To the Castle Debacle, thou hast come

Forty days and forty nights had I stumbled across the trackless desert, from dune to dune and through valley after valley, all of them the same as every one before. Time had no meaning, neither did hunger, nor thirst: they were all things which washed over me and held dominion over me, and I offered them no thought or resistance. There was only room for the simple thought: left foot, right foot…

I crested another dune and head, wavering in the heat like a mirage, there loomed a great castle, on the very shores of a vasty ocean, and I stopped walking out of disbelief and stared at it: at the towering walls and high turrets, the windows cut into the gray rock, the moat, the chain-pulled drawbridge; the black ocean with its white-cresting waves; the smashed, broken boat, resting on the land and rotting slowly away beneath the steady teeth of time itself. There was a fetid landfill, I do not know why.

With the last ounce of strength I had, I stumbled to the gate, which opened before me, and a man stepped out: bony, hollow-faced, eyes that burned with the fires of madness, and he clasped my shoulder and said in a voice like leaves, blowing across a sidewalk, “At least, you have come, thee writer! Welcome, this day, to Castle Debacle!“

He added, sensing my hesitation, “We have tea and pens.”

It was that or the trackless desert, and I allowed him to bring me inside. The great door slammed behind me, a thunderous boom, and it was the last time I should hear them open, outside of the black vale of madness and deadline. and tea… 

Silence, Patience, Grace.

The title of this blog post has three things in it which I am very poor at, in far too many conditions. I am rarely silent, I am rarely patience, I lack physical grace in a manner which would have made Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy very proud. It has always been this way, and I have been consciously aware of it since I was about ten, when an event which I shall not talk about here made me aware of it. It has been on my mind, and dwelt upon thusly, ever since.

The problem with the way my brain works is, it never stops working. It is always turning over, always thinking and analyzing and poking and creating and destroying and, sometimes, just looking. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except when it does it too much and too quickly, something I was reminded of when the conversation in the last blog post’s comments area wandered onto the topic of hyperactivity and ritalin. Certainly, I am hyperactive. Very much less so than when I was younger — these days, I am more likely to be tired than I am to be running.

TGTD: Friday

Everyone seems a bit puzzled about “the importance of Fridays,” which is just weird. We’re not leaving clues. Sheesh.

The reason I mention Friday is:

This coming Friday is the last day of the month and is, therefore, the end of the The Great Tea Debacle.

This is the really important bit:

You MUST have your final word count sent to me by 11:59, NOVEMBER 30th. 

Or else, because that final week’s word count becomes compromised, I will revert to the word count which would have been posted this past Sunday on the graph, if only that darned Castle Debacle hadn’t stolen our graph!

Friday mystery solved.

(“So what’s Castle Debacle, then?” you ask. Well, that’s not to be solved here. Or at least, not now. Mysteeeeerious!)

Here you go.

Sometimes, while writing, I begin a scene that I enjoy working on, and is well-laid out in my head. But as I’m writing it, I begin to realize that the scene shouldn’t be there. It needs to be distinctly not there, and alluded to in the next, and later, scenes, if you follow me. Sometimes, I regret it, because I’m enjoying the scene. That’s the case here. I sort of like writing Sheriff Alan Peyton. I’ve referred to him elsewhere, though he hasn’t been present, and I wanted to meet him. But as I write, I realize that I don’t need to meet him. I have painted the shape of the man through other’s words, now I shouldn’t fill it.

Otherwise, I’m grateful that I noticed this when I was only 400 words into the scene, because it means I can erase it and get back on track. It means I won’t lose my rhythm and get bogged down. I can fix the problem before it kills a day of writing for me. So that’s always nice.

So, here’s 400 words of a scene I won’t use, about a character I won’t have. It’s deleted material, isn’t that exciting? If nothing else, I like it.

Hickory Beverages (Tea review #1)

It is amazing how infrequently in my life I smell that crisp, autumnal scent of burning wood, so common in this part of the world, and think to myself “Boy would I like that smell in a cup of hot water, so that I could drink it.” Frankly, that’d be a strange thing to think.

In fact, I would otherwise recommend not thinking that at all about things you smell. Sure, you’ll start out wanting to drink the scent of summer, or wanting to drink the smell of fresh spring rain, but sooner or later you’re going to be at the bottom of the barrel (who knows what that smells like) and you’re going to be drinking “The Scent of Freshly Laid Asphalt,” and then your life is over.

Therefore, you can see how it was some hesitation that I wound up purchasing Lapsang Souchon tea. I had neither had, nor heard, of it before, and I really enjoy experimenting with new teas. (This sometimes has disasterous results: do not mix your yummy Rooibos tea with your yummy black leaf tea, it will just upset your stomach). A tin of Lapsang was handed to me, I smelled it, and was terribly surprised to find that it smelled exactly like early October weather, when the smell of burning hickory wood is thick and cloying in the air.

Still, I bought it, brought it home, made a pot. Making a pot of it, by the way, made the whole house smell like a hickory wood fire, and that’s not always a good thing. I live in an apartment building. The last thing I needed was for the neighbors to say to each other “Someone is burning down their apartment in a hickory-smoked fashion, we had best call the appropriate authorities!”

You can see how Lapsang Souchon tea would be a bit intimidating, then. It doesn’t scream “drink me,” after all, but “cook marshmallows over me” Even when you’ve drained the tea leaves and poured yourself a cup, it too smells just as strongly.

But then, eventually, it cools and you take a hesitant drink of it. That’s when you find out that all your worry was for nothing, because as it turns out, Lapsang Souchon is one of the best teas out there, in this reviewer’s wildly biased opinion.

The interesting thing is that the tea doesn’t taste very much like hickory smoked wood at all. That’s all in the smell. The tea has its own interesting taste that’s harder to nail down than Earl Grey, and less pronounced than a fruit-based tea. Its taste is not sharp, and it is not strong. It’s a wonderful tea to drink by the teapot, and it is also a very good tea to drink if you are having red meat for dinner. There are huge lists of what sort of wines you are supposed to have with what types of meats. Well, honest, the same thing applies to tea. Lapsang Souchon, then, is a Red Meat tea.

I was only hesitant in the first place. Now, I welcome Lapsang Souchon gleefully into my home. Perhaps a bit too gleefully. Honest, I probably scare the cats. I enjoy the smell of it. And just a couple of months ago, before “interesting smells” turned into “really cold, cover your face,” (which is what happens in this part of the world), when everything outside smelled like burning wood, everything was reversed: this time around, the smell out of doors reminded me of Lapsang Souchon. I can think of worse things.

A final thought: it makes a good breakfast tea, but only because it has a silly amount of caffeine to it. Drink enough of the stuff and you’ll vibrate through solid matter in no time. (This reviewer does not guarantee this ability and does not suggest you run into the wall trying to phase through it. This reviewer also hope that, if you do, you do so hard enough to forget where you heard the suggestion.)

The sweetest thing

Neil Gaiman posted a link to his favorite moment in his recent trip to the Philippines. And here it is. I love it. May I just say, if  ever I am Mr. Big Famous Author Guy, and someone asks me to do that, I would do it in a shot.

And good night.

Debacle Participation Prizes Now Postal!

Just an FYI! Hooray! Today all the Debacle Participation prizes went postal.

Kristine, I put a little something “extra” in yours. No need to wear a paper mask when you open it. Or rubber gloves. And if you have any open wounds handy, that’s okay!

Kristine, yours is JUST LIKE everyone else’s! Ha ha! Nothing extra in there!

*cracking self up*

Confessions of a Skinny Guy

The patterns of life never fail to amuse me, once spotted.

That sounds like just a platitude of some sort, but it really isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t meant to be: it’s what I want to talk about. I’m not going to get terribly deep here, because that’s my first confession: I’m not very good at it. At least, I don’t think I am. Sometimes, I hold my own, sometimes I sit and feel very distinctly like my origins, which is to say fairly shabby and simple. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind.

Anyway.

Cometh the time, Cometh the Pete

Hi, folks.

Well, I’m back. I wandered off for…what…a week? It wasn’t that long. It also wasn’t, to clear the misconception, me going away so that I could focus on writing tons and tons of words and really pull ahead in the Tea Debacle. Nah. I’m continuing to gleefully compete against two people, I’m having a mountain of fun doing that, and that’s as far as it goes.

No, I went off everything but e-mail (and, very briefly, an IM chat) because I was getting too buried in it. When I get too immersed in AW, I ban. This time, I banned, but found that so much of my attention had already shifted to peoples’ blogs, I enamored with those. So by publically announcing that I wasn’t going to comment, I could shut myself off for awhile, regain some perspective. I don’t have middle gears, something of a life problem with me. I’ve mentioned it before. So I do what I can, when I can, to balance myself out.

December 1st, we’ll be announcing something very cool, here and elsewhere on the net. January 1st will be something very cool that you will all laugh at, and I will not care in the teensiest little bit. Nyah.

…

“You want to come over for dinner, then watch a movie?” A friend asked me tonight, on the phone. I consider for a moment, because I’m busy and my wife just got home, and we’re tired from Thanksgiving* and everything.

“Absolutely,” I say. Because he’s my best friend, I adore him and his fiance**, and there’s very few things better than spending an evening, the four of us. (Five, if you count Zach. All right, four and a half.)

So after a tasty dinner, we settled in and we all watched Reign Over Me. They had seen it. My wife and I hadn’t. I have to say, that might be one of my favorite movies ever. That was a powerfully told story, it was a movie of its time, and was timeless despite of that. And it was a brilliant performance by both Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. That’s a big thing for me to say. Adam Sandler’s comedies never did very much for me (Little Nicky was awesome, though). His best work, comedically, was on Saturday Night Live (remember? It used to be a comedy). Punch Drunk Love was okay, it was trying too hard to be art.

This was great. It was moving and raw and it had a happier ending than I thought it could find. Great, great movie. If you haven’t seen it, see it.

It didn’t have the raw emotional power of The Pursuit of Happyness (which was almost painful and definitely exhausting to watch. And, as a parent, it was terrifying). But it worked, and it stuck with me the rest of the night, and I count that as a success. I wish I’d written it.

…

Nightwish has a new CD out, and it’s really good. This is their first with their new female lead, and she does a great job. Some people say she isn’t as good as the last lead singer whose name I also cannot pronounce (they are a Scandinavian band. Very good stuff. It’s not Once, which was one of the coolest CDs ever, but it’s a good CD anyway.

And I’m off to bed. Chow.

* Thanksgiving was great. We cooked, and we cooked all sorts of stuff. There was a serious lot of food for three people (myself, my wife, my sister). We got very sick from eating too much. Today, I rose and ate too much again. It was wonderful.

** My friend and his fiance are getting married, obviously. “Are you considering a date yet?” I asked him, one day. “Yeah, we’re planning for September 13th right now.” He says to me. I smirk and laugh and reply, “That’s a terrific day to get married, in my experience.”

And then I explained to him, as I am explaining to you, that September 13th…is our wedding anniversary. He didn’t know that. So this coming September, on my fifth wedding anniversary (holycrap!), I’ll be participating in some capacity in his wedding. And because we’re friends, I’m going to do two things for him I don’t otherwise do very often: 1) Wear a suit. 2) Shave.

NOW, to bed.

The Plague!

I think Kristine somehow DID manage to send me a package of ebola. Why, I’ll never know since I am the least threat in the competition! *weeps*

We had a nice Thanksgiving, but it turned bad late afternoon. I don’t know if it was a renegade slice of turkey… or pie that did me in, but something sure did. Or maybe it was the stuffing. Or potatoes. Or sweet potates. Or cranberry sauce. Or applesauce. Or any other of the multitude of things I overindulged in yesterday. More likely, it was the ebola, since no one else that dined with us yesterday is feeling the least bit bad, save the temporary effects from being a total pig.

Overnight, I was miserable. Towards morning, I was feeling slightly better so I got up to get ready for work. About twenty seconds later, I was… er… let’s just say you wouldn’t have wanted to stand behind me OR in front of me. Or in the same ZIP code. Possibly the same hemisphere.

So I had to blow my final paid day off to sit home and be miserable. That just doesn’t seem right. {Makes me think of the one Vitamin Water bottle that says, “My friend, if you’re using sick days because you’re actually sick, you’re doing it all wrong!”}

I’ve spent today thoroughly enjoying my day off. Yeah, right. I’ve spent most of the day either lying down, moaning and whining when there’s someone within earshot, or barfing or… the other. *shudder*

I wish I could take advantage of this day to write 884,326 words for the challenge, but I’m thinking not. :p

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Shortly, we will be heading to my Mom’s for dinner. We have the very traditional turkey, along with stuffing and potatoes and cranberry sauce.

My contribution is dessert. A couple of years ago, I found a recipe for Pumpkin Crumb Cake, so I decided to try it at Thanksgiving. It was a big hit, so I’ve made it ever since. It’s super easy. I’m not a recipe hog, you can find it here. I also made pumpkin pies. We have a recipe that’s been handed down for something like six generations. I don’t have it typed up, or I’d share it, too.

I love the whole idea of a day of Giving Thanks. I try my best to keep my blessings in mind every day, but it’s nice to have a day devoted to the whole notion. In theory, anyway. In reality, it’s more a day of eating far too much and watching football.

What am I most grateful for? Obviously my greatest blessing is my family. Without my husband and my son, I don’t know who I would be. They ground me and give me purpose beyond myself.

I’m grateful for my friends, both IRL and those wonderful faceless personalities behind the monitor. Yeah, I guess that means you weirdos, too.

I’m grateful for my pets… the way Kelly curls up around my head every night, Maggie’s chainsaw-like purring, Tucker’s funny meow, and now Poe’s wide-eyed enthusiasm and tireless efforts at getting in the good graces of the other three cats.

I’m thankful for the home we’ve created, the talent I like to think I have, my comfortable *stuff* and even my job.

I’m also grateful that the company finally got me the Debacle Goodies I ordered. I have them all ready to mail. I’m even sending one to Ed, in spite of his grumblings to the contrary. The Internet is quite a useful tool.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I’d love to hear what you’re grateful for.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Do you like the holidays?

Boy do I. From about two weeks before Halloween, when the world gets chill and sharp, to about a week after New Years, this is my favorite time of year. I’m happy, I’m well-meaning, I’m optimistic, I’m in love with the whole entire world.

I have nothing too much deeper to say, because it’s Thanksgiving and I’ve got to go get a Turkey a-cookin’. So I’ll say three things.

1) I love you guys

2) Happy Thanksgiving!

3) Whatcha eating?

The Pantheon of Super Heroes, part three (Hiatus)

This is the third, and final, part of my prattle on super-heroes and comic books. Mostly because I expect sooner or later, someone’s going to get sick of listening to be go on and on about them. There goes any of my street cred. This also means next week, I have to think of something different. Ye gads.

The final thing I want to talk about is history, and time traveling in comic books, something that people (the comic writers themselves included) spend a great deal of time being concerned about, and with good reason.

It had been on my mind, but I hadn’t clearly quantified it as something I could talk about, until tonight when Heroes returned on NBC. (I know it returned, because NBC spent the past two weeks telling me how wonderful it was, and how returningly it was returning).

When Heroes first started, I really didn’t enjoy it. I spent each episode being dissatisfied with things, I spent an hour or so after each episode complaining and re-writing it in my head. I just didn’t like them, though I kept tuning in each week. Now, as we approach the end of the first season, I’m excited to watch the episodes and enjoying them no end, and happily waiting for the next one.

I do believe part of the reason for this is time. Time has passed, the story has gotten underway, there is a history to the show now (albeit a small one) and a weight to the world, and these lend the stories themselves a certain amount of depth and magnetism.

The same thing helps in comic books, and are very good things most of the time. They’re also problematic, hence the debate.

On the one hand, it’s good and exciting that when you read Uncanny X-Men, there’s a huge number of back issues and storylines stretching ever out behind you. It’s nice to know that if you enjoy the current issue you’ve just read, then you can spend your next month reading hundreds of back issues, and odds are you still won’t be entirely caught up by the time your next issue comes out. Combine this with all the other comic books in the same universe which also have long histories, and you wind up with a huge and textured universe, all of which is available on paper for you to explore. That’s wonderful, at least to me.

The downside, which many people worry about, is that it can also be intimidating when you want to start reading about a hero, and have forty-plus years of back history as well as multiple titles. Do you read Amazing Spider-Man? Spectacular Spider-Man? Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man? Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane? (everyone should read that last one; it’s pure delightful fun). In these instances, the emphasis is less on the history of the character, and more on the weight of it, which can crush and scare off new readers.

This is what leads to things like the Ultimate universe, in Marvel comics. Instead of a countless number of Spider-Man comics in the regular universe, all of which are blending in and out of the world history, you can instead read a series that’s 100 issues long or so, and there’s nothing to it beyond that. And then if you’re still interested, you can go into the regular 198 universe and enjoy Spider-Man, having read something that’s like a cliff’s notes of the universe.

Of course, the problem then becomes that sooner or later, even your Ultimate Spider-Man is over a hundred issues on and developing its own crushing weight.

I’m not offering any solutions here, because I don’t see the need for them. I’ve been reading comic books of both the Marvel and DC variety off and on since I was about five years old. I like that if I pick up a Green Lantern comic now, it’s been busily doing stuff while I was away reading it. I like that characters die and come back, or die and stay dead, or just fade away. I do enjoy that the X-Men team running around in Uncanny X-Men right now isn’t the same batch as I grew up with. I even like the mini-series events that change everything, and which pretty much mean you have to read them to really follow what’s going on (your Captain America reading experience is going to be a little confused unless you’ve read Civil War, and the attached Captain America comics).

Thankfully, the invention of the graphic novel (which collect together individual issues) really take out the intimidation of trying to get caught up on a comic when you come back into it. Read two or three Civil War graphic novels, read an Uncanny X-Men volume, and you’re read to be reading the monthly issues again. Easy.

Timelines are a wonderful thing, the weight of history is definitely one of comic’s best features. It’s what’s taken a show like Heroes and really made it work and sing for me. (That, and I had to stop thinking about it like a television show with episodes and think about it as a comic book with issues). When I write long multi-part serial stories, it makes the writing easier to have the weight of history behind me, and it can make the reading more enjoyable. Witness Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, for example.

Probably the reason this occured to me is, I have a couple of Green Lantern graphic novels sitting on my desk, calling to me. Which means I’m going to go read them and get caught up.

Happy reading, poozers.

(this is the final in the super heroes series, I hope you enjoyed it. I’m still not here. Doesn’t mean you can’t have content in some form or another.)

The Pantheon of Super Heroes, part two (Hiatus)

One of the trickiest thing to balance in a super-hero comic book is keeping your character toeing the fine line between being mythic and being human.

Super-heroes, in many ways, are just the next evolutionary step in a long chain of mythic creations, after all. They are what our society has given us as an answer to our lives and times, just as Homer’s Odysseus and his adventures were what were needed in ancient Greece.

Odysseus is a wonderful example of a super-hero from ages past, in that he carried on with many adventures, some of them rather extreme and difficult to believe. He was mythic in the same way that Hercules was, and in very much the same way that Iron Man’s Tony Stark is today. (After all, Odysseus had something of a penchant for wine, women, and song; there is one piece in, if I recall properly, the Illiad when Odysseus finds his crew imprisoned by a beautiful woman. So he lives with her and drinks her wine and eats her food and has lots of sex with her for a year before he finally sets his crew free. That has Tony Stark written all over it.)

The mythic is important, one of the most important things to inspire when creating your hero. Superman always worked best when he was slightly inhuman, when he possessed an iron will and a clear sense of right and wrong. Superman was very much the sort of classic hero that we see discussed in the wonderful book Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, one of the great science fiction writers of our time. Inversely, Superman is at his poorest when mostly, he just Has Angst and is unsure of himself, and does nothing mythic.

We want to know that there is a man behind the curtain, but we just want Oz, great and terrible.
Moments of humanity are good and powerful things. Jesus was another mythic figure (I’m not saying he was a myth, I’m saying he was mythic, please put down the angry e-mail), but there were moments of weakness there. They were important because of how starkly they contrasted with the rest of his character. The moment when he drives the merchants out of the temple with a whip, or the moment when he is terrified in Gethsemane, praying that he won’t have to do what he knew he did.

If, on the other hand, Jesus spent all of his time agonizing, then there’s nothing special about Gethsemane. If he spends all of his time raging against merchants, then driving some out of a temple is nothing very special.

It’s the same with most super-heroes. Captain America or Superman are good examples. So is Batman, so is Hal Jordan. Actually, I think most of the Silver Age and Golden Age of super heroes are good examples. Even someone like Captain America, who was human where Superman was not, still was inhuman in his beliefs and his iron will.

Spider-Man is an example where the humanity is more important than the mythic. With Captain America, this is a great and towering figure striding across a scene. With Spider-Man, he is at his best when you are very aware that there is a man behind the mask. With Spider-Man, he can be fighting Norman Osborne, and you can still know that when he’s done, he may have to grab his camera and go to his job, to pay his bills. This is humanity and Spider-Man works powerfully because of it, but on completely different levels than someone like Superman works.

The X-Men are another example. They are fatally flawed individuals (who is more chronically messed up than Cyclops, after all?) And yet, in their greatest stories and most powerful moments, the X-Men too become something mythic and greater than mere humanity. When you get into the classic Chris Claremont/Steve Ditko storylines which gave us such stunning stories as The Phoenix Saga, even though the dialog is over the top (and RIFE with EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!) and even though the character motivations are clearly detailed in little bubbles, these are as mythic as Odysseus or Paris or Heracles standing on a battlefield and vaunting over their fallen enemies.

So if we treat Spider-Man as one extreme (Humanity) and we treat Captain America as another extreme (Mythic) then you can see where the importance is to not only toe the line between the two and be willing to cross over…but the most important thing is to be totally aware of it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I re-read a number of comics from the Nineties, and while they were still showing hints and signs of the mythic qualities of yesteryear, they were beginning to experience one of the fatal problems that would really hurt comics as time went on (bankrupted companies, among other reasons).

They were embarrassed of themselves.

Superman works when he stands up tall and proud with his cape flapping in the wind and the American flag waving behind him, his chest out, his hands on his hips. He shouldn’t be slightly hunched, because he’s embarrassed about wearing tights and a bright red cape in public. Just a metaphor, but you see what I mean.

Comics were suddenly going “yeah, but…” and it hurt them. The Phoenix Saga wouldn’t have worked, for example, without the vim and vigor and passion that was thrown into it. It was something of a ridiculous storyline, but it took itself seriously, and thus you are hard-pressed not to do likewise.

Comics, thankfully, are getting better at this. It doesn’t hurt that we have writers like Joe Straczynski and Peter David and Joss Whedon working on comics. They know what they’re doing.

Comics need to know where they stand. They are mythic, or they are human, and then they foray into the other side for great effect. Trying to muddle around in both — either on purpose, or without realizing at all that that’s what you’re doing — results in poor comics that lack momentum, passion, and characters you can really care about.

Super-Heroes are most assuredly a pantheon, just like the Greek gods were, just like the Roman gods were (though they evolved from the Greek pantheon) and especially like the Norse pantheon of gods. Any pantheon of gods and heroes and immortals and giants and great epic stories are the ancestors of the modern super-hero story.

It’s worthwhile to remember that.

(yes, this is more shameless use of BBT Magazine columns, but I enjoy these columns and was proud of them and want more people to read them and anyway, I’m not here. I’m not even online posting these. Enjoy!)

The Pantheon of Super Heroes, part one (Hiatus)

I’ve actually been stewing on this article for a good part of a month now, and I felt it made a good launching point for Boom Boom, a column that’s going to come at you every Monday, for no apparent reason other than to help you speed up your countdown to the next episode of [insert favorite geeky show here.]

I don’t think it’s any huge spoiler if I say, at this point, that Captain America is dead. You have to be nearly living under a rock at this point to have missed out on that fact. Much like the death of Superman in the nineties (you remember the nineties, kids? Eddie Vedder? We wore plaid? Thought boy bands were the way to go) if you have missed out on the fact that Captain America is dead, then you probably didn’t know who he was anyway, or are reading this blog.

I have been happily reading comics for most of my life now. Since I was a wee tot, whom nobody called wee tot, I’ve been reading all sorts of comics. I can still remember all sorts of storylines very vividly, because when you’re young they have an effect on you, and it’s an emotional one. You’re not yet at that age where you’re thinking Ah, smart publicity move on the part of DC to kill Superman, but of course we know he won’t stay dead, I hope they don’t screw up the return too badly. When you’re young and you’ve got wide eyes and a big imagination, comic books fill you up. I still remember that Superman died, and I was a heartbroken young man, and then shortly thereafter Bane broke Batman’s back (in the classic Knightfall series). I was one seriously messed up kid. These were my idols they were screwing with.

Batman recovered. Superman came back to life. It didn’t lessen the emotional impact, and it didn’t change how I had been made to feel. I’ve carried that with me a lot of years. Even now, I have the Death and Return of Superman in dusty, battered volumes on my shelves, and I can read them and still feel the emotions. They may just be old echoes, but I remember them.

It was just as big a deal when Hal Jordan stopped being the Green Lantern, when Wally West and Barry Allen (the Flashes) squared off.

Big deals, when you’re young.

So, fast forward a bunch of years. I drifted away from comics during parts of the nineties. Recently, I came into a hundred and fifty comics from someone’s collection, most of them comics from that weird period in the nineties when the Hulk was calm and cool and wore shirts (?), when someone thought X-Men: 2099 was a good idea (??) and when Superman had a mullet (!?). I re-read a lot of them and I remembered most of the stories, because while I’d been reading them, I hadn’t been paying close attention. There was nothing to pay close attention to. The stories were outlandish and absolutely off the wall. Which I do fully expect from Super-Heroes (like Superman and Doomsday squaring off wasn’t outlandish). I adore it, when done well. During the nineties, it was like the decline of hair metal. When something inflates too big, it either deflates slowly, or it pops. Either way, it goes down. Comics, and hair metal, popped.

Through all of this, I’ve read Captain America. Even when he really stunk (and sometimes, he really…really did). I liked Captain America. I thought he was the strongest (willed) character in the Marvel Universe. Comparable to Batman in the DC universe. In many ways, the antitheses of Batman. I followed him through his phases as U.S. Agent, and just Steve Rogers, and The Captain, all of it. I adored him. Throughout everything else that I faded reading, or stopped reading, the comics I always stuck with were simple: 1) Captain America 2) Iron Man 3) Green Lantern.

I cannot imagine what the younger me would have felt, when reaching the end of the issue of Captain America where he’s lying on the steps, bloody and listless. Steve Rogers, dead. I know what the older me felt, and there was definite emotion. I joked that it bothered me, and then gradually came to realize that actually, it really did bother me. After he died, I bought Marvel: Ultimate Alliance for the PS2, and have mostly just played as Captain America in all his various costumes. It made me sad. It really did. You can make fun of me for that if you want, but you’re reading the blog on a sci-fi magazine web-site, and I bet you cried during the Ewok song in Return of the Jedi, so let’s just respect our geekdoms, ‘kay?

(An aside: I’m now finding it impossible to read things like The Initiative comics, where we follow Iron Man’s new teams, and Iron Man himself. It’s like reading how the Nazis won, and then we have to root for them. Iron Man is in danger, and I realize that I absolutely don’t care. I really feel like the bad guys won.)

How it affected you, I will make no effort to guess. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it did. I can only talk about how it affected me. More importantly, why.

It’s not that the writing was always great on Captain America (or on any comic; it’s never consistently great). Sometimes, it was downright awful. The unique thing about ongoing series like Captain America, or any comic character, is that good or bad, you follow them from issue to issue, from month to month, from year to year, onward and onward. They never grow old, they die and are reborn, they fight, they are beaten, they get back up and fight again, and through it all, you read.

The ultimate power of comics is not always in powerful writing, although powerful writing understands this connection and magnifies it to great effect. The ultimate power of comics is that even if it’s a bad storyline, you read and you care, because if you’ve been following the character for a year, six years, twenty years, you’re as invested in him as you are in your family pet, or your favorite comic strip in the newspaper.

Every few years, they try to reboot comics, because they are ever aware of the oppressive history that bears down on them. They are afraid that new readers will not come into a storyline which has forty years of history behind it, and in many ways, they’re right.

But in doing so, they fail to realize that their success still depends on appealing to the readers who have followed them for so long. Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men both worked (at first, never mind now) because we looked at a young and learning Peter Parker and we were, in many ways, nostalgic. Likewise, the X-Men. Eventually, the storylines gather their own weight and mostly we drift back to just reading what we read before. Whatever Spider-Man you happen to like.

History is the second most important component to a super-hero comic book. They (the creators) worry about the oppressive weight of a comic bearing down on the reader, without always realizing that it’s history which garners the appeal. Some readers, myself included, like coming into something that has 5oo back issues. For one thing, it means if I am really stunned with what Joe Straczynski is doing on Spider-Man, I can go back and read my way through piles of back comics in between new issues. I can get lost in a world of Spider-Man. Sometimes silly, sometimes horrible, always Spider-Man, always the same world I willingly chose to immerse myself in.

It’s the writer’s biggest tool, and as I said, the second most important component in hero comic books.

For the first, I’ll tell you about it next Monday.

(This post originally appeared as a column on BBT Magazine’s web-site, and is being shamelessly used to give you something to read while Pete is elsewhere. Please enjoy!)

Thank **** No one censors my ****ing posts (Hiatus)

This is the fabled censorship post that I’ve said I’m going to be writing for ages and ages now. This is it. Honest.

In the news media, a very big deal is made out of the fact that video games are given ratings, are full of content which subliminally makes kids shoot up their schools, is horrible and evil, etc. Video games are the worst things ever to come along, they are the most dangerous thing to ever touch a child which is not a mountain lion, they are destroying civilization as we know it.

The bit about all that which is bullocks, of course, is that they said almost verbatim the exact same thing about that horrid rock ‘n’ roll stuff, or that Elvis Presley boy, or even the Beatles. These things are Destroying The World As We Know It.

(An aside: Interestingly enough, when they talk about rock or video games destroying “the world as we know it,” we are never concerned that the part it’s going to destroy are the bits full of war, genocide, or starvation. Mostly, we’re scared it’ll destroy the bake sales, church meets, and Sunday drives.)

Well, if you’re reading this blog, then you probably know that rock ‘n’ roll somehow failed to destroy the world after it appeared. And maybe it’s just being slow and clever about it, but so far, video games have failed to destroy the world, anymore than the day-at-a-time destruction that it’s always going through.

Nevertheless, the news media goes after ‘em, because that’s the popular thing to do. My pregnant wife and I are playing Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, which is full of super-heroes hitting bad guys. So I suppose my son is going to grow up wearing stretchy pants, carrying a Captain America shield, and fighting bad guys.

I can live with that.

What I have more trouble living with is the big, ugly, stinking world of censorship that you really never hear about in the news, that you have to go to the very back of your newspaper to read about, that you have to dig around on the internet to discover.

Books. And Comic books.

Many people innately assume that books, and comic books, are dead and dying. This is simply because in our glass teat-centric world, if the television or the internet doesn’t yap about it at some point, it must not exist, it must be dying. But to paraphrase the Bard, “there are more things in heaven and earth than the internet knows.”

Books and comics are still censored something fierce. Not only is the war against censorship tougher and more bloody there, but it gets both less attention and support than it would if someone on CNN wasted thirty minutes droning about it. The fight is more dangerous, more unreasonable, more insane.

And in case you think I’m just trying to educate you…well…I am. But I’m also pointing you toward the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. And there are other important sites, like the First Amendment Group, or the Open Rights group, but I want to talk about CBLDF first and foremost here. It’s most active on my mind.

Let’s talk about Gordon Lee, as an example.

To take bits and pieces from Tom Spurgeon’s wonderful site, where he discussed the matter (link withheld…for a moment…), here’s what happened with Gordon Lee.

“Lee, of the comic shop Legends in Rome, Georgia, was charged with two crimes stemming from a downtown community event on Halloween night, 2004. A copy of Alternative Comics #2 was given to a nine-year-old. Alternative Comics #2 was the 2004 Free Comic Book Day from Jeff Mason’s boutique comics company of the same name. It contained selections from various Alternative projects, including eight pages from cartoonist Nick Bertozzi’s forthcoming work “The Salon.” Three of those pages contained pictures of a naked Pablo Picasso acting in a non-sexual manner.

Lee was charged approximately one week after providing the child with the comic in question. The charges were “distributing material depicting nudity” and “distributing obscene material to a minor.”

When people question the value of supporting Lee, the focus of their complaints seems to be on Lee’s actions: that the retailer screwed up, he should have known better, he should have made certain this didn’t happen, and his mistake makes it that much harder for everyone who does not make such mistakes to run their businesses”

Now this is the gist of it. Gordon Lee didn’t know the exact content of a comic book he sold to someone.

I read a pretty fair amount of comic books every year. I usually read the Free Comic Book Day offerings (a sampler, of sorts, and certainly unrated, because it’s a sampler). But if you asked me the content of Issue 4 of Civil War: Front Lines, I would probably fail to recall it properly. I bet, through the little used bookstore I work at, I’ve sold a romance novel to someone under 18.

Now, it’s worth remembering (and Tom also points this out) that the danger isn’t that as a retailer, he sold a comic with mature images in it to a kid (whom I doubt read the comic and didn’t know what it was). No, the kicker is Gordon Lee is being charged criminally.

Criminal Charges. If he’d been giving kids Playboy issues in the park, maybe. But he wasn’t.

(Another aside: Where the hell were the 9-year-old’s parents? Seriously. Pay attention to your kid, chucklehead, watch how this problem doesn’t happen).

Gordon’s charges were eventually dealt out. Here’s what he lives with:

1) His home is subject to random searches at any time, at any point, on any given day.

2) He is forbidden by the courts of law in this country to make art. Meaning if he draws, if he sketches, if he doodles on his telephone pad, he is breaking the terms of his release and can go to jail.

3) He is not allowed near children.

Fun, huh? You’d think he’d been tapping little Timmy in the back of a van. He wasn’t. He was selling comic books.

The case of Gordon Lee v. the State of Georgia is still going on. And now, I’ll give you the link to Tom talking about the case.

Here it is, from February, 2005

February. 2005. That’s over two years ago. That’s when the CBLDF picked it up and started making noise about it. All of this business actually happened in 2004.

Amazing how CNN has failed to accidentally mention it in all that time.

But the CBLDF noticed, and they’re fighting.

…

So this is the bit where I plead.

The CBLDF is hardly making a tidy profit by sticking up for these people. Legal cases cost money, lots and lots and lots of money. And they need you to actually bring that money in.

So please, please, please go to CBLDF’s Commercial Site

It’s not like you’re getting nothing for your donations (unless you just straight-up donate, of course). You can get a cool Frank Miller T-shirt. You can get a bucket of Will Eisner stuff, how much better can you get? Well, Jeff Smith stuff. Neil Gaiman perfume, and other stuff. Or you can just donate a lump change of money.

The CBLDF is doing something vitally important, because if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be anybody doing it. I take comfort in knowing that if I need them, they’re there for me. Right now, I don’t need them. But they need me.

And you.

(these hiatus columns brought to you by Pete Tzinski, who is not here and who is shamelessly sharing articles which originally appeared on the BBT web-site, as part of his ongoing Boom Boom column. He’s not even online posting these. Enjoy!)

Sim Pete (Hiatus)

Today, we’re going to have an interesting and eco-centristic discussion on how the socio-political conditions in the Western Hemisphere, as dictated by the multimedia mass market, have influenced the leadership and decision making abilities of our kids.

Ha ha!

Actually, we’re going to talk about video games. The ultimate death knell to any writer who wants to get some work done.

My wife plays The Sims 2 on occasion. I know she enjoys it, because she gets Very Angry Indeed (on occasion) at those dirty rotten scoundrels, the Sims. I admit, I play it too because frankly, it’s hard to resist.

So we have The Sims 2. We have The Sims 2 Nightlife. What more could you need for a happy life?

My Sim, after much careful consideration, was named Pete. He lives by himself in a rather nice house. He is astonishingly good looking.

You see this guy?

I look nothing like him. My Sim was WAY hotter, dude.

Anyway, he’s got a nice house with lots of interesting stuff. A stereo. A TV. A bookcase. A telescope. A refrigerator. All the comforts and conveniences of real life. I played for a number of hours.

This generally a day in the life of my Sim:

1) Wakes up a bit late in the morning, because he was up late the night before.

2) Does not put on a shirt. Wears pants, only because he slept in them.

3) Goes into the kitchen. Eats. Leaves dishes on the counter where, in the Sims’ fun and cheerful graphic manner, the dish spoils and turns into a radioactive green pile with a fly buzzing around it. Ha ha!

4) Drops the Cosby Kids off at the pool.

5) Sits down at the computer.

6) Writes.

7) Has dinner.

Dances to music and chats with some random person on the telephone (because without social interaction, the dreaded Social Bunny appears and your Sim makes best friends with a mop, or a Styrofoam cup with a doodle face on it. If I were a woman, I’d start treating a sack of flour as a baby, so it could be worse.

9) Makes a final delivery for the night.

10) Goes to bed.

….And that’s my Sim’s life. After several hours of this I realized that I was sitting, at a computer, after having breakfast, not wearing a shirt, playing a game in which I was sitting at a computer, after having breakfast, not wearing a shirt, writing. I realized there was something very deeply wrong with this and quit the game, so that if I was going to Not Write, I was going to Not Write on my own behalf, damn it.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: When playing a life simulator, you will probably be as boring as you are in real life. Sorry. Play something where you shoot large guns at Ninja Nazi Zombie Eskimo Mutants. Statistically speaking, very few of us do that in real life.

A final note.

Let me tell you how, upon closer inspection, my wife plays the Sims 2. She’s got it all figured out, since “working” is a pain in the ass way to make money.

1) She dates other Sims until they are very fond of her (Yeah, we’re talkin’ the WooHoo stage; guys AND girls.)

2) She invites them to move in with her.

3) When they move in, their assets and simoleans are added to your treasury, since you’re living together now.

4) She guides them into a small room and then sells the door AND LEAVES THEM TO DIE.

Money in the bank. The downside, she tells me, is that there’s a creepy row of gravestones in the backyard and the ghosts appear to terrorize her Sim a lot. But the plus is, her Sim has enough money to just go somewhere else and have a wild party.

…I really hope the moral to this story isn’t the same as the moral to my above story.

Oh, speaking of, I have to go; she says I can have a loaf of bread today for being so good. She’s even going to let me out for ten minutes.

Meanwhile, say hello to my little friend.

(this column, as well as the columns for the next several days, were originally posted on BBT Magazine’s web-site. Thanks to the beautiful nature of time stamps, they are going to appear for your viewing pleasure on this site, over the course of the next week or so. I’m not even on the computer. I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.)

(Not here)

I’m not here. No, I’m not. I’m getting lots of work done. But I figured I could spare five minutes to give you something to do, in case you miss me terribly (har har).

 

This is me on hiatus, and what do people do on hiatus? Bombard you with old stuff. So, with that in mind, here’s an old column of mine from this past summer, which was originally posted on the BBT web-site. It’s an audio podcast. It’s me talking your ear off about the movies I saw this past summer, and What I Thought. It’s possible you’ve all heard this before. If so, then you just need to remember what a hiatus this is.

Ciao!

Gods, Machines, Grids

After this post, I am going to try and go off the grid, as it were, for the duration of the Tea Debacle, for reasons which I’ll explain briefly.

The nice thing about being banned off AW — and the reason that I insist on being banned and not merely logging out, or saying “Yell at me if you see me logged in!” — is that I am given no reason at all to visit, and so I stay away. I do other things. I don’t think about it. The nice thing about that is, it gives me distance and perspective, two things I vitally need. I don’t have middle gears. I am either away from AW (and then, gently back with perspective), or I am completely embroiled in the place and, when I’m not careful or I’m tired, it swallows my day.

So: Being away will give me perspective. I am hoping that, falling off the grid will do somewhat of the same for the internet. To my dissatisfaction, I have noted that too much of my time has shifted to pottering around people’s blogs and reading fascinating interviews with people, like the Gene Wolfe interviews I’ve been posting. I do that a lot, and while it’s not a bad thing — it counts, for me, as learning — it still isn’t getting words on paper. (Here’s a John Irving interview.)

So, I’m going to vacate the blogosphere, as best as I can manage it. I can’t be banned off that, so it’ll be up to that tricky willpower thing.

Continue to please get your numbers to me on Sunday evenings, I’ll still receive them and upload charts. Any problems, e-mail me. I cannot divest myself of e-mail, it is too much of a tie to too many people which I need to stay in semi-regular contact with. Even so, I’ll try to cut down.

Welcome to the Black Parade

(The title has nothing to do with the post; I’m just listening to that CD right now, and enjoying the hell out of it. Every time my faith in rock falters, an album like this comes out.)

Good morning.

You know, we’re almost halfway through the Tea Debacle now? We are. Do you find that exciting? Mostly, it’s like a whip to the backside to me, when I realize I’m not as far as I want to be, and I haven’t gotten enough done. Fortunately, that’s a standard feeling in everyone’s life, so I’m not going to go on and on about it. It just occurs to me.

Winning aside — and it’s quite a big aside — my main goal in the Debacle is to have begun, and then to finish, The Nondescript. This is for a number of reasons. For the first, this book marks a major turning point in the whole entire fabric of my life, and as soon as I can figure out how to talk about it without sounding confused, elitist, and possibly crazy, I’ll explain what I mean (though it’s probably evident, watching the shift of how I’ve talked on this blog, over the course of the year). For the second reason: We need the money. Boy oh boy. And before you step up to point out to me, quite rightly, that writing and selling books is a poor way to make any reliable money at first, l can assure you that I’ve been doing this long enough to know that. But to apply a metaphor to it: When you’re floundering in the ocean, you grab the first piece of wood you find and hang on. You don’t stop to consider how well it floats.  It’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and it keeps back the Long, Dark Tea Time of the Soul and the perpetual fear that I’m going to wind up working in a tire factory, grow old, and die and never manage anything.

Anyway, that’s the sum total of anything like angst which I might have. I’m terribly cheerful. For one thing, The Nondescript is going well, and I’m having the best time writing it, and I know without doubt that these are the best words I have ever put down on paper. Whether they’re actually good compared to any other standard isn’t up to me, but I feel like I’m doing good work. I’m also doing slow work. It comes sweet and easy, but slow. It’s thick text. Plus, I feel like I’ve never written before. My writing habits and tricks have entirely deserted me (and that’s fine; I have a suspicion they were just chains on my legs, while I’m floundering in the above mentioned ocean. Screw ‘em.)

…

My wife and I have been going through boxes which we have in storage, the past couple of days. Mostly, just to make more room, Lord knows we need the space. Partially because I want to condense the boxes in the storage room enough that I can then put our boxes of stored books in there (there’s about twelve of them at the moment, Lord knows we could fill at least eight or nine more, and still have books on the shelves).

This is fun, because we get to throw old crap away, always invigorating. But especially cool for me was the sheer amount of office supplies of mine which I discovered.

4 reams of printer paper, 1 ream of legal printer paper, 6 untouched and unused legal notepads, 12 70-page notebooks, 1 5-subject notebook (I adore these. I just bought a new one, a week or so back. Now I have two!). About eighteen wonderful pens. 1 fountain pen I forgot I owned. 2 Clipboards. And a box full of old stories and serial work. Take all the old stories and serial episodes and stack them, you get a stack around a foot tall, maybe more. And that’s just one box. I know I have two more boxes, in the storage room, with my stuff in them.

It was nice. It was like a wild spending-spree in Office Depot, with the sheer amount of stuff I now have. It makes me happy. Maybe that makes me a really sad person, to get that excited over office supplies, but poo on you.

…

Lori posted a link, and an article about it, awhile back on her blog. She talked about the Writers’ Rooms page, over at The Guardian. But do you know that they update, sporadically and without announcement, but they do update? They do. I visit the site more than I’ll admit in public. here’s the link, go check out the new additions, then come back later and maybe find more.

Also from the Guardian, this article on the proposed discontinuation of hardcover books. I’m not sure what I think of it yet, and I do think that the pictures the author of the article paints is a bit bleak (but not necessarily inaccurate, for all that). Personally, I find hardcover books to my preferred format. I like the bigger size, I find it easier to hang onto, and easier to read. Pocket books don’t fit in any of my pockets, so that doesn’t do me any good. But, as much as the article sort of bugs me…I realize that without hardcovers, I’d just buy more trade paperbacks, which satisfy the same desire as hardcovers for me.

Sick of Guardian links yet? I hope not. Because here’s a terrific page about why authors write, and what started them on it.

And last, but foremost among its fellow links: A Gene Wolfe podcast interview from Balticon, from 2006.  Gene Wolfe is one of my heroes of writing, not to mention as a human being. I think that, if I can land somewhere between Gene Wolfe, Les Stroud, Mike Rowe, and Neil Gaiman, then I’ll do okay. In particular, listen at the end to his advice for writers. He is very wise.

There you go. Now, I’m going to go write some fiction novel!