the boy

My fans in Denmark have come through again

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Considering how well the previous Twenty Palaces Lego sets (Child of Fire, Game of Cages) have done, the good folks in Denmark have rushed the newest Lego set into production.

Here’s the cover (again):

Circle of Enemies

Here is the early box art for Circle of Enemies.

Lego Circle of Enemies

Hooray!

I’m told the previous sets outsold the Harry Potter Lego sets, but I’m still waiting for the check with my share of the money. ::taps foot:: That Italian villa is waiting!
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In case anyone misses the joke: This image was created with Lego Digital Designer, a CAD program (of sorts) that lets you design a Lego model virtually, then upload it to their site and have the pieces mailed to you. Teh nice thing is that, as soon as he saw the cover art, my son immediately remembered that we make this joke art and started working on it. Smart kid.

Date night

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Last night was “date night”, the biweekly ritual in which my wife and I suddenly realize, at about three in the afternoon, that our regularly scheduled baby sitter will be there in an hour and a half and what the hell are we doing to do together all on our own?

My wife wasn’t keen on yet another restaurant trip and I couldn’t blame her. Instead we went to the Henry Art Museum in the U District: The PanOptos exhibit was pretty damn cool. This is one of the photos I took. I’m not sure why, except that I like the imperfections.

And James Turrell’s Skyscape sculpture, Light Reign, was wonderful (and I immediately tried to think of a way to build it in Minecraft, which only shows you what a saddo I am). I would have spent much longer in there if it hadn’t been so chilly (it’s installed in the courtyard).

Dinner came immediately after (and, since we had it in the U. District, the less said about it the better) and then we hopped over to the UW Bookstore to catch Cherie Priest’s reading of Bloodshot. I’m dubious about vampires, but her excerpt sounded pretty good, and when she talked about the book afterward she tempted me even more. Still, vampires. Hmm.

From there we took the crosstown bus to Ballard for dessert in a nice Italian place we found. My wife’s cannoli (she loves cannoli) had a chocolate coating on the shell, unfortunately, but my tiramasu was pretty dang good. Then it was home to watch the Lego animation my son had worked on.

In short, fun. And of course we spent a good deal of time talking about Important Things. For instance, we have a trip to Lisbon that we’ve been wanting to take forever, but when I bring it up it turns into a flight to Amsterdam, then a train trip to London, followed by a tour through Barcelona and Madrid and finally…

Me, I just want to go to Lisbon and check it out (we have family there). My wife thinks she’s being restrained because she’s ready to put off Paris and Rome until the next go ’round.

On top of that, I’ll be going to Readercon this summer (Hello, convention-going people. I’ll be at Readercon this July. If you’ll be there too, please introduce yourself. It’ll be my first sf convention and I’m not entirely sure how I’ll do). For my wife, this is a chance for all three of us to fly out early and check out historical sites. While I’m at the con, she and the boy would tour around the city, learning about the American Revolution and so on.

Nevermind that I’d miss out on those tours. Nevermind also that she’d like to immediately fly from Boston to Amsterdam, etc. Jeez, give that woman a transcontinental flight and she takes a month-long international jaunt.

“Quiet on the set!”

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While I work on the notes for book 4, my son has roped a handful of neighborhood kids to do voice over to his latest Lego animation. They’ve already had to rewrite because one of the “artists” didn’t know (and couldn’t say) the word “apocalypse” as in “zombie apocalypse.”

It’s hard to focus, what with all the cute.

A brief interlude from work

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My wife and son have just left me here alone while he gets an eye check up. Wish we had vision insurance, but what can you do? The boy can’t see.

I just finished listening to Nancy Pearl on our local NPR affiliate, KUOW. She recommended Jo Walton’s new novel along with Gail Carriger’s SOULLESS. I sent them an email mentioning Cherie Priest’s BONESHAKER, but Nancy Pearl brought up her name before they had a chance to read it on air.

They didn’t mention my books.

Which disappointed my wife, but I didn’t expect it. I don’t think the Twenty Palaces books are quite up her alley, to steal a cliche. Too dark, I think. Even if she had read them (and as a fan of hers, I wrote a personal note for the folks at Del Rey to send with her review copy–I even have a Nancy Pearl Action Figure but it’s an older, less flashy version) I’m not sure I would have passed her Rule of 50. Which is fine; no writer should expect that their book be loved by every reader everywhere. In fact, god forbid.

Anyway, the fam is out and Warren Olney has been turned off (I like his show, but his voice has a quality that’s hard to ignore) so I can dig in to the copy edit of Circle of Enemies. I lost the whole day yesterday dealing with my blown knee, but I’m less than 60 pages from the end, and I’d like to finish tonight.

Then, finally, I’ll be able to write a post or two about some of the things that have come up lately, like putting a direction behind the word “stand” and on the need to figure theft of your product when setting price points.

Back to it.

Things you can do with a camera

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Also, do you recognize the name Bragi Schut? No? Well, he’s the screenwriter who wrote SEASON OF THE WITCH, the new Nic Cage movie currently getting 5% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately for Mr. Schut, his name is on the movie, but much of what’s up there is someone else’s… stuff.

FYI: The spec script for SEASON OF THE WITCH won the 2003 Nicholl Fellowship, which is THE big wannabe screenwriter competition. The winner gets $30K to write a new script, plus a whole slew of Hollywood meetings. The problem is that once the script gets a lot of interest, it also gets a whole lot of people who want to change it, and those people aren’t going to defer to the original writer’s expertise. He’s just the dude that wrote it, after all.

Rumor is that this is pretty much what happened to DRAGONHEART. The writer teamed up with a director to put together a story idea. The writer wrote it. Producers loved it, some being reduced to tears when reading it.

Suddenly, it becomes this “big” project, much too big to be entrusted to the people who created it in the first place. The producer passes it off to a director who Doesn’t Get It, the whole thing is miscast, the dragon is introduced with a “Heeere’s Johnny!” bit of dialog, and they tried to make a pivotal scene “funny” by having starving villagers trip over a whole herd of pigs.

It’s one of the reasons I’m glad I write novels now. The people asking me to change this or that are good with story. From what I’ve heard, the whole third act of SEASON… is stuff the producers demanded.

Development kills.

There’s one more shooting day left for the Twenty Palaces book trailer. I’ll post pictures if I can.

Also, my son has gone back to his stop-motion animations. (Yay!)

Email notifications ON!

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My son just sent me an email (meaning he wrote the message in my msn account and sent it to the msn account, which I picked up in webmail at the Starbucks) letting me know a fat package from Random House just arrived.

Hello, copy edit for Circle of Enemies. I will be home shortly to scribble on you.

Progress in all things, right? I’ll finish the first draft of the short story I’m struggling with first, then it’s time for home-made meatballs delivered in yummy sandwich form and every grammar insecurity I’ve ever had laid bare on the page by the copy editor’s sharpened pencil.

In unrelated news, the guy sitting across from me keeps picking his nose, scraping at gaps in his teeth and digging his ear. Blech.

I’m not here

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Yesterday was Christmas.

Today is my son’s ninth birthday.

I don’t plan to be online today. Have a great day, everyone.

Beta!

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Minecraft has entered beta as of this week. Unfortunately, as I write this, there’s a bug that won’t allow it to launch in MacOSX. My son, who was so freaking excited about the new changes, can’t play and probably won’t be able to play until the new year, considering.

Still, it’s a cool game, even if I did lose my diamond sword and pick because an errant swing of my pick brought lava down onto me, killing me in a blink and destroying everything I was carrying.

Dammit.

The price has gone up now that it’s in beta, but you should check it out anyway… although maybe give them a chance to work out a couple of bug fixes.

Darkness

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Thanks to everyone who voted in my book poll yesterday. Is it perverse of me that, now that I’ve seen which books are leading in the voting, I want to pack the least popular choices? Yes. Yes I think it is.

One of the weird things about traveling by train is that they let you check three big bags. I almost have too much luggage space for my trip, and I’m tempted to add some extra gifts to make the boy’s holiday super special.

And speaking of extra gifts, I have one more to buy, but I have to buy it online, download it to my desktop, then make a Christmas card for my son so he knows to look for it on that happy morning. Strike that. I have to *remember* to buy it. And it can’t be while he’s awake, either; I’ll have to do it in the groggy early morning hours, when it’s impossible to remember anything. ::shakes fist at mirror::

Anyway, today’s kind of a big day. It’s not my son’s birthday, but it is his birthday party. We’re only having 3 other kids (by his choice) and we’ve reserved time at the local parkour gym. They’ll get a lesson and then some birthday pie. (We’re not People of the Cake.) Then it’s home to eat his favorite dinner food (expensive delivery pizza) and open the rest of his presents.

Unfortunately, we’ve had heavy winds overnight and too many neighborhoods are without power. I’m not sure what will happen if the electricity is out there. It’s not like they have a ton of electrical equipment (more like mats, boxes, and pipes to walk on) but light and heat will be totally necessary.

And, weirdly, I had a horror movie moment this morning. While I was waiting for the bus that would take me and my gigantic bag of library books to the retail core, I looked down the street to see if the bus was coming. It was weirdly dark. Like, Encroaching Shadow of Evil dark.

It gave me a silly thrill and made me determined never to write a scene like it in a book.

Now I have to get the barista to rinse the grounds out of my mug, then refill me so I can get back to work.

That train trip I have been talking about?

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It’s only four days until my big train trip across the country. Already! Time, it flies. My son and I have been pretty excited about the trip, and I’ve been kicking myself that I didn’t take the train more often. Yeah, it takes longer, but if the journey is part of the pleasure of the trip, you’re not losing out.

We also have a Superliner Roomette reserved. It’s a room of our own, for those times when an 8yo gets to feeling kinda crazy and would drive the other passengers crazy. Also, my son is a night owl, and is brimming with energy at the end of the day[1]. Better for him to have a little place for his craziness.

And we knew it would be small. I mean, we knew. We saw the dimensions right there on the site linked above (although they had a different flash applet to show the roomette’s features.

Then we saw this video.[2]

Holy crap, that’s small. Especially for a two-day trip with a kid who spends most evenings practicing “Chairkour.”[3]

Erm, maybe we won’t be spending all that much time in there after all. However, on the trip back, I’ll be spending two days in one of those, with no kid, no internet, no nothing, except my books, my work in progress, and the passing view of the country. Heaven!

We’ll see how well I hold up.

[1] No, we haven’t murdered him for it, but it’s been close.

[2] Facebook users, you’ll have to click through to see that embedded video.

[3] An indoor apartment version of parkour, ‘natch.