And The Pearl Became The World

The title of this blog comes from a Jonathan Coulton song, called Always The Moon, which you can listen to right here.

I think we can all agree that, whatever we think of Lord Of The Rings, Tolkien did a pretty admirable job in terms of world creation. (I also think it's the law that whenever you talk about world creation, you have to mention him. At least once.)

I mean - yes, it does end up being kinda racist, and it's got elements that are pretty problematic, but just as we find the flaws in it, we also have to accept that it had depth that was beyond a lot of its contemporaries. It helped to spawn entire genres and subgenres, and prompted a metric ton of tropes - not all of them great, but hey, we're talking volume rather than quality - that survive to this day, mostly unquestioned.

Without it, the world of RPGs that we live in today - wherein there are multiple super-popular D&D-related streams and youtube channels, and RPGs themselves have a far deeper cultural penetration - would have been very different, even if Gary Gygax himself went on record as not being terribly impressed with Tolkien's work. (I personally agree with him.)

So when I do my own work - writing, preparing for RPG campaigns which I am running - I feel like I have to do a reasonable job in putting together the world, unless it's already been made for me.

Everyone does this part differently. I'm sure there's lots of different approaches, some of which I would find utterly perplexing, some of which I would find absolutely fascinating. Several of the books I have on writing talk about world building, and they address it in several different ways.

My methodology is a little more slapdash.

Gareth L Powell, in his book About Writing, addresses one of the questions that people who write get asked all the time:

Where do you get your ideas from?

Short of having several funny responses (Neil Gaiman used to trot out "I get them from the little ideas shop in Bognor Regis"), the real response is: everywhere. You get ideas from everywhere. From experiences you've had, thoughts you've had in passing, a scene that plays out in your head from a song, a turn of phrase, a feeling you want to evoke. The most important thing is, you don't start with just one idea. You collate the ideas, clump them together, and form something out of the mass that is more than the sum of its parts.

Like a pearl.

That's why it's a good idea to collect as many ideas and notions as you possibly can. Write it down. You never know when it will come in useful.

For example. A setting I put together for several Pathfinder games I ran included a bunch of ideas and notions that had occurred to me over the space of years. One village was basically a smashing-together of the home village in Monster Hunter 3 and all the parts of Lilo & Stitch that I really liked, splashed with some heavy inspiration from Nation by the great Sir Terry Pratchett.. Another came about from an idea I had when I was reading the Pathfinder core book and wondered: what if there was a city, dedicated to the god of cities? In its centre was a statue that I rescued from a writing project I started (and never finished) back in 2002, a huge angelic figure with a pair of swords - one pointed at the courthouse, another at the library, the two most important parts of the city.

Having imagery like that is important. Even in a simply descriptive narrative, if I describe that statue to the people who played in that game, they'd probably be able to remember the city of Kayde. Likewise, if I describe the people with the tattoos that glow in firelight and the harpoons they craft while singing to themselves, they'd think about Haku, the village of leviathan hunters.

There's another direction to approach this from, though. The content of your world can inspire moments - can inspire situations. Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes situations inspire the world and the content in it. Sometimes there is something you need to have happen, a scene that plays out in your head or a few lines of dialogue that you need to use, and it is then on you to make the world a place that supports that happening.

My current writing project involves mecha.

This picture is the life-size Gundam statue that was outside of Diver City in Tokyo. The chap looking up at it in the foreground gives you a good idea of scale. It's a big machine.

Mine are, too. At least, they are going to be. The Gundam RX-78-2 here (aka the Grandpa Gundam) is 18.5 meters tall, that's just over sixty feet in old money. Mine are slightly shorter - fifteen meters as an average. Still, I require that sense of scale to be impressed upon people. I need there to be several scenes in which mechs and people work together, or at least, close to each other - just to demonstrate the difference. So that when I describe the main character feeling like some kind of goddess every time she plugs into her mech, one understands what I am talking about.

After all, it requires creating a world in which mecha exist in the first place, right?

A scene I envisage involves the main character defending a group of civilians. A group that know who she is, and who are rooting for her every step of the way. Someone - I don't know who - yelling at her from the ground to get up, to get back into the fight. (This scene flew together after listening to this song by Against The Current and watching this scene from Spider-Man Homecoming, by the way.) I need to make my setting work, so that they can know her name, they can know who she is and who she is fighting against, and the fight can be brought to an area that this can happen.

That necessitates a setting in which militarism exists, in which a society can know of war and know it happens. It necessitates a specific culture around mech piloting, around pilot elitism, and it requires specifics within the war that might lead to people seeing more than just a soldier in a cockpit - maybe instead of just a soldier, they see a saviour.

Setting details can lend a lot of credence to your particular flavour of military scifi.

After all, we all know who this guy is.

My work will pop up sometimes on my Patreon, and on my DeviantArt account. If you're interested in this current project, we can totally talk about it.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Through Fresh Eyes (Or, Love For Giant Robots)

So it is an important part of life to be able to reassess what you think of something based on new information.

I mean, that is how it is meant to work, right? It's how science works. If something doesn't work how we thought it did, we look at it again, and we base our attitude going forward on the actual facts rather than what we thought used to happen.

Obviously, the same can be said for media - both that which we consume, and that which we create ourselves.

I mean we already do this, in a way. There's stuff that we loved as kids that, these days, we have to concede doesn't suit us. For whatever reason. Sometimes it isn't even just having grown up with more and more complex stories, and finding that the stories that we used to enjoy don't really satisfy us any more. Sometimes it can come down to understanding nuance better, learning about racism, and then watching Aladdin again.

Yeaaaaah anyway.

This doesn't always work negatively, it bears mention. Sometimes we go into a movie or listen to an album, and we've got preconceptions about it, and that can sour the experience. The initial consumption of a thing can be put off by any number of things. Big up to my fellow mental-health individuals, for whom the difference between being able to take joy in something and being unable to is basically the toss of a coin - on a bad "head day", nothing is good and everything sucks.

When it comes down to your own creations, fresh eyes can be very important. It's why beta readers are heroes, as viewing your work from a single perspective can harm it. A certain amount of self-evaluation can help, too. Distance one's self from the work, do something else for a while, then look back at it - what didn't you notice before? What mood were you in that carried over in the work? What had you recently watched or listened to that influenced you?

A piece of writing I am currently working on is centred around something I really dig.

Giant robots.

Mechs, specifically. See - if it is something you wear, it is powered armour. If it is something you drive or pilot, it is a mech. If it is something that controls itself, it is a robot, giant or otherwise.

Well over a decade ago I was working on a mecha-themed series of novels. I was kind of wanting to go for a Starship Troopers / Ender's Game feel from it, the first book of the series being set entirely in training. It followed the trials and tribulations of a young man whose father was a legendary but controversial general. His struggles included trying to step out of his father's shadow, trying to work out why he was such a gifted mech pilot, and college level romance.

Yeah, see I read that back and I cringe, real hard. I put that series on the shelf after nearly finishing the first book. Just didn't have the heart to finish it.

Still, I keep returning to the genre. Mechs have fascinated me since I was a kid. It's my jam. The use of the training academy / boot camp as a setting appeals to me a lot, too - look at Full Metal Jacket and Forever War.

So when I came back around to wanting to write something similar - years later, at the beginning of this year - it was definitely with a new outlook.

For one thing... I have stopped making sad white boys the main characters of my book.

I mean, this isn't an indictment of depression as it affects people, nor how a specific group of people deal with it. I just wrote from that position by default. Having queried that in myself, I couldn't find a good reason to keep doing it.

Also I noticed that my main characters from that period were all... somewhat lacking in any driving force or agency. They just kind of let things happen to them, and even when they did things, it was with a kind of diffident blase attitude. They were surrounded by people who were driven and smart and strong, and they were just... unwilling to do much other than toe the line, until their super special talents kicked in.

The robots aren't the problem. My attitude to character was.

All that has changed, if only because in the past ten years I have opened up to a far wider scope of characters and stories I want to tell. Some of them might not be my stories but - hey, I'm never going to pilot a mech, am I? And the least I can do is, at various stages in creation, involve the people who are closer to the things I'm writing - and get their thoughts on it. Because fresh eyes, see? Keeping to the thematic of the blog.

The prologue of the new work is here on my DeviantArt page - but it doesn't really convey who Tori Claymore really is. It's enough to make one curious, I hope. What I am hoping I can do with The Heart Of The Star (working title) is to properly convey the characters I want to see in the world - and thank you Marvel for giving me a fantastic spread of artwork to delineate who those characters are.

Badass women.

That's hardly a complete list, obviously. I don't have a week to compile a top 50 list of most badass women and hunt down the best pictures for each of them that I can. Suffice to say, you all know what I am talking about, and yes Ripley and Vasquez make it onto that list too.

Better ideas as to what I want to do with the story, more nuanced outlook on life in general, a greater political awareness of why warfare happens and the steps leading up to it. These things all change what I want to do with this, effectively a reboot of something I did once before, but altered in the parts that really count.

Sometimes that's what is required, to make an idea work. To keep the kernel, the seed of the thing - but to change the soil it is planted in.

That's the key to growth, right?

Fresh eyes, for the love of giant robots. See I even worked the title into the body of the text, that's Oscar material right there. Damn!

Drafts of the work as I, uh, work on it will appear exclusive to my Patreon, but also may appear on request if anyone is interested. It's a thing I can waffle on about for ages, you know me.

Wish me luck.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Clash Of Steel

I'm going to say three words.

Giant Robot Duel.

Giant. Robot. Duel.

...okay so...I was far more hyped for this than my usually-sensible mind would allow me to be. Often I will see the obvious difficulties in achieving something, like health and safety and planning and stuff like this, and just understand that it won't work out the way I want it to.

This, though?

This hyped me. But it hyped me for a very different reason.

So if you actually watch the video you will probably be unimpressed and I can think of a few reasons why. They had one presenter too many (the dude was just there to annoy us I swear to god), it's over-produced, it's scripted, and it's cut in an odd and irksome way.

The thing is, though. The thing IS.

We just watched two robots fight. With pilots. Technically they aren't robots. They are MECHS. We watched a Mecha Duel.

And even if it was scripted - even so, even given that assumption - fucking robot just grabbed a lighting rig and used it as a shield. What? WHAT!?

Okay. calming down now.

Don't look at it as the first match of a new sport. Look at it as a proof of concept that such a sport could even exist. Look at it as a statement - that the three bots that were brought out were all built, and built by relatively small teams, and were built in such a way as that they could be multi-functional. They made robots, and then made those robots capable of fighting.

Imagine ten years from now.

Imagine if the concept gets carried. If teams, BIG teams, put together proper robots and organise proper duels. In order to arrange something like that they'd have to be remote controlled, and you'd have to have safety measures like Robot Wars on steroids - but if you were careful, you could show something like that in an arena.

Because WE CAN BUILD THE ROBOTS.

We CAN build them. We CAN make them move. We CAN use them as weapons. (Just ask the Pentagon.) The technology exists, and can be utilised, and as is proven by this rather cheesy video, it can be used to create a sporting event.

It CAN HAPPEN.

And if my future is going to be a late-capitalist mid-cyberpunk nightmare of Running Man-type proportions, then at least, I want to distract myself from the awful predations of my pitiless corporate masters by watching Giant Robot Duels.

It's not too much to ask.

Surely.