I can’t really offer anything other than excuses as to why. There were the usual stresses like my job and studies, yes, but there was also a personal tragedy in my life that’s knocked my girlfriend and I out over the last several months. I would love to be able to point to that as the reason for my tardiness, but the truth is that I was way behind schedule before we’d even received the first hint of bad news at home.

Bringing this manuscript to its current draft has been a tortuous nightmare of delays and procrastination. I feel like I have simply not had the time to devote, and that other issues in my life have taken precedence. My writing has suffered as a result, too, because I’ve been unwilling to move onto my next project until I finish this one. I’ve written a couple of shorts in the meantime – some of which I’m actually quite proud of – but these are a poor substitute for the larger projects when it comes to actually chasing my writing goals. I’ve found it impossible to shake the feeling that if I want to be a novelist, then I need to be writing novels. I’ve felt as though I’m losing touch with my dream, and that’s a scary-effing-notion.

But it’s coming close to done. At last, after months of slow work, I’m coming up on the end of this thing. It can finally go to my beta readers, so they can glare at me and ask me what the hell I was thinking while I sputter my thanks and apologies before taking their suggestions on board for another breathtaking round of revision. This should be an exciting time, but right now, I just feel mentally exhausted.

When I finished the Ballad of Iron Percy, I was on the verge of graduating from college. The ceremony wasn’t for another week and a half or so, and I decided that I’d spend that entire time editing. The two-hundred-thousand-word manuscript would be in its first draft by the end of that time, and why not? It wasn’t as if I had anything better to do. And you know what? I fucking did it. Less than two weeks, and I’d taken my godawful mess of a first novel off of the streets, checked it into the YMCA, and cleaned it up until it was just presentable enough for its first interviews. It felt fantastic to print this thing out for the first time – like I was taking a significant step into my own shining future. I just knew that everything would be rainbows, unicorns, and blowjobs going ahead. I knew it, man.

Now, looking back on that ten days of frantic, gleeful effort, I scratch my head and wonder just how in the hell I pulled it off without a fistful of Adderall and an endless well of black coffee. Had I gone through some sort of manic episode? Had I made some kind of Faustian pact this time around? In reality, it was a combination of being incredibly excited to ‘finish,’ being absolutely convinced that editors and agents would fall over themselves to sign me once I got this baby out, and being in a new place with nothing else to do for all that time.

Still, looking back, it seems like a superhuman feat. By contrast, editing this new book felt like trying to escape from Shawshank with nothing but a rock hammer, some pinup girl posters, and some sagely advice delivered by Morgan Freeman. It wasn’t exciting. It was grueling, and it took me several months of on-off chipping away to finish the job. And really, if I’m honest, I’m not even done. This was the first pass. I’ve taken my treasured manuscript out back and hosed him off to get the most obvious dirt off, but I still need to get him a haircut and a new outfit and I don’t even know if the Y has room.

I don’t know why I couldn’t just do what I did for my first book. Maybe I felt a little cynical about it this time, or maybe it’s just harder to summon the gumption when you have to work for a living on top of it. But I do know that something has to change. I’m excited to get back to actual writing and have a new book rattling away in my mind, just itching to get out. I’m thrilled to be able to pass this one to my beta readers, so I can get some real feedback and start making this pile of paragraphs into something resembling an actual novel. But I know I need to come up with a new way to refine my editing process, or I will probably never make it as a proper writer.

There’s a lesson in this somewhere, and I am determined to find it. I need to sit down with a notebook and a pot of coffee – perhaps a bottle of beer or two if it’s late – and figure out some way to fit my dream into the reality of my working life.

So, naturally, I’m just going to write on and pretend like that little blip never happened. I haven’t felt the urge to blog about anything for a long while, but recently, I was linked to this article and this image. I found both to be pretty thought-provoking.

Not because I agree with the message of the video, mind you – I really like how progressive the Girl Scouts are as an organization, and viewing these things makes me want to buy Samoas by the crateload.

Rather, I look at the young scout doing the talking and feel a bit sorry for her. I don’t know whether these are her own ideas, or whether she was put up to it by Concerned Conservative Parents, or if that even matters. I do know that she’s only fourteen, and the next ten years will probably be somewhat transformational. They were for me – you challenge your old assumptions, are exposed to new ideas, and grow up a lot in that time. Maybe she’ll go on to change her mind about these issues as she learns more about them, or maybe she’ll chair her school’s Christian Union and Young Republicans Club in college. I don’t know. But whatever she does, this video will still be kicking around in some forgotten corner of the internet when she does it.

It makes me really thankful that I grew up in a time when the stupid shit I said and did as a teenager wasn’t recorded for posterity. I had some idiotic opinions when I was her age – pretty much everybody does when they’re fourteen, I’m sure. I have the luxury of being able to stow those memories in a corner of my mind, away from my friends and the general public. What shame I feel for that time of my life is fleeting, quiet, and private. This girl… I think she’s on the wrong side of history, and she may come to realize that in the next decade. But she won’t have the same privilege of leaving her teenaged opinions behind, since the evidence is more or less there to stay.

There isn’t a message or moral to that comment. It just leaves me a little sad, and (somewhat selfishly) grateful that I managed to get through age 12 – 20 without recording myself doing something particularly dumb.

Another, more personal reason I find it thought-provoking is the Scouts in general. The Girl Scouts are a lot more forward-thinking and aligned with my own moral compass than the Boy Scouts of America. By age 18, though, I’d earned my Eagle Scout rank. I was, and am, proud of that – it took a lot of hard work and community service, and I’d been working at it for at least half a decade. Succeeding at something you try that hard to achieve is always sweet. The Boy Scouts helped me make friends, helped me get into college, and gave me a number of positive experiences to take into adulthood.

Yet I can’t help but be aware that if I believed then what I believe now, I wouldn’t have qualified. Atheists can’t be Eagle Scouts – I am both, but only because I lost belief in god after I earned that rank. Indeed, if I were transported back to that age, I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t want to be an Eagle Scout. To me as a teenaged kid, Scouts was all about camping, hiking, setting fun things on fire, and learning. To me as an adult, Scouts also seems to be about religion and homophobia – things that I certainly don’t want to stand for.

The cognitive dissonance I get from trying to reconcile my experience with the Scouts as a positive force in my own life with my belief that the BSA is becoming increasingly backwards on the national scene is… uncomfortable. By contrast, the Girl Scouts are a breath of fresh air.

Becki is incredibly close to her family. We make a point to head down to Wales once every three weeks or so, because she feels that she needs to make contact with the clan… especially her mother. Her relationship to her mother is very important to her.

So, two weeks ago, when her mother was in the hospital with suspected gallstones, Becki was understandably worried. I told her that gallstones aren’t life threatening, that there are ways to break the stones up or remove them with surgery, so her mother would be back to normal in no time at all. All they needed to do was run a few tests and confirm the diagnosis before they put her through some routine, painless treatment.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t gallstones. It was pancreatic cancer.

I won’t go into details about the diagnosis, save to underline the fact that it is a very serious one. Pancreatic cancer is rare, and it is especially dangerous because it displays no symptoms until it’s at an advanced stage, which is what happened here. It was all incredibly sudden. A month ago, she was her usual self. All of a sudden, she has cancer at an advanced stage. It’s terrifying.

This is all sort of unprecedented for me. I’m fond of her – not just because she’s a good person, but also because she’s so important to my one-and-only. I see a lot of her in Becki, and I’m frightened for her. I’m frightened for her whole family. I don’t know what to do or how to respond, and I feel certain that this tragedy will come to define the next several months, even if everything goes as well as can be expected.

It’s inspiring to see everyone pull together to get behind her for this. The phone over there has been ringing off the hook with well-wishers, and we have enough Welsh Cakes to feed an American family for like forty minutes. People are over constantly to see how she’s doing and keep her company. Becki, her brothers, and all of their partners – numbering six in total, including myself – have all teamed up to take care of the cooking, the washing up, and other various household chores. Everyone’s come together to help keep things normal and fight this thing.

It’s hard to watch. It’s difficult to see Becki go through it, and it’s almost too strange to accept as real. I’ve never experienced anything like this myself and can’t even imagine what it’s like for her. It’s not the sort of thing that you can make better with enough comforting words and cuddles. I feel pretty much rudderless and have no idea what to do. There isn’t really anything I can do but hold her and not let go.

It’s only going to get worse – even if all goes well, and they can shrink the tumor with chemo, it’s going to be an immense challenge for all of us over the next several months.

I mentioned earlier that it’s hard to accept as real. It’s like that for all of us, not just me – most days, Becki and I just go about our usual business. I practice drawing, write, go to work. She exercises and tries to manage her own insane workload. We laugh, tell jokes, and do all of the things that we ordinarily do. Then, often in the evenings, she’ll remember. She’ll cry and I’ll hold her, and it’s awful.

It’s also difficult to accept that there’s little we can do. We can do some cooking and cleaning for the family and keep her mother company. We can try to keep her spirits high. We can be there for support. But the hard battle is something she’ll have to go through on her own.

I’m in Gloucester, now, working as usual. So is Becki. I can’t help but feel like we should be down there, and I know Becki feels the same. Yet we can’t just abandon our lives, and the time off we have to spare is limited. Our employers are understanding, but it wouldn’t be fair of us to take a solid month off and still expect money. Besides, there’s little we can do right now. We’re still spending as much time as possible in Wales with her family, yet I often wonder if it’s enough. I feel real pangs of guilt over this. I almost feel like we should just drop everything and be there for the next several weeks, even though the reality is that it won’t solve anything. I feel like if we don’t, we’ll regret it.

I feel a lot of things. Above all, though, I feel fear. It is a general sense of foreboding that waxes and wanes, but never vanishes.

The worst part is that Becki’s mother is fairly young at just over 50. She had no risk factors – she doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, no drugs, nothing like that. This came out of nowhere.

Ask your parents to get themselves checked out. I did. I’d hate for this to happen to anyone else.

I see this discussion come up from time to time in the dark corners of the internet I frequent. It’s seen as somewhat acceptable to ridicule the obese in a way that society wouldn’t permit for other minorities. You can’t control who your ancestors were, what your sexual orientation is, or what gender you were born with, but you do have power over what food you put into your bodies and how much of it you eat. Therefore, obesity is a choice, and ridicule is more acceptable to society if your ‘condition’ is something you have control over. The other side of the debate takes exception to this, claiming that fat haters are lacking in empathy and have no idea what it’s like to live with a ‘food addiction,’ and occasionally even go so far as to state that obesity is a disability that warrants special treatment by society and subsidized care from the taxpayers.

Personal experience puts me on the first side of the debate.

I realize that the first position is a bit too simple, and that it isn’t always as simple as ‘calories in, calories out’ for an incredibly small fraction of obese people. Most of the rest of us have bodies that obey the laws of thermodynamics. Countries like America and Scotland don’t have a larger proportion of obese people relative to the rest of the world because their populations have a genetic predisposition toward these medical conditions, after all. Most of us get fat over here because of what we put in our bodies.

I acknowledge that a tiny minority of obese people do have real problems that prevent them from maintaining a healthy body weight. The vast majority of obese people do not fall into this category. They are overweight because they consistently make decisions regarding what they eat and how they spend their time that result in their becoming fat.

No, let me reassure you that I don’t hate fat people.

I do, however, hate a certain mindset that I believe often leads to getting and staying fat.

I always try to maintain the attitude that the difficulties I face in my life are my own. They might not have been my fault to begin with (though they usually are), but they’re my problem now. Nobody can solve them but me. I believe this is a virtuous attitude, yet I acknowledge how difficult it is to hold to. I don’t think anyone enjoys owning up to and confronting their own failures. I don’t always succeed in this myself, but I do always expect myself to try. I’m less concerned with what’s fair or unfair about my situation and more concerned with what I can do to change things for the better.

I find that many fat people fail to do this. They will claim or imply that their physical condition is entirely outside of their own control. Maybe they even believe this is the truth. They think that this is their destiny, and that there’s no use trying to fight it. They will tell you that they’ve tried diet and exercise and that none of it worked, straight-faced as they give you this spiel with a bucket of fried chicken sitting in their laps. They honestly believe that they are fat by accident, or because of some unlucky trick of genetics. They take comfort from this, because if it is true then it means that they have not failed themselves. If it’s not their fault, then they don’t have to change their lifestyle.

Even this doesn’t bother me so much. It’s when it’s combined with whining to the tune of ‘oh, I wish I weren’t so fat!’ that I start to rage out.

I have a few friends and relatives that do this. It always bothers me, but I never say anything, because I’m interested in remaining friends and/or avoiding a frosty stare at the next family event. Instead, I will try to avoid the subject or get off of it quickly, because such a discussion always goes the same way.

It will be a back-and-forth where I make suggestions about how they might get involved and lose some of the weight, and they counter with arguments as to why eating healthy or fitting in some exercise is impossible for their life circumstances. I will reply with an alternative, which they will then shoot down with another excuse. Presumably, they expect to convince me that they’re correct, that by the end of the discussion I will say ‘Oh man, I guess you’re right. You have no choice but to eat large quantities of processed crap or fast food, and because of your family, your job, and other circumstances, it’s impractical for you to do any sort of getting up and moving around. It’s totally unfair and it isn’t your fault at all. Here, have some pity. No, I insist.’

In these discussions, they are not looking for advice on how to lose weight. They are looking for sympathy. Now, being somewhat of a soulless douchebag myself (I have a disease called ‘being from New Jersey’ that makes this medically inevitable), I can’t summon much of that stuff for the obese. So I try to avoid this sort of banter as much as I can.

The thing is, I can sort of understand their thinking. The real solution to their problems is lifestyle change, which is not at all easy to swing. Diet and regular exercise are both hard. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry designed to sell us miracle weight loss pills, diet shakes, and the like. Some people even believe that invasive surgery is the less difficult option compared to eating less and moving more. Fat people who complain about their condition do genuinely want to be thin. They just don’t want it enough to do the hard work and make it happen.

Unfortunately for them, there is no Magic Wand cure for obesity. Unless you spend several hours per day trekking across the Arctic, you cannot eat five thousand calories worth of food every day and expect to lose weight. You have to burn the energy you put into your body if you want to keep yourself from putting weight on. It’s fine if you don’t want to spend hours in the gym – I certainly don’t. Diet is the most important part of weight loss, anyway, and that part isn’t really negotiable. You can still lose weight without a gym membership if you eat sensibly.

If you don’t want to do that, then you need to accept being fat. Face up to the fact that if you don’t make a change yourself, then it simply isn’t going to happen. Stop whining about it, own your choices, and enjoy your food.

Let’s face it. Our society is inherently wasteful. We live in a culture where pulling oil from the ground, making plastic from it, shipping the raw materials to a factory, manufacturing a new plastic spoon, and sending it to the consumer to be used once before being thrown away is seen as less effort than washing your spoon and using it again. My girl has always been sort of disgusted by this attitude, and trying to change it in the companies she’s employed with is her job. So the story of the single-use spoon is one that keeps her up at night. From time to time, we’ll talk about it and solve the world’s problems in conversation. It’s fun. Anyone who has ever had a circlejerk political discussion with likeminded friends knows what I’m talking about.

Anyway, while we were talking, I had a bit of an epiphany. Sustainability Greens are the Linux nerds of environmental science.

Bear with me, here.

Linux has a lot going for it. It’s useful, it’s free and open source, it’s quite customizable, and it’s quite efficient when it comes to utilizing the system resources. In short, for those in the know, it’s pretty much better than Windows at most things, and it costs absolutely nothing to use. Yet it has a tiny shred of the market share by comparison. Why don’t more people use Linux, then? A couple months ago, I witnessed a discussion on this very topic unfold. One user made a damned good point that agrees with my experiences as a new user of Linux. It went something like this – please forgive my paraphrasing:

“Linux isn’t as popular as Windows because it’s a lot harder to use. I think you guys are overestimating the level of tech proficiency in the general population of computer users. Have you used the latest version of Windows? It caters to that market. The average user never has to open the command line in Windows. That’s why it’s more popular.”

Obviously, this heretic was burned at the stake before he could back up his points. Fans of the OS attacked his argument on all fronts, but the general consensus of the opposition was something like “It’s not hard to use. You’re just stupid.”

I disagree. Once you open the command line, you’ve crossed the border into territory that’s far too frightening and complex for the average user to keep at it. Sure, they probably could learn what to do if they really tried. But they won’t – they’ll reboot their computers into Windows. The end result is that you get to feel smug and self-superior, but Linux keeps its small market share. This kind of thing is fine for Linux, which continues to thrive even though the vast majority of computer users don’t even know what it is, but this just isn’t acceptable for something as vital as Sustainability.

The “It’s not hard to do. You’re just stupid.” mentality definitely does exist in Sustainability and Environmentalism. In our car-ride conversation, I brought up the example of recycling to highlight the importance of simplicity at the user end.

Recycling is a simple concept. The products you use are made of resources that still have value even after the product itself ceases to be useful, and recycling is the process by which these resources are recovered. The alternative to recycling is the landfill. The idea of the landfill is also a simple one – you take everything in the bin and you put it in a pile on some undesirable scrap of land. You continue to do this until you run out of space, at which point you need to find another landfill. Which of these options is the environmentally friendly one? The answer should be obvious like the bleached-blonde hair on a girl’s upper lip.

Yet not everyone recycles. Recycling isn’t compulsory, and a lot of recyclable materials end up heaped in the landfill. Why? Why would people deliberately choose to waste things? How do we get them to change?

The answers to this are varied, and the focus tends to be on changing peoples’ attitudes, making them care, and ‘making Green sexy.’ Sustainability Greens will have their work cut out for them if this is the path they pick. It is not easy to get people off of the path of least resistance by rhetorical argument alone. You have to create a compelling message, get people to listen to it and agree with it, and hope that it’s enough to change peoples’ actions. It is extremely difficult to do this intentionally and reliably.

Behavior Change is hard. It’s pretty damned difficult to achieve on your own, when you have a real desire for it. Have you ever tried to lose weight, quit smoking, or stop biting your nails? It’s tough. Succeeding on a grand scale with a passive audience is far more challenging than that.

I think that the interested parties are approaching the problem in the wrong way. The immediate solution is not to make people care more, it’s to improve and simplify the end user’s participation in the desired behavior.

Back to Recycling.

When someone has an item that they want to be rid of, they have two solutions to choose between. One of these is easy, and one of these is hard.

The easy solution is to throw it in the bin, which takes all of two seconds – perhaps as many as ten if you try to toss it in basketball style and miss the shot. You might feel a little bit of guilt at sentencing that plastic bottle to death by slow decomposition in a landfill, but this will be short-lived.

Recycling is the hard solution. It requires more labor and specialist knowledge of the rules. You need to know what bin it belongs in, of course, but it’s more complicated than that. Is the item you’re trying to dispose of cardboard? Yeah, we can take that. Unless it’s been exposed to food, in which case, we can’t. Wait, is it corrugated? Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait. Is it? Yes? Tough break, to the landfill it goes. Got any plastic? Is it the right plastic number? Because we can only take certain numbers, you know, and we also expect you to sort by color. Whoa, are you trying to recycle yogurt pots? Shit, man, what are you trying to do, kill us all? You can’t recycle those! What do you mean, ‘How is that any different to my plastic soup containers?’ It just is! Oh, cider bottles are glass. We can take those, if they’re the right color. But wait… the top is still on it, and that’s metal. Do you need to take that off and put that in the right bin? Wait, what if it touched food? What if I get this wrong? Will that sentence the whole bin to the landfill? Okay, cool, now we’re all sorted on the rules. We can now recycle all the time. Except, wait, you’re moving to a new town? Sorry, you need to learn all the rules and guidelines again. It’s mostly the same, except… you know what? Fuck it, just throw it out.

Ahem.

My point is that people don’t see ‘waste’ and ‘recycle’ when they’re trying to dispose of things. They see an easy option and a hard option. They pick the easy option. Why can’t everything go into a single bin, to be sorted at the plant? Why can’t we recycle some things that have touched food, but not others? Why can’t we have standardized rules for it across the country? If you want more people to recycle, you need to make recycling easy.

The response to this? “It’s not hard. You’re just stupid.”

While that’s true, it doesn’t solve the problem.

The Girlfriend plays games sometimes. Co-op shooters always win big in our house… I had a ton of fun playing Gears of War co-op with her. That game is average quality playing solo, but she and I had endless fun teaming up in order to blast the Locust and roleplay the obvious homoerotic tension between the main characters. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed quite so hard playing a video game. We also played other, similar two-player games like Halo: Reach, and I like to include her whenever I can with these co-op games. It’s infinitely more fun to play them with a partner.

But I have had no luck trying to convince her to pick up some of my favorite single-player games. She tends to lose interest in them pretty quickly – even games that I am certain she will enjoy, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

So I was sort of surprised when she asked me if I owned the game Fallout 3, and if I would let her play it. I don’t know what caused her sudden interest. I did own the game, and I’ve put like 60+ hours into it, but I hadn’t played F3 in years. Maybe she saw me playing New Vegas, or maybe she watched her brother playing it at some point.

When she first put the disc in, however, I made up my mind to do my absolute best to just let her get on with it. I’d watch, I’d answer questions, and I’d help her out if she deliberately asked me to, but I would do everything I could not to interfere with her experience.

Everything went better than expected. I usually don’t enjoy watching someone else play games, but this has been one hilarious ride.

Right away, she makes a female character named Phil and proceeds to cut a bloody swath of destruction through Vault 101 as she shoots, punches, and baseball-bats her way to victory. No compromise or speech checks for her – oh, no. She kills the overseer on her way out, enacts gory retribution on half the security staff, and sets off across the wasteland. Before long, all would hear the name of Phil and tremble.

She’s not really a gamer, so she wasn’t familiar with certain conventions in games like these. Also, when something extremely unexpected or frightening happens on screen, her reaction is often akin to ‘run in circles, scream, and shout.’ The combination of these two things has resulted in extreme hilarity on a number of occasions. The first time she fell into deep water was absolutely priceless.

In real life, if you don’t know how to swim and you’re plunged into deep water, you panic. Your body operates on instinct – your legs stop moving, your arms thrash about, and you do anything to keep your head above water. Even experienced swimmers will resort to this position if they get exhausted in the water. This is what tells a lifeguard that the swimmer is in distress and in danger of drowning.

When Phil first fell into the Potomac, her reaction was kind of like that. Becki didn’t know what would happen. She was still mastering the controls, and when she leaped into the river, she sank several feet below the surface right away. An O2 meter appeared on the screen and began to tick downward at an alarming rate. It didn’t take a genius to realize that once those bars ran out, Phil would soon perish unless she suddenly mutated gills. Of course, the solution is to swim to the water’s surface. Becki did not know how to do this – there was no tutorial for swimming, after all. She completely freaked out. She turned to me for help, asking questions in a shrill, panicked voice. Of course, I was useless to her then, dying from laughter as I was. “Babe? BABE!?” she screamed, mashing buttons and trying to learn how to swim. She swung the baseball bat uselessly, as if trying to beat the O2 bar into submission as she had so many raiders, mole rats, and bloatflies. But no, this was not an enemy that could be vanquished so easily. Bullets were useless underwater. The bat, she did nothing! Fortunately, my girl’s quick thinking and cool head under pressure led her to the solution: look up toward the surface, walk in that direction, and punch your dick boyfriend in the arm for laughing so hard.

Phil also turned out to be a bit of a hoarder. Becki started to pick up and carry absolutely everything she could find. Who knows? One day, Phil might need that assortment of bent tin cans, lawn gnomes, and empty Nuka-Cola bottles! That fission battery might weigh 25 pounds and be worth a measly 50 caps, but come on. It’ll come in handy at some point. Fortunately, Becki learned about the Rock-It-Launcher (a weapon that fires junk at high velocities), and it became her gun of choice for the low levels. Mostly because she always had a crapton of ammo for it. Early in the game, we had a number of conversations that went something like this:

Her: “I’m overencumbered again?”

Me: “Check out your inventory, let’s see what you’ve got. Okay, guns, bullets, a few articles of clothing, and… mutilated organs? Where did you even get these?”

Her: “SHUT UP, I MIGHT NEED THEM LATER.”

I have mostly kept faithful to my pledge not to interfere with her experience, but I must admit that I had a great time messing with her in a number of spots. For instance, at one point, she was exploring a random Vault. There was some sort of unnatural compound in the air that made her character experience strange hallucinations. When these occurred, I pretended not to see them. Because, you know… I’m an asshole. This somehow made the experience absolutely harrowing for poor Phil. Every time one of the insane survivors struck her from the darkness, she would squeal with terror and panic for several seconds while the emaciated vault-dweller tried in vain to pierce her hardened Mk. II powered armor with his nailboard, fumbling with the controls until she could gather her wits and cut him down with a hail of minigun bullets.

I regret nothing. It was absolutely hilarious. Though I should note that similar efforts have been less successful since – Becki has learned that when it comes to advice in this game, I am not to be trusted. When I say things like “Did that Ghoul just hit you? You’re infected!” or “Can’t reach that ledge? Try a rocket jump!”, it doesn’t get the same rise out of her that it used to.

Unfortunately, Phil’s myriad life stresses led her to experiment with drugs and alcohol. I suppose my scare tactics must have played some part in this, an admission which gives me no pleasure. She suffers from an addiction to beer (no other alcohol – just beer) and buffout. The desire to be able to carry just a few more pounds of stuff led her down dark roads, and at this point, there’s very little she won’t do for just another sip of sweet, delicious beer to chase down that Buffout tablet. What would Phil’s father say about his daughter’s chemical stress relief if he were still alive? It’s only a matter of time before she discovers Jet and Med-X. Poor, misguided Phil…

Phil gets called a lot of things. Many people refer to her as the Last, Best Hope for the Wasteland, but what would they say if they knew the truth? What would they say if they’d heard Phil mutter atrocious things like ‘I wonder if it’s possible to make humanity extinct in this game?’ What would they say?

They should be worried. Their savior has become… somewhat unhinged. And she has a Heavy Incinerator.

Ahem.

She’s still barely scratched the surface of the gameworld, and she still has all the DLC left to play, not to mention New Vegas. Good times. Plus, this has proven to be an excellent diversion as I work to finish this draft of my second novel. It makes me smile to watch her enjoy the same experiences I had all that time ago, though I am starting to become a little afraid of her. I won’t get really worried until she finds a Gatling Laser in Real Life, though.

So, over a year ago, Dragon Age: Origins came out. All I knew about it at the time was that it was an RPG set in an original fantasy setting, and that it was developed by Bioware. That last bit was essentially what sold it for me. I love RPGs as a genre in part because it lends itself to great storytelling, and the writing for Bioware games has been consistently decent since I first installed Baldur’s Gate. They have been rewarded for their dedication to quality stories and settings with a rather large fan base, and I am a member of it. I bought DA:O as soon as it came out and fully expected to be entertained. I was not disappointed – I was sucked in, hurled a good 30 hours at the game on my first playthrough, and enjoyed myself immensely.

So, as you might imagine, when Dragon Age 2 was announced, I was absolutely stoked.

I wasn’t completely convinced that some of the major changes they advertised were necessary. For instance, adding a voice actor for the main character and a Mass Effect style conversation wheel… I was lukewarm about that. One of the things I liked most about the first one were the myriad origins you could play through. Now, as in ME, several assumptions are made before you begin. You’re a human, your family name is Hawke, and you’re a refugee from Ferelden, fleeing the blight that your main character in the first game defeated. You can pick your appearance, your gender, and your character class, but your race and your immediate backstory are set in stone. Dragon Age 2 has moved away from the nebulous Grey Warden style of protagonist, and toward some form of Knight-Commander Shepard.

The influence of the wildly successful Mass Effect series on this decision is obvious. I was ambivalent about this, too. The conversation wheel has proven itself in those games, so I wasn’t worried about that, but it did take yet another bit of roleplay and choice out of the hands of the players. The tradeoff for this was getting a voice actor for the main character. No more mute protagonist! Now, personally, having a silent Grey Warden as my protagonist in the first game never bothered me. Having such a customizable character in a fully-voiced game like Dragon Age was fun and interesting to me, and introducing Hawke seemed like a departure from that. It wasn’t necessarily bad (I very much enjoyed the ME games and liked playing as Shepard, so I was open to the concept), but it was different and potentially harmful to my overall experience.

I wasn’t the only one to get these impressions about a number of facets of the game, and it occurred to me before I began that the game’s developers were taking a big risk by trying to do something different. Changing the combat system, voicing the protagonist at the expense of the customized biography, simplifying the inventory system and level progression…  they were making some serious changes to the feel of the game, and they were ‘fixing’ a number of things that weren’t necessarily broken. They were taking a bunch of risks by changing a bunch of conventions that didn’t necessarily need alteration. Fan grumbling was pretty much inevitable at that point – their base accused them of ‘dumbing down the game for console players,’ attempting to turn Dragon Age into Magic Effect 2, that sort of thing. It was ballsy and they got my respect for that, but I wasn’t sure that it was going to pay off.

Then the marketing department at EA got involved and did their best to ruin everything. For one, the game released with some DLC already on the market, which falls firmly into the category of ‘Using DLC For Evil’ in my book. None of the content was really ‘downloaded’ at all – the character existed in the game at launch and you had to pay extra to unlock him. Definitely a dick move that made a lot of people frown and roll their eyes before they even installed the game. They also started giving a lot of stuff away as promotional items. You get stuff for preordering. You get stuff for playing the demo. You get stuff for a million people having played the demo. You get stuff for playing the facebook game. You get stuff for subscribing to the newsletter. You get access to a ridiculously OP’d store as DLC, or for having preordered from EA… It’s kind of absurd how crazy they went with this stuff, and, in my opinion, it cheapens the experience a little bit. Much to my irritation, they also staggered the release dates depending on what country you lived in, so I was forced to wait another three days before the game actually came out in the UK. This is not in itself a huge deal, but it really shouldn’t happen in today’s world of digital downloads and near-instantaneous data transfer from anywhere in the world. It’s a special irritation if you are prone to envy and have a number of gamer friends living in America, because they all get to play before you.

So, this, in addition to the bold tweaks that the developers made to a perfectly functional and enjoyable gameplay system, was a recipe for marketing disaster. I’ve found that hardcore gamer geeks are notoriously prone to the ‘They Changed It, Now It Sucks’ mentality as it is, and pulling the kind of crap they did with the Exiled Prince DLC is like hitting the unpleasable fanbase beehive with a rusty shovel. In the days before the game’s release, and in the three days between the American release and the European release, I saw quite a lot of angry criticism about DA2. As I examined what The Internet had to say, I began to suspect that some of the ire was not entirely legitimate. In situations like these, when a deluge of bad PR thanks to an overeager marketing team and a few changes to a generally well-liked gameplay system collide to create a perfect storm of bile and vitriol in the fanbase, one must always be on guard against a confirmation bias. If you’ve managed to convince yourself that you aren’t going to enjoy a movie before you sit down to watch it, then you probably won’t. The same applies to any entertainment media. Your experience of it is colored by the reviews you’ve read, the trailers you’ve seen, and the conversations you’ve had about it. You already have the beginnings of an opinion on it before you even start to play. I began to suspect this at work when I started seeing comments like ‘I haven’t played it yet, but I can already tell that this thing they changed will ruin the game’ with some regularity. I was a little bit worried going in, though, because of the sheer volume of complaints in the forums I browse, even if a lot of it looked like baseless or exaggerated Nerd Rage.

But I trust BioWare. They frequently put out good games that are worth playing, and I am often persuaded to pre-order them. Their stories are often very well written, and their characters are usually enjoyable. I was more than willing to put my fingers in my ears and keep an open mind while I played.

It sucked me in, of course. These games often do. It consumed my attention for a solid week as I worked to finish my first playthrough, and I’m happy to report that I found it enjoyable, on the whole. I fully intend to play it through again, after they release or announce some new DLC, or perhaps an expansion.

After a while, though, elements of it did start to get tiresome, and I began to see that the game’s most strident critics did have a bit of a point in some areas. It does fall short compared to Origins in a few important places. For one, the gameworld feels small. You spend all of it in Kirkwall and its surrounding areas, aside from a handful of brief sojourns into unique maps. By the time you’re halfway through with the game, the world stops being fun to explore. The environments blended into one another and I started to feel hemmed in. You can have great games that take place in only one city that still feel huge. That the game takes place entirely in Kirkwall is not damning on its own, I thought, but the game could have benefited from adding more maps and regions to explore. By contrast, Origins felt enormous. You had an entire country to gallivant across. The places you went were visibly different from one another – Denerim, the Deep Roads, the Dalish encampment, the Fade, you name it. Ferelden felt psychologically larger and more worthwhile to explore than Kirkwall and the Free Marches.

The main plot is also flawed somehow, but for the life of me, I can’t put my finger on exactly what makes me feel this way. It lacks a bit of direction and cohesion in the first two acts because there is no strong, overarching backbone to the story. In Origins, you’re one of two surviving Grey Wardens and you have to unify Ferelden against the Blight. A lot of other stuff happens in between, and you do ignore the darkspawn for a while as you try to muster an army, but the Blight itself serves as a convenient fire under the ass of the story. It drives things along and provides a framework for the narrative by giving the character something to work toward from the beginning. We’ve seen this a hundred times in as many games by now, and it’s starting to feel a bit formulaic, but it works.

Dragon Age 2 lacks the same sense of urgency. You arrive in Kirkwall having already escaped from the Blight, and Hawke’s motivation for questing is the need to move up in the world and move out of her wastrel uncle’s house in the poor section of town. So at first, the plot is less about you standing between the world and certain doom, and more about you trying to improve your family’s fortunes. Later, in Act II, you’re called upon to solve a crisis for the city’s Viscount, and still later you’re instrumental in resolving a conflict between two of the city’s most influential residents that threatens to destroy everything. The way that these events are connected is not immediately obvious, so at first, these main plot points appear to have little to do with one another. I haven’t yet been able to determine whether or not I liked this. It’s not better, but it’s not worse, either, because the stories are still interesting, even if they aren’t connected right away.

The structure of the narrative is also a departure from what I’ve seen in other RPGs. Hawke is given no backstory, no lengthy exposition to give her an identity. You take control just as your family is fleeing from Lothering, where Hawke is in the company of her brother, sister, and mother. There’s no talk about your time in Lothering or what you did in Ferelden – nothing so direct as that, anyway. The game expects you to roll with it, take clues from your supporting actors, and learn about your character on the fly. I felt that it worked. I found it easy to get a grasp of the story and a grip on Hawke as a character without spending hours reading the codex, and I especially enjoyed the subtle way in which your choices can influence who knows you a year after you’re into the city.

The game’s main conflict, the very reason why the Seeker Cassandra is questioning Varric in the first place, is also basically set in stone, and your choices can only ever have a limited effect on the main outcome. You’re hearing about the events before some cataclysm after they have already unfolded. There will be a disaster. Hawke is not a Commander Shepardesque force of nature yet and cannot shape the whole of the universe with the sheer power of her awesome. There’s no way to get an ‘Everybody Wins, Now Let’s Have Cookies!’ ending in Dragon Age 2, and the main character gets swept up in events beyond her control. It is a departure from the familiar ‘Hero of Legend versus unstoppable, scary threat’ formula that we see so often in RPGs like this – for now, the world is bigger than Hawke. She can’t pick any truly ‘good’ choices in the endgame and has to settle for ‘least bad’ as the inevitable tragedy occurs. I actually did quite enjoy this, for the most part. The story feels dark without being over-the-top angsty, and I empathized with Hawke and the other characters enough that the disasters and plot twists at the end of the game had a real impact on me as I tried (and failed) to shape them toward a positive outcome. The tragedy at the end felt like a tragedy, and I find myself burning to know what will happen next.

This kind of story is pretty rare in video games – there are any number of dark, tragic twists in game stories, but these usually drive the plot and motivate the player character partway through the story. Defeats occur so that you can rise above them, and when you do, the victory is sweeter. Tragedy doesn’t usually occur at the end of the game, and when it does, it’s usually not the only option. The downside here is that since it was an RPG with decent writing and characters that I felt connected to, I felt real failure at my inability to prevent the world-breaking disaster, even though the disaster is inevitable. It’s not usual for me to feel such negative emotions at the end of a game. This was a bold step. They clearly intend to move forward from here, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Still, it’s easy for me to imagine that some people won’t enjoy the way plot concludes. I believe that this will be seen as a marmite ending – players will either love it, or hate it. I liked it and am still thinking about it days later, but I won’t be at all surprised to hear it if other players complain about their choices having little or no effect on how the ending plays out. Hawke’s influence as the Champion of Kirkwall cannot avert the catastrophe, and many players will feel annoyed with the lack of any ability to change the overall outcome of certain key moments. These people will have a point – rather than directing the story, you’re participating in it, and not everyone is going to enjoy that as much. Other BioWare games do not do this.

Now, with regard to the gameplay changes, I generally felt that little had changed between Origins and Rise to Power. A lot of the complaints about this aspect of the game were that the combat was being made simpler and ‘faster’ to pander to the consoles crowd. I didn’t really get that sense as I played. I still got that tactical, semi-turn based feel in the game, especially for challenging fights. Indeed, the classes have abilities that are designed to fit together quite well – foes engaging the warriors can get hit with status effects that make the mages do more damage, for example, and vice versa. Rogues can manipulate aggro, debuff the enemies, and do excellent single-target damage with combos and backstabs, that sort of thing. It’s groovy. The system seems quite flexible and robust. My only complaint here has more to do with the difficulty curve. On Normal difficulty, most fights are easy as anything and are resolved quickly in your favor. And then once in a while, you’re thrown a fight that’s tough enough to force you to re-load the game several times. It goes from ‘I grasp rudimentary tactics and am playing my party decently well, so this is easy’ to ‘Oh my god, I have no idea where all these enemies are coming from and this is my fifth time attempting this fight’ without real reason – it’d be fine and expected for this to happen during boss encounters, but I found that it happened more often when I accidentally triggered more than one generic spawn. I plan on playing through it again on hard now that I’m more familiar with the system, and I expect this to change the experience somewhat.

(It should also be mentioned that the generic bandit/mercenary spawns are a bit… generic. As in, they’re all wearing gear that looks pretty much the same, whatever group of ill repute they happen to belong to. This feels a little lazy, but is by no means game-slaying.)

Now, this has gotten quite long already, but I feel I should at last move on to the positives. There are positives – this game sucked me in for a solid forty hours, and it couldn’t have done that if it lacked any substance at all, as some of the more vitriolic naysayers have claimed.

The companions in this game are top notch. Now I know this is a matter of subjective taste, but on the whole, I found them to be better than Origins’ cast. Don’t get me wrong – Origins had some quality characters, and I missed Alistair’s joking and Morrigan’s laser-guided snark a bit, but I found myself enjoying every single one of DA2’s companions. Varric is like a Dwarven Han Solo. Merril has to be the most adorable Maleficar in Thedas. Aveline is strong and believable, a major player in Kirkwall in her own right. Your relationship with your brother and mother is important and interesting to explore. Not all of the characters defy stereotypes – Fenris is the brooding anti-hero, Isabela is the free-spirited rogue with a heart of gold – but where these old tropes are used, they are used well. Their interactions with each other are both numerous and fascinating, as well, and after finishing the game, I was left with the impression that the characters had their own relationships with one another even when I wasn’t there, and that these evolved over time even without my direct influence. Sometimes, when you come to speak to one of them, you’ll find them in a conversation with another character and will be able to witness this brief exchange. Their banter as you travel around town is also quality, and I found that they made me laugh out loud  more than once. Little touches like these add a lot of depth to the supporting cast, and this contributed a lot to my immersion in the game. Their individual stories are also interesting and a joy to follow. Add top-notch voice acting, and you’ve got a recipe for some great, memorable characters. I really hope to see them again.

Oh, and I also enjoyed playing as Hawke more than I thought I would. I didn’t like having certain freedoms in character creation taken away from me, but I found the experience rather similar to playing Shepard in the Mass Effect games. Maybe a little bit better, even – Hawke seems to have more personality, though as I have mentioned, that makes her less immediately accessible. I found I could still identify with the character and enjoy playing as her despite the smaller degree of customization. My biggest complaint is that the dialogue wheel seemed overly simplified in many of the situations, and I would have liked more options than I got most of the time. Still, I didn’t find this terribly immersion-breaking. I especially liked how your relationship with your family added some extra spice to the main plot.

The game also did an excellent job with the underlying mythology of Thedas. I liked how they changed the appearance of the elves and the Qun’ari, and I enjoyed having the opportunity to explore Qun’ari culture a bit more in the second act. Ditto with the indirect exposure to the Tevinter Imperium thanks to Fenris’ missions. Indeed, the main plot depends more on using the game’s lore to drive the story than a big, scary army of pseudo-orcs invading the country, and I was glad to see the setting explored, advanced, and evolved with the help of my character.

I very much enjoyed this game. I sunk forty hours into it, and will definitely be playing through it again in the future. I’m going to wait for more DLC or an expansion before I do, but I certainly intend to have another romp in Kirkwall after enough time has passed. I’m pleased to report that many of the complaints I’ve read about it seem to be unfounded or exaggerated. That said, underneath the declarations of ‘Worst Game Ever’ and ‘Ruined Forever!!!’ by certain elements in the fan base, there are some legitimate concerns. BioWare tried to do something new with the story and the way they told it, and they took a real risk by trying to warp the tried and true mold with their narrative. It’s a decision that I am sure will prove polarizing with the franchise’s fans. I can only hope that it doesn’t put them off adding new titles to the series and adding to Hawke’s adventures. Thedas still has vast potential for stories.

There are also some cut corners – reused maps that become stale after a while, a lack of diversity in the enemies you fight, that sort of thing. This is absolutely true, and I don’t know why they let the game launch without addressing these issues. It’s pretty obvious that Dragon Age 2 could have used another coat or two of polish before they put it out. Fortunately, they don’t ruin the essence of the game for fans of the franchise. If you enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins for its lore, story, and characters and you’re able to approach DA2 with an open mind, then this game is worth your time and money, though I suppose I couldn’t fault you for waiting for it to drop in price.

A related question: If you could go back in time and make another choice, would you?

For me, the answer to this question is no. I like my life and I like where it’s going. Reading lots of science fiction has me paranoid that making a seemingly minor choice will have major consequences in my life later on, and I wouldn’t want to risk fucking up my perfectly good life by choosing not to tattle on Charlie Eelman for putting acorns in the urinal in the 5th grade. I’m not entirely sure how my choice to whine to the teacher about this prevented me from becoming a smack addict, but hey, who am I to think that I could meddle with causality and make things turn out ‘better?’ It’s not worth the potential risk of getting played by Ashton Kutcher in the film adaptation.

Anyway, rather than dissect Mr. Kutcher’s cautionary tale on the subject, what prompted this post was my reflection on a pair of life decisions that completely changed the course of my future and have come to define me for the last two years. These were two Moments of Truth, where I was faced with a difficult decision and could have gone one way or the other on either of them. My choices at these junctures have had a profound effect on my life and relationship.

The first came around graduation in 2008. I was still living in Britain. It was a few days before the ceremony, at which point I would be given my degree in Psychology as well as a handshake and a formal request to GTFO and go back to my country of origin. My plan was to move out to Idaho for a year after I graduated and cut my teeth in the real world there. There was just one problem. I was in love with a British girl, one of my friends throughout university, and she did not know it. I had lived with her and a few other friends in my fourth year at St. Andrews, and though I had known her for more than three years at that point, I’d only been harboring romantic feelings for her for a few months.

It was still a few days before my parents came out to see me, so we were hanging out in her apartment in Edinburgh to pass the time. We went out to dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe that night, but it wasn’t really a date. Because we were friends and had been for years, the whole affair could be explained that way if I decided to pussy out and keep my feelings a secret. That was my choice. I had resolved to tell her how I felt about her that evening, yet my defensive subconscious had been engaged in a guerilla war with my mind for hours leading up to the event as it tried to convince me not to put my self esteem at risk. Because it was at risk. I had been dropping hints since the beginning of the summer, but she had not responded to them in ways that I could call favorable. If she did feel the same way, she did not show it. So I did not think the odds of her reciprocating my affection were very high at all. If that were the case, why confess it in the first place? Doing so could put up a barrier between us and risk what had been, up to then, an awesome friendship. Why risk ruining that if I didn’t think she felt that way about me?

Because she deserved the truth, and because I knew I’d regret it forever if I didn’t. This was my best shot. If I chose not to show her my hand then, I would leave the country soon afterwards and possibly never get another opportunity. I wanted to tell her, yet it was extremely frightening. I did not know how she would react, and I had convinced myself that it would not be favorable. ‘I’m flattered but don’t feel the same way’ was, I thought, the best I could hope for. If I chose to confess my feelings, it would be my Pickett’s Charge – brave, yet foolish and perhaps futile.

But I found my courage, somehow, and I told her. It shocked her. She felt the same way. We spent the night cuddling on her bare bed, using an oversized towel for a blanket. I was absolutely astonished – it was everything I hoped for and the last thing I expected.

It could have easily gone the other way. In some other universe, I chose not to tell her, and I slowly lost touch with her over the next several months. I pity that other me. I wish that he’d found his bravery. Now, he probably plays World of Warcraft and is still wondering just what the hell he’s going to do with his life. Maybe he has some direction, but he’s not entirely certain of it. He definitely regrets his decision to keep his thoughts to himself that fateful evening in Edinburgh, because he probably isn’t truly happy.

Another similar day came later that year. I did end up going back to the States, because my visa expired and I had to go home and apply for a new one. I went to Idaho as planned, got a crappy job, and worked while I waited for it to go through. Long distance relationships don’t come with a training manual. A couple of things made this difficult. Firstly, there is a seven hour time difference between Idaho and Britain. This means that it’s hard to stay in touch as a couple if you both work. The timezones meant that when her work hours were ending, mine were just beginning and when mine were ending, she was asleep. If I didn’t specifically pick a schedule that would allow us to talk to each other, the awful truth is that we may not have made it.

Anyway, I was an idiot about it for a while. I’d fail to respond to IMs. I’d go for a day or more without talking to her because our time slots just wouldn’t line up. I didn’t realize at the time that in a relationship, regular contact is incredibly important. It’s not enough to chat to each other once in a while on IMs or send emails every other day. You need to get as close to face-to-face as possible – video chat, or at least voice chat. And it needs to be regular. I didn’t realize it at the time, but by doing these things and failing to follow through, I was really hurting her.

One day, she called me. She was in tears. She was about to come out for six weeks, and while we were both quite excited about this, she was worried that I was losing interest. She didn’t want to come out and live in a foreign country for a month and a half just to have this fall apart. She told me that it would break her heart. If that’s what I thought was going to happen, she said, then she might as well cancel the trip.

While she was talking, I started to see how my behavior was affecting her. I started to see that I’d wounded her, that I was continuing to hurt her. I was ashamed. I still feel ashamed as I write this, even now. She asked me a direct question: did we have what it takes? Was it worth risking her heart to come out here? A craven part of me wanted to tell her that I wasn’t sure. That maybe we should hold off, that maybe this wouldn’t work out. Because what we were about to do was risky. We hadn’t been dating for very long, and she was about to move in with me for six weeks – unfortunately, when you’re young, poor, and live thousands of miles away, you don’t have the resources to indulge in half measures like keeping separate places while you feel each other out. Part of me did not want to risk it. I didn’t know whether things would work out or not, and taking that chance seemed frightening.

But despite that fear, I urged her to come out. I’d started to see where I was screwing up and assured her that I could change, and that all we needed was time together and we could make it work. It wasn’t the safe option for either of us, but we decided to take the plunge and see if we could fall in love. We had a great time over those six weeks. We were just as compatible as I remembered. We made a schedule and stuck to it, too, and we managed to keep the relationship alive and healthy long enough for my visa to be approved.

But somewhere, in another universe, there is a version of me that chose the safe path and missed out on a wonderful, fulfilling journey over the next few years. Maybe he still works that shitty job in Ketchum. Maybe he ended up overstaying his welcome in Idaho, or maybe he ended up moving on and setting out on his own after all. I hope he’s doing well. I hope both of them are, in fact.

Though I do pity them.

Sometimes, it keeps me awake at night to think about how close I came to being those guys. I got lucky, I often think to myself. Though those decisions have been made, and everything turned out for the best, it is still not comforting to me to know that so much of the happiness that I now take for granted is the result of two small, almost whimsical acts of courage and a great deal of luck. In these moments, I’ll look over at the beautiful woman sleeping next to me, kiss her on the cheek, and promise myself that I won’t ever take her for granted. I’ll never let myself forget how close I came to never being with her at all.

I love you, Becki. Happy Valentine’s Day.

I’ve been working on a new project and am just now far enough into it that I can call it a manuscript. The title I’m working with is ‘Tin Ballerina,’ and I’m really quite excited about it. I think it has a lot of potential, and while the idea behind it is quite complex and difficult to do justice to in a short explanation, I think it will capture the imagination of my audience and lead to awesome things. I haven’t been this excited about writing in several weeks.

But it’s a Science Fiction novel, not a Fantasy novel. There are a number of differences between the genres, of course, but one is of particular concern to me as the author:

In a Fantasy novel like The Ballad of Iron Percy, I can make everything up. In a Science Fiction novel, I need to do research.

In Fantasy, even the laws of physics can be violated with Magic. History, Culture, and the concepts associated with both can be treated like a buffet – take what you want, leave out what you don’t. Nothing is implausible, because your readers suspend their disbelief. It takes a lot more for the story to descend into Lame. In Science Fiction, you actually have to sound like you know what you’re talking about. Your hypothetical future needs to seem somewhat believable according to the real, actual, not bullshit laws of physics and technological development that you’re used to experiencing in the real world. There’s some fudge room, of course. It’s fiction. Only the most determined pedants are going to hit wikipedia every time you introduce a new piece of hypothetical technology. Still, it has to pass clear a mental hurdle of ‘Yeah, that’s plausible enough for me to imagine’ in order for your audience to really get into the book.

You have to convince people who, in general, desperately want to believe you. This is by no means an impossible task, but you do have to try at it.

The book I’m writing features (you guessed it) a Ballerina as the main character, and its setting is a few decades after a near apocalypse in the near future. The world is relatively stable, now, but it’s vastly different from how it was before. There was a virus, and a few nukes did go off as deep, historical tensions boiled over when some nations’ populations were decimated, but that’s all in the past. Mostly. The important part is that the biosphere is relatively intact. So, instead, the Collapse was mostly economic. The world in 2030 (20 years or so before the ‘present day’ of the novel) relies heavily on a globalized economy to meet the needs of the people living in it, so in many places, life’s essentials come from far away. The means of transporting these goods around – liquid fuels – is suddenly disrupted as many OPEC nations are consumed by the Porcelain virus or reduced to nuclear craters, so survivors around the world are forced with the impossible task of trying to meet the demands of their unwieldy populations with what resources can be found or produced locally. In Post-Constitutional America, they have to do this without the aid of a central government, because the President and her administration are all locked away in a bunker beneath the irradiated ruin that was Washington D.C., and they cannot communicate with the outside because they are being actively jammed by the architect of the catastrophe.

This is an oversimplified version of the setting, but you get the general idea: thirty years in the past, a Malthusian wet dream ravaged the world economy and forced survivors to make some really tough decisions. Technology is less advanced than it was in the past almost everywhere , except where pre-Collapse tech has been salvaged and maintained. The institutions and ideas of Constitutional America have been repurposed or disbanded entirely. There’s a lot more to it than that, but I don’t want to give too much away in a blog post. What I’ve mentioned so far should be enough for you to see the avenues of research I’ve got to take. If you’re reading this, perhaps you could suggest other books for me to check out.

First is Ballet. I knew next to nothing about the art last month, and I need to have enough knowledge on the subject to portray a Ballerina convincingly in a novel. Yet as I’m sure you’re able to imagine, Ballet is incredibly complex. It takes a lifetime of study to master. Students begin at a young age and practice constantly in order to get good at it. I picked it as the main character’s profession for a couple of reasons – Ballet is incredibly cool, it’s extremely technical and requires a large amount of patience and dexterity, and it’s completely useless outside of Manhattan in Post-Constitutional America. The character is intelligent and a master of her chosen discipline, but she’s easily thrown out of her element because her area of expertise is so narrow. She looks at almost everything through the Dancer lens. So, I need to have a pretty good idea of what that lens is like. A daunting task.

“That’s okay,” I said to myself. “I’ll just consult Google, then Amazon. I can buy a book or something. It will be easy!” Lawl.

As it turns out, it’s awfully hard to get your hands on a book on Ballet that was not written under the assumption that the reader aspires to be a Ballet Dancer. I certainly don’t fall into that category. I’m not looking for a step-by-step guide to direct my practice or technique, I’m looking for a book that puts the art of Ballet in cultural and historical context for me, that describes the basic techniques and gives me the background information I need to appreciate the art from a more informed point of view. I could not find one of these books while searching on Amazon.

However, while I was on vacation in America, I happened to come across a pair of them while browsing in random bookstores. The first is called Apollo’s Angels, by Jennifer Homans. This provides the cultural and historical backdrop I was looking for. The language is dry and fact-filled, but it’s exactly the sort of source I need to fake a lifetime of Ballet knowledge.

I was also given a more practical book on modern techniques, training, and practices, along with a huge number of stunning pictures. It’s called The Ballet Book, by Nancy Ellison and featuring the American Ballet Theatre, and it’s been a great introduction to the modern art of Ballet. Plus, it doubles as an excellent drawing resource. I haven’t been this stunned at what the human body can do with enough training since I discovered internet porn.

I’ve also had to look at the scientific and economic theories that make up the ’speculative’ part of my fiction here. I haven’t had to get too deep into speculative tech ideas yet, because I’m not at that stage in my novel and any pre-Collapse technology portrayed isn’t going to be too far away from the level of tech we’re at currently. There will be a few layover gadgets that haven’t been invented yet, but they’ll apply principles that already exist.

More immediately, I’ve found that I need a working knowledge of energy technology, the power infrastructure in the US, and a bit of information about where we get the things that we require to sustain our lives and lifestyles. This has led to some interesting (if frightening) reading and research. For instance, in my speculative future, the world’s surviving population loses access to most of its oil reserves.

Fun Fact: The United States consumes roughly 20 million barrels of oil in a day, which is the highest in the world. By a lot… China comes in second place, and we use roughly triple what they do. That’s a pretty conservative estimate, too, but I’m rounding down for the sake of my analysis. America’s proven oil reserves account for 1.5% of the world’s total – most of the world’s oil reserves are in the Middle East, though Canada does have a bunch. Anyway, if Jesus came and threw some miracles around this bitch to extract all of America’s proven oil reserves, you would get something like 21 billion barrels.

Sooo, if we maintained current consumption rates, we’d eat through our own oil supply in less than three years. (21,000,000,000 barrels / 20,000,000 per day is 1050 days, divided by 365 per year is 2.87 years) I don’t know about you, but that scares the shit out of me. It’s good for my concept, though – a sudden severance from abundant energy would have catastrophic results for the surviving population. When gasoline becomes too expensive to be viable, and our network of trucks becomes useless, how will food and other supplies get to population centers like New York? Answer: it won’t. Millions will face starvation if they don’t move as they realize that their location can’t possibly support the huge number of people living there.

Fun Fact Two: America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve is beefy enough to keep the country running for like 70 days. The SPR is spread across four locations in Texas and Louisiana. So, when the fit hits the shan and the Federal Government gets decapitated in my fictional universe, the Republic of Texas will be a strong regional power. After all, much of their pre-Collapse tech will still work, and they can keep themselves safe by conserving their massive oil stockpile and using it to give themselves a military advantage for a few decades. They will have fuel to keep their tanks and jets running, and it could last a while if they took steps to conserve it.

Anyway, the reading eats into my writing time on occasion, but that’s okay. It’s still forward progress, though it does make me a little antsy to spend my writing time on research because it’s a violation of my Method. So far, so good.

Now, screwing around with the guts of your computer is a nerve-wracking experience if you’re new to it. Any mistake has the potential to be very, very expensive. Many of those parts are easily ruined by accidental exposure to static electricity or spilled coffee, so it’s not hard to imagine doing a thousand bucks worth of damage in a single careless moment. The same goes with meddling with the computer’s OS or filesystem. It’s arguably even more dangerous if you haven’t done a full backup of the hard drive or are troubleshooting a system you can’t boot – one of the maxims I had drilled into me while studying this stuff in the first place was ‘What’s the most expensive part of a computer? The data.’ If you mess around with the master boot record, then, you run the risk of rendering all that data inaccessible or irretrievable.

Obviously, there are ways to mitigate the damage here and cover your own ass. Still, if you’ve never done it before, this can be quite frightening. Even if you make all the right preparations, you can end up having to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything, which is a complete pain in the rear even if you don’t end up losing your files. An experienced technician has little to fear here, but I am not one of these, so the thought of rendering my computer unbootable still makes me quake.

My success with the laptop last week emboldened me. While I was installing Ubuntu on my coworker’s computer to see if it would work, I saw that there was an option for ‘installing Ubuntu side-by-side with the existing operating system.’ Well! Why couldn’t I do that, then? Surely, I had enough knowhow to make my computer dual-bootable. Then, I’d be able to mess with Linux to my heart’s content. This would accomplish a couple different things:

1. Making my machine dual-boot capable seemed like something of a rite of passage for computer nerds to me. It’s totally possible, even easy if you’ve got the knowhow, yet there’s enough of a risk element involved to put off newb techs like me.
2. Messing with Linux could teach me a lot about how computers work and how to get them to do what I want. My best friend from the States tells me that playing with Ubuntu has taught him a great deal, and I believe him.
3. Gushing about how awesome Linux is is a great way to increase my geek cred, increase my sexual attractiveness, and impress my girlfriend. Probably. Maybe. Okay, no it isn’t, but she’ll come around once she sees how undeniably sexy Open Source is.
4. Lastly, and most importantly, I want to use my Linux partition as a web development playground. Becki recently bought me a book on PHP and MySQL, and I’ve also got a book on how to design Wordpress themes. I want to learn how to make dynamic websites. I want to have my Linux partition dedicated to this. Oh, sure, I could do it in Windows 7, but… but… dual boot…

Still, wanting it is not sufficient by itself to make it happen. I had my boot disc and I had a little bit of experience, but I knew I’d need to do a little bit more research than that. I penciled in a whole freakin’ evening for this. “Baby,” I said to my girl, whose patience I am endlessly grateful for. I spoke in my finest Middle Earth accent. “I’m off to tame a dragon. It’s name is Ubuntu, and I need to get the vikings together to make it obey me. I must succeed, for if I fail, the consequences will be dire indeed. Give me a kiss. I might not survive this.”

She did. “That’s nice, love,” she said to me. She is used to my crazy by now.

Alas! The dragon would be fierce, for I knew its cruel brood well, having wrestled with its gnarled cousin Windows many a time. ‘Twould be a battle worthy of song most boisterous ‘fore I could return to the arms of my fair, beloved lady. My sword was sharp and my will was strong, but I knew that this alone would not win the day. Nay, let it not be said that a warrior’s strength and arms are the measure of his prowess! A keen mind is the better of these things, the most valuable tool in the arsenal. I whetted mine intellect upon the ancient Tomes of Ubuntu hidden in the great Library of the Cloud, determined to equip myself with the knowledge I’d need to face and defeat the beast. Only then would I confront the dread lord Linux.

My heart raced and my hands trembled as I read, fearful of the battle to come, though my determination did not waver. I read. I learned. I asked the Oracle Google mine questions three, acquiver with terror as I awaited her answer. It took great fortitude to listen to her response to my queries. I winced at the words as she voiced them, my fist tightening around the pommel of my sword as she spoke.

Except… oh, wow, it was actually really easy.

First thing to do was shrink my Windows partition. I have a 500 GB hard drive and use a little less than half of that, so it was easy enough for me to set aside 25 gigs for an Ubuntu partition. I ran Disk Defragmenter, then opened the Disk Management utility in Windows. I selected the C: drive, then selected Actions, and then Shrink Volume. Entered the number I wanted to shrink it by – 25600 MB (1024MB x 25GB, if you care) – and let it work. Took about five minutes.

Next, I booted to my Ubuntu disc and told it that I wanted to Install Ubuntu. I’d done this before, so I knew that I’d be allowed the option to prevent it from overwriting my Windows 7 partition, but it still scared me a little. I wouldn’t lose anything if I blew it, unless you counted the afternoon I’d have to spend reinstalling everything, so I kept going. Besides, I’d gotten myself all worked up beforehand, so I wasn’t about to just stop.

I then anticipated some difficulty telling Linux which partition I wanted it to use. The installer came with its own inbuilt partitioning utility, but I’d never used it before, so I feared having to do it manually. Surely, if I did, I’d run the risk of killing my Windows install by accident. Yet I needn’t have worried, since there was an option to use the largest region of contiguous free space for my Ubuntu install – which just so happened to be the 25 GB I’d set aside especially for it, as indicated by the helpful graphic of the partitioning tool. Click. Forward. Done.

Then, it installed. It also added a boot tool at the beginning to let me pick which operating system I wanted to boot into when I started the computer. This was nice, because I’d been especially worried about this bit of the process, and the Ubuntu installer accomplished it automatically.

Then, I restarted the computer, selected Ubuntu as my desired hard drive, and booted into it for the first time. No errors. I restarted and went into Windows, too. No errors. I was done, and I’d succeeded.

The whole thing took me maybe an hour, including the time I spent changing into my viking outfit.

It was really, really easy. Certainly easier than sorting out that memory business a week ago. Ubuntu is really quite simple to install. Where Windows automatically assumes that you want to use it as your sole operating system, Ubuntu seems to be designed for people who want more flexibility at startup. It was simple as anything to make my machine dual-bootable. Can’t wait to play with it.

Next thing to do: install and configure XAMPP on an operating system I’ve little experience with.