BiFrost's Trumpet

Connections to the Things that Connect Us

2012-01-28T12:37:00.000-08:00

My iPod tried asking out a woman we met on the street this week.

I was driving around my hometown of Pasadena, California, running errands at the time. We were stopped at a red light. I had my iPod hooked up so it could play through my car's stereo. I've started learning Korean, so I had the Korean language track playing.

While waiting for the light to change, an attractive Asian woman started crossing the street from my right. Just as she was even with my open driver's side window, my iPod said:

"Onul chonyoge chowa antushigesso yo?"

The woman spun in the middle of the street toward me, a shocked expression on her face. I stared back at her, not making the connection between her look of surprise and my iPod asking, in Korean, "Won't you eat with me tonight?"

Then, the English voice on the Korean learning track said, "Now say, 'Ok. At what time?'"

Maybe my iPod was trying to prompt her reply. It didn't work. When she heard the English voice she laughed. She nodded at me with a smile and continued on her way.

Good try, iPod. Better than I've ever done with someone I didn't know. Better luck next time.

I saw something similar on television this week. The Big Bang Theory is one of my favorite shows. I'm reminded of me and my friends in High School when I watch it. If asked, I would put myself somewhere between Sheldon and Leonard as far as my nerdiness goes.

Raj got a new iPhone this week on the show. And he fell in love with Siri, the "intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator" that comes installed on the new version of the phone. You ask it a question and it gives you an answer. Raj could talk to Siri the way he couldn't normally talk to a live woman (at least not unless he's been drinking).

At one point, Raj asked, "Will you call me 'Sexy'?" Siri responded, in her computerized voice, "Yes, I will... Sexy."

And it will do it, too. We tried in our office. Several of us were talking and laughing about the episode when one of us called over a young lady who owned the new iPhone to see if it would really do it.

"Tell me I'm sexy," the young lady whispered into the iPhone's display. I wondered, Does the iPhone come with an app to help people that had self-esteem issues? It probably does.

"I don't understand," Siri replied. "'Tell me I'm sexy.'" Maybe Siri needed some encouragement, too.

I leaned over to her. "I think you need say it differently. Raj said, "Call me, 'Sexy'."

"I don't understand," Siri said. "Raj said, 'Call me, "Sexy"?'" Maybe she didn't want her and Raj's relationship to be open yet.

The young woman rephrased her request, and Siri caught on. Siri first informed her that she hadn't updated her owner profile with her name. She scrolled instructions on the screen on how to do that. Then the owner needed to tell Siri how she wanted to be identified.

"Hey, Siri... Who am I?" she asked.

"Is there something you want, Sexy?" came Siri's obedient request.

I don't have a smartphone yet. I want one, though. I remember the first time I saw one in action I wanted one.

It was at Comic-Con, the largest comic book convention in the United States, which takes place in San Diego each July. I had met a number of fellow artists and writers that I had only known from online before. The dealers floor was closing down. There was a dozen of us standing on the sidewalk, talking. We decided we would all have dinner together.

We went the rounds of everyone's preferences and nutritional restrictions, and decided that we needed to find a Mexican restaurant that had a vegetarian menu that was within walking distance of the convention center that didn't require reservations for a party our size. Yeah.

I was just starting to think that I'd run down to Horton Plaza and get a burger on my own when one of our company pulled out her iPhone. It was the first time I had seen one. She bent over her screen and started typing something out. In a moment she announced she found a place, four blocks up and two over, that matched all our criteria. At my exclamation of surprise she showed me the map her phone was giving her to place.

After a ten minute walk and a fifteen minute wait, we were all seated and placing our orders, which included tofu burritos. Cool.

I feel an attachment to my computers. I have to take my Macbook with me wherever I go. When I'm asked why, my reply is something like, "Just in case." So far no one has gone on to ask, "Just in case... What?"

Just in case we're trapped in an elevator and our cell phones don't work BUT there happens to be an unprotected wifi hotspot on the floor just outside, I can send an email to someone to save our lives, how about THAT? Huh?

Oh, yeah... You can do that with your iPhone, too, huh?

The real reason I take my Macbook with me is because... It carries my dreams. Just like my iMac back home. I'd carry it with me too, if I could. All my stories are on it. All my drafts and final submissions. My plans for my novel. My finances. Everything I want to keep track of.

I figure if (Knock wood that it doesn't) something were to happen to my apartment while I'm gone and my beloved iMac were lost forever, my valiant little Macbook would be by my side to help me carry on with all the important things in life.

It's not just the "data." I keep all that backed up, daily, on my iPod, as well as a USB stick drive. The machines themselves have personalities now. Like the way my iMac will sometimes "accidently" bring up iTunes when I've been writing for a long time to tell me it wants to play. Yeah, you can say that the keystroke commands for saving a file and for bringing up my music player are close together, and that it's just the slip of some tired fingers. But I know better than that. Every morning, I stroke the keys, and the words flow from my brain, down my arm and into its display and storage unit.

I can't go into greater detail. What goes on between a man and his computer should stay there.

One of the worse moments of my life was last August, in Reno, Nevada. I was there attending "Renovation," the Sixty-Seventh World Science Fiction Convention, or "WorldCon." On my second morning there I went to open my Macbook to start my daily writing session.

It started to boot, then the screen flickered. I saw an icon of a bomb with a fuse. Not good. The screen went black. It died.

If you had placed me on a desert island with a day's supply of water, I would not have felt more desperate. I had backed up my work from the previous day, but... What was I going to do? How was I going to write today? With a pen and paper? Why not ask me to get back home to Pasadena in a covered wagon while your at it?

I began to wonder If I had done something? Should I have shut it down last night? Had I not packed it carefully enough for the drive up? Was my trusted friend gone for good?

Fortunately, one of my smartphone carrying friends did a search. There was an Apple Store on the outskirts of Reno, south of the convention center. A fifteen minute drive down. A ten minute consultation with a genius. They carried my Macbook into the back. No hospital waiting room felt so tense.

It was good news. A small clip holding a wire in place on the power source had snapped, allowing the wire to come loose. It was something they had corrected on later models. They considered it a warranty issue. It was fixed for free.

I carried my Macbook back to my car and set it on the front seat. I drove back over to the Starbucks where I had left my smartphone possessing friend. While waiting for her come out, I gently rubbed the brushed aluminum cover of my Macbook.

"Hey, buddy... Glad you're doing OK." My friend came out of Starbucks just then. I put my Macbook back in my bag.

I wasn't embarrassed or anything. It's just that... It was a private moment. Right?

Letting the Ghosts Run Free

2012-01-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

I don't sleep very well. I used to sleep like a log. Once, a few years after college, my roommate had to break down our apartment door when he came home from his waiter job after I mistakenly locked it in such a way that he couldn't let himself in. After standing under my window and yelling at me to wake up and pounding on the front door, he finally just kicked the door hit, breaking the flip latch I had set when I got home from my job. When he stormed into my bedroom, I was happily snoring away, oblivious to the problem I had caused.

I don't sleep like that any more. Part of it is age. If I get a good six hours of sleep, and by "good" I mean I only wake up once before falling back to sleep, I count myself lucky. Recently, though, it has been worse. And it's because I keep getting this feeling that there is someone else in the apartment with me.

It started after I reorganized my apartment. Over the course of two weekends, during which I threw out about eight trash bags and four or five boxes of junk, as well as my old sofa, replacing it with something cushy I bought from Ikea, my place has been transformed. I used to have pathways carved through the stacks of stuff allowing me to get to the places I needed to get: my bed, my bathroom, the kitchen, the TV. Now I can walk in any direction I like without any worry about bumping into anything or knocking something over. It's really something else.

I thought that this was the root of my recent insomnia. The place didn't feel like my place any more. It certainly wasn't the place I had been used to living in for almost twenty years. It was like visiting some family member and being put up in the guest room. One thing I noticed, in my bedroom's current configuration I can look through the bedroom door into the living room, something I couldn't do previously. I kept snapping awake in the middle of the night. My eyes would dart to the open doorway, expecting to see... Someone, standing there watching me. One night, the certainty that someone else was there was so great that I turned on a nightlight in living room and left it on all night. First time I'd done that in decades.

Then I remembered something my great-aunt once told me and I began to wonder... Could it be, in my apartment's newly organized state, the ghosts were being allowed to run free in my place...?

My great-aunt Isolene was my grandfather's last living sibling when I moved in with him a few years after returning to California. She lived in Pasadena, like my grandfather, in a retirement apartment on Villa, between Los Robles and Lake. I would drive her around and help her run errands while I was living with Pops, which is what we called my Mom's Dad.

"This is a retirement community," Isolene would tell me in her Belizean accent, every time I brought her home from cashing her social security check and buying her groceries. "I only pay ninety-two dollars a month for living here, because I am old. You could not live here, because you are too young yet." Part of the routine of living there was that you had to flip a little panel on your front door every morning when you woke up to show the caretakers of the place that you were alive. If the panel wasn't flipped, someone would come with keys to open your door to see if you were all right.

My Aunt Isolene's apartment was a cluttered place. It wasn't dusty or dirty. She kept it clean. But there were boxes and bags of things sitting on every chair and couch. It was a maze of stuff. You would have to walk around one stack of boxes, then dodge a chair with paper grocery bags stuffed to their top edge, just to get to her bedroom and her bathroom beyond it. More than once I bumped into one of these towers of junk and was forced to catch it to keep it from spilling its contents to the floor.

One time I wasn't so lucky. It was after putting her cans of Chicken & Rice soup away, on the uppermost shelf. This was at her insistence, even though she was about four foot eleven when she stood on her tip-toes. I never figured out how she got her cans of soup down when I wasn't there to help her. I was turning around to put the paper bags away when I ran right into one of her kitchen chairs that had two or three paper bags on it. Everything toppled to the ground and spilled all over.

"Oh, oh... Help me, hon!" Isolene lowered herself painfully to her knees to scoop the stuff up. I quickly joined her. "No, no, no..." She reached out to take some papers from me that I was shoving back into the nearest bag. "Here, here... It goes in this one, hon."

It was then, for the first time, I got a good look at what had been in the bags I had knocked over. Photographs. Really old photographs. The newest ones looked like they were taken in the fifties or sixties. Some looked like they may have been taken by some of the earliest cameras ever made.

And I recognized no one in any of the pictures. Furthermore, I couldn't see any connection the people in the photos could have with my family. The one that caught me eye showed a black couple; the man was wearing an army uniform that looked it it was from World War Two and the woman was wearing a white dress, with a pillbox hat that had that a white rose on its brim. The photo behind it was of a Chinese family. The young men were wearing heavy coats, buttoned to their necks. The woman was wearing a dowager princes style gown while seated on a heavily brocaded sofa. The photo felt like it would crumble to dust at any moment and had to have been forty years old at the time.

"Isolene...?" I watched my aunt closely as she organized the photos, putting them back into the smaller paper bags they had been in. "Who are these people?"

"I don't know," she answers. "These belonged to people that used to live here."

"What happened to them?"

"They died." She shrugged, like it was a common occurrence. "When no one came to get them or their things, I take it. Some of it. Like this..." She lifted a photo album, worn along its edges with a broken clasp, to show me before sticking it back into the bag.

I looked around at all the bags of things there, filling her place. It was a bit creepy. It was sad, too.

"Isolene...?" My aunt started to struggle to her feet. I stood, helped her up and righted the chair as I spoke to her. "I've got some free time today... How about I help you... Put this stuff away or something...? Give yourself more room..."

"Oh, no!" Isolene dropped the last bag on top of the others. She pushed it down to make it stay, then pushed the chair back into the kitchen table, which was also piled high with bags and boxes, to lock the bags in place. "If you did that, then they might come to get me!"

"Who?"

"The people who these belong to, hon."

"But... You said they were dead."

"I know..." She reached out and patted me on the air, as if I had just given evidence of being young and foolish. "But they may come back. They may come back for their things. That's why I keep it like this, hon. So if they do come, they they get lost amongst it all and they won't bother me."

I looked over her head at the stuff in her place. "It really IS a maze," I remember thinking. If she was so afraid of these ghosts coming after her, I wondered, then why collect it in the first place?

I never did ask my aunt that question. A few years later Pops died from a lung condition that might have stemmed from his working for years for a large air conditioning manufacturer. I remember people telling him he might have a case for suing them, but he refused to consider it. "They gave me a job when I needed one," he'd reply gruffly. "I was grateful for it then, and I won't 'done' them now."

Isolene, a diabetic, stopped taking care of herself as well as she used to. She moved in with Pop's widow, even though she hated the woman, once he was gone. Her and all that stuff. She lost a leg from gangrene and died shortly after.

I thought about what Isolene had told me for the first time in years recently. It was while I was laying in bed, listening to the traffic passing on Del Mar in the middle of the night. While I was trying to figure out if the creaking sound I'd just heard was from the next apartment, or from my living room. I figured if it was Isolene come back, looking for her lost stuff, then I should be OK. After all, I was the one who put the Chicken & Rice soup on her topmost shelf for her, right?

"Chicken & Rice... That's nice." Hearing her say that in my memory, as she had all the times I pulled the cans from the shopping bags, I turned over and finally dozed off.

Next time I go to the store, maybe I should buy a can of that soup and put it on the top shelf. Just in case.

Goals for the New Year

2012-01-14T11:18:00.000-08:00

It may be a little late, two weeks into the new year, but I'm using my first blog entry of 2012 to put out what my goals for this year will be.

First, I need to tell you that 2011 was a very, very good year for me. Unlike most people, I was sorry to see it go. I'm hoping to build upon my successes from last year in 2012. To that end, I've selected the following as the things I would most like to do this year.

Half a Million Words

By the end of 2011 I had written 495,892 words. I keep track of my daily word count in a spreadsheet, along with the time spent writing and the project I'm working on. It wasn't until two or three days before the end of the year I noticed that I was that close to half a million words. With all the holiday stuff going on, I wasn't able to schedule any extra time to reach that milestone. So I decided to make it my goal for this year. It comes to about 1,400 words a day, which is a bit more than my previous daily goal of a thousand words. Obviously I tended to go past my daily minimum on a regular basis last year to be so close. I think it's a very doable goal.

Why pick this as a goal? Why not say I want to sell a dozen stories this year, or that I want to get my novel published before 2012 ends? Those are things I want to do, that I'm striving to do, but they are also goals that rely on other people in order to achieve. One of the qualities I want in my New Year's resolutions is to make it something I can do on my own. Focus on my own behavior. Making sure I sit down every day and write a certain amount is entirely within my control and is the basis of achieving those other ends.

A Blog Entry a Week

This one will be harder. I was hoping to do this last year, but fell short. I've already missed the first two weeks of this year as it is. But that's not a reason to not give it a try. A record of 50 "wins" with only two "losses" by the end of the year would be a good one.

One of the problem I have with writing these blogs is my uncertainty over who might be reading them. It feels a log like stuffing a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea. Another is figuring out what my purpose is in doing it. "Everyone" says that, as a writer, I need to develop my online presence. I need to use social media to build an audience. I'm not sure what that means. I'm still trying to get published on a consistent basis. For now, I'm operating on the "Fake it until I figure it out" mode of thought. As soon as I 'get' what I'm trying to do, I'll let you know.

Submit One New Story Each Month

Another hard one that I've failed to achieve in the past. But as with blogging, I'm going to give it another try.

I want to be faster as a writer. I'm not. It takes me weeks to develop an idea to the point where I have enough to start writing about it. It will take me two or three drafts, or more, to figure out what I'm trying to say and the best way to say it. This frustrates me. I remember something I once heard J. Michael Straczynski once said, that he strove to be faster than those writers better than him, and better than those writers faster than him. I'd like to shoot for something like that, too.

I have looked at my process in this light and I think I've come up with something of a solution. At least a way of tackling the problem. What I used to do was work on something until it was complete. Get the idea. Develop it. Write it. Rewrite it. Submit. I would go on to the next thing.

What I'm trying to do now is figure out how to keep several projects moving along at the same time. This last couple of weeks I wrote out the beginnings of a couple of story ideas I've had in my mind for a while. At the same time I'm writing the third draft of the opening of my novel. In between I'm rewriting a draft of another story I finished some time ago to get it ready to submit by the end of this month. It's a bit like herding cats, but I'm trying to keep a bunch of things moving forward in all their different stages at the same time. That way there will always be something new to work on and something I've worked on ready to finish and send out. Check back here to see if it works.

I Want to Protest Something

Everyone is doing it these days. Time magazine even named the Protestor their Person of the Year for 2011. It seems like something to do.

Seriously, though, there is a lot of stuff I dislike about how things are in this world. I grew up in the sixties and yet I've never gone out and expressed my displeasure publicly over something. Watching all that has happened this year, and listening to the comments of other people sitting on the sidelines with me, makes me think that I need to take more of a stand from time to time.

I Want to Volunteer to do Something

This is the flip side of wanting to protest something. It's easy to point at something and say, "that's wrong." It's harder to figure out what to do and do it. The Occupy movement is a good example of this. Do I think things are unfair? Yes. Do I think the wrong people are getting the blame, and that people more responsible for the problems are reaping the benefits? I think there is truth to that. Do I empathize with the people who are camping out and marching and carrying the signs that express these sentiments. Definitely.

Do I think it will make a difference? That is where uncertainty creeps in. In a way it's a lot like having an idea for a story and being a writer. I've met so many people who have said they had a great idea for a story, but were worried about how to protect it so no one else would steal it. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Actually, if you bought a dozen ideas for a dime you were overcharged. It's only when you convert that idea into something concrete, and work out whatever flaws it might have, that it becomes something of value. It turns into something that can move other people, to laughter or tears, and maybe get them to do something, like buy the next thing you write.

I don't want to just be someone who says, "I don't like this." I want to be someone who does something to fix it. I used to do things like this as a kid. I want to try it again as an adult.

I'm going to leave it there for now. There are other things I want to do: Save more money. Sell more stories. Go to WorldCon in Chicago and Comic-Con in San Diego. As well as more personal things. But they are all things I've done before, or which are already part of the schema of my life. The ones above are about changes I want to make in my doing that I think I need to do in order to get to where I want to be.

2011 was a really good year, I thought. I want 2012 to be even better. As I posted on Facebook on New Years, I'm looking at 2012 as being something of a roller coaster ride. We've just begun the long climb up. I'd like to see everyone stepping off at the end year, dizzy and giggling, wiping our brows and saying on a laugh, "Let's do that again!"

Happy New Year Everyone!

The Three "People" in a Relationship

2011-11-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about relationships a lot recently. I've kinda had to since I actually have one, a romantic relationship, for the first time in... A while, let's say. I came up with a way of thinking about them which I hadn't heard elsewhere before. I decided to share it here.

Whenever you are in a relationship with someone there are actually three "people" involved.

The first one is "You." This is the entity you know the most about. You know what "You" wants. You know what "You" is feeling. You know when "You" is lying or telling the truth. Presumably you have the greatest control over "You's" actions, but we all know that sometimes "You" just seems to do things without thinking. When "You" does screw up, you are the one responsible to cleaning up the mess (even while trying to defend "You," giving all the reasons and rationalizations as to why it really wasn't "You's" fault.

The second entity is "The Other Person." This is the individual that has sparked your interest. The one that you think about most often, in an objective sense. The one you wonder about what they are doing "right now," and whether or not they are obsessing over you as much as you seem to be over them. "The Other Person," will seem to have the greatest power in the relationship to "You" sometimes. They can make you giddy with a touch or a smile. They can twist your insides into knots if they don't reply to that message you sent them until the next day. "The Other Person" will give you feedback about what they are thinking and feeling, but "You" will filter it through your experiences with previous "Other Persons" and through your own mental filters to come up with an answer as to what this "Other Person" really means.

Simple enough so far. "You" and the "Other Person." But there is a third "person" that we don't think about. At least I didn't think about until recently.

"Us" is part of this relationship as well. "Us" is the third entity, a living breathing creature, that exists between "You" and the "Other Person." "Us" is made up of what "You" and the "Other Person" want or expect out of the relationship. "Us" is also made up of what "You" and the "Other Person" put into it.

It's easy to overlook "Us." "Us" is invisible for the most part. If something goes wrong it is the "Other Person" we see standing in front of us. At such times we look right through "Us" and put everything on the "Other Person."

But "Us" is the most important of the three entities in a way. It's to create "Us" that "You" and the "Other Person" got together. And "Us" can't speak for itself. "You" have to feel whether or not "Us" is healthy. The "Other Person" will also tell "You" how it thinks "Us" is doing. Is it getting everything the two of you are supposed to be giving it? Is it nourishing the two of you the way you want it to?

There will be times that what is good for "You" and what is good for "Us" will be two different things. This happens. This is when "You" and the "Other Person" let each other know what you think "Us" needs and what you can give. It's a type of negotiation. And just like in almost any other kind of negotiation, it's good to have that third party there. You let "Us" decide what is fair. You'll be able to tell by how well it makes you feel in return. "You" and the "Other Person" will both come out feeling better for it.

Sometimes, for some people, "Us" isn't a kind nor gentle creature. It will demand from "You" more than you can or are willing to give, without giving anything in return. Sometimes, for some people, just having "Us" there is so important that we throw everything "You" has into it, getting so lost that the relationship becomes just the "Other Person" and "Us." Not good. If this happens, then "You" and the "Other Person" either need to retrain "Us" or let "Us" die and move on. If it helps, you can blame it on how "Us" behaved.

This is how "Us" makes relationships easier to deal with. By giving you that third "person" it can help you see and hear the "Other Person" more clearly. You can both tell each other what "Us" needs and help each other to provide that. "Us" becomes the project you are working on together. This is better than "You" and the "Other Person" feeling like you're trying to reshape each other or tell each other what to do.

This may sound somewhat simplistic. As I write this, I'm thinking that everyone out there will say something like, "well, duh... You're only now figuring that out?" My level of romantic experiences is quite low compared to others my age.

But I've also thought, recently, that experience in romance might not mean all that much. Each person you meet is different and unique. That means the potential "Us" you can create with them will also be different and unique, responding to stimuli differently than with someone else. I know I've had the experience, even with my limited history, of applying something I "learned" from one relationship to another and having it go completely wrong.

What does matter is seeing who it is you're dealing with. "Us" will tell you more about who the "Other Person" is than the "Other Person" can. Think about it: How much do "You" tell the "Other Person" about who you are, especially in the beginning? But it's easier to show who you are to "Us" and then "Us" will let the "Other Person" know. "Us" will be there by your side when you finally show "You" to the "Other Person." And if you've been treating "Us" well, then the "Other Person" might say something like, "Oh, I knew that. It's why I'm with you."

Remember to thank "Us" when that happens. They'll appreciate it.

Searching for Starlight

2011-09-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with a song I heard online recently. It's called "Starlight." It's written and sung by a Japanese singer named Miho Fukuhara. Here's a link to the youtube video of the song in the title: Starlight. Please, take a look at it.

As people familiar with me already know, and anyone who follows my Twitter feed can tell, I'm interesting in Japanese culture and history. I can't remember how I came across the song, though it turns about by coincidence that someone from my language study group has a connection to it. I do know that I really love Ms. Fukuhara's voice, I enjoy the song's melody, and I appreciated seeing some of the lyrics in Japanese put into the video. It was how I came part of the refrain of the song, which became my favorite line:

せめて君を強く抱きたい。In Romanji, or latin characters, it reads, "Semete kimi wo tsuyoku dakitai."

"At the very least I want to hold you close."

That's actually an interpretation of the lyric, my initial one. If translated literally, word for word, the line is, "At the very least, you, strongly, I want to embrace." In English we don't often use the adverb, "strongly," to describe an embrace. We say things like, "hold you close," or "hold you tight." I recognized this immediately and shifted the words around in my head. The meaning is a strong one, and is very beautifully expressed in Japanese. Playing around with this line in my head, coupled with the discovery that there didn't seem to be an English translation online, lead me to the decision to translate the entire song into English.

I started by translating the lines floating in the video, pausing and translating them as I went along. That was pretty easy. Next, I tried listening to the song, writing down what I thought I heard and then looking up the words in a Japanese-English dictionary.

I immediately started having problems. Within the first two lines in fact:

君は行くんだね？　そう決めたんだね？

夕日よりもう赤い空もえる場所へ

kimi ha ikunda ne? sou kimetanda ne?

yuuhi yori mou akai sora moeru basho he.

You will go, won't you? You've decided to, haven't you?

More than the setting setting sun, a red sky "moeru" place.

I used the Japanese word, "moeru," in the sentence above because there are more than one word with that pronunciation. Japanese has 1/3 fewer phonemes, or sounds used to make words, compared to English. The word, "The," for instance is made up of two phonemes: the "th" sound and the "uh" sound that follows it. Because of this, Japanese has a lot of words that sound alike but have different meanings.

When I looked up the word, "moeru," both of the words I found sounded like they could fit. One was "to burn," or "to be fired up." The other was "to burst or sprout," with a secondary meaning of, "to have a crush, to be infatuated."

Without the Kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese, I couldn't tell which of the words were being used. It gave me a choice of these two lines for the place the person the song was being sung to was headed:

"To a place more enticing that the red sky of sunset."

"To a place that burns more than the red sky of sunset."

Operating under the assumption that this was something of a love song, I picked the line for an enticing place and carried on.

The next line to give me trouble was this one:

夜空をさくせんとうきのあかり

君に生きてほしいと願うよ。

Yozora wo saku sentouki no akari

kimi ni ikite hoshii to negau yo.

The second line was easy, "My wish is that I want you to live." This seemed a odd line for a love song, but OK... The first line was more of a problem. "Yozora wo saku," means, "to tear apart the night sky." The last word, "akari," means "lamp" or "glow," the light from some object.

"Sentouki," was the word stumping me. I was pretty sure I was hearing it correctly, but my dictionary gave the definition of "sentouki" as "fighter plane." Yeah... Fighter plane. A plane the military uses to drop bombs on things.

"Tearing the night sky with the light of a fighter plane..." Hmm. Didn't sound much like a line from a love song.

It was at this point I sought help from a friend of mine that worked as an interpreter in Japan, translating Japanese and Korean for businesses. She confirmed the word was "sentouki" or "fighter plane." She went on to tell me that Japanese culture, particularly pop culture, will use technological devices as metaphors. For instance, if I'm understanding her correctly, a line about a cell phone in a song could be used as a metaphor for the desire to overcome the distance between you and a loved one.

My friend also told me something I didn't know about the song; apparently it was written in response to the rising number of young people committing suicide in that country. It's an appeal to be strong and resist the desire to do so.

Armed with this information, as well as a Japanese website that had the lyrics written in Kanji, I carried on. From the website I also learned that the "moeru" being used in the song was for "burning." This made more sense in a song about suicide.

I finished a literal translation of the song. I found myself wanting to do more at that point. Instead of merely writing down what the words of the song meant, I wanted to interpret the song into English. While at the World Science Fiction convention in Reno this year (Renovation or WorldCon 69) I attended a panel about Japanese science fiction being imported into the United States. One of the panelist offered her opinion that the interpreters of these works were as much artists as the stories' original authors. They were more like collaborators. Having watched some Japanese anime where I could tell the subtitles missed some subtle point in what was being said, I could well agree with this opinion.

Returning to my literal translation, I worked on the refrain first. It would be repeated throughout the song and having it done from the beginning would take care a good chunk of territory, so to speak. But it would also set the tone for the rest of the song as well.

Here's the refrain:

過ちも欲望も何でも繰り返してしまう。

それでも今生きているのなら

せめて君を強く抱きたい。

Ayamachi mo yokubou mo nandemo kurikaeshite shimau.

Sore de mo ima ikiteiru no nara

semete kimi wo tsuyoku dakitai.

Both indiscretions and desires we unfortunately keep repeating

But with that, if I am to live,

At the very least I want to hold you close.

I began reconsidering the last line, the part of the refrain that I was able to understand when I first heard the song. While "at the very least I want to hold you close," was a more natural translation of the line itself. With my new understanding that this song was directed to people whom the singer wanted to be strong and resist the temptation they were feeling made me think that a more literal translation was better. I began to think that the line in Japanese, "tsuyoku dakitai" or "I want to hold you strongly" might have a double meaning. A sense of, "I want to hold you as close to me as I can" and "I want you to feel the strength in me I want you to have."

It was also at this point that my concept of the second line of the refrain changed. "Sore de mo ima ikiteiru no nara," doesn't contain any subject or topic. This is something that differentiates Japanese from English. If you and I am talking about my plans, which include going to the store, I may tell you, "I will go to the store." I wouldn't just say, "Will go to the store." You might think that I was asking if you were going to the store, too. It’s more common in Japanese for someone to say the equivalent of, “Will go to the store,” with everyone understanding that I’m referring to myself.

It now occurred to me that I might be making an incorrect assumption. "Sore de mo ikiteiru no nara" could mean, "If I'm to live" or "If I'm to continue living." But it could just as easily mean, "If you are to live" or "If you are to continue living." Returning to the sense of appeal that I now thought the song had, this change in whom the line was speaking of was much more important.

After a few tries, this is what I came up with for the refrain:

So many times, we repeat the same desires, we repeat the same mistakes.

And yet, while you live right now,

At the very least, I want to hold you with all my strength.

With this change in the interpretation of the refrain, I could also now sense a resignation in the song. "You will go, won't you? You've decided, haven't you?" The opening lines of the song indicate a situation where it's too late to change the person's mind. Other lines reinforced this sense of being too late.

守りたい。守れない。

Mamoritai. Mamorenai.

I want to protect you. I can't protect you.

過ちが怖いから何も選べずに立ち尽くす。

そうだから今泣いてしまうのなら

せめて君を強く抱きたい。

Ayamachi ga kowai kara nanimo erabezu ni tachitsukusu

sou dakara ima naiteshimau no nara

semete kimi wo tsuyoku dakitai.

Because mistakes are scary, one stands there without choosing anything

So, because of that, if I'm to cry for you now

At the very least, I want to hold you close.

This sense of resignation is something I don't think you'd see in a song written by an American about the same topic. At least, I don't recall sensing such a feeling in any song or story about suicide I can remember. It does give the song a poignancy for me. Here was someone who thinks it's too late, but is going to do what they can to change the person's mind.

And this brings me to one last point I noticed about the song. The title of the song is "Starlight." And yet, there is no mention of stars or their light anywhere in the piece. We hear about the night sky, but it is being torn apart by the light of a fighter jet. We hear about the sunset, a precursor to the night sky when the stars are out, but the sun still burns and blocks the stars from view.

I think starlight represents some form of hope in the song. It's faint at the point the singer chooses to sing about. It's blocked out by the fiery feelings that are driving the person the song is for to do what he/she is about to do. It's not powerful enough to change the direction there are going in, so something more powerful and immediate, like a jet streaking through the sky, is needed.

But the stars and their light are there. All the time. Even when we can't see them. And it's their eternal presence the singer wants to point to as a reason for carrying on. Even if we think it might already be too late.

I enjoyed the process of translating this song into English a great deal. It has made this song one of my favorites. I now offer you the interpretation I came up with. If you enjoy it half as much as I did writing it, I will be pleased.

Starlight

You've decided to go, I can see it in your eyes

To a place that burns brighter than sunset's blood red skies.

You don't know, you still don't know

How the people you leave will cry after you go.

So many times, we repeat the same desires, we repeat the same mistakes.

And yet, while you live right now

At the very least, I want to hold you with all my strength.

The unloved children, who do you think they'll love?

The children that never loved, who do you think they'll believe?

I stand here and do nothing, so scared of making a mistake

So, if I'm to cry for you because of that

At the very least, I want to hold you with all my strength.

So many times, we repeat the same desires, we repeat the same mistakes.

And yet, to have you live from now

At the very least, I want to hold you with all my strength.

I would tear apart the night with a brilliant, burning light

If I could have my wish that you just stay alive.

I want to protect you. I can't protect you.

I just can't see the right thing to do.

All I can say is that I still love you so.

I want to hold you... hold you...

So many times, we repeat the same desires, we repeat the same mistakes.

And yet, while you live right now

At the very least, I want to hold you with all my strength.

I want to hold you with all my strength.

I want there to be strength.

I want to hold you with all my strength.

I want there to be strength.

The Unghat

2011-08-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

I had planned on writing a blog entry for each day I was in Reno for WorldCon. Unfortunately, my laptop suffered some hard drive problems and I was unable to use it for a couple of days. A shout out of thanks to the crew at the Apple Store in Reno for getting it up and running again.

What I've decided to do instead is write some blogs based on some of my experiences there. This one is the first.

The most fun panel I attended at Renovation was one on Stellar Evolution & Alien Design. It was part of the Teaching Science Fiction track, a series of panels directed primarily to teachers showing them how they could use science fiction in the class room to teach a variety of subjects, or how they could teach science fiction itself as a form of literature. The first half of the panel gave a very comprehensive yet easy to understand explanation about how stars evolved from their birth from cold, molecular clouds to their deaths, which depended on their mass. They demonstrated a card game to help teach the concepts. The card game was given out to the teachers at the panel, but could also be obtained through the Chandra X-ray observatory website: http://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/request_special.html.

The second half of the panel was entitled Alien Design. For this portion we were paired off with another panelist and were asked to design an alien based on the parameters given to us for the planet it came from. The parameters were:

Day time temperatures reaching 150 degrees fahrenheit.
Night time temperatures reaching minus 35 degrees fahrenheit.
Average wind speeds of 150 miles per hour.
Extremely arid climate most of the time, but punctuated with relatively brief time periods of heavy rains and flooding.
Gravity that was 75% of Earth's.

Our instructions were to design an alien that was lived on such a world. We would use the supplied arts and crafts supplies to build a model of our creature, which we would present to the other panel attendees, giving our justification for our design based on the parameters given to us. There were no restrictions as to the size, sentience, or intelligence of the creature. My partner and I came up with the "Unghat."

The name sort of popped out of my mouth when one of the instructors asked me what was.

To escape the extreme temperatures and dryness the unghat buries itself beneath the hard-packed clay soil of the planet where it estivates ('estivation' is similar to 'hibernation' except it's done to escape heat instead of cold).

The unghat's body will dry out until it is only slightly more moist than the surrounding soil. In preparation for the seasonal rains and flooding, it grows umbilical cord like structures from its back. These tubes allow the waters to reach the unghat and revitalize its body once the flooding begins. It will then use its paddle-like limbs to dig its way from its burrow.

The unghat has two folding membranes, similar to bat wings, on either side of its body. These function more like sails than wings. The unghat will spread them out and lift them above the water's surface, using the high winds to push itself against the flooding waters in its search for food and potential mates.

Because the time of the floods is relatively short, and the area of the unghat's native territory so large, the number of encounters between members of the species is relatively low. In order to maximize the chance for mating, the unghat is hermaphroditic, each individual having both male and female sex organs. When two individuals meet they engage in ritual combat, using the antennae like structures on its head to grapple with each other. The winner of these combats will take on the role of the male and deposit its sperm into the loser's, now female, body. The female will carry the fertilized eggs inside her carapace until they are ready to hatch. An individual unghat can carry several different clutches of eggs inside its shell, each from a different mating. Just before the end of the wet season, the pregnant unghat will dig shallow burrows for each clutch of eggs it is carrying. It will then dig a deep burrow for itself just before the ground hardens for it to await the next coming of the rains.

Please feel free to comment on my creation, especially if you see some point I may have overlooked. I'm going to write the unghat as soon as I come up with an appropriate story for it.

News

My story, Shadow Angel, can be found in the most recent issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, which should be in your local bookstore or newsstand. I'd be pleased if you gave it a read and tell me what you think of it. If I meet you in person, and you want me to, I'm more than willing to autograph it for you.

Qualities of a Convention Room

2011-08-17T03:45:00.001-07:00

I'm in Reno, Nevada to attend "Renovation," the 69th World Science Fiction Convention or "WorldCon." Along with the San Diego Comic-Con in July, WorldCon is one convention that I am compelled to go to each year. This is my sixth WorldCon in a row, which includes the one day I went to the 2006 WorldCon in Los Angeles. As I did with Comic-Con, I'm going to be writing a blog entry about each day that I attend, which formally opens later today.

For this first entry, though, I thought I would write something about one of the most important aspects of one's WorldCon experience: your motel room. One of the first things convention friends ask you when you run into them is, "where are your staying?" I've learned over the years that the answer to that question can have a big impact on how much you enjoy the convention and how much you get out of it.

Obviously you want your room to be clean and comfortable, but beyond that it doesn't have to be fancy. You'll be spending your day at the convention or joining friends and the people you meet at the parties and get-togethers later. Most of the time when you'll be in the room you'll be asleep or getting ready to go. How fancy does it have to be for that?

The most important feature of a good convention room is location. You want to be within walking distance of the convention center and/or the hotel where the venue is being held. This is not just to save time driving to and from the center, with the additional cost in time, money and hassle for gas and parking. It is also to allow you to maximize your opportunities to attend the post convention parties where you can meet other writers, publishers, artists and agents that work in the industry. It also means that you can indulge yourself in some fun, to a degree, and not worry about jeopardizing yourself and others.

My room this year, at the Vagabond Inn on Virginia Street, is ideal. It is situated between the Reno-Sparks Convention center and the Peppermill Hotel, which is being used for a number of the venues and parties this year. It's a 10 minute walk to the convention center and five minutes to the Peppermill. The worst room I ever had was at Denvention, the WorldCon in Denver. It was a twenty minute bus ride to the convention center, and I found out to my peril one night that the buses stopped running at around 11:30 PM or so (an additional $25.00 in cab fare). The best rooms I've had so far were in Yokohama in 2007, about two blocks away in a beautiful shopping and entertainment district, and last year in Melbourne, a five minute walk with plenty of shops and restaurants along the way.

Other features of a good convention room include:

Free WiFi or internet access. This isn't just a convention going plus, it's become a necessity of modern life along with a phone and a working toilet.

A good writing desk. It's important to me, and I too often have to make do with side tables in the room.

A refrigerator and/or microwave. Going to conventions can be expensive. Anything you can do to save on costs, such as buying groceries to keep from eating out all the time, can help.

Gym or work-out room. You need to stay healthy and fit in order to endure a convention grind. The room I stayed in while attending last year's WorldCon in Melbourne had an agreement with a gym a couple of blocks away that allowed me to use that facility as a guest.

Overall, the room I have this year rates pretty well. It's location is ideal. They give the guests free access to WiFi. The writing desk is a REAL writing desk, with a writing surface on rollers that pulls out, with room for my journal and laptop at the same time, and a wide shelf on an raised level with dedicated electrical outlets built in for my computer, plus rechargers for my cell phone, bluetooth headset and camera batteries. It doesn't have a microwave, but there is a refrigerator I'm making use of. There's no work out room, but there is a gym across the way that has daily rates that I'm going to use a couple of times while I'm here.

With a room like this, I'm ready to go conquer the World... Con.

Credit Rating Blues Riff

2011-08-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

With the news that, for the first time in recent history at least, the credit rating of the United States Government has been lowered from its normal AAA rating to AA+. Standard & Poors, one of the three credit rating agencies that perform this service, made this announcement on Friday, August 5th, after the stock market closed.

This announcement has sparked a running dialogue with myself over the state of things in my country. I am not a political nor economic expert. A lot of what I'm thinking are gut reactions, conclusions I've reached because it just feels like the right answer. But, when I look out across the sprawling landscape of modern media it appears to me that not knowing what one is talking about doesn't seem to be stopping many other people from speaking their minds these days, so why should I not share my thoughts as well.

If anyone thinks I don't understand the situation, or that I'm just plain off my rocker, or, even better, has some proof or documentation that they think will open my eyes to the truth, then please feel free to post your comments. As long as you're not a spambot trying to use my blog for advertising, I'll post it.

My reaction to the announcement that our country's credit rating was less than that of a country like the Isle of Man followed a series of thoughts. The first one was:

"I feel like a character in a Vernor Vinge Novel."

For those of you who don't know, Vernor Vinge is a masterful science fiction writer. His books are big, thick things whose action often cover huge arcs of the galaxy, pitting normal people against forces or intelligences that are as far beyond them as we are to the ants at our feet. Often these characters are struggling against these forces or intelligences have only limited information and power with which to cope. One of my favorite characters was a minor character from Fire Upon the Deep. A starship captain who has just lead his fleet into battle based on a message that he couldn't verify. With the battle done, most of his fleet destroyed and crew dead, he can only wonder if he did the right thing.

The debt crisis, and the state of the economy that sparked it, are big. B-I-G big. It's all I can do to keep my own financial state in order. I can't buy enough American made TVs, cars, dishwashers or whatever to make a difference. Even if everyone in the United States bought the same American made product tomorrow, a lamp let's say, it would cause a spike in the economy at best. The thought of my relationship to the problem, as if Mr. Vinge were writing the story or our debt crisis, was followed quickly by, "What the hell can I do about it?"

Then, another thought came to me...

"Wait a sec... Aren't these the same guys that said those credit-default swaps that started this mess were AAA rated, too?"

Remember the credit-default swaps? They were the new financial tool everyone was so hot about. You take a bunch of loans, like home loans, and roll them up into a package, then you sell them on a market similar to a stock market but where all the buyers are other financial institutions. Everyone was buying them because Standard & Poors, and the other credit rating agencies, said that these swaps were AAA. A terrific deal. As solid an investment as the United States Government.

They weren't, We all know that now. And, once the loans inside those swaps were actually analyzed, it became clear that they were basically garbage. So, it kinda brings the judgement of Standard & Poors into question. And the question I had was how they they reach their conclusion. When I found out, I thought...

"This is Payback."

Standard & Poors and the other credit rating firms were pretty well raked over the coals once their part in the financial disaster became documented. Deservedly so, too. They may not have caused the problem, but their pronouncements of those credit default swaps as being triple-A rated was definitely an enabling factor. After such humiliation, I think those companies were left with the desire for a little payback. A chance to show they weren't as stupid as everyone was saying they were, or a chance to show that the people calling them stupid, the senators and representatives in congress, were even more stupid. Or even both.

The way Standard & Poors made their announcement underscores this belief. In the initial announcement they cited the size of the impending debt as the reason for their decision to downgrade the government's credit rating. But then it was shown that they had made a 2 trillion dollar in their calculations. What? They forgot to carry the "1"? Once this was pointed out, the company held a conference call for the news agencies. They held fast to their conclusion, that the American government deserved to have its rating down-graded. The "real" reason, however, wasn't the financial one they named before. It was a political one. The spectacle of the stand-off over raising the debt limit was an indication that the American government was too divided and lacked the political will to do whatever was necessary to fix the budget deficient. It seemed clear to me that the decision to down-grade the government's credit rating was foregone. When their math error took away a clear financial reason for doing so, the company replaced it with a more subjective political rationale.

However...

"They may have a point."

There's an old French proverb that even a clock that is stopped is right twice a day. For my younger readers, this saying refers to an analog time piece, before everything was digital.

Going back to my first thought, the problems were the economy, with our government's method of raising money and spending that money, are big problems. Huge. So big that I am thinking that I'll grow old and die before I see them resolved. And the political atmosphere is not one where anyone who can be called "reasonable" will make any headway. I have heard too many people come back with, "I AM compromising!" right after someone has pointed out that they are holding out to get everything they want. It's insane.

So... Do I think the American government is a credit risk? Or, more of a credit risk now than before? No. And a large number of people seem to agree with me. I listened to a financial report this morning about how treasury bonds are being bought up. People are nervous and are buying the very thing that was downgraded as a way to feel safer, American governmental debt.

I don't have a great deal of hope for the future, though. Unless the elected officials pull their heads out of those places where they currently have them inserted, and soon, and actually deal with the problems, then the only thing wrong with Standard & Poors' decision is that they may have made it a little bit too soon.

What Motivates Me to Write Speculative Fiction

2011-07-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

At the recent San Diego Comic-Con, I attended a panel on Speculative Fiction. You can read my write-up in my entry, "Comic-Con Day Four & After Action Report."

A couple of the questions put the the writers on the panel got me thinking about what my own answer would be. This blog is my answer to one of those questions: "What motivates you to write Speculative Fiction?"

For me, the answer goes back to when I was thirteen years old.

I was a studious boy growing up. I did well in school. I loved to read. My dad used to work for a company that pulped paper and turned into cardboard that was used to make tubes to roll things on (think toilet paper or paper towels). Dad's company would often get crates of old books sent to them to use as scrap paper. My dad thought there was something wrong with shredding books like this and would often bring boxes of books home. We kept them in a spare room in our house, which we started calling our library. We had four or five different kinds of encyclopedias, including ones on astronomy and geography, and a really neat medical encyclopedia which had these really cool transparent peel-away drawings showing the different layers of the human body. There were a number of text books, thrown away by students that no longer were taking the class, probably.

Eventually I moved my bedroom into the library. Whenever we moved into a new house after that, the books moved with me into my new room. It became my practice to pull a volume from one of the shelves surrounding my bed and read for a bit before going to sleep. Most of the books my dad brought home were non-fiction. When asked by my older relatives what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer usually came from whatever book I was reading at the time. "A doctor," I would say. Or, "a scientist." Fiction to me at the time was the stuff they sometimes made us read in school, about adults doing stuff.

One day, sometime after Christmas break was over, I ran into a friend of mine in the halls at school I guess you could call it "that fateful day." He was sitting in the hall waiting for the next class. He was reading a paperback book with a strange illustration on its cover. I asked him what it was about. He replied, "it's science fiction."

Science... What? It was the first time I could recall hearing the term, 'science fiction.' My friend tried to explain to me what it was about, "the future and spaceship and stuff." Finally he suggested I try reading some myself. He gave me the name of the author of the books he was reading, someone named, "Heinlein." He told me he was probably going to return the book that day.

After classes were over, I went to the library before starting home. I found the science fiction section on the inside wall. Thinking back, our librarian must have been a science fiction fan, because that section ran all the way down one wall, turned a corner, and down another wall until it ran into the rear door to the library. I went to the "H's" but couldn't see the title my friend was reading, something about traveling with a spacesuit. I found another one by the same author. I checked it out, tucked it under my arm with the rest of my books and walked home.

After my usual routine, chores, dinner, homework, I crawled into bed and picked up the science fiction book I had checked out that day. I figured I'd read a chapter or two before going to sleep. Just as I usually did.

I finished "Tunnels in the Sky" around 5 AM. I closed the book and lay back, staring at the ceiling. In my mind I kept seeing myself with Rod Walker, "Jack" Daudet and the other students who had made the Ramsbotham Jump to that strange world. They were kids my age, or close to it, which was what made it seem so attractive and so real. I wondered if travel like that was possible. I wanted to know what happened to Rod when he went off to found a new colony. I wanted to go with him.

When my alarm rang two hours later, I got up, changed, ate breakfast and hurried off to school. I went straight to the library. I returned the book I had read and went back to the science fiction section. What could I read next? How was I to decide? Would my friend have any other recommendations for me?

I decided to do it systematically. I went to the "A's" and grabbed the first book that caught my eye. "Nightfall and Other Stories" by Isaac Asimov. I think that one took me two days to read.

It went like that for the rest of the year. Anderson, Bradbury, Clark, De Camp, more Heinlein, including "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel," which my friend had shown me, Howard, Lieber, Norton, Piper. I marched my way down the one wall and across the other. On the last week of school I tried to check out "Damnation Alley," by Roger Zelazny, but the librarian told me they didn't check out books the last week of school. I still haven't read it, now that I think about it. To this day, I will see some 'classic' science fiction book and think, "I really ought to read that," pick it and within a few pages realize I had already read it that year in Junior High School.

I did get my fix that week though. I remembered a set of books a cousin had given me for Christmas which I hadn't read yet. At the time I received them, I didn't have much interest in them. What was a "Hobbit," anyway? I couldn't find it in the encyclopedias in my room. I took it with me, along with the other three books in the box set, on Christmas vacation. That was the first of about a dozen times I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

By the end of that summer, my answer to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" had changed. Now, when asked, I would shrug my shoulders and say, "I dunno." I couldn't think of how to tell them that I wanted to go to other planets. That I wanted to learn to speak Elvish. That I wanted to see if I was really a prince switched at birth by spectral creatures and that the time of my ascension was at hand. When another friend of mine and I found a game called, "Dungeon & Dragons," it our local game store, I became obsessed. Playing D&D, along with "Traveller," which came after it, was as close to what I wanted to do with my life as I could imagine at that time. I became my group's perpetual game-master. Partly because I bought all the latest supplements and add-ons as soon as they came out. But mostly it was because I was the one spending all my free time writing adventures for them to go on. Creating characters for them to meet. Writing histories of the areas they would explore. I once created a map of an entire continent on hex-map paper, where each hex equaled 100 miles. When folded out completely, it covered the entire living room floor. I still regret that my friends only explored a fraction of that territory. So many unfound secrets remained. Tombs and temples, dangerous beings, mad kings, desperate villagers and lost treasures they never found.

I remember hearing a writer on a panel at a convention I went to say, "beware of people that write books with maps in the front of them. They are inviting you to become lost in their world and you might never get back." I think my motivation for writing speculative fiction is a bit different. As a person that writes such stories, I'm including the map because... Well, I am already lost there and I'll hoping you'll use the map to come find me. Not to rescue me, though. But because I think together we might have a really fun time.

Comic-Con 2011 - Day Four & After Action Report

2011-07-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

You can see the signs as you arrive at the convention center on Sunday morning. The little villages built around the convention center itself, like the real life version of South Park and the Fun Zone near the Transit Center, are gone. Workmen are stacking the facades into the backs of trucks in preparation to haul them away. The giant robots at the end of the road, promotion for a movie called, "Real Steel," are missing too. Presumably they were disassembled and hauled away as well, and didn't walk away on their own. The crowd waiting to get in, while still considerable, doesn't press upon you in the same suffocating way as they did for the last three days.

This is fourth, and final day of Comic-Con 2011.

My usual plan on Sunday is to see if there are any last panels I want to attend, walk around the convention floor one last time, and say good-bye to the people I know that might still be there. This year all the people I knew left before I did, so that final walk through the thinning crowds was a nostalgic one.

I attended just one panel today.

Speculative Fiction

A panel of science fiction writers brought together to discuss why they write speculative fiction and what they want their readers to take from their works. The three panelist whose work I am most familiar with were Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge and Timothy Zahn. Also included were James S.A. Corey (author of Leviathan Wakes), Gini Koch (The Alien/Katherine "Kitty" Katt series), Ernest Cline (Ready Player One), Kristen Imani Kasai (Tattoo) and Michael Cassutt (along with David S. Goyer, wrote Heaven's Shadow).

This panel represented something that I would like to do more often myself, get together with other writers and talk about writing and stuff. Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy, a well known science fiction book store in San Diego, did a good job of moderating the panel, as she had other panels I had attended. The panelists seem to enjoy the discussion and her questions to them engendered some lively exchanges. For example, when asked about his current work, Greg Bear described it as a "short novel," reminincsent of those written during the golden age of science fiction by Poul Anderson and Roger Zelazny. To that, Vernor Vinge quipped, "I'm trying to figure out how to write a shorter novel."

There were two questions Ms. Hart put to the panelists that intrigued me that intrigued me the most. The first was, "What motivates you to write speculative fiction?" The other was, "What inspiration do you want readers to take from your work?" I've been mulling over my answers to those questions since the panel ended. The second one in particular seems to be an important question a writer, or any artist for that matter, should consider about his work. Once I come up with my answers I'll post them here in my blog.

After Action Report

Now that the convention is over, I'm taking stock of my experience to see what I gained from it.

As I ride the train home, I can already feel myself wanting to do more. Write more. Submit more. Publish more. From that standpoint the convention is almost always a success. I can not remember the last Comic-Con I went to where I did not feel primed and ready to get back to writing, determined do what I could to make sure the next time I went to the Con it was as an invited guest.

This year I did pick up a couple of tricks to use in my writing. I used something I heard in the Marv Wolfman panel to rewrite and improve a scene in a story I'm rewriting to submit. And I set myself the goal, and with the writing of this entry achieved, of writing a blog entry for each day of the convention. This is the something I've tried to do in the past, but this is the first year I succeeded.

This year, though, I am going home feeling the desire to be more business like in my approach to the conventions I attend. They are and always will be fun things to do, but I need to use them to get more of my work published. Over the years I have left too many conventions without any genuine prospects for getting more work published and I want to change that.

Related to that is a desire to stay closer to the convention center itself. In recent years the cost of a hotel room in downtown San Diego has driven me to get rooms farther out and take the trolley to the convention on a daily basis. But doing so puts a definite limit on the amount of time you can stay at the Con each day. The trolleys only run until midnight. If I want to attend on of the numerous parties that are had around the convention at night, I'll need to be able to stay later than I'm doing now.

I've described the convention to others as a "geek-fest," and the people that attend it as "my tribesmen." My goal is to be the full time village shaman and make my life like Comic-Con every day of the year.

For anyone interested, you can see photos I took of the people in costume by clicking on this link: Comic-Con 2011 Cosplay.

Comic-Con 2011 - Day Three

2011-07-24T10:53:00.001-07:00

You're tired from lack of sleep. You're sore from all the marching you've been doing. You're low on supplies. And they keep coming at you in wave after wave... Thousands upon thousands of a faceless horde charging toward you bearing bloodied weapons, grabbing their booty and crying out in horrific, incoherent voices. No... This is not the last stand of Roman legion on the Germanic borders. It's...

Saturday at Comic-Con.

In recent years I've made a point of watching at least some of the entries at the Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival. The science fiction entries were on Saturday this year. Unfortunately, that meant I was going to see very few of them this year. In fact, I only saw one of the entries. But the one I saw was definitely worth it.

The Man Who Knew How to Fly is based on a short story by a Czechoslovakian writer from the 1930's named Karek Capek. A bit of trivia for you... Capek is responsible for coining the word, "robot." He invented the word, from a slovak word, "robotnik," which meant a slave laborer, for a play he wrote back in the 20's called "R.U.R." The Man Who Knew How to Fly is the story of a man who discovers he has the dream fulfilling ability to fly without mechanical assistance, and what happens to him, and that ability, once the "experts" and "authorities" discover this.

I don't want to give away any details about the story and what happens. The film, however is absolutely beautiful. It is a touching story told in an inventive way. The special effects were extremely well done and naturalistic looking. More importantly, they were done in a way to serve the story and not to draw attention to themselves. Robi Michael, who directed the film and also wrote the adaptation of Capek's work, did a truly masterful job. This wasn't just the best film I've seen at the CCI-IFF thus far. It was one of the best made films I can remember seeing in recent years... Period.

During the discussion about the film that followed its showing, Michael announced that they would be showing film in the Pasadena area sometime next week. I'm going to find out when and post the information. I recommend you go see it if you can.

Spotlight on J. Michael Straczynski - Going to the spotlight panel for J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the science fiction television show Babylon 5 and former writer of The Amazing Spiderman, defining that character in the same way Marv Wolfman defined Superman and Frank Miller defined Batman, has become something like a pilgrimage to Mecca for devout Muslims. It's something I HAVE TO do, otherwise Comic-Con really won't be complete.

"Joe," as he prefers to be called, was in typical form. Amusing the audience with his mix of both self-deprecating humor and good natured ribbing at the audience. The very first thing he did was display some "Joe, You Suck!" tee-shirts a fan had made after some of his jabs at himself.

The meatiest thing I got from Joe this year was his take on rewriting process, how your first draft was basically crap and that it was through the revision process that you make it something worth the time someone else will take to read it. Putting it succinctly, Joe said, "All you CAN say about something is in the first draft. All you WANT to say about something is in your second draft. All you HAVE TO say about something is in the final draft."

Joe handed out some news about upcoming projects:

The new version of Babylon 5 is on hold again. Warner Brothers had some "new distribution system" they were going to use for the project which fell through. No time frame as to when they might be able to proceed again.

The script for World War Z is in the hands of the studio.

He sold a treatment for a movie to Dreamworks about the real life friendship between Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Twelve, his most recent comic book project, is completed. It should be out by February.

He's working on a new pilot for Will Smith's production studio called, "Epidemic," a C.S.I. style procedural based on the Center for Disease Control (C.D.C.) in Atlanta.

The best things that you get from a Straczynski spot-light is the encouragement you get to do what you want to do. As a self-described "kid from the street," whose family moved 21 times in his first 18 years of life, he likes to depict himself as someone as far from being the type of person who should have succeeded as a writer as anyone you can think of. And yet, here he is, standing before a room full of fans just like the fan he was sitting in similar convention halls when he was young.

"Pay more attention to your failures," he said to everyone during the spotlight. "They will teach you more than your successes." "Stay true to your passions and fight for what you believe in."

It's taking his words to heart that has given me those successes I've experienced this year.

Comic-Con 2011 - Day Two

2011-07-23T00:35:00.000-07:00

Saw this moment at Comic-Con today while standing in line waiting for one of the panels. I noticed this guy in a wheelchair in line behind me. Like most people at the convention he had something written on his tee-shirt. His said, "Keep staring. I might do a trick."

I chuckled. I liked it. It said something about the guy's attitude toward the nature of things that I appreciated. I was waiting for him to look up from the book he was reading to give him a thumbs-up when one of the Comic-Con volunteers overseeing the lines heading into the panels came up to him and asked if he wanted to be moved to a space near the front of the line. The guy waved her off saying, "It's OK... I'm fine waiting."

The volunteer went away. The guy went back to reading. I readied myself to say something to him again when another person, this time a Comic-Con staff member, came up to the guy and asked, "We can move you to the front of the line if you want. Would you like to do that?"

The guy sighed. He took the sigh back in with a deep breath and looked up at her. "That's OK. I'm fine waiting. Thanks." He pointedly returned to his reading.

The lady left. I was beginning to think that maybe he might not appreciate my approval of his tee-shirt as much as I thought, but I still thought to say something to him. Before I could catch his eyes, a Comic-Con staff supervisor comes up to him. "Excuse me... Would you want to be moved up front? We can do that if you'd like..."

"Yes," he said, slapping the book closed. "Let's do that. You're the third person to ask me, and I've said I was OK each time, but it seems people are going to keep asking me until I say yes."

He started to maneuver his chair back and forth to turn it around. The supervisor starting instructing the people in line to move to make way for him. "Please... If everyone can give him room." Her voice was loud, to get everyone's attention. People passing by turned their heads to look. I wondered how many of them noticed what was written on his tee-shirt.

Marv Wolfman writing seminar. - Marv became famous for his treatment of Superman. Best thing I got out of the seminar was Marv reading the text of the Pixar Writing Bible. Per Marv, this is part of a document that Pixar Studios give to writers who work for them, telling them how to structure their stories. It is very short and succinct. It reads:

"Once upon a time, just as it was every day..."

"Until one day..."

"And because of that... And because of that... And because of that... Etc."

"And since that day..."

"The moral of the story is..."

I'll write more about this structure later. Marv also gave out a trick about how to bring out exposition without using long expository passages. He says he often writes a scene where two characters argue about what to do, during which they will cite the facts of the situation to support their case. I have a scene in mind in one of my stories where I can use this method.

Writing the Apocalypse - A panel about writing end of the world stories and what makes them attractive. Do you pick an apocalypse based on science? Nature? Some religious event? Human stupidity? For most of the writers it was some combination of all of the above.

My favorite statement about such stories came from the moderator. In apocalypse stories, anyone can become the most important human being in the universe. When so few people are left, anyone left could make the difference between the survival or the ultimate extinction of the human race.

Del Rey/Spectra - A preview of books coming from this publisher. The ones I took most note of were:

The War That Came Early Series by Harry Turtledove - The master of alternate history writes a series of novels in which World War II starts when Germany invades Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Herman Hess offers a deal to England to join forces against the Soviet Union. Apparently the offer by Hess was actually made, according to Turtledove, though it was rejected. Something I never knew.

George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series is being made into a series of graphic novels, starting in October.

The Star Wars Craft Book - Instructions to make things like a Jabba the Hut body pillow or a "droidle" to give your Jewish Star Wars fans on Hanukkah.

More tomorrow.

Comic-Con 2011 - Day One

2011-07-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

Comic-Con 2011 - Day One

The first day of the convention is over. I feel like I've been here for a week and that Sunday is a year away.

I went to four panels today. Two were related to writing. Two were related to more fannish interests.

The first of the two writing panels was entitled, "Putting the Epic back into Epic Fantasy," and featured a who's who of classic fantasy writers. The most noteworthy was George R. R. Martin, writer of Game of Thrones, but there was also Brandon Sanderson (The Way of Kings), Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind), Christopher Paolini (The Inheritance Cycle), Peter Orullian (The Unremembered), K. J. Taylor (The Fallen Moon Series) and Kevin J. Anderson (Terra Incognita). The panel was moderated by Michael Spradlin, writer of the Youngest Templar series.

The panelist discussed what made "Epic Fantasy," epic. The replies ran the gamut from the belief that "epics" are the stories which societies have used to sustain themselves to the idea that it is merely a marketing category used by publishers. There was some talk as to whether the term 'epic' referred to the size of the either the story being told of the book containing the story. The panel seemed to generally agree that a lot of what made a story 'epic' was the degree to which the reader was immersed into a particularly world.

While listening, I came to the idea that epics are stories that give the reader a sense of immortality. We see the grand scope of the story's history either by literally following a story that could take years, or even decades, to tell, or by dealing with characters whose sense of history, even personally history, can stretch across the ages.

The most interesting tidbit about craft from the panelist was about Kevin J. Anderson, who writes his novels by dictating them while mountain climbing. If I tried writing a story by that method, I would only be able to get a short short story out, which would read, "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.... Thump."

The second panel I went to was entitled, "Books vs. Graphic Novels & Comics." The panelists included Christopher Moore (The Griff), Jim Butcher (The Harry Dresden Series), Tom Suiegoski (The Fallen series), Amber Benson (who appeared on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer as Tara and writes The Calliope Reaper Jones novels) and Matthew Holms (Babymouse and Squish). David Mariotte of Mysterious Galaxy moderated.

The panelists talked about the differences between writing novels and writing scripts for visual story-telling, such as graphic novels and comics. Having written both fiction and comic book scripts myself, a lot of what they said was familiar to me. They spoke about how the approach is different. In writing fiction, you are relying on the readers to essentially cast, clothe and stage the action in their heads. Often you are not trying to give them a specific detailed description of what is happening, but one that is more emotionally based. For comics and graphic novels, you are writing for one person, the artist, and you want to be as detailed as necessary for him or her to 'get' what you are trying to convey. The collaborative nature of writing for visual story-telling was brought up, where you have the artist you are working with to help support the project, and compared with fiction writing, where the author is entirely responsible for how the final product turns out.

The last two panels were both in Hall H, which is one of the big presentation rooms at the newest end of the convention center. It was only the second time I've been in Hall H, which has its own "exclusive" food stand where you could buy snacks and drinks without leaving the hall. It's one of the rooms were they often have sneak previews of new movies and TV shows, and they don't want people leaving until after the presentation is over, I guess.

It was here that I found out that some of Frank Frazetta's original artwork will be on display tomorrow at the convention. Robert Rodriguez of Quick Draw Productions, which had produced the adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, and who is a fan of Frank Frazetta's work, announced that ten original classic Frazetta paintings, including Death Dealer, Swamp Demon, The Snow Giants, and A Princess of Mars will be on display at the convention. It is to promote the opening of a new museum to open in San Antonio, Texas dedicated to Frank Frazetta's work and a movie Quick Draw Productions is producing based on the late artist's paintings. I've been a fan of Frazetta's since I bought my first Adventures of Tarzan novel, the black covered paperbacks that Ballantine Press published, each of which featured a separate Frazetta painting on its cover. You have to send an email to an address they gave out to receive a reply with the viewings location.

The last panel I saw came right after the Quick Draw Productions event. It was a discussion with Jon Favreau, who directed the Iron Man movies, Hellboy and the new feature, Cowboys & Aliens, and Guillermo del Toro, who produced Pan's Labyrinth. They both discussed movies they are currently working on, their inspirations and their friendship. You could tell from listing to them that they are both 'fanboys' who got the chance to do what they loved doing. They both seemed remarkably friendly and fun individuals. Guillermo del Toro gave out an email for people to use if they wanted to have a tour of his current production and have "coffee and donuts" (and before you ask, I forgot the email address). Favreau is premiering "Cowboys and Aliens" at the convention as his way of saying thank you to the fans. It was a fun panel.

And now, it's time for me to get to bed before I fall to the floor and sleep right there.

Comic-Con - Preview Night

2011-07-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

It's the time of year when I give graphic proof that while my body may be half a century old, my heart and mind are still that of a 17 year old kid. It's Comic-Con time.

I am currently in San Diego after having taken the train from Union Station in Los Angeles. Tonight was "Preview Night," which is an additional evening for the dealers to sell their goods and an opportunity for attendees to get their badges before the convention starts in full force tomorrow.

My goal this year is to write an entry each day giving some details of my experience. I'm doing to share with my fellow nerdy tribesmen that couldn't make it what this year was like. And to give my not so nerdy friends a glimpse into the lifestyle of those us lurking around you. Some of them are like me, house-trained and able to pretend for extend stretches of time that they are normal. Beware.

The train is definitely the way to go. With the creation of the Gold Metro line since the last time I came here by train, all I had to do was walk to Del Mar station near my apartment, ride the metro to Union Station, take the Amtrak Surfliner to San Diego, and ride the Trolley to the stop closest to my motel, which was as close to the station as my apartment is to the metro.

Sat opposite a guy that just returned from the Ukraine after being in the Peace Corp. He and his buddy are traveling around America, helping him get re-acclimated to the place.

It was opening day at Del Mar racetrack in Oceanside today as well. The train was packed. Nerds like heading to the Comic-Con. Well dressed socialites, with women in flowered straw hats and summer dresses, men sporting hats and sneaking bottles of champagne on board. It became a traveling party, with people standing in the aisle laughing and drinking. I didn't dare leave my seat for fear someone might take it.

Had a dose of reality set in when I took the trolley to my motel. Found myself in a conversation with a well dressed gentleman wearing a matching dress shirt and tie, emerald green in color, and a knit vest. He was just coming from a meeting with members of the state assembly about homelessness. He spoke of being hopeful that something could be done about the problem, though he allowed for the fact that the politicians might just throw money at it. I asked him if he worked in politics or if he was a contractor or social worker. "No," he replied. "I'm homeless."

"Really...?" I said after an embarrassed pause. "You don't look... I mean, you don't dress like a typical homeless person." The man told me that he's been without a home for ten months now. Once he knew he couldn't afford his home anymore after losing his job, he immediately moved himself into St. Vincent DePaul's, a homeless shelter in the area.

"Anyone can be homeless these days," he added with an undeniable conviction. "I met this one lady, she has three college degrees. She's been homeless and out of work for 16 months now." I thought about my job, which I was taking time from to come to San Diego. I've told friends and acquaintances that I would almost look forward to being laid off, then I could take unemployment and spend my time writing. I don't think I'll tell people that any more.

I said good-bye to the gentleman and wished him luck at his stop. On the way back to the the convention to get my badges for the next day I sat across from a young guy dressed as Captain America. I asked him, jokingly, if he was going to a lumberjack convention. That's when his mom, who was sitting next to me, told me that he was deaf.

His name was Yasha. This is his 11th Comic-Con in a row. It's my 17th, in case anyone wants to know. Yasha and his mom come every year together. She interprets for him. He dresses as a different superhero each day. Today, for Preview Night, he came as Captain America. Tomorrow he's coming as Wolverine.

While I was talking with them I was trying to remember what little American Sign Language I had learned years ago. As we got into the conversation, and I began to gesticulate more, the mom suddenly exclaimed, "You're signing!" She complemented me on the presentation of my hands. I was doing it all unconsciously, though, and the moment she pointed it out I lost it again. I got Yasha's picture, though. I hope to see his Wolverine tomorrow.

The dealer's floor was packed to the gills. As busy as any Saturday, the busiest day of the convention. I fear for the rest of the week. I can see myself being crushed under foot.

It'll be fun.

I'll be posting pictures of my trip and the things I see here. I'll let you know when they are up.

One Sale per Break-up?

2011-07-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

I realized something the other day. The two short stories I've sold thus far were completed after I had ended romantic relationships with someone. And, they contained scenes from those failed relationships.

My first short story was published back in 1990. At the time, I was dating someone I had met while working in the same theatre company. I had recently had started writing again after a hiatus of a few years when I was focused on being an actor. I had sold some articles to role-playing game magazines but had yet to sell a piece of fiction.

I was working on a couple of stories while dating my then girlfriend. One was a rather sappy romantic story about finding one's One True Love. I think it was inspired by the current relationship. The other was a science fiction story about robotic mind control. Neither of them were going well, I recall, but I was working on them every day.

One night, my girlfriend asked me to stop by where she was doing some volunteer work for her church. I picked her up at the school she was at and we went to a diner nearby. Over pie and tea, she told me that she came to the conclusion that she didn't love me any more. She cited a recent trip she and her sister had taken to their family's cabin in the woods where she hadn't "missed me at all," while she was there. This is what lead her to end the relationship.

I took her back to the school and made the long drive home by myself. I don't remember feeling much pain driving back. I remember congratulating myself for taking the break-up so well. When I got home and went into my bedroom, I saw the most recent drafts of the two stories I had been working on sitting on my desk.

"These are actually one story," I said to myself. I immediately sat down and starting working, taking the two stories and making them into one. The next morning I read the new story, switched the position of one paragraph and decided it was done. I printed it out, put it in an envelope, opened my copy of Writers' Market and found the first magazine listed that accepted science fiction stories, which happened to be a well respected magazine called Aboriginal Science Fiction. I put it in the mail box with the the thought, "That's that."

The story sold. It eventually appeared in their Sept/Oct issue entitled, "Random Access." It was the story of a young man, in pain over a recent break-up with the woman he thought was his one true love, who uses a computer to delete his memories of her. I didn't read the story again until someone said to me, "There was a lot of you in there." When I did read it I remember feeling a little taken aback and somewhat embarrassed by the scenes I had included in the story. I also thought that it read like someone else had written, because of how good I thought it was.

The story I sold most recently took a long time to write. The idea for the story came to me when what was the opening line popped into my head. It was, "I need you take me to Broombridge, Emil... Before this gets sent to me." I immediately started hammering out a rough draft; a story about a space pilot/navigator who takes on a dangerous transit through what I termed, "sponge space," in the hopes of winning back his ex-wife.

I liked the draft I wrote, but there were some things about it I thought needed fixing. First off, I had set it in a universe I had created for myself where I was placing all of my stories, one in which an alien race visits Earth in the first half of the twenty-first century and then leaves after staying in orbit for forty years, taking a hundred and forty-four thousand people with them. I wanted to create a specific form of faster than light travel that would fit thematically with the universe I was creating.

More importantly, though, I kept thinking that there was something... Not quite there in the story. It had numerous scenes and passages that I enjoyed, but they didn't quite hang together the way I wanted them.

It was a couple of months after writing this draft, at the suggestion of a friend of mine, that I auditioned for a play at a community theater near where I work. The play they were performing was "Rashomon," based on the movie made back in 1956 by Akira Kurosawa. I loved the the movie and wanted to perform the same role that Toshiro Mifune played in the movie, that of "The Bandit." So, for the first time in years I auditioned and got the role.

It was during the audition that I met the young woman that played "The Samurai's Wife," who is raped by my character. Without going into all the gory details, she and I started what I guess you would call a "showmance." This was a startling occurrence for me. She was just about half my age at the time I did the show, in her mid-twenties. And, even more startling, she had approached me about getting together. We were together from about a month before the show opened to about two or three months after. Changes in her work made it impossible to spend time together, compounding all the other problems that we faced given our differences. I wasn't surprised by the break-up.

After the show ended, and I turned my focus back to writing again, I finished rewriting the story I had been working on. I made a number of changes to it. I got in contact with an Australian physicist about an article he had posted on line regarding, "quantum hyperspheres," which I used as the basis of my FTL drive. I restructured the story, changing it from a linear progression to one that jumped back and forth, from the present, to memories of the past, to the future. And I changed the relationship of between the "sponge-pilot" and his ex-wife. She was much younger than him now, about half his age when they met. And I put in details about how they met, while they both worked on a play they had auditioned for while he was taking a leave on a station he dove to. With these changes, which I didn't take that much notice of at the time, I submitted the story to Asimov's Science Fiction.

It sold. I got the email from the editor about two months later. For the next two months, on and off, I made some minor changes and went over the galleys. It will be appearing in their September Issue under the title, "Shadow Angel." It's been a dream of mine to get a story published in Asimov's. I'm very proud of the story.

It was a couple of days ago that it occurred to me what made these two sales similar. Both of them were reworked after I broke up with someone. And, as I write this entry, I am realizing that both women were met while doing theatre work.

But there is also a specific difference between the two. Random Access was written almost unconsciously. It was an effort, I believe looking on the process years since, to purge myself of the pain I was feeling at the time. It startled me to no end to see it published, and I spent years trying to figure out just what I did in an effort to replicate that success. As much as I was proud of the story and glad to see it in print, I was frustrated over the fact that I could not tell you how I had written it. I just had. Only when I gave up trying to duplicate what I did do I think I started to progress again as a writer.

Shadow Angel, on the other hand, was a deliberate and consciously made work. When I wrote the first draft I knew it wasn't right. I knew that I needed to create a form of faster than light travel that was not only plausible, but which had a aesthetic to it that fit the story I was telling in Shadow Angel, as well as the overall epic I wanted to tell with my universe. I knew that linear structure wasn't right for the story, but that I didn't want to tell it in flashback either. When I finalized my method of FTL, I used it's impact on a pilot's perception and experience of time to go back and forth over the sequence of events in a fashion that told the story the way it needed to be told.

And when I broke up with the lovely young woman that I was involved with during and after the play I was in, I realized that the relationship we had, of having someone that you really couldn't keep, was the same that the main character in Shadow Angel was experiencing. I folded those moments from my experience into the story in order to make it come to life. It was a deliberate choice to do this. It was, I think and hope, an artist's choice.

Finally, I think one of the reasons these two stories sold was because, at the time I was rewriting them, I was wide open emotionally. Unconsciously, with Random Access, and by deliberate choice with Shadow Angel, I let my feelings go into the stories where they needed to be. Recently, in my life, I have made the decision to live more "experimentally." To do what I feel or think I need to or want to do and see what results, instead of imagining what might happen and refraining from taking action. I am hopeful that not only will this make me a healthier, happier person, but will also allow me to invest myself into my stories to a greater degree, and create more work that will sell for people to read.

Otherwise, I'm going to have to find someone to marry and divorce in order to sell my first novel, and that will end up being a real royal pain.

Hello. My name is Erick and I'm a Twitterer

2011-05-30T09:46:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago I started using Twitter. Every day. Two or three 'tweets' a day. I decided to write about my Twitter usage in my blog.

I got my Twitter account in 2009. Twitter started in 2006. It seems a lot longer, doesn't? It feels like it's been around forever now.

After my first two tweets the day I opened my account (About the universe I created and doing laundry) I stopped using it. I didn't get it.

There has been a lot of news about Twitter this year. It was prominent in the coverage of the Middle Eastern uprisings and the tsunami.

It was after the story about 'GenkiTweets' that I decided to check it out again. They are the translated tweets sent by tsunami survivors.

I was struck by the poignancy of the messages. By using kanji, there was a huge volume of information in the tweets. http://bit.ly/fr7qlo

So, I went back to my account and started tweeting. My first new tweet, 3rd overall, was something like, "I'm up, I'm up. Time to write."

It was sort of weird at first. Writing something like that to no one in particular at 5 AM. The electronic version of messages in bottles.

Three things combined to make it something I had to do each day. The first: Having its use as a study tool for Japanese pointed out to me.

It's much less daunting to read a tweet than a book, article or even a manga in Japanese. Also, I could practice writing Japanese as well.

My favorite Japanese tweet so far was one in a series where a young lady was tweeting the events in a baseball game. Here's the last one:

松中空振り三振・・・orz 2アウト満塁のチャンスがぁぁぁぁ

"Matsunaga, swing & a miss, Three Strikes. Our two outs, bases loaded Chaaaaaance." 'Orz' is an emoticon for being on one's hands & knees.

Second: I realized that I could repost my tweets to my Facebook page. Having something I write read by someone, even a tweet, is important.

The third thing was 'finding my twitter voice.' It was the realization that the odd observations I make to people daily were tweet sized.

One time a young lady at work wanted someone to kill an already dead wasp stuck in the grill over her desk. 'Zombie wasps' came to mind.

I have a couple of 'tweet series' going on. One is "My Life's Goal" and the other is "I believe." They're strange & silly, but truthful.

My tweets are inspired by the comedy routines of Steven Wright and the Deep Thoughts of Jack Handey. Also Kurt Vonnegut's writings.

I also write about what I'm doing writing wise. I think of these tweets as little reports to an imaginary boss, to show I'm working.

It still feels a lot like I'm stranded on some island in the middle of nowhere. But at least now the bottles have something in them.

If you're wondering about the structure of this blog post, I decided to make each paragraph 140 characters (or so) long. Tweet sized.

Guess that's it. My twitter account is @ErickMelton, in case anyone out there wants to follow, retweet, reply and all that stuff. End.

News & Updates
I received a message about my comic, SoftMetal, from my publisher. They are thinking about turning it into a graphic novel. More news about that as I get it. You can still order a copy of issue #01 on line by clicking HERE. If you get a copy and meet me in person, I'll autograph it for you.

Keeping Away the Invisible Bats

2011-04-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago I while walking through the office, I was thinking about something I had experienced years ago. In a sudden fit, I raised my hands and began shaking them in the air, as if trying to drive something away from me. It happened right when I was walking past the cubicle of a young female colleague. She spotted my reaction and looked up at me.

“What was that?” she asked me. “What were doing?”

I turned to her and said, with complete candor and without any hesitation, “Invisible bats were trying to bite my face. I had to shoo them away.”

My female colleague lowered her head and stared at me a moment, her mouth hanging open as she tried to figure out how to respond. “What makes you…? I mean, how do you know they’re trying to get you.”

I smiled back at her. I nodded my head in a wise and knowing fashion. Clearly, she had made a mistake. The people that know me best, when they hear me say such things like, ‘invisible bats are trying to bite my face,’ or ‘my thoughts are leaking out of my brain and on to the floor,’ know enough to reply with, “uh-huh” or “good for you,” and then back away or return to their business without any sudden movements. This is not because I’m dangerous to any degree (despite what some members of the law enforcement or psychiatric communities may think). It’s just that quick sudden movements may invite me to rush forward with a hurried explanation when their efforts are bent toward extracating themselves from the conversation.

Instead, my young colleague had invited me to provide her with information about the nature of ‘chiroptera invisibilis.’ And since I see myself as a font of information, and am willing to share what I know about the universe (particularly those parts that I have made up), I began educating her about how invisible bats, using their sonar to stay in contact with each other, will wait until a person least expects it before pouncing to bite and extract the blood and bits of flesh they seek for nourishment. They especially are fond of attacking soft and easy to reach parts of the body, such as the lips, eyes and earlobes.

My co-workers continued to stare at me during this lesson on invisible fauna. I was beginning to explain how they were able to turn invisible (small structures on their fur which, being smaller that the wavelength of visible light, bend the light around their body) when she shook her head like someone waking up from a short nap. “There’s no such thing!”

“If you believe that, why did you ask me how I knew they were there?”

“Because…” She paused for several long moments. The question seemed to have her stumped. She shook her head again, and found her way out with, “You’re weird.”

The conversation ended shortly after that. I smiled and nodded, said good-bye and returned to my desk. She shook her head and turned to the person in the cubicle next to her. “Did you hear that…?” was all I caught as I walked away.

Thoughts just come to me like that sometimes. Thoughts about invisible bats. Or the thought that had proceeded it. About how I seem to forget things these days. Every day. I’m evening keeping a list in my journal. It reads something like this:

Tuesday - Forgot to bring my lunch to work. Hung it on the front door knob so I wouldn’t forget it, but forgot it anyway. Had to buy lunch.

Wednesday - Forgot my gym bag. Left it on the couch. By the time I got home I was too tired to go the gym so I didn’t exercise.

Thursday - Left my laptop on the sofa. I plugged it into charge it before going to work. I packed EVERYTHING ELSE into my backpack, my notebook, my pens, everything BUT the laptop which was sitting RIGHT THERE! Couldn’t work on my story at lunch because of that.

It goes on. I’ve gotten into the habit of frisking myself, like I'm arresting myself for a crime, feeling my pockets to make sure everything is there. I go through mental checklists, writing down the things I want to do when I leave for the day and what I need to bring to do them. But things still slip through. Last weekend, I opened my gym back to discover my shoes weren’t inside. Convinced that I’d left them at the gym, I went back and checked their lost and found. They weren’t there. A few days later, I found them in the closet. I hadn’t forgotten them at the gym, I had forgotten that I had taken them out of the bag and put them in the closet.

This behavior doesn’t just irritate me, though. It scares me. We are what we remember. Losing your memory is like losing bits of yourself. Sure, forgetting your laptop at home one day doesn’t change you as a person. But in the paranoid parts of my brain (which is probably more terrain that what some people sport) I wonder if it isn’t a sign of things to come. It makes me angry when I think that.

This fear stems from something that happened after I graduated from college. I went back east to visit, and eventually move back in with my parents. My Mom and Dad had moved to the same small town where my uncle and my grandparents had moved to in North Carolina. The day after I had arrived, my dad took me over to visit my grandparents.

“Now… I want to tell you something…” My dad reached out to touch me on the arm to get my attention. I turned back from opening the door to his truck to get out. “Your grandma… She’s different than when you last seen her.”

“Ok.” I knew what he meant. Or thought I knew. My grandmother had been battling Alzheimer’s for several years by then. I had heard about it through the family grapevine. The family had said things like, “things slip her mind,” and “she’s holding on,” at first. Later it was simply, “She’s getting worse,” and even more simply, “It’s not good.”

“I just wanted to tell you… To prepare yourself.” He got out of his truck then. I sat there for a moment and followed him out.

Grandpa met us at the screen door. I shook his hand then gave him a hug. He patted me on the back. He introduced me to a woman that lived next door that ‘helped out’ with grandma. I filed that in my brain. We sat in the den and talked. Grandpa asked me how I was doing. I told him.

“I’ll go see if Pearl is up, then,” the woman said. She left the den and left us talking. I was telling Grandpa about the show I had been in that summer, and about the difficult trip I’d had getting to Mom and Dad’s house. “Here she is,” I heard the neighbor-lady announce. I turned around to greet Grandma…

And found a zombie there instead. A concentration camp survivor that had been turned into a zombie. That’s what she looked like. It's the only way I can think to describe how she looked. The neighbor-lady was holding my grandmother around the shoulder. She shuffled forward, half a step at a time. Her mouth was moving, she was mumbling… Something. I couldn’t hear it well enough to tell what it was she was saying. She never stopped mumbling the entire time I was there. The neighbor-lady placed her in a recliner by the den’s entrance and sat next to her on a straight-back chair situated next to it.

“Hey, Pearl… You see Erick here?” This was from my Grandpa. The neighbor-lady joined in. “You see this handsome young man sitting over there? You know who he is? He’s come to visit you.”

Grandma’s eyes darted my way, then just as quickly moved away. Her mouth kept moving. She kept on talking to herself while I sat there in silence.

“Go on,” Dad said, nodding at me. “Go on and say ‘hi’ to her.”

I swallowed. I looked back at her. “Hey… Grandma.” I had been about to add, ‘how ya doing’ but edited that part before it got out.

Again, her eyes darted my way, then off to something else, then on to another something that only she could see.

Dad started the conversation up about… Something. I can’t remember what. I participated as best I could. Grandpa asked me about my plans. I told him. I kept hearing my grandma mumbling, a soft gentle burr to my left. I focused on my Dad and Grandpa. I didn’t know what else to do.

A few moments later the neighbor-lady said, “Oh my, would you look at her look at him!”

I looked back. Grandma was staring right at me. She was sitting up straight. She wasn’t mumbling. Her eyes were glued to my face the way they used to be when she caught me stealing cookies from her squirrel-shaped cookie jar without permission.

“Hey, Pearl…” The neighbor-lady leaned forward to look Grandma in the face. Grandma kept her eyes on me. “You know who that is? You know who that good-looking young man sitting over there is?”

“Yes.” It was the voice I remembered. It was Grandma’s voice, loud and clear. “I know who he is.” And then, without taking her eyes from me, a single tear rolled from her eyes and down her cheek.

I believe what she said. I think, in that moment, a tiny moment of clarity, Grandma remembered who I was. And in doing so, she understood or realized what was happening to her. I think that’s why she cried. It made me feel guilty. That by being the thing that sparked a return of her memory I had brought her that measure of pain.

I think about that moment more often now that I’m no longer that ‘handsome young man’ the neighbor lady pointed out to my grandma. I read every article about Alzheimer’s that comes off my RSS feed. I know that there is a genetic component to it. That I might have inherited the same gene set she had through my dad. I think about that whenever I do something like forget to pack my lunch on my way out the door. It’s not a rational fear. The odds are on my side. My grandpa lived well into his nineties and was as sharp as a tack, in complete control of his mind until the end. My Dad, well into his seventies, is doing just as well. But like the idea of radiation spreading to cover a whole country, reason doesn’t help much against it.

Every so often, like someone picking at a scab, I will try to imagine what it felt like for Grandma, that moment. A drowsy, medicine-head feeling, maybe. A dark, empty feeling, where thoughts move back and forth like mice in an empty house. And then… Out of nowhere, a light of clarity, showing the closed shutters, the dirt in the corner, the unlived-in state of things in all its undeniable truth.

That’s what I was doing, walking to my desk that day. In an unguarded moment, my mind returned to that memory and found a way to put myself in my Grandma’s place. A flash of darkness. Then, me scrambling to get away from the thought, pulling back the fingers of my mind from that dark, fearful flame. So much so, that I even raised my hands to bat the thought away, like it was a bug trying to fly up my nose, or…

“What was that? What were you doing?”

“Invisible bats were trying to bite my face. I had to shoo them away.”

And they’re out there, too, those invisible bats. And I’ll keep shooing them away as best I can.

News and Other Things

I have the galley proofs from Asimov’s Science Fiction for my story, “Shadow Angel.” The story will appear in their September, 2011 issue. I have until April 15th to review them and get any notes back to the managing editor. It’s fun seeing the galleys. There are “xxx’s” where my bio is supposed to go, but other than that it looks like someone copied it straight out of the magazine. It somewhat amazing at how long it takes to put an issue together. I’ll post any more news as it happens.

Nuclear Reactor Boy had a Tummy Ache

2011-04-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meaning to update my blog for a while now. But unfortunately I’ve been stuck.

There are a variety of reasons as to why that has been. While working on a post a few weeks ago the Sendai Earthquake and Tsunami occurred in Japan. Being a ‘Nippon-phile,’ I wanted to say something about it, but couldn’t figure out what I could write about that wouldn’t be a rehash of what other people were already saying. Also, frankly, I’m having trouble with this whole ‘blog-thing’ to begin with. I hear and read that it’s something I ‘ought’ to do as a writer. To build an audience, etc. But how to approach it has been difficult. Is this like a news report, where I need to verify every statement I make? On a writing pod-cast, I Should Be Writing, I heard someone say that it should be a dialogue, a conversation between you and your readership. Having so few things in print right now, and no novels to promote, there is a silliness factor to it as well.

But the idea of a conversation makes the most sense to me. I like talking to people. I like hearing what they think. I like telling people what I know and have learned. For the most part, though, I don’t write this blog in the same way I talk to the people I run into in my daily life. I think that might be part of what is making me stuck.

So… I’m going to treat this blog a little bit differently. I won’t do as much research on what I’m writing about. Not unless I have some specific point to prove. I’m going to talk to you more, whoever you might be. It’ll be more like notes in bottles. Interactive notes with hyperlinks to videos and pictures, floating in a bottle that will reach every shore of the world simultaneously in the instant I hit ‘publish.’

Here’s what I’m thinking about now…

Nuclear Reactor Boy has a Tummy Ache

I saw this animated video online shortly after the earthquake in Japan, when the problems with the Fukushima nuclear power-plant were beginning to mount. I believe it was made by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) that owns and operates the Fukushima plant. It’s directed toward small children and was made to educate them about what was happening at Fukushima and help allay their fears.

The video tells the story of Genbatsu-kun (Nuclear Power-plant Boy). It seems that, after the earthquake, Genbatsu-kun got a tummy ache. it was such a bad tummy-ache that Genbatsu-kun felt like he wouldn’t be able to hold in his ‘poop’ (nuclear material). Doctors (the power-plant workers) were giving Genbatsu-kun ‘medicine’ (boron and sea water, to cool the reactors) to make him feel better. Occasionally, Genbatsu-kun does release a little fart (radioactive isotopes detected in the air), but so far his farts don’t smell that bad.

I enjoy this little video quite a lot. It’s very Japanese. For one thing, I now know the Japanese words for ‘poop’ (うんち or unchi) and ‘fart’ (おなら or onara). These are words you don’t normally find in textbooks. The video also assumes that people “trying their best” to fix the problem should be supported, and that with that support they will succeed. This is also a very Japanese way of looking at things.

I’ve heard that a few days after this video was posted, Japanese mothers started posting to the site showing it messages that they weren’t going to show it to their children anymore. It seems that Japanese children who watched the video would strain to prevent their bowel movements for the sake of the people of Fukushima.

Last weekend, TEPCO announced that they were going to dump 110,000 tons of radioactive containment water into the ocean. They were doing to do this in order to use the containment tanks to hold the water pumped into the reactors to cool it down. The cooling water is now several thousand times more radioactive than the containment water, and would be far more harmful to the environment if it got into the ocean. That’s the reasoning behind the decision.

For a sense of scale, 110,000 tons of water is about what would fill three of the swimming pools they use in the Olympics. The Pacific Ocean has about a trillion olympic size swimming pools worth of water.

I wonder if they’re going to make a sequel about Genbatsu-kun needing to pee. I already know the Japanese word for ‘pee.’ It’s おしっく or oshikku. Would they say that Genbatsu-kun’s ‘oshikku’ burned? That would make it sound like a video on syphilis, wouldn’t it? That wouldn’t be appropriate for children, I don’t think.

I was talking with my Dad last week about the trouble with the reactors at Fukushima recently. He thinks everyone should leave the country. He believes that the radiation from the reactors will slowly spread across all of Japan and make the islands uninhabitable. Intellectually, I know that isn’t the case, but it’s hard to argue with the fear. I sent a message to one of my Japanese friends in Tokyo, asking her how she was doing and if there was anything she wanted. Her reply was ‘anzen.’ That’s Japanese for ‘safety.’

Novel Completion After Action Report

2011-02-27T21:34:00.000-08:00

On February 20th, at 11:07 AM, I accomplished a writing goal. In November of 2010, I started writing a novel, which the first book in a trilogy entitled, “A Spell of 13 Years,” for the National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo”). I ‘won’ the NaNoWriMo by exceeding the 50,000 word goal set for the challenge, eventually reaching 75,127 words for the month. But the novel was still incomplete and I made myself a promise to keep working on it until it was. This last Sunday I completed the novel, eventually reaching 218,997 words.

Besides the pleasure of now feeling entitled to call myself a 'novelist,' I have gained some insights into my writing from attempting and meeting this challenge. I’ve decided to share some of these via my blog. In no particular order:

I CAN Write a Novel.

This was my second attempt to write a novel. The first one remains unfinished. One of the reasons I think I failed in the first attempt, possibly even the primary reason, was that I was trying to write it while working on other things, short stories and comic book scripts, that I wanted to complete and get published. What I have discovered is that, unlike short stories where I can work on several at a time in different stages, a novel needs a greater degree of dedication to complete it. To quote a 'famous writer' I heard interviewed long ago, and whose name unfortunately I can't remember, "a poem is like a flirtation, a short story like a date, but a novel is like a marriage."

I Like Writing Big.

Before NaNoWriMo I would say I averaged about eight to nine hundred words a day. This was about twice the two page a day minimum that I had set for myself. When I did the math before going into NaNoWriMo, I realized that I needed to write about twice as much as what I was used to doing. To reach 50,000 words in thirty days, one has to write 1,667 words a day. Though the idea of doubling my production sounded difficult, I decided I would not let it daunt me. So, I rearranged my work flow, immediately sitting down and start pounding out the novel during my scheduled writing sessions in the morning.

My first surprise was that I had little problem meeting the daily goal, averaging over 2,500 words a day for the month. In fact, writing in bigger chunks like that made each subsequent day easier, as I would find myself finishing whole scenes in a single session, and be ready to start the next one fresh. Writing in bigger pieces allowed me to see each scene more clearly.

I Know the Minimum Amount of Story I Need to Have Before I Start.

I began the NaNoWriMo project very differently from my normal writing projects. For a while now I took the advice I heard from J. Michael Straczynski at ComicCon one year to heart: never start a story until you know how it ends. My interpretation of that advice was to plot out the stories I wrote very specifically. I would break everything down into a three act structure, knowing what the turning points needed to be and where the cliffhangers had to be placed. I would then commence writing the story following my outline. Quite often I would make discoveries along the way which would change some aspect of the story, but overall the draft would usually come out close to what I had created in my plot outline.

For ‘Spell of 13 Years,’ it happened differently. Because I didn’t find out about NaNoWriMo until less than week before its scheduled start, I didn’t have time to create my usual detailed outline. I had just come across the idea for the novel and was starting to jot down notes for it. I did have the main character clearly in mind, and I did know how the story was going to end. I also knew that, due to the main character’s background and other circumstances of the city where the story took place, the main character was going to participate in a coronation feast that would precipitate the drive to the story’s climax. That was about it. I had a general idea of the world the story was set in, and I had a concept for how magic worked, from which I derived the name of the trilogy, ‘A Spell of 13 Years.’ But when I started on November 1st, it was something like starting a race knowing there was a finish line somewhere out there, but not really knowing how long the race would take and where the twists and turns would come.

I have to say that I found the experience very enjoyable. At the beginning, my mind kept getting filled with details of what was going on that I struggled to write down fast enough. Characters would appear out of no where, moving through the scenes, messing things up, adding color to the world or the character’s background. Toward the end, it made things difficult as I kept trying to drive the story to the end, and kept stumbling over one obstacle after another that kept getting dropped into the main character’s way. There were many days when I would finish my writing session thinking of the character, “How is he going to get out of this one?” The next day, though, the character would find a solution, the next obstacle would present itself, and I would carry on.

Writing in My Journal Helps Me.

My work process before working on 'Spell' was, after getting to my writing desk, to write a couple of pages of in my journal. This is done long hand. One page was filled with whatever was on my mind; dreams, things that happened to me the day before, things I heard in the news, lists of what I wanted in life. The second page is more about my writing itself, such as story ideas, what is going on with my current project, things like that. When I started writing Spell in November I stopped this practice for a while, thinking that I had to use my entire scheduled time for putting down new words in order to meet my writing goal. What I discovered is that not writing in my journal left a 'buzzing' in my head that I would have to struggle to overcome before new words started to flow. I later read, in the article "50 Ways to Improve your Life in 2011" by U.S. News and World Report, that 'morning pages' like these are a way of boosting your creativity by helping to clear your mind to focus on your project. My experience taught me that this was the case and I make a point of doing my morning pages before working on my current project.

The Result

I'm still dealing with the things I've learned from the experience of writing my novel. I writing my 'morning pages' before I start working on my project. I've increased my writing time from an hour and a half to two hours in order to meet my word goal, which I've increased to 1,500 words a day. Other things will come to me as I continue to work through the post-rough draft phase. But, and this is another big difference from before, I am much more confidant that whatever challenges I may face I'll find a way to overcome them.

I'm a novelist, you see. Overcoming writing challenges is what we do.

A Question for Whomever Might Know:

Does anyone know anything about something called the White Chrysanthemum Paper?

During World War Two, during the invasion of Saipan, the first Japanese island to be invaded I believe, news reporters were horrified to see Japanese women from the island's villages grab their children and jump off the sea cliffs to their death when the American soldiers approached. Some of these newsreel reports were captured by the Japanese, and the High Command decided to do whatever they could to make the Allied forces think that such a reaction would become more and more commonplace as the Allied forces approached the main islands. It was hoped that, in the face of such fanaticism, the Allies would opt for a negotiated surrender, allowing the military regime to keep power and keep foreign soldiers off Japanese soil, over an invasion to seek the unconditional surrender the Allies had publicly announced they only accept. The Japanese didn't know the Americans were creating a third option with the Manhattan Project. It was after this secret disinformation doctrine was written that the Japanese High Command created the special forces units we knew as 'kamikaze,' and starting filming propaganda movies that were 'captured' by the Allies that showed people with spears and pitchforks attacking fake landing craft.

I read a reference to this "White Chrysanthemum Paper" in a book about the war I was flipping through at a bookstore. I can't remember the name of the book nor the author. I can't find any other reference to it online. Is there any World War Two history buffs out that that are familiar with this paper and can direct me to a source where I can read more about it.

You're assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Artistic Field Trips

2011-02-20T18:39:00.000-08:00

This year I have decided to take 'Artistic Field Trips.' I got the idea from U.S. News & World Report's article entitled, "How to Improve your Life in 2011." It's listed in the sub-section entitled "Unleash Your Creative Genius."

An Artistic Field Trip is basically going some place like a museum, a park, a garden, etc., and seeing and experiencing what is there. I've added my own caveat of walking to these locations or talking public transportation whenever possible. Thus far I've been to a couple of places I've never been to, such as the California Science Center in Exposition Park, and a few places I haven't been to in such a long time that the experience was practically a new one, such as the Los Angeles County Arboretum and the Norton Simon Museum. I take my camera with me and snap shots of whatever catches my eye.

The trips have been enjoyable and they've sparked a number of ideas. At the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, a ten minute walk from my apartment, an exhibit about the Silk Road, the trading route that brought silk from China into the Middle East and Europe in ancient times, helped me come up with some background information for the universe I'm setting my science fiction stories, which I'm calling the "Tauian Adventure." An incident that happened while crossing a street while headed to Colorado Boulevard to see the people spending the night on the street to see the Rose Parade, combined with an article I read in Scientific American, gave me a short story I'm going to write about how levels and points as those used in computer games might be used to make people better citizens.

Beyond that, though, I've noticed how these trips have been altering how I see and hear things. Sometimes it's not the artwork at the museum or the flower in the garden that is catching my attention, but someone I'm seeing there, or something I spotted along the way, or a memory that is being sparked by something I've noticed. I'm sure these little details will filter into my stories eventually, but I find myself wanting to do something with them on their own.

I've decided to share a few examples below, which I am calling "Interludes." I'll be sharing more of them as the year goes on.

Interlude #1 - Keeping Time

Walking home from the Norton Simon, I spotted this old gate.

You see things like this here and there in Pasadena, parts of buildings long gone that have been left standing on their own. Bits and pieces that remember some other time they can only hint to, but no longer show you.

As I got closer I could see the gate was pretty much useless. It was partially off its hinges. It's bottom was stuck in the surface of the concrete itself.

When I was standing right before the gate, I could see something through the bars. At the time, I thought it was some strange looking sundial. Something from another time used to measure time. Out of reach. Locked away. Counting the minutes and hours, but with no one around to tell.

Around the corner, I found a sign that told me the property was being renovated into a retirement home.

Interlude #2 - Who's Learning What?

I saw this exhibit at the California Science Center, part of a larger exhibit about the human body and how it works. I tried to enter this particular exhibit on human reproduction, but it was so crowded there was no room for me.

As I was stepping out I realized everyone in the exhibit at the time was a mother with her daughter or daughters. Not a single son or father. Where where they? They seemed to be more interested in playing a game, one exhibit over, that demonstrated the various ways seeds reach islands.

Interlude #3 - A Haiku for a Pretend Memory

A couple of years ago I performed in the play, "Roshomon." It's a famous story about a murder that takes place in a bamboo grove and all of the accounts told by those involved are different.

Visiting the Los Angeles County Arboretum, I found a small bamboo grove there. I stepped inside to see what it was like. I found myself transported to the imaginary place I had created in my mind whilst performing the play.

Look up at the sky

In the grove, the breeze's kiss

As I sigh my last.

2010: The Year in Review

2011-01-17T20:53:00.000-08:00

2010: Year in Review

Last year, at the start of 2010, I did not think I was in a good place as far as my writing was concerned. I had seen the end of a collaborative relationship with the comic book stories I had been working on. I thought I might lose my professional accreditation with Comic-Con. The stories I was submitting at the time seemed to come back faster than I could send them out. It felt as if there was a contest going on amongst the various editors out there to see which of them could send my story back the fastest once they had received it (I think the record came to be a litter under two weeks). I was wondering if I would ever seen anything of mine in print again.

Now, at the start of 2011, things are much, much better. As I think about the goals I am setting for myself this year, I thought it might be a good idea to look back over 2010 and note those things that happened to turn my writing around.

In reverse order:

“Shadow Angel” accepted by Asimov’s Science Fiction

Coming at the end of the year, the first week in December actually, this ranks as my favorite achievement both of the year 2010 and my writing career overall. That was when I received the first in a series of emails from Sheila Williams, the editor at Asimov's science fiction, telling me she was interested in the story I had submitted to them at the end of October, "Shadow Angel," and was wondering if I would be willing to revise it a bit.

This was a big deal for me for a couple of reasons. First off, Asimov's Science Fiction is one of the premier publishers of shorter works in science fiction. Writers' Digest Magazine rates in in the top 5 for the most prestigious market for a writer to have their work published. The magazine gets approximately 800 submissions each month, from which they select SIX to publish. Getting them to accept one of my stories is an achievement in itself.

For me personally, Asimov’s Science Fiction has published some of my favorite science fiction stories that I’ve read, some of which I still remember today. The stories struck me as having the perfect balance of cutting edge concepts and futuristic settings as well as some really fine writing that would stand up in any genre. When I made the decision to be a science fiction writer, one of my goals was to see a story of mine appear in the pages of this magazine. Now, sometime after August of this year, that goal will be realized.

What I learned from the experience:The edition of the magazine hitting the stands ‘now,’ was put together about four or five months before. I hadn't realized that there was that great of a lag-time between acceptance and publication. I also had my first experience working with an editor on one of my stories. The revisions Sheila requested were to add exposition to clarify the background of the story, and then to clean up some of grammar in the rewrites. I made it my goal to be as specific and direct in my revisions and to get them back to Sheila as quickly as I could, taking no more than a weekend to get them done. I guess the guidelines I gave myself worked, because Sheila informed me of her decision that she would definitely take the story in the email she sent me after the first of the year.

NaNoWriMo

The National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo”) takes place in November. It is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel (or at least complete 50,000 words toward a novel) finished by the end of the November. That averages out to 1,667 words a day to meet that goal.

I had always wanted to try my hand at a writing challenge like this but always shied away from it. Would I have enough time? Could I write that consistently for entire month? My previous attempt to write a novel, which I’m still officially working on, started a decade ago and is not close to being completed. Would I be setting myself up for failure?

This year was different, though. By November, I was already feeling much better about my writing than I had in quite some time. And I had an idea, sparked by something a member of my online writing group had included in a critique for another story. I did not have many details, mind you, but I had a good idea of the plot, from beginning to end and I could see some of the high points of the landscape I wanted to cross. With that, without even taking the time to plot it out completely (mainly because I only had a week to go before the start of NaNoWriMo) I dove in, determined to pound out the story and get as much of it done as I could by the end of the month.

Officially, I ‘Won’ NaNoWriMo. I had over 76,000 words done by November 30th. Unofficially, I don’t consider myself a novelist yet because I’m still working on the novel, which is opening of a trilogy I’m calling, “A Spell of 13 Years.” I’m into the third act, heading toward the end, currently over 165,000 words.

What I learned from the experience: That I can write a novel, something I was starting to worry/wonder about after my initial attempt. I also rediscovered the joy of simply writing away from just an idea in my head. Finally, due to a change in my writing habit to make sure I met my writing goal each day, I discovered that scenes and stories ‘hang better’ when I write them in bigger chunks.

World Con - Aussie Con 4/San Diego Comic-Con

I enjoy going to conventions. I have gone to every San Diego Comic-Con for the past twelve years and every World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) since it was held in Yokohama, Japan in 2007. In 2010, I added Westercon to my convention itinerary, mainly because it was being held in my hometown of Pasadena, CA.

Last year, however, it looked like I wasn’t going to get to go to any conventions. The trouble with the economy made such travel seem like something I should reconsider, especially for the WorldCon in Melbourne, which was the farthest I ever went to attend a convention. There were also personal concerns, such as whether I was going to have a job and my cat becoming very sick in a very costly manner, that plagued my planning.

But I ended up going, both to San Diego and to Melbourne. Despite all the uncertainty and trepidation over what might happen, I made the decision to go. Conventions represent opportunities for me to immerse myself in the things like I love the most, speculative fiction in all its forms and writing them, and meeting friends and 'convention buddies' that share that love. My favorite thing I ever heard at a convention was by J. Michael Stracznsky, creator of Babylon 5, who said, “Never surrender your dreams.” Conventions are where I go to help me remember why I dream the things I do.

What I learned from the experience: Apart from the stuff I learned in the panels, some of which I will be relaying in upcoming blog entries, what I learned this year was that often the difference is making a dream or goal come true is simply making the decision to do it. “I will go” has much greater power to help you get to where you want to be than, “I want to go.”

SoftMetal Reprint

In June of 2010, a comic I wrote back in 2005 was reprinted under its own cover. The comic is called ‘SoftMetal,’ which is drawn by Sanny Folkesson, and is currently available from Angry Viking Press.

My efforts in my comic book writing could best be described as “so close, yet so far.” My initial goal was, from the beginning, to get my own book. I’ve had four stories published in various lengths, one, “Gagaku Berceuse,” even won the Best Horror selection in Rising Stars of Manga for 2007. But all of them were run in anthology, where they shared space with other creator’s works. This is not too uncommon when you are starting out, but I wanted to reach the point where the entire book was filled with just my story. After the collaborator I worked with the most decided that he wanted to take his career in a different direction, it did not look like I would be achieve that goal.

But it happened, though not in the way I expected. Angry Viking Press is a relatively new company. The publisher, Jason Canty, was apparently familiar with SoftMetal and contacted Sanny to see what we were doing with it. It was Sanny that told me of their offer to reprint what we had published before and to complete the story we had started.

SoftMetal #01 is the collected episodes of what we previously had printed in anthology with another publisher. SoftMetal #02, which Sanny is currently working on, are the scripts for the episodes we were going to publish in with that same previous publisher but never did. I’ve already received messages from Angry Viking expressing their interest in seeing this SoftMetal continue with future story arcs. I don’t know where we’ll end up or how far we’ll go, but now that I have my own book in hand those other goals seem more doable.

What I learned from the experience: You never know where success might come from. Because of that, all you can do is keep working on your stuff and keep getting it out there. Someone might see it, no matter where it’s at, and that may prove to be the key to the next step.

The Tybalt Effect: Or, What my dead cat is teaching me about doing what I want to do.

2010-09-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

For my first blog after WorldCon, I had originally planned to write about my experience at the convention in Melbourne, Australia. But events this week have lead me to discover something that I wanted to explore.

My pet cat, Tybalt, died Saturday, September 18th after a long fight with chronic renal failure. He was about thirteen and a half years old. He was first diagnosed with this condition a little more than two years ago. Over the course of the last two years, in addition to a daily regimen of having a needle stuck in the back of his neck to administer the extra fluids he needed to live, he was hospitalized three times, once for a surgery to remove a blockage in his urinary track, twice for bladder infections that threatened to shut down his kidneys, and often had to be given medication so foul tasting that he would foam at the mouth at the effort to spit it back up. When I demonstrated his reaction to the medication to one of the vets that treated him, she said she was amazed that I had gotten him to take the medication at all.

Last week Tybalt went into complete renal failure. The prognosis was grim. Per the vet that treated him most often, he would need to be hospitalized in order stabilize his kidneys. In addition to that, because he was severely anemic, a common side-effect to renal failure, even if they could stabilize him, which was somewhat doubtful since it gets more difficult to achieve with each subsequent attempt, the process might so dilute his blood that his anemia would then threaten him. Finally, even if the could stabilize his kidneys and improve his anemia enough for him to live, the vet said she couldn't guarantee it wouldn't happen again three months later. With such a prognosis it was clear to me that Tybalt's time had come. I decided to have him euthanized and scheduled an appointment to bring him to the vet's office one last time that Saturday.

After staying up with Tybalt Friday night, I took him to the vet's office just as they opened at 8 AM Saturday. The process went quickly. They took Tybalt away to fit him with a catheter while I paid for the procedure in advance. They asked me if I wanted his ashes returned and a urn to carry them. I said I didn't. They brought him back and gave me some time alone. Then the vet arrived with two syringes. She injected a clear liquid into the catheter. Almost immediately his body relaxed. Though his eyes were still open, staring up at me, the vet assured me he was completely unconscious. Then the second syringe was fitted into the catheter. The liquid in that one had a startlingly festive color, like cotton candy you get at a fair. She injected that one in more slowly. I waited while she used her stethoscope to listen to his chest and then declared, "It's done." I looked up, startled, and asked, "That's it?!" The doctor said, "I'm sorry," then left me alone with him one last time. I couldn't believe her in that first moment. His body was still warm. His fur was still soft. He felt like he did when I got home each night and he would wait by the door waiting for me to pick him up so he would drape himself over my shoulder and purr. When I looked in his eyes, though, I knew it was true. He was gone. I arranged his body into the shape it took when he was sleeping and folded him in the blanket they had brought for him and left.

As I left the vet's office I no longer felt the need to cry. In fact, I was feeling relieved. Since last May, when he had his last bout of renal failure due to a bladder infection, it had been tough. An increasing cycle of medication and treatment. I knew that I wouldn't have to worry any more, and that he wasn't feeling any more pain and discomfort. But there was something else I was feeling, too. A restlessness. An itchy, irritating sensation that was somewhere near the base of my skull in the back of my head. I wanted... Something. Not something. I wanted... To DO something. Despite being pretty tired from my vigil with him the night before, I didn't want to lay down. I took a walk to the store to buy groceries. The exercise didn't help. If anything, it made it worse, as if the action of shopping only confirmed that I should be DOING SOMETHING.

Just as I was walking through the door with my groceries and looked at my messy, disorganized apartment, the image of Tybalt on the vet's table came to mind. Suddenly that itchy, do-something irritation blew up into something more powerful. It felt like anger. I put my groceries away and started straightening things up. I started in the bathroom, cleaning out the medicine cabinet, organizing the shelves, sweeping the floor. I straightened the shelves in my bedroom. I boxed up old games and magazines and set them aside. I took four or five boxes of old junk and threw it into the dumpster. I then moved into the living room. Friends who have visited my place will remember the embarrassing pile of boxes and bags of stuff blocking my book shelves behind my sofa, which I always told them I would deal with 'some day.' Well, some day was yesterday. It's gone. And for those of you who have asked me how long it had been there, and I would shrug and say, "Uh... I dunno," I offer you this: At the bottom of the pile I found a collection of junk mail I had intended to shred and recycle 'someday' dated from 2006. It's now shredded and recycled.

That's how my day went, from one task to the next. I went to the gym. I went to the recyclers. I cleaned off my writing desk. I created a space for the boxes of stuff I still needed to organize. I cleaned out the shelf under my stereo and created a station for my writing supplies. I wrote in my journal a list of my writing projects, their current status, and what I wanted to do with them. Every time I hit a moment when I would contemplate a task or look at a pile of stuff that had been sitting there far too long and get depressed at how big it appeared, or started feeling tired and wanting to rest, an image of Tybalt on the vet's table would come to mind, the need to Do Something would swell, and I would push through. Finally, around one in the morning, I went to bed and slept for about nine and half hours straight.

I wasn't so driven Sunday, but I continued in the same mode. I started noticing the effect the memory of Tybalt's last moments was doing to me and tried to figure out why. It wasn't guilt. Though it did edge my sadness to a degree, my rational brain was there to remind me of what Tybalt had been going through and providing assurance that what I had done was the right thing. It wasn't sadness. Sadness is never been a motivator for action I don't believe. It felt like anger, but angry at what? The unfairness of life? The fact that Tybalt had to die eventually? It didn't seem to fit.

Slowly, though, the pieces began to percolate up through my consciousness, coming together on the surface like pieces from a shipwrecked dream. Like most people, there are things I want, visions of how I want my life to be. One of them was finding a home of my own. The vision was always pretty specific. Something small, I don't need much. A townhouse, or one of those micro-homes that they build these days for the growing number of middle aged singles. Something with a loft above I could use for a writing space. And it had to have a small garden/patio/backyard sitting area type of space, one that could be completely enclosed so I could let Tybalt outside safely. Tybalt ALWAYS wanted to go outside, but I wouldn't allow him living next to a busy city street in a neighborhood where very aggressive raccoons live and dig through trash cans and DON'T back down and run away when you approach them. The only time Tybalt went out was with me on a leash. I got laughed at by my neighbors, but I didn't care. It became a bonding moment for us, it gave Tybalt something of what he wanted, and it kept him safe.

Due to various circumstances, my situation at work, the economy, things like that, I kept deferring this dream. In recent times I even got to the point of telling myself that I wouldn't be that unhappy if it never came true. It wasn't reasonable to hold on to something that wouldn't come true, right?

When I recalled that imaginary outdoor space and realized my reason for wanting it didn't exist any more, the angry, Do Something feeling returned. I knew then what was happening.

Tybalt was a good cat. He enjoyed having me pick him up and he liked cuddling and being petted. No matter how long I petted him, it was never long enough. He would stretch himself out like a noodled when I brushed him. And he wanted to be close to me all the time. He would follow me from room to room. He would sit on my lap when I was at the computer writing. He would curl up on the foot of my bed when I went to sleep. A cross-section of the cute endearing things pet owners like to talk about with their pets.

But he had an obstinate, stubborn side, too. I said before he wanted to go outside all the time. I should have said he INSISTED on getting outside. He REFUSED TO ACCEPT he COULDN'T go outside. It's why the window shades in my bedroom are half destroyed. It's because they were in his way AND he couldn't reach the upper half. It's why, despite having "Pet Proof" screen material, which the manufacture guaranteed couldn't be shredded, I kept my windows closed despite summer heat and no air conditioning. Because while it's true Tybalt couldn't shred them to pieces like he had the ordinary screens, the manufacturer did nothing to address Tybalt's ability to pull the material COMPLETELY FROM ITS FRAME through his repeated and determined efforts. During my clean-up frenzy on Saturday, I wouldn't have been surprised if I had found the beginnings of a tunnel leading outside that he hadn't had time to finish. Even on his last night, as sick and weak as he was, when I opened the window, he looked up, moved closer, and looked the screen up and down like he was sizing it up and picking its weakest spot before making one last try to get out. He never stopped trying to get to where he wanted to be.

But I had. Over the years, due to circumstances, my situation at work, my seeming inability to get enough of my writing published, the economy going bad, a whole plethora of "things beyond my control" I realized I had become 'more reasonable.' I hadn't stopped trying. But I had stopped expecting to get there. I had started telling myself that, at my age, I needed to understand that not all dreams come true. And when I saw that, I realized that the angry feeling that had been pushing me all day long had little to do with Tybalt's death and more to do with myself. I wasn't even angry so much at not having achieved something I wanted in time for my furry friend to enjoy it. I was angry at having stopped trying to figure out a way to get there.

I read once that writing a blog is providing a service. I've envisioned this blog as servicing the needs of people like me, creative individuals, mostly writers of science fiction perhaps, but anyone who was trying to formulate their life experiences into their art. I would offer my own, admittedly limited experience, in the hope of sparking something in my creative colleagues and keeping me focused on what I wanted. By writing this blog I was hoping to a great degree to serve myself. In this light, I wrote this entry for two reasons. The first was to document my realization about myself. I am already using this discovery in something I'm working right now. It is a funky sort of motivation that I didn't expect and I want to explore it.

But the second reason is the most important, and it is to put into practice what my dying cat has taught me with his life. The grief will go. And eventually I'll stop looking at the places where he used to perch expecting to find him. Eventually. Other tragedies and obstacles will appear in my life which I'll have to face. But I don't want to ever lose this itchy, angry, Do SOMETHING feeling that he has engendered in me. Maybe in his last moment on this earth, he transfered to me the feeling that pushed him to get outside all those years. I want it to be his legacy. Every time I encounter something in my way, keeping me from the place I want to be, I want the image of Tybalt to return. I want it to push me, like it has since yesterday, no matter how tired or depressed or sad I might be, to claw that obstacle aside, or pull it out of my way. If I can do that, Tybalt will continue to be alive for me in a very real way.

Good night, my little fuzzy man. Sleep well. You gave me more than ever I thought you had.

Comic-Con 2010

2010-08-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

When Comic-Con first started in 1979 about 300 hundred people attended. This year, forty-one years later, one hundred and twenty thousand people registered to attend the convention. It has become the largest comic book convention in the United States.

I’ve been going to Comic-Con for eleven years in a row now. I have come to think of this behemoth of an event as something on par with the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that devout Muslims are supposed to make. If you consider yourself a true fan-boy, a nerdy geek through and through, then at least once in your life you should experience a Comic-Con.

And so, due to events I won’t detail here which caused me to register late, I went to San Diego in a tiny eighteen foot camper trailer that I shared with my ex-roommate after college and a sickly cat. But I did this gladly. Why…?

Because it is time for Comic-Con.

Thursday, July 22nd - Day One

The convention is about meeting people. All day long I was meeting people. The client whom I didn’t know was a fan like me. My buddy who hangs out at my local comic book store. The two brothers whose novel they wrote together just won a big award. The artist whom I met while standing in line years ago for my first professional badge. Meeting people who share your dream help you to feel closer to it.

I went to three panels this day:

Science Fiction that will Change Your Life - A boldly named panel if there ever was one. The people from the online magazine io9.com give their choices from what came out within the last year of science fiction that will change your perspective. The commonality of the choices were: A lot of people liked the stuff of Warren Ellison. A lot of the stories being chosen were from small or independent publishers, a lot of which had started out online. One of the panelists noted that in a lot of ways things had already changed. Some of the notable choices include:

“Freak Angels” and “Super God,” both by Warren Ellison.

LXD (League of Extraordinary Dancers) - A Web only TV show.

“Timer” - An independent film.

“Splice” - Another movie.

“Wind-up Girl” - Nebula winning novel.

The Pitching Hour - A panel of producers and writers who have worked in Hollywood talk about what it takes to come up with and execute a good pitch for your TV or movie idea. They said that everything comes down to five basic steps:

Own Your Work.

Contract Representation.

Electronic Presence.

Adaptability

Networking.

A notable quote from one of the panelists: “Luck is opportunity & preparation.”

Abusing Science in Science Fiction - A fun panel from the people that make the TV shows “Eureka” and “Fringe” where they presented examples of scenes from TVs and movies where ‘good science’ was use (science presented well and accurately) and ‘bad science’ was used. Some things I got out of the panel as a writer were:

“Science Magic” is where anything can happen at any time. Science creates limitations and drama comes out of the limitations of what a person can do.

The presentation of exposition and how it’s handled. Give the audience one line of exposition then give them the reason why it is important, the emotional impact.

The use of an ‘Audience Stand-in,’ a character in the scene who would ask the questions an uniformed audience member might find.

Friday, July 23rd - Day Two

Batman: The Brave and the Bold - A panel about the animated TV series on Cartoon Network about the caped crusader. I had never seen the series before (not having cable). I liked what I saw. Too bad this next season will be their last 13 episodes. It’s something of a return to the campy live action Batman TV show that was done in the 60’s with Adam West. Very funny. They also presented a preview of a new animated series they’ll be doing called “Young Justice.” Young Justice uses the sidekick characters of the Justice League (such as Robin, Aqualad, etc.) as a ‘covert ops’ unit for the Justice League. It’s set on Earth-16 in DC’s multiverse. The animation clip they showed was impressive. It’s something I would want to watch.

Indy Comics Writers Unite! - Moderated by Mark Waid (writer of Amazing Spiderman and Irredeemable) and featuring Van Jensen (Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer), Larry Marder (Beanworld), Carla Seed McNeil (Finder) and Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise, Echo), the panel talked about what a creator of an independent comic needs to do to create and market their work. One message that was repeated a number of times throughout the panel was the about the need to get to know the business side of comics as well as one knows the creative side. To quote Larry Marder during the discussion, “If you are creative enough to write something people want to read you’re probably not grounded enough to sell it.” Carla Speed McNeil described being an independent comics writer as facing the same problems facing any small business owner.

Saturday, July 24th - Day Three

The Write Stuff: Writing Genre TV - A panel of writers from various genre TV shows. A lot of it was meant to be entertaining and was of limited use to someone wanting to fashion a career in the field. For instance, each panelist was asked to recall the “Dumbest Note” they ever got from a network executive. In my opinion it was a tie between the executive who, when being pitched an ‘evil twin’ episode replied, “Great! Who’s playing the evil twin?” and the note that came back about a character being killed with a stiletto that read, “Does the character have to be killed with a shoe?” The panel did turn it around every so often with bits of advice that was more grounded. How to regard the network as your collaborator when dealing with bad notes and ways of writing scenes when forced by budget constraints to not write what you want, for instance. The best advice was the most obvious; it is character that makes a show worth watching, not special effects and that continuing to write and put what you’ve written out there is the way to break-in and succeed.

Spotlight on J. Michael Straczynski - This is the one panel I make a point of going to each Comic-Con. Not only is J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the show Babylon 5 and the writer of such comics as Amazing Spiderman, The Mighty Thor and now The New Wonder-Woman, is a prolific and talented writer (each comic he’s written has reached the top twenty by the time he’s finished his run), but is an entertaining and inspiring person to listen to. The news about his work included turning in the final drafts of his scripts for his adaptation of “Lensman,” based on E.E. “Doc” Smith’s seminal work and the new version of “Forbidden Planet.” He also mentioned turning in a final script for a project called, “World War Z.” He is now writing Superman for DC Comics, and his version of Wonder-Woman will be coming out next week. Listening to him talk about his take on the iconic comic book characters he’s written emphasizes what is important in writing in general, making things personal and real. He finished this presentation as usual with his admonishment to never surrender one’s dreams. Good Advice for all of us.

Comic-Con International Film Festival - I’ve started making it a point of watching at least some of the entrants in this short film festival, focusing on those in the science fiction category. I want to prefice my comments about the films with my feeling that anyone successfully completes such a project should be applauded. Making a movie is a huge collaborative effort that takes a lot of time, patience, determination and, yes, money to complete. The makers of these movies are to be commended. This year I watched two films:

Engima - The transport ship Genesis has been found floating dead in space with all hands on board found murdered. This film was something of an ‘Alien’ copycat in terms of look and feel, but it was a good copycat. The production values and special effects were good and the acting held up its part of the deal as well. There was something of a twist ending that was somewhat unexpected, but which didn’t come out of left field. One noteworthy thing about the movie was that it was shot five years ago on an interior spaceship set originally built for the TV show ‘Firefly.’

Hunter Prey - A ship carrying a group of elite intergalactic commandos and their prisoner crash lands on a harsh planet. Their prisoner escapes and must be tracked down. I decided this was basically two films. The first was a thirty minute short that focused on the quotation by Charles Darwin that opens the film, about how adaptability, and not strength or intelligence, is the highest survival trait. This segment worked for the most part and seemed to be saying something on that theme. Unfortunately, after what I thought was an ending to the movie the film carries on into something of a long-winded version of the Star Trek episode where Kirk fights the Gorn, with a Star Wars styled bounty hunter mixed in. As the movie goes on more and more elements are added, such a secret base where another starship is apparently hidden, burdening the film instead of allowing it to drive toward a conclusion. Plus the twists planted by the writer were things I saw coming before the reveal.

The filmmakers did announce that their feature length project has been picked up for distribution by Mia Entertainment for release on December 9th, and that deals to release in Australia are in the works. You can also buy a copy of the movie on DVD if you want from Amazon.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the final day of Comic-Con. I am already looking forward to next year.

Westercon 63

2010-07-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

It’s that time of the year. The days get longer. The sun rises hot into the sky. And one has dreams of running away from the mundane world to join a conference room filled with other pale-faced nerds to participate in a discussion of manned space flight, or hear about an author’s latest science fiction/horror/time-travel/romance novel.

That’s right. Convention season is here.

I made plans to go to three conventions this year. Comic-Con, by far the largest convention focused on the ‘popular arts,’ which is less than two weeks away in San Diego; The World Science Fiction Convention, or WorldCon, which will be in Melbourne, Australia this year starting September 2nd; and Westercon, a regional convention that is held over the Fourth of July holiday weekend each year in some city in the western United States. This year Westercon 63, or the 63rd running of the convention, was held in my hometown of Pasadena, California. I was able to go to the convention all four days. This is my ‘after-action’ report.

Thursday, July 1st

The programming the first day of any convention typically starts late. This is to give the attendees time to register or check-in, get their badges and find their way around. It is also the first chance you have to run into those ‘convention buddies’ you meet every year, compare schedules and make plans to meet for lunch or dinner.

I attended two panels on Thursday, which were:

Astronomy 101 - A gentleman named Michael Siladi stepped in to host this panel when the person originally scheduled was unable to make it in time (another common occurrence on the first day of the convention as you’ll see below). This panel was about amateur astronomy and how to get into it. Mr. Siladi provided a lot of information on where one might go locally for optimal star viewing, where to find like minded enthusiasts, what to buy and when to buy it. Most interesting was the information on some of the newest software one could buy, including programs for smart phones that provide an overlay through your camera’s viewfinder to identify the stars you are looking at. Pretty cool.

As a writer, some of the interesting tidbits were about the lives of such hobbyists. For instance, most Astronomy Club meetings take place on the night of full moons. Why? Because the light of the moon interferes with star gazing. We were also told about some ‘portable’ telescopes one could buy that required a trailer hooked to a truck to pull them.

Visions of Future Past - A panel about past efforts to imagine what the future would be like that were plausible yet failed. The question posed to the panelists were why did they fail and what would things be like if they had succeeded. The panel included Richard Foss and Janine Ellen Young. David Brin was scheduled to be one of the panelists, but didn’t make it. Some of the technology discussed included Monorails, Picture Telephones, Zeppelins, Turbine Cars, Steam Powered Cars and Orion Space Craft. Flying Cars were specifically barred from discussion (I did not take down in my notes the reason given for this decision, though it seemed to land on ‘it’s panel topic unto itself’). The audience for this panel was very talkative and contributed a lot of their own opinions on the subject.

The most interesting point I got out of this panel was how sometimes failed plans leave social residue. One example was one of the Metro train lines in Los Angeles, which swings around the nearest business district to stop at what appear to be abandoned warehouses. The reason: when the route was being planned those warehouses were the sites of several aerospace companies which had hundreds of employees. By the time the line was completed those companies had been bought out, moved or closed their doors and the employees the line intended to serve went elsewhere.

Notable quote: “Monorails are the technology of the future… And always will be.

I had planned to attend a panel about Character Generation but instead meet up with some friends over a late lunch/early dinner.

Friday, July 2nd

On the first full day of the convention I went to four panels:

Writing Workshop: Generating Speculative Fiction Ideas - The panel was hosted by a science fiction writer named Maya Kaathryn Bohnoff. She spoke about where she got the ideas of the story she wrote. Some of her suggestions including eavesdropping on conversations, making lists, using your other senses to spark ideas, such as taste, touch and smell, and deconstructing objects (Why is this thing here? What does it do? Who left it? Etc.). Most notable about this panel was that the famed science fiction author Larry Niven joined us as a fellow participant. I can honestly say that, for that two hour period, I was a writer on par with Larry Niven. She had us do an exercise by picking an object from a bag of stuff she brought with her and deconstructing it to write a story. As a result I have the beginning of a new story idea that I will finish and try to submit one day.

Funniest moment: After completing the exercise, Larry Niven stood up to read his assignment first. A bunch of people exclaimed that they ‘just couldn’t’ read theirs after him. Larry ended up reading his piece last.

Notable Quote: Ms. Bohnoff quoting the comedian Steven Wright, “I’ve always wondered, if you’re driving at the speed of light would your headlights work?”

Is Manned Space Travel Gone Forever? - Hosted by Dr. Jim Busby and Robert J. Cesarone. There were two other panelist whose names I didn’t catch due to arriving late. This was a wide-ranging discussion that covered things as diverse as political will, technological developments and Nickel mining on Earth. There were a number of emotional, and sometimes contentious opinions offered by those in attendance. The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was that mankind will escape the Earth and eventually colonize the planets, and maybe even the stars beyond, but who those people and when it would happen, as well as what we should be doing about it now, was open to debate.

Notable facts: The two largest nickel mines on the planet, both in Canada, are the remnants of an iron-nickel asteroid that hit the Earth millions of years ago. Iron-Nickel asteroids have approximately one Quadrillion dollars of profitable material per cubic kilometer (this per a study done by one of the panelists for a nickel mining company).

Rudy Rucker - Rockets or Cyberspace or ??? - A talk given by science fiction writer Rudy Rucker, one of the convention’s Guests of Honor, about the relationship between his work, society and the trends in science fiction when he was working on his various projects. I am not familiar with Mr. Rucker’s work, to be honest. I went to this panel to find out more about him since the convention had named him as a Guest of Honor. He struck me as a quiet and thoughtful individual who uses the various tropes of science fiction (Faster than light travel, cyberspace, etc.) as symbols for exploration into the human condition. He was also not afraid to give his political opinion which caused one angry, though brief, exchange between him and a person in the audience that identified himself as ‘ex-military.’ His newer work focuses on bio-tech, which he seemed to feel was the next mode of exploration science fiction will follow.

Using History: Does it help or hinder a good plot? - A panel about how to use history to create alternate histories, or secret histories, for your stories. The panelists were Tim Powers and Harry Turtledove. There was some very good, basic guidelines provided by the panelists about doing research for one’s stories. Set a deadline for when your research will stop, since research is not writing but it can feel like it. Use original sources whenever possible, such as diaries, biographies or journals. If original material is not available, use a ‘network’ of sources to filter out the unknown prejudices of the author or the time he was writing in.

There were a lot of interesting tidbits thrown out during this panel. For instance, there was a special tool made in the middle ages used to push back the hands of people tossed into boiling oil (which tells you how often people were tossed into boiling oil that they had to make a tool for the occasion). The word “Groovy” was first used in the 1920’s.

Notable quote, from Harry Turtledove: “Fiction has to be plausible. History just has to happen.”

Saturday, July 3rd

Saturday is usually the busiest day at a convention. It is the day people will come when they only have one day to go. It is usually when the most interesting panels, or the most famous Guests, will make their appearance. As a result, it is usually when your hardest choices about what to do are made because of the conflicts in schedule. I chose to go to the following panels this day:

Raising the Bar: Professional Writers teach Professional Techniques - Hosted by three writers: Maya Kaathryn Bohnoff, John DeChancie and Eileen Gunn. The panelist open with a discussion as to whether writing can be taught or if there are some people out there who are “word deaf,” the same way a person can be ‘tone deaf’ and be unable to sing. This segued into a talk about writers that ‘pour out words’ and those that rewrite. All three panelists agreed with the old saw that ‘writing is rewriting.’ Mr. DeChancie offered that being an attentive reader was key, and that you should stop and take notice of something that moved you and deconstruct it. It ended with some examples of strategies used to keep up with the three rules of writing (Write, Finish, Submit), such as writing a story every week. A lot of what was brought up in the panel were things I had heard before, but it never hurts to hear them again and remind yourself of what you should be doing.

Notable tidbit: John DeChancie offered this technique to learn structure. Take a piece of work by your favorite author and write it out for yourself, word for word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. Doing this you will ‘feel’ how the author built the story he created. The other panelists seconded this technique.

Basics of Writing: What Every Writer Needs to Know - This had a stellar group of panelists, which included Larry Niven, Laura Frankos, Eileen Gunn, David Brin and Marv Wolfman. Jerry Pournelle was scheduled to be on the panel but didn’t make it. This could have been billed as a continuation of the previous panel from the perspective of different writers. The size of the panel, the largest I experienced at this convention, made for a lot of back and forth discussions, ideas springing off idea, and changes of direction. Topics touched upon included maintaining the disciple of writing, developing one’s ideas, learning to deal with and accept rejection and enjoying your work.

Notable quote by David Brin: “Writing is the one true magic.”

Anthropogenic Global Warming - Hosted by Doug Jones and Robert J. Cesarone. This was the most unexpected panel I went to in terms of how it turned out. I guess I assumed that the issue of man’s role in climate change would be fairly settled amongst the members of science fiction fandom. That assumption proved to be incorrect. The opinions on what is causing global warming and what to do about it are, if this panel was an accurate indication, as varied as one might find in the broader society of which we are all members. I will say that, in comparison to the discussion I hear out in our broader society through the various media outlets, this discussion was much more polite with a much greater emphasis on providing evidence to support one’s contention. It’s too bad I couldn’t bring a bunch of the pundits waxing poetic in those outlets to this panel to show them how discussion and debate are supposed to be conducted. I did learn something about how the calibration of the instruments gathering your data can change how they appear when graphed out.

Notable quote, from one of the panelist (probably a re-quote from an unnamed source): “Who controls the Past controls the Future. Who controls the Present controls the Past.”

Sunday, July 4th

In comparison, the last day of the convention is often the quietest. People often leave early to make their way home. The panels I attended were:

Workshop: Writing, Editing and Critiquing your own Work - A writer named Will Morton hosted this event, the longest I attended during the convention both by design (it was scheduled for 2 hours) and by actual length (we switched rooms and carried on for an additional hour and half after the end of the scheduled time period). One had to sign up to participate, and you were expected to bring a short story to share with the other participates which they critiqued after you read it out loud. It took us a while to get started and though only four of the eight people signed up brought stories, we still had to go well over the time to get everyone’s story in. It was generally agreed by everyone that stories should be submitted in advance for all to read before the panel starts. My participation actually started several hours before. Deciding I wanted to work on something new, I got up at 5 AM Sunday and wrote a 7,400 or so word story by 9 AM to bring to the panel. I got some interesting feedback that I’m already using in my rewrite.

Notable event: One of the other participants in this panel was an individual who is a member of an online writing group I also participate in. We got to meet for the first time and sat together after the panel ‘talking shop.’

Medieval Weapons Demonstration - I think this was an impromptu event since it was not listed on the schedule. Eytan Kollin, a local writer who co-authored the book, ‘The Unincorporated Man,’ with his brother Dani, brought out his impressive collection of medieval bladed weapons and gave us a demonstration of their use in the courtyard of the Pasadena Hilton. He is a teacher of history and economics and has participated in historical reenactments and battle recreations with his melee weapons. A running theme throughout his demonstration were things that he reads in novels about melee weapons that are not accurate. It was a fun and interesting way to end the convention.

Notable tidbits: It takes three hours to clean one’s sword and armor using some sort of vegetable oil (such as olive oil), sand and a cloth. This was done every day and/or after the weapon got wet (such as during a rain storm). Weapons were often stored disassembled in barrels of pigs fat (the fat kept the rust causing water off the blade).

Conventions are fun for me. It gives me a chance to reconnect with others who share my passion for speculative fiction and for writing. It reenergizes me by reminding me of the things I want to do with my stories, and of the things I ought to do to get what I want out of my writing. They inspire me to carry on.

Hope to meet you at one soon.

News & Updates

I'm please to announce that my comic, SoftMetal, is back in print through Angry Viking Press. You can order a copy through their website. If you order the classic comic book format and want me to sign it for you let me know and we'll make arrangements. If you download the digital download format and want me to sign your computer I'll do that too (though it seems kinda weird to me).

Inspired by Science

2010-06-28T06:52:00.000-07:00

I write science fiction because I am inspired by science, the tool humans use to understand the workings of the universe, and how it impacts us as people. It has been interesting to see how the stories I read as a kid growing up have turned into the news stories and facts of our lives today.

Science fiction is a literary art. I would say it is probably the one the general population is most familiar with when it comes to forms of creative expression inspired by science. It is not the only one, however. Other artists in other fields can find inspiration in our efforts to understand our world. Here are a few examples I thought you might find interesting.

Sculpture that goes 'Back to the Future'

One of the most memorable scenes in the movie "Back to the Future II," was when the main character, Marty McFly, uses a 'hoverboard' to outrace a gang trying to blackmail him into helping them commit a crime. We don't have working hoverboards yet. But that didn't stop someone from making one for himself.

It what he calls a 'study in sculpture and experiment in spatial autonomy,' French artist Nils Guadagnin has built a working replica of the Back to the Future hoverboard. It uses electromagnets to float above the surface of its pedestal and a laser to stabilize its position. It can't bear the weight of a person, but the system is pretty good at keeping the sculpture in place. Click on this link to check out a video of the work.

Music From Other Dimensions

Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist at Harvard University specializing particle physics and cosmology. Her book, "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions" was named one of the New York Times' 100 notable books of 2005. Her book alone would make her a person any science fiction writer or fan of science ought to know about. But Dr. Randall took the further step of turning her scientific work into a work of art.

"Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Plans" is a one hour experimental opera that had its premiere at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in June of 2009. Based on Dr. Randall's work on hidden dimensions, she wrote the libretto for the opera as well, it is the story of a character who explores the unseen dimensions that affect the four dimensional reality wee see around us. Hector Parra, a Spanish composer who is the son of a physicist and who has written works influenced by particle physics, wrote the score for the opera. The music is altered to signal changes in energy, mass, time and gravity. For example, as the explorer, played by the soprano, enters a gravitationally strong part of the universe her voice is electronically altered to make her phrases shorter in increments that are mathematically precise. Dr. Randall has been quoted as saying that creating the opera, "has a little bit to do with why I do science and why I think there's more out there." It's the same sense that there is something missing, she goes on to say, that drives her that she finds in the people she's met in creative fields.

Visual Science

The "Art of Science" Gallery has at the top of its hope page a quote from Leonardo da Vinci: "Study the science of art and the art of science." The exhibition is set up to explore the interplay science and art, and to give record to those moments when "what perceives suddenly becomes more than the sum of its parts." Each year the gallery picks a different theme, and then chooses work that best reflect that theme. The theme for 2010 was "Energy." The 45 pieces reflect that theme in the broadest sense. They are not pieces of art for art's sake, but are striking images that were produced in the course of scientific study. The Art of Science Gallery has links for previous exhibits going back to 2005.

While writing this blog and picking these examples, I was reminded of a couple of my own experiences.

The first one is a personal observation that has influenced my own work. As I've noted in previous blogs, I have written several scripts for comic book stories. When I first started working in the field of visual story telling I noticed something about how my creative partner at the time worked. While we were having lunch together, I noticed him drawing an image of one of the characters in our story sitting down and having lunch as well. I pointed out to him that the character never had a pose like that in the script I had give him.

"I know," he replied, continuing to work on the image. "I just wanted to see what she'd look like sitting like this." He went on to explain that it was a common practice for him, and other artists he knew, to create a notebook of sketches when working on a character showing them doing all manner of things, even if the piece they were trying to produce didn't require those actions or poses. This helped them become more familiar with the character and better able to imagine whatever it was the script required of them to draw.

Since that time, I started keeping a separate document, my Word Palette I call it, on any story that I'm working on. I use the Word Palette as a place to mix words together about the character. Lines of dialogue, descriptions, opening passages and written down and rewritten, even if they aren't going to be in the final story. It's where I work out all the aspects of the characters and plot before I actually start writing the 'real thing.' I also use the Word Palette while writing the story itself. If I find myself blocked, unable to see how to get the character through a moment for instance, then I switch over to the Word Palette and start writing about the scene. I'll ask myself questions, I'll try different versions of the passage, I'll go back and rewrite what came before to get a running start in the direction I want to go. The purpose is to 1) Keep Writing and not sit there staring at the screen and the blinking cursor challenging me to put something there and 2) free up my mind and refocus it on what the character's dilemma is and how he/she is struggling to overcome it. Once I break through the blockage, I will cut whatever is useful from the World Palette, paste it into the story document, and keep going. Since using this method I've not had an incident of what I would call writer's block.

The second experience was that of a story I had read some time ago. Unfortunately I don't recall the name of the story or where I read it. It may have been an entry in one of the Writers' of the Future contests some years ago.

The basic idea of the story revolves around an alien artifact found buried in an asteroid orbiting our own sun. The asteroid is quarantined after the military explores the artifact. The soldier that explored the artifact reports having a vision of horrific images of the Earth being invaded, billions of people killed and the planet being laid waste. Clearly, the military concludes, the artifact is some sort of weapon that needs to be defused and studied.

It turns out that the artifact is a work of art. And like all great works of art, it reflects exactly what is inside the person observing it.

Science is the tool to see what is there around us, while Art, in all its varied forms, is the means we use to express what is inside us. When these two endeavors meet, interesting things are brought out.

News

I sent a prologue to the editors at Angry Viking Press for SoftMetal, the comic I've written about previously that will be reprinted this summer. From the artist I've received word that the publishers at Angry Viking are already asking for additional issues even before the first volume hits the stands. This is encouraging news to me. I'll relay more information as it comes to me.