World of Warcraft
One thing I don’t get into a lot on Twitter is my World of Warcraft gaming. For one, while there’s an avid group of fellow WoW geeks among my followers, many people could completely care less. When I attended Blizzcon, tweeting my fool head off, I lost a couple hundred followers more interested in my library stuff, or my gaming advocacy stuff. I mention WoW , certainly: getting the Quel’Delar a week or so ago wasn’t something I could fail to squee about. I could try to express my awe that my guild (with friends) brought down Lady Deathwhisper on our first try, without a wipe — on a run when we didn’t even think we could necessarily take out Lord Marrowgar. My people have shown so damn much heart and determination to excel that I am proud and deeply humbled to be their guild master and occasional raid leader. We are a casual group of friends, and never seriously thought we could raid in WoW. We do have real lives outside the game — and achievements in the real world mean more to most of us than game achievements.

Even so, doing something that takes study, work, effort, teamwork even if it only involves pixels, is not without note. It’s something to be proud of. My research on WoW, the stuff I talked about at AzLA last December (my previous post here), showed in hard numbers how important the sense of community and collaborative effort can be. It is “just a game” but the ties that bind us together in the game make it more than “just a game.” It’s been said that “raiding is a team sport” and I agree. Maybe it’s the geek’s version of team sports, something many of us were not able to engage in when we were 8 and 10 and 15. I know I was the person picked last on the schoolyard, and my new team mates groaned when I walked over to join their side. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I was never more than mediocre at sports. (How fitting — or is that ironic? — that I write this as the Winter Olympics are being played!) This game, though, is something I can be more than mediocre at. It is more than a game.

On the Value of Games
And here’s my gaming advocacy rising to the fore, and not just about WoW. Today I stumbled on a LiveJournal blogger, sashabilton who had some nice things to say about my artwork in Tunnels & Trolls, work I did (urk!!) thirty years ago. As a youngster challenged by dyslexia or perhaps ADHD, Sasha speaks of being sufficiently motivated by my artwork in T&T to push through the difficulties in order to read the game books, the solitaire adventures. From the substantial size and substance of the post recounting his(?) history travelling through the world of games and gaming, literacy issues have evidently been overcome. Emphatically.

And reading that post awes me more than anything else that’s happened to me in a very long time. I know my artwork, my co-writing/editing of T&T’s 5th Edition gave a lot of people diversion and entertainment. I have had people tell me that my art in the Magic cards was part of what brought father and son together with a shared interest, mother and daughter together to play games with each other. But the idea that my pictures — in a game — helped someone unlock their mind and enter the world of words and literacy… now that is an Accomplishment. I didn’t do the unlocking … only Sasha could do that … but I am so profoundly and deeply glad that something I did put the key in his hand.

Let no one tell you that games and gaming can’t make a difference.

First things first: I didn’t start the challenge on December 1st. I was utterly, totally consumed for weeks preparing my Mad Skills in WoW workshop presentation. I cut myself some slack until that was behind me.

I gave my talk in Phoenix, at the Arizona Library Association’s annual meeting in preconference, on December 7th. It went very well and some good things appear to have come out of it. I attended the rest of AzLA, came home toward the end of the week and pretty much collapsed from exhaustion except for writing a very long, very vigorously worded three-blog-post (starting here) for Library Journal concerning negative research about games. That was itself pretty exhausting, mentally and emotionally.

So I decided to start my fiction challenge on Monday 14th instead of the 1st.

I won’t go into my current word count, taking a cue from challenger Monica Valentinelli. It isn’t pretty. I’m not on target to meet my 20K goal by January 14th. That said, I have more than I did on December 14th. My imagination is engaged and I know from experience how important that is.

My ex makes much of how fast he writes and sometimes leaves others with the feeling that if they don’t write as fast as he does, they’re lazy or they’re doing it wrong. (This is partly in reaction to other established professionals who, writing more slowly, think he does it wrong by writing fast. I consider both factions silly goobers.)

But one useful thing I did observe and internalize about how he was able to write so fast was how much “writing” happens between one’s ears. By the time it’s coming out on paper or pixel, it’s already half-written. The rest is transcription. The work on my novel is in fact producing a modest word count but more importantly (for me, and at this early stage of the game), it’s bubbling in my head. That hasn’t been the case heretofore, very much, and I have identified that as a key reason it was slogging until now.

The flipside to all this is that my bubbling brain is also throwing up (a term I use advisedly) yet another piece of fanfic at me. Damn me but that character loves the limelight. I gave him a couple of days to play on my computer screen, and then told him to go sit in the corner again. It’s new writing, yes, and it’s fun, but today I burrow back into my other story.

So I’m neither happy nor unhappy with what I’ve gotten done. I’d hoped to get more accomplished by now, even starting late. But I’m progressing, and that’s making me pleased. Even more than that, I feel good about the direction I’m moving, and frankly that’s the biggest part of all.

Monica Valentinelli is someone I met through Facebook and Twitter, and whom I have found to be an unremittingly interesting person. She knew she couldn’t fit NaNoWriMo into her schedule this year and decided to lay out a December writing challenge as a substitute NaNo for herself and to those around her. (Misery loves company, Monica?) Less daunting than NaNo, you set your own wordcount goal and also pledge what you’re going to do as punishment if you don’t write on a given day.

I’m planning on 20k words. And will put in time cleaning my house and yard if I don’t.

No, not really my hand

Time to Write
Twenty thousand words isn’t much. I can easily turn out 1000+ words in a morning’s session standing on my head. By the same token, the last tale I finished, at 17K, took me most of 4 months. I used the Zelazny Edict on many days (“Three lines a day. More is good, but that is the minimum acceptable.”) when I was pressured for time. I have a LOT on my plate right now, and usually do, and days I get “a morning’s session” can be few and far between.

Most days I don’t meet the Zelazny minimum. After all, I don’t get paid to write fiction as a matter of course. I have been paid for my stories, yes — rarely, and just a few here and a few there — and I was a member of SFWA for a number of years until I got so fed up with their craptastic politics that I threw up in my mouth every time I looked sideways at them. I want to write more, and write more that’s salable. But fiction isn’t my first focus. Alotting time to write suffers in consequence.

What I Write
I am paid to write and blog for Library Journal. They get my attention first. I am a correspondent to make Lovecraft blush. I don’t get paid for that but it consumes huge amounts of my time. Sometimes that body of correspondence results in paying work of other kinds, or relates to important non-paying projects like helping on the development of Phoenix Library’s Digital Studio. I have an art and an editing project in the wings. But fiction comes low on the totem pole, usually when I simply cannot NOT write a tale buzzing in my brain.

I have had a standalone novel I’ve been poking at for about a year now. Character studies, first chapter or two, sketchy outline. The tale intrigues me but the process scares me. Everyone writes a shitty first novel, it seems. I don’t want to write a shitty first novel but the only certain way to do that is never to write one at all. (I admit, I ducked the issue by writing a not-bad fanfic novella of around 45K. It taught me a lot. Now it’s time to put away the toys and get back to standalone work.)

Jakrista & the imp (from first publication)

I also have another story of uncertain length about Jakrista and the imp, fantasy characters who are in print in a 12k story out there, in the anthology Of Dice and Pen. This new tale is mostly a pile of notes and a spark. Jakrista and Carodag’s Sparrow are fun characters to write, easy casual first person with humor and snark. If the novel stymies me, I’ll play in this sandbox. I may do both.

In Progress or Kidding Myself?
The half-generated stuff I describe above is pretty typical fare for a not-writing-focused writer or wannabe writer. I’m not entirely sure what I am. I generate a hell of a lot of words every day, I can spin a good tale, but whether I’m really the writer I want to be — I’m still not sure. I probably won’t be sure until I have a formally, properly published novel in my hands with my name on the cover.

But that’s part of the point here. Monica’s challenge struck me as the right time to follow through on some of my good intentions. I’ve always been one to respond to a deadline, to a challenge. I hope to wind up with a solid start on a couple tales I’ve wanted to tell for awhile.

Maybe I’ll just wind up with a clean house in time for the New Year.

When someone speaks, what control do they relinquish?
I’ll start with my conclusion: to my way of thinking, it’s not up to the speaker to determine the value-to-others of the speaking they do in public.

The subject started this way… a fellow professional, someone who gives presentations at conferences, doesn’t want to upload their Powerpoint slides to the web for people to access after their speaking engagement. Why? The slides don’t tell the whole story. No one who wasn’t there will understand. Anyone who was there won’t need them. It isn’t a “green” solution because people will waste paper printing it out repeatedly.

It is that person’s decision not to upload their Powerpoint if they want to control their message — okay, I can grok that. I think it’s wrong because I think someone might find it more valuable than they recognize, but I’m enough of an intellectual property person to accept it.

You can’t imagine the value to me
What’s wrong-headed with their view (which I find arrogant) is my certainty that I personally have gotten great value of reading people’s PPTs for events I’ve never attended. The blogpost on Library Journal I put up recently, talking about Liz Lawley’s talk at LITA and Picture the Impossible? I had only her uploaded PPT to look at since I didn’t attend LITA. Still, it gave me points to make in my own post, and grounds to open a discussion with her via email. This isn’t the only example I could trot out: I’ve read PPTs from Jenny Levine and Beth Gallaway that were deeply influential long before I met either of them in person. And I haven’t printed out a single copy.

You can speak or not-speak. Some people like Twitter with its endless updates, some don’t. Some people freeze up to speak in public; others hold court on a moment’s notice. Some people listen when others speak… some don’t.

Are you listening?
I have discovered that people seem to want to hear things I say, whether on Twitter or at conferences, on panels or when I’m shooting the breeze in a circle of friends. My “Mad Skillz in WoW” preconference at AzLA has enough advance signups, it won’t get cancelled — which wasn’t a given (and they’re paying extra money to hear me, besides!). I’ve been asked to be part of a panel at next year’s Computers in Libraries conference, if the organizer’s proposal is accepted. I have hundreds of followers on Twitter and in Facebook, though I haven’t set out to balloon those numbers (and I regularly block suspect followers on Twitter and ignore strangers on Facebook).

Evidently, some people do want to hear about things I’m saying — whether it’s about WoW, or libraries, or game politics, or weird links… or whatever. And that’s why i choose to bloggify this site instead of making it a static gallery like my old Oakheart site.

Am I really able to keep up with the 391 people I’m technically following on Twitter? Hell no. But the fact is, most of them don’t tweet often. And I miss some tweets — well, okay, that’s life. I miss seeing my real life friends daily too, but we’re still friends.

Ask the right question
To bring the subject full circle: if you’re going to speak — or tweet — then asking “who would want to know about this or that mundane topic” is the wrong question. It’s the wrong assertion to believe I don’t want to know you love the cat sitting in your lap, or that I don’t want to look at your Powerpoint slides. On Twitter, I unfollow people I’m not interested in; they do the same to me. (At one point I had over 700 followers; I presently have 628. Maybe they left when I was tweeting vociferously during Blizzcon). I don’t follow-back people automatically — that’s not rudeness, that’s common sense. But I assume most of those who follow are interested in what I’m saying.

And in my last word on this (for now): I see a direct correlation between my mentioning a new Library Journal post on Facebook and Twitter, and the hits I receive at the Library Journal website. That alone will keep me tweeting til the cows come home. Next up — finding out if people come read here on this site when I do so!

(By the way, I tweet as @LizDanforth.)

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Ireland Map (detail)

The package I received (and which had been sitting on my counter) was related: yet another copy of Taylor’s first book An Irish Country Doctor, a book that made the New York Times Bestseller list when it came out in hardback. It’s a mainstream book, down-homey in a James Herriot kind of way, not my usual thing, but faintly sweet and full of local color since Taylor is himself an MD and ex-pat Ulsterman. I did the map for that book too, back in 2006. The copy that I unwrapped was from Germany though: Neues vom Irishchen Landarzt.

It always tickles me to see something I’m involved in appear in a language other than my own. Back in high school, I wanted to be a professional linguist and translator. I’ve formally studied Spanish, French, German, Russian and made some attempts to self-instruct myself in a bunch of others. Today I can only speak Spanish (which I do often in the course of my library work, if not exceptionally well) but I can still read a bit of French and German.

So I’m pleased to add this tome to my bookshelf. I’ll never read this edition but it’s nice to have it there. I hope I’ll get copies of An Irish Country Girl in multiple languages too.

And while I’m thinking of it: any writerly types who think they might like a map, or maps, or frontispieces to their works — keep me in mind. Most of my commissions of this sort are purchased by the publisher — not the author — but on the author’s recommendation or request. That was not the case here because I do not know Patrick Taylor in the slightest, but I’ve done maps and/or art for Kate Elliott, Mike Stackpole, and Jennifer Roberson in my time.

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For the record, this is what I promised:

I’ll give you a bit of extra motivation: from every individual who makes me a pledge of at least $1/hr played, I’ll randomly chose one of you (if you’re not giving anonymously) to receive one of my signed limited edition prints and five signed artist-proof whiteback Magic cards as a thank you for stepping up to the plate. I know times are hard; your dollars go for a good cause.

This is the place to pledge or donate. They accept funds until October 31st but I will probably make my random roll for the winner before then. Therefore, if you are still planning to do this but haven’t yet, then do it sooner rather than later!

Recalled

I had a blast. Playing with the Libraries & Librarians guild of Aerie Peak, I spent most of the day playing my Death Knight Recalled. I ran with the guild’s co-GM Melvyl and fellow fundraiser Roszmairta into Hellfire Ramparts, the Blood Furnace, Scholomance, and Stratholme.

The Fordring family

Friends in WoW
On and off throughout that day, I’d been on Ventrilo (a VoiP commonly used among gamers) chatting with the guild-folk I usually hang around with. These are almost entirely friends-in-real-life I play with, and many of them live here in Tucson. Some of them came by the house over the course of the day, bringing coffee and snacks and sandwiches, giving me hugs or shoulder massages, enormous amounts of moral support, and generally being thoroughly awesome friends. Five of them rolled up new toons on the Aerie Peak server to hang out with me in-game, and I ran my newbie paladin Zenodotus with them. We ended the night smacking Hogger around a few times.

And in the end…
The ExtraLife event brought together 1800 gamers from around the world, and raised over $140,000 for the Texas Children’s Hospital at the time I am writing this. There will be more. Some of my people ponied up funds ahead of time (THANK YOU!) and some pledged to pay up afterward by the hours I played. I still intend to play those last 4.5 hours on Aerie Peak — Pamela’s ghost still needs to be re-united with her father, and Ahab Wheathoof’s dog is still running wild. Some gamers were unable to play yesterday and they will be playing next Saturday, the official “make up” day, or later this week. The charity is accepting funds through October 31st.

And that, my friends, was the whole point, after all.

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I’m thoroughly stoked and looking forward to it with both delight and trepidation. I know what two hours in this chair can do to my rump… twelve? TWENTY-FOUR?? I have two other chairs I can switch off with, and I probably will.

More importantly, I have some amazing friends who have promised me coffee, keyboard-friendly food, and company both real and virtual. I am damned lucky to have friends like this. Jus’ sayin.

American Libraries Assoc asked me to make the poster for this year’s National Gaming Day, which takes place November 14th. It’s in the Gallery too, under “Other Artwork”, but I’m happy to put it on the front page for now! I tried to work in as many different kinds of games as I could — classics like chess, old-school tabletop RPGs represented mainly by the dice, board games old and new, electronic games (the Mii and the guitar neck) and online games courtesy of my favorite virtual person about to shove a fireball down the nose of a too-inquisitive dragon-knight.

This image is released under a Creative Commons license: (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic).

Poster created for ALA's National Gaming Day @ Your Library 2009

And I decided to hop into the game.

What and Why
Gamers have heart and, through charities like Child’s Play and Extra Life, we put a lie to those who think we don’t. We suffer stereotyping as mouse potatoes, or basement-dwelling anti-social killers-in-training or dicing with the devil because we played tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons or, in my case, Tunnels & Trolls. Well, that’s bullshit. As Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade said, “I know for a fact that gamers are good people. I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to meet hundreds of you at conventions all over the country. We are just regular people who happen to love video games.”

I’ve met thousands of you (as I’m sure he has) and I agree. I’d also add — not just video games but all games.

I don’t have children. I don’t have close friends who have children fighting cancer. My charity efforts usually extend to places like The Nature Conservancy. But this matters. We won’t get into my opinions about health care in general (and not just in the US) although one of these days I’ll tell you about my trip to Thailand to get my gallbladder removed because I was uninsured by my then-employer. My only personal connection to cancer — ever, I hope — is that my father died of lung cancer after decades of smoking.

Children and Cancer: two things that don’t belong together
As the Extra Life website says: Cancer kills a classroom full of kids every day worldwide. It takes kids from all walks of life, and respects no borders. Cancer doesn’t care about ethnicity or religion. It doesn’t care if a child is from privilege or poverty.

I have raised funds for children’s hospitals before. During Magic’s heyday, I attended a gaming convention in Albuquerque where Doug Shuler and I each auctioned off the right to be painted into a Magic card, with the money going to the UNM Carrie Tingley Hospital. That card is the Freyalise Supplicant. Doug is co-credited not for painting any part of it, but because he was the photographer who caught the perfect picture of the model. (I’d link it but card sites change often. Google the card name and you’ll find it.) Each of us raised about $1500 for the hospital doing this.

World of Warcraft
For those of you who don’t know, I play WoW. I run a small guild of friends-in-real life but I also play occasionally on the Aerie Peak server with the “Libraries and Librarians” guild (Alliance): a WoW library guild for library staff and their loved ones. It’s a pretty cool gang and they are going to play host to me and maybe some others for the October 17th Extra Life event.

So here comes the pitch:
Do you work in a library, or are you closely associated with someone who does (loved one, family, s.o.)? Are you interested in joining our team of players, and do you think you can raise pledges among just four of your friends in support of the charity? Sign up on the team page, then!

If you can’t play with me there (or even if you can), will you pledge your dollars? You could pledge $1 for each hour I play — it can’t be more than 24 hours since that’s all the time the marathon runs and in truth, there’s no way I can stay awake 24 hours even playing WoW! Pledge me $2/hr, or $5 if you’re feeling generous! Because I got into this late, I have a modest goal to raise just $300; I’d like to hope it will be more.

I may be running my Death Knight Recalled which, after all, is appropriate … battling back from death’s door, which is what the children of the hospital must do every day but in real life. I may launch a level 1 paladin named Zenodotus (the first librarian of the Library of Alexandria) in order to work in a group with others on the team starting new toons. [Kudos and thanks to MissP for making me aware of the name!] This is the link to my own page on the Extra Life website.

Added incentive
I’ll give you a bit of extra motivation: from every individual who makes me a pledge of at least $1/hr played, I’ll randomly chose one of you (if you’re not giving anonymously) to receive one of my signed limited edition prints and five signed artist-proof whiteback Magic cards as a thank you for stepping up to the plate. I know times are hard; your dollars will go for a good cause.

ETA (10/14): I’m planning to include as many of the child-specific quests as I can: notably little Pamela Redpath (for the Battle of Darrowshire), will help Alicia in SW to deliver her poem in Shattrath, and on Hordeside, go feed Ahab Wheathoof’s dog Kyle. I remember there’s a quest in Grizzly Hills as well but I doubt my DK can get there unless she levels faster in 24hr than I expect. Perhaps a higher-level guildie can escort me around…

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