Category Archives: On Writing

Fiction as Refuge

Posted by natechen on

Hello, hello, welcome back! It has…

Well. I can’t say I had a great couple of weeks off, all things considered. Still, I have vacated and now I am back so it’s time to get down to work. It’s time to talk about fiction and its purposes in our life, a topic which those who enjoy the creation and appreciation of fiction hold near and dear to our hearts.

However, I want to take look at it from a different direction. Generally the fiction aficionado loves talking about the creation of fiction, the care in construction, the integration of timeless truth with a transient narrative. The casual fictioneer looks at things differently.

That is not news. Anyone hardcore storyteller who has tried to discuss movies, TV or books with their casual friends has come to this conclusion. The structure and techniques of story rarely mean much to them. Yet if we want to be storytellers who can captivate a large audience we still need to understand why they look at stories the way they do.

That brings us to the topic of today’s post. Fiction as refuge is an idea I’ve been slowly coming to understand as I watch the gradual disintegration of the stories that formed the cultural zeitgeist for most of my life. This collapse of the narrative integrity of some of these tales is something I cared a great deal about. In this I was not alone. But over time I came to realize I didn’t look at the issue in the same way as many of my peers.

Again, this was not new to me. That’s the way things have been most of my life. Yet the reasons for these differences is something all storytellers need to grapple with, as I believe it is a significant part in what makes some stories last in the eyes of the public and others fade away.

I strongly believe that most people who appreciate fiction look to it as a place of refuge from the world.

Let me try to explain this using the classic TV franchise Star Trek as an example. The essence of Rodenberry’s vision of the future is that humanity would change and mature until they no longer suffered from internal strife and division. Instead, they would travel into the stars, using their newfound cooperation to learn, grow and conquer the stars.

Was this vision a bit naive? Hopelessly optimistic? At times painfully detached from reality? Certainly. However, when you are tired from the constant conflicts in life, slipping onto the decks of the starship Enterprise with your favorite crew to sort out some sort of nonsense science project without any of that drama is mighty appealing. You’re not looking for craftsmanship. You’re not seeking moral lessons or political insight. You just need to feel some sense of meaning with people you know and like. Fiction offers that.

Most fiction franchises rise or fall not on the strength of their plots or their twists or their moods. They stand on the strength of their characters. The crews of Star Trek are packed full of fun, relatable and memorable characters who often carried their TV shows through poor scripts and network hostility. The original cast won over audiences to the point that some of them survived the years after Star Trek was cancelled on the generosity of their fans. James T. Kirk, Spock and Leonard McCoy remain the measuring stick for effective ensemble casts to this day.

When Picard gathered the crew of the Enterprise-D together one more time fans rejoiced. It was a bit like slipping on an old, comfortable pair of slippers one last time. The comfort and relaxation provided by spending a little more time with long loved characters is a precious thing. The timeless nature of fiction makes it possible to find that respite at any time, even if all you can do is talk about stories with others who have enjoyed them with you.

Fiction’s power of refuge is special. It can be horribly misused, both by tearing down the elements of a story that offer shelter and by manipulating others through the way fiction lowers a person’s guard. Audiences can also be tempted to crawl into fiction and abandon reality entirely. None of that is healthy.

Yet, when the boundaries and purposes of fiction are properly respected, fiction as shelter is not just good, it is great. Don’t let the drive for that to replace all the other things fiction can do. Moral teaching, craftsmanship, timelessness, empathy and many, many other benefits come from fiction as well. It’s fine to work them into a warm, comfortable story. But if you want those other elements to reach as broad an audience as possible, studying your fiction as a source of respite may be the most important element of all.

The Drownway – Afterwords

Posted by natechen on

Well, another adventure in the books. The Drownway is one of the two stories I had bouncing around in the back of my mind that drove me to begin playing around in Nerona in the first place. I’ve had a particular soft spot for Renaissance Italy as a setting for stories since I read The Prince of Foxes way back in high school. Being a fan of science fiction and fantasy putting my own twist on the historical setting seemed like a natural extension. Some echoes of the Renaissance inspiration can be seen in characters like the Borgias or Cassian’s fascination with fashion.

I said at the beginning that I was also interested in story as an exploration. The Drownway was concieved as a search because I wanted to go to the edges of Nerona as I’d concieved of it and see what I could find. The Benthic started as a vague idea to explain why large portions of Nerona might be viewed as lost ruins. I had not originally intended to discuss them more than as a sea dwelling species that had once sunk part of the Neronan peninsula into the ocean.

The story served to flesh them out more and I’m very pleased to have taken a slightly closer look at who they are and what they are capable of. Will they come into play more in the future? Perhaps. I’ve greatly enjoyed writing stories set in Nerona whether in novellas, as with The Drownway, or as short stories. I intend to continue with them as time permits.

That said, I don’t think my next project on this blog will involve Cassian Ironhand and his companions. For that matter, I’m not sure it will involve Nerona at all. Right now I’m more inclined to check in on Roy Harper again and see how things are going in the Columbian West.

Whatever happens next, it won’t be for a little while yet. I normally take a week off after completing a project but this time around I plan to take two. I have several irons in the fire right now and I’m going to take a little more time to get things lined up before I return with my usual between-project musings. Keep an eye out for those beginning on September 13th.

In the meantime, one of the projects I’m working on is the 2025 Haunted Blog crawl! If you’re interested in knowning more about that and perhaps even participating yourself you can find out all the details here:

Open Call – The 2025 Haunted Blog Crawl

If you’d like to support what I do here consider picking up a copy of my book of Roy Harper stories, Have Spell, Will Travel on Amazon. You can find it using this handy, dandy link:

Thank you as always for reading. I’ll see you in two weeks!

Coming Soon: The Drownway

Posted by natechen on

Well, it’s a new year and that means it’s time for a new project. I had a number of possible projects to work on after the end of The Sidereal Saga, which is the usual way of things as I get ready to write a new tale. It’s pretty rare for authors to lack ideas to develop, although it does happen from time to time, so when it’s time for something new the biggest challenge is deciding on what you want to do. The second biggest challenge is sticking with the idea until it’s fully written.

One of the simplest ways for me to determine what a good idea to focus on is to look through the stuff I’ve written in the last year or so and see how well it matches up to waiting ideas. That is one of the reasons I publish a number of short fiction projects before launching another large one. The short fiction helps clear my mind and determine what I’m really interested in versus what I only have a few hundred or thousand words worth of story for. If I can write two or three short stories about a character or a world I can undoubtedly write a novella or a novel about it.

So no beating around the bush – if you read my previous short stories last year you may have noticed a couple revolving around the world of Nerona, a place based on medieval Italy in the Borgia era. My next project, The Drownway, will be set in that world. To go along with it there will be two Nerona short stories, including The Shadowed Canal, which originally appeared in Issue #2 of Anvil Magazine. There will also be a couple of other stories going up as well, so we will not really get into The Drownway before February. However, before we begin I wanted to take a little time and give a brief overview of what inspired the story.

That’s kind of difficult in this case because the idea behind The Drownway is actually pretty simple. There is a rich and deep history of telling stories about people that go to dangerous places, explore them and make them a little bit safer for anyone who follows in their footsteps. In most cases those stories are just that – history. However history is a great model for the fiction writer and I, for one, find it a very rich one. Yet there are other forms for this story to take.

The great exploration tales of the past involved huge expeditions, ships and provisions, casts of characters to wide and varied to encompass in a single tale. You can, of course, focus in on a handful of characters. I did just that in the Triad World novels. However there is another model.

The pulps often presented explorers as a handful of adventurers who went into the frontier or into ancient places and mapped out the dangers. They fight the monsters, they mark the dangers and they come back to accolades. Now I have my issues with the pulps in both their modern and classic incarnations but the style has endured for good reasons. The real perk of this kind of pulp exploration story is in its focus on pure entertainment. It offers a chance for a larger than life personality to reshape a little part of the world for the amusement of the audience in addition to reminding us the world can be made a better place by courage and vision. That is what I hope to do with The Drownway. I hope you will join me for the ride!

If you’re curious what my writing is like there’s a large archive of it available here. If you’d like to support this endeavor the best way to do so is by picking up a copy of my book, Have Spell, Will Travel. It’s available through this handy, dandy link:

Fiction returns next week! See you then.

The Eucatastrophy of One Piece

Posted by natechen on

I try to keep my rambling about my favorite manga to a minimum around here. It could very easily be my exclusive focus if I let it and there are so many other topics I want to write about so a certain restraint is called for. Three essays on the topic in one outing is certainly more than I had planned on and two of them on a single series is certainly excessive. Yet there is something in One Piece that I have been contemplating for a while that bears examination.

Eucatastrophe is a literary term coined by JRR Tolkien to describe the moment in a story where things go suddenly and inexplicably right for the protagonist. In short, it is the opposite of a catastrophe. It was Tolkien’s stance that eucatastrophe was the highest form of fairy story just a tragedy was the highest form of drama. They exist to remind the audience of the power of providence. They serve to reward moral behavior. And, let’s face it, when done well they serve to put a smile on our face that will not soon go away. The problem comes about when they are not done well.

The eucatastrophe is a literary device that is often employed by Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piece. However it is also one of his most controversial tropes. That’s not surprising to anyone familiar with the Internet’s fascination with both trope talk and pessimism but it does bear examination. However conducting that examination is going to require an examination of several events scattered across several thousand pages of illustrated story. I don’t have time to recap all of it so if you’re not already familiar with One Piece you may feel a little lost. My apologies but it can’t be helped in this case. And, of course:

SPOILER WARNING

Oda has a terrible habit of not killing his characters. By this i don’t mean that he doesn’t put his characters in situations that would kill them. The problem is more that he puts them in situations that should kill them, then they just don’t die for no clear reason.

The most obvious example of this is the character Pell, who takes an explosive device that will supposedly level most of a city, and flies it away so no one is harmed. He is still holding it when it detonates. Yet Pell survives and returns home about a week later with nothing more than a bandage wrapped around his head.

A similar case is the butler Merry, who is stabbed through the chest five times, left on the ground overnight, and is up and walking again just days later. The butlers of One Piece are made of impressive stuff, it would seem.

It has been argued that all people in Oda’s world are of superhuman toughness as practically everyone in his story seems stronger, tougher and cooler than a normal person. However that’s not particularly satisfying either. We do see people die in One Piece. The obvious example is Nami’s adoptive mother Belle-Mere, who is executed by the pirate Arlong, but there are plenty of others. Typically they are the friends and family if main characters. This provides us insight into the nature of our cast and an emotional moment to connect them to. Oda is quite good art creating these moments.

However, after writing his story for nearly thirty years, Oda’s patterns are quite clear to anyone who goes looking for them. Deaths in One Piece exist to create emotional moments. The often cruel and arbitrary nature of death in the real world is absent from the world Oda creates. Instead deaths are clearly and deliberately calculated to evoke the strong emotional response Oda desires from his audience. In theory there is nothing wrong with that. I’ve often stated that I believe one of the goals of an author is to create an emotional response in their readership and, over time, I’ve refined that notion to include a corollary, that the best emotion to create in the audience is one in harmony with the characters in the story.

By creating moments where his characters and the audience are both moved to mourn a death Oda pursues this goal. The problem is when he reveals a death he implied took place did not actually take place it fractures this emotional resonance. The characters in the story feel relief, the weight of grief suddenly vanishing from them. The audience realizes their emotions were being manipulated. This shatters the harmony between audience and character and frequently undoes the investment the audience had in the previous emotional moment. In some cases that investment turns into actual hostility towards the creator or the story.

This brings me to the curious case of Jaguar D. Saul and many of the events surrounding him. Saul was a vital character in the history of Nico Robin, one of the main cast of One Piece. We last saw Saul frozen solid on a burning island. Before he was frozen he gave Robin a goal: to live out her life and find friends who would care for her in the place of the family she lost.

Saul was Robin’s last tie to her childhood hopes and dreams. When the audience learned of his death it contextualized one of One Piece’s most complex main characters, who started as a cold and distant antagonist and had slowly been pulled into the fold to become a beloved member of the crew. The Water Seven Saga, where we learned about Robin’s childhood and her brief but impactful relationship with Saul, is widely considered one of the best stories in One Piece. So when it was revealed that Saul was still alive the audience was disappointed, to say the least. To make matters worse, the reveal that Saul was still alive came coupled with not one but two other characters who appeared to die but, in point of fact, did not. These three case studies in “fake out” deaths are illuminating. You see, the audience had no real issue with two of them but a third has really irritated a lot of people. Most interesting is the fact that the fake death of Saul, which had the biggest emotional impact of these three false deaths, is the one the audience has accepted the most readily.

While Saul’s case is the one which prompted this essay I’m going to briefly discuss all three fake out deaths to make my point. But before that, there is one element present in all three cases that most people have cited but I’m going to dismiss by examining Saul’s case on its own. That is the issue of “justifying” the character’s survival.

Saul was presumed dead because he was “frozen solid” by a character with the power to create ice. This is not the first time we’ve seen this power in use nor is it the first time we’ve seen people survive being frozen solid in this way. In fact, Robin herself survives one such attack. When added to the fact that Saul was on the shores of a burning island it’s not unreasonable for him to thaw out in the heat then take refuge in the ocean and thus survive both freezing and burning. At least, not by the logic of One Piece. Given that Saul was also a wanted man, the fact that he never revealed his survival to the outside world but rather retreated to an isolated island where he could lay low also makes sense.

None of this is discussed when people analyze the impact of Saul’s apparent death and survival. That isn’t because the logic of his survival is flawed but rather because the logic is irrelevant. What people are really trying to grapple with is, as I have already stated, their emotional investment in the story and whether it was misplaced. I believe this is also true in the case of Bartholomew Kuma and Dr. Vegapunk, the other two characters who “died” and survived alongside Saul.

Kuma, like Robin, was introduced as an antagonist. Unlike Robin, Kuma was much harder to pin down as friend or foe (and I’m not saying Robin was easy to work out.) Over time we came to understand that Kuma, who was uniquely strong and robust, even in the One Pieceworld, was being used as part of an experimental program to create cyborgs. The project was headed by Dr. Vegapunk. Kuma submitted to the experiments in exchange for medical treatment for his daughter, Bonney, which Vegapunk also oversaw.

However, Kuma was also a wanted man and Vegapunk worked for the government. This created a certain conflict of interests.

In order to overcome that conflict the government demanded that Kuma surrender his free will and allow his consciousness to be completely eradicated, replaced with machine programming. Kuma agreed to this happily out of his love for Bonney. The scene where Kuma and Vegapunk reflect on Kuma’s life before throwing the switch that transforms him into an unfeeling machine is one of the most tragic scenes in One Piece, a series known for making it’s audience weepy. Less than a year later the audience learned that Vegapunk would probably be able to undo the modifications and restore Kuma’s thinking mind.

Of course he was willing to do this because Vegapunk had made discoveries that put him at odds with the World Government and they had ordered his execution. Eventually that execution was carried out and Vegapunk was dead. Except the most brilliant man in the world had made provisions for that, creating a clone and backing up his memories using technology the audience knew he already had.

On a spectrum of audience reactions, Vegapunk surviving his execution is the most disliked by far. Yes, it was in keeping with his character as a forward planner and an inventor but it wasn’t particularly satisfying. While Vegapunk has only been making appearances “on screen” in the story for two years or so he had quickly won the audience over. He was a sympathetic figure to Kuma and his daughter Bonney and he had a certain kind of integrity to him. His death caused a lot of consternation among the cast and the readership. The offhanded reveal that he had a cloned body ready to go just didn’t sit right, even though all the pieces were in place for it. In fact, most people saw those pieces in place and fumed about the inevitable reversing of Vegapunk’s death long before it was made official.

This is a clear case of a moment intended to create harmony between audience and character emotions instead creating dissonance. Oda has been writing One Piece for nearly thirty years and the audience knows his tricks. When we see them coming it prevents our investing in his story even when the emotional moments are fairly good in and of themselves.

On the other hand, the revivals of Kuma and especially Saul were taken very gracefully by the fanbase. The euchatastrophe that Oda offers lands much better in these two cases and I think it’s vital for anyone who wishes to include such an element to at least try to understand why.

The first factor, in my humble opinion, is time. Robin lived for twenty two years from the moment she sailed away from Saul and the burning island of Ohara to the moment she reunited with him on Elbaf. It was a long and trying time for her, full of danger and sorrow. It also gave her the opportunity to meet her closest friends and allies and revive her passion for her childhood dreams. For the audience who read One Piece, the publication history from Ohara to Elbaf spans a period of nineteen years. Nineteen years.

I read One Piece in real time over that entire nineteen year span. I occasionally wondered if, given everything we knew about how Saul supposedly died, we would ever see him again. I watched Robin and the Straw Hats struggle and suffer through all the many cares of Oda’s world. When I heard of Saul’s survival I was a bit surprised, but not terribly. Then I watched as Robin changed her hairstyle to reflect how she looked as a child and got ready to meet Saul again. And eventually, when they met again, for the first time in decades, I was struck by a sudden and surprising sense of relief, as if something I didn’t even know I had been waiting for had inexplicably come to pass.

The moment had been building so gradually I didn’t even realize I had wanted it until it was already past.

The second factor is connection. Saul was a character with a big impact in spite of very little narrative presence. However Bartholomew Kuma has been a mover and a shaker in One Piece for a very long time, appearing in the story for the first time almost twenty three years ago in mid-2002, and having numerous contacts with the Straw Hats over the course of the story. His daughter Bonney appeared six years later, although we wouldn’t know they were related for another decade. We’ve seen Kuma with free will and without it and he has been an antagonist and surprising ally to the Straw Hats over the years.

While Kuma’s actions were often mysterious and his transformation into a machine with no human will was only fully explained in 2023, more than two decades after his introduction, we already knew all we needed to about him through the way other characters acted towards him. The villains of the tale were never fully comfortable with Kuma, even after replacing his mind with a machine, and the love and devotion of Kuma’s friends and daughter spoke volumes about him. That these factors would eventually merge to overcome mere mechanical forces and restore his humanity just makes sense. We’ve seen the tragedy Kuma’s family and friends suffered when they though he was lost. We also get several small moments where Bonney sits quietly with her father, trusting that the man she loves is still in there somewhere, no matter how machine like he behaves at the moment. These moments of connection to Kuma made it much easier to draw him back into the story. They build the emotional harmony between the characters and the audience and make it clear that what we felt when we saw Kuma “die” is not being undone. Rather, that emotional payoff is now the investment in another, even greater moment of resolution.

The third factor is providence. Eucatastrophe is inherently providential, a reaffirmation of what is good and worthwhile in the human condition as stronger than mere fate or circumstance. That Saul fought an ice man on a burning island and was frozen solid in the one place where circumstance would allow him to survive was providential. That the lonely child Kuma would meet and form a family willing to follow him into the worst places on earth and love him even when all his warmth and kindness were gone is nothing short of providential. That added element, the feeling that you can’t quite earn these moments of grace, is ultimately what makes them work. Sometimes the world is just arbitrary and capricious enough that you lose what you love most. Sometimes its providential enough that you get it all back.

Ultimately, I think it’s these three factors that make the difference between “fake” deaths like Saul and Kuma and “fake out” deaths like Vegapunk’s. Vegapunk had no providence in his revival, just his own scientific prowess, he had little connection to other characters outside his role as the most brilliant man in the world (except Kizaru, a subject way outside of the scope for today’s essay) and he hadn’t been around in the story long enough for the sudden reversals in his fate to feel organic.

However there is one other thing to keep in mind if you set out to write a eucatastrophy. The trope is, in and of itself, an idea that revolves around the concept that the universe is created and maintained by a loving and graceful God that desires to know and be known. It assumes that the universe we live in wants us to feel and reciprocate God’s love. Thus, if you seek to write eucatastrophy you are writing a story that mimics that part of the universe in your story – and that notion about the universe has never been widely accepted. It’s very clear, from his persistence in writing One Piece in the way he does, that Oda has simply made his peace with the way the audience reacts to his eucatastrophies. He wants to write them, so he has poured more time and skill into making them the best they can be. If you or I wish to write euchatastrophy, I suggest we make the same peace with whatever response we may get.

When to Press the Button

Posted by natechen on

Have Spell, Will Travel is now published. (If you’re interested in picking up a copy just scroll down and follow the Amazon link at the end of this post.) So what are my thoughts on finally getting a book out? It’s hard to summarize them but I’ll do my best.

It all could have gone a lot faster.

I was nervous about having too many pieces of the process in motion at once, a hesitation I think is perfectly understandable. So I approached launching this book in very piecemeal fashion. I ordered a cover. I got beta readers. I went through the somewhat labor intensive process of running down a program that could make .epub files and creating my own. Then I discovered half the process could have been automated.

In short, I learned a lot that I won’t have to relearn the next time I do this. But the biggest thing I learned is that I really could juggle a lot more of this process at once if I’d put my mind to it. Now, editing and formatting Have Spell, Will Travel was not the only plate I was spinning. This blog was also a part of my creative endeavors and does demand a reasonable chunk of my time, in addition to that thing known as a day job. However the climb to publishing looked a lot more intimidating beforehand. Now that I have crossed the summit I’m not so sure what it was that I was really nervous about.

When I do this again I think I’ll be able to get through it much faster. Commissioning artwork is a fairly painless process, except for the financial aspect of it, and while it does require a good idea of what you want before you start, if you have that most of the work is the artist’s share. Most artists will need a month to six weeks to return you commission, unless something goes off the rails. The artist for Have Spell, Will Travel‘s cover goes by the handle Neutronboar and he works for a reasonable rate. I thoroughly enjoyed working with him.

I think the biggest mistake I made in timing everything was in choosing to wait to begin assembling my revised document until I had the interior art available. That was a process I think I could have done while the artist was at work. Yes, I would have had to go through and add in the interstitial art at a later point but there are ways to make that go much faster than I had originally anticipated.

In order to convert my text document to an .epub file I used a freeware program called Calibre. It is free, which means its UI isn’t the most intuitive and the software itself is not terribly optimized but it does what it needs to do and does it quite well. It can load text files with embedded graphics and turn them into preliminary files with no fuss.

Calibre will also recognize your page breaks and can turn them into a Table of Contents for you. This means that adding page breaks is the easiest way to format your book, something I did not originally appreciate. A few hiccups in the process occurred before I realized that. There is also the option to fill your Table of Contents from the first line of each new block of text, which saves a good deal of time putting that together. Again, I did not discover this option until I had already gone through three or four revisions of the document, filling out the ToC manually. More time lost. Another mistake I hope not to make again.

I think in the future I will put together a list of places where art and page breaks need to go as a separate file. That list will then let me Ctrl+F and search the master document to immediately find the relevant spots. My first formatting pass through Have Spell, Will Travel I just scrolled through the document and added features as needed. It worked well enough but I did miss a few spots on the first pass. And once again, it took up more time than needed.

The real rub to all this is, I’m not sure reading my explanation of the errors I made and how I intend to avoid them will make sense to someone who hasn’t gone through the process yet. The process of putting together an ebook and getting it to market is full of fidgety details. Most of them I never considered until I realized I’d overlooked them. I’ve read several other people discuss their journeys to releasing their first book and I didn’t have enough context from it to understand about 80% of what I’d read. However there was one thing I heard that I did manage to apply.

At some point you have to publish the book. All through this process I continued to find minor tweaks that needed to be made and I received a lot of feedback about story direction, balance, themes and the like. Most of it I implemented as quickly as I could. However some of it, while meaningful and fair, was impossible to make use of without significantly rewriting some chapters. I gave it considerable thought then decided that no, I did not want to make the time commitment needed to revise the chapters to that extent. The time had come to publish.

There is undoubtedly some better version of Have Spell, Will Travel out there, where the pacing is tighter, the dialog is snappier, the balance of exposition and plot advancement reaches Thanos-level perfection. Searching for that version of the book would be foolish. Many would say this is because the book could very well never get published – which is not wrong – but that is ultimately not why I chose to go forward.

Time is it’s own currency and, once spent, it cannot be refunded. While quality is a powerful factor in art it is not the only factor by any stretch of the imagination. Availability is almost as important. Audiences cannot discover what is not available to them. However, even if it is available audiences may take a long time to discover your story and it’s wise of you to give them as much time to find you as you can without sacrificing other factors. Or, at least, sacrificing them as little as possible. Wringing every last drop of quality out of a manuscript is not always worth the sacrifice of time you take away from your audience. Ultimately that is what drove me to press the button and publish the book.

And that is a brief overview of everything I learned while publishing Have Spell, Will Travel. Hopefully it was of interest to you, even if you’re not looking to publish anything on your own any time soon. If you’re interested in picking up your very own copy of Have Spell, Will Travel you can find it over on Amazon by clicking this handy link:

The Pulp Pacing Problem

Posted by natechen on

The pulps were once an incredibly popular medium of entertainment known for publishing stories printed on inexpensive, leftover paper at incredibly cheap prices. These could be formatted as books but were just as often magazines collecting short stories or sometimes serializing novels on a monthly basis. Because there were so many magazines with so many stories they tended towards two major characteristics. The stories were experimental and they were short.

By experimental I mean they hit on any and every genre they could imagine and created a couple new ones along the way. By short I mean shorter than a similar story would be today.

Pulps are often considered to be the peak of fast paced storytelling, quickly setting up a character, situation and stakes and resolving the situation in a few thousand words. Pulp novels rarely last longer than 80,000 words and frequently got down to 50,000. By contrast, the modern novel is usually much longer, running around 75,000 words and up. Most acquisition editors today prefer longer manuscripts to shorter ones.

There is a fair argument to be made that the shortest story that says all it needs to say, and no more, is the ideal. From this point of view long novels are not ideal. In point of fact there are a lot of modern writers who admire the pulp era and strive to recapture some of the brevity and verve of that unique time in their own writing. Brevity being the soul of wit, I wish them the best. However, I think that trying to write in a style from a century ago for the modern reader is a bit of a mistake. After all, the ideal length of a story is the length that says all it needs to say.

The question is, how much do we need to say? Does it change from one era to the next?

This is a topic none of the pulp aficionados stop to examine so let us do so for just a moment or two. At the dawn of the twentieth century the world was a much different place. There were no high speed, intercontinental communications, for example, and schools of pedagogy tended to agree on an established set of classic literature and preferred interpretation. In short, cultures were more homogeneous and shared many cultural touchstones. The importance of this cannot be understated.

Let me reframe this using an example from my experience partaking in Japanese entertainment. There is a form of address in Japanese known as “keigo” which creates a structure of social relationships between speakers. There are loose equivalents for some keigo terms in English. The -san suffix could be thought of as a gender neutral version of a respectful “Mr.” or “Mrs.” while the term sensei refers to a person of learning and is often used for a teacher or a doctor.

There are also many keigo terms which don’t translate well. A senpai is someone who has proceeded you. In what have they proceeded you? It could be anything. A senpai could be an upperclassman, a colleague with seniority in the workplace or just another person with the same hobby who’s been involved with it longer.

A kohai is the opposite of a senpai, someone who came after you. The culture of Japan places a lot of importance on the relationship between senpai and kohai, loading implied duties of respect, care and even affection behind these two words. This cultural weight cannot be directly translated into an English word and often results in one of two things. Either the words will be left as-is, with footnotes or endnotes explaining their meaning and implications, or clunky and illfitting equivalents will be forced into the dialog. Neither one fully encapsulates the ideas the words imply.

All this from just two words in the keigo system, which is full of dozens or hundreds of such terms from different time periods and dialects. It’s a lot to take in for new readers. Both methods of adapting keigo come with considerable drawbacks but the concepts cannot be omitted from the story or the characters will not make sense. This is to be expected from a work written in another country.

They say the past is a foreign country as well.

As I mentioned before, the pulp writers were drawing on shared traditions, shared culture and shared education. If they mentioned Achilles, for example, we could be reasonably sure they were all drawing from the same source. The Iliad was still in on most secondary education reading lists. Just as importantly, there were very few other interpretations of the character to muddle the meaning and significance of his name.

Furthermore, pulps were primarily publishing to people in their immediate area. Books rarely went overseas due to the expense of shipping them, just for starters, but also due to frequent language and legal barriers it tended to be impractical. In the modern era, these obstacles no longer exist. Everything from distribution to copyright law is much simpler and that has made media audiences much broader and yet much narrower. Past audiences were quite restricted in what media they could afford and access. By necessity those audiences engaged with a much broader array of media and were much less picky about its genres and quality.

Now, when an audience can easily access media from anywhere in the world, new problems arise. You can no longer be sure what cultural context your audience comes from. If they find themselves unable to parse your prose there is a real possibility they will simply set aside what you have to offer and move on to something else. Dense prose full of allusion that doesn’t make sense or requires research to understand rarely holds attention now. Audiences are looking for something they can relate to what they know and yet anticipating what they know is harder than ever.

Even if your goal is to tell your story in the fewest words possible you must still face the reality that more words are needed to explain yourself now than in the past.

Added to these hurdles is the reality of modern day mediums. Brevity may be the soul of wit but prose is ill suited to the modern conception of brevity. The shortest, most information dense communication mediums in the modern era are all transmitted via the Internet and facilitated by companies like Twitter/X, TikTok and YouTube. They are multimedia and visual as much as verbal. Audiences craving the brief and concise turn to these places for their media fix. Rather than compete along the lines of brevity most successful prose opts for depth, the one angle of communication where it remains unrivaled. By exploring ideas as thoroughly and deeply as possible prose can still compete for audiences when up against these much more concise, information dense mediums.

It’s all well and good to admire punchy, fast paced storytelling. Again, I have no beef with the pulp fans who want to explore that style of writing in their own work and come back to that kind of writing over and over again. However I am not one of those writers who believes we are on the cusp of another golden age of pulp prose. The media and cultural environment just doesn’t suit it. Audiences who want that kind of story can get it many other places in forms that capitalize on the strengths of pulp far better than the written word. I believe we are now in the era of deep prose, and that is the style of writing I strive to achieve. Perhaps your experience is different, and if so please let me know. In the mean time, it’s probably time I started getting ready for my next project…

In the mean time, if you’re interested in supporting my work check out my previous project give a look at Have Spell, Will Travel, my weird western anthology on sale on Amazon! Give it a look using this handy link:

One Piece of the Puzzle

Posted by natechen on

“One Piece Fan Letter” was a special episode of the One Piece anime series, released after episode 1122 but not counted as one of the numbered episodes. It is a fascinating and touching love letter to the series itself, from fans who have worked their way into positions where they can work on the show they love. This could be a disastrous concept. Fans writing themselves into stories they love has such a bad track record that one of the best known examples of bad writing, Mary Sue, was created as a satire of the practice. (Ironically, Mary Sue succeeds in this satire, which makes her story an example of good writing.)

As an artistic achievement “One Piece Fan Letter” is remarkable. The animation is beautiful, the story skillfully weaves a number of narratives from the book Straw Hat Stories and the characters grow to be memorable and lovable in a very brief window of time. However, I’m not here to break down the approaches and techniques used by directors Megumi Ishitani and Nanami Michibata and their teams. I’m not really the best person to tackle that. I’m pretty out of touch with the anime, its production and it’s history. However it does achieve something I find very impressive. The narrative creates several characters that feel like members of the audience who have ascended into the story, while avoiding the many pitfalls satirized by Mary Sue.

It’s difficult to discuss if you haven’t seen the episode and it’s about 25 minutes long so if you have the time, I’d recommend checking it out. It may not make a huge amount of sense if you’re not familiar with One Piece in some form or another, at least up to the Return to Sabaody Archipelago, but many of the broad strokes are clear even if you’re a novice. You can find it for free here:

https://www.crunchyroll.com/watch/G14UVQ5D5/one-piece-fan-letter

Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s start with the element I find the most interesting. None of the new characters in “Fan Letter” have names. The closest is the Marine captain called the Benevolent King of the Waves, who is known by a very grandiose epitaph. However the rest of the characters are known by their family or profession. The book seller, the wholesaler’s daughter, the green grocer’s boys. In one sense these people exist to be broad archetypes, entities that don’t even need names, because they represent the normal people in a world of pirates. Most normal people never make a name for themselves in any world. That goes double in a world as chaotic and cutthroat as one in the midst of a Golden Age of Piracy.

At the same time, a forgettable, nameless kind of character with a murky background is typical of a self insert protagonist. It could be a marker of lazy writing. But in practice, in “One Piece Fan Letter,” it is an invitation to the audience. These characters are like us, looking up towards the nearly mythical pirates of One Piece from their mundane, dreary lives and dreaming of adventure.

However the closest they can get is a distant admiration.

That brings me to the second element I find interesting, namely the separation between the protagonists of “Fan Letter” and the protagonists of One Piece as a whole. While all the episode’s new characters, including The Benevolent King of the Waves, catch at least a glimpse of the Straw Hat they admire, there is always a degree of remoteness to it.

The Benevolent King finds the tiny Chopper adorable. Yet the King is also a Marine officer with a duty to arrest pirates so he can’t give too much thought or deference to the Straw Hat’s mascot character. Several characters debate the world’s strongest swordsman, unaware that Zorro, one of the contenders, is in the bar with them. The elder green grocer boy admires Monkey D. Luffy. Not because he’s a pirate or even because Luffy did him a favor once. Rather, we see how Luffy’s desperate struggle to save his brother from execution gave the green grocer’s son the extra measure of inspiration needed to drag his own brother out of danger during the Paramount War. They were in the same place but their paths barely crossed for more than a second.

These are not direct connections. These are characters who see the Straw Hat Pirates from a distance and glean a little relief from mundanity or inspiration for the day by admiring them. There is no one this is more true for than the wholesaler’s daughter. When the Paramount War turned her world upside down she saw it as nothing more than a nuisance. In the years since Gold Rogers called the adventurous to the seas many pirates have sailed through her home, flexing their muscles and pushing people around on their quest for legendary treasure. The Paramount War was a particularly bad brush with the world of piracy but Sabaody Archipelago had seen many similar disruptions before and would doubtless see just as many after. The cynical child clearly believed there was nothing she could do about that.

Except one of the pirates responsible for that brush with piracy was Nami. Navigator for the Straw Hat Pirates, a woman with no particular powers beyond her sense for the weather, Nami held her own on that crew through her wits and charm. Over time, the wholesaler’s daughter convinced herself that if Nami could thrive in a world of power and violence so could she. And in the confines of this one brief story, she does just that.

The wholesaler’s daughter is one of the characters that changed the most from Straw Hat Stories to “One Piece Fan Letter” in that there was no such character in the book. The comparable character in Straw Hat Stories was, in fact, a man who admired Nami for… other reasons. This girl is, in my opinion, what really solidifies “Fan Letter” as a story about a self insert characters.

See, Ishitani and Michibata are two women who have had to make their way through the world of entertainment. It’s a world where the powerful often take advantage of the weak. They’ve had to make their way by wit and charm, and they clearly have a great admiration for Nami, who has done the same in a world much the same. They invite us along on an adventure to try and reach the characters that have inspired us over the years. It turns out those characters were much closer to us than we thought. At the same time, there is a gulf between us and them that cannot ever really be bridged, no matter how sincere our admiration or how meaningful the impact their stories had on us.

Stories are real, in a sense, but we cannot cross into them.

Yet we can look into them. If we are very, very lucky we can ever create a part of them. What Ishitani and Michibata chose to do with that rare, precious opportunity was to create a place for all of us to stand and admire those stories from a point just a little bit closer. Through the eyes of the wholesaler’s daughter. The green grocer’s boys. The book seller and the bar patrons and the Benevolent King of the Waves. Together share that admiration with one another for a few magical minutes. That was their love letter to the fans and I am very grateful for it.

I haven’t been fortunate enough to create a part of a cultural touchstone like One Piece but I have created a few stories of my own! If you’d like to support my work the simplest way to do so is to pick up my book Have Spell, Will Travel, available in ebook from Amazon today!

A Slow Thaw

Posted by natechen on

I admit that the Cameron Winter mysteries fill me with an odd sense of delight.

To explain that I feel I have to backpedal a bit to when I first read Andrew Klavan’s The Great Good Thing, a memoir of how he came to love writing, literature and eventually Christ. For a person who is fond of all three of those things, Klavan’s memoirs were fascinating reading. However after reading The Great Good Thing and listening to a few of his podcasts I thought I would try one of his novels out and bought a book titled Werewolf Cop.

Perhaps I should add a disclaimer.

In his nonfiction prose and his podcasting Klavan is witty, wry and humorous, beginning most of his shows with a two or three minute satire segment and inviting his audience to laugh with him through the fall of the Republic. I was aware that Klavan’s fiction was focused on gritty tales of crime. However I think I can be forgiven if my expectations for a book titled Werewolf Cop were slightly colored by how Klavan speaks when addressing his audience directly.

Klavan’s stories are fascinated with the darkest parts of human nature. They are also wrapped up in the question of how we, as people, must fight back against that darkness. However, in order to properly ask that question he first has to take us deep into the worst parts of our nature to confront who we really are when all the lies we tell us about how nice and kind we are get stripped away. We must know the enemy before we can fight it.

On my first reading of Werewolf Cop I was surprised by how dark the novel was, how little the surface level ridiculousness of the title bled through into the narrative and how closely tied to the existing culture the overall plot was. It wasn’t a bad book, in concept, but it lacked something in the execution. The protagonist was an interesting character but his ability to grapple with the evil of his situation seemed almost… off kilter. The darkness of the situation felt like it should have had a much bigger impact on him, on his family and on his life than we really got from the story. The impact of such a thing felt like it should have extended much further.

All this brings me back to Cameron Winter.

By structuring the series as a slow unfolding of Cameron’s past in conjunction with a series of very depraved crimes Winter must unravel in the present Klavan accomplishes two things. He allows Cameron to grapple with the present from a position of semi-detachment. At the same time he justifies Cameron’s distant attitude by telling us about Cameron’s past and the many deep marks it has already left on him. Klavan weaves the past and present together with great expertise. Stories play out over two time periods with the events in each period expounding upon those in the other.

In my review of the previous book in the series, The House of Love and Death, I mentioned that I thought Cam was at a turning point. After reading A Woman Underground I feel both vindicated and surprised. It is, indeed, a turning point in Cameron’s life but not quite the one that I was expecting. At the end of Love and Death Cameron was on the cusp of forming a healthy relationship with a woman for the first time in a long time. However at the opening of A Woman Underground we learn he hasn’t contacted Gwendolyn Lord, the woman in question, for over five months. He isn’t quite ready to take that step yet.

Then, for the first time in the series, Klavan allows a character from Cameron’s past to enter his life in the present of their own volition. Charlotte, the girl who is the source of half of Cameron’s neurosis, makes a brief and fleeting effort to contact him and throws everything in his life out of whack. The result is a slow rolling disaster that forces Cameron to finally face and resolve a small part of the misfortune that has twisted him into such knots for most of his life.

As usual, Klavan ties his plots of hard-hearted and selfish men and women with threads of modern day events. This is done more to create a backdrop for the story than for any political commentary, which I appreciate. Fans of recurring characters like the Recruiter or Stan-Stan will not be disappointed either. However the most controversial element of this story will probably be Charlotte herself.

By exhuming, staking and burying a ghost of his past Cameron has made a definitive step forward in his character arc, fundamentally changing the dynamic between himself and the rest of the cast he works with. Charlotte, who’s shadow defined most of the character work in the first four books of the series, is going to be much less of an element going forward. Some readers, particularly those enamored of the predictable formula of television, may dislike that. I am optimistic that it signals we are going to go even deeper into the element that made the series appeal to me in the first place: Cameron’s past and how it shapes his present.

There is also a meta commentary in this story on the nature of story itself, something most authors can’t help but slip into their work at some point or another. Both Cameron and Margaret, his therapist, comment on the hand of a storyteller at work in Cam’s life. It’s the first hint of faith we see from the stubbornly agnostic protagonist and a bit of a tongue in cheek fun from Klavan himself. More than that, there is an interesting subplot early in the story that hinges on an author. The use of fiction to push an agenda and reframe a story is an interesting twist. Normally this would be the plot element where an author makes their apologia for playing god but Klavan chooses to refrain from this particular cliché. Instead, that kind of editorializing author is left to a rather ignoble fate.

As an author myself I can agree with that message but as a reader it did feel a little intrusive. Fortunately this is not enough of a major plot thread to create a negative impact on an otherwise excellent story. While others may come away with a different opinion I implore you not to let doubts about such a storyline keep you from enjoying a well told tale. As usual, I look forward to reviewing Klavan’s next work, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Hopefully it will come soon.

Speaking of books, I am proud to announce the release of my first book! It compiles eight stories of high adventure in a West that never was. Follow Roy Harper as he makes a living as a magic wielding mercenary, making the West a better one bounty at a time. Get it here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNP7DC82

AI – Two Reasons for Optimism

Posted by natechen on

There’s been a lot of hand wringing around the potential innovation and potential hazards of a thing called “AI.” There have been many debates about ethics and implications. The technology could force a significant shift in the way we look at intellectual work and intellectual property and I regret to inform you that any attempt to prevent it’s development will inevitably be worse for humanity than allowing it. (Don’t believe me? Look into why Roman technology stagnated.)

What I don’t want to do today is contribute to that debate. I am more interested in some things I’ve seen in AI that are actually signs for optimism about the way we will react to the technology. This is not to disregard the shortcomings and hazards AI may pose. But I am a creator first and foremost. We survive by making things that emphasize the good and beneficial aspects of our tools rather than by constantly dwelling on all the shortcomings. Hazards are things to be avoided and drawbacks things to be compensated for. The real question is what will we get if we avoid and compensate our way to a successful AI creative environment?

Well, the first thing is we will get a much more verbal society. Ever since Apple Computers introduced the first graphical user interface (technically inspired by Xerox, I believe, but still usually credited to Apple) electronics have been moving us towards a visual culture. Look at any smartphone screen and you can see the upshot of this. Lots of pictures, very few words. However the things we call AI are large language models (LLMs) developing algorithmic prediction based on a neural networking framework – a bunch of fancy terms meaning they read the Internet and form an idea of how the words connect to each other. That means in order to get an output from the LLM you must input words. You cannot press buttons with pictures on them. You cannot draw something.

You. Must. Use. Words.

This is very different from the way using electronics have been going for the last twenty to thirty years. Nothing has dealt more damage to the modern person’s verbal skills than how little they are needed to use modern tools. Don’t get me wrong, the visual communication employed in modern user interfaces is quite impressive. Given the international market for much of these products its also very practical. However it has also reduced the interest in and power of verbal communication in almost every aspect of society. An AI built on an LLM pushes the pendulum back in the other direction by forcing prospective users to interact with it verbally. For the writer and the storyteller that is a positive development.

Of course, AI requires a very idiosyncratic kind of verbal communication right now and that’s less than ideal but I will take what I can get.

That brings me to the next thing about AI that gives me cause for optimism and that is the need for framing. If you have used some kind of online form in the last five years or so you may have been asked to find all of the stop lights or buses in a picture before you can submit it. The primary purpose of this exercise is to prevent automated programs from flooding the form with submissions. The bots that fill out these forms cannot understand the pictures so they fail this simple test.

The secondary purpose of this exercise is to create AI that can understand the pictures.

One of the things no AI can do is frame an object. When the AI program looks at that picture all it sees is a bunch of pixels arranged in a grid. It has no way to tie specific groups of those pixels to a concept like a bus or a stoplight because buses and stoplights are arbitrary concepts invented by humans. The AI has to be taught the concept to understand it. The idea must be “framed” for the AI by human beings who already grasp it.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to learn new concepts and apply them to the world around them based on their pattern recognition skills. It is this ability to “frame” issues that gives rise to creativity, language and communication. Even if an AI can be taught the very broad, basic aspects of something like the law or medicine it still will not grasp the intricacies of a given situation in its specifics. Working out these intricacies and communicating them back to an AI is going to be a necessary skill going forward. This, in turn, will demand people develop situational awareness and communication skills, things which technology has so far driven people away from, rather than towards.

This emphasis will, once again, push people to develop verbal skills which our society has largely allowed to atrophy over the last thirty years or so. In this environment there will be plenty of opportunities for people with a strong command of language to thrive. Better yet, it may change cultural tastes. Visual art is all well and good, don’t get me wrong. I love to draw as much as I love to write. However there hasn’t been as much taste for verbal craftsmanship as there has for visual craftsmanship in my lifetime and if the rise of LLM AI pushes our culture towards verbal excellence again I think it would be a nice development.

I am not saying these things are guaranteed. Nor am I in any way implying that AI will not cause our culture considerable difficulties as it grows towards its full potential. The printing press and the Internet did those things as well. However I do see some reasons to embrace this shift in technology not just for its ability to boost dreary things like efficiency and productivity but also for its ability to push our culture towards aspects that have long been ignored by most people – the communication of ideas through verbal excellence. It is by no means guaranteed but one can hope.

The Empire of Southern California

Posted by natechen on

Most artists are obsessed with their craft, thinking about it constantly and drawing strange connections between disparate points of data to arrive at new conclusions. I am no exception to this rule. A long term study of the art of storytelling has led me to an interesting conclusion – there is more to the strange distortions that have felt through American culture than just a loss of skill or a growth of a particular ideology.

In some ways this was not a huge revelation to me. While there are real signs that ideology has taken over vast swaths of the people who produce most of America’s modern stories, that cannot explain things on its own. Sure, overpowering ideology creates blinders that get in the way of storytelling. It hampers the development of key storytelling skills and distorts the sense of truth and beauty that all the best art relies on.

Ideology is a very limited thing. In and of itself it creates a framework for viewing the world and if that framework is detached from what makes a good story that’s an issue. But if the ideology has good grounding in truth then steeping in that ideology can actually be beneficial. Ideologically driven stories can also succeed if they are tempered by other contributions from people with less ideological commitment, or at least equally significant commitment to artistic merit. So long as the ideology has a grasp on the true and beautiful there is hope for good art to come from it. So I have always found the ideology excuse for modernity’s bad art insufficient to explain the situation. That’s not to say the ideology driving much of modernity’s stories is good, I don’t think it is, I just don’t feel that alone explains the issue. That leaves lack of skill as a possible reason for bad stories.

It is harder to pinpoint what exactly could cause an artistic community’s skill to slip away and thus harder to tell whether or not it has happened at all. Many once great creators like Ridley Scott or James Cameron have produced films that fall far short of their best efforts. Is that because they have aged, as we all must? Or is some other factor at work? It’s hard too tell in an objective, testable way. The creation of art is not a scientific process, nor are the intricacies of creating it as measured and precise as science demands. I have only my intuition and a handful of data points to work from.

However over the last few months I’ve started to wonder if there might be a third explanation I’ve overlooked. What if modern storytellers are just too insular?

Indulge me in a brief digression. One of the greatest English language authors to ever live was a Regency era British woman named Jane Austen. All six of her novels were about the lives of minor, upper class British women juggling their social standing, family obligation and personal ambitions. They are wonderful studies of character and human nature. Like all art they grasp very true ideas and present them to the audience in fascinating ways. They also come from a very specific historical and cultural context.

If a Jane Austen novel were presented to the people of the British Raj or West Indies who lived at the time they were published there is a good chance they would not find it engaging or entertaining. While the basic character archetypes of, say, Pride and Prejudice are universal to the human experience the situations those characters find themselves in are very specific. That very specificity would make the entertainment provided by the narrative harder to receive for those unfamiliar with British life. Even those living in a theoretically British culture. There is just no point of cultural connection between the far flung cultures of the Empire and the culture of Jane Austen.

The purpose of this rather lengthy analogy is to undergird my theory on why so much of modern storytelling (and art in general) fails to resonate with so many people. Most modern stories, particularly in America, are seen through the filter of a small group of people in Southern California. Yes, publishing houses are mostly headquartered in New York but few Americans read stories anymore so, for the purpose of a broad discussion, publishers are sadly irrelevant. The rest of America’s modern storytellers are in Hollywood and the gaming industry. Even if these industries are not headquartered in SoCal the people who write for them come out of schools thought and schools of education that are exclusively focused on the Hollywood frame of mind.

The reason SoCal is important here is that it has a very unusual culture compared to the rest of America. It is demographically diverse, urban, childless, full of people who have spent a large chunk of their lives in “higher education” and share an extremely permissive attitude to sex. This culture is foreign to the rest of the nation. Perhaps more foreign to the majority of other Americans than British Regency culture would have been to the Indian and Caribbean cultures they ruled over.

The people of SoCal create stories steeped in their own, insular values and seem shocked when the rest of the world find these stories inaccessible to them. They are much like the oft depicted, out of touch British visitor to some far flung Imperial holding who doesn’t understand why everyone looks different, speaks oddly and eats with their hands. I have come to this conclusion lately specifically based on events around the gaming industry. For the sake of being thorough, some examples:

The game Black Myth: Wukong was criticized for lacking “representation” for black and Latino characters even though the game is based on Chinese myth. This demonstrates that the resident of Imperial SoCal cannot conceive of any culture being represented that doesn’t have the ethnic make up of the world right outside their widow. The point of the game was to represent ancient China, not modern California, so the American storytellers were scandalized.

The game Dragon Age: The Veilguard features an entire storyline about a character’s pronouns. This is a bit of linguistic drudgery born of too much useless college education, the kind of thing so detached from reality only the ultra wealthy in the entertainment and tech sectors really pay attention to it. The audience found it tedious and stupid yet Imperial SoCal cannot understand why no one cares about it.

The game Dustborn features entire mechanics built around shaming and verbally abusing other people to defeat them in “combat” using the social standards of South California’s Empire. The results range from sad to unbearably cringe inducing. The game flopped horribly. Yet the creators insist the basic system is both interesting and narratively insightful.

Audiences do not connect with the stories or critiques above. They are based in a context we do not take part of and don’t really want to understand. Modern storytellers don’t seem to understand that because they are so deeply embedded in their own insular culture. Does it explain why they struggle to create anything that resonates with the rest of the world? It could.

How is the problem to be solved? That’s harder to say. But with the problem diagnosed we are one step closer to that goal. Til next time, friends.