Eye-opening. Reminded me of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance activities, of the importance of the documents Snowden disclosed.

Schneier’s style is easy to read and straightforward, no small feat for a subject that takes in law, cryptography, and communications technology. I plowed through this book in a few days, but I’ll be digesting his points for a good while.

Three of the many things I learned:

• There are companies that sell the ability to send a silent, undetected phone call to a mobile phone. Call won't ring, but will cause it to signal nearest cell tower, giving away its location.
• FBI can (and does) collect personal data from third parties (phone companies, email servers, etc) via National Security Letters, without a warrant.
• NSA audit showed it broke its own rules against spying for personal reasons at least 8 times a day (!) from 2011 to 2012

Novel’s at 78,941 words. Which is an odd time to have finally figured out its theme.

Or rather, one of its themes. You’d think I’d have known this going in, the kind of weighty things I would be trying to deal with in the story.

Nope. I had a hook, a starting scene, and an idea of how I wanted to portray the characters. That was it.

Actually stumbled across the theme this week, while reading a different book. Something in what the author was talking about meshed with the upcoming events of the story my subconscious was chewing on, and that was it: I knew my theme.

It’s a little late to alter the draft much to accommodate it, but I’ll be writing the last third with the theme in mind. It’ll really come into play when I go back through for the second draft, and start making edits to bring it out more or eliminate passages that conflict with it.

Awesome. Easy to learn, quick to play, and ye gods, addictive. Reminded me a lot of Egyptian Ratscrew, in all the best ways.

Three things I learned about game design:

• A little chaos is ok, so long as it's not borne out of confusion.
• The simpler your rules are, the greater freedom you have to explore variety in the expression of those rules (e.g., the many, many different images you have to match against in Loonacy).
• A strong theme is important. We found the Retro deck to be more enjoyable than the normal deck, simply because the theme was 1) cool, and 2) strongly expressed.

Inspirational. Completely changed my mind on the tension between narrative and play in video games. Upton provides a perspective that shows narrative is play, just a different kind of it. In fact, play undergirds all the arts, from board games to paintings to novels.

Three of the many things I learned from this book:

• 5,000 year-old boardgames have been discovered inside Egyptian tombs
• Slot machines are programmed to pop up with near misses of jackpots often, so players think the big score is just around the corner
• Chinese narratives often follow a different structure than the Western. Where a Western narrative has some inciting incident leading to rising action and then a climax, Chinese narratives will instead establish a topic and then explore it in great detail before a plot twist throws everything into confusion, which is only resolved at the conclusion.

Novel’s at 77,376 words.

Writing’s been chugging along this week. My last major decision – read: stop and outline – point was a few weeks back, so I’ve been mostly writing out the consequences of that.

There’s another I-have-no-idea-what-happens-next point coming up, where the other shoe is finally going to drop, and right on top of my main character’s head. Not quite sure how they’ll react.

I don’t think I’ll reach it till next week, though.

Hopefully I’ll have it figured out by then?

(Probably not)

Southern Cross Vol 1 - Great art. Very creepy. Felt there were some strange jumps or discontinuities in the narrative, but overall it’s well-done.

Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol 1: Disappointing. Dialog is clunky, and none of the characters sound like themselves. Art gets confusing, especially during the action scenes. Final moments of the volume don’t land the emotional punch they want to.

Godzilla in Hell: Fantastic use of graphics over dialog. Only the 1st and last entries have an interesting story. The rest seem fine with rehashing monster battles in elemental locales, rather than exploring what Hell might be like for Godzilla.

Wicked + Divine Vol 3: Slow going in the beginning, then picks up later. Not nearly as moving as Vol 2. Feels like the heart might be missing from this one. Art shifts are possibly appropriate, but strange and off-putting. Best segments deal with the gods' pasts, though not all of them are coherent.

Pretty Deadly #1: Good writing. But the art, to me, is incoherent. Often can’t tell the people out from the backgrounds, and none of the lines seem sharp enough to distinguish objects from each other. Even the panels are cut off in odd ways that made it hard to tell what’s being shown.

Fun game with a hilarious premise. Rules were a little hard to wrap our heads around – when to pass cards, and who to pass to – for the first game, but each turn went fairly quick even so.

Three things I learned about game design:

• There's room for all kinds of games, even ones about zombies running a fast food joint.
• You can take a familiar game, like Go Fish, and -- with a few gentle twists -- make it into something new.
• Streamline your rules. Multiple paths to reach the goal make it harder for players to pick up and learn.

Came back from Boston with a lovely head cold that made me want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

I didn’t though, thank goodness. Instead I pushed myself to hit my word count every day this week, bringing the novel to 75,638 words.

And counting. I still feel like I’m on the tail end of the book, but I have no idea how close to the end I am. I could be another 30,000 words away, I could write through next week and suddenly discover I’m only 10K from the finish.

There’s only one way to know. So, if you’ll excuse me, sets hard hat on head picks up shovel it’s back to the word mines for me.

Absolutely fantastic from start to finish. Nominated it for a Hugo as soon as I read the last page.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Keeping chapters short not only gives you an excuse to read "just one more," it also lets you do abrupt transitions between place and mood.
• Characters grumbling to each other (or in their heads) can give you a very compact and fun way to explain aspects of the world that are unfamiliar to the reader.
• By shifting the metaphors used to describe a scene, you can sustain a difference of mood between locations. For instance, in a place of death and white, describing a series of building supports as "arched ribs" echoes the feeling you want to convey.

An odd mix of politics and brewing history. Gives an intro to several breweries, and how they got started, but spends several chapters going over arguments among the brewers on a blow-by-blow basis.

Really wish there had been more space given to individual breweries and going into their history. Even better would have been some chapters with advice for people thinking of starting their own microbrewery. What better way to support the craft beer revolution than to capture and pass on some of the wisdom of the pioneers?

Three things I learned:

• The larger national breweries, like Miller and Anheuser-Busch, use corn and rice additives to extend the shelf life of the beer and make it cheaper.
• Brewing beer at home was technically illegal until 1979 (!), a holdover from Prohibition.
• Stone's Arrogant Bastard Ale (one of my favorites) started out as a homebrew mistake. Before it had a proper name, they referred to it as the "hop bomb."

Not much progress on the novel this week.

I’ve been in Boston for a company meetup, which has messed with my normal schedule and kept me away from my desk.

Intending to get some writing done on the flight home tonight, though, and try to catch up on it this weekend. Can’t leave my main character struggling to escape from a trap for too long, can I?

Involved, complex, and tough.

We spent our time rushing around the board, from crisis to crisis, trying to stay one step ahead of the many enemies around us. In the end, we won, but barely. Victory felt more like a staving off of defeat than outright success.

Three things I learned about game design:

• For a complex cooperative game, leave out betrayal. It'll increase the difficulty without increasing any enjoyment.
• Tying your character classes to individuals (real, fictional, or mythological) is a great hook into the game world.
• Having enemies refresh after defeat is a good way to generate a siege mentality in your players, but it makes the game as a whole feel darker. Use it sparingly.

Lucid, detailed, and engrossing, much like its predecessor, The Plantagenets. Jones has a gift for converting a parade of names and dates into personalities and dramatic clashes.

Unlike the previous book, I could see many more parallels with events in Game of Thrones in this one. There’s a usurper claiming the rightful king is a child of adultery, there are minor houses parleying marriage to the royal house into more influence and power, there’s even a warrior king that becomes fat and indolent in old age.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Entire Tudor dynasty descends from Owen Tudor, a minor noble that Catherine of Valois (princess of France) married after King Henry V died.
• Wars of the Roses were less family feud and more power struggle between multiple great families due to the collapse of kingly power under Henry VI.
• The man who became Richard III was, until Edward IV's early death, one of the most loyal and honorable nobles in the kingdom.

Novel’s at 73,653 words.

Still pushing forward, thought the last few scenes have been hard for me to write. Usually that’s because I don’t know enough about something in the scene – how a bail hearing would be conducted, or the cooking techniques of feudal Japan – to feel comfortable writing it. This time, it’s because I know too much about what’s happening in the scene.

Specifically, I know things that, if my characters knew them, would make accomplishing their goals much easier. But they don’t work in the field, like I do, and so their knowledge is limited.

But how limited? How much should they know, and how much are they ignorant of? How much would just be common sense?

And even for the things they do know, or that they stumble on that work, how much detail should I go into as to what’s happening? How much info do I dare dump on the poor reader?

It’s striking that balance – between showing too much detail and not enough, between thinking the characters know more than they should versus not giving them enough credit – that’s been difficult for me.

Took longer to explain the rules than to play the game. Not that the rules are complex, just that the game itself is so quick.

Had a good time, but it always seemed like the werewolves had the hardest job. They have the most reason to talk during the day, if only to throw suspicion on someone else. In the games we played, whoever spoke first was probably a werewolf.

Three things I learned about game design:

• If you build discussion and argument into the game, set a time limit. Otherwise things can get bogged down, and drag on long enough to not be fun anymore.
• It is basically impossible for players to properly execute a team-based strategy if they don't know what team they're on.
• If you design gameplay that rewards players for screwing over their teammates, they need to be able to win on their own.

A bit complex to setup and rather awkward to learn. First game was really slow as we tried to figure out what we could do and what the best way to beat back the fire was.

Once we got the hang of the rules, though, the game’s speed picked up and we had a good time knocking out flames and rescuing pets (I mean trapped humans. Yes, the humans definitely took priority).

Three things I learned about game design:

• If your game is cooperative, you can get away with more complex rules. Everyone will be helping out each other on their turns, so it won't be as intimidating.
• Beware using tiny markers for important game mechanics. Unless they're anchored down, they'll shift too easily during gameplay (dice rolling, moving pieces, etc) and players will lose track of where they're supposed to be.
• Design your co-op player classes around the actions available to every player. The simpler your basic actions are, the easier it will be to balance those classes.

Novel’s at 72,337 words.

I’ve managed to fix last week’s mistake, and gotten back to making forward progress through the novel. There’s some small dangly bits of plot that are poking out around my patch, but I’ve decided to note them for now, so I can come back to fix them in the second draft.

Instead, I’m plowing forward.

Easy to pick up and learn, tough to win.

I made the mistake of playing it like a deck-building card game, only picking up mines that had victory points on them. These were few and far between, though, so I ended up with a lot fewer gems to use to purchase the more lucrative mines that opened up later on.

Three things I learned about game design:

• Don't rely on just color to distinguish sides or types in the game. I'm color blind, and had a hard time telling two of the gems apart, because their colors were so similar.
• Even a rather simple mechanic -- gems buy mines, which give gems to buy more mines -- can yield an interesting game, once randomness and competition enter into it.
• Introducing an unbalancing element can be ok, if it pushes the game towards a conclusion

Frustrating. Moving, often brilliant, but feels incomplete in many ways. Magical bits aren’t fully baked, as if he thought it was cool but didn’t want to flesh it out too much (because it doesn’t make sense). Ditto his portrayal of the future, which was scary as hell in the moment but on reflection is just another doomsday scenario from the 1970s.

The overall storyline of following a character from the 1980s to the 2040s feels better, but gets sidelined so often that the final chapters have less emotional impact than they could. There’s also numerous threads that get introduced just for plot’s sake and then dropped, with not even their emotional impact explored, let alone their practical consequences.

All in all, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Using the present tense for the main narrative means that when you do a flashback, you can reach for the past tense as an easy way to distinguish the two.
• Stream of consciousness writing can help make a normally unsympathetic character more likable.
• Stronger to use vocabulary to give a sense of dialect speech, instead of punctuation. It's also easier to read.

Novel’s at 70,855 words.

Didn’t do any writing over the week of the cruise. With no internet, and no laptop, I decided to take the week off. I feel like I’m on the final third of the book, and I hoped taking a break would give me the energy for that final push.

Returned to writing yesterday, and I’m glad I stepped away from the book for a bit. Re-reading the scene I was in the middle of revealed a glaring hole in its logic.

I found a fix, but it means shifting the course of things going back a few chapters. So these past few days have been ones of revision, of snipping out the parts that don’t make sense and replacing them with explanations that do.

I’m hoping by next week I’ll be back to making forward progress. But for now, it’s patch, patch, patch, till the plot holds water again.

This was the first cruise my wife and I had ever been on. We weren’t sure what to expect. Would I get seasick enough to ruin the trip? Would we spend the trip as wallflowers, since we didn’t know anyone else that was going? Would our clothes for Formal Night be formal enough, despite our lack of fezzes?

Thankfully, everything turned out better than we could have hoped for.

Our good luck started before we even got on the boat.

While waiting to get into the terminal, we struck up a conversation with another Sea Monkey couple that had been on the cruise before. They were funny, friendly, and more than willing to share advice on how to navigate the new world we were entering. We had lunch together that day, and they introduced us to Redneck Life, a game they thought we’d appreciate since we live in Arkansas (we did, the game’s hilarious).

We ended up spending a lot of the cruise together; they already feel like good friends we’ve known for years. Thanks to them, we never felt lonely or out of place during the cruise. Can’t wait to see them again next year, so we’re already making plans to go visit them before then :)

Our second stroke of incredible luck happened when we found an interpreter for my wife. She’s what I refer to as “suburban deaf”: not hard-core inner city deaf, just living on the outskirts of the community. It’s enough so that concerts and stand up performances – in other words, the majority of the nightly entertainment on the cruise – are really hard for her, and she misses most of what’s said or sung.

But not this time. On the second (?) day of the cruise, another Sea Monkey introduced herself after watching my wife sign. She said she was an interpreter, and would be happy to sign for my wife during the shows if she wanted.

My wife accepted, of course, and the two became really good friends over the course of the cruise. She ended up signing for my wife for all the Main Concerts, and most of the side events my wife wanted to go to. At each one, she commandeered two spots near the front, and reversed one of the chairs so she could face my wife and sign.

She’s an amazing interpreter, with a very expressive face, and a great sense of storytelling through sign. She made the performances available to my wife for the first time, and it was amazing seeing her so happy: able to laugh at the same jokes as me, without me whispering to her or using my non-fluent sign to get the meaning across.

These were the two biggest instances of kindness we received during the cruise, but the entire Sea Monkey community was amazingly friendly and welcoming.

In the game room, you could just walk up to any table and ask to play. If you hovered instead, they would invite you to join.

In the dining room, you could share a table with perfect strangers and end up making new friends.

My wife and I decided to try organizing a couple of events ourselves, and not only did they get on the schedule, they were welcomed and successful.

I’m taking a lot of memories away from the cruise – performing stand up for the first time in 2 years, the view from the top of Blackbeard’s Castle in St Thomas, my wife going to dinner with a tiny fez pinned to her hair – but the best memory I have is a feeling, the warm glow of acceptance and support I felt from everyone while we were there.

It’s an incredible community, and I’m honored to have been allowed to join it.

Made it back home from JoCo Cruise 2016 last night.

I’ll do a more detailed breakdown of the cruise later, but there is too much for now, so let me sum up: it was amazing.

I met some incredible people, who let me play games they had designed, told me about their upcoming writing projects, and just generally accepted my wife and I with open arms. I heard someone say that it’s like going on vacation with 1,000 of the best friends you haven’t met yet, and it’s completely true.

Oh, and the performers were great, too :)

If you were on the cruise this year, thank you for helping to create such an amazing community. Huge props to Paul and Storm and JoCo and Scarface and the many others that worked hard to organize it and keep everything running smoothly.

If you weren’t on the cruise, signups are available for 2017. We hope to see you there!

Such a disappointment.

What Went Wrong

How completely boring.

How to Fix It

Take Dr Swann. As written and cast, she’s just another young Bond girl. So we’ll recast her, putting Amy Purdy – Paralympian snowboarder and double amputee – in the role.

We’ll introduce her much earlier, putting her on the ground in Mexico City, where she’s on the trail of the group that’s trying to kill her father.

Bond’s there, too, but they’re working at cross-purposes. His mission is surveillance, but hers is assassination. The chase across Mexico City is in part a race between the two of them, a race that Swann wins.

Bond spends the rest of the first half of the movie one step behind Swann. When they meet, it’s not like two potential lovers chatting over coffee, it’s two fierce competitors battling it out.

Our mid-point reveal is now multi-faceted. We reveal Swann’s prosthetic legs, and that getting them for her is the reason Mr White joined Spectre in the first place. She reveals her mission to Bond, who realizes his personal vendetta and hers are aligned. Reluctantly, they join forces to go after Blomfeld and take down Spectre.

Here we subvert another expectation: Blomfeld is actually the widow from the first half of the movie.

Bond still goes to the funeral, but the widow gently puts him off when he tries to seduce her. On his way out, Bond sees Swann, and goes chasing after her, and so forgets about the widow.

But in one of the final scenes – say when Bond and Swann crash a party held at a chalet high in the Alps that they hear Blomfeld will be at – he sees the widow again.

They flirt this time, playfully, with Bond clueless as to who she really is. That is, until someone else passing by greets her by name.

Bond naturally readies for a final showdown, but Blomfeld laughs at the idea. Why would she want to kill him? He’s been doing great work for her so far.

She proceeds to outline how well Bond has helped her: how his pursuit of low-level thugs has weeded out her weaker minions, leaving the organization stronger (Casino Royale). How he failed to prevent her gaining control of vast quantities of water rights in South America (Quantum of Solace). How he took down a thorn in her side who was trying to take over her computer systems (Skyfall).

She has no reason to kill him, since he’s been helping her all along. Even the MI5/MI6 merger has been good for her, since she only needs half as many moles as she used to.

She turns to leave, but runs right into Swann. Swann, of course, has every reason to want Blomfeld dead: for first ruining her father’s life, and then killing him.

A fight ensues, Blomfeld flees, Bond and Swann give chase. We get a great sequence of them skiiing and snowboarding down the slopes at night, Bond clumsy, Swann graceful and Blomfeld desperate. They finally corner Blomfeld against a cliff, where Swann, overcome with rage, pushes her off.

Both Bond and Swann sigh with relief, thinking its over, that they’ve put their ghosts to rest. But when Bond returns to London, Q tells him of a message he intercepted: of a meeting being called between Spectre’s remaining seven heads. They’ve injured the organization, but they’ve not taken it out.

Tense, claustrophobic, and dreamlike, a Lovecraftian tale as told by Borges.

Reminded me a bit of Lost with the exotic location, the exploration of a place where strange things happen. Also because it frustrated me like Lost did, introducing mysteries and building tension that it had no intention of resolving.

Three things about writing I learned from it:

• Repeating flashbacks in the middle of a mystery narrative can backfire. If you've built up enough tension in the main story, the flashbacks will be an annoyance, an obstacle for readers to overcome.
• Beware clinical detachment in the narrator. It's ok for a chapter or two, but over the length of a novel it drains any concern the reader might have for them.
• If you can remove half the narrative and your story still makes sense, consider leaving it out.

Novel’s at 70,684 words.

Final third of the novel is starting to take shape.

The plot’s taken two sharp left turns in as many weeks, but it’s ended up on a path where I can actually see where things are going now, and how they’ll wrap up.

It’s an odd feeling. Here I was trudging along with no end in sight, just a vague idea of how I wanted things to turn out. The plot – and my original outline – suffer two sharp shocks, and now I know where I’m going.

Let’s hope it lasts for the next 20,000 words.