7 February 1998: Nothing Quite Seems Good Enough

Saturday, 7 February 1998:

Nothing Quite Seems Good Enough

I slept 'til nearly noon today, not much feeling like getting out of bed and doing anything. Now, twelve hours later, I feel that that instinct may have been correct.

I ran some errands earlier today, buying some stuff for my Dad for his birthday (unfortunately, one item I ordered has not yet shown up so I will have to tell him it will be a little late), and picking up a copy of Santana's album Zebop!, because I wanted the song "Winning", which has really excellent verses, and a really cheesy synth layering on the chorus (it would have been better served with a nice stompy bass riff).

I also spent some time getting progressively more frustrated with Myth: The Fallen Lords. I re-played the first scenario twice, the first time getting massacred in a most embarrassing fashion, teaching me that you need to face the enemy in waves, preferably with all of your forces taking on a fraction of theirs. In an even fight, you tend to get stomped. The second time I acquitted myself better, losing a third of my soldiers and one of my archers before victory.

But I still can't get through that second scenario. I've gotten utterly stomped several times. Twice I've managed to get past the waves of enemy archers (actually spear-throwers, but the notion is the same) only to be beset by hordes of zombies. Once I actually managed to take out all the zombies, but by then my main target had escaped my sight! And if I ignore the zombies to shoot at the target, then the zombies make short work of my archers. It's an amazingly difficult scenario for just the second level in the game.

I think it frustrates me that you have to plan and organize movements for all your forces at once, in real-time, and with your forces sometimes deciding that they're just going to run or attack or fire at something regardless of your instructions. You have to do almost all their thinking for the eight or ten or fifteen of your units, unlike, say, Populous, where your units behave in intelligent - or at least predictable - manner.

I'm only making progress through successive refinement of my strategy by repeated playings of the same scenario. This isn't especially fun for me.

I'm about half-done with J. G. Ballard's Memories of the Space Age, which is a little disappointing in that it's only thematically linked, not connected by continuity. Still, there are some good stories in there. It's similar to Tiptree's Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, which I said yesterday I'd decided to put down mid-way through, in that Memories' stories don't feature especially riveting ideas, but Ballard's writing is more atmospheric and compelling than Tiptree's, with less wasted text, and more believable dialogue.

I keep trying to motivate myself to work on some fiction, but it seems impossible. I come up with ideas that seem interesting initially, in the abstract, but nothing I can think of seems worth the effort once I start sketching out an actual story.

One idea I had this weekend involved humanity finally developing artificial intelligence, of the sort in Teller's novel Exegesis (see yesterday's entry) which lives on the Internet, but this happens just in time for humanity to be nearly wiped out by the next Killer Death Flu. The tragic irony of a nascent intelligence which is stillborn due to the collapse of its parent race appeals to me, but how can I make a story out of this? My main idea is to focus on one of the surviving humans trying to keep alive an AI housed in a university or government computer, the challenge being to supply proper power to the thing in the absence of a societal infrastructure. But this seems like a thin story; what's worth writing about this?

My writing often seems to fall into the trap of being a one-person story. I come up with some character whose head I want to get into, but then I can't meaningfully introduce any other characters, because my protagonist always seems too wrapped up in him- or herself. I'd like to be able to write several distinct characters with specific interactions and desires which form the basis of the plot, but I'm afraid that even by specifying it in that way I'm reducing it to analytical claptrap and eradicating my ability to actually achieve such a goal.

To be fair, I'm also starting to wonder if my stories form in this way because I envision them as short stories and so don't want to cram too much extraneous junk into them, but rather make them short and to-the-point. But I don't feel capable of attempting a novel, where I could develop several characters over a longer period of time.

There's got to be a way to resolve all of these problems. I'd consider taking a class on writing, but I frankly think I'd be a fraud in such a class until I can actually demonstrate that I can sit down and do the writing, which, so far, I haven't shown.

Maybe I'm just not destined to be a writer.

In fact, in most areas of endeavor, I seem fated to be pretty good but not particularly noteworthy. (I'll have to get a scanner sometime and treat you to some samples of my drawing, atrophied though those skills are, these days.)

Michael Rawdon (Contact)