Time is stolen

One of my favorite authors, Michael A. Stackpole, has said he has a Post-It note stuck to his bathroom mirror, where he must look at it every morning. It says, “Time is stolen.”

It’s true.

You want to write? Steal time for it. The time you spend writing is time you should spend doing the laundry, going to work, or socializing. Or sleeping. I find I need stretches of at least an hour without interruptions, so I do a lot of my writing in coffee shops with my phone turned off, or late at night when the rest of the house is sleeping. That’s time I could spend working, or looking for more work, or talking on the phone, or (maybe) sleeping more than five hours a night. It helps that I hate talking on the phone, but the rest of it I do miss.

Nevertheless, I steal the time. And I’m not especially sorry about it, no matter what I tell my friends when I make sad faces and explain that I just can’t make it to the party.

So this week I’m stealing time from this blog to work on The Novel. You’ll all thank me later.

Really.

Okay, fine, here’s a picture of two Pocket Coyotes to tide you over until I surface again:

Bye now!

An ebook experiment, and pimping for someone I like …

If you read this blog enough, you’ve probably figured out that I greatly enjoy the work of Michael A. Stackpole. He’s not my favorite writer in the universe, but he’s well up there. Several of his books are my favorite literary comfort foods. One of them probably saved my life once. Now he’s doing a little ebook experiment, and if you’re willing, I’d like to invite you guys to participate.

Full disclosure: I think I’ve exchanged maybe two emails with Mr. Stackpole in my life, and one of them was about a technical problem with his website. We are not personal friends, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know who I am, and he did not ask me to write or post this entry. I just like his work and am interested in the outcome of his experiment.

Mr. Stackpole is a big promoter of ebooks and electronic reading. After he was dropped by a publisher a few years ago, he went independent and began selling his work online. With the recent explosion in ebook sales, he is now on track (he says) to have his ebook work pay his mortgage and health-insurance costs by year’s end. Not too shabby. I wouldn’t mind being there someday, with ebooks or physical books—and ebooks pay the author a lot more per copy than the dead-tree kind. Recently, his electronic-only books like In Hero Years … I’m Dead have done quite nicely, and been good reads to boot.

Stackpole’s best-known for his Star Wars tie-in novels about X-wing pilots, but he’s written some nice epic fantasy, too. Swords and horses aren’t really my genre (I think my parents spoiled me by reading me J.R.R. Tolkien when I was four), and I haven’t been able to finish everything he’s written in the field, but his Talion: Revenant is probably my favorite non-Tolkien fantasy. I got it for Christmas a few  years ago, fell in love with the characters, and never looked back.

Talion: Revenant is about an orphaned boy who becomes a Justice—sort of a fantasy version of a marshal, with law-enforcement authority and the ability to pull souls from those convicted of capital offenses—and who, as an adult, is given the task of protecting the king who, long ago, slaughtered our hero’s family. The novel is written with two threads, with alternating chapters following the present-day story of the bodyguarding assignment and the times-past tale of the hero’s development as a Justice. It all ties together beautifully in the end, with a neat little twist, and the world is richly developed as a good fantasy world should be. And it doesn’t hurt that it shares a name with Revenant, the Stackpole-created superhero who inspired Masks all those years ago.

Talion: Revenant was the first novel Stackpole wrote, although not the first he published, and he says it’s the cause of one of his most frequently asked questions: “When are you going to write a sequel?” Now he’s finally named his terms on that second book, and set up an interesting little experiment.

Stackpole sells his own ebooks through his website, Stormwolf.com. Talion: Revenant is available for almost every e-reader that’s out there, including Nook, iPad, Kindle, etc. And its author has announced that, because he has a hole in his schedule around January that he thinks is big enough to squeeze in another novel, he’s willing to make that novel the long-awaited Talion: Nemesis if he can sell 5,000 e-copies of the first book before then. Bought through his website, the book is $5, which is less than my mom paid for my paper copy all those years ago, and you can read the early chapters for free online to see if you like them.

Now, I have a pair of dogs in this fight. First and foremost, I want to read that sequel. I love Talion: Revenant, always have, and would be delighted to get another adventure featuring that hero and his world. I’ve already bought an EPUB copy to take with me on my little traveling netbook, which doubles as my e-reader. But Stackpole has asked fans not to go around buying multiple copies and skewing his results—he wants to gauge the level of interest in the sequel, not the obsession level of a few fans. So if I want to read that sequel, I would do well to persuade a few new readers to buy.

Second, I’m interested to see whether Stackpole can pull this off. Because Masks is now off the table for traditional publishing, I may well decide to sell it as an e-book once it finishes up as a serial. It would be nice to have a functioning business model, especially if it pays my bills while I write a second serial (and if there’s enough interest, I probably will). I’d like to see if Stackpole can make this thing work, and I’d like to see if I can pull in a few sales for him—since one day I might be pulling in a few sales for me.

I have no illusions that I have enough blog readers right now to drive 5,000 sales of a book most of you have never heard of, but if you do enjoy epic fantasy, I ask you to give the free chapters of Talion: Revenant a try. And if you like them, I ask you to gamble five bucks that you’ll like the rest of the book. Basically, I’m asking you to become a patron of the arts if you care enough to patronize them. That status and a kickass novel aren’t too bad a reward for a five-dollar investment.

You can read the free chapters of Talion: Revenant here:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

A (Non-Comic) Book You Should Be Reading

Hey, look, I finally got around to a book review!

I usually read about four books at a time. Partly it’s because I tend to lose track of them for an hour or so, leave them in the wrong bag, etc., and I can’t stand to be without reading material. Partly it’s because I always have a thing or two I’m trying to read for work and a thing or two I’m reading because I’m me. But mostly it’s because I can rarely settle down enough to read only one book on any given day. 

For the last month, Michael A. Stackpole’s In Hero Years … I’m Dead has been in my Now-Reading stack. Repeatedly. As in I finished reading it and then I went back to the beginning and started reading it again. For about a week in there, it occupied my attention almost exclusively. It’s just that much fun, and nothing else in the stack could compete with it. It’s the superhero novel I’ve been awaiting for 15 years. And it’s pretty much worth the wait.

In Hero Years … I’m Dead is, as far as I can tell, only Stackpole’s second published foray into the world of superhero fiction, and his first serious whack at the genre in a decade and a half. (Full disclosure: his 1995 superhero short story “Peer Review,” which you can buy here, got me into writing my own superhero stories, which eventually became Masks, so I’m hardly impartial.) But it’s worth the delay. Unlike the hipster superheroes who surface periodically and skewer the genre before melting back into the cooler-than-thou mainstream (I’m talking to you, Soon I Will Be Invincible!), In Hero Years takes superheroes at their word. Guys in capes exist; some of them are trying to help and some of them are not; but people are people whether or not they’re wearing spandex. The result is something Stackpole calls “superhero noir,” and it mostly works. 

The narrator of In Hero Years is a former superhero, a “Felix” (read: mere-mortal costumed hero with a bag of tricks instead of superpowers) who went by the name Coyote in his spandex days, though his real name is never revealed. After being held prisoner for twenty years by mysterious enemies, the narrator returns to his home in Capital City to find it dramatically changed. Where once heroes battled villains in the name of good, they now fight it out in a manner reminiscent of fantasy football or tabletop gaming. Villains leak their plans online and heroes bid for the chance to defeat them. More successful heroes and more colorful villains rise in the rankings and see more income from the sales of their memorabilia; television viewers at home get the ultimate in reality TV; and damage to the surrounding landscape and people is minimized. Best of all, citizens participate through fantasy “superfriends” leagues, winning small sums as their favorite heroes succeed. It’s an alien world to the narrator, not least because the media-centric nature of the rankings ensure that those great heroes of the past who didn’t get on TV much—including his aged mentor, Puma, now stricken with Alzheimer’s—are nearly penniless and all but forgotten. Puma’s poignant appearances in the story serve to underscore that something is rotten in Capital City. 

But the protagonist of In Hero Years may be too far out of the game to do much about it. Twenty years past his prime, trying to reconnect with his lost love and get to know the daughter he didn’t realize he had, he discovers how fragile his tenuous existence can be. In his hero days, he lived under a series of assumed names, keeping his real identity secret even from the reader for reasons that I won’t spoil here. Now that he has to build a solid life for himself, he discovers the ground beneath his feet is quicksand—and he’s sinking fast, as someone on the villainous side seems to still be out to get him. He has three goals, then—catch the bad guy, fix his life, and somehow set the world to rights again. The result is a winning combination of superheroic action, noirish mystery, and moving character-based drama. 

In Hero Years is not quite perfect, at least by my private standards for the genre. Stackpole is just a bit too fond of indulging in psychoanalysis of his characters, and the intriguing creation of “p-crud”, or post-costume rage disorder (a psychological syndrome common to former costumed heroes), doesn’t completely make up for the narrator occasionally sounding like he’s working through a twelve-step program instead of solving a mystery or rediscovering his family or returning justice to the world. Some of the social commentary may or may not age well, either, like the evil mastermind Dr. Sinisterion writing an O.J.-like hypothetical confession called If I Were A Supervillain, though it’s all fun for now. But even Stackpole’s wobbles have a history of surviving nicely (his Star Wars novel I, Jedi is still considered among the best of the series over a decade after its publication, despite a few dated references and a similar psychoanalytic indulgence), so it’s probably best to let him run and see where these characters take him. Besides, it’s far and away the closest I’ve seen to a truly brilliant original superhero novel. At its worst, it’s still great.

Mostly, In Hero Years delivers the goods, and any stumbles are minor ones. The hero is a charming rogue, surrounded by colorful and engaging friends, lovers, allies, and enemies; the world is well-drawn and believable; the plot gamely balances superheroics, detective work, and family drama, leavened with delightful moments of humor (watch for the description of superhero poker night). Best of all, the twists of plot and character keep coming like a good roller coaster, right to the novel’s end, when the hero is revealed to be—well, I won’t spoil it. But I reread this book for a month just to see how Stackpole built up that dramatic reveal, and I dearly hope we’ll see more of his nameless hero.

Which brings me to the one big drawback to In Hero Years … I’m Dead. It’s a self-published, electronic-only novel, available for download in EPUB format here. I dropped the extra dollar for the deluxe edition, which included an afterword by Stackpole about how he came to write the book and how he developed various aspects of it, and it appears he tried for several years to get it published conventionally. Despite his status as a New York Times bestselling author, all deals fell through, and he finally decided to run the project up the online flagpole and see who saluted. Most of the wobbles in the book (including more typographic errors than I’m used to, though not enough to be really distracting) would probably be cleaned up by the attention of a professional editor, and so I join the author in hoping that a little online attention will help In Hero Years … I’m Dead finally see print in dead-tree format.

Especially because I don’t actually own an e-reader. Or a smartphone, or any other device optimized for the reading of electronic novels. I read the entire 700-page book on my laptop. I can’t say it’s my favorite way to experience books, but the free chapters Stackpole posted online were irresistible, and I’m a couple of years, a more steady job, and the conclusion of the format wars away from being able to purchase a dedicated electronic reader of my own. And so I made do with the EPUB and some e-book freeware, and it says something that this book held up so well under some fairly adverse conditions. 

One note on the two versions of the book available: the deluxe edition, which includes that afterword, is worth the extra buck for aspiring writers and anyone who really loves their DVD special features. If you’re the sort who just watches the movie and leaves the bonus disc in the box, you have my permission to go for the standard version with a clear conscience. Either way, you’re getting a ripping good yarn and the author’s getting several bucks per copy of his opus, as compared to the 50 cents or so he gets every time you buy one of his conventional paperbacks from Amazon. And he’s suggested before that books that sell more e-copies through his website will spawn sequels, so this is an excellent opportunity to vote with your dollars. 

I can’t wait to see what this Felix gets up to next …

I write like WHO now?

In the last few days, a wacky little site called I Write Like has attracted some attention by analyzing text and finding similarities between submitted prose and work by famous authors. On a whim, I decided to see whom I wrote like. The results were … interesting.

I copied and pasted the whole first chapter of Masks and was informed that I write like Raymond Chandler. Well, I haven’t read as much Chandler as I should and don’t really consider him an influence, but I am writing a noirish adventure story set in Los Angeles, so a certain Chandlerishness is probably good.

Chapter 2 came up as similar to the works of Arthur Conan Doyle. Hmmm, weird, since that’s the chapter where Trevor is having frantic paranoia fits and talks to a crazy homeless guy. Maybe Frank the crazy homeless guy was Sherlock Holmes in disguise. Keep going.

I skip ahead a bit to Chapter 6, where Trevor makes a grim and life-altering decision. Apparently I am now like William Gibson. I’m familiar with Gibson, of course—seminal science fiction writer, author of Neuromancer, coiner of the term “cyberspace”—but I, er, haven’t actually read him. Oops. Wonder how that happened.

Chapter 7, then, where Rae and Trevor actually talk for the first time. It’s long, vocabulary-rich, and has lots of dialogue, which I haven’t really tested for, and should provide lots of data for the analysis. But now I’m apparently like David Foster Wallace, and actively insulted because I’ve only ever read one David Foster Wallace story and I disliked it so intensely that I now use it as a classroom example of how not to write an interesting story. And my manuscript readers all like Chapter 7! Grrrr …

Chapters 9 and 10, where Rae meets the Masked Rider and Trevor meets John Lawrence, score as Cory Doctorow and Margaret Atwood, respectively. Now I’m really confused, because I’ve never read Doctorow. And why would the chapter that’s all about the interaction of two male characters score as similar to the works of a prominent Canadian feminist? Interestingly, Atwood herself tried the site when it first came online and was told she writes like Stephen King, so perhaps I write more like Margaret Atwood than Margaret Atwood does.

I enter some later chapters. I assume the comparisons to Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer are some kind of default mode, and the fact that James Joyce comes up three or four times may be the equivalent of an error message—certainly my brain always returned an error message when I tried to read Joyce in high school. Arthur C. Clarke comes up—well, maybe he and Gibson are the only sci-fi authors in the database, and I do use the word “teleport” a lot. But why H.P. Lovecraft keeps popping up is a complete mystery to me. I didn’t notice any tentacled monstrosities oozing through the book—just one teensy werewolf. And he has eczema, so he’s really not very scary.

After I’ve run the whole book through, a chapter at a time, I am intrigued to find that none of the authors whose work I enjoy most, except for Doyle, are on the list. None of the authors I consider my strongest influences show up, either. And that gets me thinking.

The question of literary resemblance is always a tricky one. Every new author wants to present himself or herself to publishers as being just like some successful author, to suggest that he or she will make just as much money for the publisher. But of course, the world doesn’t need another Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer (although two or more of Neil Gaiman might not go amiss—one of them could write all the time while the other does all the public appearances his fans demand, and perhaps a third actually gets to see his fiancee and kids). And nobody sets out to write just like anybody else—at bare minimum, we always tell ourselves that we’re trying to write like us.

But the fact is that we writers do learn by imitating. When I was starting out and hadn’t yet dreamed of writing for an audience of actual human beings, I carefully studied the works of my favorite authors to see how they achieved their marvelous effects. I had a few Timothy Zahn science fiction novels on audiotape, and listened carefully to how he worded his fight scenes. (I also learned about one-sentence and one-word paragraphs from him—so please direct any complaints there.) I studied the musicality of words in the works of people like Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman. I learned how to write first sentences and first paragraphs from Sol Stein. I studied the way Spider Robinson constructs his jokes, and his expository sections—there are whole pages in his novels that are actually staggeringly dull exposition and character development, and you aren’t bored because it’s all disguised as puns and drinking games. I studied how Terry Pratchett deals with big philosophical concepts in the middle of a gut-busting satire of the postal service. And just about anything I studied in novels, I studied in comic books too—how to develop characters, how to pace a scene, how to combine visuals with other information, how to write memorable dialogue. I got the very idea of writing prose fiction about superheroes from Michael A. Stackpole (who has said that he himself learned by studying Roger Zelazny and Edgar Rice Burroughs), but no one who reads my work thinks it’s especially similar to his.

And that, I suppose, is the goal. We begin life by imitating. We speak our parents’ languages, in their accents; we play the games other children play; by adolescence we spend much of our energy trying to walk, talk, dress, and think exactly like everyone else out of a morbid terror of not fitting in. (Or, in my case, declare ourselves to be space aliens and therefore exempt from human social conventions.) And yet, if we are wise enough and long-lived enough and above all lucky enough, we eventually learn not to imitate. We become less and less the people around us, and more and more ourselves. We start out singing along to our favorite recordings, and then some of us get lucky enough to learn to sing our own songs, to our own melodies, in our own voices. And maybe there’s a note here or there that a trained observer—or a particularly benighted computer program—will connect to someone else. There are only so many words in a language, after all, and only so many sounds a human throat can make. But I find I treasure the readers who say, “Well, you’re sort of like X, and a bit like Y, but not really … I guess you’re just like you.”

And as I grow older, I find that more and more I am comfortable in my own company, and slowly becoming the person I wanted to be all along. And I rather like her.

Which almost makes up for the fact that the stupid website thinks this blog entry was written in the style of H.P. Lovecraft …