Forever Old Man's Starship Troopers

I just had the opportunity to read Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein all in fairly quick succession. I’d recommend the same to any aspiring SF writer, and not just because they’re all good books in their own right. The three books are a triptych that illustrates how broadly a single subject can be approached, and shows how an author’s politics (or more broadly, an author’s beliefs about how the universe works) inform a narrative.

This trio, when viewed from a distance, show a very similar story. A future cadet from planet earth joins a unified human military force as an infantryman. The military is embroiled in an interstellar war against alien forces and uses its starship-based high-tech infantry in a role roughly equivalent to armored cavalry units. The cadet starts in basic training/boot camp and sees fellow cadets screw up (sometimes fatally) but manages to squeak by training, entering the infantry as a private. The new private sees action, more people die in action, and he sees at least one major battle screwed up royally. He rises into the officer ranks and sees his last action (in the book at least) in a battle that ends as a qualified success (at least the important characters survived.)

Of course, at ground level where the narrative meets the road, you’d be hard pressed to find three more divergent treatments of the same subject. Some examples that more than likely grow out of each author’s point of view:

• In ST, the government and the military are both benign and competent, whereas in FW they are neither. In OMW the government and military are competent but morally ambiguous and often out-gunned.
• In ST, military service is a respected duty performed by willing volunteers, in FW it is a burden imposed on draftees, in OMW it is a crapshoot taken by people who really don’t have any idea what they’re volunteering for.
• In ST, basic training is relevant to the soldier’s tasks and justified at length, in FW the training is pretty damn pointless, in OMW the training has a justifiable point, but an actively hostile universe is still handing you your ass.

In fact, someone can (and probably has) fill a fourth book with the differing attitudes in this trio of books show towards all sorts of things from the rights and responsibilities of citizenship to sexual politics.

Update: Islamic Students reasonable. Islamic Scholar, not so much.

According to Gallycat, the students riled up by the threat of Random House's publication of the Jewel of Medina were planning little more than a publicity campaign to e-mail the publisher and news outlets and so on. Perfectly innocuous stuff in a pluralistic society. Which makes Random House look like a bunch of wusses, and makes Professor Denise Spellberg's frantic warnings about threats to Random House's staff and property look even more like disingenuous bigotry, to put it kindly.

Islamic Overreaction freaks out Random House

From the “this surprises you why?” department:

Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

Apparently one of those credible sources was an American academic named Denise Spellberg (sage advice from the Smart Bitches, do not let this woman blurb your book) who got an advance copy and apparently got her knickers in a prudish little twist (you see Muhammad had wives, and gasp, may have had sex with them) and made a “frantic” call to the editor of a popular Muslim website (this book made her frantic) and asked him to warn Muslims about this nasty, evil, book that “made fun of Muslims and their history.” And apparently, armed only with Spellberg’s description of this “very ugly, stupid piece of work,” not having read it himself, he did exactly what she asked, warning people of the coming literary apocalypse. And, of course, offense spreads like wildfire.

But what seems to be the trigger that caused the book to be pulled was Spellberg’s own warning to her own editor at another imprint at Random House. According to Spellberg, if the book was released there was “a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence.” Apparently she babbled on like an islamaphobic neocon frightened by Obama’s middle name. The Terrorists would kill them all if the book saw the light of day. Her warning was bounced around the email servers at Random House until the book was pulled less than a month later.

Spellberg might count Random House’s withdrawl of the book as some sort of victory, but I wonder if she realizes that encouraging them to stomp this book by using threats of violence is casting Islam in a much more vile light before a much broader audience than the book’s publication ever would have.

Mad Cow

No strange videos recently, so here's one from the Weird Universe Weblog. (The URL onscreen is NSFW)

Orson Scott Card is scared of gay marriage

His rant is here, and somewhat predictably there are responses in the blogosphere ranging from laconic bemusement by Scalzi to rhetorical dismemberment on the Feminist SF Blog. I would like to add my own little can of lighter fluid to this raging bonfire by offering everyone who’s jumping on this OMGWTFTEHGAYS panicmobile a nice little clue:

Marriage defined by the state <> marriage as defined by the church (any church.)

Repeat this a few times every time you’re frightened by images of George Takai on his honeymoon.

Shall I defend my thesis with facts? (Oh please, not those.)

I’m married in the Catholic Church. They don’t believe in divorce, you know. If I got a divorce, all nice and legal, the Pope starts going “lalalalala I can’t hear you lalalala” and says I’m still married. Of course, if divorced me tried to continue filing my taxes jointly or keep my ex-wife on my health insurance, I’d have some legal issues. If I died without a will, she wouldn’t inherit. But in the church, I’m still married. I get another wife, the US Government says it’s just fine while the Church says I’m still married to the first one.

Another situation, a Muslim man can divorce his wife just by telling her he divorces her. Fine, his church says they’re divorced. But if he’s a US citizen and hasn’t filed the right paperwork, he’s going to be facing bigamy charges if he marries again— even if his wife says, “but he really did divorce me.”

There are common law marriages that aren’t properly recognized by any particular church, and pagan marriages that aren’t recognized by the state. There are sects of particular religions that explicitly allow polygamy that the US has never legally recognized. (That’s a particularly thunderous silence in Mr. Card’s article.)

Card’s thesis seems to be that if the State’s view of marriage in legal terms does not conform to a person’s view of marriage in religious/spiritual terms, it is a proper basis for succession and/or actual revolt. This might have been a cogent argument in the time of Henry V, nowadays it doesn’t particularly wash.

Empire State Asshatery

Politicians love child porn. It is the ultimate grandstanding issue. It is an issue with effectively no opposing side, after all, if you come out "against" child porn you've implicitly cast any opposition into the role of pedophiles and child molesters. There's no downside.

Enter New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. He loves the children. And he's discovered that there's this thing called the internet and, on it is, GASP, child porn. So, like any good crimefighter, he launches a campaign to "encourage" broadband providers to "volunteer" to take actions "surgically directed" only at child pornography and "not at any protected content." Of course, this works really well, causing Time-Warner to pull 10,000 Usenet newsgroups to curb the corrupting influence of the 88 groups that the AG's office found to contain evidence of child porn.

Even better than using this as political red meat to make him look "tough" when he's "protecting the children," Mr. Cuomo has indulged in a grand New York tradition, the protection racket. Apparently the threat of painting a corporation as facilitating the distribution of child porn is a great way to generate an income stream (from C-net):

But over time, it may encourage more attorneys general to play Net censor, especially if they come to view broadband providers as compliant, off-the-books sources of revenue. This seems to be Cuomo's opinion; his press release said Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint will pay "$1.125 million to fund additional efforts by the attorney general's office and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to remove child pornography from the Internet." [my emphasis]

So Mr. Cuomo earns a trifecta; pandering to pedophile alarmists, bulldozing the free speech rights of law abiding citizens by nuking an entire internet protocol that was about 0.009% child porn, and lastly using his sleazy posturing to blackmail litigation-shy corporations to fund his own department.

A plea to parents. . .

Your kids are grown, you own your own house, and you have at least some desire not to inflict upon your children the kind of hell me, my wife, and my in-laws have been going through. I offer 10 tips to keep your house from becoming the 9th circle of hades.

1. If you patronize the Dollar Store, and find at least four bags of crap still in the wrappers with the price tags on them back home when you're putting purchases away, stop patronizing the Dollar Store.
2. If a utility bill is over ten years old, it is safe to dispose of.
3. If you've been unable to enter a closet in the past five years, nothing in that closet is particularly important, toss the stuff.
4. If you have valuable stuff you've stopped using (china, jewelry, crystal) give it to the kids and grandkids. "Promising" it to them is a cop out, and if you lose it mentally you've insured that your kids will spend more energy fighting each other than taking care of you.
5. Vacuuming is not optional, the dust bunnies should not be larger than the cat.
6. You should not end two Christmases in a row with more wrapping paper or empty boxes than you started with.
7. Televisions that do not work are not worth keeping.
8. 8-Track is a dead medium.
9. If your kids didn't take it, they probably don't want it.
10. Rule of thumb, if it's food, and the label has faded enough to be difficult to read, throw it out.
    

Places I will be at

Quick list of my upcoming convention going.

July 25-27 (this weekend) I will be attending Confluence in Pittsburgh, PA.

August 15-17 I will be at Armadillocon in Austin, Texas. (Thanks to my fellow ex-Hamster and ex-Clevelander Maureen for suggesting I come down.)

September 26-28 I will be at Context in Columbus, OH.

November 14-16 I will be at Windycon in Chicago, IL.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that I got Valentine's Night polished up, printed out, and sent off to Eleanor today. This is the second spec manuscript I've written in as many years, in addition to finishing off Prophets for DAW. Here's hoping it does as well as Lilly's Song. This means, now that I got the rewrites done on three novels, I get to start on the next book in the Apotheosis Trilogy sometime before the end of the month. This means the counters will finally start moving again.

Now, the reason I'm not starting the new book right now leads me to the bad news. . .

You see, my mother-in-law has dementia and has moved into assisted living. This is a good thing, as she is, to put it kindly, obstinate and difficult to deal with. As in there was no way we would ever get her to agree to move, we had to check her into the ER after she wandered off and have her shipped directly from the hospital to the assisted living facility the following Monday. She's royally pissed at my wife, when she's coherent, but she now gets three meals a day, social interaction, and the occasional shower.

The bad news is her house. I get to spend this weekend cleaning out a house that hasn't been vacuumed, dusted, tidied or otherwise cleaned out in nearly a decade. Parts of it are near collapse. There's mold, bugs, rats and things I don't even want to think about. I'm afraid I'm about to run out of dumpster. I'm exhausted, and I've barely started on what promises to be a very long weekend.

The way I get through crap like this? I promise myself that it will make it into a story someday.

Assimilated into the social network. . .

Nothing particularly profound, but I just created a Facebook profile. Just as with the blogging, I'm a little late to the scene, I guess after you hit 40 it just takes a lot more frigging effort to be hip.

If you want to find me, just look for Steven Swiniarski. (As my friend Maureen pointed out, there aren't many people named that.)

Scalzi points out an asshat

Because I haven't had an asshat for a while, and because this is rich in all senses of the word, I want to share a tidbit I found on Whatever.

Meet Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Yeah, those Rothschilds. The ones that are, well, kinda well off? Not that she's any small taters herself, she was worth a hundred million before she married in to the really big bucks. This is not a woman who pumps her own gas into the SUV when going to soccer practice. You will not find her shopping at Wal-Mart— hell, not even Target. This woman would have to think for a moment if, while standing in her grand foyer filled with art costing more than most people's houses, you asked her where the kitchen was. . .

This woman, a die-hard Hillary supporter, doesn't think she'll support Obama because. . .
*drumroll*
"Frankly I don’t like him. I feel like he is an elitist."

*headdesk*

Dry clean only

More randomness. . .

My spur of the moment comment on this thread over at the Smart Bitches blog may not have won the contest, but it did get a mention that probably counts as a runner up. Yeah, pointless. . . but it is fun.

Random thought for the day. . .

I drive a 12-year old Buick Century, a car that leads to certain expectations— most of which involve liver spots and driving 15 mph down the freeway with the left blinker on. Since I'm a chubby bearded guy with a ponytail, my car's sort of incongruous. (Though cheap as dirt to maintain.)

This is how incongruous. If a cop pulled me over on the way home today and made me pop the trunk, they would have discovered the following items (in no particular order.)

• a 50 pound bag of senior horse feed.
• 5 40pound bags of pelleted wood shavings.
• a couple of books on SQL 2000 implementation.
• three or four back issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
• a two ton floor jack.
• a box of polyhedral dice in a repurposed case from a Vic-20 game cartridge.
• a rulebook for the Serenity role-playing game

Hancock. . . the movie that's its own sequel.

Just saw Hancock, the latest in the current explosion of superhero movies, and I am left with the overwhelming sense of a missed opportunity. This is not to say that it's a bad movie, there are parts that are quite good. Unfortunately, right after the big reveal midway in, the film loses its way, and we go from something that could have surpassed Iron Man in awesomeness, and end with something that's just ok.

The problem is, I think, a failure of nerve on the part of the screenwriters. The first half of the film is great on just about every level. We have a story that is centered on the concept of a superhero, we have a deeply flawed character that has the physical omnipotence of Superman, and has a problem that cannot be solved by his Godlike powers. It is a perfect set-up for a good drama, and the titular character's attempt to redeem himself, both in his own eyes, and in the eyes of the public, is a powerful engine driving the movie forward. The tension in every scene is held, not by any external threat, but by the potential that Hancock could snap and do something to destroy any chance of him succeeding in becoming a worthwhile hero.

And, for some reason, the screenwriters didn't think this was enough to carry a whole film. So we have two films. The first is the character drama I describe above. The second feels like a sequel to that much better film. Where the first move goes places that most superhero movies don't get near, and actually avoids most, if not all of the clichés, the second film is pretty much the textbook boilerplate of the cheezy superhero movie. Have your hero deal with a problem originating (so to speak) with a character related to their origin, make sure they have an explicit weakness, make sure the villains show up to exploit that weakness, and somehow have the hero overcome despite being terribly weakened in power. . .

The problem with Hancock is none of the second half is foreshadowed in the first. Much of the important plot points (like his origin) are blown over way too quickly giving a serious WTF vibe to the transition. In addition, because the way the second half is compressed, there are major plot holes. (How'd the villains just happen to show up when he was vulnerable? If this certain someone knew the consequences of being in the vicinity of Hancock, why would this person remain in LA after Hancock started appearing on the news? What did Hancock do between Miami and LA?)

All those elements, and all those problems, would never have come up if they'd just stuck with the first movie. In that movie you don't really need an origin, and ignoring it would be better than the half-assed explanation we get in the second half of the movie. You don't need a designated villain or the arbitrary weakness in the first film because Hancock is his own worst enemy, and the story is about him winning over himself.

Anyway, if you go see it, see it for the first half. And if you need a bathroom break, wait until they toss the refrigerator. If you go after that, you won't be missing much.

Channeling the spirit of Rick Griffin to sell you Coke Zero

Rick Griffin was a psychedelic artist who did a lot of posters as well as underground comics, back in the day. Stuff like this:

Note the little guys in the lower right? They're kind of a motif of his.
Apparently, someone at Coke started smoking the same stuff.

Gratuitous puppy pictures

Say hello to the latest addition to the menagerie. She is a ten week old boxer puppy named Lilli. Truffles the Lab is still deciding if getting her was a good idea.

Death of a Business Model

Historically, almost every significant economic crash has been due to one factor of the human psyche, the inability to conceive of change. Not adapt to change; we’re pretty damn good at figuring things out after the fact. Beforehand? Not so much. Entire industries collapse because of the assumption that the fourth quarter will be exactly like the first, only more so. This is true even when those assumptions are based on patent absurdities.

One incredibly obvious absurdity that infects everyone from a two person tech startup to the federal government; prosperity requires indefinite growth. It’s ingrained in our psyche. But think about it. Economics is not divorced from the physical world, and in the end economics is still the organized distribution of resources. Things will always run out. Labor, energy, capital, customers, people’s attention spans, bandwidth, tax base— everything is finite. Therefore, at some point, growth must stop. The problem, of course, is because of the assumption prosperity requires growth, we’ve done everything to insure that when it does stop it becomes a massive disaster because all the systems we’ve constructed to assume growth don’t really work when growth stops. (Case in point, the design of the Social Security system, which requires a constant permanent growth in the working population in order to work.)

Now, Microsoft’s existence is based on a similar absurdity, the permanent upgrade path. The idea that software is in a continual state of improvement, and that it is a valid assumption that the end user will continue to buy the new version of an application every few years or so. Both are at odds with reality. Every technology has an endpoint, there comes a time when a system is so mature that it does what it does well enough that any future meddling actually makes things worse. I write for a living, and deal with several flavors of MS Word every day. I can say that, for my purposes, there is absolutely no functional difference in any version of Word released since 2000. It’s a damn word processor. You’re not making it any better. The OS is facing the same problem. Intel has said there’s no compelling reason for them to upgrade their 80,000 PCs to Vista. The only reason the public’s buying the OS is because it comes on new machines— a substantial number of which are being downgraded to XP. The fact that XP is “good enough” is going to become a big problem for Microsoft. They’ll continue to push new OS’s onto new PCs, but fewer people are going to bother “upgrading,” meaning that developers are going to serve a Windows market that’s more and more fractured, and therefore they will not be as likely to utilize new “features” in the OS, (if half the computers there are running XP, you’re losing half the market when you develop something that only works for Vista or Windows 7). With less software requiring the new OS, it becomes even less attractive to upgrade. And as more and more of the stuff people do with computers moves to the internet, the OS on the machine becomes irrelevant. If your browser does all of what you need, why do you need Vista?

In fact, Intel’s decision should give itself pause, because it’s based on a similar model. What happens to the tech industry when people don’t buy a new PC every three years? What happens when the five-year old PC works just fine?

This Saturday @ the Mayfield Public Library

For those interested and in the area, I will be appearing with fellow Hamster Geoff Landis this Saturday, June 28th at the Mayfield Public Library (6080 Wilson Mills Rd, Mayfield, OH) from 2:30 to 4:30. Limited space, but it's free and you can find registration info here. For those of you looking on my shiny new Wordpress blog, this is what that calendar in the upper right is all about, go ahead, click on the red date, I dare you.

Dealing with the Origin Story

I just finished an advance copy of a neat book, (I’ll blog about it later— it’s due Feb 09 from Tor, so I have time.) and it got me thinking of a common narrative problem in speculative fiction. It is perhaps most obvious in superhero movies (I alluded to it in my Iron Man review) but it’s true for a broad class of speculative fiction, and for lack of a better term I’ll call it the “Origin Story Problem.” The problem is simple, the story itself concerns some ordinary person— at least “ordinary” in the fact that the character’s original status quo doesn’t include any paranormal/speculative elements— who through some means or other comes to grips with some kind of extraordinary knowledge/powers/abilities. This is a staple of superhero movies and comics, but it’s also recognizable across the broad swath of SF/Fantasy— normal guy becomes werewolf/vampire, stumbles on alternate universe, invents a zero-point power source, goes back in time, develops telekinesis.

The “Origin Story Problem” comes from the fact that it is very easy to obsess too much about the discovery phase of the neat idea, whatever it is. It becomes tempting to spend half a book exploring all the ramifications about the black box, before realizing “hey, there needs to be a conflict here.” Then, suddenly out of nowhere, we get a whole series of new characters and plot developments to threaten our hero. The pattern is a staple of bad TV pilots.

To address the “Origin Story Problem,” and make the story seem a cohesive whole, the main conflict of the story needs to become an integral part of all the story. i.e. The vampire hunters that are threatening to stake our newly-undead heroine need to be present before page 300. Or, more broadly, the story problems resolved in the climax need to be at least implicit in the beginning of the story.

There are several ways to do this convincingly:

1. Start the main conflict before the “gosh-neato” stuff shows up. In Iron Man, Tony Stark develops the suit as an attempt to solve the problems that begin the movie.
2. The main conflict is inherent in the “origin” itself. See Stephen Kings’ Firestarter for a primer on every shadowy government experiment gone awry. See the Bourne Identity for a more low-key variation on the theme.
3. The “gosh-neato” bits directly, and quickly, cause the source of the conflict. See most one-way time-travel stories from Lest Darkness Fall to 1632.
4. The “gosh-neato” bit is actually the real status quo, dropping the protagonist into some larger over-arching conflict; learning about the cool stuff is really part of surviving in a different world. The first volume of Zelazny’s Amber series is a good example. See also Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade.

What you don’t want to happen is have a story that spends half its time with the protagonist learning and experimenting with some new toy. Readers will say, “that’s cool” for a chapter or two. Then they’ll start wondering when something is actually going to happen.

Done, really, I mean it this time

I turned in the editorial revisions for Prophets today, which means that I am officially done with it. It got a bit longer which is why all the counters moved around. Next task, is a second round of editorial edits on Lilly's Song, which are relatively minor and should only take a couple of days. Then I need to do a revision of Valentine's Night before I give it to Eleanor to shop around.

Then I'll be writing new stuff. . .

Associated Press and MediaDefender, taking IP way way way too far.

This was a week where I discovered two little tidbits that really set my blood boiling over the state of IP law in this country. In both cases we have companies using the excuse of copyright to act like Uncle Vinnie the Mob Enforcer, but without the pinky ring or sense of style.

First up, the Associated Press, in what seems to be a belated panic about news distribution over the internet, has decided to get all RIAA over the web (and, of course, the recording industry can tell you all how well that's going) and try to sue anyone who dares quote from their stories without paying license fees protection money. Apparently the threshold for AP calling out the lawyers is 79 words. Fair use anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Is this the new way to monetize the news business? Print stories and then obsessively Google phrases hoping for a Cassie Edwards with deep pockets? So what if I embed a Google news feed into my blog, am I liable for the AP stories that come up in it? Have these asswits thought any of this through? Do they know how stupid they look? Have they ever seen a web browser? I'm waiting for some blogger to sue the AP for quoting 75 words of their content without permission. Wonder how far that will go?

Second group of thuggish IP imperialists going over the line, really went over the line. As in criminal. As in, if they did this to a fortune 500 company they might be up on terrorist charges. Quick synopsis somewhat de-geeked: You have BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that, like all file sharing methods, can be used for good or ill. It is best to distribute large files such as Linux distributions, or HD movies. Enter MediaDefender, a company that uses an arsenal of techniques suited to Russian virus authors and Viagra spam merchants, whose mission statement is to prevent piracy of their clients' media. One favored technique is to flood the internet with bogus copies of pirate files. The way they do this is posing links to said fakes on torrent indexing sites. Now enter Revision3, a small internet TV station that produces video for users to download— via BitTorrent. (dun-dun-dunnn.)

Now, of course, Revision3 would offer a indexing site for their torrents, right? Sure. Now, these indexing sites can be open or closed, and for a time because of technical issues, Revision3's index was open. That meant anyone could post the location of a torrent there. It should have been closed down so the index only responded to requests for Revision3's own shows. The response of MediaDefender was not to call up the Revision3 IT staff and say, "Hey, you got an open torrent index here, you sure you want that?" No, their reaction was exactly the same as a pirate's reaction, "Hey, this index is open. I can post my own (bogus) torrents, Yea!"

Now, so far it's morally questionable, but not criminal. However, when Revision3 discovers the configuration error on their server (with no help from MediaDefender, which, as you remember, is supposed to stop this sort of thing themselves) their response is to close the index.

One would think that MediaDefender would be happy that the conduit for pirated content was shut down. Apparently they weren't happy. In fact, their servers were pissed. After being shut out of Revision3's torrent index, they promptly launched a denial of service attack on Revision3 that took the site down for Memorial Day weekend.

Let that sink in.

They launched a cyber-attack on a legitimate business because the legitimate business stopped linking to pirated torrents. This requires a Doctorate in Stupidity.

I think the AP should hire MediaDefender to protect their copyrighted content. The combined weight of arrogance, cluelessness and stupidity might just shatter the whole structure of IP law as we know it— which I am beginning to think is not a bad thing.

Metallica = Asshat

UPDATE: At least according to the band, their managers are the clueless asshats. I think they need better management.


I haven't nominated an asshat for awhile, then I came across this little tidbit. And no, this doesn't involve some sort of draconian fan-stomping over who should pay for what. In fact, it has nothing to do with pathologic reactionary grasping onto old business models past the point of obsolescence. That's old news. No, this time we are talking stupidity that can only be described as epic fail.

Shall I posit the following scenario: you're a moderately newsworthy band producing a new album. You invite a number of internet music bloggers to a private party to listen to some rough tracks off the album. No non-disclosure agreements involved. . . What do you think would happen?

Apparently it never occurred to the band in question that said bloggers might actually, you know, blog about it. I mean, who could have seen that coming? They were shocked, shocked I say! Their management responded in a restrained and level-headed manner, blanketing said bloggers with takedown notices and threats of legal action.

Dear Metallica: PR, You're doin it wrong.

Future Americas is out.

I just got my contributor copy of Future Americas, the latest anthology by John Helfers and Martin H. Greenberg. My story within, "Family Photos," which I mentioned before, is probably one of the darkest things I've ever written in any genre. Dark enough that I still half believe that I scared away most of my writer's workshop when I ran it through the Hamsters.

Shattastic

Occasionally you discover that the time is just right for something. Things just bubble up in the common consciousness, suddenly bombarding you with some concept or image that pervades the ether and suddenly you've discovered that collective humanity has crossed some cultural Rubicon and it becomes literally impossible to imagine what life was like before. For your consideration, the following two videos, #1 from my brother-in-law, #2 from SF Signal.

Sex and the City: Why the hate?

Disclaimer #1: I liked the Movie.
Disclaimer #2: I am not gay.

Now, I'm not going to claim that Sex and the City is some high water mark of American filmmaking. It is unabashedly what it is, a piece of escapist fantasy— the relationship equivalent of an action movie with sex replacing the cars blowing up and shopping montages instead of chase scenes. It hit exactly the mark it was aiming for, and I can't imagine that anyone who really enjoyed the series wouldn't enjoy the movie. I can certainly think of other TV shows that transitioned less gracefully to the big screen.

But I am seeing a lot of hate for the film, and a good portion of it seems to be because it isn't more than what it is:

From Rick Groen:

This is a pricey handbag of a movie, uncontaminated by anything so crass as substance, filled only with the perfumed air of a culture at rest – concept blissfully free of content.

And you were expecting what, exactly?

Oh yeah, about those counters

No I didn't forget about them, it's just this little old thing called revision. See, when I finish a novel and turn it into an editor, it isn't really finished. Since you all saw those counters grind to a halt I've been stuck revising Lilly's Song for Bantam, and I'm currenly revising Prophets for DAW. I will also be spending the rest of this month revising Valentine's Night before I finally hand it off to Eleanor. Then I'll be doing new stuff, working on the second Apotheosis book.

The housing market is worse than I thought

Judging by this ad at least:
It may just be me, but dancing skeletons do not fill me with the urge to refinance. They fill me with the urge to stock up on canned goods, toilet paper, duct tape and shotgun shells.

Chronologically Incorrect Storytelling

I just finished watching the anime The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi in the original broadcast order, which renders it the most non-linear TV show I've ever seen outside of Lost. Only two pairs of shows in the 14-episode series follow each other chronologically. And it works, not just on a narrative level, but thematically with the low-key but extremely surreal nature of the show.

It lead me to thinking about the nature of chronology in storytelling. It is something that beginning writers are often explicitly told not to screw around with. Everyone, I think, has been told by someone (usually they're trying to be helpful) to NEVER use a flashback. Of course, that's somewhat bogus information, akin to telling a three-year old to NEVER touch the stove. Right now they're only going to hurt themselves, but when they grow up, they'll have to cook themselves dinner.

So the whole array of frame stories, flashbacks, braided narratives can be filed under "advanced techniques, use with caution" along with dialect, second person POV, unreliable narrators, and unsympathetic protagonists. Nothing wrong with them, they're just easy to screw up.

However, both Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi show how to use the technique well. First thing, always ground your audience in space and time before commencing a narrative in a new time period. Lost does this both with a contrast in settings and a musical sting, Suzumiya Haruhi begins each episode with narration placing us in a specific time during the school year.

Another good practice, if you're flipping back and forth, is to carry narrative threads from one sequence to the next sequence that follows chronologically. In almost every Lost episode we see this happening, both the Island narrative and the Off-Island narrative move forward in time as the episode progresses, and it also spans episodes such as this year's storyline showing Jack's disintegration after he leaves the Island. With Suzumiya Haruhi the narrative (in the broadcast sequence) often jumps across an episode, where a cliffhanger will be picked up after an intervening episode that happens later or earlier, the nature of a cliffhanger helping maintain the momentum of the suspended storyline— much as US TV uses season finales to carry over a summer hiatus.

Most important, both use a non-linear chronology to build tension toward a climax. Both this season of Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi are narrative spirals, essentially circling around to a climactic event that happens, chronologically, in the middle of the narrative. This can be a very effective technique when used well, since the importance of the climax builds not only on our knowledge of what led to it, but our knowledge of its consequences.

Spammed.

NOTE: This only applies to Blogger, not Wordpress.

I just got comment-spammed, so I'm switching on the word verification in the comments.
And, BTW, if you post something with the name "winlotto" I'm probably going to delete it no matter how "nice" you say my blog is.

Up and running.

Well I've now got my shiny new blog/website up and running. I haven't officially changed sites yet, but it's going well enough to allow people to surf on over for a test drive. Stop by and let me know what you think. The url (for now) is www.sandrewswann.com/blog.

Everybody Polka

Warning: Cognitive dissonance ahead.




Continuing with the Rammstein theme, proof that the Germans and the Japanese are up to something again. . .

Blog Update

I am working hard on the new site, pulling over the Blogger entries as needed. The main time-sink in getting the thing ready is pulling over the old home-page. I didn’t realize how much content was sitting there, all of which I’m trying to integrate into the new Wordpress site. There’re at least two pages (a home page and an excerpt page) for each book, and several complicated interrelationships that require me to touch every page and iron out the links. Upside: it will help me maintain a consistent look for the whole mass of data. Downside: the whole headache of changing the URLs for an established pair of sites. That’s a mess any way you cut it. I will probably have to keep the old pages up indefinitely just to house redirects to the new site.

Along with the new site, and a new look, I will also be changing the blog’s name. There are a number of reasons for it. The site’s no longer going to be “just a blog.” It will house all the professional data you’d expect on a web-savvy author site— data on books, bibliographies, contact info for me, my agent, my publishers, upcoming appearances, books and so on, sample chapters and such, and anything else that might come up in the future. (podcasting, book trailers, who knows?) Secondly, “Off the Pink” is a very particular reference that only applies to a particular series from one of my personas, and I need a more general name that’s still reflective of my work and all my writerly personas. The name I’m pondering at the moment is “Genrewonk.” It still might change before my new web presence goes live, but I am sort of attached to it.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new site. It’s still unfinished, but I’ll start posting links to it when I think it’s reached the level of a “public beta.”

Iron Man: how to make a superhero movie right

I just saw Iron Man and, IMO it is probably one of the best superhero adaptations made since Superman. It could have gone so very, very, wrong. We have a prolonged origin story, the driven hero with personal demons, the avuncular villian we see coming a mile away, a political subtext about weapons proliferation combined with the obligatory scenes of the hero making things go boom. . . Just think of what a mess this would be if Michael Bay was involved.

First of all, while we get the inevitable superhero origin, Iron Man handles it as an integral part of the story. The origin and development of the suit is an integral part of the movie's plot, the inciting incident of Iron Man's creation is also the inciting incident of the story that is resolved with the climax. (Superman was slightly different in this respect, as it was structured like a biopic rather than an action movie.) The superhero genre has many examples of origins clumsily shoehorned into some other story, Daredevil being the most egregious example I can think of.

Second, while Tony Stark could have been played as a self-righteous emo supertwit, we get Robert Downey Jr. playing a nuanced and very credible performance. He is a reckless, self-involved playboy who has a near literal change of heart after a period of (PG-13) torture and imprisonment, but his change in attitude is believable. We clearly see that this guy is the same reckless, self-involved genius he was before. Just he's now going to fix the problem.

Third, the politics. Dicey thing, especially in an action/superhero move, to tackle things like weapons proliferation (Case in point, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace). When the main character starts blowing things up, he can lose some credibility on those points. Iron Man actually is smart enough to take a pragmatic view. Tony Stark is not against weapons, just weapons in the wrong people's hands. He is quite content to deploy flame throwers, missiles and any other ordinance at the bad guys. Agree or disagree, it is perfectly consistent with his character. Especially when he takes the idea of non-proliferation to the logical extreme, he's the only one who gets the suit.

Combine that with the fact the writers could pull off wry humor without losing respect for the characters, they treated the material seriously but not so much to give off any weird übergeek vibes, and while they stepped in the occasional cliché, they didn't track it all over the carpet.

All in all, this movie is made of win.

Apparently the books I sent to Iraq were a waste. . .

At least according to our latest asshat, none other than Stephen King. I’ve never thought of him as having a big mouth, but apparently it is just large enough to hold a foot. Quoth King:

I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.

Ok, politics aside, I think even the most rabid Michael Moore liberal would agree that metaphorically going to Walter Reed and telling the people there, “you’d still have your legs if you were smart like lil ol novelist me,” is in really bad taste. Don’t expect King to sign books at your local VFW hall any time soon.

(Also, does the Army even accept applications from people who aren’t reading English at a high school level?)

via Terry Ann Online

Changes afoot

If I seem to be blogging a bit less, it isn't because I've stopped playing with my blog. I have finally decided to take the plunge and get my own web host. The good news is that Wordpress imports from Blogger pretty damn slick, and with a few judicious configuration changed to the permalink format, and a little SQL scripting to change the domain for my extensive self-linkage, and about 90% of my blog ports over without an issue. The main hurdle to going live is porting over all the content from my home page over at sff.net which sort of evolved over the past decade or so and therefore doesn't have the most intuitive layout (and certainly wasn't designed with a package like Wordpress in mind.)

Changing domains will be something of a pain, but since both this blog and the sff.net site are free for me, there's no reason for me not to keep redirects up indefinitely.

I will keep you all updated.

People who should know better

As the whole Cassie Edwards story pointed out, it is hard to be a plagiarist these days. Anyone with just a little suspicion can use the internet to correctly attribute just about anything, so it is a stupid, stupid, thing to do. The kind of thing you really only expect from people who never had the proper academic grounding, or a good English teacher flunking them for appropriating someone's words. . .

Then again, if your English teacher was James Twitchell, I expect that flunking his students for plagiarism was not all that high on his priority list. Seems he's owned up to plagiarizing sections of his book for Simon & Schuster, Shopping for God. (via GalleyCat)

In his own words (we hope):

It's my responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas are my own and, if not, that they are properly credited. In many cases, I have not done this. [...] I have used the words of others and not properly attributed them. I am always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points, a hurry that has now rightly resulted in much shame and embarrassment. I have cheated by using pieces of descriptions written by others.

Which is a fine mea culpa, except when you consider he's been publishing since 1995 and initially blamed the lifting in the latest book on sloppy research even as earlier incidences in prior books came to light. Where have we heard that one before?

Latest videos I have found

Mixed bag today. This one is from the Smart Bitches, and is entitled the "Engineers Guide to Cats."




Of course, that was nowhere near strange or disturbing enough to live up to some of the stuff I've posted before, so I will follow that up with some seriously WTF nightmare fuel. (From the Agony Booth) Bear in mind, you have been warned:

Dostum Yealer
by DJ_FX

If you survived that, I beg of you, not to watch this (from the same thread as above):

We have a title!

My existential title crisis is over!

And and the winner is: *drumroll*

Lilly's Song

Now we just need to decide if it's "A Wolfbreed Novel" or "A Novel of the Wolfbreed"

Twinkle twinkle little star

ADDENDUM: Charlie Stross gets in on the act.

God do I love Scalzi's posts sometimes. Before I get into details, I should point out the origin of this meme in the actions of one asshat extrordinaire, Deborah MacGillivray who engaged in gaming the Amazon.com review system, mobilizing internet stormtroopers to vote down and report negative reviews as abuse and, in the height of insanity, precipitated a pile-on victimizing a single poor reviewer who complained about her tactics, to the tune of collecting personal information, making threats and generally behaving like a stalker a few pages short of a copy of Catcher in the Rye. Punchline? The reviewer so abused had dared to post a three-star review.

Scalzi's response to this insanity seemed highly appropriate and psychologically healthy. He posted a selection of his own one-star reviews, and provided the following challenge:

[...] [T]o other authors with blogs, LiveJournals and etc: Post your one-star (or otherwise negative) Amazon reviews, if you have them, and you probably do. Oh, go on. Own your one-star reviews, man. And then, you know. Get past them. If you’re lucky, some of them might actually be fun to read.

So, in solidarity with all sane authors who don't hire a PI or a hitman when someone trashes their baby, I hereby present— free of hand-wringing, teeth gnashing or snarky commentary— a selection of my less than stellar Amazon reviews:

Dragons of the Cuyahoga

It's a mystery with any real conclusions. It moves from accusations of one group to accusations of another. The conclusion of the book is not supported by any facts in the story. It was merely conclusions that could have been taken any number of ways.

The authors writing left something to be desired. The use of big words added nothing to the story and did nothing but slow me down. It was as if the author was trying to show off his intelligence.

The use of profanity was unnecessary. The use of profanity by characters added nothing to the character development. There was no point to having it in the book.

Finally the book has very little to do with dragons. The first dragon dies in the prologue and the only other dragon in the story adds nothing to the story line. The title of the book is misleading.

Forests of the Night

It's sad to be excited about a book beacause of all the good reviews here on Amazon, and then to find it is filled with racial stereotypes. I suppose this book is fine for people of European descent, but people of color like myself might be put off by the use racial slurs like "Japs" and "wetbacks" which are used by the main character. Am I supposed to like this character? The dipiction of black people also left me saddened. This book wasn't written in the 50's, was it? And here I thought he was going to be using the concept of the moreau as a critique of rasicism as opposed to more of the same old, same old.

Teek

This book is not a new concept. Stephen King and Dean Koontz have written about telekinesis and evil organizations attempting to control and experiment upon those with telekinesis before. It's not a crime not to start out with an original concept: authors do it all the time. But what Krane failed to do was to provide an original slant and original characters. I couldn't look at any of the characters and think of someone they reminded me of or that one of them might be someone I'd like to meet. They weren't believable. Especially not Chuck. What teenager talks like that? He was full of annoying anachronisms.

Omega Game

This is one of the worst books I've ever read. Very difficult for the reader to keep track of the twenty-odd characters in "The Game." The characterizations are poor and no reason is given for the reader to care about these people. The plot is so tenuous and obscure that it is an effort to maintain interest. By the time you find out what has been happening and why - you just don't give a d---. This writer knows very little about writing - at least in this genre - and I will not read anything else he writes. Save your time and money. If I could have rated it lower than one star, I would have.

Why DRM sucks

I am a writer, that means I make money off of my intellectual property.

This does not mean I like digital rights management in any way, shape, or form. Here is an object lesson why. I don’t even blame Microsoft for giving the finger to all their former MSN Music customers, because tying rights to a user’s hardware is an inherently untenable model. With any DRM scheme, you are telling the end user “buy content, buy content, buy content” at the same time saying, “but we’ll have to shitcan all the content when the hardware changes, we sell the company, or go bankrupt.” Do we want a world where a publisher can go under and people have legitimately owned content that just expires? Of course, the bean counters like the idea of the user buying it all over again, but how many users will tolerate that? Who's willing to gamble their entire library on the chance that Kindle 2.0 won’t be backward compatible?

The economic goal here is not to squeeze the end user, it’s to make sure the content creator gets paid enough to continue creating the content. Metallica and Haraln Ellison may bitch and moan about their audience “stealing” their work, but unless they’re at the point they're selling stuff out of their trunk, the end user ain’t who’s signing their checks, and books and CDs ain’t what they’re selling. They (and I, and most creative types) are selling the right to publish our creation to some other entity. As long as that entity makes money on the transaction, they will continue to buy Metallica’s songs and Mr. Ellison’s books. Royalties are just a mechanism of profit-sharing that’s essentially arbitrary— most writers get an advance against those royalties that’s negotiated as high as possible to get as much money as possible up front. So, ideally, you get paid a lump that hits a sweet spot that exceeds all the future royalties by just enough not to eat into the publisher’s profits so much they don’t want to buy the next book. DRM exists as an attempt to preserve the current economic model, not to serve the ultimate goal of that model. The goal is to make money on content, not to force people to pay for content, a subtle, but profound difference.

Frankly, if a publisher of mine can figure out how to turn a larger profit on my books by giving them away, assuming I share in that profit somehow, I’m ok with that.

The internet is a stupid place

I just caught two rather synchronous internet implosions in rather quick succession. Both are object lessons in how the internet doesn't care what you really meant. The one implosion happened from a post on Tess Gerritsen's blog that inspired a incredulous response on the Dear Author blog. Which is sort of where it should have ended, but the internet said "flame on" and it ended with a lot of ill will and hurt feelings. The other implosion is a little less sad, and more WTF. Apparently, feminists do not appreciate "Open Source Boobs" while Scalzi stands back and protects his personal space.

It strikes me that the victims both of these situations could have benefited from internalizing the following maxim: "The Internet has no context." People will be offended, they will respond, and rarely, if ever, will you get a chance to explain the joke before it gets blown all out of proportion.

The NY Times covers election issues of substance

And then they cover this. (via Scalzi)

You know, I'm enough of a geek to actually be interested in fonts in and of themselves. But tying them into campaign coverage gives me a hefty dose of WTF.

And I give the irregular-weekly asshat award to Seymour Chwast who managed to turn font aesthetics into a partisan smackdown:

Optima is one of the worst pre-computer typefaces ever designed. It was created to satisfy everybody’s needs. A straightforward, no-nonsense, no-embellishment face, it comes in regular and bold but little character can be found in either weight.

Optima is not inappropriate for use by Senator McCain.

That's one thing to call it

"Irreconcilable editorial differences."

That's the word as Signet and Cassie Edwards part ways.

Thanks to the Smart Bitches for the tip. (Or, if you're the AP, the Smart B------)

First lines

I wrote an earlier post about starting a story off, and today (via Lynn Viehl's blog) I discovered the One Sentence website that "is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials." In other words, one sentence long short stories. The site is like literary crack, but I think it offers more than extreme ADD story fixes. Most all the sentences published share an interesting thing in common, they would make excellent hooks for a longer work. Now, don't go swiping anyone's sentence without permission, but if you look at the site, it seems that thinking in terms of "story in one sentence" is an excellent way to begin. Go there and see if you wouldn't be interested in continuing reading if these had a second sentence. . . or a hundredth.

Google knows where you live

Well, I might be behind the curve here, but I didn't realize how deeply Google had been stepping up to contribute to ultimate universal omniscience. Last I paid attention to their "street view" feature it was still in beta, then today I was playing around with it and noticed they got most of Cleveland mapped out. Above is the house where I spent a good part of my adolescence, below is the house I owned before my current residence. While my current house is visible in the satellite view at high enough resolution to see a red Ford F150, it hasn't made it into the street view yet. While this is great as a writer (the last chase scene I wrote was done with the help of the overhead satellite imagery) it is sort of creepy having the world as first-person shooter. . .

The things you don't see until someone points it out.

Just saw an interesting post on The Feminist SF Blog that draws attention to one of those little cultural blind spots that are really useful in worldbuilding. You know, the kind of thing everyone takes for granted, so when they read about another culture (real or fictional) that does it differently they're all like "whoa."

In this particular case, it starts off by noting that female reproductive parts et al. tend to be named after male doctors, scientists and so on. It got me thinking less about the patriarchy of it all (since, one presumes, as gender becomes more equitably represented in the sciences, the number of female eponyms will likewise increase) but about the narcissism of it all. The fact that science is rife with terms originating with individual people seems an interesting quirk, and it would imply something very "other" about a society that doesn't do so.

The government can't even pander to me correctly.

Economic stimulus, YEA!

But, please note the oddity in the following scenario:

I do my taxes, and per usual, am cutting the Government a honking big check. So we're in the position of sending them about $2500 (over and above what we've given them to date) so they can give us $1200. Can someone please tell me why these dipwads at the IRS could not include a little box on the 1040 that said "please debit my rebate bribe from my current tax due the amount you're already extorting from me."

This gives me the same WTF headache I get when I hear anyone talking about taxing any government benefit. (Here's a thought, just hand out that much less and the net effect is the same, and you cut down on paperwork and bureaucracy. . .)

So they force me to give them money when they'll just hand it back to me. Well, that stimulus is going right back in August's estimated tax payment. That'll show them.

Meatloaf again?

My wife inflicted this upon me against my will, and to purge the damage this has inflicted on my soul, I inflict it upon everyone else. If you are of my generation, this will surely hurt you in your brain. . .

No Intelligence Allowed (I'll say)

You may have heard about the move Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which apparently exposes the vast conspiracy of the scientific establishment to keep "Intelligent Design" from being taught in science classes alongside Evolution. This is sort of like the Yankees making a movie bemoaning the NFL's conspiracy to keep them out of the Superbowl. They're playing different games, and Ben Stein really should know better. But then, even Fox News thinks he's gone a little loopy for co-writing this thing.

A lot of the other contributors to the film at least have the excuse of having been lied to by the producers, producers who then banned some (but not all) of those same people from a pre-screening of the film. (Come on, you filmed the guy and didn't expect him to try and see the movie? WTF you smoking?)

Worse for ID proponents, the film commits a classic blunder and wastes little time in invoking Godwin's Law. . .

From Fox News:

The whole idea of Stein, a Jew, jumping on the intelligent design bandwagon of the theory of evolution begetting the Nazis is so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God’s name — he was thinking when he got into this.

From Richard Dawkins' review:

The alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what seems like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage [...] Stein has no talent for comedy [but] his attempt to do tragedy is even worse. He visits Dachau and, when informed by the guide that lots of Jews had been killed there, he buries his face in his hands as though this is the first time he has heard of it. Obviously it was not his intention, but I thought his rotten acting was an insult to the memory of the victims.

It is truly hard to believe that people making such pathetic arguments actually believe in their subject matter. In fact, given the rampant lying and deliberate re-editing of interviewees, I can't help but think Mark Mathis is in the midst of some elaborate scheme to siphon money from gullible creationists or engineer an elaborate tax dodge. Or, perhaps this case of epic fail is itself a pro-Darwinist conspiracy designed to make Intelligent Design proponents look like raving loons.

ADDENDUM: A link to show there are people who actually get the point.

Taking a breather/Title juggling

Well, since I finished up the Wolfbreed rewrite, I haven't done much writing. I guess I just needed to rest the old story muscle for a bit. Also, the next thing I'm working on is Heretic, the second book in the Apotheosis Trilogy. This means going straight from a rewrite of a medieval historical dark fantasy-cum-romance into a full-blown post-singular space opera. If I didn't take a bit of a break, I'd probably pull something from the cognitive whiplash. I plan to get going on that next week, but in the meantime I've been playing with the Title Scorer on Lulu.com.

As any reader of this blog knows, I've been racking my brain for a title for Wolfbreed #1 now that we've decided that will be a series title. I have been playing with titles (most of which suck) and now I have at lest some objective measure of how "good" they are.

Here's some examples with prospective titles I've been kicking around:

• Should any Nightmares Come scores 59.3% (phrase comes from the book, but Bantam nixed it as too horrory)
• What the Darkness Brings scores 63.7% (from the same place, a lullaby I wrote for the book, probably still too horrory)
• Lilly's Song scores 76.9% (Lilly is the heroine's name, and again it refers to the lullaby.)
• Black Cross, Crimson Heart scores 69% (A pattern that I'm playing several variants of, "Black Cross" being a reference to the Teutonic Order.)

No, really, we're serious...

When did it become acceptable to blatantly lie in internet ads? Are we just so desensitized from all the Nigerian Viagra Lotteries that it just washes over us? Is it a default assumption now that all banner ads are written by Russian script-kiddies playing with an exploit they found for unpatched versions of IE5? You expect this kind of crap when you're surfing porn, but guess where this showed up?

My SBCglobal/Yahoo! email account!

I know Microsoft is making noises about buying them out, but are they really that hard up for cash? And to the folks that created this ad: I must say, great job, very cutting-edge of you to avoid all that tired business of letting people know what you're selling. . . I also like the little reverse psychology here: "Hey, let's make it look so much like a scam people will think it can't possibly actually be a scam." Also, nice way to avoid litigation by placing a button "click here to claim" without mentioning what it is the customer patsy is "claiming."

These guys also don't seem all too interested in repeat business. I know the eighth or ninth time I was the 10,000th visitor to my own e-mail account, I started having a little suspicion that maybe it wasn't quite accurate.

Oh, and final thought, if the first line of your ad copy is "This is not a joke," it is probably time to re-think your business model.

Rewrite Done

Well, I've gotten through most of the editorial rewrite of Wolfbreed #1 (Yeah, I know, but I just e-mailed Anne a bunch of title ideas) and I'm going to go over copy-editing type stuff this weekend and hopefully send out the final draft to her and Eleanor by Monday. Most all the changes were due to genre considerations. I was fortunately expecting this, as I didn't really know what genre I was writing until I finished the book. It was a horror/fantasy/historical/romance mashup, and the final rewrite was toning down a little (ok a lot) of the horror, and ramping up the romance. 90% of this was all a matter of tone and emphasis, the only events in the novel that changed were the ending and some additional scenes of backstory. Most of what I did was crank the viscera meter down from 11. (Actual critique quote from draft 1.5: "You have quite a dismemberment theme going here.")

Well that's inappropriate.

The following clip raped my childhood (NWS audio)



This one probably rapes some poor Brit's childhood. (Again NWS audio.)



This one just rapes you. (Work safe, but not sanity safe.)



Blame the Agony Booth, not me.

In case you're wondering

Now that I finished the unscheduled spec novel (the first draft anyway) I am now in the throes of doing an editorial rewrite on Wolfbreed #1 (did I mention I need titles?) which will probably take me through mid-April (tax day, wheee). After that's done the plan is now to attack the second book of Apotheosis, and then Wolfbreed #2 (Did I mention, yeah, I think I did.) and then finish off Apotheosis.

Since what I laid out there is about 18 months work, and a lot can happen in a year and a half, this probably only has a marginal relation to reality. But the upshot is, I'm in re-write land, so we won't have any counters moving for a month or so.

Happy Easter

Hitting the ground running

The first line is always a bitch. Every story needs a hook to draw the reader into it, and your primary tool is those first few words on the first page. Intimidating to think that the entire weight of thousands and thousands of words can be sitting on the shoulders of, at most, a few dozen. Now there are no rues about openings, and there are as many ways to begin as there are novels. My own personal impulse is to compress as many story elements as I can into the first couple of sentences. I want a character doing something, a setting, a sense of conflict or some problem the character is dealing with, some emotion, and a feeling of the tone of the piece. Yes, that's asking a lot of a sentence or two, but it can be done. Here's the first paragraph of Valentine's Night:

“Happy birthday to me,” Toni muttered, toasting the empty chair across from her. She drained the remnants of her cosmopolitan and set the cocktail glass clinking next to a pair of its older, deceased siblings.

Two sentences, 35 words, and you are already in the story. In the first sentence we have a protagonist, a sense of her personality, her mood, and situation. We're already starting to sympathize with her, we can all identify with being stood up. And her birthday? We already suspect that it's a landmark birthday (18,21,30,40. . .) because we open with it and Toni obviously feels it's important. The second sentence establishes the setting almost subliminally. Because there's more than one glass, she's as a restaurant or a bar being served drinks. Since the prior sentence had a chair across from her, she's probably at a table at a restaurant— or at least a bar that serves food. She's on her third Cosmo, so we know that she's been waiting a while for someone to fill the seat across from her.

Other things we can infer from this micro-scene: It's a contemporary story; cosmopolitans are a recent invention in the cocktail world, being invented in the mid-eighties and gaining popularity in the 1990s. Toni's a relatively young adult; birthdays are important, she's ordering trendy drinks, and we strongly suspect she's waiting for a date. We also suspect that it's a dinner date, since most people don't down three Cosmos for lunch. If it turns out to be lunch, we'll probably downgrade our estimate of Toni's age and/or maturity level. (It turns out to be dinner, and Toni's hitting the big 3-0.)

A lot of this condensed scene-setting/exposition comes from writing a lot of SF. It is the mundane equivalent to the famous Heinlien line, "the door dilated." Just as every word in the English language has connotations beyond its literal meaning ( a "book" is not quite a "tome") every detail included in a story (especially the opening) carries with it an implied back-story.

Unrepentant self-satisfaction

A couple of woo-hoos:

First off, Anne at Bantam has given the ok to the outline I submitted for Wolfbreed #2 (titles, I need titles.) which means that I can go ahead with it as soon as I get the next DAW book out of the way. Second off, we are retiring the Valentine's Night counter, since I've just wrapped up the first draft.

This is shaping up to be my most productive year writing since 1992, when I started doing this professionally. About exactly a year ago, I started writing Wolfbreed #1. I've since finished the novel, landed one helluva agent, found a new publisher, finished the first volume of the Apotheosis Trilogy for DAW, and now I've wrapped up the first draft of a third novel outside of any contractual commitments.

Busy as I seem to be, my goal of finishing volume 2 for both Wolfbreed and the Apotheosis Trilogy in the next 12 months doesn't seem particularly daunting. Yea me.

Spam followup

Well, the annoying spam-meisters who've been peppering me with ads for self-published books have ended up on the radar of Writer Beware.

I should point out that if your publicist spammer includes in their subscriber list harvested emails someone who works to publicize nasty scams that target neophyte authors (i.e. things like charging to spam your book to people) implies that they do not pay much attention to who they happen to send your promotional materials to spam.

But here is it in Victoria Strauss' own words:

Here's why you should not E-blast me (or use any other kind of mass email campaign, such as those offered by some self-publishing services).

- It pisses me off. I'm always happy to consider a request to review--but I want you to approach me personally. I want you to be at least somewhat familiar with my reviews, and to have a credible reason to think I might be interested in your book. I do NOT want to get an email that says "Dear Reviewer," or an E-blast that has no content other than a link I have to click, or a request for a review that's obviously inappropriate for the magazines I write for.

[...]

- I didn't give anyone permission to E-blast me. If you think that services like Eblast are subscription-based, think again--these services build their lists by harvesting email addresses off the Internet, just as other spammers do. As far as I'm concerned, there's no difference between your book E-blast and a penis enhancement spam.

- Did your E-blast campaign include me? Shit. Now I'm on a dozen other lists, and I'm getting E-blasts for beach rentals and consumer goods. Before, I was only irritated with you. Now, I hate you.

It's also interesting who Media eBlast includes among their clientèle. Apparently they're as picky about their clients as they are about the people they eBlast spam.