Dan Wells's Blog, page 20

Wrath of Ashardalon

A few months ago I talked about the board game Castle Ravenloft, a quick, tactical dungeon crawl based loosely on the D&D 4th Edition rules. We loved the game for being fast, balanced, and fun; you could play a whole scenario in an hour, and our evenings with the game typically spanned three or four scenarios because we enjoyed it so much. Next week, Wizards of the Coast releases the second in the series, Wrath of Ashardalon, and I've had the chance to play it quite a few times. I'm pleased to report that it not only lives up to the first game, it's an improvement in many ways.

Whereas CR was set in a gothic castle full of undead, WoA is set in a mountainy cavern of some kind, filled with such classic monster types as orcs, devils, and (of course) dragons. They've refined the rules a bit–nothing that changes the game too wildly, but one change in particular helped fix one of our major complaints from last time (the weakness of the rogue) despite not actually altering any elements from the original game. The best new feature is what they call Chambers: large rooms in the dungeon that make for huge, climactic encounters, while still keeping to the same random engine that makes the game so balanced.

The new characters in the game are fun and unique–I was worried that included so many of the same classes as CR, which seemed lame, when they had so many to draw from, but the sculpts and powers are all new, plus they've made the powers interchangeable, so that a Wizard from the first game (for example) can use powers from a wizard in the second game, and vice versa. The two sets characters seem balanced against each other, and we even tried a 7-player game to see how well they combined–they combined well, and the game difficulty scaled perfectly with extra players. The game time did not, however, and adding two extra players nearly doubled the game time. Of course, doubling the game time still clocked in at half of a typical Descent session, so we still came out ahead. There was noticeable and occasionally annoying downtime, however.

My biggest complaint with the games remains the same: despite how simple the games are, the rulebooks manage to be confusing and poorly-organized. We missed several key rules that caused major problems while playing, and it took a ridiculous amount of time for four experienced gamers to comb through the leaflet-style rulebook to figure out what the problem was. We think we've got everything straightened out by now, but there's excuse for that level of confusion.

My other problem with WoA was the generic flavor of the tiles. The CR tiles were covered with crypts and chapels and all kinds of creepy atmosphere, to really give you the sense that you're exploring a castle. The WoA tiles are much more generic, and often you won't find anything interesting at all until you come to the climactic chamber. I suppose this is an accurate reflection of what it's like to explore a cave, but come on. It would not have been hard to differentiate these tiles a little. The doors add some variation, but overall they're not as interesting as they should be, and it's a poor trade-off for a dungeon with some personality.

All told, we had a lot of fun with Wrath of Ashardalon, and we're excited to play more. For a quick dungeon crawl fix that has all of the flavor with none of the onerous baggage, it's simply the best system out there.

Imaginary Swearing for Imaginary Cultures

I am writing a new novel, which I am not allowed to talk about, but I can tell you this much: it is set about 65 years in the future, in North America. Among the many setting elements that I am creating for it, I'm trying to design some new swear words for people to use. Swearing is one of the most stable linguistic categories we have, so some of the words we use now will still be used in the future; "damn" has been a cuss word for hundreds of years, and will probably be so for hundreds more. On the other hand, swearing is also on of the most inventive linguistic categories, which is why (for example) people can use the word f*** as pretty much every part of speech. So I'm coming up with new swear words for two reasons: first, for personal reasons, I don't want to use f*** at all, as any part of speech, and second, because I think it would happen anyway over time. And third, because I think it's fun, but I didn't mention that earlier.

The problem with coming up with new swear words is that it's very, very hard to not make them silly. "Frak," from Battlestar Galactica, is well-loved by fans of the show (I use it all the time), but people without that emotional investment often think it sounds silly, like the kids on the playground that say "fudge!" and think they're being clever. The challenge, then, is to create swear words that still sound kind of horrible without actually being horrible. This is even harder than it sounds, but so far I've got two that I kind of like.

I had a friend who went to on a 3-day discount cruise to Mexico, including a stop in the tourist town of Ensenada, and when she came back she couldn't stop talking about how cheap and crappy the whole thing was. She pulled out some photos of all the lame places she visited, and then told a long story about an hour-long taxi ride to go see some stupid attraction; when she showed us the next photo, she said "after that lon, horrible taxi ride, this is the blowhole we went to see." It turns out the place was literally called a blowhole–a rock formation along the shore where incoming waves get funneled in such a way that they spout straight up, like a fountain. But I didn't know that at first, and I thought she was using the word "blowhole" as an expletive, as some kind of combination of "this place is a hole" and "this place blows." It had just the right combination of nastiness to be a real cuss word in the right situations ("blow" and "hole" are both vaguely scatalogical terms) while simultaneously being a completely innocent word (a blowhole is, of course, a whale's nostril). I'm using the word blowhole in my novel, not applied to places but to people, ie, "that guy's a real blowhole." I think it's working, but we'll see what the readers say.

The second word I'm thinking of is borrowed from Wayne's World. Back in the day, they had a skit about how they, too, were looking for a new word to use, because sometimes "Shyea" is just not strong enough. The word they settled on was "rectal," which is, again, a perfection combination of gross and innocent, plus it has that wonderful "ct" consonant cluster in the middle to really make it harsh on the ear and deliciously nasty to say. I'm not as enamored with this one as I am with blowhole, but I think it can still work.

So: blowhole and rectal. They're okay, but I need more, and that's where you come in: what are some good fake swear words that you think would be awesome? Swear words tend to focus on bodily functions and religion, and I'm open to anything that is not actually blasphemous. Let's see if we can come up with something that isn't totally rectal.

It's Hugo Nomination Time!

2011 is upon us, and along with all the other things a new year brings, that means it's time to start nominating books and short stories and comics and movies and such for the Hugo awards. The Hugos are a part of WorldCon, and along with the Nebulas later in the year, they're arguably the biggest awards for genre fiction. You have to be signed up for WorldCon in order to nominate and vote, but there are two very good reasons you probably want to do that:

1) WorldCon 2011 is going to be accessible, affordable, and awesome.

WorldCon is in Reno this year, which sounds like a weird place, I know, but it's actually a fantastic place for it. For one thing, it's pretty central to everyone in the Mountain/Pacific states, relatively drive-able, and fairly cheap to fly to if you're in the other half of the country. Once you get there, Reno's status as a gambling town offers two great perks: the hotels are both really nice and really cheap. All in all, WorldCon in Reno (called "Renovation") will be the most affordable WorldCon in the foreseeable future, which means it will be well-attended and full of authors and editors. If you're a reader, this is one of the very best ways to meet your favorite SF and fantasy authors; if you're an aspiring writer, this is your chance to learn from authors directly, and to meet agents and editors in person. Attending memberships are $180 if you buy them by February 28, so sign up today, make your plans for August 17-21, and join us in Reno! We're going to do a couple of events specifically for fans of Writing Excuses, to really make it worth your while.

2) Supporting Memberships are only $50.

Obviously not everyone can go to WorldCon–you might have work you can't get out of, or maybe you just can't afford it, or whatever. If you can't go, but you still want to support the con and nominate/vote for the Hugos, you can buy a supporting membership for only $50.

So now you know how membership works. You can sign up whenever you want, including at the door, but if you sign up before March 26 you'll be able to nominate your favorite works for Hugo awards. This has been a great year for genre fiction, so there's a lot of great things to vote for; if you want to vote for me, here's a quick list of the categories I'm eligible for:

The Campbell Award

The Campbell is a special award for debut authors; last year's winner was Seanan Mcguire, and past winners include such luminaries as Mary Robinette Kowal, Namoi Novik, John Scalzi, Jay Lake, Cory Doctorow, Stephen R. Donaldson, Orson Scott Card, and C. J. Cherryh. Each author is eligible for two years, and this is my second year. If you've enjoyed my books, I'd love to have your nomination.

Hugo: Best Related Work

The Best Related Work category is for academic, historical, and instructional works. Starting this year, the category has been widened to include not only published books but podcasts, which means that Writing Excuses is eligible! If you're a fan of the podcast, and if our advice has somehow managed to be helpful to you, feel free to nominate us.

Speaking as a fan and a reader, there's a bunch of works I want to nominate as well: novels such as The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, FEED by Mira Grant, and Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal; graphic novels such Schlock Mercenary; short stories such as the stunning That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone; the movie Inception; and many more. It was a great year for genre fiction, like I said–it's going to be hard to vote for a favorite this summer, but for now I intend to nominate as many as I can.

For the full list of categories, including definitions of what each category includes, go here.

Aang vs. Heimdal vs. Racism

Friday night I was talking to a friend, and the conversation turned to a link I had posted about the racial casting controversy in the new Thor movie; briefly summarized, one of the Norse gods in the upcoming movie is played by Idris Elba, a black actor, and there are some very racist people getting very humorously upset about it. My friend agreed that these people were obviously morons, but then he raised a profoundly fascinating question: isn't this casting issue with Thor more or less the same as last year's casting issue with The Last Airbender? In both cases, a character who originated as one race was being portrayed by an actor of a different race, and yet in one instance we're all cool with it and in another instance it sparks a worldwide argument. Why the difference? At the risk of making everyone on the Internet hate me, I'm going to take a look at that question today. So: why is it okay to wish Aang was asian, and not okay to wish Heimdal was white?

1. Spokesperson Association

Let's get the obvious point out of the way first: the principles behind an issue can get very confused, or downright glossed over, when the people presenting that issue are obviously idiots. This is the same problem Wikileaks is facing right now: it's hard to focus on the "freedom of the press" issue when the man spearheading the whole thing is under arrest for rape. Julian Assange's rape charges have nothing to do with whether or not Wikileaks is good or bad, but the two topics get inevitably tangled, and the conversation becomes hard to continue. In the same way, the fact that the people protesting the Thor casting are a recognized hate group makes their actual message incredibly easy to mock. Boiled down to its roots, though, the message is more or less the same as the one from The Last Airbender: "we disagree with your decision to cast this character with an actor of a different race." If the complaints are essentially the same, does that imply that the complaint itself is not inherently racist, even if one of the complaining groups is? I believe that there are many other issues at play here, but this is our necessary starting point, and we need to keep it in mind.

2. The Best Actor for the Job

Both movie studios have defended their casting by saying that the actor(s) chosen were the best people for the job, regardless of race; if we can't separate the role from the race then WE are the racist ones, and we need to get over it and embrace the multicultural future. Now obviously we can't judge Idris Elba's performance as Heimdal until the movie comes out next summer, but it's easy (by which I mean excruciatingly painful) to look back at The Last Airbender and see that the white actors in asian roles were obviously not the best people for the job: their performances were flat, lifeless, and almost universally derided as the worst part of one of the year's worst movies. The question is, does terrible acting prove the complainers' point? The casting decisions were clearly wrong, but being wrong because of talent doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong because of race. If we say that a bad performance proves that they should have hired asian actors, we're also saying–by the same logic–that a good performance would have meant they were right to hire white actors, and somehow I don't think the people complaining about the casting would agree with that point. Put the best non-asian actor ever born in the role of Aang, and it wouldn't change the fact that Aang was not played by an asian; very few, if any, of the arguments against the casting were based on talent, as evidenced by the fact that the arguments started long before anyone had ever seen the performances. By the same token, if Idris Elba turns out to be the best Heimdal ever, the group opposing him is not going to smile sheepishly and say "well okay then, you got us, he was great and we take it all back." I think we have to say, for the purposes of our discussion here, that talent is beside the point: this is about race and nothing else.

3. Cultural Context

The article I linked to earlier, mocking the anti-Thor group, bases much of its mockery on the idea that since Thor never actually existed (a bold claim to make about a religious deity, by the way, but that's a topic for another day), complaining about his race is ridiculous from the start. Okay, we can grant you that point if you want, but it applies just as strongly to The Last Airbender. Here's the first paragraph of that essay, word for word, with only the races and character information replaced:

Did you know that the totally made-up-by-cartoonists characters of The Last Airbender were all asian? Literally none of them were white. We didn't know that, but thanks to the prodigious efforts of the [people complaining about it], the truth has been revealed: Aang, the last airbender, was asian and Zach Tyler, the American actor hired to portray Aang in The Last Airbender, is white! WHITE! More on this scandalous development after the jump!

Somehow it's funny when they're talking about the anti-Thor guys, but put the same arguments into this context and they kind of come off as jerks. Why is that? It reminds me of 30 Rock, when Jack was dating a Puerto Rican and they couldn't figure out how to refer to her race; she kept saying "just call me Puerto Rican," but the white characters couldn't do it because they felt racist just saying the words. We've become incredibly sensitive in American culture to any kind of discussion of race–so sensitive that Barack Obama had to hold a special conference during the last election just to say "it's okay, I'm black, you can talk about it." Race is such a huge issue, and so ripe for misinterpretation and offense, that we almost don't dare to touch it. The most insightful voice in the modern racism discussion was Dave Chappelle, who skewered every side of the issue on his TV show, and even he gave up after two seasons because he reached a point where he felt people were laughing at him, not with him.

Part of the problem with discussions of race is that white people in America still outnumber every other group by a huge margin, which colors (if you'll excuse the term) every other aspect of the conversation. A group complaining that an asian acting job went to a white actor is seen as a scrappy little minority standing up for their rights, but a group complaining that a white acting job went to a black actor is seen as an oppressive majority trying to reduce the rights of others. Is this disparity in the races the thing that makes us accept the Last Airbender complaints and laugh at the Thor complaints?

4. Role Models

Most mainstream heroes, either in cartoons or movies or comicbooks or whatever, are white, which means that asian kids (for example) can't look at most of them and see themselves reflected. One of Chris Rock's stand-up acts included a sequence where he joked that he wanted Obama to become the president just so he could stop telling his children "you can do anything you want." White parents, he said, never have to say that to their kids because it's obvious–white kids grow up knowing that they can do anything they want, but black kids always have to be reminded. Having a black president changes that because it gives black kids an obvious role model; it foundationally changes the way they perceive the world and their own role in it. Aang, in many ways, served a similar purpose for Asian-American kids–it allowed them to see, often for the very first time, a version of themselves that was not a sidekick or a villain but the hero. I believe very strongly that this is a important, and that casting Aang as a white kid took something vital away from every asian kid who loved the show; I honestly don't think most white people can understand just how important that is, because we have never not been the heroes of our own mythology. Following this logic, is it okay to change Heimdal's race to something non-white because white kids don't need him as a role model? Following that logic further, are we obligated to multiculturalize our movies to help create new role models? Donald Glover has been running an ongoing campaign to get himself an audition as Spider-man for the upcoming reboot movies, despite the fact that he is black and Spider-man has always been white. I love Glover; I think he's one of the funniest actors on TV, and I think he'd be fantastic as Spider-man, and I know many people agree. What does that say about our discussion here? Are we more accepting of non-white actors in traditionally white roles because white culture is simply so dominant that we don't feel threatened by the change? A white Aang is a big loss for the asian community, but a black Spider-man is a new twist on an old idea; it's the same thing happening in both cases, but we perceive it in two different ways because of the overall racial context. On the other hand, is this just a form of affirmative action? On the other other hand, does that make it good or bad? It may be that the people complaining about the Heimdal casting are the ones who DO feel threatened by change, but whether they're threatened by the loss of a white role model or the rise of a black one is not for me to say.

5. The End Game

What is our goal, racially, as a society? Do you long for the world of TV commercials, where demographically identical people of many different races all hang out together, seemingly blind to color? Do you want a world where all the races have mixed so thoroughly we can't tell them apart? Do you want a world where the races keep themselves to themselves, living in the same country but never really interacting–separate but equal? Do you want the world hypothesized in the anti-Thor boycott campaign, where even black people complain about Idris Elba as Heimdal because the races should never, ever mix under any circumstances? There are some people who want the races to be separated not just culturally but geographically, making racial identity synonymous with national identity (and, in many cases, religious identity), but I like to imagine that most of us aren't nearly that extreme. I honestly don't think most Americans really know what they want in the long term, and I worry that many of the things we do want are impossible. We want the races to intermingle, free and friendly without any barriers, but at the same time we want to preserve our cultural identities–I don't know if those are both possible at the same time. We want our children to play with all the other kids at recess, innocently blind to color, but very few of us, statistically, are prepared for that color-blindness to extend into dating and marriage. We talk boldly of equality, and yet the election of a black president has divided our country more thoroughly than anything in decades.

Why is it okay to wish Aang was asian, and not okay to wish Heimdal was white? I have no idea, but I wish I did. It's a question at the heart of what it means to be an American.

Mr. Monster is a Goodreads 2010 Nominee!

I love lists. Not just any lists, but rankings–I love the idea that you can sit down and apply an objective classification system to a completely subjective medium. Most people can't even name their top ten favorite movies, let alone put them in order, because questions like "Did I like Howard's End more or less than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World?" are impossible to answer–and yet the act of answering it, of forcing yourself to decide if thing A is better or worse than thing B, is fascinating. I recently read a Rolling Stone special issue about the hundred greatest Beatles songs, in order, and it was awesome and ridiculous and controversial and newsworthy and wrong and right, all at the same time.

The trouble with most "best of" lists is that they're really just "my favorites from among the options I'm familiar with," which just ends up cutting really good material out of the running because whoever put the list together missed something good. On the Travel Channel they have a show called Food Paradise, where they go all around the US and pick out, for example, the ten best burger places. Granted, all of these burger places are great, but it's almost guaranteed that everyone watching the show will think of one or more burger places even better that didn't make it on the list; the list is not "the ten best burger places ever," it's "the ten best burger places our producers were familiar with." And while I trust the producers of a food show to be familiar with some really good burger places, there's no way they can possibly be familiar with all of them.

Awards are the same way. Do the Hugo nominees, for example, really represent the best possible candidates for the best science fiction, or does it represent the best of the most visible science fiction as filtered by a particular group with particular tastes? Does the Stoker award really cover the full gamut of the year's horror, or does it just cover that portion of the horror market that a subset of readers happened to read? In both cases the winners are still excellent books, worthy of the awards and the praise that comes with them, because the voters tend to be widely-read experts in their fields, but other worthy contenders are inevitably left out.

This is where Goodreads comes in. Every review site puts together a "best of" list, but Goodreads has a resource those sites don't: a massive database of user ratings and site traffic that can calculate with much greater granularity the nebulous concepts of "popularity" and "approval." This doesn't make their lists "correct," because that's a meaningless term in a subjective medium like art, but it means that their lists are being compiled by hundreds of thousands of people instead of just one convention group, one editorial staff, or one lone reviewer. Yes, those hundreds of thousands of people are still self-selecting, and the results will still lean toward visibility over quality, but the huge sample size helps temper that a bit. If something gets nominated for a Goodreads award, it means that a lot of people read it, liked it, and said so without being asked, and that's why it's a huge honor for me to be nominated for the Goodreads 2010 Mystery and Thriller category.

Each category has 15 nominees, and I am completely humbled to be in the company of these 14 other authors: incredible thriller writers like Stieg Larson, James Patterson, Harlan Coben, and more. Seeing Mr. Monster on that page, nestled in among all that awesome, is a dream come true. Don't even feel obligated to vote for me, just vote; you have to have a Goodreads membership, but honestly you should have one anyway, because the site is awesome and right up your alley.

While you're there, you might consider voting for some other awesome books: Mira Grant's Feed is in the science fiction category, Mike Mignola's Hellboy: The Wild Hunt is in the graphic novel category, and Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings is in both the fantasy category and the Goodreads Author category. These are the ones I really loved, but vote your own choices, not mine; these and the all of the other authors would love your vote, and the more votes we get, the more awesome the awards become–a truly populist recognition, by and for the people (but without the "flavor of the month" effect that plagues the user rankings on sites like IMDB–book readers, it seems, are more staid in their ratings and more reasonable in their love for the hot new thing).

As a final note I have to say that of course A Day in the Life is the best Beatles song, and no right-thinking individual would ever say otherwise. Rolling Stone's list was overall pretty good, perhaps surprisingly so, but I took issue with a couple of the top ten. And I really pity whoever had to make a meaningful ranking decision between, say, number 84 and number 85.

Outlining Project Z

If you follow me on Twitter, you've seen that I've been talking about my outline all week–and you've seen that it is several days behind schedule. I can't tell you anything specific about the outline, but I can tell you about the process of creating it, and if we're lucky it will be helpful to read about.

Project Z, it should be mentioned, is not the same Project Z that I've mentioned in previous posts; Nightbringer will be written eventually, but today is not that day.

Project Z is the first of a trilogy, and has a very cool story that sets up a number of mysteries for the rest of the series. The problem is, while I had some cool ideas, I wasn't completely certain as to what those mysteries should be. Think about Battlestar: Galactica, the new one–they established a cool premise, presented some mysteries, and started every episode with the phrase "They have a plan." Everything the bad guys did was cool, and weird, and hard to figure out, but the audience went along with it and tried to piece it all together, confident that there really was a plan and it really would all make sense…and then it didn't. They hit a point in season three where it was horribly, blindingly obvious that they simply didn't know what was going on or where the story was going. They did an excellent job, in my opinion, of bringing it all together in season four, patching up the holes and making it all make sense (well, most of it), but the glitches added up. With Project Z I want to tell a similarly twisty story (hitting, coincidentally, on some of the same themes), but I wanted to do it right, which meant I had to figure out beforehand what the plan really was. Before I could start the prose–before I could even start the outline, I had to figure out exactly what was going on, what the bad guys wanted, and how they intended to go about it. Like I say in my story structure presentation, I had to figure out the ending before I could begin the beginning.

So I did. I took a week, sketched out the villains, gave them all plans and methods, and made it all work. Even better, the plans are multi-layered enough that they can be confusing and filled with misdirection and still, in the end, make sense. Huzzah! But an ending does not an outline make, and there was still a lot of work to do.

I started working on the outline of the series, but decided it would be more fun to wing it a little–I knew what the bad guys were planning, so I could fill in those details as I went along. It would be more natural, and therefore more effective, to let the heroes guide the story as they saw fit. I dialed my scope down a bit and decided to just work on the first book outline.

My problem with the first book outline, as I had originally conceived it, was that it focused too heavily on revealing the mysteries. Ending with a discovery is a cool second act kind of thing–think Empire Strikes Back, which ends with the discovery that Vader is Luke's father. That works really well, and makes you hungry for the third movie, but it would not have worked as the end of the first movie. The first act has to end with a choice and an action, not just a revelation, or it won't feel satisfying. This gave me two choices: put the revelation later, like a second act whammy, or put it earlier and find something even bigger for book two. This choice is easy to make, and we've talked about it before on Writing Excuses: don't hold back on the first book. Make it as awesome as possible, and then when that's done find a way to make book two even more awesome. With that in mind I pushed my ending revelation forward, found a strong, active resolution for the main character, and plotted everything backward from there. The story works, the story's cool, and it sets up a bunch of bigger, cooler stuff for books two and three.

Project Z is going to be awesome.

Project Z

As I triumphantly tweeted on Wednesday, I have finished the final (major) revision of my schizophrenia novel, which most of you know as Strawberry Fields and some of you know as Pain of Glass. Neither of those titles were intended to stick, and I'm happy to announce that with the revision I've settled on the final name of The Hollow City; my agent and editor love the title, so it is unlikely to change.

Tor is buying The Hollow City as we speak, but the contract is not yet final so I don't have any details to share with you. I can tell you that the book will most likely be published in early 2012, that it is a standalone SF/horror thriller, and that fans of my John Cleaver books will love it. It's not set in the same world (or least it isn't overtly set in the same world–there's nothing preventing the two from coexisting), but it hits the same psychological, urban horror vibe as my first series, and I think you'll dig it. My German publisher is looking at it as well, and we're hoping the new revision attracts some attention in my other major markets such as the UK.

This book was very hard to write, for a variety of reasons. The first is that it's not something I'd ever done before–I wanted to really play around with reality, yet still avoiding the cliches of the schizophrenia subgenre as much as possible. I started by reading a ton of psychology books; not fiction, but textbooks and self-help books and everything I could find that dealt with the diagnosis, treatment, and daily life of schizophrenia. Mental illness tends to get either demonized or glorified in our culture, and I wanted to paint it as realistically as possible–which sounds weird in a book about scary monsters, I know, but I made the effort anyway. My next step was to go back and re-read some of my favorite Philip K. Dick stories, such as A Scanner Darkly, to put myself in the right mindset. The first draft of the book was way too weird; my writing group tended to like the individual chapters, but couldn't follow the plot or piece together the mystery. I did a major rewrite, overhauling vast portions of the plot, putting many chapters in a different order, and adding in an all-new character, which helped a ton, but the book wasn't quite there yet. I still needed another revision, but the pieces were coming into place.

Major revisions, I should point out, are fun. It's cool to take a book, see the big, obvious problems, and rewrite it to fix them. It's taking a bad book and turning it into a good book, which is easy and kind of exciting. Minor revisions, on the other hand, are very hard: that's when you take a good book and turn it into a better book. You can't just run rampant through the story, gobbling up the low-hanging fruit; you have to pay close attention to details, make tiny adjustments, and polish it all to a high gloss. It's like painting a wall: slapping on a big, solid color with a roller is actually the easiest part, the hard part is going around the edges to touch up the corners and fill in the cracks. My final revision of The Hollow City took as long or longer than writing the book in the first place, and there were times I wanted to just delete the stupid file and never speak of it again. My wife talked me out of it, but boy was I tempted. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, because I'm very pleased with the final product, and I think it more than solved all of the earlier problems. I should offer special thanks here to my German editor, Carsten, with whom I had many conversations about what was wrong and how exactly how to fix it. He was a big help.

And now we begin the whirlwind that shall be known, for now, as Project Z. This is the big deal I've mentioned a few times and cannot yet actually talk about, but don't worry–the publisher is getting their announcement ready, and soon it will all be known. I don't know what they're planning as an announcement, so I don't want to overhype it–it's not like they're doing a superbowl commercial or anything, it will pretty much just be an announcement, but there you go. Project Z is a series I've thought about a lot, dealing with some themes that I love coming back to, and it's going to be a ton of fun to write it. The trouble is, I told myself I wouldn't start it until I finished The Hollow City, and I also told the publisher that I could send them a draft in February, so I'm going to be writing my head off for the next two or three months. I've never written a book on spec before (publishing-speak for "sell the book before you've actually written it"), so it's going to be interesting; I sold the John Cleaver sequels after I'd only written the first book, but this is different. And me being me, I'm going to catalog as much of the writing process as I possibly can right here on my blog. This will not be nearly as detailed as the process blogs I wrote for The Mountain of the Lord, because I don't want to give some of the awesome secrets away, but it will be as detailed as I can make it. I've already got a ton of the world-building and outlining finished–that's how I sold the publisher on it, after all–but my outline needs to be greatly expanded before I can actually start writing prose. Tune in on Monday for a look at my outlining process for the mysterious Project Z.

You can walk right out again as soon as you are in

The song "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is one of the most sociologically fascinating songs I've ever heard. I tell you this because one of my kids said something the other day about escaping the horrible drudgery of daily life (I don't know how horrible their lives can be in second grade, but that doesn't mean they can't complain about it), and I started singing the line from "Big Rock Candy Mountain" where they say: "I'm going to stay where they sleep all day / Where they hung the jerk that invented work." i've always found that song to be intensely fascinating, and this brought it back to the forefront of my mind, so now you, dear reader, get to listen to me think out loud about it. That's what you get for reading my blog, I guess.

For those who don't know, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is an American folk song written by hobos, i.e., homeless people who traveled by train during the Great Depression. It was a rough time when food and work were extremely difficult to come by, and sometimes riding the rails and picking up migrant work on a passing farm was the best you could hope for. They kept their spirits up with songs and stories and such, and this song is both: a fanciful description of an idyllic paradise. What makes it interesting is that it's not just any paradise, it's an itinerant hobo's paradise–they describe the world the way they would want it, based on the context of their lives.

Note that the song is often recorded in a kid-friendly version, with most of the references to alcohol removed. There's no real "correct" version of a folk song, but I prefer the older, hobo-tastic version.

The description begins simply: "In the big rock candy mountain, the land is fair and bright, and the handouts grow on bushes, and you sleep out every night. The boxcars all are empty, and the sun shines every day, on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees, and the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings, in the big rock candy mountain." Their ideal world is more or less like ours, full of sunshine and free food and cheerful birdies. Not everyone would get specific enough to mention cigarette trees, but whatever floats your boat. What's really interesting, though, are the living arrangements: they're describing their perfect world, where they can have anything they want, and instead of giving themselves homes they give themselves nice weather so they can sleep out in empty boxcars. Instead of imagining a different life, they just imagine the best possible version of the one they already know.

Verse three: "In the big rock candy mountain, the cops have wooden legs, and the bulldogs all have rubber teeth, and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs." More dreams of free food, this time combined with the incapacitation of authority figures. They can't imagine a world without cops, and not even a world where the cops don't chase them, but hey–wouldn't it be great if the cops had wooden legs so we could always get away? It's a fascinating kind of humility: they're not asking for the world, just a break here and there to make the world livable. We get more of the same in verse four: "The brakemen have to tip their hats, and the railroad bulls are blind. There's a lake of stew, and of whiskey too, you can paddle all around them in a big canoe, in the big rock candy mountain."

The fifth verse is the one that always gets me, because even as they start to really think big–there's no work at all in paradise, not even the concept of it–they still can't imagine an escape from certain problems in their lives: "In the big rock candy mountain the jails are made of tin, and you can walk right out again as soon as you are in. There ain't no short-handled shovels, no axes, saws, or picks. Oh I long to stay where they sleep all day, where they hung the jerk who invented work, in the big rock candy mountain." It's easy for them to imagine an end to all work because they never have jobs anyway–in some ways they're already living in a world without work, they're just imagining that it's awesome instead of depressing. But they can never escape from authority. People force them to do stuff every day of their lives. In concepting the most wonderful place they can imagine, they still think they're going to get thrown in jail all the time–they don't get rid of the jails because obviously that's impossible, they just make them really easy to escape from.

This wonderful mix of dreams and desires says so much about the people who created it: not just the free food but the specific foods they choose; not just the absence of certain problems, but the ongoing presence of so many others. It is a life completely free of responsibility, answering to no one, where they can live the cool parts of the hobo life without being brought down by any of the lame parts.

I love discovering characters like this, in songs and in fiction and everywhere else, because I know that they're different from me: they have different hopes, different goals, and different values, and that makes them intriguing. I want to spend time with those people and see how they view the world.

Different /= Lesser

I travel a lot, and the more I travel the more I become convinced that making fun of people is stupid. I still do it, because sometimes you just can't help yourself, but I try to only do it when I have the right context. It's kind of like my post about accents: I talk differently from you because we come from different regions and backgrounds, yet we both assume that the differences come because the other person is dumb or uneducated. It's my theory that most things in life are like this: When people do things you think are stupid, it's probably something totally normal where they come from, and they think you're the stupid one.

Let's take driving as an example, because over the past two months I've had the chance to drive through a ton of different states of the US. Many people think Utah is full of horrible drivers, but this has never been my experience: I can always get where I want to go, in the time I expect it to take, and I rarely ever feel frustrated or endangered by the bad drivers so many people claim to see. Are am I wrong? Are all those other people wrong? I think the truer, more meaningful interpretation is that people in Utah drive the way I expect them to, so I think they drive well; I know how to drive in Utah because I've done it all my life. People who come in from out of state (and with two large universities in a relatively small valley, my area has a LOT of people from out of state) don't have that background, and expect people to drive in a different way, so they think Utah drivers are "bad" when what they really mean is "different from me."

Consider, for example, California. I drive through there quite a bit when I'm tour, and when I'm visiting friends and family, and every time I do I get frustrated with people who drive in the left lane so I can't get around them. Don't these people know how to use the passing lane? They're such horrible drivers! But the more I drive there, the more I realize that they do know how to use the passing lane, they just use it differently than I do. They're using it correctly based on their own subculture.

The midwest is another example. As I drove to Columbus a few weeks I noticed something weird when I got to Indiana, and then the trend continued in Ohio: people were tailgating me, and I mean hardcore. They would come up really close behind me, and in Utah that means "I want to go around you," so I'd pull over to let them by and then…they'd pull over as well, staying really close behind me. This drove me up the wall, and I started to shout about how they were all such horrible drivers and nobody in the Ohio knew how to drive, but then I realized that this was silly–everyone was getting where they needed to go, and no one was crashing into anyone else, so they obviously knew what they were doing, they were just doing it differently than I expected. They have, so to speak, a smaller bubble of personal driving space than I'm accustomed to in Utah. I asked a few friends from Ohio about it, and they said "oh yeah, that's really common here–if you get in close behind someone you can either draft them and improve your mileage, or you can speed and let the cops pull them over instead." Once I understood the new rules and customs of Ohio driving, my driving experience improved greatly, and I realized that Ohio drivers are actually very careful and polite–you just have to know what's going on.

Of course, when I asked a friend from LA about California driving customs, he laughed and said "no, we're all horrible drivers," so maybe my theory falls apart.

Now, keep in mind that this theory still has ample room for stupidity: you can't explain every dumb thing somebody does just by background, because sometimes people do dumb things even within their own context. Utahns have no idea how to use a roundabout, because up until a few years ago we really didn't have any, and that's fine; we'll figure it out eventually. On the other hand, Utahns also don't have any idea how to use a four-way stop, and there's really no excuse for that because we've had four-way stops forever. There's no magical local customs you can learn for getting through a Utah four-way stop, it's just a mess no matter where you're from.

So I suppose, in the end, my point is that different people are different, and that doesn't make them bad. Beyond that, I suppose my auxiliary point is the completely non-revolutionary idea that traveling makes you more accepting of other people's differences, which is a good reason for everyone to travel as much as possible. See how other people live, and realize that despite being different from you they're completely happy with the way things are, and you'll start to see the world in a new way. It's kind of frightening, actually, but ultimately makes the world a much more awesome place.

Red Cliff

I've been talking up this movie on Twitter, and enough people requested a review that I figured I'd better write one. Let's start with the disclaimer that I love Chinese historicals–they don't even have to be kung fu movies, though that's obviously a huge part of the genre. Other Chinese movies like Raise the Red Lantern and The Last Emperor are stunning even without the martial arts, and they've got a soft spot in my heart; I love the culture, the costumes, the colors, the whole bit. So, now you know.

Red Cliff is a war movie–not a kung fu movie, but a war movie–set in the early Three Kingdoms period that will be instantly recognizable to anybody who's ever played the Dynasty Warriors computer games. The movie is definitely based on the story, though, and not the games, and I make the distinction between war movie and kung fu movie to illustrate the difference: there is plenty of fighting in Red Cliff, but it's not the "Sauron swings his mace and twenty guys go flying" kind of fights you see in the game, nor is it the acrobatic "show" fighting you see in movies by Jackie Chan or Yuen Wo Ping. The focus is not on the individuals but on the war as a whole, and we see just as many scenes of preparation and strategy as we do of fighting. One of the lead characters, Kongming, is in fact not a fighter at all but a strategist, and his efforts to recruit allies, gather resources, and plan the war behind the scenes are just as vital and compelling as any of the actual battles. An early mention of The Art of War by Sun Tzu lets you know that this movie recognizes the full nature of war: the killing is done by soldiers, but the war as a whole is fought by nobles, advisors, engineers, servants, and more. One of the most compelling scenes shows a woman performing a tea ceremony, and in a movie full of warlords and soldiers and killers she manages to have more individual effect, and a stronger "in your face" moment, than any other character. That said, don't assume that the movie has no action; this is war, and there's plenty of opportunity for warriors to ply their trade. The naval assault near is the end was especially thrilling.

The movie begins with the empire falling apart; the bloodthirsty prime minister Cao Cao runs rampant through the land, enforcing not the weak emperor's will but his own. Beleaguered rebel leader Liu Bei is losing ground every day–he has to split his forces between fending off Cao Cao and protecting huge groups of refugees, and it's simply too much for his dwindling army to handle alone. His advisor Kongming suggests an alliance with southern leader Sun Quan and his brilliant viceroy Zhou Yu, who have thus far stayed out of the war completely. This, of course, is just the opportunity Cao Cao has been looking for: if Sun Quan joins the rebels he will have a legal excuse to destroy him, leaving Cao Cao the only military power left in the empire, perfectly poised to usurp the throne itself. Thus the war is begun, centered on Zhou Yu's southern fortress of Red Cliff on the banks of the Yangtze river.

The movie was originally release in two parts, each a massive epic well over two hours. They were cut and condensed into a single version of about three hours, which is the version I watched; the full version looks like it fills in some motivational holes, but I was happy with the version I watched (especially since I could stream it over Netflix; the two-part version is available on disk only, which would have taken me well over a week to watch when you add in the shipping time). The movies are directed by John Woo, back in top form after some goof-ups like Mission Impossible 2, and he shows himself more than capable of handling a massive historical epic. I'd love to see some more from him, especially if he wants to continue the Three Kingdoms storyline. The actors were also excellent, especially Takeshi Kaneshiro (one of the two leads from House of Flying Daggers) and Tony Leung (best known to Americans as Broken Sword from Jet Li's movie Hero).

If you love Chinese cinema like I do, well, you've probably already seen this. If you like it a little, or if you like historical epics like Braveheart or Gladiator, Red Cliff will more than satisfy.