The Big Announcement (for today)

I’ll make it short and sweet:

On August 10, I will post a new FREE short story in the blog. It’ll probably be around 5,000 words, it’ll be called “Zephyr Street”, and it will take place between the events of “Motion Capture” and the beginning of Masks. It’ll be about Rae solving the murder of one of the masks who died during the purge ten years ago.

On September 10, as a birthday gift to myself, I will post a second FREE short story in the blog, also set between “Motion Capture” and Masks, of about the same length as “Zephyr Street.” It doesn’t have a title yet, but it will be about Trevor having a little adventure around the time he first arrives in Los Angeles. There will almost certainly be running and screaming.

These stories will be designed as jumping-on points for the Masks universe—I’m hoping to recruit some more readers as we head into autumn. Oh, and there will be at least one contest coming up before my birthday … haven’t decided what the prize is, though.

Now don’t ever say I never give you anything.

Oh, and there’ll be a regular blog entry sometime tonight … a comic book review …

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!

As promised, two new scenes.

These two scenes are part of a series of flashbacks that occur throughout my novel, Masks, to explain how my characters, er, got that way. All you really need to know to understand them is that a) Rae has been bullied since she was six, and this is the day she stops taking it; and b) Trevor was adopted by a superhero when he was six, and this is the night he finally deals with the stress. Rereading these scenes out of context reminds me just how screwed up my characters really are ...

ONE

Ten years old and Jaime Ortega had finally said the last wrong thing. And Rae exploded.

One final, “Hey, owl,” and she spun and lunged at him, screaming in rage and frustration and pain, fingers hooking for his eyes, face contorted into a mask of fury. Around her, kids stopped laughing. Her scream would give them nightmares for years.

She didn’t know how to fight, so she bulled into him headfirst, and they crashed to the asphalt together, kicking and gouging and howling, Jaime in pain and Rae in the savage voice of the monster in the woods, of failure, of vengeance denied.

She rolled up to sit on his belly and pounded his face until she felt his nose crunch under her throbbing knuckles. She filled his eyes with blood and tears and sobbing and she was crying too. And suddenly her fists were brown and her eyes were sky-blue, and for a moment her ST END charm flew past her eyes and it was Sam’s BE FRI and she was someone else and it was so much better than being herself—

And the teachers grabbed her by her arms and hauled her off, kicking and wailing, wretched and furious and thirsty for more. How dare they deny her? She wasn’t Rae anymore—she was misery and terror, and she was revenge, and she would finish this if she had to tear their throats out with her teeth—

And then she saw two green eyes and the wave of a black-tipped tail beyond the schoolyard fence. And she relaxed, silent except for the sniffles. She would suck her cracked knuckles for the rest of the day, and Jaime’s nose would never be straight again, and she would never say she was sorry. But she would be silent, because out in the dust and darkness, someone understood.

TWO

Ten years old and he wasn’t supposed to be here. He crouched on a warehouse rafter, invisible in the clothes he’d so carefully stained with mud and rooftop grime. Jude would ground him forever if he knew. If they both lived.

Right now Jude was strapped to a table below, unmoving, probably unconscious. It made Trevor’s skin crawl. He didn’t even like to see his mentor sleeping—it was too much like seeing his parents in their caskets. He’d wake Jude up at three a.m. sometimes, just to see his eyes open.

Dr. Maligno was busy with something at his lab bench, all syringes and beakers and test tubes full of phosphorescent goo. Trevor shivered as he watched. He felt nauseous, waiting up here like this. He didn’t like the look of the bubbles in those beakers. Didn’t like Jude not moving. Didn’t like having to choose between saving someone he loved and keeping his nights as a shadowy sidekick secret from his teacher.

Then Maligno turned around, needle in hand, and Trevor was more scared of that than of being grounded. He dropped out of the darkness with a yell, and one sneakered foot glanced off Maligno’s shoulder, and the little mad doctor stumbled into a wall of beakers with a crunch of glass, a hiss of something caustic, and a bellow of pain.

And as Trevor landed in a crouch beside him, Jude stirred and opened his eyes to see his adopted son sawing at his restraints with a shard of glass. Their eyes met, and he took in the bare-faced boy he’d tried to keep at home, and for once he had nothing to say about homework or proper sleep habits.

As Dr. Maligno struggled, shrieking, to his feet, Jude pulled himself free of his restraints and smiled at Trevor as suddenly as lightning on a summer night and said, “We’d better get you a mask.”

Round numbers, because I feel like bribing you.

I like round numbers. It’s insane, I know, but I just like nice, big, round numbers. I took a picture of my car’s odometer when it hit exactly 100,000 miles (if only because nobody expected a Geo to survive that long—and, okay, yes, because I was stuck in a traffic jam on the 110 freeway and excruciatingly bored at the time). And now, as Comic-Con approaches and I hope my revised and 200% more awesome manuscript will win the favor of the publishing gods … I find I want just a few more fans to brag about when I talk to them.

I’ve been telling people for a while that the page has “about 250 fans,” which is true if you round to the nearest 50 and sounds much better than “about 240 fans,” which was true if you rounded to the nearest 10 up until I finally hit 245 yesterday. But wouldn’t it be nice to actually HAVE 250 fans? I think it would. And, as is usually the case when I want something, I’m prepared to bribe you to get it.

So here’s the deal. Comic-Con runs from July 22 through July 25. I and the Masks Posse (there are four of us, in matching T-shirts!) will be at the con on July 25, meeting and greeting and handing out some truly awesome buttons and bookmarks. If the page hits 250 fans before the morning of July 25, then I will, at the next convenient moment, post not one but TWO scenes from Masks—one from Rae’s past, one from Trevor’s. There will be action. There will be angst. At least one person will get beaten up, and at least one person will cry. And they probably won’t be the same person.

So go to it. Invite your friends. Beg, borrow, steal; lie, cheat, bribe. Do whatever it takes to get the fan count up to 250 … and let my round-number-based madness begin.

Since when do my characters have free time?

So now everyone seems to be engaged in guessing Rae’s and Trevor’s hobbies, I guess I’ll have to work them out. Out loud. On the blog. Fasten your seatbelts.

I’ll start with Trevor. When I write him, I keep his physicality in mind as much as his personality. Trevor is happiest when he’s moving, and he has a gift for movement that borders on the preternatural. He can quickly pick up any move he sees, and although he can’t always execute it effectively if he hasn’t conditioned for it, he’s in good enough shape that he can do a lot, and likes pushing himself to try it all. He’s an excellent runner—both fast in a sprint and able to run steadily for long periods without tiring—because of his roofrunning experience in Chicago. So whenever I write downtime scenes for Trevor in Masks, he is in motion. He runs to clear his head and does kata to take his mind off stressful situations. I suspect he’d be a hell of a dancer if he ever decided to take it up, and maybe his relationship with Rae will motivate him.

Trevor’s also very good with his hands, and considering how quickly he can rewire a stolen PDA into a tracking device or anything else he needs, I can see him enjoying any kind of futzing around with computers. He is an excellent hacker and works to keep his skills sharp, but I don’t see him tackling security systems for fun or organizing botnets recreationally. He also does a fair amount of studying to keep up with his chosen profession—he’s the guy you’d expect to be up on everything from obscure martial arts to the latest forensic journals. And he is a bit of a compulsive autodidact; even though he’s been out of school for several years, he will be able to re-enter at Rae’s level as if he’d never left, mostly because he worked hard to study on his own during his travels.

Because Trevor was raised to be a mask, and because he genuinely likes it, he’s not much of a hobby guy. Part of his journey in Masks will involve discovering how normal people … well, people more normal than he is … spend their time. He’ll get dragged to movies and concerts and fed junk food (for the record, he’s going to hate Twinkies, but the character who shows him where to get a Maxwell Street Polish hot dog, Chicago style, in Los Angeles is going to be a friend for life).

Trevor’s a workaholic, but he’s the purest kind—he genuinely loves what he’s doing. And if he’s not moving, you know something’s wrong—he’s dead, he’s severely depressed, or he’s concussed yet again. (Trevor gets knocked in the head a lot; one disadvantage of being small and light and throwing yourself into fights is that you will fairly often get thrown right back out—and into a wall.)

Rae is the other end of the spectrum, really. While she does tend to go walking when she needs to sort out her thoughts (in Griffith Park … at night … which is completely illegal and quite likely to get her eaten by a mountain lion), she is also a voracious reader. While Trevor studies subjects he considers meaningful to his profession, Rae studies everything. That’s a big part of how she manages to maintain honor-roll grades even though she loses a lot of sleep and cuts class regularly—she already knows the material on the tests. The bookcases in the Black Mask’s hideout are mostly home to the dead hero’s reference library, but Rae has cleared out a nice little space for her own eclectic collection. It was her interest in books that led her to befriend the used-book dealer who turned out to be Peregrine, and who left his costume and identity to her when he vanished.

Rae is also strongly drawn to pretty much anything in the natural sciences. As a bookish little girl, she found herself taken under the wing of the neighborhood tomboy—a girl whose brash personality would later inspire Rae’s Peregrine persona—and spent her afternoons learning the habits of every cat, dog, and bird in the neighborhood. Rae is still keenly aware of local plant and animal life, and can often be seen watching the skies, the hills, or the nearest brush. So if it seems like she notices the coyote a lot when no one else sees it, remember that it’s possible she’s the only one looking.

Rae tinkers a bit with the Black Mask’s old motorcycle, but it’s mostly so she can keep it running in good condition. She’s not much of a gearhead. But all the reading and all the observing she does feeds into her talent. Her ability to assume a wide range of identities sometimes manifests itself in a tendency to play with disguises and con games. It wouldn’t surprise me to see her spend an evening in the villain bar, the Flying Tortoise, just people-watching and playing a role as much as gathering information. (Even though she’s only 16, she never gets carded. She’s that good. And before you call shenanigans, I’ll point out that someone tried to register me to vote when I was 12 years old. It happens. Except Rae does it on purpose, which makes her a bit scary, to my mind.)

A big part of Rae’s journey in Masks will be figuring out who, in the midst of all these identities, she wants to be. She’s built elaborate personae for herself, both in her mask life and in her secret identity, but having another person standing in her most private space will force her to think about who she is in that space. Rae doesn’t have time for a completely frivolous hobby, but turning all these little fragments of herself into a person—and figuring out how that person will deal with the rest of the human race—is a full-time job.

And now, because my characters are teenagers, I have to answer the inevitable TV question. What do they watch? Well, Rae is a movie buff, especially the old stuff—a lot of which will turn out to be connected to the history of the Los Angeles mask community, not that she knows that now. She loves the Marx Brothers, as well as anything of a swashbuckling nature—Robin Hood, Zorro, etc. She also likes sci-fi and fantasy and she knows her classics, as evidenced by her first meeting with Cobalt, when she immediately starts calling him “Darth Magnum.” Trevor, having lived overseas for several years, has a somewhat scattershot taste in entertainment, but he has a secret anime addiction left over from a stint in Japan that he doesn’t like to talk about. He’s also a kung fu movie buff, for obvious reasons, and is fascinated by wuxia films, especially Zhang Yimou’s recent work. He knows he can’t pull those stunts off without wires, but it doesn’t stop him from staring. Neither one of them watches a lot of American TV, except in repeats and on DVD—they both have other places to be when Lost is on. But we can be reasonably sure Rae’s seen most of Joss Whedon’s major works, or she wouldn’t talk the way she does.

How’s that, guys?

No boys allowed?

I don’t know how the actual numbers shake out, but in my hazy memory of my childhood, there were not a lot of interesting books with female main characters. At least, not the kind I wanted to read. I found lots of coming-of-age stories and historical fiction and giggly romances and spunky but dull-witted girl detectives, but not a whole lot of the sword-swinging, spaceship-flying, world-saving stuff I’d come to love as I grew up in the shadow of two brothers. As I’ve said in earlier entries, my favorite memories of childhood reading involved mental cross-dressing because Tarzan, Frodo, Sherlock Holmes, Zorro, and the rest were just more interesting than their female guest stars.

So it really creeps the hell out of me that there’s apparently next to nothing out there now for boys to read.

For most of the twentieth century, teachers found girls more interested in reading than boys were, but the publishing industry tended to skew male. Male writers, editors, and publishers in the most popular genres chose books with male protagonists having manly adventures. Women got the romance section; girls got Nancy Drew; that was about it. Women would read books about men, but few men would read books about women, or so the conventional wisdom went.

But somewhere along the line, especially in children’s publishing, someone figured out that if girls read more, and more often voluntarily, than boys … well, then, girls were a better market, weren’t they? Add to that a sea change in the population of the publishing industry—including an influx of female editors—and the rise of chick lit and other female-centric trends in grown-up publishing, and you get what we see in bookstores today: an ocean of books with pink and foil covers, cute vampire boys, vicious gossip plots, and very little your average teen guy can be seen reading in public. Not helping at all is the fact that the rise of gay and lesbian YA fiction has accounted for a fair portion of the boy books still being published. Yes, I know, this segment of the population is long overdue for literary notice, but if the human population tends to assay out to no more than 12% gay on average (and I’ve seen no reliable higher numbers), that leaves 88% of teenage boys staring at bookstore shelves with the uncomfortable sensation that they’ve come to the wrong window.

I don’t blame the publishing industry for this—after all, if boys aren’t buying books, it makes little economic sense to be in the business of selling books for boys. But if they don’t buy books, and therefore nobody writes books for them, and therefore there’s nothing for them to buy, and therefore they don’t buy books and therefore nobody writes books for them … you see where I’m going with this? This trend has been a long time in coming, but it is now officially an ouroboros.

Even the boy books I loved as a kid aren’t doing as well as they might. Let’s face it, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, brilliant and exciting as they may be, are also flagrantly racist, their grasp of things like animal biology and behavior is appallingly bad, and all that makes teachers and librarians wary. I was a precocious kid, so the vocabulary in the Sherlock Holmes stories was no barrier to my eleven-year-old joy in discovering them—but now I teach high-school kids who can’t parse the great detective’s statements. Ditto Tolkien’s masterful language—too many syllables, and too many concepts that were easy and familiar to his original readers, but now almost require footnotes for young readers half a century and an ocean away.

There are some bright spots. Rick Riordan’s recent Percy Jackson and the Olympians series has drawn in several reluctant male readers of my acquaintance. There’s always the Harry Potter juggernaut. Heck, some guys read Twilight. And comic books and manga have moved out of the ghetto and into the libraries. But as anyone who’s raised or grown up with boys knows, there are boys who will hunt for things to read … and then there are boys who will stare at the shelf for a moment or two and then go play Grand Theft Auto. Category one will take care of itself, bookwise. Category two is rapidly coming to represent the average male voter. Do we really want our male citizens to give up voluntary reading by age ten?

As much as I enjoy writing Rae Masterson as a brave, intelligent, vulnerable heroine like I wished I had when I was roaming the children’s library, I also believe that my cherished ideas must periodically be tested if I’m going to keep them. I believe that there should be entertaining, well-written stories out there for both sexes, including girls who have real, live adventures. But if this is true and I believe that adventure fiction needs strong, interesting girls, then I must also remember that it needs strong, interesting boys. Preferably in the same book. This is a big part of why Masks is told from two points of view—one male, one female: because literary ghettoes do no one any favors. That’s why Rae and Trevor travel very different arcs, but each story has a heaping helping of both action and emotion. Both narratives see stuff blow up, and blood spilled, and at least one metaphorical pie in the face, and both characters laugh, mourn, and grow dramatically, albeit in dramatically different ways. And the two lives weave together in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Mind you, I didn’t set out to do this. I didn’t sit down one day and say, “Hmm, I want to write a story that’s as much for guys as it is for girls, and as much for girls as it is for guys.” Rae and Trevor were the two strongest characters in Masks when it was a serial, and they worked best when they shared a stage, and that was that. I followed the story where it led, and wrote down all the parts I personally liked, whether those parts were powerful explosions or tearful confessions. It wasn’t until months and years later, when I began finding out more about how books are marketed, that I realized I had written one book for two very different audiences. But I grew up reading everybody’s books, and soon pulled my female friends into boy books and my male friends into girl books, and they all read Masks. The distinction is not as sharp as we’d like to think. My last census of readers of the Masks serial showed a nearly even split between male and female, from a spunky junior-high-school girl who cornered me in a parking lot to an 80-year-old retired professor who sent me an email out of the blue and said he was interested in my concept.

I like my world that way. A culture where the two sexes never read the same books is almost as bad as one where only one sex reads. And I’ve found that putting strong male characters and strong female characters in the same story—egads—makes that story more interesting! It’s almost like we’re members of the same species or something!

Now I’d like to hear from the guys who lurk around this blog. I know you’re out there—40% of my Facebook fanbase identifies itself as male. What do you want to see in a book? What pulled you in when you were younger, and what keeps you coming back now? What do you want your brothers and sons to know is out there?

The early comic strip Little Lulu featured a precocious little girl who was constantly trying to get past the “No Girls Allowed” sign on the boys’ clubhouse. It would be a terrible shame for Lulu to finally make it in only to find herself alone.

Journal Video: The Secret Origin

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

Trevor and the Acme Little Giant Killer

So Nicole finally managed to work Trevor’s signature weapon into some art in time for it to figure in the trailer—not once, but twice! And I suddenly realized I haven’t yet mentioned the weapon in question.

Trevor has a real knack for projectiles. He puts Cobalt to flight early in the book with some carefully aimed chunks of cinderblock, he’s lethal with shuriken, and he has a meaningful talk with John Lawrence about the fact that he actually can kill someone—easily—with a rock. And so his signature weapon is a sling.

Trevor’s sling came from a couple of places. The story of David and Goliath was a factor, of course—somewhere in my home I still have my older brother’s Acme Little Giant Killer slingshot left over from a childhood Halloween. Trevor, with his slight build, short stature, and lack of superpowers, makes a good David against the Goliaths of the world. I will also admit to being a massive fan of Timothy Zahn’s excellent Blackcollar novels, where his team of interstellar commandos make a point of collecting and using weapons that can bypass conventional scans. A slingshot (they seem to use the wooden kind) does not set off metal detectors, and you can find your ammunition pretty much anywhere. Trevor’s background as a sidekick also dovetailed with the idea of him as a kid hero, gleefully shooting pebbles at villains. But I wanted something even more basic.

Sometime in my high school years, the History Channel put together a series called Arms and Armor about various basic kinds of weapon. About the only one I remember was the segment on slings, which made excellent use of news footage of Palestinian teenagers slinging rocks at Israeli soldiers. The symbolism was rich, of course, but the documentary pointed out two other points about the simple cloth sling that David used. First, it’s the weapon of people with time on their hands—shepherds chucking rocks for hours because they’re bored, building their skills in case a predator prowls by. I could see Trevor chucking pebbles across rooftops on quiet patrol nights. And unlike the wooden model, the cloth sling is collapsible, and can be made out of just about anything. The first sling Trevor uses in Masks is made from garbage—the line from a twisted plastic grocery bag, the cradle from a scrap of rag. His ammunition of choice is broken cinderblock—common rubble out here from earthquakes, car accidents, and simple wear and tear on the landscape. Rae has access to the abandoned tools of a dozen dead heroes, but Trevor has only his brain and his hands. And for him, that’s enough.

I’ve mentioned several times that I love scrappy heroes who make do with what they’ve got, and it may be this side of Trevor’s character that I like best. He never gives up on doing the right thing, even when the only tools he has are the contents of a dumpster. I honestly don’t think he’s ever considered the possibility that he shouldn’t be running around in a mask without any powers. It has never crossed his mind. He sees a giant on the hilltop, and he goes looking for five smooth stones … and he’s only going to need one.

But that very confidence renders him terribly vulnerable. At the climax of Masks, Trevor must face an enemy who can end his existence with a thought. He has only his sling and his mind against someone who thinks faster than he does and vaporizes flying rocks. So while he goes confidently into battle with the weapons of a shepherd king, the forces arrayed against him are far better armed. He spends all of Masks building the confidence to enter that fight, and he forgets that a very similar choice led him to make the greatest mistake of his life, one that still gives him nightmares. But being a hero means trying even if you’re going to lose, and Trevor will be a hero if it means he dies trying.

All of which reminds me of the other piece of Trevor’s sling. I recently found in one of my old notebooks a poem I copied down in high school, around the time I created Trevor—his courage and his tragedy both. I’m not much for poetry, and I’m particularly not much for Emily Dickinson, but maybe this piece was a little bit prophetic:

I took my Power in my Hand --
And went against the World --
'Twas not so much as David -- had --
But I -- was twice as bold --

I aimed my Pebble -- but Myself
Was all the one that fell --
Was it Goliath -- was too large --
Or was myself -- too small?