Tales of meta-change

Tomorrow I start my new job.

I've been working at Circle Thrift for six or seven weeks part-time as a way to stave off unemployed anxiety. I sorted clothes and ran the register and behaved cheerfully toward customers.

I loved it. The situation was unsustainable, but if it hadn't been, I would consider making a career of it. There were colorful characters and bizarre goings-on every day I worked. I could have told a story every day.*

So at first it seems strange to me that I didn't. Didn't write or draw or sew during this time. I composed blog entries some days, but they never left my neurons. I didn't even track the movies I watched last month. (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and some other stuff.)

Instead, I volunteered. Since July, I've further embedded myself in responsibilities among my church. It's been surprisingly non-creative. Attending meetings, returning phone calls, head down, concrete, task-oriented, unreflective. Combined with a hang-clothes-handle-money retail job, there was lots of do, little doo-dah. Not my style or strength, but there kept being one more thing that needed doing. So I kept doing it.

Now I'm starting a new job, a shift from anything I've ever done professionally. Not writing. Not editing. It involves mental health clients, so I don't know how much I'll even talk about it here. Probably lots of stories, but discretion will be at a premium.

I'm also starting to read tips and lists and crap that I won't link to about blog posting. I'm spontaneously looking at new ideas for monsters. The YA novel I lost track of a couple months ago has wandered back in. Creative ventures seem to be re-emerging.

Things are changing around here. That's probably the takeaway. I'm excited by recent prospects, yet for all the change, it seems like no relief from the pinball life. The categories of change seem to be the things changing now. My change is changing.

I think I'll have more to say about that soon.

*Slumming it is underrated. A job you exceed grants a marvelous attention surplus.

Self-check

Been reading a biography of Warren Buffet, and man, does that guy think differently from me.

On reflection, I decided today that writers get hired because of the specific, different, and useful ways they think. Writing is not the hard part. The act of writing is actually so easy, you get fat from inaction. Thinking is the hard part.

So I thought about my thinking, and I think I'm an undisciplined thinker for purposes of making a profit. I've never bent my brain in one direction long enough to have a unique, salable topicality.

Thanks to almost 4 years of blog-keeping, I've now got a record of the kinds of things I think about hard enough to put into non-paying words. Extrapolating from tag counts I see that I write about:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• games in general
• religion (American Christianity, mainly)
• writing
• creativity
• media

And in a meta sense:

• introspection
• vague ideas about making money

I'm not sure why I care so much about making money. I've always liked to think of myself as a person who didn't, but evidence refutes this fancy. I apparently want to be rich.

I just don't want to be a callous douchebag in the process. I don't want my life to get absorbed into a business. (Unless I love it. Then it's fine.)

So many small business owners talk about being exhausted from some marathon thing they just finished or some associate who just screwed them or something. Something stressful and draining. And man, I just want to be a hobbit, you know?

But I must not want it too bad, or I wouldn't keep wondering what's in Bree.

Adult anxiety dream

You know that one dream where you show up for the final exam, and realize you haven't gone to class all semester and you're freaked out?

I had one of those a couple days ago, only with Art Shop. I dreamed I was setting up my booth, and I had almost nothing to sell.

As of now, at t-minus one month I've got:

• 7 big monsters done, 2 without faces.
• 2 mini monsters mostly done, with another 1 in process.
• 0 hats done, with 1 in process.
• 0 tetris magnet sets done, but all of them in process.
• 1 pillow done, 1 in process, raw materials for 2 more.
• probably 6 or 7 googly-eyed items done, with an unknown number coming. Depends on how many interesting objects I find in the trash in the next month.
  

The goal this year is to diversify offerings, both in product and price spread. Informal polling reveals that hats will likely be the big seller.

I'm not sure what conclusions I'll be able to draw. Realistically, I'm on schedule to have enough stuff done. I'm usually only comfortable though if I'm ahead of schedule. Tonight: magnets!

Haunted House

Two months ago I was killing time in a grocery store for some reason, looking through the magazine rack. One of the things I leafed through was a "Halloween crafts" special from some home decorating magazine.

Now I'm no mom or anything, but I saw a project inside that was cool, easy, and best of all, could be made from junk. It was like a snippet from Quickthinking Magazine.

Two nights ago, I finally got around to finishing. Here's the finished project in our front windows -- Ghosts! Super-cheap, fun ghosts!


They're made of milk jugs and white Christmas lights. Draw on faces with a Sharpie, and you're all done.

Happy Ghost close up:

Monster hats

A few weeks ago, as a prototype, I made a monster hat. It eats your head.

In a seemingly unrelated incident, we went to Linvilla Orchards last week (I should be getting ad revenue from these people) and Meredith wore it around. Here is a picture of Meredith wearing the hat, holding an adorable child we picked at the farm.



A dude working there saw Meredith, and admired the hat. M said, "My husband made it."

Dude said his head was too big for most hats, and I said, "That's no problem, I can make you one."

Here is the hat I'm about to send to him.


In the past, I've said that I was more interested in the making than the selling of stuff. That's still true. But this year I've become more interested in the selling bit. How does one get one's product assembled and sold in these United States of America, I wonder?

I'm going to look into that some more. I never wanted to be a businessman; I wanted to be a creative. I'm becoming more willing to entertain the idea of mixing them though.

Smart, rich pt 2

Yesterday I started talking about how being smart and $3 still only gets you a latte.

I was having this conversation with my friend Steve on Monday out at Linvilla Orchards, a 300-acre farm where a third or so of those acres are dedicated to something like a harvest-time amusement park. All over the place, somebody at Linvilla has been exercising business canny.*

Now Steve is an intelligent guy. What you call a classic "idea man." A musician and actor, with a different set of networking contacts and personal inclinations, he could do well in advertising. As we discussed good ideas (or more accurately, as Steve doled out good ideas and I agreed with them), I came upon my own: funnel cakes.

Nobody doesn't love funnel cakes. But you only ever see them at special events: fairs and carnivals and such. Why don't funnel cakes make it into everyday life? Why don't restaurants sell them as dessert options? Why don't food trucks that already have built-in fryers sell these on Philadelphia street corners?

I don't know. I don't even know how to know. And all modesty aside, I'm a pretty smart guy. I should be able to figure this out. And then sell a crapload of funnel cakes.

Some people seem to have business canny easily, but that doesn't mean it can't be learned. The question for me is not even my usual Step One question, "Do you want it?" but maybe the Step 1.1 question: "What are you willing to give up to get it?"

This is, I think, the difference between business canny and your average smart person. The business canny person has sacrificed a lot to get that way. If BC guy was ever curious about tapirs, but couldn't see how to make money on them, tapirs got left. A smart person curious about tapirs gets a zoology degree and makes $35k shoveling tapir dung.

There must be some way to walk a middle line there, to meld curiosity with capitalism. The classic question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is a misunderstanding of what smarts is good at. But it's not a bad question.

*My favorite application was a row of apple slingshots. All the apples that the orchard couldn't sell to eat, they sold for you to shoot at scarecrows with industrial strength slingshots. Turning garbage into money is fascinating to me.

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

We think intelligent people are kings in modern America. Even nerds in high school don't have it quite as bad as they used to, because everyone recognizes that nerds can grow up to become filthy rich. In America, even the classic "jocks" understand the brute strength available to the rich.

Interesting thing about making money though -- you don't need to be smart. Smart might even be a hindrance. A business canniness exists independent of intelligence, the kind that makes used car sellers wealthy and college professors lower-middle class.

(Business canny is related to, but separate from business savvy. Savvy is a practical understanding of business. Canny is a knack for working the angles. Both are different from being "smart.")

Here's a New York Times editorial from Calvin Trillin on the topic, entitled Wall Street Smarts.

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” ...

I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks.

I've spent a lifetime being smart, and that's only gotten me partway to where I want to be. I'm going to talk about this some more tomorrow.

Pixar, stickin' it to the Man!

I wrote the skeleton of this post a few months ago, and forgot to post it. During Blogaday though, nothing goes to waste.

How is Pixar stickin' it to the Man?

By not caring about the Man. That is the very best way the Man gets stuck:

Perhaps Wall Street would not care so much if Pixar seemed to care a little more. The co-director of “Up,” Pete Docter — who also directed “Monsters Inc.” — said in a recent question and answer session with reporters that the film’s commercial prospects never crossed his mind. “We make these films for ourselves,” he said. “We’re kind of selfish that way.”

John Lasseter, a co-founder of Pixar and now Disney’s chief creative officer, routinely says in interviews that marketability is not a factor in decisions about what projects to pursue. Instead of ideas that feel contemporary, he aims for stories that are rooted in the ages.

“Quality is the best business plan” is one of Mr. Lasseter’s favorite lines.

I don't know what my takeaway from this is, but I like remembering and posting things about creative ventures that inspire me. And really, who doesn't Pixar inspire?

D&D: New campaign kickoff

Started my brand new D&D campaign tonight. If you've been following my blog spoor for the last year, you might have noticed I've been screwing around with a wiki for this thing. Now, open for business!

I've spent a hella lot of time laying groundwork and spelling out rules, and it's still not done.

Important Lesson: You're never really done.

But it was surprisingly thorough. I'm methodical as a tornado when I write. I blow through town and look back once I'm done. Sometimes I've hit everything, and other times I've left whole blocks mysteriously untouched. I don't have a system. I just make up stuff until some outside constraint makes me stop.

So going in, I didn't know whether I'd written enough to make tonight work. But then I said, "Well, in the wiki..." about a dozen times in answer to questions. So I think I got all the vital stuff in.

Important Lesson: Don't worry about getting it all right. It's a game you're playing with friends.

Important Lesson: Just because it's in the text doesn't mean anyone else knows it's there.

I made the experience point totals for level gain a little higher, using a conglomeration of different Pathfinder experience gain rates. Then I told them that I'd award extra XP for people who enable group enjoyment by doing out-of-game things to make things more fun. The player who takes notes or handles mapping or draws a group shot or takes pics of minis gets an XP bonus. I hoped to encourage players to be creative and contribute on their own terms instead of doing all the work solo. This idea was poo-pooed, so it might not last.

Instead, I might use a variation on Sean Reynolds's Alternative Level Advancement System. I like Sean's idea, but changing your character every single session is too much paperwork in an already paperwork-heavy game.

Important Lesson: Adults with kids don't necessarily have the giveadamn to write character journals. In the long run, a bennie meant to encourage participation could begin to feel like a penalty on people who don't want to participate.

I thought having the rules online would be a good way to get everything out to the players so I wouldn't have to be the sole source of information. Also I hoped it would require me to lug fewer books to the game.

But the concept is a little ahead of the group's hardware capacity. Nobody brought a laptop or usable wireless device to let them look up stuff. We wound up using books anyway, which don't quite mesh with the fifty-'leben ways I've tweaked the d20/Pathfinder rules sets.

Important Lesson: Oops.

After a lot of shuffling papers and answering questions, characters were done, except for the niggling details that no one ever firms up until the third game anyway. I thought that'd be it. Good work everybody, see you in two weeks.

No! They demanded we play tonight! Begin tonight! Begin fighting! Tonight!

Since one of our regulars was absent, I didn't want to get too deep into the first adventure. So I used the time-tested, beloved pacing device DMs and comic book writers have used for decades. I threw in a combat. It wasn't meaningless, but it was off the cuff.

Important Lesson: Come more prepared than you think you'll need. And come prepared to improvise.

Good company

A game project I worked on has just had the full author list revealed. Check it out at Paizo.com: Guide to the River Kingdoms.

Here's the author list:

Eric Bailey, Kevin Carter, Elaine Cunningham, Adam Daigle, Mike Ferguson, Joshua J. Frost, James Jacobs, Steve Kenson, Rob Manning, Colin McComb, Alison McKenzie, China Miéville, Brock Mitchel-Slentz, Jason Nelson, Richard Pett, Chris Pramas, Jeff Quick, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Neil Spicer, Lisa Stevens, Matthew Stinson, and John Wick.

A plurality of writers is usually a bad sign, but it makes sense for the fractious River Kingdoms, land of the politically improbable. Once again, I'm fairly happy with my work on this book.

Also, please note that I've now worked on a project with China Mieville. That's one for the weaselly self-promotional bio!

Information: free and expensive

Taken from Wikipedia
Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, in the following context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.


From me
Information is so valuable that there has to be a way to profit from it. It's just that information's value, when decoupled from a physical medium, is extremely difficult to gauge.

Information is unquantifiable. "Cows go moo." seems like a single mote of information, but fractally smaller bits of information are implicit in that three-word sentence. Like what a cow is. How a moo sounds. Why "go" is an appropriate verb in this instance.

At this level, information is so voluminous, that you can only charge for it in bulk. In that way, all books are like newspapers -- you bundle in important parts with the unimportant parts, without knowing exactly what any given buyer deems "important." You hope people will pay to get the parts that are important to them.

Information is also extremely context-sensitive. Noise to one person is life-saving info to another one. Depends on whether you stand next to a train track, or on it. Which one would pay to hear that whistle?

Don't have a point today. Just thinking.

Tiny Art Director

Just a quick pointer today. Tiny Art Director is is blog site where an illustrator takes art direction from his young daughter. She tells him what to draw, then critiques it when he's done. Funny, cute, petulant, drawings of dinosaurs... what's not to like?

He's got a book coming out too, so add that to your amazon list, whydontcha.

Hijinx: I didn't know I thought that fast

I'm going to a game convention next month. Yesterday the organizer asked me to run Hijinx, the d20 mini-game of cartoon bands I wrote approximately one thousand years ago for Polyhedron magazine.

When the game came out in 2003, it met an audience brimming with indifference. A few people loved the humor and the gall of the idea. A few people hated it, and called it wasted space. But mostly nada.

It was my favorite thing I wrote that year though. I'm still grateful to the editor, Erik, who took the big goofy gamble with me, and Kyle, the art director, who made it look pretty good.

But when Kevin asked me to run it yesterday, I froze for a few minutes. Could I even do that? My embarrassing (but in retrospect, obvious) confession is that I never even playtested the damn thing. I wrote 20,000 words on inspiration and deep rules knowledge. Is it... is it even playable? Do I know what to do with Quickenstein's monster? Would I get stagefright? Sometimes I get stagefright!

A few hours later, without any conscious effort, I had a setup, a villain, a plot outline, and a crazy topicality which, I daresay, would make a fantastic new millennium episode of Josie and the Pussycats. Just like that. Inspiration and rules knowledge just showed up again.

So I said yes. Now I have to reread the rules and figure out if this thing is playable in the next two weeks. Loving my goofy ideas helps a lot though.

Frederator cartoons: RHOMBUS!

Seems like a long time ago when my friend, Scott, sent me a link to a cartoon short that circumscribes a 12-year-old boy's mindset so thoroughly, that one knows, intuitively, that only an extraordinary man-child could have created such a thing.

The thing is Adventure Time. I found out today that Adventure Time will become a regular series on Cartoon Network later this year (or early next year).

Faltering laurels I strain to frame around Adventure Time will be inadequate. You just need to see it. Block out the next 7 or 8 minutes for this -- minutes which will surely be among the best of your day.

Since you've got 6 or 7 minutes left on your break, also watch The Bravest Warriors by the same man-child:

Insight on doing what you "like"

I don't know nothing about Paul Graham. He appears to be some sort of venture capitalist or start-up expert, or something. I haven't bothered to research him. But as I continue on my drunken path toward becoming a person who works for himself and accomplishes things, his essays give good info I don't find anywhere else. For instance, this excerpt from an essay titled, How to Do What You Love:

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

The whole thing is worth reading.

My great ideas

Not all of my ideas are great, but when you really get down to it, most of them are. Yet every year, dozens, maybe hundreds of people shoot down my great ideas because these so-called "other people" don't think my ideas are as great as I do.

I don't know how to keep moving after that. I'm better than I used to be -- I'm not sullen when someone shoots down my great ideas any more. But I don't know how to keep moving, how to create and participate after that happens.

This is not hypothetical for someone who ostensibly does creative work for a living. You must be able to route around blocks with minimal loss of velocity, and I'm craptastic at that. Someone tells me my idea isn't great (quite often the person who has the ability to green-light the thing) and I come to a juddering halt.

Creative work is frequently collaborative, never moreso than when you're using someone else's money. It is important to know how to do this. And yet. And yet and yet and yet.

Part of the problem is that most people are lousy collaborators -- including me. Still, I have to figure out how to work even around that block, the block of your co-creators fighting against you. I had a creative director canvas me for ideas, ignore them, and then criticize me for not contribuing enough. I've had directors encourage me to use my own judgment, and then methodically shoot down every word I wrote, telling me to copy and paste what I was given. Recently, outside of a professional environment, every good idea I offered on a project was accepted, and then after discussion, rejected. FRUSTRATING. However, you have to keep contributing when that happens.

More to the point, I have to keep contributing when that happens. Some days I want to punch faces instead. Most of the time, I shut down. This might be a worse choice than face punching. I like to think I'm being a team plsyer by acquiescing, but staying in the fight (or starting one) might be a better option sometimes.

This happened to me last week. I was feeling off kilter anyway, so I yelled. Wrote a frank email and bitched to a couple of people. It didn't keep my ideas afloat; they still went unused, and I created conflict that I would rather have done without. But I've decided being less accomodating about axeing my ideas was a good idea. Maybe even a great idea.

Kids these days: any other quests?

Ran an intro game of D&D for a couple of boys tonight, ages 12 and 10. I enjoy presenting D&D to brand new players, because they haven't been trained in roleplaying game-think yet.

When you've played enough of these demanding, complex games, you learn to see the game system first, and think in its framework. It's like learning art on a computer. Fantastically versatile programs exist to help you, but you wind up imagining inside the program's technical limitations.

So the D&D naif brings a jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. (One woman I played with, who had a perfectly competent character, spent an entire session hiding in a cabinet. Because holy crap, people are shooting guns and fire blasts outside! Better to just stay safe.)

This has been my standard thinking for a long time about new players. But tonight, these kids tricked me by bringing a different jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. Having already played the crap out of Final Fantasy and half a dozen other console RPGs, these kids were not D&D naifs. They were tabletop naifs. Drawing on unmediated experience to inform their behavior was strange territory.

Excerpts:

Me: If you run out of hit points you fall unconscious.
Kid: What's that?
Me: You fall unconscious every day. What's it like then?

Kid: How much does a backpack hold?
Me: You've got a backpack at home, right? It holds that much.

The standout of the evening came after presenting entirely unsubtle clues that the Mad Alchemist's cave awaited exploration, and that there might be treasure. The boys then decided to ask around town to see if there were "any other quests." Thanks to computer games, they (quite reasonably) assumed there would be a handful of townsfolk loitering, with various problems to be solved. They would get to pick the most appealing one.

Also in a paean to overcaution:

• Long minutes were spent on Hide skill practice, followed by confirming Spot checks to see how well hidden they were.
• Rabbinical attention was paid to the number of arrows carried, and recovered, after combat.
• The sorcerer brought 20 torches, and the dwarf purchased flint and tinder for firestarting, despite the fact that he can see in the dark.
• They purchased a 10-foot pole and a mirror, and used them frequently, in ways that would make Gary Gygax proud.
  

I enjoy attempting this sort of thing, but every time, I am humbled. Improvisation is a hard skill, and understanding your own expectations is at least half the experience.

Grist for the creative mill via Pixar

Randy Nelson from Pixar talks about what they look for in a hire. Great info for anybody doing anything creative.