What happens at WonderCon stays at WonderCon ...

Hawkeye and Thor went to WonderCon once. It was terrible.

I went to WonderCon!

No, don’t recheck old blog entries. I didn’t announce it. I deliberately didn’t announce it, because it was a last-minute decision to accompany a few friends and I wanted to just go as a fan this time. Well, a fan and an interior decorator.

You see, now that I’m settling into the new place, I’m noticing how bare the walls are. Sure, my wonderfully nerdy flatmate has gleefully participated in hanging Captain America’s shield (hers) up in our coat closet and a giant Hobbit poster (mine) on one wall, but my own personal space in the apartment has nothing hanging up but a whiteboard with my to-do list (essential if I’m going to keep to a writing schedule) and a little enamel figure of a fairy holding a typewriter. I’m not used to decorating, as I did most of my growing up in a room where the major blank wall was covered by decorative wood paneling. Now I suddenly want things on the walls, and because I’m me they must be geeky things, so to WonderCon I went, off to see the Artists Alley.

Oh, and that photo? I went with a gang of my friends, temporarily dubbed the Casual Saturday Avengers. That’s Hawkeye and Thor up there with Grumpy Cat. I was Loki. You can tell I was Loki because I’m not in the photo. Tricky that way, aren’t I?

Anyway, major discoveries at WonderCon include …

Cats as absolutely everything (the artist here is the wonderful Jenny Parks, and I particularly recommend her Lokitty and her Doctor Mew images):

Sorry for the low quality on Captain Amerikitty--
had to use a cheapo camera because my good one's on loan.

 A Moriarty comic series from Image that somehow completely flew under my radar:

I did buy a copy of this, but the photo didn't come out.

And Jessica Cathryn Feinberg’s Artlair, also known as the booth where I spent ALL THE MONIES. I walked away with two prints to use as wall hangings—a gorgeous watercolor of a dragon reading a book and a fascinating clockwork coyote. She’s also put out a terrific book called The Clockwork Menagerie that I suspect will be very, very useful in creating Street of Bakers art because it breaks down the process of drawing steampunk clockwork to the reading level of an eight-year-old. Which, as you might have noticed, is about my level of artistic understanding.

You heard it here first—if I ever get a deal for Bakers and am allowed to recommend an illustrator, she is the top of my list. Actually, right now she’s the whole list.

I mean, come on—a clockwork unicorn!

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 17

In my head, this chapter is labeled INVISIBLE CLOWN ATTACK. With the caps and italics. This is partly because I changed the title of the chapter about five times and partly because I just think invisible killer clowns are hilarious.

I honestly don’t remember how I decided that Tammy would distract people by screaming about invisible clowns. I don’t think the real Tammy suggested it directly, because it sounds just a bit more like something I’d do than like something she’d do—she might come up with the screaming, but I don’t think she has a particular thing about clowns. Well, actually she does, but only as it concerns my friend The Puppet, and he’s entirely visible. I think.

I really liked the way this chapter brought out the unexpected sides of all the characters involved. Tammy, who might have come across as a little thick in previous chapters, turns out to be smarter than anyone expects. Soleil, who’s been playing the bitchy mean girl for most of the story, shows her vulnerable side, and Rae, the perpetual bullying victim, expresses sympathy for someone who looks and acts a lot like one of her tormentors. Trevor’s not the only character with secret corners inside him, or skeletons in his closet, and that’s what this chapter is about. (Well, that and invisible clowns!)

But man, Trevor’s skeleton is pretty big!

Before I delve into Trevor’s secret, I’d like to acknowledge the contributions of perhaps the most useful reference book I own. It’s called Howdunit: How Crimes Are Committed and Solved, and I received a used copy as a gift a couple of years ago. The description of fingerprint analysis in this chapter comes directly from that book, in a chapter by Anne Wingate. If there’s a writer or an aspiring writer in your life, and his or her genre involves crime or police activity in any way, this is the best Christmas gift imaginable. Seriously. Go buy it. It’s also just plain fascinating.

As far as I can tell, this scene pretty accurately reflects how crime-lab technicians would process the bottle, and the results Soleil and Rae get (only one usable print from their “suspect”) are not a reflection of their limited skill; sometimes even the most careful analyst will get only a limited result. Of course, there’s another reason for Trevor’s lack of fingerprints, too, but we’ll get to that later. [Evil smile.]

So—Trevor’s secret! What did you guys think of that one, huh? I know Rae will need a little time to process it. This is, of course, the source of the snowy mountainside and the burning train seen in Trevor’s nightmare waaaaay back in Chapter 2, and in a few flashbacks since. Obviously he’s haunted by the events of that day, but exactly how he got there and why he did what he did … well, that’s a story for a later chapter. For now, suffice it to say that we haven’t seen all of Trevor’s secret past, but we’ve definitely unearthed something he’d rather leave buried. This book is called Masks for a reason; everyone’s hiding something, whether they know it or not. This is the first of Trevor’s really big secrets, and I hope it’s piqued your interest enough to bring you back next week, because another of Trevor’s secrets will be coming out then …

This week’s soundtrack was a no-brainer. Tom Smith wrote the best scary-clown song ever, so with no further ado, here’s “Coulrophobia”:

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 13

I don’t have a huge amount to say about this chapter, what with having a book to finish and all, but I’ll make a few passing remarks:

1. I’m rather proud of filling an entire chapter with girl talk. I sort of missed the formative years of female friendships—didn’t have any friends without Y chromosomes between the ages of, oh, 9 and 15. So I approach dialogue between girls and women from a slightly antiseptic, anthropological perspective, and it doesn’t always work. But it works here, and I’m improving, and I’m proud of that.

2. I’ve mentioned before that Tammy Hoffman is based on a real person (so is Soleil, but I’ll bet the real Soleil won’t recognize herself, so I’m probably safe). So it’s with great and dubious pride that I state that all of Tammy’s lewd remarks came from the real Tammy. All of them. I texted her late at night, asking for dirty jokes about Trevor, and this is what I got. This isn’t even all of it; she made me cut some of the really strange ones. Try to envision someone with my imagination being friends with someone who can, at the drop of a hat, become a bottomless fount of dirty jokes. It’s amazing I don’t write scenes like this more often. And yes, we’ve had conversations pretty much like this, although I like to think I’m better than Rae at changing the subject.

3. The big shadow behind Soleil in the illustration: This is a venerable institution in mainstream comics and I'm rather pleased that Nicole managed to include it. I have honestly lost track of the number of times I've seen a webbed shadow looming up behind Peter Parker, or a pointy-eared shadow looming up behind Bruce Wayne. It just seems to be a visual trope of the genre, and it's nice to see it show up in a story that is very much about that genre. Also, on a side note, Nicole stole Soleil's bunk bed from the actual bunk bed where my actual college roommate actually slept. My roomie, however, looked nothing like Soleil.

4. Music! This week’s song was stuck in my head most of the time I was working on this chapter. It’s a piece I learned to sing while I was taking voice lessons in college; it comes from the musical She Loves Me. The plot of the musical has been made into movies oh, about a million times, most recently as the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan rom-com You’ve Got Mail. The story is that a young woman and a young man, both employees of a large store, are secretly carrying on a romantic relationship via pen-pal letters. Neither knows the other’s real name, and they’ve never exchanged photos, so neither one realizes at first that the coworker he/she most despises is the same person he/she is pouring his/her heart out to on paper. This song comes from early in the show, after one of the young woman’s coworkers asks her how she can be in love with someone she’s never seen, whose name she doesn’t even know. The woman insists that she doesn’t need to know her lover’s name or face, because she knows all about who he is inside. This turns out about as well for her as it will for Rae … and the young man in the musical comes out well ahead of Trevor. But now I’m dropping spoilers, aren’t I?

I give you “I Don’t Know His Name,” from She Loves Me, performed by (I think) Barbara Cook: 

MASKS Commentary Track: Chapter 3

Believe it or not, I’ve always had a hard time writing school stories, even when I was in school. I’d throw in a classroom scene here or there, but there was nothing especially scholastic about it—my characters could have been talking on a street corner as easily as in a classroom or a hallway. I never had any really good ideas for stories that could go on in a school, perhaps because I regarded school as a place to keep my head down so no one would notice me writing. But when you write stories about American teenagers, you have to deal with school somehow—either explain what they’re doing (or not doing) about their education, or why education is not a factor. Mention their schooling or homeschooling, or set your story in a post-apocalyptic world where all the schools have burned.

Or, in my case, set your story during summer vacation and have your characters be really weird people.

This chapter introduces the Hawkins Foundation, a scholarship program that will become very, very important in the lives of Rae, Trevor, and my other characters. It’s a lot more than an honors program, as you can see, and it’s a bit more than a school for superkids, too—but we’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll content myself with a little behind-the-scenes anecdote: in the first draft of this novel, Rae and Trevor were high-school seniors and going off to college in the next book, where they would meet Soleil, Tammy, and all these other characters. Then their ages got dialed back to sixteen, but I still needed the Walker University tunnels and other features, so the summer program was created and I got my main cast all together in the first "season."

This chapter also gives us our first glimpse of Rae’s family in the form of her remembered argument with her father. Rae’s parents will not be terribly present in these stories, but the fact that she has a family and is mostly estranged from it will be a big part of her character. Masks is very much about people building substitute families—Trevor and Rae, Golem and Moon, Soleil and Tammy, and eventually others as well—and so there’s some groundwork for that going in here. Masks are the kind of people who don’t quite fit in with normal life, and so they tend not to fit in with normal families, either. They build their own, eventually, and because these masks are young, they’re just starting that process.

Brief random notes on Rae’s new friends at Walker University …

1. Tammy is based on a real person, who is actually named Tammy and dates from when I used to randomly write my friends into my fiction, usually because they asked me to. The fictional Tammy is considerably more perky than the real Tammy, but no less loud and random (watch for the phrase “invisible clowns” in a later chapter). The real Tammy came up with the line about grubbies, partly as an in-joke—she is something of a fashion plate, while I live my life in black T-shirts and tatty jeans. I don’t think she’s ever had the bad grace or cluelessness to suggest I “change out of grubbies” when I’m wearing my favorite outfit, but she might have done it at sixteen, and that’s all that matters to me.

2. Soleil is also based on a real person, although she’s departed much more from her original. I knew a girl in high school who happened to look exactly like Snow White and who had, if not the wickedest sense of humor I’ve ever encountered, something very close. She was brilliant, sarcastic, and inclined to drum her fingertips together and say “Excellent,” in the manner of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. To the best of my knowledge, she was not a were-cat, but I’m not sure she’d tell me if she were. Her name was not Soleil. I wish to state for posterity that Soleil Faulkner is much meaner than the person she’s based on. She just turned out that way—another case of my characters having minds of their own.

3. Mike Glass is not directly based on anyone I know. Probably. In my head, he looks like a teenage Michael Chabon, and I’ve never been able to understand why. Keep an eye on him; he is not your average RA.

4. Robert Paine Hawkins will get his moment in the sun before the book is out, so I won’t spoil too much here … except to say that his name still makes me laugh. Years ago, I was a fan of a comic book called Marvel: The Lost Generation, which was all about a bunch of Marvel superheroes who lived and died before the ones we know (Spider-Man, the X-Men, etc.) became active. My favorite character in that comic was a gruff and cunning cape-and-gadgets guy named the Black Fox, who died in the first issue (not that that kept him out of the story, which was told in reverse chronological order—it’s complicated). His real name was Robert (Bob) Paine. The name “Black Fox” triggered my auditory memory, which is excellent but random. I have accidentally memorized hundreds of hours of random noise, especially music and dialogue tracks from movies. And I can’t read the phrase “black fox” without hearing this song from The Court Jester, one of my favorite movies as a child:

So now Bob Paine was inextricably linked in my head with Danny Kaye’s character, Hubert Hawkins (who was not actually the Black Fox, but the hero of the film, so there). After that I really wanted to name a character Robert Paine Hawkins, and when I needed to name a scholarship foundation, the name surfaced. My Hawkins doesn’t actually have anything to do with either of his inspirations—he’s just named that to make me smile and because I wanted a mysterious old man with three names. And no, he is not secretly a retired superhero named the Black Fox, although he does have a secret or two.

And then we have the program-within-the-program, the alpha track. This came out of a true story, more or less. I was a major academic overachiever as a kid, top of the class in everything, even the subjects I hated—which were pretty much all math. I was good at math; I just didn’t enjoy it at all. However, I did two years in junior high in an annual competition called Math Olympics, mostly because the practices got me out of P.E. The first year I took top honors in the logic-problem category, but in the second year I got seriously skunked by a boy about half my size—and the fact that it was a boy was especially irritating; logic was where young male math geniuses traditionally foundered in that competition. A few months later, I entered high school as a freshman and found myself in an English class whose teacher asked each student to bring in an object that introduced him or her. I brought in a small wire-frame horse I’d made from random craft supplies, mostly because I wouldn’t have time to read an entire short story. And a runty boy in the front row brought in a logic medal from last year’s Math Olympics. My nemesis and I had landed in the same high school. I whispered to the girl next to me, asking who this brat was, and she whispered back, “Oh, that’s ___. You know, the freshman who’s taking calculus?”

I was on track to take calculus as a senior. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so bad about getting skunked, though I did feel pretty small all of a sudden. I think that’s where the alpha track came from—the idea of a high achiever discovering a level of achievement that’s completely impossible for him or her. I let Calculus Boy go academically unmolested, mostly because I still hated math no matter how good I was at it, but I think that if he’d been a writing prodigy, I would have set my sights on proving I was better than he was. That’s just who I was at fifteen. Anyway, that’s where Rae’s reaction comes from—and as you’ll see, it will get her in lots and lots of trouble.

This chapter’s track is the only Hoobastank song I like, “Right Before Your Eyes.” I decided when I first heard it that it was a great theme for the dramatic changes Rae goes through in Masks, and it eventually became a kind of theme song for her. I am not responsible for the Spider-Man fan video, although it does sort of rock.