Michael Tinker Pearce's Blog, page 5

Feminism is not a dirty word.

These days the word feminism is strangely unpopular.  It’s opponents have assigned it a connotation of ‘man-hating’ and masculinization of women, and many women have accepted this to the extent that they are loathe to identify as a ‘feminist.’ This is a great victory for those that oppose equality, and it’s a damn shame.

For all of human history we have by and large followed a model of family and society dictated by biology.  Women had a specific role that was predicated by the fact that they could become pregnant and bear children.  This role itself was not oppressive; there is no shame in bringing life into the world and shaping those lives into functional, productive members of society.  But in an overwhelming number of our races’ cultures the definition of wives and children as property made it into an oppressive role and formalized and justified that oppression to the point where in many cases it amounted to slavery.

In the mid-twentieth century an innovation was created that had the potential to turn all of that on it’s ear- effective contraception that allowed a woman to control whether or not she could become pregnant.  While it is still not recognized as such this was a game-changer on the level of fire, the wheel and agriculture.  It was an invention that changed the very nature of the human condition on a fundamental level.  Most of all it kicked the props out from under the biological underpinnings of patriarchal dominance.

For the first time we need not be ruled by our biology.  A woman can still choose to play a traditional role and there is nothing wrong with doing so.  But now it is a choice. Her choice.  She can choose a different role.  Not a ‘Man’s Role.’  A human role.

I’m a Conservative, and the first thing to say about that is that you must not confuse that with a party affiliation.  I believe in the ideals of egalitarianism- equal opportunity for all and equality under the law.  I believe in the Constitution of the United States.  I believe that the market should be left to it’s own devices to the extent that it is practical to do so. I believe in a strong national defense and the individual right to bear arms for defense of self, home and family.  I believe the government should stay out of people’s private business as long as that business does not violate the law.

Some of my conservative friends are surprised that I support feminist views and ideals, but nothing that I identified above as hallmarks of conservatism in any way contradicts feminism, or is contradicted by it.  I can think of no reasonable justification for not paying women equal pay for equal work.  I can think of no reason that a woman should not hold any job that she is physically and mentally capable of doing.  I can think of no reason that women should be judged by different standards than men in any way.  Yet they still are.

Let’s be perfectly clear about this- Feminists are not looking for ‘special rights.’ They are seeking equality. Human Rights.  I think that maybe we owe that to the other half of the human race.

Michael Tinker Pearce

Researching in the new era

In the nineteen-eighties when I first had a go at writing technology didn’t play much of a role. Yes, I had a state-of-the-art writing tool – an electric typewriter that was about the size of a laptop (though about four times as thick) and was designed to be portable. It could even run off of batteries.  There was a tiny LCD screen that would show the current sentence so you could correct it before it was on paper. Instead of using dot-matrix and needing special paper like most machines of it’s era it used regular paper, because it used plotter pens and would draw each individual letter as you typed. It was super-cool.  I’d make typos because I was watching it write.

It was particularly useful that it was portable because of the way we had to do research in those days. When I needed to check on something I’d consult my books and magazines.  If the information wasn’t on-hand then I had to go to the library.  This could be a bit of a pain, but at least I could minimize the lost time by taking the typewriter with me and continuing in-situ.

I wrote two games on that little typewriter, a set of rules for a fantasy-roleplaying game and a tabletop war-game called ‘Armor 2050.’  This second of these was a rebellion against Robotech and similar games which were basically stupid. I worked with armored combat vehicles in the Army and was aware of the capabilities of them.  Robotech was set oogledy-bajillion years in the future and had giant robots slugging it out, which was kinda’ cool.  But if you had taken one of their Regimental Combat Teams from the far future and plonked them down in front of mid-1980’s NATO forces the super-advanced mechs from the far future would have been slaughtered wholesale.  The creator’s of Robotech were aware of this and tried to rationalize it in various ways that were never really convincing.

This got me thinking about what would armored combat look like in the future, which prompted me to write Armor 2050, a hard-science projection of the effects of emerging technologies on armored warfare in the future. This meant a lot of life-and-death confrontations with my old nemesis– Math.  It also meant a lot of research, which brings us full-circle.

In a weird sort of way Armor 2050 is still alive and well.  The game eventually led to me writing the first short story that I sold in 1991- ‘The Killing Machine.’  On a different electric typewriter.  Years later after I went back to writing fiction we found this story and discovered that it had aged remarkably well.  That spurred another Armor 2050 based short story, ‘What Happens in Dubai…’  The two of these, in modified form, became the basis of ‘Rage of Angels.’

While Armor 2050 continues to inform our work even after all of these years research has changed a great deal.  Very little consulting books, and no trips to the library.  Instead internet and software do yeoman service.  One has to be more careful and check sources a bit more diligently, but generally any information that you want is literally at your fingertips.

Need to learn about asteroid mining? Tab out of the story and do a quick search on Bing.  Futuristic air transport? Another search.  Need to know where to make an emergency landing in an antiquated C17 cargo plane in upstate New York, or where to set up an ambush on a column of light armored vehicles? Fire up Google Earth.  get what you need and get right back to the story.

It’s sort of interesting that the technology of writing has changed more than the core technologies of that first short story.

An unexpected greeting…

So yesterday we returned to the house from the Snohomish Pumpkin festival.  Some of our dogs are in kennels in the house while we are out so they don’t eat, say, our furniture, while we are away.  I was bending over to open one of these kennels when Bella, our Rottweiler, came charging over to greet me and ran her skull full-speed into my face and head-butted me.  Having an excited 90 pound rottweiller head-butt you is lot like being punched in the face by an adult man. Trust me, I’ve been punched in the face enough to know.

My immediate reaction involved a stream of full-volume profanity and holding my nose, fearing that it was broken and/or gushing blood.  Remarkably it was neither. I calmed down fairly quickly but the effect on my physiology and brain chemistry was less easily settled.  Having this happen to you when you have PTSD is a special experience.

When she hit me my body decided that I had been the victim of a surprise attack. Fight/flight reflexes kicked in, my body flooded with adrenaline and I was instantly enraged.  I had to immediately restrain myself from responding to the attack, and remind myself that it was just a happy, enthusiastic dog and hold myself immobile until reason could reassert itself.

But even once the intellect was back in control it wasn’t over.  I had all this residual rage and adrenaline with nowhere useful to go and nothing useful to do.  So I got into an argument with Linda.  Which of course was counterproductive. (Arguing with Linda usually is; she has this annoying tendency to be right….)

Linda finally realized that we weren’t actually arguing about anything in particular and pointed this out.  Thinking it through I realized what was really going on and was able to explain it to her, which went a good way towards resolving things.  Since she is an intelligent, nice and understanding woman we quickly de-escalated and apologized etc.

So today my nose only hurts when I touch it, and my gums and front teeth hurt but what the hell, that’s what Ibuprofen are for.  The dog, BTW, was never injured as near as we could determine.  Fun having dogs.  Anyway next time something like that happens Linda will know what’s going on and why I am acting like such a jerk.  She can remind me and I can take steps to deal with things in a more productive fashion.  Bella, in the way of dogs, is blissfully unaware that there was any sort of problem and that’s as it should be; I’m the one with the IQ and opposable thumbs after all.

Life never stops teaching us, does it?  I need to work on making things easier for it so it doesn’t have to punch me in the nose to get my attention…

Never a dull moment when you are a writer…

Writing is like a lot of creative endeavors; a little inspiration and a lot of perspiration.  It is hard work but it requires ideas to drive it.  We’re never short of ideas; right now we have the Dwarven Rifleman Series, Rage of Angels Series and no less than three urban fantasies going at once.

A few years ago I got sick of ‘Buffy Books,’ a brand of urban fantasy in which a beautiful young woman who may or may not have superpowers is fated to fight evil.  But they aren’t ripping off Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Honest.  No, really!  So in the course of working in my shop I began to think ‘What would be the opposite of a ‘Buffy Book?’  Thus The Gray Man was born.  I scrawled down a few thousand words and then put it aside, because at the time I wasn’t a writer.

Then Linda and I became writers, and it was only natural that we’d dust off ‘The Gray Man.’  We went over it, tuned it up and sent the first three chapters to a publisher.  The months went by, we moved on to other projects (too many of them) and gradually more or less forgot about it.  We never finished it because we had more pressing concerns.  Then we found out the publisher was interested. Surprise!

So nothing for it but to drop everything and restart work on ‘The Gray Man.’  While three other books are partially complete and waiting for our attention.  It’s a never-ending carnival, is our life.  Fortunately it’s interesting.

‘The Gray Man’ is a man so nondescript that people have trouble remembering his appearance.  In his own words “I’m not handsome, I have no super-powers and I’m not tragically hip.” Probably a good thing in his profession; he’s a murderer.  A serial killer, actually.  His victims are werewolves, usually newly spawned, that have killed people.  He understands that sooner or later, despite his best efforts he will be caught and punished for his crimes.  As an added bonus he hates his work.

It’s going slower than usual because in a peculiar way the story stirs up a lot of ghosts for me.  No details but suffice it to sat they are not ‘friendly spirits.’  But that’s interesting too.

In the meantime we need to keep house, care for our dogs and keep the bills paid.  It makes for interesting times sometimes, but we wouldn’t trade it.  Well, maybe for enough money, but it would take a LOT and no one is offering.

New Cover for ‘Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman’

      

We’ve had a new cover for both the eBook and hardcopy editions designed by Roberto Rodriguez Calas (http://robertocalas.com)   Roberto is a fantastic cover designer and an excellent writer as well.

Editions of both formats are pending and will be available by the end of the week!

New Short Story!!!

Our new short story Lost Boy is out.

JC’s life sucked. It’s hard to be a teenager. It’s even harder when you are trapped living with an abusive, alcoholic stepfather. His only escapes are the internet and increasingly hard drugs. But all of that is about to change…

Lost Boy introduces you to the world of The Technomancers, modern wizards of the electronic realm. You’ll never look at the internet the same way again…

Short story, Approx. 8,000 words

Guest Blogger: Neve Masklovic

This is something I knew intuitively even before being published, that it’s okay to call yourself a writer before there’s a book with your name on it.

Not aspiring writer. Not author wannabe. Just writer.

I don’t know at what moment it happens. It might not even be a moment but a phase. It may not even have much to do with the number of hours you put in each day at your word processor, or the daily word count you manage to chisel out. The best I can describe it is this way: It’s the point when you switch from thinking about trying to write a book to doggedly typing in page after page, day after day, month after month, perhaps year after year. It’s the morning you get up, and instead of thinking Should I work on the novel a bit today? you catch yourself thinking Hey, that scene I’ve been working on where Sam and Sandra go into the woods, what if instead of the romantic picnic they were planning on having, they stumble across a dead body beneath a pine tree? And they have to spend the day giving witness statements at the police station while the food in the forgotten picnic basket spoils in the sun? And their budding relationship takes a strange turn when Sam realizes Sandra knows the victim but neglected to say so to the police…

Yes, that morning. Maybe it happens after years of false starts, maybe sooner. Looking back, I can’t even tell you exactly when it happened during the (ahem) five years it took to write my first novel, Regarding Ducks and Universes. But it did, and I started using the word. Writer.

Then I noticed a weird thing. Doing so in public had the tendency to dead-end conversations. When people asked me what I do, this often happened:

So, what do you do?

I’m a writer.

Oh, have you written anything I’ve read?

Well no, I haven’t published yet.

Oh. Uh—how about that cold snap we’ve been having?

So I switched to a different answer, a more specific one:

What do you do?

I’m writing a novel.

Oh, what’s it about?

It’s called “Regarding Ducks and Universes”. You see, there’s a Universe A and a Universe B, and all sorts of stuff happens to this one guy called Felix.…

Much better.

Of course, nowadays the conversations can and do still go like that (What do you do? I’m a writer. Have you written anything I’ve read? Probably not.), so I still try to be specific.

What do you do?

I’m writing my fourth book.

Oh, what kind of books do you write?

Well, there’s a one about parallel universes, and I’ve just about wrapped up work on the third book in my time travel series…

Like that. And don’t even get me started on the difference between writer and author. That’s a whole ‘nother blog post.

—

Neve Maslakovic is the author of the Incident series (time-travel whodunits), as well as a stand-alone novel, Regarding Ducks and Universes. Before turning her hand to writing fiction, Neve earned her PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University’s STAR (Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience) Lab. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Neve currently lives with her husband and son near Minneapolis/St. Paul, where she admits to enjoying the winters. Booklist called her debut novel, Regarding Ducks and Universes, “Inventive… a delight.” Book 3 of the Incident series releases winter 2014/15.

Links:

Website: http://www.nevemaslakovic.com

Amazon: http://amazon.com/author/nevemaslakovic

Twitter: @NeveMaslakovic

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nevemaslakovic

The Reluctant Artist

Given a choice between being a poor artist and a wealthy whore I’d pick the letter every time.  Sorry, but there it is.  I like nice stuff, eating well and not worrying about the bills.  Unfortunately this is not a choice I get to make.  Like it or not I am stuck with the artist thing.  Dammit.

A few years back a service-related disability reared its ugly head and since then it has been very difficult for me to practice my profession of over twenty years. The government sends me a little money every month, God bless ‘em, but I still need to make more.  About the same time my wife and I stumbled into a chance to write for hire, and that paid a noticeable amount of money.  More importantly we discovered that we love writing together.  Hmmm… doing something we love, together, and making money at it? Heaven!

The good news is that we have ideas.  Scads of them.  We could open a discount idea warehouse store.  Plenty of things to write about.  Even better, we love to write in a popular genre. We are passionate about our stories; hell, we can’t write them otherwise. That’s that whole ‘artist’ thing. It’s what drives the whole process and makes it happen.

The bad news is that it takes time and a major investment in work.  Sure, once in a long while lightning strikes and a first-time author writes a break-away best-seller. Like the lottery it seems as if this can happen to anyone… but it very, very rarely does.  Better just to plug away, pay your dues and don’t count on the lightning. Build your readership. Slow and steady wins the race.  It’s a marathon, not a sprint etc.  All true and sound advice.

We’re adults.  We get all that. We know from long experience that the road to success is long and paved with hard work.  So we keep plugging away, getting the stories out there and pimping them to the best of our ability.  We’re pleased with the results so far; we get good reviews for our work and we’re slowly building readership.  But every once in a while- particularly while paying bills- we wish that we could just skip straight to the success part.

OK, time to stop whining and get back to work!  Have a great week, everyone!

 

New Short Story: The Technomancers: Lost Boy

Hi All,

Linda here. We are really excited to be putting out our new Urban Fantasy short story ‘The Technomancers: Lost Boy.’ It was an idea that was stewing for a while now and when we wrote it we were writing alongside all the other projects we have going. Busy Busy!

This was my first foray into writing the base of the story with Mike rounding it out. I hope that you enjoy it!

Here is an excerpt from it:

“So you are, what, trying to recruit me for your company?  Is that why you said I was ‘one of you?’”

“Yes and no,” Sid said, frowning. “After we get things sorted out you might decide that you want to work for us, but you aren’t obligated to do so. But that’s not why I said that.  We share a very special, unusual talent.”

JC was extremely skeptical, but he tried to keep it out of his expression. Now we get down to it, he thought. The sales pitch.  I wonder what he really wants?

“Look, you may find this hard to believe at first,” Sid began, “But there have always been people that saw or sensed things in the world that others couldn’t. Some of them could affect the world around them with their thoughts, their will. As technology advanced some of us found that we could affect computers and electronics.  We call ourselves Technomancers.”

It was JC’s turn to frown now. This wasn’t what he had expected. “What, like magic?  Pull the other one.  I haven’t believed in that crap since I was little.”

Sid smiled and said, “Fortunately your belief is not required for it to work.  You haven’t wondered how you can sense where weaknesses in security might be?  How you can find back-doors in the code so easily?  Do you think everyone can feel the flow of data on the web?”

JC was startled by this but tried to hide the reaction. “Every good hacker does that.”

“No, they don’t. They also don’t have invisible friends like Dravel helping them, or telling people who can help when they’re in trouble.”

If JC had been startled before he was shocked now. “How the hell do you know about Dravel?  I’ve never told anyone about him!”

 

Another teaser from ‘Battlemage: A Soldier’s Tale’

Here’s another (unedited) teaser:

“Hello Ageyra! What are you two up to?”

She looked up and saw Kettil Oddirson approaching. He was a good-looking dwarf about her own age, high-born if she were to guess. “Oh, brilliant,” she sighed. Bayorenn raised an eyebrow at her reaction.

“Hello Kettil,” she said flatly.

Kettil looked at her companion and asked, “Well then, who’s your friend here?”

“Kettil, this is Bayorenn.”

He nodded to the other dwarf. “Kettil, pleased to meet you.”

Kettil grinned and said, “Well, I can’t really say the same. I suppose you are the competition? Big fella, aren’t you?”

“He’s not ‘the competition,’ Kettil. This isn’t a contest and I’d not be your bloody prize if it were,” Ageyra said. “We’re trying to study here.”

Kettil was unfazed and placed a friendly hand on Ageyra’s shoulder. “Here now, don’t be that way. I just fancied a tumble and naturally I thought of you first.”

“If this is your idea of wooing a girl you’re going to need that hand. Best you be the one that removes it.” Ageyra told him with a glare.

Kettil laughed, but withdrew his hand quickly enough. He said, “Well, suit yourself, then. But you don’t know what you are missing!”

“I can guess,” Ageyra said. “Boredom? Frustration? Tears?”