the prodigal blog

I'm working on a new theory of the Newtonian physics of writing...

The law of writing inertia: A novel at rest persists in a state of rest unless acted upon by an external force. (I think that this is the most widely observed phenomenon in writing.)

The second law of writing: Force equals wordcount times acceleration. The graph of this is commonly called a "deadline".

The third law of writing: For every fiction there is an equal and opposite re-fiction.

For example, if there is The Hobbit, eventually someone will inevitably write Goblin Quest. It's worth thinking about before you send your finished story out into the world. Or if you don't have any story ideas to write.

The quantum physics of writing deal with the uncertainty of publication and the probability distribution of readerships, but I don't think I'm smart enough to suss out those laws.

Heads up, book lovers in Ohio and surrounding states!

The Buckeye Book Fair is this Saturday in the fair city of Wooster. A hundred authors all in one spot, and everything from kids books to genre to history to non-fiction. Yours truly will be one in a hundred.

The event is organized by one of Ohio's truly exceptional independent book stores, the Wooster Book Company. And 10% of the revenues are donated to support non-profit literacy programs, public libraries, and books in schools.

Come buy all your Christmas presents early. A signed set of the Traitor to the Crown books will make an excellent stocking stuffer. Just sayin'.

Hope to see you there!

Her name is Lilia Stepanova. But her friends call her Awesome-sauce.

I had the chance to meet photographer Kyle Cassidy, aka kylecassidy today, which was neat for a couple reasons.

First, Kyle is the author of Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. Some years ago I did work as a researcher for a book on the history of the Second Amendment, and one of the things I came away with is the understanding of how deeply embedded guns are across American culture and how none of the stereotypes -- good or bad -- apply. Kyle's book is a great illustration of that culture and that diversity. Awesome stuff. Don't take my word for it: go look for yourself. No, seriously, it's awesome, go look. But don't forget to come back!

Because if you read this blog, you're probably going to love his current project, which is called Where I Write: Fantasy & Science Fiction Authors In Their Creative Spaces. Kyle was coming out to Ohio this weekend for Cat Valente's wedding (hey, Cat, congratulations!) and wanted to meet. I skipped work at lunch today and met him at Luck Bros Coffee. I don't know if it counts as a creative space (although the baristas there are mad creative), but it's where I wrote most of A Spell For The Revolution and The Demon Redcoat so it's certainly where I found my creative headspace.

And, actually, I wrote almost 200 words on The Spirit War while we were talking and he was taking pictures. Hey, us working stiffs gotta sneak in the words wherever we can. Kyle blogged about it but don't really believe any of the nice things he says about me. It's all about the pictures. Even the ones he took with his cell phone, and especially that creepy one that makes the buildings look like plastic models -- are amazing.

Seriously, if you haven't seen his work before, go check him out. And take your time: this blog post is done, so you don't have to worry about coming back.

A very Happy Thanksgiving Day to all my friends in Canada! Here's to family, t(of)urkey, and that weird kind of football that you play up there.

Spent the weekend reading journals by and articles about Johann (aka, John) Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, 1743–1823. Old Heck, as I like to call him, is a fascinating fellow, though he doesn't, as of this date, even have his own Wikipedia page.

Heckewelder was a Moravian missionary among the Indians in the Ohio territory in the late 18th century. He and his fellow Moravians had a very indirect method of proselytizing: show up in the wilderness, be a good person, and the Indians will eventually follow your example. It worked, more or less, and hundreds of Indians, mainly Delaware, converted to Christianity because of him.

Even though Heckewleder was a pacifist, he served America in the Revolution as a spy for George Washington among the British and their Indian allies in the old Northwest. He was captured and imprisioned several times but was always released unharmed. Ironically, it was the Americans who posed the biggest threat to Heckewelder during the war: a group of vigilantes massacred almost a hundred Christain Indians at Gnaddenhutten, mostly women and children. Despite this, Heckewelder continued to serve Washington as a translator and peace negotiator through the Indian wars of the 1790s. For three or four decades, he braved constant threat of death from different Indian groups, and both British and American soldiers who didn't trust him for a variety of (probably good) reasons.

But Heckewelder is most important for two things. In 1792, he kept a journal in his native language German of his visit to the frontier town of Cincinnati (he was on his way to try to negotiate a peace treaty with the Miami Indians). It was widely published in Germany, where Heckewelder's decription of the city and land in Ohio inspired tens of thousands of Germans to migrate to Ohio. The Over-the-Rhine district of Cincinnati is a direct result of his unintentional promotion of the city.

His bigger influence was on American literature. Near the end of his life, Heckewelder published several books on the culture and habits of the Native American groups that he knew. These books were the direct source material for James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, right down to Heckewelder's history of the last of the Mohicans. In a sense, we've spent almost two hundred years correcting Heckewelder's mistakes as filtered through Cooper.

So I'm just warning you now: don't be surprised when Heckewelder shows up in the next book, even though you've never heard of him until now. He's too interesting not to use!

During research for my new book about the Indian wars in the Ohio territory, I came across this story about the origin of the name Manhattan:

As early as 1609, when Henry Hudson reached Manhattan Island, he "invited some chiefs aboard and treated them to brandy." According to this record,

One fell into a drunken stupor and remained on ship all night. When he recovered, he was ecstatic over the new experience. Two centuries later the Delawares still had... a garbled account of the drinking incident. They said the name Mannahattanik meant "the place where we were all drunk."

It sounds apocryphal and too good to be true -- the book is called Kekionga! The Worst Defeat In The History Of The U.S. Army and the exclamation point hangs there like the author has an ax to grind -- but it still made me laugh.

Doug Dangler of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing interviews me about The Patriot Witch:



( Here's Part 2. )

( And here's Part 3. )

Lev Grossman, in the Wall Street Journal, wants us to know that Good Novels Don't Have To Be Hard Work. Although he starts with entertainly aphoristic hyperbole like "Plot makes perverts of us all" and a history of the modern novel that is either too brief or too long, depending on whether you want him to make sense of the period or get to the point, he eventually comes to this interesting observation:

...millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged. Sales of hardcover young-adult books are up 30.7% so far this year, through June, according to the Association of American Publishers, while adult hardcovers are down 17.8%. Nam Le's "The Boat," one of the best-reviewed books of fiction of 2008, has sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and trade paperback, according to Nielsen Bookscan (which admittedly doesn't include all book retailers). In the first quarter of 2009 alone, the author of the "Twilight" series, Stephenie Meyer, sold eight million books. What are those readers looking for? You'll find critics who say they have bad taste, or that they're lazy and can't hack it in the big leagues. But that's not the case. They need something they're not getting elsewhere. Let's be honest: Why do so many adults read Suzanne Collins's young-adult novel "The Hunger Games" instead of contemporary literary fiction? Because "The Hunger Games" doesn't bore them.

Which is exactly the observation that raecarson, has been making for a while now, often using the The Hunger Games as an example.

Foreign Policy asks "Is a Green World a Safer World?" The answer may please science fiction writers who specialize in near future stories, if no one else:

Greening the world will certainly eliminate some of the most serious risks we face, but it will also create new ones. A move to electric cars, for example, could set off a competition for lithium -- another limited, geographically concentrated resource. The sheer amount of water needed to create some kinds of alternative energy could suck certain regions dry, upping the odds of resource-based conflict. And as the world builds scores more emissions-free nuclear power plants, the risk that terrorists get their hands on dangerous atomic materials -- or that states launch nuclear-weapons programs -- goes up.

The decades-long oil wars might be coming to an end as black gold says its long, long goodbye, but there will be new types of conflicts, controversies, and unwelcome surprises in our future (including perhaps a last wave of oil wars as some of the more fragile petrocracies decline). If anything, a look over the horizon suggests the instability produced by this massive and much-needed energy transition will force us to grapple with new forms of upheaval. Here's a guide to just a few of the possible green geopolitical tensions to come.

...followed by the guide. The only big surprise to me was the pending lithium cartel/war, but that was very interesting.

I've got three upcoming appearances in the next three months, all with other great writers. If you're in the Ohio area, take note!

* Sunday, Sept. 13, Noon-1:00 p.m. - Book Signing at the Barnes & Noble, Lennox Town Center in Columbus, Ohio with Paolo Bacigalupi, Tobias Buckell, Sandra McDonald, Sarah Prineas, and Greg van Eekhout

* Saturday, October 10, 2009 - Y-City Writers Conference in Zanesville, Ohio - Hey, look, I'm one of the keynote speakers. There's still plenty of time to register.

* Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 22nd annual Buckeye Book Fair in Wooster, Ohio - over 100 writers and artists, all in time for the Christmas season. Profits from the Bookfair go to support libraries and literacy programs throughout Ohio, something that's much needed in this year of budget cuts!

A column in Forbes talks about leadership and detachment, and I was tracking the logic until I got to the part about coffee:

If attachment is a cardinal leadership sin, detachment is a virtue.... Attachment to power and wealth can lead to the downfall of the greatest of leaders; a sense of detachment can bring everlasting glory.

But a meaningful level of true detachment is very difficult to attain. We are physiologically wired to develop attachment to the things around us. Researchers at Ohio State University and Illinois State University recently reported finding that simply touching a coffee cup for a few seconds could create a personal attachment to it.

"The amazing part of this study is that people can become almost immediately attached to something as insignificant as a mug," wrote the study's lead author, James Wolf, in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. "By simply touching the mug and feeling it in their hands, many people begin to feel like the mug is, in fact, their mug. Once they begin to feel it is theirs, they are willing to go to greater lengths to keep it."

Here's my problem with the reasoning: if people have only been holding the mug for a few seconds, it's not the mug they're attached to -- it's the hot coffee inside it!

Wait until they've finished sipping a cup or two and then see how attached they are.

A very happy birthday to raecarson! That's her in the icon, dancing to "Thriller," which is funny, because there's nothing zombie-like about her.

Except maybe her hunger for brains.

She does like being in a room full of big, juicy brains....

*gulp*

Happy birthday, darling!

I just heard from Michael A. Burstein, aka mabfan, that the Traitor to the Crown series--originally titled The Minutemen's Witch--may now be found in its entirety in The Minuteman Library System. Make some room on that shelf, Johnny Tremain.

Michael and his wife Nomi have three-week-old baby twins, which should have kept him more than busy enough, but he followed through on this anyway. Thanks, Michael!

With a denial of service attack taking Twitter offline today, my first reaction was: "Hrm, I wonder what the government of Iran is doing to its dissidents now."

I thought, Nah, they're probably unrelated, but then I went to google news and searched "Iran elections" only to discover that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the ceremony to officially begin his second term.

I can't tell if it's paranoia or insight....

UPDATE: Maybe I'm not so paranoid after all. The attack on Twitter was accompanied by an attack on Facebook and other sites.

I haven't seen any news services linking it to Ahmadinejad's inaugeration yet, but tweeters are reporting that all the Iranian opposition facebooks pages are down, and that violence is being used to crush protesters in Iran tonight. The last time violence was used against protesters, the main source of news to the outside world was sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. So it's not far-fetched speculation.

It will be interesting to see how what journalists eventually make of it. Meanwhile, I'll be thinking about the bravery of the protesters in Iran.

While researching the new book* I came across the following image: look closely at the boy standing to the left of George Washington. That's George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson (and adopted son, after his parents' death) of the first First Couple.

The young gentleman is definitely business up front and party in the back, meaning that mullets have a long and storied tradition in America's presidential mansion all the way back to the first administration.

( The Federalist Mullet. )

*Yeah, so my "research" includes looking up pictures on wikipedia: go ahead and mock me. I give my own kids permission to start there, as long as they follow the trail of sources, even if their schoolteachers forbid it.

At least in the case of Raymond Carver. Editor Gordon Lish was to Carver what superproducer Max Martin was to the early career of Britney Spears. I had no idea that Lish changed story titles, character names, dialogue, scenes and incidents, removed backstory and subplots, added details and events, and cut Carver's stories anywhere from 9 to 78 percent in length. An article by James Campbell -- The real Raymond Carver: How an editor’s pencil created an author’s literary style – and how an author’s wife has undone it -- gives all the gory details with plenty of examples.

Campbell treats this like common knowledge...

As the world now knows, the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, including "Why Don’t You Dance?", were substantially, if not brutally, edited by Gordon Lish, who was Carver’s editor first at Esquire magazine, then at McGraw-Hill, publisher of the debut collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), and later at Alfred A. Knopf, which issued the "breakthrough" book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

...but I honestly had no idea. I suspect that many readers, including writers, who love Carver's work and have been moved and inspired by it will balk at the new version of Carver's stories published as he wrote them. Just because they're so different.

I suspect there would be less controversy if we didn't adulate writers as solitary artists, sharing the inspiration of a unique and (hopefully) brilliant individual vision, and instead viewed the whole process of bringing fiction to an audience as a collaborative effort which starts with the author and is completed by the reader and usually requires a whole other necessary set of people in between who have the opportunity to make it better. The author's name is the brand, but his or hers is not the only expert hand in the mix.

Would you want to be as good and as revered as Carver if it meant letting Lish rewrite that much for you? Would you want to take the credit, and the checks, for stories that might only be 22% of what you originally wrote?

Carver went both ways in answering that. With the publication of the original version of his book -- with the Lishless and less inspired title "Beginners" -- we can have Carver's stories both ways too.

I don't know if it's exactly a wave yet, but there's a rising tide of historical fantasy. Naomi Novik's Temeraire books started the trend, and I hope my books fill a slightly different niche, and Chris Evans' Iron Elves series is yet another cool variation.

A Darkness Forged In Fire, book 1 in the Iron Elves series, came out last year and is now available in paperback. Book 2,The Light Of Burning Shadows, was released in hardcover today.

Evans is a military historian and edits military history books (and when on earth does he find time to write?!) -- but he's also Canadian, and that gives him a different outlook on imperialism and warfare than you sometimes get from us scions of superpowers (which is something he touches on briefly in his author interview over at The Mad Hatter).

Here's what I said about the first book:

Imagine Napoleon's armies invading Middle Earth, mixing gunpowder with magic, monsters, and heroes. The Iron Elves will march across the landscape of fantasy and claim new territory. Chris Evans gives us an entertaining debut, with the promise of more great adventures to come.

And here's what I said about the new book:

Once again, Chris Evans outflanks fantasy conventions with this black powder epic of ordinary soldiers, their flawed commanders, and the extraordinary evil they must overcome. Gritty, inventive, and compelling--a fresh mixture of military, history, and fantasy elements. This second volume of the Iron Elves saga is twice as good as the first book, and that's saying something!

This is the first time I've ever blurbed two books in a row by the same author! But these books scratch my high fantasy and history itches at the same time and they're entertaining. Recommended.

A new National Bureau of Economic Research study shows that, for students who go to college, those who major in social sciences and the humanities become less religious over time, while those who major in education and business become more religious.

It doesn't seem to be strongly correlated to initial beliefs either -- those with strong religious beliefs are equally likely to go into the humanities and education. But the farther they progress, the more their religious experience diverges.

The authors suggest a reason why in the conclusion to the paper: "Most provocatively, our results suggest that Postmodernism, rather than Science, is the bete noir — the strongest antagonist — of religiosity." It's the WWF of ideas and Science just got stripped of its belt!

I find this difficult to believe without qualification (like maybe "it's only true at large research universities"), having earned a humanities degree from a small religious based liberal arts college. For one thing, pedagogically, they were still much more interested in structuralism than post-modernism. Although admittedly, that was *cough cough* a few years ago.

Still, I can foresee small religious-based liberal arts colleges all over America jettisoning their social science and humanities programs! At the very least, replacing postmoderism with anti-modernism or pre-modernism: chronologically, it's the most sensible direction left to go.

Conversely, it would be interesting to see a group of radicals establish a postmodernist school of business at a major university. Imagine a Derridean reading of spreadsheets: it might actually reveal something more useful in many annual reports. It's hard to imagine an embittered postmodernist taking a prolonged bull market seriously, or failing to call a bubble a bubble. After which, they would deconstruct the whole meaning of the word bubble.

In any case, an interesting study for those who are concerned about the role of religion in education and the effect of education on religion.