Bad Writing

This text pasted below was written more than ten years ago. Maybe thirteen. I never deleted it or threw it away. I always remembered it.
Gary Gygax had a large impact on my life, like I have said before. I spent much of my time playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and much of what I wrote had to do with that genre.
The reason why I remember this piece of writing so very well is because it is a narrative that I felt was important to the pace of the adventure module I had written. I was very proud of what it was I had written and I was anxious to get to this part of the module. I think I told myself that I didn’t rush the characters to this point of the module, but now that I consider it, I probably did exactly that.
I read it out loud for the first time to the group of friends I had invited over to play. I took the game very seriously. I saw it as an extension of my creativity.
This short piece of writing is an important example of why a good writer, one that knows what he is doing, should write once, read it, write it again, read it out loud, and then make corrections.
After I read it out loud, one of my friends, who meant well, started to clap. He announced the to the rest of the group that ‘this ended their lesson on adjectives for the day’.
That friend was James and that memory of that clap still makes me smile.
If he does read this, the answer to his question is yes, I have kept almost everything…

Ghostly Encounter

• During a rest period the characters are awakened by the sounds of battle nearby. If they pick up their belongings and go to the scene they will be treated to a remarkable sight.
• (This next part is the bit I read aloud. I have copied and pasted it with zero editing.)

A coherent mist rushes about in a fury, to coalesce into the form of a unicorn grazing at the foot of a tree. It does not seem to notice anyone but the root that it is searching for so obsessively. It does not notice the two forms, malevolent and cruel, their intentions enhanced by their ghostly forms, creeping upon the unsuspecting unicorn. They finally are upon her, hacking and slashing with all of their might.
The unicorn manages to land a few blows, one of which sends a bandit reeling. Out of the brush, above the fallen bandit, comes an elven ranger, dressed in ornate leather armour, wielding a magnificent bow. He looks at the bandit and hits him over the head with the end of the bow, knocking him unconscious. The elf nocks an arrow and sends if flying through the bandit, impaling him. He slumps to the ground dead.
The elf drops his bow and runs over to the unicorn. It is dying. The wounds inflicted upon it are too much for it to survive. The elf cries out to the forest, and you hear nothing but a roaring wind that sets the oak leaves flapping into the night air. The wind whistles by the trees and the scene of the elf holding the unicorn pauses. The elf looks down to the unicorn he cradles in his lap to find it in the form of a magnificent half elven maiden, its chestnut hair matted with blood, clinging to her forehead in ringlets. The elf brushes the hair out of her face and caresses her cheek with his hand. She takes his hand in hers and squeezes it with all of the strength her dying form can muster. She arches her neck to kiss the hero one final time but just as his lips go to meet hers she reverts back to her unicorn form, her head resting once again, and finally in his lap.
The wind roars again, bending the trees with their force. The ground shakes with the energy conjured by the winds. The hero looks to the skies, phantoms tears coursing down his cheeks. In his distress, he never sees the bandit awake from his indentured slumber. For his final, evil act, the bandit hurls a dagger at the hero, his chest a beacon of a target.
The sound of the dagger connecting with the breastbone of the hero is a deafening thud. He grasps at it, trying with all his might to remove it, but it has sunk past the hilt. His eyes grow wide as he feels the warmth of poison rush through his body. He convulses, tossing the dead unicorn onto the ground. After his final throes he dies, his hand brushing the luxurious mane of the unicorn.
Thunder echoes through the forest, though the night is clear, as the bandit struggles to leave through the tangle of forest brush.
The ghostly scene fades, leaving only the hero. He gets up, dagger in chest, and walks toward the party with a determination fed by decades of anger.
“Are thee the ones who killed my lover?” He roars.

Researching – Short story

Dante

Allegory

literal

figures as symbolic personages

coventional

a symbol we have collectively assigned meaning to (and is relevant only within a culture)

natural

using the image of an arch as a symbol of strength is universal (literally mathematically universal)

A language of metaphor and allegory based on ‘natural symbols’ would be possible

• thus making a truly completely artistic society possible

Allegorical figure

• personified abstraction
• death riding a pale horse

Symbolic image

• using a contemporary figure to represent a host of qualities that the figure represents (see conventional image)
• Hell
• a pit beneath Jerusalem
• a mountainous island in the Antipodes
• located among the celestial fields

Meaning

• literal
• allegorical
• moral
• anagogical
• All can be put into one sentence
• The last three all apply to allegory

And if James Joyce was writing about his own life in general, abstract terms, in an Adamic langauge of allegory and world influences, then Finnegans Wake, while alot of work, would have been fun for him and easy in the bargain. He’d be flashing the whole world and no one would know what they were looking at.

• Steven Runciman
• “The Medieval Manichee”
• a description of the dualist churches in the middle ages

Phrase

• ‘Stupor Mundi’
• Wonder of the world
• Pun and play on words in the spirit of The Wake

Beatrice

• Dante loved her his whole life. Met her when she was 9y old?
• Died 1292 – how old was she?
• La Vita Nuova
• his text and verse on Beatrice
• Bice
• her name was actually Bice. Only Dante called her Beatrice. I like the name Beatrice better anyway

Buondelmonte

• good of the mountain?
• beautiful of the mountain?
• mountain of the beautiful?

Simon de Montfort

• really should read more about this guy.

Gemma

• Why does that name have evil connotations for me?

Books

• 13th century
• sold in apothecary shops
• funny. We still sell them in drug stores
• being on drugstore bookshelves is then a time honoured practise
• wonder why, though?

Dante

• member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries
• merchants, jewellers, painters, booksellers

Guelfs

Ghibbilenes

• war amongst themselves
• even the Guelfs split among themselves.
• Bianca Guelfs(white)
• Neri Guelfs(black)
• Can’t remember if that was one of the triggers for writing Romeo and Juliet. Surely Shakespeare would have heard about that in his time and maybe he wondered ‘what if’?

Boniface VIII

• simoniac
• him of anagni (alagna)
• and because Dante was a Guelf (more church than empire) sullying the papal seat was disgusting and hell worthy
• and personally, Boniface was a politician and while religious to a degree in his own mind, becmng part of the church was a means to an end
• to an idealized member of the Guelfs, supporting politically what they thought was too secular a concern for the church, this was blasphemy
• thought to me, it’s funny and ironic

Dante

• The Banquet
• Il Convivio
• translation anywhere?
• Writing in the vulgar tongue
• De vulgari eloquentia

Universal Law

• enforced law among the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’
• an elected monarchy, I wonder? An elected tyrant?

Canto I

Beasts

Sin

• leopard
• self indulgence
• incontinence
• violence
• ‘beastiality’
• she wolf
• malicious
• ‘fraud’

• (Penny)

• my story?
• wolf spider?
• more for my short story than for anything Dante
• greyhound
• historical
• politcal messiah who will establish a just World Empire
• ‘Stupor Mundi’
• (or Stupid Monday)
• (there’s a short poem hidden up in those four words)
• spiritual
• attributes of God
• ‘wisdom, love and power’

Hell

Canto III, lines 25 -27

• that’s what casinos sound like to me. Hell’s Vestibule (for the futile)

Hell

Canto VI

Circle III

The Gluttonous

The rain / Cerebus

• I like the image of Virgil shutting up the Hound of hell by choking it on dirt
• I like the image of rain dripping off of Cerebus
• 3 headed and dog-like (referred to as ‘The Great Worm’)
• and he doesn’t guard the gates of Hell – he guards the gluttons
• image of uncontrolled appetite (allegory)
• ‘worm’ = old english for monster
• ‘vermo’ = italian for monster
• and worm or vermo is another name for monster and does not necessarily mean dragon
• ‘ciacco’  = dig

…
Dutch Samson could not find time in his day to make out the necessary forms for someone else to effortless delegate responsibility to a third person to go out and buy a new, compatible battery for his cellular phone. Instead, he managed to keep his conversations short by beginning every one with the phrase ‘My battery is about to die, so we better make this quick’. His battery never died completely, but to keep Dutch and the parties involved in his conversations in suspense, it would beep loudly in the middle of a phonecall, prompting everyone to summarize their points, assign tasks, and get off the phone so they could go to work. Which is exactly what Dutch always did. Always does. He has never been convinced that everyone else does the same, but he never calls them up to double check, because he is never sure of just exactly how much time he had left on his battery.
He came out of the beer store on a Friday afternoon, carrying his black, plastic Beer Store bag, which held his two six packs of tall boy cans of beer, and looked across the parking lot to the Big Box Video store. He stopped for a minute and cocked his head to the side, looking at the store and thinking. A Beer Store customer parked right in front of him, got out of their car, and gave him a queer look on their way into the store.
“I’m going to buy four movies,” Dutch said before he could stop himself. He was thinking out loud and he guessed he scared the person who had been staring at him. When they heard Dutch talking to no one, they stepped up their pace and looked directly at the door into the Beer Store. Dutch wanted to curse, just softly, but held it in. He didn’t want to look foolish. All he wanted to do was to enjoy himself this weekend.
There were a couple of movies he could think of off the top of his head that he would enjoy watching. A movie purchase would cost him ten bucks or so. Four movies would be forty bucks. Renting was much cheaper, but having to go through the rigmarole of figuring out all of that required rental data and then having to remember the movies after he watched them and renting four movies was not a guarantee that he would watch all of them before the rental period expired. He thought buying was the better option.
“Maybe only three,” he said out loud. “Oh, shit,” he finished, before unlocking his car remotely using the keyfob and putting the bag of beer in the back seat next to his briefcase. Have to stop talking out loud, he said to himself. Keep it together.
He thought about taking his car the two hundred feet across the plaza to the Big Box Video store and decided against it. He wanted the time between here and there to be on his feet, so he could gather himself and reflect on the movies he would want to watch this evening and this weekend. He wondered if the video store sold potato chips or microwave popcorn. He hoped so. He thought of movies and he craved those two things, but he knew that a trip to the grocery store right now, while planning a decadent evening of cheap beer and popcorn, would kill his mood completely and likely end him up doing a bit of actual job related work before passing out on the couch. All of these thoughts went back and forth in his head, dodging around the looming elephant of his job, when his phone thundered to get his attention. It sounded like a herd of wild animals. It was the pre-programmed ring on his cellphone for when work called him. He programmed the ringtone to be a warning for him not to answer the phone. He answered anyway.
“Dutch speaking,” he said, unfolding it with a deft snap.
“Dutch. Keefer. We got a problem, man. I need your help.”
“Okay, ” Dutch said. “Start from the top. Is anyone hurt? Bleeding?”
“Nope. We’re all good.”
Dutch sighed. “Then we can take care of it one step at a time. I’m a manager, not a doctor. If someone was hurt or dying, I would be of fuck all use to you, sir.”
…

Gary Gygax died last month and that made me very sad. I could always go on the internet and find out exactly when he died for sure, but it doesn’t really matter the time or the place. What matters is that a great man who had a great idea is dead. I wonder how many geeks like me came to realize just how cool the game was. We read the manuals as kids and checked it out online when we got older. Feeling a little guilty, feeling a little like they were surfing porn and probably thinking that it would be a better idea to be surfing porn because if you are caught, at least you can explain it.

How do you explain to your wife or signficant other what a Beholder is? Or a Githyanki? Or a Mind Flayer? How do you explain the important of the number 18? What about that lucky bag of dice and that one lucky d20 they would roll only when the situation really called for it. There are some guys that still play the game every weekend, but I’m not sure they play it now like they did as kids. Play it the same as when they first took up the game. Those are the guys that consider it a serious hobby and never consider how much strength it would take to call up all his old friends and play for a whole weekend like they used to, and be able to play it like the fifteen or twenty years from the last game to this one was only a little more than a day.

Yeah. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was that cool for me.

I read the death notice out loud to Mell. It didn’t really have an effect on her. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I even told Mell who the guy was in the first place. It would not have much of a difference. Mell knows that I played the game with my friends, but I don’t think she ever saw the use of it. I think her brother played the games, too, but I can’t be sure. I’ll have to ask him the next time I see him.

Fespahr Dax, Lord of Gnarly Forest. That was my very first character. Rolled for my by Sean Jara while on lunch, during my day long, weekly scheduled, Five Talents class. I remember me doodling a picture of my character. I remember the pale blue lines of the graph paper. I remember me being able to read the statistics and build a whole person in my mind, and then I doodled it. I don’t think that Sean appreciated the doodle. He wanted to play really badly and he wanted me to play with him and everyone else. That’s not entirely true. I remember him wanting to DM an adventure and I seem to remember that it was one he had written about The Nine Hells ; but now I think that if it was The Nine Hells that he cribbed it from a year long series of articles from Dragon Magazine and took it for being his own. My character was part of the Grey Hawk setting. I don’t remember ever going on a single adventure with my character Fespahr Dax, but I carry the memory of him with me. For some reason, I remember that he had padded leather armour. And I always spelled it with a ‘u’.

There are a great many things I can go on about Gary Gygax and what his games do for me, but for now, there is just one incident that rings out in my head.

I organized once a month, weekend long gaming sessions with my friends. I would help them create the characters, but everything else was mine. Everything. I designed the world, I drew the maps, I wrote the adventures, I DM’d the adventures. I cribbed ideas, too, from here and there (most notably the Krynn adventures ; I loved those Draconians and I couldn’t get enough of the Knight of Solamnia) but I managed some pretty original ideas and the friends I had challenged my mind and my creativity at every turn.

I would pay for the pop and the chips and the pizza and everything. I did my chores and I worked with Dad, earning money picking up garbage with him once (or was it twice?) a week at the townhouse complex he managed. I think I did other things for him, too. But this was before I had a part time job at Harvey’s. Anyway, it had got to be expensive, all of my friends eating up all of my cash. Initially, I didn’t mind. I got a real charge out of people enjoying what it was my little mind could come up with on short notice and I was juiced when my friends would not do the things that I expected they would do. Kind of like ‘choose your own adventure’. You would read those books and there was only ever one or two choices, and you got to a point that you knew how to run circles through the whole book and not get anything done. I had originally thought that DMing a game or a campaign wasn’t much different. It is alot different. Choices are not so easy and kids with active imaginations tend to act outside of their personalities given the right setting. But still, all of that aside, it was getting expensive. So I started to ask for money. Not alot. Just to cover the expense. I wasn’t charging rent or anything. Or trying to rip anyone off. I was just trying to make it so I wasn’t going broke.

Most of my friends didn’t have a problem coughing up a dollar or two. I don’t even know if I can remember all of the people that played.

Jeff Storey? Gerard Wilcott? Did Hiroshi play? Yeah, I think he did. Rich Smith, definitely. Dave Aveledo was later. James. Scott. Joe. Those guys came later, too. This was at the start. The very beginning. When I thought it was okay for a dwarven fighter-magic-user-thief to climb walls while wearing platemail armour. Before the beer being chilled by the open windows in the basement. Before the intense question of ‘Is there blood on my armour?’ could be answered. Before sneaking out in the middle of the night to burn off gigajoules of excess energy. This was when I was a kid and none of us cared about reality. We enjoyed what it was we could imagine. The other things, they happened later, but at the time, when it all started, I think everyone was having a good deal of fun. However, in those beginning times, one of my friend’s mothers did not agree. Looking back on it now, my friend may have been embarrassed as hell that his mother didn’t want to cough up two or three bucks. But at the time, I was just scared shitless. Some guy’s Mom was fucking calling me to ask me where I got off taking money from her son to come over to my house. That was just cheap and low minded, I thought.

And my Dad didn’t go to the phone to cover up for me. He didn’t fight my battles. And he kept Mom away from the phone too. Dad just handed me the phone and pretty much said, “It’s for you…”

I can’t remember how long I was on the phone for. In my memory it must have been three hours. But that memory has been stretched over twenty four or twenty five long frigging years, so I bet it couldn’t have been longer than ten minutes. All I know is that I listened politely, answered all of her questions, pleaded my case, and won her over to my point of view. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember that she didn’t want to give the money to my friend, but give it to me personally. I also remember getting off the phone and having my Mom and Dad clap resoundingly at my work. They were impressed as to how well I handled myself.

Now, in this dialogue I have conjured up memories that I will spend days and weeks trying to sort out and probably try to type most of them here before I go to work on my stories. But for now, I want to remember the first thing I think of when I think of Gary Gygax and that little game he invented.

I am thirty six years old. I have a wife. I have a daughter. I have a house. I have a mortgage. I have a job that last year I made a more money that I ever have in my entire life. I have worked long to get to where I am and I have done good things and I have done bad things. I think it all started after I put that telephone down, after having that conversation with my friend’s mother, after I convinced her that I was right about something I cared a great deal about.

I miss Gary Gygax and I mourn his passing a little because I never had a chance to thank him for that.