Student of Trinity

Congratulations on your N years of continuous uptime. May N continue to be incremented, and may your operations succeed with every iteration.

That's what I was also thinking of but didn't notice that I was. Sorry about that.

Mmmmmyeahhhh .... but they don't actually go out and bang on any doors. Maybe we can tentatively define a Goduffin. People don't look for it or fight over it, but they make a lot of fuss about it, and yet it still doesn't really matter what it is. A lot of 'evil menace' scenarios end up being like this. Some pretty implausible 'bad thing' looms as a threat over an entire book or movie, and motivates a lot of very active activity, but it's never really anything in particular. The best example that springs to mind is maybe the Dolman, from Eric van Lustbader's Sunset Warrior series. It's this super bad cosmic badness thing entity villain whatever, and it looms as a threat for most of three books. When it finally shows up, it just dies, within about half a page ... and it never does become any more definite than a thing/entity/whatever. That's a classic Goduffin, I'd say. My memory is that the Dolman anticlimax didn't actually seem so anticlimactic when I read it, but I was young and undemanding at the time. In retrospect the whole series went steadily downhill from a promising start that just couldn't be sustained. As many series do.

I think you have to look for a Maguffin. You can't just wait for it.

Eat the Fig Newtons. All you really need is duct tape. Brush your teeth. I think we should allow objects that function as maguffins even if they do also do something else. The strict maguffin is a role without a character, but objects with definite characteristics can be overwhelmed by their role, like a mediocre actor starring in a save-the-world plot. Or they can be unfired guns, whose significant characteristics somehow never actually come into play significantly, leaving maguffinage as the only actual effect. This is a broadening of the concept, but I think it's worth doing. My 'Mornington Crescent' comment was just that claiming the One Ring here is like winning Mornington Crescent on the first move. I mean, well.

@Alorael: Mornington Crescent. I have a distinct feeling that I'm forgetting at least one totally awesome Maguffin, even apart from the One Ring. For my own choice I'm going to have to go with Stormbringer, the nasty black sword that kind-of belonged to Elric of Melniboné. I feel it stands out for a sort of second-order intensity of maguffinage. Stormbringer was cool, then went over the top into outright cheesiness, but then persisted until it became cool in some perverse sense once more. With strange eons, even cheese may die. I created a maguffin myself, once, for a long D&D campaign. It was inspired by a useless but wicked-looking little boot knife owned by some guy I knew in the army once. So it was a small, thin, leaf-shaped dagger, of weird black metal. It was called Heart's Venom, and had properties calculated to impress. It was inherently venomous, to the degree that if a character was so much as touched in an extremity, then instant amputation of the limb would allow a saving throw versus poison at -5. Otherwise, rapid death with no chance to save. Touching the hilt was as bad as being scratched by the blade. Bad knife = bad. If you cut yourself with Heart's Venom and survived — which would normally require a double amputation and good luck — you could control the artifact. This conferred an immediate gain of twelve levels of magic-user ability, and if this put you over 18th level, a special ninth-level spell that required Heart's Venom as a material component, and that allowed the crafting of small private universes ('carving reality'). Exactly what that meant was never really pinned down, but it was intended to be pretty mind-boggling. Regrowing some hands was presumably easy, then, though no doubt they would turn out to be demonic alien members that looked like glass filled with smoke, or something, and would never be apt to any end but evil. In this campaign, most of the most powerful NPCs were below 18th level, so a twelve-level boost would really make a demi-god. Heart's Venom had no other useful powers, though. Despite its poison, it was never intended to be particularly effective as a weapon. It was only three inches long, and I think it was supposed to be mysteriously clumsy as a fighting knife, or something. At the time of the campaign, it was the most prized item in the hoard of a two-hundred-yard-long black dragon who slept in a cave under the center of a swamp the size of a small ocean. A 19th level thief eventually dug through two feet of big diamonds to steal the thing, from under the dragon's eye. It came in a tasteful little presentation box. It played a key role in a climactic scene, and was then immediately hauled off to heaven by an ascending saint. And that was a wrap.

This is an interesting but dismaying observation. It's something that's going to be hard for Jeff to fix, I think. Too many of his beta testers are old hands who know the ropes, or else are gluttons for punishment and may not complain when they should. And even if beta testers could convey the problem clearly to the maker of the games, it might just be too much work to fix it. So Jeff may not really want to fix it, if he's doing well enough as it is. Spiderweb doesn't even try to sell games to people who really want cutting edge graphics. It may also be that Spiderweb also just lets a lot of other customers go, who would have stuck around if everything were better balanced. Maybe achieving really thorough balance is just as unfeasible, with a small company, as cutting edge graphics.

True fact (unlike the miserable false facts that you read in those other posts): dyes used to be big business. Humans didn't have a lot of ways of producing durable colors in cloth until the later 19th century. One of the few good dyes available in medieval Europe was woad, which produced a decent blue color. Woad is a little weedy plant with yellow flowers, and the process of turning it into blue dye involved a lot of urine. I've visited a town that was rich from woad in the middle ages. Somehow they cornered the trade. I don't know whether they grew especially good woad plants, or whether they jealously guarded some secret of the production process. One possibility, though, is that everyone else was content to leave the woad-making to them. They collected every citizen's urine in huge vats, throughout the year, and stored it in warehouses until the woad harvest. The tour guide assured us that the whole town used to stink unrighteously. I don't know how he would have really known that for sure, but as historical reconstructions go, it sounds like a good bet.

I'm very sorry to hear this sad news. Everyone dies, but this sounds like one of the harder ways to do it. Your care will have made an incredible difference to your mother, though, even if her brain hasn't been in shape to let you know this. It's a lot easier to face hard things when you're not alone. I think maybe the surreal thing about death is that it's all too real. It's so different from life as we get used to it, yet when it comes it doesn't go away. It can make everything else — everything — seem fake. But even silly things like computer games, and message boards about them, are actually real, too, at least in their way. If we've helped you at all in coping with some hard parts of the rest of reality, then that's really great. Thanks for letting us know.

I think your business plan may need some work.

I think I'd go for Avernum, but in the era between A5 and A6, when you can go back out to the surface after a while. I'd like to explore the caves. I like caves. I'd like to figure out some way of not worrying about monsters, though. Hire a high level party as porters, for instance.

The forecast given here turned out to be reasonably accurate, except that the guileful and charming second narrator turned out to be grief-stricken and depressed as well, at least for a while. The story as I had it laid out at this point would likely have run to at least 200,000 words, though, so I found an earlier ending point, and started planning a sequel.

Reading successive drafts of this chapter, my brother has kept insisting that the math stuff is too technical. He's convinced me, and I'll rewrite it. The idea of determinism has developed into a sort of motif for Anastasia. "What has to happen, will" is one of her catchphrases. She's a fatalist; but as she puts it later at one point, "I'm part of what has to happen." Her fatalism is the kind that encourages her to be reckless and aggressive, rather than resigned and passive. So I think that, rather than talk in the technical language of 'boundary conditions', I'll talk about determinism. It's actually only a change of language. Determinism is precisely what Anastasia and Huygens argue about, in talking about initial and final conditions, and the existence of solutions. It shouldn't be too hard to raise the same ideas in more accessible terms, and at the same time get more resonance with later parts of the story.

FYT. MMXPERT can be a boat creation, because he started this.

Woo-hoo — we get to claim Gazer. Because we're short-sighted and obsessive. The eye is having a tough time topping the door creature for ADOS. That's a clever one, and now that he's said it, we can't think of anything better.

Well, sure — if you're too much of a wimp to stab the tip of the arrow with the point of your sword, like a real man.

Really? I'm pretty skeptical. I mean, anyone can cut an arrow in half in flight, if they're really lucky. And anyone who practiced enough could probably learn to catch an arrow with a sword consistently, if the arrow were launched consistently every time, with one-two-three-go. But when the archer is really trying to hit you?

That's the uncomfortable bottom line, for me, the Kierkegaardian "either, or". An omnipotent God could make absolutely anything worthwhile. "You can't understand, but trust me, it's worth it," is an unanswerable defense for God. It may not be convincing, but it's entirely self-consistent. To me, the unfortunate 'you can't understand' part is an unavoidable part of the self-consistency. It's never been conceivable to me that the universe should be easy to understand. I mean, if God made a universe that was all about guaranteeing that a few billion primitive creatures enjoyed safe, happy lives, fulfilling their primitive instincts, then somebody would have to come along, grab God by the shoulders, and say, "Dude — you're omnipotent. What are you doing, still living in the basement like this, playing computer games? Go out and set the world on fire, for God's sake! Do something!" It has also always seemed rather arbitrary, to me, to suppose that God cares a lot about whether human beings manage to hold the right opinions. Yes, a lot of religions call that important; but to me it seems like an easy assumption to drop. With it, I find, an enormous weight falls off the whole discussion. Believers in God stop having to raise embarrassing defenses, and doubters stop having to stomp straw men into the ground.

Yeah, pretty much. Though actually it's more kind of, "Come back and tell me again how to run the whole universe, after you can make even a tiny-ass fish." That is a point. Job has indeed always been understood mainly as a takedown of theodicy. It's not that people didn't notice that. It's the party line.

I'm not sure it's so easy even for God to perform miracles great enough to prove that God is God. I'm thinking of Q, from Star Trek. Q isn't God, and certainly doesn't deserve anyone's worship; monotheism, at least as I understand it, implies that even Q is just a semicolon to God. But it seems to me that Q could perform anything that humans could experience. Hence it seems to me that there is no miracle possible which could prove to us that God exists: it's easy to imagine things that couldn't be faked by human agency, but pretty hard to think of things that couldn't be done by a merely cosmic, but non-divine, power.

It's true that Candide summarizes that viewpoint, but I think the standard reading of Candide is that this is satire; I hope I didn't mislead about this. I believe Leibniz originated it as an earnest position.

The best theodicy I know — and I don't consider it a knock-down argument, just one that seems to me the best you can say — is the one Jesus made. You can look it up in chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, but my personal summary is that bad things exist because fixing them can be leveraged immensely. Now, part of this is just the flat claim that the bad stuff is worth it, trust me; and ultimately I think that's the bottom line, from God. But the problem with that, when that's all it is, is that it seems pretty quietistic; just grin and bear it. What Jesus says is better than that, in this way: he implies that the big pay-off comes precisely from remedying the bad things, so get off your butt and do something to make things better. With that, I feel a lot better about the whole theodicy thing. It's not just me trying to prop up my theory of God, any more; it's motivation to work. Of course the tricky thing about the healing of the man born blind is that the story only works with a miracle. Ultimately that's honest, too, though, I think. If God really won't do anything whatever, no matter how low the chips fall, then even the cleverest theodicy is beside the point. There's a promise there, that if you do try to make bad things better, then not only will the pay-off for success be greatly disproportionate, but you may get some help with the effort. I could see writing that sort of thing into a story, but I'd have to take pretty much the whole book to work up to it, and even then, I'd be very uneasy.

That's kind of my concern as well. If you've got an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent character in your story, then either there's not much suspense, or your God has to be pretty inscrutable. But this may depend on theological perspective. Some people think that God's will is pretty clear, to the point where the power of prayer isn't so much different from the power of gravity. It's a reliable effect, that characters can use. Suspense comes from other things. I'm not sure I fully buy this, myself; I can accept all kinds of basic reality rules in fictional universes, but I think that reliably efficacious prayer may be a broken magic system. My own experience is that the real God has not implemented it in the real world, and the idea that it's a broken system is part of my own theodicy. Other people seem to have other experience, though, and different understandings of God. I think I can understand the market appeal. If you believe that God always grants the prayers of a righteous man, then stories in which prayer is not implemented just seem unrealistic. You can suspend disbelief to enjoy them, but you're happy to find something that takes seriously the things you know are real. Soldiers often like military fiction, and scientists often like hard sci-fi; they're disappointed if the author gets something wrong, and pleased if things are accurate.

Somewhat to my surprise, I have finished a complete draft of A Lady of Morandau. It's just shy of 125,000 words, so it's long enough. It's well short of the ending that I originally conceived. I have enough material left over for half of a sequel, and I think I may have a couple of good new ideas that will fill that out to full novel length. If the sequel starts looking skimpy or padded, I might still fold it back into the first volume, making a big, fat book. But at the moment I'm optimistic that volume two, tentatively titled Slow Poison, will stand on its own. Assuming that a more detailed outline supports this hope, then A Lady of Morandau can end as it is now (very far along from the last chunks I posted here). It's absolutely a To Be Continued ending, with a small army of bad guys chasing our heroes, but it's one of those light kind of cliffhanger endings, with only relatively slight indications that this pursuit problem may not be slight. All the major themes and plot threads that have dominated the preceding story have either resolved, or passed a decisive turning point. I feel as though a listening audience would be folding their hands, hopefully in contentment. I could suddenly grab their attention again, for a wild final reel, but you know: this is a first novel. Something tells me it'll probably be best not to overdo it. What'll I do now? Push this whole thing onto a back burner for a while, I think. I've put a bit too much time into this hobby lately. I have work to catch up on. And I should give it some space. I'll get some feedback from family members, hopefully. After that, I guess I'll polish the draft up for a while. I may end up making substantial revisions; I don't know. I've thought very hard while writing it, not just raced to get it on paper. The thing is that it's a really tight and tricky plot, with wild and crazy stuff. My sense is that it either works, and if it does there's not much to be done to improve it, or it doesn't, and there's not much that can. It's a quadruple toe loop that either lands, and that's amazing, or crashes completely. Astonishingly: it was one year ago to the day that I started writing this thing. I may have started thinking about it before that, but that's the date the oldest file I have was created. So I've averaged rather more than 10,000 words a month on the thing, considering that I have quite a few thousand more words of scenes and notes for future volumes.

I guess that's just a theological difference. I've been able to frame my own understanding of God in terms of authors and fiction, but what I say is: Human beings are not to God as fictional characters are to their author. Human beings are not even to God as semicolons are to the author. Human beings are to God as semicolons are to God. That's an exaggerated statement. We are worth many sparrows, and a sparrow is worth many semi-colons. But in exaggerated form it expresses something I believe is important. I think it would be unhealthy for me to think about God as a character, and I'd feel that expressing the idea that God could be a human author's character would be such a big theological error to convey, that it would outweigh whatever truths my writing might otherwise express. Sorry I got confused about your relationship with Randy. I hadn't seen you mention him by name before, had seen you talk about your husband, and so I somehow assumed they were the same. More logical would just have been to ask, Who the heck is Randy?