PARANOIA

Congratulations to PARANOIA mission designer Dan Curtis Johnson as he nears the end of his year-long exercise in sustained microfiction, straightforwardly called "Write Something Every Day." Dan, who has designed many fine missions (including "Mister Bubbles," "Stealth Train," and "Hunger") and has scripted dozens of comics (Dan's bibliography), resolved on New Year's Day 2010 to write new fiction each day for a year and post it to his LiveJournal, Scribbles and Lies.

"Someday, I'd like to get back into writing professionally, even if only on the side," Dan says -- he's a quality manager in Software Engineering at Apple in Cupertino, California -- "but to do so I have to make myself write -- no matter what -- when I have the time. So I wanted to see if I could train sheer force-of-will into overcoming writer's block."

Dan achieved what he modestly calls "reasonably good results": 175,000 words of entertaining reading, mostly in short laser-focused bursts. (Several dozen entries are exactly and explicitly 100 words long; my favorites include the inventive 11-part series Hell Frozen Over.) As for PARANOIA referents, any Troubleshooter who has climbed a small mountain of CPU paperwork (or endured a Humanist secret society meeting) may appreciate the fussy bureaucratic AIs of Dan's five-part Landmine Nation story.

Dan says, "Though I did miss a few days, pretty much all of them were because either I was sick, one of my kids was sick, or I was out of town away from computers and things to write on. The results were about as uneven as any prolific body of work, I expect; sometimes it's good and sometimes it's just words.

"One really positive side effect is that, along the way, I dragged around half a dozen pieces of unfinished short story work that had been languishing on my hard drive (in some cases, as much as twenty full years) and finally finished them. The desperate need to have something, anything, made me go back and cannibalize past work really effectively at times." Just last week Dan finished a piece he'd made notes on in February: "HalfLANG," about a language for the lucrative market of hobbit programmers. Reddit picked up the link, and now 45,000 people have read it, making it the year's most popular piece.

Other highlights: "Fade Away" (March 26), a hundred-word ghost-tech story that desperately needs a novella-length expansion; "Getting Paid" (October 15), which reads like Act 1 of a Tim Allen movie; and "Triage" (December 8), a note-perfect zombie tale. I liked Dan's May 19 entry so much that (with his permission) I made it a poster and put it up as a free download on the document-sharing site Scribd: Before You X, Make Sure Y.

Does Dan's example inspire you? "In case anyone decides to try this particular nutjobbery, there are three things I'd do differently," he says, "all of which can be summarized as 'I really should have been publicizing it, and myself, the whole time.'

1. "I would have tweeted a short link to each day's new story after it was posted." [Dan is @dcurtisj on Twitter.]
2. "I would have added a line specifying 'Write Something New Every Day is a 365-day project by Dan Curtis Johnson' with a copyright reminder.
3. "I would have written a pre-dated January 1st post explaining the project, so that it would always appear at the very top of the first page of my main LJ.

"In short, I am crappy at promoting myself, and it's only now at the end I realize what I should have been doing from the start."

What's next? "I'll assemble some sort of anthology book out of the 2010 pieces for publication. Then I intend to edit an existing sort-of-novel that I wrote a few years back, get it into publishable shape. And I am going to try to pitch comics on a regular basis in 2011.

"But all of those things come after January 1st, a day on which I am going to write absolutely nothing whatsoever. Man, that is going to be great."

Mongoose Publishing has posted the cover (by Chris Quilliams) for the forthcoming updated Flashbacks Redux mission collection.

The most popular XP-edition [supplement] is back, in its 25th Anniversary guise! Filled with hand-picked classic adventures from all previous editions of PARANOIA, Flashbacks Redux is gaming hilarity at its greatest. Re-live the most terrifying moments of "Me and My Shadow Mark IV," or revel in the confusion of YELLOW Clearance Black Box Blues.

These and many other classics are found in Flashbacks Redux, all suitably trimmed, tweaked and tailored for the latest edition of PARANOIA: Troubleshooters.

On the Mongoose Publishing forum, Mongoose CEO Matthew Sprange has posted his latest annual overview of the PARANOIA publisher's status. The lengthy State of the Mongoose 2010 discusses plans for Mongoose's many roleplaying lines in sober and pragmatic terms. Here is Matthew's discussion of PARANOIA:

This one has been a funny old fish for us. We announced that, as part of PARANOIA’s 25th Anniversary, we would be breaking the game into three ‘flavours,’ covering Troubleshooters, Internal Security and High Programmers. The idea was that core books for PARANOIA have always done exceptionally well, but the supplements never followed suit. With three core books, PARANOIA would naturally become a more frontline product set.

It has so not worked out that way!

Troubleshooters sells as well as a core book for PARANOIA ever has, but Internal Security and High Programmers, both complete core books, do about 20% better than an average supplement.

This is very frustrating for us because these two are damn good books -- High Programmers especially is a work of art from Gareth Hanrahan, and it deserves far more attention than it has received. After all, allowing players to use ULTRAVIOLET-level characters with all the power and resources of Alpha Complex at their disposal – what is not to like? The cover, done by Chris Quilliams, has especially nailed the game. In fact, PARANOIA creators Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan have said they consider that cover to be the best of any PARANOIA book, published at any time.

And yet gamers are still treating the game as second-fiddle to Troubleshooters…

For 2011, there will four books released for PARANOIA, roughly one every quarter. Two will be brand new adventures (likely for Troubleshooters and High Programmers). The other two will be fulfilling a commitment to keep the classic PARANOIA adventures in print, and have the titles Flashbacks Redux, and Flashbacks Redux Redux. They won’t have the same content as the original Flashbacks books, and will include not only the earliest PARANOIA adventures, but some of the favourites from the XP years as well. The first is due to appear in January and will include YELLOW Clearance Black Box Blues and, my personal favourite (and taking centre stage for the cover art, again by Mr Quilliams), Me and My Shadow Mark IV.

We remain interested in expanding PARANOIA to other territories, but the question always comes back asking what we can do with it. We remain fairly convinced that there is a decent PARANOIA graphic novel or comic strip in there somewhere but, despite several draft scripts, we still have not found the hook.

We’ll keep plugging away at it though. That is the new Mongoose mandate!

Matthew concludes, "Mongoose has taken some knocks over the past few years but the important thing is that, to quote Morpheus, we are still here. Not dead yet. Not all of our peers can say the same thing."

Labels: state of the mongoose