dungeons, dragons, and inspirational messages
Greetings from the height of summer!
I have two different kinds of autobiographical essay to tell you about this week. The first is The Gamemaster’s Guide to Short Story Plot, a writing advice column for the SFWA blog, which was ruthlessly line-edited to come as close to 1000 words as possible.
The core advice is:
Set up the problem like a gamemaster. Solve the problem like a player.
For people who have played a lot of role-playing games, this is the kind of writing-advice refrain that (I hope) you can memorize and apply in a tough spot (assuming you've got a spell slot open!) If you haven't, I suppose it's as gnomic as any other writing advice that isn't yet applicable?
I analyzed a fairy tale by Marie Brennan as part of the essay. Fortuitously, I also recently reviewed Labyrinth's Heart, the culmination of a collaboration between Brennan and her friend Alyc Helms (writing as M.A. Carrick) that began as a role-playing game and flowered into an intricately plotted trilogy.
In a completely different direction, I recently received my contributor's copy of Aspiring and Inspiring: Tenure and Leadership in Academic Mathematics:
I'm not on the front cover, but I am inside! As mathematicians do, I posted a preprint version of my essay on the arXiv when it was initially accepted. The essay does two things. It talks about my decision to walk away from a more traditional tenured position in mathematics to pursue a more unusual academic role (and the space that made to think about non-mathematical writing!) Because the volume's editors were looking for contributions from a diverse group, I also chose to write about the ways my non-standard approach to gender and sexuality intersected my career as a mathematician. I feel very strange being a role model in this manner--ideally being a queer leader ought to involve knowing what you're doing as a queer person--but one of the things I've learned in adulthood is that often the right person doesn't exist, so I made my best attempt at approximation.
Of course Gennoveus has no qualms about the correctness of his demands for attention.
Yours,
Ursula.