Author Archives: catannebee

Tuesday Maintenance Report

I’ve seen statistics about how many people are playing each class in Season of Discovery, but no one tracking what I’m really curious about: is this is largest percentage of characters with gray hair… ever? I’m seeing a lot of old humans in the Eastern Kingdoms. It’s a vibe that fits returning players, I guess.

We ran Deadmines on Monday night for the first time in many years. Compared to more recent instance groups it was a longer, slower, cinematic experience, the sort that cemented my love for this game and has been completely impossible during twelve years of having young children waking unpredictably. I’m cautiously celebrating a return of my ability to concentrate on something for a couple of hours. Maybe it’s safe to start writing and painting again.

I took the boat over the check out the world pvp event in Ashenvale. I enjoy open-world things because I can nose around and figure out the mechanics without taking a spot away from someone more qualified. On my first few trips out, I saw no horde players at all.

Tuesday Maintenance Report

Eglantine the human priest is venturing into dangerous places to bury the dead. I won’t have as much time to play now that we are past the holidays, but I am looking forward to instances and battlegrounds.

I didn’t notice it as much when playing a gnome, but many objects in Azeroth are simply enormous in comparison to player avatars. The trees can be excused as an old growth fantasy forest, but scatter items like mugs are more baffling.

Trink1385 Engineering76 Mining61 Cooking85 Fishing2 First Aid
Eglantine1590 Skinning63 Tailoring96 Cooking85 Fishing

I’m listening to the Murderbot audiobooks as I clean this week and the irony is not lost on me that I’m repeating a series that has self-comfort through repetitive media consumption as a major theme, and spending my other leisure time repeating 2005 in World of Warcraft. Murderbot is one of those fictional characters like Ignatius J. Reilly: you either see yourself, or you don’t understand the appeal. I read the series as ebooks the first time around and Kevin R. Free’s performance makes them more enjoyable because he gives subtle but distinct voices to the secondary characters, who don’t get much description in a novella’s space limitations.

We also reconnected with an old friend who we met on our original RPPvP server and lost track of after he left Facebook, so… reliving 2005 has some unambiguous positives!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to resume my episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

Believe Children

In 1937, a small boy on Matsungan Island saw a plane crash into the ocean. He told adults, but no one believed him.

In 1995, a diver found a wrecked plane… exactly where the boy said he’d seen one go down.

I heard this story listening to an interview with Bill Snavely, who believes that he’s found the final resting place of Amelia Earhart. (Image of Earhart’s Electra, above, from Wikipedia.) Whether this is her plane or a different aircraft, we can be certain that the little boy was right: he saw a plane spouting flame fall into the waves, an unmistakable sight. And no one believed him for almost sixty years.

How many victims does a pedophile traumatize before he is caught? On average, it’s 360-380 children. (Source.) He’s bold because he’s gotten away with it before. He’s bold because no one believes children when they describe a fiery plane crash, and he knows it.

Please believe the children in your life.

Tuesday Maintenance Report

Our Christmas Carol begins “Hardcore was dead, to begin with.”

Skull Rock was very quiet and I kept hearing chatter that all the players left for the Season of Discovery servers. And I missed battlegrounds. I recognize that concentrated PvP with permadeath would be inherently ridiculous but I’d do it. It would be fascinating to see how player behavior changed and how some of these maps would play with everyone acting very cautious.

I also missed roleplay ruleset servers. I was surprised to find no overlap with hardcore servers because the entire hardcore challenge is basically roleplaying; it’s trying to fill in the gaps left to your imagination with realistic motivations and consequences.

Padmina20150 Herbalism140 Alchemy150 Cooking143 Fishing77 First Aid
Evania1275 Herbalism85 Tailoring39 Cooking57 Fishing2 First Aid
Elnora1275 Herbalism27 Enchanting63 Cooking88 Fishing18 First Aid
Skull Rock

I made a gnome warlock and a human priest on Chaos Bolt (NA), an RPPvP server.

Trink1385 Engineering76 Mining61 Cooking85 Fishing2 First Aid
Eglantine626 Cooking44 Fishing
Chaos Bolt

I would probably be better off if I’d learned a language or something instead of memorizing Elwynn Forest, but those neurons are having fun firing again.

This server is bustling, and since Season of Discovery eventually ends, it meets my goal of wanting an experience that’s finite. Both discovering and using runes is fun. There are now so many variations that World of Warcraft is more of a game system than a game, and I wonder if we’ll ever see Blizzard completely embrace that and let players officially create custom experiences for one another the way they have with Overwatch.

Tuesday Maintenance Report

We’ve been playing on the Hardcore Classic server Skull Rock for a bit over two weeks now.

Padmina18144 Herbalism137 Alchemy150 Cooking138 Fishing68 First Aid
Evania1275 Herbalism85 Tailoring39 Cooking57 Fishing2 First Aid
Elnora1275 Herbalism27 Enchanting63 Cooking88 Fishing18 First Aid
Current Progress.

I expected more death, so I made three mages and planned to level them evenly so that I could return to questing with My Paladin without having to detour and catch up. I forgot that My Paladin is really good at this and his favorite iterations of World of Warcraft have been the times when he could embrace the hybrid class and both protect and heal. So we’re the perfect team and one mage is pulling ahead of her sisters.

My closest call was with the Defias Pillagers when I was alone. I’d cleared the Gold Coast Quarry and was coming out carefully when I accepted a group invitation, and I learned the hard way that Hardcore servers have layering when I was pulled into a layer where the cave mouth was not clear and I was standing in the worst possible spot for it, pulling Defias from both sides and the one on patrol in the cave. I ran for it and (with the help of a swiftness potion) escaped with single digit health. I didn’t figure out what had happened until the next night when I logged out briefly to go afk… and logged back in still in party with My Paladin, but on a different layer. I’m not thrilled to find this mechanic on Classic servers. Its introduction made it more difficult to hold server events and locate friends who were online but not grouped with you.

Tales of Kids in Azeroth: some quiet questing is happening with the toddler between 4:30am and everyone else’s more normal wake-up times. From him I have learned that my mage is not conjuring water, but coffee. “Mama drink coffee.” It is in a giant pewter mug so that makes sense…

This week’s relevant meme: “I made food! I’m magical!”

Memento Mori

Computer games and the society around them have changed profoundly in the last twenty years. World of Warcraft was the first always-online game that I played and a personal landmark in slowly recognizing the dark consequences of the dawning always-online world. (It’s crazy to realize that children born after this game released are legal adults now; I hope they vote for faction leaders based on their ability to stand in the middle of the capital and fight raid groups, since that’s newly relevant to American politics.)

And at first, the positives of this massively-multiplayer world were enormous. I cannot overstate how exciting the social aspect was in the days before ubiquitous social media and unlimited texting. Real people are so interesting that it ruined single player games for me for a long time. And the game was basically a detailed tabletop roleplaying game system with a computer doing the bookkeeping, designed to encourage players to help one another. For example, many quest sequences return to the same area repeatedly for different targets. This is not designed to frustrate the solo player. It’s so you can find players to help you fight large groups even if they are on a different quest.

The beautiful design of the game started to erode almost immediately. Even before any game expansions, most of the player-crafted items and highly situational abilities… simply did not matter. Then the game design became manipulative, introducing mechanics like daily quests to create content that was endless but shallow. (I burned out at the Isle of Quel’Danas.) Datamining websites, YouTube, and Twitch made a lot of information available but changed the culture so that other players were less patient with exploration and trying to solve game mechanics by strategizing on the fly. Changes like layering and cross-server groups solved problems, but took away the greatest catalyst for community, a fixed set of people who repeatedly interacted with and needed one another.

The Classic ruleset removes years of changes, but it wasn’t enough to interest me on its own.

What makes this game one that I want to play again is permanent death.

Now it plays like the super-TTRPG it was meant to be. Every profession and every whimsical trick matters. I’m logging in to play the part of the game in front of me right now to the fullest. The fear of missing out on the current endgame and the endless greedy acquisition is removed because this character is going to die. Will it be deserved from hubris? Undeserved from an internet outage?

Part of the fun will be blogging about the journey.

Returning to Blogging

So, the past three years have been absolute whoppers.

I intended to spend them on what I was playfully calling my “self-study MBA” in writing fiction. Instead, I think it’s fair to award myself a Master’s in familial and societal trauma. The pandemic and its losses… being audited by the IRS twice… being told in pregnancy that my infant would not live, then that he had a heart defect that could be fixed, then the journey of womb to NICU to operating room… and finally, in 2023, physically recovering from a parathyroidectomy that gave me a physical neck scar to commemorate having my throat metaphorically slit by betrayal. A family member we trusted absolutely was sexually molesting our children. And, unfairly but not unusually, we are the ones who lost friends and family for exposing him.

Fiction was on hold.

Now I have washed up on the shore, scarred but alive. I have studied evil, deception, and addiction; lived grief and grace. I have found the missing gears to my story engine in darkness, not in how-to books.

I am writing again.

I want to keep this blog active to track my 2024 writing goals, but also expand it to cover my other interests. The Old Internet has been on my mind; it was healthier in many ways. This is my conscious rejection of the past ten years of advice from salesmen to make a narrowly-focused site. Welcome to my web log about everything that has my attention.

And, while thinking about whether anyone will read this, a message for my enemy:

Merlin, remember that you are imprisoned at the end of Le Morte d’Arthur. I’m certain of more than you think I know, and my suspicions form a pattern clear in hindsight (Pepé le Pew as your Steam avatar? Really?). All of your descendants are also my descendants, and your name will be remembered with disgust and revulsion. My mind is not clouded by any love for you, and I for one will not make myself sick trying to deny what you are. Repent. You have the detective’s phone number.

Author’s Notes: Bearing the Flame

What fantasy stories might you find inside a photocopied ‘zine handed to you on the streets of Constantinople by a like-minded time traveler? (Don’t forget to give him credit for making an additional trip to type it up on an electric typewriter, draw the cover with a Sharpie, and have it photocopied in the late twentieth century.)

I was trying to come up with story ideas from a medieval imagination, and the cliché magical ability of conjuring fire seems to have an obvious employer when setting things on fire is part of the daily routine at church. But imagining fire as a liturgical art requires facing the fact that some of us who like church and like art are not as good at it as we think we are. Fellow listeners of the Lord of Spirits podcast will recognize the idea of an idol as a trap, and fellow Orthodox will recognize a pale shadow of the early morning hours of Pascha.

Scratching at these ideas in a story that was intended to be fantasy, not theologically or historically accurate for our world, meant that this particular work fit one publication best: Mysterion, and I am beyond delighted that it was accepted there because I admire it so much. I would like to specifically thank the editors, Donald S. Crankshaw and Kristin Janz, for their suggestions on how to improve it.

It can be read early on the Enigmatic Mirror Press Patreon page, and I hope to meet you all in imaginary Constantinople.

Are short stories good preparation for writing a novel?

I see this question asked frequently on writing boards, and I’m at a place in my own writing to answer Yes.

I focused on short stories for a few years because I was trying to create my own self-paced MFA in fiction writing. The creative writing course that I tried in college did not move me toward my goal of commercial fiction. Dollars go a lot further when spent on how-to books, online seminars, and an occasional paid evaluation instead (I found the Writers of the Future contest valuable because I could enter for free and get detailed feedback about where I fell in their slush pile).

Short fiction is a great way to make sure that you have mastered basic skills, and that you can keep the bicycle upright and moving. It takes a complete narrative to apply storytelling lessons, and I have time to finish multiple short stories a year, but not multiple novels. I don’t think I would have absorbed information as quickly without practice. My stories from 2017 mostly fell over, and the friends kind enough to read them probably suffered. But in 2020 I completed five short stories, and by mid-2021 I have sold two of them at professional rates.

I think I’ve reached the point where it matters where the bicycle is going: whether the story concept is interesting to the reader is more important to the success of a work than my technical skills. That’s uniquely terrifying, because I can only feel motivated to complete a work if I’m excited, and I am a weirdo with a poor grasp of what normal people think about all day.

And I’m setting my writing routine aside for a few months because our youngest son has a congenital heart defect and requires open heart surgery this Fall. It’s been a chance to examine how I spent my writing time and to plan how I will spend it in 2022. When I come back it’s time to focus completely on the novel that’s about a quarter done, and send it out into the world somehow.

Of course, short stories differ from novels in more way than length. I don’t think they are required before writing a novel, but I do think they are the most efficient way to practice the entire process of fiction writing, including submission.

Author’s Notes: The Healer of Branford

The events of this story began with thoughts about how the process of rejoining a community can be painful, since even the smallest community involves some work on yourself, treating festering flaws. Cats came into the story because I believe they are the best domestic animals to be medicine for the soul. Other pets may suffer nobly and silently if you are too self-absorbed with your own pain, but a cat will intrusively recall you to your responsibilities. His campaign of harassment when the kibble is two minutes stale is not based on moral superiority. It’s that he is more self-absorbed, and the two of you are negotiating a relationship.

I have also always remembered reading in Katherine C. Grier’s book about the history of pet-keeping that large populations of unowned cats were once part of urban life the way that squirrels and Canadian geese torment us now. That would be wonderful and terrible, and I intend to give “needs more stray cats” as worldbuilding advice to other authors whenever possible.

Finally, I’m proud to announce that this story was a Finalist in the Writers of the Future contest for the Third Quarter of Volume 37. It makes me giddy to know that my story advanced far enough to be read by authors who I have been reading since middle school.