I’ve had migraines since I was in high school, and while they’re bad, they’re never super bad–both of my siblings, for example, get far worse migraines than I do. (Both of my siblings are in far worse health than I am, in general, and both of my siblings make fun of me for eating wacky health food and using alternative medicine. I make no explicit connections between those two facts, I’m just mentioning them. No reason.) A migraine, for those blessed readers who don’t know, is a seriously horrible headache, going far beyond “my head is killing me” to reach such levels as “my head is hanging me upside down in a basement and mailing my toes one at a time to my loved ones.” Whereas most headaches are caused by pressure (blood or sinus), migraines are neurological, so the odds are that you either get them repeatedly or you don’t get them at all.

“Repeatedly, for me, is usually about twice a year, and I can always tell one’s coming because it is preceded by an aura: a visual effect, basically a local, temporary degeneration. This takes different forms for different people, and for some it doesn’t happen at all; for me it manifests as a Scintillating Scotoma, which is an awesome way of saying that I see bright jagged lines interrupting my field of perception:

That’s not a perfect representation of mine; rather than a cross-hatch of color I see actual jagged lines, usually neon-bright, like a flickering explosion effect from an old video game. I used that image to show you how disruptive it is to my actual vision, getting in the way of things and blotting out words, objects, and faces. In terms of shape and color, they’re a lot more like this:

They don’t last long, maybe 40 or 50 minutes, about half that if I can drink some caffeine as soon as they appear. Drinking caffeine early will also usually scuttle the pain, but only if I can get to some in time. Since I don’t always drink a lot of Coke, this is sometimes harder than others.

Last night, and the reason for writing this post, I had the scariest migraine experience I’ve ever had, for two reasons. First, I was driving, which meant I didn’t have any caffeine near at hand–and since my kids were home alone under their older sister’s rapidly degrading supervision, I couldn’t really take the time to stop and get any. In hindsight, I should have, because what happened next was freaky as all hell: the scintillating scotoma stayed, but then I also started to get negative scotoma on top of it. Whereas a scintillating scotoma is just a patch of wacky colors, negative scotoma is a patch of nothing at all:

Again, this is not a perfect recreation of what I saw (or didn’t see). It’s kind of like there were patches of blurry vision, but it’s really more like there were patches of nothing. I wasn’t see black spots or anything, just places scattered here and there where my brain simply didn’t process anything. I could look at a fast food sign, for example, and while I was peripherally aware of the entire sign being there, I had to look at each part of it in turn to actually see the whole thing. The creepiest one was a car in front of me, where part of the roof was gone–it wasn’t actually missing, and it’s not like I perceived a giant hole in it or a deformed shape, I just couldn’t see part of it. It wasn’t there.

Yes, I should have gotten off the road, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I knew I needed to get home to help my kids, and I knew that if I didn’t get home quickly and take some medicine the pain part of the equation would kick in and I might end up completely useless on the side of the road, waiting for my wife to finish her meeting and come pick me up, which wouldn’t happen for another hour. I should have done it anyway, because it’s stupid to drive under those conditions, but I didn’t. Looking back, I suspect that my judgment may have been fuzzed by the same effect, but I don’t know. It was just really freaky and weird, and you can tell it affected me because it’s a whole day later and I’m writing a blog about it, despite just having blogged yesterday. Two blog posts back to back? That’s crazytown.

I write a lot about mental disorders, and with THE HOLLOW CITY (coming out in July) I delved even deeper into the subject of neurological disorders, and the many, many, many ways your brain can just screw you up, sometimes for no reason at all. My little migraines and my little scotomas are a teeny tiny part of that, a bare taste of what people with schizophrenia or anxiety disorder or depression deal with on a daily basis. It opened my eyes a little bit to a subject I thought I already had a pretty good grip on; I understood the causes and the symptoms and the direct effects pretty well, but that drive made me realize the kind of helpless feeling that comes as a secondary effect, knowing that you’re essentially a prisoner to an perceptive and cognitive organ that nobody really understands. It shook me up, and at the end of the experience I’m kind of glad that it did.

I don’t watch a ton of live TV, if any, but I watch a lot of shows on Netflix and DVD, usually at night when I’m painting miniatures (or, alternately, when I’m too lazy to do anything else). This gives me the chance to try out a lot different shows and characters and actors and writers, and because I am who I am I can’t help comparing them; I don’t just like or dislike something, I try to think long and hard about why I like or dislike it, and why other people might disagree with me.

One of the shows that I’m very lukewarm on–and I know this is going to get me pilloried in the geek community–is Doctor Who. What, you say? A sci-fi/fantasy geek who doesn’t like Doctor Who? Sort of. It’s not that I don’t like it, I just don’t love it. I can watch an episode and feel no compelling need to watch another. The ideas are invariably brilliant, some of them so much so that I’m still thinking about them weeks later: the episode “The Empty Child,” for example, was an alternate history horror story zombie apocalypse wonder, more original and clever than any similar story I’ve seen in ages. But something about it, like I said, just doesn’t drive me to come back. When I’m in the mood for an SF puzzle I’ll watch an episode, but the shows I really like are the ones that keep me up until early in the morning, watching one more episode and then one more episode until I have to force myself to stop. Why doesn’t Doctor Who do that to me?

My first guess was the lack of ongoing story. People tell me that Doctor Who eventually gets one, but I’m only 7 or 8 episodes in and haven’t seen it. I like ongoing stories because of the depth they can create, and television is uniquely equipped to provide that in a way that no other visual medium can. We’re in a golden age of TV right now, due in large part to creators’ willingness to serialize a long, detailed story, and I’m loving it. But the thing is, some of my very favorite shows aren’t serialized; the sitcom Community is one of the best things on TV, even being hiatus, and while that has some long-form emotional through-lines it doesn’t have a true long-form plot. Put more simply, it’s not a show you watch for the plot, you watch for the humor and the characters and the amazing writing. It’s less “I need to see what happens next,” and more “I wonder what they’ll think of next,” if that makes any sense. I watch serials to have my expectations fulfilled, and I watch Community to have my expectations subverted. Since this is essentially the same reason I watch Doctor Who–to see where they’ll go next and what new idea they’ll have to grapple with–I don’t think I can say that the lack of an ongoing story is the problem.

Comparing Doctor Who and Community points out a more striking difference that I think hits closer to the mark: the characters. The characters in Doctor Who are, to me, essentially blank slates; their job is to encounter a weird new thing, react to it, “solve” it, and move on. The weird new thing is the part that takes center stage, and the characters are defined only by their relationship to it. I understand that this changes later on, particularly with Amy Pond, who’s gotten more press than every previous companion combined–she and her husband are apparently very strong, interesting, complex characters. Please keep in mind here that while I haven’t watched a lot of the new Doctor Who, I watched the old one religiously, and they suffered from the same problem: the Doctor always has a distinct personality, but not a lot of depth. The characters in Community, on the other hand, are incredibly round, fully-realized people. They can do entire scenes that are screamingly funny and/or touching, not just for what the characters say, but for what we know about them. Their personalities and desires and flaws help not only to make them rich and interesting, but to make the subtle nuances more important.

Put more simply, Doctor Who is about what the characters do, and Community is about who the characters are. Neither is inherently better or worse than the other, I just happen to like the latter more.

I had intended to also talk about two other shows–they were, in fact, supposed to be the entire post, but my introduction got out of hand and, well, here we are. So next week I’ll come back and compare two more TV shows, probably my favorite two shows currently running, which have deep, interesting, wonderful characters and yet could not possibly be more different from each other if they tried: Breaking Bad and Parks & Recreation.

I am a huge Star Trek nerd, as my love letter to DS9 last year can attest. I keep my pens in a Worf’s-head mug, I own seven Star Trek roleplaying books, I own a TNG script (“The Offspring,” which made me cry), and I have engaged in countless hours, if not years, of various forms of fan-wankery. I’m not the biggest Trekkie out there, but I’m a big one.

When I learned last year that WizKids had procured the gaming license for Star Trek I was pretty excited, though unsure what to expect. WizKids is one of my favorite gaming companies, thanks to the strength of HeroClix, but the Clix engine is pretty much the only thing they had going for them–their non-clix games were strained and short-lived, and even most of their clix games died. The best use of the engine was Mechwarrior, though the random distribution model totally didn’t work for it, and my favorite clix game was HorrorClix, which never took off at all thanks in large part to the lack of a recognizable license. Game after game, they proved that they had awesome ideas they couldn’t follow through on, and for an eager Star Trek fan that prospect was equal parts exciting and terrifying. And of course the main question through the whole process was the Clix engine itself: it’s primarily a combat system, and while Star Trek does have combat it’s nothing you’d call a major part of the IP. Could they branch out and do something new? Could they actually make it work? The answer is a resounding “kind of.”

Their first Star Trek game, called Expeditions, was pure Euro, and a fairly number-crunchy one at that. The components look Star Trek, but by all accounts the gameplay never actually feels like Star Trek, so I never bothered picking it up. If I’m wrong, please let me know. Their third game, due to release in the next month or so, is a straight Clix game of ship-to-ship combat, so similar to Heroclix it’s actually compatible with it (by which I mean compatible mechanically–thematically it’s a raging disaster for everyone who hasn’t dreamed about Spider-man punching the Enterprise in the face). The middle game, however, gets so much right. It’s called Fleet Captains, and it manages to include just about everything you could ever want a Star Trek game to include: you have ships, you can put crew on them, they fly around exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life, they can fight and talk and cloak and reroute power to the deflector shields and whatever else you can imagine. It’s a brilliant design with a great Star Trek feel, but it’s marred by some pretty serious flaws.

First there’s the production values, which wouldn’t be so problematic if you weren’t paying so much for them. For $100 you get a box full of flimsy cards, packed so poorly that they have an improbably high frequency of breaking loose during shipping and sliding all over the box, in the mildest cases looking messy and in the most serious cases actually breaking the plastic ships. The ships themselves are a mixed blessing: there’s a ton of them, and they look great, but they’re fragile, often poorly glued, not to scale with each other, and unpainted–which, again, wouldn’t be a problem except that you just paid $100 dollars for them. This from a company with almost 15 years’ experience producing cheap, prepainted minis. It is very hard to look at this game’s components and not feel like they were rushed to hit a street date, with little or no concern for quality assurance. Whatever portion of the $100 price tag was intended to pay for painting was used to pay for accelerated printing instead.

The game’s second big problem is thematic, and I haven’t actually convinced myself it’s really a problem a yet. Rather than focus on a specific series, or even a specific timeline, the game throws literally everything into the same pot: Kirk and Picard and Janeway can all be on the same crew, despite the fact that their stories took place in wildly different times and places. For the non-Trek nerds out there, imagine a historical wargame that allowed you to have George Washington, General Patton, and Napoleon all on the same team fighting ninjas. That makes for some good fan fiction, but it’s an inherently goofy idea that shows (dare I say it) a lack of respect for the IP. Now, there’s a lot to be said for the malleability of the Star Trek universe–there are enough temporal and spatial anomalies to explain pretty much anything you want, and I usually teach people the game by saying “just imagine Q did it.” But the crazy mixed-up timeline should be a scenario, not the baseline, and Trek fans shouldn’t have to house-rule their game just to play what most people would consider the default setting.

But then again…the game is just so good. Once you sort out your messed-up components and glue your ships back together and concoct an appropriate explanation for the narrative, all your concerns slip away and you’re playing the Star Trek game you’ve always wanted, boldly going where no one has gone before, matching wits with your Klingon opponents or scanning a sentient nebula or negotiating a peace treat between two alien species. And the possibilities for expansion are amazing: the game has Federation and Klingons, but nothing from DS9, the Borg, Romulans, Cardassians, or the Dominion. The rules are already set up to handle extra players, different modes (free-for-all, co-op, etc.), and more, all you need is the stuff (which is, admittedly, the hard part).

Do I recommend this game? Yes and no. It’s not worth $100, so I’ll tell you to buy it cheap somewhere, except then WizKids won’t make enough money to justify an expansion, so I’ll tell you to buy it full price. If we’re lucky, WizKids will fix some of the production problems and do a re-issue, but I don’t see that happening. How about this: find a copy you can rent/borrow/test, and give it a try. That will give you a really good idea of how much you like it and how much you’d be willing to pay for it. With games like this you have to remember the Boat Rule: if you want to go sailing you don’t need a boat, you need a friend with a boat. Find a Trekkie with more money than sense and start dropping hints.

As I prepare for the launch of PARTIALS next month (my new book, coming on February 28), I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and writing a lot of blog posts and, in general, looking back at my career as a writer; it’s not an especially long career, but it comprises 5 published novels, soon to be 6, and that’s not too shabby. What stood out to me recently was the running theme in all 6 of them, a theme I didn’t even realize was there until I saw it in my outline for FAILSAFE and started looking backward. I talk about a lot of things in my books, but one thread ties them all together:

How far are you willing to go to do what you think is right?

In the case of my ebook, A NIGHT OF BLACKER DARKNESS, it’s less about “doing what you think is right” than about “getting what you want.” The main character, Frederick Whithers, is trying to steal money and save his own life, and is forced into a series of ever-mounting dangers and relationships and compromises in the single-minded pursuit of that goal. It’s a classic farce structure, and the book is a comedy, but his need to say and do and become things who would never have considered before make it a very dark comedy. Every new obstacle that arises forces him to choose, however subtly: do I take the next step and push this even further, or do I walk away? That’s a choice that all of my characters, in all of my books, face again and again.

John Cleaver is a great example. In all three of his books (only three so far, at least) he finds himself facing terrible enemies that only he can stop–or at least he thinks he’s the only one who can stop them. There may be some self-delusion there. The first book makes this choice plain: a killer is dismembering my friends and neighbors; I can stop him, but doing so will make me a killer in the process. Is that worth it? Most of us, in a moment of extreme danger, would lash out at an attacker, and maybe even kill to protect our children and family, but what about other people? Would you kill a man to protect your neighbor? To protect a stranger? What if it’s not a moment of danger: you know that someone WILL kill someone else, and the law is not an option, and now in the dark and quiet is your only chance to stop him. If you kill him, you’re a killer; if you let him live, someone else dies. Would you be partly responsible for that death? Would you FEEL responsible, even if you weren’t? I don’t have a great answer to these question–I wrote three books about a character struggling with the issue, in part because I struggle with it myself. Maybe it’s easy for you; I suspect that the decision itself may be much easier than living with it afterward, no matter what you choose. John Cleaver faces permutations of this same problem over and over, sometimes going one way and sometimes another. “How far is he willing to go” is the question that drives the series.

My fifth book, THE HOLLOW CITY, isn’t even out yet in English–the US gets it in July–but it’s been on shelves in Germany since October, and it deals with the same issue plus an extra complication: how do you know you can trust yourself? The main character is Michael Shipman, and he is deeply schizophrenic, seeing monsters and manipulators behind every shadow. As the book progresses, however, he starts to realize that some of the monsters are real, and they have a very real connection to a series of grisly murders. No one believes him, so like John Cleaver he’s on his own, but can he even believe himself? If this threat is real, it must be stopped, but with his own mind broken he runs the serious risk of harming innocent people along the way. Should he back away? Should he take the risks? Can he live with himself if he’s wrong? The added uncertainty make Michael’s conflict different from John’s, but the core theme is still there: how far are you willing to go to do what you think is right?

All of this leads us to PARTIALS, an SF novel about the survivors of a world-killing plague as they try to rebuild human civilization. There are approximately forty thousand human beings left alive on the planet, and there are still many, many dangers that could reduce that number further. The stakes here are not just a murder or string of murders, but the utter extinction of the human race. How far would you be willing to go to save your own species? What would you do, what crimes would you commit, what morals would you compromise? There is a point at which NOT doing something “evil” could itself be considered wrong, if the evil act is the only way to preserve humanity. The sheer scale of the problem, in other words, warps the morality involved. The world of PARTIALS, and the outline of FAILSAFE, are filled with people who make difficult, questionable, often terrible decisions with nothing but the best of intentions. In some ways the books have no villains at all, just earnest people who define “good” in very different ways. Playing with the multitude of strategies people come up with to save the humans race is part of what makes the series so fascinating to write–and, I hope, to read.

In part, all of this is on my mind this morning because of our own world situation: this week marked the 10th anniversary of the Guantanamo Detention Facility, an off-shore prison where suspected terrorists are held without trial, tortured for confessions, and denied any semblance of human rights. My personal opinions on this are very strong, but I recognize that it’s a thorny issue with weight on each side. I’ve added a poll to the left sidebar here on my website, and I’d love to get your opinions. Given the complexity of the issue, I’ve made it so you can choose multiple answers. I’d also love to hear your responses in the comments, but remember: keep it polite.

Back in the day, when I was in…maybe junior high, but probably elementary school, I got into wargaming. Not the classic “hex and counter” games that hardcore historical wargamers consider to be the only games worthy of the category, but the big, over-the-top, “Risk to the extreme” kind of games, with big, colorful boards and handfuls of dice and piles and piles of little pieces. I wrote about this genre quite a bit in my review of Conquest of Nerath.

One of the pioneers of that gaming genre (today alternately referred to as ‘thematic games’ or just ‘Ameritrash’) was the Gamemaster series, which included Axis & Allies, Fortress America, and Shogun. Shogun was almost immediately renamed as Samurai Swords, but after a few years both it and Fortress America disappeared. It should come as no surprise that both games, now that the boardgame industry is bigger (and the kids who grew up on them are adults with greater purchasing power), are being reprinted. Fortress America will return this year under the same name, and Samurai Swords returned a few months ago with a new name–Ikusa–and a gorgeous new graphic design. I was very excited to try it out.

Ikusa is similar to Risk and other games like it in that it’s basically a big map full of territories, and you fight over them; you start the game by dealing out all the territory cards, putting a dude on each one, and then adding a few extra units where you want to concentrate your force. There are different units with different strengths, though none of them really have any special abilities aside from “melee” and “ranged.” Each territory has its own little garrison, usually peasant spearmen, but most of your forces are grouped into three giant armies that move and attack as single units. This is what really defines the game and makes it unique. Each army has a daimyo to lead it, and a special battle board showing exactly which kinds of samurai and other units are following him. The army’s position on the board is marked by a standard bearer to save you the trouble of moving twelve guys around in a pile on the board. What’s more, daimyos can actually “level up” as they win battles, gaining the ability to move and attack multiple times per turn. A high level daimyo can be devastating, marching across the board with a huge pile of samurai leaving only destruction in its wake, but this is balanced by the ninja, which you can hire to assassinate enemy daimyos and reduce the army back to level 1. It’s a slick system and a lot of fun.

The economic aspect of the game is more robust than you might expect. Each player gets a certain amount of money (called koku) each turn, based on how many territories they control, and then you allocate them to a series of slots in a tray; this is done in secret, as some of your purchases are blind bids against the other players. When everyone’s done you turn your trays around and reveal what you’ve bought–buying units, building castles, and hiring ronin are simple purchases, but jockeying for turn order and hiring the ninja are auction-based, and anything you spend there (whether or not you win) is lost.

The ronin are one of my favorite parts of the game. Instead of placing them like normal units, you place them on facedown territory cards so that no one else knows where you’ve hidden them. When someone attacks you, or when you decide to mount an attack, you simply flip over the card and place the ronin on the board (or on an army board under a daimyo; your choice). Ronin only stay with you for a turn, but they allow you to concentrate your force much more powerfully, so it’s a deep strategic tradeoff: do I want more power, and the element of surprise, right now, or do I want a unit that will stick around and give me less power over several turns? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and tough decisions like that are what makes gaming fun.

So yes, the game is great. It’s not my favorite wargame, but it’s a good one; if it didn’t involve direct player elimination I’d like it more, but that’s the breaks in an old-school game like this. I also really love the Japanese theme, and the art in the new edition is, like I said, very cool. You may essentially consider the review done at this point, because what follows is completely extraneous. You see, I’m an incurable tinkerer, and there was one aspect of the game that I really wanted to mess with–not for mechanical reasons, but for flavor. I’ve mentioned it a bit in the past, but I’m about a year and a half into an epic RPG campaign for Legend of the Five Rings, which stands for the moment as my favorite RPG setting. It’s basically a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world drawing on Asian history and mythology instead of European, and is hands down one of the richest and most interesting game worlds I’ve ever encountered. As cool as Ikusa was for me, I really felt like, if I was going to play a Japanese-themed wargame, I wanted it to be L5R. So I did a big mod and rethemed it.

The main kingdom of L5R is called Rokugan, and is split into several clans: the Lion Clan, the Scorpion Clan, and so on. Each clan has a unique personality and a bunch of cool characters that I wanted to represent in Ikusa, which seemed like a perfect fit for the daimyos–and since the daimyos can level up, it was a perfect match to a sort of pseudo-RPG feel. I made up ten or so character cards per clan and gave them each two powers: one you get right off the bat, and another that you unlock when you reach level 2. Every time you start a new Daimyo (either at the start of the game or when another daimyo is killed and replaced), you simply draw a card and place it next to your army board. The powers are interesting without really being overwhelming, because I made them weak on purpose–the goal wasn’t to change the game balance, just to add some personality to the daimyos and some L5R flavor to the game overall. I have a lot of printing contacts, so once the cards were written and designed I had a bunch of sets printed off and passed them out to my friends. They’ve become very popular. On the downside, I used actual L5R art for the cards, which means I can’t (for copyright reasons) distribute them or even display them–it’s just a goofy mod I made for my friends, using mostly our characters and NPCs from our RPG. So in some ways this paragraph has all been a big tease, but I prefer to think of it as an example of how you can (and often should) modify your games to fit your own group. House rules are like fan fiction, in a sense: we take what we love and we tell our own stories with it.

Book trailers are becoming hot stuff these days, which is surprising to anyone who’s ever seen one of the old ones: go back a couple of years and book trailer technology was basically “slow pans across still images while a breathless voice tries to make you think it’s a movie trailer.” They were goofy and weird and I’ve never met anyone who liked them, but the core concept behind them–a video promotion that can be shared on the Internet–was so strong that they kept doing it, and kept doing it, and now we’re starting to see some pretty good book trailers. A lot of old school authors and readers still don’t like them, but younger readers eat them up, which has helped (perhaps symbiotically) make them a staple of YA.

When the Balzer+Bray marketing team told us it was time to make a book trailer, my editor and I very staunchly didn’t want a cheesy, wannabe movie trailer, so we looked in other places for inspiration. We were in the middle of a fun project at the time, creating short “supplementary materials” for the ebook, sort of like the special features on a DVD. Our idea for those, rather than a series of short stories, was to do a series of in-world documents collected by a mysterious figure, chronicling the rise of biotechnology and the creation of the Partials. We thought the book trailer would be an awesome opportunity to do the same kind of thing, so we pitched the trailer as an investor video from ParaGen, the biotech company that created Partial technology. You can watch it here:

I love it, and I especially love how subtle it is: it doesn’t tell you anything about the book, really, or the story, and certainly not the characters. On the other hand, it does tell you what a Partial is, and it sets a slightly ominous tone of pride and greed–people who think they can do anything, especially if it will make them rich, will often overstep their bounds. They’ll push too hard and go too far and cause more problems than they know how to deal with. The happy, smiling people in the video are only happy and smiling because they think they have everything under control. They’ve accomplished a lot, and they’re justifiably proud.

But pride cometh before the fall….

On a completely different subject, we have new shirts in the store, including my favorite: “I Am Not A Serial Killer” t-shirts with glow in the dark words! Well, all except the word “not.” Sorry about that. Sure, it changes the meaning in the dark, but I’m sure your friends won’t mind. Why are they alone in the dark with you anyway? Serves them right. Also available in a hoodie.

Oh! And we also have a PARTIALS shirt. The first of many!

Happy New Year! I haven’t posted here in a while partly because of the holidays, but mostly because my entire brain has been focused on finishing the outline for FAILSAFE, the second book in the PARTIALS series. PARTIALS is my newest book, launching out into the world on February 28, and I’m really excited about it–it’s a post-apocalypse science fiction series about a girl named Kira helping to rebuild civilization after an engineered plague wiped out 99.99% of the human race. I love it, and I’ll post a tour schedule as soon as it’s finalized. It was also a little more ambitious than other books I’ve written, certainly my longest (about twice the length of I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER), and with a little more going on plot-wise. That made outlining a sequel for it very difficult.

Obviously a lot of the sequel was already suggested by our series outline. My editors and I sat down over the phone, way back a year and a half ago, and figured out where we’d like the series to go, what we’d like it to cover, and so on. There are a lot of big mysteries and conspiracies involved in the series, and I didn’t want to get into that situation that seems to happen to every serialized TV show where they claim to have a plan (Battlestar Galactica was very upfront about this), but then eventually you realize they don’t really know what they’re doing. I went to great lengths to figure out what the plans are, who’s behind them, and so on. But just because I know where I’m going and why doesn’t mean I know the best way to get there.

FAILSAFE turned out to be even more ambitious than PARTIALS, especially when we decided to branch out into multiple viewpoints. Kira is an awesome character, but the story we needed to tell desperately wanted to be in two places at once, and sometimes even three. Luckily, we had some fantastic secondary characters in book 1 that we kind of accidentally fell in love with (always a good sign), so we decided to break things apart and tell two parallel plotlines. Kira still gets most of the screen time, but some other cool people get to step up and be heard. I knew I’d made the right choice when I mentioned some of these secondary characters to a friend in my writing group, and he said “We get to see HER again! Sweet!” One of the weirdly surprising things about this decision was how hard it was to avoid using one of the main adults as a point-of-view character; this is a YA series, and I wanted to keep it that way, and I worried that an adult as a main character would dilute that too much and hurt the book’s relatability. Maybe I’m totally wrong and I should have just done it–I might still do it in book 3–but for now I think this was the right decision.

I don’t want to talk too much about FAILSAFE because you haven’t even read PARTIALS yet, so maybe I’ll leave you with a weird little piece of info about book 1. I used to live in Mexico, and I love everything about it, so this was also my opportunity to fill the book with Mexican characters. Why? Why not? Kira herself is Indian, but her best friend and her boyfriend are both Mexican: Marcus Valencio and Xochi Kessler. Others will show up in future books and stories. Xochi was especially fun because, as you may have noticed, Kessler is not a very Mexican last name. When the world “ended,” Xochi was only 5 years old and completely on her own; she was adopted by another survivor with Irish heritage and has thus been raised as Irish for the last 11 years. This gave me a Mexican/Aztec character who occasionally slips into an Irish accent when she gets angry, which doesn’t matter for the story, I just though it was fun. Which is all just my way of saying that in 50+ years, we won’t be (or at least I hope we won’t be) defining race the same way we are now. It will be a little more inclusive and a little less of a hot button. I think that’s awesome.

I’m not a Gears of War fan in general–I’ve never played the video game, and my knowledge of it was mostly limited to “wasn’t that the shooter game that used ‘Mad World’ in a TV commercial once?” I may be thinking of a youtube video, I’m actually not sure. I knew it was an FPS, and that it used a cover system, and it had aliens, but I haven’t really played an FPS since Battlefield 2, so my knowledge ended there.

What I did know, on the other hand, was that the board game version was designed by Corey Konieczka, who is pretty much my very favorite game designer working today. He’s worked on some of the best games in my collection–Battlestar Galactica, Mansions of Madness, and Rune Age–and he’s had a hand in some other great games that are a lot of fun (Runewars and the World of Warcraft Adventure Game, to name a couple). His designs show an amazing ability to combine mechanics and flavor; my gaming tastes, as you may have noticed, lean very heavily toward the “thematic” end of the scale, focusing on games about monsters and space ships and wizards and so on, and Konieczka does that better than anybody, hands down. The Galactica game, for example, manages to replicate not only the many different elements of the show (politics, military command, fleet management, spaceship combat, paranoia, treachery, and so on), but also the feel of the show. While playing the game the mechanics almost melt away, leaving nothing but a tense, desperate atmosphere that pulls you through to the end. The rules and the flavor blend together almost seamlessly. Corey Koniezcka does that in all of his games, and I’ll follow that kind of talent anywhere.

So when Gears of War came out, I picked up a copy.

First things first: the models in this game are so amazing they got me back into miniatures painting after a ten year hiatus. The aliens/monsters are cool, both in design and in sculpt, and the four hero figures are appropriately tough-looking. The hero figures are also, unfortunately, very hard to distinguish, which is what led me to the mini-painting–I figure if I paint them I’ll be able to tell them apart without picking them up to see which one has the tiny goggles on his forehead. The other components are cool as well, with sturdy plastic, nice cards, etc. They also all fit in the box pretty neatly, which is a nice bonus considering how tightly a lot of other games get crammed together.

In play, the game is very much like a fantasy dungeon crawl, a la Descent or Castle Ravenloft. Each player takes a hero, who has special powers and equipment, and together they explore a maze/building/cave full of monsters and loot. The main difference between this and a traditional fantasy game are the guns, and I love the way the game handles ammo; it’s a driving concern without being an onerous chore. The bad guys are fully automated by a couple of decks of cards, so there’s no Overlord or Dungeonmaster; the players are all on the same team.

What separates Gears of War from the many, many other dungeon crawls I own is the card system, which governs not only moving and attacking but wounds and healing as well. See, your hand of cards is also your life points, which has a massive web of fascinating and delicate interconnections. You play one card on your turn to act, and you can play several cards out-of-turn to react to enemies and other players, but every time you do you get closer to death. Even more interesting, when an enemy hurts you it doesn’t just tick a few hit points off a list, it directly affects your ability to act and react. A hero caught in a hail of fire will find himself with only one or two cards left, which might not be the right ones to help him escape; conversely, a hero who over-extends himself moving around and playing actions might find himself with too few cards left to survive the next monster attack. On the one hand this is a smooth and strategic system of resource management; on the other hand, true to form for Corey Konieczka, it’s a hugely thematic storytelling device that creates, without any extra effort, a lot of great character moments. Taking too much enemy fire, for example, causes you to instinctively dive for cover, retreating from the battle for a few seconds while you draw more cards and get your health back up. The first time this happened to my friend Steve, a big fan of the source material, he nodded and said “wow, just like in the video game.” The rules and the flavor go together perfectly.

My only major complaint about the game, which has made our playgroup skip over it more than once when deciding what to play, is the huge variance in difficulty. Sometimes the game is way too easy, and sometimes (though less often) it’s way too hard. Worse yet, it doesn’t seem to have any knobs you can adjust to tweak the difficulty, so there’s nothing you can do about it–it all depends on which enemy cards you draw and when. When the game randomly decides to be challenging, it’s incredibly fun and I recommend it highly. When it just rolls over and lets you win without a fight, the playing time is still just long enough to feel disappointing.

Last week I had the opportunity to write a blog for another website about dystopian fiction, so I wrote one and realized that it was way too big. I wrote a shorter one and sent it in, and you’ll see it soon, but here’s the first one in all it’s glory. (It’s actually not super long, but the other place was a short venue.)

I grew up in the Cold War, so I was surrounded by dystopian fearmongering for most of my formative years: stay vigilant, or the evil communists will get you and the world will turn into Animal Farm. We concocted, and continue to concoct, elaborate and terrifying scenarios of how horrible the world would be if the wrong people got into power, and how our freedoms would be curtailed and our rights would be stomped on, and we used those scenarios to develop a culture of fear. If you’re scared to death of The Enemy, you’ll never let The Enemy take control of you. And yet it doesn’t take a genius to jump on the Internet and see a million images and videos of curtailed freedoms and stomped-on rights, right here in our own allegedly non-dystopian country. What happened? How did these dystopian scenarios come true? Why didn’t our fear protect us?

Because fear breeds ignorance, and ignorance is the worst protection in the world.

My favorite dystopian novel is actually just a novella, practically a short story, by one of my favorite writers: The Children’s Story, by James Clavell. One day Clavell’s 6-year-old daughter came home from school to announce that she had memorized the entire Pledge of Allegiance–or as she called it (and as my children call it) “The Pledge Allegiance.” She parroted the entire thing from memory, pleased and punch, and then Clavell asked her what it meant…and she had no idea. The school had taught her what to say, but not why. Clavell walked around the rest of the day asking everyone he met about the Pledge of Allegiance, and all of them said it–usually with the same words slurred together in the same way–but none of them could tell him what it meant. Most of you can probably recite it as well, and odds are that you’re all pausing in the same places as you do so, but how many of you have ever really thought about the words themselves? How many 6-year-olds even know what “indivisible” means–or how many 30-year-olds, for that matter?

Based on this experience, Clavell wrote a novella about a generic American classroom in which the teacher is replaced by a New Teacher, a trained propagandist from what we assume is a conquering foreign power, though this is never explained in any detail. The story isn’t about who’s in charge or why, it’s about how easy it is to use words to create ideas, to change attitudes, and to form entire ways of thinking. Bit by bit, word by word, the New Teacher deconstructs the Pledge of Allegiance as a stream of nonsense: what does allegiance mean? Why would you show allegiance to a flag? Can a flag give you anything? Ask it for candy–did you get any? Now ask me for candy. See? Now you have candy. Isn’t this pledge thing kind of ridiculous? The New Teacher’s arguments are subtle and convincing and shot through with dramatic irony: a wise reader will see every ideological trap she sets for the children, and yet will also see exactly why and how those children will fall straight into them. We boo and hiss at the New Teacher for creating a new dystopia where children are told exactly what to think without knowing any of the reasoning behind it, or being given a chance to make up their own minds, and yet we can’t lay all the blame at her feet: the Old Teacher, the one they dismissed at the beginning of the story, did exactly the same thing. She told the children what to think and what to say without ever telling them why it was important. She failed to prepare them for the challenge they’re facing and the very important decisions they now have no idea how to make. The leadership has changed, but the dystopia of ignorance and miseducation was there all along.

Why is our society collapsing into a new dystopia? Because we’ve trained our children to fear a certain form of control, without ever teaching them how to recognize the real threat behind the form–the control itself, and the power that makes it possible. We’ve created a culture where ignorance is applauded, literacy is for losers, and being cool means not caring about anything. Somehow, despite all our fears and safeguards and precautions, we’ve stumbled backwards into a world that looks more and more like 1984, or Fahrenheit 451, or the rest of the dystopias that used to haunt our nightmares–and we’ve done it not because an evil overlord was creating such a world on purpose, but because we’ve been too lazy/short-sighted/misinformed/comfortable to either notice it or do anything about it.

You want dystopia? Look around. You want to do something about it? Read.

I apologize for failing to post anything last week: no blog posts (despite my goal of two per week), very few emails, and not even any facebook updates or twitter posts–I retweeted a few interesting things when I got the chance, but I didn’t really say anything new. This is because, as my Cheerfully Flexible post two weeks ago may have suggested to you, I was attending a funeral.

The funeral was for my sister-in-law, Natalie, who fought long and hard and eventually succumbed to cancer. I didn’t post anything last week in part because I was busy (5-day trip to Sacramento with all five kids), but mostly because I did not then and still don’t know now exactly how to talk about it. This feels especially odd for me because I’m rarely ever at a loss for words: not only do I write for a living, I write about death. You’d think I’d be better at this. But the things I write about are either goofy, or sensationalized, or at the very least imaginary. Natalie was real. What do you say about a real person who’s there one minute, and then isn’t there the next? I saw the body at the viewing, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit like John Cleaver, staring and wondering what all the fuss was about, while the other half of me knew exactly what all the fuss was about. There is a cognitive disconnect with death, as if our minds rebel at the concept of it. People do not cease to exist, and our spirits know this even as our eyes are telling us something different. It’s like a form of psychic carsickness, your eyes telling you you’re sitting still while your inner ear screams that you’re moving. It disorients you, and your brain can’t quite express itself through the dissonance.

I’ve dealt with death before–I’ve spoken at both of my grandparents’ funerals, for one thing–but this was different. Maybe it’s because she was so young, and because of how she left and who she left behind. My grandparents were old and their minds were failing them; it was “their time to go,” if that’s the way you want to think of it. My grandfather in particular, one of the foundational influences of my life, was healthy as a horse but deeply scarred by Alzheimers, and it hits a point where it isn’t really your grandfather in there anymore anyway, just a semi-coherent shell. A car without a driver. He died (on Thanksgiving, ironically) of a heart attack, and while we were sad–perhaps devastated–to see him go, we were more or less okay with it because we’d already lost him months before. Natalie, on the other hand, was 24 years old, with a young husband and a two-year-old son. You can’t say that it was “her time to go” without straining the definition of what that even means, and you can’t give a speech looking back on a life of accomplishment and legacy when there are only 24 years to look back on. Natalie’s eulogy–a joyful, powerful speech given by her sister–was full of memories and laughs, but they were memories of potential. She was a wonderful baker and decorator, among other things, and tried to start a cake business just a few weeks before she died. This was a woman who never gave up, who always strived to do and be more. From a certain point of view, doesn’t that make it even worse that she’s not here anymore to do or be anything?

The hardest part for me was her son, a happy little boy who only kind of understood what was going on. My wife will tell you that she’s only seen me cry three times: at my Grandma’s funeral, at my Grandpa’s funeral, and while watching a movie about Alzheimers that reminded me of my Grandpa. I’m not heartless, I just have a very male tendency to keep my emotions well below the surface (though this is changing as I age). I was fine all through the preparations for Natalie’s funeral, and all through the viewing, and then when it came time to close the casket my brother-in-law lifted up his son to say goodbye, and the boy started crying, and it just tore us apart. It’s getting to me again right now as I write about it. She wrote him a letter before she died, and imagine it will be one his most prized possessions as he grows up and remembers her. I hope it will.

I try not to get very religious on this blog, because my religion is not a part of why most of you read my work, but it is a very big part of who I am, and I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment here. I’m a Mormon, which means that not only do I believe in life after death, I believe that families will be reunited and will live together forever. This is the single most wonderful thing that I can think of, even when I’m not preoccupied with death. I love my wife, my children, my parents and siblings, my grandparents and my vast extended family, and it comforts me more than words can tell to know that no matter what happens, no matter how bleak the situation may look, I will see them again. I’ll see Natalie again, and more importantly her husband and son will see her again. Death is sad and cancer sucks and life is sometimes a brutal kick in the face, but life is not everything and death is not the end. It will be a while before we’re all together again, but meanwhile we’ve got important things to do on Earth, and I’m sure God can find a lot of uses for a woman so eager to work she tries to start a bakery while half comatose from cancer and painkillers. We’ll all stay busy, and by the time we’re reunited we’ll see if maybe we can make the world a little better than it was when we parted.

I set a goal for myself to memorize a poem every week this summer, as longtime readers of the blog will be aware, and one of those poems has been prominent in my mind ever since we got the news that Natalie was nearing the end. It played in my mind during her funeral, and when her son cried and my heart started to break it came back again, comforting me and inspiring me. I think it’s the perfect note to end on:

Mother to Son, by Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor –
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now –
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.