Factoids of the Victorian Era

I’ve been preparing for the Brass Screw Confederacy, a steampunk festival going on this weekend, and have been doing a lot of research into the time period most closely associated with this eccentric subgenre. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the more interesting statistics and facts I learned from this unique period in British and world history.

Dates

- The Victorian Era is defined as the period of time during Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901.

- The Industrial Revolution roughly started in the 1760’s and ended around the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign

- The Second Industrial Revolution began sometime between 1840 and 1860 and ended with the 1st World War

- Between 1831 and 1901, the population of England more than doubled from 14 million to 32.5 million

- Several other western nations had similar periods of growth and prosperity at this time, including France’s Belle Epoche and America’s Gilded Age

Innovations of the First Industrial Revolution

- Improvements in steam power efficiency reduced fuel consumption by 5 to 10 times what it had been

- Automated weaving machines were developed for the mass production of yarn and a variety of fabrics

- Coal replaced wood as the primary fuel source, proving to be easier to acquire and more readily available

- Machine tools allowed metal to be shaped into uniform pieces quickly, rather than having a craftsman build each piece by hand

Innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution

- More effective furnaces were hot enough to melt steel, allow this stronger metal to be used in the construction of railways, buildings, bridges, and ships

- Paper was first mass-produced from wood pulp, coinciding nicely with the invention of the fountain pen and the pencil

- The incandescent lightbulb provided a safer, more effective lighting source than oil lamps

- Developments in petroleum production, rubber, and electric assembly lines paved the way for the automobile

- The telegraph (and later, the telephone) connected the world through the first telecommunications networks

Child Labor and Prostitution

- Children as young as 5 years old worked in England’s coal mines, were expected to work 16 hours a day, and were usually dead by age 25

- In 1831, the number of inspectors tasked with enforcing child labor laws was just four for all of England

- Charles Dickens worked in a boot-black factory at 12 years old to support his family that had been placed in debtor's prison

- In 1857, there were 8,600 prostitutes in London that were known to police, although estimates at the time of the true number of “fallen women” was as high as 80,000

- An 1851 census showed that there were 4% more women than men in the United Kingdom, a disproportion that served to increase the number of prostitutes as women struggled to sustain themselves without options for marriage or other employment



This is just a small sampling of some of the information that I found. If you’d like to learn more, then check out The Victorian Web, an amazing collection of period documents and historical papers all focusing on the Victorian Era. And for those of you who are going to the Brass Screw Confederacy in Port Townsend, I’ll see you this weekend!

Top 10 Things a Writing Coach Doesn’t Want to Hear

10. This session didn't count, right?

9. I’m going to warn you up front that I don’t take criticism well.

8. How many books should I expect to sell in the first week?

7. I’m not looking to hire a writing coach, I just wanted to send my manuscript to you to get your feedback.

6. I never realized how effective semi-colons are.

5. My writing group thinks you’re wrong.

4. How many copies of my book are you planning on buying for your friends?

3. What are your rates for writing college research papers?

2. Can you help me get my fan-fiction into Barnes and Nobles?

1. I've got the cover image done, now I just need to write the book.

Can you think of any more? Leave a comment below, and let me know if you'd like to see more top 10 lists like this one. 

Looking Back at Writers on the Beach 2015

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend and present at the first annual Writers at the Beach retreat on scenic Marrowstone Island. This event, planned and presented by historical advisers Nancy and Gordon Frye, was incredibly fun and informative, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s retreat. Here are a few of the highlights from this year’s program.

After a relaxing evening of grilled salmon and pleasant conversation, we officially started the event on Saturday morning with a lecture on the history of firearms, including several demonstrations with a variety of reproductions and antique originals. I especially enjoyed it when Gordon allowed some of us to fire one of his flintlock muskets and find out just how much smoke is produced with a single shot. (hint: it’s a lot!) Other presentations included keynote speaker Libbie Hawker giving great advice on independent publishing, Nathan Barnett demonstrating several fencing styles, Nancy Frye discussing fashion trends from the Renaissance to the modern day, and a practicum on saddles throughout history. I also gave my own presentation, focusing on how writers can make their research as effective as possible.

One of my favorite activities was getting my picture taken using the same type of wet plate process that was common in the mid-nineteenth century. Jason Bledsoe, our photographer, demonstrated the laborious process to us before getting us all into a pseudo old-timey position and politely forcing us to keep still as he prepared the plate, adjusted the focus (by moving around the camera on its tripod), and finally taking the picture itself. It was an exercise in patience as we all held our breath for eight seconds, followed by an entire day’s waiting for the treated glass plate to fully develop into a beautiful black and white picture. I was especially happy with the way my eyes turned out, since I had been told that pale blue eyes like mine have a tendency to not show up, resulting in piercing white orbs where someone’s irises should be. And I thought “redeye” was creepy!

The final highlight of the event came for me on Sunday, when I had an opportunity to learn how to row a small Norse boat using two oars. The sun was shining brightly as we launched our beautiful wooden vessel out into the gentle waves of Discovery Bay with one experienced sailor and one tenderfoot (me) both pulling at the oars while our single passenger focused on enjoying the view. While I often struggled to pull with strong, steady strokes, I thoroughly enjoyed cruising between the seals and sailboats that shared the sparkling waters with us.

I’m so very grateful to Nancy and Gordon for organizing this event and inviting me to be a part of it. If you’re in the Pacific Northwest and are interested in meeting some of the outstanding people who were at Writers On The Beach, come to Port Townsend for the Brass Screw Confederacy, a steampunk festival happening at the end of May. I hope to see you all there!

First Impressions of the Dialogue in Mass Effect

Bioware’s Mass Effect trilogy is easily the most requested series of games for one of my storyline reviews. I finally purchased the bundled trilogy a few weeks ago and recently began playing this epic, space-opera RPG. I’ll reserve any judgments on the storyline until I’ve finished the entire series, but in the meantime, there is one element of the game’s storytelling that I really wanted to examine more closely .

Like most modern Western RPGs, Mass Effect uses branching dialogue trees as one of the primary methods of character development and role-playing for the gamer. Throughout most conversations with NPCs, the player is given several choices of things that Commander Shepard can say to further the plot. But what sets Mass Effect apart is that unlike other Western RPGs like Skyrim or Fallout, the player doesn’t get to choose exactly what the main character will say. For example, a minor character may tell you that her husband has died in a recent battle, and you chose the option “That’s too bad,” but what your character actually says may be something like “I’m sorry for your loss. How did it happen?”

These type of ambiguous choices are in stark contrast to the clearly defined list of possible statements that can be found in other RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon’s Age, both of which are also developed by Bioware. As I tried to think of a similar, dialogue-heavy game with ambiguous options, the best comparison I came up with were the Tex Murphy Full Motion Video adventure games. These games also relied heavily on interesting dialogue between the actors to engage the player, who would often get just a few vague prompts to determine where Tex would take each conversation.

There are a couple of problems with selecting a character’s emotional response rather than what they will specifically say. My biggest issue with this method is that it’s not always clear how Shepard will interpret the vague guidance that I’m giving him. On more than one occasion, I gave him a prompt that I thought would get him to say something in a particular way, but he went off in some weird direction I was not expecting. For example, there’s a potential love-triangle at one point in the game, and I was trying to gently break it off with one of the characters. I chose an option that I thought would be considerate, but ended up choosing her instead! I had to reload the game and give the nastier prompt, which actually resulted in Shepard being incredibly considerate anyway.

My other main complaint with this style of dialogue selection is that the options occasionally make little to no difference at all, or are so similar that it seems irrelevant for me to choose one of them. I swear there were a couple of times that my options looked like this:

1. Um…

2. I don’t know.

3. Couldn’t tell you.

And I know that on at least one occasion when I reloaded an earlier save file and tried a different choice, Shepard said the same thing, regardless of which prompt I used. Luckily, this kind of illusion-of-choice deception didn’t happen very often, as it could have easily been a game breaker for me if overdone.

All that being said, I found the dialogue of Mass Effect to be some of the best and most engaging writing I’ve seen in an RPG, and I think part of it comes from the mystery of the dialogue trees. Just like the old Tex Murphy games, there’s a sense of discovery as I watch each conversation unfold before me in a fluid, cinematic way. It also helps that Shepard’s responses are all fully voice-acted, meaning that my prompts are often just momentary pauses in the conversation, rather than a combination of a voice actor talking at me for a few lines before I have to read all my possible responses and choose the best one. Granted, I never felt like I really was Commander Shepard in these conversations, but that’s ok. I’d rather have a well-defined protagonist to follow, especially if I can choose his emotional reaction to significant events and determine what sort of hero he’s going to be.

This leads me to my favorite story-related element of Mass Effect thus far, the Paragon/Renegade system. In most games that have a morality system for the main character, the player usually has two very clearly defined choices that will either add to their morality rating or subtract from it. In this type of game, NPCs will often react to your character based on their morality rating, and games usually reward players for a score that is either very high or very low. Of course, since I don’t want to play a murdering candy-stealer when I’m gaming, I always pick the good guy responses in situations like this, which usually means I have to nobly refuse all my hard-earned quest rewards and roll over for every bully that I encounter. But not in Mass Effect.

The Paragon/Renegade system tracks your positive and negative decisions separately on two different scales, meaning that I can choose the good responses the majority of the time and still indulge myself a little without being harshly penalized for it. For instance, at one point in the game Shepard was confronted by a rear admiral with a chip on his shoulder who told me to get out of the way as he prepared to do a surprise inspection of my ship. I can’t describe the guilty pleasure I felt when I told him to get lost, and the game didn’t punish me for it! He blustered for a moment and stormed off angrily, but there were no gaming penalties, and Shepard’s reputation as a nice guy and a war hero was only slightly tempered by a developing image of a rebel who didn’t take crap from anyone. This type of narrative-driven character creation was incredibly well-executed, and was just as much fun as deciding what combat skills I would increase at each level up.

As I said, I’m still fairly early on in the game’s storyline. I’m only about twenty hours or so into the first game, and I know that I have a lot left to go. But if the game stays true to this kind of guided-narrative style, I’m definitely looking forward to following Commander Shepard’s ongoing adventures throughout the galaxy.