The Middle of the Dark

After digesting what is probably the geek-news of the decade, I’ve accepted the fact that there will be new Star Wars movies – in perpetuity, probably – and that these will be further and further removed from the film that made such an impression on me as a child. George Lucas decided to retire, secure his brain child with a corporation that will mint money off of it until it’s public domain - or they spend enough money lobbying in Washingtonto prevent that   - and let go of the reins once and for all. There are inherent pros and cons with this. I’ve found myself growing more and more excited about the idea of a new Star Wars movie, especially one set in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi, that could potentially feature so many of the characters and elements that people felt missing in the prequels. So here’s some free advice from a life long fan to Disney on how they can not just make money, but believers out of a willing but skeptical fan base (if it goes bad - we know i...

Turns out modern sci-fi owes nearly everything to a bastard . The surprise here isn't that most of the most famous tropes in science fiction owe themselves to a single work - hello, Star Wars - but that they originated from a book that was essentially fan fiction. Garret P. Serviss somehow avoided the legal apocalypse that would surely visit him today after publishing an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds - Edison's Conquest of Mars. The book was apparently written on commission from The Boston Post - I guess things were looser back then - and featured Thomas Edison leading the fight back to Mars. The article at Cracked labels Serviss a 'hack.' I won't make accusations as to the man's ability (capsule review: Serviss never met a comma he didn't like. Also, brownie points for 'puissance') but I don't think it's fair to dismiss him so easily. According to Wikipedia, 'the book contains some notable "...

The question for the last four years has been, is there any way they can top The Dark Knight? The answer is obvious, and became beside the point in the early morning of July 20th. The question unfortunately for this series of Batman films by Christopher Nolan is why such grand cinema must be forever associated with tragedy. At the end of the day, this is just a movie. It means nothing in the light of the loss of so many lives in Colorado , just as The Dark Knight meant nothing in the wake of Heath Ledger’s unexpected passing in 2008. What TDK did become was a tribute to a spectacular actor. The Dark Knight Rises was not intended to be any tribute to what happened last week, and it cannot be. What TDKR becomes is a tribute to a feat very rarely accomplished on film – the successful trilogy. The bad third movie in a trilogy is a bit of a running joke in cinema. Say when: X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3, Superman III (yes, they did it in Roman Numerals once) The Godfather 3 (this actu...

A writer offering rules on writing is always a fun exercise to - if nothing else - argue about the rules of writing. Colson Whitehead provided his own  the other day in the NY Times that you should definitely read if you write or have any interest in writing. All of the rules resonate, but for me, #1 and #10 do the most: Rule No. 1: Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do. “And what do you have for us today, Marcy?” “A penetrating psychological study of a young med student who receives disturbing news from a former lover.” “How marvelous! Timmy, what are you holding there?” “It’s a Calvinoesque romp through an unnamed metropolis much like New York, narrated by an armadillo.” “Such imagination!” Show and Tell, followed by a good...

aMAZEme Book Maze In London Imagine you wake up in the middle of one of those huge hedge garden mazes. The scary Shining kind. You start wandering around, looking for a way out. Time after time, you hit a dead end. Some paths hold promise only to come to nothing. You ultimately test each possible path, because you don’t know where you are. You know where you’re going – out – but how to get there? Eventually you find your way, but only after you have spent a lot of time, effort and frustration. Fear, even. This is writing a novel for me.

 Matthew Salesses wrote an outstanding article on revision at Necessary Fiction the other day, and it inspired me to think a little about what rules I have for revision, since it's mostly all I do. There are no hard and fast rules - a random Google search will generate hundreds of equally good suggestions - but what I liked best about the 'thoughts' Matthew shares is that they're fairly unique. Most how-to's and guides you will find on this subject are very clinical and technical. Do this. Do that. Writing is rewriting, and writing to me has always been a very intuitive process. The best one maybe the first: 1. To me, the most important question to ask as I revise is: Am I bored here? The best “advice” I’ve ever heard on revision was from the wonderful teacher and writer Margot Livesey. It was something like this: if you are bored, it’s not because you’ve read that section so many times, it’s because it’s boring. A lot of the time as a writer, you spend so m...

I came across a nice essay on the semicolon over at NYTimes today.  I'm a fan, in case you couldn't tell, but it seems not everyone is. The writer, Ben Dolnick, quotes an amusing anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut on the subject: “Do not use semicolons,” he said . “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” This only endears the semicolon to me. I find it one of the most musical of tools in the language. The semicolon allows you to impinge on other thoughts, other sentences, often in a rhythmic or as Dolnick points out when discussing William James, symphonic way; in the present tense, the use of the semicolon can help achieve a certain kind of kinetic energy that has always appealed to me. I love music. If I had a choice of any artistic ability, it would be to create music. The only way for me to even try is through words. I fail daily, but I keep tapping away at beats I hear in my head. I marr...

So, like I said.  The next novel after this new one will probably be the Elizabeth sequel. I say probably because it was supposed to have been the next book, and obviously that didn't pan out.  I do have about 150 pages of what was to be the sequel that I wrote back in '09.  I probably will not use any of this.  We'll see, but my concept of the next book has veered pretty far from what I had in mind back then.  My approach to the sequel is that it's not even really a sequel at all.  As I said earlier this year , I am approaching the sequel somewhat as a level setting of the story. It will assume no one has read the first book.  One of the themes of the first book is reinvention and the sequel completely recontextualizes the story to the point that you could call it a reboot, except it's not.  Some of the influences on this novel include The City and The City, Batman: Year One, The Long Halloween, Watchmen, and Chris Claremont's early ru...

But kind of. The story that has given me so much grief over the last - um, it's been a long time - finally came together in the last month or so.  As always with me it was a matter of confidence.  The book is more or less the version I attempted about three years ago.  I lost confidence in it then and spent a long time lost in the weeds trying other approaches.  These yielded some interesting writing but ultimately they weren't right for this story.  The Book of Elizabeth had quite a few false starts too, but none as dramatic as this (actually, I'm leaning toward my next novel being the Elizabeth sequel, which as it stands now would kind of make the first one a false start...) I hope this is something I am getting better at recognizing.  Maybe I am just one of those tinkerers that never knows when to quit.  Or maybe I just never know what I want. In any case, I am very happy that I have found my way to this place.  The novel right now s...

There was an article recently in the NYTimes (the link is escaping me) about how the boon in digital publishing for indie writers has created something of a sprint to generate as much material as possible.  The nutshell is that if you are not producing multiple books in a single year, then you are not sustaining your brand and worse yet, not making money.  Dean Wesley Smith actually breaks this down in a post on his blog that is well worth reading.  There is a lot of thought that goes into his reasoning, and that of all the advocates for blitz publishing.  The e-reader consumes at a pace that is both electrifying and terrifying.  If you want to build a readership, you need to give them a reason to stay around. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't write more than one book a year.  I will probably publish my second novel later this year.  I feel the same pressures other indie writers do.  I feel the same spirit of opportunity.  Money si...

So. Have not been posting as much as I've meant to.  This is entirely due to the fact that I can't write a novel and anything else at the same time.  I have tried.  I admire those that blog and build their 'platform' - which is so key to what indie authors need to do these days - and I admire the hell out of authors who can produce quality material at a decent pace, since that's also apparently something we need to do .  In just about every other aspect of my life, I can multi-task like no one's business.  Not when it comes to writing.  I have to focus on what I'm working on to the point that I can't really see what's in front of me.  And that's really the problem.  I've talked quite a bit before about my struggles with the Big Damn Epic.  Over the last several years, it has taken this strange place in my life.  The elephant in the room.  The monkey on my back.  Alternately it feels like I'm turning into Axl Rose, an...

This is a tough post to write. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I love Joss Whedon.  A lot of people love the current direction of the comic series, which is canon and often has matched the quality of the television show. I do not love where this comic book is going. The pregnancy/abortion storyline that sprang up recently seemed to offer a true evolution for the series and for Buffy herself.  I thought the approach was a little too literal but it offered an enormous opportunity.  The last two issues have squandered that opportunity, and frankly, the series' credibility with me as a reader. I'm a writer and it's not my intent to judge the merits of other writers, especially ones as gifted as Joss Whedon.  So this will be the last of any such post where I do anything other than offer what I'm reading/seeing as a prompt or guide for my own writing or yours.  If there is a lesson here, it's simply not to play games with your reader.  I feel ...

Back in the 80's the supernatuarally cool Nick Cave wrote his own dictionary . The only thing that would have been better than that would have been if he had made up his own words. Which of course, some people do, and you can too .  For example: rebel, rebel (noun): a torn dress So take this as a lesson - don't settle for those dogmatic tomes from Webster's. English is yours! Take it back.

As you may have noticed one of my hobbies is collecting Star Wars toys .  My very good friends at JediDefender have joined forces with me for a giveaway of my novel The Book of Elizabeth .  Take a look and if you enjoy Star Wars toys and good conversation, go ahead and join the forums!  This is my favorite place on the internet. Thanks again to Jesse and everyone on the outstanding JD staff!

A big part of what I like to write about in this blog is what interests me in the moment, and how that impacts my writing, and maybe yours.  Much has been said that this last decade or so has been the 'Golden Age of Television.'  There is no denying that, not with The Wire, Deadwood, The Sopranos, and certainly, Mad Men, which returned last night after nearly two years with a fantastic example of why the writing on television is quite possibly the best writing that's happening anywhere. That's not to leave fiction lovers or writers out.  There's lots to take away from TV, as there is any medium.  Cinema and now television have always presented an aesthetic challenge to literature - the axiom 'Show, Don't Tell' is simply a fact of life in motion pictures as opposed to a rule (well - ok, it's not, but by virtue of its nature, the camera eliminates the need for the kind of scene setting that was expected and necessary in literature in the pas...

The latest issue of Carnival of Indies, featuring a round up of great links from the world of indie publishing, is now up at Joel Friedlander's amazing site, The Book Designer .  Even better, one of my posts is among the links you'll find there - My Advice For Writers . If this is your first time to the blog, I hope you enjoy what you see and come back for more.  Thanks!

 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles...

For those of you keeping score at home, I've been on the fence with the latest comic book season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.  Unfortunately that's continued pretty much through the season so far, and continues with the latest issue, where Buffy plans to go through with the abortion of her unplanned pregnancy. I have no issue with the subject itself, or Buffy contemplating what she contemplates; as I said in my last post on Buffy , I have issue with how the series is approaching it.  Joss Whedon and company approach the issue of Buffy getting drunk, pregnant and confused literally, which has never been the modus operandi of the series.  As I said before, typically Buffy has always presented common teenage/young adult fears via mystical/magical guises. The pregnancy does not seem right now to be anything than what it's presented to be, which is the result of a drunken one night stand. I lamented the lack of subtext here, and maybe the writers anticipated that...

Community returned to NBC last Thursday, and it was very funny as always.  Britta even had an observation that some writers might appreciate: 'An analogy is like a thought with another thought's hat on.'  Ah, I have missed this show.  In all the celebration across the internet (this is where this show lives), there was an interesting and thougtful objection over at the A.V. Club about the show. Writers  Steven Hyden and Todd VanDerWerff  debated the merits of the show, and ultimately it's worth.  I found the conversation fascinating as I have had some of the same thoughts recently .   No doubt the show is an exercise in form.  As I said in my post a while back, I think the characters are secondary, and one of the reasons to show struggles to expand its audience is that it presents itself as a riddle.  In general, most people don't want to think too much when it comes to comedy.  They want to laugh.  Intelluctual comedy i...

More and more I get asked for advice from aspiring writers. Mostly this is because I have a book, not because I really know anything. I'm not good at giving advice. Actually, I'm pretty good at it, just not very good at following it myself. So take all of this with a grain of salt. Actually, you should probably just click away to some other website right now. If you're still here, or have just reached the end of the internet, seriously: I've given a lot of thought to what I say to a serious writer who is asking me for serious perspective, and in so much as I can give it, I usually speak to these things: Find your faults . You have them. We all do. One thing my day job has taught me is to actively seek out process improvement. Usually we wait for problems to come to us - it's how we know they're problems - but most often in business, this can get you in trouble. The same applies to your art. It is a process; you should actively seek to impro...

Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius to comic book and cinema fans, has died.  Sad news on the heels of Ralph McQuarrie just last week.  The two of them had an incalcuable impact on the look of genre filmmaking and the minds of impressionable young artists over the last generation or two.  I knew of him mainly through Heavy Metal and the magazine-size Epic comics in the early 80's.  I remember seeing reprints of The Airtight Garage and being a little unsure of what to make of the grandiosity of it all - at that point I was very much still planted in the grungy feel of Star Wars.  Actually it wasn't too long ago that Giraud did a piece based on Episode I that recalls Airtight Garage so much that you tend to look at the prequels as closer to him than McQuarrie: That's actually Jerry Cornelious (sorry, Lewis Carnellian ) up there in the corner.  Giraud's influence is most heavy in Tron and Alien, as well as The Fifth Element, which came later. ...

Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearin...

Ralph McQuarrie, the conceptual artist responsible for the landmark vision of the Star Wars films and consequently, one of the most influential visions in all cinema, passed away yesterday.  It's impossible to separate McQuarrie from Star Wars; without hin, Darth Vader likely would not be the icon he is today.  Vader only got his famous mask because McQuarrie was conceptualizing the scene where Vader was entering the Rebel Blockade Runner at the beginning of the original Star Wars film; it struck him that since Vader was passing from one spaceship to another, he should have a breath mask.  This stroke of genius - luck? - had as much to do with the mythic, dynamic figure Darth Vader would become and why the character will live forever. It's equally impossible to estimate the impact McQuarrie had on generations now of subsequent artists.  Not just visual artists and engineers - McQuarrie worked for Boeing before Star Wars - but writers like myse...

You may or may not have heard there was a Star Wars movie in theaters.  What continues to amaze me is the level of discourse Star Wars in general and Episode I - The Phantom Menace in particular gets, among fans.  Honestly, we never stopped talking about it.  The conversation now centers on the merits of the film, out of the glare of the blinding hype that accompanied its release.  Most people tend to agree now it was not as bad as we first thought.  It's not even the worst Star Wars film. A lot of the conversation that takes place around TPM and the prequels centers on the 'what if;' what if Jar Jar hadn't existed, what if this or that.  If I had a nickel for every conversation I have had with Ben, Sugu or any of my friends on this subject, I'd be able to finance my own version of the movie.  And I admit - I have, off and on, been writing a screenplay of a revised Episode I for a long time.  It serves primarly as a mental exercise....

Community returns 3/15!   Streets ahead!

I had commented a while back about my concerns in general with the direction the Buffy comics have taken since about the last third of Season 8.  The characters seemed a bit aimless, and the overall story left a lot of people dazed and confused.  Out of that confusion has come a very sober wake up call in the form of Buffy's unexpected pregnancy.  It could be the aimlessness was intentional, though I maintain it didn't really work (the writing is good but not great this season) and it revisited episodes Buffy has already gone through.   The character simply needs to grow and now, certainly, she must. Typically Buffy has always presented common teenage/young adult fears via mystical/magical guises.  The pregnancy does not seem right now to be anything than what it's presented to be, which is the result of a drunken one night stand.  There's a lot to be said for this.  This is a comic book after all.  But this is also Buffy, ...

Ben wrote about the announcement that DC is going forward with an ambitious slate of prequels to Watchmen.  Alan Moore and fandom at large collectively dug graves just so they could spin in them.  Like Ben, I've thought about it quite a bit and here's my thoughts. First things first: it's a money grab.  The scale of the project speaks to that.  The reason it's happening now, and not a few years ago when the movie hit and something like this would have made sense (from a purely marketing point of view) is that the comic book industry has reached its financial and creative end .  A great deal was made of DC's decision just a few months ago to completely scrap its line and relaunch with a digital slate; the underlying thinking there was that the print aspect of the comics industry is in free fall.  Print in general is, and comic books are not the only victims . I see Before Watchmen as a last ditch attempt to both breathe life into and draw lif...

The first rule of writing is there are no rules of writing.  That's clever, but not exactly true.  The word I probably hear the most from other writers is 'rules.'  It's also the most political aspect of writing as well; usually the subject falls along one of three lines: There are no rules. There are, and these are the ones you never break (Show, don't tell). You have to know the rules before you can break them. This article over a io9 last week spoke to 10 generally well known rules about sci-fi/fantasy fiction; rules in writing generally being not what you should do, but what you shouldn't.  The article makes a case for breaking every single one of them.  I thought it would be fun to talk about each one in turn as I'm facing some of these decisions now in writing the new novel. 1) No third-person omniscient. I'll be honest - I'm not sure if this is actually a rule.  As the article points out, the omniscient perspective has long been th...

Usually when people ask me why I write books, I tell them because I have to. It's a pretty good answer and I can't think of any other way to describe it.  For whatever reason, there is this narrative engine within me that compells me to try and tell stories.  This engine is missing a belt or two sometimes, but you know what I mean.  There is a very interesting article in the NY Times this morning that poses the question in general: why write novels at all?  In the face of more popular entertainment, specifically movies, why the novel and not a screenplay?  What motivates a writer to write?  A reader to read?  The novel faces the same challenge that the play did when the novel took over the mainstream consciousness.  I don't think the novel or literature is in any danger - more people read now than have ever read.  The book will be fine.  In fact, the book is experiencing something of a revolution.  The e-reader and digital...

“From the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous.” - Victor Frankenstein So after about a week of solid panic and lamenting the ruin of my art, I put it out of mind for a day.  Then I did what Anne Lamott did in Bird by Bird .  I sat down and just thought about what I liked in the story.  What the story was, not necessarily what I wanted it to be, or what others might want it to be.  I wrote down the characters, the places, the scenes, all of it in the journal there on the left, and I discovered something: all the pieces I liked, all the varying aspects of the story I tried to view it through, they all existed within the draft I had been writing.  They co-existed rather well.  This story - it's not fair to call it a story, really - this world has always been bigger than what I could get my arms around.  So many lenses existed to view the world through that I tried one at a time, certain th...

I think back to the scene in Bird by Bird , where Anne Lamott finds out her editor doesn't think the book she has invested everything in and depends on for her livelihood will not be published. He tells her he thinks it's competent, it's... capable, but what's it about? Why did you do this? She stages a passionate defense of the book (after some drinking) and in her rant, discovers the book in her heart is not the one that came out of her head. That's how I feel right now. I am disgusted with myself and the book at this point.  I went from feeling lightheaded with the tipping point a few weeks ago to the stark realization the other day that I am probably on the wrong track with this.  Again.  What's worse is I feel I was on the right track before.  Day after day I chip away at the book, and I feel, this is it, this is progress; this is the end finally for this story which has hounded me for 10 years.  The book radiates this fatigue, let's say; this n...

I thought I'd update on where I'm at in my writing on a couple different pieces since I haven't really done that here in awhile.  Twitter seems to have taken over my daily updates on my progress. Novel In Progress aka GhostofBigDamnEpic aka ThatWhichRefusesToDie: Actually pretty good progress here.  252 pages as of today.  I expect the novel will be close to 400 at that end.  What's it about?  It's about a man alive at what appears to be the cosmological end of the earth - not the end, like OMG, it's the Mayan apocalypse - THE END end.  He has seen the world floruish and freeze.  He has seen every trace of humanity in the world and in him expire.  When he decides to meet his own end, he discovers the story of man - his story - is not yet over.  I hope for this to be ready for the fall. Story Collection: This is done, more or less, in the sense I've settled on the content.  Sort of.  I've debated on the Elizabeth story in it,...