Patrick O'Duffy's Blog, page 22

Stand back – it’s SUPERHERO MONTH!

We’ve had the Avengers, we’ve had Amazing Spider-Man, we’ve had Dark Knight Rises, there are more movies on the way, there’s Green Arrow coming on the teevee, there are new Marvel and DC RPGs, Comixology is bringing out more digital comics than ever before, superhero novels are appearing in droves, Marvel is overhauling their whole line and it’s nearly a year since the DC reboot, about which I will say little other than to note the date.

I’m telling ya, superheroes are a Big Fucking Deal right now. Which is wonderful from my POV, because I have loved superheroes since the first time I saw a black-and-white reprint collection of 1970s DC comics in a central QLD newsagent at age 5 or 6. I love their action, their energy, their cavalier disregard of limitations and physics and common sense in the cause of helping and protecting others, no matter the cost.

I drink Earl Grey tea because it’s Batman’s favourite. I know that with great power comes great responsibility. I have always been ready to take up the heroic burden, even if that just means donating platelets and the occasional kidney. And I feel like, right now, this is something worth celebrating, and examining, and excitedly sharing with my readers – especially as I continue work on Raven’s Blood, my superheroic YA fantasy novella.

So August is officially Superhero Month here at PODcom! 

…okay, so what the hell does that mean?

Well, it means that I’m going to be writing a month’s worth of posts on the subject of superheroes – and that I’m bursting free of my two-posts-a-week power dampeners to post daily (or at least nearly daily) on the subject! Sure, most of those will be very short posts, maybe just a paragraph and some links, but by Great Rao I will be talking about superheroes as often as possible until winter shuffles away to be replaced by Kal-El Tammuz spring a’ coming in.

This week I’ll be talking about all the things I love about superheroes – and a few things I don’t like, sure, but in keeping with my Pollyannaish nature I’ll focus on the positive. I’m going to look at comics, movies, websites, podcasts, novels and anything else I can think of, pointing you towards the good stuff and explaining why the bad stuff is stinky. I’ll also be rolling out four of my patented Big Sunday Posts to discuss things in depth from a writer’s perspective, talking about how to write (or not to write) superhero comics – something, I hasten to point out, that I have absolutely no experience in doing, but yet feel qualified to armchair editor about. Yay me!

It’s gonna be a fun month. Strap yourself into your power armour, slide on your mask, gather up your cape in one hand and step off the ledge with me.

Have no fear. We can fly.

Getting my ya-yas out

I don’t understand young-adult (YA) fiction.

I mean, I used to think I did. YA fiction was fiction written for young adults – or teenagers, as we used to call them back in my day. Stories about teenagers, for teenagers, at a teenage reading level. That makes sense, right?

But the eager degree to which less-young adults swoop up and devour YA fiction shows that it’s not as simple as all that. Books like The Hunger Games and Twilight have many, many adult readers, from those in their 20s to those in their 50s. These are stories that resonate with adults, even if adults perhaps do not read them for the same purposes as teenagers – or maybe they do, I don’t know. Look at the way Twilight got snapped up by adult readers, its sexual elements strengthened and made more overt via fanfic, to finally transmogrify into Fifty Shades of Grey and have its pages filled with boners rather than sparkle-vampires while still retaining much of the characterisation and language level of the original. (Or so I assume, anyway, which probably means I’m making an ass of myself, so feel free to correct me.) That suggests that there’s something in those stories (or perhaps the writing approach of those stories) that speaks to adults, and they’ll take those stories and make them theirs by whatever means necessary, often by adding a whole bunch of fucking.

So anyway, many adults read YA fiction and enjoy it. But not me. I read YA books when I was a teenager, but these days I’m in my 40s and pretty much only read adult-adult books. The few times I’ve accidentally started a YA book in the last decade or so, I’ve quickly stopped when I realised that this wasn’t a story that resonated with me. That’s not a judgement on my part… okay, let’s be honest, it probably is a judgement and me looking down on YA books. Because I can be a lit-snob sometimes, even though I try to fight that urge.

But I’m trying to change that, because right now I’m trying to write a YA book, Raven’s Blood. Or, more accurately, what I think might be a YA book. Because, as noted, I don’t read YA and don’t get it. But I think this story might fit nicely into that category, and I’d like to see what working within those genre boundaries is like – which is why I’d like to work out what those boundaries are.

And I think I need some help with that.

So this is not a post where I sit you all down and educate you on what YA really means. This is a post where I hold things up, say ‘Is this it? What about this?’ and hope that you (the collective you) tells me what you think and whether I’m right – or, more importantly, where I’m wrong. Because I mostly learn by getting things wrong.

(I could probably also learn by reading some YA fiction, and I will do that at some point, but I like to get a grounding in theory before moving into practice. Which probably explains why it took so long for me to get a girlfriend in my teens. But I digress.)

This is what I think about when I hear ‘young adult’:

Characters

A protagonist that is a teenager, first and foremost, probably around the 17-18 mark. Obviously that varies down a bit (early Harry Potter) and up a little (late Twilight), but nonetheless YA books are almost always about young adults. (Although books about young adults aren’t necessarily YA, of course.) And this makes sense, because the assumed audience want to read about characters that they can personally identify with, characters their own age and with similar problems – making sense of the world, finding love, coping with the fact that their parents are STUPID.

Similarly, the antagonists should be similar to the enemies of teenagers – parents, authority figures, the forces of the adult world that try to dictate and reshape their lives before they’re fully-formed. They don’t have to specifically be those people, but they should fill a similar role. Alternatively, the other great enemy of teenagers is always other teenagers, who chip away at their identity and self-image from the other side and occasionally pants you in front of the class. Adults tell you what you should be; teenagers tell you what you shouldn’t be. Both are there to be overcome, possibly with lightning bolts.

Plot and themes

Does ‘coming-of-age story’ make me sound like Cranky Grandpa? Because that’s honestly what I figure most YA stories have – what they should have – at the core of their plots. They should reflect the lives and concerns of teenagers – the quest for identity, the need to love and be loved, the lure of booze and drugs and internet porn, and pretty much everyone in the world trying to tell you what to do and who to be.

Sometimes those concerns are presented as is; other times they’re reflected through genre tropes, so that there are vampires and aliens and spy agencies and killer bears and all of them are trying to boss you around and stop you from seeing that girl you like. Using genre like this is fun and makes for an engaging story, but can also let you use tropes as metaphors for the sturm und drang of teenage life. From that POV, it makes sense that so many YA stories are dystopias – growing up is always about inheriting the world that older people already fucked up.

And at the end of the story, the teenage protagonist should be that bit closer to adulthood – an adulthood hopefully defined on their terms, rather than just their parents’ or society’s terms. Unless it’s one of those books with a really bummer ending.

Prose style

Look, this is the point where people are going to tell me I’m an arsehole, because my first thought when I hear ‘YA’ is ‘unsophisticated writing style’.

Not, I want to be clear, an unpolished or poorly-written style – just one that is pitched at a teenage reading level. A style that primarily promotes an accessibility of voice and language, that clearly describes the appearance of people and places in mentally-reproducible details, that presents the characters and story and then gets out of the way. It is not the kind of thing we get from Don deLillo or Milorad Pavic, is what I’m saying. (Although now I’m wondering how you could use Pavic’s ergodic approach on YA fiction – like a longer, more complex Choose Your Own Adventure story. Hmm.)

This is certainly the bit where I struggle with YA, because I like my prose to be interesting in and of itself, as both writer and reader. I don’t much like transparent writing; I like stunt-writing that shows off its tricks and puts technique in the spotlight, which is not what I think YA is about.

And this is where I draw my line in the sand between the two books I’m writing right now, Arcadia and Raven’s Blood. Both are about young women trying to define themselves and their place in the world, but they have very different prose styles. Arcadia is all about exploring voice, the use of nested narratives, drawing story from structure – all that kind of high-falutin’ stuff that is probably going to alienate or irritate a lot of adult readers, let alone teenagers. Raven’s Blood, meanwhile, is where I’m trying to write in a clear, straightforward style (with occasional dips into moderate ornament), and that’s why I think that it could be considered YA and why it’s worthwhile trying to write more towards that genre and that market. Once, you know, I actually understand it.

–

So these are the elements I think of when I think about YA fiction. Am I right or wrong? How would you define the genre – or would you even bother? Most of all, if you’re a YA reader – why do you read it, and what about it speaks to you? If any of what I’ve written is correct, why do those elements appeal to you as an adult reader?

Get in there and leave comments, people – I’d really appreciate it.

(Seriously, comment. I don’t get enough comments, and it leaves me feeling like I’m typing into a void and that the world is empty and the darkness has leaked down from the moon to drown everyone else’s souls and I’m alone SO ALONE if a trees falls onto the blog and nobody comments then my words don’t make a sound.)

Resuming transmission… NOW!

I RETURN! LET TRUMPETS AND CORONETS BLART THEIR JOYOUS NOISE ACROSS THE INTERWEBS!

Ahem.

Miss me?

Where I’ve been

Last week N. and I went to the tiny Fijian island of Nanuya, some 4-5 hours by boat north of Nadi, to spend seven days and six nights relaxing, attending friends’ wedding and getting in a little honeymoon time of our own. We snorkelled, lay on beaches, swam, drank cocktails, drank massages and generally did nothing but enjoy ourselves – with a short aside to do a reading for Sabhdh and Peter, our getting-hitched friends.

[image error]Here I am at the wedding (with my pal Eamon) looking completely awesome in traditional Fijian shirt and sulu (skirt), a formal pinstripe model that I plan to wear to the office Christmas party, because it’s super-light and comfortable and it’ll be a million degrees that day.

It was a grand, grand time. Possibly one of the best times of my life. Especially the part where my wife and I held hands while snorkelling through a school of a million darting blue fish, suspended in cool water above an expanse of reef, in love and in paradise. That was the best part.

(Sabhdh is also the non-fiction blogger over at Boomerang Books, and you should check her column out once she gets back from her honeymoon.)

What I’ve been doing

We got back very late on Sunday night, and since then it’s been busy as H-E-double-hockeysticks, back at work and arse back on the grindstone.

But no-one wants to hear about my arse, do they? God, I hope not.

On the internet this week you can find me over at Louise Cusack’s site If You Must Write, where I give a quick and hopefully useful primer on how to independently publish your own ebooks. It’s neither the first nor last word on the subject, and it’s all very general; I could have written twice as much just on topics like sorting out US tax details or the proper use and value of a table of contents. But if you’ve been looking at indie ebooks thinking ‘could I do that?’, well, the answer is ‘yes’ and this may give you a bit of a head start.

You can also go check out this very positive review of The Obituarist over at the eNovella Review site, which says all sorts of nice things about my little book. Including that it could be good YA reading, something that I don’t quite understand and is prompting me to write that what-the-heck-is-YA-anyway post that’s been on my mind, possibly even this weekend.

Last night I saw the Afghan Whigs live, a gig I’ve been waiting nearly twenty years to see. And yeah, it was worth the wait. I saw Greg Dulli a couple of years ago when touring with/as the Twilight Singers, and that was good, but this was a stronger, punchier gig with all of the Whigs’ classic tracks, all jangly guitars and sleazy, lonely lyrics. The Hifi crowd was pumping and just the right size – and for an encore they busted out ‘Miles iz Dead’, the bonus B-side from Congregation, and that pretty much made my fucking week. Thank goodness that all us indie/grunge/subpop kids from the early 90s now have respectable jobs and can make it financially worthwhile for our fave bands to reform, tour and charge $70 a ticket at last.

Oh, and I saw Dark Knight Rises. Which was… hmm. Not as good as I’d hoped, due to very messy storytelling and pacing, massive plot holes and nowhere near enough Batman. On the other hand the acting/casting was uniformly excellent (especially Anne Hathaway), the development of themes within the movie dovetailed amazingly with those in the previous two films, and there were some gorgeously visceral setpieces. But still, something of a disappointment to me.

…and yes, of course I’m going to buy it on DVD and watch all three movies in a single night as soon as possible. Like that was ever in question.

What’s next?

Writing, of course. It’s been on the backburner for a bit as I got organised for the trip, flogged the last book around the internets and did, you know, living things. But now I have a head full of concepts and half-developed lines for Raven’s Blood and that old itch is building up – that terrible itch that crawls up my neck and reminds me that I could be writing, creating, making something; that it’s time for me to do the only thing I’m good at. Because there may never be another chance.

It’s very Shakespearean. And Batmantarian.

Plus I’ve managed to sort out the other half of my ideas for The Obituarist’s inevitable sequel, which I’m now formally committing to writing, hopefully by the end of the year. But don’t hold me to that date. Really, don’t.

I also need to write reviews for the books I read in Fiji, as per my last blog post – especially for Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds, which completely blew me away. Just need to find the time and the spark to come up with something fitting.

Stupid spark. Why can’t I just be on fire ALL THE TIME?

…god, I wish I was back on Nanuya.

Little print shop of horrors

BEHOLD THE TERROR I FOUND ‘PON MY DOORSTEP YESTERDAY!

NOW BEHOLD IT IN REGULAR PHOTO-VISION!

Yes, the super-limited print run (ie I could only afford to print ten) of The Obituarist arrived yesterday from Blurb, and a lovely little set of books it is too. I’m really happy with the way it came out – the cover looks good in print and the book came to a short-but-not-too-short 100 pages, perfect for pocket storage and convenient reading.

Would I recommend Blurb to others? Yes, definitely, although you’ll need to fine-tune your book files and be prepared to fiddle around for longer than you’d like with their software. But nothing good in this world comes without a bit of effort, and it was worth it in the end.

So now I have ten copies of my little book! One goes on the shelf for reference, and I think two more have already been earmarked for friends, leaving seven to take around some local bookshops to see if they’ll accept it on consignment. If you’d like to trouser one of them first, shoot me a line or leave a comment. I think I’m selling them for, umm… $15? $13? Still not sure how much I should charge, but that’s about the right level to make a sensible profit on them. Anyway, hit me up if you’re interested.

If I sell all of them, I may look at doing another short run – or a small run of Hotel Flamingo, which people still ask about. On that note, the giveaway of that and Godheads ends this weekend, so if you know someone who might like them, send them here to find the details.

And with that short post, I must away – N. and I are going to Fiji tomorrow night, and we have to tidy and pack! This means no blog posts for two weeks; please, try to control your misery. Eventually I will return with holiday snaps and more book talk.

Until then, I’ll be drunk on a beach somewhere with Irish people. Pray for me.

The stars aren’t right

HP Lovecraft told us that when the stars are right, Dread Cthulhu and the other Old Ones will wake from their slumber and make the world their fuckmuffin. It’s a harrowing thought, but we’re safe for a while yet, because the stars, they ain’t right – or, more accurately, they aren’t enough.

The rise of social media and rapid internet access has shown that humanity, as a species, really likes two activities – watching pornography and telling other people whether we did or didn’t like pretty much any person, object, creative endeavour or earthquake that there is. As soon as a thing is done, we as a species will get online to leave an appalling comment, post an image of an adorable kitten or, most of all, rate it out of five. We judge the world around us and yell out that it roxxors or suxxors. It’s the human condition at its most fundamental level.

But folks, I’m here to make a simple request. Dump the star ratings and start writing some reviews.

Now, this isn’t me talking as a writer, although indie writers live and die by the good reviews they get on social media and online stores. That word-of-mouth is vital and at another time I will desperately beg, whore and dance for your kind words. Instead, I’m saying this as a reader, one who is always looking for new books to cram into his Kindle, but keeps running into walls covered in 5-star ratings that tell me nothing about a book other than that its author begged, whores and danced for some love. Without a review, good or bad, to explain the rating it’s all just statistical noise.

Reviews, on the other hand, tell you a great deal, whether you agree with them or not – and sometimes the ones you don’t agree with tell you the most. I don’t suggest looking at my reviews as an example, both because that would be ludicrously egotistical and because it wouldn’t be useful – too small a sample size and too uniformly positive. (Because my books are pretty good, he said modestly.) Instead, let’s look at a better example – erotic juggernaut Fifty Shades of Grey. Because apparently everyone’s reading that.

Fifty Shades has 3415 five-star reviews and 2251 one-star reviews on Amazon, with around 2000 more spread around the 2-4 region. It’s obviously polarizing; the vast majority of readers either love it or hate it. But that star rating in and of itself doesn’t tell you anything; you actually need to read a few reviews to understand why there’s such a difference.

A typical five-star review:

Where to even begin? Fifty Shades of Grey is one heck of a book. It has about everything you’d ever want in a book. Love, suspense, mystery, action. Wow!

You can’t help but fall in love with sweet Anastasia from the beginning. She is a little naive and a lot clumsy. She says what’s on her mind and doesn’t think of the consequences. She has no idea what she’s getting into when she meets Mr. Christian Grey. Gorgeous, uber-rich Christian Grey. You fall for him right away, that’s how charming he is. You wish he were real or you were in the book to be able to just be with him. You want to take care of him, date him, smack him, be with him, admire him, all the above. He’s just that amazing.

A typical one-star review:

First, the awful writing. I am no literature snob. However, this book feels like it us on a 5th grade level made to seem better with a thesaurus. It’s repetitive and just plain bad.

Next, the non-existent plot. Seriously, nothing happens. They meet, they have sex, they email each other, the have more sex, the bite lips, they have more sex, the end. Just plain boring.

Last, bad sex. “Down There?” are you kidding me? It’s called a vagina. Grow up. This book most likely intrigues bored housewives and hormonal teenagers. If the author was aiming to give that demographic the tingles she most likely succeeded. However, a book that it 70% sex should at least be good sex.

I feel stupid for reading this book and wish I had spent that ten bucks on socks.

What these reviews (and those like them) tell us is not just that readers have different tastes, but that they have different purposes for reading, and that a book succeeds or fails for them depending on whether it meets those purposes. The one-star readers can’t get past the bad writing and pillory the book for its lack of craft or strong plot (this review in particular does a wonderful analysis of the writing based on term searches). For the five-star readers, none of that matters; all that’s important is the characters and their ability to connect with emotionally and (vicariously) sexually. Many of those reviews admit in passing that the book isn’t well-written, but they mention this only to dismiss its importance, because that lack of craft doesn’t impinge in any way on their enjoyment and their reading purpose. (If anything, the book’s lack of craft may help many of those readers get past the prose and drill down to the character level, but that’s a separate discussion.)

I don’t bring this up to criticise or judge Fifty Shades of Grey in any way – it’s not something I have any interest in, but it obviously speaks to a hell of a lot of people, and I’m not about to judge those readers for what they find emotionally engaging. But the key thing is to note that the book’s overall mean star rating of 3.2 tells us nothing about reader purpose or response, and nor do the 1- or 5-star ratings in themselves. We need to actually read people’s reasons before we can decide what meaning those ratings have for us and our reading priorities; we need to know why they liked or hated it before we can judge whether we would agree with them.

Similarly, check out the reviews on Chuck Wendig’s various writing guides. 250 Things You Should Know About Writing (which is a damn fine book) has 41 5-star ratings and 4 one-star reviews, all of which are pretty much the same as this:

If this author actually had anything helpful to say, it was impossible to find. The book is a conglomeration of abusive statements, excessive swearing, arrogant side-tracking and blatant lack of any sense of how to communicate ideas. Definitely not worth the 99 cents, and since I cannot get a refund, I am hoping this review will save others their hard earned money.

Chuck has gone on record as loving those one-star reviews – because they signpost the kind of readers who don’t like his stuff, and why. They thus help him sell more books to people who like his voice and his swearing, and who want to separate themselves as readers from those who don’t like those things. If all those folks left was a simple 1-star rating it wouldn’t have anything like the impact, and Chuck would no longer be pulling in so much sweet cheddar from the great books he effortlessly and constantly cranks out while the rest of his peers and contacts congratulate him and secretly wish he’d choke on his fortune and die, die, die, goddamnit I keep putting needles in this voodoo doll that smells of bourbon and wordcount and nothing ever fucking happens.

Not that I would do that, of course. Wendigo is my huckleberry.

So yeah – if you like a book, or hate it, tell people why. Don’t just leave a star rating, but write some kind of review, even if it’s only a few sentences, whether it’s on Amazon or Goodreads or the local supermarket notice board. Explain to us why you love it, why you hate it, what you look for in a book and how this particular work ranked against your internal metric. Qualitative data, not just quantitative numbers.

Not because that’s what the author wants, but because it’s what other readers need.

Do it for your peoples.

Pay it forward.

DROP THE MIC

WE OUT

Free ebooks and recursive heroics

Okay! What can we talk about tonight on Doctor Patrick’s Late Night Loveline Request Line and Chatshow? Our lines are open!

Ahem. Sorry, folks, but I’m in kind of a good mood, and that tends to make me a wee bit silly.

Why? Oh, lots of reasons. I worked through my end-0f-month sales figures to discover that I’d sold just over a hundred copies of The Obituarist in the last two months, and I think that’s a cause for celebration. My overall income from writing… well, it’s nothing to write home about, but the charge I get from people telling me they like my stuff is more important to me than the money. For the moment.

I also got a promotion (and pay raise) at the old day job today, so hopefully that will keep me afloat while I write more books that sell less than Fifty Shades of Grey. Which, okay, appears to be all books.

Plus, N. and I are heading to Fiji in a week for a combined honeymoon (ours) and wedding (friends). It should be a grand old time, featuring beaches, pleasant warmth, good company and enough alcohol to poison a battalion. And I may even have a chance to make a dent in the library of ebooks I keep compulsively downloading to my Kindle.

Plus plus plus, I now have 500 Twitter followers! A significant portion of whom have never tried to sell me Viagra or iPads!

–

Another happy-making thing was last night’s appearance at Dungeon Crawl, the monthly nerd-themed impro comedy show! It’s been a long time since I’ve done any impro, but from the laughs I got it looks like I remembered how it all worked. This was a superhero-themed night and I played upon my encyclopaedic knowledge of a certain Dark Knight to appear as Batman-Man, the Caped Crusader-Crusader who gained the proportional strength, speed and skill of Batman after being bitten by Adam West at Comic-Con. Yes, it was that kind of show and I had a great fucking time, bouncing off fellow players Lisa-Skye (‘Golden Shower’), Brenna Courteney Glazebrook (‘Super de Jour’), Richard McKenzie and (of course) host Ben McKenzie. The adrenaline high left me wobbly when it wore off, but it was a major rush to get back up on stage and be as silly as possible for an hour.

(And we got a rather lovely write-up, complete with photo of the cast and me in my What Would Batman Do? T-shirt.)

[image error]

…huh. Apparently my attempt at a look of heroic competence makes me look more like someone who just swallowed his own glass eye. Good to know.

–

In any case, to celebrate all this positivity and my good mood, I figure it’s time to pay it forward with a giveaway!

From now until the 14th of July (when is when we head to Fiji), both Hotel Flamingo and Godheads are free! Free! Totally free! Gratis! Zero dinero! FREE BOOKS, MOTHERHUMPERS!

Specifically, they’re available for free at Smashwords with the use of a coupon code. You can get Hotel Flamingo there for free with the code EQ39G and Godheads with the code KT24J. Feel free to pass those links and codes around to friends – it’s a giveaway for everyone! Party in the streets! Smack someone in the face with your Kobo! (And leave a review if you feel so inclined.)

Ah yes. Reviews.

I think that’s what we’re gonna talk about on Sunday.

Now go! Download! Read! And ask yourself this simple question: What Would Batman Do?

That’s right. When all else fails, pepper-spray a shark.

Welcome to the EOFY Follies

It’s the first of July! A time where we traditionally look back upon our accomplishments of the previous 12 months and wonder how much extra tax we will have to pay as a consequence!

Oh yes. Doesn’t that sound like fun.

But rather than calculate my writing earnings since mid-2011 (sob), or write another great long diatribe like I did last week, I thought I’d take this as a chance to quickly memorialise the cool things that happened in June around this here internet and see what they promise for the 12-13 year. Which will perhaps finally be the year when I make enough money from writing to quit the day job and just drink Old Fashioneds in my underwear by the pool all day.

And now that I’ve said it, you can’t unsee it.

What I’ve been doing

I just finished laying out the pages of The Obituarist’s limited print run! And I do mean limited – I’m planning on running off maybe 25-30 of these through Blurb. And once I have them, I don’t really know what I’m going to do with them. But hey, the important thing is that they’ll exist! In any event, I should have the rest of the details sorted out this week and the books by the end of July.
I also just had a meeting with Ben McKenzie about the audiobook version of The Obituarist, where we hashed out various points and scribbled down our to-do lists. It’s super-exciting! Especially since crime is probably the single most popular genre in audio fiction. Stay tuned for more on that as we put it together.
I did some work on Raven’s Blood, but time spent on promoting the last book is time I can’t spend writing the next book, which is one of the frustrating things in this life. I hope to get more time for that in July and start building up a head of steam, probably by adopting the same 1000-words-a-night program that got The Obituarist finished.
There was the EWF and Continuum at the start of the month, but I’ve already talked about those things at great length.
We playtested the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons. I can’t say I’m a fan at this point.
I created a fan page for myself on Facebook and began spending more time on Google+, because I have a terrible fear that I’m just not talking about myself enough.
I read a lot of comics and not enough books.

What other people have been doing

Jay Kristoff launched a stunning new website for himself and his soon-to-be-released novel Stormdancer, which is shaping up to be one of the biggest things to hit YA fantasy in ages. He’s a top bloke and a good writer and (believe it or not) even taller than I am, so go check it out – and check out the first three chapters of Stormdancer over at Tor.com.
Foz Meadows has been on fire this month with a series of scorching blog posts that ask tough questions and (sigh) bring trolls out of the woodwork. Her initial post on rape culture in gaming (there’s that topic again) drew attention and a flood of comments, both positive and negative; her follow-up post about the attention and commentary is also really interesting as a look at the kind of discussion and conversation this topic creates. And on a different note, this week’s post on sex scenes in YA fiction and why they matter is also really interesting, particularly for those of us thinking of writing in that genre.
Margaret Weis Publishing put out the Civil War supplement for their Marvel superhero RPG, and speaking as a comics nerd and roleplayer, guys, this book is pretty goddamn great. Significantly better than the Civil War comics, in fact.
Mur Lafferty released all – yes, all – of her ebooks for free! I think the offer’s only for a limited period, so don’t delay, go download the zip file and fill your Kindle/Nook/iPad/direct neural interface post right now.
Indie nerdcore hip-hop artist Adam Warrock is running a donation drive, and it’s worth giving him some cash so he can keep putting out free mixtapes of tracks about Firefly, old Marvel comics, popular TV shows and other cool shit. Because that shit is awesome, guys.
After being axed by Campbell Newman and the appalling reactionary politics of the new LNP government – who, hey, are also fucking over GLBTs, women and pretty much anyone who didn’t vote for them – the Queensland Literary Awards are being revived by local readers, writers and decent human beings. But it all takes money, so that’s why you should go pitch in to their fundraising page at Pozible.
While you’re there, you should also donate some money to Fee Plumley and The Really Big Road Trip, a project to create a mobile art space for creative digital culture and technological art. I met Fee at the EWF and was blown away by her passion and dedication to creative digital culture; help her share that passion and bring it to spaces around Australia.
You probably already know that Chuck Wendig has a new book of writing tips and advice out, 500 Ways to Tell a Better Story, because Chuck has approximately eleventy-billion readers and you all think he’s Piss Christ. Which is fair; he is in fact Piss Christ. But on the off-chance you didn’t know about the release, well, go here and read all about it.
And finally I just want to link to this post by comics writer Gail Simone, who – in addition to being fucking hilarious on Twitter – also presents one of the best, simplest pieces of advice to any writer, artist or creator in any field.

What you could do next

Remember how I said I was writing a crime story to submit to Crime Factory? Well, they passed on it as not right for them, and that’s completely fair enough. I’ll look for another home for it or maybe just give it away here. But, much more importantly, they’re gearing up for another special edition collection, Horror Factory, and they’re looking for horror stories! If you’re a horror writer (local or international), why not put together a story and submit it to them by the end of August? I know I sure as hell will.
And then I’ll write another horror story and submit it to Nightmare Magazine , which is currently open for submission and paying a very respectable 5 cents a word for pieces! It’s a good time for writing horror, so don’t let me do it alone – get those fingers bleeding onto your keyboard and write.
If you live in Melbourne and want to see me in the flesh (eww), come along to Dungeon Crawl this Wednesday night! The monthly improvised comedy show is drifting from its D&D-flavoured roots to celebrate all things superhero – so this one-time impro hound and long-time supers fanboy is pulling the costume out of mothballs and rejoining the Fantastic Four! Or, more precisely, joining the Dungeon Crawl team as the fourth member of this month’s performance group! Come along and laugh at me, preferably for the right reasons!

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s a cold and rainy night, and I’m going to go join my wife under the doona and watch a kung-fu movie. Happy Carbon Tax Apocalypse Day to you all.

The rape less travelled

So everyone’s talking a lot about rape lately.

That’s kind of a weird thing to kick off with, isn’t it? But it’s true, at least in gaming circles. Much as speculative fiction grappled with depictions of race and culture a few years ago in the RaceFail 09 debacle, gaming (video, RPG, whatever) seems to be hitting a period where parts of the fanbase are (quite justifiably) finding fault in their preferred media.

In this case, it’s female gamers (and their male allies, of course) speaking out about depictions of women in games. Which they’ve done for a long time, because a lot of games depict women in really fucked-up ways, from lesbian sex ninjas to big-titted prizes for male characters to win. Other games depict women in much better ways, and indeed in really interesting and effective ways, but it’s the shitty depictions that get the attention – and rightly so.

And all of that has pretty much been horses for courses for ages, enough so that game companies seem to think we’ll be bored with standard, easy misogyny and are instead playing the rape card to get our hearts started.

The tipping point for the explosion of discussion on this seems to be the new Tomb Raider game, of all things, a prequel in which we learn how Lara Croft learned how to do flawless backflips while wearing Daisy Dukes. But because the notion of a capable female protagonist is just crazy talk, this prequel casts Lara as a vulnerable Other that gamers will want to shepherd and protect rather than embody or empathise with. Lara is just a weak girl, and players must look after her as she’s beaten, brutalised, starved, kidnapped and threatened with rape. Screw up and she dies; make a mistake and she is raped and killed. And then you reload and she’s fine and you can try again.

Man, that game sounds fan-fucking-tastic, don’t it? Because the best way to pave the way for an escapist adventure where you shoot dinosaurs and explore a wardrobe of belly shirts is to drop us off at Rape Camp for a spell first.

One of these things is not like the other

Reaction to this has been largely negative – imagine that – and the game’s producers have started backpedalling so hard they’re running the Tour de France in reverse, but the important thing is that it’s really kickstarted a discussion about rape culture in gaming. And kickstarted a whole pile of rape threats to any woman talking about rape culture in gaming, of course, because the human race is awful.

(If you’d like to read more on these topics, I recommend this excellent article by Daniel Golding, which talks both about the problems with gaming culture and how we can perhaps work to understand it as a product of the general culture. Seriously, check it out.)

–

And while this is all happening in the world of videogaming, it’s also cropping up in the smaller, less visible but equally problematic world of roleplaying, which also has a long and storied history of treating women as Scary Vagina Mutants and rape as just one of those things us fellas can joke about with impunity. The uptick in women saying ‘hey, this is shit’ and games pushing the rape button for attention is smaller there, but it still exists, and the waves being caused by the videogame discussion are lapping against the dicey shores and kicking over rocks.

Under one of those rocks lives James Desborough, creator of ‘hilarious’ ‘games’ such as Hentacle and The Slayer”s Guide to Female Gamers, which are every bit as charming as they sound. His attempt to cash in on the outrage women feel about being objectified and othered was to write an essay called ’In Defence of Rape’, in which he says that ‘rape or attempted rape is a fucking awesome plot element’. I won’t put in a link to that, because – and I want to say this in as professional and dignified a manner as I can – Desborough is a piece of ambulatory dogshit shaped like a man. He’s a noxious, pathetic failure of a person who’s built a ‘career’ out of publishing games that objectify and demean women, that glorify and trivialise sexual assault, and that present the most egregious kinds of misogyny under the argument that ‘it’s just a joke, don’t take it seriously’. If you want to see an indepth takedown of his pathetic ‘argument’, there’s a terrific essay over at MightyGodKing that does just that.

Rather than an image of any of this awfulness, please enjoy this photo of the Dalai Lama hugging a penguin

(Also, I’m sure that during his regular egosurfing Desborough will find this blog and leave a bullshit comment, and I’ll delete it and block him, just as I’ve deleted and blocked his bullshit comments on other social media platforms in the past, and he’ll cry martyrdom and censorship to his rape-is-awesome fanbase and they’ll talk about how terrible I am while rubbing their dicks. This is a dance that has happened before. It is a dance that will happen again. Like the Macarena, but one dancer is a piece of dogshit.)

There’s a lot of back and forth about Desborough, his works, roleplaying’s attitude to rape and all of that happening on various gaming forums right now, as well as petitions, flamewars, accusations of censorship and the like on other platforms like Google + and Facebook. People are angry. That’s possibly a good thing, because anger can motivate people to get things done. Or it can motivate them to scream and snipe at each other on the internet for the foreseeable future. We’ll see which happens.

But in any event, there’s a quick (!) précis of what’s been going down in the world of gaming and discussions of rape.

Fun times.

–

But although I occasionally discuss gaming because I love games so goddamn much, this is primarily meant to be a blog about writing. So what about rape in fiction? Should writers censor themselves and shy away from the topic? Should it be taboo? Or should they view it as a ‘fucking awesome plot element’?

Many writers have used rape well as a meaningful and important event in their novels and works, from William Shakespeare to Alice Sebold. And many more writers have used rape for cheap stakes-raising and shock value, or as a clumsy and trite tool to motivate female characters who can only be defined by their femininity and by ‘overcoming’ it through trauma. And, obvious bigot and censorship lover than I am, I think a writer who views fictional rape as ‘fucking awesome’ is unlikely to write the next Lovely Bones or Titus Andronicus.

What to write instead? Well, here’s a great quote from author John Perich (whose book Too Close to Miss is on my Kindle and waiting to be read):

On the Great Wheel of Unfortunate Fates that writers spin whenever they need something bad to happen to a protagonist, there are several entries for men:

Losing a job or a source of wealth;
Getting hurt;
Getting scarred;
Losing a loved one;
Having a loved one kidnapped;
Having a loved one used as leverage for a threat;
Being arrested;
Being seduced by nefarious people;
Being betrayed;
Being watched by nefarious people;
Being lost far from home;
Etc.

If your protagonist is female, however, there are only three:

Sexual assault;
Kidnapping;
Pregnancy.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect, but not that much.

(As Perich says, this is an exaggeration, but it’s an effective and useful one.)

All of this is particular interest to me because I’m writing two books right now that star female protagonists, and young female protagonists at that. I want to cast those young women as interesting and flawed characters who overcome trials and their own weaknesses to find victory, albeit in very different kinds of stories, and in a way that engages, rather than alienates or upsets, both male and female readers.

Here are things that happen to Gwen in Arcadia:

Struggling to tell fantasy from reality
Becoming homeless
Making really bad decisions that hurt herself and others
Unrequited love
Reading The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time
Being chased through Melbourne’s alleyways by a private detective
Failing to protect that which she loves most
Doing everything she can to make it right again

Here are things that happen to Kember in Raven’s Blood:

Getting arrested for sedition
Trying to repair her relationship with her father
Uncovering the truth about a vanished masked avenger
Fighting golem-men, giant snakes and other monsters
Nearly drowning
Running across rooftops
Dealing with tragedy and loss
Taking up the mantle of a fallen hero

Here are the things that won’t happen to either character:

Getting raped
Being threatened with rape

These are stories that involve physical and emotional danger and turmoil, and I want to make that danger and turmoil exciting and gripping. But taking rape out of my repertoire doesn’t do much to stop me telling the stories I want to tell and to (hopefully) make those stories exciting and emotionally engaging. Hell, it doesn’t do a goddamn thing to my work.

In the end, writers have the right to use rape as a device in their stories. And if they exercise that right, they then have the responsibility to exercise it well, with sensitivity and care and for powerful emotional effect, rather than using it for cheap, visceral pops. When they succeed, it should be acknowledged; when they fail, it should be discussed; when they don’t even try to do it right, they should be criticised and possibly even condemned. (Certainly if they’re arsenuggets like James Desborough.)

For my part, though, I think I’ll just avoid it, because I don’t see a need for it in the stories I’m currently writing and those I’m planning to write.

(I may have a future idea that requires addressing rape, sure; I get lots of ideas, and maybe Future Me will come up with a story that demands a careful and responsible depiction of sexual violence and its consequences. Past Me did that once, after all; the short story ‘Godheads’ (in the anthology of the same name) includes sexual violence, although it’s in the past and mentioned only obliquely without being described. But I don’t see it happening for a good long time, and if it does I’ll try my hardest to explore it sensitively – and if I find I can’t, I’ll change my idea into something that works better.)

–

To summarise:

Can rape be used as a worthwhile plot point in a strong narrative? Absolutely.

Could I use rape as a worthwhile plot point in a strong narrative? Possibly.

Am I going to use rape in my books? No, because I don’t fucking want to. And I think that’s a reasonable desire for myself or for any other writer.

(Yes, this is the point of the whole post. Because why use 40 words when I can use nearly 2000?)

None of that makes me Internet Writing Jesus or the most sensitive and loveable of all dudes, of course. Saying ‘hey, I don’t plan on writing about rape’ only clears the bar of Things Worth Saying because that bar is set so goddamn fucking low that even snails have to hump their amorphous butts over it. But yet some trails of slime still manage to go under the bar, and we find awful toerags like Desborough at the other end, extruding shit from their keyboards, so there is at least a little bit of value in saying that.

Which is kind of sad in and of itself, to be honest.

The other Obituarist

Hey guys! Let’s talk about The Obituarist! You know, that ebook about the obituary writer who teams up with a slightly-mad WWII veteran and goes around interviewing his old squadmates just before they all conveniently wind up dead!

…wait, what?

A few weeks after publishing The Obituarist, I got a heads-up from someone – sorry, I’ve forgotten who, but you know who you are – that someone else has just published a ebook with the exact same name via the same channels!

What are the odds? I mean, seriously, what are the odds? Does anyone have some data on that?

Of course I went and checked the book out, in case it was some strange Nigerian-scam copy of mine or something. But it wasn’t. Instead, in a bizarre case of parallel evolution, author Paul Waters and I had both picked the same slightly archaic old term to use as the title of our novellas. And frankly, he’d used it more properly, whereas I’d made up a whole new meaning to suit my idea.

So what to do? Just ignore it? Well, that seemed a bit rude, so I sent Paul an email to say hello. In it, I said:

This isn’t a ‘cease or desist’ or any nonsense like that; it’s a good title and there’s plenty of room for people to use it. And, to be honest, you use it more accurately than I do; I kept the term but changed the meaning to suit my own purposes.

I’m just writing because it’s a funny coincidence and I thought you might be amused too. If I get any customers who buy my book by mistake instead of yours, I’ll point them back at you; I hope you’ll do the same for me.

He came back with:

I admit that I was gutted to see your title after I published mine. Though as you say, and I hope you’re right, it’s a good title. And your story is definitely different.

I’m looking at it as a funny coincidence too.

And since then we’ve been having a bit of a chat about epublishing and writing and the cor-blimey-strike-a-light-it’s-a-funny-old-world of it all. Culminating in today, when he’s written a blog post about the whole thing, and I’m doing the same. Because recursion is awesome.

I like Paul; he’s charming and pleasant and he appears to be some kind of pirate DJ donkey from his blog avatar, which I cannot help but admire. So if you get a chance, go check out his Obituarist at Smashwords or Amazon; it’s a short tongue-in-cheek thriller packed with shaggy dog stories in the best British tradition. And honour obliges me to note that his book is 24 cents cheaper than mine (although mine is longer).

So we’ve gone from a world short of obituarists to one crammed with them, but that’s okay. It’s not like there are a shortage of books from different authors with the same titles, as this LibraryThing article can attest. (And a quick Amazon check shows plenty of other books called Raven’s Blood and Arcadia, but such is life.) I think we can live with the occasional moment of confusion.

And hey, at least I know what not to call the next book in order to stay on Paul’s good side, because in his email he also said:

Blackwatertown is the title of a longer book I’m still trying to get published via more traditional routes. Please don’t tell me you have one with the same name up your sleeve.

And I could only reply with the truth:

As it happens I lived for a time in a town called Blackwater – but I was about one year old at the time, so I have no plans to write about that!

100% true.

Of course, Townwaterblack is still unclaimed…

Flash fiction – High School Methical

I once saw this movie where a guy grew marijuana in public toilets. Not in the toilet itself, or out in the open, but inside the walls. He cut open the tops of the pipes and inserted seed beds, with the hydroponic plants growing up inside the wall cavities. Completely impossible, but a great idea.

Actually, I’m not sure if it was a movie. It might have been a dream. I get those mixed up sometimes.

Anyway, that’s what gave me the idea to build a meth lab inside the actual toilets of my high school.

I didn’t really want to build a meth lab, but Jordie said we had no choice. ‘We got no choice, Oliver. If I can’t scare up twenty grand in the next two months, Royale will cut off my fucking toes.’ Royale was the guy Jordie did jobs for, but the last job had gone bad and Jordie had lost all the money he’d been given. ‘There’s no way I can get the money legally. You gotta help me, kiddo!’

Of course I had to help him. He’s my big brother.

I read about methamphetamine online and it didn’t seem too hard to create. We had some Sudafed in the medicine cabinet, so I took it out to my lab in the shed and set up a still using the fuel mixer from my model rockets. The police took my rockets away when one crashed and set fire to a barn, but I made those when I was twelve and I didn’t know as much about chemistry. Now I was fourteen and, apart from one time when a pocket of gas caught fire and burned off all the hair on my left arm, making the drug was pretty easy.

But it wasn’t enough. ‘This isn’t enough, Oliver,’ Jordie said when I showed him the clump of crystals. ‘This is like a hundred bucks worth, tops. We gotta make more and we gotta make it fast.’

That’s when I thought of making it in the unfinished toilet block at my school. They started building it a couple of years ago but then ran out of money, so it just sat at the edge of the school, locked up and covered in graffiti, while the lines to get into the working toilets got longer every day and most of the older boys just pissed up the side of the wall. No-one went there and it had working pipes and drains, so we snuck in one night to check it out. Jordie thought I could pick the padlocks, but I don’t know how to do that. Instead I just dissolved them with some acid and we brought new ones to replace them.

The toilet block smelled bad and didn’t have any electricity, but I used car battery to power some hooded lamps and then built stills inside the toilet bowls. Jordie got a bunch of Sudafed from Royale and stole some fertilizer and lye, and after a couple of nights of work we got everything percolating.

Jordie gave me a hug. ‘This is some supervillain shit right here, Oliver. You’re an evil genius! Next you’ll be making fembots or something.’ I blushed when he said that, because I thought he must have found out about my fembot research, but he was just making a joke.

Fembots are really hard to make.

So everything went really well for a month or so. We made a lot of meth for Royale, the janitors never found the lab and we only had a couple of small explosions. If I’d stopped to think about what we were doing I would probably have felt bad, so I didn’t do that. I just focused on the chemistry, which was much more fun. I didn’t go to many classes that month, but the teachers didn’t notice. I was always pretty quiet.

I was working one night when Jordie came in. I noticed that he’d been shot. ‘Ollie, I’ve been shot,’ he said. I treated the wound in his arm with some iodine while he told me that the police had raided Royale’s place and there’d been a shootout. ‘We gotta clean this place up before they come for us!’

That was a shame, because the lab was really good. I’d been hoping to build a hovercraft here once we were finished with the meth. But these things happen, so we started flushing all the chemicals away. It got pretty messy, and Jordie soon passed out from the fumes and blood loss. So I dragged him outside and then set fire to the toilet block.

It made a pretty awesome explosion when it went up. I made sure to record it on my camera to watch again later. Anyway, the explosion woke Jordie up, and he got pretty angry when he realised I’d left the meth in the lab. ‘You left the meth in the lab? You fuckin’ idiot freak!’

That made me really upset. Jordie never called me things like that normally. But I figured that the meth he’d been taking had made him irritable and paranoid, which is why I’d burned it all up. To make him feel better, I took the fall when the police arrived. I told them I’d been making fireworks, and after all the times they’d confiscated my chemistry stuff over the years I guess they believed me.

Anyway, juvie is actually pretty good. I get time to read and study without school or Dad getting in the way, and the other kids have been really nice to me since I built the vodka still in the laundry. Once I get out in a few months and Jordie’s finished with rehab, I think we should try making another secret laboratory and making something different. Like ecstasy, or maybe nitro-glycerine. Or Kryptonite.

I like the idea of being a supervillain. I think that’s definitely next on my to-do list. Once I finally work out how to make fembots.

 

–

Once again, a little prod from Chuck Wendig was enough to get me moving on an idea I’d had but never worked on. Well, to be honest all I’d had was the opening lines and the terrible play on words in the title, but sometimes that’s all you need.

Also, 1000 words is hard sometimes. It meant I had to drop the idea of having the police raid during the final night of the school’s musical and the subsequent car chase through the auditorium. But it’s all about killing your darlings, a phrase that writers love and homicide police don’t accept as a defence in a court of law.

This gets added to the set of stories that will eventually come out in Nine Flash Nine. Back in January I said that would be ready around April, which just goes to show that I am entirely full of shit about my work schedule. But it’s coming along – just a couple more stories and it should be good to go. I just need to write those in and around working on Raven’s Blood and Arcadia.

Easy fucking peasy.