The Middle of the Dark

The future is impossible to see. That's what I think of, when I think of Kit Baldwin. Kit is the main character of my novel NAMELESS, which I won't detail here too much but has to do with superheroes. Kit becomes one, accidentally. The impetus for this story began in 2011, when I read this article about firefighters who refused to put out a house fire because the owner hadn't paid the bill for these services in his rural community. Seven years ago, that was shocking. in 2018, not so much. Kit began much earlier, way back in high school. She morphed and evolved and moved in and out of stories until she finally found her place in this one. Kit was right for Nameless because I wanted someone who didn’t fit into any of the worlds within the story. I wanted someone without power, but with a great sense of justice and decency. She finally manifested in this novel, but she didn't become real until today, when my friend and critique partner Alia Hess realized her in ink:...

I've added a new links page (above) with relevant links to resources for writers. For the past year, I've been part of a writing group comprised of enormously talented individuals. They've been a tremendous help to me in improving my craft and helping back to publishing.

Here is the cover for Interzone 276, in which my story 'Tumblebush' appears. The issue is due any day now from  TTA Press , edited by Andy Cox. Tumblebush emerged out of a pair of questions about the future: what form would a living wage take, and also, what if that future is also one in which our ice caps have melted? The story takes place in a submerged New York City, about eighty years from now. It's a story about allowances. What are you allowed, for your content, the product of your own life? What do you allow yourself? Others? Tumblebush is a private detective, and product of a vanishing city - she's tough, she's merciless and she has a set of rules. Very happy to have this story in Interzone. You can order the issue here .

A sneak peak of the full page spread for my story 'Tumblebush,' set to appear in Interzone from TTA Press in July. Outstanding illustration from Dan Senecal - I'm blown away.

Happy to share that my short story 'Tumblebush' will be published in the July/August issue of Interzone Magazine, published by TTA Press . I've read Interzone forever, and I'm thrilled to be part of this great magazine. Tumblebush is the username of a private investigator in a flooded NYC, about 80 years from now. A missing person case leads her on a journey through the ruins, to a cold truth.

I used to write a lot of movie reviews, not so much anymore. Here's a stab at getting back into film criticism and discussion, with an article on a unique aspect of the reaction to Infinity War.

Happy to share that my story "Princess Mine" appears in Strange Horizons . This is my first sale since 2011, and beyond thrilled it's to this wonderful magazine. The story is available to read or listen to, as a podcast. Be aware the story deals with suicide and depression.

Trying to be optimistic on Brexit but it's hard. The fallout from this should send shivers down the spine of anyone contemplating the day after a Trump presidential win. The shock from two of the world's most influential forces voting to flee back to isolationism clearly pays no benefits, and as Brits are discovering this morning, some of the promises the Leave campaign made were false (more money for health care). So hopefully here at least we wake up a bit. A lot of people said Trump would never be the nominee. A lot of people said the UK would never vote itself out. Well. One possible benefit is the prospect of a united Irleand as the North has voted resolutely to stay in the EU. Scotland and Northern Ireland have made rumblings about leaving the UK in the take of this, which I think have to be taken seriously. David Cameron didn't take the first Scottish referendum seriously and nearly pissed away the empire then; apparently he learned nothing from it. On the dow...

What do you say? Everything you can say about the routine mass murder of innocent people seems rote. Empty. You lose the will to even say it when you realize how little comfort it gives and how little weight it carries in a country where this is normal. The outpouring of grief and support for Orlando is remarkable, but it was with San Bernadino. It was with Sandy Hook. It was with Columbine. It was with the dozens of other mass shootings that have occurred in this country. I was 6 or 7 when 'going postal' was how we described this. One post office shooting after another. I was watching the local news one night at home and they played a 911 recording of a woman, a post office worker, barricaded in some room as a shooter stalked through the building murdering her co-workers. I don't remember all of the tape, which seemed to go on forever, but I remember the last thing she said. 'I think I'm going to die.' And she did. Liz Mathis told me so, and then she moved o...

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...