This article may also be found, along with loads of other stuff on the 6 Icons Blog which is a journal of my current primary incredibly exciting project. Exciting mostly because it’s the first thing I’ve ever worked on that I thought might turn a coin… Read on at that location.

To coincide with the release (in the UK) of The Dark Knight this week and given all the chat about the characters so far I thought this Sunday I’d talk a little bit about why we’re talking about icons. This whole project started in the first place because I asked the Doodler what it was he really wanted to draw. You can see examples of his answer below. (Not on the leostableford version.)

From my point of view I had never written any kind of comic strip before and I knew that what I wanted to do was keep my storytelling simple. The reason is that in the past I have made the odd attempt at comic stuff and it’s not a novel. In a comic you have very little time to riff, you have to stay pretty glib and communicate in short bursts. This gives comic writing a laconic air that suits a particular type of humour.

I wanted to talk about the concept of icons because comic book characters are, quite literally, iconic. In a way this project is going to be a comic project about comic strips and their subjects. In one way this is quite a clever idea but it’s mostly clever because it’s so dumb.

I figured that all the gaps in my talent as a comic strip writer might end up papered over a little better if I was writing a script for these characters because they are the kind of characters comics are supposed to be about.

Hopefully this will shine through in the finished product, for that, you will have to wait and see.

Okay, okay so I admit it I’ve been keeping quiet about this one. But I guess it’s time you folks knew.

Myself and partner in crime the Phantom Doodler have been cooking up a little sumpin’ sumpin’ which maybe of interest to all of you. You can get the full story at our blog at: 6icons.blogspot.com I’ll post my own posts from that blog here also, Doodler will only put his posts on that blog so if you’re reading only here then you’re only getting the words, for the pictures you have to look in the Doodler’s direction.

We’re like a coupla guys training for some kind of sports event on this, spotting each other and providing motivation and the like so you’ll become familiar with an alien concept round these parts the *gasp* regular update. Every Sunday check in to check out what’s going on in 6icons ville. Regular service, er, Irregular service will be maintained here as usual. So without further ado, the first 6icons update. Enjoy!

I may not have mentioned this before but I have never had the opportunity to run a campaign before. For those more writing based readers of mine I should elaborate a little. In role playing a campaign is a series of sessions run in the same game universe where the players keep their characters and develop them session on session.

In the old days of role playing “developing” a character roughly meant “make them better at killing things” so that your adventurers could kill ever more extravagant beasties.

We don’t really play those sort of games.

In our games ‘develop’ usually means take the character along a journey where experience accrues to develop aspects of the character rather than to just make them a more efficient killing machine. About a month back we put the lid on our first “season” of Deliria. I didn’t feel such a sense of achievement in that circumstance as Deliria is a free wheeling kind of experience, although all the characters learned and grew it was a very natural process, besides I had very few players.

In Over The Edge the group is huge and the source material is complex. The reported experience of an OTE campaign is that the players keep asking worriedly if they’re “supposed to understand all this”. There has been a fair bit of this in my campaign. It’s to be expected.

Thankfully the players were resilient enough to accept the weirdness and have been having a jolly time dealing with each contingent as it arrives. When we started the campaign was very tied down and operating in the “normal” world to a certain degree. Now it has taken off with wings of surrealism and the party are wanderers through time and reality, ready to provide an antidote to the multiverse against a pernicious form of reality rot.

My favourite thing about this is that the characters managed to conquer the twin goals of resolving a lot of questions while leaving the overall story still hideously obscured by confusion.

All of the experience I’m building up in running (and taking part in) campaign play has lead to the development of a pretty unique story-based system I’m calling “Confined Spaces”. More on which later.

Suffice to say that I’m trying to actually develop a hobby support for people who might not have always seen themselves as gamers. I mention this because I know that you guys are often writers. Writers could have some awesome fun with role playing but not the hack and slash kind. It’s like an awesome creativity playground. I’m going to be offering up copies of Confined Spaces when it’s ready to be read for testing before a first “official” release.

I’d like some people to be “Confined Spaces” testers. Ideally people who’ve never participated in traditional role playing. I’ll explain more when the pilot is near completion, for now it’s something to mull over.

The Book: Secret of the Sands by Rai Aren & Tavius E

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: For 12,000 years a dark and deadly secret has been hidden deep below the Great Sphinx of Giza. In present day Egypt, a frightening, yet awe-inspiring story unravels as archaeologists race against time to decipher an ancient truth…

Preview Available: At http://www.secretofthesands.com/sossample.pdf

Would I buy this? Er… no.

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The whole product’s pretty darn nifty in a production values way. I spotted maybe three typos. So no more than a real book.

The Nitty Gritty:

STRANGLED shouts echoed throughout the temple as torchlight flickered outside the entrance. Several battle-hardened soldiers pounded on the door, trying to force their way in.

These opening sentences capture Secret of The Sands better than I could hope to describe them without direct reference. Let’s take a closer look shall we?

Firstly we open with some passive shouts. Who is shouting? Is it the battle-hardened soldiers? Or are we talking about some unknown other actor who is as yet unrevealed? And what relation do these shouts have to the torchlight flickering outside the entrance. We could infer, as the soldiers are pounding on the door and the shouts are echoing throughout the temple that the soldiers are merely pounding and the shouters are others whom we have not yet been introduced to.

Which leads us into… well, confusion. Utter confusion. Where are we looking and what are we looking at? Why are we looking at it? The strangled shouts are echoing but we don’t know why they are doing so before we can even ask we are instructed to pay heed to some torches which are flickering, as torches often do, outside the place where the strangled shouts we are now supposed to ignore were echoing. There are several soldiers who are apparently pounding on the door of the temple, this doesn’t do a good enough job of telling us that they did not merely forget their keys so we must be told further to this that they are trying to gain entrance by force. Oh, by the way, did I mention that the soldiers are “battle-hardened” all several of them. Uh huh. True dat.

I mean. Please. God.

It doesn’t let up. Ham fisted failures to signpost trip over cliched descriptions in their rush to avoid the clumsy verbiage of cluttered sentences. Then, when you think your brain couldn’t possibly weep any more, the utterly unengaging 0.5 dimensional characters interact using dialogue cut out of a children’s “action” cartoon from the 1960s in order to make unenthralling pot boiler discoveries with all the gravity of an up quark.

The Secret of the Sands website is dripping with reviews aglow with praise for this work so maybe I’m very very wrong but at the end of the day I have neither the time nor the patience to struggle any more with this uninspiring tripe.

The Straw That Broke The Reviewer’s Back: When I realised that, having forced myself to read in detail two or three chapters of present day, er, “action” (um, well it’s supposed to be, some people you don’t care about find some mcguffins in an acme archaeological dig) I was now skimming happily over vast tracts of prose set in the past. Why? Because I quite simply didn’t give a stuff. I couldn’t give a flying one about any of it. I could care less what metallic doodads of venerable pedigree have to do with the price of a shish-kebab in Cairo town square. I don’t want to read poorly researched and badly written historical fluff about an Egypt that never was taken from a manuscript that was possibly originally drafted in crayons.

I hated this book worse than some of the verbal spaghetti I’ve trashed on here before because it’s taken a kind of thriller I am a sap for and made me understand completely why some people look down on it and denigrate it. This was the worst book I’ve had pollute my headspace for quite some considerable time. Avoid.

I know a guy, let’s call him Edward, who’s what the world refers to as a winner. He’s, in the words of Bruce Willis via Friends “a real swell guy”. Everyone likes Edward and even those that don’t accept him enough not to confront him with their issues.

The view of the world from inside Edward’s mind is pretty good. Sure, some people have had tough breaks but Edward doesn’t contribute to that, rather he helps make the world a better place in the ways that he can. Edward is trustworthy because Edward trusts and if he can’t trust, he avoids. Edward is pretty sure he deserves all the nice things that happen to him and those few bad breaks he experiences, well, he can soak them up.

Edward is the epitome of the concept that ignorance is bliss. He is the poster boy for cognitive dissonance. He undermines the concept that if “I’m okay” then “You’re okay”. He shows a subtle flaw in the concept that “the meaning of a communication is the response you get from it” because he often gets exactly the response he wants immediately and only later finds out people have lied to him and then run away.

Why is this? Edward only experiences negativity through a very basic type of avoidance. People avoid him when they have made it plain through their actions that they dislike him. It’s a stress reducing tactic, if something’s going to upset you then make sure it’s not on your unblemished horizon. You sail on through the light winds and fair weather and you never see anything to particularly upset you. You never have to deal with being seriously upset.

Of course, this kind of backfires when you absolutely can’t avoid it. People like Edward can get in a real mess if something really hammers them because they, well, they don’t see it coming. And even after it’s been their instinct is to avoid looking at the event and to dwell on something positive.

Having a positive will to boost flagging morale is not a problem. Being blinkered can be fatal.

Now, time for an aphorism. Most of my favourite aphorisms come from one source, the sometimes controversial figure of Thomas J Watson, former CEO of IBM, he summed it up like this:

You don’t hear things that are bad about your company unless you ask. It is easy to hear good tidings, but you have to scratch to get the bad news.

He also made another coment on the same sort of lines to this effect:

Don’t make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.

Although it is impossible to capture the world in a single closed fist Watson makes an important point here. Honesty isn’t always easy, but a friend who has no time to be honest with you has no time to be your friend at all.

In the world of writing this translates to “Anyone who gives your work a good, hard pasting is someone who’s doing you a real big favour”. Actually in the world of anything it translates to “Unless someone has an ulterior motive for critique anyone who offers constructive criticism should be kept nearby at all times”.

This is the thing, if someone’s willing to tell Edward he’s not seeing all the angles and that person has no personal reason to undermine Edward’s sense of how intelligent and perceptive he is then that person is giving Edward the heads up. Edward doesn’t see it like that. Anyone who complains to Edward about Edward is just being unhelpful. Edward feels fine and he’s never made a poor decision in his life. Why think about the possibility that he might be wrong? Why think about the fact that he might have made a mistake? Neither case has ever come up before, why would it start now? Largely he’s been happy with his choices and if poor results have come about from one it was more luck than judgement.

Well, of course, if you refuse to see the flashing red warning light then you’re not going to pay any attention to it. Essentially you’re continuing making a best-informed decision without having all the facts. So… errr… non-informed decisions? uninformed decisions? Whatever.

Edward is real. I did not make him up. He actually believes that things can be entirely good, which is dangerous because that implies that things can be entirely evil too. Neither of these suppositions is true but that doesn’t stop Edward because the news that everything good has bad features and everything bad has good features makes things complicated. Complicated is WHOLLY BAD. So therefore to Edward complicated just doesn’t exist. No one can know any better than Edward and anyone who believes they do is just a tiresome worrier and needs to be set straight.

I hope I’ve done a good job of communicating the value of criticism through this description of someone who just doesn’t want any. Usually people like Edward take any criticism horrendously personally. Edward believes that if you want to tell him something’s wrong with Edward then you want to attack Edward.

I’ve actually experienced both ends of the stick, useless reviews and useless reviewees. The problem is when some clown shoes like Edward decides to tell someone else their opinion or taste is wrong then someone trying to point out to a reviewer that the review fails to deal with the product ‘as is’ gets labelled a whiner.

This post comes out of two things. My continuing state of amazement at Edward’s ability to live in the world without engaging in it on any real level and the question below asking if I’m still doing reviews.

I may not have all the time in the world but understand this people: criticism is enormously important to me. If I can’t find anyone else to criticise something I wrote I’ll have a bloody good try myself. I see it as my duty to pass on the bad stuff to people who ask me to provide it and I find it important to couch that criticism in the mould of: “Here’s what I think you were trying to achieve and this is how close you hit it”.

All other things that are an effect of critique (the fame of the critic for example) are tertiary to this goal. This is why I won’t review things in public (i.e. here) when I don’t believe the author has any desire to hear my opinion on it.

Don’t be like Edward people. Open your eyes wide and find something that’ll make you cry. Dealing with the bad stuff is part of life.

Of course the dramatic post heading refers to Google Analytics which I hooked up to the site at the weekend. I’ve been blogging in blissful ignorance of my visitor stats for years now. I once put some free measuring tool on the domain pre-wordpress but at that time I hadn’t actually even done the relatively little I’ve achieved in the past couple of years. Anyway, someone at work showed me Google Analytics and I ummed and I ahhed and I procrastinated and then I started a project on which I would like to do some analytics (more on which shortly). So after I’d started messing about with the widget on that site I finally got around to adding the tracker to this domain and well… now I am addicted to Analytics.

It’s got graphs. It’s got stats. It’s got a groovy little map which shows you where your traffic comes from. And it’s got breakdowns. In looking at the latter I discovered that some of the people who’ve been paying me a visit (Hello! Hello! Oh, and, hello!) were taking a look at my “Pledge” page. I hadn’t really looked at the text of that page in a while so I thought I’d join them.

I kinda understand now why people employ lawyers. I mean, jeez.

Although the spirit of the pledge remains intact I think that in strict logical sense it leaves a lot to be desired. The statement:

On the day that I am no longer in serious debt, whenever that day may be, all of my profit will be given away because when I have no debt I will have no need for profit from my art. I do not want a country estate, or a Porsche, or a swimming pool. I just want what I have now and to be free from having to owe people money because other people ripped me off.

for example seems to be quite self explanatory. But then you get to the questions. First of all, once I’m out of debt how do I stay out of debt? Or, more precisely, I promise to give away my profits, but what are my profits? Should I become a world famous author how much am I to set my salary at? Do I get incremental pay rises every year subject to me reviewing myself favourably? Or do I have a set stipend and access to further funds if I apply to myself?

The whole thing implies that I will only determine what my “profits” are every year in April. However should I have enough money from this income to earn a wage then in April I assumedly won’t yet have my tax bill. How much can I donate to charity tax free? Also, I’m notoriously picky when it comes to charity donation. Unless I was happy a charity was providing tangible benefit without significant wastage I probably wouldn’t be happy donating to them. If I set up my own charity would that count?

It’s pretty clear that I am referring to the profits of my writing but what about partnerships? Am I counting scripts for projects? Am I counting RPG development? Technical works? Or is it just the novels? I do a lot of different types of writing, the product isn’t always the thing that is written.

A fit of righteous fervour seems to have been counterbalanced by a moment of logical lunacy. I am not even sure what I meant by the words I wrote in the pledge at the time, not more than the vague philanthropic notion that it represents anyway. Perhaps it is a life lesson that since I typed that page 19 months ago my financial position has, if anything worsened, not grown better. I still have no royalties from my books (I haven’t sold enough to make it worthwhile Lulu issuing a royalties cheque). Of course this is pretty much as I expected. If I was to tell you my pledge wasn’t made with these results in mind then I’d be lying. It was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek declaration of the philanthropy I would indulge in if circumstances allowed.

Still, just because my intentions were badly expressed does not make them genuine. I think they just need more definition. Essentially, were it ever an issue, I would take a wage out of my royalties because that’s sensible. Anything surplus to what I require to meet my next goals is profit. I can tell you now what I would like out of life. A business, a wage, a stable, strong family. Anything that is not purposed to acquire those things is profit I don’t need.

As for charity donation. Well I figure as long as the money is transparently being put to some charitable use then who cares how the money gets from me to the worthy cause in question?

I realise that this may seem a bit rich coming from the man with a thousand projects, no money, no time and no real public profile. I reason that however tongue-in-cheek you may make your proclamations when you have very little if you don’t entertain the idea that one day you may have means in any way seriously that’s just one more count against your success and really any reduction in counts against you is needed. I can count the number of people who believe I might have some larger creative worth on the fingers of one hand and I only get to the fourth because I count myself in that number.

So the analytics tool has put me in the position of re-examining my life agenda even as it reflects my low reader numbers. So I’d say a worthwhile end to the business.