The Raptor Clause

Progress Report: 1/17/12

2012-01-17T06:29:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a tumultuous new year.

The most important news is that my father-in-law passed away over the holidays. His name was Warren Tom Cooper, and he went by Tom. It was funny... in the hospital and hospice, he would let the nurses and doctors call him Warren until he decided that he actually liked them, and then they would get to call him Tom. It was kind of a code. He enjoyed stuff like that.

I've known Tom for over 20 years, and he's been a huge part of my life. Candi's relationship to him was always very close, and when I started seeing her he was immediately supporting and accepting. This was good... standing at 6'4" and built very solidly, he could be a pretty intimidating guy when he didn't approve of something. But when you were family, as I was privileged to be, he would do anything to help you along. That was the way his mother was as well. Both of them taught me so many important lessons in my life.

Right now, the impact of his passing is still setting in. We live in a different world now, Candi and me, and we're still getting used to that new reality. Life has a way of keeping you so busy that it's tricky to just sit with your feelings sometimes, and that has its upside and downside. I will say that this is the first time I've had to be a part of dealing with all the logistics and details of someone dying -- it's quite startling how much there is to do.

Tom was very supportive of my writing, and really helped me out with some of the details about the setting of my first book. So I feel like I can honor him by continuing to write and work towards getting my work published. Which I'm doing.

Just taking it a bit slow. This new world takes some adjustment.

Progress Report: 12/5/2011

2011-12-05T06:08:00.000-08:00

Uh... yeah. I've been out of touch a bit.

So the main news is that I'm shopping for a new agent. The best advice seems to be at this point to wait until January because, as it is for most of us, December is kind of a crazy month for agents.

It's sort of a bummer to have to go through this again. My agent was never a specialist in my genre, though. She was trying to break into new areas. A first time author with an agent out of her normal depth... that's a bit of a steep hill to climb. We tried it out, it didn't work, so we decided to part ways.

Page-a-day writing continues to be a good solution for keeping the momentum going. I suspect some significant editing is going to be needed before what I'm writing becomes good finished material. That's not the important part right now. The important part is to keep writing.

Father-in-law is still hanging in there. He's beaten the doctors' predictions by a fair amount, and we're looking forward to our traditional Christmas visit.

And work is unbelievably frantic. I don't think anyone comes here to read about my work life, so I don't really bother with much detail on this blog, but... damn. The things you gotta do to survive in this economy. Sheesh.

I don't know how much more blogging I'll be able to do before the end of the year, so if I don't check in for a while... happy holidays, everyone! And the much ballyhooed 2012 is almost here. Let's see if there's anything to the hype this time...

Progress Report: 10/10/2011

2011-10-10T06:52:00.000-07:00

It's been an emotional roller-coaster ride this month.

The big event, which has exerted its gravitational influence on everything else, is that my father-in-law is quite ill. We made an emergency trip out to Nevada to see him in the hospital, because at the time we thought we were going to lose him. After a few weeks of touch and go, he's still hanging on and has even rallied. He's in home hospice now, and... well, we're not sure how things are going to go from here.

That's the very short version.

The long version is more than I want to write about at the moment. It's been a strange and overwhelming time. For the moment, we're back home and getting back to normal life, and he's stable and cruising along. We're told we could get "the call" at any moment.

Through all this, I've been writing, page-a-day style, making progress. Is the writing good? Can't worry about that now. The only days I've missed have been the ones when we were driving 14 hours, so I think it's going well.

Anyway, that's it for the moment. I'll sign off with a quote from that fountain of wisdom, Marvin the Paranoid Android: "Life. Don't talk to me about life."

Progress Report: 9/5/2011

2011-09-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

I have a new strategy.

My old strategy for writing, which it must be said has served me fairly well for many years, was to carve out a chunk of time when I could, write my buns off when I had the chance, and then stop either when I was out of time or out of steam. I have had many a productive session that way.

But for whatever reason, that isn't working now. It has a lot to do with how frantic my work life has been for a sustained period of time. I've fooled myself a number of times with a "Oh, next month looks like things will get back to normal!" At this point, I have to basically admit that what is "normal" has changed, and I'd better get used to the idea.

So here it is, the new strategy: one page per day.

Not an average of one page per day. Not, in other words, seven pages a week. Not "I'll get four pages done today so I don't have to worry about it for the next few days." Not "I missed my page yesterday, but I can do two today and make up for it." And, at least for now, not "I'm on a roll, I'll keep going and do some more pages tonight!"

One per day.

And after about two weeks of this, I must say I am extremely pleased with the results. I look forward to writing every day now, because in many it takes the stress out of it. When I was trying to carve large blocks of time in an increasingly busy schedule, I was putting pressure on myself to get a lot done at once... because who knows when I'd have time next? But one page is easy to find time to do.

What about my old friend, that muse known as momentum? This method provides a different sort of momentum. Granted, I have to put the brakes on a scene when I'm getting revved up, and once I get the hang of this maybe I will go back to taking advantage of larger blocks of time to write more. If I do, any extra pages I write will not "roll over" and get me off the hook for the next day's work.

But meanwhile, I'm sticking to the one a day thing. And I'm very much enjoying myself. Sure it means the book is creeping forward like a tortoise instead of taking great rabbit-like bounds, but we all know who wins that race, right?

Anyway, one per day for now. And in a month or so, if this is feeling good, maybe two per day? I think it's worth a try. Let's see what kind of pace we can this tortoise can sustain.

Progress Report: 8/22/2011

2011-08-22T06:13:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been writing a scene that kind of gets away from you? It happens to me sometimes, and generally it's a good thing. It means the characters are taking on a life of their own, and that's always a fine moment. But recently I was writing what I thought was a conversation, and suddenly there was seduction imagery popping up all over the place. It kind of weirded me out.

I mean, in thinking about it, it's a perfectly appropriate subtext for the scene, but if I want to keep the novel in the Young Adult category, then I need to go easy on that sort of thing. Yikes.

Anyway...

What have I been reading lately?

Well, I burned through Jim Butcher's latest Harry Dresden novel, Ghost Story, devouring it as I might a particularly tasty sandwich after a tiring hike through the mountains. What's going on in the series is kind of cool... for about a dozen books, Butcher established a certain kind of status quo. Oh, it wasn't static, like a series where you can read it all out of order and not even notice, but there were certain foundational pillars to the setting, characters, and situations that you started to take for granted. Now he's knocked most of those pillars down. It's a bold move, and I'm keen to see how far he takes it. In any case, I enjoyed this last book a lot, which is pretty much par for the course with the Dresden series.

Now I'm in the middle of George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons. And... well, I'm not burning through this one.

One might hypothesize that this is a case of me savoring the experience and making it last, since if the pattern holds it seems like it will be a long wait for the next book. But that's not really the case. Fact is, I can only take so much at a time.

It's grim stuff.

Terrible things happen, terrible people abound, and by this time we've got the idea with Martin that even when a good thing happens, it's going to eventually rebound and become a terrible thing. It's kind of the horror funhouse experience where you expect something to burst out of the dark at you at any time, but he's too good at making you care for the characters (most of the time), so it's not a funhouse at all.

I'm trying to talk about the book in the abstract, since it's just out recently and I don't want to throw out any spoilers. I'm also only halfway through it. One of the things about this book is that we know it's #5 of 7, so it's not like I'm expecting anything like the relief of resolution by the end, just another series of heart-rending cliffhangers and a character or two that I love getting the axe. This is what I have to look forward to.

Am I enjoying myself? Well, with Martin it is always top-notch writing, and I am certainly invested enough to keep going. Nothing has happened to keep me from wanting to see it through to the end yet. But we are in the middle territory of the hard slog, and it ain't easy going in here.

I think it is very interesting that right now, my wife Candi is tearing through a number of Stephen Ambrose books about World War II, reading at the blistering pace that only she can manage (seriously... she's a phenom). So here we have a historical story of a real-life dangerous, dark, and uncertain time... and it's nowhere near as grim as A Dance with Dragons. That's because in the midst of the expected turmoil and bloodshed of war, what shines out are these moments of completely unexpected humanity and decency. Unexpected, yet far more numerous than the cynic would ever guess. These moments occur, as expected, between comrades and arms... but also between those who are enemies.

Tolkien got it. The darkest part of the Lord of the Rings books is Sam and Frodo's last agonizing trek across Mordor. Yet even in the bleakest of all places, in the heart of evil, we see these moments. It's in the deep bond between Sam and Frodo, or the way Sam's tiny prayers are answered in unexpected ways, the little synchronicities that allow them to keep going, or a glimpse of the stars in the sky that remain untouched by the turmoil below.

This is what I feel is needed where we are in A Dance with Dragons, and what we aren't getting.

But hey, I'm only halfway through. I'll let you know how it went when I get to the end.

Progress Report: 8/1/2011

2011-08-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Back from vacation!

And no, as generally happens on summer vacation, it was not a time for much writing. It was, however, time for a lot of reading, which is the primary fuel for writing, and something I haven't had anywhere near as much time to do as I'd like.

I returned home to find our local Borders is shutting down, which in turn led to the knowledge that they are all shutting down. Borders has thrown in the towel.

It is somewhat sad, though it was the predictable end game of their extended struggle with the changing economy; it was not a well-managed organization. Hadn't been for a long time. Still, for me it means that the nearest bookstore (apart from the used bookstores) is now about a 30-40 minute drive away. Not something I ever expected to see.

From a writer's perspective, this isn't all that big a deal in the big picture. Fact is that while Borders is going away, and many other bookstores with it, people still read as much as ever. It's only the delivery system that is changing. A good story is still a good story.

And I am not willing to say that the bookstore -- and, more significantly, the physical book -- are yet on the cusp of extinction. The landscape is shifting, and the age of the bookstore's primacy has certainly reached its end, but they still have a place and (I believe) will for some time to come.

As for the paper book itself... well, I don't own an e-reader yet, though it is assuredly inevitable that I will. My biggest barrier is the way the screen strobes every time you turn a page. I find it annoying -- for my wife, it's a sure road to a headache, and probably to having the thing chucked across the room in a fit of irritation. So for our own corner of the world, we are still purely paper-readers.

The world is moving on.

Progress Report: 7/11/2011

2011-07-11T06:18:00.000-07:00

The lack of updates here is mostly due to a focus on work, where things are extremely busy right now. Disproportionately so. In fact, it has gotten to the point where we are having special meetings now to address what has come to be called the "Overwhelm Issue." So it's not just me.

And that's all I really want to talk about on that subject. This blog isn't about my work life or home life, it's about my writing life. These various lives are not isolated from one another, but I do try to maintain some degree of focus.

I have still managed to eke out a bit of writing in this period of several frantic weeks -- meager progress, but infinitely better than nothing.

We have a vacation scheduled at the end of this month. Every time I look at a calendar, that week seems to fluoresce, emanating a golden radiance that beckons me on with its promise of... well, if not salvation, then at least of peace. As a trend, I haven't actually made much headway on writing on vacation, unless it a dedicated "writing retreat." Nevertheless, this time may prove something of an exception. I'm looking forward to finding out.

Progress Report: 6/20/2011

2011-06-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

I carry on! In spite of what was one of the busiest weeks on record at work (my manager was on vacation, and thus I got to do the work of two maxed-out people), I managed to get some good writing in.

Translating Thunderstruck to prose has really given me an appreciation of how much flexibility the comic form gives you. There are some really cool things that you can do in comics that have no direct analogue in prose. I mean, this comic for example:

Comic 56 from Chapter 3...

I like that one. You get an ominous feel for what Grandma is up to, all done in pictures. Now, I can think of a way to describe those scenes of Grandma's and make it work, but the way they're plopped into the middle of Sharon and Gail's conversation is just not a thing that will fly in a prose context. Then you move on a few strips to something like this:

Comic 59 from Chapter 3...

And that's pretty much a wash. There are literally ten scene jumps on one page. You can make that work in a comic (I thought so, anyway), but in prose it would be a mess. And yes, there are plenty of solutions for getting across the same point. It's just interesting to appreciate how much freedom for certain things that the comic form allows.

Prose, on the other hand, has its own strengths, like I said in my last post. The translation between the two is giving me a new appreciation of both.

Progress Report: 6/6/2011

2011-06-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Let's see, starting off with an "At the Movies" segment...

I would highly recommend X-Men First Class. I went in with moderate expectations and was really impressed by the performances, the treatment of the characters, and the high level of quality of the whole thing. I am pretty sure that someone who has never read an X-Men comic would still enjoy it. It's my favorite big movie of the year so far.

Lousy batch of previews, though. I was never into Green Lantern, so it's kind of hard to get excited about a CG-fest like that. Saw the first trailer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and I couldn't swallow the premise. The idea is that a bunch of CG apes gain super intelligence, enough to wield spears and pick locks, and this somehow leads to them taking over the world, I guess. Here's a pro tip for would-be supervillains: if you're going to raise legions to conquer the planet, do not start with a species that is already endangered. You run into a real numbers problem. Also, intelligent enough to wield spears is inadequate. If this was Rise of the Planet of Raccoons Who Build Force Fields and Laser Cannons, that's starting to seem more plausible. And as you can see, I'm setting the bar really low here.

Okay, enough of that. In terms of writing, it was a really good weekend. I got a lot done, so much that I'm taking one of my "must spend" vacation days to work on more today.

What, you want a sample? Oh, very well. Thunderstruck readers will know the characters here:

"It would be natural to assume that Psyche was not the sort of person cut out for surveillance work. Taller than most men, with rare violet eyes that could stop a young man’s heart and a body that any Hollywood starlet would kill to match, she did not fade into a crowd. She moved with tigresses’ blend of grace and vitality, possessing a beauty that could make a poet throw aside his pen in despair. Psyche should have drawn the eye of every man and woman within a thousand yards; her face should have branded itself into the memory of anyone who chanced to look at her.

In fact, the opposite was true. Most people barely noticed she was there.

The eyes of onlookers widened for just a moment as they lit upon her, as if for the briefest of instants the one who saw her recognized what she was. Then the harassed glaze of the modern urbanite dropped back into place, and their eyes slid away to settle on something they could accept and understand. They shifted and moved aside to let her pass without realizing they had seen her, unconsciously withdrawing deeper into their cocoons of self-absorption so they would not have to feel the stirrings of something ancient and primal as they entered her presence.

There were times when she needed to be noticed. She had to make a conscious effort to diminish herself, to become more mundane and acceptable for as long as it took to buy a meal or ask directions. They gawked like moonstruck fauns and stammered their answers at her when she addressed them, then forgot her seconds after she turned and went along her way. The brighter Psyche shone, the more they closed their eyes against her. And so she walked among them, rendered invisible by the corona of her own radiance as she passed.

But Gail Curmen had sensed her."

Back to work...

Progress Report: 5/21/2011

2011-05-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

I suppose one can say it's progress to have survived yet another apocalypse. How many is that now? I've actually lost count. It's kind of a heroic feeling though, kind of like being a superhero!

Seriously, I didn't even know about this one until the day before when my neighbors suddenly mentioned it. Silly things, these predicted apocalypses. You would think the 100% track record of failure would put people off this particular game, but no. I suppose the temporary boost of attention is the underlying motive, even if you end up looking like another poser the morning after.

The Rapture version of the apocalypse, to me, boils down to a desire to be proven right. Hey, we all want to be right, I get it. This is just an extreme hankering for that particular human need, where the Ultimate Authority descends from the sky, says "You were right all along!" and then for good measure points at everyone who ever disagreed with you and says "You were wrong and you will be punished for it!" I suppose the theory is that you could surf on the splash wave from that moment of cosmic satisfaction for all eternity.

Is the next one actually December 2012, or do we have another interim apocalypse to get through?

The 2012 one is not, of course, a Rapture prediction, though I suspect there will be some Rapture-seekers willing to co-opt the date as another chance to have the Judge of Heaven call a final winner in their eternal argument. The Mayan 2012 prediction, as I understand it, wasn't even necessarily an apocalypse, but an "end of an age" prediction. Also, they ran out of room on their stone tablet. I mean, how much calendar do you really need to get by? Comes a point where the speculation game is a little to abstract to warrant the constant meticulous chipping and carving you need to make a calendar back then.

Anyway, I'm sure that when we hit 2013, we'll have another apocalypse prediction to look forward to. After all, that buzz you get from surviving the end of the world is too good to give up.

Progress Report: 5/16/2011

2011-05-16T05:55:00.000-07:00

About pushy characters...

In my experience, when a story is really on track, it has a life of its own. You end up writing things that surprise you. Characters take on their own identity and begin to do things that you didn't really plan for. They become pushy. This is a good sign.

Thunderstruck readers may be surprised to hear that Gail was one such pushy character. Way back in my original conception of the story, it was about Sharon's journey, and she quickly left her entire family behind. She had this sort of irritating religious sister who was, I am not terribly proud to admit, a pretty shallow figure... practically a caricature. They had some arguments about miracles, then Sharon found out some important things and pursued them on their own, bye bye family.

Only that sister, that stubborn, pushy sister, refused to just be one-dimensional. She had no interest in parroting simple-minded beliefs. She was a deep thinker, and her faith was something she wouldn't let me write off. Nor was her love for her sister... and Sharon, the troublesome creature, loved her back with just as much ferocity, despite their differences. Suddenly I had two central characters, not one, and I had to think a lot more about Sharon's whole family. And Thunderstruck became a hell of a lot more interesting.

The trouble with characters like this is they mess with your plot. They don't go where they're told, or do what you ask, or disappear when you want to be done with them.

I'm dealing with such a character now. He refused to be the simple jerk that I wanted as a plot device, he doesn't want to go away, and now Gail has decided she likes him. He's messing with my script.

So an author has the ultimate power and can force characters to behave however he wants, but I really think that severs your fundamental connection with the story and characters. The story breaks, perhaps irreparably.

But what you can do is kill a character. I think it's often a good idea to dust a character that the audience likes early on in order to show that the stakes are high. An early sacrifice. And I think I've just found my lamb.

Progress Report: 5/2/2011

2011-05-02T06:04:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Still writing, still trying to get a handle on all my new responsibilities at work, and this month an unwelcome visit from some microscopic friends has helped make things even more interesting. The cold season has gotten an extension, it seems. So without much in the way of news to report, here's something I've been thinking about as a writing matter.

We're three installments into HBO's Game of Thrones series now. I'm enjoying it, but it does make me wonder a couple of things.

1) How is it for someone who hasn't read the books?

I often wonder this about these kinds of adaptations. The Potter movies, for instance, seem like they would lose movie-only fans on some pretty significant plot points. For Thrones, I wonder how hard it is to keep track of all the characters, 'cuz there are a hell of a lot of characters to get straight. Perhaps someone who hasn't read the books but who's watching can tell me. My hope is that it would inspire you to read the books.

2) What is it that a visual medium does better than print?

This is a question near to my heart, because I am grappling with it as I adapt Thunderstruck to its new novelized form. Certainly when you have visuals, you can choreograph certain kinds of scenes (action, especially) with more ease, but I think that a good writer shouldn't be hindered by that. It's fun to see a full artistic realization of a landscape, a castle, a suit of armor, yet I find that as often as not, even big-budget movies don't add a whole lot to what I've already imagined for a book I really love.

I'd say the biggest advantage that film has is actors. The subtlety of expression and inflection that a good actor can bring to a role are things that a writer simply has to hope the reader can fill in for themselves. Writers who try to spell out every detail of their character's facial tics, body language, and vocal emphasis tend to bog down their stories. An actor can, with a very minor change of expression, convey a whole world of information. To an extent, a drawing can do that as well.

(For Game of Thrones, I'm thinking particularly of the actor who plays Jaime Lannister. I'm really enjoying his performance.)

Now, a writer has all sorts of other tools and advantages that a visual medium lacks. It's a lot easier to fill in backstory and track the internal thoughts of a character in writing, and these are things that I definitely feel are missed in the Game of Thrones show. Still, it's nice to see good acting for characters I know and love (or love to hate). It adds a new dimension.

The other thing that films have as an advantage is the soundtrack. There's not much answer to that as a writer, unless you want to say "play this CD while you're reading."

Progress Report: 4/11/2011

2011-04-11T06:14:00.000-07:00

Well, things are busy and interesting at work. The short of it is that I got a promotion, which is quite gratifying. Also involves a lot of new duties and some fair amount of ambiguity.

I have had some time for writing. Huzzah! I find that when I've been away from the fiction keyboard for a few weeks, my first stabs at writing tend to be very melancholy in tone, with characters who feel very isolated and fundamentally lonely. I don't necessarily think that it makes the best reading, though. It's something I need to get out of the way before I can write something that's more fun and (frequently) true to the character. It's worked all right for writing Sharon's wheelchair life, but really it doesn't fit Gail very well.

But I've gotten my depressing draft out of the way, and the writing is going much better.

In terms of reading, I'm done with A Wise Man's Fear. I think it was something of a sophomore slump for a talented author, and as a case study it contains a lot of valuable lessons for writers. And... I think that's about all I'll say.

Here's the colored version of the next Rose & Jade picture. With the dragon and everything.

Progress Report: 3/21/2011

2011-03-21T06:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, work life kind of takes over. This year it's been especially true, for a variety of reasons. This isn't really a blog about my job, though, so suffice it to say that it's been the experience of running uphill during a mudslide the last couple of weeks.

Which has left little time for writing. Things even out over time, and I've got the itch to hammer away on my keyboard, so I certainly hope I can get things under wraps here soon.

I am reading The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. It's a book (and series) that seems to create a certain polarization amongst fans. Some folks really love it, and others really hate it. I'm enjoying it so far, though the pace is... hmm... leisurely? I think that fits.

I recall Stephen King saying on several occasions that the destination isn't what matters, it's the journey. There is something to be said for that, and I think authors who live by that maxim like to take their sweet time getting through a story (hence King's history of writing books that look like cinder blocks). Sometimes it's fun to mozy toward your destination and enjoy the sights. Other times, it's fun to put the hammer down and burn up the road.

Anyway, here's the line drawing of an illustration I'm working on for Return of the Dragon. That's Rose Gallagher again. Odd knife she's got there, isn't it?

Progress Report: 3/7/2011

2011-03-07T06:43:00.000-08:00

Right now, work life is squalling and demanding pretty much all my attention. It's a good thing overall, with pretty good developments at work that I may be able to talk about later, but they're taking the lion's share of my energy. That, and taxes. Yeeeuch.

Here's an image I made for Return of the Dragon, featuring our protagonists, Rose Gallagher and Jade. I will be making a website for promotional stuff, and it's a nice thing to be able to provide my own illustrations. More to come later.

Progress Report: 2/21/2011

2011-02-21T06:41:00.000-08:00

Proposal is done!

>thud<

As with the query letter, everyone has a somewhat different idea of how to make a proposal, what should go in it, and what a publisher wants to see. One suggestion that I didn't take was a chapter-by-chapter breakdown. Not unfeasible for my book, which has 19 chapters and a prologue, but I've known some writers who use very short chapters and rack 'em up by the dozens. If someone really wants to see such a breakdown, I'll write it.

So I've got more to do, but for now, I can enjoy the sweet feeling of accomplishment. Now let's hope it's an effective proposal...

Progress Report: 2/14/2011

2011-02-14T07:02:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Today I have more from my proposal in progress. Below is a brief accounting of the main characters in the story. Not all proposal sites/sources suggest that you do this, but I rather like it as an addition to the story synopsis. It lets me get in a few details and flesh out some of the character motivations without bulking out the synopsis itself.

Many thanks to everyone who responded with comments & critique on the synopsis. And I welcome more thoughts if you see something you think is good, bad, confusing, awkward, and so forth.

I hope to get a working draft of the whole proposal to my agent within the week. Truckin' along...

Return of the Dragon: Main Characters

2011-02-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

These are the main characters in Return of the Dragon, listed by order of appearance:

Jade: A young dragon of the ruling bloodline, Jade is chosen to bear the monumental responsibility of re-awakening her people. Jade is unusual amongst dragons for her ability to form deep connections with others—most of her kind are fiercely independent. Though she is capable of magical feats that dazzle her human friends, Jade herself is equally impressed by human “magic” of abstract thought, technology, and social cooperation.
Rose Gallagher: A 13-year old high school freshman who lives with her father in the small town of Boulder City, Nevada. Rose is a self-sufficient and artistic—her great passions are drawing, horses, and geology. Her greatest gifts are her compassion and courage, and both will be tested as she is faced with decisions that could change the entire world.
Clay Ostrom: Rose’s classmate, friend, and neighbor, Clay has been obsessed with fantasy all his life. When he encounters a living dragon, it as if his dreams had come true—yet this awakens in him a dangerous hunger for more magic. Still, Clay shows that he his both intelligent and resourceful when faced with the perils of reanimated dinosaurs rampaging in the Lost World casino.
Sam Gallagher: Rose’s father is a rock-solid pragmatist who is a senior engineer at the Hoover Dam. He has a difficult time connecting with his daughter, though he loves her dearly. His rational view of the world prevents him from seeing or accepting that Jade is anything other than a human girl until the very end of the story.
Trevor Wallace: An athletic, somewhat bullying boy in Rose’s class, and her main rival at school. Trevor appears only briefly in Return of the Dragon, but will play a greater role in the next book in the series.
Mrs. Doris Jersey: A dynamic elderly woman who has settled into retirement in Boulder City, Mrs. Jersey is well-traveled, perceptive, and a believer in magic. She is versed in a wide variety of practices such as shamanism, Western mystery occultism, and divination through the Tarot cards. She is an invaluable mentor to Rose and Jade.
Rex Triumph: Though he appears as an extravagant casino owner and Las Vegas celebrity, Rex Triumph is really a dragon in human guise. He holds humans in contempt, and when he realizes that the Harbinger has finally surfaced, he will stop at nothing to restore dragonkind to its rightful place in dominion over the world. Rex is bold, cunning, and ostentatious—a weaker breed of dragon than Jade, but far older and more experienced in both magic and combat.

Progress Report: 2/7/2011

2011-02-07T06:32:00.001-08:00

In the post below this one, you will find the first draft of my synopsis for Return of the Dragon.

So here's what this is. When you're submitting a book to a potential publisher, you put together a proposal that contains a number of components. One of these components is a synopsis of your novel. Opinions differ about how long this should be, and I decided to try for a relatively short version that weighs in at about 2 pages.

I thought it would be cool to see how this reads to a fresh audience, since its purpose is to spark the interest of someone unfamiliar with the story. So, what do you guys think? If there are any parts that seem confusing, dull, awkward, etc., please let me know. I want to get this sucker right.

Book Proposal: Synopsis Section

2011-02-07T06:29:00.000-08:00

Return of the Dragon
YA Fantasy, 99,000 words

A real, fire-breathing dragon turns out to be only the second-most important thing Rose Gallagher discovers one fateful day in April. The dragon would change Rose’s life forever—but the odd green stone she finds in the desert threatens to bring chaos to the entire world.

Like most of us, 13-year old Rose believes dragons belong only in myths and fantasy tales. Yet the dragon she stumbles on just outside her home town of Boulder City, Nevada is no daydream—and in the face of the creature’s massive claws and rows of dagger-like teeth, it’s understandable that Rose’s first instinct is to run away screaming. As frightening as it looks, though, the dragon means no harm. And when the creature magically transforms into a young human girl called Jade, Rose realizes that she has found a new and extraordinary friend.

Jade may look like a girl Rose’s age, but she is far from normal. She speaks no English, and is dazzled every time she encounters a new aspect of the modern-day human world. Rose desperately wishes for someone to help her figure out why Jade has appeared to her—yet she cannot confide in her logical-minded father, whose ordered world has no room for magic or dragons.

Torn between wanting to keep Jade a secret and needing to find help, Rose turns to an elderly substitute teacher named Mrs. Jersey. In spite of Mrs. Jersey’s suspicious reputation around town, she turns out to be versed in the mysteries of the occult—precisely the ally Rose needs. In hopes of finding a way to communicate with Jade, Mrs. Jersey performs a mystical ritual in the remote Keyhole Canyon. There, Rose and Jade become blood-sisters, and through this mysterious bond they gain the ability to understand each other’s language.

This is when Rose realizes she has made a terrible mistake.

The strange stone she discovered in the desert is called the Harbinger—an object of unthinkable magical power that Jade has been entrusted with for the sake of all dragonkind. In her ignorance, Rose gave the stone to her father. With his subconscious mind rejecting all magic, Rose’s father seeks to destroy the Harbinger by throwing it off the Hoover Dam. Rose and Jade fly to the dam in a desperate attempt to save the Harbinger, coming a hair’s breadth from being smashed by massive jets of water from the dam’s overflow system. They recover the Harbinger, though Jade is either unwilling or unable to say what it is for.

Even the witnesses who saw Jade fly over the dam choose to believe it was a glider instead of a dragon—except for Rose’s fantasy-obsessed friend, Clay Ostrom. Clay discovers Jade’s identity, and through his carelessness, the word that there is a living dragon in Nevada reaches a dangerous figure. Soon, Rose and Jade receive an unexpected invitation from Rex Triumph, a flamboyant Las Vegas multi-billionaire who owns a dinosaur-themed casino called Lost World. In spite of their misgivings, Rose and her friends agree to meet with this mysterious mogul who seems to know more about Jade’s mission than she does.

Rex Triumph turns out to be a dragon masquerading as a human—or rather, a dreaming dragon. As he reveals to Rose and Jade, dragons once ruled the earth millions of years before mankind, creating a civilization based on magic instead of science. When their existence was threatened by the same comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, the dragons devised a plan to enter an enchanted sleep, one so deep that their very bodies merged with the elements as they slumbered. A dreaming dragon like Rex Triumph could project a phantom version of himself into the world, but Jade was the first dragon to awaken fully in 65 million years. Given to her was the sacred task to use the Harbinger to awaken the rest of her kind.

Rose is terrified of what might happen if dragons and humans fought for control of the world. Jade has no desire for such a war, yet she has been charged to carry the hopes of her people. She agrees to use the stone to awaken Rex Triumph, who plays upon her uncertainty to drive a wedge between Rose and Jade. Mrs. Jersey and Clay are no match for Triumph’s enchantments, and Jade is tricked into abandoning Rose so that she might fulfill the purpose of the Harbinger and awaken the rest of the dragons.

When all seems lost, Rose is able to use her special bond with Jade to break through Rex Triumph’s beguilement and call her friend back to her side. Yet Triumph has stolen the Harbinger for himself, and his attempts to use it cause chaos to erupt in downtown Las Vegas. Clay and Mrs. Jersey flee for their lives as the animatronic dinosaurs of Lost World come to life and run rampant through the casino, and law enforcement is powerless to restore order in the face of Rex Triumph’s magic.

Rose and Jade challenge Triumph to a duel to reclaim the Harbinger. Though Triumph is of a lesser breed than the fire-breathing Jade, he is much older and wilier. The two dragons battle over the Las Vegas strip as a sandstorm rages below, with Jade’s fiery power pitted against Triumph’s speed and cunning. The battle is decided by a factor that Triumph could never have predicted—by combining the strengths of Rose’s rational human mind with Jade’s draconian magic, the two friends create a weapon capable of bringing down even the mighty Rex Triumph. The defeated dragon returns the Harbinger to Jade, along with the burden of responsibility it represents.

Jade has a duty to her people, yet she has grown to love the world of humans, especially her new blood-sister. As Rose and Jade ponder how to solve this perilous dilemma, Rex Triumph begins to hatch a new scheme to awaken the dragons—and challenge humans for dominion of the world.

Progress Report: 1/31/2011

2011-01-31T06:25:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone, long time no see. Like I said, January is a brutal month, made even more difficult by the pesky and persistent microbes that have run rampant at work and at home.

Anyway, I did have time to write the short piece below. I know I've talked about Rose & Jade a lot on this blog, but of course not many people here have had a chance to read the story. To help it be less of an abstraction, I decided to write a few stories set in that world as bonus material, just so you could get to know the characters and setting a bit. This one is about Rose herself.

By the by, the working title of the book has changed to Return of the Dragon.

Short Story: "The Dragons She Has Known"

2011-01-31T06:18:00.000-08:00

Rose knew the names of many dragons before she met the one that would utterly change her life. There was Smaug and his golden hoard, five-headed Tiamat, little white Ruth and his brethren on Pern, and many others. But her first, as for so many of us, was Puff.

She first met Puff when she was three years old, as the dragon frolicked forth from the speakers of her mother's venerable record player. They had CDs and cassettes in the house, but her mother's old favorites were all on pressed vinyl, with their distinctive pops and scratches still intact. The care with which these large black discs needed to be handled told the young Rose that they contained the most special music. The one she requested more than all the others was the Peter, Paul, and Mary record with the bright red label that told of Puff's adventures with the young Jackie Paper.

From this song, Rose formed two mistaken impressions that persisted for some time.

The first was that there existed a substance called "ceiling wax." She grouped it in her mind with the floor wax that her mother used in the kitchen and the car wax that her father applied every month to her mother's sporty little Volkswagen. And since it was "fancy stuff," she reasoned that only rich people used it. To this day, Rose carries around an unexamined belief somewhere in one of the lower recesses of her subconscious that there is a special substance used to polish the ceilings in wealthy estates.

The second mistaken impression was that Jackie Paper stopped coming to see Puff because of an illness.

This idea formed because she misunderstood her mother's explanation about the end of the song, which puzzled Rose when she first heard it. Why did Jackie stop coming to see Puff? "Because he grew up," her mother had answered. But the answer didn't quite make it intact through the noise of the running dishwasher, and what little Rose heard was: "Because he threw up."

This made perfect sense. Rose had plenty of experience with throwing up in her three years of life. And so she understood that Jackie Paper ate something that made him sick, which caused him to stop visiting his magical friend. She also assumed quite naturally that, once Jackie felt better, he must have resumed his visits to the land of Honalee, and that Puff was assuredly happy to see him back healthy. With this happy explanation, the song's inherent melancholy rolled off her like water off a waxed ceiling, and she cheerfully drew pictures of Puff's further adventures with Jackie Paper (and often with a little dark-haired girl alongside them).

It was Clay who explained what really happened a year after she first met Puff.

She often played with Clay when her family visited the Ostroms. Clay's sisters were too old to care about Rose, but Clay was her age, and for the most part he made an excellent playmate. He didn't share Rose's passion for horses, which she found mystifying, but he did love dragons. He even had a stuffed dragon that he had won (or, more likely, that his father had won for him) in one of the carnival games down the Excalibur, and together they decided he should be named Puff. They even tried painting his wings, though watercolors on plush felt do not yield very inspiring results. Stuffed Puff was the centerpiece of many of their play sessions, but early on, Clay made his feelings very clear on the subject of Jackie Paper.

Jackie had left Puff. He had grown up, he had moved on to other things, more grown-up games like baseball or basketball, and he had stopped caring about Puff. The word "traitor" was not in four-year old Clay's vocabulary, but had it been, that would have been the epithet that described the execrable Jackie Paper. The only circumstance under which Clay could bear to mention the name of Jackie Paper was when they cast the fictional boy as the villain in their playtime or in their crayon-illuminated storybooks. Rose did not care for these games and stories. While she agreed that it was a rotten thing to abandon one's friends, she could not muster the equal of Clay's bitter, bitter hatred for the boy who had been Puff's friend, nor did she share his need to envision act of vengeance.

Rose stopped listening to "Puff the Magic Dragon" when she was five years old. It was not because she had outgrown the song, though that time would assuredly have come soon enough in the normal course of events. It was because the record player and all the old vinyl were her mother's, and they were all packed away when her mother died.

"We don't want them to get broken," her father said as her gently lowered the old turntable into a trunk, one that he would fill with old effects that once belonged to Rose's mother. The trunk was rarely unlocked, yet Rose felt its presence in the attic the same way that a compass needle feels the location of the North Pole.

She only heard "Puff the Magic Dragon" three times after that day.

The first time, it came on the radio on one of her father's oldie stations as they were driving down into Vegas. She saw his right hand lurch, as if it wished to dart out and change the station, but he snatched it back before it could touch the radio. Rose watched him as the song played, watched how he kept his eyes fixed on the road. She could see his jaw muscles taut under his cheek, and saw every swallow that forced its way down his clenched throat. He did not weep, as he had the day that her mother had died. Rose found her own cheeks were wet when the song was over, but did not remember crying.

The second time was at summer camp when she was eight years old, and one of the counselors played it on her guitar. They sat around their little fire under the glittering night sky, the smell of creosote and Joshua Trees mingled with the remaining scent of roasted marshmallows, and Rose sang along until her throat would not let her sing. Then she just whispered and wiped her eyes, and that night she dreamed about her mother.

The third time was when she was thirteen, and it was very different.

When "Puff the Magic Dragon" floated in over the speakers of at the tack store, Rose froze where she was, her fingers still inches away from the snaffle bit she was about to pick up. This time, the old song did not make her think of her mother. This time, she was powerfully reminded of the dragon itself who had lived so vividly in her young imagination. She thought of the dragon's shattering roar that could strike fear into the hearts of the most savage pirates, and of the creature's majesty that drove kings and princes to their knees in homage. Rose's eyes shifted to the window of the store, looking out into the desert beyond the parking lot, and for a moment she thought she could see the dragon there, rising from the heat shimmer in all of its glory, spreading painted wings into the sunlight.

The song ended, and Rose snapped out of her reverie. Then she thought of her mother, as she always did when she heard the old songs—Greensleeves or Red River Valley or Country Roads. That familiar sense of loneliness filled her mind like an autumn mist that obscured the momentary vision of the dragon, and she thought no more about Puff.

Not until three days later, when she met a dragon in the desert.

--------------

Rose Gallagher is the protagonist of my first novel (working title: Return of the Dragon).

Progress Report: 1/3/2011

2011-01-03T06:20:00.000-08:00

I'm back.

I did manage to get a fair amount of good writing work done over vacation, though it's really not the best time. I was laid up quite a bit with a nasty stomach virus (lovely), so I had plenty of time to stew in my fevered delirium and think about story ideas.

Which is good, because I realized I needed to get a lot more clarity about Book 3 before I could make any more progress on Book 2.

Anyway, January is a viciously busy month to start with, but by the last week and into February it tends to settle out. Shouldn't be long before serious writing gets underway.

Happy new year, everyone...

Progress Report: 12/13/2010

2010-12-13T06:39:00.000-08:00

Last post of the year. Next week we're going on vacation, and I make it a point to disconnect as much as humanly possible when I'm on vacation.

This is always the busiest time of year. At work, there's a desperate rush to get a whole lot of things done before things shut down, and of course at home there's Christmas shopping, prepping for vacation, general mental insanity, etc. Which is why I don't carry around a lot of expectations for getting writing done in December.

That being said, the story for the second book is coming together beautifully, and the outline is taking shape. Which is fantastic. Also a little bit intimidating, because the end of the series itself is still hiding in the fog, with only its barest shape visible to me right now. For me, writing is often an act of faith that the story will come when I need it to.

I have gotten emails and seen blog postings from Thunderstruck fans wondering when I'll get back to working on it. The story is never far from my thoughts, but currently the iron is hot for my dragon stories, and that's where I've got to strike. I will return to Sharon & Gail when I can. Rose & Jade are the ones who need my attention now.

It's been an extraordinary year. I have a sense of things coming together now, paths opening up and opportunities getting closer. I hope you all have good holidays, and I'll see you in 2011.

Progress Report: 11/29/2010

2010-11-29T06:28:00.000-08:00

Champagne! I have an agent.

I spoke with Ms. Devra Jacobs of Dancing Word Group this weekend, and it looks like she's a go to represent Rose & Jade. She's breaking into the Young Adult market, and she's very enthusiastic about the book and its potential. Not so hot on the title, so we'll be coming up with something else that telegraphs the content a little more clearly. Y'know, something to do with dragons.

I'm very psyched, folks.

Oh, so in terms of contacting an agent who's been holding onto your manuscript, I think it's worth it. The other agent that was in the running was taking quite a while to get back to me, though she eventually did. And she decided not to take the book on, which made my own decision much easier.

The thing is, it seems that agents will gnaw on a book for a long time if they're interested, and will send it out to other people in their inner circle to read and evaluate. This is why it takes so long. My experience is that they don't provide a stream of updates about this, so if the waiting is driving you mad (as it was for me), then you're probably best off dropping your potential agent a polite email to ask for an update. Might take a while to get a response to that, too.

Patience. This business requires patience.

Next up for me: book proposal. And, I'm told, creating a website for your book with an ambiguous "coming soon" is not a bad notion, if you can find a website designer and illustrator to help you out. Fortunately, I have both those skills myself, so there's a head start. Time to get to work!

Progress Report: 11/8/2010

2010-11-08T06:16:00.000-08:00

The plot is thickening up on the agent front.

This week's news has a different agent asking to represent my novel. Which is... yay! With complications.

The first thing is, I did agree to inform the first agent if there was any other offer on the book, and to give her the a chance to say whether she's interested or not. So I'm waiting to hear back from the first (potential) agent, and I'm not sure how long that takes. I have horrifying visions of my emails somehow being netted in a spam filter, but I'm going to take it on faith that that's paranoia in action.

The second thing is that the new agent doesn't normally represent Young Adult books, which is somewhat of a concern. The first (potential) agent does. So... yeah. You can see how this is qualified good news. Still, I think it is important to remember that it is very good news indeed!

Champagne still pending.

So on other fronts, yesterday we went and saw Hereafter. First off, Clint Eastwood is a treasure, no amount of appreciation can do him justice. I felt the film spoke profoundly to my own life. It's not because I relate personally to the near-death experience--I haven't had one. Much of the film's focus is not about the experience itself, but how people relate to you when you've start talking about something that they aren't willing to accept. Your life has changed course, and all of a sudden you find yourself out on "the fringe." The people who you once respected and identified with now look at you as "woo-woo" and irrational, if not actually insane.

As someone who works at Sounds True, and as someone who was once, philosophically, a materialist atheist, this story speaks to me very strongly. It is something I want to capture in Sharon's story, since it is the journey that she undergoes when she is blindsided by something miraculous, and it forces her to change her point of view.

In my life, I haven't experienced anything that is obviously miraculous. I'm in the more difficult position of having to decide who to believe when they tell their stories of things that don't fit into the reductionist universe. Oh, to be sure, I've gotten little tastes myself. Yet if I wanted to go back to materialist thinking, I could (unlike Sharon, whose miraculous healing and ongoing immersion into the world of magic give her pretty much no choice but to swallow that she's going to have to change her worldview).

It is a subject that occupies much of my thinking, and I thought Eastwood's handling of the material was superb. If I get the chance, I'll write more about this.

Progress Report: 11/1/2010

2010-11-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I hope this blog will be useful for is to help other writers gain helpful insights for their own careers. Right now, we have the issue of Etiquette with Agents. Specifically, how long does it take for an agent to review your manuscript before getting back to you, and should you contact them before they contact you?

For me, it has been almost two months. For me, personally, being in this kind of limbo is a particular sort of agony that wears away at my nerves. I've now frayed to the point that I am going to take the leap of etiquette and buzz my prospective agent to see how things are going. I shall let you know what results this produces, good or bad.

Meanwhile... tap, tap, tap.

Progress Report: 10/11/2010

2010-10-11T06:39:00.000-07:00

Tap. Tap. Tap.

No, I'm absolutely not sitting here drumming my fingers and compulsively checking my Inbox and messages to see if there is a message from my prospective agent.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Those dents in my desk were there when I got it. The fact that they fit my fingers is one of those great mysteries of life.

Tap. Tap.

I did have this dream that I got an email from the agent that went as follows. Subject Line: "That was fun." Email Body: "Pass." I thought it was rather cold behavior, but then again dream agents aren't as polite as real ones. Fortunately, I have not had any successful history of predicting the future with my dreams, so I can simply brush that off as a whimsical offering of my subconscious.

Tap.

Okay, so apart from all that, the big thing this week was my wife Candi's 42nd birthday. Because she's a lifelong horse lover, it was very appropriate that it turned out to be an extremely horsey week. The highlights were:

Watched a lot of the World Equestrian Games. These are kind of like an Olympics devoted entirely to horse competitions. To a true horse lover like Candi, pretty much any competition is fascinating. To a lesser horse lover like myself, I find some of the events riveting (like Eventing, jumping competitions, etc.) and some less so (Reining is what I'm thinking of here. This is an event where everyone has to do the exact same routine, which involves a great deal of charging around in circles. It's entertaining the first couple of times, and then it gets somewhat repetitive).
Went and saw Secretariat, which I enjoyed immensely. I'm in accord with Roger Ebert's assessment of the film.
Went to Cavalia, which was beautiful beyond description. This is the horse/circus show created by one of the founders of Cirque du Soleil. Seeing it simply made me happy to be alive and in the world at this moment, which I think is one of the best things that great art can do. I've never seen anyone train horses quite this way. I've seen horses trained to perform incredible tricks, but in Cavalia, the trainers appear to be working with the horses as partners far more than normal. There are lots of portions of the show where the horses are let loose and trusted to do their own thing in an entertaining way, and as a result they look like they are spontaneously playing with their human co-performers, not enacting scripted tricks.

So those were the highlights of a very equestrian week. Now I'm going to go back to not compulsively checking my Inbox. I haven't looked at it now for about fifteen minutes. See? No worries here.

Progress Report: 9/27/2010

2010-09-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

Short report this week, and I almost don't want to mention the most interesting development, because it's not anything solid yet. But at the risk of jinxing myself, there is an agent who asked to see the whole manuscript of Rose & Jade after reviewing my submission and the first three chapters. After the steady Chinese water torture of "Thanks, but no thanks" responses, even to this much interest is very encouraging indeed.

I'll let you guys know what she thinks. Fingers crossed...

Progress Report: 9/13/2010

2010-09-13T06:12:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, a couple of weeks go by in a blur, and you look up to say, "What happened?"

Ever have that experience? Yeah, me too.

In terms of progress, more queries are out to more agents. No nibbles yet, and the search continues. Don't let anybody tell you this isn't a grueling process.

What's also grueling is the novel intro to Thunderstruck, and I'll tell you why. It's Sharon's situation as she's paralyzed. If you go back to the beginning of the strip, you notice that I don't spend a lot of time on Sharon's wheelchair days. That's mostly an evasion on my part, trying to get on with the lightning bolt and the magic and stuff. It's also a bit of a cheat.

So on this go-round I wanted to give Sharon's wheelchair life a fair shake. That means doing the research on what it's actually like paraplegics in day-to-day life, which is exactly the sort of legwork I was lazily attempting to avoid when I set out on the comic. And I find myself writing about a group of people from an outsider's perspective, and wanting to make sure I don't drop the ball.

Sharon is depressed. Now, the stats suggest that people with paraplegia are more likely to be depressed than the general populace... except it's fiendishly hard to get a read on how depressed the general populace is. And one aspect of a severe spinal injury is that you by necessity end up seeing the doctor more often than the average joe, and therefore you've got professional eyes looking for depression. So one could suggest there isn't as big a disparity as the study I linked to above suggest.

But even more so, as I research and read what more paraplegic's have to say about their condition, I want to do right by them. It's natural for someone with all working limbs to look at someone in a wheelchair and think, "Boy, I would be depressed as hell if that happened to me." That's a pity reflex. It's understandable, but it's also kind of condescending. There are a lot of paraplegics who justifiably get pissed off at that, and say, "You may think there's something wrong with me, but I don't. I love my life."

When you're writing a character, it is that one individual. Sharon is supposed to be representative of Sharon, not an entire group of people. As things stand now, though, I don't have any other wheelchair-bound characters in Thunderstruck, so in a way, she does stand for a whole group of people. Which is both fair and unfair. For instance, if you see a story where you have one woman who is an absolute beast, it's always nice for there to be at least one other woman character who is more sympathetic, so you don't come away thinking, "Man, that author has some screwed-up ideas about women."

So that's the balancing act with the early Sharon chapters of Thunderstruck here. It's going along.

Progress Report: 8/23/2010

2010-08-23T06:45:00.000-07:00

In terms of news, it's been a light week.

Okay, so I've been writing, I've been trying to get an agent, and that continues to go on. Until something breaks in the pattern, that doesn't qualify as news.

Er... so let's see. I'll do an author recommendation. Let's go with:

PETER F. HAMILTON

While I haven't read Peter Hamilton's full and impressive body of work, I've read enough to say that he's excellent. To date, I've read three books in his "Commonwealth" series, and I'm on the fourth.

The first of these books is Pandora's Star, and its opening chapter (the prologue) now ranks as one of my favorites. Without giving too much away, he starts with the first manned expedition to Mars in the near future. He sets the scene in a classic, Right Stuff sort of style, invoking all the pioneering spirit and pride that comes whenever you see a picture of Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon. And then, when he's got you caught up in the momentous historic event, he throws in The Twist. Which sets the stage for the entire future universe he's created.

Sweetly done.

Hamilton has a very nice grasp on creating a plausible future world. The two main technologies that go into the creation of the human Commonwealth are a means of crossing vast distances very quickly (to enable space colonization) and cellular regeneration treatment (to enable long lifespans). The thought he puts into the culture that is built on these technologies is a big part of the fun. The Commonwealth comes across as a very plausible, scientifically-sound vision of the future.

Which makes it even more fun when he hits that next gear and we get humans-vs.-aliens interstellar war.

Contrast it, say, to the Star Wars series, which get labeled as science fiction by virtue of the fact that there are space ships and robots, but which is really fantasy. There's nothing particularly plausible about the technology or culture in the Star Wars movies. Hamilton's universe, on the other hand, is well-realized and quite convincing. It also makes you want to live there, which is a nice break from the dystopian futures that have become so popular in fiction.

And in terms of characters, voice, and plot, he's definitely got the skills.

But don't take my word for it! Smart author that he is, Peter Hamilton has sample chapters online. Go check out the prologue to Pandora's Star. If you like what you see, then you've got a lot of good reading ahead of you.

Enjoy!

Progress Report: 8/9/2010

2010-08-09T06:39:00.000-07:00

For a writer, one of the challenges of this information-rich age is how much of your life you want to reveal to the public.

I'm thinking of George R. R. Martin here, 'cuz he's a good example of what I'm talking about. So he's got a series in process, and the wait between books keeps getting longer. This happens for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the story is a big complicated epic monster, and I think that the longer you go on with something like that, the harder it is to keep all of that monster's heads focused on going the same direction. Fair enough.

Then there's the fact that as the series gets more popular, so does Mr. Martin. Which means he goes to more and more conventions. And does more interviews.

And the series itself gets more popular. Calendars, figurines, table-top games, video games, and an HBO show... and since he wants to be a good creator and take care of his creation properly, he's hands-on for all of these things to some degree.

Plus he writes other stuff. He contributes to short story anthologies and shepherds a long-running superhero fiction series called Wild Cards.

So it's hardly the picture of the writer in his secluded cabin, hammering away at a keyboard in isolation. And as the years drag on, and the wait stretches out, some fans start grumbling about when this next book is going to get done.

Which irritates Mr. Martin. For good reason... nobody wants to see the book finished more than him. Nobody feels that pressure more. And it's his life, his book. So when fans grumble and complain—Mr. Martin naturally gets annoyed. And other authors also get annoyed, like Neil Gaiman, who spelled out his feelings pretty plainly.

Mostly, I'm on Mr. Martin's side on this one, but I wonder if he's hurting himself by being as available to the public as he has let himself become. Yes, you want to promote your appearances and new products and so forth, and where's the harm posting about the football games Sunday? And those fans who wondered when you had time to work on the book in between going to a Tokyo SF con and rooting for the Jets to beat the Chargers can just deal, right? And the months roll by, the years roll by, and your book is still not done...

All in all, I think I'd rather be a recluse.

But I am posting my progress, so here it is: got some writing done, though mostly this was a week for catching up with the furious pace of work right now (I have the best team—we really support each other when one person is hammered, so I've been grateful for them this week) and dealing with a few irritating health problems.

Now, back to my cave.

Progress Report: 8/2/2010

2010-08-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

I return!

In terms of progress, vacation was a good time for writing. I feel like I managed to clear away a significant chunk of the writer's block I've been dealing with for... oh, maybe the last 5 months or so. I did it by working on the follow-up to Rose & Jade.

I don't have the plot of the book hammered out yet, which is often enough to stop me. What I'm doing instead right now is writing scenes with the key characters as they come to mind. Whether or not these scenes will fit into the final story is not the important thing. I think any time you spend getting to know your characters is well-spent, and it already feels like these scenes are leading somewhere. When I've got a clearer picture, then it's time to go back to the outline, the plot, etc. For now, this is good.

It was damned good to take a break from the grind. I spent maybe three days of the vacation slowly smothering the "think about work" reflex, and then managed to get some peace from that. Now work is back, and yep, I'm thinking about it again. Hopefully with batteries recharged and fresh inspiration.

Another agent up, another agent down. The hunt continues.

Progress Report: 7/19/2010

2010-07-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

Mostly a few odds and ends this week.

In writing news, I'm back on the path looking for the right agent. Another submission, another rejection. Most agents say something to the effect that they'll get back to you within six weeks, three months, etc. In my experience, they tend to get back to you in a couple of weeks or not at all. It's the "not at all" ones that are more frustrating, of course.

Got a short story gearing up that I'm enjoying working on. However, I think it's going to work a lot better in first person. That means some rewriting, but I'm confident it'll be worth it.

I loved Inception. Curiously, we met some of our neighbors as they were walking out of the theater, and they said they didn't enjoy it (or rather the wife said that... I got the impression that the husband enjoyed it more, but knew better than to argue). Their conclusion was that if you liked The Matrix, you'd like Inception. I can see why they'd suggest this, but I found it to be a flawed premise on many levels. The movies bear certain thematic similarities, but the execution is very different. And it's all in the execution, folks.

(I'm an oddball regarding the Matrix movies, in that I feel most warmly towards the second one. Most people I've talked to decry the second for its overindulgence in pointless style-over-substance, and I can't argue with that. What I liked about it was that in the end, it seemed to suggest that the entire Zion reality, the "real" world, was simply another level of Matrix, and that Neo wasn't a human being at all. I thought that redeemed the whole thing, since nothing about the Zion world made the slightest bit of sense if it was supposed to be real. It left the door wide open to take the third film in some exciting and unexpected directions. Unfortunately, they backed off that premise in the third film, which cemented Zion-reality as really-real and dissolved into a boring muddle. A pity.)

I'm going to be gone next week for vacation. When I go on vacation, I like to go as offline as possible. There are many ways that our work can follow us around via our various auxiliary brains (i.e., laptops, iPhones, etc.), so it becomes harder to truly extract oneself from normal life. I do all I can to make a clean break. So I'll miss next week's progress report, and I'll hopefully have some good writing time over vacation.

For Candi and me, we are approaching our 17th anniversary! This is the occasion around which the vacation pivots. Unlike birthdays, which tend to accumulate a coating of melancholy (and perhaps even dread) as they accumulate, anniversaries just get sweeter each year.

Progress Report: 7/12/2010

2010-07-12T06:13:00.000-07:00

Success! Of a sort.

So, there is a small press publisher who reviewed Rose & Jade and was very impressed. In fact, he was so impressed that he informed me that he didn't feel he could do the book justice with his fairly limited distribution network. This is an agency that mostly publishes directly to Amazon and doesn't have much traction in the brick-and-mortar distribution networks.

The bottom line is that he would be willing to publish me, but thinks the book is good enough for a bigger, more mainstream launch than he could provide.

And that's pretty encouraging. It means back to the grind in looking for agents and publishers. On the other hand, if I can't make any headway, I do have someone I can go to that would publish the book on a more limited scale. With enough of a track record in a smaller market, it is possible to get noticed in more mainstream circles.

(The classic example that everyone likes to point to of this is John Grisham, who was rejected by every publisher and agent in this quadrant of the Milky Way, and printed up the book on a small press and sold it out of the trunk of his car. He sold so many that he was able to convince a publisher that yes, people are interested in reading his stories. And thus a star was born. It should be noted that for every John Grisham, there are plenty of other writers who don't end up with that kind of success, and there are ways that starting small can backfire on you. Still, the Grisham example shows that it can be done.)

All in all, it's pretty cool. I debated going with the small publisher and talked to a number of my friends and colleagues about it (I have the advantage of working at a publishing company, albeit one that does not publish fiction, so that gives me some valuable resources for getting advice). Ultimately, it seems like casting my line for an agent again is the way to go. It's nice to have a fallback option, though. It means that one way or another, this baby will see the light of day.

Progress Report: 7/6/2010

2010-07-06T06:27:00.001-07:00

Long weekends are nice, but not necessarily great for getting work done. So the "progress" side of this week's progress report doesn't really look like much.

So let's have a couple of shout-outs instead.

First is for Marian Call. I first became aware of Marian because she won a contest for writing the best song honoring the character Saffron (or possibly Yolanda) from Firefly. This is a pretty obscure kind of endeavor, but it turns out Marian is really cool, and I enjoy her music immensely. She's in the midst of a 50-state road tour right now, and came through Boulder, so we got to see her this weekend. She plays tiny little venues (we saw her out behind a popular coffee shop) and asks only for donations. If you're keen, check her website out. She's still on the move and may be coming your way.

Look, anyone who can get a peaceful, idealistic crowd from Boulder singing "We're Out for Blood!" at the top of their lungs has something going for her.

Second shout-out is an excellent book called Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. If you ever find yourself on the defensive end of this argument about whether media violence turns kids into murderers (as I have), this book is an invaluable resource. It's also very well-written and an excellent read.

The author, Gerard Jones, takes the seemingly obvious but daring route of asking "Why?" That is to say, if violent stories and images are so bad for kids (and adults), why are we so attracted to them? What is fantasy violence actually doing for our minds? Turns out there's a strong case to be made that it helps us control our tendencies for real-world violence... the opposite of the "it turns kids into killers" premise. Jones lays out his evidence very well, and the book is worth a read.

I haven't finished the book yet, but there's one study I'm reminded of that I think Jones probably doesn't mention, because it doesn't actually have to do with children. In one of these experiments where they taught sign language to chimps, there was an interesting side-effect that was unanticipated. When the chimps got mad, they developed this behavior of coming up to each other and making the sign for "bite" or "hit." So a mad chimp would come up to another chimp and basically say "Bite you! Bite you!" instead of actually doing it. If memory serves, this accompanied a reduction in actual fights between the chimps.

Fantasy violence working on the primate level. Maybe it even helped us survive.

Progress Report: 6/29/2010

2010-06-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

Pardon my absence yesterday. It was a sick day.

The question on my mind this week for writing is with regards to vampires, specifically as they appear in Thunderstruck. I have been toying with the outline to see if there is some way to sub out vampires with some other entity.

It just seems like vampires are starting to get really overplayed. I can't keep track of all the vampire shows, movies, and books out there now. I don't watch/read any of them, and I'm still sick to death of them. Especially the vampires of the romantic teenage variety. Can you imagine a worse hell than being stuck in high school for all eternity?

Still, there are advantages to using them. The familiarity with vampires means you don't have to spend a lot of time explaining them to the reader, which is convenient. And in terms of Thunderstruck specifically, it's hard to find a substitute that will cause the least damage to the plot. Not that I mind making changes, but the element where Gail looks like she would be capable of curing a vampire is pretty critical, not to mention Bella's contingency plan...

And if I take out the vampires, does that mean that Stephanie Meyer wins?

So I think I'll stick with them, and just make sure they don't ever show up as anything like the teenage romantic variety that's so popular.

And no werewolves or zombies. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

Progress Report: 6/21/2010

2010-06-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

A report on the Critters Experience so far.

I am currently a member of the Critters website, which is a kind of large online critique group for fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Every week, people contribute, on average, 10-20 stories. These are chapters of novels or short stories. As a member, you're required to critique at least one submission per week (and very short submissions count as only half a credit). If you decide to critique someone's whole novel, you will get a large number of critique credits based on the length of the book.

There are two other basic features of Critters that it's best to know about.

The first is that it uses a very archaic formatting standard -- pure simple text. This can be a little frustrating. You have to filter out any special characters (smart quotes, accents, stuff like that) for anything you submit. You also can't use italics or other advanced formatting, though there are various ways to indicate formatting in pure text. All commentary is done in old-school email style, like this.

>Fred noticed the bat circling his head had suddenly
>begun to fly counterclockwise. He wondered what that
>could possibly mean.

You might consider using "widdershins" instead of "counterclockwise."

The other thing about Critters is that you are required by the rules to be very, very, very polite. Now, I'm all for being polite and considerate. I've known a number of people who seem to think there's a virtue in being harsh with their criticism, and relish "tearing into" another writer. This kind of criticism is usually accompanied with something like, "Hey, I'm just calling it as I see it," or "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." I find there's generally a way to phrase any sort of reasonable criticism in a way that isn't deliberately savage.

But in Critters, it goes to a pretty serious extreme. The rules state that you need to be ultra-polite even when correcting basic grammar. So instead of this:

>"Don't feed cinnamon to the lungfish" he shouted.

"lungfish," shouted

... where you just indicate the placement of the missing comma, you have to go with something like this:

>"Don't feed cinnamon to the lungfish" he shouted.

I believe there should be a comma after "lungfish" here, as in "lungfish," he shouted.

Because, after all, everything is just your opinion, even basic grammar, apparently. And you have to make it clear that you're just offering you opinion every time.

So that gets a little tedious. I suppose erring on the side of politeness is not the worst policy to have on the Internet, but still. Sheesh.

Anyway, there have been some good stories and some pretty rough stories that I've critiqued so far, as one might expect. I think it's a good place, and I'll keep with it until I find a more intimate critique group that I can be a part of, either in person or online. We'll see what happens when I submit something for critique, though.

Progress Report: 6/14/2010

2010-06-14T06:26:00.000-07:00

So here I thought this would be good time to take a day off from work -- have a nice long weekend, get some writing done, enjoy some hiking, that sort of thing. Then I pinch a nerve in my neck and spend most of the weekend in considerable pain. Plus, it rains all weekend.

Well, so much for that plan.

The old mutant healing factor does seem to be repairing the damage, so pain is diminishing today. It makes concentration difficult, this pain stuff. I'll be relieved when it finally subsides.

Given the circles I run in (such as my work place), it's no surprise that I run into the Gaia philosophy a lot. Roughly expressed, this is the idea that the planet has a consciousness, or the "Earth as God" (Goddess, perhaps). This is expressed in all sorts of ways, great and small, and people believe it to various degrees.

So let's go with that for now. Say there is a Gaia consciousness -- I certainly can't say with certainty that there is or isn't. With regards to the Gulf spill, it would seem to me that the question is not: "Why are we doing this to the planet?" I've heard variations on that one a lot, along with the idea that the planet is suffering, crying out, being raped, etc.

If one does accept the Gaia consciousness idea, then I think the question should be: "Why is the planet doing this to itself?" Because we are, after all, a part of the planet. We would be an agency of Gaia. Like every other animal, we try to spread our population, we consume things that give us energy, and we affect the environment through our behavior. The planet, if it is acting at all, is acting through us, as much as it acts through any ant colony, kelp bed, or volcanic eruption.

This is not to absolve us of responsibility, nor to suggest that we shouldn't try to avoid things like the Gulf spill. It's not to imply we couldn't do great harm to ourselves through our actions, or even drive ourselves to extinction if we really go overboard (extinction is an essential part of the planetary history). It's just that the mindset of separation from the Earth doesn't seem to do us much good. Even Gaia believers seem to hold this separation, as if our actions are somehow distinct from the consciousness of the Earth. Which, I think, undermines the whole idea of Gaia in the first place.

Progress Report: 6/7/2010

2010-06-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to be a professional writer. That being said, "professional writer" describes a very large territory. I'm in one region of that territory now, writing copy for a living. Since I love the company and (most of) the products, I'm happy to be here.

And there are some dark regions of being a professional writer that I would fear to explore.

I say this because I see they have created Marmaduke: The Movie. My mind reels when I think of having to write the script for such an entity. This was assuredly a studio decision: "What property have we not mined yet? What about that comic about the dog? You know, the big one that gets up on the couch and drools... that stuff is golden. I want to see a script treatment by tomorrow morning!"

This would be nothing but a paycheck job. Sure, life is full of them. We all have to do them. Writing such a script would be the soul-level equivalent of filling out your tax forms. It would be a chore to complete as soon as you possibly could, hopefully under a pseudonym. I feel for the people who were stuck with that job.

And, thinking about it, I'd probably do it. If I were a professional screenwriter and hadn't made enough of a name to say "no" to projects I didn't like, or if I was in a dry spell for work and needed something to pay the bills. Marmaduke? Sure, why not. It's a lousy job, but low pressure. Nobody's expecting the next Inherit the Wind here. If I manage to actually shoehorn in a few genuinely funny moments that don't get lopped out by the director, maybe I can look back on it without grimacing.

I think I'd use the pseudonym, though.

Still waiting, waiting, waiting on Rose & Jade. I can see that light there at the end of the tunnel for work, though, so I'm optimistic about more good writing time in the near future.

Progress Report: 6/1/2010

2010-06-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

It's said that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. June, I would have to say, comes in like a ninja.

As in, "What, already? How did this happen?" That tends to be my reaction to June.

In terms of progress, there isn't much to report this week. I took the long weekend off, and I was happy to do it. Now it's back to work, back to plotting and scheming and writing.

See you guys next week.

Progress Report: 5/24/2010

2010-05-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

So I wrote the agent who's looking at Rose & Jade, and nothing terrible befell me. A crack did not open up in the ground to swallow me up, and I was neither struck blind nor covered with boils. Peculiar, isn't it? I do have a sore shoulder, but I think that can be traced to a more obvious cause.

Anyway, the agent says that he is now showing my story to a few other readers to get a consensus. He tells me that this is a time-consuming process and apologizes for the slowness. All this sounds fairly promising to me. My limited experience with agents so far is they don't need any kind of consensus to tell them what they don't like, and it's not time-consuming when they're telling you to blow off (generally, they're very polite about it, so don't take that to mean they're deliberately mean. It's still no fun). I know that a project has many chances to de-rail and it could easily happen any time, but it is kind of encouraging to have gotten a little farther down the tracks this time.

Also: I now have a laptop! A fine Mac laptop inherited from my good friend Andrew, and much more potent than anything I could have afforded to buy. Now it's a matter of getting some writing done on it. Work continues to dominate, but the end of this stretch is in sight. Perhaps a couple more weeks before the schedule settles back into something that permits breathing and a re-channeling of creative energy.

Work itself can be very rewarding, at least. Sometimes I get to work with material that is simply outstanding, as was recently the case. I have been writing the copy for an audio program with Howard Thurman, and it's been amazing to listen to him. He was Martin Luther King's spiritual mentor, to create the historical context, and I thought that the hook for the package copy would be about Thurman's legacy, his place in the Civil Rights movement, and that sort of thing. What I realized is that if someone walked into the studio and recorded the same material off the street, it would still be awesome.

Progress Report: 5/17/2010

2010-05-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

I just did something that I was advised not to do, which is to bug the agent to whom I sent my manuscript to see how it's coming along. It occurred to me after sending the email that I never did confirmation from him that he'd gotten the manuscript in the first place. I just assume it went through, but sometimes with large attachments, things don't work properly.

So we'll see.

Sometimes, you have to ignore advice. Actually, I'm getting to the point right now where I've hit advice overload. How to get published, how to write for the mass market, the rules of dealing with agents, the rules of contacting editors, the rules of structuring a story, the rules of character, the rules of dialogue, the rules of... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHH!

Many bits of advice contradict one another, or at least don't line up properly. Many other bits of advice seem sound, and then you see exceptions littered all around. So I think it's time to put a bit of a hold on advice. It can get paralyzing after a while.

Progress Report: 5/10/2010

2010-05-10T06:06:00.000-07:00

Still deep in the busy stretch for work, and that looks like it will last well into June. Which means that my blog updated here will probably be pretty light, barring some kind of wonderful agent news or something like that.

George R. R. Martin just invited a pretty hearty debate about fanfiction over on his blog (link here), and I think we got down to the heart of the matter on his third post. I haven't read all the replies, but judging from how his tone has changed, enough people must've told him that he was overestimating the issue about legal fears. Many authors have made a peaceful relationship with the fanfic community. Indeed, if you read Free by Chris Anderson, you can easily see how a robust fanfiction community can ultimately help the profits of the creator by creating free publicity and interest. It certainly happened with a lot of anime and manga.

It's not really a legal issue, it's a personal issue. The short of it is that he doesn't want his view of characters or a story poisoned by some writer's crappy or disrespectful version of things. And since most fanfiction (though not all) is pretty bad, it's a legit concern. Once you strip away his reason-based arguments, which can be refuted or challenged, what it boils down to is an emotional response from a man who takes stories very seriously. And I respect that.

(I find it fascinating that Martin brings up Alien 3 as an example of how stories can get spoiled by a bad installment. I can't think of a movie I hate more than Alien 3, so I really sympathize with his point on that.)

Martin also says that "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds," which accounts for his own ventures into the grey areas of fanfiction. He contributed pretty heavily tot he whole Suduvu character battle thing, including some pieces of fanfic all his own. And yes, it was supposedly all done with permission (I have my doubts about that... Aragorn and Gandalf were in that contest, and I don't see Christopher Tolkien as giving his blessing for that sort of thing). It was still fanfiction. Publishing a RPG based on your world and characters is also entering some fuzzy territory, since it's basically giving permission for people to play in your world with your characters.

What it boils down to is that his real emotional objection is to bad fanfiction... and indeed, bad fiction in general. Not poor writing, but existing characters abused by authors who either don't understand them or don't respect them (a problem that exists whenever you switch writers -- he brings up both comics and the Alien movies as examples). Since there's no way to police fanfiction quality, and since much of it is indeed quite bad, Martin is pretty much against it as a rule.

I can respect that. Even when I was writing fanfiction, which I don't really do now (I dabbled again with the Suduvu thing), there were only some things that I felt like being a part of. Mostly I did Ranma 1/2 fanfiction, of course. I thought Ranma was the perfect subject for fanfiction, because the original material was both good enough and bad enough. The author, Rumiko Takahashi, never took it very seriously. In fact, some of the storylines she wrote were embarrassingly stupid, and would've been scorned as fanfiction if they hadn't actually been part of her canon. This is to say nothing of the anime version, which got unwatchably bad after a while. So while you had a core group of fun characters and wide-open possibilities in Ranma, it was also hard to abuse it much worse than the original creator already had, unless you went for something really depraved.

I may differ with Martin in vehemence about fanfiction, but I've pretty much gone off it myself. It's more fun to play in worlds of my own.

Progress Report: 5/3/2010

2010-05-03T06:06:00.000-07:00

At work, there are three basic speeds:

Busy
Very Busy
Mega Hyper Super-Overdrive Busy (in a white wine sauce)

Last week, and this week as well, we're on the third option. In fact, we may be on the third setting until about mid-June. At which point I am likely to invoke the "I need to take some days off or I'll melt into a puddle of useless protoplasm" clause.

Such times of Option Three are traditionally not very good for writing, since there's so much energy being dumped into work. However, if I let stuff like that derail me completely, I'll never get anything accomplished. So I signed up for Critters.org.

I haven't had much luck with finding a critique group, though I've been testing options since late last year. Ruling out the local, face-to-face options, none of which seem to work, we're left with the Internet. Critters.org is a big online critique community for Fantasy and SF writers, so it seemed like a good place to start.

My feeling right now is that I would eventually like to narrow it down and develop a smaller, more personal critique circle, where all the writers know each other and commit to supporting and improving each others' work. For now, it seems the best option is to make some contact with other authors through a larger site and see who clicks.

In laptop news, my good friend Andrew offered to pass along his old Mac laptop to me, which is terrific. The sole hurdle to this is prying it from the clutching hands of his psychotic tenant. Have you ever met someone in real life who was such a walking, talking stereotype that you would never dream of writing that person as a fictional character? That's what this tenant is like. She is, in many ways, stranger than fiction.

Progress Report: 4/26/2010

2010-04-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

With regards to agent news... still no sign of land. Fortunately, the supplies are in good shape, so I don't think we'll be resorting to cannibalism any time soon.

Got some good work done on the Thunderstruck outline this week. I also got bashed in the head by another story. Sometimes, a story comes bubbling up in a dream, and it's sufficiently compelling that I have to pursue it. I was asked by a friend if this happens often. Hmm... how often does it need to happen to be considered "often"? Once or twice a year seems about right, at least for the amount of time I have right now for writing.

Sometimes, these stories don't actually hold up that well when they start to appear on paper, which only makes sense. Dreams have their own weird internal logic. Sometimes, there's no fixing a dream story's inherent "dream-ness."

The one thing I almost never seem to get from a story that comes to me in a dream is an ending. This can be a real challenge. The first novel I got seriously going with is called The Boy in the Glass, and it came from a dream. The first several chapters were all right there with perfect clarity, to the point that I was practically able to transcribe them verbatim from memory. Neat! They set up an excellent character and a fascinating mystery that changes her life... and then, I don't know what it means. The agony is that I'm sure that in the dream I did know what it all meant, and I lost it.

I want to get back to that novel again, damn it. I know there's a solution in there somewhere.

Games, Art, and Ebert

2010-04-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

This.

In terms of movie critics, Roger Ebert is my favorite... so I do wish he would stop embarrassing himself with his strange compulsion to extend his criticism to video games. Really, he hasn't got a leg to stand on. Since he does not and (by his own declaration) will not ever play video games, what credence can he possibly have? It's like a movie critic who never watches movies.

What compels Ebert to keep poking this hornet's nest? Is it a love for attention? He already gets plenty of that. Is it sheer elderly crotchety-ness? Conceivably, though it's a disappointing idea. One of the things I admire about Ebert as a movie critic is that he is almost always willing to take a movie on its own terms. He will critique an action movie on whether or not it is a good action movie, not sneer at it for daring not to be an art film.

If only he would extend the same courtesy to games.

In any case, I like Tycho's statement on the Penny Arcade blog, regardless of the personal barbs directed at Ebert as a person (barbed words are Tycho's stock and trade, after all). Ebert is, of course, arguing in bad faith. He is setting the goalposts wherever he damn well pleases, whimsically defining the terms of the discussion as it suits him, and happily and unrepentantly speaking from a place of ignorance. Here's a good example from Ebert's essay:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

Translation: "I'm going to define a video game the way I want to define it, nyah nyah."

There are, as many have pointed out to him, countless games that are not about "winning" or "losing." They are about the experience. You don't play to win, anymore than you "win" by getting to the end of a book you're reading.

An honest discussion is one thing. Ebert is offering nothing of the sort, which is a pity. He's capable of better than that.

Progress Report: 4/19/2010

2010-04-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

I'm going to have some words with the Internet.

By and large, it's a wonderful thing, yet there are some things about the Internet that I hate. Heading that list this week is the difficulty that arises in avoiding spoilers. There I was, innocently checking out a webcomic, when lo-and-behold a big, fat, and unexpected spoiler popped onto my screen, more or less giving away the ending of Jim Butcher's latest Harry Dresden novel, Changes. No "spoiler warning" or anything... not that it would've helped, probably. I was ambushed by another such spoiler on DeviantArt, and yet another on a blog.

Honestly. What a pain. I'm listening to Changes right now and enjoying it immensely. Certainly it's possible to enjoy a story when you know the ending, but I think I would've preferred to get there on my own. This is not the first time that the Internet has hit me with a spoiler in the surprising and unwelcome manner of a sniper plugging a victim from a hundred yards away.

Also, my particular Internet continues to have little crashes here and there. Short, but irksome... I'm glad I don't play games online. If these could be timed in some way that they happen before you stumble on a spoiler, that would be a feature instead of a bug, but alas, it is not the case.

Yet another persistent issue with the Internet, and this is more my fault than the Net's, is that it is a goddamned massive distraction. This is why I am getting a non-Internet laptop, hopefully very cheap and used, for writing. I actually have an old laptop that used to serve that purpose and serve it well, but it's about at the end of its rope. This ancient creature has no USB ports, no Ethernet, and basically no way of transmitting data to other computers besides writing it on a floppy disc. Makes it difficult to get the writing off the computer. It also weighs about as much as a fully-grown Basset Hound.

In terms of Thunderstruck, I'm back at the outline stage, grinding away. You would think the comic would make a perfectly adequate outline, or at least that's what I thought. However, I've knocked over some dominoes in the rewrite, and now I'm pretty much stuck until I can figure out where they all fall down. Outlining isn't the most fun part of life, but it's necessary.

For me, anyway. Some writers talk about sitting down and letting the story flow without knowing where it's going at all. That works okay for a short story, but with a novel, every time I've tried it I find that I paint myself into a corner.

Progress Report: 4/12/2010

2010-04-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

Another week, another submission to an agent. This one also wanted to see the whole manuscript--that makes two now. Still haven't heard back from the first agent who has the whole story.

>twiddle, twiddle.<

Thus far, I've been doing electronic submissions only, but the agent I just submitted to wanted the printed manuscript. Weird to see the story as a massive block of pages, printed in double-space, single-sided. 98,000 words looks pretty substantial from that vantage. The contest at Suduvu is over, and it would appear that Rand Al'Thor from the Wheel of Time series is the winner. I am not a Wheel of Time fan. I have listened to most of them on audio--I like to fill up my commute with audio books, and one characteristic of Robert Jordan's series is that the books are long, so they last a while.

(There was a relative scarcity of audio books for a long time, and I pretty much devoured anything I could get out of the library. This accounts for my familiarity with a number of books that I would never have slogged through under other circumstances. Now, I have an Audible account, and I am never wanting for audio books anymore.)

The fanboy wars in the discussion thread are fascinating to behold. It has made me wonder about the psychology of fandom.

Let's not use the Wheel of Time as a specific example. I think any one of you can think of something that is a) extremely popular, and b) of low quality. You read these books, and if you're knowledgeable about the craft of writing, you know that nobody would ever teach an aspiring author to write that way. There are classes, conferences, and seminars devoted towards teaching people to write better than that.

Yet there it is. Cardboard characters, stilted dialogue, ludicrous plot, bad pacing... you name it, it's right in there in some of the bestselling books of all time.

The inescapable conclusion is that books (or any other storytelling) of low quality can still touch people. Somehow, it resonates so deeply with fans that they not only enjoy the books, they absorb them into their identity. The stories start to define them in important ways. I think every author wants to reach readers at that level, so it's weird to see it happen with poor quality material.

This is something that goes beyond discernment. People don't become fanboys/fangirls because they like something they know is kind of stupid. I think we can all walk out of a theater after the latest action blockbuster and say, "Well, that was dumb, but fun." That's the most basic level of discernment. The next level is more difficult for people to grasp--that is, when something is of high quality, but you don't enjoy it personally. Many people seem to be unable to recognize that something they don't like can still be good.

To enter the zone of the fanboy, though, means discernment goes out the window. Listen to the fanboys, and you will hear them say that the object of their affection is not only good, but the best thing ever written.

One of the Robert Jordan fans, for instance, argued passionately that Jordan's treatment of men and women was not only good, but the most accurate, spot-on, insightful depiction of the relationship between the sexes ever written. Understand that these are books where adults routinely spank one another or box each others' ears in order to communicate. Yet to this fan, his writing is masterful.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it's fascinating to me. I think it's too easy to dismiss fanboys of poor quality storytelling as being people with no taste. That's not enough of an answer. Their experiences are real and valid, their love is sincere (though they may eventually outgrow it--younger fans especially have torrid affairs with stories and characters, only to burn out and move on to the next thing as they grow. Adult fanboys tend to settle in for more lasting commitments). I don't think you can set out, as a writer, to touch that kind of chord with a large group of people. It just has to happen.

Progress Report: 4/5/2010

2010-04-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

Ugh. Ill today.

Working along, not big progress to report in any direction. Though it seems like something's bubbling up from my subconscious, because I have had several new book ideas this week. Well, two and a half. Nothing to be scorned.

Ideas are not precisely a dime a dozen, but they are a lot cheaper than finished product. So on to more writing...

(Sorry this is so short. I feel very tired from this fever.)

Progress Report: 3/29/2010

2010-03-29T06:44:00.000-07:00

I've been doing my Penelope impersonation this week, unraveling my previous work and re-weaving it. According to the advice I've gotten about the matter, it seems that writing a novel in present tense will make it more difficult to sell. So I've had to go back to Thunderstruck and shift what I'd written so far to past tense.

The convention in current publishing is that present tense is all right for short stories, not so much for novels. And when you're not an established author, it's not a good idea to give any prospective agent/editor an easy reason to chuck your manuscript on the junk pile.

Really, it's not too bad. While the first chapter was ideal for present tense (which is why I went that way in the first place), the rest of what I've written wasn't really enhanced by it. Present tense, I believe, gives the story more immediacy and more tension. The downside is that it feels like it gets tiring to read after a while, which is not a good thing for a novel.

Speaking of Thunderstruck, one of the things I feel like I skimmed somewhat in the comic version was Sharon's (and to a lesser extent, Gail's) experience immediately after her miraculous healing, when she was trying to go the scientific route of understand what had happened to her. I am gnawing around with different ways to flesh that part out. It isn't a speculative stretch to say that her case would be written off as anecdotal, no matter how incredible it was. There are, and continue to be, spontaneous recoveries that happen all the time. On the whole, they're ignored. The generous version of why they are ignored is that it's impossible to reproduce these events in a clinical setting (much less a lab), so there's no point in studying them. The less generous version would say that it's because science deliberately does not want to look at certain things that could upset a reductionist worldview. I think it's a bit of both, myself.

Just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It is not what you'd call a gentle book, and I couldn't put it down. Roger Ebert recently reviewed a film version out of Sweden which he thought was quite superb. I have mixed feelings about wanting to see the story in cinema. On one hand, there's some very nasty stuff in there that might be hard to take on the screen. On the other hand, it's a damned good story.

Progress Report: 3/22/2010

2010-03-22T06:57:00.001-07:00

Nothing like the joy of doing one's taxes to get the creative juices going. Or not.

Still waiting to hear back from the prospective agent for Rose & Jade. Having never gotten this far in the process, I don't know if the fact that he's taking his time is a good or a bad sign. So I sit gnawing my fingernails and generally trying not to dwell, since it doesn't particularly help.

To take my mind off things (and since my Thunderstruck writing wasn't getting anywhere this week), I did a little fanfiction. I found from George R. R. Martin's blog that there is an amusing little contest going on where fantasy and SF characters are pitched against one another in a "cage match." I'm sort of a sucker for these things, and since it was especially challenging to figure out how Martin's one-handed knight, Jaime Lannister, could possibly prevail over Cthulhu, I ended up writing a story to explain how it could be done. A silly exercise, I know, but I enjoyed it.

Speaking of writing... does anybody have opinions out there about using present tense as the narrative structure of a novel. I don't think it's done very often. I know Neal Stephenson did it in Snow Crash, and I thought it worked, but that doesn't mean anybody can get away with it.

I ask because it's something I've run into with Thunderstruck that's giving some doubts. I wrote the first chapter in present tense because it was perfect for what was going on. However, after that, it seems to be a kind of take-it-or-leave-it stylistic choice. What I don't know is if it's considered un-kosher by most publishers right now. That is to say, I don't know if I'm hurting my chances of getting it published by writing in present tense. And if I am, I don't want to get too far along, then need to go back and re-write in normal old past tense.

Anybody have any insights on this?

Progress Report: 3/15/2010

2010-03-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

For writing, the exciting news this week is that I've gotten a nice tug on the line for Rose & Jade from an agent. After reading the first chapter, he wrote back and asked to see the whole manuscript. This is a first for me.

So whatever comes of this development, I feel like it was time well spent going back and re-writing the first chapters of the story. I know that I feel more confident sending them along now. I have to admit there was a kind of nagging doubt in the back of my head before whenever an agent asked to see the first chapter(s) to get an idea about the book as a whole. I kept trying to figure out excuses for sending later chapters along, since I feel the story picks up a lot of momentum as it goes. Of course, nothing makes sense unless you read the earlier chapters, so that was never really an option.

Anyway, I don't feel that sense of doubt anymore. Funny thing is that it didn't take huge changes to make the opening chapters better. Although it took a fair amount of time to come up with them.

In other news, I am an uncle again! Congrats to my older brother John and his wife, Teuta, on their second child. His name is Erik. Apparently, all the details are on Facebook, and I think this means I'm going to have to break down and get on Facebook myself. This is something I have resisted for a long time, but the sheer social gravity of this thing is overwhelming.

Also, it's perhaps my least favorite time of the year, which is the time shift forward. I despise Daylight Savings time. Pick a time and stick with it, damn it. Enough of this mandated jetlag.

Here's compromise: set the clocks back permanently half an hour and be done with it. Sure it'll throw off all the international time zones and inconvenience the hell out of the rest of the world, but we're Americans! That's what we do! Rugged individualism and all that.

Eh, maybe it isn't such a hot idea.

Progress Report: 3/8/2010

2010-03-08T06:10:00.001-08:00

Think I'll take a little time off work this week and try to get more writing in. Last week was kind of poor for productivity.

More agent submissions in, more irons in the fire. A tip for aspiring writers: Some agents don't ever write back. They all claim they will on their website, which is nice of them, but I wouldn't take it to heart. Right now about 25%-30% of the agents I submitted to never responded. I'll take that as a "no."

Let's see, in terms of books I've been reading, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is Free: The Future of Radical Price by Chris Anderson is an excellent read. This is the editor for Wired who also wrote the essential book, The Long Tail. In Free, he lays out a very thorough overview of how the digital age economy got to where it is today, and perhaps where we are going with it. The book offers some solutions as to how one can make money by giving away things for free, which is the core conundrum of the web. Some folks have made a killing doing it right, like Google. And some folks, like YouTube and Facebook, are immensely popular but haven't actually made a dime (unless you count being bought).

The best part is that if you go to Audible, you can get the download of his book for free. So he puts his money where his mouth is on this.

(I always appreciate a good non-fiction writer, because so many of them are full of interesting information but can't seem to deliver it in an engaging way. Science writing suffers from this problem worse than any non-fiction field. Good science writers, like Carl Sagan and Robert Bakker, are a treasure.)

Okay, now the bad news.

Since I've got a book to sell in the Young Adult market, I like to check out some of the successful authors in this genre. I already know enough about Twilight not to touch it, so the next big book-turned-movie story was Percy Jackson. I started up The Lightning Thief and chugged along for a while. It wasn't exactly wowing me—definitely a Harry Potter knockoff, featuring a downtrodden hero with a secret birthright, hints at some kind of big destiny, and a summer camp that was clearly a bargain-bin Hogwarts ("Camp Half-Blood?" The Greek gods create a sanctuary for their offspring and the best they can come up with is "Camp Half-Blood?" Ooookay...). I also thought it was a mistake to choose 1st-person narrative for this story.

It was going along tolerably up to a point, and then WHAM. I'm out of the book.

(Let me see if I can explain this without spoilers. I'll call this a Spoiler Warning, though, so reader beware if you're planning to check out the book.)

Fairly early in the story, something terrible happens to Percy. He loses someone important. This should be a moment of defining tragedy for him. For maybe two paragraphs, he's thinking about this tragedy.

And then he gets a magic milkshake, and it's all better!

Seriously. His friend gives him some kind of energy drink that tastes to him like cookies, and he's all fine again. He's ready for his next adventure. No more tragedy for little Percy. He wanders off into Camp Half-Blood, meets a bunch of people, and even his favorite teacher-friend doesn't even bother to console him on his loss. Why should he? Magic milkshake solved the problem, after all.

Pop! I'm out of the book, just like that. I can't even think of Percy as a person anymore—I can't even dislike him. The story has been ripped away, and all I can see is the author, Rick Riordan, banging along on his keyboard and making a colossal mistake. I put it down and went on to the next thing.

I suppose there's a chance that someone out there has read this thing from start to finish, or has seen the movie, so perhaps you can tell me if Riordan provides any excuse later on as to why the Magic Milkshake basically cored Percy of his human soul and turned him into a Stepford Boy-God. Perhaps Riordan redeems this scene later on in some way, and I was simply too put off by the whole thing to wait around for the payoff. Or perhaps not.

Anyway, if this is the sort of thing that qualifies as a big success story in the Young Adult Fantasy market, it shouldn't be that hard to break in.

Progress Report: 3/1/2010

2010-03-01T06:31:00.000-08:00

And the Winter Olympics are over. Sad to see them go, although it does mean I will be getting a proper amount of sleep. I got the eerie impression that the coverage on NBC was all designed around a conspiracy to force viewers to watch bobsled. I like pretty much all the events except the ones where they have to slide down an ice chute.

So with regards to writing, I have entered Rose & Jade into a 1st novel contest on Wordhustler. Wordhustler is a writer networking site for finding agents, editors, etc., and does a bunch of other writer-related stuff. It seems a good service, though I have my doubts about the name. A "hustler" to me is either a con artist or a rather skanky porn magazine, and neither of those is the association I'd want to draw for my business. Oh well.

Much of my energy went into my job work last week, so not a whole lot of time for writing. Besides, my inner naysayer has come for a visit. The inner critic is an essential part of writing, but the inner naysayer doesn't have anything of value to add. This is the voice that just says, "It's terrible! Everything you've ever written is all terrible! Give it up!"

Anybody else get that? I expect it's not all that uncommon.

I've learned not to get worked up about this voice. I don't meet it with much struggle, just a kind of acknowledgment: "Oh, there you are, naysayer. I see you." It goes away on its own before long. Kind of difficult to work with it clattering around like a noisy neighbor, but as long as I know it isn't actually correct and that it's just a little bundle of insecure nerves that fires off every so often, it doesn't do any real damage. I'll see if it's quieted down this week. Meanwhile, more agent queries on the way.

Progress Report: 2/22/2010

2010-02-22T06:28:00.000-08:00

Yes, well... working along, basically. That's the progress report.

Okay, I can give you a little more than that. Going from the comic version of Thunderstruck to a print incarnation is a very interesting experience. It's true that I lose the ability to tell the story through art, which gives you tools that prose doesn't have. By the same token, I have the opportunity to go deeper in a lot of other ways. Mapping the internal geography of each character is done more from the inside than the outside. By that I mean that the drawn Sharon can express herself through facial carriage and body language much more than the prose Sharon, while the prose Sharon can give you more of what's going on in her head. It's an interesting trade-off.

Another difference, though, is that the comic version is very literal, while the prose version gives me freedom to speak in metaphor. Comic artists have been trying to cope for this a while using visual metaphor, which is a technique I only use sparingly. Manga art has a whole vocabulary of visual metaphor. Still, nothing beats the written word. I can say something like: "the earth itself seems to rise Psyche’s feet as if it cannot bear to be separated from her." Without resorting to the unbearably clunky tool of the narrative balloon, that's not the sort of thing you can really do in a comic.

Okay, so while I'm here...

MINI REVIEW
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Look, this one was an assignment for work. One of the authors we publish is Lynne McTaggart, who is cited as one of the main influences for The Lost Symbol. And since I handle the ad copy for Lynne McTaggart, it fell to me to know something about what was in Dan Brown's latest big book. After all, as The Da Vinci Code proved, his books can make a sale-influencing impact on other related material.

So I'll start with the good.

Hold on. Still thinking.

Um...

Okay, so there's something kind of compelling about the way Dan Brown writes, which is to say it carries you along in a reasonably good thriller fashion. The big mystery is why this should be the case, since there isn't an interesting or realistic character in the whole thing, and usually it's concern for the characters that allows tension to build. His research is interesting, though I would never take anything from a Dan Brown book as true or accurate until I looked it up myself (worst offender was his book called Digital Fortress from a decade or so ago, which I abandoned halfway through when it became clear to me that every single "fact" in the entire book was demonstrably wrong).

Hmm. I was trying to write "the good," and I seem to be throwing in caveats left and write. So let's get to "the bad."

There is much, much too much to cover in a mini-review on the topic of the bad. I'll just hit on a few points.

Brown writes with a sledgehammer. There's not a subtle moment in the whole thing. For someone who loves to talk about symbology and the multi-layered meanings of things, he's big on spelling everything out ad nauseum so even the thickest reader will get the point. One expression of this is his "astonishment moments." Something is revealed to the character, and they react with such utter bewildered surprise that they practically fall over. This happens all the time, often with things that are not, or should not be, even slightly startling.

There's a particular plot twist in The Lost Symbol that Dan Brown tries to set up, and his inability to do subtlety makes it painful to watch. He telegraphs the true identity of the villain pretty early in the book. And then he spends the entire book trying to conceal that identity, so he can reveal it in the final dramatic moment. It's like trying to watch a stage magician with cards spilling out of his sleeves still trying to pull off his trick. I ended up feeling sorry for the author, which is probably not the emotion he intended to evoke.

And then there's the reveal of the Big Secret. With Da Vinci Code, at least the secret was something interesting. In this case, though, it's a Ruby Slippers moment. By that I mean it's one of these "You had the answer with you all the time!" revelations, and boy, those are hard to pull off. The secret in The Lost Symbol is a big fat lot of nothing. The fact that our protagonist, who we are reminded constantly is a Harvard symbologist, finds this "incredible" obvious revelation to be the least bit surprising means they're letting any doofus teach at Harvard these days in Dan Brown's world. What's more, the whole book is spent with characters risking their lives, sanity, body parts, etc. trying to protect this deep dark secret, and nobody expresses the least shred of bitterness that it was all to protect a "mystery" that could be found in pretty much any bookstore in the world.

In short, it was a Dan Brown book. What did I expect?

Progress Report: 2/15/2010

2010-02-15T06:44:00.000-08:00

Okay, so... not much to report this week. I'm refining my query letter for agents, and showing it to some other people to see how it stands up. I'm in a bit of a waiting pattern here.

I think I'm battling a cold on and off here.

Well then, let's see...

MINI REVIEWS:
Under the Dome by Stephen King.

If I had to rank Dome in the overall library of Stephen King's books, It'd land somewhere around the same spot as Needful Things. In both books, King focuses on a very large cast of characters, trying to capture the essence of a small town in the grips of a growing crisis. On the whole, I prefer it when he focuses more on a smaller cast and gives us time to know them better. I never felt the sense of attachment to the protagonists of Under the Dome as I normally get in a King book.

And thematically, I would say that I felt the emotional impact of the story was reduced for me somewhat by the fact that the villain was so reprehensible. See, Under the Dome shares a kind of thematic resonance with Lord of the Flies. Normal folks are put in a situation where they're cut off from the rest of the world, and the civilized veneer breaks down to reveal both the scarier and more heroic parts of us. All well and good. However, the main villain of Dome is never "normal" to begin with. He starts out about as vile a human being as imaginable, and when the town is cut off, he gets a temporary and dangerous boost of status that drives the plot. It's not bad, but I don't think it's as powerful as it could've been if everyone had started off more or less unremarkable, and we'd seen their true natures emerge as their isolation continued.

Anyway, it's a pretty good read and there are always good moments in a King book. This one doesn't rank with my favorites of recent years, but it's a solid entry.

--------

First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher.

The last installment of Butcher's epic Codex Alera fantasy series. At the outset, Butcher expressed his desire to create a high fantasy story in the tradition of Lord of the Rings. Did he succeed?

In some ways, yes. Butcher's writing always carries you along. His characters tend to be likable, his plots are tight and the pacing is strong, and he's very good at building the tension with ever-increasing stakes. He also does a fine job with the "Braveheart moments"; that is, when a character has to stand before a large group of people and deliver an inspiring speech about how this will be our finest hour, or something along those lines. It's very easy to do these sorts of scenes in a cheesy, unconvincing way, but Butcher delivers them handily. And he's always reliable for a good humor moment here and there.

So it's well-constructed fantasy. In terms of the deeper mythic resonance that gave Lord of the Rings the extra level of meaning and power... no. Butcher doesn't really have that arrow in his quiver. It's a fun read, not a book that will change your life. I don't think any author should be ashamed of that, though.

There are a few things that Butcher should be ashamed of, however... or perhaps his editor. The entire Codex Alera series smacks of sloppy editing. There are way too many sentences like: "Her long hair was tied back in a long braid." The repetition is totally understandable in a first draft, but by the final version that sort of stuff should be gone. And it's everywhere in the Alera books.

Butcher also has some writing mannerisms that just get on my nerves. By now, somebody must have mentioned to him that characters "arch an eyebrow" too goddamned much. I want to take Nair to the whole cast. We also get entirely too many wolfish grins, orders of magnitude, and grunts. Repetitive stuff like that happens throughout the book, and Butcher's editor needs to step up to the plate here.

Interestingly, Butcher's tendency for repetition provides a fine object lesson in this writing truism: there are some words that you can only use once, even in the course of a 600-page novel. "Ululating" is great for one use, and after that it sticks out like a sore thumb. "Mellifluous" is another word that's good once. So choose the timing and placement of such words with care, writers, and don't get stuck on them.

--------

And last but not least, I bid farewell to Dick Francis, who just recently passed away. I'm not too big on the mystery genre on the whole. Dick Francis was always an exception. To maintain such a consistent level of quality for so long is an incredible achievement. He was, undeniably, a champion.

Progress Report: 2/8/2010

2010-02-08T06:48:00.000-08:00

Rewrite finished! Now I'll get a look at the new chapters from my C&C readers, and Rose & Jade will be ready to go back in front of the agents again.

I'm happy with the rewrite. The opening chapters are more lively and engaging, some of the unnecessary stuff is cut out, and I really like the new prologue. Previously, I was ambivalent about whether the prologue was a good idea or not. Now I'm much happier with its place in the story.

Hey writers out there. Here's something you'll want to see. In the extras on the DVD of Up, they have a segment about the first draft of the opening sequence. They even do an animated version with the storyboard so you can get a rough idea of how the original version would've played out. There are some really funny and clever moments that the writers were very proud of... and it was absolutely the right choice to cut them all out.

If you haven't seen Up, rectify that omission as soon as you can.

If you have, you know that the opening sequence is where we get the full life and relationship between the Carl and Ellie. This sequence is critical. We must fall in love with them in order for the rest of the movie to work. We have to get a full and rich idea of their life in as short a time as possible. And it has to set up the action for the rest of the film.

The original draft version would've dropped the ball. Good as it was, it wasn't good enough. The final version was a masterpiece.

As a writer, what strikes me about the journey from the first draft to the final version is how many "darlings" they had to kill. This is a kind of maxim in editing—"Kill Your Darlings." It means don't be afraid to cut stuff. Even if you've got a brilliant joke or a great character moment, if it doesn't serve the story as a whole, it's got to go.

That's hard to do as a writer. I've done a lot of commentary for other writers, and one of the things that becomes obvious pretty early on is when a writer thinks their own work is too "precious." Instead of listening to critique, they rush to the defense of what they've written. Every sentence is like a baby they have to protect from harm. They never change anything, and it's not worth critiquing them. Not that my commentary is always brilliant or correct—far from it. A writer can be receptive to critique and still decide they don't want to go with a specific suggestion.

And hell, I know how hard it is to make those cuts. It's brutal.

So here's my corollary for "Kill Your Darlings," and it's simple: "Trust Yourself." As in, trust yourself that you can write something even better. Trust yourself that you have it in you to replace whatever you cut with something that works. Once you start trusting yourself, rewriting becomes more fun, I've found.

I've got a lot of darlings to kill off in Thunderstruck. Back to the novelization this week.

Oh, and congrats to the Saints. I get the feeling that Sax and Hayaka were in the audience with their Peyton Manning voodoo doll for that key interception.

Progress Report: 2/2/2010

2010-02-02T06:11:00.001-08:00

Beg your pardon about missing yesterday's update. I was sick and not really with it.

Today, I am better, though it was still a struggle to pull myself out of bed. That isn't a sign of illness, however--I'm always like that. Especially in winter. I feel it would be a very short step for me to become a hibernating animal. In fact, that sounds wonderful.

Think of a civilization built by a hibernating species. Let's say bears. Why not? They're smart, very dexterous with their claws. Not too far from prehensile. They even walk upright when they want. So a civilization of bears, with the hibernation instinct firmly in place that puts them to sleep three months out of the year.

And let's gloss over the tropics, since nobody hibernates in the tropics. And the fact that the southern hemisphere bears would be on a different schedule. Right.

Wars would be shorter. If you didn't finish your war before hibernation time, then you'd have to leave it for three months. And you'd wake up too hungry to fight for a while, and by that time you'd have plenty of time to think about it all and decide whether or not it was worth the trouble of all the fighting.

It would be a civilization with a completely different weight consciousness. Nobody would be upset about getting fat, because you have to put on as much weight as possible going into hibernation. An when you wake up, you'd be thin! Diets wouldn't be in the picture. That alone would make the whole thing worth it.

Ecologically speaking, though, there's a big upside. Basically, the earth would get a 3-month break from bear civilization every year. Very healthy for the planet. I think we should implement it now. Sounds civilized, doesn't it?

At least we could make a Discovery Channel or Sci-Fi special about it. We could call it "Hiber-Nation."

Um... anyway. Illness notwithstanding, I got some very good writing done this week, so I'm happy about that. It's getting to be close to that time when I hit the agent pool again.

Progress Report: 1/25/2010

2010-01-25T06:33:00.000-08:00

So let's see... making progress on the rewrite of the early chapters of Rose & Jade. I think I will have it done this week.

Provided I survive the kitten.

In the time it has taken me to type the above three sentences, there have been two incidents at my desk with young Ezio attempting to do something. Kittens get ideas, you see. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to characterize them as thoughts, and certainly they are nothing so lofty as plans... ah, incident three just occurred. Yes. As I was saying, they are moments of inspiration, in which the kitten embarks on a sudden and bold experiment about where he can go, how high he can leap, and upon what he can pounce. These ideas come darting out of the ether, invisible as neutrinos and just about as numerous, and connect with the interior of the kitten's skull.

This happens to cats through most of their lives, but as they grow older they at least develop a certain buffer zone between the point at which the idea intersects with their brain and their attempt to fulfill it. There is consideration, a moment of reflection upon the possibility of the notion, during which time the self-preservation instinct has a chance to weigh in on the viability of the whole idea. With kittens, there is none of that. It's straight from inspiration to manifestation, with no pause in between.

It's amazing that any of them survive.

So, writing continues, as does madness. I suppose there is a relation between the two, so perhaps the madness of young Ezio the kitten will somehow spark creative inspiration in me. Assuming, of course, he doesn't destroy the house first.

Progress Report: 1/19/2010

2010-01-19T06:18:00.001-08:00

And "Voyage of the Piquant" is done! Go check it out for the final epic battle scene. I had a lot of fun writing it.

Missed the update on Monday, in part because I was taking Martin Luther King day off and didn't really touch my computer, and in part because of distraction. What sort of distraction?

Well, after much searching, we have a new member of the household. He is a 14-week old black kitten with beyond the normal compliment of toes. An energetic and social young fellow, he has demonstrated extraordinary climbing abilities, as well as a knack for using his Power of Smallness to infiltrate places that the adult cats cannot penetrate.

Given the extra claw and his free-climbing and running powers, we have decided that Ezio is a good name. Or Ezio Auditore da Firenze, for completion's sake. He has already provided us with many moments of great entertainment.

I should also mention that we have the best dog in the world. While the other cats have warmed up to Ezio slowly in the traditional roundabout way that is required for cat social politics, our dog Luna has done her very best to make the kitten feel at home. A good example of her strategy is that when Ezio was first trying to sniff her, Luna turned her head away so he could do his initial investigation without being watched, which made him feel safer. She then slowly turned and got some sniffs in between them. Within hours, she was grooming his head and letting him clean her ear. A true diplomat and sweetheart is our Luna.

Okay, so last week I also had the afterburners on for writing at work, and managed to achieve high-density, quality writing for seven days straight. (For those of you who don't know where I work, I am a copy writer for Sounds True). With that week done, my work schedule looks much more sane, an I see a more open avenue for fiction writing in front of me. Back to the Rose & Jade rewrite, I think. Candi gave me a good idea for a revision of the prologue. Now how to implement it...

Voyage of the Piquant [Part Four]

2010-01-19T06:09:00.000-08:00

I will make no attempt to capture the horror that we endured those next few days. Perhaps words are inadequate for the job. And if I succeeded, dear reader, if I somehow managed to properly convey some fraction the agony that comes from enduring “Achy Breaky Heart” for the 29th time, hearing a margarita-soaked golfer from New Jersey execute this hellish serenade to the ocean as I sweated and lolled on my bunk… well, I would be doing you no favors.

In my heart, I believe that this is true: if Mocha Rich didn’t exist before, we would have created him through our ill-guided enterprise. He would have coalesced from the outrage of the sea itself just to strike us down for our sins.

Four days and nights passed.

On the morning of the fifth day, with “Yummy Yummy Yummy (I’ve Got Love in My Tummy)” vibrating through the hull of the Piquant and my own sanity stretching ever closer to the breaking point, the lookout belted out her call from her high perch. “Oh my God! Thar she… um… thar she inks? Oh, whatever! It’s a big white squid! I see it!”

“Hard starboard!” Aholl roared over the speakers, his coarse voice thundering across the bridge. “Full steam ahead, damn your eyes! Beat to quarters! Battle stations, says I!”

My heart began to pound, but not from fear of Mocha Rich. “Sir, may I give the order to stop the karaoke?”

“Aye, laddie,” Aholl snarled.

Never in my life have I issued a more satisfying command.

The Piquant’s immense hull pounded through the crystal-blue waters. I craned my neck to catch my first look at the monster we’d been hunting, and felt my throat clench. The squid was a boneless colossus, over two hundred feet long, whiter than a bleached linen undershirt. It glided through the waters with alien grace, its mighty tentacles undulating behind it as it swam.

“There you are, you demon!” Aholl exulted. “From Hell’s heart, I throw an uppercut at thee! For hate’s sake, I hork a big old loogie at thee!”

“It’s real,” the captain croaked. “Great God… you fought that thing?”

“As Jacob strove with the angel,” Aholl said. “As Hercules pit himself ‘gainst Cerberus. As Ali took on Smokin’ Joe Fraiser.”

Captain Wellington hurled himself at Aholl, his voice ratcheting up into the soprano as the clutched the madman’s lapels. “You fought that thing and only lost your little finger? Why tempt fate again, you fool?”

“Fate?” Aholl roared, throwing the captain to the floor with a meaty thud. “’Tis my fate to grapple with yon devil-spawn, ye cowardly pudding! Stand not ‘tween me and my fate.”

“We weren’t standing between you and your stupid fate! You dragged us into this, you big… mean…” Wellington floundered, his face purpling as he struggled to find a powerful yet family-safe epithet, “…poop-head!”

With the speed of a popping champagne cork, Aholl lashed out and poked Wellington in the eye with his wooden pinkie. The captain let out a pained squeak as the peg struck home, then huddled into a quivering mass on the deck. “Mr. Irving,” Aholl snapped at me, “you know the battle plan.”

“Aye, sir,” I said, my voice strangely calm in m own ears.

“Then thee shall take the place of yon captain, who is no longer fit for duty,” he said. “Step lively, laddie. The demon cometh.”

Like some immense living torpedo, the mammoth squid knifed through the waters in a direct course towards the Piquant. The sea swirled in its wake Mocha Rich propelled itself forward, silently sliding its porcelain-white form through just beneath the waves. As it approached us, the squid rotated its body and a portion of its slick bulk crested the surface. One eye the size of a Volkswagen Beetle rolled towards the ship, surveying us with inhuman intelligence. Though a squid’s expressions are hard to read, I had the distinct impression that Mocha Rich was feeling grumpy.

My fingers tightened into a death grip on my clipboard. My heart thundered in my chest as the fever of battle gripped me. I saw a single vast tentacle rise out of the water and loom over the deck. Mocha Rich was in range for the first assault.

“Shuffleboarders, fire at will!” I commanded.

“Who’s Will?” they responded as one.

“The squid, you morons!” I cried.

“I thought its name was Rich,” they said in perfect unison.

“Then fire at Rich! Just fire!”

The tentacle descended towards us, seawater sluicing off its slick mass in cascading sheets. Three dozen shuffleboard sticks moved in perfect unison, cracking against the plastic surfaces of game pucks that had been sharpened and weighted for battle. The discs whizzed across the deck, up the launch ramps, and pelted into the pale skin of the great boneless appendage.

The tentacle wavered.

I didn’t give the enemy a chance to recover. “Tae-Bo squadron, forward!”

Our aerobics instructor glared at her adversary though tinted contacts. The rage of a thousand prom queens burned in her blood. She slammed down the play button on her boom box, and suddenly the battlefield was alive with up-tempo world grooves. The ex-cheerleader let loose a high-pitched shriek of command, then charged like a spandex-clad Amazon to lead her unit into battle. They danced forward to the beat, raining down bouncy punches and kicks upon the flailing tentacle of the leviathan.

“Two, four, six, eight, go hit that invertebrate!” the instructor exhorted her legion.

“Sir!” cried one of the lookouts. “A second tentacle to the aft!”

I whirled to attend this new challenged. “Bartenders, get ready! Set blenders on frappe and fire!”

The battalion of bartenders oriented their turbo-charged blenders towards the second tentacle and engaged the rotors. In daring defiance of all safety procedures, they lifted off the lids of their mixers. Crystalline shards of ice streaked through the air at fantastic velocities, glittering like diamonds in the autumn sunlight. The squid’s tentacle writhed under their assault.

“Five degrees starboard!” Aholl commanded. “We have him now, the hellspawn!”

The Piquant shifted her ponderous bulk, orienting her bow towards the main body of the giant squid. I commanded the racquetball unit to deal with another tentacle and looked on, blood pounding in my ears. The bullet-shaped mass of the monster’s main body protruded from the sea. Mocha Rich was almost in the firing arc of our main weapon.

“Sandwich crew!” I shouted through my megaphone. “Prepare to release!”

This was our ultimate weapon, the greatest creation in the illustrious career of ship’s cook Quisiene. Baked over the course of days in the Piquant’s mighty ovens, the sandwich was 35-feet of sourdough with a payload of the deadliest toppings. It had a core of glazed Damascus ham to give it weight, fiery peppers to add a lethal sting, a cement-like horseradish sauce to bind it together—and one end filed down to a keen point, revealing a spearhead of cheddar sharp enough to split oak. Through the mysterious alchemy of Quisiene’s baking and glazing, the sandwich had been hardened again and again, until it could repel even the cook’s most vigorous attempts to penetrate its crust with a cleaver.

This was a weapons-grade sandwich. Even Mocha Rich must fall before such a confectionary harpoon.

Fifty pairs of middle-aged hands took hold of the draw rope to the great sandwich, sunscreen-slathered backs heaving in unison. Quisiene’s deadly creation had been mounted like some giant crossbow bolt straddling the bow, set to a giant elastic string crossing the Aloha Deck. Every swimsuit on the ship had sacrificed its waistband to make this mighty weapon, each industrial-strength length of elastic woven together into a single unbreakable cord.

“Steady...” My voice rang strong and confident. “Steady...”

The band creaked as it drew tighter. The guardrails to which it had been attached groaned in protest, metal threatening to buckle under the stress. The bow of the ship swung slowly around, orienting closer and closer to the dead center mark on the body of the beast.

“Steady... release!”

The hands let go. The elastic thrummed like a chord played on King Kong’s banjo. The sandwich rocketed towards the squid, flakes of shredded iceberg lettuce trailing like a comet tail in its wake, hurtling directly towards its mark between Mocha Rich’s two monstrous eyes.

A tentacle shot out of the water like a bolt of slippery white lightning, whipping around the sandwich in mid-flight. The great invertebrate caught the deadly missile, killing its momentum moments before it would have punctured its pale carapace.

The moisture drained completely out of my mouth. “Oops.”

From his position in the corner of the bridge, Captain Wellington let out a tinkling giggle. “Quite the reflexes on that squid, wouldn’t you say?”

Aholl gnashed his teeth fitfully.

The monstrosity held the vast submarine sandwich in its tentacle, seeming to consider it for a long moment, then plunged the end of the weapon into its gaping beak. The hellish maw of the monster closed. A sound like a falling sequoia thundered across the waves as Mocha Rich devoured our mighty weapon, right down to the last crumb.

When Mocha Rich was done, its unspeakable eye focused on us once again. I could tell that this squid wasn’t merely grumpy anymore. We’d really managed to piss it off.

“Damn your rubbery hide! I’ll end thee myself!” Aholl bellowed, and took off like a cannonball. He hurtled down stairs and across the deck, disregarded the “no-running” safety signs with a madman’s obsession, brandishing his harpoon gun as he bolted towards his hated nemesis.

I wondered if his hand-held weapon could possibly kill such a vast creature, even if he shot it in some vital spot, but I never got the chance to find out. Mocha Rich’s body dropped below the waves before Aholl reached the guard rail, disappearing into the brine with an eerie smoothness that barely disturbed the waves.

“Now what?” muttered the captain. “Is it gone?”

“No,” I said.

“Maybe it’s full now and wants to go have a nap,” Wellington suggested. “How do you know it’s still here?”

“Because we’re still here.”

Suddenly, the waters around the ship burst into churning froth. What followed was a sound that I cannot begin to describe, a boggling series of rapid-fire, gooey thumps as thick mollusk flesh collided with steel. Mocha Rich fastened its unthinkable tentacles onto the hull of the Piquant, bonding itself to our vessel with countless jacuzzi-sized suction cups.

The captain began to emit a noise like a trapped mouse. The ordered ranks of the passengers who had been pressed into squid-hunting combat service began to dissolve as panic spread its tendrils through the crew.

“What’s it doing?” whimpered Wellington. “Does it mean to drag us down?”

I didn’t think it was possible, even for the monster squid. The Piquant still outweighed Mocha Rich by thousands of tons. I thought perhaps the beast intended to peel the hull off like the skin of a banana, yet in that guess I was mistaken as the captain.

A second sound arose in the ship, a noise even stranger than Mocha Rich affixing itself to our hull. It was a slimy, rushing noise, quiet at first, growing louder with each second, seeming to come from every direction.

“Aholl!” I cried through my megaphone. “What’s happening?”

Old Aholl needed nothing but his own hate to amplify his voice. He called back to me across the stretch of the Piquant’s deck, his harpoon gun raised in his maimed hand. I could see the whites of his bulging eyes from fifty yards away as he bellowed the last words I would ever hear him speak.

“Revenge, my lad! I told you that your kind’s outrages against the sea would bring down the wrath of yon devil, did I not? Now see the foul color of Mocha Rich’s vengeance, good Mr. Irving!”

Metal screeched behind me, and I whirled. One of the pipes had split at the seam, emitting a jet of the most disgusting liquid I have ever seen. Part seawater, part human waste, and part black cephalopod ink, it gushed out under fantastic pressure and spattered polished planks of the deck.

“Oh my God,” I choked, pressing my handkerchief against my face against the reek. Horrible comprehension dawned as I realized what Mocha Rich was doing.

The squid had somehow sensed the location of the disposal valve on the underside of the Piquant. It is from this port that a cruise ship expels her waste into the sea—grey water from all the ship’s showers, the used cleaning fluid of a battalion of maids, and most of all, the excretions of thousands of over-eating vacationers. Our holding tanks were almost full right now; we were overdue for a dump, too occupied with our preparations for battle to attend to that key element of the normal routine.

A squid propels itself through the water with living hydraulic jets. Now Mocha Rich was using those jets to pump thousands of gallons of seawater and its own inky emissions up through the disposal valve and into the ship’s plumbing.

Across every deck, I heard the toilets exploding. I knew the Piquant was doomed.

“Abandon ship!” I commanded over the PA. “All hands to the lifeboats! Abandon ship!”

All semblance of order disintegrated. I can barely remember the minutes that followed, the mayhem as the passengers stampeded towards the lifeboats while Mocha Rich continued its devastating liquid siege upon the Piquant. I remember the planks of the deck warping as swirling dark puddles spread from between the decks. I remember ducking as rivets blew off the pipes and whirred through the air like demented hummingbirds. The great cruise ship heaved and groaned as unspeakable fluids filled her living quarters, her massage parlors, her engine room, the weight dragging her down into the merciless embrace of the waves.

The last thing I recall on the ship was the screech of tearing metal to one side, then a massive column of the loathsome ink-and-sewage seawater colliding with my body like a battering ram, carrying me over the safety rail. As my body plunged into the chilling waters of the north Pacific, darkness began to claim me.

Moments before consciousness left me entirely, I felt my arm brush against something warm and savory.

It was Quisiene’s funeral cake, of course. As buoyant as it was delectable, the great confection bore my unconscious body on the ocean, its oven-fresh goodness warming me against the life-sapping cold of the sea. When the Coast Guard pulled me out, much of the cake had been nibbled away by gulls and fish. Nobody had any complaints of Quisiene’s final dessert, least of all me.

I remember none of that, however. I awoke in the hospital with what passengers and crew of the ill-fated Piquant made it to the lifeboats ahead of Mocha Rich’s terrible vengeance. I found myself caught up in a maelstrom of doctors, reporters, and scientists, all asking questions that nobody could hope to answer.

Captain Wellington took most of the blame for the incident, though the cruise company and the designers of the Piquant found themselves deluged with subpoenas and summons in the months to come. Politicians and Archbishops took the opportunity to denounce all sorts of things which they had already been denouncing for years. Engineers and scientists offered explanations of how the cruise ship’s internal plumbing could have gone out of control. But nobody credited the story of Mocha Rich.

In spite of all the cameras which had been aboard the Piquant, not a single clear image of the squid survived the devastation. The salvagers managed to recover a few blurry pictures here and there, generally with somebody’s thumb obscuring half the view, but there was nothing that showed enough to convince the skeptics. It made me wonder if Mocha Rich wasn’t more than just a bloody huge invertebrate, but if he was some unimaginably powerful and camera-shy embodiment of nature’s wrath.

The only man who might have been able to answer that question had disappeared. Aholl wasn’t found amongst the survivors. Some part of me believes that he survived, and that he still roams the seas seeking retribution for his lost pinkie, locked in a never-ending mortal struggle with the unfathomable creature that he called Mocha Rich.

As for me... I’m moving to Montana. I’ve had my fill of the sea.

Progress Report: 1/11/2010

2010-01-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

Like I said, the first week back from vacation is all about playing catch-up. Fortunately, I feel I've played a pretty good game of catch-up this week, so I think I will have more time for writing.

I did make some headway on "Voyage of the Piquant" this week, and I expect to have the last segment up soon, perhaps even later this week.

We're hosting a friend now who needed a place to crash for a while. In discussions with him, an idea arose that could be the pivotal element of a third novel in "The Awakening of Dragons" (the trilogy that begins with Rose & Jade.) I already had an idea for the shape of the story, and this new element not only fits right in, it gives the whole thing a lot more drama and tension. So, that's good. I can't be more specific without going all spoiler-ific on you.

So in summary, a lot of job-based work this week and not a lot of time for writing, but good stuff has emerged nonetheless.

Oh, we also saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Which I loved.

Progress Report: 1/4/2010

2010-01-04T06:30:00.000-08:00

Coming back from vacation is like diving into a fast-moving river. The first stage involves a lot of disorienting flailing about as you try to adjust to the current. Once that's done and you're swimming along at the river's pace, you're okay.

I'm in the flailing stage here, which on the average lasts about a week for me.

Hi everyone! It's 2010! Egad. Regarding vacation...

It was good to see family in Nevada and friends in California.
Saw Avatar, which I thought was terrific, and Sherlock Holmes, which was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. Also saw the J.J. Abrams Star Trek a second time on DVD. While the first time I saw it I was mostly focused on new actors playing beloved characters, the second time draws attention to the sheer ludicrousness of the astronomy that they invoke in the plot. Yikes.
The Denver Broncos are late-season choke artists again this year. Sadness.
Still reading Under the Dome by Stephen King. Style-wise, it most reminds me of Needful Things, since it has a large cast consisting of key figures in a small town. I'd like to write a review of it when I'm done.
Also listening to the last book of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. Perhaps I'll write a review of that as well.
As for my own writing, I didn't expect to get any done at all over vacation, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I did manage to find some time to write. I made some good progress on the 1st chapter rewrite for Rose & Jade. Time to get back into the swing of it this week.

On the whole, I'm not sorry to see the back end of 2009. It was a turbulent year. Not saying that I think 2010 will be much smoother, but a fresh start always makes it feel like there is the potential for better things.

Progress Report: 12/14/09

2009-12-14T06:33:00.001-08:00

This will be my last update of the year, 'cuz I'm going on vacation next weekend.

A lot happened this year in terms of writing. I finished my first novel manuscript, I started my next, and I made the move to pull out of webcomics. Not a lot happened this week in particular, though. It's a crazy-busy time with the holidays coming up and work being under a pressure cooker, so not much time for writing.

Thus, I'll take the opportunity to wish everyone who's reading a Merry Christmas, happy holidays... take your pick. And I'll see you in the new year.

2010. Wow.

Progress Report: 12/07/09

2009-12-07T06:21:00.000-08:00

It's my birthday this week! I'll be 41.

I have been asked a few times if I'm going to illustrate my books. I also get asked for clarification when I tell people about my writing: "Are you talking about graphic novels?" No, not right now, but illustrations are an interesting thought. Not many people do them in novels anymore, but it used to be a standard to have a few illustrations scattered here and there. It would be fun to do that, especially in a Thunderstruck novel.

Psyche, whose chapter opens the book, is one character whose visual depiction never quite satisfied me. Goddess-level beautiful is tough for me to draw. Especially for someone who then engages in action scenes. I think I should've picked an actress to model her against and worked a bit with photo references. Anyway, it would be easier just to draw one or two illustrations of her for a book, wouldn't it?

Okay, so progress. Not much to say. Writing is slow right now, chiefly because work is taking up so much energy. I'm not sure why everything has to pile up at the end of the year when everyone is trying to go on vacation, but that's what it does. Happens every December. So I'm chipping away at the Thunderstruck novel and the 1st & 2nd chapter rewrites for Rose & Jade, working as much as I can on it under the circumstances.

Currently reading: Under the Dome by Stephen King. A giant, Stand-sized monster that should hold me for a while. Wonder if there will be any mention of the concept overlap with RahXephon? I doubt it. Not that I think King ever heard of the anime--just an interesting coincidence.

Currently listening: Turn Coat, by Jim Butcher. The latest Dresden Files book, which are always fun. I have to make some effort to make sure that Sax doesn't echo Harry Dresden too much, but I think that shouldn't be much of a problem.

Although would any editor really care, or would it even be a selling point? The derivative nature of popular fiction can be astonishing sometimes. I was in Borders this weekend checking out the Young Adult section, and it's Twilight clones from here to breakfast. The vampire-romance craze will die down, but for now they're going to squeeze as much juice out of it as they can. Agents & editors like to talk a good game about originality, but when I look at the shelves, I have to wonder just how much of that is smoke up the ol' tailpipe.

Progress Report: 11/30/09

2009-11-30T06:39:00.000-08:00

December is just around the corner, and seems to be holding to pretty much the same pattern as it does every year. That is to say, things get very frantic in the weeks leading up to vacation, and then we go away for a while and get the chance to sleep.

In terms of writing productivity, it's the most difficult time of the year. I always built up a pretty good buffer for Thunderstruck around this time of year, because it was very easy to fall behind. I tend to have great ambitions to write on vacation, which do not always pan out.

In terms of this week, I'm carrying on with writing. I'm also testing out another critique group. This one is a lot closer by than the last, which is good. The possible drawback is they meet every week, and I was kind of hoping for twice a month. But hey, if I get into the habit, it could be a good thing. We'll see.

Progress Report: 11/23/09

2009-11-23T06:13:00.000-08:00

The novel version of Thunderstruck is underway.

It's funny how one shift can suddenly change your whole perspective and open many doors. What I wanted to do to make this story work as a novel is get the larger, overarching plot with Vigil, Bella, etc. into the mix earlier. These elements may not be visible to Sharon and Gail at first, but I did want the reader to get an idea that there's something going on.

My solution is to start with Psyche. So the book will open with her introductory scene as a kind of prologue. Psyche then watches the sisters from a distance for most of the first novel as events unfold and they start to discover the magic around them. Through Psyche's perspective, we start to get the hint about all the other forces swirling around the lives of Sharon & Gail.

Anyway, we're off to the races. Trying out another critique group as well this week. I'll get around to finishing "Voyage of the Piquant" eventually--it was always just a fun side project, so I'm not worried about deadlines or anything like that. Is anybody reading it?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Book Review: And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer

2009-11-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

I am assuredly the kind of reader that Eoin Colfer was most anxious about when he took on the monumental task of picking up where Douglas Adams left off to write the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. That is, I am a huge Adams fan, and I’ve never read any of Colfer’s other books. It is with good reason that Colfer expressed his anxiety about stepping into Adams’ shoes. Did he pull it off with And Another Thing…?

Unfortunately, no.

I applaud the effort and the risk he took. I would say that if Adams had ended the “Hitchhiker’s” series after So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, there would have been no need for another installment. But the fact that Mostly Harmless ended the series on such a bleak note—and the fact that Adams said that he wanted to write a sixth book to remedy the sour taste left by Mostly Harmless—is enough reason to justify Colfer’s heartfelt attempt. While And Another Thing… has its inspired moments, ultimately it does not measure up, even to the lowered expectations I had for another author attempting to live up to Adams’ legacy.

So where does Colfer go right, and where does he go wrong?

STYLE
Adams’ unique style is a hallmark of his work. Both the Hitchhiker’s and Dirk Gently books are filled with his ingenious use of language, his abrupt insights, and his intelligent humor. Colfer does a creditable job of trying to create a compatible style without directly attempting to imitate Adams, and pulls off some very good turns of phrase.

However, most of the time it seems like he’s trying too hard. He frequently throws in “Guide Notes” in honor of Adams’ signature tangential asides, but they typically feel forced and overused. Adams’ Guide entries often reflected what was going on in the story or made some salient point in relation to the characters, but Colfer’s Guide Notes mostly distract, and provide very few humorous moments.

Colfer also repeats too many of Adams’ old jokes. We endure entirely too many references to Eccentrica Gallumbits, for instance, to the point that any humor value was long gone the fourth or fifth time she’s mentioned. The worst example of this Colfer’s use of the word “froody,” which he seems to think is an inexhaustible mine of comedy gold. There is one particular instance of this that just about made me stop reading: Colfer sets up a joke, telegraphing from a light year away that he’s going to haul out the poor battered corpse of the word “froody” and attempt to use it as the punch line one more damned time, and then forces us to endure the humiliating march through an entire paragraph towards this inevitable, predictable, and painfully unfunny payoff.

Again, he has his moments. I thought his handling of the Vogons was pretty good. But as a whole, Colfer’s attempts miss the mark.

CHARACTERS
I’ll review how Colfer handled the primary returning characters from the series. It should be noted that Marvin doesn’t appear in the book, nor is he referenced by name. Take that for what you will.

Colfer’s strongest character is Arthur Dent. Colfer does a very solid job of capturing the essence of Arthur in both dialogue and internal monologue. He manages to iron out the most blatant lapse in Arthur’s characterization that Adams himself committed in Mostly Harmless, which was the fact that Arthur quickly forgot about Fenchurch once she disappeared. High marks for Colfer in this area.

Ford Prefect, on the other hand, is by far his worst characterization. Throughout the book, Ford exhibits himself to be stupid, unobservant, lazy, and interested in nothing but getting wasted in one way or another. While it’s established that Ford does love to party and have a good time, Colfer turns that facet into the totality of who Ford is, and it’s extremely frustrating. Ford should be a resourceful survivor, well-traveled and capable of ingenious solutions. In the original series, Ford is usually the one who has a clue what’s going on, in contrast to Arthur’s general floundering. None of this makes it into Colfer’s Ford, who is an unlikeable moron with not a single virtue to his name. There were several Ford moments that came a hair’s breadth from making me give up on the book entirely (in fact, the only thing that kept me going at these points was that I was determined to write this review).

Trillian is somewhere in between, and on this I’m willing to cut Colfer some slack. Adams expressed his own insecurity about how he wrote women—he felt he made them too idealized and not human enough. Trillian doesn’t have as strong a personality in the original stories as the other main characters, and is mostly stuck with being sensible and practical while everyone else is being over-the-top. That being said, I never warmed up to Colfer’s Trillian, who manages not to be very sensible or practical, but also not very distinctive.

Lastly we have Zaphod. I felt that Adams’ Zaphod was a more nuanced character than it might seem at first blush, who hides a mixture of brilliance and deep insecurity under a deliberately flamboyant, narcissistic persona. Colfer takes a certain liberty with Zaphod that allows him to plausibly write the character in a very different way—that is, the persona becomes the reality. This Zaphod lacks any depth at all, and is often so stupid that he’s not remotely believable, but he has his charming moments. It’s not great, but not offensively bad.

As for the remaining characters, I would say the core problem is that Colfer gives us very few characters to like. Adams had a gift for making even his bit players sympathetic, but Colfer’s characters are for the most part appalling. Much of the action takes place on a planet called Nano, and there is not a single inhabitant of that world for whom I developed even the slightest affection. It is one thing to make characters who are flawed, but Colfer’s original characters so lacking in redeeming qualities that there’s really no warming up to them.

Oddly enough, the one exception to this is a Vogon named Constant Moan, whom I quite grew to like. You would think that if you could make a Vogon sympathetic, other characters would be a piece of cake, but it turns out not to be the case here.

PLOT
A meandering plot is hardly a sin in a Hitchhiker’s book, so that can be forgiven. Blatantly recycling Adams’ plot elements is not so forgivable. This is especially problematic in the first half of the book, and it doesn’t help that Colfer tries to squeeze humor out of the characters saying, “Hey, we’ve done all this before.”

In the second half of the book, the plot enters more original territory, but this doesn’t really improve matters. The bulk of the story revolves around the fate of the planet Nano, and the key problem is that I hated this planet and everyone on it. There were some set-ups that might’ve been funny, like when the administrator of the planet is conducting job interviews with various gods, but it always seemed to me like Colfer was trying too hard. The humor felt strident and forced.

The thing about gods factors into one last problem I’d like to bring up, which is that Colfer doesn’t have a feel for when it’s best not to explain things. Douglas Adams used the gods—the Asgardians pop up at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe or Thor appear with Trillian at a party. But he did not go into any great detail about how mythical deities fit into a science fiction universe. In an infinite universe, anything is possible, right? So a few Aesir show up, and you go with it.

Colfer makes the mistake of trying to explain how the gods fit into the big picture, and doesn’t realize that this is a writer’s tar baby. The more he attempts to make sense of it, the less sense it actually makes. He repeats this mistake throughout the book in various ways. To quote Adams, “The impossible has an integrity that the merely improbable lacks.” Adams allows his universe to be nonsensical and impossible, whereas Colfer can’t seem to resist trying to explain in some semi-rational and therefore merely improbable fashion.

CONCLUSION
And Another Thing… is a laudable effort, and it has its good moments. However, these good moments are floating in a vast sea of not-so-good moments, which rank from simply weak to “Where’s my lighter fluid and matches?” bad. I don’t consider this some kind of referendum on Colfer as a writer. Given the pockets of inspiration present here—and the sheer guts it took to take on this project at all—I am perfectly willing to believe his other books could be excellent. This time, he just bit off more than he could chew.

Progress Report: 11/16/09

2009-11-16T06:30:00.000-08:00

This week, I began sampling critique groups, and attended one Wednesday evening. I liked the people, but the attendant costs and driving time are not ideal. I'm going to see what I can find closer to home, and then make my decision from there.

I am also working on the outline for a novelization of Thunderstruck. The biggest challenge is trying to create cohesive novel-length installments. The structure is very different from the ongoing serialized form that works in a webcomic. For instance, assuming the first novel starts at the same place as the comic does, where then does it end? I would like the novel to be a self-contained story, setting up to be part of a series. I think it ends after the "Heritage" chapter, when Sharon & Gail set off for New Orleans, but it feels like that would be a fairly short book. Maybe it ends when they reach New Orleans, or maybe I lengthen the story in some way before they set out... there are options. Just have to figure out which ones are best.

I'm also writing a book review, which is something I plan to do from time to time. I finished listening to And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer, who has picked up the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series where Douglas Adams left off. I'll post that this week sometime, and let you know how well I think he managed that admittedly daunting task.

No "Voyage of the Piquant" this week. Still working on that last installment.

Voyage of the Piquant [Part Three]

2009-11-09T06:16:00.000-08:00

Aholl drove the ship by sheer force of will, studying the charts endlessly as he tried to anticipate the moves of his enemy, training his crew in the secret arts of maritime combat, sniffing the briny air for a hint of where his prey might be hiding. Never once did he take advantage of our seemingly endless array of entertainment features to unwind and get away from it all. Whether it was wisdom, instinct, or madness that drew him on, I know not. He was a man with a purpose on a ship full of cruisers, and we found ourselves infected by his unforgiving quest for revenge.

No matter who is captain on a cruise ship, routine is always the king. So adapting to this sudden shift in our well-lubed pattern took its toll on the officers and staff. Louis and his massage team pulled many a late shift, I can report, as we all scrambled to shape Aholl’s militant orders to a palatable form for our passengers. Trying to make the effort of preparing for battle with a monstrous squid into a luxurious and exciting holiday experience put our skills as vacation experts to the test.

Yet for some of us, this venture into uncharted territory felt invigorating. We who serve aboard cruise ships bear little resemblance to our pioneering forbearers, the explorers of past centuries who dared to chart the unknown seas in their primitive wooden galleys without the benefit of charts, modern electronics, and fully-appointed spas. Being swept up in Aholl’s lunatic pursuit of Mocha Rich was, for most of us, the first time we had ever stepped into the unknown as the sailors of yore had done, pitting our mettle against a true elemental force of nature.

In theory, anyway. We hadn’t seen the squid, after all. And some of us wondered if it even existed.

“He’s completely barking mad,” Captain Wellington observed one night as we gathered in the kitchen after the evening meal. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he concocted this whole yarn about a giant squid out of his twisted imagination.”

“What about his pinkie?” asked Louis.

“Hardly compelling evidence,” the captain said. “There are any number of ways a man could lose a pinkie. Look around this kitchen, for instance. Knives, cleavers, electric can openers… all sorts of things that could take a finger off. Right, Quisiene?”

The burly cook looked up only briefly from the immense mixing bowl over which he was laboring. He grunted in a way that could have meant anything.

The captain frowned at him, then spoke again. “So it needn’t have been any kind of attack. He was probably preparing some calamari dish with a light cream sauce, had an unfortunate slip of the knife, and then over the years he’s embellished the tale up to this business about a giant white squid.”

The staff murmured. It sounded like a plausible story. Quisiene simply shook his head and heaved an oar-sized spoon through the dough. “Think that if it gives you comfort,” said the cook, “but you are the one spinning stories here, not Aholl.”

“What makes you so sure?” I asked.

“The kind of madness that grips Aholl does not come from delusions and lies,” Quisiene said. “His are the eyes of a man that have stared into the naked truth, the truths that we who live cocooned in luxury and privilege do not dare to see. Aholl tells no lies, captain. ‘Twas a monster squid what took his finger. Before this voyage is over, I fear the beast will take far more than that.”

“Well that’s just ludicrous!” the captain spluttered. “Even if there is a big white squid out there somewhere, it’s not a threat to us unless we’re stupid enough to jump off the ship or something. It can’t hurt the Piquant. This ship is six hundred feet long. We’re too big to fail!”

Quisiene simply shrugged and went back to his mixing.

“What the hell are you making, anyway?” the captain asked.

I intervened. “Aholl has him baking day and night. Something to do with the hunt for Mocha Rich.”

“He does,” Quisiene said, “but this dish isn’t for Aholl. It is a tradition harkening back to the early days of the epicurean explorers. When one of us died at sea, we were committed to the waves in a funeral cake. ‘Let Davy Jones know that the dinner bell has rung,’ it was said. ‘To the locker we commit a true gruelmaster.’”

“A funeral cake?” the captain squeaked. “You’re making a funeral cake for yourself?”

“Aye,” said Quisiene.

“Well I order you to stop it!” Wellington demanded.

But Quisiene paid him no heed. The squishy slurp of his great wooden spoon plying the dough seemed to whisper of an oncoming doom.

The next morning, Aholl called me to the Fiesta Deck at the aft of the ship. “Mr. Irving,” he said, fixing me with that tax auditor glare of his. “Ye asked about long lines and fishing. Well, we shall be dropping some lines into the water today, and then we shall see if Mocha Rich takes our bait.”

“Bait?” I asked. “Is this what Quisiene has been making for you?”

“Nay, lad. Take a look for yourself.”

He gestured to a length of thick cable on the deck, coiled next to a monolithic form draped in canvas. At his command, I unveiled what was concealed beneath, the bait that Aholl intended to use. I must’ve looked quite perplexed, for Aholl let out a chainsaw laugh.

“Speakers?” I said.

“The very thing,” he said.

The great speakers had been pulled from the dining hall, cocooned in watertight clear plastic, and affixed to reinforced cable. I puzzled over this oddity for a while, then a chilling insight made an unwelcome entrance into my head, and I felt some inkling of what Aholl might be planning. Trembling, I traced the path of the cable back to its source.

Sure enough, Aholl had moved every scrap of karaoke equipment on the ship out to the Fiesta Deck.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “You intend…”

“That’s right, lad.” With a mighty kick, he shoved the plastic-wrapped speakers off the side of the Piquant. The cable slithered after the heavy payload, unspooling in the wake of the heavy amplifiers.

“Send an announcement to the passengers, Mr. Irving,” Aholl trumpeted. “Thar shall be karaoke! Nonstop, day and night, twenty-four bleedin’ seven!”

I felt my stomach quake at the thought of it, but Aholl had even more insanity yet to reveal. He brandished a sheaf of papers in front of my nose, and grinned like a barracuda. “This is the playlist,” he growled. “They shall sing these songs, cast them into the sea, and let Mocha Rich hear how we mock him.”

With sweaty hands, I riffled through the list. It was worse than I could’ve imagined. “Sir, you can’t mean to… sir, a karaoke performance can turn even a masterpiece into unlistenable drivel. But this list… I mean, ‘Muskrat Love,’ for God’s sake! Nobody should be singing these atrocities!”

‘They’ll sing them,” Aholl vowed. “They’ll sing them flat and toneless and off-key, and they shan’t break for a minute. And we shall drop every botched note and pitch-poor warble into the darkest depths, where dwells Mocha Rich.”

“But really, will a giant squid even care?”

“Ye never have understood him,” Aholl glowered. “Mocha Rich is not some oversized mollusk, plying the lightless waters and waiting for a sperm whale to gobble him down. He is as intelligent as he is cruel. A din such as we will inflict upon him will run fingernails over the blackboard of his evil heart. Let him hear the bitter discord of my hate. Let him hear a green grocer from Queens serenade him with ‘Macarthur Park.’ He will come for us soon, laddie. He’ll come.”

That night I lay in my bunk, tossing and turning in a puddle of my sweat-drenched blankets, drifting in and out of fevered dreams. I dreamed of the whole sea rising up in indignant fury, towering over the tiny form of the Piquant as we blasted the heaving waves with a karaoke-mutilated version of “(You’re) Having My Baby.”

Nature itself would rebel against us for what we were doing. Truly, the Piquant was now cruising the waters of the abyss.

Progress Report: 11/9/09

2009-11-09T06:06:00.000-08:00

I realize these Progress Reports are not the most thrilling reads. It's not their job to be exciting. It's their job to give me a weekly benchmark for how my writing is progressing. Oft times, those steps aren't too interesting to read about, but that's the way it goes. When there's electrifying news to report, nobody will be happier than me. Meanwhile...

I rewrote the first chapter of Rose & Jade, and started another editing pass. This pass isn't so much about rewrites as it is about trimming excess language.

The third segment of "Voyage of the Piquant" is ready to roll. After this: the shocking conclusion.

Inspired by poetry I've been reading, I've started a metaphor journal as a place to record colorful language and turns of phrase. Naturally, the moment I sat down to record some of the ones that I had been thinking of, they all drained out of my head like... like... oh, see? There they go again. Something more interesting than "water down a plughole." This is why I need the journal. I have gotten a few, my favorite of which is: "a scimitar smile."

Voyage of the Piquant [Part Two]

2009-11-02T06:30:00.000-08:00

Captain Wellington’s only attempt to take back the ship ended almost as soon as it began. Reasoning that every man, even a mad one, had to sleep, the captain assigned us to watch Aholl all through the night as the gristly squid-hunter stood vigil on the bridge. It wasn’t long before Aholl seemed to drop off in the sumptuous captain’s chair, but when Wellington gingerly reached for the harpoon gun, one of Aholl’s bloodshot eyes bulged open. The harpoon tip bobbed and pointed at Wellington’s generous belly, and our captain let out a squeak and stumbled away.

“I think he is actually still asleep,” I whispered to the shaky captain. “His eye never focused on you.”

“Well you try and take that thing away from him, then!” Wellington hissed.

I declined.

We retreated together to the officer’s lounge to confer with the rest of the staff, leaving Aholl in sole possession of the bridge. Wellington delivered the news to our colleagues that our attempted mutiny had come up short. Everyone expressed their disappointment, but all of us are well-trained in customer relations, so everyone had encouraging words to say about how brave Wellington had been to make the attempt, what a clever plan it had been, and how they were sure things would go better next time.

Only one voice spoke in dissent. Quisiene, the head chef, cut through the babble with a voice like a double-bladed electric turkey carver. “You stand no chance against that man, captain,” he said.

We all turned to regard him. Quisiene occupied a position of legend in the crew. A massive man, standing 6’4” and muscled like a lumberjack, Quisiene was covered head to toe in tattoos of entrees from around the world. He had served with the U.S. Navy and later as a freelance cook with the merchant marines, and had cooked on destroyers, gunboats, and aircraft carriers. Quisiene had seen his share grueling combat, and had plucked recipes from the heart of enemy territory in some of the deadliest seas of the world before finally coming to the Piquant. His 30’ submarine sandwich was legendary crowd pleaser in the cruising world.

Captain Wellington sucked in his gut and glared at Quisiene. “We’ll simply wait until he’s more deeply asleep.”

“A man like that never truly relaxes,” Quisiene said.

The head masseuse piped up next. “Perhaps I can offer him a complementary full-body rubdown and spa treatment. He’ll be sleeping like a baby…”

“He’s not the type to accept a spa treatment,” the cook said.

“Well then, smart guy,” the masseuse said, “how about when he’s in the potty?”

I leaned in and whispered to him. “We call it the ‘head’ on a ship, Louis.”

Quisiene ignored the lapse. “None of you have ever met a man like Aholl. He does not relax his guard, not for an instant. All of human sanity and joy has been boiled out of him, leaving only a hard egg of revenge. Nothing good shall hatch from such an egg.”

“Hard-boiled eggs don’t hatch at all,” protested the captain.

“None of us are a match for him,” Quisiene said. “Not even me. I fear he will lead us only to ruin.”

It was a fortunate thing that we were in the latter stages of our voyage. By now, we’d conditioned the passengers out of the last vestiges of independent thought, and they responded like a well-oiled machine to the new agenda. They rotated by group through the new “craft time” activities, making the modifications on the Piquant that Aholl required for his hunt.

Aholl himself, billed in our impromptu literature as a “special celebrity guest,” paced the decks with relentless determination. He drummed his peg finger on the rails and bulkheads as he scowled out at the waves, scanning the peaceful waters for his ancient nemesis. The passengers at first were wary of him, for his sheer intensity shattered the atmosphere of relaxation that we try to enforce. Yet beneath the guttural swearing and the blood-chilling stare, I saw that he possessed the deep charisma of a true leader. He quickly divined how to best motivate the passengers as they took their duty on “wildlife watch,” looking for any sign of Aholl’s great white squid.

“I shall reward the first man, woman, or child to spot the beast,” he told the assembled passengers. He reached into the dark folds of his coat. “I affix these up where all can see them, and they shall be a prize for the one who first sights Mocha Rich!”

With that, he withdrew a sheaf of vouchers for free car rentals, hotel rooms, and dinners at four-star restaurants and nailed them to the Promenade Deck. The passengers babbled in appreciation and rushed to their posts, eyes searching the choppy waves.

On the third day, twelve minutes after the end of lunch, I plucked up the courage to approach him with a question that had been bothering me.

“Mr. Aholl. Sir. Um… it’s about this squid.”

He whirled to face me, eyes round as golf balls. “Have ye seen it?”

“No, no,” I said, flapping my hands in front of me. “It’s just… well, isn’t it true that the giant squid is a deep sea creature?”

“Aye, ‘tis so.”

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, sir, how is it you plan to hunt one from the surface?” I looked around the deck. “I mean, shouldn’t you be trawling with lines or nets or something? Not that we have any on the Piquant…”

“Lines and nets cannot snare the likes of that devil-spawn,” he rumbled. “Mocha Rich is no ordinary squid, lad, not even for a giant squid. He’ll come to the surface if he’s drawn.”

“Drawn?” I repeated. “By what?”

“By me,” Aholl declared. “We are bound together by the suction cups of fate, he and I. And I think he shall be drawn to this ship as well.”

“Why?”

He gave me a knowing look. “I’ve read how these cruisers foul the seas, pumping out your waste and wash-water into the oceans as you heave these soft-bellied vacationers ‘round the world. Such things invite the wrath of Mocha Rich.”

I felt cold sweat trickle down my back, but tried to laugh it off. “Sir, I’ve served on cruisers for over twenty years now, and I’ve never heard of one being attacked by a giant squid.”

“Mayhap they don’t want you to hear of it, lad,” Aholl said. “Still, ye do have a point. Mocha Rich shall need more incentive than I’ve yet given him yet to seek us out. Once our preparations are done, I know how to lure him out of his Stygian depths. I know how to drive him into a killing frenzy. He shall come for us, all the fury of Hell at his back, and seek us out for battle. Fear not on that score, laddie.”

“Fear not,” I said weakly, feeling my heart tremble. “Of course.”

Progress Report: 11/2/09

2009-11-02T06:20:00.001-08:00

Real life concerns took precedence over writing for the most part this week. One thing that happened is that we had to say goodbye to our oldest cat, Quantum. He'd been with us for 16 years, almost as long as we've been married, and was the first pet that Candi and I got together. Quantum was a very weird and delightful Siamese, as fine a companion as you could ask for. He embodied the feline traits of dignity and absurdity, which is a paradoxical trick only cats can pull off. Towards the end, he was in a lot of pain, though, and his body was breaking down. It's very hard to make the decision to put a beloved pet to sleep, but this is part of the contract. We help them along when it's time to go, as much as it hurts to say goodbye.

So my focus wasn't totally on writing. For that reason, and others.

In terms of writing, I did manage to hammer out a few more pages of my "Voyage of the Piquant" story, which I'll post after I finish this entry.

Also, I'm revising the opening chapter to Rose & Jade. It's clear that in the process of shopping a book, a lot of weight is put on the first pages, so they'd better be good. I think this fixation on the introductory pages is more important to agents/editors than it is to readers, but that's the nature of the beast. I also think that my first chapter could be better, and I've got an angle on how. Hopefully, that will increase my chances of catching the interest of the right agent.

Voyage of the Piquant [Part One]

2009-10-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

Voyage of the Piquant
Part One

Call me Irving. The tale I am about to relate is a story of obsession, madness, the power of the sea, and other heavy stuff like that.

I was serving as Chief Activity Coordinator aboard the Piquant, a six-hundred foot cruise ship operating off the Pacific Northwest. We were late in the season, perhaps our last run along the Canadian coastline, when we found ourselves drawn into a nightmare of unspeakable proportions. It began on a normal day, during the normal routine, on a cruise that seemed no different from the hundreds I had seen in my career.

A seaman is supposed to be able to sense a storm coming, and I suppose I must’ve gained some of that legendary faculty for precognition during my years on the sea. I first felt a sense of dread as I was guiding my group of passengers through their early evening routine.

“And ready... now drain!” I checked my stopwatch, ticking off the standard seventeen seconds. “Good... now shake! Two, three, four. Now retract... and zip! Group three, move out, group four into place.” The next line of men shifted their way to their assigned positions with the practiced ease of a precision drill team. “Check your number to your urinal,” I instructed, my tone crisp and professional. “Now unzip, and extend...”

And I felt it—an ominous premonition something was about to happen... something that was definitely not on the agenda.

I stared into the distance, looking past my clipboard, as if I could see through the steel hull of the Piquant and into the ominous forces gathering in the endless depths upon which our vessel we floated. The seconds ticked by on my stopwatch, unheeded, until finally I heard one of the passengers clear his throat. I glanced towards the sound and saw the men standing before their urinals, poised and waiting for my command.

I shook off the strange feeling, remembering my duty. “Sorry, men. All right, on my mark… now, drain!”

I dismissed the eerie premonition as nothing more than a lapse of consciousness, perhaps brought on by an ill-advised second helping of Muenster-spinach quiche with truffle garnish at breakfast. Yet within thirty-eight minutes, I received the first sign that there was more to my feeling than a case of gastronomic excess.

As my group shuffled onto the Riviera Deck, the intercom crackled to life. “This is your captain,” came the voice of Captain Wellington. “This ship will be making an unexpected stop. There is no cause for alarm. Please continue with your scheduled activities.”

The passengers milled nervously, low chatter humming to life from the group. Aboard a cruise ship, that kind of uncertainty can lead to unthinkable chaos. “To your positions!” I snapped, my voice cutting through the babble. “We are not deviating from the schedule! Stand on your color-coded squares... very good.. Mr. Armstead, please turn your head towards the viewing marker. Now breathe deep, and... appreciate the sunset!”

My timely actions may have saved us that evening, but nothing could have prepared me for the horror that was to come.

I guided my charges through the remainder of their routine without further incident. Three minutes and twenty-two seconds after I had sealed the cabin doors behind the passengers for the night, I spoke to the captain about the disturbance. “What happened back there?” I asked.

Captain Wellington twirled his fingers along the length of his waxed moustache. “We picked up a castaway,” he informed me.

“Sir?”

“He was lost at sea, in a rubber life raft,” the captain said. “By maritime law, we were obliged to pick him up. Even if it meant sacrificing our position for optimum viewing of the sunset. Damn, but the sea can be a cruel mistress.”

“Where is the castaway now?” I asked.

“Sickbay,” the captain said, then both of us stopped. A sound came to our ears from along the corridor leading to the bridge. We heard footsteps and the familiar swish of a hand sliding along the polished brass surface of the safety rail. Yet there was something different about that sound, something alien that sent a chill straight down my spine.

The man who entered stared at us with black eyes that contained nothing of human sanity. His coarse beard seemed to be made of bristling wire, similar to the copper scrub brushes they use to clean the grills in the kitchen when they get really nasty. He had skin as rough and leathery as an old loafer, creased into a permanent scowl of rage. And we saw the horrible truth behind that discordant sound on the handrail—on the grizzled madman’s right hand, where his pinkie should have been, there was only a wooden peg.

“What the devil are you doing here?” the captain demanded.

“The devil?” the stranger rasped. “What do you know about the devil, you softgut? The devil lurks out beneath the waves, white and slick and hungry. He tasks me, and I mean to have him! I’ll chase him around the Cape of Good Hope, past that boot-shaped bit of Italy, and through the Perdition’s flames before I give him up!”

“Pardon me, but what are you talking about?” I asked.

“My name is Aholl,” he growled. “I’m taking command of this ship.”

“You most certainly are not!” Captain Wellington said..

Aholl drew a harpoon gun from the folds of his battered black coat. “Say again now, you bowl of pudding?”

“Eh... heh,” the captain chuckled weakly as the tip of the harpoon pointed between his eyes. “Now... I’m sure we can discuss this like reasonable men.”

He brandished his peg-pinkie, the veins on his neck standing out like jump ropes. “Reasonable? You see this, milk boy? You think a man like me is capable of being reasonable?”

“It’s only your pinkie!” the captain squeaked.

“Only?” Aholl roared. “Try touch-typing with a thing like this, flounder-breath! I used to be able to hit eight-five words per minute. Damn it all to Hell!”

“How did it happen?” I asked, hoping to draw his attention away from the captain.

He whirled to face me, flinty eyes shimmering. “Bitten off, lad. Bitten off by the fiercest hunter in the seven seas. My little finger rests in the gullet of the great...” He paused.

I leaned forward.

“...white...”

I held my breath.

“...squid.”

“Squid?” I repeated. “A squid bit off your finger?”

“They have very powerful beaks,” the captain said, keen to placate the lunatic with the harpoon gun. “Can be quite nasty.”

“This ain’t no ordinary squid,” Aholl told us in his gravelly voice. “’Tis a beast what squirmed straight out of the poop-chute of Lucifer himself.”

“Oh gross,” I moaned.

“He roams the sea, laying waste to everything that dares cross his path. White as bone, and twice as vicious. I call him Mocha Rich.”

“We serve that at the coffee bar,” I said.

“Shut up,” Aholl snarled. “That devil took down my last boat, destroyed my entire crew, yet somehow I survived. My last ship, she was too small for the job. But this tub of bolts,” he looked around at the bridge assessingly. “Aye. This might just be enough.”

“But surely you can’t mean to use this ship to hunt a squid!” the captain protested.

“He tasks me!” Aholl bellowed. “He tasks me!”

“Right, yes, you already mentioned that,” Wellington said. “But we have a schedule to keep, don’t you know. The passengers...”

“Shall be my crew! Fear not, they’ll be well rewarded when we take the beast. I am a man of some means.”

“But it is not in the itinerary!” cried the captain.

“You can shove your foul itinerary into Mammon’s blubbery armpit!” Aholl thundered, waving his harpoon gun wildly about mere inches from the captain’s face. “Do as I say or I’ll skewer you like a sautéed prawn!”

Wellington clapped his hands together, smiling through the sheen of sweat which covered his face. “Right! Well, then I suppose we shall be making a new schedule for tomorrow. Mr. Irving? Let’s report to the copy room. And for the love of God, I hope we have enough toner.”

Progress Report: 10/26/09

2009-10-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

Got a nibble.

At this point, it's no more than a nibble--that is to say, an agent has asked to see more of my novel. But a nibble is something, and that's at least encouraging. I will, of course, keep you posted.

Meanwhile, apart from making more submissions and contacting agents, I realized I was having a hard time motivating myself to write this week. Forcing it, almost. As I reflected on this, I discovered one of the unforeseen voids left by Thunderstruck in my life. The comic was a labor of love, written pretty much just for fun, with no major pressure. Every writing effort I've made since then has been, in one way or another, geared towards professional publication.

So I needed to write something just for fun.

I'm posting the first part of this story on the blog and on my DeviantArt site. It's a silly piece of work, but that's precisely the point. It's called "Voyage of the Piquant," and it is a homage of sorts to a famous literary masterpiece. See if you can guess which one.

Progress Report: 10/19/09

2009-10-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

In terms of progress, I could copy and paste the previous report and have it covered.

At this point, it's kind of like forging across the frozen reaches of Siberia. "What did we see out there today?"

"A lot of snow."

"Same snow as last week?"

"No sir. Different snow."

"Looked the same."

"I promise, it was different. We're getting to new snow every day."

"Well, I guess that's something. Let's keep going, boys. We're bound to make it through all this snow eventually!"

(muffled collective cheers from the team)

(Aside) "I hope to God we're not going in circles."

Progress Report: 10/12/09

2009-10-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

Submissions and more submissions.

Successful writers always like to tell stories about how many times they were rejected before they finally got their break. In that tradition, I'm accumulating rejections now for Rose & Jade. Got a pretty good collection so far.

Everybody gives advice about perseverance, tenacity, sticking with it, and all that. The "I got rejected a thousand times before I was published" stories come from all sides, from your local authors all the way up to your multi-million selling giants. Successful authors share these tales in order to give heart to starting authors, such as myself. And it's good, because it helps me keep going.

But at the conference I went to recently, one writer who was giving a presentation looked out over the room full of agents and editors, and he said something quite candid: "There isn't one agent that I wouldn't want to run over if I saw them on the street."

Because being rejected is no goddamned fun.

Anyway, the cycle continues, and writing continues. I'm going to a critique group this week to see if it'll be a good fit for me. I joined the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers association. I have the outline for a new novel churning along, and I'm probing the conceptual approach for a novelization of Thunderstruck. I'm thinking point of view style chapters, as in George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, might be the way to go.

Why "The Raptor Clause"

2009-10-05T06:20:00.001-07:00

I chose the title of this blog as a play on words to incorporate two of my favorite things: dinosaurs and writing.

This is not to suggest that all my stories will contain dinosaurs. Thunderstruck contained no dinosaurs, unless you count the "Patches" outtake. But Rose & Jade features dinosaurs in addition to dragons, so I decided to tip my hat to that passion of mine for the title of the blog.

One of the things that's really cool in modern paleontology is that we are finally able to look at the soft tissue imprints of fossils with more detail and clarity. That's allowed scientists to peek inside the chest cavity of well-preserved dinosaur mummies and check out the heart and other organs. We've had pretty good skin impressions, too. It's kind of sad to think about how many good soft tissue fossils have probably been destroyed through routine efforts to expose the bones, but now that paleontologists have better technology at hand, I expect we'll see more and more discoveries.

Traditionally, most scientists have depicted fleshed-out dinosaurs very conservatively, draping a reasonable quantity of muscle over the bones and providing them with some basic gray-green skin. This is a conservative approach, and scientists are by nature conservative, so that's to be expected.

But dinosaurs were assuredly much more interesting, magnificent, and strange than the bones can indicate.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Take an elephant skeleton, and put it amongst paleontologists who have never seen an elephant or any related creature. What do they make of this peculiar being's skull? How do they suggest it got food to its mouth? The most significant feature of the elephant is its trunk, yet there are no bones in the trunk (just tens of thousands of muscles). I'm not sure what these hypothetical scientists would postulate, but I they wouldn't go as far as nature did. And they'd probably miss the ears, too.

Artists get more leeway than scientists. The dinosaurs I like to write about are colorful, weird, and have adaptations that are unlike anything we see today. I may be wrong about what the real beasts were like, but no more wrong than the super-conservative version. If I'm going to err, I'll err on the side of magnificent.

Progress Report: 10/5/09

2009-10-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

All submissions, all the time.

The differences between what agents want to see make the whole submission exercise somewhat slow going. For instance, I've now written synopses of varying length, from one sentence to a full page. As I get more of them done, I expect I will be able to re-use more elements.

One of the agents had an interesting request, though. In addition to the first 30-some pages, this agent asked for "one of your favorite sentences from your story." That took a bit of looking to figure out what to choose. This is the one I picked:

The living juggernaut rammed headfirst through the blackjack tables, tossing its mighty horns as playing cards fluttered like a cloud of butterflies in its wake.

I selected that because the first 30 pages are not action-heavy, and I wanted to give a hint that we get into some action down the road. Also, I like the bit with the butterflies.

Other writing churns along. I've had a lot of ideas, which is good, and now I need to get some more onto paper. The screen. Whatever.

Progress Report: 9/28/09

2009-09-28T06:22:00.000-07:00

This week was mostly about whipping my query letter into shape and getting it ready to go off to editors. Which I have done now (two queries out) and will do some more this week.

Query letters are intimidating. I think virtually every writer would like their query letter to say: "Look, could you just read my damned story, okay?" and leave it at that. I feel like I have a bit of an edge on this process, since I've been writing ad copy professionally for +5 years and the principles are pretty much the same, but it's still a bit of a trial.

From what I've seen, the thing that most writers run into is a difficulty boiling down their own story to its key, interest-grabbing essentials. Actually, the problem for writers is that there is a sense that if you can write a 250,000 word epic fantasy novel, a page of sale copy ought to be a snap. It doesn't work that way. Copy writing is its own beast, and there are writers who are superb at other sorts of writing that can't scratch together a piece of decent copy to save their lives.

(By the same token, if you've ever tried to read a full length book written by someone who knows only copy writing, you have tasted a special flavor of pain.)

In terms of fiction writing, I'm progressing along on a short story that is currently called "The Dragon and the Aussie." It's about a friendly dog meeting a wary young dragon. Not enough to build a trilogy on or anything, but I think it'll be a sweet little piece. Short stories are a nice way to keep in practice between stretches at novels. I'll have to look more deeply into the ins and outs of short story publication once I get a few under my belt.

Speaking of short stories, I have also been combing through some of my older stuff to see if there's anything up to snuff for publication. Jury's out on that, but there are some fun reads, and I'm thinking I'll go back to these pieces and start posting them on DeviantArt once and a while (linked to this blog as well), and give people something to read.

Also on the agenda: making this blog look more interesting. Needs some art, some links, stuff like that. It's pretty bare-bones right now.

Possible Futures of Thunderstruck

2009-09-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

Understandably, a lot of people who have followed the story of Thunderstruck want to see it continue. So would I (as I hope you know). Here are some of the suggestions that I’ve seen, and my answer to how likely they actually are.

1) Publish an Outline.
Or a bulleted list of what I planned to happen. The answer on that one is no. This would be a cheap and hugely unsatisfying way to end a story. Picture for a moment your favorite series — Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, what have you. Now think of a bulleted outline of the last book. How does that experience compare to reading the actual book? The answer is that it sucks. The experience is so bad that it would be better not to have read the outline at all.

That is not the only consideration. The fact is that I do not write with a rigid outline. Thunderstruck has on several occasions jumped the tracks and gone in a way that my outlined version did not predict. Which is fine, because every time it’s done that, I’ve liked the outcome. So even an outline would only give you one vague possibility for how things might have gone, and not a very accurate one at that.

Besides, if I publish an outline, that kind of kills the suspense if I ever do come back to the story, doesn’t it?

2) Go to a Reduced Schedule (1-2 times a week)
I seriously considered that possibility. Ultimately, what it boiled down to was a question of whether I devote myself to writing or keep trying to be an artist/writer. And I choose the former. I love drawing, but for various reasons, I don’t think it’s my career path. Writing is.

3) Publish the Existing Comic as a Graphic Novel
I appreciate the encouragement from people who say they’d buy Thunderstruck in a traditional print format, and I am not immune to the appeal of this vision. There are some technical problems with this. For one, I have not drawn with a print format in mind. Go back and look at the physical dimensions of the comic throughout its history. They’re all over the place. Notice the font size, and how it will vary wildly from one strip to another. These things aren’t too bothersome in the fast-and-loose world of online comics, but in a print format they will stand out and look shoddy. This could probably be handled, but it would be time-consuming.

Another practical issue is that I have shamelessly mined the Internet for photography to use in backgrounds. I haven’t kept track of who owns the copyright to these photos or what the usage agreements for each might be. Since Thunderstruck has been a virtually profit-less enterprise (a hobby, in short), there’s really not much legal concern. If I were to physically publish the comic, I would have to scour through each of these and most likely re-do the backgrounds. Not impossible, but again, time-consuming.

But the ultimate decider on this is that I would want to go back and re-write a lot of the story. Not just to bring the older art up to snuff (though that is a temptation). It’s because the writing itself would need an overhaul. More detail on that in just a second.

4) Publish a Prose Version of Thunderstruck
This is the most likely thing to happen. I have a lot of work in Thunderstruck. It’s a world that is rich in detail and compelling to me, and I’ve got a lot left in the story I still want to tell. There is a lot of potential for prose-novel version of Thunderstruck.

Don’t expect it to be identical, though.

The thing I liked least about writing a webcomic was this: you’re stuck with your first draft. Oh, there’s no physical barrier to making rewrites, but readers don’t really dig being dragged back and forth through a rewrite process. The very act of drawing the comic also makes rewrites incredibly tedious — I can change dialogue without too much difficulty, but the effort that goes into drawing is so great that the prospect of re-drawing completed pages is enough to send me screaming for the nearest balcony.

First drafts are messy, and there’s a reason that rewrites are so important. It shows in the end result. The pacing in Thunderstruck is inconsistent. Characters change as I get to know them, and their later incarnations don’t mesh with their first appearance (Grogan was the most striking example of this). I ended up hitting the reader with great walls of exposition, clumsily delivered. Elements of the plot shifted around like sand. And so forth. I’ve had many readers say wonderful things about how well-executed and written Thunderstruck was, and I am very grateful of it (and fairly proud as well), but I know it could be a lot better.

I was thinking at one point of picking up the story from the last strip, and carrying forth in prose. But I think if (hopefully when) I return to this universe and these characters, it will be with a fresh page in front of me, a stronger idea of how I want to shape and pace the story, and a better, tighter approach. Back to the start, in other words.

Ah, but I will miss some of the things you can do in comics. Like the bit where Sharon and Gail first communicate through their respective bathroom mirrors — that came out quite nicely, and it would be hard to capture it the same way in prose. Comics also give you the option to subtly drop visual clues in a way that isn’t the same in prose, like Jude’s necklace.

So, will Thunderstruck return someday in a new incarnation? I think the chances are good. What I am really ending right now is my hobby as a webcomic writer/artist, in favor of devoting myself to a professional career as a writer. But there’s no reason to believe story of Thunderstruck can only exist as a webcomic. It is a world close to my heart. And it would be a fine, fine thing to go back someday and share more adventures with Sharon and Gail.

Progress Report: 9/21/09

2009-09-21T06:34:00.000-07:00

This blog has several purposes, but the primary one is to keep up-to-date with these progress reports. One of the things I learned from writing a webcomic was how useful it is to have a schedule. It keeps me on task, allows me to budget my time, and generally lets me establish a discipline around writing.

So for now, I intend to publish one progress report per week, every Monday, on my writing. If I haven't gotten any writing done or made any progress over a week's time, I'm doing something wrong (unless I'm on vacation). I didn't end Thunderstruck just so I could have more time for video games or watching football. I did it because those hours I spent on the comic are quality hours I am going to use for writing. That's my promise to myself, and to you.

This week's progress was mostly about wrapping up Thunderstruck, but I think I should tell you a little about my novel here while I've got you. It's called Rose & Jade, and is the first installment of a planned trilogy called "The Awakening of Dragons." It took me about two years to write it, and it is now in a sufficiently polished form that I'm shopping it to agents and editors. This week's efforts will be focused on that endeavor, and I'll tell you about all that in more detail next Monday.

Welcome to The Raptor Clause

2009-09-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Sorry the place is kind of sparse right now. I just moved in, and I'll get it spruced up here as I go along.

I expect that most people here right now are coming from Thunderstruck, so I'm going to talk about that. For those of you who don't know, Thunderstruck is a web comic that I've been self-publishing since May 31, 2004. I just ended it today, and I'm betting there are some readers who won't be happy with me about that.

The last strip of the comic pretty much gives you my reasons for bringing Thunderstruck to its abrupt close. Here's a little more about why I chose to end the way I did.

There was a strong pull to wrap the story up in some way instead of severing the plotline in the middle. As I examined this option, I realized that there was no way to do this in a satisfying fashion. Everything I considered started to feel cheap, rushed, and uninteresting. If I crammed the ending into a small space just so I could have something that felt like a conclusion, it would've been lousy.

I considered publishing a kind of outline of where I thought the story would go. That was even worse. First of all, my outlines are only general guidelines, and I know just how much I deviate from them when it gets down to the actual writing. Secondly, outlines are just boring. I know some of you may be frustrated by not knowing how things turn out or what the secrets are, but I don't think an outline would've brought any real satisfaction.

I then considered at least getting to the end of the chapter, just to get a better closing point. Since all the chapters end in cliffhangers, that's not saying much, but it would've at least been a cleaner breaking spot. The problem with that was that I knew I was going to end it. Thunderstruck demanded a great deal of time, energy, and passion, and that last ingredient is the key. I couldn't devote myself in the way that any story deserves, especially a demanding one like this, if my heart wasn't in it.

And there's the other trap. If I kept writing until the end of the chapter, the pull to carry on after that would start to creep up on me. I'd fall back into my routine -- demanding, yet comfortable -- and might lose the momentum to do what I know is the right thing.

I know the ending is sudden. But it's time.

Thunderstruck has always been a labor of love. It is very hard to let it go. It's been a part of my life and my identity for over five years now. I know I'm going to miss writing it, and miss interacting with all of you who have read and enjoyed it.

I've learned a lot from writing Thunderstruck. And I plan to put that knowledge to good use.