Paradigm Schmaradigm

I usually stay away from the politics in this blog, and I had originally planned not to post anything about 9/11. But it's so much in the air that I thought I may take a stab at getting my own thoughts in order and in print.

I saw "The Path to 9/11" last night, and thought it was generally okay. There were some clunky "author's sermon" bits of dialogue, but I thought that they got the weaselly bits, and more importantly, the clueless mind-set of the Clinton administration down perfectly. And five years down the road, they're still clueless, still arguing for the same failed approaches that got us to 9/11 in the first place.

See, something big happened in this country on 9/11 that had huge consequences for the world, and I'm not speaking specifically about the attack on the World Trade Center. I'm talking about a change in mind-set, a different paradigm, if you will, that emerged from the fire and rubble of that day, and that was codified in Bush's speeches shortly afterward.

It was the recognition that we were at war.

And it's something that the ex-Clintonistas, the Bush-haters, those on the left refuse to admit or acknowledge. I'm not talking about people making the grudging admission that "Yeah, we're at war, but it's Bush that put us there." I'm talking about deep down, where you really believe that this is a kill-or-be-killed situation and you'd better start taking the threat seriously and acting accordingly. And the left aren't there. Never have been.

Ever.

The Clinton administration's biggest failing in dealing with terrorism was their insistence that terrorism was a law-enforcement problem. Someone does something wrong, you arrest them. You only go after those directly responsible for the incident in question, and only if you have sufficient evidence to connect them. If a Blood kills a Crip, you don't round up the whole gang. You arrest the one Blood responsible, and if you don't have sufficient proof that he did it, you have to let him go. That's the law enforcement mindset.

And evidence for it is everywhere. From U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine's letter to the LA Times ("The Cole was also a crime scene"), to Clinton's vow to "bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes," to the continued loony insistence that Bush lied about a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in order to go to war. He never did no any such thing. He claimed links between Al Qaeda and Iraq as part of a larger case for Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism. People have interpreted that as him saying Saddam was in on 9/11 because they're listening through a law enforcement filter: "you only go after those directly involved."

And they're still doing it. Yesterday, Vice President Cheney was on Meet the Press and went through an amazingly frustrating "Who's on First?" routine with Tim Russert that illustrates this very problem. A small sample:

MR. RUSSERT: All right. Now the president has been asked, "What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?" and he said "nothing." Do you agree with that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I do. So it's not...
MR. RUSSERT: So it's case, case closed.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We've never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11.
MR. RUSSERT: And the meeting with Atta did not occur?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don't know. I mean, we've never been able to, to, to link it, and the FBI and CIA have worked it aggressively. I would say, at this point, nobody has been able to confirm...
MR. RUSSERT: Then why, in the lead-up to the war, was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: That's a different issue...

America's response to terrorist attacks under Clinton was paralyzed by the "Superman problem." Superman's so strong that he can finish most enemies with one punch; no one can really challenge him toe-to-toe. Superman's big problem is that before he can hit someone, he has to figure out who to hit.

As I was watching TV that morning 5 years ago, part of my deep depression was caused not just by what was happening at that moment, but by the feeling that, like Clinton, Bush's response to the attack would be a few angry words followed by a shrug: "We will do whatever we can to bring him to justice, but in reality, 'whatever we can' will amount to a lot of talk and a couple of empty gestures."

The policy that George Bush announced immediately in the wake of 9/11 was a radical shift away from this mindset. So radical that many people in this country still either don't comprehend or believe it. Bush did not announce a simple investigation to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Nor did he announce that we were at war with Al Qaeda, although I've heard lots of people use that phrase.

This was the Bush policy in a nutshell: the problem isn't just Al Qaeda. It's the fact that Islamic jihadists have been allowed to breed and flourish, that countries around the world found terrorist groups to be such valuable tools that they were giving them weapons and money and training and safe haven. So bringing bin Laden to justice is only a small part of what we need to do. The big part is bringing down that edifice of terror-sponsoring regimes, and the intricate networks that fund and train and supply terrorists. Because we are not at war with Al Qaeda. We are at war with the larger system which brought Al Qaeda into being and helped it grow.

Here are direct quotes from Bush's speech on September 20, 2001:
"Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."

"Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success."

"And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Everybody heard these words that night, but apparently few took them to heart, didn't believe they were true or that Bush meant them. But looking back over the past five years, it's apparent that he meant every word.

What has the Bush administration done in the intervening years? Gone on a single-minded manhunt for bin Laden? Made a couple of arrests and a cruise missile strike, then declared victory and quit?

No. They've brought down terror-supporting regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, created a new cabinet-level department, embarked on secret programs designed to monitor terrorist communications traffic and strangle terrorist finances, changed or began planning to change the way the military is structured and equipped to fight this enemy.

Quibble with Bush's execution, if you will. Necessary intelligence overhauls still have not been done, and the Iraq occupation has not been handled well. Bin Laden is still at large, although his influence has been diminished as other players have come to the fore. And there are serious debates about civil liberties versus the need for security.

But stop with the "Bush lied" nonsense. He said what he meant, and he did it. The problem is, after eight years of having to read between the lines of every utterance by the Big Weenie, to try to divine the truth behind the carefully-worded ambiguity, a lot of people were not prepared for a President who did that.

That's about it for now, because it's lunchtime. I will add that many see our handling of Saudi Arabia as an indication of Bush's hypocrisy, but I disagree. I'll argue that later if someone insists. And I may talk more about Clinton later. Or not.

Die Hard Part 4: Conclusion and Lessons Learned

So what have I learned from rewatching the film and tearing it apart? Is there anything I can apply to my own work?

Lessons to apply:

1. Intercut scenes and use subtly parallel structures: true parallels, foreshadows, echoes, reverse foreshadows, reverse echoes.
2. Dialogue needs to sparkle.
3. Strive to write scenes and dialogue that work on multiple levels at once. The best line of dialogue is one that gives insight into a character, while also advancing the plot, while also being entertaining in its own right. Not everything can work this way, but look for opportunities where it can.
4. There is no such thing as a throwaway character.
5. Humor and heart can go a long way toward papering over plot holes and inconsistencies. If the audience is identifying with the characters, they're less likely to look for logic holes to pick at.
   

Some of it I'm already applying. I've added a lot of POV intercuts, explaining the bad guy's plan and sequence of actions more clearly, and giving minor characters more room to grow. I've tried to flesh out the characters more, making them more easy to identify with.

Unfortunately, while I've always considered dialogue one of my strengths, I think it might be suffering in the rewrite as I try to give more dramatic weight to the proceedings and lose some of the levity. However, I think I'll then be going back over the novel again in what the movie types call a "dialogue polish," specifically to brighten and tighten the dialogue. And with luck, I can make the book sing.

The big problem, and one that just hit me in a lightning flash this afternoon, is that the protagonist isn't. He gets recruited to join the team in act 1, then kind of mopes around aimlessly in act 2, wrestling with a moral dilemma, and failing to act on it, until the villains force his hand at the act 2 climax. He doesn't really protag until act 3, when he gets off his butt and kicks ass.

Act 1 works pretty well as near as I can tell. And the act 2 climax and act 3, while they need a lot of patching, are structurally sound, I think. But for the bulk of act 2, I need to give my protagonist a goal to work towards, something to keep him pushing forward and to get the reader to keep turning pages. Which means I'll need to introduce some kind of subplot and re-restructure the work I've been slogging through for the past two weeks or so. This kind of reimagining is something I'm very bad at.

Die Hard Part 3: Dialogue & Character

Three things set "Die Hard" apart from the general run of action films that immediately preceded it.

First was the brutally simple premise: lone cop is trapped in a skyscraper with a large team of well-armed terrorists and must defeat them using brains and guts. The premise was so compelling and easy to understand at a glance that it spawned its own mini-genre of imitators, commonly referred to as "'Die Hard' On A ______""

• "Under Siege" ("Die Hard" On A Battleship)
• "Under Siege 2: Dark Territory" ("Die Hard" On A Train)
• "The Rock" ("Die Hard" on Alcatraz)
• "Speed" ("Die Hard" On A Bus)
• "Speed 2: Cruise Control" ("Die Hard" On A Cruise Ship)
• "Passenger 57" ("Die Hard" On An Airplane)
• "Air Force One" ("Die Hard" On A Really Famous Airplane)
• "Con Air" ("Die Hard" On Yet Another Airplane)
• "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" ("Die Hard" In An Airport Full of Airplanes)

The movement reached its nadir with the novel Vertical Run by Joseph R. Garber, which was "Die Hard" In A Skyscraper!

Second, and where most of its imitators fell down on the job, was the complex storytelling structure (as discussed last time) it used to tell such a seemingly simple story.

Third, and the real subject of this post, was the attention given to creating memorable characters and quotable dialogue, something notably missing from the book.

Take the opening scene as an example: A jet touches down on a runway. Inside the plane, a passenger is gripping the armrest fearfully. His seatmate, an experienced business traveler, notices his fellow passenger's distress and tells him the secret to beating jet lag is to take off your shoes and walk on a thick carpet "making fists with your toes." Then the nervous seatmate gets up to leave and is revealed to be carrying a gun. "It's okay," he says, "I'm a cop." Then he pulls a giant teddy bear out of the overhead compartment. And thus we are introduced to John McClane.

It's a brilliant opening. In less than a minute and a half, we are introduced to the main character in a way that highlights his human flaws, and that hints at the two big (and conflicting) pillars of his life, police work and family. And even though the seatmate is seemingly a throwaway character (he never appears again), he gives us a memorable line of dialogue ("fists with your toes") that sets up one of McClane's big handicaps during the film (McClane, practicing the businessman's advice, is forced to flee without his shoes when the villains strike) and serves as a sort of reverse foreshadowing of the rest of the film (the business executive in his element, taking the nervous cop under his wing).

And the rest of the film only builds on this. We get a string of memorable characters: Argyle the hip chauffeur, Ellis the vapid salesman, Al Powell the cop, Dwayne T. Robinson the officious deputy chief, Johnson & Johnson (no relation) the FBI agents, not to mention the terrorists.

And line after line of sparkling dialogue:

"Sir, this channel is reserved for emergency use only."
"No fuckin' shit, lady! Do I sound like I'm ordering a pizza?"

"Who's driving this squad car, Stevie Wonder?"

"Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except the four assholes coming in the rear in standard two-by-two cover formation."

"Hey babe, I negotiate million dollar deals for breakfast. I think I can handle this Eurotrash."

"You ask for a miracle, Theo. I give you the F-B-I."

"You're nothing but a common thief."
"I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane. And since I'm moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite."

The characters may be cartoonish, but between the wittier dialogue and the excellent performances by the ensemble cast, they have a lot more heart than the cynical, vicious bastards moping their way through Thorp's novel. And even the throwaway parts get memorable bits, like Al Leong's terrorist stealing a candy bar while he waits to ambush the SWAT team, or the pompous anchorman who tries to show off his erudition by placing Helsinki in Finland.

Next up: Conclusion and lessons learned.

Die Hard Part 2: Structure

So why, out of all the stories I could pick to analyze, did I pick "Die Hard"?

Number one, I often want to do something like this with movies I watch, but some people get so wrapped around the axle on spoilers that I shy away. But "Die Hard" is almost 20 years old, so I'm not worried about spoiling anything for anybody. And number two, it and "Big Trouble in Little China" were both big influences on my work in how they combine action and humor. And since I spent several hours yesterday sitting at the keyboard trying to figure out how to approach a particular story point in the second draft, I could use some inspiration right about now.

Structurally, the movie is very similar to the book, only much leaner. The sequence of events, in general, is the same. However, the book, concerned as it is with the events of the terrorist siege causing Leland to examine the many ways he has fucked up his life, intersperses a lot of flashbacks into lulls in the action.

The movie, on the other hand, compresses everything and keeps pushing forward. Which is not to say that it's full of mindless action. The movie takes almost 30 minutes setting up McClane's character and his relationship with his wife before the villains are even introduced. But even much of the exposition is done in motion: McClane gives us the essential outline of his backstory during a limo ride, and the essential geography of the setting is set up as we travel through it with him.

Then throughout the film, things happen much faster than they do in the book. The most obvious example is the fire hose rappel. In the book, Leland fashions a harness from the straps of a kit bag he's wearing and uses it to attach himself to the hose, then carefully measures out the hose and calculates every aspect of the drop. In the movie, McClain is racing to get the hostages safe from an impending explosion while being shot at by FBI agents in a helicopter. The hose is a last-second impulsive choice, his only slim chance of survival. He ties it around his waist and jumps.

Of course, this approach has its drawbacks, at least in written fiction. The movie blazes past you so quickly you can't reflect on what you've just seen or heard, or else you'll miss what's coming next. So, for instance, you can let some howlers like Al Powell's backstory pass without complaint (the howler in question is the fact that in the movie, Powell is the first responding officer on the scene, then later tells McClane the story of how he accidentally killed a kid and was subsequently pulled off the streets; those two elements just don't fit together). A written story doesn't have that same luxury.

On the other hand, some of the structural techniques in the movie work better than the book. The book is told exclusively from Leland's point of view, while the movie intercuts between parallel lines of action: McClane and the terrorists, usually, but also the police in the street, the hostages, the TV reporter covering the story, the limo driver in the parking garage. In the action leading up to the fire hose rappel and the roof explosion, they're intercutting between four parallel activities: McClane fighting Karl to get to the roof, Gruber and Holly in the vault as they pack up the loot, hostages being taken to the roof, FBI agents on helicopters getting ready to blow away the bad guys and cold-bloodedly discussing how many hostages will die.

One of the neat structural tricks in the movie is to mirror action between the heroes and the villains. So, for instance, McClane or the cops will make a plan, while the villains are making their own plans, then we see teh results of both actions. We also see both sides succeeding and advancing simultaneously. So, for instance, after McClane has finally succeeded in getting the cops to take the threat seriously after a few failed and foiled attempts, we find that not only have the villains proceeded in their vault intrusion efforts, but that McClane's efforts have actually advanced their plans as well.

Next up: characters and dialogue

Finding What Works: Die Hard

So I thought I would take a break from obsessing about my own progress (or lack of) and talk about something I really like, while trying to find the elements that make it work so well. So I thought I'd take a good close look at "Die Hard."

The movie came out in 1988, just after I'd left The Daily Oklahoman. It starred Bruce Willis, who was mainly well known for his role asDavid Addison in Moonlighting, a combination screwball comedy/romance/mystery TV series that was a huge hit, if only briefly. Before the movie came out, I had my doubts about Willis being able to pull off an action role, but he did it brilliantly.

But before I start tearing apart the movie, which is an almost perfect piece of action-adventure entertainment, let's look at the book that inspired it.

In 1979, a guy named Roderick Thorp released a little suspense novel titled Nothing Lasts Forever. The book was actually a sequel to his 1966 novel, The Detective, which had been made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra.

Comparing the novel and the movie is an interesting exercise. There is one school of thought that says you should be as true to the book as possible when making the movie. Another school of thought says that you can take liberties with the text, changing and combining characters and events, as long as you are true to the spirit of the book. The general line of thinking goes that if you discard both, you're sure to have an awful movie.

"Die Hard" disproves that. It's true to neither the plot nor the spirit of the book, and it's a rip-roaring good time. Yet, for everything from the book that it discards or changes, you can still see the skeleton of the novel in the movie, unlike say, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," which discards virtually everything from Gary Wolfe's novel except for a few names and the central conceit, that toons are real and photographed, not drawn.

So what did the movie discard from the novel, besides the title? The main characters' names, for one. Joe Leland is replaced by John McClane. Stephanie Gennaro, Leland's divorced daughter, is replaced by Holly Gennaro, McClane's estranged wife. The terrorist leader, Little Tony the Red, becomes the suave Hans Gruber.

Yet the basic structure is much the same. Leland flies to Los Angeles to be with his family on Christmas Eve. Joins his daughter at a Christmas party in the high-rise building where she works. Terrorists attack while Leland is off cleaning up, relaxing with his shoes off. As the terrorists defend the building from police and try to break into the safe on the top floor, Leland picks them off one by one. He breaks the neck of one in a fistfight. He escapes down a ventilation shaft, using his rifle strap as a rope. He takes a bag of plastic explosive and detonators off a dead terrorist, and later drops that explosive down an elevator shaft as a makeshift bomb. He cuts his bare feet on broken glass. He listens over the radio as Ellis, his daughter's coworker, is killed by the terrorists right after giving them Leland's identity. He argues with the cops outside, ends up trapped on the roof, and has to rappel down the side of the building with a firehose. He finally shoots Little Tony, who grabs Stephanie's watchband as he falls out the window, dragging her with him. In the end, as McClane is about to be killed by Karl, the vengeful brother of the man whose neck Leland broke, the final terrorist is shot by Al Powell of the LAPD.

Anyone familiar with the movie will recognize these familiar touchstones, and yet the flavor of the book is completely different. Leland is a bitter old man, a retired cop and widower who has grown estranged from his daughter. Stephanie is a self-absorbed, cocaine-snorting yuppie, and while Leland loves her, he doesn't much like her. Little Tony is a committed communist who commits the assault in order to steal money the corporation has gotten by illicit means. After Leland kills Tony, and accidentally causes his own daughter's death in the process, he proceeds to the opened safe and throws of millions of dollars in cash out the open windows into the streets, in order to punish the corporation, a big oil company whose misdeeds prompted this whole mess.

While the book is suspenseful, the characters are all sort of sour and used up and pathetic, and it's hard to really root for any of them. From the pessimistic, contemplative title to the final line, there's something in the book that's like, to quote Stephen King, "biting on tinfoil." A stinging undertaste that never mellows.

Next time: how to turn this bitter downward spiral into a sweet roller-coaster ride.

From The Horrors of War To Just Plain Horror

Finished Gust Front by John Ringo today, finally, and I must admit, I'm getting a little burned out on military SF for now, having gone from Wentworth's Hrinnti series to Drake's Hammer's Slammers to Ringo's Posleen war almost without pause. So now I'm reading something completely different, suggested by Jess Nevins and Chris Roberson at ArmadilloCon.

I'd never read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, although I'd seen several movie versions. But after being burned by several failed attempts at reading classics above my level as a child (in my youth, I got somewhere between a third and halfway through Frankenstein and Dracula and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea {failed to finish that one twice} and The Time Machine and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which was not at all like the Invisible Man movies, BTW), I've always been a little leery of reading classics for their own sake. Not that I was unable to understand the books, although a lot admittedly went right over my head. They were just boring for a kid raised on The Brady Bunch and Space Ghost, Jonny Quest and Gilligan's Island.

I've rectified some of that lack in later years. I did get all the way through Frankenstein on my second try, and whizzed through The Time Machine. I read The Iliad once for the hell of it, and I read The Sun Also Rises on a dare (the deal was that I read Hemingway while my friend read Stephen King - neither of us liked what the other one loved).

So Nevins and Roberson said that Jekyll & Hyde was a great book to read, well written in a style that hasn't dated nearly as much as other authors of the period. They also mentioned a lot of gay subtext, which is not so much an attraction, except I just had to see it for myself. And as I'm about a third of the way through right now, I have to say: I see it. I don't know if I'm only seeing it because I've been told it's there, like listening to "Stairway to Heaven" backwards, but I definitely see the intimation.

Wait... Okay, I'm Ready... Wait...

I finally got an answer on my short story "Shell,"which has been languishing in the slush at Intergalactic Medicine Show since February. It has gone into the editor's "Read Again" pile, so there's hope that this could be that elusive second sale. This also means at least another couple of months of waiting. Aaargh, the pace of this business kills me.

Which is not a criticism of the editor at IGMS, any more than it is of the editor at Baen's Universe, who has a story I submitted in December of last year and won't be giving me a definitive thumbs up or down until after my 44th birthday, probably. I mean, it's basically a result of too many people chasing too few dollars.

Also, I'm approaching the halfway point of the novel rewrite and hitting one of those "this book totally sucks and I should quit and do something else" doldrums with it. One of the problems is that I've planted so many clues to the villains' plot that the heroes need to twig to it a little earlier, which means revising their actions for the remainder of the second act.

Problem is, what I really need is for them to do something in reaction to the perceived danger that actually puts them in a worse position when the real danger is revealed. So I know what I want the effect of their actions to be, but as far as their substance, I'm clueless. Need to think...

Of course, once I finish it (which if I work really, really hard will maybe be within a year of the time I started), then it goes into a slush pile somewhere, where it will wait for two years, if I'm lucky and they like it, before being accepted for publication in another two or so years. So start the chant now: "Digger in 2010."

Out of the Loop

Well, the WorldCon is in full swing, and I'm not there. Not that I ever had serious plans to go, but it's in Anaheim this year, which is where I attended my first WorldCon 22 years ago. I have lots of memories of that con, probably more memories of it than of the other WorldCon I attended, which was just six years ago in Chicago. Next year's is in Japan, which I would love to attend, but certainly cannot afford, but maybe the year after that. It's an event worth doing every few years.

To clarify the post from a couple of days ago, I have never personally killed nor maimed a cat. But I will admit I don't much like them, which may be why I find stuff like BonsaiKitten.com funny (their site was down when I included this link - if it's still down, you can read about the phenomenon here and here and here and see a mirror of the site here). There's something about cats that makes their destruction and torture an acceptable subject for humor while the same cannot be said about dogs or snakes or even goldfish. You would never see a BonsaiPuppy website (unless some catlover ginned one up just because I said it couldn't be done). You would never see a dog equivalent of How to Kill Your Girlfriend's Cat. I don't know why this is, but it seems to be true, and it works for me.

Cold War Hilarity

I know this will probably get some animal rights folks all het up, but come on, it's cats. They deserve it.

Second Draft: The Countdown Begins

So I decided to start back up with the word counter thingie, except since I'm in the middle of a second draft that is growing quickly (and that I'm not rewriting from scratch), it's easier for me to do a page counter. Here's where I stand right now:

192 / 504 (38.1%)

To illustrate how different the second draft is, this is the corresponding place in the first draft:

153 / 466 (32.8%)

So I've fleshed out the beginning quite a bit. The manuscript is almost 10% longer than it was before. I don't know if the rest of the manuscript will grow at the same rate. I hope not. Then again, if I do still decide to go to Baen first, they want at least 100,000 words, and I'm still not there, so I've got room to grow without really needing to cut much more.

One cool thing I'm finding is that scenes that seemed sort of pointless or throwaway in the first draft are being rewritten to focus a lot more on the overall arc of the story and really draw out the conflicts between the characters. The second act wandered all over the map while I tried to find the storyline in the first draft. The second draft is much clearer and more focused.

Going Postal

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the event that gave birth to the phrases "going postal" and "disgruntled postal worker." Twenty years ago today, Patrick Sherrill went on an armed rampage at the Edmond, OK post office where he worked, killing 14 people and wounding six more before taking his own life.

I was working for The Daily Oklahoman at the time, so I was peripherally involved in the news coverage that day. I was grabbed early in the day to follow one of the reporters to the post office, because they needed radio-equipped cars to coordinate the coverage. I can remember riding back to the paper with one of the reporters, listening to other reporters on the radio telling about the people they were interviewing, relatives and friends and neighbors. One reporter in particular mentioned that Sherrill's neighbor, completely opposite of the old cliche about the neighbors saying 'he was always such a nice, quiet man,' could not say enough bad things about the guy.

I remember how the newsroom buzzed frantically all day, and how, about 10 minutes before I was supposed to go home, I got grabbed again by one of the editors and sent to Edmond to pick up a photo of one of the victims from her husband. I drove the half-hour out to the home, feeling awfully put out because this would keep me working for an extra hour at least. When I got there, the red-eyed husband handed me a Polaroid photo that had been cut in half so only his wife's face showed. I hesitated as I took it, and he asked me what was wrong. With my usual lack of tact, I mentioned that the resolution of the Polaroid was really not suitable for reproduction. He began to get upset, and someone else came and angrily told me to get out of there, so I took the photo and returned to the newsroom. The picture went out over the AP wires that night.

I really don't like myself sometimes.

That night, at home, I watched the local news of all three stations. One station billed the story as "Tragedy in Edmond," and had the local anchors interviewing Sherrill's sister on the living-room-style set of their morning show, all muted colors and hushed voices. "Did you ever get any indication that your brother was capable of something like this?"

One of the other stations had a blood-red graphic that simply said, "Massacre!" and interviewed Michael Bigler, one of the surviving victims, in a live remote from his hospital bed. "So where exactly did he shoot you, Mike?" asked the grinning anchor.

Bigler later recounted in an article in Guidelines magazine how God had saved his life that day. When Sherrill shot him, God told him to play dead. So Bigler lay still on the floor and didn't move, listening to the shots and screams as Sherrill continued to gun people down. And then the screams stopped. Then Bigler heard footsteps in the adjoining room, punctuated by occasional single shots. "He's shooting everybody again, to make sure they're dead," Bigler realized.

And God said, "Run."

Bigler then scrambled out the nearest door while Sherrill was reloading.

That day was actually my second experience in a newsroom frantically covering a breaking story. The first had been in 1985, when a fireworks factory blew up in Hallett, Oklahoma. But I wasn't personally involved in it like I was in the Edmond story, however peripherally. So the Edmond thing affected me more and taught me some things about myself that I didn't particularly like.

The novel rewrite continues apace. I'm over a third of the way through, and the second draft has expanded quite a bit so far. I've deleted some extraneous material and tightened up some of the dialogue, while adding quite a few scenes to make the timeline clearer and develop the characters and their relationships further. I've also added a lot of sensory descriptions for setting and atmosphere, so the characters aren't walking around in a bland gray void. I still don't know if the book will work as a whole, but I think it's getting better.

More Reality TV

So I mentioned a couple of weeks ago about Who Wants to Be a Superhero? It's a weird show, a combination of reality tropes and cheesy cheese. The thing is, sort of like The Apprentice, the show's biggest weakness is its centerpiece: Stan Lee. The attack dog challenge was awesome, but some of the others, like the prisoner interview challenge, have been either ill-conceived or just too simple and vague. In some cases, Stan The Man has had to grasp at straws in choosing which hero to dismiss.

For instance, Stan took one hero to task for making fun of another's costume. "Superheroes are supposed to make people feel good about themselves," says the man who introduced the concept of heroes who constantly bicker and fight in the Fantastic Four.

One challenge involved heroes ordering food in a restaurant and being seduced by a sexy waiter/waitress into giving up their secret identities. "The number one rule of being a superhero is never give up your secret identity," says the man who started a new era in comics by introducing superheroes whose real identities are common knowledge (the Fantastic Four, again).

And then there's Major Victory, a former male stripper who keeps getting chided by Stan about taking off his cape during challenges. "You'd never see Superman taking off his cape," Stan says. Well, apparently, Stan didn't read the same Superman comics I did, because Superman took his cape off all the time, wrapping Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen in it to protect them when he flew them to the Fortress of Solitude. Batman has also taken his cape off a few times, for instance, to fight a hawk or to duel R'as Al Ghul.

And perhaps most frustrating of all, whenever he talks to the superheroine Lemuria, Stan can't pronounce her name (although to be fair, no one else can, either), pronouncing it "Lumeria," except for the occasional voiceover.

I'm looking forward to the final episode, although I fear that Fat Momma, she of the doughnut utility belt, could well win it all, which would just be wrong. I would rather see Feedback win, although he has crazy-ass long mutant arms and is taking all this way too seriously. But he's got the best costume, he's a martial artist, and he plays the game well.

Working Up My Courage

So I mentioned a while back that I had this idea for a magazine that I would never produce. And then I got a favorable comment about the idea. And then I went to ArmadilloCon and met several small publishers, some of whom, like Chris Roberson and Monkeybrain Books, are putting out some awesome product (I really want the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and Superhero: Origin of a Genre). And I'll stop geeking out about Monkeybrain now, I promise. Seriously, you guys.

So I started thinking more about it. I have quite a lot of it in my head. I know vaguely how I want it to look. I know what kinds of stories I want in it, and how I plan to sell content and pay contributors (a different scheme that I don't think anyone has tried before, although Universe is similar in some respects). I have a couple of ideas on marketing, but not enough. My big problem now is numbers; when I sketch out my idea of what an issue will be and translate that into costs, and then I look at what kind of response I have to have to get that back, it's pretty scary. And the one thing nobody can predict is how people will respond to something new.

One thought I've had is trying what I call Issue Zero, something about half the size of my eventual goal, and seeing what kind of response I get. I'm not going to go into details here. If you want to know more, email or comment me and I'll give you the big picture.

I'm Back

ArmadilloCon Day 3:

I was entirely too bright-eyed on Sunday. I'd expected, from that first panel on Friday, that this would be an ultra-party con, but it was not so much (or maybe it was, but the parties all revved up after I left). They seemed to anticipate big party action on Saturday night, else why delay the panels until 11 a.m. on Sunday? Which is not to say there weren't parties when I left Saturday night, but just a couple.

Went to a couple of good panels on Sunday. One, on 19th Century Fantastic Fiction, was very informative, and I came away with titles of several things I want to look up and read. The other one was on Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan. This is the 100th anniversary of Howard's birth, and they're planning big doings at World Fantasy Con this year (also being held in Austin). I won't be there, both because it's during November Sweeps and because I can't afford it. But this panel was good and informative, and once again, I came away with some titles of things I need to hunt down and read.

I've only ever read one thing by Howard, a Conan novella in some anthology I can't remember (I'm sure I've got it packed away somewhere). I remember sort of dreading it before I tried to read it, just because I anticipated some muscular but dreadfully clumsy pulp prose. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the writing was. Not perfect, but better than I'd anticipated. I'm in a reading phase right now (currently reading A Hymn Before Battle by John Ringo - in this first book, at least, he's obviously knowledgeable about the military, but the prose and characterization are clunky, and 5 chapters in, I'm getting impatient for the action to start), so I want to take advantage of it by reading some classics as well as new stuff.

I'd planned to attend another panel at 3 p.m., on using current scientific discoveries in writing, and attending the legendary Howard Waldrop reading after that (I heard him recite the opening sentences to the story in the first panel of the con, and it sure sounded intriguing), but about 2 p.m., I decided I'd had enough and decided to beat feet for home. The drive was mostly uneventful, except for traffic jams in Austin and Fort Worth. I listened mostly to music rather than talk radio.

When I left Tulsa, gas here was $2.95 a gallon. When I got to Austin, it was $2.84 in places. As I was driving back, I made sure to refill before I got back home, so I could save that 10-ish cents a gallon. Got back here and discovered that gas was $2.75. Doh! It dropped 20 cents a gallon here while staying basically the same in Texas. And the weird thing was, while I was on the road, I was hearing news reports that gas had hit an all time high, with the lowest gas in the nation costing $2.82 in North Carolina or someplace.

Anyway, I'm back, and I even got some novel work done while I was gone. I also got bored at the friend's house while I was waiting for the Mobile Command Center to recharge, so I got out their copy of The DaVinci Code and started analyzing the structure. The book is clumsily written on a prose level, to be sure, and you can pick it apart endlessly on its errors of fact and its wooden characters. But on the structural level, where it introduces mysteries and weaves together parallel plotlines as it doles out small answers and clues while deepening the mystery further, it's actually pretty sophisticated. If I could do that with Hero Go Home, I might have a page-turner on my hands. I only got through about the first tenth of the book, but I think I learned some things that I might try to apply on the third draft of Hero Go Home (and there will be a third - I'd hoped to clean it up sufficiently in the second to submit it, but I can already tell it will need further polishing).

Day 2

ArmadilloCon Day 2:

Wow, long day. Went to several panels, including one on editing, one on comics, a really fascinating one on small press publishing, a fun one on King Kong and giant apes in general, one on finishing a novel manuscript, and one on on-line publications. I also did some math and realized I had economized enough to buy at least one book. I bought a copy of an anthology titled Adventure, edited by Chris Roberson (whom I mentioned yesterday). He liked the "Whack a Monkey" shirt, and asked me to send him one of my stories. If he likes it, he'll keep me in mind for his next anthology project.

The capper of the day was the evening's performance in lieu of a dance. At Conestoga, they have a costume contest and a play during the judging. The play itself has been hugely entertaining the two years I've actually watched it. It is written by members of our local writers group, and is generally hilarious, due to its script, but also to the rather embarrassingly amateurish performances. A Penguin Playhouse production is neither smooth nor rehearsed, but the way the players deal with cheaply-built props falling apart, blown lines, missed cues and other disasters is part of its charm.

The performance at ArmadilloCon was the polar opposite of the Penguin Playhouse. The show by the Violet Crown Radio Players was slick and smoothly rehearsed. It was an onstage performance of a radio play, with a small band, a crew of voice actors and sound effects being performed live. They did King Kong, and it was hella cool. It made up for the disappointment of not having the Baen crew here. I have met four other Baen's Universe authors, but there was no official presence, so that was kind of a bummer. However, the other benefits have made up for it. I'm having fun, and there's still one more day to go.

So Yeah, Okay, I Went

ArmadilloCon Day 1:

So I came down yesterday. Eight hours of driving, sipping Diet Coke and listening to AM radio (the AstroCruiser does not have a CD player). Heard Air America for the first time. I was able to listen to about 10 minutes of it before I started screaming at the ignorant host-chick, who was prattling on about how the neocons don't understand the "peace process." Then she started explaining the peace process in terms that would make the Underpants Gnomes proud.

Step 1: Israel withdraws its forces
Step 2:
Step 3: Peace

Turned off the radio before I blew a blood vessel in my head, causing me to go blind in one eye, causing me to lose depth perception and smash into a road barrier at one of the ENDLESS road construction sites.

Went to the hotel at about noon today. Registration wasn't supposed to open until 1, but I was getting tired of sitting around my friend's house. Spotted the hotel from the freeway: easy. Found a road route to actually get me to the hotel: not so easy. Looked for the entrance to the hotel's parking structure: nearly blew another blood vessel in my brain. After a brief fit of rage and FOUR LAPS around the block, I talked to the con staff and figured it out, then discovered that there was literally nothing to do until, like, 5 p.m. Even the dealers' room didn't really open until four-ish, which brought me back to remembering why I've always been kind of take-it-or-leave-it with cons, at least until Conestoga this year, which I loved.

If you aren't actually a guest of the con, there will be long stretches where you have nothing you want to do, but you don't want to leave, because it's such a pain in the ass to leave the hotel and navigate your way back. So along about three, four in the afternoon, I started thinking I might have made a big mistake coming here.

Then I attended the "Welcome to ArmadilloCon" panel, which made me think that maybe this would not be like any other con I'd ever attended. I've attended a few cons in my time, mostly in Oklahoma, but also in Nebraska and L.A. and Chicago, and even one in Austin (a NASFIC 21 years ago, God, has it been that long?). I have never been to a panel where the moderator pulled out a huge bottle of gin and said, "Who wants martinis?" followed by another panel member saying, "If you don't like martinis, I've got Shiner Bock and barbecue ribs." I was worried about my food budget here, but I had a chili dog in the Con Suite, a rib at the opening panel and some crawfish in the ApolloCon party. I may actually save enough money on food that I can buy a book if I want to, and there are some books in the dealer's room that I really want.

Met a member of my online writing group in person (the first such I've met). I also met Julie Czerneda, a fellow Universe author, as well as Elizabeth Moon, who writes military sci-fi (I have not read any of her books yet, but they will go on my list soon). And I talked comics with Chris Roberson, who has written a book called Paragaea: a Planetary Romance. I don't know if the book is any good, but it has one of the coolest covers I've seen in years.

I'm still kind of on the fence about whether this will be worth the trip. I don't know, for instance, if there will be an official Baen's presence tomorrow or not, but I am ready to schmooze if there is.

During the down times, I've been working on the second draft. It's really eating at me; I thought the second draft would be much easier than the first, but I've felt kind of adrift. I read through the revised first act. When I read the first draft, it was like, "This has some cool energy, but structurally, it's a mess." Now it's like, "The structure works a lot better, but the prose feels dead." Dang it, when did writing get so hard?

Kind of Boring Discussion on Rewrite Goals

This may not interest anyone, but once again, it helps me to write it out.

The novel rewrite is proceeding. I'm done with Act I. I don't know how much better it is (if any), but it's longer by about 25%, and that's with at least two short scenes cut out. The basic problems I tried to address: introduce some major characters and their motivations earlier, give the protagonists and their relationships a little more time to breathe (the first part of the first draft was a NaNoWriMo project, so it was a little breathless, with major story elements elided), flesh out the generic first act climax with detail specific to the setting.

Since the first act climax takes place in Phoenix, I hit up an online acquaintance for help. He came up with some pretty good ideas, but in the end, I decided not to use his suggestion, setting my big action set piece not on Camelback Mountain, but in Patriots Square Park downtown.

Moving on to the second act now. The second act has different problems, mostly caused by my wandering around as I tried to find the storyline and fill time between the end of Act I and the Act II climax. Major goals here are much the same as in Act I, only more so: eliminate the extraneous elements and false starts, the scenes and subplots that end up going nowhere, while fleshing out the parts that push the story forward. First reader reaction to the Act II climax was that it felt a little rote. This says to me that I emphasized the action too much, while losing track of the emotional connection to the characters. Goal: play up the emotions more while still retaining the big explosions.

Mobile Command Center: The Verdict

The first act, second draft is finished. Much of the rewriting was done on the Mobile Command Center (aka my New Toy) . So now that I've had two weeks to break it in, how does it stack up to my expectations?

On balance, I have to say it's working better than I'd expected.

The negatives first: even though the T/X has a bigger screen than most other Palm devices, the screen is still small and hard to read sometimes. Although the resolution can be adjusted, it sometimes changes unexpectedly, and I'm not sure why. I get a lot mistyped characters on the keyboard, more it seems than on a regular keyboard, because the sensitivity of the keys seems to vary or something (it communicates with the Palm via infrared rather than plugging in). Also, using the stylus as a selection tool, rather than a mouse, is frustratingly imprecise. And I have occasionally gotten a lot of typos introduced as artifacts during the synchronization process; I think it has to do with the translation between regular Word files and Word To Go files. And the battery life is not as great as I might like between charges.

Now the positives: I'm finding a lot more time to write than I'd expected. When I bought the MCC, I was planning to use it mainly as a tool for typing in bars on the one night a week or so I go out. Instead, I find I'm working during my lunch hour almost every day, which means I'm being a lot more productive than I'd planned. The ebook function is getting a lot more use than I'd expected, also. Depending on my mood, I might spend my lunch time reading a couple of chapters (currently Stars/Over/Stars, the sequel to Black/on/Black), or writing a couple of pages, or doing a little of each if I have time. I'm loving the flexibility. The keyboard is not perfect, but the keys are almost full-sized, so it's not as difficult to type as I'd thought. And I like the fact that I can either edit the full MS or start a new document to write a self-contained scene to drop in later.

So on balance, although it's not perfect, I think I'm going to get good value out of the Command Center. Now I've got to get back to work.

Second Draft Blues

So I'm approaching the end of the first act in the rewrite, nowhere close to the pace I wanted to set, but not bad, considering. The thing is, although the draft is cleaning up okay, I don't know if it's actually going to work. The book has good parts, but I'm having one of those crises of confidence, where it feels as if no amount of polishing can fix the deep problems with basic structure and the book's overall storyline/character arcs. I should finish the first act rewrite by this weekend. I think it's better, but I really have no idea.

I've got a place to stay in Austin, but still don't know for sure if I'm going. Stupid Alaska pipeline. Gas alone for the trip will be over $100 (don't know how much over, but probably close to $110 total). So I'd be in for $150 just in gas and con registration fees, before I've eaten a single meal, or bought so much as a paperback from the dealers room. Are the networking benefits worth it? Of course, there's no way to know until after I've done it.

Miscellaneous Crap

Went running yesterday. I've been trying to get back into running for over a month. For some reason (probably a mix of infrequent training, low carb diet, and killer heat, plus maybe just getting damned old), yesterday was the first time in this training cycle that I've been able to complete the entire 2 1/2 mile course without stopping to walk. Usually I bounce back to being able to run the entire distance after one or two break-in runs, but this time, it's taken weeks.

I saw Stan Lee's "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?" on Sci-Fi last night. I love reality shows anyway, but this one was especially fun. They had to complete a challenge by fighting off attack dogs while trying to advance 50 yards or so to a door. A couple of the guys succeeded by simply carrying the dogs (which had latched onto the sleeves of their protective garments and hung there like furry icicles). One really big guy who's a bouncer in real life carried the dogs almost all the way, then fell about a foot from hte door and quit. The women all got taken down by the dogs really quickly and quit, except for the last girl, Monkey Woman, who fought with the dogs for almost 10 minutes (!) and managed to drag herself all the way to the door and complete the task, the only one of the women to do so. Now that's a hero.

The coolest twist on the show was when they kicked the bouncer off, only to redesign his costume and turn him into a supervillain to challenge the remaining hero candidates.

I washed the "Whack a Monkey" shirt tonight. I didn't read the care tag and dried it on high instead of low. I think I shrank it, but it looks like it will still fit. I'm telling myself that I can make it to ArmadilloCon. I emailed someone today to see if I can stay with friends down there. I've also been approved for vacation days during FenCon in September, if this con doesn't work out.

The Mobile Command Center is turning out to be pretty handy. Although I bought it for use in bars, I've used it almost every day this week to write during my lunch hour. If I can turn that into a regular ritual, I'll get a lot more writing done this year than last, and finish the novel in decent time.

Working for the Man vs. Entrepreneurial Drive

I said some things in yesterday's post that could be construed as disparaging to the small press and those authors who publish there. This is the flipside of that, another aspect of my dilemma, if you will.

When the Wife and I were dating, I remember one time we were discussing something about the future and she said something about how she wished I could get a really good job with a company that I could stick with for a long time. I objected to that, because it was never an ambition of mine to be a corporate man. She and I were brought up in different types of households, understand. Her grandfather and her mother both worked for rather large companies, and had worked for the same company for basically all of their adult lives. On the other hand, my father owned a jewelry store, his father and brother were independent farmers, my stepmother was a florist and my stepfather was a partner in a construction equipment firm, for a while at least.

So she came from a family of company folks, and I came from a family of entrepreneurs. It's not surprising that we looked at the issue from different directions. Now I'm in my forties, and I've been a company man for several years (although with different companies). I still think it would be cool to be my own boss, but like those folks who say they want to write when what they really want is to have written, I don't know that I have the mindset to be a successful entrepreneur.

And this is the thing about the small press. Say what you will about Yard Dog (which I mentioned yesterday) - the lowbrow humor and the amateurish production values and the cheesy marketing techniques - but they have managed to survive through some really tough times for ten years now. They've grown and built a core audience, and they've managed to collect a stable of authors who are willing to jump through hoops to publicize their books.

And the thing is, if it weren't for entrepreneurs like Selina Rosen, one of the driving forces behind Yard Dog, we wouldn't get the new blood that the publishing industry needs. If the Big Three or Five or Seven publishers were the only game in town, who knows how much good work would go unnoticed?

But it takes a special type of person to lead that charge, and I don't think I'm it, as much as I might want to be. I've got this idea for a fiction magazine, something like Baen's Universe, only with a bigger emphasis on adventure and not limited to SF/F, something like the old Argosy, only pitched at the same audience as Maxim, say. A magazine full of fast-paced adventure and rowdy humor. Frankly, I first thought of it as a way to market the stories I've written that don't seem to fit the existing markets, considering the big magazines are looking for serious literary stuff and the small magazines are mainly looking for dark stuff. Nobody seems too interested in a romp for its own sake, and that's what this would be. In fact, I even call it Romp!

I think it could sell, and my limited experience combing the slush piles at Baen's and picking winners (defined as "stories I liked that ended up being bought") makes me think that I could do a good job editing it. But will I ever try?

Probably not. Like I say, it takes a special type of person to want to take on the challenges of publishing a magazine and trying to get it marketed, and I just don't think I'm it. I think, as much I may have denied it years ago, that I've now thoroughly become a company man. I demonstrated that pretty definitively with Blue Falcon, which I hardly dared to market at all once it was published. I'm content to write and cash the checks, and let others go through the heartburn of publishing. Which disappoints me a little, but there you are.

Lake, Drake, Eudaly, McQuay, Wooley and Me

Apologies in advance if this is too long and rambling, but I'm trying to work some things out.

In yet another example of the synchronicity which seems to permeate my life, I happened to run across this blog entry by Jay Lake on the same weekend as Conestoga, and it has me reevaluating my life and work. I had already been nibbling on the edges of this idea, by applying for a writing job in the previous week, but this has all come together on me in the last couple of days, so forgive me while I type it out so as to sort it out in my head.

The blog entry: the thing that prompted it was a discussion within an online writing group (of which I am a member) that has run for several days, debating the value of sales to semi-pro markets (markets with miniscule readerships that pay less than 3 cents a word). On the one side, ably represented by Mr. Lake here, you have the people arguing that for many writers struggling to build a career and a reputation in a shrinking small fiction market, any sale is cause for celebration. On the other side, you have the more ambitious neo-pros arguing that time spent pursuing sales to tiny zines for tiny pay and no eyeballs is time that could have been spent working toward a more productive end.

Conestoga: David Drake sits next to Rhonda Eudaly at a panel. David Drake is a seasoned pro, a very successful author with a career spanning decades. Rhonda Eudaly is a vivacious up-and-comer with several short story credits, and a fixture on the Texas/Oklahoma convention circuit. Eudaly is currently fighting tooth-and-nail to sell 300 copies of her latest book to win a bet; to Drake, only 300 copies sold would be an abysmal failure. So there's Eudaly, performing a ritual of the modern-day convention circuit author, setting up a wall of books in front of her as a big billboard advertising what she's got for sale. And Drake looks at her and says, "What are you doing?"

She explains that she's setting out her books so people will know what she's written. And Drake says something like, "I've written lots of books, but you don't see me setting them in front of me." (Or maybe he didn't say it but only shook his head or something-I was there, but not paying close attention, but Eudaly talked about the incident more than once on other panels).

Her feeling, of course, was that he didn't have to, because he's David Freaking Drake, but people who are still struggling to make a name for themselves must promote themselves more actively. And I see her point, I really do. But at the same time, I found myself feeling rather sad for these struggling writers, setting their stacks of low-budget stapled chapbooks with amateurish covers face out on the table in hopes of convincing one of the ten or fifteen people attending the panel to pick up a copy. It seems like a lot of effort for miniscule return, effort that could be more profitably spent improving their craft and their product.

Which is easy for me to say, with my one (1) sale to an on-line market, and my one (1) self-published POD novel turned face-out on the table right alongside theirs, when it's not gathering dust in my office not being sold to or read by anybody. But I wonder if the so-called snobs and elitists in the writing group aren't onto something, which is (if I may paraphrase) that thinking small leads to acting small, which leads to small returns. If I want to be the David Drake on the panel, perhaps I shouldn't follow the Yard Dog crowd in hyping and pushing $5 chapbooks and POD novels (which I so far haven't done). At the same time, I should probably stop pretending that I have unlimited time in which to make my mark, and start pushing hard to get more and better product out there.

My big soulsearching dilemma is that I have known two novelists pretty well (I know more now, since joining OSFW, but I'm speaking of years back). The late Mike McQuay was a science fiction novelist I knew back in OKC. He cut his teeth on work-for-hire Mack Bolan novels and movie adaptations, then moved to science-fiction books under his own name, won some awards, and in the later phases of his career moved to political thrillers. He signed some lucrative contracts in his career, but never really sold enough to justify his high advances, and his career slumped badly toward the end of his life. His most successful book (and his only hardcover release) came out after his death in 1995. He was a tremendously intelligent man, who had managed the feat that so many writers only dream of, which is that he supported himself solely through writing novels. But he was a profoundly unhappy man at the end, I think.

Through Mike, I met John Wooley, a writer for the Tulsa World who has also authored several novels, both by himself and in collaboration with Ron Wolfe. John has worked continuously in all sorts of media for years: he has scripted TV movies and documentaries, written novels and magazine articles and non-fiction books and stage plays and comic books, put out a CD with a garage band and hosted his own radio show, in addition to his duties at a daily newspaper. At one time, I mentioned to McQuay that John was writing copy for a set of (I think) Betty Page trading cards, in addition to his comic book endeavors. Mike made a face and said, "John's always knocking himself out doing all these little projects that never make him any money."

So yeah, if they were sitting together at a con, the '95 Mike McQuay and the '06 John Wooley, McQuay would probably be the Drake at the table and Wooley would be the Eudaly. But Wooley would be the happier man, getting paid (however little) to do what he really loves.

So the questions I've been asking myself today are, what are the chances that I can become a Drake, or even a McQuay (supporting myself solely by my writing, to the point where I don't have to jump through hoops trying to sell a couple hundred copies of a small press book or content myself with sales to tiny webzines that pay one cent a word and have a subscriber base made up almost solely of other writers wanting to sell to that same webzine)? Am I willing to commit myself to the effort and sacrifice it will take to achieve such a goal? If I am willing, what are the best steps I can take right now to put my feet on that path?

I'm guessing one of those steps will be setting aside time (at least an hour) to write every day, rather than the sort of casual "when I feel like it and I can get out of the house" that I'm doing now. I'm starting to do that a little by carrying the Mobile Command Center with me to lunch. I've managed to write two weekdays in a row now, which is sort of unusual, actually. But I'll need more than 20-30 minutes stolen out of my lunch hour if I intend to make a serious change.

So that's my first goal: establish a writing schedule that allows me to get some serious writing done every day.

A little over a week till ArmadilloCon and I haven't figured out precisely how to raise the money to go, yet, but I feel as if I need to go. I've set aside the vacation time, and they say it's one of the best literary cons in the Southwest. I need to get my name and my face out there, and it couldn't hurt to start by being seen with the Baen contingent visiting Austin. I just need to figure out how to pull $200 out of my ass. I'm starting to regret having bought the Mobile Command Center, because I could really use that money right now.

OPW Pimping

I'm going to take a moment to pimp some Other People's Work, both because it's good stuff, and because doing so could indirectly help me as well. Here's the deal:

Baen's Universe Issue Two is now live. That means my story is no longer in the active issue, but in the archives. If you've thought about subscribing, but have held off because you didn't know what kind of value you could get for a $30 subscription, try this:

The first issue contained 22 short stories, including a Laundry story by Charlie Stross, a Tran-Ky-Ky story by Alan Dean Foster, a Hammer's Slammers story by David Drake, along with excellent stories by Gene Wolfe, Greg Benford, John Barnes, Elizabeth Bear and ME! It also contains the beginnings of 3 serialized novels by guys like David Brin, John Ringo and Eric Flint.

The second issue contains 16 short stories, including a new Dune short story by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, plus stories by L.E. Modesitt, Catherine Asaro (I'm not familiar with their series, but these stories do fit in with them), Cory Doctorow and Esther Friesner, plus some awesome stories in the Introducing Section: kick-ass military SF by M.T. Reiten and William Ledbetter, plus a great story called "Technical Exchange" by Kevin Haw that I had the great pleasure to read in the slush pile. All this, plus the continuations of the 3 serials.

By contrast, the three issues of F&SF that I picked up from the freebie table at Conestoga contained a total of 21 stories (of which 6 were technically novelets, but then again, so are some of the Universe tales). Which is not to put down F&SF, but to say that Universe gives you a lot of bang for your buck: two to three times the number of stories you get in an average issue of F&SF, with no ads. And they're downloadable in a variety of formats with no copy protection. I have an HTML copy on my desktop and a Mobipocket version in the Mobile Command Center, so I can read them on the go.

Universe is a noble experiment that deserves to succeed. I understand that they had an excellent initial response from Baen regulars when they first announced their subscriptions, but in order to succeed, they have to move beyond just their own regular audience. I realize that, out of the average of 6 people a day who read this blog, most of you either have subscriptions already or have decided not to subscribe. But if you're on the fence, please take a chance and subscribe. They are working hard to make science fiction fun again, and I would hope we can all get behind that.

In other news, I need to come up with a way to raise about $200 in ten days to make it to ArmadilloCon.

Just In Time... NOT!

So guess what came in the mail today, one day after Conestoga has ended? That's right. The "Whack a Monkey" T-Shirt.

So now here's my dilemma. I've already taken vacation days in two weeks, the weekend of ArmadilloCon in Austin, TX. Problem is, I ended up spending more money than I expected at Conestoga, and not making any back by, say, selling copies of Blue Falcon (not that I tried very hard, really). But as I'm not an invited guest, the chances are even slimmer that I could really get any immediate financial benefit from a visit to ArmadilloCon.

But on the other hand, there will be Universe events that I could attend, and hopefully help the magazine with its publicity efforts (by, say, wearing the "Whack a Monkey" T-Shirt, among other things). I could meet industry folks who didn't make it up to Conestoga and make valuable connections. On a personal level, I could hang with some cool people that I currently only see, like, once a year. I could squeeze out some money to go, but it would be a rough time. Is it worth the investment?

Guest Starring: Tony Frazier

Conestoga's over. It was my first convention as an invited guest, and I had a blast.

Cons are weird animals, because the first day is all sort of set-up and prelude. There are a few activities, but it's mainly just opening ceremonies and a couple of practice panels, followed by parties. This con was weird, because although I went to a couple of parties, I did not drink at all Friday night, and only a little Saturday. Saturdays, everything gets into full-swing, day and night. Sundays, everybody's exhausted and (for some) hung over, and the con is ending soon, so everything feels low-key and brittle. And then you go home.

Friday, I got to the hotel about an hour before registration was due to open because of a childcare snafu. Walked into QT to get breakfast and ran into K.D. Wentworth, who said, "They need help setting up the art show." So I got "Hey, you"'d into service before the con actually started. After I'd helped them hang up some art, I went to registration to check in and ran into Paula Goodlett, assistant editor at Baen's Universe. I've corresponded with Paula via email quite a lot, but had never met her in person, so that was cool. As it turned out, I saw a lot of Paula over the weekend.

My first panel was "The Year in Movies." I thought it was weird that I ended up on that instead of "Year in Television," since I work in TV but rarely go to movies anymore. However, it turns out that most of the TV panel was spent talking about shows I don't watch, and I actually got in some good comments on the movie panel, so it turned out okay.

Saturday was full. I had a New Writers panel, where I sat next to K. Hutson Price, whom I had also sat next to on the Movie panel. Turns out she's a former 98G Voice Interceptor Linguist (only Russian instead of Korean). Small world. She was a lot of fun, but we didn't get to talk much, because it was such a busy day.

Later I had a panel about anime. I mentioned a while back that I needed to study up for this one. Well, as it turns out, I didn't do it, but I think it turned out well. It's been a long time since I've had an opportunity to flip that switch and go into onstage mode, but I think I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and the audience seemed interested. I had planned to get something signed by the Guest of Honor, David Drake, but I never did dig the books out of storage, so that opportunity passed. I did get Black/on/Black signed by K.D. Wentworth, though, which was cool.

The con was at a hotel which was way out on the east side of town, just a mile from the only Korean restaurant in Tulsa. I rarely eat there, because it's so far out of the way and I'm hardly ever out that far. So Saturday, I took advantage of the proximity and went there. I had the buffet, which was ok, but I wish I had ordered from the menu. One funny thing: the sneeze shield had little signs to identify which food was which. I grabbed some stuff identified as "Chicken Teriyaki" even though it was stir-fry in some red sauce. As I was eating later, I noticed a tentacle in my "Chicken Teriyaki," so I'm pretty sure it was mislabeled, unless they were using, like, Elder God chickens or something.

After lunch, I went back to the hotel and realized that I'd just had a spicy kimchi-laden lunch just minutes before I was supposed to sit on a panel with the Guest of Honor, so I jumped into the Green Room and drank a bottle of water in about 2 minutes to try to wash away some of the residues. Of course, once I got to the Baen's Universe panel, David Drake sat right next to me. I hope I didn't smell too awful. The panel was pretty good, but I fear I babbled.

My reading was opposite the Yard Dog Press Travelling Road Show, which means no one was there. Lee Killough was the only person in the audience. I bummed around, watched bits of panels featuring my friends, and then went up to the film room to see a short film by Frank Wu. Frank is a hyperactive dude, very enthusiastic, who is a former Illustrators of the Future winner and who is featured in the first DaiKaiju! anthology. He has turned his DaiKaiju! story into an animated film, which is pretty hilarious. I got a free "Guidolon, the Giant Space Chicken" T-Shirt from him.

At 6:30, the Universe folks met in the lobby to go to dinner. We ended up having one person too many to fit on the vehicles provided, so I offered to follow in my car. William Ledbetter, another Universe author, rode along with me. We were going to a restaurant I'd never been to before.

I got lost. Called The Wife for directions, but she didn't answer her phone. Bill called his wife to see if she could pull directions off the internet, but she did not answer either. I ended up calling the Master Control room at the station to ask them to check the address for me. Dinner was good, but expensive, and the portions were huge, which caused me some later distress after my spicy Korean lunch.

We had a Universe party in the hotel after dinner, which was sparsely attended, but fun. I drank a little (thanks for the beer, Matt), but went home a little after one in the morning. I missed the masquerade and play, which means I also missed the announcement that I had won second place in the Bad Metaphor contest. My winning entry (as well as I can remember):

Her eyes clouded over with a troubled expression, like the coating of dust on a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot; he wanted to take his finger and write "Wash Me" on her eyeball.

Even though I hardly drank at all, I had a raging headache all the next day. I had no activities scheduled for myself except a signing. I broke out some old copies of Blue Falcon, just to have something to sign, but didn't sell any. I mostly watched panels by my friends, then attended the closing ceremonies.

Later that evening, I went to the Dead Dog dinner at Johnnie's. David Drake and James Hogan were there, which surprised me, but I was still all with the headache, so I wasn't as social as I might have been otherwise. Then again, everybody was tired, so maybe they didn't care.

Anyway, it was fun, and I even took some pictures, but they didn't turn out very well. I was having flash problems. The pictures where I didn't use the flash are blurry because of the long exposure time. The pictures with flash have little blobs of light all over them. I think my lens is dirty.

So there were some problems, but overall, it was a great time.

A Little Worried

The "Whack a Monkey" T-Shirt has not arrived yet. It's not a huge deal. I'd planned to wear it Saturday, so I still have tomorrow, and if it comes Saturday, I can still wear it Sunday. But it sure would have been better to have it in hand today.

Other than that, things are okay. Only about a quarter of a way through The Tank Lords, and it's not what I expected. I sort of knew what to expect, given it's a Hammer's Slammers book, but what I didn't realize is it's a collection of shorter works. So there was an opening scene that was only tangentially connected to the next big storyline (which I'm currently reading), but I don't get the feeling that it's going in to a definite conclusion. It just seems to happen aimlessly, moment by moment, which is not bad, exactly, but doesn't really keep me glued to the page in suspense, trying to help push them to their goal.

Making no progress on Hero Go Home, but with luck, this weekend will inspire me.

The Ivanhoe Problem

So I finished Black/on/Black and now I'm reading David Drake's The Tank Lords, one of the Hammer's Slammers series. I'm hoping to have it and Stars/Over/Stars, the sequel to Black/on/Black, finished by the start of the con. I probably won't, but the new toy has made reading fun again, now that I can carry several books, plus my own manuscripts, in my pocket. I find myself reading during lunch, during breaks at work, during any sort of lull, really. I was suffering a bit of buyer's remorse right after I bought the Palm, but I'm hoping that the Frazier'sBrain Mobile Command Center will prove its worth at the con.

About Black/on/Black: I had avoided reading this for quite a while, mainly because of the main character (a seven-foot-tall fuzzy alien with fangs and claws who goes by the name of Heyoka Blackeagle). The alien species seemed terribly derivative of both Niven's Kzin and Cherryh's Chanur series, plus having an alien with an American Indian name seemed a little too precious. But when the author read a portion of a short story in progress featuring the same character, I was intrigued enough to hunt down the book and try it out, and I've got to say, I'm glad I did. It was pretty good.

The one big shortcoming for me is a matter of personal taste, a pet peeve I call the 'Ivanhoe Problem.' When I was young, I read a book titled Ivanhoe; I don't think it was the Sir Walter Scott version, but perhaps a novelization of the movie or a modernized version for younger readers. I remember liking parts of the book quite a lot, but I was horribly frustrated by one major feature of the book's plot.

Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the title character, is terribly wounded early in the book, and spends much of the plot being shuttled and hidden and cared for by Rebecca, only to emerge again toward the end to win the day in the big battle alongside Robin of Locksley. So for most of the book, instead of reading about the heroic knight whose adventures I'd signed on to read, I was reading about all of the plots and counter-plots surrounding the heroic knight, along with the efforts of the supporting cast to get the heroic knight into position for the climax. The "hero" I wanted to read about was lying in bed, sweating and shivering with fever and infection.

Once again, perhaps the balance is better in the original than the version I read (if indeed I read a different version - it was 30 years ago or so when I read it). But ever since, it has irritated me to one degree or another to open a book and get interested in a character, only to have that character torn to shreds and spend a long time recuperating. In Black/on/Black, we're introduced to two main characters on page one, and within a couple of chapters, they're both wounded and helpless and spend most of the rest of the book incapacitated in some way, being shuttled around by the supporting cast. I like the writing, and I like the characters, and I understand the impulse by the author to signal to the audience that the characters aren't invulnerable, but damn, I hope the sequel lets them stay on their feet a little more.

A New Toy

So for about two decades now, I've made a habit of taking a notebook with me when I go out for a beer. Over the years, I've written major parts of three screenplays, three aborted novels and two finished ones in bars over a beer and (in more recent years) a cigar. I like the ambience, the rush and babble of people, and the fact that when I get tired of writing, I can pause and observe people, and when I get tired of that, I can go back to writing.

But lately, I 've found myself getting more and more impatient with paper and pen. Sometimes, I want to stop in midstream and work on something different, but I don't want to get the pages mixed up. Sometimes I get an idea I want to save, so I jot it in the margins, only to forget about it once I've transcribed the notes. Sometimes, my fingers just want the feel of a keyboard under them. So I've considered getting different types of laptops over the years, only they're too big and too expensive. On the other hand, a PDA/keyboard combination wasn't practical because of the limitations of the technology.

But now, technology has caught up to what I wanted to do. I bought a Palm T/X with a Wireless Keyboard. The Palm T/X has bluetooth and Wi-Fi, plus built in software to make it compatible with Microsoft Office, so I can edit my Microsoft Word manuscripts on it, plus I can carry and read ebooks as well (I'm currently reading Black/on/Black by K.D. Wentworth, an award-winning writer and a member of my local writing group - snagged it out of the Baen Free Library - this weekend at Conestoga, I'll probably buy a paper copy and have her sign it). The keyboard is collapsible, so that I can carry both it and the Palm in the same small zip-up binder that I've been carrying my mini-legal pad in.

That's right. I can carry my Wi-Fi compatible computer with an almost full-sized keyboard, and still have my old notebook with me, in the same binder. I hope it turns out to be worth the investment.

Only a few days left till Conestoga. The "Whack a Monkey" T-shirt is on its way. I still have to decide what story to read. I need to do some reading up on what genre movies came out in the past year. I need to bone up on my anime. And I need to get some work done on the second draft of Hero Go Home. And then I've got to figure out whether I'm going to Armadillocon in Austin or not. I've got the weekend cleared for vacation, but I still haven't bought a membership or figured out where I would stay if I went. Rrrrrgh.

Redesign Time?

The more I look at that freaking enormous banner I made, the more I think I want something more compact and reader-friendly. And maybe a less bilious color sceme while I'm at it. Keep your eyes open.

Whack a Monkey

Okay, the "Whack a Monkey T-Shirt is now available. It's not exactly the same as the pic I posted yesterday; I noodled a bit on the monkey's arm and did some digital surgery on the stop sign to change the angle. It's something so subtle that maybe no one would ever notice, but it was bugging me, so I fixed it.

I'll probably only sell one to myself, which would be sad, because this one is so much cooler than the first one. I'll be wearing both to Conestoga, though, so maybe they'll be worth something as advertising, if nothing else. Damn, art is fun, but it's eating a lot of time that I probably should be writing. Still, I feel the need to stick to the art kick while I can to get some stuff out of my system (plus, you never know, I may get all cocky and pull a naamah_darling by entering Illustrators of the Future as well as WOTF).

Another Shirt

I mentioned a while back that I had another idea for a shirt. It may not make it all the way to shirt-hood, but I felt compelled to try the illustration anyway, and I think it turned out okay. Here's a small example. Click on the picture to see it a little larger.



The JPEG is a little lossy and blurry, but it should give you the flavor. It was quite a long process to go through all the steps, but I'm happy with the result. If anyone is interested, I'll put together a little something to show the steps the illustration went through. There are some interesting things in there you might not expect. But I won't go to the trouble unless someone asks.

Oh yeah, if this did become a shirt, the back would read something like...

"...and he's got this stop sign that he's yanked out of the ground somewhere, and he's popping these monkeys on the head with it. Like, you ever see North by Northwest? When the biplane's chasing Cary Grant? Kinda' like that, only with, you know, green monkeys."

Missed Again

Well, I finally got notified of my WOTF entry's fate. Quarter-finalist again. It's odd. I've been waiting so long that I really was hoping for more significant news, so I'm really disappointed right now, even though I knew when I submitted the story that it was not a contest winner. It's not a bad story. It's fast-moving and quirky and fun, but as I mentioned when I submitted it, it's lightweight. All flash, no real substance.

Which makes me wonder which market to send it to. It's one of those stories that just rides the edge of the genre. The fantasy element is almost all in the stylization. I've heard the term "magical realism" bandied about, but I've never read one of the books in question, but I wonder if this is what they mean. It's almost mainstream in the sense that it never totally crosses the line into fantasy in terms of magic or elves or such, but the characters and events are so cartoonish that they feel like fantasy. All I know for sure is that it's not right for the big SF mags, it's not right for the big literary mags, and Universe, for which it is very nearly perfect, isnt buying right now. I must chew on this for a while. Maybe I'll just start throwing the orphans up on Amazon Shorts.

In the meantime, does anybody know of a good market for a funny, slipstreamy story about hot rods?

Latveria For Real

The Shirt arrived yesterday, and it looks pretty good. There's a little color bleed, but it's green from the monkey, so that's okay. Makes him look like he's glowing or something, which is all good. Got my submission to Playboy put together last night for transport to the Post Office this morning. Got up this morning and realized I'd forgotten to include the SASE. Doh! Time for some envelope surgery.

We were sitting around the station yesterday talking about North Korea, which was the subject of news stories on at the time. And the subject comes up about where they get their money from, and it is mentioned that much of their money comes from weapons sales and organized crime (e.g. gambling parlors in Japan, counterfeiting of U.S. currency, etc). At which point a light bulb goes on over my head, and I say, "They're Latveria!"

Which, as you know, is the fictional country run by Dr. Doom in Marvel Comics (I say this having not read a Marvel comic in years, the company having pissed away my loyalty as a consumer long years ago). A worldwide pariah, a country run by a maniacal madman (but Dr. Doom's no madman, you say - go perform your own experiments that combine science and black magic, that go so horribly awry that thay scar your face so terribly you have to wear a mask just to be seen on the streets, and then we'll talk about sane or mad), isolated and feared by the world community yet rolling in the dough to buy massive amounts of weaponry, financed through illicit means. North Korea isn't identical in every detail, but it is the closest thing to a real-world analogue.

Superman Returns

I saw Superman Returns on the Fourth (was it really just yesterday?). My reactions are mixed. By now, you probably know that the film does not so much reimagine Superman as revive the 70's movie version, acting almost as a replacement Superman 3. From the opening titles to the production design to Brandon Routh's performance to Lex Luthor's band of thugs, the film refers back to the first two 70's films constantly, but updates things on a grander scale and with awesome updated effect (the bit where Superman is shot in the eye absolutely rocks).

But when it was over, I wasn't satisfied, like at all. My complaints:

Taking off from the 70's films gives you a built-in history, but at times, it almost feels like a really big-budget fan film. You know, where you've got actors playing all the right parts and going through all the right motions, but the faces and voices are just wrong. There's a certain spark missing. Case in point: the final shot of the film mimics the final shot of the Christopher Reeve films, but Routh doesn't nail the mugging-the-camera smile with the same panache that Reeve did.

Lex Luthor again? Seriously. I know that Superman's villain bench is not as deep as, say, Batman's or Spiderman's, but the Superman animated series showed that you could do interesting variations on the comic's villains. But out of five Superman films, Lex has been a baddie in four. I thought Spacey was great in the role; he was brilliant and sociopathic, with a perfect balance of envy and hatred. But dang it, let's give somebody else a shot, mmm-kay?

The climax disappointed me. Superman only seems to win because Singer decided to retcon kryptonite. In earlier versions, kryptonite weakens Superman whenever he is in close proximity to it. In Singer's version, it only seems to affect him if he's touching it. It makes for a disappointing climax, because instead of rooting for Superman, I'm trying to figure out why he isn't dead.

I had others, but these are the biggies. I liked it, and I'll probably buy it, but this one didn't thrill me the way Batman Begins or the original Reeve Superman did.

Scheduling Blues

I volunteered for as many events as they could put me on in Conestoga, because it's my first con as a guest, and I was excited. But now I find that my Baen's Universe panel, for instance, is opposite my friend Richard Cox's reading. My reading is opposite both Richard's signing and a panel about gaming (with another friend from my writing group) that I'd like to attend. My signing is up against both a Writing Action Sequences panel I'd like to attend (with Richard), and a Graphic Novel panel likewise (with mtreiten). Now granted, in my experience, panels are rarely as good as you hope they'll be, so I probably won't be missing much. And there will still probably be plenty of fun to be had. Baen's Universe is throwing a party Saturday night, and I'll be sitting on a panel with David Freaking Drake at one point, so good for me. But still, I'd like to be able to support my friends as well.

In other news, I submitted a story to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine a while back. It got rejected pretty quickly, and it's been sitting quietly waiting for me to figure out the next place to send it to. I think I'll send it to Playboy. I may go through and trim it a bit more before I do, but if you're submitting, might as well start at the top.

Chilling and Regrouping

I've actually gotten a lot done this weekend, but it's hard to point to any one thing. I've been repainting my flash drive casing (the silver coating had almost completely rubbed off the plastic, so I've been doing a Superman-type blue and red), but screwed it up this afternoon and have to redo one side. I washed my car today (which might not sound like a big deal, but trust me, it is). I've done laundry, I've done some computer maintenance stuff, and I got my T-shirt store set up.

Weird thing about that: I ordered the shirt Saturday, then slapped my head when I realized, it's a four-day weekend, so the order probably won't even get sent out until Friday. So imagine my surprise when I get an email on Sunday saying my order is on its way and giving me a UPS tracking number!

I haven't written a short story since March, and haven't really written anything since finishing the first draft of Hero Go Home in May. I've been reluctant to work on short stories until I finished the novel, and once I did, I was just too tired in my brain to work on one. I've got a few old ideas still floating around, plus a couple of new ones, but I don't know what I'm going to do first. I need to write some new short stories so I can enter Writers of the Future again, assuming my current entry is not a winner (I hear through the grapevine that the finalists have already been notified, so I'm not hopeful).

I've got four stories out right now, and all of them have been waiting on responses for a long time. "Double-Secret Weapon" has been at Baen's Universe since December (and won't get a decision until October at the earliest), "Frame by Frame" has been at "Paging Mr. Hitchcock" since late January, "Shell" at IGMS since February (where it has apparently been passed up from slush to the editor - he tells me it's in "the middle" of his stack), and my current WOTF entry since late March. The ironic thing here is that the latest submitted will probably get the first response.

It's weird. After a while, I get tired of waiting and hoping for acceptance and just start saying, "Reject me already." After a certain point, I'd rather have rejection and closure rather than a continuing vague promise of possible acceptance out there somewhere.

On the good side, I got some good feedback about Hero Go Home (not so much in the "this is great" sense as in the "this is what you need to fix" sense) that actually helped me sort out a lot of my own thoughts about what I want to accomplish with the rewrite, so I may be starting that really soon. I want to have a lot of progress made by Conestoga.

Speaking of which, more tomorrow...

The Shirt Is A Reality

Well, I finally finished the design for the shirt. I decided to include the quotation in the illustration and leave the back blank. I may change that if I get inspired, but it was enough work just getting the front prepped. If you want one (and you know you do), go to my store and check 'em out. I only selected a few styles to offer, but if they have a shirt style you want that isn't in my catalog, I can add it, no problem. Just let me know. Here's a look at the final illustration:



I've already ordered mine to wear at Conestoga. See you there.

A Further New Look

Decided to make it a little more colorful. Learned about the wonderful uses of color wheels, to keep the colors from clashing. What a great tool; wish I'd paid more attention in freshman art class.

Anyway, I'm still not totally thrilled with it, but it's getting closer to what I want. I may leave it alone for a while (which in practice usually means a year), because I have other things to do. I got the green light from Baen's Universe for the T-shirts. One step closer to making them a reality. Now I've got to see if I can get one in time for Conestoga.

The New Look

If you've been here before, you obviously notice a change. I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but at least it's not all girly like the previous look. I'm going to keep toying with it while I try to find something I like, simple and direct, yet fun. I'll probably change the plain colored background to some kind of image background, once I find something I like. I may change the grey boxes to different colors. And in a couple of months, I'll probably get tired of the banner at the top and change it to something better looking (as I get more experienced at image processing). I may switch to a 3-column layout. At this point, I'm not sure of anything except that I was tired of what I had before.

Enjoy your long weekend, if you get one, and if not, work hard.