A Halloween hallucination

It’s a strange feeling to meet your character in the real world.

I’m told that Sir Terry Pratchett visited the set during the filming of the TV version of his excellent novel Hogfather. He had a cameo role in the production, sharing a scene with perhaps his most iconic character, but actually running into the guy was a little jarring. You see, his co-star was Death—the Grim Reaper himself—robes, scythe, and all. Death makes a personal appearance in nearly every novel in Pratchett’s Discworld series (37 of 39), and takes center stage in Hogfather, where he takes over the role of a Santa-Claus-like figure after the fat man’s untimely demise. (Imagine children waiting up for Santa and getting a skeleton down the chimney instead. Exactly—hilarious!) So you can imagine Pratchett’s reaction when the first person he met on-set was a 6’7” Dutchman in a black robe with a polished white skull for a face. On the one hand, it’s delightful to see the fruits of your imagination brought so vividly to life. On the other, it does tend to make you worry about your sanity—and, in the case of Sir Terry, your impending mortality as well.

So here’s what Johanna looks like in her custom-tailored Peregrine costume, which you’ll all be seeing later on the cover of the collected edition of Masks:

I was happy to find the costume came out pretty close to Nicole’s original drawings. The tunic turned out to be a bit more complicated than I expected—any big sewing project always does—but I think it’s still within the abilities of a talented sixteen-year-old with sufficient motivation. The real problem was appliquéing the Peregrine insignia on the back, which was probably eight or ten hours’ very fine and fiddly work. (Next time I design a superhero costume, the insignia is going to be a circle or something just as easy to sew!)

I’m rather proud of the pin, though. I was unable to get a metal fabricator on board, and unlike Rae, I don’t have access to a metal shop, so I had to make do with polystyrene and the judicious use of a Dremel rotary tool. It was my first time using a Dremel, and I am inordinately proud that I didn’t injure myself in the process. Last time I checked, I still held my high school’s record for the largest number of objects broken in a single chemistry experiment, so I fully expected to spend my weekend in the emergency room, but I didn’t even come close to cutting myself, and with a little touch-up paint, the results weren’t too bad. My only real complaint about the pin is the mirrored finish; I don’t think Rae would wear anything that reflective, but I didn’t know how shiny the plastic would be when I ordered it, and it was either that or take my chances applying silver paint to flat black styrene. Still and all, not a bad job, and any little inconsistencies can be fixed digitally when I take the cover photos.

Still and all, it was weird to look at. I’ve known Johanna for years, but as soon as she pulled that hood up over her hair, it was like someone else was standing there. She borrowed my favorite black bandana to use as a facecloth, something I’ve done myself as part of other costumes, and even though I’d seen and handled every part of the costume while making it, something about seeing her pull the bandana up over the bridge of her nose transformed her into someone I didn’t know in quite the same way. I found myself taking mental notes on little things—the way the folds of the bandana settled around her neck when she tugged her mask down, the way her eyes moved in the shadow of the hood—as if I were observing a stranger.

So this is what it’s like to hallucinate, I thought as I put my camera up between myself and my creation.

There was a little bit of pride involved (hey, look, my character design actually works!) and a little trepidation (gee, I hope this doesn’t look stupid to everyone else), but mostly it was just weird. I remarked that I was probably more excited about seeing Johanna in the costume than I would have been about wearing it myself. Johanna asked why.

“Because,” I said, “if you dress up as my sixteen-year-old character, it’s cute. If I dress up as my sixteen-year-old character, it’s creepy.”

But that wasn’t the only reason, of course. There’s more than a little of me in Rae, and I can’t help wondering … if I start dressing up as my own creation, how will anyone tell where she ends and I begin?

Will I still be there at all?

Oh, well. Happy Halloween, everybody!

A MASKS Primer, Part One: What If?

We’ve had a bunch of new folk join the Facebook page of late (hi, Mr. Olson’s minions!), so I thought I’d take a detour this month and blog, in one convenient place, everything you need to know about Masks and how it came to be.

Masks is my first novel (at least, my first novel likely to be published). It’s based on a series of stories I began writing when I was fourteen years old (more on that tomorrow). It began with a question: what would it take to make me—a nerdy, emotionally scarred teenage girl who didn’t even have a driver’s license, let alone powers—a superhero? And after some thought, I came to a surprising conclusion.

All it would take … is one good reason.

Masks is about that reason. It’s about what takes people who may seem ordinary, or even weak or silly or cowardly, and makes them heroes. No matter what anyone else says or does. Everyone’s reason is different—but every reason matters.

In Masks, being a superhero is a career. There are superheroes in every major city on Earth … except Los Angeles (my hometown, as it happens). Here, an unknown enemy mysteriously killed off all the heroes about ten years ago, and almost no new good guys moved in to replace them. That’s where one of our two main characters comes in. Rae Masterson is fighting the good fight as Peregrine, a wisecracking heroine with an arsenal of tools and weapons that once belonged to the city’s dead “masks”. Rae is brave, intelligent, and passionate about doing the right thing. She’s also sixteen years old and completely devoid of superpowers. In any other city, someone in a cape would have picked her up by the scruff of her neck and called her parents, but L.A. is so short of heroes that even the cops look the other way. Someone has to stand up to the mad scientists and super-terrorists and monsters from the sewers, and Peregrine is all they’ve got.

Rae pours everything she has into her life as an amateur mask. She is estranged from her parents, who travel a lot and don’t know what their daughter does at night. She has no friends at school, where she makes fantastic grades (she’s scary smart) but also wears all black and a lot of goth makeup, so there are a lot of freaky rumors about her. As far as Rae is concerned, her real life begins when the sun goes down. As Rae, she’s lonely and cut off from other people and angry all the time; as Peregrine, she’s happy and free and has a purpose in life that includes kicking people in the face and playing practical jokes on supervillains.

Rae’s story begins when she sneaks out of school to stop a bank robbery. On her way to the scene of the crime, she passes a boy her age panhandling on the sidewalk. She doesn’t have any money on her, so she pulls the sandwich out of her lunch and hands it to the boy as she runs past him. Moments later, she’s changing into her costume in an alley when the boy walks around the corner and sees her!

That boy, of course, is our other main character. Trevor grew up in Chicago, where he has been training to be a mask since he was six years old. Trevor was adopted and raised as a superhero’s sidekick, so he’s already a master detective and a brilliant hand-to-hand fighter. He probably would have taken over for his mentor someday—except that his mentor disappeared, leaving behind a pool of blood and a whole lot of trouble for Trevor. Trevor has searched all over the world for the man he considers his father, and his last lead has brought him to Los Angeles, where he hopes to solve the mystery once and for all. There’s just one problem—something bad happened to Trevor during his odyssey, something so horrible he’s afraid to talk about it. The other superheroes have turned against him, and he’s on the run from some scary guys he refers to as “the foxhounds.” If he doesn’t find his dad soon, he’ll have a lot more to worry about than weird girls giving him sandwiches.

Trevor deliberately bumps into Rae in the alley, and he steals the key to her secret hideout so he can search it for clues. Rae, meanwhile, goes to stop that bank robbery—only to be upstaged by Cobalt, a well-known armored superhero who’s mysteriously in town and has no patience for superhero wannabes. Even when Rae turns the tables on Captain Catastrophe, the bad guy robbing the bank, and gets him to surrender, Cobalt’s still not happy. In fact, he pulls a gun and tries to shoot Captain Catastrophe in the face!

Now, Rae is just old-fashioned enough to believe good guys don’t shoot bad guys after the bad guys have surrendered. She tricks Cobalt into missing and saves Catastrophe’s life, but now Cobalt wants to silence her before she can tattle on him. Rae is forced to run for her life, and it doesn’t look like she’s going to make it—until she falls, wounded and slipping in and out of consciousness, on the doorstep of her hideout. With Cobalt right behind her. Just as Trevor’s coming out the door.

Trevor is a lot of things, but he still wants very badly to be a hero, and that means he can’t leave the nice girl to die. Trevor uses his long-neglected hero training to fight Cobalt off, and he and Rae are safe—but only until Cobalt finds a way to get them back. If they want to live to see next week, they have to find out why Cobalt wanted Captain Catastrophe dead, and stop him. And if they want to do that, they have to trust each other, which is the single hardest thing in the world for either one of them to do. Especially when they’re both keeping big secrets.

As Rae and Trevor work together, they learn a lot about the world of superheroes and how it works. They go to a bar full of supervillains and make some unexpected friends (and enemies). They cross paths with heroes, villains, and monsters—and one person who’s all three. They meet John Lawrence, a big glowing Boy Scout of a superhero who definitely has his own agenda. And they come to the attention of supernatural forces—a spectral coyote that has stalked Rae since her childhood, and a ghostly horseman called the Masked Rider whose appearance is thought to be a death omen for masks … and who is suddenly very interested in Trevor.

And in spite of all odds—and very much against their wills—Rae and Trevor find themselves drawing closer and closer to each other. Before the story is over, they’ll find out what that reason I mentioned really means—what really makes a hero. And they’ll find out whether saving the day is worth the price … when the price is losing the person you love.

Whew! That’s a lot of story! But worth it, I think you’ll agree. Tomorrow, I’ll post a second entry about how Masks went from scribbles in a secret notebook to a finished novel on its way to publication. And I’ll include a links to some free short stories and some other cool stuff. See you then!

New short story: "The Buddy System"

The story is here! It's up! And it features previously unreleased art by Nicole Le! (She tells me it's a study for a painting, based on a picture I took of the Olympic Boulevard bridge ... somewhere in there this story developed.)

Remember, you can still enter the fan-art and recruitment contests--they run until September 25!

And now, I'm going to go take the rest of my birthday off. Turning off the cell phone ... NOW!
The Buddy System

New short story: "Zephyr Street"

Zephyr Street

How to make your own MASKS T-shirts (and other stuff too)

Okay, here’s how I put together the T-shirts the stylin’ Masks Posse wore to Comic-Con. These directions tell you how to create the image on a black T-shirt, which is considerably harder than on a white one. All images referenced in this post are available in this Photobucket album.

1. Snag the image of Rae and Trevor holding hands—either full-color or black, white, and red. Save it to your computer.

2. Open it using the GIMP image manipulation freeware (available at http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/The_GIMP/gimp.html)

3. Copy the image (right-click + “Copy”).

4. Open a new image in GIMP of the same dimensions (my version was 4844 x 5358 pixels).

5. From the “Layers” menu, select “Add Alpha Channel.”

6. Also from the “Layers” menu, select “Color to Alpha” and set the color to whatever the background color of your image is. (In my case, it was white.)

7. Paste the Rae-Trevor image onto your new image.

8. Now here’s the tricky and time-consuming and crazy-making part. Using the Eraser tool from the main GIMP toolbox, erase all the parts of the image that aren’t Rae and Trevor. All that uniform white around them? Erase as much of it as you can, keeping as close to their bodies as you can without erasing the figures. You will see a checkerboard pattern emerge as you erase the black. Everywhere you see checkerboard, you will have a transparent image. So erase everything you don’t want to see on a shirt.

9. Save the file as a PNG file, and jump through any hoops GIMP makes you jump through to do that.

10. Go to http://www.cafepress.com/make/custom-t-shirts.

11. Click on whatever T-shirt you want to design. I created this design for a black T-shirt, so I recommend something that comes in black. There are sizing charts and whatall—just pick what you like, click on the shirt, and go to the shirt designer.

12. Upload your image to Cafepress. If it’s too big, go back to GIMP and re-save your image in a smaller size.

13. Add the text to your shirt. I used the Chandler font in a dark red for “MASKS” and in white for “Truth / Justice / Secrets.”

14. Drop your image onto the shirt and pull it around and resize it until it’s where you want it. The pattern will let you center your image, but please note that Rae’s and Trevor’s hands are slightly off-center because Trevor’s throwing arm sticks out a little more on his side. I chose to center their hands over the S in MASKS, and centered the text. Don’t go outside the boundaries of the design area on the shirt. Nothing outside that box will print.

15. When you’re satisfied, click “Done” and order your shirt!

TO DO THIS ON A WHITE SHIRT:

Just upload the image and add the text. No muss, no fuss.

TO MAKE BUTTONS:

The button images are available too. Upload them to either Cafepress or Zazzle.com (the site I used this time around), center and jigger them around until you’ve got what you want, and then order as many buttons as you can stand.

There. You are now the most stylish walking billboard in town!

Journal Video: The Secret Origin

Be gentle. I'm still figuring out this voiceover thing. :)

Pyramid marketing for books ...

Gathering fans on Facebook is hard. Period. On MySpace, you can invite people by the hundreds—it’s limited only by your willingness to sit there clicking that button hour after hour. Facebook, meanwhile … well, it’s a little tougher. I can only invite people on my personal friends list, and because I have this thing about having actual friends on my friends list and they don’t all have a legitimate interest in young-adult superhero fiction, it’s slow going.

So I’m going to bribe all of you to recruit for me.

Through the end of February, we’re going to have a fan contest on this page—that is, a contest to see who can add the largest number of fans. I think it will work like this:

1. Invite your friends to join the page. Simple, right? There’s a little button under the profile image that will let you spam your whole friends list.

2. But wait! There’s more! When you invite your friends, ask them to leave a comment on the page’s wall with the name of the friend who invited them. If a new fan gets more than one invitation, he or she is welcome to name all the people who invited him/her. I’ll keep a running tally of the names that get mentioned most. I do have a way of identifying new fans on this page, but I don’t know how they got there, so this is the only way I can track who invites whom.

3. The contest will end February 28, 2010. On March 1, I will announce the winner—at which point that fan and all the fans he or she invited will get prizes.

I’m still figuring out what those prizes will be, though, so I’m going to test this new blog system by inviting votes. I’ll list the options, and I encourage you to leave your votes in the comment section of this blog.

There will be two levels of prize—one big one-of-a-kind prize for the person who adds the largest number of fans, and a smaller, more easily replicable prize for both the winner and all the fans who nominated that person.

Possibilities for level one:

1. Original MASKS plushie, handmade by the author. Current plan is either my new fleece-coyote design (recently beta-tested on a Christmas gift recipient) or a doll of Rae or Trevor—recipient’s choice.

2. Original MASKS art—a signed Nicole Le sketch, again of the character of the winner’s choice. Nicole’s agreed to do contest art again if I bribe her with Flame Broiler. Derrick does not do contest art, apparently because he has more self-respect than Nicole. (I love you, Nicole …)

3. Naming a character in MASKS. I have to add a couple of people in the Fourth Draft—at least one male and at least one female—and I’d be willing to give away the naming rights to a character, within reason. (Keep it PG, and no profanity, please—but I’m more than willing to name the character after you!) Each of these characters will have dialogue and be the centerpiece of at least one plot point.

Possibilities for level two:

1. Exclusive MASKS wallpaper. Nicole’s got some art she’s saving up for Free Comic Book Day, but I have Flame Broiler coupons …

2. MASKS podcast—a limited edition, one-of-a-kind, limited-time-only audio recording of something related to MASKS. Maybe someone reading the first chapter or two …

3. An early look at the new MASKS short story I’m writing for Free Comic Book Day … which isn’t until May, so you’d get two months and some change to taunt people with it. There are ninjas.

Register your votes, for level one and level two. Remember—the person who brings in the largest number of fans gets both prizes, and everyone he or she brings in gets the level-two prize. I’ll also accept suggestions for alternate prizes, if anyone’s got any brilliant ideas.

If this works well, I’ll probably do more recruiting contests in the future, with more prizes, so your odds of winning something are pretty good. And with luck, sometime soon I’ll be able to give away autographed first editions …

Our story so far ...

Originally published 10/13/09:

Masks began as an experiment. That’s the long and short—I tried something to see what would happen, and what happened surprised me mightily. In fact, it seems to have surprised me more than it surprised anyone else, but that’s another story.

When I was 14 years old, I had exactly two friends. Both boys, which made my reputation at school pretty interesting, and both what would now be called geeks. Our common bond, besides the fact that none of us really liked showing our faces on the playground during recess, was our love of the nerdier side of pop culture. Comic books. Science fiction. Fantasy. Computers. Anything Joss Whedon wrote, ever. You know—cool stuff.

But if there was one thing we hated, more than playground jocks or bad dial-up connections or network executives, it was the three little words that make every fanboy scream. “To be continued.” And they happened so regularly! Every TV season, every cool anime episode, every issue of our favorite comic books, seemed to end with “to be continued.” It seemed so perverse. We had to wait days, weeks, even months to find out what happened. What if we got hit by a bus before then? What if we stopped liking something? It was so unfair.

So, as someone who was never without a pencil, I started to write my own endings. I’d never heard of fanfic, and wouldn’t discover it until years after, but that’s pretty much what I wrote. I’d take the season finale, the most recent issue or episode, and write What Happened Next. The results were passed around in a three-ring binder, which I carefully mislabeled in case my mother found it, and were so successful that my two friends began suggesting that I think about writing for a living. Comic books, especially—I was extra good at writing crackling superhero action, seasoned with funny little insights into what the characters were thinking. How did Batman and Superman REALLY get along? How would the X-Men deal with a normal human stuck at the mansion? If Daredevil had a hyperactive sense of touch, how did he feel when he punched someone?

It was an attractive proposition. But write a story every MONTH? On a DEADLINE? I wasn’t sure I could do that.

So I pilfered a spiral notebook from a cupboard at my house and started to write, just to see whether I could. I decided I should work with original characters so I wouldn’t have to keep up with established continuity for Captain America or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I chose a superhero story, since the genre seemed wide open, and set about creating my hero. Or rather, my heroine.

For most of my life, I’d been frustrated by the lack of interesting girls in the kinds of stories I liked to read. It seemed like most of the fictional girls clustered for protection behind pink covers, playing with dolls and doing each other’s hair, so when I wanted to go wrestle lions or fly starfighters or leap tall buildings in a single bound, I had to be content with mental crossdressing. It was easier to slip into Tarzan’s skin than Jane’s, more fun to identify with Superman than Lois Lane, more enjoyable to face Darth Vader as Luke Skywalker (or better yet, Han Solo) than Princess Leia. I didn’t want to be saved, I didn’t want to be a foil, and I didn’t understand why so few girls had adventures worth reading about. I dumped Nancy Drew as soon as I discovered Sherlock Holmes, and never looked back.

But there was nothing intrinsically wrong with girls, I reasoned—after all, I was one. Sure, they were a bit short on upper-body strength (except for Buffy), but if Professor X could fight evil from a wheelchair, surely a girl could fight evil without bench-pressing it. And it would be easier to write a girl protagonist than a boy one—after all, I’d been a girl all my life, and if my brothers’ ideas about girls were any indication, neither sex understood the opposite one very well. Leave boys for later.

So I set out to design a heroine for my story. She would be smart, and strong in spirit if not in body, because that’s how heroes should be. She’d have a wicked sense of humor, because I loved writing snarky lines. She’d get in over her head and scared witless at least once or twice per chapter, because I did that all the time and knew what it felt like, but she’d never let it stop her. And eventually she would, without meaning to, surround herself with the strangest people I could dream up. I made her a makeshift superhero, in a borrowed costume with a borrowed name, running around saving the world from evil by hook and by crook because most of the big-name heroes of her world were dead. And as I picked up the knack of plotting and writing to deadline, I genuinely started to enjoy her company in these stories written just for myself.

Then someone took my notebook.

I was 15 by that time, a freshman in high school. A sophomore walked up to me as I was scribbling away on a chapter in the school common area, said, “What are you writing?” and took the notebook out of my hands. She was taller than I was, prettier than I was, and often surrounded by giggling friends. I knew her. I was terrified of her. She walked off with nine or ten months’ work in a spiral binding, flipping idly through the pages as she went. I watched, feeling like I’d lost an arm.

Three days later, she brought the notebook back and told me to finish my chapter.

Things moved fast after that. More people discovered the notebook, and a rotation developed so they could all borrow it as I finished chapters. Then the covers fell off, so I began typing the stories and delivering stapled packets to my readers’ lockers twice a month. We started eating lunch together—the pretty sophomore, a tough girl who wore a leather duster to class, a quiet one who didn’t talk much but knew everything about The X-Files. The popular crowd reacted, too—the class president asked me if Rae was really me, and a cheerleader demanded I stop writing because it stole her spotlight. I just grinned at them both.

I relaunched my series at the beginning of my junior year, fixing three years’ worth of rookie errors and broadening the focus from Rae’s adventures to an evolving, expanding universe I called Masks. Readership grew to the point where I couldn’t afford to print the stories anymore, so I sent them out by e-mail. And it was right about that time that the troublemaker walked into my life.

Next: Trevor makes his appearance.

AIEEEEEEEE!

No, your eyes (and coyote lolspeak) do not deceive you. As of this morning, I have signed a contract for professional representation with the respected Angela Rinaldi Literary Agency. The Nameless Agent I’ve been blogging about all along is Angela Rinaldi. The Juvie Agent is her associate, L. Spencer Humphrey, who will be working point in getting MASKS sold to a publisher.

Now, a word on what having an agent DOES NOT mean. Having an agent doesn’t mean MASKS has a publication date, or a publisher, or any of that stuff. We ain’t published yet. Having an agent means having a foot in the publishing door, but that’s it. Ms. Humphrey has a lot of connections in the publishing industry, and editors know that she can be trusted to pitch stuff they’re going to like. That symbiosis, and that access, are the advantage to having an agent. They’re also the reason I signed on to have Ms. Humphrey market MASKS.

As a series.

Yep, you read that right. MASKS is going to be a series of novels, not just one. Just got the news late last week that Ms. Humphrey wanted a full rundown on a chain of books. I spent most of the weekend throwing ideas onto my thinking board, pulling stories out of my notebooks, and assembling a multi-book saga that will take Rae and Trevor to places I’ve only dreamed about up until now.

The outline is by no means final, but there’s good stuff in what she’ll be pitching in New York starting next week. Some tidbits from possible future books include organ piracy, mask kung fu, a superhero murder mystery, and the shocking resurrection of a mask everybody thought was dead. Oh, and we find out what the coyote’s REALLY up to …

But I need your help!

Over the next few weeks, as Ms. Humphrey pitches MASKS to publishers, they’re probably going to be looking at this page to see whether this project really has legs. The reason I’ve been posting all this MASKS stuff so far in advance of publication is to convince all of you guys that you truly will enjoy my book, and to show publishers that real live people will read my work. (After all, if I can collect a few hundred or a thousand readers without a publishing contract or a marketing budget, imagine what they could do with a book in bookstores!) So please, please, please, please, PLEASE make some noise on the page in the next few weeks. Post comments to the page and blog (especially the “The Curtain” entry via the link on the main page), invite your friends to come take a look — get the word out! We need this place to look as popular and populous as we can right now. The more noise we make, the faster I can get MASKS into your hands.

To thank you for all your help, I will be posting lots more goodies. There’s another video in the works, as well as more plushies, and Nicole Le is plugging away on more artwork. Hey, maybe we’ll have a few MASKS contests — give away some more buttons and stuff for MASKS art or other stuff. There will be character profiles, too, and maybe another short story. Together we can do this thing.

And, of course, I’ll be posting stuff about Book 2. Speaking of which — how do you guys feel about ninjas?