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Mar302014

Video Games: An Unlikely Writing Teacher


I just finished Mass Effect 3, the end of the epic Sci-Fi trilogy series from Bioware, and it’s left me with the same sense I get when a great book comes to an end. I know there’s plenty of debate out there about video games, that they’re too violent, too addictive. I’d say that any compelling form of escape, including reading, can cause controversy. My own mother called Ultima “sorcery” when I played it on the Nintendo Entertainment System. She might have been onto something. Video games, RPGs at least, have always had a certain magic for me.
While tabletop role playing games are a collective storytelling experience, a situation where we each bring something to the table (usually beer and sarcasm at my table), I prefer a solitary video game experience. I turn on the screen, look into that other world, where I create a separate identity and see where that character goes.
Mass Effect follows Bioware’s extremely high standards (mirrored in Dragon Age, their fantasy trilogy) of forcing the lead character into tight corners where you make difficult choices that impact the series again and again. Every choice, imported as I’ve moved through the games, came back to bite me. Forget the incredible graphics and top voice talent—it’s that narrative, that raising of the stakes until the character has no way out but one of two equally terrible options, that drives my love of the series.
In elder days, I’d have a similar experience with Ultima. The classic series of computer RPGs were one of the biggest reasons I wanted a PC after experiencing them on the NES. Ultima was the first game to really draw me in, encourage me to create a character and set them loose in a fantastic world. In many ways the lower quality, vaguer, graphics enhanced my experience as my imagination could fill in so much about the relationships among the party and their motivations. I’ve learned about narrative by reading, but video games have long been a lab where I’ve grown characters.
Reaching the end of Mass Effect (and I’m proud I was able to avoid spoilers two years after the game released), was like getting to the end of a great book. My head spins a little. I already miss some of the characters. I’m tempted to start the whole cycle over again and make different choices, but I’m more inspired to go write something, to look at how I can set up those kinds of no win scenarios and see my own characters beat the odds.
Mar242014

Some Bookish Things to Do in Denver and Boulder

I’m a Denver resident so I have to be upfront and admit that I’m not as familiar with Boulder. I’ve included items for both cities.
Denver
If you’ve got a few hours, I’d recommend a walk from the Tattered Cover LoDo to My Brother’s Bar and back. There’s a good view from the top of Confluence Park (though the Union Station construction will mar things a bit behind you unless you’re fascinated by trains). If you’ve more time, 
I suggest going to the Tattered Cover’s Colfax location. It’s a beautiful space in a historic theater. A quick stop at Book Bar (west of everything else in the Highlands) is well worth it.
Tattered Cover
I’d heard about the Tattered Cover before I’d moved here twenty years ago. While the other locations have never had the same charm as the old Cherry Creek store, the Colfax and Elizabeth location is beautiful, airy, and well stocked. The Lower Downtown (LoDo) location is a close second favorite.
My Brother’s Bar
Has been a quiet institution for a long time. There are stairs that no longer rise to a missing second floor, a beer garden (they only play classical music). Jack Kerouac immortalized it. Not nearly as bookish, but still worth a stop and great for an inexpensive lunch. Don’t confuse it with Brother’s Bar. That’s where most of the bad reviews come from.
Book Bar
Book Bar is neat little coffee shop/bar/bookstore. My book club meets there sometimes. It’s just a perfect little book themed space with great coffee and better wine.
Murder by the Book
Sadly, this little gem of a store no longer has a storefront so it’s technically cheating to put it here, but I want to support their online efforts to stay afloat.
Boulder
Boulder, especially Pearl Street, is a highly walkable place. It’s a great area to wander and see and well worth some hours. I prefer it in the summer when the students aren’t around and the weather is warmer, but it’s a good place any time of year. If you’ve a couple of hours to spare, be sure to walk the creek past the library and see the dam under Broadway.
Trident Café and Bookseller
I have a soft spot for the Trident as I met my ex there for our first real date. The Trident is close to the Boulder Bookstore and open until 11 pm so it’s a good place to go and browse used books if you’re wandering around after Booktopia.
The Catacombs
Whether you’re staying in the Hotel Boulderado or not, check out the Catacombs bar. Not bookish per se, but a cool, inspiring space (especially for mystery or fantasy writers).
Boulder Public Library
A quick walk from the Boulder Bookstore, the public library branch is well designed and near the creek, so it’s a good place to clear your head and see the town.
The Stanley Hotel
If you were taken with the Shining, then the drive to Estes Park from Boulder will be worth it. If you’re going to spend the time then I recommend making sure you explore Rocky Mountain National Park. Not bookish in itself, but it has some of the most amazing views.
Erika Napoletano’s List of Independent Bookstores
I found this list of bookstores for Boulder and thought I’d share:
Please note that Left Hand closed a while back (thanks Rachel Adler for the tip).
I didn’t mention Boulder Bookstore as Booktopia will give you the chance to see it.
Thanks to my book club and Brian Staley for helping with this list!
Mar122014

I Think I’m in Love. Athens Might Get Jealous

Three days back and Rome is like a dream. I’ve waxed poetic before on the beauty of travel. It takes you out of yourself, away from your daily grind, and gifts you with insight. For me, a city so steeped in history is a natural draw. Even without the churches, the whispering fountains, the great food or perfect coffee, the ruins remain.
I had the fortune this trip to spend a day with Peggy Ryan, whose Gracefully Global blog is more than worth checking out. She had some great tips for little things off the beaten path, and she shares my love of the Trastevere neighborhood. She also introduced me to cacao de pepe, which officially blew my diet.
We wandered with our mutual friend Clint, who’s always good at spotting an odd twist in the path and leading you to the unexpected. As usual I hauled back too many books, but strangely I didn’t take many pictures. I wanted this trip to be more in the moment, more immediate and less of a record. I captured memories, bits of ideas and faint inspirations as Clint and I walked the city, exploring her ancient and medieval boundaries. I made a friend, a guy from Milan who taught me some Italian sayings.
Now I’m back, and while the getting home was as strangely rough as always, I’ve carried that sense of wonder with me. That’s what travel does for me, why I prioritize it over owning a car of a bigger house. If I preach anything, if I’ve found anything that makes me happier, it is the long game of valuing experience and people over material goods.
Rome has made an impact. After three trips there I’m starting to feel like I know the city, even if my terrible sense of direction hasn’t caught up. I’m clinging to the feeling the journey gave me. Maybe I’ll learn to make pasta.
Feb232014

Cottontop


Memory is a tricky, private thing. While it’s true for everyone that Guthrie, Oklahoma in the 1970s was a very historic, very small town, we didn’t live in Guthrie. We lived near it in a pocket universe of flannel and scrub oak.
I grew up in the woods near Lake Liberty, at a little bend in the water we had all to ourselves. Only the occasional duck blind or abandoned Coors can gave us signs of intrusion. Our three acres, with my grandparents’ pink brick house at the top and our trailer at the bottom of the little hill, were as far from civilization as you could get. I don’t remember a time without corduroy and jean jackets, chickens and BB rifles, or my orange tackle box. Going into town was a big deal. The school bus took forever. Trips to Wal-Mart or the feed store were rare and necessary.
It was a whole other world, and never one in which I quite belonged. I wanted magic and spaceships, droids and a robot dog. I asked my uncle to build me a wooden box that I could paint blue and pretend it was a TARDIS. What I didn’t understand was how magical my world already was. I could be gone all day, wandering paths through the high grass that pooled when the woods of scrub oak broke. Lightning storms were common in the fall, as were the lime green skies that marked the chance for a tornado in the spring. We’d find lumps of iron, pitted and black, in the red clay or soft sand. We called it lava rock. Perhaps it was bog iron, though any bog that might have produced it was long gone. Perhaps they were meteorites.
The smells were acrid, like the garbage we burned, and verdant as the leaves uncurled. Everything had a taste, the metallic air that came from our trailer’s heating vents in winter and the leaf mold of the shady earth beneath the branches.
Summer’s light would strike the oak leaves, giving them an emerald glow that contrasted so sharply with their black, flaky bark. We chased fireflies in the years we had them, missed them when we did not.
In the few photos I have my hair is white, so pale they called me “cottontop.” I am not alone. I had older brothers, a younger sister. I didn’t think about the hand me down jeans and threadbare clothes that marked us as poorer than some other kids. I had a wild, infinite backyard. And I had my head, my imagination: a world full of space and science fiction.
Then I had the city. For my father, always aspiring to a better life, the climb was uphill. He wanted more than a trailer at the bottom of his in laws’ little hill. We left Guthrie, that magical world, behind us. I remember crying forever about Patches, the cat I could not bring with us. I vividly recall the big steel barn that marked the turn off, the way down to Forest Hills, our “neighborhood” of similarly sized plots.
I can still drive that road. The barn still stands, but Guthrie isn’t a place I can recapture. Going home for me means visiting a tiny world where the woods are only a few feet higher than I am. Drizzle and rainstorms still make the red clay bleed, but now houses line the lake. Those little paths are someone’s property. The forest is divided by lines.
What I had, where I lived, is a memory. I’m not even certain how much of it was real. Trying to write about it, I come across images and anecdotes, none of which I’m certain really happened. When I talk to my siblings about it, their memories are just as tangled and unreliable. That just makes it all the more magical, a world I may have created, like so many others.
Oct182013

Sometimes I Miss Vampires, but I Miss My Doc Martens More

 
I’ll confess that I’ve been over vampires for a while. They lost their sparkle some years ago, to the point where I recently picked up an urban fantasy that was really drawing me in until a vampire showed up and drowned me in cliché.
I wasn’t always so burned out on bloodsuckers. Years before Buffy put a stake through my heart, I held a dark and twisty love for Anne Rice, New Orleans, and all things that went bump in the night. I was an angsty boy, Goth before we called it Goth.* 
I cut my own hair and dyed my clothes if anyone tried to dress me in colors. My father called me the “Prince of Darkness.” It wasn’t that I celebrated depression by wearing a lot of black. It’s that wearing black gave air to a feeling, a claustrophobia I felt about my own skin, that I hadn’t been able to express. 
I write a lot about damaged characters. Sometimes their marks are physical, sometimes spiritual . And they can’t always name the source of the injury, usually because they haven’t yet identified it. I write about these boys, and they are usually boys, because I was that boy. I write about them finding some peace, some healing, because despite my young adult angst, anger, and walking around in the rain, I’ve found those things.**
My primary problem with vampires is that most of them are idiots. They live forever and never evolve. They never grow. You shouldn’t get to be immortal if you’re going to be an immortal idiot. Okay that, and I think that 100 years of high school is my idea of hell. 
I loved Anne Rice because she showed us vampires struggling to change. Lestat wanted to break all the rules, burn down the world, and still settle into a quiet little townhouse with Louis at the end of it. Okay, I’ve a 1950s ranch with weird siding and cats, but I’ve settled down enough that I only occasionally want to scream. I never burned the world down and trying mostly singed just me. I’m not a broken boy anymore, but I remember him. He informs my stories. He sits in the dark, where he can see. He’s got something to show you, and he’s got a match ready to light.
*The term still eludes me since the gothic style let more light into cathedrals. You want shadows and gloom, get yourself a Romanesque basilica.
** It does, by the way, get better. Hang in there. It does. I promise.

 

Sep292013

The Stars Shone Bright

 
Texas isn’t home. It never felt like home. And it does not call me back. Still, I go there for work sometimes. This week I had the fairly disconcerting experience of being sent to Dallas where my hotel stood about a mile from my first apartment in the demilitarized zone between Grand Prairie and Arlington. Gunshots weren’t uncommon and the cops couldn’t decide which suburb should police it, so neither did.

I went by the brick mini-manor my father owned with my first stepmother, where I lived as a teen. I wanted to climb the fence, see the backyard, where I first kissed a boy in the rain, under a willow tree, beside my father’s goldfish pond. The experience washed me in bittersweet sentiment, in memories both good and bad. They mixed with feelings that were often just so overwhelming back then.

That boy, my first love, also overwhelmed me. The neighborhood was new then, freshly plopped atop the black mud they called Gumbo. We’d sneak around at night, wandering through unfinished houses, musing where we’d put the furniture, the piano, if the house was ours. It was perhaps the only time in my life when I yearned for domesticity. When it ended, after a few years of me pining and him denying me, Dallas felt like a crater. I climbed out and trekked to Denver on a scholarship earned through all the bad poetry the experience inspired. 
Texas doesn’t call me back. Still, I had to see. I walked around the little park where I ditched school to read Margaret Atwood’s CAT’S EYE in one intense sitting. There were a lot of books in Texas. A lot of coffee. I was lonely. I was bored. So I read. I read voraciously. And I told stories, about myself, about him, the other boy. 
When people ask me what I write I tell them that I write the book I always yearned for when I was a young adult, the YA book I still can’t find: an action-heavy fantasy with a gay protagonist. I write other books, but that’s the book I want to publish, the book I never see on all the YA shelves and tables that seem to be slowly winning all the shelf space. And I have to think there’s room.
Sep212013

Hello Autumn!

 
It’s been a fantastic, busy summer. I set a while ago to try and see the entire Shakespearean canon before I died, and I managed to knock quite a few of them off my list this year. I’ve been to Boulder and San Diego, Cedar City, Utah, and finally landed in Ashland, Oregon. Among it all I had the pleasure of taking my god daughter to her first play.
As I watch, as I listen, I start to find themes in the plays that reflect my own life or my own writing. That’s the point of it all, isn’t it? Shakespeare was written for the masses. The struggles of his characters, particularly in love and matters of station, would have resonated with his audience.
When I compare it Young Adult literature, I can’t help but see how writers do the same: first love is a constant, though after a summer filled with reading YA, I’m getting a little weary of triangles involving the good boy, the bad boy, and a female lead that can’t see past this struggle to more important matters. Still, it’s an old story. There’s even a jealous triangle in King Lear, and it works destruction on all its members.
It’s easy to note Shakespeare’s influence on literature. For me, I didn’t really discover the point until I started college, with a professor who made me read Hamlet so closely that she tested us on footnotes. Even with her encouragement, and even with my love of reading, I’ve never been good at reading plays. I have to hear them, to see them. I don’t think I really fell in love with a Midsummer’s Night Dream until I saw it in Ashland, done in the new style that’s as multimedia and lively as possible. Now I’m fairly obsessed with it.
I arrived in Ashland so stressed out from my day job that I was nearly in tears, after one of the worst days of travel I’ve ever experienced. Now I’m renewed, at least enough to blog again, and hopefully with lots of great plot tangles to ponder and unwind. If great literature has a point for me, a purpose, it’s that it can help us escape our troubles, and help us sort some things out while we’re gone.
Jul62013

“Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys.”

 
The PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER is one of those books that can hit you pretty hard. For me, someone who felt pretty isolated as a young adult, someone who could really have benefited from the Internet and social media, it had an intense impact. I was that weird kid. I am still that weird kid. 
A friend recently watched the movie and a group of us gathered to watch it with her. Comparisons to the book were inevitable, and sort of the whole point. While I didn’t dislike the movie (of course I thought the book was better), the film did remind me of something critical that the book taught me: those first real friends, the first people you meet who are like you, can save your life.
Another important reminder was how easily we forget our young adult experience. Some people seem forever caught in that time, perpetual teenagers who skipped the valuable steps of finding one’s self. Others seem destroyed by it: what happened to them in that period never goes away. It lingers as a destructive time. And still, a third group seems content to wholly forget what it was like to come of age. These are the parents who can’t imagine why their teens act the way they do.
PERKS is an important book to me because it depicts the time when I came of age, and it references wonderful music like the Smiths, already defunct when I discovered them but whose songs spoke so clearly to what I was feeling and going through.
Since I write YA, I work hard to remember it all (embarrassing and painful as much of it is). It would be easy to slip into self-pity here, but I look back at my experience and realize that while I was that weird kid, he grew into a unique adult who can’t imagine being anybody else. And I think of the good friends I’ve had, then and since, all a little weird in their own way, and I’m grateful for every one.
Jun222013

Influences: Past, Present and Future

Anyone who’s known me a long time will hear me talk about Ultima, the series of rpg video games that provided me with some much needed escape in high school. The vagueness of the characters got me telling myself more about them. The long hours I spent, camped in my grandmother’s tiny second bedroom, staring into a black and white television set with controller of my Nintendo fixed in my hands were formative. It wasn’t long after that I wrote my first piece of fantasy: a terrible little thing with swords made of gemstones. Still, it was a start.
I’d always been a world builder. It’s the part I enjoy the most. Funny that I never got into tabletop gaming until gaming until my 30s. I guess I’d clung to the idea that I’d lose my connection to reality. I know it’s happened with video games. Last summer I completely fell into Dragon’s Dogma. I don’t remember Labor Day, but I remember hunting remishrooms to gift to Reynard, the cute wandering peddler.With tabletop, I found a lab for ideas. Writing a novel is very different than gaming, but still, I knew I was starting to nail a character when someone would talk about them like they were real.

But nothing influences me like books. Joss Whedon once said that you either watch television or you make it. It’s not the same with reading. You have to read in order to write, not just to know the market, but to learn. I haven’t been blogging a lot lately, and when I have, it’s mostly to review a book that really struck me. I’ve said before that bad books can teach you as much as good. I remember good lines from bad books, good parts of terrible books, and the scene stealing secondary character that should have been the star. Yet the really great books are the ones that lodge overall in my memory.

So I’m back to blogging, but I’ll be changing my focus a bit. From here on I’ll be including what the book I read taught me about writing. And I’ll be getting a bit more personal about the influence a book, film, or game had on me. I’ll try to avoid spoilers whenever possible but sometimes I’ll need to go into plot to talk about what I got out of the book, so I’ll let you know if there’s spoilers.

Apr292013

A Young Adult Book That Can Teach Literary Fiction a Thing or Two: Yeah, It’s That Good

I have to confess that I can be terrible about book recommendations. They pile up, float around my brain, and sometimes surface years later. I don’t doubt they’re a good read, but I sort of have to discover a book for myself. I can be just as bad about books gifted to me. They sit in a stack, slowly read but always growing in number. If I’m ever snowed in for six months, I might get to them all.

I first heard about Chris Crutcher’s STAYING FAT FOR SARAH BYRNES about fifteen years ago. A teacher recommended it to me in passing, and I forgot about it until recently, when I started writing a YA book and therefore, started consuming YA books en masse. STAYING FAT… popped up and wow, I’m glad it did.
I’ve read a lot of YA. There’s romantic YA, fantastic YA (my corner of the block), and there’s a set I’d call “heavy YA.” In the heavy YA category I’d put the PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, SPROUT, and anything that really dives into the young adult experience in a realistic manner. STAYING FAT FOR SARAH BYRNES might be the reigning champion. It’s dark, but genuinely funny, while delving into questions about religion, morality, and what bonds us with other kids.
This is one of those books that I sort of feel like an idiot for not reading sooner. It won a large number of awards and is famous enough that it should have penetrated my bubble even back when I was being an English major snob about books (a habit I’m happy to have broken). STAYING FAT is one of those cases where I can set a Young Adult book beside a good number of literary fiction novels and it just blows them all away. 
In case you’re as in the dark as I was, it goes like this: Eric used to be fat. He’s still husky, but joining the swim team in high school has thinned him out. He fought it for a while, inhaling more food than was healthy, because being fat was what bonded him to Sarah Byrnes. Their childhood friendship was built on the foundation of his weight and her hideously disfigured face. Now Sarah isn’t speaking. She’s in an institution, and Eric is determined to draw her out. To do so, he recaps their exploits and how their friendship started. Along the way, Eric deals with a number of issues typical to high school: deciding where he stands on some things and learning how to go after what he wants. STAYING FAT…reminds me what it’s so easy to forget as an adult: that school was no golden youth, and that teenagers deal with heavy issues, heavy consequences, and heavy choices all the time. I’d tell you more about the book, but if you don’t already know, just pick it up. If you’re a parent, a teacher, anyone interested in writing young adult lit, or anyone just interested in reading a good book, then put this one at the top of your stack. I feel that strongly about it, me, who forgets recommendations and really wish I hadn’t ignored this one.