words

I’m supposed to be working

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So of course I’m typing this instead. Here’s my life in convenient bullet-list form, which is how I experience it myself.

* I uploaded a larger jpg of the Game of Cages cover, so anyone who missed it the first time or thought it was too dark or small can really see it now. It’s practically actual size.

* I just put the signed contracts for Russian language editions of CoF and GoC in the mail. Yay! Last night I took a deep breath and sat down to read through them, only to discover they were a civilized two pages long, with one column in Russian and one in English. Easy-peazy.

* As evidence that I am still not caught up on my sleep, I just used the phrase “easy-peazy” for the first time in my life. No, I have not been transformed into an adorable urchin in a 1950’s sitcom. I’m just feeling odd and out of sorts.

* Yesterday I got back on the “read faster” bandwagon with my current library book. As I mentioned before, I read more slowly than any novelist I’ve ever heard of, and at this point it’s a real hindrance on my productivity. The polish of Man Bites World I’ve been working would have been finished long ago if I were someone else; as it is, I’m on page 115 of 381. After I finish this post and one or two other online duties, I’ll post how far I’ve gotten at the end of my work day. Shame is a great motivator.

* If anyone is curious about the book I’m reading, it’s Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why by Laurence Gonzales. It’s a bit of a narrative wander, but the subject is fascinating. So far, I recommend it highly, especially if you’re interested in why people seem to do exactly the wrong thing in stressful situations.

* Someone on Justine Larbaletier’s blog recommended Mac Freedom, a free software download that turns off a Mac’s wireless for any length of time the user wants. My eyes bugged out of my head, because this was the thing I’d always wanted without knowing it. I headed to download.com to read their review of it first, and was startled to see the review say it was a silly program because a Mac’s wireless capability was trivially easy to turn off already.

It took me a moment to realize they meant clicking the little fan in the upper toolbar. Yeah, it’s trivially easy to turn off, but it’s also easy to turn back on when I’m stuck or frustrated. Do they expect me to have some sort of self-control? I’m not made of stone, people!

Okay. More coffee, then on to page 116.

GoC Cover Art!

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One of my LiveJournal commenters (thanks, geniusofevil!) mentioned that the cover art for Game of Cages is on the Amazon.com site, which I’m taking as explicit permission to post the art here:

Whoo-hoo!

Game of Cages

Mysterious house? Check. Red lightning? Check. Windbreaker and t-shirt in the dead of winter? Check. A facial expression that suggests someone needs some killin’? Check-check!

And, because this image is a little small, the text under my name says: “Author of Child of Fire, a Publishers Weekly best book of the year”

Thank you, generous PW peoples!

Side notes: the polish of Man Bites World continues–actually, it’s picking up pace as certain distracting domestic sleep issues have been resolving. Also, I received the contract for the Russian sale yesterday. I’ll read through them tonight and mail them back tomorrow. Then, more money!

I’ll call this a good day (so far).

UPDATE: I uploaded a larger image so it’s easier to see.

Everyone Wants to Go to Heaven, But Nobody Wants to Die

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Jim Hines talks about killing characters in books, especially beloved characters and protagonists. You can see the discussion on his main website or follow a much larger conversation (by a factor of ten or more) on his LiveJournal.

I posted a comment there (my LJ handle is burger_eater, for those not reading this post there) but wanted to expand a little: When it comes to killing characters in violent stories–and many fantasies rely on fighting for their conflict–there’s a wide spectrum between the slasher flicks at one end (where everyone dies) and the A-Team (where a whole armory-worth of bullets are fired but no one is ever hit).

Where readers fall on or within those extremes depends on the type of book they’re reading, their mood at the moment, or whether the wind is southerly. That’s natural. But I was astonished by the number of people who said they felt “betrayed” by the death of a major character.

Personal (and spoiler-free) story: When [Major Character] was killed in the first book of A Song Of Ice And Fire, I was startled and grateful. It was a real Joe Bob Briggs moment*, thank you muchly, and it showed me just how much danger these characters were in.

Contrast that with the end of that Tad Williams tree-killer epic, where ten or twelve characters rush into a headlong fight with Big Evil but only one minor character loses his life.

If the reader is ready for it–if they’re willing to go along–it’s powerful and fun. If the reader is not ready for it, either because a book has too much killing or not enough, they feel manipulated.

Of course, no one story will satisfy everyone, but I sure would like to work out the fat spot on the bell curve.

* Joe Bob Briggs number one rule for a great horror movie: “Anybody can die at any moment.”

Low/High Thrillers – Obligatory genre disclaimer here

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We all know that genre definitions are inexact (to put it mildly). Stories defy easy categorization, and that’s what genre (and sub genre is all about). Still, humans like to sort things, and we like to think of things by their types. Which is why I’m typing all this out.

Most everyone reading this knows the meaning of the term “High Fantasy” (warning! that’s a tvtropes link!): Fictional-world stories about kings and armies, lots of magic, vast and powerful Evil, an epic scale, and the characters are people firmly within the halls of power.

In contrast, Low Fantasy seems to have been created to cover everything else. It doesn’t, not really, but low fantasy is often characterized as having little magic, small stakes and a less GvE morality. The characters are more likely to be common citizens–often they’re part of the criminal class–and the story centers on their personal problem rather than the fate of the world. And while High Fantasy is often noble in tone, Low Fantasy is frequently cynical or funny.

Now, yeah, we can all come up with examples of stories that straddle definitions–we don’t need to check off every item from the list for something to be one or the other. LOTR is certainly High Fantasy, even though it doesn’t have all that much magic in it, for instance, but Conan falls pretty solidly in the Low Fantasy tradition.

A while back, I decided I should apply these descriptors to thrillers. I’m talking about books here, not films, because in movies “thriller” means something different. My idea is that a High Thriller concerns people in power–not kings, obviously, since thrillers are set in our world, but Presidents, CIA officials, FBI investigators, DEA agents, etc. A High Thriller has gigantic stakes, good guys and bad ones, and a major part of the appeal is that it gives the reader a peek into the “halls of power” to lean heavily on a cliche.

Want to know how the president stays connected while on Airforce One? Want to know how a CIA Agent files secret reports? Curious to see how a White House Chief of Staff spends his day? A High Thriller makes an implicit promise to the reader that the writer has researched the book to the degree that, while the characters and the dangers are fictional, the depiction of how these powerful people and agencies act is bulletproof.* In fact, that research is part of the foundation of the genre’s appeal.

By contrast, a Low Thriller doesn’t portray powerful people. It generally portrays low level criminals or regular citizens who get caught up with low level criminals. An insurance salesman’s black sheep brother turns up after 15 years, with criminals on his trail. The criminals want the money the brother stole, and they’ll do anything they have to do to the salesman’s family to get it. Or a low-level mobster realizes he’s about to be betrayed by his bosses. Or some oddball criminal types try to pull off one last job, with comically disastrous results.

David Morrell and Elmore Leonard write these sorts of books, along with many many others. They might be noirish or comic. The characters are rarely wholly good or bad (although the villains are often crazed killers) and a tense confrontation is more likely to take place in a motel or boiler room than the Oval Office.

Which isn’t to suggest that Low Thrillers aren’t carefully researched, or that the research isn’t part of the appeal. But typically, the research isn’t there to give the reader a glimpse at the tools and methods of power.

Low Thriller is my favorite sort (and I’m still trying to work out how it differs from and overlaps with “Detective Fiction”) but I’ve been trying to figure out how this dialectic would map onto urban fantasy. High Fantasy and (my invented idea of) High Thriller both focus on people of authority and power, and there’s certainly a lot of that in UF. You have werewolf clans, vampire courts, wizard societies, etc., each with its own politics and area of authority. You also have outsiders, criminals and average citizens (well, not as many of those as I’d like). You have stories about the end of the world, and stories about small-scale threats.

It’s something I’m going to be thinking about.

* Police procedurals also rely on this sort of bulletproof research, but they are generally not thrillers and have a different sort of appeal.

Woo-hoo! Child of Fire Makes Another “Best of 2009” List!

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This time the list is at PopSyndicate.com. Here’s the link.

The author added an “e” to my last name, but hell, everyone does that; at least she’s done it in an unusual way. Here’s a quote:

“This one has some delicious creep factor to it, and Lilly is a protagonist that you find fascinating.”

Did you hear that, universe? You find him fascinating!

Hee. I’ll write a grownup post sometime soon. :)

Randomness for 1/6

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1) A cult I might join, and a manifesto that would do me good.

2) This is an article I’ve been waiting a few days for: What if the Christmas bomb had exploded? Did the Nigerian terrorist have enough explosive to bring down the plane? The answer seems to be “Maybe, but probably not.”

3) Lunch Lady Paper Dolls! Not your average lunch lady, either–it’s the crime fighting lunch lady from the popular comics.

4) Pride and Prejudice, told through emoticons. This is awesome.

5) The Venn Diagram of Cookie Status.

6) The difficult, difficult work of plotting AVATAR.

7) Screenwriters are trained to fail the Bechdel Test. “Ego and laziness – the intrepid supervillain team!” via Jim Hines.

Quote of the day

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This is a long one, from an interview with Terry Rossio, one of the highest-paid screenwriters working today, and the man who runs the Wordplay site, which is full of writerly advice. I learned a lot on the Wordplay message boards, and in the columns, and I learned a lot from this interview (even though I’m supposed to be MAN BITES WORLD.

Anyway, this is about screenwriting, naturally, not writing books, but I think it’s pertinent:

JRM (interviewer): How did you break in, and how did you come to be where you are now?

Terry Rossio: I’m going to try to not give the usual boilerplate answers in this interview, and that means not going along with false presumptions, no matter how seemingly benign. The question about breaking in seems perfectly legit, but really it’s not. A writer must create compelling work, and then try to sell it. Once sold, the writer has to do the same thing again. It’s really not true that the writer ‘breaks in’—that’s an artifact of the belief that the person is being judged, not the work, and also of the belief that there is an inside and an outside, which I don’t think exists. There are too many screenwriters out there with only a single credit for there to be an inside, and too many writers on the outside making sales, to too many markets which are either new, changing, or undefined.

In truth buyers are just not that organized, your buyer is not my buyer, or in some cases, you can become your own buyer. Courtney Hunt was nominated for an Academy Award this year for best screenplay for Frozen River, and she’s never sold a screenplay. Is she on the inside or the outside? In truth, anyone, at any time, can come up with South Park or Superman or Sandman, and that’s all that matters.

And I can’t resist adding this one:

Screenwriters are the Charlie Browns of Hollywood, and everyone else holds the football.

I recommend reading the whole interview. Yeah, it’s a little long, but the stuff on constructing a story is wonderful

Whitman Authorized Editions for Girls

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I shouldn’t be startled by this, but I am. Maybe the only reason I’m surprised is that no one is doing it right now.

I stumbled on this weird bit of publishing history because I watched a Bonita Granville NANCY DREW last night (NANCY DREW — REPORTER. Verdict: terrific. It rang the bell for my expectations of a Nancy Drew movie, which aren’t necessarily sky high, but still). After the movie, I did what I usually did after seeing a good performance by someone I hadn’t heard of before: I looked them up online.

Bonita Granville’s wikipedia entry directed me to the Whitman Authorized Editions above. For those who didn’t click the link (and who have bothered to read this far) the WAEfG were suspense/adventure novels that starred actual movie stars of the time. For instance, Bonita Granville gets to star in her own Nancy Drew-like adventure, Bonita Granville and the Mystery of Star Island. There’s also Judy Garland and the Hoodoo Costume, Dorothy Lamour and the Haunted Lighthouse, Deanna Durbin and the Feather of Flame, and so on.

Some of the novels portray the actresses as themselves. Some (like the Betty Grable’s) portray the actresses as themselves if they’d never become famous movie stars.

Now, I’m sure there’s a fan fiction term for this: famous real people breaking up Nazi spy rings or solving decades-old murders in the swamps, or whatever. They even sound like they’re full of id-driven weirdness.

But why doesn’t someone try to revive this? It sounds like it could be odd, fun and successful, if it was handled correctly. Jennifer Love Hewitt and the Spectral Lighthouse, or Michelle Obama and the Mystery of Chesapeake Bay, or Anne Hathaway and the Poisoner’s Letter, or what the hell, even Susan Boyle and the Music Hall Gunman.

These people are all public figures, too, so I’m not sure what sort of rights issues would be involved.

Randomness for 12/29

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1) Tape measure superpowers. via sinboy

2) Blue Thundercats are only the most obvious uses for cgi. It’s also useful for turning sets into locations.

3) Romeo and Juliet by people who slept through English class. Hilarious. The text is fun, but listen to the audio news report, if you can. It’s not only wonderful, but it goes a little deeper than you might expect.

4) I’m supposed to be on a holiday media fast, but some things can’t be ignored: Is this Iran’s Second Revolution?

5) First link from James Nicoll: Most unsympathetic protagonist of 2009? The list is limited to protagonists who are supposed to be sympathetic, and Thomas Covenant has been awarded a lifetime achievement award and is no longer eligible.

6) Second link to James Nicoll: Rail travel in the U.S. Personally, I’d love to see more reliable, faster rail service in this country.

7) Sixth Pacific NW police officer dies of gunshot wounds in two months. First we had an office in Seattle shot to death on Halloween night. Then there were the four Lakewood officers. Now this. Law enforcement deaths are down from last year, nationally, but shooting deaths are up (most law enforcement deaths are auto-related). Condolences to his family and his fellow officers.

Randomness for Christmas Eve!

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Let’s go with a theme today:

1) Christmas gift warning! HP Computers: Racist? via mightygodking, who called this a FAIL, and I have to agree.

2) Give yourself a gift! The writer’s bible for Batman: The Animated Series. And here’s some analysis by Chris Sims.

3) Have some glad tidings! How Earth 2 Will Save Publishing.

4) Why does “A Christmas Carol” have to play every year? “Evocriticism” or Evolutionary literary criticism–an evolutionary explanation for the appearance of art.

5) More gifts! And prOn! It’s book pr0n. via James Macdonald on the Absolute Write forums.

6) Norad Santa Tracker. ‘Nuff said.