Something That Makes Me Inordinately Happy...

Just in case your planet is going to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass or something...  NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has created a great little widget to allow you to design your very own custom planet from any one of the many lifeless rocks currently hurtling through the void. Using their "Extreme Planet Makeover" you can terraform a world at the click of a button or if it better suits your fancy, make it hostile and lifeless.  The possibilities are mind boggling, (if you indeed have a mind that is prone to Boggle).

I fear that the waiting list is rather long, however, as the planet of Magrathea is currently closed and if NASA has the technology to build a custom planet... well, then they're holding out on us, I think.

Keeping Up Appearances :: The Perils of Writing In Public

This morning, my friend Dre talked on her blog about the public perception of those people who write in public.  At coffee shops.  This was apparently prompted by a clip from Family Guy, which I've helpfully appended at the end of this post.  Dre writes at a Starbucks from time to time and delves into this with gusto.  If you enjoy a bit of snark with your coffee, I commend her blog post to your attention.

This isn't really about Dre, it's about my own perception of the issue of perceptions and "performance writers" and other hipsterkind.

There's no end of people who are more interested in being seen to write than they are in writing.  Just as there are those who read Russian Literature not because they enjoy it but because they want to rub your nose in the fact that their taste is elevated above your plebeian romance novels.

But applying this label to anyone seen sitting in a cafe putting words in a row is intellectually lazy.

If you operate from the home position that anything and everything one does in public is performance art.   or if you're just offended by people being literate in your general vicinity.

There's a guy in the window of this very cafe where I am typing.  He's wearing an old grey sport jacket and green waistcoat and has a tweed cap on his head.  He has earbuds in his ears and, God help him, he has a laptop.  I think he's writing something snooty, something with lots and lots of polysyllabic words (like "polysyllabic" for instance) or maybe he's blogging about bands I've never heard of...  

On appearances alone, I'm sure to get a conviction in the court of public opinion; jury returns condemnation as "hipster jerk just waiting to disdain my latest Ke$ha song or Stephen King novel."

Gosh, all those people who write at coffee shops are such sanctimonious hipster putzes.  And those uptight bastards that actually read actual books in public?  How dare they be literate at me!  Obviously they're just showing off, the jerks.

Maybe he is.  Except that he's not.  Because he's me.  The old jacket is because it's cold outside and because it's darned comfy and the hat... well, I just like hats.  And though there's a bit of polysyllabism in the story I'm writing, there are also quite a few fart jokes.  And while I do read the Russians from time to time, I also enjoy a good properly-schlocky mystery or adventure story.  And the only reason I don't read  much Stephen King is because it gives me bad dreams.

It's hard to be snotty about something that gives you the willies.

In short -- appearances are often deceiving. And what's more, until I started reading Dre's blog this morning, I never gave much thought to what the people around me thought about having me here, pounding out a novel between appointments.

As anyone who has read this post (or just been around me for very long) I am well known for pulling out a pen and notepad or laptop at any rest break.  Any horizontal surface will do really, and I do write at home but mostly I write at a coffee shop because I like the bustle and energy of public spaces.  And because I need to be at work (across the street) in a couple of hours and I shoehorn my writing in wherever it fits.  If you want to write and maintain an otherwise hectic life, that's how you do it 

Not everything has to be performance art.  And I'd wager that most of the people around you -- whether they're writing, reading, or just staring out into space -- haven't given a whole lot of thought to what you're thinking about what they're doing.  They're just doing their thing.  And the ones that do care what you think?  Who cares, really?

Honestly, I think we'd all be happier if we'd just each do our own thing and let the chips fall where they may.

So if you see me, stop by my table and say hi!  I'll stop what I'm doing to share a cuppa with a friend or to meet someone new.  And I promise not to be literate at you as long as you're willing to wait just a sec while I finish one... more... paragraph...

Clear cutting the Genre Jungle

We think of science fiction as being a relatively new phenomenon.  Even if you include the works of Jules Verne, that still only makes the genre 148 years old[1].  However, I would argue (as do many others) that science fiction has been with us since the beginning of the spoken language.  When early humans stared up at the stars and postulated reasons that they were up there, who put them there and whether or when they might want them back, the first science fiction stories found their grip. 

Speculative fictions have been used since the dawn of time to entertain and enlighten, to help us to accept and process our fears and hopes as they were reflected by the unknown and the unknowable. 

When Jules Verne put us at the center of the earth, on the moon or 20,000 Leagues deep he was expressing the popular scientific ideas of our time, the potential of the industrial revolution, and the latent fears of his age -- that our technologies were maturing faster than our culture.  During the 1950's, science fiction achieved its golden age in that heady moment when the industrial revolution surged forward once more and our hopes and fears got tangled in a time of cold war paranoia.  In a time when our culture wasn't willing to look inward with clear eyes, some of America's finest writers showed us ourselves in the mirror of the sky.  Aliens and robots infiltrated our world as a stand-in for our fears of communists and flying saucers came to get us because our official narrative was that atomic power was our Great Hope even as school children were taught to duck and cover. 

As the Soviet war machine crumbled, we turned simultaneously to more hopeful messages of Utopian visions and turned to the likes of Gene Roddenberry's quietly subversive*[2] Star Trek even as our fears of ourselves cranked ever inward.  Star Trek's hopeful future was always at war with the apocalyptic and dystopian visions of the cyberpunks and with the dawning of the new century, our fear of ourselves gave rise to shambling hordes of zombies.  With the 21^st century dawning as a time when our greatest fears are infectious diseases, the onus of exploring our fears shifted ever more heavily onto the shoulders of the horror writers who once spent their ink on the spooky and  supernatural.

In some ways, this frees science fiction to return to celestial matters and even though the dystopian continues to infect the culture (see Firefly), we're slowly returning to the idea that our future lies in our hope of a better place elsewhere.  Even when we look back, our eyes have a gauze of the fantastic drawn over them embodied best by the advent of Steampunk.

Science fiction has long been uneasy bedfellow to that other monolith of the speculative, the fantasy novel.  The roots of this lie in the fact that what was science in an earlier time becomes the fantasy of the present.  And is further complicated by movies and novels of the Star Wars variety which use of science fiction as a setting rather than a mission, using it as a language and framework to explore our imaginative realms with little regard for how, or if, the things we’re talking about would actually work in any sort of scientific way.

Many authors and fans of the science factor bridle at this comingling of science fiction and fantasy in the bookstores and movieplexes.  As you might imagine, I personally think that there’s nothing wrong with using an existing framework to just have a little harmless fun.  Howard Carter Saves the Earth certainly swims in that end of the pool.  

I bring all of this up because I firmly believe that the genre distinctions that I’m describing are evaporating far more quickly than we can argue about where the borders lie.  Genre is and always has been largely a matter of marketing and it is an illusory map that we’ve drawn for ourselves to help our fans find our works in libraries and bookstores.  But in a world where the library and the bookstore are virtual, where it would be shelved is less meaningful than what it might be tagged in a database.

“Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find items on the Amazon site as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify items for later recall.”
                                                             Source: Amazon.com

At Amazon, a book like Howard Carter might be tagged with any of the following: young adult, adventure, comedy, humor, science fiction, government conspiracies, time travel, mad scientists, robots, science fiction, giant robots and any one of a dozen or so more.  

Out of curiosity, I went and clicked on those tags and looked at what -- other than any other books I write -- Howard Carter will be “shelved” alongside at Amazon.  I was surprised to discover that Howard, who would live comfortably in either the YA or science fiction/fantasy sections of any bookstore or library, would share the monitor screen with the likes of  The Dangerous Book for Boys and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which I sort of expected, but also Eat, Pray, Love (I kid you not), a boatload of adventure novels I’ve never heard of, and for better or worse, the Wedding Crashers DVD.

Now, I’m the first to admit that the latter half of that list is pretty silly.  I sincerely doubt anyone will ever say “I loved Eat, Pray, Love, let’s go read this book Howard Carter Saves the World.  Never mind the big robot on the cover; I’m sure they’ll be exactly alike.”  But it does illustrate how far the barriers have eroded. 

Readers of books much closer to Howard Carter might stumble across my funny little book from more likely crossover titles ranging from Hitchhiker’s Guide to Harry Potter and even places that wouldn’t normally be on the same floor in a brick & mortar store like Catcher in the Rye.  Not because I think I belong on the shelf next to Mr. Salinger, but because the database doesn’t really care what I or Mr. Salinger might think about it -- a book is a book and a coming-of-age story is a coming-of-age story.

Science Fiction has always been a way of exploring the hopes and fears that lie in the unknown.  In some ways Howard Carter is an expression of my own hopes and fears for what this future world without genre might hold.  In a time when everyone -- myself included -- are bemoaning the death of the physical bookstores, it’s worth it to pause and reflect on some of the other changes that are happening in the shadow of the battle between the real and the virtual.

Just as the clear cutting of any real jungle is not adviseable, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to just wipe out the delicate ecosystems that have evolved in our bookstores and libraries just because we are transferring to a virtual economy.  But maybe that's just because the most basic concern of all humankind is shelter and at the moment the entire literary world is looking askance at the future and asking "Once this is gone, where shall we live?"

Or maybe it's just time for us to evolve.  Maybe it's time for the literary amphibians, a time for both readers and writers to make themselves at home in more than one environment.  Or is that just my Utopian ideals surfacing again?  Only the future knows for sure...

 

---

[1] Verne wrote Paris in the 20th Century in 1863, though it wasn't actually published until the 1990's.  Journey to the Center of the Earth would be published a year later.

[2] Don't think of Star Trek as subversive?  The original Star Trek debuted in the disaffected years of the Viet Nam era, in the heart of the Johnson Administration, after the assassination of Kennedy and what was viewed by my father's generation as the fall of the dream of an American Camelot.  It took place in a future where money was meaningless and the striving of capitalist societies were viewed with distaste.  Which, considering the tone and tenor of the time, makes it pretty darned subversive.

Howard Carter :: The Story So Far...

Sometimes, when telling a story, it's good to recap.  It helps your audience see the larger picture and allows you a moment to catch your breath while you think how to tell the next bit.

We have before us the story of a young man living in a suburban world very similar to our own, a boy who has the very ordinary desire to be wanted and included, yet has the extraordinary ability to do all of the things that other eleven year olds can only dream about. 

Howard Carter has built robots to help him clean his room and mow the lawn and a time machine to help him go back in time and undo the mistakes that keep him on the outside looking in.  The lawn mower develops a propensity for self-expression on the lawns of his neighbors, his room-cleaning robot becomes a pirate and his time machine never takes him to the past he remembers and won’t take him to the future he hopes for.

While his dazzling talents have drawn him at least two good friends, they have also drawn the notice of an alien with a puppet fixation, a government agency so secret even the government doesn’t know about them, and a mad science teacher.  With the hunters closing in, Howard took his two friends and attempted to escape as far into the past as his time machine would take him.  But his future self apparently felt as if his young life was not complicated enough because he sent his future wife to destroy the time machine, taking most of the hillside with it.

In the aftermath of the time machine’s destruction, Howard, his future wife, his family, his friends and his science teacher were captured by WARD, the Wartime Advanced Research Directorate, and taken to a hidden base buried somewhere on the west coast of the United States.  There, Howard is shown an army of robots being built to defend the planet against an alien invasion fleet.  The invasion is expected but the aliens are early and humankind cannot hope to repel the invasion without Howard’s help.

Meanwhile, we find that Howard’s future wife is also the future queen of the planet, the puppet alien is running around in a new body and the mad scientist has discovered to his surprise that in fact, he isn’t mad at all, just a little irked.

Cry havoc and let slip the robots of war...

Howard Carter is my latest project and you can read it as I write it!  The first draft of the story is going up online chapter by chapter.  Click the image above to be take to the site and join the story.

Bandwagonpunk! Is it right for you? (Probably not)

I think I mentioned that at the last PNWA conference I heard several agents ask for steampunk stories and many in the crowd had no idea what that meant.  Because I seemed to know what steampunk was, I was asked by several aspiring authors to explain it to them so they could alter their already-written books to fit this unknown setting.

Allow me to repeat that: alter their already-written books to fit this unknown setting.

I've been pretty immersed in the genre for awhile because I was (at the time) contemplating a steampunk novel.  I answered their questions and asked my own.  Mostly I asked why they would want to do such a thing?

Because it's what they want. ("They" being accompanied by a nod toward the nearest editor or agent.)  I tried to explain that it really isn't, but I'm not sure I got much traction.  In a competitive marketplace, it is tempting to write to the current trend.  But any reputable agent or editor will tell you not to chase the trends.

And then they ask for anyone who has one to step forward.  I know, it's frustrating, but after years and years in bookstores, this much I know is true: There's no appreciable market for Bandwagonpunk.

It just seems like there is because we see so much of it, but not if you want a lasting career.  Because while I have little or no data to back it up, how many of those authors do you think earned-out their advance?  How many of them do you think put up sufficient Booksense numbers to earn a second contract?  Relatively few.

Sure, careers have been launched by following what someone else did.  It's hard to name a fantasy author who didn't get started aping Tolkien.  God knows Harry Potter made the world safe for everyone from Artemis Fowl to Percy Jackson, but those are two among a horde of also-rans.  And note that neither of the two I mentioned is a clone of the author that laid the path that got it into the bookstores.  There's a difference between "Psht!  I can write that, here's boy wizard Number 293" and "That's an intriguing idea, what can I do that's new, but fits?" 

There are probably some good authors who have tried to hook a vampire premise to their novels just to catch the coattails of Twilight and some of them even pulled it off.   But I would wager that those authors would have done just as well (if not as quickly) if they're resisted the urge to graft foreign elements into their tales.

If you are adding things that the story does not demand to fit the trappings of the current setting du jour, then I (and many of your readers) will get bored quickly.  What's more, we'll trip over the things you grafted onto the story because even the most myopic readers will realize that they're not supposed to be there.  But if the story hinges on the death of Queen Victoria and troubles with the accession of King Edward VI, or if you're making some important parallel point using the story world to mirror our own, then I'll have my bowler hat and brass goggles and be flying alongside in my airship the whole way.  (Or space helmet, diving helmet or other headgear as appropriate.)  

Seriously, I sometimes think that "Me Too" should be a genre of its own. 

I think it usually goes something like this...

"I want to write a sort of proto-King Lear with a female as the Lear character."
"That's been done to death; how are you going to make it new?"
"I'm going to set it ON A SPACE STATION!"
"No one writes space opera anymore, Steampunk's really big right now..."

Make sure to oil the axles, that bandwagon squeaks something awful and they'll hear you coming.

Okay, I'll admit that I'm being a bit snarky.  On the face of it, there's nothing really wrong with this.  Putting it in space (or steampunk London, or Narnia, or turning them all into vampires for that matter) might make an old story feel new.  Maybe.  God knows Shakespeare's been cadged in every setting under the sun.  And a good writer could make that work.  But even though making King Lear into a western sort of worked with King of Texas (kind of), it only worked because the setting suited the story and there were enough changes made to the play to carry the western motif.

But it seems to me that someone who does this is actually creating obstacles for themselves that don't need to be there unless there's some compelling reason beyond "because it's cool right now".   Unless you have an angle that demands this setting, you have a longer road to walk than your peer who is telling a story that needs to be told in that setting.  If you're gifted (or lucky) you can make this work anyway.  Unless your reason for taking your story into space or back in time is the story, it's going to feel like a gimmick and you will have to work a lot harder to make it not feel like a gimmick.  Writing is hard enough; ask yourself why you're giving yourself extra work to do.

My guiding light remains true: Elements are in service to the story, never the other way around.  When you're shifting the story to fit the elements, you have a problem.

A Moment Captured

Just a moment's pause to remember how many ways there are to tell a story.  This is beautifully done.


Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

Hucked :: The Trouble with Twain

Any time I read in a news report that "The blogs are on fire today with opinions on..." I usually zone out.  This is a defensive response since my wife hates it when I yell at the radio, and this isn't that kind of blog anyway... most of the time. 

But this time it was one of my favorite books at the center of the storm.

I grew up in Missouri, immersed in the legendary shadow of Mark Twain.  I spent a lot of time pretending to be Tom Sawyer (I found Tom more relatable than Huck)  so an incredible amount of my parent's and grandparents' twine and twigs were sacrificed to my adolescent experiments with raft building.  One of the reasons I focused on Tom rather than Huck was that I never quite knew what to do with the escaped slave narrative.  I knew what to do with "River Pirates", but not what to do with Jim.

I grew up knowing that the black kids were every bit as human as the white kids, so Huck's slowly-dawning revelation about that fact seemed a bit daft to me.  It's a mindset that I cannot fathom... but I knew people, all too many people, who had no trouble whatsoever thinking of dark-skinned people as less.

I wasn't going to comment on this because, let's be honest with ourselves, this is not the first time Huckleberry Finn has had its language whitewashed.  When was the last time you heard young Huck say "Nigger Jim" on the silver screen?  Why?  Because we don't say that anymore.  And to put those words in a young actor's mouth in our racially-charged culture would be anathema to our sensibilities.

And if you cared to look, there are a dozen "condensed" or "young reader's editions" of the book for sale in which that troubling racial epithet is suspiciously absent.  Why we're arguing about it this time is anyone's guess.  I suspect it's that the imprint putting it out is called "New South" just puts an unfortunate spin on the story with southern states holding events to celebrate their secession from the union.  Timing is everything, I guess.

And while the reasons for the Civil War was more-or-less an argument about state's rights, the "state right" at the center of the fight was undeniably the right to own people because they have a darker skin color than yours.

I'm not a sociologist and I'm not a Twain scholar.  I'll leave the socio-political wrangling over this mess to those as have the academic credentials to back up their arguments.  But my friends in the American Library Association tell me that Huck Finn is at or near the top of every list of books that have been challenged or banned and has been pretty much since it came out.  Maybe we can take some solace in the idea that the reasons for challenging Huck have (we are told) evolved from "This is too accurate about how we are now" to "This is too accurate about how we were."

That is progress of a sort, I suppose...

Unless, we're lying to ourselves.

Unless, as Salon said, this is viewed from the standpoint of America photoshopping the flaws out of its history like a magazine airbrushing the character out of an aging starlet's face. 

Wait... Did I just say that our turbulent racial history is akin to "character lines"?

Yes, and I think that's an apt description.  Every wrinkle on your face is the track of past moments of joy or anger or grief.  Just as every muscle showing in your torso is the record of hard hours at the gym, every blemish or bloat are the remnants of indulgence or negligence or sloth. To wave them away with the stroke of an editor's pen is to lie about who you really are and worst of all, to lie about the past that got you to where you are.

This is less about the excision of a word from a single book (as I've noted, it's not the first time) and indicative of something that's a resurgent trend in our books and classrooms.  When textbooks are being rewritten to make our founding fathers seem more pious than they were, or our forefathers seem more enlightened than they were, it's a lie.  And the most troubling part of that lie isn't the lie itself, but how it hides the progress we've made (or the ways we've regressed) since the incident we are sanitizing to fit a current ideological desire.

History is what it is.  It's what happened, not what we wish had happened.  It's about what our forerunners believed and taught and thought and how it impacted the way that they acted.  It's how we measure our progress from one state to another, from one mindset to the next, from the barbaric to the civilized and all too often, back again.  It is how we learn not to repeat mistakes past and what we point to when we have. And every time we put a coat of paint over the past in the interest of keeping people comfortable, something valuable is lost... the wisdom that comes with the lines on our collective face.  Wisdom that we will soon forget if we bury the lines under layers of airbrushing.

This is what we are doing with Huck Finn.  Lying to ourselves, to our children especially, about how we got from a place where we required a journey through cold, dark waters to arrive at the conclusion that that people with darker skin tones are just as human as we are to a point where we're uncomfortable admitting that we ever thought that they weren't.

And worst of all, it reminds us that we're not as far down that road as we would like to think.

Lego Head :: Or, Where I've Been

It would be easy to tell you that I took some time off for the holidays.  Because I did. But I never intended to be gone from the blog for quite this long... You see, I got a little sick.

Don't ask why it's a baseball player laying the tape outline (They were out of chalk). 

Well, maybe not that sick, but pretty sick.

One morning shortly after Christmas, my wife says to me something to the effect of "Where did all your wrinkles go?"  Some folks might take that as a compliment.  Without wrinkles, I'd be looking younger, right?  Everyone wants to look younger.  But not everyone carries an epi-pen around in their pocket.

My face swelled until it was almost as smooth and shiny as plastic.  I looked like a caricature of myself, or perhaps an "after" picture at a Botox clinic.  Or a Lego mini figure of myself.

I looked something like this, only my coffee cup was white...

Lego heads are only cute on tiny plastic figures that live in worlds that are inhabited by other tiny plastic figures with round plastic heads. It was most troubling.

This has happened before and this summer it landed me in the hospital over the 4th of July weekend.  This time I was looking at celebrating the new year with the nurses, but this time I had a new doctor and got some better attention earlier, and didn't even need to use the epi-pen to manage it.  Lego head was averted, but it was placed pretty high on my list of The Most Annoying Ways to Spend a Holiday.

It has, in fact, been suggested that holidays are what I'm really allergic to.

This new doctor, incidentally, is a character waiting to be turned into television series.  The look on his face as he was running through the differential diagnosis was reminiscent of a kid unwrapping a new toy on Christmas morning.  To be honest it was heartwarming.  After years of getting doctors who frown and forget me the moment they walk out the door, I loved seeing actual interest in his eyes.  He called me from home on New Year's eve to tell me he was spending his holiday evening reading up on the literature and how fascinating it all was.

At long last, a fellow geek was on the case!  And I mean that in the best possible way.

Part of his fascination is that what he thinks might really be happening isn't a holiday allergy, but an extremely rare condition that triggers periodic swelling in my face that is (in his words) "benign but rather annoying to put up with" and has very little to do with anything, holiday related.  I rather like the word "benign", but could do with a bit less of the "annoying to put up with", honestly, but we take what blessings we get, mixed though they are.


Not the kind of fame anyone wants, really.  And honestly, who wants to be known as the 81st person to do something?  So, I've decided to name it myself: I officially declare myself patient zero for Sporadic Lego Head Holiday Syndrome.  

Take that, Medical Science!

Don't worry, it's not contagious, I just like the sound of "Patient Zero".

In the meantime, my head has returned to the normal proportions (or at least what passes for normal in my world) and rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.