Two-Cent Tuesday: Pure Magic

After years of selling books online, there has been kind of an odd trend.  The books I've sold the most copies of are at two different ends of the spectrum.  One book was written at the height of my literary powers and the other is a series written when I was just starting out and had no idea what the hell I was doing.  Life is weird like that.

Of course the book I've sold the most copies of is Where You Belong.  In large part because it had a 3 year headstart or so on most everything else.  And also I pushed the hell out of it with a blog tour and website and everything.  Why shouldn't I?  It was the best damned book I ever wrote and will ever write.  As I said it was written at the height of my literary powers (such as they were); I was really locked in or in the zone when I wrote that.  I had a determination and purpose that I don't think I've ever matched, not even in the books that followed it.  I mean, I enjoyed the Scarlet Knight and Chances Are books, but they weren't so literary in their ambitions.

As I said at the beginning, on the flip side the other series of books that have sold the most copies are First Contact/The Savior/The Final Battle published under one of my pseudonyms.  (I'm not counting books given away for free.)  I find it amusing that those have sold so well because I wrote those my senior year in high school.  I did it pretty much on a lark too.  Well part of it was my brother had moved out and so I had a room to myself for the first time and a newfangled word processor (a technological marvel for 1995--not really) so I finally had time and space to get down and do some real writing.  Except of course I had no idea what the hell I was doing.  Most of the story was cribbed from Robotech, Transformers, and Timothy Zahn novels.  And I'm sure the grammar wasn't great from a grammar snob standpoint.

Anyway, I think the best thing about those books was because I was young and ignorant.  I wasn't really worried about commas or -ing verbs or cliches or any of that bullshit.  I just had FUN.  It was purely for the love of the game, not about getting published or making money or anything like that.  I don't think I've really been able to replicate that feeling again because you can't unlearn what you've learned; you can't really go back in time, which is the point Thomas Wolfe was trying to say.

On the other hand, Where You Belong was not really FUN to write.  It was a lot of WORK.  Months of late nights at the library and weekends at coffee places and Panera Breads.  And that was just the first draft!  Then there were more months to rewrite the entire thing in first-person!  But then there was the moment where I could step back and finally say, "I did it!"  And it was good.  I haven't really been able to replicate that feeling either because I'm lazy and I just haven't felt the need since to put that much raw effort into anything.  Not that the Scarlet Knight books or Chances Are books didn't involve any work--just not as much.

I guess if you want to get all sappy about it--which I will since it's the last Two-Cent Tuesday--there are those magical moments in a writing career.  Maybe it's when you're just starting out and don't know any better or maybe it's when you're a grizzled veteran and finally find that one story that really gets you going, but those are the magical times that should be treasured.

Two Cent Tuesday: Growth Chart

Over a month ago I created a full bibliography of all the stuff I'd written and published since 1994.  Eventually I got to thinking of a way to represent this graphically--in graph format.

Because the idea that occurred to me is that by looking at those books I could track my growth and lack thereof as a writer.  So first let me post the chart and then I'll get down to explaining it.  BTW, the numbers are pretty much arbitrary values.

Click to embiggen as Offutt would say...

The bottom (Y?) axis represents a year, some being listed more than once as they correspond to a particular work.

From the chart you could extrapolate a few distinct periods:

Period One:  Infancy (1994-2001)

We start arbitrarily at 1 with A Light From the Darkness in 1994.  It was by all measures not very good.  It's the kind of thing I probably shouldn't put out there, but what the hell.  Hardly anyone ever buys it.  There's a slight uptick then with the Rebirth Trilogy as I eventually called it:  First Contact, The Savior, The Final Battle.  The story was a little sharper though the grammar was still pretty bad.

 Period Two:  Aggressive Expansion (2002-2007)

Starting in 2002 with The Leading Men I began to get into literary fiction.  Really between 2003-2006 was when I was sort of hitting the books, really working on the craft and all that.  That was when I naively thought if I just worked really hard at it I'd find that fabled Northwest Passage to getting published.  There is a large drop for what eventually became Young Family (Children of Eternity #2) just because it took three drafts to get that into something not completely awful.

Period Three:  The Peak (2008)

All that hard work on craft and all that left me burned out in 2007, but it opened the door to reaching the peak with Where You Belong in 2008.  That's where I was in the zone as they say.  I'll talk more about that next week.

Period Four:  The Permanent Period (2009-Present)

Since reaching the peak, things have largely plateaued.  There were a couple of setbacks in Time Enough to Say Goodbye and Awakenings, both of which required a couple of drafts.  The Chances Are series I consider to be the best from this period, though others may disagree.  More or less right on through the present things have been keeping an even keel.  The name "Permanent Period" comes from Lay of the Land by Richard Ford where the narrator claims you eventually reach a point where great changes are no longer possible.  You are who you are and that's how it's going to be from now on.  That's not really a bad thing in my book; if you've been at it for almost 20 years and you still haven't figured out your identity yet that would be the bad thing to me.

The idea here is to chart a writer's growing maturity--or lack thereof.  You start off knowing very little and then you learn until you reach the pinnacle of your powers and then you settle in.

I used myself because who else do I know that well, but really you could do this for any author who's been around 20-30 years.  I could plug in my literary hero John Irving or someone like John Updike or Kurt Vonnegut or Stephen King or John Grisham or whoever else you want to name who's been around for a long time.  I'd wager the chart would wind up looking pretty much the same.

You could look at it like an athlete in whatever sport.  A guy breaks into the league, hones his game, becomes a star for a while, and then as he gets older settles back in as a reliable but perhaps not spectacular player before finally calling it quits.  Think of Michael Jordan for instance.  He was drafted in the early 80s and then through the 80s was honing his game before he exploded in the 90s as the king of basketball and then with the Washington Wizards he settled into being an OK but not great player for a couple years before he retired.  So it goes.

So where do you think you are on the chart?

Two Cent Tuesday: Grumpy Potpourri

Let the grumpiness commence!

In the spirit of Festivus, I feel like airing some recent grievances.  Maybe later I'll challenge Rusty to the Feats of Stength since we're probably the only ones who still get the Seinfeld reference.

So like a month ago Blockbuster announced it was finally mercy killing both its stores and its DVD by mail service.  I was reluctantly using the latter because Netflix pissed me off a few years ago by sending me the same broken DVD TWICE and I'm too lazy to go to the Redbox kiosks.  Anyway, I could have seen the handwriting on the wall a while ago.  Blockbuster's problem wasn't just people were going digital with movies, but also that they sucked in providing for the customers.  I mean just about all the movies on my Blockbuster queue that were "Medium Demand" or "High Demand" or "Very High Demand" were readily available on Netflix's DVD service once I switched back to them.  Part of that is probably because they knew they were winding down their business, but really long before that they were slow about mailing movies and if you weren't able to get a new one the day it came out, forget about it for like six weeks.  So really, why should people stick with you?  The only advantage of Blockbuster is their envelopes are so much nicer.  They're easier to open and much smaller than Netflix's, which don't fit in the mail slot for my apartment's mailbox, which is extremely irritating.  Why does Netflix need to waste so much paper?  Think of the trees!

Anyway, speaking of companies going out of business in the near future, I recently got a $5 off coupon from Best Buy and decided to use it on a Sims 3 expansion pack since there was really nothing else I needed.  I could buy it to download from the site so that seemed simpler than going to the store.  WRONG!  With Amazon for instance you pay for the download and BOOM! you start downloading it and then installing and playing it.  But stupid ass Best Buy you have to wait for them to add it to your "digital library" which takes like an hour or so.  Well then I go to my digital library and where is it?  Not there.  I chatted with some dope in customer service who "assumed" it would take up to 24 hours.  Well gee 48 hours go by and still my game isn't there!  I tried to email them.  No answer.  Tried again 40 hours later.  No answer.  Ranted about them on Twitter and got an auto Tweet--and that was it.  Finally I sucked it up to navigate their obnoxious phone system.  When I get a person she assures me they'll send me a code by Email in 24 hours.  Nope.  I call the next day another lady tells me they'll send a code in 24 hours.  Nope.  I call the next day the guy gives me the code over the phone.  Hooray?  Nope.  Doesn't work.  Finally I just went to EA's Sims 3 site and bought the game from them for $20.  Ten minutes later it's installed.  Gee, 10 minutes vs. 5 fucking days.  This is part of the reason they'll be out of business in a couple years.  Which is kind of sad because honestly I still like having them around for situations like when I bought my new computer and for whatever reason the thing only had DVI connectors and I have a VGA monitor.  I was luckily able to go down to Best Buy and get an adapter.  But when Best Buy goes under what do I do?  Wait 2 days to get it from Amazon?  Wait a day or so to find some Ma and Pop computer parts store?  Because the only other stores with electronics these days are Wal-Mart, Target, etc. and they wouldn't carry specialty parts like that.  I guess I'd just be screwed then.

Since I mentioned Sims 3 Expansion Packs, they are largely a ripoff.  I wanted the "Movie Stuff" one because it promised to have superhero costumes and I thought that some professional ones might be better than someone's homemade ones I recolored for my characters.  WRONG!  The problem is EA is so fucking arrogant about these things.  Instead of designing like some generic superhero costume parts, you can pretty much only get their character Peacock Man or whatever the hell it's called.  If you don't want Peacock Man you're screwed.  And for the ladies the ones they designed looked great if you were making She-Ra, who incidentally is not classified as a superhero.  I mean, did these people even read a comic book or watch a superhero movie ever?  Pretty much for $15 you get like 3 or 4 new outfits per sex/age and maybe a couple new hairstyles, most of which are pretty fucking lame.  And they're so lazy they just give you full outfits instead of putting shirts, pants, skirts, etc. separately, which would be more useful.  It's a ripoff.  The sad thing is that people do so much better work from their basements than EA's professional designers do.  I mean the hairs EA designs are always crap.  They're always so flat and dull compared to what other people do on their own.  Here's an example:

Less Boring.

BORING.

Now just to get my goat I'm sure you all will say you like EA's better, but you would be wrong.  If they just put a little thought and effort into their creations they'd be much better, but they'd rather bilk suckers for $15-$40 per set.  Then again most people probably aren't as big of sticklers about this as I am.  Maybe they want to use Peacock Man.

I think the summary of my first three points is that big companies suck because they just don't put much effort into it and then they wonder why they fail and customers eventually leave them.  Surely if there were a better way of designing my people (like if I actually could draw) I'd do that rather than use EA's crap.

Since "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" are behind us, what's this bullshit of websites like Best Buy being "sold out online" of stuff?  I understand if a product is no longer being made it could be "sold out" but really if it's still in production like Kindle Fires for instance then it's not like you can't just order more of them from the manufacturer.  Instead of "sold out online" you should just say it's backordered for a few days.  But really I think it's more that they want you to go into the store to look for it in the hope you'll spend more money there than online.

Here's a mini sports rant for you.  Considering NFL teams are starting such luminaries at quarterback as Josh McCown, Kellen Clemens, and something called Scott Thorzien, you'd think a guy who led his team to a .500 record and won a playoff game could get work as at least a backup.  I am of course talking about Tim Tebow who got Denver to the second round of the playoffs and was rewarded with being traded to the Jets, whose brilliant plan was to bring him in for the "wildcat" and then have him run the ball for 2 yards.  Every.  Single.  Time.  Because no one would ever figure that out!  After a tryout with "genius" Bill Belichick's Patriots he's now on the street.  My thought for why this happened is that teams are lazy.  For someone with Tebow's somewhat limited skill set you need to redesign your offense to accommodate him.   Denver had success when they did that.  No one else has tried that because it would take a lot of effort.  Why go to that much trouble when you can just shove some journeyman like McCown or Clemens or Chad Henne in there?  Even horrible teams like Jacksonville are too lazy to give it a try, despite that if the gamble paid off the coach might actually save his job.  Or I suppose instead of laziness you could all it arrogance.  But I'd say if you're 1-9 then you are clearly not a coaching genius; you might as well accept your failure and try something different.  Or not.  It is the NFL (the National Football League as every "analyst" has to call it as much as possible) where "new" typically means doing what other teams did 15 years ago.

A final thought on NaNoWriMo:  after I got to the 50,000 it was harder to get motivated to write except on weekends.  I suppose 50,000 is a good goal for a lot of people, but for me it was much too short.  And then having achieved that goal it's kind of a letdown.  Just another reason not to bother with it.

Last week was Thanksgiving and Black Friday.  I'm on record at being annoyed that they have to have sales on Thanksgiving now.  Most people concentrate on the "plight" of the workers for having to work.  When you think about it, the sales creep is really symptomatic of not only our culture of greed but also our inability to actually take a day off.  It's a well-known statistic that Americans take far fewer vacation days than workers in Europe.  We just seem incapable of really taking a day off to relax.  If we don't have to rush around to sales then we have to pack the day with a bunch of social obligations.  We all really need a day just to actually just kick back and take a load off for 24 hours.  No sales, no complicated dinners, no cookouts, no parades, no fireworks shows--just a day where everyone who isn't essential to keeping the country running can not worry about stuff.  Call it National Chill the Fuck Out Day; it's sort of like that movie "The Purge" only the opposite of committing crimes.

I have to slip in a rant now about the Family Guy episode where they "killed off" the dog Brian.  I'm going to use quotes because for now I'm assuming this is still a short-term ploy.  I can't honestly say I was really outraged at first.  Watching the episode I was more like, "OK, Stewie's going to use the time machine to save him...wait, he's not?  We're really doing this?"  It's the kind of thing where I watch through the credits just to make sure nothing is going to happen.  Then later I was pissed because Brian's my favorite character, owing to that he was a struggling writer and an atheist Democrat.  (I'll just ignore that he drove a Prius instead of a good American car.)  My thoughts on this subject are thus:

First, how could this episode be construed as funny in any way?  At least when they killed off Peter's adopted father it was in a bizarre fashion; getting run over by a car is extremely ordinary.  Especially since my avatar Blue II died a couple months ago, I'm a little sore on the subject of dogs dying.  Anyway, part of the reason I've only watched the show sporadically in the last three years or so is this new crop of writers they have blow.  To use Peter's words, they've gone all sissy-man Alan Alda.  Like that horrid 150th episode where Brian and Stewie were locked in the vault that was just painfully unfunny.  There have been quite a few others too where they've just seemed to have forgotten it's an animated comedy, not a drama.  It's probably why I've enjoyed American Dad a lot more than the show preceding it, at least until next season.

Second, what was the point in doing this?  When The Simpsons killed off Maude Flanders it was in large part because the voice actor didn't want to be on the show so much anymore.  In real-live shows we've seen quite a few examples where a character gets killed off because the actor wants to move on to "bigger and better things" (seldom with good results) or like with Two and a Half Men because of a dispute between the actor and management.  Obviously in this case those scenarios don't apply since Brian is voiced by Seth MacFarlane, who still is going to be doing a bunch of other voices on the show, so you're not saving any money and since Brian's voice is his normal voice you can't even claim it's to relieve any vocal stress.  If they'd killed Meg or Chris or someone like that off I could have seen where hey one less paycheck to write.

Third, are the ratings going down so much that you need to pull off something so desperate?  It seems to me that you're just antagonizing the fans.  How is killing off my favorite character going to make me watch the show?  And how is that going to bring in new viewers?  As a writer I've killed off characters plenty of times--the Scarlet Knight series for instance features a number of characters dying--but there's always a purpose to it, but in this case I just don't see what the purpose was.

Those who followed the Grumpy Bulldog Blog would know that I was a big Obama booster in 2012 and in 2008 before that.  I'm using past tense because it's over now.  First there was the Syria debacle where he got outmaneuvered by Putin.  Then the stupid government shutdown (not his fault but still).  Now the complete boondoggle that is the Obamacare rollout.  At this point he's going to go down with the likes of Ford and Carter, except with two terms.  Not a total disaster like Bush II but just couldn't deliver on anything.  Part of that was the opposition was just fucking insane but the other part is I guess he didn't pick a very good team to support him, like the people on this Obamacare website.  He must have hired people from Best Buy to do it.  I mean really that was the center of his legacy and with as fucked up as it's been, unless things get turned around quick he's got nothing to hang his hat on except a bunch of empty promises.

Which is too bad since he was the first minority president you want him to set a good precedent.  As it is, the next black person (or Asian, Hispanic, Indian, etc.) who runs for president people will think, "Oh, another Obama.  Meh."  Which is not what you want.  It would be like if Jackie Robinson had signed with the Dodgers, hit .050 and made six errors a game; baseball would probably still be segregated.  Will his failures spill over to 2016 to pave the way for a Republican victory?  Probably.  In which case don't worry about Obamacare because that'll be the first thing to go.  And if the Tea Party is still calling the shots, anyone who's not a white guy over 40 can expect to get fucked like everyone in red states has been.

Would you like to hear a story about mundane domestic stuff?  A couple months ago I began the great Saga of the Shower Curtain.  I'd had my previous shower curtain for like 4 years but it was getting gross so I thought I'd buy a new one.  The old one was just a basic Wal-Mart model I got for like $5.  I figured it should be easy enough to find something similar.  It wasn't.  I tried a couple hardware stores but they only had ones about as thin dollar store ones.  Eventually I sucked it up and went to Wal-Mart and got a "heavy duty" one for $10.  The problem is when I hung it up is they creased it so tightly that it was jutting into the shower.  I got fed up and tried a second one, only this one I soaked in warm water like I read somewhere.  That's easier said than done since the shower curtain floats.  It was a real mess and in the end it still wasn't work well.  Finally I found the solution:  Command adhesive Velcro strips.  I put one of these on either end of the shower and a matching one on the ends of the curtain.  Then I could pull the curtain tight (after a little trimming) so it wouldn't bunch up anywhere.  But really why was it necessary to crease the damned shower curtains like a pair of pants?

And what's the deal with airline peanuts?  Well I suppose you can't make those jokes nowadays because no one gets peanuts unless they want to pay $50 extra.

Box Office Blitz Regular Season Finale!

It's the epic conclusion to the regular season of Box Office Blitz!  Remember there are spectacular prizes on the line.  Also remember that we'll be guessing on Friday-Sunday, not the whole long weekend.  At least if you have a long weekend; some poor bastards have to work Thanksgiving and Black Friday.  I never really get the Black Friday thing.  Stampeding with a bunch of other schmucks to try to get $10 off a crappy DVD player they only have 3 of doesn't seem like fun to me, especially when I can stay in my nice cozy motel room and buy stuff from Amazon without all the hassle.  And now all this crap where we can't even take 1 day off from all this madness; no we have to do it on Thanksgiving too.  You people make me sick.

But anyway, those who win the fabulous prizes will have slightly more money to buy Chinese-made crap with, so that's something.  The rest of us are just playing for playoff positioning and pride.

Meanwhile, there's like two new movies in wide release.  I wonder, does James Franco get this year's Jude Law Award for Guy Who's in a Ton of Movies in the Same Year?  There always seems to be some dude who pops up in 4-5 movies one year.  This year Franco's been in "Oz the Great & Powerful," "Spring Breakers," "This is the End," and now "Homefront."  Did I leave any out?  At least unlike when Jude Law did it back in 2004, Franco's movies weren't all bombs.  Actually I think Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has at least that many too: Snitch, GI Joe 2, Pain & Gain, and Fast & Furious 6.  His were all released within like 3 months too.  Again they weren't all bombs, so that's pretty impressive.  Though the Rock's is kind of cheating because GI JOE 2 was supposed to have been released last year and then got pushed back.

Anyway, here's the list of movies from my local megaplex (* denotes a new release)

• 12 Years a Slave
• Black Nativity*
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2
• Dallas Buyer's Club
• Delivery Man
• Ender's Game
• Free Birds
• Frozen*
• Gravity
• Homefront*
• Jackass: Bad Grandpa
• Last Vegas
• Oldboy* 
• Philomena*
• Rush
• The Best Man Holiday 
• The Book Thief*
• The Christmas Candle*
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
• Thor: The Dark World

 And I'll pick

1. Hunger Games 2 $50M
2. Frozen $30M
3. Homefront $15M

You make your picks in the comments.

Two Cent Tuesdays: Rules Made to Be Broken

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:  In case 99 cents was too rich for your blood, you can now get my gender-bending superhero novel Girl Power for FREE on Amazon.  (And also Smashwords.)  They were a lot quicker matching Smashwords this time than on other books.

The good thing about the blogosphere is it can help feed me topics when I really can't think of anything to write for posts like these.  This one comes from over a month ago.  I saw it on Goodreads originally.  It's about first-person narration.  The author is about the third person I'd heard in a few days who'd said how difficult first-person is.  I've never really had much trouble with it, but then I didn't think much about all these supposed "rules."

Uses 1st Person

The first one I'd agree with.  It's something the other people on a message board had been saying, which is first-person shouldn't be narcissistic.  In other words your narrator should not drone on and on about every little detail of their life or go on and on about their brilliance and good looks and so forth.  Because no one cares.  That's pretty much the second rule too.  It's sort of like Fight Club that way.

Which hey, wasn't Fight Club a first-person novel?  Brilliant accidental segue into my next point!  The first rule I don't agree with is about the "uninteresting narrator" and how your narrator needs to be the Most Interesting Man (or Woman) in the World.  This is simply not true.  Take Fight Club there for instance.  The guy narrating the story (Ed Norton in the movie) isn't as interesting as Tyler (Brad Pitt in the movie).  Of course then (spoiler!) we find out Ed Norton IS Brad Pitt, which is a big downgrade for Brad Pitt.  The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood is similar where we think the sister narrating is so boring until (spoiler!) it turns out she really wrote the book supposedly written by her sister.

But probably the best example of when this is not true is The Great Gatsby.  The whole novel is first-person narrated by Nick, who is not nearly as interesting as Gatsby or Daisy.  Breakfast at Tiffany's uses the same sort of narration where the first-person narrator is like an observer of the action, not the focus of the action.  The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell is another example of a less-interesting narrator, focusing on Derfel, a soldier and buddy of Arthur.  Ian McEwan did it in his Booker Prize-winning Atonement.  John Irving, my literary hero, does this in The Hotel New Hampshire and A Prayer for Owen Meaney, where John the narrator is not as interesting as those around him.

And who else has done this?  This guy!  One of the frequent complaints about Where You Belong is that Frost Devereaux isn't assertive enough.  As I've said before, that was the point.  He's more of an observer narrator than a participant narrator.  The Maguire twins and even some of the secondary characters are a lot more interesting in many ways than Frost.  The idea, inspired by the Irving novels above, was for Frost to get steered along by these characters until he finally decides to take control of his own life.

That's a pretty good selection of books there to dispute that "rule."  I'm sure we could find tons more evidence if we so chose.

The rule about the omniscient first-person narrator is another one I dispute a little.  It's one I largely cast aside in Where You Belong, where I applied what I refer to as "four-dimensional narrating."  The idea is that Frost is narrating this from some future point and therefore has access to information he wouldn't have in the present of whatever moment in the story.  So when people whine about how it's not written like a toddler's point of view at the beginning, well of course not.  Who the hell would want to read a toddler's narration?  It would be confusing as all hell since they don't know what anything is.  Though Room by Emma Donoghue was one case where a child's narration was good as a way to contrast his innocence to the horrible things we knew were going on.

McEwan's Atonement was another one that sort of uses this idea.  Though (spoiler!) we find out later that what's going on with other characters the narrator couldn't possibly know about at the time is actually part of a book she's writing.  So really she's kind of fictionalizing the events of those other characters to some extent.  Still, it helps illustrate that if your narrate is telling the story from some future point, they can add information they wouldn't otherwise know.

Lastly is the "rule" about who is the narrator talking to.  You can't have your character be dead or turned into a crocodile.  Why the hell not?  The former worked pretty well in the Oscar-winning "American Beauty."

Really the problem for me is that if you want to get into that point, first-person narration of any sort doesn't make much sense.  Now in some cases maybe the narrator is writing a book or dictating a police statement or writing a blog or something.  In most cases we don't really know who they're talking to or why and it doesn't really matter.  Because first-person most of the time isn't very logical.  I mean, unless your character has a photographic memory, how can they remember exactly what everyone said and what they were thinking at every single point?  I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast this morning, let alone what I was thinking while I was eating it.

Who the hell am I talking to?

Think of those voiceovers in noir movies taken from books like Chandler's Philip Marlowe stories or Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade stories where the detective starts off saying, "A dame walked into my office..."  Who the hell is Marlowe or Spade or whoever talking to?  Me?  But how?  I'm in 2013, not 193_ or 194_!  You can't be talking to me unless you have some kind of time machine or weird Twilight Zone-type telephone.

Present-tense in first-person is especially a lot of bunk.  In The Hunger Games, how can Katniss be telling us that she's shooting an arrow at someone while she's doing it?  Who the hell would she be telling it to?  In Chance of a Lifetime how can Steve Fischer tell you that he's turning into a woman while it's happening?  Don't make much sense, does it?  But we just overlook that because we don't care.  So the idea that you have to have some logical framing device in place is a lot of hooey.  I think the reader generally accepts that we throw out those kind of logical notions when reading the story.

It kind of bugs me to think these bogus "rules" might be why some authors are getting their stories rejected.  That I suppose has always been a problem in the publishing industry; you are pretty much at the mercy of whoever is reading the query and then the story.  If that person for instance thinks that someone wearing magic armor to fight crime is too "far out" then you end up getting a rejection.  But hey, whoever said it's a perfect system?  Sure as hell not me.

I would like to float a "rule" of my own though.  Some jerk reviewing Last Chance (the third Stacey Chance book) was whining about "correct pronoun use in prepositional phrases."  And my thought was:  you really except Stacey to have perfect grammar?  I don't know how you could read all three books and not get that Stacey (and Steve before her) was anything but a Rhodes scholar.  Steve never went to college and as is indicated a few times, his police reports were almost incomprehensible.  Stacey finally graduates college with a degree in music but even then it was a state college and she had about a C grade point average.  Nowhere in her background does it suggest that she should have perfect grammar.  If anything I should add bad grammar into it to make that clear.  So when you're reading first-person, don't whine because the grammar isn't perfect when that narrator isn't a professional writer.  Customer reviews are going to be the death of me.  (That and bad cholesterol and high blood pressure.)

Tomorrow's Comics Recap features zombies, cannibals, vampires, Death, and a talking frog!  You won't want to miss that.

Two Cent Tuesday: Odeathon

From 11/2-11/9 is Tony Laplume's Odeathon blogfest.  I keep thinking of it as the Odinthon, though that would have an entirely different meaning; it would be appropriately timed with Thor 2 coming out on Friday.

The idea is to write an ode to your favorite author.  I already did that back in 2004 with a short story with a long name:  Spring in the Land of Broken Dreams.  It's an ode to the works of John Irving, chock full of references to his novels--as many as there were at the time.  If you're really familiar with his books you can probably find most of them.

Go over to Wattpad and read the story.  Then come back here and I'll give you the list of references--the conscious ones anyway.

In the meantime, here's some appropriate music to read by.

And now some spoiler space!  Here's the revised revised revised hopefully last edition of the cover to Girl Power:  The Impostors.  I realized the old version had all this space in the middle and the guy's ear kept bugging me because it was front and center.  so in the second one you can see how I cut the ear off by putting the girl's hair over it.  Now it looks more like she's standing in front of him, which gives it more of a 3D look so it's less flat.  The overlapping isn't seamless, but from a distance I don't think it's noticeable.

Before...

After

OK, so there's all the spoiler space in case you wanted to do this right and not just cheat to find the answers.

Anyway, here are all the John Irving book references in the short story:

1. The fat, obnoxious Harriet is the type of overbearing girl found in The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meaney, and Until I Found You (for starters)
2. The author's name "Jack Colvin" is an amalgamation of Jack being another name for John, Col from Ted Cole in A Widow for One Year, and "vin" like IrVINg.  Lot of work went into that.
3. The New England setting of the town is a staple of many Irving novels
4. New Hampshire is the setting (obviously) for The Hotel New Hampshire
5. The town of St. John's stems from St. Clouds in The Cider House Rules combined of course with the author's name
6. The red Volvo would be like the one TS Garp drives in The World According to Garp, in which one son is killed and another blinded in a car accident
7. The Black Angus cows behind a stone wall were mentioned in The World According to Garp when he went out jogging and was nearly killed by a crazed fan
   
8. St. John's Academy is similar to those featured in many Irving books, all of them based off Exeter (and sometimes he gets lazy and just uses Exeter)
9. The wrestling coach is based off the one in Hotel New Hampshire for the most part, but also probably some other books as wrestling is another staple
10. The coach's name "Bob Wolf" is an amalgamation of the wrestling coach in Hotel New Hampshire and a literary agent in Garp
11. The cannon with names of lovers on it is similar to one in The World According to Garp that became filled with condoms
12. The Federal-style house on Fourth Street where the old lady lives is based off the one the narrator lives in in A Prayer for Owen Meaney
13. The lady's surname "Berry" comes from Hotel New Hampshire
14. The pictures on the wall is a reference to A Widow for One Year
15. When she says a picture is "out of cleaning" it's the same excuse Eddie gives to young Ruth in A Widow for One Year
16. Prostitutes are featured in many Irving books
17. Bears are another Irving staple.  I couldn't wedge an actual bear in, so I used the bear-shaped door knocker as a substitute
18. "Bogus" (used here for a dog) was the main character's nickname in The Water Method Man  
19. The dog's breed comes from Hotel New Hampshire or The World According to Garp (or possibly both)
    
20. Pooh-slinging with lacrosse sticks was featured in The Fourth Hand

So you can see I crammed a whole lot of references into my ode to John Irving.  There aren't specific references to a few books like Setting Free the Bears, The 158-Pound Marriage, or Son of the Circus but some of the general ones cover those.  I really would have liked to wedge in some mention of Vienna, Toronto, and India since those were locations of some of Irving's novels, but obviously I was a bit limited by the New England setting.  I think in an early draft I had someone from Vienna with a bear but I think I cut it because the story was getting too long.

And before you go and think I'm some creepy stalker, the whole point of this story is that you shouldn't meet your literary hero because you might find they aren't who you think they are.  The idea for that came when I read Irving's autobiography in Trying to Save Piggy Sneed and when he was writing about a visit to the White House during the Reagan era it occurred to me the author might be kind of a jerk.  I did write him eventually and he was very nice in his reply, so perhaps he's mellowed since then.

Have you ever thought of doing an homage to your favorite author?

Two Cent Tuesday: The Hierarchy

Unleash the grumpiness!

Here's a scary post--as in scary crazy!

I'm in a grumpy mood, so here's a Grumpy Bulldog rant that you may not agree with it.  Which is fine, it just means you're wrong and stupid because I am always right.  (Except all those times I'm not right in which case it's the world that's wrong, not me.)

Anyway, you know how in movies and TV and such when they depict high school they also have all these social castes:  cool kids, jocks, stoners, poor kids, geeks, whatever?  Like in "The Breakfast Club" or "Clueless" or "Mean Girls" and shit like that.  (I've honestly never seen the latter, nor do I intend to.)  It's occurred to me that writing is a lot the same thing.  There's basically a social hierarchy at play when writers socialize.  I imagine it goes something like this:

Top:  Household Names
This would be Stephen King, JK Rowling, John Grisham, and their ilk.  The authors who make billions of dollars and people line up to buy their books.  It's like the 1% of the writing world.

Second Tier:  Bestsellers
These would be authors who sell a lot of books but probably aren't as well known as the Household Names.  I'm trying to think of specific names but I really can't at the moment, so feel free to suggest someone.

Third Tier:  Midlisters
These are the authors who might be published by the Big publishers but don't sell enough to get on the bestseller list or on the Today Show or Good Morning America or anything like that.

Fourth Tier:  Small/Self-Published
This is Me and pretty much everyone who participates on my blog.  The people who have a book published by a small-time publisher or self-published.

Lowest Tier:  Unpublished
This tier used to be a lot bigger in the old days before anyone could self-publish on Amazon or Smashwords or whatever.  But there are still those people who keep trying to get traditionally published instead of self-publishing or else just haven't quite finished that novel they've been working on for the last fifteen years.

And then each tier can probably be subdivided into other tiers.

The thing is, if you're in one tier it's hard to interact with a tier above you.  Again think of it like high school where if a nerd tries to sit with the cool kids, he's liable to end up with an atomic wedgie.  (Honestly though I never got any wedgies in high school or shoved into a locker or any of those TV/movie things bullies do.)

For instance, I follow a few Midlisters on Twitter and Facebook and whatnot.  Do any of them ever come to this blog to check out my musings?  No.  Do they ever reply to any Tweets I make that don't reference them specifically?  No.  Do they Like my random Facebook posts that again don't mention them specifically?  Hardly ever.  Because they stick to their little clique of friends and acquaintances and I, being only a small/self-published author am not worthy of being in their circle.

At the same time, those Midlisters who shit on me, do you think they can get into the inner circle of a Bestseller?  Unlikely.  And Stephen King sure as hell isn't going to give them the time of day if they call his mansion.  And if some Unpublished schlub wants me to read his latest opus do you think I'm going to make time for him?  Um, probably not.  Step off dude, I got Big Important Author stuff to do.

I imagine even if you sell enough books to no longer qualify for a lower tier it's still got to be hard to move up socially.  I mean if EL James goes to a big fancy cocktail party with a bunch of authors do you think Jonathan Franzen is going to let her into his group of literary snobs?  Maybe at first just so they can dump pig's blood on her later.

Anyway, this is my observation of the literary world that is let's face it built on scant anecdotal evidence.  Maybe certain Midlisters don't really mean to freeze me out, just like I may unintentionally freeze Unpublished people out.  It's just that we've all got our little worlds and it's hard as hell to try to break through the force field keeping you out of someone else's little world.  Since we're all authors or would be authors we should probably try to treat each other with mutual respect and stuff, but hey, we're busy right?

A Window Into the Creative Process

October has 5 Wednesdays so the Recap will post next week.  Here's today's bonus Wednesday post!

First off, what do you think of this cover for Sisterhood (Tales of the Coven #1--and only)?  The story focuses on Sylvia Joubert, the redheaded witch from the first 5 Scarlet Knight books so I put "redhead witch" into Fotolia and this picture came up.  I think it looks kind of YA-y, though I'm not sure how witchy she looks.

I'm not sure about the font type and color; my options on PowerPoint were somewhat limited.  Before I run out and buy images, I like to consult with you people first so I don't waste my hard-earned dough.

Now for the rest of the bonus post!

Early on in my Wordpress blog, back in 2010, I demonstrated how I went from notes on a story to an outline and then eventually into the actual story itself.  I've pretty much stopped formal outlining since then, just relying on notes and the seat of my pants for the most part.  Anyway, to sort of rehash it, here's some notes I wrote up for a possible story to give you a glimpse into Grumpy Bulldog's creative process.  Your process will no doubt differ and also is terrible compared to mine for I am a genius. (note sarcasm)

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Mock cover

The Pretender (working title)

Here’s my epic mash-up of “Darkman” and “The Invisible Man” series that used to be on Syfy. (Mission statement)

OK, so we have a guy we’ll call Vince (because I think that was the first name of the actor in the Invisible Man show but I may be wrong about that).  He’s an expert con man, who’s been quite successful at it for a long time, though not so much financially successful in recent times.  Then he cons the wrong people, some mob dudes, and ends up with some MacGuffin that he shouldn’t have.  The mob guys find him, beat the crap out of him, and leave him for dead in a building they set on fire.  Vince is badly burned but manages to escape.  Though he doesn’t get far before he passes out.

He wakes up some time later in a secret government hospital.  He should be in agonizing pain since he has 3^rd-degree burns over like 75% of his body, but he’s not.  This is because he’s a government guinea pig for this wonderful new drug called Repressitol—or something less stupid.  The drug suppresses the pain in his nerves and has the awesome side effect of giving him Captain America-type strength and speed because adrenaline is flowing unchecked.  Vince promptly uses this to try to escape, but doesn’t get far because he’s like a mile underground or something.

Eventually a hot doctor chick shows up and explains about the drug.  The downside is the drug only works for 24 hours, which necessitates a shot every morning.  Otherwise he’ll be in excruciating pain.  Then some dude from the CIA or NSA or whatever shows up to drop the other shoe.

Basically the government wants to utilize Vince’s unique skill set.  They’ve obtained an artificial skin formula from a dead scientist (name omitted) and with that and the help of a make up whiz, they can make Vince look like just about anyone.  From there it’ll be up to him to use his con man skills to fool anyone. 

The drawback is the skin only holds together for two hours before it falls apart.  Which means whatever Vince does, he has to do it quick; no long cons will be allowed.

Vince is reluctant to sign up for this crazy scheme, but it’s explained to him that either he does it or they cut him off the drug and let him spend the rest of his life in agonizing pain or in a morphine coma.  So he decides to agree.

His first assignment is pretty easy, just something for a warm-up.  It goes largely without a hitch.  Before they can collect him, Vince sneaks off to find whatever chick he was banging before he got busted.  She of course doesn’t recognize him and it’s not long before his face starts to melt, so he has to run off until he finally gets caught.

The CIA/NSA guy chews him out and introduces a handler who will be keeping a close eye on Vince during his missions.  Vince is pretty bummed about his situation.  The hot doctor tries to cheer him up, but does not welcome any advances.  (Because who wants to fuck a gross mummy?)

Then a bigger assignment comes up.  It just so happens to involve the jerks who fucked up Vince’s life!  They’re going to use the MacGuffin to do something with some nasty people.  Vince has to infiltrate the crew to find out what’s going on.

Things seem to go OK at first, but eventually it starts to fall apart just like Vince’s face.  The head mob guy gets away with the MacGuffin to complete his nefarious work.

Vince’s handler is pissed and they’re ready to shut down the whole program.  But Vince convinces them to give him one last shot.  He plans to get close to the mob guy and then impersonate him to recover the MacGuffin and get the goods on the scheme.

To do this, he gets skin made of himself.  He goes to the mob guy to act as if he’s trying to shake the guy down for some hush money.  He gets the guy to tell him where the MacGuffin is and then knocks him out to steal his identity.

He goes to the meet, but things fall apart when it’s revealed the CIA/NSA guy is a traitor!  He reveals Vince’s identity and is going to kill him.  But Vince has one last card to play, like the MacGuffin is a fake that’s actually a bomb or some shit like that.  Then with the help of his handler, Vince takes the bad guys down.  He’d like to kill the traitor, but turns him over instead.

The mission is deemed a success and so the government decides to keep the program going.  As a reward the hot doctor gives Vince some extra copies of his own face for whenever he feels like looking human for a couple of hours.  They maybe kiss, but nothing more than that.

On to the sequel!

#

As you can see, at this early point it's a lot like a Mad Lib.  There are a bunch of holes to fill in like names, locations, and plot specifics.  The point though is to get the overall shape of the story and then start to worry about filling in those holes.  As I fill in the holes I might come up with some other ideas for the plot or for characters or whatever, which would probably necessitate a rewrite of the notes in part if not on the whole.  Better that than to rewrite the story later, I suppose.  And then I'll probably come up with some things as I'm writing the story (if I ever do) that will completely fuck up most of my notes, which will require new notes.  Will this idea ever make it to a finished product?  I have no idea.

But now's the time to weigh in if you think this is the stupidest idea ever.

Two Cent Tuesday: The Art of Self-Delusion

Last month I finished watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Netflix (I'm currently watching season 9 on FXX but season 8 has not been added to Netflix yet) and one thing the show really does is illustrate how delusional most people are about themselves.  (Even the show's title could be called symbolic of that idea.)  Because really almost every main character in the show is deluded about themselves in some way:

• Dennis thinks he's handsome enough to be a fashion model and was like Van Wilder back in the day
• Mac thinks he's a musclebound tough guy
• Charlie thinks he's going to make "the waitress" fall in love with him
• Dee thinks she's going to be a famous actress/stand-up comic

In reality all of those assumptions are completely wrong.  The only one who isn't delusional is Frank (Danny deVito).  He actually spent most of his life deluding himself into thinking he could be some wealthy social climber when really he was happier living on the fringe.

A Season 9 episode kind of reinforces all of this.  When "the gang" is in a convenience store during a robbery they all fantasize about a different scenario.  Mac's is like a big action movie with kung fu battles and pithy one-liners.  Dee imagines how the scenario will launch her entertainment career.  Dennis's fantasy involves sort of a "Million Dollar Baby" thing albeit with damage to a woman's breasts instead of her spine.  Charlie dreams up an "Up"-like scenario involving the waitress.  And Frank just imagines eating some hot dogs.  In the end though they just steal some junk food and run away.  (If you read the convenience store robbery scene in A Hero's Journey you'd know my scenario is to cower in fear and piss my pants.  "Up front she saw a fat man in a baseball cap cowering by a rack of potato chips, just as Marlin had said."  That's me!)

The message for writers should be obvious.  Most of us think we're awesome, when in reality maybe such is not the case.  (For you people. I really am as awesome as I think.  No, wait, MORE awesome than I think.)  On a deeper societal message, I think this type of self-delusion really illustrates the plight of the 99% in America.  It's the idea that all of us schlubs want to think we're special, we're better, we should be rich and famous--it's just The Man keeping us down.

That's the kind of delusion that's fueled reality TV for about 15 years now, people willing to make jackasses of themselves on TV because they think they should be famous.  Some of them, like the Kardashians, actually do get to be famous because of it while most others just get 15 minutes of fame that they'll be chasing the rest of their lives.

It's kind of depressing to think the characters in IASP are pretty good satires of regular Americans, in that they think they should be something, despite that they really don't have any talents or brains and not that much in the looks department (at least compared to TV and movie characters).  Yet there's that undeserved sense of entitlement, that ego that drives them to keep trying again and again despite all evidence that they should quit.  If you want I guess you could call that hopeful; I just call it sad.

It's like this commercial for a lottery game where people talk about the numbers they pick every day and think someday will come up.  It's really sad to think of these people who waste money every day and/or week for years thinking that someday their ship will come in.  What are the odds it will?  One in three billion or so?  Yeesh.  You might as well have just flushed that money down the toilet for all the good it did you.  Offutt will tell you that if you had just taken that money and invested in some decent stocks, you'd be much better off.  Which is true.

I think the problem's only gotten worse since social media came along.  Now everyone who thinks they should be a superstar can have a Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube account--or a blog.  So basically you can have hundreds of millions of people all making the same stupid jokes about Miley Cyrus, each person thinking how much cleverer they are than everyone else to come up with it.  And they can write and upload a book that is certainly better than any other book out there.

Anyway, I think amidst all my rambling the point is that you're not special.  You're just like everyone else.  And yet chances are even as you read these words, you will choose to disbelieve that, even as I disbelieve it when I write it.  Because it's always sunny in our world.

Two Cent Tuesday: Anti-Anti-Heroes

I can't dance...

Tony Laplume frequently compares A Hero's Journey to Adam West's Batman, which is not something I approve of.  For one thing Emma does not dance--and when she tries it's usually a disaster for anyone in the vicinity.

I like to think this is his way of saying that Emma is not the gritty anti-hero so common in today's movies and comics.  For the most part she's a squeaky-clean goody-two-shoes.  She doesn't drink or smoke or eat fatty foods or curse or whore around.  At the end she does ride a motorcycle, but that's for strictly operational reasons.  While she did suffer a childhood trauma, she doesn't brood about it in a cave; mostly she just focuses on her studies and then her job to repress the pain.  When she fights people, she doesn't kill her enemies.  Most of the time she doesn't even hurt them too much.

The point being that she's more of a hero-hero than an anti-hero.  Actually at three points in the series we contrast Emma with a grittier version.  The first time is in Book 4 when her friend Becky takes over as the Scarlet Knight for a brief period.  Becky has no qualms about using a gun to shoot her enemies, though she does stop short of killing them.  She doesn't have much qualms about cussing and such either.  The second time is in Book 6 when Emma's daughter Louise inherits the mantle.  Louise is a lot mouthier than her mother and unlike Emma she kills her enemies--not so much by choice.  Then in Book 7 it's Emma who becomes darker and grimmer, though really it's more like a separate personality that develops after she suffers a psychological trauma.  That Scarlet Knight routinely puts her enemies in traction (though still doesn't kill them) and tortures people for information.  I guess it'll be up to any readers to decide which version they like better.

It's not to say I don't like anti-heroes.  I don't mind cussing (obviously) or drinking or smoking or that.  I think killing is where I draw the line.  I don't have so much of a problem if they kill out of self-defense or when there's no other option.  It's when they do it as pretty much the first and only option that it becomes a problem.  So-called "heroes" like Frank Miller's Batman or the Punisher or Rorshach and the Comedian from Watchmen are not really any better than the thugs they bust.  I'm not so much a fan of that.

I suspect other people feel differently or those wouldn't be so popular.  As someone who grew up with Adam West's Batman, Superfriends, and Christopher Reeve Superman movies I guess my idea was superheroes should be heroes, not bloodthirsty thugs.  It's not even so much about not smoking, drinking, or having sex so much as it is about the attitude.  Emma does what she does because she feels she's obligated to--that whole with great power comes great responsibility thing.  It's not about working out childhood trauma or thrill seeking or anything like that.

Some crank reviewing the book said she doesn't earn the armor, which simply isn't true.  She earned it by 19 years of being a good person.  That's why it seeks her out and calls to her, because it knows she'll use it right.  I think that's a lot better than having her simply stumble upon it in a basement or something.  The original short story I wrote featuring Emma was called Heart of a Hero and that's what it's all about, the heart inside the hero.  If your "hero" has a dark heart then they probably aren't much of a hero.

I am not a role model.

Since I own quite a few revenge-oriented movies like Darkman, Robocop, and the Crow and did something similar in Chance of a Lifetime, I should really draw a distinction there.  I think I can tolerate those characters killing people more because we're not billing them as superheroes.  They're just someone with a score to settle.  The way Stacey Chance differs from Emma Earl is that she does kill some people and has no problem torturing people to get information; Stacey's standard operating procedure is pretty much to go find the nearest snitch and shake them down by whatever means at her disposal.  The difference though is that Stacey isn't a superhero; she's just a girl who used to be a guy who used to be a cop.  She's not really intended to be a role model or anything.  I guess I'm old-fashioned enough to think superheroes should be role models, which is probably where I differ from many comic book writers.  This might be why the Stacey Chance books are outselling the Scarlet Knight ones by a wide margin.