Tag Archives: collaboration

David Drake, 1945-2023

Posted on by Henry

Rest in peace, David Drake. May your memory be a blessing.

I did not know David Drake, but I knew his work. I reviewed a number of his books here. Recently, when a friend was looking for a very particular flavor of genre fiction, I recommended Drake. I said, “He may not write the most poetic or literary story, and you might be able to spot tropes from a long ways off, but damn does he know how to drive plot.”

From what little I know about Drake’s writing habits and his collaborations, I admire him. He apparently knew the arc of each story well enough to write detailed plot outlines (there’s a free example here), and would then hand those off to his collaborator and take second billing. He thus helped other writers get published and break into the market. Eric Flint, if my memory of various author’s notes serves, found those outlines to be extremely helpful with their shared Belisarius series.

David Drake also clearly wrote to release some of the awfulness he’d experienced while serving in Vietnam, especially in his Hammer’s Slammers series. He was of the generation of genre authors, especially military fiction authors, whose lives had been turned sideways by the war. His post here from 2009 states his feelings about the war pretty eloquently.

Relatedly, I appreciate Drake’s military fiction; its sense of grim loneliness and futility, blended with camaraderie and the occasional glimpse of something more admirable, feels like a fitting portrait of war. It fits with what I’ve heard from my veteran friends who’ve been in combat. Unlike other mil-fic I’ve read, Drake’s stories don’t pretend that there’s some inner nobility or heroism inherently brought out by war. Nor does he pretend that wars accomplish much good.

I never dug deeper into David Drake’s political leanings. Given my frustration with other mil-fic authors, perhaps I wanted to protect myself from unwanted knowledge. It’s easier for me to read Drake’s work and appreciate it when I don’t feel immediately repelled by him. We’ll see whether I risk learning more. It won’t happen today.

If you want to read Drake’s books, you can find some of them here in the Baen Free Library. I can’t recommend the Larry Correia or John Ringo titles that appear nearby without wreathing my recommendation in enough caveats to float a lead brick. Stick with David Drake instead.

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.

Worldbuilding: The Mad Libs Approach

Posted on by Henry

Building a setting piecemeal is sometimes difficult, but often fun and rewarding. By playing mad libs with your setting, you’re able to cram together a wild group of ideas that fill out your underlying concepts and give the whole thing its own distinct flavor. My favorite example of this was Continue reading →

Don’t Know Where the Story’s Going, Quick Thoughts

Posted on by Henry

This post follows Be Boring and Be Hungry. It’s all about making characters for roleplaying games, and how to think about RPG character creation from the perspective of a writer.

Playing RPGs recently, one friend of mine was struggling with how to make and play her character. It was not her first time playing RPGs, but she felt less experienced than most of the other people at the table and was anxious to make a good impression and make good story contributions. She has a writing background, and is familiar with arcs and storyboards and how to make a good dramatic narrative. But she was foundering as we sat at the table, sinking beneath the weight of making a character who would be interesting enough to the rest of the players, a character who would have a complete story. She couldn’t see a way to do that, couldn’t see a way to tell the stories that seemed right for the character she had, and couldn’t reconcile her knowledge of how to tell stories with the structure of our RPG.

In a darkly funny sort of way, Continue reading →

BE HUNGRY: Building your own Buy-in, Quick Thoughts

Posted on by Henry

So many of the stories we tell, so many of the stories we read, are about reluctant heroes and passive adventurers. But those character tropes are woefully misleading and destructive when it comes to driving collaborative story-telling. Characters like that work in fiction because the creators of that fiction spend a tremendous amount of time finding ways to force the characters into action. That’s time and effort that you don’t see or recognize when you look at the story as a consumer. It’s time and effort that can suck energy out of gaming groups.

This is about defying those tropes, and having fun while doing it.

You don’t sit down at a diner counter and demand that the waitstaff convince you to buy food; you’re there because you’re hungry. You picked that place because 1) you already know they have something you want, or 2) you want to try something they have.

Besides, insisting that waitstaff Continue reading →

Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein

Posted on by Henry

There are a number of covers I’ve seen for this book, and while they all ostensibly represent the book, the one above is the only one I saw in person that feels appropriate.  It’s a very good book, definitely worth reading, and more than a little dark.  Here’s the other one I’ve seen in print for a spot of comparison:

Continue reading →