So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Ever since Douglas Adams coined this phrase, I've used it as a general yet cheerful way of saying goodbye. In this case, I'm saying goodbye to the blog.

At least, I'm saying goodbye to this blog.

My new blog, wherein I'll talk about my career in writing, is located at my home page at WWW.DARRINDRADER.COM

For those who have been following me, here, I look forward to seeing you there. Please take the time to subscribe to the new site.

Farewell! See you on the flip side!

(in case you missed it the first time)

WWW.DARRINDRADER.COM

What's New In My Life

Hey all,

It's been a few months since I came out strongly in favor of True20 as the premier source for Modern and Future games. I've obviously done design work for Wizards of the Coast, I'm a former employee of theirs, and by all rights I should come out strongly in favor of the D20 Modern game. Modern isn't a bad game, I've written a book for it, however, I find the simple act of creating a character for the system tedious at best. I also think that when we start talking about things like firearms and energy weapons, hit points aren't really the best measurement of how your character is doing. In these games, it isn't like D&D where you're some guy encased in steel, letting your armor take the brunt of the blows that connect with you. I think Hit Points are reasonably believable in a fantasy setting, but when we're talking about a firearm aimed at your skull, frankly, a real person's chance of survival will have more to do with their luck and a measure of their toughness. True20 supports this style of play, and better yet, character creation is not overly complicated.

So to get to the point, I've been out of game design for about a year and a half now. The reason is simply that real life demands were severely cutting into the amount of time I had for game design. That is no longer the case, I've decided to make the transition to full time writer, and my time as a writer is going to be about evenly split between fiction and game design.

More to the point, as I said before, I've written books for D&D, I've written a book and some web enhancements for D20 Modern, but the one thing that I've never had the opportunity to do is work on a project of my own. I've always been more or less a hired gun. There's nothing wrong with that since that's how freelancers make their money in this business. At the end of the day though, it left me wondering if I've ever really contributed anything substantial to the hobby I love.

I am pleased to say that I have made arrangements with a publisher that's willing to take a risk on True20, and I'm working on something that I'm actually pretty excited about. I can't go into any real details right now, other than to say that its going to be a new setting book, it incorporates a lot of the elements of what I've always enjoyed or thought was cool about the genre for about as long as I can remember, and it is very likely the start of a new product line that will be exclusively for the True20 rules. Be watching for an announcement soon. I'm pretty excited about this because not only is this an opportunity to bring my vision to this hobby, but its also giving me a chance to work with some great people whose work I have admired for a while now.

So to sum it up, I'm back in the gaming industry, I'm in all the way this time, and at least for the time being I'm hitching myself to the True20 rules.

When Will My Characters Stop Corrupting My Plots??!

I'm participating in nanowrimo this year. For those who aren't aware what that stands for, it's National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you generate a novel of 50,000 words inside of the month of November. Now frankly, a 50,000 word novel isn't likely to get published, the minimum length that's usually taken seriously is 80,000 or more words, but it's a good start, and it's a realistic goal. As a writer who has already been published, I don't really need to do something like this. The usual procedure is to outline a book, write the first three chapters, and then have your agent shop it around for you.

Except I have no agent. Hmm, maybe that's the subject for another blog entry.

So this novel I'm writing is a heroic tale set in the post apocalyptic world. Set fifty years after a nuclear war, it deals with a fairly commonly used plot device: robot invasion. Without giving too much away about the novel, since I know that my hordes of adoring readers will be rushing out to get this novel once it's made available (and it will be made available in one form or another), I can say that the story begins with our hero in action, and then the story morphs into a struggle against a robot army that has decided to bring order to the world by imposing the will of its leader upon those who inhabit the post-nuke wasteland.

Again, without giving too much away, there are some themes running through this thing, such as what happens when you have bad leadership in charge of civilization (whether it be large or small is of no consequence), whether civilization is even worth rebuilding, friendship, loyalty, and of course, the nature of heroics.

Now I'm planning on the final novel length being somewhere around 80,000 words. I'm currently at about 20,000 words, and I anticipate being at 30,000 words very soon. What's interesting is that through the course of exploring the story (without an outline. Yes, I know, writers must always work from an outline!), the real plot of the book hasn't even come into focus. In fact, other than the introduction of a character in the very beginning, and then vaguely hinting at the fact that he's now mixed up with the heroes, there's really been no hint of that plot line surfacing.

I do know how this thing will progress, and approximately when things will set the major plot of the novel in motion, but it's already farther into the novel than I expected for the big event to take place.

And that brings up a point. Characters in novels don't seem to follow the author's plans all that often. It's almost like you can't force your characters to do anything they don't want to do. Sure, you know they will do certain things because it's in their characters, and because you wouldn't have a novel if they don't, but they also seem to have their own agenda that has nothing to do with anything you planned.

In this novel I'm writing, they decided to pull a fast one on me. Rather than simply plunging into the story as expected, they decided that since the town they lived in had become so corrupt, they wanted to retake the old family farm and start a new community there. OK, no problems there, until the corrupt dude in charge of the town figures out their little plan and decides to derail it. Now here I am, twenty thousand words into this thing (or seventy pages, for those who keep track more of page count) and they're fighting with this corrupt town. It's almost the plot of a western, and if it weren't for the fact that there is a larger story to tell that includes some really fantastic elements, I could probably set the entire novel around this first conflict that I hadn't even planned in the first place.

Why is it that characters tend to derail your stories? Of course am I really complaining about this? The fact is that I think I'm covering some interesting ground here, and this episode should add to the overall enjoyability of the novel.

Ah well, maybe next time I'll tackle the concept of procrastination in writing, which this blog entry certainly qualifies as, though some would call it a warm-up in preparation of the actual writing. In either case, I have 5,000 words to knock out today if I want to hit my goal of 50,0000 words by the end of the month.

Review of Star Trek Q&A

If you don't know what Q&A is, it's the third novel in the Star Trek: The Next Generation relaunch series. You can purchase it here: http://www.amazon.com/Q-Star-Trek-Next-Generation/dp/1416527419/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-4517723-4494238?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193603769&sr=8-1



This is an updated repost of the review I posted at Amazon.


A Sound Novel For the TNG Fan

My first reaction is simply "Wow!" I have to admit that while I had been looking more towards Resistance, I was let down by it for a couple reasons. The first reason was that I couldn't comprehend Picard ever choosing to be reassimilated as Locutus under any circumstances. There were still options they didn't bother to consider, and ultimately the only reason he chose this course was because the Borg now attack on sight. Does this mean that engaging a hostile enemy is such a huge risk that it makes more sense for the captain to try to infiltrate rather than simply taking them on? It was a brash move that made very little sense to me.

The second reason I didn't love Resistance was that it left me wondering who in the heck was going to round out the command crew of the post-Nemesis Enterprise. Sure, we got to meet T'Lana in that book, but it didn't seem like a true re-launch, where we would get to see the new cast of characters as they interacted with each other for the first time. This novel should have been the pilot for what is essentially Star Trek TNG: Phase II, but I don't feel that we reallygot that until Q&A; which brings me to the novel I'm actually discussing in this review.

I have to admit that I went into Q&A fearful that it would be another retread, much like Resistance. Is it possible that the TNG well has actually gone dry? I read the teaser text inside the front cover, which described Q getting kicked out of the Continuum, and I rolled my eyes and wondered why I was even bothering with this. Q was originally kicked out of the Continuum in the third season episode Deja Q. As it turns out, the teaser text was just a flashback to one of the better Q episodes, and the rest of the novel was not a retread of a previous story.

So let's get down to it.

The Good: it finally deals with Data's death in a way that felt real. In particular, Geordi had to deal with Data's replacement coming aboard, and it became apparent that he was not handling the death of his best friend all that well, even all these months later. I kept wondering if they were going to use Q to restore Data, since he has the power to do so. I'm not going to ruin that surprise with this review, though I will say that a character or two portrayed on-screen by Brent Spiner make an appearance.

We also finally get to meet the new members of the new command staff. I think they did a good job adding two distinctly new personalities, neither of which seem like old characters that we've seen before in any of the other iterations of the Trek franchise. I had feared that they would go with Trek's tendency to overdo the diversity and include either a pair of females or bring in new or obscure alien species that end up being hard to imagine. I'm pleased that neither of these scenarios played out the way I expected them to, and I'm actually interested in seeing more of them in action.

The new second officer is a human female of Japanese/European heritage named Miranda Kadohata. She was handpicked by Data to be his replacement as Second Officer when he was to be promoted to First Officer. According to her back story, she served aboard the Enterprise-D where she worked in the science department and reported to Data. The fact that she knew Data and was familiar with many of the other crew members of the Enterprise helped her integrate into the command structure while simultaneously providing us with an outsider and insider perspective of the characters we know and love. The bit that is really unique about this character is that she's a career mother. While Star Trek has featured mothers before, this is the first time that we see things from the mother's perspective as she goes about her career while husband and family are left behind off the ship. There are no children on the Enterprise-E!

The other character came as a bit of a surprise. Zelik Leybenzon is a very flawed human with a receding hairline and a cheesy mustache. He takes an almost standoffish position towards the other officers, Geordi LaForge in particular, and his methods of motivating those under his command immediately appear harsh and heavy-handed. Miranda Kadohata at one point refers to him as a wanker. But, he was selected by Worf, who served with him during the Dominion War, so Picard allowed the appointment, despite the fact that the guy never even went through Starfleet Academy. We get to know Zelik Leybenzon fairly well by the end of the novel, and despite his flaws, I'm actually looking forward to seeing more of him in future novels.

The bad: Too much space in the book was wasted on pointless cameos. Riker and Troi are shown aboard the Titan. Donatra, the Romulan who arrived to help the Enterprise against the Scimitar in Nemesis also made an appearance, as did a two-bit trader in the Gamma Quadrant, and some radiation dumping alien from a mildly interesting episode of Voyager. Multiple pages were written around each of these secondary characters, and by the end, the repetition became rather annoying.

The most ambitious aspect of the novel was to take every Q episode and frame it within the context that everything Q had done over the years as a means to prepare Picard for the events of this novel. Although this was well executed, I felt that this had a profound effect upon the series, and might be reaching just a bit much for a story that is not canon (in case you're wondering, no Star Trek novels are canon).

Conclusion: So why was I wowed? In the end it wasn't the story itself, but the execution; DeCandido did the right things at the right times in this novel, and it was a definite page turner. He spent a great deal of time dealing with the interpersonal issues aboard the Enterprise, which I think is something that was needed in light of all the changes that had occurred in Nemesis. He didn't just gather the characters in one place and then send them on a mission, he had them meet, rub each other the wrong way, and build up some dramatic tension between them. We then have the joy of watching those tensions play out throughout the course of the novel.

Once we move beyond that, the middle portion of the book does an excellent job discovering the nature of the issue, all the while amusing us with Q's antics. Again DeCandido does an excellent job of portraying Q as he appeared in Next Generation. I didn't feel like I was watching Q as filtered through an author's voice; he felt authentic, and he was definitely more true to form than he was in his Voyager appearances.

Finally the ending seemed a bit surreal, but it's a Q novel and that's expected. There isn't much I can say about it without giving up too much of the novel, but I will say that I found the chaos and sense of risk and wonder just as satisfying as All Good Things.

Overall, it isn't a perfect book, but it's a very good book. It's one of the better Next Generation books I've read, and unlike the A Time to.... series, the pervading sense of gloom finally seemed to be lifted. It is exactly what I was hoping for from a Next Generation relaunch book, and unlike most of the books I tend to read, I could actually see myself reading this one again.

Four out of five stars.

Freedom!

I was working on a D&D adventure arc for the D&D website. Things fell behind because of personal issues on my side, but it did get half completed, and I did get that half turned in. The 4th edition D&D was announced, and I wasn't sure whether or not they would still be needing the rest of it. Frankly, even if I were to finish, I have a hard time seeing them getting the thing through editing before 4E. On top of that they put a moratorium on adventure arcs through the launch of 4E, which leaves my small project dead in the water.

While it's sad that the ten part story I was going to tell won't see the light of day, at least not under the 3E rules, it does one thing for me that I've been needing for a while: it completely cleared my writing schedule.

The last couple major projects I've had on my plate were this and a Babylon 5 novel. The B5 novels probably would have also been a cool thing to have my name on, except that due to open and public criticism between the B5 series creator JMS and Mongoose Publishing, they decided not to go forward with their novel line.

It's unfortunate that two projects are canceled. One was certainly partially my fault, but the other was not. In any case I am now free to pursue a career in fiction writing. In fact, I've recently been immersing myself in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I have a few novel ideas. I am a published author, and they do publish a lot of books. I think it's time to put gaming behind me and finally embark upon the novel writing career I've always wanted.

Re-Examining Star Trek: Nemesis

It hardly seems possible, but as of this writing, Star Trek: Nemesis was released five years ago. It did abysmally with the fans, it did poorly in the theaters, and actually constitutes the only box office bomb in the Trek franchise. I am the first to admit that I was predisposed towards not liking it, given the fact that this was being touted as the final Star Trek: The Next Generation movie, and it was well known ahead of time that it would feature the death of Data, who is not only one of my favorite science fiction characters, but also a favorite within Trek fandome in general. I didn't bother spending my money to watch it in the theater, and I actually waited a while after it was out on DVD before finally watching it.

So it was a disappointment, other than the fact that there is a new Trek movie coming out in a year, why bother taking another look n0w? Well, this is TNG's 20th anniversary, there is a new line of TNG novels out right now that take place after Nemesis, and there is that movie coming out that's been getting a lot of press. In short, maybe it's time to finally deal with Next Gen's demise before moving on to a Trek reboot.

First off, let me get this out of the way right up front. Next Gen was my Generation's Star Trek. Yes, I enjoy the original, but there's nothing like being there for a historic TV series when it airs for the first time. I was a young teen when it premiered, and the series completed when I was nearly finished with college. I read the novels, I bought the Star Trek magazines, I gobbled up any media pertaining to Trek, because at that time, it was the best thing on TV. Right now, I can say that Next Gen and Babylon 5 remain my favorite television series. In other words, the characters have been around for so long, and I grew so attached to them that they're almost like real life friends or family. Kind of sad, I know, but I'm also not the only person who bears the Trekker mantle who feels that way.

So yes, I rejected Nemesis because it was about the end of a family I cared about and featured the death of a character I considered a friend. There are a lot of people who like to blame the director, Stuart Baird for the movie's failure, but the truth is that given the events that occur, there is nothing he could have done to win a lot of us over. Want to blame someone? Blame Rick Berman, or the writer John Logan; or even better yet, blame Brent Spiner for encouraging the death of his character.

Or better yet, don't blame anyone at all, because it's actually not the stinkfest that everyone loves to make it out to be. In fact, it's actually quite good, but you really have to look into the themes involved rather than simply expecting it to be a fun ride like most Trek movies. That's right, this one may be a science fiction action movie, but it's one with actual depth, and at the heart of it is the very thing that I profess to love about Next Gen: family.

There's a whole special feature about this on the DVD, so I'll provide the Cliff's Notes version. Picard and Data both meet their dopplegangers. Despite their high hopes, Picard hoping that Shinzon could be something of a son to him, and Data hoping that B4 would be a brother who was not a psychopath like Lore, ultimately they are both disappointed in them. In Picard's case, he is forced to kill Shinzon, at the cost of numerous crew members, his ship, and one of his most trusted friends. In Data's case, he isn't forced to take action against B4, but he knows that he will never be able to instill in him the drive to become more human that he possesses. In both cases, these individuals are unable to rise above their past and become something more, and in the end, they all realize that their real family is the one aboard the Enterprise, and like it or not, with Riker and Troi getting marries and going off to command the Titan, Crusher going back to Starfleet Command, and Data dying, that family is coming to an end.

So let's for a minute look at some of the other elements of the movie. The Romulan council chambers was a great set, and the sequence where they're all destroyed by thalaron radiation was well done. The Scimitar was an enormous and truly menacing ship, but even more important, is was actually plausible. The acting was top notch on the part of all the cast members. The action was good and steady throughout the film, and none of it was disappointing in any way. In fact, were it not for the simple fact that an important character dies, it was a good movie, at least according to this reviewer.

So why did it fail?

When the original cast called it quits, Star Trek VI ended on a happy note. Everyone survived, the Federation made peace with the Klingons, and they all had one last grand adventure together before the end. Roddenberry created Star Trek as an optimistic universe where humanity had worked out most of its problems, and I think that this is one truth that the fans understand. Star Trek: Then Next Generation is arguably a lighter, happier show than the original was, and it really embraces Roddenberry's optimism. The original cast got to go out on a high note, and I think that most people feel that it was wrong for the final Next Gen movie to be as dark as it was.

If you were to take this movie out of the Star Trek universe, I suspect that it would have been received much better. I'll repeat, this wasn't a bad movie, it just wasn't the movie that the fans wanted, and in the end, that is the reason it failed.

Yes, there were a few plot holes. How did the Enterprise detect positronic energy coming from a planet from light years away? Sure, that was just an excuse to introduce B4 and lure the Enterprise close to the Neutral Zone. Shinzon's plan required B4's involvement, so suppose they had not detected it. Suppose that even if they had, they'd decided that this wasn't important and could be investigated later. Suppose that a different ship would have been dispatched to Romulus. Had these things happened, Shinzon's plan to get a blood transfusion from Picard would have fallen apart.

Hey on that note, if Shinzon would have simply asked Picard nicely for a total blood transfusion, don't you think he would have done it out of kindness? He could have provided some to Crusher, who would then have rapid-cloned it, and that would be that. No need for anyone to die. These are issues that hinder the suspension of disbelief. There is no reason to look at the good without looking at the bad.

Now as for me, after five years, I've completed the grieving process, I've read all of the available reboot novels, which are actually quite good, and I'm able to approach this movie with an open mind. It was a dark movie. The final movie of the series should have been more like Undiscovered Country than Wrath of Khan. The truth of the matter is that it was a good movie, but it wasn't the right movie for Trekkers. The only way Trekkers would have been happy with Nemesis is if it would have involved them all living happily ever after.

We Found That The Service Was Lacking....

I'm tired of leaving tips. Maybe it's just that the service I've received lately has been so shitty.

In my first example, my wife, our four children, and my mother went to have dinner at a nationally known 24 hour restaurant. Sure, there's better places out there, but hey, we were hungry and the food is passable.

So we get there and they tried to seat us at a large booth, which is a good thing. Unfortunately they had seated us at this booth before, and it really sucks. On one side you're facing a window where the sun shines directly in your eyes, and the blinds aren't thick enough to filter out the sunlight, so if you happen to be the one sitting on that side from about 4:00 PM to about 6:00 PM during a nice fall evening, you can pretty much expect to be squinting the whole time while your eyes suffer damage from UV rays. Here's a thought: maybe they should offer UV protection sunglasses for the people they seat there.

The other side of the booth is no better. Apparently the seat is so old and in such disrepair that it's probably not safe to sit there anyway, and you will quickly find yourself at the bottom of a hole. Moving left or right doesn't really help because someone else is sitting next to you, and unless you can move over one whole space, you'll find yourself sitting at an angle.

In short, the booth sucks.

So we asked them if they could find us another table. Now there were plenty of smaller tables that could have been pushed together, but they decided to usher us off to the back room and give us the big banquet table there. Hey, I like this idea. This is really good service.

Except that the moment we were seated, a manager walks up to the person seating us and rather rudely informs us all that we can't be there because the place is reserved. The girl, as politely as possible mentions to the manager that they have over an hour before the other party is expected, and we even agree that we can be out of there by then. Frankly, we just wanted to grab a bite to eat and then get the hell out anyway.

This conversation is repeated as a second manager comes and voices her dissatisfaction at our seating arrangements. And then a third.

Hey look, we didn't ask for this particular spot, and even if we had, wouldn't the proper thing to do be to pull the person who seated us off to the side and find another solution that doesn't involve staring into the sun? So we ate our dinner, worried about the time, and generally not enjoying the fact that we were eating out as a family. Was it really worth pissing us off to make sure that that table would be empty by the time the other party showed up?

At any rate we did tip because it wasn't our waitresses fault that their managers were acting like asses. For a brief time, I have worked for a restaurant, a major grocery retailer, and other sales based retailers in the past, and at no time was it acceptable to yell at your employees in front of the customers, or in any other way make your customer feel awkward or unappreciated. The fact that these people are doing so, and they work for a national chain is disgraceful. We still aren't sure whether or not it's worth a letter to the corporate office.

Example two, which occurred during the same week as the previous incident involves a local pizza joint. This time all I did was order in pizza and breadsticks for the family. Since the single container of pizza sauce is never enough, I ordered a second pizza sauce so there would be enough for everyone. The previous few times I had done this, they had neglected to deliver the second pizza sauce, so this time I checked while the pizza guy was at the door and, lo and behold, one single pizza sauce. I pointed this out to him and he said it wasn't on the order. OK, so the guy on the phone fucked up my order, but I still did order it, and I still did want it. I had written in a two dollar tip into the check I gave the delivery guy, and he had obviously seen this, so he said he'd run back to the place and grab more pizza sauce.

Take a guess who we didn't see again that night.

Hey, I understand that mistakes happen, and that there will be differences of opinion, but if you say you're going to do something for a customer, you should damn well come through for them, especially if they put a couple extra dollars in your pocket. I'd go elsewhere if it weren't for the fact that I like their pizza better than any other place in town, and I've been a pretty loyal customer for half my life.

I would complain to the management, but I'm reasonably certain that the guy who fucked up my order to begin with by not writing down everything I ordered was the manager. Also, when sending in complaints about the service in the past, my experience is that no action is taken and they do not typically offer compensation in an effort to try and secure your future business.

I suppose it all comes down to whether or not the company perceives that they will save any significant amount of business by keeping you happy. How is it in their best interest to go out of their way to keep their customers coming back if they're already making enough money to keep their shareholders happy?