Clockwork Storybook

New Stuff Coming

2012-01-31T22:07:00.000-08:00

I'm glad Bill Williams posted his new video series on here. It's great, and not just because he has interviewed me and Chris Roberson. It would be great even if we weren't involved.

This space has been quiet for a while, but that's about to change. Expect some more frequent posting, especially by me, coming off of our 30-day Novel challenge, as me and several other CWSB members attempt to continue our daily writing habit into 2012. The goal is a million words generated in 2012. I personally feel we're going to smash that goal.

That is my goal-smashing mask, right there. You have all been warned.

Meet Chris Roberson

2011-12-30T11:11:00.001-08:00

I sat down and chatted with our very own Chris Roberson about writing novels and comics. Make with the click!

Hi everyone! Yes, we're all still alive...

2011-11-07T02:38:00.000-08:00

Though some of us are in far better shape than others. So, here's a quick plugola for you.

I've moved my venerable commentary column, Finn's Wake, over to a blog. Come visit me there, won't you? It's available at:
http://marktheaginghipster.blogspot.com/

Also: I'm tweeting pretty regularly about funny things I think up, comments on pop culture, and the occasional retweet from one of my brilliant friends. If you follow me, you'll also get updates to the blog and info on any new projects that drop from me, like my upcoming comic book series, SCOUTS! and the 2nd edition of Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. Find me on Twitter at:
@FinnsWake

Now you know everything!

2010-08-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

Hello folks.

Sorry for a long time absence, but I've been busy writing and drawing and internetting.

Part of the work to come out of that effort is my spiffy new author based website---

www.billwilliamsfreelance.com

It seemed like a good place to yammer on about writing and post videos of Chris Walken. And muppets. But not together. That would be odd.

And a refurbished version of the Tokyo Pop short story collection wandered out into the wilds of the Kindle Store this week. It is now titled Tokyo Bound so that it will not be confused with the manga publisher. And it now has 30% fewer typos.

No Words, Just Pictures

2010-06-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

So, I ran out of writing work and have been doing a lot of inking and coloring. I'm in a mad rush getting some things together for the #SDCC show.

This is the cover to a digital issue of the SideChicks webcomic. I inked and colored it in one day last week. Bask in its glory.

'It' Leads to Disaster

2010-05-11T22:33:00.000-07:00

While I'm waiting around for a new comic book project to appear, I'm taking some of Willingham's advice and finishing a novel. I have a few bad writing habits that manifested while writing my first novel that I finished last week. Writing that first mystery was a tough staggering fight and I just made it to the end like a punch drunk boxer looking for that final bell. When I'm working I can get a lot of words down on the page each day, but my bad habits bloom. One of those has to do with the word 'it' which in most cases is a place-holder for a much better term.

So after a few days tending to other projects, I was ready to knock that word out of the manuscript as best I could. I set up a Find/ Replace operation where the computer would find the next instance of the lazy word and I would manually make some sort of change. Then I would move on to the next and so on. Well, I have a trick computer that sometimes throws the cursor around and adds keystrokes. The machine had one of its spells as I was in that find/ replace mode. Then I saved the document. A little poking around in the novel revealed that the computer had replaced the word 'it' with nothing. Thanks to that fluke, 'it' had been removed from the entire document, all seventy thousand words. That disaster tore apart words like wait, white, with, within, security, reality, etc. Those of you who live in Austin may have heard my profanity-charged tirade. Birds scattered. Dogs were silent.

My just-a-quick-polish draft turned into a word-for-word careful examination of the novel. It hurt, but it focused my mind on the manuscript in a unique way. The Milk Run is a better book for it. Still, I hope that never happens again.
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Comic Writing Class

2010-04-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

Recently I was asked to compose a short comic book writing tutorial for a group of writers up in Toronto. I thought I'd share it here with you as well.

Bill’s Letter to you Writers

On Writing Comic Book Scripts

When you’re writing a comic book script you need to be able to do two things simultaneously. On one hand you must write an interesting short play, with (one hopes) compelling dialogue and captions, whose purpose is to tell the spoken part of the story. On the other hand you have to also write a personal letter of instruction to only one person: the artist who will illustrate the comic book, using the information in your letter to him to tell the visual part of the story.

It’s simple: all you have to do is perfect the art of being the ultimate high-functioning schizophrenic. Like Jekyll and Hyde, to do comics well, you need to be two completely different types of writers sharing one body. Unlike Jekyll and Hyde though, you need to be able to switch back and forth at will, to do two completely different types of writing.

One writer has to be the artist, the wordsmith, the poet. His work will be read directly by the readers. The other writer isn’t interested in poetry, or a deft turn of phrase, or in making sure a given character is speaking in his own distinct voice. His prose needs to be dry and undecorated. This second writer is a technical writer whose job is to instruct a customer in how to program a DVD player, or assemble a piece of furniture, or disassemble an engine. Clarity and simplicity are his only concerns. “Can the customer understand what I’m asking him to do?” is the only question guiding him. In this case his customer is the artist who’ll draw the story.

Here’s the technical writer at work in a sample bit of script taken from an actual issue of Fables. All it consists of is what the artist has to draw on each page:

Page One (five panels)

Panel One

We open this issue with an establishing shot panel of the Farm, including the “village” area, town square, main set of buildings. The early morning sun is coming up over the horizon.

Panel Two

Same scene, but now we move down into the main square. Beauty and Beast are walking arm in arm across the square, towards the steps to the main house. They are dressed formally, in dark funeral clothes. They look pretty sad, but a quiet “they’ve already done their crying” sadness.

Panel Three

Same scene, but closer now on Beauty and Beast. She looks up at him, still sad, but not crushingly so.

Panel Four

Same scene, but now they are both caught in a flash of light coming in from the side (from off panel). The light is intense enough to bathe them both in brilliant light.

Panel Five

This isn’t really a panel. It’s the space you need to leave at the bottom of the page for this issue’s titles and credits.

Pages Two and Three (one panel)

Panel One

This is a double-page spread. Suddenly now, as Beauty and Beast look on from the far left hand side of the two pages, the town square area fills up with people and animal Fables. They have all just arrived via teleportation from Fly’s new kingdom of Haven. Flycatcher is in the exact center of the arriving mob of Fables. There are the sparkly special light effects around Fly that we’ve seen in the last few issues, just like what used to surround Boy Blue in his witching cloak, when he was in the process of teleporting (as seen in the War and Pieces collection). In this newly arrived mob of Fables we see: Bigby and Snow and their cubs (all in human form); Rose Red and Sinbad; Totenkinder and the other 13th floor sorcerers (including Mr. Grandoirs, the big Russian bear-like fellow, whom we’ve seen a lot of in recent issues, and little Ozma, the little blond girl, who is going to become an important character soon); King Cole and Grimble and Hobbes; and a big group of the Farm animal Fables, including Stinky the Badger. Pinocchio is here, but basically alone – not part of one of the groups of Fables. He’s carrying blue’s trumpet with him. Clara the Raven flies more or less near Rose Red. All of these newly arrived Fables walk away from Fly in the middle, off to their various homes and forests and such. Sinbad is practically holding Rose Red on her feet. She seems overcome with grief. Stinky the Badger is trailing behind Totenkinder and her bunch. All of the characters who wear clothes are dressed for a funeral. David: If you want to include other known Fables here, like Doctor Swineheart, the fat nurse, the Three Crow Brothers and such (or other favorites of yours), feel free to. But I’ve listed the ones who have to be in this scene. Note that Mowgli, Bagheera, or anyone appearing in the recent back-up stories, can’t be here. Note also the order in which the dialogue takes place on these two pages, to help in deciding where on the pages to place the various characters. Okay, one final note: Recently all of the Fabletown Fables have moved back up to the Farm when Fabletown was destroyed (another big secret you have to keep), so, depending on how much room you have in this spread and in the pages to follow, we need to see lots of cars and trucks parked wherever there’s room, and lots of tents and temporary shelters pitched wherever there’s room. Thanks.

Page Four (four panels)

Panel One

Same scene, but now we concentrate on Bigby, Snow and their cubs. They are all subdued. Bigby and Snow walk arm in arm and the cubs trail behind them. They are headed towards the main house, where Beast and Beauty are still sitting.

Panel Two

Same scene, but now we concentrate on the kids, trailing behind Bigby and Snow.

Panel Three

Same scene. We are at the main house, where Sinbad is leading Rose Red through the front doors at the top of the steps. Beast and Beauty are still sitting on the steps, so that Sinbad and Rose Red have to walk around them. Rose Red still looks like she might collapse if Sinbad lets go of her.

Panel Four

Same scene, but now Rose Red and Sinbad are inside the doors, while now Bigby and Snow head up the same front porch steps into the same doors. They also have to walk around Beauty and Beast on the steps. This time Beast shoots Bigby a suspicious stare, which Bigby doesn’t see as they pass by. The kids are still following their parents.

And now here’s the same section of script with the dialogue and other matter added that the first writer is responsible for. Note that the artist needs this information too, because the dialogue gives him important clues to every character’s expression and body language. The artist also needs to see the order in which the dialogue occurs in every panel, so that he can position the characters in those panels accordingly, and leave enough space in the panels to fit the amount of dialogue the first writer has written:

Page One (five panels)

Panel One

We open this issue with an establishing shot panel of the Farm, including the “village” area, town square, main set of buildings. The early morning sun is coming up over the horizon.

Non Narration Cap: The Farm

Voice (from Farm): That was a lovely service.

Panel Two

Beast: It was. Flycatcher spoke well. And Pinocchio was on his best behavior. Good service indeed, but a dreary way to spend our anniversary.

Beauty: Oh, is it – ?

Beauty: I guess it is.

Beauty: I forgot.

Panel Three

Same scene, but closer now on Beauty and Beast. She looks up at him, still sad, but not crushingly so.

Beast: Don’t worry. Today of all days you have a good excuse for forgetting. And any sort of celebration would be inappropriate.

Beast: So instead, I guess I should just ask you the traditional, annual question. How about it?

Panel Four

Same scene, but now they are both caught in a flash of light coming in from the side (from off panel). The light is intense enough to bathe them both in brilliant light.

Beast: Care to take one more circle around the sun together?

Beauty: Without question. And I think –

Beauty: – huh? –

Panel Five

This isn’t really a panel. It’s the space you need to leave at the bottom of the page for this issue’s titles and credits.

Title (display lettering): Waiting for the Blues

Subtitle (display lettering): (An Epilogue of Sorts for The Dark Ages)

Credits

Pages Two and Three (one panel)

Panel One

Beauty: Oh, it’s Flycatcher again. These should be the last Fables from Haven.

Beast: Quick turnaround this time.

Rose Red: No, Sinbad, I don’t want to talk about us, or about anything. I just want to get back into bed.

Rose Red: And Clara? This time I expect no interruptions. Understand?

Clara: You get your rest, boss. Don’t worry about us. I’ll keep everyone in line.

Stinky (the Badger): So how soon before Boy Blue comes back, Frau Totenkinder?

Stinky: The important ones always come back, right? Isn’t that how it works?

Totenkinder: No, that hasn’t been demonstrated in a conclusive way.

Totenkinder: Certainly not to my satisfaction.

Totenkinder: We haven’t established any measurable pattern.

Page Four (four panels)

Panel One

Bigby: We should think about parking the cubs with their grandfather, until we know just how much danger we might be in at the Farm.

Darien: What danger, papa?

Winter: More dangerous than grampa’s castle?

Panel Two

Same scene, but now we concentrate on the kids, trailing behind Bigby and Snow.
Conner: Gram Paw’s castle isn’t dangerous no more, stupid. Not now that our Uncle Monsters are gone.

Ambrose: But is anywhere safe? Uncle Blue got killed dead right here.

Panel Three

Rose Red: No, I want to be left alone.

Rose Red: Completely alone.

Panel Four

Snow: Either your father’s keep, or Haven.

Snow: Somewhere safe.

And that shows the two different writers you need to be in a nutshell. No, you don’t have to write the panel descriptions in italics. I just did that to better show off the two different sides to the work ahead of you. The hardest part of this particular type of storytelling, at least in my humble but long experienced opinion, is being able to switch back and forth between the two writing styles at will. If you can’t do that, you can’t do comic books very well. One technique I have found that helps, is that I will first write out long stretches of dialogue at a time – the entire scene’s worth – before I go back and plug in the page and panel descriptions. I write the story like a play, with dialogue only. That way I am able to live in the artistic writer for as long as possible, before switching over to the technical writer. One problem with doing it that way though is remembering what you wanted to happen in any given panel by the time you get back to describe it.

Many comic book writers do the opposite of my process. Since comic books are considered primarily a visual storytelling medium, they write out all of the “action” – the page and panel descriptions – first, and then, only when the issue is entirely done in the technical writing side, do they switch to the artistic writer, going back to plug in the dialogue. This is a perfectly fair and legitimate way to do it, but since my scripts tend to depend more on what characters say to each other, I prefer dialogue first, action second.

Of course you’ll find your own preferred way to do it and your own best pace on how often to switch back and forth between your two writers.

One last thing. Remember that your two different writers, the artist and the technical writer, are partners. They need to work together to produce the best of all possible stories. The artist better not try to cram in so many lines of dialogue and captions into a single panel, that the technical writer can’t possibly fit them in. Since the technical writer is just a stand-in, at this stage, for whoever will actually be drawing this story, you need to treat him kindly, or some comics illustrator (who’s an actually separate person) will grow to hate you. In the same vein, the technical writer can’t try to have more than one action occurring in a single panel, or too many people in a single panel, or too many panels per page, or that same very real comics illustrator is going to hate him too.

So that’s the lesson. You need to be two different writers in one body. You need to be able to switch back and forth between them at will. And, unlike the original Jekyll and Hyde, both personalities have to be partners – the best of friends in fact – each working to bring out the best in the other.

Thank you.

Bill Willingham

Somewhere in Minnesota

To be or not 'TO BE'...

2010-04-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

Over the past few months, I've been writing like a fiend and now have a pair of big projects close to completion. As part of that, I have sent these projects around to get feedback from other writers. One is a script for a pilot and one is a chunk of novel. In that process and in getting back reader notes, I found that I have a bad writing habit that appeared in both jobs. That habit undermines the quality of my work toward the final projects. Here is the killer bullet point from the script notes that sums up the bad habit-

- Don't use any form of "To Be". Everything needs to be active. "Catalina stands," "She answers her chirping cell phone..." that kind of thing, instead of "is standing" and "is answering."

"I was doing the same thing in my novel." Just like that last sentence. Reread it. It needs to be more like... "I wrote the same way in my novel." So now, I'm going back on a polish draft to remove the weasel words and ironing out the passive sentences. That simple change makes a big difference.

Are you guys aware of your bad writing habits? And how much did it sting when they were pointed out?

(Rather than look at my mug, I thought you'd all appreciate a Scott Campbell drawing of Captain Hammer. Enjoy.)
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San Diego

2010-04-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

The madness begins anew for me. I've stayed away from San Diego for a number of years, and for various reasons, most of them personal and petty. Now I find that if I want to get anything done in the industry, I have to go. So, cue that Al Pacino impression that they all did back when the Sopranos was good, and let me vent just a little bit.

I'm not telling any tales out of school when I say that Comicon International is now misnomered. It's not about comics. It's about the periphery of comics. It's about popular culture, movies, anime, costumes, and just about everything else, and oh yeah, there are comics there, too. That's the reason why it's so big. If it were just about comics, it would be a navigable experience.

I used to love going to conventions, back when I was sixteen, and then again when I was twenty-one and just trying to get into the business, and again when I was twenty seven, when I was back in the business again, and then something happened when I turned thirty. I got fed up to my eyeballs with conventions. Not all conventions, to be sure. Just the really big ones, where the room was so large, and so full of people that it was impossible to hear yourself think. Where "participating" in the panels and special events meant standing in line all day so that you'd have a chance of actually getting to see something.

For the fans, this may be a great thing, and as spectacle goes, it's one of the few places where you can affirm that comic books and super heroes are indeed an indelible aspect of our culture, for what it's worth. But for professionals (and I'm not just speaking for myself now) it's akin to the Bataan Death March. Long lines, long hours, crowds of people grouped around, and virtually impossible to get anything done on a business level unless you plan for it in advance like a Hogan's Heroes mission. But, the other side of that coin is this: with business tight for everyone now, the only place you can see everyone at once is at San Diego. For many companies, it's the only show they go to. So, for better or worse, it's the one show you can't afford to miss.

Conventions like World Fantasy Convention and ArmadilloCon are more my speed, now. They are smaller, much more personal, and usually centered about the hotel bar, great conversations, and easy access to the people you need to speak with to keep your career on track. This year's World Fantasy Convention is in Columbus, Ohio (one of my favorite cities, I kid you not) and it's going to be a blast. I've just got to survive San Diego, first...

2010-04-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I went to the monthly get together of a bunch of mystery writers here in Austin. It was nice to chat about writing and what not. The guest speaker was Kaye George who can be found online here.

The topic for the talk was using social media as a writer. Much like being a hired killer ours is a solitary profession. The web provides the means to stay in touch with fans and foes alike. A lot of you all work for good- sized publishers, so they do some marketing work for you. With the competition for eyeballs being what it is, is that enough?

With this in my melon, I wanted to ask the group this question... If you use social media, how do you use it for promotion?

Personally, I hang out on the IDW message boards and yammer with the ANGEL fans. I throw out links on Facebook. And I tweet about interviews like the upcoming one on the Spike mini-series at Buffyfest.

Ex Parte #3 is live!

2010-03-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I launched a comic series at Lone Star Press about a lawyer that represented super-types. The market yawned and we could not continue publishing the series. There were individual stories that were mostly completed which ended up not ever being published.

I put this one by Bob Hall together from the files on hand and posted it on WOWIO so that fans might be able to read this sweet little story of a hero with a heart of gold.

Ironically for this page, its the first one that I didn't write. But the next one is all me.

Re-Tying my Gordian Knot

2010-03-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

Last year I accepted a contract to do a revised, second edition of Blood & Thunder. The project originally took about a year and a half to write, and that included doing a quantity of original research as well as assimilating all of the research previously done. As a writing exercise, it was without a doubt the hardest thing I ever had to write. Biographical writing occupies a completely different head space than fiction writing. You don't have the freedom to dictate the story, or tweak the plot, or even to play with the dialogue. What was said, was said. And what was done, was done.

That's not to say there isn't room for creativity in biographical writing; on the contrary, making the story come alive and "flow" for the modern reader requires a deft, creative touch. But, as you well know, it take a lot of work to make something look easy, and that's exactly what Blood & Thunder was for me. I sweated writing it so that you wouldn't sweat reading it.

Well, now I'm in the process of rewriting the book, adding in discoveries that were made between 2005 and now, and expanding and correcting existing chapters. I thought it would be a piece of cake. Boy, was I wrong.

See, when I write something, especially something like this, I try to create a seamless transition from point to point, like a conversation. I've got it all laid out in A-B-C fashion. Now, I'm trying to shoehorn B.5 between B and C and it's upsetting the flow. I'm rewriting way more than I had anticipated. And I'm scrapping some things that I originally really liked to make points transition better.

But what's really hard is that I'm trying desperately to re-examine my mindset from five years ago and I find it nearly impossible to do so. When I write anything, fiction or essay, real or imagined, as soon as the story leaves my head, I start erasing the data from my mental hard drive to make room for new stuff. More than once, I've re-read a story I wrote several years ago and found myself laughing at some point of dialogue or turn of events that I'd honestly forgotten that I'd written. Either that, or dementia is setting in early. Let's hope it's door number one.

Getting back to the point, I now find myself reading pages from my book and wondering why I wrote something that way, and trying to ascertain if it comes up again later. I remember when I was writing the book the first time that I had points I intentionally made in chapter 3, knowing that when I got to chapter 8, they would come back up again, with new clarity and meaning, and people would think I'm a genius. Now I'm looking at that magic trick, and I don't know how in the hell I pulled it off.

Starting from scratch isn't an option. I've got too many other things on my plate, and besides, the book isn't broken. In automotive speak, I'm simply tricking it out. Turning it into a high-performance roadster. It's just that I've got a set of metric wrenches and all of the nuts and bolts are standard. I'm getting the job done, but there's a lot more trial and error than I anticipated.

Reading with your lips moving

2010-02-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

I'm getting ready to do a reading this week, down at the KGB Bar in New York, and Matt Staggs at Suvudu asked me if I had any advice for new writers on how to do these things. Now, I'm an ex-Theatre major, and so maybe I approach these things differently than other folks, but for me, there are two things I keep in mind: (a) the spoken story and the written story are two different things, and (b) you have to treat it like a performance.

It starts with the editing. Here's the bit from the interview on how I edit:

After I finally decide on a scene to read, I begin editing, and try to make it work as much as possible as a standalone piece. I cut out exposition that doesn't matter outside the context of the novel, and then trim other distracting details. I've cut entire characters, added descriptions from earlier in the book, and combined scenes--any hack to make it work.
Then I print out the pages in a big font and practice reading it aloud. I always have to line edit, deleting repeated words, or altering near-rhymes I didn't catch when I wrote the scene. If I've really marked up the page, I'll make the changes in the file and print again. I practice a couple more times. Even after all that, when I start reading it live, I usually realize that there are yet more changes that I should have made. If I'm feeling jazzy and confident I'll make those changes on the fly.

So, is that overkill? Underkill? What do the rest of you Clockworkers do?

A couple of things I didn't mention in the interview, and those related to the performance part of the process. One, I always read standing up. It keeps my energy (literally) up, and I can move around. I don't act out the scene -- not by a long shot -- but I do move my arms, and I do things like pause and look at the audience when the character is pausing and looking at another character.

Also, I deliberately move to address one side of the room, then another. Part of this habit comes from theatre, but mostly it comes from my three years as a high school teacher. I'm a little bit paranoid about boring people, so I like to move in on them. I think this will be harder to do at the KGB, because there's a podium with mikes, and the place is supposed to be crowded. I'll report back.

The second thing I think about is character voices. This is tricky. My first advice to a new writer is, if he's a guy, don't attempt a "woman's" voice, and for a gal, vice-versa. And for God's sake, don't do some ethnic dialect. Your only way to get away with that is Meryl Streep-level accuracy. Anything short of that will be heard as an embarrassing stereotype. The one exception? Pirate. Even Pirate-Americans find their accent funny.

I have to admit, though, that I'll be breaking the dialect rule. See, my book is set in the Smokies, and I am sure as hell going to throw down some southern accent. This is why I have 10,000 cousins all over East Tennessee -- so I can do their voices in this story. (Notice, though, how I deflected critique by claiming insider status? This is the "I can do the voice because I'm from there" defense. This strategy does not work on the internet, though. It's the fastest way to start a Race-Fail flamewar.)

But you can't not do something with your voice. I try to concentrate on emotion and tone. If I get the tone of the character right, whether they're male or female or Moldavian or nosferatu, the audience will usually meet me halfway.

That's the theory, anyway. If you're in NYC this Wednesday, Feb. 17, stop by the KGB Bar and see how it goes down. Oh, and there's this guy named Peter Straub reading too. I hear he's good.

See y'all later.

Born Standing Up

2010-02-01T13:15:00.000-08:00

Steve Martin uses this wonderful biography* to chart the development of his stand-up routine. It starts with his first job selling guidebooks at Disneyland and ends with him walking away from that life on the road to make his first movie, The Jerk. He is by turns harsh to the people that never followed through on showbiz promises made and kind to comedy giants such as Johnny Carson and Carl Reiner. His relationship with his Dad and women on the road are a little too intimate for me, but this is a fascinating and well-written book.

The wonderful thing for me was discovering the genesis of his act and seriousness required to make it hum. His stories of failed attempts and stumbles are as entertaining as his impressions of Saturday Night Live alum like John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. His anecdotes and clever approach to being silly really makes me want to go back and listen to that old vinyl. It almost erases the stench of some of his recent movie projects.

More importantly for those of us who make a living with stories of 'jokes and punching' is the constant analysis of what he was doing and what he learned from that. In the beginning, he carefully considers breaking the old structures to create something new in comedy. There are dozens of entertaining and charming parallels between the writing life and the comedy writing life. This should be a primer for anyone considering a life in entertainment.

* I know the term is autobiography. But he makes the point that he is writing about the man he used to be, so I am using his terminology.

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A Challenge Answered (and a little explanation)

2010-01-28T18:23:00.000-08:00

When Bill laid the gauntlet down, I immediately said yes, even though I knew good and well that trying to write like Robert E. Howard is a fool's game. Even to go Howardesque invites scorn and ridicule. Nevertheless, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what goes into the hopper to make Howard's writing so good. I thought that it would be fun to play with his "clash of cultures" idea that he used to great effect in most of his stories. There was always someone different or apart from the rest in Howard's work. Conan, in his youth, is the outsider, the barbarian, in such stories as "The God in the Bowl," but clearly Working For The Man in "Beyond the Black River" as he battles the savage Picts.

Anyway, for some reason, I keyed in on The Northern Warrior and so that is what pulled the story in this particular direction. It's a mere 1,600 words. But I tried, like REH, to pack as much story into the space as possible. So, give it a read and tell me how I did.

(Side Note to the CWSB Crew: If I win this bet, I'll make it worth your while, as I happen to know Bill makes a hellacious lasagna, for he taught me the recipe. No pressure, here. But seriously: godly lasagna.)

A Challenge Answered

by Mark Finn

Brannon Harak, the northern warrior, kicked the door open. There was murder in his eyes and cold steel in his hand. “Vahid!” he screamed. The muscles of his neck strained against the collar of his ring mail shirt as he cast his gaze about the room. The inner sanctum of the keep was as opulent and decadent as the main hall. Rich silk tapestries dripped down the rough stone walls, and rounded oil lamps hung from chains in the ceiling, swaying gently in the night air. Each guttering flame cast amber light into every corner, while errant shadows played across the ornate, heavy furnishings in the room.

One light burned brighter than any of the lamps, and that was the arrangement of candles at the head of a large stone table. Laying on that table, covered in white linens, was Nissa. Her golden hair spilled down over the lip of the table, and her eyes were closed. Standing over her, still in his riding garb, was Count Vahid. The wrappings from his head were loose, hanging to one side of his dark face. He stared at the Northman with a mixture of disbelief and unconcealed hatred.

“What have you done to her?” Harak thundered, crossing the distance between them in a half dozen massive strides. Before he could reach Vahid or the altar, the Count drew his own curved tulwar and the blades crashed uselessly together over the woman’s still form.

“I? Nothing!” Vahid turned Harak’s broadsword away and swung around the altar. “She caught an arrow from your men as we rode back to my castle.” He slashed at Harak’s head, the sharp steel whirring through the air as Harak jumped back. “I was tending to her wounds when you kicked open the door.”

Harak roared and leapt forward, his blade cleaving great arcs before him. “I’ll not leave her to your foul magic! She lives or dies by Jheran’s whim, not your black deviltry!”

Vahid barely drew his curved fighting knife in time to deflect the rain of steel that sought his hide. He countered and parried with both blades, his lips drawn back in a sneer of contempt. Unable to penetrate Vahid’s defenses, Harak aimed a kick at the Count’s midsection.

But Vahid was adept at close quarters melee, and he caught Harak’s boot on his thigh and turned down and away, sweeping his leg against the giant’s unprotected knee. The maneuver would have shattered the bones of a lesser man, but Harak simply fell down and away with a grunt.

Vahid stood over him, the point of his curved sword inches from his face. “You ignorant savage. Our ways are neither foul nor unclean. You would treat her wound with prayer, while I would use herbs and medicines.”

“Don’t speak to me of civilization, Count,” said Harak. He clutched his knee and grimaced. “You sweep into our village in the dead of night, when we had brokered peace with your city-state not a fortnight ago! Your men set fire to our Great Hall so that you can spirit away the king’s daughter in the confusion. Not even the Jaffiri in the West would stoop to such barbarous tactics!”

“And what was your plan, General Harak? I can hear no nattering diplomats in my courtyard below. Not unless all of your Chieftain’s court ride chargers and swing swords.” He withdrew the point of his sword and walked to the window. “No, indeed, it would appear that my men have yours at a distinct disadvantage right now.”

“Liar!” Harak roared. He staggered to his feet, favoring the leg. Truthfully, the blow hadn’t hurt him at all, but Harak knew what a crafty fighter Vahid was, and knew he could use the theatrics to his advantage. “I brought a squad of my finest men.”

“And yet, they seem unable to kill boiling oil and crossbow bolts,” Vahid said. He smiled. “It would appear that you are to be my guest while I conclude negotiations with your chieftain for sweet Nissa, here.” He bowed slightly, and moved away from the window. “See for yourself, Oh mighty oaf, for I can plainly see that you do not believe me.”

Harak approached the window, wary of Vahid’s blade, but the Count retreated behind the stone table where Nissa lay, allowing Harak to spare a glance down into the courtyard below. What he saw sickened him. He had ridden through the city and into the keep with forty-eight men. Now there were less than a dozen of them, pinned between two portcullis gates. Archers were running up the steps to the ramparts, nocking arrows as they went in their eagerness to rain death down on the intruders. The men had formed a perfect shield wall, circular, but their shields and their will would only last so long. It would be a slaughter.

Harak turned to the count. “Spare my men,” he said. “Spare them and I’ll turn myself over as your hostage.”

Vahid smiled at Harak. “Your word?”

“Aye. My word.” Harak set his broad sword down and backed away from it. “Spare them.”

Vahid strolled back to the window and shouted down in Farese. Harak never bothered to learn the language, but he recognized the shouted reply that drifted back up to the window. He breathed a sigh of relief and clasped his hands behind his back.

Satisfied that his orders were being carried out, Count Vahid turned to face Harak again, and something kicked him in the chest and knocked the wind out of him. He staggered back against the window and saw a small throwing axe embedded in his chest. It had gone through his leather jerkin like paper. He tried to speak but produced only a bloody cough. His eyes were accusing as he slid to the floor.

Harak reclaimed his sword and sheathed it, watching Vahid for any sudden movement. “And what good is your word, that you have broken our peace?” Harak said quietly to the dying man. “We are enemies. Now and ever more. As it has always been, so shall it always be.”

Vahid summoned the will to gasp out, “It is…our way…”

Harak reached down and planted his foot on Vahid’s shoulder and pulled out his axe. A ribbon of blood and air followed its withdrawal and the Vahid was gone in seconds. “We are too different, our people,” Harak said as he turned away, now thinking only of Nissa.

She was still breathing, Harak saw, and he cradled her head as gently as he could in his hands. “Nissa?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

Her eyes fluttered. “Oh, my Love…” she said.

Harak’s heart swelled and jumped in his chest. It was the first time she had ever addressed him in so intimate a fashion. Their exchanges in court had always been notoriously formal.

“It is I, Brannon,” he said. “You are safe, for now. Can you move?”

Nissa’s eyes opened, pale, blue, and questioning. “What…happened? Brannon? I don’t understand…”

“You were kidnapped,” Brannon said shortly as he examined the wound in her side. “Spirited right out of the Great Hall by Count Vahid and his mongrel horde.”

“Where is he?” she cried.

“It’s all right,” he said, smiling, his voice now gentle. “He won’t bother you any more. Well,” he said, standing up, “I think we can wrap your wound up with some of this silk and then get you on a horse…” he turned around to pull one of the tapestries down. Behind him, Nissa had started to sob, but he couldn’t be bothered to deal with that just now. They weren’t out of danger yet.

Something hit Brannon on the back, under his shoulder blade; it felt like a pinched muscle as it made his back spasm. He tried to draw a breath and found in a panic that he couldn’t. There was a second hit, and then a third, and now he knew he was being stabbed. He let out a bellow of rage, sweeping wide around for the assassin that must have climbed in through one of the open windows and found only Nissa, holding a bloody ceremonial fighting dagger. In fact, it was a dagger the King had given her on her last birthday.

“You fool!” she screamed. “You great, lumbering fool!”

Brannon moved to take the knife away from her, but he still couldn’t get his lungs to fill with air and his grab became a lunge that she easily sidestepped. He landed awkwardly on the stone table, his back soaked wet with his own blood. “I saved you…” he said.

“You didn’t save me! I wanted to leave! Vahid and I were in love! The peace accord was part of our plan to wed!” Nissa pointed at Vahid. “He was going to make me a queen! I would have ruled this city-state! Not some collection of shacks and huts. Oh, you stupid fool, you’ve ruined everything.”

Brannon could only watch as Nissa pulled the Count’s cloak and broach off of his body and fasten it around herself. “Maybe I can stay here. I’ve got to find Zelik and the Master at Arms.”

“Nissa,” Brannon gasped. He tried to stand. “I’m…I’m…” He never got the rest of his apology out. She walked out of the room, swearing in Farese. As the dark tunnel slowly closed off his vision, he thought, I didn’t know she could speak that foreign devil’s tongue. He fell, not an arm’s length from the man he killed.

Outside the window, a shrill command was shouted. Arrows twanged in the night air. And all was silent.

Miscellaneous Stuff

2010-01-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

I should catch you up on some news and general stuff, much of which has been piling up and some of which doesn't merit individual posts.

Item One: Scattered Werewolves spotted, with chance of howling.

If you glance to your left you will see the gorgeous cover to a Bigby-centric Fables original graphic novel (coming out not soon at all) called Werewolves of the Heartland. Its title is not, as too many comics sites have posted, Werewolves in the Heartland, which sounds more like a weather report to me, rather than the more poetic of the. Small differences can be vital ones.

The cover was painted by the vastly talented Daniel Dos Santos whose website, which is chock full of wonders, you can visit here. The Werewolves piece is a wrap-around cover, so you are only seeing the front half of it here.

So who is that achingly lovely blonde in Bigby's arms? It certainly isn't Snow White. Is it Cinderella or Rapunzel, as many have already guessed, or somebody new entirely? You will of course have to read the book to find out.

Item Two: A small private debate made public.

I had an interesting exchange with Stacia Kane, the author of a number of fantasy books. You can learn more about Miss Kane and her books by visiting here. On her website, or blog (or I forget), she expressed such a strong dislike of first person narrative in general, and a vow never to perpetrate it in one of her novels, in specific, that I had to find out why. As an admirer of the first person story I felt a need to stand up for it and the following mini debate ensued (paraphrased in parts, due to my doddering old man's memory):

Me: First person has one quality I like. With damn few exceptions (such as unreliable narrator) it's loyal to one character in the story. True and dedicated loyalty is so rare in real life that I want to experience it from time to time in fiction. First person almost requires the reader and the point of view character to be allies. Almost. When's the last time you spent so much time with a person you knew you could count on, when the chips were well and truly down? So that's one among the reasons I like first person. It forces you to pick a side.

She: Good point, yes, but I write in a very tight third, single character. I don't jump into other POVs. In actual first person I'm forced to deal with the filter of the POV character -- all those "I felt, I saw, I blah blah blah," -- whereas in third I can almost cut out the middleman. I think it feels more intimate, rather than less. At least the way I do it.

Me: Granted. Very tight third person single character POV is just as good. Your rebuttal to my rebuttal is on target. I yield the point. (And then, following some back and forth nonsense): Take what victory trophy you deem most fit.

She: I win! I win! But you don't want to give me that kind of freedom. You'll end up with my name tattooed on your very attractive ass. (Okay, she didn't actually say "very attractive" there. I may have inadvertently added that part. The original transcript seems to be a bit garbled there.)

Me: How about I write a blog post about our wee debate in which I admit you fairly out-argued me? Will that suffice to prove I am well and truly owned?

And so it went. But, regardless of having to concede a highly narrow point to Stacia Kane, I am grateful to her for forcing me to put into words one of the more compelling reasons I am a fan of first person narrative in fiction. And, with my limited research powers, I can't find that my specific argument has been made before. I have yet to do a prose novel in first person -- at least none that have been finished and published. Now I need to. I've got the bug.

Item Three: The Robert E Howard Day, One-Man Contest.

Look at the post below by Mark Finn. He's always a good writer, but he's seldom better than when writing about Robert E Howard. All three of those points he made are cogent and compelling. I must use the term "tall liar" in a story soon. When Mark makes the claim to be a Robert E Howard scholar, I suspect he might be guilty of understatement. But how often can Mark write about Howard? Why not instead pay tribute to that author we both love by writing a Howardesque story?

From time to time us Tick Tock Men (back when we were all male, so no intention of leaving you out, by using the old, defunct term, Marjorie) would issue writing challenges and contests to each other, often with mixed results. But they were always fun and revealing. So I hereby issue the following writing challenge to Mark Finn alone: You will write a prose short story in the Howard style and post it here. Your opening line is: "Brannon Harak, the northern warrior, kicked the door open. There was murder in his eyes and cold steel in his hands."

Here are the rules:

1) You can fix that opening line(s) a bit, but not much.

2) You must finish and post the story within five days, starting tomorrow, Sunday. And no, I won't accept as an excuse that you didn't see this post in time. You and I share many aspects of the same ego, buddy, so I know you've been checking back here at least daily to see who's commented on your latest post.

3) You are limited to between one and two thousand words, max, but fewer is even better.

The Prize:

A) If you simply finish on time and within the rules, I cook you a victory dinner at the next Clockwork retreat (with the same dinner for the others too, if you deign to allow it).

B) If all other Clockworkers unanimously vote that it is an excellent story, then not only do you get all of the above, but I do the deed, cooking and serving, in full formal mode (ala the Famous formal dinner in which you and Brad cooked and served and you-know-who had to wear the chicken suit), cooking a menu of your decree. No, guys, I'm not the one in a chicken suit, in this scenario. I'm in the fancy pants "Happy to be of service to you, sir, will there be anything else?" part of the famous bet. Ask Mark for details if you must.

And Mark, of course you are allowed to campaign for "excellent" votes from your peers. We are still a silly people at heart.

Happy 104th, Robert E. Howard

2010-01-22T11:45:00.000-08:00

104 years ago, the Muses set a thunderbolt down on this planet in a small town in Texas. His name was Robert E. Howard, and he was the greatest pulp fiction writer the world has ever known.

Here at Camp Clockwork we have spent many an hour talking about REH, and even penned a tribute issue of the old Clockwork Storybook web magazine to him. Howard invented the genre of Heroic Fantasy (less charitably called "Sword and Sorcery" by some) with the stories "Red Shadows," featuring Solomon Kane, and "The Shadow Kingdom," featuring King Kull. He wrote several successful series characters in a humorous vein, including my favorite, Sailor Steve Costigan, and the hillbilly man-child Breckenridge Elkins. Of course, he is best known as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, who has become one of those universally recognized characters in the same camp as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes.

Undoubtedly, Howard was an inspiration to so many writers, including myself, of course. But what exactly made him such a great writer? I think there are three major components to his "style" of writing, along with a host of other intangibles that vary from character to character, story to story, and series to series. But the three biggies are as follows.

Howard was a poet. His was a lifelong study of poetry, both as a reader and a writer. His mother read poety to him as a child, and he really took to it. He wrote reams, literally, of the stuff, and he wrote so much of it that it's very difficult to even try and sort it into classifications. Regardless, Howard was used to thinking poetically--that is, descriptively and with economy. There are no wasted words in his work. There are only the right words; the words that you key into and create the most vivid pictures in your mind as you read. Howard wrote that way, intuitively, whether he was laying out kingdoms in broad, swift strokes, or relentlessly pounding out a boxing story.

Howard was a tall liar. That's a Texas thing. The appropriate turn of phrase today is "Master bullshitter." And one of the best definitions of bullshit I ever heard is, "If it ain't true, it ought to be." A tall liar in Howard's day was the porch swing raconteur, the fellow who could walk into the general store and waste five minutes of everyone's time talking about "this old boy from over yonder" and the hi-jinx he got up to the other day. H.P. Lovecraft famously said of Howard that he "believed everything he wrote," and this has been mis-interpreted over the years to mean that Howard was crazy. In fact, he merely invested in his writing the same earnest verisimillitude of authenticy that a veteran tall liar would in his oral recitation. Howard may well have been the first Texas writer to ever write fiction from the precepts of oral tall tales. But it's why, in so many cases, his prose just rings true. Of course the sword would turn on the shield that way. Certainly the horse would throw the man just so. That sense of earnest bullshit is one of the most overlooked traits in Howard's writing.

Howard was trapped. In his personal life, Howard was the primary caregiver to his tubercular mother. His father was a doctor, back in the days when they made house calls, and he frequently traveled for days at a time to be with and tend to patients. Had their unique family situation not been what it was, Howard may well have pursued a more physical career, or at the very least, moved to a larger city to follow his passion. As it was, he was stuck, either by his own hand or others, in a small Texas town, surrounded by a number of people who didn't fully understand the situation in the Howard house. Thus corralled, Howard did the one thing that was available to him: he projected his imagination as far away as he could, moving through time, back into pre-history, and even to other worlds. His fierce imagination gave him the needed building blocks to create some of the most memorable characters in popular fiction and imbue them with the life he himself could never lead.

Howard's personal story is a sad one. But his legacy as a writer of merit and substance continues to this day. The 11th book in Del Rey's line of Robert E. Howard books comes out in February: El Borak and other Desert Adventures. This character, believe it or not, was one of the early influences on Indiana Jones. No kidding. I love these stories. Heck, I love them all. I still get that twelve year old's rush of discovery when I re-read certain stories he wrote.

If you've got any Howard on your shelf, today is a great day to pull a book down and read something he wrote. You won't regret it.

Happy Birthday, Bob!

Serendipity is the Enemy!

2010-01-18T14:30:00.000-08:00

As a mystery and crime writer I like to believe in cause and effect. Beyond the poetry of the prose, there lay the nuts and bolts of story construction. My characters have to figure things out, so I have a series of objects placed in front of them and the correct construction of the right clues will show a solution. It is like being a puzzle-maker, but I use things beside jigsaws and lumber.

I recently hit a wall in a certain plot and had a character just stumble across a thread that would lead to a momentum- changing clue. To me it feels like a cheat. That moment of serendipity stands out like a sore thumb. It's the bathroom with the bad drain in the brand new house. With luck, I will be the only one to notice. Rather than going back and fiddling with it endlessly, I'm working on the next thing. But it is rather irritating to have a coincidence propel a detective story.

Clockwork folk, how often does this kind of thing happen to you?

(Yes, when it gets cold enough, I dress like a manga character.)

Lessons from Westlake

2010-01-05T05:52:00.000-08:00

Michael Berry, the science fiction columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has posted a list of 5 writing lessons he's learned from the work of Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark). It seemed like a strong list to me, so I figured I'd share them here and see what you folks make of them.

Choose a strong title.
Some of the early Parker novels have titles so terse that they don’t really stick in the memory: “The Score,” “The Outfit,” “The Seventh,” “The Hunter.” I have trouble keeping track of them in my head. But after a 24-year break from writing about Parker, Stark brought him back in “Comeback.” Which was followed by “Backflash.” Followed by “Flashfire,” “Firebreak” and “Breakout.” The titles are down to one word, but they’re evocative and the progression from one to the next is clever without being distracting.
Waste no time getting the story started.
In the early books, the first sentence always started with “When…”
When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. He heard the plop of a silencer behind him as he rolled, and the bullet punched the pillow where his head had been. — “The Outfit”
When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. – “The Split”Even without that gimmick, the openings are always active and compelling.
Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and a packet of explosive in the other. — “Slayground”

These aren’t books that begin with long ruminations about the weather. There’s action on the very first page.
Understand structure.
Many of the Parker books are organized around a four-part structure. The first two parts are from Parker’s perspective. The third offers multiple viewpoints of a critical plot turn. The final portion wraps things up, again from inside Parker’s head.It’s a particularly effective technique. The third-person limited perspective keeps everything focused and leaves little room for extraneous business. The late-in-the-game breakout from the protagonist’s perspective allows the author to ramp up the suspense by dramatising conflicts that Parker can’t foresee.
Don’t be afraid to change your style. Westlake has said that he once grew frustrated with a draft in which Parker kept losing the thing he was trying to steal. Rather than bull his way through a book that wasn’t working, Westlake decided to turn it into a comedy, thereby creating his long-running character John Dortmunder, who first appeared in “The Hot Rock.”
If you don’t work to avoid obsolescence, you may wind up having to kill someone to keep working. Although not published with the Stark pen-name, “The Axe” is one of the bleakest novels Westlake has ever written. The tale of a middle-aged middle-manager who strikes back against downsizing by killing off his competitors, “The Ax” is cautionary tale for anyone who has become too complacent about their job security.

Check out the original post on Berry's blog for more.

It seems this has somehow become my New Year's post.

2009-12-31T07:29:00.000-08:00

So there's Coleridge who saddled us with the notion that the ideal reader-writer relationship is achieved by a "willing suspension of disbelief," which idea caught on and we've been stuck with it ever since.

As you can no doubt tell, I don't like the idea and never have. Long before I had any real notion of becoming a storyteller myself I was a dedicated participant on the reader side of the equation, and could never warm up to the concept that a reader will (or even could) temporarily cancel his disbelief mechanisms in order to be drawn into a story to the extent that he could care about characters and events that never happened and never will. It always seemed to miss the mark. But I couldn't pin down what was wrong with it until I stumbled across an essay from JRR Tolkien who posited the more apt idea that readers "create a secondary belief." And I knew instantly, in that unmistakable ping of epiphany, that this was right. This was the essential formula in a successful story, and the proof at last that Coleridge had gotten it wrong.

Why does this matter? Why is it more than just a semantic exercise?

Well, for one thing, the most important thing in fact, a suspension of disbelief, willing or otherwise, is a negation. It's passive. Not an act, but a lack of one. However the creation of secondary belief is active by definition. The partnership between writer and reader is a collaboration in which the reader participates actively and bears much, if not most, of the responsibility of creating the fictional world in which the stories take place. There's nothing passive about it. As one tiny example of the million things a reader will bring to any story: the writer may mention a city in which part of the action will take place, and maybe even describe some of the details, but it is up to the reader to create the fullness of that city in his imagination. Not being able to abide a blank canvas, he fills the streets with people and architecture and a nearly infinite number of details the writer can't fully describe for fear of bogging down the story beyond endurance.

Your readers don't sit at a remove and let the story happen to them. They don't suspend application of consistency, logic and accountability. They participate. They get to work on each page, paragraph, sentence, teaming up with you to create.

Create.

Active.

Any story in which the reader hasn't actively and enthusiastically participated in the creative process, every step of the way, is an unread story. There's no other option.

In part I mention this in order to get it on the record, to let my colleagues know, in our ongoing discussion about the craft, that anytime they mention the "willing suspension of disbelief," the conversation (whatever the specifics of the conversation might have been) will grind to a halt while we argue the point of suspension versus creation. And I'll win that debate, so why even try? Can we just agree now to suspend the idea of suspension?

Okay, I've been meaning to get to this rant for some time, but deadlines, holiday guests, and other things intervened, as things often will, until now it's become a New Year's Eve post. I suppose that obligates me to tie it in somehow with the new year. Easy enough: In the coming year I plan to write about thirty (or so) comic stories, a couple of short prose stories, and at least one new novel. And each of these stories will fly or fall depending on the willingness of many readers, most of whom I will never meet, to do most of the work, to help create the worlds, the characters, the histories and the events, and every other detail in each and every tale. I'll do what I can to make all that work enjoyable.

Also in the coming year I plan to read a lot of books, including just about everything written by the nine other writers sharing this space with me. In that role I will be a willing and active participant, rolling up my metaphorical sleeves, doing my part in our collaboration to get those stories told. I will not be at a safe remove, negating. Sorry, Mr. Coleridge, but you got it wrong.

The New Haiku Review

2009-12-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

Pandemonium
is a great book. Big thanks to
Daryl Gregory

.

Post Holiday Haiku

2009-12-27T15:16:00.000-08:00

The tree is dead now,
its last brown needles swept up.
Christmas is over.

haiku inspiration (thanks, jess!)

2009-12-25T15:27:00.000-08:00

christmas with my dog
chewing a dried bull penis
(him, of course. not me.)

happy birthday, baby jebus!

A Christmas haiku...

2009-12-25T07:43:00.001-08:00

...for children, and those young at heart, everywhere:

I waited all year
Christmas tree devoid of Wii
Santa, you bastard

A Little Clockwork Christmas Cheer, Mark Finn-Style

2009-12-21T15:51:00.000-08:00

Call me old fashioned, or even sentimental. I miss the old days when we all had to contribute a Christmas story. So, since I was feeling festive, I decided to write one. It's all part of the larger project, but I hope for some of you it's a fun thing.

Now, without any further ado, allow me to present...

Sailor Tom Sharkey and the Christmas Savages

I was feeling pretty low in December, 1914. Kate was gone, and I was all alone, and it just wasn’t feeling much like Christmas, what with everything going on. Bar troubles, mob troubles, political troubles, you name it, I had it. Even managed to work up a good-sized gambling debt, betting on the horses. Not a very merry Christmas, I can tell you that.

I mostly kept to myself, but even loners get thirsty, so I spent some time in the bar, sipping whisky and eating pickled eggs. It was no kind of lunch or dinner, but with Kate gone, I didn’t have the energy for much else.

It was in this general state of configuration that Charlie Murphy came walking into the bar, his nose up, his eyes all crinkly, like he was smelling something. Politics, most likely. Murphy was the leader of Tammany Hall, which meant that he controlled the Gas Light District, and it also meant that he controlled me. At least, he thought he did. Or, more appropriately, I thought he didn’t.

Anyway, he comes walking in and gives me that stiff-upper lip look, and holds out a beefy hand, and says, “Tom, how’re you doin’, lad?” He was peering at me over the tops of his eye glasses, and made him look like a scolding Bishop.

“Getting along, Charlie,” I replied. “Buy you a soda?"

“I’ll pass,” he said, his expression unchanged. Teetotaler, he was, and he was a professional at it, to boot. An Irish teetotaler. That’s practically unchristian. “Listen, Tom, I know you’re stretched thin right now, and I’ve got a wee favor to ask that can put you right again.”

There wasn’t much that Charlie Murphy didn’t know, and I resented him keeping tabs on me like he did. Then again, I knew he kept tabs on most of the Irish celebrities in town. Political insurance, he once called it. That and his “wee favors.” I finished my whisky and signaled Prong-Head for another one. “Not another political appearance? Election season is November, Charlie.”

“This one’s different,” Murphy said. “Personal appearance. An orphanage. St. Ignatius’ Home for Wayward Souls,” he smiled, indulgently. “You’ll be the guest of honor. And I’ll pay you fifty bucks.”

“Remember when I used to get a thousand clams, just for walking in the door?” I asked.

“Those days are long gone, Tom. Ye’ve only got your reputation, now. So, what do you say? It’s for the children.”

I just knew he was setting me up for something, and I told him so, and he said, no, he wasn’t, and so I said, what’s the catch, and he said, he’d have some of the boys with me to pass out literature for Tammany Hall, and otherwise all I had to do was hand out presents and make a quick fifty bucks, which didn’t begin to cover my debt, but I told him okay, anyway, because fifty bucks is fifty bucks.

It was only after I said yes that he started piling on the conditions. “So, I’ll bring the Santa Claus suit over to you later today—”

“Belay that,” I said. “Santy Claus? I can’t be no Santy Claus.”

Murphy looked shocked. “Why on Earth not?”

“Just look at me, Charlie. I ain’t got the circumference to pull it off.”

“There’s padding in the suit, Tom,” he explained in that convalescing way of his that always made me want to sock him. “And a beard,” he added, cutting short my next objection. “Don’t worry, Lad. It’s the full package.”

“I still don’t think it’ll work,” I grumbled.

“Well, that’s as may be, but I’ll bet the kids will be so distracted by what we’re bringin’ ‘em that they won’t even notice you’re not the genuine article.” He smiled, and clapped me on the back. “You’re doin’ the Lord’s work,” he said.

“Don’t think so much o’ yourself,” I replied. He let that go and left me to my pickled eggs.

A couple of hours later, one of Murphy’s cronies brought a large package which turned out to be my Santa suit. I tried it on, and after I rolled up the cuffs on the jacket and the pants, I gotta admit, I looked a lot like the Old Gent. “Haw Haw Haw,” I said, and the crony pointed out that it’s actually “Ho Ho Ho.” I told him I can’t laugh like that because I’ll sound stupid and besides, these kids won’t know the difference no how. He gave me a look and was about to say something when a blast from a truck horn told us it was time to make the gig. He handed me an envelope with five tens in it, and I stuck the money down into my boot for safekeeping.

Seamus McInnery was driving the truck, and he give me a big hello when I jumped up into the cab. We talked about boxing as he drove the truck up the narrow streets. The other crony, who introduced himself as Duffy, just sat there and smoked. During a natural pause in the conversation, I remarked, “This is an awfully big truck for a bunch of presents for orphans. What’re you givin’ ‘em, anyay?”

Duffy grinned and Seamus laughed. “Oh, there’s a buncha dolls for the girls and baseball gloves and balls for the boys, but that’s not what’s in the truck,” Duffy said.

“Okay, then, what’s in the truck?”

Duffy started chuckling. “Charlie didn’t tell ‘im,” he said to Seamus.

“No, he didn’t,” Seamus said. Catching my murderous look, he wiped the smile off his face and said, “Tammy.”

“Stop the goddamn truck!” I bellowed.

“Aw, Tom, don’t be like that,” said Seamus. “Think of the children.”

“Yeah, Tom,” said Duffy. “They’re countin’ on an appearance from Santa. You wouldn’t want to disappoint a whole orphanage, now, would you?”

“You put me on the bill with a live tiger!” I hollered. “I don’t play second fiddle to jugglers, because I can’t do it myself, women who sing in real high voices, because it makes my teeth hurt, and any animal bigger than a dog! And Charlie knows that, too! I’ve been shanghaied by politicos! Now, let me out or I’ll cream the insides of this truck with your whisky-soaked brains!”

Duffy started to talk some more but Seamus motioned him quiet and pulled the truck over to a stop in front of a large church. “Okay, Tom, here you go.” He set the brake and opened his door. “Come on out, Sailor Tom Sharkey!”

“Well, finally, Seamus, you’re showing the proper feudal spirit…” I slid out of the truck and jumped to the ground, and landed right in the grip of a stooped-over old priest with glasses so thick I could’ve ice skated on them. “Oh, Tom Sharkey! Bless me, St. Peter, I can die now and go to heaven! It’s really you!”

“Yuh…yuh…” I tried to say something, but the old Hymn Flinger bowled right over me. “When they told me that this year we’d get a visit from St. Nicholas, and not only that, but it was the world-famous Tom Sharkey, I knew my prayers had been answered!” He grabbed my hand in his, and it felt like I was holding an assortment of chopsticks. “Father Gilligan, Mr. Sharkey. And may I say, I’ve been a fan of yours ever since you set foot in San Francisco, lo, these many years back. I listened to all of your fights on the radio and I even waved at you during the St. Patrick’s Day parade after your fight with Jeffries, and son, you looked right at me and waved back!”

I stood dumbfounded in the wake of all these personal revelations. I’ve heard people gush before, and I’ve talked to priests, but this was new to me. Most religious types throw up a crucifix when they see me, boxing being what it is. “It’s nice to meet you, Father,” I said, retrieving my right mauler. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to call me…” That was about as far as I got when an unpleasant thought stole over me. “Say, what’s the name of this church, anyhow?”

“St. Ignatius’ Home for Wayward Souls,” said Father Gilligan, beaming with pride. “And a more spirited and enthusiastic lot of children you’ll never meet!”

I turned in a wrath on Duffy and Seamus, but they just pushed a giant bag of toys into my hands and said, “Come on, Santa. You’re up, first. We’ll bring the tiger out after you. First billing, and all that.” Duffy smiled at me, and I made the instant determination that after this job was over, he’d be the one I punched first, even though Seamus was the one who played that dirty trick on me. “All right, you thick-headed Micks,” I growled, “Get in there and help me distribute this loot.”

“Why, sure thing…Santa,” said Duffy, and then he laughed. Seamus held the door open and I stalked through it with Gilligan following after me, blathering like his life depended on it.

Gilligan led me down a hallway and into a small choir room. “Now, the children are all inside the chapel,” he explained, motioning to the door to the right. “I’ll go around the long way, and come in from the other side. You listen at the door, here, and then I’ll introduce you.”

“Okay, then what?”

“Well, you’ll come out and wish the children a Merry Christmas and maybe say a few things about how they have all been good little boys and girls. You know, be Santa Claus. Then we’ll distribute the presents and you’ll wish every boy and girl Merry Christmas. Can you do that?”

“Merry Christmas,” I repeated. “Yep. Merry Christmas!”

“Good,” said Father Gilligan. He stepped around me and nearly sprinted out the door, looking like a question mark with legs. I checked my hat and my beard in the mirror, and pushed on the padding a little bit, just to make sure I was appropriately jolly. Then I heard through the door, “Say Hello to Father Christmas!”

I looked around. Father Christmas? Was this a variety show? Who the hell was that? I thought I was going on first? The kids were clapping and yelling, but I couldn’t hear the opening act. Then they died down and Father Gilligan said, again. “Father Christmas!”

More clapping and shouting. Then nothing. I leaned in on the door, listening for Father Christmas, but couldn’t hear anything. Maybe it was a deaf-mute show.

“Hello? Santa Claus?” It was Father Gilligan.

“I’m in here!” I bellowed.

“Will you come out and greet the children?” He sounded upset.

“Okay,” I said. I threw open the door and strolled out onto the raised area where Father Gilligan stood. “Haw Haw Haw!” I said.

The children were quiet. They were all looking at me, their eyes wide. Maybe fifty of them in all, some of them real small and a few looking like teenagers. They just stared at me.

“Merry Christmas!” I said.

I couldn’t understand it. No reaction. Weren’t children supposed to love Santa Claus? It was a loveless room I was in, that’s for sure.

“Er, Santa, was there something you wanted to say to the children?” Father Gilligan prompted.

“Oh, yeah. Merry Christmas!”

“Was there anything else?” he said, pointedly.

“Um…Merry Christmas?”

A little kid in the front row, maybe eight or nine, said, out loud, “Last year’s Santa was a lot taller.”

“And fatter,” said the kid next to him.

Now the old Bead-Counter was getting flustered. “Have the children all been GOOD this year?” he asked.

“Merry Christmas!” I said. I could tell he wanted me to say something else, but for the life of me, I didn’t know what. And I couldn’t stop saying “Merry Christmas,” either. It was like being on the Ferris Wheel at Coney Island. It’s fun until you get up to the top, and then you get all woozy, and then you come down, but then you go right back up again.

I could feel my face getting red, and I was two seconds away from tearing these false riggings off, when Seamus and Duffy appeared behind me and said, “Okay, kids, who wants a present from Santa?”

The children all made shuffling motions and began filing dutifully up the stairs to receive their hand outs. Every time I handed the kids their present, I said, “Merry Christmas,” and after a while, the kids were saying it, too. Some of them said it before I said it, and some of them said it at the same time I said it, and some of them just chuckled as they snatched their ill-gotten loot out of my hands. None of them said thank you. A few of them tried to start a ruckus by pulling on my beard, or telling me I wasn’t the real Santa. I threatened that kid with a beating and Father Gilligan pulled him aside when he started crying. The fellows were looking at me like I’d done something wrong, but it wasn’t my fault that the kid couldn’t be civil, was it?

Eventually, we got the presents distributed, and Seamus and Duffy were throwing Tammany Hall buttons and hats out at the kids. Father Gilligan held his hands up for quiet and I took the cue and said, “And so, children, let this be a lesson to ya. Be good and kind and Santa will bring you stuff. But act up and cause a fuss and Santa may just hand you a beating! Merry Christmas!”

Father Gilligan’s mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out. Duffy and Seamus were nowhere to be found. The kids were all looking at me, suspicious-like. What a bunch of ungrateful savages. All dressed up in their orphan clothes, looking at me like I was some sort of monster. Who brought them presents? Me, that’s who.

Finally, Gilligan found his voice. “Let’s thank Santa, children,” he said in that prompting way that grown-ups talk to kids. The little savages started clapping, feebly. I heard that one kid in the front say, “Short and dumb. Some Santa Claus.” I started for him, but Father Gilligan pushed me back into the choir room.

“I’ve an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you change into your regular clothes, and then we’ll introduce you to the children so they will know who you really are? I think…that would explain a lot,” he said.

“Fine by me, Father,” I said. I was tired of playing Santa, anyway.

Gilligan hurried back out into the chapel, and I looked around for my clothes only to remember that I didn’t bring any spare duds with me. Resigned to my fate, I sat down in on a piano stool and took off the hat and beard so I could catch a breeze. Then I heard an eruption the likes of which nearly knocked me off my stool. The kids were going nuts.

I went to the door and opened it a crack. Sure enough, there was Duffy, standing in front of a tiger cage that just barely enclosed Tammy, the official mascot of Tammany Hall. She was just a cub when they got her, maybe a dozen years ago. They took her to all of the rallies and political fund-raisers, and she got pretty used to crowds of people. But that was then. Now she was older, and a lot crankier. But they still kept wheeling her out for public events. They just made sure she was well fed, first.

Well, Duffy was standing there, telling the children all about Tammy, and what kind of tiger she was, and how much she ate, and stuff like that. And, get this, the kids were eating it up! Some days, it doesn’t pay to be me.

Duffy was explaining that Tammy wasn’t feeling too well, but if the kids wanted a closer look, they could form a line and each child could come stand by him and that way they could see Tammy real good. Those kids got into line like they were being horse-whipped, each one pushing and poking someone else, jockeying for position. I watched as, one by one, they approached the spot where Duffy was, turned pale, and then quickly walked away. But they seemed to like it, too. Maybe that’s what was missing in my Santa act; an element of danger.

I was mulling over the prospects of who someone like Santa Claus could fight when I noticed a small girl, one of the little smart arses who questioned my authenticity, was staring at the tiger with a strange little smile on her face. She stepped closer to the cage, and Duffy, thinking she was fleeing the scene, motioned for the next kid to come up. But she didn’t turn and go the way the rest of the children. Instead, she spun and headed for the back of the cage, on the opposite side.

Tammy’s tail was sticking out of the cage bars, flicking to and fro, lazily. She stood there, apart from the rest of the group, staring at it like she was in a trance. “He’s not sick,” she finally pronounced. “He just wants to play.” And so saying, she reached out and grabbed Tammy’s tail with both hands and pulled like she was fishing for marlin.

A few things happened all at once. Gilligan, finally seeing where his young charge was, screamed “No, Mary Alice!” Then Duffy, who saw what Gilligan saw, said a word you’re not supposed to say in church. Tammy, who was just minding her own business, roared and kicked both of her legs backward and pretty much shattered the cage door. The children, upon hearing the roar and the crash, screamed bloody murder as a group, and damned if that didn’t really upset Tammy, who wasn’t used to such goings on. She gave a little jump, and then the top of the cage sorta buckled, and the next thing you know, there was a tiger loose in the church.

Tammy leapt out of the ruined cage and landed in a full stretch that looked an awful lot like she was fixin’ to pounce on the little girl who’d done the tail pulling. Father Gilligan was hollering bloody murder, trying to get Mary Alice to run to the edge of the platform whilst the rest of the kids ran like hell for the doors in the back of the chapel. Mary Alice, in fact, was the only thing in the room not moving. She stood there, eyes locked on Tammy. I could see the muscles in the big cat’s back legs bunching up.

“Aw, hell,” I said, and bolted out of the door onto the stage. I had enough time for one really stupid thing to do, and so just as Tammy’s back legs left the ground, I grabbed her tail with both hands and jerked her back down to the ground, away from the girl. As the cat yowled in pain, I skidded to a stop in front of Mary Alice and kicked her in the direction of Father Gillian. She howled too, but I had my eyes on Tammy and, strangely enough, she had hers on me.

“Santa Claus kicked my bottom!” Mary Alice bellowed. “I just wanted to pet the big kitty!”

That was too much for me. I whipped around and said, “Listen here, you little biscuit-grabbing…”

The children screamed again, and this time, I knew why. I spun back around, but Tammy was in mid-air. I tried to put my guard up, but my arms got tangled up in the floppy Santa suit, and by then, I felt all five hundred pounds of that mangy tiger slam me into the wooden floor like I was a paper doll. My hands were on her throat, holding her head away from my neck, but her front and back claws were just gutting the Santa suit, literally. Stuffing flew everywhere, and I dimly heard the children scream, “The cat’s killing Santa!” I’m still not sure if they were horrified or cheering the cat on. Either way, the padded suit was the only thing that saved my life.

I finally got a leg up under Tammy’s ribcage and kicked her off of me. She tumbled once and then righted herself with a snarl, and I knew I was in for the fight of my life.

“Come on, Tom!” shouted Father Gilligan.

“Get the kids outta here!” I yelled back. “If she’s tangling with me, then she can’t eat any of your little savages.”

“Tom, don’t be stupid!” yelled Seamus. “Duffy’s got a tranquilizer gun. He’s getting it right now!”

“You don’t be stupid!” I said. Tammy was coiling up for another leap at me. “She’s gonna kill us all before that dumb bastard gets back!”

And right then, Tammy pounced, but this time, I was ready for her. I dodged to the left, away from her, but I hadn’t counted on her reach. One set of claws raked across my ribs, and I felt the claret pouring forth, free and generous. The cuts didn’t even hurt, which scared me a little bit. They were razor sharp, and she didn’t even get a solid blow. However, the blow she got was enough to knock me down and she lunged for me. I gave her a mouthful of boot in return, and Tammy stripped it off my leg like a fat man eating chicken. In a second, she’d destroyed the boot, and I took that second to get back on my feet.

Tammy smelt the blood, and she regrouped, licking her lips. I was in trouble. She circled me, slowly, and I tried to keep facing her while holding my cuts together with one hand. That wasn’t going to work real well. One more leap and I was done for. So, I abandoned the defensive posture, which was never my style, anyway, and squared off. Tammy made a hissing sound in her throat. She gathered herself up on her haunches and launched at me like an orange striped cannonball.

I had my fists up and cocked, and I met her in mid-air with a swing that had every ounce of my beef behind it. My whole arm went numb, but I also felt and heard something crack and Tammy gave a most peculiar yowl and dropped to the ground. Damned if I didn’t break her jaw! She writhed and hissed, her back legs kicking out in her pain, and I felt a little sorry for her. I mean, she was just doing what came natural, after all. And would it have been so bad if she’d eaten a couple of the orphans?

Duffy and Seamus ran up around this time, and while Seamus dragged me off the stage and away from the cat, Duffy wept and howled bloody murder that he was gonna kill me. I stood up and told him to bring his lunch, and also that rifle, because he was gonna need it. Then the blood loss sorta got to me, along with all the beer I’d drunk, and I sorta passed out.

And that was pretty much that. They moved me to Father Gilligan’s office and I laid there, bleeding out, until the sawbones arrived and proceeded to stitch me back together again. Duffy and Seamus doped up the tiger and took her to the zoo, where they told them she’d never recover from the broken jaw, on account of the fact that she was pretty old. They put her down, and Duffy cried like a little girl. Naturally, Murphy blamed me for the whole thing, like it was my idea to introduce a tiger to a bunch of feckless orphans. He demanded that I pay for the tiger, and I told him to go pound salt up his ass and pay for my medical bills, instead. And by the way, the boot that Tammy stripped off my leg was the same boot that had my fifty bucks in it, so he owed me that, again. Murphy declined to reply. And that pretty much ended my association, if there ever really was one, with Tammany Hall. What Murphy did to me later, I’m sure had everything to do with me breaking his prize tiger. But that’s another story for another time.

Father Gilligan wrote some very nice things about me the following Sunday, and the whole church prayed for my speedy recovery. I sent him an autographed picture, and he replied by bringing around little Mary Alice, who was suddenly my biggest fan. I showed her my scars, and she showed me the scab on her knee she’d received when she tripped and fell, running out of the church. She thanked me, gave me a hug around the neck, and read to me the card that the kids made. It was a hand-drawn picture of Santa Claus holding a tiger over his head. I kept that in the bar, stuck in the corner of the big mirror, for years. I don’t know if it was a mistake or someone was trying to be clever, but underneath the little drawing on the front was the name, “Santa Tom Sharkey.”

The Iron-Clad Scrooge

2009-12-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

I was watching "A Christmas Carol" today, as performed by a bunch of church kids, ranging in age from 4 to 14 -- including my 13-year-old son, who, I have to disclose, was playing Scrooge -- and I was struck by how bullet-proof the narrative structure of this story is.

The setup is clean: Awful man does a couple awful things, and is presented with a warning. Then, the three spirits in three nights (or one night, as Scrooge discovers, as he awakes in time for Christmas) appear, moving the story from past to present to future. Then we arrive at redemption, and Tiny Tim is saved.

You can do almost anything to this story-- rewrite it, re-gender it, transpose it to any time period, animate it in 3-D or shoot it in black and white, play it for laughs or for pathos -- and if you stick to that structure, the story will work.

The audience, like the original Greeks at a Sophocles play, knows the plot. There are no twists, no surprises. To modern day westerners, the tale is better known than any bible story. And it's much more satisfying than the usual Christmas play material. The birth of baby Jesus -- the gathering of the animals, the shepherds, the wise men, and heavenly host -- is essentially static, the opposite of drama. It's why you can do everything you need to do with that story with those "living creche" enactments. But Scrooge's transformation from curmudgeon to Christmas-filled coot is satisfying.

The only thing we expect out of a new version of "A Christmas Carol" is to get to that ending, and along the way to be charmed by minor variations in the presentation, or to be won over by the performance of a Bill Murray or George C. Scott or, say, a gangly young man who looks a lot like you.

As a writer, I'm always on the lookout for these iron-clad structures, to either use them or play against them, in the same way an architect first learns how to build a sturdy house, before messing with the structure to attempt something like Fallingwater (There's another blog post to be written about how it is that some artistic masterpieces are on closer inspection leaky, hard to maintain, and way over budget -- yet are still undeniably masterpieces).

I'm interested to know what narrative structures my fellow Clockworkers most often make use of (the old buff and bluff? The Hail Murray? The Susquehanna Shuffle?) And then I will steal them. Because that's what this season is about, isn't it? The giving, the receiving, the re-gifting? That's the real blessing. Or as Tiny Tim says, Are you gonna finish that turkey leg?

The Clockwork Storybook Christmas Special

2009-12-20T04:47:00.001-08:00

I wouldn't normally take it upon myself to link to my blog here, but I'm announcing something rather grand. The members of Clockwork Storybook kindly agreed to help me write a cheesy 1960s Christmas Special guest-starring this august assemblage. Please pop along and see our joint efforts:

http://www.paulcornell.com/

In which you'll witness Bill Willingham's song about the Grinch to a Billy Joel tune; Chris Roberson falling down a chimney; and the terrible wrath of Marjorie Liu. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Christmas Has Begun

2009-12-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

As a general rule, we aren't going to make this a link blog -- you know, one of those blog's whose basic purpose is to provide links to various cool things to be found out in the wilds of the internet, even though there are admittedly many wonderful things to be found out there. But we have a specific purpose here at the Clockworks among which linking to other cool things has a very low priority. However, there is that thing some bright fellow mentioned once about a foolish consistency having something to do with hobgoblins. Not being a fan of hobgoblins, we don't want to exercise a consistency that wanders into the foolish end of the dial. With that said, I am going to direct your attention, via a link, to something pretty cool.

Christmas has finally and quite officially begun.

How do we know this? Because our very own, and very distinguished, Paul Cornell has started it over on his personal blog, by once again posting the first of his Twelve Blogs of Christmas. Apparently he does this annually, this year being no exception.

Beginning today, the 13th of December, and continuing on until the Night Before Christmas, Paul is posting a new and entertaining, and possibly enlightening, thing every day, each post having something to do with the holiday that is nigh.

Today's offering is a lovely prose story, featuring a famous Doctor some of you might recognize, and with whom Paul has had many a delightful past encounter. In the days to follow you might see some other interesting and surprising guests pop up to entertain you.

Christmas ends in the usual way, with a big flourish on the 25th. But it begins now.

Go here to join in.

And do please have a Merry Christmas.

Finding Character(s)

2009-12-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

I could be wrong, but let me take a wild guess and state outright that most writers are professional people-watchers. That's the case for me, anyway. Everywhere I go, I'm watching faces, reactions, interactions. It's not a conscious thing. I just do it.

One of the questions I get asked most is "How do you invent your characters?" Or, put another way, "What's your process for creating the men, women, children, and other non-humans who inhabit your books?"

My answer, truly, is that I don't know. I think of circumstances, the person comes to me, and the events of his or her life alters the perception. But, let me state again, I'm a people-watcher. I'm a people-watcher with a dash of empathy -- watching, trying to understand what's going on -- and even if ten minutes later I don't remember what I've seen, it's still in my head, jumbled around. Ending up eventually, I'm sure, on the page.

Take a look, for a moment, at the picture below. I took that just a couple weeks ago, while visiting the Forbidden City in Beijing. See that face? The expression in her eyes? The dot of blood on her tissue? Even her clothes, her jewelry. That's character. That's not an invention. That's real life.

And you want real life in your books, even if they're populated with unicorns and shape-shifters, or men who turn into wolves. You want the characters to be real -- so real they could walk right off the page (into the head of the reader).

Everyone has a different way of approaching character development and creation. Find the process that works for you. But, should you be feeling a bit stagnant, or at your wit's end, take a walk. Go to the mall, or grocery store; or better yet, any place you can sit and watch folks come and go. Look for old portraits on the internet (try Nat Love or these outlaws).

Stare into those eyes. Imagine what's going on. Build a world inside that heart.

Well.

2009-12-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

I'm flattered to be a part of this group, but also feel not a little like my name should be at the bottom of the list on the left, down in the steerage/"and puppet show" section.

I'll just have to work harder to prove I belong, I suppose.

To answer Mark's kind leading question...I'm actually between projects, which feels unnatural. The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes is done, more or less, and is being shopped to publishers. My pulp roleplaying game, Strange Tales of the Century, is done and is being gone over by the copyeditor and publisher. But I don't know when either of those will appear.

I've got one project I can't talk about, but it's only a probable project, not a definite one. I'll be doing a scholarly edition of the penny dreadful The Skeleton Horseman for Udolpho Press, but I don't have a firm date for that yet and haven't begun work on it. I've got this steampunk Boxer Rebellion roleplaying game I'd like to write, but I need to figure out how to write it. I've got a kid's book I'm itching to do, but I need an artist. And a publisher mentioned the possibility of a second edition of Fantastic Victoriana.

So I could have a very busy 2010 or...not.

And then there were 10...

2009-12-09T22:16:00.000-08:00

I want to welcome the esteemed and much loved Jess Nevins to the ranks of Clockwork Storybook. Jess is a good friend, an affable drinking companion, and a veritable River Thames of geek arcana. Chris first stumbled across his work annotating Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Like Chris does, he shares his discoveries, and soon we were big fans of Jess, too.

In the New Texas Weird Circle of authors, he quickly established his bona fides by being the guy in the room who knew the answer to even THAT question. And, unlike some of us, could actually be succinct, or failing that, interesting, when answering said question.

Jess, it's great to have you. Is there anything you've got on your plate that you can share with the Tickwits?

The Well of Words and What to Do With It

2009-12-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

I do not want to be thrown in a cauldron with the other oathbreakers. I have a feeling that the great One-Eyed god will be less than lenient with me if I reneg on my oath to write a post today. So here goes.

One of the things that confounds me sometimes is that I will, every few weeks or so, find that I simply have nothing in the well where the words usually are. Usually I can just drop the bucket into the well and pull up some words, no big deal. But sometimes the well is dry and I just have to wait for it to fill back up. If you're on a deadline, then I have to find other options. I look for puddles nearby that I can sop up, maybe try to squeeze some words from something else I wrote a while back and discarded.

Ideally, though, I have to wait for the words to pile up a bit before I can start going again. Now here's the question: what can you do to help fill the well with new words? When I can't write, I spend a lot of time reading, which seems to help a bit. It makes sense: some of the words in those books are bound to get shaken loose from the page and fall down into the well. But sometimes even reading seems too hard, too uninspiring. When I can't read, I'll watch a movie, preferably something that I've never seen, something that came out a long time ago and isn't part of the current zeitgeist; the words are always better if they've been aged a bit first. If I can't watch a movie, I'll watch TV. If I can't even watch TV, then I know I'm screwed. Then it just becomes a waiting game. Me and my blank computer screen. Me lying on the couch looking up at the ceiling. Me waiting.

But then, after that waiting, something finally clicks. It's never a conscious thing. Never a "I'm going to get up and write now, by Odin's beard!" Instead, an idea comes into the front of the mind. "What if..." and I get up and run to the keyboard. "What if... What if..." and the words are now spilling up out of the well unbidden.

It's an interesting cycle, and it seems to work for me. The downside, though, is that during the waiting part, I often have thoughts along the lines of, "My career is over." and "I will never have another good idea again, assuming I ever had any to begin with." These are feelings that I'd rather avoid entirely if at all possible.

So I put it to my fellow Clockworkers: what's your pattern? Do you ever end up in that waiting place? If so, do you have ways to get out of it? Do you have ways of avoiding it altogether? How do you keep regular bucketfuls of words coming out of the well?

The Cauldron Problem

2009-12-09T10:26:00.000-08:00

Now, I have to tell you that I'm a wee bit worried about one of my fellow Clockwork guys, that man being one Matthew Sturges Esq. You see, Matt was just about this time yesterday, expressing his bafflement and sorrow at the dearth of postings here on the ol' blog as of late. He railed at the slovenly habits of the new Clockworkers, who've hardly posted at all, except to (rather timidly) announce that they exist. And while I fully agree with Matt that the new folks better step up pretty damn quick, I understand that they are a humble lot, still sorting out their place in the grand Tick Tock world. It may take some time for them to feel at home enough here to wade in often and with the unbridled enthusiasm of us old hands.

And truth be told, I suspect Matt was also feeling more than a bit chagrined that he hasn't posted here too often of late.

So what did Matt do?

He boldly swore, by the grand and frosty Beard of Odin, that he would post something here on the blog today.

But he hasn't posted yet, has he? No, he hasn't. In fact he's already making excuses. "You see," says he, "there was this thing with the doorknob on my house. It just fell off and I had to get that fixed. But I'm no handyman, and fixing it took all day, so I don't think I can get to the blog thing today."

And I suspect, after making his promise yesterday, seeing that Chris Roberson had just posted something took quite of bit of the pressure off to post his own post.

But here's the thing, Matt. You swore on Odin's Beard. ON ODIN'S BEARD! Do you know what happens to oath breakers in the viking afterlife? They end up boiling for all time in a big black cauldron, while Garm and the other giant witch dogs come along from time to time and eat them alive. Always boiling, always eaten, but never fully devoured and always fully conscious the entire time.

You don't want that, Matt, do you?

For your own good, get your post on. Don't end up in the oathbreakers cauldron.

Pacing and Proportions

2009-12-08T07:01:00.000-08:00

Okay, this has been bugging me for months, and I'm hoping that someone here will know the answer.

Since late last year, I've been involved in a long ongoing reading project, reading the classic runs on all of the silver age Marvel Comics titles from start to finish. Early this year I finished reading Lee and Kirby's run on Fantastic Four, then moved on to Lee and Ditko's "Doctor Strange" stories and the Lee-Kirby and Steranko "Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD" stories from Strange Tales. Currently I'm approaching the end of the Lee-Kirby run on The Mighty Thor.

Throughout, whenever I'm reading something drawn (or at least laid-out) by Kirby in his silver age Marvel period, I'm perplexed by a strange bit of layout that he continually uses.

Since the earliest days of silver age Marvel, Kirby typically used a three-tier layout for the majority of the pages. In the early days, there would often be three panels per tier (a nine-panel grid), or even more.

Here's an example from Fantastic Four #1.

As the various series progressed, Kirby broke the stories down into fewer and fewer panels, while keeping the three-tier format as the standard page layout. The most panels you'd typically get on the page by that point was six, all of equal size on three tiers. Here's an example from Fantastic Four #61.

But eventually even six-panel-pages became somewhat rare, with the majority of the pages being five-panels, and almost all of the five-panel pages use that same three-tiered layout, with one of the tiers being a page-width panel (so it would be 2-1-1, 1-2-1, or 1-1-2). Here's an example from The Mighty Thor #136.

(Essentially Kirby was working out a visual syntax for his comics, structures that he could use again and again. When he moved over to DC a few years later, he perfected this to an art, with his "syntax" expanding to include the layout of entire issues, nearly always with two-page spreads on pages 2 and 3, four panel grids, etc. But that's a discussion for another time.)

Okay, so what bugs me about this? Well, note that I said "usually" and "typically." When there are three tiers on a page, Kirby virtually always laid them out so that they were all the same height, each taking up one third of the page from top to bottom.

But when he didn't use a three-tier layout, and instead used a two-tier layout? Then the top tier was virtually always bigger than the bottom.

And this wasn't a late development. He did it for years. Here's an example from Fantastic Four #1 again.

And again from Fantastic Four #61

And once more from The Mighty Thor #136.

As I've said, as time went on Kirby tended to break the story into fewer panels, and the nine-panel grids of the early days were rarely seen in later years. And these three examples certainly show that progression, from a six-panel grid, to a four-panel, to a two-panel. (I'm cheating just a little bit, as the Thor example above actually came out a few months before the later Fantastic Four, but that's just because I'm too lazy to keep hunting for other visual examples.) But look at those proportions from top to bottom. They're almost identical, over the course of five years or more.

So my problem is this: Why did Kirby nearly always use unequal tiers when dividing the page into two tiers, when he used equal tiers when dividing it into three? And why was it always the top tier that was the larger?

Somebody help me please, I've got to know!

I've Got My Christmas Feet On

2009-12-01T19:32:00.000-08:00

The Tick Tock Gang (that's us) has a private email list that we kibbitz on, and something Paul sent out today made me think of those Halcyion Days of Yore, when we were doing the online magazine, and every year we'd each contribute a Christmas story for the December issue. I loved doing that. It got me in a Christmas mood (even if my stories trended cynical) and it always made me focus in and think about what is most important to me at this time of year.

Of course, what probably set me on this mental train track was the watching of Robert Zemeckis' version of A Christmas Carol, probably still playing at a GigaPlex near you. Zemeckis chose to make the movie in CGI, and it's the same company/development group that he's been with since The Polar Express. Suffice to say, they have the process down pat by now, and the visuals are nothing short of stunning. Moreover, they are perfectly suited to capturing the magic of the story itself. Zemeckis lifted dialogue and imagry directly from Dickens' classic, which was another refreshing change of pace.

My father-in-law opined after seeing it that he reckoned A Christmas Carol was the most frequently filmed story, ever, and he rattled off for me several versions that I'd never seen or heard of. I was busy making my own list, and quickly came up with five versions that I could remember seeing in my lifetime. Maybe he has a point, at that. Moreover, the vast majority of the film and television versions all manage to stay true to the core of the story (Patrick Stewart's version a few years back was a noteworthy exception as they managed to get a lot more Dickens into the script). I'll give a pass to Scrooged because I love Bill Murray, but again, we see that the core message remains the same.

It's interesting to me that the story is full of magic and wonderment, and it's held up as THE parable for how to act at Christmastime (and of course, we are to take from the story that we should probably act like that all of the time, but hey, give me a break). Christmas, as a holiday, in fact, gets a pass from everyone who would otherwise have nothing to do with magic and mysteries and flying fat men and elves. We not only except it but we accept it as de rigeur; of course there's a Santa Claus, honey; yes, he knows if you've been bad or good; the elves load the sleigh and the reindeer fly. How else would he travel?

This post started in one direction and has gone in another, so I'll try to tie it up like so: for me, Christmas is about family. I like my family and I like getting together with them. We laugh and have a good time and in general really enjoy each other's company. I know that's not everyone's situation, but it's mine, and I'm really grateful for it. But I also like the other aspects of Christmas, too. I like that we're all a little nicer to each other. I like that we all think about things outside of our bubbles, and usually act on them, even if it's just donating a toy to Blue Santa. Christmas really does bring out the best in people.

And all of that stuff with the fat man and the flying sled is pretty cool, too.

Hi, My Name is Mark, and I'm Internet-Dependent

2009-11-20T17:48:00.000-08:00

What I love most about Google is not that I can, if asked, find pictures of the neighborhood where I lived briefly in Berkeley, Ca, but rather if I stray into the more powerful tools like Google books and Google scholar, I'll find all sorts of useful information tucked away in books and papers I would have never otherwise thought to peruse.

One of the best examples of this is my current Golden Age Boxer project. A quick Google of "Sailor Tom Sharkey" gives me nothing to work with that I don't already have (and may I just say, a pox on those websites who just glom onto other sources and present the same info over and over again ad nauseum). But if I type that name into Google Books, I start finding mentions of him in old, very out-of-print memoires of then-famous referees, or write-ups in collections of one sports writer's columns. I have found this type of information to be invaluable, since it was usually written during Sharkey's lifetime, and even as anecdote, it's a measure of how he was seen in society. Very, very cool.

Google Image, How I Love Thee

2009-11-20T15:01:00.001-08:00

Today I was working on something that required a bit of photo reference, in this case of the Montgomery Street BART Station in San Francisco. In pre-internet days, that would have required at least a trip to a library, or more than likely an actual journey to San Francisco with a camera in hand to take a few shots myself. Now, thanks to the magic of Google Image search, I turned up many images online, not just of the platform (both with and without trains), but the escalators leading up from the platform, the mezzanine, and several of the street level entrances. I was able to load the script up with links to exactly the shot that I had in mind, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

I mentioned this online, and Willingham asked how writers in pre-internet days were able to write, without having recourse to Google Image. And honestly, I didn't know the answer. It's gotten to the point that I can't imagine writing without having access to internet searches, not just for image reference but for research and data.

How about the rest of the Tick-Tock Gang? Have you become as dependent on the internets as Bill and I have?

A Few Random Notes of Possible Interest

2009-11-18T05:58:00.000-08:00

I'd like to mention just a few things before delving deep into the writing hole for a while. First of all, I'm bone tired of being behind on all of my deadlines, and remember fondly that (nearly) one whole year in Vermont when I was actually ahead on all of my deadlines. So I have decided to take a fairly radical step in correcting that.

Starting today (as soon as I finish this note, in fact) I'm going to embark on a 30 scripts in 30 days writing marathon. In the past I've been able to complete a single comic book script in a day, without killing myself. Now I'm going to see if I can do it for many days in a row.

Blame Matthew Sturges for this ridiculous stunt. He so inspired me with his 100k words in one month triumph that I simply had to try something comparable. It really was a triumph too, in every sense of the ancient tradition. Matt rode into Rome on a gilded chariot. He wore a crown of laurels, which he continues to wear every day while writing. He had an honored slave riding in the chariot with him, whispering in his ear: "Remember, all glory is fleeting."

I want that too. Especially the slave, because my house needs lots of cleaning and the yard is looking a bit ragged.

But take note that, although this is a silly stunt, it's not a contest or a competition. We've done writing contests to death in this blog and we aren't doing that any more -- not now that we've finally succeeded in recasting this blog into what I'd wanted it to be all along: a never-ending convention panel discussion about the art and craft and joys and horrors of the writing profession. So no one else among the Tick Tock Men and Woman will be joining in. In fact, they are forbidden to take part, or do anything but cheer or jeer (or comment) from the sidelines. So there.

And, in order not to derail the conversation here, I will not be posting updates here. I will do that via Twitter. So follow me there, if you are at all interested in keeping up. I imagine this sort of like the Jerry Lewis Telethon, where half of the fun of watching it each year was in watching Jerry slowly melt down as the event wore on. You can watch as my Twitter posts slowly get less cogent and more deranged over the coming month or so.

I say "month or so" rather than the precise 30 days because I have written in a few strategic days off into the schedule for this damned fool stunt -- for holidays and friendship maintenance and such. So really it's more of a 30 scripts before the new year thing, but that doesn't have the same sort of poetry in it, does it?

But on each actual work day I do plan on completing an entire comic script. That's the part that makes this a bit more than just a "I plan to work harder for a while" sort of event, which really has no pizazz at all.

Okay, on to other things.

The New York Times Holiday Gift Guide for Graphic Novels has come out, and out of the eleven books listed, two of them are Fables books. Yes, I am bragging. Yes, I know how unseemly it is to do so. But since the universe decided long ago that I don't get to be Jennifer Connelly's favored play toy, I need something to cling to. You can go here and see what I'm talking about.

I bought books.

I recently purchased our own Daryl Gregory's Pandemonium for the second time, because I lost the first one while I was only half-way through it. It worked out well though, because I was able to get Daryl to sign the second copy and he wrote a wonderful (and woefully undeserved) dedication to me in it, which was made doubly gracious when the story turned out to be so wonderful. I didn't see the twist coming, Daryl, but in hindsight it's the only way it could have happened. Lovely job.

I just picked up Never After, an anthology of fantasy stories by Laurell K Hamilton (who must be the designated heavy hitter, because her name appears about three times as large as any of the other authors), Yasmine Galenorn, Sharon Shinn and our very own Marjorie M Liu. I haven't read it yet, but I'm starting with Marjorie's tale, which is called The Tangleroot Palace. So I hope these stories don't have to be read in order.

I bought Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, by David Benedictus, who does a reasonable job of following the genius of AA Milne, and by Mark Burgess who illustrates the new book in the style of Earnest H Shepard. But I have one BIG complaint. The credits read: Decorations by Mark Burgess. Decorations? Seriously? Were you trying to be whimsical, or glib, or what? In point of fact, by designating these terrific illustrations as mere decorations, you were being dismissive and insulting. And I'm talking about insults in the ancient tradition, where spilled blood is needed to correct the matter, else the wonderful Clockwork mechanisms of the Heavens and the Earth will be forever after misaligned. How dare you assholes do that! Mark Burgess, if you need a second when you demand redress, I'm your man. I've many good blades, if swords are called for, and guns if it's to be pistols.

And to my everlasting shame and embarrassment, I bought Richard Castle's new book, Heat Wave. Yes that Richard Castle. It even has his picture on the back. As you will note by the material above, I am perfectly willing to go along with a good literary stunt. Judging solely by the first page, this story may not suck.

I'm off to start my first script in the marathon. I'll post here from time to time, but it's likely not to be too often. In the meantime, the other eight will have far too much to say to inform and enlighten you.

Hard to fly, easy to fall...

2009-11-15T06:18:00.000-08:00

I love what I do. But, occasionally, I fear that I will kill what I love.

I was cruising the web the other day, and found this blog entry about how and why businesses, even successful ones, fail. The five stages of decline pertain to almost any profession -- but as a writer, I found them particularly relevant.

STAGE 1: HUBRIS BORN OF SUCCESS

So, let's enter a fantasy world for a moment. Pretend your first book is a critical and commercial success -- you're at the top of the dog pile, and miracle upon miracle, your next book does just as well. And the third, too. You're, like, a genius. Right? You can't not write a gem. Easy breezy.

Uh-huh. Start sweating. Put your feet back on the ground, darlin'.

Look at it this way: You wouldn't expect Michael Phelps to keep winning Olympic gold medals without training. You wouldn't expect, at all, that he could spend a year on the couch eating nachos and jelly beans, and then dive back into the pool and break more world records. You'd call him a fool if he tried.

Don't let success, however you measure it, turn you into a fool. The work never ends. All that changes is how you approach the work -- whether you come to it with dedication, love, a little insanity -- or whether you treat it carelessly, as something you are entitled to and can coast through. You might be able to fake the goods for a while, but eventually you'll slip.

Heck, you might slip even if you write another gem, a masterpiece. Life happens. Sales fall. Readers find some other bright new star.

STAGE 2: UNDISCIPLINED PURSUIT OF MORE

Taste success, and you want more. Makes sense. The problem is when you allow the visceral rewards of success to become all that matters -- when the rush that comes from doing well matters more than the work itself.

Again, step back. As a writer, you must push your limits -- explore the edges of what you're capable of -- but be practical. Think. Plan. Practice. Be disciplined about your expansion. Quality matters more than quantity (excluding, for a moment, a discussion about the practical and monetary reasons for writers to create more than what they're always comfortable with).

STAGE 3: DENIAL OF RISK AND PERIL

This is what happens when the bad reviews start coming in, or your sales figures drop. I could add some other things to the list, but those are the two that kill most writers (figuratively, and literally). Now, in defense of authors, some of that is out of our control. Placement, covers, bad copy, bad marketing -- all kinds of things can affect sales. And reviews -- oh, man -- you can't anticipate what people will love and hate. You do your best, and you move on.

But let's also be practical. If your reviews are bad and numbers are dropping, you need to accept that maybe, just maybe, you're doing something wrong. Seriously, take a look. Some authors can't handle that kind of responsibility. They attack readers when reviews are bad, rather than stepping back and giving their books a good, hard, look. They blame publishers and booksellers when sales figures head down the drain (sometimes the blame is well-deserved) instead of asking themselves whether it's possible that maybe their book just isn't that good.

Are you slipping? Are you self-aware enough to notice? Are you humble enough to listen when people say that you need to work on your storytelling?

STAGE 4: GRASPING FOR SALVATION

At this point, you're no longer at the top of your field. You've slipped. And you're frightened. It's not too late to climb back up the ladder, but it's going to take hard work, and self-reflection.

Instead, you want a quick fix. So you do something crazy. With a writer, that could be anything. Maybe you change publishers, change genres -- but you do something radical that gets you all that attention you've been missing. Maybe it works. Maybe it works for only a short time. But either way, you're motivated by desperation, rather than cold calculation (there's a difference, I assure you).

STAGE 5: CAPITULATION TO IRRELEVANCE OR DEATH

Start thinking of a new pseudonym, friend. You've ruined the one you've got now.

The good thing is, if you've got some heart and courage left over, you can start again. You can always start again, no matter what you do with your life. As George Weinberg says, “Hope never abandons you; you abandon it.”

But don't let it get to that point, okay? A little self-awareness, humility, and common sense go a long way. As writers, we're called out on a long journey that will be full of ups and downs -- but how we approach our work (and our own selves) will determine whether we fall, merely stumble -- or fly.

Six Word Stories from the Tick Tock Men (and Woman)

2009-11-14T06:55:00.000-08:00

I want to respond to all of the posts below from those who've responded to my "What do we owe the readers?" question, because I've still got more to say about it, especially about the fact that so few weighed in on my following question, "What do we specifically not owe the readers?" which granted could be just a touch incendiary, depending on the responses, so I don't really blame the others for not jumping on that grenade.

But all of that will have to wait because it's time, as promised, for our six word stories, and here's what we found out: Six word stories are fun. Before this I thought comic book writing left no room for wasted words and run-on scenes, but I was wrong. Now I see that comics are positively fat with room for leisurely prose, for slow and deliberate character development, for almost glacial building of plot and tension. The six word story is where the really terse and bare bones writing is done these days.

But it seems even this isn't the acme of the short story. As you'll see below the new guy, Daryl, thought that was one word too many -- that the six worders contained too much room to ramble on. Or maybe he just thought he could show us up again. Regardless, we now present a selection of six word stories (and one five word story) for your enjoyment.

Chris Roberson

Librarian of Alexandria seeks overdue books.

Matthew Sturges

1) A stitch in time saves Lincoln.

2) We're all dead? Good. Let's eat.

3) The universe ended this morning. Again.

4) THIS virus, however, is totally safe.

5) I ate her brain. She reciprocated.

6) No, the aliens ARE the ocean!

7) Dad: fangs. Me: stake. Oedipus: schadenfreude.

Marc Andreyko

1) they married. he died. she's rich.

2) the asylum doors broke open. crap.

3) the diagnosis was bad. he partied.

4) satan: "So?" walter: "It's a deal."

Paul Cornell

"It's my vagina, my dear Watson."

Bill Williams

The ball bounced. I leapt. Score.

Daryl Gregory

"Daylight savings," Van Helsing answered.

Marjorie M Liu

1) I only have eggs for you.

2) Never date Amish vampires. No bite.

Mark Finn

1) Sports fisherman accidentally kills Moby Dick.

2) Slot machine of Dorian Gray malfunctions.

3) Sam Bowen becomes Godfather of Chinatown.

4) Clockwork Storybook expands. Publishing world contracts.

5) Disgruntled elf sleighs Santa. Christmas sucks.

6) Sex therapist's new hobby turns deadly.

7) Biographer rewrites his own life story.

8) Ambrosia unknowingly served at convenience store.

Bill Willingham

Traditional Horror: "What curse? I can't read hieroglyphs."

Modern Horror: Chop! Chop! Chop! Stab! Stab! Stab!

Fantasy: Dark Lord missing. Final battle postponed.

Sword and Sorcery: He came. He saw. He cleaved.

Traditional Romance: "It's not love. It's something more."

Modern Romance: "It's not love. It's something less."

Western: The outlaw drew first, but missed.

Mystery: The butler didn't do it. Yet.

Traditional Lit: Scoured the moors, but she'd departed.

Modern Lit: Suffering ennui, he ended the affair.

Science Fiction: Fleet never surfaced. Hyperspace is fickle.

Historical: Albinus stepped hesitant into the Rubicon.

War: Zulus attacked in waves. "Volley fire!"

Adventure: "One chance! See that rooftop? Jump!"

Children's: Itsy bitsy bug, needs a hug.

"New" Fiction from Finn

2009-11-13T16:35:00.000-08:00

Well, it's only new if you weren't around in the Halcyion days of Clockwork Storybook. But it's with great pleasure that I will direct new and old Tickwits alike to that wonderful website, Revolutionsf.com, where you will find an updated and expanded and revised version of the Condorks sequel, The Chance of a Lifetime. The novel will be serialized weekly, so you can read it as it appears or save up a few chapters and read them all at once.

For those of you who don't know about the Condorks, Larry, D.J., Burt and Turk, I will point you in the direction of the first novel, The Transformation of Larry Croft. And yes, both of these books are available for free on RevSF. Is this a great country, or what?

Trusting the Unconscious

2009-11-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about Chris's post below, about Eric Brown's Ten Tips for writers. In some of the other tips, Brown talks even more about the unconscious and how important it is to the writing process. So in coming up with a response, I started out thinking about how instinct and intentionality play into my own work.

I used to outline everything ferociously. Especially with my comics work, what with it being such a structured medium, I would panic if I didn't know exactly what was going to happen every step of the way. I understand the fear that Brown talks about: you worry that you're going to make a misstep, go off in the wrong direction, write yourself into a corner. These are all symptoms, though, of an underlying fear which is the fear that you don't have anything to say.

I find that as I spend more time writing, I spend less time staring at a blank screen. In fact, it almost never happens to me anymore. Part of this is planning, and the other part is overcoming that fear. The mistake that I made as a beginning writer was that I'd sit down in front of the computer having no idea what it was that I planned to write about. Just staring, waiting, praying for some inspiration to leap up and grab me. Or if I did have an idea, being afraid to leap into the fray and start writing it. I wrote as though every word was sacred, every press of the delete key an affront.

At some point in the process, you start to realize that stories are expensive, but words are cheap. What I mean by that is that you need to have some idea of what it is that you're doing before you sit down and start typing. But you don't need to know exactly what you're going to say. I'd think, "How do I start? How do I come up with the perfect opening sentence?" I don't think that anymore. Now I just plow on in. Grab the first sentence that comes to mind and go with it. If it doesn't work, so what? I can always start over, and I'll probably learn something in the process.

Nowadays, I work out the general layout for a story long before I sit down to write it. I ponder stories while I'm lying in bed waiting to go to sleep (which often takes me hours to do, insomniac that I am), in the car, in the shower, watching TV. I don't start typing until I know where I'm going. But--and this is an important but--I don't wait for every little piece of the puzzle to fall in place. You can spend your entire life doing research and plotting and planning and never write a single word: that's the fear working its magic.

So once I sit down, I've already spent a good deal of time working out where I'm going. But then I start typing, and often whatever it is I've planned goes out the window. Sometimes just a little, sometimes utterly. There's a kind of magic that happens when you have a direction and just start typing toward it. All sorts of little things start popping into place as your unconscious mind gets a hold on things. The more you put down on paper, the more it has to chew on. Things start to happen.

You'll often hear writers give that old chestnut that "the characters just took on a life of their own." It is, of course, nonsense. Characters are just ideas in your head, and they have no life of their own. What does happen, however, is that your unconscious mind is always back there making connections. And it's very good at emotions and personal relationships. Sometimes you'll have a scene in mind where character X wants something and character Y wants something else, and as you're writing it, you'll realize that what character X really wants is something completely different, and that character Y's reaction ought to be something else entirely. As the chain of cause and effect from writing to thinking to un-thinking goes around, all that new information stirs up new ideas. That, I think, is the magic of writing.

Sometimes I'll read something I've written and think, "That's just wrong." Something doesn't click; it doesn't feel right, and you can't put your finger on what it is. I think often these jarring disconnects come when your conscious mind has forced a story into a situation where it doesn't belong, and your unconscious mind, your instinct, is back there bleating wordlessly at you, telling you that it doesn't belong there. To me, the unconscious is a big mess of images and words and phrases and emotions that can't speak clearly; it can't speak up for itself. So when you sense that wrongness (or rightness, which happens sometimes, too) you have to really listen to it. Go back and examine what you've done, line by line. When does the screaming become the loudest? Is there some key sentence or bit of dialog that really gets it going?

Often you already know the answer, and you're afraid to admit it because fixing it would take so much effort. I recently had a situation in the novel where the character that I wanted to have in the book just didn't belong in it. I was trying to shoehorn her in because I liked the idea of her. But she created more problems than she solved. She was, ultimately, unnecessary. Every time I read a scene with her, I started to get bored. At the same time, there was another character who really needed to be there, but seemed kind of one-note and uninteresting. At one point, I found myself writing a scene for the unnecessary character, and when I went back to look at what I'd written, I realized that in two places, I'd typed the other character's name unintentionally. And there was the answer. I went back and excised the unnecessary character, blending her in with the character that needed to be there, and that feeling of wrongness completely vanished. I got rid of someone who didn't belong, and I fixed a character who was broken, all in one fell swoop. But I had to own up to the fact that what I was doing wasn't working, and I spent an entire day correcting that misstep. But boy was it worth it.

So, to put this in geek terms: plan carefully for your assault on the Death Star. But when you get there, don't be afraid to turn off your targeting computer and rely on the force.

And if your unconscious talks like Alec Guiness? Boy are you lucky.

Eric Brown's Ten Tips for Aspiring Writers

2009-11-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

Science fiction author Eric Brown has posted a set of ten (well, tenish) tips for writers on the blog for Solaris Books, and while in general it's a worthy list, the same sort of thing you'll often see established writers trot out for the neophytes, he says one thing in particular that I found interesting. It was second in his countdown.

2. Trust in the subconscious. Beginning writers are beset by fear. I was. I overcame the fear - i.e., the doubt that I had anything to say, the tools to say anything - by writing and writing and trusting in the subconscious. Write long enough and the old SC kicks in. Try it.

Check out the rest of Brown's list for the rest of his advice, but this one I thought might merit discussion. I know that I have often been rescued from some nettlesome plot point by ideas that bubbled up my from subconscious, or discovered at the eleventh hour that some part of my brain was working out the mechanics of a plot without me being consciously aware of it. I've set up mysteries without knowing the answer, only to discover that the obvious solution was in front of me all along, and more than that, I had been seeding clues as I went along.

I think that learning to trust your own instincts, or to rely on the unconscious parts of your brain while writing, is an important step in the development of any writer. What about the rest of the Tick-Tock Gang? Is this something that resonates with you?

My Veterans Day Post

2009-11-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

Some of you, while you were out and about today, might have noticed a small table, set with an odd selection of items, set out, usually in the entrance to a restaurant. I saw it today at the local Applebee's, which offers a free meal for all active duty and vets today, which I think is a very nice and generous gesture. Of course I came unprepared with my camera phone, or I would have snapped a picture of it.

It's called the Missing Man table, and each item at the table is there for a specific reason. Here's an explanation of what each item symbolizes:

The tablecloth is round, to show our everlasting concern for our missing men.

The plate is white, symbolizing the purity of their motives when answering the call of duty.

The single rose, displayed in a vase, reminds us of the life of each of the missing, and the loved ones and friends of these Americans who keep the faith, awaiting answers.

The vase is tied with a red ribbon, symbol of our continued determination to account for the missing.

A slice of lemon on the bread plate is to remind us of the bitter fate of those captured and missing in a foreign land.

A pinch of salt symbolizes the tears endured by those missing and their families who seek answers.

The glass is inverted, because they aren't here to share today's toast.

The chair is empty... they are missing.

What can I add to that, but my thanks to our veterans, those still missing, those who've paid the ultimate price, and those who were prepared to, who took their turn when it was their turn.

What do we owe the reader? A coherent plot, for one thing

2009-11-10T19:09:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking about what we owe, and what we don't, and I don't have a good answer yet. The other Clockworkers' posts strike me as well-reasoned. But I will say this, since Matt brought her up: JK Rowling may have kept some of her promises, but she broke a big one--that her plots would make a lick of sense. Instead, they make less sense the longer you think about them.

Voldemort: Here's the plan, Barty. You disguise yourself as Mad-Eye Moody for nine months, then sneak Harry's name into the goblet of fire, and then rig the contest in such a way that Harry is guaranteed to win.

Barty Crouch: What?

Voldemort: You see, the trophy is really a portkey! Ha ha! It will transport Harry outside the school, where my minions can subdue him and then use his blood to ensure the final phase of my resurrection.

Barty: Okay, but...

Voldemort: You dare to question me?!

Barty: Why don't I just, you know, hand him the portkey?

Voldemort: [Stares blankly]

Barty: I just walk up to him, hand it to him, and poof, he's teleported out of the school. We can do it tomorrow.

Voldemort: Barty. Barty. I'll overlook this because you're new. But you obviously have no idea how to be the FRICKIN' LORD OF DARKNESS, okay? That's MY job. Now drink the frickin' polyjuice potion, and I'll get back to you in June.

Now, this kind of sloppiness is not uncommon. How many breakneck adventures have your read, how many X-Files or Heroes episodes have you seen, how many comics have you inhaled that you enjoyed in the moment, but about 30 seconds after putting down the book or turning off the TV, you thought, Wait a minute...

Rowling particularly annoys me. Not just because her stories depend on some kind of attention-deficit disorder dream logic, but because she has sold so many books, and made so many children happy (including my own, and soon Matt's, I'm sure) that it's clear her readers don't care about the plot. They forgive her, or they don't notice, because they like hanging out with Harry for 800 pages. Which goes to show you: charm and wonder trump craft every time. Now: Would anyone like to discuss A.E. Van Vogt? Or the second drafts that PK Dick never wrote? No?

What We Owe Our Readers: My Caveat

2009-11-10T16:32:00.001-08:00

Having read over Chris and Matt's entries on the subject, I find that I agree in bulk with what they have said. Matt's notations about an ending summoned up all of the rage I felt at the end of the Sopranos, and the terrible disservice David Chase did to his viewers, and most importantly, himself. If, as he contended, he was disappointed with the American viewing public because everyone liked Tony Soprano, that was his own fault. And he should have taken his story back and had Tony killed, or put in jail, or something to show us that crime doesn't pay, or that sociopaths are bad, or whatever. I guarantee that, as potentially upset as some of his viewers may have been with a Tony Soprano assassination, everyone would have accepted it because it was a conclusion that was borne out of the narrative. I told you that to tell Matt this: Kelly Link did her ending better.

I wanted to add something to the big "Ditto, Guys" that I just laid down in the paragraph above. I think we also owe readers a point of view. I don't think every book has one, nor do I think every author does this, but in my own reading experience, the best authors, the books I most remembered, the ones that stick with you and become your favorite reads, all have a strongly dileneated point of view.

This need not be through the eyes of a character, either. All of Tom Robbins books are very obviously and intentionally written with the authorial point of view in the fore, so much so that I would contend a goodly number of his characters fall into the sock puppet category. Likewise, Stephen King, when he's good, has a strong point of view in his writing.

A number of the Texas Weird authors like Joe Lansdale, Howard Waldrop, and Neal Barrett, Jr., have very strong points of view; they are actually known for it. Sometimes it comes across as a sensibility in the writing. Usually it's the stuff that makes you look up from the book and shake your head and wonder how they ever thunk that up in the first place.

Donald Westlake, my favorite mystery writer, was very good at moving his point of view around from the main character to the supporting characters in ways that were significant and effortless all at once. Even though the vast majority of his work is set in the modern world, it's always a world that you have no idea about. His crime fiction is a dark and mean place. As a reader, it takes less than one chapter for Westlake to establish that you've gone through the looking glass.

This is not to say that I don't value narrative in a good story. But I read for two reasons: to educate myself or to entertain myself. I have found that the best reads do both at the same time. In non-fiction, it's always a bonus, as it makes what you are reading far more digestable. In fiction reading, the entertainment value usually comes in the form of the author's point of view.

What Do We Owe Readers?

2009-11-10T11:01:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about this "What do we owe readers?" business for a little while, and while I think Chris more or less summed up my feelings on the matter, I've got a bit to add.

I think we owe readers what we promise them. A story makes promises early and often and what we owe our readers is to follow through on those implied promises. And that's pretty much it.

The cover art makes a promise, as does the blurb on the dust jacket or the back of the book and whatever author quotes might be found. Hopefully whoever wrote the blurb was able to communicate the essential promise of the novel. We writers should pray that they do, because that text can return your book to the shelf before any reader ever even sees all those pretty words we wrote.

With any luck, the potential reader has made it past the cover unharmed, or has had the book recommended by a friend or a reviewer (who have already made promises to this reader over which you have no control whatsoever) and doesn't bother to inspect it. Then your reader goes and orders a latte and sits down to read the first few pages before she decides to buy it. (My reader is female and she orders a latte. I don't know who your readers are or what they order.) This is where our promises start.

From the very first sentence, our stories tells its readers about what kind of story it is, and what they ought to expect from it. Assuming the readers make it past the first few pages, they're going to expect that we deliver on those promises. And that, I think, is what we owe them.

Consider the opening of the first Harry Potter novel (which I happen to be reading to my daughters at the moment). In the first ten pages you get: a buffoonish family, a coterie of silly wizards, and a baby with murdered parents and a great destiny. What do these pages tell readers? They promise that this story is going to be a story about magic and wizards, that it is going to contain farce, and that in its pages, a boy will discover and confront his destiny.

Say what you like about the Harry Potter books, but one of the reasons these books are so satisfying is that they deliver exactly what they promise. Rowling has told her readers precisely what to expect from her story and then she follows through. Give me that and a character I can root for, and I'll let you get away with plot holes, narrative gaps, and pedestrian prose until the cows come home.

I'll quibble with Chris on one point--I don't think you owe the reader an ending. Well, let me be a bit more precise: you always get an ending (every story stops sooner or later), but you don't always get a conclusion. And I'd argue that you don't always owe one. If you promise the reader a conclusion, then you have to deliver one, but if you never make such a promise, then you don't.

Consider Kelly Link's magnificent story "Magic for Beginners." The story claims to be a description of an episode of a television show, which focuses primarily on the personal lives of a few teenagers who spend most of their time watching a television show of the same name. The story makes no implied promise of a payoff; it doesn't adhere to a traditional narrative structure. It instead wraps up its readers in its crafty mysteriousness, drives them out to into the woods blindfolded, dumps them there, and then drives off cackling. Readers at the end of this story are left to wander in those woods. The story has no conclusion; it just stops. But I'd argue that while it doesn't conclude, it ends at a beautiful moment. Kelly Link knows (my guess is that she knows it intuitively) when to stop, when not to explain, understanding that in the worlds she creates, to explain is often to ruin.

To further illustrate, let's look at a story that fails catastrophically to deliver on its promises. When I was a teenager, I read the first few volumes of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I loved 'em. He wrote four of them, waited for a long while, and then wrote three more. And at some point in the interim, he totally forgot what it was he was supposed to be doing.

The book opens with a stellar, simple premise. A gunslinger is chasing a man in black. We don't find out for a very long time why he's chasing him, and we don't care. But this is the central story that spans all seven volumes: the gunslinger chases the man in black in a world that has moved on. This world is connected to our world somehow. Fair enough. But in setting up this premise, King has made a huge promise: at some point, the gunslinger needs to catch this motherfucker. And guess what? He never does. After twenty years and seven books, the gunslinger fails and we're never told why.

That's pretty inexcusable. I read an interview in which King described the ending he provided. (And here, okay, I see that there's an exception to the notion that all stories end. The Dark Tower doesn't actually end at all. If you followed it to the last page, you know what I mean.) He claimed in this interview that his ending was the only possible conclusion. But this is madness. There was only one possible conclusion to this story and for reasons we may never guess, he deliberately chose not to provide it.

But there are other crimes here. Long about the sixth book, King goes off on an insane metafictional tangent in which King himself and his books appear in the narrative. I have no problem with metafiction. I love it and have indulged in it myself. The problem is that at no time in the first couple thousand pages of this massive story was there any hint given that metafiction was going to come into play. This was not in the contract. It's as bad as if you were reading a Sam Spade mystery and at the climax you discovered that the murder was committed by the Loch Ness Monster.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that The Dark Tower is a deeply unsatisfying story for the simple reason that it breaks all of its promises. Mr. King, sir, I fell in love with your story and then it broke my heart and pawned the engagement ring.

So that's my answer. What we owe the readers is what we promise the readers. No more, no less. Readers, like lovers, will forgive a great many sins as long as we remain faithful to them.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I can't remember if he catches the guy or not; it's all kind of a blur. Does anyone know? Either way, when he finally gets to the Dark Tower, it's a pretty big letdown.

I'm pretty sure Robert Louis Stevenson wasn't actually a psycho killer.

2009-11-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

Mark Finn asked the question here. And it's such a good question that I'm going to take a whack at it.

First of all, Mark, I was just going to say that I don't anticipate ever doing a story that would fit into the details of your question. I won't be writing any fictionalized and fantasticalized account of an historical figure. But then I recall I did exactly that when I wrote Robert Louis Stevenson into my second Beowulf novella (or was it a novelette? I keep forgetting the official divisions), even going so far as to make him the villain. That was the textbook definition of taking gross liberties with the facts. In that case I read the widely available details of RLS's life, found out when he was in America, when he might possibly have been wandering about in the old west, realized that I would have to fudge the dates by a month or two, to make it tie in with the rest of the book, and with malice aforethought went ahead and did it, changing what I needed to change to make the story work.

I think that's an entirely legitimate way to do it. Then again, once I was willing to take the arguably outrageous step of making RLS a villain -- for which there is absolutely zero supporting evidence -- rearranging some of the details of his actual timeline by a month or two didn't add much to my sins.

But I do sort of have a personal policy of setting the record straight in the afterward notes, when I do take such liberties. I call this the Bernard Cornwell rule, after the author of the wonderful (you need to read these) Sharpe's Novels, wherein he takes sometimes huge liberties with the facts and events of the Napoleonic Wars, so as to properly insert his fictional hero into every major battle, but then carefully explains the changes he made by providing an Historical Note at the end of each novel.

Another example: In Peter and Max I had to move the dates of Hamelin's main Pied Piper festival, in order to make the fictional timeline of the novel work. I had no trouble doing so, but I did mention it in the back-of-the-book material.

That's my personal rule, but I don't necessarily believe it should be a universal rule. I probably believe -- I say 'probably' because I haven't yet given the matter all that much thought before now -- that a writer of fiction should be free to take just about any liberty with the facts, the history, and the public record (not always the same things, but you already knew that) for the good of his story. It's called fiction for a reason. And, he should not be required or even expected to explain himself. Many are of the mind that a story should always stand on its own, not needing an explanation or apology at the end. I don't know that I absolutely subscribe to that notion, but I can absolutely see the sense of it.

I would encourage you to take any and all liberties with Tom Sharkey that you deem necessary to your tale. And I agree with Bill Williams that, if a Tom Sharkey biography ever is written, you're likely to be the one to do it, and thus will have plenty of opportunity to set the record straight.

Convention Fever

2009-11-09T08:57:00.001-08:00

I have plans to do some more writerly posts to follow up on some of the things that everyone else is talking about, but first I want to mention the two conventions that I've been to in the past two weeks.

First was the World Fantasy Convention, that was held over Halloween weekend (much to my girls' chagrin). I'd gone once before, about ten years ago, but that was a long time ago, and so much has changed since then that I'm discounting it and calling this my first World Fantasy. Chris Roberson had been building it up to me so much that I was expecting a combination of Valhalla and Disneyland. It wasn't quite that, since I spent a lot of time meeting new people, which can be very tiring for me, but it was a lot of fun. I got to spend time with Rani Graff, an editor from Israel, who is a fine fellow and always interesting to talk to. Also very much enjoyed spending time with Jess Nevins, who is way too knowledgeable about all of the things I wish I was knowledgeable about. Australian writer Liz Argall is always a lot of fun to talk to, though her obsession with the unique uses of gourds in Papua New Guinea is questionable. Jen Heddle, who's the editor of the upcoming anthology With Great Power..., featuring a number of Clockork types, was an absolute joy to talk to, as was Electric Velocipede editor John Klima.

And in his role as social hub and drinking companion, Roberson certainly excelled. He knows everyone there and they all know him, and so I could typically start a conversation with any stranger just by saying, "I'm a friend of Chris's," and their eyes would light up in recognition. His wife and partner Allison Baker was enormously encouraging and really seems to know her way around this thing.

All of these interactions were lovely, though I have to say the high point for me was when I got lost in downtown San Jose on Halloween night, wandering amongst huge crowds of people in costume, and found myself in a nearly deserted hookah bar discussin philosophy with a guy who (I'm pretty sure) was smoking something a little stronger than tobacco). All in all a wonderful (if tiring) occasion.

Next, the West Texas Comic-Con. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this one, since it's the first one they've done, and since it was in a small Texas city that I've never visited before, but I have to say that it was perhaps the best small regional con I've ever been to. Robert Mora from Star Comics spearheaded the thing, and he did a fantastic job. The guests were treated great, the fans came and stayed awhile and participated, and everything went off without a hitch. I probably signed more books in those eight hours than I have at any other convention--including some San Diego shows. Special thanks to Todd, Lance, and Ty for being such fine hosts, and to the guy who let me pose with the Cosmic Rod he handmade for his Jack Knight Starman costume. I'll definitely be back if they'll have me.

A great two weeks, but now it's really time I got back to work.

What Readers Are Owed

2009-11-09T06:12:00.001-08:00

A while back, Bill asked "What do we owe our readers?" I've been mulling that over in the days and weeks since, in and amongst going to conventions, playing video games (for work, honest!), and reading big stacks of comics.

I tried to think of the question from both sides, taking into account not only my expectations as a writer sitting down at the keyboard, but as a reader when picking up the work of another. And I think my answer can be summed up in one simple phrase. What do we owe our readers? "A good story."

That deserves a little unpacking. A good story, I think, is one that has an ending. And so writers owe their readers an ending. If you begin a story that can't be comfortably fit into one volume, fair enough, but writers should ask their readers to begin reading a story if they aren't ever going to provide the ending. Obviously, there are real-world complications that can get in the way, and some writers have the poor foresight to die before finishing their tales, but all things being equal I think that writers should finish what they start.

What else does "a good story" mean? Well, I think that varies a bit from reader to reader, but in general it means that there should be some point to what's going on, that stuff should go on, that there should be characters (hopefully interesting ones) in a setting doing stuff (or at least talking ab0ut doing stuff, or maybe just thinking about doing stuff). There should be some entertaining element to the story, on some level, and if the writer can manage to squeeze a little enlightenment in there, so much the better.

This "entertainment" and/or "enlightenment" business is something I've thought about a lot over the years, and which I may talk about again at some point. To cut to the chase, though, I've come to look at myself as an entertainer, primarily. Not every writer is the same, obviously, and there are those who put more value on enlightening their audience--teaching them something, or portraying some truth, however painful or difficult to hear--but as for me, I'm Sammy Davis, Jr. I'm a song-and-dance-man, and while I harbor ambitions of working in a bit of Truth in my fiction whenever possible, I know that if I have to choose only one or the other, I'm going with entertainment.

But my thoughts on the entertainment/enlightenment question aside, the fact is that I think that readers deserve a story that exists for a reason. That reason may be to entertain them for a short while, to thrill or amuse them. That reason may be to bring home some underlying truth about the human condition, or a glimpse into the lives of others that we wouldn't otherwise have gotten. But whether the story is pure entertainment or some kind of enlightenment tract, the important thing is that the story has to be for something. If a piece of writing neither entertains nor enlightens, then it might be stylistically accomplished, it might have all sorts of pretty bells and whistles, it might be a dandy-fine writing exercise, but it isn't a story. And readers are owed more than that.

Office of Shadow

2009-11-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

Over on my facebook page, I said nice things about Matt's new book. I finished it this weekend, so I might as well cross-post that note here. I'm a fan of short statements. I think I gave it five thumbs up.

"Matthew Sturges has pulled off a mean feat with his second novel. He has constructed a grounded and believable fantasy world and populated it with relatable characters. If his first novel, Midwinter was The Dirty Dozen with elves, then Office of Shadow is a Robert Ludlum style Cold War thriller with elves.

Powerful political figures fear the worst as a terrible ultimate weapon is used to destroy an Elven city. Knowing that their enemies will use the weapon again, Queen Regina Titiana orders the Office of Shadow to find and stop the weapon before it can be used again. The narrative follows Perrin Alt, Lord Silverdun from Midwinter as he gets drafted into service as a shadow in the Queen's service. He is aided by an ex-soldier nicknamed Ironfoot and the delightfully unhinged Sela.

The action moves right along and the ending satisfies. I hope he writes another."

.

On Historical Accuracy in Fictional Adventure

2009-11-08T17:31:00.000-08:00

For the past few days I have been actively plotting (some would call it "python wrestling") my Sailor Tom Sharkey Quasi-Historical Fantasy Romp. It's been a real challenge for me in that I have made the decision to be as historically accurate as possible and veer off into the Realm of the Weird when I have a blank spot on the map or a period of time unaccounted for.

Being so limited to the facts has been an issue, but not an insurmountable one. After all, if I don't know about this specific period of time for a Golden Age boxer, then chances are you don't either, and will follow me wherever I choose to take him. Were I writing a novel about, say, Abraham Lincoln, and I positioned him on the California coast in 1861, well, that wouldn't work at all because of what most fifth graders know about the Civil War.

Rather, what's been far more difficult for me is taking and utilizing the dates and facts that I do have access to. For example, boxing historians know that Tom Sharkey and Jim Jeffries toured the country with a vaudeville troupe in the 1920s doing re-inactments of their famous fights. What I also found out is that Sharkey appeared in several silent movies from 1925 to 1928. Interestingly, his first movie (as an actor) was a Clara Bow feature. How cool is that?

SIDEBAR: Finding this out was only a moment's worth of joy, in that now I have to go read something about Clara Bow in order to have Sharkey meet her. I've already got so much ancillary stuff in my head, on my computer, in three different notebooks, and now another biography added to the list. Rapture.

So, I've got a very organic life in Tom Sharkey on the California coast in his fifties, trading on his name and former glory, doing movies and going out with traveling shows to make ends meet. This probably happened many times , in between films, and as he ran out of dough or ran up a gambling debt. Were I writing a real biography of the man, this would be fascinating in the extreme, and the back and forth would be an exciting chapter or two as he meets all of these famous celebrities.

However, I'm writing a novel, and not only that, it's an adventure novel wherein I've chosen to follow a specific form (never mind what). I have a powerful urge to just set my adventure down in the midst of these little traffic cones so that it's seamless and perfect. Again, I'm not worried about the details. I'm intimately familiar with the Roaring 1920s, but for some reason, the idea that one day there will be a Tom Sharkey biography out in the world that bulldozes my novel fills me with dread and loathing.

So, I've been hammering at my plot, making modifications and trying to work out the structure of the project (yes, it's a project, and not just one book) so that it makes sense and is a complete thing. If I do this right, it'll leave the door open for more short stories as I see fit, but it will give me an epic architecture from which to hang those stories.

And forget it if I don't write down the skeleton. I can't do big projects any other way. I have to have at least the framework in the form of an outline up before I get started. I may deviate from the frame, or change it in mid-stream, but without those tracks laid down, I don't leave the station.

What about the rest of you?

It's true that cockroaches have eaten an awful lot of my best work.

2009-11-07T07:20:00.000-08:00

When Kurt Vonnegut died recently -- yes, 2007 is recent, because I'm getting old and the years are passing much quicker now -- many who loved him and his works passed around his list of eight writing rules. That's when I first became aware of them. They're pretty good rules. At least one of them surprised me -- I mean really surprised me. I thought I'd share them with you, with my own notes and commentary appended.

1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

I agree. Part of the unbreakable contract with the reader is that you won't waste his time. I would add that this includes an imperative to do away with all artsy fartsy writing, designed primarily to show off your amazing skills and talents. Quit trying to impress your reader and tell him a story instead. I suspect this is also a call to get to the point. Quit beating around the bush.

2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I mostly agree, but the challenge of this statement does tempt me to one day see if I can write a compelling story wherein every single character is a despicable fiend with hellish goals. I'm trying to think if there are any good examples of that -- not just the antihero, but one with no redeeming qualities at all.

3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

I think this pretty much speaks for itself. Some variation of this rule shows up in every writer's advice on how to create "real" believable characters.

4) Every sentence should do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

I think I mostly agree. But what about describing the setting? Can that be done totally within the context of revealing character or advancing the plot? Aren't you in danger of unduly burdening otherwise tight and concise sentences if the character and action parts also have to get bits of setting and physical description injected into them from time to time?

5) Start as close to the end as possible.

I agree and this is one of those bits of advice, obvious in hindsight, that freed up my own writing considerably. A lot of dead weight got lifted with this rule.

6) Be as sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they're made of.

I agree wholeheartedly. This is the rule that frustrates me most, because it is so self evident, and yet it causes the most problems with a modern readership that is more and more composed of angry "we're constantly looking for ways to take offense" indignation groups. If your characters are black, or gay, or female, or any other sort that can be shoehorned into some category for which there is a vocal, self-elected and angry group of protectors, you're going to take some flak for what you do with them. Do mean things to someone of theirs and they will howl bloody murder. The thing you must constantly remind yourself is that these folks are few, no matter how loud they may be, they do not speak for the majority of whatever group they pretend to represent, and you must ignore them and soldier on, continuing to do nasty things to those characters, because doing otherwise is boring, which is among the worst offenses a writer can commit. You need to remind yourself that you will never hear from the thoughtful, reasonable reader, the way you always will hear from the indignation groups. But they are out there, and they are your true audience.

7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

This rule is most often expressed as "write for yourself" or "write to please yourself." I mostly agree with this. I tend to write for a very small, very select group, but not just a single person. I write to please and make sense to the other folks in the Clockwork group. But the entire purpose of forming the group was to be surrounded by those of like minds and similar tastes. Writing simply to please myself smacks just a bit too much of narcissism, and I know I'll never hold my own feet to the fire for my self-indulgences the way the other Clockworkers will. They will not let me get away with any self-indulgent crap.

8) Give your readers as much information as possible, as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This was the one rule that really opened my eyes. Before this I was all about keeping the suspense, which usually translated into keeping the readers in the dark, until The Big Reveal! Now I see that the big reveal was much overrated. I now think of my relationship to the reader(s) as leading a group of trusted comrades on a commando mission. If I die en route, they should be able to carry on and blow up the Bridge without me (and, guys, please make sure you shoot Alec Guinness, if for no other reason than to see if he comes back all ghostly and reveals you've been hot for your own sister for the last two movies).

Gordon Gekko Was Right

2009-11-06T17:02:00.000-08:00

The first issue of Chris Roberson's Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love came out two days ago and has been garnering some well-earned critical attention since then. So just an hour or so ago Chris was gracious enough to publicly thank me, via the (possibly insidious -- we'll see) vehicle of Twitter for "handing (him) a comics career." His words, not mine.

But of course, as generous a notion as it was, Chris was dead wrong. No one gets handed a comics career. As tiny as the comic book business is, compared to the TV or movie business for example, it's a popular one, so much so in fact that, for every available job in comics, there are literally hundreds of people who would love to have it, and a large percentage of those who'd trample their dear old granny to get it. Our racket is tough and competitive. If you can't cut it, there's someone ready to step into your shoes right now. As a result there's zero room in it to hand out a single career as an act of charity. (We won't even get to the fallacious notion that I'd somehow have some ability to give them out, if such gifts were possible.)

Chris got his comics career because he can do the job. Period. In fact, I've known for years what a rare few knew: that he was one of the most qualified persons for a career writing comic books that wasn't currently doing so -- an oversight recently corrected. The truth is, Chris came into this business years later than he deserved. Anyone familiar with his far too numerous prose novels and short stories could see that he was built for writing funnybooks.

So then, what did I do? Not much. When some work became available and I was asked for my opinion on who we should get to do it, Chris was first on a list of a very few names that I rattled off.

When I pointed this out, Chris, ever the gentleman, thanked me again, for at least "holding the door open" at the opportune time, and that's a pretty fair assessment. I'll cop to that.

Now why bring this up at all? Is the purpose of this post to demonstrate what a fine fellow I am?

Not at all. Since the oft-stated purpose of this blog is to discuss the art and craft and business of our profession, I think there's a larger observation to be made here, one worth pointing out.

Basically, I told you all of that to tell you this:

Helping a fellow storyteller get work in the same field, provided he's a gifted one (and he is), isn't an act of charity, or generosity, or selflessness, or largess of any kind. It's a quite premeditated and entirely selfish act of self-preservation -- it's long range career planning.

Follow me on this: In order to make a career telling stories (and after a quarter century in the business that's all I'm qualified for anymore) one has to have (meaning cultivate) a large and dedicated readership. Now here's the thing. Readers read. They read a lot. They read much more and much faster than any one writer (even Geoff Johns -- hi, Geoff) could ever produce material to sate their hunger. Therefore it's in my interest to do everything I can to keep the field stuffed with good writers, who want to write the same or similar sorts of stories I produce, so that my readers are kept happy, so that they'll still be around to read what I produce, when I am able to produce it. Like any species of critter, readers who aren't kept fed will wander off to other fields.

Those who know me well know that I am a dedicated capitalist, with all that implies. I could have rewritten Gordon Gekko's famous "Greed is good" speech so that it made sense -- so that anyone could see that capitalism, done right (meaning hands off, you pinko do-gooders) is not only a compassionate system, it's the only compassionate system. So believe me when I say that I wouldn't go out of my way to create competition for myself. But giving other writers a chance to create stories in the same genres and mediums I do isn't creating competition, it's growing the overall readership, which redounds to the benefit of all. Ever hear the economics proverb, "A rising tide lifts all boats?" It's true. It does. And it applies in this case.

So, finally, here's the lesson:

If you want to make it long term as a writer in the funnybook business (and I suspect this applies to other mediums, but I won't pretend to be an expert in other mediums), you need to write terrific stories, you need to have a herculean work ethic so that you can actually produce said terrific stories on time, and then do it again and again, you will need to be able to resign yourself to the fact that you will never ever again be "off duty" (which I understand actually occurs in other careers, but it's too glorious a dream for me to quite believe it), and when the chance occurs, you need to be ready to give the next guy a hand through the door, for your own sake -- because he may just be the guy that keeps enough dedicated readers hanging around that you can have occasional access to them.

So there. Greed really is good.

From Clockwork Storybook With Love

2009-11-03T16:15:00.000-08:00

If you're in Austin Texas tomorrow, or can get to Austin Texas tomorrow, you should make plans to go to Austin Books, which is just about the best funnybook store that a funnybook store can be. And from 4 to 6 pm tomorrow you can have our own Chris Roberson sign your just-released first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love.

Unless you've been living under the densest of rocks, then you know Cinderella is the spy to beat all spies, keeping Fabletown safe from destruction and discovery for longer than any other spy has been alive. Bond could learn a lot from this blonde. Matt Helm would be a babe adrift in her realm. She could stagger the Sandbaggers. Now see Cindy in her greatest adventure to date.

Go. Do. See. Get.

The Excitement of Comics

2009-11-03T12:01:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I've got a new comic coming out. Black Widow: Deadly Origin is its name, and you can listen to me going on about it here. I'm very proud of it, and I'm tremendously excited for Wednesday (Thursday in the UK), when the title shows up in comic shops. This is hardly an unknown condition for my fellow Clockworkers, all of whom are, as we speak, I'm sure, groggily trying to piece together some fragmentary memories of the World Fantasy Convention in order to frame a report or two. (Seriously, communication from the floor was limited this weekend. I waited in vain for a photo or two from the bar, with glasses being chinked and people falling out of windows, but... nothing! Did an EMP bomb of some kind go off? Or would said reports just read 'bar, bar, awards, bar?') Many of them are comic book writers, and Chris Roberson has the first issue of his own Cinderella title out tomorrow too. Indeed, that's his first issue of any series, so he must feel extra excited.

That Wednesday feeling, where one hangs around I Fanboy (I hope they note I've dropped the comma I kept putting in their name, like they were the fan equivalent of I, Claudius), Millarworld and other forums, waiting for the first reviews to wander in, when one can pop into a comic shop, and actually see it sitting there on the shelf (right next to the Avengers titles, hmm, that's good) is just one of the many lovely things about writing comics. There's that ability one has to edit dialogue right up until the last moment, to make speech suit expression, or add a joke (like some of John the Skrull's lines) that I only thought of very late. There's the joy of getting new pages of artwork in one's inbox. And the realisation that, if you're vocal in your praise at that point, gradually inkers and colourists will join in sending you their work, because they all love what they're doing too. There's that feeling, a little like playing Test Cricket, that one is joining in with an enterprise (the Marvel Universe or the records of the MCC) that stretches back a long way, that you're comparing your efforts to those of the greats. (And being found wanting, obviously, but maybe one day...) There's working with a really small team, really fast, to create serial fiction under pressure, sometimes working from a whole plot, sometimes leaping hopefully from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, with none of the many layers of approval required of the broadcast media. And there's the audience: immediate, terrifying, roaring, non-impartial pop music reaction.

I think the feeling is quite an ancient one, akin to what Conan Doyle and Dickens and all the other writers of serials for magazines must have felt. I think if Apple do make comics available on ITunes for their Tablet (if such a thing is forthcoming) then that feeling may become a genuinely populist movement again. At any rate, I really love it, and I hope some of that comes over in the comics. Dears, do any of the rest of you want to talk about your special feelings towards this medium? Cheers.

Why I Hate Daryl Gregory

2009-11-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

When I met Daryl Gregory in person, the first thing I told him was that I'd read the first five pages of his novel Pandemonium, and then hurled the novel (quite forcefully) across my office, knocking over a carefully constructed tower of yet-to-be-read comic books in the process.

Why the anger? What had Daryl done to arouse my ire? It's simple: he came up with an idea that was so good that I was furious I hadn't had it first.

There is probably no greater compliment to another writer than this sort of hatred. When we read the works of our literary heroes, we're able to marvel at their great ideas from afar. We don't see ourselves on the same plane as the Alan Moores or the Gene Wolfes or the Robert Heinleins of the world, so when we come across a bit of cleverness in their works, we take it as a given; we don't expect ourselves to reach such heights (at least not at this point in our careers--give me a few years and I'll teach that Michael Swanwick a thing or two about good ideas).

But when one of your peers does it, it's different. It sets off the "I personally have no idea what I am doing and am, in actuality, a fraud" receptor in your brain. Most writers I've talked to have this receptor, and I suspect Daryl has it himself.

But it's not just Daryl. Oh, no. Come to think of it, I've probably had a twinge of it from most of the writers that I know. Our very own Clockwork vets Bill Williams and Mark Finn have done this before as well. Bill with his hard-boiled temple employees, and Mark with his Sailor Tom Sharkey tales. What neither of them knows is that the rest of us have had conversations where we (jokingly, I promise it was jokingly...mostly) considered killing them and stealing their ideas for themselves. We haven't had this conversation about Daryl yet, but give us time.

Well, I decided to go ahead and finish reading Pandemonium on the flight back from the World Fantasy Convention. Having met him in person, I found that I didn't have the option of disliking him as a person while still enjoying his book, which can sometimes be a salve: "Well, sure that guy's books are good, but he's a total douche in person." No, there was nothing for it but to sit down and finish the thing.

And it's just as good as its premise might lead you to believe. He doesn't lose the thread of the plot or fail to stick the landing or drop important threads or commit any of the grievous errors that might have made it one of those "great idea, but..." books. I didn't even see the twist coming until it was practically thrown in my lap. I am sad to say that Pandemonium is a really good book, and I can't help but recommend it to all and sundry.

Bastard.

I've gotten the impression that the other Clockwork folks feel the same about Daryl and his damn book, and we don't want to inflate his ego too much, so what authors do the rest of us hate? And are there better, healthier ways to deal with our peers' artistic successes?

Live from The Drafting Table

2009-11-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

Folks, if you have ever wanted to see my giant talking head, today is your lucky day. The short piece of video I have been working on for a bit now is finally finished. You can see it here.

In the video, I talk about the work on the upcoming ANGEL comic series as well as how we put together a page of the SideChicks webcomic.

Day Thirty One- Sturges Wins!

2009-10-31T20:35:00.000-07:00

Took a few days off from the accounting since the horse race is over. Watched DEXTER Season 3 which was fabulous. Watched THE INVISIBLES which never quite gelled.

Will Dixon has a nice post about twists and turns and reversals in storytelling and it puts it in context with a look at the first act of the very first episode of the BUFFY TV series.

Most of the work this month was on the OGN which is about half done unless I get a few more good ideas along the way.

Final total for October- 33645 words.

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It turns out I did know the way to...

2009-10-31T07:59:00.000-07:00

I'm in mostly sunny San Jose at the World Fantasy Convention, along with fellow Clockworkers Daryl Gregory, Chris Roberson and Matthew Sturges. About two to three hundred other writers, publishers and editors of genre fiction are here as well, making for days of interesting conversation and inspirational idea generation (including more than a healthy dose of "I wish I'd thought of that").

I notice the other five Clockwork men and women are disturbingly quiet in our absence, owing I'm quite certain to a knuckling down on various deadlines, due to a profound work ethic (which is a hallmark of your average Ticky Tocker), and having nothing whatsoever to do with a secret coup in the making.

When I return, festooned with a vasty supply of new books and enough Beowulf brand mead (guaranteed to unleash your inner viking) to see me through my year of not traveling, I intend to talk about a few things here, including why perhaps you should be able to tell a book from its cover, even though the old adage promises you can't, the myth of cultural appropriation, the imaginary credentialed, the lure of multi volume epic fantasy, and other things of interest (to me at least).

And, as Marc Andreyko and I embark on our super secret funnybook project, maybe it would be fun to keep a journal on the process and base mechanics of co-writing the thing, as it's done, all the while revealing next to nothing about the story's actual content.

See you in a few days.

Never (Ever) After

2009-10-27T09:42:00.001-07:00

"My songs are my children, and I expect them to support me when I'm old."
-- Dolly Parton

That was quick. I have a new release today: NEVER AFTER, an anthology with authors Laurell K. Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, and Sharon Shinn. "Feminist Fairytales" are the theme of the book; feminist, in the sense that the princesses are the ones who save the day and take charge of their destinies. My contribution is called The Tangleroot Palace, and it's about a girl named Sally who escapes betrothal to a warlord by seeking out a magical forest, and the queen who sleeps within. Of course, nothing goes exactly as planned.

I wrote that story while in Shanghai, sitting at a Starbucks, displaced from my favorite seat by the window because I needed to plug in my laptop and the only place to do that was beside the condiment island -- you know, the one with the napkins and sugar, and plastic utensils, and people splashing coffee on themselves and then looking at you like it's your fault. Not exactly a fortress of solitude. But I've written a lot of books -- or partials of those books -- in that particular Starbucks. Some places just make the brain spark.

In other news, if you'd like to see me a little more animated (ha, ha) check out this interview over at Second Life. I talk writing.

A Jealous Man

2009-10-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

My name is Daryl (hi, Daryl), and I'm a jealous man.

This week I'm jealous of full-time writers, including most of these clockwork people. Like Paul Cornell, who just talked about how he's home in a room getting insane amounts of work done, though perhaps while going quietly insane (that's how the British do it, I'm told). And Chris, writer and publisher, has got more irons in the fire than, well, some metaphor involving irons and fire. Bill Willingham's announced that he's not going to travel anymore this year after World Fantasy because he needs to get even more work done than he's already pumped out.

And this month, Matt Sturges wrote 100,000 words. That's insane. (Matt, if you're not full-time, you have some explaining to do.)

All these people are in multiple media -- comics, games, prose, television, and for all I know, puppet shows. I don't think that's accidental. In fact, it may be required for full-time-hood.

Me, I write short stories, and I recently broke into novels. But even sticking to old fashioned prose, I'm slow. I could no more write 100K in a month than grow an extra hand from my stomach. Though that might help me type. It could at least hold my coffee cup.

Worse, I spend most of my day at my day job. (That's why they call it that.) It's a white collar job, not one of those awful yet colorful endeavors that manly old-time writers used to put on their resume. You know, like stevedore, or pig strangler. The point is (and I have a point), is that even though that job pays our mortgage and will help our children go to college, I still resent it when I'm aching to get more writing done.

I know that most writers are part-timers. And most of the ones I know who are full-time have a spouse who's bringing home the health insurance. Probably every clockworker had to work out deals with friends and family to get by.

But they're full-time now, and I'm not. So maybe that's my purpose here at Clockwork Storybook. The new guy who will represent the jealous and the discontent, the writers struggling to get enough time behind the keyboard after the hours at work, the kids' band concerts, and the dog's vet appointments. I'll be asking them how they got to where they are, and what the hell I can do to get there. (Unfortunately, I suspect I already know the answer: Dude, keep writing. Then write some more.)

And Marjorie? Who's a lawyer as well as a hugely productive writer? You've got some explaining to do too.

My but she's been in bed a long time.

2009-10-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

I'm off to the World Fantasy Convention in sunny San Jose (yes, I know the way), along with about half of the Clockworkers. While we're gone there are finally enough other Tick Tock types to keep the conversation going here in our absence. Basically I see this as one long cool convention panel, on a variety of subjects, with some really interesting panelists. Sure, we're mostly speaking to each other, which is the point of this site, but in public and on the record, and you get to follow along and ask questions as they occur to you.

And another thing you can do while some of us are gone is to take a look at this far too cool Joao Ruas cover for the upcoming 94th issue of Fables.

94 issues! Wow. I'm beginning to think this series might have legs. And this is by far my favorite of Joao's covers so far. It's Rose Red of course, for the first issue of the five issue story arc titled Rose Red. I suspect you can figure out from the cover and from the title which Fables character this arc centers around.

In other news, this is my last convention commitment of the year, before taking an entire year off from travel and appearances to concentrate on getting more writing done. Following this, I have one store signing, in Boulder Colorado, in early November, and then nada until 2011. Don't get me wrong. I love traveling and meeting the readers of my various stories. I basically do what I do in a room all by myself, so it's good to be reminded from time to time that these things are reaching an audience. But I'm too far behind right now on every deadline, and have not one but two novels in the works that need tending. So, one year of reclusion.

And if I really dig my heels in and stick to my guns, I may be able to keep my year of reclusion down to two or three trips.

On the Lack of Flying Cars in Modern Times, an open response to Bill's open letter

2009-10-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Bill posted a lament about the lack of flying cars and jetpacks in modern times over on Big Hollywood, in the form of an open letter to me. I complain about not having a flying car and a jetpack all the time (I also complain about not having a functioning lightsaber, but that's another matter entirely. I appended the following response in the comments, which I'll quote here in full.

*******

Since Bill addressed his flying car lament to me, I figured I owed him a response.

(For those who don't know me personally--which would likely be just about everyone--a quick note about where to place me on the political spectrum. I am what was termed by my father's generation a "pinko." Worse yet, I'm a secular humanist pinko. But I'm also a huge geek, and got every one of Bill's references at the beginning of the piece.)

Oh, how I wish I had a flying car and a jetpack. And I share a lot of Bill's concerns about the "nanny state" aspects of modern culture, but I'm not as quick to dismiss it entirely as pernicious. (As a parent of a five year old daughter, the question of how much danger to allow her to put herself in is a constant struggle for me. I don't want to see her hurt unnecessarily, but at the same time I don't want her to grow up cossetted and cushioned against *all* of life's ill. Check out Michael Chabon's excellent essay "Manhood for Amateurs" for some thoughts on this: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22891)

The problem with flying cars as I see it, though, isn't so much the danger it poses to the driver, but the danger it poses to everyone *else*.

If an idiot kid gets behind the wheel of a car and barrels down my street at far above the posted speed limit, it might have disastrous, even tragic, effects. He could hit another car, he could hit a pedestrian, could get in a wreck and kill and injure not only himself but other innocents. Sure, he has to be licensed to drive, but there is still risk to the rest of us, but as a society it's a risk that we've come to accept as a trade-off for the convenience and luxury of the single-passenger car.

The problem with the flying car is that the danger posed by unsafe and inexperienced operators is magnified many times over. A thoughtless kid behind the wheel of a ground car could hit a pedestrian, or rear-end a school bus, or any number of other ills, but he's not likely to destroy my house and everyone in it. An inexperienced "driver" of a flying car? A heavy projectile filled with inflammable propellant hitting my roof at high speeds might just do that. Until flying cars can be made safe (there's that pernicious word again) not only to the people onboard but to all of the people on the *ground*, I'm content to live without them.

Jet packs, now, are another matter, or at least pose a less significant threat to all of us on the ground. I think the problem *there* is that the physics just don't seem to work. Like everyone in my generation, I grew up with images of the Rocket Belt, and figured that I'd be able to soar through the air in one *long* before I reached my current age. But the problem with things like the Rocket Belt is that that are (a) prohibitively expensive to operate, and (b) extremely limited in application. I could buy one now, if I had the means, and go out in the desert and fly in a small circle for a minute or two before the tiny fuel tank was exhausted, but that doesn't put me any closer to strapping on a jetpack and flying from here down to the corner store. Even if I could make it there, I wouldn't have the fuel to make it *back*.

Who knows? Maybe some genius will come along and figure out how to rewrite the gravitational constant on the fly, and we all can float safely through the clouds with flight rings like the Legion of Super-Heroes used to hand out to its members. (Heck, they even gave the *rejects* flying belts.) And if we should happen to collide with the ground, we'd do no more damage than a mylar helium balloon blown over from the birthday part of the kid next door. But in the meantime, while still worrying about the possibly pernicious ills of the nanny state, I'm happy that there's someone out there keeping big hunks of flaming metal death from plummeting out of the skies onto my head.

Babel Clash: Things Midwinter Taught Me

2009-10-26T07:23:00.000-07:00

My final post over at Babel Clash is in response to the moderator's question about what aspiring writers can learn from my novel Midwinter.

I pondered this question all weekend. What lessons could Midwinter teach aspiring writers? The self-flagellating artist in me immediately responds, “Nothing. It’s a mediocre book at best; derivative, not descriptive enough, goes off on a far-too-wide tangent about 2/3 through. If aspiring writers were to learn anything from it, it would only be from the massive pile of mistakes I made in it.”
Of course, this is hyperbole. Sure there are things I could have done better, but all in all, I think Midwinter works just fine. Great literature? Probably not. A solid fantasy read? Sure. Certainly a journeyman first novel. Even downright clever in places.
Maybe this is what it can teach you. Unless you are one of those supremely confident individuals who never second-guesses him/herself, and also happens to be brilliant, you are very likely to have misgivings about any story you embark upon. The bigger the story, the more moving parts, the more trepidation you are likely to experience. You will probably spend some time in the midst of writing it (somewhere just past the halfway point seems to be my personal favorite spot) thinking that it is the worst novel ever written, and any smart person would abandon it now. Other days (maybe the next day), you might find yourself thinking that you are a genius who can do no wrong.

Hello

2009-10-26T00:20:00.000-07:00

I'm Paul Cornell, I write stuff. I'm currently adjusting to the fact that my wife is commuting to theological college (where she's training to be a vicar), so I see her for a few minutes in the very early morning ('gah,' I say to her as she hands me a cup of tea) and for long enough to watch one telefantasy show over dinner every evening. But the Jedi powers she's learning make up for my writerly loneliness. A mate popped over to fix my computer the other day, and he was a little freaked out by how attentive to him I was. 'You're people!' I said. 'Living, breathing, people!' 'Yes,' he replied, backing towards the door. 'I *am* people.'

So we're trying to sell the house to move nearer the college. It's a brilliant place, a home we've really loved, but nobody's buying. Which may be because we painted the lounge red and orange. (It really works in autumn. But only then. As we discovered in our first Spring.) I'm also waiting to hear about a rather lovely game-changing thing (and waiting, and waiting, until, this being the life of a freelancer, someone will say 'Oh, what, that thing? Not going to happen, we heard months ago. You should have said'). And about another thing, which has been in a horribly stressful sort of limbo for a while now. And there are several more things in a holding pattern, any of which could either make or break my life and career.

Basically, the only way things could get more pressurised is if we tried for a baby. 'What the hell,' I said to my wife. But she just shook her head. She does the wisdom for the both of us.

So in the face of all that, I've reacted in two different ways: I've getting insane amounts of work done. Neurotically. Because that will shore me up against all horror. And indeed, you know, actually does pay off. And I've also opted to support a stress-related skin disease which needed a home. (No, it's just on my forearms, I'm not turning into... some sort of... monster.)

Yes, I probably do need a holiday, but we just had one of those, and came home early because we were sitting there feeling that we should be doing stuff. And I kept falling out of boats.

So, anyway, what I meant to say was: I'm really glad to be part of this gang. I'm glad the name of the group has nothing to do with Steampunk. That was the deal breaker for me. And my future posts won't be as whiny.

What do we owe, as writers, to an audience? To open these curtains behind me, and show them something, and then close them again. And that's what I've just done. And that's it.

Day Twenty Five- What Was I Drinking?

2009-10-25T21:34:00.001-07:00

Struggled with a case of Newcastle poisoning from an excellent Halloween party last night. Camera-phone photos here. Managed to write a few comic pages with football on in the background once my head returned to its normal (giant) size.

Watched a couple of episodes of The Invisibles. Fun premise, but I can see why it was cancelled.

After playing the Washington Generals from the beginning of the month on, I have decided to run out the game and try to get the OGN a little farther along.

11 comic pages--> 5500 words. Running total 29,145 words.

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Hi, there.

2009-10-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

Small confession, right off the bat: I'm not a joiner. If there was a herd, I'd be the stray little pony wandering up the mountain, accidentally (on purpose) getting away from everyone else. Sure, there are wolves (as well as cliffs and Bigfoot), but there are slaughterhouses, too. Ain't no safety in numbers.

But I do make exceptions, most humbly, and with great appreciation; such as when I received the surprising invitation to join this lovely crew of writers. I don't know what kind of craziness inspired putting my name in the hat, but I'm glad to be here.

So, with that said, Bill Willingham has asked what we, as writers, owe our readers.

My readers and I have got a trust thing going on between us. No one's ever said that, of course, but when folks read your work, they're taking a leap of faith. Someone's out there, opening a book, saying, "Do right by me. Take me somewhere else."

And I try. I don't always succeed, but I try.

I owe readers to be true to myself, to write the stories I want to write, and to tell the best stories I possibly can. I owe my readers respect, because I appreciate it more than I can say when people take the time to read something I've written (whether they like the tale or not).

But, as much as I love my readers, I owe them nothing else.

I'm a hypocrite, of course. As a reader, who has lived in agony for the next book of my favorite author, who drools over excerpts that end too soon and joins newsletters and reads blogs for updates, and who daydreams about worlds that exist only on paper (or, now, those various e-reader devices), I demand satisfaction. I want adventure, and thrills, and just the right outcome. I want, at the end of a book, to feel bigger than my body (even out of body), ten feet tall and ready to take on the world. I want, simply, to have an experience. A good time. A great time.

That's what I search for. And I can only hope that's what I give. Not every time, but sometimes, for someone.

Anyway, that's it for now. This little pony is going to gallop her way up a mountain of deadlines and battle those wolves for words.

Thanks for having me here.

Stuff I Said

2009-10-25T12:36:00.001-07:00

Recently I was a Guest of Honor at Tel Aviv's Icon (as in Israel Convention, natch') where, among other things, I was interviewed by some nice and thoughtful people. The results of that interview, excised of all of my "uhs" and other verbal tics, making me seem much more cogent than I really am, is now posted and available.

You can find it here.

Also, in the spirit of properly welcoming our new members, I'll throw out a general question which each of them (of us, new and old) can tackle in a post of their very own. This is something I'd been meaning to address for some time, and now seems just the right time. So, what is it you owe your readers? What, if anything, do you absolutely not owe your readers?

Update: Okay, so I'm looking over the posted interview and I see that the language barrier was in fine form over there. Some things got spelled oddly, due to imperfect pronunciation on my part, and some things seemed to just get lost in the kerfuffle. I do know that Laura is Rob's wife's name in The Dick Van Dyke Show. I have no idea how they heard that as Barbara. Reforger, the yearly war games during the Cold War, should be capitalized. Civic Comics was actually Pacific Comics. And so on. Most folks in Israel speak English. In fact I didn't meet a one who didn't have some English, but it wasn't always their first tongue. And sometimes I do tend to talk faster than my mouth can keep up. And some things are clearly just transcription typos.

It was pretty cool though being sponsored in part by the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. They wouldn't provide me Marine Guards though -- cheapskates.

Yet another update: I have an open letter to fellow Clockworkian Chris Roberson posted on the wonderfully cranky right wing Big Hollywood site, which you can find here. You may need to scroll down a bit, depending on when you read this. It's about the future, but not the one we think we were promised.

hello!

2009-10-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

so, i am one of the newbie members of CS and couldn't be happier (or more honored). my name is Marc Andreyko, author of stuff - including the critically-acclaimed and oft-cancelled Manhunter, Torso (w/ some guy named Bendis), The Lost, Casefiles: Sam and Twitch, Streets of Gotham, Blade, Wolverine, Dr. Strange, blah, blah, blah... and the usual TV/movie nonsense (i'm an Angelino). Oh, and how could i forget?, an upcoming book for Dynamite co-authored by me and Bill Willingham!!!!!

likes: dirty jokes, blu-rays, john waters, john irving, sushi, and Chris Evans sans shirt.

dislikes: overhyping, avocados, blood sausage, "my super sweet sixteen", and bipolar stalkers.

thanks for having me!

I've Offically Stopped Counting

2009-10-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I topped 100,000 words for the month of October. That's more than I really hoped for, and a nice conversation piece. I'll probably keep track of the final total just for my own amusement, but I won't continue to bore anyone with the daily details. I'll be finishing the manuscript of the novel today, mission accomplished, thanks for playing along!

Now I yield this silliness to the ongoing discussion of writerly things, in which hopefully our new members will soon join.

Onward!

More Minutes on the Clock

2009-10-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

We're about to start expanding the conversation by expanding the ranks of Clockwork Storybook. The five of us recently put our noggins together and selected four new professional writers to invite into our group. So far two of them have accepted and you'll be meeting them a bit later on in the week. Until then we're going to keep mum on the new Tick Tockers, except to mention that this is no longer an all boys club.

With these new perspectives wading in, the conversation about all things writing can only get better. Being an egotistical bunch, we hope that in the not too distant future Clockwork Storybook will be the premiere writing group of our generation, in our chosen genres. Once upon a time The Inklings gave us both JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. That's a pretty high bar they've set. Won't it be fun trying to reach similar heights?

Update: Now all four candidates have accepted membership in Clockwork Storybook, and we are absolutely tickled to have them in. You should be seeing some "Let me introduce myself" posts from them soon.

I'm ALIVE! ALIVE! HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!

2009-10-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

Folks, I apologize for my lengthy absence here, but I've got a couple of really good, credible excuses. However, the "hardware-ethernet-DSL line" excuse isn't really interesting, nor particularly zippy, so we'll just go to the other RGCE: I've been researching.

Part of the fun of being in a writer's group with Chris Roberson is getting to watch him start a new project by building a veritable igloo out of reference books, and then watch him walk out of that igloo to go construct a yurt instead. And even as we mock him for knowing, for example, far more about the Soviet Space Program than was ever necessary, one cannot help but mirror his efforts when dipping into a historical context for story background. At least, I can't.

Having sent out several Sailor Tom Sharkey stories to a variety of publishers and outlets, only to have them come back with some really flattering rejections, I am instead turning the whole concept into a speculative historical novel. Think Robert E. Howard's Steve Costigan stories as if they were written by George MacDonald Fraser.

So, I've been building my own tree-fort out of books as I chase down various anecdotes about Tom Sharkey (yeah, he was a real person), the twilight of Vaudeville, circus life in the theater, Tammany Hall, Jim Jeffries, Wyatt Earp, Dundalk, Ireland, and a half dozen other subjects. Now, all of this won't go into the same book. But because I'm telling the series backwards, I need to tip these tidbits in for later.

This is probably the most ambitious thing I've ever attempted. Well, in non-fiction, anyway. I've been writing some small pieces to help me anchor story points in place. I'll post some of them later.

Days 20-22

2009-10-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

Time lost to sickness, other work, apathy, and ninjas. Lots of busy work and revising and other foofaraw, plus one day, Wednesday, where I accomplished nothing whatsoever.

Day 20: ZERO WORDS
Day 21: ZERO WORDS
Day 22: 10 comic book pages -> 5,000 words.

Total so far: 97,315.

Wouldn't you like to be a Hero too? (sung to the tune of...)

2009-10-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

For those of you familiar with, and perhaps playing the City of Heroes online game, you might be interested in this. The boys and girls who make the game hired me to create an adventure for it, as part of their new Guest Author program.

My adventure is called Quest for Magic and you can find it by going into one of the city's Architect centers -- where you get to build and play in your own adventures. Find the list where you get to shop for possible adventures you might want to play and the Guest Authors adventures will be at the top. I'm the second one down, just after the merely amazing Scott Kurtz of PVP fame.

And watch for other interesting adventures to come, from some of the best of the fantasy and science fiction and comic book creators, including the other members of Clockwork Storybook. In the coming month look for new adventures from Mark Finn, Bill Williams, Chris Roberson, and maybe even Matt Sturges, if he learns to mind.

I'll be introducing some of the City of Heroes guys to some of the writing folks out at the World Fantasy Convention next week, and who knows what famous author might create some lovely and interesting characters you can pound the living crap out of for your entertainment and enjoyment?

Day Twenty Two- Buffy-tastic

2009-10-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

I missed Buffy-mania the first time around and I've been watching the series as part of the ongoing work for IDW. Tonight I finally finished Season 4 which I think started strong and fizzled a bit in the end. The highlight of the season is of course Spike. He should have gotten his own show.

I'm doing a webcomic creators weekend for a local comic shop with Scott Kurtz and a few others in December and I was encouraged to bring merchandise to sell. So far, SideChicks essentially exists as a series of zeroes and ones. Think I'm going to make T-shirts. After two years, seems like a good idea. Saw some of Thom's art for the shirts and that man is a genius.

Saw a rough cut of the music video I worked on and it looks amazing. Looking forward to the Premier Party next month.

1 comic page--> 500 words.

Daily total 500 words. Running total 23,645 words.

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Six Words to Immortality

2009-10-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

Go to this place right now. You'll thank me later.

For those of you still with us, who need more coaxing before leaving the safety and comfort of the Clockwork Blog, let me tell you what you'll find there. Wired Online Magazine took an inspiration from Hemingway's shortest story -- "For sale: baby shoes. Never worn." -- to invite 33 other known luminaries in our current literary firmament to do likewise and write their perfect six-word story.

The results are at least interesting, mostly good, and in some cases both wonderful and diabolical. My favorites are the contributions from Joss Whedon, Alan Moore, Eileen Gunn, and Orson Scott Card.

But best of all is that most of them are indeed complete short stories. When Matt and I did our hundred-word stories, to introduce the new Jack of Fables funnybook series, I thought that was a nearly impossible exercise in concision. What a luxury of abundance we had!

A six word story allows no room at all to waste one. Every word must carry more weight than Atlas in all of his tribulations could never have imagined. How cool is that?

Most of us here at the Clockwork Blog are crushed under deadlines and then taking off to San Jose next week for the World Fantasy Con. But once we return, each of us, along with a carefully selected list of invited authors, are going to present our best take on the six word story right here. It's too glorious (and painful) an idea to pass up.

In the meantime go see what 33 other writers came up with.

Which are your favorites?

Babel Clash: Lunatics Running the Asylum

2009-10-22T08:00:00.001-07:00

Today's post over at Babel Clash is a love poem to the Venture Brothers, and the new high-octane storytelling that pop culture has given us:

I think that we are living in a Golden Age of popular culture.
At least, for the me and the other members of my generation, we are. I imagine that older generations must think us insane. All of the things that allured us as children, the onslaught of trash culture and science fiction and fantasy and horror have all come home to roost in the current generation of writers; the obsessive quirks of very smart people reeling in a torrent of inputs both sublime and ridiculous, sacred and profane. And now the ones who were raised on all that stuff–everything from H.R. Puff-n-Stuff to Stanley Kubrick to Kurt Vonnegut to Spielberg to Star Wars to Star Trek:whatever to Conan the Barbarian to Raiders of the Lost Ark–are now the ones producing it. We grew up imbibing the distiled essence of twentieth-century pop culture, created by people who themselves had been nursed on Burroughs and Lovecraft and Poe and Superman comics and Tex Avery and Universal monster movies. The things that our generation has assembled as a result are the purest distillation yet, managing to cram a pressure-cooker of allusive play and substance together in a bright mishmash that defies tradition and genre while embracing and celebrating it at the same time.

Full post here.

Filling in the Gaps

2009-10-22T06:24:00.001-07:00

I've been swamped with reading this week, and haven't had time to get back to Arthur Conan Doyle and the Power Rangers yet, but hopefully I'll have a chance in the next few days.

In the meantime, a quick note. Once I get the Conan Doyle-Power Rangers thing out of the way, I plan to talk a bit about my thoughts on the use of "types" in fiction. Not archetypes or stereotypes, but recognizable character types. The Victorian Consulting Detective, the Grim Pulp Avenger, the Suave Cold War Superspy. That kind of thing. It's something I'm a little obsessed with, and something about which I've thought a lot.

This morning, I came across something that resonated quite a bit with my thinking about types. One of the illustration blogs I follow is that of Annie Wu, an illustrator/writer and student. She's working on a big senior thesis at the moment, and posted a little tease from it to her flickr stream last night. She describes the project as being "a series of 18x24 posters for films that don't exist." She appears to be drawing inspiration (and imagery) from things like Kevin Dart's Yuki 7 (which I've raved about before), the "Escape to the House of Mummies Part II" episode of The Venture Bros (which opened with a recap to a Part I that never existed), and the Grindhouse trailers.

It was how Wu summed up her reasons for the project that really struck me.

Basically, it's all just an excuse for me to design ridiculous characters and make up as many crazy standalone scenes as I want without consequences. The stories only live and breathe within these posters, and the viewer fills in the (massive) gaps with their own imagination.

I just want to put a metaphorical pin in that, to come back to later. "The stories only live and breathe within these posters, and the viewer fills in the (massive) gaps with their own imagination." Make a note of it for later reference.

Okay, that's it for now. I'm back to reading. You nice people go check out the art of Annie Wu, why don't you?

Day Twenty One- Story Splinters in my Eye

2009-10-21T21:34:00.001-07:00

I made the weekly trip to the comic shop and today when asked, I explained the problem I have with certain titles in a 'family' of books. I read some comics because I like the character and some because I like the writer or artist or whatever. SuperGirl has been the only one of the Superman Family titles that I have stuck with for reasons that are leaving me rapidly. The last three issues are a perfect example of a way to lose readers. SuperGirl #44 is part 3 of a story concluded in another title. SuperGirl #45 is part of a story started in another title and SuperGirl #46 is the conclusion of that same story. By tying every title in to the current meta-story arc, the work discriminates against casual readers and makes the comic maddeningly insular even to long time readers like me.

Reading a title like SuperGirl is like reading every fourth chapter of a novel. It is an unsatisfying experience and it does not bear repeating.

Did some more inking today, finishing a page and even managed a little writing work on the OGN. The inking is for the next SideChicks story and I am far enough ahead to consider releasing a digital version of the work ahead of its release as a webcomic. But that just feels wrong, like the release of the Spider-Woman motion comics on Hulu before the release of the print comics.

If I can take a minute, Matt Sturges' new novel Office of Shadow is excellent and you should all rush out and pre-order it here. It is a great read.

3 comic page--> 1500 words.

Daily total 1500 words. Running total 23,145 words.

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Some might claim it was the Wampa Ice Creature who saved the day, but I dispute that.

2009-10-21T16:03:00.000-07:00

While I was recently the Guest of Honor at Icon (Israeli Con) in Tel Aviv I had to spend a considerable amount of time on a stage in front of audience -- not one of my favorite places to be. On one of those nights I took questions from the audience, which included a few from my host on stage (Hi, Ziv) about the time I saved Superman.

Yes, once I saved Superman and it's a modestly funny story. Intrepid Israeli fantasy and science fiction publisher Rani Graff provided a recording of the "How I saved Superman" story. You can listen to it here, if you like.

It's a better story if you have your Wampa Ice Creature Star Wars action figure handy.

Babel Clash: Mainstream Space Squids

2009-10-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

Today's Babel Clash post, more rumination on the "mainstream acceptance" question, even though Gene Wolfe already said what needed saying.

Over at SF Signal, there’s a “Mind Meld” discussion about the perennial bugaboo of “mainstream approval” for literary science fiction and fantasy. Does literary genre fiction have the respect of the mainstream? Does it need such respect?

The predominant response seems to be “no.” And whenever this topic comes up, the response invariably seems to be “no.” No, we don’t need it, don’t care, doesn’t matter, and here’s a list of a thousand reasons why (my favorite of all the responses is Gene Wolfe’s, who sums it up more eloquently than I could). I can’t think of an instance where a genre writer has responded, “I sure do crave the respect and admiration of the mainstream! Without such respect, all is for nought!”

Read the full post here.

Cooling My Feet in the Sidestream

2009-10-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

There is a very good discussion about mainstream respectability for the fantasy and science fiction genres, over at SF Signal, which you can find here.

There's a lot there to absorb, but I agree that the mainstream doesn't actually exist anymore. Bookstores don't treat our genres as mainstream, keeping them in the so called SF and Fantasy Ghetto. But I seem to notice, from the perspective of far too many years, that the ghetto has grown considerably. Those SF and Fantasy shelves are generally much larger than they used to be, and often placed better in the stores.

At the same time, fantasy and science fiction books such as Harry Potter, Twilight, and a host of others continue to be racked in other sections, perhaps so that they won't get the 'taint' of SF and Fantasy on them. But that taint is dying, my friends. It's barely noticeable any more.

And that's all beside the point, since I don't yield the power and authority to bookstores to make that decision. They may be clinging to an outdated idea of what constitutes the mainstream, while SF and Fantasy stories dominate all other media.

Is there a mainstream, and if so, does SF and Fantasy finally, at long last, occupy a respected place in it? Who cares? Figuring out such things is what the fussy fiddlers do to occupy their time, the same way they worry about what is Art and what the themes of any given book might be. It doesn't matter. Whether we occupy a metaphorical sidestream or the metaphorical mainstream, telling good stories to a readership matters, and though I can't say we're doing as well as we can in that regard, we aren't doing so bad either.

At least I'm not doing so bad. I've made a living (sometimes a good one, sometimes not as good) telling stories for 25 plus years. A majority of my closest friends do the same. To quote Snoopy (from the musical, don't you know): Not bad. Not bad at all.

Day Twenty- glamourpuss

2009-10-20T22:59:00.001-07:00

I worked on the inks for a SideChicks page that is way too busy. Who wrote that nonsense anyway? Colored the page for Wednesday and am pretty happy with the results. I may figure out how to do that well eventually, but the page took forever to finish. It was cool and breezy this morning and I found out that the 'usually outside' cat snores.

Still waiting on the big checks. Spent some time reading Glamourpuss by Dave Sim. I love the look at the Juliet Jones strip and the examination of the photo-realist style of Stan Drake and the research Sim does, but the swipe at the fashion mags he creates makes me want to wait for the trade that just examines the art. But at ten pages every two months, it's too long to wait. Still, half of the comic is totally lost to me.

City of Heroes is having a Halloween event, so I'm blasting zombies and fiends in my down time.

1 comic page--> 500 words.

Daily total 500 words. Running total 21,645 words.

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The Conversation Continues

2009-10-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

Both Matt and I have new postings over on Borders Books' fantasy and science fiction blog Babel Clash, which you can find here.

I talk about Heinlein a bit, then try to change the subject by talking about the vital writer/reader collaboration that is part of every story.

Matt talks about using reality as the most essential building blocks of a good fantasy story.

Hie yourselves over there and take part in our continuing conversation about writing. Or don't. It's still America for a little while longer and you can do what you want.

Days 18 & 19: Winding Down

2009-10-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

So I sprinted to within spitting distance of the finish line on ye olde novel, and am now limping across, what with the hours upon hours of revisions over the past couple days. Which means that what with the adding and subtracting of stuff it's hard to know exactly how much I actually wrote during that time (the current word count is about 600 words less than it was when I started yesterday. I'm a firm believer in the "write a lot, cut a lot" school of writing).

A safe (but incomplete) estimate, counting only big discrete chunks written over the last two days, is:

Day 18: 1,223 words
Day 19: 2,262 words

For a grand total of: 92,315. The final two chapters should kick me up over 100K, and then I can collapse, spent but proud.

Day Nineteen- Jack of at Least Three Trades

2009-10-19T22:31:00.000-07:00

Realized that I would not bust out 100K words this month and more or less took the weekend off.

I managed to get a little prose pecked out today. And I inked a SideChicks page for the next story and did a little color work on the one scheduled to run on Wednesday. Usually, I start on the Wednesday strip on Tuesday night. A Monday start is crazy early for me.

Watched Big Bang Theory and Castle which were good, not great. Fillion makes the show and the humor work. Plus there is typically at least one clever 'detective' thing per episode. Tempted to get the book by 'Castle'.

Feeling pretty productive for not getting much done today. Maybe it is the early start on the next color page.

1 comic page--> 500 words. 1010 Prose wordyness.

Daily total 1510 words. Running total 21,145 words.

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Swiping Styles

2009-10-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

Jim Rugg pointed out this interesting piece on the Next Issue blog, in which Kevin Mutch talks about "swiping," or the appropriation of one artist's (or group of artists) style by another. He cites the examples of R. Sikoryak's Masterpiece Comics, Matt Madden's Exercises in Style, and Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca's Afrodisiac.

It struck me that there is significant overlap between what I enjoy about all three listed works, and what I enjoy about mashups and crossbred fiction. A kind of friction between disparate elements, and interesting sparks sent flying by unlikely elements sent colliding into one another.

Some interesting thoughts in Mutch's piece, worth checking out. (And if you haven't read any of referenced works, what the heck are you waiting for?!)

The Heinlein Method

2009-10-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

Today's post over the the Babel Clash blog, in which I gently poke Bill Willingham with a sharp stick and, incidentally, talk about Robert Heinlein, and why I love Heinlein's work despite myself.

Read the post here.

Four Good Rules

2009-10-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Massively talented writer of various Marvel comic books and urban fantasy novels, Marjorie Liu, recently posted this short litany of writing advice she finds helpful to remind herself from time to time: Get to the point. Get back to basics. Do it with a little pizazz. Don't lose your edge.

It's pretty much self explanatory, but why should I let that stop me from explaining it? Okay, not really explaining it, but I thought it would be fun to break it down to its four component parts and examine what I have been able to glean from it so far.

Let's proceed, shall we?

1) Get to the point.

In other words, quit dicking around by showing off your stellar wit and finely crafted prose and get the story told, with expedience, clarity and honesty. I'm sure we're as impressed as you are with your artistic turn of phrase and your intricate and poetic word constructions, but those don't mean a thing if you don't get the story told.

Orson Scott Card, one of the finest writers in our field, takes writing advice questions on his blog, fielding one from a fellow who was worried about his writing style, and complained his inability to refine his own style was causing serious blockages to getting his novel written. I deeply paraphrased the question and now I'll do the same with the answer. Card replied that it was a silly distraction to worry about style. Just tell the story as simply as possible. Do that and your style will be whatever comes out of just telling the story.

I mentioned that exchange because, whether it helped that fellow or not, it was a Damascus Road experience for me. The scales fell off of my eyes at the simplicity and obviousness of the advice. I had been struggling to learn prose writing, was finding it difficult, next to impossible, and was about ready to pack it in and stick with comic book writing for the rest of my career. And then Card said that, and it made sense. It was actually a freeing moment, in which a ton of metaphorical weights seemed to drop right off of me.

Don't worry about theme, or style, or any other extraneous nonsense, and just tell a clear story. Let your readers eventually decide those other matters. And, if you run into trouble between two wonderfully crafted scenes that need to be connected, just write the minimum material you need to do that, almost like notes to yourself on what needs to happen, and that should remove the blockage. Later on you may find that it's the simple terse connecting material that is the better stuff and those two artfully constructed passages are what needs to go, or at least be slimmed down.

2) Get back to basics.

I see this as, "don't try to reinvent the wheel." The stuff of good story isn't going to change. Trying to do something that's never been done before, such as writing a novel that's simply one run-on sentence, or purposely constructing indecipherable passages to "challenge" the reader, or any of a vast number of so-called new literary conventions, are all hooey. At best they're stunts. At worst they're purposely malicious. My job is to communicate an interesting story to my readers, and communication can only occur when the reader knows what the hell I'm saying.

3) Do it with a little pizazz.

When Marjorie first posted this, fellow Clockworkian Chris Roberson mistook it as: "Do it with a little pizza," and said as much, which put pizza in the minds of many of those of us who read the small exchange. I wonder how much pizza was ordered that night as a result of the misunderstanding? I know they got me, and my editor at IDW.

But tastiness aside, pizza is not required to write well. In fact it may be an impediment, if you like to keep a clean keyboard.

Here's how I think Marjorie's third rule applies to me. It's not a repudiation of what I just wrote above about ignoring style. We still ought not to worry about our writing style, because that can only grow organically from our actual writing. I think it has something to do with confidence -- as in we should have some. Do it with a bit of a swagger.

Humility is all well and good, and a character trait much to be admired. But it has limited use to a writer. If I don't have enough ego and confidence to believe I have an interesting story to tell, then why am I wasting everyone's time by jumping up on the metaphorical stage and shouting, "Give me your money, your time and your attention for as long as I want it, because I have a great story to tell you!" That is an act of bravado bordering on arrogance.

This business isn't for the timid. Writing is an act of leadership, and no one follows an overly timid leader. When you write, bring your swagger. Bring your confidence. Bring your pizazz.

4) Don't lose your edge.

I've lost my edge before. Hell, I've lost the whole damned blade. I think the only way to keep your edge is to keep honing it. Keep writing or your tools get dull and useless. If I go a few days without writing it's like I'm starting all over again when I start up again. Ultimately writing means sitting alone in a room getting hours of work done one day, and then repeating it the next day and so on, for far too many days in a row. If you can't stand to be alone with yourself in a room for protracted lengths of time, then you can't do this. You will all too quickly lose your edge.

That's what I take, so far, from Marjorie's four admonitions. I know as I ponder further I'll get other wisdoms from them. That's the nature of good advice. I wonder what the other Clockwork boys take from the same four rules. Maybe they'll share as much in their own posts.

For those who want to go to the source, or maybe find out for yourselves why we're Marjorie Liu fans here at the Clockworks, you can find her and her books here.

Days 16 and 17: Light at the End of the Tunnel

2009-10-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

On Friday I did some gearing up, and on Saturday I wrote like some kind of possessed grizzly bear (a bear that's able to cogitate and type). I think I wrote more on Saturday than I've ever written, in a month where I've already written quite a bit. It seems like if I could keep up this pace, I could write a novel a month and then take a few days off at the end. But I don't think it's sustainable. I think. It might be worth trying. Probably not.

Anyway, for those keeping count (which includes me and my mom, maybe):

Friday: 3,753 words
Saturday: 12,083 words.

Total: 88,830

When they talk about an artist's need to learn storytelling, this is what they mean.

2009-10-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

If you want a good, no nonsense tutorial about comic book storytelling, then take a look at this Saturday Evening Post cover from three years before I was born. Three panels that tell a complete and engaging story, all without the intrusion of any text or dialogue.

I think this shows more compellingly than just about any other example I could imagine how it is the artist's job (and burden, and glory) to tell the bulk of the story in any given comic book.

Just starting out drawing comic books, or trying to break in to the business? Then study these three panels. Click on the image to enlarge it and give it a good and proper going over. It won't take a long time to plumb the depths of these three panels. It's all there with remarkable clarity and simplicity.

Drawing ability and storytelling ability are the two pillars on which a comic artist's career are constructed -- period (unless we are talking about work ethic, but that is a whole 'nother discussion). Drawing ability is a difficult skill set to master. Storytelling ability is more about how you see things and can imagine translating them to the page. This one example (from an artist I sadly cannot identify) pictured here is a master class in that subject. Enjoy.

Day Sixteen- Chop, Chop, Chop

2009-10-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

Frankenscript is finished. And my darlings are dead. But the vouchers are turned in. This image was stolen from Wrightson.

The UT vs. OU game is tomorrow. I may spend the day hammered.

Thinking about what to do next. It looks like more on the OGN and a Cannonball Read.

1 comic page--> 500 words.

Daily total 500 words. Running total 19,635 words.

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The Practical Man(ifesto)

2009-10-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

Not always being one to sit on the sideline of an interesting discussion, I have joined it, more or less with permission.

Now I also have an essay on the Babel Crash site, which you can find here.

Here's a wee sampling of it:

This isn’t a Zelazny line, but it could have been: “Then the volcano erupted, blasting its full compliment of ghost dragons into the sky, burning the sky first and then the seven god cities adrift in it. As the cities began to list, founder and then fall, trailing black ash and fire, I sat on the next slope over to smoke a cigarette, finish my coffee and ponder my next move.”

Crossbreeding Genres

2009-10-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

(I wanted to title this post "Matt, you ignorant slut," but was afraid that was taking things too far...)

Yesterday, our own Matt Sturges posted his most recent salvo in his ongoing tete-a-tete with James Enge over at the Borders blog, title "Zombie Ninjas on the Moon." Some might have seen that title and assumed that they were in for a bit of fun, but I knew better. See, Matt and I have been having this particular disagreement for a while. A friendly disagreement, please bear in mind, but a long-running one.

See, Matt's tired of what he's calling "mashup fiction," which he defines as "stories whose genesis is the intentional combination of unrelated tropes, historical figures, or characters from previously published works." I know just what he's talking about. That's not just my bread-and-butter as a writer, it's the primary staple I consume as a reader. That's the stuff I live for.

Naturally, as one might expect, I disagree a bit with Matt's assertion that such stuff is getting stale, and past its sell-by-date. And not just because "mashup-fiction" includes the vast majority of all of my favorite books, comics, music, and movies. "Mashup-fiction" isn't simply a viable approach to entertainment.

Entertainment needs "mashups" in order to survive.

That may sound like a stretch, but work with me for a moment. Perhaps it would help to think of it not as "mashup-fiction," a term of relatively recent coinage suggestive of splicing together the songs of one musician with those of another. Think of it, instead, as "crossbreeding."

(A note on terminology: Back when Matt and I were in college we called this kind of stuff "intertextuality," a term we picked up in a postmodernism seminar, but I think we had the definition wrong, as we meant something entirely different than semioticians and postmodern scholars mean when they use the word. I've also tried "metafictional," but that carries connotations beyond my intended meaning. More recently, Willingham has referred to such things as "Wold Newtonry," a reference to the playful intermingling of genre fiction and history that Philip José Farmer pioneered in Tarzan Alive and elsewhere [you think it's mere chance that Matt has included an image of my own personal Bible, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, in his essay lambasting mashups?], but Wold-Newton has a very specific meaning for Farmer fans, and the use of the term for more general metafictional play tends to raise their ire. I'm using "crossbreeding" at the moment, but I'm not entirely happy with it as a solution.)

I tend to look at genre as functioning like gene pools. Remaining within the confines of one genre for too long leads to the serious risk of inbreeding, and producing anemic works with all sorts of congenital problems, barely fit to survive. (Does this make a tenth-generation xerox of Tolkien on par with hemophiliac European royals? You might say it does, and I wouldn’t argue with you if you did.)

Crossing genre boundaries expands that gene pool, producing fit fiction with all sorts of interesting new traits. In time, the hybrids most fit to survive might even emerge as full-blown genres in their own right.

The “mash-up” that Sturges decries, the PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES and such like, are just the most obvious types of crossbreeding, and like the offspring of a horse and a donkey are mules fit for one generation, but not healthy enough to sustain offspring of their own. Which isn’t to say that mules don’t have their uses, from time to time, but you wouldn’t want them to be the only members of your breeding pool.

The preceding represents only my initial thoughts. I'll stop here, and continue in another post in a few days. Maybe my next salvo will cover the ways in which crossbreeding genres will save us all, and to illustrate I'll explain the little known fact that Arthur Conan Doyle was directly responsible for the creation of the Power Rangers...

Day 15: Clashing toward Babel

2009-10-16T08:22:00.001-07:00

Somehow I managed to complete 10,332 words of the novel yesterday. It was a second-wind kind of a burst which I hope will now cushion the remainder of the book, which is just a meager 19,000 words from the finish line, which leaves me plenty of time for revisions and twiddling and so forth before the deadline. I am a happy, happy man, with sore fingers.

This brings my monthly total to a preposterous 72,994 words.

More About Mashups, and a Bit About Punks

2009-10-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

The indomitable, and far too well spoken, James Enge has responded to Matt's ill considered tirade against the genre mashup, in their continuing discussion about writing, over at Babel Clash (terrible name).

You can find it here. Read it. It's (mostly) good. Tastes like chicken.

I do object to Enge's attempt to reclassify Roger Zelazny's unique and always quirky work as (long babel of something)punk. I thoroughly dislike any name for a literary movement with the word 'punk' appended to it. Punk is a word that belittles by its nature. And in that regard it was used perfectly for the cyberpunk movement, as that dismal sub-genre was purposely replete with punks. But (with the possible exception of the lead character from Damnation Alley -- and I'm not sure even he qualifies) Zelazny didn't write punks, who are silly, swaggering and unimportant by definition.

Unfortunately any label that ends with punk is far too easily embraced by the unimaginative masses that comprise the bulk of Geekland. I hope the damage isn't already done. For that only, in an otherwise wonderfully crafted essay that rightly takes Sturges to task, shame on you, Mr. Enge.

Day Fifteen- Redux

2009-10-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

Spent most of the day doing little rewrites. Shade a line of dialog here and add a flashback there. I had to destroy a couple of pages that I really liked. In their place, I wrote two more. I had to tear apart a whole issue only to stitch it back together. I like to think I get it right the first time. Today was a little painful.

Another day of this and I should be back at work on the OGN.

Just how did Napoleon Solo get captured by these well-armed kids?

2 comic pages--> 1000 words.

Daily total 1000 words. Running total 19,135 words.

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Zombie Ninjas on the Moon?

2009-10-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

Today's Babel Clash essay...

This talk about genres reminds me of a current persistent trend in genre fiction of which I am growing painfully weary. It’s certain to irritate some of my writers friends when I bring it up, so I hope some of them will jump up attempt to tell me how wrong I am.
I’m speaking of what I’ll call “mashup fiction.” The This sort of thing has been around for some time, but in the last few years there’s been a flowering of it in comics, fiction and cinema and I am frankly sick of it. By “mashup fiction” I mean stories whose genesis is the intentional combination of unrelated tropes, historical figures, or characters from previously published works. What some call “crossover fiction” I’ll relegate to a subcategory of this.

Read the full post at Babel Clash.

Day 14: The End Is Near

2009-10-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

I looked up today and realized I'd passed the 100K mark on the novel, which was the inspiration I needed to actually finish it without resorting to drastic measures. How addictive is crystal meth, really? Is sleep actually essential? I saw that episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Rob stayed up for like five days, and he was still mostly able to speak in coherent sentences...

Anyway: 5,004 words for the 14th, bringing me up to 62,662 for the month of October. Eat that, Roberson!