Going Low Noise

I've spent a lot of time over the years tuning my levels of digital noise (more on this in existing post 'Noisedialling'). Most often, that's meant dialling down the number of notifications I receive and how strongly they're foregrounded (e.g. having messenger apps display notifications only in the notification area of my phone, meaning I have to actively go and fetch them rather than them interrupting me), or establishing rules for how I interact with 'noisy' digital systems like social media.

I've always found myself, though, reverting to a state of higher noise. This has often felt like a 'failure' relative to my more disciplined and healthy approaches. It also feels like somewhat of an inevitability, because, as I've come to realise, sometimes the higher noise state is just what I need and contributes to making me feel better, not worse.

Dialling down the noise, then, is not the best state in and of itself. The important thing for me is being critical about what I actually need and having mechanisms to move between the two. All of which amounts to intentionally considering the digital noise I am letting in and shutting out, and recognising when I actually need to shift states. The contrast between the states also helps me stick to the behaviour of each one.

Low Noise

• Notifications off for major messaging apps (for me that means Signal, WhatsApp, and Discord)
• Phone almost always in some kind of focus mode
• No Twitter on phone
• Use Tweetdeck on desktop, tuned for no retweets and only people I know personally
• Generally try to time-box or batch communications rather than being as ad hoc
• Avoid or minimise checking the news or other information firehoses

Obviously there need to be temporary exceptions -- e.g. if I'm due to meet someone who'll message me by WhatsApp, it's silly for me to be actively opening the app every few minutes to see if I've missed something.

It's also a lot about what it shows me in my own behaviour. All this isn't much good if I'm opening the apps every ten minutes. But being in 'low noise mode' helps give me a framework to remind myself that I'm trying to invest less ongoing attention in those things (right now), and push myself to, say, reading an article or book (or doing nothing!).

High Noise

• Notifications on for major messaging apps
• Phone in focus mode when working or needing quiet time, but otherwise open
• Twitter on phone is okay but still try to limit the doomscrolling
• Enjoy being more ad hoc and responsive with messages and communications
• Open to the information firehoses

If my brain feels like it's exploding or that there's just too much going on, that's a building signal that I should switch to Low Noise state. If I'm constantly checking messages anyway or reaching outwards for more stimulation or connection persistently, that's a sign to step it back up again. But I try to stick at the current 'footing' for meaningfully long periods.

(When I say that I overthinking everything and overengineer structures for myself, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about. And yes, is it really over-anything if it actually works for me? Who can say?)

Layers of Rules

I've fumbled around previously with my own definitions of 'fiction-first' vs D&D* TTRPGs. I mentioned that those games generally have a different 'locus of simulation' -- what are the rules primarily interested in simulating? Which to me generally seems to be 'the actions of the actors in this fictional world' or 'a piece of fiction in this style or genre'.

For me, that's still a useful lens, particularly in terms of the clarity it's given me about what works in some and not others. Most obviously: D&D* doesn't really do anything in terms of teaching its players narrative/dramatic tools -- around pacing, framing scenes, getting to the interesting stuff, etc. If you bring those skills in from outside, there's a better chance of having a good time. Fiction-first TTRPGs often have explicit rules, tools, or guidance that gets people thinking along those lines ('you are not just playing a character, you are an actor in a story').

I bring this up again (again!) because I read this piece: Three layers of RPG rules, which I think approaches this in a more systematic and interesting way.

Go read the piece, but to summarise: the 'rules' in TTRPGs aren't really just the bits about maths and rolling dice and how abilities work. They are also the social rules of the table and the fictional rules of the world. Different TTRPGs put the focus in different places (what I'd call the 'locus of simulation', though I think these layers usefully collapse/muddy that a bit), but it's more productive to think about all of those things as being 'rules', because it helps us disentangle what we really need to understand to have a good experience of a game.

I also love the examples of choosing to keep rules in the fictional layer:

First, I welcome you to take a look at the “powers” list in Project Ikaros, or “talents” in Eos or Legends. Here are a few:

Superheating: Scald or melt with a touch.
Sincerity: People may or may not believe you’re right, but always believe you’re honest.
Abjuration: Enemies cannot approach or attack while you chant, so long as allies do not attack.

These lists favor fictional rules over abstract rules. Thinking about what I need at the table, and what I find easy or hard to adjudicate, led me to fill pages with abilities I hoped would be self-evidently useful. They operate at the fictional layer because I find it easier to just describe the obvious result of being touched with a superheated hand than to I find it to track abstractions like hit points. And I still think of them as “rules” because they still provide guidance we need to abide by; I may well need my player to remind me, “I put on my most sincere smile, and count on him to believe me…” That governs what is allowed to happen next. It’s a rule.

This is another feature I associate favourably with fiction-first TTRPGs. Coming from a D&D background, coming across rules like this can feel vague on paper ('but... what am I allowed to do with it?'), but feel very empowering in play. (The flipside is usually around game balance, but that doesn't have the same concern where the game is less invested in the abstract rules layer.)

Closing thought: also check out the Indie RPG Newsletter #98: Play Culture of Why I Play How I Play for another perspective on these. Above all, I still enjoy architecting elaborate stories to delight and horrify my players, which pulls me back to D&D* games. But that's a point of differentiation, rather than something implicitly superior.

Ways of Being

I finally finished James Bridle's Ways of Being last night. As with his last book, New Dark Age, this is one of the most striking and important books I've read in recent years. It's a fascinating and captivating survey of what it is to be us, and of the particular juncture at which we find ourselves in terms of our relationship to technology, our planet's other inhabitants, and each other. Our misguided, anthropocentric attempts to define intelligence (in our own terms), our poor stewardship of the world and separation of ourselves from animals, our complex relationship with machine which we see as an inevitable monolith -- but is in fact the result of singular, comprehensible choices.

As with New Dark Age, I find something slightly uncanny about reading Ways of Being, inasmuch as it so squarely aligns with a set of interlocking topics which have fascinated me for years. It's both validating and unnerving to see someone else (someone much better equipped to explore and articulate them) working through my same set of preoccupations.

The book has filled me with a lot of thoughts and emotions. A combination of hope and more articulate despair, with both a sharper awareness of how far we are from where I feel we need to be, but also with a clear sense of vision of what that could look like that makes it feel more than theoretical, even if still remote. I've still got some chewing and recapping to do, but it's also snapped into focus some important themes and elements in a couple of pieces of my own work that have been kicking around in loose development for a few years. I look forward to disentangling what I've come away with.

Ways of Being, James Bridle, Penguin Books 2022

Blog Status July 2022

I've been keeping this blog for closing on 2.5 months now (first post was April 26th). It started out more ad hoc, then targeting three posts a week; now, I aim for one post per working day. This should be the 40th post.

In my first post, 'On Microblogging', I said this would be

Somewhere for me to put out smaller, singular posts with, honestly, less filter and polish. That's key for me -- the further I get into editing or second-guessing what to put, the greater the activation energy to actually getting any posts out, ever. So I leave filtering as an exercise for the reader.
...
Sometimes, I need to turn my brain inside out and shake it. That's not always going to be advisable or pretty, but it's certainly An Image. ... This, as ever, is more for me than anyone else

All of this still holds true, but I put it more succinctly in a later post

In keeping with the nature of this blog, they're not meant to be finished, polished artefacts. I'm thinking of them more as 'thought sketches' -- a way for me to reflect roughly on the project as much as to surface anything externally.

I think 'thought sketches' is exactly the right way of describing what I post here. I'm toying with the idea of distinguishing between those and doing more polished posts intermittently, but I don't feel I have the bandwidth or workflow for that right now.

Maintaining this blog has been good training of the mental muscles -- striking a balancing of finding something to think about on the page each day, and getting better at making a thought sketch more like an actual thing (without losing the sense of roughness that constitutes a sketch). I guess: even if your intended output is a rough sketch, if you do lots of them, what constitutes 'rough' for you should, in theory, decline over time.

In keeping with the exercise, I've avoided drafting multiple posts ahead of time. That would be more time-efficient, but remove the element of practice that this is meant to provide. Given that goal, if it becomes too much burden to find time for this daily, it would instead be better to cut back the number of posts in a given period, rather than trying to 'batch' my work on it.

He's Gone

I'm writing this at lunchtime and scheduled it for the afternoon, so there's every chance something here is horribly out of date already, given the tenor of the last 48 hours.

In the newsletter that preceded this blog, I used to write occasionally about the latest in UK politics. I sort of... stopped doing that some time in the latter half of the 2010s, which was ultimately sensible for a bunch of reasons. Primarily: my own sanity, given I had enough sources of despair into which to gaze; and because frankly no one needs yet more underbaked punditry on national politics. There are plenty of people who know very little opining very confidently on Twitter and in major newspapers.

But seeing him on the way out the door today, and in such a messy and undignified manner, is a relief. I know that it doesn't fix everything -- maybe even anything -- but I also don't really care for the slightly smug-feeling pointing-out of that as if it were some sort of gotcha. As if, somehow, those celebrating it hadn't thought about the matter beyond gleeful crowing.

No, it doesn't fix everything. The rot is real and pervasive, the alternative options (both for the next Conservative leader and also the other parties in the mix) are variously dangerous and disappointing. And immense amounts of damage have been done in the process.

We seem incapable of imagining a better country -- a better way of doing things. While the latest asshole may be going up in smoke, he's done a good job of shitting all over the place as he burns, and Johnson's departure is not in and of itself a promise of better things.

But it's also okay to celebrate the humiliating fall of a would-be tyrant.

Sacral Catenaries

I've talked before about the umwelt of birds and what that means to me. A couple of threads came together for me last week in my brain:

• The feeling of coming 'close' to an animal like that has a kind of sacral quality to me.
• Not 'close' necessarily in the sense of physical proximity, but the sense of briefly brushing close to something other, intellectually and emotionally.
• This isn't -- almost never can be -- more than momentary, transitory. (The kind of connection that wasn't both of those things would feel different anyway.)
• But there's a sense of brushing close to something -- two catenary lines that trend together, briefly, before diverging.
• The briefness, unlikelihood of that encounter is something that empowers it.
• In what will briefly feel like a complete topic shift: I've been playing Wildermyth recently (it's very, very good). And one of the things that struck me about the writing (which is also very, very good) is how well it does old gods and magic -- the feeling of encountering something unknowable and fundamental.
• Writing that sort of thing well is hard. Pull back too much and keep things too vague, and it's very mysterious, but distant and unsatisfying. Dive in too deep, and you've got something that feels close and knowable and not sacral.
• The feeling that Wildermyth creates for me in those moments, like finding a vast stone idol with a crystal heart beneath the mountain, is this feeling of two catenary curves brushing past one another.
• There's enough detail and specificity and feeling that you are seeing something and being seen by it, but without full mutual comprehension.
• There's the sense that this is a meaningful enough encounter that it can change one or both of them.
• But it doesn't seek to explain everything or peel back the veil so far that things become mundane.
• Back to animals: we often, understandably, anthropomorphise them and their behaviour. But that in a way reduces it and distances us from the reality of what's going on -- the complex self and umwelt of the animal when we (try to) discard our human lens.
• But there are those rare moments where you can feel like you're in communion with another being as itself and not solely as a function of projecting human qualities onto it. It's fleeting and fragile but it has that feeling of two objects brushing past one another in deep space, before hurtling off unstoppably.

The Bretton Oak

Last week, Peterborough City Council cut down a 600-year-old oak tree, the context for which -- if it can be said to have one -- is just so baffling and infuriating.

Campaigners said the tree - which appears on the Woodland Trust Ancient Tree Register - is one of the last standing oaks from the original Grimeshaw Woods and dates from the 14th Century. ... "Six hundred years it's taken to grow and I've been here for an hour and they've destroyed half of it already. ... He said although the council understood the residents' point of view, "all options to save the tree could have cost the council hundreds of thousands of pounds in repairs and legal fees" if homes were affected by it.

My initial reaction to the story and the reason for its destruction was a string of expletives, the upshot of which was 'wouldn't it just be better to let the bloody houses fall down'. But that's also the wrong way of thinking about it -- those are people's homes, meaningful places to them. It stings, thinking about how those may well not make it another few hundred years, in contrast to a tree, but still: it is meaningful to recognise this.

So the council should have found another way to protect both. But, in one of the articles, I found a quote indicating that even pursuing those options would wipe out the arboreal budget for the year. Doing this one thing would mean doing no other things like planting new trees that year. Zero sum.

And in this is the perfidy of the thing. I truly don't believe that anyone is sat there, twirling a moustache as their plan to kill a six-hundred-year old being comes to fruition. This is not just the outcome of individual decisions, but systems.

In the UK version of his book LYING FOR MONEY, @dsquareddigest talks about a "criminogenic environment" created a UK banks. No one says "go commit crimes", they just set policies and targets in such a way that crimes are the logical outcome.

— Django Wexler (@DjangoWexler) June 19, 2022

And what does that say about our systems? This is practically the definition of an externality problem -- the existence of the tree is not something neatly recognised by any of the human systems at work here, and it is the being in the loop that has no agency nor any 'standing' or material power. By the same token, destroying it -- killing it -- doesn't come with any real, manifest penalty in the contexts of those systems. So, through that lens, it makes complete sense that this is the outcome -- it's one that's essentially all upside with no downside from the point of view of the system -- and the blame is spread thinly, with everyone thinking like they've made the 'correct' proximal decision based on the situation that was presented to them.

It makes me so angry. Even if you just think a tree's a tree and don't see it as a form of complex being -- a life, a whole and complete thing.

But it's okay though, they say, because they'll be planting a hundred sapling oaks to make up for it.

A single 400-year-old oak ... [is] a whole ecosystem of such creatures for which ten thousand 200-year-old oaks are no use at all.

—Oliver Rackham, Woodlands (2006). Quote via an epigram from Wilding, Isabella Tree (2018)

It's not the damned same.

High and Low Protagonicity

Another quote from that Kim Stanley Robinson interview:

Another useful conceptual tool is protagonicity. Does a novel have high protagonicity or low protagonicity—meaning the story is maybe spread out among a lot of different characters, who might be considered minor characters, except there aren’t any major characters. The story I intend to tell determines or suggests how I might go about deciding this.

Mountain Song, Claudio La Rocco via BookForum

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Maybe because my original writing background is in short fiction, I find myself biasing towards 'high protagonicity' when thinking about new story concepts. Actually, expanding that thought, it's probably also influenced heavily by games. This is a snap response rather than an explored thought, but I'd expect that games bias high protagonicity, by Robinson's definition, due to the role the player tends to occupy in relation to the story. The player character almost always acts a singular lens for the player to experience the story, and there are lots of by-this-point tropey narrative conceits to justify why the player is uniquely positioned to find that artefact/kill those rats/help this NPC find love.

(There are games that play with these ideas, of course, but offhand still with reference to the player character centred as protagonist.)

But, to immediately counter my own theory, the picture gets complicated when the player character is a cipher or else silent and where their relation to the narrative really comes down to the actions they are required to perform (which Only They Can Perform). That feels more like a weird collision of both high and low protagonicity, where so much is concentrated in one individual, but the means by which the story is told is in a lower-protagonicity way by NPCs with more dramatic range and narrative-if-not-actiony agency.

There are certainly some games that deliberately steer into low protagonicity more deliberately. The first one that sprung to mind was Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, a game I played while in the throes of a high fever as a young adult and so which I'm not entirely convinced is real.

Other (vomiting from the eyes emoji) Quantic Dream games do this too, leaning into storytelling with low protagonicity (e.g. vomiting from the soul emoji Detroit: Become Human). But I wonder if that's also wrapped up in the way those games so frantically borrow storytelling techniques from film in particular, a clutch that I think would risk seriously hampering their efforts if they had anything going for them to begin with.

Acolyte is Out Now!

It's a good month for 'games I worked on' coming out. Acolyte from Superstring is a technological conspiracy story leaning on conversational AI, with ARG puzzle elements. (Trying saying that quickly, well, one time.) I wrote a bunch of Ana's dialogue, plus designed most of the ARG puzzles and associated content, which was an exceptionally fun thing to do.

You can pick up Acolyte on Steam!

Actants, and Relating Characters to Concepts

A few items from the narrative toolbox that came up for me over the weekend.

Kim Stanley Robinson on 'actants':

I start with a situation, usually. Say I want to write about terraforming Mars—then I need a terraformer, a person opposed to terraforming, a political radical, a Machiavel, a builder, a psychologist, etc. The French structuralists spoke of characters as actants, as the action-doers who make the plot happen. A single character could cover a couple of actants at once, or an actant could be split between a few characters. This I’ve found useful in clarifying things to myself as I get started. Therefore, characters are, at first, kind of just positions, or needed operators of the plot. But this is just the start.

Mountain Song, Claudia La Rocco via BookForum

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And something from the Failbetter Games blog (and I have no inside insight on this; I read this blog post before I started at the company and it's stuck with me):

One of the first things we did during narrative pre-production was invent the ensemble cast for Mask of the Rose.

...

To arrive at those different types, we asked ourselves questions like these: Whose hopes, goals, and ambitions would be advanced by a fall to the Neath? Whose would be thwarted?

...

Drawing from the lore, we asked ourselves, What lore mysteries might this character help us illuminate? What common Neath activities would have been different just after the fall? Would this character still be in Fallen London three decades from now, and what would they be doing there? Are they anyone we already know?

Designing Characters for Mask of the Rose, Emily Short via Failbetter Games blog

(And to reiterate for the avoidance of doubt: the opinions and assertions here are my own and not related to my work for Failbetter Games.)

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The connection point across both of these for me (and this was in the context of digging around for tools to help me with my own short story problems) is the conscious casting of characters with reference to the story you're trying to tell. There's a version of this which is very 'mechanistic' -- seeing the characters as nothing more that little plot devices. But I think to view it that way misses the point. The power is in using this as a lens, filter, or razor to tie characters into the story world.

I think this is most pressing in the development stage if you're trying to go from a raw concept into interesting characters whose own arcs will help you uncover aspects of the story world for the audience or help you explore your intended premise better. Obviously it's possible to start the other way round -- with a stronger handle on a character or few -- and I think this tool plays a bigger role in genre fiction or in forms that aren't, say, a literary novel.

One of the reasons these quotes stuck out to me enough to record them was that they were congruent with a previous thought I'd had along the same lines -- an explicit step during story development where you work through the process of relating character (certainly the MC) to the core concepts with which you're working. If you're exploring a premise, fictional world, theme, or question (which, I mean, most stories are doing more than one of those things...), I'd say it's vital to think explicitly about how your characters relate to those things so you can lean into or away from them. Or, more pragmatically, if a character's own story is going to be about something that feels largely unrelated to the central premise+, you need to be okay with that and make sure the form in which you're working can actually support that without it undermining your intended effect.

(If nothing else, if you think that your story DOESN'T have some central concept like those I describe above, that's usually a sign for me that I need to deeper my understanding of what the story's trying to be about (which may be different from my starting point), certainly in the forms in which I work.)

Likely no posts Thursday, Friday, or Monday.

End-of-Day Shutdown

At the end of each working day, I run a batch file on my computer which loads up a fresh copy of a .txt checklist. I work through this list top to bottom, deleting each line as I complete it. This serves two functions: practically organising things and setting myself up for the next day, and trying to switch my brain and body out of work mode (admittedly to mixed success).

Here's what's on that list right now:

How was today? I update my bullet journal and review each item for today. I try to give myself a gut 'how do I feel about this?' on each -- very negative, pretty negative, neutral, pretty positive, very positive. More than anything, this actually helps me recognise the preponderance of good (or at least 'not really bad') things even if I'm frazzled and grumpy.

What's tomorrow? I review my calendar/task list for tomorrow. Brief, as I usually have a pretty good handle on things.

Review APB -- ensure settled APB is 'Another Project Board', my main task Trello board. I glance over it and organise anything that's out of place. This is mostly a brief attempt to reassure myself that I have a handle on things and don't need to think about them until the next time I'm due work on those tasks.

Capture work Have I worked on anything that I should note down somewhere? This is largely to future-proof against times when I'll need to update my portfolio or give an account of what things I actually did when I worked somewhere. I struggle to do that in any detail retrospectively, so now take notes as I go. It also serves as a nice sense of 'hey, I did these things!' along the way.

Update timesheets This is the step where I update my sprint tickets if I haven't already. For contract work, I use an invoicing platform. When I incur some billable time, I create an invoice at the end of that day, scheduled to send automatically at the end of the month. Then, at the end of each day where I've done more billable work, I edit it immediately to keep it up to date. (I keep my own separate records in case things go squiffy.) This way, I don't have to worry about remembering to invoice on time -- it all just goes out in its turn.

Clear desk I tidy everything away from my desk and reset it for the morning.

Check and respond to message channels (no more than 10') I spend up to ten minutes replying to (usually personal) messages. Less necessary when I'm already in a 'high noise' cycle, but fairly vital when I'm in 'low noise' mode and being much more hands-off with communication.

Close down programs Close down everything except the text document I'm using to check things off. A digital desk tidy.

Change lights My desk lamps are set to a different colour temperature when I'm working. Shifting them out of that mode is a nice visual mode-switch.

You are done with work for the day I literally say this (well, 'I'm done...') to myself three times. I can't remember where I read this -- the person who mentioned it noted that it felt as weird and awkward as it does to me -- but I do find it helpful, as someone who struggles to 'shut down', to make myself go through this ritual.

Set computer shutout timer I set my computer to shut down in 15 minutes. I don't shut down right away because I might think of something I need it for, or otherwise come back to play games, but this is a nice forcing function to step away from it.

Leave the room, read for at least 5 minutes I think of this as a 'firebreak' activity, trying to pivot my brain to a different mode (something which, again, I struggle intensely with). It also means I don't go straight to playing games at my desk after work. I don't strictly limit this firebreak activity to reading -- cooking, walking, or if I have some evening commitment all work just as well. The point is do go and do something that engages me right away and isn't work. The more tired I am, the harder it is to untangle my brain from all the perceived-open loops that are still running.

Small Units of Time

I've become very good, over the years, at two things in particular: creating the space for myself to do deep, focused work on one thing intensely for a span, and batching/circumventing/streamlining smaller tasks. Alongside this, I've done a lot of work on cutting down on lots of 'time sink' activities like social media, Twitter being the lingering exception (though even that in phase).

I don't bring this up out of a sense of smug superiority, but because one thing that's left me with is a strange difficulty in spending small units of time. If I have an hour, I can get a hell of a lot done (and have probably planned in advance what that is going to be). If I have a bunch of smaller tasks on my plate, I can spend thirty minutes cracking through a bunch of them all at once, and otherwise, they can sit there until their time comes round again.

There are many reasons why this works for me (a lot of it I think comes down to activation energy and spending it as tactically as possible). The problem is, if I have ten minutes, I often have no idea what to do with it, or even lack the capacity to spend it happily doing nothing. My brain will be rifling through the things it might do and rejecting them due to 'not enough time' or 'too much risk of absorption. It's that muddy middle where to actually spend that time well would mess with where my brain is focusing and make it hard to move on.

To sharpen that last point slightly: I fear either starting-but-not-finishing a task and thus having another open loop to juggle in my head (see the Zeigarnik Effect), or getting so into it that I don't effectively break away, leaving me with a kind of cognitive inertia that tails me into whatever activity put the upper limit on that time.

'Doing substantially nothing' is an entirely fine way to spend ten minutes, and I am not very good at it. Once more, this isn't out a misplaced boasting around productivity and unidleness -- I consider this a kind of small liability, really, an unfortunate byproduct of other habits and systems that are actually good.

Oblique Reflections on a WIP Short Story

I drafted a new short story back in January -- the first for a while. I've been too busy since to dust it off, but finally got back to it last night. In the spirit of my script dissection of The Last Clockwinder, I'd love to dump the current draft here so people can see the WIP -- BUT I don't want to kill of my own first publication rights by doing that either!

Anyway, it's about wizards in space. Here's the (current and not-for-long) opening:

Free-floating in space, Meiro convulses in panic. She fights for breath, she fights – pointlessly, it must be said, in blind, animal instinct – to drag herself back to the safety of the ship. She fights the chill grip that wraps itself around her as her cells threaten to burst and her blood freeze.

Behind her, the Merula streaks away. Ahead, the interceptor manoeuvres to a stop, orienting itself so the grab team can launch itself directly from the airlock. It’s hard for her to take the threat seriously, though, while she drifts suitless in vacuum. To her left—

A miracle.

Specifically, what made me want to write this was a collision of ideas: in the Dresden Files, wizards are powerful, but catastrophically wreck technology by their very presence. What happens when you put wizards with that aura effect in a high-tech, Expanse-style setting? How do absurdly, continental-shelf-shatteringly powerful beings cope with being cut off from an expanding universe?

During my readthrough and with particular reference to Writing Advice From A Slush Reader by Evelyn Freeling, here are the main things that stuck out to me that need changing:

1. It's surprisingly overwritten. I say 'surprisingly' because I'm usually pretty good at economy and flow within prose. It's serviceable, but I want more than 'serviceable'. This is an easy (and enjoyable!) thing to fix on an edit pass -- although that'll be the last thing on this list to get done.

2. Too much lore-dumping. This stems from a complex story-world setup playing poorly with short-form fiction. The answer here, I think, is largely yeeting it, but I plan a pass where I work on inveigling those things better into the story. The important elements of it, at least. This will likely be a combination of 'figure out how this lore actually manifests in concrete ways', 'slip in a sentence here and there rather than whole paragraphs', and 'trust the story/reader more'.

3. Craft issue: general structure/intercutting. The current draft flips between the 'now' and the 'then'. See the Freeling blog above on this. I've done this before in another (unfinished) story and rightly been pulled up on it. The blog has a good take on this here, I think, in that people reach for it as an arresting opening image BUT don't get back to that same height. I wonder if it's also drawing on a more cinematic style of a 'cold open' and intercutting, which makes far less sense in prose. I did wonder if I could get away with it, but on balance NO I think it needs work.

4. Craft issue: opening question. Related to that, I think there's a bunch of crafty techniquey things I can do on the first few pages to redress that balance with point 3. I think the premise/setup of the story has a solid opening question, so it's doing the work to surface that better.

5. Thematics. And linked to that, too little background on/interest in the MC. The deuteragonist has more spice about her that we just don't get from the MC. Their stories need to connect up more based on what they're each bringing into the story, rather than just through what happens within it.

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Right now, I'd say it's an acceptably written account of some cool things that happen. But it doesn't sing as a story. Not all the elements are pulling in the same direction, and the technical side doesn't bring out what is there enough. But I'm pleased to feel like I have a solid plan forward. I appreciate that reading about this without the context of an actual draft may feel pointless. But this is my thought process on it, nevertheless.

The Last Clockwinder: Some More Detailed Line Cuts

Picking up a thread from my diachronic script revisions review from The Last Clockwinder, here's a detailed looked cutting down a few lines. What I'm doing here is trying to retroactively apply logic to the changes we made. I'm not going to claim they are 100% the thought process at the time.

Here's what I quoted yesterday:

Version 1.3: I never really knew her. We’d speak, a little, when I brought shipments. Small talk. She wasn’t very good at it. I guess when you’re stuck out on the edge of the world with nothing but a bunch of plants for company, you don’t get too good at small talk. This life wouldn’t be for me, is what I’m saying.

Version 2: I never really knew her. We’d talk, a little. But when you’re stuck out on the edge of the world with nothing but a bunch of plants for company, you don’t get too good at small talk.

What changes:

• 'speak' --> 'talk': Sounds better when read aloud.
• 'when I brought shipments': Cut. It's redundant. That was the only time Levi was here, we can infer that.
• 'Small talk. She wasn’t very good at it. I guess': Cut. Repetitious of the sentence that follows.
• 'This life wouldn’t be for me, is what I’m saying.': Cut. Not really relevant to the thrust of the scene at hand, even if it's true and potentially interesting.

Another line:

Version 1.3: She was brilliant, though, that much was obvious. I don’t really understand how this place works, why it’s here, any of that, but she clearly knew every living breathing bit of it. And she loved being here. This was her place, y’know?. There’s few enough find that in their lifetimes. Got to envy her that.

Version 2: She was brilliant, though, that much was obvious. She clearly knew every living breathing bit of this weird place. And she loved being here. But I think she was lonely.

What changes:

• 'I don’t really understand how this place works, why it’s here, any of that, but she': Cut. Not actually important for us to have this called out? It's sort of obvious from Levi more generally, but also just fundamentally not an important explicit piece of information, or charming/entertaining/engaging by itself
• 'it' --> 'this weird place': Tidying up to consolidate into one sentence.
• 'This was her place, y’know?. There’s few enough find that in their lifetimes. Got to envy her that.': Cut. I liked this line, mostly for 'There's few enough find that in their lifetimes.' But that wasn't really what the scene was about in the end, either, which meant it was tangential to the thrust of it. I'm not arguing for this leanness in all writing, but also: space was tight.
• 'But I think she was lonely.': Replace the last line. Levi psychoanalysing Edea (probably incorrectly). Ultimately flowed better into Jules's capstone on the scene.

Then through some further alchemy, these two separate lines combine and consolidate into one:

Version 3: But Edea... I never really knew her, you understand. She was brilliant, though. And she loved it here. But I think you were good for her.

What changes:

• 'But Edea...': Added to bridge the subject back and keep flow moving without excessive words.
• 'We’d talk, a little. But when you’re stuck out on the edge of the world with nothing but a bunch of plants for company, you don’t get too good at small talk.': Cut. Nice enough line, but wordy per se and also... fairly self evident from the time we've spent with Edea. Not doing enough work to make the final cut.
• 'you understand.': Added for rhythm in that first sentence. Technically unnecessary, but sounded better on reading. Not 100% if that made it into the audio.
• 'that much was obvious. She clearly knew every living breathing bit of this weird place.': Cut. Again, at this point, the lines that we're cutting are not especially bad in and of themselves. Instead, it's coming down to 'what is this scene for and how few words can we say it in?' We know this about Edea by this stage, and the gist of it is therefore carried, more simply, by Levi's next line of 'And she loved it here.'
• 'But I think she was lonely.' --> 'But I think you were good for her.': A more personal and justifiable thing for Levi to declare, while having the same flow effect. It's also more specific.

Reading this draft back, a lot of these changes come down to 'we figured out what this scene was doing, and needed to do that in the least space without killing off the charm'. Jules is curious about Edea, and the effect her arrival might have had on her. Levi surprises her a little with his answer, with he's right or not.

The Last Clockwinder: Diachronic Script Development

My goal here is to present a snapshot of how the script for one scene evolved over time and for what reasons those changes happened. The only context worth having for reading is that Jules is the player character, and Levi is her old friend and colleague, talking to her over the radio. (Though you can check out this other post for more context.)

I’ve used images in-line with my doodled notes on them. If for some reason images aren’t good for you, I’ve replicated these and my scrawling on this Google Doc.

Alright. Here’s Version 1. This is the first typed-up version I found, so is the oldest barring whatever I scribbled in my notebook.

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Iteration 1 (First Draft) 350 words, 2 pages

Three takeaways at the end, which mess with the rest of my numbering system, hah. 

1. It’s shorter than I would have guessed for the first draft (though we’ll see why later)

2. The skeleton of the final scene is here from the very beginning. That’s one of the reasons I chose this scene over some of the others that kept the same title, but whose content entirely changed – we’ll actually be able to chart a course through the revisions. 

3. For all that it’s short, and in some ways more successful than a few of the later versions, I’d call the style quite rambly and unfocussed compared to where it ends up. 

On to version 2

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Iteration 2 (First Revision): 500 words, 3 pages

The scene fills out quite a bit in this version. Key callouts (from this point, my numbering will be incremental and will help draw things together across versions): 

1. Added some lines for flow – Jules needs Levi to coax out what’s bothering her. More dramatically/emotionally interesting BUT it very much feels like padding compared to the leaner final scene. 

2. A revision of the previous version that doesn’t really change anything yet. This line will become a theme – it changes in almost every draft, as I was clearly dissatisfied with it in some way, until I land on something that actually works.

3. Lots of lines added here – the wordcount soared by 150w! – which do a decent job of fleshing out the characters, building in some world details, and injecting some humour. But at the cost of bloating the scene significantly.

4. I use placeholders like this a lot when drafting, though you won’t see many here, because I generally resolve them, even if not perfectly, for a turned-out versioned draft. 

5. More added, as in point 3. It does flesh things out in ways that get lost in the final draft, but there just ultimately isn’t the space for this kind of thing in this form of narrative. 

6. ‘and now our new friend here’ is an artefact of a point where the player character might have been a third party other than Jules or Levi.

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Iteration 3 (Version 1.3): 575 words, 3 pages

2. Yep, still playing with that line.

4. An attempt at a ‘fictitious swear’. Didn’t fit well; rightly removed from here and the script overall after this.

7. A new closing monologue from Levi. This is playing with theme and what the story is grappling with and has to say. It comes off a bit bald, but even more than that it just makes the scene even longer (up another 75 words!).

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Iteration 4 (V2): 300 words, 2 pages

8. Now we’re talking! This was part of the Big Cut Pass across the whole script when it became clear just how untenable scenes of the previous length were. This shaves off 175 words, and takes it down to barely 2 pages. It makes a massive, positive difference. You can see we’ve lost some detail, but considering how the scene flows now, it’s clear just how desperately needed that was. 

Slightly extended tangent on that point: the bloating and then shrinking of the scene could be taken as evidence of a certain amount of ‘faffing about’, given that it’s come back to a form much closer to where it started. BUT I think that’s a flawed reading. First off, the process of adding then subtracting is – if done judiciously – more like reducing a sauce than pushing a rock up a hill. Things may end up looking a bit like where they started, but it’s a lot stronger and more intense. 

Second off, the redrafting was part of the process of figuring out more about the game as a whole – exploring character and theme, and strengthening what things end up on the page, even if other things gets left out. I will say that this was an intensely good-feeling thing to do, and also a bit of a luxury in games writing. The ability to iterate like this – to test and extend the writing and make it better, was very, very valuable, but is not always possible. 

(Add to that that some of the iteration came specifically from playtesting and seeing what people were and weren’t getting about the story and story-world – what was boring them or going over their heads. Length played a big part of that – saying too many things just meant that nothing stuck, no matter how compelling the individual details were.)

9. This line is an interesting one to compare directly across versions. 

Original version: Over the years? A dozen? At most. There are – were, I guess – supply runs every half-year. I picked up a fair few of them. Heh. But I guess you know that better’n most. Why d’you ask?

First revision: Over the years... A dozen? At most. There are – were, I guess – supply runs every half-cycle. I picked up a fair few of them. Heh. But I guess you know that already. Why d’you ask?

Very minor wording changes. Notably, ‘half-cycle’ feels a lot more ‘on genre’ than ‘half-year’. 

New revision: Over the years... I brought a few dozen shipments, maybe? Why d’you ask?

Those words – 13, count ’em – say as much as the 36(!) of the original line and give up precisely nothing of value. 

What’s even more important, actually, is how this line looks in the final script:

Final script: 

That’s right, zero words. Because, ultimately, with space at a premium, that line was achieving absolutely nothing. 

2. THERE it is! Finally, a version of this line that actually feels like it snaps. The space dedicated to it feels fairly sizeable in this revised scene (a line, a reaction, then a line), but I think this was worth keeping because it was amusing and good for showing the relationship between Levi and Jules. The humour angle (I’m not going so far as to call it A Joke, but it’s certainly a minor gag) gets goodwill from the player BUT crucially also gives some nice dynamic lines for the voice actors to play off, and really works tonally with the shift into the emotional core of the scene at the end. 

10. Another set of lines to compare to the previous version. First off, they’re the only bits that remain of a much longer exchange. Second, the lines themselves:

Version 1.3: I never really knew her. We’d speak, a little, when I brought shipments. Small talk. She wasn’t very good at it. I guess when you’re stuck out on the edge of the world with nothing but a bunch of plants for company, you don’t get too good at small talk. This life wouldn’t be for me, is what I’m saying.

Version 2: I never really knew her. We’d talk, a little. But when you’re stuck out on the edge of the world with nothing but a bunch of plants for company, you don’t get too good at small talk. 

About half as many words, and I think nothing lost that’s not a) not that important or b) communicated just fine elsewhere. 

Version 1.3: She was brilliant, though, that much was obvious. I don’t really understand how this place works, why it’s here, any of that, but she clearly knew every living breathing bit of it. And she loved being here. This was her place, y’know?. There’s few enough find that in their lifetimes. Got to envy her that.

Version 2: She was brilliant, though, that much was obvious. She clearly knew every living breathing bit of this weird place. And she loved being here. But I think she was lonely. 

Similar reduction. We lose some of the more naturalistic rambliness and wordiness, but we knew by now that was absolutely not the way to go with this script. 

7. Also note how much has come out of the ending. No more monologue; slightly different emphasis, but striving for the same emotional/thematic notes.  

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Iteration 5 (Final script): 175 words, 1 page

There we go. Less than a page. 

11. The first line is now Jules. This is the result of a match pass – these scenes were always triggered by the radio ringing, and the player answering it. Having Jules speak first didn’t make sense! So, this is purely functional to cover that. 

9. Right to the point. Some of the same lines, but no working around to the point of the scene. There just isn’t the space for that. 

12. We switched this from a chuckle to a groan on the basis of trying to tamp down any read that Levi and Jules were an item. If that’s what you got from the game... well, you do you (but also: no). 

13. Slightly simplified version of this gag. 

7. Same ending content, but much simpler. No monologues, just a few lines with the characters’ own points of view in brief.  

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These were by no means the only interations, just the ones notable enough to reproduce here. If people find this valuable, I might dig into the passages I quoted at length and why I think each of the cuts to it worked (the process of figuring out what to take away at a word-by-word level). And, potentially, look for another scene to dissect in this way. Say ‘hi’ in the comments or on Twitter if that’s interesting to you.

Locus of Simulation in D&D

I've previously described a distinction between fiction-first and D&D-like TTRPGs as the 'locus of simulation'.

Basically, my theory runs, in (many) D&D-style games (which often have a heritage of battle/wargames) tend towards a simulation of the actions of characters within the world (and the world itself), and fiction-first TTRPGs (e.g. Powered by the Apocalypse games) are more about simulating a particular piece of fiction. This is evident in the tools each gives its players, and often additionally through the sense of shared authorship/vs architected underlying reality that runs through them.

(I highly doubt this theory holds up to a truly robust kicking; rather, I've found it an interesting lens to clarify the distinction/strengths in my own mind.)

I bring it up (yet) again because it was (yet) again on my mind over the weekend. I had cause to look up 5E's 'stealth in combat' rules (yet again...) and found that they were a) simpler than everyone seems to think but b) run consistently against people's mental conceptions of how that should work in a world simulation.

I won't turn this into a dissection/reiteration of those rules, but it had me flashing back to my earliest days of D&D, haggling over things that 'didn't make sense' in the rules with people arguing about what they felt they should be able to do when looking at the situation logically. (Which never came up when the rules did allow them to do something that didn't fit with that same logic.)

This is one of the major shortfalls of the D&D* approach, for me.

• The rules themselves often seem precise because they are seeking to so specifically simulate various different aspects of the world and its characters, say, what it means for one to be hidden from another.
• But the rules are a necessarily imperfect and simplified abstraction of those things (which also have considerations such as game balance).
• But what we encounter in a successful [by my metrics] game is a kind of immersion in the fiction more where players don't see things so much as a more straightforward 'tabletop battle game'.
• Which leads to regular situations where we have an intuitive sense of what the world-state should look like and what action should be possible that doesn't match what the rules tell us. Usually, in the case of my stealth example, that's on one extreme end of 'your enemies don't just forget you exist because you've briefly disappeared from view' and 'I should be able to use the Hide action all the time because they're facing the other way fighting Bob.'
• Neither of those examples are actually things the D&D stealth system cares about (it's not about them not knowing you're there -- it's about them not being able to see you; 'facing' isn't a standard 5E concept).
• And the answer is often just 'ignore those rules that get in your way', which is all fine and good but can run into other considerations I won't get into here.

My point isn't really about stealth in 5E. It's to illustrate what I mean when I talk about the 'locus of simulation'. D&D* can end up tripping over itself trying to give us comprehensive enough rules that they feel like they're simulating elements of a physical reality, but not so overcomplex they become cumbersome. (Which can lead to a kind of 'uncanny valley' where our immersion in the fiction rubs against rules that seem more precise than they are.) Whereas other, fiction-first systems don't care about that in the same way. Hiding from someone in combat might have no rules, or use some other piece of rules that more closely represents what it is trying to accomplish in the fiction.

What I realise when coming to the end of this shard and being out of time is that there is some connection to the idea of naturalistic vs non-naturalistic representation of rules and fictional acts. But I'll have to dig into that thought another time.

How to Write When You Can't

Today was a hard writing day -- one where everything felt hard to turn out, and the substance of it wasn't quite working. This happens, and I still actually got a lot written in spite of that, which counts as a win.

A few observations on the days like these:

• You can, and will, fix it later.
• The output of the bad days and of the good days is much harder to tell apart later than it seems at the time. It's often more psychological/physiological than anything intrinsic. (It's not coincidental that writing was hard on a day where it's 29C, the pollen is kicking my face off, and I'm tired and grouchy from the impact both those things had on my sleep.)
• There are tools that help. For me, format-shifting is always good. Getting things down on pen and paper feels a little freer and less formal, and it looks much scrappier. It give itself permission to be bad, and you know you're only going to improve it from there as you shift what you've got to another format.
• Seek clarity about what you're trying to do. Take a step back. What's the story, beyond whatever narrative techniques you're using to tell it? Do you understand it well enough and have it loaded into your brain? How does that flow into whatever narrative units you're using? What does the unit you're working on right now need to actually accomplish? If something's still not working, why isn't it? Are the motivations clear? The characters', the player's, yours?
• Write what you can, omit what you can't. Stitch it all together later.
• Take the rest when it comes.

Folder Structures for Project Organisation

Knowing where to put things is invaluable. Having a sense of structure to where important information goes and my path to accessing it has been a tool that has paid incredible dividends over the past few years (if, indeed, a tool can pay dividends).

I've mentioned my writing advice folder on Twitter before; it's not something I can easily share for a ton of reasons, but knowing that that's where I file things like that and that that's a place I can go to get unstuck on problems is amazing.

Matt Webb's rules for blogging also shaped my workflow for these shards. I have a shortcut which prompts me to type an idea, which it then saves as 'IDEA [The Idea].txt' in my blog folder. When it's time to write, I skim the list for something that interests me right now.

Information in context.

I had a pretty good folder structure for projects already, but Antony Johnston's system from The Organised Writer helped take that to the next level.

My 'Projects' folder is synced through Dropbox and pinned to Windows Explorer. Here's a (redacted) snapshot of the top level:

The next layer down is slightly different for all of them, but broadly has a 'stages of the project' structure:

‘Games’

‘Fiction’

The next level down is the individual projects. Here are a bunch of short fiction things:

I can move projects between 'stage' folders depending on their status. This has secondary benefits for things like selective file syncing on my laptop. But most of all: I always know where to find something.

I also have a template of 'useful folders to stick in any new project', which are: Archive: Folders or files that form part of the project and I want to keep around, but which I don't want to actively surface when looking for information day-to-day. (In long-term projects with more complex file structures, individual folders might have their own Archive, e.g. [Project Name] > Design > Archive.)

Materials: Stuff I have been sent about the project. Usually limited to 'stuff I have received from a client or collaborator'.

Press and Praise: Save nice things people say about your work! 'Press' is a more obvious element -- if I think is out and receiving attention. But even just if someone says something specifically nice about something you did on Slack, save it. You might never be able to do anything external with that, but if you're having a bad day, it's nice to be able to go and look at those things.

Project Management: Everything related to organising the project. Especially: contracts, statements of work, invoices, remittance advice, timesheets, your log of work. I cannot overstate how useful it has been for me to keep all of this in one place per project. Having a specific place for that info makes it easy to file it routinely, and knowing where to go looking is 👍👍👍.

References: On smaller projects, I often collapse this with 'Materials', but if you've got a lot of external references, here's a good place to list them, store copies, or link out to them. Might be duplicative with a moodboard, etc. if you're using it, but link out to that if not.

Generally, actually, if I have stuff on the web, instead of using brower bookmarks (though I will if I access it, like, daily), I save web shortcuts into the folders. Same if there are other project-relevant folders which need to live outside of Dropbox, like a local repo copy. Everything I need for a project is in one place.

A Chain of Thoughts on Fiction-First TTRPGs vs D&D*

Further thoughts on fiction-first TTRPGs that have solidified recently:

• To reiterate, a major difference is the 'locus of simulation'. Are you simulating the world and its people, or simulating a fiction about that world? This is striking in the genre-focused games of Powered by the Apocalypse, in particular.
• D&D(-alikes) often don't include tools or guidance within the game that make its GMs and players grapple with pacing or other narrative concepts which more readily create compelling fiction. (Not that it never engages with those things or tries to showcase them, but they're at best tangential, or more focused on the macro level of storytelling than narrower scenes and beats.)
• This doesn't matter so much if you're playing D&D* with people who bring those skills in from elsewhere.
• For this and other reasons, D&D* tends to lend itself to a 'contiguous time by default' mode of play, where you're mostly dramatising everything ('Okay, so you weave your way through the town's streets looking for an armour shop.'), and the GM exerting more of a directorial role over the flow of the narrative can sometimes feel like a failure state (emphasis on 'feel', because it's not).
• One of those other reasons (and this came up in conversation with a friend recently; forgive me -- I forget who) is probably down to D&D*'s history -- dungeon crawls and battle maps, where time happens necessarily slowly to give the players the opportunity to declare checking for traps, sneaking down corridors, etc., where the player is trying to simulate their character's actions as closely as possible -- and failure to, say, look for traps in one particular room can lead to a 'gotcha'. Pulling agency back from the players -- a narratively interesting and necessary tool -- becomes an incidental weapon in that environment.
• The same is true more obviously of combat -- D&D* has us dramatise essentially everything, moment-by-moment, because that is inherent in its combat system, which forms a significant part of the game (both present and historical).
• This makes the idea of 'hard framing' or even just using dramatic framing techniques as narrative tools, feel incongruous if you've come into TTRPGs through a D&D* mode (certainly speaking for myself).
• But good narrative really demands use of tools like this -- thinking about framing, where the action is, etc. -- otherwise you end up with a higher proportion of dead time.
• You do wrest some agency away from the players by doing this BUT player agency is not an unalloyed good. Different games and tables will benefit from different approaches to it, and most players I know would trade 'always on' agency for more of their limited at-table time to be spent on the good stuff.
• Fiction-first games build this tool into the system and surface them as explicit elements of play. Some are better at teaching this than others.
• Even if you prefer D&D-style games for other reasons (on balance, I think I still do), understanding the affordances of your system and what tools you can import from elsewhere can transform your play experience.
• One thing I love about D&D* is precisely the possibility of architecture in game-planning that runs against the affordances of an average fiction-first game which prioritises shared authorship over a hard underlying reality.

Why is a Dojo like a Toilet?

In Jiu-Jitsu, there is the concept of creating a notional, even ritual space in which to train. The practice of 'rei-ing' (bowing) in to the dojo -- the physical training space -- is a performative act that represents an engagement with that space -- a step away from the norms and rules of regular life, and into something other.

(At least, that is how I have always thought of it. The organisation with which I trained is built on the Japanese martial art of jiujitsu, but is several steps removed from Japanese elements of it by history (e.g. by being imported and reshaped in the UK). There are elements, such as the names of techniques, which bear reference to its history, but I don't intend to make any suggestions about the art's roots, nor Japan. Caveat lector.)

This bowing is a threshold ritual. Most people I trained with had at least one story of sleepily bowing into a toilet or a lecture theatre or a church -- other forms of spaces that feel specific and set apart from your average room in some way. People weren't seeking to venerate those spaces, but the pricking awareness of the otherness of the space they were entering triggered a reflex.

I think this connects interestingly to the nature of modern community space. The foundation with which I trained doesn't have permanent training spaces -- it makes use of shared university gyms, community centres, even squash courts. (There is, it must be said, something singular about the experience of having to wait, robed and belted to practice pretend fighting, while a bunch of 10-year-old ballerinas file out of the hall looking much cooler than you.) The act of bowing is a transformative one -- it changes the space into which you're stepping from a room into a dojo. I find the idea that a dojo can be anywhere -- that it's made by the people and their observance of it -- compelling.

It came up in conversation with a friend recently that there are analogues between this and some of my daily working rituals. I have 'start-up' and 'shut-down' procedures that mark the beginning and end of my work day. They are rooted in something practical -- they are a set of things that it is useful for me to do at the start and end of the day. But through habit and ritual, they become something more than that. They're not passive markers of the start and end of a period of time -- they are a performative act that creates or transforms that time into something else.