The great thing about giving up on actually finishing any fic is that when I finish a bit of a fic I can just POST it (eventually) and not have to slog through all the in-between bits that get one from A to B. It's underrated and I should have done it years ago.
This is more of the "proper writing" companion piece/backstory to the epistolary fics, of which I'll be posting another instalment very very soon.
( Read more... )
This is more of the "proper writing" companion piece/backstory to the epistolary fics, of which I'll be posting another instalment very very soon.
( Read more... )
A couple of years ago I wrote an epistolary fic in which the Ninth House (from the Locked Tomb Trilogy) occupied the same muso-historical space as The Sisters of Mercy (from Leeds). I did this because I am insane, and because I am the only person who could or would write this, and I am still perversely proud of it. But I also wrote a rough draft of a proper fic with a narrative voice and everything. I don't know if I'll finish it so I'm not putting it on AO3, but I wanted to put it somewhere. Here it is.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Coming back to life
Jul. 28th, 2022 06:40 amI'm getting sick of posting stuff to AO3.
That's not a knock on AO3 in the slightest. It's just - archives are for completed material that's on the historical record, and I have a nasty habit of posting things that I don't finish, or decide need a heavy rewrite, or weren't cooked all the way through to begin with. I miss the workshop culture of Auld Live Journalle and forums, which is where I learned to write, and it's the process of writing and talking about writing that I enjoy at least as much as having the work out there. As life goes on I realise how rare it is to get the sustained commentary that kept me going with A Sense of Fatal Allegiance for as long as I did. I also realised, thanks to some good buddies on Discord, that I needed to dial up the levels of action-movie-hero-girl in The Fledgling for her prequel story, Just A Melody, which is the fic I've been failing to finish most during the TWO GODDAMN YEARS I spent forgetting Dreamwidth was a thing.
It's always refreshing to come back here though. Tumblr is the Reblogging Things platform, a Public Forum. There's something intimate and safe about a dead end and an old-fashioned, pre-algorithm, not-scrolling-endlessly kind of e-space. Anyone who knows about your Dreamwidth is someone who you can trust to not be weird about it, I feel.
I'm going to start posting fic here, I think. Drafts, really; stuff I'm still fussing with, working through, might scrap entirely if I don't like how they're going. Material I don't mind sharing, but don't want committed to the finality of archival.
( Catchup under the cut )
That's not a knock on AO3 in the slightest. It's just - archives are for completed material that's on the historical record, and I have a nasty habit of posting things that I don't finish, or decide need a heavy rewrite, or weren't cooked all the way through to begin with. I miss the workshop culture of Auld Live Journalle and forums, which is where I learned to write, and it's the process of writing and talking about writing that I enjoy at least as much as having the work out there. As life goes on I realise how rare it is to get the sustained commentary that kept me going with A Sense of Fatal Allegiance for as long as I did. I also realised, thanks to some good buddies on Discord, that I needed to dial up the levels of action-movie-hero-girl in The Fledgling for her prequel story, Just A Melody, which is the fic I've been failing to finish most during the TWO GODDAMN YEARS I spent forgetting Dreamwidth was a thing.
It's always refreshing to come back here though. Tumblr is the Reblogging Things platform, a Public Forum. There's something intimate and safe about a dead end and an old-fashioned, pre-algorithm, not-scrolling-endlessly kind of e-space. Anyone who knows about your Dreamwidth is someone who you can trust to not be weird about it, I feel.
I'm going to start posting fic here, I think. Drafts, really; stuff I'm still fussing with, working through, might scrap entirely if I don't like how they're going. Material I don't mind sharing, but don't want committed to the finality of archival.
( Catchup under the cut )
you thought me dead, but i sailed away
Jul. 25th, 2020 07:15 amBack at work. Two days a week. Still better than the longest school holiday since I last had school holidays. Although wired to spend whole weeks not going out unless I'm getting paid for it, and not speaking to anyone who doesn't sleep in the same bed as me, it still feels good to be somewhere else, doing something else. The argument for ludic labour doesn't always feel compelling, but when I've spent four days in a cellar reorganising books and hauling crates about - I start to get it. There's a novelty there that not all forms of bullshit job come with. Of course, the week I went back was also the week I fucked my collarbone falling over in the bath (I turn more and more brittle and prematurely elderly with every passing day) and it's still stiff and sore and why is physical existence a thing at all, don't we have the tech bros working on this yet?
Back on my game dev bullshit too. I've functionally dropped out of the PhD, because I can spend a few months making a game or putting together a paper that investigates a problem in a small way but constructing a problem and then committing to it for SIX YEARS of spare time feels increasingly less workable. I mention this because all of the little games I've put out are working toward something bigger, describing the edges of a space I may one day feel compelled to go in and explore.
(Except Bloodspell, which is its own little bitter pill - a heartbreaker that turned into a hack that briefly dabbled with being a lecture. I thought I was done with it, but I woke up this morning with Laetitia's words on my lips and a strong sense of where a scene was going and what it was saying, so I guess we're still doing this.)
Anyway. I came in here to say it's Free RPG Day and those of you who like RPGs and Free Stuff should consider this Free Games Digest. It contains a game called Aces High which I wrote about ten years ago and did shit-all with except bung it up on a wargaming blog where all of four regular readers would be interested. Dolled up with art (Bri de Danann), editing (J. W. van Heerden) and layout (by Francita, who I know only as Francita) it is now looking and reading a lot nicer. Check it out. Also there's a cute Land Before Time style dinosaur adventure and a big folio o' random tables in there if they're your thing.
If you want to buy something, you could do worse than Volume 3 of the Short Games Digest, which (among other things) contains a game called All Your Houses, which I wrote and which also uses cards to substitute for a whole lot of other system cruft. In this case, it's a dynastic story-building kind of game which probably works perfectly well as a hand management game if you don't want to tell stories with it for some reason.
I am currently working on another game, working title The Hitch Hiker's Guide To Elfland, which is my attempt at - hm. Not decolonising D&D, because I am the last person on Earth who should be asked to decolonise anything, and colonialism is only one of the violences D&D has to offer. But there's a sort of attack-and-dethrone-D&D vibe and a reclaim-the-OSR vibe in the industry air at the moment and I'm trying to do that with a game about being a good tourist and exploring for the sake of exploring and building systems about that, rather than systems you ignore in order to do that. It's an experiment, but that's what the Digests are for - short-form experiments in game design that might be fun, give them a try. It'll be in Volume 6 when Volume 6 comes out (mid-September, ideally).
All of this is sketching around the edges of... something. It uses Tarot cards, ideally. It is fantasy, but not post-Tolkienian. It is an RPG, but not post-wargame. It is in some way indebted to the fiction of E. R. Eddison and it uses a lot of ideas from the OSR, but stripped clean of as much of their baggage as I can shift. It is not 'manifest destiny with swords', but it might be 'the Renaissance in space with crossbows'. It might have runes in it, or verb-noun magic, or I might come up with something else, probably involving Tarot suits. It is something I have been working towards, in a crabwise and inconsistent way, for the best part of a decade, and it will probably say what I want to say about games and death and stories in a more artful and poetic way than writing a thesis about what other people have done.
I bloody hope it does or I'm going to feel a right plum in 2025. Assuming we all live that long.
Back on my game dev bullshit too. I've functionally dropped out of the PhD, because I can spend a few months making a game or putting together a paper that investigates a problem in a small way but constructing a problem and then committing to it for SIX YEARS of spare time feels increasingly less workable. I mention this because all of the little games I've put out are working toward something bigger, describing the edges of a space I may one day feel compelled to go in and explore.
(Except Bloodspell, which is its own little bitter pill - a heartbreaker that turned into a hack that briefly dabbled with being a lecture. I thought I was done with it, but I woke up this morning with Laetitia's words on my lips and a strong sense of where a scene was going and what it was saying, so I guess we're still doing this.)
Anyway. I came in here to say it's Free RPG Day and those of you who like RPGs and Free Stuff should consider this Free Games Digest. It contains a game called Aces High which I wrote about ten years ago and did shit-all with except bung it up on a wargaming blog where all of four regular readers would be interested. Dolled up with art (Bri de Danann), editing (J. W. van Heerden) and layout (by Francita, who I know only as Francita) it is now looking and reading a lot nicer. Check it out. Also there's a cute Land Before Time style dinosaur adventure and a big folio o' random tables in there if they're your thing.
If you want to buy something, you could do worse than Volume 3 of the Short Games Digest, which (among other things) contains a game called All Your Houses, which I wrote and which also uses cards to substitute for a whole lot of other system cruft. In this case, it's a dynastic story-building kind of game which probably works perfectly well as a hand management game if you don't want to tell stories with it for some reason.
I am currently working on another game, working title The Hitch Hiker's Guide To Elfland, which is my attempt at - hm. Not decolonising D&D, because I am the last person on Earth who should be asked to decolonise anything, and colonialism is only one of the violences D&D has to offer. But there's a sort of attack-and-dethrone-D&D vibe and a reclaim-the-OSR vibe in the industry air at the moment and I'm trying to do that with a game about being a good tourist and exploring for the sake of exploring and building systems about that, rather than systems you ignore in order to do that. It's an experiment, but that's what the Digests are for - short-form experiments in game design that might be fun, give them a try. It'll be in Volume 6 when Volume 6 comes out (mid-September, ideally).
All of this is sketching around the edges of... something. It uses Tarot cards, ideally. It is fantasy, but not post-Tolkienian. It is an RPG, but not post-wargame. It is in some way indebted to the fiction of E. R. Eddison and it uses a lot of ideas from the OSR, but stripped clean of as much of their baggage as I can shift. It is not 'manifest destiny with swords', but it might be 'the Renaissance in space with crossbows'. It might have runes in it, or verb-noun magic, or I might come up with something else, probably involving Tarot suits. It is something I have been working towards, in a crabwise and inconsistent way, for the best part of a decade, and it will probably say what I want to say about games and death and stories in a more artful and poetic way than writing a thesis about what other people have done.
I bloody hope it does or I'm going to feel a right plum in 2025. Assuming we all live that long.
Bloodspell: The Answer May Surprise You
Jul. 25th, 2020 07:11 amWe’ve done this quite a few times, since we met Dominique and Sylvester. The four of us meet up on the Quay and start walking, out of town and around the headland and then down to the beach once we’re safely out of sight. We build a fire, and once it’s going we sit close enough to stay warm and far enough to feel safe (and look spooky, if I’m honest), and we talk about what it’s like.
There’s something on my mind tonight. I curl my toes up in the sand, on instinct, bracing for the revelation or something, and I ask “have you… how many people have y’all killed?”
Dominique blinks, deadpan, then laughs. Throws back her head and practically roars with laughter. I’d be offended, but I’m too busy thinking how incredibly hot she is. I’d never admit it, but the reason I suggested these little meetups was at least eighty per cent to spend more time talking with, and looking at, and thinking about Dominique. She glows in the firelight, shimmering dark and sleek across from me, and the next breath I take as I’m about to apologise for being such a weapons-grade dumbass is rough and unready because what I’m actually thinking about is jumping across the fire and burying myself in her giant hair and covering that long throat of hers in bites and kisses and —
I was gonna say something, but that’s Dominique for you.
“It’s not the sort of thing I count,‘Titia,” she says when she’s finally come back to Earth. “One thing to let it happen now and then, by accident, or to do in need when the damn fool’s decided you’re a monster and you gotta burn. But you don’t sit there, brooding and preening over what a monster you are. No pride, but no shame either. And never trust anyone who says you have to keep score.”
She leaves us no choice but to stan, says a stan who has no choice.
Dorian follows my eyes and coughs. I know they’re nervous about this. They’re not stupid, they have eyes and a bunch of brain cells, and they know — because we had the talk about this around the time we had the talk about that and the other, and what I’m saying here is that babe, I’m a vampire led in good time to babe, I love you and I don’t want to see you die one day and because we’d reached that point we had to negotiate with ‘til death us do part is a lovely sentiment but I’m poly and I have to know — will you get jealous?
D doesn’t get jealous, or at least they never admit to it, but they are a one-at-a-time kind of lover, and I think something buried deep in their psyche still worries about competing with Dominique. I keep telling them a) it’s not a competition and b) I have more than enough love to give and c) I don’t even know if Dominique swings my way and d) I live with Dorian and I let Dorian turn me into this and dear God I love you Dorian, you stupid sweet sexy jazz dork. I don’t tell them e) which is that nobody could compete with Dominique anyway, and I would hate to ever have to choose between them because if Dominique said yes, but it’s me and only me I might not immediately want to say no.
Anyway, Dorian coughs again and pokes up the fire to hide it and says, huskily as they can manage, “It’s not about keeping score, Dominique. If you reach a point where they’re just numbers, you’ve already gone off the deep end. But I think if you’ve happened to kill someone — if you’ve had to kill someone — you owe them something for the life they might have led. I keep diaries, and I write down every single name, every time for eighty years, just in case. Someone ought to remember them, and I’ll be here a bloody long time.”
Dear God, I love them. That’s what surprised me most about them. Not that they were a vampire, not even that they’d left the whole concept of ‘gender’ down the back of a sofa when Prohibition was still a thing and sort of got along without it ever since, but the sheer decency of them. The same petty, prissy, fussy little things that make them such a good teacher make them such a good vampire — according to my extremely limited ‘is it like a horror movie in here?’ sense of what makes a ‘good vampire’, anyway. Of course they keep notes in case they forget what happened last time. Of course they never throw away a diary in case they need it forty years later to remember some obscure fact about someone who might well be dead by now. Of course they care.
Sylvester. We all look at Sylvester. Dominique smirks, feline, and I crush the obvious joke as it bubbles up in my head even as I think about stroking her (stop it) and whether she purrs (stop it). Dorian’s lips are thin and tight, their eyes owlish behind their glasses, turning the firelight back. There’s some history there, and I’m afraid to ask.
“What are you all waiting for?” Sylvester grumbles. He’s kicked off his worn old man shoes and his worn old man feet are closer to the fire than any of ours. Words flit around my head — weatherbeaten, salt-stained, tanned — and as Sylvester shuffles himself a bit closer I catch a glimpse of scars and tattoos on his legs and the glimmer of heavy gold rings in the dark. If Sylvester the vampire pirate didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him. He’s just too good to be true.
“C’mon, Sylv,” I say. “How many?”
“None.”
The word falls out of him grudgingly, a single penny in a slot machine, no lights or sounds blarting out at you, just the smallest kind of victory.
“You?” The word’s out of my mouth before I can cram it back in there, and “I don’t believe you,” says Dorian, and Dominique doesn’t say anything, she just sits there and smiles.
“Not for this. Not to eat. That’s what you’re aksing, in’t it? You live a kind of life where you kill a man and go to gaol, ‘less you’re in the army or the navy or what-have-you. So you’re aksing me a question as makes sense to you.”
Dorian’s mouth is open and they’re saying words — “You know very little about the life Laetita’s led” — and I put my hand up.
Sylvester nods to me and he says: “I don’t know how many men I killed at sea. Don’t know how many I knifed or hit in dock as died later. One or two women, I do know, and I amn’t proud of it now, but…” He rubs his beard, tugs at it like he does when he’s thinking, and points at Dominique. “Since that ‘un brought me over? Not one for eating, and I never tried to kill none either, after we ‘scaped Haiti and came to shore. Believe it or don’t; still God’s honest truth.”
It’s always the ones you least expect.
There’s something on my mind tonight. I curl my toes up in the sand, on instinct, bracing for the revelation or something, and I ask “have you… how many people have y’all killed?”
Dominique blinks, deadpan, then laughs. Throws back her head and practically roars with laughter. I’d be offended, but I’m too busy thinking how incredibly hot she is. I’d never admit it, but the reason I suggested these little meetups was at least eighty per cent to spend more time talking with, and looking at, and thinking about Dominique. She glows in the firelight, shimmering dark and sleek across from me, and the next breath I take as I’m about to apologise for being such a weapons-grade dumbass is rough and unready because what I’m actually thinking about is jumping across the fire and burying myself in her giant hair and covering that long throat of hers in bites and kisses and —
I was gonna say something, but that’s Dominique for you.
“It’s not the sort of thing I count,‘Titia,” she says when she’s finally come back to Earth. “One thing to let it happen now and then, by accident, or to do in need when the damn fool’s decided you’re a monster and you gotta burn. But you don’t sit there, brooding and preening over what a monster you are. No pride, but no shame either. And never trust anyone who says you have to keep score.”
She leaves us no choice but to stan, says a stan who has no choice.
Dorian follows my eyes and coughs. I know they’re nervous about this. They’re not stupid, they have eyes and a bunch of brain cells, and they know — because we had the talk about this around the time we had the talk about that and the other, and what I’m saying here is that babe, I’m a vampire led in good time to babe, I love you and I don’t want to see you die one day and because we’d reached that point we had to negotiate with ‘til death us do part is a lovely sentiment but I’m poly and I have to know — will you get jealous?
D doesn’t get jealous, or at least they never admit to it, but they are a one-at-a-time kind of lover, and I think something buried deep in their psyche still worries about competing with Dominique. I keep telling them a) it’s not a competition and b) I have more than enough love to give and c) I don’t even know if Dominique swings my way and d) I live with Dorian and I let Dorian turn me into this and dear God I love you Dorian, you stupid sweet sexy jazz dork. I don’t tell them e) which is that nobody could compete with Dominique anyway, and I would hate to ever have to choose between them because if Dominique said yes, but it’s me and only me I might not immediately want to say no.
Anyway, Dorian coughs again and pokes up the fire to hide it and says, huskily as they can manage, “It’s not about keeping score, Dominique. If you reach a point where they’re just numbers, you’ve already gone off the deep end. But I think if you’ve happened to kill someone — if you’ve had to kill someone — you owe them something for the life they might have led. I keep diaries, and I write down every single name, every time for eighty years, just in case. Someone ought to remember them, and I’ll be here a bloody long time.”
Dear God, I love them. That’s what surprised me most about them. Not that they were a vampire, not even that they’d left the whole concept of ‘gender’ down the back of a sofa when Prohibition was still a thing and sort of got along without it ever since, but the sheer decency of them. The same petty, prissy, fussy little things that make them such a good teacher make them such a good vampire — according to my extremely limited ‘is it like a horror movie in here?’ sense of what makes a ‘good vampire’, anyway. Of course they keep notes in case they forget what happened last time. Of course they never throw away a diary in case they need it forty years later to remember some obscure fact about someone who might well be dead by now. Of course they care.
Sylvester. We all look at Sylvester. Dominique smirks, feline, and I crush the obvious joke as it bubbles up in my head even as I think about stroking her (stop it) and whether she purrs (stop it). Dorian’s lips are thin and tight, their eyes owlish behind their glasses, turning the firelight back. There’s some history there, and I’m afraid to ask.
“What are you all waiting for?” Sylvester grumbles. He’s kicked off his worn old man shoes and his worn old man feet are closer to the fire than any of ours. Words flit around my head — weatherbeaten, salt-stained, tanned — and as Sylvester shuffles himself a bit closer I catch a glimpse of scars and tattoos on his legs and the glimmer of heavy gold rings in the dark. If Sylvester the vampire pirate didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him. He’s just too good to be true.
“C’mon, Sylv,” I say. “How many?”
“None.”
The word falls out of him grudgingly, a single penny in a slot machine, no lights or sounds blarting out at you, just the smallest kind of victory.
“You?” The word’s out of my mouth before I can cram it back in there, and “I don’t believe you,” says Dorian, and Dominique doesn’t say anything, she just sits there and smiles.
“Not for this. Not to eat. That’s what you’re aksing, in’t it? You live a kind of life where you kill a man and go to gaol, ‘less you’re in the army or the navy or what-have-you. So you’re aksing me a question as makes sense to you.”
Dorian’s mouth is open and they’re saying words — “You know very little about the life Laetita’s led” — and I put my hand up.
Sylvester nods to me and he says: “I don’t know how many men I killed at sea. Don’t know how many I knifed or hit in dock as died later. One or two women, I do know, and I amn’t proud of it now, but…” He rubs his beard, tugs at it like he does when he’s thinking, and points at Dominique. “Since that ‘un brought me over? Not one for eating, and I never tried to kill none either, after we ‘scaped Haiti and came to shore. Believe it or don’t; still God’s honest truth.”
It’s always the ones you least expect.
logged the fuck off
Apr. 11th, 2020 11:36 amI was going to wait until I'd tweeted 9,000 Tweets before I stopped, so I could say my power level was over 9,000, but I'm just sick of it. A parade of other people's pain and fury, every damn day, and I keep pressing the switch because my brain craves the Bad Chemicals or something. It doesn't matter what the last straw was. None of it fucking matters. Despite how the world seems sometimes, not everyone is on Twitter - hardly anyone is - and the state of being experienced by the terminally Online, in which we're either permanently outraged by the world-as-is or cruising around looking for noses to rub in it or barfing out vacuous dribble because it's a coping mechanism, is not a healthy or even a default state for human beings to live in.
Facebook would go if my work and gaming group didn't use it to co-ordinate and if the phone signals weren't jank around here. Sadly, I need to contact people in real time and Messenger is still the most reliable way to do it. I have a particular loathe on for the Facebooksphere at the moment because of all the Twitter and Tumblr screencaps people barf onto it, filling up another feed with the kind of crap I left other platforms to get away from.
Talking of people filling up the Internet with crap, I wrote a whole chapter of The Fic this week and it's now posted and everything. Act III is now almost done. There'll be a break while I refresh myself on the 'verses involved (I feel I've lost some character in Act III - like, the window dressing and mood setting stuff people say they like about the fic has kind of slipped off the shoulders of the character and plot beats), and then I'll either do Act IV of The Fic or start on the spin-off.
I hate to beg at this or any other time, especially since I've been complaining a lot in this post, but I need comments, and would greatly appreciate any that you have to spare. The work is enjoyable but what makes it rewarding and gives me momentum is knowing it's been read by people who think things about it. I am made unhappy by the idea that this thing into which I have put a lot over the last few years just flops out there into a few disinterested eyeholes and doesn't even merit a "meh, 's all right I guess." I don't ask for fame, just interaction. Tell me it sucks if you like, that's better than the soft sound of a flop into the dust.
Facebook would go if my work and gaming group didn't use it to co-ordinate and if the phone signals weren't jank around here. Sadly, I need to contact people in real time and Messenger is still the most reliable way to do it. I have a particular loathe on for the Facebooksphere at the moment because of all the Twitter and Tumblr screencaps people barf onto it, filling up another feed with the kind of crap I left other platforms to get away from.
Talking of people filling up the Internet with crap, I wrote a whole chapter of The Fic this week and it's now posted and everything. Act III is now almost done. There'll be a break while I refresh myself on the 'verses involved (I feel I've lost some character in Act III - like, the window dressing and mood setting stuff people say they like about the fic has kind of slipped off the shoulders of the character and plot beats), and then I'll either do Act IV of The Fic or start on the spin-off.
I hate to beg at this or any other time, especially since I've been complaining a lot in this post, but I need comments, and would greatly appreciate any that you have to spare. The work is enjoyable but what makes it rewarding and gives me momentum is knowing it's been read by people who think things about it. I am made unhappy by the idea that this thing into which I have put a lot over the last few years just flops out there into a few disinterested eyeholes and doesn't even merit a "meh, 's all right I guess." I don't ask for fame, just interaction. Tell me it sucks if you like, that's better than the soft sound of a flop into the dust.
Perfect Isolation, Here Behind My Wall
Mar. 17th, 2020 04:33 pmSo, in news that will surprise nobody, going down to that London even though the Book Fair was cancelled was not strictly tactical. The thing is, I needed a proper holiday, and having the whole week meant spending actual time with my old pals Gee and Chris before they fuck off to Japan, and being able to go to the Wellcome Collection and see an exhibition that was totes research-relevant, and motivating myself to at least open and annotate a Scholarly Book again (I did two chapters of Shared Fantasy which isn't much but it's more than I've done all year so far).
It also meant seeing an Erin and a Katy and their gorgeous cats, and playing some Azul and Everdell (good board games) and some Tapestry (difficult board game) even though Eurogames give me impostor syndrome a bit because I'm not good at them and HOW DARE I STUDY GAMES WHEN I CANNOT EVEN MASTER THE RULES?
And it even meant going up to Shepherds' Bush and playing some proper Warhammer, which is always nice since I only get to do that a few times a year now. Certainly helped that I won both games, chuff chuff. Buuut that's probably where I got the scratchy cough that's settled in even though I'm not breathing London air now and is probably the NINETEEN CROWS DISEASE. Or it might have been at the Wellcome now that I think of it, I definitely touched some interactive exhibits while I was there.
So I'm staying in my plague pit for the next two weeks. Work have sent up a care package of basic vegetarian breakfast stuffs and potatoes and Quorn (and like six proofs for me to read, and I can tell they actually thought about me because Ghostland is in there and I've been meaning to read it). So that's nice.
And I have a lot of big slow things I've been meaning to do and might as well get on with, like writing a sort of hacky companion to V5 so I can figure out some of the new rules and put some more definite advice on how to play alongside it, and learning a bit of CSS so I can put it online. I have a Neocities account I'm not using so I might as well do fanstuff on it and complete the triforce of old-school World Wide Web.
I'm also probably gonna start streaming again in the evenings, for someone to talk to. Might do a big Total War campaign, real paint the map job where I try to fight everyone. Or start back on Overwatch if lots of mates are going to be self-isolating, get the meme team back together. We'll see. At least I'm used to staying indoors for days on end, although I didn't want to go back to the freelance life just yet.
It also meant seeing an Erin and a Katy and their gorgeous cats, and playing some Azul and Everdell (good board games) and some Tapestry (difficult board game) even though Eurogames give me impostor syndrome a bit because I'm not good at them and HOW DARE I STUDY GAMES WHEN I CANNOT EVEN MASTER THE RULES?
And it even meant going up to Shepherds' Bush and playing some proper Warhammer, which is always nice since I only get to do that a few times a year now. Certainly helped that I won both games, chuff chuff. Buuut that's probably where I got the scratchy cough that's settled in even though I'm not breathing London air now and is probably the NINETEEN CROWS DISEASE. Or it might have been at the Wellcome now that I think of it, I definitely touched some interactive exhibits while I was there.
So I'm staying in my plague pit for the next two weeks. Work have sent up a care package of basic vegetarian breakfast stuffs and potatoes and Quorn (and like six proofs for me to read, and I can tell they actually thought about me because Ghostland is in there and I've been meaning to read it). So that's nice.
And I have a lot of big slow things I've been meaning to do and might as well get on with, like writing a sort of hacky companion to V5 so I can figure out some of the new rules and put some more definite advice on how to play alongside it, and learning a bit of CSS so I can put it online. I have a Neocities account I'm not using so I might as well do fanstuff on it and complete the triforce of old-school World Wide Web.
I'm also probably gonna start streaming again in the evenings, for someone to talk to. Might do a big Total War campaign, real paint the map job where I try to fight everyone. Or start back on Overwatch if lots of mates are going to be self-isolating, get the meme team back together. We'll see. At least I'm used to staying indoors for days on end, although I didn't want to go back to the freelance life just yet.
Someone off of Discord asked for a list of inspirational moving pictures for that there Vampire: the Masquerade, and while I'm not the expert on postmodern vampire films, I at least work with her and it'd be a shame not to take a shot. The following list is by no means exhaustive - it's the movies I think are closest in terms of inspiration or general vibe to some aspect of V:tM.
THE UR–EXAMPLES
The Hunger is about as close to the Platonic ideal of Vampire: the Masquerade as you can get. Nightclubs! Gratuitous Bauhaus! Lesbian kiss! The aesthetic is spot on: it looks and feels like early Vampire art, or rather early Vampire art looks and feels like this film. V:tM may have come out in 1991 but it's rooted firmly in the 1980s and the vampire chic this film defined. The Hunger will dump the vibe of the game right between the eyes and it's as close as I dare come to "must-watch."
V:tM's Gehenna concept is heavily mirrored/inspired by the novel Queen of the Damned, which was filmed around the time Gehenna was actually happening and the line was coming to a close. The Hunger defines where V:tM came from, all Eighties post-punk writhing - this chuggy post-industrial apocalypse-glam perfectly sums up where it's going.
THE META TAKE
Shadow of the Vampire is about a vampire playing a vampire in the first vampire movie ever made. In a weird way I think that's perfect for the sense of the Masquerade, hiding in plain sight, preying on the worst instincts of humanity and encouraging them to let you get away with all the awful things you want to do. In microcosm, it's the perfect analogy for the "vampires secretly run society" vibe.
YOUR FLAVOUR OF BASTARD
Depending on what type of vampire you want to be (and I'm going with V5's categories here), I recommend at least one of the following:
THE UR–EXAMPLES
The Hunger is about as close to the Platonic ideal of Vampire: the Masquerade as you can get. Nightclubs! Gratuitous Bauhaus! Lesbian kiss! The aesthetic is spot on: it looks and feels like early Vampire art, or rather early Vampire art looks and feels like this film. V:tM may have come out in 1991 but it's rooted firmly in the 1980s and the vampire chic this film defined. The Hunger will dump the vibe of the game right between the eyes and it's as close as I dare come to "must-watch."
V:tM's Gehenna concept is heavily mirrored/inspired by the novel Queen of the Damned, which was filmed around the time Gehenna was actually happening and the line was coming to a close. The Hunger defines where V:tM came from, all Eighties post-punk writhing - this chuggy post-industrial apocalypse-glam perfectly sums up where it's going.
THE META TAKE
Shadow of the Vampire is about a vampire playing a vampire in the first vampire movie ever made. In a weird way I think that's perfect for the sense of the Masquerade, hiding in plain sight, preying on the worst instincts of humanity and encouraging them to let you get away with all the awful things you want to do. In microcosm, it's the perfect analogy for the "vampires secretly run society" vibe.
YOUR FLAVOUR OF BASTARD
Depending on what type of vampire you want to be (and I'm going with V5's categories here), I recommend at least one of the following:
Thinbloods lend themselves well to the What We Do In The Shadows conceit of vampire flatmates (or The Carmilla Movie, I guess, but I haven't seen that one). They're millennial vampires; all the power and resources are concentrated in the hands of previous generations, so they pretty much have to bind together and find something else to enjoy in life, 'cause they're never going to be powerful in the conventional sense. Thinblood games are low power, a bit domestic, and often the closest to "normal life but we happen to be vampires and bigger vampires try to kick our heads in occasionally."
Neonates are your classic Gen X eighties/nineties vampire movie - The Lost Boys. Still weak enough that they're better off standing together, strong enough that they can afford to be a bit cocky around humans. Probably share a sire, mentor, authority figure of some sort and should probably be working on his agenda once they've finished prowling the boardwalks and clubland at night. They're a step further removed from society, but they can pretend to be human for an hour or two if they really try. Also, this is the other one that was in the air and influential when V:tM first came to be - along with The Hunger, I'd recommend it as the closest to a must-watch.
Ancillae (the upper reaches of age and power offered by the V5 corebook) are more your Interview With The Vampire kind of deal. You've lived a long life, your adventuring days are behind you, and now you're something of a mover and a shaker - you're probably permitted or at least not prevented from siring and you're looking to give someone the choice you never had. Modernity gives you a headache but at least you can work a smartphone four times out of five. Ancillae games are a nice balance between "you're powerful" and "you still have to answer to someone".
If you're extending into Inconnu territory, settle down with a small glass of something and enjoy one of my favourite films ever, Only Lovers Left Alive. It's a slow story, and not a lot happens, but that's elders for you. They become introverted. They fall into a groove. They keep to each others' company. It's beautiful and haunting until some clueless childe comes along and screws it all up for them and they have to admit what they really are.
Want to figure out the Sabbat? Watch 30 Days of Night and thank me later. The vampires there are getting away with something horrible because they've fallen through the cracks in the world. They act alpha-predator but they still live on the fringe or civilisation, the little savages.
REFLEXIVE ACTION
It would be deeply remiss of me not to talk about Underworld, the film series transparently inspired by V:tM,.to the point where White Wolf as was took the producers of the original to court over it. Underworld reflects V:tM at its most "gamery" – all custom weapons, trenchcoats and corsets, fighting werewolves in the dark, flashing back to the
WAIT, THIS ISN'T VAMPIRES!
V:tM is synonymous with politics and backstabbing, and there isn't in my opinion a vampire movie that really hits that. Thing is, Reiny-H also loves Mafia movies, and the concept of omerta – which is why, to grasp how a Prince or Baron holds court and influences people, you really should just sit down and watch The Godfather. Which is a pretty basic recommendation, granted, but I don't know if anyone else is here for my "Guy Ritchie's V:tM" style of action storytelling...
YOUR OWN PERSONAL
What are your top three movies? Why? That'll give you an idea of what you, as Storyteller, are most interested in running. Now grab some friends and ask them the same question. Wherever you find an overlap in your tastes, that's something that's worth focusing on in your actual game. Try to make sure there's a couple of vampire-themed answers in there, but also something else, because "being a vampire" in and of itself doesn't make a story (unless it's a quiet, short one like Only Lovers Left Alive, but that's a one-off, not a chronicle).
People often expect an RPG to come ready-made and ready-to-go ("We're playing the Lost Mines of Phandelver") and Vampire, at its best, is a bit more bespoke. Asking players about their taste in media is one way to start that tailoring process, making your V:tM something a bit different from everyone else's and getting into that transformative stuff that makes RPGs so gosh-darn amazing.
Mine, discounting the one I've already gushed about up the line, are a nebulous "pick one from Guy Ritchie's early career" and Franklyn. My games run on generally have a couple of seemingly indestructible SPCs nobody likes and a dark secret that can absolutely take them down, someone WILL have an impenetrable regional accent, but there's also a layer of exaggerated Gothickry over everything, neuratypical characters will perceive the world very differently, vengeance and trauma will drive the major players and love may conquer all but you'll have to lose a lot to get there. None of this is essential to V:tM but it's what makes my V:tM different from A. N. Other Storyteller's.
Mine, discounting the one I've already gushed about up the line, are a nebulous "pick one from Guy Ritchie's early career" and Franklyn. My games run on generally have a couple of seemingly indestructible SPCs nobody likes and a dark secret that can absolutely take them down, someone WILL have an impenetrable regional accent, but there's also a layer of exaggerated Gothickry over everything, neuratypical characters will perceive the world very differently, vengeance and trauma will drive the major players and love may conquer all but you'll have to lose a lot to get there. None of this is essential to V:tM but it's what makes my V:tM different from A. N. Other Storyteller's.
anyway yes fanfiction
Mar. 2nd, 2020 11:53 amI always miss Six Sentence Sunday - it's the last day of the working week for me and my inclination to even look at Scrivener is pretty low by the time I close up. But today I had a good look through and I realised the reason I've not been working on A Sense Of Fatal Allegiance even though I know more or less how it ends is that it's so INERT. Like - I think the scenes are well written but they're just cutting back and forth from the same conversations on the same evening and it's all moving so slowly. The current way of filling a chapter - one scene checking in with each of our PoV ghouls and giving them a moment to discover something or push for something or just to witness, from the outside, an intrigue I don't want them or the reader to entirely grasp, and me writing enough to hit that point and then cutting to someone else - well, at this rate we're never going to cover any ground at all. So I may need to shake things up a little bit and, not to put too fine a point on it, cheat. Tell-not-show that vampires are talking to vampires but at the end of a long night it's all just vampire bollocks and they don't tell their ghouls anything and their ghouls are the protagonists here so what they don't know won't kill us.
It all feels like a cop-out but it's in the interest of getting to write something more interesting for the next four chapters. I don't even get to do any scene-setting bits because I already SET these scenes three chapters ago. It's a fault in the process - each arc has seven chapters and each chapter has four scenes (plus a bit of elision if it's been a while and I need to reintroduce an idea or draw a veil or whatever). It's not like I Just Want It Done or anything but I don't think I'm interested in the minutiae of who said what to whomst on the phone and neither should you be. And the tone of this one is starting to get out of my control as well - like I'm not doing the work on character beats after a revelation because the situation that forces the revelation is urgent, and as people who've sat through my Skyrim Opinion (TM) will tell you, if there's one thing I hate it's setting up an urgent plot situation and then sculling around on stuff that ain't that forever. Even if the character work that needs doing and that fanfic is for and that justifies a fanfic's existence to me is, er, being crowded out by all that plot stuff that I say I don't like.
TL;DR I am dissatisfied by my WIP and hope that skipping a bit will let me get on and enjoy writing it more and I hope I'm not letting these characters down. I could use my Biggest Fan right about now, but she got married and hasn't really done anything fandom-wise since then, which isn't really a bad thing but is sapping my momentum a bit. Selfish, huh.
( Here's an extract, does it even work? )
It all feels like a cop-out but it's in the interest of getting to write something more interesting for the next four chapters. I don't even get to do any scene-setting bits because I already SET these scenes three chapters ago. It's a fault in the process - each arc has seven chapters and each chapter has four scenes (plus a bit of elision if it's been a while and I need to reintroduce an idea or draw a veil or whatever). It's not like I Just Want It Done or anything but I don't think I'm interested in the minutiae of who said what to whomst on the phone and neither should you be. And the tone of this one is starting to get out of my control as well - like I'm not doing the work on character beats after a revelation because the situation that forces the revelation is urgent, and as people who've sat through my Skyrim Opinion (TM) will tell you, if there's one thing I hate it's setting up an urgent plot situation and then sculling around on stuff that ain't that forever. Even if the character work that needs doing and that fanfic is for and that justifies a fanfic's existence to me is, er, being crowded out by all that plot stuff that I say I don't like.
TL;DR I am dissatisfied by my WIP and hope that skipping a bit will let me get on and enjoy writing it more and I hope I'm not letting these characters down. I could use my Biggest Fan right about now, but she got married and hasn't really done anything fandom-wise since then, which isn't really a bad thing but is sapping my momentum a bit. Selfish, huh.
( Here's an extract, does it even work? )
been readin', been wonderin'
Mar. 1st, 2020 12:10 pmMasque, and wondering if Phantom of the Opera fandom has finally come to claim me after all these years, because apparently I have thoughts about Christine Daae: Monsterfucker and how it's a shame Bethany Pope's published phanphic doesn't go as hard on that as it could. Inverting the monstrosity of the fellas while also NOT inverting it because Erik still kills people and there's a glimpse of interiority for Christine (well, more than a glimpse, a third of the story), but there's this huge open door around Erik's murder and their making art until someone dies and IDK, it's all terribly Mad Love but it doesn't actually step through that door and go hard on Christine and Byron and murder and deciding she's going to learn to love that face - it's all there but the WHY isn't, it's like it collapses back into pure plot at all the wrong moments. Otherwise, quite liked it.
Talking of Mad Love, I also read Harleen, and my gosh is talking about Harleen a fucking minefield of discourse that I don't really fancy skipping through. Suffice to say that I think it's a sensitive, occasionally sexy, not at all apologetic version of the Joker/Harley romance that has Harley herself valourising it but also deep-inside self-aware about how awful it is - it's got nuance is the point I'm saying, and I think Stjepan Sepic's background in thoughtful and considered bondage erotica is helping him negotiate all of this. It's also GOOD. And the reason I want to talk about it is partly because it's good but also because I can't stay away from this kind of mindfucky groomy power-imbalancy awful-people relationship when I read and write - it's not something I live but it's absolutely something I live for, the fantasy of it, and yet I'm aware of exactly what kind of awful-yet-basic daddy-kink-yet-so-vanilla patriarchal dork-scum say things like that and I have enough decency/dignity to not be one of those guys (except what if I totally am?).
(Vaguely related, I also watched Birds of Prey with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hark for Obligation Day, and I am so here for vigilante lesbianism in what's clearly Gotham's gay village, far too gay for the extremely heterosexual Batman to get involved with, and also for unabashedly camp superhero movies that aren't afraid of being anything other than dark and quippy. Please let DC decide that since they can't compete with the Disney/Marvel Extremely Normified Superhero Propaganda Machine, they might as well go cult and camp and weird. And let them poach Taika Waititi. Obviously all corporate cinematic media is wanktoss and so on and so forth but I still want to see this dramatic industry pivot. It'll be amusing.)
Love is for Losers (proof copy, a perk of the job), and wondering why I apparently have a frustrated teenage lesbian dwelling not terribly far behind my eyes, because I never USED to be a sucker for romantic realism or high school "o shit I'm so gay" plots and sometimes I just don't know who I am any more. Maybe this is all arrested-development nonsense (I mean, it's 2020 and I'm sitting here on a LiveJournal clone, so probably)? I mean: single parent family, single sex schooling, eighteen years old before I (briefly) got a sex life, most of my twenties trying to fake middle-class heterosexual career fella... I feel like there's a lot missing there. Or maybe I'm next in the "my midlife crisis is being trans!" line that quite a few now-ladies of my acquaintance and approximate generation seem to go through - as if we've failed/been failed by masculinity so hard that rather than trying to live up to it by exaggerating (buying a motorbike or something) we just fob it off altogether. I don't even know if I'd entirely mind, although my face looks off without a beard so I'd rather eat shit than pass. (Unless I want that as a way to not be quite so problematic in my tastes, as discussed previously - is it different if it's queer, if it's a trans woman liking/writing it?) Anyway, Love is for Losers is spiky awkward broken girl meets girl who has her shit together and takes approx. 350 pages to figure it out.
Boy Parts (another proof), and wondering about life and art and such. See, there's this bit about how teenagers unironically love their faves and (if they're bein' crea'ive) their influences and wear that on their sleeves, in the kind of "my tastes are part of my identity, saying 'this sucks' is saying I suck, fight me online" way that I'm sure we've all been through to an extent. And then, by BA, they unlearn that, because they're being educated to, because they've learned that detachment protects against that particular kind of pain that comes from a perceived attack on the extended selfhood, and they learn to say things like "a perceived attack on the extended selfhood" instead. And then, maybe, they come back around to unironically liking things again, which makes me think of a) Evanescence, and how pissed off I am that they've become a meme band when they still slap and the last album has a cut of Bring Me To Life like Amy Lee WANTED to record it, and b) how I never took lyrics into any of my creative writing classes, I think because I didn't want to unlearn unironically loving them, and how all my fic is songfic now and maybe that's how I get back into unironically loving something enough to deal with all the unpaid labour and failspotting and hoo-hah of Doing Fandom, because I never ruined lyrics for myself by studying them.
And gosh, how basic is "I studied this and now it's not fun any more" - I promise I enjoy doing research, I think provided it's aligned with Making Better Things rather than Talking About Things And Trying To Sound Clever, and all of this is a roundabout way of saying I might well drop out of my PhD/tap out with an MRes/come back practice-based and actually make RPGs instead of doing theory about them, because I secretly enjoy doing something and commentating on it a great deal more than theorising and then applying theory as analysis. It's just I've done more of the analysis stuff because I was consistently deterred from creative practice outside of a very specifically bourgie mould - "you can't be in a play but you can take A-level Drama and do Music/Speech/Drama festivals and get awards and qualifications because that's acceptable and probably won't make you a willy woofter" kind of thing.
Really, that whole "frustrated lesbian theatre teen" is starting to make more and more sense. Let's go peak fandom-as-filter-for-parsing-a-difficult-world: wish I could just regenerate.
Talking of Mad Love, I also read Harleen, and my gosh is talking about Harleen a fucking minefield of discourse that I don't really fancy skipping through. Suffice to say that I think it's a sensitive, occasionally sexy, not at all apologetic version of the Joker/Harley romance that has Harley herself valourising it but also deep-inside self-aware about how awful it is - it's got nuance is the point I'm saying, and I think Stjepan Sepic's background in thoughtful and considered bondage erotica is helping him negotiate all of this. It's also GOOD. And the reason I want to talk about it is partly because it's good but also because I can't stay away from this kind of mindfucky groomy power-imbalancy awful-people relationship when I read and write - it's not something I live but it's absolutely something I live for, the fantasy of it, and yet I'm aware of exactly what kind of awful-yet-basic daddy-kink-yet-so-vanilla patriarchal dork-scum say things like that and I have enough decency/dignity to not be one of those guys (except what if I totally am?).
(Vaguely related, I also watched Birds of Prey with
hark for Obligation Day, and I am so here for vigilante lesbianism in what's clearly Gotham's gay village, far too gay for the extremely heterosexual Batman to get involved with, and also for unabashedly camp superhero movies that aren't afraid of being anything other than dark and quippy. Please let DC decide that since they can't compete with the Disney/Marvel Extremely Normified Superhero Propaganda Machine, they might as well go cult and camp and weird. And let them poach Taika Waititi. Obviously all corporate cinematic media is wanktoss and so on and so forth but I still want to see this dramatic industry pivot. It'll be amusing.)Love is for Losers (proof copy, a perk of the job), and wondering why I apparently have a frustrated teenage lesbian dwelling not terribly far behind my eyes, because I never USED to be a sucker for romantic realism or high school "o shit I'm so gay" plots and sometimes I just don't know who I am any more. Maybe this is all arrested-development nonsense (I mean, it's 2020 and I'm sitting here on a LiveJournal clone, so probably)? I mean: single parent family, single sex schooling, eighteen years old before I (briefly) got a sex life, most of my twenties trying to fake middle-class heterosexual career fella... I feel like there's a lot missing there. Or maybe I'm next in the "my midlife crisis is being trans!" line that quite a few now-ladies of my acquaintance and approximate generation seem to go through - as if we've failed/been failed by masculinity so hard that rather than trying to live up to it by exaggerating (buying a motorbike or something) we just fob it off altogether. I don't even know if I'd entirely mind, although my face looks off without a beard so I'd rather eat shit than pass. (Unless I want that as a way to not be quite so problematic in my tastes, as discussed previously - is it different if it's queer, if it's a trans woman liking/writing it?) Anyway, Love is for Losers is spiky awkward broken girl meets girl who has her shit together and takes approx. 350 pages to figure it out.
Boy Parts (another proof), and wondering about life and art and such. See, there's this bit about how teenagers unironically love their faves and (if they're bein' crea'ive) their influences and wear that on their sleeves, in the kind of "my tastes are part of my identity, saying 'this sucks' is saying I suck, fight me online" way that I'm sure we've all been through to an extent. And then, by BA, they unlearn that, because they're being educated to, because they've learned that detachment protects against that particular kind of pain that comes from a perceived attack on the extended selfhood, and they learn to say things like "a perceived attack on the extended selfhood" instead. And then, maybe, they come back around to unironically liking things again, which makes me think of a) Evanescence, and how pissed off I am that they've become a meme band when they still slap and the last album has a cut of Bring Me To Life like Amy Lee WANTED to record it, and b) how I never took lyrics into any of my creative writing classes, I think because I didn't want to unlearn unironically loving them, and how all my fic is songfic now and maybe that's how I get back into unironically loving something enough to deal with all the unpaid labour and failspotting and hoo-hah of Doing Fandom, because I never ruined lyrics for myself by studying them.
And gosh, how basic is "I studied this and now it's not fun any more" - I promise I enjoy doing research, I think provided it's aligned with Making Better Things rather than Talking About Things And Trying To Sound Clever, and all of this is a roundabout way of saying I might well drop out of my PhD/tap out with an MRes/come back practice-based and actually make RPGs instead of doing theory about them, because I secretly enjoy doing something and commentating on it a great deal more than theorising and then applying theory as analysis. It's just I've done more of the analysis stuff because I was consistently deterred from creative practice outside of a very specifically bourgie mould - "you can't be in a play but you can take A-level Drama and do Music/Speech/Drama festivals and get awards and qualifications because that's acceptable and probably won't make you a willy woofter" kind of thing.
Really, that whole "frustrated lesbian theatre teen" is starting to make more and more sense. Let's go peak fandom-as-filter-for-parsing-a-difficult-world: wish I could just regenerate.
my characters, let me show you them
Feb. 22nd, 2020 05:47 am
Riccardo Giovani (back left: white suit)
Born 1776, Serene Republic of Venice.
By adulthood, was actively resisting/disrupting governance of the Provinz Venedig.
Death and Embrace (following street fight) in 1802 (sire: Iago Giovani).
Married and Embraced Luciana Giovani in 1866.
Relocated to USA in 1901: via Giovani holding companies, provided funds and security for the establishment of Venice, CA.
Currently owns and operates (via proxies) property development and funeral businesses, held in the name of Richard St. John.
Predator Type: Cleaver
Luciana Giovani (centre)
Born 1828, Königreich Lombardo–Venetien. Records of parentage lost, believed Giovani "single blood". From childhood, "afflicted with a wasting sickness" (congenital muscular dystrophy, co-morbid SMA syndrome, tumour necrosis) and confined as invalid within Palazzo Ca'Giovani. Between direct access to elder tuition and considerable intellect, confirmed necromantic prodigy. Granted Proxy Kiss 1845, arresting her physical decline: death and Embrace 1866 following marriage to Riccardo Giovani.
Relocated (against her will) to USA in 1901.
Patron of Santino Giovani since 1992: successfully petitioned for his Proxy Kiss and Embrace.
Predator Type: Consensualist
Santino Giovani (front left)
Born 7th September 1970, Oakland (CA).
Educated Los Angeles Valley College (majored in music).
Founding member of Driftback (guitar, keys and vocals), active 1991-1998.
Proxy Kiss (and maiming) 4th April 1999.
Founding member of Shroud (lead guitar, backing vocal, primary songwriter), active 2000-2004, 2007-2009.
Death and Embrace 4th April 2009 (sire: Riccardo Giovani).
Released "posthumous" solo album ηλεκτρικά βασιλεύει ('Electra Reigns') in 2013.
Current public status: presumed suicide - rumours of continued survival boosted by occasional scratch gigs in south-western USA and Mexico. A handful of fans know the truth, and when word gets out where Santino lives, some of them try to find him.
Predator Type: Osiris
Alistair Roderick William Dunsirn (back right: grey suit)
Born 23rd May 1940.
Educated St. Aloysius' College 1945-1958.
Imprisoned HMP Barlinnie 1959-1964 (violent disorder; assault with intention to resist arrest).
Educated St. Andrew's University 1964-1968 (MA International Relations).
Employed Dunsirn Import/Export 1969-1976.
Married Helena McCann 1974.
Sabbatical 1976-1980 - heavily involved with Scottish Labour Party.
Imprisoned HMP Barlinnie 1980-1992 (possession of shotgun without licence; shortening of shotgun; riot; prison mutiny [sentence extension]).
Death of Helena McCann 1985.
Employed Dunsirn Ectopic Consultants 1992-1998.
Death and Embrace 5th November 1998 (sire: Luciana Giovanni).
Seconded to Giovani Holdings LLC (Los Angeles and New York) 2005-2009.
Unofficial position adjacent to Alexandra, Prince of Edinburgh 2010-2017.
Economic instability, partial dissolution of Dunsirn assets and Inquisition activity in Scotland have led to the collapse of the Edinburgh Camarilla and Alistair's withdrawal to Glasgow; he is currently preparing to leave the country.
Predator Type: Bagger
Sorcha Dunsirn (front right)
Born 10th June 1999 to Alistair Roderick William Dunsirn (Motherwell) and Ilaria Rossellini (Venice).
Educated Scuola Elementare Armando Diaz 2005-2010, Erskine Stewart School 2010-2016 (suspended 2015).
Gap year: six months' voluntary humanitarian work in Anatolia, one month in Los Angeles, began side career as underground party planner and minor social media icon, posting as #sorchamidnite.
Educated University of Glasgow 2018-2019 (MSci Chemistry, to include year abroad).
Death and Embrace 10th June 2019 (sire: Alistair Dunsirn).
Sorcha is currently travelling through the Midwest; credit card traces link her to a series of murders in backroad motels.
Predator Type:
Art by
emoslasher (commission 'em, they're good!)Yeah, they're for VtM. I know, I know, I'm an antifan now. I still like these characters and I've still had good times playing the game. And Predator Type is so close to being a good mechanic, and I don't hate what I've seen of the Hecata material (still salty about not getting to write it, but I don't have fifteen grand to burn on becoming mates with the dev team, so I'll just have to live with that). I find myself not wanting to walk away, even though most of the IP holders and quite a few of the social-media fans make me sick. This thing is still a vehicle for something I hope is worth doing.
Storm Ciara fails to destroy me
Feb. 11th, 2020 05:30 pmUp to Manchester and back for a funeral this weekend (my better half's older grandmother, who'd been on the way out for a couple of years; still deeply sad but in many ways a relief). Deeply odd to be surrounded by her cousins from that side. It's been eleven years and the last time I was feeling profoundly awkward because I met them all at a party and, forgive me, if there ain't games at a party I struggle to people at them. With all those years between us I thought it'd be hella awkward but everyone seems to have aged into this contented "nice to all be together again, even for a shit reason." Despite everyone tearing up at the service, the pub afterwards was convivial. Every time I was about to tap out someone put a Jameson's in my hand and, of course, it'd be rude not to... so I stayed 'til close of play and you know, had quite a nice time actually.
Now we lumber back on a train running at normal speed (not the 5 hour slot of the mid-storm run up from Wales) across lakes that weren't there last week, and probably won't be there next; fleeting waves across a darkling plain, or something like that.
Bereft of gaming PC I've done a lot of reading this week: Bring Up The Bodies (ahead of The Mirror and the Light coming out and a sales position needing to be formed, because I'm not having it stick around like The Testaments did); Watership Down (my father-in-law has the edition I was scared of and threw up over as a kid and I like to remind it who's boss) and now Viper (possible teen book club book for next month, assuming any teens show up). The brain now refuses to take on any more Literature, so I'm reduced to blogging like it's 2002 again, trying to free up some brain tape and get back into the habit of talking about my actual life on the Tubes.
I'm hoping to wean myself off the Socials, see, off the hot takes and the discourse and the flood of callout posts for people I've never heard of. I miss the kind of Internet that DW and AO3 and Neocities embody and since all those things exist, why not retrain the brain to seek its idle pleasures and good chemicals here, in a Better Place?
So. What else is going on? I've commissioned the cover for Bloodspell volume 2 and have an idea of the contents (all the nice to haves, the things I didn't want to present as integral but still want to present). A couple of my ideas for a fantasy RPG have turned around and completed each other, and A Thousand Lifetimes is a good title for something, don't you think? I'll be releasing a little preview of that #soon, I hope, assuming the next Roleplayer's Guide goes smoothly. Should probably write that up properly tbh.
And there's a couple of other things, titles with concepts hanging off them, experiences in search of a rubric: If Looks Could Kill (a natural Short Games Digest contribution?) and Moriendi/Morituri, which is SOMETHING to do with what my thesis is about. And may be a better medium through which to pursue those ideas. The more time I spend off-PhD the less I want to go back. I like academic work, mind: the conference round, the occasional book chapter, even the games-as-research-praxis. I just don't like being wedded to this huge theoretical project for the next five years. I may have to talk about going practice based when or if I go back; making games and talking about influences rather than analysing, analysing, laying everything out in terms of what who said about wherefore.
An inconclusive entry, this. But we've just arrived at Hereford and that means we're nearly home; just twenty minutes and a cab ride to go.
Now we lumber back on a train running at normal speed (not the 5 hour slot of the mid-storm run up from Wales) across lakes that weren't there last week, and probably won't be there next; fleeting waves across a darkling plain, or something like that.
Bereft of gaming PC I've done a lot of reading this week: Bring Up The Bodies (ahead of The Mirror and the Light coming out and a sales position needing to be formed, because I'm not having it stick around like The Testaments did); Watership Down (my father-in-law has the edition I was scared of and threw up over as a kid and I like to remind it who's boss) and now Viper (possible teen book club book for next month, assuming any teens show up). The brain now refuses to take on any more Literature, so I'm reduced to blogging like it's 2002 again, trying to free up some brain tape and get back into the habit of talking about my actual life on the Tubes.
I'm hoping to wean myself off the Socials, see, off the hot takes and the discourse and the flood of callout posts for people I've never heard of. I miss the kind of Internet that DW and AO3 and Neocities embody and since all those things exist, why not retrain the brain to seek its idle pleasures and good chemicals here, in a Better Place?
So. What else is going on? I've commissioned the cover for Bloodspell volume 2 and have an idea of the contents (all the nice to haves, the things I didn't want to present as integral but still want to present). A couple of my ideas for a fantasy RPG have turned around and completed each other, and A Thousand Lifetimes is a good title for something, don't you think? I'll be releasing a little preview of that #soon, I hope, assuming the next Roleplayer's Guide goes smoothly. Should probably write that up properly tbh.
And there's a couple of other things, titles with concepts hanging off them, experiences in search of a rubric: If Looks Could Kill (a natural Short Games Digest contribution?) and Moriendi/Morituri, which is SOMETHING to do with what my thesis is about. And may be a better medium through which to pursue those ideas. The more time I spend off-PhD the less I want to go back. I like academic work, mind: the conference round, the occasional book chapter, even the games-as-research-praxis. I just don't like being wedded to this huge theoretical project for the next five years. I may have to talk about going practice based when or if I go back; making games and talking about influences rather than analysing, analysing, laying everything out in terms of what who said about wherefore.
An inconclusive entry, this. But we've just arrived at Hereford and that means we're nearly home; just twenty minutes and a cab ride to go.
BLOODSPELL: CLARIMONDE EXPLAINS IT ALL
Jan. 25th, 2020 12:45 pmShe’s not what I expected.
You say “elder vampire lady” to me and I’m picturing floor-length crimson ballgowns, nails and cheekbones you could cut yourself on, lips the only thing about her with any colour in it.
Clarimonde is five-five of boho chic; dress over jeans, big hat on the back of her chair, OG Doc Martens she's not been assed to lace up all the way. She does have long nails, but I’m pretty sure they’re fakes. There’s a tiny glass on the table in front of her, and it’s empty; can she keep it down?
She leans back to air-kiss Dominique, real old-school mwah-mwah lovely-to-see-you-babe; introduces herself in French, and smiles when I stutter my way through my je m’appelles and have to say in English, “but everyone except my mum calls me Tish.”
“Tish. My pleasure. So, why has Dominique brought you to see another old lady?”
Dominique glances at me — permission granted — and I explain there’s something I’m not getting from her and she thought hearing it in another voice would be good for me.
“I’ve lived a very boring life, my dear. Dominique has been around the world three times and left a trail of nonsense in her wake, what could I —“
“It’s the way you tell it,” says Dominique, rolling her eyes. “And of the two of us, who’s been on television?”
It’s Clarimonde’s turn to roll her eyes, and she does it with a little sniff that’s much more my idea of “elder vampire.”
“I was immortalised without my permission,” says Clarimonde. “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you, Tish; they tell you that you’ll live forever, they neglect to mention ‘as a petty pretty monster who leads innocent young men around by their dicks and away from God’. It could be worse; look what happened to poor Louis and his confessional. How many books of revision to his life story are there, now?”
“For real? The guy from —“
“Yes. The first at least is a true story. There’s a grain of truth at the bottom of all the stories. For instance; mine is truly the world’s oldest profession. I liked being called a ‘courtesan’, I wasn’t keen on ‘moll’, ‘whore’ has always been an insult…”
“What do you think of ‘sex worker’?” It’s out of my mouth before I know what I’m saying. Go for woke, I guess.
“Matter of fact, boring — but honest, which has its charms.” She smiles. “But — to stay on topic, because Dominique is making the face,” and she is, “let me forestall the inevitable question. Him too, and he was a piece of work.”
“The thing Clarimonde does so well,” Dominique explains from her end of the sofa, “is talk about men.”
“About a specific class of people,” says Clarimonde, and her pout looks like she wants to poke her tongue out of it. “Mostly men, who did awful things, frequently to women, and who happened to be like us. I’ve collected vampire stories ever since I was in one, and for the longest time they all had something in common. Take Dracula. Born in the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth, he re-emerges with a grand plan; he’ll move himself to what he’s been told is the greatest city on Earth and he’ll re-invent himself as a modern monster. What does he do when he gets there? Obsess over the first girl he gets his teeth into, and stalk his solicitor’s wife to punish the man for escaping, or whatever mad reason he had. Not just a monster but a failure. Why do you think that happens?”
“He’s got really poor impulse control?”
“And you said she didn’t get it.” Clarimonde laughs behind her hand, and for a second I can see her in costume-drama gear, peeking over a fan. “He’d been around too long. Once he’d been an empire-builder, and he remembered being that, but — did he really remember? Can the mind hold on to what it was five hundred years ago? Four hundred? When we cheat ourselves and say we were better people as little girls, from only ten or twenty years away?”
“I get it,” I say, practically talking over her. “I think. You’re saying he was trying to be who he thought he was, what history said he was. But really, he was… just a vampire.”
“And what a piece of work is a vampire?” she purrs, declaiming at her little glass. “Just a being who thirsts. A paragon of animals. Over time, we forget what else we were. Dominique brought you to me because I’m old. Because there are so few older. I’m a simple girl at heart; I take money and a little blood from people who have both to spare. It’s a simple rule, and it’s not a big plan, and it’s not much to hold on to.
“I keep my memories in stories. I don’t know if I’ve always looked this way, or if I saw that girl pretending to be me and made myself like her. Do you know Louis went back to his maker in the end? After everything he told, everything in that book, he went back on bended knee because he’d started to believe what was made up about him afterwards. He went back to a man he’d tried to kill and he thought he was in love. But he’s still alive, and he’s doing no harm to anyone but himself. And maybe one day I’ll wake up with a rosary in my hand and a pretty boy in my bed and I’ll hope to God he paid for it. That’s what happens when we live too long, Tish. We start believing what they say about us.”
You say “elder vampire lady” to me and I’m picturing floor-length crimson ballgowns, nails and cheekbones you could cut yourself on, lips the only thing about her with any colour in it.
Clarimonde is five-five of boho chic; dress over jeans, big hat on the back of her chair, OG Doc Martens she's not been assed to lace up all the way. She does have long nails, but I’m pretty sure they’re fakes. There’s a tiny glass on the table in front of her, and it’s empty; can she keep it down?
She leans back to air-kiss Dominique, real old-school mwah-mwah lovely-to-see-you-babe; introduces herself in French, and smiles when I stutter my way through my je m’appelles and have to say in English, “but everyone except my mum calls me Tish.”
“Tish. My pleasure. So, why has Dominique brought you to see another old lady?”
Dominique glances at me — permission granted — and I explain there’s something I’m not getting from her and she thought hearing it in another voice would be good for me.
“I’ve lived a very boring life, my dear. Dominique has been around the world three times and left a trail of nonsense in her wake, what could I —“
“It’s the way you tell it,” says Dominique, rolling her eyes. “And of the two of us, who’s been on television?”
It’s Clarimonde’s turn to roll her eyes, and she does it with a little sniff that’s much more my idea of “elder vampire.”
“I was immortalised without my permission,” says Clarimonde. “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you, Tish; they tell you that you’ll live forever, they neglect to mention ‘as a petty pretty monster who leads innocent young men around by their dicks and away from God’. It could be worse; look what happened to poor Louis and his confessional. How many books of revision to his life story are there, now?”
“For real? The guy from —“
“Yes. The first at least is a true story. There’s a grain of truth at the bottom of all the stories. For instance; mine is truly the world’s oldest profession. I liked being called a ‘courtesan’, I wasn’t keen on ‘moll’, ‘whore’ has always been an insult…”
“What do you think of ‘sex worker’?” It’s out of my mouth before I know what I’m saying. Go for woke, I guess.
“Matter of fact, boring — but honest, which has its charms.” She smiles. “But — to stay on topic, because Dominique is making the face,” and she is, “let me forestall the inevitable question. Him too, and he was a piece of work.”
“The thing Clarimonde does so well,” Dominique explains from her end of the sofa, “is talk about men.”
“About a specific class of people,” says Clarimonde, and her pout looks like she wants to poke her tongue out of it. “Mostly men, who did awful things, frequently to women, and who happened to be like us. I’ve collected vampire stories ever since I was in one, and for the longest time they all had something in common. Take Dracula. Born in the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth, he re-emerges with a grand plan; he’ll move himself to what he’s been told is the greatest city on Earth and he’ll re-invent himself as a modern monster. What does he do when he gets there? Obsess over the first girl he gets his teeth into, and stalk his solicitor’s wife to punish the man for escaping, or whatever mad reason he had. Not just a monster but a failure. Why do you think that happens?”
“He’s got really poor impulse control?”
“And you said she didn’t get it.” Clarimonde laughs behind her hand, and for a second I can see her in costume-drama gear, peeking over a fan. “He’d been around too long. Once he’d been an empire-builder, and he remembered being that, but — did he really remember? Can the mind hold on to what it was five hundred years ago? Four hundred? When we cheat ourselves and say we were better people as little girls, from only ten or twenty years away?”
“I get it,” I say, practically talking over her. “I think. You’re saying he was trying to be who he thought he was, what history said he was. But really, he was… just a vampire.”
“And what a piece of work is a vampire?” she purrs, declaiming at her little glass. “Just a being who thirsts. A paragon of animals. Over time, we forget what else we were. Dominique brought you to me because I’m old. Because there are so few older. I’m a simple girl at heart; I take money and a little blood from people who have both to spare. It’s a simple rule, and it’s not a big plan, and it’s not much to hold on to.
“I keep my memories in stories. I don’t know if I’ve always looked this way, or if I saw that girl pretending to be me and made myself like her. Do you know Louis went back to his maker in the end? After everything he told, everything in that book, he went back on bended knee because he’d started to believe what was made up about him afterwards. He went back to a man he’d tried to kill and he thought he was in love. But he’s still alive, and he’s doing no harm to anyone but himself. And maybe one day I’ll wake up with a rosary in my hand and a pretty boy in my bed and I’ll hope to God he paid for it. That’s what happens when we live too long, Tish. We start believing what they say about us.”
Masterpost: A Sense of Fatal Allegiance
Jan. 13th, 2020 09:34 amA Sense of Fatal Allegiance is a bastard-ass long series of songfic crossovers which I started writing around Christmas of 2017, when I'd just gotten into Life Is Strange and it had torn my heart out.
Before The Storm's second episode was almost pitch-perfect and spoke directly to elements of one's own life; its third was a total fucking trainwreck, and between that and Farewell I went back and watched the Eurogamer playthrough of the original game, which I still haven't finished because it makes me bawl my bloody eyes out and I suck at the stealth bits.
Anyway, while I was processing all these feelings there was a chance moment at which Rachel talked about "watching the sun go down on Santa Monica Pier" and I went "hmm", because I've played Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines a few times over the years and spent a lot of time in video game Santa Monica as a result. And I'd already statted up Rachel, Max and Chloe as Mage: the Awakening characters, I think because reducing them down to their archetypes helped me get a handle on why I was so affected by them.
And that remark caught me, and I had a couple of weeks off work, and the chapters just kept coming. Gradually, it turned into a low-key, medium-slow-burn story about masters and servants - or rather, domitors and regnants, or vampires and ghouls. A series of relationships, mostly F/F, which were characterised by a distinct inequality in power and the dubcon elements that come along with vampire blood addiction and various kinds of vampire mind-whammy.
The original story was called Prisoners Of Our Own Device and I kept going with it until the day job put me on a retainer that was supposed to be for two months and turned into five. Strangely enough, cranking out six thousand words a week on three or four different topics left me disinclined to write more in my spare time. I'd also run into some problems with my planned direction for the material: it was going to be something a bit more rooted in the broader World of Darkness, and a bit more of a mirror of what happened in Life Is Strange's first season, and it was going to put Rachel in the fridge, and - basically, it wasn't going to work.
The abortive attempts at making it work became Fall Guys Tumble On The Cutting-Room Floor, because I don't exactly hate any of the material I wrote. It's all... reasonably well executed. Just poorly conceived.
After another month or so I started out again, leaving the cliffhanger ending of Prisoners hanging and starting a new story of similar length - like episode two of a BBC serial or the second series of a traditional British Brevity telly show. Phony People, Come To Prey weaves those relationships I'd made my priority into a different kind of story - a political thriller/police procedural/underworld drama kind of deal which is influenced by and influences the relationships but isn't directly instigated by them. It's also an attempt for me to feel my way through what the new tabletop edition of Vampire: the Masquerade is trying to do, returning to this kind of intimate street-level storytelling that doesn't allow you to forget that your characters are vampires and do vampirism. They drink blood, they cultivate prey to get the kind of blood they want, and they're only not hungry when they kill.
The rest of the fic is roughly outlined, in that I know what the remaining works are going to be about and I've worked out which songs and lyrics are going to form the chapter structures.
Now He Is The Prince of Darkness will also see us getting to know a few of my Vampire OCs, since people seem interested in them and their stories are compatible with VTMB's setting. I'm not ruling off a spinoff story (On Such A Winter's Day) which will dig into their backstories a little more. It's not as if I have a two hundred year soap opera about these characters sketched out in my goddamn memory or anything.
(Talking of spinoffs, I also have an outline for Faces Come Out Of The Rain which will take us back to Arcadia Bay, to see what Max has been up to in this heavily divergent timeline, and to see how even a couple of Kindred can totally change the course of a small town's history. I don't mind saying that it'll explore some ships I sort of ship but didn't originally think I'd ever end up writing.)
And The Rainbow Rises Here - the thrilling conclusion - will focus on a genuine, dangerous, absolute antagonist, and force the characters to reconsider their divided loyalties and finally make a choice about where their allegiances lie. It'll also introduce another element to the crossover; something that thematically fits (because Dontnod clearly went through White Wolf's bins when they made it) and which riffs off the most underdeveloped this-was-cut-for-a-reason Plus Patch content Bloodlines has to offer.
It's all taking a bit longer than I'd anticipated, because I had a lot of feelings to work through regarding VtM and its owners and fans, but I do like the fic and I have every intention of finishing it. Maybe this year. It's been twenty years since I started VtMing and that's a good point to wrap things up with.
Before The Storm's second episode was almost pitch-perfect and spoke directly to elements of one's own life; its third was a total fucking trainwreck, and between that and Farewell I went back and watched the Eurogamer playthrough of the original game, which I still haven't finished because it makes me bawl my bloody eyes out and I suck at the stealth bits.
Anyway, while I was processing all these feelings there was a chance moment at which Rachel talked about "watching the sun go down on Santa Monica Pier" and I went "hmm", because I've played Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines a few times over the years and spent a lot of time in video game Santa Monica as a result. And I'd already statted up Rachel, Max and Chloe as Mage: the Awakening characters, I think because reducing them down to their archetypes helped me get a handle on why I was so affected by them.
And that remark caught me, and I had a couple of weeks off work, and the chapters just kept coming. Gradually, it turned into a low-key, medium-slow-burn story about masters and servants - or rather, domitors and regnants, or vampires and ghouls. A series of relationships, mostly F/F, which were characterised by a distinct inequality in power and the dubcon elements that come along with vampire blood addiction and various kinds of vampire mind-whammy.
The original story was called Prisoners Of Our Own Device and I kept going with it until the day job put me on a retainer that was supposed to be for two months and turned into five. Strangely enough, cranking out six thousand words a week on three or four different topics left me disinclined to write more in my spare time. I'd also run into some problems with my planned direction for the material: it was going to be something a bit more rooted in the broader World of Darkness, and a bit more of a mirror of what happened in Life Is Strange's first season, and it was going to put Rachel in the fridge, and - basically, it wasn't going to work.
The abortive attempts at making it work became Fall Guys Tumble On The Cutting-Room Floor, because I don't exactly hate any of the material I wrote. It's all... reasonably well executed. Just poorly conceived.
After another month or so I started out again, leaving the cliffhanger ending of Prisoners hanging and starting a new story of similar length - like episode two of a BBC serial or the second series of a traditional British Brevity telly show. Phony People, Come To Prey weaves those relationships I'd made my priority into a different kind of story - a political thriller/police procedural/underworld drama kind of deal which is influenced by and influences the relationships but isn't directly instigated by them. It's also an attempt for me to feel my way through what the new tabletop edition of Vampire: the Masquerade is trying to do, returning to this kind of intimate street-level storytelling that doesn't allow you to forget that your characters are vampires and do vampirism. They drink blood, they cultivate prey to get the kind of blood they want, and they're only not hungry when they kill.
The rest of the fic is roughly outlined, in that I know what the remaining works are going to be about and I've worked out which songs and lyrics are going to form the chapter structures.
Now He Is The Prince of Darkness will also see us getting to know a few of my Vampire OCs, since people seem interested in them and their stories are compatible with VTMB's setting. I'm not ruling off a spinoff story (On Such A Winter's Day) which will dig into their backstories a little more. It's not as if I have a two hundred year soap opera about these characters sketched out in my goddamn memory or anything.
(Talking of spinoffs, I also have an outline for Faces Come Out Of The Rain which will take us back to Arcadia Bay, to see what Max has been up to in this heavily divergent timeline, and to see how even a couple of Kindred can totally change the course of a small town's history. I don't mind saying that it'll explore some ships I sort of ship but didn't originally think I'd ever end up writing.)
And The Rainbow Rises Here - the thrilling conclusion - will focus on a genuine, dangerous, absolute antagonist, and force the characters to reconsider their divided loyalties and finally make a choice about where their allegiances lie. It'll also introduce another element to the crossover; something that thematically fits (because Dontnod clearly went through White Wolf's bins when they made it) and which riffs off the most underdeveloped this-was-cut-for-a-reason Plus Patch content Bloodlines has to offer.
It's all taking a bit longer than I'd anticipated, because I had a lot of feelings to work through regarding VtM and its owners and fans, but I do like the fic and I have every intention of finishing it. Maybe this year. It's been twenty years since I started VtMing and that's a good point to wrap things up with.
