I just finished Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets, which I enjoyed a good amount. I highly recommend the book to any printing / bookmaking geeks, it features an interesting (though mostly fictional) account of Gutenberg’s life and cross-cuts it with a modern-day mystery adventure through Europe. In this post, however, I’d like to talk about two aspects of the book that irked me, and that strike me as part of a larger pattern of contemporary historical mysteries. These are, the gender roles in the book and the persistence of a Da-Vinci-Code-esque imagery of Dark Secrets Held By The Church. I talked about gender roles in my last post, so this one is going to be about the Da Vinci Code imagery.

To put it simply – Book of Secrets is an interesting historical fiction about Gutenberg, coupled with an exciting journey of historical reconstruction through Western Europe, on top of which is grafted a mostly unnecessary historical mystery plot. By unnecessary here, I mean that the plot has little value or consequence for the book as a whole. In the end, the Devil’s Library has burned to the ground, its secrets gone forever. The budding relationship between Nick and Emily is based on the hardships they endured together, and on a common enjoyment of reconstruction and old things, not on some Secret they share. The secret bestiary is also gone, and ultimately much more important as a symbol of the hurt, complicated relationship between Kaspar, Johann, Aeneas and their world, than as some dark secret the Church wants to keep. No one in the contemporary plotline seems to recognize the true significance of the diary, nor could they – the characters simply don’t have the relevant context. So why is it in there?

In the years since the publication of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and (more recently) Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, there has been a plethora of historical mystery novels with this same general theme. The Church has Some Terrible Secret they wish to keep so. Plucky young heroes are, through happenstance, thrust into the middle of a plot to uncover this secret. In the climactic resolution of said novels, however, we often find the secret is either inconsequential or not a secret at all. This let-down is rooted, in my opinion, in the simplicity of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s original mystery… (SPOILERS) Christ was human, possibly married and had kids, and descendants of those kids survive to this day. This may be a very controversial statement to some Christians, but there’s nothing more there. All subsequent attempts to harp on the same theme either end up repeating it, coming up with some secret that has nothing to do with Christianity, or (as is the case with Book of Secrets) never revealing the secret in the end.

The Ultimate Answer that all these books try to circle around was penned by Umberto Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum. Towards the end of the book, as the main character gets more and more bogged down in the world of mysteries, his wife tells him, his secrets lie in the human body and in the world around us. Our bodies have two legs and two arms, so we assign significance to the number two; we love and hate and hurt and rejoice and so we wrap those feelings up in fancy packaging and spend years looking for the answers that are right in front of our noses. Our body, our human experience, is the true book of secrets. We may enjoy trying on all the fancy symbolic wrappers, but in the end, I would guess, we’ll come back to the naked form and enjoy it all the more.

I just finished Tom Harper’s Book of Secrets, which I enjoyed a good amount. I highly recommend the book to any printing / bookmaking geeks, it features an interesting (though mostly fictional) account of Gutenberg’s life and cross-cuts it with a modern-day mystery adventure through Europe. In this post, however, I’d like to talk about two aspects of the book that irked me, and that strike me as part of a larger pattern of contemporary historical mysteries. These are, the gender roles in the book and the persistence of a Da-Vinci-Code-esque imagery of Dark Secrets Held By The Church.

First, the gender roles. The protagonist is male, which remains the norm in the genre, a norm I dislike and do what I can to change. It’s not just the gender of the protagonist: the gender roles are pretty traditional, in a way that grates on me. There are two major characters in the contemporary plotline of the book who are women. Emily is the “positive” character who helps the protagonist. She is frequently passive (though occasionally awesome and competent) and gets sidelined towards the end of the book, even though, in some ways, her story is the more interesting one. Gillian is the “negative” character. She is an independent, strong woman who goes where she wants and does what she wants, but through the lens of the author and of the main character she appears “the wild woman, untamed and unknowable” – and her actions ultimately put her at odds with the party and the law. At the end of the book, she simply disappears, no longer a lover or a friend, but still an unsolved mystery.

The 15th century plotline in Secrets is even worse with respect to gender roles. Gutenberg himself is a major character, and homosexual; his homosexuality, however, is never anything more than a torment or a jealously guarded secret. I appreciate the fact that a gay man might find himself very much an outcast in 15th century Europe, but the Gutenberg sexuality arc features no progress until the resolution when Gutenberg claims he is cured of his “demon” by God after a particularly stressful night when he (temporarily) loses his friend Kaspar. This sort of statement makes me extremely uncomfortable. On its own, it is certainly possible for a person’s sexuality to change drastically after particularly stressful episodes. However, the way Harper chooses to portray Gutenberg’s sexuality has a very unpleasant “casting out the demon feel” that suggests (homo)sexuality is something that is at worst hidden deep and at best cured like a disease. Again, the social norms of Gutenberg’s time and place may have suggested a similar portrayal, but it is my experience that sexuality is an intensely personal matter. A character’s perception of their own sexuality may be tinged by the messages they get from social context, but it grows and changes as the character grows and changes, and (I would argue) never does it conform to any socially held view of sexuality.

This post has gotten a bit too long, so I will leave things here and talk about the Da Vinci Code and related matters in the next post!

Quick aside: I am going to be talking about gender in a non-binary way in this post, and for me that includes using gender-neutral pronouns. I realize that folks have differing opinions on these pronouns, and some people don’t like them at all. I totally respect that. These pronouns are how I choose to talk about non-binary genders now, and they may not fit for other people, or even for me in the future.

Putting up these photos is a) extremely rewarding, and feels very good, and also b) highly thought-provoking. When I search for photos to reblog online, I find myself thinking about gender, expression, and beauty. Beauty is such a loaded word that I don’t explicitly look for “beautiful” photos to post. However, more often than not, one of the criteria that will make me submit a photo for review is “this person is beautiful.” So of necessity I’ve been thinking about beauty and gender-fluidity a lot.

There is a social standard of beauty, especially female beauty, that other people have written volumes about so I won’t mention it much here. I only want to say that this standard is both highly unrealistic, in the sense that few, if any, actual people match it; and annoyingly persistent, in the sense that I find it burrowing into my head when I look at people. There’s an easy trap I sometimes fall into: when looking at gender-queer and gender-fluid and transsexual people, I catch myself judging them by socially normative, cis-sexual standards. I can look at a picture and say, “oh, ze is beautiful because there is this maleness that’s rugged and strong but also this femaleness that’s soft and curvy and they’re sort of together here.” But when I do that, it feels wrong.

What feels right, then? Well, it feels right when I don’t try to break down and analyze beauty in terms of gender and norm. The way ze wears stripy socks is beautiful. The way ze sticks hir hands awkwardly in hir pockets is beautiful. The way hir hair falls all over hir face is amazing, and so is the light in this picture. The smile, the skin, the pose, the eyes, all those things that people of any and all gender have and express themselves with, those make some inner beauty shine through. The sum result may be a fierce rejection of gender norms, or a fierce expression of the same, or anywhere in between.

I want to emphasize that I’m talking about a continuum here, not a binary acceptance/rejection of cis-sexual presentations, or even of what I internalize as cis-sexual ideas about beauty. To put it simply, some folk like to be cis-sexual. Some folk are trans-sexual, but like to present as cis-sexual. Some folk have trans days and cis days and days when they don’t want to present in any particular way, and all of that is totally cool. Also, I want to say that I’m talking primarily about visual stimuli, which offer only a narrow window into someone’s identity. I can’t *for sure* tell if a person is trans or cis or *anything* from looking at one photo; thinking that I can is equivalent to stereotyping. So, really, I’m sharing my impressions and ideas, but I’m aware that those impressions and ideas can be, and often are, wrong.

Still, I feel that even if I stumble on particulars, my general point is worth expressing: Genderqueer folk come through as genderqueer without having to build themselves out of normative-gender Lego bricks. They can throw out the whole set, or keep any part of it they want, and be beautiful all the same.

This post is the result of a long, complicated meditation, throughout most of which I was pretty unhappy. And then it just ended, and I am happy, so before I forget, I want to write about it. The meditation is about planning, control, and awareness.

I used to be (in some ways, still am) a creature of control. It turns out that there are Good Ways of Doing Things. If you pay your bills on time, you don’t get late fees. If you go to college, you are (more likely to) get a better job than if you don’t. If you say please and thank you to someone, they will be nicer to you. My brain would take these Good Ways and try to apply them to every situation. Unconsciously, I would convince myself that there was a “good” way of handling situations and that if I just found out what this “good” way was, I’d “win” the situation at hand.

This desire for control led to (I believe) a very unhealthy way of dealing with life. I would separate life into two neat boxes: “problem” and “not problem.” The most vivid example of this is my first long-term relationship. One of two things was always the case: my girlfriend was feeling good (“not problem”) and my girlfriend was not feeling good (“problem”).

Let’s look at the second case, first. When my girlfriend was unhappy, it was (to me) a specific situation that there was a Good Way of dealing with; furthermore, since I’d spent so much time thinking about Good Ways of dealing, and such situations in general, the Good Way of dealing with such situations was Fixing them, and the Fixer would be me.

Of course, it often happened that I couldn’t Fix the problem, either because there was no problem, or because the problem had no Fix, or because I had no business Fixing it. My normal approach to failure would be obsessively looking for mistakes I may or may not have made, and planning to fix them next time. If only I could avoid the mistakes, it would be all good.

Now let’s look at the first case. When my girlfriend was happy, clearly there was no problem on hand, so I would not be mindful. I tended to focus on myself, and not on her or on the relationship we had.

I did this for so long it had become an almost ingrained reflex; this attitude of Fixing, mistake-obsessing, and lack of mindfulness persisted long through one relationship, through my graduation from college, through large parts of grad school. But it slowly got better.

I learned about Awareness. Awareness is not about Fixing, or Best Ways, or mistakes or planning. Awareness is not about control. It’s just about taking a look and/or listen, to the world. It’s about extending that boundary between I and World, and paying attention to other people – the way they act, the way they talk. It’s also about paying attention to yourself.

Once I started to pay attention, I realized that the world was messy and complicated. I also realized that, despite being messy and complicated, the world works. People misunderstand each other and make mistakes in relationships ALL the time. And yet, many people make friends, and fall in love, and have long-term happiness in their lives. Being aware really helps.

Being aware is listening to your friend, and realizing why they’re unhappy. Being aware is also realizing that right now, you can’t magically fix them, or the situation. Being aware is knowing that somebody just wants a hug right now, not a thousand dollars or a logical explanation of how to go about feeling better. Being aware is realizing that your significant other just wants to stay in and watch a movie, and that you really want to go out, and talking through that. Being aware is realizing that your feelings, or your goals in life, are changing, and expressing that.

None of these things require planning, or fixing, or Good Ways. They take some time, and some practice, and they *won’t* necessarily solve problems. Awareness is not good-things-only, awareness includes bad and unhappy things. But without awareness, we are alone and blind. Other people don’t exist, except as blurry objects we bump into by chance or clumsiness, or, worse, except as obstacles in the way of our plans, problems to fixed or puzzles to be solved. When we practice awareness, we can still get hurt, and hurt others; but without awareness, we never get to realize what happened, and we keep hurting. Please, please be aware.

As the author of Everything Is A Remix notes, this idea clashes with common beliefs about innovation, whether in the arts or technology, being spontaneous, a stroke of genius like a flame in the night, something out of nothing. The author dismisses these beliefs as simply wrong. I disagree with him, however, and here’s where I think remixing gets interesting: while the core ideas that go into innovations are nothing more than remixes and mashups, their execution often takes us by surprise and comes off as a stroke of genius.

Let’s look at some examples of great execution*. Johann Gutenberg’s printing press was built upon a number of components, most of which had been around for centuries. Gutenberg’s own additions, such as the invention of the matrix to produce metal letters, were definitely important, but it would be silly to argue that Gutenberg invented the printing press. What Gutenberg did was make it possible for people to print hundreds of thousands of books in the span of a few years. What he ultimately enabled was the popular consumption of books. These books contained knowledge and information. Knowledge and information are magic. Gutenberg made it possible for the farmer, and the craftsman to go to a store and buy magic.

Now skip forward about five hundred years. Steve Jobs wants to build a personal computer. He takes ideas like the Graphical User Interface and the Mouse from PARC, and builds a pretty cheap machine – only a couple thousand bucks – that has moving icons and windows. Again, nothing in the Macintosh is fundamentally new, all copied or derived or improved upon. But Steve makes these computers for the middle class families, the farmers and the craftsmen of the twentieth century, and he makes them look like magic.

At first glance, Steve’s invention doesn’t look very magical – if you consider magic just knowledge and information. After all, there were plenty of computers out there in the seventies and eighties that contained knowledge and information. The problem was, these computers had text-based interfaces and obscure commands. Like scrolls in Latin and Greek, they could only be read by an elite, the geeks who had spent years learning about computers. Steve made it possible for a middle-class family to get to all that knowledge, to access the magic. The people who bought Macintoshes didn’t have to know Latin (or Assembly); they had to know how to press and hold buttons, and drag a mouse around. Boom. Magic.

These two examples are all about the power of execution. Executing on an idea is actually a pretty complicated thing. It requires great engineering and logistics, a solid understanding of marketing, and a good measure of luck. If I had to bring it all to a single word, though, “magic” would be it. Take existing ideas and turn them into something that feels like magic.

I wanted to conclude this post with more ideas about what magic actually looks like, but I feel like that’s a long enough discussion to merit an separate post. So, until next time, when I talk more about magical things and how to make them!

*material for this post collected from Wikipedia

PS I realize this post feels like it’s cribbed from Malcom Gladwell. A) That’s kind of the point and B) In my not so humble opinion, I believe I have a few ideas that differ from Mr. Gladwell’s about tipping points and making things popular (all parts of execution)… again, stay tuned till next post

PPS I originally tweeted that this post would be about Diaspora. Sorry. Well, here’s my cop-out: Diaspora is NOT magic. It’s awesome, and a great idea, but magical it is not.

For a while I find nothing to focus on
And I keep drowning without moving.

A point of light appears
It could be a planet, or an early star,
Or a satellite.
I watch it.
(The grass feels soft and warm on my skin)
It moves.
It looks like a glow worm
Crawling through a maze
With walls I cannot see,
Trying to make its way home.

Godspeed, brave glowworm:
The sky may be a dark and dangerous maze,
But you will light the way,
And the rest of us will follow.

However, I do not believe the situation is as clear-cut as (in Tim’s words) “videogames killed videogames.” There is nothing inherently wrong with creating digital objects, or digital spaces, not directly connected to the physical. These spaces allow us to construct narratives that, in turn, allow us to escape from other parts of our lives. Further, these narratives can be enjoyable in their own right, beyond escapism. Games like Farmville constrict these objects to ones that feed into behavioral mechanisms that get us to pay more and play more, but they also lower the barriers for participation, sharing, and building. It doesn’t take a hundred million dollars of special effects and 3D rendering to build a Farmville, to deploy it on Facebook and share it with your friends. We can build on the platforms these games are creating to build new social games that are more like stories and less like Skinner boxes.

The counterpoint to “we can do it too!” used to be – yeah, but it won’t be profitable. That counterpoint, however, is only relevant in a context where it’s only ever worth it to build something profitable. When costs are high and resources (skilled developers, server space) are limited, this context applies; as costs shrinks and resources become ever more bountiful, we enter a new context – one where it’s worth it build a story just to entertain your friends, or maybe your friends and a few other other people. The value proposition is the smiles and the excitement and the shining eyes that come with being in a fun story, not the currency (of whatever form) derived from a virtual space. I would argue that social games, wittingly or not, are taking us one step closer to that context of freedom. It’s not all a world where we’re sitting in our underpants in front of our computer looking at avatars sitting in their underpants in front of their computer. It’s also a world where we can hack up a game like this, or this, over a long vacation or a few weekends, send it to our friends, and play it together. I think that’s a good world.

With one episode left in the current season of Doctor Who, and such great episodes out as The Girl Who Waited and the God Complex, I wanted to reflect on one of my favorite themes in Stephen Moffat’s Doctor Who – the theme of growing up.

My first experience with growing up was Peter Pan (no, it wasn’t; it was Winnie The Pooh but I don’t want to tell that story now). I loved Peter Pan, and hated the ending. Peter comes back, but Wendy’s all grown up, and they can no longer understand each other. Their friendship has faded and broken. Only by abducting Wendy’s children can Peter find happiness again.

Stephen Moffat deals with a similar plot narrative. The Doctor is excitable, impulsive, dismissive of adults – all traits of Peter Pan. He takes Amy away to a wonderful world where she can travel through time and space and have many adventures. And, in the end, after going through death and cracks in space-time and the destruction of a whole universe together, they part. Amy grows up, and the Doctor leaves her. Presumably, in the future, the Doctor meets a new companion and the cycle repeats.

The current state of this plot thread, as depicted at the end of the God Complex, is no less bittersweet than Peter Pan’s. However, I think Moffat handles this resolution much better than James Barrie. The transition of Amy into adulthood is not painted as a bad thing, in contrast, it is a tough but ultimately rewarding journey, the scariest adventure of them all, in the Doctor’s own words. Amy’s feelings of adoration for and excitement about the Doctor slowly morph into her feelings for Rory, who turns out to be as dedicated, adventurous, and strong as a fictional hero – but also her nurse husband, her partner who shares with her in the good and the bad of life. Amy’s daughter does not continue the cycle of abduction, adventure, abandonement; she is infused with the TARDIS, which makes her more Time Lord (Time Lady?) than human being, and she has her own dark and passionate history with the Doctor, independent of the companion cycle.

In the end, the scene where the Doctor drops Amy and Rory off at their new townhouse (with Rory’s Favorite Car parked up front), is still deeply bittersweet, filled with a sense of loss and profound change. At the same time, however, I feel a sense of positive transformation whenever I watch it. I do not feel like emotional closure has been achieved between the Doctor and Amy, I think they still care for each other deeply. At the same time, however, I feel like they’ve both changed for the better, and that their bond will, likewise, change but not break, space and time be damned.

Let’s start off with a personal and biased definition – interactive fiction, for me, is fiction that integrates the fiction producer (writer, director, designer) and fiction consumer (reader, viewer, gamer) in a way that goes beyond the traditional model. By the traditional model I mean one where the fiction producer works tirelessly on his / her work, releases it to the world, and then fiction consumers passively consume said work.

To me, this model is boring: in it, the producers and the consumers are both silent and isolated. They never get to exchange ideas, or give feedback (except implicitly, through purchasing decisions). The little engines of conversation and creativity that fuel a lot of fiction never get started, because there is no space for readers and writers to talk to one another.

In contrast, interactive fiction provides just such a space. Fanfiction sites allow fans of books and movies to get together and expand upon their favorite works. Forum boards let readers speculate on what’s happening in the next book, or when the next game in a series is coming out and what changes it will bring to design and story. Role-playing games allow players to take up the mantle of their favorite characters and do things differently. Everything from writer panels at geeky conventions to viral marketing campaigns that give teasers for the next part in the story makes it a little easier for fiction consumers and fiction producers to talk to each other, to learn from each other and to affect each other – in other words, to interact.

I love interactive fiction. I love thinking about it and blogging my thoughts. I love doing it, such as when I write or run roleplaying games. My biggest geeky project right now involves designing a platform for that makes it easier for readers and writers to talk about books together. And since I am blessed to have great novelist friends like Max Gladstone, I’m constantly thinking about how to help them spread the word about their novels with the help of interactive fiction (I’d say more, but that project is Sooper Sekrit ).

So, yeah. I am an interactive fiction geek. I hope this post has explained a little what it is and why it’s so interesting. I also encourage you to get out there and write, read, game, post, comment – make your voice heard, as reader or writer or both – and help make fiction a more truly interactive medium!

I saw worlds destroyed
And worlds created
Through a crack in your walls,
A tiny crack.

I brought my blue box
(Bigger on the inside),
I said, do come along,
Won’t you come along?

Just another companion,
I thought, but in hindsight,
I see I was wrong,
So very wrong.

I watched you fight angels
And bring down tyrants.
I told you lies,
So many lies.

I watched you get married
I watched you inspire him,
And then he died,
And then you died.

It’s me and my spaceship
Now, desperately searching,
For you in time
In all of time.

And if I find you
Scared or hurting,
I’ll give you my smile
I’ll make it right.