There is a specific type of activity in role playing games (which are, by design, social gatherings) that is importantly and essentially NOT a social activity, and it goes back perhaps to the very start of roleplaying gaming as a hobby.

Speaking broadly, this category of activity encompasses a lot of solo activities that sort of surround the Actual Playing Of The Game, like space trash around the Earth -- as a player, it includes things like writing diaries or journals from your characters point of view, drawing sketches of them or the people they know, painting up a miniature for them, devising complex back stories, or simply sitting around and 'generating' new character after new character ... all of whom will probably never get played, et cetera -- as the person running the game, it involves stuff like the above, as well as developing complex societies, environments, ecologies, history, and various bits of fiction... hell, whole worlds that provided the backdrop for the story of the game... most of which no one but the person running the game would EVER KNOW.

As I said, it's a standard element of classic roleplaying games. Sometime in early 2006, a gamer on the Story-games forum coined a name for this kind of activity, referring to it as "lonely fun".

Before that point in time (and, in fact, long before there were role-playing games), it had a different name: "writing".

I've never been very good at Lonely Fun. Along the same vein, I'm having a hell of a time with my current W.I.P. because, unlike most of the stuff I've done before, I'm writing it alone. (My wife, who has been subjected to various excerpts from the ongoing story, might argue this point, but compared to my previous efforts, writing Humorless has been like working for a solid month inside a sensory deprivation tank.) No partner, no secret-blog that a couple dozen people can read as I go... nothing. My only reader is myself, and the only interaction I get with the story is my own.

I don't care for it much. Frankly, I've created a lot more fiction as part of a group of creative people (read: gaming) than I have solo (read: writing), and that's the activity that pushes all the good endorphin buttons in my brain. Maybe that's because I've conditioned myself to work that way over the last twenty years, but there it is.

Going to take a long time to break that habit.

Full essay is here.

Steampunk's key lessons are not about the past. They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times. A host of objects and services that we see each day all around us are not sustainable. They will surely vanish. Once they're gone, they'll seem every bit as weird and archaic as top hats, crinolines, magic lanterns, clockwork automatons, absinthe, walking-sticks and paper-scrolled player pianos.

We are a technological society. When we trifle, in our sly, Gothic, grave-robbing fashion, with archaic and eclipsed technologies, we are secretly preparing ourselves for the death of our own tech. Steampunk is popular now because people are unconsciously realizing that the way that we live has already died. We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses. Steampunk is a pretty way of coping with this truth.

It's a really interesting insight into the movement and, thinking about it, I probably agree... though at the same time I still just plain like stuff like zeppelins because they're cool.

But when I think about the story I'm writing in Humorless, and the steampunk/clockpunk tech that shows up, a lot of it (with the exception of the story's namesake) has corollaries in today's technology, and each example has something wrong with it -- flaws that also have a modern corollary.

Is that what I'm writing about? No. ¹ However, I think it's fascinating that, in introducing steampunk elements into the story, my mind naturally bestowed these relics of a technological path-not-taken with the same points of failure as the technology we have today.

Doing that sort of thing is, according to this essay, a kind of definitive part of the steampunk 'thing', and one assumes that that commentary is a conscious effort on the part of the participants. The fact that the same sort of deconstruction happened in my own story without my being aware of this alleged underpinning of the genre implies something even more important: that this knowledge of the oncoming failure of our current technological culture and the way we can/could reflect it in the Brass Mirror of pseudo-Victorian tech-that-never-was is something deeply ingrained in the subconscious.

---

¹ - Truth be told, I probably won't know exactly or even generally what I'm writing about until I'm done, or probably well after that -- I know that brothers and sisters seem to be figuring fairly prominently, and that's about it.

Here, for your entertainment, is an entire chapter of the current W.I.P., Humorless.

Day Two

Thaddeus was lost.

Right. Back to work, then.

Simplefit: Bodyweight Exercises, circuit training. I've always been a fan of weight training based entirely on your own body weight. Throw in some biking or an elliptical for cardio...

Note to self: you've been meaning to get a door gym; quit putting it off.

I thought I understood what was going on.

I mean, it seemed fairly reasonable. I'm writing this new story, and I'm using a lot of footnotes -- a LOT of footnotes -- and I've never used them before, and for all I know that cross-referencing and so forth might require a lot of behind-the-scenes data-tracking ¹ to handle -- the fact that my 35+ page document was already one and a half megabytes in size... around 1750k... well, it surprised me, I'll admit, but I assumed it was mostly my fault for using all those footnotes.

But something happened yesterday, Microsoft Word. I was using a different laptop than normal, one on which I had tried to put my copy of Office 7. But it didn't work -- you decided that I'd hit my limit on the number of home computers on which I could install the software THAT I HAVE PURCHASED, so not only is the new Office not working, but the install wiped out the old Office 2000 install that HAD been on there.

So, out of desperation, I grabbed a copy of Open Office 3 and installed it. It was quick (the entire software suite is the same size as just the Word 7 installation), it was easy, and it was free, but even more importantly it actually let me install it on as many computers as I liked. I'll admit that I was nervous that if I opened my super-hyper-complicated-footnotey story in Open Office, that I'd lose formatting or the footnotes would all become endnotes or the world would drop to a Blue Screen, or something.

But none of that happened.

I shut off Open Office's inexplicable word-completion option, set hot keys for the two main special functions I needed ("Insert Footnote Here" and "Word Count"), toggled off two settings in the screen appearance, and off I went.

When I was done, I saved it and emailed myself a copy.

During the save, Open Office warned me that I might lose some OpenOffice formatting options if I saved to the Microsoft Word format -- and that the size of the file itself might be affected. I sighed and confirmed the save, knowing that if the venerable Microsoft Word couldn't squeeze my story down under a meg, the open-source, free Open Office was probably going to hand me a file that was barely small enough to be attached to an email.

The save completed, I attached the file to my email, and checked the file size.

103k.

Less than 1/12th of the size it had been before.

I reopened the file in Open Office, in a bit of a panic. All my precious words were there. ¹

I opened it on another machine using Microsoft Word... and the formatting was perfect.

In short, nothing was wrong; my story's file was just much, much much smaller.

I'm sorry to tell you this way, Microsoft Word, but we need to break up.

• You're using too many of my resources.
• Your new Version 7 outfit is distracting. And not in a good way.
• You won't go all the places I need you to go.
• Finally... and I hate sounding so superficial, but you're just... you're getting too big. And you make all my friends fat, too.

Please don't call me; it will be hard enough seeing you every day at work.

Best regards,

Doyce

---

¹ - By the way: "behind-the-scenes" is three words, and "data-tracking" is two. According to you, those five words only count as two; it seems like a small thing, but the way I write, believe me when I say it adds up. I like working with someone who gives me credit for what I do; you're just not there for me when I hit Ctrl-Shift-G.

I'm currently working on two stories, one of which is called Humorless; sort of a horror comedy¹ about the intra-dimensional invasion of an otherwise harmless clockpunk-fantasy world. The cast currently includes:

• Grayson Dawes, antisocial alchemist and captain of the airship Humorless
  
• Hugh, his friend
  
• Emma Elsa Eliza Cassini, math-wiz
  
• Her suspiciously competent horse
  
• Grand Duke Jonathan Jacob Jorgen Cassini
  
• Simon Sayers, the Duke's youngest and most gifted adviser
  
• Rebecca Vaughn, senior engineer aboard the Humorless
  
• Thaddeus Vaughn, one of the most gifted spies within the League of Professionals; bit absentminded, though

As the title of the story clearly conveys, this is meant to be be somewhat funny², and I thought I'd share a few bits I like.

The Humorless:

The bag of the dirigible was oblong from starboard to port as well as stem to stern - like a fat cigar that had been stepped on - and was woven of asbestos and glass silk. The whole of the thing was encrusted with sensor arrays, weapons, armor plating, landing platforms for smaller craft, several clockwork mechanisms of undetermined and likely illegal purpose, and one transplanted roof garden. The overall effect, when viewed from the city below, was that one was looking up from the bottom of a pool at a fat woman floating on the surface, wearing an ugly dress and too much jewelry.

Bit more on the zeppelin:

No one in Bodea-Lotnikk looked particularly surprised that their city was talking; it wasn’t a terribly common occurrence, but it happened often enough that most people knew what to expect when it did.

A talking zeppelin, though; that was something else entirely. That was something worth paying attention to.

A bit on the city below:

The irregular, winding, and most of all narrow streets of Lotnikk reminded Thaddeus Vaughn (not uncomfortably) of the moment of birth. That was always the first impression that came to him – claustrophobic, yet disconcertingly Oedipal.

Thaddeus encounters the worst that the world has to offer -- professional adventurers:

It goes (almost) without saying that the man had companions. Professional adventurer types almost never travel in packs of less than four and, if separated, have a preternatural habit of ‘accidentally’ stumbling upon their lone companions just before or just after said companion is about to attract some kind of potentially profitable violence to their person.

There's a few other bits that I've emailed out to the defenseless folks on in my contacts list, but these are what's caught my eye today. Cheers.

---

1. Too many re-viewings of movies like Army of Darkness, House, and Shawn of the Dead, I think. There's been (so far) only one or two scenes that went in the way of the Spooky, but I think they came off fairly well. My goal is to try to convey (through showing) the kind horror-via-non-euclidean-wossnames that Lovecraft enjoyed telling about.
2. Being funny, as others have already said many times, is exhausting. I don't really know how some authors manage it.³
3. There's also quite a lot of footnotes.

... but I haven't got to it yet.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics... they will only grow louder and more dissonant... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

I'm writing a novel this month , and once again I'm surprised by the (recurring) fact that the process is different than anything that's gone before. I keep hoping that eventually my writing process will develop some kind of pattern, but it hasn't happened yet.

Unlike previous efforts, however, I'm not entirely comfortable with this one. Here's a few ways this year's effort is deviating.

1. Due to the technical limitations of the software I prefer to use vs. the story I'm writing, I am forced to use Microsoft Word for the first-draft writing. This is entirely my fault, because I'm including some typographic elements that more plain-jane programs don't (and shouldn't) support.

2. I had two pretty clear ideas for a story, and had to pick one, because they aren't remotely similar. Hell, I'm not even sure they're in the same genre. Normally, I have about half of one idea. I'm actually writing the story I came up with more recently, and not at all the one I'd planned on.

3. I'm reading other books while I'm writing. Not at the same moment, but interwoven with the writing. I do not usually do that, simply because I'm a bit compulsive about wanting to finish a story once I start it, and that gets in the way of the writing. Also, I'm reading something that's much more in tune with the story I'm NOT writing (Stephen King), than something that is (Terry Pratchett or maybe To Say Nothing of the Dog, but with airships and flamethrowers).

4. I'm not at all sure I picked the right story to write. I tend to write stories set in places I could live in (with a twist, but still) and not in made-up fantasy worlds. (That's not entirely fair, because I wrote Spindle, and that's a made up fantasy world, but by the time I was done with it, it didn't feel like one, and the caricatures felt like regular people, so maybe I'm being a over-dramatic artist type and I should just cut it out.) My main reason for thinking this is that almost every single word in this story has come hard. I'm not saying that that never happens -- everyone has days where you have to just pound the words out of the keyboard one painful syllable at the time -- but I've never had it happen this close to the beginning of the story.

It's close enough to the start that I still fiddle with the idea of switching to the other thing that (I think) would be easier to write, if not as much fun. I don't think I will, mind you -- it's just one of those thing I mull¹ over consciously, while my lizard brain works in the background to unearth the next part of the story for me -- but it's odd all the same, even to be pondering switching horses once the race starts.

I guess I'll be interested to see where things are at ten thousand words.

________________
¹ - De opines that I'm not allowed to say I muse, so instead I mull.