The Spear of Anoch Sun
Ollin Sword Design, the shop that made my spear, put up some interesting detail photos and wax molds of the spear, and listed it amongst the other great work on their custom shop page.
Check it out. Best gift I ever got.
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R.I.P. Gary Gygax (1938-2008)
I was very saddened to hear that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, possibly the greatest game ever, died yesterday. He was 69. Some shoddy business deals cheated Gary out of much of the financial success of his work, but the gaming world never failed to give him his proper respect, and that’s more important in many ways. He will go down in history as the father of the RPG.
I started playing D&D (technically AD&D) the same way I started just about everything in my early life; my brother was doing it and I wanted in.
Johnny was three years older than me, and like any dutiful younger brother, I followed him everywhere, and looked on with wonder at the “big kid” stuff he got to do. So when he and his friends started playing Dungeons and Dragons, I was there like a mosquito, buzzing around and annoying them as they ate junk food and rolled dice.
“You’re too young to play,” they all said, and I guess technically they were right. The game was for “players aged 10 and up” and I was maybe 7. But I ignored them, sneaking into Johnny’s room when he wasn’t home and reading the rule books.
I don’t think I ever got to play with the big boys, but they soon tired of the game and stopped playing anyway. Johnny was never one for book-learnin’, and you’ve got to do a lot of homework to play D&D.
You’d think I could have acquired the rule books as a hand-me-down from a loving sibling, but things never worked that way in the Brett household. Even toys that Johnny didn’t play with anymore were his until I traded him something of equal value, and he knew I wanted those books BAD. In the end, I traded the little color TV I had in my room for the black and white one in his. It was a hard bargain, but in all honesty, I never regretted it. I treasured those books and still do.
Soon after, I was playing D&D games at lunch in 3rd grade with my friends Brett Erenberg and Russell Whalen. We would leave the school grounds (!) and go to Russell’s house which was right across the street, playing until we were late for class. I smoked my first cigarette during one of those sessions; Russell swiped one from his grandfather, and we all puffed on it until we were sick.
Then I got my first taste of being Dungeon Master in summer camp, and won a little plaque for it.
In high school I played with the stock boys at the grocery store where I worked (express lane cashier, feh). They were in college, so we would go to their campus and play in the rec hall. After that I played in college with my friend Myke and this guy he introduced me to named Garrick. Garrick was the DM, and really raised my game because he refused to use adventure modules, as I had always done. Garrick wrote his own stories, and put the players through that. He inspired me greatly.
After that, I was hooked. I went out and spent much of my modest college stipend on all the second edition hardcover rule books, which had a lot of new rules and options for players and dungeon masters. I found a new group to play with (Randy, Ryan, Myke, Jay, Cobie, Meredith and some other rotating players), and took over as Dungeon Master, running adventures in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
I used to spend hours and hours in my college dorm room writing plots and creating characters, studying monsters and maps and magical items. A lot more time than I spent studying schoolwork, to be sure. I would spend hours designing an innkeep or a town guardsman, creating a huge backstory and motivation for them, only to have my players kill them before any of it came out, and then try to have conversation with some other person in the room that I had just thrown in as background. Argh.
But that was okay. Not knowing what the players were going to do was what made the game so great. You had to be an agile storyteller, ready to react to the unpredicatble, and prepared to let your hard-created characters die.
Even after college, I kept on with the D&D, playing with Matt and Jeremy and Randy and Jen and Eric and Nikki and Ivan and Mike and Mcallen and Bhudda and Dani and probably a dozen other people. I even got a game going with my sister’s boyfriend Kevin. She HATED that.
I owe a great debt to authors like Tolkien, Brooks, Salvatore, Jordan, Martin, Eddings, Friedman and the like for fostering my love of fantasy and helping me on my path to becoming a writer myself, but I doubt all of them together have had half the influence on my storytelling style as the game that Gary Gygax created, not to mention all the personal joy it gave me and so many others over the years.
Rest in peace, Gary. I owe you more than I could ever repay. You’ll be missed deeply.
Tea Party
So it looks like there won’t be any Little League games or GI Joe wars in my immediate future, but tea parties and stuffed animals? There’ll be no shortage of those.
We went to the fancy doctor’s office with the million dollar hi-res sonogram machine, and took at look at little Squirmy Brett, particularly between the legs. I’ll spare you the gory details; let’s just say the nursery will be decorated in a Wonder Woman theme instead of Batman.
This comes as no surprise to me. I have always known it would be a girl. Not sure HOW I knew, but I just sensed it. No matter how many children I have, they will all be girls. I am doomed to be the only man in a house full of women. I just know it.
Luckily, I like women. A lot.
The best part is, Dani, even though she knows I am always right, was doof enough to bet me that it was a boy. Now she has to bake me a cake. Hah! Suck it, baby momma! Get in the kitchen!
Using state of the art 3D ultrasound, we were able to get digital images of our -4 month old bundle of joy. We saw her make a little fist, and punch Dani in the stomach with it. We saw her suck her little thumb, and kick her foot over her head like Trinity from the Matrix. I think she’s going to be a kickboxer one day. That chick is limber.
I can’t even begin to explain what it’s like to sit there and see your baby’s little fingers and toes and all 4 chambers of her rapidly beating heart. I hope that heart beats nonstop for another hundred years.
Except when she falls in love. She’s allowed to skip one beat when that happens. It’s a special moment.
But enough of my blather. Let take a look at the photos!
Fight Quest
Fight Quest on the Discovery Channel is an amazing show. Two young American mixed martial artists travel from country to country, studying each region’s traditional martial arts style with its masters, and then fight an exhibition match in the style. Each episode is like a mini-documentary on a different martial art, highlighting its uniqueness and philosophy. You get to see exactly how Savate differs from western kickboxing, or how Aikido is different from Judo.
My favorite so far is Korean Hapkido, which I had never even heard of, which is apparently exactly as I imagined my fictional Krasian martial art, Sharusahk, to be; throws and holds designed to quickly cripple or kill your opponent by turning their own force against them. Good for fighting demons, too, since they are much stronger than humans.
I think a show like this is a must for anyone interested in writing good hand-to-hand combat scenes, because it opens up a wealth of ideas, and really helps generate an understanding of the mechanics of combat. Shit like this fascinates me, because you can tell when a writer understands this stuff or not, and I think it is crucial to writing tense, engaging action.
If you don’t have cable, you can watch clips here. I think you can also watch whole episodes free on the internet if you download the proprietary movie player on the Discovery channel site. Just click the “video” tab. I can’t imagine downloading the player could be harmful to your computer. I mean, come on! It’s the Discovery Channel!
Now, if you’re more interested in writing about things blowing up, I recommend Mythbusters.
Remember the olden days, when writers had to go to the library to do research? Chumps.
Paperback Writer
I’ve been thinking a lot about Paperback Writer while I work on the line edits of my book.
For those infants and philistines amongst you who don’t know, Paperback Writer was a song by the Beatles, a mop-topped bunch of British hippies who would probably be the world’s greatest rock & roll band if it hadn’t been for Led Zeppelin (also a bunch of long-haired British hippies).
The premise of the song was that the singer was an aspiring writer trying to get published, and the lyrics are his query letter. Like many writers looking for their first break, this guy was desperate for attention and the good will of the nameless, faceless publisher, and willing to do just about anything to get it, including sacrificing any and all artistic integrity. He’ll make it shorter, make it longer, change it in any way they want, if they’ll just give him a break.
This was how I felt when I was writing The Painted Man and shopping it around. Shit, part of me even feels that way now. Writing fantasy novels for a living has been my life’s dream for as long as I can remember, and though I never actually expected it to happen, I would have done most anything to make it happen, even sold out my babies, the precious characters I created and breathed life into on the computer screen.
But after the sale, it was surprising how fast that changed. At first, it was me debating big things with agents and editors; is the book better or worse off without the prologue? How important is chapter 7? Would the book be improved if I moved it? Cut it? Rewrote it entirely? Was character X in character when they told off character Y?
Sure, I had lost some of that “I’ll do anything if you print this” attitude, but that’s good, right? You don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot over artistic integrity, but you also don’t want to do anything to make the end product with your name on it worse than it started.
Now, though, I find myself internally wrestling with a strange kind of… indignance over stupid shit. Like, “What? How can anyone not appreciate the masterful way I streamlined that sentence by removing unnecessary indefinite articles to improve narrative flow? I left that “a” out on purpose!”
My mom says she’s been on the lookout for me to start getting full of myself ever since I got the book deal. I think this is it. I’d better get that shit under control tout de suite before I start yelling at people for using sugar instead of Equal in my latte.
Paperback writer
Paper back writer (paperback writer)
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
It’s the dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn’t understand.
His son is working for the Daily Mail,
It’s a steady job but he wants to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
Paperback writer (paperback writer)
It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few,
I’ll be writing more in a week or two.
I can make it longer if you like the style,
I can change it round and I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
If you really like it you can have the rights,
It could make a million for you overnight.
If you must return it, you can send it here
But I need a break and I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.
Paperback writer (paperback writer)
Paperback writer – paperback writer
Paperback writer – paperback writer
I wonder how long it will be before my wife sees this post and puts some sort of Beatles trivia in the comment section? Any bets?