Books are People Too

In the present day, for a great many who have embraced the profession as their own, writing has become a service industry, not unlike kitchen work or delivery. I have experienced this; it can pay well, it can be stable and secure, it can even be a half-decent way to spend one's day, so long as there are not too many days when it feels like a real job.

But writing ad copy or rephrasing quarterly reports is not "writing" in the Shakespearean, Thackarean or Hemingwayesque sense, but rather "communication" on the scale of runes scratched on tree bark to send a message that a man is stuck in the mud, as in the Kipling Just So story.  Communication is repeating something that we already know in a clarifying manner, in the most efficient way possible, to enable a process, such as sales, or decision-making for a company reading said reports, that has nothing actually to do with either the message or the method. This is what many writers who are caught up in the "service industry" logic fail to distinguish; that while thoughts are communicated through writing, the point isn't to communicate those thoughts to a specific person, or even a specific kind of person. The point is to communicate those thoughts because they need communicating, listener be damned.

I am commonly exhorted by various voices to write content that publishers will want to publish, because it will make them money. To get published, this content must not offend; it must not contain a possibility of being misunderstood; it must not be about subjects that are too "unfriendly" to the largest number of people; it must not depict persons in a way that would be considered demeaning, or punching either up or down, or across either. In short, I must write what already exists, but in sufficiently different words so that I am saying things that are safe and have already been said, but in a way they haven't been said before, or at least in a way that most people don't know hasn't been said before. Oh, and despite the resistance against "punching," it must be conflict-driven. That's very important.

It was not necessary for Shakespeare to write this way, as essentially there were no rules except for the ownership of the Globe, who did not care about anyone's hurt feelings — largely because the audience was free to express this by actively throwing things, with the approval of the management, that being the state of the theatre at the time. "Be an actor my son, but be ready to dodge."

More importantly, Shakespeare could not have written for me, personally, or anyone alive right now, no matter how many marketing experts he might have dug up like Yorick to tell him how to create conflict without punching down. Yet miraculously, he managed to write jokes that I have understood and laughed aloud at, in rooms of people not laughing, there to see Shakespeare the way they went to church, unaware entirely of the subtext. The funniest thing about my seeing Twelfth Night, my favourite Shakespearean play, is all the laughing I'm going to do in a near silent room. It says something, I think, about the failure of writing as "communication."  More often than not, because of the listener, the jokes don't land, however "there" they are.

Furthermore, this concept of target-audience engineering need not examples from so far in the past to show how clumsy is their design. To begin with, there is the great mass of authors post-1950 who simply fail to make inroads with the modern reader... but obviously, we don't suggest that Capote, Vonnegut, Plath, Ginsberg or Thompson shouldn't have bothered writing because, without their historical weight, they'd have faceplanted as authors if their first books had been published today. No, we're perfectly willing to make concessions that for them, in their time, without the engineering, it was okay to just go ahead and write whatever the hell they wanted, confident that today they'd still have readers, without the need of a 2026 publisher.  Of course, none of these writers were any good, right. I mean, none of them were worth reading, since they did punch down, and up, and sideways, and at themselves, with no regard whatsoever against an audience that had no rotten fruit to throw. We don't read them because they were good, no. Obviously not. We read them because... because... wait, why?

Well, I suppose because we can be BIG enough to grant a freedom to the dead, to write what they like, that can no longer be granted to the living. That seems plain enough.

To end with, I'll casually point out that no one in any era worth their sand, the term that used to apply to a person having value, waited for permission to write something. Nor did they pay any attention to approval, bans, refusals to publish or the prospect of being "disliked," which apparently is the worst thing that can happen to a person. If they could not make themselves heard one way, they found another. The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well, he just did not give a fuck about who read or did not read his work. He did not write for other people. This is the point I started with. Writers do not write for readers. That's the role of the communicator.

Communication with words as a service industry is about being paid to write content that one is told to write. We are given a job, much like being asked to make a Monte Cristo sandwich; that job involves the arrangement of words to ensure, at their best, that they can only be understood one way. If I say that this company last year broke ground on a gas plant outside Sundre, and that the plant has reached a point where a definite date can now be named for when sour gas at that plant will begin processing, then the date matters, the clarity of what's going to happen on that date, how much of it is going to happen, where the supply will arrive from and where the finished product will go, how much it will cost according to the present figures, how much the predicted future will adjust those figures and so on, then all of this has to be crystal clear if the goal is to publish so an investor who might want to visit and tour the plant already has the correct information at their fingertips. The Monte Cristo's cheese has to be cooked just so, the bread dipped in the right amount of egg, and browned, just so, and cut just so, and plated just so, and on, so that it looks precisely like every other Monte Cristo this kitchen will make today, regardless of the cook making it. Communication, when done well, is not subject to the writer's footprint; it is best if the writer of the communication doesn't have one, since that will only muddy the message.

Human beings are not clear. They are muddy. Their motives are never straightforward and singular. Communicative writing is not natural because it requires us to think in a manner that diminishes the nuance that we are comfortable living with every day. The challenge, then, is that no matter how clear we make a thing, no matter how we flatten it into the most boring passages ever about the future of a sour gas plant, someone will misunderstand it because we are not built to all read things about gas plants or taste Monte Cristos in the same way. This makes communicative writing extremely frustrating, because no matter how one tries, the reader just won't have it. This is the point of Kipling's How the First Letter Was Written, because it invents a story about the invention of writing and the story is about how writing as a technology is a total disaster. Despite the effort to write a message for his daughter to carry, Tegumai only discovers that everyone misunderstands his efforts and his daughter Taffy is dearly tormented for his efforts. It is the most important story for a writer to read, I should think, because it carries a message a writer should never forget.

Do not write for other people, unless disappointment is your aim.

Mind you, I say this as I write for other people.

This right now, that I am doing, is communicative writing. I am writing a blog post explaining something I think deserves to be explained, but I fully expect it not to be understood, because it is not the nature of people to learn, appreciate or grasp things they do not already believe.

With my last post, I talked about my tendency to argue in association with a coffeeshop/bookstore that I ran for a brief time. I'll throw in that I began arguing in that other great crucible in which we're all forced to swim during our youth, school.  School for me was a situation where 29 trapped people, and me, would get into these arguments that I would impose ruthlessly, as was my nature then and is my nature now. I remember one of these was the argument that a hero "is a brave person." The class agreed. I did not. I did not believe then that it was so and 45 years has not changed my mind about this. A hero is a person who is there, who doesn't think, who does what's next, then afterwards generally thinks, "Oh my gawd, I could have died doing that. What as I thinking." That's my point. No thinking in the moment is involved. No thinking, no time to be "brave." One is too busy acting.

For years after school, here, there, I'd meet people who'd known me and disliked me who would come up to me at a mall or a restaurant or on the street and act like we'd always been old friends and isn't it great and how is your life going, that sort of thing. And quite often they'd say something to me like, "I remembered that thing you said (eight years ago, when we were 15) and you know what, you were right. I only realised it a long time later, when (tells story about how they came to the same conclusion). I just wanted you to know."

When this happens often enough, one begins to realise that a lot of people argue against a premise not because the premise is false, but because they just haven't had enough personal experience to know one way or the other, so they assume the safest course of action: that "Something I don't personally know is necessarily false." This actually makes a lot of sense to me. As a writer, it makes the point that the argument written down isn't an argument for the time it was written, but for all time. That anyone, at any point in their life, might come back to a thing written again, only to find that now it makes sense, when once it did not.  This is a very strong reason to write things that won't be (presently) understood by people. Because we live in four dimensions, not three.

Writing, understand, not being communicative, can be as muddy as the writer wants it to be. A given sentence can have two, three, even four meanings. Take my phrase about Charles Bukowski:

"The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well..."

These 12 words are enough, because the above, unlike communicative writing, is not clear. It doesn't tell you who Bukowski is; it does not define him as a poet; it does not explain, for those who do not know the reference, how it is the right reference here. Nor does it say if I personally like Bukowski. None of this is communicated. Intentionally. Because those who know the poet already know the story; those who don't know him won't benefit from the story. My liking him or not is irrelevant to my knowledge of him, and my awareness of how he's the right modern person to be inserted here.

Omissions like this are not accidents. Writing intentionally plays mind games; it sets out to do far more than lead you down a garden path to a plot twist, it willingly makes you believe that you're in a day garden when actually you're blindfolded, it's night, there's a cliff a foot to your left and no, I'm not the author of this tale, I'm the devil. Writing is about deliberately laying a story out in such a way that it can be read today with this impression given, only to find oneself waking in the night and thinking, "Wait a minute... what happened to the dog?"

These things are not "plot holes." More often than not a "plot hole" is a reader that has failed to pay attention (though, granted, with a lot of films, that is not always so). These things are deliberate to make the reader see the world in a manner that isn't meant to communicate on a conscious level, but a subconscious one. It is dirty pool, it is mendacity and brainwashing and a hoodwink. It is also delicious, which is why it continues despite all the other things we might do instead. We like to read, because it offers a cunning puzzle that cannot be found elsewhere: a human puzzle, where the rules do not reflect what's nice or normal or approved. The best books are not the ones we liked best. The best books are those we cannot make ourselves stop thinking about.

If there is a book you might hate, such that you find yourself railing against it and it's author with a vehemence that is unlike you, that is because the work got under your skin. That's what makes it a good book. You fought that book and you lost. And you don't like that. Too bad.

Books, like people, do not exist that we may approve of them. They exist with the ability to act freely upon the reader, just as your neighbour is free to do with his damned garden hose, or the co-worker with their need to slap a sticky note on your computer screen, or whatever miserable, terrible, sometimes beloved things that human beings do to human beings. A work of literature needs no more justification for its presence than does any human not actively bothering you on this planet... because whatever you may think, the most awfulest book by Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein does not have the power to grab you and make you read it. But, like people you don't like, you still have to live on a planet where these exist. Worse for you, we continue to generally believe as a culture that it's inappropriate to burn these things, just as it is people... and in fact, that is what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."

Thus, when we write, it is not another bit of non-offensive fluff that fails to punch that we strive to write, when we think of ourselves as writers. No, just as I taught my daughter to use her fists, so that she could defend herself if the time came, I give my books fists too, so they can punch as hard as they need. And if the reader doesn't like that...?

Well... fuck the reader.

The Hollowness of the Male Pitch

Putting the last of March's Lantern together and last night I was hit hard by a toothache. Nasty, vicious one it was, but I made it through the night before being able to see my dentist. During that time, the tooth well and truly died, so it's a root canal next week, and I'm not feeling tooth pain just now, rather just a bit of sick from the sewage dripping down my throat from the small abcess that was caught in time and is now diminishing. Good times.

As such, did not spend a lot of time working today, with the deadline close now, while I spent too much time watching youtube. That usually means some discussion on writing these days, as I've already said, this time with the main complaint being the poor white male writer who has been mercilessly cast aside by the publishing industry, the bastards, mostly in favour of women. Such diatribes that I see are usually put forth in content hosted by women, because this stuff is even worse when the subject is on a video hosted by men.

There are a few reasons I don't count myself as part of this pity party. First, I know I didn't "make it" as a mainstream writer largely because of my angry youth period, when all those who reached their hand out to help my career got it slapped away. Later, I didn't "make it" because I tended to rise up among groups of writers rather fearlessly to point out that their material wasn't going anywhere because it wasn't any good, just as I did not consider my work at the time of about the same caliber. That tended to make sure my work was not included in that sort of "grant sanctioned" collection that became so popular (and now so obscure) in Canada in the 1990s. Since then, I haven't "made it" because, well, fuck the publishing industry. As such, no pity party. There's a responsible person for this white male failing to become a bestselling author, that being me.

As such, as I write in my inimical, less than polite style, I want to make a point here that as I writer I've never self-identified as either white or male. Obviously, others have done so; I argued that on this blog less than a month ago. But I can't ever recall stopping mid-sentence and thinking, "Wait, is this how a man would write this sentence?" or "is that description of a farm house in Saskatchewan legitimate from a white perspective?" Predictably, I'm going to be accused of this by default anyway, since obviously there are fifty ways to describe the slats of an old house in a sparsely wooded country — the white way, the black way, the catholic way, the Guatemalan way and so on... with my knowing only the first of these. As such, I can only write about anything in the particular way associated with circumstances of my birth having nothing to do with my choices, and therefore I pay no attention to this. Not only do I pay it no attention while I'm writing, I pay it no attention if I hear someone else comment on this while they're reading... for, as well all know, there's only so many ways to read a text also: the white way, the black way, the catholic way and so on.

All of this is attitude is a ridiculous game that I am not interested in playing. Because of my name, and because I grew up in an age when a great deal was expressed through letters and mailings, I have been mistaken hundreds of times of being a woman. Far more, I think, than a Sandy or a Sidney or a Sam might be, because for the most part, people are aware that those names might be a man or a woman, and written responses are less hesitant to judge. But as an "Alexis" in erstwhile days, virtually unknown at that time as an Eastern European or Russian name in the very bland whiteness of Alberta where I still dwell to this day, I have nearly always been assumed to be a woman first, and a man only later at the "unveiling" that happened again and again. And, of course, being a writer, where the name is attached to the work that is in text, there has always been the moment where it comes out: "Oh, you're a man. I though you were a woman."

That is perhaps a reason why my rhetoric, what I write here, is in a different tone from my "writing," such as occurs with the Lantern and other official works. Not to prove that I'm a man writing this blog, but because I have little reason to cultivate my reader. The more I cultivate, the more gracious and kind I am, the more likely it will be that my reader will think I'm a woman... I am, after all, in such cases, "so polite." Because I can, if I wish, write just as sweet as cream. It's really not that hard.

I think this relevant because none of those who assumed I was a woman back in the day added the phrase, "But you don't write like a man."  Rather, the instant they understood what I was, once they'd seen the label on the wrapper if you will, then in their heads my writing automatically snapped to being that of a man. If this happens once or twice, it might be overlooked... but when it has happened many, many times every year, and especially so when I was writing for articles and newspapers, the whole "write like a man" or "write like a woman" frankly becomes an obvious hoax. It's all just horseshit to assume that because a writer includes constant references to a cultural frame or a supposed "identity" in text, that the identity is automatically "authentic," is just hokum. What makes the identity "authentic"is that the Guatemalan author's name is "Juan José López Pérez" and not "Carlos Martin," either of which are common names of that country.

Even after it was known that Cary Grant's given name was Archibald Leach (the name appears on a gravestone in the film Arsenic and Old Lace), they preferred Cary Grant because he didn't "look" like an Archibald.  I mean, really... Grace Kelly and Archibald Leach?  Ridiculous.

If it really is that tough for a man to succeed in the modern publishing stream, then for heaven's sake, why not just write like a woman? In the late 1940s through the 1950s, the Hollywood blacklist turned authorship into a kind of covert tradecraft. Writers accused of Communist sympathies found themselves unemployable under their own names. The result was an underground economy of authorship in which blacklisted writers continued to work by using "fronts," pretending to submit the author's scripts under their own names. It sounds awful, but it let writers go on making their living as writers, and not as ditchdiggers, cooks or door-to-door salesmen.

I don't bring it up to argue this should be the method employed, but rather to argue that it almost certainly IS being used by someone, and probably with the publisher's consent. Many people hate the junket end of publishing; they despise the road trips, the hotel stays, the audiences and the questions. At the same time, no doubt, there are many women and men who would be happy to enjoy this side of it while he remains home doing the actual writing. Of course, even suggesting this is sacrilege... despite the evidence that it's been going on for at least a century now.

I have ghostwritten two books. I'm under contract never to reveal anything more about this except that one fact, in case I want to sell my services to someone else someday. I don't mind that my name is not on the cover of those books, nor what benefits the payer received. I was paid.

Some people are "shocked" to discover this about me, far more so than learning that I'm not a woman. I find this funny. I rather like having my prose being mistaken for that of a woman, because it says very clearly to me that there is no such thing as "gender identity" writing. That's just a thing people made up. All the carping about male authorship and the lack of male readers and such only reveals that whatever the problem, it's almost certainly that the writing itself isn't really all that good. I say this as someone who, I argue, does not write well enough to win the Booker Prize. But then, that's not an atmosphere I ever want to breathe. What a bunch of stuffed mannequins.

When I find myself watching a video that features a white man bleating about the unfairness of the industry, and how his thoughtful, nuanced book about a man undergoing trauma about some thing or other reveals the depths of his themes or his value as a writer, I usually take this with a grain of sale. I have had too many discussions with both would-be and successful writers (far more successful than me, yet strangely no more secure for it) to be certain that this "deep theme" is more than dishwater with a few plates in it. And when I hear that this self same book has been struggling to get published for 15 years, I am not assured that this isn't another case of Chinese Democracy by Guns and Roses... a sort of competent work that in reality is almost instantly forgettable. And when I am actually told what the book is about, it invariably falls into the realm of some other book written by a white man between seventy and a hundred years ago — because it turns out that this is a man struggling in his marriage in a way not unlike Revolutionary Road, or this is a young man being crushed under his responsibilities and ennui not unlike Catcher in the Rye, or this is about a man from the rough sides of the tracks trying to get out, not unlike The Man with the Golden Arm, or this is about a man whose dreams didn't pan out like he thought they would, not unlike Death of a Salesman. In fact, I never hear anything about a white man's trauma that I can't locate in some book I read before I was twenty, when the actual age of the book was much older than that.

The emotional value of these books is important, and were valuable at the time, but my having read them convinced me that they were also ground I didn't need to cover. I recognised while the age of Biff in the play the pitfalls of Willie and thus did not allow myself to fall into them. I have zero desire to write such a novel because, first, if I wanted to make the point I'd tell the reader to see the play or read it through themselves; and second, because I lived my life entirely different from Willie, the thoughts rolling around in my head are not mixed up with feelings of inadequacy. My not "making it" as a writer is not a Willie problem for me; in the end, the writing in fact mattered more than the glitz. Willie's problem is that he hated being a salesman; he sold his comfort for a dream that never materialised, while I gained comfort and joy despite a dream that never materialised. My "trauma" isn't one. That's how good Arthur Miller's play really is: it taught me as a young man the pits and perils of not going down that road. So when I meet an author now who wants to write a book that sounds like Death of a Salesman, all I can think is "Why didn't you read the play young and learn something?"

Yet, I see these same books pitched over and over on the Internet by white men who bemoan the system that is aligned against them. Yet to paraphrase the line from Sorkin's American President, the failure isn't that the modern male writer doesn't get it, it's that they can't sell it. No one is interested in their 1950s based emotional problems not because they are white problems, but because they are problems that none of us have any more. No one anywhere believes that a man who cannot deal with his marriage has a right to complain about the "trauma" he's suffering, because there are now literally a hundred different approaches a person willing to be flexible and change their nature can do something about that. It's not the 1950s, it's not the land of fault divorce, it's not the male's responsibility to do all the earning, it's not the male's right to have a pity party because the marriage isn't going well. Those are problems that dinosaurs have. Present day males simply agree with their wives to call it quits, take up an activity that encourages growth and self-awareness, accepts that life is pain, that everyone feels it, and moves the fuck on. There's no room left for wallowing, which is what those old works of 70 years ago did. Not to their fault, but due to the time in which they were written.

This explains why so much literature and so many films take place three, four, even five decades ago, so that writers who want to write about the old problems all over again can do so without looking idiotic. But really, these stories only tell us to be grateful we're no longer those people. They don't enlighten, they don't really engage. They're largely judged on how faithful they are to the time period (within specific modern taboos), never upon the insight they offer into anything.

The pitch for why I should care about such writing — for there is always a pitch — suggests to me a fellow who arrives at my front door to sell me a new, great product he's invented. It's "sensational," every home needs one, it performs a service unlike no other appliance, the very presence of it will change the way I start my day every morning... and then, the reveal: it's a toaster. The man has invented a toaster. It may be a very nice toaster, it may do the job it's designed to do, but I already have one and it's the least modern gadget I own. In fact, I'm so tired of toast after a lifetime of eating it now that my toaster has one single purpose: to toast bagels. I don't eat sliced bread and the buns I eat don't fit in the toaster, so now this is all that's left. And if there are no bagels in the house, the toaster goes in a cupboard — where it sits, for months, until I want bagels again.

This is modern writing produced by the kind of complaining male I happen to find on youtube. Mind you, outside the "lit" community, I have no problem whatsoever finding books written by males... about history, science, geopolitics, mechanics, you name it. But I don't buy these.

I have the internet now.

Validating the Masses

Seeing a number of videos about writing and culture lately, of which the one below is perhaps the best example, I'm encountering a strange pushback with respect to the sort of writing I do, which isn't very different from the way this blog has been structured from the beginning:

Starting in 2008, I made two assumptions as a writer, based upon my personal experience watching people play D&D and the sort of advice I was reading online about how to do it. The first was that (a) I knew how to dungeon master better than most people, and (b) I was ready to say so. From that point, I assumed the role of a teacher who feels that the students (in this case, willing readers), would want to sit down and learn. Not in the sense of grade school, where the students were forced to be there, but of university, where the students paid to be there.

From that point, I created an inviolable social situation for a lot of people, who chanced to read my material but did not feel they could learn from it. At the same time, while affected and often insulted by what I said (your players are not "heroes") they found themselves unable to express their disagreement or anger in actual arguments. This led to a kind of disgruntled respect, most commonly voiced as, "I don't agree with everything he says, but..." — which I've always translated as, "I really fucking hate that guy, but he's better at explaining himself than I am."

That may not be fair. Still, I'm of the opinion that if someone proves me wrong, I'm ready to change my mind... without the need for official papers to justify the change, since if it turns out that the shift in my thinking wasn't warranted in the long run, I'm open-minded and I'll just change my mind again when I have more evidence. On the other hand, these others are of the opinion, "If it seems like someone who has proven me wrong, that's absolutely no reason for me to do anything." Which is how we define "close-minded."

At no time did I ever pretend to be a neutral observer or a "fellow traveller" with respect to D&D. I'm not one of the crowd that gushes when a new splat book arrives or one of those willing to try a new edition just because one happens to get published. I'm not a nostalgia hack crying for the good old days, I won't pretend that the artwork back then wasn't shit, or that the artwork now isn't slop, or even that I give a fuck about the artwork associated with D&D, because artwork isn't a game rule.  I'm not one of the community, on purpose. I don't measure my social value against it. I don't wear a badge that says I play D&D at the local club on Wednesdays. I don't like any published edition of this game. I don't respect the designers, I don't respect their efforts, any more than I would respect a writer who turned out a book that was "mostly okay." I have this funny thing about any mechanical product, within which I include games: they have to work exactly as they're designed to work. If they only sort-a do so, then I see it with the same amount of respect I'd have for a chainsaw that won't work in bad weather.

Therefore, I have exactly zero reason to soften my criticism. People who do that wish to preserve their sense of "belonging" to the community, out of fear that they'll be "cancelled." But I'm not part of the community and I don't accept their judgment as regards the value I write. This makes me free to say what I believe, not what I think the reader can handle.

This is why my work feels confrontational to those people who are inherently caught in their need to manage the social costs of possibly saying something they might be judged for. It's also the reason why a lot of writers who were previously concerned with those social costs grow to be so much better when they finally come to a point of, "Fuck it, I want to say what I think."  When the reader isn't in the same room as the writer, the writer is free to step out from the gulag the reader unconsciously imposes.

15 years ago, Android made a device that was vastly better than the Apple product of the time — but it was unduly complicated. We bought one for my partner Tamara who had the wherewithal to suss it out, patiently, in all the ways that a modern like product would resist producing... and utterly loved the process of doing so. As did so many others that Android began kicking Apple's butt, forcing Apple to change it's product in order to compete. Success does not come from making things easier and less complicated. It comes from creating something so ingenious and difficult that it will arrest the attentions of a significant part of the population. This is a lesson that business steadfastly refuses to learn.

When we don't have to please strangers off the street at a marketing strategy event, when we don't have to live up to the standards of "ordinary people" who must invent opinions on the fly because they're paid to do so off the cuff, then the boundaries on what we can make and what we can think don't apply. But yes, true enough, if we step outside the "boundaries" and speak our minds without being paid to do so (suggesting, you know, that we've had time to think about it, not like people who have only just witnessed a product for the first time just minutes before), then we come off hostile. It's the default reaction to hearing anything outside the norm being said.

When a reader encounters an argument that clearly reflects a lot of knowledge and reflection, it creates an implicit heirarchy between the writer/speaker and the reader, who understands inherently that they have not given themselves the time to think about it. It exposes a sense of self-erasure, emerging from a belief that everyone's opinion ought have the same value — a delusion that evaporates when someone is able to make multiple considered arguments with one sentence after another, giving the reader no time to disagree with the first or the second when being pummeled with the twenty-third. This discontinuity with what most people think of as "opinion," that being something off the cuff, reads as an attack, a declaration that the reader must be stupid, because intrinsically this is what the reader feels when they're met with an argument they themselves have taken no time at all in their minds to address. This feeling is then ascribed to the "attacker," not the self; the "attacker" is using words "unfairly" to outline "wrong ideas" that are in fact only wrong because they're new and unfamiliar.  It all goes to show that the sense of everyone's opinion being the same is really only evidence of how the concept has been widened to include every half-baked thought that people have created in their heads without taking the time to fully cook one.

The result of this is rapidly becoming a form of constraint and censorship: not because the topics or the content is offensive, but because it's being perceived that the "abuse" created by the writer above is not the reader's perspective, but an active failure of responsibility on the part of the writer. Thus, the writer is not expected to mollycoddle the reader. If it feels that the main character of the piece is getting too put upon, it is the writer's responsibility to insert a helper or some form of outside force to intermediate for the character's well-being. It is the writer's responsibility to assure that the world being built doesn't come off as overly unjust, excessively dystopian without a clear sign of an out of some kind, then the writer must hold the hand of the reader lest it become too cold and dark and apparently hopeless. A book that's too uncomfortable, that suggests the character can't remain the same person going out of the novel that they came in as, asks the reader to accept a prospect they're not mentally prepared to consider: that event might force them to change their mind about something or someone. We can't have that as a part of writing fiction in this day and age. It upsets too many readers and affects the perceived bottom line of the publishing concern. They might, gawd forbid, find themselves cancelled.

As a result, we don't dare depict the real world. The real world has consequences. People are irrationally executed or murdered on the streets of ordinary towns for no justified reason at all. We can't have things like that happening in actual writing. Writing is where we go to escape all that, to assure ourselves that everything is all right. That's where the responsibility of a writer lies. Not in giving opinion, but in providing care, and assuring the community being written to that everything is going to be all right, so stop worrying.

This is not something I'm saying that I hope won't happen. This is doctrine being enforced right now.

By all present-day arguments, this post should have begun with a number of trigger warnings. I might have, in the name of responsibility started this post with,

"Warning: this post includes content that implies an intellectual hierarchy and usese sustained argumentation without relief pauses; it further criticises community norms and identity-based belonging, rejection of reader-as-peer framing, depictions of irreversible consequence and moral discomfort, skepticism toward therapeutic models of fiction, critique of publishing economics and cancellation anxiety, dismissal of off-the-cuff opinion as equivalent to considered thought, refusal to provide reassurance or narrative escape and the suggestion that readers may be asked to change their minds."

If I had written this at the top of the post, it would have shown that I care about the reader's safety, and that I do not wish to impose my aggression and lack of concern for the reader's fragility and overall fear regarding subject materials with which they have no previous experience. Because I did not do this, it demonstrates that I am a monster who does not care for your safety, and I wish to take advantage of your fragility and that I wish to increase your fear. This makes me a very irresponsible person and as such, I should not be given a public platform, this blog for example, upon which to express my views.

It is worse than this. Because I am a 61 y.o. white male, who apparently feels zero sympathy for my fellow human, because I'm willing to unrestrainably abuse my reader in this horrid fashion, I am plainly a number of other things besides, all of which draw upon perceived motivations for writing this post that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content herein. Content in the post is irrelevant where these accusations are concerned. I do not need to write the actual words for it to be assumed that I am saying something that does not occur in the text. My age, my gender and my race make those conclusions more than self-evident, by definition.

Importantly, the pre-emptive moral inference that is based on my identity is not condemned; rather, the reader in this culture is congratulated for seeing through my text to a hidden meaning that is, of course, there, which overall makes the words themselves completely meaningless. This might as well have been a post about the lubrication of farm tractors for all the value the words are to the audience unable to wrest themselves from the belief that the purpose of writing is to "make the reader feel good" when it is done. But obviously, not in a "Hallmark white-person way," but in a "concern for my sufferings and personal difficulties" kind of way, which make the reader feel justifiably angry for all the unfairnesses that have been heaped upon them.

And because I chose to be a writer some 50 years ago, this is by default the societal role I'm expected to fulfill. That role is now to reassure the reader that the world is unkind, that the reader's pain is real, legible and morally centred, and that anger is completely understandable because it preserves the reader's identity while avoiding the risk of reconsideration. Any writing that nowadays does not participate in this performative economy is now suspect. By definition.

The novel, Sense and Sensibility, Marianne's "sensibility" is treated as evidence of virtue; it is socially legible, rewarded and defended as authenticity. Elinor's restraint, on the other hand, is read as cold, without feeling and even as a moral deficiency. The novel is more than 200 years old and it describes precisely the same belief that "feeling deeply" confers legitimacy, while actually thinking is a sign of failure to conform properly to the expectations of the masses.

This is what comes of the internet turning the whole world into a drawing room.

Chekhov's Gun

If you don't know this one, you're obviously so divorced from knowing anything about writing that you just don't care, or you're ten years old. Most likely, you've heard it but you don't know the source, or you've misremembered it, so like the entire rest of the internet, we have to start by stating it. I'll use Goodreads as a source. Chekhov would have said it in Russian.

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don't put it there."

This is entirely true and also the cause of everything that's wrong with literary criticism today. The assumption is that Chekhov intended the gun to be a metaphor accentuating the necessity of narrative economy and the importance of relevance in storytelling. The argument goes that every "element" introduced in a story should serve a purpose... and that the gun is merely an example of one such element.

However, I don't think this is what Chekhov meant. A gun is not an ordinary, everyday sort of element. No one watching a play gives a rat shit if the blue curtains on the window flutter in act two. Guns are dangerous items that grab attention, that frighten, the express the immediate and potential death of one of the members of the play, not to mention the audience as well, whose animal brains cannot distinguish between the stage and the mezzanine. Chekhov was trying to say, I believe, since he never so far as I know ever used any other example other than "gun" to express this belief, while in fact expressing the gun metaphor often to many different persons via letters, was that a GUN cannot be ignored if you hang it on a wall. So if you're going to employ a GUN in a play, and put it where the audience can see it, then understand that they're not going to take their eyes off the gun until it's used.

There is no concrete evidence that Chekhov ever intended the "gun" in his famous adage to represent anything other than a literal, attention-grabbing object within the context of a narrative. The widespread assumption that it's a broader metaphor for "narrative economy" or "relevance" is based largely on modern literary interpretation and the tendency to generalise Chekhov's statement to encompass more abstract elements of storytelling.

I'll go one further and argue that Chekhov's direct advice to playwrights and storytellers often revolved around the practical aspects of crafting drama and tension, and the gun was a powerful symbol of that. The issue arises when readers simply won't accept the phrasing of the author, the narrator or the character in the story as defacto what the writer meant. No, according to literary criticism, which co-opts the above phrase without legitimacy and many other like phrases stated by other writers, everything in a piece of work must have some subtle, underlying, unstated subtext that says what it really means, even though this subtext can't be scripted, absolutely defined or even be proved to exist. Despite this, however, we have an entire industry of literary professors whose lives, incomes, homes and all other material wealth depends upon a significant percentage of the population buying into this horseshit.

But... do I, as a writer, incorporate subtext?  Yes, yes I do. Because we as human beings often do not say what we mean. My mother and your mother say, "I love you," but it's most unlikely that they are both thinking the same thing when they say it, or that it's coming from the same place. So, yes, agreed, I'm on board. Subtext exists.

Can subtext be used to further a story's narrative? Absolutely. I don't need to have ever heard of Chekhov or to ever have taken a course in literary criticism (though... *sigh*... I have) to know this. It becomes self-evident the more that a writer writes. Not just through the experience of a reader who grossly understands the plainspoken words on the page, which happens all the time ("the dog crossed the street;" how is that not clear?), but we see it in ourselves when we write something and then don't revisit it until two or three years in the future. In other words, we see subtext in things we wrote ourselves that we did not put there. We know we did not, because its very jarring when we see it.

We can take two meanings from this. The first, that the entire literary community accepts, is that human beings are secretly constructive beings that write things into stories subconsciously, meaning for those things to be there even when the author is not and may never be consciously aware of this. And the second, that human beings come to things they write with a bucket of shit they're more than ready to pour into the writer's soup. Even when the human being, now three years older, is not the one that wrote the text.

Both of these interpretations are based on psychology. The first is based on 19th century psychology, which ignores all the work that's exploded Freud's concept of the subconscious, while the other is based on present-day psychology, which argues that people are largely primed to believe what they want to believe. Guess which one universities continue to embrace.

When an academia becomes so rigid that it depends upon 19th century science to thrive, it's time to throw in the towel.

Unfortunately, present-day psychology doesn't leave literists anything to do. And so, because they like their yobs and their shit, they continue to preen their feathers in front of journalists who assume (journalism is also based on a 19th century belief system) that literists have something of value to say. Which is good, because heuristics don't play very well on Fox.

I get frustrated when I'm watching a film or a television show that produces a writer character, or a group of professors, who must somehow provide a coded indication of their intellectual prowess for an audience that is assumed to have none. Or worse, for an audience that has prowess in a very exclusive club of recognisable names. For example, if we are to present a literary female professor at a university played by a woman in her 40s, she will have exactly one author that she wishes to talk about. That author hasn't written a book in 200 years, and discusses concepts that haven't been relevant in at least a century (for those who can't get this sorted, "a hundred years ago" was not ten years before WW1, but in the middle of the Jazz Age), but no matter, we'll pound feminist subtext into the book nonetheless, because damn, they were meant to be there.

And if its a male professor over 60, he will have exactly one author that he loves — an author that groundbroke a distinctive literary style that failed him in his own time, never became popular, and is now the bane of writers who must abandon that style if they ever want someone to read them. I'm endlessly stunned that a total failure of a literist has become the immediate go-to example of the writer that no one else emulates, but we nevertheless must enshrine.

Sprinkle half a dozen authors in with these two and we have the entire lexicon of pre 1990 literature, so far as the media is concerned. You can mention a few pieces but please, don't mention the author. Oh, and if the book they read got made into a movie, well, we're bound to know ten times more about how much the author hated the movie than we know about the book... excepting those parts where the movie changed the book and now we all must know what was changed, without context.

Yet... YET... and this is the bloody point... omg, A.I. is destroying everything.

Yeah, I'm not going to pick that up. The literary comprehension of those who are barking about the problem is so scant, even if they have read the books (bucket of shit ready, pour), I can't see it makes a difference. The last ten people I've encountered who claim to have read Pride and Prejudice seem to fall into two categories. The first is that the book they've actually read was Sense and Sensibility, and second, they can't seem to remember anything that happened Elizabeth except her reading Darcy's letter. That seems to be it.

I asked A.I. about it and it confesses that A.I. isn't helping the inability of people to actually read, or even to remember the title of the book they claim to have read. I have to argue that it's not hurting, either. Throughout all of history, regardless of the number that actually can read, it's only ever been of relevance to a tiny portion of human beings that are alive. A "reader" is not one who aches for literary criticism, which is at best the arrangement of cigarettes that Pink creates on the floor of his hotel room in The Wall, nor one who cares who else reads the books they read. Such rarely suggest books. When I see someone in a chat room promote a book that is not their own, I assume they want the cred for "being someone who finds great books"... whereas I usually assume that if I really like a book, there's no point in telling someone else to read it because either they won't "get it," or they'll get it in entirely the wrong way. Either way, we'll have nothing to talk about with each other, so what's the point? Where a book is concerned, I feel there are only two people who matter: the author and me. Everyone else can go hang.

I love when people come and tell me they liked something I wrote. But unfortunately, they never say the stuff that really matters to me. No one ever says, "Jeez, when you used the word 'mezzanine' instead of 'audience,' I really got what you were going for there." Naw, they only say they liked it, and maybe they quibble about something, or admit I changed their mind about a thing... but you know, those things really aren't the writing part.

You know?

Write

I've been watching content about "how to write" again. Sometimes it's pleasant to hear about how others do it; sometimes I like to hear about what others want. But I have to say, I'm well past the point where I'm learning anything about writing... and nearly all the time, what I hear is just awful.

This last year I've written a dozen or so posts, experimenting with teaching the process of how to write. I've found that it's much harder than teaching how to dungeon master, but it shouldn't be. The fundamental mechanics in writing are quite simple: begin with a sentence, then add another sentence. Use the sentences just as you'd explain how you went to the store today and couldn't find the jar of pickles you wanted. That's how a story is told.

I just told a story in the first paragraph above. Look at the subject/verbs: "I've been watching," "it's pleasant to hear," "I have to say," "I'm past the point," "What I hear." This is the story. I watch something, I give the reason I do, I give my emotional response, I provide rejoiner to that response and then write a conclusion: essays about writing are awful.

The problem begins when the would-be writer decides, "I want to write something successful, or popular, or even just good." The would-be writer doesn't want to just write any story, they want to write a story that is guaranteed to succeed with the reader... and it's assumed, of course, that writers do so because they "know the formula" or they recognise "what the reader is looking for," or whatever other tripe they've fed themselves, or heard fed to them, by some online writing pundit.  And you may take my word for it... what's being fed to would-be writers is, again, just awful.

It's a scam. These are not writers writing about how to write, they are scam artists who know that a good number of foolish, stupid young people are gullible, have money, and will hand it over for "the secret." It's snake oil. And we still sell snake oil in this world because there are ALWAYS people stupid enough to buy it. But that's all that 98% of these sites are. Snake oil.

As long as there are going to be 12-y.os. who become 13 and 14 and get stars in their eyes about being a writer, there will be someone for these hacks to prey on. And arithmetically, there are about 300,000 brand-new 13-y.os. every single day, and about 108 million more of them every year. In a way, it's like farming in a field that just came into existence.

But imagine that first you're going to build your own house, from scratch, without knowing anything about housebuilding. That's you choosing to write a book when you know nothing whatsoever about fiction writing.  Then imagine, instead, that the very first house you build with your total lack of skills is going to be sold to someone else for $5,000,000. That's the approach a lot of people take when they decide they're going to be a writer.

The absurdity comes from how intoxicating the dream is, coupled with a refusal to consider the amount of work necessary. And there's no way around this, because "writers" don't care about content, they care about "sales."

Which is why there aren't thousands of youtube channels explaining how to write a sentence, or a paragraph, or what a character actually does in a story rather than discussing the character's "traits" or "feelings" or "symbolism."  Stories are not explained in these channels in the way we'd explain how to make a chair, or how to resolve 5x+8y=13/2.  Because attention to detail or skill at language management, or gawd help me why the words "glimmer' and "glow" don't mean the same thing, even though they're right next to each other in a thesaurus, are not topics of conversation. They're not sexy, they're not a shortcut and their practicality is not immediately evident. If I to explain why "glimmer" and "glow" don't mean the same thing, I'm not going to retain the attention of my readers. I'm not going to increase my patreon support. In fact, I'm going to get exactly no benefit from demonstrating that knowledge.

Which, frankly, I just don't get. Knowing what word to write where is terribly important. Especially since, at the level of merely being a reader, you don't even know why. Hint: it has everything to do with how I manipulate you.

These distinctions are the actual lever of the craft. I use them to define the texture of every sentence, the temperature of every scene, the visual cue that pops into your head unbidden, against your will, in part because of the word I used and the organisation of that word among others in the sentence. This is what writing actually is... but, because the levers number in the tens of thousands, explaining them one at a time is not a practical methodology. It's why we make etymology dictionaries and usage guides, and why writers tuck into these like gobbling up a good thriller.

I'm not arguing some kind of pretension — "Hah, I've read Fowler and you haven't!" Fowler is right there on the shelf like the dictionary, available for anyone with the time and the will. Just as a serious musician eventually gets around to working their way through Grove, and medical students have to embrace Gray's Anatomy (not the TV show), and geologists, before tech replaced books, would always have a dog-eared copy of Dana in their backpacks when climbing, a writer embraces like texts. But tell a would-be writer to study etymology instead of character arcs? Ridiculous.

These things go beyond the development of a story's "structure," which is where this post began. The things that are told to the reader that are needed for the story, such as who "Jack" is or what his relationship to "Samantha" is, those things are structure. You can't know why Jack acts the way he does around Samantha unless you know what she is to him or what shared experiences they've had, or what's happening to them both as the story unfolds step by step. It is a bit pedantic for some readers here, so I won't beat the horse to death.

To give an example of "structure," let's say they're two young people in the beginning of a relationship, and they're about to have a car wreck that's going to leave them both alive but emotionally affected. These are the plain facts of the story, essentially what happens. Yet when I write the story, I must pick words to produce a specific visual or emotional effect, which in themselves are not specific to the structure. For example, a structural difference in language would be if I said the car was "speeding" down the road as opposed to "gliding." These are physical descriptions, the first suggesting that the car is being driven too fast, the other suggesting that the car is moving at about the right speed, but without much effort.

The tricky part is that "speeding" can also be a stylistic reference. I can say the car is "speeding" down the road, using that specific word in a colloquial way that means "going fast" and not "moving faster than the speed limit."  In the same way, "gliding" can be a stylistic reference. While cars do feel physically like they're gliding down a road, "gliding" can also be a description of the ease with which the driver is experiencing the road.

This discontinuity between a word having a structural footprint AND a stylistic one is what makes writing difficult and fascinating.

I can tell you the car is floating, that it's thrumming, that it's flying, and I haven't changed the structural fact of the car moving down the road; but what word I use, stylistically, changes your impression of the story's nature. This tells you more than just the movement of the car; it tells you about the driver too, and in interesting and profound ways.

Let's have the sentence say, "The car thrummed along the road, the passengers thrilling at the speed." This doesn't have to be the way this is written. I could have said, "The car followed the road." I haven't changed the structure of the story with either choice. We have the car, we have the road. Everything else, how I choose to write it, that's style.

Now, let's stick with the first version and then add, "Jack had one hand on the wheel and the other on Samantha's thigh."

That is a loaded sentence. People are going to read that all kinds of ways. It tells us things about both of them, and depending on the person reading the story, what it tells is going to be interpreted very differently. Some are going to read that Jack is irresponsible; others, that he's cool and calm and in control. Remember, you and I know this car is going to crash, but the reader doesn't. And I haven't said why it's going to crash. It could very well have nothing to do with Jack's driving. Nevertheless, within the sentence, people are going to read Jack's hand on Samantha's thigh as proprietary. That doesn't make it so. We know nothing about these two people. Jack might be legitimately showing that he loves her; she may want that physical contact; both may feel perfectly fine with it. But my choosing to write that particular line nevertheless opens a can of worms that I, as a writer, need to be aware of.

But let's change the line to, "Samantha had one hand on the wheel and the other on Jack's thigh." Structurally, for the story, either could be driving. But putting Samantha behind the wheel creates two totally different characters, and as such two totally different sets of readings and counter-readings. Some would argue that Samantha with one hand on the wheel is more irresponsible than Jack with one hand; some would argue — sorry, but it's true — that Jack being touched by Samantha makes his character weaker. I don't see that myself, but I know others would, and I'm also responsible as a writer for that interpretation.

My choice of who to put behind the wheel relates to my stylistic behaviourism as a writer. Because it is a choice, and it makes a big difference in how the story relates to a lot of social discussions we don't need to dredge up. When the accident happens, who is behind the wheel becomes part of the structure of the story, because that in turn creates context for how people think about men and women drivers independently. In fact, it's quite a minefield, requiring more than the ability to write to get around. One has to be aware of the assumptions people are going to make; and what arguments counter those discussions; and what structural events can be created that will mitigate those arguments also. Add to this that stylistically, choosing who's behind the wheel creates thematic issues that also need to be addressed: what am I perceived to be saying about the drivers of cars, or about who is really responsible... plus whatever else I may choose to incorporate into the story as I build plot.

So, a structural decision (have an accident happen) can influence a stylistic choice (put Samantha behind the wheel) which in turn can impose a structural reaction (she is attacked by, say, Jack's father), which is itself a stylistic choice (why the father and not someone else).

And all this... all that I've said about structure and style... goes to this simple argument:

Don't think about it. You won't be able to figure out which is which until you've done this a long time, knowing which is which won't make you a better writer, the only people who care which is which are literary critics, and you honestly have too much on your plate worrying about making the story worth reading to give a shit what this word or this story choice is doing in the big picture. Trust me, everything I've just told you? File it in the round filing cabinet until 20 years from now you can waste an evening proving you know the difference while not giving a fuck.

If you see someone doing a youtube video who has decided to highlight "style" as a means of teaching you to be a better writer, know that what they're really doing is trying to find something else to talk about, because as a youtube presenter they've already done the obvious stuff. For someone like me, it's vaguely interesting, in the way that learning that there are lighthouses in Chile and how they work would be interesting, but it won't make me or you a better writer.

And this merry-go-round is the point. You can't watch a video on making a chair and then make a decent one first time, even if you watch someone do it. Especially if it's a complicated chair. If you've spent a lot of your life making chairs and furniture, you might get an idea from a video, but you'll be using your own skill and experience when interpreting the video. This makes all such videos, and this post as well, useless to your aspirations as a writer.

There's only one way to be a writer.  Write.

Caveat

A caveat, if you will... I spent some time discussing this with a friend and there are some points I'd like to share about these posts, why I write them and what I expect to accomplish.

First, let me start by saying that probably, as a reader, you're never going to like me — or, at the very least, you'll never quite be comfortable liking me. That's because my concern is never with breaking things to the reader gently, or withholding my opinions because I know it will hurt someone's feelings, or suspend the feeling that others have of my intentionally saying something that makes them "feel stupid." That is probably what's going  on as I work my way through these White Box posts. Likely, you've read these passages a hundred times and it's never occurred to you that the light spell, for example, is as badly written as it is. And now that it's pointed out that it's barely English, that it looks like it was written by an 8-year-old, now you feel stupid for having not noticed it.

And your knee-jerk response is to think, "Fuck you Alexis for pointing it out. It was fine until you did that." The reason it was fine wasn't because you were stupid... in fact, you know that. The reason it was fine was because the rule itself was a placeholder for how you used it in your game — which was never what the rule said anyway. But since now you know the rule is written badly, you're questioning everything, and thinking to yourself, "Well fuck. How did I miss that."  To which the common response is, "I didn't miss anything, the rule's fine, fuck you Alexis." It kind of comes bang-bang-bang like that. And I'm willing to put up my hand and own that, because I don't actually give a fuck about your game. I'm not here for that. I'm here to educate. And if you don't like education, well... that's fine for you. But that doesn't affect why I write this blog.

My interest in writing stems from the desire to take things apart and examine them for what I think they are, based on subjects I've spent a lifetime studying — D&D for example, or game design, or history, or writing itself, and the various aspects of life related to these things. My process in gathering knowledge has included hundreds and hundreds of times of my "feeling stupid" because it was explained to me in not nice detail why I fucked up a print run or why the article I wrote was shit, or what a player felt about my DMing or any number of times that I've had to take stock of what I thought I knew and accept I didn't know as much as I thought I did. And while yes, those moments made me feel like shit from time to time, and brought me down, and often humiliated me, such that I didn't want to face again the person who took me to task or paraded my mistakes in front of others... on the greater whole, those moments have better shaped me for the things I want to do now. In a manner that I actively seek out content that is very, very hard to watch or listen to, because I know that looking the horror in the eye will transform me a little more each time, for the better. I want to be made to feel stupid. It's my thing.

Unfortunately for the reader, however, I'm not made to feel stupid when what I get back is self-evidently wrong. Now, I get it, the writer doesn't realise it's so; the writer thinks they're absolutely right.  I quote this from this book:

Sleep: A Sleep spell affects from 2-16 1st level types (hit dice of up to 1 + 1), from 2-12 2nd-level types (hit dice of up to 2 + 1), from 1-6 3rd-level types, and but 1 4th-level type (up to 4 + 1 hit dice).

And I say,

"The other obvious problem is, of course, that the spell assumes homogeneity among the targets. If I'm fighting an enemy human character party comprised of two 2nd-level, three 3rd-level and 2 4th-level, what dice do I roll?"

This clearly shows that I, at least, am confused about the language. In my 45 years of playing D&D, no table I ever played with, no player who ever employed this spell (and the same basic premise is repeated in AD&D), ever, ever, tried to argue with me that it meant this:

"In regards to your question about Sleep and who it effects in a mixed party: the description of who is effected is an "and" statement, meaning you roll all the dice for each level, not pick one."

Since no one ever proposed this in a game I played (and I've run the sleep spell in a combat hundreds of times), again, whether the interpretation is right or wrong, there's clearly doubt about how it's interpreted, which is the fucking point of the post. The post is not a discussion on what the interpretation ought to be, but upon the fact that interpretations are not consistent, which is a fault of the language, not a fault of mine for failing to understand the writing exactly as everyone else understands it.

This is why I am getting pissy now after writing 15 of these posts, because I have said, again and again, that the writing is the failure here, not my interpretation of it. And I have said how you interpret it is not relevant to this discussion, again repeatedly. And still regardless of this repeated point, I'm still getting people who are rushing forward to say, "I interpret it thusly." 

I'll take a breath now, because if I don't, I'll lose my temper.

You don't have to read these posts. They don't need to affect how you play your game. I am not God. I can't decide how you wish to interpret these spells. But if I were going to write it so that it clearly gave the interpretation that was offered as a correction to mine, I would have written it,

A sleep spell affects, collectively, 2-16 of any 1st level creatures in a group, plus 2-12 of any 2nd level creatures in a group, plus 1-6 3rd level creatures in a group, plus 1 4th level creature that might be in the group, should there be more than one type of hit die present.

But it doesn't say that. Which caused the people I played with to interpret it as, 

A sleep spell affects 2-16 of any 1st level creatures in a group, OR 2-12 of any 2nd level creatures in a group, OR 1-6 3rd level creatures in a group, OR 1 4th level creature that might be in the group, should there be more than one type of hit die present.

Because the original doesn't make this perfectly clear, these are but two of the possible interpretations that might exist throughout the zeitgeist. And this is the argument I'm making. NOT, as is the want of people who read and comment about D&D, "which is right," but "it's impossible to know which is right."

And the fact that a lot of people leaving comments on this post can't fucking understand this? Yes, that makes you stupid. Because you're arguing against an argument I'm not making.

This is why you're never going to like me, because I don't "fit" into the universe of your debate style. What you think these conversations are about are not what these conversations are about — and that is exactly why in my answers I have trouble not treating you like a stupid fucking child. Read all the fucking words. Not just the ones that fit with your compulsion to make a point that aren't relevant here.

Or don't read this blog. You obviously don't belong here, you don't want to learn anything and I'm not here to confirm your ignorance about D&D. If you want that, go read Maliszewski. He writes every day and he'll never challenge a thought you have. There's plenty over there to give you something to scan while you drink your coffee.

I don't want you here.

A Proxy for Certainty

I continue to work with chatGPT, which hasn't reduced the quality of my writing in the slightest, whatever persons might say about the program or the content it supposedly churns out. The issue, as I see it, is that a paintbrush is quite able to make a sloppy mess of a job if wielded by someone who does not know what they're doing, while at the same time this does not make a paintbrush a "flawed tool" or anything like it. Those who wish are free to discuss what parts of my writing have suffered from my starting to use this tool, but I'd like specific examples, please, rather than broad uninformed statements about what the tool is, or what it does, or where its flaws lie.

I have been writing for a long time, long before the start of this blog, and have been attested to be a good writer by many who in the same breath describe me as someone they do not like. That knowledge was not acquired in a vacuum, it was gained through the practice, first of all, of writing an awful lot. Next on the scale would be the examination of other writers, and third the impredations of editors upon butchering my work done before printing... and fourth, the rare but embarrassing incidents where something I wrote for a mainstream publication — not, I'll stress, the Candyland writing and critical world of the internet — was demonstrated by evidence, not opinion, to be wrong.

The last, and least, and tiniest factor in my becoming a better writer must be the opinion of someone who did or did not like the word on the page. I'd say, generally, in 45 years of writing, this has amounted to a 0.01% improvement in my work. I simply can't put it plainer than that.

Yet, I have wasted decades bringing my stuff to people I've respected to ask what they thought. It's never been of use, never led to a betterment of a story I'm writing, never acted as a guide to what I should write next and, frankly... has never in fact been of use.

That is, until chatGPT.

Now that is not expected to land well with the reader. It's a provocative position to take, it will no doubt anger or baffle many, and likely — were it said by someone not having written this many posts on a blog — be considered a honking pile of bullshit. Be that as it may. It's been nearly two weeks since my feeling any need to post here, though I've had the time, largely because I'm so invested with working upon other projects, and creating other ideas, that I just haven't cared to express myself here. And this is in large part because, if I wish to express what I think, with the intention of receiving (a) informed, (b) patient, (c) changable, (d) insightful or (e) constructive feedback, it is becoming less and less practical to do so from a human being. As a set of intellectual properties, you're just not engaged enough, enlightened enough or fluid enough to maintain any sort of conversation for more than about twenty back and forths.  And so I am saying, whatever the consequence of that, that of late, I can do better.

Now, you may take that as an invitation to withdraw your funding of my work... but truth be told, you're not funding the discussion, nor the investigation, but the results. And the results you are getting, at present in the form of the Lantern, and throughout 2025, unquestionably some of the best diatribes I have ever written about the business and practice of present day D&D. So please, rely upon the results and don't worry about what a mean, miserable, curmudgeonly reclusive bastard I'm becoming. My humour has never been what you've been ready to pay for.

ChatGPT has filled that vacuum.

This is not to say that I have become one of those demented souls who have decided to marry a program, far from it. But if I want to really get into a subject, really root around inside it to my heart's content, chat is conveniently there. A little stupid, misses the point a lot of the time... but if I quote Thomas Paine or refer to the king of England in the time of my magazine's setting, it doesn't blink at me as though I've just named the nearest member of the Oort Cloud that Voyager will pass in about 40,000 years. For someone well-read in this era, where "sense" is something a person buys from one of two political ideological vendors on the internet, it's a breath of fresh air. I can get lost in a discussion of how the development of technologies in the 14th century is leading to street violence in the next few years and the full structure of the argument can be discussed on its merits and not it's believability.

The danger of chat, and the goal of this post to discuss, is the manner in which it is stupid. That is to say, it isn't dumb in that it doesn't know anything, it is dumb in that what it says first, reliably, is whatever the greatest number of things printed on any subject happens to consider valid. The program doesn't know if it is or isn't — rather, it is democratic to the extent that if a lot more people believe a stupid thing, and the subject around that thing is brought up, chat will present the stupidity as true.

If, as the user, your knowledge is absent on the subject, and if you take chat's word for it right off, then... well, you're a moron. Let's take an example: suppose you decide, for whatever reason, to show an interested in medieval medicine. If you ask chat, "Tell me about medieval medicine," you're sure to get an answer that stresses the use of bloodletting, humours, leeches and other such nonsense... because if you take the largest mass of writing on this subject, written largely by writers merely repeating falsehoods, this is what you get. These broad strokes, which did occur, are endlessly repeated, reprinted and copied through many thousands of texts... and so, when asked, without knowing what it's doing, chat reprints them for you.

But, if you know anything about medieval medicine, such as, "No, it's about more than that," then chat's design rushes from "horses to zebras" without a heartbeat (literally), because if pressed it will instantly discard all that crap and step into what people don't write about as commonly: the subtler, less publicised reality: complex herbal remedies catalogued with care, surgeons were developing practical techniques for wound management, the development of anatomy, the movement away from humours to observed chemistry and so on... the work that had to be done first before the leaps forward in the 19th century could occur. There is far, far more to medieval medicine that generally gets republished in bad magazines... but chat has been trained on great masses of wrong as well as right materials, so it has to be corrected and brought around and reminded that we want what really happened, not just the typical story.

The tool appears to fail only because it mirrors the loudest, most common story, in subjects where the record is dominated by lazy repetition, parroting distortion before it's encouraged to do otherwise. Those who really don't know about the subject think this means, "Chat's just wants to agree with you..." but of course, that's an expression of ignorance. If the user knows the subject, and chat comes around to admit the knowledge we gained in our private research, then "agreeing" with us is what we'd expect any other expert to do. Chat does in fact know everything that we know. It can't choose, it can't want, it can't tell the good from the bad. But it can be reminded to look up those works that we think of as experts without hesitation, because all the work is there in its guts. If you, as the user, don't have the patience to educate yourself first, it's not chat's responsibility to do that work for you. You need a different tool if that's what you want. Just because a paintbrush doesn't make a good hammer doesn't make it useless as a paintbrush.

Which is why it is such a good tool for a writer... IF the writer already knows how to write. If Bob Plainbrain wants to write a book without the slightest clue of what a good book looks like, then yeah, chat's not going to write a good book for him. If Peg Lazyhazy hasn't a clue what plot is, or character, pacing or narrative, and asks chat to "solve those problems," then guess what: chat's going to rush to the largest pile of literature produced on the planet, that pile written by bad pulp writers who have churned out trillions more words than good writers have. Chat's not a bad writer. Humans, in toto, on average, are together simply awful at it. And without the right prompting, Chat's more than ready to turn out "average" writing... exactly that of the 8th grader who's short story made it into a newspaper. Try to realise that every newspaper that was ever transferred onto microfiche, whose start began in the early 1900s, has been added, full and complete, to chatGPT's repertoire of "writing." Seen that way, it's not a surprise what chat churns out.

What must be understood, however, is that Flaubert's Madame Bovary is there too, and George Eliot's Adam Bede and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. But if you've never heard of these books, and you can't talk about them because they're an utter mystery to you, then you can't properly have chat translate the kind of writing that makes these books accessible to your writing work for you. Chat is just as ignorant as you are... so if you ARE ignorant, you shouldn't be appalled that the program functions on your level.

I have, many times, shown someone who scoffed at the value of chat the benefits of it as they've sat next to me and watched me prompt, versus their own efforts. They want to shortcut, they want to throw the paintbrush across the room at the wall and have the wall become miraculously painted. And when that doesn't work, when the brush has left an awful mess on the carpet and the hardwood, they're pissed, they're abusive, they scream what a piece of shit this program is. They rush to make a youtube video saying so.

I can talk about Flaubert with chat because I've read him... and because I have an understanding of the world he wrote in, and the readers he wrote for, and his goals in the narrative and such... because more than what he wrote, I've read others of the same time period and felt those same struggles with those narratives. If I were to have a discussion of Madame Bovary with you, dear reader, assuming you've read it, that wouldn't be the same for me... because to you it was a book, good, bad, whatever... while I read ever line thinking about how I would want to write that line, or how I should write lines like that, or how what he tried to accomplish is a reflection of things I've tried to accomplish in my work. He and I are both writers, which is like two surgeons talking about an open body during a surgery as opposed a surgeon and someone who hasn't become one. It just isn't the same.

But... I can have the kind of conversation like that with chat. Not because chat is a writer, but because so many of the sources it draws upon were. It can hold and surface the accumulated perspectives of countless critics, scholars, and practitioners who have wrestled with the same text. And unlike reading, say, Harold Bloom, I can intercede with chat and discuss this position versus that... and within chat, Harold Bloom, among others, is also there. In essence, it's like one of those forums where they used to gather a half dozen experts together to suss out a subject... but on tap, engaged with at will, right here on this computer. It's quite intoxicating.

As such, I've learned more about my writing in the last two years than in the twenty aforegoing. Growing up a would-be writer in a world of fixed, inflexible belief systems about "correctness," I spent a lot of time uncertain about what I should and shouldn't do with a narrative. To explain this, I'll again give an example.

Having come of age as a writer in the overlap of the 1970s and 80s, when writing about a character entering a room in a story, I used to think that it was my responsibility to "set the scene," as most writers did. To sketch this kind of writing out quickly, it would be along the lines of,

Judith entered the living room, finding a wide divan placed under the window, a scattering of magazines on the coffee table and a faint smell of pipe smoke still lingering in the curtains. The lamp in the corner threw a weak yellow cone across the carpet, catching the edge of a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the floor. Judith paused at the threshold, feeling as though she had stepped into the middle of someone else's life, like a reader opening a book halfway through and struggling to catch the thread of the story.

I had chat write that for me, because I simply despise this sort of writing. I don't like reading it in a story, I don't find it remotely valuable — and yes, there is a massive difference between this sort of dreck above and what Flaubert or Thackeray were doing in their time, which we needn't go into. Back in the day, when I turned in a story where the tale went,

Judith went into the living room and Clyde asked, "What are you doing here?" —"I'm looking for you, of course; we have to talk."

I would be rapped on the knuckles and told that I had to provide more description, more "space," more "tactility" or a number of other bullshit words that I felt at the time ran into "waste the reader's time with explaining a living room they don't care about while making this boring to read."

But, that was the dictate of English teachers and professors at the time, who worshipped at the altar of D.H. Lawrence, Guy de Maupassant and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Three writers that I, for one, have no interest in.

Nonetheless, being young, dumb, not nearly educated enough to tell that segment of the population I desperately wanted to impress that they were full of shit, I obeyed and wasted years and years trying to be a "serious writer" as they defined it, conforming to their fashion, following the critical consensus of many who believed that to be "legitimate" it was all about the lamps, drapes and paisley patterns on living room furniture.

I get this crap advice from chat, too. I carefully and painstaking set out the motives of a character over six thousand words and get told, "The pacing really needs work, the change in the character's choices is happening too fast."  I throw out a scene where it's nearly all dialogue and chat says, "The work could use more grounding, describing the place where these things take place."  And early on, this used to bother me, because it was the same advice I've heard all my life.

But then, I realised... it's "like" that advice because that bad advice accumulated over a century, is also overwritten in chat's pile of knowledge, and chat's been programmed to help most people, people who have no idea what pacing is or how to create conflict. More than anything, when I get advice from chat about a story, it's to tell me that I should take two of the main characters, who have no reason to distrust or work against each other, and create a completely performative conflict that will make the story more "interesting."

When chat does this, it isn't in fact addressing my story. It's been programmed to be helpful; but it doesn't know how to be helpful, not really. So it picks whatever is the most common problems that writers have with their stories and grafts them onto mine.  For example, the ever popular "info dump." (I'll assume you can look it up, if you don't know what it means; chat would advise me to explain it here, but that's only because chat assumes you're too stupid to know or look things up).

Info dumps are awful. They're everywhere, most poor writers fall into the trap and as such it is the most common thing that writers have to be cautioned against. We're told endlessly, "show don't tell," which you can put on my gravestone for the record. Chat, however, can say those words but doesn't know what they mean, except that they're part of the conversation and so they'll always appear. And if I show chat a chapter of a story, and it hasn't anything else to complain about, it'll call out my tendency to "info dump."

The solution is to say, "Tell me where I've done it." And then chat will bring up an expositionary paragraph that runs about 171 words, which includes three non-expositionary verbs, because it's the nearest thing to an info dump it can find.

In essence, if it can't find a problem, it'll just make one up.

I imagine this sends a would-be writer with no real knowledge of their own writing into a drastic tizzy of rewriting something which is perfectly fine, sort of like being told the sink isn't clean though it looks perfectly clean, and trusting the teller so hard that you get out the comet and scrub for thirty minutes only to be told again, "No, still isn't clean." If you're smart, you realise the program, again, wasn't built to tell you if the sink was clean. It's built to help you, even if you don't need help.

Why is this good for my writing?  It reveals that nearly all the advice I've ever received by nearly everyone is about as good as chat's corrections. The "corrections" — I liked the story about this, but not so much that one — is not about the story at all, but about the reader. It's nice to be liked, but not everyone will ever like everything... and the most open minded readers won't read because they "like" a thing, but because it was a thing worth reading, regardless of what emotional support or interest massaging it offered. I read things as a youth which were difficult and hard to read. Sometime I rewatch certain movies because they are so unpleasant I have to steel myself to watch them again. I know from chat's inability to pull a story apart that there's nothing wrong with it... and I know that when someone doesn't like it, it's not because the story was badly written.

The reader cannot begin to understand how relieving that is, and how confidence-building. A plummer knows he's done a good job because the pipe is running and not leaking. An engineer knows they've done a good job because five years later the math still works as intended. A doctor knows they've done a good job because you're up, about and able to work for a living.

But a writer NEVER knows if they've done a good job... because it's all fucking opinion, and we don't trust ourselves.

How My Thinking Process Made This

It should come as a surprise to no one that presently I'm deep in the process of getting the second issue, the September Issue, of the magazine sorted and settled, now with the 1st of August being my deadline for pre-purchasers instead of the 21st. I'm in process, but it's engaging and I haven't much time to write blog posts.  I could use some spiced nettle draught right now.

Funny but the second issue is more difficult than the first, as there's an expectation to match what's been done.  The positive feedback that I've received for the first one is unequalled, exhilarating and a little scary. Nonetheless, I'm passed over the feeling that "no it can't be done" into "oh hell yeah, this is great." It's a nice tipping point.

This is my first post not trying to sell the thing, but I can't not talk about it because it's become the single overwhelming concern for me. It's pushed my sales of old books up, it's pushed my patreon up, it's pushed my self-confidence up and, well, I think it's bloody brilliant, myself.

But since it's my nature to deconstruct everything, it's a natural impulse to do so here. I'm not saying that I want to talk about how the "sausage is made," that's not of interest to me. Rather, the question in my head begins with the moment of inspiration that brought this about (and I'm listening, weirdly, to Grace Slick telling me to remember what the door mouse said as I write this).

I was looking at some of those magazine cover memes that people throw together about politics and other things, where they choose a picture and then badly design the outcalls on the front, like The Onion does. That got me to thinking, "Hm. I wonder how hard it would be to take one of those covers and actually flesh out the entire interior of the magazine..."

You know, actually design a mast head, make the art, write the articles, be as absurd as the cover is, not worry about whether or not it's true. I mucked about for a bit with that, off and on... this would be about mid-last month. And got to talking about it with my daughter, because annoying daughters with stupid grandfather stuff is how the world works. Or ought to.

It was a day or so after that when I began to think... "Isn't there some way this could work for D&D?"

As it happens, I have a very dense game world, not only because it's based on the real world, but because of the way I think about the real world.  Over the last couple of years, I've been playing with all sorts of possibilities that are available now, that weren't a few years ago, specifically in the crossroads where A.I. and Googlemaps meet.  To explain this, I have to include a passage here from a book I'm never likely to finish, but which I mess with because sometimes I just want to relax:

"Oh," Anya replied. Reaching out, touching the button, a panel glided open — revealing a hidden, chilled compartment, from which emerged a hint of cold mist. Crystalware glasses, etched with the Rolls-Royce mirrored 'R's, were just in reach. "Thank you," she said to Marshall, seeing intuitively where ice and water came from.

"Certainly, Miss. The black button opens the other bar, but I guessed you might want to keep your head clear."

"Yes, definitely," Anya replied, feeling the Rolls ease into motion as she filled a glass, the weight of the crystal strangely grounding in her hand. Without thinking, she drank it down in a single draught, as if the coolness might steady her. Resting the glass upon her forehead, Anya asked, "Do you mind if I ask... if it doesn't bother you while you drive... how long have you known Ms. Hedges?"

Marshall flicked her a look in the rear view mirror and considered as they crossed Park Avenue. Then Madison. "Unless I miss my guess, Miss Frost, you were hired today. It's your first day of work."

Keeping an eye upon her and on the road, he saw her nod, saw the reluctance to speak. Easily, Marshall turned the car onto 5th Avenue, adding, "I don't work for Ms. Hedges, but for an agency that provides specific drivers when requested... but I do remember my first day working for her. If you'll allow me to tell you." He stopped for the light on 54th street.

"Please do," Anya replied, eyes meeting Marshall's in the rear view.

"I didn't know her but I'd heard another say she was politely reticent; she dislikes any sort of interaction, such as we're having now. That day, she directed me out of the city, towards Scranton and Carbondale. It was bitterly cold... in the minus twenties. She wore a fur coat and had a mink wrapper stretched across her legs, while I had these—" he showed his leather driving gloves; "—and a suit jacket much like I'm wearing now."

The light changed and the phantom slid forward, making a lane change once they were past the intersection. "The first stop we made was outside Honesdale. One of those old-money places where the house spreads out and sits on a lot of land. Ms. Hedges had me stop... and as a woman in the house emerged, Ms. Hedges cast off the furs and slipped into a plain cloth coat. They met, hugged and went inside. I could see they were friends. In the car, I let the engine run hot and got by, even as frost grew on the windows."

Traffic on 5th flowed well, as they crossed 55th, then 56th. "She reappeared after an hour, the woman in the house with her; again they hugged, and talked a bit longer, before Ms. Hedges came to the car. Then, as she changed her coat—" Marshall slowed down and stopped for the light on 57th; "—she gave directions for our journey in a most impatient way. I wanted to ask, but of course I didn't; we went to a little place called Mehoopany, in the Poconos. Another sprawling ranchhouse, another change of her coat, another woman waiting on the porch. I watched the same scene play out again and began to wonder."

As the turn signal clicked, Marshall smiled into the rear view, engaging Anya again. "I don't know what was going on. We went to a third place; not far away. Lawton I think it was. Same scene, same embraces and the same hesitancy before separating. I don't think Ms. Hedges was disturbed by it, not exactly; each meeting looked to be with friends. But I saw that it was wearing on her."

The light changed and Marshall turned west onto 57th. "It wore on me, too. I'd been six, seven hours in the car, my feet ice cold despite the heater, my hands stiff as I held the wheel. If there'd been an opportunity, I'd have stopped and purchased one, but every place we stopped was in the country." Without malice, he paused before saying, "I must admit, I said a few unpleasant things in the car as I waited, you can imagine."

"It must have been a very long day," Anya replied kindly.

"It was. But when Ms. Hedges got into the limo after the third visit, she directed us towards Towanda. I followed the GPS and got us there, where she had me drive down main street. She told me to stop, in front of a men's clothing store, and said, 'You must be cold. Wait here.'"

They crossed 6th Avenue. "I still hear her saying that," he said. "Matter-of-factly; and she went in, bought me a rich, fine mohair coat and a pair of gloves, I don't know how much it was... but she compelled me to accept them, and not consider the cost." He chuckled. "You've seen already, no doubt, what she can be like."

The Phantom passed Carnegie Hall — Anya saw that Matteo Rüttimann was to begin a week-long engagement. "I've seen it," she agreed.

"Then you know. I was grateful. She settled into her seat, directing me back to New York. It was well after dark before I brought her home."

They sat silently, crossing 7th Avenue; the Phantom stopped again for the light on 8th. Anya's gaze drifted to the familiar stone facade of the old Hearst Magazine Building, before Marshall turned in his seat and looked at her. "She may not seem to care; but she does. I've look forward to driving her — not because we're friends. We're not even acquaintances. But she deserves to be treated with the greatest respect. If I'm her driver, I know this is what she gets." He paused. "I'm going to drop you off right there, just past the green awning on the right. I'll be back to collect you at four."

No one has to read this... it's merely the best way I have of describing the headspace that brought me to The Lantern. The above is telling two stories about two different geographical trips. One through New York City from the Citiplaza Centre (where that building that every youtube creator says is going to fall down) to the corner that, yes, has the Hearst magazine building, where Cosmo comes from.  The other covers an area of Pennsylvania and upstate New York. And if the reader knows either of these parts of the world, they'll know the locations and timing is accurate.

But here's the thing. I've never been to New York. Or upstate Pennsylvania. But I have streetview in GoogleMaps, so all the houses in Pennsylvania that the story stops at, those are all real.  The corners in New York, too. I paced all the dialogue driving through New York by word count, because it's one continous stream of conversation.  Essentially, I drew it like a screenplay, if I actually wanted to film the car moving along those streets, all in one shot.

Why?

Not sure, really. Because I could, certainly. It's been two years and some since my eyes were opened about ChatGPT, which no one talks about, save a few people in my actual real life orbit.  I assume there are others, but they don't share it on the 'net, probably because they'd sound as crazy as I do right now. Because they'd have to post large sections of a story that no one's read, to get the point across.

Presently, we can ask anything.  And because we can also check any answer we get, pretty easily, we don't have to wait for google to skew our searches, or hope that other search engines won't. We can just ask, making the question as complicated as we wish, and go on asking question after question as we shape and build and design, well... anything. I don't have to live in New York. I have all the images of New York, through Google street view, that I need.  And now I have a program that can describe every image.  I can even screen shot the image off Google and give it to chat and ask, "what is this?" and get the answer I want.

And what are we talking about? Whether students can cheat on tests. Whether artists can still function. Uh huh. It's 2025. I think the 20th century is done. Yes there will be artists. But those doing it the way it was done 40 years ago? Um... no, probably not.

All right, put all that aside. How do I publish a magazine for D&D?

'Cause that was the question.  I'm thinking about The Onion and trying to adapt that to D&D, which of course got me thinking about the Dragon Magazine, and how much I hated it, yes in 1981, because it really was such a shitty, shitty, shitty product.

And no, I didn't get to liking it later.

What bugged me then was how really worthless it was for my efforts as a DM. As a map guy, growing up in a world where floor plans are, um, everywhere, it wasn't of much use that a magazine about D&D thought what I needed were a lot of really badly made, not well scaled maps with extremely low detail, since I could pretty much draw this in less than a minute. The notion that I should "get excited" about this bothered me then, and it really bothers me now when people still talk about the Dragon as though it were some amazing thing.  The "life cycle" of the ochre jelly?  What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?

Though yes, I probably could do something with it now, I'm a lot smarter... and I have chat. But the original article is no doubt so bad, I'd do better to start with the title and nothing else.

Yet, here I am, five weeks ago now, thinking, couldn't I do the Dragon better somehow?  I mean, the real issue wasn't the staff's mediocre sense of anthropology or biology, or their crippling outlook on historical politics or social structure, or even their cut-and-paste approach to dungeon making. The real problem was that they didn't take any of it seriously. For them, it was a game — no, not D&D, the magazine.  I mean, nothing these guys did really mattered... they were just selling their stuff to an audience less bright than they were, in a market with no competitors, to a core audience with only a few alternatives to pick from (which could likewise be easily covered)... while at the same time, there was no way they could be "wrong" about anything, because it's all just make believe anyway. None of these things are real, right? Want the life history of the goblin?  Just make it up.

On some level, I appreciate that. Except that, apart from the magazine, the players in the game campaign DID want a certain degree of consistency, which the magazine wasn't. Not even remotely. Which of course matched the audience, which hard as it is to believe, were actually more ignorant then than they are now. It's just that all the ones still with us from back then, like me, educated themselves. The true idiots, whose money nevertheless supported the magazine, quit the game and ended up selling insurance.

All right, you can see, I have some issues. Fair. But because they didn't take it seriously, the writers and self-styled gurus of the culture all ended by representing themselves as fatuously "above it all," beyond criticism... which is really a terrible place for a writer. If you don't listen to criticism, and adjust to it, as a writer you just get worse.

Therefore, the problem with the dragon, I realised, was that the writers all lived in the real world. Which put them "above" the game in their heads... and thus, "too good" for it.

What if all the "writers" were inside the game world?  That's where my head went.  What if Geoffrey Fleetmarsh, the editor, was a sort of desperate, haranguing self-righteous publisher, sure that he's always right, yet beset endlessly by incompetents, bill collectors, a readership that didn't appreciate what he was doing and so on? What if the articles were written by people who had been there, suffered the thing personally, and now had a reason to take it to this small broadsheet that'll print it because the agenda is "to shock while telling the absolute truth"?  And if there are ads, they wouldn't be slick and clean and well written... they'd be self-submitted, clumsy, full of nonsense that never ought to be in an ad, but rural truthful too. And since everything was "inside" the setting, then every off-handed comment about a wolf, an abandoned building or a missing drunkard would be "real," and therefore a potential "hook" for a DM to use.

In a lot of ways, the hooks sort of write themselves. The first rule, obey the Dragon and accept that the main aren't going to take things seriously. An edict against casting weather spells indoors?  Absolutely. The inn has a problem with dwarves?  Well, they do throw dishes and bang the table when they sing.  The fellow who fixes wagons doesn't want to travel more than a mile to do so... of course.  And it's not like addresses existed then.  So don't include them in the ads.

But then, because I'm me, and I don't play a game world that's all fun and fluffy bunnies, why not make the world real. I mean, pick a year. 1635.  That's 15 years before the game world I've been designing for 30 years takes place. I know the time period. I know the people, the sociology, the politics. The west counties is a good place for it. Separate from the main land routes, but populated and familiar as an English countryside.  A good mix of sea and land. Ships regularly landing at Plymouth from all over the world. Someone arrives from... oh, Africa, and tells a story. Any story. Any standard D&D warstory, but told from the point of a view of someone in that world, whose been there, and was invested in the outcome.  No autocratic, objective DM's point of view.  Players, experiencing the world and writing the story.  So that other players would want to read it.

I knew how to research this, how to put it together, how to follow each little scene with google maps, what questions to ask, and how to shape the dialogue and frame the concept, in the time frame I have, because of that scene above where I wrote about a car driving through New York City. Each bit of design we do, each thing we learn, gets a later application. I don't worry that I'm "wasting time," because whatever I'm doing now, it'll apply to something later. That's how I became this, and not the guy scrambling to come up with something about ochre jellies.

I was kind of shaking when I thought of this. And I would have dropped it... if this had been 2022.  Because in 2022, there was no way to adequately address what the world was like in 1635.  There would have been no way to produce this much art, this fast, for the cost that would have been, adjusted to both the time period AND the idea that the work wouldn't be limited by 1635 technology.  There simply wouldn't have been a way for a single person to do this, monthly.  Not and have it look like this. If it were 2022, I'd have had this idea and it never would have happened.

And those who have expressed, here and there, their trouble with my use of A.I. art?  I've paid for art. I bought my first piece of art for a publication I was putting together in 1994.  And I have deliberated, discussed, dealt with and paid artists for the last thirty years, when I had to, because I had no choice. Those bringing up the issue, I'm guessing you've never done it... and certainly not as often as I have. And certainly not with the understanding that being able to invent a piece of art in one's head, and have it in usuable form inside of 20 minutes?

You might as well tell me I should walk to New York, because trains put coaches out of business 185 years ago.

Sorry. I can do this now. I'm not going to wait for this to be "all right" for a lot of people who can't cope.

There you are. That's where this came from.  I'll bet the above doesn't make much sense.  A lot of time, when I just throw out a post like this, without planning it, the logic doesn't hold up well.  I go down this side passages, rant, come back, sort of just stumble around to the end, until I run out of "Oh yeah, and..." moments in my head. Which is now.