Dan Wells's Blog, page 19

Week Two of #PoetrySummer

I was delighted to see such a great response to my "memorize a poem every week" challenge. How did everybody do on the first week out? I memorized "High Waving Heather" by Emily Bronte, one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets. The first time I read it the last line grabbed me–really jumped out and caught me–and when I recited it for my friend it caught him as well. I was pleased to be able to share the experience with someone. My friend recited "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent," by John Milton, and my wife recited "Hug of War" by Shel Silverstein (she didn't have much time last week, and went for a short one). It was a lot of fun, and even my two older children got in on the act, pulling out some of my old poetry collections. A great start to the summer.

Another of my favorite poets is e.e. cummings, and I already have one of his committed to memory: "who knows if the moon's," which I used for the epigram of I DON'T WANT TO KILL YOU. It's a wonderful poem, sweet and simple and kind of sad (at least in my interpretation), and would be a great choice if you're looking for something to memorize. Since I already have that one, I'm going for a different cummings this week: "I carry your heart," which is probably my favorite love poem. Men, memorize this one and recite it for your wife/girlfriend/chick you're trying to pick up at a literary convention. You'll thank me.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

It's short, like last week's, but it lacks the rhyme and meter and other structure that made last week's poem so easy. I'll branch into bigger stuff later, but for now I want to keep it simple. My wife is going for a similar length, choosing one of my very favorite Langston Hughes poems, Mother to Son":

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I'se been a-climbin' on,

And reachin' landin's,

And turnin' corners,

And sometimes goin' in the dark

Where there ain't been no light.

So boy, don't you turn back.

Don't you set down on the steps

'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.

Don't you fall now—

For I'se still goin', honey,

I'se still climbin',

And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

One of my favorite parts of this endeavor has been seeing what poems everyone picks, so please, share them here or link to your own blog on Facebook or Twitter. Use the hashtag #PoetrySummer so we can all find each other.

Quick — recite a poem RIGHT NOW

A friend of mine came over the other day (I was experimenting with the concept of stuffing donuts with bacon–no, seriously–and he came to help taste test), and as it inevitably does with him, the conversation turned to literature. The friend in question is Brian "The Lovebasket" Ellingford, the AP English teacher at Orem High School, and a very thoughtful, almost philosophical man when it comes to the subjects of reading, writing, and education. Somewhere in the middle of talking about what kids should read, what kids actually read, what can be done to help kids read more, and so on, the conversation turned to poetry, and we started to realize just how many poems we both had memorized. I can rip out a pretty good array of poems, everything from THE JABBERWOCKY to DEATH OF A BALL TURRET GUNNER and all kinds of stuff in between. How many do you know? I hope that it's more than you think.

Being naturally competitive, we decided to a) memorize more and b) turn it into a contest. Starting this week, and proceeding through the summer, we're going to memorize one poem a week, that's 12 poems. Want to join us? Here's the rules:

1. It must be a poem you don't already have fully memorized, but it's okay if you already have some of it memorized.

2. You must recite the entire poem, out loud, from memory, for at least one other person, on Sunday. That gives you slightly less than a full week for the first one, so pick something easy.

3. There are no length restrictions, but if all your poems are little quatrains or tiny nursery rhymes you're cheating in spirit. Throw a few multi-stanza poems in there; you can do it.

4. No William Carlos Williams allowed. There will be zero tolerance on this point.

5. Everything is done completely on the honors system. If you say you did it, we believe you.

For my first poem, I'm going to start with one of my favorites: High Waving Heather, by Emily Bronte. It's a passionate, almost violent depiction of a thunderstorm on the English moor, told with Bronte's typical intensity. I already have the first stanza cold, so all I need to do is nail down the other two. Here's the full text:

High waving heather, 'neath stormy blasts bending,

Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars;

Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending,

Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,

Man's spirit away from its drear dongeon sending,

Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.

All down the mountain sides, wild forest lending

One mighty voice to the life-giving wind;

Rivers their banks in the jubilee rending,

Fast through the valleys a reckless course wending,

Wider and deeper their waters extending,

Leaving a desolate desert behind.

Shining and lowering and swelling and dying,

Changing for ever from midnight to noon;

Roaring like thunder, like soft music sighing,

Shadows on shadows advancing and flying,

Lightning-bright flashes the deep gloom defying,

Coming as swiftly and fading as soon.

Secret Good News: Hugo and Campbell Nominations

If you were hanging out on Twitter or Facebook Sunday night, you may have seen a massive flood of excited announcements and joyful congratulations, coming and going and whizzing around on all sides. The Hugo nominations were being announced! I was nominated twice, and I was ecstatic, but I was not surprised–I'd already known for two weeks. Keeping it secret was maddening.

For the first leg of my book tour I stayed several nights with Mary Robinette Kowal and her husband in Portland, and one day between writing sessions we started talking about Hugo nominations–we knew they were coming soon, but we didn't yet know exactly when, and since we were both eligible we were walking on eggshells. "The thing is," said Mary, "they have to call ahead for every nominee to confirm that you're eligible, and to ask if you want to recuse, so the nominees know early. This time of year you can start to figure out who's been nominated just by watching Twitter for people saying 'I have secret good news I'm not allowed to talk about.'"

Later that night she checked her email, laughed, and said "I have secret good news!" Her short story 'For Want of a Nail' had been nominated, so we went out for Thai food to celebrate (no specific thematic reason, we just all like Thai). And then began what we shall call "The Great Refreshening of Email." I think I refreshed my email about 200 times over the next few days, but nothing appeared. Either I hadn't been nominated for anything, or they were still making their way through the categories.

A few days later my time in Portland came to an end, and I woke up early to drive to San Francisco. I was about 2/3 of the way there when Brandon Sanderson called. "I assume you're away from your email, because you're not responding to the thread."

"Yeah, I'm in the middle of nowhere on I-5, what's going on?"

"Writing Excuses has been nominated for a Hugo for Best Related Work."

"Awesome!"

"Yeah," he said, "have you been nominated for anything else? You're eligible for the Campbell this year."

"I haven't seen anything," I said, but you can bet I pulled off the road and refreshed my email a few thousand more times just in case. Nothing. I drove the rest of the way to San Francisco, called my wife to tell her the news, and went for a walk in the rain just to force myself away from the Internet. It was really starting to drive me crazy.

The next day I signed in Borderlands, and afterward a nice young lady came up and asked if I could spare a few minutes for some questions. I said sure, and very quickly realized that the questions centered around the strong central theme of "are you eligible for a Campbell award?" the Campbell is not a Hugo, but it accompanies them; it the award for Best New Writer, and therefore has a very brief window of eligibility following the date of your first publication; two years after you've published something professionally, you're not really a "new" writer anymore. My books came out in 2009 in Europe, so I was still legal, and my one previous short story publication had been in a small, non-professional student magazine, for which I wasn't paid, so I fit all the criteria. It turned out that this was one of the award organizers, and she officially congratulated me: I had been nominated for the Campbell!

That was two weeks ago, and while I may have let the news slip to a couple of people here and there, I managed to keep my mouth pretty shut. One of my only nights home during that book tour included RPG night, and as we all sat down to play I turned to my friend Larry Correia. "Before we get started, I have to ask: do you have secret good news you're not allowed to talk about until Sunday?"

"I don't know," he said, "do you have secret good news?" And then we both smiled, because we knew, and we congratulated each other for our secret good news. I'm honored to be sharing the Campbell category with him.

And now it's public, and I couldn't be happier.

I should also point out a few close other friends who've been nominated. First, of course, is my awesome editor, Moshe Feder, who's been nominated for Best Editor, Long Form. Since his only authors publishing last year were Brandon and I, we're justifiably proud of him. He's an awesome guy and an awesome editor.

Eric James Stone, whose work I've been touting here for a while now, was nominated for Best Novellette for his story "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made." This story was also nominated for a Nebula, and it absolutely deserves all the hype, and it's up for free on his website so go read it as soon as you can. It's awesome.

I met Lauren Beukes at WorldCon in Montreal, back when we were both completely unheard of, and I became a fan within the first few pages of her novel Moxyland. She writes fast-paced, prophetic cyberpunk set in Johannesburg, plus she's incredibly cool and very nice. As with Larry, I'm honored to be sharing the Campbell category with Lauren.

A week and a half later: Halfway through the book tour

It's been over a week since last I posted, and it's interesting to look back and what's happened during that time. For example, my son is still reading me a book about manatees, only this time he's 8 instead of 7. The only constant is change.

The reason you've heard so little from me since the last post, both here on the blog and in venues like Twitter and Facebook, is twofold. First, after leaving Portland and driving to San Francisco–this being over a week into the tour–I was brain dead and ready to be done. I had several hours in my hotel in which I planned to do so many great and wonderful things, like maybe write some short stories and write a big blog post and do some revision on PARTIALS, but I just couldn't do anything. I ended up staring at the walls–not even watching TV, literally staring at the walls. I walked the block to SF's Chinatown and got some awesome food, then came back and collapsed into exhaustion. Alas. I managed to have plenty of energy for the signing at Borderlands, which went great, so that's awesome. I love Borderlands, they're one of my favorite stores; I was further gratified to see that their business is booming. Huzzah for the indie bookseller!

With a day and a half to recover in SF, I caught my second wind and headed to LA, where my ability to do work took its second enormous hit: my family showed up. The week I was scheduled to be in Southern California turned out to also be the week my children had Spring Break–and the week of my son's birthday–so they drove down and met me and we spent the week in San Diego. Here's a quick breakdown of the week:

Monday: Wake up in LA, hop in the car, make a quick stop at Vroman's, drive to San Diego, have lunch in Old Town (the pozole at Barra Barra was amazing, but the chile colorado left something to be desired). We checked into our hotel, let the kids swim, and ate take out on the floor while watching rerun after rerun of Good Luck Charlie. I have since become convinced that Good Luck Charlie is the only show ever broadcast on the Disney channel, all day every day. I'm also beginning to understand why my wife hates the Disney channel so much.

Tuesday: We spent the morning at the Midway Museum–a decommissioned aircraft carrier crammed stem to stern with awesomeness. I thought my son would love this, but he walked through the halls pointing at ever picture and exhibit saying "dumb, dumb, dumb." Finally we got to the part where there's a bunch of cockpits you get to sit in, and a simulator where you can pretend to fly a jet, and he loved it. The afternoon and evening were spent at SeaWorld, which is way cooler than when I was a kid. We saw all the shows, got soaked to the bone by both whales and dolphins, and rode the roller coaster twice since the crowds were so thin you could walk right on without waiting. My daughter's opinion: "The SeaWorld roller coaster is kind of like Splash Mountain, except instead of cute furry animals there's a weird voice telling you to save the ocean."

Wednesday: We walked approximately nine thousand miles in and around the San Diego Zoo. The lowlight were the tigers, who insisted on hiding every time we passed. The highlight were the rhinos, who were up and active and chasing each other and wrestling and frankly I've never seen any animal perform so entertainingly in a zoo, let alone a pair of animals as big and awesome as rhinos. My son still hated it, because he was determined to hate everything, but I could tell that secretly he enjoyed it against his will.

Thursday: This day was for the Safari Park, which I had never been to or even knew existed. It might be my favorite part of the trip. I was just so dang impressed with everything they were doing to help some incredibly endangered animals, by the end of the day I wanted to just throw money at every zookeeper I saw. There are only 7 Northern White Rhinos left in the entire world–only two males–and I got to see two of them. That means I saw about 30% of the Northern White Rhino population in the entire world. That's amazing and humbling and terrifying all at once. That night I signed at the Borders in Mission Valley, a wonderful store with such a consistent, active, well-read staff they always feel like more of an indie than a chain, if I can say that without sounding insulting. As an author traveling and signing, I can always feel a distinct difference between the indies and the chains–at an indie store I show up, the staff knows me and says hi, we chat and have fun, and they invite me back. At most chains (not all) I'll walk in, meander for a while trying to find a bookseller, introduce myself to a new hire I've never seen before, sign books while they hunt for the "autographed" stickers, and then smile and leave. The Mission Valley Borders is like walking into an indie, and I love that.

Friday: Back to Sea World, this time for the Sesame Street 4D show (chosen for the benefit of my two youngest, who refused to watch it anyway, but that's okay because it was dumb) and for the Penguin and arctic exhibits. Don't bother with the motion-simulator ride at the Wild Arctic exhibit, but definitely go check out the animals. The polar bear was asleep (though my wife was there at exactly the right time to watch him stand up, poop, and go back to sleep), but the walrus was awake and active and amazing. First of all he's huge, just gargantuan–easily as big as some of the elephants we saw the day before–and then he came right up to the window to eat, his whiskers pressed up against the glass just a couple of inches from our faces. I could have watched him for hours, but I had to get to one of my other favorite bookstores, Mysterious Galaxy. Where so many other stores are failing, chain and indie alike, Mysterious Galaxy is expanding to a second location (Redondo Beach), and with good reason. They know their genre backward and forward, they're extremely nice and friendly and talkative, and people simply love to go there. After the signing a big group of us went out to a Japanese place (Ichiro's) and talked for several hours. It was great.

Saturday: The weather was great, so we took the kids to Balboa Park, listened to them whine about how they couldn't walk another step, then took them to the beach where they ran around like maniacs for five or six hours. My two eldest children told me they'd put sunscreen on, then proceeded to burn to a crisp, which is how they learned the valuable lesson of Not Lying to Dad. We played in some tide pools, hung out with some cousins we love but rarely see, and I skinned a large chunk of my knee clean off learning to skimboard. I never did get the hang of it. Dinner was a 14 person party (8 of whom were children) at a big restaurant that obviously had very little experience with parties of that size and composition. Say what you will about Utah, you show up at a restaurant with 8 kids and they doggone know what to do with you.

Now I'm spending today and tomorrow trying to catch up on as much work as I can before heading back out: I'll be in Baltimore on Wednesday, Atlanta on Thursday, and Minneapolis on Saturday. The "big group hangs around after the signing and goes to eat somewhere" plan has worked really well so far, so we'll continue it at all of these events–if you want to say hi, ask about writing, tell me how much you love/hate my books, yak about roleplaying, or anything else, come on by.

Book Tour and NaShoStoMo Updates

So my book tour is going very well. The book launched one week ago, and my two events in Utah were fantastic; my signing at the Orem B&N was the biggest I've ever had, and things are going well. Thursday morning I woke up early and drove to Seattle, which takes about 13 hours including stops for gas. People always ask if I use my road trips to listen to audiobooks, but I have a travel game I love too much to do anything else: I flip through the radio stations at random, seeing how long it takes me to figure out if each new one is Christian or not. My record so far is two and a half heavy metal songs before I realized it was a Christian heavy metal station. What audiobook could possibly compete with that? (Aside from my own, of course; go buy it now.)

My brother happened to be in Seattle for a job interview, and I got there early enough to meet him for dinner: raw oysters on the half shell, one of my absolute favorites and something he's only just now getting introduced to. We both loved it. The next day I had a signing at the University Bookstore, which I was almost late to thanks to a deluge of rain causing significant slowdown on the freeways. "Deluge of rain causing X" is kind of an ongoing theme for this tour, as it didn't stop raining for pretty much the entire three and a half days I spent in Seattle; we may have gotten three or four rainless hours total. Seattle is one of my favorite cities in the world, but it was really going out of its way to live up to its weather's reputation last weekend. The signing itself was awesome, with a great discussion followed by a fantastic meal with local readers at The Night Kitchen. My decision to eat dinner with a big group of readers after every signing has been awesome, and I will carry it forth for the foreseeable future–if you're in town for any of the rest of my signings (listed on the calendar to the left of this text), please join me afterward for dinner and scintillating conversation. Thus far, no one has died at any of these events.

The weekend itself was LDS General Conference, which doesn't mean much to those of you who are not LDS, but it's basically a series of five two-hour meetings broadcast over satellite by the Church's top leaders to the entire membership. We do it every six months, but this one was especially awesome. I really loved it.

On Monday I woke up to a phone call from my editors at Harper, and we talked for three solid hours about my draft of Partials and their notes for the rewrite. This feels almost more like a collaboration than a typical authorship, and my two editors are very much involved on every level of the creative process. It's been awesome. Finishing that I did several more business-y things, grabbed some steamed pork hombow from my favorite Chinese Bakery (Mee Sum in Pike's Place Market), and headed south to Portland. Once again, the rain made the roads slow, and the drive became downright terrifying in more than one instance when a big truck started kicking up enough water I felt like I was driving through an aquarium. I arrived safely, and the signing was awesome–nearly as big as the one in Orem–followed by, again, a truly fantastic dinner with local readers. We had an awesome time.

I'm staying in Portland with Mary Robinette Kowal and her husband, and so far we've managed to threaten each other with death only two or three times each. They've been very accomodating, and Mary makes a mean peach cobbler, and in just a few minutes we're off to watch True Grit. But first I'm on the phone listening to my son read my a book about manatees.

As promised, I've been writing a short story every day this month for NaShoStoMo. They have been unilaterally awful, but I'd like to think they've been at least getting better as I go. the list thus far is kind eclectic to say the least:

April 1: The Cat Lady. A woman tries to convince her weird old mom to start cleaning up her house and yard and get rid of her many cats.

April 2: Standoff. A mercenary cowboy and two deadly gunslingers try not to die.

April 3: Memory. A scientist experiments with a memory drug on a patient.

April 4: The Volunteer. A new story starting with the same basic premise as the last one.

April 5: Old Things. My attempt to come up with a story based on looking around Mary's house, seeing her collection of old typewriters, and somehow combining that with the Cthulhu mythos.

I will continue to write and keep you updated. I'm really learning a lot.

The Dan Wells Book Tour Challenge: NaShoStoMo

You know what I'm horrible at? Short stories. From an outsider perspective that looks ridiculous, I know, because I'm a writer, right? I just wrote a 100k book in three months, how hard could a short story be compared to that? The answer: incredibly hard, to the point of not really being comparable. Writing a novel uses completely different skills and techniques than writing short stories, and those are skills and techniques i do not possess. But that's what practice is for, right?

Yesterday I said that I was going to do something crazy and dumb while on tour, and you probably though I was talking about skydiving or shark hunting or shaking people's hands, but no, I'm talking about a ridiculous short story challenge. During the month of April I intend to write a short story every day. Consider it my own little version of NaNoWriMo, but with short stories instead of a novel. Many of them will be VERY short, and most of them will be awful, but that's the point–I'm doing this to force myself to learn, and to keep my writing going while on tour. It's incredibly difficult to novel while doing a lot of traveling (at least for me), but cranking out short crappy stories is something I (probably) will be able to do. With any luck, by the end of the month I'll be better at this stuff. If any of them are good enough for public consumption, I'll post them here.

Want to join me on this mad endeavor? I think it's a great opportunity to learn some new things, and I'd love to commiserate with anyone nuts enough to join in. Here are a few rules and guidelines to help us along:

1) Start by reading this post from Eric James Stone. It's got some valuable advice that I know will be specifically handy for me, and probably for you.

2) I'm setting the minimum at 200 words, though most of my stories will likely be longer; it's possible to have shorter story, but I specifically want to stop myself from writing "There once was a man, he lived and he died" kind of stories. 200 words is short while still being long enough to force me to take it seriously.

3) Each story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We're trying to learn how to write short stories, not random 200-word space-fillers.

4) As long as you end up with 30 stories, one per day, it doesn't matter which day they were actually written on–so if you get in the zone and do more than one at a time, you can afford to slack off. This will be handy for me, as some of my tour days involve 14 hours of driving, plus I plan to take Sundays off.

5) If you post about your quest on Twitter or Facebook, use the hashtag #NaShoStoMo. Which totally sounds like the name of Quasimodo's brother.

Ready? Go!

Book Launch Day, and Dan's Mystery Project Revealed!

First things first: today is the official release day for I Don't Want to Kill You, the third and final book in the John Cleaver trilogy. As much as I love the first two, the third book is my favorite: it has my favorite character, my favorite ending, and my favorite reactions. Mr. Monster was the book that my friends read and said "Dan, you really scare me." I Don't Want to Kill You is the book my friends read and say "Dan, I hate you and I can't believe you did this to me and when are you writing the next one?" Don't let that comment fool you: this is the end of the series, and the plot you've been following for three years comes to a solid resolution. When friend and fellow author Seanan McGuire finished the book she said: "You stuck the landing, and you stuck it HARD." I won't leave you hanging. But that's not to say that I won't someday come back and tell a new story with these characters….

The book lauch will be tonight, Tuesday March 29, at Sam Weller's in Salt Lake City at 6pm. I'll be signing at the Orem Barnes & Noble tomorrow night at 7, and then heading off on a month-long tour; full details are on my website calendar. I've also added to that calendar every con appearance I have scheduled for the rest of the year, including some very big events: WorldCon, DragonCon, World Fantasy, etc. If you're going to be at any of those, look me up.

Now, on to the other piece of exciting news: the long-awaited revelation of the Mystery Project I've been teasing you with for months. Remember when I always used to say "no one will knock on your door and ask you to write a book"? Well, I can't really say that anymore.

Several months ago, my agent was talking to a friend at Harper Teen about how they were looking for a solid YA post-apocalypse series, and they didn't really have any in the pipeline; my agent, being awesome, said "I've got an author who could KILL a YA post-apocalypse series," and promptly called me. Within a few hours I was emailing the editor, resulting in a phone call with two editors, resulting in me pitching them an idea for a series about genetic manipulation, engineered plagues, and semi-human armies (at this time I was in the middle of writing my cloning book, Extreme Makeover: Apocalypse Edition, so genetics were on my mind). They liked the ideas, we kicked around a few other options, and before I knew it we were signing a contract for a trilogy.

The first book in the series, which I have finished and which my editors, Jordan Brown and Ruta Rimas, are currently reviewing, is called Partials, a reference to the semi-human army I mentioned earlier. It starts about eleven years after the Partials released a plague that destroyed mankind, all but wiping our civilization off the face of the earth. The North American survivors have gathered (and may have been herded) to Long Island, where they are struggling to cure the plague and save their species. The main character is a girl named Kira, a 16-year-old medical student, determined to unravel the mystery of the plague, the Partials, and everything else.

Partials comes out sometime in 2012, the same year as my schizophrenia book The Hollow City; I don't know the exact date, but my guess is either Spring or Fall, which narrows it down to about half a year, which doesn't really tell you anything. The manuscript for the first book was due in the first of March, after signing the contract sometime in November, which meant the turn-around for the book was insane: I had to plot out the trilogy, craft the characters, outline the first book, and write it, all in about three and a half months. It was nuts, but I'm really proud of the results. The second manuscript is due in the first of March next year, which will be much easier to hit. I'm hoping I can go back to Extreme Makeover and finish it by the end of summer, about five months from now, which will give me six months to finish the second Partials book; since the world has already been created, and the overall plot is already in place, the prep work for Partials 2 (not the real title, obviously) will be pretty light. Extreme Makeover will be a Tor book (my editor Moshe is incredibly excited about it), and I'm hoping to arrange the situation such that I can put out two books a year: a YA from Harper and an adult book from Tor. In 2012, in between writing the second and third Partials book, I plan to start a new series set in the John Cleaver universe, which should make a lot of you very happy. So now you know what I'm working on for the next two years—with the caveat, of course, that I am an excitable man, and fickle in my writing tastes, so don't be surprised if I end up taking a few months in the middle somewhere to write something else for no good reason.

So that's the news. I hope you can all join me on my tour in April, to talk about John Cleaver or Partials or The Hollow City or anything else. Also, stay tuned tomorrow when I announce the crazy dumb thing I'm trying to do while on tour. A gauntlet will be thrown.

Book tour info for I DON'T WANT TO KILL YOU

At long last, I have finalized my next book tour and posted all of the times and places in my calendar (right there in the left column of this website. And yes, there are east coast and limited midwest events! I'm very excited. For convenience, here's the full list:

March 29: Book launch at Sam Weller's, Salt Lake City, 6pm

March 30: Barnes & Noble, Orem, 7pm

April 1: University Bookstore, Seattle, 7pm

April 4: Powell's, Beaverton (Portland), 7pm

April 9: Borderlands, San Francisco, 3pm

April 10: Dark Delicacies, Burbank (LA), 2pm

April 14: Borders, Mission Valley (San Diego), 7pm

April 15: Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, 7pm

April 20: Barnes & Noble, Baltimore, 7pm

April 21: Peerless Books, Alpharetta (Atlanta), 7pm

April 23: Uncle Hugo's, Minneapolis, 7pm

April 26: Murder By the Book, Houston, 7pm

Every event will be filled with awesomeness. Also: signings of books.

I want to try something new on this tour. My favorite part of traveling is eating new food, but when I go on tour I usually end up eating take-out burritos in my hotel room, because eating alone is boring and takes all the fun out of it. This is doubly ridiculous given that my signings are usually full of friendly people who love to talk about books and writing and such. So: what I want to do this time is work out some lunches and dinners with all you awesome folks. You show me your favorite restaurants, we'll yak about whatever, and we'll have a grand old time. Note that this is all dutch–I'm not asking you to buy me food, just join me. Sound awesome? Let's do it! Post here or contact me through dan AT fearfulsymmetry DOT net,and we'll start setting this up. Note that if you live in Seattle (April 1-3), Portland (April 4-7) or Minneapolis (April 22-23) I'll be there an extra day or two not mentioned on the schedule above. Also note that dinner in San Francisco is already claimed by Seanan McGuire, who has a machete collection, so don't mess with her and/or don't wonder why I disappear halfway through the tour.

Protagonists you don't like

I recently watched The Social Network, and if you read my glowing love letter to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World you can appreciate the weight of meaning when I say that The Social Network was the best movie of the year. I know it didn't win the "big" Oscars, but I'm a writer, so the only Oscars that really matter to me are the writing ones, and in that category The Social Network had no serious competition. The dialogue and pacing and storytelling in that movie crackle with more life and energy and creativity than any movie in recent memory, which is pretty amazing for a movie about socially inept people looking at computer screens. The first scene sold me, practically the first line of dialogue; it had an organic ebb and flow to the language that we use all the time in real life (though not with that level of rapid-fire cleverness), and yet most books and movies are never able to catch. In an entertainment industry where most characters speak because they have important plot elements to reveal, these characters speak because they have things to say. It was refreshing and brilliant and depressingly rare in writing.

And yet–and yet–no matter how much I loved the characters and their story and the things they said to each other, I never actually liked them. They are not likable people. Peel back the excellent writing and this is a movie about mean, dishonest people being jerks to each other, often for no real reason other than "we're jerks, and this is what we do." I'm not making a comment on the real people involved, just their characters as portrayed in the film. This is a movie without any good guys, and yet somehow I was pulled in and absorbed and emotionally involved. Interesting.

Meanwhile, on cheap cable TV, the movie Jumper came on one afternoon, and because I was bored and because I have an ongoing quest to like Hayden Christenson in a movie, I watched it. It was better than I'd been told, with some very interesting ideas and a fantastic performance from the perpetually undervalued Jamie Bell; Hayden Christenson was, as always, stiff and incomprehensible. Jumper, for those unfamiliar, was about a boy who can teleport, and the mysterious organization that tries to hunt and kill him. And here's the thing: just like the Social Network, there are no likable characters, and no good guys anywhere to be found. The protagonist is a thief and a leech without the slightest pang of conscience, and the mysterious organization is completely justified in hunting him down, and yet they're kind of viciously overzealous about it (and needlessly homicidal in at least one scene) so you don't really like them either. When the movie switches gears in the second half, focusing full force on its "let's stop this mysterious organization from killing our kind" finale, you just don't care because you've never become invested in them. You don't actually want them to win, because the first half of the movie drove home so solidly the fact that these guys are all bad. Hayden Christenson bears a lot of the blame, definitely; if the kid who played his younger self in the opening scenes had stuck around, we would have liked the character a lot more. But this goes far beyond that–even Jamie Bell, who as I said was excellent, still wasn't likable.

So: two movies with unlikable protagonists, and in one I get sucked in and one I don't. In one movie I can't get enough of the little twerps–I don't like them, but I love them–and in the other I just keep watching my clock and wishing it were better than it was. What's the difference? This is of special interest to me for obvious reasons: I write about a sociopathic proto-killer, a classic example of "unlikable but we like him anyway," and figuring out how people create characters like that, both successfully and unsuccessfully, is part of my job. I've come up with several theories:

1) The characters in The Social Network are never depicted as heroic, yet the characters in Jumper are obviously portrayed in a heroic role–despite never actually being or feeling heroic. In other words, I like the characters in The Social Network more because they feel like they fit their own story. They're not trying to manipulate me, through the contrivance of the plot structure, to cheer for a "hero beats the bad guys" ending that doesn't make any sense in the story.

2) The characters in The Social Network are hard workers. Whether you like them socially or not, you can't help but admire their work ethic–everything they get, they earn. They are good at what they do and they dream big, always trying to make something bigger or better than it was before. The characters in Jumper, on the other hand, work for nothing: their teleporting powers are innate and accidental, their wealth is stolen, and the most ambition they can summon is to spend their days roaming the world, stealing surfboards and eating fast food. Every single person who watched that movie could think of a better use for teleportation than the characters did. If they could at least embrace their role as supercrooks–if they had any lasting impact on the world in any way–we could get behind it. Instead we see the misuse (and even worse, the non-use) of unearned power. The characters were spoiled and boring.

3) This goes along with the last point, but the characters in The Social Network are competent. The third scene of the movie shows the protagonist hack a series of photo databases and construct a complicated website from scratch in the time it takes a group of older, richer, more successful students to get drunk at a party. The comparison is explicit: this guy is really good at what he does. The characters in Jumper, on the other hand, are competent enough with their actual jumping, but not really good at anything else: when the bad guys show up the protagonist is completely outclassed and barely escapes with his life; when he decides to take the fight to them he proves inept at evading them, tracking them, fighting them, and pretty much everything else he tries to do. Your characters have to be good at something, even something stupid, or the audience just won't care about them.

4) The quality of the dialogue in The Social Network is, as I said, stellar. You can sit and listen to them snap at each other for hours because they're just so frakking entertaining as they do it. When Jesse Eisenberg tells a lawyer that no, he's not worthy of his attention, yes he's being a jerk but you still want to stand up and cheer because he was being a jerk so well. He gives that lawyer a verbal slap across the face that every one of us has wished we could give to a similar pompous windbag at some point in our lives. This is the same as the "he's funny" principle I talk about with John Cleaver: if my sociopath can make you laugh, you'll like him no matter how dark and creepy he gets. The characters in Jumper don't have anything like that–they're not clever, funny, charming, or anything else that would help get you on their side. The closest it gets is when Hayden Christenson gets into a bar fight and ends up jumping the other guy into a bank vault and flashing a truly awesome evil smile right as he jumps back out. That's the kind of "look how awesome I am" attitude that could really win over an audience, but it's the only one in the movie, and it still doesn't work because it's surrounded by so many weird things: a bar fight with a drunk guy is not the best way to show yourself in a good light; Christenson himself started the fight; the other guy was just drunk, not evil (ie, he didn't "deserve" it); the moment was dark, but the movie was not prepared to go any further down a dark path with Christenson's character and thus the moment was squandered; and perhaps worst of all, the girl in the scene immediately distracts us from the moment by demonstrating a superhuman lack of believable motivations.

Any ideas of your own? Any other examples you'd like to share? What makes an unlikable character likable, memorable, and more?

Natural Selection

A few days ago I tweeted about boxcar2d.com, and since nobody said HOLY CRAP THAT'S THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER, I assume none of you went to look at it. Or maybe I'm just overexcited. The website is a program designed to simulate natural selection and evolution, using a track and a vast population of little cars. The program uses a physics engine called box2d as its base, so the cars have weight and size and speed as defined by a simple list of traits, and the goal is to get as far along the track as possible. the traits for each generation's best cars are used to create the next generation, and thus, over time, the cars become better at navigating the track, and can go much farther.

What I love about this program is the wonderful way it emulates evolution as a combination of natural selection and mutation; it's the most perfect illustration of how those concepts work together that I've ever seen, and it almost makes me want to be a biology teacher just so I can use it in class. The natural selection part is obvious: cars that perform better on a certain track will survive to pass on their traits to the next generation, thus providing continuity over time. If that's all you had, though, the population would stagnate–eventually every car would be as good as the best car, but no better. Mutation guarantees that every now and then a new trait is introduced into the gene pool, and if it's valuable it gets carried on, and if it's not it disappears. Thus the species actually improves over time.

Let's look at an example. The tracks the program uses are essentially a series of obstacles: Big Air is a set of progressively harder jumps, The Gap is a set of progressively wider potholes, Hang Ten is a set of progressively steeper hills, and so on. My favorite is Big Air, because it's thrilling to watch the cars figure out how to clear the longer jumps, but for this example I'm going to use Blockhead, a straight, flat track blocked by a set of progressively bigger walls made of stacked bricks. Moving along the track requires knocking the walls down, moving over the fallen bricks, and so on.

Each population starts with a generation of completely random traits–they can be any shape, with any number of wheels attached to any number of points on the car. Most of these cars aren't even recognizable as cars, and indeed most of them can't even move; think of them as the single-celled organisms in the primordial soup. Some of my first-generation cars could actually move forward, usually on one wheel, either pushing their body ahead of them or pulling it behind them. Of these, most of them could knock down the first wall or two, but had trouble going any farther. This continued for a generation or two until one of the one-wheeled cars showed up with a wedge-shaped body, like the prow on the front of a train. This proved incredibly useful in plowing through the first several walls, and the car got farther along the track than any car before it. All of a sudden the next generation was filled with variants of this wedge, some more successful than others: one wedge was lower to the ground, digging under the blocks but eventually getting too buried to move; another wedge was so small that the wheel ended up flipping it around, using it like a mace, which knocked over walls with no problem but couldn't get past the rubble. Over several generations the wedge refined itself into a blade-like triangle capable of plowing under the walls and knocking them over its back, and then one of these cars grew a second wheel. This proved much more useful than one, with much better ability to climb over piles of fallen blocks, and within a couple of generations the population was filled with sleek, two-wheeled blades that rammed the blocks at full speed and raced over the fallen debris. These cars proved useless against the heavier walls until another mutation showed up; many of the cars had developed third wheels here and there, sometimes giving them extra speed or stability, but the winning combination was a third wheel perched on a small spike in the front, jutting forward like a buzz saw, which knocked down all the walls before the main body of the car even got there, preparing the way for the two main wheels to just crawl over the wreckage. With this new adaptation the cars could travel much farther than ever before.

The previous paragraph evoked one of two reactions in you: either you were bored, and you're still reading because your job is even more boring than this, or you were completely fascinated and already clicked the link at the top of the article. (I suppose technically there was a third group that got so bored they stopped reading altogether, but those people aren't here anymore so I don't have to talk to them. I can talk about them, though: what losers! How is this not the most fascinating thing you've ever seen?) One of the things you may have noticed in that description is the way the simulation demonstrates even the subtler aspects of evolution, such as increased complexity, increased efficiency, and the carrying on of key traits long after they become vestigial. The wedge-shaped bodies ceased to be important when the second wheel showed up, because the cars were no longer using them as plows to knock down walls, but they hung around anyway because there was no significant selection pressure to get rid of them. The human appendix is the same way: we don't use it anymore, but people without one are pretty the same as people with one, so the trait never gets weeded out of the gene pool and we continue to produce babies with a useless extra organ.

When you try out the program, make sure to try it with several different tracks, because it's fascinating to see which traits get selected for on which tracks. It's also interesting to see which traits get selected for on every track: most cars will end up with two large wheels on the front and back, no matter which track you're on, because it's simply the most effective means of travel. This is another real-life analog: cows and crocodiles don't share a lot of common ancestry, and thrive in very different environments, but they both have a head, body, tail, and four legs. Some shapes are just too efficient to not use.

To all of you science geeks: your welcome. To all the rest of you: thanks for reading anyway. I promise to talk about something more pertinent to your interests next time, probably a movie comparison between The Social Network and Jumper. I know that sounds weird, but seriously, it's really interesting.