I don’t hide the fact that the protagonist of The Repossessed Ghost started as a character I played in a roleplaying game. He changed between the time he was a character in someone else’s game and when I finally gave him his own story. In fact, it had been over a decade between those two events, and I wasn’t interested in writing a story that felt like a roleplaying game, if that makes sense. I didn’t jot down Mel’s stats or keep track of a mana bar or anything like that. I wanted my story to be a real story, and the fact that the character’s voice started in some other medium didn’t matter to me.

Some of the early feedback came from people that knew me as a gamer, and they kept saying that they could see the character being someone from a roleplaying game, and it made me want to pull out my hair.

In this age of Critical Role and Dimension 20, it’s probably not such a bad thing to have some association between an author’s story and a game they enjoy. Still, that’s not what I wanted with The Repossessed Ghost, and I think my story, in its released form, satisfies my requirements. If you have read it, please feel free to let me know if it made you think of a roleplaying game.

If you have not read it, let me recommend that you do, especially as the inciting incident takes place on Halloween.

Now that the book-pimping is out of the way, let’s talk about what roleplaying games do for me, and how they impact my writing.

I have talked before how reading and writing exercise the same muscles. Roleplaying games also exercise my writing muscles, but in a different way. To strain the analogy, reading is like cardio, while roleplaying games are like weight training.

When I get to play in a good game, I’m forced to focus on character voice in an improvisational setting. I consider my character’s wants, needs, and personality as I try to navigate someone else’s world, and I try to keep it entertaining not just for myself, but for everyone else at the table. A lot of these things I practice in a game setting are exceptionally valuable when making realistic characters as a writer.

As a player in a game, not only do I get to work on my own character skills, I get to see how other people develop their own characters. Some are better than others, but everyone has something you can learn, if you pay close enough attention. I remember one player that annoyed me at first with the way they always talked about their character in third person. After a while, I got into it and really dug what they were bringing to the scenes.

The only problem with roleplaying games as a writing exercise is that it’s really hard for me to find games I can readily play in. My friends have moved on. The twin demons of Scheduling and Responsibilities have laid waste to my gaming groups. What’s a lone player to do?

I play computer-based roleplaying games, watch for opportunities to join other games, and I write. I hope to find or maybe create another regular gaming group, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

When I was young, the bookstore was more important to me than the toy store. I remember walking to The Bookworm and drooling over the spines of books filling the science fiction and fantasy sections. They were separate sections, and even back then, I preferred SF. When one of my parents was there with me, I’d usually get to leave a new book, probably by Heinlein though I did read other authors, too.

I spent afternoons and weekends reading. I played music and video games, too, but I could often be found sitting in a chair or lying on a bed with a book in my face, especially at night. I even had a special book lamp, which was wonderful because it illuminated the pages when the batteries were fresh. It was also terrible, because most books didn’t fit in it, and I accidentally ruined the covers of many paperbacks trying fit them in.

Reading was a huge part of my life when I was younger. These days, I don’t read nearly as much.

I want to, but it’s not as easy as it used to be. I have to wear reading glasses these days, and I usually just don’t have that much time. I do manage to read actual books from time to time. Most of the time, however, I listen to audiobooks, especially when I’m in the car. Since I haven’t been driving much the last few years, my book consumption has dropped. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to audio books while walking through the neighborhood.

Just today, I finally finished listening to Neuromancer. I’ll have a lot to say about that book, some other time.

What about other people? Are people still reading? How much time am I wasting trying to create books to entertain people, if people have moved on from books?

You can do your own research, and probably should. I did some Google searches and read a few articles from sources that seem reputable.

From what I can tell, we experienced a 9% decline in reading over the last decade. However, from 2022 to the present, readership increased enough to flatten out the curve. More and more people are doing like I am and listening to audio books more than reading physical or digital text, and the inclusion or exclusion of audio books may bias the numbers.

Some of the decline in readership has to do with the economy. People have less disposable income, and less time. Many younger people are having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

Bookstores have been drying up, thanks to Amazon and online sales. We still have Barnes & Noble. There were a couple of years where it looked like we were going to lose them, too.

I have been told that there are more eager readers now than ever before. At the same time, we have economic difficulties, fewer local options for shopping for books, more diverse ways of consuming stories, and large publishers producing fewer books in some popular genres. Consolidation and questionable business decisions made in Big Publishing lead to fewer books by new authors, or at least the appearance of fewer books as the marketing money is reserved for the authors with established audiences.

To put it all together… there is still an audience of readers to please. The paths to reaching these readers is fraught at both ends. It has always taken a great deal of luck to make it. Now it seems like it takes a miracle.

So, I will keep writing.

Admit it. You looked at the title of this post and thought, “He’s going to talk about A.I., isn’t he?” Yes. But not right away. Let’s just chill out a moment. I’m not looking for an excuse to rant about large language models or anything like that. I really just want to focus on writing itself, and what it’ll look like in 5, 10, or maybe 20 years.

Before we jump ahead, let’s start in the past and move chronologically forward.

An Extremely Condensed History of Writing

If we go back far enough, we start with just verbal storytelling. Stories were memorized and recited, or embellished, and I have to imagine that some real doozies were distorted or forgotten over time.

Move forward a little bit and we start to actually writing things down. I imagine the invention of writing made it possible to create more complex narratives. Details could be preserved, and the thoughts and intentions of a storyteller could live on, long after the creator passed away. There’s still the problem of the material decaying over time, and ink fading, but we got better at that, too.

Many of the inventions around writing made it possible for more people to immortalize their thoughts and stories. Cheaper materials, better ink, better printing. Typewriters came along. Then computers. Then The Internet.

When I consider the evolution of writing from this perspective, I see a continuous trend of putting the power of words into the hands of more and more people. When we actually start thinking about the future of writing, we might be wise to consider this trend, and extrapolate along the lines of history.

Writing in the Present Day

The concerns of the past have been addressed, and writing today is more accessible than ever. If you prefer to write with pen and paper, we’ve got you covered. Pens are cheap these days. Companies literally give them away, emblazoned with their logo and corporate slogan. Some of these are nice pens, but even cheap ones last a long time and have good ink flow. And, even though there’s been a paper shortage in the printing industry, notebooks are relatively easy to come by. You can go as plain or as fancy with your notebook as you like.

This is how my friend Michael Gallowglas writes. On his blog, in his “A Day in the Life” post, every time he mentions writing, he’s doing so with specialized notebooks and multicolored pens. When he’s ready, he transposes his handwriting into a computer and uploads his words to wherever they need to go so that they’re not lost to the frailties of physical matter. One of the benefits of his approach is that even after his work has gone to print, he still has an artifact made with his hands, filled with his hard-earned words, scrawled out in his distinctive handwriting.

I start cramping and aching just thinking about it. I tend to use a custom-made split mechanical ergo keyboard I built myself, and that helps keep me from exacerbating the continuous pain I feel in my wrists. The pain has been there since my time in the Air Force, and while it’s never fully gone away, it usually doesn’t bother me unless I do something stupid.

I use Scrivener, though when I wrote The Repossessed Ghost, the first draft was done entirely in Word. When submitting my stories to my critique group, I compile it and copy it into Google Docs. My Scrivener files themselves go into the cloud, so not only can I write from different laptops or workstations without a fuss, I never have to worry about a simple hard drive failure wiping out all of my work.

The Crash of ’98 for me had nothing to do with Wall Street, but was instead the time my computer fell off my desk and wiped away all of the writing I had done up to the point.

The technology of today has made it easy for me to compose my stories into a medium that is indelible, yet malleable enough for me to edit and transform into whatever format is required for submissions. I don’t need to go to a special, dedicated place for writing, and I can bring it with me wherever I go. I have word processors, dictionaries, spell checks, thesauruses, grammar checkers, and baby name generators all at my disposal, as long as I have access to The Internet. There are podcasts and online classes to instruct, when such instructions are desired. I’m out of excuses, just like you are.

Writing in the Future — A.I.

Let’s get the bogeyman out of the way. I don’t believe that A.I. is going away. It will continue to get better over time, meaning the quality of the output will start to look more and more like the kind of fiction an author creates. Look at how far it has come with visual art. I see no reason it shouldn’t advance and produce written fiction that is both coherent and compelling.

I think A.I. and large language models will get more sophisticated and more prevalent, and I think writers will have a choice as to whether or not they incorporate them in their writing process. The recent results of the writer strike preclude writers getting replaced by A.I., and writers cannot be compelled to use A.I. to write in the movie or television industries, but if I read it correctly, it didn’t say that writers couldn’t voluntarily supplement their work with A.I.. I think there are still some legal kinks to work out, but that seems like something that will be solved before the next decade.

Before I move on from A.I., I want to drop this little analogy about how an A.I. writes. It’s like producing chicken nuggets. In the large language model, all sorts of writing, good and bad, are thrown into the mix and churned into indistinguishable word slurry. It is then shaped into something like looks like writing. It bears the familiar shape of writing, but it’s imitation information.

There is a book on Amazon today, fully generate by A.I., and it’s all about how to identify mushrooms. Don’t trust this book. The life you save may be your own.

Writing in the Future — Everything Else

Within the next 5 years, I don’t expect writing to look much different than it does today. Some other piece of software might come out that captivates the writing community and supplants Scrivener. That’s always a possibility.

Any day now, I expect a huge leap in technology involving speech-to-text. Michael has dabbled around some with this, and I know that’s how Kevin J. Anderson writes. I think Piper J. Drake also uses voice software, as she has wrist pain that is more debilitating than mine.

Our phones are capable of listening to us and turning our spoken words into text, but it isn’t awesome, and I keep wanting it to be. I want my digital assistant to actually assist me. Maybe we’ll have that in the next 5 to 10 years, and that could be an interesting game changer for writers.

I don’t think we’re particularly close to having ubiquitous thought-to-text interfaces. Following the lines of history, that feels like the next major leap to make storytelling even more accessible. Make it a waterproof wearable and people will never lose those killer ideas they have in the shower.

Imagine recording your dreams and then editing them into coherent stories.

For enough into the future, we will still be telling each other stories. But we might not be writing as we do now. We don’t practice storytelling the way we did a few thousand years ago, and our writing technology has advanced over what we had a few hundred years ago. We have eliminated most of the barriers to entry.

Perhaps the final barrier is the act of writing itself. Far enough in the future, storytelling might look completely different, and this act of scratching ink onto paper, or wiggling our digits over so many clackety keys, will seem archaic and primitive, like cave painting or chipping words into stone.

When I first put down this topic, I rubbed my hands together and laughed a maniacal laugh. I figured this would be a lot of fun.

Now I see that the word itself is packed with a lot of meanings, and I’m going to need to disambiguate a little bit if I want to say something actually true.

So, let’s start with the dictionary definition, according to Dr. Google:

noun: drama; plural noun: dramas

1.

• a play for theater, radio, or television.
  “a gritty urban drama about growing up in Harlem”
  Similar: play, show, piece, theatrical work, spectacle, dramatization, screenplay
• drama as a genre or style of literature.
  “Renaissance drama”

2.

• an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances.
  “a hostage drama”

I don’t think that helps much. The second definition is definitely in the ballpark, but I’m not sure it does enough to get at drama. When you think about the fallout that surrounds a particularly active Drama King or Queen, you aren’t usually considering the Renaissance.

Let me give an example of some drama that has captivated me recently. There is a very popular YouTuber that goes by the handle of SssniperWolf. Controversy has swirled around her for a very long time. I won’t go into her long and fraught history, but she currently produces content by creating reaction videos. She freeboots the product of smaller content creators, replays them for her 30+ million subscribers, and provides no real substance. It’s lazy, non-transformative, exploitive, and disgusting. If this were a play, show, theatrical work, etc., SssniperWolf would be our clearly defined villain.

Now enter on original YouTuber, Jacksfilms. He doesn’t have the same following as SssniperWolf, but he’s well known enough, and his content actually is original or transformative. For the last several months, he’s been shining a light on SssniperWolf’s content thievery by creating his own reaction videos to hers. He’s actually done a commendable job not resorting to personal attacks. He doesn’t talk about her looks. He calls out his viewers that bring up SssniperWolf’s controversial past. His message is, stop stealing, giving proper credit to the creators, and put in more effort so that your reaction videos are truly transformative and actually fair use. Again, if this were a work of fiction, we have our clearly defined hero.

Not all drama has to have heroes versus villains. If you watch shows like Survivor, sometimes all of the people involved are villains. The excitement and tension stems from watching events unfold, and seeing whether or not justice is served or not. Will the person that is lying and manipulating the people around them get called out, or will they slither their way into the the finale, lauded for their ability to “play the game.” Sometimes they get called out. Sometimes they walk home with a million dollars. While the drama is unfolding, we’re safe at home, saying things like, “I can’t believe they just did that.”

Going back to the SssniperWolf/Jacksfilms drama, I have watched for weeks as Jacksfilms, the underdog, has refined his criticism into a Bingo game, where the spaces are all the predictable things that occur in SssniperWolf’s videos. In the last few weeks, some of the people SssniperWolf has stolen from have come forward and put claims against the videos. SssniperWolf has reacted by editing some of the called-out videos, sloppily removing some of the stolen content.

Friday night, the drama went from a 6 or a 7 to an 11 when SssniperWolf posted to her 5 million Instagram followers a poll, asking whether she should go to Jacksfilms’ home. She showed up in the evening, filmed Jacksfilms’ house, posting his address to all of her followers.

This is called doxxing and is against the law. She crossed the line, weaponizing her large following to intimidate and threaten one of the people criticizing her content.

This is drama. And it’s almost impossible to look away.

I had no intention of writing about this when I put Drama in my topic list. I figured I would talk about the shows Melissa watches. She gets invested in unscripted programs like Married at First Site. It’s harmless fun, it keeps her entertained, and she shouldn’t be ashamed of drawing entertainment value from these shows. I may not like them, but she shouldn’t feel bad for indulging in the entertainment equivalent of fast food.

I was going to gently poke fun at these shows while dissecting them to determine what it is that makes audiences love them. All the while, I’m indulging in my own variety of unscripted drama, invested in it, wondering how it’s all going to end.

It’s the thrill of watching a train wreck, or a collapsing building, or some other disaster. We crane our necks as we drive by, safe in our little bubbles, curious how things are going to turn out.

I think we get invested because of our empathy, which is a good thing. We imagine ourselves in the situation. How would we react? Would we be able to climb out of the wreckage? Would we be able to make the marriage work if we just met at the altar? How would I react if someone with a huge following showed up outside my house and tried to endanger me and my family by weaponizing their followers?

That is the attractiveness of drama. It’s not enough that there is strife. We have to be able to relate to it. We have to be able to imagine ourselves in it. If it can generate an emotion inside our hearts, we will be hooked, and we will continue to show up for more.

There is probably a lesson there for how to make our stories more attractive to readers.

For most of a decade, I attended multiple writing conventions a year. I still attempt to attend as many events as I can, but what I get out of these conferences has changed over time. When I first started going, the panels were important to me, and I took diligent notes. Some of those notes are still floating around on this blog. Eventually, my note taking slowed down, and now I’m usually bored when I sit in on panels.

Did I stop learning? What’s the complicated answer?

The short answer, which is technically correct, is that we never stop learning to write. The language we are working in evolves over time. The way we express ourselves also changes.

But as my old friend used to say, that’s the Sunday school answer. That’s the obvious, boring answer that lacks nuance.

I believe there comes a point where the only way to continue to improve as a writer is to just sit down and do it. This is the point in our development where sitting and listening to people talk about writing isn’t going to move the needle much any more. It may inspire us or motivate us, and we might pick up some ideas to try, but none of that matters until we go and put pen to paper. Or hands on keyboards. You know what I mean.

Am I saying there that the value of workshops and other formats where writing is taught diminishes over time? I think so, yes. Everyone is different, so the point of diminishing returns will be different for various writers. Also, as we develop our skills as a writer, we will invariably hit multiple plateaus. Sometimes our egos will tell us we’ve plateaued, or mastered the subject when we haven’t.

My ego may have driven me to touch this subject in the first place, but I digress.

Let me see if I can find another way to describe what I’m talking about, and unwind my idea in a way that makes more sense. Let’s take me and a handful of astronauts that have never spent much time writing, put us all on a spaceship, and send us to Mars. During this trip, we are going to keep our spirits up by teaching each other different skills. I’m going to teach my shipmates how to write.

Initially, we will see fast progress. I’ll talk about using strong verbs. I will demonstrate how adjectives are delicious, but at the cost of pacing. We will talk about character voice, metaphors, plot structure, and several other topics that I have studied and practiced as a writer. For a little while, the astronauts will become better writers from my teaching along.

After a few million miles, one or more of them will have some breakthrough. The things they have been learning will lock into place. They will basically learn everything I have to teach them, and then the only way they’ll be able to improve is through practice. Sitting in a tiny vessel, hurtling through space with limited distractions, they’ll have plenty of time and opportunity to work on their craft. And they will improve, honing their voice and becoming better writers. They won’t progress as quickly as when they were first actively being taught. There won’t be anything left for me to say or do that will help them become better writers. They’ll just have to do the work on their own.

What happens when we get back to Earth and they find a better teach? From a place of both humility and reality, it will be a trivial matter for them to find a better writing teacher. Will they once again start to see rapid progress?

Probably. But the things they learned from me, they’ll have down. Perhaps Jennifer Brozek will teach them the lesson she taught me, which is that they can do more with less words just by trusting their readers a little bit more. They’ll see a huge improvement in their writing, and then hit another plateau.

Maybe Dan Wells will next teach them how to use Excel to manage their outlines, or give them a deeper understanding of story structures and how story structures can be used as a diagnostic tool when their stories aren’t quite working. Again, they’ll get another bump in improvement, and then plateau again.

With enough time and exposure to other experts, the frequency with which these astronaut-turned-writers improve their craft will flatten, because there is only so many ideas that can be taught. Attend enough classes and panels and conventions, and you start to hear the same things, over and over.

That is the long-winded, winding answer to the initial question. Yes, on a long enough timeline, we basically stop learning to write from other people, and can only improve through practice and direct application. And experimentation.

In Summary…

We don’t need to worry about the question of whether or not we stop learning to write from other people. We should keep an open mind, listen to what others have to say on the subject, and celebrate the times we do learn something new. We should also not worry too much when we hit certain plateaus. If you think you’ve hit a plateau, that means you’re at a point where you need to practice what you’ve learned more.

This has been Brian’s Excuses. I’m out of excuses. Now I need to go write.

Dragon Gems is the line of short fiction published by Water Dragon Publishing. These stories are not necessarily fantasy, and they do not have to have anything to do with gems or dragons. They are tonight’s victim topic, and if you’re in a hurry, I recommend skipping to the Deals on New and Old Releases section where I have some links to some special deals taking place right now.

Why Short Fiction Matters

Not every story needs to be a backbreaker. The scope does not always need to be epic. Unlike some things we can talk about, bigger isn’t always better when it comes to stories.

Short fiction is some of the best fiction out there. Go pick up This is How You Lose the Time War and see for yourself. Or Binti. Or The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Or Metamorphosis by Kafka. Or a whole bunch of Philip K. Dick’s fiction.

An argument can be made that short fiction is ideal for modern audiences because in a world of TikTok, microblogging, and YouTube shorts, people have shorter attention spans. Maybe there’s something to that, but short fiction has been around a lot longer than the internet.

Short fiction can deliver a satisfying, emotional experience in a very efficient way.

With regards to my writing, I have started six novels, completed three of them, and published The Repossessed Ghost this year. On the other hand, I have written and completed around a dozen or more short stories, novellas, and novelettes. It might be actually be closer to 20.

By the way, since it’s that time of year, you can read Halloween Harvest right on this site. I’m still really pleased with it. And I’ll also remind you that The Repossessed Ghost begins on a fateful Halloween night, and true to the title, involves ghosts. It might satisfy your Halloween craving without being particularly scary.

And, I may have some other nice news with regards to Dragon Gems and my own writing coming up, though it’s too soon to talk about now.

Dragon Gems Matter

For all the reasons I just applied to short fiction, Dragon Gems are a good thing. They are a lower commitment both in terms of time and money, allowing the reader to essentially try out some of the writers published by Water Dragon.

You can get the anthologies. You can also get individual releases. Short fiction in book form. Most of the time when looking for short fiction, you’re either going to find it in online magazines or anthologies. Water Dragon is actually producing short fiction as individual, bite-sized volumes. They’re incredible, and quite popular in any dealer’s room that happens to be hosting a Water Dragon table.

Deals on New and Old Releases

As of today, the Fall 2023 edition of the Dragon Gems anthology is available. Here is a page with links to all the different editions. And, in case you were wondering, it’s a complete coincidence that the day I chose for talking about Dragon Gems is the same day this anthology became available. It’s fate!

Also, for a limited time, digital editions of Winter 2023, Sprint 2023, and Summer 2023 are available for just $0.99. The non-digital editions also appear to be on sale on this page.

So, rush out and try some of this fiction. And if you have an opportunity to leave a comment, tell them I sent you. It won’t get you a discount or anything. I just think it’d be funny.

It would be really easy to bash on Elon Musk and the atrocious state of Twitter, which I will never refer to as “X.” If I went on such a rant, it would come from a place of deep emotion, because for a really long time, I loved Twitter. It felt like a constant afterparty I could wander through, sharing jokes and getting into light conversations with acquaintances. I met a lot of great writers through that medium, and I mourn its loss.

I’m not interested in hating on Elon, though. That’s not how I want to spend my time. And, to be fair, while I enjoyed the people I interacted with on Twitter, I have always kind of hated Twitter and social media in general. I called it The Great Mistake a couple of years ago, and I stand by that assessment.

And yet, here I am, logging into bunches of social media platforms every day. It’s junk food for the soul. It provides an illusion of connection and socialization. There is no real nutritional benefit to it, though, and in addition to the empty calories which fail to sustain me and keep me from loneliness, it is also bad for my heart as too often, it’s a source of fatty rage and diarrhetic existential dread.

I continue to connect to social media for two reasons. First, there are still people I want to stay connected with through those platforms. Second, I feel like it’s a requirement that I remain active in social media, as it’s one of the few avenues available to me to keep my stories visible to the public.

So, let’s go through the different social media platforms that I’m connected to, talk about the good, bad, and ugly, and maybe mention some of the ones I’m not connected to and why.

Twitter

I didn’t delete my account there, but I did delete all of my posts. I only log on to that platform now to check for direct messages. I will not be posting there again.

Twitter has gone through a lot of changes. The promotion of the subscription program makes people invisible when they eschew the 8 dollar badge. The badge program itself watered down identity, which opened avenues for impersonation. It is not an attractive platform for News Media at this point, and recent changes hide the text for links that go outside the site.

As far as I’m concerned, Twitter is dead. The only reason I haven’t deleted my account is because it’s my name, and if some miracle should occur and my books should take off, I don’t want someone impersonating me there. Impersonation on that platform is easier than its ever been.

It’s not a safe place. It actively allows the worst people to promote hate and bigotry, even in their advertisements. Oh, and the recent change in the terms and services describe how all the Twitter content will go into some new A.I., which is reason enough for me not to give Twitter any more of my words.

If you’re still on Twitter, do yourself a kindness and get off the platform as soon as you can.

Bluesky

The shattering of Twitter created an opportunity for bunches of other platforms to try and fill the gap. Bluesky is one of those younger platforms, and I’ve mostly been enjoying it. It satisfies the itch more than the other Twitter-clones, for some reason.

To get into Bluesky, you need an invite code. If you’re a friend of mine and you want an invite code, let me know. I have a few.

Bluesky is not perfect. It lacks some features Twitter had, and some of the bad habits developed during Twitter are still present on Bluesky. But, the culture there seems to be less about fixing on the hate and fanning the flames, and more about blocking and moving on. I appreciate that. You don’t snuff out a fire by giving it more oxygen. You can’t delegitimize hate speech by giving it more attention.

I’m not sure Bluesky will serve my author needs, but that might change over time.

Mastodon

I created an account on Mastodon many years ago, when it first popped up and Twitter already seemed like a terrible place. Mastodon is geekier and more challenging to engage with, mostly because it kind of looks like Twitter, and it smells like Twitter, but it’s underlying structure is quite a bit different.

Mastodon is not a monolithic service like Twitter or Facebook. It’s instead a whole bunch of little cities that have some interconnectivity. These cities have their own focuses, and their own culture. When you find one that suits you, you can join and you’re more likely to see other people that are within that city. At the same time, you can follow people that are in other cities.

There are fancy words like “federated” thrown around when dealing with Mastodon. It’s not quite as easy to use because of the underlying complexity, but since the different communities vary as much as they do, it’s easier to find one that you’re more likely to engage with than the platform as a whole.

People that love Mastodon really love Mastodon. I appreciate it, but I’m also not completely engaged with it. I have an account on The Wandering Shop, but very few followers.

Spoutible

If you have not heard of Spoutible, I don’t blame you. It’s one of the Twitter clones that popped up last year, I think, and it has the same look and feel as classic Twitter. Spoutible spends a lot of its time focused on what’s going on with Twitter, and how much Spoutible is better than Twitter. It is a jilted lover that is having a really hard time getting over its ex.

My presence there is even smaller than Mastodon. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll continue to log in. I don’t see it going the distance until it develops a unique voice of its own.

Facebook

I still hate Facebook. I’ve hated it for a long time, but I still go there because it’s the only way I stay in the lives of some family and some people I went to school with a long time ago.

I don’t post many original thoughts there, though I’ve been more engaged on that platform this last year. I don’t trust Zuckerberg and there is a lot about Facebook and Meta that make me upset, but at this point, I’m still logging on there and posting links to my blog.

Facebook Messenger is spyware, and I recommend that you take it off your phone if you have it installed. If you’re able to uninstall it.

We all should know by now that Facebook is generally evil, so I won’t spend any more time talking about that platform.

Reddit

I’m including Reddit here, even though it doesn’t quite fit the same mold as traditional social media. It’s mostly a place to go and follow specific topics of interest, and I enjoy it for what it is. I like the Cyberpunk and Valheim reddits. They’re fun. I should probably engage with more of the fiction reddits, but I don’t usually find that experience to be enjoyable, for some reason.

Not that long ago, Reddit changed some policies with regards to APIs, which impacted moderating, and basically made the place not good. It was a really big deal, and now I don’t see anyone talking about it. I don’t know if the changes were rolled back, or if the platform shrunk, or if people just accepted it.

I don’t spend as much time on Reddit as I used to, and I’ll probably continue to diminish my time spent there.

Instagram

I wound up with an Instagram account by accident many yeas ago, and I did absolutely nothing with it. Then I had a book coming out and it seemed like I should probably post some stuff there.

My distrust for it is the same distrust I have for Facebook. They’re the same company. But, begrudgingly, I have to admit that I’ve been having fun on Instagram lately.

Because I refuse to install any of the social media apps on my phone, I find it harder to use Instagram than most people. I have to move my pictures to my computer, then use the web app to upload my stuff. I will continue to do so, but because of the self-inflicted lack of convenience, I’ll never be super prolific on that platform.

Plus, don’t their terms of service have some draconian language about what they can do with the content posted there?

LinkedIn

This is another oddball, and I think the only reason I remain active on it is because I keep getting scouted on it, and sent emails. Everyday is another LinkedIn email or two, and I click in and check notifications.

I’m told that it’s possible to promote myself as an author there, but I’m not sure there would be much benefit to it. I don’t know.

LinkedIn is generally there to help people network and get a new job, right? I’m hoping to stay with Trimark until I can’t be a programmer anymore, so I’m not sure LinkedIn has much value to me. I haven’t posted any articles there, and I’ve only read a few, ones created and promoted by Trimark.

TikTok

I do not have an account on TikTok and I don’t use it. It’s another one that sort of demands the app on the phone, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever create a TikTok account and engage there. It’s possible that I’m making a mistake, because I hear that “BookTok” is a real thing.

I don’t know. It seems like a platform for a younger audience. I don’t think that the people enjoying TikTok are going to be particularly interested in short videos by an old like me.

Threads

Threads was Facebooks attempt at a Twitter clone, and it is tied heavily to one’s Instagram account. I would have checked it out, except there was no web client. Since I’m never going to install the app on my phone, I will never engage with Threads.

As I understand it, Threads had a tremendous intake of people, then immediately lost the vast majority of them. I don’t know anyone that is currently using Threads.

One of the interesting things about Threads was that they said they were going to be accessible through the Mastodon federation, which means I would eventually be able to follow some Threads users through my Mastodon account. I thought that was pretty cool.

Now, since it doesn’t seem like anyone is using the platform, I’m not sure federation even matters. I’m not sure if they’re still planning on developing that feature. So, Threads is effectively dead to me.

In Conclusion…

There’s not much else for me to say about social media that I haven’t said before. Across the board, it’s not healthy for any of us. It’s still The Great Mistake. I’m still engaged with a lot more of it than I like.

But what else am I going to do? Work on my stories?

Yesterday, we talked about villains. Tonight, let’s talk about heroes. Like last night, I’ll list a few samples, then break them into categories of my own making. Within each of these categories, I’ll offer some humble tips on how to write heroes of that type.

The list of heroes that come to mind:

• Luke Skywalker
• Frodo Baggins
• Rand Al’Thor
• Superman
• Indiana Jones
• Harry Dresden

Hmm. Now that I look at this list, I see that it’s quite a sausage fest. For our purposes, I’m not sure that matters, since I’m really only focusing on types of characters, and gender doesn’t matter at that level. We can easily swap in Wonder Woman for Superman, and Laura Croft for Indiana Jones.

Iconic Heroes

Speaking of Superman, Wonder Woman, Indiana Jones, and Laura Croft, all four of them are examples of iconic heroes. Iconic heroes are characters that don’t change very much over time. They end the story just as heroic as they started it. These characters are ideal for serialized storytelling. Because they go through a minimal amount of development, the reader or viewer can follow the current story without having to go through a deep backlog.

Iconic heroes can have an arc within the story, but the ideal story for an iconic character is plot driven, rather than character driven. Like the Embodiment of Evil characters described last night, Iconic characters can be on the thin side. But that’s okay. We still love them and will follow them on their adventures, because the adventure is the point.

Reluctant Heroes / Campbell’s Heroes

The reluctant hero is your farmhand-turned-sword master that initially resist the call to action. This is the character that stars in your Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Luke Skywalker and Rand al’Thor and basically every character to participate on the aforementioned Hero’s Journey can be classified as a Reluctant Hero. Do remember James Kirk from J. J. Abram’s reboot of Star Trek? That was a Reluctant Hero.

Writing a Reluctant Hero is not that difficult, since there are so many examples in fiction to follow. The key is to map out the journey the hero will take, and write someone that will believably follow the path. Luke desperately wanted to be a hero, but was loyal to his family and his duties on the farm. Rand dreamed of adventure, but was loyal to his father and his duties on the farm. The Reluctant Hero generally has the qualities of a hero within them, and its those qualities — loyal, dutiful — are the things that hold them back when adventure first comes to call.

Everyman Heroes

Frodo is the perfect example of the Everyman Hero. He’s generally willing to do what must be done, but he isn’t particularly endowed with the qualities of a hero. He is relatable, and a perfect stand-in for the reader or viewer.

This is where I would slot Harry Dresden as well, even though he starts off gifted with magic. In personality, he is relatively normal. I almost slotted him in with the Iconic Heroes, but I believe Dresden changes over the course of the books, which is not usually something that happens to Iconic Heroes.

Mel Walker from The Repossessed Ghost is also an Everyman Hero, in my opinion. He quickly develops psychic abilities, but in personality, he’s just a young man in a world that’s way bigger than him, and he’s doing his best. Even more than Dresden, Mel Walker changes over time.

To write an Everyman character, focus on the character’s voice. Develop someone that is not too cowardly nor too brave or exceedingly competent. This should be someone that the reader can measure themselves against.

In Summary…

All characters are the heroes of their own story. Some of those stories aren’t particularly interesting, which is why they aren’t the star of the book. But every character should have the illusion of depth, if not true dimensionality. That security guard over there? He keeps touching his vest pocket, as that’s where he put the folded up picture of a dinosaur that his daughter gave him this morning before he came in to work. It sure would be a shame if something happened to him. See that bank teller? She keeps adjusting her glasses because they’re her old prescription. She’s too embarrassed to admit what happened to her current glasses, but she’s also chewing a lot of gum to hide the alcohol on her breath, so maybe it isn’t that big a mystery, after all.

Protagonists come in all shapes and sizes, and the three types I listed above are really just scratching the surface. Character driven stories demand interesting and engaging characters, and they may defy being categorized. That’s a good thing.

The key to writing a good protagonist is to give them wants and needs, and enough drive to pursue those wants and needs. A good protagonist will move the story forward through their decisions.

A few nights ago, I wrote about writing women characters. If you don’t have time to read it, the sentence summary is just write a male character and give them a female name. Or another way of saying it, focus more on writing the character than writing a woman. Similar thoughts apply to writing villains, too.

Before I get too far into the villain conversation, I have a brief follow-up to the writing women post. I didn’t really talk about descriptions, even though I started the post with a reference to “breasting boobily.” The follow-up is: over-applying descriptions to your women over your men is a way of drawing attention to the gender of the character, which you know, might not be cool. Treat your characters equally, regardless of their imagined gender.

Women characters deserve to be defined by their actions. As I said in the other post, women should be able to have noble deaths. Furthermore, they should be allowed to be menacing villains on par with their male counterparts.

So now let’s talk about villains.

Villains come in different shapes and sizes. Here’s a list of some villains, in no particular order:

• Darth Vader
• Macbeth
• Zuko from the start of Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Emperor Palpatine
• Lore from Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Ursula from The Little Mermaid
• Dr. Doom
• Magneto
• Annie Wilkes from Stephen King’s Misery
• Killmonger from the movie Black Panther
• The Joker from Batman: The Dark Knight

There are many others I could mention, but this seems like a good, eclectic list. Some of them have quite a bit in common with each other, and some stand out on their own. A couple of them are my favorites, for different reasons.

I’m not going to belabor this by talking about what a villain is. Instead, I want to break this list into different categories, and talk about what makes these characters work within those categories, and what it takes to write them.

Embodiment of Evil

The Embodiment of Evil villain type includes irredeemable characters that strain believability. Star Wars has a lot of these villains in Palpatine, Darth Maul, Snoke, and even Darth Vader throughout Episode 4. Depending on who is writing him, Dr. Doom might sneak into this category, though I think the best Dr. Doom stories are the ones where he is more nuanced.

That’s the thing about Embodiment of Evil characters. They serve the simple purpose of being bad guys, without a lot of depth or nuance at all. They don’t need it. There usually isn’t a lot of difference between any of these types of character. Palpatine and Scar from The Lion King may have more lines than Darth Maul, but we don’t get a lot about what makes them tick or why they are motivated to be evil.

How do you write one of these characters? Don’t think too hard about it. To pull off a proper Embodiment of Evil, the character should have a strong presence. Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men may not have an impressive costume, skull horns, or glowing red eyes, but there is no doubt that he has an overpowering presence on par with that of Darth Maul.

Embodiment of Evil characters do terrible things on screen or on the page, and we usually see them through other characters. If we sympathize with the characters that are witnessing these monsters, we can empathize with their fear, which is the key to making these Embodiments of Evil characters terrifying.

These characters are generally pretty easy to come up with. The challenge to writing these characters well is conveying the effect they have on the other people around them.

Bad Guys with a Message

The Bad Guy with a Message can often look like an Embodiment of Evil. The difference is that they have just a little bit more depth and motivation.

Heath Ledger’s Joker is a perfect example. In that movie, Alfred sums him up: some people just want to watch the world burn. We are given multiple explanations for The Joker being the way he is, which is chilling because these explanations are contradictory. There is implied depth but no definitive backstory, making him even more an agent of chaos. For all his chaos, he executes elaborate plans, all in an effort to say something about human nature: we’re all just one bad day from being monsters like him. He ultimately fails in that movie not because Batman beats him up, but because the people on the boats refuse to act in the way he predicts, thus refuting his entire message.

Anne Wilkes doesn’t have much of a message, but we see her motivation. She’s a reader that would never let a single profanity slip from her sweet lips, and a fan so driven and attached to a set of characters that she’s willing to torture the writer in order to get him to write the next book. She is the darkest muse. If not for the explicit motivation spelled out, giving her a little bit of depth, she would be an Embodiment of Evil.

That is the first clue on how to write one of these characters. The Joker and Anne Wilkes both have the presence and terror of an Embodiment of Evil, but they’re distinct in that they are highly motivated. Motivated characters are beloved, even when they’re villains. Sometimes, especially when their villains.

Broken Moral Compass

The Broken Moral Compass character is probably my favorite. Like the Bad Guy with a Message, they are highly motivated. They’re living in a world that from their perspective, is wrong in a specific and infuriating way, and they are driven to act out and solve it.

Magneto is a Broken Moral Compass character. He’s intelligent and compassionate. He cares deeply for mutant kind, even those that stand out as his enemies. The evil he does is in the name of preserving mutants and elevating them.

Good Dr. Doom stories paint him with a similar brush. And another Marvel character on my list, Killmonger, has a moral compass so close to being correct that if he hadn’t burned the heart-shaped herb, he might have been the hero of that story.

It seems like Marvel really likes the Broken Moral Compass character type. An argument could be made that Thanos and Loki fall into this category, too.

To write a Broken Moral Compass character, you must look at the world you’re creating through a unique perspective. Take something that your heroes hold to be true and important and turn it upside down.

The Broken Moral Compass character is ultimately the hero in their own story. The hero in their own mind, though they might not admit it. Like the Bad Guy with a Message, the Broken Moral Compass character is highly motivated, to the point that their motivation defines them.

Dark Reflection

The Dark Reflection character is one that mirrors or highlights qualities of one or more of your heroes. Lore from Star Trek is a Dark Reflection of Data. What if Data traded in his decency and conscience for emotions? Ursula is a Dark Reflection of Ariel’s father, King Triton.

The Dark Reflection character is more derivative than the Broken Moral Compass. In some stories, Magneto is essentially written as a Dark Reflection of Professor Xavier.

To write a Dark Reflection character, pick one of your favorite, most flavorful heroes, and invert them in some way. You still need to do all the work to make them work as a character. The Dark Reflection character is usually deeper than the Embodiment of Evil characters, but not always.

Doomed with Knowledge

The Doomed with Knowledge character used to be my favorite type, and I’m still very fond of them. These are characters that would have been the hero, if not for some piece of information given to them when they weren’t ready for it.

If Macbeth had not been given the prophecy that he would be king, would he have still killed his best friend and taken the crown? Would Lady Macbeth egged him on to do it if he hadn’t shared knowledge of the prophecy with her? Macbeth was a hero right up to the point where he became the villain.

Would Anakin Skywalker still turn into Darth Vader if he wasn’t told that he was the one prophesied to bring balance to The Force? That probably played a part in his downfall. Would he have turned to the Dark Side if he had not been plagued with visions of Padme dying? He closed the loop on that vision because in turning to the Dark Side and assaulting her in his anger, she probably wouldn’t have died in child birth.

I like Anakin for another reason, because looking at Phantom Menace, he was doomed by the Jedi Council’s lack of knowledge. When asked how he felt, he answered, “cold, sir.” Yet Yoda took that as a sign of Dark Side influence, when really, the kid was used to the heat from his desert world.

I think Boromir also qualifies as a Doomed with Knowledge character. He knew where The One Ring was, and he knew that it was powerful, perhaps something that could be used to save his people. Had he not bore such knowledge, I don’t think The Ring would have been able to find purchase within his mind to tempt him.

To write a Doomed with Knowledge character, write a hero, and then give them some temptation they cannot resist. Doomed with Knowledge characters are best when they are deep and pitiable. You have done well when the reader can imagine how they might have turned out if only they had the strength to resist temptation. Preferably, a temptation that the reader can appreciate and sympathize with.

The Redeemable

The Redeemable character is essentially the complete opposite to The Embodiment of Evil. Where an Embodiment of Evil is thin, The Redeemable is deep, complex, motivated, and nuanced. The Redeemable can do terrible, evil things, but they usually aren’t kicking puppies for fun or acting without a conscience.

Let’s look briefly at Zuko from The Last Airbender.

Zuko is tasked with hunting down and killing Aang in order to reclaim his honor. That’s all he’s ever wanted, really. He sets off on a dangerous journey, serving the man that claimed his honor and deeply scarred him when Zuko didn’t deserve it.

Zuko is a survivor of abuse. He acts on his emotions. He’s impulsive, driven, and young.

Over the course of his adventures, he learns and he grows. He finds that he and Aang aren’t so different, and that they could be friends if they weren’t on opposite sides of an ongoing conflict. And through the love and patience of his Uncle, he learns his own worth, and that the honor he always wanted was his all along.

Zuko is one of the best written characters, pretty much ever, and he started as a villain. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

In spite what we see in Return of the Jedi, I don’t believe that Darth Vader falls into this category. He gets some redemption, but I do not believe he is actually redeemed. He killed too many younglings.

If you want to learn how to write a Redeemable character, go watch the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Even if you don’t want to learn to write this type of character, go watch that series anyway. It’s excellent storytelling and a good time all around.

In Summary…

I prefer nuanced, interesting characters. However, not every story needs the villain to be that deep. Palpatine was a perfectly serviceable villain in the original trilogy. Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace served his purpose, too, and he basically didn’t have any lines.

Look at your story and determine how important the relationship is between your protagonist and your antagonist. If it’s important, your story may be better served with a villain that is deeper and more interesting than someone that just laughs and twirls their mustache.

One of the reasons I’m doing the blog challenge this year is so that I will be ready for Nano in November. Every time I have been successful in Nanowrimo, it’s been after a successful Blogtober.

The book I want to write (at least get a good start on) is the sequel novel to The Repossessed Ghost. It’s a story I’ve been thinking about for almost 10 years.

With that much forethought, you’d think I’d be more prepared than I am.

At this point, I just have a collection of ideas. There is a couple of characters I want to introduce that I think are going to be a blast to write. There will be more travel in Mel’s future. Compared to The Repossessed Ghost, the sequel is going to be a bit more involved, and a little bit bigger in scope.

I still want to keep it light and fun to read. But I want to reward readers that pay close attention. There are some details I’m prepared to sow into this story that should make it extremely satisfying to people that read stories the way I do.

I’ve learned so much since I wrote the first book. I’m not too worried about it, but I do wonder if I’ll be able to capture the same tone and humor of The Repossessed Ghost.

Without going into spoilers, most of the characters from the first book will be returning in the second. I touch on most of the characters in the short story I mentioned yesterday, but we don’t really see much of them. I want to expand their stories in the second novel.

When I first started writing The Repossessed Ghost, I didn’t have a title. I just called it The Mel Walker Story and eventually, while I was reading one of the drafts to Melissa, the jokey title came to me and stuck. I imagine something like that will happen with the sequel novel.

With the first book, I didn’t exactly work from an outline. I used the flashlight approach, which I’ll talk about later this month. For the sequel, I want to have a good, solid outline. I’m more comfortable with outlines than I was 10 years ago. Also, this story is going to be more complicated. The only way I’m going to be able to keep track of all of it while putting it together is to establish timelines and the order of events before hand, which means working from an outline.

I was talking to Mike Baltar about what it is to write a Mel Walker story. With a mystery, the characters are gathering clues in order to figure out who did the crime, and why. A Mel Walker story is sort of like a mystery turned inside out. Because Mel can do what he does, he can quickly learn the end of the mystery. Hand him the murder weapon and he’ll pull a vision off of it that will not only show him who committed the crime, but what was going on their head. That’s powerful.

A Mel Walker story is more about discovering the journey along the way. It’s about figuring out what to do with information that no one else has. In Mel Walker’s world, the police aren’t just going to take a psychic’s word for anything. And, like what happened in The Repossessed Ghost, if Mel isn’t careful, he’ll draw unwanted attention to himself. From the perspective of the authorities, how else can Mel know so much about the crime if he wasn’t the one that committed it?

I like these stories. I like telling them, and I think they’re unique and fresh.

A common compliment I’ve received about The Repossessed Ghost is that it is very easy to read, that it hooks the audience, and keeps them turning pages all the way to the end. I need to recapture that essence in the sequel. Spin City is a slower story that builds gradually over time. Synthetic Dreams is a more cerebral story, that keeps the reader interested, but it isn’t an adventure the way The Repossessed Ghost is. That’s what I need to accomplish in the sequel. Get in with both feet running, and keep things light and engaging from beginning to end.

I think I can do that.

The more I think about it, the more excited I am for November, when I get to actually start. Until then, I have a lot of prep work to do.