Opinion – Page 9 – Blue Ink Alchemy

Category: Opinion (page 9 of 18)

Opinion Is Not Fact

Most individuals with a modicum of intelligence and self-awareness will tell you the truth, uncomfortable as it might be: Not everything you produce is going to be good. Even if the idea seems immaculate in your imagination, the transition between brain and mouth or fingers can dilute it somewhat. We have to clarify ourselves at times, in order to ensure we’re understood, meaning the way we initally articulated ourselves was imperfect. So too are our ideas: the perspective we have on the world around us, the stories we experience and the events of our lives is unique. We each have our own unique opinions and the Internet makes it possible for us to share, discuss and debate them. It’s this diversity that makes living with other human beings, at times, a wonderful experience.

At other times it’s grueling torture because some people don’t understand their imperfection.

You’ve seen these people. You’ve read their comments on forums, YouTube channels and Twitter feeds. Barely coherent, badly misspelled, over-abbreviated and wholly inaccurate ramblings that, when challenged, incite anger and accusations rather than honest debate. I’m painting with a broad brush here, but the sad fact of the matter is that the amount of hatred spewing from the mouths and fingers of the ignorant far outweighs the pontifications of people who actually have something to say and the means with which to say it to a large audience.

And when someone does gain a large audience, the arrogant and entitled flock to the outlet in question to make their voices heard, piggyback on success, do their damndest to outshine the reason they showed up in the first place.

I’m guilty of this behavior, if I’m honest. I’ve chimed in on the videos of those sharing their reviews, opinions and news readings not just to support their efforts but in an effort to promote myself and my work. I have to. If I hope to have any success in the mass market when it comes to selling fiction, I have to get used to the idea of selling myself through any means necessary. Now, I don’t post on forums or respond to tweets for this purpose alone. I’m not a SEO bot or a web marketer. But I’d be lying if I said I do what I do simply for the enjoyment of it. Even if it is a great deal of fun to talk about ways The Dark Knight Rises could go horribly wrong with twitter peeps (tweeps), it’s getting my name out and there’s nothing wrong with that.

What bothers me is the behavior of people who post their thoughts for the sole purpose of dissention and rabble-rousing. Constructive criticism is one thing, combative, racist or incendiary commentary is quite another. It’s rude, dickish behavior that can border on harassment in certain contexts, behavior for which you can be banned from whatever venue you were using to spew your ignorant bile. And yet, it persists. These people keep right on finding ways to annoy and harrangue, under the presumption that not only is their opinion the only correct one (arrogance), they have every right to voice it any way they wish to whomever will listen (entitlement).

Critical analysis and review is everywhere on the Internet. But you will never catch any such entertainer worth their salt telling you point-blank that they are 100% right in their opinion and everybody else is wrong. Go ahead and take a look. Yahtzee, MovieBob, SFDebris, Confused Matthew, Red Letter Media, TotalBiscuit, the Extra Credits crew – none of them end a discussion with “I’m right, you’re wrong, your mom agreed with me last night” in any serious discussion. Some of them may play this sort of thing for laughs, but even the most satirical and cynical of these folks are also intelligent enough to know that anything upon which they might pontificate involves the exposition of their own subjective views.

Sorry, that was a lot of big words. Put simply: None of these people believes they are a holy authority on anything they talk about. Yes, some of them are professional critics, paid to give their opinion based on the years of experience they have weighing objective and subjective criteria of various media, but each and every one of them are human beings, and human beings are fallible, subjective creatures. Yahtzee and MovieBob might not like shooters, but that doesn’t mean shooters are bad. People like those caricatured by MovieBob’s Anti-Thinker may consider retro games to be stupid, but them saying it does not make it so. These people I’ve mentioned know this.

It’s a shame a lot of the people who chime in on their presentations can’t have the same sort of self-awareness. And when you try to point out the flaws in their arguments, their mental couch forts repel your critiques with such eloquent responses as “NO U” or “COOL STORY BRO.” Just because your point of view makes more intellectual or logical sense doesn’t mean you’re going to win over the mistaken. Ours is a culture that nurtures the arrogant and entitled, and trolls of this stripe thrive in this culture, the pundits and politicians ranting on about rights and freedoms while these dregs emerge from under their bridges to tell you why your opinion sucks and theirs is The Truth. It’s a level of impenetrability to reality that would be impressive if it weren’t so pathetic.

I don’t know what I hope to accomplish by posting this, other than to bring attention to and underscore the causes behind this prevailing sentiment among the seething and apparently idiotic masses of the Internet. Because like any disease, the more we know about the causes, the better chance we have of finding a cure.

If one even exists.

The Query’s The Thing

January 3, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

I’ve discussed querying in the past, and I’ve also mentioned the manuscript-mincing site Query Shark. Since I’m back at the point of sending out queries to agent, I think it’s worth reheating the subject.

Query letters are at once the most straightforward and the most complex thing a novelist can write. It’s straightforward in its concept: “Describe your story and make it appealing to others in 300 words or less.” But the simple aim belies the complexity of assembly. You don’t want to ramble overlong about your content or characters, but you also don’t want to leave out key elements that set your story apart. You also don’t want to spoil too much, however. It’s a fine line, or rather a series of fine lines that make the scope of the letter quite narrow and somewhat difficult to maneuver.

It’s a challenge that must be overcome, however. Unless one is of a mind to self-publish (if you’re not sure you are, consult this checklist) you’ll need representation with the guys that put ink on paper for tens of thousands of tomes. And they’re not going to take just any manuscript that floats in from the street. You need to get them interested, and to do that you need a query.

I plan on refining mine and sending it to Query Shark. I’m ready to be torn to shreds. It’s the only surefire way to build myself up enough to knock out the competition and actually get this thing published.

Habits & Dreams

November 29, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Some personal stuff related to writing and my life in general follows. Maybe this stuff will be useful to somebody else, and I apologize in advance if you choose to click the spoiler link and find the following text empty, useless or pointless.

Spoiler

There are some habits that are good to get rid of. Excessive drinking, smoking a pack of cigarettes that are more chemicals than tobacco a day, picking your nose or other body parts in public… You catch my drift.

There are other habits that one should hold on to. Keeping up on household chores, paying bills on time (if one’s economic situation allows), things of that nature. It can be a lot easier to fall out of these habits than it is to lose the habits that are bad for us, mostly because the more effort something requires, the less inclined we are to do them, especially if there’s a dayjob and other responsibilities involved. Firing up a game or watching a movie requires a lot less effort than washing the dishes or changing the car’s oil, after all.

But the more we put those things aside, the longer we stay out of the good habits, the worse things get. Detritus piles up, be it dirty silverware or engine deposits or recyclable waste. Then more effort than what should have been necessary is required to deal with that detritus, leaving us even more drained and less inclined to do the task on the following day. It’s a cycle that perpetuates itself, and it takes conscious effort to put a stop to it.

The habit of pursuing art is no differnet. Gone are the days when the artist could seek a patron as a source of income that kept them fed and clothed while they pursued their vision. Nowadays, to appease the exorbidant rates of utility companies and maintain even the most meager of households, one has to submit themselves to the will of a corporate or small business master. And while the cost of living goes up with shocking regularity, the salary of the day worker often remains the same. Make a single mistake, indulge in a single distraction, and you can expect nothing but disappointment if not scorn from those above you.

Thus it falls to the artist to engage in the habit of pursuing art in one’s spare time. The reduction of a life-long passion to the status of a hobby can be a crippling one. Your dreams limp along, gasping for air and vying for one’s attention admist distractions that require much less effort, input and time. After a long day of disappointment and doubt, a film or game or night out holds a great deal more appeal than even more disappointment and doubt, even if it’s in the form of something you love.

As my big sister was in the habit of saying, “Suck it up and deal with it.”

Without our passions, we’re nothing. We’re empty husks trudging from day to day banging away at insignificant tasks and spewing preprogrammed corp-speak jargon. Living that way isn’t really living. It’s existing. Amoebas exist. We should live.

I know it may seem like a lot of whining or grousing on my part but it’s been made crystal clear to me that I have once again gotten out of the good habit of seizing appropriate opportunities to write. It’s a habit I need to return to and this is my way of expressing that. Maybe somebody reading this will come to a similar realization and re-engage in a discarded good habit that leads them to freedom from a vicious cycle of depression and a dimishing self-image.

We, as individuals and especially as artists, are so much more than cogs in a machine, regardless of what anybody with a higher pay grade might say. It’s necessary for most of us to become a part of that machine just to afford a warm place to live and clean food to eat. But the machine need not be our lives. It doesn’t have to be our reason for being. There’s a reason people put faith in things that cannot be proven by science, other than ignorance or stupidity – there’s hope in the notion that there’s something more than what we see every day, because most of what we see every day can be pretty damn depressing.

I know I may never really succeed at writing. I know I may be doomed to working thankless, underpaid jobs for which I have little passion until my body begins to fail, my mind starts to unravel and all of the fire in my heart goes out.

That’s not going to stop me from trying, dammit.

I just have to try when I’m not getting paid to do something else.

Okay, Okay. iSurrender. iGive.

October 7, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

The setup in the home office of Beardy McWriterbeard

This is something that’s been in the back of my mind for some time now. You can blame three people for it spilling over into my blog. Or you can just blame me for having nothing interesting to say at the moment that I feel you’ve either already heard or don’t give a crap about. And it’s possible you don’t give a crap about the iPad either, in which case you’d be best tuning in tomorrow instead since there’ll be a new & exciting ICFN for you to enjoy.

In the meantime… yeah. I kinda want an iPad.

Now, I’m not going to impoverish myself to own one. I don’t feel there’s a void in my life that only leased hardware from Steve Jobs can fill. And I feel odd talking about a device that costs hundreds of dollars that does little on its own and that I wouldn’t be able to troubleshoot myself. Last night’s Internet outage reminded me that skills for a job I held many years ago still apply despite advances in technology, i.e. my knack for understanding and working with computer hardware that isn’t printers. I hate dealing with problematic printers. After all, they were sent from Hell to make us miserable.

More and more, however, I’m starting to see the merits of it. First and foremost, of course, is the convenience it’d offer my writing efforts. A few steps could be eliminated in the process of crafting words. The last few chapters of Citizen in the Wilds were written by hand and then transcribed into the electronic manuscript via PC keyboard. And for the first round of edits I printed out the entire thing and went over it in pen. Now, I’d be the first to say that nothing will ever replace the feel of printed pages in your hand, be it a book or a manuscript full of darlings to be put to the sword, but there’s a nagging feeling I have that I’m not helping the environment as much as I could by using 300+ sheets of paper to print out a document I already have several means of manipulating, editing and presenting. The iPad would be another, highly portable option.

Speaking of books, I mentioned Barnes & Noble’s PubIt earlier this week and noted that its content would be available for the Nook, which just happens to have an app. As much as I love pulling out a book on the train or sitting down with one at home, my bookshelves are already glutted with tomes I may never read again. I’ve been somewhat fascinated with the concept of eReaders in general, and while it might be reducing the amount of information we leave future generations when our computer systems crash, it’s another argument for convenience. They generate less waste, weigh less and one can carry the contents of an entire library. Couple that with the ability to write or take notes as well as read, and to me that spells win/win.

Beyond that, I’ve started running D&D for friends & co-workers, and having the latest issue of Dungeon, a compendium of rules and a dice-roller all at my fingertips and out of sight of the players appeals very much to my Dungeon Master sensibilities. This is in addition to the aforementioned convenience of carrying one device into a session instead of a stack of hardcover gaming books. Don’t get me wrong, I love my hardcover gaming books, even my copies of Alternity, but it goes back to my observation that I already have a lot of books to haul around when I move from place to place. I’d like to make our next move less weight-intensive, not moreso. Means I might have to do a used book sale at some point.

It is very expensive, though. Most of a month’s rent expensive. “I could pay our utilities with that money” expensive. So I’m not going to get one any time soon. And then there are horror stories I’ve heard about what happens when you drop it, get it wet, feed it after midnight or look at it the wrong way. Back to the iStore to pick up a completely new one for you, buddy! Oh, and don’t mind the staff while they try to stuff a dozen new iToys down your throat while you’re there.

But hey, it’s available on Amazon. And they have gift cards. December’s coming soon, now that I think of it… …Actually, that was my sister’s suggestion. She’s pretty smart.

Give me more pros. Give me some cons. Tell me funny or cool iPad stories. I want to know more. I want to justify this subtle and somewhat unsettling craving.

EDIT: And then there’s this.

Cerberus Daily News

October 2, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 1 Comment

As much as I love BioWare, I can’t shake the notion they’ve gone in the wrong direction.

You see, they’re developing a Star Wars MMO. Granted, it’s set in the wildly popular and surprisingly rich universe of the Old Republic, the same as their previous RPGs and some of the best comics written in that universe (in my opinion). So while I’m cautiously optimistic and might try out the beta if I can, I don’t think I’ll be buying it.

If they had developed a different game, I think they’d be getting a lot more of my cash. And not just mine.

What I’m driving at is, BioWare ~~should~~ needs to develop a Mass Effect MMO.

I know there are arguments why this shouldn’t be done. A lot of people who play single-player games like Mass Effect despise MMOs. And I can understand their sentiment. I agree that I wouldn’t want a game that’s just World of Warcraft in space. I think that as the Mass Effect games continue to evolve, the combat system is becoming more refined, and porting that into an MMO would work as a nice change from the usual MMO method of point-and-clicking something to death.

Other people seem to think that having a massive amount of players in the universe will ruin the universe. Granted, you’ll definitely have people running around trying to be nothing more than Shepard 2.0, the latest and greatest Spectre who doesn’t play by the rules and is out looking for answers and is letting their assault rifle do the talking and their assault rifle speaks very loudly and rapidly. But there’s something out there that both gives me hope that this would be a minor problem and encourages for me the idea of an MMO in this universe working.

The Cerberus Daily News.

Established concurrently with Mass Effect 2, the CDN is an in-universe news bulletin board. They added a commentary box to it for visitors to use. Role-players were drawn to this like moths to a sci-fi lens flare. An official forum has become attached and the sheer amount of storytelling going on, for better or worse, is staggering.

I hope this community continues to thrive. To me, this is evidence that people want to play within the Mass Effect universe as somebody other than Shepard. Now, it may simply continue in this vein if Star Wars: The Old Republic fills the LucasArts/BioWare MMO niche, or they may expand into new territory with a Mass Effect MMO. I’m curious to see what happens.

Then again, maybe this is just my bitterness towards Lucas coloring my opinion. As I said, the Old Republic portion of the Star Wars universe has provided us with some great stories so far. Maybe an MMO set there will satisfy the sci-fi role-players unfulfilled by EVE Online and the lack of role-playing freedom in Mass Effect. It could very well be that, between the CDN and the folks who go into the Old Republic, a Mass Effect MMO would prove to be unnecessary.

I’d still rather play that than another Star Wars game, though. That’s just my opinion.

Until we know more for sure, I’ll continue checking out the CDN. It’s an interesting look at the sort of role-players drawn to the Mass Effect universe, if nothing else.

Category: Opinion (page 9 of 18)

Opinion Is Not Fact

The Query’s The Thing

Habits & Dreams

Okay, Okay. iSurrender. iGive.

Cerberus Daily News

Buy This Book!

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