The Author's Journey

October 15, 2005

Today, I write the first page of Fortuna, reproduced below.

Her avatar was a stone statue of the Virgin Mary. The image was not animated like virtually all the others in Fortuna. Not animated – and therefore hastily obtained? But why? The soft voice that now reached his ears carried a hint of echo, as though the speaker were hiding behind the statue. Someone was hiding behind that statue.

“You are in danger,” she said.

Remember, this is only a game.

Jason typed, “Does your husband know about us?” The computer at the other end of this exchange would synthesize the voice of Lucco Pitti, a friend, and later rival, of Cosimo di Medici – Cosimo “the elder.” Jason had chosen Pitti’s voice for reliability. It was not platform-sensitive.

“Worse.”

He stared at the computer screen, the only source of light in the room where he was ensconced. It was on the second floor of a small, relatively new villa where he served as caretaker in exchange for free rent. The owners, who had ridden the 1990’s Silicon Valley boom to early wealth, were in Provence, and would not return for several months. Perhaps never. The villa was eerily quiet.

“Worse?” Jason typed, wondering what she had in mind. She was really good at this. Playing the Fortuna simulation with her was like writing a screenplay – a whole lot better than his life as a computer science grad student at Stanford.

“We must meet. Sunday, at noon, in front of the new cathedral in Pisa.”

This made no sense. Pisa was out of the range of the simulation. Jason typed, “Do you mean Piazza San Marco?”

“No. In front of the new cathedral. In Pisa.”

Was there a new revision he had failed to download, one that added new geography? Surely he would have gotten an e-mail. He quickly launched another browser window and typed “Cathedral of Pisa” into the search window. In three clicks, he was looking at an image of a church completed, according to the caption, in 1350. Within the simulation’s time frame, but not its geography.

Jason weighed the situation for a moment and then decided to risk jumping out of character.

“Pisa isn’t in the game,” he typed.

Very quickly, the voice responded. “This isn’t a game.”

To be continued…

October 7, 2005

My father, Will Stevens, was a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner, one of the two dominant San Francisco newspapers in the 1950’s and 1960’s. (The other was The San Francisco Chronicle, which still exists.) He was also a novelist, short story writer and poet. On the weekends, starting Friday night, he would regularly stay up until three or four in the morning, typing on an old Underwood typewriter and smoking endless cigarettes. As a romantic figure, Hemmingway had nothing on him.

He worked at various projects for years, and, in his late fifties, finally got a break. The Examiner’s book critic, one Luther Nichols, left the newspaper business to become the West Coast acquisitions editor for Doubleday. My father showed Nichols his latest project, a book called Three Street, about the bums in what was then San Francisco’s Skid Row. Doubleday ended up buying it and it became a local (but not national) best seller.

I myself became a professional writer at the age of fifteen, when I began writing a weekly music column called Modern Music for my home town newspaper, The Vallejo Times Herald, where my dad had once been managing editor. In college I got one article published in the UC Berkeley literary magazine, not a small achievement, but after I graduated I abandoned writing for several years.

The insurance payoff from a rather severe auto accident that put me in hospital for nine months in my late ‘twenties gave me a chance to devote significant time to writing once again. I wrote two novels over a period of about five years, a techno thriller that almost made it into print and a semi-autobiographical spy novel that never went anywhere.

All the while, I was actually making my living as a writer. I started out on technical manuals, then moved up (in pay, at least) to advertising copywriter, and finally ended up working as a creative director, which still involved a lot of writing.

At a certain age, no matter how clever you may be, it is no longer possible to market yourself as a “creative,” the term used for writers and art directors by the marketing types who hire them. I transitioned into PR, specializing in high tech and education, and now spend most of my time writing marketing documents and web copy for large multi-national corporations.

This is not the ideal day job for a novelist. Most people have only so much writing energy per day, and if you use it up writing a speech for the CEO of a Fortune 50 multinational, that energy will probably not be there for your main character’s crucial interior monologue. But my freelance work does pay the mortgage, and it keeps me up to date on the technology that has played such an important role in my fiction.

To be continued…

October 12, 2005

I am on the phone with a friend I have known since grammar school. He is an executive in an insurance company now – something we would never have dreamed of when we were students at UC Berkeley together. He majored in History, I in English, and both of us were ready to do jail time for our causes if it came to that – which it did. But that’s all water under the bridge. Or is it?

I am telling him about another high school friend who has just returned from a class reunion, where he bumped into an old girlfriend of mine. She’s married now, kids, etc., but, as my other friend put it, she wants to get in touch. Fred is quite struck with this situation.

“You ought to write a book about that.”

“About what?”

“Getting together with an old girlfriend after all these years! It’s amazing how things happen. You should write a book about it.”

“I don’t know.”

“You should.”

I don’t say anything more. I know quite clearly that I’m never going to write a book about getting together with an old high school girl friend. But I also know right then, at that very moment, that I am going to write a book about MMORPGs. I will set my game in Renaissance Florence. That will give me the caché of Renaissance culture, which has propelled quite a few books onto the best seller lists lately. (Lucrezia comes to mind, a biography of Lucrezia Borgia, a sort of Renaissance femme fatale.) But because I’m writing about a game, I won’t have to concern myself with precise historical accuracy, a huge plus.

The book will be about how the hero – a computer genius at Stanford, one of my two alma maters –  tries to break through the barrier of anonymity imposed by the game and connect with the real person behind an avatar he meets online. I will call it The Florentine Game.

The notion that an NPR segment and a phone conversation could trigger the concept for a book makes no sense. But neither does the very idea of writing a novel. It’s a bit like deciding, upon entering high school, that you’re going to have a career as a point guard in the NBA.

Nonetheless, a few hours later I am at my computer, thinking about how my game would work. I design a spinner that the players – shall I call them novitiates? – will use to determine their station at the moment they begin the game. They won’t have a choice. Their status will  be determined by fate. Fortuna.

To be continued…

February 5, 2005

  I am listening to  Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio and I cannot believe what I am hearing. I have been vaguely aware of massively multi-player online role playing games, known by the awkward acronym MMORPGs in the trade. They are the Internet’s answer to the Dungeons and Dragons games my stoner friends used to play for days on end when we were in college. Well, maybe they’re just a little more than that….

Actually, games like Worlds of Warcraft and Second Life are a global phenomenon with millions of players, and I’m learning that they meld with what gamers call RL (real life) in scary ways.

Let’s say, for example, that you and I are partners on a mission in Worlds of Warcraft. Through some kind of trickery, I manage to steal a magic sword from you. And then – this is the possibility that amazed me – I sell that sword on eBay for $75. You can sue me. And, at least in some countries, you can win.

How could there be a market for swords, shields and other accoutrements of war made out of nothing but pixels? The answer harkens back to the medieval ambience shared by so many of these MMORPGs: It is about sloth, the Fifth Deadly Sin. In MMORPGs you can’t kill a powerful dragon with any old sword. You need a special sword, and the only way to get it is by killing x-hundred dwarves (or other beings who are relatively easily to kill). This takes a lot of time. What if, instead of spending endless boring hours dwarf-killing to get that sword, you could simply buy it? Well, you can.

In fact, there are 21st century sweat shops in Third World countries where young males sit in front of monitors twelve hours or more per day killing those dwarves for you and selling their spoils to brokers, who in turn make them available on places like eBay.

The larger point is, transactions in MMORPGs can have financial ramifications in RL. And this raises some interesting questions. If you role play in Second Life, the online environment created by Linden Labs, what happens if you win a million Linden Dollars in a lottery? That’s about $4000 at the current rate of exchange between L$ and US$ (and there is one). Is that “money” taxable?

And, because nobody takes these games seriously, is this is ultimate money laundering opportunity?

 To be continued…

This blog is about getting published. It’s not a set of instructions about how to get published. It’s the story of how one person actually did get published. Me. And like my novel, Fortuna   (OceanView Publishing, May 3, 2010), I’m going to start in the middle of the story. My future posts will be in chronological order, from the moment of inspiration (there was one) to the launch party and beyond.

Picture a large ballroom in a relatively elegant San Francisco hotel filled with aspiring authors. They are seated at large, round tables, eight to a table, and they look good, some conventional but stylish, some hip but not scraggly. I have chatted with many of them and they are, by and large, pretty interesting people, with impressive ideas for books. The age range is from college to seventy-something.

At the moment, their attention is directed towards a stage where about a dozen literary agents are explaining what sorts of manuscripts they are interested in seeing. All but one are women, all but two from New York. They are, judging from their presentations, a collection of hard-edged, arrogant, caustic individuals who are reveling in their position of power as gatekeepers to The Land of the Published. I keep telling myself that they have very hard jobs, suffer constant rejection, probably have trouble making their rent some months… but all of this does not maker them less odious.

I say to myself, I cannot play this game. But then the inner dialog continues. I remind myself that I paid $550 dollars to attend the 2007 San Francisco Writers Conference, that I knew going in there would be a moment when I had to confront the incredibly competitive nature of the publishing industry, that perseverance was part of the process. But the only part of the dialog I can really hear was “f**k this.”

The presentations are half over. I am assiduously trying to take notes, but it is difficult to keep the names straight, connect their faces with the photographs in the conference program, scribble things like “thrillers,” or “no sci-fi” in the margins, all the while fighting the urge to get up and walk out. And then, Kimberley Cameron, the woman who will eventually become my agent and through amazing persistence sell my book, comes to the podium.

To be continued…