Towards a Green Future

That last post was very whiny and left a sour taste in my mouth. I attribute part of that whininess to general stress (it's the second busy time of year for me and my time is being split between work, writing, podcasting, and Dragon Age in proportions that I'm not exactly pleased with). I'm at the library looking for a book to read and am very frustrated by the shelves of books that do not interest me in the slightest.

Wanted: Chosen One is not off the tracks, but it is rocking back and forth precariously. I was thrilled with the book's start, but I am now 61,000 words in and not a lot is happening. I seem to be pulling a Gabaldon, describing every step along their path. Somewhere 30,000 words ago the pace of the book slowed incredibly. Nashau also seems to be in a constant state of PMS. One minute he's happy, the next he's snapping at everyone and anyone around him. His character seems inconsistent. I try to explain this by the stress he feels at being unemployed (I know that feeling well), but that emotional state did not exist at the beginning of the book, it's odd that it should rear his head now. He's also a bit of a coward, yet he's snapping at everyone.

He seems to be an asshole when he has no right to be. Combine that with the lack of reading, and that's what set me on my rant about fantasy. Have you ever noticed that people in fantasy books are huge assholes? Even when they shouldn't be. They may be talking to the one person who can save their lives/the world. They may be speaking with someone that could kill them in an instant. But they're assholes nonetheless. This pervades fantasy video games as well.

Who the hell treats someone whose help they need so callously? The word is please. you should try using it!

So here's what's happening with Wanted. Podome and Nashau have met Bastin and Bastin has a thing going on with Jara, the second-oldest daughter of the owners of the Migrant Goose. I didn't see this relationship coming at all. It just kind of happened. Bastin hasn't been anointed CO yet and Podome is still quite insistent that it's someone else. Podome has a concussion from where a gate guard struck him and they're taking him to an apothecary.

This is all well and good except for the fact that, with the exception of Bastin escaping the Baker Boys and Nashau/Podome running away from a Cheynean assassin, there is no conflict in the story. They just bitch and tell stories.

I know what the end is. I have no idea how I'm going to get there. I just kind of keep rolling along, trying to find my way. If I keep rolling the way I am, this thing is going to balloon to 200,000 words or more. Can you imagine a 250,000-word fantasy novel without any action?

I've taken a wrong turn somewhere. I just don't know where. I don't want to go back, though. I worry that I'll just get mired in revision without making the way forward any easier (or actually making it harder).

It's He-Man's fault.

He-Man didn't begin like the cartoon character he became. He wasn't Prince Adam and his weird wizard thing Orko. He was a Conan rip off. When He-Man wasn't kicking butt, he was on the beach sunning himself on a rock. He didn't turn into some wimpy klutz. He became a pin-up model. How do I know this? Because I had the good fortune of buying He-Man when he first came out. Like any child, I wanted the toys my friends got, and when I was 4 and 5, that meant He-Man and GI Joe. I come from an incredibly conservative Catholic home and how I ever convinced my mother to let me have fantasy action figures, I'll never know. I hid any fantasy novels I read from her until I left for college, but somehow He-Man was deemed safe.

That was the seed. I loved GI Joe as much as He-Man, at the time. They spurred my imagination, but only one of them inspired my creativity. Even after my friends had moved on to better things and I resignedly boxed up my own figures (which would one day be given to my nephews as a present), that seed germinated. He-Man was why I read the Chronicles of Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia are why I (tried to) read the Lord of the Rings. And that road took me to Tad Williams.

The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy struck my 14-year-old self with such immense impact that I would never dream of doing anything but writing fantasy. I've grown since then. I've dabbled in science fiction, spec fic, I've written plays, thought of literary fiction. But no ideas come more readily, no words come more easily than when I'm writing fantasy.

This is strange because I hate fantasy. I don't hate fantasy, obviously. I love fantasy. I'm just tired of the tropes that seem to be regurgitated onto the page year after year. It's why I wade through George Martin's incessant description of everyone in the room. Because he breaks the mold of what is a fantasy book. Dragons, elemental people, mage orders, white robed chosen ones, magic ships, blah blah blah blah. I stand in the library looking at the bookshelf and desperately search for something that doesn't make me roll my eyes. Wiliams, Martin, Bujold...is that it? Are those the only three authors I can read?

Well, no, I enjoyed Elantris enough to finish it, which is more than I can say about other books that couldn't hold my attention longer than five pages. But still, I see so many stories told and retold. The world/kingdom/empire is ending and this plucky protagonist will discover his true power/prove his worth to this mystical order/find this mystical artifact and learn secrets of his own mysterious past along the way. These were good stories (maybe) the first time we read them. How does the fantasy industry sustain itself by telling the same stories every year?

Here's a spoiler for you. The Third World is coming to an end. What happens at the end of the series? IT ENDS! There is no plucky protagonist who saves the world. The heroes die and the Fourth World begins.

I've never had a problem with being in the minority before. People like Martin (whose use of dragons is exactly how I like it) have made a name for himself. I can too. But as I wait (maddeningly) for an agent who will want to represent me, that niggling self-doubt returns. The same stories wouldn't be told over and over again if people didn't like reading those stories. What's wrong with having magic in fantasy? It's fantasy, after all. If you don't want magic, write literary fiction. What does it mean that I could not read more than five pages of the Talisman of Shanara or two pages of the first Dresden book?

Well, it means I don't like those books and everyone has their own preferences. Yeah, I know, quit whining, Joe, you fucking drama queen. Well listen, I want to relieve some stress so this is where I do it. I know there are readers enough for my style as well. It would be nice to hear it more often. I don't care if Dresden gives TPC or Bearswarm a hard on. Any book that starts by telling me how cool its main character is is not a book I'm interested in reading. Penny Arcade's Franzibald novels seem spot on to me.

Still, I've now read everything that Bujold has written. I've read everything Williams has written (other than the Otherland series that I keep false-starting on), and I'll be old and gray before a Dance with Dragons ever comes out. So what's left? I've picked up Butcher's Furies of Calderon. I don't know why. It's either that, or go back to reading Pride and Prejudice on my Blackberry (no nook for me now that I bought for new tires).

Have you made it this far? That was a lot of whining. Apologies to Butcher for panning your novels. I'm sure you're a nice guy. I submitted to your agent, but omitted the part where I only read two pages of your novel before I gave it back. Apologies to Butcher's agent. Clearly you've done a good job at selling Jim's work. Care to take on a new author whose characters usually die at the end of his stories?

So, if you're like me, you have to be wondering one of two things. 1) Is he always this whiny? Read this journal enough and that question answers itself. Just ask LurkerWithout. 2) How does he know any of that stuff about He-Man? Well, when the figures first came out, they came with little comic books. Parents complained, of course, because parents are stupid. They said it was too dark and/or too violent. There wasn't a sorceress of Castle Grayskull, it was a ghost. And it was AWESOME. He-Man was a bad ass 24/7 whose metal armor (what little there was) could deflect lasers and other technological wonders that could otherwise overcome his manly manliness. His tiger was a bad ass tiger 24/7 and all the evil characters weren't minions of Skeletor. A lot of them were pretty damn evil all on their own. He-Man wandered the countryside and fought evil monsters and asserted his awesomeness while defending Castle Greyskull.

Those comics were some of the most influential things I've ever read in my life. It was He-Man, Vonnegut, and Williams. Put those three in a pot, stir in some angst, and you get me.

...okay, I should probably get back to writing. Want a spoiler about Wanted: Chosen One? They all die at the end. That's how I roll.

I want to write a short story where an astronaut is flung through a black hole. He's encased in a metal egg to shield him from the radiation caused by the generated field necessary to survive a black hole. He finds a similar but different universe on the other side. Instead of expanding, that universe is collapsing. It has existed for tens of trillions of years. Species have evolved so there isn't a single dominant sentient race, but numerous sentient yet mundane creatures (birds, cats, monkeys, etc).

I don't know what the story is yet, but I want to explore it at some time.

I think I posted previously of having a new idea for a Black Magic and Barbecue Sauce sequel. I do. It's a story that can be told once it moves out of conceptualization. It's just taking its sweet time coming out of conceptualization. I know it's a ghost story, but every I start the wheels turning in my brain, I go places that are not conducive to a ghost story.

So tonight I'm watching Fellowship of the Ring with Jen, as is our holiday tradition. There is the prologue with Galadriel speaking of history becoming legend and legend becoming myth. There there's Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday. He lives so much longer than the other hobbits. I start pondering how exasperated would one become watching people make the same mistakes over and over again, perpetually repeating history because they weren't there when it happened.

Well, I happen to have a story where people do live forever and would be there when history happens and there again when it repeats itself. Now Cy isn't the type of person that would be affected by that. He files things away into the recesses of his self-conscious. He doesn't remember enough history to get upset when it repeats itself. But surely someone else would? Who? Who's so focused on history that it would upset them when people keep screwing up.

Herodotus of course.

So he's not part of a ghost story. This is a different sequel. I'm not entirely sure what it is or how it will work, but it will involve Herodotus being extremely pissed off.

Whichever one of these stories moves past conceptualization first, I'll start on. Not until I'm done with my current ms. I'm at 55,000 words and not even half-way finished. This looks to be bigger than I expected. 150, maybe even 200k words. I worry about that, since it's not epic fantasy. It's hard to justify a 200,000-word, non-epic fantasy. Still, the story is what the story is. I'm not going to sacrifice content in the first draft to shoe horn it into a 100,000-word package. That's what revision is for. ;)

Okay, back to the movie. I think Frodo is about to fall down.

Attention humans

I am Cyrus the Conqueror. I am not Mr. Whiskers. I am not Kitty the Conqueror. And I am most asuredly not Wittle Whiskers the Wonkerer. If you must speak, address me as your majesty, as you should every cat whose presence you are fortunate enough to be in. It has come to my attention that one of your ilk had the good sense to include me in his manuscript. I will overlook the fact that he did not ask my permission. The quality is such that to execute him would be a waste of human talent, what little your species possesses.

The story does not focus on me, and I am thankful for it. It is unlikely a book could adequately capture the wondrous life a cat leads. No, this monkey scrawl focuses on one of your own, Cy Lekkas. He is extraordinary in comparison to the rest of you and not just because he buys me gormet cat food. He can speak to me in the majestic language of cats, not that gutter language you use. He can speak to other things as well, doors, stoves, ceilings, anything really. He is called a Speaker. His kind has been known to my people for millennia. They live forever, speak in tongues, and eat strange foods that fuel their powers.

They are still humans despite themselves, and monkeys will be monkeys. They play games, steal from one another, beat their chests, and fight. Really, if you hadn't shed so much of your fur, I don't know if I could tell you apart. It seems that Cy stole a pearl from another Speaker, Christian, who then sold the pearl to antoher Speaker, Seth, who discovered it a fraud. Seth demanded that Christian find Cy and retrieve the pearl, hence the fall of dominos that lead to action-packed fights, daring rescues, and an epic faceoff of immortals. I watched the whole thing from the top of my couch and was quite impressed.

The whole thing is 110,000 words. How a human assembled 110,000 coherent words, I do not know. But there it is. He calls it contemporary fantasy and titled it BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE. His name is Joe Selby, and he has written coherent words before. Perhaps he is a genetic anomoly. His ten-minute play was produced in Sioux Falls, SD, as a finalist in the Kennedy Center ACTF. He wrote the role-playing rule book, Dangerous Denizens for Kenzer & Co. in 2003. And he wrote 33 role-playing adventuures for Kenzer & Co. and Wizards of the Coast. This will be his first commercial novel. I am told he also follows your blog. I do not see the appeal. Your inclusion of a dog marks it as an inferior endeavor. Perhaps if you were to feature a cat, you might garner some success. I may be willing to make an appearance if your tribute is worthy.

That is all.


Your benevolent feline overlord

Cyrus the Conqueror