I live in the Boston area. I've been here for going on a decade at this point, but I still think of myself as a Midwestern transplant.

Bostonians like to refer to our fair city as the "Hub of the Universe," which is a slight misquote of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The actual line from The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is: "Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crow-bar."

I have never been 100-percent sure how to take that sentiment, but since I am neither a Boston man by birth nor possessed of such a mystical crowbar, maybe that's to be expected?



Well, I have a "job" working for a video game development studio. I call it a "job" because I show up at the office each day, and I do job-like things for the next nine or ten hours -- I bang on my keyboard, I drink lots of coffee, I nod my head in meetings (I don't mean to be immodest, but I am a very good head-nodder -- I'd say it's one of my real strengths), I refill the coffee pot if it's empty, I insert myself into other people's conversations and laugh at their jokes, and I make a lot of scatter plots (again, not trying to brag, but I make a mean scatter plot).

Sometimes, people will come into my office and ask me questions. And I will say: "Hmm, that is a good question. I'll have to run some numbers on that." And then I hide under my desk until they go away.

Somehow, every 12 months or so, a videogame pops out!

Now, I can't prove that said game's development hinged on my scatter plots and/or coffee making, but I feel like that's a pretty fair assumption.



Well, when I was finally mustering up the courage to join the site, I asked myself: "What's a nice, funny, non-threatening name that won't make people want to run me out of town on a rail?" And I landed on OrcishLibrarian because, hey, everyone loves Phil Foglio art, right?

I may have been mistaken in that assumption.

But, hey, I'm still here! Apparently rails are a lot harder to run people out of town on than the saying would imply!

Okay, serious answer (we'll see how long that lasts...): I always liked the art on Orcish Librarian, and, for a story-telling community, it seemed strangely fitting.

Plus, I am old enough to remember when the very first Sligh deck was dubbed an "Orcish Librarian deck" by tournament reports which didn't have any other way to describe this absolute pile of crummy red cards that was somehow cutting through a field full of Necro-decks like a hot knife through butter. And since that deck remains one of my favorites of all time, I've always had a soft spot for the little red book-eater ever since.



I started playing back during Revised. My best friend and I were at the mall, and we were supposed to go to the arcade. But he started telling me about this card game he had discovered, and he convinced me to blow our arcade money on Magic cards instead. So we went into the Electronics Boutique (which was still a thing back then!) and I bought two starter decks.

As I was getting ready to crack open my decks, my friend told me that the card he most desperately wanted to get was a Royal Assassin, because it could kill any other creature. He had been trying and trying to open one or trade for one, but hadn't had any luck.

"Is this the card you mean?" says I, as I casually slide a Royal Assassin out of my first starter deck.

I think he wanted to kill me.

Then I opened a second one in the second starter deck.

I think he really wanted to kill me, then.

So I traded him one, and then we both had Royal Assassins. And I've been hooked more or less since then.



I came to the M:EM pretty late in the day. I stumbled across it on the old WotC forums about a year back. I honestly can't remember what I was initially looking for on the site, but I somehow stumbled across the M:EM section, and I just instantly thought that this sounded like just about the coolest thing.

And the timing was just providentially fortuitous, because I had been looking -- for years, really -- for something that I could use to motivate myself to start writing again. For most of my life, I have been very excited about the *idea* of writing, but I have been miserably bad at the *act* of writing. I tend to be very, very self-critical of my own work, and, without some larger goal that I could yoke myself to, it was just very difficult for me to summon the mental stamina to actually write. For example, I was able to do it in college, when I had to do it for a creative writing class. But, once I graduated, I really stopped writing, and other than a few abortive attempts at writing a crime novel (don't ask) and a collection of short stories about life in a Great Lakes lumber town (*please* don't ask), I didn't pick up the pen again for years.

But the M:EM just looked like so much fun, I wanted to be a part of it. And the idea of having a story in the Archive gave me a concrete goal which I could shoot for. So I made myself a deal: I would take a month, and I would try to write some stories. And, if people enjoyed them, then hopefully that would get me to write more. If not, I could disappear back into the mists of the Interwebs, and no one would ever have to be the wiser.

And you all have been such a delight that, once I showed up, I never wanted to leave.



Well, I once wrote a 75,000-word doorstop of a graduate thesis, so I apologize to the rest of the world for all that deforestation which I caused. My bad.

I spent many, many years writing for student newspapers, and I also wrote some articles for The Magic Dojo and FanFiction.net way, way back in the day. But the less said about those, the better.

Nowadays, I write a mean performance review. If they gave out Pulitzer Prizes for performance reviews, I don't think I would win. But I wouldn't get laughed off of the stage, either.

I mean, take a look at this: "[WORKER] really took a big step forward this year by improving his Python skills. He completed a Python training course outside of office hours, and was able to apply that knowledge in a job context by updating our build-pushing and build-archiving scripts. This sort of independent, proactive professional development is emblematic of [WORKER]'s commitment to personal growth, and will help him to play an expanded, multidisciplinary role on future project teams."

Poetry, right?

[quote="OrcishLibrarian"]Alright, time for the exciting (?) conclusion -- OrcishLibrarian 2: Electric Boogaloo!


Well, this was a different sort of writing. But, when I was growing up, I remember that it seemed like the characters in the books and TV shows who I thought were cool always seemed to be the editors of their school newspapers. (This shows what a warped concept of "cool" I had as a young kid.) So my goal growing up was always to write for a newspaper. I started working on the newspaper in middle school, and I'd say that was when I started writing.

Pretty much all the way through high school, I thought I wanted to pursue journalism as a profession. And -- as crazy as this sounds -- it wasn't until I spent a summer working on newswriting and realized that I was actually frightened half to death of interviewing people that I realized that print journalism was maybe not going to be a viable career option for me.

With that being said, I think that trying to learn newswriting was incredibly valuable for me. It teaches you very hard lessons about trying to be clear and concise, and trying to choose your words thoughtfully, and those are lessons which I am still trying (and failing, for that matter, but trying nonetheless) to apply today.

I studied creative writing just a teensy bit in college, and I only really picked the habit back up when I started posting here on NGA.



Oh, wow. I am pretty oppressively boring most of the time.

I go to work. I enjoy playing paper Magic, although I don't get the chance as often as I would like. I enjoy reading and watching TV. British mysteries and cartoons in the Futurama/Archer/Simpsons vein are perennial favorites. I like to listen to my Bob Dylan albums as much as Mrs. OL can tolerate. I like to play music games and strategy games and Western RPGs.

My coworkers and I have a pub trivia team, and we compete most weeks. The bar we go to has cash prizes for first place but also gives out free shots to the team which finishes dead last, so, based on where we stand at the midway point of each contest, we make a strategic decision as to whether we are trying to win or we're playing for the shots. (Which, come to think of it, are probably worth more than the cash prize. We ought to play to lose each week.)

I get to spend my days with Mrs. OL, which makes me insanely lucky.

And, of course, I get to hang out on NGA with all you lovely people!



That's a tough question just because I have so many, and they change over time.

If I had to just name a couple long-time favorites, I would probably pick Mike Royko and Elmore Leonard.

Royko was a legendary Chicago newspaper reporter and columnist, and one of the liveliest writers I have ever read. He wrote weekly columns for about four decades, and it seemed like he never wrote a bad one. His prose was concise, and razor-sharp, but it was so vivid. And his range was amazing. He could be hilariously funny one week about the correct way to make a Chicago-style hot dog, and the next week he would write a denunciation of some social injustice which would just rip your heart right out. He was the first person I ever remember reading and thinking, specifically in terms of prose style: God, how amazing would it be to be able to write like that? I've been trying for years and years, and I have never come close.

I came to Elmore Leonard a little later in life, but his work had the same effect on me. I will always remember reading Get Shorty and just being blown away by how the characters spoke to each other in that book. The dialog felt so crisp, and so real, that it almost seemed like Leonard hadn't "written" it at all. You got the sense that these characters were real people, and that somehow, Leonard was just following them around, listening to them talk, and watching what they did, and that all he had to do was write it down. I always think that the first chapter in that book, where Chili Palmer's coat gets stolen, is a master class in characterization and dialog. You leave that chapter feeling like you know Chili Palmer. And Leonard made it look so seductively easy. You read one of his books and think, "I could do that. How hard could it be."

Well, really, really, really hard, it turns out.

There are many, many writers who I admire where my reaction to their work is to kind of think: "It doesn't seem like a human being wrote this. It feels like it was crafted by the muses." (Dylan Thomas and Flannery O'Connor spring to mind.) I love that kind of work, but it feels like there is a barrier between it and myself which I can't ever overcome. Conversely, people like Royko and Leonard also use language in beautiful ways. But their language is seductively relatable. It seems similar enough to the way that we speak and think in everyday life, that I can trick myself into thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could write something like that.

I can't. But I'm still trying.



This one's easy -- Mrs. OL. She is both my biggest cheerleader and my best critic.

But I'm really, really grateful to everyone who reads my work. Honestly, I'm usually a nervous, emotional wreck when I'm writing. One of the reasons I find the wherewithal to stick with it is the enjoyment I get from seeing other people interact with something I've written.



I almost don't want to dignify it by calling it a process.

I'd say that, four times out of five, my stories start with a single image, or a stray bit of dialog. I just see a picture of a character in my mind, or I hear them say something, and something about that mental image or overheard piece of speech just captures me. And then the challenge becomes, can I figure out what the story is which those words were plucked out of? I seldom see the beginning of a story first, or the end. I usually get a little snippet out of the middle, and I have to kind of work out in both directions from there.

For example, "Red Eyes" just started with a line of dialog from Jackie floating through my head. I just had a mental image of her blindfolded and tied to a chair, and I heard her say: "I make so much money off of you, we're practically partners." I had no idea what was going on, or who she was talking to, but that moment was so interesting to me that I felt like I needed to find out just how she got into that situation. And the whole story eventually expanded out from there. Similarly, for "Foxtrot," I just had this vivid mental image of young Jackie slumped on the floor in a bathroom, blind drunk, and threatening to shoot the first person who came through the door. And, again, the rest of the story came to be as I tried to figure out what on Earth Jackie was doing in that bathroom.

Anyway, I tend to hear little bits of dialog in my head, and I try to write them down on notecards before I forget them. It's hilariously old-fashioned, but I have a drawer full of these notecards. And, usually, a story idea will have to percolate in my head for some time -- could be days, could be weeks, could be months -- until I get this kind of go-ahead from the characters, telling me that they understand what the story is, and what they're going to do in it. Once the characters start talking to me like that, I tend to write in short bursts. I'll usually get a first draft done in a day or two, depending on how long the story is. The longer pieces do take a little more time, especially since I can't type. I may be the last person under the age of 40 still hunting and pecking with two fingers, and it is slow going at times. I try to write fast as I can once I start, though, because I have this terrible feeling like the story is "ready" inside my head, but that it may not stay there for long, and so I have to just get it down onto paper before it can get away. And I usually feel this kind of nervous excitement, like my goal is to just write down what the characters are telling me to write, and the trick is: Can I do that without screwing it up in the process? Sometimes I do screw it up. But sometimes I don't, mercifully.

Then it's a question of editing and revision. I read and re-read my drafts, especially out loud, and I'm just looking for things which are unclear, or which don't ring true to the characters. Some stories undergo very little revision. ("Love and Theft," for example, just seemed to arrive miraculously fully-formed the first time I wrote it. I don't think I added or removed more than a dozen lines from that piece.) Others change so much during revision that the first and final drafts are basically unrecognizable. ("Reclamation," for example, got seriously overhauled several times.)

Then I just publish and pray. I'm never really sure how people will react to what I do. Sometimes, I have a sneaking suspicion that something might be good. But, most of the time, I'm just a bundle of nerves. I'm almost always convinced that the thing I just wrote is lousy, and why can't I do something as good as that last thing I did? (Of course, I'll think the exact same thing next time, which shows how irrational I can be about all this.)



Tell the story you want to tell. Don't worry about what other people want to hear. If they like your story, that's great. That's a bonus. But make sure you're telling the story you want to tell. If your story doesn't make you happy, then what's the point?

(I know that I am a massive hypocrite for saying this, given how much of a wreck I can be when I'm writing. But, contrary to modern belief, hypocrisy is not the greatest of sins. So, if people can do as I say, and not as I do, I suspect they'll be happier for it.)

Beyond that, never underestimate the value of feedback. Listen to what other people have to say. If they have good ideas, take them! If you don't agree, that's fine, too. Stick to your guns. It's your story. But think about why you prefer your version. A lot of times, I'll learn important things about a story in that way. Someone will suggest cutting a line, for example. I'll make the cut, and I'll find that I miss the line. So then I ask myself: Why? Why do I miss that line? And, sometimes, I discover that line is serving a purpose in the story which I wasn't even aware of. And maybe I can change it, or add to it, to make it better. It's amazing, the things I only discover after the fact, because someone else gets me thinking about them.


I do talk about Mrs. OL a lot, which she keeps telling me does not embarrass her, and I keep believing her, which just goes to show what a dope I am.

Way back when I first started posting, we discussed whether it would be funny if she created an account of her own, but she decided that she enjoys being a Mrs. Columbo figure around these parts -- often spoken of, but never seen.

I have still not given up on doing a Mrs. OL collaboration. Especially now that microfics are becoming popular, I'm hoping I can sucker her into working on one with me.

Anyway, to actually answer your question (quelle idée!), she hears essentially all of my stories before I post them. (I'm sure there has been an exception somewhere along the way, but I confess that I can't think of what it would be.) Usually, what I'll do is I'll read what I think is the final draft aloud to her, which is helpful to me in a couple of different ways. First of all, I always catch mistakes reading aloud that I miss when I'm just editing on paper. Second, I always get a better sense for the cadence and flow of the dialog when I'm reading aloud, and this is my chance to see how well the dialog sounds. Third, Mrs. OL claims to enjoy this process. Fourth, she has a knack for putting her finger on the weak point in a story.

I'll always remember that, when I was reading either the third or fourth Beryl story (again, I wish my memory was better), I got to the part where I was describing Beryl's physical appearance, and Mrs. OL cleared her throat a little bit.

"Yes?" says I.

"It's not that this is bad or anything," says she, "but, you know, you don't have to describe Beryl in every single story you write."

That surprised me a little. "But what if people haven't read the other stories? They won't know what she looks like."

To which Mrs. OL replies: "Sure. But, if they haven't read the other stories, then not knowing exactly how Beryl looks is going to be the least of their problems."

Which, I had to admit, was totally true, and is why I no longer try to wedge a three-paragraph physical description of Beryl into each story I write.

And, finally, she always performs the critical task of reassuring me that the thing I just read her is *not* the worst thing I have ever written. Which is something I basically always need to hear before I can get up the nerve to post a story.

(God help me when I actually do read her the worst thing I've ever written. That will be a tough day.)



Jackie's arrival in my life was just one of those serendipitous events. I'm sure I've used this phrase elsewhere in this context, but stumbling across Jackie just felt like catching lightning in a bottle. Who knows how many times that will happen, so I have just tried to be as thankful as I can be for the fact that I got very, very lucky.

Back in late January/early February, I was really feeling like I was at a creative low point. I had written a bunch of Beryl stories in pretty quick succession, and I realized that I needed to give Beryl some time and space to breathe before I could come back to her again. So I was desperate for something else to write about, and I was getting nowhere. And, as that went on, I was starting to hear this awful little voice in the back of my head saying: "You're out of ideas. Beryl was a fluke. You don't have anything else." And that voice was starting to sound awfully convincing.

Then, a series of events just happened to collide with each other.

Now, it all starts with a song: "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts," by Bob Dylan. Which is a fairly deep cut as Dylan songs go -- I would assume that people who haven't wasted way too much of their lives thinking about Bob Dylan (*sheepishly raises own hand*) won't be familiar with it. But it has always been one of my favorite songs, in large part because I just love how each verse ends with the same phrase -- "the Jack of Hearts," who is the protagonist (if you will) of the story in the song -- and yet that phrase takes on different meanings over the course of the song. Sometimes it refers to the character, whereas at other times it refers to a the playing card, and in some cases it can be read either way.

Lyrics below, if you're interested:



I think it was at this time that Barinellos and I were discussing playing cards in the context of Alessa, and so I re-read "All In" by RuwinReborn so that I could make a note of the suits and ranks of the playing cards in that story. So I had playing cards on the brain. And I had also recently read "Showdown" by RavenoftheBlack, which was a retelling (if you will) of a Beatles song, so I had retelling songs on the brain. And both of those stories were set on Jakkard, so I had Jakkard on the brain, too.

And, at some point, while all those things were rattling around inside my brain, "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" popped-up on my music player. And, after the dust settled, I had the idea to try to retell the story from that song on Jakkard.

Now, this idea made me really nervous, for a couple of reasons. First off, I had never tried to adapt an existing story before, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to retain the things that made the story interesting while still making it distinct and different. I was worried that I would end up either with a carbon copy or a pale imitation of the original. Second, I had never written anything even vaguely Western-y before. And, third, I didn't actually know that much about Jakkard.

But the idea seemed strangely compelling, so I decided to take a shot at it. And I made four important decisions right off the bat, two-and-a-half of which would turn out to be dead wrong.

First, I decided to flip the genders of the four main characters in the story. I did this mainly because I felt like, as much as I love the original version, the characters in it -- the suave outlaw, the crooked tycoon, his trophy wife, and the hooker with a heart of gold -- have been written about so many times already that I didn't really have anything new to say about them. Swapping their genders gave me a slightly different angle to attack from, and that was critical for making me feel like I wasn't just retelling the same story which people had heard a dozen times before. So Big Jim became Diamond Jane (horrible inside joke rationale: the character of Big Jim may have been roughly based on Diamond Jim Brady, and the song claims that Jim "owned the town's only diamond mine" -- which, again, could be both literal and/or a reference to cheating at cards), Lily became Trotter (just because I loved having a fox named "Trotter"), and Rosemary became Saxifrage (which, unlike Rosemary, isn't even an herb -- it's just a decorative plant).

As for the main character, I decided that the Jack of Hearts would become Jacqueline DeCoeur (because French is the only other language I know even a tiny bit of), that she would be half-human/half-angel, and that she would have a tattoo of a heart next to her eye, which she would cover up with dark sunglasses.

Well, that didn't last long.

The first thing to change was the name, which got almost immediately shortened to Jackie, for the embarrassing reason that I kept misspelling Jacqueline. (Revealing that Jacqueline was Jackie's full name in "Rest for the Wicked" was an awful little inside joke at my own expense.)

The next thing to change was Jackie's history. I initially wanted to go with half-angel, because I liked the idea of a renegade angel taking vengeance out in the Waste. Trouble was, when I actually tried to write Jackie, I realized that was totally wrong. It wasn't the character she wanted to be, it wasn't speaking to me. On top of which, Barinellos already had a half-angel character who was much better,, and I wasn't even sure if half-angels were possible on Jakkard.

And the tattoo just seemed kind of dopey, too. It was just hammering home the "heart" theme way too much.

Then, the funniest thing happened. It was almost like it wasn't even a decision I made, so much as something I just discovered.

In my mind's eye, I saw Jackie take off her sunglasses for the first time. And, when she did, I saw that her eyes were red. "The color of fresh blood," as Trotter always puts it.

And it was like all the pieces just fell into place.

She wasn't a half-angel. She was a half-demon. Which it suddenly seemed like she had wanted to be all along. And she wore the dark glasses to hide those tell-tale eyes of hers.

And, suddenly, the whole story just came pouring out. I already had the main plot beats and characters, thanks to the song. I just had to watch them hit their marks. And I couldn't believe how well they performed. Maybe more than with any other story I've ever written, I just had a sense as I was working on that one that it could turn out to be something special.

Now, I still had trepidations when I posted "Love and Theft." Would people want to read a song story? Would they want to read a story that had basically no magic in it? Would they feel like it was clichéd, like they'd heard it before? Would people think there was something wrong about the love story between Jackie and Trotter?

And, through another quirk of timing, that story just landed on the boards during a kind of slow period around the M:EM. I think it sat there for three weeks or more without anyone having read it. And I got more and more terrified that I had been totally wrong, that the story was a flop, and that people wouldn't connect with it.

Then I had to travel for business, and I didn't have internet access for about a day or so. And, when I logged back in, suddenly there were all these comments on the story, and people really seemed to have liked it. And that was, maybe, one of the happiest moments I've had in my creative life. It just felt so, so good to feel like people were getting even a fraction of the happiness from these characters that I was.

Like I said before, I just feel so lucky that I ended up where I did.

Stephen King talks about stories as found objects, and about writing them as a kind of excavation -- you just dig out these stories which already existed before you came along to tell them. I don't usually agree with that mindset. But, in this one, particular case, I do. I almost don't feel like I created Jackie. I feel like she was always there, and I just happened to stumble across her as she was making her way into Diamond Jane's cabaret, and she was gracious enough to let me tag along for the ride.

At the time, I didn't have any plans to write about Jackie again. But she just took up residence in my mind. And, in my quiet moments, I would see her red eyes staring at me from the corner of my mind's eye. And I would look over, and I'd see her there, grinning her gold-toothed grin, and giving me a look that said: "Want to go cause some trouble?"

And that was that. As Trotter would have put it, I never had a chance.


That's an unexpectedly tough question to answer.

My thought process tends to be very scattershot, very associational. So I think I'm constantly grabbing things from a whole variety of different places -- books, games, movies, songs, the whole shooting match -- and putting them to use for my own purposes. Sometimes it's deliberate -- for example, Trotter has a line in "Stare Down the Basilisk" where he says to Jackie, "you can't be any poorer than dead," which is me blatantly lifting a turn of phrase associated with Flannery O'Connor because I just like it so darn much.

But a lot of time I think it's also happening at the subconscious level. Going back to "Stare Down the Basilisk" again, I had this moment of real shock maybe a week or so after I wrote that story when I realized how closely Jackie's dilemma about how to rob Brax's compound mirrored the problem of how to rob Fort Knox in Goldfinger -- all the way down to the incapacitation of the guards and the use of a stolen train. Now, here's the thing: I love Goldfinger. I've read the novel at least a half dozen times, and I don't even want to think about how many times I've seen the movie. So Goldfinger is just present in my brain at some basic level, and so it isn't surprising that I wound up creating something similar to it. But I never had any conscious intent to do so. It wasn't something I planned. It just happened. The parallels are so obvious that, once I saw them after the fact, I couldn't not see them. But, had you asked me in the moment whether or not Jackie's caper was inspired by anything else, I'd bet my bottom dollar that I would have told you no.

So, a lot of times, this stuff just creeps in. It's a very strange sort of inspiration by osmosis, I guess.

I would say that I try not to imitate other writers or the like when it comes to style, for the simple reason that I can't really pull off any style other than my own. (Don't ask me what my style would be, because I doubt I could articulate it in any meaningful sense. It's just the way I tend to write, with all the good and bad baggage that comes with it.) I can *try* to write like George Higgins, or I can *try* to write like George Orwell, or I can *try* to write like George R. R. Martin. I mean, for that matter, I can *try* to imitate the other writers in the M:EM. But it doesn't work. At the end of the day, I can't pull it off. I just end up writing like me. So I try not to do it. After all, no one wants to read my bad imitation of a George Higgins story, or a George R. R. Martin story, or a RuwinReborn story, or a Barinellos story -- et cetera, et cetera. They can just read the real thing! And it will be better! So, except for a rare exception or two, I try to avoid looking to a specific author's style for inspiration.

But I think there are definitely a few stories which just occupy a central enough place in my brain that I find myself going back to them again and again for thoughts about themes and characters and tone. I think one concrete example would be "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. Growing up, that was one of my very favorite stories, and I still love it to this day. I'm actually not a big fan of Dickens generally, but that one particular story really sticks with me. I think there's just something about Scrooge's (reluctant!) journey towards redemption which connects with me at a very basic, very elemental level. And I often find myself being drawn back to that story in one way or another when I'm trying to think about pieces I'm working on.

For example, Fisco Vane reminds me of Scrooge in a lot of ways. (Which, I want to be clear, I don't mean as a direct comparison. Apologies to Ruwin if he feels like I'm mistreating his character here.) But not in the most obvious ways, even. For example, they both like money, sure. But, honestly, when I was trying to understand Fisco a little better so that I could try to write for him and do the character justice, the thing which floated into my head was a comment that George C. Scott made in an interview. Scott played Scrooge in my all-time favorite film version, and he was asked once about how he tried to approach that role. And the thing he said was: Most of the time, when people think about Scrooge, they focus on the fact that he's cheap. But Scott said that he thought that the real key to Scrooge wasn't that he was cheap, but that he was lonely. And I kind of found myself thinking about Fisco in that way: I think that Fisco, as much as he would probably deny it, is lonely. He misses the basic experience of human fellowship. And, to the extent that he is unhappy, I think that's one of the big reasons why. So "A Christmas Carol" provided a lens which I used to try to understand Fisco better.

I also come back to that story in simpler ways. There is a line in "A Christmas Carol" when young Scrooge's fiancée is leaving him, because she believes he no longer cares about her. She says to him: "May you be happy in the life you have chosen." And, in the scene in "The Lies We Tell" where Beryl is essentially trying to cut ties with Astria, I found myself really thinking about that moment in "A Christmas Carol," and I wound up giving Beryl a very, very similar line. (I changed it just a little bit so that it sounded more like Beryl -- the original version is just a little too formal for her typical pattern of speech. But, for all intents and purposes, it's the same line.) Again, I didn't do it because I was trying to draw a correct comparison between those two stories, or even those two scenes. I just did it because, tonally, that line felt so correct to me, so right for the moment, that, once it had come into my head, I just couldn't imagine Beryl saying anything else.

So there are stories (and songs, and games, etc.) like that which I find myself drawn to again and again for reference. I'm having a surprisingly difficult time listing them, now that I'm consciously trying to do it. But they definitely exist.


That's another good one.

Trying to write for characters that I didn't create is always an interesting challenge, and it's something which I take very seriously. My own characters feel very, very important to me, and so I try to keep in mind that other people can have the same level of attachment to their own characters. As such, I don't want to try to write anybody else's characters unless I feel like I have a good enough handle on them that I can do those characters justice.

When I feel like I'm doing a good job writing, the experience always feels like I'm listening to the characters speak. I can hear what they're saying to each other, and, occasionally, I can hear them saying things to me, as well. And that's always the tricky thing, to feel like I understand someone else's character well enough that I can hear them actually speaking, and to feel confident that the words I'm hearing are really that character's words, and not just words I'm forcing into that character's mouth.

As such, I have a tendency to just really pepper the character's original author with questions, and I really appreciate that everyone has been gracious enough to take the time to help me. I've been extremely fortunate to get to work with several wonderful characters from other M:EM authors, and the experience has been profoundly positive. I've done a little writing with Alessa recently, and Barinellos has just been an endless source of character notes and insight. He really knows his characters, and he can always spot the moments where I don't have them quite right, and then offer suggestions for how to write them better. The good Barin has also been very generous in suggesting characters which I might be able to use, which has helped me to develop some storylines which I couldn't have arrived at on my own. Similarly, one of Raven's characters just crossed paths with Beryl. Raven had already written most of the parts which included Nasperge by the time I got involved, but, for those portions where he let me take the wheel, he was similarly helpful about answering my questions and providing suggestions. I had some pretty crazy ideas, and Raven really encouraged me to run with them. And I've worked with a whole bunch of Ruwin's characters at this point -- Fisco, Aloise, Mal, Lucy, Diana, etc. -- and that has just been a real pleasure and a treat. Ruwin is yet another writer with just a wonderful touch for characters, and I do my level best to try to hit the same quality bar when I'm working with his roster.

I know I've said this elsewhere, but I will always be eternally grateful to Ruwin for letting me use Aloise in "A Bet on Kindness." I was brand new around these parts, it was only the second story I had written, and Aloise was a brand new character. So Ruwin was taking an awfully big leap of faith by letting me write for her -- especially since that story is so dialog-centric. It would have been easy for me to really mess things up. But I could just hear Aloise's voice so clearly in my head, and she just seemed so correct for the story -- there's no way that story works without Aloise in it. So I'm glad that Ruwin took a chance on me. I'm relieved that the story turned out as well as it did; I think I was able to do right by Aloise, and I hope I've been able to maintain that standard for the other characters people have generously placed in my care.

Settings are a little bit trickier, just because I honestly don't have a good head for settings. People who read my stories may have noticed that a disproportionate amount of the action consists of people speaking to each other inside small rooms, and that's no accident. I don't think I write large scale very well -- I think I write small much better than big. And, because I'm not a natural planner, and because I want the characters to be able to surprise me as I'm writing, I tend to like to have the freedom to make up settings as I go, which can make it pretty tricky to use established locations. Jakkard has kind of been an exception for me, but in large part that is because so much of Jakkard is a blank canvas -- that plane gave me a lot of freedom to invent people and places and customs and the like as I went along. It didn't feel restrictive. It felt open, and liberating. Conversely, that's why I tend to try to avoid canon planes at all costs. I don't know enough about them to be sure of doing well, and I don't want to run afoul of established facts. Again, this is where help from the other M:EMbers is invaluable. They know more than I do, and they tend to keep me (more or less) on the straight and narrow.

Los Angeles, CA.



Right now? Catering, which is a fancy way of saying I'm in the market for a more steady job.



Back when I was signing up for the Wizards forums, I wanted my user name to be the name of Magic's greatest villain (at the time, in early 2001)... Volrath! But that was taken, so I remembered some of the Magic comics I had and their coolest villain, Tevesh Szat. I misspelled the name since I didn't check and the rest is history.



Back in third grade, some of my friends started playing, so I got myself a few cards (starter set and what would later be called a tournament pack), taught myself the rules from the rulebook insert that came with it in those days, and started building and playing myself.



Discover? I was there when it was founded, bwahahahaha! Really, though, I was. I think what brought me around as a semi-frequent contributor was that there had already been some short story contests, and writing for those had been light and fun (and I have trouble resisting anything called a "contest"), so why not keep going with this new version?



Aspiring professional author! I've finished novels (Science Fiction as well as Fantasy) but have yet to sell them and am still trying to go a more or less traditional publishing route rather than the self-publish road.



Probably high school? That's the first point where I've got anything that resembles solid writing and the first point where I didn't loathe my english classes and this started to think I might enjoy writing for its own sake... but I've told stories for much longer, and sometimes wrote them down, so it's hard to really say.



Games, mostly, though I still do read. Tabletop games, board games, some video games -- whether I'm rolling dice, placing tiles, playing cards, or any other sort of mechanic, I'm most comfortable doing something interactive rather than passively watching movies or television.



Ooooooh, that's a hard one. I'm going to go with Lloyd Alexander and his Chronicles of Prydain series, but honorable mentions to JRR Tolkien with The Hobbit and The Silmarilion or HP Lovecraft with The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, and The Music of Erich Zann.



I hadn't heard of that before, but it's somewhat interesting -- I don't really have one, I don't think.



I spend a lot of time just trying to snatch ideas from the Aether. When I get one, I outline it in terms of "parts" (could be movements, scenes, chapters, or acts), start to get ideas for good scenes or lines in various positions, and then at some point actually start to write. I tend to write in long sessions with lengthy wind-ups followed by moderately fast paced creation, during which I am constantly revising, rewriting the words, lines, or paragraphs before the current one as I'm still moving forward. Kurt Vonnegut referred to "Swoopers" and "Bashers", and his definition of a "Basher" pretty well describes me: When I'm done I'm done, I don't really do multiple drafts unless a LOT of time has passed and my skill has improved in a major way.



"Never give up" and "Know when to fold 'em". This may sound like contradictory advice, but allow me to explain: You mustn't give up on writing or get discouraged with the process of writing itself, but a bit part of this is the other bit of advice: you have to realize and be able to admit when something is NOT working. If a scene, or even a story is flawed in a fundamental way, don't be afraid to scrap it. If there was something good in it, you'll be able to salvage it elsewhere. Sometimes I've culled entire novel plans from the roster, only to later combine the core ideas of two or more into a single, new, more fleshed out idea. I'm not saying you should kill plans lightly, or at the first sign of adversity, but you need to be able to look at you work in an analytical sense and know when you're having trouble as opposed to when you're on the wrong track, and react appropriately.



I get inspiration from a lot of places, and which one is "biggest" depends on what I'm writing. Lloyd Alexander and HP Lovecraft probably donate the most, overall: Alexander for his character-building, Lovecraft for exploration of the unknown and perhaps unknowable forces that are beyond the protagonist entirely. I've also probably taken a lot from visual media such as Doctor Who and Jonny Quest (ToS and Real Adventures).



Larasa and Morgan were first created for a contest run by the M:EM when it was on the old Wizards forum. The prompt was simply to create a "Planeswalker Duo" -- a pair of Planeswalkers who travel together. Planeswalkers being notoriously hard to get along with for extended periods, I figured there had to be some special circumstance involved. At first, I thought about blood relations, but Barinellos, our Negaguru, found it quite unlikely. I think he mentioned offhand there that planeswalkers ascending at the same time was more possible, having been seen with Bo Levar and Urza (both ascended from the Sylex Blast). Well, I started thinking about what could cause two spark ignitions to occur together without relying on absurd levels of coincidence. It would have to involve a lot of people... That's when what became known as Before the Dawn started to take shape, telling the story of the demise of an entire plane and its two survivors.

Since then... well, I think I may just be a sucker for romance! They actually sat with just "Before the Dawn" for quite some time. Then, I had to introduce Lia and I felt like the storyteller format worked well, but who'd write it down? Morgan, the scholar of course. Once I had him keeping notes, using his and Larasa's travels to explore Iun Ilana also seemed natural. The World at Dawn came much later, when I sat down and decided to actually explore the two of them as people rather than as windows onto something else, and how better to do that than to see the bonds between them actually forming?



The focus on dialogue isn't conscious -- I can actually get really purple-prose-descriptive when I want to, but once characters start talking they just sort of stop taking in their surroundings, because they're talking and that's that. As such, I end up with a sort of cinematic style that has an establishing shot and then a lot of closeups as the characters speak. Internal monologues get cut off because... well, there's only so much time to think before someone notices "hey, she's not saying anything." For most characters, at least. I've written (though not for the M:EM) characters portraed as smart/crazy enough to go off on a multipage tangent between lines without the other characters noticing any lag.

The weakness, though, is a deliberate choice, because in my view it's really hard and NOT really rewarding to write for high-powered protagonists. I'm not saying that it can't be done, just that I for one don't favor doing it. Back when Future Sight first dropped, I wasn't a fan of the Mending but I realized that, you know, Brady was right. It's not easy to write for Superman, because to challenge him you either need to cheat, write him stupid, or play on a less human level. And to play on the cosmic level, you don't NEED a cosmic protagonist. And you have to challenge your protagonist: easy if he's Taran of Caer Dallben or The Doctor, significantly harder, especially in adventure context like most of my work is, if he's Doctor Manhattan!

Maybe it's because I never got into superhero comics growing up (Watchmen and some Hellboy comics are the only comics I've ever read), so I don't have that touchstone influence that's pretty common in SF/Fantasy circles, but I've always been fond of situations when the hero at least SEEMS an underdog, and they have to have wits, luck, determination, and perhaps inner strength to triumph in the end -- they aren't flat-out better or stronger than their adversary. Helps drama too, that.

I'm probably rambling now, but I think this point is an important one: Even if narrative structure dictates that the heroes must win, it's no fun if the odds are on their side in character. There has to be the point where, suspending disbelief at least, you think they can actually lose, and that puts a floor on what any given protagonist can tangle with but no ceiling. I mean, perhaps there's some level on which a certain character can't compete, but as I said earlier Lovecraft is one of my major influences and you don't see a greater power differential than that between, say, Randolph Carter on one side and Nyarlathotep on the other in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

I haven't made many baddies for the M:EM yet, but those I feel would be likely to be more significantly powerful. Really, it's just Ellia (Lourima is more of a tragic figure in the end and Amah is morally grey and likely to serve as a protagonist) Ellia the Endbringer already is -- she's one of the most potent entities in the M:EM (though she has something of overspecialization compared to core canon's Nicol Bolas who is a dragon on top of being an ancient and powerful mage), but that's because her place in a narrative is to BE a seemingly insurmountable obstacle not to overcome them.



Its oddly liberating to work with Expanded Multiverse/Dominia materials. You know how MaRo says that "Restrictions breed creativity"? It's true with writing too. I've come up with a lot to do just in the context of Magic: the gathering and sometimes feel more inspired here than in the endeavors where I have full creative control (Though length may also have something to do with that). Though, to date I've avoided characters by other authors (not settings, characters) because I'm afraid of getting them "wrong".

I haven't done much in the way of collaborations, but I have worked with other M:EM authors from time to time and while schedule slip can reach levels where you think you've planeswalked to The Eon Fog, they're all great guys/gals/eldritch horrors and I'd gladly work with them more.

I live in the darkest depths of the deranged mind, the shadowed corners of Man's hearts where only the maddest of us dares to venture. It is the locked, barred and chained chests of our deepest fears and apprehensions, the place we put those things which we endeavor to remember to forget, but which whisper always in forgetful remembrances of things we've never known.



I am an adjunct instructor of English at a small college. I primarily teach freshman composition courses, attempting to teach students how to write. Occasionally, it even works!



"Raven" has been a nickname of mine since High School, ever since I memorized "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. The "oftheBlack" was added a bit later, and it came from a writing project I started in College which was eventually dropped. It was comprised, amongst other things, of a faction known as the Black Contingent, or the Black Sect. So, for a while, my online name was going to be "RavenoftheBlackSect," but ultimately it seemed too long and a bit awkward, so I dropped the "sect" and simply went with "RavenoftheBlack."



I was first exposed to Magic in the mid-90s. A friend of mine was very interested in trading card games, and he and I used to play one called Wyvern, which I enjoyed much more for the art than for the game. Anyway, he started getting into Magic, but I couldn't afford to support two different trading card collections, so I stuck with Wyvern, because I knew it. However, I would occasionally play Magic with him and some mutual friends, just using his cards. But I wasn't overly into it, stopped playing, and basically forgot about it. Flash forward to college, and I met my best friend. Our second year, he and I and two other guys rented a house a few blocks off campus. He was really into Magic, and wanted to teach me. It wasn't until later that I remembered I had actually played the game before, but I was older now and was able to get into the game more. We played quite often using his cards and decks, and eventually I started collecting cards. The first card I bought was Akroma, Angel of Wrath, which I slipped into a soldier deck without telling my friend. When I was finally able to hard-cast it and I was reading off her list of abilities, the look on his face was priceless. Soon after, I started getting into the flavor of Magic, and there it is.



Years after I started playing Magic regularly, I developed a desire to make my own cards. I did this for fun and as a creative outlet, and eventually it led me to the Wizards' forum, and YMTC. There, I had a lot of fun with card creation, particularly Fakeartist's "A contest like no other" and ChainofFools "The Chain." I had particular fun with flavor text for these cards, and prided myself on making flavorful cards. I also started getting into the Magic novels, and began collecting them. Wanting to learn more about some of the more obscure aspects of MTG lore, particularly the Elder Dragon Wars, as memory serves, I wandered over to Flavor and Storyline there, where I started asking questions. KeeperofManyNames and Barinellos and others were helpful, and slowly I started spending more and more time there, and less at YMTC. Then, someone asked for a brief summary of the history of the Multiverse. With my background in poetry and my comparative knowledge of MTG lore, I wrote what would become The Song of Dominia. It was well-received, and I eventually started writing more MTG poetry, and then fiction. I started the Poetry Plane, a thread on the old boards where I posted my MTG poetry, and there Keeper and Its_Always_42 (Lord LunaEquie is me) encouraged me to submit some of my stuff to the M:EM. After learning more about the M:EM, I decided that was a good idea, and submitted my poem Blasphemous Act for M:EM vote. In March of 2013, it was accepted, and I became a M:EMber.



I write poetry for myself on a semi-regular business, and have started several writing projects, but I have never published anything, nor do I post fiction or poetry on any other forum or for any other fandom. I have completed three novels, or at least novel-length manuscripts, but have yet to secure their publication, and honestly have not tried overly hard to do so. They were all written before I started writing MTG-themed stuff, and likely need a lot of work, although I do enjoy them and the world in which they are set.



I learned to write in grade school, or perhaps before, I don't really remember... Oh, I see. Well, I've had an interest in writing since fifth or sixth grade. In seventh grade, I started working on a novel that I worked on off and on all throughout highschool. The thing is about 600 pages, if memory serves, written out in notebook paper. It is, however, fairly bad, and the sort of thing you would expect to see from someone with no writing experience and that level of maturity and development. I think the story and world MIGHT be salvageable, but my interests currently lie elsewhere, and for all intents and purposes, it's dead in the water. In college, I took every creative writing class available, including one that wasn't (a bunch of us from Advanced Creative Writing convinced the prof to do an Independent Study with her and meet in a Creative Writing workshop. It was a great time.)



MORE WRITING! Oh, wait. No. My hobbies are fairly benign. I enjoy reading, playing video games, and watching movies. I have seen nearly every film that has ever won an Academy Award for best picture (I still haven't gotten around to the most recent two). And, of course, a great deal of my time is taken up with teaching and grading.



I think Edgar Allan Poe would have to be my favorite author and poet. His stuff was probably the most influential on me as a writer, and I just thoroughly enjoy his work. I am also fond of the American short story writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the Romantic poets of Britain. I used to have a favorite novel, but the more I am exposed to, the harder it becomes to pick a favorite.



I just want people to enjoy my stuff. If I can make them think a little, or smile, or go "Oh, wow," to themselves, then that's my ideal reader. Obviously, someone who enjoys a pun or obscured reference is also preferable!



I'm actually a pretty linear writer. I usually start at the beginning and write straight down to the end. Often, I'll have a pretty solid idea of where I want to go with the story as I sit down to write it, but I don't often use outlines except for particularly long or convoluted plots. Usually, I will have a beginning and an end in mind, as well as a few moments throughout, and the writing process usually becomes a sort of "connect the dots". I type out my pieces in a Word document, often with music playing in the background, though occasionally a movie or show, but I dislike writing in silence. For descriptions, I try to visualize what I'm describing. For dialog, I try to put myself in the character's place and live the conversation, as much as possible. For poetry, it's much more difficult to describe. Naturally, I try to play into my rhyme scheme and get imagery and word choice that fits into the overall theme. After I've finished writing, I go back and re-read what I've written, often while listening to it aloud with a text-to-speech program, so that I can hear how it sounds and catch some of the major errors. I'll usually try to re-read it again a day or two later, to give it time to simmer.



Keep going. I find people often run into some kind of snag, walk away from a project, and never go back. In my experience, some of the best stuff comes while I'm writing rather than before. A lot of people who like to write fall into the trap of only writing "when they feel like it." Forcing yourself to write and to push through the rough spots will often get to some really good stuff. Also, read a lot. It will improve your basic writing skills and give you ideas, which can be adjusted to fit your own story or style. Also, seek out criticism and take it well. Modern (American) society seems to want to equate criticism with negativity, when in fact it is a path of improvement. We are none of us perfect, and I firmly believe that there is no writer in existence who cannot improve. Criticism is an ideal way to help facilitate that. Finally, have fun with it! Writing is time-consuming and challenging, but incredibly rewarding, so enjoy yourself!



I take my inspiration from a fanfic writer I encountered a couple of years ago. Everything I write, I try to emulate his style, because he's a genius, and perhaps the greatest writer of all time. Everything I read of his is just absolutely glorious, and it inspires me every day. His name is RavenoftheBlack, and I...oh, wait a minute...



Okay, joking aside, working with other people's characters is very difficult for me. With my own characters, I usually develop a sort of immediate understanding of them. Sure, sometimes they surprise me and do something unexpected, or change over time, but they were created as a part of me. It may be a small part, or an exaggerated facet or something, but still, it's sort of a part of me. But with other people's characters, there's always a separation there. So first I have to get past my unfamiliarity with them. When I first wrote for Fisco Vane in Deals and Devils, it really took a lot to get into his character. Ruwin helped a lot with advice, but he's a tricky character to get a handle on. Huinn caused a similar problem, which Barinellos helped a lot with. Lukas Harran provided a similar but different problem. Because Lukas's creator, DavFlameRock, was no longer around, and no actual story had been written about him. So I had a framework for Lukas, but little else. So while I wanted to stay true to the original character, I had a lot of opportunity to sort of write the character myself. Most recently, while I was writing for Beryl, I actually found her surprisingly easy to write for, which probably speaks to how much of her story I have been exposed to. Lukas and Huinn had no stories when I picked them up, and at the time I wrote for Fisco, I believe he only had two, his intro and Two Bullets. Beryl has had many stories, so I think it was easier to grasp her character for me.



Pure, unmitigated genius... Okay, let's try again with more humility. The basic story of the creation of the Dual-Walkers was that I was sitting around, playing Duels of the Planeswalkers on Xbox, and I sort of accidently reversed the name in my head, which I actually do with a lot of things because I, for completely unknown reasons, find myself greatly amused by that. Anyway, when I reversed it, I wound up with the Planes of the Dual-Walkers, which I thought sounded pretty interesting. So, I got to thinking about what it would take to have Planes of something called the Dual-Walkers. Obviously, we needed multiple planes. This eventually led to the creation and unique metaphysics of the Wheel. For "Dual-Walkers," we clearly needed two 'walkers who worked together for some reason. If memory serves, my first thought was a married couple, but I dismissed that when I hit on the idea of Twins. At the time I was writing Planes, I was not yet a M:EMber, and I did not write anything within the story with the M:EM in mind. So the thought of a set of Twins both with the Spark, while I knew was statistically improbable, was no concern of mine. Now, as I was making the story, I decided the planes should each have one color of mana, but all block one color specifically. Ultimately, I settled on green for a few different reasons, and I therefore made the protagonist of the story a mono-green 'walker. The character and primary motivations of the Dual-Walkers were formed as a result of them actively hating green mana. It's an interesting thought experiment to ponder what the Dual-Walkers are like in alternate realities where I chose a different color for them to despise. Anyway, I finished planes and it was fairly well received, and it was voted into the archives, and I was more or less done with them. Then, Ruwin wrote a story about a young 'walker dying on his first 'walk, and Yxoque made an off-handed comment on how it would be cool to see more stories like that. And because it's just what I do, I decided to write something based off that, eventually leading to Dead Man 'Walking and I needed something to sweep in at the end and, spoiler, kill the narrator. I settled on the Dual-Walkers, because I thought it was a nice way to tie the story to something else I had written. From there, the Dual-Walkers just sort of grew on me, and that's when I approached Ruwin about using Fisco to work with them. And that was the development of the Dual-Walkers.



One of the Most? ONE!!! OKAY, this interview is over! Well, after this question... Because this was the last question you asked me... What were we talking about? Oh, yes, poetry. I've been writing poetry since high school, and it's something I pride myself in doing. So few people seem to write in formal poetry anymore, and it's something I consider myself to be good at. Also, it was my poetry that first got me "noticed" by the M:EM in the form of first The Song of Dominia and then my Oblivion Ring poem. It's sort of a signature of mine, and I love writing MTG-themed poetry. The connection to Jakkard started with Keeper. In my "Poetry Plane" thread on the old forums, I was bored one night, and asked for requests. Keeper requested a Jakkard folk song. I had never written a song before (well, that's not ENTIRELY true, but none you guys know about...) but I thought I'd give it a try. It took me about an hour and a half, but I wrote Down to the Valley, and I was happy with it. To specifically address your question, it was certainly not something I set out to do, no. Interestingly, I didn't think much of Jakkard, at first. It wasn't that I disliked it, but I did dislike the idea of things like guns and trains in a fantasy setting. The discussion took place before I was a M:EMber. But Ruwin's Two Bullets sort of changed my mind on it, and I've really come to love the setting. I'm really glad I've been able to impact it, hopefully for the best. The musical nature of Jakkard is something I'm actually directly and indirectly responsible for, and I find that pretty ironic, considering my lack of musical ability. But it is something I'm proud of, and again, I'm glad I could help!

Las Vegas, mostly. Sometimes when the angles shift just so and the shadows overtake the light, I find myself in Utah. Always a surreal experience.



I am actually going to be out of the job very shortly! But with any luck, I'll be able to get hired at one of my favorite Game Shops at the turn of the year. Cross your fingers!

College is expensive. That's really all there is to say on the matter.



Wow. That is a good question. I have no idea. I know I became a really big fan when I learned about EDH. I've been playing for about... Eight years, now. Damn. It's been a while.



Ahaha, I lurked on the old forums for like, two years, just reading the Flavor and Storylines chatter. I think I tripped over the EM when I was on the forums one spoiler season (Alara, I believe) and sort of just started reading everything. Then, around when RTR started up, someone was bashing on the Orzhov (my favorite guild) as unimaginative and boring! Well, I couldn't have that! So I wrote "The Good Pontiff" in hopes that I could change some minds. I didn't expect it to get such a good review but, well, here we are!



I've dabbled in writing Homestuck fanfiction but I've never published anything. I've been working on a personal story for a long, long, long time, but it never really goes anywhere. It's just something for me to think about when I'm bored now, mostly.



I have on vivid memory of me writing a stupid story on scratch paper in sixth grade and stapling it together into a proper book and never showing anyone. My memory is awful, and I don't remember much of my earlier years, but that always stood out to me.



A combination of reading and video games. Occasionally I'll go out and be social, but that's more of a structured thing than something I do voluntarily. DND on Wednesdays, FNM on Fridays. Nothing super exciting but it keeps my feverish mind occupied.



I'm not sure I have a favorite author, but Tamora Pierce was very influential upon me when i was growing up. Patrick Rothfuss has struck me as a man with real talent recently, and I would go so far as to say that "A Wise Man's Fear" is probably my favorite book in the world. In the realm of Fanfiction, I am currently completely enamored with Oriflamme's "Like One Sundered Star" Homestuck fanfic - definitely worth reading, updates semi-regularly.

Homestuck, of course, is my favorite hyper-web-comic thing. Not sure how to classify that.



Man I have never heard of this. I've never really thought about it, though. I just sort of write stuff and go "I hope EVERYONE likes this!". So... My ideal reader is the everybody.



First, I sacrifice at least three healthy children to the Dread God Barinellos...

Oh, writing process! That's different, then.

I sacrifice FIVE children.

Then, I sit at my computer and type until I become too stressed to think of anything else or the story is finished. It's pretty obsessive and tiring, so I don't usually write unless I've got something on my chest that needs to get onto the page.



Paragraphs. Please use paragraphs. Nothing makes me not want to read something more than not using paragraphs. I'm not even sre that made sense but It LITERALLY makes me uncomfortable to look at.

Also - your work is always better than you think it is. Stand behind it. Don't post something expecting poor reviews - post something and say "This is what I've done and I think it's great!". Then, when someone tells you otherwise, engage them in discourse and not defiance. Learn, don't deflect.



I don't even know. Like, I absolutely LOVE Homestuck, and it's got a lot of cool ideas, but it doesn't really inspire me? It inspires to produce, yeah, but I'm not sure if I draw m ideas directly from it, or directly from any sort of media I consume? You know, actually, I will say that whenever I see a really interesting character, I get super pumped. I'm all "This character is awesome!!" but they usually end up being side characters, or they die, or they have super unrealistic qualities and... Well, far be it from me to criticize any of my favorite authors, but I just think that sometimes, these characters (or even character archetypes) need to be done justice.

So I pull bits and pieces from everything I see. Sometimes, stories just need to be told, you know?



I love it. It's probably one of my favorite things to do - write for other people's characters. I'm not very good at meeting or talking to new people in real life - it's something I really struggle with. Because when you meet actual people, they misdirect, they don't know themselves, they don't understand what they're doing, you don't know what they think. And man, that's stressful for me.

But with these fictional characters, we get their stories, their thoughts, their beliefs and fears, all splayed out in front of us. And when I have access to this information, I can really understand them, whoever it is. And once I understand someone, well, it's just a matter of going "Hey, here's this situation - what do you do?"

And I just let them answer.

Special thanks to OrcishLibrarian to putting that into words when I couldn't.



Yeah, if anyone had told me a few years ago that my most beloved character would be a cantankerous loan shark with depression I probably would have been all like "Wait, have you been to the future? How do you know this?"

Creating Fisco was easy, though. "Interplanar Loan Shark". That's all it was. The idea came up while I was discussing The Good Pontiff with Keeper on the old forums. I just ran with it, really. Came up with a card and a short introductory piece. Gave him a back story. Gave him a cigar. Called it good.

Then Jakkard happened.

I don't think Jakkard would be what it is without Fisco, and I don't think Fisco would be who he is without Jakkard. It's just - that's surreal, to me, that a character that I created, completely independent of Jakkard, has both shaped and been shaped so heavily by a community made setting that I had NOTHING TO DO WITH. How crazy is that?

And I think, I really think, that sort of encapsulates the Planeswalker experience. Fisco was born without any knowledge of other worlds, of the wider multiverse, and when his spark ignited, he became more than who he was. More than a sad boy in a prison cell. He transcended his own boundaries - for good or for evil - and was let loose into a multiverse of infinite possibilities.

Fisco going to and being impacted by Jakkard was just as statistically likely as me stumbling upon the M:EM in the first place. It's all so random and serendipitous, but in the end, we just take it all at face value and call it "life". Sometimes, that just blows my mind.

To tell truth, I am not terribly comfortable with this being public, but it has come out in the past, so anyone that can do a little digging will be able to find it. I live in Alabama, and next year I plan to try to move to a town called Madison just outside of Huntsville.



It is derivative of Barrin's full name.



That is... a bit of a complicated question. I originally picked up the cards some time ago with the release of Portal. The art and window into the world instantly captivated me. Shortly thereafter, a coworker of my mother's who was getting married was... persuaded, shall we say, to donate his collection to me. I enjoyed having the cards, but never did anything other than put them in a large folder. (most of that collection, if you were wondering was Ice Age and Mirage block.)

Flashforward several years, and for lack of anything better to read, I decided to pick up Time Spiral. Quite possibly THE worst book to begin with. I read through it quickly, as was the fashion of the day, and eventually moved over to Ravnica. Now THAT was the series to read. It even managed to get me to buy cards once more, though the new frames put me off initially. Everything past that is history.



Naturally, Keeper built part of the MEM around me. Which was ironic since very early on, I had no intention of being involved. I was against the liberties that might be taken with canon and it was as an advisor that I joined the project, specifically to keep straight what was canon and what was not.



Ssssssort of. It's complicated.



Also complicated. It depends, truly, in what capacity you mean. (because after all, nothing is ever simple with me.)



The usual. Listen to music, read, play the vidja games, a little light cooking...



HA! I consume literature at a rate of approximately 1200 pages a week. I can't have just one favorite author or I would go mad waiting for them to release new books. I have a very solid LIST of favorite authors though. They definitely count as influences as well.



I would say there's more a genre or particular style more than any singular influence which has shaped my own work. There is, for lack of a better word, a certain nature to the worlds and characters I create.



I suppose I do, but I'm mildly uncomfortable speaking of the matter.



Step 1: Be tormented by the voices.
Step 2: curse the muses, often time getting more creative about it, ironically
Step 3: compile information regarding the project
Step 4: procrastinate now that the voices have stopped momentarily
Step 5: finally get off my ass and start something
Step 6: After getting it half done, put off finishing it for approximately 6 months
Step 7: Seized by madness once more, throw together everything that I can.
Step 8: Cradle my fragile ego for a bit before finally throwing it to the masses.



Nothing general worth noting. I basically only work in specifics.



Mildly frustrating. It appears that there are certain basic approaches to the way that I deal with characters that are different than the ones who created them, and it causes a fairly pronounced clash in their personalities. I tend to push them to their extremes.



I... dunno honestly. It's been important for me to work with people and I think we're all richer for the interaction, which is why I tend to get sort of antsy when I see a notable drop in participation. We're a community unto ourselves, and I'm glad to be involved with them, so the health of the community is a high priority for me.

And besides that, it lets me channel my creativity into something I feel I'm actually accomplished at.



Conceptualization is a big part of my process, and in some ways I enjoy working on a puzzle more than getting to "know" my creations.

Canadia, Toronto specifically, and alternatively the suburbs of Pennsylvania in the USA



I teach art history, and I'm in grad school working on a thesis on comics.



I couldn't settle on a name.



Flavor-first. I fell in love with the art and flavor text and became totally enamoured of the hinted-at storyline of Invasion.



I discovered it, I guess, as a potentiality within the community. People were writing fanfiction at a much faster rate than we were getting actual canonical fiction, and I thought, hey, we can do something more with this...



I run a blog, Storming the Ivory Tower. I also am working on an academic thesis.



I've always noodled around with stories.



Yell at people on Tumblr, read, cook, look at art, and look at weird monster porn.



Prooobably Terry Pratchett though it's always a bit of a tossup. Favorite novel though is probably Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, or possibly Planeswalker by Lynn Abbey.

Stephen King believes that every author has an "ideal reader" - the one person who they write for, the one person whose reactions they care about. Do you have one, and if so, who is it?|When I'm writing Magic fiction the ideal reader is the collective Magic fanbase. When I'm writing for StIT it's ideally someone engaged in pop culture and willing to suspend objection long enough to consider the weirdness of Theory.



Cry a lot; stare at the page; fail to write; occasionally vomit out nonsense in big bursts



Keep poking at things, try addressing the core ideas from different angles. Often it's finding the right knob to twist, I find, and sometimes it takes awhile to find said knob.



I think I draw a lot from Magic fiction, actually, and other sort of lower order, less respectable fantasy, anime, comics, &c. Low culture stuff basically. But I also more and more am drawing upon my own experiences with depression and with queerness, and my knowledge of Weird Theory Crap, to put into my stories.



It's totally nervewracking to take other people's characters for a spin, but what little of it I've done I've really enjoyed. Working in the shared world of Magic is always incredible. It's just getting over that initial fear of bollocking everything up I think, that's the trick. I like collaborating but that can be a bit nervewracking too, since I work at such an agonizingly slow pace. I always feel like I'm letting people down. And in the past sometimes the weight of responsibility has just been a bit too much. But nevertheless, it's something I think is improving over time, and I'd like to collaborate more in the future.



I was disappointed, maybe a year or two in, that there was so little story writing and our numbers were sort of dwindling. And there were individual moments of frustration (like Skibo singlehandedly blocking the acceptance of Sertaria--that was a hell of a thing). On the whole though, the last year+ has been incredibly rewarding. Watching people take this basic setting and run with it has been incredible, and it's somewhat comforting or rewarding to think that it wouldn't be possible without the structure I proposed early on and without the work I did encouraging me. I don't know how much credit I can take since this is all fanfiction, but nevertheless I do feel like I helped to start something really special. I always knew this kind of thing was possible within Magic's setting though. It's the setting that is all settings



This might be the case. I know that I tend to slow down work on other things if I've got these big projects to deal with, because I feel like I have to prioritize them. Sometimes this bothers me if only in the sense that I feel like any lasting impact I've had has been largely offscreen, or in the sense that I haven't actually added that much to our shared world, and even less that others have picked up for use. But at the same time I write at an agonizingly slow pace, and maybe my role as a facilitator is ultimately the role that I'm most comfortable with--writing less of my own stuff might be more a reflection of the greater comfort I have with organizing than with writing. I do like working to make the project as a whole function, and I've ultimately gotten what I always really wanted: actually well written Magic: The Gathering fiction with a continuity not snarled with terrible character deaths and temporal screwiness.

Maybe this is a bad time to announce my newest M:EM project: Time Warp III: Two Dozen Deaths.