When I took this picture of buildings all jostling for space with each other on a Liverpool street I was going to just post it as a throw away picture post. However this was one of the views, with its variety of buildings from different eras, that inspired my render Accretion City. So I thought I might expand a little on the idea that pictures (especially 3D renders) need to be careful of avoiding mono culture scenery. I really like CityEngine (I think my reviews of CityEngine Indie and CityEngine Vue made that pretty obvious).

A lot of 3D scenes reveal their artificial nature because they use the same elements over and over again. I can’t remember which film it was but I do remember one of the 3D cartoons with insects films a few years ago where all the background insects looked the same. Every time I saw a group of ants in the background I knew I was watching a CG movie and it pulled me out of the story.  Vue users have become so used to EcoSystems they almost forget the power the variety gives in making scenes more believable through variation.

The sample scenes are great but they tend to create models of settlements that are very mono culture in nature. Even when they feature different types of area they tend to be of one era. CityEngines way of creating models of a city is great but they aren’t settlements that grow over time – and trying to making them do that is a task that would scare me and probably wouldn’t have huge benefits. So the trick will be to include a variety of building types to make it seem a model has grown over time. That will include creating models that fuse multiple styles so the old can be extended sometimes in a way that would have Prince Charles talking about carbuncles if these were real buildings.

Anyway somewhere along the lines before I’d finished writing what should have been a complete post I was struck by how I don’t just think this way for 3D stuff but also when I’m world building for stories or games. In fact I went as far as writing up a formalised way of doing that when I put together STEEPVM. Thats quite a formal method and I know that most of the time the ideas for a setting layer themselves by accretion until, hopefully, I have something believable.

Thankfully I don’t have to create some sort of procedural set of instructions for this to work. However I do have to be careful of the trap that lies in wait – a curate’s egg setting.

It is far too easy to be lured by lots of shinny, shinny ideas and to throw them all into a setting and be left with a mess. I hate to pick on one particular target but the RPG Waste World seemed to me to suffer baddly from this.  On the flip side I was really pleased when Nightfall Games posted on their new(ish) forums that they won’t be updating SLA’s technology because at the moment, for me, its achieved a level of accretion without tipping over into being a mess.

I was starting to write something about that when I remembered I’d written Leave out the (Steampunk) Kitchen Sink last year so I’ll not go back over that old ground again…

Then hours later I’m burning some calories on Wii Fit advanced step.  My scores are poor by my usual standard but I’m not really bothered – it’s about losing some excess weight not the score.  When – wham! – for the second time in the day inspiration hits.  I know who the main character is and why they’re a spam bot.  I know who the bad guys are.  I know what they want, how they’re trying to get it and why it makes the main character so important. I know the day after tomorrow setting that lets the story happen.  Slightly annoyingly I think the main character works better as a woman rather than a man.  While I’ve written a female lead before in Mrs H’s Knitting Circle I’m never sure if its such a good idea.

In about an hour I’ve written a one page outline for a big chunk of the story before the main action kicks off.  I’m thinking a couple of sessions with the snowflake method might push me to a point where I can write it.  So damn the inspirons – full speed ahead on this I think.

Finished reading Michael O’Byrne’s The Crime Writer’s Guide to Police Practice and Procedure on the way to work today.  There are plenty of books on writing crime fiction around including the Writer’ Digest Howdunit series.  What makes this book stand out in the photo lineup is its focus on British policing and that being published in 2009 it is extremely up to date.

The opening chapter covers the detail of a major murder investigation including the roles of the officers who would be involved, the crime scene and the use of the HOLMES computer system.  The second chapter covers the tools the police use such as stop and search, arrests, searches of premises and interviews.  The remaining chapters cover forensics, profiling, other serious crime, the use of force, technology, organised crime and relationships with other agencies.  A chapter of police miscellany covers discipline, suspension, senior officers, police culture, informants and representative organisations.  There are useful notes in many places on using the material for writers including warnings of the pitfalls of following too closely the real world in a narrative.

Michael O’Byrne served as a Police Officer in the Royal Hong Kong Police in the 1960s.  He then worked in Notting Hill, the West End, New Scotland Yard, Surrey and the Thames Valley before ending his police career as chief constable of Bedfordshire.  This really helps as we get a view of the police from an officers who has served in every rank and in both city and rural forces.  He is also someone who has written so he has an idea of the challenges facing a writer and what they need to know.

One problem writers can find trying to research the police is that the memoirs of real life police officers don’t include a lot of the information needed to write a story.  They can shine light on police culture or specific areas of duty.  They may talk about high-profile cases or dramatic incidents.     By their nature they tend to be focused on one kind of crime or duty. The Crime Writer’s Guide to Police Practice and Procedure isn’t a book of reminiscences and over repeated police canteen stories.  There are a few, carefully chosen ones to illustrate police culture but largely the book relies on providing information.

While it is very much a book about British policing in the 21st Century there is information that would be useful if you’re writing a story anytime back to the 1960s.

I would recommend The Crime Writer’s Guide to Police Practice and Procedure as a resource to anyone writing a police or crime story set in the UK.

The 19th Century Church of Saint Andrew on Rodney Street is known locally as the Scotch church. It was a Presbyterian church built to serve the Scottish community of Liverpool. The church was closed in 1975 and is in an extremely poor state. In the small graveyard is a rather unusual grave in the form of a Pyramid built for William Mackenzie.  The first mystery is about his surname which is sometimes spelt  MacKenzie and McKenzie depending on who is writing about him.  I’ve gone for the name in the title of the transcription of his diaries.

A much repeated myth has sprung up surrounding Mackenzie that claims he was a gambler who was buried sitting upright in the tomb holding a winning hand of cards to cheat the devil to whom he’d promised his soul for a winning hand in a game. This appears alongside many pictures of his unusual tomb. I can’t really claim the moral high ground as I’ve played with it in an unfinished story.  However I am really intrigued as to why he really had a pyramid-shaped tomb.  I’ve done some research (ok I’ve done a bit of Googling).

Born in 1794 Mackenzie was the eldest of eleven children born in Lancashire to Alexander Mackenzie a Scottish contractor and Mary née Roberts. Apprenticed as a weaver in 1811 he switched to become a pupil of a lock carpenter on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal then later the dry dock at Troon harbour, on Craigellachie Bridge and as an agent on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal.  Later he worked under Thomas Telford and then returning to contracting on railway and canal civil engineering in Britain.  His work included the rail tunnel between Edge Hill and Lime Street Station.

From 1840 an invitation to tender for the Paris to Rouen railway by Joseph Locke led to his association with Thomas Brassey. After that he worked on railway engineering in France, Spain, the Italian state, Belgium, England, Wales and Scotland.  His investments included ironworks in Wales and France, housing in Liverpool and estates in Scotland. He had offices in Paris and Liverpool.  He was married twice and had no children.  When he died in 1851 his £341,848 estate mostly went to his youngest brother.

So far the closest I’ve placed him to a pyramid is Rome which has its famous pyramid.  This doesn’t explain his pyramid tomb which is of a very specific style.  The Diary of William Mackenzie (Thomas Telford Publishing in 2000) is a full transcription of Mackenzie’s diaries.  So my next step is to borrow it from the Liverpool Library to see if it sheds any light on the mystery.

Why are fantasy ideas of settings based on the 19th century always so unoriginal? Steampunk blah blah blah goggles blah blah blah.

I didn’t have time for a long answer then (too busy watching Sherlock) but I think Brian has touched on a more fundamental question.  A question that is important for writers, world builders and setting designers.  Why are so many settings unoriginal? A good answer to that will also answer the question How do you avoid your setting being unoriginal? Or why are so many settings unoriginal?

There are quite a few possibilities.  One of the main ones being settings that are simply rip offs of someone else’s work with the serial numbers filed off.  There is a fine line between parodying a work, producing something in the same genre and simply ripping off the market leader in the hope of making some cash.  Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek and lots of things with Vampires in them rip offs I’m looking at you.  This isn’t the problem I’m interested in tonight.

The problem I’m interested in tonight is the And the Kitchen Sink setting.  There is a real art to knowing not just what to put into a setting but what to leave out.  There is a temptation when building a steampunk setting to include every trope that can be thrown in: flying ships, anachronistic machines, steam mechs, ninja, steam cars, zeppelins, difference engines, mad scientists, clockwork, magic, polished brass, psychic powers, corsets,  gears slapped on everything, monsters, steam powered potato peelers and inevitably goggles.  Of course this isn’t just a problem for steampunk; there are plenty of settings in other genres that have suffered the same fate.

I hate to pick out just one culprit when there are so many around but the game Waste World (Manticore 1997) sticks in my mind for trying to shoehorn as many science fiction ideas into one setting as was possible.

Its very easy with this approach to creating a setting to cram lots of cool stuff in without working out what its impact on the world really would be.  It can become a thick layer of makeup caked over the setting’s pretty face.

Personally I think a sounder approach is to build a setting up in small steps.  Heinlein’s Future History stories are a good example of this approach most add a few changes to the world with each step forward.  To pick four of the stories:

• The Roads Must Roll – Rolling Roads
• The Man Who Sold the Moon – Space Travel
• Delilah and the Space Rigger – Women in an all male environment
• The Long Watch – Moon based nuclear weapons

There are some that do add more.  If_This_Goes_On— has a post religious revolutions America, scram jets, social engineering and other stuff.  However it  was a novella so had more space to play with the ideas and there were three unwritten stories between it and its predecessor in the series The Menace from Earth.

My personal experience is that its easier to avoid adding stuff than it is to take it out.  Its also easier to take stuff out earlier in the development process than to do it later.  Avoiding adding something in also avoids wasting time on research and writing unnecessary material.

Plus if you’ve left something out and you wind up with a success on your hands you can follow Heinlein’s path and add each new thing in as you go along.

The short answer: Because it helps me think about my own writing.

The long answer:

I used to write what I’ll call proper reviews, they’d appear in Valkyrie and Ragnarok.  My review of 7th Sea produced at short notice got me the writing gig with Valkyrie so even though reviewing wasn’t what I’d set out to do I thought it was important to carry on and do the best job at it I could.  I’d think long and hard about them.  I’d spend hours carefully reading a product (and if possible playing it).  I’d consider the presentation, the content, the quality of the writing, the cost, its originality, production issues and a hundred and one other factors.  I’d try and give a balanced and fair assessment.

Then I had a run of what I will call issue reviews.  A publisher wasn’t happy with a review because I wasn’t their target market so I couldn’t apparently understand their product.  A book I reviewed that was ok but not exceptional and had a flaw won an award after sending high value goodie bags to the voting panel.  Having been asked to review a product for a magazine I’d not written for before I was told the review wouldn’t be used as they’d just signed a big advertising deal with the publisher and they didn’t think it was favorable enough.  Which was funny because I’d really worked hard to find good things in a product that I know retailers couldn’t sell.  It stank and it sat on game shop shelves.

So I stopped writing serious reviews.

I’ve been asked to occasionally for magazines and websites.  It might be good self promotion and get me some writing opportunities but I’m just not interested in running into the political side of  it again.

Now what I label as reviews here are more after action reports.  I try not to spend too long on them (although some still take a couple of hours to write).  I try to keep them personal – they are after all just my personal opinion.  I use the review label as a convenient way of lumping them all together to make them easier to find.  Maybe someone will be saved from wasting a turkey or will enjoy my insight.  I hope so because they do get a reasonable number of visits and visitors seem to spend time reading them.

Still that doesn’t explain why I write them.  I don’t see them as a great self promotion tool.  I write them to help me think about my own writing and game design.  By thinking about a Doctor Who episode or a film sometimes I see how to improve my own work.  I wrote about Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire and I knew where the script I’d written had gone wrong (using silly names and anachronism).  I’ve still not worked out what to put in their place but I think the script is tighter and funnier now without them (although one character is still called Snot because it just fits).

Sometimes the best thing happens.  I’ll get a good idea.  Not a simple rip off of someone else’s concept but a genuine tangential idea.  That moment when you’re watching something and you think you know what’s going to happen and then something else happens.  Sometimes those original ideas can take on a life of their own.  For example recently I had watched a Doctor Who episode and was writing up my thoughts.  That’s when I had a Good Idea^TM.   I’ve had a bad guy (originally a Darklord for a Ravenloft domain) floating around for a long time that I could never find a way to spin a story around and while I’ve been writing that review I now know how to make them work.  The only problem I have is they’d be fun for a Ravenloft adventure but they also fit in with a Dirk Dangerous story I’d got floating around.  I don’t suppose I can get away with using the same idea twice

When I posted a list of 13 of them as a Thursday Thirteen it was great technique that saved me no end of time and felt less like hard work than using books of names, random generators or other methods.

Now I have a problem. Where I used to have 1200+ spam messages to pick from I’m down to about 400 and the names have become really poor. With only a fraction being names and not just random gobledygook. The same is true of the constant stream of comment spam to my blog: of nearly a thousand spam messages caught by Akismet not one has had a believable or amusing name. Its almost like its become harder to spam so spammers have become a bit bored and are struggling to get up in the morning to put the effort into their job anymore.

Its a shame because at least in the good old, bad old days of spam they seemed to take some pride in having believable names to try and trick you.