Fragments of Shadow

The clock said 4:57 when gunfire woke me from strange dreams. I think it was a revolver, or at least I counted five more shots after the one that woke me.

I lay in the dark, not knowing what happened, who was shot or why, or if the gunman was still outside. I was afraid to turn on the light, to draw attention. Still half-asleep, tangled in the vestigial strands of my dreams, my fear was amplified to an almost paralyzing level. If I moved, if light shone out the window, they would come for me. They would come for Kat, asleep beside me.

So I lay there, trying to go back to sleep. In the dark, the crack of the shots loomed. They became other gunshots, echoing from childhood. My father teaching me to shoot in the mountains of Arkansas. The deafening sounds of the pistol that would eventually take his life reverberating through the foothills while he drilled into my head that someone wanted to hurt me, hurt us, and that I had to be able to defend myself. Shades of the fear I felt when I hid under the bed while he volleyed fire with the men who came to repossess our car added to the fear I already felt.

Six gunshots in the darkness became all of these shattering moments in my head.

Now, in the sunny morning light, I know I should have called the cops. I should have done something. But I was afraid in the dark of my room, where shadows lingered and swelled rational self-preservation into irrational terror.

I understand the villagers of gothic horror so much more, now. As the sun set, they locked their doors, fearful of every crack and thump outside. The sounds of night creatures transmuted into the snarls of werewolves and the howls of vengeful spirits. In the dark, alone, it’s easy for your rational mind to run away and hide.

To wait for sunrise.

It’s crazy when you think about how much the world has changed in such a short time. When I was born, way back in 1976, there were barely even home computers. There were no mobile phones. Now we carry phones in our pockets with more processing power than the supercomputers of the ’70s.

Louis C.K. says it best:

Thirty-four years ago today, I was born. Today, I thought it might be fun if we talked about things that shaped us. Movies, books, music… It’s all fair game. I’ll start:

Sherlock Holmes

I learned to read on classics. Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, etc. But none of them grabbed me like Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes.

Brains over brawn appealed heavily to me, since I was tiny and easily bullied. I mean really, I was tiny. I wore a size 2-toddler shirt until 8th grade. But beyond Holmes’ combustible wit and deductive skills, he could hold his own if things came down to a fight. My parents were judo instructors and, thanks to my size, I was a perfect fulcrum. Things rarely got that far, but when they did, I usually got out of it pretty clean.

I had a friend, named Kevin, who was also a huge fan of Holmes. He was a husky boy, muscular in the vague way school bullies generally are. But he was my friend, not a bully. Of course, he fancied himself Holmes, and me Watson, but whatever.

We used to watch Mystery! on PBS every week, he in his room, me in mine, tethered together by the telephone line. Of course, we’d both read all the stories, but Jeremy Brett’s Holmes was perfection. We talked about the changes we noticed between the story and the show. Kevin wasn’t my only friend. He wasn’t even my best friend. But he was the only one I could share Sherlock Holmes with.

I even wrote horrible stories about Holmes’ descendent and his assistant, Chip Watson. I’ll get back to him, but it’s my birthday, so I’m going to cut this short.

What about you? What shaped you?

When I was nine, my dad took me to live with his parents for a while. I’d grown up in Denver and Tampa, so it was my first real experience living on a farm and, for reasons I’ll get into later on down the line, it was a stressful, crazy time.

My grandfather Del was a ghostly presence, even then. He woke up early to do farming chores, then worked a normal job at a factory, then came home and did more farming. The main image I have of him is a grimy, sweating man in a light blue work shirt sitting in a ratty la-z-boy watching John Wayne movies in the evening. His glasses were thick, and his hair was always combed tight against his scalp, like Franklin Roosevelt, who took office a month after Del was born.

My grandmother  Patricia, on the other hand, was a constant presence. She was always there, taking us out to pick blackberries, or burning off the inevitable ticks we picked up in the process. Even if she was out working, she was within shouting distance of the ramshackle house we lived in. The strange thing is, I have less of an image of her burned into my head. I remember her hair was curly, and she wore an apron over old-fashioned dresses.

It was the most traditional environment I’ve ever experienced. In many ways, it was more like I’d been transported to the 50s than it was like 1986.

These were dark days. My dad’s mind had never really recovered from Vietnam, and this was deep in his final spiral. I spent a lot of time inventing stories with G.I. Joe figures (old-school giant ones, my modern Joe vs. Cobra toys were back in Tampa) and creating my own little newspaper. I buried my head in the sand.

One day, my grandfather took me down into the tornado shelter. He’d set up a makeshift desk in front of one of the low concrete benches and on it, there was an antique Royal typewriter.

“That belongs to your grandmother, so you take care of it, y’hear?” he said. “Figured you make a newspaper, you oughta do it right.” That shelter, cool and dark, safe under heavy metal doors… That fussy old typewriter… That was the first time I truly escaped into writing.

After my father’s death, his family blamed my mom for it, and I lost touch with them. I visited them once, years ago, but we never really got past the estrangement.

I just found out that Delano Otto Simmons died on December 31st, 2009, followed by Patricia Glenn Simmons on June 10th, 2010. You’d think that the attenuated relationship would make it hurt less, but somehow, finding out so belatedly hurts even worse.

They were family, no matter what stupid, broken drama had accreted between us, no matter what walls had been built by misunderstanding and pained memory. I’m sorry we never really repaired things, grandma and grandpa.

Farewell.

In my day, men pretended to be robots, and we liked it!

My dad was a Vietnam vet. The war messed him up, that’s no surprise… He had a screwed up knee that meant lots of trips to the VA hospital when I was little. And of course, back in the dark ages of the early 80s, before iPods and iPads and hell, even before Gameboys, we had to make our own fun.

Let’s just say that the VA hospital was not exactly designed for entertaining small children, at least not in the wing where I spent most of my time. In fact, aside from the odd copy of Highlights or an illustrated Bible, there was nothing. Well, nothing aside from the hall-cleaner.

The hospital  had an automated cleaning system, like the massive evolutionary ancestor of a Roomba. It came from behind a black metal door, and plowed down the halls on a system of rails near the floor. Seriously, this thing was like a zamboni mated with the rat-things from Snow Crash. And it had an eye.

An oscillating red eye, sliding back and forth like the front end of the Knight Industries Two Thousand or, far more important to me at the time, a fracking Cylon.

Yes, in my mind, the Cylon war had reached Earth, and the shock troops were scrubbing the floors at the VA. So I did what any good Jedi–

What? I was five. Bite me. If it was in space, it was fair game.

Anyway. I did what any good Jedi would do. I attacked the cleaners with my inflatable lightsaber. Down there in the bowels of the hospital, people rarely walked the halls. So when I heard movement in the hall, I ran out to do battle with the Cylon before it retreated back into its base. My mom didn’t care because, seriously, inflatable lightsaber.

And then, one day, everything changed. I heard the noise in the hall. I grabbed my trusty lightsaber, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age, and I ran out into the hall to catch the mechanical villain. Only, it wasn’t the cleaner.

It was a Cylon.

Seriously. There was a silver-and-black Cylon Centurion standing in the hall all red-eyed and “by your command.” I lost my shit. And I did what any good Jedi would do. I unleashed holy hell on that poor Cylon.

It turns out that a guy in a Cylon suit had come by the children’s ward, much like the Imperial 501st do now, dressed in Stormtrooper gear. One of the nurses had mentioned me, and he came all the way over to that wing of the hospital to try and entertain me while my dad was in surgery.

My mom had to pry me off of him.

And the next month, when Darth Vader made an appearance at Cinderella City, the local mall? She made me leave my lightsaber in the car.

It’s easier to fail. Success is hard, no matter how you measure it. For me, it’s writing. It’s easier and, usually, more fun to fail. Galloping across the farthest reaches of Northrend with Kat in World of Warcraft, or catching up on the latest episodes of Leverage, or rewatching Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica… Failing is easier. Hours pass and I realize I didn’t write again today.

Deadlines are a little better. People are more likely to leave you alone when there’s a paycheck on the line than if it’s some ephemeral personal project. But I need to buckle down. More paying gigs would be nice, but there are three personal projects that are important to me. I have to stop getting in my own way.

To that end, I need to establish habits. In Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit, she says “first steps are hard… Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this?” (The book, by the way, is awesome. I can’t recommend it enough.) I need my rituals. This blog will become one of them.

Artists limber up by sketching. That’s one purpose this blog will serve… It’s hard to stare at a blank page, but once you get your mind in the writing mode, it’s a lot easier to just keep going. So I’ll see you here, right? It’s no fun without you.

This post is going to be a kind of manifesto in a sense, and just plain catharsis in another, It’s probably also going to be pretty scattered. Mostly, this is about my mindset and the emotional and creative frequency I’m currently on. If you’re not interested – and really, I don’t blame you – maybe you’d like something else?

I’m Going to Suck

First thing you need to know? I’m a shy and insecure person. I’m not nearly as bad as I used to be, but I am. I have never really been able to fully invest myself in anything I’ve done creatively, because I always have the little voice in the back of my head… They’re going to laugh at you. Nobody will like it. Even now, every time I send off a draft to my editors, he’s there… This is it. This is the one. They’re going to read this and you’re going to get an email that says “whoops, we made a huge mistake. I’m not sure why we even hired you in the first place.” I stress out and live in fear of people thinking my work sucks and, by extension, so do I.

Fuck that.

Everything I do isn’t going to be gold, and I have to be OK with that. But just because I produce something that sucks once doesn’t invalidate the other things I’ve done or the potential I have to produce something amazing in the future. Honestly, I think getting the suck out now might even raise my chances of producing that amazing thing.

I’m a Writer

Someone asked me what I did the other day, and I told them the truth as I see it.

“I’m a writer, and a web designer,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “anything I might have read?”

“Probably not,” I shrugged. “All of my actual published work is in tabletop RPGs.”

“Oooh. I thought you meant a real writer.”

Yeah. And again, fuck that. I don’t need validation from anyone to know that I’m a writer. I’d be a writer even if I didn’t have a pretty regular gig doing it. I write. As melodramatic as it sounds, I couldn’t survive without writing. Without it, I wouldn’t be whole. I’m proud of my work for White Wolf. I love role-playing games, and I love that I get to take part in shaping and building a world I’ve been immersed in for over half my life. I will never be ashamed of that.

That guy who basically said I wasn’t a “real” writer? He didn’t mean to insult me. He was surprised that it annoyed me.

Pretension

Society frowns on the kind of earnest and thoughtful intensity that creates its most enduring, beautiful works. It’s interesting, because it’s almost like a kind of institutionalized discrimination. People who try are weird. Pretentious. Even when you make it, even when you earn society’s “acceptance” of your weirdness, you’re separate. Celebrity is, in a sense, another kind of segregation. It’s still a matter of us and them.

Pretension is such a dirty word. Except all writing is pretense. Everything worth doing is pretentious. You’re damn right I have aspirations “above my station.” You’re damn right I’m going to stretch and reach for things.

And I may miss. I may fall off the ladder I’ve built for myself. But that’s just an opportunity to stabilize the foundations and build it higher before I climb back up.

I’m done apologizing for that.

Good lord. It’s been too long since I made a proper post.

I’m never going to get around to redesigning my site. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, and all that. So, for the moment, I just went ahead and installed WordPress and a theme that doesn’t make my eyes bleed.

Let’s see: Quick updates this time.

Writing

I’ve been writing like a madman for the last month. By the 4th, I should have written 64k since March began. I’ve been sick for most of that time, too, which is slowing me down more than I’d like.

Shadows in the Dark: Mekhet, Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners and New Wave Requiem have all been released and very well received. I’m really proud of NWR in particular, since it’s actually convinced longtime Masquerade fans who dismissed Requiem to give it another look.

Gaming

My group will start playtesting Geist as soon as I finish this mad dash of writing. The Hunter game and the Mage game are on hold until we get through that.

Miscellaneous

We might have a new cat soon. His name is Hoshi, and he’s adorable.