A Classic-Style Story Deserves a Classic-Style Cover

Planning to write old school SciFi makes me nostalgic for those ratty little paperbacks my dad used to pay a quarter for off a flea market spinner rack. They usually had a space man or a robot on the cover. If I was lucky, there was a girl and maybe some dude with a laser pistol, but they ALWAYS had titles in all-caps.

So it was only a matter of time before I created a ratty pulp mass market cover for Howard Carter.  And with some time on my hands and a day to go before I can start officially putting words on the screen, I had to do something right?

Oh, November, why must you wait until Monday to begin?  Why, oh why, oh why?

Library: The Digital Evolution of An Iconic Space

Kinda strange and very cool.  It reminds me strongly of a lot of what goes on in Seattle's 'Experience Music Project'.

Why Bother?

At least two people who've read only the brief description of the novel I'll be writing for National Novel Writing Month have asked me why I'd bother writing about boy geniuses and giant robots.

I find this approach simultaneously amusing and frustrating.  The idea that seems to be operating here is that in order to tell a new story, all of the characters have to be of a variety no one else has ever thought of before.  As if such a thing were even possible.

Entire forests have been expended in pursuit of young wizard's apprentices and orphans, yet that didn't stop JK Rowling.  She knew that even though she was walking in the footsteps of everyone from Charles Dickens to Craig Shaw Gardner, her book would be different because she wrote it.  And thank God she did too -- Harry Potter almost single-handedly reawakened the sleeping giant of midgrade and young adult fiction.

Because she wasn't afraid to take a comfortable idea -- the boy wizard -- and say something new with it.  In many ways, she rewrote David Copperfield for a post-Tolkien world.  She took almost word-for-word the  grafted on a lot of ideas that were floating around at the time and synthesized them into something that felt new even though nothing really new happened in those books.


I don't remember the last time I read anything that was literally unprecedented.  The Odyssey, maybe.  And Joseph Campbell assures us that Homer's epic mostly feels original simply because it's far enough in the dark and hoary past that we just don't know where Homer got his ideas.  While that's no excuse for not attempting do to something new, the best anyone (Homer included) can really hope for is to look at something with fresh eyes.

Which puts me in mind of something I read the other day...

"While the optimist tells you the glass is half-full, the hipster tells you they knew about the glass before you and it's not cool anymore." -Anonymous

The quote was unattributed when it crossed my desk, so I'm not sure who came up with it, but I find it very telling.

Tom Swift was the iconic boy genius.  Over a hundred books have featured the character over the years and almost every writer I admire from Asimov to Douglas Adams have pointed to young Master Swift as an inspiration. Talk about territory that's been thoroughly explored.  But just as Star Wars didn't signal the end of spaceships and laser guns (quite the opposite, actually) Tom Swift didn't bankrupt the storytelling power of the young genius. Walking that same ground has come have Encyclopedia Brown, The Mad Scientist's Club, Artemis Fowl II, Hermione Granger, Veronica Mars and Agatha Heterodyne.  My personal favorites among many, many others.

And while my young genius may be informed by all of those and more, and may have come out of a childhood spent absorbing the adventures of Tom Swift and Encyclopedia Brown, he's not going to be either.  Nor will he be any of the other young geniuses featured in the stories I've absorbed during my stay on this odd little planet.  It goes back to what I've said a thousand times about why ideas can't be copyrighted -- because if you and I set out to write a book from the same idea, the two books would not even remotely resemble one another.

Don't get me wrong, there are many stories that have been told a thousand times and characters that need a rest. Our culture likes to dry up a well before we move on to drilling the next one.  I'm personally rather sick of stories about vampires, werewolves and zombies, but that doesn't mean there's nothing new to say with those characters.


It may or may not be true that there's nothing new under the sun.  The greatest stories ever told all came from somewhere, but that didn't keep those writing them from licking the tip of their pen and getting to work writing them.

Howard Carter is a deliberate homage to the science fiction of the past and the unrealized promises concocted to brighten up The World of Tomorrow.  Promises written so deeply into our culture that everyone periodically gazes skyward and dreams wistfully of a jet pack or flying car.  (A phenomenon that is directly proportional to the amount of ground traffic around you.)  Even his name was inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's iconic character John Carter.  But this isn't an Edgar Rice Burroughs story, it's a Scott Perkins story.  And in some ways, it's going to be a story that looks at the 21st century we have and contrasts it with the 21st century we were promised.  (Yes, that's been done before too and I still don't care.)

There is a fine line between creating a pastiche and paying homage.  And don't think I'm not looking down at the wreckage of those who slipped and fell before me. The danger is half the fun.
- Scott

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Howard Carter Saves the Earth is my next novel, to be written in public by posting chapters as they are finished.  Subscribe to my Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter to receive updates, links and free short stories.  You can also read "Tractors Aren't Supposed to Do That", a prologue posted here last Tuesday.

SideNote: I was delighted to discover recently that the earliest adventures of TOM SWIFT are out of copyright and available as free downloads via Project Gutenberg.  Just enter "Tom Swift" into the title search. Of course, all of these books predate modern sensibilities, so the usual caveats apply.

Kitchen Geekery 101

What I'm reading and what I'm listening to...

Block Party II

If life gives you writer's blocks...

Block Party :: Dealing with writer's block (Redux)

Everyone's talking about Writer's Block all of a sudden.  I think it's the looming aspect of NaNoWriMo that brings it out of people, that fear of getting to day fifteen and getting stuck.

I usually don't get writer's block.  Which isn't the same as saying I never get stuck or write myself into a cul de sac.  To my mind, that much-feared malady exists on a far more epic scale than merely running out of words for the day.  That happens all the time.  In my world, writer's block is about running out of words for the month. I had it once - that sick feeling that it was gone and would never come back - and I got over it once I figured out that the secret to finding the next word really was writing the next word.  That's the dumbest-sounding advice anyone can ever give you, but it's also true (and #5 on my infamous list of Writer's Block cures, for those keeping score).

Personally, I think that a big part of writer's block is the fear of it happening much more than the actuality of the thing.  It's the bugbear under the bed, the monster in the anxiety closet of too many writer's offices.  So what do you do to disarm a bogey man?  We mock them, of course.

So, in the interest of a bit of fun and making fun of the bugbears, I've generated a list of some of my favorite and most oddball advice on writer's block...

Send in the monsters:  
"One thing that happens with comedy writers is that they are all really good at coming up with beginnings... really good set ups, but they can't figure out how to pay them off. What my father figured out was, if you can't get out, you just either blow something up, or eat something, or just throw penguins in the air."  - Brian Henson, son of Jim Henson


It's hard for a non-functional scene to continue if a monster runs in and eats everything.  But it's not about Cookie Monster running into the scene and gobbling up everything in sight.  I don't know about you, but there are no monsters at the end of most of my books.  It's about getting out of the scene any way you can once the business is done.  Cut it off and move on and if you have to, you can clean it up in post. 

Remember Chandler's Law.
"When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." - Raymond Chandler

This is the tried & true default position for mystery writers on page and screen and has been since the man said it.  If you're writing a kids book, maybe it's a squirt gun.  If you're writing science fiction, it's a ray gun.  If you're writing a farce, a lit bomb.  And if you're writing a melancholic disquisition of the futility of modern life and there's no room for a man with any kind of gun, make it a banana.  Those things are lethal! 


I know that I restated this as 'Kill someone' on my last list, but you don't have to kill anyone to do this.  The trick isn't always about finding the next word so much as it is about finding a way to move the scene into a new and more urgent place.  Change the game.  It's hard to lose at chess when you're playing Monopoly.

Go to the library.
"I can’t function as a writer unless I’m reading somebody else — somebody better than me — and stripping off parts and reverse-engineering special effects and so on as I go. Maybe I need somebody to compete with, or just somebody to remind me that things that seem impossible are in fact possible (for other people)."  -Lev Grossman, The Thief & The Soloist: A Very Brief Taxonomy of Writers

Like the man said.  Sometimes all it takes is reminding yourself that your task is attainable because that guy did it.  And in all honesty, if you need to do this, why not go the extra mile and read something bad  I mean anything you can find that's distressingly terrible.  You know the book I'm talking about, it's hovering in your mind's eye as you read this and the bile rises in your throat at the thought of cracking that cover.  And as you read it - whatever it is - constantly remind yourself that if that shlock found a publisher and an audience, what are you so worried about?  Now put that crap away and write something good, would you? 

You are human, deal with it.

I can't find the exact quote, but Margaret Atwood once said that if she waited for perfection, she'd never write anything.  Most of every writing books I've read have two parts.  Part One: The author coming to terms with their own fallible humanity.  Part Two: Convincing the reader of theirs.  Let me summarize and save you the read: Because you are human, you're not going to create a perfect story. It's high time you got over it.

Now go away.

"Writing is 10% talent and 90% being able to ignore the internet." -Unknown

Never was so much time wasted by so many while so few knew how to get things done by turning it off.  This blog included, why are you reading this when you could be writing?  Now off with you, you've pages to type.

Teaser Tuesday: Tractors Aren't Supposed to Do That

NaNoWriMo is 13 days away!  And today I'm posting a glimpse of things to come, a prologue I wrote when I first took a pass at this story and probably the only part of the story that I plan to keep.

Without further ado...

HOWARD CARTER SAVES THE EARTH!


PROLOGUE
The Engels Family Farm, Rural Missouri, Early tomorrow morning

Bob Engels had been a farmer his entire life.  He had never known anything except the smell of tractor exhaust and the pleasant sight of acres and acres of the green and growing.

Green and glowing, however, was a bit out of his wheelhouse.

It began as a normal morning of mumbled pleasantries around the breakfast table as he and his family tried to chase away the phantoms of sleep with coffee and flapjacks.

The doorbell rang and they glanced at one another and then over at the front door.  No one who knew them ever came to the front door; friends and family entered and exited through the kitchen as was right and proper.  They lived too far out in the boonies for salesmen or missionaries to bother -- the world left his family to fend for themselves in the venues of vacuum cleaners and eternal salvation.

Then the tractor walked past the kitchen window.

Lumbered, he supposed was a better word for it, sort of a slow, ponderous march across the back garden.   It took Bob a minute or two to get past ‘Oh, that’s odd’ and all the way to ‘Tractors aren’t supposed to do that.’  The family rose as one to watch the big green tractor step almost daintily over the back fence and strike out across the fields in big loping strides.

The doorbell rang again.

“Walter, get the door,” Bob mumbled to his eldest son.  “Mabel, fetch me my shotgun.”

“What good’s a shotgun going to do against…” His wife gestured out the window.  “Against that?”

Bob didn’t know.  He only knew that was what his daddy would do and somehow he felt like it was the right thing to do when your farm equipment was trying to make a break for it.  His hands ached for the smooth surface of the walnut stock.

He heard voices from the hall and turned to find Walter leading another boy into the kitchen.  The kid was Walter’s age, but dressed in a suit and tie that looked like he’d been sleeping in a ditch for a week.

“Who is this?”

“I’m Howard Carter, sir.”  The boy stuck out his hand.  The fingernails were dirty with axle grease and Bob Engels got the feeling he was about to find out why his tractor was running away.  His hands itched for that shotgun.  Or a switch.  Teach the little hooligan a lesson about turning a man’s property into a robot...

The first flying saucer shattered the front window as it roared over the house.  Everyone ducked.  Except Howard Carter.  The strange boy stared up at the shaking ceiling with the look of someone facing an algebra test that they’d stayed up all night studying for: resigned but ready.

“What was…” The second flying saucer drownedt the rest of Bob’s question.  He looked up to find the boy watching him.

“I’m sorry about your tractors -- I’ll try to get them back to you in one piece, I promise.”  The boy led the way out into the garage with the Engels family falling in behind him like soldiers behind a general.
Outside the sky was alight with a sickly green glow and one of the neighbor’s big combine harvesters was tapping its foot, waiting impatiently for the boy as more flying saucers lit the sky overhead.

“When the government gets here, tell them I went on ahead,” Howard Carter shouted over the whine of the spaceships.  Bob Engels nodded dumbly.  What could he say to this odd boy and his robot army?

“What is this?” Walter shouted.  “Why are you here?”

The boy stared at him and then glanced up at the sky.

“I’m here to save the world.”

The harvester bent down and plucked the kid off the driveway and raised him to sit on its mighty green shoulder.  The Engels family waved as the robot and its boy turned and lumbered off across the fields in the direction of the woods.

Bob stood watching for awhile and then turned to his family.  He caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of the battered old farm truck watching him from the shadows of the garage. 

“Well?  What are you waiting for?  You might as well get after him!”

The truck flashed its headlights and sprinted off down the driveway and across the culvert while overhead, the saucers began to circle and land.

---
Read New Chapters as they are written on the NaNoWriMo page of the Pages to Type website and get updates and notices when new chapters are posted by following me on Facebookor Twitter !

Your humble patience pray :: Guidance from Master Shakespeare

All the world's a stage...

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

In the prologue to Henry V is found the advice every writer or actor should hear in their heads as they embark upon any effort to present events larger than their stage or page can hold.  Not familiar with it?  You should be, and not only because it's the beginning of one of the Great Works, but because it holds an enormous amount of advice for writers from one of the greatest (if not the greatest) writer ever to lift a pen.


In these words, Shakespeare admits to and then dispenses with the doubts his audience might hold in their hearts that he can pull off the sprawling battle of Agincourt and unfurl the landmark event of English history in the space and time constraints of the stage.  He admits right away the limitations of the stage and actors to truly capture the events about to unfold without the willing assistance of the audience's imagination.

And as he said in a later play 'Aye, there's the rub'.  Nothing you write is going to work if you forget this simple fact: You are putting images in someone else's head and it's your job to give them enough to suspend their disbelief and let their imaginations do the rest.

But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

A novel is not a stage... or is it?  Certainly, you can populate the vasty fields of your imaginary worlds with  all the armies of man and monsters you care to name... but really, how much can you describe them before the reality breaks down and it becomes a treatise on the arms & equippage of imaginary armies?  Too much is worse than too little.   You can't show it all, some part of the action and world will always fall off the stage.  And take it from a sometimes actor, the lap of the front row is a bad place to end up.

So your problem is somewhat the opposite of Shakespeare's stage, but the solution is the same...

O, pardon! since a crooked figure may 
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder...

I've read many an early draft of fantasy epics and space operas that dwelled so intricately on the arms and equipment of each armsman and space ship (or whatever) that you forget you're reading a novel and begin to wonder whether this is a doctoral dissertation.

Let one or two speak for many.  How do you cram an army onto a stage or page?  The same way Shakespeare did.  The same way, incidentally, as Tolkien did.  And John Toland and Joss Whedon in Firefly for that matter.  By giving us a handful of representative characters who stand in for the millions.  One crooked figure from which your audience is to extrapolate the millions unseen.

I'm about to unleash an army of aliens and giant robots upon the fields of the earth but don't look to me to create them in intimate detail.  Tell us they exist.  Set the scene and pan the camera across the field as the armies of monsters and mechanized monstrosities clash and then shift your focus to the heroes because the next line might be the single-greatest line in any prologue in English history, the prayer every writer utters in the dark watches of the night...

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts

Get your audience rooting for your characters (and you by extension) and they will suspend their disbelief, willingly participate in your ruse.  They will populate an imaginary field with aliens and robots and clothe your naked scaffold.  They will fill in the gaps where you eliminated all those adverbs.  When you get them on your side, you don't need to tell them that your character said something 'tiredly', they'll be so wrapped up in the action that they'll read it tiredly.

Because that's the secret:  The reader wants you to succeed.  They want you to tell them a story and as long as you never betray them, they will follow you through the gates of hell and allow you to take one character and let them stand in for thousands and compress the events of years into a few pages.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts 
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour glass...

Time and character compression are your friends, but only if the audience is.  And it's easier to get them on your side if the stage is not so awash in characters and needless detail that they can't find the story.


At the end of the day, writing is writing, whether it's a play or a sci fi lark about a boy genius who turns farm equipment into robots.  End the end, even Shakespeare knew that no matter what you are trying to say about the human condition, it all boils down you connecting with your listener and getting them on your side long enough to hear you out.

And as I prepare to send my muse into the field on a mission to which she is unaccustomed, that's a great comfort to me.  Bring on the robots! Cue the aliens!

Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Exit, stage left.

Writing in public & other matters...

I know that I've been scarce the past couple of weeks.  In November, you might get a little tired of me, so think fondly of this little respite.

Here's what's happening behind the scenes...

• I've been rolling-out a new computer program and database at the Writing & Tutoring Center where I work managing data.  It's been sapping my energies and making my hands hurt because the software's designers didn't seem to care that someone would eventually have to use this program.  I put in a requisition for an ergonomic mouse.
  
• I'm finally setting up a 'real' website.  (Remember those? They're like blogs, but more static) More details on that soon.  I promise some free content and much coolness as a reward for showing up.
  
• Speaking of websites... I've been setting up a Google space to post chapters of my NaNoWriMo novel as I write it.  Each chapter will be posted as I finish it.  It's a work in progress.
  
• One of the reasons I'm reviving my Midgrade/YA idea for this is to make it as fun to read and write as I can make it with a minimum of research necessary.  One of the mistakes I made last year was focusing on a story that would require significant research, which is never fun if you have to do it on the fly.
  
  Boy genius, mad scientist, aliens and giant robots?  I think I can handle making that up out of whole cloth without needing run to the library too often.
  
• And what's an effort like this without a logo?  I made a quick logo that should look a bit familiar since it's generated using the same set of photos I used for the masthead on this blog.

 

More news later.  Things are still in flux aro7und here.  I appreciate your patience, mind the dust and please accept my apologies in advance if the construction workers whistle at you...

-Scott

Math for Writers & An Announcement

It's hard not to picture it like the beginning of the TV show 'Numbers'. . .

That's what I call compelling math.

There are limited number of words knocking around in the world, but hiding among them are all of the stories you can imagine -- my stories, your stories, the unknown plays of William Shakespeare, the lost works of William Blake, the stories that have been told and the stories that are yet to be told.

Richard Price famously noted how crazy it is that writers spend year after year rearranging twenty-six letters over and over again.  It's crazy, but inspiring too, because all stories are made of the same elements combined in different ways. Letters form words almost on their own, but it's enthusiasm and human will that forces them into one end of the clattering, whirring machines and draws a story out the other end.

Starting November 1st, I'll begin writing a novel. If all goes well, I'll have 50,000 words in the bank and a finished first draft.  Adrenaline sports for literary masochists.



And you can follow along!  Following the example of my friend Maggie, I will be setting up a website, either on WordPress or Google Sites where I'll post chapters as I finish them. For the occasion, I'll be rebooting my abandoned YA science fiction story from scratch, throwing out everything except the characters and starting over completely.

50,000 words in month, written in public.  The literary equivalent of working without a net.  A raw and unedited glimpse inside the strange world that exists inside my head in a story that I first pitched to my wife as 'The Nick Adams stories as if they'd been written by Douglas Adams."

Stay tuned for 'Howard Carter Saves the Earth'.

Quote of the moment...

"You're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing as you're trying to do the thing itself."

-Jim Henson

Intellectual Freedom

There's an unwritten contract between writer and reader. The author is here to challenge you, to hold up a mirror and show you what they see, a new viewpoint different from your own. It is in the nature of any reflection that we will not always see what we expect to see. At its worst it is merely titillating, but at its best this is the beginning of a conversation.

The juxtaposition of different viewpoints, one set beside the next, interlocking reflections of life in our times (or past times in some cases) adds depth and understanding because no single image can be the entire picture. In the words of the oft-censored author Douglas Adams: "The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough..."

Without the conversation, without seeing as much of the picture as is available to you, all the reflections available to you, you cannot hope to have a fully-realized picture of our culture. Pull the mirror off the wall and the reflection will go away but it will not change what it showed. Only by taking all the images available -- even those we disagree with -- and overlaying them can we begin to see the whole interconnected collage of overlapping lives and loves and wonder that surrounds us. The whole of creation laid out before us in the stacks of the world library.

Last year, Judith Krug died, leaving behind a tradition of raising up those voices that others would silence. Ms Krug founded "Banned Books Week" from the aptly-named Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.

Art is supposed to be a challenge to your viewpoint. If all we ever read or hear are those voices which already agree with us, then we are stagnant and the conversation dies. And that... that would be truly tragic.

The Hall of Dangerous Ideas includes the likes ofL Geoffery Chaucer, Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, the Christina Bible, the Quran and the US Constitution. These are the dangers when we allow someone else to decide what we can read.  Some of the greatest minds and influential works ever to pass from pen to page have all been censored, blocked, burned and banned.  And through it all, the real literary heroes have been the librarians who stepped in front of the censors and said "Not on my watch".

UPenn offers the following list of banned literature: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html.

Find out more and get your own free unplugged robot bookmark downloads from The American Library Association (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom.