Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Oh me, oh my, how quickly I abandoned my (earnest at the time) resolution to blog more frequently. I've noticed several writers who have dropped off the blog radar in favor of having more active twitter accounts. Not so here -- I just tend to drop off the Internet circuit and have trouble catching back up.

Don't ask me how many messages are in my inbox. If 30 messages or less is success, well, I've got a long way to go until I'm successful again.

But in the meantime, there's a very complimentary review of Haunted up over at Drive Thru, which makes me quite happy. (If you are a book blogger -- or are willing to post reviews on your Good Reads account or elsewhere on the internet -- and are interested in getting a review copy, comment here and I'll let you know how to do it!)

I also found some things in my writing drawer that I thought it would be fun to share, since I've not done much of that lately. This is from an art book project I did for Empty Room Studios awhile back; a few writers (mainly me and Andrew Schneider, who had a recent adventure appear in Dungeon here) wrote scene snippets for artists in various subgenres of fantasy and science fiction. This one was from a private eye meets interstellar politics mash up. The scenes were a great exercise -- and also a ton of fun to write!

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Don't get me wrong. There are good things to be said about working for space tyrants. The job may be difficult, but it's always lucrative. They pay in cash (or wire it into your account from an anonymous bank in New Switzerland), and they pay on time. They are nothing if not predictable.

Right away Myrah Deen, Tyrant of Saitoga, some inter-corporation built on the side of a half dead moon, defied my expectations. Where most Tyrants had a paunch straining their well-stretched belts, she had a petite waist surrounded by curves that might have been old-fashioned, but I'd always liked a curvy woman better than the waif that had cycled back into style. She wore her red hair sitting on top of her head, held by two silver pins that I highly suspected doubled as darts, as opposed to the traditional comb over. She also came into my office herself instead of sending some underpaid aide who would be disposed of after the fact if they heard anything too important.

I'd gone through her records. If she'd ever had anyone so much as detained on the edge of legality, her tech-clouds had better cover than even I could break through. When she entered, I stood, watching how the stars outside my window framed the wisps of auburn that fell around her chin.

"Ms. Deen," I said, and she nodded. "Pleasant surprise."

"I'm full of surprises," she said, straight like it was business, without a hint of coyness. Then she smiled and undid the whole effect.

"Gin?" I offered.

She watched me pour. "I don't drink," she said, took the tumbler, and downed it all in one throw.

I think I mentioned awhile ago that I did a number of short pieces, alongside Andrew Schneider, for the Empty Room Studios Art Book. These pieces are now filtering about the web, from the Digital Webbing forums to EnWorld to DrunkDuck as the artists tackle each description and make it their own. It's great fun watching it happen over on the ERS forums, and I'm enjoying the fact that my part in the process is completed and the pieces are finding life in other hands.

Since it is Valentine's Day, I thought I'd post one of the shorts I wrote. It's a superhero piece titled "Outnumbered":

Valentine's Day is never a good day in Chicago, not since the twenties. And some crooks seem to take it upon themselves to make each V-Day a little bit worse than the last. Seems like there's a challenge to beat the previous record for violence and mayhem. In Detroit, the freaks all come out for Halloween--Devil's Night, they call it. Us? We've got Valentine's Day. Ironic.

The cops are spread thin as it is--the good ones, anyway, and the bad ones are useless--so I always end up on the top of a building somewhere in the Loop, trying to dodge bullets and fists. Occasionally one gets through. Two years ago it was the Sears Tower. Last year it was on North Michigan over at the Hancock. This year, I'm on Aon Center, where my day job is. On the upside, if I mess things up, I won't have to go in tomorrow. On the down side, if I mess up too much, I won't be going in again, ever.

If I had known this year that Electrode was involved, I might have called in the big leagues. New York has more heroes than you can shake a stick at, and, as you may have guessed from the above, February is a slow month in Detroit. I've been known to hop over there in October to help out, so it'd only be fair. But knowing me, I'd have been a fool and ended up in this situation anyway. Yeah, that's me. Gatlin Gun ammo stinging like bees and electrified mobsters swinging lightning rods on all sides. I can smell atmo burning all around me, smell the hair on my arms burning, and feel the rest of my flesh rising in goosebumps. Not that I'm paying close attention to those details. I'm a little more concerned about not falling the thousand feet down onto Randolph.

And Electrode's maniacal laughter? Not exactly inspiration for keeping grounded, if you'll forgive the pun. Frankly, I'm beginning to wish I could fly.

Wednesday I finally got around to stopping by my new local comic shop, Curt's Comics and Collectables. This was in part because I'd gotten e-mail from Things from another World, the official Dark Horse store, about the new Serenity comic. (As it turns out, that doesn't release until March, but I'm an e-mail scan-reader, and so I missed this vital piece of information until second reading.) I also wanted to order the new Hero by Night hardcover, as Jason Embury, who used to be a member at Empty Room Studios, is working on the art. I've been following it and wanted to support these guys for telling a good story.

The shop is great. It's a small space, and Curt told me he's planning to get more lighting to brighten it up, but the displays are excellent. Best of all, all of the comics are open to the air, instead of packaged in plastic. I'm not a huge fan of stores that don't encourage a read-while-you're-here mentality, and Curt's seems like the kind of place where someone like me (who likes to look before buying) could fit right in. He did have a couple of long boxes, so I imagine he'll cater a bit to the collector crowd as well. :) And hopefully one of these days, we'll see Cowboys and Aliens II on the shelf!

In other news, I lied to you all a few days ago. I said I wasn't going to write a story for the Fantasist Enterprises submission period. As it turns out, the story I'd been planning to write for it congealed in my head, and I wrote all 4600-odd words yesterday, just in time to submit! (After listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn discuss the Grimm's fairy tale "The Water of Life" and correlating it with a Buddhist understanding of consciousness, I thought it would be extremely fun to set it in an ambiguous, Asian-flavored fantasy setting.)

Whether or not it's a great piece of work, I have no idea--I'm still far too close to having written it. But it's the story I wanted to tell, and now it's off in the mail!

So, the works-in-progress bar currently looks like:

"Saving Tara"

359 / 5,000 (7.2%)

"Choosing Fate"

0 / 5,000 (0.0%)

"The Water of Life"

4,600 / 4,600 (100.0%)

I got my contract in the mail today, so it's official: I'm the new writer for Cowboys and Aliens: Worlds at War, the sequel to the original Cowboys and Aliens graphic novel by Platinum Studios. The first volume is still available online, and though we'll be departing from the style of storytelling in the original, we are drawing on the first volume for characters and set up.

The entire project is being led by Jeremy Mohler (of Baeg Tobar), and everyone working on it is part of Empty Room Studios. Rick Hershey, the creator of Steampunk Musha, is the primary penciller for the series. Daniel Harris, who I haven't worked with before, is the colorist.

Doing the research on this has been skads of fun. After doing some initial research on the world in 1873 (Platinum provided us with quite a bit), I started looking up information about the Apache to better flesh out two of the main characters. I studied Native American Anthropology in college, so doing linguistic and religious research has been refreshing, even though I imagine very little of the actual research will show up obviously in the comic.

The really exciting thing about Worlds at War is that the stories take place all over. So we'll be covering everything from the shift between Edo and Meiji Japan to the Boers (Dutch rulers) of Transvaal (South Africa) and their ongoing conflicts with the Zulus. Because we want to keep everything as realistic as possible--to provide a counterpoint the fact that the series revolves around an alien invasion--each section is going to involve a research period getting us up to par on the cultures and politics of the area we're working in.

As soon as the project goes live, you can be sure I'll post the link!

While making progress on Regaining Home, I managed to completely neglect other assignments with rather firmer due dates. Which means that this weekend is devoted to those pieces (short articles about authors), and hopefully I'll be back to work on the novel by Tuesday.

While working on the articles today, I discovered the websites or Joaquin Dorfman, who is the author of Playing It Cool and was born the same year as me. (This is yet another reminder that I am no longer young--I've discovered that a lot of the folks I work with at Empty Room Studios are my age or younger, which was a bit of a surprise. For years I was used to being the youngest person I worked with. But I digress.)

At any rate, his current website www.joaquindorfman.com and his old website at www.melloweb.com are distinctly less than useful to a researcher--but hilarious to watch. The writer comes across as a ham, but in all the right ways, and the fact that he would film himself doing goofy stuff and then put it up online--to promote his books, of course--is endearing enough to me that I'm sharing. So go spend the five or ten minutes on his websites to watch the goofiness. And then maybe pick up his books. (I won't know if they're any good until I read the reviews for my article, and even then, the reviews aren't always a good judge. I say that as a reviewer myself.)