Dangerous Crowns: Buy my novel on Amazon!

omg hi!!

i’m new to fragrance too! what a wild corner of the fashion world. right now my favorite is essential parfums nice bergamote. i found it at ministry of scent in san francisco. it’s very mild, but i worry a lot about smelling bad to people, so that’s okay. i like clean, dry notes, white florals like neroli or jasmine, and citrus like bergamot. things that sit lightly so you can wear them all year.

i got shalimar several years ago because of its storied history as The Flapper Perfume, and i love it, but i don’t wear it much. like many old perfumes, it’s strong and has a heady sex appeal. i don’t know if i have the personality to pull it off. the same house, guerlain, also makes neroli outrenoir, which is beautiful but sooo expensive. i can’t justify the cost. my mother has worn aromatics elixir for like forty years, and i had no idea how polarizing it is for some people! i guess they can’t stand the aldehydes. i find it comforting because i associate it with her. when i was a child, it felt like “the grown-up lady scent.”

when it comes to cologne, i’m not picky. honestly, i take just about any fragrance on a man as an encouraging sign that he’s making an effort. i think i did that silly “character has a unique scent” thing in dangerous crowns and made marcus smell like orange peel and soap. i will say that i’ve smelled ds & durga’s coriander, and i’d wear it myself, but i could see it being interestingly gender-neutral. it’s like standing next to the ocean and shoving a fistful of fresh herbs in your face. zesty!

oh man. good question! it’s been a long time. i was a contractor, so i filled in incidental writing, primarily the soldier stories on the loading screens. i got the obsidian job before coh3 shipped, so i’m not sure which of my assignments made the final cut. it happens! off the top of my head, here are some things i wrote that may or may not be in the game:

• a sapper from a large italian-american family
• a country-boy sniper with hunting and tracking experience
• a chaplain from new zealand with a conscientious objector friend at home
• a canadian postal corpsman’s adventures in an italian outpost
• a posh british travel writer covering different italian cities [i think these stayed, i was told they used some in the marketing]
• a serbian exile spying on a collaborator for MI6
• a family man from the east end
• a medic in a beleaguered unit writing to his nurse girlfriend [they warned me they might not use this one because of its darker tone]
• a commando who was secretly an X trooper [they also warned me this one might get heavy sensitivity eyes, which was fine]
• overworld barks for an axis sally-type character
• assorted unit bios
• surely i put wojtek in there somewhere

this is more of a crunchy design thing than a narrative thing, so i’m kind of leaving my wheelhouse, but i’ve heard teammates talk about it. i think the idea is, like, it’s not fair to give the player a problem that’s solved by a specific tool until you’ve shown them the tool is there. you wouldn’t want to put a quest objective at the top of a rocky ledge until you’ve taught them there’s a button to climb. that’s what tutorials are for!

re: confusing players with the world - a lot of video games are Big Genre. you’re in some speculative world with lots of concepts to introduce. “commander shepard” in a vacuum doesn’t mean anything. how do we know who they are? what’s the “alliance navy,” and what do they do? what’s a “prothean artifact,” and why do the characters care about it? you know, all the exposition you have to handle at a story’s outset.

do you reckon it would be weird if i re-polished that FNV fic and posted it on ao3. i think about it in the shower sometimes

anyway! my workflow depends on a lot of different things. unless i have a large writing assignment that takes me a long time, it’s rare for me to do the same tasks two days in a row. i write a lot, but i spend at least as much time editing, fixing bugs, or helping another department solve a problem. the “pitch an idea” stage is short.

when you get assigned something to write, who does it come from? either a producer or someone from the nebulous cloud called “leadership,” like the game director or my narrative lead. sometimes it’s a direct request, or sometimes they’ll say “we have this thing that needs doing,” and i can volunteer if i have time. like a lot of studios, we have an online work inbox - producers assign tasks through it, and i close them when i’m done.

where does it go? if you mean “where it goes in the game,” pretty much anywhere. one day i could write dialogue. one day i could name items, or something like that. once i’m done, it gets handed off to another department to implement in the game itself. many NDs have to touch their game’s engine. i don’t, thank god!

what details do you get about it? this one depends too, because i’ve done work that’s wholly mine, and i’ve also written on assignments that were someone else’s first. sometimes an ND writes something, but when we revisit it months later, they’re busy with more important work, so i need to pinch-hit for them. or they leave, and someone needs to take on the work they left behind. either way, i try to retain as much of their vision as i can. technically, they forfeit ownership of that writing if they leave, and i’m not beholden to them. but i don’t like that, so i keep them in mind anyway. i just know i’d feel bad if someone took one of my characters and turned them into something that flouted all my principles.

if i’m starting from scratch, i’ll definitely get parameters. they’re vague ingredients that have to inform the ideas i pitch. for NDA reasons, these aren’t specific examples, but it could be like:

• “we need a guy in X Area so players will talk to him and find the item we hid there.”
• “this quest needs the player to do something in X Dungeon.”
• “this encounter needs to teach the player to use a special ability.”
• “this quest needs to teach the player about a conflict between two groups.”
• “this character should introduce X Worldbuilding Concept.”
• “we want to give the player X Reward.”

they sound utilitarian, but they don’t have to be. i can still go wild as long as i tick the right boxes. they’re more guardrails than anything. in game writing, where you have limited assets, you have to be careful not to get out ahead of your skis and pitch something the team can’t make. you also don’t want to put the player in a situation you haven’t taught them how to handle, or confuse them with your world. i mean, they’re still confused sometimes, but… you know!

of course you can hope. you can always hope. hope was the last thing left at the bottom of pandora’s box after all the curses flew out. i spent most of my twenties fearing my writing would never go anywhere. i was just too stubborn to give up, for better or for worse. when people asked me “where is this going?”, it made me all the more indignant to find some way to make it work, even if i didn’t know where to turn next.

and, you know, for what it’s worth, i had a very long time where it felt like everyone was moving up and leaving me in the dirt. it didn’t matter what it was - jobs, dating, getting to see the world - i was always failing at something. [i’ve still failed at dating, i just try not to dwell on it.] i gave that insecurity too much power. i said a lot of things i regret. you sound nicer than me, so you don’t have to worry about that, but it’s something i think about whenever i’m tempted to compare myself again. in fact, if your friends really like you - which i’m sure they do - they want to see you up there with them, even if they don’t know how to help. it can’t hurt to ask!

if i have, it bears repeating! here’s a rough timeline of what i did. never discount the value of luck and the kindness of friends

• 2016: i was doing a random freelance transcription job when i saw @theivorytowercrumbles post about writing for voltage. they reblogged the studio’s open casting call for new writers. since it was so lenient - no experience, fanfic samples allowed - i applied. they hired me for their new project, but let me go after a trial period, citing that the tone of my writing was a bad fit for that game. i foundered for a while after that. i don’t take rejection well. i started dangerous crowns to try to make money from writing some other way.
• 2017: one of voltage’s producers reached out to me and said they’d started another project that i was a good fit for. she felt letting me go was a mistake and wanted to snap me back up. i said yes, i mean, are you kidding? so i started on reiner’s route.
• 2018-2019: i kept at it. i took on diego’s route. it occurred to me that i wasn’t making very much money, but i liked my coworkers, and i was building my portfolio, so who cared? i also finished dangerous crowns, and a handful of people bought it, but certainly not enough to support myself or anything.
• early 2020: between the pay and creative differences with voltage’s team, it started to sink in that i needed to find other work. i applied to the few open game writer jobs i could find, but with only mobile romance in my portfolio, i got nowhere. i threw in dangerous crowns samples. i tried to network on twitter. i still never made it to the interview phase. i foundered for a while again.
• late 2020: the voltage writers went on strike. i gave a statement to a journalist that one of obsidian’s narrative designers noticed. we became acquaintances over it. another old friend of mine threw me a life raft in the form of a different contract, better paying, on a non-romance indie game. i took it gladly. i added a twine game to my portfolio, too. i kept applying. i got a few interviews, but something still didn’t click.
• 2021: i finally accepted that i needed formal help. i did a portfolio workshop. i got resume coaching. the coach passed my name to a writer on the company of heroes team. they liked me! they also paid me more money than i’d ever seen in my life. at the same time, obsidian advertised a narrative job opening. i applied on a lark and let my ND pal know i was doing so. why not, right? college-new-vegas-fan me would want me to. they rejected me, but not before i passed their writing test and two interviews. i had nothing to lose at that point, so i told my ND pal that i was bummed. she gave me a golden piece of advice: “you came really close. try again.”
• 2022: obsidian had another narrative opening. i threw myself at it. i was now going to annoy them into hiring me. since i was a known quantity from applying six months before, they had no qualms about interviewing me again. this time, it worked out, and i’ve been there ever since.

what’s the common denominator here? i met people who thought i was all right and gave me a hand up when i needed it. the standard advice is to work with a community of your peers instead of trying to get your heroes to senpai-notice you. it’s not that they don’t care - they just have their own thing going on, and your peers could be the heroes of tomorrow if the right project comes along. i also found the portfolio was the end-all-be-all when it came to job hunting. i went through a grieving process with that! i’m not afraid to admit it. i wish studios had held my degree or dangerous crowns in higher regard, but i just had to make games in a wider variety of genres, and that was that.

one caveat: narrative is a really saturated field right now. a lot of people want to write, and there aren’t many openings. it’s not uncommon for big studios to get hundreds of applicants. larian probably got over a thousand for the job they posted recently. i feel awful saying that, because i don’t want to discourage you, but i’d feel worse if i didn’t let you know what you were getting into. if it’s something you want, you should try! keep an open mind about the random projects you may find. you never know where they’ll take you.