Song of the Day: “Desired Constellation" (Björk)

Björk's music is dear to me, and has been for a long time. Her vulnerability makes me feel like maybe it's possible for me to be vulnerable, to sing loudly over quiet music. This morning I rediscovered this track from Medulla, and it vibrated in me.

"With a palm full of stars / I throw them like dice

On the table

I shake them like dice / And throw them on the table

Until the desired constellation appears

How am I going to make it right?"

The question "How am I going to make it right?" is one I feel all the time. I struggle with the thought of saying it out aloud, never mind singing it.

Song of the Day: "Masterpiece" (Big Thief)

It's Sunday morning and I’m getting choked up at the kitchen table. I'm only halfway through my first cup of coffee. It’s that song again, folding me into a hug till my throat cramps. Big Thief's ballad “Masterpiece”, the solo acoustic take. When I retreat into my music-critic mind, I feel embarrassed at how effortlessly the songwriter has snipped through my heart's yellow perimeter tape ('crying scene - do not cross'). Simple guitar chords. A pretty but uncomplicated melody. No production or compositional sleight of hand. An acoustic guitar, for bob's sake. Have I always been such an easy mark?

Back in the mid naughts I served on the editorial staff at Paste, which had a special fondness for singer/songwriters, folk and Americana, disproportionately so in the company’s early years. Three chords and the truth, an acoustic guitar. That sort of thing. We got savaged routinely for promoting music that our critics described as “boring” or “beige” or – if the nuclear strike was to be called in – “safe”.

Why am I getting weepy then? Why do I feel so vulnerable listening to this song? Isn’t that the opposite of safety? Isn’t that the very definition of risk? And if I feel vulnerable even listening to this song, how must the singer feel singing it?

“Years, days, makes no difference to me babe / You look exactly the same to me / Ain’t no time, crossing your legs inside the diner / Raising your coffee to your lips, the steam.”

The coffee-sipping woman in the diner arrives and all of a sudden I picture my little girl grown. The same girl running through our kitchen shirtless in her underpants while I type these words. Rowan, five years old, not yet banished from Eden snake-bitten and self-conscious.

The economy of the song’s details pare flesh with scalpel sharpness. The affection of the word ‘babe’. The neutral ground of the diner table a world away from the intimacy of the kitchen table at which I’m drinking my own coffee. Rowan doesn’t even drink coffee yet. She calls it a “daddy drink”. Some time has clearly passed but a parent always recognises a child. The pair in the diner, perhaps it’s a strained relationship. The crossed legs might suggest a defensive posture, the lower-body equivalent of folded arms.

“You saw the masterpiece, she looks a lot like you / Wrapping her left arm around your right / Ready to walk you through the night.”

'Masterpiece', what a lovely bit of name-calling. Liam, you are a masterpiece. Rowan, you are a masterpiece. The fact that you look a lot (or even just a bit) like me is something I hold dear. That outward clue to our ineradicable kinship.

Tears come more easily as I get older. Maybe it’s parenthood. Maybe my defences are getting weaker, less stubborn. Or maybe I’m actually getting stronger – in my ability to plunge myself into difficult, unsettling feelings. Maybe it’s because my own parents are getting older and the cycle of existence, birth and death, is never far from my mind. I want to experience life free of illusion, hold the milk and sugar.

Over the past year I’ve started drinking my coffee black. Was it fair to say that I liked coffee if it needed all that sweetening and cream before I could appreciate the flavour? I’ve grown to appreciate the hint of bitterness. Life without the assurance of God, of heaven, of rapture, has been the same. A brew too bitter for many, though one whose character you can grow to appreciate.

The experience of listening to music can function in the same way. If you strip away all the production and instrumentation and aural confection that sweetens the taste, sometimes you’re left no escape from the truth. As "Masterpiece" reminds, our children will become adults in the span of time it takes us to blink and reopen our eyes, an experience Frans Hofmeester mirrored so poignantly in the timelapse he made of his daughter's journey from newborn to teenager. After leaving the hospital room hosting our welcome party, it can feel as though we get little more than a stroll around the block before we're back in there for the send-off.

“Old stars / Filling up my throat / You gave 'em to me when I was born / Now they’re coming out / Lying there on the hospital bed your eyes were narrow, blue and red / You took a draw of breath and said to me

"You saw the masterpiece, she looks a lot like me / Wrapping my left arm round your right / Ready to walk you through the night.”

Stars punctuate the darkness. Not by a lot. They’re small specks, to be fair. But their glow is reassuring. Sometimes a bit of milk starlight is all you need. The milk of human kindness, one person's arm wrapping around another's. Not all is dark. The coffee is bitter, the mug is warm.

That time Dan Savage went back to church

This evening I came across a tweet from somebody who goes by the handle Armchair Philosopher, which reads, "I'm agnostic, but I started going back to church. What am I thinking?!" His sentiment immediately called to mind one of my all-time favourite This American Life segments – a Dan Savage essay that wrecks me every time I listen to it.

A lapsed Catholic, Savage discusses his atheism and the way in which his mother's passing tempted him to return to the church St. Ignatius in which he grew up. The comfort of the church-going ritual, the way the memory of that institution bonded him to his mother. He bristles at how the Catholic church regards sexuality in general, and his homosexuality in particular. He wonders aloud how you enter into the grieving process when Christian doctrine so eagerly assures you that your mother's not really dead, just relocated.

The audio version of Savage's reading has always been a treat, so intimate in my earbuds. As if spoken into a hand cupping my ear only. But tonight, after that random tweet sent me searching, I found a video clip of it from a staged broadcast of This American Life that was beamed out to cinemas. Seeing the author's composure crack as he reads the page in front of him. Even more powerful. Rituals bring comfort. Going back to enjoy this essay again, that's a ritual too I suppose.

Savage in front of that crowd. He could be a preacher, or a poet. And a poet.

The preacher tells us we're going to die, the poet reminds us we're not dead yet. You'll find both sentiments here.

You Died: A Retrospective

It’s been a little over a year since my friend Keza and I published You Died, a book about the video game Dark Souls and its cult following. We published our project in the traditional fashion, with a small Scottish press called BackPage (staff of three, basically). No month-long Kickstarter campaign. No stretch goals. No afternoon of badminton and falafel wraps with Keza and me for those who pledged €5,000 to support the project. None of that. 

It’s my first book. And, to be candid from the start, when Keza first invited me to join her as a co-author I had misgivings about whether I’d be able to deliver my portion of the words. I’m a slow writer and have struggled in the past when it came to projects that exceeded four- or five-thousand words (the upper limit of the magazine features I’d filed throughout my journalism career). What I told her was yes, I’d love to. I suspected that, if I was going to manage the feat, my chances were infinitely better if I had the accountability of a collaborator holding my hand over the flame.

There’s an area in Dark Souls called Tomb of the Giants (from which I drew the pun “Tome of the Giants” for the book’s Twitter profile). It’s deep underground and almost pitch black. When you first enter you’re forced to traverse chasms using toppled stone sarcophagi as bridges. Since you’re only able to see a few inches in front of you at any given time, there’s a constant fear that you’ll either stumble off the edge into the abyss or confront some ghastly foe. That’s what writing a book feels like, only the sarcophagus you’re crossing is the span of the Golden Gate and the bones it contains belong to all the well-intentioned writers who've started projects that never saw the light of day.

I would have coveted a blog post that mapped out the various twists and turns. A snapshot of what to expect from the process. When Keza and I set to work there weren’t a huge number of books that resembled the one we’d set out to create so it was hard to tell how much appetite there was for such a project. Anecdotally there appeared to be a growing segment of people reading and producing thoughtful, book-length criticism and literary nonfiction about games. Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives (which sold an impressive 11K copies in hardcover during its first year), Brendan Keogh’s Killing Is Harmless and several others. Commercial considerations weren’t the primary driver of course. After formally reviewing Dark Souls for Edge back in 2011 I simply struggled to purge the observations about the game’s design that continued to clutter my mind – its staunch difficulty, the world’s layout and ruined architecture and opaque backstory, the way in which all the pieces fit together. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. While playing other games I’d find myself instinctively using them as a lens to better understand Dark Souls, that old undying ember.

Even if you’re labouring away on a passion project, it’s only human nature to ponder its commercial viability. My wife and I hope to purchase a home here in Ireland someday, but the prospect of fishing €20,000 in spare change from between the couch cushions for a mortgage deposit seems all but impossible. Without any prompting required, my brain set to work grinding out hypotheticals: the Dark Souls series has an intensely devoted following and has sold millions of copies, if even a small percentage of those people felt compelled to buy a book about the game, maybe the royalties could help pole-vault my family over that financial hurdle.

Just as You Died involved me writing a book about Dark Souls that I wanted to read but didn’t yet exist, this blog post is me offering the publishing backstory, sales figures and personal reflections I would have appreciated referencing as a first-time author. I hope it’s useful for anybody embarking on a creative project, literary or otherwise. Not as a means to assess whether your project is worth the effort, but simply to leave the outline of some footprints so you can be reassured that others have ventured into the dark before you.

[Disclaimer: Any opinions shared in this post are strictly my own and don’t necessarily reflect those of my esteemed co-author.] 

JOINING FORCES

When Keza surprised me with a Google Chat message in January of 2015 to ask if I had any interest in teaming up to write a book about Dark Souls, I was already working on my own Dark Souls book for a separate publisher.

Though I hadn’t formally signed a contract, I’d been approached by a journalist colleague of mine named Brendan Keogh a year prior. He and fellow Australian academic Dan Golding were launching a publishing company called Press Select. They planned to release a series of ebooks inspired by the 33 ⅓ music books. Instead of a single book about a single album, however, each book they published would deep-dive into an individual game (a dream that has since been realised by the good people at Boss Fight Books). I’d volunteered to write Press Select's volume on Dark Souls. I had a title ready to go: Nobody Wants To See You Go Hollow: The Story of Dark Souls. (Because I set aside the project I'll forever be left to wonder whether that title would’ve actually fit on the front cover.)

© Duncan Harris / Dead End Thrills

It would be disingenuous to say I failed to finish writing that book; in truth, I’d barely begun. I had the aforementioned title, a rough chapter outline containing prompts such as “The Curse: A Personal Lament (book of Job?)” and a joint interview I’d done with indie developers Terry Cavanagh and Jasper Byrne at a noisy Cambridge pub about their thoughts on the game’s influence on other game designers. I’d crashed at Terry’s apartment afterward and stayed up late watching him begin a fresh playthrough at soul level 1. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Sadly, all of the relevant interview files from my digital recorder got corrupted by time I began working on You Died in earnest, causing a 10-minute slice of the conversation – tangential small talk, naturally – to play on a loop for the sound file's whole duration.

Keza already had a deal secured with a publisher called BackPage that specialised in football biographies and other sports-related titles. The company’s founders had both covered football for newspapers before starting the company. They stumbled upon the world of video games after finding unexpected crossover success with a book about the addictive sports sim Football Manager that had sold over 10,000 copies. A Google search for award-winning video-game writers had led them to a celebrated article about EVE Online written by Keza and they’d pitched her on writing a book about the burgeoning esports phenomenon. She had a different idea: how about a book about Dark Souls instead? BackPage came around to the idea.

Before she approached me, Keza had been working with a different writer. That partnership had run aground, however, when it became clear that her collaborator intended to write an academic critique of the game and did not share Keza’s desire to profile members of the Dark Souls community. Though initially reluctant to leave my existing Dark Souls project behind, I liked the idea of joining forces with one of the world’s most foremost experts on the Dark Souls series. Keza had been instrumental in raising awareness of Dark Souls’ predecessor Demon’s Souls in the West after pitching a review of the game’s original Japanese version to a UK website while residing in Japan. I also felt like we had a better chance of writing the definitive Dark Souls book if we pooled our efforts instead of racing each other to publication of competing volumes. I’ve always preferred co-op to PvP.

I sent a sheepish email to Brendan and Dan at Press Select letting them know that I intended to work with Keza and BackPage. They couldn’t have been more gracious, wishing me the best of luck and inviting me to pitch them ideas in the future if I had other games I wanted to explore in depth. It's fortunate that I answered Keza's bat signal, as Press Select would be quietly put out to pasture not long after.

SLOW GOING

Though both Keza and I had cutting-floor scraps from previous interviews we’d done with Dark Souls’ development team, we hoped to amass fresh material that would allow us to paint a detailed picture of Dark Souls’ development. The game’s publisher Bandai-Namco showed little interest, sadly. Their promotional priorities had moved on. To be fair, there's little business incentive to cement the legacy of a title that's already been on the market for several years. Keza hoped to get some additional time with From Software at the tail end of a Bloodborne press trip to secure some fresh interview material about Dark Souls for the book. That access would not materialise.

© Paul Scott Canavan

We mistakenly assumed the credibility we’d banked as journalists over the course of our working relationship with Bandai-Namco PR and From Software would make them more willing to support the book we were writing with developer access. I’d visited From Software’s Tokyo offices on two separate trips to Japan. At one point a UK PR rep for Bandai-Namco suggested that we’d have a better chance of gaining their support if we agreed to give the publisher sign-off rights on the book’s content. We politely told them to dive-roll off a high ledge. No author wants a corporate censor going over his or her work with a Sharpie in hand.

I was on a streak of fabulous productivity throughout 2015 but only if you’re using my tally of completed Destiny bounties as a KPI. I’d made little progress on the chapters I’d committed to writing. Keza would periodically check in on my progress, causing my guilt levels to spike off the charts. I had excuses, flimsy ones. The reality is that it’s hard to spend eight or nine hours at work generating pages of writing for your day job and then come home and sit down at the computer to make progress on a personal writing project. Lots of writers successfully juggle both and locate the motivation to power through. I am here to tell you, I find that machine-like perseverance difficult to summon. Also my personal insecurities were raging. The usual messages: you're a failure, you'll never finish this book, your writing sucks, people who say nice things about your work are lying because they feel sorry for you. Depression is never a boon to productivity.

YOU DEADLINED

As ever, deadline terror is the most effective motivator.

We needed to launch the book during the hype window surrounding the release of Dark Souls III, allegedly the series’ final instalment. Hitting this launch window for the book was a non-negotiable. It felt like our best and only chance at catching a wave of topical relevance. Our book centered on a game that was already creeping up on five years old. The attention life cycle in the world of video games can be harrowingly brief. A game that’s been on the market for five years might only command the price of a fast-food value meal. Not exactly a recipe for front-page gaming news. Furthermore we didn’t expect any mainstream, non-endemic press to have any interest in our Dark Souls ruminations (spoiler: they didn’t). If the video-game community was already writing about the legacy of the Dark Souls series on the occasion of the trilogy’s conclusion, perhaps they’d be more inclined to reference our book.

As 2015 wore on, a pall of urgency settled over the project. Keza and I would need to leave time for revisions, proofreading, typesetting and printing. At one point Keza mentioned that if we didn’t finish writing the first draft of the book by the end of December, we wouldn’t make our April 2016 launch target. I swallowed hard.

© Duncan Harris / Dead End Thrills

By the time autumn rolled around, the only copy I’d filed was my contribution to the book’s Prologue. It was time to knuckle down. The first “chapter” I finished ended up being an unwieldy 14,000-word travelogue entitled “Chasing The Sun: A Tour Of Lordran” in which I contemplated the game’s universe, taking each zone in turn. I don’t know how I expected a chapter of that length to survive intact; 14,000 words is roughly the length of a Kindle Single.

The simple justification is that I’d been dying to write about Dark Souls’ world – all of it, in exhaustive detail. I can recall thinking to myself, wasn’t this the attraction of writing a book in the first place? Having room to say everything you’ve ever wanted to say about a subject that fascinates you. The luxury of going deep, a spelunking expedition to the center of the earth and (finally!) sufficient rope to make the descent, or possibly hang yourself in the attempt. The luxury of creative self-indulgence. After realising I couldn’t feasibly replay each area of the game to refresh my memory on the microscopic details, I took to writing on the living room couch with my laptop while streaming YouTube Let’s Play videos from expert players (EpicNameBro, et al) on the television. It felt like the period earlier in my career when I’d play music CDs on repeat for hours at a time while writing reviews of them.

It was Keza’s idea to split up the 'Tour Of Lordran' chapter and have it snake through the entire book, deploying a batch of areas as interludes every few chapters, a structural solve which I resisted at first but quickly warmed to. Good ideas can come from anywhere, but it was in moments like this that I appreciated the perks of working with such an attentive co-author.

Though we’d banked a handful of chapters by Sept/Oct 2015 time frame (Prologue, Tour of Lordran, Dark Souls’ development backstory, Twitch Plays Dark Souls), we completed the overwhelming majority of the book during a surge of productivity stretching from late November 2015 to the end of January 2016. I did most of my writing on my laptop at the kitchen table after getting home from work. I’d work till 1 or 2am in the morning, crash, then repeat after getting home from work the next day.

Keza and I exchanged messages constantly via Google Chat, updating each other on progress, fielding questions about game-related details, sense-checking lore theories or just indulging a quick therapeutic moan. During the co-writing of the Appendix in which we described Dark Souls’ cast of characters and their role in the game’s narrative, we used a shared Google Doc, either writing directly into it or copy-pasting in our contributions. It felt thrilling to watch the document filling up with words at such a brisk clip.

I took a week off work at the end of January 2016 to complete my last several chapters. I needed an environment suitable to deep focus so I set up camp in the guest bedroom of my parents’ house in the Wicklow countryside. I proceeded to work for four or five days from a small desk in that room, sitting down at my laptop right after waking up. My mom would bring in a bowl of soup and bread on a tray, which I’d eat quickly and then return to my writing, finishing the day’s work at roughly 10pm. I conducted several Skype interviews (including all the subjects of the “Challenge Runners” chapter) during those days, transcribing them and writing the relevant chapters immediately afterward. It’s the most productive, focused sprint of writing I’ve ever undertaken. I had back pain for weeks afterward from hunching over my laptop for so many hours interrupted, or from being almost 40 I guess.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE... PAPERBACK

No Microsoft Office applications were used in the making of You Died. No emailing of Word docs back and forth. No confusion over versions during editorial revisions. Using Google Docs with shared editing privileges we could leave margin comments on each other’s work, track changes and suggest revisions. All of our raw materials – interview transcripts, illustrations, photos, idea brainstorms, chapter outlines, master content schedule and deadline spreadsheet, blog posts for the You Died website, collected player quotes, and more – existed in a Google Drive shared between Keza, myself and our two editors at BackPage. No separate online database needed to host all the project files. Our primary BackPage contact Neil hadn’t used Google Drive previously and required a bit of skilling up, but I can’t imagine having worked any other way.

Keza edited my chapters, I edited hers, a process that working in shared Google Docs made infinitely easier. On the few occasions in which an errant change slipped through, it took just a minute or two to pull up the revision history and restore a previous iteration of the document.

Keza and I have different writing styles. Mine tends toward the florid. I cast about in search of illumination through analogy. I enjoy wordplay and the occasional questionable pun. I’ll wander off the path to explore tangential connections. For better or worse. Possibly because I came of age as a writer at a music magazine rather than a newspaper where style choices that distract from the story’s core facts tend to be plucked by copyeditors like unsightly eyebrow hairs. Keza brings a disciplined rigour to her phrasing. When editing my copy she’d lawn-mow passages that were flowery to the point of allergic reaction, imposing a helpful check on my more self-indulgent tendencies. When I edited Keza’s work I suggested opportunities to add extra colour or humour to passages that felt excessively dry.

I like that You Died accommodates both styles. A dinner buffet containing carved strips of both white and dark meat. That’s why I don’t feel overly panicked when a reader review of the book voices a preference for Keza’s contributions. For example, one GoodReads commenter named Ben writes, “I prefer MacDonald's sections to Killingsworth's, who's prone to the kind of hyperbole I expect online and bought a book to escape.” Another commenter named Nicholas writes, “The Killingsworth sections are sometimes a bit jokier than I was hoping for, with some groan inducing play on words.” (People groan during orgasms... right?) 

DRAW YOUR WEAPON

One of the most enjoyable parts of creating You Died had nothing to do with writing. I relished the search for the artists who would create the book’s cover art and interior illustrations. Keza put out a call for submissions via her Twitter account and we started going through entries. This was a point at which our collaboration could have hit the rocks. What if she fell in love with a cover artist or concept that I found repellant? Or vice versa? Just like a marriage, when you have two people in the mix (and the decision-making powers are equal) there is always a risk of stalemate.

Fortunately Keza and I had a very similar vision for what we wanted the book to be. We didn’t want a cover that focused on the more horrific aspects of the game (corpse-like hollows, gore, etc). We wanted something refined and evocative. When Scottish illustrator Paul Canavan sent over a spread of cover concepts (see below), both Keza and I were immediately drawn to the sword of Artorias. We loved the moodiness of it. Darkroot Garden just happens to be my favourite area in the game. And the image of the grave of Artorias, with its symbol of mortality, thematically reinforced the book’s title You Died.

© Paul Scott Canavan

Beyond the cover painting, Canavan contributed a massive volume of work to the project, drawing pencil sketches for each of the areas explored in my Tour of Lordran passages, 20 sketches in total, completed over the course of just a few weeks. Personally I never thought we’d be able to afford to work with Canavan. BackPage managed the payment/budget conversations directly with our two illustrators so, to this day, I don’t know exactly what compensation they received. I suspect it was modest and I’m deeply grateful for their generosity in taking our labour of love their own. Without their illustrations the book’s quality would be significantly diminished.

In the same way that Keza and I brought contrasting writing voices to the project, we liked the idea of having two different visual styles present in the book. I’d gotten in touch with my favourite illustrator Richard Hogg to see if he might be interested in collaborating. Though enthused about the prospect, his schedule didn’t allow him to sign on. He suggested I reach out to Angus Dick, a friend of his who’d done some animation work on Hohokum, a video game that Hogg helped design. Angus is a huge Dark Souls fan with an instantly memorable style that brings out the game’s humour and fundamental weirdness. When I reached out, he responded with instant enthusiasm about working together.

© Angus Dick

I floated the idea of him illustrating a bunch of different scenarios in which you can die in Dark Souls (cursed by basilisks, getting knocked off a ledge by a swinging blade in Sen’s Fortress, etc). Keza and I filled up a Google Doc with about 40 different iconic deaths and we narrowed the list down to our favourite 18. That brainstorm provided such a fun diversion. Angus’s drawings are genius. We placed one at the end of every chapter. I become so enamoured with these death illustrations that, at one point, I tried to convince Keza that we include the one of the Asylum Demon squashing the Chosen Undead on the book’s cover. Both she and Neil pushed back, assuring me they loved the illustration but were afraid that, as a cover image, its whimsy (reminiscent of Quentin Blake) felt out of step with the book’s overall tone, which aspired to be more serious and authoritative. Such checks and balances had a positive effect on the book. Debating these points clarified the path forward.

PROMÖTER HEAD

Successfully completing a book feels amazing, but it’s only the first leg of the race. Once Keza and I finished the first draft of You Died and moved into the editing and proofreading phase, we began to shift our focus to building awareness about the book’s existence. Perhaps then we might even sell a few copies.

I volunteered to set up a Twitter account for the book. Since the Souls community congregates online and the official You Died website lacks interactivity (no comment threads, discussion forum, etc), it felt important to have some kind of hub for conversation about the book. A place where people could ask us questions directly or tag us into messages and posts in which they’d written about the book. Though we amassed just 1,300 followers in total and I’m much less active in updating the You Died Twitter account now a year on from the book’s publication, it was worth the effort just to see readers posting photos of their newly arrived copies of You Died after the book’s launch.

The book you’ve written, it’s right there in people’s homes, in their living rooms, resting on the arm of their sofa, on their bed, on their desk. They’re snapping a photo of it with their phone the way a person might a delicious dinner that’s just arrived to one’s restaurant table. That felt amazing. The thing that means so much to you, means something to another person. In a universe only so slightly parallel, it could’ve been me taking a selfie with someone else’s Dark Souls book and tagging them into the post in hopes of getting a gesture of recognition from the book’s author. A digital, wordless tip of the hat.

Our publisher set up a Wordpress site for the book and urged Keza and I to update the blog regularly as a means of generating interest in the book. I don’t think I had any clear expectations of what sort of promotion or marketing support we might be able to expect from our publisher. They ran targeted Facebook ads on a handful of weekends. That was generally the extent of their post-launch investment. There was no external PR agency contracted to send out review copies and follow up. If somebody reached out to us for a review copy or we had a particular individual we wanted to get their hands on the book, we could pass along those mailing addresses to BackPage and they’d make sure a copy got sent out. Otherwise they politely encouraged us to keep the blog entries coming.

The only struggle for me in terms of the ‘website blog as marketing strategy’ was that I’d just written nearly 40,000 words about Dark Souls. I’d finally managed to say everything I wanted to about the game. The itch was well and truly scratched. The idea of squeezing out a regular stream of Dark Souls-related content after publishing the book felt a bit like revisiting the lunch buffet minutes after a competitive eating trial. I was ready to write about something else. I was happy to discuss You Died and the historical impact of Dark Souls during podcast guest spots. The medium of conversation felt fresh. I just didn’t want to keep trying to gin up fresh angles about the game.

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING

Neil and Martin at BackPage were a pleasure to work with, true professionals. I’m not confident, however, that a traditional publishing house added any clear advantages over, say, running a hypothetically successful Kickstarter and self-publishing. You Died never landed in brick-and-mortar retail. You won’t find it on the shelf at your local library. There was no book tour (to be fair, a questionable tactic for a project with an admittedly niche audience) or any other scheduled appearances. No PR blitz. Many of the key support functions that require the unique expertise of a publishing company, that would have been difficult to navigate independently, seemed absent. The book launched and, apart from me and Keza spamming our personal Twitter and Facebook followers with updates, launch fanfare was muted. In retrospect I wish Keza and I had stepped up to schedule a small launch party to celebrate the book’s launch.

It may seem like a minor thing, but I was disappointed that You Died never got a hardcover edition. BackPage assured us that hardcovers only make economic sense if you’re launching during a holiday season where people can justify the higher sticker price by purchasing as a gift item. I still feel like hardcore Souls fans have a collector’s mindset and would embrace a higher sales price for the more elegant production values. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll be able to do a small hardcover print run to coincide with the game’s 10th (or 20th or 25th) anniversary. If you work with a traditional publisher, be prepared to compromise on features of the product that may be personally significant to you.

I took solace in the fact that BackPage expressed interest in our idea of making our paperback feel a bit more collectible by adding a UV treatment to the moon looming behind Artorias’ grave marker, which would give it a luminescent shine. However, when the boxes of books showed up, the UV treatment had been neglected. BackPage claimed it was an administrative oversight but it was hard to shake the impression that it was simply a cost-saving measure that would be easier to apologise for than pitch ahead of printing. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of promotional investment from our publisher stemmed from their not quite knowing what to do with You Died’s subject matter, which clearly diverges from their “sports stories” identity.

One of the most telling facts: to this day You Died appears nowhere on the main portfolio section of BackPage’s website. Though I did appreciate it surfacing in a recent blog entry on the their site entitled “The book no-one knows we published”. (How many authors get to be a publisher’s dirty little side fling?)

SELLING YOUR SOULS

In the aforementioned blog post it was generous of Neil to describe You Died as a “brilliant book” that’s sold well. I feel confident in the book’s quality, though I am more sceptical in my appraisal of the book’s sales performance. The numbers look decent but unspectacular to my eye. 

Sales figures for You Died as of the end of March 2017:

1,876 lifetime paperback sales + 1,682 for ebooks (Kindle, iBooks, etc) = 3,558 copies

Paperback sales breakdown by month:

March 2016 (pre-orders): 219 / April (launch month): 525 / May: 569 / June: 118 / July: 89 / Aug: 50 / Sep: 32 / Oct: 40 / Nov: 42 / Dec: 88 / Jan 2017: 40 / Feb: 27 / Mar: 37 / Apr: 30

Book advance:

£2,000

In any close collaboration, professional or personal, it’s easy for financial matters to become a point of tension. Though I didn’t feel comfortable voicing my discomfort at the time, one of the only awkward aspects of the co-author relationship was that Keza received our book advance and maintained sole discretion over its spending. These funds enabled her to travel to Japan to do research for the book. My expenses remained fairly negligible – a budget flight to London for our joint interview with Dark Souls’ localisation specialist Ryan Morris and a handful of interview transcriptions by a freelancer that Keza arranged. At this point, without any visibility on the expenditure breakdown, Keza informed me the advance had been spent, leaving me feeling a bit like a spouse denied access to the checking account. The situation didn’t impede our working relationship, but the sour aftertaste seems to me an unfortunate and avoidable byproduct.

© Paul Scott Canavan

Author royalty split:

55% Keza, 45% Jason

Keza never treated me as anything less than an equal, respected creative partner while making decisions about the book’s content. And yet the ancillary features of the arrangement, such as the handling of the publisher advance mentioned above, reflected a distinct hierarchy. Keza requested a larger royalty share to reflect her efforts in negotiating the BackPage deal. We discussed this arrangement and it seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

During the proofreading stages, when I inquired if our names would be listed alphabetically on the cover to reflect our equal partnership, Keza demurred, stating that it “wasn’t a big deal”. I didn’t push the issue since she’d invited me be part of the project and I understood that she felt a sense of ownership.

I don't highlight such disparities to tarnish Keza's good name. I merely want to underline the fact that co-authorship is very much like a marriage. It’s easy to let your mind become preoccupied with calculations of fairness. The best advice I can give to writers considering collaborations is to lay out the expectations as clearly as possible right at the start. That way there’s no room for assumptions to distract from the larger shared goal of producing a high-quality book together and getting it out into the world.

Publisher/author royalty split:

Based on UK retail price, our author royalty rate is 10% on the first 5,000 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 10,000 copies sold and 15% on all further copies sold, 50% of net receipts on ebooks.

I'm not aware of BackPage’s standard contractual royalty rate, but we were told that they gave us a more favourable deal because we’d bypassed the extortionate expense of retail to sell direct to consumer. Keza and I would make the hard decision to neglect selling the print version of the book on Amazon.com because the world’s largest online retailer demands a 60% cut of sales, a figure that still makes my eyelid twitch when I think about it. (Can you imagine asking an indie author to give up that much of their already negligible proceeds? Crazy talk.)

The Kindle ebook edition would be available via Amazon, however anybody interested in the print edition would need to order through our exclusive distribution partner. Since we'd be generating all our own sales directly and had an already niche audience, the idea of funnelling all those potential buyers directly to Amazon would have been a financial sinkhole of lost proceeds.

How much money I’ve made so far:

Royalty payment #1: 02/09/2016 / Reference: Paperback and ebook royalties for Jan-June 2016 = £858.06

Royalty payment #2: 08/05/2017 / Reference: Paperback and ebook royalties for July-Dec 2016 (£559.95) + 50% of Storybundle payment (£447.50) = £1,007.45

After a year of sales I’ve received royalty payments from You Died totalling £1,865.51 (or $2,389.53 USD).

Not bad. Not life-changing either. But it’s worth reminding myself that I never longed to publish a 330-page love letter to a Japanese video game for the purpose of retiring young. As author Elizabeth Gilbert says, it's not fair of creators to thrust upon our art the additional baggage of having to supply our livelihood as well.

Would Keza and I have made out better by running a Kickstarter campaign? The Dark Souls board game was, after all, one of the most heavily backed crowdfunding campaigns in history, garnering more than $5.4 million in pledges. A French publisher called Third Edition Books successfully crowdfunded their Kickstarter campaign for a collection of video-game books, including a volume about Dark Souls, racking up €139,296 (or $155,788.65 USD) in pledges.

A journalist acquaintance of mine, Andrew Groen, crowdfunded a fabulous book about EVE Online, generating Kickstarter pledges totalling $95,729. I struggled with jealousy seeing Groen's frequent Twitter updates about his book’s successes – a lavish hardcover edition (sigh), his 10K copy sales milestone, conference panel appearances, etc. The comparison game is a dead end, an Ash Lake-style cul de sac. No matter what you achieve in your life or career, there will always be somebody whose revelry will come drifting down to you from a seemingly higher plateau. You've gotta let that shit go or you'll never be able to keep working. For a while I convinced myself that Groen was an insatiable braggart, but I realised I was just horribly insecure and not in a healthy enough emotional place to follow his Twitter updates about the success of his book (which deserved every plaudit that had come its way).

Keza and I may have reason to Startkicking ourselves. Maybe we could have reached a significantly larger audience by building visibility through a viral crowdfunding campaign. On a gut level it felt like there was something honourable in neglecting to pass the hat for donations since we already had a traditional publisher lined up for You Died, but perhaps that self-effacement hurt the book’s reach.

LOVE IS THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

Bringing your creative work to the marketplace can be an agonising experience. In the absence of hard quantitative measurements for artistic quality, the temptation to latch onto sales math as a surrogate for that reassurance is difficult to resist.

© Duncan Harris / Dead End Thrills

During a trip Keza made to Germany to attend a Dark Souls III press event, a Bandai-Namco rep pulled her aside at one point to express interest in placing a copy of You Died in every press kit accompanying the game. This deal would have amounted to somebody paying us to do a PR press mailing of our book. Keza and I were giddy about the development. It felt like our Big Break (TM). Alas, nothing ever came of it. Fortunately disappointments such as these evaporate when I pick up the book and flip through the pages, smiling at the illustrations, feeling pride in the fruits of all those long hours at the computer.

So much love goes into a book, I wonder if readers ever realise the full extent. I hope people who pick up You Died can feel that reverence and enthusiasm. Falling in love with Dark Souls was ample reward for the passion invested. We even had a kid together. How many fans can claim as much? How lucky am I? Let us crumple up the sales figures and royalty statements, pitch them into the bin and right this second pronounce You Died a smashing, unqualified success.

On Childhood & Exploration Through Art

In his essay “The Wilderness of Childhood”, author Michael Chabon frets aloud about the narrowed confines of the world contemporary children are free to explore without adult supervision. He notes some of the rationale for this curtailing of adventure and shutting down of Wilderness – heightened anxiety over child abduction due to lurid news cycles, a society predisposed to tort cases over even minor scuffs, etc. – and ponders what unintended effects such diminished room for exploration might have on creativity at large.

“Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map,” Chabon writes. “If children are not permitted – not taught – to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”

My own parents never stood between me or my siblings and the Wilderness. We spent entire childhood summers in southern California barefoot, burning our soles numb on the blacktop. We rode bikes all over the hills surrounding our Mission Viejo neighbourhood. We speculated about a splotch of red staining the wall lining one of those hilltop bike paths. Neighbourhood lore had it that a child had struck his head against the wall after somebody who lived in a house up the hill had launched a gobstopper at him from a slingshot. The stain on the wall allegedly evidence of where the blood from his head had oozed, baked into the stone beneath unstoppable sunshine.

But when it came to ideology and politics, that’s where the Wilderness experience ended and the metaphorical chainlink began. Only approved music and literature found their way inside. Our primary social circles conformed to the demographics of the church youth groups and Christian school clubs we frequented. Though Chabon laments the foreclosure of physical Wilderness spaces and geographical exploration, you could just as easily apply its logic to the realm of imagination. When children are penned in and prevented from poking around the Wilderness of ideas, having adventures outside the confines of parentally mandated wisdom and party lines, you can train a child to fear knowledge, to regard it as forbidden fruit.

I’ll confess to interpreting the Garden of Eden myth differently today. The Garden seems an obvious picture of childhood, before shame enters the world. Family photos of me as a young child naked from the waist down building sand castles, unconcerned with my nakedness. The Garden, where Adam and Eve walked alongside their parent in the cool of life’s morning. When they developed an appetite for knowledge, he kicked them out. Instead of being fed and pampered they would have to struggle with soil to grow their own food, irrigate fields with the sweat of their brow, bring forth new life in agony. The scriptures deemed such toil a curse.

If only I’d realised then what I’ve come to understand since, that the difficulty and struggle to feed oneself (either physically or intellectually) is one of life’s most ennobling privileges. That to stay in the Garden, even if it meant the company and protection of a helicopter parent, is no life at all. The walled Garden doesn’t need bricks to form an enclosure. The moment we leave the Garden and undertake the toil of living and learning, even if it means losing the father’s presence, that is a blessing to be cherished. Let Jesus curse the fig tree while we reserve our spite for its discarded leaves, the ones Adam and Eve used to shield their skin as the axe of separation fell. The fallen leaves. The fallen axe. My fallen forbears. The fall from the nest that had to inevitably occur before I learned how to fly.

I needed a new spate of experience. I craved exploration. The nascent Internet, the strangers I met there, opened a crease between me and a wider intellectual wilderness, the world outside the Garden of childhood. I caught a glimpse of something.

David Bazan and the scars of intimacy

When songwriter David Bazan impeached Pedro, his former band, and began performing under his own name, it wasn’t clear just how much of himself he was committing to offer listeners in so doing. The bracing parables of infidelity and self-righteousness and murder and religiosity and capitalism that he’d recorded under the Pedro The Lion moniker always vibrated with observations about human nature that seemed almost impolite to voice aloud.

Working in the realm of fiction furnished a truth-telling hall pass. The sensationalism of the plot twists – on Winners Never Quit a squeaky-clean politician murders his wife after she threatens to expose him, on Control a spurned wife stabs her philandering husband – reassured us with the implicit disclaimer that any connection to real persons or events was entirely coincidental. And concept albums, as we all know, are contrived by definition (right?). The wrapper of fiction offered plausible deniability, that we weren’t really that awful to each other. Bazan could hacksaw all the way to the bone and exhibit the black-rot marrow because it was somebody else’s bone, and the bone was all just a metaphor anyway. For all we know, Bazan might even be autopsying a straw man. But if his concept albums could be safely relegated to fiction, what were we to make of songs like “I Do” off 2004’s Achilles Heel?

“And when his tiny head emerged from hair and folds of skin

I thought to myself if he only knew he would climb right back in...

Now that my blushing bride has done what she was born to do

It's time to bury dreams and raise a son to live vicariously through

The sperm swims for the egg

The finger for the ring

If i could take one back

I know what it would be”

How's that for confessional candor? Even if we could be sure this narrator was simply an invented character, couldn’t it still be a sock puppet used by Bazan to vent his own ambivalence about parenthood? The playfulness of the cliche “blushing bride”. The brazenness of a father openly acknowledging his desire to live vicariously through his son. Maybe it’s all just black comedy, even if that final unresolved hypothetical left hanging in the air makes our chest tighten. Regretting a child or regretting a marriage. Which admission leaves the less scorching impression?

Consider the early Pedro song “Criticism As Inspiration” in which Bazan visits this same theme of how we commodify others to give our lives meaning, how we use them to plug up our own emptiness. Instead of the open legs of a labouring mother, this time it’s the posture of a receptive lover.

“Then there's your girlfriend / She opens her legs and gives your life meaning / Is that what you love her for? / It makes me feel so good to always tell you when you're wrong / The big man that I am to always have to put you down / It makes me look so good to always put you in your place / I can write it in a song but never say it to your face”

There it is again, the wallpaper-stripping sarcasm. Bazan seems to be checking his own motives for drawing attention to the messiness of other’s lives. What better way to deflect attention than to indulge in a critique of one’s neighbour. But then came Curse Your Branches, the first album to feature a photograph of David Bazan (however blurry), obscured somewhat by the giant, bright yellow text “BAZAN” in all-caps. It felt like a proper ‘coming out’ moment, the singer megaphoning his disillusionment with Christian fundamentalism, his slow dissolve into the booze he enjoyed a bit too much for his own good, his empathy with sinners, drunks, losers and fuck-ups the world over. Bazan seemed to be engaged in controlled burning as a means of clearing away the weeds and tangle and occasionally whole trees, giving light a chance to hit the forest floor. Self-immolation as the path to being born again, or at least giving new life some room to grow.

Bazan’s solo albums do have this weird obsession with trees, come to think of it. The cover art of 2006’s Fewer Moving Parts featured an illustration of Bazan cradling an axe against shoulder, standing in front of a grove of tree stumps. Clear-cutting. On the track “Backwoods Nation” he sang about America’s most regressive, hateful fringe existing in this metaphorical forest, insulated from multiculturalism and what some might deem progressive social values. Then on Curse Your Branches the tree imagery returns, wholly unavoidable given the fact that Bazan’s axe had finally bitten into the biblical tree of life itself. Leaves fall from branches, unable to determine where they land, or if they even have to fall at all.

By the time you get to Bazan’s last couple solo albums, Blanco (2016) and now Care, his axe has chopped to kindling any guitars hanging about the studio, making way for moody synths and programmed drum beats. The coarse grain of Bazan’s baritone finds its perfect complement in the album’s toasty-warm synth textures, shimmering keys and throbbing bass frequencies. Though the electronic components take on a grungy patina at times, the overall impression is one of cleanliness, clarity and metronomical order. Counter-intuitively, the more Bazan seems to slide into various forms of intoxication (“I recreate in the usual way, shut some breakers off but not the whole box, next day I wake till the fog finally abates, again at risk of being bored by clear thought”), the more sober his instrumental and compositional instincts become.

If Curse Your Branches found Bazan searching arms extended through the cloud of steam left over from the evaporated reservoir of his own baptismal font, Care seems to investigate the dissolution of a more terrestrial bond – marriage. He sings of infidelity (“Stop romanticising cheating, we are cowards everyone, all of us need major healing, come and get yours in the sun”), but this isn’t the hyper-dramatic sort from the protagonist of Pedro the Lion’s Control. The record’s title track follows a platonic relationship between a man and woman that pulses with not-so-naive intensity. “Later on we went out walking without ruining our lives," Bazan sings, "we know the difference between talking and going just outside the lines. It’s not like we’re immune to it.”

“Make Music” captures the struggle to hold together the planks of a marriage’s splintering hull, even as salty ocean gushes through the breach:

“Didn’t the disappointment press in the middle of your chest / Disbelief turned to bargaining, heartbreak turned to stress / Though the words had not been said yet, it was all you were gonna to get / You don’t know what will happen now and it’s caving in your head... / Didn’t I always interrupt that the sun was coming up / You believed it for a little while but you might have given up / I considered getting sober, I don’t want to be left over / But I would need a little more of you to try and fill the void...

"Didn’t we always vote for love when our friends were breaking up / Then they’d go and see a counsellor to find it’s not enough / Didn’t we hope it wouldn’t come for us when adulthood called our bluff / And we tried to turn the volume down and muddle through the hush… / Didn’t we make music? / Didn’t we always risk our hearts to do this?”

I’ve been through stretches in my own marriage where the silences punctuating the hardest conversations felt bottomless, spike-lined. And even those pits, without any safety net below to catch a falling body, felt safer than any web of words that might be stretched across the gap. That is a terrible despair, an almost impossible vulnerability. Maybe it’s something that every married person experiences at one time or another, if only for a season, but the marital scars Bazan spends several songs on Care describing certainly feel like a eulogy. In “Lazerbeams” he sings in unmissable past-tense,

“I woke up thinking I should stay / Awake whatever's coming next / Tears in someone's office / Unpacking our regrets / Now it's time to repaint / But it could be time to sell / All the plans we made together / And all there is, mis-remembered wealth / And though we couldn't see the future / Or comprehend the past / We knew that it would last / When we were lazerbeams”

Though it would be presumptuous to believe we have a perfect read on Bazan’s life simply from listening to Care, it feels like (if only in parable) he's written a second divorce record. And once again he accomplishes the feat with miraculous sensitivity and compassion. Maybe that’s what Bazan’s songwriting is all about – tracing a finger along the bruises, the scarred wrists, not out of disbelief but simply to acknowledge that we all carry them beneath our sleeves. He caresses these bruises. In short, he treats them with care.

The Chemistry of Ignorance & Awe

I’m fascinated by the plot twists fate appears to write into our life stories, if only to create drama for its own amusement. Writing about my religious upbringing may seem like a non sequitur after publishing a book-length appreciation of a video game. But don’t be fooled. There's a thread uniting these two projects – one about a medieval fantasy role-playing game, the other about religion. And that link resides in the way mystery interacts with the human psyche.

Mystery inspires appreciation, even worship. Mystery fosters the interactivity of conjecture. Mystery in art (the ‘Elsa Effect’ of don’t let them in, don’t let them see) is what drew me to Dark Souls. And I’m increasingly convinced that, despite my eventual deconversion and exit from the church, mystery is the thing that provokes my ongoing fascination with religion to this day. I’ve heard my condition referred to as being “Christ-haunted” (though it's difficult to understand why Christ would do the haunting himself when there’s a Holy Ghost on the payroll).

Four or five years ago, as I was beginning to admit to myself that I didn’t see or feel any compelling evidence of God’s presence – in the world, in my life – I ended up texting with an old pal. He’d gone through his own spiritual deconstruction but his curlicue trajectory had led him from evangelicalism to the Greek Orthodox church. He talked about the enjoyment of loosening his grip on certainty and seeking the rapture of mystery, of letting oneself be dazzled by a light too searing for the mind’s eye to register, of calling that God. Even if we couldn’t form an intelligible mental picture, we could still shut our eyes and bask in its warmth, he suggested. There was something attractive to me about that idea. A letting go of the need for certainty, a growing peace with “I don’t know” even while clinging to that old majesty.

© Paul Scott Canavan

I write in You Died about how the game’s use of ruined architecture and intentionally fragmented narrative draws you in and keeps your mind engaged, long after you’ve stepped away from the game. If you’re a straight man living in a historical period that obligates women to cover their bodies head to toe, the mere sight of an exposed ankle might drive you insane with lust. You might spend hours ruminating on the landscape concealed behind that curtain. Religion doesn’t reveal God’s ankle so much as it passes down a body of literature written by people who did and were transfigured by the sight. If we believe the stories, this simply creates even more mystery for our brains to chew over. With no empirical evidence to review, the pleasure loop of cogitation and conjecture – what we’ve come to call theology – can cycle like a perpetual-motion machine.

The ignorance of having never seen God’s face, or heard his voice, wasn’t bliss exactly but it felt like a necessary precursor to bliss. The straining toward illumination, the intellect’s version of sexual tension. The less resolved the question could be, the more you could exist in the strip tease of the half-naked truth. I’m convinced this is where the ecstasy of religion exists for many people. A mystery so impenetrable that one can spend a lifetime squirming in anticipation of the dam burst of answers occasioned by one’s own little death.

I’ve heard fellow atheists mock God as the “hide-and-seek champion of the universe” (no less strident a provocation than the words God’s own prophet Elijah used to troll the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18:27). I just think He’s a love interest that plays ‘hard to get’ more effectively than any being in the universe. His unattainability, his silence, his aloofness, is the very thing that makes his admirers want to drop everything and chase him, panting and deranged with desire, to the horizon's far edge.

On Perfectionism

Of all the oasis mirages at which I’ve knelt and gulped, Perfectionism has been the most unexpectedly rancid. The conviction of its reality and the mental models I built atop that foundation may take the rest of my life to disassemble. And I'm OK with that. It will be time well spent. No illusion has been more stunting in my growth as a person, more counter-productive in the furnishing of my worldview and ethical intuitions, more corrosive to my mental health, more devilling in my attempt to get a finished sentence on the page. If a theoretical perfect sentence does exist, you could spend a decade trying to crowbar the one you’re writing into closer resembling it. You might die trying. Or die from the trying. If you had an obsessive enough streak you might never arrive at sentence two. And by you, of course I mean me.

In its most popular usage, “perfectionism” refers to a lofty personal standard or philosophy that rejects any contribution judged inferior. I’ll call that lower-case “p” perfectionism, the sort author Elizabeth Gilbert warns against in Big Magic, her book on creative living:

"Perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear... perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, ‘I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.’"

I’m not using the idea of Perfection to mean, simply, top marks. As in the phrase ‘Frightened Rabbit’s album The Midnight Organ Fight is perfect’ (though it is). I use the term 'Perfectionism' to describe a belief system, predicated on the existence of an ideal form against which we can measure deviation (a.k.a. sin). It's then a natural follow-on to bring that almost mathematical certainty into arenas of life filled with ambiguity: art, ethics, faith, etc. Guilt can be understood as the psychic angst and frustration experienced by the inability to bring ourselves and our contributions to this world sufficiently into alignment with this hypothetical ideal.

After becoming disillusioned with Christianity in my mid 30s, I assumed the root of my quarrel with religion hinged on its peddling of truth claims that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. That the world was created ex nihilo in six days. That death and suffering entered the world because my ancestors snacked on the wrong piece of fruit. That Jonah survived in the digestive tract of a giant fish. That there was an otherworldly inferno called Hell into which God would one day plunge his adversary Lucifer along with the rest of the world’s unbelievers. At five years old I anxiously informed my mother, “If the devil has wings like an angel and God throws him into the lake of fire, he could fly out again.” I was doing my best with the facts I'd been given.

Much of the modern case made against religion in the years since the attacks of September 11th has focussed on the ills of religious fundamentalism – terrorism (the attempt to move the world closer to one's model of Perfection through armed struggle), apocalyptic ideology, dogmatism, imperviousness to any scientific finding that contradicts one's holy book, etc. Yet the more I attempt to understand what injury I suffered in my evangelical upbringing, if any, it wasn’t just the systematic teaching of the scriptures as an exam answer key. Religion, and not just its fundamentalist strain, rests atop the premise of Perfectionism – a fundamental faith in the existence of Perfection. Fundamentalists carry this assumption further than their more liberal co-religionists, granted, but the vast majority of Christians take at least a handful of the following from religion's buffet:

• There is a perfect being: God

• Parent: also God

• Human: Jesus

• Book: the Bible

• City: heaven

• Earth: the Garden of Eden, before humanity’s rebellion

• Morality: whatever is consonant with God’s nature

• Sexual expression: straight, married

I could list more, but you get the gist. Religion thrives on the steadying benchmark of Perfection. Having such tidy parameters removes guesswork. People often describe the fundamentalist mode of thinking as ‘black and white’. Even the notion of black represents a taxonomical Perfection. Unambiguous evil. Perfection boasts a reassuring simplicity, whether earned or not. The more perfect the model against which one bases a judgment, the more certainty one feels entitled to marshal.

Bless This Mess

© Richard Hogg

Let's call the antidote to Perfectionism “Messiness”. In almost every zone of knowledge the fundamentalist argues, “It’s simple!” Even as the progressive, fielding the same question, surveys the Messiness before her and says, “It’s complicated!”, deploying caveats and further considerations. The fundamentalist will immediately detect such a response as weakness, insecurity, a smokescreen, a dodge. This is why fundamentalists have a relatively easy time winning converts – they radiate certainty, which makes their conclusions, even the bankrupt ones, feel unassailable. As a child I preferred simplicity. Who doesn’t?

The belief that every living thing appeared on earth in its present form, immutable, unchanging – that’s Perfectionism. Asking somebody to embrace the veracity of evolution, on the other hand, invites them to make a truce with biological Messiness on a grand scale. Whales with hip bones left over from their landlubbing ancestors. Humans with tail bones. Human embryos with gills, with coats of hair covering their entire body but shed prior to birth. Unending change, every living thing a so-called “transitional form”. A whopping 4,500 different species of cockroaches alone. It’s enough to make a Perfectionist dizzy. Ask a creationist about abiogenesis and they’ll tell you, “It’s simple: God did it!” Ask a scientist and they’ll tell you, “It’s complicated! There’s so much we don’t know.”

In Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, a book-length appreciation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, he considers the biological version of Platonic essentialism, the widespread creationist intuition that animal species possess essential forms in the way that geometric shapes do. That there is, for example, an essential rabbit, a sort of celestial cookie-cutter shape with floppy ears that could be used to stamp out such a form at the dawn of creation. The basic act of giving animals names further adds to the aura of immutability.

"The Platonist regards any [evolutionary] change in rabbits as a messy departure from the essential rabbit, and there will always be resistance to change – as if all real rabbits were tethered by an invisible elastic cord to the Essential Rabbit in the Sky. The evolutionary view of life is radically opposite. Descendants can depart indefinitely from the ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants....

"If there is a ‘standard rabbit’, the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell-shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution shifts with time. As generations go by, there may gradually come a point, not clearly defined, when the norm of what we call rabbits will have departed so far as to deserve a different name. There is no permanent rabbitiness, no essence of rabbit hanging in the sky, just populations of furry, long-eared, coprophagous, whisker-twitching individuals, showing a statistical distribution of variation in size, shape, colour and proclivities… All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed. After a hundred million years it may be hard to believe that the descendant animals ever had rabbits for ancestors."

It’s a seductive idea: that we might be able to file living things into categories as clearly labelled as “triangle”, no additional qualification needed. And not just rabbits, but an Irishman, say, or a Christian. I suspect that xenophobia and resentment for immigrants owes much to the dissonance that arises from seeing a Platonic ideal muddied. The smile of a flag-pledging American patriot framed by the fabric of her hijab? Nice try, scoffs the jingoist in his camouflage cap, swatting away the cognitive dissonance, that orbiting mosquito whose buzz never quite goes away.

Perhaps my childhood experience growing up in Ireland in the early ’80s contributed to my illusion of a perfect Irish archetype. We shared an accent. We shared a paleness. How clearly I remember the classmate of mine who spent the entirety of his summer holidays in Africa and returned with his skin tone noticeably darker than when he departed. His transfiguration confused me. Six years on the planet by then and I’m not sure I’d seen anything resembling dark skin till that moment. Homogenous communities, how deftly they trick us into believing cultural purity exists outside the mind.

It’s comforting to imagine we live in a world of sturdy taxonomies. It helps us orient ourselves in the cosmos. Christianity’s various simplifications appear to arise from the same urge. The waypoints of a prepackaged moral system. The equatorial delineation of God and Devil, good and evil, angels and demons, heaven and hell, lost and found.

Culture Warriors

© Richard Hogg

Once the software of Perfectionism begins running on the human brain, however, it doesn’t stay corralled within the religious sphere. If there’s a perfect God and a perfect book, why shouldn’t there be a perfect mental archetype of what it means to be American? The famous metaphor of The Melting Pot, after all, is simply one way of expressing the desire to reduce the Messiness of cultural pluralism down to the simplicity of a uniform ideal. When Obama took office, the conspiracy shit-show of Birtherism seemed to ooze from a desire to resolve the cognitive dissonance of an American President that diverged from the perfect mental model of what an American looks like, the sort of name he ought to have. It’s easy to understand how a certain kind of fundamentalist would find in WASP-y homogeneity a sort of Perfection. Multiculturalism, after all, is demographical Messiness on a grand scale.

It’s no coincidence the American culture war between Left and Right tends to centre on the issue of abortion. To many opponents of abortion, there couldn’t be an easier ethical quandary. When does life begin? “Simple! At conception, end of story.” When Obama was asked by Rick Warren, at a 2008 campaign stop, when life began, he claimed the question was “above his pay grade”. Obama’s critics pounced on this answer, characterising it as a weaselly attempt to sidestep a question that has a simple answer.

However flippant Obama's answer may have come across, the phrase “above my pay grade” is simply another way of saying “it’s complicated". If a foetus has a heartbeat and can respond to stimuli, can we then conclude that it possesses an immortal soul? That the stopping of its heartbeat ought to be classified as murder? To the Perfectionist, any assertion of Messiness in such an allegedly tidy moral issue will seem unconscionable. To concede that foetal development is a nuanced progression, and carries with it corresponding nuances in our ethical obligations, would require a stand-off with Messiness that might never be satisfactorily resolved. The path of least resistance is to just affirm a belief that life starts at conception, that we have the same ethical obligations to an embryonic stem cell that we do to a 20-year-old college student, and move right along.

In his controversial book Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out Of Ethics, Richard Holloway, who was still serving as bishop of Edinburgh at the time of its publication, writes:

“I regret it when either side in the abortion debate assumes the moral high-ground, so that prohibitionists give the impression that those who believe in choice have no moral basis for their point of view and are little more than murderers; while pro-choicers sometimes give the impression that abortion is as morally unproblematic as a tonsillectomy. That is why some of us feel acutely uncomfortable in positioning ourselves at either end of the continuum and prefer, however agonisingly, to pick our way with considerable care through the middle of the battlefield.”

It’s hard to imagine a more articulate contrasting of Perfectionism and Messiness.

Like the abortion debate, it’s also no coincidence that the gender issue has become another key battleground of the culture wars. When right-wing Americans get distraught about transgender citizens using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, that anxiety isn’t just about safeguarding the nation's youth against pedophilic opportunists. The opponent of transgender rights, the person who would rather we just file gender dysphoria in the drawer marked mental illness and move on, the person who may even flat-out deny the possibility of sexual ambiguity or hermaphroditism, is simply building a big, not-so-beautiful border wall between themselves and Messiness. Don’t even try to break down the tidy categories of male and female, they seem to be saying, don’t you dare. Boys have penises, girls have vaginas. It’s simple!

The conservative right wing hardly holds a monopoly on Perfectionism. The same propensity manifests on the far Left in abundance. Asserting that all people who oppose gay marriage are bigots – Perfectionism. That all people who have concerns about immigration are backwoods racists – Perfectionism. That all Americans who deem Islam’s radical fringe a threat to national security are paranoid Islamophobes – Perfectionism. All I hear in these epithets is a conviction that, in making such judgments, it’s simple! Human beings are not complicated, the illiberal Left has them all figured out. (Granted, some of the above folks might actually be honest-to-god bigots, racists and Islamophobes. But to tell one from the other, you'd actually need to interact with them and give their views an honest hearing, you'd need to lay down your bag of slurs and quit broadcasting long enough to listen.)

At this stage in my own political affiliations I’m trying to carve out room in the rapidly shrinking centre, but it’s hard. The dialogue polarises to the fringes as people strive to impose a Perfectionistic narrative. Good and evil. White and black. Republican and Democrat. Christian and Islamic. My own father, who delighted for eight years in referring to Barack Obama by the nickname “BO” (geddit? the acronym for body odour) claims to this day that nothing good came out of the Obama presidency, that it was an unqualified mess from start to finish. Partisan Perfectionism, that’s my heritage. To acknowledge the presidency of a rival political party to have produced some positive results, and some negative, that would be a cognitive dissonance too Messy to bear.

Rehearsals For Departure

© Richard Hogg

My long, slow disillusionment with Christianity occurred in direct proportion to my willingness to declare a ceasefire with Messiness. Going all the way back to my high-school love affair with the roots-rock band Vigilantes of Love, who sang about God but also about sex and depression and Eleanor Roosevelt (really). The band’s songwriter Bill Mallonee dropped the occasional bit of profanity, which felt to my Perfectionist sensibilities like eating a healthy salad and occasionally cracking my teeth on a Gobstopper. I would be forced to reconcile that even sentiments laced with profanity could speak a truth worth hearing. A band that was, as the saying went, “too Christian for the secular market, and too secular for the Christian market”, this was Messiness in the artistic domain. The Perfectionism of the Christian music industry demanded that Christian artists sing about Jesus in as literal a manner as possible, and leave the ambiguity and metaphor to their secular counterparts. Anybody raised in the evangelical subculture has seen the chart on the wall at the Christian bookstore: If you like Perfectionism, then you'll love [Christian Artist X].

As I grew older, the dominos of Perfectionism tumbled in slow motion, over the course of years:

• The Bible’s Perfection eroded by my reading of scholars who worked unbridled from the yoke of apologetics.

• The Perfection of my own snazzily costumed Christian family, as it fissured and cracked in ways both overt and subterranean.

• The assumption of one Perfect sexual expression undermined by friendships with flesh-and-blood gay friends and colleagues.

• The Perfection of creation quaking as I took the time to understand how fully the theory of evolution departed from my unchecked checkmates (“then why are there still monkeys?”), as I engaged honestly with the supporting evidence.

• The Perfection of God and the morality to which his nature supposedly gave shape, destroyed by a frank appraisal of his Old Testament rap sheet, refusing any interpretive contortions to make apology for his poor behaviour. The growing feeling that to do so would be tantamount to a battered wife saying, He loves me, he just has a strange way of showing it.

Every time I looked within myself, I observed Messiness, a fact I’d once lamented but had started to regard with more compassion. And, increasingly, pride. Here’s the rub: imperfection is so much more compelling. Imperfection is texture. Imperfection is the Rice Krispies snapping and popping of a record needle on a beat-up LP. Imperfection is the crack in the singer’s voice at the edge of her range. Imperfection is the recipe for surprise. Imperfection is you, and me, all of us beneath our party masks.

A Stepford Wife fem-bot is perfect; yet I still prefer the grit and opinionated spikiness of my wife Summer. Plastic is perfect; I prefer fabric, wood (splinters included) and leather. The auto-tuned pop diva’s voice is perfect; I prefer the idiosyncratic voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and Tom Petty and Scott Hutchison and Bill Mallonee and Dave Bazan. Classical music is perfect; I prefer traditional Irish folk music with its improvisation, unpredictability and unpretentious humanity. A mainstream summer blockbuster may have a two-dimensional villain trying to blow up the world; I prefer films (and television and books and video games) in which both the good guys and bad guys have a yin-yang mixture of dark and light.

Certainty is perfect; I now prefer doubt, the modesty it engenders, the journey of learning that terminates not at any destination or epiphany but only at the hard stop of death itself, cutting us off mid-senten_. In the face of such consorting with Messiness, many fundamentalist Christians double-down on their faith. Richard Holloway, a personal hero of mine who I've quoted earlier, describes this impulse in his memoir Leaving Alexandria:

"How does such hard and punishing certainty emerge from the existential gamble of faith? Paradoxically, it is lack of faith and fear of doubt that prompt it. What do you do if you can no longer live with the doubt that is co-active with faith? You try to cure yourself. And the best cure for doubt is over-conviction. A well-known mark of the uneasy doubter is over-confidence. It is like the refusal to let pity weaken you in the face of your enemy. Doubt, like pity, erodes certainty.

"If you are desperate for certainty because you believe only it can hold chaos at bay, including your own inner chaos, then you have to repress your doubt and pump up your convictions. Tone is the giveaway here. If you want to sell something, whether a commercial product or an ideology, hyper-conviction is an essential element in the transaction. Pooling your doubts, sharing your uncertainties, may be humanly more interesting, and may even lead to genuine discoveries that prompt a rueful, modest sort of faith, but it will never persuade multitudes. Or yourself, for that matter, which may be the real name of the game."

When the realisation dawned sufficiently in my mind that God, more than likely, did not exist, I fumed at my indoctrination. I veered into an atheist facsimile of the over-conviction Holloway describes. I splashed offensive memes across my Facebook page, one of which boiled down Christianity to the belief that “some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.” And there was the meme I posted of Jesus in his crucified posture photoshopped onto a water slide, arms outstretched as he hits the splash pool. (My older brother sent me an angry message telling me I was acting like our father's blowhard hero Rush Limbaugh, and he wasn't wrong.) I was busy working through my anger, my regret over pointless self-chastisement, my embarrassment over what I’d put stock in for so long, for too long. Just like that crucified Jesus, I had my own puncture wounds, many of them inflicted by the very faith I'd embraced with open arms.

I Of The Storm

© Richard Hogg

At a certain point you have to move from the question of “does God exist?” to the more nuanced question of “what are the consequences of believing a God exists?” What are the consequences of Perfectionism?

I’m starting to mellow. I still think the idea of God is a bit nutty – an assessment my Christian friends would likely endorse, even as they press forward into that presence they feel but are happy to consign to mystery. Embracing Messiness to any degree hardly obligates a person to renounce her faith. The move away from Perfectionism can be roughly measured by how many tenets of Perfection mentioned earlier, how many absolute certainties, one has foreclosed on. Is the Bible the perfect inspired word of God or a messy, fascinating porridge of poetry and metaphor? Were its pages written by a perfect God? Or messy humans?

The Bible has transformed in my conception to a work of classical literature, as worthy of study as Homer’s poetry or similarly important works of antiquity. Ethically instructive with sufficient cherry-picking, but hardly a Perfect guide to living. The ritual of prayer has been replaced with mindfulness practice. Being present, being non-judgmental of the Messiness of my own thoughts, attempting not to get swept away in that whitewater. I need infinitely more practice.

I still battle my addiction to Perfection and the easy certainty I once possessed. But I can't afford to keep up the habit any longer. The clinical depression I’ve struggled with throughout my life, for decades unnamed, drew nourishment from my Perfectionism, which in turn drew nourishment from my religious conception of the world. I still feel the overwhelming urge to check out, either mentally or physically, when the Messiness surrounding me gets too intense. Having two young children means I can’t escape it. But it’s a process. I’m getting there slowly. Bear with me. These are the musings of an Irishman with an American accent, remember.

It’s complicated.