The Invisibles

I stayed up late last night, so I think I've mentioned a little of this before but I will start from the beginning so I can organize these ideas for later reference.

Up the street from where I lived, there was a small utility company office. This is strange in that AmerenUE has a monopoly and it wasn't an Ameren office. It took me years to hear the name and I never did confirm it was what it said it was. It did not have a sign or anything. All it had was a sculpture on its front lawn. A concrete lightning bolt.

It took me a few years before I even noticed it was there. I don't know how many times I had driven up Watson to Hampton and on up to the interstate. It was one of my three main routes around the city. So I was astonished when one day I was walking rather than driving and there was a lightning bolt on someone's lawn.

It reminded me of the kind of lightning bolt you'd see on a comics superhero, a yellow bolt in a black circle or something. And I thought to myself, how interesting would it be if that was a headquarters for a super group and they put a sign right out front because it was a place of business but no one questioned it. We just move on past without thinking about it.

Now I'm in New England. I work on the west side of downtown just before Back Bay in Boston (sw corner of Boston Common). If you walk toward Back Bay, the pike and Tremont move at an angle askew to the normal urban grid, which causes one street to seem more like an alley because it doesn't really go anywhere. It just has a triangular building that reminds me of a rundown, brick version of the Flatiron building. This building has a defunct Italian joint, a Mexican restaurant, and a biomedical supply company (or so they claim!). The doors to the biomedical side of the building are all wooden with black iron bands. They have gargoyle head, iron-ring handles with a stone gargoyle over the door. If Doctor Strange was ever to have a headquarters, this would be the place!

AND THEN! I find out in Boston's North End, there is Henchman Street. I swear to god, that's a real street. Henchman Street!

This only stokes the fire of my imagination of a whole hero/villain panoply hidden in plain sight. I've been wanting to do this for awhile (since the lightning bolt) but I keep writing Hellboy. I need something fresh. I think this will work better as a graphic novel. The visuals of seeing these places out in the open will communicate better.

I thought of a title this morning, "The Invisibles," which unfortunately is the title of a comic that Vertigo ran from 1994 to 2000 (even though the stories are nothing alike). Granted, titles can be reused, but that's not always a classy way to go. And since I don't even have a story yet, it's nothing I need to sweat.

It'll be fun if I ever get to do it, though.

Speak More

The first novel I ever finished is titled BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE. While it needs some tweaking, I still enjoy it. I actually read a few chapters a month or so back because I was in that type of mood. I posted chapter 2 (which should be chapter 1) to Liz Poole's 50-follower blogfest. Of the people that read this blog now, only LurkerWithout has read the entire story. Much like THE TRIAD SOCIETY, I have avoided writing a sequel because the first was never published (though it did receive a full request). This is also the novel that got compared to Percy Jackson, which upsets me even a year later since the two only have two things in common, that Greek gods are somehow involved in some way somehow in the plot and that they're both written in English.

I was watching the new "Clash of the Titans" movie with incredibly low expectations. The production value was surprisingly good. They put a lot into effects, setting, and makeup. Even the actors involved pull down some serious dollars. Too bad the writing wasn't up to snuff. It got me thinking, though. I had been asked for a sequel to the story for some time. I had a ghost story in mind, but really it was weak tea. Maybe a short story¹. But then I'm watching this movie and I start wondering if the fates show up, the Moirae, the three women with golden sheers who apportion a person's thread of life.

Then I started thinking of a woman in a dingy New York high rise sitting at a typewriter, chain smoking and guzzling bourbon. Ham up all the classic stereotypes. Except she's not a wannabe writer. She's a Moirae (whose name is Moira). BEST SELLERS AND BARBECUE SAUCE.

No plot yet, but there's a seed there. I think I'll plant it and let it grow.


¹ Which, funny enough, is how BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE was first born.

Patapan

The year is 1816. President Benedict Arnold made the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon Bonaparte thirteen years previous. Defeated at Leipzig and driven from the French throne by the Sixth Coalition, Bonaparte fled to New Orleans. There French loyalists rallied around their emperor. They seceded as a US territory and declared themselves New France (Burgundy?).

Napoleon's army marched northward, following the Mississippi river. Now it approaches Arnold, a Missouri town still loyal to the United States. They prepare to defend themselves, but with Napoleon to the south and Saint Louis to the north, can they hold out long enough for President Jefferson to send troops to save them?

This has to have been told somewhere

Okay those of you who read sci fi, tell me the name of this book. There's no way this hasn't been written before. It's so fundamentally classic that I'm surprised I've given it a second thought.

Idea for a new story came to me on Friday (third of the week, actually, but I didn't write the other two down because they didn't seem like they had enough to flesh out to a full story). This one is about a person who uncovers a vast conspiracy. Robots are infiltrating humanity. What he sees as familiar coworkers are actually just cyborgs. When one malfunctions, he learns the truth and the chase is on. The robots are coming for him and he has to flee and find others who know the truth so he can save humanity!

Pretty standard stuff, yeah? In the end he discovers that they robots aren't coming after him to silence him but because he's a malfunctioning robot himself. In fact, there are no humans left. They died off a long time ago. He and those others he meets that "know the truth" are in fact all malfunctioning.

So there's no way someone else hasn't written this story. I don't read a lot of sci fi (I stick more to fantasy), so someone tell me the name of this novel so I don't invest the time to right it only to find out it's a novel by John Scalzi or something.

Captain Majors and the Super Squad: Soldiers of Tomorrow!

So I don't know where this idea came from. It hit me while I was driving home from work. It's incomplete, though. Still, it's worth writing down so that I can work on it later if the mood takes me. The interesting thing is that it's not a fantasy book. I don't get the sense that it's sci fi either. It feels more like a popular fiction where there are sf elements in it but it has a broader market appeal so they call it "fiction" and be done with it.

ANYWAY...main character is a decorated Iraqi Freedom vet. He survived the worst fighting in 2003-2005 including all the fighting in Fellujah. His platoon was ambushed by insurgents and only a handful of them survived. He's cycled back to the real world and is off his tours while he goes through physical therapy over some kind of injury that prevents him from being sent back to Iraq/Afghanistan.

It's not your typical, "I'm scarred by war" kind of story. While it's not easy to just reinsert yourself into a non-war environment, he has a wife and family and friends and they have enough experience as a military family to help him work his way back to equilibrium.

One thing he likes is golden age television. All the early black and white stuff right after Vaudeville. All the way up to the pulp sci fi of the 50s. All the space ranger and silly stuff like that. While garage saling, they find a DVD boxed set of "the greatest shows of public television." It's a collection of public television programming from across the country.

One of the shows is "Captain Majors and the Super Squad: Soldiers of Tomorrow!" After gaining a cult following, it aired only one episode on national TV and was cancelled. It was seen as not futuristic enough.

When he watches the episode, he sees that Captain Majors has a cell phone and a blue tooth. There aren't flying cars and they're not on the moon. They're dressed like Marines, carry modern rifles, and use modern military parlance. Then the "action" begins and Main Character sees that the episode is a perfect reenactment of one his own missions from Iraq. He gathers a few other episodes and finds them to be perfectly accurate as well.

I am waffling on how this is happening. I'll have to make a decision later. That's what I got for now, though.

Arcadia

When I was a young lad, only twelve, and had decided in earnest that I was going to be a novelist, I began tap tap tapping away on my Apple IIGS (Appleworks, baby!). There were a number of ideas bumping around in my head. I wrote stuff for Jim Henson's Storyteller (which in no way fit the program but what the hell did I know). I got into a lot of trouble when my mother (who spied on me to make sure I wasn't being amoral--that clearly didn't work) saw me title a story "Lucifer Jr." The work I put the most effort into was Arcadia--I don't remember the actual title.

Arcadia was a post-apocalyptic story. Between pollution and natural evaporation, there was so much moisture in the air that clouds could actually sustain weight. Humanity fired took what could survive and sent them up in rockets. Over times, they evolved so their bones were lighter and they had wings. They kept their prisoners down below but one of them escapes to the clouds above.

I'd print pages off on my dot matrix printer and send them to my sister to read. She thought they were interesting. She was upset when I stopped writing it. I thought it was crap. This says something about her taste. I never forgot that story, though. It was my first genuine attempt. It was my first real failure. And it was so BAD!

My sister still asks about it from time to time, when we talk (which granted is not often). A small part of me tries to write the absolute best story I can so I can send her the book and say, "See, this is why I quit writing that novel when I was 12. This is good. That was crap."

It's kind of odd how much influence a 21-year-old failure has over my effort today. (My writing is totally better though.)

When all is said and done and I'm bereft of new story ideas, I'll totally resurrect this thing and shell it out there. :D

A Good and Happy Life

Occasionally I'll rant in my head¹. Something touched me off yesterday. I think it was a webcomic or a response to a webcomic. I don't know. The jist of it was that an author uses his medium as a pulpit for his own opinions.

At face value, this can be true. The context of the statement was saying that an author always uses his medium as a pulpit for his own opinions and this is just crap. It's an opinion that comes up more frequently than I think it should. In short, it says an author is incapable of envisioning or writing a world or action that deviates from his own perceptions of said world. What? If that's the case, Jennifer Hiller is a serial killer². Of course authors can create characters that have opinions, desires, and motives different from their own.

That was a short rant because I've had it before and with real people. I then began to examine my own work and realized I've never actually written a work (to date) where the characters or events are representative of my opinions or beliefs. Some might fall in line, but none of them are a megaphone. None of them are a purposeful allegory.

So I pondered about writing a story that represents my biases and opinions and frustrations and proclivities. And as I pondered the happenings of this treatise, A Prairie Home Companion uttered the phrase "A Good and Happy Life" and I found my title.

SPOILER

Summation: The disparity in wealth widens and leads to its inevitable conclusion. The have nots rise up, the economy collapses, and in the anarchy before a new regime brings order, we set our stage. A wealthy teen away from home returns to find her parents murdered, her sister taken, and her house being ransacked. She pairs up with a street urchin who was looting the house at the time. After yelling and haggling and an offer of payment, the urchin says she knows where the sister is being held and will take the girl there. They brave the mean streets of [New York/Boston/St. Louis/not sure] in an effort to get the girl back. They voice their opinions on what's happening, extol the virtues of the young girl taken to be sold into who knows what kind of depraved service, and what they dislike about the other group.

In the end, the older sister makes a mistake, continuing to act from her station. With her life threatened, she begs the urchin to save her. To which she does not, as the mistake was a sign of her selfishness and disregard for others. If she truly had loved her sister, she would have endured. The girl is killed. The urchin then goes and rescues the little girl [maybe] as she was worth saving.

Not sure when I'll write it, but I like it enough that I've added the title to my queue.


¹ This is not surprising.

² She's made a similar such comment on her blog or on Killer Chicks. I can't remember which.

Hurry Up, Technology!

I've made this complaint before, but we need those dream records they have in "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within." I had a sequel/continuation to a previous dream. Both of them were awesome. Both of them vanished from my brain the moment I woke up. I have little broken pieces, images mostly, floating around in my brain. But it was SUCH a good story. It focuses on a young adult and given how dark YA has been skewing lately, I think could be fit in that genre. The protagonist is a young girl, maybe 14 or so? New Zealander I think, or somewhere around there. She's put in a facility for problem children and...something.

This story blew my mind. It was so heart wrenching and poignant. I don't think I could ever just take these few scraps and craft the story that I saw. Sometimes it feels like I'm not even dreaming, that I'm watching someone else's life. That if I could just record it, I'd have a story more true to form and detailed than anything I could craft with my imagination.

But it's in a dream! It's trapped there, and I can't get to it!!!!

Little pig, little pig, let me in!!!!!<sup>1


1</sup> Not by the hair on my chinny chin...frontal lobe.

Afternoon Showers on the Frontal Lobe

I did some brainstorming with Elizabeth Poole today, which was incredibly helpful. I was wavering on 7Sac, as the scope was too large and the story too small. There wasn't enough steak and potatoes. It was mostly pre-dinner rolls. The story was at risk of falling into too many cliches, specifically the "build a team" story where the majority of the story is building the team and not actually dealing with the threat at hand. Plenty of good books have followed this route, but plenty bad books have too and frankly it's a trope I'm incredibly bored with.

So rather than assemble the team, I'm going to chase the team.

Here's the quick breakdown. The book begins with the main character, Cheshire. Cheshire meets Albrecht who offers the inciting action. Cheshire and Albrecht meet Ananta the Magician and his two slaves.

That was the mistake. Having Ananta and his slaves all appear at once put too much weight on forward action without explaining why these three people have shown up or why they become necessary for the group. I kept focusing on Ananta. The slaves were window dressing even though both of them are necessary for the plot's advancement.

So, the obvious track is to introduce them individually. But that's where the "build a team" thing comes in. Now Ananta doesn't have slaves. They've become Grant Black and Coeas, demon hunters in their own right. Saying something like "we need to find these men" when Cheshire has been hunting demons for 42 years is totally stupid. The man has killed more demons than the rest of them put together, so to suggest he needs to build a team to accomplish what he's been doing for decades rings incredibly false.

BUT! The same inciting action that applies to Cheshire applies to Grant and Coeas as well...IF they're not being recruited but being stopped. All the demons have to be killed within a 24 hour period, hence the demons Cheshire has killed reincarnating every seven years. If Grant and Coeas found and killed their demons as well, the cycle repeats itself and they'd have to wait another seven years (and Cheshire is already old as dirt).

Sure it's still a team in the end, but the task isn't to go find and recruit people, but to find them and stop them from screwing everything up. That pleases me.

I'm also juggling on POV chapters for people who are possessed by the demons. I have a few ideas for these, some of them safer than the others. I think I'll just have to give it a try and see what happens.

Regardless, in this case, I have enough where this is officially a novel to work on. I'm going to take my computer with me to work tomorrow. Huzzah!

Thanks Liz!

Plontsing the Sac

I've been on holiday! It is becoming a tradition that each Christmas my wife and I go up into the White Mountains for a few days. Though New Hampshire is a small state, the North country and the South Country are pretty different (as we're often reminded by those that live in the North). You can cut the state in half and vary the temperature by 10 degrees. Life is different there, including living in the lower elevations of the northern Appalachian Mountains. It's a great time, though this year absent snow. We are expecting a blizzard to hit tonight, so that should make up for it. Of course, it was supposed to start snowing 2 1/2 hours ago, so who knows if that will actually materialize.

If you're ever in North Conway, consider staying at the Wyatt House Bed & Breakfast. They were great to us. The food was delicious. And it's ideally situated.

While I was there, Jen too copious amounts of naps, more than usual, which gave me the writing time I needed to wrap up JH and send it off to beta readers. That number is down to two, now, which is disappointing. But people have lives and it's the holidays, so I understand.

I had thought to maybe spend a few weeks reading. I'm going to put attention to finishing Tad Williams' SHADOWHEART. I finished MOCKINGJAY yesterday. It was good, but I don't think it was worth the hype that it got. The ending averted being a disaster and ended up being just okay. The whole trilogy almost seems like it was written just to show which boy the character will choose, which is interesting for all of five pages, not three books.

As for me, spending time reading is turning into prep work for writing THE 7TH SACRIFICE (I've officially changed its name to be 7TH instead of SEVENTH).

For starters, I'm no longer calling the counties the counties. I originally conceived this story between writing WANTED: CHOSEN ONE and THE TRIAD SOCIETY. The former puts a lot of focus on duchies and a king. The latter puts more focus on counties. For 7Sac, I had wanted to use counties as a regional boundary because so often people focus on duchies or kingdoms and I like that county is still a word we use today. When I abandoned my first attempt at 7Sac, that bled over to TTS. The problem is, now TTS is a finished novel and the possible first in a trilogy, so using counties again seems like beating a dead horse.

I went horseback riding on my vacation. The farm was 77 acres of an original 1000 acreage granted to the owner's family in 1771 by King George III. Yup, I went horseback riding on a 239-year-old farm. New England is awesome. This made me tweak things a bit.

Basic breakdown. "The Kingdom" is where this takes place. The Kingdom is broken into four areas, originally called counties. Each of these counts claimed the thrown after the king died under mysterious circumstances. That's getting modified. The counties are acreages. Acreage is a little cumbersome to say. I was watching "Valhalla Rising" yesterday (disembowelment on Christmas!) and they calls Mads a terror from the southerlands. Well isn't that nifty. You always hear highlands or lowlands or East and West or what have you. Hell, I even used Southerland in TTS as Soderland (German), but this feels different. The acreages are delineated by compass.

Cumberland Acreage, the Westerlands
Arostook Acreage, the Northerlands
Somerset Acreage, the Easterlands
Kennebec Acreage, the Southerlands

Now, instead of counts, each of the Acreages is rules by a prince or princess, with Cumberland being home to the Crown Prince and rightful heir. The rest claim he assassinated their father and thus forfeited the throne. Each of them now call himself/herself King/Queen, but most just refer to them as the Pretenders (a term I made the first time around that was used much less).

I also used Tinkers in JEHOVAH'S HITLIST, so it wouldn't do to include them again in 7Sac. But I love the tinkers I've created, so really I'm just changing the name since the two types of tinkers were completely different. Now they'll be called Peddlers.

One thing that's getting dropped all together is the varying naming structures. Each county represented a different European culture in terms of naming. I think I'll just stick with Brittany this time as I so often move into other areas of Europe for inspiration. Main character's name is Cheshire, after all, and don't want to change that. So it wouldn't make sense if everyone else had a Russian name.

The visuals in "Valhalla Rising" were pretty amazing, enough to make up for the fact the story (there was a story?) made no sense whatsoever. Quite inspirational. Gave me a lot of ideas on description for the Four Corners, where the four acreages meet and where the abandoned royal palace still stands. I had thought to write the description here, but I'm not in the mood any more, so I'll save that for next time.

Hope you all had an enjoyable week while I was away. Time to get back to work. :)

(Oooo, and I got a Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock t-shirt in my stocking! Woo hoo!)

(And a titanium spork!!!!)

My people, they have but one bunghole

Extra extra extra tired today. Thus I talk to anyone and everyone to keep myself awake. This does not lead to quality work, but does lead to some fun creativity. Follow this thought process:

I'm talking to my friend Michelle. She says she needs to go eat lunch before she passes out. I keep talking because if I don't I'LL pass out. Eventually I hit a lull and tell her to go eat a burrito

Burrito

Burrito makes me think of burro.

Burrito
Burro

Burro is a fun word. It makes me think of a really long trilled R. Burrrrrrrrro

Burrito
Burro
Burrrrrrrrrrro

Trilled Rs make me think of Roberto. Flicking that R right at the beginning.

Burrito
Burro
Burrrrrrrrrrro
Roberto

Roberto morphs into Boberto

Burrito
Burro
Burrrrrrrrrrro
Roberto
Boberto


I am changing the name of the main character in WHAT'S BEHIND THE CROOKED DOOR? from Brian to Rob just so I can have a character call him Boberto.

This name is awesome. Envy Boberto. He gets all the chicks.

I'll Make a Bajillion Dollars!

So, as we all know, the reason there is still resistance to the ebook is because some people worry about losing their pretension. How can one prove that one is better than those around one if they cannot see that the book one is reading is clearly far beyond the reading level of everyone else gathered.

There had been a quickly-abandoned proposal of creating ereaders with screens on both sides, one for reading and one for showing the cover. Given that nearly all ereaders are immediately put into a protective cover, this proved a waste of time and monies.

But there must be a way we can welcome the coming epocalypse while maintaining our pretentious superiority! Well, there is, with the Selbomatic eBook Attenuated Label (SEAL-the bad ass of ebook covers).

Take the standard design for an ebook cover. Thick, padded sides with straps to hold in your ereader. Cut a rectangle into the top cover and shave off a few millimeters so there is a book-like divot in the cover. Slice an opening in the side. Print out a color image of the cover of the most pretentious book you want people to think you’re reading (and if you’re really concerned about looking superior, I suggest you actually read the book too lest someone else ask questions you cannot answer). Put the paper image between two thin pieces of plastic, then slide them into the opening until the image is situated in the divot. This divot being in truth a window to your intellectual superiority.

Ideally, you could manufacture this entire thing, but if your intellect can’t wait to be on display, you can accomplish it with a razor blade and a file. I am now accepting start-up capital.

His Shadow Stands Over Us

Streaming Netflix over my Xbox (really, it seems that's the only thing I use my Xbox Live account for any more^{1 2}), I watched a miniseries with Daniel Craig called Archangel. Though I think I may have seen the ending before, the rest of it was quite interesting. Especially the first two episodes. General premise examines just how much Stalin means to rural Russians even today, just how ingrained the Communist revolution is in those areas not immediately affected by insurgent capitalism (so everything out of major metropolitan areas). Not an expert on Russia, I have no idea how much of this premise is exaggerated or flat out fictional, but it was a lot of fun.

Short explanation of the inciting action, former Soviet higher-ups have discovered that Stalin has a son and they mean to bring about a second Bolshevik revolution.

At the end of the final episode, they have a quote from Stalin's real daughter: "He is gone, but his shadow stands over us. It still dictates to us, and we still obey."

This immediately set my mind to racing.

An old kingdom swamped with history and tradition. A fetid royal house. A dead king leaving behind a host of children, none capable of ruling with his authority, none yet burdened by the paranoia that caused him to starve to death, unwilling to trust even his food tasters.

His is a kingdom so dependent on his absolute rule and so mired by his insanity, that his children must work together and against one another to bring about the future they want. But none of them are as capable as he. Even in death, his shadow stands above them. His mad design plays out and they obey his will, until their entire house is destroyed.

To add to the queue: HIS SHADOW STANDS ABOVE US


¹ I'd just use my Wii to stream Netflix but it doesn't have an HDMI connection. I love my high definition picture

² Once upon a time, XBL was useful to me. Now, I think the only two games I have that can be played with other people are Castle Crashers and Snoopy Flying Ace.