Success in the job market

So Friday's interview went really well. In fact, it went so well, that Behrend offered me two sections of Comp for the fall semester. The pay's not quite good enough for me to leave my dayjob yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. I'm totally pumped; not only do I have a teaching job, but it's one at the ideal location, and now that I've found a job I can spend my mornings writing instead of job hunting. Good stuff.

Wish me luck

On Friday, I'll be interviewing at Penn State Behrend for an adjunct position teaching two sections of Composition. Wish me luck!

Publishing Update and the other two thirds

Publishing Update:

"Everything Ends" will appear in the inaugural issue of A Capella Zoo. It should be due out around October-ish.

As for the rest of D&D 4th Edition, overall I think things went in a real good direction. The Monster's Manual, especially, was great. They did a lot of things in it that make the life of the DM a lot easier: no more rolling HPs for monsters, no more guestimating monsters to match the level of the party, hell 4th edition even includes lore data. The artwork in there is pretty great too. My only real complaint with the Monster's Manual is more of a semantics thing--I don't care for the Demons and Devils concept; I much rather liked the 2nd ED Tanar'ri and Baatezu...but really that's a nerd-point that matters little in the grand scheme of things.

As for the new Dungeon Master's Guide, I didn't find it to offer much for the old Hat DM like myself. It has a lot on world creating, encounter creating, and even a little on crowd control (as in how to control your players at the gaming table). I think, had I found the book 18 years ago, when I was starting out in D&D, I would have become a good DM a lot faster. It's well put together, but since they dumped a lot of the former DMG stuff into the PHB (magic items and the like), there really isn't as much in the DMG that an experienced gamer needs to have.

So overall, D&D 4th is a clear triumph over the clunky garbage of 3rd and 3.5rd, but I still think WotC is missing the boat on the Role-Playing aspect of D&D. It was there before 3rd edition, and I'm certain that the miniature rules are what's currently destroying the Role-playing nature of the game, but mechanically, it seems like the game will run pretty clean. I just wish they would have included more non-combat related spells/powers/abilities, or Perhaps one thing that should have been in the DMG: a guide on how to create your own powers and the like.

A One-Third Impression

As most of you know (If you don't, welcome to the club), I've been a long time D&D nerd. At an age in my life where most of my friends have lost the time to play, my wife and I soldier on...adventuring on our nightly walks with Molly. Though our playstyle has evolved pretty far from the ruleset, I still get a kick out of new source books, and under such pretense, I picked up a copy of the new 4th edition rules. Since I finished plowing through the Player's Handbook yesterday, I'm going to offer up a 1/3 review of the new face of D&D.

Before I begin, let it be known that I'm somewhat old school. I came into D&D at the height of 2nd edition AD&D, and immediately hated and scoffed at all that was 3rd edition for its entire lifecycle (with the exception of the two Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance PS2 ports, to which, 3rd Edition rules worked wonders). In essence, I felt that 3rd edition was a dumbing down and a 180 about face to the 2nd edition rules: roleplaying opportunities decayed into infinite skill/power checks, and everyone wanted miniatures combat so they could use their silly feats. So, long story short, the few 3rd ed books I did buy, were mainly for the artwork, and ideas; I tossed all the rules and replaced with a bastardization of 2nd edition and my own house rules.

I was fully expecting to toss out 4th edition just as quickly, but I've seen several improvements upon 3rd edition, and what's more, an actual evolution that feels right for the D&D name. What do I mean by that? Well, originally, D&D 3rd edition was supposed to be a sort of simplification of 2nd Ed. AD&D rules (I guess the "Advanced" was causing WotC to lose customers or something). But, to all appearances, I think 3rd Ed. ended up being by far more complex than anything 2nd Ed. had done. 4th Ed. is a clear simplification of rules. It's also a very baseline release. WotC (that's Wizards of the Coast, the current owner of the D&D name), in its unending pull for massive amounts of money, drops several thousand hints to bigger and better things you can do for your PCs in upcoming books (that will probably also hit you at $35 per pop). I like that. 4th Ed. embraces the KISS principle in initial Racial/Class offerings. It also has a compact array of spells, powers, equipment, and feats so that anyone can sit down and whip up a pretty decent character on the fly. Content-wise, the new Edition is written clearly enough that a 10 year old initiate will be off the hook excited about it, and yet still with enough interesting stuff that old hats like myself can pull something out of the reading.

Instead of giant blocks of text, I'm going to break into list mode for things I like and dislike with the PHB:
What I like:

• The new powers working: At Will/Encounter/Daily <-- this is all very smart
• Wizards have become more versatile and less weak seeming--to some effect they can sling a lot more magic per day, and the At Will cantrips do a great job of making their minor magic abilities shine in ways I've always envisioned
• Finally, Rogues are not completely shat upon by the rules.
• Paragon and Epic tiers are well defined at the get go.
• Implements for spell casters (such as rods, staves, wands, holy items) are now integral and pretty slickly incorporated
• Overall magic Items have become somewhat more generic, but they serve as a good template for creating a lot of different items. Also, the inclusion of magic items in the PHB is smart.
• I'm so glad that they dropped the Threat rating garbage for monsters. Also, from briefly thumbing the Monstrous Manual, I see that they've added lots of flavor text, stuff for what you can learn based on monster lore, tactics, and finally, fixed HP counts for monsters. At a glance, all of this looks very accommodating for no-pre-planning DMs like myself.
• Healing Surges, though completely non-realistic are a kind of cool idea, and well implemented.
• The God-related Skills are a nice touch.
• Halflings have finally become something interesting (neither 2nd or 3rd edition could capture anything interesting for this short-statured race.) They're kinda Kender-like now, and I like that a lot.
• Dragonborn and Eladrin are pretty decent as far as new races go.
• Retraining is a great idea.
• Feats actually seem to fit into this edition in a non-clunky way.
  

What I don't like:

• Almost all the powers in the PHB are combat oriented. I want to see more full-figured powers. Alteration magic, for example, is almost completely non-existent currently.
• Some former spells have become rituals, and currently take too long to cast (seriously, ten minutes before your knock spell fires? come on.)
• miniature combat. Every time I've ever tried it, it destroys my mental image of the battle scene. I wish WotC would leave wargaming to the folks over at Games Workshop. D&D has never, in my mind at least, been known for its miniatures combat rules. I think 2nd Edition did the best at handling this--they kept it as a supplement. A lot of powers and feats now require squares and all that positioning garbage; I think it would have been easier to have some of that more vague, so that it could fall into the standard realm of DM describing the combat, and players reacting. We've never had trouble keeping all of it in our heads.
• Tieflings, though I love them, have really become very generic, losing all of their glorious chaos in appearance, function, and role. This makes me very sad.
• It looks like the beautiful 2nd Ed. view of the Multiverse, crystal spheres and the like has been shattered. D&D 4th ed. talks about a lot less in terms of primes, planes and the stuff in between. The Astral is super heavily built up, but the planes, seem, for all purposes non existent beyond the old Inner planes, now called Elemental Chaos. To supplant, they've added Fey worlds and I think the shadow realm, but I think overall, Planescape was one of TSR's greatest creations, and it saddens me that they're throwing out a lot of the beautiful madness of that campaign setting.
• The Open Gaming License is no more. WotC, you are a bunch of greedy dumbasses for dropping the OGL in 4th Ed. Shame on you for creating a beautiful 3rd party explosion with 3rd edition only to cut off that world with your new baby.
• Plate armor for only 50gp?! Madness I tell you.

I think really, that's about all I can say at this juncture. Overall, I think 4th edition is a big improvement over 3rd, and so far I like it enough to be willing to give up on the (now almost 20 year old!) 2nd ed rules.

End of an Age

So now I'm graduated. After two years, a lot of fun, hardship, and other bits in between, I am a Master of Fine Arts. How's it feel? Same as always, but different.

I guess the big thing that everyone says is, "well it'll feel different when you don't have to send out a packet." True. But at the same time, I have to keep going, keep writing, but now without deadlines, and that's (for me at least) the true test of my experience. To me, the only difference between a student and a "professional writer" is that students still feel the need for implanted structure; something to force them to do what they want to do--to write. Supposedly, by the time we graduate, we should feel that deep-gut need to write on our own rather than on someone else's timetable. Or at least that's how I see it.

In that vein, I think I'll probably be successful. I have a dedicated time of day (4AM - 7AM) to write every day, and for the most part, it seems to be working out. Plus too, there are other opportunities for "packets:" submitting stories, job hunting, setting up reading/lecturing gigs.

I guess the trick for me will be to keep my goals pretty high, yet attainable. Currently, I'm looking to finish Not an Autobiography this year. I'm also hoping to snag a teaching job before the year's out as well.

I'll end with some fun statistics:

Before grad school: 2 publications, maybe 4 rejections, 6 total submissions

During grad school: 4 publications, 68 rejections, 90 total submissions, 2 contest wins, 1 runner up, 1 Pushcart Nomination

For the visual folks, I paper my office's closet with all my rejections:


















And here are the acceptances:
So as you can see, it's a long tiring road, but that, I guess, is the magic of a graduate program like Spalding. Before I started, I wasn't writing all that regularly, and I wasn't seriously trying to get published beyond the couple stories that college workshops polished up all nice and pretty. But as I progressed through the program, I began to develop a stronger sense of my goals as a writer, as well as an academic. And I found as each semester waxed into the next, my neurosis about having to write and then going upstairs and staring at a blank screen slowly disappeared. So while I may be spending a lot less time in front of the computer, the time spent here feels a lot more productive than the time I used to spend here, and that, I suppose is a good thing.

So all in all, having a MFA isn't all that different, other than the fact that I can apply for a real career with it, and it's conditioned me into a more structured writer, and helped me net some publications, and meet wonderful new writer friends, and well, I guess it was a pretty good idea afterall.