is a blog by Brendan
The first Anacrusis ad ever is running at Blank Label and its principal sites for the minimum of 20,000 pageviews. Judging by the run length of other ads I’ve seen on the site, they burn through that pretty quick.
The fact that I am paying to persuade people to come and look at something else I pay to make available is not lost on me. I always said I wouldn’t advertise for my work until I thought it was good enough for anyone to read it and like it. I held true to that.
I stated in an Anacrusis LJ feed comment-thread, last week, that Memento had more structural influence on my writing than basically anything ever. I realized later that that’s not exactly true; it did have a lot of influence, but before I saw Memento I was reading Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake and Lady Oracle are all shuffle-structured books, although they tend to start at middle / beginning and finish at end / middle (whereas Memento starts at the beginning / end and ends at middle / middle). Orson Scott Card does a lot of shuffling within the corpus of The Worthing Saga, too; I actually read that in high school, so I guess it was really my first exposure to the style.
Of course, that’s omitting the randomly jumbled reruns of cartoons I watched as a kid, which seemed to come from different seasons at random–not that Thundercats drove a terribly epic tale, but the cast (to my perception) did expand and shrink on a daily basis. They weren’t doing it on purpose, though.
I’m not sure what single factor determines my fascination with these stories. My borderline ADD is certainly involved, which doesn’t imply a negative context: there’s something important and powerful about screwing with linearity, about building a narrative out of noncontiguous events. It makes individual elements of a story stronger, for one thing; there’s no room for laziness when every page has to give you something to take back to the larger structure. (Note that this is also one of the big reasons I like word-count fiction so much.)
Hmm.
I can do better.
So I already put my bragging rights at stake in the Iron Game Chef contest, which means I need to design a game. This year involves not only the standard time limit and ingredient requirements, but a set of rules limitations as well. It’s a timed constrained game writing exercise! It’s a good thing those all make me gasp with excitement, because I’ve only got six days left and I haven’t so much “started.”
So here’s where I’m thinking of going. This isn’t an opinion poll–I’m going to make the game that I believe in the most; I just want to have a sketch-record in case I come back to some of these later. You’re welcome to steal anything here and make your own game, of course.
Ingredients: Anasazi disappearance, 1300s. “Entomology,” “Accuser” and “Companion.” Multi-meaning die rolls and pregenerated characters.
Problems: Huge and clunky. Not sure I can do this without a very coordinated pair of GMs, which I don’t want.
Ingredients: Dot-com boom, late 1990s. “Entomology,” “Wine” and “Invincible.” Multi-meaning die rolls.
Problems: InSpectres probably does this as a subsystem, and better.
Ingredients: Loosely based on the heyday of the Silk Road. “Wine,” “Companion” and “Accuser.” Color-based resolution and custom card deck.
Problems: I don’t know anything about economics. Also, not sure this is actually a role-playing game.
Ingredients: “Wine,” “Companion” and “Accuser.” Color-based resolution, obviously. Historical basis: pick one.
Problems: I’m not sure I have the balls for this, and I don’t know anybody who would actually want to play it.
I’m kind of scaring myself, right now, by leaning toward the last one. I’ll pick for real tonight.
In some genres there’s never really a question of whether the protagonist will get what she wants. Stories are often about emotional fulfillment, after all, so when you start watching (say) a romantic comedy, you’re not really wondering whether they’ll end up together. You’re wondering what it will cost.
I asked myself: What does it cost?
Wanna see how?
An Anacrusis Exclusive
Starting Monday
I keep meaning to talk about Vocabulary Notebook! Why haven’t I talked about Vocabulary Notebook yet! Ack!
So basically Jeiel (and, sometimes, his cousin Mia) checks the Word-of-the-Day lists at MW or NYT or wherever and finds a cool word, and writes a story using it. I think this is a fantastic illustration of an inspiring constraint–he starts every story with a limitation and the seed of an idea, and they’re different every time.
Jeiel’s stated that VN was inspired by Anacrusis, which is very flattering (and is how I found the site in the first place). This isn’t a sneaky back-pat loop, though; the stories he writes are good, and they’re getting better.
David Flora steps up with a terzanelle of his own–ignoring word count, but with fantastic use of full-line rhyme as a substitute for repetition and slick iambic pentameter (in which terzanelles are really supposed to be).
Fixed-format poetry was just one more subgenre of constrained writing, which is probably why I find old forms so much more interesting than those of modern and postmodern poetry. Constraints like the terzanelle provide so much opportunity for innovation, as Holly and Flora have just demonstrated. I still think the best explanation of the value therein comes from Constrained.org’s FAQ:
“Constraints set additional challenges to the writer. Writing to a constraint is like solving a puzzle. Graceful solutions have a pleasing feel – like watching the moves of a chess master – on top of their value as stories.”
I’m always delighted to rediscover that my friends are masterful, in some way or many.
In other Anacrusis-tangent news, I’m happy to report that Holly threw my gauntlet right back in my face and did, in fact, prove me wrong. I reprint her story-poem here, with her permission, to keep it from getting lost to the winds of LJ-feed comment rot:
The Burger King is fat with youth,
With adolescent pageantry,
With shining eyes revealing truth.He’s fifty-two; unagingly
He lounges over golden thrones
With adolescent pageantry.Unwrinkled cheeks, uncreaking bones;
But nothing sinster to dread.
He lounges over golden thrones.No bloody baths, no gingerbread.
He chargrills souls to golden brown
But nothing sinister to dread.Adorned with shining paper crown
His sceptre’s high; his forehead clear;
He chargrills souls to golden brownAnd swallows them with ginger beer.
The Burger King is fat with youth,
His sceptre’s high, his forehead clear
With shining eyes revealing truth.
Aahhhh, I can’t do it! I did manage to write this within the constraints I imposed, but it ends up too incoherent to be a real story, so I’m sacrificing the basic premise in order to satisfy the extra ones. That’s weak. Ergo this isn’t going in Anacrusis, but I’ll gladly dump it on you here, where apparently I have no standards.
I no longer think it’s possible to write a terzanelle in 101 words that’s still a good story, and I’m positive it can’t be done in meter. I’d love it if you proved me wrong.
There’s little to Terza but her frame.
She rolls. Nine sixes again:
at the Thousand-Year Club they’re all the same.They gambled away bad luck, when
they thought they were wise.
(She rolls nine sixes again.)When age dulled their eyes,
they’d gamble that away as well,
they thought! They were wise.Terza chose to lose Hell
(she’d be different here);
they gambled that away as well.Risk can’t be where fear
is not. Alone she’d be different; here
she’s one more clone.There’s little to Terza, but her frame
is not alone at the Thousand-Year Club:
they’re all the same.