Diabolical Plots: David Steffen's quest for publication and world domination

CSCI 5561 Programming Assignement 3

2010-04-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

These are my results for CSCI 5561 Computer Vision: Programming Assignment 3 (stats further down):
Image 1: Original and region-labeled

Image 2: Original and region-labeled

STATS RESULTS:

Blob Statistics (Image 1)

MBR:

Object 1: (62,13) and (84,31)
Object 2: (10,33) and (41,76)
Object 3: (65,44) and (92,79)

Centroid:
Object 1: (72,21)
Object 2: (24,51)
Object 3: (74,64)

Number of Holes:
Object 1: 3
Object 2: 4
Object 3: 1

Area:
Object 1: 305
Object 2: 984
Object 3: 491

Area of Holes:
Object 1: 4, 4, 22
Object 2: 32, 20, 3, 33
Object 3: 15

Perimeter:
Object 1: 84
Object 2: 152
Object 3: 128

Elongation:
Object1: 23.1344
Object2: 23.4797
Object3: 33.3686

Blob Statistics (Image 2)

MBR:
Object 1: (17,3) to (30, 16)
Object 2: (53,18) to (62,24)
Object 3: (60,29) to (69, 37)
Object 4: (14,30) to (36,38)
Object 5: (24,42) to (96,96)

Centroid:
Object 1: (21,9)
Object 2: (57,20)
Object 3: (64,32)
Object 4: (26,33)
Object 5: (58,69)

Number of Holes:
Object 1: 0
Object 2: 0
Object 3: 1
Object 4: 1
Object 5: 3

Area:
Object 1: 59
Object 2: 70
Object 3: 81
Object 4: 88
Object 5: 1500

Area of Holes:
Object 1: 0
Object 2: 0
Object 3: 9
Object 4: 20
Object 5: 1596, 15, 4

Perimeter:
Object1: 56
Object2: 34
Object3: 38
Object 4: 64
Object 5: 256

Elongation:
Object1: 53.1525
Object2: 16.5143
Object3: 17.8272
Object 4: 46.5455
Object 5: 43.6907

Diabolical Plots is moving!

2009-08-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

Grand Opening! Fabulous Prize! My interviews/reviews/con reports/editorials are moving to a new site, where I am joining forces with fellow writer Anthony Sullivan. The other site is much prettier, due to wonderful art contributed by illustrator Joey Jordan and Anthony's website know-how. And with more than one of us working on it, we will be able to put out more content and more consistently than I was able to on my own.

http://www.diabolicalplots.com

Newly posted: our interview with Joey Jordan, and with Writers of the Future coordinating judge KD Wentworth.

Upcoming interviews: Jordan Lapp, Charles Coleman Finlay, Nancy Kress, Tad Williams, and more!

I've also moved all my interviews and many of my other posts over there. Also, check out my bio page, which has a link to my bibliography, which will have links to all my publications. :)

I hope I don't lose any of you in the transition, but the blog will still be open over here so any stragglers will see this link. and I'll still get notifications if you leave a comment here.

And yes, there's a prize, so check it out, explore, leave a comment (alas, relatives of myself and Anthony not eligible). We look forward to having you around. :)

Upcoming: Joey Jordan interview

2009-08-20T04:33:00.000-07:00

You readers may have noticed that I haven't posted as many interviews in recent weeks. Don't worry, they're all still in the works, and they'll all come out in due time. I'm experiencing some delays:
1. Some of the interviews haven't happened as fast as I'd hoped, real life intruding and all that.
2. I'm submitting my nonfiction to markets who haven't published me, such as IRoSF and ASIM, so the time waiting for their reading queues is delaying some of my interviews.

Anyway, on to today's news. Coming soon: an interview with artist and illustrator Joey Jordan Her illustration work has been printed in Jim Baen's Universe, and you can check her work out at http://www.joeysrealm.com She's a very talented artist who I've had the pleasure of collaborating with on more than one occasion.

If you have any questions for her, drop me a line and I'll try to work them in.

Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

2009-08-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

Written by Frank Dutkiewicz.

Inferno is the modern day telling of Dantes 14th century epic poem. Even for those who have never read The Divine Comedy (such as myself), this tale of a trip to hell is familiar to many. The 1976 Hugo and Nebula nominated novel by Niven and Pournelle has had over twenty reprints over the years. The latest reprint is available on the shelves of bookstores in time for its long awaited sequel Escape from Hell.

The novel opens with Science Fiction writer Allen Carpentier dying in a stunt to impress fans. The agnostic Carpentier finds himself in an astral equivalent of solitary confinement. His world is a bronze haze. He can think, speak and move but cannot feel or see a thing. His very existence challenges Descartes statement I think therefore I am. In a fit of madness, he says the magic words that frees him from his prison (a djinn bottle), only to find himself in the Vestibule of Hell where he meets guide, Benito (a real person in history). Benito informs him where he is and claims to know the way out, through the nine circles of hell to its very center.

The ever-skeptical Carpentier chooses to believe he is elsewhere and theorizes he is in a futuristic amusement park he terms ‘Infernoland’. Allen and his guide travel through all the horrors of hell all while he meets people that he knew during his life and famous people throughout history.

Inferno is a visual masterpiece. Each layer of hell is laid out as maze of terror. The souls of the damned suffer as cruelly as the fire and brimstone preachers have claimed, and some, in this book. Carpentier and his companions suffer many of the punishments of the damned as they cross each circle. They endure such cruelty as a boiling lake of blood, a desert of burning sand with snowflakes of fire, and an industrial wasteland patrolled by driverless Corvettes that run down the wasters in life. However, Carpentier’s real struggle is with his own agnostic beliefs.

One of the foundations for an agnostic is why would an all powerful being create a supernatural torture chamber like hell? Allen, the Science fiction master prefers to believe he is another prop in a futuristic society than contemplate a possibility that Dante’s vision was real. He is constantly reevaluating his theories while witnessing many of the miracles and horrors of hell, such as; never being able to reach the short wall the circles hell, the judge of Hell, Minos, and his impossibly long tail, and the ability to heal despite suffering the worst of injuries.

Carpentier cannot understand the unending punishment souls are forced to face for eternity. The suffering that many endure seem out of balance for the sins they had committed in life. His conscience argues this point throughout the book while he tries to piece together the where and why he and others are there. The ability to make a universe does not presuppose moral superiority, he concludes at one point. By the end of the novel, Allen finds a reason on why god would have a place like hell, one that I found fitting.

As an amateur that writes as hobby, I recommend Inferno as a great template on how to build on a familiar theme (hell) and insert characters that are larger than a wonderful plot. One of the recommendations that many ‘How to’ books stress is to make your character change from the experience in your story. Allen Carpentier changes like few others that I have read before. Niven and Pournelle create a man who faces down demons and wades through boiling blood very believable to me.

There are very few writers in the industry that are able to work together and produce a publishable story, Niven and Pournelle make it look easy. The two accomplished authors have published several together, The Mote in God’s Eye, Lucifer’s Hammer, Footfall, are just a few. Inferno was their third collaborative novel together, and in my opinion, their best. I was hooked on the first page, followed their journey eagerly as they passed through each circle of hell, and found the ending moving.

Some may find Inferno theologically challenging. I believe it was written to be that way. As reader who loves Science Fiction and Fantasy, Inferno has remained in my top ten favorite stories of all time. I can’t recommend highly enough.

Frank Dutkiewicz is every bit as cute and cuddly as his picture suggests. He has nine stories that have been published. His first eight were all flash fiction then he got wise and rode Dave's coattails and sold one to the upcoming Shadows of the Emerald City anthology. The chicks dig Frank and can't keep their hands off him but hate his cold nose.

Frank's owner is a truck driver for a car hauling company. He travels all across the country and may have ran you off the road at one point. He has a lovely wife and two equally as lovely teenage daughters.

SpoCon report by Anne Wilkes

2009-08-08T21:49:00.000-07:00

This con report was originally printed on Ann Wilkes' blog:
http://sciencefictionmusings.blogspot.com/2009/08/spocon-con-report.html

Spocon Con report

Spocon Day one, Friday, July 31

I arrived at the con early enough to hit the dealers' room before opening ceremonies. I ran into Maggie Bonham (M H Bonham) before opening ceremonies and invited her to read with me at the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading in the morning. All the local Broads had other plans or were getting ready for WorldCon.

Last year, opening ceremonies was very entertaining, with Timothy Zahn and filking by Char MacKay. Of course, the bat flying around the auditorium was a nice touch, although no one could take credit for that but the bat.

This year was ... different. I should probably stop right there before I slam the poor con com. But now you're curious, aren't you? Well, when Dennis Gagaoin said that we were about to reap the benefits of the con com's months of fighting, that was clearly not a good sign. I'm not sure if the program they had originally planned fell through because someone bailed or they never truly spent time organizing the opening ceremonies. What followed was a lot of people standing up and pinch-hitting. It would have been better to just have one person apologize for the lack of any formal opening ceremonies and say, we have a great weekend planned for you filled with this, this and this. Now go have fun. But no one asked me. Luckily, I live two states away so I can't be tempted to sort them out.

Having taken two planes to get there, and having to read at 9AM, I begged off of further con fun for the evening.

Day two, Saturday, August 1

Only one person showed up at the 9AM reading, so the readers outnumbered the listeners. I read from a story that is set in Chelan, WA and begins with a tragedy that really happened there in the 40s. Our audience of one cried. Maggie read from her new novel, Lachlei. We traded books, so I get to read the rest. :)

I stayed with my writing buddy, Sue Bolich, who lives near Spokane. (Way better than the dorm experience of last year – don't get me started.) I had met Andrea Howe of Blue Falcon Editing last year. It wasn't long before the four of us were the four musketeers for the remainder of the weekend, beginning with a panel Saturday morning. When we weren't paneling, we were eating, talking and laughing our heads off.

My schedule of panels, as I said before, was a perfect fit for me. And my co-panelists were all marvelous, informative, polite and entertaining. My-Twit-Book, Sci-Fi and You Are you kidding me? What do I spend more time doing than writing? The artist guest of honor, John Picacio was on the panel and brought some pointed Twitter questions. I wasn't much help with those since I'm still ignoring the (bird) call to tweet. We did have a lively discussion about posting or tweeting etiquette and how to silence people who fill up our walls or phones with a constant barrage. I met John in the green room (which moved not just once, as it did last year, but twice!). He was asking about the table tents and if his was there. I didn't recognize him and said, "It would help if you told me your name." He's apparently forgiven me.

My next panel was in the same room ten minutes later. Another subject near and dear to my heart (and my writing): grammar. Andrea sat next to me on this one and after she made a Princess Bride and Firefly reference in asides to me, I knew: friends for life. Maggie, Sue and I had made lunch plans already. I invited Andrea and our little band of geeky, literary lasses was born.

I shared a signing with Patty Briggs. Her line was none-stop, a dozen people deep for the whole hour. I didn't get a chance to speak with her, but she has obviously made an impression on a good number of people. I hope I can get to know her at a future con. I signed one copy of Awesome Lavratt.

Day 3, Sunday, 8/2

Sunday was yet another 9AM appearance. Good thing there was no drinking – or at least none that we bothered to find. The panel was on Worldbuilding. What could I possibly say sitting next to L E Modesitt, SpoCon's writer guest of honor? Sue, Maggie and I still managed to look half-way intelligent. I picked up a couple of good book recommendations along the way: Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, both by Jared Diamond, and A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat.

Three of the four musketeers (minus Andrea) had a nice conversation with Lee (Modesitt) in the hall after the panel. Very personable guy. And he redefines dapper. Mark Ferrari asked him how many vests he owns. His reply was something over 80! I had interesting chats with Mark in the (first) green room about publishing and writing. And I lugged Mark's hefty tome, The Book of Joby, up to Washington just to get his autograph.

Mark and I were on a panel last year in which we created a story for the audience on the spot. What fun! He read Awesome Lavratt during the con and praised my sense of humor during the panel – bless him! We've been pen pals ever since. He was the artist guest of honor at SpoCon last year.

Something new this year was a charity thing where people bought little matchboxes with slips of paper in them for a buck. The slips of paper had a name of a guest or pro and a greeting. They had to find the person and offer the greeting. Then they got a donated item from that person's goody bag. It was a nice idea, but will need some fine tuning for next year. I especially enjoyed signing one of my books (out of the goody bag) for an eleven-year-old girl.

My con report is rather limited. I didn't attend the masquerade, I don't game and I had to catch the flight back before the closing ceremonies. Still worse, thanks to the TSA (They searched my husband's luggage and it poofed.), I had no camera for the trip. I should have picked up a disposable. Anyway, I took one picture with my phone and had a passerby take another. They looked great when I peered at them at the time. Apparently, not so much...

Ann Wilkes' stories have appeared in magazines and print anthologies. Awesome Lavratt (2009, Unlimited Publishing) is a tongue-in-cheek space opera with mind control, passion and adventure. If her alien worlds don't hook you, her sense of humor will. Visit www.annwilkes.com, for a full bio, her blog and links to online stories.

Sale #2!

2009-08-06T19:57:00.001-07:00

More good news, I received another acceptance this morning from J.W. Schnarr who is editing the Shadows of the Emerald City anthology, a Wizard of Oz horror anthology. When I heard the theme, I knew I HAD to submit, and I'm glad I did. :)

The story is titled "The Utility of Love", and it's a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, but the Tin Man is 2 stories tall and... isn't such a nice guy.

A few stats in case people are interested:
Time since I started writing fiction: 2 years, 6 months
Time since I started writing short stories: 1 year, 2 months
Short story #: 19
Total responses before this sale: 128
Total rejections since last sale: ---2
Time since last sale: ---7 days
Total rejections of this story before this sale: 0
Total responses from Pseudopod before this sale: 0

New Article at Fantasy Magazine: Wicked: Novel vs. Musical

2009-07-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

Fantasy Magazine has reprinted one of my reviews titled Wicked: Novel vs. Musical.

You can check it out here.

My First Fiction Sale!

2009-07-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

I have some exciting news today--my first sale! Yay!
Pseudopod has decided to buy my story The Disconnected to publish as a podcast. It will be available for free download on their site. I'll post a link when it's available.

One nice thing about this sale is that it is audio rights ONLY. That means that I can still try to sell first printing rights to a professional print market.

A few stats in case people are interested:
Time since I started writing fiction: 2 years, 5 months
Time since I started writing short stories: 1 year, 1 month
Total rejections before this sale: 124
Total rejections since last sale: ---(I'll fill this in for future sales)
Time since last sale: ---(I'll fill this in for future sales)
Total rejections of this story before this sale: 8
Total responses from Pseudopod before this sale: 1

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

2009-07-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

Just to let everyone know, there will be changes coming. What changes, you ask? Well, it's a surprise, and you'll just have to wait and see.

Don't worry, I'm still going to do the 2 interviews per month that I've been doing. :)

Found in Translation: Juliette Wade

2009-07-28T04:20:00.000-07:00

Juliette Wade is a writer of speculative fiction whose story Let the Word Take Me was published in the July/August 2008 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Her second published story, Cold Words, will also appear in Analog, in the October issue, on newsstands at the time of this interview.

Her stories are unique in that they draw heavily on her background in anthropology and linguistics. So many science fiction stories avoid the topic of linguistics entirely, either by ignoring it, or by hand-waving with gadgets like universal translators. Juliette's two Analog stories are centered around establishing communications with alien cultures.

Besides her successful fiction career, she also maintains a blog focused on discussions of linguistics and anthropology of both the real world and fictional locations. Her blog is particularly interesting because she makes it so interactive. You can raise questions there and she also periodically runs worldbuilding workshops, about which I've heard very good things. Check out her blog at http://www.talktoyouniverse.blogspot.com/

Juliette, thanks for agreeing to this interview.

David Steffen: In your own words, could you tell us a little bit about Cold Words to pique our interest?

Juliette Wade: The thing I love most about Cold Words is that it takes what seems like a pretty simple spaceport deal and turns it into something really exciting by putting it in the point of view of a 6'4'' drug-addicted wolflike alien with ulterior motives. Boy, did that add stakes and complications!

David: Cold Words is told from the point of view of a character who is not human. What particular challenges did this provide? Any advice for writers who would like to write from a non-human point of view?

Juliette: Creating Rulii and his voice was the biggest single investment of time and effort that went into the creation of the story. I actually started with the characteristics of his language, picked a species that would match well with status language issues, then designed the sounds and structure of his language. After that I figured out how I was going to reflect the structure of his language in English, and developed the prose. The step that followed was figuring out what kinds of metaphors he would use to describe his life, and the details of how he would live in the environment of his planet. I kept finding new places, like architecture, where the Aurrel species and their environment would require unique details. My advice to writers who want to write from a non-human point of view is to be systematic, and make sure you're grounded in what the character knows based on his or her environment and experience, so you can use only those things to express the character's judgment of people and events. Otherwise the human viewpoint will start to intrude.

David: You managed to get your very first fiction publication in Analog--which is on the top of many speculative writers' "wish list". Can you tell us a little bit about how this transpired? How long had you been writing before this sale?

Juliette: The Analog connection was very fortuitous, really the result of networking. I'd met Deborah J. Ross when we shared a panel at BayCon in Spring 2007, and having heard about my interest in Linguistics, she introduced me to Sheila Finch, author of The Guild of Xenolinguists, at Westercon a month later. Sheila was the one who told me that Analog's editor, Dr. Stanley Schmidt, enjoyed stories about linguistics. Because of Analog's known interest in hard science fiction, I'd never before considered sending anything to them, but after her recommendation I gave it a try. And it worked!

David: What was your first reaction when you first heard of the story's acceptance? How did you celebrate?

Juliette: I got the letter as I was running out the door to take my kids to gym, and could barely drive. When I opened it I found the first words were "I like 'Let the Word Take Me'." My heart was pounding. It was actually a conditional acceptance, because Dr. Schmidt wanted me to change some of the harder science aspects of the story, like whether the gecko aliens could stick to walls (they were too large to do so, according to the laws of physics). I knew this was my chance, so I changed those aspects of the story and sent it back. I agonized until I got confirmation that the story would be published. Then I did a happy dance!

David: How did your reaction to the second sale differ from the first?

Juliette: I was thrilled, actually, because this time it wasn't a conditional acceptance, and Dr. Schmidt said very nice things about the story. Also, on some level, I was really relieved because I could now be sure the first acceptance hadn't been a fluke. The first one was an idea I'd had for a long time and it happened to land, but Cold Words I designed expressly for Analog.

David: Has being published in Analog helped her with other pro markets? Sales? Personal rejections?

Juliette: I couldn't say. I don't think so; I'd been getting personal rejections for some time before the Analog sale. Also, since I designed Cold Words for them, I never sent it anywhere else. My other current stories are fantasy, so I don't really think there's much cross-influence.

David: Can you explain a little bit about how your world-building workshops work? Who is eligible to join? How do people join?

Juliette: Sure! The workshops are pretty informal and unscheduled. When I think I'll have time to hold one, I post a poll on the blog asking for expressions of interest, and if I get enough, I schedule one. I get people to submit 500-word excerpts from the start of a story, and I pick five participants based on how helpful I think I can be to them. Anyone can submit - there's no requirement that the story be *about* linguistics or anthropology issues - but because of my interests I particularly enjoy working with people who care about the worlds they're building and take interest in strengthening those aspects of their stories. In the last few months I've been too busy to propose a workshop, but I hope to have time for a third one later this year.

David: If we found intelligent extraterrestrial life, how difficult do you think it would be to establish communication? Would it even be possible?

Juliette: In fact, I think it would be extremely difficult and maybe impossible, particularly if we were trying to accomplish it at a distance with no context of alien physiology or environment. There are Earthly scripts we still can't decipher, and we certainly have difficulty with the more complex communications systems of animals on Earth, like dolphins and whales, for example. Languages are fitted to the transmission and reception systems possessed by their speakers, and we could find some things out there that would be beyond our ability to perceive, much less decipher.

David: With your background in linguistics, do you have trouble enjoying SF stories that avoid the issue of language barriers.

Juliette: Actually, no, though I always enjoy the ones that try to take language on. The classic solutions, universal translators or language-deciphering AI's, are so prevalent that I generally consider them to be an element of premise, i.e. I just have to accept that the method works, somehow. That's not too difficult to ignore, and then I can get onto enjoying what the story is really about.

David: Do you write novels, as well as short stories? If yes, do you prefer to write one or the other? Which comes easier to you?

Juliette: Yes, I write novels. I started writing them first, in fact, but I enjoy writing both. I found that starting to write short stories really helped me grasp some of the larger structural aspects of directing a story, so they've helped my novels a lot, indirectly.

David: What's your favorite way to spend your time, besides reading and writing?

Juliette: Being with my family. Going out to the children's museum, or ice skating with them, or just reading books, maybe helping my kids learn to use the computer. Also, talking with my husband is one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes we discuss my writing, and other times his work or events in the world.

David: If you could give only one piece of advice to aspiring writers trying to secure their first fiction sale, what would it be?

Juliette: Be dogged, both in improving your writing and in finding ways to connect to the community of writers. If you believe in it, just keep going.

David: More specifically, since you've had repeated sales to Analog, what is your advice to writers who wish to break into that particular market?

Juliette: It's hard to say. I was lucky, in some sense, that linguistics is what I do and Dr. Schmidt happens to like it. But I do have two pieces of advice: don't *not* submit just because you think Analog is a hard market to break into. Let the editor decide if your story is appropriate for them. The other is, keep in mind that Analog stories are very principled. Follow the guidelines as far as making science (linguistic or otherwise) integral to your plot, and be maniacal about keeping scientific grounding and consistency. This is not to say that you need to explain all the relevant science, just that it needs to serve as a rock-solid foundation for the story to succeed.

David: What was the last book you read?

Juliette: Ship of Dreams, a pirate historical romance written by my friend, Elaine LeClaire. Actually the first romance novel I've ever read, so it was fun and a change of pace. Very well written, too, with terrific historical detail - I heartily recommend her work.

David: Your favorite book?

Juliette: Hands down, my favorite book is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. It was the inspiration for my writing philosophy.

David: Who is your favorite author?

Juliette: In science fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin, for the depth and realism of her worlds and their people. In fantasy, I'd say Patricia McKillip, for her sense of story and her poetic use of language.

David: What was the last movie you saw?

Juliette: In the theater, it would have to be WALL-E. A bleak vision of the future, but a wonderful story - and a testament to how effective body language can be in communication.

David: What is your favorite movie?

Juliette: I'm not sure. The Lord of the Rings series is certainly high on my list.

David: Are you currently working on any writing that you'd like to give a sneak peek at?

Juliette: I'm designing a new story for Analog, tentatively titled "At Cross Purposes," where some human terraformers run into trouble with spacefaring aliens who have an unusual view of technology. Almost finished with a novel of linguistic fantasy, "Through This Gate," involving a magic book that contains a world literally made from the delusional writings of a Japanese madwoman who has lived inside it since the 11th century.

David: Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions, Juliette. I look forward to picking up a copy of Analog to see your new story in print.

Also, thank you to Brad R. Torgerson for his contributions to this interview.

Karl Johanson interview's a little delayed

2009-07-19T10:57:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the long period of silence. I just haven't had time to write any non-interview posts for a while. I'd planned to post the Karl Johanson interview in the middle of this month, but he's been pretty busy, so it might be a bit longer.

And the Juliette Wade interview should be posted on the 28th, come rain or shine!

Upcoming interview: Juliette Wade

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

Coming soon is an interview with Juliette Wade, a science fiction author who draws on her background in linguistics to create unique stories. Her second published story, Cold Words will appear in Analog, hitting newsstands on July 28th. I highly recommend the story and I'm looking forward to reading more of her work.

If anyone has any questions for her, drop me an email and I'll try to work them in!

David Farland (Wolverton) interview now posted at Fantasy Magazine

2009-07-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy/?p=4189

Upcoming Interview: Karl Johanson

2009-06-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

My next interview will be with Karl Johanson, editor of Neo-Opsis Magazine.
Got any burning questions for him? Email me.

My new Fantasy Magazine Article posted

2009-06-29T15:41:00.001-07:00

It's a reprint of my previous blog post "Wizard vs. Witch: Who's the Real Villain?"

http://www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy/?p=3984

Enjoy!

Cat Rambo interview

2009-06-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

My guest today is Cat Rambo, fantasy and science fiction writer and editor of Fantasy Magazine, a market recognized as being professional by SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America). Check out her website at http://www.kittywumpus.net and check out Fantasy Magazine's website at www.fantasy-magazine.com

David Steffen: Cat, thanks for coming. I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview.

Cat, what plots or types of stories are you tired of seeing?

Cat Rambo: I am tired of seeing retold fairy tales that don't do anything new with the fairy tale, where they just kind of say, okay I'm going to retell Cinderella but it's going to be a shopping sale at the mall and don't do anything new with that.

I have a great fondness for sword and sorcery. I grew up reading sword and sorcery. I read Fritz Lieber and C.L. Moore and a lot of Michael Moorcock, but I think there again you have to do something new for me to be interested. I get a lot of stories that are sort of Conan the Barbarian revisited but they're not as good as Robert E. Howard. Unless you are as good as Robert E. Howard it's probably best for writers to steer their way away from that.

David: Do you prefer certain subgenres of fantasy such as urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, high fantasy, etc?

Cat: I love urban fantasy. Paradoxically enough, given how much of it is out there, I don't get a lot of good urban fantasy. I like stories that tend to work on more than one level. We have, for example, a story that was very popular with our readers last year, Elena Gleason's Erased, which I was just looking at again. That story on one level is about someone's boyfriend who is invisible and what do you do when you're confronted with an invisible boyfriend. But on the other hand, at a deeper level, it's about what do you do in a relationship when the other person is vanishing. So I like the stories that work on more than one level. The stories where you go away and you find yourself thinking about later and think "Oh, yeah, okay, it works like this too."

David: Are there any big changes on the horizon for Fantasy Magazine?

Cat: Oh, onward and upward for Fantasy Magazine. We have a web comic that will be appearing soon. We have been reorganizing and getting a lot of people in to drive individual areas like TV or books, and comics. So there's going to be a lot. We're hoping to up the amount of content to put out something interesting at least two or three times a day.

David: Can you elaborate about the web comic?

Cat: It's a fantasy comic based on a setting that will be familiar to a lot of our readers, which is inside a fantasy role-playing game.

David: Are there any features coming up in Fantasy Magazine that you're particularly looking forward to?

Cat: Right now we're running a series called "Game-mastering NPCs". The first of the five part series was just posted last week, talking about the importance of NPCs (non-player characters) to a roleplaying game campaign. Also, I'm particularly looking forward to some articles by Genevieve Valentine.

David: Which were you first, a writer or an editor?

Cat: First and foremost, always a writer.

David: Do you think that being an editor has changed the way you write?

Cat: Not really. It's one more thing nibbling at my writing time. I think every writer experiences that in some form or another.

David: Has being an editor provided you with extra skills that have been useful as a writer?

Cat: Yes. One thing about reading slush is that it gives you greater confidence in your own writing. It has really driven home the importance of making the first paragraphs of a story draw the reader in.

David: Has the economic crisis impacted the magazine at all?

Cat: Not really. Previously we hadn't been drawing in as much advertising revenue as we could have. We're making an effort to do better in that respect, so we may actually be doing better now than before.

David: SFWA added Fantasy Magazine to their list of professional markets earlier this year. Has this sparked any change in submissions, either quantity or quality?

Cat: Yes, in both respects. We're getting 500-600 submissions a month now, as well as seeing submissions from some pro writers we hadn't seen before. It's been a good thing we have the new online submission process, which speeds things up significantly.

David: I have noticed in my submissions a large reduction in turnaround time since the new online submissions system was set up. How exactly does that system make things faster?

Cat: We were just using Gmail before, so every couple weeks we had to check the junk folder just to make sure that things weren't getting lost there. And there was stuff bouncing every once in a while. Someone's spam filter would eat our stuff. So it just makes it a lot easier to track what's going on and you've got a system also where we can see which slushreader is reading and who is slacking and go prod them. *laughs*

David: What are your personal pet peeves when reading stories?

Cat: Personal pet peeves? In terms of the stories or in terms of the way they're presented?

David: Like little grammar mistakes that you see too often, things like that.

Cat: Oh, "its" and "it's" drives me nuts. I taught composition a few times and I always tell students that is the one error that will get under my skin. Its/it's and they're/their/there. Nowadays we have spellchecker, so there's really no excuse for having too many actual misspellings but we still see alot of the it's/its.

David: How about other things that bother you. For instance, some editors really dislike reading stories that begin with the character waking up.

Cat: I don't like the beginnings that start out with kind of two heads talking in space where there's no sense of location and you don't know what's going on. I don't like beginnings that aren't well-grounded and give us a sense of the story world.

I don't like the endings, not so much the beginnings, where someone wakes up as the endings and is "Oh my God it was all a dream." And it's like "Oh, come on!"

David: It sort of makes you wonder "Why did I spend my time reading this?"

Cat: That's it, it insults the reader: "Ha ha I tricked you and you wasted all your time." I don't like stories that take the "I'm cleverer than you approach" to the reader.

David: I've heard that some editors like a little humor, but so many people have different views on what's funny. How do you judge a humorous piece in submission to Fantasy or do you generally steer clear of humor pieces?

Cat: I like humor. I love a good funny story. I love, for example, the Terry Pratchett books which I think are just wonderful, or the Jasper Ford Tuesday Next stories. I like humorous pieces that don't depend on cliches. If it's a joke that's been told before, I've heard it before, so I don't really want those. Good humor is very hard to write and it's far too scarce in the submission pile.

David: What was the last book you read?

Cat: It was a really cool Japanese murder-myster that Ann Vandermeer turned me onto. I just did a workshop with her and she recommended it. It's titled "Out", written by Natsuo Kirino.

David: Your favorite book?

Cat: I will go with a classic and say Thomas Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur which is one of my desert island books.

David: Who is your favorite author?

Cat: I will be slightly pretentious and say James Joyce because I do love what James Joyce does with language.

David: What was the last movie you saw?

Cat: We went and saw The Hangover which I thought was a lot of fun. We love Zach Galifianakis. We'd seen him in a documentary called the Comedians of Comedy and he was so hysterical in that.

David: I saw that last week as well. There are a few moments in that movie that are sure to be nominated for the MTV Movie Awards' WTF award.

Cat: *laughs*. It just had so many moments like that where you were just like "Oh my god where are they going to go with this"

I kind of want to go so Land of the Lost simply because I loved it when I was a kid. I like Will Ferrell but I"m just not sure the combination is going to work. I like Will Ferrell. I have liked him in a great many things, and then I have seen him in many things where I've said "Well okay that's not as interesting as it could be."

David: What is your favorite movie?

Cat: I really love the Wizard of Oz.

David: I just wrote a story specifically for a Wizard of Oz horror anthology called Shadows of the Emerald City.

Cat: Oh cool, what a neat idea. I had just been reading John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence. Which I think kind of pokes gentle fun at the economics of Oz which is kind of a funny way to do it.

Who's putting out the horror anthology?

David: Horror writer JW Schnarr: http://jwschnarr.webs.com/submissions.htm

David: Do you have any upcoming publications that you'd like to tell us about?

Cat: Indeed I do. I have a collection coming out with Paper Golem Press. The title is "Eyes like Sky and Coal and Moonlight."

David: That's a catchy title.

Cat Rambo: That's the title story.

David: Is it a collection of reprinted stories or all-new writing?

Cat: I think It's about half and half, there is about 50 percent new stuff, and a couple Strange Horizons stories, and the Weird
Tales stories. Kind of the best stuff that's appeared in publication. I'm really happy about that, because somethings appears in small magazines then sort of vanishes like a leaf on the wind. It's nice to get a chance to put stories I'm really pleased with out in front of folks.

David: If you could give only one piece of advice to aspiring writers trying to get published, what would it be?

Cat: Be persistent. More than anything else you have to cultivate the hide of a rhinoceros, put your head down and keep plugging away.

David: Do you have any works in progress you'd like to tell us about?

Cat: I am finishing up a young adult novel called Phat Fairy. It is my reaction in some ways to reading the Twilight series.

David: What did you think of the Twilight series?

Cat: I thought that they were decently written but I thought they were just an appalling message for young women. You have this utterly passive heroine whose main motivation is nailing her man. I really didn't think they were a good message for young women at all. I have a goddaughter who will at some point be reading YA fiction, so I wanted to make sure there was at least one book out there with a healthier message. Though I am not trying to write a message-driven book either.

David: Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions, Cat, and letting us get a glimpse into Cat's world of writing and editing. Also, thanks to Frank Dutkiewicz, Brad Torgerson, and Gary Cuba for your contributions to this interview.

Stay tuned for more interviews! I've got a full schedule, at two interviews a month, lined up through mid-October!

Alethea Kontis Interview now up at Fantasy Magazine!

2009-06-20T14:30:00.001-07:00

http://www.darkfantasy.org/fantasy/?p=3867

Upcoming: Reprints in Fantasy Magazine

2009-06-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to say that reprints of a few of my blog posts are slated to be published in Fantasy Magazine! Some interviews, and some analysis of books/movies. Needless to say, I'm very excited. :) More details soon.

Cat Rambo is not a robot

2009-06-16T08:13:00.001-07:00

I called Cat Rambo yesterday for a very pleasant phone interview and conversation. She's a very nice person and fun to talk to, and I hope I have an excuse to talk to her again in the future. I'll be transcribing the interview into text, and I hope to post it some time next week.

And, most importantly, Cat Rambo is not a robot.

Humans unite!

2009-06-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

Most of my writing friends and contacts are entirely online contacts. Sometimes, like right now, the philosophical center of my brain takes over, and I start to wonder if these online contacts are really real flesh and blood people. The only evidence of their existence is lines of text on my computer screen, which are composed of small changes in voltages sent through my Ethernet cable.

For those of you who are flesh and blood people, I apologize in advance for when I meet you in person. I may stare. Don't worry, it will be nothing you said, and you don't have a booger hanging out of your nose. It's sort of like when you listen to your own voice on a recording and it sounds nothing like what you hear in your own head. Just grab a soda or a cup of coffee and wait for a few minutes. Eventually I'll sort it out and will return to my usual charming self.

But until I meet you, the most important and immediate question here is, "How do I know you aren't robots?" Perhaps the robotic uprising is nigh. Perhaps my banter and exchanging of writing ideas are all just contributing to the robots' understanding of human abstract thought so they can better learn how to manipulate and eventually destroy us.

The answer to this question seems particularly obvious when reading form rejection letters from certain publications which are so badly worded as to be entirely inhuman. The robots think so little of me, they sent their crudest AIs to smite me. For instance, the oft-used "Your story does not suit our needs at this time"--I'm always tempted to reply and ask at what time my story WOULD suit their needs. (The topic of form letter dissection has sparked a new post idea--will post more on that soon).

So beware--when you send communications to people you only know on the Internet, you are contributing to the accelerated downfall of humanity. Be warned! Your knee-jerk reaction to this blog-post may be to laugh. "He's contradicting his own warning by putting it in a blog post!" you say. But I'm craftier than you realize. By lacing my own message with this major logical fallacy, I've rendered this post invisible to modern artifical intelligence. They'll disregard it as nonsense. So if you've made it this far, you must be a human. Either that, or the robots are more intelligent than anyone thought, and all is lost!

Humans unite!

Email address

2009-06-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

I've now updated my profile with an actual email address:
diabolicalplots<>gmail<>com

Replace the <> with an at sign, and the <> with a period.

Feel free to email me!

Alethea Kontis Interview

2009-06-11T16:06:00.001-07:00

My guest today is New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis. She co-wrote the Dark Hunter Companion with fellow New York Times bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple professional publications, such as Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Realms of Fantasy. Not only that, but she's published a children's book titled AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First, with a sequel upcoming. Besides her fiction, her essays can be seen at several professional magazines and have been collected in book form, the first volume of which is called Beauty & Dynamite.

Check out her website at www.aletheakontis.com

DS: I'm sure you answer this question all the time, but I have to ask: your name is so unique. Is there a story behind it?

AK: "Alethea" is the Greek word for "truth." As all Greeks know, words have power. My name is as much of a curse as it is a blessing, especially when my grandmother continually reminds me to lie to her friends about my age. (Sorry, Nana!)

My mother discovered the name as the family settled down to watch "Kung-Fu" on March 15, 1973 -- my older brother's 9th birthday. (West is currently a 4th-degree black belt in Taekwondo.) In that particular episode, Jodie Foster played a precocious girl named Alethea Patricia Ingram.

I discovered the details of this event only a few years ago...after I had already been a buyer at Ingram Book Company for over six years. Oh, yes. Words have power, my friend.

DS: You've written so many essays, and I've enjoyed the ones I've read. They flow so naturally that they're effortless to read, yet at the same time are very focused on each particular topic. Do essay ideas just slap you across the face, demanding to be written or does it take a more concerted effort? How does essay-writing compare to fiction-writing?

AK: I was raised in a family of storytellers. And when I say that, I mean that we put most voice actors and stand-up comedians to shame. You only have as much time as everyone plans on sitting around the dinner table, and you only have the floor for as long as your voice carries over everyone else's...so whatever you choose to impart to the group, it better be GOOD. Every time I sit down to write an essay, I imagine myself around that table. As long as I have the floor I've got to have a great beginning, I've got to keep my audience engaged, and I can't take forever to get to the point.

Someone asked me once if one needed a diverse and interesting background to be a writer. I think everyone has a diverse and interesting background; writers just exploit theirs. Everyone has stories to tell; you step in them like puddles every single day. For whatever reason I seem to have this abnormally remarkable life -- these are just the stories I step in.

DS: Do you prefer to write by yourself or with another writer (like the Dark Hunter Companion). What sort of unique challenges or benefits arise when working together?

AK: The Dark-Hunter Companion is the only collaboration I've done to date. Sherri and I had a unique arrangement with the Companion that could have been as much a disaster as it was a triumph. I started out with a stack of novels, a notebook, a glorified outline, and an anticipated word count. I re-read the whole series (many for the 3rd or 4th time), took notes, and then wrote the entire encyclopedia as if I was just another smart-mouthed character in the Dark-Hunter universe. I handed the manuscript over to Sherri, who then pulled out some spoilers, put in some teasers, and altered a few things that could only be altered by She Who Keeps Entire Worlds in her Head.

When I got the manuscript back for copyedits, our writing style blended so perfectly I honestly couldn't tell where my words left off and hers began. Everyone was pleased with the end result -- the fans most of all. It was a fascinating experience.

DS: What do you think has been the most significant event to advance your career?

AK: My life suddenly flashes before my eyes: My parents telling me I couldn't major in English. My English teacher telling me no child would want to read my fairy tales. My friend Gail telling me to just write my picture book idea "so you can read it." Orson Scott Card telling me to just write the novel. Tom Piccirilli taking me to task when he found out I hadn't submitted a finished manuscript. Kevin J. Anderson slapping me in the face when I denigrated my own writing.

If I had to pick only one event, it would be the Baen dinner in the fall of 2003, where David Drake found out I lived only a couple of miles from Andre Norton and ordered me to go visit her. "She has no idea what she means to this industry," he told me, and he was right. My correspondence and friendship with Miss Andre is something I'll treasure forever.

DS: What is your favorite thing about writing?

AK: Making my mother cry.

When I wrote stories as a kid, making my mother cry was a mark of excellence -- I knew then that I had something powerful. My mother was always my first reader and ("get a real job" major aside) my biggest advocate -- up to and including calling a particular university and bullying them to accept my application essay despite the fact that I was a few hundred words over the limit. (I was accepted to said particular university, but ultimately could not afford to attend.)

While at Boot Camp in 2003, I called Mom from the campus of UNCG and yelled into the phone, "ORSON SCOTT CARD SAID I'M A GREAT WRITER!!!" I could not have offended her more. There was silence on the other end, and then a very cold, "Alethea, we've been telling you that for years. So now you're going to believe some guy just because he's some big fat best-seller?" It was then that I officially realized my mother hadn't actually been spoon-feeding me a load of crap, as most mothers are wont to do.

She forgave me. Six years later, she's still my first reader. And she still tells me every time I make her cry.

DS: Do you have a particular writing process you go through for every story, from story conception to drafting?

AK: Because I was raised a storyteller, I'm what they call an "Athena writer" -- the stories all but spring fully-formed from my head. I mentally work through my plot points and dialogue and edit as I write. The words need to be in order, and they need to be the right words.

As a result, when writing fiction I average only about 500 words an hour and only a few thousand a day at my most productive. But I rarely go back and rewrite, and my first drafts are very, very clean drafts.

DS: If you could only give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

AK: Do the thing that scares you.

DS: What's the last book you read? Your favorite book? Your favorite author?

The last book I read (all the way through): The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, by Leanna Renee Hieber. (For the record, I loved it.) Favorite book and author -- ha! I could no sooner choose a favorite star in the sky.

DS: What was the last movie you saw?

AK: Last movie I saw: UP. I think I only cried more after seeing Big Fish.

DS: I know you're very active on the convention circuit. What upcoming convention appearances do you have planned?

AK: I've just finished six weeks of the heaviest schedule I've ever had (including Penguicon, Mo*Con, Hypericon, and BEA). The rest of 2009 is fairly light -- I'll be at Necon in July and, of course, Dragon*Con on Labor Day weekend.

DS: What do you like best about conventions? Do you suffer from stage fright--if so, how do you get up there in front of all those people?

AK: I'm a raging introvert, but I have no problem with stage fright. My Aunt Ernestine (actress Ernestine Mercer) taught me how to say "TA-DA!" when I was a baby -- a feat I had turned into a lucrative acting career by he time I was eight. I was on stage all through high school...which trickled down to only helping out on student films in college...and then after I graduated, the hermit took over and I slipped into borderline agoraphobia.

All it took was one panic attack in the grocery store for me to say, "NONE OF THIS NONSENSE, PLEASE!" From that point on, I concentrated on consciously participating in a healthy amount of social activity and pulling myself back out of my shell. I am definitely not the mealy-mouthed frump I was five years ago. Five years from now, people will have to put on sunglasses just to look at me.

DS: Any convention stories to share? Strange people you've met?

AK: Ha! Plenty. There are...um...more than ten in Beauty & Dynamite alone. My very first convention was Dragon*Con in 1996. From the minute I showed up on the front steps, it felt like I had come home. And all those misfits I've met? They're all as close as family now. I love every single one of them. Some of them even dubbed me their Princess, an honor I have accepted with all the appropriate grace and aplomb. I now have a collection of tiaras...but that I blame on Jill Conner Browne.

DS: Do you have any newly published stories or soon-to-be-published stories that we should watch out for? If so, what can you tell us about them?

AK: This year, keep an eye out for "The Giant and the Unicorn" in Shimmer Magazine's steampunk Clockwork Jungle issue. I've got "The Witch of Black Mountain" coming out in Apex's Harlan County Horrors anthology and "The God of Last Moments" in Maurice Broaddus's Mo*Con anthology. I'm also working on a piece for Doug Warrick and Kyle Johnson's Nick Cave anthology...which I really need to get home and finish. And, as always, keep watching the blog for the next humorous installment in the Adventures of Lee.

DS: Any exciting works-in-progress in the pipeline right now? What can you tell us about them? Can you give us any sneak peeks at any of them to pique our interest.

AK: I've just finished the unabridged, novel version of "Sunday", my fairytale novelette that appeared in Realms of Fantasy in October 2006. If you'd like a sneak peek, the story is available on the Anthology Builder website.

DS: I'm keeping a running "wish list" of guests for interviews. Is
there anyone in the speculative fiction industry you would love to see
interviewed?

AK: Ha! I've been interviewing folks for the Ingram Genre Chicks column for over five years now, so every time I think of the answer to that question, I just hunt down the prospective victim and interview them. Neil Gaiman? Charles Vess? Anne McCaffrey? Easy-peasy. What I love best are the interviews that surprise me. I go back and re-read Naomi Neale's (aka Vance Briceland) or Joe Hill's answers whenever I need a pick-me-up. Heck, Edmund Shubert's still makes me laugh so hard I cry. I know I'll never look at penguins the same way again.

Good times.

DS: Alethea, thanks for taking the time to answer all my questions. It's been fun. I've been meaning to make it to some cons this year. If I end up making it to Dragon*Con I'll be sure to look you up on the event list. I would love to meet you in person!
:)

Questions for Cat Rambo

2009-06-11T05:17:00.001-07:00

Coming soon: my interview with Cat Rambo, writer and co-editor of Fantasy Magazine.

Any questions you'd like to add to the interview? Drop a comment here and I'll try to work them into the interview.

A Year in Rejections

2009-06-09T19:22:00.001-07:00

It was 1 year ago that I sent out my very first submission, my first novel to Tor. And what a year!

1 novel finished before the year started.
19 short stories written to completion within that year.
31 venues received my submissions.
91 rejections on those stories.

Almost to the century mark for rejections. Lately the trend seems slightly more positive--I've actually gotten a few "almost" replies, and one that's being held for consideration for an anthology. I'm hoping that's a continuing trend and not just a shallow peak. Here's hoping! Who knows what the next year will bring.

I am a little bit curious what the big 3 digit rejection will be, the big one oh oh!

When is a writer a writer?

2009-06-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

This was inspired by a Facebook post where someone said "not everyone who calls themselves a writer is a writer".

When is a writer a writer?
To write: to form (as words) by inscribing the characters or symbols on a surface.
So whoever puts symbols surfaces is a writer? No. Writing does not make you a writer, or anyone who is literate would be a writer. A person would become a writer when they pay with a check or write a grocery list. That's writing, not Writing.

When most people speak of a writer, they are speaking of someone who has written something in particular, especially a book. But does one become a writer simply by writing a book? I've written a book. Does that make me a writer? It's sitting in submission at a publisher at the moment. I've written more than a dozen short stories, does that make me a writer if none of them are published? What about a writer who's been too afraid to show his work to any other person? Are they still a writer, or does their fear of rejection take away that title?

Does someone have to like your writing to make you a writer? What if you've shown your writing to some people, but none of them have enjoyed it in the slightest. Must we seek a seal of approval to call ourselves writers, or should this writer declare his title regardless if anyone cares for his work?

Are you a writer once published? Most people would agree that people who make their primary income from writing are writers. But what if you've published a single short story? What if you've been published only at semi-pro markets? Token markets paying a half cent a word? No pay at all? Does that make you any less of a writer? Many of history's greatest artists were not appreciate in their time, does that mean they only became artists post-mortem? Until then they were just losers with paintbrushes, and somehow became artists as a side effect of decomposition?

When the subject comes up, I tend to call myself an "aspiring writer". Not because I really think there's much difference, but because that one word avoids the inevitable and awkward follow-up question: Where can I see your work? But once I publish a short story, is that the time to call myself a writer or do I need a longer bibliography? Perhaps there should be stages of writership, novice, apprentice, journeyman, master, grand master. I could try using these as my writing career develops, but unless these terms go into wide usage, people will just think me a weirdo. Which is fine, I am a weirdo and proud of it, but the terms don't provide clarity if no one knows what they mean.

Once a writer, always a writer? What if I won a short story contest in grade school and never write again? Does that mean I can always carry the title? If people ask, I can show them the story collection with the byline "David Steffen, age 7". Does that entitle me to call myself a writer? What of J.D. Salinger, who has not published an original work since 1965? Most people would call him a writer because his wild success of "Catcher in the Rye", but what if the book had been less successful? What if it had been a single short story? Would he still be considered a writer today?

Many similar questions apply to painters. Monkeys can manipulate paints on a canvas, but does that mean that monkeys are artists? I suspect that painters would be insulted by the idea--no lower species could be capable of art. Yet I've seen some abstract art that looks remarkably similar to monkeys fingerpainting. Does that mean that that artist is not an artist because a monkey could do the same?

Movie Review of X-Men origins: Wolverine

2009-06-06T06:03:00.000-07:00

X-Men Origins: Wolverine was an okay movie. It had its moments, in particular I liked some of the casting choices, but overall it left enough continuity questions and major plot holes that it really just bothered me.

One of my favorite scenes in the whole movie happened in just the first few minutes, where it shows Wolverine and Sabretooth fighting in every American war since the mid-19th century, each of them of course in period uniforms and with grainy photography of each era.

Overall it was okay, but some of the character motivations were thin at best, there were several characters that were clearly only included so they could be part of merchandising later on. That aspect wasn't as bad as X-Men 3 (thank God) which included dozens of characters that were only on camera for seconds, just long enough to say their name and show their powers.

The movie follows James ( who we know in later movies as Wolverine or Logan) played by Hugh Jackman and his brother Viktor (who later becomes Sabretooth) played by Liev Schreiber. Never mind that Liev Schreiber looks nothing like the Sabretooth of the first X-Men movie. You would think that they could have at least died Liev's hair the sandy brown color, but apparently that was too much to ask. On the other hand, Liev did make a good Sabretooth, albeit one who didn't look right. And apparently mutton chops are a genetic trait--their dad had them in the opening scene, and both of them have them as adults also.

Anyway, it follows their lives as brothers, and how Wolverine became Weapon X with the adamantium laced skeleton that makes him nearly indestructible. Together they join a strike force led by William Stryker, who you might remember from X-2. You might also remember Stryker having a southern accent which is oddly absent from this movie. Despite that, I did like the casting choice for Stryker. He had a very smooth convincing voice which is perfect for the character.

The action was good, but there was just too much of it sometimes. A movie about Wolverine has to have lots of action, but he pretty much ended up fighting every character he meets, even if they are on the same side. Granted, this is a tried-and-true comic book tradition, throwing two "good" characters together and making them think they're enemies for an episode, and then they're shown to be friends at the end at which point they apologize and unite against the enemy they both came to fight. But just because comic books use that device doesn't mean that movies should.

I really liked Ryan Reynolds character, but he wasn't in enough of the movie to make it worthwhile. He had some good wisecracks while he was on screen though. And it was good to see Dominic Monaghan, though his role wasn't a huge one.

Keep reading if you've already seen it or you don't mind some spoilers

SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT

But there were some MAJOR problems. First and foremost--the final scenes take place on Three Mile Island, and the action actually ends up causing the meltdown. That's a bit contrived but not the worst plot device I've ever seen. But the thing that bothers me is that NONE of the characters suffer from radiation poisoning whatsoever. Wolverine has some excuse for this, because of his healing factor, perhaps he's immune to radiation sickness. Stryker, however, is entirely human, he was on the site, and not only does he survive the movie, he's alive for X-2 that happens maybe twenty years later with no apparent ill side effects. Explain that to me! Did the makers of the movie really not realize that a nuclear meltdown is not a healthy thing to be around.

Another MAJOR problem--they didn't do their chemical research. At one point in the movie, someone uses a drug to fake a death, to supposedly slow their heartbeat down so it's unnoticeable. That's fine, but the drug they used was hydrochlorothiazide, which is not a heart medication, it's a diuretic. That's right, all it does is make you pee. (Thanks to my wife the pharmacist for pointing this out). The only way it could affect your heart, and even this is a stretch, is if you peed so much that you lost too many electrolytes and your heart went into arrhythmia, which is not what happened here. Two minutes with Google could have given them a medicine that at least slowed down heart rate--that's just lazy!

Another big one--the use of adamantium is inconsistent. In X-2 I believe it was an alloy, not a pure metal, and once it hardened it was impossible to melt again. But in this movie Stryker finds it in it's hardened form and yet is somehow able to use it as if it wasn't--continuity error! Then Stryker creates a gun that shoots adamantium bullets, and assumes they will be able to puncture Wolverine's skull--but you need something harder than adamantium if you want to puncture it!!

Another big continuity error--in this movie Stryker has the ability to steal powers from one mutant and give them to another mutant. If he knows how to do this now, he should know how to do it later in his life, but somehow he doesn't in X-2. He's the sort of man that would use any weapon in his arsenal whenever he can--I doubt he would have held back in X-2 if he knew how to do it.

Well that's all, I just had to rant about it, and I was cataloguing all these little problems as I watched the movie. We're trying to get back into the habit of watching a weekly movie, so I hope to do these reviews more often again!

My next guest!

2009-06-03T18:40:00.001-07:00

The next guest to be interviewed right here is Alethea Kontis, writer extraordinare! She's a great writer whose fiction and essays have been featured at several major speculative magazine as well as having published multiple books.
Check out her website at http://aletheakontis.com/

Do you have any questions you're dying to ask her? Drop a comment here and I'll try to work them in!

RIP David Eddings

2009-06-03T11:48:00.001-07:00

http://scifi.about.com/b/2009/06/03/david-eddings-is-dead.htm

I've read and enjoyed a few of his books and have been reading to read more of them.

Interview Schedule

2009-06-03T05:02:00.000-07:00

Tentatively I'd like to do two interviews a month, one near the beginning of each month and one near the middle. I have a list of folks who've expressed interest in being interviewed, including some editors, some writers, slushreaders, and illustrators.

Within the next week I'll try to announce the next guest to give you guys some time to send me any burning questions you may have for him or her. Stay tuned!

Rough weekend

2009-06-02T14:44:00.001-07:00

Between Friday and Monday I received SEVEN rejections. 2 on Friday, 3 on Saturday, 2 on Monday. Ouch, my ego!

On the bright side, a story I have posted to the Baen's Bar forum (a critique forum that doubles as a submission route for Jim Baen's Universe) is getting some positive comments, even from Edith Maor, one of the slush readers who is notoriously hard to please.

Lately I have noticed that, in my writing submissions, when I get particularly bad news it seems to come paired with some measure of good news on the same day. Maybe it's just a fluke, but maybe something really good is just around the corner. I can hope, right?

Google Precedence

2009-06-02T04:54:00.000-07:00

Just for fun, I did a Google search for my name to see where I rank these days. I've now moved up to #4, and even passed up one of my unsavory name-doppelgangers that has thwarted me for a long time--the web page is titled "Is David Steffen and elitist bigot?"

1. President, Biomedical Computing in Texas
2. convicted murderer from a case back in 1983
-I think I can safely say that I am absolved of all guilt in this case--I was less than 2 years old.
3. Generic WhitePages.com search for my name
4. Internet Broadway Database (IBDB)-- a fellow who works in marketing
5. Me!
6. Is David Steffen and elitist bigot?

Gary's Tiny Timmy's Tweets

2009-06-02T04:52:00.000-07:00

Tiny Timmy Tweets: Tub Travails

Tiny Timmy loved his bath toys. Except for the whirring one, the hairdryer that Mommy would sometimes toss into the tub. See Timmy splash!

Tiny Timmy hated taking baths. Especially when Mommy held his head underwater to teach him how to count. How much is a gazillion, Timmy?

"Dive, dive!" Tiny Timmy said in the tub, making like a submarine. "You need more ballast," his mom replied. "How about this cinderblock?"

Interview with David Farland (aka David Wolverton)

2009-05-30T15:06:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted to introduce David Wolverton (aka David Farland), New York Times bestselling author who has published nearly fifty science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Runelords series (which I highly recommend). In addition to that, he's served as the coordinating judge for the Writers of the Future Contest.

You might also know him from his email blog "Daily Kick in the Pants", through which he gives motivational tips, insights on writing, and helps us see the ins and outs of the writing business from the point of view of a highly successful author.

You can check out his website at http://www.runelords.com/

David, thanks for stopping by.

David Steffen: You always seem to have the answers on how to establish yourself as a successful writer. Was there ever a time when you found yourself ready to hang up the typewriter? How did you handle it and get back on track?

David Farland: I've never felt in despair about my career. I love to write, nd I've always thought that if there was anything else in the world that I wanted to do, I'd just do it, too. For example, when I was young I went to school to study medicine. I thought that it would be fun to be a genetic researcher or a pediatric physician, then write my novels on the side. Unfortunately, I would have needed an endowment of stamina to do it. (For those of you who have read The Runelords, you'll get the joke!)

Seriously though, I did go through a fit of depression a few years ago, and went through my "midlife crisis." I found out that Prozac doesn't help most men, but Welbutrin does.

David Steffen: You've given aspiring writers endless tips to help get their careers started. If you could only give a single piece of advice, what would it be?

David Farland: Be persistent. It's your career. If you really want to be a writer, make time to practice, to hone your craft, and just do it.

David Steffen: Where do your story ideas come from? Do you see stories everywhere you look and you just have to pluck the ones that appeal the most? Or do you have to sit down and actively say "I'm going to think of something new to write today"?

David Farland: Ideas come to those who look for them sometimes, but other times they just hit you. A twist of a phrase, a powerful image, a news story, an insight from a child--anything can set you off. I have at least a dozen story ideas per day, I suppose. I can't write even a hundredth of them. So I just siphon.

Yet even with all of that, I find that I sometimes have to go searching for good ideas to fit a particular story. In short, you never get to rest.

David Steffen: In particular, what was the first idea that came to you for the Runelords series? A character? An idea for the magic system? The world itself?

David Farland: With the Runelords, I knew that I just wanted to write a big fantasy at first. I wanted my series to appeal to medieval fantasy readers--the Tolkien crowd--but I also wanted it to be different from any other story. So I had a basic idea for the world. I knew that it was going to be medieval, and that it would have plenty of large animals and monsters. In short, it is covered with megafauna, much as the United States was twelve thousand years ago when dozens of breeds of mammoths and mastodons roamed here, along with cave bears and sabertooths and dire wolves and all of those other cool animals. So I knew that I wanted to make my world similar to other fantasy worlds, but there are no glorious elves in it, no dwarves or orcs. I wanted my own creatures.

But what really set me off was the magic system. I wanted to create a new kind of magic for my world, and I knew that it had to be different and mind-blowing. I spent months looking at various magic systems used throughout history, and then one day the whole concept of wizards drawing attributes from vassals--glamour, brawn, wit, grace, sight, hearing, etc.--just literally seemed to fall right out of the sky.

David Steffen: I find the endowment system in the Runelords series particularly interesting, where a donor or "Dedicate" can permanently grant an attribute to a recipient or "Runelord", and that link lasts as long as they both live. Where did the idea for this system come from?

David Farland: Well, when I was researching magic systems, I knew that I wanted to write about one that had something of an economic base. There needed to be a price for the magic.

But you know, you can't really tell where these things come from. I mean, I didn't base it upon anything that I've seen. I pondered dozens of magic systems, and then one day it hit me. I think that I might have had an inkling of it when I was watching a show where a calf got branded. My mind went, "You know, they used to brand slaves like that, too." And I thought at the time, I wonder if it would be interesting to write a fantasy novel where people got branded as part of a magic system."

It was just a fleeting thought. I was in Scotland a few months later, traveling down a road past Innessfree, when a friend asked, "Could you imagine what this must have looked like 2000 years ago?" I recall reading from a Roman historian who complained that on one night, some 40 men were dragged from their beds and eaten by wolves. He said, "The only thing worse than the wolves are the wild Scotsmen themselves!" I was thinking about that, and suddenly my subconscious said, "Hey, I've got your magic system!" and the whole complex system--along with the first novel in the series--just popped into my head at once.

David Steffen: Do you have any guesses who the next big up-and-coming big name writers will be, from your recreational reading and from your role judging stories for the Writers of the Future contest?

David Farland: Well, in fantasy it will be Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss. I know some excellent new writers who are coming along, but they'll have to get their books written and sold first.

David Steffen: What was the last book you read? Your favorite book? Your favorite author?

David Farland: I just listed my two favorite new authors. I don't want to choose between them, since I like them both. I know I should have done it years ago, but I'm reading Eragon right now. My favorite living author right now is still Orson Scott Card, overall.

David Steffen: How about the last movie you saw? Your favorite movie?

David Farland: I saw the latest Terminator last night, but it wasn't nearly as good as Star Trek. I need to go see Angels and Demons this week. There are a lot of good movies coming out this summer.

David Steffen: How did your writing career get started?

David Farland: Actually, I began writing heavily in college, and my career took off after I started winning writing contests. I entered my first short story in a little contest and won third place. When I was done, I thought, "Wow, I spent ten hours on this story, and I won $50. That's $5 an hour. Maybe if I worked a little harder, I could win first place in a contest."

So I spent some time thinking about how to win writing contests, and then wrote several short stories. I entered six different contests, and won first place in each of them, including the Writers of The Future. When we went to New York for the awards ceremony, a number of the judges had already gushed to various editors about how good I was (Thank you Robert Silverberg, Orson Scott Card, Algis Budrys, and Roger Zelazny). Half a dozen editors approached me, asking if I was interested in submitting novels. Not only was I interested, I'd packed a novel proposal in my suitcase! Within a week, I had a three-novel contract with Bantam Books.

David Steffen: What was the single most significant step you took to advance your career?

David Farland: You know, I realized after I'd written my second book that my real last name, Wolverton, always put my books on the bottom shelf at the end of the rack. That was terrible placement. So I decided to begin writing under a pseudonym. That was tough to do, given that I was hitting at the top of the bestseller lists for science fiction. But when I moved to fantasy, my publisher allowed me to do it. I think it was a smart move.

David Steffen: What convention appearances do you have planned?

David Farland: I'm trying to decide whether to go to DragonCon in August. I believe I'll be at World Fantasy Con in San Diego in October, and then I'll probably go to Life, the Universe, and Everything at Brigham Young University in February.

David Steffen: What's your next publication that we should watch out for?

David Farland: My next novels are Freaky Fly Day, Book three of my Ravenspell series, which comes out in September from Covenant Books. I also have a historical fiction novel that deals with the Willie Handcart Company, in which Mormon pioneers crossed the prairie in 1856, facing tremendous hardships. Here's a link for that one: http://davidfarland.zenfront.com/books/in-the-company-of-angels.html. I also have the eighth book in the Runelords series coming out in October, called Berserker Lord. You can see the cover in the art section at www.runelords.com, and you can order a signed/numbered copy of the book by emailing davidfarland@xmission.com.

David Steffen: What are you currently working on? Can you give us a sneak peek?

David Farland: Yes, I'm actually reading galleys for Berserker Lord, and you can read the first couple of chapters on www.runelords.com. I'm going to put up a new feature on my site that I'm thinking about calling "Over my shoulder," where you will be able to read what I've written recently, and I'll explain why I made the choices that I've made.

David Steffen: How did you react to rejections when you started writing? How has that changed over the years?

David Farland: My reaction has always been the same. I try to figure out why I got rejected, and then I rewrite and try harder!

David Steffen: Do you tend to write in a certain environment? For instance, some people say they write better with particular kinds of music, or can only write if they have an hour or more of uninterrupted time, or like me, they tend to do their best in the morning just after they get up.

David Farland: I find that I do my best writing in the morning. It's important to be comfortable, so I write with a laptop while sitting in an easy chair. I tend to like it to be perfectly quiet, but sometimes I write with music playing softly--instrumental soundtracks from movies like Lord of the Rings, or possibly some classical music. To tell the truth, that's always difficult. I like to rock out.

But I write best if I have long blocks of time to focus. For that reason, I usually take writing retreats a couple of times a year. I like going to Mexico, but with all of the problems there lately, I'm thinking about heading off to Alaska in a couple of weeks.

David Steffen: David, thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy schedule for this interview. Now I need to catch up reading on the rest of the Runelords series so that I can be ready for the new release.

Also, thanks to everyone who assisted me in the interview process, including A.W. Sullivan, Jordan Lapp, and Joey Jordan.

Tiny Timmy's Tweets

2009-05-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

More tweets from Gary's horror series:

Tiny Timmy was told never to play with his father's table saw. But he seemed bound and determined to become known as Tinier Timmy.

"Hot! Too hot, Mommy!" Tiny Timmy cried. Mom pulled him out of the microwave and put him back on the floor. "Now will you please _behave_?"

"Time to learn a new word, little man," said Tiny Timmy's haggard babysitter, cleaver in hand. "Can you say 'decapitation'?"

"Help! Help!" Tiny Timmy cried from the well's depths. "Won't anyone save me?" The piqued director called it a wrap, and the crew left.

Upcoming Interview: Dave Wolverton (aka David Farland)

2009-05-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

Keep your eye on the blog! David Wolverton (aka David Farland) has agreed to join us for an interview on my blog some time very soon. He's an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author who has penned nearly fifty science fiction and fantasy novels.

I've been drawn helplessly into his "Earth King" series, starting with "The Runelords: The Sum of All Men". I also look forward to his regular "Kick in the Pants" email blog posts, where he gives insights about writing, plus motivational tips and news.

Burning with questions to ask him? Now is the time. If you add a comment to this thread with a question you'd like to ask him, I'll try to work it in.

I'm not sure the exact date I'll post the interview yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Gary Cuba Presents Tiny Timmy's Tweet's: The Beginning

2009-05-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

And now, with no further ado, guest blogger Gary Cuba, a good friend of mine, a slush reader, and fellow writer. Heeeeere's Gary!

Dave has been a great e-friend of mine for quite a while, and he once invited me to do a guest blog. I'm not sure what that actually means, but recently, something popped up that may justify me figuring it out.

So what it is, is this: I ran across a tweeter story site recently (specifically, http://tweetthemeat.blogspot.com). And, given that I can no longer find the will or the way to actually write a blasted full-length story myself, I got lost in this strange concept. 140 characters to comprise a tale? Sheesh. I've tried six-sentencers, 100-word drabbles, 50-worder stories. But _140-character_ tweeters?!

Then I got hooked with the notion, once I tried it. It's more compelling than Sudoku. More fun than sex. (Well, given my advanced age and prostrate condition, it _seems_ that way, anyway.)

Me loves it.

And as I began to wend my way more into it, it occurred to me that I got stuck on a particular theme. Sort of a "subgenre" of the tweet horror genre, as it were.

I call it: "Tiny Timmy Tweets." Here are a few to prime the pump:

"Doggy! Cute doggy!" tiny Timmy said gleefully, toddling toward the lumbering, slavering cur. "Didja just eats some whip cream, didja?"

Tiny Timmy looked into the well, its bottom lost in the darkness. "Gosh, it's deep," he said. "It'd be awful to fall into it." I grinned.

Tiny Timmy watched his mom prepare the turkey. She looked down at him and said, "Now, what shall we stuff it with, little man?"

"Timmy, you bad boy," his mom said. "You come here at once!" Tiny Timmy slunk further under his bed. Okay, he shouldn't have eaten the cat.

Well, you get the idea. Any other Tiny Timmy pieces rumbling around in your reptilian brain center? I've got dozens. Don't worry: Tiny Timmy can never _really_ expire!

What Lies in Wait Beyond the Next Branch

2009-05-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

Just some philosophical musing today at the approach of an important anniversary.
One week from tomorrow (June 5th) is the 1 year anniversary of my very first story submission dropped in a mailbox. It's also my 5th wedding anniversary, but that's not what I'm talking about today. :)

I started writing fiction in 2007, and jumped right in, diving head first into writing a novel with no prior experience writing fiction, no critique group and rare feedback from anyone. I finished a rough draft of that novel last year. Over that whole year I hadn't even considered writing short stories. If you want to make it big, I reasoned, you've got to aim high. Book royalties, that's the key. Once I finished writing the entire book, I polished the first 3 chapters to the best shine I knew how, wrote a synopsis for them and dropped them in the mailbox addressed to Tor. Their website at the time estimated 4-6 months for reply to slush, so I figured I had time to polish some more chapters before I had any chance of hearing back from them. I figured most places will take at least as long as the time estimate they give you. Right? Wrong!

I had their rejection in my mailbox 12 days later, a grainy photocopy of a form letter: "Dear Submitter", "signed, the editors". Now what should I do, I thought. Not that many places even take submissions of just 3 chapters + synopsis. Many places require you to work through an agent. Many others require an entire manuscript. I found another publisher that would take 3 + synopsis, Elder Signs Press, and sent it off to them. Once that was out the door I decided I needed a change in tactic.

Since novels take such an ungodly amount of time to write, and since so few publishers will take 3 chapter submissions, I decided I'd better get writing something shorter. So I wrote up my first short story, originally titled The Long-sought Purpose of the Divining Man. It was filled with almost constant exclamation points and semi-colons as I'd had a secret love for these punctuations. It was very long and had all kinds of problems, but of course I thought it was great. :)

I made my very first story post to Baen's Bar, the critiquing forum associated with Jim Baen's Universe. It took me quite a while to work up the courage. What if someone steals my work? What if someone rips my story apart? But I sucked it up, because quite frankly, their money was among the best pay in the short story biz. And of course, the good Barflies there told me what they really thought of it, pointing out all the problems that they could find. "Wow, this is harder than I thought", I said, but at the same time was delighted to get prompt and knowledgeable feedback not only from fellow writers who were more experienced than I, but from the slush readers Edith Maor, Gary Cuba, and Sam Hidaka.

I've used Baen's Bar both to give and receive critiques since then and have yet to see its equal. The critiques I've received there have helped me grow as a writer much more quickly than dogging through it on my own. In the year since I started writing shorts I've learned 10 times what I learned the year before trying on my own.

I also found other useful writing forums like the Writers of the Future forum, and Hatrack River forum where I began wonderful friendships, discussed the ins and outs of writing and of the publishing business, and just had a great time. :)

More recently I've started grabbing writer friends on Facebook, which has been fun. Many of them give frequent updates about tour dates, publications, and you can just interact with them for fun too. It's been awesome. Before you start talking to these people it's easy to put them up on a pedestal and think of them as some sort of strange otherworldly being that can pull prose out of their ears unbidden, but they're folks just like you and me (albeit talented ones).

Anyhoo, I sent that ESP novel submission out over 300 days ago now, and have queried at 6 and 9 months without even an acknowledgment in return. How different would my writing career be nowadays if I had sent that first manuscript off to ESP instead of Tor. I probably would never have started writing short stories, so I wouldn't have come across critique forums like Baen's Bar. I never would've made the awesome friends I've made, and I would be left slogging through the revisions of that novel (or ones of a second novel) with little or no feedback to help me understand what works in stories and what doesn't. ALL it would've taken would have been a different address on that one envelope, and this would be so different.

I'm glad I addressed that first envelope to Tor, it set me on the path I've traveled to be where I am today. :)

Now I just need to get back to revising that novel! Such a daunting task now that I have a pretty good idea what I like and don't like about different stories!

Soon to come: A special guest blogger. Who could it be? More details soon.

Good News and Bad News

2009-05-25T17:27:00.001-07:00

First, the bad news. I got a response from Flash Fiction Online which I've been anxiously anticipating. Rejection! I'm extremely bummed, but it's still a somewhat positive note. It made it to the winnowing stage, the third and final stage of reading at that venue, which supposedly only 3-10% of stories make it to.

The good news: I got a response from JW Schnarr, the editor of a Wizard of Oz horror anthology that I submitted a story to. It sounded like he really liked the story and wanted to hold it for consideration which he'll determine later this summer (the deadline for the antho is at the end of July). If I got in, it wouldn't pay a lot, but the idea of the antho is so awesome that I would love to be a contributor! I'll keep you all posted.

Story Recommendation: "Snatch Me Another" by Mercurio D. Rivera

2009-05-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

http://www.abyssandapex.com/200801-snatch.html

I highly recommend this story from Abyss & Apex: "Snatch Me Another" by Mercurio D. Rivera. It's a well-told highly emotional tale exploring what the world could be like where we could have pretty much everything we wanted for free, by a new black market invention called The Snatcher.

This is a case where I didn't particularly like the protagonist, which is usually something I insist on for a story I like, but the premise was interesting enough to carry me through.

Novel Recommendation: The Runelords by David Farland

2009-05-22T05:11:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading The Runelords, novel 1 of the fantasy series of the same name written by David Farland (aka David Wolverton).

Some of you may know the author from his "Kick in the Pants!" email-blog. He periodically sends out emails that give tips on writing, getting published, and dealing with the industry. They're very informative and well worth the time. If you are interested, just email dwolvert xmission.com (with the replaced with an @ sign, and say "Kick me!"

Anyway, since I started writing 2 years ago, I haven't come across a single novel I enjoyed. I'd been starting to think that by learning to pick apart my own stories critically that I'd rendered myself unable to enjoy other people's novels.

So I was very glad to realize that I was thoroughly enjoying this one. I'm about halfway through--I'll try to write up a full review when I've finished the book--and it's been great every step of the way. Some of the early chapters have some passages approaching info-dumps that may be a little bit out of character POV, but the information they provide is interesting and pertinent enough that it didn't really bother me. There's also occasional head-hopping, but again, it was done in such a way that it didn't bother me.

The most interesting thing for me in those early pages was to hear about the magical endowment system--this isn't a spoiler, you learn of this very early on. Through this, any person can endow another with their own attributes, such as wit, brawn, grace, sight, etc... The giver of the attribute finds themselves completely without that quality, while the receiver finds their attributes increased by that much. So a wise man can give his wits to another, the giver becomes a drooling husk, unable to even control his own bowel movements, while the receiver becomes that much smarter, able to remember more things and puzzle out difficult problems. The link lasts only as long as the two people live--if the giver dies, the receiver loses that endowment. If the receiver dies, the giver returns to normal. In this way, the people who have received many endowments must protect their Dedicates (the ones who gave them endowments) in order to protect their own abilities.

The implications of the Endowment system are major plot points that help keep every twist and turn interesting. At times, the story seems like it follows a common fantasy style, but just as I settle in to get comfortable, Farland takes a common idea and twists it to make it his own. The writing and plot are excellent and I would recommend this book to anyone.

What is The Race?

2009-05-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

For those of you who aren't familiar with The Race that I referred to this morning, it's a system concocted by Dean Wesley Smith as one way to help motivate writing.

Check out a post from back in September '08 for more details:
http://steffenwolf.blogspot.com/2008/09/race.html

I am currently at 21 points:
3 points for a novel synopsis+3 chapters to Elder Signs Press.
18 short stories at various magazines.

I don't see the points as a goal, but a means to an end. A high score, by itself, doesn't imply skill nor does it imply imminent publication. You still have to put your best work in and strive to make each story the best thing you've ever written. But I do like some of the behaviors it encourages, and so I see it more as one metric among many that helps me determine progress. Unlike most other metrics, this is easily quantifiable, which makes it easy to judge at a glance.

The Race isn't for everybody. Using the system encourages you to behave in a certain way, which is only good if you believe that behavior is beneficial to you. In particular, in can help if you believe:
1. The more stories you write, the better you'll be at writing. That is not to say that you should send a story out before it's ready--far from it. But I believe the more stories you write, the more point-of-view characters you write as, the more plots you construct, the more versatile you'll become. Some people don't agree with this, preferring to continually revise the same story many times, trying to approach the best the story can be. There's nothing wrong with that, but that approach doesn't work well for me. If I revised the same story over and over trying to make it perfect, at best it would an asymptotical approach, always getting closer but never quite making it. At worst I would over-analyze it and edit the life right out of the story. By using the score, you're encouraged to write more stories, because you can only increase your score by writing more stories.

2. It's best not to overanalyze form rejections. If I get a form rejection, I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out why it got rejected. I just send it right back out again. The reason is simple--there's not enough data to come to a sound conclusion about why it was rejected. Maybe they didn't like your writing. Maybe they don't like stories about dragons. Maybe their magazine was overbooked already. Maybe they had a bad taco for lunch and now your story has an unfortunate association in their mind with food poisoning. By keeping a Race score, it encourages you to send it right back out again.
Now, if I get a personal rejection or critique from someone, listing specific reasons why they didn't like it, such as "the beginning was too slow" "I never felt close to the POV" or "The ending left me unsatisfied", then of course I consider carefully what's been said and whether I want to change anything.

3. You don't want to put anything in the trunk yet. So far I haven't really felt comfortable putting stories away in "the trunk" and taking them out of submission. Even my earliest stories have some merit, though my skill has definitely grown beyond those days or I wouldn't have written them. By using the Race, it encourages me to keep these stories in submission.

What do you think of The Race? I'd be interested in discussing what flaws advantages you see in it. :)

21 points!

2009-05-21T04:13:00.001-07:00

Well, I pushed my DWS Race score up to 21 points for the first time yesterday with a Wizard of Oz horror story sent off to the Shadows of the Emerald City anthology (an Oz horror antho). That makes my 20th story to enter circulation (including the novel).

I've had an unusual number of story ideas lately, despite not being able to spend much time with them (or perhaps because of it). I have a few stories that I need to revise, which always takes longer than I expect, and then I'll be back to writing new stuff. :)

Story Recommendation: "Deep Moves" by William Highsmith

2009-05-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

Abyss and Apex has a story I particularly liked this month by William Highsmith. I tried to give this one a critique before it was published, but I enjoyed it so much that I really just enjoyed it the way it is. It's a quick read, chock full of emotion and story, and it's also free! I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think. :)
,Dave

http://www.abyssandapex.com/200904-deep.html

Wicked or Oppressed: Bimodal distribution of humanity, ala Sweeney Todd

2009-05-08T19:29:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody! Sorry for the longer than usual delay since my last post, it's the end of the semester and I've been very busy with school and work.

For those of you who haven't seen Sweeney Todd, as either the movie or the play, be warned that there will be plenty of spoilers following. FULL SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

First, it's kind of funny how I first heard of Sweeney Todd. I first saw it in the Ben Affleck/Liv Tyler movie Jersey Girl. In that movie there was a parent/child talent show where each pair was asked to choose a song to perform and act out for the school. Everyone but Ben Affleck and his daughter performed "Memories" from Cats. So after hours and hours of replays of the same song, these two go on stage and perform "God, That's Good!". On the upper tier of the stage, the barber Sweeney Todd cuts the throats of customers, who then fall through a hole in the floor and are served as meat pies to unsuspecting customers in Mrs. Lovett's restaurant to dispose of the evidence.
If you want to see that video clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkLSFdvrhq0

Anyway, the details of the story FULL SPOILERS AHEAD are this:

I'm assuming that you all have seen the story. If you want to remember the details, here's a link to a Wikipedia synopsis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweeney_todd

In the song "Epiphany", Sweeney states his view of mankind:
"They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. There's the one stays put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one's face. Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you. We all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us death will be a relief."

His simple bimodal distribution of humanity is very apt for the play. Only a few characters violate this description, and those are the most remarkable characters. Here's an analysis of all the named characters in the play, classifying them as the Wicked and the Oppressed:

First, the clean cut ones:

Mrs. Lovett (played by Helena Bonham Carter in the movie):
Definitely Wicked. She's the one who suggests putting human meat in her pies. She also deceives Sweeney, leading him to believe that Lucy is dead so that she can seek Todd's love for herself. You can't get much more wicked than that.
Dies by Sweeney's hands for her crimes.

Judge Turpin (played by Alan Rickman in the movie):
Definitely Wicked. He wrongfully imprisons Barker to get at his wife. He exploits Lucy to the point that she attempts suicide. He imprisons Johanna and tries to force her into marriage. Rich man, and civil officer, taking advantage of decent people--definitely wicked.
Dies at Sweeney's hands.

Beadle Bamford (played by Jamie Campbell Bower in the movie--you may know him as Wormtail/Peter Pettigrew in the Prisoner of Azkaban)
Wicked. He seems to have a pretty good life. Though he lives under the command of Judge Turpin, he doesn't really seem to suffer for it. He's well-dressed and happy enough. He helps Judge Turpin in his unethical actions. He's wicked, though not to the extreme of his employer.
Dies at Sweeney's hands.

Signor Pirelli (played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the movie)
Wicked, though he's the least wicked of the wicked. A rich man, very well dressed, who exploits the general populace by pretending to be Italian and selling them overpriced barber services as well as selling them "miracle elixir" that's supposed to grow hair, but is really just a mix of urine and ink. Tries to blackmail Sweeney.
Dies at Sweeney's hands.

Lucy Barker
Definitely oppressed. Her husband is wrongfully imprisoned, then she's relentlessly pursued by a man in power, then exploited, then takes poison, but doesn't die. She ends up brain damaged and begging on the streets.
Dies at Sweeney's hands.

Now for the dual case:

Benjamin Barker/Sweeney Todd (played by Johnny Depp in the movie)
These two sort of follow the rules, if you consider multiple personalities to be different people. I think that Barker/Todd really believe their statement that there are only two kind of men. Benjamin Barker is the oppressed man who lost his wife and child. Desperate for revenge, but unable to bring himself to it, he creates another persona: Sweeney Todd. Sweeney Todd is more than capable of enacting revenge on the judge, but he's incapable of compassion and more than willing to commit mass-murder.
dies at Toby's hands

And the really strange cases. Interestingly, the strange cases are the ONLY people who survive:

Toby:
Transitions from neutral to Wicked. His life at the beginning isn't particularly terrible. He has a home and a job being a crier for Signor Pirelli. If I remember right, he's a rescued orphan so his life is looking up. After that he's taken in by Mrs. Lovett who treats him like a son. He's suspicious of Sweeney, but they manage to coexist until near the end when Toby discovers what Todd and Lovett have been up to. He's lurking in the sewers beneath the basement when Mrs. Lovett is killed. After that, he creeps up and kills Todd while Todd is cradling Lucy's dead body. Murder at such a young age seems like it will make him wicked for sure.
She is still alive at the end!

Johanna:
Transitions from Oppressed to Neutral. Her life at the beginning is terrible, forced to live with Turpin as he tries to force her to marry him. But Anthony comes along and rescues her. In the end they run away together. You could argue that she'll be Oppressed for the rest of her life because of childhood trauma, but I like to think there's a happy ending there.
She is still alive at the end!

Anthony:
He is the most unique character, arguably the hero of the story. He is neither Wicked nor Oppressed at any point in the play. He does not perform any actions to hurt other characters, but he does not allow himself to be pushed down by other characters either. His actions only have good effects, allowing Johanna to be free, and absolving Todd's guilt to know that his daughter will be in good hands.

Judging by all of these things, I think the story is told from Barker's point of view (hence why most everyone fits so neatly into the two categories). In this story, Anthony is the hero because he saves Todd's daughter.

If anyone has any thoughts on this analysis, I'd be glad to hear them! :)

"Submitting to Literary Magazines 101: Professionalism"

2009-04-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

Topic discussing a blog post: Submitting to Literary Magazines 101: Professionalism.

http://ptbertram.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/submitting-to-literary-magazines-101-professionalism/

I came across this link on Facebook, and followed it out of curiosity to see what they had to say about the "rules" of submitting to literary magazines. Interestingly, what Pat Bertram claims are the rules of the submitting to literary violate what is common knowledge for speculative fiction magazines. Listed below I listed the major differences I noticed. "Literary" refers to the comments entered by Vince Gotera (though he may not speak for the entire genre, he speaks as though he does).

1. Cover letter
Literary: The cover letter should be entertaining and chatty--no publication history. This one surprises me. After all, editors have a lot of work to do, right? Wouldn't they rather get down to business instead of reading a chatty cover letter that has no bearing on the submission itself?
Spec Fic: Bare bones, only what's useful, publication history if you have one, otherwise just a title and word count.

2. Font
Literary: Use Times New Roman because it's easier to read. Do NOT use typewriter fonts like Courier.
Spec Fic: The industry standard manuscript format is Courier. The reasoning I've heard is that it's easier to estimate the space require to print the story with a monospaced font.

3. Pen names
Literary: frowned-upon, though the reasoning seemed more opinion than based on any sound reasoning.
Spec Fic: use them if you want, why should the editor care?

This raises a couple questions for me:
1. what do you do when you submit to a magazine that considers itself both literary and spec fic?
2. Does this guy actually speak for the whole industry?

Weird Game Spotlight: E.V.O. The Search for Eden (Super NES)

2009-04-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

I would highly recommend that anyone who likes games try out E.V.O. The Search For Eden. It's an old school Super Nintendo game, which aren't too hard to find these days for free online. Just search for "emulator" (free software versions of the game systems) and ROMs (freecopies of the games). I haven't tried this search for a few years, but I'm assuming you can still find them somewhere.
Nintendo Wii also allows you to download certain games for a fee, but I would guess this is not popular enough (because it wasn't that well known) to have made it on the list.

This is the only game I know of that's (loosely) based on evolution. You are the chosen one selected by Gaia to remove obstacles to evolution. You start the game out as a lowly minnow, tiny and toothless, swimming slowly and with barely any hit points. By attacking and eating other animals you can gain evolution points which allow you to upgrade your body bit by bit. You can update various pieces, such as:
1. body size: you can upgrade size, which makes you slower but gives you more hitpoints
2. armor: slows you down but decreases the damage you take from attacks
3. jaws: bigger teeth, faster kills
4. tail: swim faster
5. horns: ram enemies (or give special traits, like the angler horn that attracts smaller fish right to your jaws

So the first world, which has a couple dozen stages, is you as a fish. Then there's another world as amphibians. And another for lizards where you can evolve into a big armored dinosaur with huge teeth. And then the final couple worlds are for mammals.
Each type of animal has its own evolutionary possibilities. For instance, the fish, amphibians and reptiles only have one attack--the bite. But when you become a mammal you get a second attack--the kick. It isn't very impressive in your starter form, the mouse. But later on you can get quite a nasty creature with the strong kicking legs of a horse, big sharp-toothed jaws of a predator, the armored body of a rhino, etc...

It has quite a bit of replayability, because each evolutionary choice you make takes you down a branch of the evolutionary possibilities. For instance, there are certain tracks that allow you to become a bird. You can even be a human, through an obscure track that most people will probably only find if they look it up online. Being human isn't all that impressive because humans only have one kind of attack while other mammals have two.

The unique premise alone is worth checking out, but the gameplay and the strategy is also really fun. Well worth the time. :)

If you want to see some images, there are a few at the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.V.O._Search_For_Eden

Revision methods

2009-04-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

An open question for everyone: what method do you use for revisions before you decide something is ready to be submitted?

1. Rough Draft. Write the first draft as fast as it will come out. Details may not be consistent between beginning and end, some of the scenes may not flow correctly into one another, some major continuity errors might exist, as well as grammar and spelling errors. I try not to edit too much at this stage, as it makes the whole process take many times longer. But this draft has an attempt at a beginning, an attempt at an end, and some series of (perhaps disjoint) scenes that lead to the end.
2. Continuity Revision. Read through everything, looking for inconsistencies. Cut unnecessary scenes and resolved conflicting information. Make sure the scenes make sense in the order that they're in there and that the action moves logically from beginning to end. When this draft is done, I have a story that makes sense, but is maybe not very easy to read.
3. Flow Revision. I read through again, looking for ways to improve the flow of the story. This includes adding beats to dialog to adjust pacing, adding some scene descriptions, trying to convey the emotions the character is feeling in each section, and looking for awkward sentences. Try to get the minute details of the beginning and end just right.
4. Recital Revision. I read it outloud (or at least under my breath). No matter how hard I work on the earlier revisions, I always catch errors here. This makes it much much easier to find awkward sentences, subtle grammar errors, and minor mistakes.
5. Give to First Readers. I give it to a few people whose critiquing opinions I trust. Exactly who I give it to depends on who I've been interacting more with lately, who I've read stories for (I prefer to trade rather than one-sided critiques) etc... I read the critiques as they roll in and mark comments into the draft document so they're easy to look at later.
6. Post-Reader Revision. I carefully consider all the comments that my First Readers make. I never use all of them, but I'll think very hard about which ones I agree with, and will make the changes as I think are necessary.
7. Post-Reader Recital Revision. Another outloud read to catch any mistakes I may have added.
8. Send it out!
9. If I get a form rejection, I go back to step 8.
10. If I get a personal rejection with some ideas why they didn't accept it I go back to step 6.

Lately my rate of completing new stories has been very low. My current work in progress (a retelling of the Wizard of Oz) has taken a long, long time, much longer than I'm used to. I've been working on it for nearly 3 weeks, and I'm now about halfway through stage 2. Stage 1 took most of that time, partly because it was just a really long story, and partly because I've been very busy with the end of the semester approaching.

Book Review: The Shining by Stephen King

2009-04-24T14:33:00.001-07:00

To bring the topic back to reading/writing after a couple days of gaming posts, I just put down The Shining. I realize this book is decades old, but I'm just working my way along my bookshelf, overflowing with many books both new and old that I haven't gotten to yet.

This was my first time reading this book. It's the story about Jack, an author who takes a job as a winter caretaker at a hotel in Colorado called The Overlook. he brings his wife Wendy and his 5 year old son Danny there to live with him during this time. They know they'll be isolated over the winter, but what they don't know is that the hotel seems to have a life of its own. Especially to son Danny, who has "the shining" which is a pretty word for some degree of psychic powers. Danny is especially sensitive to the dark manifestations of the building. Over the course of the winter, the hotel turns them against each other and they're faced with ever-more terrifying ghosts of the building.

This story is one of those rare cases where I liked the movie better than the book. Not the original Jack Nicholson movie, but the miniseries starring Steven Weber in the 90s. I've yet to see a Nicholson movie I liked (to be fair, I haven't seen some of his more famous ones like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

For one thing, the head-hopping really drives me nuts. Just when I'm getting close into one character's head, the viewpoint jumps into another character's head, then another and another. It keeps me from feeling really close to any of them (perhaps that was the intent so I don't have to feel too close to Jack the psycho).

SPOILERS ahead for anyone, though I'm sure most people have seen some version of this already.

I couldn't even finish the book. I had 180 pages left and I realized that reading it had become a chore, so I just put it down. From what I remember of the Weber series, I thought Jack was portrayed as being a pretty sympathetic character at the beginning of the movie. So his gradual descent into psychosis is a major change, and is quite frightening. But in the book, it's made very clear very early on that Jack is going to snap sooner or later. Two years ago before the book started he broke Danny's arm in drunken anger. He's since quit drinking, but he has a history of manic violence even when sober. The reason he was looking for the caretaking job is that he lost his job as a professor because he was he assaulted a student, beating him bloody in the parking lot of the school.

Since the student incident, he has a tight reign on his temper. He's still an angry person, but he balls all the anger up inside. Like a tightly wound spring, it's only a matter of time before something snaps. He would've snapped eventually, regardless of circumstances. The Overlook may have accelerated the process, but even without that, he would have totally snapped in a year or two anyway. Especially since he has a knack for self-sabotage--any time things are looking hopeful in his life he ruins the chance in a completely avoidable way (the assault on the student being just one of these).

Maybe 1/3 of the book is spent in his head, which was a mistake--I can't relate to his character in the slightest between the self-sabotage, the anger issues, the abuse, and the developing psychosis.

Then there's Wendy, who is quite frankly, TSTL (too stupid to live). She knows about Jack's history, and his mental instability even when he was sober. Her first mistake was staying with him for so long. If it had only been her own life at stake, I might forgive that--love can make a person do stupid things. But her son's life is at stake here. But the much larger mistake is for her to agree to live with them at the hotel for that whole winter. She's aware it will be stressful--she worries about "cabin fever" several times, but she knows Jack well enough that she should be able to predict his snapping a long time ahead of time and she should have run like hell. But either she's just unbelievably dense or is just a tool of the author and nothing more.

Another 1/3 of the book spent with her, who gets herself and Danny into this mess, I can't relate to her at all.

The remaining 1/3 is spent with Danny, who I can relate to and who I really liked. He can read minds to some extent, so he gets glimpses of his parents' thoughts and intentions. He's the first to see manifestations of the hotel, because of the shining, and his viewpoint is at once terrifying and reminiscent of any kid's childhood fears of the monsters under the bed. If the whole story were told from his point of view, I might have stuck with it the whole way, but since he's only 5, he doesn't understand the full complexities of his parents' marriage, so it probably wouldn't have worked.

I wouldn't mind renting the Weber mini-series and watching it again to see if I still like it. I haven't seen it since I started writing and my criteria for what I like are totally different now.

My attempts to make games

2009-04-23T16:35:00.000-07:00

To continue yesterday's subject of games:

In my college days, as I was learning C++ I really wanted to make a text game engine. I wanted to do it in a way that you could just provide a series of text files to the engine, each representing rooms and items and monsters, etc... so that once the engine was finished I would just be able to type up text files to make new games. Alas, that effort fizzled, and I'm guessing there's better ones on the net by now anyway.

I wanted to be a video game programmer for the longest time, so I had several of these efforts. I also had a try at an "Alleyway" type game, where you have the paddle on the bottom and a ball that bounces around and you need to hit the blocks and break them. It was sort-of working, but sometimes the ball would travel through the outer wall of the screen, and then it would keep going forever until you terminated the program.

The ONLY successful game-making effort I had was a school project I chose to make a Minesweeper game with the OpenGL graphics library. Everything worked the way it was supposed to. The little squares visibly depressed when you held the mouse over them. You could do a controlled clear by right+left clicking, just like in the real game. It had a high scores list with a very simple encryption system so that you couldn't easily type in your own scores. It had easy, medium and hard, and custom levels and everything. When I told people I was making a Minesweeper game they weren't too impressed, but I got a lot of nice comments on the final project--all the extra little features were enough to interest people. :)

Website Recommendation: Abandonia

2009-04-22T20:11:00.001-07:00

Today's post isn't writing related, but relates to one of my other interests--gaming.
I'm a huge fan of really old video games, ones that came out in the days before 3D graphics. Why, you ask, would I want to play 2-D VGA adventure games, or *gasp* text adventures? The answer's simple--They had to make the games great, they had to make the games fun so that people would play them once and want to play them again and again and again, not just to look at shiny graphics, but because the game is so great and just SO challenging.

I would LOVE to hear about people's favorite old-school games! Feel free to comment and say your faves. Maybe you'll find kindred spirits or maybe you'll just be providing great recommendations for other gaming enthusiasts. Either way, it couldn't hurt, right?

The downside is that the games a decade or two back were sometimes a little TOO challenging. Consider Ghouls and Ghosts for the NES. You start with a guy in armor. If he gets hit once he loses his armor. If he gets hit again without finding more armor, he dies. He has not many lives, maybe 2 or 3, and if you die there are NO continues!!! If you spent hours getting to the last level and you die, too bad! You're starting right back at the beginning, bub! Modern gamers would have a fit if there were a game like that released today! I suppose it's a side-effect of short attention spans, if you have to restart the game after an hour, then people would be more likely to just find another game.

I always sought out fun old games, bought a Space Quest collection, a King's Quest collection, found a "Lost Treasures of Infocom" text adventure collection which had Zork 1-8, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and at least a dozen others. It was amazing! Granted, I was terrible at it, and I never finished a single one of those games, but it was darn fun to explore, and the manuals were like little novels!

Anyway, I do have a point with all this. If you love old games like I do, and are sad that you can't find them, then you should check out Abandonia.com
They have old, old games available for download, and some of them are just plain amazing. Some of the games listed on there are not available for download, but they claim to have near 1000 downloadable games. The ones that aren't downloadable are to avoid legal trouble, which is understandable enough.

I think this site is great. After all, not many people would be willing to pay money for these nowadays right? Sites like this keep the intellectual property readily available to anyone who is interested in it, and offers suggestions for how to run it with modern software on top of it.

A few that you might want to try:

Elder Scrolls: Arena
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/195/Elder+Scrolls%2C+The+-+Arena.html
For those of you who played Morrowind or Oblivion, this is the original original. I tried it for a while, and it was moderately fun, but I just plain wasn't very good at it.

Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/202/Freddy+Pharkas+-+Frontier+Pharmacist.html
A rather funny adventure of a pharmacist in the wild west. The manual for this one alone is worth a download, an 1800s pharmacy manual. It's somewhat educational, but not boringly so. You do NEED the manual to do some of the pharmacy puzzles as a sort of copy protection.

Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon-Ra
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/186/Laura+Bow+2+-+The+Dagger+of+Amon-Ra.html
This is a great mystery Whodunit sort of game. The protagonist is a female reporter in male-dominated 1920s. She just got hired on the job. She keeps a notebook of all the people she meets and the various topics. In each conversation you add a little bit more to the notebook, so when you talk to someone else you can use the notebook as a questioning mechanism to learn more and more. The story starts out pretty tame, but before too long bodies start piling up and you'll need to be very smart to sort it all out! I made it through act 1 with no help, but I confess that in Act 2 (I think? This was years ago), I had major trouble with a task that was supposed to be pretty easy according to every walkthrough I've ever read--All you're supposed to do is eavesdrop at a party, but I could NOT do it. The game offered a mechanism to skip ahead to the next act, but then I missed the major plot elements and once I cheat once I lose the resistance to cheat again so the challenge sort of goes away. Anyway, it's a great game (at least the parts that I finished).

Movie Review: Sunshine Cleaning

2009-04-20T20:12:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a good indie film to remind me why I like movies. An outstanding cast, an original premise, and a strong script made Sunshine Cleaning, a comedy-drama, well worth the ticket price.

It stars Amy Adams (who I loved as the charismatic Princess Giselle in Enchanted) and Emily Blunt (who had a major role in The Devil Wears Prada) as sisters who've fallen on hard times. Rose (Adams) is a single mother of a young boy who gets kicked out of school after school. Oscar (played by Jason Spevack who I recognized as the young Jimmy Fallon character in Fever Pitch) isn't a bad kid, but he just gets bored and causes trouble. Rose wants to put Oscar in private school, but doesn't make enough money as a maid to afford it. Meanwhile, Norah (Blunt) loses her job. A timely job opportunity presents itself through Norah's lover (played by the cleanest-cut Steve Zahn I've ever seen). During one of their clandestine hotel stays he mentions that crime scene cleaners make a lot of money cleaning up the mess after murders and suicides. Rose and Norah join forces and start Sunshine Cleaning.

There are a few spoilers to follow, this is a movie that's a little bit difficult to review without revealing a few things. :)

With a lot of help from their father (Alan Arkin) and Winston, the softspoken one-armed owner of a cleaning supply store, they become professionals, learn about each other and about themselves (it sounds corny but it's true). They're surprised to find that they actually like the business. Every house they go to is different, yet the same. Different in the particulars, but each family has gone through a tragic death and they feel good that they can help in even such a small way.

Norah tracks down the daughter of a suicide they'd cleaned up after, befriending her and finally coming to terms with the death of her own mother as a child. Amy Adams develops the beginnings of a romantic relationship with Winston.

I like to see movies that didn't come straight from a Hollywood mold, and this is one of those. A one-armed love interest, the lead females scrubbing blood off walls with toothbrushes, and a CB radio that connects to heaven. There's a lot to love in this movie, and it would be worth paying to see it again (the true sign of a good movie).

Hopeful news from FFO

2009-04-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

I just got an email from Flash Fiction Online, a pro short story market:
http://www.flashfictiononline.com/

I've had a submission out to them for just over 2 months, it's a comedy about the end of the world. Apparently the story has made it into their 3rd and final stage of reading (called winnowing), which only about 10% of stories make it to. For more information on the readin process there:
http://flashfictiononline.com/bb/index.php?topic=127.msg499

So I'll be crossing my fingers until I get confirmation one way or the other. I would love to sell a story to FFO and be able to put it on my cover letters. :) Wish me luck!

In the meantime, you might want to check out one of their recently published stories that I particularly enjoyed, called "I Foretold You So":
http://www.flashfictiononline.com/f20090401-i-foretold-you-so-rod-santos.html

The Mysteries of Memory

2009-04-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

Wow, I've had a lot of posts in the last week and on random topics. Well, here's another one--the mysteries of memory. In particular I was wondering how the brain chooses what to remember and what to forget. I'm a mediaphile, always hunting the next great movie/tv show/book/short story/etc, and I am constantly amazed at how much totally useless information I have stored up there. Is all that information using up my storage space? Is that why I forget where I put my car keys, or totally blank on test questions in my classes?

Does anyone else find they have huge amounts of totally useless things stored in their brains? For instance:

1. Video games walkthroughs. I haven't played Super Mario Bros. 3 on NES for 10 years. The last time I played through it, it had been at least 5 years before that, and I knew EXACTLY where everything was in the game. Where the warp whistles are, exactly how to get hammer brothers suits, where the invisible note blocks are. And my muscle reflex is still completely intact for that game, I barely skip a beat.
I could also probably list at least 20 special moves for various characters in the Mortal Kombat series, though I haven't played those for 10+ years also.

2. Random associations. When I was in junior high and high school, I liked to play through video games on one TV while I had the little black and white TV showing TV shows in the background. In this one, one media becomes melded together with the other in my mind. There's a particular level in The Illusion of Gaia (on SNES) where you're fighting your way through the jungle. When I was playing through that, I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where they meet a genderless alien race. There's one member of the race that is intrigued by human femininity and so she tries to be more womanlike. Riker grows a love interest for her and has some very awkward conversations about sex. Then at the end, the race discovers her deviance and brainwashes her back to "normal" behavior. I haven't seen that episode since then, but I remember all those details.

3. Faces on movies/tv shows. My wife and I make a game of it when we're channel surfing or going out to movies, if we can figure out where else we've seen an actor without going to IMDB. We've been doing that so long that it's rare to watch something where there isn't some association. I should start playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that game always sounded fun when I heard it on radio shows and stuff.

What is "literary"?

2009-04-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

My question for today's post is: What is "literary fiction"? Taken literally, the answer seems pretty straightforward. "literary" seems to be related to "literature". "Literature" means "written". So "literary fiction" simply means written fiction, right? Wrong!

I've yet to find a widely accepted definition of "literary" as a genre. Glimmer Train classifies themselves as literary, as does Zoetrope (and many others). Whether you like the stories in these magazines is, as with all magazines, a matter of taste.

But to me classifying some writing as "literary" to the exclusion of other writing implies a sort of elitist attitude, as though "literary" writing is the only sort of writing that has value. The same for labeling a section in the bookstore as "literature", as opposed to other fiction sections like mystery, horror, science fiction/fantasy. I don't object to the section--I've read many books in the literature section that I enjoyed, but I do object to the title. The book store might as well label it "high-quality fiction" and "other". As I'm primarily a reader of speculative fiction, this bothers me.

And a lot of times, the boundary is fuzzy anyway. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire, is in the literature section, despite it being clearly fantasy material. Why is that classed as literature? I suspect its the tone and style of writing, which would explain why this is the only Oz story I don't care for.

Classic science fiction and fantasy is generally classified as literature also--I believe I've seen The Time Machine, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, and other classics in there. Is Speculative fiction like a fine wine, somehow gaining quality as it ages? If we'd been alive to taste of The Time Machine shortly after it was written, would it have ruined the experience because it wasn't old enough? Maybe if I take a George R. R. Martin novel and put it in the book cellar, and pull it out again in several generations, it will have become literature, perfectly aged and fetching a handsome price from literature connoisseurs who will riffle the pages, sniff the binding, and read only a paragraph at a time so as not to be overwhelmed by the power of the prose between the covers.

City of Green--Another thought or two

2009-04-14T19:41:00.000-07:00

A couple more thoughts on the topic of the green-goggled city.

In The Matrix, there's at least one mention of Oz--not surprising of course with the parallel world analogy. But another parallel that might not be so obvious is that the cities inside the matrix tend to all be tinted green, as though seen through a green filter, just like the Emerald City. And in both cases, the populace is largely controlled by an uncaring dictator who controls them by misleading them.

Also, a friend pointed out an interesting side effect that might be visible to Emerald Citizens when they first see the outside world, assuming they are physiologically capable of seeing other colors. When you look at one color or image too long, then when you close your eyes or look away you often see an afterimage, everything still in the same place but with all the colors inverted to their negative--black becomes white, green becomes red, etc... So these people might see everything in tints of red for a while until their eyes cope and adjust.

On a related side-story, I took a car trip with my older brother a decade or so ago. I wasn't old enough to drive yet, so he did all the driving, and I tended to be lulled to sleep by the sound of the engine. On more than one occasion I woke up to find the whole world was tinted green! The effect faded after a few seconds or a minute, and then everything was normal again. It was bizarre! I recently found out that it was probably just another afterimage. I must have been sleeping in direct sunlight so that the sun glowed red through my eyelids. After hours of red exposure, I woke up, and opened my eyes, and everything was tinted green--the negative of the red filter provided by my eyelids. Crazy stuff. :)

City of Green

2009-04-13T20:40:00.000-07:00

I found a great anthology to submit to, a horror anthology of stories based on The Wizard of Oz:
http://jwschnarr.webs.com/submissions.htm

I am SO submitting. Without a doubt.

On a related topic, when I read L. Frank Baum's original The Wizard of Oz, his description of the Emerald City got me thinking. In that version of the Wizard of Oz, there was a city law mandating that all people entering the city must have sunglasses attached to their head. The shades literally locked over your ears (though they seemed to not notice the fact that the tin man and scarecrow don't really have ears). The stated reason they gave for this was that the emerald city was so dazzling that you needed to wear the sunglasses or you would be blinded. Inside the city, everything was green, green buildings, green clothes, green horses, green-skinned people, everything. They even get Dorothy a green dress. Well, they have their audience with the Wizard and everything, and then leave the city, having the shades removed at the gate and Dorothy is surprised to find out that her dress has changed to white. Later they find out that the shades weren't just shades, they were tinted green! The city wasn't really as green as it claimed to be, but everyone thought it was because they were wearing green sunglasses! Now, there's some inherent flaws in this whole plotline, such as the fact that they didn't notice that each other turned green as well.

Anyway, imagine a race that grew up in such a world, where they were forced to wear green shades all the time. It's sort of a specialized way of being color blind. It's still monochrome, but instead of seeing in shades of gray, it's shades of green.

But the most interesting thing would be the question of what happens when you take an adult, who's lived their life in a green world, out of that world and let them see the full spectrum. The first question, and an interesting one, is whether they would be able to see the other colors at all. I took a psychology class in college, and one of the random tidbits I remember from it is that vision isn't inherently built into our systems. It is learned through experience. They explained one experiment in which they put polarized glasses on a kitten and kept them on it for the first couple months of its life (probably not ethical these days, but the results are interesting nonetheless). When they finally took the glasses off, the kitten couldn't see light that was polarized in the other direction! It had never seen that kind of light so its brain never learned to process it. I don't recall if the cat developed the full optical abilities later in its life, but I think animals have to learn pretty early.

So along these same lines, would people who grew up in the Emerald City be able to see other colors at all? I don't think they would. What would they see instead? Would they see everything, but shifted into the greenscale? Would non-green things be essentially invisible to them, hiding in giant blindspots? I'm curious.

Let's assume that they're physiologically and mentally capable of processing the full range of colors. Can you imagine what a wondrous time it would be, just taking them for a walk, showing them multicolored flowers, seeing songbirds, or even a rainbow? It would be like a drug! They would never want to go back to the Emerald City again! And if they did, and they told their friends about colors, their friends would laugh and think them crazy!

Would a monochrome society develop any differently than a full-color society? At least some areas would. Art would be viewed very differently. Florists would probably have much less demand. Marketing people would have to rely on other tactics rather than color of packaging. I'm sure there are many other ways. Can you think of any others?

Would people as individuals develop any differently?

Now, this idea was covered in some extent by the movie Pleasantville, but in a rather different way. In that movie, the main characters enter a classic 50s TV show, which is of course in black and white, and are stuck there for a while. But that is really a different thing. That society didn't develop that way, it was an artificial construct by entertainment censoring standards in the 50s, as well as the lack of the development of color TV technology at the time. It wasn't forced on them by their government, it was just how the artificial world was fabricated. Along with the lack of color were other oddities, such as no one being aware of sex, or toilets, or reading, and firemen that didn't do anything but rescue kitties from trees. When color started bleeding into the world, it represented a loss of innocence, which some people thought was a good thing and others thought was a bad thing. It's a great movie, but again, it's usage of color is rather different than the Emerald Citizen concept. Emerald Citizens are otherwise normal people, knowing of copulation and defacation and firefighting.

If this sparked any thoughts or comments, I'd love to hear them!

Magazines Review: Glimmer Train Winter 2009 and Zoetrope All-Story Winter 2008/2009

2009-04-12T14:38:00.001-07:00

Reading these two magazines was an attempt to broaden my horizons and learn more about so-called "literary" publications. I put literary in quotes because I don't care for that label at all. Isn't all writing literary? To me, it's like labelling a section in the book store "The Good Stuff", leaving the obvious assumption that everything else in the bookstore is not good. But that's a topic of its own that I'll cover another day.

Anyway, these two magazines label themselves as literary, making me question whether I ever want to submit to a literary publication. I don't think my stories could fit in, if these two copies are the norm.

Among other things, each of these magazines cost me 9 dollars. Even the more expensive speculative novels don't cost that much, and the expensive ones of those are often 800 pages! It's worth it for a little market research, but I can't imagine paying that regularly for a magazine.

Does anyone have any literary publications that they think are particularly good examples? I would love to read one that would make me want to buy a second copy. I welcome any input--if you suggest one that I can find a copy of, I'll try to give it a read. I don't want to make blanket statements about literary magazines without a well-rounded sample.

In these two issues, I only enjoyed one story, but it was the one published back in 1921, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". No doubt it was included more as part of a cross-marketing campaign, but I'm glad I read it. It's rather dry, and doesn't get very close into any of the character's heads, but that was more of the style of the time, so I'm not going to criticize reading/writing tastes of a long-gone decade. I can tell even just from seeing the previews that they changed quite a bit from the stort-story, which is fine. The short story is a neat idea, but not nearly fleshed-out enough to want to spend two hours with. I'd been wanting to see the movie, so it's raised my interest level.

The rest of the stories were pretty much all the same as each other, so I won't list them off. It was clear that many of the writers have a whole lot of talent, I'm not disputing that. There were some great turns of phrases and some interesting moments that let the talent shine through, but I think they could write better: the talent's there but they're holding themselves back.

I tried to read these with an open mind, I really did. I'll always be, first and foremost, a speculative fiction fan. Like so many things, this is just a matter of taste. I've like many non-speculative books and stories, but nothing quite hits that "sense-of-wonder" button like a good science fiction or fantasy. I didn't try to compare these literary stories to speculative stories as that wouldn't have been fair. I wanted to decide if I would just enjoy them on their own, not compare them to some other ideal. I really didn't care for them, and while trying to examine why, I made a short list of things that seemed to be in common between many or all of these stories:

1. No cohesive theme. After I read something, I like to have a feel for the theme. That doesn't mean it has to be spelled out with an explicit moral, like the ending of a fable, but I like to have a feel for what it was trying to say. Either these stories were trying to give it no theme or too many themes. Too many themes is just as bad as no theme, as each one is diluted by the presence of too many others. Perhaps they all had the theme "Life sucks". That's possible, but I don't really care to read them in that case. I can get enough "Life sucks" themes by watching the news.

2. No plot, no climax, just a series of small things happening after another. Like ripping a page from someone's journal at random. You see some of that person's day-to-day struggles, but you're told that these struggles have been that way for a long time, and nothing in the story hints that they will be any different in the days to come.

3. No attempt to get close into the protagonist's point of view. My favorite stories are the ones that allow you to get into the protagonist's head. This is why prose has the potential to be so much better in its way than cinema. Cinema allows you to see what happens, but well-written prose allows you to experience it. Instead of being told what happens by a seemingly impartial (and boring) narrator, the narration can be a lens through which you can see through the eye of the protagonist. There was none of that here. Each story told me what happened in that person's life, without really letting me get into their head. Perhaps that's the preferred way in "Life sucks" stories to avoid causing depression in yourself.
This somewhat relates to a previous blog post of mine, about cinematic descriptions:
http://steffenwolf.blogspot.com/2009/03/cinematic-descriptions.html

4. almost all are in 1st person. I've heard many editors complain about first person stories, how writers should generally stick to 3rd person. I'd never understood, but I think now I'm beginning to. I felt like first person was used to counteract the #3 on my list, getting close into the protagonist's point of view. Rather than going through the difficult labor of making me see through the protagonist's eyes, just use first person narration instead. After all, what's closer into the person's head than first person? The trouble is when first person is used as a substitute for #3. In one case, a woman is talking to her friend and the friend suspects her husband is cheating on her. She's right, and it's the narrating woman who is the other woman, but we don't find that out until halfway through the story! When the protagonist withholds information from me that's not mysterious, it's annoying and distancing.

5. The opening sentence and paragraph have nothing to do with the rest. I like opening sentences best when they are like a topic sentence of the story--they tell what the stories about without giving too much away. For example, in the cheating story mentioned in #4, the story starts out by saying they got an unusual September snow, then spends the whole first paragraph telling about. The story has nothing to do with weather in general or snow in particular, so when the topic suddenly switched to cheating husbands in the 2nd paragraph it was annoying and disorienting. Did they stick that first paragraph on by mistake? If it had nothing to do with the story you could paste it onto the beginning of ANY story and it would make the same amount of sense.

6. no real ending or beginning. Most of the stories didn't really have a beginning nor really have an ending. The stories began when the words started, and ended when the words stopped. Typically, the real story begins when something changes in the person's life, and ends at some kind of resolution, whether it be death, or change of character, or the resolution of the actual conflict. Not so in these stories.

7. The stories all had a tone and them of "Woe is me ain't my life terrible". It's easy enough to find these stories on the news, do I really need to seek out fiction that does the same thing? And I really hope the proportion of protagonists who hate their lives isn't proportional to real people who hate their lives, else we are all in a lot of trouble!

8. Not in every story, but maybe 1/4 to 1/2, pedophilia is an element, whether it's explicit sex or just creepy looks from teenagers' dads. Maybe I'm just naive, but I like to think that it doesn't happen to everybody as often as these stories would have me believe.

Invisible formatting

2009-04-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

Does anybody else hate MS Word's invisible formatting? Where if you accidentally delete one then suddenly a big chunk of your file goes wonky? Does anyone know if there's a way to reveal them?

Specifically I'm trying to post a story to a critique forum and just one phrase disappears though it's formatting is totally identical to every other word in the document as far as I can tell. It's the following sentence:

My jet touched down in Des Moines at eleven, and I walked into the diner at eleven thirty.

The "eleven thirty" at the end of the sentence disappears when I copy it to a particular forum. Blogger wouldn't even allow the post because of HTML tags it didn't like, so this is a retyping of it c(I'm not saying it's Blogger's fault, just further annoyance). That one sentence had about 100 lines of HTML formatting crammed around it.

A quick Google search reveals this is a common complaint about Word. Other word processors have an optional "reveal" that allows you to edit this stuff. *sigh* Why do I use Word again?

Lois McMaster Bujold

2009-03-30T06:17:00.001-07:00

Apparently Lois McMaster Bujold lives in the same metro area as me, and on Tuesday she'll be a doing a reading of an excerpt from her upcoming Miles Vorkosigan novel at a library in Lakeville, MN.

I'm not yet familiar with her writing, but I've never been to a public reading before, so I want to check it out. I also need to get in the habit of networking, so I hope to get a chance to talk to her as well.

Google Alerts

2009-03-27T20:22:00.001-07:00

Just a short post today, a head's up about a handy internet tool called Google Alerts.
All you have to do is enter a search string and it will search for the string periodically and send you an email when it has new results. You can set it to daily, instantly, and I think there's another setting or two.

This can be very handy for writers to see what people are saying about them. Just start a search for your name. If you've published some stories, you could start separate searches for the titles.

I started doing this a few weeks ago. Most of the time it just comes up with people who share my last name, but I got a hit in the last couple days that links to a blog that links to my blog.
In case you're interested, the site is here, under the name Bibliophile Stalker:
http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2009/03/march-27-2009-links-and-plugs.html

Google Alerts could be useful for other things too, of course. I first heard about it from a magazine editor who used it to track web traffic about his magazine, that way he can find out what people are saying about, good or bad, without any effort.

You could also use it to track news about a movie release or DVD release, that sort of thing, news about a particular topic of interest, etc.

"beats" in dialog

2009-03-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

Just like "he said"/"she said", beats can be used to good effect as speaker attributions. A beat is an action or description in the middle of dailog in a story. But both can be used too often, and in the case of beats, beats that are too generic can get old fast.

Unique mannerisms are less likely to get old. nods and smiles have their place, but if someone is nodding/smiling/scowling after every single line, it may be too much. If no one ever has any facial expressions, that's probably not enough.
Keep in mind, if the dialogue is between just two people, you don't need an attribution after every line. You can assume that the speakers are alternating, in which case you can have 3 or 4 (short) dialogue paragraphs with no attribution and it can flow very smoothly.

To me, beats serve three main purposes:
1. attribution: lets you know who is saying what.
2. characterization: actions speak louder than words, this can betray a lie, show nervous habits, convey more subtle communication between characters, any number of other things.
3. pacing. A longer beat conveys a longer moment of time between speech.

An example of beats used for pacing:
Alice glared at Tom and slapped the countertop with her hand. "Tell me what you know."
Tom didn't look up from the dishwater. "I can't."
"You can't? That's baloney and you know it. This is important. You could save her life."
He rinsed a handful of silverware and set it in the drainer with a clatter. "It's not that simple."
"What's not simple?"

Once Alice and Tom start talking, she has no beats because she doesn't hesitate. As soon as he speaks to her, she has a response. She's very upset at Tom, and she isn't pulling her punches.
Tom, on the other hand has beats before both of his lines, and long ones at that. The beats slow down his responses, giving the impression of hesitation without actually saying "he hesitated". The second beat is longer than the first, implying a longer hesitation. His words make it clear he doesn't want to talk, and his actions support that by slowing his pace.
In this case the particular actions aren't even that important. Are clean dishes vital to the story? Probably not. He's fixating on them, using them to try to delay the conversation.

Also, a related point about point of view. To me, I want to see the story through the eyes of the character using the prose as a lens. What I mean by that is that so many things, down to scene descriptions, and in this case, beats, are opportunities to characterize.
In the case of my example dialogue, whoever is the protagonist notices Tom's actions in close detail during the argument. Let's say Alice is the protagonist. She notices when he sets the handful of silverware down because she's eager to continue the argument and she's frustrated at his hesitation. If she was just asking how his day was, she might not be scrutinizing every detail of his dishwashing. In that case I might have used different things for beats, something appropriate to the occasion.

Cinematic Descriptions

2009-03-24T21:02:00.000-07:00

A common trait I've noticed in many stories written by many people who've never written before (and I wasn't exempt, I wrote my share of these)--cinematic descriptions. Movies have an advantage in a certain way: you get descriptions for free. In just a moment you can show a scene that would take pages and pages to describe adequately in words. The stories I like the best use the narration as a filter to see through the eyes of the protagonist.

I think the reason many beginners try to write that way is that they want to describe the scene exactly as they see it, to make sure the reader sees exactly what they do. But a reader doesn't HAVE to see the same things as the writer. Each reader brings a little something of their own when reading the story. It's sort of like never stepping in the same river twice.

Trying to imitate cinema in prose rarely works very well, IMO. Prose can never imitate cinema well in this respect, and concentrating on this weakens the other aspects that prose can be better at. Cinema allows you to watch amazing events happen, but well-written prose allows you to experience it. Instead of describing every detail of a scene, describe only those details that the protagonist would actually notice. Several birds with one stone that way, characterization and description, as well as pacing. A person walks into a building they've never been in before--what do they see? A warrior might note the number of guards and their weapons, their level of alertness, and so on, in order to judge the military preparedness of the castle as a whole. A thief might note the number of windows, count the candlesticks, shadowy corners. An aristocrat would notice the material and cut of other people's clothing, to judge their relative social worth, might note the furnishings as a measure of status but would be very unlikely to note the servants at all. A peasant who'd never been in a castle at all would be overwhelmed, noting fragments of everything but not quite understanding the relative importance of one versus another. If all of these things were described by the same person, then you 1. probably spent so much time describing it all that the pace has been totally killed. 2. have lost an opportunity at characterization, because describing everything is as bad for differentiating character as describing nothing.

Also, using the amount of description for pacing is a useful tool. A thief running from guards in hot pursuit is going to notice much less than a thief casing a potential target. This might seem obvious, but I've critiqued a lot of stories that halt in the middle of an epic battle to describe a scene or describe backstory, so when this happens I picture the character standing in one place and staring into the depths of his memory. Oddly, these stories never end with his reverie being interrupted by a sword through the gut.

"Sketch a Novel" link

2009-03-22T14:26:00.001-07:00

For anyone who's thinking about writing a novel check out the following:

http://www.yorkwriters.com/2009/02/sketch-novel-in-hour-exercise.html

I'm just getting started on a novel, an expansion of my latest WotF entry, so very handy timing for me as well.

The Last Continent, a novel written by Terry Pratchett

2009-03-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

This book takes place on Discworld. For those of you who aren't aware of this world, it is a magical world created by Terry Pratchett. Discworld is (not surprisingly) a disc, which is balanced on the back of four giant elephants, who are standing on the back of an even more giant sea turtle named Great A'Tuin who is swimming through space. Pratchett has written dozens of novels in this universe. He's a great writer of humor fantasy. My favorite book by him is Small Gods.

The Last Continent, copyright 1998, chronicles the more of the perpetual misadventures of Rincewind the Cowardly Wizard. For him, running is the solution to nearly every problem, but somehow trouble always manages to find him despite his best efforts. This book occurs after the events of Interesting Times, where Rincewind traveled to the Aurient. At the end of that book the faculty of Unseen University tried to rescue him with a magical transportation spell, which went humorously wrong and transported him to the continent of XXXX (pronounced EcksEcksEcksEcks or Fourecks).

XXXX is also known as the Counterweight Continent, because it's presence is only inferred by the locations of the known continents, and the assumption that the flat disc of the world has to have roughly equal weight distribution. Fourecks is remarkably similar to the continent we know as Australia, which perhaps isn't so remarkable when you've read other books in the Discworld series and realize that many of the lands are distorted reflections of locations in our own world.

I didn't like this book as much as I've liked most of his other books. I think I've become much more picky since I started writing, so this may be a reflection of that. To me, it's not that easy to relate to Rincewind because he is so cowardly by definition, his reaction to any danger is to run like heck in the other direction. He doesn't MAKE things happen, things just happen TO him. I would much rather read a story about a character that MAKES things happen. Even if he's reluctant, I still expect it to be his own decisions that drive the story. Also, Rincewind's never shown any character growth. He's always been defined by his cowardice which hasn't ever changed.

That being said, much of the draw to Pratchett's books isn't necessarily the character development, but the humorous situations. In that respect, I didn't think this one had as much humor appeal as others. Most of the story was just a series of coincidental run-ins with mildly villainous characters that then served as origin stories for (for instance) cork hats, and some things that I'm guessing are likely Australian delicacies.

I think the biggest lack for me, is the lack of villains in the piece. When Rincewind arrives on Fourecks, he screws up history in some sort of vague way. It's not immediately clear how, and is only vaguely clarified further on, but his changes have made it never ever rain in Fourecks. In parallel, the faculty of Unseen University (Rincewind's alma mater) are searching for Rincewind and stumble across a passage through time to an island in the past where the god of evolution is working out how to make things evolve. This provides some laughs, but is an almost totally unrelated story to the story of Rincewind. Only in the last 30 pages are the stories tied together in the vaguest of ways, and a pretty random coincidence occurs that provides the resolution to everything.

All in all, it's an amusing book with Pratchett's signature sense of humor, but it lacks a cohesiveness that I expect out of a story. If you love Australia it might appeal more to you--I've never been there, so I probably missed out on some jokes. But if you're just looking for a good story in general, I think you'd be better served picking up one of Pratchett's other books like "Small Gods", "Soul Music" or "Thief of Time".

Wizard vs. Witch. Who's the real villain?

2009-03-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

While writing a story for JW SChnarr's Shadows of the Emerald City horror anthology, I began to wonder why people assume the Witch of the West is the villain? I thought the same as a child, but looking back at that movie I don't understand why she is seen as the villain at all. It can't just be the maniacal laughter and green skin, can it? I've known several very nice people with laughs that could scrape the paint off a wall, but that doesn't make them evil. And to discriminate based on green skin? I'd like to assume the makers of the movie weren't selling a racist agenda in their children's movie. I should note that the Witch in the original book did not have green skin, but she was described as being very very old, homely and having only one eye, so it could still be that she was assumed to be the villain just because she was unattractive or very old.

Let's look at both sides, witch vs. wizard:

The Wizard is in a position of power where he has spent a lifetime misleading the public and frightening his citizens into submission. A little girl from a far-off land approaches him, asking for assistance, and his response is to send her on a mission to kill his most dangerous adversary. In return he makes promises that he's incapable of keeping, giving snake oil presents to Dorothy's helpers and then escaping before fulfilling his promise to Dorothy. His only explanation is: "I'm not a bad man, only a bad wizard." That's a terribly weak excuse considering the magnitude of his crimes. The Wizard escapes without providing his promised payment AND without paying for his crimes, and we think the story ends happily?

The Witch: The Witch's eastern counterpart is dispatched without warning by a powerful child adversary who claims she didn't mean to do it. But of course, that's exactly what any child-assassin would say in that circumstance. And honestly, when was the last time an intact house fell out of the sky by coincidence? And if it were an accident, what are the odds that it would land on the Wicked Witch of the East? The Witch would be a fool to believe Dorothy at her word. Then, despite the child-assassin's claims of innocence, the girl accepts a mission from the Witch's greatest adversary to go kill the Witch. How can anyone fault the Witch for trying to kill Dorothy? It's clearly self defense! Even in the moments of her death, the Witch has no reason to question her own judgment--somehow the girl knew her one weakness and used it with no hesitation. Dorothy claimed it was an accident, but again, what are the odds of that?

In a discussion with writer Jeanne Tomlin about this topic, she said the following:
"It's hard to separate this subject from the very real persecution of women that witch hunts in Europe covered up. What you are looking at and questioning is some pretty basic sexism. Any time a female creature (especially in a Disney movie) wants power, then she is by definition evil since power by rights belongs to males. Blech. I prefer to concentrate on less depressing parts of fantasy."

While there probably is some degree of sexism at play here, particularly since the source material was written over a hundred years ago, I don't think that's the whole picture.

If I had to pick who was the most powerful character in the story, I would say it was Glinda, yet she's not portrayed as evil. She plays a positively depicted female in power, despite her ridiculous bubbly voice, and her unfortunate fashion sense (was that pink monstrosity of a dress EVER in style?). She's the only one who is shown using magic of her own, even if she does show it by riding around in a bubble. The Wizard's magic is smoke and mirrors, and the Wicked Witch of West seems to have no magic, save through magical mediums: the broom, the crystal ball, the monkeys. Glinda is the only one who shows any inherent magic, and she's the only one who can determine the magical nature of the slippers. If sexism were the only agenda here, I think Glinda would be portrayed differently.

Glinda and Dorothy are both portrayed very positively, but every single major male character has a major flaw that mars his character: the heartless, the brainless, the cowardly, and the impotent. Granted, it may be a stretch to call the Tin Man and the Scarecrow male, but they were referred to with male pronouns in the book, and were played by male actors for the movie.

It seems to me that the sexism of Witch vs. Wizard is perhaps not so much a fault with the filmmakers, but is due to assumptions made by the viewers. Looking at it objectively, it seems very clear to me that the Wizard is the villain because of his behavior.

What do you think? Do you think the Witch is the real villain, or the Wizard, and why?

Wicked--Novel vs. Musical

2009-03-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

Warning: some spoilers ahead!

Wicked, the novel by Gregory Maguire
(the review of the musical is much further down)

Let me start by saying how much I love the land of Oz. I've always been fascinated by Oz, and by Wonderland, ever since I was a kid. I don't know what it is about these strange parallel worlds that fascinates me so much. Maybe it's because they were some of the first really speculative stories I was exposed to as a child. In any case, anything in either of these universes is almost an automatic hit with me, but Maguire has managed to write the only Oz story I've ever hated.

I read Wicked a few years ago, and hated it. Then I saw the play last year and LOVED it. I decided to give the book another try, just in case I'd been wrong. Nope, I still hated it. The book has almost nothing at all to do with the play, other than sharing the same characters and a couple settings.

For those of you aren't familiar with the premise of the book, it's a retelling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from a new point of view--the Wicked Witch of the West. He attempts to explain why the witch is perceived as wicked, how she came to own the west, how she came to be called a witch, etc... Honestly, with a premise this great, how could I not like it? I have plenty of reasons.

The book is split into several sections, each basically covering a portion of Elphaba's life (Elphaba is the Witch of the West's name). But it often seemed like all the important events were occurring off-camera. We see part of Elphaba's life, then it skips 5-7 years between sections, then Maguire works the events of those years into pace-killing infodump summary that made me want to skip ahead. Then repeat, repeat, repeat.

Not only that, but each section introduced a whole new cast of characters--who for the most part were not seen either before or after that section. So I felt like any characterization of them was just a waste of time.

Sure, there were a few major events that happen on-camera, but even those were hard to get into. Part of it was the head-hopping. The predominant style these days is to choose a single POV character for each section/chapter of a book, and stick entirely with that character. I think this is a very positive trend, because I think it can be so much more immersive. I like to see the world through the eyes of the character using the narration as a lens. It's a hard thing to do as a writer--trust me, I know--but it's a worthy goal, a writer's Everest. But the head-hopping in this book killed any potential it had. By head-hopping I mean that the point of view (POV) jumped from person to person within the scene. Elphaba would mentally describe Glinda for a paragraph, and then suddenly Glinda would mentally describe Elphaba, etc... I find it distracting.

SPOILERS!

And Maguire's use of sex constantly annoyed me. Now, I'm no prude when it comes to sex in stories, but the sex has to serve a purpose just like everything else. It has to carry its weight. Sex can be a great tool for characterization, showing motivation, exploring relationships between characters. But instead of using sex to enhance the characters and plot, Maguire's uses sex like pink flamingo lawn ornaments--it's only effect is to distract and annoy. You can't go a chapter without the subject coming up in the strangest of places. Perhaps it's a countercomment on the total lack of sex in the film and book? I don't know. A way to ensure that it didn't end up on the kid's rack? Could be. For instance, about 1/3 of the way through the book, many of the characters go to the Philosopher's Club, a cultish sex club reminscent of Eyes Wide Shut. But neither Glinda nor Elphaba went in. Boq the munchkin, who had been a major character in the prior section, went in, but we barely see him for the rest of the book. Fiyero, the Winkie who becomes Elphaba's only love, goes in but he seems unaffected by his experiences inside there. Crope (or is it Tibbet?) goes in, and gets some kind of STD and wastes away from it, but he'd always been a minor character. On the subject of Crope and Tibbet, both of those two were just token homosexual characters with no individual personality, as if they were an afterthought to meet some sort of equal rights requirement from his publisher. I got the impression we were supposed to gasp at the idea of homosexuals in Oz, but no effort was made to make them into real characters.

And the premise of this book is for us to try to understand the Witch better, right? Well, by the end of the book she's actually more despicable than I had thought she was in the movie/original book. In the movie/book, I think the Wizard is the villain, not the Witch. Think about it. A little girl goes to the Wizard for help. He says he'll help, but only if the little girl acts as an assassin and goes to kill the Witch. Dorothy doesn't want to do it, but feels she has no choice. After that, the Witch's actions are all self-defense. She knows Dorothy is her intended assassin--what is she supposed to do, sit and wait for her to come and kill her? We as viewers know that Dorothy could never intentionally kill anybody.

But in Wicked, what really convinces me that she's a bad person is how she treats her son. She's not entirely sure he's her son (long story), but when she leaves the convent (another long and uninteresting story) the other nuns make her take the child with her. The narration makes it very clear that he is her son, referring to Fiyero as the father, etc, so we know he is. But whether or not he's her biological son is beside the point. He's her responsibility either way because she's accepted custody of him. But she totally ignores him. She has no idea where he sleeps (on the floor in one of the children's rooms), what he eats, what he does (lives in constant torment by the other children). He's so unloved that he will do anything for approval, including getting kicked around by the cruel other children. Elphaba sees this and doesn't care, nor does she lift a finger to stop it. One day Liir (the boy) is playing hide and seek with the other children, and one of them convinces him to hide in the fishwell, where he can't get out on his own. Then the kid leaves him there where he sits for DAYS and almost dies. During this time Elphaba doesn't even realize he's gone! It's this that really convinces me she's a villain. I liked some other aspects of it, but this is what really made me hate her. I couldn't like anyone who treated their own child that way.

END SPOILERS!

Apparently somebody liked the book, because it's already spawned two sequels, "Son of a Witch", which I'm assuming is about Liir, and I saw a new one about the cowardly lion.

Wicked the musical

As far as I'm concerned, the only good thing that came of Wicked the book is that it gave someone the idea to make Wicked the musical. This play is great! I like musicals in general, and this was better than average. It was everything the book should have been. Instead of being a meandering, slow-moving plot about a despicable character, it tells us about an Elphaba that I can actually relate to. The play is much more focused on the relationship between Glinda and Elphaba, which gave it a much stronger core. In the book, the two were only anywhere near each other in one section. The musical is focused around both of them, starting at Shiz, the college they both went to, and progressing to their meeting of the Wizard. From there, their paths diverge, but they are still both relatable. They both want to change the world, but Glinda tries to do so by society-approved advancement through government, and Elphaba tries her own radical ways. We already know how this works out for them, of course, but I still rooted for Elphaba because she was clearly a good person at heart with a good cause.

There are a lot of amazing songs in the soundtrack. Particularly noteworthy are "What is this Feeling?" where Galinda (it's spelled Galinda in the early scenes where she insists on an aristocratic air, and Glinda in the later scenes where she's more down to Earth) and Elphaba profess their immediate loathing for each other and "Popular" where Galinda gives Elphaba a much-needed makeover. Galinda/Glinda was played by Kristin Chenoweth on Broadway, who some people might know as Olive Snook on the now-cancelled TV series Pushing Daisies. She deserves special mention because she plays such an amazing Glinda the Good Witch. Spot-on, the voice, the look, everything is perfect. I didn't actually see her in the part but she did an amazing job on the soundtrack, and she is perfectly suited for it. Also good songs are "The Wizard and I" sung by Elphaba, and "A sentimental Man" sung by the Wizard. Some of the lyrics were very impressive with their clever rhyming. For instance, the Wizard: "There are very few at ease with moral ambiguities..." And Glinda: "Don't be offended by my frank analysis. Think of it as personality dialysis. Ever since I've become a pal, a sis--ter, and advisor, there's nobody wiser. One slight pause in the middle of sister and it all works.

Now, I should note that the play deviated from every other version in major ways. It wasn't particularly faithful to any of the other renditions. But the ways it veered off the beaten path were so compelling, and they made such sense with the world of Oz that I didn't mind at all.

For one thing, the origin story of the scarecrow and the tin man were totally different, but the way they were changed tied them very closely to Elphaba's story. Their original backstories were fine for the original book, because they didn't have to be tied closely together to the witch.

SPOILERS!

The Tin Man in this rendition turns out to be Boq. While they're in school Boq has a crush on Galinda, but she convinces him to take pity on Elphaba's sister Nessarose, because Nessa's in a wheelchair. He asks her out, and then never has the nerve to break it off. She becomes mayor of Munchkinland to the East, and eventually labeled the Wicked Witch of the East. She's so afraid that he'll leave her that she never lets him leave, always keeping him cooped up even though he wants to travel. He feels smothered, and one day during an argument between Nessa and Elphaba his heart gives out on him. Elphaba tries to save his life, and using the Grimmery, the magic book given to her by the Wizard, which she barely understands, she tries to find a spell that will save him. Instead of healing him, the spell changes him to a form where he doesn't need a heart at all--the Tin Man.

The Scarecrow turns out to be Fiyero. He is engaged to Galinda for quite some time, and works in the military for the Wizard. But he defects in order to save Elphaba's life. He's captured by a troop of soldiers and they carry him away. Elphaba casts another spell to try to save his life, casting a spell that his bones may never break, that he'll never die, and will not feel pain. Thus he became the scarecrow.

The Nessarose portrayed in the book and the play are totally different in almost every way. They're both crippled, but with totally different disabilities. In the book, she has no arms. This makes her very dependent on other people--she can't even walk unless someone helps her balance. While in the play she's in a wheelchair. Book--she's a religious zealot, following the religion of her father, but using it to become a Tyrant in the East. I couldn't find anything about that Nessa to like. Play--she's very sweet and it's easy to feel bad about her bad fortune in life. It's very sweet when Boq asks her out to the dance, and I really enjoyed seeing her face light up, even though I figured it would end badly one way or the other. Again, Maguire seemed to go out of his way to make sure every character was totally unlikeable. Just because a character is labeled as a villain doesn't mean they can have no redeeming qualities!

END SPOILERS!

Obviously I feel very strongly about these two versions of this concept. I guess the other positive thing I can say about Maguire's version is that it certainly got me aggravated enough to give me a topic to go on about.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz--L. Frank Baum

2009-03-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

I read the original story by L. Frank Baum. I don't think I've read this since I was a kid, if even then. I thought it was reasonably good, though it, not surprisingly, had a dry explanatory tone that is common in older literature. Also, there's a lot of "As you know" dialogue. The scarecrow is constantly saying "I'm too dumb to do ____", and similar statements from the Tin Woodsman and the Lion. What interested me most were the differences I noticed.
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
(just in case anyone hasn't read this book from 1900!)

1. The ruby red slippers from the movie are actually silver. I suspect they made them red in the movie to show off their new color technology.
2. The Tin Woodsman is quite ruthless, beheading animals left and right, including a wildcat which was doing nothing more than chasing a field mouse. I'm sure they cut this to avoid blood.
3. The Lion is actually lion-shaped, not people shaped. Not a surprise there, since they had to have a guy in a lion costume.
4. The Emerald City is not really emerald. Everyone in the city must wear sunglasses by law that are locked onto your head, supposedly to protect you from being blinded by the dazzle. But the glasses are secretly tinted green, so everything looks green.
5. The Wicked Witch of the West does not use a crystal ball, she has just one eye which can see everything. Also, her skin is not green.
6. The Wizard takes on a different form for each of them--a giant head, a beautiful fairy, a ball of fire, and a 5-eyed 5-armed rhino-headed beast.
7. The Wizard gives them different gifts than the movie, though they are the same sort of "snake oil" placebo gifts.
8. It's not all a dream in the book.

Actually the ending is quite amusing. Dorothy's apparently been gone for quite some time, because Henry has had time to totally rebuild the house. Dorothy appears in the yard, Aunt Em finds her, and the first and only thing Em says is "Where did you come from?" That is a strange reaction for your dependent who has been missing for at least weeks, presumed dead in a tornado, that suddenly appears out of nowhere.

20 points!

2009-03-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

I sent in my Q2 WotF entry on Friday, bringing me up to 20 points. After a bit of revision work, I think I'm going to take another crack at novel-writing.

Three theories of time travel

2009-03-03T20:17:00.000-08:00

This post is intended to open speculation about time travel. As far as I've seen, there are three main theories of how time travel works, depending on what you're watching/reading.

1. Time is a slate--anything can be can be changed! Be very careful, you might prevent your own birth. (ala Back to the Future). Paradoxes are a major problem--if you change antyhing you could prevent yourself from going back which would keep you from going back to prevent yourself from going back--and so on.

2. Time is a tree. You can change things, but all you'll do is create an alternate timeline. That is by making a change you just force yourself down a different branch. You can't prevent your birth, but you can send yourself down a branch where you were never born. (ala Back to the Future II, which doesn't seem to use the same concepts as Back to the Future)

3. Time is written in stone. Whatever happens in the past has already happened, observed events are 100% unchangeable. For me to believe in this one, I feel I also need to believe in a higher power (a fate or a god or what-have-you) to make sure everything is neat and tidy. (ala 12 Monkeys)

To me #1 is unlikely. If this were the way time travel worked, the space-time continuum would have ripped a long time ago, or a long time from now, which amount to the same thing when you're talking about the space-time continuum.

#3 can only work if there's a higher power, because something needs to decide what events are "allowed" to happen.

#2 is the most likely in my mind, though it opens the door to another discussion--alternate realities. Each branch of possibility creates new realities that may exist only in potentia. Changing events instantiates these realities.

Push

2009-03-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

here's my first review. :)
Nicely enough, The Curse did not manifest itself too strongly this time. My wife and I have been plagued with a particular curse that follows us to events--concerts, hockey games, movies. You know that one guy in the stands that is so annoying you have to assume he's never been in public before? The next time you see him, look in the seats immediately surrounding him, because we're guaranteed to be right in front of, behind, or next to him.
This time wasn't too bad in that regard. true, 5 of the other 10 people in the movie theatre were seated together in the row just behind, and they did laugh uproariously at the most unusual times, pretty much whenever anybody died, but at least they didn't talk throughout it, and I didn't hear anybody getting intimate (yup, that happened once during "Eastern Promises", during Viggo's nude fight scene and let me tell you, that is the last scene in any movie I would expect anyone to be turned on--it wasn't that kind of nudity!)

I just saw Push today at the MoA. I went with low expectations, just looking for something to do. I was reasonably satisfied with this one. I think they made good use of the premise, and took it as far as it could go. That's all I could ask for. Most of all, it provided what the previews had led me to expect. Plenty of action, shiny spec fx, and a relatively good plot. For me this was a great premise. I've always been interested in plots about people with extra abilities--X-men being a particular favorite.

The premise is this: In WWII, the Nazis tried to create armies of supersoldiers. They failed, but in the following decades, other governments set up research programs to continue this research. They categorized and trained those with abilities, mostly mentally based. The two main characters are Nick and Cassie. Nick is played by Chris Evans who you may know as Johnny Storm from the 2 recent Fantastic 4 movies. He's a Mover, a telekinetic (each class of people has a clever little name like this). I wouldn't say he's the best actor in the world, but he didn't turn me off either. Cassie is played by Dakota Fanning. She was reasonably good, though I could've done without seeing the preteen in a mini-skirt throughout the whole film. She's a Watcher, someone who can see glimpses of possible futures. They're both on the run from Division, the US organization that tries to control these special people: Nick because his father was killed by Division when he was a boy, and Cassie because she wants to rescue her mother from Division where she's been held captive. They (and everyone else) are looking for Kira, a Pusher. Pushers are the most scary kind, they can make people believe and do whatever they want to. On a random sidenote, Kira looks almost exactly like Kim from Kath and Kim (who's played by Selma Blair).
Most of the move takes place in Hong Kong, which I thought was particularly cool since I've been there a couple of times for business trips.

The main things I didn't like about this movie:
1. too much preteen Dakota Fanning in a mini-skirt
2. At least twice they used a real fakey solution to a near-death situation: the protagonists are about to be killed, but an enemy Watcher says "no, don't kill them, that could change the future" so they let them go to fight another day. It made sense in the context of the movie, but it still felt cheap, like the writers had written themselves into a corner and just needed a quick fix to get them out.
3. This requires a spoiler, so if you want to see the money you might not want to read on.

SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT

3. About halfway through the movie they realize the enemy Watcher is better than Cassie, so they have to find a way to be totally unpredictable. So Nick writes bunch of instructions for everybody in sealed envelopes, including for himself, and then he has his memory wiped by someone with that ability. Again, it made sense in the context of the movie, but it was rather annoying at times, because NONE of the main characters had a clue what the plan was. They just opened the envelopes and did what they were told to do, and everything worked out in the end.

The rest of the movie:
The whole object of the movie is to find a serum that boosts abilities to a much higher degree. Division wants it so that they can create their own army and keep others from finding the serum's secret. Cassie wants it so she can use it bargain for her mother. A Hong Kong crime family, with many henchmen with abilities, is the third side.

The fight scene at the end was just awesome! With all three sides of the conflict there, it was very chaotic. With Pushers, Watchers, Bleeders, Movers, etc.. all fighting against each other, deflecting bullets. Kira was really scary in that scene, using her mind manipulation to turn enemies against her and recruit soldiers to protect her.

The ending was relatively happen, with open elements to guess what you will. Nick and Kira ended up together, though I had to wonder how you could ever trust someone who could manipulate your mind to that degree. All in all, I really enjoyed it.

19 points!

2009-03-01T15:40:00.000-08:00

I finished a new story and posted it to Baen's Bar. Unfortunatly I realized after getting a few critiques that something that I had intended to be very clear was totally unclear to every reader who read it. So this one's going to take at least one more revision. Oh well, that's one of the reasons I like Baen's Bar. I can get that kind of feedback, and I have a second chance!

The 20th point will be coming soon as well. I have a new short story I'm working on for the Writer's of the Future contest. I think it has a lot of potential, and I've gotten a few critiques to base another revision on. A little more polish and it'll be ready to go out the door. I just have to mail it by the end of the month to enter it in this quarter. :)

Reviews coming soon

2009-03-01T15:36:00.000-08:00

I realized I don't add new posts as often as I should. As a way to do so, I plan to start writing reviews. I have a subscription to F&SF magazine so I'll review those issues (one issue every two months), as well as books and other magazines that I read.

I'll intersperse these with writing updates, and any writing tips that I come up with! Stay tuned, and I'll do my best to make a new post at least once a week!

Novel query

2009-01-26T21:09:00.000-08:00

ESP has now had my novel submission for 6 months now (as long as my short story career). They estimate 3-6 months for submission replies I sent off a query today. They estimate another 1-3 months to reply to queries.
With the geological pace maintained by the industry, I'll be published in no time!

18!

2009-01-26T21:08:00.001-08:00

I finished a new flash piece (story that's less than 1000 words). This is the shortest I've written, only 600 words. It's off to Asimov's and that makes 18!

Analog submission lost

2009-01-20T07:01:00.000-08:00

The Analog excitement was for naught. Either the submission or the reply got lost in the mail.

Analog Submission in Promising Territory

2009-01-17T10:23:00.001-08:00

I have some hopeful news. I have a submission that's now been at Analog longer than any of the rejections listed on the statistics sites I use: Duotrope, Ralan, and Submitting to the Black Hole.
That could mean that the Dr. Stanley Schmidt (the editor of Analog) is giving it a second look. Or it could mean my manuscript got mangled in a mail sorter in the post office way back in October. Only time will tell...

17 points!

2008-12-31T12:30:00.000-08:00

I FINALLY made some writing progress after stalling for a month. I got a big new project done for the quarterly Writers of the Future (WotF) competition. And I finished polishing another piece that had been sitting on the back burner since November. That was another Liberty Hall one. So I'm up to 17! Almost to 20!

Liberty Hall flash challenge, 15 points!

2008-11-23T06:32:00.000-08:00

I tried something new on Friday. I went to a site called Liberty Hall, a writer's website. They have a weekly Flash Challenge. You sign in and it shows you a trigger: a phrase, or a few words, to give you the idea for a story. Then a timer starts and you have 90 minutes to write a complete short story. I tried it out and I thought it went quite well. I didn't have time to go back over it, so it probably had some typos, but the story is decent enough. 1300 words total. I gave it a quick polish yesterday and sent it off, so that brings me up to 15 points! :)

14 points!

2008-11-18T05:20:00.001-08:00

FINALLY got another new story out the door for the first time since halloween. It's posted up at Jim Baen's Universe now, where I can get very useful feedback from the slush readers and my fellow writers. up to 14 points!

13 points!

2008-11-01T13:49:00.001-07:00

I hit 13 points, and of all days to hit it on, it happened on Halloween, which I didn't even plan. :)
This one's off to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) in Hoboken, NJ.

dialoguing

2008-10-30T15:18:00.001-07:00

I've posted this on a few forums, but decided I should also post to the blog. It's an illustrative example of dialogue. :)

"As we both know, I'm here to learn good dialogue. Is this good dialogue, Susan?" Brandon posited quizzically.

"No, no," Susan said. "You don't need to say what we both already know. Also, people don't posit, they say."

"What?!" Brandon questioned loudly. "But all those 'said's will get repetitive! Won't they, Susan?"

"Actually, no. 'Said', unlike most other words, is nearly invisible to the reader, even if its repeated. And try to cut back on your exclamation points, too. You're going to give yourself a hemhorrage."

"But I'm upset, Susan!!" Brandon countermanded huffily. "I have to use exclamation points!!!"

Susan shook her head. "No you don't. If the dialogue's written well enough, the tension of the words will come through to the reader. If you use too many exclamation points, people will accuse you of trying to inject tension in with punctuation instead of writing it in. And multiple exclamation points at the end of a single sentence is a sign of a mentally unbalanced individual. Ask Terry Pratchett."

"There's just so much I don't know,Susan," Brandon moped depressingly.

"You can't 'mope' a sentence. Stop trying. Even if you don't stick to 'say', you still can't stick just any old verb back there. Are you trying to do everything wrong or is it just coincidence?" She put her hand to her head. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I'm just frustrated. Why do you keep saying my name in every sentence? Real people don't talk like that. Why are you putting a speaker attribution after every line? There's only two of us, so a few lines without an attribution won't be confusing, especially since our manner of speaking is unique from each other. Have you ever heard of beats?"

"I don't think so, Susan," Brandon cogitated placatingly.

"They're actions you insert between lines of dialogue. You can use them instead of saying 'said', to show who's speaking." Susan sipped her coffee. "And it adds some pauses to the dialogue to give the reader a feel for the intended pace, while giving a bit of characterization at the same time by showing the speakers actions."

"Now I understand, Susan!!" Brandon roared intricately.

"I don't think you do." She sighed. "And could you PLEASE stop using so many -ly adjectives? If I can't tell how you said something, the dialogue is probably weak and you should work on that instead."

"Look at me, Susan! I'm dialoguing!!!!" Brandon ejaculated profusely.

The door slammed shut.

"Susan? Susan? Where'd you go?" Brandon queried querulously.

12 points!

2008-10-28T14:37:00.001-07:00

Writing pace a little slow lately, because I seem to end up editing old stuff for much longer than I'd like! But I finished a new story on Sunday and posted it to Jim Baen's Universe. And I've got another story half-done. The new one is another flash story, this one in the sub-genre of Magical Realism. This means that it takes place in a "normal" setting, but there are some unexplainable elements, such as the laws of physics being different. It's kind of a fun genre, though I find it harder to come up with ideas for it.

11 points!

2008-10-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

I finished a new story, my first flash story (a short-short story, less than 1000 words) which is also my first attempt at comedy. I posted it to Jim Baen's Universe, and so far it's gotten a lot of positive feedback from writers and staff alike. :)

Classic SF

2008-10-12T16:21:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I found a great deal at the local library. They were having a clearance sale to make room for new inventory and I picked up a copy of "The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction Eighth Series", published back in 1959, a collection from F&SF magazine. Wow the styles have changed! Many of the things that are forbidden today were common then. I've only read the first two stories, but there is head-hopping, multiple POV characters (who don't even add anything), "said" synonyms, and -ly adverbs galore (all things that I've been told by dozens of sources to never do). Just a few blurbs, all in a 2-page span:

"whispered inadequately"

"said enthusiastically"

"rolled his eyes lickerishly"

"complained" (instead of said)

"bellowed" (instead of said)

"began" (instead of said)

"chattered" (instead of said)

"protested" (instead of said)

"nodded" (instead of said)

"smiled" (instead of said)

"he said diffidently"

It makes me wonder what readers in another 50 years will think of our writing from the present, and how the styles will change in that time.

Not to mention the totally different view of the sexes. The first story, by C.S. Lewis called "Ministering Angels" is about a crew of astronauts (all men) on Mars, and the new "Aphrodisio-therapy" approved by the government is to send women there to have sex with them as a form of stress relief. It turns out the only two women that are willing to go are an overweight prostitute who's lost all her customers, and a female professor (about 70 years old) who is one of the main advocates of the new aphrodisio-therapy, who can't stop talking in a blustery academic way for even two seconds. Half the crew ends up having a mutiny and fleeing the station, leaving the rest to live with the two women indefinitely (which the ones left behind clearly view as a terrible fate). Very weird to read something written in such a different time, where the mere possibility of a female astronaut even in the far future was so clearly ridiculous.
And the introduction explains that there IS a difference between "science fictioneers" and "Beatniks". I'm glad I read it, or I would always have wondered!

10 points!

2008-10-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

I'm up to double digits now, by sending my newest story to the magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). I've been bogged down with revising a couple things this week, so nothing new in progress just yet.

Clarkesworld response in record time

2008-10-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

23 hours from submission time to rejection. Wow, that's fast. Apparently they only take 12 stories a year, so the odds are pretty dismal, but at least I only spent a day waiting for it. :)

9 points!

2008-10-09T06:43:00.001-07:00

Sent off a story about man who can talk to cars. Sent it to Clarkesworld, a free online magazine.
They even have an online system for me to check on submission. Right now it is #38 in line to be read. That's a nice feature.
Up to 9 points now!

Worn out...

2008-10-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

That 24 hour writing spurt must have worn me out. The next idea's coming more slowly than usual. I'm sure it'll come soon, my brain's just giving itself a rest. ;)

New story!

2008-10-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

I finished a new story today, in record time! 24 hours from start to finish! I usually wait a week before sending to the first publicaiton, to give my first readers the opportunity to consider it, so I hope to get 2 new stories out next week. I had just finished my last story yesterday, so I hope to send off the 2 new ones next week. If only I could be this productive all the time.

Website recommendation--TalkToYoUniverse

2008-10-03T07:16:00.000-07:00

For anyone looking for an interesting blog to read, you should check out TalkToYoUniverse, a blog by Juliette Wade:
http://talktoyouniverse.blogspot.com/

I came across her blog after reading interesting conversations with her on the Asimov's and Analog forums. She's a linguist and an SF/fantasy writer. On her blog she discusses many language-related things, particularly pertaining to SF/fantasy stories. I had an interesting discussion with her on the subject of whether humans will ever outgrow spoken language, which became a topic on her blog on September 27th.

8 points!

2008-09-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

I sent off a new story, titled "Priority."
It takes place in a future where robots raise everyone's children and workers are obsessed with maintaining their websites to earn a living.
That brings my point total up to 8!

New JBU version of "The Disconnected"

2008-09-23T08:59:00.001-07:00

I've posted a new version of "The Disconnected" on Jim Baen's Universe Slush forum. It's a story that speculates what the future may look like if over-dependence on cell phones continues to grow. People become so dependent on them that those who are separated from their phones are cast out and are treated like animals.

You can visit the forum by going to bar.baen.com You have to register to get a username and password. Then click on "Baen's Universe Slush" in the Forums panel and choose my story to read it. Then if you want to post comments about it, you can do it under the "Baen's Universe Slush Comments" Forum, under the same title.

7 points!

2008-09-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

I polished up a story today and sent it off to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. I feel really confident about this one, but we'll see how it turns out. The nice thing about that magazine is that if they reject a story you almost always get a reply in your mailbox within 2 weeeks, so at least you don't spend forever wondering. :)

The Race--clarification

2008-09-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

My previous point about the unlikeliness of reaching 50 points is solved easily: write more novels.

But for now I think I'll concentrate on short stories. 5000 words of short story take a small fraction of the time it would take to write 5000 words of novel (at least for me). My goal is to get published, so having more stories in circulation is to my advantage, even if they're not worth as many points.

The Race

2008-09-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

I'm currently trying a method of staying motivated created by Dean Wesley Smith that he calls "The Race".
http://deanwesleysmith.com/mt/archives/cat_blog.html#000178

It's a point game, with the points as follows:
1 point for each short story that's currently in submission right now
3 points for each novel submission comprised of 3 chapters + synopsis
8 points for each full novel manuscript submission

Currently my score is 6:
3 points for a novel submission (3 chapters plus synopsis) to Elder Signs Press.
1 point for a short story submission to Writers of the Future Contest
2 points for 2 short stories submitted to Baen's Universe

DWS suggests that successful writers manage to stay in the 50-75 point range consistently. With the short story market the way it is, I am skeptical that this is possible. SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) lists 18 publications they currently recognize as being professional. Most will not take multiple submissions (that is, more than one submission from one author at a time), Baen's Universe being the one exception that I know of.

So if I stick to pro publications, to reach 50 points I could do it by having 1 story at the 17 publications that don't accept multiple submissions, and have 33 stories simultaneously submitted at Baen's Universe.

In any case, it's a way to help me keep each story in continuous submission loop, if 50 points is unrealistic. :)

Welcome!

2008-09-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog.
This is my first attempt at blogging, so bear with me. :)
I'll try to put periodic updates here on the current status of my writing and submissions.
Enjoy!