Off The Pink

Forever Old Man's Starship Troopers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islamic Overreaction freaks out Random House

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

From the “this surprises you why?” department:

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

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

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

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

Good News and Bad News

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dealing with the Origin Story

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

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

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

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

There are several ways to do this convincingly:

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

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

Done, really, I mean it this time

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

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

Then I'll be writing new stuff. . .

Future Americas is out.

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

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

Oh yeah, about those counters

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

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

Chronologically Incorrect Storytelling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

via Terry Ann Online

People who should know better

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

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

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

In his own words (we hope):

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

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

We have a title!

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

My existential title crisis is over!

And and the winner is: *drumroll*

Lilly's Song

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

Twinkle twinkle little star

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

ADDENDUM: Charlie Stross gets in on the act.

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

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

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

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

Dragons of the Cuyahoga

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

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

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

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

Forests of the Night

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

Teek

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

Omega Game

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

That's one thing to call it

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

"Irreconcilable editorial differences."

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

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

First lines

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

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

Google knows where you live

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking a breather/Title juggling

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

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

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

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

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

Rewrite Done

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

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

In case you're wondering

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

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

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

Hitting the ground running

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unrepentant self-satisfaction

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

A couple of woo-hoos:

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

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

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

Spam followup

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

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

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

But here is it in Victoria Strauss' own words:

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we go again

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

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

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

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

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

And, apparently I'm writing porn

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

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

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

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

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