love and monsters
Gentle readers,
Today I released a game!
"Monster in the Wilderness" is a one-player role-playing game. It took me a while to understand what one-player games are for, especially if you're already a writer--couldn't you just write a story? The answer (as it was explained to me) is that the fun of a journaling game is not in creating polished prose, but in unexpected juxtaposition. Game mechanics push you to combine ideas in new ways. The reward is not polished prose, but the feeling of discovery.
I'm really proud of the game mechanic in "Monster," which uses a house of cards and its inevitable collapse. (I wrote a variant using random generators, for people who don't have a spare deck of cards, or like to keep things tidy.) In terms of feelings, the inspiration was my childhood antipathy to stories like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" or The Cat in the Hat. I hated the idea that some supposed hero could show up and destroy your entire home. I couldn't believe that this was funny. My playtesters told stories of a hairy monster hissing over its nest and a swamp creature who had forgotten its heart. It's fascinating to me to see how different people balance sympathy between the hero and the monster.
Speaking of unexpected juxtapositions, I recently reviewed Kelly Link's forthcoming novel Book of Love. Link has a child with my name, and one of the protagonists of Book of Love has my sister's name; the book is about an intense sibling relationship and is scheduled to be released on my birthday. This was so much stacked synchronicity that I had to take the beginning of the book very slowly. (Fortunately for my sense of coincidence, neither my sister nor I has ever been in a band.)
If you want the capsule summary of Book of Love, it's like an adult version of a Diana Wynne Jones novel, both in the fascination of its layers and the need to pause three-quarters of the way through to explain an elaborate plot that took place before the book ever started. I thought it was glorious.
As a final juxtaposition, here are two cats who are much more willing to snuggle now that the weather has turned cold:
Yours, Ursula.