Stop that. You’re helping no one.

Too often, fruitful discussion of problems is derailed by proposed solutions and then argument over the solution’s foreseen effects. Sometimes, that leads to further understanding of the problem, but just as often it turns into a pointless waste of energy in the form of a flame war.

It also creates a situation where “I see a problem and want to talk about it” is unhealthy, because the discussion desired is not the discussion created. And then those sorts of conversation seeds are less often planted, which hurts us all (if, like me, you believe that discourse is how we elevate our communities).

Next time someone presents a problem, take a moment to understand it. Set aside your assumptions as best you can — especially when those assumptions are counter to the problem. Like countering someone saying “I don’t like playing games like Burning Wheel because they’re too crunchy for me” with “Well, it isn’t for me” as though the human being you’re replying to is the problem.[2] Ask questions. Get some sense of what is behind the problem.

I understand the desire to immediately problem solve, because that is for many of us its own reward cycle. And I understand the impulse to be the first to post a new solution online, because then maybe you look smart and that’s yet another form of reward. But slow your roll and take some time to understand problems, and you’ll get something even better out of it:

You’ll become one of the sharpest people in the room, for having come to understand so many viewpoints. And you’ll be one of the more appreciated people in the room, because instead of being an assuming cockbite with fast, vacant answers, yours are thoughtful and are themselves worthy conversation seeds.

So, if you cannot bring yourself to slowing down and understanding someone else for the good of others and the community overall, consider the rather selfish ones I just stated. :)

- Ryan

[2] If you say that, punch yourself in the face right now. That’s pretty damned insulting to immediately suggest the other person is him or herself the problem.

Thinking about the work will help you answer questions you know, so it’s good to chill and think outside of the actual moment of working. But in doing the work, writing or designing or whatever, something interesting happens: you discover questions you didn’t expect, and — more importantly — you discover answers you didn’t expect.

I’m changing Mythender’s character creation up a bit, to make it faster for convention play. If you’ve seen the character creation from before, you’ll see that there are different questions for your Heart and for your History (now called Past). They were open-ended questions. Some people dug them. Some people stalled. So I decided to just have three stock answers to chose from for each.[2]

Which, by the way, is a fuckton of content to make up.

The other thing you had to make up before, which I’m now putting on as choices, are what your Weapons are. I wasn’t sure how to do that; a couple months of mild thinking about this didn’t answer the question, and since I’m running this in a couple days, I had to just sit down and do it wrong just to have it done.

In doing that, the solution presented itself: the Weapons you choose come from the choices you pick for those questions. Now, that seems obvious, but it wasn’t obvious when I wasn’t sitting down and actually doing the work.

(Why I wasn’t doing the work? Making up 108 answers felt daunting, even though I know the way I should have done it is to do a little at a time. Sometimes, I’m a damned moron. :)

I’ve felt that way project after project, and if I need reminding of it, I’m sure others do to. So, if you’re stuck, and taking a moment hasn’t unstuck you, sit down and just be willing to do it wrong. You’ll discover unexpected answers in that path.

- Ryan

[1] I stumbled upon this old post recently, which I never followed up on with Part II. Or my blog is an ongoing Part II. I’ll go with the latter.

[2] For those who liked filling in the blank, that still exists. It’s now called “Advanced Character Creation,” and the text for that is pretty much “The questions are there. Pick your own answers & Weapons.”

Here’s the thing: life isn’t going to give you those moments. At least, it won’t when you need them. (Frankly, you probably get them more often than you think, and don’t notice them. But that’s a digression.)

I will digress a little further, and make a gaming analogy.[1] In Don’t Rest Your Head, as the GM spends Coins of Despair, they turn into Coins of Hope for the players. The players may, when their characters are in a moment of rest or calm, spend one of those Hope to heal their character.

And as the GM, it’s not my fucking job to give you those moments. You want to heal? You want to breathe? Make that moment happen.

The same with life. You need to make those moments happen when you need them. Sometimes that means pushing to accomplish something pressing harder than you otherwise might. But sometimes it means being honest with your capacity as a human being and carve out a time where you can breathe despite the feeling that the walls are closing in.

I cannot tell you which is right for you, because it’s all situational. I have to deal with a bunch of pressing health stuff right now, which cannot wait long. But once I accomplish the next goal with that, I can give myself a day or two to breathe. On the other hand, sometimes I need to give myself the day off of freelance work, because the pressure causes me to become subpar with the work. And evaluating which is which is a skill that I’ve only started to hone, and am far from mastering.

When these moments happen, I try to ask myself (though the wording is not quite like this in the moment in my mind): What is the most pressing problem? What’s needed to deal with this? Will pushing on it be a detriment to my short-term or long-term sanity?

And when I deem I need to, I force moments in time for me to breathe. Because no one is going to hand those to me.

That I didn’t do this enough in 2010 is why I crashed hard, burning business relationships and some friendships, and why I slowed down in 2011. After all, sometimes the reason we need those moments to breathe, sometimes we feel like we’re being pushed too hard, that’s because we’re doing it to ourselves.

I encourage everyone who works with me on projects to do the same thing, and I try to recognize (when I’m able, like when we’re working in the same office) when people need and aren’t themselves recognizing it or feeling the ability to ask. Because sometimes we need some help from allies to make those moments happen. No one’s an island, etc.

- Ryan

[1] Which breaks my rule for analogies: stick to food, relationships, or sex. Other analogies, including sports, don’t always translate. (Which reminds me of a story that Paul Tevis told me about baseball analogies not translating to his Swiss coworkers.)

I strive to be unnecessary, on my terms.

This might sound weird, but when I come onto a project, it’s because my skills are needed. Same reason anyone comes on board something, ideally. Some of my jobs at Evil Hat involve figuring out what resources we have for our Fate & Dresden projects, project a publication date, and then figure out deadlines to get to that point (or revise the publication date because the deadlines are unreasonable). I talk with writers & editors to figure out how the hell we do this thing. And I talk with Fred about what his needs as a publisher are.

That was my job when I came on board for Dresden, because that didn’t exist. Amanda Valentine was attempting that, but she was fighting a hard battle, between gaining rapport & trust with the crew and Evil Hat growing as a company & learning to, well, be something more than a three-man band, it wasn’t working. At one point, I said “okay, my turn” and I started coordinating with everyone. I had a decent rapport with most of the people involved, and I have the sort of personality that worked in that moment to get the project moving.

Today, Amanda’s that person on the Paranet Papers, and I’m happy. Why? Because I made myself unnecessary for that role. (I am, of course, still doing that for Don’t Hack This Game.) I don’t just want to bring my skills, I want to transfer them. I want others to learn from whatever I’m doing — good and bad — just as I want to learn from them. And in doing so, a really cool thing happens:

I become free to grow and try other stuff.

I grew up in a world of people who became necessary, became core to the place where they worked. That is, until they got laid off, and then they struggled to find relevance in a job market that changed on them. As a third-generation software developer, I grew up in this world, watching us move for jobs or struggle in unemployment, vague memories I don’t quite understand because I was young. When you become too important to a place, growth is stifled. When you work 50+ hours a week, the time & energy to develope professionally for the future is cut short.

So, I try to make myself unnecessary, on my terms. I still strive to be useful & highly skilled, but not so core to something that I am lost when life happens and I’m suddenly out of a job. And not so core to something that if I’m hit by a truck, people who depended on me are now totally fucked over.

That’s what I mean when I say “on my terms.” When I’m in control of how I keep myself from becoming to necessary to something, then I have the flexibility to adapt to life changes. I know many people who fear this state of being, because they see no security there. But having worked in government service, I see such security as an illusion; no one can provide security to you but you.

This is likely a ramble to most people, but it’s been on my mind since I’ve re-entered unemployment.

- Ryan

The people you admire have two things in common: they dared to try something that seemed too big for them, and when they failed they dared again and again.

Being awesome is partly learning how to soar, and partly learning how to take a fall. You can’t do either if you stay in your safe little nest.

Normally I write a bit more on these things, but fuck it, stop reading this and just dare already!

- Ryan

Proposal #1: Don’t Turn Your Back
~2000 Words
Rob Donoghue – [redacted]
I’ve Written for Evil Hat, MWP, WOTC and White Wolf.

Don’t Turn Your Back: A game of action, espionage, and the prices to be paid for both.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a hack for using DRYH to run stories in the style of Casino Royale – superspy stories with all the trappings of gadgetry and badassery, but with nightmares and madness being replaced with the growing threat of compromise and moral decay. Characters are Agents, badass masters of espionage, assigned to stop The Opposition from carrying out their Sinister Master Plan.

While this was conceived in the vein of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, the idea is flexible enough to handle much of the “action-espionage” genre. This is not suited to games of quiet intrigue – it is for a game where intrigue is shaken (not stirred) with excitement, violence and sex.

Mechanical Tweaks:

• Exhaustion is now moral exhaustion, the toll of taking lives and trying to live in the strange limbo of a spy’s life. Go to far, and you’re In the Wind.
• Madness is Support (sounds nice, doesn’t it) – you can draw on it for resources and gadgets, but doing so runs the risk of Blowing Your Cover.
• Talents – Two Statements, one “I Always” and one “I Never”, both with a qualifying conjunction from the GM(A la Mortal Coil)
• Despair is The Master Plan, and serve as a clock for the game.

New Elements:

• Asset Dice – A single blue die to represent that NPC helping you out. Useful, but expendable. Works like extra discipline, and can be sacrificed to recover from being In The Wind or a Blown Cover, but the Asset goes to the GM.
• Help and Trust – Loan another agent your discipline dice for a roll, but he may choose to put any bad outcome on you.
• Secret Agendas – In multi-agent games, everyone has their own agenda over and above stopping the opposition.

I like this; it clearly states the idea and the points of interest for the article. It tells me what to expect. And, most importantly, it makes me want to read the thing.

You need to sell the anthology editor on the idea first and foremost. Your pitch to them has to say “I know you’re going to get a few ideas, and maybe even one like this one, but what I have here is worthy of your attention.”

Oh, and you need to do that in, like, 30 seconds. Because that’s all you’ll get if you have a boring pitch. How do you handle that? With deliberate detail to the reader’s eyes. (In the case, the reader in the antho editor, like me.)

First para is a single sentence, and my eye bounces there. Then it bounces to the “Mechanical Tweaks” heading, and then I see bullets there as well as the next section. This is all within roughly a second of my eyes having contact with the email, before actually reading it.

And now, going in, I feel like there’s some structure to the pitch that gives me confidence in what I’m about to read. Given that I’m not actually reading these much before the pitch window closes (as I have other things that I need to work on), deciding to read his pitch right away is an accomplishment.

If Rob had put the same information in two large, dense paragraphs, my initial impression would have been to sigh and file it away.

That Said…

Now, Rob broke one of the rules in the pitch: 200 words on the synopsis. His was a touch over 300. Yesterday, I said on Twitter that part of the point of pitch guidelines is to demonstrate that you can stick to guidelines. And here, Rob gets a pass…and in no way does he get that pass because he’s one of the owners of Evil Hat.[1]

He gets it because I know he can write to guidelines. There’s a dirty not-quite-secret: once you prove yourself, you get more flexibility in how you handle things like this. The degree depends on the editor involved and your rapport with him or her, naturally. With me, it’s simple: if I’m intrigued enough to where I want your article and I know you can write to spec, as long as your pitch doesn’t bore me or piss me off we’re good.

And he gets it because what he wrote was good. The intro was spot on, and the backup material told me what he’s thinking in a quick & clear way. In fact, it’s material he could have tossed out of the email and kept as notes for himself to make the pitch shorter, but it’s good material for me.

If I don’t know you, and you demonstrate not writing to spec, then your pitch had better be damned interesting to me. You’ll have to work harder than someone who did follow the guidelines.

And here’s where it gets really sticky: often, shorter is better, because it’s a teaser trailer for the article. So I might just like that shorter pitch someone sends in over the longer one you do.

In short: Rob’s got a good pitch. The proof is in the fact that I’m going to take it. But don’t tell him. I’m going to wait until after the pitch window closes to let him know. *shhhh*

- Ryan

P.S.

I’ll share with you one more direct not-quite-secret about anthology editors: you can actually, you know, query us about breaking the rules. There was an interesting 500 word idea that was posted up that I might have taken if the author wrote and said “hey, I have this idea, but it’s only 500 words.” We might say “no” or we might start a conversation. But you won’t know until you ask.

[1] I chuckled at his footnote about his wife’s comment, because it’s true. :)

I gotta ask, have you ever had so many projects going on, you didn’t know which one to do next?

Hah, man, yeah. All the time. Freelancing taught me a rule: Just Start Something.

But that’s easy to say. Maybe you have four ideas, all of them playing tug-of-war with your attention. Maybe you have one project with five chapters all vying for attention. Whatever the scope, it’s easy to not know where to start.

So I write down all the things I could start — that way, they’re out of my head and on paper so I don’t have to keep track of them mentally. And I pick one. Whichever one calls out at me loudest, or at random, whatever. I post it up somewhere, start new empty documents with each of them as titles, etc. I’ve been doing that lately with Mythender.

Now, it could turn out that I’m starting the wrong thing first. And that awkward little fear has kept many a person for leaping in. But you won’t know if you’re working out of order until you actually start working. And nothing’s saying you have a schedule frozen in carbonite when you start a project.

Pick something, and if your flow or momentum sputters, switch it up. You’re going to be revising everything you write anyway (if you’re worth a damn), so you might as well get some random shit on the page so you know what you’re doing when you come back to that piece of work.

Related post: Overthinking is Toxic

- Ryan

There was a pause, a stare, and I was compelled to add “Okay, I’m less young now, but still young. And I’m a different stupid.”

And then that became the conversation, about how we should be willing to risk being different-stupid, to throw ourselves in unfamiliar arenas in life and have to learn over again. And, most of all, to not be the same-stupid, to grow and learn and (most important here!) change.

The conversation went on from there to talking about this and that, but talking about being a different stupid registered as something I should say here. So be a different stupid, folks. Don’t be the same stupid you were a one, two, five, ten years ago.

And if you can help it, and I do hope you can, be a better stupid.

- Ryan

[1] And sadly none of them about Zeppelins.

If you attempt and fail, you’ll have a stronger understanding of what to do next time, what did and didn’t work, and be a more awesome person for it. This what what we call “failing forward” applied to real life.

If you don’t even try, you’re letting life pass you buy with no growth or becoming more awesome.

So, unless the price for failure is something like death or dismemberment or entering politics, fucking do it already. Start failing forward, stop sitting on your ass.

- Ryan

Speaking of Guests of Honor, @RyanMacklin gave a really good tip I’d love to share again. While cons ask some to be GoH, some ask the orgs.

There’s a perception that you need to wait until you’re invited in order to take advantage of something, like being a guest of honor or to work with a company you want to. And that sort of thinking will hold you back. It did me for years.

I grew up in a predominantly female household run by a Southern woman, and her influence firmly taught me to be in Guess Culture, where we didn’t ask outright but did ways of hinting that we wanted something in order to get the other person to offer it to us. Because that was how I was brought up, that’s how I lived my life for years, and today it’s no surprise that I stunted my professional and personal growth with that way of life.

The full realization happened at the first RinCon I went to, which I believe was the first time they got seriously regional. I was there, hanging out with Paul Tevis (a special guest), John Wick (a special guest), etc. I joked with friends that I flew there because they invited my friends, and I wanted to hangout with them.

One of the folks running the show came up to me and said, “Dude, what are you doing at our show?” He was surprised — in a good way (yes, shocked, I know) — that I flew in for their shindig. We talked briefly, and he ended with “Dude, if you asked we would have made you a guest.”

I thought, and might have said, “Oh, you can do that?” That’s when it started to sink in.

How to ask

Let’s say you’ve done some writing or art or whatever, and have been published. You think it’d be fun to be on the some panels at a regional convention you attend to every year. You have two options:

• Wait until you catch just the right person’s attention, at just the right time when he or she is thinking about panelists for a show… (And if you meet a eventcoordinator at the show, they’re (a) busy and (b) probably have several months of forgetting your impression unless it’s especially good or especially bad.)
• Find out who to ask and, well, ask.

The “finding out” part is the hardest bit. Do you know someone who has been a panelist? (Or whatever it is that you’re looking to do.) Ask them how they got in. Ask them who they should know. Ask them to make an introduction.

If you don’t have that in, you might want to spend some time making friends first. Hotel bars are fantastic for that.

Once you know, see if you can get an introduction. Because it’s one thing to email out of the blue — you’re a strange name in an inbox list. It’s another for that to be started by a name then know and respect.

Whether you have that, the next step is, well, asking. Often, we’re shit at selling ourselves, so if you find you can’t come up with a decent email to send, write something and have some friends look at it. Fix it up based on their comments, no matter how boastful it might seem to you, and fire it off.

And that’s it! You might hear back. You might not. And you might get turned down — especially if you’re late coming to this and they’re full up for the year already. With every response, but respectful and gracious — you’re playing the long game here, and a no this year could be a yes next if you aren’t a raging cockbite about it.

(Also, event coordinators are like everyone else: they talk. If you’re a cockbite, others who are in a position to grab you for a convention will know. Ours is a world rather small.)

Why This Works

There are two main reasons why this works: event coordinators are too busy to randomly vet people who may or may not be interested, and asking speaks of professional character.

Let’s say a convention has a budget for ten special guests, because they comp hotel rooms and only have so much space & event bandwidth for guests. (When the guest/event coordinator ratio is out of whack, that spells doom for a convention.) Four of the guests are regulars, so they’re invited back and say yes. A couple suggest an up-and-coming colleague, so that’s six total. There are three people who wrote in asking to be guests, and seem like a good fit for the show. That’s nine out of ten. For that last one, the coordinator asks some folks he knows who would be a good match, and that one person is invited.

Incidentally, you might notice that this is not based necessarily on merit, but on who you know and whose positive attention you’ve gained (which is often at least partly based on merit, as like attracts like).

Now, being a guest is a gig, not a free ride. They’re looking for people to speak at panels or do meetups or run special event games, etc. People who stand up and ask communicate that they’ll Be able to fill this role. Is that inaccurate? Totally. But that doesn’t make the perception less a factor.

If you’re like me, you’re fighting against Guess Culture here. And since Guess feels natural, you’ll grit your teeth at doing this. I used to. Now, I live Guess Culture more in my personal life and Ask in my professional. (Though, the more I live Ask professionally, the more I appreciate it and the less alien it feels, so I’m starting to live it personally.) we Guessers aren’t doing ourselves any favors by waiting, because the larger successful world is full of Askers.

So stand up and ask for what you want. You might just get it.

- Ryan

Hey, Ryan, I’ve got a question. Increasingly I feel pull of editing instead of writing. Suggestions on cultivation of this?

Next, let me give some context.

I noticed it first at work. We were working on a technical document AND a system design. We started having to define terms. I found myself evangelizing for using one word over another. I became the unofficial technical editor before it went off to the professional editors.

Around the same time, I started on a really ambitious blog project (detail of it isn’t important) involving RPG system conversion. I’ve since lost steam on it.

I’ve never considered myself a writer. I don’t really know if I’m cut out for RPG game design. I do find myself weighing the importance of the written and spoken word. Terms / semantics are important to me. Effective communication relies on them.

Does this mean I have some latent editor screaming in my head trying to get out? If so, how do I go about cultivating him? I have no experience in this whatsoever. Your blog posts on editing have spoken to me, but it’s information I enjoy but don’t know if I will / can use.

Jeremy

So, you want to be an editor? Cultivate this talent? Friend, I hate to break it to you but what you speak of is no mere job or skill. It’s a sickness. It’s a memetic disease, one for which there is no cure. And I don’t mean that in some sort of cute way. I mean it will infect many avenues of your mind and change you in ways you won’t anticipate.

But it sounds like the sickness has already set in, and it may be too late for you. So much like the hideously deformed[1] seek out the circus act in hopes to turn their ailment into an asset, I will share with you how to try turning this unfortunate condition into one. There are other ways than what I’ll say here, as this is from my own background.

First, be known for something other than editing

I was a podcaster before I was an editor. That’s how I got on other folks’ radar.

Second, be loud

Be not shy of speaking your opinion about things you read. Talk about the effects of word choice and organization and all those great things.

Expect to be viciously hated for this. People loathe it when their darling authors are ever talked against. Authors and artists have some vicious cults of personality and everything you say, which would sound like non-inflammatory “duh”, will feel like a slap in the face to them. And because they are ignorant of this craft you’re starting to hone, they will throw feeble bullshit at you in response.

Ignore those people. They aren’t worth your time, and you’ll no more convince them that you’re right than they will convince you that whatever text you’re talking about is “perfect”. Seriously, ignore them. Do not make the mistake I did of trying to treat them like they actually wanted to have a conversation. They don’t, not on the Internet.

You’ll discover that other people share your opinion, but have to good sense to keep it to themselves because they have better things to do than spend time and energy on pointless nerd arguments that crazed fans make in order to prove their status in said personality cult. (And to be totally fair, some authors don’t actually create the cult, but are more a victim of it. And those authors are worth talking with, because they’ll engage you like a human being.)

Those people are folks you’ll be able to converse with. They’ll share ideas and find in you a kindred spirit.

Third, get involved

The community is always looking for folks to playtest & comment on games. Get involved. Play games, and comment about how your play was affected (bad and good) by reading the text. If the person you’re playtesting for is worth a damn, he or she will be interested in your comments because more playtesters will give vague ideas of did or didn’t work and often not be able to articulate why.

Do all that, and you gain peers

To start out with any field where your role is that of support structure (editing, layout, software development, etc.), you need peers to work with that create the initial clay, be it writing or art or whatever. In this case, we’re talking about authors with ideas they want to publish.

Those people who find in you a kindred spirit? Those are your peers, your connections. Some of them may also be writers or know someone who needs some editing they don’t have time to do. People who read your comments and ask you to look over future text or future games are also new peers.

My first job as an editor was for Paul Tevis’ A Penny For My Thoughts. Paul & I had been friends for years before that, and my being loud about my thoughts on editing and several emails about playtesting & thinking about his game was eventually responded with “So, let’s make this official. What’s your editing rate?”

My first job with Fred Hicks was when I brought him on to layout my first book, where I learned how to be an editor, Finis: A Book of Endings. A year or so later, I would be talking with him at Dreamation over a meal, and he would pitch to me the idea for Don’t Lose Your Mind, the Don’t Rest Your Head supplement. Before the words “I’d like to write for it” could leave my mouth, he asked me “Would you like to edit it?”

That’s how this starts.

Finally, profit?

By which I mean spend over two months trying to get a response about payment from a publisher, only to finally get a short, sharp email indicating that that you’re a pest for bothering them and to expect it “sometime.”[2] And be despised in a community because its most celebrated authors read like twitchy monkeys. Have writers pissed off with you because you killed their darlings. Oh, and did I mention being underpaid when you get paid at all?

There is a good side, though. I’m an editor because I believe people deserve to clearly understand the games they buy without bullshit frustration. And when I see one of my games on the shelf, I beam. I’m a craftsman as much as any author; just as the blank page and pen are a writer’s tools for making words, those words are my tools for making flow, for creating information constructs that set firmly and referencably in the minds of the reader. You are the shepherd of ideas.

When that succeeds, fuck yeah. It doesn’t matter than the author will get credit for my efforts, because that’s not the point of being an editor. (If credit for ideas is important to you, you really want to be a writer and not an editor. And few things suck more than an editor that is really a frustrated writer. So don’t do that.)

Given all I said, would I go back and keep myself from being an editor?

No. Because by being this loud, “Internet rockstar” editor, I’ve been able to do some pretty cool shit, and it’s caused me to meet and get to know some really amazing people. It’s presenting paths in my life I never expected. And right now, I’m writing on the bus to a video game designing gig because a few years ago Paul Tevis asked me if I’d like to edit his book.

Plus, it’s not like I could anyway. The disease was already inside of me. I just turned it into a circus act.

There are other ways to do this “be an editor” thing, sure, and I hope other editors will share their stories. If you do, please comment on this post so I can read them! :D

- Ryan

[1] There’s my non-politically correct term for the year.

[2] I’m pretty fucking bitter right now over this, because I turned down one cool gig to do work for a publisher that’s now treating me like I’m an asshole. While that’s coloring some of my response, but it’s not like this is an uncommon one to have.

Since there’s quite a bit of investment in Mythender, I thought I would be upfront about why I said “two months” for the initial set of booklets going out to donors:

• I start a new job as a social game designer on Monday. Yay job! But it means I can’t 100% gauge my evening bandwidth, so I’m assuming roughly 12-16 hours a week to work on stuff. Part of the reason I won’t be posting on Monday or Tuesday, likely.
• I am finishing up some work for Evil Hat Productions on The Paranet Papers. After that’s done and off to peer review, I’m taking a sabbatical from EHP to work on my own books — not jut Mythender, but starting with that.
• Speaking of Evil Hat, there will be revisions on my short story for the upcoming Don’t Rest Your Head fiction anthology, Don’t Read This Book.
• I have Void Vultures to edit, which I’m working on now. It won’t take too much of my time — the form factor & Roby’s writing is pretty solid, but that’s ahead of Mythender because it got funded first. And because we said backers are getting it in December (as well as the rest of the world).
• I have a holiday trip to Seattle for personal matters. Some work will totally happen then, and some won’t.
• I have a trip to Minneapolis for JoshCon in January. I’ll probably run Mythender then, from pre-ready booklets if I bust my ass enough, so that’s my current goal.
• Oh, and I have to learn how to do InDesign competently for Mythender’s layout.

Once Mythender’s written, it goes to a Secret Cabal of people who have played before (and a couple who haven’t) to make sure everything that’s in my head is out, before it goes to donors & the editor.

The bonus content starts once I have that off to donors and my editor. And yes, I’m paying for editing on a free project. That’s how I show my respect to people who are willing to take the time to read my game and how I show respect to those who helped Kelly out. Seriously, mad love y’all.

Here’s a bit about my plans for the form factor & production:

• The game will be in electronic form (PDF), visually-designed for iPad and similar use. That aspect ratio, minimal art for easy loading, good contrast, with some color & iconography to aid in explanation.
• The game will be made easy to print as a series of booklets, using normal 8.5″x11″ paper & normal desktop printer margins. There will be a black & white version of the PDFs for those who don’t want to use color. Folding the pages in the middle and stapling (or however else you’d like to bind it), the sort of thing that some folks can do at home or work, and isn’t too horrible to do at a Kinkos.
• Each booklet will range from 8 pages (taking 2 sheets of paper to print) to 32 pages (taking 8 sheets of paper to print). By “pages” I mean once the booklet’s printed. Four pages fits on a single piece of paper when printed double-sided and folded landscape.
• Ideally, each idea will be contained on either a page or a spread, with larger ideas being broken up. Sometimes this won’t work, but I’m trying this as hard as possible.
• There will be a version of the PDF that is set up for booklet printing without needing special printer/PDF reader options to make that happen.
• I want to have art on each booklet’s cover, to visually distinguishing them at a glance.
• The back of each booklet will be some form of quick reference.
• The middle spread, the one that naturally falls open, will be another reference.
• The planned booklets:
• The core booklet/table of contents/tone setter/basics, 8 pages
• “Creating Your Mythender”, the rules for making a character, 24-32 pages. It’s streamlined from what I have posted before.
• “Moments in your Adventure”, the rules for everything that isn’t a Battle, 24-32 pages
• “Your First Battle”, a tutorial battle for first timers, 24-32 pages
• “Epic, Godending Battles”, the battles rules, 24-32 pages. The tutorial will not refer to this booklet.
• “Mythmaster’s Handbook”, what a Mythmaster (GM) needs to keep in mind in order to make Mythender rock, 16-24 pages.
• “Mythic World #1: Mythic Norden”, the first world of gods to kill in Mythender, 16 pages.
• Loose leaf material: the character sheets, the Mythender Archetypes for character creation, some references, sample characters.
• (Note: these are estimates)

If that sounds like a lot of printing, note that I’m saying a total of 8+32+32+32+32+24+16 booklet pages, or 176 pages (which are small pages, since we’re talking 8.5″x5.5″, before printer margins are taken into account). That’s 44 printed pieces of paper. Anyway, I think that’s all. Writing this may reveal another. Plus, I am intending this to also be easy-to-use electronically, so hopefully that works for y’all.

And other Mythic Worlds will be around the same page count, maybe large, depends on the world.

I should say that most of the text is written, in some form or another, sometimes as outdated rules. So I need to quickly rewrite it for this form factor and shift in tone. (I’ve abandoned the “woe is the mtyhic world and let’s be emo” tone for a “CHOKE THOR AWW YEAH and emo optional” one.)

What, you wanted to know about the actual game? :)

I’ve talked about it quite a bit on my blog, and I’ll keep talking about it. But too much posting about how Mythender works keeps me from writing about how Mythender works in the text. :) Here’s what some folks who have tried it said about it:

It certainly had a lot of cock. And not in a bad way.

- Filamena Young

I GOTCHER DIVINE RIGHT RIGHT HERE GOD BOY

- Cam Banks

Mythender struck me like a thunderbolt. I’ve seen it light wildfires in people’s imaginations. It’s part game, part legend.

- Will Hindmarch

My dice wept tears of blood.

- Logan Bonner

Roll the storm, gain the thunder, unleash the lightning — and End a Myth!

- Chad Underkoffler

Finally, a game that weaponizes my existential angst.

- Nora Last

The finest game of deicide since Candyland.

- Josh Roby

I know what kicks ass. Mythender kicks ass. A Mythender stands on the battlefield atop the broken and bleeding bodies of his enemies, screaming defiance at the gods…and the gods are afraid to answer. That is kick ass.

- Brennan Taylor

I hate this game.

- Thor, wananbe “god” of thunder

Anyway, there you go. Those are my plans. Perhaps they’re ambitious. Perhaps not. I should briefly thank Jeremy Keller for inspiring the form factor, which is a bit amusing. Technoir’s Player’s Book and Transmissions are easy-to-print, and I really dug them hitting the table. Why it’s amusing is that I inspired his Transmissions. All life is circular, baby.

Thank you again.

I’d better get to fucking writing.

-Ryan

Dear Past-Ryan,

You’re a fucking moron.

Thanks to your actions, I have four companies* that aren’t paying me for work we’ve done. I have a few thousand dollars in outstanding payments, emails to these people go into the ether, and I’m wasting a lot of spoons having to chase payments instead of, you know, be awesome.

And as much as I blame them, I also blame you. Let’s go through what was going on in your mind…

I’ll Get One Soon

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

*snort*

Sure you will. Did you already start working?

Yes.

Bam! Lost your leverage on getting a contract, buddy! *sigh*

But They’ve Got A Tight Schedule

Oh, I’ve heard that before! (Since, you know, I’m you.)

So you’ve been pressured to start working before getting a contract because of their schedule? Do they have a contract ready for you? No? Then how the hell should you expect them to have other things they need ready for you in order to keep to that schedule?

You can’t. Being pressured to work without a contract is a company’s way of saying two things: one, don’t expect that schedule to be held, because it’s too unrealistic for them; two, they don’t respect you.

And if they don’t respect you enough to give you a contract prior to starting work, they don’t respect you enough to be paid.

I’m Doing This For The Exposure

If I could go back in time to do any one thing, it would be to punch you-me in the mouth for saying that.

You’re saying that you’re okay with being taken advantage of “for the exposure”? See if you still feel like that now? No, you don’t. Why?

Because people who don’t give contracts tend to be people who don’t run their business well. And those people don’t actually finish making products that you’ve worked on. So that thing you did in order to “get exposure”? Dead project. You worked many hours for piss all. You can’t get exposure if no one sees it.

I’m Afraid If I Ask, They’ll Can Me

Then you’re doing yourself a favor by asking. Work with no one who will treat you like you’re an asshole for asking for a very basic thing.

You’re Being Unfair

I am? Okay, yeah, maybe a bit. I’m pretty angry.

No one I’ve worked with intended on screwing me over. But the lack of contract is an indicator that I’m working with a company that will disregard me and fail at their job of being a business. There are several opportunities I passed up because I was busy on one gig or another that to this day hasn’t paid. And I continually feel both the sting of non-payment and the sting of opportunities passed by.

Sincerely,
The person who is dealing today with your naïveté

This is what it’s like to be a freelancer in this hobby, in software development, everywhere.

- Ryan

*To be fair, most of them aren’t in the RPG world. I’m also a freelance software developer. Still, with the situations I’ve dealt with in RPG-land, the lessons apply.

(Yes, this isn’t the post some of you were expecting. That post is in the works, and will be a much shinier, happier one.)

Well, if you’re me, you end up accumulating stuff over a year that turns you into a mobile writing station. I thought I’d take some time today to share this gadgety setup with you fine folks:

iPad, keyboard, cases, portable USB battery, stylus, mini surge protector, split charge cable (Not pictured: iPhone)

What you see there, from left to right:

• New Trent iCruiser IMP1000 portable battery
• iPad (first generation, wi-fi only) in the standard-at-the-timeApple case
• Apple wireless keyboard in an Incase Origami workstation/keyboard case
• SGP Stylus Pen Kuel H10 Series (which you can’t really see will in that pic, but the cap is hanging off the right side of the iPad and the stick itself is on the top of the keyboard.)
• Split charge cable, along with the long USB-power cable I either got with my iPad or I went out and bought. Given how long that is, I probably had to buy it separate at the Apple store.
• Belkin mini surge protector with USB charger

What isn’t in that picture, because I used it to take the photo, is my iPhone (3Gs right now) with the standard Apple headphones.

The portable battery takes a bit longer than overnight to charge, but once it does, it has enough juice for around 40-50 hours of iPhone use, and less for my iPad. That’s a necessity for using my iPhone on the go, given how much data & music, like running Pandora, can kill the battery. It also helps when I forget to charge my iPad. The battery has a single USB outlet and a simple indicator to tell how much power is left on it. It also automatically shuts off after around a minute of not charging, so if I unplug my phone from it, I don’t have to worry about it continuing to operate fruitlessly.

The writeosphere has talked quite a bit about writing with an iPad, so I’ll save you a lengthy explanation. I like the fact that it requires me to focus, being a unitask device (even if you can multitask via background), and when I’m not near wifi I can’t get too distracted by doing a “quick” Wikipedia search. For the times when I need to look up something on the Internet or want to take a quick Twitter break, that’s why I have my iPhone.

Of course, I need to get back to wi-fi to sync. Right now, I use Notably along with Dropbox (while I have Pages for my iPad I haven’t used it in ages). I have tried also editing off of Google Docs directly, but that requires an Internet connection and honestly the iPad editing web software is so not ready for primetime. I did nothing but mangle a doc I was working with, causing me to just revert back to an earlier version. Ugh.

For a few months, I stopped using my iPad to write. This is mainly because while the Apple wireless keyboard is sturdy enough to just toss in my bag, whoever thought it was a smart idea to make a sensitive touch on/off switch is an asshole. I would more often than not find that my iPad was disabled because in transit it would get turned on and keys would get pressed, attempting to insert a code to unlock my iPad. When that failed, the iPad would lock up for a bit. I recall one time where I had to wait 45 minute before I could fucking write.

I was pissed. If someone meets that product designer, buy him or her a beer. And then throw it in his/her face.[2] At least they got the on switch right on the Magic Mouse.

My iPad was still good as a TV, game station and library, so it’s not like it was a waste. But writing on it wasn’t going to fly.

Then I got the Incase Origami workstation. It’s a case for the standard wireless keyboard that, when opened and folded. gives you a place to set your iPad. It works great with the standard-at-the-time iPad case from Apple. It protects my keyboard from scratches & dings, but more than that it keeps it from turning on or getting pressed. :) And then it gives me a place to use my iPad like a netbook.

There’s no attachment, it’s just a place to put the iPad. I sometimes use it apart, when there’s not a good place to put the setup but there’s a good place to sit and a place to  put my iPad at eye level. I then cross my leg and use that to rest the keyboard on.

iPad & keyboard station separated

I also have a simple stylus for my iPad, and man is it great. It helps keep oils from my fingers from messing up the screen, it’s more comfortable, and it just feels a little bit classier. The stylus I have us an insert in the cap where it attaches to the headphone port. Since I use my iPhone for music 95% of the time, that’s not a problem. And if it is, I can take out the stylus cap for a little bit, whatev.

The split cable is nice. It’ll charge one device and work as a charge & sync cable for another. Now, it won’t jive with the portable battery because that doesn’t produce enough juice to power two devices, but that’s cool. It’s mainly for when I’m out at a coffee shop and don’t want to take up two outlets. Also, it lets me use my long cord to benefit both, giving me more choice of seating in a shop.

Finally, I have my mini surge protector, or as I like to call it, the device that makes friends. If I need an outlet and it’s crowded, I’ll ask someone if I can unplug theirs long enough to put the mini in. And now we have power for three 110s and two USBs.

So, that’s how I roll. Here’s the kicker: all together, it’s still lighter than my MacBook Pro, which is the main reason I use this setup instead.

- Ryan

[1] Which, since I intend on moving to Seattle in the coming months, is part of why I’m trying to get my sun fix right now. :)

[2] I get a huge hate-on for shitty product design. It magnifies when dealing with cross-OS/device applications where it’s clear the UI developers on each app don’t talk to each other. Hi Twitter, Facebook, and Wunderlist (which, aside from that, I’m liking so far).

In Games

I used to play a lot of chess with a friend of mine also named Ryan[1]. We would go out to a local brew-pub and drink liter steins of beer while playing game after game. Typically, we’d play three games during one of those afternoons, of which I averaged winning one out of three games. Ryan was pretty good. And while we had a ritual where we would deconstruct a loss — including backing up a few moves and playing together to see how to get out of a situation — I still wanted to win.

When it would get to a point in a game where I wasn’t going to win, due to material lost and position ceded, I would play to the stalemate. Sometimes, I would get that stalemate. And while that isn’t a win per the rules, my own emotional rewards for achieving this new goal were triggered. I felt like I won. And when it comes to psychology, feeling like you won is winning.

I used to also play the Legend of the Five Rings CCG, many years ago. I made a Scorpion deck that was neat, thematic, and…impossible to win with in a multiplayer game. Almost all we played were multiplayer games, so it was a bit of a disappointment. But then the third time I tried it, I noticed a pattern — I ended up playing the kingmaker, the player who would decide which other player would win. The other players started to hate that deck, because it robbed them of a sense of a “clean” victory, so my new win condition, from an emotional reward standpoint rather than a rules standpoint, was to make the win “dirty.”

And I won a few times, from that standpoint. It did get boring, so I made a new deck, but these times where I would adapt what was, for me, “winning” to feel good about the game I played is interesting. If you watch, you’ll see the gulf between “winning by the rules” and “winning by your own emotional validation” — tight gulfs can result in hyper-competitive people for whom there isn’t much of a different, or you’ll see wide gulfs in people who just enjoy playing games regardless of who wins…if the game is interesting. Sometimes you even see that last one to an extreme, where “an interesting game” is the only reward condition, and winning a “boring” game doesn’t actually trigger the emotional rewards.

(Edit: To be clear, since Rob brought it up, I’m not advocating this, especially not to where you become a dick to other people. I’m pointing this out because we all do it at times, and it’s useful to examine that.)

In Life

You also see this all the time in life. The asshole who cuts you off in traffic is trying to feel a win. The person who gives a dollar to someone on the street is trying to feel a win. We’re always going for wins in life, in big and little ways. Sometimes it’s a win against another person and sometimes it’s a win against a sense of yourself or the world. And when a big win looks like it’s not going to happen, folks grasp to change the win or to get some small wins instead. It happens all the time, and it’s worth examining if you’re a game designer.

And that’s where we get to publishing. Specifically, the indie publishing vibe of “this isn’t my core business, and I don’t rely on it to pay for my bills.”

In Publishing

The reason so many stupid, pointless bullshit arguments happen revolving publishing in indieland is because different folks in it have different win conditions. There are folks for whom “I have a book in my hand!” is a win condition, or number of sales reaching some arbitrary point, or just the act of finishing a draft and putting it out on the Internet, etc.

And sometimes in publishing, we feel like we’re not going to hit whatever win condition we fantasize about early in a game’s life — a bunch of sales, awards, critical acclaim, the respect of our peers, or whatever we think of when we go to bed on a night after working on the game. My humble win for Mythender was to sell as many copies and get as much play as A Penny For My Thoughts did. Not because I needed that to pay for anything, that was just the mark I was going to hold Mythender to.

Mythender

When it’s clear that we’re not going to win, we adapt or suffer disappointment. And it’s pretty clear that Mythender won’t get as much play, because it’s a weird die-heavy game. A bit ago, I decided to change the design to match the win I wanted, to make a game, and strip out a lot of the economy & number of dice needed. I worked on that for a bit, but I was really unhappy with it. The mechanics work, even if it seems cumbersome and it is component-heavy. That was discouraging as fuck, because I was breaking my game in order to make it more accessible & sellable.

After talking with some friends, and initially saying “I’m closing Mythender” — to where I even have a blog post about it that I kept hesitating clicking “publish” on — I thought about what the win condition was. And I spent a bit thinking about some of the other things I wanted to do with Mythender: use it to demonstrate a way of presenting RPG text, experiment with PDF widgets, show folks how this complicated engine that no one else has made[2] works. So I changed the win condition: just get it done and put it out there, like some sort of thesis paper on information presentation & flow.

Trying to sell it isn’t a part of my win condition, so I’m right now playing with putting it out for free. Because by putting “will it sell?” on the line, I’m putting a place where I might lose a personal win condition. And for Mythender, I’m not sure I want that sort of post-creation stress.

That’s what I’m working on right now, alongside making notes on a game whose win condition is “be considered a quality investigative horror game” and “gets as much play as A Penny For My Thoughts.”[3]

The Unwinnable Condition

There’s one condition that you can’t win: make the game perfect. There are folks who believe you can, and tell you things like “You need to just let your game sit for a long while” or “A year is too short a time to make a game.” You get this from people who are afraid to actually finish their games, because finishing a game and then discovering that there’s one more thing they could have done — and you always discover that — means you put out a game that’s an emotional loss.

Don’t listen to those people. Their notions are broken because they cannot win, and they’re trying to pass their inability to win and to change their win condition onto you. Sometimes there’s wisdom in their statements, but that needs to be separated from their crippled notions of winning in order to apply them in a non-toxic fashion to your publishing and your life.

I hope you all find your win condition, friends. And I hope you all grow to see your win conditions change as you get more wins under your belt. It’s pretty awesome.

- Ryan

P.S. I’m still going to be taking a break from blogging for a bit while I finish, but I wanted to pop my head up and say something. Let’s see how well this works out for me.

[1] If you’re familiar with how I held public Drunken Chess Tournaments back in my early 20s, this is the guy I founded that with.

[2] To my knowledge, of course. Though there’s a thing some of us say when anyone says “that no one else has made”: “There’s probably a reason for that.” :) Not to stop people from experimenting, but to check a misplaced sense of cleverness at the door as you work on your experiment.

[3] Penny is a mark for me because, well, actually as I type this sentence it seems hard to explain. But it’s the mark for similar-sized games I’m making. I’m not trying to duplicate Penny as much as use it as a goal for measuring resonance. I have no idea if that makes sense to other people, though.

I’m gonna take a few days off from blogging. I want to hunker down and finish a project I’ve been working on, which I’ll share with y’all soon enough. And lately I haven’t been able to quite manage both a couple thousand words on projects and writing up a blog post. And I’m going to use that as a segue to talk about mental health.

This constant workload is one of those things that ends up biting me. Lately has been a lot of “burning the candle at both ends” sort of activity, to finish up some stuff for other people. Unfortunately because of that, some days I just can’t get the words together at all. This is partly do to dealing with a psychiatric condition that causes excruciating headaches in times of stress or heavy continual brain contact. With the anti-anxiety medication I take[1], working an eight-hour day is doable, but the eleven-hour ones eat up my spoons quickly.

Having to deal with being a creative and dealing with psychiatric conditions means gauging your ability to work, and not working like you see other people doing. I would love to have the output that, say, Matt Forbeck has. Especially with his 12-for-12 project, which I encourage you to check out. But I can’t do that; I’ve tried, and found my neurochemistry doesn’t support my desired output. Since I’ve come to terms with that, I’m pretty watchful for “wait, the extra hour of work I’m about to do tonight is going to kill my brain for the whole of tomorrow. Fuck.”

I want to finish this project without crashing myself. And I want to finish it soon, because that’ll make me happy. So I’m at that point where I look at the “this is what I want to do” pile and “this is what I have the bandwidth for” meter, and decide what has priority.

Anyway, I figured I could just say “Hey, taking a break! Working on something cool!” and folks would just nod. But I wanted to say a little more, because I know I’m not the only creative type out there who deals with mental health issues.[2] I’m rather resentful of this limitation, but that’s what I get to deal with.

In the meantime, you should check out Elizabeth Shoemaker-Sampat’s new blog. Her first post is pretty amazing.

See you in a bit!

- Ryan

[1] Which is why I’m so very damned loud about health care in this country. Because I pay for the medication out of my pocket, and my thought process each time I do is “Okay, I’ve bought another 100 days of sanity & ability to work. What can I do with it?”

[2] I’ve always been quiet about such things, because I’m genuinely afraid that it’ll cause me to not get hired by some people. But I think I’m done being quiet.

Wait, you need more? Heh. I did as well years ago, before I crossed into the Fog of Achievement.

I saw some stuff lately that’s caused me to write about this. First, the image to the left, reading “i do not fail, i succeed in finding out what does not work.” Now, sure, that’s funny and gets a snort. But here’s the thing: if you actually do that last part, you’re on the path to success.

Back in January, I wrote this when I wrote about Luck and Wisdom:

If I am at all wise, it is because I neither ignore nor obsess over the mountain of failure I have created in my years.

Since then, I’ve had some more failures that I’ve learned from — professional, creative, personal. Nothing that’s disheartening, because the point of experimenting it to see what works, what doesn’t, and to move on. Because you can’t really predict success in the creative landscape, experimenting is what you gotta do. Each failure is just more concrete in your creative foundation. (Also, a good place to hide the corpses of past projects.)

Now, I’ve become a fan of Nice Peter and his Epic Rap Battles of History. He does some other weekly shows that are neat (though he lives up to his moniker of “Nice Peter”, so if you’re expecting disses like the raps, you’ll be disappointed. I am not). One from earlier this October, he crossed the threshold of having one million YouTube subscribers. He talked about that a bit on this video:

He starts talking about how it took him twelve years to get to this point, and he didn’t expect to get to this point by being an Internet rapper. Start at 1:02, for around 30 seconds. Or watch the whole 6:41 of it, because he’s upbeat, chill, nice. And if you’re looking at the Internet, chances are you need a dose of that. :)

If there’s one thing I learned from this experience [of getting one million subscribers on YouTube and being an Internet hit], it’s don’t ever give up on what you’re doing! But, remember it’s not going to end up exactly how you thought it was.

- Nice Peter

I totally understand that. When I started as a RPG design podcaster, I didn’t expect I would be a multiple award-winning game editor/developer. I didn’t know that was in me.

And when I think of unexpected successes, I think about one of the people that I…fuck, I hate saying “look up to” because honestly uncomfortable when people say that to me. It implies some sort of distance between a creator and the person saying it that isn’t there, some sort of status bullshit. But it’s a useful phrase, so sure…look up to, Wil Wheaton. Did he expect to become the cornerstone of geek culture that he is today? Not really. But that’s the thing about success — if you keep at something, examine your successes and failures, adapt, and be patient, it’ll happen. Just not how you expect. Wil adapted and became the dude he is today.

Now, when I say “be patient” I don’t at all mean “be still,” which is how I used to hear it when people said that to me. Success is like baking a cake. The cake is constantly becoming the thing you want it to be, not just sitting around unchanging. But if you rush it or open the oven too early, you’re going to fuck it up. Patience is constantly acting knowing the big payoff is years away, and not letting that deter you.

But patience isn’t never throwing in the towel, saying “fuck it” and going off to drink or play video games. That happens to all of us. We all need breaks. We’re not emotionless, tireless robots.

Patience is knowing you’re going to pick the damned towel back up in a moment and keep pushing. Patience is when that towel never leaves you for long.

Success is the long game. It’s unpredictable, it takes time, and it’s fucking exciting. Go grab some.

- Ryan

Only she didn’t have days. She had hours.

We talked, and I’ll share with you the tips I did with her. (I’m sure they aren’t the only ones, so please comment with your own!)

Blank Page, Round Two

Sometimes, I will start over. I’ll shelve the document I have, and then rewrite it from memory.

What this accomplishes is revealing what I think I’m talking about versus what I actually did. And because I’ve written the draft already, I know the beats I’m working with — narrative, argumentative, or illustrative — and where I’m headed.

Then I’ll compare with what I had before, and see which ones had strengths that I want to use. I essentially merge those strengths together into one near-final version. After that comes making sure it’s coherent and the necessary copyediting.

I know people used to do this all the time, but I’ve also seen this technique get a bit lost thanks to our ability to easily edit everything we make.

Twist the Layout

When I made a little ashcan game back in 2007, I was putting text I had worked over into layout. Suddenly, it looked new — the fonts were different, the orientation caused the line breaks to be in different places, the shape of the text on the page was different. Within moments, I caught typos, missed words, unclear language, the sort of stuff I was trying to work over the day before.

Since then, when I get to that point in a document & I’m using Word (or anything that lets me fiddle with layout), I’ll get crazy with it, switching from portrait to landscape, changing the font family & size, making it a two-column layout, all that stuff. Because I’m using Word at this stage, and not layout software like InDesign, I’m comfortable with those layout tweaks. They aren’t tweaks I’m planning on keeping; it’s just a took to have the text look fresh.

So, when you’re in this situation, what do you do?

- Ryan

I won’t say you aren’t that person, but I have talked before about this feeling. Baby steps means trying to create stuff at night, but then how exactly do you do that when you’re running on fumes?

[Before I go further, this is an audience participation post. I'm looking for your tips as well! Please comment.]

Stop, Drop & Write

When I know I need to get something done, I don’t go home right away. My commute home right now takes around 75 minutes. I take a shuttle 25 minutes to get to the part of town that has some open coffee shops, and I sit down to work.

By not immediately going home, I deny myself the restful rituals involved in arriving home — dumping my bag, laying down, etc. I’m so used to doing that the first few minutes of getting home, as a way to shed the day’s stress, that it breaks my flow. So I hold off. I write, or edit, or whatever I can do while in a public place. (Recording a podcast is right out, not that I’m a podcaster anymore, but I have edited some in a coffee shop.)

Those uncomfortable-after-too-long chairs, those just-big-enough-for-my-laptop-and-coffee tables, the lighting that’s crap-but-sufficient, the endless coffee you get if you do the free refill thing, all of that helps me push forward for an hour or two.

I don’t generally stay for more than two hours. But still, that’s two hours I might not have worked if I went straight home after a hard day. The siren call of “chill the fuck out” gets strong sometimes. And then we’re able to trick ourselves into thinking we’re working by lying around just thinking.

You don’t need a laptop to do this. There’s a great new app called “paper and pens”. I gave it five stars.

Aziz, Light!

You have problems sleeping while it’s light out? Use that.

Monitors are designed to look like a close approximation to sunlight. So far things like fluorescent bulbs. Gets bright, white lights and use them in your work space.

Now, that’ll play hell with you trying to sleep later, just like drinking caffeine late at night would. So be warned. (I know someone who used to do this and take melatonin shortly before work was done for the night.)

Related, if you do a lot of work at night, I recommend checking out the color temperature regulation software for PC & Mac, f.lux. I’ve been using it for nearly three years now. I have this on most of the time, but turn it off if I need the light to be bright and keep me awake longer.

Sit Up Straight!

Seriously, sitting up straight works. And get a desk & chair that’s at a comfortable height. And then sit up straight. Don’t slouch. That posture can keep you alert, because it’s not a restful one.

If sitting up straight seems to be an issue for you, and it sometimes is for me, there’s something I discovered this past August when I rented the tux for the ENnies. I have suspenders, and when I wore them, they made it awkward and uncomfortable for me to slouch. I still need to pick up some to see if it’ll help my productivity, but I’m thinking right now it couldn’t hunt.

Yes, I’m talking about having “big boy worky time suspenders.”

Better Yet, Stand

Standing desks are all the rage. But not everyone has one, has room for one, or has room in the budget for one.

You know what makes a great standing desk? Your kitchen counter. And it’s conveniently located near your coffee maker, tea pot, or whatever caffeine injection systems you use.

Keep your back straight when you do, though. Get some phone books[1] or whatever to have your laptop or notebook or pad of paper at the right height. And put something near your feet you can rest a foot on, like how bars have rungs at the bottom so you can elevate one foot and shift how the weight is distributed on your knees.

Easy on the Stimulants

You might be guzzling coffee or chain-smoking to keep yourself up, but that doesn’t last long. And it comes with side-effects — restlessness that’ll keep you up, headaches, things like that. Take it easy on the stimulants. In the long run, they’ll fuck you.

Here’s how:

• 9pm: Oh man, I have a hell of a night ahead of me. Time for the coffee!
• 2am: Jeez. Done. Okay, time for sleep
• 3am: SLEEP BRAIN SLEEP
• 7am: [Alarm goes off]
• Every moment after 7am: Utter exhaustion

And that’ll carry over throughout the day and into that evening & night. When you’re young, you can bounce back, but I’m not able to bounce back like that today in my mid-30s. You’re time-shifting your exhaustion, not dispelling it. And it’ll come back to crash on you.

Kick-ass Playlists

Keep your energy up with playlists that motivate you, that get you moving. One of my is the Tron: Legacy Reconfigured soundtrack/remix album. And Korn. Yes, I dig me some Korn — when the work I do can bare to have lyrics involved.

Sometimes I do headphones. Sometimes I do stereo. Depends on if I feel I need the music in my ears or around my space.

What music do you groove on when you’re in the late-night zone?

Flip It Around

Working at night, after you’ve been working all day, is hard. You have all that energy and passion in the morning, and having to wait until half a day later to act on it is rough.

So why not go to sleep earlier, wake up earlier, and do your creative work before you head out? Seriously. I know so many writers that swear by that. It’s not unlike people who get up early to go to the gym

Try it for a week or two. You can DVR your favorite shows and postpone some social engagements for a little bit.

Take Some Time Off

When I was working on the Dresden Files RPG, I was working between 55 & 65 hours a week (again, day job). I was burning myself out, and toward the end, I crashed on one of my chapters. Luckily, Clark Valentine was there to put the finishing touches on City Creation, but if I had taken a couple days off here and there, I wouldn’t have crashed. This is something I see from a lot of during-my-spare-time creators. Take some time off. Don’t try to push something out every night. Know your energy levels, and know when you need to replenish.

You cannot be productive at night if you create a situation where you have no energy at night. (And, really, you can remove the “at night” parts in that sentence.)

What Tips Do You Have?

So, faithful readers and newcomers, what tips do you have for working at night after you’ve been doing day job work all day?

- Ryan

[1] I look forward to the day where this is an honest-to-god anachronism.

During the creative process, overdocumenting cannot hurt you. But not writing something down because it was “obvious” or because you’re “totally remember it later” will. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost thoughts because of those excuses for not writing something down. No, really, I can’t, because I don’t remember all those times.

It happens as we’re drifting off to sleep. When that happens, I’ll type myself a note on my phone or use the voice recorder function if it’s more complicated, and email that to myself so I can check it out the next morning.

It happens while we’re testing something. When that happens, have a piece of paper around to jot notes on. And then when the testing is done, go back and see if you still understand your shorthand. If you do, rewrite it in a way that’s clearer to someone else — trust me, you’ll regret leaving notes in shorthand. If you don’t, ask the group what that note could have meant. Likely they’ll be able to tell you.

I was recently talking with a friend about his playtest. He was telling me about the stuff he learned from it, and I asked (because I always do), “Have you written that down?” He said no, that he’d remember it. I just glared at him, because I wish someone had done that to me every time I thought the same thing. Eventually, he started writing down his thoughts.

On another playtest where I was a participant, the designer was working out some issues in his game & had some epiphanies. He was new to this, so whenever this happened, I would say “you should write that down.” It’s a habit we’re not use to when we’re just playing games, to stop and write down thoughts mid-process, but it’s necessary when we’re making something.

This applies to fiction as well. If you have a thought about a scene idea in a story, but you’re not at that point or up to writing it at the moment, jot it down. And here’s where I can get to a specific example from me. Last night, as I was taking the shuttle home, I had an idea for a scene for a story in the upcoming Don’t Rest Your Head fiction anthology[1]. I didn’t immediately grab for my phone, because the shuttle & my medication tends to make me dizzy. Instead, I closed my eyes until the 20 minute ride was up.

And guess what I didn’t remember? Yeah. Luckily, I have other ideas, but that’s not the issue. By not penning it down, by not writing or speaking into my phone a couple dozen words, I’ve denied myself the option of choosing that. Maybe whatever ideas I come up later will be better, but there’s no way to tell. More than that, I’ve denied myself the option building on that to make something stronger.

I know some people would say “well, if you can’t remember it, it probably wasn’t any good.” Those people are ignorant fucks who know nothing of this process we go through. As creators, we’re constantly responding to stimuli, synthesizing that with our experience. Let the mind go blank for whatever reason — in this case, to combat nausea — and you could lose the idea when other stimuli hit you. A billboard, a near-fatal car accident, a cute guy or gal, cacophonous traffic, whatever.

That’s why we need to document. Because then we retain what we have synthesized previously. We don’t have to reproduce it, with whatever changes we accidentally introduce. And only when we do that do we have the choice to use something we’ve come up with. If we forget something because we didn’t document, we cannot choose to use or build on it.

Which is to say: documenting isn’t making a commitment. You’re not saying “I am going to use this” and certainly not “I must use this” when you write something down. You’re saying “This might be useful, for this project or maybe for another.”

Now, yes, there is one sizable flaw in overdocumenting: if you have a shitty organization scheme (or no organization whatsoever), then you might be causing yourself a lot of headache with overdocument. But, then, is overdocumenting really your problems?[2]

- Ryan

[1] And for more, you might want to check out Monica Valentinelli’s post about her involvement, since it’s currently the only post I can find about it on a quick Google search.

[2] Here’s a hint: nope.