Alexandra Erin

One more reason I’m glad I’ve stayed the hell out of traditional publishing.

Jeph Jacques (whose name Ariella tells me I’ve been saying wrong for years; apparently, it’s pronounced “Jeau Smythe”) of Questionable Content has written a blog post which echoes much of what I feel about independent artistry on the internet, a subject I haven’t said as much about lately as I once did.

(By the way, I know Pages Unbound is still screwed up. I’m going to be looking at that next, but maybe the lesson here is that I’m not meant to run anything more complicated than a blog. Sigh.)

He’s looking at it through the prism of being a cartoonist, of course, but most of this stuff crosses media and genre boundaries.

He’s responding to a blog post by Neil Swaab, a Serious Cartoonist that digresses from bemoaning the death of printed alternative comics to point out what’s wrong with the webcomics model. (See my previous post about Andrew Wyeth for my prescient thoughts on this.) Jeph’s got a great rebuttal to the contention that the average successful webcartoonist is simply a t-shirt designer using a comic to advertise their wares:

“Saying webcartoonists are t-shirt hucksters is like saying Charles Schultz was an insurance salesman because Snoopy is on the Met Life blimp.”

Actually, though, that’s not my favorite quote from the post… that position is reserved for another one.

Here it is:

“I don’t know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I’m sure glad I don’t live there! Money is Money!”

That right there about sums it up. When self-produced works fail to make any money, Serious Practitioners of the Art dismiss it as a hobby. “It’s a sad thing, but we have no concrete measure of success except money… and you don’t have any so HAHAHAHAHA.” When somebody finds an innovative way to make their art pay so they can continue to produce it, it becomes a matter of “BUT… BUT… THAT DOESN’T COUNT!”

Jeph identifies the sentiment as sour grapes. I’m not quite sure I’d agree. The story it puts me in mind of is not the one about Aesop’s fox but the one about the Emperor and his snazzy new duds.

I’ve said before that I think the reason people who are working their way up the ladder of success through traditional publication are the ones who react with the most hostility to my mere existence is because the idea that my success is valid diminishes their specialness at having been chosen by editors and publishers, and because the fact that I don’t have to compromise my work in the same way they do makes them feel uncomfortable with the compromises they’ve made.

I’ll confess to not knowing much about the world of syndicated comic strips, but I’ve never once read an insider’s account that said “THE SYSTEM IS AWESOME! IT EXISTS TO BENEFIT ME! I FEEL LIKE I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD! EVERY WEEK I SEND OFF MY STRIPS AND THE EDITOR CALLS ME UP AND SAYS I’M CONCERNED THAT THESE DON’T REFLECT YOUR ACTUAL INTENTION ENOUGH AND WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT YOU SHOULD FEEL FREE TO CUT LOOSE AS MUCH AS YOU WANT!”, so I’m going to assume that it’s similar in some regards to the world of book publishing.

But people really don’t need to worry about the idea that hordes of independents and amateurs are going to diminish their specialness. One point Jeph keeps returning to is that the key to financial success for a webcomic is audience, and this is true. If your comic’s audience is large enough, you will be able to make a living for it. If not… well, you might be able to recoup your costs or have money for ice cream every weekend, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

But I think that’s probably another side of what scares people. There’s no such thing as an amateur syndicated cartoonist. Even if you’re living in an airless garret or your rent’s being paid by your SO or you’re working two other jobs on top of it… when you get picked up by a syndicate you’ve made it. You have earned your Merit Badge. You might spend the rest of your life chasing the brass ring and never catching hold of it but you can introduce yourself at parties as a cartoonist, and when somebody asks “Where might I have seen you work?” you can tell them.

The self-publishing gig doesn’t have anything like that. You can introduce yourself as a cartoonist, and when you get asked where people can read your work, you tell them “the web”. And they go, “Oh.” Because their twelve-year-old kid has a strip on comickeenesispotspace.blag and they’re not sure how yours is different, and in your soul of souls neither are you because nobody has told you that you’ve made it.

And the bitch of it is, I can understand where they’re coming from. When I tell somebody that I’m a writer, and they ask me, “What have you written?”, I know they’re expecting to be told the name of a book or a magazine that I’m published in or something like that, and I know that some of them are going to be less impressed when I explain what it is I do than they were prepared to be when they thought I was going to tell them about my book deal.

But, to quote the great philosopher Epictetus, “I don’t know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I’m sure glad I don’t live there!” Most people with book deals are living in garrets and working two jobs so their spouses can support them. Trufax, as they say dans la belle internet. It takes an average of ten years for a successful novelist to make a living at their craft, and most novelists aren’t successful. So what I’m doing–what I’ve done–is damned impressive by any measure.

Jeph Jacques writes one of two comics for which I start refreshing spasmodically every weekday-preceding night at around 11:00 p.m. He’s successful by any meaningful measure of the word. As far as I can tell from his newsposts and twitterings, most of the t-shirts in his shop are there because somebody told him they would totally pay him money if he made it available to them.

Ignoring that wouldn’t make him a better artist… just a poorer one. It’s funny to me that Mr. Swaab can write a blog post that concludes by saying whatever successful business model web artists come up with will be the future when he would apparently advise artists to turn down an opportunity like that.

Yesterday I received Open Grave, the 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons supplement concerning undead. I haven’t spent much time with it yet but my first impression of it is very favorable, and it will be a huge aid to me in preparing my first 4E campaign.

It also reminded me that I’ve been meaning to post reviews of the 4th Edition sourcebooks. I’ll get to OG after I’ve examined it more fully. For now, I’ll do the book that my thoughts are the best-organized about and that I have the most to say about, good and bad:

Manual of the Planes

This is the sourcebook of the new edition that I was the least interested in, as the nitty-gritty details of the planes in D&D are usually inextricably bound up in with the default mythology/theology and I prefer to come up with my own of those. However, I knew this book would contain new monsters, rituals, etc., that I might want to incorporate into my games, so when I had a good coupon for Borders I went and bought it.

It’s hard to say if it was worth it or not. Although I had no intention of using the default D&D cosmology, I find some of the concepts presented interesting enough to adopt, but…

Gah.

I was a little peeved to find that Draconomicon was being released as a series of books and that the first one was going to cover the chromatic dragons when they were the only dragons presented in the first line of core rulebooks, but I ended up appreciating the finished product.

Having read Manual of the Planes, I can see even more strongly why this divided approach was good.

For those who are familiar with previous editions and haven’t read up on the 4th Edition, this book might be confusing. The cosmology worked up for previous editions has been set aside, with the number of planes simplified… somewhat. What exactly constitutes a “plane” is a little bit fuzzy.

There is the World (what was formerly referred to as the “prime material plane”), and then there are four other worlds/planes jutting out from it: the Astral Sea, the Elemental Chaos, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell.

The Astral Sea, which is the old astral plane and the outer planes smushed together, conceptualized as outer space with the various celestial realms hanging in it like islands or planetoids. Different, but not an uninteresting idea. The assorted elemental planes are now the Elemental Chaos, a realm of primordial creation and destruction. Instead of being instantly fucked because you entered into a realm made entirely out of fire or water without the right protective magic, it’s now a place you can traverse in the normal fashion… as long as a mountain doesn’t explode on you or something. I think it’s much more interesting, and the idea that the elements all coexist among each other makes for some more interesting possibilities, which the 4th edition has embraced in its treatment of elemental monsters (more on this later).

The Nine Hells of the devils are found within a planet in the Astral Sea, and the Abyss of the demons is a corrupted area of the Elemental Chaos. They’re referred to as “planes” (as are the individual hells and the layers of the abyss), existing within the larger planes.

The two remaining greater worlds/planes are the Feywild and the Shadowfell, which are conceived of as being mirrors of the physical world, one bursting over with life and magic and the other tainted with darkness and death. The geography of these realms are a funhouse mirror of the “real” world, and there are places where natural crossings occur. They allow for fairy tale or horror flavored digressions in a campaign, and provide a setting if you want to run an entire campaign that way.

Really, each of the four major realms to me represents a major step forward in making planar adventures really interesting in a way that goes beyond portal chases. You can sail the Astral Sea, negotiate the Elemental Chaos, step in and out of the Feywild, and try to escape the Shadowfell…

So, yeah. Grade A job on designing the world cosmology. It’s been changed from a concern of high level wizards and clerics to something that any group of adventurers can contend with.

But simply put, there is not enough information about any of the four major realms or the subrealms belonging to the devils and demons to be truly satisfying and make it worth the price of admission.

Each of these realms was covered at a glance in the core books. Each of these areas receives expanded coverage in the Manual, building on the information that could be gleaned from previous mentions and generally demonstrating the fertile and rich potential of them, but that’s pretty much it.

They show the potential.

If you’re going to be setting a campaign in the Feywild or the Astral Sea, you’re going to be making a lot of it up yourself. And I stress that I don’t see this as a burden, but I also don’t see it as something worth paying money for the privilege of. If the descriptions I’ve written above… or the ones present in the core rulebooks… tickle your fancy, you could just take them and run with them almost as easily without this book.

Sure, in defining and designing the specifics you’d end up doing 99% of the work yourself… but with this book, you’d still be doing like 90%.

The problem is that a book this size (a relatively slender 160 pages) can’t hope to give enough coverage of four completely different worlds and their major subrealms. Instead, it gives you their “fluff” (broadly-painted flavor text) and a few examples of gameable material for each.

If the Monster Manual contained a few example monsters and a light discourse on the principles of monster design and some flavor text describing the various sorts of monsters there might be stats for, who would buy it?

As a concrete example of its shortcomings: the section on the Elemental Chaos describes at a glance the perils of traversing an area made up of elements and chaos, and then has a couple of random elemental hazards thrown in as examples of the sorts of things parties could experience (a blast of elemental steam and a chaos storm).

Okay, well, examples are nice… and the chaos storm at least serves as a fairly iconic example of what the Elemental Chaos is all about… but why not something like the catalogue of traps and hazards that came with the Dungeon Master’s Guide?

Sure, I can make up a couple dozen of own… or put an elemental flavor on the ones from the Guide… but if I’m going to do that, coming up with 22 such hazards isn’t much different than coming up with 24 of them. So why buy a book that has exactly 2 hazards fully statted out in it in it?

One area I was very hopeful about was the bestiary. Being that the Feywild and the Elemental Chaos comprised somewhere between 33% and 50% of the book’s focus (depending on how you count the demon/devil subrealms), I was looking forward to getting more fey and more elemental creatures to add to my repertoire.

Big disappointment there.

The Monster Manual has stats for two types of elemental warriors called archons: fire and ice. It mentions that many, many other types exist in the Elemental Chaos. How many of these many, many types are defined in this book? One. The air archon. No earth archon. No water archon. No steam, dirt, mud, pungent, or boom archon.

The Monster Manual also demonstrated the potential of your basic “elemental” monster when you allow that they may contain combined but unmixed elements (fire + air equals a monster using both fire and air)… it did so at the expense of including the four “basic” elementals or any of the traditional D&D para-elementals.

So, the door was wide open for Planes here. Continue with more varieties of combination elementals? Go back to basics? Throw up some para-elementals? Or how about D, all of the above?

I’m sorry, the answer was E. There are no new elementals in this book.

There’s only one new fey and one new denizen of the Shadowfell… though that one, the Keeper, is kind of cool. Their flavor text ties them to a specific setting within the default cosmology, but they’d be easy to fit in any setting that requires ooky creepy otherworldly caretakers.

I think a book covering the Feywild and describing the society and culture of Eladrin and Gnomes in their native environment might have included stats for new varieties of these, as well as some other examples of wee folk and fair folk and less than fair folk. How about some pucks or bogeys or something? But, no joy.

The bulk of the bestiary is given over to new devils, demons, and such, which would make sense if this were some iteration of The Book of Vile Darkness or something.

And this brings me to my ultimate point: they should have done this as multiple books. Maybe one for each realm, or maybe combine some and do three: one for the Feywild and Shadowfell, and either one for the Astral Sea including the Nine Hells and one for the Elemental Chaos including the Abyss, or one for the Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos and one for the Abyss and the Hells.

Oh, I’ve got no doubt they’ll release more books that will expand on this stuff, but that just makes this book all the more superfluous. It’s kind of like those teaser booklets they put out prior to 4th Edition’s release.

None of this is to say that the book isn’t interesting, especially to me as a veteran of 2nd edition AD&D.

There’s a three paragraph section in the Shadowfell chapter mentioning “Domains Of Dread”, “places hidden behind thick walls of mist, places ruled by dark and deeply troubled beings bound to the plane by dreadful curses.” Hear that? If you want to port some old Ravenloft material over to 4th Edition, they’ve just told you where to stick it, so to speak. I’m guessing we’re eventually going to find out that the “Demiplane of Dread” is contained within the Shadowfell, in the same way that the Abyss is part of the Elemental Chaos and the Nine Hells is part of the Astral Sea.

On the subject of the Sea, there’s also a single stat block for a “spelljammer” vehicle as a means of accessing and traversing the it. Don’t tease me like that, Wizards… is this a shoehorned-in continuity nod for us 2E veterans, or is it a sign that one of the more interesting campaign settings from that era is going to be revived and folded into the new cosmology in a real fashion?

The player content is also decent: a handful of cool new paragon paths, a smattering of new magical items, and new rituals that focus on planes which are useful if you want to do a campaign where PCs are self-directed planar travelers and aren’t simply straying into strange new realms.

So, really, the designers of 4th Edition have succeeded in impressing me and made me interested in future products involving Des Plaines, but there is not one person I would recommend this book to as being essential. Not one. Buy it out of a sense of completism or brand loyalty, not because it’s the essential ingredient needed for your game.

Thought for the day: if ever I feel like I’ve lost my drive to succeed or my way or my sense of purpose or who I am and what I’m doing in the world, it’s a sure sign that I haven’t been listening to enough showtunes.

Just to let everybody know: Twitter’s “@reply” feature is something I frequently forget exists, so if I don’t answer people’s response tweets, it’s not that I’m ignoring them so much as the entire feature.

But there were a bunch in this past week about problems with the page layout on Mac and I’m not sure if those problems were resolved or not. So. Mac users, any text being eaten or run off the edges on the story pages?

Other tweets addressed the forum, such as getting different software and/or setting up a free board somewhere and letting someone else moderate it. Not bad ideas, but at this point I just don’t want to mess around with it. I could set up an independent board and then appoint moderators, but the buck would still stop with me.

Story time:

Years ago, I hosted a MUD of sorts, and I had a few mods/GMs appointed… only people I trusted and only people who knew me well enough that they could pretty much decide what I would do in a given situation… and rule #1 was that they had full authority to act on their own without consulting me and that I would not overrule their decisions. This was because I was also the game’s only designer and I also liked playing it every once in a while and I didn’t want to have every action the mods took being brought to me like I was some court of appeals.

And every action was still brought to me like I was some court of appeals. I just had to know about the Horrible And Shocking Abuses by these Power Mad Dictators and since they were committing their crimes in my name it was my responsibility to blah blah blah blah blah.

So, as far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as putting my name on something as the official forum, in other words, and then keeping it a hands-off affair. As long as there is some channel of communication open to me, people would bring their grievances to me. If the mods were strict, I’d hear about that. If there was a laissez-faire atmosphere and as a result there was a lot of heated arguments and/or off-topic silliness, I’d hear about that. If there was a moderate and balanced approach, I’d hear about how strict they are and how they refuse to do anything.

If somebody else wants to be a forum moderator, I have no problem with them setting up a forum. I’ll even add them to a links page or whatever, as long as they’re not also serving up kitten snuff porn or something. But I’ve got no time or interest in moderating a forum right now. phpBB appealed to me for the same reason that Windows does: when it works right, it’s easy. If it’s not going to consistently work right… well, I can’t really get by without an OS, but I can get by without a forum.

• Friday:
  • Void Dogs
  • Tales of MU
  • More Tales of MU
• Weekend:
  • Finish fixing up new page layout.
• Monday:
  • Void Dogs
  • Tales of MU
  • More Tales of MU
• Tuesday:
  • Star Harbor Nights
  • Tales of MU
  • More Tales of MU
• Wednesday:
  • Void Dogs
  • Tales of MU Other Tales
• Thursday:
  • Star Harbor Nights
  • Tales of MU
  • More Tales of MU
• Friday:
  • Void Dogs
  • Tales of MU
  • More Tales of MU

Starting February 9th, I’ll be posting these Monday. I’m going to see how making Wednesday a lighter day with something a little different goes in preventing Thursday burnout.

Alexandra Erin’s Stories on Livejournal.

Apparently I can’t enable OpenID for discussions without allowing anonymous commenting, so I’m not going to be doing that… not so much out of a fear of anonymous commenters (I mean, a Livejournal account isn’t exactly an photo ID, is it?) but out of a dislike of having multiple people contributing to a discussion with their name as Anonymous. I could put up a rule against not using an ID, but enforcing it would be a suck of both time and energy. I’m going for low maintenance here.

I went ahead and put in entries for the chapters I posted yesterday, just to get the ball rolling.

Okay. After spending yesterday beating my head against the forum and not figuring out the CSS and HTML-Fu I needed to gracefully resolve the banner ads, I’ve simply removed the bottom bar entirely for the time being. That way it’s not cluttering up the view while I figure out what needs doing.

I’ve also come to a decision about comments. After interacting more with some of you on Livejournal in the past week… and looking back on Tales of MU’s early days as a Livejournal-based story… I’ve decided to give Livejournal a try as the Official ™ discussion area. I’m setting up a community for it right now.

So this community will also now serve as the master story feed. Yes, you’ll have to update your bookmarks and RSS whatsits. I’ll put an entry in the current master story feed pointing to it and telling people to update their stuff when the first entry goes up in the community. I’ll also add links on the story pages and put something here.

You’ll also have to either have a Livejournal account or an OpenID (I’m pretty sure LJ accepts those now) account to comment. Yes, that’s less convenient than the old comments, but again, I’m counting on that to cut down the noise a bit.

Benefits: threaded discussions (whee!), comment editing for people who have a paid account (whee!), no maintenance for me (whee!), ability to easily appoint other moderators if needed without having to worry about what else they get access to (whee!)… yeah. I think this is a good decision. There are a lot of readers following through their LJs already.

In other news, I’m catching up on my personal email a bit. The Laptop Incident resulted in having my mail accounts scattered across computes and partitions. If you emailed me at one of my pubilc addresses in the last week, I haven’t gotten to it yet but I’ll be doing that this weekend when I get my mail clients straightened out.

In my personal email, I received a very nice message from my father in response to my entry a while back about mortality. He shared his thoughts on Such Things, which was weirdly comforting. I also got a message from my younger sister, who told me that she’s started reading Tales of MU, which was weirdly a little less comforting. I’ll get over it, though. As I said long ago, it’s weird to think about one’s family reading one’s work, whether it’s “kitten snuff porn or the trilingual instruction booklet for a six speed blender”.

(If you’re reading this, Sister Of My Mine, don’t sweat it. Getting over caring who reads what I write or what they think of it is an important part of what I do on a daily basis.)

The forum is fucked.

It’s not the forum itself that’s causing this, it’s something with the server. I know this because I’ve installed a clean copy of the same software (newer version, even) in a different directory and it does the same thing: slooooooow with frequent timeouts. Error log is uninformative. Despite my best efforts, I keep getting distracted by it because I’m a compulsive problem solver.

That’s not to say I’m always good at solving problems… I used to be fairly good with computers to the point that I was troubleshooting them over the phone for a living, but I’ve fallen out of the habits and the frame of mind necessary for that. “Creative AE” is not the same person as “Technical AE”… I can’t go back to being the former without banishing the latter.

Anyways, as I said, the problem seems to be something server-related. The forum, along with my blog, is one of the few things left on my Dreamhost account. I left them there on the principle that if my story host ever went down I would have a channel open for communications… same reason Livejournal and Dreamhost both have their status pages hosted remotely.

But now I’m mirroring everything I put on my blog on my Livejournal, so the need to have two separate hosts, however cheap they might be, is kind of obviated.

So maybe if I move the forum over to my other host the problem will go away, right?

But here’s what I’m thinking…

This marks the second time my forum has randomly stopped working with no discernible cause.

(Yes, the forum problems do roughly overlap with when I started changing the layout, but changing CSS for a Wordpress blog shouldn’t affect the forum… and at the point that people started reporting the problem I’d only messed around with the MOARMU page, which isn’t on the same server.)

That’s two complete meltdowns. There have, of course, been other, lesser problems. And the last person to register and be approved before the Ice Age began is a goldfarming spammer. It took a while for the spammers to show up since the last total meltdown wiped out the old version of the forum, but now that one’s showed up, there will be others.

So here’s what I’m thinking: do I really want to do this? Do I want to spend more time now and in the future maintaining this thing? Even if tomorrow I wake up and it’s started working normally as mysteriously it quit, the fact will remain that it’s another drain on time and resources.

It’s not that I don’t like the forum. It’s got a great core of people who read the story and share their thoughts and opinions and theories and predictions. The signal-to-noise ratio’s been a lot higher than the comments on the story pages. But… I’m not a technical person. I’m not a community leader. I’m not a moderator. I have it within me to be any of those things, but there’s only so much room in my head, you know? The forum’s great to the extent that I can ignore it beyond reading the discussion threads and chiming in every once in a while.

I’m not making up my mind yet… just thinking “out loud”.

(Insert joke about the economy here.)

My performance was a little bit uneven compared to yesterday, but I brought in about ~6,000 words and I feel like I got a lot done even while the forum kept tempting me to poke at it with a stick. A difficult to solve problem can’t begin to distract like an impossible to solve one.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to reinstall phpBB (the forum software) at this point, an exercise that shouldn’t take long but which I have chosen to save for the weekend because if I do it tomorrow and something goes Horribly Wrong then I’ll have to choose between fixing it (at the cost of writing time) or ignoring it and having a dead forum. Even if I choose to ignore it, knowing that there’s something to be fixed would eat at me…

So, anyway, what this will mean is that the forum will have some downtime at some point on Saturday. It’s not getting a lot of casual use at the moment anyway, so I doubt anybody will mind.

Anyway. At this point I’ve made up my mind to get rid of the floating bar at the bottom of the page. Yes, yes. Rejoice. I do believe that if I left it there people would eventually get used to it and that it wouldn’t be a huge issue for new readers except for the fact that it screws up pagination when people scroll using page down/the arrow on the scrollbar. I could probably fix that with an iframe or something, but I’m not that committed. I wanted to see how much difference it would make to advertisers, as measured in dollars and cents, and the answer tentatively seems to be “about a buck a day”. It’s possible that would go up if the slot had a proven performance record over time, but since it does impact readability beyond “there’s less space”/”it just bugs me”, I don’t think it’s worth waiting to find out.