Spoiler follows… J.K. Rowling is not a good writer, but she is a good storyteller. She makes characters that we care about, a world we want to believe in, and a tale we want to see resolved. She also relies on ridiculously lengthy exposition, bends the plot around foolishly improbable coincidences, and skimps on evocative imagery, sometimes requiring us to reread entire paragraphs so that we can just follow what the hell is going on. At least her being a mediocre writer means that we get the satisfying epilogue that is typically denied to sophisticated readers. I’ll probably read the whole thing to my own (hypothetical) kids some day, but maybe I’ll edit a bit as I go.

Mitt Romney’s favorite novel is Scientology-founder L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. I find this interesting, as Romney is a Mormon, and Mormons and Scientologists are easily the two most mocked religions among cynical liberals. Also, it reminds me that I want to read more sci-fi novels.

The first comment on the blog that posted this information noted that Battlefield Earth is a crappy novel, and you should instead be reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, or any of a number of other authors, including “Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Gibson, Heinlein, McCafferey, Zelazny.” I’ve read all of these and am kind of in the market for new, decent science-fiction novels to check out, so please feel free to suggest someone or something interesting and less well known. Also on the already-read list: Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Diamond Age were good but his endings kind of fall flat), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat’s Cradle among my favorites), George Orwell (1984 a longtime favorite), Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was good), Neil Gaiman (pretty much all his modern urban fantasy stuff is decent), and Ursula K. LeGuin (never did much for me, but maybe I’d appreciate more if I went back and reread). So yeah, please feel free to suggest decent science-fiction novels in the comments, if you know of any.

It’s the winter of 2000, and I’m visiting the Twin Towers in New York with my family. The walls in the observation floor are decorated with painted designs, including a fragment of a Vonnegut quote: “… skyscraper national park …” Some time after the towers go down, I think about how I had stood on the roof, and how I had stared at that quote. I wonder how Vonnegut is processing the whole event, and whether he even knows his words were painted on the wall.

Read More…

I’ve really stopped reading Star Wars books for the most part, though I indulge every once in a while—it’s a guilty pleasure. I’m tempted to say that Allegiance is the best entry in the franchise since Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Cycle—which isn’t really surprising, given that it’s written by Zahn himself. Then again, I was underwhelmed by Zahn’s last four entries (The Hand of Thrawn duology, and the Outbound Flight/Survivor’s Quest pair). Maybe it’s because Allegiance is set back in the period between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, and thus features a lot of familiar and favorite characters. Or maybe it’s because the premise of a rogue stormtrooper squad that’s become disillusioned with the Empire is an interesting spin on the black-and-white good vs. evil rhetoric of the Star Wars universe. Mostly, I suspect, it’s because the book hearkens back to before the dark times, before George Lucas decided to heavy-handedly rob his own creation of all that was pure and good.

The New York Times informs us that “The word ‘scrotum’ does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.” And that is why, the article explains, the recent Newbury Medal winner The Higher Power of Lucky has been banned from many elementary school libraries.

Check out the aforementioned article for the general overview of the situation, CJR Daily’s article for some helpful nitpicks, and this Gelf Magazine post to see the many other places where scrotums appear in children’s literature. Apparently the author’s mistake in this case was putting it on the first page, as most adults won’t read further than that in a children’s book unless there’s a wizard on the cover.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: the writing in iWoz is pretty atrocious. It reads, at times, like it’s been written by a seventh grader. That said, Steve Wozniak isn’t a writer; he’s an engineer—a very impressive one, as he tells us repeatedly (tech journalist Gina Smith gets a “with” credit for the authorship, but I have no idea what part she played in the actual writing process). His attitude rides the fine line between confidence and arrogance, and while it might occasionally grate, it’s hard to argue with the guy who made the personal computer what it is today. Among the lesser know, but fascinating stories in here, is the fact that Woz’s small plane crashed during takeoff in 1981, leaving him with anterograde amnesia (an inability to form new short-term memories—think Memento) for a period of five weeks. There must be some way to link that to the fact the man now plays Segway polo as a hobby.

The seventh (and as far as I know, final) Harry Potter book will be titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I have no idea what a Deathly Hallow is (any more than I guess I knew who the Half-Blood Prince was), but hey, it’s no Indiana Jones and the Opal of the Mer-Man Prince.

The last thirty days have been spent undertaking a truly grueling task, one that happens to fall upon me every year at this time. I’m speaking, of course, of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo to those in the know). I finished my 50,000 words just moments ago, on this very computer, then promptly went to put dinner in the oven. Again, I’ve been handsomely rewarded with a full set of icons (better looking than last year’s) and a charming PDF certificate I can print out for myself.

I took a minute to look over my post-mortem from last year’s event, the first that I managed to complete, and found that most of the things I said there held this year, despite the fact that I’ve been writing professionally for nine months now. There are still days where I feel like I can’t produce an intelligible sentence, and I still hate writing the word “turned” (add to that any form of the word “look”).

While I have reached the requisite length for the contest, the novel itself is only about halfway done, if my previous efforts are any indication. This is the third and final book in a series which I began to write, in its earliest form, more than seven years ago. I think I’ll save recollections on that long and arduous journey for when I complete this volume, probably some months hence.

What have I learned from this past month? It’s even harder to find time to write when you’re employed (even when—or perhaps especially when—said employment consists of writing). That said, if my notes on last year are accurate, I managed to finish about the same time, with around five plus hours to go before the deadline. I also seemed to have paced myself slightly better, having written around 4500 words today, rather than the 6000 I pumped out on the penultimate day last year.

One difference from last year was that I got to add a couple of writing buddies this time, my mother and my boss). While it was handy to be able to pace myself against them, and occasionally discuss things with them, the whole thing still remained mainly a solitary task.

Writing wise, did I learn anything? Certainly. My ideas for this book being somewhat less fleshed out than last year’s, I ended up skipping around quite a bit, moving ahead to chapters that I had a better feel for. One of my two main characters’ plot line came very easily; the other was like pulling teeth and it needs substantial revision (probably involving tossing out whole chapters). But writing’s a process, and editing is part of that process, though I may leave it until I’ve at least finished a rough draft.

Finally, I’ve made no more progress on getting any of these books published, but that’s something that’s high on my list for the coming year. Of course, there’s plenty of other stuff to deal with in the next couple months, including the holidays and quite a bit of travel for both work and pleasure. But I’ll still be finding time to write, and hopefully to start submitting some more of my fiction (and perhaps non-fiction as well).

Once again, I own thanks to family and friends who put up with me through this ordeal. I’m looking forward to finishing this story sometime in the next year, perhaps just in time to start with a wholly new idea for next year’s NaNoWriMo.

I’ve read in a few different places that publishers shy away from green covers. When I first encountered this idea (and I wish I could remember when that was), it was presented as a simple truth about markets. Surely, with all the money at their disposal, major corporations have conducted research demonstrating that green covers simply do not sell well as covers with other colors. This must be why sometimes quite excellent covers, such as original cover on Craig Thompson’s Good Bye Chunky Rice, get replaced with inferior covers. The next edition of that book had a ridiculous orange cover, perhaps (I assumed) because the first edition was cursed by its greenness. (That cover has since been redesigned with the same image but with blues instead of orange.)

According to a recent article in Slate, however, that’s all malarky, and the magazine industry is just as silly about this superstition.

Cindi Leive, now the editor in chief of Glamour, remembers getting into “an almost physical fight” at Self over a cover that pictured Stephanie Seymour in a dark green sweater. “I liked the cover,” Leive recalled. “But my art director … not only was she screaming, she was screaming in a thick and impassioned Finnish accent and telling me that dark green was the color of death … in Scandinavian mythology, but also on the newsstand.”

Green has always been my favorite color, so I’d just like to make an open call to designers to make more green covers. Don’t be afraid. We can do this together.

Those of you who read our erstwhile comic adventures may remember that from time to time, we took some, um, liberties with characters from other properties. And while some of the material might have been protected under parody, our biggest defense was probably our utter failure to ever become popular, and the fact that we never tried to make money off of our endeavors. After all, trying to benefit off of someone else’s works, well, that’s just foolish, isn’t it?

Which is why when I came across this story on Neil Gaiman’s blog, my head almost exploded. Essentially, a fan fiction writer decided that she would self-publish her novel. Her Star Wars fan fiction novel. For sale. On Amazon.

I’d like to be nice and say that this is a ballsy move, designed to instigate a discussion on copyright in the electronic age, but no. No. Not a chance in bloody hell. This is actually just ignorance, compounded with stupidity. She even went so far as to address copyright concerns in a Q&A on her own website (which has since been apparently Alderaaned by Lucasfilm’s Death Star-flying lawyers).

Q: Having set Another Hope in an already existing universe, I find myself wondering if there was any concern on your part regarding copyrights?

No, because I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.

Q: I also wonder how far a writer is allowed to write in a world and to use characters introduced by another author?

If it’s not a commercial project, I don’t see any problem.

[From A Writer's Life]

That…is why you fail.

At last check, the Amazon page for the book is still available, though to add insult to injury, it seems as though besides being a massive copyright violation, the book was, well, bad.

Now, I admit, I’ve written some fan fiction in my day; I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with it, ghettoized though it is destined to be. There is, however, a line in the sand, and I rather hope that this one person’s mistake doesn’t end up punishing a whole bunch of people who are just in it for the fun.