Pale Moonlight

Announcing the release of Pale Moonlight, an epic vision of vampire literature.

This is the latest in my self-published works.  You can find the paperback version here and the Kindle version here.

This is the first book manuscript I deliberately wrote, after the thrice NaNoWRiMo experience that resulted in The Cloak of Shrouded Men.  I wrote it in the fall of 2009, with the idea of doing a fairly straightforward vampire novel, a sort of swashbuckling version that exists in the completed story in the form of the pirate Quincy, one of several supporting characters.  Instead of an action adventure, it became as most of my stories do an exploration of motivation.

I attempted for years to sell this book to traditional publishers, and never found any success.  I continued writing manuscripts, but it's the failure to find interest with it that led to all of the self-published efforts that make up the bulk of my releases.  I figured it was about time for the story to join that tradition.

Besides the silly notion of writing a version of the vampire story that I could never hope to complete with my particular writerly inclinations, Plato Finnegan's adventures in relation to his sister Fiona and the vampire Eolake in that particular aspect were based on my close bond with my beloved sister and her own successful efforts to emerge from a bad relationship.

Happily, the story also afforded me an avenue for a recurring character in some other projects, Oliver Row, who in Pale Moonlight is my version of Van Helsing, the one that would necessarily have to exist in this modern era of skepticism and TV drama which so often turns to this sort of material for inspiration.  One of the many minor characters who help round out the cast is Jason Clayton, my vision of an American Harry Potter, whose Dumbledore mentor is also an homage to a favorite high school teacher.

Pale Moonlight was originally entitled Finnegan, and that was what it was for the longest time, with at times various subtitles such as American Nightmares.  I had at one point retitled it Modern Ark, but recently - and for that reason finally decided to release it - on the present one, which not only evokes classic vampire imagery (not to mention the naming scheme for the Stephenie Meyer books) but a line from the Tim Burton Batman and a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode (bonus points if you can give me details on both, perhaps even a free copy!).

As with a lot of classic literature, it is most likely completely unfilmable, but if you want to try, I would be more than willing to help adapt it.

As I am a terrible CreateSpace formatter, the paperback features nothing that would be mistaken for a professional release.  I released it because I believe in the story.  There are bound to be the same typographical errors that plague all my releases (although since this also occurs in the ones released by persons other than myself, I don't feel quite as bad).

It is a book I hope may be enjoyed by everyone, but I know it won't.  If you are Pat Dilloway, for instance, Pale Moonlight will probably damn near infuriate you.

I am quite pleased to present it.

The People vs. Epiphany

I can get a little ticked off sometimes.  Sometimes, I'm not very patient with other people.  Mostly it's because I sense the presence of intellectual cowards.

Those who anger me the most are people who take the easy way out when they react to a work of fiction, whether it be a book, a TV show, a movie.  They anger me because they end up walking the fine line between narrative and epiphany.  Narrative is what most people want from a story.  They want a beginning, a middle, and an end.  They want, in short, a story about a complete journey, and the reason they want it is because they believe that every story has that, and not just every story but every person.  We're told constantly that we must become something.  If we're not something then we're nothing.  The more something we are, the more important we are.  The less something we are the more we allow ourselves to be labeled as insignificant, both by others and even by ourselves.

And to a certain extent, that's both a healthy and natural reaction to living.  That's why it's entirely common for stories to feature narratives with those definite beginnings and endings.

But it's the middle where the interesting things happen.  The middle is the epiphany.  It's okay to mistake the beginning as the epiphany, but the beginning is really just an imperative.  The imperative means nothing without resulting in something.  Where I disagree with people is that the result is the conclusion.  No, the result is the epiphany.

The epiphany of a journey is the defining moment of a person's life, when they realize the journey they're on.  If you think about it, the journey itself has so many starting points that to pick one at all is to pick at random, because the starting point you identify still needed to have conditions necessary to allow it to happen, and those conditions are already present well before you're born, and involve people you will never know, even from your own times.

The epiphany isn't the ending, either, because there never is an ending, but rather an arbitrary conclusion that satisfies the arbitrary beginning, if the story is a good one an exact mirror.

But without the beginning or the ending, what is the point of the epiphany?

The point is everything.  The point is, without the epiphany a person is meaningless.  Without the epiphany the story is meaningless.  It's a random series of events that have no personal attachments.  It's all the network TV shows everyone claims they don't take seriously, so that all the cable TV shows that in fact focus heavily on narrative are all the ones people respect.  Yet these cable shows are equally meaningless without the epiphany.  I consider the critical darling Breaking Bad to be meaningless without Walter White having ever confronted the journey he undertook.  The decision to deal meth was not an epiphany.  It was merely a beginning, and not a very good one.  One doesn't decide to radically change one's life merely on the diagnosis of a terminal illness.

The epiphany is something that in a honest story, or an honest life, may not be properly understood by the individual in question.  This is keenly evident in recent films like Saving Mr. Banks and Winter's Tale (if both happen to feature the actor Colin Farrell, it's because he's the rare actor who has realized the importance of such an element to the roles he chooses).  Saving Mr. Banks might be construed as a movie about making the good guy look like the bad guy (as I saw it described recently).  Or it might more accurately be described as an epiphany perhaps only the audience is best suited to comprehend (I wrote a great deal about this movie here).  Winter's Tale cleverly suggests the whole narrative is really an equally challenging example of epiphany for its audience.

Ambitious TV shows are often challenges like that.  The ones I admire are the ones that remain true to this exploration.  Lost is the perfect example, and one of the many reasons fans eventually became disillusioned with it might be this disconnect.  On the surface it would seem obvious the whole point of the show was to figure out how the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 would get off the mysterious island, with or without discerning its secrets.  But it was really about characters whose lives had already passed the point of epiphany, and these experiences the series chronicles were ways for them to process the epiphany, certainly not the epiphany itself.

Other shows challenged the relationship between epiphany and narrative.  The whole first season of Heroes was about epiphany.  The rest of the series took epiphany as an ongoing narrative.  When most fans assumed the characters had reached their cathartic, definitive (or, concluding) moment at the end of the first season, the series continued for three more seasons, continuing to explore the matter of epiphany, where the characters came from and where they were going.  The whole series was already a challenge to the traditional notion of what a superhero is supposed to be.  There were never any costumes.  Even the last episode, which reached an appropriate echo from the start of the series, didn't reach an ending, but rather another epiphany.

Prison Break was the same way.  The whole series challenged the notion that a defining event, or epiphany, was the only thing to explore about its characters.  The first season was the prison break.  But that was hardly the end of the story.  If the end occurred somewhere near the beginning, then it was indeed a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

I've tried to write like this even when I didn't realize I was doing it.  Maybe that's why I've had such a hard time convincing other people to take my writing seriously.  Actually, the whole of my short fiction collection Monorama is about this, and I didn't realize that when I was writing any of that material, either.  My WIP has reached the part where I'll be writing about a life in transition.  If people crave narrative, they crave definition most of all.  They don't want to be told there isn't an ending.  They want the complete arc explained right away.  They think that something that doesn't have a definition attached means nothing.

Maybe they're right.  As for me, the meaning isn't in the definition, but how it's used.  An epiphany is something in motion.  It's on the move.  In the Land of Pangaea is a story of three lives, the first two being dramatic examples of traditional narrative, the third an exploration of a story with no ending.  I've long struggled with another manuscript, which I have finally decided to release on my own, which I now call Pale Moonlight but has previously been entitled Modern Ark and Finnegan, which began as an idea about vampires, but became something else.  It became more ambiguous.  It in fact because my first study of epiphany, when I discovered that the characters I was writing didn't have traditional narratives attached to them.  It takes the shape of narrative, but it breaks all the rules.  I don't have the arc of the main character explained at all.  The epiphany is something in the eye of the observers, and perhaps of the reader as well.

And for this, I look around and see how uncommon this is, to write like this, to think like this.  And, yes, it causes me anger.  I'm not really angry with other people.  I'm angry that when anyone tries to explore this idea of the epiphany, it doesn't really help others.  And really, it shouldn't.  You can't force an epiphany.  All you can do is provide the opportunity.

And perhaps that's why I write.

Why Neil?

So, why Neil Gaiman?

The short of it was that it was offered me and I was quick to embrace the opportunity.  The long of it, of course I'm a fan.  I didn't mention him in the Ode-athon, but Neil has been a huge inspiration to me.  His depiction of the trickster god Anansi has informed material in Minor Contracts, a manuscript I wrote three years ago, and is a considerable part of In the Land of Pangaea, my WIP.  Anansi was featured in Neil's American Gods and of course the subsequent Anansi Boys, and perhaps it's a sign of my affection for the character that I was never able to understand why people didn't like that one as much as I did.

Plenty of people love Neil's work.  I spent a good portion of this year reading his Sandman, and as I have yet to read the complete series (to say nothing of the new follow-up, Sandman Overture), I anticipate doing more of that in the future.  It's arguably the most literary comic book ever attempted, and the style hugely informed how I approached Modern Ark, a manuscript I wrote four years ago (what's easy to do in a comic book is not so easy to do in a book if you're looking for an actual audience; maybe I just need to identify my Morpheus more clearly?).  Since I didn't read Sandman as it was originally released issue by issue, even though I was actively reading comics during the second half of the series, it's been interesting to play catch-up.

Neil can sometimes be a little intimidating.  And yet I don't think he's hit his full cultural reach yet because I also think he can be underrated by people looking for a little more of the mainstream in his work (a problem that also plagues Grant Morrison).  Sometimes even as we champion artists who can make anything mainstream we limit our ability to find them by asking that they have a certain level of conformity to what already exists.  They see that Neil came from comic books and that's excuse enough to not take him as seriously as they should.

I haven't read enough of his work, Sandman or otherwise, even though I was still in high school when Neil started taking the art of writing books seriously.  That would have been a good time to start, but then I was still fighting my appreciation of Stephen King then, too.  I think Neil has a good amount of King in him, but they approach the same kind of material differently.  For Neil it's about seeing the grand scale on an intimate level, whereas King takes the intimate at a grand scale (which is why he can do horror and things like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption with equal aplomb).  But they're essentially the same.  They see the hidden mythologies around us and attempt to interpret them.  Clowns are scary, mm-hmm.

On the one hand having this comic biography under my belt means I'm an inch closer to working in comic books the way I always dreamed.  That's the selfish part.  On the other, I'm also an inch closer to Neil creatively.

But only an inch.

Sending queries

I just sent off a new query for Modern Ark.

This is significant for a number of reasons.  A few years back I went through a long period of sending queries for this manuscript, and didn't get anywhere with it.  I was as frustrated as you can get in this process.

It was the first manuscript I'd done this with, the first book-length story I'd completed after the three NaNos that produced The Cloak of Shrouded Men, a superhero story I had less faith in finding a home for than something that featured vampires.

I completed the first draft of Modern Ark in 2009 (which seems like a lifetime of several lifetimes ago now).  Since that time I'd gotten to think of it as the first of the yearly manuscripts I've managed to complete to date, but it's also a particular baby of mine, no matter how difficult it's been.

It was supposed to be a simple story, and yet it became what remains my most elaborate and complicated one.

And that has made it difficult for me to sometimes think of in the simple ways that are necessary to make it seem attractive to publishers.  If they can't understand it, they will find it all the more difficult for readers to comprehend.  Who wants to look at a book in the store that they don't get on a basic perusal?  Me, I like to choose the books that come with praise I can respect, the careful cultivation of trusted writers.  But that's just not the way most people choose their books.

The first readers are always the ones you have to solicit.  Not the ones who are potentially glomming onto a phenomenon, however big or small.  You need to capture attention with the work itself for those initial readers.  And only so many of them are doing it for the sheer love of reading, of discovery.  Only so many readers approach a book like the most discerning critic.  Here I imagine Anton Ego (so brilliantly voiced by the ever-evolving Peter O'Toole) in Ratatouille.  These people are hard to impress.  These are the readers I imagine as my best audience.

But I can't even begin to imagine facing them if I can't get the thing published.  And so I face rejection with fortification.  I try to understand my own story.  And that's something I've tried to do with Modern Ark for years.

It's perfectly possible to overthink even a complicated plot.  The thing any writer always needs is the ability to see even their own work with clarity.  Especially their own work.

I'm not talking about interpretation.  Interpretation's another bag entirely. 

Clarity is the first mark of inspiration.  It's why you want to write a story in the first place.  Except that story can sometimes evolve into something else as you're writing it.  That happened every other chapter in Modern Ark.  And so I needed to rediscover the clarity of the work, not in broad idealistic strokes but for what it was, what had never changed despite everything that ended up in it.

And so that's how I ended up writing this latest query.  Even if this one also ends up going nowhere, I'm starting to see real progress in this process.

And I'm starting to feel good about Modern Ark again.

Musings of a savage detective

I'm currently reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, which is a fictional account of the late author's own literary life experiences.  Bolano died a decade ago this year, but it wasn't until about four years back, with the publication of his masterpiece 2666, that I took notice of him, and the Chilean writer subsequently became my all-time favorite novelist (supplanting Herman Melville, no less).

Bolano spent most of his time as a novelist musing on his own experiences, much as aspiring writers are always told to "write what they know."  He considered himself first and foremost a poet, and it was in this mischievous form that he existed for the events depicted in Savage Detectives, the tenuous heart of a whole movement that never really happened although still accomplished its goal of being honest about itself, which was the whole point.

It's gotten me thinking about a number of things, both about my own experiences in literary communities and how I tend to write my own stories, if I indeed "write what I know."

As far as communities go, I've never quite been a Bolano, but to a certain extent maybe I have, if not quite a charismatic center then certainly the enigmatic figure who drifts in and out of writing circles.  In college I was part of the poetry scene that coalesced around a couple of acquaintances who stumbled into some of the same classes together, which eventually led to the short-lived Hemlock literary journal.  Since I wasn't part of the inner circle of that group, more like the narrator of the opening section of Savage Detectives, I would never be able to give a truly definitive account of those days, but it's still nice to look back on.

The Hemlock experience was something I enjoyed quite a bit, which led to the abortive Dead Letter Quarterly several years later, the product of acquaintances from a comic book site I wrote at for awhile, which led to the more successful Project Mayhem anthology I put together for my budding Mouldwarp Press imprint (if you're interested, you can still consider contributing to a follow-up).

In recent days the idea of a writing community has shifted to blogging buddies such as yourself and even former coworkers.

Part of what's made this such a roundabout experience for me is that I spent all my budding years as a writer not actually writing.  In middle and high school, I developed my tools for world-building rather than writing, I guess believing that knowing a story is the first stage to writing it.  By the time I started writing stories in earnest it took my some time to integrate the world-building, but at least gave me time to work on my storytelling.  I knew I was a writer before I did any serious writing, which is perhaps why I exist much as Bolano did, as a literary romantic, and don't necessarily view it the same way that others of my ilk tend to, as something they do rather than something they are.  I tend to shout at the opposition like Bolano, and this can sometimes make it hard to find kindred souls (people don't generally liked to be shouted at for some reason), whether or not they exist at all.

As far as writing trends go, I'm different from Bolano in that I don't tend toward extrapolations of my own experiences in the same literal sense so much as drawing from elements.  For Modern Ark I imposed my relationship with my sister on a vampire story.  In the current Pangaea plans, I've been modifying characters to be a bit more like Bolano, although the framework remains very much my own.  All my stories are reflections from my perspective and aims for literature.  Where Bolano tended to look at the world from an intimate vantage point, I lean toward expansive, which opens for more fantastical opportunities, although he's a writer who shares my need to represent myself in a more obvious way (once you know it's there) than I find in others, although certainly in some like Melville it's clearly there and adds layers of depth to the storytelling and for me defines what being a true writer is all about.

The Insecure Writer's Support Group October 2013

I've spent a long enough time not participating in this thing, so I figured I'd finally join.  And such good timing!  The IWSG now has its very own site.  It's the brainchild of ninja captain Alex Cavanaugh and meets on the first Wednesday of every month.  As for the purpose?  It's the porpoise, of course.  (He's in the water across from the lighthouse.  He took the picture.)

For my inaugural post, I'm going to talk about clarity.  Recently I've been exchanging thoughts on the film Immortals with A. Lee Martinez on Facebook.  Why I'm talking with Martinez, the author of such books as Divine Misfortune, is because of Pat Dilloway, who has latched onto the author.  Martinez recently saw Immortals presumably for the first time, and thought it was a hot mess.  The film, from visionary director Tarsem (best work: The Fall), was originally released in 2011, and is a more recent version of the sword-and-sandal epic resurrected by Ridley Scott's Gladiator in 2000 and also exemplified by Zack Snyder's 300 from 2007.

Now, even though Gladiator won a Best Picture from the Oscars, most people these days still think of 300 as the definitive modern example of this genre of movies, even though Gerard Butler, the star of the film, is equally considered by most people to be merely a more histrionic version of Russell Crowe, who starred in the Scott picture.  Immortals was Henry Cavill's first big role, but chances are people were thinking then and will still now and for the foreseeable future consider this past summer's Man of Steel (where he played, y'know, Superman) for that distinction.

Immortals is one of many, many films that were released in the wake of 300 to adopt a similar aesthetic presentation.  In fact, most people seem to have assumed the whole reason it was made at all was to capture the very same audience, and perhaps for studio bosses that was exactly the case.  And yet, knowing Tarsem as I do, I could never view it that way.

The film, as Martinez suggests in his vehement and negative opinion, can easily be said to be a hot mess, in one viewing.  Even though I have an abiding love for Tarsem, that's pretty much how I saw it myself the first time.  It was virtually impenetrable, or in other words lacked clarity.  Cavill isn't nearly as striking a presence as Butler is in 300, and he's rarely in a position as Crowe is for the majority of Gladiator to command attention.  The roles are very different.  If anything, Cavill is far more like Sam Worthington in Clash of the Titans, a reluctant hero who has to crawl all the way to the top (besides being a generally heroic and capable kind of guy to begin with).  (Given that few people seem to like the Titans remake, this is not such a great allusion.)

No, the big star of Immortals is Mickey Rourke, who approaches the villain role much as Butler does the hero role in 300.  There's also John Hurt, who has one of the most distinctive voices in film today, who acts as narrator and one of the guises of Zeus, as well as the lovely Freida Pinto in one of her early post-Slumdog Millionaire roles.  (She is was and always will be the best thing about that movie.)  The fourth and fifth leads go to Stephen Dorff and Luke Evans.

The gist of the story is that Rourke is a power mad monarch who wants to declare war on the gods by unleashing their ancient rivals (who just so happen to be...the Titans).  Naturally Zeus isn't too keen to see this happen, so he gently nudges Cavill into position to stop this from happening.  The problem is that in the chaos that follows in the wake of Rourke's maneuvering, Cavill ends up further from his goal than is convenient.  By the time he's ready, it's too late and the big battle at the end of the film has already provoked tragedy, including the deaths of several gods, which finally forces Zeus to break his own vow of noninterference.  It is indeed Cavill who stops Rourke, thus being the hero Zeus thought he could be, but the catastrophe remains.  But then again, the original war between the gods wasn't so great either, and once the Titans, like the kraken, are unleashed there's only so much damage control possible.

The visuals do indeed evoke 300, but there are the telltale signs of Tarsem all around.  (He began his career in music videos, but called greater attention to himself with The Cell, in which Jennifer Lopez traverses a surreal landscape.  In fact, Tarsem is always immersing himself in those.  It's the story he tells every time, and like a great storyteller is always finding new ways to do so.)

As far as clarity goes, however, there's not so much of that going around, at least initially.  For this reason, it can seem unsatisfying and even a gross case of bad filmmaking in general.  In such cases it's easy to extrapolate that the story simply didn't work or was executed poorly, or that characters behaved stupidly.  All these things are the reaction of someone who failed to connect with the presented experience.

So why am I going on and on about this in a post that's supposed to be about my specific writing experience?  Well, for one thing I recently had another look at one particular chapter in my manuscript for Minor Contracts, one of three I have floating in the air.  I was unsatisfied with the way I'd written it.  And I went back to reservations I've had about the opening chapter.  And I started to think, maybe I have to write the whole thing over again.  Generally, I hate even the idea of doing that.  I will sometimes have to start over again, but I've never even thought about doing that with a whole manuscript.  With the Modern Ark  manuscript, I haven't thought about doing that sort of thing too much, because it's a whole house of cards, almost every chapter doing something entirely different.  If I move one piece, the whole thing could collapse, and I've already monkeyed around with the opening chapter of that one several times.  I'm of the idea that what was going through my mind when I wrote the thing in the first place is more than likely the best version.  Anything else is just another version.  If the due diligence was performed in the original conception, you should be fine.

Now, certainly editing is a key thing to consider.  In movies editing can affect everything.  Oliver Stone has four cuts of Alexander (my favorite movie, and another sword-and-sandal epic), for instance.  Studio heads used to chuckle wildly as they hacked apart Orson Welles' work.  With someone like Orson Welles, you change the shape of his work and you most definitely change the whole thing.  (I'm not claiming to be Orson Welles, mind you.)

And I'm just talking about things I've already written.  Twice now in the past month I've already radically altered the course of the next manuscript I'll be writing, In the Land of Pangaea, even thinking of alternate titles (which happens to my stories frequently anyway, even years after I've completed first drafts).  Thinking of those changes and the changes I could make to Minor Contracts doesn't even begin to take into account clarity.

Because I'm always wondering how clear my stories are.  Most of the writers around me strive almost single-mindedly for clarity.  Sometimes I've taken that to patronizingly calling their work simplistic.  And yet most stories are like that.  When it's anything but it's either quickly forgotten or a classic.  (And no, I'm not going to say I write classics.  That's for history to decide.  And here you understand that I'm speaking in the voice of Dr. Sheldon Cooper.  Which reminds me, bears are terrifying.)  

When I'm looking at my own work and not even considering clarity, I can understand why I look at a movie like Immortals differently than A. Lee Martinez.  Clarity is clearly one of his priorities.  Me, I can deal with a little mess.  This isn't to say that I'll accept anything.  There's really is such a thing as a hot mess, when someone's reach has exceeded their grasp.  I don't think that's the case with Immortals.  It would be hard for someone like Tarsem to do that after nailing something as brilliant as The Fall.

So when I look at my own writing, and worry about specific elements or passages, I'm worrying less about how they will ultimately work and more about how they fit into the greater tapestry.  There's got to be a unifying imperative.  In Immortals it was always John Hurt and and my belief in the abilities of Tarsem.  Did I convince myself the movie worked because I wanted it to work?  That will always be the counterargument.

But I don't think so.

My Current Doings

Things I'm currently working on:

• "Unsafe at Any Speed" - This is a short story for a WWII era anthology that's being spearheaded by Brennon Thompson, started out as a proposal for comic books but has since shifted to at least initially a prose property.  This story takes its title from one of Ralph Nader's famed consumer advocate articles (that for some reason he never talked about while running for president), but features a character I first envisioned while I was in high (possibly middle) school, a youthful speedster who sucks at being a speedster.  I've been working out the whole arc of the story, and that's been fun, as well as started writing it, but for some reason I've known that this isn't one that I should just get over with, which is what I do with the majority of my short fiction.  Thompson's vision is known collectively as The Tarnished Age, and hopefully I'll have more to say about this, even though it's been a thing I've been helping develop for months now.
• In the Land of Pangaea - Perhaps I've got a problem of the impulse to write too many books, especially considering that I've had a "little" trouble getting them published by someone other than myself (though I'll be working on that with Seven Thunders in the coming days and weeks, submitting it to at least two potential outlets).  The book I'll be starting soon (because I've more or less written a manuscript a year since 2009) is something I hadn't even considered until earlier this year (thus postponing yet again some other stories), but the more I've thought of it the more excited I've been to work on it.  Pangaea is all about a fake pre-history of mankind, a previous era of great achievement that takes place two hundred million years ago (during the Jurassic period), and ties together a lot of obsessions I've had and want to work out in writing (which tends to be what all my stories are about, which I figure should be what every writer does), among them the continent of Africa, Hurricane Katrina, and the trickster god Anansi, who makes a cameo (along with other deities) in Minor Contracts.  And yes, in my mind, part of the whole reason for writing Pangea at all is to help justify both Minor Contracts and the earlier Modern Ark, because one of the other things I hope to accomplish with Pangaea is a further exploration of dragons, and our continuing obsession with them, but outside of a typical fantasy setting.  The story will unite the present and the past, and dragons will be that connection.  The biggest conceptual hurdle of Modern Ark is the fact that the main character is a dragon, although he is also a perfectly normal human being.
• "Outliers - A Deep Space Nine Celebration" - I've been writing Star Trek fiction for more than a decade now.  For most people, this stuff is known as fan fiction, but for me, it's just another form of my own particular work, that follows its own particular rules, and is not strictly just me mucking around someone else's playground.  Actually, my Star Trek work is a huge part of my formative development as a writer, and I'm particularly grateful to it for that reason.  This story will appear on my writing blog.  Although fun fact!  I've written at least one Star Trek story every year since 1999.  This one won't be this year's first, but it will be one of the few ones to feature the cast of my favorite series, Deep Space Nine, which premiered on TV twenty years ago this year.  "Outliers" will feature each of the signature characters just before we met them, some of them in the very first episode, and many well beyond that point.  Should be fun!  Hopefully this particular one will be done before the end of this month, as will be the first draft of "Unsafe at Any Speed."
• And yes, there are a bunch of other stories I said I'd be working on this year, and before my laptop developed issues, they were absolutely going to be done.  But life threw some curveballs, and this is what I did with them.

Song Remains the Same reminder, more on Ark obsession

I thought I'd pop in and give a little update and further thoughts on that last subject I talked about...

Mouldwarp Press Presents #2 "Song Remains the Same" is still open for submissions.  I originally posted the guidelines in January (find them here), but considering that the deadline is in fact in December, there's no giant rush.  If you've been considering, or even writing, a story for entry, thank you very much.  If this is the first you hear of it, then you still have half the year to work on it. 

Now, last time I was here I was explaining my breakthrough on a manuscript I wrote in the fall of 2009, originally entitled Finnegan but since rechristened Modern Ark.  This was the first book (and if I'm being honest, the only one) that I made a concerted effort to sell to agents and/or publishers.  Obviously I had no luck.  And part of the reason why, I've come to accept, is that conceptually it can easily be described as a hot mess.  I like to believe in a good way.  I like literary fiction the best, the truly expansive (I like it in movies and TV shows, too) material that subverts most expectations but at its heart speaks very directly to the human condition.

To me, there're very few stories that speak as directly to the human condition as Noah's Ark from the Bible.  There's also Adam & Eve (and Cain & Abel), but I wrote a manuscript about them, too (Minor Contracts), the year after completing Modern Ark, in part because there were always the troubling biblical episodes in that one, one of several elements that made it so hard for me to summarize in any kind of concise way what it was.  Noah does in fact appear in Ark this way. 

As a reader, I've been fortunate to read a number of fascinating fictional takes on Noah, and I talked about that before, but here I'll talk about Noah a little more directly.

And before I go much further, it's recently been made aware to me that hardcore 19th century racists in fact used the story of Noah to justify their beliefs.  This is plainly idiotic, using the wording of how one of his sons was punished for bad behavior to try and explain why certain races in general must in fact be inferior.  If you know much more about that, I beg you to forget it.  If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.  Suffice to say, my interest in Noah has nothing to do with that.

But Noah as a whole fascinates me.  As I related in the last post, you don't have to be particularly religious to care about his story.  There's a whole tradition that supports the basic narrative, and the idea of the flood is one that encapsulates a lot more than whether you believe in one god, many gods, or no gods at all.  The basic idea behind Noah's version is that the Hebrew god looked upon humanity and saw that it was very bad, and so he decided to press the Big Wet Reset Button.  But he spared Noah and his family (plus a lot of animals, all in their biologically considerate pairs).

If you want to think about that, there's plenty to think about.  Noah was supposed to be very old at this point in his life.  He had a wife and three sons, and those sons each had wives, too.  As with the Genesis account of all mankind being the offspring of two people, this is still a pretty small sampling to start from (but then, think of it as the old riddle of the chicken and the egg if you want), in a lot of ways an unlikely one.  Again, don't worry too much about that.

Noah is told that all mankind is going to be erased.  What does he do?  He builds the ark.  The dramatic elements that are commonly added to this part of the story are all Noah's neighbors who think he's crazy (see: Evan Almighty).  In fact, while it's common to consider the Superman origin story of his father Jor-El's efforts to warn his fellow Kryptonians that they will soon lose their planet is very much ...wait, if I explain it like that you already know where I'm going with it.  Suffice it to say, but observers normally consider Superman to be a modern version of Moses.  He's much more like Noah.

In fact, if you don't so much believe the biblical account, there's still the fact that the flood definitely happened.  Perhaps you can consider Noah to be the Superman who repopulated Jewish tradition.  (Superman was created by a couple of Jewish teenagers.  Read the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay analogy from Michael Chabon, or perhaps even Brad Melzter's fascinating Book of Lies.) 

Either way, the books I've read based on Noah all agree that it was tough going surviving on that ark.  It was a true test of the human will, and spirit.  Noah isn't really just about getting on a boat of preserving the future of life on Earth thanks to and in spite of extreme divine intervention. 

If I tried to do anything like that in Modern Ark, again I wasn't originally conscious of that fact.  But that's exactly what I did.  All of this is also a way of saying that I've been experiencing a lot of breakthroughs in my life, realizations of what's really been going on and where it's been leading, and it hasn't always pointed in the directions I originally thought.  Maybe I'll talk more about that here at some point.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

The Ark in Modern Ark

Hopefully I've been babbling about my writing projects long enough that you get a sense that I've got a number of projects in the air.  One of them is the first book I deliberately wrote, which is currently known as Modern Ark but was historically entitled Finnegan (the switch is recent enough that I have a label for both on this blog, which only traces back to last summer).

I wrote Modern Ark in 2009.  I feverishly attempted to sell it to publishers or agents throughout 2010, with absolutely no luck at all.  I've periodically tried to sell it again since.  Now I'm wondering if the problem all along was that I'd never myself understood the story I'd written.

It began as a simple concept, my very own vampire story.  Twilight was still becoming a thing at the time.  I was working at a bookstore at the time, so I got to follow much of that develop (and then later tried to convince customers that The Hunger Games was a thing, which of course it later became in earnest).  Except when I told myself that I was writing a vampire story, I really had no idea what that meant.  I really set out with the intent to write a story about dragons, because I'd had the idea and phrase "The Dragon Scribes" for a while (which became the title of the second act in Modern Ark), but had no idea what to do with that, either.

So I sketched out the story and thought that was just as well.  When I sat down to write it as an actual book, I discovered how ill-prepared I was to write a simple vampire story.  Apparently I really don't do simple easily.  I incorporated the dragon thing as an incredibly metaphysical element.  I wrote chapters dealing with biblical parallels.  I wrote about Japan post-WWII.  I basically did everything in my power to do anything but write a simple vampire story.

This was something I never intended, but that's just what happened while I was writing it.  And yet by the end, I was still trying to conceive of it in terms of a simple vampire story, with unwieldy aspects.  It's no wonder that no one took it seriously.  It probably screamed incoherence.

"Modern Ark" is another phrase that I kicked around for a while, and originally it had nothing to do with the vampire story.  And yet at some point it just seemed completely natural.  Finnegan became Modern Ark.

Now I start a different kind of narrative.  When I was in college I took a course in Canadian literature.  It was probably one of several such classes I really didn't have to take, and part of the reason why I had to go back for another half a year to get the credits I needed to graduate.  Anyway, among the things I read (besides the poetry of Leonard Cohen, whom the professor was obsessed with and you might know from the song "Hallelujah," which was later affirmed as a great song by the late Jeff Buckley) was Not Wanted On the Voyage by Timothy Findley.  The voyage of the title was basically the story of Noah's Ark.

(And before I go much further, let me just confess that the phrase "Modern Ark" was obviously my version of the more famous phrase "modern art," just something that sounded clever.)

Anyway, Findley's take on Noah was a revelation.  It wasn't particularly reverent.  It didn't need to be. But it resonated.  We all know that the flood in the story was something that was based on a thing that went around the Mesopotamian world, and can also be found in the tale of Gilgamesh.  Finding Noah's ark was something the tabloids were pretty obsessive about in the '90s.  Findley's ark was the start of my own personal journey.

Another book was released early in the new millennium, The Preservationist.  This was also about Noah's Ark.  I kept it in mind for years.  The author was David Maine.  Eventually I read pretty much everything Maine has published, and his ark was also notably irreverent, and that was fine, too (though Fallen is a better book, and it's about Adam & Eve, who are also the stars of a book I've written and is floating around).

There's a boat in Modern Ark.  It was always there.  Originally it was just Quincy's boat.  Quincy is a modern pirate, and the substitute love interest for Fiona, who has become entangled with the nefarious vampire Eolake.  Fiona's brother is the formerly eponymous Finnegan, the man with the dragon complex everyone but him seems to identify.  My Van Helsing, Oliver Row, would be the one to put all the pieces together, if he weren't basically a fraud.

The whole thing is about faith.  By the time the good guys gather on the boat, I'm the one who distracted myself from seeing what the story was really about.  By this point, Fiona is immersed in a dream narrative induced by the vampire.  It stole my whole focus.  The boat is the ark in Modern Ark. It's where the characters gather in their peculiar two-by-twos, their dual roles finally coming into focus.

I realized this after I read Andrew Morgan's Noah's Ark.  Morgan's book isn't about the ark at all.  It's completely metaphorical.  That's how I realized what I'd done.  I'd told a completely metaphorical version of the ark.  Noah's story is all about faith.  Yes, it's about God becoming so angry with the ridiculousness of mankind that it seems like a good idea to do a soft reboot of creation (although "soft" would be a term only the survivors could really appreciate).  My book, I already knew it was about faith. But I'd never really known how it was about faith.  Like Noah, like Jonah, like Job, the characters in Modern Ark undergo an extreme test of faith.  They're not being tested by God so much as themselves.  They're all on personal journeys, and these journeys come together, much like what happens on the ark, and they have to figure out what it all means.

That's what Findley explored, that's what Maine did, and I guess I finally figured out that this is what I wrote, too.  Maybe next time I attempt to sell this book, that's what I'll try to explain.  Is there a market for that?  I certainly hope so...

Am I a Hobby Writer?

I have to wonder, am I a hobby writer?

Recently I went into a funk after failing to secure successful bids in a couple writing contests, one for Top Cow comics and another for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel, where I didn't make it past the first round.  I've been trying to break into comics for years, and Modern Ark, the novel I submitted to Amazon's contest, has been the source of my most sustained effort to be accepted by actual publishers.  Admittedly, it's an incredibly tricky book, a literary jumble really, something I was incredibly proud to write but probably looks at the very least convoluted to anyone looking for something with obviously broad appeal.

The other reason the funk happened is that I haven't written a word of my WIP since last year, and for a number of reasons, including the fact that financially I've been on a slippery slope since Borders closed in the fall of 2011, and I've been feeling panicky for months now, trying to secure a better employment position and failing miserably.  That's pretty much the mode I've been in since Borders, actually, so there are bound to be moments where it feels overwhelming.

A lot of the writing I've done has been where I've been in a more secure situation.  The lone exception was just after Borders closed, when I was completely unemployed for four months, and I wrote Yoshimi Trilogy.  It's much more difficult, apparently, to write with what for all intents and purposes is a part-time job.  Throughout 2013 so far I've been getting very few hours, which at least in theory would have been fantastic as far as using the time to finish the first draft of the WIP, but I ended up spending a lot of time job-hunting, and blogging.  I love blogging, otherwise I wouldn't do it, but there are times that I wonder if it gets in my way.

That and doubts.  I know I've stumbled into a community with a whole Insecure Writers thing every month, and I've never taken part in it.  Sometimes it just seems as if the whole community spends all its time supporting each other, not really reading each other so much as, well, supporting each other, and it can get a little annoying.  But I get my doubts, and the recent failures gave me pause.  A great big pause, because I don't like failure any more than the next guy, and sometimes it seems as if failure is all I ever really experience, and I wonder, what's the point?  I've now written a number of manuscripts, and last year the one book I had a contract with a publisher to have released by someone other than me ended up losing its home.  Earlier this month I salvaged some of my self-esteem with the Project Mayhem anthology, and...I'm not sure, but I guess I'll just have to accept it as a personal accomplishment, because I just don't have the ability to see it go much further than that.  I thought maybe the contributors would have been a little more excited about it, or have more or better connections than I do, or maybe they were all thinking the same about me.  Well, unfortunately that simply isn't the case.

And so it makes me go back to something I said in a book review I did earlier this year for someone in my blogging circle.  I called them a hobby writer.  I'm not sure, but I think they might have taken offense to that.  So what exactly is a hobby writer?

As opposed to writers who feel it in their bones, hobby writers write because they feel like it, because they always thought it was a really good idea.  They have ideas, but they don't have inspiration.  What I mean is they can come up with ideas.  Any writer needs ideas, and obviously every writer works with ideas, the whole point of being a writer is that you feel compelled to write about your ideas.  A hobby writer stops at that level.  They don't particularly know or care to develop their own specific voice.  They believe that their ideas are enough.  It's not really about the words that shape the ideas, it's just a compulsion to write.  They add to the catalog of stories but they don't necessarily add to the canon of books.  Their work is disposable, essentially, something that will entertain people who exist at the time the writer is living, releasing their material, but will be forgotten utterly and completely in the years to come.

This is not about popularity.  Popularity is a shifting phenomenon.  Something that's wildly popular one day can and will be completely forgotten the next.  Transcendent writing of any nature whether in books or songs or movies, endures, can and will be rediscovered and recognized for what it is, not the work of the writer but a story that seems to exist on its own merit.  I tend to think true writers can work in this mode on a consistent basis.  Hobby writers, then, are the ones who don't.  They are and always will be sustained on a basis of being known as someone who writes.  The others are known because of the stories they've written.

As a blogger, as someone who actively blogs about writing, I wonder if I'm a hobby writer.  Do I in fact write stories that exist to say that I'm a writer or do the stories exist that reveal me as a writer?  More and more I've been thinking of self-publishing as a way to conclude this once and for all.  In the days and weeks and months to follow, I think I'll be self-publishing a lot more material.  I'll start with Yoshimi Trilogy.  I've been telling you a lot about the Space Corps saga, and that of course is the subject of the WIP I hope to finish as a draft relatively soon (I've only had a third to go since December), but Yoshimi Trilogy represents a different kind of iconic story for me, something uncomplicated, which I can release as a series.

Yes, it seemed that as soon as I released Project Mayhem I dropped off the face of the earth, certainly here on this particular blog, and now I'll be spending time here talking about a different project, then another, then another...To me, it's weird, but then I haven't spent a lot of time talking about myself as a writer, really only when I was doing NaNoWriMo circa 2004-2006.  Hopefully when I'm finished, and maybe this will take all of 2013 and maybe longer, I'll have an answer to my question and maybe put it all behind me.  We'll see.

Break on Through...

As you may know from reading this blog, I have a number of unpublished manuscripts on my hands.  Sure, I've got some self-published material out there (and to your right), but "unpublished manuscripts" still means the potential to be published by someone other than myself.

The first manuscript I completed after the serial nature of what became The Cloak of Shrouded Men is currently known as Modern Ark.  It's the trickiest thing I've ever written, trickier all the more for the simple fact that I originally set out to write it with a story I thought was going to be far more mainstream than it turned out.  As it is, Modern Ark represents for me my purest literary effort to date, something that I willingly put against whatever you may think of as literary fiction.

I recently went on a binge watching Tarsem's passion project The Fall, something he spent years filming, which I sometimes refer to as the adult's Wizard of Oz, about a girl who steps into a storybook, basically, with far less romantic results, although for adults, the romance of The Fall is far greater than what can be found in Wizard of Oz, no matter how passionately Judy Garland sings (the late Hawaiian folk singer "Iz" Israel Kamakawiwo'ole combined "Over the Rainbow" with "What a Wonderful World" to create the definitive version, and one that's far more relevant to The Fall than Wizard of Oz).

It's filled with Tarsem's patented whimsical imagery, which in last year's Mirror Mirror went mainstream (and probably would have been more successful if Snow White and the Huntsman hadn't been released as well).  It's also soaked in melancholy.  The man telling the girl the story is a stuntman who experienced the first layer of the eponymous event.  He's depressed, suicidal.  He turns the story into a dark corner, and the girl rescues both the story and the storyteller, in the end.

I've begun thinking of The Fall as one of the best comparable stories I know to Modern Ark.  Life of Pi is another.  The popular bestseller of a decade ago finally became a movie.  It's one of those books that some people will say is impossible to film, although I think it's instantly cinematic, a boy deserted on a raft with a tiger.  Maybe I just read too many Calvin and Hobbes comics.  As an animated film, Life of Pi would have been incredibly simple to envision.  Tarsem could've done it, too.

If you don't know what Life of Pi is about, yes on one level it's about the boy and the tiger, but it's also about the boy and the life he's trying to continue living after a disaster at sea.  The tiger might be seen as a metaphor, a trick of the imagination, like Calvin's best friend Hobbes.  It was the kind of bestselling literature that the first decade of the new millennium bequeathed readers, but isn't so common these days.

Modern Ark is tricky like that.  The main character, Finnegan (who used to give the book its name until I rethought it, James Joyce considered), is both a man and a dragon.  It's something that makes perfect sense in a metaphysical sense, and conceptually it's completely necessary, but for readers it might be something of a nightmare.  Life of Pi was a hit in two forms.  The Fall is still waiting to find an appreciative audience.  If Modern Ark can escape such a fate, it's because it's also about a vampire, who becomes obsessed with Finnegan's sister.  Maybe readers are bored with vampires now.  Or maybe they're looking for a new way to look at them.  (Fifty Shades of Grey may suggest that.)  I don't know.  I didn't write Twilight.  I wrote Modern Ark.

I discovered in the midst of writing it that at that point, I really wasn't capable of writing a traditional narrative.  So I started to discover digressions.  I was raised Catholic, and read Bible stories even before I could conceivably care all that much about the Bible.  I discovered a wealth of rich characters.  In many ways, that still defines my relationship with religion.  People can sometimes forget that every religion begins with a good story.  It's the best way to sell anyone on anything.  Modern Ark isn't about religion, but I use religion to help explain the necessary relationships that define its story.

I tried selling Modern Ark to agents and publishing houses for maybe a year after completing it (or so I thought, because there have since been revisions).  I had no luck.  I'll admit that I grew discouraged, stopped making the effort.  It was a tough sell.  I knew that going in.  But I never abandoned it.

A few days ago I submitted it once again, this time to Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award contest.  I found out about it because of the CreateSpace activities I've been up to since last July.  It sounded like a great opportunity.  I've since discovered that no book that won the award has distinguished itself in any other way.  I'd never heard of them.  I decided it didn't matter.  It's worth the shot.  I believe in Modern Ark.  I'm not ready to give up on it.

Although if this one doesn't work out, maybe it's time to think self-publishing again...

Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for the ladies...

In related news, I'm in another WriteClub.  This one is different from DL Hammons' WRiTE CLUB in that it is spelled differently, plus its full title is WriteClubCo, which is the first indication that it's a local affair, meaning that I interact with people instead of computer monitors ("Co" is the grammatically incorrect abbreviation of Colorado).

The club is all but a reunion of former Borders coworkers.  We had our first meeting in years last night, and much of it was spent simply catching up.  Only a few of us were there in the final days of the store we all worked at together (in Colorado Springs, the Southgate location, on the off chance you might care about such details).  Scott Quine, the general manager at the time I originally started working at this location (I originated at Borders when Burlington, MA, got its store in 2006), put the club together, something he'd begun elsewhere, which was how Lorraine Wright became a part of it.  (I still remember when Lorraine transferred to the store, the first one since me.  I guess I felt my gimmick had been infringed.)

Also present last night besides Scott and Lorraine were Christy Koffman Smith (whose tenure at Borders was complicated because she worked as the vendor representative of Paperchase, and the company made this difficult in its final years) and Kelsey Kramer, who knows weird veterinarian terms.  Lorraine brought her husband along, plus pictures of her cats, and stories about her ferrets!

It was fun getting some of the band back together.  I had only participated in the club once before, during which Christy memorably read a story about buttons.  Thanks to "Project Mayhem" (still accepting submissions!) I've had a chance to catch up with her creatively, and even got a preview of the story she read last night, which I've been encouraging her to expand into a novel.

It's funny, because most of the meeting was spent talking about things other than writing, which I actually think was a good thing.  As us bloggers know, talking about writing can be perfectly fine and certainly encouraging, but if that's all you talk about, it can be limiting.  After all, a writer isn't just someone who writes but who observes.

For my part, I read a story based on the Space Corps, part of my continuing effort to begin writing more Space Corps rather than simply plotting out the saga.  Last year I made more progress on that front than at any other point in my writing history besides 2002 (with bleeds into 2001 and 2003), when I wrote, or attempted to write, the foundation myth of the Galactic Alliance, where the excerpt "Quagmire" comes from that's featured in Monorama (my Facebook page for the collection is up to 22 people who "like" it, including a bunch of random individuals who may or may not have been confused by its title to believe it's something other than what it is).  I wrote several short stories last year, including "Warship" and "Who Killed Iron Joe?," both of which can be found at Sigild V, my writing blog, plus began writing Seven Thunders.  The story I read last night, "George Jackman and the Monastery of Burnside," ties into both Seven Thunders and the greater Space Corps saga, as it reveals certain details in a moment in time for both Lance Nolan (star of Seven Thunders) and Lord Phan (who is featured in "Quagmire" and several other points in the saga).

This year I will be finishing Seven Thunders and shopping it around, plus writing "Darkness Falls on a Dark Land," which explains a little more about the foundation myth of the Galactic Alliance (it'll be serialized at Sigild), as well as at least begin writing The Dark Side of Space, the second volume of the Space Corps saga and prequel to Seven Thunders.  If I indeed finish Dark Side of Space, I'll be reaching completely unfamiliar territory for me, since the next three books will at least in theory be far longer than anything else I've written.

It was interesting reading "George Jackman," because along with all the talk I've been doing here and the few stories over at Sigild, this is the biggest public exposure of Space Corps to date.  A decade ago, when I wrote the abortive story behind "Quagmire," I kept most of the details of the saga close to the vest.  Of course,a decade ago key elements of the saga had yet to coalesce, and in fact that story had a big hand in shaping what it would become.  Like George Lucas, I believe that a sprawling space saga needs specific points on which to rotate, otherwise it's just a bunch of random stories.  That's what Seven Thunders as the first book is meant to address, and why even an apparent throwaway tale like "George Jackman" needs to address important elements, and why "Who Killed Iron Joe?" explains the origins of another key character in Seven Thunders (and why I was both sad and happy recently when a tiny publisher rejected it for an upcoming anthology).

The title of this post, meanwhile, refers to the fact that I am currently in the midst of watching an Alfred Hitchcock DVD collection.  As the two films based on Hitchcock himself that were released last year suggest, he was indeed fond of the ladies, but what I've taken away so far is that his films do in fact put them in very prominent positions, even if sometime the camera leers at them the way Hitchcock himself apparently did.  It's a way of saying that the themes that define us are hard to get away from.  WriteClubCo reminds me (and hopefully you) that I was part of a similarly named club last year.  Much of my experience with other writers has been in environments like this, though previously only in school.  I don't do workshops.  Workshops are for writers who haven't discovered their voice.  If I haven't discovered mine yet, then I am a failure.  Maybe workshops also help with connections, and maybe I should take them more seriously because of that, because I have few enough writing connections.  WriteClubCo is one of mine, and I intend to value it.

I also have what's quickly amounting to a writing history, which at the moment I'm defining by Space Corps, which is long in coming, because I've been making a go of these stories in theory since 1995.  That's a long time gestating!  I'm also attempting to get Modern Ark (previously known as Finnegan) off the ground.  I just wrote a new prologue, "Before Finnegan Wakes" (thus alluding to part of the reason why I've decided to change its title, just so no one is confused about whether or not I'm calling to mind James Joyce), which can be found at Sigild.  I still strongly believe in Modern Ark, even though it may be something of a conceptual nightmare for some.  I recently went on a binge watching Tarsem's The Fall, which has been a favorite of mine since its release.  It's a personal work of great brilliance, yet it's a movie that you truly have to follow in order to appreciate, steeped in a very specific mythology.  Modern Ark is a little like that.  Actually, quite a bit like that.  And the other problem of waiting to see Modern Ark published is that Minor Contracts can perhaps best be appreciated in relation to it.  Even though it's mostly a story of Adam & Eve (and Cain, and Abel), there's a good chunk of it that also challenges the reader to rethink their relationship with religion, which is part of what Modern Ark is about, when it isn't about vampires (in the sense of Stoker, not Meyer).

If you've actually read all of this, thank you and congratulations.  I suppose it's another way of restating my goals for 2013, plus being thankful that I have some people I know personally who may very well be rooting for me.

The Seven Books That Follow "Seven Thunders"

With a nod to PT Dilloway's recent Scarlet Knight timeline/outline for future volumes, I thought I'd give you a sneak at the bigger picture for my current WIP, Seven Thunders, which is part of the greater Space Corps saga, which is something I've developed for almost twenty years.

Before doing so, however, let me just put in a word or two as to why I'm finally writing Seven Thunders, after initially conceiving it in 1998, and why I feel like announcing the rest of the series.  For one, I've written a number of manuscripts at this point (including Modern Ark and Minor Contracts, which I've talked a little about previously, as well as the Yoshimi trilogy, but more on that in 2013), and so have gained a certain level of confidence in my ability to write books I'm satisfied with.  But I'm also beginning to see where my vision can fit in.  Thanks to certain movie and television developments of the past ten years, I've been able to see past some of my original sources of inspiration, Star Trek and Star Wars.  Peter Jackson's Tolkien films, for instance, or Harry Potter, even George R.R. Martin's newfound wide success thanks to Game of Thrones on HBO.  These have widened the public's popular reception for science fiction and fantasy (at a certain point, Space Corps really starts to blend the two genres).  It's not hard to see how the recent past has made it cool to be a geek.

Anyway, that's not really here nor there.  Space Corps is my baby.  I've nursed it to the point of obsession.  It's time to start introducing it to the world.  Seven Thunders, as I've discussed in the past, owes a great debt to the War of 1812, so it's only appropriate that I've begun to make it known in the world in 2012, the bicentennial of the conflict.  It's about two brothers, however, caught in the cross-hairs of a war between civilizations.  I've learned a great deal about this story I've only thought I've known as I've been writing it.  There were some things about it that could only have happened once it became a reality rather than something floating around in my head (and various notes).

And yet Seven Thunders is only the beginning.  One way or another, the saga will continue:

• The Dark Side of Space, which in many ways is a direct prequel to the story.
• The Fateful Lightning, which in many ways is a direct sequel.
• A Tremor of Bones, which in many ways is my favorite Space Corps story.
• The Feud We Keep With Space, which mirrors many of the elements of Seven Thunders.
• Dead Letters, which brings the timeline into entirely new territory.
• The Second Coming, which plays even wilder games with the timeline.
• The Universe and You, which is an indirect prequel to Seven Thunders.

 Should be fun.  You have the Space Corps scoop right here.  Years from now you'll thank me!

The Age of Convolution

We're living in a weird kind of world.  I'm sure most of you know that already.  Part of the benefit of enjoying the arts is getting to be entertained rather than frustrated by this.

Here I'm thinking of Oliver Stone's new movie Savages, which was released over the summer and has just come to [insert home video market of your choosing].  There're a lot of ways to view it, either as the latest of his mostly-violent-popcorn-flicks (see: Natural Born Killers, U-Turn) or as the latest of this year's mostly-violent-popcorn-flicks-by-various-directors (see: Seven Psychopaths, Killing Them Softly), or even as a new version of Traffic (which was itself based on a prior incarnation of something called...Traffic).

Savages is about the modern drug trade scene (as opposed to the '70s drug trade scene as seen in American Gangster, or the '80s scene as seen in Scarface or the '90s drug scene as seen in Trainspotting or the '00s scene as seen in...Traffic), but it's not just that (although Stone and some of his critics who've softened since some of his more polarizing efforts, which culminated in Alexander, would have you believe it's just a mostly-violent-popcorn-flick).  It's about the horribly convoluted business of the drug trade, but it can also be about the horribly convoluted business of any business.

I think we're living in an age of transition.  I think most people can see that, but even after the great recession begun in 2008 that exposed the horrifying number of ways that lots of businesses were doing business very badly and are still trying to get away with it today (Occupy Wall Street, which ultimately failed, was an attempt to remind everyone that we have definitely not solved those problems, although peasants have been revolting ineffectually against the system for many centuries).

The reason why I say that we're in an age of transition, which anyone can see for themselves, is that more and more the little people are attempting to exert themselves.  The big people are certainly fortifying themselves, but the little people are trying to operate more and more on their own.  That's what the fad of crowdsourcing is all about.  It's the next iteration of all the illegal file downloading people were doing at the turn of the millennium, which caused such a revolution in the creative business model and brought us a lot of things with a small "i" at the start of it.

The short of it is that the little people are trying to get control of their own affairs.  This works really well, to a certain extent.  Of course, these little people realize from the start that this is only possible by building a huge network of support.  This is of course what brought us the old model that got us to where we are today.  The difference is that these people are theoretically learning how to do this without any one person gaining an inordinate share of the profits.  It's about the work more than the money.

Basically it's the monetary system that's in a form of transition, but because there are a few people (as there has always been) who really, really believe that money is the ultimate goal of everything, this is a process that is going to take some time.

Anyway, the Age of Convolution happens when all the people scrambling to figure out their place in the new system butt heads.  In a lot of ways, Breaking Bad has been demonstrating this for years, and a lot of TV viewers really enjoy it.  Savages is like the movie version of Breaking Bad, if that makes it easier for you.  Instead of a cancer patient looking to solve his problems by (to my mind illogically) creating bigger ones, we get two young guys making their money and also becoming involved in something far bigger than they realized.

Stone often makes movies about people falling into situations they did not expect and being swallowed whole.  It's practically the only movie he makes, actually.  In Savages you mostly don't have to worry about the politics.  One of the young men is a former soldier, however, and so our current wars are at least name-checked (the connection between war and drugs is not made as clear as in American Gangster, but it's the same; it's worth noting that the current comic book Before Watchmen: Comedian has touched on the same subject).

The problem is that these guys can't exist in a bubble.  They're closely monitored by an agent of the DEA and are actively being recruited by a Mexican drug cartel, the latter of which leads to a situation very similar to No Country for Old Men (the one actor I will reference directly is Benicio del Toro, who in this particular role is very similar to Javier Bardem, a physical presence, as del Toro always is, that haunts the movie and defines it without having to do much more than be the manifestation of the violence at the heart of the story).

What looks at the beginning of the movie like a fairly simple living arrangement for our two young guys (and their beach bunny mutual lover) quickly devolves into, yes, a convoluted affair.  Not convoluted as in Stone doesn't help us figure it out, but that he lets us know all too well what's really going on.

That's what makes it topical, that's what draws me back to my point about the changing nature of the world we're living in.  That's basically what's going on everywhere.  Everyone's trying to get their piece of the pie and they don't really care who they step on.  They're stumbling around.  That's the nature of a transition period.

In a lot of ways, Stone is most closely echoing Shakespeare.  I'm not calling Oliver Stone our modern William Shakespeare (that's an argument for another day), but that's exactly what Shakespeare was doing in his plays.  Think about it.  Romeo + Juliet is all about two families that outmaneuver themselves so cleverly, with so many convoluted things going on, that they don't realize the biggest losers are the smallest pieces on the chess board, the title characters who are just a pair of lovebirds.  That's Hamlet, that's Othello (though admittedly it's Iago pulling all the strings), that's King Lear, that's Macbeth, that's every single one of them.

Shakespeare was writing at a time where England was in a marked transition thanks to Henry VIII's religious reforms, which caused a cosmic shift in the balance of society.  Elizabeth I caused a lot of stabilization to occur, but she was also reigning at the start of the the exploration of the New World, and massive changes were still on their way.  In each of his plays, Shakespeare writes about a paradigm shift.

Our shift is all about globalization.  Some of us embrace it, some of us fear it, but it's an inescapable fact that it's happening.  It's drastically affected the economics of every nation in the world, and we're still trying to figure out how to stabilize the process.  It's mostly a problem of figuring out how we can begin to respect everyone and where their specific productivity exists.  So much of the past was defined by physical resources, and yet now we're discovering that more and more it's the intangibles that we must depend on.  Everyone knows the statistics that show how the physical resources are consumed unequally.  That's what's a part of the transition, why so many people are warning of environmental catastrophe (to force those consuming more to rethink their policies).

Anyway, the convoluted nature of the world is something that's surfacing again in our fiction.  Savages is one example.  I'm writing about it in my writer's blog because this is exactly what I do in my fiction.  I guess I tend to write stories of this nature because that's what I've known in my own life, how forces that have been building to this moment and continue to develop have affected me throughout my life.  I guess I didn't really realize it until now.  I'm not plugging a book.  I just renamed one of my manuscripts, Finnegan.  It's now going to be known as Modern Ark, for any number of reasons.  That's a title I've been playing with for years.  I named a poem after the term.  It refers in one sense to the biblical tale of Noah's Ark, which was all about God's wrath and how a few people escaped it along with a lot of animals.  I've read a number of books that reinterpreted it for modern readers (the two best being Not Wanted On the Voyage and The Preservationist).  Modern Ark is not about Noah's Ark, however.  It began as a vampire story.  I thought it was going to stay a vampire story.  I proved myself wrong fairly soon.  There ended up being a lot of convoluted relationships that consumed the story, some associations that Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers comic would appreciate, characters that never meet because some of them are biblical and therefore thousands of years in the past.

Not all of my manuscripts are like Modern Ark, but it's an effort that I've tried selling to publishers with no success.  I guess the recent developments concerning the fate of Yoshimi (which I'm now thinking I'll either sell around or sell myself in installments, the latter of which is similar to how Stephen King did The Green Mile and Michael Abayomi has done his science fiction epic).  I'm beginning to see why it's so difficult, because not many people write like that.  But there's an audience.  If Oliver Stone can make Savages (and there being any number of examples of other filmmakers making similar movies, and even William frickin' Shakespeare), then I'm not so far off the mark.  It's a direct reflection of the world we're living in, after all.  Maybe it's not always popular to be such a direct reflection of complicated times, but that's another thing that makes the whole affair so brilliantly convoluted.

Maybe you're free of such relationships.  Maybe everything runs smoothly for you.  Maybe everything is simple.  But I doubt that.  Everything about everything is increasingly convoluted.  Sometimes it's beneficial to shine a light on a giant mess.  You'll see a lot of ugliness.  But you'll also see beauty where you never thought it could exist before.  One man's trash is another man's treasure, after all.  It's all a game of perspective, and that's what art at its best can give you.  I like escapism as much as the next guy, but sometimes I like to have a little more.