Name that pup!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild things

Fingers ... om nom nom.

I consider myself lucky to have spent time with wolves.

Sazi, the pup's foster mom.

Domesticated wolves, mostly, or wolf-dog hybrids; a wolf-malamute cross, a wolf-German shepherd cross, a wolf-husky cross, and one magnificent creature who was half gray wolf and half red wolf, according to the experts’ best guess. For the record, I don’t keep them as pets and never have; keeping wolves is a rather restricted activity in California, as it is in many states, and my contact with these animals came through a friend who grew up alongside them and knows them far better than I ever will. Frankly, she’s the only person I’ve ever met who I believe was truly qualified to work with them. I spent a little time with her recently, and with a recently adopted pup, and it got me thinking about wild things.

At the top of the stairs, an invisible caribou.

The thing that nobody understands about wolves, even ones that have been raised by humans and are as domesticated as they’re going to get, is that they’re not dogs. I don’t care if they’re genetically similar; they’re different creatures. The red-gray wolf looks like a big shepherd dog with reddish-brown fur, but every once in a while she gives you a look that a dog never will. The look says: I don’t need you. Maybe I eat your food and live in your house, and maybe I consider you part of my pack, but there is absolutely nothing that could stop me from walking out that door and becoming the apex predator of some forest somewhere. Wolves are a bit like cats in that way; they might be domesticated, but they’re never, ever tame.

She was sure I was hiding raw meat on my person.

My friend told me once that the difference between a wolf and a dog is that when you call a dog in for dinner, it comes running without a second thought; when you call a wolf, it often trots into view and then stops, waiting to be convinced. They are considerably more intelligent than dogs, and have a much better idea of what humans are up to. They’re surprisingly strong, too; one member of my friend’s pack once pulled a wooden post out of cold concrete and didn’t notice she’d done it. She just ran off, dragging the post behind her, along with a big concrete chunk and a very surprised human who’d gotten tangled in the rope. The human got herself untangled within about 20 yards, but the wolf kept on running and it took my friend hours to track her down.

Taking a nap under my jacket.
(Photo is blurry because my jacket was on my lap.)

Think about that. Something that looks like a beautiful, friendly dog, but is frighteningly smart and so strong it doesn’t have to notice it’s pulling your weight. I’ve met people who tell me they’ve always wanted a pet wolf, and I’ve usually looked at them like they’ve sprouted a second head and said, “Are you sure? Have you ever met one?” They haven’t. Most of these people seem dumber than the average golden retriever. I can understand why, when we humans bred wolves into dogs, we bred them to be friendly, dependent, and just a little bit thick in the head. There’s something unsettling about a furry quadruped that seems to know something you don’t. Especially when it probably does.

Don’t get me wrong—I’ve loved every second I’ve spent with wolves, and my friend couldn’t imagine her life without them. The red-gray wolf effectively adopted her infant son—guarding his crib, hurrying to comfort him when he cried, curling up protectively around him when he sat on the floor to play. I swear I saw him spit up once, when he was six months old, and the wolf had licked him clean by the time his human mother had picked up the spit rag. It was a very doglike thing to do, except that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog with reflexes that fast, or a thought process that complex. It was a wolf moment.

With a few select exceptions, I don’t think humans should live with wolves, or wolfdogs. My friend is an unusual case; after a lifetime of experience with these animals, she speaks their language and knows them better than she does human beings. Everybody else who meets her pack, myself included, takes one look at them and immediately thinks: Dog! And that’s where the trouble begins. They’re not dogs. They’re too smart, too strong, and too knowing. Most of the would-be wolf owners I’ve met have been fed the romance of the wolf, the wild beast that takes a human into its wild heart. And sometimes wolves do that—but more often they don’t. Unlike dogs, they choose their companions carefully, and many of them will never choose a human at all. They don’t have to, and don’t want to. They’re wolves.

 

I keep these lessons in mind whenever I write about animals, especially wild ones. They don’t care about the big bad wolf of fairy tales, or the noble wolf of modern myths. Maybe a few of their ancestors came out of the woods and joined primitive man beside his fires, but the rest of them didn’t. They stayed wolves. And whenever I write about the coyote in Masks, or any wild animal in any one of my stories, I remind myself: this isn’t a dog, or a cat, or anything I know. This is something else. This is something that stayed a wolf. They don’t have to come inside, and they don’t have to notice they’re dragging you in their wake, let alone consult you on where they’re going.

How would the world be different, I wonder, if more people understood that?

Make your own Pocket Coyote!

Enjoy, crafting superheroes! All that stands between you and your very own Pocket Coyote is a couple of hours of sewing ...
Pocket Coyote Pattern

Meet Rae and Trevor!

Well, electronically.

Once again, I find myself in need of a little online noise—traffic on the blog and Facebook page, people reposting and commenting on the trailer videos, etc. Once again, I can’t tell you why I need that noise, for the usual reasons. And once again, I’m willing to bribe you to have fun. Does it get any better than this?

We’re coming up on Thanksgiving, so Rae’s off school for the week (or maybe just playing hooky again—it’s hard to tell the difference). Trevor, of course, does not go to school except to tinker in the computer lab and eavesdrop on the guidance counselor’s office. Captain Catastrophe is visiting family back East, so his next nefarious plot will probably focus on TSA screeners in Atlanta, and therefore he’s not much of a threat to L.A. right now. The forces of evil are mostly either trying to get their Christmas-death-spree shopping done early or still putting the finishing touches on turkey-based death rays.

In short, my heroes are just a little bit bored. So I’m going to let them out to play with all of you.

For the next week, Rae, Trevor, and my other characters will be answering fan questions on this blog and on the Masks Facebook page. So if there’s something you absolutely have to know about the world of Masks, this is your chance to ask the source. Have you ever wondered where the hell Rae’s parents are, and why they don’t seem to mind her running around in the dark beating people up? You can ask her, and she’ll tell you. Or maybe you’d like to know what the Masked Rider does when he’s not delivering cryptic warnings and casually foiling robberies with spray paint. He’s got an answer for that, although you might have to get Nathan Fillion to translate. And Trevor’s got so many secrets I know you’ll have questions for him (How did he end up a superhero’s sidekick? What did he do for two years on the road? Where did the creepy voices in his head come from?), and maybe he’ll even give you a straight answer to one or two. The coyote will be available for questions, too, although of course you can’t always trust what a trickster says.

So if you’ve ever wanted to know something about one of the Masks characters … or even something about the world (Where did superheroes come from? Why didn’t new masks come into L.A. after the purge killed off the old ones? Do superheroes often fall in love with each other, or are Rae and Trevor an exception?), this is your chance.

To ask a question, leave a comment on this blog entry or a post on the book’s Facebook page (see the links in the column to the right), addressing the question to the relevant party. (Example: “Coyote: How do you stay ahead of Animal Control?”) I’ll get back to you with the character’s responses throughout the week. (“I iz wily. And I bitez thru truck tires.”) The best questions and responses will be reprinted in an interview on this blog later.

Now let’s make some noise!

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!

Two contests for the price of one! Well, actually for the price of two ...

While I’m slaving away over the second short story, I think I’ll put my wonderful readers to work. That’s right, it’s time for another contest! Or, in this case, TWO contests!

One of the most interesting aspects of running Masks as a monthly web serial back in the day was the fan art I’d get. Some of it was pretty darn cool, and some of it made me laugh, and occasionally it made me wonder what kind of medication my readers were taking, but it was always entertaining. I’ve gotten a little bit of fan art while I’ve been hyping the book, but I kind of miss the zaniness of seeing my universe through others’ eyes.

So for the next six weeks, I will be accepting fan-art submissions for the new contest. The fan art can take pretty much any form as long as it produces an image—drawing, painting, photograph, video still, whatever. The art can draw on existing Masks characters and stories, or expand the universe in some way (hint: dozens of masks died in the superhero purge ten years ago—and I’ve only named about ten of them so far!). If you’re not comfortable with a pencil, go crazy with the contents of your closet and take photos. Paint up an action figure like Guillermo did in “Zephyr Street.” Use screen captures from an MMO like Erik Johnson did for his Masks project in City of Heroes. If you're musically inclined, post a video of a song! Wacky videos are acceptable, as long as you made them yourself and you don’t mind my sticking a screen capture in the album for reference. I’m not looking for Hollywood-caliber production values here—anything that’s fun and superheroic (or supervillainous) is fine by me.

Pretty much any kind of art will do as long as a) it stays PG-13 (no profanity, nudity, sexual content, or racial slurs, please); b) it’s not going to get me in trouble with the copyright monkeys (no Superman or Dr. Horrible—but your own original character is fine); and c) people looking at it can tell it’s associated with the book somehow. Feel free to plaster the title on the image.

Submit the art to this blog or the book’s Facebook page on or before September 27—I’ll be developing an album on the page so everyone can see what gets turned in. After the submission period closes, I’ll post a link so the fans can vote to choose the best submission. Ah, democratic anarchy!

And oh, yeah, there’s a prize! The best submission wins a bloodthirsty animal sidekick with which to battle the forces of evil. That’s right, the Pocket Coyote is finally coming along … and the best fan art wins one, handmade by yours truly! Photos of it soon.

But wait! I hear you saying, “Rebekah, I have the artistic ability of a poleaxed goat. I can barely hold a crayon, let alone a needle or a camera, but I want to win a Pocket Coyote, too!” Well, never fear, because there’s a contest for you as well! We’re having another fan drive, something like the last one.

Invite your friends to Like the book’s Facebook page OR sign up to follow this blog (that’s right, if they do both it counts TWICE), and comment on the blog or the page to identify who invited whom. Whoever gets the most new fans between today and September 27 (i.e., fans that join or follow between now and then) gets a Pocket Coyote of their very own in the mail. I'll send the thing to any location the postman can find in the United States or Canada.

Unless it’s John K, who won last time. Fair’s fair.

Ready? On your mark … get set …

Introducing the Backpack Coyote!

That's right, the plushie pattern is here! Now I just need a name for my finished prototype ...
Backpack Coyote Pattern