TKO Creations

Hello.  It’s community enemy #1 again.  Careful with the tomatoes, they stain the soapbox terribly.

The reader base of Exiern is a very varied group, perhaps much more so now than ever since I muddied up the perfectly decent waters and started bringing in new folks to the party.  There’s a old hymn that goes, “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.”  But how exactly do you do that, especially when the old friends will inherently feel slighted the moment the environment that at one time completely catered to them no longer does?  How do you dull that feeling of neglect or betrayal?

There was a fairly sizable readership to begin with, and what they liked wasn’t exactly a secret; they liked the fractured fairy tale, the aping on contemporary culture and fantasy tropes, the chuckles and the gags, and yes, they liked the fanservice (on both sides, though the ladies didn’t get nearly as much as the guy readers did).  They liked the theories they had spent years developing and sharing with other readers.

Then here I traipse in, and change the feel; exploring the serious, dramatic elements that were occasionally waved at, but not deeply delved (if not removed entirely).  I completely invalidate all the mental exercizes and experiments that readers had devoted to with something that is admittedly a more “simple” explanation that doesn’t seem to really do the character justice (though I would disagree with the benefit of knowing how the story will play out).  The gags, at one time prevalent, are now like the werewolf; showing up once a full moon.

With the changes came a different group of people who found the nudity as nothing more than click-fodder; who think a dragon taking a cleavage nap is a crude, base attempt at humor, unfit for the more serious tone.  They wonder why I would cater to such a group of blatant perverts rather than the true thrust of a dramatic story.

Well, the answer to that is two fold:

1) I don’t want to COMPLETELY discard everything that Exiern once was, but at the same time expand what has been under the surface.  I want to meet difficult, uncomfortable themes more head on, yes… but at the same time remind everyone there IS a more lighthearted and silly element to the world (even if I don’t do so as much as some would like).  Make new friends yet keep the old and all that.

2) I am more a Realist period writer than anything (though I won’t deny Modernist and Romantic influences).  My view of realist literature is that it should reflect something about well… the real world, even in a fantasy setting.  That means a world where peoples lives have a little bit of drama, a little bit of tragedy, a little bit of romance, happiness and sadness, love and loss, and yes… even a little bit of crazy comedy and laughs.

So just as I don’t apologize for giving Typhan-Knee a dark and perhaps despicable history (the reason of which I hope will serve to give merit to the whole character arc), I’m not going to apologize for a napping dragon finding a pair of amazing pillows to nestle in.  It’s all a part of the world, and it all belongs.

Thank you for your time.

Recently on Exiern, I starting pulling the threads together on a story line that my predecessor Drowemos started early in the strip’s development.  Tiffany (Typhon-Knee’s) sexuality and preference was frequently hinted at, toyed with, teased, and skirted around.  At this point, it’s now clear, and I’m ready to discuss it in more detail.

From the beginning, my interpretation of Tiffany’s actions was of a repressed homosexual in denial.  I never liked the idea of Faden’s “curse” changing Tiffany in any fundamentally mental or emotional way.  This is labeled as a “cop out” by some.  To be honest, I felt the “cop out” was to alter her mind along with her body. To me, that makes the change too neat; too clean.  The curse then becomes a clean break from what Tiffany was and what she now is.

The thrust of this “Wild North” storyline is to pressure Tiffany into accepting what changed and what didn’t, forcing her to confront her past so that she can move forward with her life.  It doesn’t entirely resolve the issues she has with her identity (in fact, I could argue the disconnect between her and her body is worse than it was), but it’s the first of many steps Tiffany will make in coming to terms with her place between two cultures, two ways of life, and where her life goes from here.  The events that led to her exile had haunted her, and the guilt is still building.  This is just the beginning of her resolution.

Does that mean there weren’t other valid interpretations?  No; of course there was.  There’s no doubt many more complex and interesting roads that could have been taken.  But to me, her sexuality and/or her gender identity is not the twist in this tale.  That she wasn’t “normal” in some fashion was rather obvious.  This “reveal” is the context for the real “twist” that’s coming next week.  Remember those recollections into the death of Raviner-Behr and the boy’s exile?  This reveal is what pushes Tiffany to finally set the record straight on what she saw that fateful day.

The reveal is for the sake of the story; the story is not for the sake of the reveal.

I do apologize if this element of the story disappoints some of you.  I apologize if the part of the story that most engaged you was not the primary motivation for the story I am trying to tell.  I can only hope that you do find that story to at least dampen that disappointment.

Thank you for listening; and thank you all for reading.

Here’s something really interesting, and for a moment I got myself wondering, “Am I a hypocrite?”

Guild Wars 2 is a game that I spend maybe an hour or two a day playing.  I’ve mentioned it occasionally on this blog, but by and large have tried to avoid critiquing the writing staff too much.

But I rather hit my limit when trying to discuss the character that is Scarlet Briar.

For a better part of roughly six months, GW2 players have dealt with a really slow moving set-up (or at least I presume it’s a set-up) for the motivations of this character.  It’s a consequence of their two-week “Living Story” updates and not wanting to dump so much content that casual players get left behind.  Nonetheless, this REALLY long slog has been taking its toll on an increasingly larger segment of the player base that the forums are beginning to sound like a Monty Python Segment.

Get on with it!

And honestly, at this point, I’ve joined those masses.  I mean, I get what Arena.net is trying to do… they’re trying to get us thinking, speculating, then “wow” us when all the pieces fall into place.  But it’s not working.  There’s not enough meat every two weeks to keep people interested.

And that’s where I kinda froze up.

Because that was a complaint that popped up on more than one occasion as I’ve been putting together “The Wild North” for Exiern.  And, it’s true that I’ve made (and am still making in some ways) a very slow play of story elements, which probably isn’t resonating with every reader as it’s on a 2-page a week schedule.  Yes, I was hearing “get on with it” too.

And perhaps this is rationalizing on my part, but as I gave it some thought, I decided at the end that I can criticize Arena.net’s progress with Scarlet Briar while maintaining my own slow play.

Why?

Arena.net’s audience had to drop $60 up front for this slog.  Exiern remains completely free-to-read.  As a result, I really am under no obligation to answer to my customers… because at this point, I don’t have any.  I know that there IS a store and a secondary site involved, but I have nothing to do with either, and I see no profits from either.  They are of no concern to me.  I am more than comfortable telling my story at my pace.  I will remain to see $0 from it until the story is completed and is (hopefully) published for sale.

As such, my end goal is not immediate satisfaction.  I need to compose the best complete story I can, and this particular story I am trying to tell I feel best comes together over time.  It honestly won’t feel nearly as long and drawn out when it’s all in front of you to be consumed at once.

Arena.net, on the other hand, has an obligation to those who gave them money to entertain them, and their slow play isn’t cutting it.  Sorry guys… you better wrap it up.  Quickly.

It’s hard to make your “big break” in this business.  I know this all to painfully well.  I celebrated my 35th birthday just a couple weeks ago, and even at this point I would still have a failing grade on the Internet Celebrity report card.  A major reason I’m where I’m at is because of the professional and personal relationship I have forged with Fred Gallagher (a man who at this point doesn’t need his resume listed).  Our Endgames short story was no doubt one of the influences that earned me the contract writing Exiern, and the reason Amazon gave me a bit of an accelerated process to get my first book to print.  I would still be nervously scrawling my manuscript, terrified to show anyone, without his influence.

So, it felt like a low blow when I got this e-mail earlier today:

“I’ve followed your work for some time followed your updates, read your free content. Haven’t bought your book yet but I’m getting to it.  Don’t have much money.  But there’s one thing that kinda upsets me and I wonder if it upsets you.

Does it bother you that Fred Gallagher doesn’t support your work?

The Endgames story went nowhere even as people wanted more.  Was he scared that people liked it more than his solo content?  He hasn’t said anything publicly about your novel or your own webcomic; I had to learn about those from others.  I was at Youmacon when Mookie and Sonny Strait wanted you to join them on the webcomics panel, and it was your supposed patron who nixed it.  Now I get that you don’t want to burn any bridges, so you can just make it our secret.  Does it bother you?”

In short; no.  In reverse order –

Clearly, whoever saw this scene play out wasn’t close enough to the action, because they obviously didn’t hear my words to Ray Kremer, who was sitting right next to me.

“Bullet.  Dodged.”

Perhaps I should explain something about myself that people might have gotten the hint on based on how rarely I make posts here.  I have a mild social anxiety; not a crippling disorder, but enough that I can become unsettled in public, especially when surprised or put on the spot.  Mookie and Sonny didn’t know, and I certainly don’t want them to think that I am chastising them here.  Fred does, and knew that it would have been a bad idea to put this deer in front of those headlights without any advance warning.  The end result of me being on that stage would have been me clutching the table in fright, effectively deaf mute.  Entertaining for some, perhaps, but not for me.

As for not saying anything publicly about my other work, personally I prefer his actions.  At the convention last week that he supposed “nixed” my promotion, he was also giving me half of his booth space to sell the book that he supposedly wasn’t supporting.  That’d be a little odd, don’t you think?

Finally, the Endgames issue;  yes, I had a preview for the first full length light novel at Youmacon 2012, and that nothing came of it in the end.  It was an unfortunate set of circumstances; Fred’s heart trouble and recovery followed by the success of public funding the Visual Novel, which as a result has taken priority.  We are both very busy people, with other projects to juggle (and a full-time job in my case).  Would I like to go back to the Endgames world?  Absolutely… but it’s something that will only be able to happen down the road.

At the end of the day, I feel supported just fine.  Any “failure” for me to succeed is on my shoulders, not because I’m not getting “plugged” enough.  I’d been trying to get my voice and story out there for the better part of a decade.  Only one person listened, and that’s the guy who is getting snide e-mails sent to me about.  Maybe you should ask the publishers who started ignoring me those questions first.

This was a blog post passed onto me through some forums I frequent.  http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/

Now this is going to probably come across as a “hater”; but I am rather amused that the man who developed Star Wars Galaxies talking about taking criticism when it was trying to implement too much fan feedback that effectively destroyed the game, but that’s beside the point.  Raph Koster really doesn’t tell a creator anything they shouldn’t already know.  The advice falls fairly hollow because it’s pretty much common sense.  You SHOULD listen to all criticism, especially the bad, because just listening to people saying how good something is doesn’t actually teach you anything on how to improve.  You shouldn’t take the negative personally, just as you shouldn’t use the positive as a crutch to ward off the former.

If you’re a serious developer of creative content, and haven’t learned that yet… you’re not a developer.  You’ve already burned out and cursed everything that led you down your prior path (paging Phil Fish… paging Phil Fish… oh, he’s left the building… again).

So no, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Koster’s words of wisdom. “Accepting all criticism” is the creator equivalent of “the customer is always right.”  It’s a wonderful axiom, and it should be applied whenever possible.  But sometimes… the customer isn’t right.  Sometimes, the customer is being completely unreasonable.  The same is true for criticism.  Sometimes what an angry or dissatisfied fan wants isn’t something you’re comfortable giving.  Just because someone doesn’t like what you’ve created is not suitable reason to drop everything to change it for them.

When and how should you act on criticism?  Well… here are some things I suggest be considered:

1) Sometimes, feedback is mutually exclusive

It’s no secret that different people like different things.  It’s also no secret that what one person likes, there’s someone out there that absolutely hates it.  This is why it’s not as simple as rejecting positive feedback and accepting the negative.  Positive feedback is not dangerous, as Koster claims.  What someone thinks you are doing right matters too.  And changing things that people dislike to suit them may very well anger the person that likes what you’ve done.

The question a creator has to ask when they get conflicting feedback is “Which person am I trying to target?”  No matter what… someone is going to leaving this interaction pissed off.  It’s unavoidable.  By identifying who you want receiving your message, you change your design or intent (or not change) accordingly.  It’s okay to tell someone dissatisfied with your work that your work isn’t for them.  You’re not going to please everyone.  Trying will only give you ulcers at the end of the day.

2) Contrary to conventional wisdom; your message does matter.

A very popular belief spouted by readers and creators who want to sound smart is that authorial intent is irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is the audience’s interpretation.  In a sense, that’s true… to the audience.  But interpretation is not a universal thing.  Give a book to ten people, and you’ll get fourteen interpretations of what the author was trying to say.  The “audience” isn’t a single voice speaking to you.  It’s a mess of discordant whispers, that as mentioned earlier, often want different things.

When all is said and done, it’s your story to tell.  Your hand is wrapped around the pen.  It’s all well and good to accommodate your readers when you can.  But if parts of your audience wants something that conflicts with the story you want to tell… you have to ask how important that is to your message.  If it’s not something you can work with and keep the story yours, it’s usually best to tell them “sorry.”  This story is your voice to world… if you wouldn’t accept someone shouting over you in discussion, you shouldn’t let them shout over your literary voice, either.

3) It’s okay to toss all the above out the window, and act on the cold, hard numbers

As much as I value my literary integrity, that’s just me.  For a good many creators, they’re more interested in what will sell; what will keep the most of their fans happy and buying the next game/movie/book/DVD/CD.  And that’s perfectly fine.  For some people (hell, I’d say most people) that paycheck is more important than their message… and hey, I understand that.

And in those cases, what the mob wants is what the mob should get, even it runs completely contrary to your original intent.  The problem is gauging just what your audience wants.  It’s not a matter of who screams the loudest.  It’s not a matter of who has the largest cadre on official forums, or fansites, or whatever.  It’s not about surveys or polls.  This requires actually getting into very detailed interaction with as many people within your audience as you can, finding out the core of the complaints rather than just the complaints themselves… and that is a full time job in and of itself.

Good luck.

4) Finally, for the audience; “not acting” does not equate to “not listening.”

Another big problem I had with Koster’s words of wisdom is that readers can (and will) make a very dangerous conclusion from it.  When you tell people that no one’s feedback is never wrong, even though that’s true, it creates a causation of “well, if my criticism is not wrong, but the creator didn’t change it, then obviously he/she/they is/are not listening.  And if they are going to disrespect me, why should I respect them?”

That is what I believe is at the heart of most flame and vitriol from fans.  Because when people feel ignored, they have a tendency to lash out, becoming more aggressive and vicious the longer it seems that you are not listening to their complaints.  Just like “the customer is always right” has led to some horribly boorish and despicable behavior from customers; so does “your criticism is not wrong” engender a hateful, spiteful response from sections of your audience that feel “shunned” or “betrayed.”

To the audience, I humbly wish to say for the most part that is not true.  Even when creators take the most standoffish reception to your criticism, your voice did not go unheard.  Your dismissal is more likely due to the fact that you are hardly the first to air that particular criticism.  You’re probably not the first to air that criticism that day.  It’s easy to assume the worst.  It’s easy to think you’ve been slapped down.  It’s harder to accept that your complaint has been noted, and that creators aren’t always going to heed it… and that it has nothing to do with you as a person.

Just like creators should never take criticism personally… the audience could stand to be able to take the response the same way.

Whelp, in 21 days, Youmacon launches, and I should be there, with copies of The Broken Prophecy on hand for sale; you’ll be able to find me hogging poor Fred Gallagher’s boothspace (that he’s graciously letting me have to peddle my wares).   In the meantime, feel free to purchase copies from Amazon if you want to bring them to have them signed.  I’d be flattered to see ya!

What is The Broken Prophecy?  What happened to The Second Gate?

The major problem I had with trying to get The Second Gate published was that publishers balked at the manuscript’s size for a “new” author, and even self-publishing options wouldn’t let me sell it for anything less than around $30 to make it worth my time.  And so, the first novel has been split into two parts, with the second part (now Book 2 in the series), The Sixth Prophet, ready with cover art and all the bells and whistles by early 2014 (hopefully).  With The Broken Prophecy coming in at 270 pages, it’s not exactly a short read anyway, so I do think readers will get their money’s worth.

Has anything changed between the initial rough manuscript you pandered for $0.99 a year and a half ago?

Nothing significant really.  The text has gone through some further editing and clean up, but none of the major plot points have changed significantly.  If you were one of the ten people who bought that rough copy… then pat yourselves on the back, I suppose, because you got quite the deal.  Unless you really want to support me and my efforts, you won’t miss out on any big reveals, and hell… you’ve even got some massive spoilers to hang over people’s heads.

Are you eventually going to sell it on [insert website or service or e-reader here]?

As of this moment, the physical dead-tree version is an Amazon exclusive… but I’m open to other retailers if there is enough demand.  As for other e-book formats… that’s rather unlikely.  ISBNs are not particularly cheap, and for any other format I translate it to, I’d need a separate ISBN for each format.  Nook and Kindle cover a large enough percentage of the market that I am content running with those two.

So you really ARE alive!

Perhaps unfortunately.

An article got linked to me a couple days ago from a personal friend, and he was curious as to my thoughts.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/swimming-in-a-sea-of-shit-the-internets-war-against-creatives

So, now with some time to process the article, the responses, and my own experience… here are said thoughts:

On the surface, it sure seems like the article “gets it.”  Because, yeah, it seems like creators are under near ceaseless attack on-line.  Whether it’s Activision developers being assaulted with death threats because of balance changes, George R.R. Martin being told to have a heart attack and die already, Bioware writers receiving messages hoping that they lose their jobs and go hungry and homeless… No one, in any medium, is safe from what seems to be a tidal wave of hate and negativity.

Hell, my own experience upon taking over the writing duties at Exiern was filled with gems such as these:

“I wish I could go back in time and kick your mother in the uterus.”

“How can you be such a faggot and not have AIDS yet?”

“Please leave the gas on in your oven tonight.”

But with all that said, I do think the article misses the mark.  I think the focus of its accusation is too narrow.  I’m not sure the Internet is so much at war with creatives as the Internet is at war with pretty much everybody.  Go to YouTube, Reddit, 4chan… anywhere your heart desires, and you’ll see petty anger, mean-spirited sniping, bullying, jackassery, fired like a shotgun from a cracked-out blind man in the middle of a crowded shopping mall.

The Internet is really the new social frontier, and much like all frontiers, it is a largely lawless zone where people can act with complete impunity, and will do so with alarming frequency… especially as what few “laws” are in place tend to be administered arbitrarily and with very little consistency from one place to another.

What helps me get through the muck is to remind myself that this sort of abuse is hardly new, and it’s not really all that much worse now than it was even before the Internet.  People haven’t lately developed such hateful behaviors; history provides reams of evidence that is most certainly not true.  We’re no more hateful or spiteful than we were even 400 some-odd years before when Shakespeare was being heckled as a hack and charlatan.

The only thing the Internet has done is given the average man/woman the means to readily and more often demonstrate the general asshattery of our collective societal consciousness, and the audience to make it a much larger issue than it deserves to be.

Yes, it’s a lot easier to say, “ignore it” than to actually do so.  Hell, I’m not sure it is possible to ignore.  But what you can’t let it do is run you off or make you stop doing what you want to do.

Micro Mart is a UK tech publication that does a little bit of everything… but they aren’t really what this post is about.

It’s about a particular article in a recent issue, a particular cover story.

This one:

So, what’s wrong with that article?  Nothing at all, actually.  Because it’s quite true.  The XBox One assumed that every single person that bought their console and their games needed to be checked in on to make sure they weren’t running cracked or pirated copies of their electronically stored games.

But the sad answer to the articles question is found when you run a google search for the article’s title:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Why+does+the+XBox+One+assume+you’re+a+thief&oq=Why+does+the+XBox+One+assume+you’re+a+thief&aqs=chrome.0.57.12981j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

The first three links lead to torrent sites where you can download and read the article without paying for the magazine.

That’s the simple and depressing answer; if you lived in a neighborhood where every other person knocked over your mailbox as they walked by, you’d get damn suspicious of anyone who moseyed by your driveway.  The XBox One assumed you were a thief because… well… there’s an awful damn lot of thieves out there.

To hear game developers and publishers say it, anywhere from 50% to over 90% of the game copies people play are pirated.  While I don’t know if those numbers are accurate, I do have personal experience of this blog getting hundreds of hits looking for a free download of the Megatokyo Endgames short story I wrote about a year and a half ago.  And I’m talking about a $0.99 Amazon Kindle story here… it’s not like it was priced out of too many people’s budgets.

Now, as Eminem would say, “don’t get this twisted”, because this isn’t a defense of Microsoft, the XBox One, or DRM as a rule.  DRM is nigh entirely ineffective, and the only thing it does is punish the people who legitimately bought their product.  The XBox One’s measures would have only destroyed their own userbase, and would have ended their gaming division, because people would not (and should not) have to accept that load of bulls—.

The Visual Novel project will be DRM-free, any e-books I publish under my own imprint will also be DRM free for that very reason, and I don’t have to pretend to a bunch of ignorant shareholders that it does.  But thanks to those ignoramuses who need to feel like SOMETHING is being done to fight piracy, you’ll continue to see misguided salvos fired into the consumer field, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.

Nonetheless, as we steadily transition into a fully digital entertainment experience (and most PC-users are almost completely there already), it would REALLY help if honest solutions that actually address the PROBLEM could be brought to life.  Because piracy (and greedy entitled brats who want anything they can get their hands on without having to pay for it) is not going to go away on its own, and if there ISN’T any protection for companies and developers and publishers once that day comes, there’s not going to be anyone willing to create or entertain at the level we’ve come to expect.

Not much to talk about, except these little cosmetic changes I’ve been adding to the blog.  I dunno, I guess now that it has its own domain and all, it should look semi-professional.  I think it kinda does.

Mission Accomplished?

Meanwhile… the Megatokyo Visual Novel kickstarter is at $131k and climbing; but it still needs a little bit more help to reach its final stretch goal.  We can do it, folks!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fredrin/megatokyo-visual-novel-game