It's All Fun and Games!

This is another brainchild of the blogfest behemoth: Alex J. Cavanaugh! I don't always have time to take part in Alex's incredible ideas, but this one sounded easy, and I couldn't resist talking about games.

Okay, admittedly, I did it to Alex, again, missing the actual festival by a day, but he's used to it by now, and Alex is very understanding, as well as being the nicest guy you could ever meet.

Let me get to my three favorite games:

There is no game in my entire life that has influenced me more than dear old D&D. I first started playing in like 2nd grade, with my best friend Bill, and his 7 older brothers. Okay, not all of them played at once, but it did make for some big parties.

D&D did more to expand my vocabulary than any other game, teaching me words like contingency, illusionist, paladin, cleric, claymore, flail, morning-star ... I could go on. D&D also taught me to love language. Some of the original modules written by Gary Gygax were full of purple prose, but he also had a flair for description and for clever naming conventions.

And, of course, finally, it was D&D that led me to my love of all things Fantasy. Well, technically my dad read LOTR to us kids at night sometimes before I started playing, but it was D&D that led me to Anne McCafferty, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, The Forgotten Realms, The Call of Cthulu (which used be a horror RPG, in addition to the incredibly creepy short story by H.P. Lovecraft).

My family's favorite "board or card game," or basically the only game we really play together on a regular basis is Apples to Apples. This is a simple, but hilarious, word association game with several variations the never cease to fill the room with fun, language, and psychological hijinks. If you aren't familiar with this game, please run out and get it.

You won't be disappointed.

But the game I've been having the most fun with lately, whenever I'm drunk and bored, or just have some free time, is playing around with hashtags on Twitter. If you don't know what a hashtag is, I'm probably not the one to school you, but if you do know, then by all means, read on.

One of my favorites lately was #LovecraftPictureBooks. My best tweet during that round of hashtag madness was probably "At the Mountains of Madlibs." Get it? Do you see how this works? Credit for this hashtag goes to @ShaunieDarko.

Another favorite of mine was a few months ago, #BetterFirstLines. That search is apparently too old to yield any results, but my favorite (of mine) from that round of hilarity was "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to the Bravo channel." Okay, technically that's not a better first line than the awesome opening line of William Gibson's Neuromancer, but it is funnier. Sometimes that's the point. Credit for this hashtag goes to @SimonCLarter, at least as far as I know.

Then there is always the venerable #ZombieProverbs, like my best "A brain in the hand is worth two in the bush ... nom, nom, nom." See? Such fun!

I could give you more examples, but I imagine you get it by now. If you'd ever like to play hashtag madness with me and my wild friends, you know where to find us (on Twitter, wink, wink).

Alan Wake

Anyone who owns an Xbox 360 and is a writer should give this game a try. It's not the most incredible gameplay or amazing graphics (though both of those aspects ARE good) but it is one of the most interesting stories I've seen in a video game in a long time.

Alan Wake is a bestselling novelist who has had writer's block for the last couple of years. He and his wife Alice decide to take a trip to the fictional towns of Bright Falls, Washington. It's an idyllic setting with snow capped peaks, beautiful alpine lakes and dense pine forests. Eventually his wife goes missing and it all turns into a nightmare.

I won't ruin the story but I will share a little bit about the most fun parts for me as a writer. Throughout the game you are running around collecting pages of a manuscript that Alan doesn't remember writing and yet is a key part to the mystery. Then at one point your literary agent, Barry (that's him in the picture above in the red down jacket, Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts) shows up to save you. He drives a Hummer and is basically a stereotypical New Yorker except he acts more like a Hollywood agent most of the time. It's funny because the people who made this game obviously didn't realize that literary agents in real life are already like rock stars. Have they not seen Nathan Bransford's hair?

You can read the manuscript pages as you collect them and I must say: though the story is very disjointed and there are a lot of cliche phrases, the writing ain't bad. The game even quotes Stephen King in a monologue at the beginning.

Now if that's not great entertainment for us dorky writers, I don't know what is!

Now I need to take care of some business. Hilary Wagner has agreed to do the guest post for TheQQQE this Friday and her book NIGHTSHADE CITY is set to be released by Holiday House Books this October. Here is what THE Rick Riordan had to say about it:

“Fans of Redwall and the Warriors series will love this heroic tale of good versus evil in a subterranean society of rats. The world of the Catacombs is so compelling readers will wonder if it really might exist under our city streets. Expect great adventures in Nightshade City.”

When I told my kids that Hilary was going to be kind enough to grace my blog with her presence and what Mr. Riordan (their favorite author) had to say about her novel; they literally squealed.

So obviously this means that all of you will be marking your calendars and making certain to return on Friday but it also begs the question who will be sharing their query in the week following Hilary? As of right now my spreadsheet is empty after her. I need to get on it and decide who I want to ask to be a guest but in the meantime I want to put it out there that any one of you who has a query that earned you at least one partial request can be a featured guest here. The idea is just to share and analyze queries that worked, at least as far as accomplishing that important first step.

My email is on my blogger profile if you want to volunteer.