It’s been a while! Too long a while, really. Too, too long a while if I’m being really honest but I have an excellent reason for that and it’s in the post title up there.
We had a kid!
A little girl to be specific, and she’s incredible. But along with all her brilliant, beautiful, adorableness (trust me, that’s a word), came a really huge problem: time. Turns out that wonderful little kids eat up a TON of time; both the time they demand because they truly need it and the time you give them with joy because they’re incredible and being with them is like holding happiness.
Except when they make a huge poop. Then it’s like holding, well, a huge poop AND happiness. Which isn’t quite as good.
Naturally, I couldn’t give up time with the kiddo or her mommy. And I couldn’t give up time writing my books–though I did actually have to start sleeping less and writing in the middle of the night just to get any writing done at all, but that’s a story for a post about my new book :)–so I gave up posting here and doing much on social media in general.
I do really want to have more posts written here in the future. It’s a goal I intend to hit. But not at the expense of my family or the stories I love writing more than anything.
So this post is to tell you that I’ve been gone… but I’m coming back! But only in the form of weird, happy, little posts from time to time as I have something to say or something I think is fun to share.
First on that list HAS to be the story of how I wrote this new book. I say new, but I’ve been working on it for quite a while (see the whole “middle of the night” business mentioned above). It’s finished, beautiful, and… OUT ON SUB!
Here’s to the next stage of the adventure, my friends.
8+ years 7 finished manuscripts 200+ rejections 1 dream come true
Honestly, this is about the level of chill I have regarding all this.
After more than 8 years of queries and 7 manuscripts, I’m happy to announce that I am now represented by the wonderful Melanie Figueroa of Root Literary! I’m thrilled beyond belief to have found an agent that believes in my voice, writing, stories, and self. To have reached this milestone floors me. I still can’t believe it.
As writers often do when they get an agent, I wanted to share my journey to reach this point. Both because I hope it can offer some information and encouragement to others still looking for their agent and because I think my path was a little stranger than most. You see…
I never planned to write books.
I was a poet. And I don’t mean, “I wrote poems for fun when I was a kid” (though I did 100% do that). I mean, I deep-dove on poetry all through high school and college, including writing an Ars Poetica for my degree’s senior honors project to go with a true epic poem. Not to mention that I really, REALLY wanted to be a poet for my career. I’d been writing since I was a little kid—it’s been my passion for most of my life—but the only prose I wrote were fragments of short stories and the occasional start to novels that I never finished because I didn’t believe I could write a good book.
‘Poetry,’ I thought to myself as I graduated with degrees in English and psychology, ‘poetry is a stable career into which I can launch myself!’
Have I ever mentioned that I’m an idealist… and sometimes a hopeless optimist?
Yeah, that didn’t work out. Shockingly, there weren’t a copious supply of full-time, well-paid poet positions available on the market in 2011. Or, y’know, ever. So I did what I needed to do in order to help support myself and my (awesome) wife: get a terrible job at an insurance company. I was an Agency Sales Support Assistant (or A.S.S. Assistant). Weirdly, no one at the company wanted to call it by that acronym. The job was absurdly boring. I worked hard, did well, but my brain was dying from lack of stimulation, so I decided to do something crazy: write a book.
I couldn’t do this on my work computer, of course, so I took the sheets of used printer paper (the to-be-recycled cover sheets from faxes and such where one side just had a date on it) and started writing one line at a time with a pencil. Finish a work task? Write one line. On my single 15-minute break for the shift? Write a few more.
Ultimately, I wrote a 123,000-word epic fantasy that way. My first finished novel.
I adored it… It was full of big ideas and over-the-top action. It was great, dense, and definitely terrible.
In anticipation of this post, I dug through old emails and found evidence that I had sent some queries (all form rejections, of course) before I tried to write something new. And hopefully better.
I’d gotten bitten by the book bug. Bitten BAD.
My 2nd book came not long after. My first kids book (a YA fantasy), it had a lot of great ideas that were all executed pretty poorly. Also it ended on a horrific cliffhanger. But I learned A LOT in writing it. Most especially, I realized that I loved writing kids books. Something about the dynamism, joy, realness, and wonder of kids books really clicked with me. Still does.
I queried my 2nd finished novel around 15 times. All rejections. Bummer, but I already had a new idea.
My 3rd novel took much longer than the 2nd. It was my first science fiction outing (I adore sci-fi), built around AI and questions of humanity centered on a kid protagonist. For the first time, I felt like I’d crafted a complete, engaging story that others could enjoy. It was also a lot more grim and intense than anything else I’d done. In part because that fit the nature of the story, but I also had an incredibly stressful job as the Research Director and Managing Editor for a healthcare advisory firm at the time. When I started the novel we were cruising upward in success, working with healthcare leaders across the country.
Then an outside firm purchased our start-up and I was forced out by a change in management. It was mid 2017. I thought I would get another job in 1-3 months. My wife and I could handle that.
It took 15. 15 months of looking at jobs every day. Applying for everything I could that fit my experience and skills. Hundreds of attempts. 15 months.
And to keep myself sane during that time, I worked on what I loved: my stories.
I wound up finishing my 3rd novel in the immediate aftermath of my healthcare position. I threw myself into the work: revising, editing, polishing, striving every day to make it the best story I’d ever created.
I made a writer Twitter account and participated in my first Twitter Pitch events. I made my first Twitter writer friends. And then I queried my 3rd novel, a YA Sci-fi, 20+ times. I don’t know the exact number. I wasn’t keeping the best records yet; that came later. I submitted to PitchWars and other manuscript/editing contests. I tried as hard as I could.
(It’s worth noting that I queried 20+ times, but I closely considered and researched WAY more agents than that. I’ve always been really picky about who I submit to as I tried to find someone who seemed like they would love my stories and fit well in a working partnership with me.)
All rejections. No requests. Just rejections. It was the best thing I’d ever written. My beta readers loved it. But it still wasn’t getting any success outside of my small circle. And yes, I know I could have sent WAY more queries than that, but throwing myself into what I felt would be more rejections on top of the job rejections I was getting was too much. It hurt.
No matter how many rejections you get, they ALWAYS hurt. That vulnerability is simply part of sharing your creativity and art with the world. And it’s worth it.
But anyway, as I waited to hear back on those queries, I threw myself into writing the sequel to that YA Sci-fi. Most of my books (at that time) took over six months to write. This one took 1.5 months, flat. It was crazy. Time and a desperation to find satisfaction in creativity really drove me forward.
But no one wanted that book either. ~30 queries. Many, many pitch events. No requests. All rejections.
I definitely felt like a winner.
All of this takes us from 2012 through 2017. By the beginning of 2018, I came to a decision that would change my life: I was going to write something just for myself. I wouldn’t worry about genre, age category, or comp titles. I wouldn’t even think about what anyone else would get from it. This new book would be just for me. Only for me. Because I needed something to go my way. I had nothing to lose. With my incredible wife’s support, I started on a book featuring a character some of you may have heard of: Iri.
Iri’s story would be a secondary world fantasy inspired by the style, themes, and tone of North American Indigenous oral mythology. I wanted to celebrate the ancestry I carry. Embrace a world filled with people whose skin looked like mine. A world full of stories and beauty and wonder.
I started writing Iri in March of 2018. Finished in less than 3 months. Edited the whole book immediately afterward. I got my first agent request for Iri from a pitch event in July. Then came the big fall pitch event combo: #PitMad and #DVpit, barely a month apart. Iri blew up. I got dozens of agent requests, received likes from editors at major publishers, and met a bunch of really great writers that I’m still friends with to this day.
I wound up with a bunch of full manuscript requests. FULL MANUSCRIPT REQUESTS!
To someone who had gone 4+ years without even getting a partial, I cannot express how revolutionary this felt. People—cool, publishing industry people—wanted to read something I wrote. And many of them enjoyed it… but none of them loved it “enough.”
All querying writers know the line: “I just didn’t fall in love with [BOOK]”. I also got some “this would be great if it was traditionally written.” And a few, “your voice is wonderful BUT…”.
In the end, despite all the successful pitches and queries, I didn’t get any offers. I realized something that had been true from the beginning: my books leaned literary, which could make it hard for them to push an agent over the “offering line”. But I knew I was close, so I kept working. And anyway, I love writing stories, so why would I stop? Honestly, if you had told me at any point over these years that I was destined to never get an agent, I still would’ve kept writing purely for the enjoyment and satisfaction of it.
My 5th book, an MG portal fantasy built around video games like Pokémon and Jade Cocoon, was drafted before the middle of 2019. 21 queries.
1 full request from an agent named Melanie Figueroa.
This would prove to be very important.
I waited for a reply on that full with an enormous amount of anticipation. Melanie was from a terrific agency (Root Literary!) and her interests leaned literary, just like mine. She seemed upbeat and excited about kids books. A few months later (April of 2020, no less), her reply came: a rejection… but the BEST kind of rejection. The kind where she told me what she loved and what didn’t quite work for her. She encouraged me and told me that I had a wonderful voice for middle grade. Even better, I could tell from how she described the book that she got it. What the story was really, truly about.
I’m a firm believer that fantasy and sci-fi novels should use their fantastical settings to tackle real world issues that can be difficult to address in contemporary stories, and I could tell Melanie understood. She instantly shot to the top of my list of agents to query with other projects. A lot of writers talk and joke about their dream agents; Melanie became one of mine. She was on the shortlist from that day forward. (Fun fact: around this point, my wife decided that Melanie was her preferred agent for me to get someday!) In the last line of her rejection, Melanie said she would be happy to see something else from me, and I just so happened to have this one story about a girl named Iri and an adventure across two worlds.
Now, this wasn’t the Iri that I’d first queried to agents in 2018. Nor the completely revised, rewritten, and queried version from 2019. This was a third, brand-new version that I’d been working on since the pandemic started. Now an MG fantasy, I’d worked SO hard to bridge the necessarily complex style of storytelling with easier-to-approach narration and a smoother runway to the core plot and conflict. With her permission, I sent the first chapter to Melanie. She asked for the full the next day.
I may have been a little hyped. Or a lot. Okay, very much a lot.
This was it. This had to be it.
Here was an agent who got my style. Loved my voice. Enjoyed my work. And I’d just sent her the best thing I’d ever written. This HAD to be it. I’d sent ~90 queries for Iri. Pitched it in at least 15 events. Gotten 15 full requests plus requests from editors at five major publishers, including an open invitation to submit Iri directly to one. I was SO close. I just needed to wait a little longer.
Of course, 2020 interfered with everyone’s everything. We all fought to survive the disease, our anxiety, our fears, our depressions. We lost loved ones. We grieved. We struggled to be creative and hope even as the world around us seemed dim.
I started writing a new book—a YA space opera—and got 40,000 words in before something more joyful stole my attention: a modern YA fantasy involving a magic food competition. Still waiting for Melanie’s reply, I spent the last months of 2020 feverishly drafting this new book.
And then the email came in the first days of 2021. It started so good. Again, she loved my voice. Loved the beauty of the descriptions and the stories. BUT…
She had some concerns. She wanted to know if I would consider revising and resubmitting.
I admit, that hurt a little. Sure, it wasn’t a No. But it also wasn’t a Yes. Still, I know that one of the most important things to reaching your dreams is perseverance, so I told her I was interested because of course I was. She was still one of my dream agents.
Still, I know that one of the most important things to reaching your dreams is perseverance
I had finished my edits on my new YA Fantasy—my 7th finished manuscript—and gotten that querying as I waited. And despite my and my beta readers’ sky high hopes, my queries weren’t doing great. With Melanie’s Iri email in mind, I started reworking Iri.
I had a small number of queries still out on the YA Fantasy as I worked on revisions. No other prospects. Nothing particularly promising to talk about. 4.5 months had passed since Melanie’s last email. I was thinking about how I would pitch my new book in the June #PitMad. And then, one Wednesday afternoon utterly out of the blue, I got an email. It was Melanie. And she wanted to talk to me on the phone about Iri and some other things like my new project.
An agent. Wanted. To talk to me. On the phone. HOLY CRAP.
This had never happened before. In the eight years since I sent out those first queries, no agent had ever asked to call me. Let alone an agent I liked.
Some of you may immediately have thought, upon reading this, AND YOU KNEW SHE WAS GONNA OFFER.
But you’re wrong. I didn’t know that. Sure, I had the crazy, distant hope that she was calling to offer… but offer on what? She loved two of my books, loved my writing and my voice, but she’d gently declined both full manuscripts. I convinced myself she wasn’t going to offer in anticipation of our call a few days later.
And I was wrong.
Actually my face during the call.
Melanie went on to explain that she couldn’t stop thinking about the voice of my stories and the way I write. She explained the potential she sees for me and my career. And it was everything I’d been waiting more than 8 years to hear. I notified the few agents still considering my material, some of whom asked for (and got) full manuscripts and shared glowing words with me, but none of them held a candle to what Melanie offered. Like I (and my wife) felt over a year ago, Melanie gets my stories. Gets why I write. She understands what I’m trying to do and agrees that kids books (especially MG) can have such a big, positive impact for their readers. She wants to help me bring my stories to the world.
Of course, I accepted the offer.
And now, here I sit, writing this gargantuan post to tell an honestly short version of a gargantuan story. There’s so much more I want to say; want to explain. So many moments of triumph and utter heartbreak. So many times I was cut down by someone and uplifted by someone else. So many times I watched friends who started querying long after me succeed long before me as I cheered them on despite the part of me that hurt. But that’s the way of things. Everyone’s journey is full of uncountable details. Innumerable little moments where we choose to go forward when we want to give up. Choose to try again even though the last 200 attempts have failed. And sometimes that feels like insanity. That’s what people will say, of course: that doing the the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. But in the words of activist Olga Misik: “I guess hope is insanity.”
Everyone’s journey is full of uncountable details. Innumerable little moments where we choose to go forward when we want to give up. Choose to try again even though the last 200 attempts have failed. And sometimes that feels like insanity.
And I along with my wife, my parents, my sister, my in-laws, and my friends, have had so much hope throughout this journey. Even in the darkest, hardest days.
We have even more hope for what wonders the future will bring.
With all that said, I want to end on gratitude:
Thank you to God for making all this possible and inspiring me to write.
Thank you to my wife, Reneé, without whom I would be lost. I believe in the you that believes in me. I love you so much.
Thank you to my mom, who always treated every story like a good one… even when they definitely weren’t.
Thank you to my in-laws, who have become such fierce supporters to me on this journey.
Thank you to my friends, who have been cheerleaders, beta readers, and all-around cool people.
Thank you to Melanie, who believes in me and my voice. Who has a vision for the stories I’ve dreamed about for so long.
I can’t wait for what comes next. I can’t wait to show you all the worlds I imagine and the characters I love. It’s time to find out what the future holds.
-Christopher
(If you have questions about querying and my journey or simply want to discuss, feel free to comment here or find me on Twitter via @Dreamertide!)
Winter is always the season when I read most. When you combine winter with the soul-crushing difficulty of quarantine life, reading becomes even more appealing! I received many terrific books for Christmas/my birthday and while I won’t be writing reviews for all of them, I wanted to take a little time to discuss those that I found particularly noteworthy or interesting. With that covered, let’s start talking about Crazy Horse!
[Note: There will be spoilers… but they’re primarily spoilers on real world historical events so, uh, take this warning as you will.]
Written by Joseph M. Marshall III who is a noted Brulé Lakota historian, teacher, and author, In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse uses a straightforward Middle Grade narrative framework to provide a considerable amount of information on the life and experiences of noted Lakota leader Crazy Horse. The stories-within-the-story style unveils Crazy Horse’s life through the lens of a modern Lakota grandfather sharing tales with his grandson as they journey to related U.S. landmarks.
If this sounds very informational, it is! Perhaps my largest misconception before reading this book is that it was first-and-foremost a narrative. That’s not quite true. Most of the words in this book are understandably devoted to the stories of Crazy Horse (Marshall’s self-professed hero), and so it feels much more like a text I would use to teach a middle school history curriculum than a “story”. And there’s real merit to that.
By exploring the authentic, meaningful Lakota side of Crazy Horse’s story, we step beyond the leader too often vilified in American history books and understand him in valuable context. Marshall succeeds in showing Crazy Horse to be a gentle man and kind leader forced to extremes by extreme situations. At the end of the book, when Crazy Horse is killed, I felt a deep sadness.
But that same moment of the book reveals In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse‘s primary shortcoming: it isn’t really a narrative. It’s an effective history lesson pressed into a light, narrative body. When the grandfather, Nyles High Eagle, finishes telling his grandson of Crazy Horse’s death, he places a bundle of sage at the monument in Fort Robinson State Park. He sings a warrior’s honoring song. He cries. And it’s a beautiful moment full of heartfelt poignancy that left me emotional.
It also left me wanting more.
I wish Marshall had invested more into the narrative itself, allowing it to build reciprocally as he shares more of Crazy Horse’s life so that this moment could truly be appreciated for what it is: a man lamenting the loss of a hero and, with that hero, a way of life that would never be the same.
As someone sadly estranged from my own Indigenous heritage, I felt a sort of kinship with the character in that moment. A sensation of longing for something that can never be. I wish I knew more about my ancestors. I wish I could have a better relationship with that side of my family. But I can’t, and in that longing for what might have been, I found a personal connection here.
So, taking it all into consideration, this is a great book to read if you want to learn more about Crazy Horse (particularly from the perspective of his own people) in a kid-friendly package. It’s even better for kid readers as a way to teach them about this incredible figure in American history. But for me, I would have dearly loved a stronger narrative built around the history. A story to better show the reader how the echoes of such a remarkable life can carry forward into the present.
In lieu of that story, I’ll hold Nyles High Eagle’s song in my memory and treasure what I learned from the read.
On that note, thanks to Joseph M. Marshall III for writing this book! I don’t know him, but I understand how difficult it can be to write about something so deeply significant and personal. His love for the Lakota people and for Crazy Horse is clear in every page. And he should be (and has been) rightfully lauded for putting such work out into the world.
That’s all for today! Thanks for reading. If you’d like to discuss this book or anything else, feel free to leave a comment here or look me up on Twitter.
I’ve been a Pokémon fan since I got Red for my Gameboy Pocket a long time ago. I’ve played at least one game in every generation that’s released since then (8 for those curious), and while my love for the games has diminished over time, they still hold a fond place in my heart.
One of the reasons that I don’t enjoy the games as much as I used to is that they’re made for children and, well, I need a little more difficulty to keep things engaging. To solve this exact problem, members of the gaming community came up with Nuzlockes: a self-imposed Pokémon challenge run that comes in many variations but which generally share three rules.
You can only catch the first Pokémon you find in each route.
You have to name every Pokémon you catch.
If a Pokémon faints, it’s “dead” and can no longer be used for the rest of the attempt.
I’ve never tried a Nuzlocke before, in part because doing so would require deleting the save from one of my existing games. However, for Christmas this year, I received a copy of Pokémon White 2, a sequel game from the 5th generation, that I’ve NEVER played. Naturally, my first thought was “I should do my first ever challenge run in a blind playthrough! What could go wrong?”
A lot, dear reader. A LOT.
So much, in fact, that my wife (who gifted me the game) requested I document my hardships and triumphs for you. And those hardships start with Waddles.
Heroic namesake seen here. If you know this reference, I like you.
In every Pokémon game, you have to pick a starter. I generally lean Fire type in this choice, and I lean even more strongly that way in the 5th Generation because I’m not a big fan of the Water or Grass starters. Thus, I chose the Fire-type pig, Tepig. And since Nuzlocke rules demand I name him, my Tepid became known as Waddles.
I was very proud of Waddles. We got off to a good start by beating our rival trainer (the weirdly intense Nigel) twice. We met other Pokémon like a Patrat I named Timom (was supposed to be Timon, but I mistyped) and a little caterpillar I named Nibbles. To be clear, I had no intention of using Timom or Nibbles. I was hoping to catch the Dark-type cat, Purrloin. Or even a Lillipup, since they’re cute and evolve into a solid attacker.
But no. I got a misnamed gopher and a caterpillar wearing a leaf hat.
At least I still had Waddles.
The first gym comes at you fast in White 2. Waddles was level 13. Nibbles was level 8. Timom was level 6. There weren’t any other trainers to battle. Grinding for more experience would be a SLOG since the only mons around were very low level.
So I took a stab at the Aspertia City Gym, battling its leader, another kid named Cheren who really liked normal type Pokémon.
“No problem!” I thought to myself, like an undeservedly confident fool. “This will go fine!”
It did not go fine.
Cheren led with his own Patrat (it did not have a name), which Waddles successfully overcame with some mighty Tackles. The leader then dug deep into his collection of 2 Pokémon and threw out his mightiest…a Lillipup. That’s right, a tiny little puppy named as a reference to the diminutive people in Gulliver’s Travels.
Sigh.
This little puppy hit HARD. It exclusively used the move Bite. Since I needed to heal Waddles from the gopher battle in the first round, I used a Fresh Water, which brought my pig back to full strength: 41 hp.
In comes the first Bite for…19 Damage?!?!
Seen here: my heart and my brain at that moment.
I didn’t expect anywhere near that damage out of the puppy. Waddles had fine defenses. I assumed he could take 4 or 5 hits before getting low. Nope. Not even close.
I used a Potion to heal him back to full.
Another Bite for…18 Damage.
“Okay,” I thought, “It does a little less than 20 damage per Bite, so I can get in an attack before I heal again. Great.”
No, Christopher. Not great. MISTAKE.
I ordered Waddles to launch his most devastating assault, and he surged forward like the champion he was surely destined to be, leaving the Lillipup inches from fainting.
Then came the expected Bite. But it didn’t do 18 damage. Or 19. It did 22.
22!
For anyone doing the math, Waddles had 22 hp at that point. And in one terrible CHOMP, Waddles was no more. See, I knew that almost every damaging move in Pokémon has a range for the specific amount of damage it can deal. I did not know the range could be as high as 4 points so early in the game. This wasn’t a crit. No extra luck or stat changes involved.
Just a slightly bigger bite that ruined my dreams.
I looked at the rest of my team and saw a misnamed gopher and a caterpillar named Nibbles who wore a leaf on his head.
With nothing else to lose, I tossed Nibbles out…
AND NIBBLES WON!
HE NIBBLED THAT PUP UNTIL IT GAVE UP AND I TASTED SWEET VICTORY!
Except that I lost my best Pokémon in the process. In the first gym of eight. Barely an hour into the game.
Meaning my only hope for success remained a Disney knock-off gopher.
And this fierce guy:
Find out what happens next in Nuzlocke Part 2: Leaning on a Caterpillar Is Not a Good Plan, coming to this blog soon!
So I’ve been living the isolation life for almost a week now, experiencing the strange mental state that some have called plague mindset. The easiest way to summarize the feeling is the innate sense that something is very wrong. So very wrong, in fact, that you feel an urge to act…except that the best thing you can do is nothing. Nothing at all.
It’s a paradox of panic and tedium. Anxiety and boredom. DO SOMETHING and do nothing.
All of this is to say that I’ve had a lot of time to think and to try to write. (I say “try” because it’s a little more difficult to get into the appropriate creative mindset during a pandemic.) As I wrote poetry last night, I put together some words of hope and shared them with my wife. She thought it would be a good idea to share them with you.
Afterward
We all breathe and wait and listen, pining for the normalcy we always dreaded; the burgers we’d grown used to, the sights that had grown old. And though all this is terrible, though considering it in full reaves my soul, I can’t help but think of that moment when this dismal pall rises, and we return to the world we’ve left behind.
That world will be different. The old will not have grown new, but it will have become beloved. The small gifts and pleasures of the city and the country will be received anew. Every smile will be welcome and well-earned.
And, perhaps for the first time in many years, we will all remember the childlike joy of stepping through the front door and feeling the world unfold around us, decked with trappings of sun and summer, and in that moment, we’ll begin to heal. To live, truly live, again.
Feel free to come say “Hi” on Twitter using @Dreamertide. The sun will rise, my friends. In the meantime, let’s get through the night, together.
As a kid, I didn’t know anyone else like me. My parents got divorced when I was 4, and I only saw my father for 1 week a year if he decided to drive across the country (spoiler: he stopped deciding to when I was ~11). The only piece of him I got to hold onto (and the only piece I really wanted to) was my ancestry. Through his side of the family, I am Cajun and Indigenous. That meant everything to me. Most of my young life, I felt dramatically “unspecial”. From elementary school forward, I got picked on, bullied, and abused almost everyday. I went to a small 99.9% white school in rural Wisconsin, and being even a little different made things difficult. But despite the racial slurs and insults (among countless other affronts), I remained proud of what I was; especially being Cajun and Indigenous.
Being picked on isolates you, especially when part of what you’re being attacked for is looking different from everyone else. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t look that different. I know that innumerable others have suffered so much more than I have because of something so superficial as appearance. But I suffered nonetheless, finding myself desperately lonely though I could pretend to be happy with terrific aplomb. From within that loneliness, I took solace in fiction.
I read voraciously almost every day. I loved it all: classics, literary, sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books, too. From amidst the pages of the latter, I found something special: Forge.
I’m going to take a wild guess that most of you don’t know who I’m referring to. Birth name unknown, Forge is the preferred name of a mutant that first appeared in the mid-80s and later joined the X-Men in time for my childhood. His story has always been rather convoluted, if I’m being honest, but that didn’t matter to me as a kid. What mattered were two incredible aspects of his character that I will never forget:
1: Forge’s mutant power is a gift of invention or intuitive genius. Imagine the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Shuri combined; someone that can one day wake up perfectly understanding how to create time travel or infinite clean energy. In short, Forge was smart. He spoke intelligently and other characters went to him in order to get the newest equipment or create a new technology that could save the day.
2: Forge comes from the Cheyenne. In fact, an enormous part of his backstory revolves around his being trained to become a traditional healer (sometimes called “medicine man”) but taking a different path due to his mutant gifts.
Forge meant so much to me. He was NOT the most popular X-Man. Not even close, but his existence felt so incredibly special because he was Indigenous. Just like me. I had (and have) no tribal affiliation. I don’t (and can’t) connect with that side of my family. I didn’t know anyone else that felt the same as I did. But Forge was out of place, too. He never fit into the situation, and flowed through countless storylines like a ghost on the battlefield. Even better, he was smart. Part of why I got bullied so mercilessly in school was for trying hard in classes. I needed to do well, so I pushed myself. I answered questions in class and did all the homework. I was smart, just like Forge… a hero who fought with the X-Men.
As a child, you don’t know that you’re dealing with anxiety and grief and depression. You can’t understand those terms or the greater concepts to which they allude. You just feel wrong, and search for anything to make it feel even a little better.
So many children today don’t look like most of the heroes on TV or in movies or in books (comic or otherwise). They get picked on for their appearance or for being smart or for any other thing that makes them seem different, even though those differences are ultimately what makes each of us beautiful. Having a hero that mirrors ourselves back to us can make a world of difference. It bridges the gap between depression and courage, reminding us that we are not forgotten.
To myself as a child, Forge proved that being smart and Indigenous were as cool as I wished they were. His existence helped me justify my own, when I felt like nothing.
That’s why we need diverse characters. Not to “cater to liberal interests” or “comfort snowflakes,” but to remind every child that they have value and are not forgotten. That no matter who they are, they can be a hero if they want to be. I may not be a part of the X-Men like Forge, but I’m trying to be a hero by writing books that feature diverse characters.
I hope more than anything that my Iri can help even one child feel less alone. That would make all of the effort in the world worthwhile.
Thanks for reading!
If there are any characters that helped you like Forge helped me, please let me know in the comments below or on Twitter.
And if anyone was curious, my other favorite X-Man was the Cajun, Gambit.
I’ve been writing for many years. If you want to be very specific, the first creative work I specifically remember making of my own accord was a three-page poem about wolves that I wrote in the third grade. I kept going after that, writing predominantly for fun until I suddenly found that writing was an excellent way of processing everything going on in my life as well.
I didn’t start seriously writing novels until the year after I graduated from college. In the months leading up to writing that first manuscript, I wrote basically nothing. I had been depressed with difficulty in finding a job (Yay, Millenials!) and deciding whether I wanted to pursue graduate school to become an English professor.
For years, I had written nearly every day, but over this span of arduous months…
I stopped.
And from that stop came a new beginning.
Since then, I’ve drafted six novels in about the same number of years, steadily improving from quaint narratives that seemed fun to a story crafted in the style of Indigenous oratory mythology featuring a teen trying to decide who they are amidst a world full of people with countless expectations. (To those familiar with my Iri, that last one will sound familiar.)
I’ve written a thousand poems, too, in margins or texts to myself or actual dedicated notebooks that I lose sometimes.
What’s my point?
Maybe we don’t need to be so hard on ourselves when we take a break.
https://giphy.com/gifs/xYHscQ1Np55i8
Crazy, I know.
Burn-out. Fatigue. Exhaustion. I’ve seen them a million times. I’m sure that by the end of this week (I’m drafting this on a Tuesday), I’ll have seen at least one person posting about it on Twitter, asking if it’s okay that they haven’t written in an hour or day or week.
Of course, it’s okay.
Stopping is not always failure. A lot of VERY famous and wonderful authors have quotes about the merit of “writing every day.” I’m not here to dispute that. And I’m definitely not here to encourage your (or my) procrastination.
The point isn’t to stop writing when it gets hard or you don’t know the solution to a problem. Often, the best and only solution to writer’s block is to keep writing anyway. Even though it may be bad. Even though it feels icky.
Stopping as a way of avoiding our challenges only makes those challenges seem more imposing. Before long, you can create a scenario where you never write at all, even though you have all the talent and ideas in the world. The mountain you’ve created seems so vast that beginning anew feels pointless.
I’m not advocating for that.
What I want you to consider are the occasional breaks from creative output that we ALL need to settle back into who we are. These may be evenings goofing off. Or a week away. Or a month spent pursuing something completely different. The usage of the “stop” matters less than how you approach it.
What matters most is that you commit to yourself that you’ll come back. The fine line between learning from defeat and giving up is whether you’ve chosen to try again.
Life is complicated. Being creative adds more complication, especially for those that use their creative works to tangle with difficult topics. It’s normal and healthy to want a break. To need a pit stop amidst all this goingoingoingmorefollowersmorewordsmorechaptersmoreEVERYTHING.
To summarize this rambling, I’ve been consuming a few books recently about the video game industry and the effort that goes into game development. The making of Stardew Valley certainly aligns with these ideas. A single developer devoted himself to the work over the course of years, and regularly found himself drowning in a growing frustration with the process until he took time to step away. To catch a breath.
A word I hear a lot in these books is “grit,” meaning a dedication to a goal regardless of setbacks or obstacles. Many people celebrate grit, and I agree that it plays a huge role in the successful pursuit of dreams.
But remember that grit doesn’t mean you can’t take a break every now and then. Grit does not require you to make yourself miserable for the sake of word count or imagery or “showing-not-telling”.
And remember: (if you’re not a full-time creative writer yet) your day job is not a break. So don’t do that, “I’ve been working all day, that’s enough of a break from my creative output, so it’s time to write for 12 straight hours before another shift.”
That’s burning the candle from both ends and also putting it in a microwave. Be kind to yourself.
If I’ve learned anything from my journey so far, it’s that everything comes with time and practice. The harder I am on myself, and the more I give in to that feeling that I will never be enough, the worse of a writer I am.
So every now and then, take a break. Try to see things for what they are rather than what you think they might be.
As a character says in a lovely TV episode named “The Visitor”: “Well, I’m no writer, but if I were, it seems to me I’d want to poke my head up once in a while and take a look around, see what’s going on. It’s life. You can miss it if you don’t open your eyes.” You can miss it if you never blink, too.
Take care of yourself. I’m rooting for you.
Thanks for reading this rambling return to posting more regularly. Also, apparently, a return to alliteration. I’d love to hear what you do to take breaks from writing. As you may have guessed, I love to dip into gaming as a way to unwind. How about you?
Answer in the comments below or find me on Twitter: @Dreamertide
So sorry for the massive delay on this folks! Turns out that starting a high profile technical writing gig, still finishing your newest book, looking for a new house, and then buying a new house is REALLY TIME CONSUMING.
Nonetheless, I’ll have a new proper post this week about artistry, grit, and the need for stopping without stopping (it’ll make sense once you read the post).
First things first: it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and for that, I apologize. I could tell you that “a lot has happened since last post,” which would be true.
Through a minor miracle, I started a new contract as a freelance technical writer. And, thanks to a lot of hard work (plus some great managers), that three-month contract has turned into an entire year.
I’ve had the greatest creative success as a writer of my life: my novel Iri and the Spirit World got a bunch of full manuscript requests, superb feedback from many agents, and even requests for future submission from editors at some of the biggest publishers around the world. Even now I’m waiting to hear the good word from an amazing agent that I would be thrilled to work with.
Moreover, I finished a draft of my newest novel, an MG Fantasy featuring an anxious 12-year-old hero exploring an all-too-real world of dreams inhabited by incredible creatures he must train and overcome.
I even turned 30.
See? A lot has happened since my last post, heh. And yet, that’s not what this is about.
The biggest thing keeping me from posting has been myself. Somewhere in the midst of all those things above, I dipped into a whole lot of anxiety. Now, anyone who’s been here before knows that anxiety and I are old friends. And by “friends,” I mean that I want to shoot anxiety into the sun, but since that’s not an option I live with it instead.
Even more than that, I found that I was trying to avoid being sad about a bunch of admittedly really sad things that were happening in my life as well.
Fun fact: Don’t try to avoid/escape your emotions. They don’t actually go anywhere. Seriously, they’re still there. For real.
–Captain Obvious
Sadness, like Inside Out taught us, has a very important purpose: adapting, accepting, and moving forward. Saying farewell and preparing to say hello. Letting go and beginning anew.
Sadness makes those things possible…
And yet so often I and much of our society treats sadness like something that needs to be avoided at all costs. “Don’t cry,” we’re told. “There’s no crying in [football]/[the office]//[cake].” “Don’t be sad. Smile. Chin up. Distract yourself.”
And so on.
I think a lot of us are afraid of sadness. I know I am. And yes, of course, too much sadness isn’t a good thing. Like any emotion, it must come in moderation. Steep yourself in it for too long and you throw yourself entirely askew. But too often, we don’t let ourselves feel sadness at all. Or perhaps, we only do at a sad movie so we can “get a good cry.”
Sure. We all need a good cry sometimes. But we also don’t need to use a movie to justify it. We don’t need to hide from how we feel about the challenges we all face.
And we do all face challenges.
So, to conclude this extremely long (clearly unplanned) introduction, I took a lot of these thoughts and wrote a poem. Please know that this poem is strictly what I knew I needed to hear. What I know I needed to say to me.
But I hope it helps you, too.
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Sad is Brave
Sad is brave. Letting in all the everything, open, honestly forgiving more yourself than them. Sad is brave. The old say not to cry, but I think that’s cowardly, denying the power of a tear to heal or save: you see, sad is brave. But so is happy; neither one lives separately of all I am or would like to be. Each muddled in this mixture called me, and God, I see, sad and happy are stronger than I think and like me are brave.
Sometimes, you miss the party on something in pop culture, whether it be a game, book, show, or movie. Years later, you finally get around to experiencing that whatever-it-was, and then you start a new series on your website where you write story-focused reviews for those things.
Or at least, that’s what I’m doing!
Today, we’ll be reviewing Transistor, the 2014 indie release from Supergiant Games.
Seeing as I’m a writer, it makes sense to primarily focus on the characters, story, and worldbuilding. Don’t worry, though, I’ll have a section for all the gameplay elements as well. Let’s do it!
This review is MAJOR SPOILER FREE.
Basic Game Overview
Transistor takes place in a futuristic world where every aspect of society is governed by the will of the people. Red, our protagonist, makes her living as the most popular performer in the city; a singer of incredible ability. Following her performance one night, a strange group called the Camerata attack her with an odd sword known as the Transistor…
But a man intercepts the blade before it can claim Red as a victim.
And there, the game begins.
REVIEW
Worldbuilding
Transistor‘s greatest achievement is its world. Without exaggeration, this is the most a game has reminded me of exploring Bioshock‘s Rapture in many years. That is not to say that it’s similar to Rapture in an overt way. Rather, the similarity comes from the dynamism of the environment, where every piece of the world, as seen and described, contributes to the overarching narrative. Indeed, the raw appearance of the world often does a better job of creating tension than the story beats themselves.
A beautiful cyber-metropolis at its heart, Transistor‘s world drew me in. While playing, I wished numerous times that this title had been a major studio release so that I could have more to explore. Fascinating, engrossing, terrifying, and beautiful, the world of Transistor tells a gorgeous story all by itself.
Music
I won’t always include a separate music category in this part of the review, but Transistor demands it. Since Red, our protagonist, is a singer, music takes on great significance throughout the narrative. In fact, a simple gameplay feature even allows you to directly connect to the soundtrack in any given area, creating this visceral blending of player and character.
Does it break the 4th wall? Very much so.
Will you mind? No. Not even a little. In fact, you’ll do it regularly, if you’re anything like me.
I probably spent 10-15% of my playtime just enjoying the music and Red’s performances. Each track fits the area for which it was written, mirroring the ongoing developments in the story, becoming more driving during moments of tension, and capturing the degradation of a society with mourning.
Darren Korb’s work on Bastion was terrific. His work on Transistor is sublime. Much credit to Ashley Barrett as well, for her wonderful vocal performance. The soundtrack of this game forces you to invest in the world and its characters. You can’t avoid it. Without a word, you are made to feel. And that is great worldbuilding.
Characters
Transistor focuses primarily on only two characters. There are others, throughout, but they primarily exist only as mouthpieces for exposition or background for the greater conflict at play. While I believe the game would be better served with a more memorable antagonist (the final foe lacks any real gravitas), the two most important characters succeed enough to overshadow these faults. Ultimately, you won’t remember any character’s name besides Red, but I think that’s okay.
Red, her voice stolen by the Transistor, exists as a mute protagonist who still ably demonstrates complex emotions and character development. Through her actions, you feel her fear and sadness. When she gets the opportunity to type comments into the city’s moderation system, you witness a sharp-witted survivor determined to discover how to free her savior from the Transistor and rescue the city from the Process. Admittedly, these basic traits are not unique to Red, and her memorability as a protagonist comes more from the unique qualities of the game as a whole compared to her own personality and choices. (Compare to Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn, who bears enough unique characteristics to exist in your memory without the addition of plot.) By the same token, this is a small game: only ~8 hours to 100%. So we can’t be too critical of character development time, when so little is available.
The other main character comes as the Transistor itself. Nearly all the spoken dialogue in the game reverberates from the glowing blade, which has taken on the personality of the man who sacrificed his life to save Red’s. He speaks to her almost constantly, but never in a way that becomes annoying. He is no Legend of Zelda fairy.
Instead, he shares his thoughts, fears, and hopes. The strongest emotional beats of the story come by virtue of this voice trapped within a sword that you will care for by the end of the game. I will always welcome an emotionally forward male character in a video game, and Blue (as the voice is affectionately called), definitely qualifies.
Speaking of the end of the game…
Story
Now, I won’t say an enormous amount here because in a game so short, any in-depth discussion would require spoilers. Thus disclaimed, though, I will say that the end of the tale left me mildly disappointed, and I believe that much of that disappointment comes through the limited scope of this title.
Throughout the narrative, you follow a tightly-woven trail. No branching choices exist here: you are a passenger aboard the story the developers wish to share. Like a novel, for this type of story to succeed, the reader/player needs to “buy-in” to the characters’ choices. Hopefully, by the end, you understand why certain things took place, even if you didn’t agree with choices themselves. Context aligns with action. Decision with emotion.
Yet this story ends with a moderately strange choice that feels more like PLOT than the choice of the character. The best narratives, as you’ve heard me prattle about before, create real characters and document their decisions. The overbearing intent of the writer (otherwise known as PLOT) should never be noticeable. Every twist and turn should make sense within the context of the characters making them.
In Transistor‘sending, I felt as though I were reliving an early draft of a novel I wrote a few years ago. In that draft, a character makes a dramatic choice that certainly got the attention of readers but did not really align with the characterization of the individual up to that point. Red’s final decision struck me in the same way. Can I justify her final choice? Certainly. Like all of you, I am more than capable of filling gaps in the narrative with my own suppositions, creating MY version of “correctness.”
But, frankly, we should never have to do that. The climax of a narrative should never leave enough gaps for speculation to be required. Ultimately, Red’s climax left me wanting more context. More explanation. More characterization that set up a relatively dramatic decision. We’re led to believe that enormous stakes hinge on her choice, but she makes a choice without hesitation…and I was left dissatisfied.
This moment aside, the rest of Transistor‘s storytelling had me consistently pleased. Since so much characterization and exposition comes through the music, visuals, and hidden information to be unlocked, you constantly feel rewarded for paying attention. By the same token, however, you need to pursue these activities to fully understand what’s going on. It is possible and rather easy to simply miss crucial pieces of worldbuilding exposition simply by not using certain weapons or skills during combat.
Other Bits (Gameplay, Visuals, Etc.)
Honestly, Transistor is a joy to play. It’s combat can be handled through both real-time and pause-and-plan mechanics. You are free to customize your combat tactics as you please, with considerable story incentive to mix up your move set on the regular.
While the game hits satisfying levels of difficulty, I never felt upset at the balancing or ran into an enemy that straight “cheesed” me. Even better, when completing difficult encounters, I often succeeded or failed based on my own choices, not on unseen interactions or luck. Unlock Bioshock, the final boss encounter pleasantly surprised me. A tweak to the game’s systems for that fight made it very memorable (and solidly difficult for my loadout).
Visually, the game’s style had me stopping to goggle at the environments quite often. Gorgeously done. Kudos to Supergiant for achieving such loveliness. Combined with the music, I’ve never spent as much time sitting in a game doing nothing and being satisfied.
As far as overall length, as I said earlier, the game is short. If you main-line the story and stick with the strongest abilities, you could probably complete the entire thing in 4-5 hours or so as a first-time player. In my efforts to see as much as possible, I got a little over 7 hours out of my run.
Conclusion
Transistor is a beautiful game that tells its best story through setting, music, and art direction. While the story’s conclusion left me disappointed, ultimately that disappointment arises from there not being enough of the game. I wanted more time to get to know these characters and their world. More time to learn their idiosyncrasies and understand what makes them tick.
I wish there could be more, but I am extremely glad for what already exists. If you haven’t gotten around to Transistor yet, I highly recommend it.
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Thanks for reading! Be sure to leave your thoughts on the game and this review below. Or drop over to my Twitter (@Dreamertide) and chat with me there!
