November 2004 Archives

Thanksgiving weekend is almost over, so Christmas is in full swing, as far as the television networks are concerned. My family is spending its last night before the flight home watching some smarmy holiday special, starring Peter Falk as an angel meddling in the lives, arranging happy endings for second-rate actors. I wouldn’t mention it at all, were it not for the subtext running through my head as we watch.

See, I like In Nomine a lot, enough to read and reread over a dozen or so rulebooks and supplements in the line. In Nomine is an RPG devoted to the theme of an ongoing war between heaven and hell, using human lives to keep score. And, since I’ve studied the game setting with such relish, I find myself viewing all angelic material through its lens. This can be a problem: it distorts how I absorb actual angelic mythology in preparing for Fairyland, unless I persistently remind myself to keep a sense of perspective. On the other hand, it makes stupid programs far more interesting, because the transparent characters of a Christmas special become so much more layered and complex.

Suddenly, Falk isn’t a saccharine do-gooder; he’s a Mercurian serving Yves, Archangel of Destiny. When his methods develop logical loopholes, I can now ascribe such incongruities to his choir and servitor dissonance restrictions. His fussbudget supervisor isn’t a simple foil, she becomes one of Yves’s Seraphim. And when she begins losing control of herself, it isn’t for cheap comic relief; it’s because she’s becoming dissonant, having violated her seraphic nature by lying. It’s built into her very nature. Her arguments with Falk aren’t cut-and-paste dialogue; they’re symptomatic of the differences of grand perspective between Seraphim and Mercurians, and between old and young angels. I can amuse myself by working out which Demon Prince would most like to interfere with the angelic program, and trying to pick his demonic agents out of the crowd of bit parts. My money is on the bully kid at the babysitting service, though Sally’s boss, with his appeals to profit and job responsibility, might be under the thumb of one of Mammon’s Habbalah.

Watching this way is sort of like taking Star Trek shots, or making smartass comments along with Mystery Theater 3000. The only problem is that the jokes make sense to a much smaller demographic. Well, that and the fact that it proves my irrecoverable geekdom.

My family is in the TV room, enjoying a good Thanksgiving food coma; I’m here in the computer room, fighting the food coma to stay in practice with my writing. Lousy deal for me, eh? Well, just a quick word on the Buddhist monastery down the street.

That it exists at all is the most remarkable part. This is down the street from my parents’ house, planted firmly in the corn belt. (My folks rent out 15 of their 20 acres to a corn and soybean farmer.) It’s not territory wherein one would expect to find enough Buddhists to support a monastery. But there it stands, with a big, gold-painted arch at the driveway, lettered in a weird, pseudo-Burmese font. I appreciate that archway sign, because it’s the only indication of anything unusual at all. Otherwise, the property is an unassuming little farm: a few barns, a grain silo, a yellow house near the front, a second-hand car in the drive.

And isn’t that what a monastery is supposed to be? A quiet spot removed from the world? And, to be removed from the world, it needs to make a fair stab at self-sufficiency, so a farm is almost axiomatic. It scarcely differs from the medieval abbeys, apart from the relative sophistication of the rest of the world. Once, monasteries were islands of literacy and systematic industry in the remains of a disintegrating civilization. Now, they’re hard-pressed to find anywhere distant from the relentless expansion of civilization. Already, my parents complain of the sprawl of subdivisions rolling out of Rockford. How much more, then, must the monks feel the pinch?

I voted Democrat this election. The results were a terrible disappointment, though not much of a surprise.

About ten days ago, I learned of a website called “Sorry Everybody” at sorryeverybody.com. Ten days later, it's still on my desktop. It is a collection of 5000+ pictures and growing, mostly apologies from Americans to the world for the re-election of George Bush. Some of them are quite moving, especially the ones from anti-Bush Republicans and the messages of support from outside the country.

(If you feel yourself likely to be angered by this site, hey, don’t go. It’s not meant to generate anger or divide anyone any further into hostile camps. If you absolutely must go, at least read the FAQ first. That should go a long way to defusing any rancor.)

I’ve spent a lot of time lately surrounded by like-minded voters, at Fiddler’s Green, among my gaming friends, with my writers’ group, with my wife, and through the media I frequent. While wary of the danger of climbing into an “echo chamber,” reflecting my own political views back at me, I am reassured that so many Americans are aware of the larger world, and refuse to sacrifice the world’s welfare to American pride. I don’t know what picture to submit, but I do know what I’d like to say. These statements don’t cover all my thoughts on the election; they just cover those sentiments which would be appropriate to the site, condensed to a manageable – or almost manageable – size.

I’m sorry that so many of us mistake aggression for patriotism.
I’m sorry that so many of us mistake self-righteousness for morality.
I’m sorry that so many of us mistake tyranny for security.
I’m sorry that the right to choose must include the right to be terribly wrong.

Sent a proposal to Joe Sanders this morning for “The Sandman Papers.” I’ve been wrestling with the question of just what my thesis is for five days, now, and I’m finally satisfied that I have one. Readers unfamiliar with the Sandman comic series may want to tune out – no, scratch that; readers unfamiliar with the comic should go out and get familiar with it, right now. It is time well-spent.

The big question that held me up was whether Morpheus actually wins his challenge for Nada. On one level, he fails, since he only gets the key to the gates of hell. On another, he succeeds, since the key then draws Nada’s soul, held hostage by Azazel, to him. But then, having freed Nada, Morpheus is still destroyed by events growing out of his challenge: he meets Nuala, who calls him from the Dreaming as the Furies attack; he learns something of Destruction, the search for whom also precipitates the final murder of Orpheus; he earns a debt from Loki, who therefore seeks to destroy him. And yet, if Morpheus is destroyed by his challenge, it may be just what he wants. Death suggests as much.

So does Morpheus win where Azazel loses, or do both lose their challenges? The complications of Morpheus’s death wish finally cleared up when I realized Sunday afternoon that he is determined to free Nada even at the cost of his own destruction or imprisonment. He explains as much to his servants before approaching Lucifer. Ta-da! Problem solved: Nada is free, so Morpheus wins, despite the price he pays.

Now to settle down to writing the paper.

Sent a proposal to Joe Sanders this morning for “The Sandman Papers.” I’ve been wrestling with the question of just what my thesis is for five days, now, and I’m finally satisfied that I have one. Readers unfamiliar with the Sandman comic series may want to tune out – no, scratch that; readers unfamiliar with the comic should go out and get familiar with it, right now. It is time well-spent.

The big question that held me up was whether Morpheus actually wins his challenge for Nada. On one level, he fails, since he only gets the key to the gates of hell. On another, he succeeds, since the key then draws Nada’s soul, held hostage by Azazel, to him. But then, having freed Nada, Morpheus is still destroyed by events growing out of his challenge: he meets Nuala, who calls him from the Dreaming as the Furies attack; he learns something of Destruction, the search for whom also precipitates the final murder of Orpheus; he earns a debt from Loki, who therefore seeks to destroy him. And yet, if Morpheus is destroyed by his challenge, it may be just what he wants. Death suggests as much.

So does Morpheus win where Azazel loses, or do both lose their challenges? The complications of Morpheus’s death wish finally cleared up when I realized Sunday afternoon that he is determined to free Nada even at the cost of his own destruction or imprisonment. He explains as much to his servants before approaching Lucifer. Ta-da! Problem solved: Nada is free, so Morpheus wins, despite the price he pays.

Now to settle down to writing the paper.

Eileene is watching old episodes of Good Eats, a cooking show we both enjoy. Eileene likes the humor, such as it is; I like the way Alton Brown stops to show you what food looks like when it’s gone wrong. Television cooks usually just show you the film where everything goes just right. It helps a lot more to have an instructor say things like, “If it’s boiling this hard, the temperature is too high,” and, “This is what happens to noodles that aren’t placed in enough water.”

I bring this up because one of these backlog episodes is on tomatoes, and how fresh, garden tomatoes are the culinary pinnacle of summer. Which is ironic, as I just brought in our last batch of home-grown a week ago.

This has been my third attempt at growing my own tomatoes, and my track record to date has been quite poor, even for someone who started knowing zilch about gardening. The first year, I decided up front that nothing good would come of the attempt: whatever dangers lurk for an ignorant gardener, I would find them, probably several at once, and the plants would die. Then I could apply all that hands-on training to another crop. The plan worked; I grew no tomatoes. I started too late, mistaking the date for transplanting baby tomato plants for the date to plant seeds. I planted them too close together – not my fault, since the seed envelope had a typo. The plants should be about 2’ apart; mine were spaced at 2”.

The second year went much better, in the sense of actually getting tomatoes out of the deal. The plants got off to a strong start, though three suddenly toppled, as though lopped off by an errant golf club. Dad explained that it was probably the work of “cut worms.” I’d never heard of these devils before, but these beetle larvae lurk just below the surface, and climb out to eat about one eighth of an inch of plant, right at the ground level. I had five surviving plants, and they weren’t heavy producers, but I had several promising fruits…until some neighborhood animal sensed I was ready to pick them, and gnawed through them all. Ultimately, I got only two tomatoes, one the size of a tennis ball, the other the size of a golf ball. They were mighty tasty. Worth the effort? I dunno.

The third year went better still. The soil sifted for larvae, and the patch caged by chicken wire, the seedlings raised in our sun room, the plants practically exploded out of the ground. Though they were slow to blossom, we eventually got enough flowers to promise great results.

Then the tomatoes started to rot, somewhere around the pink stage when they just start to ripen and the green pigments vanish, but the red ones have yet to arrive. I don’t know why. We only got five good, red tomatoes this summer.

And then, as though in a desperate attempt to reproduce in the face of 50ºF temperatures, the plants began popping out tomatoes like crazy somewhere around the end of September. We’ve got two bags of the things on the dining table, refusing to ripen. Alton Brown says a banana produces plenty of some gas that acts as a ripening agent, so one bag has a banana in it. The other is our control case for the experiment. Neither bag has shown any real sign of ripening, though the banana was certainly encouraged by the tomatoes.

So that’s the lesson for today: if you have any bananas that need speed ripening, put them in a brown paper bag in a sunny location with some green tomatoes. Don’t ask me why it works that way; I can’t even grow tomato plants properly.

Today I began work on a paper for submission to “The Sandman Papers,” a book of essays examining the Sandman, edited by Joe Sanders. I’m just going to take a baby step from my new area of expertise, to examine the parallel challenges from Season of Mists. Morpheus, goaded by his siblings, first challenges Lucifer for the soul of a mortal lover. Later, the demon Azazel challenges Morpheus in turn for the key to the gates of hell. There are numerous similarities between these challenges, but one glaring difference: Morpheus eventually gains satisfaction, and frees his Nada, his lover, while Azazel not only fails to get the key, but loses two prisoners and its freedom in the bargain.

Whether Gaiman intended so strong a parallel or not – and I feel he must have – the success of one and failure of the other make the two attempts read as a “do-and-don’t” list of how to go about confronting a deity.

Before I can really sit down to the keyboard, of course, I need to study the source material very, very carefully. Not just Season of Mists, but The Kindly Ones as well, since just how successful we judge Morpheus to be depends on how much importance we attach to his ultimate fate. So many events stemming directly from the key figure in Morpheus’s demise that we have to wonder how far Lucifer may have engineered it. If Lucifer did mastermind Morpheus’s destruction, then the lord of the Dreaming can only have won a partial victory.

It’s interesting how much more you see when you force yourself to read word by word. I have to be careful, or I'll start seeing things that aren't really there.

In researching Fariyland, I naturally read a great many books. Anyone wanting to learn more about Fairyland, or just to check my scholarship, might want to read what I found most helpful. This list is meant to highlight sources that particularly influenced me, and why. It is not currently presented in any particular order, but it will grow with time, and I may need to arrange things somehow later.

Readers may notice that classics like the brothers Grimm, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and the epic of Gilgamesh are (currently) absent. This is not because the classics are overrated, but simply because they are well known. Anyone deeply enough into folklore to be reading this page already has at least a dim awareness of King Arthur, and can easily find him on the shelves of any sizeable book store. For this list to be really helpful, it needs to point your attention towards less obvious treasures.

Despite the title of this page, not everything will be reading material. I drew from as broad a selection of stories as possible, and a few appeared originally outside of print. (Alas, only a few. Too many movies and radio or television shows of Fairyland are simply adaptations of books, or of even earlier oral traditions captured in books.)

Enjoy!
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Spells of Enchantment. Jack Zipes, ed. © Jack Zipes, 1991. Published by the Penguin Group. ISBN 0-670-83053-4

This volume takes fairy tales from many periods and presents them in chronological order, starting with Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche,” and progressing right through Philip K. Dick and Tanith Lee. This presentation gives the reader a great view of the evolution of the fairy tale. I was fortunate to find this book early in my readings; an outline of trends in fairy tales let me concentrate on periods that produced stories with a strong sense of (super)natural law, and avoid wasting too much time on meandering romances or fantasies with magical beasts lacking any cunning whatsoever. (I read some of these, too, of course, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.)

The tone of the stories ranges from wistful fantasies to pity morality plays, from high art to low humor. It is outstanding as a sampler of fairy tales.

Ingeborg Bachmann’s “The Smile of the Sphinx” was a gift for A Survivor’s Guide to Fairyland, a beautiful demonstration of Rule 25: there are larger games than yours. In this parable on the dangers of science divorced from humanistic perspective, the Sphinx comes to a kingdom and asks three riddles of its king: what is in the earth, what is over the earth, and what is in the people you rule? Desperate to avert the monster’s wrath and save his subjects, the king commands his scholars to Herculean efforts to find the answers. They ultimately succeed, but only at the price of dissecting the people for exhaustive analysis. The king answers all three riddles, at which point, he and his kingdom, destroyed at his own command, are spared whatever ruination the Sphinx may have visited upon it herself. The Sphinx then merely smiles and leaves.

Until I came upon this story, the only arguments I had for larger games than yours were literally dozens of stories that all read the same: the devil spares a mortal soul in his thrall, knowing it works far more evil on the earth than it could suffering in hell. A good point, but somewhat obvious, and thoroughly hackneyed. The malicious subtlety of the Sphinx is far more menacing, and far more instructive. It also cheered me to find a concrete example proving Bill Willingham’s Thessaliad comic book series wrong: the Sphinx is not a paper tiger condemned to ask the same damn riddle forever. Don’t underestimate a monster just because you’ve heard of it being defeated once.

Also, don’t miss James Thurber’s “The Girl and the Wolf,” originally from Tales for Our Time. No, I’m not going to tell you. Go read it.

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi. Hayao Miyazaki, director. Studio Ghibli; distributed in the US by Walt Disney Studios as "Spirited Away".

As mentioned above, good movie sources are hard to come by. Movie monsters that do more than butcher teenagers or demolish Tokyo almost always first appear elsewhere. In this wonderful exception, Chihiro, unhappy about moving to a new town, loses her parents when they get lost and stop to look around. Ignoring Chihiro’s misgivings, they enter fairyland and offend the witch Yubaba by helping themselves to a banquet, and are transformed into pigs. Chihiro must sell herself into service to Yubaba to have any hope of winning them back.
The movie is noteworthy in its absence of direct antagonism. The magical creatures aren’t out to get Chihiro; they just have their own agenda to pursue. Witness the confiscation of Chihiro’s name to represent power over her, the importance of food as a bond, and the warning not to look back as she eventually exits fairyland.

"Not Long Before the End," and related stories by Larry Niven.

In the short story “Not Long Before the End” and several sequels – short stories and novels – Niven postulates that magic is fueled by a non-renewable natural resource, and examines what impact this natural (supernatural?) law would have. Although these stories do little to examine the social laws of fairyland, they are excellent explorations of the idea that magic should be governed by any laws at all. “The Three Wishes” was particularly inspiring in its treatment of a genie’s generosity as a ritualized game. Other titles to watch for are “What Good is a Glass Dagger,” The Burning City (with Jerry Pournelle),The Magic Goes Away, The Magic May Return (collection), and More Magic (collection).

On the trip home from Minneapolis, I had no book to read. (I had foolishly taken only one along and surprised myself by reading it entirely on the trip there.) Frankly, I doubt I had the energy to read anything, anyway. So I spent the bulk of both flights leaning my head against the window and watching the world go by.

I used to think city lights and road networks were pretty at night. At 27,000 feet, you can just barely distinguish features the size of a large shed. Noise and pollution and the problems of daily life are invisible. The world in miniature looks like the handiwork of some master craftsman. A town is beautiful.

A town is beautiful. Mile upon mile of towns, not so much. The entire flight corridor from Minneapolis to Milwaukee to Newark, apart from twenty minutes over Lake Michigan, passes over an unbroken stretch of towns. They crowd too closely; none of them quite ends before the next picks up. There is no dark velvet of empty land for the city lights to stand against, like diamonds against a bad metaphor, or inky depths into which the highways can vanish. Lift your gaze higher in the airplane window, and you can see the little cities stretching away, appearing flatter and flatter toward the horizon, but never thinning out.

You can see it on those satellite maps, too. You know, the ones that photograph the light emitted over a country or continent? Those lights used to look like spider webs, gently tracing out the borders with coastal towns and major routes radiating from Chicago and St. Louis. Now – and it can’t be more than forty years of growth since the dawn of satellite photography – they look more like cancerous growths, blots where somebody spilled white ink all over the Boston-DC axis.

The real ugliness lies in the realization that under that light lies pavement. It wasn’t too long ago that I watched a news clip warning of the shrinkage of unpaved space, not for the loss of natural habitats, but simply for the loss of somewhere rain water could sink into the earth. We’re already straining abusing our existing water supply. What happens when we cut off its source? What happens when rain runoff is too poisoned with petrochemicals to be useful?

I don’t usually trust alarmist reports very far. Population explosions and ozone depletion are plotted as exponential curves depicting what will happen if the trend continues indefinitely. Trends like that don’t, because they develop slowly and continuously. We don’t suddenly wake up fifty years hence and discover we can only feed half the world; food slowly gets scarcer, and births decline. Ready oil deposits are drained, and the price of oil rises as we pull it from increasingly difficult sources, and demand falls. Forests start to vanish, and wood becomes more expensive, until it becomes economical to replant them. The longer we take to smell the coffee, the worse things become, but never to the point of catastrophe. Desertification is different, though, in that it operates on a vicious cycle. As water dries up, the plants necessary to maintain the water table thin out and, ultimately, vanish. There’s a built-in catastrophe at the point where desertification becomes self-sustaining. And then we’re screwed. It’s already happened, too, on a small scale in the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, and an intermediate scale in nations around the Sahara. We could wake up and smell the coffee too late.

Asymptotes are a bitch. I guess science can, occasionally, spoil an appreciation of beauty, after all.

We have just returned from a lovely convention devoted to the Sandman comic series. The final event, in keeping with tradition, was a grand discussion panel with all the guests at once. In that discussion, Neil Gaiman raised the matter of how many stories had been left untold: from what great labor had Dream just come, that he could be so trapped in the first issue? What was the nature of Despair’s death and reincarnation? How did Delight become Delirium? In pointing out these untold stories, he was hinting that he might write them some day, and was, to some degree, fishing for what the fans would like to see.

The audience, being fans, showed all the interest you might expect. There was an excited murmur as each question was raised, a manifest desire to see these stories told, as well. Any true fan would want to read all of them. But interest was clearly strongest in Delirium, perhaps because a visible slice of Sandman’s fan base identifies with Delirium, perhaps because Gaiman was playing so coy. He had indeed decided why Delight had become Delirium, but refused to share the information.

This was Big Stuff. This was a Secret, something Gaiman wouldn’t even share with his collaborators, not even illustrator Jill Thompson, who was with him at the moment the reason for Delight’s transformation popped into his head, not even though Thompson pleaded him with a fangirl intensity that had not died in the familiarity of working alongside Gaiman. Of course the audience wanted to know. Right then, if not sooner. Tell us. Initiate us into the inner circle of worshippers. Share the secrets you have trusted to no one else. And in that expectant pause, I had a moment of clarity. It took the form of an image from Sandman itself.

In Fables and Reflections, Cain and Abel host an impromptu tea party, complete with an exchange of tales. Cain tells of parliaments of rooks, wherein the birds congregate around one member, listen to him, and either take flight or tear him apart…and no one knows why. Abel spoils the mystery: the lone rook is telling a story, and the parliament’s response is a judgment on the tale. For this affront, Cain slays Abel – again – savaging him with a fireplace poker and shoving the body head-first into the fireplace itself. And as he does so, Cain explains it’s all for his brother’s good, that murder may help Abel learn a lesson before spoiling a mystery really gets him into trouble. “It's the mystery that endures, not the explanation. A good mystery can last forever...Nobody really cares who-done-it. They'll peck you to pieces if you tell them, little brother.”

Knowledge preceded understanding; the unbidden image popped into my head before I asked myself any questions like, “Which of these stories should be written first?” or “Should they be written at all?” But once the image of Cain and Abel did appear, I considered, and agreed. The genesis of Delirium is a mystery, and should remain one.

Can I justify Gaiman keeping the mystery to himself, when I reached the conclusion through inspiration rather than reason?

It’s hard to imagine Gaiman admirers pecking him to death, literally or metaphorically, even if the origin of Delirium turns out to be a lousy story. (It could. Even Homer nods.) For one thing, they’re really a sweet bunch, taken as a group. More importantly, fans like to be told everything. All at once, please, just as soon as you can, even if it isn’t much good. I know many Tolkien lovers who disliked the Silmarillion, but none who regret that it was written at all, or even that they had read it. The origin of Delirium would obviously sell, so there would be no money lost. Gaiman’s reputation is strong enough to survive a weak story here and there.

Nor is Delirium’s origin likely to be a lousy story. It will probably be terrific. Not everything Gaiman writes is terrific, but most of it is. He’s very, very good. And he loves the art of storytelling far too much to sacrifice it to mere curiosity. No, not even for the fans to whom he gives so generously of himself. I would want to read it, too.

So why on earth shouldn’t he write a comic on Delirium’s origin? And, if he truly shouldn’t, why should I feel he could safely write more of Dream and Despair?
Well, two reasons, perhaps. One, I trust Gaiman to pick fertile ground for a story far more than I trust his adoring fans. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and it is kind of him to poll his readers, but appreciating the magic Gaiman works doesn’t mean you can do it yourself. Second, there’s that sense of identity. I saw a lot of red and orange hair dye in that crowd, and there were plenty of Deliria at the costume ball the night before, but nobody dressed after the fashion of Despair.

Everyman characters – Charlie Brown, for example, or Homer Simpson – are simple for a reason. Detail interferes with identity. We all feel distracted at times, confused by the world around us, part of a group whose members show more sense of direction and self-control than ourselves. Portraying Delirium as a wild-eyed young woman with flaming hair reinforces her attraction for young women who feel out of sorts with mainstream society, but simultaneously distances Her from everyone else. Every character trait we learn of Delight is a chance to feel, “Oh, I’m not much like her after all.” The more profound the trait, the more likely it is to break a sense of identity. And that which can change a god-like being must certainly be profound. I fear that giving readers who are deeply into Delirium’s character what they want will be a very different thing from giving them what they will like.

Feel free to send me questions, commentary, etc.

Thank you for your interest!

www.mdlake.net

Okay, we made it to Fiddler’s Green without significant mishap. The nerves are gone, helped by a hefty dose of exhaustion. Waking at 3:30 for an early flight can take a lot of steam out of anxiety. Now there only remains the difficult task of selling myself, without the panic.

My experience so far is that the attendees are very pleasant, chatty but subdued. Many wear black as a sort of membership badge. They compare favorably with the regulars at game conventions, which I more regularly attend. The Gaiman fans have more sophisticated social skills.

This is good, in a way. It’s easier to approach them. I’ve actually opened conversations with three strangers, rather than sinking into my usual habit of letting someone else – in this case, Eileene – do the talking, and interjecting only when I have something significant to add. On the other hand, anyone more socially aware than gamers require some small talk warmup, so I’m sort of out of my depth. There’s a decidedly liberal bent here, so I’m safe using the politics as an opener. We’re still stinging from the presidential race. Last night, Neil Gaiman read a short story to us in place of the scheduled Nancy’s Boys excerpt. He introduced it as a story written for his daughter’s eighteenth birthday, a year and a half late, fuelled by election frustration. (When down in the dumps, he feels, one should make good art.)

I’m setting my schedule around the mythological events as much as possible, missing comic book topics when necessary. People sitting around me are more likely to be interested in Fairyland that way.

The advertising has begun. We printed personal cards and pamphlets for distribution at the Fiddler’s Green convention this weekend. They are plain, but tidy, and nice to look at. At least, nice for me to look at. It’s hard to avoid a thrill at seeing your own name under a book title.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a bit less thrill. Eileene is delighted at the whole process. She’s the one with the skill to assemble graphics and text, and to manage a web site (amateur-friendly Moveable Type notwithstanding). She’s excited to be part of the process. I, on the other hand, have a bad case of nerves. It isn’t really fear, at least not at a conscious level, but an unfocused anxiety I get before performing. Stage fright. I’m going to be trying to sell my book, and to some degree myself, to people in the publishing community. When I put it out of my mind, I’m merely nervous. When I imagine you readers out there looking at even these harmless paragraphs, my hands…well, they don’t shake, exactly, but my typing gets awfully jerky.

I went with a public domain graphic of a sphinx for the pamphlet, a Greek urn version of the sphinx, not the Egyptian monument. It would never have occurred to me on my own, but when I saw it in a list of graphics, a sphinx made a lot of sense. It’s a readily recognizable figure of myth, and the most famous of riddlers. (Well, Bilbo and Gollum are better known these days, but they aren’t public domain. And Odin is a riddler who might be more famous, but not famous as a riddler. But I digress.) Though I enter the publishing phase with an open mind, prepared to take any suggestions an established professional may offer, I think I’d like to keep a sphinx on the cover of the real printing.

The inner two pages of the pamphlet contain a condensed version of the introductory chapter. I wanted to clip out cautions about sources, but found that what remained was still too large for a single sheet, so several paragraphs of flavor text had to go, too. A shame, but anyone interested can read the entire first chapter here at mdlake.net, since the address is on the brochure.

The back page is the Rules themselves. That isn’t giving away the store, is it?

What on earth is Mike doing here? He is not a poet damned with a poet’s eyes, nor even a writer’s soul. He has the soul of an editor, much more comfortable with refining existing material than with producing something original. He did not know at an early age that he had a book somewhere deep in his guts, yearning to come out. He doesn’t follow web journals. He did not major in English Lit, but mathematics. These are not promising grounds for books on Fairyland and entertaining essays.

Mike likes games. Lots of different kinds of games – board games, role-playing games, computer games, anything that explores the question of how to get the most out of a situation while someone else (or many someone elses) are operating at cross purposes to one’s own. That’s how he got into just about everything he’s ever done.

He’s studied math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rockford College, and the University of Illinois, because math homework always had the best puzzles. His graduate work is in optimization theory, of which games theory is a prominent branch. He’s also read a lot of history, because the rise and fall of empires, merchant princes, and great battles are all games writ large.

He attends at least two gaming conferences a year, sometimes more. He typically writes and runs two adventures for each.

He currently plays a Dungeons and Dragons campaign weekly, though he desperately wants to talk his fellow players into using a different system.

He squanders his free time on computer strategy games. Civilization, Zeus, and Age of Empires figure heavily in this wastefulness.

He has just written a book on natural and social law of Fairyland, and hopes to find an editor. He started the project out of curiosity about ritualized games found in folk tales, though the book grew and changed even as he researched.

That the book was finished at all is due to his lovely wife, Eileene, who kicks his literary ass when needed, maintains this web site, and helps host a monthly round of board games with friends. They have neither pets nor children, though Mike does look longingly at dogs they pass in the park.

I did not begin this book as a writer, but as a reader. This is the book I would have liked to read five years ago, but couldn’t find.

I had just read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic anthology. Some episodes were riveting, others less so. What held my interest, more than anything else, was the attention Gaiman paid to the formality of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming and title character, in his dealings with other beings of myth. He painstakingly acknowledges every debt and obligation, and speaks with the care of someone negotiating a legal contract. He even warns Lucifer of his intent to challenge the prince of hell, because seeking the advantage of surprise simply wouldn’t be proper.

A circuit closed in my brain after I set Sandman down. I remembered “Riddles in the Dark,” the famous chapter of The Hobbit wherein Bilbo engages Gollum in a ritual riddle contest. Tolkien takes a moment aside to tell the reader that the riddle game had sacred rules, ancient even in the hobbit’s day, which even evil creatures feared to break. I remembered Larry Niven’s “The Wishing Game,” a tale of the wizard Clubfoot challenging a djinn to give him three wishes. Niven describes the djinn pausing to remember the ancient rules of the game. I was dimly aware of other ritual contests: the shape-changing duel, the impossible task, combat between champions. But although writers would mention the ancient and sacred rules to these contests, nobody really wanted to say what the rules actually were.

So I went out to find the book that would tell me, and came back empty-handed. There were a few near misses, but nothing that really catalogued the ancient rules. That’s the book I set out to write.

The first thing to do, of course, was research. I started reading every book of folktales I could lay my hands on, with a heavy leavening of modern fantasy. Two problems soon surfaced.

One: while there were a few stories of game-like contests – like the shape-changing duel – there weren’t all that many. Trying to discern a comprehensive list of rules from them would be like trying to divine the rules of baseball after watching a dozen games. Two: the stories didn’t always agree in their details. Some riddle contests, like Bilbo’s, involved a continuing exchange. Others, like the Sphinx, ended after the first question. Sometimes the challenger asked the question; other times he answered. Riddles meant different things to Vikings than to Zen monks. Now felt like I was trying to divine the rules of professional baseball by watching a dozen casual sandlot games. I could only resolve these problems by looking for broader, more over-arching similarities.

The longer I sought consistent rules, the broader the generalizations became, until I was no longer looking at the rules for ritual contests, but the foundations of natural and contract law in the magical realms of fairy tales. And that’s what I wrote down. An oath is binding. Warnings are to be heeded. There is power in names. No trespassing. And twenty-eight others.

Fairyland: a Survivor’s Guide, encapsulates the rules you’ll need to know before undertaking to deal with a man-eating troll, a cunning leprechaun, or even the devil himself. Even if you don’t intend to go exploring fairy rings, sacred mountains, and the deep, dark woods, it’s always possible for the creatures of Fairyland to come to you. For every hero who slays the dragon, there are a hundred also-rans who didn’t know the rules, and wound up as the dragon’s lunch.

Can you afford not to be prepared?