Meanwhile…

If you’ve read this blog long, or know me personally, you’ll know I read comics. I’ve read them for most of my life, and it’s probably my favorite storytelling medium. If I could draw I’d totally make my own. Alternatively, if you are an artist and want to draw for me, let me know.

I’ve toyed with the idea of posting reviews of the week’s comics, but since I switched to ordering mine a month at a time, I don’t get them every week like I used to. This is a bit awkward, as I often have to duck spoilers all month, and can’t really participate in current discussions until weeks after the books have come out. Annoying, but comics are getting too expensive for me to buy them at full retail anymore. Looks like Marvel may be making the jump to 4 bucks an issue soon, for example.

Anyway, I frequently get asked which books I read on a regular basis. This list changes periodically, as I lose interest in some characters, or creative teams (that’s the writer and artists, for the uninitiated) switch out. There are whole lines of books I’ve picked up or dropped, and there are certain characters who I’ll probably never drop, regardless of quality or creators. It’s probably incredibly hard to understand unless you’re a comics reader.

I should note that this isn’t everything I read. There are some excellent series that I pick up in trade rather than issues, such as Walking Dead, Powers, and Ex Machina. I’m working on picking up all the Y The Last Man trades, though that series is done. It tends to be more mainstream books that I read in singles. Then I can stock up on the indy books in hardcover to make my bookshelf look smart.

There are also the odd mini-series that I read. I’m checking out Brubaker’s Incognito, and I buy anything that says Astro City on it (though those are rare nowadays, and it’s been a while since any new Astro City material). I’ve been keeping up with the big DC event, Final Crisis (though I haven’t gotten the last two issues yet, should be coming in today!).

I should also note that there is plenty of great stuff I don’t read, and a lot of it’s probably better than what I do. I’m not made of money, you know!

So, here are the ongoing books I pick up every month, at the moment at least (I’ll put in a jump in case you really don’t care and just want to skip it ): Continue reading

Not much to report at the moment. I’m mostly just trying to get through this last week of work before I’m out on vacation. I should start pumping out some more work next week. In a bored moment yesterday I wrote up this fun little scene. I think I’ll end up using it as part of the larger story about these two characters, both of whom you may recognize if you’ve been reading this blog for very long. Just a couple of hundred words.

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Last night I was playing around with a little flash piece about a super-speedster. I’m not sure it’s working out, and I think maybe the point of view is the problem. I think this might be too introspective and too slow for a character defined by speed. It feels like it should have more energy. I started off like this because I imagine the world must seem like a very slow, still place to someone who exists between the seconds. Anyway, here’s a section of it. I may actually finish it like this, then as an experiment write it in the third person, just to see the difference. I also have a tendency, in first person, to stray into present tense, which is just irritating.

I’m not so sure about his name, either, but that’s another matter. Less than 500 words. Continue reading

Well, my NaNoWriMo word count stands a little north of 10,000 words. While that’s bad for NaNo, it’s actually pretty good for me, for a month. I feel like it’s a solid start to the book I want to write. I’m starting to doubt, however, that what I’ve written will stand well by itself, so I probably haven’t ended up with a sellable short story (er, novella).

I doubt I’ll get much else written in the next few days. There’s the mess of Thanksgiving, of course, and I’ve taken on a freelance copyediting project that’s going to eat up some time as well. It’s a fun project, the contents of which I will only hint at!

However…I think I have made an unexpected and delightful breakthrough as concerning the Asta the Android story I was trying to write previously and got distracted from. The villain featured in this section of the NaNo piece is heavily tied to Asta. It’s simply later in his career than the point at which our android detective met (and subsequently incarcerated) him. Now that I’ve firmly cemented this guy in my mind (well, mostly – I still need a good name for him), I think writing the Asta story should go easier.

So I’m going to set myself a goal for December – write the origin story for Asta the Android. The tagline: Murder! Robots! Mad Scientists! Lesbians?

Great. Now I’ve set myself up for all the “robot lesbian” Google searches. My apologies if that’s what brought you here. Your unnatural but intriguing desires can only go unfulfilled.

I would really like to go all superhero in December. Look out for some superhero flash as well. I’ve been neglecting that urge for too long.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Just so I don’t feel like I’m neglecting this place, a brief excerpt from some writing I did yesterday. The villains of my piece are starting to shape up a bit. Continue reading

There is a ton of information of the Chicago of the 1930s. Sadly, this is forty years before our stalwart hero is alive. There doesn’t seem to be all that much info about ’70s Chicago. I guess I could just take the ’60s, subtract some repression and add some polyester and I would more or less have it.

I’ve obtained so far, a few books for NaNo:

Chicago:  A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods, produced by the Chicago Historical Society in 1979. This was written right around when a lot of the novel is taking place, so that should be very helpful. I know absolutely nothing about how Chicago is laid out or where people live or anything. It seems like a lot of films, for example, of Chicago focus a lot of the architecture and what not, but don’t really talk about the geography or neighborhoods. It’s very different from stories set in New York, where the burroughs are very well known.

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities, by Janet Abu-Lughod. This is kind of a sociologist’s view of these big cities. It’s looking at the big picture and large events. Looks like it’s a good mix of history, politics, and cultural demographic information.

I have a third book about Chicago that’s a history book (don’t have it handy at the moment).

Startlingly handy little tidbit I discovered: Chicago’s first and only female mayor was elected during this era. That dovetails very nicely with some of my themes. I’ll need to look up some more stuff on this lady.

Needed still: Greek gods, women in police history, Chicago public school system

The more I’m looking at all this, the longer I think I’m going to spend on Kelly’s childhood.

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 a couple of weeks ago we were critting one of friend Stephanie’s latest stories, an excellent work about a pair of demon-powered superheroes. The story is a blast and will make a fine addition to whatever market *cough*A Thousand Faces*cough* accepts it.

One of my comments on the story was this: she used the term superhero (and supervillain) a couple of times in the story. I suggested she find better words, but I don’t think I really explained myself very well. Over the past couple of days I was checking out both Mercedes Lackey’s The Secret World Chronicle and Mur Lafferty’s Playing for Keeps, and the terms popped up in both of those otherwise perfectly entertaining stories as well. I have a number of reasons why I don’t like seeing it in fiction, so I thought I’d lay them out.

1. Superhero is a literary term, in the same way, say, protagonist, epilogue, or deus ex machina are literary terms. We use these words to describe fiction, or scenes, or archetypes of people. But you don’t usually use them within the story, unless you’re doing it in some sort of winking, breaking-the-fourth-wall sort of way. Or you’re Deadpool.

2. Superhero has baggage. Like any broad character archetype, the word superhero brings to mind certain images and conventions that you don’t necessarily want. For most people, saying superhero will bring to mind a big guy in tights and a cape, who flies around saving people from burning buildings. But if your character isn’t anything like that, it may hinder your attempts to make them unique and interesting.

3. Superhero is generic and unhelpful. As much as the term may conjure up stereotypes you don’t want, it’s also a pretty broad category that doesn’t really tell the reader much about this particular person. It tells me they have powers, and that they are supposedly heroic (or villainous). That’s not even necessarily accurate; Batman is certainly a superhero, but has no supernatural abilities. What I’d rather see is a description of the powers or whatever is remarkable about their skills, and a reason why they’re considered a hero or villain. Better yet, show me. You can usually kill two birds with this one scene by showing them using their powers for good or ill.

It’s not that the word doesn’t have its uses. It certainly does. As with everything, context is important. But as a shorthand description as I often see it used, it’s pretty weak. There will always be a better word to use as a descriptive. This is English; we probably have fifty words for “good guy” and “bad guy” that will better apply to any particular character.

At least, that’s my opinion. Agree or disagree? Chime in!

It’s interesting how versatile the Western genre and the Western Hero archetype can be. You can put them in space, of course, and that’s been done very well on numerous occasions, from Outland to Cowboy Bebop and Firefly. I still have a bit of an itch to write one of those. But you can also do a lot of fun stuff with westerns right here on Earth. Western comics were big back in the ’50s, when nobody was really making superhero books, and of course that was their heyday on the big and small screens.

I wonder, has anyone done a western underwater?

Westerns have kind of made a comeback recently, with some fantastic movies and a few comics. I’m loving the new Lone Ranger comic, and I hear Zorro is quite good as well (both from Dynamite). There’s the fun Daisy Cutter series from Viper, one of which I picked up at a Free Comic Book Day a year or two ago. DC has Jonah Hex, supposedly one of their best titles at the moment. Marvel has a history of old western comics, like the Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, and Kid-Colt (sensing a theme here?), that they don’t really use anymore. It’s good stuff.

So here’s mine, the Dallas Damsel. No doubt her adventures will include aliens and steam-driven robots and mad scientists. Making her a red head kind of feels cliche, or at least wrong. I may change that. I dunno.

This was my first writing prompt of the month, and as I was chugging through it I realized I was revisiting my time traveling supervillain. I wrote a couple of little exercises about him a while back, then totally forgot about his existence. I changed his name (though I’m sure I’m not the first to use “Epoch” for a time-hopping bad guy), but otherwise he’s very similar, even hanging out with the same incompetent henchman. I realized when I reached the end that I should have written it from an entirely different point of view, which would have allowed for a really great ending and actually explained why Epoch was there to kill her to begin with. Oh well.

Prompt: Create a story using

• one of these settings: Luau, western bar, funeral, big city, construction site

• One of these people: comic book villain, DJ, poet, damsel in distress, business tycoon

• And one of these things/objects: nail polish, magic door knob, cancer, samurai sword, banana

(I played it a little loose with the requirements. About 600 words.)

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