I've said it a few times and I'll say it again now, there's no such thing as writer's block. If you find that the words won't come, you've made a mistake. Go back, fix the mistake, and words will flow again. There are other reasons why you might not be able to right. Emotional state can run a creative well dry very quickly. I was worn out from my pace and took some time off to read. Usually I need a week off and then I'm ready to go again. This time, though, I just couldn't get going. I didn't like the ending. The ending seemed to simple. It lacked tension and grandeur. So I took more time off to read. Still nothing. Then I started revising. I only have five chapters left to write, after all, so it's not like starting revision early would risk me not finishing the novel.

But the beginning of the book wasn't as good as I remembered it being. In fact, I was quite disappointed with parts of it. Sure, the setting and the theme of the book had changed radically since inception. I went from one duchy to an entire kingdom that was part of seven kingdoms that were colonies from a homeland long forgotten. Things would need to be polished to fit into this new setting. Still, that didn't resolve my unease with where I was at the end.

I spent a LOT of time mulling this over in my brain. Finally, I just poured out all my frustration to Jen and that seemed to break open the dam. I had commented on this journal some weeks ago how the story had shifted in a way I hadn't expected and that I was much closer to the end than I thought. That was a mistake. Well, it was half a mistake. The way I had planned on going still isn't right, but the way I went wasn't right either. I removed tension and conflict and things fell too easily. I need to spice things up. I introduced people and events that needed attention and resolution and I had bypassed all that.

So I've skipped back 16 chapters and am rewriting. I'm going to try and save as much as I can, but there are some substantial changes that will have to be made. Hopefully this is the fix I've been needing. Either way, I revised chapter 32 (which is a great chapter in first draft form and even better now). Chapters 33 and 34 have to be revised so that Jara can run away to try and rescue her sister, something I had dismissed as "too dangerous" in a single paragraph, which was a dumb mistake.

Onward, to adventure!

I have a few agents I won't hear from for a few more weeks yet, but for the most part, everyone I have queried has rejected me either with a rejection or with silence. I don't form rejection letters. It would be great to get personalized letters, but given the dirth of queries they receive, I understand why they use them. What I dislike is the "If you don't hear from us in x days, that is a rejection." Really? You never lose a single email/letter? You don't have the time to copy and paste a standard rejection letter or have a macro to do it for you? Whatever, man. If you don't have the time to do that, how will you have the time to pay attention to me when I'm actually a client?

I received a letter from Ginger Clark the other day from Curtis Brown. I had had my fingers crossed for her reply since I first sent the letter. Of my first batch of queries, Ginger was the only one I actually mailed. I included my SASE, made sure the address was accurate and that it had a stamp. I had already been rejected by Karen Nelson (twice!), but Ginger seemed the squared away type and I'd like to work with her.

Well, the rejection letter came. There was no way for me to know it was a rejection letter. It's not like college where you get the big ass packet if they accept you. A request for a partial or a full manuscript submission doesn't take any more space than saying thank you for submitting but this doesn't seem right for me. But I knew, oh I knew it was a rejection. You see, the gods had made sure I could tell just by looking at it that it was a rejection. The letter had gotten caught and mangled in a machine at the post office. The return address was completely gone as was half the to address. It was so decrepit, that it had to be put into a sealed envelope from the post office marked Damaged Mail (really USPS? Damaged mail? I couldn't fucking tell by the fact that half the letter is missing). I extracted what was left of the form letter inside and scanned for the phrase "not right for me" or an explanation of why it was a form rejection letter (and thus looking for the work rejection). Classy agents will tell you not to take a form rejection personally and Ginger is clearly classy. I found the word rejection, half of an apology and what I think was the standard "this isn't right for me" phrase. That half of the letter was missing.

Now, rejection is part of the business. It's a much larger part of the business as queries increase and publishing lists decrease. Plenty of rejection to go around. A writer has to have thick skin. If he can't query again after getting rejected, he picked the wrong profession. This does not, however, make rejection easy. It stings. It bums you out. It sucks. Now imagine receiving a mangled rejection letter. It wasn't enough just to reject my work, oh no, the universe had to stomp on it, to crush it, to shit on it and throw it at me and say here's your fucking answer. No, you're not going to be published.

I didn't actually feel that way. I didn't wallow in melodramatic self-pity. But that was the symbolism of the moment. I laughed. I laughed out loud. It was the kind of laughter Sisyphus laughed. (Okay, so that was melodramatic too, but I'm crafting an image here, dammit.)

I wrote my first piece of the Third World going on seven years ago. It was much an attempt to bend the traditional in new ways. There were elves and dwarves and the main villains were orcs, but I wouldn't call them that and they wouldn't be like the elves and dwarves and orcs you found in standard fantasy. Dwarves were hill-folk rather than mountain dwellers. Elves were more like dryads than elves. And the orcs, oh I gave them a once over.

These changes remain, though I've given all three races different names and have all but abandoned introducing the words elf, dwarf, or orc into the stories. It would just be a distraction. So what's the problem?

The orcs are called Enders. They bring about the end of the Third World and the beginning of the Fourth World. They're massively muscled characters with razor claws, black skin, and poisonous blood. They burrow up through the earth and attack without warning.

This may be ringing a bell. If you've been playing video games lately and ran through Bioware's fantasy RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, you may think I just described darkspawn. And I did. But here is the catch. Here is the massive frustration. I'm not stealing the idea of darkspawn. I wrote the Enders seven years ago. Seven! Dragon Age wasn't even in development at the time. Of course, I never finished either of the Third World novels I started and neither was published, so when they're finally released, the Enders will appear after darkspawn are introduced into the fantasy cosmos.

Dammit.

I've been breaking my first rule. Don't write on another project while your current project is incomplete. WANTED is past 105,000 words, but more and more frequently I'm having ideas for THE LOST LEGION, which is difficult since I'm not done with WANTED. I am purging this morning's thoughts in a brief plot description

(Now, I say I'm purging, but really I'm encouraging myself to keep righting on the Lost Legion, so this is a bad thing, but I'm a rule breaker. I'm a rebel. I'm bad.)


Three thousand years ago, Emperor Jaephus ordered the third legion to the Injari Peninsula with a simple order, do not come back until the Inja were added to the world-spanning Haen Empire. And there the legion remains, a vanguard in the jungle fighting the Unconquered People for an empire long-since collapsed.

Kyse is not one of the immortal Haen officers. He is 90th-generation foot soldier about to take his test to make sergeant. And while he should be concerning himself with the Injari threat hiding somewhere out in the blackness of the jungle, he cannot help but dream of the homeland he has never seen but only heard of in stories passed in secret when the officers cannot hear. His is a world of Fort Victory, Dogtown, and the jungle that surrounds them. But there is a world to explore with oceans and rivers and mountains and snow. A world that is coming to an end.

The Enders have come, an ancient legend from before the empire, creatures that will tear down the kingdoms of men and usher in an age of darkness and death. Now with the legion lost to the empire and alone in the jungle, Kyse must convince his superiors and his enemies who have been fighting the same war for millennia that there is a greater threat, one that can only be defeated together.


Now that I've written it, I'm not sure if I like it. It doesn't seem special. It seems redundant. It seems a story that's been told a billion times before. But really, I didn't have an ending until I started writing this, so perhaps that will change. Right now I am unimpressed with my own offering. Still, hopefully this got enough out of me (or perhaps has even discouraged me enough with its mediocrity) that I can get back to the novel I'm actually writing.

I'm writing a scene where Bastin, Jara, Nashau, and Podome have dinner with the Duchess d'Seaside. It's a bad scene. It's necessary for the advancement of the story, but it's still bad. I'm giving it the NaNoWriMo treatment and just plowing through it regardless. I could spend a lot of time fixing these two chapters that are only a transition from the first act to the second. I wish I had gotten them right on the first pass. Hopefully I can improve them with the second. As it stands now, it's amateur stuff. Must fix! Must wait for the revision. It's chapter 40. I'm sure the 39 chapters before it need work as well.

In the beginning, xxx the mother and xxx the father were one, they were xxx the potter. They created the earth and with it cast the trees and the animals and eventually man, cast from the clay of the earth they created. A curious monkey caused an accident and their kiln exploded, tearing them apart. Thus xxx became xxx and xxx.

Damini wants to have children, but she fears the changes that causes. Who was the greatest hunter before her? It was xxx, a tiger of a woman. But then a monkey stole her heart and she was wed. Then she had children. And now, even though her children are old enough to be taught and spend all day with the baba, her husband does not let her return to the hunt. He keeps her caged like the legionnaires and the animals they capture from the jungle.

One is not struck by cupid's arrow. A monkey steals one's heart and it is up to the one who loves them to get it back. (Metaphorically of course.) When Damini and Garja finally make love for the first time, Damini has strong reservations since it goes against everything she's ever been taught, every custom of her people. Garja tells her a monkey has stolen her heart and she is hiding it. Damini goes to get it, they make love, and afterward she tells her that she did not find her own heart, but that of her lover's. Now they've traded.

At the end when Damini's relationship with Garja has been exposed, the village matriarch tells her to drink from a small vial. It will prove whether their love is true and meant to be. If it is not, she will forget the girl. If it is, nothing will happen. The matriarch is lying and in truth she gives the girl poison. Damini dies. Garja comes to her bier and kills herself. Her spirit merges with Damini's and Damini wakens, born anew as Mausam.

So, when I first heard about authonomy, I thought, what an ingenious idea, Harper Collins! They had turned the slush pile into a social media endeavor! How smart. Now they could take a larger, unseasoned pool of manuscripts and let other hopefuls do a lot of the weeding for them.

The opportunity for gaming the system is obvious and that facet has born fruit. I thought quality + networking might win out over networking alone, but I was wrong on that front. The flaw with authonomy is that few people are honest in their comments. They're hyperbolically enthusiastic. Why? Because they put their name and book title in their comment and they hope that you'll enjoy their comment so much you'll tack it above all the others. Your manuscript because a type of billboard for their work.

Add to that, the people doing the reviewing are just as hopeful as yourself and you get a weird review/backing commodity trade system where people are backing you solely for the hope you'll back them. Out of all the comments I received for BLACK MAGIC, only one was truly constructive. One claimed that my first chapter was so fundamentally groundbreaking that he would never look at the world the same way again.

WHAT? Are you fucking kidding me? This is not Dickens, Vonnegut, or the Bible. This is not revolutionary or life changing. It's fun fiction with a little black humor thrown in. There is absolutely nothing life-changing about anything in that manuscript. What the hell is wrong with you, pal.

At the same time, it's great for the ego. Authors hate the "I liked it comment" because it adds no value to the work. Everyone says that. It's like saying "I'm fine" when someone asks you how you are. It means you didn't even think about the question before asking. Give me something tangible. At the same time, praise is great. We want to entertain and have people like the work and love us because we entertained them. I love me some constructive criticism. But I love praise too. And authonomy gives you praise in spades. Sure it's false praise, but as long as you know that, who cares?

For that reason, I'm putting the first chapter of Wanted: Chosen One up there too. Most people don't read more than the first chapter. Only one person read more than the second chapter even though I posted 6. So I'll put one chapter up there (a great chapter, I might add. I edited it today and was blown away by the promise of this manuscript. No wonder I was so excited when I started!) and let the praise come in for awhile. It won't improve the book any, but my ego will enjoy the stroking. :)

Of all the nations of the Third World, Inja has been the hardest to find a story for. They are the unconquered people. They were never assimilated into the empire and thus suffer no repercussions from its collapse. They are isolated on a peninsula between a great plateau and a plain so vast that its inhabitants think they're the only people in the world. While I could do a stranger in a strange land story, I already have one of those and doing a second would be lame.

Conversely, skip back to the days of the Haen Empire when the Injari were fighting for their freedom, and plenty of interesting stories arise (including DAMINI, which I mentioned earlier). So what's the mistake I've made? There are two, actually. They're all alone and they're absent an enemy. But the Haen are all but extinct. Should I just arbitrarily create a new villain?

Oh no, my friends. May I present to you THE LOST LEGION. This group of Haen soldiers are duty bound to conquer the Injari peninsula or never return home. Cut off from their supply chain, they never received word of the empire's collapse. They built a fort in the middle of the jungle, a few villages, and bolster their numbers through the ancestors of their foot soldiers and underlings (as Haen are extremely long-lived, perhaps even immortal). I am incredibly enthusiastic about this development as it now puts this area back into play and I've wanted to work here since the very beginning (a flash fiction piece starring Damini was actually the first thing I ever wrote for the Third World).

Woo hoo!

Last night I dreamed a buddy chase movie. If you don't know what a buddy chase movie is, think of Pineapple Express or similar such movies. There are two main characters on the run from a Big Bad who experience comedic hijinx along the way. I wish I could remember more of it. I probably should have tried to write it down as soon as I woke up, but even then it was fading.

It stared Jason Segal (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Masi Oka (Heroes; Get Smart) on the run from Timothy Omundson (Psych), an alleged corrupt US Marshal. The two witnessed a crime and are being put into protective custody. Segal oversees Omundson do something suspicious and the two pals make a run for it. The real villains (mob?) are chasing after them both. Damn I wish I could remember more. I do remember Jason Segal finally learning that Omundson isn't corrupt while he's hanging out the 9th-floor window of a hotel deciding whether he should make a jump for it or not to the third-floor roof of the grand ballroom. They came from something, I can't remember if it was a party or a concert or what. Ah well. Not a lot left any more.

So I'm reading through the 50 Things we know now that we didn't know this time last year and I see something I've wanted for a very long time.

2. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images. (Full article here)

Ever since I saw Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within, I've wanted something that could do this. I don't dream normal, erratic, nonsensical dreams. I dream stories. I dream of other people and lives and events and sometimes I even cast those roles with well-known actors. They're stories, and I lose so much by writing down what I can remember when I wake (if I can remember anything). I want this machine! ...once it's been perfected and can simulate the clarity of the dreams a la the Final Fantasy movie.

But then I'm thinking about it not just for my own benefit, but in a spec fic sort of way. Emerging technology is a great gray area where you don't have to have all the answers of how something works because the people working it don't even know. They're in that transition area between idea and reality.

So what if there is a protagonist who dreams like I do, of people and events of stories. But he's not just dreaming stories, he's dreaming reality. He's dreaming violent crimes, or rape and torture and murder. Of course, he doesn't know it. What he remembers he thinks is just a vivid imagination or the result of too much TV before bed. But then he signs up to be a test subject for the university developing the machine and they record all the dreams in all their vivid details. And those details match information being disseminated to the public by the police. Here is this guy, is he psychic or is he the murderer?

Drama, action, and adventure ensue.

I think this is a short story or maybe a novella. I think anything longer will start dipping in the "seen it before" well. We'll see. I do have a title, though. "The Sleeper."

And if I have a title, then step one in the writing process is already complete!

Perhaps it would have been better if I had held on to my submissions for a month and a half and submitted to agents when they are fresh and rejuvenated rather than counting down the days to break. Meh. I don't think it made that big a difference. I did wait a week on new submissions though. I'm sending off four today so they'll be there when they return. Again, perhaps I should wait a few more weeks, but meh. Submissions should arrive when agents are returning to work. I'll be part of that mountain reminding them that two weeks off from work are a bad idea. :)

I hate "x is the new y" statements. This is unfortunate because it's used all the time in writing. Currently, it's "x is the new vampire." "X is the new vampire" has been around for awhile, so truly, "vampire is the new vampire" is perhaps the most appropriate. Still, with influences from movies, I thought "zombies are the new vampire" was a fair assessment of a new trend, but a dark horse seems to be making a play for first. "Angels are the new vampire."

This bugs me because I actually have angel stories in my queue (two that I'd like to be part of a series, but really, I only have titles and a general sense of a story). I don't think I've actually mentioned them here before because I don't really have a story, just a general premise and titles that stoke my creativity. Originally inspired by a KoRn song, the first novel is called "The Mortal Earthbound" and its sequel "The Dearly Departed." The general premise is that angels that refuse the will of heaven fall to hell, but hell turns out to be an office job on earth. There is no fiery pit, Earth is hell, which is why it never gets better despite our best efforts. I need to make it feel less like a Matrix clone and find a genuine story to pursue, but I love the title and have to write a story to match it.

We had a long drive today. In addition to recounting the above to Jen, I had time to ponder a short story I had planned for the Third World. The Injari don't get much (any) attention in my currently planned novels, but they're one of my favorite cultures. For that reason, I decided to write the short story "Damini," a Romeo and Juliet story in the Third World. I pondered this today. It started as a day dream, really, using the story to fulfill a request for an anthology. First it was an anthology of love stories that I was invited to contribute to. Then it was an anthology of LGBT love stories. And that's when a light bulb went on above my head. The story I had planned was pretty lame. It didn't reimagine the Romeo and Juliet story, it just transposed it to the Injari Peninsula. And sure, I won't be the first to explore this concept either (reminds me of the first half of Chutney Popcorn, in a way), but it still seems more exciting than anything I had considered before. In fact, this has opened up so many story ideas that I might turn it into a novel. Damini is the alpha female of her village, but an alpha female in a patriarchal society (okay, it's actually a matriarchal society, but even then, the women are expected to remain alone. You'll have to read it to make sense of all that). Damini does not realize she's gay. She's never been attracted to anyone, male or female. Villages exchange youngsters so they can learn the ways of the different villages and diversify the breeding pool. A new group of exchanges arrives. The alpha male of that group takes a shine to her. He asks female character X to talk to her, and Damini falls for X rather than alpha male.

I'm currently enthused enough about that story that I might write it after Wanted is finished. I was going to go back to Sandwich Notch. We'll see.

Huzzah for writing! I need to hurry up and finish so I can start another one.

So Google tells me Captain Widdershins is a character from A Series of Unfortunate Events. I don't care. I like the word Widdershins and I want to use it as a character name. I am officially adding a clockwork character to House on Sandwich Notch Road (or is it Lane, I can't remember which I switched to) that is named Widdershins. He won't be able to speak, but can play records that emulate speech. I'll work on that later. I'm just writing this down so I don't forget.

Common Sense: You've slowed your agent submission rate.

Me: I've reached the end of my list of agents I feel comfortable submitting to.

Common Sense: That's not a very long list.

Me: That's all I could find. Do you have any suggestions?

Common Sense: Google your favorite authors and add the word "agent." Find out who their agents are and query them.

Me: ...

Common Sense: Yeah, I know. You're stupid. That's why I stopped by. Now get to it, magoo.

I had to check and see when last I posted. It's been a busy month. I'm on the tail end of the second busy cycle for the year at work, and for some reason, problems just keep coming up to draw it out longer and longer. This does not interfere with my writing in the morning or evenings (not like the summer where I work on the train too), but interferes with me sneaking in some extra time on other projects like podcasting. That should change soon.

So, not knowing how long its been, I had to check and see what was posted last. Ah yes, the whining. Rejections continue to roll in, and I don't post about them here. When I first posted about a rejection, a lot of people said some harsh things about the agent who rejected me. Rejection is part of this industry. She wasn't cruel about it. It just was. So I don't talk about it, because that's like posting about that you just sent an email at work. That happens every day so why post about it (unless it's your commute, in which case you should post about it on Facebook so all your friends who drive or work at home can experience the crazy with you). Still, rejection is hard. No what's harder? The lack of acceptance. Give me a dozen rejections, two, three, as long as they come with that eventual and inevitable acceptance. That's not how this works, though. You get the rejections. The acceptance? Maybe. Wait and see.

Waiting is hard! It allows time for self-doubt and self-pity and then you whine on your LiveJournal. Combine that with where I was in my new manuscript. I see a trend appearing. When I get to the middle of a story, I get really whiny. lurkerwithout had to give me a smack upside the head because I was complaining how my story was shit and no one was going to read it (though if I never get a deal, no one ever will!). It seems I did the exact same thing with this new story. So all that emotion just snowballed with one another and caused a giant emo avalanche.

As for Wanted: Chosen One, I had a very good day on Thursday, not just in word count, but in story development. Things changed. A direction became clear. While I don't have it all yet, the majority of the second half of the story crystallized on Thursday. Bam!

If you haven't heard of Harper Collins' new social slush pile idea, go to Authonomy.com and check it out. This is a big idea and other houses will do the same. They've turned slush pile reading into social media networking. Readers do a lot of the job themselves. Now, of course, they can't replace unpaid interns and assistant editors who normally man the slush piles, but they can crouch on their knees in the muddy stream and find that dirty gold nugget that might have otherwise been missed. Hopeful authors wanting to get recognized by HC (and all its imprints including Eos) post a minimum of 10,000 words of their novel to the website. Others read it and "back" it, offer criticism, what have you. Depending on the quality of the backer and the number of backings, a story may be elevated in the rankings to be brought to the attention of HC editors.

Now, let's take this with a grain of salt. Anyone can post content there and let me tell you, anyone does. There is some really good stuff there. And there is some really bad stuff there. Some of that bad stuff is ranked highly. Why? Because the author knows how to network, how to game the system. So this isn't a miracle solution to find a publisher, but it is one more opportunity for your work to be seen and maybe you'll get some good feedback too. (Don't hold your breathe on that one. Most people just tell you how great it is in hopes you'll back their book too and you can go up the rankings together, lah dee dah.)

I've posted the first six chapters of Black Magic. When I'm finished with Wanted: CO, I'll shop it around first and then post it there as well. That's still a ways off. I was saying March, but I don't know. With some of the changes I figured out on Thursday, I'm now projecting 150,000 words, which is another 70k. We'll see. Good night, all.

Saturday's whining seemed to act as an emotional colonic, as I wrote 3000 words on my way into work this morning. I'll finish the day with 3500-4500 words. Not bad for a commute.

That last post was very whiny and left a sour taste in my mouth. I attribute part of that whininess to general stress (it's the second busy time of year for me and my time is being split between work, writing, podcasting, and Dragon Age in proportions that I'm not exactly pleased with). I'm at the library looking for a book to read and am very frustrated by the shelves of books that do not interest me in the slightest.

Wanted: Chosen One is not off the tracks, but it is rocking back and forth precariously. I was thrilled with the book's start, but I am now 61,000 words in and not a lot is happening. I seem to be pulling a Gabaldon, describing every step along their path. Somewhere 30,000 words ago the pace of the book slowed incredibly. Nashau also seems to be in a constant state of PMS. One minute he's happy, the next he's snapping at everyone and anyone around him. His character seems inconsistent. I try to explain this by the stress he feels at being unemployed (I know that feeling well), but that emotional state did not exist at the beginning of the book, it's odd that it should rear his head now. He's also a bit of a coward, yet he's snapping at everyone.

He seems to be an asshole when he has no right to be. Combine that with the lack of reading, and that's what set me on my rant about fantasy. Have you ever noticed that people in fantasy books are huge assholes? Even when they shouldn't be. They may be talking to the one person who can save their lives/the world. They may be speaking with someone that could kill them in an instant. But they're assholes nonetheless. This pervades fantasy video games as well.

Who the hell treats someone whose help they need so callously? The word is please. you should try using it!

So here's what's happening with Wanted. Podome and Nashau have met Bastin and Bastin has a thing going on with Jara, the second-oldest daughter of the owners of the Migrant Goose. I didn't see this relationship coming at all. It just kind of happened. Bastin hasn't been anointed CO yet and Podome is still quite insistent that it's someone else. Podome has a concussion from where a gate guard struck him and they're taking him to an apothecary.

This is all well and good except for the fact that, with the exception of Bastin escaping the Baker Boys and Nashau/Podome running away from a Cheynean assassin, there is no conflict in the story. They just bitch and tell stories.

I know what the end is. I have no idea how I'm going to get there. I just kind of keep rolling along, trying to find my way. If I keep rolling the way I am, this thing is going to balloon to 200,000 words or more. Can you imagine a 250,000-word fantasy novel without any action?

I've taken a wrong turn somewhere. I just don't know where. I don't want to go back, though. I worry that I'll just get mired in revision without making the way forward any easier (or actually making it harder).

It's He-Man's fault.

He-Man didn't begin like the cartoon character he became. He wasn't Prince Adam and his weird wizard thing Orko. He was a Conan rip off. When He-Man wasn't kicking butt, he was on the beach sunning himself on a rock. He didn't turn into some wimpy klutz. He became a pin-up model. How do I know this? Because I had the good fortune of buying He-Man when he first came out. Like any child, I wanted the toys my friends got, and when I was 4 and 5, that meant He-Man and GI Joe. I come from an incredibly conservative Catholic home and how I ever convinced my mother to let me have fantasy action figures, I'll never know. I hid any fantasy novels I read from her until I left for college, but somehow He-Man was deemed safe.

That was the seed. I loved GI Joe as much as He-Man, at the time. They spurred my imagination, but only one of them inspired my creativity. Even after my friends had moved on to better things and I resignedly boxed up my own figures (which would one day be given to my nephews as a present), that seed germinated. He-Man was why I read the Chronicles of Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia are why I (tried to) read the Lord of the Rings. And that road took me to Tad Williams.

The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy struck my 14-year-old self with such immense impact that I would never dream of doing anything but writing fantasy. I've grown since then. I've dabbled in science fiction, spec fic, I've written plays, thought of literary fiction. But no ideas come more readily, no words come more easily than when I'm writing fantasy.

This is strange because I hate fantasy. I don't hate fantasy, obviously. I love fantasy. I'm just tired of the tropes that seem to be regurgitated onto the page year after year. It's why I wade through George Martin's incessant description of everyone in the room. Because he breaks the mold of what is a fantasy book. Dragons, elemental people, mage orders, white robed chosen ones, magic ships, blah blah blah blah. I stand in the library looking at the bookshelf and desperately search for something that doesn't make me roll my eyes. Wiliams, Martin, Bujold...is that it? Are those the only three authors I can read?

Well, no, I enjoyed Elantris enough to finish it, which is more than I can say about other books that couldn't hold my attention longer than five pages. But still, I see so many stories told and retold. The world/kingdom/empire is ending and this plucky protagonist will discover his true power/prove his worth to this mystical order/find this mystical artifact and learn secrets of his own mysterious past along the way. These were good stories (maybe) the first time we read them. How does the fantasy industry sustain itself by telling the same stories every year?

Here's a spoiler for you. The Third World is coming to an end. What happens at the end of the series? IT ENDS! There is no plucky protagonist who saves the world. The heroes die and the Fourth World begins.

I've never had a problem with being in the minority before. People like Martin (whose use of dragons is exactly how I like it) have made a name for himself. I can too. But as I wait (maddeningly) for an agent who will want to represent me, that niggling self-doubt returns. The same stories wouldn't be told over and over again if people didn't like reading those stories. What's wrong with having magic in fantasy? It's fantasy, after all. If you don't want magic, write literary fiction. What does it mean that I could not read more than five pages of the Talisman of Shanara or two pages of the first Dresden book?

Well, it means I don't like those books and everyone has their own preferences. Yeah, I know, quit whining, Joe, you fucking drama queen. Well listen, I want to relieve some stress so this is where I do it. I know there are readers enough for my style as well. It would be nice to hear it more often. I don't care if Dresden gives TPC or Bearswarm a hard on. Any book that starts by telling me how cool its main character is is not a book I'm interested in reading. Penny Arcade's Franzibald novels seem spot on to me.

Still, I've now read everything that Bujold has written. I've read everything Williams has written (other than the Otherland series that I keep false-starting on), and I'll be old and gray before a Dance with Dragons ever comes out. So what's left? I've picked up Butcher's Furies of Calderon. I don't know why. It's either that, or go back to reading Pride and Prejudice on my Blackberry (no nook for me now that I bought for new tires).

Have you made it this far? That was a lot of whining. Apologies to Butcher for panning your novels. I'm sure you're a nice guy. I submitted to your agent, but omitted the part where I only read two pages of your novel before I gave it back. Apologies to Butcher's agent. Clearly you've done a good job at selling Jim's work. Care to take on a new author whose characters usually die at the end of his stories?

So, if you're like me, you have to be wondering one of two things. 1) Is he always this whiny? Read this journal enough and that question answers itself. Just ask LurkerWithout. 2) How does he know any of that stuff about He-Man? Well, when the figures first came out, they came with little comic books. Parents complained, of course, because parents are stupid. They said it was too dark and/or too violent. There wasn't a sorceress of Castle Grayskull, it was a ghost. And it was AWESOME. He-Man was a bad ass 24/7 whose metal armor (what little there was) could deflect lasers and other technological wonders that could otherwise overcome his manly manliness. His tiger was a bad ass tiger 24/7 and all the evil characters weren't minions of Skeletor. A lot of them were pretty damn evil all on their own. He-Man wandered the countryside and fought evil monsters and asserted his awesomeness while defending Castle Greyskull.

Those comics were some of the most influential things I've ever read in my life. It was He-Man, Vonnegut, and Williams. Put those three in a pot, stir in some angst, and you get me.

...okay, I should probably get back to writing. Want a spoiler about Wanted: Chosen One? They all die at the end. That's how I roll.

I want to write a short story where an astronaut is flung through a black hole. He's encased in a metal egg to shield him from the radiation caused by the generated field necessary to survive a black hole. He finds a similar but different universe on the other side. Instead of expanding, that universe is collapsing. It has existed for tens of trillions of years. Species have evolved so there isn't a single dominant sentient race, but numerous sentient yet mundane creatures (birds, cats, monkeys, etc).

I don't know what the story is yet, but I want to explore it at some time.

I think I posted previously of having a new idea for a Black Magic and Barbecue Sauce sequel. I do. It's a story that can be told once it moves out of conceptualization. It's just taking its sweet time coming out of conceptualization. I know it's a ghost story, but every I start the wheels turning in my brain, I go places that are not conducive to a ghost story.

So tonight I'm watching Fellowship of the Ring with Jen, as is our holiday tradition. There is the prologue with Galadriel speaking of history becoming legend and legend becoming myth. There there's Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday. He lives so much longer than the other hobbits. I start pondering how exasperated would one become watching people make the same mistakes over and over again, perpetually repeating history because they weren't there when it happened.

Well, I happen to have a story where people do live forever and would be there when history happens and there again when it repeats itself. Now Cy isn't the type of person that would be affected by that. He files things away into the recesses of his self-conscious. He doesn't remember enough history to get upset when it repeats itself. But surely someone else would? Who? Who's so focused on history that it would upset them when people keep screwing up.

Herodotus of course.

So he's not part of a ghost story. This is a different sequel. I'm not entirely sure what it is or how it will work, but it will involve Herodotus being extremely pissed off.

Whichever one of these stories moves past conceptualization first, I'll start on. Not until I'm done with my current ms. I'm at 55,000 words and not even half-way finished. This looks to be bigger than I expected. 150, maybe even 200k words. I worry about that, since it's not epic fantasy. It's hard to justify a 200,000-word, non-epic fantasy. Still, the story is what the story is. I'm not going to sacrifice content in the first draft to shoe horn it into a 100,000-word package. That's what revision is for. ;)

Okay, back to the movie. I think Frodo is about to fall down.