Today I have been writing! Costa Rica is fabulous, and we’re enjoying Jaco. Walked out for breakfast this morning and later on to the super mercado for groceries. My high school Spanish is, luckily, coming back in leaps and bounds.
I’ve been working not on a story set here, though, but one in Vegas. Here’s the beginning of what is looking like it will hit novelette length at least, “Carpe Glitter.”
Carpe glitter, my grandmother always said. Seize the glitter.
And that was what I remembered best about her: the glitter. A dazzle of rhinestone, a waft of Patou Joy, lipstick like a red banner across her mouth. Underneath all that, a worry little old lay with silver hair and vampire-pale skin.
Not that she was one, of course. But grandmother hung with everyone during her days in the Vegas crowd. Celebrities, presidents, they all came to her show at the Sparkle Dome, watched her strut her stuff in a black top hat and fishnet stockings, conjuring flames and doves (never card tricks, which she hated), making ghosts speak to loved ones in the audience and when she stepped off the stage, she left in a scintillating dazzle, like a fairy queen stepping off her throne.
All that shine. And at home?
She hoarded.
I mopped sweat off my forehead with the hem of my t-shirt and attacked another pile of magazines. No cat pee – I’d been spared that in these back rooms, closed off for at least a couple of decades. Grandmother had bought the house when she was at the height of her first fortune, just burst onto the stage magician scene, a woman from Brooklyn who’d trained herself in sleight of hand and studied under the most famous female stage of her time.
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On The Treatment of Coders
Coders can seem like odd creatures sometimes. Under that ladybug costume, though, they're as human as you or I.This article originally appeared in the now-defunct online magazine Imaginary Realities. It talks about MUD administration, and draws on my experience working with Armageddon MUD, the world of Zalanthas. For those who don’t know what a MUD is, it’s a text-based roleplaying game. Here’s the wikipedia article on MUDs.
One of the sad truths of the mud world is that there are never enough coders. Builders aplenty, brimming with fresh idealism and plans for entire zones, appear (and sometimes disappear) at the drop of a hat. But coders are the unicorns of the mudding world, seldom glimpsed and ardently pursued. We are lucky enough to have three dedicated coders on Armageddon MUD: Morgenes, Tenebrius and Tiernan, as well as a few other staff members willing and able to wade through the bugs file and tinker with things upon occasion. How, then, does an administrator keep these rare beasts happy? The following four steps may help.
1) Communicate: When asking for new code, try to let the coders know exactly what is desired. For example, instead of ‘Let’s make archery more complicated,” a staff member might propose “Let’s put a range on archery, so the farther away the target is, the harder it is to shoot it.” A full description of the the idea, perhaps including examples, such as fake logs showing what the idea will look like when being used, helps make sure the originator of the idea and the coder are on the same track as far as things like syntax and usage are concerned.
The same holds true for bugs. Describing how it’s supposed to work as well to how it’s working right now helps clarify ideas. Coders want to know if the bug is REALLY a bug, or something being reported because it doesn’t work as the reporter feels it should.
With bugs, give the coders as much information as possible, including how to reproduce the bug. Examples by way of logs are great, and if they include some form of error message (or message that they’re getting that shows it’s an error), it often allows the coder to track down what section of the code needs to be worked on.
Make sure people aren’t bumping into each other. On Armageddon, we’ve got a coder’s board, where people post changes as they make them. This alerts fellow team members to what they’re doing and is also helpful if unexpected bugs crop up, enabling people to track exactly what got changed and when. Two people should not be working on the same idea at once unless they know it, and can divvy up the work accordingly.
2) Have a purpose: Will it get used? Is it something players are asking for? This one is a matter of ego, but we’re all human and we all do have egos. Seeing their work getting used, regularly and as envisioned, is a reward beyond any thanks or congratulations other staff members can give a coder. Track player requests, through entries in the bugs/ideas/typos files as well as emails to the account and posts on the general discussion board in order to convince a coder that the players want, and will use, something.
Generally, with new ideas figure out how they are moving towards some goal. A piece of code like a new skill is going to sound more interesting if it fits into some overall purpose, such as a master plan of non-combat related skills for the economy than it would if it is just a random idea. You are also going to end up getting more out of the idea if it is part of a greater whole.
Make it innovative. Some coders like to be trail breakers, to feel that they’re not just playing catch-up with another mud, but are creating ideas and concepts new to the mud community. Some ideas get requested to ‘balance’ things out between groups: guilds, or races, or mount speed. When a coder starts to feel like the code they’re doing that day only works to nullify a change made last week, then they’re going to start wondering what they will be asked to implement tomorrow.
3) Share the work: Do as much of the grunt work as you can for the coders, including helping thoroughly test, providing help files and documentation, and fleshing things out. In testing, give coders information about what is not working and how to recreate the result. Be precise about what needs to be changed: not ‘the plague of locusts spell needs to do more damage’, but ‘it needs to do about twice the damage it is now.’ When something requires a new help file or modification of an existing help file, do not expect the coder to do it, but supply it yourself. If it is something that requires building, provide the items. Teamwork of this kind, when it is working well, is terrific, and will often produce amazingly cool results.
4) Appreciate: Good coders can never be praised sufficiently. We try to make sure that players know who is responsible for new and interesting changes, by posting information about them in the news as well as in our weekly update, which is a mailing our players can subscribe to, which provides information about changes, staff and world news, upcoming recommended playing times, etc. When players write in with compliments or feedback on a code change, make sure that the note gets passed along to the person , as well as that the coder knows how cool or slick you think the ideas they have implemented are as well.
There is a tendency sometimes to regard coders as resources that spit out code at request. But the fact of the matter is that treating coders in that way will frustrate both sides, leading coders to become discouraged and unmotivated to implement new ideas and builders to feel that their coding needs are not being met. These four points may help avoid such frustration.
Description captures so much nuance, and the structure of the sentence can prove integral to its effect, as frequently happens in Dunnett's writing.A series that I come back to repeatedly is Dorothy Dunnett’s marvelous six-volume series The Lymond Chronicles. Dunnett has two strengths: dialogue and its accompanying actions as well as a descriptive gift that I am bitterly envious of. Right now I’m working my way through the books for a third or fourth time, and I’m midway through Book 3, The Disorderly Knights.
In this chapter Lymond and Oonagh are escaping the Turkish camp, and it’s just marvelous.
At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?”
The sea is the still dark pool, the brimming edge of freedom and we know that it’s still perilous and questionable because they can’t even see the boat. It’s a passage where words are scarce and breath is conserved, and Dunnett deftly raises the stakes here with that six word exchange.
In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. ‘Trust me.’ And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water searched out, discovered his burns. Then with a rustle she saw his pale head sink back into the quiet sea and at the same moment she was gripped and drawn after him, her face to the stars, drawn through the tides with the sea lapping like her lost hair at her cheeks, the drive of his body beneath her pulling them both from the shore. They were launched on the long journey towards the slim shape, black against glossy black, which was the brigantine, with Thompson on board.
Right off the bat, the first moment of the paragraph, the terse tense nature of the dialogue is maintained, along with a single detail reminding us of the lack of lighting. And because it’s Lymond, brilliant ephemeral Lymond, that detail backs up the dazzle of his character with its verb masquerading as a noun: flash. The moment where he draws her into the water, first to the lovely image of the phosphorescence around her ankles, then and deeper, and deeper, as though each comma was a wave, is one of those that bludgeons me with despair whenever I read Dunnett, because I don’t think I’ll ever come close to the precision and brilliant construction of that sentence, and she does it line after line after line for six fricking books, plus the eight book Niccolo series and the MacBeth one. HOLY COW. And then she delivers the final stroke with the temperature of the silky water combined with the information that now she’s up to her waist. We’re reminded that Lymond is not in the best physical shape because Dunnett never resists a chance to ratchet up the tension.
After that a long sentence conveys the sense of the journey, starting with the sound and visual of his pale head. Something about the way the sentence is constructed mimics the physical blocking of the scene, with Oonagh being drawn over and through the water with the drive of his body submerged beneath, pulling them both forward. Followed by more journey, and even more sense of the lighting, with the ship black against glossy black.
She never knew how long a swim that was, for she had one task: to make his work possible. Her body limp, her limbs brushing the surface of the sea, she took air at the top of his thrust; learned after the first gagging mistake to close every channel to the sudden dip, the molesting wave that slapped suddenly over one cheek. The hard grip under her armpits never altered, nor did Lymond’s own breathing for a long time vary at all.
That paragraph has a lot of sexual, physical terms (her body limp, her limbs brushing the surface of the sea, she took air at the top of his thrust) that turn violent (learned after the first gagging mistake to close every channel to the sudden dip, the molesting wave that slapped suddenly over her cheek), which echoes Oonagh’s experiences in the book, having been beaten many times by her former lover Cormac MacCarthy. But interestingly, the next sentence shows us that Lymond is steady where the violence is sporadic; he is drawing her forward through it. I’ve noticed Dunnett repeating figures like this over and over before — in Queens’ Play, it’s eyes, for example, so I’ll be curious to see whether this keeps getting repeated — or I may go back to earlier chapters to look at their interactions again.
I urge my writing students to copy out passages like this, to test them sentence by sentence, looking to see how the effects are created. Sometimes it’s just an exercise in angst, when you’re working with a writer that’s much better than you are, but I can’t help but think you always learn something from the practice.
