Ten Ways To Look At Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is a great game. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with that assessment. Ken Levine's tale of Booker DeWitt, the down on his luck Pinkerton detective and Elizabeth, the girl who can give him his life back had been winning awards left and right even before it came out, and now looks likely to take home Game of the Year more than a few times.

But if you had to sum up Bioshock Infinite in a sentence, what would you say, exactly? That's not an easy question for a game with a story this complex.

Here are ten possibilities. Note that from here on the SPOILER WARNING is very much in effect, because I'll be flat out summarizing the game's ending.

It's A Major Award!

So a few weeks ago I entered the Caramel and Magnolias contest held by author Tess Thompson. I entered the contest because, well, I was on this wacky kick where I thought I'd win a tablet if I entered something like eleventy billion blog contests offering to give tablets away. Because they are out there and I am strangely lucky at contests authors run on their blogs.

I did not win the tablet. But I did receive an email after the contest closed:

"Congratulations!  We are excited to inform you that you are the winner of an autographed box of Kleenex in the Caramel and Magnolias contest giveaway hosted by author Tess Thompson.  Thank you so much for participating in the contest and helping to spread the word about Tess's exciting new romance release."

Oh. Okay!

I double checked the website and found that yes, this was an official booby prize that was being offered, if not advertised. So I said yes, by all means send me the autographed box of Kleenex. Why not? This is a major award! I'd get the box labeled Fra-gee-lay and everything!

And only a few weeks later, I got the box. Or, well, wrapped parcel.

It was not labeled Fra-gee-lay.

Not at all labeled Fra-gee-lay. But it was autographed, I'll give them that.

Now, I am not blaming Tess Thompson for this. Every piece of correspondence I got indicated that she'd outsourced the contest to persons (whom I will not name) that were doing all the heavy lifting of picking a winner and sending out the prizes.

And I'm going to be polite to those persons, too, because along with the bent/spindled/mutilated box of Kleenex I got a polite letter apologizing for the delay in sending out the Kleenex, offering me a free electronic copy of one of Miss Thompson's books. So as far as I'm concerned I'm getting the real prize, fair and square, and a great little gag gift to go along with it.

But I do have four words for anyone looking to run an author's giveaway contest of their own.

Corrugated cardboard shipping containers.

Tears and the Telephone... The Recovery of A Thousand Dollars From Bob the Banker... Everything Takes an Hour in Texas...

The first I knew of the problem was when my wife slammed her hand on the desk and demanded my phone.

I'd just helped her pick out a new Dell computer to replace her Inspiron, which I was going to upgrade and use to replace my computer - a win all around. Then Sarah opened her email and found a message from her bank letting her know that they'd declined the charge, for her protection. Because my wife is a 1337 haXX0r who'd bought an apron and a desk earlier that day to test out the credit card she'd stolen from herself.

I handed Sarah her phone, in case they were checking numbers, and went off to heat up a frozen pizza for dinner. I'd been fighting our home wireless network all day, and after that evil bastard I had no desire to witness the coming conflagration.

I could hear the conversation getting more and more heated, and then "Dave!" Sarah saw me come in to the office and told the guy on the phone "You're going to have to talk to my husband, because I'm about to start yelling at you." Then she handed me the phone and burst into tears. "It's the Gremlin," she explained, and went looking for tissues.

I put the phone to my ear and heard... something. Bob (not his real name) had a thick accent, and there was static on the line. I could have handled one or the other, but the mix blended into a symphony of gibberish and I could only make one word of his out of ten. In return, I had to yell all of my answers and tried to keep them to three words or less.

I eventually deciphered that the bank had canceled the charge to prevent possible fraud, and Bob had been trying to make Sarah call Dell to resolve the problem, because the bank certainly wouldn't do it again. Finally Bob agreed to conference me into a call with Dell to have them put the charge through again.

Let me be abundantly clear: Bob the Banker was going to call Dell's support system with me.

We waited on hold together for ten minutes, during which Sarah came into the office for a hug. Finally we got through to Al, who took my order number and offered to transfer us to the department that could actually rerun the credit card. Then he hung up. This is Dell's standard practice, apparently.

Bob called Dell back. Another ten minutes on hold. Chris picked up and took my order number again, also my address, name and phone number. He transferred us to the Very Important Department, which we got to fifteen minutes later. Donna picked up the phone and said "Hello?"

I opened my mouth, and then Bob began yelling into the phone at the top of his lungs right over me. So I shut my mouth and let him go on, then I noticed that Donna was saying "Hello? Can you hear me?" I said "Hello!", but Donna had already hung up. I heard Bob mutter "Are you serious?", and by God I felt for the man at that point.

Bob gibbered at me in a futile attempt to get off the phone, but I had him conference us in to Dell again. This time we got Jose, who in defiance of every law of telecommunications was the easiest man to understand I got the entire evening. He put us through to the hold system for the next twenty minutes.

At this point I was an hour into the call and was getting a little loopy. Sarah had brought me the pizza and a drink, so at least I wasn't hungry, but the entire call was so absurd that I couldn't stop giggling.

Finally Ellen picked up and offered to run the charge again. I confirmed with Bob that yes, it would work this time, the charge was run, and everyone confirmed that it had gone through successfully this time.

Ellen hung up and Bob asked if he could do anything else for me, a question so jaw-droppingly stupid that I assume it was part of his script. I blanked, trying to decide if I should demand he raise Sarah's credit limit or lower her interest rate, when Sarah saw my expression and snatched the phone out of my hands to lay into Bob for a good five minutes.

And that should have been that, but like any good monster movie Bob came back for one last scare. I found an email in my inbox saying that Sarah's contact information had been changed, something I should not have gotten. Apparently Bob, out of confusion or pique, had swapped my wife's email address with my email address, something I had never given him. When I worked up the nerve to tell Sarah she immediately called the bank, and the first thing she got was an automated message asking her if she wanted to activate her new credit card?

I took Lina outside to run around in the back yard. Every man has his limits.

On Tracking Your Work

I've written a few times that I work best under a deadline. Deadlines are awesome. They focus the creative mind wonderfully. An author without a deadline can pick at their work and keep polishing it until they're old and gray. An author with a deadline mailed their manuscript out at 11:59 p.m. last night, and got a receipt so they can prove it when rabid wolverines devour their work halfway to the publisher.

The only problem with deadlines is that they need to be... toothy. Bitey. A deadline set by an outside agency is a ravenous monster that will eat you for your failures. And they can smell failure. But a deadline you set yourself can be more of a tame pet. You can stroke it, give it a few treats, scratch its ears, and before you know it you're two months behind and your deadline is fat and sleeping on your sofa.

This is not helpful.

I've been trying to reckon a way around this problem for awhile now. My first instinct was to go the NaNoWriMo, Stephen King, every-damn-writer-who's-written-a-book-on-writing route: set a word count every day, meet it, repeat. And that worked. For a bit.

"Authors live or die by their word count." I'm certain somebody's said that at some point. And if you're a full time writer it's true. Every word you write is another nickel* in your pocket to, say, pay your rent, or buy that medicine for your sick kid, or, y'know, eat.

So I respect the word count. 1,000 words a day, 1,667 words a day, 2,000 words a day, whatever target you can reasonably shoot for, go for it! And when I'm writing a first draft I'll go for my own target (1,000 words per day). It's respectable. It's The Tradition.

But let me ask you something, if you happen to be a writer out there.

What about all the work that doesn't include a word count? What about sketching out a map of some Godforsaken island your story takes place on? What about figuring out the names and backgrounds of that pantheon your protagonist worships? What about the hour you spent in a library (oh let's be honest, on Wikipedia) digging up names from some obscure language so everything sounds like it fits? What about the photos you pulled off of TMZ so you know what your cast looks like?

What about the stuff that only gives you a piddling little word count? Outlining, jotting notes on index cards and pasting them to a wall? Hell, how about the time you spend staring at said wall and rearranging those fucking cards? (Bob gets to Chicago here, but he meets the Mayor here, and that can't happen under the laws of physics so he has to fall in love here, and that means his car breaks down just outside of Chicago and I have to introduce a rabid wolverine here...)

In short, a fair amount of the work in writing isn't measurable by word count. The majority is, absolutely, but not all of it. And if you try to measure your work solely by word count, you're going to write a first draft in a very respectable amount of time and then end up feeling at loose ends, feeling like you're not getting anything done, when you find yourself facing the editing process. I know, I've done it.

So I've refactored my goal setting. Rather than track my daily word count, I pick a goal every night before I go to bed. If I'm writing, it'll be a word count. If I'm editing, maybe it'll be a page count to review. If I'm outlining, I'll set a chapter count to summarize, or pick a chapter and break it down by scene. If I'm brainstorming, I'll pick something I want to flesh out and... well, flesh it out.

The point is to set a goal I can mark as Done or Not Done, every day, and then get it done. Then get it done the next day. And the next day. And the next day, too. Pretty soon you've got a Seinfeld calendar going and all you've got to do is avoid breaking the chain. I keep mine on my Google calendar.

I broke the chain a few times.

Am I overthinking this? Maybe. But I'm getting more writing done, too, so I'll live with it. Now excuse me, I need to get this rabid wolverine off my leg.

*I suspect I'm inflating the figure here.

Night Writing and Unexpected Victories

So this is a weird post. See, a few days ago I tweeted this:

And that attracted the attention of Nick Kyme, author and all around good guy (also the first editor I ever worked with, in conjunction with Alex Davis). Nick used the tweet as the jumping off point for a rather nice blog post about his writing habits.

Nick is a morning writer by preference. I'm usually most productive at night, after my wife has gone to bed and I've walked the dog. The house is quiet, I don't have any chores left to do, and I can pop something on for background noise and go to it. (A movie I've seen repeatedly with a lot of narration can be excellent for this: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Goodfellas work well for me. Music also works well depending on my mood, but podcasts are a bad idea.)

I can write in the morning, if I'm up early and I've had enough sleep and I'm not at work. These factors rarely line up well for me, but when they do I can get a good amount of words down before lunch and still be up for a second session later in the day.

Afternoon writing rarely works for me. Life likes to keep me busy in the afternoon, and if I'm running errands or visiting friends or cleaning house, I'm obviously not writing. Worse, knowing that I'm going to do these things a half hour or even an hour in advance acts like writer's block for me; instead of getting words on paper (or into Scrivener) I'll piddle around with other things until it's time to go.

Conversely, I love to write right before a meeting, or in a waiting room. Give me an uncomfortable chair, a notepad, a pen, and a few strangers and I can knock out a few hundred words with ease.

So broadly my schedule is do most of my writing at night, and get a few words in where I can the rest of the day. If I hit my target (usually 1,000 words, if NaNoWriMo isn't on) early, I'll let myself have the evening off, unless I've got a scene I'm looking forward to in the queue.

But that's all beside the point of my tweet, which is that fatigue ate the last few hundred words in my quota one night. Believe it or not, this doesn't happen all that often. Either I'll make my word count (good), or I'll come to a grinding halt trying to hit my word count well before I actually fall asleep on my keyboard. This is usually accompanied by repeatedly browsing useless websites, checking my manuscript, and then going back to the useless websites again. I guess you could consider it creative fatigue (or just having too many distractions, if hitting the router with a hammer stops it - but it doesn't always).

When I find myself at a dead stop, sometimes I'll switch to a different scene to jar loose a few thoughts. If I can't do that for some reason, I'll just jot down a few extra words to get myself to a good stopping point.

Today was one of the latter cases. I'd just finished writing the climactic final battle of the book, and wanted to be able to say I was done with the first draft, today, no messing around. But I had an epilogue chapter planned that would wrap up loose ends with most of the extended cast and see the main character set out for more adventures...

...and I'm getting fatigued again just writing that. I wasn't going to get the whole chapter down. So to let myself say I was satisfied with the day's work, I wrote just enough to establish that the main character was alive and safe, if a bit banged up. I had him say good night, I had his potential love interest say good night...

...and then for no reason I wrote the biggest Wham Line of the whole book for the last sentence. Totally unplanned on my part. And the damn thing works, much better than a lengthy closing chapter could have.

Fatigue: it's not always a bad thing.

And that's all a roundabout way of saying that I managed to finish the first draft of my NaNoNovel in just under two and a half months. 80,000 words as it stands, with a fair bit of expansion likely as I flesh out descriptions, move scenes around, and try to turn the slog of a plot into something a bit more interesting. I don't even want to try and predict how long that's going to take, but I find I'm looking forward to it more than usual (read: not at all) this time.

Fetch the red pen of doom, and let us away!