D.B. Jackson's Blog, page 68

New Freebie Added to the Website!

Today I updated the D.B. Jackson website to include a free download of "The Tavern Fire," the first story (the first fiction, for that matter) I published as D.B. Jackson.  The story first appeared in a terrific anthology called After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar, which was edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray.  Under the terms of my contract with Daw, the publisher of the anthology, I am allowed to make the story available on my site now that a year has passed since the anthology's publication.

I should note here that mine was just one of fifteen stories in the antho, and you should still go out and buy After Hours to read those other stories.  But in the meantime, you can visit the "Free Samples" page on my site and read a .pdf version of my story.

Told from the point of view of Tiller, a mentally-challenged young man, "The Tavern Fire" offers one possible explanation for a devastating fire that swept through the Cornhill section of Boston early in the morning on March 20, 1760.  I hope you enjoy it!

Review: The Hunger Games

Last night I went with a group to see the movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins' YA bestseller, The Hunger Games.  Our group consisted of seven teenagers, all of whom had read at least the first book in the Hunger Games trilogy; two middle-aged guys, one of whom had read all three books (yes, that's me), and one of whom had not read any of them; and an older woman (the grandmother of two of the teens), who had read all three books.

The verdict?  All of the teens loved it.  Both middle-aged guys loved it.  Grandma liked it, but found it a bit too fast-paced at times.  So that's nine "loves" and one "like" out of a total of ten; hardly scientific, but still that's not a bad result at all.

So, why did I love it?  Well, let me start by saying that I have seen every Harry Potter movie, I saw the Percy Jackson movie, I saw the Lord of the Rings movies, and I have seen a host of other movie versions of science fiction and fantasy books.  With the possible exception of Blade Runner, this is the best adaptation of a sf or fantasy novel I have ever seen.  It was true to the book without being constrained by it.  Director Gary Ross did a terrific job of sticking to the text when he could, but adding elements that actually enhanced the storyline and made accessible to viewers elements of the narrative that would have been impossible to convey had he followed the book more closely.  (The books are all written from the first person point of view of Katniss Everdeen, the lead character.  It works in the book, but would have created problems for a movie director.  Ross dealt with this brilliantly.) As a result, unlike the Harry Potter movies, especially the later ones, which were almost impenetrable to those who were not familiar with the novels, The Hunger Games was easy to follow, even for my friend who had not read the book.

But more than this, the movie worked terrifically well on its own terms.  It was visually stunning.  In one scene, when Katniss is hallucinating after having been stung by genetically modified wasps, the cinematography is both jarring and compelling, deftly conveying the character's sense of disorientation while still providing the viewer with narrative clues that keep the plotting clear.  The pacing of the story never flags, but also never feels rushed.  And the action scenes had me squirming in my seat, even though I knew exactly how things would work out.  Even the acting, so often the downfall in these sorts of adaptations, did not disappoint.  Jennifer Lawrence, as Katniss, was effectively understated in the role — strong, but vulnerable, sympathetic but with a prickly side, beautiful but not so much so as to be unbelievable.  Woody Harrelson as Haymitch, gives one of his best performances in years.  Donald Sutherland as President Snow looks benign, but oozes evil.  Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman is delightfully campy.  And Amandla Stenberg as Rue is a revelation — a superstar in the making.

I'm sure that critics will find some faults with the movie.  The opening sequences, set in Katniss's impoverished home district, were filmed with a hand-held camera, no doubt in hopes of giving the scenes more verisimilitude.  I found the effect distracting, as did others in our group.  And I'm also sure that fans of the books will note certain omissions that might have made the movie even better.  The genetically-engineered dogs that appear at the end of the Games are not quite as horrifying as they were in the book, for reasons that I won't divulge so as not to spoil the book's ending.

But in my opinion these are minor quibbles.  This is a very, very good movie.  How good?  Again, this is just my opinion.  But if Thieftaker is ever made into a movie, this is the crew — director, cinematographer, etc. — that I want working on the film.

Today In History: Lighting the Fuse

On this day, in 1765, the English Parliament passed legislation that would come to be known in the North American colonies as the Stamp Act.  In the wake of the Seven Years' War against France (referred to in the colonies as the French and Indian War), the British Empire found itself badly in debt, and in need of new ways to generate the revenue necessary to maintain its colonial holdings.

George Grenville, who in 1763 became Prime Minister of England and Chancellor of the Exchequer, believed that Britain's colonists were deeply under-taxed, and that the North Americans needed to assume greater responsibility for the funding of their own administration and protection.  In 1764, he pushed for passage of the Sugar Act, which he and others in Britain called the American Revenue Act.  In 1765, he followed that up with the Stamp Act.

The Stamp Act established the first direct tax (as opposed to a tariff) on the colonists, by requiring that any and all public and private documents have a stamp affixed to them.  Said stamp was to be purchased, the funds going directly to the English Exchequer to pay for the British military presence in North America.

The act met with some opposition in the English Parliament, but that was nothing compared to the backlash it would provoke in the colonies.  On this day in 1765, of course, Grenville, King George III, and their allies in Parliament had no inkling of this.  They passed the legislation fully expecting that British subjects in North America would follow the law.  It took just over two months for word of the act to reach the colonies.

In the months to come, the Stamp Act would lead to the colonies' first truly violent protests against British rule, and would thus begin the long, winding march toward separation and revolution.

And for the purposes of this site and the Thieftaker books, this act would also provide the backdrop for the first Ethan Kaille novel.  For Thieftaker (due out from Tor Books on July 3) opens on the night of August 26, 1765, when, for the second time in as many weeks, Boston's streets are filled with rioters protesting against the new Stamp Tax.  As angry mobs rampage through the streets of Boston, a young girl, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, is murdered.  Is she, as some believe, a victim of the rabble that has destroyed property and threatened the lives of those who represent the Crown?  Or is there more at work here, something darker, more evil, something that draws on conjuring power the likes of which Ethan has never encountered before?

I Want To Go Back To College

Really, I do.  It's not that I miss being in my late teens and early 20s.  I don't want to go back to that part of my life at all.  But I would love to be a college student again.  I posted about this a bit at another of my blogs (under my other writing name) but today I feel it even more acutely.

My daughter and I visited Wake Forest today, and were both blown away by the place.  It's beautiful — like the college campus from Central Casting, if you know what I mean.  But it was also a great day.  We both got to attend (separate) mock classes, and the lecture I attended was fascinating.  It was on Conspiracy Theories and ways of debunking them, which is interesting in its own right.  But the professor who gave the lecture was dynamic and articulate and clearly passionate about his subject.  It was a terrific lecture.

I am certain that I could get far more out of college now than I ever did when I was a kid.  I might not be able to pull all-nighters or party the way I used to.  But I would get so much more out of classes and I would certainly do better, more consistent work.  And I would relish the opportunity to spend all my time focusing on learning, on reading, on sharing ideas and debating concepts.  I am, I have to admit, a bit jealous of my daughter, and the adventure on which she is about to embark.  More than that, though, I am thrilled for her.

Flash Writing Tips: What To Do When You're Stuck

I'm going to put the flash in "Flash Writing Tips" and keep this one really brief.  But just because this is short, that doesn't mean that it's unimportant.

This is one of those things that happens to all writers at one time or another:  Sometimes in the course of writing a book, I will find myself stuck from a plotting point of view.  Things seem to be stagnating; my characters seem to be running around in circles (in a figurative sense) not getting anything done.  I know that I need jump-start my story, but how do I do that?

I have one friend, who believes that when things slow down too much, it's time for her to kill off a character.  Seriously.  That's the way she deals with the issue.  Stalled narrative?  Time to kill someone.  And for her it works.  It might work for you, too.  And I have to admit that I have used that approach every now and then.  But sometimes upping the body count really doesn't fit with what's happening in the book.  So what then?

Well, one thing I do is ask myself what it is my main characters are trying to accomplish at that particular moment.  Then, I try to figure out what would be the absolute worst thing, from their perspective, that could happen to them at that moment.  And then I do that to them.  Cruel, I know.  Evil, even.  But lots of fun.

At other times, I will introduce a new character.  A love interest perhaps.  An ally for my protagonist, or a co-conspirator for my villain.  Like killing off a character, adding a new person to the mix changes the dynamics, forces the other characters to adjust and act.

The thing to keep in mind, is that you don't want to create problems or throw obstacles in their path, or kill off or add new characters JUST for the sake of giving yourself something to write about.  You need to make certain that what you're doing to your characters has narrative purpose.  It should fit with your larger story arc.  It should add something other than pages to your book.  How do you make sure of this?  It's easier than it sounds.  Quite often the changes you make at these moments might feel like they're born of desperation.  But before you know it new plot threads will open up, new character interactions will appear, and you'll be rolling again.

So when things start to stagnate, shake them up a bit.  Sure, doing so means deviating from that outline with which you started, but it might just save your story.

Keep writing!

A More Perfect Union

I'll get back to Flash Fiction Tips soon — over the weekend or early next week.  But I've also posted about history on this site; with Thieftaker, my first historical fantasy, coming out later this year, it seems appropriate that I do so.

I spent today with my older daughter in Washington, D.C.  We're here so that she can look at a couple of colleges, and that's how we'll spend tomorrow.  But today we walked around this spectacular city, explored a couple of museums, and visited some landmarks.  We wound our way through the National Archives, seeing not only the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, but also the Emancipation Proclamation, a couple of Congressional documents from the earliest days of the Republic, and some very cool footage of past Presidents.

We saw the White House, the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court.  This evening we walked down to the Lincoln Memorial  Yes, my daughter had seen images of all these places on TV and in movies, in the pages of books and magazines.  But seeing them for real is so very different.  This city exudes history.  Even the most jaded among us (and I'm often pretty jaded) cannot come to Washington without discovering a renewed appreciation for the founding principles of our nation.  Do we always live up to those ideals?  Of course not.  Did our founders cross the line into hypocrisy as often as not?  Absolutely.

Still this remains just about the best idea for a governing system that anyone has ever had.  I truly believe that.  I have lots of friends who are quite conservative politically.  I disagree with them on almost everything.  But at least we can join together in celebration of a system that allows all of us to shout our beliefs from the rooftops, to argue about politics openly, publicly, without fear of sanction or arrest.  Remarkably, that remains rare in our world, even today.  And it has been the bedrock of our political and social structures for over two centuries.

That's pretty cool.

Flash Writing Tip! Making Our Imagined Worlds Come Alive

Okay, birthday is done, but I'm still on the road.  Time for another Flash Writing Tip.  Today's topic:  Worldbuilding!

The object of worldbuilding for writers of speculative fiction is really no different from the goal of mainstream writers setting up their real-world settings.  We want to create places that come to life for our readers, that have depth and richness and texture.  We want our readers to open our books and be transported, be it to Pern or Middle Earth, modern New York or 1760s Boston.

The thing is, when spec fic writers create our worlds whole-cloth from our imaginations, we have a far greater challenge.  If I tell you that a book I've written is set in, say, contemporary Phoenix, that immediately conjures up certain images for you:  heat, traffic, desert wilderness surrounding a sprawling urban oasis.  But when I tell you that I set a book in Aneira of the Forelands, you don't know anything about it, and can't even begin to envision what it might be like.  So my job is to make that place real to you as quickly as possible.

What factors go into creating a new world of this sort?  Well, we need a landscape — that's why so many fantasy and sf books have maps in the front matter.  But we also need history, religion(s), cultural traditions, societal customs, myths and legends, economic systems, sources of food and material for clothing, and much more.  There are countless factors that define a culture and a civilization, and all of them are necessary in worldbuilding.

I'm often asked what I do to make my worlds come to life for myself as well as for my readers.  And one of the best answers I can give is this:  I write short fiction about my world.  As I develop my histories and my mythologies, I write short stories about certain aspects of them.  When I work on my map and name different cities or landscape features, I will write short stories about how these places got their names.  As I think of important figures in my world's past, I write about some aspect of their lives.

Some of the short stories become good enough that I can sell them.  Most of them don't.  But all of them help me discover the world about which I'm writing.  Even if the stories themselves never see light of day, the things that I learn about my world while writing them come to inform my larger projects.  And really, that's the point.  The better I know my world, the more fully I will be able to convey their flavor and character to my readers.

So as you're worldbuilding, take some time to write stories or even fractions of stories about the places you're creating.  Even if these stories never wind up being published, they will make the rest of your work more genuine and more exciting.  And you might even learn something about your world that you hadn't known before.

Keep writing!

An Apology for a Lame Post

Yeah, I should probably do another writing tips post today.  And I certainly will do my best to post some later in the week.  But today is my birthday and I'm on the road visiting with friends, and I am going to allow myself to be a bit lazy.  Hope you all have a good night!

Flash Writing Tip! Dialogue Attribution Exercise

I'm about to be on the road for a while, taking my daughter on a college tour through the Southeast.  I'll try to post regularly from the road, but I won't have as much time for longer posts.  So, as kind of an experiment, I'm trying out something new today:  Flash Writing Tips!

Flash Writing Tips are just what they sound like:  Short tips that I can write quickly, and that you can read and put to use just as quickly.

Flash Tip Number One builds on the post I did a while back on said-bookisms.  If you're looking to improve your dialogue attribution, try this simple exercise (simple to explain, not so simple to execute):  Write a scene between two characters, either characters from your work-in-progress, or characters you make up just for this exercise.  And when you write the dialogue, do not use any phrase of direct attribution.  No "she said" or "he asked" or anything else that explicitly tells the reader that "so and so just uttered these words."  Certainly do not use any said-bookisms (if you've forgotten just what those are, use the link above to refer back to the said-bookisms post).  Instead use gestures, facial expressions, and other descriptive passages to convey who is doing the speaking.  So that instead of saying this:  "I wish we'd never met," Cassie said angrily. You might try saying this:  Cassie glared at him.  "I wish we'd never met."

The first uses direct attribution, and does too much telling rather showing.  The second uses indirect attribution and is, in my opinion, far more evocative.  Anyway, give this a try.  It doesn't have to be more than a page or two.  But I bet that it will give you a new sense of you might spice up these kinds of scenes.

Good luck!

Writing Tips: Point of View and Voice, part III — Voice and Authenticity

A couple of days ago, in the second installment of my Writing Tips series on Point of View and Voice, I focused on how I decide how many characters to use as POV characters, and how I choose which characters would make the most effective narrators.

There is a second element to these decisions about point of view that relate more to voice and the authenticity of the narration, and these are the choices I'd like to talk about today.

The most basic of these choices  can be summarized fairly easily:  Do you intend to tell your story in first person or third person?  First person, of course, means that the story is told in the "I" voice.  "I did this," "I said that," "My life was in danger."  Third person replaced "I," "me," "my" with "he," "him," "his," or "she," "her," "hers."  I suppose you could say that there is a third choice:  Writing the story in second person, so that the story is told by projecting the reader into the narrative.  "You do this;" "you say that," etc.  This is NOT a voice that is used often, and as a literary device it is likely to fall flat in today's market unless handled by a master.  For the purposes of this post, we'll confine our discussion to first and third person.

As I mentioned briefly in my first post in this series, the advantage of first person is that it lends a visceral quality to the narrative.  There is almost no distance between the point of view character and the reader.  Everything is immediate, powerful.  Again, it is one thing to have a friend tell you that someone she knows was in a car wreck.  It is another thing entirely to have your friend tell you that she was in a car wreck.  First person brings that level of emotional and experiential power to your story.  It can be particularly effective in urban fantasies and mysteries with a single POV character, as it allows the reader to experience the unraveling of the mystery and the danger of the investigation first hand.

Now you may ask, if first person POV is so powerful, why doesn't everyone use it?  Well for one thing, in books with multiple POV characters, that would quickly get pretty confusing.  Second, there are times when that lack of distance between character and reader is not only less effective, but actually awkward.  Thieftaker is a perfect example.  On the one hand, it is an urban fantasy with a strong mystery element.  It would seem to lend itself perfectly to first person POV, and in fact, I did consider writing it in first person.  But there is also the historical angle to consider.  There are times when I need to step away from the narrative briefly and, without resorting to the dreaded data dump, explain a historical event or situation.  When I do this, I always remain in the head of my POV character, Ethan Kaille — I maintain his voice, I explain things as he would consider them in his thoughts.  But even so, it would sound contrived and a bit awkward doing this in first person.  That slight distance offered by third person POV allows me to give these explanations in a more natural way.

In this way, third person POV can also be more appropriate and effective for epic alternate world fantasies in which magic systems and aspects of worldbuilding sometimes need some brief explanation.  Let me reiterate, third person POV is not an excuse to step out of a character's head and just dump information on our readers.  But it is a slightly distancing voice that allows us to give information that would sound odd in the more conversational tone of a first person narrative.

Of course, there is more to the voice of a point of view character than just the pronoun used to describe action and dialogue.  A perspective character needs to sound interesting, she needs to sound unique.  Readers need to hear in the thoughts and emotions of that character all of the history, all of the attributes, all of the quirks and strengths and flaws that they come to associate with that person.  Just as we bring our personalities to our views of all that we encounter and experience, so our POV characters should do the same.

Using narration in this way — relying on voice to strengthen character development — is what makes point of view such a crucial component of storytelling. We have to ask ourselves how our POV character would perceive the world.  Is s/he timid or bold?  Confident or full of self-doubt?  Passionate or stoic?  Sophisticated or not?  Young or old?  Moral or amoral?  Educated or not?  Privileged or not?  Every aspect of his or her personality can come to bear on the tone of his/her narration.  That is why I speak of point of view as being the nexus of narrative and character.  Because in using a character to convey storyline, in blending voice with plot, we strengthen both and make it possible for the arc of our stories and the development of our characters to happen simultaneously.

By honing our point of view character's (or characters') voice(s) in this way, we bring a level of authenticity to our storytelling.  We are no longer simply writing a story; we are instead allowing our characters to tell their stories.  And there is a world of difference between the two.

Think about this as you choose your point of view character and begin to develop the voice for your narrative.  It will strengthen your writing and enhance the experience of your readers.

Keep writing!