I’m answering a ques­tion that was asked on twitter that prob­ably won’t be of general interest, but, well. It’s a ques­tion about the dedi­ca­tion of Cast in Decep­tion.

Over on Twitter:

@msagara

Hey, a few years ago a few of my friends and I turned up in the special thanks section of your novel “Cast in Decep­tion*”. We were really excited about the shout out but I’m wondering, why did we turn up there exactly?

The answer is a tiny bit circuitous — which is to say, this won’t seem like an answer until closer to the end.

*

PART ONE

My house­hold is basi­cally a geek house­hold — a house full of people who drift from one end of the over-focused spec­trum to the other (can walk into moving cars against a red light because they are *thinking* and every­thing else is autopilot). The so-called “normal” anchor (for a value of normal which passes muster in our house) is my spouse.

I have two sons. When the oldest was a toddler, he would sit in my lap and play Doom. Or rather, he would make me clear the level — he hated the noise the demons made — and then happily explore the 3D envi­ron­ment when every­thing in it wasn’t trying to kill him.

My younger son drifted toward computer games as well — but he had no interest in Diablo or other RPGs. 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Said Younger Son is the editor to this post. Hi!]

My husband intro­duced both to youtube, in part because of a series of youtube videos: “Will it blend?” in which someone with a super powerful blender shoved things into it and emptied the remains — if the blender survived. (One of these things was an iPhone.)

He also inad­ver­tently intro­duced them to XKCD and Order of the Stick. (I digress. I do that a lot.) 

This lead — of course it did — to the wider envi­rons of the internet — to various bulletin boards, the rest of youtube, etc. 

*

PART TWO

This is going to sound like a digres­sion. 

I was published before I had kids. My first novel came out in 1991. 

My chil­dren there­fore grew up around a writer. They grew up listening to frus­tra­tion and struggle and anxiety, all elements of acts of sustained creation (imho). They knew that books — at least mine — were not written overnight, and that it was *work*. It wasn’t tradi­tional 9 – 5 work, but it was what I did. 

Writing is not for everyone. But I think, on some level, that I want everyone to be a *creator* of some­thing. Not because we’re somehow exalted exis­tences (and frankly, my advice is always to have a Real Job first, because I *like* having a roof over my family’s head) but because there’s a kind of deep joy in parts of it.

I don’t think that people who do create but don’t attempt to make a living at it are foolish or wasting time. 

I think it’s impor­tant, however, to find some­thing you love doing, and … do it. 

This is not like loving choco­late. If you love choco­late, you eat it. You do not go and pick the cocoa beans and milk the cows and what­ever it is that’s required to *make* choco­late. You buy it, you eat it. 

There is *nothing* wrong with this, btw. It’s my attempt to make a distinc­tion between the use of the word ‘love’.

I love writing. I wrote even as a child. But writing *for other people* requires an addi­tional skill-set. Regard­less, there are times when it is anything but fun, and large clumps of hair are being pulled out. So my use of “love” here is: that thing that brings you enough joy you will wade through the unavoid­able tedium and anxiety in order to do it.

Love of some­thing is internal. I could not somehow light that internal fire for someone else. If my kids enjoyed things, they pursued them. I didn’t tell them what they should enjoy or why. It was enough to watch and listen. 

I’m sure you can see where this is heading.

*

PART THREE

Both of my sons played Doom. Interest in Doom took them to Doom-on-the-internet. They then started to play doom online in private servers, which lead them to a small but active commu­nity of Doom gamers. 

This lead to dinner stories of Doom games and the people they knew only by Doom monikers (i.e. every single person they played with, many of whom were not North Amer­ican). Some of those names came up fairly early, and some came up frequently. The kids were not, by this point, toddlers; it was not required that I know every single aspect of their lives.

At some point in the murky period between then and now, they found Doom wads and mods, and servers that played combi­na­tions of the ones they liked. Stories of Doom and its many wads became a consis­tent dinner conver­sa­tion. I still have distinct memo­ries of stories about people I have never met. 

One day Older Son said to Younger son: why don’t we combine this wad with this other mod? I think people would really like it!”

[Editor’s Note: Neither mod was actu­ally a .wad file, both were .pk3 files]

And Younger Son said, “Sure.”

This caused a whole new range of stories and obser­va­tions because of course there was obser­va­tion — of the commu­nity, of the map and mod creators, etc.

(I would love, some day, to find some trace of Ijon that is current on-line, because Ijon stories were incred­ibly popular and lead to me reading a lot of forum threads, among other things.)

This combi­na­tion of WAD [again, tech­ni­cally pk3] and mod was not simple, and neither of the two were program­mers yet. But they threw them­selves into what seemed, at a remove, to involve a *lot* of tedium and a bit of fun. (Espe­cially the multi­player-only bugs and the endless, endless debugging.)

They had their own pseu­do­nyms, they were part of this commu­nity. I was not.

But over the course of time, they learned a lot about people and commu­ni­ties that were entirely virtual. My Younger Son, who avoids talk about anything emotional, ever, sat down for a very long debate with someone that … no one else felt up to debating. I asked him why he’d done this the next day, and he said that someone had to do it.

This shocked me, but in a good way.

*

PART FOUR

Because of a charity auction, I had a dedi­ca­tion that I’d set aside for the auction; various things happened and the dedi­ca­tion wasn’t wanted. So, I went to the sons, and said, I would like to dedi­cate a book to these total strangers who have, nonethe­less, become some­what familiar over the years.

And they thought this sounded like a good idea. 

I have never inter­acted directly with any of you, but I am grateful that you are all out there doing your own things.