I have a couple of the books collected in this series, and I can attest that they are stunning and excellent. I have been waiting for years for a collection like this, to see the images on fine paper and in a lovingly curated collection. Perhaps there’s something more “authentic” about seeing Depression-era stories told on the cheap, used, newsprinty-paper copies I have, but honestly, Ward’s work deserves the premium treatment.

These works were really influential for a lot of comic book artists (including Spiegelman, I’m guessing), and to me while I was first getting into my studies of visual storytelling and design. I had been counting the years until this material goes into the public domain (in a good long time), hoping that I’d be able to put together my own collection sometime, but I’m very happy that much more qualified people beat me to it years in advance.

12 Number of flights taken
411 Number of bylined Macworld articles I wrote
32 Number of books I read
3 Number of books I read that were graphic novels
45 Number of movies I watched
37 Number of new movies I watched
2 Number of Dungeons & Dragons adventures completed as DM
5 Number of Xbox 360 games purchased
4 Number of above games completed (for reasonable definitions of completed)
50,574 Number of words written for NaNoWriMo
84,508 Number of words written in non-NaNoWriMo novel
1,089 Number of photos taken (not including iPhone)
1 Number of spoof movies produced
10 Number of Doomcast episodes released
2:55:17 Length of total Doomcast episodes

It’s December 2nd, and if you’ve ever met me, you know what that means: I’m in the throes of the post-National Novel Writing Month hangover, trying to find something to fill the now gaping void previously occupied by furiously concocting new ways to torture my characters.

In the preceding thirty days of November, I produced a 50,000 word piece of fiction which, I’m going to be honest, nobody will ever likely see. That’s by choice though; like a dented can of soup past its expiration date, I would not wish it on my next-to-worst enemy. Worst enemy? Totally.

I also think this will be my last year of NaNoWriMo.*

I started thinking about this blog post shortly before this year’s NaNoWriMo, when I found myself wondering why exactly I was planning on taking part again. I’d planned to finish last year’s project, which I dubbed Everything Is Fine Until It Isn’t, Part II: You’re A Good Man, Charlie Stokes, mainly because I wanted to prove that I could finish one of these stories. (Dirty secret: The last novel I actually finished was the one I started for NaNoWriMo in 2005.)

Let me be clear: I’m not giving up writing. If there’s been one good thing to happen to me since I first put fingers to keyboard back in 2005, it’s that writing has become part of my life, both professionally and personally. I relish those days when I can slip out to the café in the early morning hours of the weekend and spend a couple hours doing nothing but immersing myself in a cup of tea and another world.

That’s good. That’s what NaNoWriMo is supposed to do. But having reached that point, I feel a bit like I’ve outgrown the exercise. In March of this year, I started working on a new novel, tentatively titled Resurrection Men. The idea for this book has been uncoiling in my head for several years now—the characters first came to me in 2001, if you can believe that, at which point they stood around impatiently waiting for the right plot to arrive.

In the seven months leading up to November, I wrote just over 70,000 words in that story—it’s funny to think that I wrote more than two thirds that amount in the last month alone. But unlike the breakneck pace of NaNoWriMo, about 10,000 words a month seems pretty reasonable.

The problem with NaNoWriMo is that it isn’t sustainable. Most professional novel writers don’t work at those speeds (and it’s their job). As positive an exercise as I think NaNoWriMo is, there’s a priority of quantity over quality that I’ve moved past. I couldn’t have produced 50,000 words of Resurrection Men in a month and maintained the level of writing that was my aim, so I did the only other thing that seemed to make sense: I set it aside for the month.

That turned out to be an incredibly frustrating and, in retrospect, foolish idea. For most of November I was itching to work on Resurrection Men, but instead found myself having to pound out my daily quota for my NaNoWriMo project. That’s not to say I didn’t do some good work in Charlie Stokes; there were definitely scenes and lines of dialogue here and there that I was proud of.

But I ended up running headlong into the same problem as last year: when it came right down to it, what was the story actually about, other than being a sort of therapeutic quasi-autobiographical mishmash? And all the while, on my morning walk to work, my mind would spin with ideas for the story I did know.

Still, I felt dedicated to seeing NaNoWriMo through, even though the only person who probably would have faulted me for stopping was, well, me—just like you don’t want to throw in the towel on mile 16 of a marathon. I managed to sneak in one day’s work on Resurrection Men during the month, which was just enough to keep myself tuned in to that story. But every day I continued the slog on Charlie Stokes so that I could feel like I’d accomplished my goal (and, most importantly, get that little badge to stick at the top of this post).

But, unlike Marc Antony, I came here not to bury NaNoWriMo but to praise it. These past five years have had a huge impact on my life, and to anybody who has ever wondered if they have a novel in them, NaNoWriMo is the excuse you’ve been looking for to give it a shot. At its best, NaNoWriMo is about cutting out the bullshit and getting to the act of writing—as such, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Me, I’ve long held the belief that the curse of talent is the ability to recognize genius. I’m just smart enough to know that I’m not a writing prodigy whose first work is going to be tearfully lauded by reviewers, readers, and every single person who so much as glances at the cover, but I also know that I’m good enough to produce a solid piece of fiction—if I put in the time to work on it.

That’s what the past five years of NaNoWriMo have taught me.

Five years ago, I would have laughed long and hard at the idea that somebody might one day pay me to string words together—and I’m sure I did. Nevertheless, here I am. If nothing else, it makes the idea that I might someday get to tell stories for a living seem not so preposterous after all.

* I do reserve the right to change my mind about this at any point.↩

As we here at Doombot have long celebrated Day of the Tesla, we thought you, the readers, might enjoy partaking in some of the more time-honored festivities of this highest of holidays. As always, we perform the ceremony of failing to electrocute an elephant with alternating current (we use symbolic plush toy elephants, of course—this is no diabolical, hedonistic Edisonstravaganza), followed by the traditional viewing of Tesla biopic The Prestige.

Finally, the evening is concluded with a live reading of our award-winning* children’s book, Tesla and His Pigeon: A Children’s Story of Love and Loss in the Electric Age, based on Tesla’s relationship with his favorite creature.

Afterwords, the kids are sent to bed with the reminder that the spirit of Tesla won’t appear to deposit Serbian dinars bearing his likeness unless they are fast asleep.

If this is your first time celebrating Day of the Tesla, you might also wish to partake of these classic episodes of our podcast adventures, The Scrimshaw Meme and TMYK, in which we pay homage to Tesla through the deepest respect of humor.

Finally, the most devoted of Tesla followers undertake—at least once in their lifetime—a trip to the laboratory of the man himself, Wardenclyffe Tower, where the prescient inventor intended to pioneer the field of wireless communication, were he not dastardly foiled by the dark lord Edison.

And so we wish you a happy Day of the Tesla, and to you and your kin, we say: may the eternal peace ray shine down upon you.

* Tesla and His Pigeon was the recipient of the 2006 award for Most Promising New Children’s Book Involving a Historical Inventor of Serbian Descent, by the National Association of Serbian Inventors Whose Initials are “N. T.”. It was also on the short-list for the Newberry Award in the same year, though it was narrowly beat out by Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow ↩

Well, I read some of those books, and didn’t read some others, and I read some other books that I saw listed on “science-fiction novels that are super awesome” kinds of lists. I didn’t bother writing “short reviews” for most of them here because most of them bored me, but I’d like to get an updated picture of what sci-fi is supposed to be worth reading, and Amazon’s recommendation system turns out to be kind of sucky. So, I thought I might check back in to let you know how my recent reading has gone, and see if you have any other novels you’d recommend to me, to each other, or to the world in general. I also welcome you to use this opportunity to tell me I have crappy taste in literature, as I suspect that is what many of you may feel after reading this post.

Books That Bored Me to Varying Degrees

Glasshouse: Charles Stross—recommended by friends and authors I respect—pens a tale of intrigue, identity confusion, and murder in the far-flung future. I actually liked it quite a bit for much of it, but I was really geared up to read about the freaking future, and this book abandons that to a large extent to focus on living in a simulated 20th-century environment. Okay, our arbitrary gender roles and frozen food products would seem weird and alien to people in the future! I get it! Move on! But actually, this was the most interesting book for me in this “books that bored me” category, so I gave another Stross book a chance…

Halting State: Charles Stross—who I still want to like—writes a novel about a heist that takes place in an MMO? That sounds awesome! Turns out that it doesn’t really go anywhere, though, and the characters are kind of dull people. Great setting, but I’d rather see how somebody else populates it.

Newton’s Wake: Ken MacLeod thanks Charles Stross right on the first page, which I guess should’ve been a tip as to what would come. Again, I really wanted to like this book, but I just felt like it went nowhere and presented characters with boring personalities and/or unclear motivations. Maybe I’m also just bored of the idea of “The Singularity,” too. (Though I enjoy the term “The Hard Rapture” for when everybody gets sucked into computers against their will.)

Consider Phlebas: Yeah, didn’t do it for me. I may check out A Player of Games based on friends’ recommendations, but it’s not high on my list now.

Perdido Street Station: I haven’t finished this book yet because I find it boring and overwrought. People keep saying that Chine Mieville is really weird, but I’m just not getting it. To me, the truly “weird” is that which prods at you, uncomfortably deep within your mind, like that itchy feeling Haruki Murakami tends to leave on the roof of your mouth. “Weird,” for me, is not just an unlikely blend of dissimilar elements, like a peanut butter and ringworm sandwich (or, in this case, sex between a fat guy and a woman with a bug for a head). I’ll probably get back to this later because I actually paid for it, but this is the book that finally got me to get a new library card.

The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three: Probably the Dark Tower series gets more interesting as you get further into it, but the second book just left me cold, and I can’t help feeling like these ideas would have seemed way cooler to me if I’d read them when I was closer in age to how old Stephen King was when he wrote them.

Dune: I started reading this in 8th grade, got bored, and quit. I just got it out of the library and read through it pretty quickly. Parts of it were interesting to me (like the integration with the Fremen), and I think I can see why it was very influential (blending of science/religion, basis of a large “world” before everybody and her brother had their own sci-fi franchise planned out). I kind of wanted to just be done with it for large parts, though, and adding it to my Amazon wish list brought all kinds of recommendations for books I don’t want to read (again), like all kinds of stuff by Asimov and Clark. If I’m going to read more of the “classics,” I’d rather pick from the lesser-known ones that I might not have gotten to already.

Books I Liked Quite a Bit

A Fire Upon the Deep: I liked this quite a bit. I usually try to mix up which authors I’m reading, but I’ve disliked so much of the sci-fi I’ve been reading lately that I may just go hunt down more “Zones of Thought” books.

A Game of Thrones: Still working on this one. I am usually hesitant about starting a series that hasn’t been finished yet (a lesson learned the hard way by Robert Jordan fans), but it looked interesting and relatively cheap, so I bought it. And I like it a lot! I’m not really big into fantasy literature, and the conventions of the genre are kind of grating for me even here, but I’m willing to overlook that for interesting characters and character dynamics, a compelling mystery in the plot, and the promise of an even greater struggle to come.

Despite what this short list at the end might suggest, having multiple, parallel story lines and protagonists is not a make-or-break factor for me. Mostly I just want a book that has an interesting, identifiable plot, and characters who seem like they could be actual people. I feel like too much of what I’ve tried reading has been about cool ideas, but an idea isn’t enough to make me want to finish a whole book.

My first reaction to the game covers was, I wish game covers really looked like this. Upon further reflection, though, I realized how misleading that would be. These look great—but by and large, they’re aesthetically disconnected from the games’ visual and narrative style. I could imagine some of the older games sporting covers like these, such as some of the Sim City covers and a Missile Command cover, and perhaps one Mirror’s Edge cover actually resembles the style of the cut scenes in that game. Many of these, however, are lovely but downright hilarious (and often intentionally so, I wager) in their stylistic incongruity with the original games. The Harry Potter redesigns, meanwhile, work decently well, in my opinion.

Part of the reason covers in the “classics” styles wouldn’t really work for games is that many of the featured titles have a clear visual style already, whereas the cover alone defines the visual style for most novels. (Notice that the game covers that might work are generally for games with much less developed or more abstract graphics.) But that’s not the whole story, I think. Part of the incongruity is that most games are still testosterone-soaked gorefests with no attempt to transcend their period or genre. It’s hard to see a work as a true “classic” when its greatest aim is to achieve a multi-generation franchise, and its greatest legacy will be as a piece of nostalgia.

I’ve started to look at the NaNoWriMo process as an exercise, a chance to try out things that I wouldn’t otherwise. By this point, I’m pretty confident in my ability to write, regardless of what month it is, so it’s an opportunity for experimentation.

Last year, I tried to write a young adult science-fiction novel about a girl who discovers that her older brother is part of a secret organization that fights aliens and deals with the powers of the occult. If that sounds a lot like The Middleman…well, it is, but I hadn’t heard about it prior to coming up with the idea. The Middleman had roughly the same concept as my story, but with one major difference: vastly superior execution. That’s okay; I don’t regret the experience of writing that story—but I don’t think I’m likely to finish it either.

So, what have I learned this year that I didn’t know last year? Well, I’ve learned that even though I can write mainstream fiction, I seem to keep coming up with better genre fiction ideas at the same time (I thought of at least two premises for good stories that I’d like to write). I’ve learned that having an entire plot in mind—which I didn’t this time around—really helps not only the day-to-day act of writing, but also the emotional investment in the novel and characters, and I learned that I can produce 50,000 words without breaking too much of a sweat. In many ways I felt like I put in a lot less effort this year. I went to most of the local area write-ins, and I regularly cranked out more than my allotted word count for a given day, allowing me to skip several days over the course of the month. I also learned that the first-person perspective is great, because you can just delve into long periods of wandering introspection, many of which were probably the better—or at least more amusing—parts of this book.

This year’s effort, Everything Is Fine Until It Isn’t—and as much as I don’t want to heap on the self-adulation, I still love that title—was largely autobiographical and, let’s be honest, more than a little therapeutic. I ditched the idea of writing for therapy way back in my first or second year of college when I realized that it was basically an attempt at wish-fulfillment: creating the scenarios that I wanted to happen in real life. That’s ultimately unsatisfying, however, and even though I did base a lot of this year’s novel on my own life, I wanted to take a more investigatory approach to the past and present, fictionalized as they were, instead of creating a speculative future that could never exist.

In the volume department, that works out great: there’s always more material to mine from inside your head. In terms of quality, it’s a little more hit-and-miss. Despite truth often being stranger than fiction, most of the time it’s a lot more boring. The story might be interesting from a purely navel-gazing perspective, but if you just take what actually happens, it’s a lot of people moving around, talking, and not doing much of anything. Which just kind of makes it sound like the government.

However, one of the problems with the first-person narration, especially when it’s a thinly fictionalized version of oneself, is that there’s a temptation to somehow try and get your entire being onto the page. Not only is that impossible, but it’s usually unwise too. The act of creation is as much about what’s left out as what’s put in, and you can never recreate the thing itself—nor should you. It’s like trying to make a completely photorealistic painting.

This year’s work started out strong, mainly because that was the part that I’d mostly written in my head already, but it dropped off quickly as I realized that I wasn’t really sure what this book was about. I do think there’s a potential story with these characters and this premise, but I don’t think I quite hit the bull’s-eye this time around. Despite that, I think the opening to Everything is among my favorite things that I’ve written and it’s kind of okay if the rest of the novel doesn’t live up to it, because at least I wrote that part.

So, having learned my lessons, where do I go from here? Well, there’s still that pesky third novel in a trilogy to finish (and I have a couple of beta readers who have been bothering me about that recently). I’ve got four more volumes of my graphical novel to finish (despite the fact that I recently lost all my notes for it in a horrible data catastrophe), and there are at least a couple more ideas that I alluded to above that I’d like to flesh out a bit—not to mention my latest, greatest idea for an espionage cookbook.

As always, there’s plenty more to write and never enough time to do it. But NaNoWriMo does remind me that it’s possible to keep writing during the rest of the year—if not everyday—and still accomplish something.