The Boomerang

It’s gone and hit me on the head. Twice.

The first boomerang I threw over to America, specifically to my agent. That was the synopsis for The Pale Summer. He’s gotten back to me on it, and has given it the thumbs up with a few caveats. He likes the story, but feels I should make a notation of the particular structure for it right at the start, and then, once the convention has been established, simply get on with the story proper.

The second, far more nebulous and tricky to both throw and catch boomerang, was in the form of the niggling question I had in my mind about whether or not there was anything more to be done with some of the events towards the end of the novel. I had wondered briefly about it, and had an itch that something else could be done, or changed. I kind of shrugged and looked off into the horizon of my subconscious (since it seems to know how to write better than I do) and grabbed my slippery inquiry in hand, to toss away into the depths.

As expected, it kept going and going and disappeared from view.

Earlier it came winging its way back in stealth mode and hit me on the back of the head with a message scrawled on home made paper in charcoal. I will not divulge the contents of said message, suffice to say that it made me rub my head, go “Aw, man…” and realize there’s a chance my word count may go up a notch. Still, the change, while not effecting the ultimate ending, goes away towards altering some of the events in the end game, and changes a critical event by a few degrees.

It will be something of a minor pain.

But I like this change and think it’s worth it.

Bleah. More work on the synopsis and more work on the book…

Edits & E-Bay

I am not allowed to have an E-Bay account.

This was decided very early on in the relationship. At about the same time it was decided that I am not allowed to have a credit card, or any great amount of money in my bank account. The reason for this being it tends to get spent immediately on games, DVDs, or other gimmickery that is not rent, utilities or food. I am perfectly content with this arrangement since I have no head for finances and what money I do keep is sufficient to the task of buying cigarettes and hamburgers.

However, E-Bay does have it’s uses. For example, there’s a game that I played once on the X-Box that is completely amazing and fun. The game is called SSX 3 and I had to review it for GameAxis once. I was completely engaged by it and to this day recall it as one of those games that is very nearly perfect in execution; you can marathon it, you can take it for a quick spin, you can fool around, you can practice hardcore, you give yourself goals, or you can just take a leisurely trip down the mountain, and the music kicks Super-Ass.

After hemming and hawing for the last couple of years, we finally decided to track the game down on the PS2, only to find that Singapore’s fear of the old had once again taken hold, and no one carried the game here anymore. On E-Bay, however, we managed to track it down for the unbelievably reasonable price of $4.75 American. So in just six weeks more snowboarding fun than you can shake a stick at will be MINEMINEMINE!

With permission from the Fiance, of course.

The line edit to The Pale Summer is now done. I went over it with the metaphorical fine toothed comb and fixed the errors I could find, meaning that there’s still probably a 20% margin of things I missed. I’ll probably try and go over it one more time when I’m doing the big rewrite. The page count has gone up by two. That’s not as frightening as it sounds. All it means is that some chapters ended right at bottom of a page and the insertion of a “he said”, or “that was” bumped the line into the next page. What is frightening is the urge to embellish more details here and there, and that would bump the word count up significantly so I’m having a mighty struggle to resist that urge.

Still waiting on comments from readers. I’m hoping they’ll see things that I don’t, since I’m at that stage where I look at the manuscript now and think “I just don’t know…” There’s a lot in there that I’m proud of, and a lot in there that I think may or may not require adjusting. I’m hoping some of them will point these things out, especially in the “You can lose that” department, because the whole point of the exercise at this point is to cut things down. If they start telling me that I really cut too close to the bone on some parts and need more development, then I’ll know for sure this book was meant to be somewhat bigger than what I sheared it down to, and that’ll be complicated…

Nerd Mecca: Sim Lim Square

There is an immiment trip to the place local tech-geeks love and know very well. It’s called Sim Lim Square. This is a “mall” that has been stuffed to near capacity with high tech shops selling everything from cameras to PC components (Though far more of the latter than the former) and looks like a big mess of shiny objects with price tags designed to make you faint.

It’s an interesting sort of place that acts kind of like a barometer for Singapore’s consumer climate. When I first came up on it years ago, it was THE place to go if you were into video games because so many of the stores there weren’t really stores; they were just barely decorated rooms with a few shelves here and there and a cash register. The rest of the room was stuff with pirate software and pornography. For the price of a legal game, you could walk away with four or five games, or four or five new porn videos. Of course, since heavies like Microsoft have weighed into Singapore and set up corporate regional HQs here, this practice has been heavily swatted at with a multionational corporation sized fly swatter, and such shops (Though they still do exist) are found mostly in the fringes of less common areas on the edges of the island, and maintain a nomadic existing, opening for a few days before closing to move on, like digital gypsies moving their circus from place to place.

These days all the stores in Sim Lim are legit, but then it was always the more legit stuff that brought in the crowds. If you were the type that scoffed at package deals from Dell or IBM and preferred to assemble your PC from choice components all by yourself, Sim Lim was–and is–still paradise that way. Custom cases, cooling units, RAM chips, graphics cards, sound cards, motherboards, hard drives, optical drives, keyboards and a million buzillion other peripherals are all there for the taking if you’re just willing to suck it up and accept the fact that there is no map, and, in a Bladerunner-esque sort of way, navigate through the sometimes grungy shops, and negotiate with the owners in broken accents who will tell you things like “Aiyah, is already best price I give you, cannot go lower, ah?”

Oh well, off I go…

It Is Time For You To LEARN…

It’s a slow weekend, nothing to do but some shopping, some editing and some gaming, but I figured I would do you all a favor and turn you onto something that you really have no excuse to be unfamiliar with now, Infocom Text Based Adventures.

Back in the 80′s this was one of my all time favorite genres of gaming because it was BOOKS YOU EXPERIENCED rather than books you just read. It was like an author welcomed you into his world and let you play around in it, rather than simply being a spectator. Infocom was the big producer of quality games in this department with such titles as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Written by Douglas Adams himself!) endearing little titles like Wishbringer, the infamous Zork which started it all, and lots of other fun titles like Planetfall and Leather Goddesses Of Phobos.

Most of these games are classified now as “Abandonware” in that no one makes them and really have no intention of ever bringing them back. However, thanks to the magic of the internet, you can find most of these games free for download if you spend a few minutes digging deep. I’ll get you started though, you can find Hitchhiker’s, Wishbringer and Zork here.

I’m currently giving A Mind Forever Voyaging a shot. It’s one of those games that was hailed as a masterpiece of the genre but at the time of its release, my spending power was limited, and it was $50. If you’re interested in other interesting attempts at interactive fiction, people have since gone on to create their own (I haven’t yet dug up the addresses for those sites yet, but I mean to) and there is one in particular that I highly reccomend by Activision of old. It’s more passive than Infocom games, in that what you did was navigate a series of menus to “unlock” more of the stories, but it was a well told tale for fans of science fiction called Portal.

Check ‘em out, these are gems, and you can be sure not many people will jump on this bandwagon, so you can maintain your snooty “I prefer text adventures” attitude for years to come. Lord knows I have…

The “What The Hell Was I Thinking” Hat

At least that’s what I think I put on my head when it comes time to comb over a novel looking for all the errors.

This is why I think that anyone that believes they’re so wonderously talented that a novel is done when they type “The End” is deluded or simply drunk. Unless you’ve been meticulously editing and going back over it again and again while you’re writing, you’re going to miss something, errors are going to creep in, and you’re going to realize that what you have at the end might require tweaking at the beginning or the middle to keep things more in line.

I’m halfway through my line edit. I still have no major rewriting to do yet, as I’m waiting on comments from other readers, but in the time that I’ve been trawling through my book I’ve discovered all kinds of things that make me smack my forehead. Continuity errors are the biggest thing, like people putting down glasses of wine, only to be staring at them in their hands three paragraphs later. Or cigarettes that get lit, and then are forgotten about and remain in their fingers, unsmoked, as another is lit.

And of course, my personal favorites, typos. It more or less completely changes the context of an entire conversation when someone casually remarks, “That’s a hard on” as opposed to “That’s a hard one” which is what was supposed to have been said. Still, the former does open up some potentially interesting avenues of dialogue, but not in this book.

And then there is the rewrite itself. I see some things that I might need to tweak, and other things I suspect I might need to change, but I want to wait on confirmation from a few people first to see whether I’m being objective about a change, or just needlessly fussy. Like my initial reaction is, “I need more descriptions here and there” but that instinct is curbed by the past comments that I often have a tendency to overdo it in the description department and perhaps this time I’ve gotten it in reasonable amounts.

It’s funny though how wildly opinions can vary.

I’ve had some early feedback, and already I’m seeing some divirgent opinions. Some people think certain characters should act a particular way, other people think the character in question is just fine and that to do more would wreck empathy with said character. Some people find that there are too many explosions and action sequences, other people are scratching their chins and saying, “Why’d you cut down? I really like the action oriented stuff.” I’ve also gotten some comments that there’s not enough dialogue, and other comments saying I could afford to shave some away, so again, it’s a fascinating process seeing what different people bring to table, getting their take on how they’d do it, and seeing how much in conflict that might be with another person’s ideas.

But at least no one is saying it sucks, and a few have already cursed me for writing something they couldn’t stop reading, so that’s always a positive sign.

And my obsessive quest to end Psychonauts on 100% completion draws nigh! I AM THE KING OF BRAINS!

Right. Back to editing.

So Much For The First Book Being A Novel

They are offering money and the job is reasonable, so I’m gonna’ take it.

I just came back from a meeting where I was offered a writer’s gig to crank out a small, fact-based book/guide thingy for kids. The company’s always paid me, and were never especially cheap with freelancing gigs, so it seems like a sane decision to accept it.

Of course, the only dark cloud that hangs over this otherwise straightforward transaction is wounded writer’s pride of, “Damn, I was hoping that my first book on the shelves would be one of my novels.” As it is, the first book will now only be available on local shelves, and will have nothing to do with telling a fine yarn, so much as–like an extended magazine article–presenting the facts in a fun and harmless way.

Oh well…

I’m just going to try and rationalize it by telling myself I can just consider this a warm up for the real thing, so that at least I won’t be quite so nervous when the first novel finallys rolls onto shelves.

Yup, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it…

Giant Robot Toys

Okay, so now I know more about Gundam toys.

It was actually a fairly illuminating visit for me, because up till now, the toy area of the geek-o-sphere was a place I’d never really gone to, having burned myself out on my Star Wars toys collection back between the ages of 5-12, and then more or less completely abandoned it with the introduction to the Atari 2600. Now I feel like a more well-rounded geek since before I had passing geek fluency in TV, Film & Comics, with total fluency in Gaming and Genre Literature, but my Toy-speak was incredibly weak.

I went down to a place on Orchard Road commonly known as Orchard Cineleisure. This was also the same place that Neil-O showed off Mirrormask and did his signing. The shop I went to was a little place called Rapid Culture, which was started by this guy by the name of Yanjie. He started the shop in another building, with zero marketing, catering only to toy collectors that had a thing for Transformers and some of the rarer toys available for it, but word of mouth got around and eventually he had a nice following of collectors and he expanded from just Transformers to other stuff, including Gundam toys, which he told me are his “cash cow.” Transformers are more expensive, and have a higher nostalgia value, but because Gundam has a new iteration practically every year, that’s his “mainstream product” that most people go in to buy.

I got the crash course in Gundam toys and models with all kinds of talk about non-gradeables, high grade, master grade and perfect grade, and saw some of the toys and models. It freaks me out that some of these things practically require an engineering degree to put together, calling for you to assemble the internal skeleton, and then wire it up so the lights actually work. And then you start getting into limited editions, rare editions, the endless variants from clear to special edition colored… the list goes on and on.

I think this kind of hobby is for the exceedingly rich geek. With prices on perfect grade models starting at $200 and going up from there, this is just waaaaaaay too expensive for the average toy lover…

Game Week

It would appear that this is GameAxis week. That being the magazine I crank out articles on occasion for. They have a bunch of stuff they want by the end of the week, including some Nintendo DS games for review (Most of which, quite honestly, are somewhat questionable in quality, but oh well…) and a trip down Otaku Memory Lane with a visit to a toy store (Again, not a regular toy store as you remember from a childhood, but a “professional” toystore with items no child could afford) and have a talk with some of the owners about that institution of anime, Gundam, and the endless variations on that theme that are now available.

So it’s off to the toystore this afternoon with the little ol’ micro-recorder to get some of the thoughts from the toy aficianados about the wild n’ whacky world of Japanese giant robot toys and modeling kits, which I have only a cursory familiarity with. I know Gundam, and am a big fan of the second installment in the “original universe” series, Zeta Gundam, but knowing Gundam does not mean knowing the toys, since I can tell you that Zeta Gundam is transformable, but I cannot tell you which edition of the “Gundam FIX series 0005 through 0072″ is the one that’ll actually do that. Let alone whether that series actually covers Zeta Gundam, or one of the other variations like Gundam Wing or Gundam Seed.

I just read that last paragraph back and realized the intimate knowledge required for made up stuff is now beginning to rival the amount of knowledge a particle physicist needs…

Oh well, off to the land of toys.

Slow Rewrites & Comedy Videogames

The rewrite on the novel has yet to take place in any meaningful way, except for the occasional boot up and random check on a page to fix a typo here and there. Mostly I’m just sitting on it while a bunch of people (Mostly in Canada) go through and start the painful process of telling me, “This character is dead weight, jettison him” or “Do you really need this chapter?” Once those critiques start coming in and I’m finished crying in the corner sucking my thumb and wondering why I ever thought I was writer, I’ll get back to it in a big way and then do the line edit.

However I finished Haunting Ground, which was a short, creepy burst of Capcom stalk-the-nubile-blonde fun, and jumped into Psychonauts.

This is one of the funniest games I’ve played in years.

The plot centers around a psychic summer camp for kids who are being trained to be the eponymous Psychonauts, a force of psychics that travel into people’s heads to combat their neuroses, psychoses and other mental problems. Into this camp stumbles Raz, a kid who desperately wants to be a Psychonaut, and only has a day and night to prove it before his parents come to pick him up since he ran away from the circus to join the psychics.

It is brilliant.

The writing is smart and incredibly funny. The levels consist of jumping into different people’s heads with hilarious and truly inspired art design. For example, one of the minds you explore is a mad, tortured artist who more or less lost it when his wife was seduced by a famous bull fighter. Since then the only thing he can paint is matadors. When you jump into his head, everything is black velvet with bright neon colors, and you run into elements of his psyche that are trapped by the bull, most of them are dogs that yearn for the days when they could sit at a table and play poker, but that was before the bull came.

Another mind is that of a conspiracy nut. His mental environment looks like a topsy, turvy suburban neighborhood where everything from the mail boxes to pink flamingos on lawns snaps a picture of you when you turn away from it, and all the road workers, telephone line repairmen and sewer workers are guys in trench coats that blend in by saying things like “I am a sewer worker. Despite the fact that I am often covered in excrement, it is a necessary job and I deserve your respect.” Or the “house wife” with a rolling pin that says “Even though I am not paid for it, I consider home making my occupation.” They say these things in flat dead pan.

The game itself has some problems, most notably the traditional problematic camera that so many 3D platformer games suffer from (Man, you’d think after nearly 10 years of 3D games, they’d have this licked…) but the actual game design, the writing, the humor and art work are all clearly so wickedly inspired with genuine enthusiasm that it’s hard not to love this game. It is FUN. It is out for all major platforms. If you’re looking for a game that’ll make you actually laugh out loud, this is IT.

Wow, I Had A Dream

I rarely remember the dreams I have, so it’s always pretty weird to me when I do wake up having had a dream. In this particular dream, I was back in highschool, only it was one of those amalgam schools made up of physical elements of my elementary, junior high and high school, all combined into one “proto-school”. It’s next door neighbor was a small office for NASA that was currently undergoing a recruitment drive to find the one lucky person that was going to be selected for the new lunar mission using advances in technology to automate the flight so much that only one astronaut was required. Rumor had it in the school it was down to one of two teachers, the young social studies teacher that was heart throb of all the girls, and the physics teacher, who was fat, insecure sort that phoned in his moves to Magic: The Gathering on his cel phone in a game that seemingly never ended, and periodically interrupted his attempts to teach us Newtonian physics.

I had an arch-nemesis. I don’t remember what her name was, but she was the progressive, young, new teacher that was set to change the way education was done, and wanted to “reach out and really make a difference” to the kids. For whatever reason, she thought I was an amazing kid, but I really couldn’t stand her, and was too busy being astonished by her earnest but idiotic teaching policies and the fact that she no grasp of reality. The other kids were pretty much what I remember from high school; the girls were pretty, vapid and cruel, while the boys were athletic, sadistic and moronic.

Well, except for this one kid. No one really liked him much, and they were all afraid of him. They kept calling him a freak. Probably because of his black body armor, and the fact that he was a little over six feet tall, and had asthma, because he had this really, really bad breathing problem, and he spoke with a very deep voice, and brought a knife to school, only it wasn’t a knife, it looked like some kind of sex toy until he turned it on and a focused beam of light erupted from it, making a dangerous humming sound. He was foreign or something, because his name was Darth Vader and all the kids made fun of him because of that.

He kept following me around like some kind of loyal puppy and calling me his “Master” which really freaked me out. I kept saying, “Look, you don’t get it. I’m just trying to survive here, I got no influence, okay?” And he would nod and say stuff like, “I see, my Master. To arouse suspicion before it is the proper time is unwise. I am learning much from you.”

And I would roll my eyes and mutter “Whatever” and just try not to get harrassed too much that day.

Still, he had his uses, like when we were playing dodge ball, and all the kids, as usual, started throwing their balls at me, he waved his hand around and the balls started flying back at the throwers so fast it was knocking their teeth out of their mouths. That was cool.

The progressive teacher was extremely worried about me. She’d do stuff like make me hang back after class, while Darth Vader watched from the window, and she’d lean on the desk beside me, saying things like, “I’m worried about you. You’re a good kid, you’ve got a lot of potential, I just don’t want to see you throwing it away.”

“Like how?”

“You know, like falling in with the wrong crowd.”

Then she’d go on and on about the future of the world, and how politics was so important, and did I ever stop to think that maybe the socialists were right, and what did I know about a black robe with a hood that had gone missing from the school laundry?

Of course, when I came out of the class, the freaky foreign kid produced said black robe and said, “I hope you find these raiments worthy of you, my Master…”

I rolled it up into a ball and tried carrying the robes around with me like that, and tried to lose the foreign kid fast.

I had a spare class (meaning I had no class at that time) so I went over to the NASA offices to see how they were doing. They were happy because they’d picked the social studies teacher. The physics teacher was all bitter about this, and kept claiming it was because of Magic: The Gathering prejudice that they’d passed him over. They ignored him and kept showing their new astronaut all the high tech equipment he was going to be using, and gushed with pride over how the new ship was going to be able to reach the moon in a record 2 days. I was starting to feel hungry when I realized I’d forgotten my lunch that day.

This huge rumbling occurred outside, and everyone went to see what it was. It turned out to be a MASSIVE triangular ship that was descending from the clouds. A contingent of jocks in white body armor came out of it, and the one in the lead was carrying a brown paper bag. He got on one knee and held it up in front of me saying, “Take this, sire.”

The NASA guys blinked a lot and looked at me, and the white armored guys. I shrugged and said, “Uh… It’s for that foreign kid.”

They closed their eyes, smiling, nodded, said “Oh, okay!” and went back inside.

At this point there was some rumor going around that I was actually an Emperor, and all the girls who’d scorned me so much suddenly started paying a lot more attention to me. They kept asking me to have talks with them that coincided with their gym class when they’d try and hold the conversation while they were changing. Most of these conversations consisted of them stripping while asking, “So… what are you doing Friday night?”

“Playing video games.”

“Oh… cool! I never told this to anyone before, but I love video games! Especially that new one, Pac-Man? With the little fat guy jumping over the barrels and the big monkey? That’s sooooo cute!”

“Uh… Yeaaaaaaaaaah… right.”

Then, for no apparent reason whatsoever, we were called out to the field where Sarah MacLachlan had set up a stage for a concert. She grabbed the microphone, we all went wild, and she said, “This is dedicated to a very special guy out there. Lead us to a new order, my master, it is your destiny!”

All
the kids looked around wondering who she was talking about.

She got into a couple of songs, the kids were all dancing (Except for me and the foreign kid), everyone was having a great time until my arch-nemesis teacher stopped the proceedings to take the microphone and lecture us about how upset she was about the missing robe, and how she tried to reach out to us, and how she couldn’t helpt it if the teacher was sometimes overwhelmed by the woman who just wanted to bring out the light in each and everyone one of us and make it shine.

I realized at this point with a clarity I have never had, that in a few months she was going to die in an accident. I also heard strange music playing, like old men chanting, followed by an amazing explosion of horns in a dark, militaristic theme.

After the concert was over, the foreign kid and I were walking past her office, and she was looking at us. I hid the robe I was still carrying behind a bag, carefully making sure it was manuevered behind the bag as we passed the teacher.

“Why don’t we elminate her, my Master?” the foreign kid asked.

“That would cause all kinds of hell,” I said. “I think we should wait. She’s going to die on her own anyway, I’ve foreseen it.”

He nodded. “Yes. Remain the shadows, use ignorance as strength. I am learning much from you, my Master.”

Hey, I never said this dream made sense, did I?