words

Randomness for 5/12

Standard

1) Sci-fi IKEA manuals.

2) The first five Harry Potter novels abbreviated in comic form.

3) Since when did diligence become a psychiatric disorder?

4) Japanese TV show pranks a man with a haunted mirror. Video. I’m a bad person for laughing as hard as I did, especially after things got crazy. Be sure to watch the whole thing.

5) TV writer Doris Egan on The Moment They Figure It Out: open and closed plot structures, realization, and turning points, with a little Doctor Who thrown in for good measure.

6) “I will tell you a secret to make you stand out.”

7) “Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says” Oh god, for once, read the comments on this “article.” Let’s be CLEAR this is not a VADER victory but a victory of our boys in white, not to mention the leadership of Lord Tyrannus the Count Dooku who started the manhunt in the first place. LOL via Jay Lake

Randomness for 5/6

Standard

1) The world’s first zombie-proof house.

2) It’s the newest fad! White guys across the globe are going to be sporting this baby soon. Real soon.

3) Amazing WWII monuments in Yugoslavia.

4) “Who is Osama bin Laden? Is he famous?”

5) If Superman was an alien in other movies.

6) “Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.” The ten oddest sentences from conservative editorialist David Brooks’s new book.

7) Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day: Which offerings are good and which are not? And if you drop by a comic shop, be sure to buy something, too.

Repeat after me: Don’t make your points by telling people to “repeat after me.”

Standard

I’m sure Deborah J. Ross is a good person who’s kind to children and small animals, but she’s completely wrong-headed here. First of all, don’t make your points by telling me to repeat them, as though I’m a child. Because, really.

Second, it’s terribly easy and terribly unconvincing to try to disprove an assertion by trotting out The Bad Version. You know what I mean. Someone makes an assertion (playing tabletop RPGs can be helpful for writers!) and the counter-argument is always Something Awful That Might Come Of It: you learn to railroad a story like a railroading GM, you write a bunch of fights and encounters with no emotional content, you let the characters carry around Too Much Magic (srsly, check the comments), you get the pacing wrong.

But this is like saying opera isn’t beneficial to prose fiction writing because you might make all your characters sing their dialog. Yeah, gamers sometimes write bad stories that are too much like games. Guess what movie- and TV-watchers sometimes do?

Of course there are aspects of games that don’t translate to fiction. Do I want to buy a novel that recounts someone’s D&D adventure? Probably not.

But there are things to learn, too. I’m not going to make an exhaustive list: I’m only going to mention one: PCs are annoying. No matter what a GM thinks will be the proper course for the characters, the players will come up with something else, something fiendish and clever that slants things to their side.

That’s what they do: they scramble and plan for every edge they can get. Bad guys holed up in a house, waiting for you to break down the door? Hey, is that a wooden house? Well, let’s get some gasoline from the car, put it in this old beer bottle–who has a lighter? We’ll shoot them as they come out.

Long corridor with doors on either side? Treasure we want probably down the hall? Let’s not fight our way through. Just jam those doors shut and we’ll bypass the enemies there. Anyone have spell for that?

A new super-hero in town with water-based powers? And the new D.A. is named Sam Lake? We break into his house and search the place until we find his costume.

Players will teach you to be sneaky, to cheat, to take unfair advantage (but always within the games rules). They’ll teach you to look carefully at the plot, and to make it better.

So says I.

Mercy

Standard

My screenwriter buddy Josh has a new book out. It’s called Mercy, and it’s a little unusual: It’s an epistolary novel about the zombie apocalypse. Specifically, it’s about one woman’s attempt to return home to her husband and daughter after her plane goes down, stranding her miles and miles from home.

Now, personally, I don’t like zombies. Can’t stand the gross. Can’t stand the chewing. But I’ve started reading this book and it’s really drawing me in. Gah! And yeah, he’s released it as an indie novel.

Here’s a few sample pages for them who like samples. Or you can read the samples provided with the Kindle file (not to mention buy the book). You can also buy it from B&N for the Nook.

Zombie fans, give it a look.

Man With High-Paying, Prestigious Job Expresses Interest In Extending Current Employment

Standard

This is the sort of story that annoys me, I have to admit. For those who don’t want to click, it basically says that Taylor Lautner would be interested in continuing his role in the TWILIGHT movies, if the author decided to write a spin off series.

And how is this news? The guy’s an actor. Actors want jobs. I imagine Lautner has a whole SHARKMAN AND LAVAWOMAN pitch carefully folded in his pocket, just in case he runs into Robert Rodriquez at a party or something.

You know what would be news? An actor who said they hated a role and never wanted to do it again. Even better: An actor that loved a role so much that they were raising funding to pay the novelist to write a sequel. Wake me up when that happens.

In more personal news, over on my LiveJournal account, user Ms_King asked me about outlining, and I answered, describing my odd way of pseudo-planning the books I write. So naturally, what should happen? Later that morning I realized I had rushed into the draft of A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark, before I was ready because I had some half-baked character interactions and not nearly as much of the book worked out as I needed. In fact, I was almost at the end of my synopsis at only 34K workds.

No worries, though. I have plot elements and under-utilized characters, so I’ll just have to work out how they all come together, and I’ll be ready to draft again. Today is a long(ish) writing morning, so I’ll be on that for the next few hours.

Also, Twitter, where I’m @byharryconnolly.

N Things Make a Post

Standard

n-6 ) I want to say thanks to everyone who answers my hypothetical posts. I don’t always respond to every comment mainly because I don’t want to do a bunch of “Cool!” or “That’s a great idea!” replies, but that’s pretty much what I’m thinking. However, my filmmaker friend Steve Barr left this comment, which probably deserves its own story seed spot.

n-5 ) “Then you are prejudiced, Timmy, because Steve is your filmmaker friend, and not your friend.” (I suspect that the only people who’ll get that reference are readers Of A Certain Age.

n-4) According to Twitter, ARCs of Circle of Enemies have been spotted in the wild. Yay! (gulp!)

n-3 ) Norwescon starts today but I’m not going. I have some stuff to do, and I have other plans for tonight. Here’s my schedule for the rest of the day: 1. Finish this post. 2. Email agent to let her know Twenty Palaces is on the way. 3. Walk to the post office on this chilly, sunny day to mail said book. 4. Go to library to drop off books and write a few pages of A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark. 5. Return home to have dinner (burger salad tonight!) 6. Kick back with a book and read for most of the evening. God, I’m so looking forward to reading again.

n-2 ) This deserves its own post, but R.I.P. Elisabeth Sladen. She was the costar of the first Dr. Who I ever saw, and every costar since has had to measure themselves against her. She was wonderful in the role, and I hope that she had good, happy, satisfying life. Too soon.

n-1 ) I’ve talked before about the Bookscan numbers Amazon.com shares with authors, and the fact that the numbers for my books were improving after I guest-posted at Charles Stross’s blog. Well, last week the numbers had nearly returned to the levels they were during my stint at antipope.org, and I wondered over it. This week, the numbers have jumped even higher. Like, much higher, about triple what they were before my guest blog. At this point, I don’t much care why. I just want it to keep going on.

n) I haven’t seen GAME OF THRONES and I’m not planning to. The problem with having a kid who’s a night owl is that I can’t spend late evenings watching grownup shows with the volume down while he sleeps. Instead, I spend them sitting beside him, gently suggesting he shut his damn eyes and lie back down. I’m seriously excited for the next book, though.

Randomness for 4/21

Standard

1) “Speed-climbing” the Eiger. This dude is nuts but the footage is gorgeous. Video.

2) “You will ripen with my child, faerie girl.” I don’t like to take digs at romance novels because so many people do it out of ignorance and misogyny, and I think the genre is unfairly maligned. Still, these excerpts from bad romance novels are pretty damn funny.

3) Curious to see what a professional comic book script looks like? Greg Rucka helps you out.

4) DIY Bacon Roses. via Jay Lake.

5) Ten Important Tax Charts.

6) Ten Deadly DIY Gadgets. The “flame gloves” pretty much qualify you as a Batman villain, and the crossbow that shoots machetes would be perfect for a zombie apocalypse, but it’s the car you can drive with an iPhone that really scares the hell out of me. via Jay Lake

7) An interactive map showing how much oil each country produced over the last fifty years. Just click “play.”

Nerdscape!

Standard

Over on Suvudu, Kevin Hearne has posted a couple of Nerdscape photos: tableaus of action figure, book, and junk food. I thought it would be fun to play along (and it’s an excellent way to get my son off the computer now that his time is up) but I’m not much for junk food. Therefore, I have substituted pain-relieving ointment, which serves as my go-to comfort item.

IMG_2543

Action figure Nancy Pearl shushing (and slugging) Giant Batman! An oppressed rock monster from a Power Miners set casts aside the numbing tools of its oppressors! A useless Jenga ripoff from the creators of Uno! A novel from the Song of Ice And Fire series, because of its hugeness (and also because I couldn’t find my copy of Inda–If you’re looking for more tough-minded epic fantasy in a series that actually completed, check Inda and its sequels out.)

This is my life.

Randomness for 4/15

Standard

1) Breaking it down.

2) The Pierley/Redford Disassociative Affect Diagnostic. About as accurate as any internet personality test, but this one’s actually cool to take (and only 20 “questions”).

3) The Amazing Media Habits Of 8-18 Year Olds

4) Seven basic things this Cracked.com writer thinks you’re doing all wrong, for certain values of “you.” The only one my household didn’t know about was the brushing after meals thing.

5) Borders execs try to justify bonuses on the revenue their company will bring in someday after they get this little bankruptcy thing straightened out. God forbid their bonuses should reflect what they’ve already done, rather than what they expect to do.

6) Book reviewers, let me point out a thing that is not cool.

7) This is simply wonderful. Play with it when you can listen to sound on your computer.

I’m not talking about that thing I want to talk about

Standard

Not because it’s a secret, but because it’s not the sort of thing writers talk about online, and it’s faintly ridiculous to be upset about it. Also: unseemly to feel neglected by people who are friendly enough but do not owe me anything.

So I’m going to talk about ebooks instead. Lots of people talk about the disadvantages of ebooks: you can’t loan them (usually, right?), can’t resell them, they feel ephemeral, some systems don’t even let you own it outright.

But many people obviously prefer them over physical books–they certainly rhapsodize about them online. You’d think that, with readers switching in large numbers, they’d be willing to pay more for those features.

I know I know. Ebook readers have all sorts of justifications for why they think they should be paying less. I just listed a bunch two paragraphs above. Still, it’s about demand, right? What price people will pay?

This jumped out at me while reading this article. The author starts with the assumption that all these features should lead to higher price points, which is very much the opposite of the usual set of assumptions I’ve found so far.

Anyway, it’s not going to happen right away, not while readers are agitating for price reductions. At some point, though, I suspect the price of ebooks will split off from the price of paper books, and ebooks will either cost the same as they do now (or increase slightly in price) but include ads or will come with upgradeable options that cost a little extra. (“Is the plottable map in the new Rothfuss worth an extra 99 cents?”)

End obligatory useless ebook prophecy.