Meanwhile…

Exercise: Write a story about something horrible. If that’s too vague, you can start with one of these objects: pliers, crust, unsanded lumber, half-moons, bicentennial quarters, candy made of teeth. Anything made of teeth!

This was mostly inspired by some show on the History Channel I watched the other day about the aqueducts of the ancient Roman Empire. I set it in the collaborative fantasy world that a few of us in the writer’s group have put together, though I wouldn’t say this is canon. It was a handy little exercise to characterize certain aspects of the setting. I don’t know that I’ll keep the aqueducts; I’m not sure a people living in a Canada-like country need them, or how feasible they would be.

Elves are interesting and popular fantasy beings, and for some reason I’ve always made my elves to be somewhat villainous. They’re a savage, nomadic people, at odds with the civilizations constantly encroaching on the lands they used to roam so freely. They’re one part Viking and one part American Indian, I suppose. There’s a nobility there, an enviable spirit, but they have a dark streak. I find that generally more interesting than the Tolkien-style beings of pure light and good. Best part of Lord of the Rings? When Galadriel almost takes the Ring. All I’m sayin’. This particular elf is undoubtedly an evil bastard.

Anyway, this is about – yikes, 750 words! Continue reading

Just received word from the lovely folks over at Every Day Fiction that they’ve accepted my flash piece, “Apotheosis Cake.” Exciting! I imagine it’ll show up in October or November.

If you’re going to the Baltimore Comic Con this weekend, look out for the A Thousand Faces booth. Check out Issue 4, where you can see my epic superhero story, “Shades of Red.” I wish I could go, they’ve got some awesome guests scheduled. And how cool would it be to hang out and sign at a con?

Work has been crazy the last couple of weeks with the load and the overtime, so I have gotten virtually nothing done. I’m resolved to get at least one exercise done this week, so I’ll probably get something posted in a couple of days. I haven’t even had a chance to see the new Coen Bros. movie. Miracle at St. Anna comes out this weekend, too.

Tomorrow: Flogging Molly show! Yay! (In Dallas – not so yay, but I can live with it)

9/24 Update: The show was awesome! I moshed! And picked up their latest CD for dirt cheap! A fun time was had by all.

I don’t normally do this sort of thing, but what the heck. I don’t get too personal on here often. You can blame Erin for this.

The Rules

1. Link to the person who tagged you
2. Post the rules on your blog
3. Write 6 random things/unspectacular quirks about yourself
4. Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them
5. Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is posted.

Random Facts about Alex

1. If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably gathered by now that I am extremely geeky. From my unhealthy obsession with all things Joss Whedon to my constant mentioning of comic books. This is all topped, however, by my sad, sad addiction to HeroClix. I was raised a gamer, so when a collectible miniatures game based on the comic books I love so much came out, I was an easy target. It’s sort of like chess, but with math and a few thousand pieces to chose from, each of which has a different way of moving and attacking. On Sundays I go play at a local comic shop. Please don’t shun me!
2. I’m on a quest to get autographs and pics with every member of the cast of Firefly. So far I’ve gotten Summer, Alan, Ron, and Morena, plus Christina Hendricks. Jewel is next month!
3. You may or may not know that I work in publishing, as a copyeditor/typesetter. How did I get into publishing in the first place? I lied, of course! Sick of crappy retail jobs, I was scouring the newspaper for a new job and spotted an ad for the local newspaper, which was in need of a typesetter. I downloaded a demo of Quark and taught myself how to use it in a day, then went in and faked my way through the interview. The rest is history. By the time I got to my current job, I was an old pro. I actually really loved working at a newspaper, but the pay just wasn’t enough.
4. Though I never watched an episode, I saw enough of the “Previously on…” recaps that I could probably wax intellectual on Dawson’s Creek. It’s not my fault! It came on right after Buffy!
5. I own a copy of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. It gets worse: whenever they mentioned a rule on Deep Space Nine that wasn’t in the book, I would write it in. I take back my earlier statement; this is by far more geeky than HeroClix. My only defense is that it was a long time ago and this book hasn’t seen the light of day in years. My enthusiasm for Trek has dwindled since the ending of DS9, but it’s a universe I enjoy and hope to see more of. The execution really needs to start matching the idea, though.
6. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a pilot. I loved everything about airplanes. For years every research report at school was about some aspect of flying, usually centered on the two world wars. I read Chuck Yeager’s autobiography. I was fully Microsoft Flight Simulator qualified. My eyesight is crap, but that didn’t seem to bother me. This lasted up through high school; when I started looking at college, I included a couple of flight schools in my search. I’m not sure why I didn’t go through with it. Probably the hard sting of reality.

Tags

It’s kind of silly, because I don’t really know any bloggers that Erin doesn’t. Let’s see…

1. Michael Sherlock – a young writer who’s just has his debut over at Every Day Fiction.
2. Cortney – my cousin, who I believe is an aspiring writer as well. She hasn’t updated in forever, so we’ll see if she pops her head up.

I think I may have to leave it at that. Everyone else I know has already been tagged.

Well, we’re nearing that time of year again. This morning I received an email from the NaNo people warning that they’re about to prep the site for this year’s contest.

It’s still over a month away of course, but I think the biggest thing that kills NaNo attempts (or at least mine) is lack of preparation. If you’re writing a fantasy/science fiction story, you’d better have your world pretty well built by the time you sit down to even outline, I think. That can take a lot of time. I tried to do all that on short notice two years ago and it didn’t work out so well.

I’m determined to get a lot of material written for Kelly Sienna, The Scarlet Ranger. I’ve already got one published short story about her, plus several short exercises (mostly posted here somewhere, if you look around). A lot of her life story is written out in my head, so I think I can put together a pretty decent outline. It might be roughly broken down into something like this:

Part 1 – The Early Early Years, about Kelly as a young girl, when she first receives her powers and massive events that will shape the rest of her life happen.

Part 2 – The Teen Years, when she discovers just how different her powers make her, and must decide what to do with them.

Part 3 – Early Hero Years, involvement with the second generation Liberty Gang

Part 4 – The Experienced Years, as she comes into her own as a hero and her rocky romance with The Chicago Defender.

Something like that, anyway. That would be 12,500 words per section. 

 So now I’ve got to decide on a couple of things. Do I want to write it as several novellas? Should I avoid the decades-spanning story and focus on just one of those periods? If I decide to write a later period, will I regret limiting what I can do with the earlier times?

I’m leaning toward a novella of each time period. This way I may be able to avoid Star Wars-style continuity issues, and if I feel like there’s enough story in one, it can always be expanded. I may add another Part, which would give me five 10,000-word stories. If some fall short I can always fill in with much shorter one-off adventures. I don’t have a solid villain for her yet, so I could maybe do little flash pieces about whoever that turns out to be to fill in the gaps.

Anyone else out there doing NaNo? It’s daunting, but as I understand it, it becomes easier once you get it done once. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.

I absolutely love writing action scenes. I feel like I’ve always been pretty good at it, and that probably stems from growing up reading a lot of books with great action scenes. (Michael Stackpole, I would have to say, is a huge inspiration for this; his action scenes are always stellar.) I’ve been complimented on my clear, fun, descriptive action scenes. It’s one of the few times that my tendency to over-visualize is an asset, I think. I don’t know if I’m any good at writing the stuff in between the action, but I’ve got that, at least.

So when Jens sent out this prompt this month, it got me a little excited (and I didn’t have to grab a dictionary to understand it ):

Prompt: Write a story with the best dang fight scene ever. But it also has to mean something. Within the context of the story. A spectacular, mind-shattering fight scene, but with emotional heft and moral repercussions, in under a thousand words. Yeah!

So I took the opportunity to fledge out a little more the Scarlet Ranger’s history. With some expansion, I think this might might a pretty good stand-alone short story, so I’ll just post a brief bit of it here. This is set in the early days of her career, before Kelly even took the mantle of the Scarlet Ranger. A member of the Liberty Gang, Lieutenant Governor (formerly sidekick to the Governor, of course) is featured as well.

The more I think about it and the more I write about her, the more I want to NaNo Kelly’s story. I enjoy writing her enough that I think I could keep it up for a month, and portions of the story are already rolling around in my head.

Anyway, on to a dark, dingy Chicago alley, mid 1980s… Continue reading

So HBO’s new vampire series, True Blood, premiered last night. You can read friend Erin’s reaction here.

It’s funny, I had the exact opposite reaction to it than she did.

I couldn’t connect or care about any of the characters and the setting did nothing for me. I found the feisty friend to be over the top, and the general scum-baggery nature of almost every single person in the show was a turn off. The script was meh.

The premise of the show is that vampires have been “outed” to the general public. Everyone knows about them. A synthetic blood has been created that is supposed to make them palatable (ahem) to normal human society. Presumably, with this “True Blood” drink, vampires can live among us without the need to consume their still-living neighbors. Even the characters in the show express some doubt at that idea.

To me, the problem with this is that vampires are still monsters. They are unequivocally evil. So the parallel to whatever civil rights movement you might want to allude to kind of falls apart. Furthermore, vampires are seen as desirable and cool.

I watched one of those “behind the scenes” specials just before the show and I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “metaphor” spoken so many times in 20 minutes. I found this irritating primarily because it’s so obvious; of course monsters are metaphors. They always have been. Whether it’s a giant killer robot, zombies, werewolves, irradiated ants, or alien invaders, they all represent some facet of the human condition. It’s what you do with the metaphor that counts. Vampires are a bit unique in that they are remarkably versatile; immortality, death, hunger, all sorts of potential uses for them. For True Blood, they kept pounding in the idea that vampirism is a metphor for sex.

That’s fine (though I’d say Buffy, which was completely left out of the special’s account of the history of modern vampire myth, already did it years ago, and I’m sure they weren’t the first). The opening hook features a guy getting a handjob in the car when he excitedly notices a passing store sells True Blood. Later we’re introduced to a couple of vampire fetishists and a brutal tape of a vamp having sex. There was no subtlety to it whatsoever.

So given the celebrity status of vampires in the show, am I to conclude that serial rapists and murderers are desirable and cool? I guess there is some potential satire and social commentary there, but that’s been done before, too, and it wasn’t all that interesting then, either.

I wasn’t really seeing any layers beyond those two surface-level items, which is another mark against it.

But, like I said, Erin, who is way more into vampires than I am and probably better versed in the modern vamp mythology, liked it quite a bit. I also only watched half the episode, so feel free to take my opinion with a grain of salt. But based on what I saw, it’s not a fictional universe in which I’m interested.

Just submitted a couple of stories to two different markets. They’re fun little stories, I think. I expect to bring news of their rejection soon enough.

Just picked up Acacia: The War with the Mein, by David Anthony Durham, from the library. I own and quite enjoy his historical fiction novel, Pride of Carthage, about Hannibal’s invasion of Rome. I’ve barely started it, but I’ll let you know what I think.

If I’m about to write some fantasy stories, I find it helps to read other stories of the same genre. Some people like to avoid reading their contemporaries, for fear of copying something I guess, but really it’s a mistake to not stay current with the genre or medium in which you’re attempting to write. You need to make sure you’re not doing something that’s been done a million times and become cliche, make sure your voice is offering something interesting to the pile, and so forth. If anything, the other writers should offer something that inspire you, or even present something you discover doesn’t work.

So don’t avoid reading because you think you’re going to be influenced. You should be reading and hope you are influenced.