Next is Cory Doctrow’s Little Brother. All the cool kids seem to know who he is, so I thought I’d check it out.

(I also note that Master and Commander has been on the nightstand since June. I check in on it occasionally to make sure nothing happened while I was away.)

I have a couple of articles I’m intending to write for the Flash Fiction Chronicles, one about superheroes, and another about small apocalypses. Stay tuned!

First up was Four Eyes, by Joe Kelly and Max Fiumara. I’ve liked Joe Kelly’s stuff since the late ’90s, when he wrote a criminally overlooked run of Daredevil. More recently I’ve been reading his creator-owned stuff. (I can’t recall if I talked about I Kill Giants here, but if I didn’t you should check that out if you get a chance; it’s fantastic and touching piece of magical realism.)

Four Eyes is about a young man named Enrico, who lives in a 1930s New York where dragons are real and forced to fight in brutal, illegal dog-fight style matches while gamblers bet on them in a desperate attempt to alleviate their Depression woes.

If you need more than that I’m not sure why you’re even here. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and hope to see more. There’s a lot of potential in the setting, and the art is excellent. At the moment I think this is all there is, with the future of the series uncertain. But it works pretty well on its own, so if we never get any more I won’t feel like I’ve been left with a cliffhanger.

Next was Sweet Tooth, by Jeff Lemire. A post-apocalypse setting in which a plague has wiped out much of humanity, the story follows Gus, who is among a new breed of human-animal hybrids who are immune to the plague but hunted by surviving humans. This first volume hints at a lot more going on in the world than simple survival. Isolated for years from the harsh, shattered world, Gus is a voice of hope and innocence in a dark fairy tale.

Sweet Tooth is coming out regularly, so I’m looking forward to the next trade.

The past five years I’ve had a day job at Thomson Reuters. Typesetting (which is essentially using the copy –> paste function all day) and copyediting boring accounting guidebooks. It was easy, it paid enough to get by (sort of), and I made a lot of great friends, including the members of Writer’s Ink, without whom my writing would be, well, nonexistent as opposed to mediocre. One of them occasionally hands me a baby, which can be taken as either a sign of trust or an attempt on my life, I’m not sure which.

It was downtown, which I loved, and this particular wholly owned subsidiary had a lot of little perks like free drinks, flexible scheduling, and monthly parties and what not that made it a genuine pleasure to work there. Thanks to the nature of the work and the laid back atmosphere, I had a lot of opportunity to write, of which I regularly took advantage. I would guess that most of my published stories (and many of the posts here) had their genesis at my little windowed cubicle on the 13th floor of Burnett Plaza. I would sum it up as “comfortable.”

O cruel irony!

Corporations being what they are, a lot of the perks were gradually trimmed. Bonuses were stripped away, reduced from significant quarterly cash dispersal to “hey, take the afternoon off.” Of course, while they are doing this, various higher ups and memos touted the massive amounts of money the company was making and how many new little companies they were gobbling up.

Then the layoffs began. First they stop replenishing natural attrition, then trim the temporary employees (who, by the way, were generally treated like second-class citizens, though I imagine that’s not unique to Thomson), and then they start picking off a few employees here and there.

As this is going on, we kept getting more memos about how successful the company is, and some free swag like Thomson Reuters bags or water bottles or whatever. Big heavy full-color brochures that tell us about how great we are. An executive flew into town for a big pep talk meeting in which he cracks jokes about his hotel, which happens to be the nicest, most expensive hotel in the city. After a professionally produced 20-minute video about how great we are. At this meeting was at least one person who’d just been told this was her last week. This was back in November or December.

Then a few months ago (five, maybe?) the bomb hits: they’re moving some operations to India. It’s all very vague, and there are no hints as to how many will be laid off, or when, or what the ultimate goal is. There would be jobs lost, and we were supposed to be training our Indian replacements despite having fewer resources to even do our regular jobs. There are implications that plans are still being made, etc, etc. This is all bullshit. There were layoffs within a month or so. An executive showed up to (not) answer questions in person, implying that layoffs would be in a couple of months. Two weeks later there were more layoffs.

I should say our particular department was not hit as hard as some of the others. We lost only a few when others were gutted. We hear all this second-hand, of course, because the company is still being absolutely tight-lipped about everything. I also don’t expect there would be more people let go before the end of the year – like any publishing company Thomson has a crush at the end of the year as it pushes out the bulk of its products to make the fourth quarter revenue.

However, pretty much the day of the original announcement, I updated my resume and started sniffing around for a new job. The way the job environment is, I expected there wouldn’t be much available and that it would take me ages to actually get anything. I figured I’d still be looking in January when the company made its money and decided to trash the rest of our department, but at least I’d have a jump on things and be prepared.

Then a few weeks ago I was contacted by a law firm here in Fort Worth and they quickly offered me a position. It lacks some of the perks and benefits, but it pays more and, more importantly, it’s stable. This is a company that’s growing, has local interests, and isn’t subject to the whims of a global conglomerate.

(Well, it sort of is, but that’s another story. There is a photo to illustrate this that I want to take in the new building, but haven’t had a chance. The caption will read, “Monument to Human Folly.”)

At any rate, these aren’t people who are going to shuttle my job off to a country ruined by centuries of Imperialism and call it an “opportunity for a global community.”

So I have taken this new job, and am in the midst of the second week there. It’s less copyediting so much as double-checking lawyers’ work, which I suppose makes me a paralegal now. This is a pretty significant shift for me; I’ve been in the publishing business for a good seven or so years now, and I liked the idea of that. I can’t think of myself as working in publishing anymore, at least not professionally. It’ll take some adjustment. Aside from all the usual hectic stress of adjusting to a new job, it’s one that requires more attention and focus, and thus my contributions here may be limited for a while. I’ll have to adjust my whole schedule and start making more time for writing outside of the office.

I don’t hold anything against the people I worked with at Thomson Reuters, and it was far from an easy decision. I wish them the best of luck. In a way I kind of wish I’d been able to stick around to see the dissolution. I’m sure a non-fiction book about outsourcing, written by someone in the middle of it, training his or her replacements and coping with all the fear and paranoia and despair in the resulting atmosphere, would make for a best-seller.

I am particularly taken with the propaganda posters, which will likely soon take their place on my computer desktop.

I think items 12 and 13 are my favorite.

(From my friend over at Forgotten Bookmarks.)

Watched Inception over the weekend. Amazing!

Also watched the first couple episodes of “Louie.” Greatness. And thus Louis CK gets added to the pile of people to whom my wife compares me (a distinguished list that also includes Ricky Gervais and Larry David). I just have more hair.

I’m like Serpentor, if his DNA had been culled from and hilariously awkward comedians.

Reading-wise, I just finished up Michael Moorcock’s A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy. It was a quick read, and a lot of fun. The stories get increasingly darker as you progress through the three books, which are essentially Moorcock’s deconstruction of Imperialism. I highly recommend them.

I’m chugging through China Miéville’s The Scar now, and it is as usual incredible. I picked up another fantasy book, a new book by a new writer (I think) at the same time, purely on impulse, but didn’t make it far. I will itemize the following rules for prospective fantasy writers:

• I should be able to tell the difference between the name of a person and the name of a city, artifact, or creature.
• There should not be a made-up word in every single paragraph.
• I no longer care about royalty (did I ever, I wonder?) or who/whatever else rules the kingdom.

I finished a story over the weekend, worked at it to get it to an easily sell-able flash length, then realized it is only the end of a story, and probably needs a good thousand words prior to where I start. Such is the life of a fiction writer.

title

The first volley went wide and we let them know, screaming our disdain over the walls and pitching to them the head of the spy we’d captured. They replied with a nanobot assault that ate several hundred of the night watch before the cybermancers shut it down. When I took my post at dawn, the battlements were flecked with blood and circuitry. It would be a long day.

Jovan leaned a few feet to my left, chewing on a breakfast of jerky and scratching absently at the grey stone blocks that protected us from the siege. His spear propped him up, humming with the energies that would cut a swath of death through the enemy ranks if they had the misfortune of reaching the top of the wall.

“Neven died last night,” Jovan told me. I grunted and bit from my own breakfast, a bit of bread stuffed with bacon. “I hear we might get hit with aero today.” He gestured at the clouds.

I shrugged. Aero assault was flak team’s job. Nanobots were cybermancer’s job. Supplies. Morale. Latrines. Gates. All someone else’s job. Just let me know when someone climbed the walls.

I stepped up to the edge of the wall and peered out. Beyond was the vast stretch of mud, dirt, and rubble that had once been the magnificent city of Drago. There, amongst the shattered homes and cracked skyscrapers, their enemy lurked, huddled around thousands of campfires that were little more than wispy columns of smoke in the dead morning air. Massive siege engines sat at the edges of the suburbs, just out of artillery range; the trails from their yards-wide tread tracked across the barren wasteland toward the walls, but always turned away before reaching their target. Wreckage and bodies in varying states of decay littered the no man’s land. I imagined the dirty buzz of aeroship engines echoing among the blasted, windowless canyons of downtown Drago.

#

And in honor of yesterday, happy birthday you poor, deluded, doomed nation.

At any rate, I found this article over at The Comics Detective about one particular trial involving Will Eisner, one of the greats in the biz. The complete transcripts of Eisner’s testimony are available there. I’ve only had a chance to read the first few pages, but it’s fascinating stuff. My favorite line so far comes from the judge (who just seems really impatient and annoyed with the whole lawsuit): “I don’t know that a man in tights can be copyrighted.”

Primarily, this is brought home as we are world-building. We’re coming up with these vibrant, colorful, interesting cities with skylines full of towers, fantasy hydro-electric plants, airships, trains, canals, slums full of kraken-worshiping mutants, etc.

You know, the usual. And there are places in this real world of ours that are just as interesting.

Texas is not one of them. I can’t walk a block without seeing a slab of concrete full of idiotically huge trucks. Beside these parking lots hunkers a string of donut shops, tanning salons, pizza joints, huge pharmacies, and dental offices. Half a mile down the road, you will find the exact same thing, only there donut is spelled doughnut. Across the street from these stand more of these outlets, only half the stores are empty, and further down there is an identical outlet under construction. If you want, you can jump on the highway and drive ten miles (which will take you at least half an hour in traffic) to reach any number of other areas that look exactly the same, or go downtown, which is full of more parking lots. It’s hard to find a coffee shop that’s open past three or four in the afternoon (that isn’t a Starbucks), and local bookstores are nonexistent. Everything is built to last only as long as it needs to until the next corporate entity comes along to knock it over and build something equally unimpressive. An eon from now archaeologists will snicker at the suckers who get stuck digging up ancient America instead of ancient Europe.

Unless you’re a musician, building a community of artists is difficult; I feel extraordinarily lucky to have found the handful of peers that I have. Even with our close-knit group, finding places to gather can sometimes be a chore. Most would rather live somewhere else. This just isn’t a place conducive to creativity.

I shouldn’t pick on Texas, since this is a widespread phenomenon across the US. It’s just easier because I live here, and because just a year ago I was in a city that was awesome in pretty much every way that things suck here.

And don’t get me started on the politics or the “Texas is awesome just because” mentality, which seems to do nothing but leave people contented to live with what is actually a pretty shitty status quo.

I’ve been picking at this post all morning and now forgotten what my original point was. I guess this is all just a side effect of creating a playground for storytelling. There’s always been an escapist element to reading, and perhaps we shouldn’t go comparing fantasy to reality too much.

Post Script: To end on a happier note, I should say that cooperative world building with a like-minded writer, especially one as talented as Jens, is mind-blowingly awesome. The logistics of it are daunting, but when it comes together the process is extremely fun.