Here I go!

See, a year and a bit ago, Berglaug asked me if I was still interested in making comics. My answer was a resounding “YES.” She told me that her friend had a sister who was an art student interested in the same. The trouble was, this girl needed a writer.

Perfecto.

There was just one problem. Ragnheiður, the artist in question (and now my artist-in-crime), had never worked from a script before. She’d never seen a comic script before. So I wrote her a guide.

It’s short, casual, and never meant for public consumption. But I found it amusing, and I thought some of you might think the same. So, here. Some rough scribbles for your enjoyment.

Becky’s Script Guide (PDF, 3.23 MB)

The only trouble is that after months of doggedly working on it, I’m now lacking in the time to write. My freelance work has been slow as of late, and that means more hours spent trying to cobble together new gigs. After years of tinkering with this story, and after months of hammering away at it, I can’t quit now. As such, I’ve decided to raise the curtain on my writing cave and launch a Kickstarter campaign. There’s all kinds of stuff there about the project and the story, and there’s even a video of me talkin’ about it. Hooray for books! Hooray for space! Hooray for Kickstarter!

More than just garnering support, I also want to make you part of the process. As I discuss in the video, back in my theater days, it was common to have donors sit in on rehearsals. I’ve always liked that idea. I liked that the people who believed enough in the production to help fund it got to become part of it. To that end, one of my low-level rewards is the promise of weekly video updates keeping supporters posted on my progress. Not only will folks get to see just how they’ve helped me out, but I’ll be making them part of the project. I tend to be a bit of a hermit while I’m writing, so this is a very new thing for me — but I think it could be a lot of fun.

If you are inclined to chip in, a million thank yous. I’m looking forward to taking you to space with me.

More stuff soon.

Mr. Sportcoat told me I had a nice smile. I thanked him. He said that I could be a movie star. I laughed, kind of. It sounded like the sort of thing he said to a lot of bartenders.

“Isn’t that what all women want?” he asked. It was less of a question and more of a statement. “All women want to be glamorous. To be a star.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Sure you do,” he said. “Wouldn’t you love to walk down a red carpet with cameras flashing?”

“No,” I said with a smile. “I wouldn’t like that at all.”

Mr. Sportcoat seemed at a loss. He drank the rest of whatever-it-was in silence.

This memory popped up just a little bit ago, for no apparent reason. It was an odd synapse to have fire, though I think it probably was triggered in a roundabout way by Merlin Mann’s Webstock 2011 keynote speech, “Scared Shitless,” which I watched yesterday. It’s been turning over heavily in my brain, because I, too, am scared of everything, all the time.

In the talk, Merlin showed slides of index cards with his fellow speakers’ fears written on them. How brave and terrifying is that? Something about sharing fears with a roomful of strangers seems a bit like painting a big target over your heart and saying, “Hit me right freakin’ here.” Which, of course, if you’ve ever seen any action movies, is the most badass thing a person can possibly do. It’s like that scene in Breaking Bad when Gus, totally unarmed, marches right towards the hill where the sniper is shooting at him. He throws his arms wide, looking scorched-Earth mad, daring the dude to take the shot. You know right then that absolutely nobody can hurt him.

So here’s my fear:

I am constantly afraid of what people think of me. I am afraid of doing something stupid in front of them. I am afraid of them thinking badly of me. I am afraid of them laughing at me.

This fear increases tenfold if the people in question are strangers.

This is a problem, because I love writing very much, and the whole point of writing is to have people read it. If you’re going to attempt to earn your bread by writing, then your very livelihood depends on getting your work out to as many strangers as possible. Sharing the things I write with other people, especially people I don’t know, scares the ever-living shit out of me. Every single time.

I’ve struggled with that fear for a long time. It gets in my way almost every day. It makes me dig in my heels when I think of new projects. It makes me beat myself up when I realize after the fact that I didn’t say something the way I wanted to, and that other people have already seen it (that happened today, incidentally). Some days I dread getting on my computer at all. It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid. I am a tiny person who writes things of little-to-no consequence through the most impermanent medium our species has ever known. I know it’s a baseless fear. But it’s there. I can’t shake it.

That video of Merlin’s confirmed something that I already knew: that fear isn’t going away. That makes me mad. That makes me want to scream and swear and break things, because dammit, I hate being scared. I do not want to be scared my whole life. But maybe, as Merlin said, everybody is. And maybe that’s just how our species rolls. I guess from here on out, I just have to keep doing what I’ve been doing: making stuff anyway.

So, there. That’s what I’m scared of. I’ve just admitted it in the scariest way I can think of. Maybe that’ll give me +1 to my armor class, in the end.

The first is Scrivener, which is the very best thing in the world for a lengthy writer like myself. I rarely write things in the order that people later read them in. I may start with the ending, or with a middle bit, and then cobble the structure together as I go. This is especially true if I’m working on fiction. I cut and paste, write and rewrite, swap things around and turn everything on its head. I used to deal with this by keeping different scenes or essay sections in separate document files. It could get pretty confusing, especially given my bad habit of naming files things like “intro,” “first try,” or “aaaaa this draft sucks stop it” (oh, you think I’m kidding).

What Scrivener does is keep all those separate pieces in one place. Within a single project file, I can have as many separate scenes or chapters as I like, all visible within a sidebar. I can drag-and-drop them to change order as I please. If I put a section in the trash, it isn’t permanently gone unless I specifically make it so (which is great, because I am notoriously wishy-washy about what’s good and what’s scrap). I’m not exaggerating when I say that it has changed the way that I write for the better. Best forty bucks I ever spent.

The second is Dropbox, a file sync service that does what I have wanted computers to do since the days of floppy disks. Though I work from home, I work on a few different computers. My netbook is the usual suspect. Sometimes I prefer to work on the desktop, which has a bigger monitor. If Berglaug’s using the desktop and I still want to avoid eye strain, I may use her laptop. If I’m visiting family, I might use my mom’s computer. And so on. I used to get around this by using a flash drive to shuffle files back and forth, but sometimes I’d get confused as to which draft was the most recent one, or I’d forget to load the latest draft onto the drive before heading out to work at the library or a cafe. I’m sure you’ve all been there.

Dropbox is a nifty little service that creates a hard drive folder on all the computers I use, then syncs the files between them. In other words, if I save a draft on my netbook, then go to work on the desktop, the latest draft is automatically there on my desktop hard drive within seconds. If I’m on a computer that I haven’t installed Dropbox on, I can just access my Dropbox account through the browser. Best of all, Dropbox has alleviated my crippling fear of losing drafts. Unless some cataclysmic impact event destroys my netbook, my desktop, and the Dropbox servers, there will always be a copy of my stuff somewhere (in such an event, I will likely be far more concerned about nuclear winter than about lost files).

The combo punch of Dropbox and Scrivener have made my workdays infinitely more efficient. I love them. I suggest you go try them out.

I let my brain wander as a couple hours of epic music washed over us. I thought of the movie, of course, and noted that the same goosebumps that pop up every time Gandalf and the Rohirrim come charging down the hill into Saruman’s Uruk-hai appeared from the accompanying music alone. But I also thought of being about six or seven years old, tucked in beneath my alphabet-printed covers, staring up at a dark ceiling, very far from sleep. My mom had been reading me The Fellowship of the Ring as a bedtime story. She had closed the book and turned out the light right after four little hobbits hid alongside the road, a rider in black prowling around nearby. I wasn’t scared, exactly, but I was concerned. Deeply concerned. Who were the riders in black? Were the hobbits going to be okay? Why wasn’t Gandalf there to help them? These were the questions that kept me awake at night when I was seven years old. I haven’t changed much in twenty years.

I wondered what the other audience members at the concert were thinking of, and figured that their thoughts had a different cultural twist from my own. Tolkien is a big deal in Iceland. Ol’ J.R.R. was a huge fan of Norse mythology. He owes most of the dwarves’ names (and Gandalf’s as well) to the Poetic Eddas, and the term “Middle-Earth” comes from…okay, I don’t know offhand where it comes from. But it’s one of theirs, too. Icelanders, as a general rule, dig anyone who loves their stories. I’ve heard that Tolkien visited here before he started writing The Lord of the Rings, which makes total sense. The prologue of Fellowship (“Concerning Hobbits”) is basically everything you need to know about how Icelanders feel about food, ancestry, farming, and foreigners.

I looked around the concert hall and felt a little in awe of the fact that everyone there — young and old — knew the story without any program notes or subtitles. I wondered what Tolkien would make of it. It’s staggeringly unlikely that I’ll ever write anything of the caliber or of the cultural significance that he did (nor do I really wish to), but I could picture him in a setting that is very familiar to me: at a desk, surrounded by used teacups and stacks of notes, trying to write down a story in a way that made sense. I wondered if he ever sat like I sometimes do, his words staring oddly back up at him, wondering if the stuff he’d just written was total crap. I wanted to jump in a time machine and drag him back to the concert, just to see his face when he realized what an incredible thing he’d achieved.

Then again, that might be a very bad idea. If I were in his shoes, I might go hide in a cave forever after something like that. Plus the appearance of a time machine might shift his creative focus to science fiction, thus causing the entire high fantasy genre to disappear from existence. I don’t know about you, but my childhood would’ve been pretty boring without it. I might’ve slept more, though.

See, as someone whose career has shifted from one creative venue to another, money is not something I have ever had in spades. When faced with terms like “one million dollars,” my brain short circuits. I have no idea what I’d do with that much money. I can’t even conceive of that much money. A real sum of money, to me, is a thousand dollars. I know exactly how much good an extra thousand dollars would do for me. Ten thousand, wow, yeah, I can wrap my brain around that, and it’s fantastic. I can put those numbers in terms of rent, bills, food, plane tickets, how many hours I could set aside for fiction instead of other work — ordinary yet all-important things. I can conceptualize my life in conjunction with these more manageable sums of cash, right up until one hundred thousand dollars, at which point I begin to envision myself diving into a swimming pool full of gold coins a la Scrooge McDuck (has anyone else ever contemplated how much that would hurt?).

I was thinking about the aforementioned video one day as Cian and I were cautiously navigating the icy sidewalks in our big stompy boots. I am a horribly spoiled product of digital consumer culture, and I found myself wanting to go to the next level of wildcat-and-laser-pointer entertainment. Medium-sized cats behind fences weren’t enough for me. I wanted to see big cats chase laser pointers. I mean big, big cats. In the video, the laser pointer is eschewed by lions and tigers. I was not satisfied with this outcome. Surely, their predatory instincts had been dulled by a life in captivity. I told Cian I wanted to go to the African savanna via helicopter, find a pride of lions, and shine a laser pointer down to their paws from the safety of the air, at which point the lions would tumble over one another in a frenzied pile. After a moment of pondering, I decided that a hot air balloon would be a much better choice of aircraft, as the noise of a helicopter might scare the lions off. I liked the idea of a hot air balloon better anyway, because it felt a bit steampunk, and because I have an inexplicable synaptic connection between hot air balloons and picnic lunches (I have an inkling that some book I read as a child made mention of balloonists having a picnic, but I can’t coax my neurons into explaining further).

With that, I perfectly understood what it means to have too much money. It means watching lions chase laser pointers while you eat finger sandwiches and cake in the sky. I think that’s a dream we can all aspire to.

We’ve decided to switch from releasing one chapter at a time to pushing out new pages every other Monday. It’s easier for Ragnheiður to tackle the scripts that way, and it helps me keep my momentum up as well. We’ve got four new pages up today to start things off, and some other changes coming down the pipeline as well. Check it out if you fancy magic and mischief.

A giant nerd, that’s who I am. If you recall, last year I won a lovely picture of Commander Shepard and Liara, made just for me by artist Stacie Ponder, whose stuff I like very much. In September, Ms. Ponder announced on her Twitter feed that to help fund an upcoming move, she was having a sale on her sketch cards. Now, since I got the first one for free, and since I’m also a freelancer whose very ability to eat depends upon making stuff that strangers will want to buy, I decided to help a sister out.

As I already had Shep and Liara, I wanted a few more game characters that meant something to me, not just in terms of fangirl squeeing, but that marked important points in my life. I’ve been gaming a long time, and through all my successes and failures, there’s usually been a game somewhere in the background.

So here’s what I got:

Nine-year-old me with the Myst book, for curiosity. Lara Croft, for bravery. Asrai, my WoW druid, for friendship. Chell, for creativity. Shepard and Liara, for love.

Yes, I’m getting horribly sappy. But look at them.

I can’t wait to get them framed.