Over twenty years ago, much of writing was in the form of playing on Star Wars MUSH. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically a bunch of friends playing a text based roleplaying game where we work together to write Star Wars fan fiction. Honestly, it’s a fantastic way to work on writing dialog and deep characterization because the stakes are low and the feedback is immediate. MUSH’s might be a topic for a different day this month.

One of my favorite scenes was with Justine Diamond. We had basically just met and it was early in our times playing together. The scene was brief, but one of the things that makes it stand out in my memory is how we used the weather to punctuate the emotions of the scene. Rain poured out of a blackened, starless sky, and as the dread of the scene began to crescendo, lightning flashed and thunder boomed, exaggerating the monstrous nature of my character and the isolation of her character.

Setting, when done well, is a character in the background of your scenes. As a character, setting is relatively passive, except when the weather comes into play. The clouds might part and a ray of sunlight can beam down during a moment of triumph or introspection. In my previous example, the characters can be pelted with rain or yelled at by an angry sky full of blinding light and fury. The setting can be secretive, with thick fog hiding the way forward.

The weather is the setting acting out in that moment. The seasons, on the other hand, can be a memorable part of world building.

Think about the common phrase associated with the cultural behemoth that is Game of Thrones. I’m sure we all told a friend or a coworker, “Winter is coming.” The seasons in that world work differently, where young children can go all their lives without knowing any other season other than summer, which is where another cheeky phrase: “Oh, my sweet summer child.”

The seasons do not need to be alien to be a part of the world building. Sometimes the changing of the seasons are used by the author to show transition or change, as we saw a few times in the Harry Potter stories.

Unless your entire story takes place inside a space ship, or perhaps a spinning city on The Moon, you might want to consider using the weather and the seasons as a tool in your writing.

On a completely different topic, The Repossessed Ghost is officially out tomorrow. That will be the topic of tomorrow’s post. I’m so excited! I hope everyone that reads it has a good time.

For my day job, I write software to make renewable power projects more affordable. Before that, I worked in life insurance, and before that, managed health care. I sleep much better at night these days.

Climate change is real. I know that what I’m doing isn’t enough, but maybe if enough of us do our part, there can be a future for our children or our children’s children.

We’ve seen hurricane seasons get worse, record high temperatures get higher, and catastrophic forest fires become seasonal events. We have the data. It’s not a fluke. It’s serious. The one planet we can exist on is on fire, and it’s a problem we have to take seriously.

I’m not sure what else to say on that topic.

The Repossessed Ghost doesn’t get into it. It’s a light, fun, urban fantasy that doesn’t deal in particularly difficult topics. It’s escapist fiction which offers a pleasant distraction from the kind of existential dread one might experience when considering climate change and the future of humanity.

Synthetic Dreams, on the other hand, has climate change at the core of its premise. It seems that when I sit down to write futuristic fiction, my imagination rarely comes up with pleasant futures for us humans. Spin City is a little bit more hopeful, but there is implied cataclysm on Earth in the background. That story does not visit Earth, and if I write any sequels, it’s unlikely that I’ll take the narrative to Earth then, either. It’s probably not a very hospitable place.

I’m not the only writer of science fiction that has a hard time seeing us get around the problem of out-of-control global warming. There’s something about the data that when you look at it, and then you look at the rest of the world and the kinds of problems people seem most concerned with, that hope is not the first thing that comes to mind when writing about the future.

Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe enough of us will do what we can to put out the fire on time. I’m not holding my breath, but I am still doing my job.

This is a huge bummer of a post, and I’m sorry for that. Tomorrow I’ll talk about weather as a tool of the writer and it’ll be much more pleasant, but when it comes to the climate and climate change, it’s hard for me to make light of it.

The original planned topic for tonight was “World Building — Festivals, Holidays, and Cultural Touchstones” but I feel like I covered that fairly well just a few nights ago with Celebrations. I might be able to cite more examples in popular stories, but I think it would be more fun to talk about one of my favorite inspirations for stories: gaming.

It is no secret that The Repossessed Ghost is ultimately inspired by a roleplaying game I played in over twenty years ago. My character was Mel, and while he’s a bit different in the book from that game, his voice and attitude are relatively close to what I remember from when I first started playing him.

During the game, I wrote a couple of short stories starring Mel. They weren’t particularly interesting, but it proved to me early on that I could craft a narrative with Mel in the starring role. Long after the game died, Mel remained in my head, begging to be put into his own story. Then with NaNoWriMo 2013, I let him loose. I de-aged him a little and took him back to the very beginning. He did not disappoint me.

So far, Mel is the only character I’ve fully translated from a game to a book, but there are other characters rattling around in my head. There is a trilogy of fantasy stories I would like to write that will feature some of my favorite characters I’ve ever played. It will be a while before I work on that story again, but I trust those voices to be ready when I call for them.

Gaming allows the writer to test out characters in a fun, low-risk way. In the game I was playing earlier today, I’m testing out someone named Connor Smith, a gay blacksmith turned pirate after falling in love with a man that swept him off his feet and whisked him away on adventure. Connor lost his one true love to sirens, and has now found himself the captain of another ship, sailing the Caribbean and trying to avoid dragons. I’m not sure Connor will make it into any of my stories, but I’m having fun with him, and his voice becomes more clear to me every time we get together to play.

Most of my gaming experience is as a player. As a player, I narrow my focus to the narratives, motivations, and voice of a particular character. At the same time, I practice “yes, and” with the other players at the table, while we share the spotlight and create stories together. When running a game, the writer can practice world building and narrative structures, building frameworks that allow the characters to make interesting decisions and drive the plot. These are all skills a writer should hone, whether they play roleplaying games or not.

Gaming does not have to be used to practice writing skills. Writers are going to do that on their own, and the games involved don’t have to be traditional tabletop roleplaying games. I found out this last weekend that my publisher used to play City of Heroes the way I did. Running around in Paragon City, he and his friends would get inspired to write short stories for their characters.

Writers can be inspired by anything, but I find that gaming is particularly good at inspiring narratives, especially when the game leaves you room to fill in the gaps with your own stories.

Michael Gallowglas reminded me recently of the best writing advice he received, which is to live an interesting life so you have things to write about. I believe gaming is a part of that. It’s hard to go out in real life and pull off a heist, or ride a dragon, or slay an evil monarch, or learn to use your psychic abilities to save the world, but that’s the bread and butter of games. And though the events in a game are not real, the emotions those games generate are real, which can make your writing that much more authentic.

The very first post here, In The Beginning…, was posted on July 8th, 2013, a short time after Westercon 66. I talked about how much I love writing, and I gave something of a mission statement: Write every day, and if I’m not working on one of my stories, write something here.

That is a worthy, aspirational goal, which I immediately stumbled over and failed to achieve. I do not write every day. My time management is not that powerful. I think about my stories all the time, and there is some writing-like activity every day of my life, but I have not held with the intent of my mission statement, which is to create or edit words each day.

In the beginning, I didn’t know what I needed. I didn’t know what I was doing. To a certain degree, I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I know more than I did 10 years ago. The key is to find the balance and maintain it. Rather than focus on the word count, focus on the joy. I love writing. It keeps me happy and sane. If I’m experiencing joy and sanity, I’m probably writing enough. It doesn’t hurt to write more, but I don’t need to beat myself over the head if I’m not drafting all the time. Unless I’m under some kind of deadline, in which I need to write faster.

This has been my open journal to describe my journey as a writer. I had nothing published. Now, 10 years later, I have a novel completed, with the official release date just a few days away. I’m working with Water Dragon to get the pre-orders out, and last weekend, I had one of the best weekends of my life, getting to hold my book for the first time, and getting to sell my book to friends and strangers. My friend Mike Baltar, who is currently sitting across from me at this Shut Up and Write, read the book that weekend and told me it was a page turner. Other people I have given ARCs to have messaged me, telling me they’re enjoying it. As I sit here, a slightly damaged copy of the book is resting next to my laptop. I can look over at it from time to time and gather fresh encouragement from it, simply from it existing in the physical world.

These last 10 years haven’t been easy. There have been deaths. Melissa’s sister Patty, and her father, Don. Some people I loved as friends and family are no longer in my life, for various reasons. I’ve battled depression. Truth be told, I’m still battling it, though the last couple of weeks offered ammunition to help fight it.

There has also been joy and blessings. I am extremely fortunate. Privileged. Blessed, if you prefer that word.

In the last 10 years, I have taught High School kids programming in an after school program. I have played in several bands. I have completed 3 novels and dozens of short stories. I have excelled in my work at Trimark. I have survived Covid, President Trump, and some personal trauma that need not be displayed here. I have not let Imposter Syndrome hold me back.

In 1992, someone I cared very deeply about and respected immensely told me that I couldn’t call myself an author until I was published. In 2019, I successfully published a short story in an anthology. That little victory didn’t feel like enough, though. It felt like it didn’t count. In 2023, I have successfully published a novel. Again, it’s sitting right next to me, with the name my parents gave me on the top of the cover and on the spine. I really am an author, now.

Of course, whether you call yourself a writer, an author, a scribe, or a vocabunaut, it’s all the same. It doesn’t matter if people never read your work or if you make the New York Times Bestseller list. Call yourself by whatever name makes you the most happy, and just keep writing. Others might tell you what that one fellow told me in 1992, and if it gets you down, ignore them. If it motivates you to write harder, then let flow the gork.

In order to write, I had to make some sacrifices along the way. Those programming classes I was teaching? That was one of the first things to go. The bands? I had to drop out. During the years where I was most active musically, I didn’t finish any stories. Within 2 years of quitting the bands, I completed 2 novels and several short stories. I want to play music with people, but there is only so much time.

I like to think that if I had more time, I would write more. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? For me to write, I need time, energy, and either motivation or some degree of comfort. Covid hit in 2020 and I lost the energy and the motivation. I pushed through on a novelette for Michael Gallowglas, but it was one of the most painful writing experiences of my life. I had time during the pandemic, but there was a moment where I didn’t think I would write anymore.

I wrote 10 years ago that this was the beginning. Today is not an end. I’m not even sure it’s a middle. I’m still on my journey as a writer. I have achieved a life long goal, but that doesn’t mean the story ends here. I have more tales to spin, more books to publish, more words to put on the page, and more people to reach with my writing.

Let’s keep it going. Ten years down. Who knows how many more to go.

Tonight, let’s talk about celebrations, both from literary and literal perspectives. Because this month marks 10 years of running this blog, I’ll start with ways I’m celebrating in real life, then move into how celebrations can flavor world building.

I’m celebrating this blog this month by writing an entry every month, using topics provided by people I asked on Twitter and Facebook. How do I celebrate 10 years of maintaining this open journal which chronicles my thoughts and feelings on the road to becoming an author? By giving myself more work!

“Brian, you’ve done such a good job that I’m going to make you write an essay every night for 31 days. Yes, you have to.”

It is a way I celebrate, though. I enjoy this. Writing both thrills and calms me, even when the writing is this sort of free and direct speech into a blog. I prefer writing fiction and crafting interesting narratives, but blogging has its charms.

Last weekend, at Baycon 2023, the entire convention felt like a celebration of getting The Repossessed Ghost out into the world. The official release is still a few days away, but people at the convention were able to get the book ahead of everyone else, even those that pre-ordered. There were so many people at the convention that I’ve known over the years that have genuinely supported me and my writing, and most of them bought my book and had me sign it. I defaced their books with my signature and sincere appreciation. Also, complete strangers bought my book and also had me sign it. The whole weekend felt like an out of body experience, where this guy that looks and talks like me was having the time of his life. Baycon 2023 helped me celebrate the release of my book, and it was hard to come back to the “real world” after that.

Celebrations are a part of our culture, both in society and in our family groups. Christmas from family to family looks different. So does Thanksgiving, and Halloween, and the various Hallmark-invented holidays that American culture both celebrates and endures. My family (as in me, Melissa, Bryanna, and Christopher) tends to have more subdued holiday celebrations.

We’re just now on the other side of the celebration of the 4th of July. My family used to go to the mall near Sunrise, where we’d sit on the grass and watch the fireworks show. Sometimes we’d buy fireworks to light up at home, but most years we left the pyrotechnics for others. This year, the kids were off on their own, celebrating in their own ways, while Melissa and I turned on the sprinklers and hoped our pyromaniac neighbors would fail in their efforts to burn down our home. We kept thinking of Melissa’s Dad, that served several tours in Vietnam, and how the loud fireworks were terrible for him.

Our real-world experiences of celebrations can inform our writing, and can make our worlds and our characters more realistic and relatable.

Let’s start with world building. Societies share celebrations. If you’re fictional society doesn’t have regular celebrations or rituals, you’re missing out. With more fantastical settings, the changing of the seasons often have significance, whether its as mundane as a marking of when farming can happen, or whether its something supernatural, such as Death Magic works best in Winter. How did your fictional society rise up? Is there a battle that they commemorate, perhaps by setting fire to an effigy of the dead god that forsook them?

I’ve talked in the past about world building, and how I think authors can get distracted by it and do way more than they need to. When dealing with the setting, you could do worse than having some kind of culturally significant celebration take place when things are happening in your story. Diehard did this and changed what it means to be a Christmas movie. In the cyberpunk novel I’m working on, the company my protagonist works for will definitely have some kind of celebration over the destruction of one of the rival companies, to promote brand loyalty and encourage the workers to stay the course.

Celebrations in stories can enhance the setting, but it can also be part of the plot.

Additionally, how your characters react to celebrations can speak volumes about who they are, and make them more interesting. Does your fearless vigilante eschew holiday festivities because they were an orphan growing up, and they cannot bring themselves to open up during that time because of the pain and trauma they continue to carry with them? Or, maybe your fearless vigilante goes overboard with holiday festivities specifically because they were an orphan, and burying their found family in gifts and food is their awkward way of showing their love and appreciation.

When writing about celebrations to create interesting worlds and characters, we can draw from our experiences and make our writing authentic. This is one of those places where “write what you know” can be used appropriately. By that I mean, you can reach into your own experiences, knowing what it feels like to wake up on Christmas morning, excited to check under the tree for presents you were hoping for. You can impart those same feelings onto your fictional celebrations, or fill your characters with the same excitement and anticipation. Just remember that “write what you know” should not be taken literally.

It’s been 10 years of blogging here. Thank you for stopping by to visit, and thank you for helping me celebrate!

Okay, it’s July 6th, so let’s talk about hydration!

…

I’m… not the person you should listen to about hydration.

Whatever I say here is not medical advice. You should check with your doctor. I’m a writer, which means I have opinions on a lot of different topics, but nothing I have to say about this subject should be taken seriously.

Mostly, I think you should drink when you’re thirsty, and if you’re not thirsty, don’t force it.

I have seen people walking around with a barrel of water, chugging it down like they miss their Atlantean home, and that’s not for me. Maybe it’s good for them? I don’t feel like it’s good for me.

This is rich coming from the guy that gets kidney stones and has high blood pressure, I know, but I don’t think my medical problems have anything to do with me thinking it’s a bad idea to overdo it on the hydration.

Do you want to know how I can tell if I’ve had enough fluid? I look at the color of my pee. If it’s bright yellow or orange, and I’m not taking any drugs that would make it so, I probably haven’t had enough to drink. If it’s closer to clear, I’m doing fine.

Also, I listen to my body. Or at least I try to. I have been known to get distracted, ignore my thirst, and have problems, like kidney stones.

Melissa has lived with me long enough that she knows I can get absorbed in one of my projects or a game and ignore my thirst. She is always trying to get me to drink, and I try to keep her happy.

If you want to drink 8 liters of water a day, go for it, i suppose. Just try to avoid sever hyponatremia. Drink too much water and it will eventually mess up your brain, put you in a coma, and kill you. You have to drink a LOT of water to do that, but it’s happened. On live radio, even.

I probably should drink a little more water than I do. I just prefer my water have a little something in it. Like flavor. Or sometimes coffee. But not caffeine, still.

I think that’s all I have to say about hydration. Maybe hydration will come up in a future story? I don’t know. This was one of the first topics suggested for this month, and I’ve covered it about as well as I’m going to cover it.

In other news, I have a bunch of books that need to go out to pre-orders. I have the list of names, and I can customize them. There is a little bit of bad news, though.

Many people ordered hardback, which is amazing and awesome and I love you for it, but we don’t have enough of the hardbacks to go out this run to cover all the orders. They’re still going to get customized and sent out, but it’ll be about 2 weeks before they’re printed and available. We have enough of the trade paperbacks, though, so those will go out very soon.

The official release is next week, on July 12th. I’ll have more to say about that soon, as well!

Today was the first day back to work after one of the best weekends of my life, so I’m going to make it easy on myself and use today as a day of planning for the rest of the month.

Like so many Octobers, I want to create a blog post every day this month. I stumbled a little bit out the gate, but like I said before, these rules are arbitrary and I’m holding to the spirit of them. So far, so good.

I asked on Twitter and Facebook what I should talk about this month, and here is the list of topics compiled from your suggestions. I’m not sure how many are winners, but I’ll make the most of it and we’ll have a good time.

Let’s see if I can order these by day number, including the days that have already passed:

1. Baycon 2023 Day 1, Blog Year 10
2. Baycon 2023 Day 2
3. Baycon 2023 Day 3 – The Brain Weasels
4. Baycon 2023 Day 4 — Time To Go Home
5. All The Things We’ll Talk About This Month
6. Hydration
7. Celebrations
8. The 10 Year Recap
9. Gaming as Writing Fuel
10. Climate and Climate Change
11. Weather and Seasons — Setting the Mood
12. The Release of The Repossessed Ghost
13. Dragons!
14. The Pros and Cons of Different Writing Communities
15. Pushing Through Writing Struggles
16. The Joys of Semicolons
17. Favorite Whiskeys
18. Shoes
19. Romeo and Juliet
20. The Byzantine-Sasanian War of 620-628 AD
21. Mashed Potatoes
22. State of The Brian — 2023
23. The Rise of Queer Protagonists in Genre Fiction
24. The Most Common Questions I am Asked
25. Monty Python
26. Water Dragon Publishing
27. Writing in Someone Else’s Sandbox
28. Sequels!
29. The Repossessed Ghost Readings!
30. My Story Ideas — 2023 Edition
31. The Games We Play

That’s the list. I may move things around, and I may call an audible and do something not in the list and rearrange things. This is sort of how I create my outlines before a draft. It’s a plan set in clay, not in stone, and if I see a better way, I’ll do that.

Melissa and I just got home. We’ve unloaded the car, but we haven’t really unpacked. That might be a task put off to tomorrow.

What can I say about the final day of Baycon?

I had such a good time the whole weekend. I attended my final panel, “The Greatest Writing Advice I’ve Ever Received” and it may have been the best panel I’ve ever been a part of. It was certainly the most attended.

After that, I spent most of the time in the dealer room, and I wasn’t at the Water Dragon table nearly as much as I was at the Small Publishing in a Big Universe podcast table. I got to interview several people for the podcast. While I was there, a few people I met last night came buy with freshly purchased books and had me sign them. That’s never going to get old.

All good things must come to an end, though. I attended the closing ceremonies, then Melissa and I helped put away all the Water Dragon stuff and pack it to the car. Once that was done, all of the Water Dragon folk (me included) went to the patio outside the bar and had one more drink before hitting the road. We had a great visit.

It got late while we were driving home, and we wound up seeing more fireworks than I expected. At several points on the freeway, the skies surrounding us were on fire. Traffic was a bit thick when we dropped of Mike at his place, but we didn’t have a problem getting back on the freeway, and we continued to drive beneath multicolored sparks and light blossoms.

Honestly, after the weekend I just experienced, it felt like the whole world was celebrating with me.

We’re home, now. Tomorrow, it’s back to the usual routine. It’s not quite 11PM, and it sounds like the pyromaniac neighbors might be starting to wind down, too. Maybe they heard the news about the house fire just a few blocks away. Unlikely, but it’s a possibility. I turned on all the sprinklers just in case our luck turned bad tonight.

I feel inspired, and I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to write. I haven’t felt this excited to get back to writing in a long time.

This was a good trip.

We’re rapidly approaching midnight, so I need to get this finished before I’m stuck writing two posts tomorrow.

Today was another excellent day. I was on two panels, both of which went fairly well. I noticed while sitting on the panel, listening to other panelists speaking, my imposter’s syndrome reared up. The voice in my head said “You shouldn’t be up here” so loud it seemed the people in the audience should have heard it.

Several times I walked through the halls of the hotel alone, and the brain weasels were there, trying to bring me down. “You’ve been too happy for too long, Brian. You should be sad again. It’s what you deserve.”

I’m not sure where it comes from. I pushed it down and focused on the happy things. All weekend, I have visited with friends and people I admire, and they have all been so supportive that I’m not sure what to do with the positive emotions.

My excellent friend Mike Baltar bought my book this weekend and read it entirely. He told me it was a page turner, and he was excited to get to the end. It’s everything I want and hope to hear, and I thanked him with as much grace as I could while a part of me wanted to reject the praise, the way someone’s body might try to reject a transplanted organ.

Nothing at this convention has been bad, for me. All of my internal drama is internal, and I don’t know why I do this to myself.

I’m winding down now, getting ready to go to sleep. There’s one more day, and one more panel for me to attend, and it’s one I’m looking forward to as it is The Greatest Writing Advice I’ve Ever Received. I think that one is going to be a lot of fun.

Tomorrow, Melissa and I will need to return to home and all of our normality. There’s been so many good and happy events this weekend, I should have plenty of fuel to fight the brain weasels for a long while.

Woops! I didn’t get this posted yesterday. Has my post-a-day challenge for July already failed?

Not really. I’ll post this one now, and another later today. Life happens, and it’s important we forgive ourselves, especially when the rules we made up for ourselves are arbitrary.

Besides, the main reason I didn’t post yesterday was because the day was exceptionally full, and when we got back to my room last night, I immediately went to sleep. Baycon Day 2 was a full and happy day.

The biggest highlight of the day was in the evening, when Melissa and I took several wonderful people to dinner. Once every convention, I try to take a group out and treat them, so it can just be a time of low stress, good food, and happy conversation. Last night was no exception. It was a fabulous time.

I attended a panel earlier in the morning on How to Make Believable Characters, which was interesting and engaging. I found myself nodding my head a lot, agreeing with what was being said.

I participated on one panel a little later, on Noir in Science Fiction and Fantasy. When putting the program together, I’m not sure they knew my particular set of qualifications for that panel, since Spin City isn’t out or broadly known, but based on the experience of writing that novel, and because that particular combination of noir and SciFi is my catnip, I had a couple of things I could say on the subject. I think the panel went well. Attendance was light, so it was low stress and low stakes, which is fine by me.

In the evening, I briefly attended Rebecca Inch-Partridge’s party for the release of her book, Escaping the Dashia. Years ago, when Rebecca and I were in a writing group together, I read early versions of that book at the same time that group was reading early versions of The Repossessed Ghost. It’s great to see both books taking physical form and going out into the world.

Melissa and I went to Michael Gallowglas’s poetry slam, but I only could stay briefly. The poetry was excellent, and I wanted to stay for more, but my body simply said No, so I listened to it. We came back to the room and I immediately passed out.

All in all, I would say Day 2 was an excellent day. Highly recommend it. Would do it again.