Malcolm Schmitz

if it sucks you should still write it

if it'll be unfinished you should still write it

if you never share it you should still write it

if it's not a linear fiction adventure you should still write it

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

There's nothing wrong with writing the same, comforting, boy-meets-girl or family-gets-found plot over and over again. Plenty of writers have made their careers on such. But if a writer only ever writes what their audience expects, with zero twists along the way, zero discovery of a story that might not hit every beat correctly, zero authenticity on the part of the characters- then they are a hack.

(And AI is doomed to produce the thing you expect, every time, because it's a statistical analysis program at heart. You can't get a wild twist out of AI without putting in some genuine human work. AI on its own will always be a hack.)

Carved ivory furniture plaque in the form of a rearing goat, Assyrian, 8th century BC

so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah​ or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:

pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)

extras in comedy sketch shows

esports players

real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks

70s baseball players

athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type

ska, jazz, and blues musicians

firefighters

improv troupes

for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date

state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)

people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)

something i wrote down while I was at work

When I was walking in the town I saw some cool graffiti, and I thought, Hmm. Graffiti is a lot like weeds. It pops up in neglected and overlooked places, and thrives until someone destroys it in routine maintenance.

Like an ecosystem, art is a living system.

I quickly began to think of ways that graffiti and weeds are alike.

It is perceived as worthless or threatening economic incentives.

There are active efforts to destroy or eradicate it, which are eternally futile because of the aliveness of the system.

It appears in areas of active, violent neglect, disruption, and abandonment.

Its absence or presence can be a visual signal of class.

I thought, what are some other "weedy" artforms?

Fanfiction could be a weedy artform.

Huh, I thought. Are there domesticated or cultivated artforms?

It became clear to me that the answer was yes.

There are two types. One type is the crops: those plants that have daily necessity for all people. They are often monocultures, often highly exploitative, but they are a daily part of existence.

In art terms, this is pop culture and mass media: popular music, movies, tv shows.

The other type would be the ornamentals: those that are cultivated because they are perceived to have intrinsic value or beauty. These are the poems, paintings, sculptures, the arts that are seen as more intellectually important and more restricted in who has daily access.

Well, I thought then, are there "wild" artforms? And I thought that the answer once again had to be yes: that's textile arts, woodworking, pottery, basket making, arts that are often considered according to their practical value and not given the same consideration as fine arts. They are often romanticized and thought of as artifacts of the past to be preserved, and sometimes they are brought into cultivation (appreciation as fine arts), but they can lose their context and everyday usefulness. They are considered as threatened by economic incentives and efforts to protect them are perceived as wasteful.

Graffiti and fanfiction are weedy artforms. Are there others?

In addition to the qualities of weediness I listed up above, there is another quality: They get some of what they are from their antagonistic relationship with the mainstream view of what has value. They emerge in a space that is "owned" by another entity and thrive because there is no economical way to destroy them all faster than they can emerge. Likewise, Weeds are inherently (by some definitions) disrupting the intent of a space: they exist in defiance of what that space is "supposed to" be.

Fanfiction could be compared to weeds in an agricultural crop field: they spring up in the monoculture of popular media franchises and become more powerful and compelling than the environment that created them, even though many people will overlook their value.

Graffiti could be considered like lawn weeds: its presence has intense connotations of class, and the extermination campaigns are intense, but lawns that are neglected long enough (just like the walls of an abandoned building) can become places of diversity and thriving.

Weedy art could also be any art you create for yourself without special skill or economic incentive to do so, purely through intrinsic motivation. Many people kill these weeds before they grow into flowers, thinking that a common weed without any cultivation could never produce a beautiful flower, but if you let them grow you are often surprised. Doodles, drawings, anything you create could be weedy art.

Weeds are invincible on the evolutionary timescale, impossible to fully eradicate. They are our friends and have sustained us in many ways throughout human history. I read in a paper once a theory that true monoculture is only an idea in the human mind, never able to be truly realized, because weeds will always emerge and disrupt this false idea of perfection.

Certainly, our ecosystems are held together and sustained with life within this gap between how we imagine the world should be (clean, perfect, without weeds) and how the world really is (weeds! weeds! WEEDS!). Without weeds, the biodiversity in the world around us would crash dramatically.

Hey, friends! I've got an exciting new announcement for you- the Super Secret Project that's been taking up most of my writing time is (starting to) come to fruition!

I'm partnering with Choice of Games to bring you an interactive fiction story called Bright Young Things: a game of justice, heroics, and an ever-widening gyre. It's a 1920s superhero story- think one part Jeeves and Wooster and one part The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

The world’s hung over from the War and the Flu. But the night’s young, the music’s loud, and you’ve got a city to protect… During the Great War, both sides used xyltraxazine- a dangerous new chemical weapon- to incapacitate the enemy. After the War, people who’d been exposed to xyltraxazine began to change, and not all for the better. Some of them gained strange abilities- incredible strength, inhuman speed, flight, shapeshifting, invisibility, or even mind control. The zills walk among us, and you never know who is one until they lift a motorcar. Some lost their minds, becoming anti-social, vicious, or outright murderous. The d—-ed blighters want to destroy the world for the fun of it.   Unfortunately, these two categories overlap… and that’s where you come in. London needs a hero; you need a distraction.     Discover your superpowers in 1920s London. Choose your past- were you a poor soldier? An ambulance driver? A rich kid in the officers’ tents? Choose your powers- are you a Herculaen, a speedster, an icarus, a skinchanger, or an invisible? Help the citizens of London - for fame, fortune, or the joy of doing the right thing. Fight petty crime, stop a runaway train, and kick the blighters into next week. Keep up a double life- or don’t. As a widowed person of quality, you’ve got to keep up appearances. Lords and ladies don’t acknowledge all this super-hero rot– and they certainly don’t participate in it. Will you hide behind a mask, or defend your do-gooding? What will you do when you have to be in two places at once? Fend off your feckless “friends” and hangers-on… or convince them to help you stop the end of the world as you know it.  Romance a messy young lord, an excitable pilot, your steadfast valet/lady’s maid, a canny cub reporter, or your childhood friend turned anarchist blighter. Or love them all, come what may. Balance Society’s expectations on your love- or flout them, and pursue forbidden romance. Uncover a blighter conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of government… or discover the method to the blighters’ madness, and join them. Save London from utter destruction, or rebuild it in your image in the aftermath. 

Goosebumps, Haunted Canada, Eerie Elementary, Mister Shivers, The Nest, Hide and Seeker, Joel A. Sutherland's Haunted series, The Jumbies, Doll Bones... the list goes on.

And for anyone who's unfamiliar with Joel A. Sutherland, he's basically the Canadian equivalent to R.L. Stine. If your patrons like Stine, they'll likely enjoy Sutherland's work.

It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)

-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps

-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.

- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back

- Footwork drills

- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords

- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position

- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear

- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes

- Learning how to maintain your gear

- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.

- Even more drills

Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial

When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing

There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.

However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.

Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight

At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can

Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other

At least in the modern version of sparring, one of the things we learn is how to spar. There are standard protocols to sparring depending on the form you're learning, and it's super important that you follow them.

This is not just about learning how to be the attacker--you also need to know things like how to fall right, which you learn for real life but also for sparring, because it can be really unsafe for both you and the person you're sparring with if you don't know the basics of how to keep yourself safe.

Tapping out! When you're doing particularly forms where you're touching each other/grappling/doing joint locks/etc., one of the main ways you signal to stop is by tapping out. This is key to keeping people safe during sparring.

People can get hurt during sparring, especially if you screw up. I once almost dislocated someone's shoulder doing a joint lock (they were fine, they tapped out, we talked through it, we figured out what I did wrong), and I had someone hyperextend my elbow once. It also seriously exasperated my wrist's repetitive stress issue, particularly from someone repeatedly muscling through something they shouldn't be muscling through.

You can also give people concussions, cause bruises, or even break bones if you aren't careful. I got a bruise that took months to heal (probably a bone bruise) from falling the wrong way during some exhibition sparring on a wooden platform.

If you start sparring/partnered fighting when you don't have the foundation of how to fight, especially if you're partnered with someone who doesn't know how to properly guide you, it's really easy to build bad muscle memory. The right way to do something, is not always the instinctive way to do it, and if you get thrown into partnered fighting unprepared you will fall back on instinct, not training.