Off The Pink

Forever Old Man's Starship Troopers

2008-08-18T18:02:00.005-04:00

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.

2008-08-07T17:58:00.002-04:00

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

2008-08-06T16:55:00.001-04:00

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

2008-08-04T21:05:00.002-04:00

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

2008-08-01T07:46:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-28T19:20:00.002-04:00

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. . .

2008-07-24T22:29:00.005-04:00

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.

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.
If a utility bill is over ten years old, it is safe to dispose of.
If you've been unable to enter a closet in the past five years, nothing in that closet is particularly important, toss the stuff.
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.
Vacuuming is not optional, the dust bunnies should not be larger than the cat.
You should not end two Christmases in a row with more wrapping paper or empty boxes than you started with.
Televisions that do not work are not worth keeping.
8-Track is a dead medium.
If your kids didn't take it, they probably don't want it.
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

2008-07-22T20:53:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-18T22:20:00.003-04:00

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. . .

2008-07-17T12:00:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-11T07:56:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-09T12:41:00.002-04:00

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. . .

2008-07-07T20:45:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-07-06T18:41:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-05T00:06:00.005-04:00

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

2008-07-03T21:22:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-28T10:56:00.004-04:00

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

2008-06-26T19:24:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-26T13:14:00.002-04:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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

2008-06-19T21:54:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-06-17T12:45:00.006-04:00

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

2008-06-11T21:10:00.004-04:00

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.

2008-06-10T18:48:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-09T20:23:00.002-04:00

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?

2008-06-05T07:47:00.004-04:00

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

2008-06-03T12:10:00.003-04:00

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

2008-05-31T14:23:00.002-04:00

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

2008-05-27T18:13:00.005-04:00

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.

2008-05-22T15:20:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-05-18T19:54:00.003-04:00

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

2008-05-16T12:40:00.004-04:00

Warning: Cognitive dissonance ahead.

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

Blog Update

2008-05-12T12:03:00.001-04:00

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

2008-05-08T18:15:00.006-04:00

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. . .

2008-05-06T12:01:00.001-04:00

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

2008-05-05T22:37:00.002-04:00

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

2008-04-28T19:44:00.004-04:00

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

2008-04-26T22:00:00.004-04:00

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!

2008-04-25T17:46:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-24T19:25:00.009-04:00

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

2008-04-24T12:10:00.004-04:00

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

2008-04-23T21:23:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-22T13:03:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-19T19:45:00.003-04:00

"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

2008-04-19T09:22:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-18T19:25:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-04-18T13:59:00.004-04:00

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.

2008-04-14T12:39:00.008-04:00

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?

2008-04-12T21:58:00.002-04:00

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)

2008-04-11T18:21:00.009-04:00

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

2008-04-09T17:38:00.004-04:00

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...

2008-04-05T08:46:00.006-04:00

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

2008-04-04T20:09:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-03-28T22:16:00.005-04:00

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

2008-03-26T07:37:00.002-04:00

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

2008-03-23T15:41:00.000-04:00

Hitting the ground running

2008-03-22T07:43:00.005-04:00

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

2008-03-20T20:16:00.006-04:00

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

2008-03-19T18:00:00.008-04:00

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.

3 things No Country For Old Men can tell us about storytelling

2008-03-13T20:04:00.006-04:00

A thread on the Agony Booth got me thinking of this movie again (see, they don't just talk about crappy film there) and like Lost, it is unconventionally structured which in some ways highlights some of the storytelling mechanics. So I thought I'd come up with another list (which may be spoilery.)

1) Any time you set out to illustrate a theme, it should be both simple and readily illustrated by the majority, if not all the scenes in the work. No Country does this in spades. The theme is pretty much, "The world is random, violent place, and men cannot control it." Every scene in the film feeds back to this idea, from Tommy Lee Jones' monologues, to the penultimate scene where the ruthless assassin who's driven most (but nowhere near all) of the violence is the victim of a completely random, and very nasty, accident.

2) Follow the action. Find a way to show the interesting things that happen in the story even if the nominal "protagonist" is not present for them. In No Country, by most academic definitions, Tommy Lee Jones is probably the main character, since he is the one who has a character arc. However, like The Great Gatsby, our protagonist has an internal low key struggle while most of the "action" happens without him.

3) Clichés can be great tools for misdirection. While it is generally good practice to, as they say, avoid clichés like the plague, they can be a tool like any other narrative element. If you introduce half a clichéd situation, there's a built-in expectation that, as they say, the other shoe will drop. If you instead drop a brick, you surprise the audience. The whole plotline of No Country can be thought of as being built on this premise. The whole film is constructed of cliché genre set-ups that resolve in ways other than expected. From the large, having the climatic gunfight happen off-screen with the "wrong" guy losing, to the small, the whole business with the coin flip. I bet the second flip didn't end how dozens of action films led you to expect.

Sir, please back away from the sex scandal

2008-03-12T07:44:00.003-04:00

Ok, there are some internet folks out there that need a whopping cluebat of perspective. May I please provide your clue:

Sexual solicitation is a non-partisan activity
Spending $20 bucks for a blow job in an airport bathroom my be sleazier than buying the service of a $5000 call girl in a luxury hotel, but is on the same moral plane (unless you're wincing at the gay sex, but that's another post.)

Here we go again

2008-03-07T20:59:00.004-05:00

Like I mentioned with Wolfbreed #1 some time ago, there's a point in every novel I've written where I feel like, "OMG what kind of garbage am I writing here?" It always happens in the last third of the book. I hit a wall where I feel everything I've written is total shit and I have to slog my way through the next few scenes no matter how excited I am about the project. However, I must still be growing as a writer, because I've just made two discoveries about this phenomenon.

First, this did not happen with Prophets, and I think it must be related to the fact that it is the first book in a trilogy, and really is only the first third of a narrative and not a stand-alone book.

Second, and more important, in today's "slog," I discovered a way to short-circuit the process. I skipped back into the first third of Valentine's Night and added a new scene retroconning a plot point I realized I needed for the ending. Turns out that, while it wasn't my intent, adding the scene (where my vampire RN heroine gets to set her own compound fracture in a wrecked police car) managed to re-ignite the enthusiasm that made me launch the project in the first place. Now I'm back to being excited about attacking it this weekend. Got to remember this for the next novel, it'd save me some angst.

On an unrelated note, I got notes back from Anne for Wolfbreed #1 (still need titles), and with them I have the first word on when it will see print. As of right now, we're looking at Summer 2009. Mark your calender.

Please explain this

2008-03-07T18:45:00.001-05:00

I just saw a guy wearing a snowsuit that was hunter orange camouflage.

What's the point?

And, apparently I'm writing porn

2008-03-05T20:43:00.003-05:00

No, don't get too excited. But, in regards to my last weekly asshat's asshattery, an apparently otherwise intelligent blogger, in posting her own rebuttal, suffered an extreme case of foot-in-mouth disease:

[...] romance novels [...] are not "books", as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold.

Hoo-boy, is that a stupid comment. And in the ever-widening comment thread that followed, the author is thoroughly and repeatedly trounced for it, and seems quite befuddled at the strong response it engendered.

However, what amuses me that if Bantam follows through on bringing Wolfbreed #1 (still need titles) out under the paranormal romance umbrella, then by this light, in addition to doing a historical, a fantasy, a romance, and a horror novel, I've also written porn. Wow. Two sex scenes in a 100,000 word novel go a long way.

This week's asshat

2008-03-02T16:48:00.005-05:00

Introducing Charlotte Allen, from the Washington Post. Before I deconstruct her rampant idiocy, let me allow her to spew a few of her own words:

The theory that women are the dumber sex [...] is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

Do I need to point out that someone who starts a paragraph with "women are the dumber sex" and ends up "the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average" has not thought through her premise. Also, using cultural artifacts like Oprah, Grey's Anatomy, and Chick Lit to prove her thesis amounts to a tautology based solely on her own stupid tastes. ("I think this art is stupid. Women like this art. Women are stupid, QED.")

And god help us, pointing out that Hillary Clinton has run a bad campaign is NOT a example of gender stupidity. Good lord, a presidential candidate is going to be a statistical outlier from any population. Aside from that, does this woman actually think the candidates run their own campaigns? They actually hire people to do that.

The author herself is the best argument for her thesis, and a weak one at that.

From the department of mixed messages. . .

2008-03-01T17:39:00.003-05:00

This is an actual assault rifle. As in, it shoots real bullets. This is so wrong, and yet so cool. (Read more here.) I wonder if fellow hamster Marie might want one.

More on Query Letters

2008-02-25T18:15:00.004-05:00

Still a-novelling, so my blogging is minimal, but I thought I'd post link to some deconstructions of good query letters (query 1, query 2) posted some time ago by Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown Ltd. both showing impressive examples of what a good query should look like. The more examples I see, the more I wonder how my first query landed me an agent. (thx to La Gringa)

Pop culture implosion

2008-02-23T20:55:00.004-05:00

This pic from io9 has to be a sign of the apocalypse, or something.

Moving the Goalposts

2008-02-22T17:58:00.004-05:00

Blogging is taking a back seat to the new novel (30K+ yea me!) And yes, I bumped up the total wordage of Valentine's Night, the spec novel I'm working on while waiting to hear back from Anne. Two reasons.

I have trouble writing short, and I don't feel I'm that close to the halfway point.
I can.

Another week, another asshat. . .

2008-02-19T12:20:00.009-05:00

Presented for your consideration, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of California. Whose attitude toward the free flow of information on teh interwebz seems cribbed from North Korea. Apparently a swiss bank is somewhat miffed at Wikileaks.org a website organized by a bunch of journalists and other activists whose primary mission is to give an anonymous platform for publicizing documents showing governmental and corporate wrongdoing in situations where the "leaker" would suffer serious reprisals. (i.e. it targets a lot of nasty regimes that could, for instance, kill you for blabbing embarrassing facts.)

So what happens when lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer, file for an injunction to suppress the site's publication of several documents posted on the site allegedly revealing the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion? Why, the judge issues a permanent injunction shutting down the whole effing site, with only a couple hours notice to the sites' owner.

Now, within a few hours, someone must have pointed out to Judge White that he was not, in fact, issuing internet rulings in mainland China, and his injunction might be viewed as a tad extreme, because the permanent injunction was clarified with a temporary injunction focusing only on the documents in question.

Way to uphold the bastion of freedom. Nice to know that any tin-pot regime and corporate scumbag can get a web-site sanitized just by filing suit in California.

(But actually not, since no one can take back electrons. The site is mirrored up the wazoo all over the world, meaning the injunction is pointless and ineffective in addition to being draconian.)

We just keep rolling along

2008-02-18T11:09:00.004-05:00

Well my latest spec project is still rolling along quickly, quickly enough that if Anne continues being overworked at Bantam, I might get the whole thing done before I have to do any editorial revisions on Wolfbreed #1 (titles, I need titles). I started it a week and a half ago, and I have 23K words. The good news is, unlike Wolfbreed I do not anticipate going back and completely revising everything halfway in. (Of course, I just jinxed myself, as I didn't have any plans like that for Wolfbreed at this point.)

For those curious, I have returned to vampires. However this is going to be unrelated to the pair of Blood & Rust novels. I'm trying my hand at an intentional paranormal romance. One that kicks most of the late 20th Century's contribution to the vampire mythos to the curb. No blood-drinking cabals conspiring in the darkness, no angsty goth heroes, and no supernatural vampire hunters of whatever dynasty.

Holy acid flashback, Batman!

2008-02-16T22:19:00.005-05:00

No, I can't explain it. (blame the Smart Bitches)

If that didn't weird you out, maybe you want to watch this.
Or not. (Blame Mrs.Giggles)

Coping with the day job

2008-02-14T07:23:00.001-05:00

Reading Scalzi’s great posts on making a living as a writer got me to thinking about the worst piece of career advice I ever got:

“Take some brainless low-paying job just to make ends meet so you can devote all your creative energy to work on your writing.”

Do me a favor, next time someone utters this, or something similar, to you, slap them. Hard.

The people making this asinine comment are either justifying their slacker attitude at their 7-11 gig, or are just in love with the image of the artist struggling for their art.

Bullshit.

First off, if you undervalue yourself for a third of every day, you’re going to undervalue yourself as a writer. Also, nothing saps writing energy as much as stress about money, food and shelter. Dreading waking up to go to the daily grind will not make you excited or give you more energy for the writing. Also, if you’re placed in the position of relying too much on a low income writing (voice of experience here) you can severely sabotage your writing career. If you have a decent income at a decent job, one you enjoy, you are in a much better position to see the merits of any offers that do come in.

Say someone offers you two grand for world rights and a film option on your 150,000 word epic fantasy. It’s a lot harder to say "no" to a horrid offer like that if your paychecks come from Burger King, rather than Google. (See prior comment about undervaluing yourself.)

You want to be a successful writer? Get a day job you like and that you’re good at. The worst that could happen is that you’re a bigger success at that. So what? If you make more money in IT, or sales, or real estate, than you do with your novel, it doesn’t make you a lesser writer.

To paraphrase General Patton, “Your job isn’t to suffer for your art. It’s to make the other guy suffer for his.” Or, ah, something like that.

Tomorrow's economy.

2008-02-13T07:59:00.001-05:00

I've gone on at length about the replicator economy, what will happen to commerce as the cost of "stuff" goes to zero and the ability to copy anything becomes ubiquitous. Understanding the implications of this is going to make the difference between success and failure for whole industries. It also will help in drafting a post-Singularity tale that has logical economics. Well, I came across an absolutely magnificent article by Kevin Kelly on The Technium on exactly what you can sell when copies (of everything) are free. The premise is simple: if copies are ubiquitous, copies are worthless, so we trade in what cannot be copied. Think about that long enough, and you can leverage yourself out of the 19th century widget box much of the western world is still trapped in, and achieve, zen -like, an economy independent of things. This is the kind of article that will make an RIAA executive's head explode.

Book spamming for the Lord!

2008-02-12T12:13:00.001-05:00

Today I got a new book spam. This has come to me via Media E-Blast, a company whose name was coined by someone in a desperate attempt to make unsolicited spam and e-mail harvesting all respectable and Web 2.0ish.

Here's my first piece of advice: Paying some "consultant" to make you a fancy JPEG ad and send it to a "carefully targeted" e-mail list doesn't make you look any better than someone using broken English to peddle erectile-dysfunction medication. Just because they can use Photoshop and have a mailing address in the continental US doesn't make it less sleazy, it just means it's a little less likely they're using hijacked zombie PCs as mail servers. (Mmmm zombies. . .)

Second bit of advice: If you're self-published, seriously consider paying someone else to write your ad copy. If you rely on borderline ludicrous sentence constructions like,

"Sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, drug or alcoholic addiction, sexual addiction, murder, losing a loved one, broken marriages, are many things that we sometimes face."

your only market will be among the kind of masochists that buy awful prose with the specific intention of mocking it.

Third bit of advice: Don't lie in the subject line of the e-mail and pimp your work as "Warren Caldwell's #1 Best Seller." It really looks bad, especially for a minister whose selling his "life-changing testimony." Here's a little clue: those lists in the New York Times, those books? No spam involved. That should tell you something.

Fourth bit of advice: No one likes large unsolicited JPEG attachments. Most are porn, and I like to solicit my own porn, thank you very much.

Last bit of advice: Never use the phrase, "I stripped down to nakedness to share my most inner self," in a spam that lands in the same folder as all the penis enlargement ads. We don't need that mental image.

An idea whose time has passed

2008-02-11T19:49:00.000-05:00

According to Reuters, Random House is trying an experiment:

Random House ... is planning to test selling individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand. [They] will sell the six chapters and epilogue of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" for $2.99 each according to the report.

First: e-books have been around for years, and authors have been putting out samples on the net for ages. Not new, or innovative.

Second: it makes no sense. iTunes can bust up albums because, with very few exceptions, each track on a CD represents a standalone piece of work. Unless the book is an anthology or collection of essays, chapters themselves won't stand alone. $1 for complete work > $3 for incomplete work.

Third: who's the market for this idea? Why would someone pay three bucks for one seventh of a book when you can get the whole thing from Amazon for 16.47?

Fourth: what do you do when your more savvy competitors give out samples for free?

This strikes me as someone either a) trying to make a bad analogy with the iTunes business model or b) the person in charge of the implementation hates the idea and is making sure it tanks before it gets off the ground.

[Thanks to Dear Author.]

Attack of the muse: redux

2008-02-10T15:45:00.001-05:00

So I finished and turned in the Prophets draft. My next project is Wolfbreed #2 (Still need titles for those) but I can't really start until Anne at Bantam gets back to me, approving the outline for the next book. Since I didn't want to jump into the next Apotheosis book and have to interrupt it, I was just taking a short break. . .

My Muse didn't like that. Like the attack that resulted in Wolfbreed #1, I was sitting, minding my own business, and my muse bitch-slapped me with an idea I just had to start on. As of right now, after about four days, I have nearly 10K words. It's deja vu all over again.

I even went and added a counter for it.

Seek, and ye shall find (not)

2008-02-09T21:25:00.000-05:00

Periodically I check out what people are Googling when they come across my site. Sometimes it makes sense (all the folks checking up on Cassie Edwards, for instance) but often, it, well, doesn't. . .

And this week's asshat is...

2008-02-08T12:40:00.000-05:00

Hong Kong Actor Edison Chen. Who, through a critical mass of sleaze and stupidity worthy of certain toe-taping senators is embroiled in an internet sex scandal. Apparently Mr. Chen liked to watch himself, so he took pictures of himself getting busy with a bunch of actresses. Ok, I'm a Libertarian, I don't have a problem with consenting adults filming themselves.

My problem with Mr. Chen starts with the fact that he apparently liked to share these pictures without the consent of his partners, and worse, he had the bonehead stupidity to leave these 1000+ dirty pictures on his laptop's hard-drive (God does that sound dirty) when he sent it in to get it serviced. (Eww, that's even worse.)

Here's a clue to all you celebs out there. The techs working on your computer are going to look at your photos— You're a fucking celebrity!

So these photos found their way on to the internet, and Chen's all dumbfounded, first denying it all ("they're all photoshopped!") and now all tearful and apologetic saying, "The lives of many innocent people have been hurt by this malicious and criminal conduct and in this regard I'm filled with pain, hurt and frustration." The malicious conduct he refers to in this case is posting the pics on the web. And the fact that he includes himself with the "innocent victims" is just gag inducing.

(Thanks to Mrs Giggles.)

5 Things LOST can teach us about storytelling

2008-02-05T18:09:00.000-05:00

Because I am not going to post about "Super Tuesday" I've decided to celebrate the return of my favorite TV series. Lost has, IMO, managed to do just about everything right so far, and the premiere last Thursday seems to indicate that this won't change. As a fan since the pilot episode, I thought I'd delve into the series so far and highlight some of the storytelling elements within that are worth emulating:

Sell the little things and your audience will buy the big things: One of the things Lost does well is pay attention to detail. Even things that, at first, would seem like continuity errors are explained later on: The food supply in the hatch is a good example, it was clearly not enough food to last for years, but then later on, there was a food drop. The anachronistic washer/dryer set was actually a clue that there had been contact with the hatch later than the 1980s. The plane found in the first season with the faux priests actually formed part of the backstory of one of the major tail-section passengers. This attention to detail actually adds verisimilitude to the batshit crazy stuff that's yet to be explained. (Smoke Monster anyone?)

Suspense comes from foreknowledge: One of the major arcs of the last half of last season was about Desmond seeing visions of Charlie's death, something that was arguably foreshadowed in the first season. When Charlie goes down into the Looking Glass station, not only are we expecting him to die, he's expecting to die. Even though both us and the characters saw this coming miles away, it still makes for a powerful scene: even in retrospect, seeing the character's this season react to his sacrifice.

Complicated stories require predictable structures: Lost is a rat's nest of conspiracy, conflicting motivations, shifting relationships, and backstory, backstory, backstory. . . One of the only ways it keeps the whole from becoming completely unintelligible is by adhering to a very rigid structure. Not just the alternation of flashbacks and island time, but in the narrative uses of each. Up to now, with only two exceptions I can think of, the flashbacks were character studies, more or less narratively self-contained, and could cover an arbitrary amount of time. The island segments are explicitly linear, and are home to the major multi-episode narrative arcs of the Lost storyline. That's oversimplified (especially now we've seemed to have crossed a temporal Rubicon and are into flashforwards now) but the point is, after two or three episodes, the structure is apparent and provides a framework to keep the audience form becoming disoriented in the complex multi-character multi-era story.

The argument's more interesting when both sides are equally "right." John and Jack have been at odds throughout the whole series, and it stands only to get worse as things progress. What makes the conflict interesting is that neither man is completely in the right. While it's clear John Locke has some connection to the Island and may, in fact, be closer to the "truth" than Jack Shepherd, he is clearly not infallible and, in his way, is as arrogant as Jack is. Jack is clearly trying to do right, and is doing the logical and sensible thing, but some things he just don't get.

Plant your seeds early: One of the things that gives a narrative a sense of unity is how strongly later elements tie to earlier ones. in other words, what's happening now in a story isn't just a result of the last scene, but also develops out of events in the first few chapters/episodes, or helps to explain them. The last season actually involved fewer new mysteries, and spent much of its time explaining the older ones: Why Claire was kidnapped? WTF Polar Bears? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? Why's Ben such an asshole? I suspect, as we progress, the ratio of questions raised to questions answered should continue to reverse itself, and I suspect the nature of the Smoke Monster (the first big question) will be the last one answered.

Turns out, Bob's not all that happy to see you

2008-02-04T12:43:00.001-05:00

I suppose this will come as a surprise to everyone, but apparently Bob's been duped. All that Enzyte he's been taking hasn't done squat to enhance his maleness. In fact, according to the Cincinati Enquirer, when former Enzyte exec James Teegarden Jr. got before a judge:

He said employees of the Forest Park company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back up claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

“So all this is a fiction?” Judge S. Arthur Spiegel asked about some of the claims.
“That’s correct, your honor,” Teegarden said.

Wow, you mean they lied? Who knew?

Signing Books

2008-02-04T12:33:00.000-05:00

For those interested, and who're in the area:

I'll be signing books at the Gray & Co. booth @ the Cleveland Home & Garden Show at the IX Center (directions) on 2/8/08 from 7:00pm to 8:00pm.

BOOTH LOCATION
Booth #379. Enter from the West Entrance. Head to the left
throgh the fountain area towards the Bella Italia Bistro (or follow
Aisle 300 to CBG Cleveland Magazine Feature booth). Head towards the
GardenArea, we will be the last booth on the left (after Cleveland
Magine, and WDOK; across from Petiti's Garden Stage) before you
enter the Garden Area -- Next to Garden G1 for Soeder Landscaping.

Now I wish I collected baseball cards

2008-02-02T20:43:00.000-05:00

Thanks to The Smoking Gun website, I now know that Tops is including presidential candidate trading cards in their sets of baseball cards. . .

I didn't want to know this existed

2008-02-01T21:09:00.000-05:00

But now that I do, I'll share: American Idol Slashfic.

I wonder if I should be worried that this doesn't really surprise me?

And the asshat for today is. . .

2008-01-31T17:03:00.000-05:00

Paul McGuinness, manager of U2. Ok, we get it, music piracy = bad.

But, do we think that either a) Making ISPs responsible for policing net traffic for copyrighted data or b) Taxing ISPs to compensate artists (read: compensate the monolith corporations that profit from said artists) are in fact good ideas?

Quoth asshat:

If you were a magazine advertising stolen cars, handling the money for stolen cars and seeing to the delivery of stolen cars, the police would soon be at your door. That's no different to an ISP.

So a manager for a major rock group can't tell the difference between a content provider and a distribution channel. So if some *cough*Negitiveland*cough* artist decided to sample too much of U2s songs, he'd figure it was reasonable to expect the record stores selling the offending CD to be liable? Or maybe he just wants the stores to check their product for oversampling.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. . .

2008-01-30T21:52:00.000-05:00

Many moons ago I posted about a spam query letter I got. (Not to be confused with the spam book promotion I received recently.) Just to reprise, the query was about "A Best Seller waiting to be published - Discover the Revolutionary New Way to Heal Yourself!..."

Needless to say, the first mistake was confusing a writer with a publisher. But our spammer was not one to make such fine distinctions. Anyway, I posted, I vented, and the tale thus ended.

Or did it?

I was just checking traffic to my site and discovered a new referring link from the Doubtful Muse blog. It seems that our spammer has finally gotten around to spamming editors. Yep. She's still at it. And, yep, by the pronoun I have a gender. You see, the recent post at Doubtful Muse gave me two tidbits of information I didn't have before (or I just wasn't up to Googling for at the time.)

Tidbit one is a post or two at the The Rejecter blog. Apparently this poor employee at a literary agency got the same spam around the same time I did. The response reached a snark level that equaled if not exceeded my own:

Fortunately you have magic cards to heal yourself from the emotional trauma when you don't get published because you pissed off potential agents and publishers by randomly spamming their emailboxes instead of submitting your idea in the proper format, which can be found on the very page from which you got my email address.

But wait, there's more! The second tidbit was the fact that the proprietor of the Doubtful Muse was able to Google the mysterious website only alluded to in the spam email. This was a dangerous thing to let me know. Apparently, our spammer is a woman named Christina, who operates out of the UK. Saying she doesn't "get" the publishing industry is an understatement. Here's some quotes from the site:

The ideas for these manuscipts [sic] are born out of many situations, if you have an idea worthy of development, please contact me for an informal but confidential discussion.
[...]
Therefore, the role of the editor is to save the writer from the embarrassment of presenting poor quality workmanship. Once an editor has proofed and streamlined a manuscript by strengthening any weak areas, the manuscript will then be ready for market.
[...]
I hope to fulfil certain criteria:

- to produce excellent, professional novels worthy of publishing
- an original plot idea
- to appeal to the a broad market place - with enough potential for the book to be commercially viable
- to continue to produce novels and I as an author stand the test of time

I won't link to the site, but feel free to Google it yourself. The woman has invested a lot in web design, but could have done a lot better by actually submitting proposals. I really don't know what makes her think some publisher is going to surf her site and solicit her for a book proposal. Not only that, but Christina is paranoid about "revealing" her "secrets." She has synopses up on her site, but they're password-protected MS Word documents. She has the spammed proposal up on its own domain that's unlinked to from her author site, and insists you e-mail her for chapters. She has sample articles up, but no publishing credits listed. None.

However, we know she's a certified published writer. How, you ask? Because she has this:

How can you argue with that?

Plot vs Character: aka The Emotional Zombie

2008-01-29T07:40:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to seeing 28 Weeks Later on DVD, and it's a great zombie flick and one of those rarities; a sequel that is a considerable improvement on the original. Not that 28 Days Later was a bad film, it was just sort of typical for the genre; "You're in the midst of the Zombie Apocalypse, you have to survive. Go!" And, while 28 Weeks starts out in the same place, it goes in a way different direction.

When people talk of fiction, there's often much made of the distinction between plot and character, or "plot vs. character," as if the two were somehow in opposition. The fact is, a story needs both to survive. If either is missing it becomes hard for a reader to care. Without character there's no reason to care about what's happening. Without plot there's nothing happening to care about.

Now the connection between the two is not always very strong. There are literary character studies where the protagonist is caught up in events beyond their control and the object is to watch how this person's character changes, and there are genre stories where interesting sympathetic characters are caught up in some grand adventure that doesn't do much other than threaten their safety and give them something to do.

But, in the best stories, the plot is a direct result of character and vice-versa. It is a feedback loop that, in a tale like 28 Weeks, sets up a resonant vibration that shakes the whole universe of the story apart. (Before you go on, warning: Here Be Spoilers.)

In 28 Weeks we start with the typical post apocalyptic holdouts, a bunch of people including a man and wife whose children are safely on a school trip out of the country. The movie begins much as Night of the Living Dead ends, with the zombies storming the house, and one lone man (the husband) escaping. This is the point where we enter new territory. Not only do we jump to the post-apocalypse reconstruction effort, we get to see Dad— wracked with survivor's guilt that's painful to watch— reunited with his kids. When he breaks down explaining what happened to Mom, we care about this guy and his kids more than any ten characters in a dozen other action/horror films.

This is also key to the series of events that pushes the rest of the movie into motion. The kids slip out of the safe zone, not because they're kids and kids do stupid shit, but because the son's grief-stricken and his big sister wants to go back to their house and get some pictures for him. When Mom's at the house, apparently uninfected, the first thought isn't "What? How'd she survive?" it's more "Mom's alive!"

Of course when the army brings Mom and the kids back and put them in isolation, Dad's reaction is even more intense. Up to now he believed he had left her to die. Of course he's going to go see her. . .

The most powerful moment of the whole film is when he's facing his wife, apologizing for leaving her in the farmhouse to die, and she forgives him! You've agonized with this guy since the opening of the movie, and you can see the weight lift off his shoulders. He walks to her side, and even though you're screaming at him not to, he kisses her.

And unlike so many "too stupid to live" characters in dozens of other movies, you're not screaming at him because it's an idiotic thing to do. You're screaming at him because you know, given what he knows (the plague has burned itself out, the military said so), and what he's been through (this his his wife) there was precious little else you'd expect him to do. Even though we see it coming, because we see it coming, we're as horrified as his wife when we see the infection grip him, and when he kills her it's as close to classic tragedy as I've seen a genre film get.

28 Weeks is made of this stuff. Human beings bring about the end of the world, not through malice or stupidity, but because they're human.

In case you weren't sure what plagiarism isn't.

2008-01-28T18:18:00.000-05:00

The whole Cassie Edwards flap continues to ripple outward, leaving blog posts and long comment threads in its wake. One of the things it has unearthed is a widespread misunderstanding of what plagiarism actually is, leading to some rather eloquent posts on the subtle difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism.

But there is another widespread confusion that also needs to be addressed. It seems that for every person who believes "she did noting wrong", or "she was just lifting non-fictional facts", or "it's romance so it don't really matter. . ." there's someone else who's just as willing to dive overboard and say "hey that (description of a) book looks like (a description of) some other book," and point screaming "PLAGIARIST" like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Such people don't get the fact that, in fiction at least, there's no ethical problem with taking ideas/plots from prior work and adapting them to your own.

In fact, there'd be a bit of a problem if there was such a restraint as is pointed out rather amusingly on the Smart Bitches' blog:

There seems to be some confusion regarding the status of ideas in copyright law. You can’t copyright a plot or an idea. You can only copyright the specific expression of that plot or idea as recorded in some sort of tangible form. Think about the nightmare of attempting to nail down and legislate a plot or idea for a story. How specific would you have to be before you could declare something unique enough to copyright?

“An angst-ridden story about a vampire falling in love with a human.” Dude, if you can copyright that and collect a small fee every time somebody published that story, you could have your own giant pool of gold coins to swim in, Scrooge McDuck-stylee. (Side note: doesn’t that sound like a painful idea to you? Because it always has to me.)

Or, as Justine Larbalestier pointed out in a follow-up on her blog:

I am so sick of people thinking that retelling a story is plagiarism. If that were so then we would have, at most, ten novels. All books about vampires, zombies, middle-aged English professors are not the same (well, okay, some of them are). It’s not about the story you tell so much as HOW YOU TELL IT. Why is that so difficult to understand?

Georgette Heyer did not plagiarise Jane Austen. David Eddings didn’t plagiarise J. R. R. Tolkien. Walter Mosley didn’t plagiarise Raymond Chandler. I did not plagiarise C. S. Lewis.

The next person who says to me, “Oh my God! Did you see that Certain Writer’s next book is set in a future world where you have to have your skin removed and replaced with carbon when you turn sixteen? That is just like Scott’s Uglies books! He should sue!” That person will get smacked. HARD.

For some reason, a lot of people are tied up with this misunderstanding, to the point that I've seen multiple someones opine that Author A should sue Author B because of some similarity in plot mechanics. ("OMG they both feature red-haired were-weasels in a New-England high school!!!1!) In their view the similarity (usually between two Amazon-style plot synopses) is a BAD THING.

To this I say, "No, it isn't, you twit."

Fiction endlessly recycles plots, characters, tropes and the other structural elements of a story. Fiction is in a constant dialog with itself, and many stories are written in reaction to prior work. My own Emperors of the Twilight is a response of Heinlein's Friday, Dragons of the Cuyahoga was directly inspired by the "Future Boston" portrayed in In the Cube by David Alexander Smith, Raven has Edgar Allan Poe smeared all over it, the situation in Broken Crescent bears a (in this case accidental) significant resemblance to the plot set up in Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook, and a large part of Wolfbreed #1 owes its genesis to an anime series I'm rather fond of.

Those of you who've not gotten the point are going to start getting all Sutherland on me, somehow thinking my history of literary borrowing makes me a hypocrite for jumping all over poor Ms. Edwards. Let me clarify something for you. In fiction. . .

PLAGIARISM IS THE COPYING OF SOMEONE ELSE'S TEXT. T-E-X-T. NOT PLOT, NOT IDEA, NOT SOME CHARACTER'S ÜBER-COOL SUPERPOWER. TEXT! AS IN, THE PLAGIARIST OPENS THE SOURCE AND COPIES THE WORDS THERE! GET IT?

Thanks.

And he gets +4 vs. Furries

2008-01-26T10:59:00.001-05:00

I saw a post on Lynn Viehl's blog and I just had to follow suit and use the online Trading Card Maker for one of my most popular characters. . .

(Pic is from the Japanese Ed.)

It made sense before the LSD wore off. . .

2008-01-25T17:40:00.000-05:00

Ok, maybe I can buy the cobra. . . But what the hell is up with the Santa hat?

When a would-be writer is in denial

2008-01-23T21:32:00.000-05:00

One of the most important elements in being a pro writer (or artist of any stripe) is the ability to accept criticism. Not only will you receive it from editors and, if you get published, fans and reviewers, but if you wish to improve your craft you need to accept that others will read your writing and find fault. Maybe a lot of fault. If you're a beginner, it will be a painful amount of fault. Not everyone is thick-skinned and mature enough to accept this. Some are so in love with what they think is on the page that they cannot conceive of something wrong with their golden words, the mean person disrespecting their story is either jealous, or reading it wrong. . .

I bring this up because I have a significant follow-up to my last spam deconstruction. When last we talked about this "compelling and absolutely authentic SF novel" I was reflecting that spamming a bunch of professional SF writers and hawking your self-published manuscript was not the best way to sell your book. However, curiosity did get the best of me and I did eventually visit the spammer's website. Here's a sample.

Journey with our main characters SeiWan Li and Lazarus as they go from young adults to maturity while they begin their mind altering excursions into the familiar settings of our solar system and beyond. Quest with the feating duo in their magnificent vessel The Star Voyager.
[...]
Immerse yourself in the informative epilogue providing detailed diagrams and alpha numeric data of ship profiles, speed scales, alien life, and locations throughout Star City.
[...]
We want to maintain a comprehensive narrative. Informal facts are available for the appetent scientific crowd to devour. This is not a work of strictly science yet herein surfaces fantasy.

I was so aghast at all this I had to tell someone, but instead of blogging about it (I'd already done the spam, and that seemed enough) I posted my discovery on my favorite bad movie site, the Agony Booth. I started a thread on the forums there letting the patrons know that this curiosity existed. (If you're curious about the site, the link to it is in the first post there.)

I created a monster. Nearly two months later, and the thread is six pages long. And, believe it or not, the author showed up, posting in the same broken spamtastic grammar. With the Mary Sueish touch of using his protagonist's name as a handle. Here're a few choice quotes:

You'll get 87.000 words of structure and adventure of exeedingly accurate and classic scince fiction action, thrill, and even a little romance for all you lovers out there.
[...]
I would like to assure you though I am in aggreeacne that we are not an official dissenminator of science fiction
[...]
I am reasonbly certain you will find it thoroughly efficient. Our team consists of writers, philosophers, and physicist to bring you the most accuract perspective on true space exploration.
[...]
The armature work "Star City" is available and ready to be acquired. Though you may find random spelling anomalies even in the face of our diligent editing of the conglomerate host of narrative and astronomical data, we believe that the random grammatical anomalies could be overlooked for the sake of ease.

This stuff parodies itself. If you've been on the internet any longer than the last 24 hours you can only imagine the level of snark that erupted in the thread in response to these pronouncements. It would be awe-inspiring if this was all there was.

But it isn't.

One of the fellow forum members, Premier Blah, actually had the balls (or the masochistic streak) to order a copy of the book. The author actually had the balls (or the masochistic streak) to send him a copy. Now, since the Agony Booth is dedicated to sarcastic, snarky, scene-by-scene deconstruction of crappy movies, you can guess what happens next.

Premier Blah starts his own forum thread where he does his own recap of the novel in question. And it is as awful as you think it is. And the author himself weighs in, which I'd feel kind of sad about if it wasn't for the fact that this train could be seen coming for two months and the guy still stood on the tracks pimping his self-published masterwork. It is a sight to behold. . .

At least this way, there's only one payment

2008-01-22T12:08:00.001-05:00

Part of an ongoing series on stupid internet ad copy:

All I got to say is that's one hell of a monthly payment.

Laughing with you/Laughing at you

2008-01-20T10:42:00.002-05:00

Well, I have again returned from the CWRU Film Society's SF Movie Marathon, which makes this about #20 for me. (I've been there enough times I've seen Zardoz twice there.) As last time, I've been left thinking about SF movies— in this case "SF/horror" movies since there was a zombie/undead theme going on. In particular, I've been left thinking about the differences between parody and homage.

If you look to the left here, we see four films I saw during the marathon. (Shaun of the Dead was one of the three "surprise" flicks, for the commenter who asked; the other two were Ice Pirates and The Day the Earth Stood Still.) The four share a common thread in that they are rather loving reworkings of earlier genre material done with tongue firmly in (through?) cheek.

I probably won't hear much of an argument if I say Young Frankenstein is the best of this lot. (And IMO the best film Mel Brooks ever did.) I may hear more of a complaint if I say that Planet Terror, is the least of the four. Yes, I rank it below Black Sheep. Why? It comes down between the difference between parody and homage.

The dictionary definition of the two mostly take the tack that parody is imitation with ridicule, whereas homage is imitation with respect. Which, when we talk about films, is close but not really exact. Parody can be done with great affection for the source material. In this case, parody is making fun of structural elements or genre tropes, taking them further than they normally go for the sake of highlighting them. This can be done with ridicule or, as in Planet Terror, with great affection. In Planet Terror the attempt is give an extra postmodern level by inserting splices, scratches, film burns, trailers, and missing reels to mimic the experience of cheap urban 70's filmgoing. Only Young Frankenstein can match it for authentically reproducing the feeling of its source material.

So why do I think it the lesser work?

To explain, let me define "homage" in this context. A film, IMO, counts as a homage when it imitates the source material faithfully enough to actually become an example of the genre. It may be self-aware, but it isn't (when well done) self-conscious. Most important, the humor is self contained. A proper homage stands alone as a film and will work for a viewer who has no prior experience in the genre being paid tribute to.

In contrast, a "parody" relies a great deal on the viewer's prior experience.

A good part of Planet Terror, especially the missing reel gag, requires the viewer to understand the source to get the gag. For someone unversed in 70's schlock, the self-conscious reproduction of all the form's flaws will, at best, come across as slipshod screenwriting.

However, while a diet of zombie apocalypse cinema makes Shaun of the Dead a richer experience, anyone can enjoy the film, even if you think George Romero is the host of an Italian cooking show (and today... brains!).

Young Frankenstein is hilarious even for people who've never seen the Universal original that it gives tribute to so faithfully. Even Black Sheep, a gory New Zealand effort that owes a lot to early Peter Jackson, while it has the DNA of a 1970 wildlife-gone-amok film, has smartly decided not to rely on the viewer's knowledge of that particular micro-genre.

Planet Terror is redeemed by the "cool shit" factor, and is loved by many for that alone. But it unfortunately so in love with its subject and in such a self-conscious and self-referential manner that as the movie proceeds, the less accessible it becomes, until it largely falls apart as a film and devolves into a sort of uber-sketch; a bloated version of the fake trailers that preceded it.

We have a novel

2008-01-18T12:21:00.000-05:00

Or a third of a trilogy. Final verbiage until editorial revisions kick in: 95,859. Since rewrites for me always go long, Prophets will probably be 100K words when it hits the shelves. I've retired the counter, and adjusted the word count for the trilogy as a whole so that Prophets is actually 1/3 of the total.

Yea me!

I now have a long weekend ahead filled with a buttload of SF movies and office furniture assembly.

I guess I overshot

2008-01-17T20:57:00.001-05:00

By about 5000 words so far, but another 1000 to 2000 words and Prophets will be done. I was going to try and wrap it up tonight, but ended up dealing with insurance people (will people stop it with the rear ending of me and my wife, please!) and buying a new office set for my wife, who definitely needs her life organized (guess what I'll be doing with my day off Monday?) and I just now finished dinner, and I'm dog tired. So, what's another day? Sigh.

Good thing is, cliffhanger ending or not, I think I did find a nice natural break to end book #1. Sure I killed a major character, left another one floating stranded in space, and everything's sort of going to hell, but it feels like a good place to stop.

And the asshat for today is. . .

2008-01-17T12:13:00.000-05:00

Steve Jobs, for the following quote RE the Amazon kindle: (via Gallycat)

The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore.

Yeah. The internet would really take off if people get over this whole reading thing. All those blogs filled with words and stuff. Man, you make nice hardware, but sometimes you ought to just shut the pie hole.

Wherein some Smart Bitches give me romantic advice

2008-01-16T17:47:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed, even before the whole Cassie Edwards flap, that I follow the blog, Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books. It is, as advertised, smart, bitchy, and chock full of the kind of humor I tend to appreciate. Well, on said blog they have a feature called GS vs. STA (aka Good Shit vs. Shit to Avoid) where their readership asks the massed genius that is the Smart Bitches for genre recommendations in a particular subset of romance. Today, they posted my query, since, as an accidental romance author, I need to brush up on the genre I find myself writing in. The comment thread so far may interest SF/F fans, since there's a heavy overlap. I even got one recommendation for Poul Anderson.

My Mind is Melded

2008-01-16T07:16:00.000-05:00

Over at the SF Signal blog they have a cool feature called "Mind Meld" where they ask a bunch different SF-type people a question and post the answer. This week's post is the second half of a two-parter on the definition of SF. I've made the following contribution, which expands a little on my prior post on the topic:

Defining SF has always been problematic, since there's no definitive plot element (as in Romance, or Mystery) or mood (as in Horror, Comedy, and Suspense) or setting (all Historical Novels) that helps us in defining most other genres. To this is added SF's Siamese-twin, Fantasy, a separate genre that carries the same lack of definitive plot elements, mood, or setting.

In most popular discourse the definition of SF and Fantasy ends up being definition via trope. (It has a starship, it goes here. A dragon, over there. What? Pern? Head'splode.) The other popular method of separating the twins is by splitting things up along a possible/impossible axis. This has its own consequences, such as slotting time travel and FTL into the fantasy realm. It also excludes from the SF fold stories whose point is to logically extrapolate from some fiddling with natural law-- I mean a novel about a box that adjusts the gravitational constant should be shelved in fantasy?

My own definition of SF comes in two distinct parts. First, while the story's world is not the same as the author's, there is some explicit or implicit congruency between the story's universe and the author's. There is a map from here to there, even if it's to go back to 1908 Siberia and take a hard right at Tunguska.

Second, and more important, the story is written from the perspective that the universe runs by predictable and knowable laws, and those laws are the same as those in the author's universe. If they differ at all, the difference must be explained in such a way that the story doesn't loose its connection to the author's universe.

Irony, thy name is Cassie Edwards

2008-01-15T18:31:00.000-05:00

I thought I had posted all I was going to on this. But, then, my wife was waiting at Walgreens to get a prescription filled and was walking past the book isle, and came across this. I draw your attention to the lower right corner.

How bad is it?

2008-01-14T19:43:00.000-05:00

Cassie Edwards' plagiarism that is?

Well I tried an experiment. I decided to spend part of my evening hunting down some CE sample text, look through it, and see if I can Google a lifted passage. I decided this at roughly 7:30.

It is now 7:47. The seventeen intervening minutes was spent as follows: Fifteen minutes launching Amazon in my browser, searching for Edwards' work, finding a random book of hers that allowed the "search inside" feature, and scanning the pages for likely candidates. Two minutes punching a few phrases into Google.

I got a hit.

From Savage Intrigue by Cassie Edwards, Leisure Books 2007 p4-5

Wakan Tanka breathed life and motion into all things, both visible and invisible. He was over all, through all, and in all. Great as was the sun, and good as was the earth, the greatness and goodness of the Big Holy were not surpassed by either.
The Dakota could look at nothing without seeing Wakan Tanka; they could never evade his presence, for it pervaded all things and filled all spaces.

From Land of the Spotted Eagle by Luther Standing Bear, Bison Books 1978 p179

Wakan Tanka breathed life and motion into all things, both visible and invisible. He was over all, through all, and in all, and great as was the sun, and good as was the earth, the greatness and goodness of the Big Holy were not surpassed. The Lakota could look at nothing without at the same time looking at Wakan Tanka, and he could not, if he wished, evade His presence, for it pervaded all things and filled all space.

So in less than half an hour I was able to hunt down a random piece of Edwards' text, find its correct attribution, transcribe it, and write a blog post about it.

That's how bad it is.

In her own(?) words

2008-01-14T12:16:00.000-05:00

What follows may be as close to a complete statement from Cassie Edwards as we’ve had since the whole plagiarism issue raised its ugly head. It is allegedly an e-mail response to a fan expressing support, and is documentary evidence of why lawyers generally tell you to shut the f**k up when the feces hits the fan. The text via the Smart Bitches blog: (My comments in green)

[UPDATE: Dear Author contacted a representative of Cassie Edwards to confirm the authenticity of this e-mail. The response was "no comment." An evil, hateful person would assume that this means Cassie finally talked to her lawyer.]

I just got on My Space and I found your wonderful encouraging letter. Thank you for believing in me, for I have done nothing wrong.
[SWANN: exsqueeze me? Even when this was restricted to non-fiction you were saying to the AP that you just “didn’t know” you were supposed to cite references. Hint- if the behavior isn’t wrong, you don’t have to make excuses for it.]
My publisher is standing behind me 100%, for they know my work better than anyone,
[SWANN: Quoth Signet: “… we will be examining all of Ms. Edwards’ books that we publish, and based on the outcome of that review we will take action to handle the matter accordingly. We want to make it known that Signet takes any and all allegations of plagiarism very seriously.” Apparently, they don’t know your work that well.]
and they know that all romance authors who use research for historicals have to use reference books to do this.
[SWANN: Cassie, here is a hint. Use <> Copy. I’ve written historical novels, read a whole lot of reference materials, and the only passage I ever felt the need to copy verbatim was from a news article in the Cleveland Press about the Torso Murders, and that was because a character was reading that edition of the paper. I don’t think your 19th century characters have the same excuse lifting passages from a 2005 nature article about ferrets.]
My readers love this accurate material about the Indians.
[SWANN: And, apparently, ferrets.]
And if I couldn’t use this material my books would not be worth anything to my readers who depend on me.
[SWANN: Depend on her? Ok, I feel a little responsibility to my readers (sort of the reason I don’t lift passages wholesale in my books) but she makes herself out to be like a paramedic, a cop, or at the least the Roto-Rooter guy who came and kept my basement from flooding. It’s a novel, get over yourself.]
The sad thing is that I am writing these books now in a way to honor our Native Americans, past, present and in the future.
[SWANN: Why do I get the feeling that her primary demographic is not down on the Res?]
And I am honoring my great grandmother who was a full blood Cheyenne. She would be so proud of me if she could read what I am writing about the Indians who have been so maligned for so long.
[SWANN: The white man steals our land. We shall steal the white man’s words.]
And do you know? I feel picked on now as our Native American Indians have always been picked on throughout history.
[SWANN: How juvenile can you get? Chicky, you were outed on a blog for near-verbatim copying of your sources. You were not stripped of your property and made to march barefoot a few hundred miles to a reservation, forced to abandon your language and religion, and given a pox-infected blanket for your trouble.]
I am trying to spread the word about them and what do I get? Spiteful women who have found a way to bring attention to themselves, by getting in the media in this horrible way.
[SWANN: You note, at this point, there is not a single denial of what she’s been accused of doing? All she can do is malign the women who brought attention to the fact she’s been stealing passages wholesale.]
Right now I am getting hit from all sides....CNN, The New York Times, AP, everyone who those women could think of to contact.
[SWANN: Um… they posted it on a blog. That’s telling everyone. Also, I think the press caught wind of this themselves. It’s sort of like, their job.]
And what is also sad is that a fellow author, has spoken up and condemned me.
[SWANN: Hi there, I’m a fellow author. Pleased to meet you. Guess what? I’m condemning you too. And, frankly, I haven’t seen an author write about this who is not pretty pissed at your antics.]
Thanks again for your support. When I am feeling stronger I plan to write a bulletin on My Space, but right now I am totally drained of energy from what has been done to me.
[SWANN: You know, Cassie, if someone posted a picture of you shoplifting, I do not think an adequate defense is to decry how horrible it was someone posted the picture.]
I hope that you will tell your friends, who are so much also mine, the wrong that has been done to me, and tell them that I will get through this. I will be found innocent and vindicated [sic] of any wrong.
[SWANN: This is classic, and still not a denial. She never says “I did not do those horrible things I’m accused of.” Probably because it’s all in print and can’t really be denied. The best she can do is, “The horrible things I’m being accused of aren’t wrong. No, really, it’s ok. My publishers would have said something, wouldn’t they? Please, it’s not like I’m killing puppies. They’re all jealous anyway. They never liked me. Please feel sorry for me.”]
For now, it’s all too raw and horrible, but I will be alright.

I actually do feel sorry for her. Not because she was outed as a plagiarist, but because she, and her readers, were very ill-served by a series of editors who either never had enough respect for Cassie and her readers to discover this pattern twenty years ago and straighten her out, or worse, knew about it and did nothing. Instead of being bitch-slapped some sense in the eighties, at which point she might have been able to recover her career and have by now, perhaps, 80-some untainted novels to her credit, she was given permission, either implicit or explicit, to do what she was doing. Now, because no editor ever corrected her behavior, she has 100 novels out there every one of which is questionable, and it’s possible she will never be able to recover from it. That’s an appalling situation on any level. She might bear full brunt of the blame for doing what she did, but the people in the publishing industry that enabled her and encouraged her are equally complicit.