Seven Minutes to Bangor

Stupefying Stories recently published my short story Seven Minutes to Bangor, and I’ve had a few people ask my about it in the past, so I thought I’d give some background for it here. If you have been living without the joys of this story, it’s in the December 2011 issue.

I’m a big fan of the modern holiday of Christmas. As invented in the late 19th and early 20th century, it’s pretty cool. Stripped of all religious meaning, it has become a winter festival of color and light, pushing aside the deary weather and isolation so many dread during the coldest months. It’s got family gatherings, presents, and lots of bric-a-brac. The practical traditions, such as decking out your house with difficult and often dangerous-to-install lights, fragrant and messy wreaths, and tactically-placed mistletoe make it unique in other ways. Just seeing the trappings of this holiday evokes strong memories, even among those who have never celebrated it directly, like me.

But the best thing about it is how completely nonsensical the mythology surrounding it is. It’s unabashed fantasy. A jolly fat man rides in a flying sleight pulled by twelve giant arctic deer, who also fly. He delivers toys to the world’s children*, in a single night. These toys are constructed and assembled at the north pole. By elves.

Yeah, freakin’ elves. Awesome.

How can this be improved upon? Well, I love the adventurous style of this holiday story. It’s got a kinetic frenzy completely lacking in every other holiday. If you think about it, what other celebration is kicked off by such a mythic worldwide race against the clock?

Seven Minutes just looks at what might go into the actual execution of such an absurd event. Who is the man at the center of this whole thing? How can he do so much in one night? And what’s the deal with those elves?

I wrote this years ago, in a writing group I started with some friends in Chicago, and then let it simmer for a while. Santa Clause wasn’t going anywhere, I reasoned, and I couldn’t seem to find the right platform to submit it until I started working with Stupefying. Also, the story came pre-dated, as the whole affair was powered by super technology that would never exist laid over a foundation of the antiquated and the obsolete.

I’m not one to include popular references in my writing, and Seven Minutes is one of the only times I’ve done so. This sort of thing never ages well. But I include a lot of small detail that make the story feel like it takes place somewhere in the early nineties. In the end it won’t matter much, since the story is, of course, about a guy delivering presents made by elves and flying deer. And those never go out of style.

Often unable to save face

Recently, I saw a movie called (uncleverly) Faces in the Crowd, in which a woman takes brain damage as a result of a fall. Brain damage is, as a storytelling device, loads of fun. It allows writers to examine our normal lives through the lens of impairment. In this case, she develops a marked case of prosopagnosia.

Prosopagnosia is commonly called “face blindness”, and there are many levels of the disorder, most of them accessible through brain trauma. Sufferers display varying levels of difficulty in facial recognition. In severe cases, the person may be unable to recognize anyone, even themselves, and must continually fall back on other cues as to who people are.In the movie, of course, the damage was taken while evading a serial killer (what else could it have been?).

So the killer plays a rather unimaginative game of cat and mouse with the protagonist, knowing that she’ll never be able to recognize him later on. In the movie, the prosopagnosia is shown by having multiple actors play each character, with changes of actor coming whenever the character’s face goes out of view.The actors were all similar, of course, but the idea was to make the viewer vaguely uncomfortable, by defeating their natural recognition by continually changing the character’s features.I, however, just barely noticed, and usually didn’t see the transitions at all

.I have prosopagnosia, you see. So the movie didn’t work for me. Sigh, Yet another theatrical masterpiece, spoiled by neurological deficiencies!

I’ve only become aware of this in recent years. I have a lifetime’s irritating habit of monitoring the way my mind works (this goes way, way beyond introspection), and have always known I was bad at recognizing faces. I have memories of saying this exact thing to people at nearly every age.

“I’m really bad at names and faces,” I hear myself say, over and over, “so if I don’t recognize you next time, don’t get mad, or anything.”

“Oh, I’m no good at that either,” was the usual response. But my no good was at a whole other level than theirs, I was almost certain. And I must have been mostly right, because I can’t count the number of times I’ve have strangers walk up to me and greet me by name.

“Hey!” I’d gush, feigning pleasure at seeing them. “How’s it going?” This gambit to learn something that might jog my memory as to who this person might be is pretty weak, since most people just give you a placeholder answer, rather than a fact.

I used to think my poor skill at remembering faces was sort of ironic, given my lifelong interest in portraiture, and drawing people. But recently I’ve begun to wonder if my striving for technical skill in this area isn’t some sort of coping mechanism, a new set of hooks to hang my visual impression on, a way to categorize features so that I might be better at recalling the face as a whole. And perhaps this has worked. Who can say how bad I would be at this if I didn’t have this habit to fall back on?

First Impressions

November saw the publication of my short story First Impressions in the magazine Stupefying Stories. I've been asked about it by a few people, so here goes some navel-gazing about it.

There are spoilers, though, so if you haven't read it, don't read this blog post about it first. Go buy it! No, really.

First off, this is the first SF story I've ever written that has aliens in it. Yep, I don't do aliens, since people are strange enough. But the entire point behind this story is how aliens are treated by most SF: as surrogates for specific human cultural traits or viewpoints.

I've only read a few pieces that actual make aliens seem alien. Usually, I sort of nod my head, and say, "Yep, those are the samurai. Oh, those are Soviet." or whatever. So many writers crib human cultures its almost hard to remember that it can be any other way. Most attempts to get inside an alien's head reverts to merely examining in painful detail human foibles. Star Trek has this approach down to a science. And most attempts to avoid these pitfalls create painfully awkward and self-conscious writing.

The core idea of First Impressions was to take these traits and run with them. The aliens in the story are completely human, mentally, with only superficial differences. They look like the classic grays, which was my unwritten signal that this was about our collective cultural memes regarding aliens, and not aliens themselves.

The protagonist, Darrel, being primed to meet aliens, is basically taken for a ride by prankish children, who abuse him physically and mentally in a sort of light-hearted game to see who can outdo the other with outrageous acts and still stay in the alien persona they've adopted. The Eisenhower-era characterization of their mother is a nod to the Golden Age of SF, where Cold War sensibilities rule in the far future.

The final entrance of yet another alien, whose thought exactly mimic Darrel's just drive home the point: these aliens are just human minds in other bodies.

January Recap

Okay, for some reason the wheels came off my writing this month. I cranked out the first book in the Queen of Cinders trilogy in less than 30 days. In that same amount of time, I've written one-third as much on book two. Lame! At this rate, I'll be wrapping this book up around April. No way. I've got to speed this puppy up!

If only there were a way to get two extra hours in a day...

I did three speed paintings this month, which isn't quite on schedule, but they're quick, so no worries there. The thing about painting fast in digital is that the medium's shortcomings and strengths become all the more apparent when working quickly. The program's quirks, too, loom larger when time is critical. For example, if something is a problem that can be fixed by fiddling with the tool settings, I'd normally stop working and do a quick "sharpen the saw" session, and adjust the tool. During a speed painting, though, I don't do that. I just let it go. Why? I'm not sure. It's not like I can't pause my timer. But I don't.

Strange.

I'm also looking into e-pubbing one of my novels, and have been reading other people's notes on how it's going for them, the pitfalls, and so on. It's a lot to take in, but the more I look at it, the more viable it sounds. For the first time ever, going the traditional route (agent, publisher, etc.) seems antiquated. I haven't made any decisions, yet, but there seems to be little to lose, really. Except two novels, of course, if the experiment goes terribly wrong.

And that's it, work-wise. No game news, no new publishing.

Funny, I'm looking forward to beginning the editing I've got slated for February. This will be the first time I've read through my first draft of Queen of Cinders, Book One. I'm not a big fan of editing, so that must say something about what a grind January was. And, the only way I'm going to start editing Book One is by finishing Book Two.

Here We Go Again

2012 is here, and I’m in full swing to start my shiny new year.

First off: Goals
2 novels
Sure, they’re books 2 and 3 in a trilogy, but I’m hoping to knock them out the way I did the first.

12 short stories
And I do mean short. One or two days to write a first draft, max.

Speedpaintings
1-hour paintings to keep me in the groove and all limber, art-wise. No getting bogged down with these. Just one a week.

App Development
I’ve grown tired of beating my head against the physical market, and have decided to move Bradford Design games and puzzles onto mobile platforms, where appropriate. I have two projects on the starting blocks, and hope they can see daylight before the end of the year.

Look into E-Pubbing
While I’m going to give all of my novels a chance to go the traditional route, I think that testing the e-pubbing option is something worth exploring, even though every fiber of my being protests. It just feels too much like vanity publishing, but maybe I’d better get with the 21st century.

New Web Site (or sites)
Yeah, my presence on the web has really gone nowhere, but that should turn around this year.

Resume contact with the rest of the world
My habit is to work in the evenings, in the two hours I’ve got free, but I need to get back in touch with my friends, too.

And there you have it. 2012’s biggest goals.

Returning to the Cloak

Cloak was the first novel I wrote. In a furious writing streak that I've never replicated since, I cranked out a monster of about 800 pages in 103 days. Writing eight hours a day, every day, simply never got tiring. I started with a goal of 2000 words a night, but, as the ball began rolling, I found myself sprinting through 4000 easily, and my average was around 5000 words or so, every night, with a personal best of over 7000. Fourteen pages in eight hours is about as fast as I could type, and I found myself writing at that pace for days at a time. Near the end I remember that my fingers were cramping up pretty badly, and I found myself typing with my ring fingers and pinkies, which was sort of sad.

Cloak marked the beginning of what I think of as my modern writing phase, a more mature stage than the early short stories I'd been doing. I'm not sure if other people have a particular project that they can point to that divides their "please forget me" learning phase from a more marketable one, but I could tell that, with Cloak, things were different. Every story I've submitted or sold has come after this first novel.

My rules for writing this novel were simple:

1. Don't stop. A no-brainer, but I had to be clear that this project was going to continue until I had completed it.
2. Never read what I'd written before. It was simply too easy to drop into editing mode, and, as George Lucas once said in an interview, if you read as you write, you'll never get past page four. So, lots of notes, and let the mistakes wait until the second draft.
3. Write until the story is finished in its own time. This one was the flipside of Rule One. Don't rush things, and let the story develop at its own pace.

Only one poor soul read the first draft of Cloak, and I cannot figure out how. For all of it's length, the novel read like a four-hour car chase. Reading the first draft myself was exhausting. I remember thinking that, for all the cutting and tightening I'd be doing, I had to add in some material to slow down the pace. Like sliding graphite control rods into a reactor core, the manuscript needed some cooling.

So, after four drafts, and some sendouts in the early 2000's, I let Cloak go for a while, concentrating on writing other things. This kind of cycle, of creating, polishing, active submission, and then being benched while other work is done, probably explains most of the multiple-year publishing stories out there. For example, I find it hard to believe that J.K. Rowling spent 11 years actively submitting Sorcerer's Stone. There simply aren't enough publishers and agents out there. Of course, when she started the process, multiple submissions were frowned on, and so it was with me for Cloak. It was common to have submission guidelines state that six to nine months was an appropriate wait for a response, and, after not hearing anything after that time, a query letter could be send inquiring as to a manuscript's status. Each sendout could take most or all of a year to garner that rejection. Thus I submitted Cloak to just a few publishers in the following years, but it was time-consuming.

Remember, back in 2000, the jury was out on whether or not a literary agent was necessary, and I couldn't tell you how many published authors advised against them for first-manuscript sales. But I can say that it was almost exactly half of those I contacted with the question. Literary agents were harder to track down and research then, and the age of mandatory blogs, websites, and twitter feeds was years in the future. So, years pass, and no action on Cloak.

One post-editorial-phase friend I asked about it (the mighty Barbara Young), when told of it's length, told me flat-out it was too long. "You've written a trilogy," she said. I told her that Cloak was book one of a trilogy, and that I'd already begun the next in the series, titled Curve. At that point I was 250 pages into Curve, and it was clear that neither title could be chopped down to one-third of it's length. A trilogy of trilogies seemed silly to me, and I didn't know how to continue. It seemed like a mistake to continue writing a series that was guaranteed to be made of books too big for a new author. So I placed Cloak and Curve onto the back burner, and wrote my next book, Firewatcher.

But now, having returned to it, I've cracked Cloak into three novels as Barb advised me to do years ago, using the three divisions of the novel as guidelines. Each is of novel length on its own. And, after having not read it for eight years, I read it without any preconceptions for the first time. I saw the characters the way they appear on the page, not as they appeared in my head. I found myself surprised at where the plot went, so far had it faded from my memory. The details were new to me, and I experienced the story for the first time as a reader.

So, how does it hold up? Surprisingly well.

I expected it to be far more cringe-worthy. Sure, at the pace I was writing it initially, and, given my wariness of adding more length, it gets pretty stingy with descriptive language at times, and there's a lot more telling than showing than I'm comfortable with. And, after all these drafts, a surprising number of small typographical errors. Not a terrible amount, but really, these should have been stomped out long ago. The effect of reading what you remember writing and what you expect was clear, once I was forced to rely on what was actually on the page.

But the plot itself, and the developing storyline, intrigued me all over again. They say that a writer needs to be their own fan, which makes sense, but I was ready to abandon Cloak to the trunk if it couldn't hold up. But it did for me, and I'm hoping it will for an agent sometime soon.

My Marketing Year

Okay, let just start by saying that 2010 was a tough one for resolutions. I have to give myself some slack, since the birth of my daughter last summer reworked my priorities (and rightly so), but now I've got her woven into the equation.

So, this year, I've resolved to renew my marketing push, getting as many of my finished and polished work into the hands of publishers as possible. No new games. No new writing. No new art, even. All marketing. All the time. It's a strange resolution to resolve to create less, but that's what I'm going to have to do in order to get those wings flapping again.

This recession has hit my in-production queue very hard. Projects that were supposed to be on shelves in late 2009 or early 2010 are now being pushed back to some time in 2011. Others have been killed as the companies I work with scale back their new offerings. So I've got to fire up the submission machinery in order to get things moving forward again, no matter how slowly.

But I certainly have enough to keep busy, even so. Two series of novels to continue to polish (an ongoing task, as anyone whose written one can tell you), about fifteen short stories I consider good candidates for publication, and an equal number of games for various markets.

I've got a lot to do. And it's the 9th already! Gak!