@NeilFein cool. (Mac here, but good to know anyway.)

@BESW thanks for your help in another chat room earlier. I'm sorry you ended up being the target of misdirected ire.

Thanks, it's nice to know the blues have my back when this sort of thing happens in chat--it hasn't always been true.

I'm quite pleased with the recent network attention re: chat hospitality.

This one does, as do the others who were around. Sorry it hasn't always been true, but with 500 mods across the network it's not too surprising that somebody didn't.

Yeah, people have to stop assuming that "it's only chat so we don't have to be civil". Um, yes you do; there are real people here.

My poor experiences are years away, and recent encounters are much more pleasant.

Good, good.

Are you writing anything at the moment?

Right now I'm trying to figure out ways to map a complex set of character/location relationships.

That map doesn't even get into things like who's co-workers with whom.

I'm also trying to figure out good symbols and motifs for a poster advertising a local production of The Crucible.

@BESW oh wow, that looks complicated. And you probably need to encode strength of relationship somehow, though some of your labels implicitly do that I guess (like BFF).

Yellow is "hate," green is "like," purple is "love."

(Looks complicated, but isn't really. Think about how many people we all have connections to...)

Box shapes indicate upper/middle/lower class; box colours indicate youth/adult.

Ah, I was just typing a message asking about the color/box encodings.

Did you do that in layers, so you can easily look only at (say) the hates?

Square = rich, oval = poor, rectangle = middle class; blue is youth, pink is adults.

Alas, the free program I used doesn't do layers.

I tried to add a Venn diagram underlay for things like "the garage" and "extreme sports" to indicate broader social connections, but my brain started to steam.

Some characters have four or five different significant social groups.

Yeah, that would make it really complicated. :-)

This almost calls for software rather than static images, but then you're into the space of data modelling and visualization tools and...yowza.

Oh, and the dark blue is the main characters.

That's why they don't have any outgoing arrows.

They're more free to shift and change their opinions of people as the story needs.

Protagonists get to have Nuanced Feelings.

They do!

It's a Veronica Mars style narrative.

I haven't actually seen the show, I'm afraid.

It's quite good. Think Buffy style banter and character development, with noir-in-highschool themes along the lines of Brick.

Sounds cool. I should add it to my Netflix queue. (Goes to do that.)

I'm using the Bubblegumshoe system to improvise "youth detective" stories with some friends.

A major part of the system's power lies in a structure for designing relationships like you see above.

Depth of character is important to move from "just a plot" to "story", and relationships are important to develop depth of character.

It mechanises the idea of reliance on one's friends and family, by having us figure out a field of competence a protagonist can only access because of their relationship with a person.

And if the protagonist leans on that competence too hard, it stresses the relationship.

Are you writing short stories or a longer work?

Right now we're roleplaying improvised stories.

Ah, gotcha. I know that Bubblegumshoe is a roleplaying tool but somehow got it in my head that you were using it for writing instead somehow.

It's a great way to explore the edges of what makes stories interesting and compelling, and some of the systems we use ARE also used by professional writers.

Of course, roleplaying -> writing sometimes. :-)

(I've done that...)

@BESW yes, I agree -- especially when you're working with other people, talking/playing through something before committing chapters to paper (well, disk) seems like a good idea.

Like, the creator of the TV show The Librarians uses a modified form of the Fate Core system to track his characters' traits, relationships, pressures, etc.

Rapid prototyping applied to writing.

Well, story-creation -- writing is just one manifestation.

I'd like to do more formal sitting-down-and-writing but lately it's mostly just been the occasional exercise in this chat.

And we've been really spotty with the exercises, too. :-(

I did the last one! My short writing exercises tend to be more creative non-fiction, I've found.

Writing into an idea or theme that's been gnawing at me.

The time doesn't work well for me, and I usually intend to come back later, see what the theme was, and add a late submission, but then I don't, or it doesn't feel like I'm really participating if I'm that late, or something. (But I am not saying it should move; I'm not doing a very good job at showing dedication, after all...)

Same here; it's, like, 2am my time usually.

@BESW nice. And yeah, most cultures assume at some level that their myths are global, and yet that's clearly ridiculous. And the answer isn't to have Santa ride a Chinese dragon and distribute mooncakes in one part of the world and the sleigh/reindeer/sack-of-toys in another...

My profession deals with navigating cultural contact zones and intersectionality, so it's something I think about. There's not really a one-size-fits-all answer.

It's more like, something to be aware that we're going to stumble over and be ready to learn from.

Yeah. When I was a kid the biggest question about Santa was "how does he get into houses without chimneys?". Nobody was asking "does he deliver toys to kids in Korea?".

People just don't think of this stuff.

In "Guardians," the Tooth Fairy is an Indian (like, from India) princess and the Easter Bunny is... an earth spirit who lives on Easter Island.

(And Santa's a reformed Russian barbarian.) It's an interesting approach--to re-write localised stories to have global origins. I'm not sure how well it works for this author, though.

Oh, huh. So the author is taking the approach of "somebody on the team relates to a culture, but each one is different" approach. But Santa/Easter bunny/tooth fairy aren't inerchangable, so I'm not sure how well that would work.

Oh, the book is mostly about how they team up with Jack Frost and fight extraplanetary evil from before the dawn of humanity.

Okorafor's Lagoon, on the other hand, basically assumes that everything is alive and true for some value of itself, and that if they all wake up at once things will get messy. The book is about aliens arriving and waking everything up.

Ah. Ok, that's not what I was imagining. Yeah, if they're not serving their "typical" user base, it doesn't matter so much. :-)

@BESW I enjoyed Lagoon. It was unlike anything I'd read before.

I think that was the point, and it did it very well: to showcase how African speculative fiction can be very much itself.

And I just loved how things that seemed to be throw-away details came back later. Nice storytelling there. :-)

I've ordered hard copies of The Pack and Yohancé for similar reasons.

The Pack is a set of comics about werewolves in various historical African civilisations, and Yohancé is an Afrofuturist space opera graphic novel.

Yes, reading this made me realize that I'd never read any African speculative fiction before and why was that? Soon after I read Three Body Problem, not because it was Chinese but that did move it up in the queue.

There's also a by-and-about-Africans RPG in the works, Ki Khanga.

Cool.

yeah, I've been trying to seek out works by authors who don't normally get a lot of publicity from publishers and reviewers.

Victor LaValle writes novels which claim the Lovecraftian Mythos for African-Americans. They're pretty harrowing.

I'll bet they would be! (I don't care for the Lovecraftian Mythos, so I'll just take your word for it. :-) )

Yeah, it's kinda hit-and-miss for me. I really appreciate parts of its underlying aesthetic and concepts, but there's so much baggage piled on top that it's hard to read, and it tends to be so much more cynical than I usually want to read anyway.