Back from Gen Con

Last week I made the pilgrimage (bathing every veyne in swich licour) to GenCon 2012 in Indianapolis, which is no longer Lake Geneva.  I had a terrific time.  This was my first visit to the "original, longest running, best attended,[comma sic] gaming convention in the world."  GenCon is bigger than Origins, and much bigger than Philcon, although I like those very much as well.  I like the Cons.  I do.

I was fortunate enough to stay with my old friend David and with his friends, all of whom know how to do this right.  I made some mistakes.  For instance, I spent money on generic tickets rather than specific event tickets, discovering only too late that the events (that is, game sessions) I wanted to enter were all sold out by day one.  I also planned my return flight for not-long-after-dawn on Sunday morning, which put a damper on what might have been a big Saturday night of playing Werewolf or Mansions of Madness.

Some of the games I, we, or they played and enjoyed (or just stood and watched) include:

Elder Sign, a card-based Cthulhu game of eldritch horror and sanity points.

True Dungeon, which is a kind of D&D haunted house, meaning that you actually roll a character and walk through it.  In the end, though, it's really neither true nor dungeon.

Lords of Waterdeep, in which political/criminal/heroic factions struggle to control territory in a seedy fantasy metropolis, kind of like Monopoly with assassinations.

(A) Game of Thrones, in which the various House factions of Westeros struggle to play Risk and kill each other, just like in the book.

Rex: Final Days of an Empire, which, though set in the full-developed Twilight Imperium universe, is widely recognized as a nearly exact clone of the old Avalon Hill Dune.

An X-Wing Miniatures Game involving expensive little models shooting lasers and photon torpedoes and making maneuvers in what was still (alas, the tabletop) two-dimensional space.

Mansions of Madness, a Cthulhu game that might best be understood as Clue with eldritch horror and sanity points.

Eldritch horror and sanity points are everywhere in gaming, which is a testament to both the power of H. P. Lovecraft's dark imagination and the fact that his work is now mostly out of copyright.   Cthulhu is huge and terrible to imagine, but he is also free of licensing restrictions.  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl ftaghn, indeed.

(I'm looking at my list, BTW, and noticing how much it is dominated by games from Fantasy Flight.  Thanks, Fantasy Flight!  They certainly rented a lot of space at the Con.)

There are costumes at these conventions.  I didn't have one, but I was impressed with a lot of the ones I saw.  Others less so.  Do not expect too much from your first "Slave Leia."

There are costumes and there are costumes.  Some of these people are clearly talented armorsmiths, seamstresses, and ear sharpeners.  Others look are a little harder to figure out.  ("Is this a D&D Orc or a Warhammer Orc?"  "Is this a Steampunk wizard or Sherlock Holmes?"  "Is this supposed to be Kevin Smith circa 1999?")  It occurs to me that it would be interesting to hold Cosplayers to the same standards as Civil War reenactors, who lose points for wearing contact lenses or anachronistic bathing.  But how would we know?

Big Books I Have Read: (Update!)

We're continuing on with LOTR aloud.  It is still great.  I have had reports from folks who found similar experiences to be less than stellar, but I think we've hit the lucky jackpot.  Still, there are variations.  Orcs are more exciting than Entwives, but we have stayed on.

The boys and their mother took a long car ride to a family reunion.  What should have been seven hours plus seven hours turned into twelve out and eight back.  Fortunately, they were listening to the unabridged Rob Inglis LOTR on CD, and (believe it, parents in the room!) THIS MADE THE CAR RIDE BEARABLE.  Twenty hours is enough to get you from Rivendell to Fangorn Forest (meaning all the way through Moria and Lothlorien and beyond), if you want to know.

This also means I missed reading those portions, which makes me wistful.  Rob Inglis does a good job, however.  I am sorry not to have done the death of Boromir myself, although I probably would have choked up, because, you know, that part will always and forever now retroactively be Sean Bean getting totally *Thunked*.

More on Bad Fiction (Perhaps an Ongoing Series)

One feature of bad fiction is that the author is obviously trying to write a movie.

I don't mean write a screenplay or write a book that will be turned into a movie, but that they're trying to create in narrative prose the experience that they get from movies they love. This almost always results in way too much moment-to-moment description of action and too much visual detail; they're working overtime to create that movie scene in your mind's eye, but all they have is words to do it with. Scenes and plotting are built around movie timing, so everything feels rushed from action-beat to action-beat, with everything in between serving as obvious linear set-up to the next beat. Variety of scenes and characters are limited to whatever makes for easy counterpoint or quickly apprehended irony.

Most of all, words are used only for description of objects and actions, and vocabulary is just to establish tone. There's no composition in the language, which is merely instrumental (or, worse, strained to unnatural elevation). Everything is announced; little is suggested.

I'm not being down on movies. It's just that cinematic storytelling and novelistic storytelling are very different terrain, and you can't do one very well with the expectations of the other.

Here's an example.  You can blame me for this one, but I've seen worse in the wild:

It was dark in the kitchen when she entered. Fumbling for the light switch, she had the sense that it was still early, although she could not see the white, round clock in the dark. The switch flicked at her touch, and it seemed somehow too long a second before the lamps buzzed to stark life and cast shadows across the refrigerator, the toaster, the coffee maker, and other appliances. For an instant, the shadows on the coat rack looked like a man standing in the corner, watching her, and her pulse raced a beat. Of course it was nothing, just her red, hooded Lands-End parka, which was in the kitchen. Reaching across the counter, she picked up the small stainless-steel butter knife. Her right hand tightened on the handle while her left groped for the catch of the zipper on wide blue thigh-side pockets of her canvas cargo pants. She bumped against the edge of the counter, and again there was the usual metallic noise as the silverware clinked in the left-side drawer. Unzipping the pocket, she removed her car keys and house keys and placed them on the counter, next to the whole wheat bread that was already there from the night before. Unwrapping the bread from its cellophane bag, she removed a slice and laid it flat on the cutting board, which was brown and scarred by years of service. She cast her glance across the room for the strawberry jelly jar that should have been there. Where was the jelly? Oh, there, next to the sink. With her left hand she reached for it. Bread and jelly would taste good, she thought. Unscrewing the jar, she took a first dollop of jelly and spread it carefully across the bread. There were gaps where bread still showed, so she used the knife to spread another portion of jelly. She blinked.

 She blinked.

50 Shades of OMG This Is Awful

My experiment with comparative prose yesterday caused me to take another look into This Year's Popular Melodrama Of Illiterate Titillation. 

It's really hard to describe how bad it is. Everything you've ever heard said about terrible writing is there: lifeless prose, clunky dialogue, soap-opera emotions, tired descriptive cliches. The sex and even the musing on relationships are just weirdly written, like someone's unfamiliar imagination of what these things must be like. Everything that's supposed to be edgy just comes off as uncomfortably clinical.

It's been said that most sex acts in fiction are cartoon fantasies bearing little relation to the real thing.  With 50 Shades, this extends to depictions of flirting, studying, and talking to yourself.

Big Books I Have Read Out Loud: LOTR, Part IV

As mentioned, this summer we're reading The Lord of The Rings aloud at my house.  We finished The Hobbit before I began this series, and right now we're starting Book Two of The Fellowship of the Ring.  Fact:  LOTR is a trilogy of six books.

Reading Tolkien aloud is a joy because he knows the sound of sentences.  There is flow and music in his language, as can easily be heard by reading a page of LOTR after a page of any worse novelist (or journalist or blogger).

Bad writing is not hard to come by.  Here's a snippet of execrable prose plucked at random from a lifeless headache of a novel that people who still ought to know better are reading today.  (And reading on the bus, I must add.  Hello?  You may have a Kindle, but it's still porn.)

I roll my eyes at myself.  Get a grip, Steele.  Judging from the building, which is too clinical and modern, I guess Grey is in his forties: fit, tanned, and fair-haired to match the rest of the personnel.

Another elegant, flawlessly dressed blonde comes out a large door to the right.  What is it with all the immaculate blondes?  It's like Stepford here.  Taking a deep breath, I stand up.

These sentences start.  Then they stop.  They pass basically without having happened.  They bear no relation to one another in sound or any other pattern.  The passage seems composed mainly to avoid taxing anyone's vocabulary or ear.  It's like Stepford here.

Now, Tolkien.  Again, almost a random example:

Immediately, though everything else remained as before, dim and dark, the shapes became terribly clear.  He was able to see beneath their black wrappings.  There were five tall figures:  two standing on the lip of the dell, three advancing.  In their white faces burned keen and merciless eyes; under their mantles were long grey robes; upon their grey helms were helms of silver; in their haggard hands were swords of steel.  Their eyes fell upon him and pierced him, as they rushed towards him.  Desperate, he drew his own sword, and it seemed to him that it flickered red, as if it was a firebrand.

This isn't even Tolkien at his best.  "Keen and merciless eyes" may be almost a cliche, but in context I'll take it over "I roll my eyes at myself," especially if I am forced to visualize it.

But read both passages aloud.  Really do it.  I like to think that I'm pretty good at that, as I've always done it in private and I've spent years delivering passages in front of classrooms.  Try as I might, I can't make the first example sound like anything other than someone trying to put captions to a series of pouty fashion photos.  In the end, the language has gone nowhere with me.  We've just agreed to call it quits.

The Tolkien, meanwhile, establishes pacing and tone and rhythm, even though it is anything but sing-song.  Each sentence pulls the voice forward into the next.  It doesn't want to stop.  This is language that wants to be read.