The Revolution Will Be Televised

One of the new shows I'm watching this fall TV season is Revolution, which posits a future where technology has been rendered worthless by the nullification of electricity.  Some commentators have suggested that it's a little silly to suggest that 1) electricity can be blocked like that and 2) people won't be able to work around that without going medieval.

For one thing, it's not uncommon for apocalyptic visions to view people having a hard time getting technology back up and running even when electricity hasn't been tampered with (see: The Stand).  For another, if society went to heck in a hand basket, who do you think would have a better chance of surviving the initial chaos, the big surly bullies or the puny little science geeks?  This week's episode had an anecdote about that very scenario, by the way.

Considering that the purpose of this update has nothing to do with Revolution, there's very little point in continuing to talk about it except to note that failure of the imagination can be catching.  As a writer, I come across this more often than I expect, in more ways than I'd like.  The world can be and in fact is very screwy like that.

If you'll recall, I put myself on a schedule for the end of September, hoping to round up some lingering projects before finally tackling a book I've been meaning to write since 1998.  I finished up "City of Tomorrow" at Sigild V as planned.  Tweeting a few of the chapters got me more readership than usual, so that was nice.  Overall, I think it was a more rewarding writing experience than other serialized stories I've blogged, because although I plotted the story, I let most of it develop as I wrote it.  That's nearly the opposite of what I hope to accomplish in the next three months as I write Seven Thunders.  Today I wrote the 5,000 word prologue (every chapter will be that length, half of what I eventually mastered writing in single-day marathons last year working on Yoshimi).  As I've mentioned, this is a story I've been developing for some time now, but even in recent weeks I've discovered new things that needed to be incorporated.  So although most of it is indeed planned out, I expect to have a few more surprises yet.

That's something of what's happened with my Top Cow/Ji Xi script sample.  I've known for weeks what I expected to do with it, but the original plan to have it written by yesterday didn't happen.  I wrote the captions today, however, as I continued to warm up for writing another book.  I only have dialogue and panel descriptions to go!  Normally I write all of that at once, but this is my second chance with a Top Cow talent search, and I don't want to foul it up again.  During my Digital Webbing days, I think I was more confident about my comic scripting abilities (this was several years after losing the first Top Cow contest), and I've been out of practice for a while.  I wrote two biography scripts for Bluewater early in the years, but there's been little word on progress in turning them into actual comics, and a graphic novel with an honest-to-god collaborator is still getting its sample pages illustrated.  (I know how this sounds like I'm almost a glimmer of a big shot!  But I don't feel like one, so don't worry about it.)  As I've mentioned, there's more Bluewater work I may hit this month in a Dr. Seuss biography, which I plan to do in Dr. Seuss style.  (But I've been dallying so long on that one, will someone else have been given this theoretical book?)

Anyway, the most important bit to take away from this is my excitement over finally beginning to write Seven Thunders!