I saw the Prestige. When I first left the theater, it was quite good. That evening, it was pretty sweet, and the next day it rocked. It's one of those movies that settles in. So go see it. The plot was cool and twisty and the acting was supurb all around.

There's finally a title for the novel that will be based off of "The Ballad of Hero Kyros." I'm calling it, "A Ballad of Heroes." I kinda like it. I spent the afternoon writing a grant proposal for BYU mentoring grants to try and convince them to pay me next semester to write the novel. It would be nice to get the extra cash.

Between writing this grant and trying to translate Chaucer (I mean, seriously, it's annoying to read, let alone try to find rhetorical figures), I'm pressed for time to blog. So I'll get back to it after midterms.

Oh, and I re-started "the Envoy," and it's going much better.

And I'll be sending "Ballad of Hero Kyros" off to TTA press as soon as they email me back and tell me how much they pay per word (their website doesn't say). Or I'll send it off by Friday. Whichever comes first.

The Prestige comes out this weekend. It looks pretty amazing. As you know, I look to visual media for a lot of my ideas and inspiration. For those of you who haven’t seen the previews, it’s about a pair of magicians (played by Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) and Christian Bale (Batman)) who get into a battle of wits and skill. It looks very good and apparently the book was incredible.

I had another idea for a story. I keep getting those. My ideas are years worth of work ahead of the amount of writing that I can actually get done right now.

Our Shakespeare professor was talking about Henry the somethingth (fifth?), in which the battle of Agincourt is referred to. He mentioned that it is a common, but lesser known belief that every nation on Earth has a Warrior Angel that leads their troops into battle.

That idea is really quite cool and it would be fun to play with. I mean, it could make an entire novel, but I’d like to write a less than 4000 word short story out of it. I hate trying to write short stories, and I hate short short stories even more.

The Envoy is up to 4,600 words now and I feel like it needs to be tightened. It’s written well for say, a novella (which there is no market for) or even a long short story. But I need to perfect the ability to write short stories in less than ten, or even five, thousand words.

When you write a story that short, it’s a completely different ball game. I originally wanted The Envoy to have a subplot or two and various reveals and intrigue, but I just don’t’ have the word space. It makes me sad, because there’s so much potential for so much story, but I don’t have the space for it.

I might go ahead and start it over again. I’m not sure. The plot is pretty much set and won’t be changed, but it needs to be trimmed down to a much simpler set up.

I need to spend more time studying published short stories to figure out how they write short things skillfully.

I’m trying to find a professor who will support me in doing a mentoring grant. The way it works at BYU, you write up a research project or talk about a paper you want to get published or something like that and you lay it on thick to convince the grant office people to give them money.

If you get accepted, you get $1500 or more and work on the project over the next semester, with a qualified and agreeable professor who checks up on you once in a while. You turn in the final project with an essay explaining what you did.

My hope is to convince them to let me get published. It might be a stretch, because most faculty types have a thing against creative fiction, especially speculative fiction. But I think it might work if I lay it on real thick and possibly propose an entire novel (I think I’d work on the Hero Kyros novel I’ve been wanting to start). The advantage there is the amount of research I would have to do, and maybe I could just sell it to them as a historical novel. In fact, that’s a really good idea. I think I’ll try that.

Influences

Good news and bad news. The good news, F&SF have a very, very good turnaround. Bad news, they already rejected Hero Kyros. Oh well, on to the next. I was thinking Black Gate, but they only do epic fantasy, and I'm not sure if Hero Kyros falls under that. It's slim pickins in the short speculative fiction market. Maybe Cicada, but I can't seem to find a definate payment amount. I'll decide at some point this coming few days.

I was up late last night watching the ever high-quality cartoon network. I saw a vampire anime called Trinity Blood. I actually quite enjoyed it. There's a lot of crappy anime out there, and it's kinda ironic, but the very best that I've seen tend to be dark and bloody with equally dark and bloody tragic heroes and anti-heroes. Animes like Trinity Blood, Hellsing, Vampire Hunter D and Berzerk. I don't actually write anything having to do with vampires, but I really like the vampire animes. The good ones.

The only character I'm writing with similarities to the heroes that we know and love from hard-packing animes is Warren Drake, from "the Envoy." He's a crazy, bio-genetically advanced cyborg about four hundred years in the future. He's certainly proving to be fun to write.

Even though I rarely write similarly to the wild style of vampire animes, I feel like I get a lot of inspiration from them. Their characters tend to be deep and powerful and they have a great combination of character and plot-driven written style.

I do draw a bit of my influence from the old style epic high fantasies with thier farmboy-turned-king heroes on a quest to save the world. I do my best to ignore that influence though. They were good during their time, but they've generally lost their charm.

Which brings us to a conversation I had with Bookstore Guy Steve a little while ago. We were talking about how what an author reads reflects in what they write. There are definately trends in writing and the industry is changing continuously, and so it's important that a writer reads what is being sold. Reading the old stuff is alright, and most of us already did when we were kids, but we need to stay on top of the industry.

We're making some great advances at Leading Edge. Our latest issue just came back from press and will be shipped out next week. I finished the project I was working on, which was a card-stock order form included in each issue. We've got five more bookstores carrying LE now and we're talking to corporate at Waldenbooks. We've also got the new website under construction (you may have noticed that the old one, linked to on the side, is crap).

Another idea that we'll be putting forth soon is a subscription and back-issue order form in every rejection letter. We're putting on a severe drive to improve our subscription base over the next year or two. We may even be moving to three issues a year from our current two.

So I guess I’m coming up on a lot of Google and blog searches for WotF and the like. Pretty snazzy.

The profession of writing is a funny thing. When a person asks me what I do, I usually tell them that I’m a writer. These are the common reactions here at BYU.

From a Female:

Me: I’m a writer.
The female then gets a really interested look in her eyes. The same look people get when you mention “Rocky Horror Picture Show” or “A Separate Peace.” “That’s really cool, she says. “What do you write?”
Me: “Speculative fiction.”
Female: Blank, but interested look.
Me: “Science fiction and fantasy.”
Female: The interest drains from her eyes. “Oh, you mean like Lord of the Rings and that sort of thing...” she trails off, trying not to be rude.
Me: “Yeah.”
The conversation ends there and we share an awkward look and wander opposite directions. Unless she’s pretty— then I forge on with something infinitely more interesting as a conversation topic.

From a Male:

Me: “I’m a writer.”
Guy: Raises his eyebrows slightly and nods. “That’s cool, what kind of stuff do you write?”
Me: “Speculative fiction.”
Guy: Blank, vaguely interested look.
Me: “Science fiction and fantasy.”
Guy: “Oh yeah? Cool.”
Me: “Yeah, stuff like Halo and Lord of the Rings.”
Guy: “That’s cool s***.”
We give each other tight lipped, knowing smiles and nod, feeling fulfilled with our deep and meaningful discussion.

Now, those are just samples. I’ve had great conversations on writing with men and women from all sorts of walks of life. Some of the funniest people have an inner geek. But I don’t think you have to be a geek to enjoy SF&F. Admit it; you catch snippets of Stargate during commercial breaks of the football game.

The problem I find is the general lack of respect for speculative writers. It’s not just pompous university professors with Hawthorne fetishes. It’s the general populace of college-grown Americans. Every good Humanities major was taught how to hate writing. They are given “quality” literature.

Unfortunately, “quality” literature makes people want to commit suicide. People read “quality” literature in high school and college and figure that, “Hey, if this is the best out there, I certainly have no intention of reading anything ever again. Except the articles in Playboy.” Did anyone actually like “Lord of the Flies” or “1984” or “Brave New World?” Or did they just say they liked it to sound more artsy? And we wonder why no one reads any more.

You may have noticed that I enjoy complaining about the lack of respect for fantasy and the junk that they make us read at school. I complain loud, proud, and at great length. There’s a lot of bad literature out there. And I will be the first one to admit that some of the worst is published in speculative fiction. But when it comes to novels and short stories, the literary field is certainly not helping keep many readers past their late teens and early twenties.

I say this to both sides. Professors! Publishers! (*cough* Analog and Asimov’s *cough*). Start making us read good stuff. Not crap. And don’t present speculative fiction as the lesser art. “Commercial fiction” is a term for the literature that people pay money for. That means they enjoy it. Let’s take a hint.

New Beginnings

I’m trying to catch up on some of the reading laying around on my bookshelves. On the top of the stack are the last two Writers of the Future anthologies.

In my own writing groups, and whenever I have independent readers looking through my stuff, people always seem to demand more clarity. They want to understand everything that’s going on, immediately. They want it spelled out for them. And I’ve been trying really hard to do that.

I’m not going to try quite as hard from now on.

Don’t get me wrong. Clarity is of the utmost importance in any sort of writing (except poetry, eww). But in reading the short stories being published these days in WotF or Azimov’s or F&SF, I’ve noticed that immediate clarity is not the number one requirement for publication. In fact, I have yet to read a story in the current issue of WotF that begins with clarity and there are even a few that don’t end with clarity. Those ones just get on my nerve.

Obviously, any good story is going to actually tell us something that we understand. Otherwise we wouldn’t read it. But as a writer, there is a point at which we attempt to make things so clear and defined that we can’t ever perfect our writing and we just kind of fall off or get frustrated or write a short story with a fifteen-page intro.

Every story, EVER, starts in medias res; in the middle of the action. Even the Bible starts in medias res. Something went on before every story. The very fact that we’re interjecting into an unfamiliar circumstance means that there’s going to be some catching up to do. Add on top of this the fact that speculative fiction is not just unfamiliar circumstance, but often unfamiliar worlds, cultures, times and even beings. This means the learning curve will automatically be quite large.

So I’m going to stop trying to explain everything right off the bat, even if I keep getting demand for it constantly. (I know, I still need to keep a happy medium) The point of the beginning of the story is to grab the person. I will pull them in, even if they are confused a little. In fact, a solid story grabs the reader but leaves them wondering the whole way through.

I’m about half way through the latest WotF. I’ve read one really good story and a few decent ones, two that were mediocre and one that was well written but so awfully disturbingly depressing that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I liked (I really hate it when publishers put out stories that leave me feeling ill afterward).

Once again, I say that I've had little time to write and things are busy with school and work. I'm getting sick of my own excuses.

My biggest problem is that when I get home in the afternoon and I have some time to chill and maybe get some writing done, I'm tired. I suspect, hope, everyone has to deal with this and I really want to know how they do. I get in from school and I've been going for 8-10 hours and I'm just buggered and I know that if I want to get to my evening things like Leading Edge that I need to just sit and veg. My brain is goo. And I take a nap or watch CSI and then I go out and get things finished up and I come home and it's nine-thirty and I finish up some homework and I'm ready to get some writing in because my brain is finally working again and then poof. It's ten-thirty and if I don't go to bed now I won't be able to function in the morning.

Maybe it's the RA. I don't know. It's just frustrating, not having the mental energy to plot and write and create. I get little bits in here and there and I'm using some of my brain-dead time to read the latest WotF or F&SF. I even came up with a great idea for a short story based on British Imperialism not fifty minutes ago. Jotted down half a page on the idea. But when will I flesh it out?

The only choice I have is to keep on truckin'.

Wine, Women and Song

And suicidal tendecies... the keys to becoming a successful writer.

At least, that's the impression I get from the stuff they teach us in class. Most of what they teach us in college, however, if utter boulderdash.

I saw the Illusionist the other day. In case you haven't seen it yet, go and do just that. It'll hit the dollar theaters soon. It was a quality movie. It's not often these days that you see a movie that has been well done without ludicrous amounts of sex, or with blood splattered all over the screen (really, what was with those Kill Bill movies? Artistic my butt. They were just dumb).

The techniques in the movie have been done before, and any frequent movie goer will recognize them for what they are. I won't give any spoilers, but rest assured that it doesn't detract from the film in the least.

The reason I mention the Illusionist is that many movies are a creative muse for me. I tend to be a visual writer and seeing a well done scene in a movie, or an excellently designed plot is a booster for me almost as much as reading a good book. I saw Superman last night for the umpteenth time, and I didn't mind it in the least. One, because it's a good, quality movie; and two, because it's one of the most successful plotlines in the history of man despite using a main character who is for all intents and purposes, static.

Speaking of which, when is someone going to make kryptonite-tipped bullets and finally kill SM?