Change of Scene

After two years stuck at home, my thoughts recently have been turning quite regularly to getting out of the house for longer than a couple of hours at a time. The problem is that I'm still taking the pandemic quite seriously, and so I remain uncomfortable with certain activities or locations. This has limited me to places I can reach by car, but I've been discovering that I can still reach quite a few places.

I just spent the past week down in Orange County, in fact. I took my work laptop and all the stuff I needed to spend a week away from home (exercise gear, books, personal laptop, foodstuffs I didn't want to go bad while I was away), and drove down Saturday before last. I stayed at my mom and stepdad's house down there, keeping him company while my mom was out of town (she's a lot more confident with traveling than I've been, though I've had external circumstances that made that harder). During the days I'd drive down to the condo they had nearby, which they were renting out but is currently empty and typically used as my mom's office. Because I'm fully remote at work, I didn't need to get permission, just headed down and got my work space sorted out down there.

Having now been back home for one workday, it's struck me how much like a vacation it was, even if I was working my normal hours. For one thing, the commute gave me a nice sense of split between work and not-work, even if I spent about ten minutes in the car each way. I'd arrive in the morning, change out of my jeans and pour a bowl of cereal, before logging on for the day. At five, I'd log out, change back into my jeans and drive back to watch German TV with my stepdad and have dinner.

The other thing that made it feel like a real vacation was the scenery. They live in a pretty prosperous part of Orange County, not far from Laguna Beach and the coast generally, with communities sprinkled onto hillsides, so that basically every house has a beautiful view. I kept going for my daily walks last week, and quickly realized that if I walked up the hill, I'd get to a road that had amazing views east toward the mountains, or west toward the coast. A far cry from the flat suburbia that I usually walk around in Palo Alto.

That last part was a bit of an adjustment for me, because I've spent the last twenty years being down on Orange County. I went to college at UC Irvine, and always thought of it as a blinkered place, full of right-wing people and racist cops. If I've considered the merits of moving to Southern California, it's always been to Los Angeles, where there's exciting cultural stuff going on and I'm slightly less likely to run into a pro-Trump protest. However, the prospect of being able to enjoy views like that every day has made me a little more open to settling in Orange County...

What also helped was the subtle changes from my regular routine. For whatever reason, even though I work from home and have zero commute, I usually feel a little rushed in the evenings at home, trying to fit in writing, dinner, cleaning and whatever other tasks I want to accomplish. Down there, my stepdad usually cooked and preferred that I leave the dishes in the sink, so he could put them in the dishwasher. Plus, they've got their cleaners back in once a week, so the place was more spotless than my house, which was also nice.

One other thing, not a particularly big one but fairly important now that I consider it, was the feeling of taking a break from the pandemic. Here in Palo Alto I still wear a mask when I go out for walks, or at least carry it with me. Down there, because so few people are out walking on the roads near the condo, I didn't even bring a mask along, and honestly didn't need it (it's not like there are stores nearby that I could nip into). I maintained my usual rules of masking up in stores and of not eating in restaurants, but on Friday my stepdad and I grabbed a drink at the balcony of one of the local hotels, and ended up eating dinner there.

As I said, I spent the bulk of the pandemic at home, first on my own and then with my then-girlfriend. Since I've been on my own again, I've been trying to balance staying safe (the pandemic is still out there, even if it's not quite as out of control) with doing stuff outside the house to keep sane. My first vacation away from home since 2020 was at Christmas, when I went to Orange County to see the family, and then my first long weekend away was in March, when I went skiing for a couple of days with my dad. This trip has awakened me to the possibility of decamping somewhere else to work for a few days, and really taking advantage of being 100% remote. I don't see myself becoming a digital nomad (I'm still not completely sold on air travel) but it's nice that the possibility is open.

And failing that, I've also spent some time scanning Zillow for houses within my budget in Orange County. I'd be limited to condos, but it's nice to see I'm earning enough now for it to be a realistic idea. It might be a stretch to imagine that I'll truly end up there (I have a better social network here in the Bay Area), but I'm not ruling anything out just yet.

Though if I do move down there, I'm going to have to invest in a Brita filter, because the tap water is gross, y'all.

Catching Up With the Rocky Series

When I was going through the Dirty Harry movies last month, my eye kept being caught by the brightly colored icons for the Rocky movies, and I promised myself that I'd tackle those next. Which is lucky, because it turns out that they're all leaving HBO Max at the end of April. It's been an instructive experience so far (I just finished Rocky III), watching Sylvester Stallone (and Rocky Balboa, of course) go from loser to world star.

I'm always taken by the story behind the original Rocky movie, which is that Stallone got the idea for it from spending his last few dollars to attend a boxing match. He wrote the script, starred in it, and it took off to an extent nobody was expecting. I was too young to watch the movies when they came out in theaters, apart from the sixth one, Rocky Balboa, but I was always aware of them, because kids at school were talking about Ivan Drago or there were commercials for them.

The other thing that sticks with me about the movies is that Rocky represented a sort of "Great White Hope" that appealed to America in the era of Black heavyweight champions, and especially Muhammad Ali, who was pretty controversial. For one thing, it's hard not to see Ali in Apollo Creed, the flashy and quick-tongued champion who fights Rocky in the first two films, and then becomes his buddy.

If you look at the movies through this racial lens, you can see a similar narrative at work in Rocky III, where he fights Clubber Lang (played by Mister T), who's portrayed in a pretty unflattering light, especially when he makes crude remarks about Rocky's manhood to Rocky's wife. It's there in the training montage, when Apollo takes Rocky to LA to train in the gym where he came up, and Rocky's friends are horrified at being around a bunch of Black people.

I've never seen the fourth movie, but I expect you can read the Great White Hope narrative into that one too, as the Black boxer, Apollo, isn't enough to beat the USSR's champion Ivan Drago, and dies in the ring, so that Rocky has to avenge him. In any case, I can report back on that once I've seen the actual film.

This blog got heavy fast, so I'll switch to another thing that struck me as I was watching the movies. Stallone's performance is really charming in the first two films, as he plays Rocky as a lovable lunk who has hidden depths. The actual fights are relatively unimportant in those movies, taking up only about half an hour at the end, but instead we get to see him woo Adriene and grapple with the turn his life has taken. There are also nice scenes showing how his stardom has affected those around him, like his friend Paulie.

It also struck me that when I'm watching Rocky, I'm not thinking back to the Rambo movies (which happen to be the only other serious exposure I've had to Stallone). I consider this to be the mark of a really good actor, especially when he's not changing his appearance drastically between roles. The other example I use is Harrison Ford, who is completely different as Han Solo compared to Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan.

As I said, I'm only halfway through the main Rocky series, so I still have Rocky IV and Ivan Drago to consider. It does feel a little silly to consider that Stallone thought he could make some political point with that film, but it'll be fun to see brainless 80s propaganda - and maybe there'll be some interesting stuff beyond the flag-waving?

Of course, once I finish these films, I'll be on the lookout for the Creed movies, starring Michael B Jordan as Apollo's son Adonis. I'm looking forward to those too, because they've got much better reviews than any of the main Rocky films except the first.

Getting Inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons

I've mentioned before that I did NaNoWriMo to get started on a novel-length project, back in November, and I've probably alluded to the fact that I've continued working on this project. NaNo's website is pretty handy to carry over even past the usual month that they do, because you can create a new project and track your progress against it. The best part is, you can set whatever word-count goal you want, so instead of aiming for 50k words each month since then, I've gone for more realistic goals, which I've hit every month (except December, when I set myself the goal of doing 25k words; probably not the smartest thing when you have a week of not working between Christmas and New Year's).

That said, I haven't talked much about where the idea came from. As the title suggests, it came from a weekly-ish game of Dungeons & Dragons that I've been playing with my friends since January 2021. I started playing my character, and as I fleshed in his backstory, it occurred to me that he might make for an interesting novel protagonist. So as I went on playing the game, I also thought about where he came from, why he's an adventurer, what his motivation is, and as those came to me, so did ideas for a story.

Another inspiration was the Classical Chinese account that inspired the novel (and TV series) Journey to the West, which gave rise to the character Monkey. To be clear, I've read neither Journey to the West, nor the Tang Dynasty era Buddhist monk Xuanzang's historical account, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. But I came across a mention of the factual account in a history of China I was reading in 2020, and was taken by the idea of a scholar traveling across a fantasy world. That thought probably gave rise to the character I rolled for my D&D game.

Now, since I started writing back in my teens, I've seen the repeated advice not to try to turn your D&D campaigns into a novel, so I want to make it clear that I haven't. Rather, I've taken the way I play the character, and the way I see him, and turned him loose into a story centered around him. None of my friends' characters appear, nor do the settings we play in. I've shared some of the backstory I created for my character, including his family dynamics, with my DM, and she's incorporated a couple of these points, but the two are linked only by the same character appearing in both.

At the same time, it's important to mention that role-playing game settings can form the basis of actual stories: Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont based their Malazan books in an RPG setting they'd created (and it kinda shows in the first book), while Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck based the Expanse series around an RPG setting that Franck ran, or at last devised. I'm sure there are others, even before we get to the decades' worth of Forgotten Realms and DragonLance novels that TSR commissioned in the 1980s as tie-ins to their D&D settings.

I suppose the difference is, creating a setting and exploring the stories that arise from that setting is valid, as opposed to trying to novelize an account of each fight and each perception check your characters run. It's probably why there have been so many bad movie adaptations of video games over the years. At any rate, I find that D&D stories are rarely fun to retell to someone who wasn't in that session, which makes it even harder to turn them in narratives.

As I mentioned, I'm not translating my D&D campaign into a story, so that's not a problem here. What I do find interesting is how it took certain elements I'd been thinking about for a while, remixed them and generated a story that I've now been able to draw out into over 70k words, and which I've been working on for a little over five months. I've found that story ideas frequently come to me like that: I'll pick up some interesting fragment from somewhere, and it'll sit in the back of my mind for a long time until it can latch onto another interesting fragment, until enough of them have fused together to become an idea worth exploring.

It also makes sense that D&D, or RPGs in general, should be the starting point for ideas. I've long played video game RPGs, starting with Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES, but even the most advanced ones that I've played recently are still fairly rigid. A table-top RPG, on the other hand, forces you to come up with a lot of backstory to explain why your character does the things they do. This backstory then influences the choices your character makes in the course of the campaign, giving you a good sense of their personality. I've always had trouble with characterization, but I think this campaign has helped me with that, at least to an extent.

Anyway, this is how it's panned out for me. There are many ways to get inspiration for stories, but D&D has revealed itself to be a good one. Just as long as you remember not to retell your weekly campaign.