Author: Shoshana

Vacation and Completing A Project

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writings

There is nothing more satisfying than completing a project.

Used to be in the old days I’d be afraid of finishing something. If you finish a project, you have to let it out loose into the world and talk about it and let other people see it. That used to be frightening. These days, there is nothing more that I enjoy than crossing off a project on my list of things to do and going to have a celebratory cup of coffee. (Because really, when is there not an excuse to have a cup of coffee?)

The other day I completed No Exit for Evil Hat Productions. It’s one of the stretch goals for the meteoric Kickstarter that’s under a month to competition. It’s been a joy to work on and now I’m looking forward to poking at more things with Fate Core. Because I’ll say this, it wasn’t just fun to write – writing No Exit gave me tons of ideas. I have been kicking them around in a notebook for a bit. The sky’s the limit with a system like Fate Core and my friends are going to get bombarded with ideas for a tabletop game or six in the next few weeks.

That is, when I get back from drinking butter beer at Harry Potter World.

Vacation is a heck of a thing. I took the opportunity to go in between semesters of graduate school and I’m going to nerd it up at the giant Hogwarts in Orlando for a week. And, y’know, sit next to a pool in the sun and write. Because a change of scenery does ya good.

In other news, I’ve also picked up my novel again last night to finish it. Because, as I said before, I’m not scared of finishing things any longer. Consider that a lesson learned from 2012 — writing is the act of bringing something into the world. And if you don’t let it free, it hasn’t really been completed. I’m not going to be scared of that any longer. Hey 2013, let’s see how much I can get done.

Fate Core: Or, How To Adore Your Editor And Weaponize Memory

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writing Update

It’s been quiet so far on the home front here at my blog. And that’s probably because it got mighty busy around the holiday season. Graduate school final projects are no joke and then the holidays hit, which included my birthday and New Years as it does every year. In between all of that, of course, I’ve been tackling the amazing project I’ve been doing for Fate Core – my setting in psychological horror, No Exit.

The process of creating No Exit has been a learning curve and an eye-opening process for me. Not only am I organizing a lot of thoughts about the basics of psychological horror, I’ve been learning quite a lot about how much to show an audience in a gaming book. Coming from a fiction and screen writing background, writing for games is a whole new ballgame that requires a different way of thinking. Thankfully I’ve got a great editor, John Adamus, mentoring me through the process. His comments on my first draft made me cringe, then laugh, then cringe again. Then crack up a heck of a lot in retrospect. A handy tip: whenever your editor hands you a note, always consider it carefully and decide whether you agree or not before you start making changes. Unless it’s about grammar or layout, in which case you’re probably terribly wrong and should fix it immediately.

My favorite part of creating No Exit so far has been messing with the mechanics. I’ve enjoyed finding out the best way to fight an environment in a game and what would be the best way to do things like, oh, attack an apartment building. What fascinated me was the idea that you could do these things with Fate Core easily – need a new mechanic? Hack in there and create what was needed. Don’t have a skill that exactly fits what you need? Make it work yourself. The sky really is the limit. I’ve had a lovely time finding a way to turn people’s memories into weapons and creating a mechanic for it.

Speaking of new things I’m excited to see – the other stretch goal settings and scenarios for Fate Core have me excited to give them a chance. I really want to play White Picket Witches by Filamena Young and Camelot Trigger by Rob Wieland because small town witches and futuristic Camelot just sounds like fun. And it only goes to show what you can do with Fate Core – which, as far as I can tell, is pretty much anything.

I’ve also been delving into some other inspirations for No Exit recently. Here’s some things I’ve been listening to and watching to keep me in the mindset of this setting:

Songs:

“Amen” by Leonard Cohen, “Seven Exodus” by Tub Ring, “No Light” by Florence + The Machine

Television:

“Lost”, “Twin Peaks”

Movies:

“Identity”, “Jacob’s Ladder”

Today I hope to complete draft two and send it on it’s way. A change of scene is hard when you’re trying to write scary and you’re sitting in the bright sunny SoCal sun!

FATE CORE: “No Exit” As Fate Psychological Horror

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writing Update, Writings

Hey all of you out there in gamer land. You might have heard that this week has been HUGE on Kickstarter for a game called Fate Core. You may have heard of it before, but if you haven’t here’s the skinny. Fate Core is the awesome new version of the Fate System, which is the engine behind such games as Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files RPG, and Bulldogs. The folks over at Evil Hat Productions put together a fantastic new Fate Core and the book went up on Kickstarter this week. And, wouldn’t you know, it’s doing pretty well.

Yeah, okay, that’s the understatement of a lifetime. It kind of exploded in a glory of Fudge Dice and amazing stretch goals. The book was funded in the first fifteen minutes and as of this writing is somewhere around $93,o00. The response has been unbelievable and as a huge Fate fan I’m thrilled. But I’m not just here to raise a celebratory glass to Fred Hicks and the folks at Evil Hat. I’m here to tell you about a little scenario called “No Exit” being written for Fate Core – by yours truly.

A few days before the Kickstarter went up, Fred reached out to me to write a supplement that would be included as a Kickstarter stretch goal. We tossed around a few ideas but one rose to the top pretty fast. The scenario’s called “No Exit” and if you’ve heard that title before, maybe you’ve read a certain play by Sartre by the same name. That play’s been one of my favorites for a long time and feeds perfectly into the themes of interpersonal psychological horror I want to explore with “No Exit”.

“It’s what one does, and nothing else, that proves the stuff one’s made of.” – INEZ, Jean-Paul Sartre’s NO EXIT

Folks who know me know that I love games that give you the space to explore powerful interpersonal relationships and interactions. Any time I can really get into deep role-play situations that tug and pull at social dynamics, charged intertwined backstories, or intense psychological drama, you’re singing my tune. I’m a big fan of shows like Lost that play havoc with people’s emotions by twisting each character around the other, making everyone play off each other in remarkably odd circumstances. The goal is to discover how people REALLY are when the chips are down. So I boiled down those elements with a weird, unnerving scenario that came out of a strange encounter in the dead of night.

I had come home late from graduate school late one night and walked into the apartment to find no one home. That’s not unusual so I went about my business. As I was getting ready for bed, I heard a noise at the front door. As it was three AM, I got concerned and went to check. I tried to pull open the front door only to find it stuck. I tugged it over and over, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally I pulled as hard as I could and the door unstuck with a jolt, and I looked into my hallway. Down the hall stood a man, stooped over, looking at the floor. He looked up at me from under a hat for a moment and then walked through the door to the fire stairs. I wondered what the man was doing in the hall and why it sounded like he was at my door. I looked down and saw I was standing on a religious pamphlet going on in tiny, hand-written letters about bringing me back to God. I turned and went back inside and made sure to lock the door. I tossed the creepy pamphlet, forgot about it for the most part and went to bed. But before I fell asleep, I imagined one thing: what if the pamphlet had said something else? What if instead it was just a note.

It would say, “I know your secret.”

What if it was more specific? How about, “Your husband has been lying to you all along”?

No, more specific. “Your daughter isn’t your daughter after all.”

What if there were more notes, one for every apartment? What if there were phone calls, and mysterious voices that spoke through drains? What if there was a man in a hat who told you as you went to the garbage to think about last Christmas, when everyone went home early from the office party and you stayed behind with that girl from Accounting. And don’t you just remember that night, but you never told your SO for fear of what they’d do…

I lay in bed thinking about these options. Then I wondered about the front door and thought:

“What if it wouldn’t open?”

Intimate psychological pressure, confinement and the search for meaning. To paraphrase Sartre, hell really is other people.

With my stretch goal funded on Day One, “No Exit” will be released at the end of the Fate Core Kickstarter run. And I’ll give more updates about the process as I go along. Meanwhile, this project’s a hell of a ride and I’m excited as can be to be a part of it. Time to get on the writing fingers and go find out just what keeps people between the four walls of Westley House.

Flash Fiction: Elderberry Wine

by Shoshana, posted in Flash Fiction, Writings

Here’s a little flash fiction update from me, inspired by my hero Chuck Wendig for a quick mid-week writing excursion. He’s my hero by the way because of an amazing post on his blog about quitting versus failing that I suggest for ANYONE to read. Like anyone, creative types or not. Anyway, the constraint of this week’s Flash Fiction challenge is that the work has to be 100 words or under. This one hit just 100 words. Enjoy!

Elderberry Wine by Shoshana Kessock

Elderberry wine tastes like piss. It made the cheese taste like moth-eaten socks.

“You’ll marry me,” Adam said. He handed me a piece of meat, which I nibbled; more socks now. Meaty socks.

I stood up. The trees overhead swayed, the wind brisk and cold. I fought down the urge to scratch my leg where an ant had crawled.

“You got the wrong meat, the wrong cheese to go with it, and the most god awful wine,” I accused. I dusted off my skirt. “The next time you want to ask a girl to marry you? Try asking correctly.”

“Promise Small, Deliver Big”: The Art of Project Balance

by Shoshana, posted in On Writing, Writing Testimonial

During Metatopia, a discussion came up at one of the panels regarding best practices for freelance writers and game designers. The question had developed out of a talk about how to pitch for work on other people’s projects and how to develop a reputation for being a freelancer people want to work with. As I may have mentioned in a previous post, reputation really becomes your currency when dealing with a small industry like gaming. And I don’t mean that in a calculating sort of way. No, the kind of writer you are and the practices you’re known for really does impact what work you may get in the future.

One of the things that was mentioned at the talk was the expectations that freelancers put forward to their bosses. It can be a temptation to promise that you can do a whole lot and then, when the chips are down, fall short of deadlines. Why? Because there is a temptation as a freelancer to want to do more, to show that you can handle more, and then struggle to produce all those checks your body can barely cash. When someone brought that up, I had a thudding moment in my stomach and realized: holy cow, I do that all the time. In my excitement to get involved with great projects, I tell myself that it’s okay to take on ‘just one more thing’ because the opportunity might not come up again. And I do this, even when I know that I don’t have time to take on one more thing because I’m already struggling with what’s on my plate. But the urge to impress, the urge to be involved with all the cool things, is difficult to ignore. It’s also a bad practice I’m working on breaking, and here’s what I discovered in the process: nobody is going to think you’re better if you break your head to produce one more piece of work.

During the talk, Clark Valentine (an awesome writer and game designer) said something I really liked: “Promise small, deliver big.” And it resonated with me very deeply. I think it’s built into a lot of our culture to be performance driven, and one of the keys to performance is seemingly how much can you get done. It’s a very rat-race kind of thought process: how much work can I chug through per day, per week, per month, how much can I put on my resume. Yet by promising smaller – taking on fewer projects with perhaps less ambitious goals – you get to impress by delivering solid, well-considered work that you didn’t have to rush to produce. With less on your plate, you give your talent room to move and have a better chance of delivering on time than if you were stacked to the rafters with projects.

I speak in this case from personal experience. Over the last few years, I’ve fallen into the habit of saying yes to projects even when I knew I was vastly stretching my work load capacity. I figured ‘I can get it done by sacrificing some extra TV time or hang-out time’ and that work was more important. It took Hurricane Sandy proving to me that this kind of intense schedule-packing is dangerous. When I had no ability to work for one week, my schedule went into catastrophic meltdown and I’m forced to play catch-up on lots of things. Why? Because I packed my schedule so tight there was no room for error. That was my mistake, and one I don’t plan on making again.

So what did I learn from all this? A fundamental skill at being a writer or game designer or artist of any kind is knowing your limits. You may believe you’ll have all the time for the half dozen things on your plate, but it takes a combination of diligence, discipline and some handy time management to make sure you get it all done. Overbooking yourself will only take away the time you have to dedicate to each of your individual goals and ultimately water down what you have to offer. Plus, if you run into any snags, you need to have built-in time to still meet deadline and not lose control of the situation because of a single snafu. Then, if you have that extra time, you can deliver early and bigger than promised and THAT can be impressive all on it’s own.

This is how I’m planning on adjusting my work ethic from now on to be a more responsible freelancer, both to those I’m working for and to myself. Because in the end, I could sacrifice my TV time or friend time to work, but all work and no play makes Shoshana a disheveled, grouchy cat. And in the end, I want to enjoy my work and not resent it. By cultivating best practices, that’s how I’m going to keep writing and game design fun, which is one of the major reasons I chose this career.

Live and learn, they say. So here’s to a lesson learned.

Metatopia: Where Game Designers Come To Play

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design

As I mentioned in a previous post, I rode out Hurricane Sandy in Jersey City with some amazing gamer friends of mine. Yet all I could think about while we waited two and a half hours on line for gas, or when sitting in the dark by candlelight playing Munchkin, was that I needed to escape. Not because I don’t love my friends (though I got cabin fever something wicked). No, I needed to get down to Morristown NJ for the second annual Double Exposure game design and playtest convention, Metatopia.

Metatopia as a convention is near and dear to my heart. I cut my teeth on running LARPs and tabletop events at the other two Double Exposure conventions, Dreamation and Dexcon. I also got my first taste of pitching and developing a new RPG idea by attending the indie gaming roundtables hosted at those two conventions, where green folks interested in creating a new roleplaying game could come and pitch their ideas to a table of industry professionals. I was blessed in that time to have folks like Rob Donoghue (Evil Hat Productions) and brilliant editor John Adamus give me advice at these conventions that drove me towards taking game design seriously as a career option for my future. So when the convention’s director Vinny mentioned an entire game design convention, strictly for the sake of bringing game designers together to share information and feedback on developing games, I was excited as hell. Last year’s Metatopia helped me develop my game, Wanderlust, into something approaching a coherent document. GenCon and the First Exposure Playtest hall, run by the Double Exposure folks, gave me the next step. And then came this year’s Metatopia. Here are the convention highlights:

  • Wanderlust Focus Groups: So as I may have mentioned, there was a wee problem of being trapped in Jersey City during the hurricane. That meant that I did not get to go home to Brooklyn and get ANY of my play test material (or business cards, or, y’know, clothes!) going into this convention. Instead of presenting a working playtest, I instead presented two focus groups on my game. One hour focused on the game mechanics and the second on the game world setting and character types. I was blessed to have folks like John Adamus, Michael Consoli, Caius Ward and the amazing Darren Watts sit in to give me feedback (there was a final gentleman at the table whose name I did not catch). I was excited to find that the changes I made after the GenCon focus group seemed to work better and with the feedback from these talks I’m now ready to go into testing to get this game out the door! I also came across a very good saying about my game, it seems: “The act of discovery isn’t gentle or easy.” Take that as you will…
  • Hey, I hear you like panels, so I put some panels on your panels: Who needs breaks? Or food? I’ve got panels to go to! The schedule for Metatopia was jam packed with great games to playtest, but the highlight for me was the amazing panel track. Darren Watts worked very closely with the Double Exposure organizers to put together panels on everything from How to Cultivate A Fan Community to The Care and Feeding of Artists to How Not to Be A Jerk In Your Games. I was delighted to be on three panels as a speaker, including Women in Game Design, Sexism in Gaming, and a long talk on LARP. I attended numerous panels with folks like Brennan Taylor (Galileo Games), Kenneth Hite (Pelgrane Press), John Stavropolous (NerdNYC), Amanda Valentine (Editor Extraordinaire for numerous companies), and Jason Morningstar (Bully Pulpit Games, writer of Fiasco). My favorite panels included the Evil Hat Productions panel, the panel about dealing with artists, an intense panel on how to pitch your game and John Adamus’s writing panel. There were so many I didn’t get to go to, but there’s only so many hours in the day!
  • Pro Tip: Don’t Ever Walk in Late! My most amazing moment of the weekend came on the heels of an epic zonk-out by me on Saturday afternoon. I was rocking a cold so I took a nap, only to wake up late for the RPG Development Panel. I shook a leg downstairs to slip in late to a room full of some of the best folks in the industry up in front of the room: Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue from Evil Hat, Darren Watts, Jason Morningstar, Cam Banks from Margaret Weiss and the illustrious Kenneth Hite. I got to my seat just as another designer was finishing up pitching and talking about his game. When nobody else raised my hand, Rob decided to toss me to the lions to ask me about how Wanderlust was doing! After mumbling something about just waking up from a nap (I’m so articulate when sleepy) I brought up the pitch I’d worked on at Mr. Hite’s panel earlier that day and tossed it at the panel – and it went great! I got to thank Rob later for tossing me in front of that truck, but it was worth every second.
  • State of LARP Address: It was my privilege to sit on a panel of four to talk to a room full of people about LARP. Considering that I want LARP to be the focus of my academic career at the NYU Game Center, I was glad to get the opportunity to discuss my passion in a serious discussion. What I discovered is that… well, there’s a lot to talk about. I also discovered that while opinions may vary on aspects of the hobby, there are universals across different kinds of LARP that we could all come together about. I was also super excited to hear that Jason Morningstar is developing a LARP version of Fiasco! I can’t wait to give it a shot. I also got the opportunity to speak with William White, one of the authors of Immersive Gameplay, and share some personal insights into the best practices when running and playing a LARP.
  • Women in Gaming? We Have Those! Two other great panels that happened at Metatopia this year came about as a result of some work between myself and Avonelle Wing, one of Double Exposure’s organizers. She and I got into this five hour discussion over the state of women in the gaming industry, both on the professional end and within the community, as well as about female representations in game content and art. We then made sure there would be two panels talking about the problems we saw. One, Women in Gaming, brought together myself, Avonelle, and two amazing women, Amanda Valentine and El Wood. We tackled issues of subconscious bias, confronting sexism, cultivating a female-friendly community, and the duty of women to support one another, without ever once dealing in man-bashing language. I felt a particular thrill when I was able to say to the audience, “First of all, I don’t believe feminism is a dirty word” and got a round of applause. Thank you, Metatopia, for engaging in a great debate about women’s issues and letting me be part of the discussion.
  • Above All, Metatopia Is About The People: The best part about coming to Metatopia had to be the people I got to spend time with. while many folks might spend their time at a convention like Metatopia focusing on the formal aspects of the play testing (because that’s what we’re there for!) or trying to network like mad, I found that I genuinely enjoyed just spending time with and getting to know folks from around the gaming community. I really enjoyed shooting the breeze with plenty of people who I previously had felt too shy to approach. This convention really taught me that, despite my shyness and the intimidation I may have felt to approach some people because of their fame in the indie community, as soon as I relaxed, people were open, friendly and genuine. I was also humbled by how supportive tons of folks have been in regards to my game and my company, Phoenix Outlaw Productions, lending advice, ideas, critique and encouragement while I bring this company and my RPG from dream to reality. If I had to thank everyone it’d take all day, but I can’t imagine not saying a special thanks to Rob Donoghue, John Adamus, Fred Hicks and Brian Engard for being so awesome.

On the heels of Metatopia, I’ve got a bunch of killer notes to update for Wanderlust and preparation for play testing to begin. I’ve also got the name Metatopia going around at the NYU Game Center, because how can these two amazing forces of game design and play testing not come together for more awesomeness in the future? I also obviously cannot wait for next year. Considering the last two years, I want to pledge to myself that come next Metatopia, I’ll be able to talk about the process of finishing and publishing Wanderlust and then going on to the next game on my mind! But if I want to do that, I gotta get to work. Once more, I want to say thanks to the great folks who made Metatopia this year what it was, and I can’t wait until next time!

Dice, Dead Deer and Dire Cabin Fever: Hurricane Sandy After-Report

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Random Aside

I, Shoshana Kessock, have never been so glad to sit at a computer and type things to the Interwebs.

It’s been a few days now since I escaped the blacked out portions of New Jersey and got to a place with power, and I’m still counting my blessings every time I turn on a light switch. The devastation of Hurricane Sandy that wrecked portions of the East Coast and walloped the Tri-State area had me sheltering in place with some friends in Jersey City for the duration. We returned from an amazing weekend at Deathcon, Dystopia Rising’s Halloween season ender, just in time to hunker down for the storm. Eschaton Media staffers Ashley Zdeb, Sean and Megan Jaffe, their roommate Shaheen, my best friend Andrea and our friend Schuyler made ourselves at home for the crisis. The story has become my favorite example for how generous and welcoming gamers can be, as the good folks opened their home to me for six days when the power went out during the storm Monday and stayed that way until Friday evening.

Now, you’d ask: what did you do during that time? Well, folks, we did what any good gamers would do during a shut-in period of a few days. In between trips to the local Target to charge our items, gather supplies and generally touch base with the outside world, we did what gamers will do. We found games we liked and we played the hell out of them. What did we play? I’m glad you asked!

  1. Fiasco: For those of you unfamiliar with Fiasco, it’s an amazing tabletop storytelling game written by Jason Morningstar. Described on Amazon.com as ‘a roleplaying game about ordinary people with powerful ambitions and poor impulse control’, Fiasco is an incredible narrative-driven game that lets you essentially play out a Coen Bros. movie with little to no prep and a lot of interpersonal insanity. The version we played was based on a horror world created by Sean Jaffe where some folks from a small town were hanging out in a bar when they’re offered $50,000 each to watch a shiny red Cadillac for one month. The catch? They just couldn’t open the trunk. But what happens when you hear the trunk a’thumping? Yeah, it was that kind of game. Sean also included some amazing horror elements in the game that had us genuinely clawing at each other’s arms and jumping at the smallest noise… which was funny, since we were playing it through the worst of the Hurricane. It’s a testament to how good a GM Sean is and how solid Fiasco is as a game that we barely blinked when the power went out – we just picked up candles and kept going.
  2. Munchkin Cthulhu– What could make a card game like Steve Jackson’s Munchkin better? Toss Cthulhu into it! The popular card game has about a dozen editions now, including one based on Firefly, on White Wolf games, on James Bond and Super Heroes, but it’s the Cthulhu one that’s nearly standard for any gamer nerd. We played the ‘kick down the door and kill a monster, but don’t forget to screw your friends over!’ game by candlelight on the third night of our forced Staycation and it was actually the most civilized session of this game I’ve ever played. Maybe we just didn’t want to get all Lord of the Flies over defeating the Dread Cthulhu, but I’ve had some wicked competitive games of Munchkin in the past. This one managed to stay fun and supportive all the way thru, like when we all let Sean beat up on Dread Cthulhu because, heck, why not?
  3. Lego: It’s not really a game so much as a toy, I guess, but I’ll include this here. Designing Legos by candlelight can be fun. Watching friends try to create a better spaceship than the other is hilarious and awesome.
  4. Super Hexagon: Got some battery left on your iPhone? Why not try an amazing game called Super Hexagon, why doncha? If you can’t get a signal out to friends and family, you might as well play this super abstract, super hard game to pass the time.

The other thing this vacation from the land of power and cell service did was give me an opportunity to prepare for Metatopia, the game design convention which passed this last weekend. Friday I was lucky to get out to Morristown for the con and had such an amazing time, it will get it’s own blog post. However, during the blackout, I got the opportunity to toss around ideas for finalizing the system for my tabletop RPG, Wanderlust. I also gave feedback for a project Sean was working on as we game designed in the dark.

All in all, I learned a couple of valuable things during this hurricane. One, when putting a car in a garage, make sure it has a way to be opened without utilizing electricity BEFORE the power goes out. Two, I can cook better than I ever imagined using just a stovetop. Three, games can make the worst situation so much better. And four, MAN do I get cabin fever in the dark. Special thanks to Justin Cronin’s new book, The Twelve, for helping me to get through it all.

Next post will talk about the amazing time I had at this year’s Metatopia. Until then, let’s wish everyone recovering from Hurricane Sandy good thoughts and much help. Also don’t forget to vote!

All Of The Games: Game Design, Graduate School and Me

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writings

It’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left without word. Can you ever forgive me?

If you’re still reading, perhaps you have. Maybe you’ve put aside the long wait for this post and wait instead to hear what has been going on in my life. For that, dear reader, I appreciate your patience and would reward you with cookies if the internet had the ability to send real baked-goods thru wifi. But sadly, since I can’t email a brownie, I’ll just give you the low-down on the world as according to me.

Life has exploded exponentially lately. I was accepted earlier this year into the NYU Game Center MFA program for Game Design for it’s inaugural class. For those of you not familiar, Tisch School of the Arts within NYU has a program that studies games of all kinds. It’s built around the Game Center, which is its library of games that students can come in and play as part of an ongoing project to study games as a growing media and job market. This year was the first time they expanded the program to include a graduate program and yours truly was accepted. I’m humbled and ultimately boggled by the fact that I’m studying under amazing teachers like Jesper Juul, Eric Zimmerman, Katherine Isbister and the head of department, Frank Lantz. I applied on a wing and a prayer and now I’m studying game design and theory at one of the best schools in the world! For a while it was hard for me to fathom – the whole thing felt very surreal.

Then school started and surreal disappeared when the work-load began. Graduate school is, no joke, probably one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever had educationally. The work load is pretty intense and, along with the other projects I’m working on, keep me very busy. But I’m designing some great games with some amazing people, all to make me a better designer for my future career, so how can I complain? I’ve met some amazing fellow students so far and we’ve jumped head-first into the work. Already we wrote a kind of cracked-out version of the card game war called WarSlayerz (the Z is very important) and I’m learning how to work on digital games via platforms like GameMaker and Unity. The digital aspect of the program is the most daunting for me, as I’ve never done computer programming at all in my life, and I’m struggling to grok a completely different language to translate game design ideas into little digital dudes. I’m also making sure to rep pretty hard the wonderful world of analog gaming, especially the live action role-play community and their importance as an evolving international media. I’ve been up, burning the midnight oil to do all my work and my other projects outside of school.

Speaking of those other projects, I’m still blogging over at Tor.com even though my posts have slowed down distinctly. GenCon rolled right into a LARP weekend and then into orientation and graduate school, which effectively tore through my writing schedule. I’ve recently taken on reviewing NBC’s newest post-apoc show Revolution for Tor.com and I’ve got a few more posts coming out. I enjoy working for Tor.com so much and the chance to do review and criticism is something I don’t want to give up while going through school. There might, however, be a wee slow down from the posting schedule I had before.

That’s also because, outside of the Game Center, I’m working hard at developing my tabletop RPG game Wanderlust. In the coming weeks there will be more information about it, including the launch of my company Phoenix Outlaw Production’s website, the exciting announcement of new talent being added to our company’s team, and even a schedule of publication and (hopefully) our Kickstarter. We’ll have a Facebook page all set up for updates too that’ll get put up here with commentary from my partner in crime Josh Harrison and more articles here about how things are going development-wise for the game. I believe it’s important to keep folks in the loop about how a game dev is going so they can see the process from the bottom up, and I’m excited as hell to share the development of this game with you. I’m working with a fantastic editor as well in John Adamus and he’s been fabulous at helping me turn this book into a space-epic reality.

I also recently broke through one of my most challenging fears by completing and submitting a short story to an anthology (which I’ll be writing about in a future post). That plus some other freelance work, my storytelling for Dystopia Rising New Jersey and preparation for Double Exposure’s Metatopia convention has kept me busy. When do I sleep? Let’s just say the last few weeks has been full of Red Eyes (lots of espresso!) and power naps.

So that’s the lay of the land, sports fans. I’m working hard to produce what writing I can in both the game design field and in plain creative writing. But I don’t want to forget that I have this blog too and it’s chock full of space for commentary and articles I want to put together too. In the upcoming weeks you’ll hear more about lots of nerdy things, including stuff I’ve read that is keeping me sane throughout the hectic work weeks and some views on writing too. Meanwhile, I’m staring down a pile of work with my name on it so I’m signing off.

Until next time, writers and gamers and geeks out there – don’t let the man get you down. Or the beagle. Those beagles are deceptively shifty.

He Said, She Said: Writing To Opposite Gender

by Shoshana, posted in On Writing, Writing Update, Writings

In one of my previous blog posts, I talked about how I love reading for inspiration. In my mad crash through my bookshelves recently, I finished (among other books), Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds and Lev Grossman’s The Magician King. What fascinated me about both of these books was their use of strong, complex female characters who were nuanced and engaging – specifically, Miriam Black in Blackbirds and Julia in The Magician King. Why bring up these two authors and their great female characters? Well, folks, they’re two examples of great male authors writing great female characters.

But Shoshana, someone will ask, why bring up the gender of the authors in question at all? Why’ve you gotta go all gender about good writing? Gender is a hot-button questions. And may I say, wherever that term comes from, there are degrees of ‘hot’. Where ‘who left the toilet seat up‘ might be a somewhat warm question and ‘did you sleep with my boyfriend‘ is a hand-in-the-toaster kind of hot, gender representation is one of those scorchers. Nuclear strike from orbit scorchers. Please deposit twenty-five-cents for SPF 9-Million scorchers. Everyone’s got a soap box about it, yours truly included. Hell, a lot of my blog posts for Tor.com or other places have been on the subject of gender representation in media of various forms or in the gaming world. But if I’m going to be able to stand up and question the way that other people represent women in their work, I believe it’s only honest to come clean about a problem I have as a writer.

So here goes. Hi, I’m a female writer, and I find writing dudes difficult. There, I said it.

This issue has come up for me because the novel I’m writing right now has a male and female protagonist. It’s the first time I’ve tried for a solid male protagonist to carry along a full-length novel and while I’ve found that while I can connect to my female protagonist Kate without too much trouble, I struggle to find traction when writing Scott. He slipped through my fingers whenever I tried and I began to wonder if it was because of difficulty capturing the male mindset, or if I’m just having trouble with Scott as a character? That got me back to thinking about male perspective versus female perspective, and if in the end there is a difference.

When creating Scott, I tried to think about the environmental factors that created this guy, the life he lived, and the thoughts he might have. I considered what he might have gone through, what ideas might have shaped him, and what his attitudes might be on things. In other words, I went about creating him the same way that I would any character: considering their history, their environment, their upbringing and factors like political ideas, orientation, ect. That’s how I approach the creation of any character, be they main protagonist  or side character, and of either gender. As I began that shaping, I wondered if there was something inherent to consider about being a guy that needs to be included in writing a guy, a perspective that I was missing. Was that the place I started to have problems with his personality? Or was it just that I couldn’t reach the character of Scott as a person?

In the end, I went to the internet for advice and found, rather than a greek chorus, a cacophony of dissenting opinions. The one, however, that seemed to resonate the most with me was in blog posts by SciFi writer Hilari Bell. She stated that actions a character takes are not necessarily gendered. When writing a character the actions are only as ‘genderized’ as you want them to be. Character X might go across the street to shoot someone, for example, but how you describe their actions is more important than their gender. The character must be informed by their life experience, which are affected by their experience with being their gender, but it’s just another factor in their life along with any other. She also states that often, bad writing comes when writers get hung up on gender and don’t focus on characterization instead.

But are there portions to a character that are inherently important due to their gender, such as gender-specific experiences? I’m thinking of things like issues of birth and motherhood with women. And are certain experiences very gender-based, such as differences in sexual experiences? When bringing that to the page, it can feel like a stretch to try and portray a man’s headspace in sex when you’re, well, not a guy. That’s where research comes in. If there is an experience I haven’t had and need to write about, I try to read about or talk to someone who has been in that situation, be it childbirth, flying a helicopter or anything else. The experience of gender is just another piece of the human experience to explore and even though we’re often told to ‘write what you know’, research is the key when you’re stepping out of that comfort zone. So if I need to know about a guy’s experience having sex, or how a guy might relate to his father versus how a daughter does, that’s going to mean research for me rather than a fret session over how I just ‘couldn’t understand’. Anecdote and people-watching research mode are a-go, and I’ll just have to find a guy friend willing to describe what sex is like to a guy. I’ve got lots of chatty friends, I’m sure it’ll make for a hell of a conversation.

When it comes to the novel, in the end I sat down and thought more about what made my character Scott tick. It took some time but I realized that it wasn’t the gender issue that was getting to me. I did a lot more thinking about Scott as a person and that let me grab his more vulnerable, human side by the horns. Where before I was hung up on him as a guy, I had to get into the meat of what made him a thinking, feeling person to get inside his head. I found the commonality between us that I could riff on and suddenly I was off to the races, no longer afraid. The book now has several distinctive male characters, all done in the close third and each with their own life experience as different as they are. I decided that I won’t let the great gender debate worry me. My writing isn’t some grand exploration about what it is to be a guy, or a girl, or a treatise on gender experience – it’s a fantasy novel, and I had to just relax.

So I’ve decided to worry less about gender. My concern instead will be with writing in depth, well-developed characters where gender is only one of the factors that make up their anatomy. Or, to cut it short, I’ve just decided to worry less about gender. And maybe worry less in general and just do the work. Let’s see where that gets me.

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Juggling Is Hard, And Also Murder”

by Shoshana, posted in Flash Fiction, Writings

It’s that time again. Flash Fiction challenge is up on Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds. This week it’s Antagonist/Protagonist as a theme, and the idea is to write half the story from the perspective of the antagonist and the other half from the protagonist. So here’s my contribution to that, which I like to call “Juggling Is Hard, And Also Murder.”

 

Juggling Is Hard, And Also Murder by Shoshana Kessock

There’s a technique to juggling, they say, and Robert Fagan knew he didn’t have it. He stared hard into his reflection in the mirror and tried a basic hand-off without looking. The ball in the mirror went from his right hand to his left with careful fluidity. His doppleganger made it seem a lot easier than it felt. Robert frowned, then tried the pass again. His fingers fumbled on the ball and found purchase; no drop. Still, it wasn’t clean, wasn’t smooth. He tried it again and his thumb fumbled, wouldn’t close over the sphere, wouldn’t complete the movement. A phantom pain juked through his knuckles and he fought the urge to wince. He’d been practicing for too long.

“I’ve got four days to learn to juggle,” he said over his shoulder. “Four days. God had more time to invent the world.”

Behind him, the only response was the uncomfortable shuffle of feet. Robert grinned into the mirror, sheepish. “Sure, I guess that’s a bitter analysis. God had a lot more to put together than a simple three-ball toss. Still, God at least had the tools when He started out. He had the design knowledge, one would expect, for life and the totally-phenomenal cosmic power workbench from which to launch Universe 1.0. All I’ve got are three balls and a fourth on the side that’s never going to get used.”

The word never hung in the air thicker than Robert liked and he turned from the mirror. Behind him, Carina stared at him with her impossibly wide eyes. She shuffled her feet but otherwise sat silent, still.

“Do you think that’s stupid?” Robert asked. He held up the ball in one hand. “I can’t help but imagine that I’m overstating the importance of this, but you do understand, don’t you? They’ll hire someone else if I don’t get this. Then where will I be? Jacky Hardooley is just waiting for me to fail because he wants to get off the midway. He wants into the tent and if it means manipulating the Boss Man into unrealistic expectations-“

Robert stopped, then ran a hand through his hair. “What am I saying? What am I doing here?” He threw the ball up in the air and caught it with a satisfying thwack. “Last year I was at Fordham, now I’m here. Last year I was debating where I’d go for my PhD for Chrissake and now-“

He tossed the ball up in the air with more force. It came down, a loud smack on flesh. Carina winced.

“I’m sorry,” he said and found, strangely, he meant it. He set the ball down on the worn dresser that rounded out his battered, road-worn furniture. As he did, Carina tensed and Robert saw her eyes track to the ball and then back to him. “I’m talking too much about this, aren’t I? I’m just under so much pressure. I shouldn’t talk so much about myself.”

He knelt beside Carina’s chair and his knee kicked up a cloud of dust. Robert hesitated, then put a hand on her slender, perfect foot. The charge of skin on skin contact made him shudder and he heard her whimper. It sent a jolt through his blood and he looked up at her with barely masked adoration.

“You’re just so easy to talk to,” he confessed, then set about checking the rope around her ankles.

 

Talking, Carina thought. The key was just to keep him talking. That’s what they said in all the shows, but how did one do that without being able to talk back? How did you make small talk, build empathy, with a dirty pair of Jockey’s shoved in your mouth?

The eyes. Windows to the soul, weren’t they? Carina’s heart rate rode high in her ears, her blood pounding, and her mind fragmented into a million cliches: windows to the soul, home is the place your heart is, grass is always greener, and all that jazz. She felt crazy, the taste of cotton and sweat in her mouth driving home the inevitability that said she was seeing, for the first time, the real face of this rodeo clown Devil’s Rejects escapee.

He talked. He talked for hours. When he wasn’t speaking, he tossed that ball. She watched the ball because as long as it was in his hand, he didn’t have a weapon. Only his words. Only his hands.

Carina wasn’t sure how long she had been in that chair. She knew it was long enough for her to have to piss so badly that she’d nearly cried. He’d brought her a bedpan and humiliated her by smiling kindly into her face while she used it. Had he been a nurse? She saw the scars on his knuckles and thought better of it. Boxer? MMA fighter? The thought made her cringe. He had barely used his hands on her when he’d carried her from the midway at the close of the day. Could he do more? Was he trained? Was he capable?

He kept talking and Carina watched the ball in his hands, reading his words and not his body language. He was calm and she wanted it to stay that way. Gain an inch, she might get a mile in return.

She shuffled her feet; there were the cliche’s again.

Her eyes widened as he turned to her with those too-wide eyes. He earnestly asked her a question and knelt beside her chair. It took everything she had not to scream when he touched her foot and she felt the eager tremor in his moist grip. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and steadied herself.

If she was going to embrace cliche, she’d stick with something about darkest being before the dawn. She prayed, hope against hope, that he wouldn’t figure out the ropes were loose.