My rock ‘n roll story IN SPAAAAACE! story is up over at Every Day Fiction. Check it out. Let me know what you think.
And now I’m off to work for another 11-hour day. Guh.
Update – I immensely enjoy that Jim Hartley left a curmudgeonly “get off my lawn, damn kids!”-style comment. It fits the story perfectly.
I have a ba-billion (which, I believe, is slightly more than a gajillion) things to do, so I’ll make this fast!
Stephanie has a new story up over at Every Day Fiction. It is fun!
My new story, “With the Band,” will be up Friday!
After a minor rewrite, “With the Band” has been accepted by Every Day Fiction! It’s a fun story, I think. There is a band, and someone is with it. More info on publication date when I know it!
In the meantime, enjoy as I brutally devour Stephanie.
I received word over the weekend that “Apotheosis Cake” was chosen for the Every Day Fiction Best of 2009″ Anthology!
Erin is featured as well, with a staggering four stories. I think that might be it for the Writer’s Inkers this time around – we had a fairly light presense on EDF this year compared to last year.
EDIT: Oop, apparently Jens and Stephanie are in as well! Yay! Perhaps we can do that book signing we tried to put together last year?
The full list hasn’t been posted yet, but I expect a lot of familiar names to be featured. It really is a great anthology. If you missed last year’s you can still find it at Amazon or order it directly from the good folks at EDF.
I’m seriously considering making the trip up north this time to make the launch party. I think it would be a blast. I’ll just have to see if I can put the money together for the trip. I’ve never been to the barren tundras of Canada before, though. Do they have cars up there? Should I bring my own food? Or perhaps a weapon with which to hunt for game (and if so, will the natives be frightened of gunpowder)? Someone let me know.
You may or may not be familiar with Castle, ABC’s latest procedural cop show. Castle stars Nathan Fillion as Richard Castle, a rock star mystery writer who has been (via some rather stretchy but unimportant plot points) allowed to hang out with unfeasibly sexy Detective Kate Beckett, played by Stana Katic. Together, they solve crimes and pretend like they totally wouldn’t tap that, given sufficient opportunity. It’s a surprisingly fun show, despite the ridiculous premise and sometimes uninspired mysteries. What really carries the show is Fillion. The guy has a natural charm that really shines through the character. He’s a delight to watch, regardless of what he’s doing. He’s awesome in everything I’ve seen him in, from his brief appearance in Saving Private Ryan (a part I remembered well even before I realized who’d played the role) to Firefly and Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog. He exhudes charisma. If he’s in something, odds are I’ll watch it.
In the episode coming up this Monday, Castle will be dressing as Captain Reynolds for Halloween, and namedrops Buffy. Clearly, these people know what they’re doing.
The previews I’ve seen for the new V with Morena Baccarin give me a similar nerd boner.
Or as my wife would say, a regular boner.
What this all makes me think of is how important loyalty is for writers. Not just loyalty to us as writers, but loyalty to our characters. How many terrible James Bond movies have we suffered through, just waiting for the one where someone will come along and get it right? How did the last Indiana Jones movie make so much money despite it being one of the worst movies released last year? Star Wars books sell like crazy because people love the universe so much even if the writing’s not great.
How many crappy issues of X-Men did I buy before I finally gave up on that whole franchise? The internet is full of comic book fanboys complaining about this or that plot in their favorite series, but they are still buying the books. I’m sure this is confusing to publishers, who probably get tons of hate mail but watch their sales numbers go up anyway.
The lesson to learn is that character and reader loyalty frequently trumps quality. It’s a pretty compelling arguement not to skimp on character development when you’re creating those heroes you may want to re-use in the future.
Just be careful, because even the most die-hard fans have breaking points.
[This is where I was about to also upload a picture of Jar Jar Binks, but I couldn't stand to have both him and Morena on the same page at once. You will have to use your imagination!]
My day job has gone into crazy overtime busy season, so I’m getting pretty much nothing done (other than my twitter stories, of course). I am, however, finding time to read and what not. A little, anyway.
Reading
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young. This is 
the recent comic book adaptation of the classic Baum book, and it is absolutely gorgeous. I’ve never read the originals, but I understand this is pretty faithful to the novels. It’s a lot of fun, and I recommend nabbing the hardcover so you have a version to read to your kids. Work is already under way on Marvelous Land of Oz, the next book in the series.
Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. I mentioned some time back that I read Iron Council, which is actually the third book in the series that begins with Perdido Street Station. As much as I loved Iron Council, I think this may have been a tiny bit better. So good. I can’t recommend Mieville’s books enough. If you enjoy fantasy or steampunk, you will certainly enjoy these books.
I just started in on the behemoth Illuminatus! Trilogy, by the Roberts Shea and Anton Wilson. At the rate I read, I will report back sometime in 2013.
Watching
I finished up the last season of Veronica Mars this past weekend, sort of on accident. I didn’t realize I’d reached the end until popping the last disc to discover it contained only speacial features. There are only twenty episodes in the third season, so I must surmise the network didn’t let them finish properly. Two episodes would have easily been enough to let them wrap up a few hanging plot threads. While it’s a shame it ended on such a whimper, I enjoyed the show immensely. The first season is easily one of the best seasons of television ever made, and the second is nearly as strong. The last season was decent, certainly better than most of what gets put on the air. Any fan of mystery and noir will find a lot to like.
Paris, Texas, which is quite good. Moving character drama with powerful performances all around, and some great visuals. At first when I saw the bleak, desert landscape, I immediately thought, “Paris is in northeast Texas, and this is clearly west Texas!” But the film didn’t fall into that usual Hollywood fumble. You can kind of tell that the script wasn’t actually finished when they started filming, but the way the main character develops smooths out the rougher edges of the story and the viewer can fill in the gaps pretty easily. The asshole in me wonders why you would ever turn a camera on anyone other than Nastassja Kinski.
I’ve always wanted to watch director Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire as well, so maybe that’ll go on the queue sometime soon.
From Hell. I probably should have seen this years ago, being both a comic book geek and Alan Moore fan. I’d never really heard much good about it, though, so it just kind of slipped my mind. I’ve also never read the book, so I have no attachment to the source material. It was better than I expected, even if it didn’t blow me away. It looked great, and the story is a fun and interesting alternate history murder mystery procedural conspiracy tale. It fell short in the actually making me scared or suspenseful department, though, which is unfortunate.
That’s about it for now. Anyone reading or watching anything interesting?
Wait, wait, hold up. A month ago I write a silly little exercise about an invasion of the moon, and now NASA is launching all-out assaults on that supposedly peaceful satellite?
Coincidence?
Or conspiracy?
So it seems that NaNo is right around the corner. Hurm. I was going to pretty much pass on NaNo this year, as I never seem to really get much out of it. It’s fun, but at the end of the month I end up with nothing that’s actually useful. I’m starting to think the whole exercise is maybe not the great idea that everyone thinks it is. I think for some people it encourages a kind of “wait until November and do it then” mentality that is counterproductive. Either way, by the end of the month you’re likely so sick of whatever it is you just pounded out that you don’t ever want to look at it again.
However, I think I may take advantage of the extra write-ins and the spirit of productivity that NaNo creates to work on expanding my Chuck Chaykin story into a novel. It’s already over 8,000 words, which is a little long to sell to a short story market anyway, and could easily be expanded. It’s the kind of story in which a publisher like Baen or Tor might be interested.
The trick will be weaving the two characters together. Chaykin is a rough and bitter mercenary, albeit one who is a bit of a softy deep down. His sidekick, Val, is a teenage orphan girl raised in a prep school for psychics. They have certain shared experiences that bring them together, and I know there’s a fun chemistry between the two, but their stories before they meet are so vastly different that it may be difficult to easily switch between the two plots. Or should I skip her story and not introduce her until they meet? I don’t want to shortchange her, but I’m afraid it would seem like two completely different books crammed together.
I’ll have to do a little world (or universe, rather) building. I have a general idea of how the setting works, but I haven’t worked out specifics.
More importantly, I’ll need to design the ship. In any setting where the heroes spend their time mostly aboard some sort of vessel instead of a particular city or planet, the ship becomes not just the setting but a character unto herself. I’ll need to work out how big Chaykin’s ship is, how many rooms, how it’s laid out, etc. The ship isn’t really featured much in the short story, so I didn’t have to worry about it before. Heck, I had a hard time even coming up with a name.
At any rate, you get the idea. I’ll probably spend the next few weeks working on these issues and if I can come up with a decent working outline I may go for it. I don’t know if I’ll go for the insane NaNo pace, but with a little energon and a lot of luck I’ll get a significant amount of work done.
Received two rejections over the past couple of days – one from Austin indie mag Space Squid, and the other my expected Writer’s of the Future rejection. It’s all good. The Space Squid story has already been redirected, with a few tweaks, to Every Day Fiction, along with a requested rewrite of my rock and roll IN SPACE! story. I am feeling productive!
It helps that I had to stay home from work today. We’ve got some home repairs going on.
My WoTF story I will take another look at and likely send spinning in the direction of Space Westerns.com. It seems right up their alley, being a space western and all. Or maybe I should expand it into a novel? Hmm.
Oh, if you are in the Austin, TX area in the next few months, I recommend stopping by the Harry Ransom Center on UT’s campus to check out the Edgar Allan Poe exhibit. It’s quite spiffy. They’ve also got a great exhibit dedicated to the International Year of Astronomy and one of the Gutenberg Bibles.
Just don’t go on a game day. That whole area becomes a mess, and you’ll see more burnt orange shirts than any human being should ever have to suffer.
I have a new flash piece up over at Big Pulp. It’s fun! Check it out here!
In case you are interested, there really was a train called the Ak-Sar-Ben Zephyr, it was the overnight return trip from Nebraska to Chicago. They just reversed Nebraska. I suppose they should have also reversed Zephyr, just for consistency, but wants to try and explain how to pronounce Ryhpez? This, of course, was all back in the first half of the 20th century, when trains still had personality.
At any rate, let me know what you think! These are characters I wouldn’t mind returning to. I love the scientist-adventurer archetype.
