A Poem and a Story

This past week has been a rough one for me. I was hospitalized with a very bad stomach infection, and actually wondered at a couple of points if I was going to die. To make a long and miserable story short, I was able to recover, and I’m home today with my family and with a new perspective on life.

I wrote a poem a few days back, and I understand its meaning even more now than I did before my ordeal. When I was laying sick in my hospital bed, I remember waking and feeling infinitely better, and knowing as I watched the sunrise that I was lucky to see its beauty once more. How many people passed away in the night, never living to see that beautiful change of the sky? I was given a good lesson: never take for granted the life you’ve been given, live every day to its fullest, and know that the things of this world are all going to decay and rot with time. Live and love like today is your last day, and never be ashamed of time spent having fun with those you love.

Enough rambling. On to the poem…

Journey’s End

The hurried man pressed on

Alone, through the wood

Each step moving forward

Quickly as he could

No nose for the smells

Nor eyes to sightsee

A schedule maintained

Meant places to be

On weary pace forward

By chance he did meet

Fellow traveler, all dozing

At mighty oak’s feet

This second man smiled

Content wave his greeting

The first scowled and moved on

No time for chance meeting

What a queer way to live,

The first thought of the second

One must strive to ignore

These distractions that beckon

Yet imagine surprise

When the first man did see

The second man once more

Asleep at the tree

“Have I circled?” he wondered,

“Or is he this fast?

How else could this be

That last man that I passed?”

The second sat up

With a wave and a smile

“Would you care to sit, friend,

And rest for a while?”

“Why do you tarry

And waste so much time

With challenges to face

And mountains to climb?”

“I’ve climbed my own mountains,”

Said man number two

“I walk the same path,

But I’m different than you.”

The first shook his head,

Smiled, mocking and sad

“You must learn to rush

If good things you would have.”

“Oh! Never,” he answered

While patting the tree

“The things here worth having

Are closer to free.”

With a snort and a shake,

The first man pushed on

Seeing no sense

In this second man’s song

Yet no matter how frantic

No matter how fast

The man made his pace

The second he passed

First once and then twice,

A third time, you see

The first man caught up

To that man by the tree

And too soon came winter

The trees fell to gray

The man became weary

As night replaced day

He stumbled and tripped

And the schedule did fall

For all clear the date

When that night comes to call

“Glad to see you!”

The second man said

As the two lay immobile

On hospital bed

“What happened to beauty?”

The first wailed in fright

“I worked to find peace,

Once I reached this twilight.

Yet I’ve found only pain

And despair in the cold.

Now the beauty is gone

And I find myself old.”

“The beauty is here,”

The contented man said

A wizened old finger

Gestured to the head

The first man thought hard

For mem’ry that satisfied

But his life had been built

On a system that lied

“You can enjoy the breeze

Or grasp for the wind

But death waits for us all

At this journey’s end.”

Randall Madden

September 21, 2014

Another Milestone

I’ve worked to expand my online readership for quite some time now. When I first got serious about being published, I read in every article the suggestion to build a large reader base online. In pursuit of this goal, I’ve been working on an opening on some of the gaming sites I’ve frequented in the past.

It finally paid off when I was accepted to write for Bell of Lost Souls, covering various aspects of Dropzone Commander. As a result, I’ve been able to build more readership on my own blogs and work toward the goal of being published.

With that said, the added responsibilities have cut down on my normal writing time, which means that the intended draft has yet to be finished. I’ve got one and a half paragraphs to go, which will be followed by a round of edits prior to readership. It has taken much longer than I originally intended, but I am going to stick with it no matter how long it takes. I’ve learned to be much more patient, and I also know that a good thing simply cannot be rushed.

For those who have followed my journey, I appreciate the support. One day, I hope that a finished product will make it to your hands.

Poem - To Sleep

Oh, that most lovely of feelings!

To slip from reality’s snare

Spend an hour in refugee status

Fleeting trip, without a care

A dozen short memories are made

In that phantom, ethereal mist

A fortune is made, a dragon is slain,

A beautiful maiden is kissed

The tendrils of sleep pull my mind

Allured, my perceptions, to trod

As the eyes drift shut, the tendrils will pull

‘Til that weariest head starts to nod

Oh that dreamscape, it beckons, so unfair

Our escape lasts for so short a time

Reality’s gaoler pursues us

And in pain and in cruelty they bind

To map that realm, an impossible task

Or at least that’s the way it would seem

Prison sentence will end as flesh sloughs away

In death comes the eternal dream.

Randall Madden

September 8, 2014

Poem - When I Was Alive

In times now past he became

He was born, he grew, he thrived

Do you remember those days spent playing

In the time he was truly alive?

Time went by so slowly then

Now it passes, so fast, seems to melt

As a child he dreamed and he marveled

But where went the joy he felt?

You’re now an adult, they tell him

You must see what is here, what is real

Yet the dream is his essence, he’s drowning

With no ear to hear what he feels

A world of worker ants, throbbing and pulsing

The heart of a heartless machine

Scalp gripped tightly by world’s cruel claws,

Nose forced to the grindstone, he screams

The skull that created is crushed

With the beauty inside left to spill

No concern for his art and his passion

Just his blood, to oil the wheel

And that’s why he’s gone away now

An attempt to escape from the pain

Tired of watching his life, going slowly

Sullied water, away through the drain

You could never have known when he left that day;

Left to you is to wonder why

It seems unfair to leave you wond’ring, alone,

As the last to see him alive.

Randall Madden

August 24, 2014

Progress Report

It has been such a long road to this point on the book. I’ve worked in genres with established backgrounds and worlds before, but with this fantasy series I’m building so much from the ground up. There are so many groups of peoples, areas in the world, and character stories to place together. Then there are the ways in which this world’s physics differ from our own, such as multiple moons and the presence of magic. Add in a history to keep straight and it has been a true journey in straightening out details.

I’m not complaining in the slightest. This has been a fantastic journey for me! I’m putting the final pages in this week, with a new character that came about from talks with my wife. Once these are done I have just a handful more edits to complete, and a single chapter to write in the middle of the book. Once these are done and cross-checked with my notes, I should be ready to release the draft to my initial group of readers.

I’m still so energized for the process, and I’m finding that the desire only grows as I come closer to the end. I’ve spent more time per day in the book as it comes to life, and I can only hope that others will be as interested in the story as I am. If everything goes to my plan, I should have the book in my first reader’s hands by this weekend!

Mission Impossible? – Empathizing With Female Characters

If you came here to find a misogynistic article to hate on, you have come to the wrong place. While my title may fit the definition of “click-bait,” it is more of a tongue-in-cheek way of summarizing the struggles I have experienced in writing effective, believable female characters as my writing style has matured and been polished.

As a writer, my goal is always to get into a character’s head. I want to know why they feel the way they do and why they do the things they do. In essence, your character must be real in order to convince the audience that they are real. To do this, you must have real motivations and actual problems that drive them.

When I first started writing in grade school this came easy. I was still operating with a young child’s understanding of the world, and all of my characters essentially fell into two molds. There were people like me (the good guys) and people who were different than me (the bad guys). The good guys all shared traits that I valued and respected, and this invariably meant that they were flat, one-dimensional beasts who were more or less me (or at least my idealized vision of myself). They were also invariably male.

As I grew in age and writing experience, I started to flesh out the idea of character empathy, working my way into character archetypes that varied from my own personality. This allowed me to add neutral characters, and it also allowed good guys that had personality traits I might consider annoying or less than ideal. They were, however, invariably male.

The next evolution in my writing technique came with bad guy empathy. This one was very hard for me, as I’m very much a “black-and-white” kind of person when it comes to right and wrong. However, I learned with practice to put aside my own values long enough to step into the mind of a given villain. I then realized that most of my bad guys through the first twenty years of my life were nothing more than mustache-twirling figureheads who cackled maniacally, representing evil in its purest form. By working to give them proper motivations I was able to create deeper bad guys, those who came across more as the angel fallen from grace. Still, however, there were no female leads, even in the bad guy camp.

I’ve always accepted that my writing projects were a build-up, practice for the real thing one day when I came across an idea I could take seriously. Dawnbringer is that project for me, and in its pages I have worked with every fiber of my being to bring a great variety of characters to life. I don’t necessarily want a given character to fit neatly into the realm of right or wrong. These people are meant to be believable human characters, and as such they should all inhabit areas of gray from time to time. Even if there is no malice in a character, it makes sense that they would occasionally do something wrong.

With all that said, I was determined to bring at least one female lead into play for the very first time. Her story started out simple enough, but as those who write will tell you it rarely stays that way. Complications arose throughout, and before I knew it I had a full-blown tragedy written into this young woman’s life. As I started to navigate her character through the issues, I felt like a driver just as he hits a patch of black ice.

Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I am a sensitive person; I hope my wife agrees when I say that her feelings and opinions mean a great deal to me. Still, trying to reach into the head of this female character proved to be a struggle that I wasn’t initially sure how to navigate. It seems to me that some of it comes from cultural norms; we all throw around light-hearted jokes from time to time.

Women can’t drive.

Men will not read instructions.

Characters on television don’t help matters in this regard; the American father has been made into a figure of complete idiocy in all the sitcoms of late. These stereotypes only damage our ability to truly understand one another.

So, I unashamedly started visiting sites for women in similar predicaments to my character. What I read on these websites made my heart break. I experienced the realization that women have the same feelings of failure that I do when they fail to actualize society’s expectations. This is something I’ve always known to be true, but knowing something and being rocked by its actual affect are two completely different things.

I think it’s unfair to call what I went through an epiphany, but I definitely had an eye-opening moment as I realize all the false constructs our society sets up between the sexes are just that: false. Again this is something we all know, but I had a very real moment of empathizing with these women as they endured problems that I as a man cannot go through. If I were to summarize what I’m trying to say into a single sentence:

Women and men are alike in far more ways than they are different.

Now, this is not to deny the inherent differences between men and women. To pretend that these differences don’t exist is a lie that belittles our nature as human beings and attempts to hide some of the wonderful gifts that come to each sex. However, sometimes I think society as a whole tends to exaggerate the differences to the exclusion of our similarities. Men also experience societal expectations that they sometimes cannot fulfill, or choose not to fulfill. The social stigmas, awkwardness, and frustration are, I imagine, much the same.

The process of writing this complicated character has helped to actualize me as a person, and it has also caused me to urge others to make attempts at empathy. This doesn’t just apply to the opposite sex, it also applies to those with different beliefs, skin colors, and all the other wonderful things that make humanity diverse. We each have our own struggles, victories, and accomplishments that bring us to be who we are. Take the time to put yourself into the shoes of another, and appreciate what they go through in this life.

To those of you who read Dawnbringer one day, I desperately hope that I’ve brought all my characters to life, male and female, big and small. In my eyes, anything less would be a failure.

Poem - Unknown

A faintly whispering breeze

Coming toward me through the wood

I wonder why it frightens

I’m curious if it should

Unknowable ‘til arrival

Dark thoughts inside my head

Just wind? or cold Death’s touch

Causing tender leaves to shed?

No running, no escaping

Its ponderous crawl too fast

What is this terrible nothing

That has known me, in times past?

Noiseless cacophony crushes

As this bow wave sweeps me o’er

And I’m ripped from being, screaming

Like a child sucked from the shore

Reality crumbles ‘round me

The ground falls from beneath

That fathomless journey finds me

And I drift away, a leaf.

Randall Madden

August 5, 2014