Day: June 19, 2022

I spent some time in Mox Boarding House yesterday. It is the mecca of gaming in the Seattle area. Seattle is the birthplace of the Shadowrun roleplaying game. That is why is was so difficult to recognize that Mox hardly carried any Shadowrun products. In the one US market where Shadowrun should be selling, it is not. That sucks. That also reminds me of how my success is invariably tied to the success of that franchise as most of my writing is for that franchise. This is to say, I need to expand my horizons and write for other people. When you write for one thing or write one thing or get too successful doing one thing for too long that is what people know you for/as. You become locked into that singular POV and that can limit your ability to do anything else.

I love that Shadowrun straddles sci-fi and fantasy, because it means I still have stake in both. I can move from one to the other freely (I suspect) and not lose too great a market share of my audience. Of course, that means having a personal audience, which I don’t truly know if I have. I’m sure there are metrics and ways to track it, but I remained more focused on telling the stories than figuring out who is reading them. Still, I care enough to wonder if when I do write more independent stuff, will I have an audience.

Again it all comes down to telling good stories. I think I do that. At least I do it enough that I feel good about the words I put down on paper, and that in my mind is success.

I finally watched Reminiscence, Lisa Joy’s merger of cli-fi and noir. I hoped to like it more, as she has plans in place to adapt William Gibson’s work to the screen and, well, she’s married to Christopher Nolan’s little brother so… All of that is to say she has film bona fides. She co-wrote Westworld, she has Nolan as an alpha reader… what more can be asked? Well, characters. I’d ask for better characters.

A compelling character has something about them that makes them unique but instantly familiar. They are connected to the experiencer in a way that makes us want to feel what is at stake. This can be done in a number of ways, but the key way is for us to understand their core motivation or at least for us to see our own motivations mirrored in their actions. This is not easy work. If it were, all fiction would be good fiction. It is not. Therefore the lack of ease is clearly demonstrated. Stephen King is a master at this. The team that writes as J.A. Corey is a master at this. In her own way Stephanie Meyer is a master at this. Lisa Joy can create compelling characters, but the motivation of said characters does not persist long enough to sustain a movie or even more than two seasons of a TV show.

I wish it were different, but it isn’t.