The king is a noob

Last summer several friends encouraged me to pick up Crusader Kings II, a video game which, when I had to explain it to my mother, I called a "medieval politics simulator." I have ended up sinking a good amount of time into what Wife and I have simply been calling "Europe," as in, "Have you been in Europe all afternoon?"

Part of the game's appeal is its detailed dramatis personae: you can play as a ruler of almost anywhere, from emperors down to counts, and (at least from 1066 on, I think), all the people you can play as are verified historical personages, with Wikipedia pages and everything. Of course, once you take control history goes off the rails. By the time you've played your first character's heir, and then their heir, and so on for a century or so, things can get pretty fanciful (such as, for example, a continental Cathar Irish Empire, or a Nubian king simultaneously holding the thrones of the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires). It's a game where politics are intensely personal, and some time (not today) I want to get into the ways it demonstrates 1) a game without a set story can still have a strong message; 2) game systems are worldviews; and relatedly, 3) simulation is political. (I've been paying attention to some interesting video game commentary lately that's been feeding into this.)

But right now, I just want to appreciate CK2 as a story generator, and share a few of the imagined lives that have emerged from it. Some characters, especially in the first few generations of any given simulation, I have grown kind of attached to.

Gaudiosa the Cruel, Queen of León

Gaudiosa was my first fictional ruler, the daughter of real-life King of León Alfonso VI. In real history, Alfonso ruled from 1065 to 1109, being briefly deposed by his brother Sancho (King of neighboring Castille) in 1072. He lived to be close to 70, had five wives, a few mistresses, and six children. His eldest daughter and successor married into the house of Burgundy and that was the end of the dynasty.

Things went differently in my game. Taking over Alfonso in 1066 my first move was to get him married to a Byzantine Princess. (I was a little dodgy at this point on how to marry my characters advantageously, so this union didn't do a great deal for him politically but at least it was novel.) Alfonso made war on his brother Sancho at the first opportunity and took over the Kingdom of Castille. He then died suddenly during a celebratory tournament, leaving the crowns of León and Castille to his 3-year-old daughter, Gaudiosa. (On the ruler's death, I stopped playing "as" him and "became" Gaudiosa.)

Gaudiosa was lucky in her guardian, a loyal, upright, and kindly man who taught Gaudiosa her virtues and succeeded in curbing her vices (most troublingly, a penchant for torturing small animals). Unfortunately, he died while Gaudiosa was still young and her next guardian couldn't keep her from developing a sadistic streak. But I tried (and so, by extension, she tried) to remember the mentor of her early youth and grow into an upright ruler.

Much of the politicking of Gaudiosa's regency revolved around trying to arrange a betrothal between her and the heir to the neighboring kingdom of Galicia, which would unite most of the lands that the historical Alfonso VI had managed to rule. The King of Galicia would hear none of it, so Gaudiosa began to court both the king and his heir directly with gifts. There was never a betrothal, but when the young man came of age and came into his inheritance (the one quickly following the other) he agreed to the marriage his father had rejected. There seemed to be something of a love story in it. More pragmatically, their heir nearly inherited a united northern Spain (though in fact, through some genealogical snafu, she inherited a patchwork).

Gaudiosa reigned for fully 70 years. She made frequent (and variously effective) wars on the Muslim Caliphs to her south, and dealt with several peasant revolts. There was an element of tragedy to her epithet, though, because in spite of her best efforts to the contrary she became known as "Gaudiosa the Cruel." Indeed, when you spend your nights lying awake, in a concerted mental effort to not go torture the prisoners in your dungeon, you probably won't be remembered for your gentle spirit.

Dirk V "the Old," and the Rain of the Holy Roman Emperors

Oh Dirk, you sneaky bastard. Dirk V of Holland was also a real person, but his life in my game unfolded quite differently than history. When I took control of him he was a boy of 14, and he spent the rest of his upbringing learning the various combinations of cloak and dagger. Upon coming of age, Dirk was apparently far-and-away the sneakiest man in all the land.

Dirk's liege lord, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich IV, soon invited him to be the royal spymaster, a title which Dirk would hold through the reigns of at least four emperors.

Heinrich IV quickly died a natural death. (His successor kept Dirk in his position as spymaster.) It was only later that Dirk started working on a plan to make Holland independent of the Holy Roman Empire. Doing that, however, would require a weak ruler he could impose his demands on.

Dirk had the realization that, when all of the spooks and scoundrels in the king's service answer to you, it's astonishingly easy to knock off the king himself. Indeed, a beam soon gave way in the rail of a battlement as the emperor took a walk, and his imperial majesty fell to his death. Awkwardly, the carpenter who had weakened the battlement had an attack of conscience and fingered Dirk as the mastermind of the assassination.

Somehow, this didn't have a noticeable impact on Dirk's reputation. The new emperor, in fact, invited Dirk to reprise his role as arch-schemer. Dirk was, after all, the most qualified, and the new emperor may not have shed many tears over the passing of the old one.

Tragically, shockingly, an unknown assailant (it was Dirk) soon pushed the new emperor from a high rampart, and the second consecutive Holy Roman Emperor accelerated into the afterlife at a rate of about 9.8 meters per second squared.

And no one suspected Dirk. One wonders if the Rain of the Holy Roman Emperors might have continued indefinitely, but the next emperor was a child, and so he won the grand prize: ot falling to his death but instead being presented with an ultimatum from various territories seeking independence, led by Duke Dirk of Holland.

Dirk V lived to be known as "The Old." I imagine the epithetiers were alluding to his ability to kill the most powerful man in Christendom twice and somehow still die of natural causes himself.

Aodh the Gentle, King of Ulster

Aodh was a king of the early Irish, a nominally Catholic people who lived as disorganized tribes and were, frankly (and, to be honest, because I enjoyed it this way) barbaric to their neighbors. Aodh, however, was zealous both in his Catholicism and his desire to see his people become more civilized.

As a youth, Aodh suffered from fits that his family interpreted as demonic possession. It provided an interesting bookend to his rule.

Without going into detail about administrative reform, King Aodh succeeded in moving his kingdom into a more organized way of life. He expanded his kingdom, and generally did a pretty good job kinging for most of his life.

Then one day, on a campaign for a war that didn't turn out well (at least, for his allies--Aodh himself was just being neighborly and it wasn't any skin off his nose), Aodh saw a comet and took it as an omen. That's when things started going downhill.

Aodh started hearing a voice, which he became convinced was the voice of Jesus Christ. This in itself was not a disaster for the kingdom: in fact, it might have done Ulster some good. After all, if Jesus were telling you to do things, they would probably be for the benefit of your neighbors, the poor, and so on. Following the advice of the voice in his head, Aodh began living a concertedly virtuous life. He received back into his court an aged concubine who he he had once loved and discarded, now unlovely and consumptive. His love for his lawful wife became the subject of much comment.

The voice became more insistent, as head-voices probably tend to. Aodh drained the royal coffers giving alms, and eventually ended up giving alms on credit. And eventually--finally-- the voice warned him of the scheming of bishops and cardinals around him, and Aodh broke with the Catholic Church to follow what seemed to him a simpler faith.

In his time as king, Aodh had made enemies, but he had never antagonized anyone on the scale of professing heresy. All his neighbors pounced, raising arms against him as a heathen. Aodh's allies, and he had a few, would not move to help him--kill real Christians to protect a heretical madman? Never. Suddenly Ulster stood alone, it seemed, against the whole Christian world.

That would soon have been the end of Aodh, Ulster, and the nascent Irish state, if not for something that could itself have been divine providence: King Aodh died peacefully in bed, at what everyone agreed was a reasonable age. The crown passed to his son, an uncontroversial Catholic. The armies arrayed against Ulster collectively blinked, muttered a few awkward and insincere apologies, and returned home.

How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

The week of this Thanksgiving I visited my family up in Long Island. It happened to be the final week of NaNoWriMo (or ShoStoWriMo, in my case), with me planning on busing back to Maryland on the 30th, meaning I would have to either hit 50,000 words a day early (unlikely) or cross the finish line in transit. I would be getting home so late that trying to get in a day's writing after I arrived would surely tempt the wrath of the muses, and possibly defy logistics outright.

The day before I left--a day which I had earmarked for a long push in an involved freelance project--my laptop began acting sickly, clicking and stalling and generally toying with the idea of becoming a brick. I was able to do some necessary work in Safe Mode, and then I spent my first day with my parents like this:

I didn't intend this picture to be a selfie when I took it, but there I am. As might be gathered, I was not feeling too great myself at the moment, a heating pad wrapped around my neck like a brace. The bus ride up north was pretty nice as these things went, but it had left me pretty sore and I probably had a cold too.

What my computer is doing in this picture is mostly magic to me, but I did find a way to conceptualize what I think it was doing and explain it to my parents:

Inside my computer lives a cloistered monk, in the medieval style. He sits at his table with a quill and ink, and a massive tome containing all the information on my computer. When I ask my computer to do anything, this monk finds the information I want through a convoluted series of cross-references, or else writes whatever else I want to record wherever he can find enough white space on the nearest page.

In the centuries of computer time that have passed since 2008, this tome has been through a lot. Some of the pages have been marred by water and others by fire. Vandals got in on a few occasions and their additions have been meticulously crossed out. But in all that clutter lately my dutiful monk has spent more time squinting at certain hard-to-decipher passages than he has actually doing what I ask him to do.

So the work my monk is doing here, if I understand the process correctly, is to go through the entire book, from one end to the next, and wherever he finds a page or line that is hard to read, to figure out to his satisfaction what it actually says and then re-write it clearly on the blank pages in the back of the book.

Anyway, that was how I described the process to my parents and to myself, and it made me less likely to rail against fate for how long the process actually took--four or five hours. There's a lot of data in this computer but that monk can scribble pretty fast.

Whether or not I had it right, the process revivified my computer. I still kept the computer in Safe Mode while I worked; I was walking on eggshells. (And if hearing that makes you want to bang your head against the wall, rest assured I suffered for my ignorance... I think. Read on?)

So in the last four days of November I put out almost 15,000 words. Ironically I think these were some of the best words I had gotten down the whole month. My graph, courtesy of Nanowrimo.org, ended up looking like this:

With the highlighted part happening at my parents' house. The days on either side were spent on buses. The day in the middle was Thanksgiving.

It seems a shame not to mention Thanksgiving itself, but the day was not the stuff good stories are made of. My extended family was good company and all the food turned out well. I discovered that my father actually prefers marshmallows on his sweet potatoes, which I had previously dismissed out of hand as a barbaric custom, but beyond that what's to tell?

When I got on the bus to go home and settle in for my final lap of the month's writing, I discovered that the last 10,000 words or so of the project were gone.

Why? I'm not certain. Did they refuse to save because I had been working in Safe Mode? Perhaps, but that doesn't some things that didn't disappear but should have. I don't have a better theory, anyway. Maybe the end of story number 4 and the beginning of story number 5 are still knocking around inside my computer, but they are beyond the reach of my own feeble magics. To adapt an old saw, God and I were both there when I wrote the first draft, but I fear that now God has the only copy.

But I'm taking credit for the words because dammit, I wrote them.

As I said, this was intensely frustrating because I think what I lost consisted of some of the best writing I had done that month, including several thousand words of Robert E. Howard pastiche that felt (I'll probably never know how they stand up to rereading) pretty spot-on. Luckily, I do think I remember enough of the content and the feel that the stories themselves won't be lost to the world.

The five short stories, for the curious, are as follows:

1 - Three Go players try to slip out of human space to play a game with an enigmatic race and prove that human beings have souls.

2 - In a world crisscrossed by traveling storytellers, one boy in a village that executes them as blasphemers becomes obsessed with what he's missing out on.

3 - Humans develop humanlike AI and promptly find a way to have sex with it. One programmer wants more.

4 - When a nigh-omniscient computer takes on the utilitarian calculus of governing a country, its citizens come to worship it as God and set out to conquer the rest of the world. An ambassador visits their capitol to sue the computer for peace.

5 - An author with a telepathic link to a sword-and-sorcery hero tries his darnedest to kill the character off.

Anyway, it was a fun month and an... exciting last week.

My novel is shrinking!

I think it's because Girlfriend isn't here this weekend, and I don't have anyone to look busy for, that I've done such prodigious procrastinating these last two days. I came into the weekend with three hours of writing to do and have only just, only now, starting it, at 6 o'clock on Sunday evening. Some days this situation might bother me; tonight I feel pretty writerly.

Self-indulgence can be energizing or enervating. Most recently I've been indulging myself by reading about writing again--this time reading The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. Reading about how to write is a drug for the aspiring writer--so I suspect--but it's a stimulant, and my system has been clear of it more or less since I set down my Orson Scott Card writing books last year, so it packs a kick. With any luck I can ride it past the end of this post.

One point that Keyes makes is that good writing is clear. He does not go quite so far as to say--but he comes close to saying--that writing well is as easy as thinking something interesting and then communicating it in words.

I'd been rediscovering this myself as I edit Hengist and Undine again, for what I once again hope is the last time. My last edit did not go well, as I confessed at the time, and I put it aside for a good while, and accomplished some things in the interim. But I think at least part of what went wrong last time was that I spent my time embellishing the words on the page, rather than improving my communication of the story. I had inadvertently turned it into a book about words.

As I've been editing, I've been remembering what's actually happening in the book--or what should be happening. I've been paring away some of my lexical and syntactic indulgences. In a few places, and all places I am pleased with so far, I have expanded on scenes, fleshing things out where time has "revealed" more about the characters and cultures of my story. I had hoped that this might happen more often, and my book (then 88,000 words long) would expand like it did from its first rewrite (from a mere 50,000 words) to assume a respectable epic heft. Instead I find that nearly everything, at this point, is mostly improved by shortening.

To my horror, the draft has been gradually shrinking in spite of my efforts to bolster it. A third of the way into the draft, the manuscript is a little over 1,000 words shorter, in spite of the addition of at least that much new material.

I realize that part of what frightens me is that as my book creeps steadily closer in length to The Last Unicorn than Knife of Dreams, I expect more to be expected of me. Who do I think I am, asking people to buy my skinny little book? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Ezra Pound? Of course such anxiety is foolish and insulting to everyone involved. And if the leaders in my weight class are too light on their feet for me, the solution certainly isn't to pack on fat until I can enjoy more sluggish competition--no doubt that is an invitation for the worst kind of percussive enlightenment.

So I expect that Hengist and Undine, when it is finished, will be 85,000 words long.