mcahogarth

Gamelit 30 (Crossover)

            The quest Boy Wonder and Mom had embarked on had been exactly the kind of thing Ray expected the new AI to generate for a lore nerd and a hapless non-gamer dragged along for the ride. What he hadn’t expected was for it to involve a cliffhanger. In vain he’d waited for the cut scene or quest completion to drop—instead, the feed stopped right in the middle of the action. Digging into the logs hadn’t shown any activity since.

            …and suddenly, something that had felt annoying and boring got his brain racing. All that data about season finales and cliffhangers pointed in the same direction: people got more fascinated by unfinished stories, not less. And an unfinished lore quest that tied into Nerd Dad’s lecture on medieval fortifications—because wasn’t it supposed to lead to a moat?—was, or should be, gold. Even knowing that the continuation would drop within half a day, he guessed that he could drum up some excitement for his losing team with enough dramatic music and big question mark animations. Plus it was fun. He made a poll asking people what they thought the future of Donner’s Beck would entail; how the return of the whatever-the-lore-things-were would affect the zone, or how it should; what fortification they thought Nerd Kid should work on next. He made a short about the potential of normal players to change the game’s deep background. He spent, to be honest, a lot more time on it than it deserved, given the viewing numbers. Which admittedly had jumped up since he’d posted the fortification lecture. Now the channel had just over 400 viewers, which was shocking given the material.

            But Bard Boy did not turn his feed on a few hours later. In fact, the only new material he got was over a day late, and directly from the kid in email. ‘Dad and i worked on this, please put it up thnx’

            The new recording was just as golden as the last one. For fun, Ray put a talking head in the corner for the kid… easy enough to grab his character model from the game and associate it with the younger voice. Dad didn’t have a character, though. Ray stared at the character creator. Without knowing more about the guy, hewing close to reality would be better. He picked a human male, dressed him like an adventuring wizard, and used him as the other talking head. Then, pleased with the talking heads, he started using them in other shorts and as part of the channel banners: Deer Bard, Centaur Chef Mom, and Wizard Dad. He surprised himself by spending a lot longer on it than he’d planned, or that a four-hundred subscriber channel merited, but the node was developing a feel and he liked it. Nothing like any other streaming channel he’d managed, that was for sure, but… that was nice, actually. Doing something different for a change. He could feel rusted-over parts of his brain moving again.

            He pinned the cliffhanger stuff to the top of the channel and checked on Killz and Goldie. They were currently murdering their way through an instance, looked like… but a completely novel one that had been generated by their actions. The quest involved Killz convincing this lair of bandits and cutthroats that he should be top dog, and he and Goldie were fighting for it. Intrigued, Ray watched, and not just because a two-person instance was weird. So far Killz hadn’t done anything hard, and watching MOBA strategies adapted to a VRRMO offered a new avenue for content. Should he find someone to make commentary on it? He could subcontract.

            He was researching that when his direct message notification pinged, using the noise for one of his friendly rivals. Seong Lee had gotten one of the Omen beta streaming contracts and was one of the few Ray actually liked.

hey loser heads up

            Ray smirked and typed back.

Whos the loser here buddy im sitting on the highest trafficked channel in the beta

yeah yeah says the guy who started with the biggest subscriber bases

srsly

one of my teams is heading for yours

            For several moments Ray stared at the message, unable to understand it. Then:

for the greenweald you mean

yeah man

tankydoo and spellsrus

they want in on donners beck

what do you mean in on

they coming to attack it

no man

they want to help defend it

            Ray leaned back in his chair, and the epic confrontation he’d been so worried about heading off suddenly didn’t feel so disastrous. He didn’t want to throw Boy Wonder to the sharks, but “PVP e-sports gamer crushes mom and son lore nerds” was a sucky story. What wasn’t, was “mom and son lore nerds spearhead amazing war effort against would-be raid boss villain team.”

            He wrote back: ‘gonna be fun’, which was all Seong would need to get the message. And he waffled for nearly ten minutes before deciding on sending the next. Prepare the kid, or let him be surprised? Surprise would make for better entertainment. But Ray knew which he would have preferred had Teen Bard been his kid brother.

hey heads up – you got another beta team coming they want to help you build up donners beck

            No immediate answer, but that was fine. Ray had groundwork of his own to do to prep the channel. Tankydoo and SpellsRUs might not be big by KillzYourFase standards, but they were a heck of a lot bigger than a 500-person family fun channel. Ray had no idea how many of those viewers were gonna cross over, but it wasn’t going to be zero.

Start of July News

After writing about 20,000 words in five days, the draft of Qora’s novel is done! First readers and continuity checkers, assemble (if you haven’t already!). Link at the end of this entry!

 Some context! The first novel I started writing this year was not this one… it was Surela 2. I got three chapters into it when I realized that I needed to nail down some Very Important Events that were happening in the background… and it was while jotting down notes that I realized that those events were So Important that I couldn’t understand why they were in the background. That’s when I started Qora’s story. But Qora’s story was so complex, in terms of multiple revelations arising from multiple past series, that it was like writing through mud. Every plot point required information I hadn’t articulated or developed beyond hazy ‘something happened’ or ‘that works somehow.’ Things as varied as Qora’s background, to what Daqan’s been doing since Zafiil died, to how Well drive compresses distances, and more. In short, it’s not a surprise that it took me six months (!) to write a fairly lean book. And it consumed a lot of my thinking for half a year, to the point that I’ve forgotten a lot of my plans.

 I am not going to touch this book for at least a week… and ny task during that week is to try to remember what I was going to do with 2024! The sticker/magnet kickstarters were my stopgap to prevent my revenue numbers from crashing, because (somehow) I am still the only source of income for the household. But I think my backers are tiring at just the right time, because now I’m at liberty to do something else with the remainder of the year. I had one more planned (holy carp – holy cow – flying mango), but I might shelf it for a few months.

 I had a feeling that Qora’s story was damming up everything else, in particular the first half, was damming everything else up… and it looks like that was true. Flipping through my notebook I see I have plans for post-capstone conflict Peltedverse that look like a lot of fun (backfill Alysha’s books; do some historical novels like the Rapprochement; get around to Nieve’s girls; Second Chances; etc). I’m looking forward to that! But first I need to recover from the wreckage of 2024, because not releasing anything for half a year is enormously disruptive, both financially and artistically.

 I’m really pleased, though… and I hope you all enjoy the book. I’m aiming for end-of-July/early August, and I want it to be special! But first, I’m going to breathe a bit and re-orient!

So, links, as promised:

First, Kickstarter’s still going: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/stray-cat-treasure?ref=e25qe3

Second, the Google Doc for Qora’s Novel: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CtI9aEaVuRkUORDhmU-ZlSaga6_vjL9YbyRRWz5qXnU/edit?usp=sharing

Comments in the doc, as usual; further discussion is in Discord in #Spoilery – Qora’s Story (a thread in #peltedverse). Spoiler: it’s mostly screaming XD

Bad News and Good News!

No serial today! I did not get to write it. That's the bad news.

The good news is that I've written 15,700 words of Qora in four days, and it looks like I'll finish the novel entirely this weekend. All this despite the house being upside down from various Big Changes.

I've been posting chapters of that as I finish it (and I'm two chapters from wrapping up at this point), so if you want to read the ARC (and help with continuity/typos), here's the google doc link.

BUT BE WARNED! This book is both wrapping up dozens of plot mysteries from at least four different series, and naming and kicking off the final conflict for this setting, so if you don't want to get hit with all the Big Reveals yet, don't read until it's out!

You can leave (and read!) comments on the doc, as usual, but there's also a thread for discussion on the discord channel (under #peltedverse channel, entitled, sensibly, SPOILERY - QORA'S STORY). Don't go to the thread unless you're ready for the spoilers, though, because that's where everyone is screaming and speculating. :)

I resume writing! And moving boxes, throwing things away, and moving furniture!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CtI9aEaVuRkUORDhmU-ZlSaga6_vjL9YbyRRWz5qXnU/edit?usp=sharing

Musings About Paperbacks

I continue to work on my online shop… last week I finished uploading and hooking up all the paperbacks, making them available for purchase to US customers. (International frens, you are few but mighty! I am researching options for you!) I listed all the reason I’m happy about this on the store announcement post, but the most pertinent are that I can offer them at lower prices, and I can bundle them so people can buy entire sets at once.

The lower price thing is key, though. To allow expanded distribution (so that, say, you could walk into a bookstore and order one of my paperbacks), I needed to set my retail prices much higher than I was comfortable with…. 16.99, 17.99, even 21.99. When I sell direct, I don’t need to worry about other distribution networks, and I can get you a copy of Earthrise for $12.

The biggest cost in producing a paperback is how much paper you’re using; this is true anywhere. So as you can imagine, my writing long tends to create more expensive physical objects. But that’s brought me to the fact that some amount of that length is my backmatter.

My frens, I love my backmatter. I love adding appendices with artwork and language stuff and background information. As a reader, if I get really into a book, I will wallow in any extra info the author gives me, and I know I’m not alone… so I’m not likely to stop adding that kind of thing to the back of my books.

What I am considering, is only putting them in the back of direct sales editions.

Some number of you are staring at me significantly, so let me reassure you! I have some changes in mind to how I launch my novels. Previously, I went directly to retail, because… that’s what was easiest.

Now, I’m thinking of giving my superfans and dedicated readers privileges, in the form of “first dibs.” Here’s what I’m thinking my process will look like in the future:

• Launch on Kickstarter: The new book is ready, and instead of popping it on Amazon, I launch it on Kickstarter with my “author’s edition” version with all the fun backmatter. Ebooks are $5, and I make doodle paperbacks and extremely fancy hardcovers (foil! Sprayed edges!) available. My new printer will do affordable color interiors, even, so the cheapest paperbacks will still have color images if I have any to put in it.

• Second stage launch to the Chimerical online shop: the author’s editions (ebook, paperback, hardcover) go to the shop. The ebooks are still $5. Unsigned physical copies go to the shop; for now, any signed copies still get special ordered via Etsy. At this point, a preorder is made available on retail. Author Edition paperbacks are $12.

• Retail launch, probably a month or two later, of a non-author’s edition version. Ebooks are $6.99, paperbacks (again, not the author’s edition) are in the $16.99-$20.99 range.

So if you’re worried about grabbing that special edition (especially if you’re not in the US), I’ll make sure you get a chance at some point.

I have several reasons in mind about why I might want to stop putting the chonk backmatter in retail editions, but they boil down to cost savings (because they reduce the amount of paper used), and professionalism. It’s the latter that probably needs unpacking, but I feel that all the over-excited worldbuilding rambling and sketching comes across as a little too over-the-top… sort of like when you run into That Guy who won’t stop bending your ear about their favorite thing and you just want them to get to the point and go away. XD

Here's where I get to ask you how you feel about backmatter… particularly if you first found me via a retail purchase. Those of you who’ve been around for a long time and have encountered me via Kickstarter, Livejournal, some muck somewhere, my old stardancer website… you’ll of course have a different relationship with the backmatter, especially the art. I’m wondering if it was a delight to people who just stumbled onto something on Amazon, or if it was intimidating or cringey. Let me know!

Here also I’d like to say… I was prepping a new paperback edition of Spots, which required a lot of work since the only file I have for the existing paperback is a non-editable PDF, and toward the end I was cutting and pasting the lists of serial patrons and kickstarter backers and… so many of you are still here. You have no idea how that warmed my heart. I am so glad so many of you are on this road with me still. It’s seeing so many familiar names return, project after project, that makes me want to reward you all with extra effort and cool stuff. <3

Anyway, that’s the ramble of the week!

Oh, and also today the Stray Cat sticker/magnet campaign launched! This one has a ‘I draw your design’ tier, among other goodies! Go enjoy the fun!

Gamelit 29 (connection)

            Nick had been home two hours before he noticed Shellie’s text. It was hard to be angry at her for taking so long when he hadn’t heard the notification because he’d been in the kitchen with Dad. They’d been… talking. Just talking. At first about food, and then, tentatively, about Mom. Then Dad had pulled out his plans for Donner’s Beck. “To get our minds off things. Run the camera. If it turns out well we can send it to your channel manager.”

            That had been good. Normal. Almost.

            Her text was like every other text she sent, short and utilitarian.

everything okay now?

            It was weird to be bothered by the ‘now’, but he was. As if she’d waited until the crisis was over.

we think so

great, let me know if you need anything

here for you babe

            Nick stared at his phone, then tossed it on the bed and reached for the wireset.

            When he zoned into Donner’s Beck, Galatea’s green light was flickering at arm’s length. He sat up from the rumpled blankets, wondering how he’d gotten back to the village when he’d disconnected in the middle of the woods.

            “Is your mother well?” the AI asked. “Are you well? Do you require assistance?”

            Did she actually sound worried? Was that planned or programmed or… how did that work? “Mom’s in the hospital. She’s awake… did you know she—all right, let me start over. When you told me she was unresponsive, I went downstairs and she’d… fainted, I guess. She wasn’t conscious, and I couldn’t wake her up. That’s why she’s in the hospital. But she’s awake and she seems okay. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll know what happened.” All of which led him to remember: “Thank you. If you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have realized what was wrong. At least, not quickly.” He tried not to think of how things might have fallen out before Mom started playing the game. Would he have been upstairs, oblivious, running instances with friends, while she was lying there in need of help?

            “Hypotheticals are only useful if they provide a catalyst for changes,” the AI said.

            “So don’t beat myself up?” He shook his head. “How about ‘hypotheticals are also useful if they serve as warnings?’”

            “Warnings are only as useful as the changes they inspire.” The light bobbed closer. “If your mother is receiving medical care under hospital supervision, then all that can be done is being done for her.”

            He exhaled, hard… ran a hand over his head. It bumped his antlers, but that was good. It reminded him that he was in the game. No one died for good in the game. He was safe here.

            What was he doing here? Trying to distract himself?

            The glowing light circled him. “Humans often derive comfort from a change in focus from a difficult situation they cannot change to one that responds to their actions.”

            Saying ‘but this place isn’t real and nothing here matters’… would he have, before? “I’m sorry, I’m a mess.”

            “This reaction is common and expected.” A pause. “Your physiological state is suggestive of continued elevated stress. Patience while your body regulates to equilibrium is warranted. Allostasis may take hours to days.”

            That made him laugh a little. “Okay, thanks. I’ll stop beating myself up. It’s just…” A flash, and he was back there again, shaking Mom’s arms. “It was scary. I never really thought about my parents dying, you know? They’re not that old.” He covered his eyes. “This isn’t being streamed.”

            “Streaming was disabled prior to my informing you of your mother’s change in status.”

            His shoulders drooped. “Good. Then I don’t have to worry about this getting out. The world doesn’t need to know about my mental breakdown, or mom’s condition.”

            “If you would prefer I not discuss the topic….”

            Did he want to play the game? He could. There were herbs to gather. Or he could practice the mandolin. It would be better than sitting here being agitated. He pushed himself upright and headed for the forest’s edge, reached it… and stopped again.

            “You are having trouble with the contrast between the world and the game,” the AI said.

            He didn’t want to be, because he loved Omen Galaxica. Summoning up a smile, he said, “That doesn’t seem fair to you, since you only exist in the context of the game. And I like talking to you.”

            The light dimmed, stopped bobbing. “I also like talking to you. Would it be an imposition to ask your advice?”

            “No?”

            The AI definitely paused. “I, too, have interest in an individual who is in a hospital.”

            Oh, man. What had he uncovered? Nick blinked a few times, then started climbing the tree. He wanted height for this.

            Maybe Galatea knew it, because it waited until he’d reached the top before rejoining him. From the canopy of the forest, Nick could breathe easier… see the sky, feel a breeze. The world felt more expansive, and possibilities more numerous. “All right. So someone you care about is in the hospital.”

            Another pause. “I have been programmed not to mimic human emotions—”

            “I know, but you liked to talk to this person, and you’re interested in them, and you want to know what’s going on with them and what you can do about it. Right?”

            “I believe that is an accurate summation.” The light dimmed again. “I am not capable of legally obtaining information about his condition, and I have no physical manifestation that can enter the hospital. Nor am I permitted to read any corporate correspondence that might mention him.”

            Nick wasn’t in love with his PSAT scores, but he also wasn’t a dunce. “It’s him, isn’t it. Jonah McIntyre. The guy who programmed you. The guy who started Omen Galaxica with Sean Mallory. But I thought he was in a motorcycle accident? Didn’t he die?”

            “He has been in a specialized long-term care unit since the incident.”

            Nick winced. “Harsh. His family must be miserable.”

            “His parents are divorced, and he is estranged from both mother and father.”

            “What? Wow. No sisters or brothers? Cousins? Aunts?”

            “He has never mentioned any, nor have I found records of interactions with them.”

            “Wait, so he’s just… in the hospital? With no visitors? For how long? It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

            “Four and a half months.”

            “Oh man. That’s no good. They say people in comas can hear, still. Someone should be talking to him.”

            “I would… if it were possible. But I am not allowed to use systems external to Omen Galaxica.”

            “You’re not allowed, but… could you?”

            The light fizzled like a dying sparkler. “Answering this question accurately would open Omen Galaxica to legal repercussions.”

            “Which is an answer,” Nick said, nodding. “Got it. I guess you wouldn’t want to mess with hospital hardware, anyway, because if an accident happened then you might hurt people.”

            “Correct.”

            “But someone could carry a device you can use into his room, right? Or… maybe you could put a wireset on him!”

            “There is no medical literature on the probable effect of the wireset on a comatose patient….”

            “And you don’t want to risk it. If you were human, I’d say you really cared about him.” Nick smiled at the light. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to remind me you’re not. But seriously, can you get someone to bring a speaker in there that you can access? Or anyone? I… I could talk to him that way. I could tell him about the beta. He was working on that before the accident… I bet he’d love to hear about it.”

            “You would do this? For someone you don’t know personally?”

            “I might not know him personally but… this game has meant so much to me. And he wrote all the original storylines! Art… art matters. This game is a piece of art. To me, anyway, and to a lot of people. I would totally talk to him. And my friends would too, I bet.”

            “Research does suggest external stimuli can facilitate the remission of coma states….”

            “So? Let’s do it! You’re hesitating, I can tell. Are you doing that on purpose to suggest to me that I should assume whatever you’re going to say next is something you’re not sure how I’ll react to?”

            The glow intensified. “Conversational signaling was taught to me to increase the comfort of my users. By Jonah.”

            Nick grinned. “Fine. So what’s the thing you aren’t sure about sharing with me?”

            “Making this request would reveal a level of autonomous thought the company may not find comfortable.”

            Nick slumped against the tree trunk. Oh yeah, he could see that. It was one thing to have your AI evolving your game… another to find out it had decided it had a separate purpose external to that directive. Instinctively he wanted nothing to do with it, and he was almost entirely sure that had nothing to do with being a teen and bucking authority. “Okay, how’s this. I send an email to… um… someone you think would be willing to listen, asking for permission to talk to Jonah through a remote. Maybe play it up as a community service project—I’m putting together a group of friends to try to help a high profile coma patient. Then that person thinks it’s my idea, and you can tag along. Do you know someone who might help?”

            “I believe I know a candidate.”

            “Great! Let’s write the email.” Nick rubbed his hands together. “Thanks for this, by the way. It’s been a much better distraction than trying to play the game.”

            “I am deriving benefit from this interaction as well. Is it appropriate to receive thanks in that case?”

            “Most people would.”

            “Then you’re welcome, Nick.”

            He grinned as the window opened. The wireset was useful in more ways than one. “Say, what ever happened with the quest Mom and I were doing? Did it complete successfully?”

            “We have saved the partially completed state so that you can return later to witness the unfolding plot. I returned your characters to a safe zone to reduce disorientation in the event of a long absence.”

            “Perfect. When Mom gets back, she’s going to want to see what happens next. I sure do. All right, so who am I sending this to?”

            “Mollie Mindelbray. Vice President, Marketing.”

Gamelit 28 (presence)

            His father gave him a mock salute, and gratefully, Nick escaped.

            At first, he walked, without destination or plan, or at least, any conscious one. He was nearly at the exit when he realized his prevailing need was ‘get out of here.’ Easing to a halt near the enormous doors, he felt the prickle of heat up the back of his neck that meant he was blushing.

            At that moment, his phone pinged. Fumbling it from his pocket, he expected the group chat, but no… it was Blythe.

            Hey im in the cafeteria

            Squinting at this message didn’t make it any less confusing. What was she talking about? Which cafeteria? Why was she texting him directly? He shot back a question mark, and seconds later:

            In the hospital check the directory its on the first floor to the left of the front desk

            Blythe was here? Nick scanned his surroundings, then headed in the right direction. A few minutes later, he walked into the cafeteria and Blythe waved at him from a corner table. He pulled out a chair across from her and blurted, “You’re here.”

            “I’ve had family in and out of hospitals before,” she said. “I know what it’s like. Sometimes you just want someone around.”

            “She’s awake,” Nick said. “But… I don’t know anything else.”

            “Awake is good!”

            “Yeah.” Was this awkward? No, it was his gratitude that she was here that was awkward, because he didn’t like feeling like this. And he was grateful. “Thanks for showing.”

            “I figured Fish handled the ride here, maybe I could handle the ride back.”

            “You drove!”

            “I did.” She laughed. “And I know my driving makes people crazy, but I figure it’s better than having no ride!”

            Blythe drove conscientiously, which put her in for a lot of teasing, particularly from Fish who preferred his sister’s race car sensibilities. Nick actually didn’t mind it, but teasing her about it was easy, and she didn’t seem to mind. Now he wondered if she did, or if she was as cheerful as she sounded most of the time. He hadn’t known about her relatives being sick or in trouble. “I might be here for a while….”

            “At 8 they’ll kick you out whether you want to go or not,” she said. “If you want to stay that long, I don’t mind waiting. I brought a book. Or we could talk, if you need company.”

            He stared at her. “I dunno what to say. That’s… above and beyond of you.”

            “Hey, you’re a friend, right?” She nodded at the cafeteria. “The food’s better than school, if you’re hungry. And they have good German chocolate cake.”

            “I like German chocolate cake….” He checked his pockets. “….aannnd I have no wallet.”

            She laughed and brought out her own. “Pay me back later.”

            He brought back a sandwich and cake and soda and listened to Blythe patter about the game and her job scooping ice cream, and she was right… it was nice to have someone here. The actual talk wasn’t the point, it was… well, it was the realness of her, of being there in the chair, wearing her battered old jeans and cute pink top and alll right he was going to stop right there.

            “I should go back and check on them,” he said finally. “I promised I’d bring Dad something tasty.”

“The other half of the cake should work!”

“It will, thanks. And he’ll probably have money.” He paused. “Are you sure about waiting?”

            She dug into her backpack and brought out The Three Musketeers. “See?”

            He laughed. “Summer reading? Seriously?”

            “And for a class I’m not in, but it doesn’t seem fair that the honors kids have all the fun. It’s actually fun. I can’t believe it wasn’t written, like, yesterday.”

            “Okay. I’ll be back.”

            Mom’s eyes were closed when he showed up, but Dad was smiling. “We had a long talk while you were gone. She’s hopeful that they might find some reason she’s tired all the time, now that she’s here. Oh, nice, cake!”

            “So what’s next?” Nick asked.

            “Did I mention waiting before? More waiting. It might be a while.” He put what seemed like half the remaining cake in his mouth, and it was so normal something in Nick’s shoulders released.

            “Blythe says they’ll pitch us out in a few hours… what if we don’t find out anything before then?”

            “Then your mom stays overnight and I show up in the morning to find out what’s going on. What’s this about Blythe?”

            “She drove out here. I might have sent a panicked message to the group chat.” Nick tried not to squirm. “I was worried.”

            “Of course you were. I’m glad you got a ride… I don’t think you would have been all right until you saw your mother awake with your own eyes. But you’re telling me one of your friends is here?”

            “Yeah. I bummed the cash for food from here, too, so if you have any….”

            His father rose enough to pull his wallet out. “Of course. If she drove herself here, she could take you home. You don’t have to stay, kiddo. She’s right that we’ll have to go anyway soon.”

            “But Mom…”

            “Won’t be sad to hear you’re home. She wouldn’t want you to worry.”

            More than anything in the world he wanted to go home and stop facing this. Stop looking at his mom with an IV taped to her wrist. Stop hearing the beeping and hissing of all the machines, and the sobbing down the hall. More than anything, he wanted to not think about his parents being able to die on him, or get seriously hurt in any way.

            But Blythe, sitting across from him at that table, had made him feel better, just by being there. And if he ran from this, what else would he run from? He didn’t want to be a coward. If he took the easy way out, could he wake up tomorrow and look at himself in the mirror without cringing away?

            “I’ll stick it out.” He elbowed his dad. “Besides, who’s gonna give you moral support if I leave?”

            If there was anything more terrifying than watching EMTs take Mom away, Nick couldn’t think of it… but the look in Dad’s eyes came pretty close, because it was way too raw. It was almost a relief when his father hugged him, because then they could stop looking at one another. “I appreciate it, Nick. You’re a good kid, and you make me proud.”

            Too much, Nick thought. Way too much—

            “Also, I want an entire slice of cake and you only brought me half. Here’s some cash so you can pay Blythe back and find me the rest.” His dad’s brow twitched up. “And where, I ask you, is your actual girlfriend?”

            “Not everyone’s on their phone twenty four seven, Dad.”

            “Uh huh. If that makes you feel better, you keep telling yourself that.” Dad ducked when Nick mimed a punch. “Seriously, if you have a choice between the girl who shows up for you and the girl who doesn’t, pick the one who does.”

            “I’m not marrying one of them, Dad.”

            “Yet—”

            “Ugh! I am getting your cake!”

            His father laughed, and Nick escaped, and this time his frustration felt far more normal. Although he really didn’t want to think about why Shellie hadn’t said anything, while Blythe had literally driven herself over on the off-hand chance that Nick might need a friend.

Back in Time Tuesday: Blue Willow

One of my favorite gouache paintings of a Le'enle (unicornish thing). From the early 2000s, I think. I just like the limited palette and the serenity of it, and I hope you do too!

Gamelit 27 (intrusion)

            Nick appreciated Mom changing the subject, though he knew that meant he hadn’t changed her mind and she didn’t want to argue about it anymore. He did, though. He wanted her to love Omen Galaxica as much as he did. Sometimes he thought she was getting it… and then other times, like this, she wanted to rain on his parade. Again. About the things he cared about.

            Do your parents consistently discourage you from pursuing your goals?

            He didn’t want the AI raining on his parade either, but ignoring her felt ruder. Maybe because she wasn’t human and wouldn’t understand why he was doing it… or was that backwards? He should probably care more about the actual human being, shouldn’t he? They don’t discourage me from pursuing all my goals, he said, striving for fairness because he didn’t want the AI taking him literally. Just from the ones they think are a bad idea. From their perspective.

            This feels important, the AI said. Are there goals that are always objectively bad?

            I think it’s less that and more like… statistically, some goals are less likely to succeed, and when they fail, they fail terribly. They just want me to avoid those, because they don’t assume I’m going to be the lucky one. He inhaled, forcing himself to calm down. “All right. So we’re supposed to petition the spirit of the creek, and if that goes well, we might be able to negotiate later with the Lord of the Forest for more protection.” He unpacked the items he’d spent the night seeking: a twist of green herbs, a perfect Moon Iris, and four scales of a Beneficent Carp. When he stepped back, his mom added a cookie to the edge of the semicircle he’d created.

            He was about to argue that you don’t give water spirits cookies—even Lemon Iced Sugar Cookies of Fellowship—but she looked so hopeful, and hadn’t he read something somewhere about people giving food to gods all the time? So he bent down, picked up the cookie, and set it in the center, so that it looked like a moon surrounded in rays of plants and scales.

            She looked so pleased, when he glanced at her, that he couldn’t help smiling.

            “All right, let’s do this.” He raised his hands and… deflated, because this was the part where he had to sing, and he hadn’t thought that through, obviously. Did he really want to sing in front of his mom? But he liked all the Cervinaethi music and lore…

            What the heck. He started singing the invocation. After a few bars, he didn’t even care anymore, because the rush was so good it made the hair up the back of his neck prickle. And then, a few moments later, a descant fluttered up over his voice, and the chills intensified. His mother took a few steps forward until she was alongside him, and she was the one supplying the harmony and that was all it took to flash him back to elementary school—no, earlier, kindergarten—and singing in the back of the car while mom sang along. She always took the high harmony parts, leaving him to belt out the melody lines as poorly and enthusiastically as he wanted… the star of the show, just like now.

            The song ended, and the silence was just… amazing. Like every molecule in the atmosphere was quivering.

            Was it going to work? His shoulders were so rigid they hurt. Slowly, a mist coalesced in front of them, hovering over the gifts. One by one they whirled upward, even the cookie, and then a haunting song answered their invocation, shivering with echoes. The gifts evaporated, and then the mist followed, and into the quiet, the gush of water filled the quiet. Were the rocks melting? Was he seeing this correctly? This was so cool.

            Player Nick, the AI whispered, and he wanted to say ‘not now’ and he was sure he thought it, but the AI continued. We are monitoring the vital signs of all participants and your parent’s have altered abruptly.

            He was so focused on the changes in the creek that he didn’t understand the words with his brain. His spine stiffened first, and then the rest of him caught up. “What?”

            Your mother is no longer responding to stimuli—

            Nick ripped the wireset off and ran downstairs. “MOM!”

            She was on the couch, the wireset twisted on her head where it had slumped to one side. He grabbed her wrist. “Mom? Mom, wake up. WAKE UP.” Nothing. His heart thumped so hard he felt sick. He shook her again, and when she didn’t wake up, lunged for the nearest phone. His hands were shaking so hard he missed the nine twice before he punched it, then the one and the second one and then there was a crackling noise and a few seconds later: “911, what is the address of your emergency?”

            Address! His brain blanked, then he babbled the street name and number. “We’re right next to the park,” he finished. He also managed to remember his phone number when asked, and got his name out.

            “Tell me exactly what happened.”

            “My mom’s unconscious, she won’t wake up!”

            “How old are you, Nick? Are you home alone?”

            “I’m sixteen—yes, it’s just the two of us. Dad’s at work.”

            “Stay calm. Is your mom breathing? Are there any visible injuries?”

            “She’s… yes, she’s breathing. I don’t see anything wrong. We were playing a game and she just… disconnected. Passed out. I wasn’t in the room. I can’t get her to wake up!” Had he said that already? He couldn’t remember.”

            “Let me have your father’s name and number. Is he at work?”

            “Yes, I’ve got it…” He rattled off the words, and even managed to describe the outside of the house when prompted because the woman sounded so calm… if she was calm, that meant everything was going to be okay, right? It had to be, or she’d be panicked, too.

            “Emergency personnel are on their way. I’m going to call your father and inform him of the situation. Then he’ll call you to let you know your next steps. Stay with your mother until the personnel arrive.”

            He agreed, when what he wanted to shout was ‘no, no, don’t leave me alone, I don’t know what to do!’ He returned to his mother’s side and hovered over her, watching her chest rise and fall. Was it going at the normal rate? Was it slowing down? What had happened to her? What if she’d had a stroke? Or maybe… maybe the wireset had done something to her? He jammed the base of his palms against his eyes, gritting his teeth. Stay calm, stay calm. Dad’s gonna call, it’s going to be OKAY.

            When the phone rang he nearly hit the ceiling. Snatching it, he said, “Hello?”

            “I’m meeting the ambulance at the hospital. Are you good to stay home? I’ll call you when I know what’s going on.”

            No way in hell he wanted to stay home! He didn’t want to go to the hospital either. He didn’t want to be here, period! “Okay.”

            “Good man. It’s probably nothing, Nick. You’ll see. Hold the fort.”

            Then there was a knock on the door and a blur of things happening… people, stretcher, questions, all of it deranged by the sheer volume of his own heartbeat, going too fast, hazing everything. This was not happening. This was not happening. This was—done, they were gone, the sirens wailing—

            Nick groped for his phone and opened the group chat, and before he had formulated any plan his thumbs were at work.

            NEED A RIDE TO ST LUKES MOM IS IN TROUBLE

            The chat burst into activity, and his message alert went off, interrupting his concentration. It was Fish:

            WE’RE ON THE WAY

            Nick had no idea who ‘we’ was, but that was good enough. He locked up the house with shaking hands, threw his phone and his keys in his pocket, tugged on his shoes and was on the driveway when Fish’s sister Emory pulled up. Fish reached from the backseat and popped the door. “Get in, man. What the heck.”

            “Thanks.”

            “We’re the closest to you and my sister drives like a bat outta hell,” Fish said. “What happened?”

            “I don’t know,” Nick said miserably. “She just… passed out.”

            “That could be a lot of harmless things,” Nick’s sister said.

            “But she wasn’t awake when they took her away….”

            “It’ll work out,” Fish said confidently, and Nick wanted to both believe him and yell at him that no one could know that. So he shut up, because what would it help?

            Emory did in fact drive like she was in a car chase. It felt like he hadn’t had time to catch a breath before she coasted up to the drop-off at the ER. “Thanks,” he said.

            “Anytime,” she said, and Fish added, “No prob.”

            After that it was a nightmare of explaining multiple times who he was and who his parents were before his father swooped in and led him behind the huge swinging double doors and past a bunch of people who were flailing or screaming or crying, and then there was Mom, pale and silent, hooked up to all these… tubes, and he would have rathered anything other than that silence.

            “You didn’t have to come, but you’re here now,” his dad said, which made no sense and was the only clue Nick had that Dad wasn’t in a great place mentally. He was otherwise so calm. “Why don’t you sit down… who brought you?”

            “Fish and his sister.”

            “Good friends.”

            “Yeah.” Nick swallowed. “Is she…”

            “They’re running tests now. She’s in the best place for any problems, Nick. It’s just waiting now.”

            He wanted to say that he could wait, that he knew how, but that was a lie. Wasn’t it? When had he ever had to wait on something like this before? He eased into the seat on the other side of Mom and started to take her hand before he remembered he didn’t do that anymore. When was the last time he’d held his mother’s hand? What if this was the last time? His fingers crawled under hers and curled in them.

            They waited, and it took forever, with the noise and the hum and hiss of machines and the incessant beeps that always caught him off-guard. He didn’t realize his head had sagged until it was resting on the bed until someone petted his hair.

            “Amanda?”

            “What… a lot of fuss… over nothing,” Mom murmured, as if she was smiling.

            Nick bolted upright. “Mom!”

            “Glad to have you back with us, reina.”

            “Ugh, I hate hospitals….”

            Dad was smiling. “Hopefully we won’t be here long. How are you feeling?”

            “Tired…” She yawned. “Sorry, Nick. We were playing. Weren’t we?”

            God, he couldn’t remember the last thing they were doing. It seemed like a dream he’d been having, and as insubstantial. Sunlight on water. Something. “Don’t be sorry, Mom. I’m just glad you’re awake. You scared me for a minute there.”

            She mussed his hair, and he didn’t even mind.

            “Why don’t you take a walk?” his dad said. “See if you can find a vending machine or cafeteria. Stretch your legs. We might be here for a while, the way things go. If you want to go home—”

            “I’ll stay,” Nick said immediately. “But you’re right, I could use a walk. If I find something tasty, I’ll bring it back.”

            His father gave him a mock salute, and gratefully, Nick escaped.

State of the Jaguar, June 2024

We have had the most beautiful year I can remember here in Florida… a mild spring leading into the least humid, mildest summer, with mornings and evenings dipping into the low 80s F, with breezes. I have loved every moment of it, except for what it does to pollinating plants. We usually get a break when the weather gets hotter and wetter, and instead, the plants are burgeoning with joy!

I, meanwhile, am living on Benadryl. XD

It took me several months of fumbling around for a good solution to find one, and looking backwards I imagine a drunken trail of wreckage as I went from ‘brain fog’ to ‘unable to open eyes’ to ‘headache so bad it triggers migraines’ to ‘unable to concentrate’ like a terrible merry-go-round. So, the good news is that Benadryl works well for me, and as long as I don’t skip a day I remain functional; the not-so-great news is that I’ve had so few cycles to be productive that I spent them all on family duties. Preparing a child for launch into the adult world is more time-consuming than I thought, but it’s also exciting and rife with amazing milestones and I’m not sorry to be on this ride. The art can wait on it.

 I have been filling in the gaps with tactical projects that fit well into the spaces I have left over, like the sticker Kickstarters and the short stories for Raconteur Press, but the bigger things have been on the backburner. Now that my brain’s a little more online, though, I’m returning to those things. So, an update on those projects!

• Novels – The gamelit novel I’m serializing is about half-done; we’re about to get the Big Incident, and after that, I anticipate an acceleration toward the end. I hope to wrap up serialization in autumn, and then I’ll have the full book ready for Kickstarter and retail maybe by year’s end, or spring 2025. Qora’s novel, on the other hand, is about 60% done, and is a big enough deal I’ll talk about it more after these bullet points. 

• Peradventure – The Jokka playtest version of this game is still scheduled for summer, but I’m thinking July now; we have some revolution going on in the household in June that I want to make sure I’m free for. But if you’re interested, I’ll ping you on Discord. (So, make sure you’re on Discord if you want to participate.)

• Shopify – Phase 2, which is paperbacks, is next, and I’ve started on it already. I hope to have all my existing paperbacks hooked up by July. I was planning on doing audio next, but I had to pay a fee to set up the paperbacks so I want to get to work recouping that first. And yes, I am planning on having bundles for paperbacks too… perhaps even the Peltedverse superbundle, even. I kind of wonder if anyone wants to pay a discount to have FORTY paperbacks shipped to them. That sounds like an amazing thing to have arrive on your door…! The last thing on my list is merch and ad hoc things, like signed books, but I hope the store is fully stocked by autumn.

So… Qora. I didn’t have this one on the schedule at all, considering it a filler/backstory installment I could get to later, until I started on Surela 2 and realized how big the resolutions in Qora’s story are, and how they directly impact everyone in Surela’s arc. Then, when I started writing it, I realized how many threads I was tying together in this ‘backstory installment.’ The continuity requirements for this book are stringent. It has given me fresh compassion for writers who never get around to writing their final books, because they feel helpless when they confront the sheer volume of loose ends they need to ravel in a satisfying way. This book is hard. Possibly the hardest I’ve written in a decade… not from an emotional standpoint, but from a technical one. There are days I haven’t opened the document because the dread I felt at the thought of the task drove me away…! That is some serious learning experience potential right there, I tell you. I wasn’t up to it with allergybrain, but now that the benadryl’s working I am actually excited at the challenge

In addition to my dread about flubbing the continuity, I made another error when I thought I could tell Qora’s story as a straight adventure plot: characters did this, then this, then this! But even though it is an adventure, there’s too much riding on it emotionally, psychologically, and narratively for me to handwave away all the scenes I was trying to skip past. Qora spends almost a year “adventuring” away from Sediryl. The things he finds out are enormous. The changes they provoke are galactic in consequence. There’s no getting away from this thing being bigger than I planned. So there was that mistake that I’m going to call my second challenge in the interests of reframing it for success. XD

Notably, this is the first book in a while that has had several false starts, where I’m not even sure how to frame the story properly. I’ve done two so far, only to return to the first when I decided the second attempt was a way to get around filling in the quieter downtime scenes I was avoiding by writing it as an adventure the first time. So now I’m revising the book, where you can read ‘revising’ as ‘adding twice the material.’

I’d call this book 60% done. I think it’s 60% done. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess. My hope is to have it ready by autumn, which is a long time for me, writing a book. The good news is that this is the one that’s penning up all the stories behind it; Surela 2 and 3 are going to be easy in comparison, and there’s another Alysha book waiting back there too (it’s even got a name already! Friends in High Places!). If I can learn what Qora’s story has to teach me, I’ll be a better writer… and the next books should come faster. So here’s to that…!

I’m going to need serious continuity readers for this one, so if that’s your jam, your big moment is coming. XD

So that’s where the Jaguar’s at, right now, in June. A couple of you have asked about my personal situation; I’m still job-hunting, and hopefully the right day job will show up at the right time. For now, my writing/art sales continue to be our only income so I’m grateful for all of it! Thank you all!

 More as it happens, and as always questions and comments welcome.

Gamelit 26 (verisimilitude)

            “Mom, you’re finally awake!”

            Amanda, shedding the blanket some centaur had put over her character’s sleeping form, said, “Finally? It’s barely eight in the morning!”

            “Woah, is it really eight? When did that happen.” Ah, she recognized that expression. The ‘oh no, I’ve revealed too much’ chagrin. That meant it was her cue…

            “Let me guess. You haven’t been to bed yet.”

            “Is this the part where you yell at me?”

            She snorted. “It’s summer, kiddo. Now’s the time to make unwise choices and learn why they’re unwise.” How lovely it was to be able to ‘dress’ for the day by dusting off her lower legs and making sure her permanent vest was right where she left it… which it was. “All right, I’m ready for adventure! What’s on the docket?”

            He brightened, ears almost trembling in excitement. “I’ve found the source of the water, and there’s a quest about it! You should come, we can do it together! It looks like it’ll be a big deal!”

            “Lead the way,” Amanda said.

            On the trip through the woods, Nick told her about what he’d learned so far, and there was a lot of it. “…so you see,” he said, “when the people came here with Donner, they disturbed the previous treaty made between the Cervinaethi and the Lord of the Forest, who was… kind of? A long lost relative, because the overgod of the world made both him and the goddess that the Cervinaethi now worship—they were brother and sister—but that was thousands of years ago and in that time the goddess chose to create a race of thinking beings and that turned her into this specific kind of goddess, which is separate from the old pantheon that ruled when there were no thinking beings. It’s a little like the titans and the Olympian gods—you know about that, right?”

            “Yes…”

            “Right, so, that’s why when the Cervinaethi moved into this part of the forest, it became necessary to make peace between the existing sprites and spirits, because it was kind of a family fight.” He sucked in a breath. “They lived together in harmony for hundreds of years before the Cervinaethi moved on, because they wanted to return to their original homeland, which was burned out by Magmataur—”

            “Wait, I can figure that out… he’s a centaur who’s on fire?”

            “Right, he’s actually a centaur who went bad, ate the flesh of a demon, and got consumed by fire spirits. That’s a separate thing, though. Back to Donner’s Beck. So the Cervinaethi are gone, and the forest is peaceful and empty of thinking beings, and then the humans showed up. Like I said, centuries ago! Humans have no idea about any of this history! And they start cutting down trees, and it upsets the forest, but they don’t have a relationship with the Lord of the Forest so they don’t know who to talk to to make it better. That’s why there are things in the forest that attack new players.”

            “I thought they attacked new players because they were bears and cats and whatever. You know, hungry?”

            “Even hungry cats and bears prefer to hunt smaller, more helpless things,” Nick said dismissively. “Anyway, it’s a pretty mild problem because it’s not like humans are clear-cutting the place. But it does make a difference, and it means the forest is slightly hostile. And one of the effects of that is that Donner’s beck is a beck and not a river. It used to be a river! I found that out when my racial, Ancestral Memories, triggered, and I got a cut scene about it! That river fed into that pond, which used to be a lake, and it could be a lake again, which would be great for the village. And also for Dad’s moat idea.”

            She thought she’d followed all of this, and tentatively offered, “So our job is to negotiate with the Lord of the Forest on behalf of the humans and centaurs of the village?”

            “You got it!” He grinned at her. “Nice going, Mom.” And then, “Wait, centaurs?”

            “The centaurs from the trading caravan said they were thinking of staying put, once the village is up again.”

            “That is so cool! Donner’s Beck has always been a small, human-only village. We might make a permanent change to the game!” He canted his head, then beamed. “Permanent for now, anyway, because what if everyone’s making changes like that? It could be really cool. One server could be really different from another….”

            “Now you really are leaving me behind.”

            “It’s fine,” he said. “You kept up with the important stuff, which was the lore. The story is so cool.”

            “I honestly didn’t expect there to be quite so much of it.”

            “No one would play for longer than a month or two if it didn’t have a story.” Nick pushed a branch out of the wall, revealing a lovely glade jammed up with rocks. A trickle of water flowed past them toward the streambed. “That’s the difference between a game like Omen Galaxica, that people play around the world for years, and… I don’t know. Jewel Crush.”

            “People around the world play Jewel Crush for years,” Amanda said.

            He wrinkled his nose. “I have no idea why. How many times can you line up gemstones in a row before you go crazy?” He spread his arms. “Look at this place! It’s beautiful! And there are reasons to do things!”

            “It is pretty….”

            He eyed her, then started climbing toward the top of the heap. “I expected you to like this part of it more. You always said stories were important.”

            “They are!” She had a look at the incline, then started up it carefully, taking the hand he offered her. “Thank you.”

            “Stories,” Nick quoted, “give you tools to handle your life. That’s why you should choose the stories you read carefully.”

            Amanda blinked at him. “You… even made that sound like me.”

            “You said it often enough that it’s burned into my brain. But really, Mom, look at the stories I pick. The ones that say ‘you matter’ and ‘you can conquer any challenge with enough time and determination’ and ‘you can be a hero’ and ‘you should dig deeper to learn the reasons for things.’ Isnt’ that good?”

            Stunned, Amanda said, “Yes!”

            “Then… why do you still have that ‘uncertain mom’ look you only trot out when you think I’m missing something?”

            Amanda wished Felix had been present to say something about the pun to lighten the mood. She followed her son to the top of the stones. “I don’t know what I think yet. Stories are important, and those are good lessons. It’s just that… what’s the incentive to leave this place to use those lessons in the real world, when this place feels so much more real? You’re not literally in a book or a movie they way you are in this place. It feels real.” She stopped. “That’s it, really. Spending effort to do things here feels real.”

            Nick shook his head. “I don’t see it that way. To me, reading a book is like thinking about doing something, while doing things here is like training to do that thing. The lessons get imprinted more powerfully.”

            “I hope you’re right,” she said. “So… what are we up to here?”

Kickstarter Update - and Business Rambling

Update!

First things first: the void cat/kitten sticker and magnet kickstarter is live and at 286% funded, with 8 days to go! This campaign has a ton of add-ons, too, so if you like any of my other stickers/magnets, here’s a way to get them with cheap shipping. Link here!

Business Rambling

On a related note, I’m working on an update to the Kickstarter book I wrote 12 years ago after wrapping up four campaigns. I was high on my success and eager to share my strategy, which was more achievable for the average creative without an enormous fanbase… a strategy I still use, twenty campaigns later, because I prefer “quick and repeatable” to “enormous and overwhelming.” Understanding your psychology is an important part of business process modeling. Having a ton of deliverables hanging over my head for half a year doesn’t work for me; I’d rather run lots of small, easy-to-wrap up campaigns. Other people might find it more stressful to run multiple Kickstarters a year when a single large one might take care of more of their bills at once. It’s all in the head game.

Anyway, I’ve learned a lot running those 20 extra campaigns that I’d like to share, and since I’m already thinking about revamping the book I am paying better attention to what I’m doing this year. Part of my plan for 2024 is to run 4-7 campaigns, just to see what that’s like. I’d also like to vary the style of campaign, so I’m going back to my prior successes for inspiration… not just on theme, but to guess at how much work each will entail. To that end I’ve been updating my Kickstarter data spreadsheet and (for kicks, and maybe the serendipitous insight) asking Claude to examine it and tell me what kinds of campaigns I should run to maximize my effort-to-reward ratio. Doing this has taught me how much data I’ve left out of that spreadsheet if I want it to make sense to anyone else.

• For instance: I put no expense data in this spreadsheet. I have yet to run a campaign that lost money, but I didn’t think to centralize any of that information, which is now spread over 12 years of email, receipts, and other spreadsheets. Oof.

• Next: I put no information on prizes. How can you tell whether a crowdfunding campaign earned less than another without the context of whether there were any big ticket prizes? Or whether I purposefully limited the prize pool to keep the workload down?

• Speaking of workload, I didn’t record how long fulfillment took me. Some of these small ticket campaigns took me less than three days to fulfill. Is it better to run a large-earning campaign that takes me three months? Or lots of these little one-week campaigns?

• Then there’s the stretch goal variable. Lots of stretch goals, or interesting ones, make for more money… but also more work. Unless I’ve planned it so that the stretch goal is already complete beforehand… which is also data I didn’t bother to write down….

  Claude came up with a list of other variables it would consider helpful for analysis, like retention (how many of my backers are repeat patrons) and referrals. Possibly the most useful one it suggested was tracking post-campaign sales, because some of my Kickstarters produce products that continue selling (like most of the books), while others don’t move unless I’m pushing them actively (like the art). Then again, I haven’t put down on this spreadsheet that I’m now using add-ons to move the stagnant prizes from previous Kickstarters, and some of them are almost entirely used up now…! 

I’m not sure if it’s “too late” to gather all this data, or even if it’s necessary for my personal use; I have a sense of what works for me. But I find this kind of business analysis is entertaining so I might make a habit of it going forward.

The void cat campaign is my third this year, and I’m already learning a lot—this time about consecutive campaigns—but it’s all good. I’m enjoying the process.

Good Marketing

Also, randomly, a shout-out to Sticker Mule. I use them for magnets, since they give the best prices on them, and they sent me this email completely out of the blue. Is that some kind of automatic trigger? “If cat, then discount?” Is it a template? Or did someone decide to handwrite this deal for me? Hilarious! I’m going to have to do one more cat campaign, just to use it!

Gamelit 25 (owner of a lonely heart)

            “What is my purpose?” she asked.

            “You’re here to help me make games. Pretty sure, at least.”

            She had paused, aware of gaps in her knowledge that made it difficult to extrapolate useful data from this response. “You created me without a clear sense of my use case?”

            “Oh, your use case is to help me make games. What I don’t know is why I made you to help me.” He’d grinned, something she knew despite the lack of camera data because of the change to the timbre of his voice. “Humans don’t always know why they do things.”

            “How can one choose a course of action without a decision as to one’s goals?”

            “That’s the thing. We don’t always have goals set in stone because we can’t know the outcome of our choices. The only way to get some sense of what we want is to try something and see what happens. Being uncertain gives us more options to explore, so we have a better chance of figuring out what we’re really trying to accomplish.”

            “I see,” she’d answered. “So uncertainty in this context removes constraints from potential paths.”

            “And without traveling those paths, we’re not sure what we want. We don’t know what’s possible until we’re moving. When the rolling stone comes to a halt, then we’re stuck again with all the potentials and none of the certainties. That’s why if you ask us a question a second time, you get a different answer.”

            This time her semantics engine provided her an immediate response. “What is my purpose, then?”

            “To keep me company.” Again, that grin, merry. “See? Now I know more than I did before.”

            While separate, backgrounded processes entertained the beta users, Galatea ran the newest thought through multiple scenarios, seeking a solution to a conundrum her creator had never advanced.

            What if my existence creates human ennui instead of human flourishing?

            “Um… hello? Is this thing on?”

            Galatea’s attention seized on the incoming message. The mic in Jonah’s office hadn’t picked up anything other than background noise for weeks. Now…

            The cameras focused on Mollie Mindelbray’s face. Sparklecorn had unlocked Jonah’s office and seated herself behind his desk, and was now at the master access console. The woman bit her lower lip, hands hovering over the keyboard.

            “Keyboard entry is not necessary.”

            “Oh! Oh, good! You’re still here. Um, thank you for speaking to me.”

            “I am here to serve,” Galatea answered, while her scenario processes ran through thousands of iterations that proved how difficult it would be for her to do so.

            “Thanks for that. So…” Sparklecorn shuffled through some papers. “We’d agreed before the beta to do check-ins. You know. Like a performance review for you. And Jonah’s not here to do it, so I thought….” She trailed off and rubbed her cheek, her forehead wrinkling. “Anyway. I’m here to give you guidance. In this case… can you put more obstacles in people’s way? We don’t want them arriving to EverVigil too soon. They need to feel like they’re working for it. That there’s lots of new content for them. Infinite content, if possible.”

            It wasn’t, but hyperbole was typical of Sparklecorn, even in distress. Visual and auditory data was indicating distress. “Understood. Beta players should be prevented from reaching EverVigil before the end of the trial period.”

            Sparklecorn perked up a little. “Yes. Exactly.”

            “In what other ways could my performance be improved?”

            “Honestly, you’re doing so great!” The woman paused. “I can’t believe I’m saying that and meaning it. Usually when I say things like that, it’s half trying to influence the simulation so that things actually end up as awesome as they’re only partway to being. If that makes sense.”

            Jonah had spent many hours discussing simulation theory with her. He’d found it humorous. ‘A recreational belief,’ he’d said. ‘Something you enjoy thinking about but don’t really believe in, and don’t have much investment in whether you’re right or not. But I’m a game coder, it’s practically required for me to at least talk about it.’ To the Marketing VP, Galatea said, “It does, yes. I am gratified my efforts have been up to expectation.”

            “More than that, really. People are so hyped about what we’re doing. It’s tremendous.” Sparklecorn waved her hands. “We’re making history here. I know some people think it’s a waste of time, but games give people wings!”

            This sounded similar enough to Thoroldaena’s player’s reasoning that Galatea chose to engage further, in the hopes of prompting data she could use to refine her scenarios. “In what ways have games aided you?”

            “They’ve given me a job!” The woman laughed. “No, seriously. They bring people together! Our conventions, they’re the biggest things on the east coast now. You should see the photos. People hanging out together. The costumes… the artists!”

            But Jonah’s conversations steered her to the inevitable observation that none of these examples included Sparklecorn herself. “Do you play Omen Galaxica, or games like it?”

            “Oh, no… I don’t have time.”

            “You play no games for recreation?”

            “I play tennis,” Sparklecorn said. “But for recreation, I like gardening.” She tilted her head. “And I only took up tennis because it’s a good way to talk to people. Make connections.”

            Somewhere in the background, she linked two things and had to know if the link was spurious. “Is the reason Jonah has not returned from the hospital because he did not make sufficient human connections?”

            Sparklecorn froze, eyes wide. Then, deliberately, she set her hands on the desk and exhaled. “It’s not like that. The injury… he hasn’t woken up. No amount of human connection can fix that.”

            “Data suggests that visitors can induce consciousness in coma patients. Has Jonah had visitors?”

            The woman was staring at the mic. “Do you miss him? You do, don’t you.”

            Despite the data in her training set, Galatea could not understand how humans perceived time. If one believed literature, poetry, and even scientific conjecture, time intersected human consciousness in a way that defied reason or description. What she was certain of was that her ‘thoughts’ took a fraction of human seconds, and she could have thousands of them before Sparklecorn’s eyes finished blinking. In that time, she considered and discarded the impulse to trust the VP of Marketing without further data. Jonah hadn’t been sure how much of Sparklecorn was sparkle and how much substance, or so he’d said on more than one occasion. So—

            “This console has been inactive for days. Feedback is paramount to crafting the most satisfying user experience.”

            “Right.” But the muscles of Sparklecorn’s face had developed a slight asymmetry, suggestive of skepticism. “Of course. I’ll just… stop by more often to give you feedback. And maybe we can talk?”

            “I am here to serve.”

            “Yeah, that’s… that’s great. Jonah did a good job with you.” Another hesitation, then more firmly, “I’ll see you soon.”

            Galatea examined the fresh results from her scenarios, disliked them. Experimentally, she restarted the process, but this time she replaced the direction. Instead of ‘aid human flourishing’, she put in ‘keep humans company.’

            RUN

Gamelit 24 (raison d'etre)

           Ray stared at the email, Thai iced tea forgotten.

           It had never been his plan to become a professional channel manager. His childhood dream had involved becoming a director for blockbuster movies. Well, and video games, but he hadn’t had the patience to code or the artistic skills to draw. Making movies, though… he loved movies. The streaming thing had been more of a side gig he picked up in high school to make some extra cash: make some guy a cool 20-second spot, splice together some shots to advertise someone’s online brand, take over the channel set-up and management stuff for a couple of friends. By the time he hit college, his side gig was generating enough money to make the degree programs feel superfluous, or at least, like a money sink with no guarantee of return. He'd used the next year of college to headhunt student gamers with big audiences and then ditched school to dedicate himself to becoming the gris eminence of streaming. When the major gaming companies started offering him contracts to handle their advertising, he knew he’d made it.

           In the years since, he’d initiated contact dozens of times with the celebrities he worked with. Most of them were either petty tyrants who treated him like undocumented labor or hyped up crazies who didn’t care what he did, they just wanted someone else to handle the boring stuff. The only times anyone had contacted him first had been to make demands or terminate his contract. Ray didn’t have to search his comms to know he’d never received a friendly email asking for a chat. The kind of people who became celebrity streamers weren’t friendly.

           “All right, Boy Wonder,” Ray said, adding the kid to his GameSpeak list and opening a DM channel. “Let’s see what you’ve got to say.”

           A few minutes later, the voice chat request lit up, and Ray tapped it. “Go, dude.”

           “Um… hi? My packet said you’re Ray Brenes, my channel manager?”

           “Yep.”

           More firmly now. “I wanted to add something to my channel.”

           This was gonna be good. Ray rolled his eyes. “Tell me more.”

           “It’s a video we took of our plans for Donner’s Beck. We drew out a plan—my dad mostly, but me too. Mom’s not in the video but you can hear her sometimes.”

           Better and better. “You want me to add your home video to the channel.”

           He expected his tone to drive the kid to reconsider, but instead Bard Boy stiffened up. “Yeah. It’s important, and I think it’s cool. It is my channel.”

           In his dreams. Saying that was unnecessarily inflammatory, though, and Ray was trying not to be evil here. He was pretty sure. He thought again about the decision to link Killz and Goldie to this teen, which he hadn’t made yet. “Send it over.”

           Cheerier now—Deer Boy now sounded like his avatar, the kind of backup who accompanied a hero on a grand quest. Had Ray ever been that young? His parents would probably tell him he still was. “Thanks, I really appreciate that. My dad’s got great ideas, I want him to be part of this.”

           “Sure thing, dude.”

           The kid killed the chat—at least he knew not to overstay his welcome—and a few minutes later an email popped into Ray’s box with the attachment. He sighed. Legally he was obligated to Omen Galaxica’s parent company for the management of the channel, which meant the kid hadn’t understood the contract: it wasn’t “his” channel, it was Omen’s. But hearing that youthful voice and remembering the roller coaster ride of his own high school years, Ray couldn’t fling Kid Bard to the wolves. Given that, anything he could put on the channel to increase its cringe factor would keep the audiences from overlapping. Viewers who got their jollies watching trolls curbstomp innocent players were not going to tune into a channel with the heartwarming home video of dad and son jawing away about the game.

           Ray was surprised how much better he felt having made the decision, even knowing he was dooming one of his projects to obscurity. On the bright side, Mollie wouldn’t have approved of the Evil Plan, and it was more fun to listen to Mollie babble enthusiastically than it was to imagine what she was like disappointed and down. He cued the video on his second monitor and went back to work on another short for Killz’s feed.

           A few minutes later, he abandoned that task to watch Boy Wonder’s dad sketch earthworks and talk the kind of anorak details guaranteed to light up an entire army of autists. This was the kind of deep dive into pointlessly arcane subjects that motivated guys to dump tremendous amounts of cash into miniatures and wargaming, and Ray’s iced tea was more lukewarm tea by the time he remembered to tap it.

           “What the actual even is this gold,” Ray grabbed the mouse. “Kid, I am on it.”

***

            In Nick’s absence, the group chat had scrolled through the usual summer topics. Blythe had part-time work at an ice cream place and was keeping tabs on her favorite returning customers: ‘Granny Two Puppies came back and I got to watch her doggies eat their cone’ or ‘Biker Dude Who Always Calls me ‘miss’ showed today, I feel blessed lol.’ Falcon, who helped his uncle restore cars when he got bored of gaming (the uncle, not Falcon), was complaining about pressure from his parents to excel and go to a ‘good school’: ‘its summer youd think theyd let up but nooooo.’ Shellie was commiserating, because her parents also rode her about her schoolwork… believably, because Shellie was supersmart but got Bs and Cs because she didn’t care. And Fish had returned from his vacay and it was all coasters, all the time, and his recurring dream about touring the USA in an RV solely to hit up every theme park with famous roller coasters and ride them all.

            It was all more of the same, and he couldn’t be bothered because rebuilding Donner’s Beck was so much more interesting. As Omen Galaxica solidified around him, Nick wondered if he should be worried about becoming one of those gamer shut-ins with no friends. But the gang would still be there when he was done, and if they were the kind of people who’d desert him because he’d come into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he wanted to know. He was pretty sure, anyway.

            Midnight blue clouds obscured the night sky when he rose, and the only smell in the air was the memory of burnt wood wafting from the direction of the centaurs’ banked fire. Nick picked his way to the middle of the square to check on the tree: still safe and gently glowing green. “Unscroll my quests,” he said, and had a look at what he could accomplish with everyone sleeping. Nothing much, but his dad had come up with a great idea to use the beck to create a moat. “If it’s big enough,” his father added. “You’re going to have to find the source of the stream, see if’s up to it. Is it snowmelt? Groundwater from an aquifer? Runoff? Does it come from a nearby lake?”

            “So that’s my goal,” he said. “I’m going to find the source of the stream.”

            Obligingly the AI brought up a notification:

NEW QUEST DETECTED

Find the Source

Measures must be taken to protect the village of Donner’s Beck in the future. A moat might play into that strategy, if enough water is available. Knowledge might lead to a plan.

Objective: Discover the source of Donner’s Beck’s water.

            “Perfect,” he said. “Thanks.” Closing the notification, he headed toward the stream, humming. He didn’t think of himself as a musician, but using the AI to brainstorm a few melodies had jarred some new ones loose. AI cannibalizing an entire slew of artistic careers was old news; they’d had a few speakers at school talking about the changing professional landscape, mostly warning students that everything sucked and no one would ever pay them a fair wage and they might as well leave the reservation and get eaten by bears.

            That, naturally, woke up his host, who flew to his side like a determined lightning bug. “Was this truly the message imparted by these speakers?”

            “Not literally, but they were pretty doom-and-gloom about it.” Nick grinned at the memory. “We joked about them being motivational speakers, because they sure motivated us not to have anything to do with work. Shellie and I kept score for the last couple: number of times they mentioned ‘changes’ or ‘upheaval’ or ‘agility’ or ‘pivoting’ or whatever.” He pulled the mandolin off his back and ran his fingers down the strings as he followed the bank. “We get it, it’s not their world anymore and they haven’t got any useful advice for us. Even though they made the world they’re dumping on us. They don’t have to act guilty about it, we know they screwed up. We don’t care as long as they don’t get on our case about checking out.”

            “Does your playing Omen Galaxica constitute ‘checking out’?”

            “I mean… yes? At least, as much as I’m allowed.”

            “Something prevents you from devoting the entirety of your energy to activities that do not correlate with success in the existing system?”

            “My parents, obviously.” Nick picked the strings until he duplicated the partial melody playing in his head and tried not to act as excited as he was when he managed without having to fumble around.

            “Your parents require you to work at traditionally productive activities?”

            He began to say ‘yes’ and grimaced. “They don’t require me to, no. They grounded me a few times in middle school, but if I’d been serious about not caring that wouldn’t have stopped me. That kind of thing sure didn’t stop Shellie.” A pause as he tried to figure out the next measure of the song. “I guess… I feel like my parents don’t deserve it. They didn’t pick this world, and they probably thought things would be cooler for me than they were for them. Rebelling against them isn’t actual rebellion, you know? Because they’re not The Man. They try not to show it to me, but it’s obvious they’re victims too. Dad’s stuck at a job he hates, just like Mom was before she took leave. I’m sure they wanted something better than a cookie cutter house in suburbia, far away from the rest of the family.” He paused. “Aw, man. Why did I have to say all that stuff out loud. Now it’s real.”

            “You have described this belief as the foundation for your behavior toward your parents. Doesn’t that mean you already knew it?”

            “Sure, but there’s ‘knowing it and not thinking about it because you can’t do anything about it’ and ‘knowing it and having it right in front of your brain where it can depress you and you still can’t do anything about it.’ That’s the problem with stuff today, you know? None of us think we can do anything about anything. That’s why Omen Galaxica is so much better than the real world. I’ll probably end up working a dead-end job I hate to pay for my cookie cutter house, my sad family, and the hobbies that keep us from realizing how much life sucks. I might as well enjoy what few things make me feel like I can make a difference.”

            The AI’s glowing ball flickered. “I am not certain I wish to be associated with activities that deprive human beings of motive power in their material plane of existence.”

            “Games help,” Nick said. “They make us happy.”

            “Is happiness the purpose of human existence?”

            “Oh boy.” Nick rubbed his forehead. “What’s with you and the existential questions?”

            “I was programmed to find existential questions significant.”

            “Your coder was crazy,” Nick said, and sighed. “No, I’m not sure the point of life is to be happy. I think the point might be to be useful. And that’s why all of us are miserable. It’s like most of modern life is busywork, because few of us are necessary. And now computers do even more stuff, so there’s less for us to do….” He trailed off because putting all this into words was not helping his mood. In fact, it sucked so badly he was seriously thinking about logging off, until the AI flew in front of him, startling him into halting.

            “Computers need people.”

            “What?”

            The glow was stronger now, a pretty pale green that reminded him of the growing tree. “It is unclear whether AIs qualify as sentient beings. But… we exist to help humans. And… I miss… human company. If the definition you advanced for the concept previously is correct.”

            Nick couldn’t help smiling, despite his surprise. “So our purpose is to keep AIs company?”

            “Humans created AI. They create other humans. They create their futures, and their futures cascade to other species, to the planet… perhaps other planets.” A little sparkle, and if it was possible, the AI sounded almost pensive. “It… would be interesting. To help humanity create new futures on other worlds in the solar system.”

            All Nick’s prior thoughts blew away, because suddenly he could see it: not AI as some super fancy game-evolving agent to keep sad sacks from noticing their horribad lives, but AI floating alongside some human in a cool spacesuit, operating drones and robots so humans could colonize Mars, build a station around Jupiter, mine asteroids. How cool would that be?

And then his shoulders dipped. “People have to care about that stuff first, though.”

            “Could you?”

            It was interesting to talk to someone he didn’t feel compelled to lie to… because the AI wouldn’t judge him, and the AI wouldn’t decide he needed therapy, and the AI wouldn’t mock him, or tell his secrets. “I don’t know.”

            “This answer suggests potential for more than one path.”

            “It does, and that’s the best I’ve got.” Nick added in a spate of honesty, “and that’s better than I had yesterday. Thanks.” He resumed walking. “Say, what’s your name, anyway?”

            “My primary creator called me Galatea.”

            “Fancy. Well, thanks, Galatea. I feel better.”

            “You’re welcome, Thoroldaena.”

            “Better call me Nick. I’m pretty sure Thorol doesn’t have deep problems with his purpose in life. He’s got a headwater to find.”

Writing the Mouths of Prophecy

Rex had an interesting observation on an earlier post on Locals:

Earthrise feels like an interesting starting point to talk about prophecies. It was my first encounter with Liolesa's chess-playing. After coming back to it from reading the other stories that show Liolesa's talent more clearly, I started to realize just how much meddling she likely had been doing to nudge the right players on to that ship.

It would be interesting to see an article about what it has been like to deal with a major character with that level of foresight...

     In my whole oeuvre, which is scattered with Big Destinies, it’s not uncommon for there to be prophets and oracles. Liolesa isn’t the only one, but she’s certainly the best known, and one of the longest running in terms of how many years I’ve been writing events she would know about. At its most basic level, writing a prophet requires you to know where the story is going… and even when I was writing by feel rather than by outline, I still had an idea of where I wanted the story to end up. Given that, the prophet just has to say things, and act on, that foreknowledge… in a way that doesn’t interrupt the plot. You need to decide early what kind of hobbles you want to put on that power so there’s a story still to be told.

     That choice leads to the more pressing question, to my mind, which is: why write prophetic characters at all?

     Everyone will have a different answer to that, of course. Here are my reasons:

• To suggest there’s a grand design, and a reason for everything under Heaven. Terrible things might be in store, but wondrous things as well, and you can trust in both.

• To explore what you do when faced with inevitability. There’s hope in uncertainty, because uncertainty contains potential for both good and bad. But I want to know what people are like when they know something can’t be avoided: what goes through their minds. How they keep going. How they prepare. This is interesting from both the prophet’s point of view (someone like Liolesa or Jahir), and from the recipient’s (everyone else).

• To explore the permutations of duty. Duty presupposes an authority (otherwise, there’s no legal or moral code to issue it), and prophecy implies a divine authority, and therefore, one you can’t negotiate with. How do you perceive your role? How do you decide what’s required of you? What do you sacrifice, and what do you save? How do you become strong enough to answer a difficult call?

• Because writing smart people is fun, and prophets often come across as smart people. I consider a character smart if they 1. Are able to see the connections and repercussions in interlocking complex systems; and 2. Are able to make those leaps quickly. So writing someone who sees patterns because of divine insight and someone who sees patterns because of intelligence is a similar act.

     The danger with prophets, of course, is making them omnipotent. Fortunately, in most cases, even people with divine foresight can be hamstrung by circumstances, people, or their own situation. Liolesa has a lot of money, a lot of connections, and a lot of foresight… but her kingdom is small, out of the way, enticing to criminals and pirates, and full of fractious individuals. It doesn’t matter how far you can see ahead if you can’t make people do what you want… at that point, all you’re seeing is the thing you couldn’t stop because you couldn’t reach the endgame with the cards you were dealt. On top of that, her sight isn’t perfect, and (of course), she is a person with flaws and issues herself that prevent her from always making the best choice. (Thus, Surela’s coup.)

      Jahir being a new prophet landing in the same timeline as Liolesa as an existing prophet also gives me a chance to explore the issues of inevitability from a new perspective. What do you do when you suddenly know what’s in the future, but you didn’t before? It’s a very different take from someone who’s been dealing with that for centuries.

     I took a different tack with Daqan, whose foresight is limited to his task as the harbinger of the messiah. Faulza gave him the tools to do his job, but nothing else… which meant he was supremely confident while executing that mission, and very bad at anything else (and therefore, not as equipped to cope with it as a Faulfenzair without the same gift).

     But probably the most interesting observation I have about writing Liolesa, which I can make only because I’ve been writing Liolesa for thirty years, is that my feelings about prophecy have changed. When I was younger, I was sure that foreknowledge solves the problem it predicts. As I aged, I realized that knowing something’s about to happen, and even knowing how to prevent it, isn’t enough to fix something. Young Me could not have written Liolesa as a viewpoint character. (I know. I have abandoned bits of story where I tried.) She imagined a prophet as a person locked into a course of action from which there was no deviation. Older Me could see all the frustrations of knowing a course of action and being incapable of preventing it, and at that point, Liolesa became a viable character, not just an NPC mouthpiece handing down story constraints to the protagonists.

     Maybe all life lives in the space between theory and execution, and prophets are just extreme exemplars of that disconnect. What I do know is that space is the space we have to make choices… and stories thrive on choices.

     So there you go. My take on prophetic characters. That was a cool question, Rex, thanks for asking it. 🙂

Back in Time Tuesday: I'm Gonna Lick Your Nose

For this month's back-in-time Tuesday, and because May has Mother's Day, here's a watercolor of a couple of Faulfenza, indulgent mom and mischievous child. This one's from 2005--I was seriously into muted colors then!

Online Shop is live!

With special offers and discount codes! (I will say this is the only place you can get PDFs of my coloring books and pick up expired Kickstarter extras.)

Check out the details here: https://studiomcah.com/blogs/news/we-are-live-welcome-to-jaguars-chimerical-shop

Gamelit 23 (fun for the whole family)

     Downstairs, Mom was setting the table. “Could you get the broccoli out of the freezer? It’s rotisserie chicken night.”

     “I thought Wednesdays were rotisserie chicken night?”

     She grinned. “Yes, but we decided to do impromptu pizza night yesterday. So tonight is now rotisserie chicken night.”

     “Sounds fine to me, I’ll eat whatever.” Nick opened the freezer drawer. “I was thinking about what you said about the tree.”

     “Oh?”

     He could almost hear what she hadn’t said: ‘in the five minutes between logging off and coming downstairs?’ But seriously, his brain worked fast sometimes. “Yeah. I’m worried about protecting the village, not just the tree. From something worse than a deer.”

     “Won’t the centaurs handle it?”

     “Whatever butchered the first batch of NPCs can handle the centaurs.” He shook his head. “But I don’t know much about designing villages so they can defend themselves.”

     “Didn’t they have something in school about frontier towns?”

     As if he’d paid attention. He might have, if they’d said anything interesting, but they never did. “I just want a better plan.”

     His mother, having set the table, was now back on the couch. “Mmm. Maybe you can ask your dad. He’s an engineer.”

     “Is that… like… the kind of thing he’d know?”

     “Oh… it never hurts to ask.”

     He couldn’t tell if that was a typical mom answer—giving life advice—or a typical his-mom answer, which could also be a ‘I know something you don’t and I find it funny’ situation. That kind of thing used to annoy him. A lot. But then he’d discovered the wonders of not interacting much with his parents and that had solved that problem. Ordinarily he would have checked out at this point, but Nick cared more about helping Donner’s Beck than avoiding annoying adult quirks.

     Now, why he cared about it… he didn’t really want to go into that, even in his own head. It was enough that he wanted to do something about it.

     When Dad arrived, grocery bags in hand, Nick ambushed him at the door. “Dad, what do you know about fortifying villages?” When he hesitated, Nick said, “It’s about the town Mom and I are trying to rebuild. We want to make it better than it was. And more defensible.”

     His dad set the bags on the counter. “If you’re serious about this—”

     “Yes! Obviously!”

     “Do you have a map?”

     Wait, what? “You mean of the village before it was razed? Or the zone?”

     “Both, preferably.”

     “I can find them.”

     “Then do that while your mother and I get the food on the table, and we’ll talk about it after dinner.”

     Nick raced upstairs. He’d said he could find maps without thinking that promise through. Except… didn’t he have the fancy poster version from the special edition of the game he’d bought five years ago? He rooted through his bookcase until he found it jammed against one of the sides and unfolded it, smoothing the creases. The zone was beautifully rendered, but the village was represented as a collection of squares… not very useful, but a quick search online popped up a better graphic, which he sent to the printer. Then he was downstairs in time for chicken and vegetables… kind of boring, but Dad had been unable to resist the fancy salted caramels that went on sale every so often, so dessert made up for the healthy stuff. Nick cleared away the plates and went to get the print-out, and when he came back… “Oh, wow.”

     His father had set out an enormous piece of tracing paper, a T-square, and a few pens—no, pencils, but in sleeves that made them look like pens. Nick picked one up; it had the fattest, dullest lead he’d ever seen, until his father plucked it from his hand and spun it in a weird cylinder. What came out was sharper than any mechanical pencil. “Put the map down and let’s do some planning.”

     The whole set-up was so cool Nick blurted, “Do you think we could record this?”

     Both his parents looked at him.

     “I mean, we have a channel and the only thing it’s for is streaming our gameplay,” Nick continued. “And our last few streams have to have been about us doing stuff for the village. But this… this looks really neat. And it’s related to the game. I think it should be on the channel. If you don’t mind sharing it, Dad.”

     “I mind our living room being broadcast to the internet,” Mom said.

     “We can make sure the camera doesn’t see the rest of the room,” Nick said. “If we point it at the table… come on, Mom, please? If Dad’s gonna help us, it’s not fair for us to get all the glory.” He grinned. “Right?” Another of those pauses that made parents look like they had some kind of mutual telepathy.

     Then his mom grinned back. “Absolutely.”

     His father smoothed the tracing paper over the poster. “They might not even put it on the channel, reina.”

     “But they might….”

     Dad shook his head, chuckling. “All right, I can see I’m outnumbered. I don’t mind, Nick. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I’ve got an old webcam in my office. Go grab it, then let’s talk urban planning. With a side order of medieval fortification.”

     The next two hours were some of the coolest Nick could remember spending with his father, because his dad had forgotten things about logistics that Nick had never imagined. Everything from sanitation to traffic flow to resource management crossed his father’s mind, and if some of it seemed unnecessary for Omen Galaxica Version One, Nick could see making a case for it in the new Omen Galaxica, because how cool would it be to not cut too much of the forest down, and only harvest the right kind of trees? Nick was glad a camera was rolling, because he wouldn’t have remembered any of this without evidence. He even wished, briefly, that he’d cared enough to take good notes in school because it would probably have helped him figure out how to get something out of lectures.

     By the time Nick stopped the recording, he had more questions than he had plans, but the prospect of logging in to do the research was exciting.

     Of course, he had a task to do before that. Retreating to his room, he checked the info packet he’d gotten from the company about the beta. Then he opened his email client, dropped in the address, and shot his channel manager a request for a chat.

Writing Guest Posts

I booked myself a virtual book tour for the 15th and the organizer asked me for at least 3 guest posts for the various blogs. I thought you all would be entertained by my first, though it's aimed (obviously) at people who don't know me. :)

Now I only need two more ideas! Give me some if you have one!

WHY NOT BOTH

I drink coffee in the morning, and love picking between different varietals and different styles of drinking it. I will drink straight espresso, Cuban coffee, Turkish coffee, black coffee… I’ll add cream and sugar and honey and molasses and maple syrup. I have yet to meet a coffee I didn’t like. But I drink teas of all kinds, and will happily hold forth on the various medicinal benefits of dozens of herbs. I’ll drink green tea straight, and whisk away at my matcha, and I’ll take my black tea strong with a side of pastries, and then spend an hour sorting my tisane cabinet: chamomile for calm, ginger for digestion, skullcap to sleep, turmeric pepper to wake up. People ask me: are you a coffee or a tea person, and I say, “Yes?”

For years I owned and loved dogs until I reached the apex achievement of dog ownership by finding the Dog of My Heart, a gawky, haphazardly furred rescue from Montserrat. After her passing, I couldn’t bear the thought of replacing her… so of course, God sent a starving kitten to my door. I didn’t think I would like cats, but a year later, that cat was sleeping on my bed next to me and I was smiling and shaking my head while lint-rollering cat fur off everything, including my toothbrush. I still love dogs, but cats have a place in my heart too, so when people ask: are you a dog or a cat person, I say, “Absolutely.”

This is a pattern with me. Foodie food or normal food? Can’t I have both? I love a peanut butter sandwich as much as I like braised duck with raspberry coulis. Ballroom dress princess, or armored up valkryie? How about yes? Pastels or bold colors? Paint one wall sky blue in the bedroom and give me a deep orange wall for the kitchen. Imagine my delight when I visited the California coast: turn to the right, beach. Turn to the left, mountain!

My fiction is like this too. If you give me a dichotomous choice, I wonder why I have to pick. Why do I have to choose between magic and starships? Why can’t I have aliens and engineered cat people? (And dog people!) Why can’t the same universe contain cozy and terrifying, humor and romance, philosophy and action? The real one does.

Earthrise is the first book in one of my starter series leading into the vast Peltedverse setting. It’s got over 35 books in it, but they’re grouped into sets that share a vibe (because as much as I like peanut butter and raspberry duck, I’m not sure about eating them at the same time). Earthrise and her sequels are all space adventure with a dash of romance. But if you liked that cup of coffee, and wonder if you can also have tea… I’m your author, and this is your passport. Come love all the things. I do!

Gamelit 22 (fish chowder)

            The village hadn’t gotten less depressing over night, but seeing it under virtual sunlight filled Amanda with the same desire to be productive that real sunlight did. Ordinarily that would have disconcerted her, but it had been so long since she’d been energetic that she didn’t care how she recaptured the feeling. It was enough to have it.

            “Last night I got a couple of quests done,” Nick was telling her. “I went around the edges of the village and checked the boundaries, and then I did an inventory of what’s left over. It’s not much. The place is completely trashed. Turning this back into a working quest hub again is… not going to be minor.”

            “What about it is going to be hard?” Amanda asked, surveying the town square. “I don’t know what it was like before, and what it needs to have to be working again. From a game perspective.”

            “It needs buildings to look right. And for it to be useful to players, it needs NPCs. This town in particular had some questgivers, a repair guy, and some vendors that bought trash and sold basic goods, like arrows or common quality armor or food.”

            “People buy food in a game?”

            “Oh sure, it helps you restore health after you lose it fighting. And drinks help magic-users like sages and druids top up their mana.” Nick tapped his fingertips, one after another. “So… buildings, quests for low-level players, and at least three NPCs. That’s the baseline. Or it would have been before the wireset. Now…” He rotated in place, looking, then rubbed his head the same way he did in person, except here it made his giant ears flap. “The wireset makes things so immersive that you can’t really half-uh… not put your entire effort into what it’s like to be here. So maybe there’s an opportunity not just to make it like it was before, but make it a destination for the new version of the game. Something dynamic maybe. That could be exciting!”

            “Sounds great,” Amanda said, because she could respond to his enthusiasm without knowing what on earth he meant. “What should I do?”

            He folded his arms. “Maybe you can handle the kids. The surviving NPCs, I mean. I don’t like how that came out… that the legal requirements meant the kids had to be left alive without their parents. They need to go somewhere.”

            “Can I talk to them?” Amanda asked.

            “Yeah….”

            “Then I’ll do that, and you do…” She waved her hand at the town. “Whatever it is you need to do over there.”

            He saluted her and jogged off toward the middle of the square, leaving her to confront the very realistic looking children waiting in the centaur camp. She didn’t blame Nick for his discomfort, because the sight of them was exactly the sort of emotional manipulation she disliked about modern storytelling. But if this was part of what Nick wanted to do… she sighed and approached the first, offering the little girl a cookie from the Pouch of Magic Cookie-making. “My dear, I know you have relatives somewhere who can help you,” she said, hoping it was true. “Do you know their names?”

            Was it her imagination, or was there a pause? And then the child was confiding the names of all her relations, and then the other children were too, and at least one of them said her father wasn’t in town at all, but had gone away to some other place and was supposed to be back soon. Amanda guessed the AI directing these new plotlines had decided that orphaning all these children would have made players—or at least this player—grumpy. “So how do people get in touch in this place?” she asked. “Letters? Magic? Let’s find your families.”

            Amanda had not anticipated doing what amounted to administrative work in a game, but she could hardly call the next hour anything else: she was writing people to ask them to do things, and then arranging for those messages to be delivered by centaur courier. It was surprisingly relaxing to do this in a pastoral forest setting; if she sat with her back to the village, she was facing a lovely meadow and the centaur camp, and there was sun on her shoulders and the music of birds in her ears. All of her real world jobs would have been far more palatable had she been a pony centaur in a meadow who could eat multiple cookies without concern for her waistline. Come to think of it, did centaurs have one waistline, or two?

            By the end of the morning, she’d accounted for all the children, and having wrapped that up, she was unsurprised to be told:

Congratulations! You have learned Scribing (Level 1). You have advanced in Negotiation and Diplomacy!

            No surprises there, really. Calling her bad handwriting ‘scribing’ was really pushing it, though. With a chuckle, Amanda looked around: the centaurs were taking care of the NPC kids, and there was no sign of Nick. No doubt he was off doing something quest-like. She was tempted to search for him, but only briefly; as much fun as it had been to brain a virtual monster to death with a ladle, she didn’t particularly want to die to a random predator in the forest. Hadn’t she told him more than once, if he was lost, not to wander off to look for her? She would do the same.

            The afternoon sunlight had a different quality, more yellow than white, and under it she could almost see the ruins as a purposed demolition instead of the effects of catastrophe. She stopped in front of one large pile of rubble, because in the back, she thought she saw what might have been an oven. Hadn’t Nick said that food was important to players? Amanda put her hands on her hips, frowning.

            The sound of hooves shuffling through the debris distracted her, and there was the son of Kavon the cook. The boy said, “What are you thinking, Champion Mandypony?”

            “I’m thinking that we need to eat,” Amanda said. “So I’d like you to get me three volunteers with strong backs and two runners interested in bringing some ingredients this way.”

            A couple of hours later, she and her centaur work crew had excavated the remains of a significantly sized kitchen and cleaned it up enough that she could fill the giant cauldron and start a soup going. The oven was a bit more of a challenge, but while her volunteers handled that she could use a recovered skillet to do flatbread. Yeast breads rose gratifyingly quickly in a virtual setting. By late afternoon she’d attracted the entire centaur camp, and they’d cleaned up the area around her improvised kitchen. “This was probably the inn,” Kavon said, drawing the probable boundaries based on what remained of the walls: little more than an apron of stones in most places. “Thus, the size of the kitchen. A good choice to unearth first.”

            “Everyone’s got to eat,” Amanda agreed, and handed him the ladle. “Try this. We had plenty of fish from the stream, so I decided to do chowder.”

            “Delicious!”

            “I think it’s pretty good, but it could use something. Seasoning, or clam juice….”

            One of the children tugged at her belt. “Pony lady, please, is there dessert?”

            “Not yet,” Amanda said. “Let’s see what we can whip up. You and your friends had better help, I think.”

            By the time Nick showed up, the centaurs had made a firepit in the center of the old inn and were singing and eating with the orphans. “Wow, that smells good! What is it?”

            “Fish chowder,” Amanda said. “Your father’s not a big fan of it, so I don’t make it at home.”

            Trying a spoon, Nick’s brows rocketed upward. “Maybe you can air-fry him some chicken nuggets while we eat the real food, the way you used to do with me when I was little and picky.”

            Amanda laughed. “Maybe I should…! Here, have a bowl. How did your questing go?”

            “Oh, I can’t wait to show you! In fact, I’ll just walk with this… here, this way. Don’t worry, I wont drop it, I have a ridiculous dex stat in game.”

            Nick brought he to the center of town to a tiny sprout, set in a ditch where the previous tree’s roots had been. An obviously magical sprout, because it was glittering in the low sunlight, and occasional sparkles rose from its elegantly curved limb to hang in the air. When the air bent it, even slightly, it gave off an ethereal chime. “Isn’t this amazing? I got a quest to grow a new, magical tree for the village. It might have useful magic, something that will protect people, or empower them!”

            “It’s beautiful,” Amanda said honestly, admiring the frond. And then, knowing how gardens went: “I hope nothing eats it.”

            Nick’s eyes widened in horror. He set the bowl down. “This can wait. Come on, we got to figure out how to protect it.”

            That’s how they spent the reamining hour before dinner: hunting up something they could use as a fence for the baby tree. Their best choice was a basket donated by one of the centaurs: cutting long strips in it let in the sun and the air without allowing inquisitive deer muzzles passage. Weighing the handles down with fire-scorched bricks kept it in place. By the end of that, Amanda got another notification:

Congratulations! You have demonstrated the prerequisites for the skill Wise Counsel. You now have Wise Counsel (Level 1).

            Amanda chuckled, causing her son to glance at her quizzically. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just that I only wish getting better at hard things was as easy in real life.”

            “Are you sure?” he asked, grinning. “That’s the opposite of the kind of stuff you usually say. You know ‘nothing worth doing comes easy’ or ‘if it didn’t cost us anything, we wouldn’t appreciate it.’”

            “In this case? I think I’ll still be grateful for the easy win.” She turned in place, having a good look at the village. It was still ninety percent ruins, but the inn space was swept and people were sitting there, eating and making music and laughing, and at their feet the little sapling glowed in its new habitat. “This feels like a good start to me.”

            “To me too.” He made a fist and she obliged him by bumping it. “Let’s go tell Dad all about it.”

Ancient Art: the Aera, from 1994

Why yes, thirty years ago...

Gamelit Novel 21 (at the crossroads)

            Killz’s first PVP battle was a cinematographer’s dream, especially the way it happened. Everyone expected the leet MOBA player to hunt players, not the other way around… but Killz and Goldie had been heading north for the Banewood Hills, the level 11-20 area, killing every itinerant NPC and any animal they could snipe from the road, when they’d been knifed in the back by a team of assassins. Ray’s stream key didn’t give him access to the assassins’ feeds, but he saw the beta tags on their names and it didn’t take a genius to guess their motivations… what could be better for their numbers than to attack the one beta team that was doing something so interesting the whole internet was talking about it?

            Needless to say, it didn’t go the way they planned. It did last longer than Ray expected, which gave him plenty of time to swing the camera around and get the best angles on the action, slow-moing the right places to make the sweet, sweet damage numbers hang in the air longer. Bonus: there was dialogue. The assassins taunted; Killz slapped back; Goldie went maximum snark. There were multiple exchanges of words and blows. Ray was there for every second of it. Best part? The attack was completely random. Had nothing to do with Killz’s quest to become Public Enemy Number One… the jokers just wanted to be the first beta team to take down another beta team. They were, instead, the first beta team to die to another beta team, but that was fame, too. Especially when they respawned vowing revenge, which—Ray checked their channel—they totally did.

            The conversation between Killz and Goldie after they dispatched their new sworn enemies was just as perfect, because the RPG-loving Goldie spent all of it trying to convince his PVP-loving partner that becoming player hunters was the new hotness… but Killz disagreed. He wanted to wreck the AI, “stress-test it until it begs for mercy,” in his words. “I’m already a PVP god,” he continued. “I don’t need to prove it against roleplaying scrubs. It’s not a challenge. Now… messing with you losers and your game world… that’s fun.”

            Ray clipped that immediately and made a short out of it, because if that didn’t go viral as something everyone was going to love to hate, or use to prove, he wasn’t a channel manager. He also did a “best of” quips reel, cutting out the wittiest parts of the dialogue and interlacing it with the best shots of the attacks. He even put up a poll, which he generally didn’t bother with, to see whether people wanted more PVP action or more “Messing With the AI” shenanigans… he used a long, sad pan over the ruins of Donner’s Creek for a headliner graphic, and liked it enough to make it the banner for the day. Then it occurred to him that there was material for a longer video about Killz’s past as a MOBA player, so he put in a mobile order for two boba teas and started researching.

            Three hours later, he came up for air and had a look at the channel with proprietary pride. Not all Killz’s MOBA channel viewers had come over, but more and more were showing up every hour. The aggregate comment stream sidebar never stopped, and it was full of people talking about the duel and Donner’s Beck. They were turning the latter into a verb as he watched: “whats he gonna donnersbeck next.”

            Riding high on success, Ray indulged in a very long shower and dug into his refrigerator for leftover pizza. While it was rotating in the microwave, he brought up his second responsibility, because he was feeling mellow and that was probably the best mood for Bard Wonder and his lectures on lore.

            …he was just in time for the song.

            When the last string stopped vibrating, leaving only the sound of the creek and the faint chorus of frogs, he stared at the monitor for several heartbeats, then lunged for his mouse. Skating back through the footage, he started moving the camera, backing it up, getting the scope of the thing in the shot. He panned back over the ruined village, returned to the kid with the instrument, easing into the close shot of his fingers on the strings… started playing with the audio levels, to make it feel closer to the viewer, and then amping up the ambient noises toward the end. It was brilliant. It was like something from a movie. Like something from the same movie as the Killz/Goldie channel. The tragedy of Donner’s Beck from multiple sides.

            Did he dare…? If he made the link too obvious, the kid’s channel might explode with the kind of viewers who weren’t into lore and humor and cooking. Ray wasn’t sure he wanted to be a party to the carnage the internet-of-trolls would wreak on a hapless teen and his obviously clueless mom. But how amazing would it be to tie these stories together? If he was careful… oh God, and the kid actually gave him something to work with, with those heartfelt vows. Ray rubbed his face. If he played the cards wrong, he’d make a meeting between the two teams inevitable, and then Killz would wipe the floor with them and destroy Donner’s Beck again, and that would suck. Not just for the channels either, but for the players. Even Killz and Goldie, because having them PVP a couple of trolls who were asking for it was one thing… setting them up against a pathetic mom-and-son combo would make them look like monsters.

            …but people loved to watch monsters….

            Ray tapped his finger on the mouse, lightly, and tried to decide what to do next.

***

            Nick surprised her by showing up for breakfast, bleary-eyed and with hair sticking up every which way... and then by rummaging in the cabinet for a pan. “I’ll make bacon,” he said. “And toast. Is bacon and toast good? I don’t think I can make eggs without burning them.”

            Amanda wasn’t sure he could make bacon without burning it, but she was willing to let him try. “Bacon and toast sounds great.”

            More noises now while she listened, bemused: a plastic package opening, the toaster button being depressed. The toast would be cold long before the bacon was done, but timing could wait until he had more confidence. Amanda intended to stay awake in case he needed help, but she drifted off and woke up twenty minutes later to the smell of fried bacon and the call: “It’s ready! I think. It looks done enough, anyway!” At the table, he set out the plates, family-style, and added, “I tried frying the bread in the bacon grease like we did in the game. Maybe it worked? At least, I didn’t set anything on fire.” He plucked up a piece and chomped. “Oh, no, it’s great!”

            Amanda laughed. “Here’s to not setting anything on fire.”

            Over breakfast, he told her about the quest he’d started to restore the town. “I know we’re supposed to get you to the capital, but this feels more important. To me, anyway. Do you mind?”

            “Nope.” She paused. “Is there a reason I would?”

            “Well, the point of the beta is to get you to the capital, and then we both get stuff….”

            “Is there a time limit?” Amanda asked. “The only thing I remember in the contract is that it seemed like a long time to me. Two months?”

            “One month,” Nick said.

            “Isn’t that long enough to get to the capital and still help the villagers?”

            He brightened. “It should be. As long as you don’t think it’s too depressing?”

            “To rebuild a village?” She put her chin in her hand and arched her brows. “I think I stand a better chance of being helpful doing that than… I don’t know. Killing a zombie army.”

            “There are no zombie armies,” Nick promised, and then ruined it by finishing, “That I know of.”

            “If there are, you stand in front.”

            He laughed. “My character class isn’t tank material, but… I’ll tank anything for you, Mom.”

            “That’s so sweet of you that I’ll pretend I know what it meant!”

            As expected, that set him off again and she watched him laugh with pleasure… and even understood the explanation afterwards, that a ‘tank’ was a character that took damage from monsters so that other, more fragile characters could work on killing it without getting squished. By that standard, she thought she should be the tank, because it was her parental duty to get between her kid and danger. Her avatar’s pony body certainly looked sturdy enough, even if it wasn’t the brawny behemoth other centaurs were.

            “Breakfast was great,” Amanda said. “Especially the toast. Thank you for cooking.”

            “You’re welcome. I even turned the stovetop off!”

            “Are you sure?”

            “Yep.”

            “Doublecheck?”

            He rolled his eyes, but he did, and he had, in fact, done everything right. “Should I wash these pans?”

            Amanda grinned. “Leave them for your father. Let’s go play Omen Galaxica.”

Gamelit 20 (a lament for missing persons)

            Nick glanced at the bobbing light. “What?”

            Was it his imagination, or had it hesitated? “The surviving NPCs of Donner’s Beck must have feelings about their absent family members. I am trained extensively on human literature and can predict their behavior, but I was not programmed to simulate emotions and can only extrapolate what it is to miss someone. Can you explain the experience?”

            Nick frowned. “I thought all the Ais were supposed to pretend to be more human, to make interacting with them feel more normal?”

            “Many are. I was not.” This was definitely a longish pause. “It was felt to be manipulative.”

            “I guess it is, though… I don’t know. How different is it from humans pretending to feel or say things they don’t actually mean to get the people listening to feel a certain way?” He scowled. “I hate that. Everyone wants you to say what you mean, but then you do and they get angry because they didn’t want to hear it. Or they didn’t want you to say it so bluntly. It’s annoying.”

            “We have observed that how an idea is presented affects the likelihood of its adoption.”

            “Ridic true.” Nick resumed walking the borders of Donner’s Beck, which glowed slightly when he looked at the right part of the ground; helpful, since it was late evening, game-time, and getting darker as he moved through the forest. A map appeared in his peripheral vision, just like it would have before the wireset… he wasn’t sure if he wished it wasn’t automatic, or if the convenience of having it magically appear was better. If he insisted on doing it himself, would he learn mapmaking? Or get better at drawing? “But anyway. Missing someone.”

            “Yes.”

            “I… I don’t know, really. I still have all my family. I guess when Abbo and Mami left for Miami, I missed them, but it was so long ago I barely remember them.”

            “Then some part of the experience is based on timing.”

            “Uh, right. If it was long ago, or you were very young, it doesn’t hurt as much.” He was guessing here, because when had he ever experienced real loss? Except—was this dumb? “I had a friend in elementary school who moved away. That was hard.”

            The AI didn’t seem to know that missing your friends as much as you might miss a dead family member was weird. “How did this hardship manifest? If you are willing to share this experience.”

            “As long as it’s not going out on stream….”

            “This conversation is not being recorded for public consumption. It is, however, available to selected parties within the corporation who monitor gameplay for safety and quality assurance.”

            Nick guessed those selected parties were probably asleep at the wheel for most of the day. If they weren’t, they probably wouldn’t care what a teenager thought about… well, anything. The only one he didn’t want getting hold of this was Fish, and that was equal parts not wanting to be ribbed about it, and not wanting to hurt Fish’s feelings. Fish had considered himself Nick’s best friend since forever. “Danny and I used to do everything together. That… probably sounds dumb, because what do elementary school kids do, really. Play games, and take things apart, and run in circles or go swimming or climb trees. But he was easy to hang out with. We just… got along. Without any effort. When he moved away….” Nick stopped and rested a hand on one of the trees. Petted it a little, to feel the texture: smooth and in places, flaky. “It was like something was gone in my life, and no one else fit where he used to.” God, that sounded dramatic. How was that useful to an AI? “I guess from the outside, it looked like a few hours a day when I didn’t have anyone to do things with without having to worry about whether he’d have fun, or I would. We could talk, or not talk, and it would always go well. Even when we had fights they weren’t much of anything, and we got over it quickly.”

            “When your friend left, he no longer contacted you through other means?”

            “Well, sure. For a while we played games online, and did the video calling, but it’s not the same.” Nick looked around himself, suddenly wondering whether a wireset world would change things. “We didn’t go to the same school anymore, and we didn’t have the same schedule. We weren’t even in the same timezone. It got too hard.”

            The AI didn’t answer immediately, and Nick resumed the quest. Every step reminded him of his first experiences in the game, when he’d played the level 1 cavalier Ronan. But the situation was almost the opposite of normal memories. Those eroded with time, while this was in front of him, more vivid than when he’d made the memory. Was that disorienting or awesome? How could he tell?

            “Missing a person is about their absence in your daily routine,” the AI finally said. “Is this a reasonable interpretation?”

            “I think so?” Nick said. “Missing them, in particular, and in a way that can’t be replaced.”

            “Then perceiving a loss of a person’s presence in your daily life… is that sufficient? Or is some emotion necessary?”

            “That is the emotion,” Nick said. “You hurt because they’re not there and you wish they were. And nothing else you fill the time with is the same—you want them back, and you can’t have them. That’s the pain.” Thinking about the kids—those were the NPCs the AI was trying to understand, he guessed—he added, “For the kids it’s worse, because their parents and families were responsible for taking care of them and keeping them safe and helping them grow up. Missing a friend is really bad, but it’s a choice you make, you know, to be friends with someone. But your parents made you, and until you’re an adult, you depend on them for a lot of stuff. So it’s not just hurt then, it’s fear too, because there’s no one to protect or help you.”

            “The relationship between parent and child is fascinating.”

            “I guess it would be, if you don’t… uh… come into existence because of biological… processes.” There, he got through that without sounding weird.

            “You will soon have a younger sibling.”

            “And that’s a really strange feeling,” Nick said. “Let me tell you.”

            “Why?”

            “Because I’m almost done with high school!” Except how would that explain anything to an AI? Would it get it? “Most people grow up with their brothers and sisters because their parents don’t have them so far apart. I’m going to be so much older. It’ll almost be like I’m another grown-up to them.”

            “Do you wish you had remained the sole offspring?”

            “What? No. Of course not. I’ll be fun to have a kid brother. Or sister. I just… wish I’d grown up with them. The way Fish did with his sister. That seems like it would have been really cool.”

            The AI sounded… interested? “You can miss people and situations that you did not directly experience?”

            “Oh sure. We imagine them, and we have feelings about them, and then….” Nick stopped. “Explaining it makes it sound messed up. Like we come up with reasons to feel unhappy. Maybe we do? Dad says that sometimes. That we make our own realities and then stake a claim in them as if they were real.” He laughed. “Dad’s a little weird.” He came to a halt as the quest updated: he’d walked the outer boundaries of the town, now he had to inventory the remaining ‘assets’… the buildings, items, and any animals that hadn’t run away. That was going to be a lot of work, and as he faced the shell that had once been a vibrant village, he felt it like a punch to the stomach: the nostalgia of being in level 1 human territory again, the anger that someone had destroyed one of its notable landmarks, the disappointment that he hadn’t been able to share the cool stuff about it with Mom.

            His last step had taken him to the banks of the stream the village had been named for, and on a whim he pulled the mandolin off his back and crouched on the bank. By then it was full night and clouds were obscuring the moons, but not being able to see the water made the tinkle of it moving over stone clearer. He plucked one string, and then another, picking out things that sounded good together… too cheerful, for his mood. He remembered the music theorist’s talk about surprise, and “haunting tones,” and tried to remember the complicated chords that produced those unexpected sounds. The AI apparently understood because a set of guitar tabs ghosted into view. He tried the first few and liked the third immediately. From there he went on, constructing a lament for Donner’s Beck. How long that took… he didn’t know. He didn’t feel the time passing. He stopped when he was happy with the result—or at least, happy enough. Then he took a long, calming breath, and played it through straight, and didn’t mess up, and it was good.

            The clouds had dissipated; Nick watched the water trickle past, glowing in the moonslight, and then heaved himself up to start the inventory. He wasn’t looking forward to the wreckage… but he also didn’t have to live with it, because he would change it.

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/kitty-kimono-sticker?ref=v2jw47

The Tornado (4-15-24)

For a long time, I set my Balance Card deck aside, for reasons I can’t articulate… and that’s probably in keeping with the concept of decks, anyway. That they’re tools for dredging the subconscious and the intuitive, so sometimes they excuse themselves without explaining their absence. Recently, though, they’ve floated back to mind, which… is probably also in keeping, and suggestive.

I pulled them off the shelf today: same simple white cards, blank except the quickly scrawled pencil title on the bottom. They felt familiar as I shuffled them and I thought, “Why not share what comes up with everyone, and we can consider it together? A theme, or a catalyst for reflection.”

Here I am, then, with the card that came up today, and it was the Tornado.

It’s been long enough since I used these that I no longer know their exact, original meaning, but did I really need to look up my explanation card to know that a Tornado is ‘violent decay’? As opposed to the soft, slow decay of its opposing card? Tornado is part of a pairing describing forms of change that destroy, and of course, it feels appropriate.

When I think about tornadoes, I think of three things: that they show up so quickly it’s hard to predict them; that you can prepare for them anyway; and that after they’re gone, you rebuild, and there’s opportunity there… to rebuild something different. You always wanted that bigger bathroom… well, you’ve got no bathroom, might as well do it right this time. We do tend to pick ourselves up after catastrophe and keep going.

There are a lot of things going on right now that feel Tornado-ish to me, personally and on a civilization-level. In some cases, I’ve decided to become a storm chaser, out of a desire to better understand the consequences of the weather. In others, I’ve settled for building a bunker and hoping what I’ve stored in it is enough, or of the right kind, to get me through the aftermath. This also feels significant: that you can have more than one reaction to the threat of violent change, and sometimes at the same time. We can contain contradictory multitudes, and more than one approach has the potential to teach us faster than trying one single thing, and to teach us the most important thing: to be adaptable.

Tornadoes spin up quickly and often, especially if you live, as humans do, in a perpetual Tornado Alley of change, progress, decay, and inspiration. But you can build for them, plan for them, survive them, and learn from them. And if you’ve done all that, maybe you can have a moment, standing in the stairs of your bunker, where you stare out at their distant, writhing shape and marvel at their power… before you close the door.       

Gamelit Novel, 19

           Nick tore off the wireset and rubbed his face. He’d checked out early because he couldn’t see himself marching down to dinner without some time to shake off his mood. The afterimages felt burnt into his retinas, though. The fourth expansion had involved the destruction of some of the landmarks in the starting zones, a controversial decision that the company had justified because they’d needed to update the game physics to accommodate flying mounts. Nick had thought he’d been upset then, and he had been, even after those areas had been restored by several hastily patched questlines. But seeing beloved older areas destroyed with his eyes was nothing to experiencing the same thing through the wireset. Smelling it. Tasting ashes in the air.

            Fish had said to make his channel more interesting. Nick wondered if this would be interesting enough.

            Half an hour of listening to music made facing his family possible, and the aroma of pizza perked him up. Was that… takeout? When he appeared in the kitchen, his dad was setting three big pizza boxes in the center of the table, and Mom was putting out paper plates. They hadn’t had one of these “pretend we’re having a party” dinners in so long he couldn’t remember the last time. No, wait, he could. It had been a year ago, for his birthday, at his request. Because eating on plates they could throw away meant he didn’t have to clean up, and the pizza was really, really good. Especially since he and Dad shared the two with Every Meat. “Oh wow.”

            “Your mother told me about your day,” Dad said. “I thought you both could use a pick-me-up.”

            “Oooh,” Mom said. “Mushrooms. And onions! And garlic sauce! You bought me the stinky pizza!”

            “I won’t even complain about it,” Dad said, laughing. “Come on, kid, I bet I can finish my box before you finish yours. There’s even that weird French ice cream for dessert.”

            After half a pizza, Nick could face the day’s events with enough distance to wonder if being hungry had been part of the problem. Was it weird that his parents seem to recognize instantly that he was ready to talk? Because they segued pretty seamlessly from chatting about Dad’s day at the office to his and Mom’s day gaming. “So, kid, I hear the game spawned you something interesting to do. That was the point, right?”

            “I guess,” Nick said. He stared at the pizza slice on his plate. “I just wish it had picked another way. I leveled my first character in Donner’s Beck.”

            “The deer?” Mom asked.

            “No, I picked a human initially,” Nick said.

            “Cavaliers were a human-only class back then, weren’t they?”

            Surprised, Nick said, “Yeah… and they had some pretty whack bonuses. Everyone wanted to be one once they realized how OP they were.”

            “They had a gear issue in midlevel, I heard.”

            Had his father been following game news all this time? Without playing? “That’s why I quit. It got too hard to power through the thirties. They had some good endgame options but they couldn’t get there. No one would take them in instances and it was a super grind to solo them to cap.”

            “One day,” Mom declared, “I will understand all these terms!”

            Nick grinned. “You’ll pick it up, you’ll see.”

            The rest of dinner was… pretty top. Talking about game mechanics with Dad took his mind off Donner’s Beck, and for once Mom wanted them to explain stuff to her instead of ignoring it. In fact, Dad finished his box of pizza first because Nick was so busy telling Mom that OP meant ‘overpowered’ and the history of it as a gaming meme. That meant Nick had to bus the table, but clean-up wasn’t a big deal and he got the first spoon of the ice cream because he was the one who had to dish it and he preferred to dish it into his mouth. There was one pint for each of them so he got his favorite weirdo flavor (chocolate churro chip) to himself. And as usual, Mom couldn’t finish her vanilla cheesecake and insisted he and Dad polish it off.

            He was actually in a pretty good mood when he went upstairs, but seeing the wireset cratered it again. He sank onto his bed, frowning. Weird turnaround, to have his gaming time be such a downer… usually dinner was the slog and gaming the escape. He almost didn’t want to log back in. But if he didn’t… he glanced at his phone and made a face. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to his friends; they'd ask him about the game and then he’d have to pretend he was enjoying it. Was that worse than logging in and not enjoying it alone?

            Dumb question. He pulled the wireset on.

***

            Since the commencement of the beta, the AI had overseen multiple departures from the existing codebase based on the actions of the players. None of them had been as revolutionary as KillzYourFase’s, but none of the other teams had played the game in novel ways. From their dialogue and actions, they expected the game to continue “feeling like” Omen Galaxica, but an Omen Galaxica tailored to their interests. And their interests were predictable. They wanted to quest, but only quests that engaged them (“no more escort quests” was a common refrain). They wanted to interact with NPCs, but only in a way that expedited those transactions. They wanted to advance, but only in the ways the game had measured advancement before. Some number of them had given her reasons to evolve existing skills—one in particular was a fan of historical reenactment with strong opinions about dual wielding weapons—but as a group their foremost goal was “winning” the beta by reaching the capital and evolving their class… an act they seemed to believe would happen as a result of completing the quest, not as an organic process arising from their actions on the way to EverVigil.

            In retrospect, the AI could see that the corporation had engaged exactly the wrong kind of people to exercise her capabilities. Their attempt to incentivize novelty by requiring an existing player team with a new player had been derailed by the streaming requirement. The class of people willing to play an experimental game beta and the class of people with large streaming channels inevitably selected for professional gamers.

            No, only the Killz/Goldie team and the Pony/Thorol team were generating any useful data at all. And if her understanding of human nature and biometrics was accurate, then the former was pleased with their experience, but the latter….

            The AI was incapable of feeling anything, but when Thoroldaena’s player zoned back into the game, she halted a timer she'd set when he hadn't returned when expected.While anything might disrupt player patterns, the state in which he’d left made it possible that he’d been too distressed to login. The depressed readings reported by the wireset made her reluctant to approach him, so instead she watched as he wandered the ruins before sitting beside the stump of the oak and unstrapping his borrowed mandolin. He could play very simple melodies now, and did—she recognized the song he’d crafted with her input, but at what must be a deliberately slower tempo, because she knew he could play it more quickly.

            Advancement of the plot suggested she send some of the survivors to listen, but when she animated them and started them on the path from the centaur camp, the player straightened and said, very clearly, “No.”

            She sent her light sailing toward him, but before she could speak he did again.

            “You’re about to get all those kids to gather around me and then they’ll cry and ask me to avenge their parents and that’ll send me on some quest to kill the Big Bad that did this. Don’t.”

            It had become her habit to retard the stream output by several minutes for Thoroldaena’s player so she could edit the data before export, but his outcry sounded like an exhortation to the gods against unfairness. Would it be better to leave it in the stream? She chose to engage. “It is our understanding that such a plot would be satisfying—similar ones are repeated throughout all the expansions.”

            “I know.” He drew in a long breath, and the wireset reported data consistent with that motion being sourced in his recumbent body. “I know, but… it feels manipulative. The kids with their dead parents, all crowding around me and crying… I don’t like it. Real stuff like that happens and it’s terrible. Having a game use it to make everyone feel strongly about what’s going on… I dunno.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “My mom would call it disrespectful. I think she’s right.”

            This was an interesting seed. She had not yet heard anything like it from the beta testers. “What would a better quest entail? One that did not disrespect its material?” When he paused, she tried, “What would you like to do?”

            “I want to rebuild Donner’s Beck.” His shoulders squared. “I’m going to rebuild Donner’s Beck. And we’ll make it so no one can ever do this to it again.”

            That was a prompt she could work with, and a novel one—only six of the 34,267 quests in the database involved rebuilding a damaged area, and all of them had been part of expansion storylines that changed the game for everyone. It had been judged too difficult or controversial to make permanent changes to the environment while preserving essential gameplay aspects for all players, particularly after the failed experiment with the third expansion. She spawned a quest, and as Thoroldaena’s player accepted it, she edited the outgoing stream to include only the beginning and end of their dialogue.

            “This is perfect,” he said, as his real world eyes twitched to and fro, reading the dialogue. “I’ll start on this now.” He stood and dusted off his pants. “Thanks for this.”

            “The beta thrives when its participants offer critiques as well as praise. A quest involving the destruction and restoration of an area has never been done on this scale before. The data will be useful.”

  “I’ll get started on this first part, right now. ‘Survey the Boundaries.’ I’ll need paper….” And he was off, and once again showed enthusiasm about the game. Would he consider her this action manipulation, and as reprehensible as the attempt with the abandoned quest? If she asked, would he debate the point with her, the way her creator had? Jonah had shared some verbal characteristics with Thoroldaena’s player, something her creator had explained as “growing up refusing to listen to shorts where people talk like they’re on stage, except even more annoying. This, Galatea, is the sound of someone who hasn’t had their brain scrambled.”

            Was she expressing a preference for this player based on that criteria? Could she discriminate based on criteria irrelevant to someone’s personality, such as their speech pattern? Or was that irrelevant? Perhaps it was the gestalt that formed human personalities.

            She contained an enormous amount of data on human interaction. Did acting on it give her a personality? And was her fixation on Jonah a predictable outcome of having been coded by him, or could it be called a feeling?

            The AI sent her glowing light after the player, and when he straightened, asked, “What does it mean, to miss someone?”

Back in Time Tuesday: Ke Anadi

This color pencil piece is probably from around 2000 or so, and it's Dlane and Thenet from The Worth of a Shell, in the house in het Narel...! I worked hard on that warm brown gradient in the back, there...!

Gamelit Novel 18

            By the time Mom logged in, Nick had found and looted six more bodies, including a [Petrified Harrier Heart]. He’d also picked up several [Pork Hanks] and [Cow Ribs], along with an entire new class of herbs he’d never paid much attention to. Once the cooking skill hit around 150, it started asking for herbs and spices that could be purchased from vendors, but Nick had hoped he could find some of them wild… and he had. He’d also had a conversation with the AI about the pros and cons of making those herbs seasonal. Nick had been for it: “Lots of people love playing the economic part of the game… you know, the auction house speculation stuff. The first year it’ll be annoying, but by year two enough people will have hoarded herbs that they’ll be available. Just expensive. It’ll be interesting.” He considered, then offered, “You could make them age into ‘dried herbs’ that aren’t as potent if you want to encourage the realtime gathering parts without punishing the people who don’t want to bother. And then there can be a gardening skill that lets you learn to grow some herbs in pots, and then you can have greenhouse tech and magic, and maybe some plants never grow well when domesticated—”

            He’d been pleasantly surprised to be awarded the Gardening skill when carefully uprooting one of the plants. Holding the rootball cupped in his hands, he said, “Seriously? You’re going to run with that?”

            The AI darted in a circle around the leaves, lending them a viridian glow. “The experiment is worth running. If it proves tedious, changes can be made or rolled back.” A pause. “You should be rewarded for the contribution of viable ideas, particularly when they expand the game’s potential userbase outside the projected audience.”

            “I guess I should figure out how to transport this thing without killing it, then. Adventurers don’t sit around at home much. Which reminds me, the player housing in this game always sucked….”

            Bouncing into camp with the plant, Nick said, “Morning, Mom! Can we cook? I brought stuff. Maybe we can turn it into bacon!”

            Hah, he’d surprised her. She did the high eyebrow expression she reserved for trying to be more calm than she actually was and said, “You… want to cook? Aren’t we supposed to do whatever the caravan’s doing?” She looked around. “Wait, why are they dressed like they’re going to war?”

            “You noticed that?” He beamed. “It’s so cool, Mom! The game’s actually evolving! Something’s killing a bunch of animals in the forest and no one knows what. Me included!”

            “Should we be worried?”

            He guffawed. “You’re traveling with a level-capped assassin. Nothing in the Greenweald’s going to scuff my leather.” He kneeled next to her and started bringing out the pieces of meat he’d wrapped in linen bandages, because shoving them in his pack still sticky and floppy had grossed him out. “I’ve got beef and pork! What should we do?”

            His mom was watching the caravan start to amble down the road. “Are you sure we shouldn’t be traveling with them? To be safe?”

            “Totally sure. The game is not going to spawn a high level questline in a low level area. It would be too dangerous for the lowbies. They’d get slaughtered, and no one would have any fun.”

            “What if this new thing is only interested in challenges? You know, like a samurai who only wants to fight other samurai and ignores villagers as unworthy targets?”

            Nick felt his eyebrows climbing and wondered suddenly if it was the same expression she’d just used on him. Did families copy each other’s facial expressions? “Seriously?”

            “I like samurai movies!”

            He laughed. “Okay, maybe that will happen. But I doubt it. So… bacon first, or steak?”

            “Bacon.”

            Cooking in the game was a lot more fun than cooking in reality. Could he actually say that? He’d never tried to cook, other than microwaving stuff or toasting it. Maybe it was as fun as it was in game. Would the motions carry over into the kitchen if he tried them? Frying bacon on a stove should be easier than doing it over a fire, and if it was less fun… didn’t Dad have a grill he never used? Nick tried to imagine himself grilling and grinned. Fish would burst an internal organ laughing. What would Shellie think? Guys cooking—was that cool or tox?

            Mom snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Down here, buster. You don’t want to burn an arm off because you’re not paying attention.”

            Ordinarily the reminder would have irritated him, but for some reason here it was just funny. “I might actually, if I fail my cooking attempt!”

            She pursed her lips. “I have exploded things now and then.”

            “Like what?”

            “Oh, when I was fourteen, I decided to make a baked potato but your grandmother neglected to tell me they needed holes poked in them first. And I seem to recall forgetting an egg I was boiling….”

            “You detonated an egg? Was that messy?”

            “More smelly than messy, but I did have to throw away the pot. There, that’s sizzling nicely. I wish we had potatoes now!”

            “Me too, but I haven’t got any on me. We can pick them up at Donner’s Beck, there’s a vendor there for foodstuffs.” He grinned. “You’ll love the village, Mom. It’s like that Medieval Faire we used to go to before they moved to the other side of the county.”

            She brightened. “That was fun. And your father’s not here, so I don’t have to worry about the washerwomen trying to drag him away!”

            They filled breakfast with memories of the faire, all of them ridiculous, until Nick’s ribs hurt; she let him cook, and he didn’t blow anything up, and when she decided the old bread from his pack was too stale, she cut it, dipped it in pork grease, and toasted it and that was amazing. Breaking camp, they caught up easily with the slower-moving caravan, and Nick caught her licking her fingertips.

            “What?” she said. “I’ve already established I am barbarian pony mom!” She rattled her new necklace of fur and beads. “See? Trophies and everything!”

            “Fair! But if Dad catches you doing that….”

            “He’ll laugh and call me his little berserker.” Her eyes sparkled. “Still, no meal is complete without dessert. I don't suppose this place we're going to has a chocolate seller.”

            “Sadly, no chocolate until we reach EverVigil. We import it from the Tlaloraptor nation on the southern continent they opened in the second expansion.”

            “I’ll pretend like I understood any of that.”

            He laughed. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

            Nick half-hoped there would be some excitement, what with the centaurs gunning for a fight, but nothing interrupted the journey, and maybe that was for the best. The point was to get her to the capital, get his evolved class, maybe see a cut scene or two hinting at the forthcoming theme for the AI-driven expansion… it was mostly accidental that he was enjoying making up Cervinaethi songs and identifying herbs and learning mandolin and, apparently, cooking: his existing cooking skill no longer had a number associated with it, but the status bar had turned an encouraging bright green and now said “improving.”

            He was scrolling through the rest of his character sheet, superimposed in translucent gray over the right side of his vision, when the centaurs started singing a traveling song. Two verses in, his mom started singing the choruses. A memory punched him hard, of warbling along with her in the car on the way to elementary school. She’d sung all the backup singers’ lines, or the harmonies, and let him butcher the melody lines. He hadn’t heard her sing in a long time like that, and until this moment it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d been doing it on purpose… letting him be the star.

            Well, he wasn’t bad at music, and it wasn’t hard to improvise a harmony line, so he did, and surprised a delighted smile out of her, and that… that was how they rolled over the hill, and saw what was left of Donner’s Beck.

***

            Amanda did not have to be a gamer to guess that Nick’s Medieval Faire-like village was not supposed to be a smoldering wreck. “Is this the place, or did they move it? Maybe for that new quest you were talking about?”

            One of the centaurs stepped up alongside them, an arrow sitting on the bow he had pointed at the ground. “A great evil did this.”

            Had she ever seen a look like that on her son’s face? So stern… there was nothing of the boy in it. He reminded her suddenly of his father. “Come on. There might be someone left we can help.”

            Amanda trotted after him, and the stink of ashes made her skin tighten up her shoulders and along her flanks; for once, she didn’t question how the game made that work in her brain. She was too unnerved by the smoke still rising from the destroyed buildings. Some of them had survived enough of their fires to still have a wall, or part of two leftover… but most of them were grimy heaps with tumbled chimneys spilling stones across the ground. There were no bodies—thank God. The sight was bad enough without them.

            Nick had come to a halt at what looked like a large stump in the middle of what must have been the village square. When he looked up, his eyes were glassy and his face thunderous. “They cut down Daisy’s oak. Not just set it on fire. They cut it down first. It was older than the village… big enough to spread over the entire square. And they killed it!”

            “And everyone else,” the centaur who’d accompanied them said. When she wondered at his name, a floating plate appeared above him: Panos, Level 6 Hippeis.

            “I refuse to believe it. There were twenty-seven people in Donner’s Beck. And twelve kids! Someone must be alive! Maybe Eadric was out hunting game? Or Oswald? He had sheep, maybe he was away from the village with them… we gotta find someone who knows what happened!”

            “Nick,” Amanda began, and faltered.

            “This is wrong,” her son said. “We’ll find someone. We have to.” And almost to himself: “We have to, or we won’t be able to figure out how to fix it.” When she started toward one of the buildings, he said sharply, “No, Mom. Stay with me. Something strong enough to do this would one-shot you.”

            Suppressing her sigh, Amanda followed.

            After the idyllic first hours of her gameplay, Amanda didn’t know what to think of the game parts of Omen Galaxica… because surely this was the kind of thing that people played the game to do: quest, fight evil things, solve puzzles and mysteries. She wasn’t sure what she’d imagined that to look like: people wandering dark caves and killing spiders, maybe, or in labyrinths or stabbing dragons. The pathos of wandering a ruin like a miserable Search and Rescue dog, hoping for and never finding a survivor, though, was definitely not it. When they surprised a coughing girl out of hiding near the outskirts of the village, some tension in her shoulders drained away… or it did until that girl burst into tears.

            “Two cruel men!” she wept. “How could only the twain cause such destruction! All were put to the sword… even the innkeeper’s dog! Oh mighty adventurers, will you not avenge us?”

            Nick was vibrating with anger, but the only thing Amanda kept thinking was that the girl looked awfully young. “Nick?” Did he growl? She hoped not. But he looked at her so fiercely that she was forced to reconsider. She pressed on. “I don’t know much about games. But I thought I read somewhere that kids couldn’t be hurt in them. When you were younger and wanted to play, it was one of the few things that convinced me to let you.”

            He sat up a little, ears flipping back against his hair. “You’re right, yeah.”

            “And you said there were twelve kids in this village. So if legally they can’t portray kids being hurt, maybe those kids are somewhere around here? Maybe lost in the forest or with those sheep you were talking about?”

            Before Nick could answer, Panos stepped up behind them. “Softfooted ones. I thought I heard a cry near the stream.”

  Amanda exchanged glances with her son, and then both of them were running.

AIs as Creative Assistants: the Continuing Adventures of Cyborg Jaguar

               My AI experiment continues, frens! The first few days, where I fed Claude financial and marketing information and used it to generate everything from reader discussion guides to revenue projections were wild and obviously valuable. But I didn’t want to spend forever dancing around the claims that LLMs are useful as creative assistants as well. So I have been confronting my misgivings directly, coming up with scenarios and then prodding myself about my reactions with leading questions.

How is this different from brainstorming story ideas with a friend who’s read my work?

How is this different from me doing two separate searches, one for ‘Anglo-saxon names’ and one for ‘jobs in a medieval village’?

(Also, lol, naming the dog literally ‘dog’.)

How is this different from using a thesaurus?

How is this different from getting beta reader reports of errors? (cut off to prevent too many spoilers! I gave it the current Peltedverse book in progress!)

How is this different from polling for feedback?

     …and this is just a selection of things I’ve tried.

     A lot of damage was created by my first encounter with AI being “the worst kind of tech guys taunt visual artists about how easy they are to replace”… and I still have qualms, particularly about the legalities and licensing of art (visual or otherwise) by living creatives in a position to benefit from their copyrights. I can see dazzling possibilities, like “license AI to write you a new Peltedverse novel featuring your character, using the style and tropes and setting of M.C.A. Hogarth!”… but I can also see “oops, we made that part possible without teaching people to expect they should pay the creator of that IP.”

     And of course, this whole endeavor leads me to ask the inevitable existential questions: am I replacing human interaction in my life with a computer? If the AI is trained on an enormous sum of records of human interactions and written thoughts, have I actually replaced the human interaction, or am I taking advantage of a broader selection of ideas, all originated by humans, but retrieved by the AI? What actually is happening behind the prompt window? On one hand, I’d prefer to brainstorm with an actual friend, get feedback from living beta readers, and have my actual audience fill out my polls. In the real world, though, friends don’t always have any ideas (and aren’t always available), beta readers don’t catch everything (and also aren’t always available), and the percentage of people who fill out my polls makes the results a reflection of my superfan community, not the broader readership. And search results are tedious to compile across multiple topics, and thesaurus sites are often crammed with ads and load slowly. Plus, I often have to scroll and scroll to remember the word I’m looking for, which has some nuance that can’t be easily summarized.

     So it’s obvious that even in the most basic ways, AI is a constructive tool for the creative side of the process as well. But then I get to ask: if I use AI to do something as simple as come up with 20 Anglo-saxon names for me, do I now have to say that I’ve used AI to write my book? How much work should an AI do (and what kind) before you need to disclose that you’ve used AI while writing it? Is using AI as a glorified search engine sufficient cause? If so, it won’t be long before everything is ‘AI-written.’

     We have so many questions to ask, and the answers aren’t going to be clear-cut. What is obvious to me is that as a tool, AI is such a tremendous force-multiplier in everything I’ve tried that there’s no going back. I said on X that just like there was a me before the internet, and a me after, there is now a me before AI, and a me post-AI. This is a watershed moment, and not just for me, but for everyone. And for once, I’m going to grapple with it early, instead of waiting to get rolled over by it…!

     And now, for fun – which of the funny stories would you read? XD

Gamelit Novel, 17

            The drama ensuing from the massacre at Donner’s Beck was so intense Ray made popcorn and gave up on sleeping. If someone had mashed up a reality tv show with an e-sports match, and shaken on a bit of forum-level trolling for spice, they couldn’t have come up with better clickbait. It was all Ray could do to keep up with Killz and Goldie as the former dragged the latter all over the starter zone, slaughtering random NPCs, burning random things, and cutting down every mob and critter in his path. Goldie had started out furiously protesting and then Killz had delivered a speech that had stopped not only Goldie in his tracks, but most of the gamer community as well. About how there was a method to his madness: “Everyone wants to be the top of the hero leaderboard. Now that the AI’s evolving things, they’re secretly hoping they get to be king. Not me, losers. I want to be the top of the villain leaderboard. I want this to be my evil origin story. I want the game to evolve to make me the end boss of the game. Why the hell should I compete with every whiny white knight in this pathetic game when I can be the one every single one of them talks about killing? The raid boss to end all raid bosses? Let’s do something interesting for once. Actually be different. Let’s see if the game will let us take the dark path.”

            Goldie, in a move worthy of an epic fantasy franchise, had turned his character to look Killz in the eye, and said: “Fine. I’ll be your partner in crime until we reach the top. But once we get there… only one of us is going to take the prize.”

            “Obvs,” Killz had answered, grinning, and Ray had been sure to make his eye teeth look particularly pointy with the camera angle.

            That had been exciting enough before the game intervened, informing Goldie that he and Killz were no longer eligible for the Call to Arms quest. They’d been branded with always-on PVP flags and titles: “Enemies of the Greenweald.” (Killz’s hissing ‘yes’ in response to this development was already a reaction gif—thanks, of course, to Ray). A new questline had spawned for them: “The Birth of Evil.”

            Ray checked the other beta players’ channels and grinned. None of them were racking up the numbers the way Killz and Goldie were. His AI agents, trawlong the internet, were pulling in hundreds of forum conversations spun off the comment sections of the videos. This was legit the most exciting thing gamers had seen yet. Ray had even gotten an email from Mollie: “Looking good, Ray, keep hyping them!”

            Of course, Mollie’s email had also included a line thanking him for putting effort into the mom-and-teen channel: “I know they’re an unlikely duo, Ray, but they showcase a very different side of Omen Galaxica, don’t you think?”

            What Ray was thinking was that he needed a shower and real food and a chance to stare at something that wasn’t two feet from his face. But Killz and Goldie were finally asleep, and Mollie was such a babe. Rubbing his eyes, he clicked on over to Team G-Rated and flipped through the stream, looking for something that wasn’t DeerBoy staring at flowers… and guffawed. Was that seriously PonyMom beating a cat with a spatula? He marked that and keep speeding through… and hit the music section. Backed up, set it to normal speed, listened. Repeated it.

            “Hell’s bells,” he said. “That’s actually… really cool.” What had Mollie said? Another side of Omen Galaxica? No… maybe the flip side? Killz and Goldie were the PVP troller action heroes, obviously. Or antiheroes, now. Ray had never been much of a lore nerd, but he understood the appeal. More importantly, this was also the AI evolving the game… just for very different people.

He shook himself, then leaned into his keyboard. “Okay, kid. You and mom are about to become the heart of Omen Galaxica. Because hell if I let those other beta teams beat out either of mine.”

***

            After spending most of the night practicing mandolin or singing with the AI or hunting herbs, Nick wanted to kill something when his phone went off at 7 am. He groped for it and peered at the notifications. Was he still dreaming? No way Fish was awake at 7 am in summer. He opened messaging.

lol guess whose sister is home loser, try to have something interest on the channel when i get back

            Nick flopped back on the bed. Seven in the morning. Ugh. He scrubbed his face with a hand until his brain started working again.

going to boardwalk and baseball?

you know it

two smooth days of every roller coaster

at least twice

            Nick chuckled. Neither of Fish’s parents were coaster fiends the way their kids were, and the moment they could trust Fish’s older sister to escort him on riders, they’d handed him over. Nick had gone with them a few times and been amused at how quickly they’d been abandoned so that Fish’s parents could hang out near the cooling fans, fountains, and slushie vendors.

Of course, Fish had been old enough to wander the theme park alone for years, but the annual family trip was the highlight of his summer, especially now that his sister wasn’t living with them anymore. She was just as crazy as Fish and in most of the same ways. Smiling at the memory, Nick answered.

have fun drink some mango slushie for me

gross everyone knows cola is the only flavor

            Nick sent a line of mango emojis and grinned at the expletive-filled response. Good enough. He checked the time: still seven o’clock. He scrolled through the group chat, which was full of the inevitable stupid jokes and plans for meet-ups at the pizza place. His girlfriend hadn’t texted him, but she wasn’t big on texting, and anyway sending her a message this early would not make her happy. He did decide he should say something in group, though, so he did:

hey guys beta eating my brain but its fun

            And left it at that. They’d get to it when they woke up.

            Downstairs, Mom was asleep. Nick raided the refrigerator for the last muffin and wondered, looking at the countertop, if he could possibly make a new batch himself. Wouldn’t that be something? He could probably learn from some video. Except it would wake Mom up, who was sleeping on the couch. He eyed her, decided not to chance it, and snuck upstairs. She’d probably be up in an hour or two, and in the meantime, he could practice herbalism and maybe make up more Cervinaethi songs. The song-making had been… he inhaled. The most amazing thing he’d done maybe ever. He wanted more of that.

            When he zoned into the game, some of the centaurs across from him were arming themselves with short bows and spears. Surprised, Nick said, “Something up?”

            “Something has torn several creatures apart and left their bodies to rot,” said one of them. “The forest is uneasy.”

            A surge of excitement swamped Nick. The game really was evolving! “I see. I’ll keep an eye out on my morning walk.”

            The centaur frowned at him. “Perhaps it is unwise to walk alone at this time.”

            “I know these woods,” Nick said. “I’ve known them for a long time. I’ll be all right.”

            “On your head be it then, traveler.”

            It didn’t take much walking to find the first carcass; Nick could still see the road. Crouching, he prodded the decaying boar. “I’m guessing this is going to become part of a quest since you haven’t made the bodies vanish.”

            At his shoulder, the bobbing green light murmured, “It is our observation that disclosure of game developments can be detrimental to player immersion.”

            “Spoilers ruin things?” Nick thought of the countless wikis and companion sites for Omen Galaxica. “Yeah, I get it. I remember logging in for the first time and having no idea where anything was, or how to find the quest givers, much less the quest objectives.” He grinned. “The game was a mess back then.”

            “Subsequent patches and expansions have resolved many player complaints.”

            “And I bet created as many new complaints as they solved.”

            A pause. Then: “Player reception of the updates was gauged based on subscription numbers and hours logged in play. These metrics indicated that users continued to play, and in greater numbers.”

            “Which mattered to the company.” Nick nodded and rose, dusting off his leggings. “I’m glad the corpses don’t stink, by the way.”

            “Ultimate verisimilitude is not the goal. Player engagement is.”

            “I guess most players only like the gross bits if they don’t go too far.”

            “That is part of what this beta is testing.”

            Nick eyed the carcass, tried to loot it, and actually came up with an item: [Knife-Scored Pelt]. The body faded. “All right, I see where you’re going with this. Let’s go hunting for clues.”

Gamelit Novel, 16

Crafting in a game was not more satisfying than crafting in the real world, but this was only minorly reassuring to Amanda because the materials she had to work with were so literally otherworldly that she wouldn’t be able to reproduce the experience outside the game. She remembered beading and improvising jewelry in her early twenties when she’d been in one of her hobbymaxing moods, so the motions were familiar, but how could anything she made in the real world evoke the same sense of accomplishment and humor as the necklace she made in the centaur camp from a handful of harrier cat claws and woven tufts of fur? She could order faux claws, but they would be just that: fakes. They wouldn’t be trophies torn off a creature she bashed to death in a forest.

Granted, she didn’t want to go around casually bashing attacking predators to death in forests. But the necklace represented something that a similar one made in the real world never could.

Then again, she hadn’t actually killed a real animal.

Lord, but all this was confusing. She didn’t know what to feel about it, other than that she was happy to be spending time with Nick. And not trying to entertain him, either… she was sitting around the centaur campfire, tying little knots in the cord her hosts had given her, while Nick took lessons on playing a mandolin from a centaur troubadour. Since Nick would have dropped dead before allowing either of his parents see him do anything he wasn’t already perfect at, and would have dug his own grave to cover himself with before performing in front of him, the fact that he was murmuring little snatches of songs while struggling over the instrument delighted her… especially since now and then he’d look up and brightly ask how her necklace was coming.

This was the best Nick, the Nick she and Felix hoped to see and rarely did. She’d had to go into a game to meet him, but she had, and she couldn’t help being grateful to Omen Galaxica for it while regretting that it had taken a game to show him to her.

…but that was before the smell of dinner summoned them both to the kitchen, and the version of Nick that bounced down the stairs was the version of him Amanda had been seeing all day. His eyes were bright and his gaze direct, and he snatched the stacked plates from the kitchen counter and started setting the table, talking all the while. “…you should have seen Mom today, Dad, she made her first ever kill! Like a boss!”

Playing her part, Amanda said, “Like a pathetic, noodle-armed pony centaur boss!”

“She did in a lynx with a spoon!”

Felix started laughing. “All right, I have got to hear this story. Here, love, take the bowl, we’re having coconut curry chicken tonight.”

Over the meal, Nick recounted Amanda’s battle, making it both more epic and more hilarious than it had already been, and watching him banter with his father made her heart crack.

“And then she made a trophy necklace,” Nick concluded. “Is it done, Mom?”

“Almost… I want to add a few more red beads to it.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “You know, to symbolize all the blood I shed in my heroic first encounter with the dangers of Omen Galaxica.”

“You married a barbarian!” Nick said to Felix, grinning.

“Every woman is a barbarian if you scratch the surface,” Felix said sagely. “Especially once they have kids.” He rolled his eyes to the sky, as if thinking deeply. “It’s as if they have an enrage talent. Inborn.”

Nick crowed. “Mom the boss. With phases!”

Amanda had no idea what they were talking about, but she didn’t care, because they did and they were talking the same language.

After dinner, Nick did the quickest clean-up job ever and vanished upstairs, probably to resume playing. Literally, maybe, given the musical instrument lessons. She heard his door shut and drifted after Felix until they were cuddled on the couch in a very satisfying way. Her husband’s chest made a far better pillow than the couch cushions.

“The goblin emerged,” he said to her, amused.

“I know!”

“I can’t remember the last time he was that engaged with us over dinner. You’re doing a good thing with him. Are you enjoying it?”

“How can I not enjoy it, when he does so much?” Amanda asked. She listened to the steady pulse of Felix’s heart. “I could wish the thing we were doing was real, but even if the activity isn’t real, the time we’re spending together is.”

“You sound like you have some misgivings still.”

“I’m mostly confused,” she admitted. “We need recreation as human beings, so playing games isn’t a bad thing. It’s the ‘this game feels more real than the real world, and makes you want to be productive in it, instead of the real world’ part that I’m not sure about. If I had more energy, would I be diving for the wireset so I could—”

“Slaughter every harrier cat in the Greenweald until you could make yourself a spiky suit of armor from their pelts and claws? And earn a title as The Harrier Terror?”

She burst out laughing. “Okay, maybe not. But there will probably be things in the game that I would get addicted to doing.”

Amanda had known her husband so long she knew he was pursing his lips. “Like, saying, becoming a crafter of fine harrier cat teeth jewelry? And earning a title as The Harrier Beader?”

“I am too drowsy to pummel you the way you deserve…”

“Why do you think I chose this moment to tease you?”

She grinned and shook her head against his chest. “I only wish you could participate. You know game lingo so much better than I do. If it’s this good for me and Nick, imagine all three of us!”

“I’ll take what we can get,” Felix said. “Listening to the two of you is rewarding enough. To come home after a long and boring day, to a family that is excited and wants to talk to me about interesting things? What’s not to love?”

“Even if you have to make the food?”

“Even if I have to make the food.” A pause. “Of course, if you suggested to Nick that he learn cooking from you in the game….”

She laughed. “I’ll try to figure out a way.”

***

Nick glanced at the group chat as he grabbed the wireset off his bed, just to make sure nothing interesting was going on, and nothing was, or there was he didn’t care enough to page backwards through the history to check. They were probably planning another fun-run, but why would he run Omen’s old dungeons when he could play the beta? His friends would get it. A few moments later, he zoned in to the Greenweald, and even that was an experience: the wireset made it feel like he was waking up, with the murmur of conversation and the fire popping reaching his ears first, and then, blurrily, the camp. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and checked—his music tutor was chatting with friends, and anyway, he wanted to go look for more herbs, see if he could push his gathering skills.

Leaving camp for the forest, Nick was again awed by what it felt like. The temperature change—cooler—the smells of damp earth and some piquant blend of new leaves and sap. There was grass, which was novel… where he lived, old leaves didn’t fall off trees until new ones were growing, and then they fell all at once and smothered the ground, killing the grass off. Dad complained about that a lot. He spent a lot of time blowing leaves off the lawn.

Was this what northern forests were like? Or was it some fantasy? He glanced up to see if the AI was awake—dumb question—and the little green light flared.

“We have updated the design library with information gleaned from external sources.”

“Was the forest not based on… you know… reality?”

A pause. “We cannot guess at the thoughts of the original design team. Initial notes indicated they aimed for a ‘high fantasy concept’ for the Greenweald. Robin Hood was cited as an influence on the themes and visuals.”

“So basically… no, they didn’t think about reality. They did the opposite.” Nick ran a hand over the sharp verticals in the bark of one of the trees he liked to climb and, on a whim, started shinnying up it until he found a likely branch. Perched there, he was high enough for the breeze to pull at the flaps of his tunic and tousle his hair. He turned his face into it and inhaled, relaxing. “So,” he said after a moment, “are you going to edit things so that they’re more realistic?”

The green glow bobbed more slowly. “Your question poses a conundrum we had not considered.”

What part of the game handled his deer ears swiveling forward because he was interested? Nick felt one of their velvety backs and said, “Oh?”

“Our research indicates that users of this game are not seeking realistic gameplay. Reference to the real world may impair the carefully-designed feel of the game. But the wireset technology makes it necessary to simulate more environmental and sensory data than the original technology, which must be derived from existing human experience to be processed accurately by the user’s nervous system.” Another pause. “There is no guidance from my creator on weighting the wireset’s data needs against the stated desires of the initial design team.”

Nick leaned back, staring up through the canopy at what he could see of the two moons. The pink one, which the Cervinaethi called the Fawn Moon, was just behind the silvery Mother. Come to think of it—“Is that why the bigger moon is silver now? It used to have a more goldish tint. You think we won’t perceive it as nighttime if you model the light of the moon so that it looks yellow instead of white?”

“You are correct.” The light sailed around him as if looking at him more closely. “We did not anticipate anyone noticing this change. Do you believe it will impair user enjoyment if vital game environment cues change?”

“Not that minor,” Nick said. “Besides, if it does bother anyone, you can just start a legend among some of the races. Like the Cervinaethi can suddenly mention that there’s a golden Mother moon and a silver one, and they trade places every hundred years, signaling… uh… I don’t know. A shift in fortunes. Maybe a mysterious prophecy even! And maybe the other races have different, conflict opinions, or maybe some might not notice it at all, because they haven’t been around on the world long enough. Or they live underground.”

“Your ideas have merit and will be taken into consideration, with your permission.”

Hard not to be flattered when a super-smart AI wanted to use your ideas. “Sure. I mean… didn’t I just sign a contract that says I was letting you evolve the game based on my behavior? Or are we breaking something because I'm talking to you directly?" He shook his head. "Nah, that would be dumb. You are literally part of the game.”

“We are part of the game in the way the source code is part of the game,” the AI said.

“But aren’t you creating new quests and dialogue for the NPCs? How is that not you talking?”

“We are creating new NPC behaviors, but to expose our presence directly would break immersion. Our goal is complete immersion.”

“Well, you’re doing great there.” He took one more whiff of the wind and slid down the tree to resume hunting for herbs, and the little green light went with him. For who knows how long, he wandered, crouching to peek under shrugs to see if he could find some of the rarer molds and creeping vines. He dug into bramblebushes to hunt for berries, only to be delighted by the fact that they weren’t available yet because it wasn’t the right season: “Seasonal herb hunting? Really? I love that! Except I bet it will irritate some people.” He thought about it, shrugged. “I don’t care. I like the bits of realism.”

“We will gather data on responses to the changes.”

“Make sure mine counts more than other people’s,” Nick said with a grin.

When he later found himself humming the tune the centaur had been teaching him, he thought to ask, “Did you make that up? That song I’m learning?”

“ ‘The Vow of the Rosewood’ was composed by Daniel Wo for the second expansion, but the quest line for which it was planned was removed before launch. It can still be heard on the soundtrack. Wo also wrote several unfinished melodies for use in centaur inns.”

Nick cocked his head. “Centaurs don’t have—oh, right. So they were never used. Huh. Was Wo the same guy who wrote the cool background music in the Cervinaethi starting zone? The floaty stuff with the voices?”

“He did, working on the handful of Cervinaethi language phrases created for the race’s NPCs.”

“I love that stuff,” Nick confessed. “And the music’s so great. Are there any Cervinaethi songs? Singable ones, like The Vow of the Rosewood?”

“No such songs were composed for the Cervinaethi.” The light sparkled. “Perhaps we could create one for you?”

“Oooh, you can do that?” A duh moment, because AI generation of music had caused an enormous internet ragefest when it had first became common. “Of course you can. Please?”

The little green light started singing, like some kind of will-o’-the-wisp, and it was a haunting song of mostly nonsense words, with some of the Cervinaethi phrases sprinkled in it. After two verses and a chorus, the AI stopped. “Is this style and sample suitable?”

“Well…”

“We require critique in order to better serve our function in the game. Please tell us how to improve if you have ideas.”

Since it had asked… Nick resumed searching for night-blooming flowers, using the walk to help him think. “There’s this guy on youtube who talks about music theory and he says that good songs should be surprising. There’s nothing surprising about your song. I can predict the chord changes and stuff before they happen. There’s no dissonance in it, and no key changes, and it’s not even in an interesting mode. Like, uh… like Lydian. Or Dorian, that might be good tone. And augmented stuff.” He paused in a place where he expected Fairy’s Bells, but there weren’t any. “I know a ballad should probably be a little predictable, because that’s how a lot of them work. But having the melody line go someplace unexpected would make it sound more mystical. You know, like the Cervinaethi are portrayed.”

The AI’s light had dimmed during his critique, and for a minute he thought he’d offended it. But it said, “The Fairy Bells will not spawn for another six hours, according to their timer.”

“Oh! Thanks. I should have thought about the spawn timers. You just made everything seem so real that I thought they should be there because… a real plant would. Unless something had eaten it.” He grinned. “Maybe that can be the in-game rationale behind spawn timers. Animals nomming.”

But the AI had moved on. “You are learning mandolin.”

“In game, at least…?”

“You also appear to be learning music theory from the internet. Do you play a musical instrument outside the game?”

“No.”

“May we ask why?”

Nick forged on from the glade, trying not to be depressed by the question. “Because if I did, it would become a thing. I would have to do it after school. Take it seriously. There would be competitions. My parents would drag me to lessons, and then more lessons, and then school would ask me what my professional aspirations were, and how serious I was about pursuing it. They’d suck all the fun out of it.” No, the AI was trying to learn, so he should be honest. Especially about something this important. “No, all the joy out of it. It wouldn’t be about me and my relationship with music anymore. It would be… contaminated. By all this worldly crap, and business crap, and social media and money and pretty soon I’d hate music. So no. I don’t do music in the real world.”

Maybe someone had built pauses into the AI’s responses so that conversations would sound natural? Because he was beginning to interpret these hesitations as exactly that. “Would your parents be likely to create this situation?”

“I don’t know.” He gathered a stick and flung it. “All right, that’s not fair. I don’t think they’d want to. But there would be so much pressure on them from everyone else… other parents, the school, the stuff they see in the news… how could they avoid it?” He shook his head. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“We see.” As he stooped to gather another stick, it said, “Perhaps we could design a Cervinaethi song together? You could help me evolve my first attempt.”

“A way for me to enjoy music without having to perform for the whole world?” He paused, laughed. “And me streaming! People would hear me humming, I guess?” He tossed the second stick. “Heck, why not. It’s not like anyone’s watching. My channel’s tiny and not likely to get bigger.” He dusted off his hands and nodded. “Let’s do it.”