pubs
When writing, the worst thing you can do is break flow. The same goes, really, for any creative process. One word leads to the next. Ideas follow only for the momentum. They materialize because they must. If you blank out on a word or can’t solve a problem right away, make a note and keep going. Don’t miss the one… beat. If you can’t find the phrasing you want, use any phrasing. Skip it. If you can’t boil down a thought, don’t. Just go. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, all the better. Just go. These are all just details. They’re editing. Don’t confuse writing with editing. They’re two different mind states, that cancel each other out. They aren’t compatible, and you can’t do both at once. There will be a time for editing. That time is later. Always later.
Stasis is death. Even a short pause is danerous. Even a small heart attack can be enough to kill.
All creation consists of two steps: dumping and arranging. Each is a skill that can carry a work on its own, and somewhat hide the deficiencies of the other. Neither should have to, of course — but that’s how things go, sometimes. (Now I just skipped back a phrase to fix a word and can’t remember what I was saying. What was I saying? Now I just skipped back to add parentheses. Now I’m even more lost.) Oh, right.
In film, there’s the filming (and all that consists of), and there is editing. There is composition, and there is arranement. There is writing and there is editing. You throw down all you’ve got, recklessly; then you make some sense of it all. You pretend that you knew what you were doing; that there’s a real order to all of this nonsense.
Some would insist on a third step: that of preparation. These are the people who think you can study for an SAT. Outside some vague templates, you can’t prepare if you don’t know where you’re going — and in a creative process you never know where you’re going because the act of outputting in itself leads you in directions you would never have been clever enough to have anticipated; more organic directions than you ever could have calculated. You can only prepare when you know what you face — which makes it a subsect of editing. Arrangement, preparation: they are one in the same. They bring lucicity to the irrational.
I need a schedule. I had one, once. And it kind of worked.
My mind is most prone to make interesting mistakes when I have warmed up my consciousness for a dozen hours or more. The house is most prone to quiet when no one is awake. I sleep best when I have accomplished something. It is the relief of excretiion. Perhaps from midnight to four.
This counts as today’s. Tomorrow, I pick up something I have left sitting for three days. And I finish it.
This is some of the best advice for writing I’ve received in awhile.
Thanks.
I agree!
And as for preparation — it can be useful, but you need something to *work* with first. If you try to prepare everything ahead of time, you’ll either end up in a creative flow anyway, or you’ll end up with noncreative crap (Like something that was made by committee).
But once you’ve done some flowing and some editing and have some good stuff to work with, at some point you have to step back and say “ok… so what *do* I want to do with all this?” The preparation almost seems to come near the *end* of something rather than the beginning…
does that even make sense? hrm..
I was going to post later down for the purpose of losing the comment in a larger pile of entries (since my comment is on something unrelated and outdated), but then I read this post and realized it’s exactly why I’m up so late. Can’t let the symmetry go.
I was cruising through the InsertCredit forum collecting links about the ea_spouse story and I found your post about Konami and tea. After reading through the whole thread my predominant thought was that I find it oddly amusing that I don’t think this is the first time I’ve had the distinct urge to beat the shit out of someone on your behalf at three AM. Anyway, sentiment there.
I’m in a tea community,. It’s pretty good, but there is a distinct anti-bag bias there. I am mailing nine boxes of discontinued Sunburst-C Celestial Seasonings to one of the people in the community, though, because she’s been drinking it for fifteen years or something but CS discontinued it and I knew our local Whole Foods still had some. So all is not lost. I drink way too much tea for it all to be loose-leaf. That, or maybe I’m lazy. We currently have a crock pot full of spiced cider. It’s a lot. Which is nice, too.
Loose tea isn’t that much more of a bother on the preparation end (especially if you’re making a whole pot). The main issue is obtaining the stuff. However you get it, it usually takes a special visit. It is easier just to pick up some bags while you’re at the market, and hold onto the loose leaves for special occasions.
And well, heck. Bagged teas just tend to come in so many more flavors. I guess the key there is “flavor”: the difference between a gimmick and fine distinctions. I don’t care, though. Vanilla? Yum!
I guess it’s been long enough on the Konami thing. The deal was, I made a comment on a message board about Rumble Roses. Although the game hadn’t been released at that time, the contents of the comment were public knowledge. I mean, you could find the information anywhere. I knew I had signed an NDA, so I knew what not to say. I was even purposefully vague in the post, saying I couldn’t really talk about about the game until after it was released. But hell, I’d played the game at E3. It was no secret that it existed, or that it was scheduled for a fall release.
My dumb mistake, in retrospect, was that I made the comment while I was at work. It hadn’t occurred to me that everything I did was being watched. But, well. Someone popped up from the woodwork and began to act like I’d just done something horrible. I was perplexed.
The weird thing was — he not only fired me on the spot, but threatened to set the company’s legal team on me if I didn’t delete the post. Which… again, had nothing new or interesting in it.
I suspect that he was just waiting for an excuse to fire me, because I didn’t fit into the bureaucracy as well as some might have liked. Maybe I attracted too much attention, and just made myself a target. I don’t know. At any rate, if you look for something you generally find it.
In a sense I’m relieved that I didn’t have to put up with a situation like that any longer than I did (which wasn’t long). It’s a shame, though. There was a lot that I could have helped with, given the time. Most of my bug submissions were corrections of others’ — particularly those involving writing, which was generally corrected from a grade school to an eighth-grade level before I got to it. And there were some cool people there. I had some of the more colorful discussions I’ve had, with some of my co-workers.
However: it’s their loss. Outside of my observations, all I got out of it was a paycheck. And… hypothetically, there are other places to get those. Or so I hear.
It does!
It’s true!
People are screaming outside my window, and blowing into empty beer bottles.
Or. Not? Hell. There are some pretty fruity loose-leaf teas out there.
Still. There’s a place for pedantry. And that’s not in my teapot.
Am I supposed to read something into this, or is this just another winking non-sequiter reply?
Generally, because loose leaf teas can be mixed by the smaller shops themselves, I tend to find that one can actually find more flavors among the loose-leafs than the bagged teas. The problem is you need a nice tea-exclusive shop, like Tealuxe (in Boston) or Savoure (in Eugene). Savoure in particular had the most amazing teas. At that place especially I could understand becoming a tea snob. At the same time, though, complex flavors like that, and ones so delicate that you have to sit there for three minutes each sip to soak in a full appreciation, would almost be wasted on day-to-day tea-drinking. So I think bags are good for that. I don’t react to caffeine favorably, so I tend to prefer herbals and fruit teas, for which freshness is particularly a big issue, and those fare better in foil packets and bags than in tins. I do have an amazing ginger peach tea from Savoure, though, and an “anise melange”, a French fruit and anise tea. That in addition to the bag of “Wedding Imperial” we picked up when we visited Smeagol — a chocolate and caramel tea that’s stronger than coffee, it makes most other teas I’ve had taste like barely tinted water.
I’m trying to convince Lan that we need to move to Eugene. =P Garage Games is up there, along with Pipeworks and a Dynamix splinter called Lunar Logic, which does mostly web apps and database programming, but has more ex-Dynamix folk than any of the other companies, all working on their own game endeavors.
The testing situation in the industry is currently shit. It’s actually better than it was, but it really riled me to see that you’d gotten caught in one of the beurocratic spokes. Part of it may have been that your asshat boss was intimidated by you and was looking for a reason to fire you, but the heat has been on lately about employees posting in blogs or message boards about company information ( http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65912,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 ). It’s almost been a ‘fad’ to come down on employees for the most trivial blog posting, never mind that you get a double-edged badness effect where the company doing the firing takes a public karma hit for it AND if anything the bloggers’ comments nine and three quarters times out of ten are going to be at worst harmless and at most beneficial from a guerilla marketing standpoint. If they were smart AT ALL you would have at most gotten a warning for it, but many companies these days are getting too big to be smart. Anyway, I am outraged that some ignorant fuck was smug and fired you, for your behalf, and I am outraged that the industry can still be so stupid.
It is entirely their loss, and it makes me wonder how many huge resources in the game industry are getting turned back at the QA doors because of draconian management practices (and the overall reeking lesion that is QA in the industry today). The problems facing QA departments, both because of incompetence due to hiring processes in turn due to a perception that QA should be “unskilled” labor, present a quagmire that I have no idea how to begin to fix. Interestingly, Lan has some ideas. I’ve been trying to get him to channel them into a document for me.
At any rate, we will move to Eugene and gather talent and create an independent game studio. And then we will TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Only with good QA managers.
Where’s Eugene?
It’s true. Most of the labor was… rather unskilled. The only people who really knew what they were doing were in the higher levels, and even then that was not always true. In some cases, they just… had more authority. Which caused me to ask a bunch of questions that, in retrospect, they perhaps resented. One guy in particular (the one who eventually fired me) just walked away whenever I began to ask for clarification. Another one gave me a strict talking-to whenever I made any suggestions. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I might have been shaking up something that had become comfortable. I wonder how the competent people get on. At least one person above me reads Insert Credit regularly, and knew exactly who I was. He was the reason I got hired initially. I could have conversations with him about E.B. White’s preferences in punctuation.
Anise melange!
I found some salted liquorice Swedish fish in an unusual-foods store a few blocks up on, I believe, Polk. They scared away everyone else I offered them to.
Eugene is in central Oregon — either four or six hours north of the OR/CA border. Really pretty place — big trees Willamette river. Apparently completely polarized — 50% crazy neocon, 50% diehard hippies. As one of them put it, if you don’t have a cause, something is wrong with you. They riot about things all the time, apparently. You wouldn’t be able to tell from the look of the place, though — it feels very peaceful. But then I’ve been either in Los Angeles or in Albany for the past few years. =P A “riot” in Eugene is a bunch of people with signs. When USC imported the Primal Scream from Cornell, someone set a couch on fire and put it out the window if a three story building. Different places, different definitions.
The more I find out the more I figure that the game industry is very broken right now.
Salted liquorice — Lan could tell you more about that. He brought some back from Sweden and gave one to Peter. I don’t think he’s forgiven him since. He spit it across the room, hitting a wall that was over fifteen feet away. The way that Lan describes the taste, I think I’d be scared too.
Is that one of those strange Northwestern logging communities?
Ho ho! Yes, it is an… acquired taste. The salt brings out the flavor, though! It’s very old-fashioned.
I think so. The conservatives are left over from the bigger logging days (and some logging is still done, but it’s done with environmentalists farming the trees IIRC) and the rest are there because pot is legal. =P They have a TV station called “CannabisTV”, and the theme for the morning show is “Wake and Bake”. You practically get high just watching it.
That’s what I’ve heard, about the licqorice. I like licqorice in general, but the bit about it becoming a high velocity projectile when tasted has made me a little wary. I guess the initial flavor is… shocking? =)
I can see someone describing the flavor as something that will “put hair on your chest”. It sure feels like it must have some side effect.
If you already like black liquorice, it shouldn’t be a big problem. All the salt does is make it richer. Make the sweetness harder to find. If you don’t know what you’re getting into, though, it could be… surprising, yes.
I now consider it “the good stuff”.
That sounds even more obnoxious than normal television.
THE ADERACK IS A MYSTERIOUS PLACE