City of Masks storygame at Nerdly Beach Party

If you're in the neighborhood of San Simeon State Park on Friday 19 September, my storygame based in the same setting as the City of Masks novel is set to be playtested at Nerdly Beach Party.

Thanks to Nancy (Faerieloch) for facilitating this.

Eating elephants

It's said that if you want to eat an elephant, the correct way to proceed is to take a spoonful at a time.

That's an approach that works really well for writing. The blogging that I'm doing over at Hypno NZ is gradually getting me the elements of a nonfiction book. I've already assembled one series into an ebook on personal change techniques, and another series, on Health Behaviors, is just about to wrap up. Together, and with a bit of expansion and incorporation of other blog posts that weren't in the two series, they should make a decent book.

The other good thing about the blog format is that it encourages you to write new stuff instead of procrastinate by revising what you've written so far.

I'm also writing Gu on another blog. Again, it's a good way to write. I've never been very good at short fiction, because my ideas want to expand. This way, I get to do a long-form work that consists of short-story-like vignettes of about 1500 words each. The short story on which Gu is based was 5500 words, but I've reached - I'm estimating here, because Blogger doesn't have word count - about 24,000 now simply by expanding the embedded stories in that story. (That's based on 16 posts so far at about 1500 words. The early ones are probably a bit shorter, the later ones a bit longer.)

Unfortunately, at the moment I can only see about another six posts or so in what I still have to cover. (I have a sort of hit list of ideas.) That would take me to about 33,000, which is short of the 40,000 words that the SFWA counts as a novel, and the 50,000 that most other definitions use.

Still, 7,000 words short is definitely spitting distance. Even 17,000 is probably achievable, though I don't want to just pad it out for the sake of it. I'm especially wary because it's told as a documentary - it doesn't have a plot as such, in the sense of characters doing things - and I don't know how much of that people can put up with. I have kind of a sense of how I might incorporate story into it, by following the documentary maker, Susan Halwaz, as she lives out her everyday life using Gu. Silent, mostly, with no dialogue. And then after each such sequence (or before?), an interview with some expert about what she's just experienced.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to make things harder for myself by doing experimental stuff like this. I mean, a novel which is puportedly a blow-by-blow description of an immersive documentary, told in the second person, in which large sections have no dialogue and most of the rest is talking heads? But the fact is, because this is a completely noncommercial project - nobody has bought it, I have no publisher who cares if I can sell 5000 or 10,000 copies and wants me to write a series of three books - I can do what interests me and what occurs to me at the time. Artistic freedom, huzzah!

It also makes it more difficult to actually sell it, of course. City of Masks suffered from not being in any recognizable genre, so it's hard to identify a market for it. A wide variety of people who have read it have all responded favourably, despite its odd language and journal format, which encourages me that it is actually good and would do well if only anyone knew about it. And I'd tell them, if I knew where they were.

Gu has a more identifiable market: Science fiction readers who like Charles Stross or Neal Stephenson. (One person who's reading it has also compared it to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, mainly for structural reasons.) And such people are open to new ways of doing things. So maybe I will be able to sell it after all, who knows?

Who cares? I enjoy doing it. Even though this blog post is an attempt to procrastinate working on it, because I have minor writer's block about what I'm going to write next. So I should just start writing and see what comes out. That's basically what I'm doing anyway.

Occasional update

Hello, Faithful Readers. (By switching my RSS feed to Feedburner I've managed to discover how many of you there are, and it's more than I thought. Though still not many. No, I'm not telling you.)

As you may well have realized, the reason I've not been blogging much over here is largely because I've been blogging a lot over at Living Skillfully and podcasting at City of Masks. The latter will be coming to an end in the next couple of months, all going well, and I'll be moving on to a new fiction project. If you want to be involved in the next-project-deciding process, hop over to City of Masks and leave a comment.

It's interesting how writing contributes to personal shifts. In the course of blogging about various topics and finding which ones attract me, I've discovered that what really interests me in hypnotherapy is actually the stuff that I thought I would find boring, bread-and-butter: smoking cessation and weight loss (or rather, positive eating, which isn't by any means just about weight loss). In fact, health promotion and helping people to engage in healthy behaviours has become quite fascinating.

There's a discipline of psychology called Health Psychology which deals with this, and there are several courses on it at Massey at masters' level, so providing my interest endures (always a question with me), a health psychologist is what I'm aiming to become. I've been thinking for a while that "hypnotherapy" is not an ideal label from a marketing perspective - not only because of the perception issues it has, but also because it is marketing a feature - hypnosis - rather than a benefit - such as getting healthier or gaining confidence.

So until I can legitimately call myself a health psychologist, I'm contemplating using the term "health coach" - also still mentioning that I do hypnotherapy, but emphasizing what I use it for.

In other news, thanks to Andrew and the new Monastics group (the Desert Mothers), I've had a small breakthrough in my understanding of the "spirituality of everyday life" thing. There's no magic to it. There's no technique. You just have to do it - be aware of what you're doing, be present, pay attention.

It's simple and hard.

Soon, I hope to post more garden photos, since it's a year since my big planting and everything is growing well. Until then, keep paying attention in everyday life.

Free press releases

I spent quite a bit of Friday submitting press releases to a number of sites, a process which is often more fiddly than it needs to be. A couple of the sites I simply couldn't get to work at all; their CAPTCHA tech was faulty or the forms wouldn't post.

The easiest to submit to is NZ's own Scoop; you just email the editor, rather than having to register and fill out an online form which asks for the same information as all the other websites, but in a different order.

Here's Scoop's version of my press release about City of Masks. They changed the headline from "Book Promotion, New Style: Novelist Makes Maximum Use of Internet Technology" to the more clickbaiting, if slightly deceptive, "Renaissance Hits the Internet".

Anyway, for your reference and mine here is my collection of sites tagged "freepressreleases" at Del.icio.us.

Incidentally, I also found a nice site which you can use to submit a web page to multiple social bookmarking sites: Haliboo.

You can put a button like this on your site:



(That's functional, by the way - when you click it it will submit this site. It'll submit whatever the URL showing in the browser is, so if you want to bookmark this particular post rather than my whole blog, click the post's permalink first. That's the title of the post, for those unfamiliar with how Blogger does things.)

City of Masks - NZ Printing

I just received my printing - hopefully the first of several - of 50 copies of City of Masks from Zenith.

It's been a drawn-out process, made two weeks longer by the fact that my email with the cover art never reached them and I didn't realize until I eventually asked why I hadn't heard back from them. They have much, much less functionality on their website than Lulu or CreateSpace - practically none at all, actually, it's just a brochure, and not even a particularly informative one. It doesn't even give their prices or any templates or sizes. This makes everything a lot more manual than dealing with Lulu or CreateSpace. On the other hand, you get personal service - their sales guy, Ocean Reeve, has been very helpful through the proofing process and gave me a second proof for free when the first one had an issue with the page numbers being cut off at the bottom. He also put the ISBN barcode on at no extra charge. In gratitude, I plan to write a layout guide for authors that they can put on their website, and which may help others to avoid some of the issues I had.

This is one of two events that I've been waiting for before launching Phase 2 of Operation Promote Novel. The other, which is entirely dependent on me and I should have done by now, is getting five episodes of my podcast of City of Masks together so that I can launch it on Podiobooks. I'll then put out press releases, send out review copies, and generally toot my own horn.

Speaking of which, I'm now on goodreads, which is a kind of social networking site for readers and authors. I'm thinking of putting one of their widgets in the sidebar here to show what I'm currently reading, once I get the time.

City of Masks for sale on CreateSpace

You can now buy City of Masks on CreateSpace as well as on Lulu. The corrected proof just arrived.

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes to get into Amazon's catalogue. I'll then be able to do a comparison of total timing as well as all the other factors.

I should have Zenith Print as a third point of comparison fairly soon too.

City of Masks for sale on Lulu

You can now buy City of Masks on Lulu. I had just finished recording the next podcast episode and was about to start editing when there was a pounding on the door, and there was the courier with a very large and well-packed package, containing my proof. As far as I can see there are no printing errors, so - the book is officially available.

W00t!

The CreateSpace corrected version is on its way to me now and should arrive this week (based on past performance). Based on the emails I got from their support people, they went through exactly the same steps this time as last time, suggesting that they need to improve their ability as a "learning organization" so that they only have to fix problems once.

Once that proof arrives, I'll do a major post comparing Lulu and CreateSpace step-by-step, feature-by-feature. At the moment I have to say I wouldn't be using CreateSpace except for the access they give to Amazon (and their audiobook and multi-disk CD capabilities), but their site is somewhat less cluttered and, for me, slightly easier to use.

I had fewer (in fact, no) printing hassles with Lulu, whose pricing is slightly better for single books and much better for bulk.

(Their freight prices to NZ are just ridiculous, though. If I get 50 books shipped to NZ, it's $245.16 (USD) for shipping and it'll cost me $14 (NZD) per unit in total, for printing, postage and packaging. Shipped to US: $31.60 (USD) for shipping, $8.58 (NZD) per unit. Actually, if I select USPS Media Mail instead of UPS as my shipping option, it's only $17.30 (USD) for shipping and $8.21 (NZD) per unit. So I'll be asking my parents-in-law if I can trans-ship through their address in California. There's no way it'll be over $200 for them to send the package on here.)

I know that others' experiences may well differ; anyone want to share Lulu or CreateSpace stories, good or bad?

I'm in iTunes, and other book news

The first episode of the City of Masks podcast is up, and can be found in iTunes. That's pretty exciting.

I'm having some problems recording the second episode - getting clipping of the sound for some reason.

Once I have five episodes, I can load them up to podiobooks.com (they've already approved my first episode as meeting their quite high standards).

On the race between Lulu and CreateSpace, so far we have:

Submitted: Thursday 3 January (both)
Ordered: Thursday 3 January (Lulu), Saturday 5 January (CreateSpace) - because CreateSpace has a manual checking process before you can order.
Shipped: Saturday 5 January (CreateSpace), Tuesday 8 January (Lulu). So CreateSpace achieved same-day shipping, while Lulu took 5 days.

Judging by previous experience, the CreateSpace one could be here today or tomorrow, at which point (all being well) the book will go on sale via CreateSpace and Amazon. Which is thrilling.

EDIT 10 January: Well, CreateSpace wins the race, except that they have sent me a proof with the same issue as the first proof I got - all the ligatures and apostrophes have dropped out. This is a mark against them, getting the same thing wrong twice on the same title - they need to tighten up their procedures. So no book for sale just yet.

Hopefully the Lulu proof won't have the same problem (or any others). It should arrive about Monday or Tuesday judging by the CreateSpace one's transit time.

EDIT 16 January: It was actually Wednesday, i.e. today, and I have another post comparing my experience with Lulu and CreateSpace so far.

Dual-wielding Lulu and CreateSpace

Erin finished reading my CreateSpace proof copy of City of Masks yesterday (the replacement one that they sent after they sorted out why the ligatures were disappearing), so today I made the edits, re-uploaded the files, and also uploaded the Lulu versions. I made the mistake of setting the size for the CreateSpace edition, completely arbitrarily, to 8.5 x 5.5 inches, and that's a size that Lulu doesn't offer. Next time it'll be 9 x 6 for both and I'll be able to use the same interior file (though I'll still have to make a small change to the cover, as CreateSpace has more trim on their cover spec than Lulu).

I'm using both services because CreateSpace gets me into Amazon for free, but Lulu gives me much better discounts for bulk orders - they cut in earlier (at 26 copies instead of 50) and are more generous, so it's worth my while to put the book through them as well so that I can order bulk copies to sell directly off my website, to give to people who helped me by offering critique, to send out for review, give to my family and all the rest of the things one does.

There weren't very many changes. One was to the blurb, which was originally written before I finished the book. Blurbs are traditionally written last of all (I know, because when I worked as a book editor I was several times called on at the last moment to do so). So I souped it up following her suggestions. It now uses the keywords "adventure" and "Shakespeare".

Another was slightly embarrassing. Erin didn't know what "barratry" was (in a short list of crimes), and when she asked me, I had to confess that I wasn't sure either, but I thought it was some sort of violent crime, like assault. "You really shouldn't use words that you don't know the meaning of," she said, and as is so often* the case, she was right. I looked it up today. The connection with assault was all in my head (probably because it sounds like "battery"). It's the crime of, among other things, sinking a ship in order to claim the insurance. So I changed it to "assault".

I want to write in depth on the differences between the two print-on-demand houses, but a couple of them I found today: Lulu have automatic, immediate checking that your uploaded cover file is the right size (because of an error I'd made - confusing points and pixels - mine wasn't). CreateSpace's checking is apparently manual, or at least batched overnight.

The other difference is that CreateSpace insists that you receive and sign off a proof before you can release the book; Lulu suggests that it's a really good idea to get one before selling, but you don't have to.

So now the two are racing, since I uploaded the files immediately after one another. Who will win?

*But not always. Sorry, Chook.

Status update for end of 2007

On the last day of 2007 - what's happening for me?

I said back in March that I planned to do these status updates "from time to time" - I'm glad I didn't set a specific time period. This is my second update.

Writing: City of Masks is in its final stages of being (self)-published. I'm gearing up to do a big promotion with press releases and so forth.

I'm having some fun putting together a podcast of myself reading it - each small section of the book will be an episode. Because it's told in journal entries (and other documents), and the first one is dated "the sixth of the first month", I'm going to try to release all the podcasts on the correct dates as per the timeline of the book. The first one is recorded and I plan to record the second later today. I'm using incidental music from Jon Sayles, a classical guitarist and Renaissance music enthusiast who loves it so much that he gives it away for anyone to use for any purpose. I emailed him and he's just as pleased as I am that I'll be using it, which is very cool.

The Journey in Four Directions didn't go anywhere this year. It's reaching the point where I feel the need to rewrite or at least redraft it, and I'm thinking of doing that by blogging bits here, once City of Masks is less central to my attention.

I haven't done any more substantial writing this year - just the blog, and hypnotherapy scripts. Next year, more writing.

Spiritual practice: my on-again, off-again relationship with centering prayer is off again. I just don't seem to stick to it if any kind of disruption comes along - this time it was being unwell for most of December (persistent cough, which has pretty much gone now). I think I may need to do myself a hypnotherapy script on creating a disciplined practice.

Exercise: I've started using the crosstrainer we bought for Erin to help with her fitness programme, so that she doesn't need to go to the gym after work and then get stuck in traffic (and for after her gym membership finishes). She's getting fit for ankle surgery. I'm getting fit for general life improvement. I'm only doing five minutes at a time but I'm getting faster and going further in that five minutes.

Tomorrow, Julianne and Mark M. are coming round and we're going tramping in the Waitakeres, something I've wanted to get back into for a while.

Hypno NZ: I'd hoped to have my online shop up and running by now, but there aren't yet any completed recording sets to put in it. Because of the cough and general voice roughness, I haven't recorded many scripts yet, though I've written several that are waiting for recording time. One this afternoon is a possibility.

Nobody has used the online booking form to book an appointment, and only one person has used the "tell me about yourself and your issue" feature (and never replied when I contacted her). Sigh.

I've been getting about one client a week since taking out an ad in the local paper. There's another, larger ad in a different free newspaper coming out in a couple of weeks; I'm going to try to "out" myself to my new boss before it comes out because someone at work is sure to see it. (So far there's never been a good time to mention at work that I'm developing a hypnotherapy practice on the side.) I think Max will be cool with it, as long as my work isn't compromised.

The therapy room is pretty much fully set up now, except I never did get a larger rug for the floor; it has two comfortable chairs, a set of drawers, a little table for my laptop, and a plant on a stand. I have all my diplomas and so forth nicely framed in the entryway.

Study: I'm in the process of enrolling for a Certificate in Health Science from Massey, which I'll be studying extramurally. It's the first step towards a bachelor's degree in health science, which could well lead to a Master's (endorsed in psychology) - though that would be about 10 years away unless I go full-time for a while, which isn't likely.

I was looking for a course where I could study anatomy, physiology, body systems in sickness and in health, nutrition, cognitive science and so forth, so that I can fill out my hypnotherapy skills with knowledge of the human mind-body system and basically help my clients more effectively. There are several around that are for naturopaths and medical herbalists and the like, but they all include things like iridology and homeopathy which I consider pseudoscience. I finally thought of checking Massey - their course hadn't come up on any of the Google searches I did, they need to work on that. It's pretty much exactly what I was looking for, from a reputable research-based university that's part of the NZ government's education system, at about the same cost as the dodgy ones.

I will have to take a couple of compulsory courses which sound fairly uninteresting and not all that useful, but they may have redeeming features that don't come through from the course descriptions. My current planned curriculum also doesn't quite give me a major in psych for the bachelor's degree, which would mean I'd have to make a case to get into the master's programme, but - cross bridge when come to. By the time I get to that point, if I even do, they may have changed the degree regulations anyway.

So, 2007 was kind of a ramp-up year. I'm looking forward to lots going on in 2008.

City of Masks proof

The City of Masks proof arrived from CreateSpace just now - impressive, considering that it was shipped on Tuesday (and I ordered it on Monday). Especially impressive this close to Christmas.

The cover looks great, title, cover illo, C-Side Media logo, even the spine text is correctly aligned, despite CreateSpace's dire warnings about the risks of putting text on the spine of a book under 130 pages (it's 128).

However, something's gone wrong with the ligatures in the interior copy, and the letter combination "fi" has dropped out almost everywhere it occurs (also fl, all apostrophes, and probably some others). It looks fine in the PDF I have here. I've just sent a support request; hopefully they can help me out.

I was going to do another proof in any case, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I'm now planning to dual-publish at CreateSpace and Lulu. Lulu has much better pricing once you start buying in bulk, but getting distribution through Amazon with Lulu is relatively complicated, costs extra, and has certain limitations, so publishing through both at once makes sense. Unfortunately, when I was doing the original CreateSpace setup I picked the size 8.5 x 5.5 inches, completely arbitrarily - and Lulu doesn't print in that size. They both do 9 x 6, which just involves putting an extra quarter-inch all the way around the pages, so I should be able to do that without too many issues. (EDIT: No, I can't. CreateSpace doesn't let you change your mind about the trim size after you've ordered the first proof. Damn!)

The other reason I need to revise it is that I put a URL on the cover and in the front matter for a Wordpress blog, before I'd thoroughly investigated the functionality available at wordpress.com. I was relying on a description I'd read that said "Wordpress can do such-and-such", without realizing that while Wordpress the application can do a great many things when hosted on your own site, Wordpress the site is very sandboxed and paranoid and will let you do hardly any of them. In particular, you can't put HTML in your Wordpress blog which includes a form, so I can't include a signup form for my mailing list on the blog. That's a dealbreaker for me; people are much more likely, in my opinion, to sign up from a simple form than they are from just a link. So I'm going to be using city-of-masks.blogspot.com as my promotional blog for the book.

I'm planning to record myself reading the book and release it as a series of podcasts, then sell it as an audiobook. I may even, if I get myself organized, release the podcasts on the corresponding dates to the dates in Gregorius's journal (most of the book is told through journal entries). That would be kind of fun, and would give me a deadline.

City of Masks about to be published at last

I finally decided to stop waiting until I was happy with the game for City of Masks and just publish the novel without it.

I'm going through CreateSpace, since that gets me straight into Amazon (who own CreateSpace). So far it seems pretty straightforward.

I've used LyX for my typesetting, which was somewhat frustrating for a while but I finally figured out how to get it doing what I wanted. It's one of those programs that has two levels: Incredibly basic and very, very technical. I managed not to stray too far into the very, very technical side but it did take me some messing about. I'll be able to use it much faster next time.

I did the cover in Inkscape, because I find the Gimp totally unintuitive; I always end up frustrated whenever I try to use it. I should probably download GimpShop, which skins the Gimp to look like Photoshop. Not that I've used Photoshop for years, but it may be an easier interface to work with.

The cover illustration of the mask comes from an Italian artist, appropriately enough, at DeviantArt (donia.deviantart.com). She very kindly let me use it for free with acknowledgement.

So my total outlay for getting my book into print (and distribution) will be $5.71 USD plus shipping, for the proof to be printed and sent to me for approval. Amazing.

Publishing certainly has changed since I were a lad.

Wen Spencer, please work harder!

ADVISORY: Probable complete unfairness to a living author.

I've been reading a few books by Wen Spencer lately. I came across Tinker first, liked it, moved on to the four Ukaiah Oregon books, liked them too, and last week read A Brother's Price. Which I liked. But I would have liked it a lot more with a bit more work from the author.

To get at what I mean I'll have to give a little background. Like my City of Masks, A Brother's Price is speculative fiction in which there is no magic and the technology is lower than our current real-world technological level, but there is a significant sociological difference. In ABP's case, this is based on a significant biological difference: Very few male children are born. Consequently, men are highly valued - as possessions, to be protected, traded and sold. They aren't usually taught to read (which leads to the classic "deny them education, then point to how dumb they are" maneuver), and they do most of the domestic work - washing, cooking, childcare - for the very large families of sisters and their offspring by a jointly-held husband. Women do everything else. In other words, gender roles are switched, and this provides some thought-provocation.

Where I detected laziness, though, was in the worldbuilding and in the characterization/plotting (I group those together because plot is what characters do).

Firstly, the setting. It's basically 19th-century America, complete with sixguns, Stetsons and derringers (each so called), which I find very lazy worldbuilding. There is a difference: the country is ruled by Queens (they aren't a monarchy as such, because whichever generation of the royal family is currently the "mothers" are, jointly, the rulers; rule passes to the next generation at the birth of its first child). In fact, the country is called Queensland, which raises the never-explored questions, how are other countries governed? What other countries are there? Where are they located in relation to Queensland? What trade goes on with them? Is Queensland a former colony of somewhere else, or has it been settled time out of mind? Queensland seems to sit in a historical and geographical vacuum, surrounded by blankness. There is some history of Queensland, a kind of civil war fought a couple of generations before, but that appears to be all the history there is.

What's more, the women who do everything in Queensland do it in exactly the same kind of macho way as men would - they are warlike, violent and argumentative. Whether this is realistic could be debated, but in this book, it certainly isn't; it's just a given. The people who run society will be macho idiots a lot of the time, end of issue, now let's have some fighting.

Then the characters and plot. One of the (male) main character's sisters behaves very badly and irresponsibly early on, then - gets over it and doesn't do it again, doesn't take revenge out of anger for her punishment, generally seems to mature for no discernable reason. One of the princesses has a very understandable objection to a course of action favoured by the others, and then - gets over it all of a sudden and for no discernable reason. We don't see any process of how these characters changed, how their powerful emotional issues were resolved. They just cease to be an impediment to the plot. Just as in Ukaiah Oregon the "Famous Bitch of Ice", FBI Agent Zheng, thaws completely and instantly when she meets Ukaiah. We're not told why she's a bitch of ice in the first place, exactly what was magic about Ukaiah... We see no process.

I'm not advocating holding up the action while the characters talk endlessly about their internal conflicts; after all, I'm reading this kind of fiction rather than another kind because I like the externalization of internal conflicts. But that's not what I'm receiving. I'm receiving the replacement of internal conflict (and its resolution) with external conflict, and it's just not fully satisfying; it feels rushed and incomplete.

Ideas as beings

Tony Dowler recently let me critique his work-in-progress Mathematica as part of a critique exchange over at Story-Games.

Capsule summary: it's a well-done alternate-history Renaissance game, built on Clinton Nixon's Solar System. His main addition to that system is the "war of ideas". Without giving away too much, questions like "Can the Pope be infallible?" can be invoked during play for mechanical advantage, and eventually get "resolved", the answer becoming part of the game world.

That triggered off an idea in me for an alternate treatment. What if the ideas (let's call them Theses, like Luther's) become like very cut-down characters, which "advance" as they are invoked and involved in conflicts until they "transcend" and become orthodoxies or truisms accepted by at least some people as just part of the way things are?

This makes them rather like gods, of course. And, in fact, the ideas of the Renaissance and afterwards did start to be treated, in many ways, like the gods of polytheism.

Those same gods were given a revival in intellectual and artistic discourse in the Renaissance, their symbolism and attributes used in discussion and symbolic art about ideas. Probably this had something to do with the age's desire to disentangle itself from the medieval Church, which did a similar thing with the symbols and attributes of the saints.

Interestingly, like me in City of Masks, Tony has made the continuation of Roman paganism part of the background to his setting. I suspect his reasons may be similar to mine (I seem to remember him saying somewhere that he's a fairly conservative Catholic): Doing this enables you to play with ideas about the role and influence and corruption of the Church in those times, without the emotional complication of its historical continuity with the Church of which you are a current faithful member.

So anyway, there's an idea for my file of "may have legs" ideas. Theses, and, naturally, antitheses, which act like characters in at least some ways.

More in my next post.

Playing the role you don't want to live

My father was, in many ways, the inspiration for the character of the Innocent Man. Yet he loved to play villains on the operatic stage. As a bass-baritone, he often got the opportunity, though sadly he never fulfilled his ambition to play Mephistopheles in Faust, the ultimate villain.
Neighbours of ours once took their young sons to a production of The Mikado in which Dad was playing the title role, and Dad was highly amused by the question one of the boys (about 8 or 9 at the time, I think) asked his parents afterwards: "Now the play is over, can Mr McMillan go back to being a nice man?"

All of which as introduction to why I'm really enjoying playing Garan in Vaxalon's Amber wiki game.

Garan, I've come to realize, is like a stereotypical D&D character, only HARDCORE! (to use Jess Hammer's technical terminology). Not only does he want to kill Corwin and take his stuff, he wants to chop the corpse into small pieces and create a zombie Corwin army (which I suppose would make him Chaotic Evil, in D&D terms). He's also suggested killing Brand: "If the blood of Amber is so great, I'd like to see some."

The format of the game helps with being able to do stuff like this. Because it's a wiki, we can retcon and revise, and I can indicate either in the wiki or on the out-of-character email list we are using to coordinate in the background that I'm not seriously suggesting this (besides which, the scene is set within the existing Amber canon, so I know going in that the suggestion isn't going to be taken up). We're creating a shared fiction in which Garan is a particular kind of extreme character, who pushes things in a particular direction but isn't going to get his way most of the time. I'm loving that; I get to propose mayhem, with the knowledge that it won't get acted on.

In other words, it's a safe way to indulge my desire to be a complete loose cannon and sow mayhem and destruction - not something I actually want to do in real life, because unlike Garan I'm aware of consequences.

I remember years ago reading a Philip K. Dick story (the one with Lincoln in it, I think) and being struck by the term Maschenfreiheit, which means "maskfreedom". This is the freedom you have to act in what would normally be unacceptable ways, by virtue of wearing a mask. Garan is an instance of maskfreedom for me, just as the Mikado or Dick Deadeye were for my father.

EDIT: See my follow-up post.

City of Masks disappointment

I just got the rejection email from Macmillan New Writing for City of Masks.

So I guess it's off to get myself an ISBN so I can self-publish.

I am comforted by the thought of the many good books that had trouble finding publishers, and annoyed by the thought of all the crappy books that have been published.

Would have been nice to have Macmillans' distribution working for me, though.

EDIT: Not only do the National Library of New Zealand not charge you for supplying an ISBN, they emailed one to me with stunning rapidity. And a moment's Googling found me a site where you can get an ISBN made into a barcode, online, for free.

I love the Internet.

Of course, now I have to lay my book out and create, or have created, a cover on which to put the barcode.

Portraying myself

First, another quote from City of Masks (Tamas's sermon, given while, ironically, disguised as someone else):

...A mask is made, not only by the craftsman whose hands have formed its physical being – as parents form our bodies – but by the wearer and by those the wearer encounters – as we, and those we befriend and oppose and learn from, form ourselves as human beings, form our souls.

The soul is a flame, we are taught, like and yet unlike to this flame which burns beside me; it is a flame which feels, reasons, speaks, forms relationships of love – and also of hatred. And like this flame beside me, it can be seen, and when we make it manifest, we call this a mask. For the mask which hides is not the true mask, it is not the light but the darkness; it is the mask which reveals that is the true mask. This is why, when we honour some man or woman by naming him or her a Character, the mask that is given to him or her is the mask of his or her own face. We are saying: This man has portrayed himself, this woman has portrayed herself. Only his face, or her face, can represent who and what this person is, for he or she has been himself or herself.

And so I say to you, brothers and sisters, children of the Lord Sun, put on the Sunmask each day in your lives. Take upon yourself the light, not as something merely external to yourself, but as something that rises up from within you, that is the truth of who you are. Each day arise, each year renew yourselves, in the struggle against evil, in the struggle against ignorance, in the struggle to bring truth out where it may be seen. Wear the true mask. Do not have one appearance in your words and another in your actions; be whole. Do not wear the mask of darkness; wear the mask of light. Wear the mask of your own face and let that be the face of the Lord Sun. And if you do so, you too, in your daily lives, in your daily business, in your daily rising and your daily shining, in small ways and in large ways, you will be heroes of the Sun.

Now, personal context.

I realized during Centering Prayer on Easter Sunday that the next thing I need to work on in myself is the way I was "devoiced" by my family - which includes the critical voices they implanted so I keep second-guessing and editing myself. I read a chapter in Psycho-Cybernetics on exactly that on Monday night, "as it happens". Part of what Maxwell Maltz recommends there is to just talk, without constant vigilance and self-censorship and self-criticism. He answers the inevitable "But it's important to think about what you say!" with: Yes, but not for people who already do it too much. Body temperature is important; if you don't have it, you're dead. But if you have too much of it, despite the fact that it's important to have some, a doctor will try to reduce it. Same principle.

I was talking about this with Andrew at spiritual direction last week (hence the realization on Sunday), and also last night, and we were looking at strategies I could use. One I came up with was to start another blog, a pseudonymous one, one that didn't have my real name and my photo and links to my professional website, where I could behave badly - cuss people out, be sarcastic, rant, vent - without feeling the need to self-censor.

I thought about it on the way home and thought, "No. There's already too much of that on the Internet. That's like deliberately dissociating that part of myself and saying it isn't me. It's putting on a false mask."

So here's what I'm going to do instead.

When I'm blogging away and I think of something sarcastic, negative or critical to say, I'm going to say it. I'm not going to censor it out so that I can look like a nice guy. BUT, I will go back before I post and put an advisory at the start of the entry. Something like:

Advisory: Sarcastic and critical comments about a named group (theological liberals).

That way, I can be more spontaneous, but at the same time I can demonstrate that I'm aware of the fact that I'm acting badly.

I don't know whether that's a good solution or not. The more I look at it the more stupid it sounds. I'm going to assume that's my critical voice, and post it anyway.

Stravaganza and my City of Masks

Arthur Amon spotted a copy of a YA book called Stravaganza: City of Masks in a sale and got it for me (thanks, Arthur) because of my novel City of Masks. I've just finished reading it. It's by Mary Hoffman and is the first in a series.

In the odd way that these things happen, it has a few coincidental overlaps with mine, which was started well before it was published in 2001 (and I guarantee, Mary, if you're reading this, I only just read it this week, and I finished my novel months ago).

The obvious parallel - that both Cities of Masks are inspired by Venice - is hardly surprising, since Venetian masks are well known. MH's city is directly and quite closely based on Venice, though, while mine has no canals - it's just an Italianate, early-Renaissance-esque city-state on a harbour. It owes at least as much to Shakespeare's Verona as it does to Venice, if not more.

Both books also have a city law requiring the wearing of masks, but in mine, it applies to everyone, not just unmarried woman, and is much more central to the plot.

One of the odd coincidences is that both of us have characters called Juliana (in my case) or Giuliana (in hers), though the characters are very different from each other, and mine is a much more central character. The other main coincidence, involving family relationships, one of the two old scholars and the woman who rules the city, I won't describe in detail since it's a spoiler for both books.

My central character, Gregorius Bass, is a foreigner, like MH's Lucien, but he is an adult (though a very innocent one), and isn't from our world. Nobody, in fact, is from our world; Bonvidaeo, my City of Masks, is without direct connection to our world, it exists in its own cosmos so alternate that even the geography is different. And it's non-magical, unlike Bellezza.

Oh, there's another coincidence; MH's city is called Bellezza, meaning "beauty", and mine is Bonvidaeo, meaning, approximately, "good appearance". The intent of the names is quite different, though; Bonvidaeo is "good appearance" in a sense indicating fakery.

As I hinted above, both books have two old scholars and a woman who rules the city, though MH's Duchessa is the legitimate and acknowledged ruler and my Countess is the covert and unofficial ruler. Both could be described as ruthless, but the Duchessa's ruthlessness is very mild compared to the Countess's. The two pairs of old scholars are also quite different from one another in their position within the city, the origin of their relationship and their studies.

In fact, the two books' differences are considerably greater than their commonalities, which is good, because I'd hate to end up in a plagiarism suit - not because I couldn't prove that I didn't plagiarize, but because I wouldn't want the hassle of having to do so.

It makes you wonder, though, about other plagiarism suits like that one over Harry Potter. Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Current Status

I think I'll do this from time to time, as much to give myself a record as anything. What's taking up mind-space or life-space or just in progress for me at the moment?

Writing:

• City of Masks is with Macmillans for consideration.
  
• The Journey in Four Directions I've just signed up with an agent who will represent it at some book fairs in Europe.
  
• I'm thinking about sending 'Gu' to a magazine, maybe today.
  
• Restarting the Alphabet is drafted up to the first third ('Maiden'), and sitting at the Glyphpress forum.
• Topia has been stalled for a while. I've finally realized what one of the main themes is: Letting, or not letting, your disabilities define you. I need to rewrite pretty much from scratch, I think, which doesn't sound like fun.

Games:

• City of Masks has had one playtest and I've included it in the MS I sent to Macmillans. It needs more playtesting.
• Errantry needs playtesting too.
• The unnamed third game is stuck while I try to figure out the mechanics.
  
• I'm signed up for Fred's Amber play-by-wiki game, starting at the beginning of April.
  

Spiritual Practice:

• I'm doing my Transforming Practice every morning, usually in the shower. Erin used it yesterday (when she got to work but before she left the car) and said it helped with her crappy day.
• I'm doing the rosary on my commute. It's good.
• Centering prayer about 5 days out of 7 (in the evenings). Mostly I get the kind of good where you call yourself back to attending, more than the kind of good where you are attending.
• Tai Chi with a bit of Qi Gong - I count this as spiritual practice, partly in order to defy Descartes. I'm probably doing that 4 or 5 nights out of 7.
• I've given up buying books for Lent, which I've been on the verge of regretting a few times but have managed to stick to.
  

Websites/Programming:

• I'm working on getting my online booking system set up on hypno.co.nz. I'm now at the boring testing and perfecting bit, so progress has slowed.
  
• After that I'll turn my attention to finishing Unfolding Forms.

Hypnotherapy:

• I'm waiting for Roger to come back to me with a date for my interview. I strongly suspect, from what others have said, that I'll end up getting the diploma because I pass the Association exam.
• The Association exam is at the end of April.
• I'm reading Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics.
  
• On the business side, I've set up a bank account and got business cards and my room is pretty much set up. I'd like to get a better chair for myself, and a rug for the winter, and I want to get a standalone drive case so I can use the CD writer with the laptop to give people CDs of the suggestions to take with them at the end of the session. After the start of the financial year on 1 April I'll start spending money again on this stuff. Also a wireless network setup.
  

Reading:

• I find I'm tired in the evenings, so I'm mostly reading light stuff (and finding good light stuff hard to come by - I read too fast and the best authors write too slowly).
• Psycho-Cybernetics is interesting; "Man is not a machine, but he has a machine", namely the subconscious, which is a goal-seeking mechanism according to Maltz. It's programmed by the various messages we receive but we can take conscious control of the process and reprogram it. I'm not sure I totally buy it, but it's interesting.
• The Tribe of Tiger is the other non-fiction I'm reading at the moment.

Forums:

• I'm chiming in a bit on both "I would knife-fight a man" and Story-Games. Racism is one of the current hot topics at both.
  

Why The Innocent Man?

Don't you hate it when you arrive at someone's site or blog and there's no context to explain what they're about?

I do. So, herewith, context.

I debated with myself about what to call this blog (and I may yet change it). I thought about Digital Medievalist, which while accurate is not everything about me. I settled on The Innocent Man, after the main character in my (as yet unpublished) novel City of Masks. (It's with Macmillans for consideration - at least I hope it is, you never know when you email stuff.)

Gregorius Bass is a naive foreigner in the City of Masks, where everyone must wear a mask and comply with the expectations around that mask. He must be protected by wearing the mask of the Innocent Man:

We talked for some time longer, and then Corius fell to suggesting with the old man and his secretary masks that might fit me; as, "Gentle Knight", and they murmured, "No, for we want no provocation"; and "Honest Courtier", and they said, "No, too rare, too obscure; and there are risks attached to that one, which you may not be aware of"; and some more I have forgotten. Often, Felkior and his secretary fell to arguing some point of philosophy, and Corius had to return them to the topic. Their talk was filled with many terms and references which I knew not, being foreign, and I was soon lost. I had ceased to attend, and was watching the passing traffic from the window (for none of the sage's many books looked light or amusing), when one of them – Tamas, I think – cried, "Of course. The Innocent Man."

I turned around – for his voice had been loud – and surprised an odd expression on the face of Corius, which changed, however, in an instant; it had looked like amusement, but what with the mask it is always hard to tell expressions, and it may well have been rejoicing only.

"Aye," said my servant, "the Innocent Man. Ideal in every way."

"It is true," I said, "that I am guilty of no wrongdoing; but what is this 'innocent man'?"

"The Innocent Man," explained the sage, "is a mask worn rarely, for it is rare, as you know, to find a man without any guile at all. Its significance is this: that any question asked by the character is to be taken, not as a veiled insult or intended blasphemy, even if such is the plain meaning of it, but as the question of an uninformed innocent who means no harm thereby.

"The Innocent Man has no enemies, for he offends nobody. He is openhearted and generous. It is always wrong, and always an offence, to challenge him, or to attack him; he should be protected, rather. The only thing is this, that he is not known for courage (though he is not known for cowardice; the Innocent Man is simply not placed in situations which require courage), and he is not unusually courteous – not so as to be remarkable for it."

One of my hesitations about having a blog, apart from the time commitment, is that I would inadvertently say something stupid or controversial which would haunt me. So here's my attempt to head that off. Treat everything you read here as the words of the Innocent Man. If something appears offensive, that's probably not my intention.