Name that pup!

I’m feeling lazy. Let’s have a contest!

You guys might remember Rae has a bit of a thing about coyotes—if by “thing” I can mean “massive childhood trauma.” Rae lost her childhood friend, Sam, when her abusive family put her in a car and drove off with her, and Rae was unable to stop the car because she ran into a menacing coyote in the woods that blocked her from cutting off the car’s path. Rae has been creeped out by coyotes ever since, and really doesn’t like them. Late in the first volume of Masks, however, she had to face her fear in the form of her own memories—a spectral coyote that forced her to answer a question in order to rescue Trevor.

Now, I’m not dropping too many spoilers here, but the adorable little coyote at the top of this blog entry will play a small but important role in Volume 2, helping Rae deal with some of that trauma (and providing much-needed cuteness). But I’m having a devil of a time naming him! So whoever can come up with the right name—the one that clicks in my brain and helps me figure him out—will win a signed copy of Masks Volume 1, in either paper or in finished-soon-I-promise ebook form. (Yes, I can sign an ebook. Win the contest and find out how.) The winner will also receive a limited-edition (because I don’t have them made very often) Masks button or two, including the design above—and a handmade Pocket Coyote of your very own, to be named whatever you like. You’ll also be mentioned, by name, in the acknowledgments of Volume 2.

Now, here’s how to enter! Simply leave your suggested coyote pup name in a comment on this blog entry. You may enter as many times as you like, but each name counts as only one entry; if ten people enter the name “Spot” and I choose that name, the first one to suggest it gets the prize. Except I’ve just suggested “Spot,” so that one’s taken now.

Ground rules (also known as “things I won’t even consider, so don’t bother suggesting”):

1. No naughty words. This is a PG-13 site, so the pup won’t be named anything you can’t say twice in a PG-13 movie. Naughty-word suggestions will not make it past the comment moderator to be entered in the contest, so you’d basically be wasting your time.

2. No Wile E. Coyote references. So no Wiley, no Whylee, none of that. In the unlikely event Masks gets famous enough to attract the attention of lawyers, I don’t need Warner Bros. suing me for copyright infringement.

3. No Cervantes jokes (unless they’re really unusually clever). There’s already been a Don Coyote cartoon, so this pup will not be named Don or Dawn or anything of the kind.

4. The pup cannot be named Kirby, or any variation thereof. Sorry, but Amadeus Cho’s coyote pup was named Kerberos, shortened to Kirby, and because I enjoyed the adventures of Kirby and Amadeus, I consider the name permanently taken.

Other than that, the sky’s the limit! I can tell you so far that the coyote is male, and basically orphaned as a pup; Rae will name him, somewhat unwillingly; he will really like eating black licorice; and he will, of course, be more than he appears, including just a bit magical (in the manner of the Masked Rider … whatever manner that is). He’ll also be a bit bitey when he first shows up, with a habit of gnawing on people’s fingers, as young canines tend to do.

I will announce the winner … ehh, pretty much when I’ve got one. But the sooner you suggest your name, the sooner you can win all that lovely loot!

What's next for MASKS

 

Well, Masks is rapidly barreling toward a conclusion over on Pocket Coyote, I’m working on the ebook, and people are starting to come at me with that special glass-eyed stare and ask, “When is Volume 2 coming out?”

Yeah, okay, only two people have asked me that, but I hate conversation enough that I’m going to blog about it so I can refer people to this blog next time they ask. So this is a time-saver for me, and a sneak peek for you guys. Win-win, right?

(Don’t give me that hurt look. I like talking to all of you, I really do … it’s just that I have to curl up in a ball for an hour afterward. I used to get migraines from chocolate, too, and it didn’t stop me from loving it—or eating far too much.)

(There was going to be a point to that anecdote, I swear.)

So what’s next in the magical world of Masks? Well, without giving too much away, I can tell you that the current serial will end with Chapter 32, after seven months of weekly superheroic action. The main plot will be tied up at the end of the serial—we’ll find out Cobalt’s secret, the good will end happily and the bad unhappily (well, mostly; I have mentioned that I like to kill off characters, right?), and most of the trailing threads will be tied up. There will be a clearly identifiable ending, with just a bit of a teaser for future adventures. Then we’ll take a break. Just a short one.

No whining, now! How many TV shows produce 32 episodes in a single season? Or air one episode a week, without interruption, for seven months? This stuff takes time to produce, and I’m working three jobs, so there will be a little bit of a delay before the action picks up again. You’ll probably want a bit of a lie-down after Chapter 32 anyway, and if you’re absolutely desperate for more Masks, you can buy the Volume 1 paperback or the ebook (available soon!), each of which contains a previously unpublished 4,500-word short story, “The Missing,” that takes place after the end of the first serial and drops lovely little clues about the second one.

Oh, did I say second serial? Yes, there’s going to be one. I’m not getting as much traffic as I’d like (invite your friends, for God’s sake, it’s a free book!), but I’m getting some, so I’m planning a big Volume 2 launch. Just not yet.

I have to finish work on The Novel before I do anything else, and work on the ebook and a couple of videos, but I expect to start writing Volume 2 around the time Volume 1 wraps up on Pocket Coyote. To tide you over while you’re waiting (or recuperating), I’m planning my usual madness for Free Comic Book Day, a big free story that, er, doesn’t have a title yet but will be a complete rip-roaring adventure and also set up quite a bit of what happens in Volume 2. This story will expand the Masks universe by introducing three heroes who haven’t appeared in the series before—one of whom is the Black Mask. That’s right, the Black Mask will actually show up in person instead of in grainy video footage, he’ll bring two unlikely pals along with him, and you’ll get to find out at least one rather embarrassing secret of his. That story will hit the web—as a PDF, as a Pocket Coyote entry, and as a free download—on May 5, 2012. There will be pictures, although I’m not sure yet who will draw them.

Meanwhile on Pocket Coyote, there will be more news, regularly—the release of the ebook, at least two (maybe three!) videos, and lots of spoilers about Volume 2, which I hope to start up sometime in early July. I’ll be ramping up the advertising, too, and there will be opportunities for you guys to get involved in promoting the Masks universe.

Because I really do need your help, folks. Tell your friends and family, tell strangers, tell your Facebook buddies—this series is awesome, and you can read all of it (well, except the bonus features) for free! And because some of them will very sensibly point out that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and ask what I’m getting out of all this work, you can tell them that as long as they’re looking at the site, I’m getting exactly what I want—eyeballs. All I want is proof of concept; I want a bunch of people reading my stories each week so I can shove my raw traffic numbers in the faces of people who think nobody reads my stories. I want people to read my stories. You like to read my stories. You are people. Win-win.

As for what’s in Volume 2 … well, I can’t say too much without giving away the ending of Volume 1, but let me see how many hints I can drop. 

1. Dead people will turn up in unexpected places.

2. Romance will bloom in other, equally unexpected places.

3. Trevor’s foxhounds will catch up with him.

4. Rae will make a new friend and a new enemy, perhaps at the same time.

5. The secret cause of the superhero purge will be revealed.

6. There will be a truly ridiculous amount of running, punching, and stuff blowing up.

7. Trevor will get kissed and concussed again (probably in rapid succession).

8. Rae will wear leather pants, but not for the usual reasons.

9. The Masked Rider has a plan.

10. There will be a cute fuzzy animal in a prominent role. And Moon and Soleil will be in the story, too.

There, I think that’s enough spoiling for now, don’t you? I can’t wait to see what happens next …

Picture puzzle

Sorry, guys, not a lot to say today. I’m neck-deep in page layouts and the like for the collected edition of Masks, and I’m in what I think is the exact middle of writing a short story, “The Missing,” to be included in that volume. So in lieu of something genuinely interesting, and because I just wrote a scene with these characters in it, here’s Nicole’s illustration for Chapter 27. 

Yes, I’ve already posted this image on Facebook, but I want to point something out right now and establish that it’s not a mistake on Nicole’s part.

See that horse? That’s the Masked Rider’s horse, obviously. And that’s the Masked Rider behind him. The Rider just rode up on that horse and then dismounted. There’s also some fire in the shot, but they didn’t do that. 

Notice anything missing from this picture? Something to do with the horse, perhaps? Give it a moment; you’ll see it. You don’t even need to know much about horses to figure it out. I’ll wait.

Trippy, huh? I just want to say that Nicole didn’t make a mistake. I told her to leave that out. You may consider this a spoiler about the true nature of the Masked Rider. And his horse. 

I look forward to seeing your theories in the comments …

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 19

Well, what do you guys think of this one, huh? Tell me I surprised you at least a little. Go on, tell me. No, seriously, I’ll cry otherwise.

Oh, all right. This chapter is one of those points where the differences between Trevor’s point of view and Rae’s become really apparent. Trevor’s actions in the previous chapter made perfect sense to him, but to Rae they were absolutely crazy. And of course the explanation only makes the whole situation worse.

I enjoyed bending genres in this chapter. I deliberately wrote Rae creeping through the tunnels as if she were in a horror movie. One of the things that always intrigued me about superhero comics is the way they combined genres in utterly insane ways. They’d have team-ups between kung fu masters and wizards and secret agents and vampires and space aliens and cowboys and time travelers and God knows whatall else. You never knew when your favorite superhero would find himself in the middle of a horror movie, or a spy thriller, or a cosmic odyssey. And the superheroes mostly take it for granted that these things happen. So the horror overtones in this chapter were my way of reminding everyone that in a book with a ghost cowboy, a teleporting super-commando, a were-tiger and the last son of a dying planet all running around, anything can happen. And it usually does.

Moving on!

I know I’m going to get asked about this, so I’ll mention it now: the “artist’s impression” Rae mentions was planted waaaaayyy back in Chapter 5, when Rae was griping about her bad press. Yeah, I plan that far back. Anything can happen!

Once again, the conflict in this chapter comes down to whom you believe. We’ve seen in Trevor’s flashbacks that he’s haunted by the train bombing, but do we believe his version of events—that he screwed up—or Rae’s—that he’s a murderous terrorist? And do we believe Rae’s story about finding the Peregrine costume in a box, or do we think she had something to do with Jude’s disappearance? Don’t worry, we’ll get into all these issues in later chapters.

The Masked Rider makes another appearance in this chapter, but you might notice the change in Rae’s behavior—for the first time, instead of hiding from him, she tries to chase him down. I think this is the first scene where we see how reckless Rae’s capable of being. We know she’s scared of the Rider, but that doesn’t matter when someone she loves is at stake. She’s willing to literally chase after the angel of death. She doesn’t do the greatest job of it—there’s no way she’s going to catch that horse on foot—but this is a major turning point for Rae, and you’ll see how it affects her as we move into the last third of the book. This won’t be the last time she does something crazy because she’s run out of non-crazy options.

The next chapter gave me an interesting bit of trouble. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but the chapters in Masks alternate points of view—Rae gets all the odd chapters and Trevor gets all the even ones. Trevor’s just been kidnapped by Cobalt, so the next chapter would logically show what happens to people after Cobalt takes them. But … well, what you see isn’t always what you get, okay? Just come back next Wednesday for a guest star you won’t forget …

This week’s soundtrack is “Reason to Breathe” by Acacia Sears. (Personally, I prefer the recording on her album, "Dialtones", but I couldn't embed it here.) Something about this song speaks to the misunderstanding between Rae and Trevor: “Couldn’t we please just try this again from hello? / Take back the history, make believe we just didn’t know …” 

Reason to Breathe

Pocket Coyote gets medieval!

I’m up to my eyeballs in revisions this week—getting everything done for the collected edition of Masks—so this week I’m making do with an interesting photo and a few random observations/teasers/spoilers from the later chapters of Masks.

First, the photo! That is Pocket Coyote sharing the frame with the lovely Jeri Westerson, author of the Crispin Guest “medieval noir” mysteries. Ms. Westerson is the only living mystery author whose books I collect, and it’s partly because of her richly drawn medieval world and her alternately poignant and hilarious character interactions. Even when I don’t care about finding the murderer (which is frequently the case even in the most well-written murder mystery), I’ll keep reading to find out what happens to Crispin, a disgraced former knight with a penchant for wine and Aristotle, or his sidekick, Jack Tucker, a street urchin and former thief who’s trying to grow up just like Crispin (much to Crispin’s chagrin). If you enjoy a good medieval murder mystery with a dollop of sex thrown in, I can’t recommend this series enough. And no, I’m not being paid to say this—unless you count a nifty plastic souvenir sword that doubles as a ballpoint pen.

Ms. Westerson was signing books and giving a presentation on Canterbury Cathedral at Book Carnival in Orange yesterday. After much wheedling, I managed to get a photo of Pocket Coyote lounging among Ms. Westerson’s collection of “visual aids”—he does seem to have his eye on the sword, doesn’t he? In retrospect, I’m glad I got him out of there when I did.

And now, random things I noticed while revising:

1. I really seem to like the word “vicious,” but only in revisions. It shows up twice in red ink and not at all in black. Odd.

2. Once the Masked Rider starts talking, he really doesn’t know when to shut up.

3. Rae has one of the more interesting methods of dealing with her childhood traumas. I sort of wish I could do something similar, but unfortunately I don’t have the cooperation of the Angel of Death.

4. I can check one more item off my bucket list; I got a superhero to make a “your mom” joke.

5. In writing “Talisman,” I almost had Trevor use just five smooth stones in his sling, a la David and Goliath. I eventually rejected the idea because I couldn’t think of a way for him to take out all his enemy’s footsoldiers with just five rocks and still have enough ammunition for the final fight. Evidently I forgot that I’d already done a David-and-Goliath homage at the climax of Masks. Next time someone asks, this is why Trevor uses more than five rocks in “Talisman.” That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

6. My favorite line from the climactic chapters of Masks: “Ain’t you read your fairy tales? The little girl lost in the woods is dangerous. Your enemies don’t know their stories. Otherwise they’d know better than to let you near the witches and the wolves.” I may have to put that on a T-shirt …

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 12

This chapter goes all the way back to one of the stories that got me into graduate school. Seriously.

In 2006, I got an interesting offer from the scholarship foundation that had paid my tuition at USC. They would pay for me to get a master’s degree as well as a bachelor’s—if I could find a California university that would accept me into a master’s program within the next, oh, three months. There followed a completely insane period of midnight research, intensive soul-searching, and frantic test-taking. I registered on Monday for the Graduate Record Examination (like the SAT, but for grad school) and took the test that Friday. My official CD-ROM containing my official test-prep software didn’t arrive until after I’d taken the exam. (Luckily I’m one of those people who naturally test well—yes, we exist, and yes, I agree it’s unfair.) But the only part of the application process that genuinely worried me—not the tests, not the transcripts, not the thousand-and-one forms—was the writing sample. To get into a master’s program in writing, I had to submit professional-quality writing in my intended genre. Because I wanted to major in fiction writing, that meant short stories or a section of a novel.

I can bluff my way through a test. I can bluff my way through an awful lot of bureaucracy, and I can sweet-talk department secretaries until the cows come home. But you can’t con a writing sample like you can con a department, and I didn’t have time to write something especially for the application. I had to pull stories out of my files and polish them up in the hope that they would be judged worthy, and I knew the stories would receive more scrutiny than any other part of my application. Since Masks was the largest, richest, most complex thing I’d ever written, that meant picking the best Masks chapters.

One of those chapters happened to be about the Masked Rider—a short story told in terms of a stack of comic books read by a young boy. Stories from different eras of comics had wildly different takes on the Rider, and the few commonalities between the different mini-episodes explored his character in ways I found interesting. I don’t remember all the details I stuffed in there now, but I do recall that the Teddy Roosevelt sequence also included a cameo by Annie Oakley and a reference to the fact that the Masked Rider limps when he walks, which is why he so rarely gets off the horse. He tells Oakley that he’s had the limp all his life, but it got worse after the Battle of Gettysburg. Make of that what you will …

Oh, and the whole thing was inspired by this letter which I read reprinted in some random old book. The chance to combine T.R. with Buffalo Bill Cody and superheroes was just too good to pass up. And I was quite astonished when I actually got into the program ... especially when I met my fellow students and realized I was almost always going to be the only "genre fiction" writer in any class. It makes me wonder sometimes what the admissions committee saw in my ghost cowboy.

Then we come to Rae’s confrontation with Mike. I’ve heard from readers with two different interpretations of why Rae says these things to him. Some people seem to think that she’s conning him, crying crocodile tears to get him to back off and leave Trevor undiscovered. Certainly the fact that she starts crying so suddenly indicates to me that she’s faking it, at least a little. But I’m mostly in the other camp—I think she genuinely is upset about the way the alpha-track kids are privileged over the normal kids, and she draws on real feelings to scare Mike off here.

Part of that, I’m sure, comes from my own upbringing and the way it worked into Rae’s character. I spent a goodly portion of my childhood in one of the richest counties in the United States—but in one of the less affluent parts of that county. I went to private religious schools, where I was usually on the low end of the socioeconomic scale. My family wasn’t on food stamps or anything, but I was the kid who wore K-Mart clearance clothing instead of name brands, the one who never bought hot lunches because they were too expensive. I was the scruffy one, the one from the blue-collar hometown, and at least among girls, it didn’t matter that I was a probably-certifiable genius—I just never measured up to their standards.

It didn’t matter at first, but as I got older and met classmates who had access to pricey private tutors and extensive test-prep programs, I felt like I had to work twice as hard at my studies to overtake the kids who were far above me on the social ladder. I had to compete with people who, in my mind, got to cheat—so I competed extra hard. I was a straight-A student, the girl who won more academic honors than she could carry, and that was my ammunition in the class wars. “What I did over the summer” essays, for my classmates, were about vacations to far-off places; I would go to the public library, pick a random subject I didn’t know much about, and read every book in that section until I was satisfied. I was the classroom expert on everything from carousel-horse carving to Aztec human sacrifice. It helped that I genuinely enjoyed learning, but when my classmates complained that I blew the curve on tests, I apologized for spoiling their day—and then went and studied even harder for the next test, because unlike them, I couldn’t afford to get a B.

Now, Rae comes from a relatively wealthy family, what with her father being a well-known televangelist, so I applied my class anxiety to her dealings with superpowered heroes. I met enough kids growing up who thought their parents’ money made them my natural superiors that I enjoyed blacking bullies’ eyes; considering Rae’s history with bullies, it only made sense that she’d attack powers snobs with the same ferocity. And so she uses her one real advantage—her intellect—to keep up with the superhuman Joneses. I think she does pretty well.

And then there’s Rae’s missing friend. She’s based on a true story, as it happens, but I think she deserves a blog entry of her own. Maybe someday soon …

This week’s soundtrack is Johnny Cash’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Further On Up the Road”, one of the songs I use as the Masked Rider’s theme. (The other is, of all things, Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Pony Man.” I never said I was sane, guys!)

By the way, guys, time's running out to download "Talisman," the short story I wrote in 48 hours to raise money for some needy kids. I need to actually buy the stuff for them, so the sale will be closed and the story taken down on Sunday night. I have no plans to reprint "Talisman" in any future collections, so if you want to know what Trevor was doing in the middle of the Night Lords' War, or you want to meet his mentor face-to-face, or you just want a bonus Masks fix for this week, you have until the end of the weekend to pony up a whole two dollars for a story twice as long as a typical Masks chapter. All proceeds go directly to buy much-needed school supplies for the children of a needy local family ... who, by the way, don't know yet that I'm doing this, because the teacher who told me about them is going to surprise them with the goodies. :)

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 1

Hello, and welcome to the first installment of the commentary track for Masks! In these probably-weekly posts, I'll dissect all the hard work I do to entertain you over on PocketCoyote, offer a few tips for the aspiring writers out there, and generally make an idiot of myself. Which is exactly what commentary tracks are for, right? Right!

So here's how the commentary starts:
 

Beginnings are hard.

I have a bit of an obsession with openings. I compulsively re-read the chapter in Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing that deals with first words, first sentences, first paragraphs. A beloved high-school drama teacher used to tell me that, “As long as you have an opening and an ending, you have a show.” While that’s not strictly true of novels—people may sit through the dull middle of a play but they won’t slog through the dull middle of a novel—I have always tried to abide by his advice and provide bang-up beginnings and endings.

The first chapter of Masks came from several places. First off, I knew I had to introduce the character of Rae, and I'd have to go back to my original concept for the character. Waaaaayyy back when I started writing her as a pimply fourteen-year-old (long story), she was my idea of what it would take for a kid who didn't even have her driver's license, let alone superpowers, to become a hero. I had her inherit a costume and a name, and I gave her a bit of a secret in her past that would motivate her to jump off rooftops and punch Captain Catastrophe in the face. And while I've written her at many other stages of her career, I knew that this time I had to take her right back to that beginning--a scrappy teenage girl, making things up as she went along, zip-tying the bad guys to street signs. (Though she does have a driver's license this time, mostly because I had to cut the character who taught her to drive illegally. Ah, well, you can't have everything.)

The big goal with Rae in this chapter was to make her someone you guys could root for. I knew from experience that Trevor would provide all the angst and darkness and mystery and bad-boy appeal I could ever want, but it would be Rae’s job to carry the audience’s heart until Trevor softened up a little. In Masks, both Trevor and Rae become heroes—but only Rae starts out as someone you might actually want to talk to on the bus.

So I played up her nerves in this chapter, and borrowed a beloved moment from an earlier draft—the bit with the safety on the death ray, which my beta readers kept pointing out as the moment that won them over to Rae’s side. The moment also introduces the closest thing Rae has to a superpower—her ability to get into other people’s minds and understand how they think. She’s not a mind-reader or a shape-shifter, but she is uncannily good with people, mostly by instinct. Watch that brain of hers--it will get her into trouble before this story is through.

Second, I had to include the Masked Rider. This chapter introduces the Stetson-wearing angel of death himself! The Rider started out, years ago, as my homage to cowboy heroes in the comic books, and the fact that they all but died out with the arrival of the Silver Age superheroes in the early 1960s. Considering their roots in the pulps, and the dime novels before them, it made sense that death, to a superhero, might look like a masked horseman. He came in here because I needed to get rid of a lot of superheroes so that no one would wonder why the real heroes weren't stopping Rae from doing her thing. But the Rider’s a lot more than a simple omen of doom. Masks plays a lot with mythology, and you’ll see how he fits into our little modern myth. I needed his appearance to be brief and scary, and so I wrote it like I imagined most of his appearances would go from an outsider's point of view—he’s in and out, we never see everything he’s doing, but he scares the bejeezus out of everyone while he’s around.

Finally, I needed “The Wannabe” to be fun. I wanted a rollicking superhero adventure, a coming-of-age story for a very unusual girl, and just a bit of a scare for people who thought they knew how the tale was going to go. I knew there was plenty of darkness and trouble on the horizon in Chapter 2, so this chapter is all about what it’s like to be a superhero—the good parts and the bad, but mostly the good. There’s lots of running and tumbling and kicking people in the knee and making jokes at the expense of the bad guy, and a few moments of wonder mixed in with the terror. I really do think that’s what being a superhero would be like—exhausting, exhilarating, mysterious, and occasionally necessitating a change of underwear.

For this chapter, as for each chapter in the book, I have selected a song that connects to the content or the characters. (This may end up being the strangest Pandora playlist ever.) Since this chapter focused so closely on a rookie superhero, I’ve chosen “What If?”, from the filker Tom Smith’s excellent album The Last Hero on Earth.  Years ago, I wrote a Masks screenplay that used “What If?” as a superhero theme song, and I believe it still applies. Enjoy, and do check out the rest of the album if you like it—if you buy through Bandcamp, the money goes to Mr. Smith, not Steve Jobs.

Next time: Chapter 2, Trevor’s demons, and a little Social D.