Category Archives: Autobiographical

Mrs. Pollifax, elderly women as spies cont.

Posted on by Henry

As I was writing last week’s post, I knew that I was forgetting something. I’d read fun stories about an elderly woman involved in espionage before. Or more accurately, I’d listened to them: some of my childhood’s many long car rides were filled with hours of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books on tape. Young Henry thought those books were both hilarious and excellent.

I haven’t read them since. But I want to. I want to read them again, find out whether or not they’re as fun as I remember them being. In my memory, they were a perfect storm of ridiculousness and good genre fiction.

That said, I’m a little hesitant too. The first books in the series (there are many of these books) were written in the 60s. The last one was published in 2000. Given the gulf of years, I bet I’m going to stub my toes on something.

But I’m willing to bet it’ll be worth it. At worst, they’ll give me a place to start in my hunt for similar genre fiction. And if they’re anywhere near as good as I recall, I’ll probably be guffawing my way through them.

Plus, for all the absurdity and narrative contrivances that I remember in the several Mrs. Pollifax books I listened to, I think they captured several very important points that flashier spy stories forget. It’s valuable to be overlooked and underestimated. And—maybe this was just my impressionable youth speaking, but—Dorothy Gilman was nearly of an age with my grandmother, and Mrs. Pollifax’s surprising skillset reminded me of my grandmother too.

I remember growing up with plenty of stories about my grandmother. She fixed a stranger’s broken car on the side of the road (in Uganda or Kenya I think), using safety pins and pantyhose to replace a timing belt. She reversed a van at speed down a dirt track while being chased by a bull elephant. She had other adventures too, but more regularly she would weigh and vaccinate hundreds of babies in an open-air clinic, or help local women establish clinics in their villages and towns. And when I knew her as an older woman, she kept a thriving thicket of a garden, pointing me to the various things she wanted me to cut or harvest, showing me the good berry brambles.

So when I read Mrs. Pollifax, I see a little bit of my grandmother. They’re not the same person at all, they’re not doing the same things, but… in some ways they’re cut from similarly capable cloth. And reading that in a piece of spy fiction, when the protagonist sometimes underestimates herself almost as badly as her opposition does, is simply a treat.

Anyway, yes, I’m looking forward to picking up those books again. Maybe I’ll have something more for you here when I do.

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Away

Posted on by Henry

I’m visiting family, and I’ve neglected to prepare a post for today. I am part way through A Taste of Gold and Iron, by Alexandra Rowland, and I’ll probably post about that soon. It’s fun. Court intrigue, gay romance, fun.

I hope that you’re doing well and staying safe and warm. Happy holidays.

Reader’s experience & author’s influence

Posted on by Henry

Sometimes, you start a chapter and just know that this is the creepy one. You know it as you skim that first page. And when that happens to me while I’m lying in bed in the dim light and drifting towards sleep, my self-preservation kicks in.

I don’t always manage to do this, but the most recent time it happened, I stopped myself. I set the book aside and reminded myself of which world I existed in, and resolutely tried to go to sleep without the drowsy conjured nightmares of this fictional world. That mostly worked.

The problem was, once I’d done that I struggled to pick up the book again. I knew that I was going to return to the story at a spooky moment, and I still had that lingering sense of dread that had warned me away from reading more just before sleeping. Having put the book down that way, it took extra work to pick it back up again.

I haven’t finished that book yet.

I was right about that chapter though. It was spooky. I read the rest of it, after psyching myself up to do so, and I’ve read some more after that chapter since.

But the material since hasn’t been as spooky as I’d expected. It was a very sharp peak of spookiness. As I’ve kept reading, I’ve struggled to tell how much of that diminishment of spookiness is in the story, and how much of it was inside my own head. Did the story actually reach such a heightened peak, or did I create more of a peak through some combination of reading late at night and apprehensively avoiding the book for a few days?

And, critical for me as a writer, how much of that experience was desired or intended by the author? How was that experience created?

People have funky and idiosyncratic responses to stimuli. Sure, there’s some general consistency, but when you’re trying to produce specific emotional responses in your audience via art you’re going to run into some odd responses. People will experience things that you didn’t anticipate, or that you thought weren’t there. It’s even worse when you have little control over how the art will be consumed. Once you’ve released art into the world, you give up any semblance of control over how it’s interpreted and just have to hope for the best.

Back to the spooky piece at hand…

The question that nags at me here is: how much of that experience came from the author’s decisions, and what can I learn from that? How much of that can I use in my own work? And how much of it was inside my own head, and won’t be shared by anyone else reading the book?

I’m lucky. I know that some of my friends are reading this book right now, and I’ll have a chance to talk with them about it soon. I already have a few questions lined up. But until then, I’ll keep reading and stewing, wondering what precisely is going on underneath the surface.

11/24/22

Posted on by Henry

Today is Thanksgiving in the US. It is also the Day of Mourning, as organized by United American Indians of New England.

I grew up in Vermont.

Maybe more importantly, I grew up knowing that I was on Turtle Island. I was surrounded by stories of and from the Abenaki people who had lived there long before my settler ancestors arrived, and who live there still. I studied the history of the Iroquois Confederacy and their governing principles. I learned about how the First People in the Northeast had lived on the land, tending to it and to the well-being of the life around them, seeing the connections between each.

My fascination with stories was fueled by Wolfsong, an Abenaki storyteller. I went to every event of his that I heard of, and I can still hear his voice in my memory. His tales resonated deeply with me. I listened to him enough that (this must have been insufferable, adorable, or both) I would sometimes mutter them to myself while he told them. His stories certainly meant more to me than the ones people told me were my own.

For better and for worse, I was told that I have Mohawk and Huron ancestors (among many others). The family members who told me that were pretty reliable with tracing family connections back in other places, but… I haven’t done that research myself, I can’t trace that back, and I won’t claim it as truth. I am far too aware of the tradition of settlers claiming American Indian descent to be comfortable with it.

But I’m thankful for that old family story. I have no doubt that it drove some of my search for greater understanding of many groups of First People, and gave me greater respect for their traditions. I know that it informed some of my family’s engagement with ecological education and stewardship, environmental advocacy, and community building.

At the same time, I’m also descended from people who were on the Mayflower—and I *can* trace that back. I know that my ancestors received aid, and made treaties and honored them. I know my ancestors also broke those treaties and engineered the death or expulsion of many. I know that I have benefited from that, directly or indirectly.

I say all this to remind you, my mostly USA-based audience, that however much Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks, this is also a time for remembrance and acknowledgment. The highly sanitized origin myth for this holiday was cobbled together during a time of civil strife, and it erased the sobering legacy of the violence that preceded and followed that feast.

So. Please, listen to what American Indian communities have to say, today and on other days. Learn about our past, and how that has shaped our present. If you want somewhere to start, try UAINE.

Back to LARP writing

Posted on by Henry

I’m writing LARP material again!

It’s been a while. I’ve sat on an idea of mine for a little over a year, and I’m finally having the excited conversations with other LARP friends that keep pushing me to develop it. It’s a good feeling.

I’ve also been writing material for a different LARP that my friends are running. This means taking limited information about national histories, and group goals, and maybe a sentence or two about group flavor, and turning that into 400-500 words of group background with coherent flavor. It’s a rewarding exercise, something I haven’t done recently but have plenty of experience with. Plus, it’s wonderful being able to just produce creative work and share it with people immediately.

I’ve stopped doing that here, for a number of reasons, and I regret that sometimes. Maybe I’ll change that again in the future.

As for the fun LARP ideas I’ve been having, they’re tied to a combination of old story ideas I’ve mused over for about five years and a set of scene ideas that have inspired me in the past two years at Wayfinder. The basic concept: PC groups of treasure hunters and historians return to the ancient places of their ancestors in the Shunned Lands to recover lost relics, and in the process discover both why their old stories refer to a prior golden age and why that golden age ended in catastrophe. The rest of the game is all about facing the consequences of releasing the disastrous remnants of that ancient history.

My excited conversations have mostly been about puzzling through how to produce specific scenes, and what we’d need to make them work. It feels really good, engaging with my WFE friends like this outside of the camp season. That collaborative problem solving and supportive creativity is something I always miss during the rest of the year, when I spend most of my time staring at words and trying to cudgel them into some more effective shape.

Perhaps I’ll be able to work more of that into my other writing routines, and carry that excitement forward.

News, LARP writing, Pomodoro

Posted on by Henry

One of my writing group friends suggested I try writing in 30 minute sprints, with a little (also pre-measured) time off between sprints for breaks, other work, other projects. It’s a minimally different variation on the Pomodoro technique. I’m surprised I hadn’t learned this work method before.

I was hesitant to take their suggestion. I usually struggle to fall into the zone that I find so helpful for writing. Writing without being in the zone feels like pulling teeth, getting into the zone takes a while, and… round and round the problem goes. But I’ve been pretty desperate to get more writing done, so I tried it.

It’s fucking phenomenal. I don’t know why it’s working for me right now. And I’m not going to look a gift writing-hack in the mouth.

The other important piece of implementing this for myself has been stricter limits on what I can and can’t do before I start writing in the morning. Listening to music is good, physical movement is good, but reading anything is dangerous, and watching a video is right out (doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s news, documentary, someone’s Let’s Play, or what). I could probably find something that would be okay for me to watch (maybe a sped up painting process for a fantasy landscape), but that would require me to navigate past lots of other enticing videos which would drag my eyes in.

Safer not to risk it. More productive not to risk it.

This is a little awkward, since it means I can’t safely read news before writing. Not even the tech news I use to doublecheck my various sci-fi projects. I also have to avoid responding to any notifications on my phone, which pile up quickly. In fact, this makes it difficult to use my phone at all, even though it’s currently my alarm clock, morning music source, and timer for this approach.

But the upside to this improved morning mental hygiene is that when I set that 30 minute timer I make significantly more progress.

A little context.

I used to regularly produce 2k words a day, mostly without a struggle. Being in that rhythm felt a lot like any other fitness regimen: it hurt to get up to speed, and every so often one of those days would be a total drag. But when I was regularly writing 2k a day, it felt… familiar. Not necessarily comfortable, but certainly not onerous. And at the end of producing that 2k, I felt good. Energized.

Writing with this timer system, with better morning mental hygiene, feels like that. I’m reaching rates close to my 2k a day. It feels great. And when the timer goes off, I can do something else that’s been weighing on my mind before I go back to writing… because I’m free of the need to be writing. I’m not constantly should-ing myself, scolding myself for insufficient focus or insufficient productivity.

I think that’s the biggest lesson I’ve found so far. This external practice frees up my internal judgements. When the timer is on I know it’s time to go. When the timer is off I know it’s okay that I’m not going. That state of being okay with not writing is incredible for my state of mind.

I’ve felt able to let go and make more new stuff that isn’t connected to anything else (yet). That isn’t helpful to my pre-existing projects, but it feels good, like I’m clearing out old pipes that had rusted nearly shut with arterial blockage. Setting aside time like this lets me turn off the voice that’s constantly worrying about what I should be doing right now, what I should be doing next, and just make stuff.

I guess what I’m trying to say is… I’m really appreciating this. I don’t know to what degree this is better brain weather, or better mental hygiene, or a useful way to guide my brain in the right direction. I don’t especially care. I’ll probably try tweaking the lengths of work sprints and breaks, but I’m definitely keeping this.

It’s even helped me feel so much less stuck that I’ve felt free to help friends with material for their LARP. I’m putting together group backgrounds based on a few objectives and a thin thread of preexisting setting, and its rewarding to quickly share those with an appreciative audience. Helps to remind me that I’m competent at this, pulling voice and larger worlds together from a few scraps.

Contracts, Art, and making World Seeds

Posted on by Henry

My World Seed creation process has slowed down. The hard part isn’t the words, though.

The hard part is finding artists. Locations keep coming to me, but without art I’m reluctant to publish the Seeds. I know I have good written content, but the art really helps. It convinces me that I’m offering something more than my own words (the value of which I’m far too ready to dismiss).

Sorry, I was wrong about the hard part. The hard part is having a contract I’m willing to use with artists. I’m sure I can find artists via several different channels, if I reached out through those. I have a short list of places to put calls for art, after all. But I don’t want to reach out without a written contract.

I might be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Unfortunately, from the horror stories I’ve heard I’m also confident that having a bad contract can and will come back to bite me.

My first two World Seeds have art made by people with whom I have some kind of personal relationship; either I know the artist myself, or they’re within my immediate circle. There’s some basis for mutual trust. There’s some history of collaboration with myself or with someone else I know.

Without that, I don’t want to move forward on a wing and a prayer. Is that a mistake? Maybe. It certainly feels like one. It feels like I’m sitting on my hands and doing nothing, even though I keep adding to my collection of location descriptions to use in the future. I’ve posted forty nine of those so far to Patreon, and have thirty one more finished first drafts waiting in the wings (eighty in total). I average a little over a new one every week, more or less.

I have a few leads on contracts and contract advice, and expect to receive those reference materials in the near future… but there isn’t a clear timeline for that beyond “soon.”

Maybe, then, the right choice is to put together art-free versions and sell them for less. At least if I do that I’ll be moving finished products out the door, things that will require a minimum of additional work to fill with art once I have a contract ready. Doing that would allow me to publish an art-free Seed within a couple weeks, and another one within a couple months.

That isn’t what I’d dreamed of for this project—I’d thought about selling art-free Seeds while first developing this project, but incorporating visual art was always the goal. Sadly, that’s not where I am right now. If I want to make visible progress, it’s time to change course and ship something while I wait for the contracts and visual art to catch up.

Expect to see those art-free versions come out soon. In the meantime, if you want to see the currently available World Seeds, check out my stuff on DriveThruRPG.com.

Even Though I Knew The End, and finding gems

Posted on by Henry

I mentioned in my big thinky post Genre fiction, Mercantilism, Geology that I was probably going to recommend C.L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew The End. I was right. I’ve finished it now and enjoyed it a great deal and I strongly suggest getting it when it comes out.

This post will necessarily be less in depth than the review I’m writing for GeeklyInc (I’ll share a link to that review when it goes live). I got pre-release access to the book through writing a review for them, so that’s where the full review will go. But ETIKTE is good. Finishing it has left me excited to hunt down more of C.L. Polk’s work.

There’s a certain joy to discovering a book I love by an author who has other work I haven’t read yet. As a kid, that was how I chose most of my new reads: I’d discover an author I liked, and then I’d hunt through everything else I could find by them (even when it wasn’t necessarily “age-appropriate”). My approach was also pretty scattershot, because this was before I had access to or knowledge of ways to find an author’s complete bibliography (unevenly distributed access to the internet, etc.). Each visit to the bookstore or library was a treasure hunt, and used bookstores were especially appealing. Any good genre fiction shelf could be full of gold.

That’s felt less true over the years. As I’ve gotten older, I haven’t chased every last book by an author in the same way. I think part of that comes from my discovery that, sometimes, I don’t actually like all of an author’s books. Perhaps it’s because I’m more judgmental and genre-savvy now, or because I’m more willing to put a book down when I don’t like it, or maybe I’m jaded by my access to the internet’s firehose of information… but these days I more often see those shelves and think “ah yes, more of the same.” I read the jacket copy, see the comp titles, and don’t feel hooked. Finding genre-fiction gold feels rarer, and like it takes more work.

All of which is to say… when my friend over at GeeklyInc offered me Even Though I Knew The End, I had no idea I was about to relive that whole giddy treasure-discovery experience. I don’t know whether C.L. Polk’s other stories bear any resemblance to ETIKTE, but I’m damn well going to give them a try. After the fun I had with this book, I’d be a fool not to.

Removing old stories, discovering old habits

Posted on by Henry

I have finally taken down an old post, a story that I am now submitting elsewhere in a far more polished and developed fashion. What I originally posted here as rough draft flash fiction under 2k words is now a story over 5k words long that has been through multiple rounds of edits and rewrites.

I’m not sure to what degree my old stories here are impossible to sell elsewhere. It probably varies by how strictly other publishers interpret the “first publishing rights” required of nearly all publications. But perhaps via extensive additions and rewrites, and pulling the original rough draft down, I can make some of my flash fic more salable.

This process is a bit dispiriting, in some ways. I found posting flash fic here quite satisfying, and I wrote a lot of it. The whole experience gave me good practice sharing things with the rest of the world (a frightening prospect, usually), and the structure and rhythm of it meant that I managed pretty regular output. Knowing that some people would enjoy seeing the story, even when it was only a few folks, was a nice incentive.

My hope is that I can instead (finally) reach the same feeling of regularity in submitting finished stories to paying outlets. But I’ve been hoping that for years, and it’s been quite difficult for me to achieve. My perfectionism doesn’t help, nor does the frequent rejection, nor does the difficulty of sharing the piece with excited friends beyond whoever helps me with critique and revisions. At least when I post on the blog I can send people an simple link.

And with all those issues, there’s also the simple fact that I can’t submit (or can’t bring myself to submit) the same one-and-a-half-drafts quality work to publishers that I would regularly post here. Even if I could bring myself to do that, I suspect it would scupper my chances of being published. This means that—where I had previously beaten out my perfectionism by allowing myself to be wrong on the internet—I now *do* turn more of my critical focus on my work before sharing it with the rest of the world. That critical focus is a huge stumbling block when it comes to producing anything.

In some ways, I taught myself to produce work consistently by convincing myself that the final quality of the piece didn’t actually matter. Ceasing to post rough passes of material here makes that belief feel more and more like the lie that it is. The final quality does matter, when I change the context in which it’s being submitted. All of that means I have to relearn how to make myself produce regularly. Funny, I hadn’t recognized the extent to which that’s true until now.

‘Yes’ means nothing if you can’t say ‘No’

Posted on by Henry

I’m fortunate. I’m lucky in the extreme, in many ways. One of those ways is the fact that I exist at all. My existence in the first place was improbable—my conception was a wildly unlikely event. And, given everything else going on at the time, there was no guarantee my mother would want to give birth to me. Yet my mom has told me many times that she feels blessed to have had me. I feel blessed in turn.

“Ah ha, Henry must be anti-abortion!” You say.

No, the opposite.

I was born because my mom wanted to keep me. I was born in a world where she had a choice, unconstrained by legality or safety, about whether or not I would be born. I was raised by a mother who was able to look at her life, at her family, and say “yes, I want to bring another child to this, and I am ready to love and provide for that child.”

I am lucky, I am blessed, because my mother was able to make that choice. In many ways, my life feels more meaningful because my mother had other options and chose me. I was never unwanted. I wasn’t a burden. I was chosen.

I want others to be chosen too.

But being chosen requires that it be a choice. That choice matters. Preserving the ability to choose matters. ‘Yes’ is an empty word when you can’t say ‘no.’

Taking away someone’s ability to say ‘no’ doesn’t mean they’ll say ‘yes.’ It means you don’t care what they think or feel. You might as well just tape their mouth shut.

And it’s dishonest to look at this issue on its own. Abortion access may be legislated separately, but the arguments about abortion and restricting access to it are deeply entwined with other political messages. They coexist with other narratives, and other goals.

The political party that would restrict abortion access also votes to cut funding for public health care. In Mississippi, anti-abortion legislation is passed even while support for future parents is not. And politicians arguing against abortions often also vote against funding programs that support poorer people, or expanding that support to prevent poverty in the first place.

Here in America, many of these arguments come back around to personal responsibility. Individuals are to blame, by the logic of personal responsibility, for all of their success or failure. And many anti-abortion politicians support measures that push this narrative. They sell the idea that they’re empowering the individual to plot their own course or stand up for themself.

Unless you’re pregnant.*

Raising a child in our society is extremely expensive. Giving birth is more dangerous here than in many other countries, on top of being pricey. Quality medical care is not reliably available to everyone, and where it is available it’s still costly.

Choosing not to raise a child under those circumstances is a responsible decision. Choosing to raise only the number of children you can afford to raise is a responsible decision. Choosing not to take the medical risk of bearing a child is a responsible decision.

I am lucky because my mother knew that she could provide for me. She knew that having me wouldn’t be the straw that broke the family’s back. She could make the choice to have me without being irresponsible.

But politicians who love personal responsibility would prevent people from making responsible choices. Because if someone is pregnant, then these politicians know best. They know the government should strip away that vaunted individual choice, they know the government should disempower pregnant people in their own personal lives.

I firmly believe that people should be allowed to not get abortions if they don’t want them, or if they feel abortions are morally unacceptable. They can choose to never have an abortion. They can make many personal choices, for themselves, as they see fit.

But they can’t make those same personal choices for others. They must not gnaw away at other people’s access to health care. It’s unacceptable to force anyone but yourself to carry a fetus to term.

There’s far more to say here: about political narratives, religion, extremism, and broken systems… but I’ll leave it at this for now.

Being chosen was a blessing. Let other people choose for themselves.

*In fact, this message of “empowering individuals” comes with far more caveats. It’s not just about being pregnant: when you look at larger patterns it also often matters whether you’re white, rich, male, straight, etc.