Category: side projects (Page 1 of 5)

Word Counts and Critical Voice

May 26, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I never realized how much my consideration of a project’s word count could invite my critical voice to make an appearance. After all, if I’m writing a novel, don’t I have to make sure it hits a certain word count (ballpark, anyway)? Same for short stories, novellas, etc. How can I write anything without considering word count?

Here’s another case of me not heeding my own advice. I tell students all the time that page counts and word counts are arbitrary when it comes to prose. Teachers tell students to write five hundred words (or a thousand or two-fifty or whatever) not because the word count is intrinsic to the piece of writing, but because of other factors: we don’t have time to read twenty-five eight-thousand-word essays this week, or we want the students to learn brevity, or we simply follow convention by giving students their beloved “How long should this be?” question an answer.

The real answer is, “However long it needs to be.” But students hate that answer. We teachers sometimes hate it too.

If we were printing a magazine or a newspaper, then column length would matter. There’s only so much space on a page.

If we were publishing books, then length would matter too for something pushing against one thousand pages.

But students aren’t usually writing for publication in a print newspaper, and novelists aren’t usually pushing against one thousand pages for their novels.

The answer is, “However long it needs to be.”

And yet here I am, sitting here week after week, scribbling and typing away at my stories, constantly checking the word count to see if it “fits” the prescribed type of story I’m writing. Not genre, not narrative. But: Is it a short story? A novel? A novella? Better make my “short story” the right length. Not too long, not too short. Better make sure my latest novel is between 90k and 100k words. Better work towards a “length,” because how else will I know I’m done?

Idiocy.

Despite what I tell students, I’ve internalized the “How long should it be?” question for my own writing, and it’s opened the door to Critical Voice. Instead of spinning the yarn and letting it go where it may, I’ve decided ahead of time what “type” of story it is, and I’ve been writing to that length and structure.

Who is to say what I’m writing is a short story? Even if I set out with an idea I think will be a short story, what happens if it starts to pick up steam and becomes something more? Am I open to that possibility, or am I stuck in “short story”-mode, trying to fit an oversized foot into a glass slipper that just won’t hold it?

For Norse City Limits, I decided that it needed to be a “proper” length. Fantasy, after all, is a genre that welcomes the longer book. Readers expect a hefty tome.

But what if my story isn’t fit for hefty-tome-dom? What if NCL needs to be 60k or 70? What if it needs to be ultra-hefty? 300k? Or more?

I am not trusting my Creative Voice here. I am working towards something arbitrary instead of something that comes intrinsically out of the story itself.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

I never realized how much the “publishing” side of things was intruding on my creative process. I thought that since I always write what I want and never to “market,” that I was immune from the business side interfering with Creative Voice.

Gah! I was so wrong!

Sneaky, that Critical Voice.

If I were writing for a print newspaper, things would be different. If I were writing a sonnet, obviously, the form demands a certain length.

But I’m writing fiction and nonfiction on my blog and as an indie publisher. Length doesn’t matter.

This is wildly freeing. Today, as I worked on a “short story,” I realized that there was no reason it had to be bound by the term “short story.” I mean, maybe it will end up being a short story. Chances are it will. There are only a few characters and one setting. It’s basically the story of a brief affair. I don’t think it will be more than a short narrative.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is only the first chapter of a longer story. Maybe this little May-December romance will become something larger in scope.

That’s not for me to decide at the moment. All I have to decide is what the next sentence will be. And the next. Until the story finds its ending.

That’s the key: The story must find its own ending.

Not a word count or publishing consideration. Those don’t determine the ending. That’s Critical Voice thinking.

What does the story need? Where will it end?

That’s Creative Voice talking. I’m just along for the ride.

I finally realized today that I’d been trying to backseat drive, trying to route the way only to discover that there is no fixed destination. Not yet, anyway. The route, the journey, my Creative Voice will decide the destination, not me.

And not my word counts.

Return to DCC RPG

April 23, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m playing a solo Dolmenwood game right now, my kids and I are playing some adventures using Hero Kids, and I might be joining an open table for Shadowdark in the very near future, but I’ve also been cooking up another solo adventure/campaign using the Emirates of Ylaruam gazetteer from TSR, and I was thinking of using Cairn for my system, and yet now, I’m getting the itch to return to my first OSR love: Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.

I’ve played several games using DCC, and I’ve loved each and every one, but I find that players don’t always love it as much as I do. Maybe I’m not a very good Judge, maybe the players have wanted a more typical 5e experience, I don’t know. But I’ve moved away from DCC RPG partly because there are so many new games I’m interested in (Dolmenwood!!), and partly because I’ve found it hard to get a regular game going.

But if I love it so much, and I’m planning a solo campaign, why not use DCC for my solo campaign? It’s an obvious choice!

One thing I’m interested in is using DCC for a homebrew. Although Goodman Games makes excellent adventure modules, I’m more and more curious to see how DCC works when using the core rules but adventuring in my own world (“my own” is a stretch… I am using the Ylaruam stuff from TSR… but I’m not using any pre-made modules; I’m making a sandbox and letting my PCs go wherever, no set story).

One of the things I love most about DCC RPG’s core rulebook is the way it encourages the judge and players to develop their own world: make your own patrons and deities and monsters and magic items and everything else in between. If dice rolls lead to wild results, play out those results and see what happens. A spell goes awry and transports the party to another dimension? Cool! Go explore that dimension. A PC dies and his friends want him back? Cool! Travel to the underworld and rescue him. The warrior wants to learn a new fighting style? Cool! Seek out the legendary sword master of the far-off mountains and convince him to train you.

The Goodman Games modules are fun, but one of the things that drew me to DCC RPG is the way it inspired my own adventuring and world-building ideas. I like the modules for one-shots, or even as locations/encounters within a hex crawl, and I might use a few as I solo-play, but I’m really in the mood for creating my own map of adventures, my own locations, my own quests. I’ve never really used DCC for that kind of play yet, and I want to try.

I’m inspired on some level by Bob the Worldbuilder’s excellent Skrym resource. By using the Ylaruam gazetteer and the Skrym random tables (as well as the tables in the DCC core book), I feel confident I can make a robust solo campaign.

In some ways, I wonder if Goodman Games’s success with its modules has hampered or undersold DCC’s ability to work as a homebrew game. The game itself has so many interesting quirks and tables that create stories simply by the effects of a spell roll or treasure table roll or patron roll. The modules are wonderfully weird and well-designed, offering the perfect DCC “flavor,” but as a system, I think the DCC core book gets overshadowed by this robust line of adventures. I’m genuinely curious to see how well the system holds up in a sandbox campaign that is not based on any DCC RPG modules or settings.

American Fantasy in a Box of Rain

February 28, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Ross Douthat had an op-ed a few months ago where he posited that America needed its own quintessentially American fantasy novel/series, and while I immediately objected to the headline’s premise that we’ve never had one (ever heard of Oz, my dude? Or the John the Balladeer stories?), I understood that Douthat was arguing for a “Great American Fantasy,” a Lord of the Rings for our purple mountains’ majesty.

He also acknowledges the Oz books and others, and yes, he does say we can have a great American fantasy that is for children or that does something outside of epic fantasy.

In his opinion, no “American fantasy” has achieved greatness yet, and that’s what he’s challenging authors to do. “Make American Fantasy Great” (but not “again,” because, well).

Okay, cool, fine, whatever.

I’ll admit that I have a fantasy novel idea (that I first developed back in my early college days) that seeks to blend my love for psychedelic 1960s music with my love for fantasy, but I don’t know if it would meet Douthat’s idea of “great.” Too quirky, perhaps. Too niche.

In many ways, the Between Earth and Sky trilogy by Rebecca Roanhorse is what I would call an “American Epic Fantasy,” but I’m not sure it counts for Douthat’s vision, and I don’t think he’d call it “great.” For Douthat’s “American Fantasy,” America = United States, whereas Roanhorse is definitely America = non-European, indigenous America. She’s decidedly pre-Colombian.

My idea is of the “magic school,” magic-in-the-real-world variety. Think A Separate Peace set at a music school with magic and dragons and it’s the 1960s.

For me, psychedelic rock & roll has a lot of fantasy connections. It’s why hippies and college students were all saying “Frodo Lives” in the 1960s, making The Lord of the Rings into a huge American bestseller. We all know Led Zeppelin was putting Tolkien references into their lyrics. And the weirdness of an LSD trip can definitely feel like traveling into another world, a magical world (so I have heard).

In particular, the Grateful Dead’s music and Robert Hunter’s lyrics have always been a source of inspiration for my imagination and for my fantasy writing too. If there’s an “American Fantasy” soundtrack, I think it might be the Dead who plays most prominently on it. This is partly because of the free-form style of their music, the occasional weirdness. But it’s also because of Hunter’s lyrics, which blend Americana with mystical imagery; a very grounded, homespun sensibility with a dream-like lyricism:

“Walk into splintered sunlight

Inch your way through dead dreams

to another land

Maybe you’re tired and broken

Your tongue is twisted

with words half spoken

and thoughts unclear”

…

“Just a box of rain

wind and water

believe it if you need it

if you don’t just pass it on

Sun and shower, wind and rain

in and out the window

like a moth before the flame”

(“Box of Rain,” words by Robert Hunter)

“Box of Rain,” “Ripple,” “Dark Star,” “St. Stephen,” “Terrapin Station,” “Franklin’s Tower”: These are only a few of the Dead’s songs that carry me away to an Otherworld, to fantasy.

I think we tend to associate British bands like Zeppelin, or heavy metal and prog rock in general with fantasy — which makes sense. These genres and bands are often heavily influenced by fantasy literature. And fantasy literature has, to Douthat’s point, been generally associated with European culture for a lot of its history (though this has changed more recently).

But the Dead are also a band with a fantasy vibe, it’s just that their vibe isn’t always drawing FROM fantasy literature but instead from a different corpus that includes American history and folklore as well as classical literature, the Bible, the folk, blues, and country traditions, and, of course, the Ken Kesey Merry Prankster LSD stuff from their early years. The Dead are American Fantasy to me because of the way they bridge so many different influences, while also bringing their own original visions to bear on these source materials. It’s old and new, traditional and experimental. Earthy bluegrass and psychedelic flights of fancy.

One need only look at the album artwork and overall aesthetic of the band’s merchandise and promotional art: animated skeletons and dancing bears and all kinds of fantastical and sumptuous pastoral imagery. Crows and cats and harlequins. Banjo-playing turtles and skulls and starry skies.

(To be fair, lots of promo art from the psychedelic sixties and seventies fits this bill. But the Dead have kept it going beyond that particular period, making this aesthetic an integral part of their oeuvre.)

In some ways, the “Great American Fantasy Novel” isn’t even a novel at all. It’s the body of work done by the Grateful Dead. Maybe this isn’t what Douthat is looking for — this isn’t a Moby Dick but for “fantasy” — but as the man once said, “Believe it if you need it. If you don’t just pass it on.”

I believe it.

Ten Years Zine

January 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The way I got to this little project was via reading old newsletters from my inbox. I have a problem with not deleting emails, and also with not always reading things that I want to read. The never-ending stream of emails continues apace, and then the ones I want to read get lost in the cascade until eventually it’s been five years and I still have dozens upon dozens of unread newsletters that I really want to read.

So, the other day, I scrolled back half a decade and started catching up on old mail.

This one, from Austin Kleon, struck me as a fun challenge, so when I needed a break from grading papers, I decided to give it a go. I most definitely took more than 20 minutes to do it.

Turns out #1. I have a pretty terrible memory. I should have spent some time rereading old notebooks or at least looking at a calendar or something, because I really could not remember what happened circa 2015 or between 2018-2019. I remembered 2016 and 2017 only because I had my sons in those years.

And, of course, #2. The Year 2020.

I didn’t bother adding everything that happened that year. “COVID” and a few random words like, “Masks!” were enough to convey the memory. Because it’s all too much, and also too numb to be captured on a tiny zine page. Even now, five years later. It’s not that I particularly suffered all that much from the virus we know as “Covid-19,” (thank God, my family was lucky), but the world suffered, and since I live in the world, my world tilted as a result. I can’t even say exactly when it started tilting — maybe it was also in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 — but 2020 was when it tipped over. I fell over and flipped back up again, somehow different. Honestly, world-views were shattered. They’re still shattering. I went full-Idler.

Anyway, after the rupture of Covid, it’s like the years couldn’t contain everything that happened to me. The zine pages weren’t enough; I couldn’t fit myself in. Ink everywhere, everything at random, new memories popping up just as I thought I’d finished with the pages. No births, but some deaths, and even the biggest one, I couldn’t fit, or didn’t want to fit — it was beyond the format — and trying to catalog the rush of change and then reversion and then change and then–

I didn’t realize my decade could be divided so neatly between “ordinary” — ho-hum, having babies and raising them and work and whatever, to the point where I couldn’t recall the distinct days — and “momentous” — the rush and rumble of a boulder rolling downhill, of huge changes, bad changes, good changes, trials and errors (so many errors), (so many trials), and now I’m back where I seemingly started from in 2015: in the thick of teaching, raising my children, trying to write and publish, and wondering if I’ll ever get the hang of any of it.

But I’m definitely different. That much is true.

Which is good. One should probably change after ten years.

Ten Titles, Ten Characters (from my notebook, January 2024)

January 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I was flipping through my notebooks from 2024, mostly to see how many books I’d read in the past year (more than 40, by the way… so not bad, but now I’m thinking I want to set a challenge for myself to read over 60 this year), when I came across an entry from my January notebook that included two “Try Ten” lists.

One was ten titles, one was ten characters. Here are the lists:

Ten Titles

  1. Bicycle Repair
  2. Professor _________’s Guide to the Magically Perplexed
  3. Went Away Sailing
  4. Grandma’s Gnocchi
  5. I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream
  6. Brennivin. Shot. Cold.
  7. Stolen Goods
  8. The Voice in the Heating Vent
  9. Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat
  10. Whenever You Think of Criticizing

Ten Characters

  1. An old cop who serves evictions now
  2. The ghost of a young woman’s dead twin
  3. A boy who is in love with his best friend
  4. A foreign cleaning lady
  5. A tree that can communicate with a human
  6. An old man who stole a fellow soldier’s ID back in Vietnam
  7. The driver of a bus that takes devils in and out of Hell
  8. A middle-aged woman who once got to spend her afternoons with a unicorn but hasn’t seen one in decades
  9. An oracle/fortune teller who has lost her power
  10. A man who must take care of his sick wife in quarantine (he hasn’t seen her in a week?)

I’ll admit, that last character entry doesn’t quite make sense to me looking back at it now. Has he not seen her in a week but now can see her and must take care of her? Or has he been taking care of her in quarantine but she left him and hasn’t been seen in a week?

I really don’t know.

The funny thing is that I used one of those titles and wrote a short story to go along with it. “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream.” It was a writing challenge I did with my Creative Writing students where we had to write a short story in one hour. I participated and used this title.

The story turned out all wrong. I tried writing an unreliable narrator and it was an utter failure. Just didn’t live up to the title at all. And I tried an ironic twisty ending that was pretty stupid, frankly.

But I still like the title. I’m tempted, even now, to use the title again and write a different story. And why not?

In fact, it might be kind of funny to write several short stories, all with the same title, all different, and then put them together into a collection.

Or maybe that would be utterly not funny but just kind of stupid. I have a difficult time distinguishing between the cool and the stupid until I’ve done the thing. Before I’ve done the thing, it seems pretty cool. After I’ve done the thing, it feels pretty stupid. I have two choices, then: either keep doing the cool-sounding thing, hoping one day it won’t turn out stupid, or stop doing any of the cool-sounding things. Which means I’ll have done nothing.

I think I know which choice to make.

Better to write a dozen (or more) stupid stories than to write none at all.

Anyway, some of these ideas and characters and titles don’t sound particularly interesting at the moment, but I often wonder if these little seeds and sparks of ideas might turn out to be pretty great once put into action. It’s the action that matters. The telling of the tale. Because otherwise they’re just a list of words. I could write a dozen stories called “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream” and they would all be different. Who can say, just from that title, what stories may come?

This is why the ideas really don’t matter all that much. I can come up with ten more ideas right now. So can any of us.

It’s the weaving of the story that matters. The particular sequence of the tale is what counts.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if I combined a title from one list with a character from the other. Might be a fun game. What kind of challenge could I make for myself in this new month of a new year. From two lists in January 2024 to ten stories in January 2025…

To do that, I’d have to get over my trepidation. My worry that I’m not up to the task of writing ten stories in one month. Can I do that? Can I get over that hump, that lack of confidence?

My husband said that the word he would use to describe my 2024 was “confidence,” but I just don’t see it. I feel the opposite, like my confidence is slowly draining away. But maybe he can see something I can’t.

I hesitate to even set a challenge like ten stories in one month because what if I can’t do it? What if it stresses me out? What if I simply don’t have the time, on top of all the other duties and goals I’ve already set?

Might be fun though… the old cop serving evictions, entitled “Went Away Sailing,” and the old cop has to serve someone who never seems to be home, who might have gotten on a sailboat and drifted away, and the cop tries to find them, to serve the papers, yes, but also, just to see what it would be like to sail away from everything…

The old fortune teller who has lost her gift… every time she tries to tell a fortune and see the future, she sees her grandmother, bent over the kitchen table, rolling out potatoes and flour to make the gnocchi dough… Maybe she has to talk to her grandmother, and maybe she can’t break through, she’s lost her gift, after all…

The foreign cleaning lady hears a voice in the heating vent…

The driver of the Hell-bus… “Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat…”

(I could go on, but I’ll stop for now. The question I always have as I make up these stories and possibilities, is will my story end up being worthwhile? Will it have any meaning? Any emotion? Will readers enjoy it, or am I simply playing a word-association game with myself?)

To write ten stories in four weeks means roughly two or three stories every week. That seems like a lot, especially as I try to get NCL finished. Maybe the challenge isn’t to do it just in January, but to do a story every week? Or try to write ten stories in the first quarter? Or… I don’t know. Something.

I feel a pull toward this challenge. It’s not a coincidence that I opened my January 2024 notebook to this page with these two lists. I should ride it out. See where it goes.

I always was dissatisfied with that first “Ursula Le Guin” story. Time to try again. And the new year is the perfect time.

Dolmenwood Solo Gaming

December 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The best TTRPG Kickstarter from 2023 was Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood. The whole Dolmenwood universe has been my favorite fantasy adventure gaming stuff since way back with the Wormskin zines. It’s the perfect distillation of my favorite fantastical elements–magical forests, goblins and fairies, a quasi-Medieval world that feels like an old Arthurian romance– and it’s inspired by some of my favorite fantasy art, from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to Tolkien’s “Smith of Wooten Major” to Ridley Scott’s Legend.

Dolmenwood is the gaming world designed to perfectly match my sensibilities. It’s a bit too dangerous, perhaps, to want to actually live in, but it comes awfully close. It’s an Elfland I’d love to occasionally visit, after falling asleep by a fairy mound and finding myself walking through a sun-dappled, autumnal forest.

Norman and a host of other indie game designers are doing some of the most interesting world-building in all of fantasy art and literature. In the case of Dolmenwood, Norman mixes in a lot of traditional fairy tale and folk lore elements, but the combination of whimsy and horror, of earthiness and strangeness, though drawing upon familiar iconography, ends up feeling singular and original. Maybe this is because original D&D was inspired more heavily by Sword and Sorcery fantasy and not fairy-tale fantasy, but I also think it comes down to the fact that Norman is so well-versed in the fairy tale and folk lore he draws upon, while at the same time adding original elements that feel as if they belong to those old tales.

The mysterious Drune, for instance, are (as far as I know) original to Dolmenwood (though they definitely have a druids-in-the-glade vibe, inspired perhaps by the clash between pagan and Christian believers in early medieval Europe), and the breggle, though drawing upon medieval traditions about goats and their connection to Satan, are nevertheless a novel concept, taking these medieval traditions and turning them into something new. The same could be said of the cat-fairies, the Grimalkins. Or the wood-grues. Or the mosslings.

Needless to say, I love Dolmenwood. Everything about the world, the game, and the way it makes me feel–that slightly topsy-turvy feeling of excitement and anticipation a kid feels on Christmas Eve–are why I don’t want to wait until I can set up a gaming group to play. I want to play it now. Solo-style.

I’m still making my way through the Player’s Handbook, but I’ve listened to enough 3d6 Down the Line podcast to understand the basics of game-play (and I’m pretty familiar with OSE rules too). My plan is to create a trio of PCs and have them travel to the mound in Winter’s Daughter. After that adventure, I’ll see where it goes.

I have a bunch of resources for solo gaming, though I don’t think I’ll need much for this Dolmenwood adventure. Using the module and the three core books should get me pretty far, and then a simple oracle (that can answer “yes/no” questions), and a couple of reaction and random encounter tables (that can answer “what kind?” questions) are all I need.

I have Knave 2e and Cairn and other game systems like World Without Number and Shadowdark that all have excellent random tables, so if I need to, I can use those tables for extra detail and randomness. But since I’m using the module Winter’s Daughter, I won’t necessarily need a lot of tools for building the dungeon or encounters.

And, of course, I have my notebook with the dot grid and some pens, pencils, and dice. Eventually I’ll have the Dolmenwood minis from the Kickstarter, but for now, I’ll settle for theater of the mind.

Playing solo from an adventure module might be a bit tricky because I need to read some portions of the module to understand how to proceed, but I don’t want to read too much and miss being surprised by what I find in each room. It means I have to pretend not to have certain knowledge at times so my characters can act freely, which is where I’ll rely on my oracle. Even if I, the player, know going into a certain room is bad news, I’ll let the oracle decide these things for my PCs so I don’t fudge them.

What I’m most excited about, especially as the icy winter descends upon my own town and fog is predicted in the forecast for Christmas, is the chance to embark on a journey into Dolmenwood, even if it’s a solo journey. Hopefully, after a few dice rolls and pencil scratches on my characters sheets, I’ll have three imaginary traveling companions, ready to trek into the mists and bramble of the tangled wood in search of an ancient tomb.

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