Otherwise, it's a big waste of space.

Far back as I can remember, a certain epiphany falls on me, every single time I take a road trip. It doesn't happen until the city I've come from has long since vanished in the horizon of my rear view mirror, and long before my destination is even a mirage on the road ahead. It's in this surreal landscape of "neither here nor there" that it quietly slides from one of the folds of my cerebrum and curls up in my arms.

It starts small, too. A car passes in the opposite direction, always too fast to make out anything but the barest essence of the driver and their passengers. I almost want to wave, like they yet do in some parts of the world, like we might accidentally be neighbors and should probably be friendly just in case. But my hands stay on the wheel, 10 and 2. I imagine the other driver, and think they might be doing the very same thing. There might even be a moment where they think about waving at me, just in an effort to be friendly. After all, they're on the far edge of no man's land, and that nearness to their destination can be a heady mixture of exhaustion and adrenaline.

I'm like that on the last few miles into my hometowns. I've engraved them all in my mind, to where Pavlov smiles his knowing smile at me, recognizing in my expression the face of a man coming home again. Maybe this other driver is coming home. Maybe he's been away too long - maybe "too long" even means but a day - and his own home, his own favorite chair, his television and its remote have been practicing their "welcome home" and yearning for the chance to let it ring out. And he'll sit back, kick of the driving shoes and sip a cold beer to wash away the thick dryness that only a long drive can create.

Or maybe they're just now starting their adventure, too; only in the opposite direction. Nature abhors a vacuum; maybe they have to go to Seattle to fill the space temporarily left by me and my family? I'm excited for them on their future experiences. I love my city, but I love sharing it. I don't mind letting folks use it a bit whenever I go away, there's plenty of it to go around. Try the clam chowder or the salmon, it's almost always excellent.

Either way, I don't know them, and they don't know me, but here we are, each going a mile a minute in different directions, but just for a moment sharing almost the same space. Is it fair that two families can cross paths so quickly and so closely and yet know nothing about one another? Seems like a terrible injustice. I'm sure they're excellent people, and as I see their tail lights in my mirrors, joining with the great convergence of sky and land, I mourn that missed opportunity.

I should have waved.

At some point after that, I start to look at the houses as we speed past. House, house, house. Cars in the driveway, toys in the yard. Satellite dishes. Lovely landscaping. Each house is at least one story; each story has dozens of chapters. I drive by, wondering what stories are going on right at that moment.

And that's when it happens: I find myself wondering, is there someone in that house who, right now, is looking out at my car driving past, and wondering, "is there someone in that car who, right now, is looking out at my house as they drive past, and wondering, 'is there someone in that house...'..."

My mind takes that thought and unravels it like a great ball of yarn. It's a delicious and impossible imagining, and feels like the essence of staring into the abyss and counting the stars, wondering who else is looking back. Because the truth is, there's ALWAYS somebody out there, somewhere - whether in one of those houses by the roadside or on another planet somewhere out in the universe, looking back.

I know there's a lot of talk about monkeyspheres and proximity to association, and a lot of discussion about the internet and how it reduces our sociological parameters, but, sometimes - - usually when I find myself right about halfway between where I've been and where I'm going... I just feel like maybe we're all the same; maybe we're all just not all or always on the same page. Maybe we just forget that we're all doing our own thing in an effort to understand our purpose.

Maybe the key to our ongoing struggle to fight together against our own failings is a reminder that even though we're all unique, we're all individuals, we're all separate and distinct creatures, that we're really all just bits of the greater whole.So I invite you to take a moment, today - turn the volume down on the rest of the road noise and look out the window, and recognize that you're not the only person looking across into the other lane and wondering about your fellow travelers.

With any luck, they're looking back at you at that very minute and doing the same thing.

Have a good day, my friends.

*waves*

So the Second Fish Says, “Nothing”

“Rectum? Damn near killed ‘em!”

It’s odd, considering the number of times I’ve heard that line in a movie, I’ve never actually heard the full joke that leads up to it. I’m assuming at this point that the joke will never live up to the amusement its mere punch line has evoked in countless repetitions across so many mediums. In fact, that single line of dialogue has made its way into a lot of movies and books, as a sort of catch-all for “we join this amusing conversation, already in progress”, so often that it has come to represent more than just a punch line. It has come to represent the notion that an entire conversation has gone on already, filled with humorous anecdotes and likely some degree of heavy drinking between erstwhile comrades. Plus, you’re left with a feeling that you’ve missed out on something, like some interesting bit of revelatory substance has occurred, and you just missed it.

Strange, that a silly punch line from what I can only assume to be a slightly off-color joke can accomplish so much.

Dialogue is a funny thing like that. It can do so much with so little to evoke copious amounts of reference and inference, fleshing out characters and settings with very little apparent heavy lifting. It is, I have found, the culmination of the old writer’s axiom of “show, don’t tell,” even though, when you think about it, it’s really doing a little bit of both.

One of my favorite pastimes is watching movies, and, for me, there are really only a few things I require of my cinematic experience: good characters (and the actors who play them), good soundtracks, quality cinematography, a decent story that’s good enough to make me ignore any plot holes that might be present, and, if there’s any room left in the budget for it, engaging dialogue. (If you look carefully, you might recognize why I’m a fan of most Steven Soderbergh or Aaron Sorkin projects.) In fact, if you can nail the perfect dialogue in a movie, I could generally care less about what else the movie plans on doing. 

Dialogue. By itself, it’s a pretty fascinating literary device – its history and development as a means for the conveyance of larger concepts is fascinating. Did you know its etymology? It’s from the Greek word “dialogos”, which literally translates to “dual meaning”, or “the two-way flow of meaning”. That adds a nice heft to the word, don’t you think? Back in college, I had the idea of dialogue described to me through an metaphor of painting; that the finished product is as much a result of the eye, arm and hand of the painter as it is the consistency of the paint, the hairs of the brush and the texture of the canvas. In a dialogue, we have the two (or more) persons involved in the conversation, their minds that conceive of the motivating principles that generate the emotions behind the words, the words themselves and the ears of the other(s) involved – lather, rinse, repeat. Essentially, what is being said is only partially literal – a conversation tells you more about the persons saying the words than it does anything else on its own. But, even by itself, that is a Big Truth Worth Reading.

One of the projects I’ve been working on lately is a script, and has resulted in one of the most fascinating studies in the power of conversation I’ve had in a while. With only a small allowance for blocking instructions, the rest of the writing is all conversation. Character A says this. Character B says this. The occasional adjective for emphasis, and that’s it. Can a story be told with only dialogue?

Well, in point of fact, yes. But for this to happen, the words have to mean something. As I said before, I love movies – and at the risk of getting Judgy Face from you, I’ll admit to a certain weakness for “comic book adaptations”. And no, I’m not just saying “superhero movies”, I mean comic book adaptations. While this includes the obvious films like “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight”, it also includes films like “Tank Girl”, “Book of Eli”, “Sin City”, and “The Walking Dead”. Unfortunately, it also includes movies like “The Amazing Spider-man”.

The recent Spider-man movie kind of hurt my brain, much in the way an out-of-tune piano hurts my ears.  I mean, it was so close to being a good movie, but so many little things flicked my inner child in the ear that, eventually, it just failed. Initially, it was difficult for me to point my finger to the place where the film hurt me – the cast was mostly brilliant, the special effects were mostly good, the music wasn’t bad, either. The story was riddled with holes (honestly, I’m just not the sort who’ll look for those in a movie. If I see them, you already lost me. Just for future reference, kay?), and there were a couple moments where I very nearly stood up and left the theater. One of these involves construction cranes, and both involve scenes with C. Thomas Howell.

But what killed it for me was the lack of good conversation. Now, again, for much of it I have to admit it was good, though I’d have to credit the actors for managing to deliver pretty awkward dialogue. But the line that shoved a pencil through my cold, black, heart was the jumbled wreck of line delivered by Uncle Ben to a struggling and confused Peter Parker. I can’t even now remember exactly how the line went, but I know what the line was supposed to be. He was supposed to be telling Peter that “with great power comes great responsibility.” That’s a wonderful line. It’s meaty and full of promise. It weighs on you, gives you a lot to ponder. For the purposes of the story, it’s the reverberating meaning that gives direction to a fledgling Spider-man, and carries him through tragedy into becoming a fantastic hero, worthy of storytelling. But rather than use that line, the writer and director decided to NOT use the line, and cobbled together a half-hearted cheap red haired stepbrother of a conversation, for no other conceivable reason than to just not use the line from the book.

To me, that’s like doing a production of Hamlet and having the titular character at one crucial moment ponder aloud, “Jeez, should I live or die? Hmm. I don’t really have an answer to that.” It is substantive dialogue, and its absence will be felt; like a gaping pothole directly in your path.

At the same time, cutting out essential matter isn’t the only way to fail. Remaining too true to the source material can also kill a project twice dead.

The thing that some people fail to accept is that comic books are not movies. They have teeny tiny conversational bubbles that, for the purposes of accompanying a panel of art, serve as micro-tweets from the characters. They’re confined to space and the writer has to bear this in mind, trimming away the fat to ensure that the most essential matter gets through.

(Unless you’re Brian Michael Bendis, of course, in which case screw convention and tack on five hundred speech bubbles, because by god this conversation is gonna be played out exactly as conceived and no limitation on space is gonna get in the way!)

This becomes a clearly challenging balancing act, between remaining true to the stories and knowing where to add and subtract to make the stories effective, and, most importantly, knowing how the characters talk to one another.

Joss Whedon understands this, as one recent example has shown. Take his recent adventure, “The Avengers”, and strip away the comic book elements – no superpowers, no gamma radiation, no space gods. Imagine the movie being told as a gang of individuals being brought together to help a large company be saved from a hostile corporate takeover. Think of the tone, the dialogue, the pacing. It all still works, every last bit of it, because even though all these characters hold unimaginably potent forces at their beck and call, they talk like real people.

Well, they talk like really cool people. But you get my meaning.

Whedon also succeeds in the way in which he takes expectations and yoinks them to the side just as you get comfortable. He takes conversational tropes and tweaks them just at the last minute, so every fast ball becomes a curve ball and every slow ball speeds past the plate at the last moment.

Captain America: “Is everything a joke to you?”

Tony Stark: “Funny things are.”

Or, in a larger context, the entire conversation between Loki and Natasha/Black Widow. It stops being just words and turns into a slow-motion Bruce Lee exchange of verbal parries and jabs until…well, I don’t want to give it away, assuming you’re one of the few people alive who hasn’t yet seen the movie.

I almost want to add a counterpoint, here, by mentioning movies that suffered from a pronounced failure of strong dialogue and writing, but there’s just so many. I’ll just cough and mutter under my breath that three good examples of bad writing were prequels, and happened a long, long time ago. Sorry, George, I have to be bold, much as it pains me.

In a perfect world, additional emphasis would be placed on the scripting (specifically the dialogue, but they don’t have to stop there) for future comic book adaptations. But let’s be clear, here. Any movie – any book, any play, any written work involving dialogue of any kind – could take a strong lesson from what makes the movie enjoyable in any lasting manner. Save a million off the top of your special effects budget or your swollen actor pay and invest in a strong script. Seriously. Its dividends will be monumental.

It doesn’t matter how many explosions come bursting out of the screen, if the words coming out of the actors’ mouths isn’t similarly well-written, all you have is eye candy.

Granted, it’s very expensive eye candy.

With Great Stories...

I'm a big fan of comic books. I have to use the present tense there for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's still true. I pick up about a dozen comic book titles on a monthly basis, and have been reading them almost without fail since I was about nine years old. Almost without fail is accurate, as well, because in the 1990s...well, comic books weren't exactly without fail. In point of fact, they were woefully bad.

It's easy to look back on a period of artistic development - like comic books in the 90s - and see how badly the trends thought back then to be likely to last forever truly were. But even then, I just got tired of them. It's not even that they weren't "cool" (comic books weren't even CLOSE to the realm of relative social acceptance they've since achieved) or that I'd grown out of them. They were just not very good at all. Art, marketing, stories, they just... well, they got lost a little bit.

I picked them back up after the 90s when I came upon an independent publisher called CrossGen who was doing some impressive and unorthodox titles like Scion, Meridian, The Path, Way of the Rat, and so forth. Really imaginative and original material - it brought me right back in to the waiting arms of the comic book industry.

I watched the movie "Unbreakable", and really enjoyed it - not so much for the storyline as for the statement about how comic books were becoming the storytelling voice for our generation. And I still truly believe that.

For example, look at the motion picture industry, and its now standard approach to development. In most movies now, one of the certain stops along the moviemaking process is a little standby called storyboarding. Broken down, it's really little more than comic book design. And I think it's no mistake that this design mechanic is both attributable to comic books as much as it is creating a certain stylistic rhythm to the movies they end up becoming.

But more directly, comic books have become many movies - with many more on the way - so much so that they have begun to defy simple movie categories. Not just "action" or "science fiction", they're starting to be referred to under the title of "comic book adaptations". I recognize that this reference bristles many a critic, but where it fails to accurately define the movies' genres, it does underscore the fact that comic books truly do have a distinct storytelling style than most movies.

The Avengers is currently on track to becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of all time (as of this week, it's at number 3) - with a handful of other comic book adaptations peppered across the list: The Dark Knight, Spider-man, Iron Man 2, and so on. So it's no surprise that more and more studios are looking for ways to stake their claim on a superhero property for conversion to the silver screen. Marvel/Disney are still hoping to regain their movie rights on the X-Men titles, Spider-man and the Fantastic Four, while DC is being represented by WB and others without a centralized in-house movie production company.

This year was an unnerving one for me, being a comic book fan. This year held a lot of.... well, I want to say "promise", but I also want to say "hype." The feeling was somewhere in between the two. Essentially, we had the Avengers , The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spider-Man (yes, I know Dredd is coming out later, but I really haven't been terribly worried about that one).

I've loved the Marvel movies leading up to this, and I've always been a fan of Joss Whedon's work - he wrote my favorite spin on the X-Men comics, and though he's never had a big budget movie like this to flex his cinematic muscles, he's never failed me thus far. Christopher Nolan has done a fine job of reinventing the Batman franchise, so I remain comfortable in my anticipation of that - but Spiderman had me the most worried. You see, of all the comic book characters EVER, Spidey was always my favorite. I don't pretend to say I understand him better than his creators - I'd never presume to think I could write him, or anything.

I'd watched the Spidey cartoons, the electric company shorts, the live action television show (don't hate. It was the 70s, and there was no tech for it), and then the Sam Raimi movies of the 2000s. I liked them all, in their own ways. Though Sony movies bent Raimi over with that third movie, I still thought his three movies were a great introduction to the Spider-man universe. Oh, sure, I had my points of criticism, but what are you going to do? It's not like they're going to make the movie as per my precise specifications, nor would I want them to.

Okay, well, maybe a little.

But here's the point I've been meaning to get to. Writing comic books is not the same as writing comic book movies. The two do NOT instantly, automatically, convert to each other's mediums. The average comic book does not simply become a movie, nor vice versa. And yes, put your torches down, there are some that have come very, very close. The Walking Dead turned into a series with huge chunks gleaned straight out of the graphic novels, for example.

And I feel for the poor wretches who decide to make comic book adaptations. There are some pretty terrifying critics out there that movie companies aren't used to having to accommodate: comic book fans. It's not like movie critics, who can always be counted upon to provide a blurb or what not. Comic book fans will often pore over the set photos and teaser trailers and insider buzz about the movies from the moment Variety announces the movie, and unleash a barrage upon the internet about their take on the films, long before the movie is even into its principle stages of development.

Sometimes, their criticism is found to be pretty valid (for example, the almost-was Wonder Woman television show, the Tim Burton/Nicolas Cage Superman movie), and other times not so much. A couple good examples of the "not so much" were the casting choice of Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man/Tony Stark, and the hiring of Joss Whedon to helm the Avengers movie. The internet suffered a mild aneurysm when those two things were announced, but look at them now: they were both pretty damn ideal.

So, yes. The Avengers... remains perhaps one of my favorite comic book adaptations of all time. Brilliant perhaps because it was not a literal adaptation of comic books. The bulk of its story cannot be found in any one Avengers comic - in fact, most of it came from a series in Marvel's "Ultimate Universe", in the comic title of the same name, written by Mark Millar and drawn by Bryan Hitch. In fact, in that comic, they designed the character of Nick Fury to resemble Samuel L Jackson - and in one scene following the main climactic battle, they sit around contemplating the likelihood of Hollywood filming their lives, and Fury insists that only Samuel L Jackson himself should play him in the movie.

Not a bad prognostication, considering it was published in 2002.

But the part that really made the Avengers and the Dark Knight movies pay off for me as a moviegoer was that they at some point stopped being Comic Book Movies, and started being...well, movies.

I watched the new Spider-man movie this weekend, though, and clearly a lot of people still don't understand why movies like the Avengers and the Dark Knight movies worked so well, and why the Amazing Spider-man did not.

And let me be clear - almost everything about the Spider-man movie, I felt, was done right. They had an almost ideal cast (Andrew Garfield did a fabulous job, by the way. Major kudos to him.), they've got the special effects down very well, and aside from some pretty horrible continuity errors and plot holes, the movie essentially holds it own.

Where I felt it really failed, though, came down to one big thing: the script. Broken down further, it would come to the dialogue and the characterizations.

The dialogue was, to a broad point, frustratingly painful. They deliberately avoided certain key and essential dialogue in a way that I found unforgivable. One perfect example of this is the specific omission of the "with great power comes great responsibility" line. Though not originally a spoken line of dialogue in the comic, it's an integral part of his origin and his core. It's why he's Spider-man at all. In point of fact, that sentence is as key to Spider-man's universe as "To Be or Not to Be" is for Hamlet. Oh, sure, you're going to make that face at me because I just compared Spider-man to Hamlet. But you know what? They DO compare. In fact, pretty much everything in Hamlet can be found in Spider-man stories, if you want to pick nits. But my point is that there are key elements which are tied to the particular verbiage of a script, the omission of which is just ridiculous.

Seriously, what would have happened if Kenneth Branaugh had made Hamlet and left the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy out? You'd NEVER have forgiven him. But this is just an example - one particular Spidey-specific phrasing that is essential to the character's iconography - every bit as critical as the white eyes and the spider imagery, the cracking wise and the general rambunctiousness of the character. But there's just a certain quantity of Spidermanitude which is requisite to the character that I found strongly lacking from this movie. In a nutshell, what failed wasn't the acting or the special effects - hell, I could even live with the costume if I was forced to - but the writing and direction. Someone, somewhere, looked at that script and the story, and said, "yeah, man, we got ourselves a Spider-man movie!".

Fact is, if you strip away all the aspects of "comic book"ness, it should still make sense as a movie. And this movie wasn't that. It was a "spider-man movie", and sadly, not an even good one at that.

And on that note, I'll stop. There's only a week or so left until the Dark Knight Rises, and I don't want to depress myself further before going to watch it.

Ciao!

In Which We Attempt to Pay the Bills

I don't like flooding my twitter stream with the deets - plus, come on, 140 characters can't do everything - so I wanted to update you with some of the basics of my current books:

Rom, sketched by Joe Benitez

The main series - completed, "in the can", and available for your hungry reading-holes, is titled The Chronicles of Aesirium. Though labeled as science fiction/fantasy, it's got a funny little delicious aftertaste that you might not recognize, but is called "Steampunk." But the books are at their heart about a young orphan girl named Romany ("Rom" to her friends) who finds that not only are the Reapers real - those terrifying beings that are said to steal away the souls of the unwary as they fly above the rooftops of Oldtown-Against-the-Wall - but that she is one of them!

Described as "a Victorian Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and "Death, wearing a pretty black dress", the Aesirium books take you through the streets of Oldtown, over the eponymous Wall and into Aesirium itself, discovering - and answering - the riddles that plague the people who live there. These same riddles that had divided their city, and are tied to the many threats of their past and future.

It's available in individual volumes on Amazon both as ebooks for the Kindle and in paperback formats, and in bundles at Barnes and Noble for the Nook.

The next series is my "Into the Dust" series, a prequel of sorts to an upcoming novel that retells the story of Peter Pan as a contemporary fantasy horror story. I wrote these with the fantastic author Kiri Callaghan, with whom I am completely blessed to be friends.

We compiled the entire series of stories into "the collection", and even added a bonus story. Who says we don't know how to drive a bargain?

The individual stories of "Into the Dust" are available only for the kindle; the collection is available as a Kindle ebook and as a paperback.

Then, and in a wholly literary divergent direction, I've also done a sort of compilation of blogs and musings about growing up and finding myself to be an adult geek in Dad form. I called these compilations "The Middle Age: A geek's journey from boy to man". These are available as kindle books, as well.

Also, I participated with my creative cohorts at Talaria Press to produce "Quests and Answers" - 7 great tales of....well, Quests and Answers. Duh! This is available as an eBook and also as a paperback.

Okay, so that's the bulk of my publishing materials thus far. What's next?

Well, I'm working with Talaria Press on the NEXT anthology, which is going to be quite delightful and a bit more fun. One of the stories I'm doing for that is about a character that will be appearing in my next series, which I'm already writing and will be called "The Old Bones." I don't want to give too much away, but suffice it to say that it's going to be a fully contemporary series, so I'll get to make all those jokes about Star Wars and Starbucks I've been just dying to make all this time.

Also, Kiri and I will be working together again, this time to do the full "Dust" book that our original project was designed to introduce. If the wind stays at my back, both these novels should be completed by the fall - but I'll be releasing additional smaller projects along the way, count on it!

If you've picked up (or decide now to pick up) any of the above titles, please let me know - I'd love to hear what you think! And reviews on Amazon are, of course, ALWAYS appreciated!

Thanks for reading!

Allons-y!

The Wild West

A few years ago, my day job was pretty much your stereotypical technical support position. Taking calls, answering questions, helping internal customers (also known as "employees"), and fixing computer problems. Oh, and there's also the re-routing of about a dozen or more calls a day who were sent to the wrong department, but, eh. But beside the occasional and frequently aggressive hysterics that IT support persons have to experience, the element that was the most difficult for me was the part of just being at work by 4 am, 5 days a week. I'm not really a morning person - well, I am, provided that I can spend my morning sleeping. But, being at my desk, logged into the phones and my desktop computer, ready to process another bundle of technical nightmares....well, some days there just wasn't enough coffee in the world.

On several occasions, I would simply find myself sitting at my desk, without clear recollection of having gotten up, dressed, and driven to work. And yet there I sat, pants (thank god), shoes, socks, shirt, and so forth. Those days were a little unsettling. I mean, I clearly had driven there (though finding your car in the parking lot when you have completely forgotten where or how you'd parked it can be a bit of a challenge), but I'd obviously been pretty half-asleep along the way. Yikes, right?

I was reminded of this the other day when a friend of mine and I were talking about the progress I've made in writing over the past couple of years. Though, granted, it's still evolving, things are a fair sight more established and blossoming than they were even a year ago. But it occurred to me that I've come a long ways and hadn't really pondered how I'd gotten here. I've been asked by a lot of "aspiring writers" (and please, for the love of god, you've really got to avoid ever saying that about yourself, trust me.) what the secret is - both to getting projects done and to getting attention as a writer. And to be honest, I struggle with settling on any one answer to that question.

I don't think this is a bad thing.

Another author friend of mine compared the current period of DIY-ism that can be seen in music, writing, film and even industries previously believed to be safely in the hands of big business like video games, to the Wild West and the time of the Gold Rush. Just look at the frenzy - everyone with two metal pans to rub together has a chance to strike it rich, even though in the end only a few will strike true paydirt. I've seen a few people compare self-publishing to the lottery - many people play, and almost nobody wins. You want to be rich? "Then, play by the rules, and get in line like everybody else. Maybe you'll get lucky."

Publishing is turning out to be less like the lottery, however, and more like the gold rush. The numbers seem to back this up - although some of the larger publishers and chain bookstores have been claiming a drop in numbers, when you factor in all the various ebook and POD suppliers, book sales are actually higher than they were, say, 4 or 5 years ago back before the technology of ebooks, internet marketplaces and self-publishing (as opposed to Vanity Press companies) really got a head of steam going.

Until this time, it was very challenging for a new author to get published, but over the years a very particular path has been laid out for them: write; get short stories published; work hard; get recognition; prove yourself; find an agent; get published. A simple enough path made all the more complex by the sheer quantities of competition.Thousands of unpublished manuscripts are read and denied every week at each level of the publishing industry: agents, editors, publishers. The US alone has enough unpublished authors to fill a mid-sized American city, and only enough agents, editors and publishers to fill a football stadium. Those aren't good odds, are they? And with so many layoffs in these same publishing houses, the ratio of author:publishing contact is only getting worse. So what happens to these unprocessed, unpublished manuscripts? If you ask the proponents of conventional wisdom, the answer boils down to "if it's good enough, it'll get published. Just keep trying." This is a silly distillation, and, also, complete bullshit.

It is, however, the quickest way they can think of to clear off their desks and get people to stop emailing them.

Let me clarify something here. I've submitted a couple of my own books into the Query mill, and in spite of really positive responses, they all ended up saying roughly the same thing - discarding the dozen or so "thank you but no thank you" form emails their own time constraints require of them. Only a few agents didn't even respond at all, but I hold no ill will towards them, either. In fact, to all the agents, editors and publishers who've told me "no thanks", I'm not mad at them. Seriously. I'm not even upset at the process. It's unfortunate, but it's the best we've had for years at trying to process the thousands and thousands of manuscripts all yearning for publication.

The common answer I received, by the way, was NOT a form email. Several agents and I talked at length about my books, and they always really liked the books, but just didn't know how to market them. The characters, the world, the history - they loved them all. But how do you market a young adult science fiction fantasy adventure with a hint of steampunk and a subtext of cultural revolution, housed in an alternate history dystopian civilization? Last time I checked, Barnes and Noble didn't have a shelf for that.

And let's be honest: when it comes to the present state of the "traditional publishing" industry, it's all about fast returns and the price of real estate. I get that, I do. It's about crunching numbers and determining investment over ROI, and figuring out what it will take to bump your company's shares up a point. It's about making your quarterly goals and lifting the overall value of the company. But for me....well, I can either consider myself a chunk of grist to be cast into the mill and cross my fingers for that perfect combination of agent/publisher that will see the inherent value or potentiality of me or my books.... or I can go out and make it happen on my own terms.

One of the really interesting things I've noted along the way is the general wailing and gnashing of teeth from people who hold to the "traditional" route. Oh, they sound angry! But honestly, I can look past their general disdain couched within their "friendly advice" to see what is going on. They're justifiably nervous about the changes to an industry they previously enjoyed in a quite solitary capacity. Where once there had been relatively few truly successful publishing houses, suddenly there was an explosion of business popping up at every turn. All the rules of publishing genre were smashed. People were coming out with digital books for a fraction of the price of their paperback counterparts - and bypassing hardcover books entirely! And what's worse, so many of these "publishers" were the authors themselves, making 35-70% or more on every unit they sold! Good god almighty! It's the end of the world, they'd cry, rending their garments and coating themselves in ash and sackcloth. Or, like we now know it, snark and condescension. (I really wanted to include links here to a few of the big offenders, but I won't. They have their opinions, and I have mine. In the end, does it even matter if either one of us is correct? History would tell us we're probably both wrong.)

Change can be a little scary, sure. But I'm not here to either bury or praise Caesar. I'm here to tell you why I think that it doesn't have to be an "either or" situation. This is not Thunderdome.

Amazon - just like so many successful franchises - started with the notion of finding a new way to do the old things. It looked at the internet and saw that it was a virtually untapped hemisphere of marketing potential which gloriously catered to the forward-thinking and geek-centric. It addressed people's inclinations towards getting things now, to liking to shop but not to mingle - it offered a service in a way Amazon supposed would not immediately catch fire, but, in time, would.

People didn't always feel they needed to call out for pizza. One hundred years ago, did people look at their phones and say "gosh, if only I could pick up this infernal contraption, and place a call so that a fresh hot pizza would arrive here within 30 minutes or less?" No, not really, no. but someone thought so. In 1960, Domino's started up, and here we are more than 50 years later and it's everywhere. I was in Mexico City when two of its first franchises in the country opened - I know this because I knew one of the managers - and they did more business in their FIRST MONTH than any other Domino's store in the entire world. Just like Ewan MacGregor's character said in "Robots": find a need, fill a need.

And they weren't alone - there were other companies (with new ones popping up every day) who tried to jump into the maelstrom of internet entrepreneurship, only to be dashed against the Scylla or Charybdis along the way. One might say our entire national culture has derived from an almost Darwinian practice of letting the victor have all the spoils. But in the end, Amazon remained as the essentially undisputed champion of internet bookstores.

That's when they did something really weird. They reached out to authors who weren't getting published in the old standard way, and gave them the chance to get published, on their own merits. In the truest example of corporate-sponsored capitalism, everyone who writes gets a chance to be read. Amazon reportedly now has millions of self-published books, both in ebook and paperback format, created, developed and priced by the authors. Successful authors can even be picked up by the larger publishing houses, after an author finds a level of success on their own. Or even successful authors can opt to work with Amazon to publish all their work, including the backlist of their work, long since abandoned by the publishing houses.

Marketing and genre-bending opportunities are everywhere, now. An author need not shove their work into a marketable genre, just on the hopes of getting fitted into the shelves. They can write their story as the story demands, and then use keywords to help direct shoppers to their work.

There's that wonderful scene in Star Trek 2, where the crew of the Enterprise and Khan are playing a lethal game of hide-and-seek inside a sensor-blinding nebula. They out-maneuver Khan, who, unused to the challenges and opportunities of deep space tactics, does not think of looking up or down for the clever Federation. It's a bit of a limiting parable, but one I think very much applies to so many of these companies that are unable or unwilling to access the parts of their mind which might allow for new and exciting revenue streams or the monetization of the internet.

To them, I want to say "snap out of it, you gol-darned idjit! There's gold in them thar hills!"

And to the rest of you, readers and writers alike - I say thank you for embracing the world of the new, and for wandering with me through these exciting lands of adventure and suspense. What will tomorrow bring?  Honestly, we don't know. None of us do. There's no magic bullet, no prophetic prognosticator capable of knowing exactly what's going to work and what's going to happen and what won't.

What I do know is that the future we make, we're going to make together.


More to follow.

Is that worth demonizing?

Steampunk Tales, now on the Nook!

I've been a pretty big fan of the Amazon kindle experience so far - had a couple of issues with the Barnes and Noble process, mostly of a technical nature. But at this year's Emerald City Comic Con, a lot of readers asked me to offer up a Nook version of my books. Well, rather than go through and individually publish all six of them, I'm doing you one better.

Now, the first three are available as a set. Yes. At the risk of putting on my late night infomercial voice (don't make me, I'll do it, I swear!), you get three novels in one bundle. Three.

It's already gone live on Barnes and Noble's website here  and it looks very sad and lonely without a few reviews. Please let me know if you have a Nook and would like to read and review them for the B&N site. First five people to volunteer will get a free copy of the Nook version.

No, I'm not bribing people - - I'm just saying if you are willing to take the time to read and write a review, then the least I can do is not make you pay for the book in the first place.

So either let me know in the comments section, or drop me an email at ren at renwritings dot com and I'll hook the first five folks up!

Artist's Statement

A good and extremely wise friend of mine and I were talking the other day about Artist's Statements. And when I say we were talking about them, what I really mean is that she mentioned it and I realized that I've never actually written anything like that. Struck me as a really good idea, it did.

Bit of conversational backstory: been feeling a bit restless, creatively, since the last of the Chronicles of Aesirium books came out, back in December of last year. Those six books summarized a fair bulk of my creative work over the past two years, and it left me a bit stretched out and feeling vacant. And it wasn't that I had no other ideas to write about - I've already completed a few other projects and have many others in various stages of development. But it almost felt like I was in between relationships - a softer sense of mourning, I guess.

I haven't really felt the urgent sense of work work work because oh my god it must be done like I'd felt previously, and that lacking had nothing to do with a diminished sense of desire nor any sort of writer's block. It wasn't a becalming, it...well, I had more explanations describing that which is was not than I had for what it was.

I've been tracking book sales - this has become a year wherein I actually have to start tracking them, the fact of which generates in me a good deal more gratitude than I'm presently expressing - but as it turns out I'm really not in this for the money. And to that I say, excellent! So if modest returns don't fill me with a sense of deepened satisfaction, what will?

That was the question which not only gave me pause, but the pausing itself filled me with a renewed sense of purpose. Why do I write? "Because I must".... isn't enough. It was enough, ten years ago. It's not, now.

So here I am. And here is my artist's statement.

The moon is a funny thing. She just floats out there in the sky above us, reflecting the powerful sunlight which marks our days and nights. My eyes have always seemed to find her there, and though I claim neither lunacy nor lycanthropy, I've felt a certain kinship to her waxings and wanings. As a boy, I'd often look up and recognize that a million other eyes were likely watching her as well at that very moment, and it made me feel connected to them all in that instant. The big planet of ours seemed just a little smaller - an odd thing for so distant an object to generate a sensation of such closeness.

I was raised by the seemingly incompatible cultures of religion and pop culture - putting as much faith in the Force as I did in God. And though my faith has changed many times in the course of my life, it now feels far more like a pilgrim's journey than anything - and that journey, both in execution and evaluation, has always sought conveyance; usually as a metaphor in some manner. Also, quite often, with a little bit of funny thrown in for good measure.

As I grew, that lingering sensibility remained - with pictures, with music, and, eventually, with words, each finding in me a love for their crafts and their ability to create that same associative approximation as the moon. The gentle lines of a soft pencil upon canvas, the melodic refrain floating from a piano, or a tale of adventure or love's redemption...I often can't tell if I'm the pianist, the piano or the melody. And that's okay.

I feel a kinship to the bardic tradition, of storytelling and passing along the myths and legends to the following generation - of reaching up towards the stars and weaving them into constellations. And also, to borrow from George Bernard Shaw, I love to dream of worlds which have never been - but quite possibly could - asking, "Why not?" 

And then, you know, write about them. 

Year 42 A.I. (After Internet)

1969 was a pretty banner year. Man stepped on the moon; the Beatles gave their final public performance; the Haunted Mansion opened its doors in Disneyland... and the first nodes of the creature which would one day become the Internet were launched.

Considering how much has changed on the Intranet landscape just over the past 10 years, it's hard to even remember what life was like back in the data-dark ages. In the middle of reading a bit on twitter this morning, it struck me that there are a few things that just will no longer be the way it used to be. It's like asking kids these days what a specific brand of ink pen has to do with cassette tapes.

Like, having lived in that particular generation of time, I get the association - but people growing up with CDs or MP3s.... it's just not a connection. Not a big deal, sure, but it's a common frame of reference that is essentially gone forever. Feel free to shed a tear. Or not. Your choice.

The Internet has accomplished a wide variety of disassociations - not just the lack of a need to relate certain elements, but the awareness that they were ever a thing at all.

For example:

1) Talking behind someone's back - thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Podcasts, emails, voicemails, and so forth - is essentially a dead art form. Whatever you say/tweet/post/text - is almost certainly guaranteed to get back to the subject of your comment. What surprises me about this, however, is the fact that people continue to do it. I mean, really? Talking smack about someone and yet expect them NOT to find out? I've decided to try and live my life as if it were the subject of a Reality TV show. Now, if I go into the "confessional booth" and talk about how so and so is a total douchebag....I have to be prepared for them to a) find out; and b) confront me about it.

2) Lone gunmen - Remember those "crazy" people you used to see on street corners, holding up the "The End Is Near" signs? Notice how we don't see those anymore? They don't need street corners anymore - - they can wax conspiracy theory from the privacy of their own homes. The world is their street corner, now. And what's more, we see now that no matter how wackadoo a person's pretenses might be, there's going to be at least one more person out there holding up a cigarette lighter and screaming for an encore. I think Andy Warhol was only partly right - - except the world doesn't just get fifteen minutes of fame anymore. Now, everyone gets an audience.

3) Encyclopedias - If you haven't heard, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has announced the end of their print run - - due mostly, I'm certain, to the prevalence of sites like Wikipedia. (author's note: I just pulled up the link there and felt suddenly really cruel. Odd.) I remember one time in school having to go do a report on something, and our class went to the school library, and I was one of the last people into the room and BAM. No encyclopedias - all the other kids had grabbed pretty much everything but Q and Z. It sucked. I had to actually look up OTHER BOOKS to get information. Oh, the humanity! But now, I've got Wikipedia (or a similar variant) on my phone, my Kindle, and as a favorite on my laptop. I use IMDB whenever we're watching a show and have one of those "who is that? They look soooo familiar!" moments. When I'm in the middle of working on a new book and need to know what the names of the masts are in a british sailing vessel, I can find it in SECONDS, and get right back into the pace of writing without having to stop the process. I can search for character reference pictures, costumes, locations, everything, and I can do it so quickly that I don't need to swap out the hemispheres of my brain in order to do it.

4) Patience: - Here's a pretty simple example - I got a Kindle Fire (blatant product placement) for Christmas last year, and the first book I downloaded was The Hunger Games. A lot of people had commented on the tone comparisons between the Suzanne Collins trilogy and my own YA Steampunk books, so since I was finally wrapping the last of my series, I felt comfortable breaking down and checking it out myself. I was perhaps 3 chapters into the Hunger Games and I knew I would love the series, so I clicked back onto the Amazon app on the Kindle and ordered them as well. They were both on my Kindle before I'd finished the next page of the book. That's just a wonderful thing. It's a bit dangerous for an impulse shopper like I often am, but it's also fantastic. I don't hate stores - I enjoy them, honestly (though, salesmen - - please, please please can you stop walking up to me and asking me if you can help me? If I need help, I'll come find you, I promise!) - - but sometimes, I'd rather not make the drive just for one thing. And sometimes, I want it now. Or, rather, tomorrow, via overnight shipping.

What about you? What things have you seen get run over by the progress of the Internet?

Let me know - let's raise a glass in honor of these fallen concepts.

The Twitter

Read a recent post by fellow author and all around wonderful person Lorna Suzuki where she talked about her logical process for "to follow or not to follow" on Twitter, and it made me take a second look at my own use of twitter.

I'm not so much a social networking expert - I definitely don't think I have any justification for telling people what it takes to build their followers or increase their Klout rating or monetize their Facebook profile - if I had, I'd likely be spending a lot more time counting my paypal pennies and less time bragging about it.

But I do trust what Lorna has to say - she's never steered me wrong yet - and I agreed with her list. It's really all about figuring out what she personally wanted from her Twitter experience, and as with so many things out there on the web, it's about figuring out your desired destination as well as the journey, and also placing a certain amount of prioritizing weight on both. Are you looking just for a huge twitter following? Do you want attention? Are you a net-stalker? Or are you looking to socialize? Are you working on developing your Brand, or looking to spam the universe?

Or are you looking for a radically, personally balanced, combination of those things?

I read a few dozen posts a day about people telling me "how to" do X thing the best. It's a lesson I learned years ago from a raven - an actual bird, yes - who showed me that by sampling everything and spitting out the garbage, you get a pretty good chance of filling your belly. And I'm fairly confident that there are lots of people out there who might just quickly filter my posts and tweets into that "garbage" column, and I'm fine with that. Sure, I wouldn't mind bending the ratio there a bit, but that's me and my hangups.

What is twitter for me? Well, I don't want to pretend like you asked that question, but in brief, twitter for me is a good way to quickly scan what is going on in publishing and media. It's a quick peek at the weather vane to see which way the wind is blowing, as well as a fairly expansive bulletin board to let a lot of folks casually know about things that they might be interested in. It's also a nice way to get the word out about whatever project I might be working on at the moment. Or help spread the word about projects friends of mine are doing. Fact is, you probably are reading this now BECAUSE of a tweet I made.

That actually made me smile to write that. Heh. Cool.

But the truth is, I really learn a lot from twitter. It's the simplest and broadest way for me to people-watch. And phrases might jump out (the ones where I accidentally misread them are the best by far!) that might trigger some other random idea that might make its way into a book. That's a whole lot of mights. But they're good mights. Mighty mights.

Twitter is a funny thing. I got into this weird headspace a while back where my follower count had frozen at around 1240 followers. It just didn't go up. At all. I'd pick up 5 new followers, and 5 others would unfollow. It was like running on ice. Crazy curling stuff, I'm telling you. I resisted the urge to do one of those "find out who is unfollowing you!" websites, because that would just likely feed into my already-enhanced twittneurosis. Like I need more things to be crazy about.

Then I went through a huge purge sometime late last year - I was following 2001 people and Twitter had cut me off - because I kept finding new people I wanted to follow, and that's when I realized I really was spending too much time reading the words of others and contributing so precious little back into the world. I went back, finished my last Aesirium novel and did a few other fun projects and am now feeling like I'm back into a better groove. A blog or two a week - a few tweets a day - and keep the juices flowing. A magical symphony of temporal balance, coupled with a healthy adjustment of extroversive and introversive (no, spellcheck tells me those aren't actual words, but I'm inventing them.) energies, and voila.

To sum up: if you've followed me and I haven't followed you back, please don't take it as a slight. I haven't followed maybe even half the people who've followed me, and a lot of the people I follow haven't followed me either. It's a sad cycle of accidental and perceived rejection, and I'm not gonna cry about it. Well, okay, I was sad back when Warren Ellis unfollowed me. But I got over it. @NeilHimself , @ThatKevinSmith and @TheNerdist have no idea who I am, either, but to be clear, that's never been my goal. Getting more books written - getting better books written - and coming to depend upon my personal creations and the results that come from them, and shifting my world into a much more artistically production-heavy one.... those are my goals, professionally speaking.

And at the end of the day, I can live with that.

The Murder Virus

Been - for reasons not even I am familiar with - watching a few documentaries about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and something occurred to me. Random thought, detached hypothesis.

Can neuroses - mental or psychological or emotional affectations - be contagious?

For example, if you hang out with a friend for a long period of time, is it not possible - plausible, even - that you begin to take on aspects of their personality? Sort of like, if you hang out at a particular place - a coffee shop, bookstore, bar, whatever - you take on a variety of elements of that location, at the very least the aroma of the place. The books we read, the music we listen to, the media we consume leaves its mark on us, to some at least mild degree.

So what about the internet? The websites, and so forth - might they start to also migrate their way into our minds, into our sense of interaction?

Taking it to the next step, then, how might the designs and functionality of those sites filter into our subconsciousness?

And the people who design those sites - assuming that the design of their sites come at least subconsciously from their own personal preferences and design aesthetics - what about the potential of their subconsciousness making its way across their sites and into the minds of the people viewing them?

So this now gave me an idea for a short story: The Murder Virus.

Probably already out there somewhere, but if not, I'm calling dibs.

Avast!

Running a nice little promotion over on Amazon today for one of the sections of the dark fantasy anthology "Into the Dust" that I co-wrote with Kiri Callaghan. For today and tomorrow (April 24th and 25th), "Avast" will be absolutely free as a download for Kindle, right here:

http://www.amazon.com/Avast-Into-the-Dust-ebook/dp/B007FDVIVA

"Into the Dust" is a 10-episode serial retelling the Peter Pan story as a dark fantasy. It's also the prequel to another novel currently in production and due out later this year. But for now, it's a great chance to take a look at a different sort of Neverland.

Take a peek and see what you think. It only costs a single happy thought - what have you got to lose?

Addendum to my last post

In all the excitement about chronocling the recent conversation between my daughter and I, I completely neglected one of the funniest bits. Shame on me!

As we were driving away from the UW campus, we both remarked on how hungry we were, and ran through a quick list of the nearby foodstuffs in the area. We sped through a variety of world cuisine, and we came up on Dick's Drive In - great burgers, if you've been there you know.

I said, "oh, hey, we can go there, to Dick's Burgers."

Jillie started giggling uncontrollably.

"What's so funny?" I asked innocently. "Is 'Burgers' a funny word?"

Her: "No." *giggle*

Me: "Oh, 'Dicks'? Is the word 'Dicks' funny?"

Her: *giggling hysterically*

I'm sure this threatens to revoke any Dad Cred I might have earned, but I don't care. I totally love that my daughter laughs at things like that. It's like she's 12 or something.

Heh.

Leveling Up

Yesterday was a field trip. No, that's not code for playing hooky from work, I volunteered at my daughter's fifth grade field trip to UW's college of Engineering "Discovery Days". It's sort of an open house, where many of the students display some of the more vibrant and dynamic projects in which they are engaged. She was excited about it, and insisted I take a day off from work so we could hang out at a college.

Seriously, who could say no to an invitation like that? Not this dad.

So in spite of some rain - yes, this is Seattle, so what did we expect? - it was a great few hours at the event. We saw an actual wind tunnel, a human powered submarine, and - my personal highlight of the day - met Monty Reed, inventor of the pneumatic-driven lifesuit. Dude is Tony Stark, only thus far Robert Downey Jr isn't playing him in any movies. But it's still early.

Jillie had her iPod handy, snapping pictures of the architecture of the school, and remarking frequently to me how much she loved interesting buildings. We talked about going to England someday so we can look at actual old buildings. Science and innovation was everywhere, floating around the air like cherry blossoms.

Since I'd driven down, we decided to hang out a bit longer at the event, and then take a nice drive around the city. Since we live about a half hour out, we don't usually get the chance, so now that the rain had gone away, it seemed a perfect time to do so. We drove around aimlessly in the downtown streets, Jillie pointing at this building or that, and I even pointed out a few buildings I've been considering for inclusion in an upcoming novel. As most of our downtown trips require, we swung by Uwajimaya's and picked up a few new manga (which catches her up on Soul Eater) and some treats for us to share later as a family. You know the drill - pocky, Ramune, all the basics. A short lunch later and we were back on the road.

Now, ever since Jillie was a wee thing, we've tried to be open and honest with her, and tried to encourage an air of sharing between us. Frequent readers of this blog or my Middle Age books will no doubt recognize
this pattern. It does, on occasion, lead us into potentially awkward situations (such as being asked to help her shop for bras a few months back), but every time I've come away being more and more impressed by this wonderfully intelligent child that I somehow have been granted the opportunity to help raise and be a father to.

Our drive back home provided the perfect backdrop to a new series of conversations. It started with a reflection on the Discovery Days, and with both of us wondering aloud just what Jillian might be when she grows up. The choices are out there, broad in scope, with no real demand for a decision as yet. For now, Jillie is enjoying writing stories and drawing. She's not far off from how I was at her age. Dungeons and Dragons, video games, friends, comic books and music. Pretty standard fare, yes?

We talked about life wishes, and I confessed that Neil Gaiman has stepped up to share the top spot with Sting on my list of people I'd love to hang out with someday over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. We both agreed that Yoko Kanno would also be extremely cool to meet, and she started thinking of a list like that of her own.

This conversation led naturally into one about growing up in general - exploring the world, learning everything, and yet Jillie insists that she will always live near us, calling or visiting us every day to share in the joy of new discoveries and celebrating new successes of dreams realized and boundaries broken. I can think of no greater way to spend a life, really.

I laughed when I told her that one of the things that worried Lizz and I was the general tendency of teenagers to rebel against the constraints of their parents. I admitted that although it wasn't like we just let her go insane on the world, we tried to apply logic and wisdom to every restriction we applied to her life - and even then, it isn't like there are many of them. We try to help her learn from every rule - why it exists as a rule and what we hope she will gain from it. In the end, we want her to be able to be the master of her own life.

It went from there into a brief conversation about her shaving her head and getting tattoos - by which I mean to say she made the cartoon gagging face at my implication that she'd ever do either. I told her it was at some point going to be her choice, and that like so many choices she would face in life, there would come a time where Lizz and I were not going to be in the room when she had to make them.

One of the things that I carried with me from my youth was the idea of making your decision before you ever had to make a stand - to decide what you wanted to do in certain situations long before you found yourself in a place where you were being asked to decide it.  I told her, also, that things like drinking (before you're 21) and smoking, doing drugs, and having sex were all things that, in the moment, may no longer seem like such bad things. Almost as if they're good things. People might like you. They might like you more. They might not make fun of you. In that moment, it's almost too late to decide what you want to do.

At this point, we'd gotten home, but she asked if we could stay in the car and just talk - that way the dogs wouldn't interrupt.

Drinking, smoking, doing drugs - those were all clear issues for her. But when we listed off sex, she made a horrified and confused expression. "Oh my god, why would I want to do that ever? I'm not having sex until, like, at least two or three years after I get MARRIED!"

My laughter surprised her, so I had to explain. (author's note: I asked her before I decided to write this for her permission - she thought it might help other dads feel more comfortable talking to their daughters about sex, so told me to go ahead with her blessing)

Me: "You mean, you're not going to try and have babies until two or three years after you get married, right?"

Her: "Right. So I can wait and have sex, then."

Me: (after a healthy pause) "Well, you know sex isn't ONLY for making babies."

She looked at me like I was a crazy man. "But it's GROSS!"

Me: "Okay, let's be honest about it. Sex might seem gross to you, but it can be a pretty wonderful thing that two people who truly love each other and love being with each other can do. It's like kissing, only thousands of times better - it's like kissing, hugging, riding a roller coaster, eating a bite of the best chocolate ever made, laughing, tickling - it's one of the truly best feelings two people can ever share. But, yes, it's also a way that people can try and make babies. But it's not JUST for that."

We'd talked a bit earlier about Darwinism, and about how his theory suggests that (for example) only the tall giraffes could eat, so the short giraffes all died, leaving only tall giraffes. I added that people felt good having sex so that they'd do it a lot - because if people didn't make babies, then the people were all gonna die.

"But also," I added, "when you're with somebody you really really like, you're gonna kiss them (No, Jillie, stop making the yuck face, it's going to happen and it's okay. It'll happen). But when you do, you're going to feel all kinds of tingly, and your body is going to start thinking it's time to go further than just kissing. It's going to feel like it's okay to do more."

Her: "So you kiss and then you have sex?"

Me: "Well, no, there's a few steps between one and the other."

Her: "Oh, like people touching your...."

Me: "Your 'privacy bits', yes."

Her: "Well, that's OFF LIMITS."

Me: "But as you get older, and when you start to really kiss a person you really like, that part might not feel like it wants to be off limits."

Her: "Well, I'm just gonna tell them no. And if they try it, I'm gonna punch them in the face."

Me: "I'd rather there was no punching, but if you say no and they don't listen, then do what you have to do, yes."

Her: "If a boy doesn't listen when I say no, then I'm not going to be friends with them."

Me: "If a boy doesn't listen when you say no, then he's already not friends with you."

Her: "And he better not punch back."

Me: "Better not."

Her: "So that's why I'm going to wait."

Me: "Well, I just think it's best that you take any of those steps one at a time, and give yourself a chance to make each choice with a clear head. And THAT's the decision you have to make before you even find yourself kissing someone."

She pondered this for a moment, and nodded thoughtfully. And what she said next made me feel like I was somehow witness to the greatest realization of the universe.

"I think it's like in a video game. You have to start playing by learning how to fight little stuff, and then when you level up, you can fight more powerful stuff. But you have to level up and get cool weapons and equipment first, and level your party up, too. And sex is like...the BOSS. If you try to fight him before you're ready, he just KILLS YOU."

So there it was. My 11 year old daughter just explained sex with a metaphor as playing video games. Leveling up.

We laughed about that for a few minutes - I admitted that I couldn't have imagined a better metaphor to use for that entire conversation, and we decided it was a good point to wrap it up, go on inside and watch a bit of television and relax. Meanwhile, I sat there and pondered the fact that my daughter is simply amazing.

Twelve years ago, I was terrified. I felt - no, I was certain - that I was unfit to the task. I didn't think my experiences or knowledge were anywhere close to being adequate to the responsibility of being a father. There are still days I feel that sting of life-applied humility. But yesterday... I felt like I'd kind of leveled up in the Dad video game. Or at least, she leveled up as my little girl. She's just awesome. Eleven years old, and already making analogies like an old pro.

So, yeah, college is still a few years off, and no, I'm really not in any hurry to see my little girl going off into the world - - but I definitely feel a lot better about her ability to do so in a grand way.

Hear that, world? Get ready.

Emerald City ComiCon 2012

I spent a weekend at the 2012 Emerald City ComiCon, and I'd meant to jot down my thoughts on it sooner, but...well, I'm still filtering bits of it into my conscious mind. It was a fun and satisfying venture. A nice little write up can be found over on the Talaria Press site - go check it out here if you have the inclination.

But I also got to hang with some great folks - new and old friends alike - and got to deal with a nice little case of laryngitis, so clearly I was doing a monster bit of chatting.

Some of the particular folks I got to hang with were (in no particular order):

Joe Benitez - who drew a fantastic sketch of my daughter, cosplayed as Rom from the Aesirium books. He's also giving me some great advice on further ways to expand the books into a few other mediums, but this is a larger project I'll tell you more about later.

Emonic - he and Chemix are some amazingly cool cats, and if you haven't at least met them, then no wonder you've been feeling like your life's just not been complete. Wish these guys lived closer, we'd totally hang out more.

Alexis Cruz - okay, don't look at me like I just started name dropping. Alexis and I go back years, but I'll be damned if the man didn't just walk up randomly to my table. That was just an awesome moment.

Sometimes, crossing paths with certain people can be viewed as a simple happenstance, but I choose to see this creatively delicious convergence as an indicator that things are truly moving in the direction I've been trying to get them to go. Something about just sitting on the other side of the table all weekend long, talking to hundreds of total strangers - at one point talking to THOUSANDS of total strangers - reminded me exactly why I love this business. Telling stories, sharing the creative bent of my fractured brain; it's just a wonderful experience - - talking with others who share a similar path was a great way to reassure my little 7 year old boy shadow that things are gonna be just fine.

Writing is a wonderful experience. Totes worth the effort, worth the occasional self-doubt and the struggles it's taken to get things lifting off. And the best part is that it's just starting.

Speaking of which, we're now in the 4th month of 2012, and I still have 3 novels to finish this year, PLUS a lot more short stories.

But "Into the Dust" is finally up, in both ebook and paperback - - which was shockingly easy to produce. It's made me re-examine a lot of the production processes that have served as "common knowledge" thus far.

Literally, the entire project took a bit more than one month, start to finish. The sales have been spectacular, and, because of that, I've changed the timeline for the novel for which this collection serves as a prequel. But that just means I'll be working on potentially all three novels simultaneously.

I'm a madman.

Thankfully, one of those novels will be co-written with another author, so it won't be as brutal of a process, and both this and the third novel are already mostly structurally built out. But just know that though blogging might dwindle a bit, I'll try and post updates either here or over on Twitter or on Facebook. So, yeah, you're not rid of me yet, by any stretch.

Ah crap. And there's the anthology of children's stories I'm doing with my daughter. And the next Talaria Press anthology. Hrm. Okay, no, don't worry. I can juggle it.  It'll be another adventure. :)

Anyway, thanks again to Jim Demonakos and his team of convention staff and volunteers - - with an extra shout out to Joe Parrington, who is pretty much an all-around awesome person.

Choose Your Own Adventure

A couple weeks back, the most ridiculous idea for the most ridiculous publishing concept came up in a half-joking conversation: a do-it-yourself choose your own adventure. Basically, all the page numbers were filled in, and every couple of pages or so would be capped off with “if you choose to do one thing, turn to page 37; if you do something else, turn to page 61, and if you choose to do nothing at all, turn to page 114.” And then, random pages would be covered in endings, such as “You have died” or “You won!” or whatever. Everything else would be blank. I don’t know why somebody hasn’t done that already.

I really loved the “choose your own adventure” books – they were, to my mind, the ancestors of the RPG (though I wonder if they didn’t actually come out later), in that you, the reader, had some say in how the book turned out. There’ve definitely been a lot of books and movies I would love to have had the opportunity to choose my own ending, that’s for sure. Is that arrogance on my part? I don’t know. It’s not so much that I think I can do it better, but I would love a chance to have done it differently. For example, I agree with Joss Whedon when he said that he’d have done Return of the Jedi where Luke and Leia were not actually siblings, but the “other Skywalker” would’ve been a female jedi who totally kicked ass. Tell me that wouldn’t have been awesome.

But those CYOA books just fell in line with my youthful ambitions to tell stories, create my own endings to whatever tale I was reading. Even when I get the occasional moment to play video games, the parts I enjoy most are the storyline elements. The gameplay, sure, it’s fun, it’s dynamic, totally. But give me a cool story that I get to help define as my characters level up, and you’ve got me in the palms of your hands. Most of all when you surprise me in a good way. Tell me a story I haven’t heard before; or tell it in a really interesting way. Don’t just tell me the story that tested well in development or that mirrors the narrative arc that did so well in the theaters last year. Don’t just find a new way to retell Titanic, don’t just reboot dwindling franchises, don’t just do cover songs that sound a lot like the original (though I admit, I kinda liked Pseudo Echo's version of that, much to my deep and abiding shame).

As I was watching a recent episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he had a guest on there – Elon Musk, entrepreneur made wealthy for his involvement in PayPal who is now developing a private company dedicated to developing space travel. One of the first statements the man said in response to the question “how do you go from PayPal to Space Travel?” was quite illuminating and inspiring. He said “when I was in college, I believed that there were three things which would revolutionize the whole world: the internet, sustainable energy and space travel.” I completely agree, and for the very same reasons that he stated. He explained that the whole problem with the world right now is that we’ve to a very large part abandoned the spirit of exploration. We’ve stopped boldly going; we’ve begun to shift in many ways into a process of just trying to monetize the things we do – rather than following JFK’s indication that "we choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win ...", we do things only if they are easy and we can get paid for them. Granted, sure, I understand the idea of wanting to have a comfortable lifestyle, but also… we need to keep an eye on the adventures we have not yet dreamed up. Life cannot just be about problem solving. It has to be about dreaming up a world we haven’t yet built and saying “why not?”

Jon’s parting words to Musk were ones I could feel echoed in my own mind: “Take me with you.”

Because come on, what’s happened to us? Last night, my 11 year old daughter was asking me about current technology – a conversation that came out of the innocent question “What’s a Walkman?” – and I pointed out that not 25 years ago in Star Trek, they had datapads, which, at the time, seemed to help place the show physically in the realm of Science Fiction. These conceptual future computers in turn inspired the iPads that now pretty much everyone either has, has seen, or desperately wants. I myself fall into the last two categories, but only for the short term. Sad Ren, huh? I’m still waiting for the flying cars that the movie industry has promised me – though I’d be happy with the maglev cars seen in Minority Report, just so we’re clear. But I’m concerned by the perception that we appear to be catching up with our imaginations a little bit. At least… at least it has SEEMED that way.

I personally do not believe this to be the case. I think it’s a matter of time, really, before things punch through to a new level of imagination and comprehension.

I see it like this: until the world’s explorers fir circumnavigated the globe, there was not yet definitive belief or understanding that the earth was truly round. But discovering that – proving that – forced us to universally update our perceptions. Currently, we have the perceptions of things we publicly indicate to be unchanging and unwavering principles – things like the theory of relativity, for example, which we’ve decided are going to be unshakeable truths.

Things can’t travel faster than the speed of light? Well, who knows? We used to think things couldn’t travel faster than the speed of sound, and we eventually learned that wasn’t the case, either. And if we proceed with the notion that perhaps things CAN exist in a structure of believe not aligned with what we have traditionally accepted, what will that do to the thousand other possibilities that exist?

In a series of observations woven into the classic postapocalyptic novel “Earth Abides”, one that always stuck with me was the notion that the past does not define the future. Just because you’ve never broken your arm does not mean it is unbreakable. Just as the fact that you have not yet died does not mean you are immortal. Things can happen – sometimes radically – to utterly devastate previous dogmas. Sometimes, the world does it to you. Sometimes you go looking for it.

But these new observations do not happen on the roads which lay so paved and neat, tramped down by generations of travelers. You have to take that path less travelled – or maybe take no path at all, forging ahead into the dark wilderness that yawns wide before us.

Our family tries to take an adventure every year. Sometimes it’s a simple journey, like to Disneyland or whatnot, but other times we have simply jumped into the car and headed out, following our noses. Those are the vacations I love the most – though they’re often quite complex and not always easy. They recharge me, showing me parts of the world I’ve never seen, feeding into the hungry Pit of Carkoon that exists at the center of my creative process. Feed the maw, I say.

Find your own maw, and see what it craves. Feed it. Explore. Experience. Choose your own adventure.

And then come back and share your stories.