Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 39

Projects You’ll Never See

So, the other day someone asked me about some of my “dream projects.” The basic assumption in the question was this: If you had the time to work on any one project that you haven’t had the time to work on, what would it be?

The problem with this question, though, is that makes an incorrect assumption. Time isn’t the limiting factor in my dream projects. The truth is this: I am extremely fortunate in that I can generally shuffle my time to my own dictates.1 If I feel really, really passionately about something, I can figure out a way to work on it.

But my dream projects aren’t just a matter of time — they’re a matter of resources.

I love writing novels, but it’s pretty damn convenient that I don’t need anything to do so. All I need is my iMac or my iPad and my typing fingers. No massive capital investment. No partners. No skill set other than my vocabulary.

The following projects, though, would all require skills I don’t possess: Drawing, coding, design, etc. In other words, I would need other people to jump in and work on them. Which means I would need to be capitalized2 in order to make them happen.

Here they are…

Publish an anthology set in a common fantasy world, where individual authors tell their own stories, all interweaving into a final, climactic tale at the end of the book, jam-written by all of us together.
Produce a videogame.
Develop the very cool iOS app I’ve been thinking about for years.
Do my own web comic.
Publish the awesome ersatz Batman and Robin comic I’ve had on my hard drive for literally twenty years.
Produce the sequel to Mangaman.
Make a short film based on a comic strip I tried to draw back when I was a kid.
Create and manage a website based on the premise of “open-source fiction.”

So, there you are — some dreams that will probably not come true. At least, not any time soon. Unless someone out there is a coder or an artist who would like to work for very, very cheap.

Fortunately, I have many, many dream projects that I can work on. And I’ll be getting up to speed on some more books soon.

Leia notwithstanding. But even with a newborn in the house, my designated work time is still extremely flexible.As in money, not as in letters!

About the TV Show…

So, a lot of you have been asking, and now I can tell you: The I Hunt Killers TV show is not going to happen. At least, not in its current form.

The folks at WBTV gave it their best shot. They optioned the series before the first book was even published and they’ve spent three years working very hard to bring it to the small screen. But they’ve officially let the option lapse at this point.

I know this makes some of you sad. And I know that some of you are happy because you didn’t like some of the changes WB was going to make in order to bring the series to TV.

Me? I’m neither happy nor sad. Look, it was always a longshot. Something that people not involved (even tangentially, as I am) in the entertainment business don’t understand is that it’s a miracle anything gets made at all. There is a constant tension between what the studio1 wants and what the network2 wants. It can be difficult to align everyone’s interests and desires in such a way that what comes out is any good at all…and oftentimes, everyone just decides that it’s best not to proceed.

Which is what has happened here. And I’m fine with it. I also would have been fine with the show proceeding and ending up on the air.3 Would the show have been perfect? Would it have been exactly what I would have done, had I been in charge? Nah, of course not. But it would have exposed a vaster audience to my work, and that would have been nice.

So, the show is dead, but the books can never die. And who knows? Maybe someone else will come along and want to make a TV show or a movie out of these books. And maybe this time, the stars will align and it’ll actually make it all the way to your eyeballs.

Stranger things have happened, after all.

The people making the show, in this case WBTV.The people who broadcast the show, such as The CW or ABC Family or MTV.Yes, even with a girl Jazz.

I Love Me Some Fanart!

The title says it all.

Brandon Macias had a Fine Arts project in school. Inspired by Game, he decided to evoke the Crow King… (Make with the clicky to see it larger!)

Pretty cool, eh? Thanks, Brandon!

 

#Nerdrage

So, my best friend (who, it must be noted for the record, is basically a real-life Captain America, except he doesn’t need the crutch of a super-soldier serum) bestowed upon Leia this cool book:

Obviously, I wholeheartedly approve. My daughter is fated to grow up to be a superhero, after all, so it’s just as well she begins her studies young.1 I’m glad there’s a book like this for her, to reinforce that girls kick ass.

However, I have a few nerdly bones to pick with it. First of all:

Um, no. Last time I checked, “healing herself and other people” does not number among Hawkgirl’s powers…unless you count basic first aid as a superpower, in which case, just call me Gauze Man. Hawkgirl’s powers, in fact, are best described as:

Can fly. Like, fast.
Can bash people’s heads open with medieval weaponry (cf. the mace she carries in this very shot).
Can always find Hawkman after reincarnating.

I don’t know where this healing nonsense came from. (And apropos of nothing, I vastly preferred it pre-Crisis, when she was Hawkwoman.)

Secondly, there’s this page:

Excuse me? Is someone afraid that Marvel will sue if a DC character uses her actual name? She’s Mary Marvel, folks, not just plain ol’ Mary. “Mary” might help you with your homework. “Mary Marvel” will dropkick a globe of supervillain-containing Suspendium into the upper atmosphere, demolish a nuclear-powered robot from the future, rescue a cat from a tree, and still have time to help you with algebra before the bell rings to end study hall.

I give the folks at Downtown Bookworks high marks for inculcating in our young lasses the important urge to dress in outlandish garb and promote the greater good through fisticuffs, supernatural apparel, and sonic screams, but beg them to get their facts right. The next generation of geeks, nerds, and fanfolk deserves no less!

 

That slacker Bruce Wayne waited until he could walk. What a loser.

Tim Cook Says:

“We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.”

–Tim Cook, coming out in an editorial in Businessweek.

Tales of Incompetence: UPS

Over the years, I have had many, many causes to be annoyed with UPS. I wish now that I’d written them down each time because being able to point to a laundry list would make this story better. Alas, I didn’t, so all I can do is say, “A lot of annoying stuff happened…and then this.”

As I am wont to do, I ordered some Apple stuff recently. As it turns out, it was scheduled for delivery on the day something else was delivered. So, needless to say, I wasn’t home. Fine. My bad.

UPS, as per usual, left a ticket explaining that it would attempt two more deliveries on consecutive business days. Problem is, I wasn’t going to be leaving the hospital in time. No problem, thought I, for UPS has a system whereby one can reschedule delivery.

From the hospital, I called UPS and — after some confusion brought about by my sleeplessness and the UPS rep’s not seeming to understand what I wanted — I arranged to have the package delivered on Monday, October 27. There was a nominal fee for this, but that was fine by me. Everything seemed great.1

Monday rolled around and I woke up, eager for my new toy. I checked UPS.com and saw, with puzzlement, that my package was not slated for delivery that day. I called UPS and was told that someone from the local center would get in touch with me, but that my package “might” be delivered to me that day.

“Might?”

A little while later, the local center called to confirm that, yes, there’d been a mistake and my package had not been placed on the truck. Now I was peeved. The fee had been nominal, yes, but still — I’d paid to have that package that day. Somewhat snidely (considering she’d owned up to a mistake) the woman at the center said, “What do you want me to do?”

“I want my package delivered today, like I paid for. Like I was promised.” It was still mid-day, and the center wasn’t in another time zone or anything like that. I figured some adjustments could be made and I’d have my package.

Nope. My only option was to have it delivered the next day. So, sure, OK, whatever, I relented, though I told her my fee had better be refunded. Again, it was a small amount, but the principle mattered.

Late Monday night, with my Spidey-sense tingling, I decided to check UPS.com. What I saw when I tracked the package shocked me: UPS had scheduled the package to be returned to Apple!

I immediately called UPS. The automated phone system confirmed the return to Apple. I spoke to a live human being. “Why is my package being sent back instead of delivered to me?” I asked.

“It isn’t,” the rep said.

“I’m looking at your system right now,” I told her, “and it’s scheduled for return to Apple.”

“Well, it isn’t,” she snapped. “There’s a note in the system that you’ll get it tomorrow.”

“Then why does your system think it’s headed back to Apple?”

“It isn’t. The scans are wrong. It’ll be delivered to you tomorrow.”

Now, to say that at this point I was skeptical is understating it. No one I’d spoken to had been able to tell me the truth, whether from incompetence, malice, or apathy I can’t say. So, in frustration, I said to the woman, “What am I supposed to do tomorrow when it doesn’t get here?”

“That won’t happen,” she said dismissively. “You’re getting it tomorrow.”

Well, you know what happens next: Woke up on Tuesday, tracked the package…and UPS.com told me it had been returned to Apple. In case I thought this might be a glitch, I soon thereafter got an email from Apple saying, basically, “Hey, dude, we just got back that sweet, sweet Ive-crack you ordered. Are you sure you don’t want it? Let us know if we should send it back to you.”

So, I called UPS again to tell them that they’d screwed up, to ask them why and how, and to ask them how they planned to fix it. I knew they wouldn’t be able to fix it and I knew that their explanation would amount to “oops,” but I was curious as to what they would say and what — if anything — they would offer to do to keep me a (theoretically) happy UPS customer.

This time I got a very nice rep, who seemed genuinely distraught that she couldn’t fix the problem for me. Then I spoke to a supervisor, who seemed similarly upset. He even called the local center and reported to me that he was appalled by the apathy of the people there who’d bungled the delivery. But there was nothing he could do — “It’s on a truck on a highway right now,” he said, “and I can’t put my hands on it.”

I also talked to him about the rude and dismissive attitude of many of the UPS people I’d spoken to, especially the woman from the night before who’d blithely blown off my concerns and said, in essence, “Don’t fret, little boy — your box is on the truck.” I was surprised to find that there was no way to track back to that woman. So, UPS has reps who suck and no way to discipline or reprimand them. Nice.

We agreed that UPS’s best move would be to try to get the package and send it to me Next Day Air at its expense. He said he would try to figure out a way to intercept it. “I’ll call you back sometime in the next thirty minutes.”

Say it with me, folks: sixteen hours and counting, and still no call. And — joy of joys — no way to get in touch with him.2

As of Wednesday morning, UPS.com shows the package at a facility in Illinois. If that’s so, and if the supervisor meant what he said, it should have been grabbed and fired back to me via Next Day Air. Since it hasn’t been, I can only assume he’s as efficient, truthful, and conscientious as everyone else at UPS. Which is to say, not at all.

Where does that leave us? Wednesday morning; no package; no way to talk to any of the people I’ve already spoken to about it, meaning I would have to dial in blind and start the whole process again.

You might wonder why I care. I guess it’s because I believe in accountability. UPS’s core function is to move packages from Point A to Point B. They failed at that. This was a complete systemic failure, beginning with the web site that wouldn’t let me reschedule, down to service reps who offered no help, down to a warehouse that didn’t put the package on the truck. In short, every function at UPS that faces the customer collapsed.

You would think that someone at UPS would think, “Gee, we botched this one. Let’s figure out how and why. Let’s examine it and see what person or persons or protocols failed and put into place systems to lessen the chances it will happen again. Let’s do more than just say, ‘Oops, sorry,’ and go about our business. Let’s improve our business.”

I don’t like when people are bad at their jobs. I try to be good at my job. When I’m not, I try to learn from it and improve for the future. My experiences with UPS (not just this one — all those others over the years, too) tell me that UPS just doesn’t care about improving. At all.

This is how corporations defeat you. They put up so many barriers, so many blind alleys, that eventually it’s not even like you choose to give up — you have no choice but to give up. And they know this. They know that they can stall and stall and stall until you just drop from exhaustion and lack of options.

Needless to say, I’m done with UPS. I will no longer use them to send packages and I will request that people sending things to me not use them either. Because at the end of the day, UPS’s job is to deliver stuff, and if they can’t do that — and if they won’t fix the problem when they screw up — then why hire them for that job in the first place?

I tried to reschedule the delivery online, but the system put me in an endless “please log into your account” loop. That was an ill omen of what lay ahead, as you’ll see.He informed me that he doesn’t have a direct line. At one point, we were disconnected and, miraculously, he called me back. CallerID captured a Virginia number, but when I called it back, it told me, “This is a non-functioning UPS line” and directed me to call the 1-800 number. Insert your own joke here about all UPS lines being non-functioning.

A Second Star for Blood of My Blood

I am thrilled to announce that Blood of My Blood has received a second starred review, this time from School Library Journal. (The first one was from Booklist.)

Jasper “Jazz” Dent is locked in a storage locker with two dead bodies, trying to nurse his own bullet wound in the dim light of a fading cellphone. Picking up (without pause) from the cliff-hanger ending in Game (2013), Lyga’s series about the 17-year-old who was first introduced in I Hunt Killers (2012) as the son of escaped killer Billy Dent continues as he tries to aid the police in his father’s recapture. Unaware that his girlfriend Connie has been lured by Billy to a Brooklyn tenement house and imprisoned with Jazz’s mother, and that his hemophiliac friend, Howie, has been attacked, Jazz faces his demons alone—including repressed memories with sexual undertones, and the creepy voice of Billy educating his son on the acumen required to be a good serial killer (appearing in italics). The worrisome genetic factor plagues Jazz yet propels him in the right direction to foil some copycat killers and elude authorities long enough to solve his own life’s mysteries. Obstructing the law, the teen follows clues that take him back home to Lobo’s Nod for the chilling climax and surprise ending, despite red herrings thrown in the readers’ path at every turn. Connie and Howie continue to play major roles in this episode, often providing their own points-of-view, as do officers Hughes and Tanner as bumbling but likable authorities. As a trilogy wrap-up, this gory winner with raw appeal requires having read the first two titles.

Thanks, SLJ!

What About Ugly J?

Big-time spoilers for Blood of My Blood and the entire I Hunt Killers series in this post, so whatever you do, do not read any further if you haven’t read all three books! Seriously!

And now here’s some spoiler space…

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OK, that should do it.

So, a few days ago, I received an email from a reader, asking about Ugly J. Specifically:

Did you always know that Jazz’s mom would turn out to be another killer, and specifically the kind of killer she turned out to be? What ways do you think she relates to other characters (specifically female characters) in the series?

Good questions!

First of all, yes: I always knew Jazz’s mom would be another killer. There are clues in the first book, after all — the note acrostic that spells “UGLY J” and the appearance of the stranger at Jazz’s play at the very end, for example. I knew from the get-go that Ugly J was Janice and that the figure in the back of the auditorium was Mom.

And, yes, I knew what kind of killer she would be, as well as all of the specifics of her relationship — for lack of a better word — with Jazz. I had to know these things right away. Female serial killers are rare, so I knew I wanted to play with that. And I wanted to set up a series where Billy is the Boogeyman, only to have readers learn that there’s something so much worse just around the corner.

One thing that has amused me about Blood of My Blood and the revelation about Jazz’s mother is a few folks who’ve said that they predicted it. Which is fine, but what they mean is that they figured out in advance that Jazz’s mom was a killer. OK, great, good for them. But they didn’t figure out the nature of her madness, the fact that she was worse than Billy, that she was just as evil as Gramma intimated in the first book, that she had a twisted, Oedipal relationship with her child. That she’d originally gotten pregnant in order to kill her own son. Those are the real “twists” in the book and in the series. The identity of Ugly J/the Crow King is only the beginning.

As to her relationship to the other characters… One of my regrets is that the nature of the plot didn’t allow for more interaction between Janice and the other characters. Her scenes with Connie, I think, are extremely chilling, in retrospect. She’s playing with Connie. She could have killed Connie any time she wanted, but she didn’t because it was more fun to screw with her instead. And Janice knew she could hunt down Connie and kill her any time she wanted. After all, who do you think Mr. Auto-tune was in Game? It wasn’t Billy, after all — he admitted as much. No, that was Ugly J, playing a little side-game of her own, screwing around with her son’s girlfriend.

And I think that summarizes Ugly J’s relationship to the other characters pretty well. If we’re prospects to Billy, we’re toys to Janice. And when a toy is broken — like Gramma — she just throws it away and doesn’t look back. She very specifically doesn’t like Connie, obviously, because Connie has taken her “toy” — Jazz — away from her. To Janice, Connie is barely worth the effort to kill, but Jazz’s affection for her forces Ugly J to consider killing Connie, and this outrages her.

In the end, I think Ugly J stands on her own as a force of evil, but if we’re looking at her purely from Jazz’s perspective, I think she represents the worst betrayal of all, the maternal bond gone perverse and destructive. Someone told me that if I’d revealed that Billy had molested Jazz, it wouldn’t have made them half as upset. Somehow, we expect better from mothers, and seeing Janice go as far down the rabbit hole of Bad as you can makes it so much worse.

Interview: Peace, Love, Teen Fiction

Over at Peace, Love, Teen Fiction, I answer some questions about I Hunt Killers. Here’s a sample:

Where do you come up with the names of your serial killers?

BL: Good question! I just started riffing one day, throwing out ideas. I kept the ones that seemed either really eerie or slightly silly. If you think about it, a name like “Son of Sam” is sort of silly, until you know the context. I wanted some of my names to be similar. “Hand-in-Glove” (one of Billy’s aliases) is kind of absurd…until you know it’s the name of a serial killer.

Go check it out!

I Hunt Killers & Game: $1.99 Each on iBooks!

For the rest of the month, Apple is running a “Spooky Stories” sale through iBooks…and both I Hunt Killers and Game are participating.

Starting today and ending on October 31, you can get these books for just $1.99 each! Let’s be honest, gang — that’s practically outright theft. But I encourage you to go for it anyway!