Musings

So yesterday I finally got to see the final chapter of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King.

All in all it was an excellent movie. The cinematography was incredible. I especially liked the way Peter Jackson combined the wide angle panning shots to give the viewer the impression of just how vast and alone the various people were in thier parts of the quest, yet wasn't afraid to jump "into" the action with handheld camera effects (best ones were as Frodo and Sam are climbing Mt Doom.) or close ups to personalize the enormatiy of what is happening, especially int he battle scenes.

I must say, having read the books 20 years ago and then trying and failing to reread them a few years ago, I liked the visual represenations Jackson brought to the screen. To me, Tolkien has always read like a biographer too wrapped up in his subject to fully comprehend the enormity of the happenings around them.

Most of the acting in the movie was wonderful, but there's always been two weak points on all three of the movies for me. Elijah Wood, mostly through no fault of his own, has a very weak character to work with in Frodo. And alot of that has to do with the very nature of the character. For me, the best acting he did was when he wasn't speaking at all, but let his eyes and body do the telling for him. Once he opened his mouth, Tolkien's rather banal words seemed to shatter part of the illusion Wood had created.

The second major complaint about acting is Gimli. Yes, once again the script didn't leave him much. But, as I read them, the dwarf character was never about comic relief. Yet that's how he kept coming across as. I know Ive read stories about how the 9 actors that composed the original Fellowship did a lot of off camera activities together, but that John Rhys Davies was the only one who didn't go for the tatooing, and I wonder if, in some small part, that exclusion reflected back on the screen performance he gave. Or it could just be that the screenwriters needed a "Mutt and Jeff" routine for the movies and since Orlando Bloom got to play the glamorous elf, they left the dwarf's best qualities in the mines.

Now, with all that said, I enjoyed the movie alot. We had a friend watch the kids and we went to the movies with another couple, the second such time in about six months. At this rate we might have a normal social life in 25 years or so!

Tomorrow I go back to work after 5 days off. I'd be lying if I said I have't once checked email since I've been at home. In fact, since I've ben home I've checked it on an average of 3-4 times a day. I can blame it because I'm "on call," and, in fact have been contacted twice about problems I have no control over, but the truth is, I like my job and want to know what kind of snake pit I'm going to be dropping into tomorrow. From the looks of things, I'll be slammed for at least a day, maybe two with 5 days of support requests. But I suspect what's really going to hammer me are the bug reports.

As part of my job I triage all bug reports. This means I decide what's a bug, what needs more information before it's passed to QA, and what's actually a support request in disguise. Since our bug reporting tool is active while a user is in-world, it's not uncommon for 30-40% of all bug reports to be actual support requests or abuse reports.

In either case, I should be very busy tomorrow.

Christmas Day:

Its funny, but I'm still coming to terms with Christmas.

I grew up jewish in a very christian area. So, to me, Christmas has always been the holiday where all your friends go off and do family things and you go and hang out at Tower Records.

Wehn I got married 12 years ago, I knew my wife had been raised catholic, however since neither of us were particularly religious, Christmas was more of a commerical holiday than anything else. Yes, there have been a few exceptions, like when my mother made christmas dinner for my wife, or the time her family was getting together in DC and we scraped up enough money to have her go out to be with them. But, for the ost part, it's still just been us, and later the kids.

This changed about 5 years ago. We started importing my wife's family to California one at a time. First it was her younger sister who lived with us for about 6 months, then found her own place. Next was her older sister who stayed almost 2 years. Also during that 2 years, my wife's mother finally retired from the Foriegn Service and two years ago she and my father-in-law moved into the condo they bought for their retirement (well one of them, but that's another story.)

So over the past 5 years ago or so, the family has been gathering for the holiday.

Last night my wife went over to her folks to goto midnight mass. This year I was spared the agony of her parents couch, so the boys and I stayed at home and are headed to my in-laws in a few hours.

I'm still not used to this whole extended family thing, but I'm starting to like it.

This is technically not my first attempt at a blog. The first I did was almost 5 years ago, but was strictly focused on the World Cup soccer tournament games in France. I say technically, because, while I wrote reviews of the games, I never did make the effort to actually post them to my website.

So where to begin?

How about the why? Several people in my life have suggested I write a blog. I'd like to think it's because they think it would be interesting reading, but I suspect it has more to do with me being very opinionated and they are hoping by writing it all down I might actually let them get a word in edgewise.

So, I thought I'd give a try.

The who part can be seen in my blog title: SWG Fo2K.

Which stands for Suburban White Geek, Father of 2 Kids and sums up a part of my indentity very well.

I've been married for 12 years, 6 months and 16 days. My wife and I have two sons, both in grade school. live in the SF Bay Area, in the largest city no one has ever heard of, Fremont. And I like it that way.

Fremont is actually a group of 5 townships that merged together. So while it's technically a city and has a population over 200,00, it feels more like a series of small towns, each with their own identity.

I've been involved in the computer industry for more than 7 years at this point, though have been actively using computers online for more than 20.

My current position is with a company involved in creating an online virtual world.

When I'm not at work, I can be found watching movies (I took several courses in college on film critiquing from both a technical as well as content standpoint.) playing games on the computer or in the garage (our garage is a monument to my misspent youth as we currently have 5 fullsize arcade games, 2 pinball machines and an Air Hockey table) cooking (I love to cook and eat, though thanks to some surgery and a horribly picky palate, I don't have a wide range of tastes) and role playing games (I've been a professional game designer for more than 15 years.)

So with the introduction out of the way, I'm finding myself at a bit of a junction and not knowing where to turn.

I guess I'll focus today on writing, since that's where the origins of this blog are, as well as focus in my life.

As I mentioned before, I'm a professional game designer. The truth is, I feel into in entirely by chance. I started pen and paper role playing games, like many people, with Dungens and Dragons. When I started there were 3 books in a white box and that was it. My first gaming experiences were more along the lines of looking at a map drawn on graph paper and moving my players around to help with combat. The majority of the actual roleplaying I did was in my head as I created characters for games my friend ran for me.

I actually didn't learn about roleplaying until I tried introducing my dad to the concept thanks to Dragon magazine # 44 (I think that was the issue.) For those of you unaware Dragon is a publication dedicated to D&D. Back then it also mentioned other TSR products, but #44 was (and may still be) a famous issue because they parodied themselves. In any case, the "adventure" was that you were a boy scount in a mad professors house. So I decided to run my dad through the adventure, and he played a boy scout to the hilt, equipping his character as a boy scout would be and using all of his items to great success.

In high school, I gravitated into a few gaming groups, one which would experiment with just about every game known to humankind, the other which was more focused on a few systems and either played straight up games or used the system to create their own universes. All things considered, the gamers I played with were, for the most part, not the typical loners that get portrayed in film and fiction, but were almost all well adjusted individuals, who used gaming as one of many creative outlets.

College came and I went off to the University of California at Santa Cruz, following a couple of my friends who had graduated a year before me and were now sophomore's there. While there, they had met the owner of a small game publishing company and were hanging out with him as friends and occasional contributors. As I gravitated into the circle the owner had an idea for his next game and wanted to run it by us.

That night, in an orgy of brainstorming, Cyberpunk was conceived. In many ways it was one of the most thrilling rushes I've ever experienced. From the cover illustration of a book four or five of us created a universe and game system in around 3 hours. But during those three hours, it was as if my creative energies were really unleashed for the first time.

Don't get me wrong. I've been writing since I was five (or 30 years.) And I've got enough talent to come up with catchy ideas. What I really don't have a lot of is drive to finish them. It's almost as if the act of creation in my head is often enough for me and I'm probably insecure enough to not want to share them with many other people. I think part of it is, I often read my own writing and, while I'm not ashamed of the concepts, I'm most often not satisfied by the results.

But I digress (I love cliche's BTW.) Cyberpunk took time to evolve into an actual game. I went home during the summers between my freshman and sophmore years full of ideas for the game (though I wasn't even an employee of the company yet,) and wrote a lot of them down. By the time I came back to Santa Cruz I had a lot of things on paper and showed them to the company owner.

While much of what I wrote never actually made it into the game, it impressed him enough to, in his own words, realize I wasn't just a guy who hung around with some writers, but could, in fact, write myself. As I mentioned, a lot of the words I wrote didn't make it into the game, but a lot of the "feel" of the game came from those writings.

In some ways, though, getting published at 19 was a horrible thing.

For one thing I developed one heck of an attitude. After all I was a "game designer." In reality, I was probably a typical 19 year old but since I had something to feel superior about, I certainly played it up.

So for the next few years I wrote on the side, while trying to get a Lit degree with Creative Writing emphasis. Of course, I had been published in a "genre'" category which means I was doomed to fail in this effort since the program at Santa Cruz was focused on fiction as an art. Part of me wants to suggest it's possible my writing wasn't good enough to get into the program, but, in truth, I suspect it was since I had no problem getting into all the upper division writing courses (which required the same writing samples and you were suppoed to be in the major to get in.)

The other major thing that happened to me with regards to writing was I met a woman in an course on writing Science Fiction (taught by an anthro grad student as a lower division course.) Three years later we were married.

After I graduated, I continued to write for the game company for another year, but, due in part to a deterioration in my writing quality (I got sloppy in my arrogance) contracts were few and far between and eventually dried up.

Over the next 5 years or so I would write sporadically, starting some 7 novels and discarding them before I'd finished more than a few chapters. I also discovered the Bulwer-Lytton contest (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com)

Conversely, during this time, my wife continued to write and submit short stories for publication, as well as a novel of which none of them sold. Finally, real life started to intrude (the whole procreation, mortgage and a very sick husband) and she slowly stopped writing.

Jump forward a few years.

I'm still writng and getting published in a game field. Most of what I've recently written has been for a game company which was started by a high school friend. As I look at what I've written for him I see a pattern I'm not liking. Which is to say my early stuff is reasonbly well written, sometimes even with a flash of brilliance, which is slowly deteriorating to some good ideas which are poorly being executed. I think the important part here is Im recognizing things and may be able to turn them around, if given a chance.

I've had a few things published on the web in non paying markets, mostly non-fiction.

However, a funny thing happened this summer.

For the first time in 13 years, I completed an original work of fiction. By original, I mean it has nothing to do with a roleplaying game previously published and by fiction I mean an actual story as opposed to non-fiction anecdotes or role-playing related scenarios. Originally I had an idea it could be a comic book, and wrote about 500 words which could be converted reasonbly easy into that medium (at least I like to think so, but since I rarely read comics, I may have been deluding myself.) Then about 3 months later I picked it back up and started writing on it again. Then gave it to my wife and a few friends for critique then actually started submitting it for publication.

So far it's been rejected 3 times and is out at a forth publisher, whom I don't expect to hear from for a while. Still, it was fun to actually write again for myself and, more importantly, finish something.

The other thing that happened in recent time was the dot com boom. It plays an important part in my life, not because I've got rich off of it, far from it, but because I was contracting for some time I eventually stopped for the most part to be a stay at home father in January of 2000. The other half of this is that my wife also joined the IPO Lottery in May of 2000, until her eventual layoff from the large company that swalloed her smaller company (giving the small company CEO a nice payout, which he did not share with the other employees which is unusual.)

Though notified on October 2002 of her layoff, she didn't stop working for the company until December, at which point we agreed we would try and switch roles so she could stay at home and make a go at being a full time writer. Our initial agreement was she would write until May 2003, unless I had found a job in which case we'd try and give her the 3 years off I had.

May came and I still didn't have a job. Since our finances were better than we expected, I suggested we postpone her job search until her unemployment benefits ran out in October. I did this mostly because as she rightly points out, she's a writer. It's really part of her soul. And when she isn't writing, it effects her in a really negative way.

Now, less you think I'm an angel, I'm not the worlds most supportive husband. I do think she should get the time to write. However, when I agreed to it, I was under the impression (i.e. we talked about it and both came away from the conversation with two vastly different understandings. Either that or one or both of us has changed the conversation in our minds to suit their current needs. I suspect a combination of the two,) that her writing would be done on "her time" which meant that if I was going to work, she'd write while I was at work and the kids were in school and maybe at night as well.

Apparently I was wrong.

Writing is a full time obsession with my wife. In the past calendar year she's written over 650,000 words of fiction. While I am amazed at this accomplishment, what I don't have time or the energy to read every one of them to offer my opinions. And she resents that.

The funny thing is, she's under the impression I will be more supportive (or possibly take her more seriously) if she publishes one of her novels and actually brings in an income. It's not that I don't take her seriously as a writer, nor do I not see it as a full time job. My main issue is that she spends all of her time writing, be it for herself, critiquing other writers works so they will return the favor, or participating in an online writers comunity. And, while she is doing a certain portion of the duties we discussed she would take over when I went back to work, I find myself increasingly having to add more things onto my shoulders, though I have a 75 minute commute each way to the office each day, and, because I'm at a start up, often have things to clean up when I get home.

Is it any wonder I'm tired?