to give bad travel advice, so if I said there was a train from so-and-so, then I made damn sure you really can catch a train there.

I was a little less careful about the London book but I still added a back-page disclaimer that some of the things I portrayed were out of date or modified for the purpose of the story. But here too, I was being careful.

I'm still being careful in the Kyoto book, but something has happened in the meanwhile. The world is changing. It is probably happening a lot less in Japan, but right now, I am feeling more and more that what I am writing about, in stories set in 2018 and 2019, is a vanished world. My reader is no more going to be able to follow exactly in the footsteps of Penny Bright in the London of 2018, than they would be able to go and do what Linnet did in the 1940's diary Penny discovered in the Underground.

January is going to be a tough month. February might be too. I think it might be March before we see a light at the end of the tunnel -- and find out if it is daylight or an oncoming train.

Military Blues: Halo 3 ODST

I am tempted to call this a Noble Experiment of a game. The stated purpose of the developers was to get away from the all-military environment of the Spartans and Master Chief and show some of the smaller stories of people caught in war.

The best parts of the game, in fact, is when you as The Rookie are searching the war-ravaged streets of New Mombasa through one long night, avoiding Covenant patrols while looking for other members of your squad. It is dark, noir-like chiaroscuro lighting and cool sax music is playing.

And as The Rookie picks up emblematic items left behind by his fellow soldiers -- a broken helmet, a discarded sniper rifle -- you shift in time and POV to play as that soldier and experience what they saw before that long night.

This is reasonably clever but it is also great play pacing. After sneaking around and running from firefights it is nice to get into a pedal-to-the-heavy-metal Warthog Run.

But that's the first 2/3 of the game. The rest of it, you are back to frenetic firefights, running back and forth trying to reload from weapon drops and pick up more health packs.

Thing of it is, even The Rookie is ODST. Master Chief might be a super-soldier in the Steve Rogers mold, but you are Special Forces. The ordinary soldiers the developers spoke of are still cannon fodder, and there's still chatter about how grateful they are about having one of You to help them with their battles.

And the civilians? Nothing but voices on a recording (which is too easy to miss, too). (Plus those darkened streets are so dark you end up playing most of the game with Batman Vision -- sorry, HUD enhancement -- on.)

The Heroine's Journey

 I've been reading an interesting book called The Heroine's Journey, by Gail Carriger. Her thesis is that, for as many stories that can be dissected in terms of the Campbellian "Hero's Journey," there are as many for which the themes and tropes of that journey are antithetic.

To explain; the Hero leaves his/her social circumstance to begin their adventure. The Hero's ultimate victory is in solo heroics. Their victory also leaves them outside society; they may as Campbell says "bring the boon back to the village" but they can not go back with it. Frodo must sail away to the Everlasting Isles.

Which is actually a great way to talk about the contrast. Samwise Gamgee returns to the Shire. Sam spent his adventure as one of a group of companions. Whereas Frodo followed in the footsteps of Bilbo to leave home, Sam travelled for the Shire -- he almost literally carried the Shire on his back (well, on Bill's back). Sam did go into the Underworld, but the one time he took up the Magic Artifact and set out on a Solo Adventure he was only to happy to get back to the supporting ground of being a supporting character.

Which is Gail's argument; that for some characters and some stories they stay within society and have equal companions and win not by becoming special and an outsider but by fitting in. 

And also that these aren't mutually exclusive stories -- as seen in the above example with Sam and Frodo, who both go through elements of the traditional Hero story as well as the alternate Heroine story.

Actually, Gail's thesis is perhaps more that a story shouldn't be described as "failing" if it doesn't have the proper Hero's Journey elements to it. But her book is really about understanding the various themes and tropes both as analytical tools, and as tools for the writer.

***

I'm only a few chapters into that book but it is already making me think. My novel Shirato I thought of Mie's social circumstances as something she had to overcome, even if her ultimate goal was to get back to society (to "find her proper place," as she kept saying.) But really; she is a heroine forced on a hero's journey and the worst mistakes she makes -- the times she hurts people and almost makes things worse -- are when she is isolated. Her greatest triumphs are swaying her old crew to her side, her friendship with Yuri, and making herself a temporary home in the market on Koyama.

This same intersection is happening in the Athena Fox stories. I am more conscious of the themes I am weaving, but this gives me a new analytical tool to describe them and think about them.

The climax of the London book was absolutely constructed as the Underground sequence of a classic William Campbell. So much that the bit where she has to bluff a guard to get into the excavation at the start of the journey is called, in the chapter titles omitted in the final compile for the public, "Threshold Guardian."

But even there, underground, the Graham Magic comes into play. This is the way the character Graham had attracted various skilled people into his orbit: it is also the analytical tool Penny uses now to look at the friends and supporters she has made. It is a conscious choice I had been making since the first book; that Penny meets people and makes friends and these are all people who can help her later.

(It is also that she is a Fox. Her nature is not to be a really good fighter, it is to manipulate the situation around her. A Wolf would fight their way in. A Fox sneaks...or makes a phone call to a couple of Ninja she met earlier...)

I could easily take this too far, such as by saying her stabbing of Fawkes crosses the line into isolation but the epilogue pulls her back into society (by getting her arrested but, eventually, forgiven by the society she has transgressed against).

Because helpful companions aren't the same thing as equal companions. Penny is more on a Hero's Journey than a Heroine's. And at least for one more book, at the crux she will be once again solo (at the climax, though, she has -- if not friends, at least allies. So even there I was aware that she works not by doing everything herself and fighting alone, but by making friends and allies.)

***

And, yes, I'm still struggling the transition into story proper. Roughly 20,000 words in, the reason behind some of the things that have been happening to her in Kyoto has become clear and she's been introduced to Transcendence and convinced to help investigate them.

I re-read and re-wrote dozens of times before the transition finally started making sense to me. 

And, yes. I am totally going to do a Mario Kart scene. Having just discovered they have them in Kyoto, too. Even though it does require a really big hand-wave...

It has a familiar ring: Halo 2 (Anniversary)

I've wanted to play Halo for a while but it was originally Xbox exclusive. Until the Master Chief Collection came to Steam, and the price dropped down to about as much as the last paperback book I bought.

Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 form the core trilogy. Halo Reach is a sort of prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 3: ODST takes place on Earth during the events of Halo 2 and the start of Halo 3, and Halo 4 returns to the Master Chief, but in a new situation on another planet.

All of these are in the Master Chief Collection, with the first two games being remastered or "Anniversary" editions.

That all straight now?

***

Anyhow, Halo 2 is when the lore starts getting complicated. You play about half the game as the Arbiter, who is an Elite chosen by the Prophets to redeem himself after losing a Sacred Ring to the Demon, and finds himself in conflict with the Brutes especially after an Oracle explains a few things the Prophets had wrong about the Great Journey....

Yeah. This is what Yahtzee was talking about in one of his Zero Punctuation reviews. There are conversations in this game where every other word is capitalized.

So short version -- as of Halo 2 -- what is known is that the long-extinct high-tech Forerunners (as if you couldn't tell just by their name alone) were losing to the Flood, a parasitic alien life form (think fast zombie plague with all the trimmings), and they created the Halo Rings; ring-shaped habitat megastructures with about the habitable surface area of your average planet (for whatever reason) but entirely intended as doomsday devices; when the Rings fire they wipe out all life, period -- thus starving the Flood of potential hosts.

Some years later, the Covenant -- a theocratic alliance of several alien races -- has decided the Forerunners are gods and has confused the firing of the Rings with some sort of mass spiritual transcendence which they would very much like to happen. Oh, and they hate Humanity for desecrating all their cosmic temples. But while brawling around the Ring of the first game someone lets a sample of the Flood out of secure containment.

In the second game the three-way fight turns into a globular cluster. The three leaders of the Covenant have a religious falling-out, one of the more militaristic member races pulls a coup, and the Flood gets enough infected brains in one place in order to grow its own colony intelligence. Shifting alliances and frequent betrayals characterize the remainder of that trilogy.

A cool thing about that brain thing; the Flood tactics visibly change through the game, going from Zerg Rush to being dangerously canny. There are some other social dynamics at play; the Brutes operate in packs, fighting cooperatively, but when isolated from his pack a lone Brute will go rogue and start charging things. The Unggoy cannon-fodder lack esprit de corps and if their commanders are killed they will flee the battle.

***

The second game has more visual impact, and communicates a little better the scale of the Halo megastructures. There is more sense of space overall and orientation over a landscape, even if you traverse that landscape by going through far too many similar valleys/rooms/corridors/tunnels. At least there aren't quite as many this time, and they aren't quite as claustrophobic.

Still, I have to compare again to Mass Effect and Half-Life. Both of those games changed things up, with the environment, the mix of enemies, special goals or properties causing dynamic changes to the mix of strategies you could employ. In Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 the combat is largely defined by your personal preferences and whatever weapons you managed to find lying around. Even in the larger arena-like spaces there aren't good ways to bunker and snipe or to bunch up enemies for a grenade or take over a pintle-mounted heavy weapon and go to town. You pretty much just do the same thing, only it takes longer to reach the next save point.

It is nice looking, and the play is fast and dynamically changing and you need to be smart and adaptable. So that's all to the good. Not bad for the price of an omelette.

Thank Ou

 Today was mostly re-reading what I've written so far. And I got hung up on the Japanese.

Specifically, the romanization.

So in the Hepburn Romanization, this would be written Arigatō. Notice the macron there. In the Revised Hepburn Romanization, the spelling is rationalized to be closer to the Japanese original; Arigatou.

If you look closely, you can see the hiragana above has five characters; A, Ri, Ga, To, U.

But this is a Japanese word (not, however, a loan-word) which is familiar to English speakers. Who have gotten used to seeing it spelled Arigato.

For this one, I feel okay diverging. But Kyoto, too, is more properly written Kyōto. And that can be a problem; taking words the reader is familiar with but making them unfamiliar by using spelling that looks unusual. I had the same problem in the Athens novel; many people outside of die-hard Classics folk are using a closer approximation of the Greek names rather than the Latin versions we've grown up with. Achilleus instead of Achilles, for instance. But that was, I felt, one thing too many to throw at my readers.

In any case, the older Hepburn is deprecated, plus too, many readers aren't used to the idea of the macron as a long vowel. And then there's the problem of a long ī, which is hard to read with a macron and works better as ii. The preferred Arigatou, however, to an English-speaking ear looks as if the final vowel sound should rhyme with "you." It is even harder for the average reader to understand that this is simply the same "o" sound drawn out to take twice as long to say.

***

Plus I'm fighting the usual struggle between natural variety and nuance and idiom versus simplifying the language so the reader has half a chance of figuring some of it out (or at least, not being completely flummoxed at Penny's ability to pick some of it up.)

That's been my intended goal since the first book, incidentally; that if it is plot-significant, the reader learns it at the same time Penny does. Sometimes I will have to break this, mostly by having someone (usually Penny) drop a lecture on the reader, but whenever possible I'm trying to let the reader learn more organically, by demonstration within the story.

The Japan book I have two strings to that bow; first is a running gag about a really thick "History of Japan" she picked up just before she got on the plane. Second is her friend Aki, a self-described otaku, on a bluetooth earpiece. Both of these allow me to dole out history and culture and language a little bit at a time. With lots of opportunities for gags.

And I am getting to be afraid that's going to be the nature of the series. As much as Penny is impersonating Athena Fox -- the experienced and polished world traveller, expert in history and speaker of multiple languages -- each story is going to drop her fish-out-of-water into yet another unfamiliar situation so the reader can as much as possible be shown and not told how the place works.

Bucket Heads: Halo CE Anniversary

Way back when I first joined the Replica Prop community over at the RPF, some of the greatest looking props were coming from the video game world. Several names were popping up all the time in the stuff I really liked the look of; Portal, Half-Life, Mass Effect. And Halo.

I impulse-bought Portal when it came on sale for a couple of bucks, and that started a whole love affair/huge time suck with modern games, especially "twitch" games -- first-person and third-person real-time games, as opposed to the turn-based strategy stuff I'd been doing before then.

It has taken me this long to work my way around to Halo.

Mostly I came to it for the world-building, the setting and lore. And that's a mixed bag. Yes, you are exploring a (small) Ringworld. And you can look up in those very few scenes that are set outside and see the Ring stretching above you. But other than that there's little sense of the thing.

Well, that's for Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the series, which I played as the Anniversary graphics upgrade. (Which, in a cute but poorly-documented bit, will toggle between the upgraded graphics and the original graphics with a tap of the tab key.)

Scale is a bit inconsistent in the game anyhow. In the last section you fight your way through a crashed ship with the final battle being in the main engine room with thirty or more opponents shooting at you. I've worked in much bigger buildings. But then you drive at top speed for six minutes to escape the ship. Drive, at a scale speed of at least thirty MPH. 

And that sort of segues to the lore. The lore is interesting, and complicated, and it has a deep history. And here is where I'm going to contrast with Mass Effect because Mass Effect gets history. Everything in the ME universe arises organically from the foundations. Yes, real history is complicated and inconsistent and entire civilizations go missing for centuries before someone reads the right inscription.

But the Halo universe feels wrong. It feels like every time the game designers needed to break up the endless combat with some slightly different version of the same endless mazes of corridors and small useless rooms, they invented some new bit of lore. "Wait, that couldn't have been made by the Forerunners! Oh, okay. So we'll just say this was made by the Predecessors. What happened to them? Oh, let's say there was a war with the Forerunners."

To give the first game credit, it keeps most of its lore behind the scenes. Why did Cortana send them to the Halo and how did she even know about it? Why did the Covenant attack Humanity? Who built the Halo and why were the Flood held captive there? None of this is explained and this is actually a strong choice -- a lesson George Lucas apparently forgot. You don't need to know everything; you are just one soldier doing the best with the facts at hand.

Which mostly involves shooting at far too many of the same basic enemy types in a maze of identical winding little rooms and corridors. Seriously, I got lost so many times. And getting killed, which moves us to gameplay.

Whereas the primary elements of most modern AAA shooters are the Holy 4 weapons selection and chest-high walls. (you will always have four weapons; not three, not two. Five is right out.) That is, cover shooters and you largely vary your tactics by choosing rifle/sniper rifle, machine gun, shotgun, and nobody chooses the pistol. Except me, and a few other people who have realized that often the pistol deals the highest damage at intermediate ranges and is extremely accurate.

Halo CE introduced the Holy Trilogy of Halo; weapons (which you have two and only two), grenades, melee. Instead of cover, it has recharging shields. And smart AI and lots of indirect fire. So the usual tactic is to hit-and-run, actively engaging to take out priority targets then ducking out of sight just long enough to recharge your shields.

Also, whereas vehicle sections, heavy weapons, and other ways to break up the pattern are usually scripted bit in AAA games, Halo CE largely integrates those. And I have to say, shooting an enemy driver and stealing their Ghost (a motorcycle-like ground skimmer) was my go-to any time the game gave me an opportunity. 

Some enemies are bullet sponges, and the Flood particularly go for Zerg Rush tactics, so the biggest enemy is, as with most games, attrition and fatigue. After dodging near-misses and scrounging for ammo (usually by trading off weapons endlessly for every weird alien weapon you find lying around the battlefield) and trying to watch your shields over a ten-minute mad fur-fight, eventually you blink and...it's back to the last checkpoint.

It does keep things lively, though. You rarely have the chance to really strategize and pick the optimal weapon and approach. Instead it is whatever you currently picked up and the best you can make do with it. Halo CE also has an annoying habit of insta-kills; there are artillery and various things that explode and enemies that spawn right on top of you and there's a lot of times you didn't do anything wrong, it was just you got unlucky.

So my rating? Aside from the endless, endless little rooms and corridors, the combat is decent. I probably would have dropped to an easier setting not because I had any trouble beating it, but because it was getting boring and repetitive.

The lore? It is a very Marines-themed universe (well, at least the parts you see of it). So now I understand that part of how people talk about the game and it's universe (because make no mistake, there are dozens of games, plus books and comic books and fan-made films, set in that universe.)

But regardless of how you feel about the lore, the interaction with it is different. You don't make choices, you don't have dialog, you don't really interact with anyone (particularly not civilians). So on that basis, I really prefer walking around the Mass Effect world.