That sound obvious, right? It’s harder than you think. Many indie peeps will write to the audience immediately around them, the folks I call alpha fans. They’re super easy to write to, because they already have a buy-in to what you think. You can engage in minimalism with them to a lazy degree. And if they’re the only people who you expect will ever buy your book or play your game — like you’re just making something for your friends — cool.

But a writer honest with him- or herself has to go farther than that, to imagine what other people outside of the alpha fan group will likely be checking this out. After all, how else are you going to grow that group? (I should point out that you’re doing this for two sets of folks: you, as a creator showing that you care about a broader group of people; and your alpha fans, who probably want more great people to play with.) So then you have to consider who, realistically, is going to check out your fan, should for some reason you break out of a small circle of folks who know about your thing and into a the notice of a larger population.

This isn’t just fantasy land. Look at Wil Wheaton pimping Fiasco. Something like that could happen to you, perhaps at that scale, perhaps smaller but still larger that your own sphere of influence.

So, who is that group? That’s something we had a discussion about with Fate Core, which ended with to following notions of audience:

• There are a lot of alpha fans of Fate. They get the ideas, which is to our benefit. So we shouldn’t write solely to them. We’re still writing for them, but we should be writing to their friends, folks they want to introduce to Fate.
• There’s a non-insignificant who want to get away with reading as little as possible, until they’re sure they’ll like something. These folks are more focused on kinesthetic learning (whether due to preference of brain makeup, whatever). So let’s make it so they only need to read the short Basics chapter, as long as someone (ideally the GM) reads the rest of the thing. And we’ll declare that to be the case upfront.
• The Fate veterans will need to have spelled out some of the terminology & rules cleanup we’re doing for Core. Since there are a bunch of different implementations of Fate right now, we don’t know which ones someone will have in mind when they’re reading Core for the first time, so we’ll have to make sure we don’t confuse them while writing to their friends.
• We will not be writing to an audience not aware of roleplaying games. Evil Hat doesn’t have the sort of advertising budget to reach out to totally new people. Like with almost every other RPG producer, we rely primarily on word of mouth & exposure to get new people to try out games. Very few people are actually exposed to our hobby directly from a book these days; they are from friends who have already been exposed. So we’re not going to waste time trying to explain our hobby to someone completely new.
• And because a game can live and die by the loudness of its alpha fans, we’re definitely still writing for them. Just not solely to them.

This conversation about audience came after some of Fate Core was written, and Lenny & I had a sit-down to talk about how we need to reflect to our audience. This solidified which of the two approaches for Core we were looking at:

• The first was a purely toolkit model. After the Basics & Aspects chapter, every single thing in Fate is entirely modular. We were going to focus solely on how to built your own Fate game from that modularity.
• The second was to take a slim setting example and build around that, so we had some finalized Core rules that embodied Fate Core, the sort of thing we could use to start with, and then drift from that central point in future discussions of toolkitting.

Because we realized the primary text focus should be to folks new to Fate, not new to roleplaying, and likely have a friend around who knows this but not necessarily, we went with the second approach. Once we understood this model, we were able to put the toolkit element — which is critical to Fate Core — in context.

What that means for the text, well, we’ll show you when we can. But for now, I just wanted to write a bit about thinking on your audience.

- Ryan

P.S. This is the core of my problems with I used to talk about Apocalypse World’s text. Which I stopped doing because rather than actually engage in conversation, the fans I talked with just said “Well, I don’t see that” and shut conversation down. Of course you don’t, you’re in the alpha group. But that’s a possibly future post, about how that phrase is toxic slime in various geek cultures.

But that doesn’t stop us from questioning what we’re writing. Sometimes when we allow ourselves to “write shitty,” we’re focused on being okay if a sentence sucks or is unclear and we move on, knowing that either it’ll get fixed or cut in revision. But when it comes to ideas that take a lot of words — 500, 1000, 2500, whatever — there’s a sense of commitment that we believe we’re creating in putting that work in.

And then we start questioning that commitment. “What if this idea sucks?”

In this first draft I’m working on, I had that thought a few times. “What if presenting the setting as vignettes totally missing the shit out of this?” “What if these rules totally suck?” “What if…” all over the place.

Part of the HK-TK experiment was to make myself write in spite of that feeling. The game, as I assumed and found out in the first playtest, is broken as fuck (which I still need to blog about). But if that stops the writing process, then writing would never get done. I wouldn’t have found out what does work, why some things don’t, and build off of that.

Which is why I’m writing this. You need to bullshit your way through that first draft. You need to accept that some of the ideas that you feel like you’re committing to will be wrong, but you need to write it because you won’t know which will be wrong, and you won’t know why some things work and some things won’t. Be bold; press on and be willing to bullshit.

Because that’s what every writer does. It just doesn’t look like total bullshit because of revision, peer review, beta readers, editing, all that work. But I assure you, a first draft is born of bullshit.

How do you bullshit? When you come to a point in your writing where you need to make a decision, just make one. Then write on from there, until you need to make another decision, and just make that one as well. Keep going. Don’t pause to muse on one and turn it into a catalyst of procrastination. To quote the brilliant Kit La Touche: “The beautiful thing about making decisions is that, once you’ve made them, you can evaluate them, and change them if need be. if you never make them, then you can’t do that.”

- Ryan

Oh, and if you want to know more about the bullshit process that is writing (and I say that with love, else I would not keep doing this), you should devout the shit out of Chuck Wendig’s blog & books on writing. But I’m going to assume you’re doing that already. :)

[1] One of my favorite bits about this comes from Anne Lamont’s Bird by Bird, her chapter on Shitty First Drafts. My magazine writing teacher years ago had us read this, which caused me to get the book.

What I do in those situations is twist the layout in Word. Let’s start with the first page of a draft, my story from Don’t Read This Book. Here’s how I start, with the defaults in Word for Mac 2011:

Then I do four things:

• I change the layout from portrait to landscape.
• I switch to two-column layout.
• I change the font family. If I’m using a serif font, I’ll go sans-serif or monospace. Vice versa. Sometimes I also change the font size.
• I use line-and-a-half spacing. This is partly a holdover from back when I printed material to revise or edit.

With that done, a really neat thing happens: the line breaks shift. See, we’ll often get hung up on text as it is on the page, not just the words as they are. So by changing that, making the lines look different and the font making the letter shapes slightly different, it shifts from pure visual memory into a fresher space.

See, when we’re reading the familiar, we fill things in our minds — not just textually familiar but visually so. This is to short-circuit that.

See for yourself. Grab the PDF with both versions as two separate pages.

Granted, what I’m showing you is the final version that you’ll see in Don’t Read This Book. I’m a bit too embarrassed by the first draft to share that one. :) Anyway, I hope this trick helps you out.

This idea has inspired Rob Donoghue to try something similar — use one writing tool for initial writing, and another one with a different layout for revision. I look forward to hearing about his results.

- Ryan

First of all, let’s start with what a second draft isn’t.[1] It is not just taking what you’ve written in the first draft and doing some light copyediting. That’s the lazy high school approach to a second draft, and it doesn’t work in the real world unless your first draft is 95% on the mark already.

During your first draft, you’ll discover ideas that you didn’t have in your outline or (if there’s no outline) initial thoughts that triggered whatever you’re writing. It could be that you’re writing an essay piece and you have come to a somewhat different conclusion — that happens sometimes when you’re making your thoughts more concrete by the process of writing them down. It could be that some part of your fiction change because, now that you’ve seen it on paper, you see different problems and different solutions. Whatever it is, things happen between “I had an idea” and “the first draft’s done” that can change things.

That’s the point of a second draft. These ideas may come within a few minutes of putting pen to paper. They may come midway through the process. Perhaps some come right at the end. And often, they come after you’ve finished the draft have put it away for an hour, day, week, whatever. It’s usually all of these.

Those that come early are pretty easy to deal with. It’s those midway through and later that cause issues. No doubt you’ve seen people (maybe even yourself) write sentences that seem to have completely changed partway, as if the writer’s brain shifted to something totally different and didn’t realize it. That happens at different scales, where a sentence might show that change in thought, or two sections are contradictory because one is based on an earlier idea and wasn’t changed in that first draft. When you have new ideas midway through, you’re going to have vestigial pieces.

The ideas that happen after you shelve it and your mind starts processing it in the background can only happen after the first draft is done. So naturally those can only happen after that’s over.

But the biggest benefit I see between first and second drafts is that of voice. Voice is key in text; it’s what gives a piece flavor & emotional resonance that will connect with a reader beyond just transmitting facts. Frankly, when it comes to RPG text, voice is one of the most powerful tools in getting people to remember whatever the hell your rules are. And voice is something that gets discovered over time.

Part of the reason I have had to rewrite a lot of Mythender is because of voice. Early drafts were technical & purely procedural — playtest stuff. Then I wrote drafts that were trying to be serious, an RPG text that was also trying to be like a saga. That was the wrong voice, one I wasn’t having fun with. The most recent voice, that of, well, me when I’m GMing the game, is the one that’s right for it. But it took writing it dry (so I knew the content) and writing it saga-ish (which, like any experience, taught me what worked and what didn’t) to get to where I am with the game.

And that’s what I saw as I went through Don’t Hack This Game submissions over the last few weeks. I had to reject some because they were effectively cleaned-up first drafts, devoid of voice. Voice is hard as hell to get right in the first draft when you’re not sure of the entire contents of said draft, and it needs that second draft to fully develop. And without that voice, you aren’t going to get anyone to give a fuck about your game, article, whatever, when there are plenty of people who do develop voice also producing great stuff.

I know some folks who do entire rewrites on second drafts. Others (like me) like to print out hardcopies and mark them the hell up with revision notes, so as to remove the temptation to nickel-and-dime revise as I’m going through. There are various ways of tackling the job, as long as you go from simple copyediting to examining the piece’s structure & voice, and making sure that from start to finish, it reflects your latest thoughts and doesn’t hold onto any old, erroneous stuff.

- Ryan

P.S. I rarely do a second draft of a blog post. When I realize one is crucial because my idea shifted, I tend to shelve it for days (or longer, with some remaining unfinished). But that’s partly because blogging is an exercise in Being Done, and no one is paying me to create fully polished text.

[1] Side note: defining by the negative first is one of those things I tell people to never do when I’m editing their work. It’s a specific tool. But that’s another post.

I wrote this game over the weekend” is like saying “I painted the Mona Lisa in a day”; it makes the rest of us #jealous

Putting aside the self-deprecating ”trust me, HK-TK is no Mona Lisa,” that it’s only 6500 words, and that other people designed most of the parts to this — that reaction is something I’ve thought about my whole adult life, as it’s been said often to me ever since college.

Except it was said about being a programmer. A few of us were always done with coding labs within ten minutes, when we were given an hour. Other people who were struggling in class would ask us how we were so fast at it. The answer was both simple and useless: in my case, I’ve been fucking with computers since I was six years old. And while the specific subject matter is new, it builds on subject matter I’ve been contacting with for years and years. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to finish these exams back then (putting aside that I might have just walked away to find a juice box).[1]

No, I know I’m not a particularly fast writer; at least, not consistently so. On the other hand, my friend Matt Forbeck is known for his Herculean writing feats. He’s often teased on Twitter as a robot, or we “lesser” writers tease each other about our own tiny wordcounts. Matt’s an icon when it comes to our industry. But, just as I wouldn’t be able to do the coding things I can without the nearly-three decades of practice and scholarship, neither could he have done his tremendous daily wordcounts right out of the gate.

Well, unless you believe some of the Myths of Forbeck, in which case he was born from the written word itself, so yes, he could.

That’s because what we’re doing in a day or weekend or whatever relies on what we’ve been doing for years before that. I’ve been solidly fucking around with RPG text & game design since 2006, and half-assedly well before that. So I have a sense of what reactions & rewards I want, which pieces produce what reactions, what happens when you put different pieces together, how to present them in text, etc. I’m not saying HK-TK actually works; it hasn’t been tested. But it certainly isn’t something I could have written in 2006. Or 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Maybe I could have last year.[2]

I’m sure it’s the same thing with John Harper’s Lady Blackbird, which was also quickly written up & visually designed if I remember right.

With time & practice comes understanding of your craft, and with that comes loads and loads of little tools in your mind that allow you to do things faster or better. And while this might impress some people, the reason I’m not self-impressed is because I see all the little marks of time in this document, the mistakes I’ve made in the past or seen others make, places where I am trying things that have worked in the past, stuff like that. I see five years of practice in a hastily written, unedited document.

Pretty much anyone can do that. Just takes time & practice. Which means it just really takes passion. So if you’re passionate about something, start putting some more time & practice in. It’ll pay off like you won’t believe.

And with enough passion, time & practice, perhaps any one of us could ascend to be like Forbeck. ;)

- Ryan

P.S. And just because something looks easy to another person doesn’t mean it was. But the hardest parts of writing HK-TK is another post.

[1] And I certainly wouldn’t have been able to finish them without exposure to how other people do things, learning from them. Not unlike taking pieces other people have designed, seriously thinking about them, tinkering with them, and putting them together. Same principle: no one of us is an island.

[2] Disregarding the fact that I wouldn’t have been inspired by Push until 2009.

I know quite a few freelancers who just enjoy doing work in a field, and have a great day job or spouse or both, and don’t care about the money they’re getting from some project they’re on. As a result, they don’t put effort into making sure things like contracts are delivered or payment is even relatively prompt.

But from the perspective of publishers who are forming how they’re doing business, what you’re doing hurts your colleagues who do depend on this for money, as there’s no difference to them between freelancers who need the money and freelancers who don’t. Those who do, those who have to struggle to invoke Fuck You, Pay Me, we looks like chumps because we’re sitting alongside you, who isn’t asking for that.

So if you want to help your fellow freelancers, chase after contracts and payment. Help us out by being a constant reminder of that, and of helping us being a unified force — one that doesn’t create incentives to continue hiring people who don’t need the money, and force unscrupulous publishers to shape up or dry up.

- Ryan

(There’s a related post somewhere in me about those freelancers who need the money but are timid about it.)

The reason I have this rule is partly psychochemical — I have anxiety issues that are linked to the sort of stuff I work on, and the form that takes is that I get tired quickly due to my brain running overtime–especially when I’m editing, as I’m keeping in mind multiple reader viewpoints at once. When I hit around two hours non-stop, I poop out, and the work suffers.

Now, you might ask why not make it a two-hour rule? Because it takes far less time to take a break after 90 minutes to reset myself than it does after two hours. If I can get my brain to relax when it’s not exhausted, it’ll start again faster than if I try that once I am.

This becomes a problem when I’m on deadline, but since the reason I’m working on a project is because of my expertise and skill, I have to choose between getting something done now and have it suffer, or take the pace I need to and risk running the deadline. And since having work suffer is something that’ll haunt me & the work after publication, I end to take the second route.

But because I am, I feel guilty, which then causes me to unconsciously push myself anyway. And then I crash, which can cause me to run the deadline anyway. So it’s sort of a catch-22, but in the moment I’m not thinking about that.

This is something I’ve spent years coming to terms with. I am not as fast as many of my peers, which frustrates me. And I suspect I never will be, because of how my brain is wired. (And this is with taking anti-anxiety medication, which is necessary for me to work at all now[1].)

Thus, much like eating lunch, this is one of those rules that exists for the purpose of making me a more production & healthier creative. But it’s something that’s easy to space on, which is why it’s an explicit rule I try to follow.

- Ryan

[1] As crippling headaches come are a constant when I’m not on medication.

• Rotating quotes using jQuery, with a follow-up tip
• Some simple tricks for making tables friendlier with row hovering & column hovering
• Collapsable menus with persistence (much like I do on this blog, only the article’s code is a refined version, and far more elegant) and a follow-up on making a menu not respond to the hiding code without changing the code much.

I’m pretty happy with these. I have done quite a bit of tech writing, but it’s usually been for government projects, which means very few portfolio pieces. And while I don’t normally talk about software stuff on this blog, I thought I would use the opportunity to talk about process. Since that’s a big part of why people follow this blog.

For the last few years, whenever I’ve written anything — technical, writing craft, RPGs, whatever — it started with an important thought:

It doesn’t matter if I’m not qualified to write about this. I will either become qualified enough or throw it away.

This is essentially a specific version of not telling yourself “no”. To try things and see what happens. Either you’ll become qualified in the process, or your piece won’t be worth publishing. Either way, you’ll learn something.

So let’s talk about how to become qualified:

• Try things
• Talk with people who know about what you’re doing
• Do peer review
• Dare to be wrong publicly
• Consider & process criticism

I’ve been doing this in my technical field for years behind closed doors, so writing how-to documentation with tested code snippets isn’t really a big deal. especially when you have folks for peer review[1] and good editors. But the only way I was able to crank out those articles, these blog posts, various games, etc., was to try things I wasn’t qualified to do in the first place.

So, you know, do that. Years down the road, you’ll be happy you did.

- Ryan

P.S. Today, I drive from Northern California to Denver, so I’ll be out of touch for two or three days.

[1] Thanks to Tracy Hurley for some peer review on the above articles

That means do things like ask & be aware of a schedule, notify people if you’re going to slip or bail on the commitment, understand that your work may need revision or just end up not being right for the project, put honest effort into it, and, most importantly, communicate the limits of what you’ll do for free.

Treat free jobs like they’re job applications for future gigs you don’t know about, either from people you’re doing the work for, folks they know who ask for someone like you, or folks who see the end result with your name on it.

Finally, know what you’re getting out of it. Are you getting a future favor? Networking opportunities? Exposure? Traffic & SEO? Social capital? A warm, fuzzy feeling of helping someone out? This might be uncomfortable to talk about, so it’s on you on whether you will (and with some like social capital, talking about it can potentially lower it, so it’s all messy & weird), but even just knowing what you’re personally getting out of something can help you deliver what you need to.

(Actually, let’s tackle that dirtiest one: exposure. That’s what people tell you in order to get you for free or cheap. So if someone’s trying to justify getting you on the cheap with “exposure”, walk away. More than likely, that’s someone looking to exploit you and are overselling the exposure you’ll get. If it seems like too good an opportunity to walk away from, research; find out who is has worked for this person for exposure, and see how true that rings.)

- Ryan

P.S. Since I was asked by some people yesterday: no, these posts aren’t passive-aggressive notes to people I’m working with or have worked with. Just thoughts on the realities of working for free, as I have done many times. (Including Mythender, which is why it’s on my mind more, I suppose.)

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.[1] 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

[1] 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.