After a rough weekend, a new book is released

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This past weekend was pretty rough. The one bright spot was lunch on Saturday to catch up with an old friend, but the rest was a litany of minor difficulties: tiny black ants came through the wall that divides my bathroom from a neighboring unit, the section of book I’m writing “feels” wrong while I push through anyway, I’m getting phantom food reactions, and my son had one of his irregular bouts of insomnia which meant he was up in the ass-hours of the morning and punchy through most of the day.

It gets to the point where a guy can’t even steal time to post on his blog.

I have a post brewing about peoples’ tendency to see fantasy as a conservative genre and another about the interesting Amanda Palmer TEDTalk that’s been going around, but both have fallen victim to the demands of making wordcount for THE WAY INTO MAGIC.

But I do want to announce the release of this:

KingKhanCover.jpg-large

Yes, the Spirit of the Century tie-in novel I wrote for Evil Hat has been released as an ebook, but only to the people who backed the Kickstarter. If you’re one of those people, you can download the book from here. If you didn’t back the project when it first went live, you’ll have to wait a bit for it to hit the stores.

Now, I know there are lots of folks out there who could find a way to torrent a copy or whatever so they have a chance to read it right away. If you do, please consider buying it anyway when it hits the stores, maybe as a gift or something.

Thanks!

The Onion Apologizes

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Over on Facebook, The Onion apologized for their nasty tweet last night where they called a little girl a cunt.

Feb. 25, 2013

Dear Readers,

On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting.

No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire.

The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.

In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

Sincerely,

Steve Hannah
CEO
The Onion

That’s the way an apology ought to be done, with none of this “We’re sorry if people were offended” bullshit. Still, it would have been better not to make the mistake in the first place.

Always punch up. That’s the point of satire and mockery. I’m not sure who said it first, but you don’t make fun of the people who are weaker or more vulnerable than you; you go after the powerful and the comfortable.

That’s not just a good rule for life, it’s a good rule for fiction, too. If your protagonist gets snarky and mean to people less powerful than they are, they are a shitty person. Always punch up.

Feeling good about skipping the Oscars last night

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According to Twitter and other sources, there was some ugly, obnoxious shit aimed at the little girl who was nominated (weirdly, getting an “account suspended” page on that link), plus general awfulness. Apparently, it’s still going on, if you’re willing read the comments. Yeah, comments are ugly but it’s also a sign of who we are.

I’m not sure what’s supposed to be the point of making nasty remarks about the actors and directors whose work has been nominated. Puncturing the pretensions of people who make art? Please. It’s art, it’s supposedly the pinnacle achievement to win this sort of recognition, and generally-speaking people have to do great work for years to get to this point.

There’s this idea that the Oscars need to be entertaining for the masses, which I guess means taking digs at people.

Whatever. It’s just another set of awards, which means it’s pretty much meaningless except to those who are deeply invested in it. I just wish they didn’t judge the value of the ceremony by the ratings, and try to drive ratings with shitty behavior.

In other news, I was unusually active on my blog this weekend. To link back:

Why Libraries Still Matter: I respond to That Article.

EMP Followup I heard back from the Experience Music Project about PanelFail.

In which I deny my son an Xbox . My kid wants to play All The Games, but I expect something more from him.

Okay. Writing to do.

Why libraries still matter

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Many people already know this about me, but a few years back, when my son was still very small, his mother was injured in an accident. Without going into details, she couldn’t work and we had huge medical bills to deal with. At the same time, my little boy–who had started reading at two–was becoming a voracious reader.

The picture books he loved were expensive. Like, brutally expensive for a guy who couldn’t even cover the bills for his wife’s surgery.

The library saved us. There were so many books to choose from and the staff were so wonderful in helping us find things we liked, that my son was able to keep reading and learning. This past year, times have been a little tight for us again, so I’ve been leaning pretty heavily on our local branch. I’ve been bringing home Lemony Snicket, Scott Westerfeld, Diane Duane, Catherine Jinks, Jeanne Birdsall, and Cory Doctorow–frankly, with the way he reads, it’s a pretty good workout. What’s more, the books he discovers are the library help us make smart choices when we do hit the local bookshop.

We couldn’t afford to buy all those books on our own and we’re grateful to live in a community that buys them for everyone to share. That’s why I can’t help but shake my head at misguided authors who think borrowed books are lost sales. Library borrowing drives sales. Well, it drives ours, anyway. Without our local system (which is excellent, btw) we’d rely on garage sales and used book stores. We’d buy and read less, and there’d still be no extra royalties for Mr. Successful Author.

Still, I wish I could get a piece of that Public Lending Rights action. Get paid every time a book was borrowed? How civilized.

EMP followup

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Remember last week when I mentioned that I had taken my family to an EMP event to see a specific panel and the room was so packed we missed it? No? Well, you better click on that link then.

I never did get an email back, but I did get a phone call. The dude was quite apologetic and very nice. Unfortunately, there was no recording of the event; apparently the companies many of the presenters work for had a bug up their butt about what could be recorded and what art they were going to show. Understandable, really, except that the panel we wanted was two local educators, so I suspect they would have been cool with a camcorder or two, but never mind. It’s done.

On the plus side, EMP intends to refund the cost of the tickets.

That’s very nice of them. While they might have made an error in planning their event, their customer service was pretty great.

In which I deny my son an Xbox

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On Twitter, @JoshDaws asked me to explain my reasons for not buying my son an Xbox and I figured it was too involved to do it in a few 140-character messages, so I’m putting it here.

Everyone is a consumer. Everyone consumes culture of some kind, whether it’s radio, TV, games, books, movies, theater, whatever. For some people, it’s Honey Boo Boo. For others, it’s sitting on an overturned bucket in a warehouse while they watch a play about women in Afghanistan. For others, it’s that one Merle Haggard album they just can’t get enough of. And for still others, it’s a whole weekend shooting zombies on the Xbox.

Now, I don’t have a problem with any of this, right? God forbid, considering some of the movies I’ve wasted portions of my life on. Consume what you want. Enjoy it. With my son, he’s latched onto things that I thought were dumb enough to kill brain cells (like Garfield books) and other things that were mostly a waste of time. But he enjoys them and I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.

However! When he came to me to say he wanted to buy an Xbox–with his own money–I told him he couldn’t. (FYI: he’s 11.) He was pretty upset (and is still trying to wear us down) but I was adamant. It’s not that I dislike video games. He has some right now and has played them ever since he was small; Minecraft is his current obsession. Yes, it can be difficult for him to stop when we ask him to, but that’s true of any kid doing any activity that they love. We also have a Wii (which was supposed to be used for the Wii Fit, but nevermind) although he doesn’t much like the games we have.

It’s not that the games are violent. There are plenty of sweet, non-violent puzzle/platform/whatever games. Besides, we’ve watched every episode of Burn Notice and he’s played Call of Duty (and #2) on the iMac.

The question is: how much of his life is spent consuming, and how much is spent creating?

See, when he was small, he would spend hours making things. As a toddler he would make endless lines of tiny blocks all through the apartment. As he got older, he made comic books, then baked goods, then finally short animated Lego movies.

And they were all terrible. The comics, actually, had some effective layout and design, but the food he made was a random mix of whatever he could grab and it tasted like poison. “For you, Mom!” (and she would always taste it.)

The Lego shorts were always busy but there was never a plot that made sense, half the snaps would be out of focus.

They were good for his age–actually, they were excellent for his age. Look at the “novel” of his I published last year on the blog; I couldn’t write with that much verve at his age.

But he lost all that when he went to school. The biggest lesson he took from public school is that “fun”, “projects”, and “learning” are all separate categories. He still likes to make things, but only in Minecraft and it’s been a long time since he set aside several hours to create something. At best, he’s been putting in an hour or two a couple times a week with Garageband to make electronic music.

I don’t much care what he wants to do with his time, as long as he spends a good portion of it making things. Any asshole can spend every weekend of his life shooting baddies in a video game (and I’ve been that asshole, sometimes). I want him to have more than that. It’s not enough just to consume products made by some corporation, even if they’re cool products. He has to turn that around, too.

To that end, we’ve suspended regular homeschooling so he can work with me on a “book trailer” for THE WAY INTO CHAOS. We’re shooting it in our living room with Lego figures. It’s completely inappropriate for the tone of the novel, if you know what I mean, and would be terrible marketing if I were remotely impressed by the marketability of trailers anyway.

Still, it’s a project. He’s throwing himself into it with his old enthusiasm, and I love him for it. I just wish we could return to the days when this was a habit.

Anyway, that’s why I won’t let him buy an Xbox. He has games already, and Netflix, and DVDs from the library, and books, too. That’s a lot of opportunities to consume. I don’t think he needs enough to fill his whole life.

Randomness for 2/22

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1) How a web designer got revenge on a company that wouldn’t pay its bills.

2) Okc_ebooks: Pick-up artists trying to chat up a robot horse.

3) Finding optimal marriage pairings using the assignment problem.

4) Forbes posts an infographic showing the effects of vaccines on morbidity.

5) “Invisible Man” artist has himself painted to camouflage himself into his environment.

6) The Venn Piagram

7) You, too, can become a robot!

Novelist as trickster

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Something that’s been bugging me lately:

I have a trick for picking the killer in an Agatha Christie whodunnit: The first character who absolutely couldn’t have done it, having been cleared by an iron-clad alibi after being arrested or even confessing to the crime… that’s the killer. The narrative presents the question: Who is the killer? Then it presents the likely and unlikely suspects, giving you reason to favor some but not others.

This is something people miss sometimes. It’s not enough to present a mystery. You have to throw in red herrings. You have to give the reader a reason to think the correct answer is not.

Partly because there’s a story sense that we develop as we read and watch movies that let us predict too many plots. A buddy of mine had this annoying habit (we haven’t watch TV together in a few years so I’m hoping he grew out of it) of guessing what would happen next in any TV show we’d be watching. The protagonist’s doorbell would ring and he’d say “It’s the psychologist.” And it would be.

It wasn’t because he’d seen the show before. It was because the psychologist hadn’t turned up in the story for a while and it was time for him to reappear.

For most movies, in face, events are utterly predictable. You know when the villains will burst into the hero’s hideout. You know when the new love interest will turn the corner and see something misleading. You know when the corrupt cop will reveal himself, and usually you know who it is.

So it’s not enough to have a mystery, even a minor one, without red herrings. Who is the mole in the spy agency? It’s not good to just leave the question up in the air, without focus. Give us a reason to think it’s character A and a reason to think it couldn’t be character B. When B is revealed as the real thing, that makes the surprise all the better (assuming the clues and red herrings are well laid).

Mystery: not enough. There has to be trickery, too.

Experience Music Project Fail (or Let me share my pain with you)

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Last night I took my wife and son to the Experience Music Project for the opening night of their “Game Nite” exhibit, which is their new video game project, I guess. Let’s start by saying it didn’t go well.

My wife has zero interest in video games at all, and I really enjoy them but try to keep my distance. I can be a little obsessive about things, and video games sometimes take over my whole life. However, my son loves them and has been making noises about creating some. Unsurprisingly, we want to support that.

The main feature of opening night was a series of talks given by game professionals and educators who teach game-making. That page is gone from EMP’s website but you can see the Google cache while it lasts. We were especially interested in this one:

So You Want to Make a Video Game?
Raymond Yan, Senior Executive at DigiPen Institute of Technology
Jason Pace, Executive Director at University of Washington Center for Serious Play

Now, I know there are resources online for creating games. I’ve looked. We were especially interested here because it was two guys who were local to us and because they would have a chance to bounce ideas off each other. I wanted to see a contrast between them. I also wanted to ask questions.

To that end, we skipped the tour of the actual games and got in line early for the keynote speech. We even got ourselves some good seats. The keynote was fine if not life-changing.

Unfortunately, because there was a line of people waiting to get in to the theater, they make the audience exit the room and get back at the end of the line. Because we had good seats we were one of the last out. The line went around two corners and up a flight of stairs.

We did not get into the one panel we most wanted to see.

Much of our time was spent standing beside game stations waiting to play one of the DigiPen games on offer. All the games were made as student projects and they are all hand-coded–no engines at all. You can play any of the games in their gallery for free. Most of the kids were playing a driving game I didn’t learn the name of, but “Solace” and “Nous” were other good ones.

My son did get to play some and so did I. My wife was interested in eavesdropping on some of the sound designs but nothing more beyond that. However, the largest portion of our time was spent playing a board game in the lounge. Pandemic. Damn, that’s a great game.

Anyway, I sent an email to EMP pointing out how frustrating it is to drop $35 on an event and then be barred from the think you most wanted to do. With luck they’ll post video of the event and someone will have asked the questions I wanted to ask.

Randomness for 2/12

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1) The Galactic Empire responds to the White House refusal to build a Death Star.

2) Goodreads review in 2250 of a historical novel set in the present time: “Most of the details were correct, but the author forgot that, in the early 21st century, people had to wear special clothes in the rain because their clothes were not yet water- mud- and oil-proof.” Video.

3) An index to fantasy maps. Would it be ungrateful of me to suggest that this seems thin?

4) Walter Cronkite describes the space age kitchen of the far-distant future of 2001. Video included but no auto-play.

5) A chart to demonstrate that fantasy series get longer with each book.

6) “Game of Thrones” Valentines

7) OH MY DAYUM. Video. Normally I’m not big on autotuning normal dialog but this is brilliant.