They say writing is rewriting, and you nod and say, oh yeah sure, definitely, makes sense, and then one year you look up and realize that’s how you’ve spent two thirds of your actual butt-in-chair time this year revising and that’s how you’re likely to spend much of the rest of it. Which is an indicator of drafting success in previous years, naturally! But still. I love revision in that I’m good at it and it’s where a critical stage of magic happens—that painstaking last-mile work through which the creative fire that brought me to the page catches in the reader’s mind, the Penn-and-Teller point where the magic trick depends on the magician putting in a degree of effort that’s so absurdly out of proportion to the intended effect that the audience tumbles into a place of wonder. Necessary! But after spending much of this year listening to strange knocking sounds from various story engines, asking myself why the steering feels sluggish and if I want it to feel that way, and if I don’t, what can I do about it?, I’m looking forward to the different problems of the utterly blank page.

Is something going on with the word “demure”? It’s not a word I expect to encounter in the wild on my corners of the anglo internet—I find it vaguely charming and out-of-time, the vocabulary equivalent of a Regency bonnet—but I stumbled on a couple videos this week that used it, including one in which a young-ish guy at a comic con was encouraging peers to be respectful and “demure” while asking for pictures with cosplayers. An idiosyncratic usage—but people ‘catch’ words from others—so what’s the ‘vector’ there, how did it spread? I’m sure there are models for this sort of thing (hi, Vlad)—and this question seems like a much more interesting direction for the “render words as vectors in multidimensional language space” tech than “generate a lot of B- work emails, bad code, and halfhearted poems about avocados.”

Each word and phrase in a language is an alethiometer glyph, with layers of meaning and association and context. Whenever I’m running and someone says “On your left” as they pass me, I wonder, how much of a Captain America fan are they? Of course people said “on your left” before Captain America: Winter Soldier, that’s why Captain America says it in Captain America: Winter Soldier, but whenever I say it on a run now, I get this tiny little burst of pleasure at being like Captain America in Winter Soldier, and: I can’t be the only one who feels that way. (Though I am peculiarly susceptible to that sort of thing.) We could use the tools and techniques on which LLMs are based to explore connection and reference and depth and significance in language, to see how terms shape and reshape themselves, to meet the strange faces and odd corners of culture. I guess B- work emails are cool too.

I recently turned my baleful gaze from Slay the Spire to a new game called Tactical Breach Wizards which, so far, rules. It’s a grid-based tactics game about special forces black ops wizards—there’s a guy with a gandalf beard and wizard hat and a “tactical staff” that looks like a long gun built around a D&D wizard’s stick complete with sparkly gemstone at the top. The game has some Into the Breach DNA and some X-Com DNA but really it’s doing its own thing. One of your characters has limited foresight, which is the game’s way of explaining why it lets you play turns, see what happens, then (so long as you haven’t started your next turn) rewind and play the turn again without limit. This lets you try out new abilities, experiment with combos, set up complex moves, and generally test limits in a way more rigid games don’t. It keeps the game light and fun, which is key—I like this sort of tactical puzzle but it’s easy for my brain to slip into a gear that is very good at the puzzle and very bad at being-a-human. Not great if you’re turning to games to relax!

The gameplay is fun and the writing really sends it to the moon. I love the wizards in a modern world concept. (I mean of course I do.) A friend of a friend recommended Tactical Breach Wizards to me as “the most Max game I’ve ever played that wasn’t written by Max,” and I’ll allow it. The necromedic—who can heal people but only if they’re dead first—in particular feels like they walked out of a Craft book, but the whole vibe, with druid terrorists and traffic wizards and geopolitical tensions, the sorta-Shadowrun of it all, is extremely My Jam. And, at this early stage it’s hard to say why, but it feels as though there’s marrow in it. It’s fun and playful without being weightless. Not everything has to be fun and not everything has to be significant, but you can weigh your belly down with significance just like you can make yourself sick with cotton candy. It’s a rare and wonderful thing to find a project that works the tension.

Did I recommend Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End on here before? The Hero and the Crown was a foundation-stone book for me—I can’t think of a book I’ve read more other than maybe Lord of Light—but I gave her fairy-tale retellings a miss when I was a kid for whatever reason and I’ve had a joyful last several years slowly correcting that mistake. Though—as a kid I would have had a totally different response to this book than I did as a parent. I love Rosie’s story, but it’s Katrina’s that I felt right at my core: the sudden responsibility of care, its attendant miracles, losing and finding yourself, and the sudden gifts.

That’s all I’ve got this week, friends. Take care of yourselves. Happy reading.