International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day

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This year, I’m posting a screenplay.

Five years ago, a friend and I decided to make our own ultra-low budget horror movie. Our plan was that we’d make a solid story and people would overlook whatever shortcomings our budget brought us.

It’s called The Dead Feed (pdf file – html file — the pdf is easier to read, but I know some people hate that format) and it’s not a standard hungry zombie movie.

And! As I give away my writing for free, I also link to a roundtable of sf/f book reviewers on the recent changes to newspaper book reviews and book review sections. Check it out.

Quoting agent Amanda Urban

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“When [Toni Morrison] finishes it, you know, a very polished first draft, which means it’s probably her seventh or eight or tenth draft, she gives it to Bob Gottlieb, her longtime editor and me, and we read it, and amazingly she is always open to comment. The best writers are. They want reactions and if somebody has something smart to say about the book, they’ll go back and rework it. It’s very interesting. She’s great to work with – she’s very easy to work with and she’s so brilliant and she’s so much fun.”

Bicycle Parkour

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It’s fantastic. via mighty_god_king.

Bleh

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Not feeling all that well today. This morning’s work on my (final?) revision of Everyone Loves Blue Dog was cut short by a need to return home early. It didn’t help that the homeless lady sitting right next to me was clipping her nails, swabbing beneath her bandages and wiping her toes clean. Uck. Starbucks, please don’t be gross.

Today’s work involved the first really major sequence in the book. It’s supposed to be a transition from one section to another–changing the setting, the relationship between the leads, and expanding the stakes. Unfortunately, the last round of notes pointed out a problem there.

Now, as a reader, I have certain kinds of text that I skim. Those long travelogues in Fellowship of the Ring with detailed descriptions of the landscape? Skim. Car chases? Skim. Super-tense slow-moving characters checking out that strange noise in the basement? Skim. Some fight scenes, too.

I skim right over them until I get to something that might actually change the story.

That can cause problems. I skipped over the dream sequence in Red Harvest because I didn’t realize that some of it wasn’t a dream, and later had to backtrack to review it. Still, it’s how I read and how I think a lot of people read.

And the latest round of notes indicated that this whole sequence was skimmable.

“Be interesting,” is the number one law when I’m writing, and I’m not seeing the skimmable parts here. I’ve trimmed some minor sentences and reordered paragraphs to string like information together (which also slows the pacing, but that’s okay right now) but I’m concerned that I’m just too close to the text.

Hell. I’ll power up the laptop and sit by the big window. It’s a beautiful sunny day today, and even if I’m not feeling well, I can listen to the birds and look at the blue sky while I fret.

#Agentlove

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Remember that self-aggrandizing goofball I linked to earlier? (Hmm. I guess that one was LiveJournal only. Anyway…) Some of the commenters there, at the Agentfail blog, and elsewhere has been full of anger and resentment. In that first link, you can read a comment from agent Nathan Bransford stating that the amount of anger he’s been seeing lately makes him very nervous.

So. Author Beth Bernobich suggested an #Agentlove post. I think it’s a great idea.

Except, you know, I’m not going to talk about “love” because I’m a married, she’s married, and we have a business relationship. And I know very well that the author/agent relationship can be fraught–some writers can be a little crazy about it. So I’m skipping over the word “love” here.

Let me start off by saying my agent is a former editor–I get fantastic notes. Seriously, I have two editors working with me to iron out the trouble spots and check for flubs. And one thing I learned with the back and forthing over the end of ELBD is that, even if she disagrees with the choices I want to make, she’s on my side.

I’m really, really lucky to be working with her. When she sold my book last year, I about fell over at the deal she got me. It was utterly outside of my expectations, and I’ve been trying damn hard to be worthy of the work she’s done.

Another great thing about working with her is that she always gets back to me quickly. When I have a question about how the publishing business works–Is this a good thing? How rare is this? Should I try this or not?–she gets me the info I need promptly.

And she laughs at my jokes, mostly.

For the record, I didn’t sign with her because a pal of mine got me an in. I didn’t pitch to her at a conference. I didn’t do any of the crazy things people say writers should do.

I wrote the book. I wrote the query. I revised both thoroughly. Then I queried widely and carefully. Out of sixty I sent out, eight responded with a request to read more. Of those, three offered to sign me. It was all textbook, people. I went to Miss Snark’s archives and followed her directions step by step. And now I’m doing this professionally.

My agent is made of awesome, and I’m damn lucky to be working with her.

Hey, if you want to talk about how great your agent is, or if you want to sing the praises of an agent who did right by you, please do so.

I’ve been wanting to write a couple of more substantive posts…

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But that’s going to have to wait until I have some quite time. With Salad Eater attending a conference this weekend and working today, I’ve had a couple of Midays in a row.

Meanwhile, I will shock and surprise you all by posting a link.

Darths and Droids, a fumetti (as in: a webcomic made from photographs) that justifies the utterly random plot of THE PHANTOM MENACE in the only way imaginable–it was a fictionalization of an rpg campaign.

All the photos are stills from the movie, and I swear it is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Just as funny as DM of the Rings, which is a couple of years old (in case you haven’t seen it). The dialog for the comic is the dialog between the game master and the players.

And, God, does it bring back memories. Seen via AntickMusings.

6 things make a post

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* Check out this short “video” which I guess is supposed to advertise a new TV. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have quote marks around that word, because this is a digital video at 30 frames a second, but it’s really more of a technical acheivement than a short film. Basically, it’s “bullet-time” on red kryptonite.

* Health care reform without a public insurance option=the German model. Money quote: “Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.”

* Seven year old boys prefer store-bought lemon-lime soda to the homemade variety.

* On NPR this morning, the father of Roxana Saberi, the journalist sentenced to 8 years in prison in what appears to be an Iranian kangaroo court, has been trying to make waves by telling people that his daughter was tricked into confessing to spying. According to him, they promised to let her go if she admitted to the crimes, which he thought was illegitimate. I hope someone explains to him that this happens in the U.S.A. all the time–the teenagers wrongfully convicted in the Central Park “wilding” case were nailed because of exactly this tactic, and that the FBI wanted Richard Jewel to confess to the Olympic bombing as part of a “training video.” While the Iranian government is deeply fucked up and in desperate need of reform, there’s no point in criticizing them for doing the same thing we do.

* I don’t have whatever cable channel showed THE WIRE, but I know it has a lot of fans. If you’re interested, here’s the original pitch and series bible. (Warning, that’s a .pdf file) I haven’t looked at it myself, because I plan to watch the series someday.

* Finally, putting my wife on a bus for her second day at her conference pretty much wasted my writing time today. My son is up, too, and once that happens I’ll have no time to focus on the book at all. Which sucks, but hey, that’s what family is about. Now we’re off for our Saturday library run.

I have only two things to say about yesterday’s “teabagger” protests

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First: Yes, I giggled like the middle-aged schoolboy I am at the name.

Second: Remember all those anti-Iraq war protests from six years ago? All those giant puppets and silly costumes? Remember how many people(including me) thought they were a ridiculous freak show?

Those people were right.

And I was wrong not to see it. Sure, I looked at them and thought They don’t represent me, but they didn’t have to, and it was narcissistic of me to think they should. They were in the right, and we would be in a better place right now if we’d listened. I would be in a better place.

So, yeah, the tax protests yesterday (I passed a small one on my bus ride home yesterday) had a bunch of silly signs and whatnot, but I’m not going to assume that makes them wrong on the issues[1]. I’m not planning to make that mistake twice.

Having Glenn Fucking Beck on their side makes them wrong, but that’s a post for another time.

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Today, I pored over Everyone Loves Blue Dog, and accomplished nothing. Also, the book my wife gave me to read couldn’t be renewed. I had to strip out all her bookmarks and slip it into the conveyor belt at the library.

As for the LiveJournal feed for Nathan Bransford’s blog, it turns out that Mr. Bransford himself ask that it be suspended. I have no idea why; LJ syndication is just another kind of RSS, but whatever. No more “This Week in Publishing” I guess.

At work, I discovered that the intranet policy book pages I’d spent a good part of last week working on were completely useless now. The manager copy and pasted them into .mht files elsewhere on the network, breaking all the links. There were good reasons to move them to another part of the network–our system is criminally slow–but damn.

Finally, do you know what my company and I both pay, per month, for the basic health insurance my wife, son and I have? Not just what I contribute, but everything?

Over $1,600. Per month.

We need reform in this country, and we need it now.

Links! The Top 16 Worst Movie Quotes to Utter During Sex. Is it wrong of me to laugh so hard at this?

Next, another amazing animation, this one done with stop-motion. Sorta. Check it out.

Finally, tweenbots, a video art project via Jay Lake. His link described it as teh cute, but I think that misses the point. The really, really cool thing about this is that the robot is a cute, nearly helpless little thing that relies on complete strangers to help it get where it needs to go. Even if you can’t watch the video at that page, the write up is fascinating.

It seems that a lot of my posts lately have been straight link farms. I feel boring. Is there something I should post about? Something I said I would talk about but haven’t? Let me know.

A post on a sunny day

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Agent Nathan Bransford is running an Agent for a Day event. Basically, he’s posted 50 queries in his blog, and his commenters get to reject or ask for more. Three of the queries are for books that went on to be published.

It’s pretty interesting stuff. I could never be an agent, because I would reject everything. Still, I wish the LiveJournal feed for his blog would be fixed.

Today I went back (yet again) to Everyone Loves Blue Dog. The changes that need to be made are pretty straightforward and shouldn’t take more than a week or two, depending. And for the future, I’ll have to be aware that I need to prompt the reader’s memory when a character re-enters the story after being out of it for 200 pages or so. An unusual name simply won’t cut it.