David B. Coe's Blog, page 16

Calling All Podcast Nerds

So, I have a short story that I've written under the D.B. Jackson pseudonym, and I intend to make it available soon on the D.B. Jackson website as a .pdf (as I have other stories, as well as sample chapters from the books).  But I am also interested in possibly creating a podcast of me doing a reading of the story. I have a microphone that I use for music, and I know that I can record myself in Garage Band.  But I don't know what to do after that.  Do I have to put it up on iTunes as a podcast?  Can I simply make the file available as a download on the website, just as I would the .pdf?  Any feedback/advice would be most appreciated.

Four Home Runs: A Post For Baseball Nerds

Last night, Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamiliton hit four home runs in a single game, tying a Major League record and becoming only the 16th player in the history of the game to accomplish the feat.  This actually marked the second accomplishment of such magnitude of this young baseball season.  Only two and half weeks ago, on April 21, Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched the twenty-first perfect game in Major League Baseball history.

Baseball has three in-game individual achievements that rank as the rarest feats in the game -- in all of sports, really -- one for hitting, one for pitching, and one for fielding:  The four-homer game, the perfect game, and the unassisted triple play (where a single fielder manages to record all three outs for an inning in a single play).  This last, like the four homer game, has happened sixteen times in MLB history.  Think about that for a moment:  There have been a couple of hundred thousand games played in the history of baseball -- regular season and postseason -- with eighteen batters in the combined line-ups, and eighteen half-innings needing to be completed.  And from that we get a TOTAL of sixteen four-homer games and sixteen unassisted triple plays.  By that reckoning, pitching a perfect game is a relatively common occurrence.  Not only have there been more of them (twenty-one) but there are fewer opportunities per game.  As I say, with the homers and fielding play, there are eighteen opportunities in each regulation game.  Only two guys -- the two starting pitchers -- have an opportunity to pitch a perfect game.  And still, perfect games are incredibly rare.

You might think that feats so rare would only be achieved by superstars.  But no:  The history of the game is littered with unheralded players catching lightning in a bottle for a moment or a few glorious hours.  The list of pitchers who have thrown perfect games includes Hall of Fame inductees Cy Young, Addie Joss, Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax, and Jim Hunter, as well as future Hall of Famers Randy Johnson and Roy Halliday.  On the other hand, it also includes pitchers like Charlie Robertson, whose 1922 perfect game for the Chicago White Sox was one of the few bright spots in a career that ended with a won-lost record of 49 and 80, and Len Barker, who did manage a couple of decent seasons, including 1981, the year he pitched his gem for the Cleveland Indians, but who also ended his career with a losing record.  Don Larson, whose perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in game 5 of the 1956 World Series remains the single most heralded individual game achievement in baseball history, was for the rest of his career a pitcher of middling achievements.  He never won more than eleven games in a single season (though one year he did lose twenty-one), nor did he ever lead the league in any positive statistical category (his 21 losses led the league in 1954).

The history of four-home-run games is much the same.  Yes, Willie Mays, Lou Gehrig, Mike Schmidt, Chuck Klein, and Ed Delahanty all hit four homers in a game during the course of Hall of Fame careers.  And several others who had four-homer games went on to have excellent careers. Gil Hodges, Rocky Colavito, Shawn Green, and Carlos Delgado were quality players, perennial all-stars.  And Hamilton himself is certainly an excellent player who may someday find his way to Cooperstown. But what about Mark Whiten, whose four home runs on September 7, 1993 represent nearly four percent of his career total?  Or Pat Seerey, a part-time outfielder for the Cleveland Indians and (at the time of his big game) the Chicago White Sox, who hit a total of 86 career home runs and never managed to hit over .237 in his brief and undistinguished career?  How do we explain his presence on the four-homer list?  Babe Ruth never did it.  Neither did Hank Aaron or Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams.  During all those years when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds were filling themselves with Human Growth Hormone and hitting home runs at historic (with an asterisk) rates, none of them ever did it.  But Pat Seerey did?  Really?

Unassisted triple plays are certainly the most democratic of the three major achievements.  Of the sixteen players who have turned the trick, none -- NONE -- is in the Hall of Fame (although current Major Leaguer Troy Tulowitzki -- April 29th, 2007, seventh inning, against the Atlanta Braves -- might well be on his way).  Thus, the list of players who have recorded unassisted triple plays includes such giants of the game as Bill Wambsganss, Ernie Padgett, Glenn Wright, Jimmy Cooney, Mickey Morandini, and Randy Velarde.  I'm a devoted baseball fan, a student of the game, and I had to look up four of those six guys in the Baseball Encyclopedia. The triple play is the ultimate instance of being in the right place at the right time.  Unassisted triple plays happen in the blink of an eye, always with at least two men on base and (historically speaking) always on a line drive hit directly at a middle infielder (thirteen of the sixteen have been turned by shortstops or second basemen).  The infielder must catch the ball, tag a base and then tag a runner (or tag a runner and then tag a base).  It is an act reflex, of instinct, and, yes, of good fortune.

Why have I spent so much time on these baseball accomplishments?  Because to me they point out one of the great things about baseball.  In most major American team sports -- football and basketball come to mind immediately -- the big individual accomplishments belong almost entirely to the biggest stars.  The running backs who rush for more than two hundred yards in a game, the quarterbacks who throw for six touchdowns, the forwards or guards who score fifty or sixty points -- these are the guys who start every game, who have the ball in their hands most often and who are expected to do big things.  Baseball is different.  Every starting player on a team gets his turn at-bat, every pitcher in the rotation has his turn to take a shot at glory, every fielder on the team might be in position to make the big play.  Even in the playoffs and World Series, any player can emerge as a hero.  This is why in the annals of baseball history, names like Mays and Mantle, Ruth and Koufax, can be found alongside names like Larson and Dent and Lemke.  Yes, today's game is filled with overpaid, spoiled athletes (not to mention overpaid, spoiled owners).  But every afternoon, every night, players take the field to play a game that might carry any one of them to baseball immortality.  Every player is just four at-bats away from being the next Pat Seerey, every pitcher is just nine innings away from being the next Charley Robertson, every fielder is only one line drive away from being the next Mickey Morandini.

And if that's not worth playing for, I don't know what is.

A Writing Post About . . . Well, Several Things

Today’s post can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the group blog on the business and craft of writing fantasy that I maintain with fellow authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, A.J. Hartley, C.E. Murphy, and Kalayna Price, among others. The post is called “On Writing: Potpourri -- First Lines, Short Fiction, Dialogue,” and it is about different aspects of writing, with some emphasis on short stories. I hope you enjoy it.

Interview With Alethea Kontis

Today, I am truly delighted to welcome the wonderful and talented Alethea Kontis to my blog. Alethea is the author of the AlphaOops children's books (AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First and AlphaOops: H is for Halloween) and is now about to release her first young adult novel, Enchanted. Enchanted is a wonderful book that ties together several of your favorite fairy tales into something unique and utterly compelling. I read it in about two days, and it only took that long because I needed to pause for meals and sleep. Recently, Alethea and I were able to sit down for an e-conversation about her work.

DBC: Why don’t we begin by having you tell us a bit about Enchanted. What’s it about, and who do you imagine to be your core audience?

AK: Enchanted is a book I would have fallen in love with when I was a young girl reading my way through the juvenile section of the library. (This is when there was only a "juvenile" and "adult" section, before the internet, back when we all rode dinosaurs.) Enchanted would have been in my checkout pile along with Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, Lloyd Alexander, Ellen Raskin, Edward Eager, and Orson Scott Card.

The premise of the world of Enchanted: All the fairy tales you've ever read (and many that you haven't) all originated in the Woodcutter family. Enchanted is the story of the youngest daughter, Sunday Woodcutter. The main threads are "The Frog Prince," "Cinderella," and "Jack and the Beanstalk." Ultimately, the more you know about the unexpurgated tales of Mother Goose, the Grimms, Lang, Perrault, and Andersen, the more fun you will have with Enchanted.

DBC: The book is a marvelous mash-up of fairy tales -- where did the idea come from and how did you manage to tie so many stories together in such an effective and innovative way?

AK: The idea for Enchanted began as a contest challenge in my writers group (Codex Writers). Our stories had to be inspired by at least one of four "seeds": "Fundevogel," "The Princess and the Pea," the Irish legend of Cú Chulainn, and the nursery rhyme "There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe." I couldn't choose between them, so I chose them all...as well as all every other fairy tale and nursery rhyme that was suggested.

I've been reading fairy tales, folk takes, fables and legends all my life. The more you read, the more you see common threads running through them (like the fate of youngest siblings or the cleverness of elves). I pieced them all together in my own schizophrenic John Nash puzzle. Oh, that fine line between genius and insanity...

DBC: It seems as though fairy tales are “hot” right now. Grimm and Once Upon a Time are on television; Mirror, Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman are in theaters (or soon will be); and a number of books have come out in the past couple of years that also draw on fairy tales for inspiration. What do you think explains this trend? Is it just a market tide, or do you see something deeper at work? Put another way, I suppose I’m asking “Why now?” What is our culture or society getting out of this return to fairy tales?

AK: J. R. R. Tolkien once said (and fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes agrees) that fairy tales were 100% guaranteed moneymakers. In these times of extreme economic crisis, doesn't it make sense to bet on a Sure Thing? Even Mama wouldn't disagree with that. J

I believe this is a trend that started once upon a time in sixteenth-century Italy. We're definitely on the crest of a fairy tale tidal wave right now. I hope that wave continues for a very, very long time...or until we all live happily ever after. Whichever comes first.


DBC: I’ve noticed -- and really it’s no great surprise -- that so many of these fairy tale treatments have had to reexamine gender roles, and especially revise and update the portrayals of what it means to be a young woman. Your story takes a nursery rhyme about Sunday and her sisters and twists the meanings and implications in ways that the people who first came up with the nursery rhyme could never have imagined. I’m guessing that you enjoyed that. Can you tell us about that aspect of working on the book?

AK: I did enjoy that, thank you! I still giggle to myself from time to time, randomly.

My family tree branches are Greek and French: two old world cultures that carry with them a few old world ideas that never really go away. One of these ideas is the power of words--especially for the Greeks. Every word you say is a double-edged sword. It's why you see them spitting all the time. If you say a baby is beautiful, you have just cursed it to grow up ugly, so you "spit" on the baby to counteract your good wishes and maintain the balance of the universe.

"Alethea" in Greek means "truth." It's a wonderful and horrible curse all at the same time. Whether or not my parents meant it, I've always found it much easier to tell the truth, for better or worse (and many times the latter). It's tough for me when a situation occurs in which I need to lie--I have a really difficult time with that. (Acting is a completely different story. As is writing.)

I was also born on a Sunday. When I was young I thought the Mother Goose poem would have some brilliant insight into what my life would be...but that whole "bonny and blithe and good and gay" bunk is a crock. Who has a life like that? Who would want to? But is this the Happily Ever After all those tales elude to?

There is always more to what's written on the page, just as there is always more to people than what we see on the surface.

DBC: Looking just at the Woodcutter family, the focus of Enchanted, it seems as though you have a huge amount of material still at your disposal, should you choose to write sequels. Is there an Enchanted II in the works? [If so] Can you give us a bit of a teaser? What’s going to happen next?

AK: There is an Enchanted sequel in the works, but if I share any of my brilliance, it will probably be edited out. [spit spit] The next novel will be about Saturday, of course! The goal is to work my way backwards through the sisters, all the way to Monday. (Monday's story is awesome.)

I'm also working on many other things: short stories, essays, and picture books, as always -- I can't stay away from them. I'm super excited about The Wonderland Alphabet, that will be out next month. It's a collaboration with my exceptionally talented longtime friend Janet K. Lee, who won an Eisner Award with Jim McCann last year for their graphic novel Return of the Dapper Men. The Wonderland Alphabet is an ABC book with Janet's art and my poetic verses, all based on Lewis Carroll's fabulous classic. And it's a board book. Squee!

DBC: Are you an eclectic reader or do you tend to stick with a genre? What are you reading right now, and what’s on your To-Read pile?

AK: I am an eclectic reader just like I'm an eclectic writer, but I have far less time to read now than I used to and it makes me sad. I mostly read SF and Fantasy for my review column for Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show --but I'll drop everything the moment a new Jude Deveraux book is released. Right now on my TBR pile are Wuftoom by Mary G. Thompson, The Taker and The Reckoning by Alma Katsu, and Thieftaker by D. B. Jackson.

DBC: What advice would you offer to aspiring writers looking to break into the young adult market? Do you think that the YA field will continue to be a driving force in publishing the way it has for the past decade or so?

AK: I do think the teen section in the bookstores is here to stay, and YA is a force to be reckoned with if you're up for the challenge. Kids are reluctant (and often not encouraged) to graduate themselves into the adult section, but adults have far fewer qualms about walking into the teen section and picking up an armload. So if a book is YA-OK, why not just list it at YA from the start? It’s a bit of marketing genius.

As for new authors, I would say: be true to your voice. If you write young, write young. If your writing is more mature, go with it. YA runs the spectrum, and is very all-encompassing. If you are trying to force your voice to fit a market, you're already starting off on the wrong foot. Write that book in your heart from the voice in your head, and let the marketing department worry about where to shelve it. WRITING will always be an author's most important goal.

DBC: Last question: If you could spend a single day as any character you’ve ever read, who would you choose and why?

AK: I think I'd like to spend a day with Calcifer the Fire Demon and have a jaunt around the countryside in Howl's moving castle. The follow-up question is whether or not I'm willing to pay the price for Calcifer's company...but you didn't ask me that one. J

DBC: Thanks so much for joining us today. It’s been great having you here.

AK: It's an honor!

POWERS by James A. Burton

Some time ago, I was given an advanced reader copy of a book called Powers, by James A. Burton. Burton, the pseudonym of author James Hetley, is represented by my agent, Lucienne Diver, and Jim and Lucienne were interested in having me blurb the book. I read the book in about a week -- a busy week -- and gave it the following blurb:

"Take an unusual hero, throw him together with an unlikely ally, and send them on an unorthodox quest to a unique and fascinating world, and what do you get? Powers, a story of demons and gods, intrigue and magic, that is as original and readable as any book I've picked up in a long while. Highly recommended!"

Well, Powers by James A. Burton hits the bookstore shelves (real and virtual) tomorrow, and I continue to recommend it with great enthusiasm. Go out and buy yourself a copy. You won't be sorry.

A Post About Character Dynamics

Today’s post can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the group blog on the business and craft of writing fantasy that I maintain with fellow authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, A.J. Hartley, C.E. Murphy, and Kalayna Price, among others. The post is called “On Writing: Character Dynamics,” and it is about developing relationships among our characters. I hope you enjoy it.

Birding at Radnor Lake

This morning I drove with a friend to do some birdwatching at Radnor Lake, one of the birding hot spots in the Nashville area. Nashville is about 90 miles from where we live, so this was no small undertaking. It turned out to be a quiet day. We saw a few things at the end of our walk -- a singing male Prothonotary Warbler, resplendent in brilliant yellow; a furtive Northern Waterthrush, which is not an easy bird to find; a singing male Summer Tanager, bright red and very cooperative. But we had hoped to see more. This is the height of Spring migration, and Radnor is known for turning up rarities. We didn't find any.

It would have been easy to feel that we had wasted the day and the long drive. But it was a beautiful morning, breezy, warm, sunny. There were Wood Ducks all over the lake. We saw thrushes and managed to find Scarlet Tanagers -- common but gorgeous -- Swainson's Thrushes with their ascending, ethereal, flutelike song, Nashville and Blackburnian and Yellow-throated Warblers. I had some nice time with a good friend. And I was outside, smelling wild roses and the sweet scent of Sycamores.

There was nothing wasted, no reason to be disappointed. Sometimes adjusting expectations is the key to enjoying oneself. Today was a perfect example.

A Post About Characters Run Amok!

Today’s post can be found at http://www.sfnovelists.com, the group blog on speculative fiction that I maintain along with a group of over one hundred published authors of fantasy and science fiction. The post is called “Characters Striking Out On Their Own,” and it’s about those characters who surprise us by becoming more than what we as authors originally intended. I hope you enjoy it.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Spring bird migration has come early to the Cumberland Plateau. Usually mid-April is when birds start trickling in -- swallows swoop and dart across fields, gnatcatchers and White-eyed Vireos scold from overgrown thickets just beginning to leaf out, the first warblers -- Black and Whites, Black-throated Greens, Yellow-throated -- sing from still-bare branches of oaks and poplars.

This year, though, is different. With the uncommonly mild winter and early spring, everything leafed out early -- most of the flowering trees are done flowering; nearly all of them have leaves. My wife's garden is weeks ahead of where it normally is. And the birds, somehow sensing this on their wintering grounds in Central and South America, have already started streaming through in earnest. Tanagers and orioles, grosbeaks and buntings, thrushes and several species of vireo -- all are here. And in the past few days the warblers have arrived in numbers. Hooded, Tennessee, Nashville, Yellow, Cape May Palm, Prairie, Blackburnian; Ovenbirds and Waterthrushes. I've seen more than twenty species of warbler already this year. No doubt more are on the way.

If you've never seen a warbler, you owe it to yourself to look for them, or at least Google "Blackburnian Warbler" (as a for instance) and look at the photos that pop up. These are gorgeous birds, decked out in smart suits of yellow and black, blue and gray, green and brown and red. They winter in the tropics and even the dullest among them look exotic. They are tiny -- each could fit in the palm of your hand. And their songs -- they offer a repertoire of trills, sweet whistles, chips, and bouncing melodies that, for me at least, is the true herald of spring's arrival.

But this is a limited time offer. The birds pass through on their way to their breeding grounds in the northern forests of New England and Canada. So look for them soon, or wait until next year.

Happy birding.

A Post About Virtuous and Dark Protagonists

Today’s post can be found at http://magicalwords.net, the group blog on the business and craft of writing fantasy that I maintain with fellow authors Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, A.J. Hartley, C.E. Murphy, and Kalayna Price, among others. The post is called “On Writing: Characters to Love, Characters to Hate,” and it is about finding the right balance between “too nice” and “too dark” in our protagonists. I hope you enjoy it.