Roja, Mortal Kombat, and a genuine tragedy

This day started off on a bad note. The alarm went off, I hit the snooze, then said to myself, 'In ten more minutes I have to get up and get ready for work. That stinks.' It took me a long while to fall asleep last night, so I was already in bad shape. During those ten minutes, I lay there trying to build up the will to keep existing. Then I said, 'Hang on. I saw Skyfall with Claudia yesterday, and we saw it on Saturday.' Then I accused my alarm clock of being the male child of a female dog.

Part of the fun of writing is you're always exploring new ideas, places, and people. The downside of that is unless you already know everything, you need to do research to address your ignorance. Earlier today, I needed a name for a skin condition that would be a likely suspect for something in Roja, and browsing around, I thought of something I heard in the new Mortal Kombat trailer. (I'm a huge fan of the original movie, even though I only played the game a few times and got my backside handed to me) So I looked up Harlequin Ichthyosis.

I have learned so much over the years from writers who put little tidbits in their stories that were about something I had never heard of before. I need you to hear me say this next part in a grumpy old man voice, because it won't have the same impact if you don't. Back when I first started writing, if you needed to know something, you went to the library, and you hoped it wasn't something so exotic that the librarians wouldn't know what you were talking about. Today, we have Google, yet people on the whole don't seem to know much more than they did those few decades ago. I looked that skin condition up, and I got one of those shocks where my head is screaming, 'What the hell? How can something that disturbing exist and we don't regularly hear about it?' Babies get born with that condition, and life sucks from that point on. Usually, not for long.

Part of the way we deal with the world, is to build a picture of it in our heads. Let's say I have a brain saw, and I pull out your gray stuff and pop it into a scanner. A lot of the info that I read is going to be interconnected into an overall picture not of this world, but how you think this world is. Each brain world is going to be different. If you're a physicist, your world is made of atoms and quarks and semi-real strings, as opposed to a stockbroker, whose world only breaks down beyond physical matter when you think about it really hard, but that has this dynamic, chaotic system of how money works. If you believe in psychic powers, then some people show up too late to board planes doomed to crash in your world because on some level, they know what's going to happen. If you believe we went to the moon, then your world has a moon with leftover pieces of spacecraft on it. If not, it has governments that lie about those spacecraft.

This world building comes in handy for those of us who build new worlds all the time and then try to sell them. All we have to do is make worlds that you want to read about. Simple, right? I can hear Hollywood knocking on my door right now. Oh wait, that's my supervisor, wanting to know why I'm not at work. People are funny when it comes to what we like to experience, and what we want to know.

Does your world have babies that are born with skin that comes in plates, with weak gaps between them? Do those babies usually die of infection, or suffocate because that skin is too tight over their chest to let them breathe? Does your world only include women and men, and not people who are born with characteristics of both, or neither? Human beings are funny things, and the parts that make us up, physical, mental, and spiritual, fit together in all kinds of patterns. Is it possible for us to understand all those patterns? Maybe, maybe not. But we're aware of a hell of a lot more patterns today than we were yesterday.

Still mixing the patterns around. Still writing.

How to steal and be complimented on your theft

So today (Saturday) the internet is being a bit wonky. So I'm going to use this time to get this week's entry typed in a head of time. I'm clever like that.

A friend and I once got into a spirited discussion about fanfiction, which ended with an armistice rather than a real peace. We had started discussing Sherlock Holmes, and the story, 'The Seven Percent Solution' came up. This is a story not written by Doyle, but considered so good that it gets treated as cannon, meaning all the little details in it are considered just as true as those from the books that were written by him. That's when hostilities began.

There are a lot of created universes. Harry Potter, Holmes, Michael Moorcock's, Discworld, and yes, Twilight. They get a lot of fans reading them, and most people who read have enough imagination to take the stories and wonder what else could happen in this strange, exciting place. If the story really reaches out and grabs us, (and that's and individual response, so I'm not going to get into whether or not a universe has to be widely considered 'good' for this to apply) then it's fun to just daydream about what our life would be like if we lived there, too. This real world can sometimes suck, and a fantasy world only sucks in ways we can handle.

Is it wrong to imagine? Hell no. Everyone should do it. Imagine enough, and you might start to come up with a story of your own, something where the hero (gender neutral usage) finally takes care of that one twit in the story that you really hated. Since this is your version of the world, there's a place for you, too. You can be the hero's next door neighbor, his confidante, his backup, and you can be a hero too, when the main one is off doing something else. So far, so good.

Should you write all this down? Why not? It can be fun, and if you write other stuff, it can kick-start that part of your head if it ever gets sluggish. I've done this, and takes me in directions I might otherwise not go.

Then you decide to go out and make some money with this story. That's when I ask that you pause for a minute.

As I've said before, writing is work. You start with an idea, an image, a bit of dialogue, or something else that gets the brain juices flowing. Then you take that seed and plant it in the (hopefully) fertile soil of your perception of the world, either the real one, or the one you're thinking about. It takes root in your own concepts of how people talk, whether or not we landed on the moon, whether that shy guy at the back of the classroom is going to grow up to be the inventor of a faster than light drive or someone who collects other people's spleens, and whether or not something creeps out from under your bed while you're asleep. You start that seed growing, and you prune it when it goes in directions you don't want. Get your plant big enough, and you've got a story.

When someone writes fanfiction, they're starting with a big chunk of someone else's plant. Again, not a bad thing, but recognize where that part comes from. Assume there are no copyright issues. (BIG assumption. I know very little of that field, and I know enough to say that it can be really, really messy) This is a moral argument, not a legal one.

When you make a character, and you either put enough work into him or her to make a good one, and/or you get lucky and create something that pushes people's buttons in the way that they like them pressed, you've made something good. Holmes is the standard by which all other literary detectives are judged, and with all the movies and plays that have come out, we've seen multiple interpretations of the character. Then someone went and wrote, 'Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula.' I saw that title standing in line at the library when I was ten years old, and I've never been the same since.

So what do you do if you have an idea that was spawned in someone else's flowerbed? Grow it, of course. Let it grow as big and as beautiful as it can. Then step back and look at it, hard.

Is it good? More importantly, is it strong enough to survive on it's own? If not, keep it and enjoy it. If it is, take a cutting from the part that you made, transplant it, and see it it will grow. One of my major complaints about the 'I am Legend' movie, wasn't all the tweaking that they did with the setting, it the fact that both of the endings were completely contrary to the ones that Matheson wrote. If you're going to borrow that heavily from someone, do what George Romero is supposed to have done with Night Of The Living Dead. He got the idea, and the scares and suspense, of a lone house surrounded by undead from I am Legend, and built his own story around it. It's great to get seeds from other people's plants, just do your own growing. 

I've finally made a profile over at Fearnet. One of the bloggers that I follow, Drew Daywalt, had some trouble happen to him recently, and I tried to offer a bit of encouragement.

Still writing, although the fact that this isn't getting posted until Monday might seem to call that into question.

Oh what fun

  Just a normal update. I got through the first slog through Roja, where I needed to make sure all the chapters together. Now all I need to do is make sure that all the bits and pieces that make up the chapters do the same thing. Nothing much else has happened.

Oh, wait. Halloween.

Our neighborhood had a couple of other houses decorated, but most weren't. My idea to use chem lights in the balloons didn't work as well as I thought it would. When I tested them in the darkened garage, they looked fantastic, but my neighbor has a really powerful floodlight, which washed the glow out. Oh well. So I got Applebones put together, and my wife took a few pictures, then I parked myself out in front of the house and waited, sitting completely still.

Shortly before it got dark, the first batch of kids came up. They ooo and ah at me, but then go right to the door. As my wife opens it and begins letting them grab the candy, I turn and face them, but since they're all looking at Claudia, they don't notice. As the last one gets his loot, they all turn to go. That's when one of them notices I'm not in the same position that I was a minute ago. He stops to look, and everyone else does, too. When I reach out with my stick fingers that are a couple of feet long, the whole bunch of them shriek and run away as fast as they can. Not too bad of a beginning.

We got a decent amount of trick or treaters. Most of them in groups, and most with a parent or two along for the ride. One man saw me move when his son didn't, and he called the boy over to him so he walked within my reach. He laughed when I reached out and his son yelled. One mother screamed along with her kids, and when Claudia asked for them all to pose with me so she could get a couple of pictures, she put her children between herself and me. The next mother screamed when I moved the first time, and when her daughter looked away from the door to see what the fuss was, I extended a hand toward her, and she howled like she was being skinned alive.

We got one bunch of older boys who stopped by, three of them with hats on but otherwise without costumes. Claudia commented that they might be a bit old, but handed out some candy. As they walked off, they said 'Goodnight.' I waited until the door was shut, then I said, 'Goodnight.' One of them stopped walking and said, 'Who said that?' I didn't move or say a word.

One boy who came in with a group seemed to like my costume so much that he announced to me that he wasn't afraid. Then he poked me in the chest and tried to lift my mask to see if I was real. Maybe next time I should have makeup on under my mask.

Other than going to a friend's party on Saturday, that's pretty much the week. Verdict? Best Halloween that I've had in a long time. Can't wait for next year.

If could ask one thing of you folks, please get out and vote. People fought and died to give us that right.

Still writing.

Why I don't read Ray Bradbury

Actually, I do. So should you. If you read his work, hopefully you'll know what I'm talking about here. If you don't read his stories, you should. Right after you finish reading this posting would be a good time to start.

I do read Ray Bradbury, but I don't read him the way I read King, Matheson, Poe, David Nickle, and most of the stuff in Cemetery Dance. With those guys I can put myself into the story and just enjoy a good scare. That's the purpose of a story.

But Bradbury wrote damn well, and he wrote in a way that made each story personal, and brought it out into this life as opposed to the paper one. That's the purpose of a story, too.

At Fen-Con I picked up the graphic adaptation of The Martian Chronicles. I haven't read the print stories themselves yet, but I saw the mini-series that came out on TV many, many moons ago. So I thought I had an idea of what I was in for.

Yeah, I was wrong. Bradbury hits a nerve that no one else does. He makes us remember what it was like to be a kid, and to dream like a kid. Then he makes us remember what it was like to get too old to hold on to all those dreams. He shows us how beautiful we all are, and all the hideous things we do. He makes us happy, sad, and scared all at once. He feeds us every flavor of life, and reminds us that the last course is graveyard dirt.

Compare him to another great writer that I can only take in controlled doses, Robert Heinlein. I recently finished Starship Troopers, and although Heinlein was able to keep from preaching to the reader at the beginning of the book, he gets right to it toward the end. By the time I finished it I wanted to get out the ouija board, bang on it with a complete edition of Stranger In a Strange Land to get his attention, and ask, 'What crack pipe did you dream up this version of the military from? Everyone in here is good, honest, clean, honorable, and mindlessly loyal! They're goose-stepping boy scouts with bazookas!' Heinlein loves to tell us how great the world would be, if only we would all give up our own opinions and follow his vision. Bradbury is more honest with us, and he won't tolerate us being dishonest with him, or with that person we always see in the mirror.

The reason that I don't regularly gorge myself on Ray Bradbury, is because his stories always feel so sad. I have a mental image of him, (blissfully formed without checking any facts) as a really happy person. How could he not be happy, when he bled all his sorrow out on paper and send it straight to everyone else in the world? For personal reasons, I don't like sad thoughts. Ask me why sometime, and I'll either say, 'I'll tell you later,' or, 'I already told you,' depending on what books I've written.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to writing them.

The wife has returned!!

Okay, short update this week. My Lady Love just walked in the door, returning from Oni-Con, where she rocked. She dutifully reported all the cool sights to me, including the ridiculously cute Little Red Riding Hood that she would have sent to me just to get me to blush. (She has done that in the past with everything from little Japanese girls in French Maid costumes to REALLY nice-looking Wonder Women)

I spent pretty much the whole weekend pounding on Roja, including filling in a gap where I looked at the outline I had made, after writing the book, and realized, 'Oh, there's a whole chapter where one character seems to stop existing.' I'm borrowing, in the Doctor Who sense of the word, a technique from IT where I tell two different story lines at once. One part had what happened in the spring, but not in the summer.

I was finally able to find some of the mini-chemlights that I've been looking for. The plan is to pop them in some helium filled balloons on Halloween night, and let them sway in the wind. If I can figure out how to post pics on here, I'll show you how they look.

Still writing.

A bit of real life

Took a bit of a breather yesterday. My wife and I went down to Galveston, and after driving around for a while, we found a spot by the sea wall where we could just sit and look out over the ocean. It was warm, but the wind was blowing that fine salt spray in our faces, and I think a small storm was brewing out there too. It's nice to just sit down every once in a while and do something to remind yourself that you're on a planet, you're on a ball of earth and stone with a good amount of water on it's surface, and that ball is spinning and whirling through an empty, cold void. It puts a lot of what you have to deal with into perspective.

Tor turned down 'Welcome Home,' and I'm probably going to send them 'Stilling the Demons,' today when I get a couple of other things done. Stuff keeps piling up faster than I can do it.

During the week, I came up with an idea for my Halloween costume. Now all I have to do is make it.

Just a minute ago, I watched a vid on Youtube that showed Felix Baumgartner jumping out of a balloon that was up so high, when you looked up, you didn't see sky, you saw space. You could see the curve of the earth instead of it looking flat. Incredible doesn't even begin to describe that.

Still writing, and about to get back to it.

What would they do if...

Hey there! Good to see you again. Let me introduce you to a couple of people. This is Dale. He works out at the beef-packing plant as the loading dock supervisor. He's been working at that place for over thirty years, at first to support his mother and sister, and then later his wife and son. He's not quite as content with that fact as he used to be.

And this is Frank, a deputy with the local sheriff's office. Back when he first joined the department, one seriously evil SOB was running it. But he stuck to his guns, even though it cost him his marriage. Now he wants to be sheriff.

Whats going to happen to them? Well, that depends on you and me.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it's more important that you know your characters during the rewrite than when writing the first draft. On your first trip through the story, you're seeing the big picture, and making sure the ground under your feet is solid. The characters are there to prop up the plot. Whereas you and I (unless the Rutan are reading this) get our structural support from our skeletons, these folks start with what they contribute to our tale. If you took a close look at them the first time they get mentioned, they would probably look like wax statues, not even shaped into good detail on the back. They don't have any life of their own at that point.

On the second pass, they need more life. We're not just appreciating the scenery at that point, we're taking note of how clear the path is, whether the plants look green or brown, and if the area smells like rainforest or store-bought fertilizer. Assuming you're writing something that you want people to read, you better make it a worthwhile investment of their time. If you say the mailman did it on page 483, say it was done with a knife on page 101, and say the mailman faints at the sight of blood on page 257, someone's going to notice. Heck, some people will notice if you misspell one word out of a hundred thousand. People are like that. (See an older entry about writing or filming crap)

What will they do if you get it wrong? Depends. If you're Stephen King, and you put an electric chair in a novel set a few years before they were actually used, every amateur critic and rabid fan in the civilized world will take to the internet and froth at the mouth over it, and it won't affect your sales one bit. If, on the other hand, you're an unknown, and you write 'cleaver' when you mean 'clever,' or worse, you miss-type it and your autocorrect changes it to the former, the editor may well throw your story in the trash, and you'll only get a form letter with 'not what we're looking for at this time' pre-printed on it.

So think about those characters. Wait until you have the story set in your head and the frame of it on paper first, but try this thought in particular: What would they do if you didn't use them as cannon-fodder? If the martians didn't land, or the dead stayed content and quiet in their graves, or that little piece of a deadly crystal didn't show up at just the right time, what would those people do on what would otherwise be the opening day of your story? As far as the two men you met a few paragraphs ago, Dale would get a little more bitter, just as he did yesterday, and the day before that. His birthday's coming up, you see, and he hasn't lived quite as much as he expected he would have at his age. What about Frank? Well, I told you he wants to be sheriff. I might have glossed over the fact that he's already run once, and that he actually held the office for a short while under less than ideal circumstances. He already has a firm picture in his head about how the people in town feel about him, and he tends to ignore anything that contradicts that image. Frank won't be disillusioned any time in the immediate future. He'll just go about his business, being wrong about some very fundamental facts.

But of course, we know what's really going to happen. We've known all along. But also knowing what they might do if they existed without us lets us plot their actions a little more consistently, and it makes them a little more sympathetic to us, which helps us make them more sympathetic to everyone else.

Speaking of which, could I ask for a bit of sympathy? I went through all that chest-puffing last week about how The Red Man Burning was going to be my next book, but between then and now I pulled up that other one I mentioned, In The Dark, and used the word count function. It pulls up at around 43,000 words. At that length I might as well fatten it up and serve it with some flourish. Dress warmly if you read it. It's a bit cold out there in the dark.

Still writing.