Max Gladstone's Blog, page 20

Recent Work!

Since I last wrote in this space, I’ve snorkeled with manta rays, climbed through lava tubes, kayaked next to a humpback whale and her calf, surfed, danced with a volcano goddess, and drank an awful lot of coffee.  Then I came back from Hawai’i, and spent the next week and a half editing the next book for Tor.  Critical time—somewhere in the two weeks of vacating I think a lot of the disparate threads of the manuscript came back together, and I’ve been much happier about the last two drafts.

I’ll be writing more in this space in coming days, but for the moment I want to catch y’all up on my writing as it’s spread throughout the internet.

Over on Aidan Moher’s blog A Dribble of Ink, I continue my blog post series on non-Western fantasy source material with a gigantic essay on Romance of the Three Kingdoms that is, among many other things, a naked plea for everyone on the internet to just watch Red Cliff already.  If you missed it, I posted a similar essay on Journey to the West last month!  Already thinking about next month’s entry, which kind of terrifies me in scope.
On Sunday, inspired by my recent round of revisions, I posted to Operation Awesome about Allen Ginsberg’s Fourteen Steps for Revising Poetry, which work for almost everything really.
For that matter, a couple weeks back I posted another little entry on wordcount and tracking accurate metrics in writing that might be useful to anyone who’s ever agonized over wordcount.  I don’t so much offer answers as suggest that questions which are easy to ask and answer are not always the most helpful.

I hope you’ve all been well, and I look forward to posting here a little more often in coming weeks!

On Michael Poe

I’d like to talk about Michael Poe for a second.

Poe, as I’ve known him, is the writer and artist behind the comics Errant Story and Exploitation Now! and Does Not Play Well With Others.  He was admitted to the hospital with acute renal failure a few days ago; he’s home now, and on track to recover, which is awesome.

I know this through the internet.  I’ve never met Poe in person, and I haven’t traded emails or chatted with him in about a decade.  I’ve never spoken with his wife.  But Poe’s been a model of mine for almost half as long as I’ve been alive, and when I learned about this I felt like I needed to say something.

It all goes back to the Fantasy Powers League, that strange corner of the internet where I started to mature as a writer.  The FPL’s a website where players create superpowered characters and match them against one another in gladiatorial combat.  A core group of creators started to rope all these characters, from undead barons to semi-rational penguins to anime schoolgirl defenders of the universe to intergalactic businessmen, into a single weird almost-continuity, a stir fry of genres and tropes.  Fertile ground for a young and growing writer.

And Poe was there.  He was one of a few artists in a room full of writers.  He had the power to make ideas visible.  The best creators at the FPL had Poe draw pictures of their characters.  After I’d been writing there for a year, he drew a character pic for me, and looking at that picture for the first time made me as proud and psyched as the day that character won the FPL’s main event.

Poe wasn’t just an artist, either—he was making it.  Around the time I joined the FPL, he started up the studio that became Caffeine Angel Productions.  Soon after, he launched his first webcomic. I watched with joy and respect as Poe took that same creative energy we all poured into fanfiction, and turned it into a career.  Over ten years, his art matured, and he moved from gag-a-day antics to deeper storylines and back again.  As I wrote book after book, knocked on doors and sent out query letters, I kept tabs on him, and reminded myself that yeah, this is possible.

So now he has kidney trouble, after two years of intense trial for his family.  Poe and his wife are explicitly not asking for donations, though they do have books and original art for sale. Poe’s worked faithfully for a decade.  He’s a good person, with a pleasantly twisted mind.  I don’t know if one blog post will be much help getting the word out, but this is the internet, and all things are possible.  Drop by his site.  See his work.  Buy books and tee shirts and prints.  Help out.  And if you don’t know his work already, read and enjoy.

Three Parts Dead Charity Auction for Con or Bust

Boston / Somerville has survived Snowmageddon 2013—six foot drifts outside my house, but a few hours of shoveling and a mug of Burdick’s hot chocolate makes everything better.  I spent as much of the weekend as possible chilling out, though we did step out yesterday evening for a performance of the ART’s excellent Glass Menagerie, on which more later.

Big news now, though—I want to encourage y’all to participate in February’s awesome Con or Bust auction.  Con or Bust is a non-for-profit fund that helps sponsor fans of color who wish to attend conventions but can’t for monetary reasons.  They’ve been doing great work since 2009.  Tor has donated a copy of Three Parts Dead to the auction, and I’d obviously feel tickled if it went for a good chunk of money, but the Con or Bust website (linked above) has a bunch of excellent SFF-themed auction prizes, ranging from books to crits to Ekaterina Sedia’s offer of a wardrobe consultation.

Go forth!  Support SFF community diversity!  Rock on!

Roberto Bolaño / Mass Effect

Happy Friday everyone!  We’re settling in for a crazy blizzard up here in the Northeast.  Fortunately, as a result of the Birthday of the Trees seder a few weeks back we still have about three gallons of wine in the fridge, so we’re all set for a fun weekend in.  I finished the first draft of the third book in the Craft Sequence (of which Three Parts Dead was the first) last week.  This is a much more first-drafty first draft than mine usually are, so I’m looking forward to hearing what the beta reader round thinks of it.  I have some thoughts of my own, but after stressing out over this book for the last four months, my thoughts are skewed.

So, for this week I’ve turned my attention to other areas of life.  I’m working on outlines for a Seekret Project which should be a lot of fun, which has involved writing a more detailed background and world bible for the Craft Sequence setting.  Muahaha.  Also chipping away at this weird short story I’ve been working on for months now, which makes the Paris Review’s recent post of Roberto Bolaño’s 12-step guide to the art of writing short stories all the more interesting.  Check it out!  I’m a Bolaño newb; I’ve only ever read The Savage Detectives, but I liked it, even though I didn’t quite get the ending.  Even if you’re not a Bolañophile, though, his thoughts on short story writing are pretty awesome.  I especially like the bit about writing nine to fifteen stories at once.  Ack!  Alternatively: “oh, so that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years.”  Points 9 and 10 are particularly worthy of note:

9. The honest truth is that with Edgar Allen Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read.10. Give thought to point

10.  Think and reflect on it.  You still have time.  Think about Number 9.  To the extent possible, do so on bended knees.

What a boss.

Speaking newb-ness, I took the excellent advice of basically everyone on my facebook feed and spent yesterday playing Mass Effect.  I’ve never played ME before, and damn, I’d forgot how awesome Bioware could be, and how fun it is to play something in which you have no professional interest!  There’s a line in Sandman where Gaiman’s Shakespeare says “Everything that happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays.”  You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who wouldn’t agree with that statement; I’m tempted to add “or as an editor of plays.”  (Or of, you know, fantasy novels.  I digress.)  It takes a weird kind of concentration to just enjoy books at this point, unless they’re so close to perfect as makes no difference.  But, folks, I am lost in Mass Effect.  I’m even enjoying the Warthog!  That’s how lost I am.

I remember people being frustrated by Warthog segments when the game first came out, but I’m finding them fun in a weird sort of way.  I take a ‘broadside’ approach to the thing: when I see enemies on the horizon, I stop moving, turn myself sideways, and move forward or backward (that is, from side to side with respect to the camera angle) to dodge incoming super slow rockets, while returning fire with the main gun.  This, by the way, Dear Reader, is why we don’t make super slow rockets.

I mean, sure there are things I could nitpick if I wanted to pick nits.  But the important point is that I don’t want to.  I’d much rather participate.

Superman and ‘Maybe…’

Ever since the new Superman trailer dropped a while back, I’ve seen a lot of people griping about Pa Kent’s “Maybe…” line.  The context, as much as is apparent from the trailer: kid Clark has just saved some kids in his schoolbus from drowning by lifting the bus out of the water by himself.  This seems to have triggered a low-key Smallville witch hunt (voiceover by shocked mother: “I saw what Clark did,” with that sort of nasal overtone that implies “and he will suffer for it”), which leads to the following conversation.

Pa: You have to keep this side of yourself a secret.

Clark: What was I supposed to do?  Let them die?

Pa: Maybe…

I get the anxiety about whether we really need a darker Superman, even though I would read the hell out of a Superman comic that had the Man of Steel hitchhiking across Steinbeck’s America, and I sort of hope this film (which seems to have some industrial fishing sequences) will linger with Clark on Cannery Row.  But man, Kevin Costner as Pa Kent is selling me on that line.  He sounds like a man who understands that he lives in, well, Smallville.  That the people he’s grown up with are good, and kind, and might be scared by something they don’t understand.  That small town life may be wonderful, and / but it’s also built on secrets known and never acknowledged.  On silence and studied avoidance of confrontation.  On learning rules and lines and staying within them.

Based on delivery, I don’t think that’s the end of the conversation between Pa and Clark, either.  Beats me whether the movie will do anything interesting with that line, but, you know, someone’s going to raise a hand and say “I actually like that line and what it implies,” and it might as well be me.

 

Joan Didion on Superheroes

I don’t think I’ve ever read two paragraphs with more to say about superheroes, secret identities, and American comics than these, from Joan Didion’s brief essay about Howard Hughes, 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38.  Paste “Tony Stark” or “Bruce Wayne” or whatever for Hughes in the following:

That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake … but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.  It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Of course, we do not want to admit that.  The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another.  A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called “the fatal separation” between “the ideas of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.”  ”I mean only,” he wrote, “that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning, and international cooperation.  …  Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them.  Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a great literary way.”  Officially we admire men who exemplify those ideas.  We admire the Adlai Stevenson character, the rational man, the enlightened man, the man not dependent upon the potentially psychopathic mode of action.  Among rich men, we officially admire Paul Mellon, a socially responsible inheritor in the European mold.  There has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes.  It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.  In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly asocial.  He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

It seems to me there’s a lot to unpack here.  Secret identities tend to fit the “what we officially want” model—especially old-school ones like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne.  Tony Stark is a funny corner case, since his ‘secret identity’ was not-so-secretly modeled on Hughes, and the character has become popular at a time when maybe we’re more likely to claim we want amoral power, and secretly want justice.  (I’m reminded of the weird way many kind, good folks I know and love use creepy “when I rule the world, you’ll die first” type rhetoric.)  Or maybe so many enterprises are built to cater to ‘our’ secret desires that these desires are barely secret any more, and even (as in the She-Hulk’s superhuman law arc, which I’ve been reading recently on Alyssa Rosenberg‘s recommendation) become the external identity…   Not to mention the way superheroic romance seems to revolve back to that line between “the people we marry” and “the people we love” (which was at least part of Spider Man’s arc in the Sam Raimi movies).

While on some level this is just another way of saying that superheroes address repressed desire, Didion’s essay makes the point that the particular form this desire takes is uniquely US-American… which might explain why secret-identity superhero comics have remained a cornerstone of the US-American comics market, even in an age of competition from robust Japanese and European comics industries.  Anyway.  I’ll ponder this more; seems deserving of a seriously Long Read.  Any thoughts?

Hugo Awards Season is Here, and You Can Vote!

When I was a kid, just discovering science fiction and fantasy, my uncle recommended I start with books that won the Hugo and Nebula awards, and move on from there.  I discovered some of my favorite books this way, but I always figured that the awards were voted upon by Secret Masters seated on some distant mountain.  Only last year did I learn that anyone can nominate works for the Hugos, and vote on them—well, anyone willing to spend a little money for the privilege.

Here’s how it works: each year, one science fiction convention out of all conventions in the world holds the title of “World Con.”  This year’s World Con is Lone Star Con, held in San Antonio.  Anyone who, as of January 31 2012, has a membership (basically, a ticket) to this year’s World Con, or last year’s, or next year’s, can nominate and vote.  World Cons even have a ticket you can buy if you don’t want to go to the con, and only want to nominate and vote on the Hugo Awards—it’s $60, and gives you voting / nominating rights both this year and next year.

For $60, you get to stand up and say what you think the most important works in science fiction and fantasy were last year.  Pretty wild.  And the voting pool’s actually quite small.  It’s not tiny or anything, but each vote makes a difference, and if you feel certain works or authors aren’t getting enough attention, your voice matters.

On top of that, for your $60, you generally get electronic copies of the works that end up on the final ballot.  All these authors deserve your, you know, real financial support—as far as I know being in the Hugo voting packet doesn’t garner anyone royalties or ad impressions—but voting packets are great ways of discovering new authors you can support in the future.  One of my favorite genre books of 2011 I discovered in the Nebula voter’s packet.  Pretty neat!

Here’s what you do:

1. Register for World Con before Jan 31 2012, by filling out this form.  Click “Submit.”  This will take you to a page where you can select the kind of membership you want to buy.  If you don’t plan to go to World Con this year in person, you want the “Supporting Membership ($60),” which is the last option on the next page.   Fill out the form, and click “Buy Now,” which will take you to a PayPal payment processing page.

2. Receive a Hugo Voter PIN.  World Con will send this number to you.

3. When you have received your PIN, use this electronic form to nominate works for the Hugo, and there you go!  You’ll receive more instructions from the award administrators from that point on.

But Max, what should I vote for?

If you got this far, you probably have some strong ideas of your own, and I bet you can decide for yourself.  The Hugos have categories for everything.  This website I keep linking you to has a list; some sections about which you may have opinions, depending on what you do for fun, are “Best Novel,” “Best Short Story,” “Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)” (which is to say, movie), “Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)” (probably a single episode of a television show—I don’t know how two-parters work in Hugo voting), Best Professional Artist, Best Fan Writer (very happy this category exists!), Best Fan Artist (ditto!), and so on.

This year was pretty dense with writing, and I didn’t catch up on a lot of the good new releases.  Rise of Ransom City, by Felix Gilman, came out in 2012, as did Railsea, by China Mieville, and I liked them both a great deal.  A kind of left-field idea: Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles is amazing, and while it’s shelved in the Literature section of the bookstore, it’s that rare gem, a retelling of the Illiad that actually includes, you know, gods, and goddesses, and all that fantastical stuff that’s actually in the text.  Plus, it’s beautifully written, and it’d tickle me if there was an edition of the book that had both the Orange Prize and the Hugo listed on the cover.  Take that, Artificial Genre Boundaries!

Of course, there’s plenty of television and film to nominate.  This was a good year for SF and superhero blockbusters—but please consider my impassioned plea to consider Rian Johnson’s Looper.  At least see it, if you haven’t already.  It’s a good film.

What are you eligible for, Max?

My first book, Three Parts Dead, is eligible for Best Novel, and is awesome.  I’d be pleased if you would consider nominating it.  Don’t take my word for it—ask Carrie Vaughn, or the Book Smugglers.  Also, I’m eligible for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer award this year  The Campbell isn’t a Hugo Award, but Hugo voters vote on the Campbell award at the same time as the Hugo award.  A little complicated, I know.

As for related works, my amazing cover artist, Chris McGrath, is eligible for Best Professional Artist, and my editor David Hartwell is almost certainly eligible for Best Editor.

And that’s a long post, so I’ll cut it short here. Any questions? What did you think was the best genre novel of 2012?

Let Us Turn Our Thoughts Today…

It’s a small ritual, as rituals go, but every year today I listen to this song.

The Year is Dead! Long Live the Year!

One of my favorite internet-geeky traditions over the last few years has been following the Death vs. Old Year chase on Tatsuya Ishida’s Sinfest.  Considering this year’s installment just ended, I figure I’m not too late to publish my “Hello 2013″ post.

First, finishing up old business: over at The Book Smugglers, Three Parts Dead made Ana’s Most Excellent Books of 2012 Top 10 list, coming in at #2!  Also, two Tor.com reviewers named Three Parts Dead one of their favorites of 2012!  Each reviewer was asked to pick only three books, which makes this extra neat.

2012 was a wild year for me, and for my family.  Huge heaping gobs of change and transformation, one of those years that makes you think Heraclitus was right.  My first book came out.  I quit my day job.  I’m an uncle, now.  My wife’s graduated from law school, and started working.  I’ve made new friends, climbed on a glacier, given a speech at Comic Con, read the Hunchback of Notre Dame in Paris, visited Napoleon’s tomb, traded jokes with guards in the Department of Justice, and improved from being a complete idiot on the fencing strip to being an almost complete idiot.  I drafted a successful Control deck for the first time.  I’ve met amazing authors, and I’ve met excellent folks over dumplings who I only later found out were amazing authors.

All in all, a great 2012.  2013 is shaping up to be less hectic, but still awesome.  For starters: in the next week or two I’m going to finish the first draft of this novel.  And then I’m going to write another one.  Because that’s how I roll.

Merry (belated) Christmas!

I’m still here in a metaphysical sense—visiting with family, and taking long walks in the woods, but far away from my desk and my usual routine.

I hope all of you are enjoying your respective holidays, and the coming new year.  In the interim, if you’re looking for something of mine to read, how about this little essay I wrote for the Book Smugglers, on the miraculous nature of finding the right book at the right moment?