the prodigal blog

Website down: Day 5

My bank doesn't trust a payment request from a Canadian company, even though I've been making payments to them for the past five years. Despite a bunch of phone calls and assurances that this has been/will be resolved, it isn't. If it's not fixed this morning, I'll be back on the phone again.

Meanwhile, this may be a good time to freshen up the content.

Earlier this morning while I was lying awake in bed meditating, I started making a mental list of things I would include in a "Best of C.C. Finlay" volume. Not because there's one in the works -- although, publishers take note! -- but because I want to write more of the awesome stuff and less of the crap people hate only slightly less awesome stuff.

Maybe it's kind of pathetic a testament to my virtuoso range, but two of the things I would include in a "best of" volume are from the 2008 SFWA elections, my "I come not to rip [Name Withheld] but to praise him" post in the message board election debates and The Secret Life of Walter Burty blog post. (BTW, for those of you who aren't writers, SFWA is the sound that deadlines make when they fly past you. You're welcome.) The former post was as transitory as an election promise -- wiser people than me destroyed all evidence that incident ever happened deleted the rancorous debates after the election so the organization could move on. But I reread the latter again this morning and think it holds up pretty well as a piece of entertainment. Since SFWA's mission is to help writers write better, the whole episode stands as a testament to the usefulness of the organization. Go SFWA! (I think I just heard a deadline pass...)

The point is that the SFWA elections inspired me to act like a jerk write some good material because I was so caught up in the immediacy of events. That feeling of urgency, that drive to write something right now because it really matters, makes me write better. These days I find myself looking for someone else to pick on like the bully I apparently am that same sense of urgency and engagement, that immediate inspired spark, as I work on the new big novel project. So that's what I learned about being awesome this morning. Well, that and the fact that I might as well get up, make some coffee, and write for an hour instead of trying to fall back asleep. Writing for an hour -- now that would have been awesome!

Oh, and for the record, the font of inspiration is Courier. Courier takes you places.

There's no need to thank me for that little writing tip. Really.

...I point them to things like the journal entry I saw today on Patrice Sarath's website.

(And by the way, google alerts make ego-googling so easy it's almost impossible not to do it -- the ego comes straight to my mailbox! Almost as though I were actually the center of the information universe! I'm not too ashamed to admit it.)

Patrice has two books out from Ace, Gordath Wood and Red Gold Bridge. While she's working on the third book, she mentions a lesson she learned from my writing:

I need to give the reader a sense that the world goes on when the book is closed. The best modern example I can give of that is Charles Coleman Finlay’s Democracy of Trolls, which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and later was expanded into a novel. In the novella, there’s one scene that expands the simple story into a small part of a greater whole. I had such a feeling of depth, as if I was peering through a keyhole at a huge tapestry, with a sense of a greater world behind the door.

I knew at once that Finlay knew everything he needed to about his world, and chose to tell us only this story, at this time.

That’s what I want.

Usually when I'm held up as an example, it's as a bad example: "For God's sake, don't do what Finlay did!" Okay, so that happened when I was four years old and walked down the middle ailse of the church with no pants. Hey, I had only figured out half of the tasks involved in going to the bathroom by myself, but I like to think it was the more important half: step 1, take down pants. Forty years later I'm still working on the "put the lid up, put the lid down" thing. Still, the point is, some scars stick with you forever.

But, getting back to Patrice -- yeah, always hinting that the story is bigger than the margins of the page, that's something I try to do. It's part of my attraction to writing series, because there is always another story beyond the margins of the page.

Thanks to google, I can point to Patrice's blog and tell my family that -- despite making pie for dinner, displaying questionable driving decisions, and liking the Legion of Super-Heroes more than X-men -- I am capable of being a good example.

If you prefer the bad examples, here's some Warren Zevon:

2009. It was the best of years; it was the worst of years.

At the end of every year, I traditionally go back and look over my writing accomplishments. By any measure, 2009 was my best year yet: three novels published (The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, The Demon Redcoat), my first starred review in Publisher's Weekly, and a profile piece in Publisher's Weekly; three award nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon; two new stories published, two stories reprinted including one in a Year's Best and one in an internationally noticed anthology, and a new translation into Czech; plus a film made out of one of my short stories.

Heck, somebody even made Proctor Brown and all the other Traitor to the Crown characters into gaming figures!

Throw in my first trip to New York's ComicCon, a repeat visit to Readercon where I got to give a presentation on the genre roots of American literature (something I can blather on about much too long), another Blue Heaven workshop, interviews in some new venues, and a chance to meet lots of readers at book signings for the new books, and what's not to love?

Well. 2009 is the first year in a decade that I haven't sold any new fiction. That's what's not to love!

Not one story. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. You can't sell anything if you don't send anything out and I didn't send anything out. I didn't even realize it until the past couple weeks.

What the hell, right?

Sure, I've been writing all year. I finished first drafts of a couple new stories, a big chunk of a new Proctor and Deborah novel, and have done solid work on the new sekrit fantasy project. But after finishing three books in 18 months, I feel overwhelming lameness for not completing another novel this past year. Especially since it was my goal to have another one done by the end of December. On the other hand, I've learned a lot by seeing readers' reactions to the Traitor to the Crown series, especially the things that didn't work the way I expected them to: being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I think that's invaluable. But -- as is entirely self-evident -- if you don't send work out, no one's ever going to read it.

So I feel a lot of pressure to be more submissive in 2010! Wait, that doesn't sound right... More submitful? Overmit? I dunno. But you get the picture. One of my writing traditions has been to start a new story at midnight on New Years. Tonight I think I'll stay home and get one ready to go out in the mail instead.

Luckily, raecarson is on board with the plan. (This is why I married another writer.)

If there's any time left over, I've got book proposals to work on too.

Farewell, 2009. Here's to 2010. Happy new year, everyone! May it be a good one for all of you.

As he promised in the comments on a previous post, Andy McMaster of Newcastle upon Tyne has turned Proctor and Deborah and the other characters from Traitor to the Crown into gaming figures!

You can see the whole thing at Andy's blog: http://blog.belisarius.org.uk/2009/12/life-liberty-and-pursuit-of-magic.html. He rewrites the story a bit -- an alternate history of a secret history!

Here's a taste of his work -- if you like the taste of rotting flesh: the zombies attack.

Science comedy from youtube. I'm thankful I have friends who get this. Happy Thanksgiving Day, all.

You can try to kill James Lowder's zombie anthologies but they keep coming back. Just like the undead. The new one is The Best of All Flesh. It's the super-zombie of zombie anthologies, methed up on death and ready to eat your brains.

If you missed the earlier All Flesh books, you can make up for it now with this collection of the best in the series. With stories by tobias_buckell, jimhines, scottedelman, and all the other folks you can see listed on the back cover below. Including yours truly.



The next time I blog I ought to say something about the story that's reprinted in here. "Fading Quayle, Dancing Quayle" is, among other things, a zombie love story. Because everyone deserves a chance at love, even zombies. And I should mention the great email I got about the story last year from Leonard Richardson. The book goes on sale next week, so if I haven't said something about it by then, remind me.

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.