It’s been a while since I talked about podcasts, and since there’s been a new development on an old favorite, what a good time to do so.

Harmontown

The first time I encountered the concept of podcasters playing a roleplaying game was on the podcast Harmontown. After a while, it became a recurring segment to play some comedic Dungeons & Dragons with their dedicated game master, Spencer Crittenden, and the occasional celebrity guest.

Here’s the moment they accidentally plucked Spencer out of the crowd.

Listen to Harmontown here: https://podbay.fm/p/harmontown

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Nerd Poker

After that one, I discovered Nerd Poker in 2012 through the podcast grapevine. They were part of Earwolf back then, and the early episodes are only available behind its paywall. Since those days, they’ve done an additional 6 seasons and are deep into season 7.

It’s an actual-play podcast and features a bunch of comedians, so things can get hilarious.

Listen to Nerd Poker here: https://brianposehnsnerdpoker.libsyn.com/

Dungeons and Daddies

The next one I’ve really stuck with is Dungeons and Daddies (Not a BDSM podcast) [2019]. This podcast is more improvisational and prioritizes the story and laughs over strictly following the rules. The first two seasons are based on the Dungeons & Dragons rules, and then they make a switch to the Call of Cthulhu system for season three. This is another podcast with a bunch of comedy writers in the cast, so you're in for plenty of laughs.

Listen to Dungeons and Daddies here: https://www.dungeonsanddaddies.com/episodes

Pink Fohawk

A relatively new podcast a friend told me about a year or two back, Pink Fohawk. Pink Fohawk is an actual-play podcast set in the Shadowrun universe, and it rapidly became my favorite role-playing podcast. They’ve finished two seasons and are doing a one-off campaign of the Delta Green horror roleplaying game, which they’ve dubbed Delta Pink.

The show is notoriously slow to release but is one of the funniest podcasts I’ve ever heard.

I urge you to listen here: https://pinkfohawk.podbean.com/

I didn’t realize it until I was about halfway through writing about Nerd Poker that all these role-playing podcasts are united in that they are very funny. This is probably why I stick with them and have gotten bored with some other role-playing podcasts.

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Last Thursday—while I should have been working—I was watching this Worldcon panel. I kept pausing to reflect on things they’d said, and one of those times I cast my mind back to the origin of my writing career. And that gave me today’s blog post idea.

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Here’s that video in case you missed it.

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What is the plot continuum? Well, when it comes to writing, authors typically fall into one of two categories. Pantsers and plotters. Or, as George R.R. Martin puts it, architects and gardeners.

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”
― George R.R. Martin

I prefer to use the terms gardener and architect because they sound more professional and because I like them better than pantser and plotter. While I have nothing against the term plotter, the pantser was that creepy kid in elementary school who tried to yank your pants down while you weren’t looking.

But what I meant with the title of this blog post is that I feel these are just opposite poles of the same thing. Like many things in life, your writing style will land somewhere between these two extremes. As I thought back through my projects before deciding to become a professional writer, I realized that I had changed over time.

My first two projects were role-playing games. An untitled generic fantasy game that didn’t get much further than thinking up some character classes that I thought would be fun. And the second Mech VS Monster (MVM) that I took all the way to beta before abandoning the project. I realized that I don’t have much success playing roleplaying games these days and wrangling adults to play a campaign on a schedule is just awful. That, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time tweaking rules. What these two projects have in common is that I just had something spark my mind, and I started working. I was very far on the gardener side of things.

After switching to writing stories and not games, I tinkered around with some short stories and then moved onto a couple of stories that I gave up on. The first one was about kids back from college going on a road trip. The second was about a psychologist coming out of retirement to help a family friend (which I might revisit someday). By the time I had moved onto these stories, I was less on the extreme end of plot gardening. With both stories, an interesting idea hit me, which gave me the elevator pitch. Then I sat down and thought up the characters and then set out to figure out where these stories were going. The first story went on and on, sometimes entertaining, sometimes boring. Without landmarks to guide me, I just got lost in the woods. And the second one was much the same except before that could happen, I reread what I had and questioned where the story was going and realized that I was bored. And if I were bored, the reader would be really bored. So, I gave up on it before I got completely lost.

By the time I started working on Walk Amongst the Stars, I was a few steps into architect territory. My imagination sparked from a joke I heard on a podcast, and then I noted it down. Later, when I was deciding what to do next, I mentioned to my dad that I liked the small amount of world building I had done in my roleplaying game; he suggested I use that somehow. Before I could get back to the computer, those two worlds were colliding. Then I had a brainstorming session, and my prewriting came up with most of the cast of characters and, for the first time, the beginning, middle and end of the story. This time when I set out for adventure writing this story, each section of the story expanded like memory foam as I unpacked it.

And finally, I started the second book in the series while my editor was working on my manuscript. For the second book, I did the same thing as before except this time when I was writing up the beginning, middle and end they came to me as an empty container that I filled with scenes that I wanted / needed. I’m not a speedy writer, so I only got a couple of chapters deep into that one before my work came back and I needed to switch tasks. But that’s been my journey from plot gardening to being pretty deep in plot architect territory. It seems like those first two books would have been better if I had been an architect back then. But then again, most writing teachers will tell you that the typical author has a few bad books in them before they really nail it.

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