He would not underestimate anyone ever again.

He also knew that traveling by oxcart would not give him the speed he needed to reach his city in time to stop a monster from devouring it, a monster he had indeed created.  It had been constructed to bring free energy, free power to his city but in the wrong hands it had become a disastrous weapon.

As he rode along in yet another oxcart, three children next to him, their small dirty legs hanging off of the edge, their laughter tickling his ears, he finally saw a welcome relief, something for which he had been patiently scanning the landscape: a modern building.

It was a two story concrete structure, primitive by modern standards, but possibly holding some type of technology, some type of communication equipment, something that he could use to contact the outside world.  Climbing down from the cart, his face grimacing about the slight twinge in his back, he walked to the door and spoke the language of the men who guarded it.

“What is this place?”

One of the men, a burly hulk of a man, dark skin and shaved head but with a crisp forest green uniform.  “It is government offices for province.”

The traveler stood, put his hands on his hips as if in despair.

“I am an American and I’m lost,” he explained.  “My clothes and identity have been stolen and I need to communicate with my offices back home to have them wire some money to me.”

The other guard, a rail thin man with a raspy voice said “This building has no access.  No way.”

The traveler smiled, his teeth filmed over.  “I have to…look…there will be a big payoff to you both if I can get to my offshore account.”

The two guards looked at each other, the bigger one smiling as if he knew something the traveler did not.

The traveler knew.

The skinny guard pulled out a set of keys and unlocked the steel door allowing the traveler to enter.  Inside, he found an old rotary telephone, a beaten up Acer computer and a monitor that looked like it was not made for computing but watching soccer games.  After some unceremonious and sharp cursing from the skinny guard, the computer was up and running and the traveler soon was able to access a Swiss bank account to transfer some money to a service, send a few e-mails and then log himself out before the skinny guard returned from his fit of laughter outside with the burly hulk.

The traveler jogged outside, then sat beneath the shade of the building and waited, reassuring the two guards that “their services will be well compensated.”  Two hours and a snack of couscous and goat meat later, the guards and the traveler were laughing and telling jokes as a sleek black chopper flew overhead and then landed, swirling the sand and dust of the desert around it, the blades making a high whine as the traveler jogged toward it, waving back at the guards.

The guards stood to their feet, readying their rifles as if preparing for battle, but lowering them as the traveler returned with a small black leather briefcase.  He handed the case to the guards, shaking their hands with an iron grip, and smiling as he returned to the chopper.  As the helicopter lifted off, the smooth takeoff of an expert pilot, the guards read the side of the chopper and puzzled over the name printed there in large white letters.

“Wayne Enterprises.”

Roland standing by the Dark Tower and the Can’-Ka No Rey. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We all have our favorite books as writers.  All of us have that author we would aspire to write like and have the successes that that particular writer has had.  One problem that plagues many amateur writers is their self-imposed need to be exactly like “so and so” because that author is successful or has had best-selling accolades.

Of course, some times this works out for them as in the case of E.L. James and 50 Shades of Gray or Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy  novels.  Sure.  If you like that sort of thing.  However, at what point do you write like yourself and break out of emulation (and in some cases down right copying) to find your own voice?

First of all, emulate is defined by good old Webster’s as to “match or surpass (a person or achievement), typically by imitation”.  Sure I would like to write an epic set of novels like Tolkien’s or write great science fiction like Orson Scott Card, but I first need to understand what my own voice might be and try to hone that into something unique.

Are we, after all, only products of the writers we love?  It took Stephen King a long time to find his own voice as a writer (since he basically started out lampooning his own high school teachers) but King knew great literature since he taught high school composition while working on Carrie while also holding down a job at a laundry to support his wife and first child (heh, sounds a bit like me).  If one reads his novels from that first novel mentioned to the most recent offerings like The Dome  and The Wind Through the Keyhole, one can watch the progression of King’s voice as a writer and also notice the ties that he has to classical literature/storytelling.  When examining a list of King’s top 10 favorite books, we can see why he writes the way he does and that he is emulating such great writers as Frank Norris, Mark Twain and William Golding.  King is a fantastic example of someone who emulates the humor of Twain, the darkness of Frank Norris and the despairing fear of William Golding all the while doing so with his own unique voice.

I am currently pouring through King’s Dark Tower series again, and it is inspiring me to move forward with a series of books that I have always wanted to toy with.  I will finish the current WIP (the time travel novel) but after that I will delve into the world of a bumbling biographer and the subject of his frightening adventures, a man who is a cross between Batman, Clint Eastwood and Jack Reacher.  It will not be Dark Tower at all, but have thematic elements of the Mad Max films, the stark and absurdist humor of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, the frightening yet joyful darkness of Stephen King and the spirituality of C.S. Lewis.

In so doing, I will not simply be making a copy of a book that I love, but broadening out my palette to include many of the writers that I know and love, creating my own unique art but at the same time paying tribute to those whirling dervishes of the pen who never fail to cause me to wonder and dream and find my own way.

In an article in The Telegraph, the co-writer of the screenplay for Gatsby, Craig Pierce, details his history with Luhrmann and how he and the director went about writing the screen play for the film.  Many years ago there was a small screen adaptation of Fitzgerald’s famous novel that I have used in my classroom to illustrate certain scenes and have students determine how close they were to the novel.  I believe that the current 2013 offering will probably be closer than ever to the novel because Pierce and Luhrmann did very careful research into the novel, the “Jazz Age” and Fitzgerald’s notes.  The article goes into explicit detail about how they researched for the writing of the screenplay.

Research is extremely important in writing anything substantial.  Even if you are writing a completely fictitious story set in a completely fictitious place, it is important to make sure that things seem real enough for a reader so that they do not run away screaming from illogical and sometimes otherworldly nonsense that our stories can become.  Here are some tips:

1.  Interview Experts – Do you live near a college?  If you do, then most professors will have office hours and you don’t have to pay them to get their expert opinion about something (most times a cup of coffee will do).  If you tell them that you are doing research for a book, they usually oblige if you give them credit in the dedication.  I have consulted experts for understanding about Middle Eastern politics, the effects of a superbug, world economics, algae blooms, global warming, and a number of other things.  I asked an Army Ranger Captain what would be the protocol for running out of fuel on a battlefield. I asked a police officer what would happen if the city he patrolled suddenly lost all power with no hope of restoration.  If you don’t ask, you will never know, and it always helps to use that information well so that your books will take on a more realistic feel.

2.  Bad Science - One thing that irks scientists is reading a science fiction novel and finding bad science.  If you are writing about something pertaining to – say – quantum physics (as loosely discussed in my current WIP) it would help to get information and discuss scenarios with a quantum physicist in order to at least make your science seem plausible.  You don’t have to use all the jargon, but it helps to give your story that much more of a boost scientifically if you write science fiction.  It’s like James Kirk climbing in rank from an Ensign to a Captain in one movie.  Ya canna change the laws o’ physics!

3.  Hit the Books - I never really use the local town library for anything other than finding a quiet place to write.  If I’m going to do research about a WIP, I go to my local university library.  The University of Oklahoma library for example has over 3 million books available and also will give me a guest log-in so that I can use their databases and card catalogue.  I can’t check out any books, but I can use their handy dandy USB scanner and take PDF pictures of pages of material that I can use later.  They have maps, charts, history, and literally millions of tools that any good writer would love to use.

One note about researching is that I will usually have a germ of a story when I set about researching or at least an outline.  I cannot say how many times I have been researching and the things I discover produce even more ideas and plot points to add to the novel.  Researching is probably one of the most important steps to any novel.

So get to the library or local university and get cracking!

The following flash fiction story was inspired by something I actually saw in the real world that started my imagination to humming.  While walking to the Metro library to record our latest podcast, I happened upon a plywood box on the sidewalk with the curious words “Please don’t let out the snakes.  MGMT” written on top.  I discovered later that the city was working on installing new traffic signals and that these boxes hide the ugly wires that protrude from the sidewalk, but I’m a writer and suddenly my mind started whirring.  Here is what it produced:

Gerald was late for his appointment at the metro library.

He parked along an oval loop in the street between some white lines just outside the Oklahoma City court house and then paid the credit card meter for fifteen minutes, all that was left in the business day.  His OCD nature told him that he could possibly get a ticket even though they stop writing them after six.  After sticking the 75 cent pass in his window with the supplied adhesive tab, he grabbed his gray and blue Targus backpack, shouldered one of the straps and moved quickly along the sidewalk toward the library.

Just before the intersection, the streets now cleared of people and cars due to an impending Thunder game, he spotted a plywood box.

It sat in the center of the sidewalk, nailed together somewhat hastily, the top panel about a quarter inch too large which caused one of the side panels to be offset just enough to allow a half inch crack along one edge.

Darkness within.

Written on top of the box, letters written officially yet not engraved in the wood, was the following message:

Please do not let it out.  MGMT.

Gerald stopped when he saw the words, focusing in on the word “it”.

What was “it”?

He looked toward the library just across the intersection, the front wall of the building made up of panels of curved glass, his tiny reflection staring back at him like a clone, and he lowered his Targus bag to the ground carefully.

Something in the box made a sound, something like the purring of a cat but deeper, yet somehow mechanical, echoing inside the small confines of the plywood container.  Perhaps someone was playing a joke on him.

He looked across the street and a woman was walking a very small dog, not sure the breed, her yoga pants skin tight, her blue and orange Thunder shirt one size too big, her bright orange sun visor over her white Oakley shades.

She didn’t notice him, only jogged on by, her tiny dog trying to keep up.

Please do not let it out.  MGMT.

What was “it”?  And “please”. Why “please”?

He knelt down by the box, his face getting closer to the small crack on one side, his squinting eyes peering into the darkness beyond, and then he thought he heard a smacking sound, the sound of a wet mouth and…breathing?

It caused him to jump, stand upright.

Just go meet Ryan.  Just leave here and go meet Ryan.  Don’t be late.  Who cares what “it” is?

Something is alive in there.

He wondered why someone would put a cat or an animal in a box and leave it on a sidewalk in downtown Oklahoma City, or any city for that matter, or anywhere.

Gerald sat by the box, cross legged, his Targus backpack discarded, and wondered what was beyond the plywood.

Can’t be too bad.  Plywood after all.  If it was that dangerous, it would be steel or titanium and… and not on a sidewalk in the middle of town.  Right?

He reached out, his hand trembling, his eyes widening, and a horn honked somewhere, causing him to start backward.  When he did, his leg jerked, an involuntary action, and his foot collided with the plywood box.

Whatever it was it was not a cat.

Gerald’s final word was “please”, but it escaped his quivering lips in the form of a scream.

The actual box that this story is loosely based upon. It’s really just a way for the city to hide ugly wires.

In 1977 when this book released I was in 2nd grade and Star Wars had just hit theaters.  It wasn’t until Jedi was released in ’86 that I picked up a copy of this book and immediately identified with the angst of Ender.  The book was like nothing I had ever read, the hero being a little boy who is forced to grow up very fast and rise through the ranks of his military to play a “game”, thinking he is on a training simulation but discovering he is actually waging real war.

This book was long before virtual reality video games, long before Kony’s boy soldiers.  It was somehow shocking for me at the time, a young high school student, because it had the dynamic of a coming of age story with a truly hard-line and danger filled plot.  For Ender it is kill or be killed, step on the necks of others to rise to the top, and all in the name of saving the human race.  It is also great science-fiction in that it has so many different universal messages.  It is about war, about the innocence of youth, about the power of the individual and about self-discovery.  It is about family, the pain of loss and the struggles of sociological conundrums that many of us face.

I wish one day to meet Card, but one of my friends met him in 2000 and after the author signed his hard bound copy of Ender’s Game, my friend asked him if the book would ever be made into a movie.  Orson replied: “There are such complexities to Ender that would be hard to translate to the big screen.”

This, indeed, is true.

I think it would be possible to translate all of the zero gravity wargames to screen pretty well, but much of the novel takes place within the mind of Ender, and it would be difficult to show his own internal struggles and difficulties in the Academy.  The biggest problem would be the articles written by Ender’s sister and brother who orchestrate a cultural revolution on Earth.  This plot detail takes up too much of the novel to simply cut it out and focus on the Academy.  How will they do it?  How will they translate this amazing book to the screen?

We will have to wait for that.  Until then, fans of Ender’s Game will wait in eager anticipation until the November release date.

Iron Man in his Bleeding Edge armor. Cover art to Invincible Iron Man (volume 5) #25 (second printing, August 2010) by Salvador Larroca. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This weekend I caught Iron Man 3 at the local cinema and as a comic book geek who loves good writing I will have to say that it was a fun ride while maintaining the integrity of the Iron Man mythos.

Many comic book movies of the ’80′s and especially the ’90′s gave in to the producers and film-makers who wanted to re-craft the mythos into their own image and therefore produced such ilk as Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin.  Films of this low quality often still raise their ugly head such as Nick Cage’s Elvisy Ghostrider and that horrible Jonah Hex film that does not need to be mentioned.

The fact is, the folks at Marvel have discovered the truth: do what the fans want.

The fans (at least the hardcore folks like me) want a true-to-comic retelling of the characters we have grown to love through the comics, keeping continuous with the lore, yet we want them to tell a new story that is intriguing and powerful.  Iron Man 3 delivers.

This film is mostly a popcorn movie, but it has a heart and a dark angst that is due in large part to the expert writing of Drew Pierce and Shane Black.  These writers (one the director) took most of their material from great comic book stories by Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Leiber and Jack Kirby.  Of course all the wonderful sardonic quips by Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) are there, but there is a definite sadness to the character in this one, brought on by Iron Man’s trip through the wormhole as seen at the end of Avengers.  It plagues him, and he is also plagued and haunted by mistakes made in his pre-make-love-not-war past.  Out of this a villain arises that is masterfully played by Sir Ben Kingsley…sort of (I don’t want to spoil it).

Some of the best writing in this film is the banter between Tony Stark and a boy named Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins).  The dialogue is well written, is natural, and in many ways unexpected and brash.  Tony says some very rude things to Harley, but the banter works and it is worth noting that it is not a typical child-dreamer-meets-superhero relationship.  Stark is knocked back on his heels by the lad, and the boy is definitely a mirror of Stark in many ways.  The boy is an excellent foil.

Overall I loved this film.  It was a nice capstone to the trilogy, not predictable at all, and more gritty and dark than the other films.  It ends well, and I cannot wait to see Stark return in Avengers 2.

Oh and there was a foul odor.

Somewhere in the distance, outside this large white room there was the sound of talking, chatter really, sort of a low mumble that was unintelligible to him.  He took two steps back, clearing the yellowed puddle of grease, and then his boots echoed on the hard floor, a sound of hard heels on thick glass.

He crouched down and spread his fingers across the hard surface.

It was glass, a thick lumpy uneven surface, and past his reflection he noticed that there was some kind of mechanism beneath it, a white plastic cog nearly three feet in diameter.

He stood again, careful not to slip in the grease, and that was when he noticed that the glass floor was actually a disk shape, perfectly centered within the four walls of this square room.  One wall seemed to be made from the same material as the floor and the wall directly to the left of that had a protruding panel with a grid of holes that were as big as his hand.  He walked slowly toward the wall, his boots clanking on the floor, and placed his hand inside one of the holes to discover that it was only a covering for something beyond in the darkness.  He peered inside one but the dim light from the glass wall did not provide enough for him to see anything other than an inky blackness.

Suddenly a noise from beyond the glass wall caused him to jump, to clatter across the glass disk and press against the back wall of the room on the opposite side.  The light coming from the glass wall grew suddenly brighter and he could now see beyond a black mesh screen on the other side of the wall which looked now more like a window and a pair of gigantic blue eyes peering at him.  He heard a deafening thunk and the glass wall hinged open on the right side and a large tubular object, its white wrapping an organic texture, was placed in the center of the glass floor with a heavy thud by a giant hand, the fingernails painted a delicate azure blue.

The door slammed shut again, and as the giant fingers pressed buttons on the outside of his room, each press sounding like the scream of a little girl, and as the odor of used grease transformed to burning ozone he realized that his life was at an end.

There is a famous story about Gene Roddenberry’s pitch to NBC about his “wagon train to the stars” idea he ended up calling Star Trek.  He told them that it would be a space adventure and that each episode would focus on some kind of deep philosophical or allegorical idea that commented on something that was pertinent for the day.  NBC told him: “That show sounds too cerebral.  Tell me more about wagon train to the stars.”

I’ve been watching my stats slowly drop off for the past few weeks and have alluded to it in a previous post.  However, I will not let this sway me from writing on this blog because if a few of you read it and get something out of it, then I’ve done my job.  Hopefully as my agent and I fall closer together over the next few months or year I can report on what I am learning about the publishing industry as well as offering writing tips.

But this has caused me to think carefully about why I am doing this blog.  I wrote down a few reasons on a legal pad, and here they are:

1. Venting – The writing process is indeed hard, and since I live way out in the middle of nowhere I do not have a readily accessible writing group that I can meet with on a regular basis.  This blog allows me to try out ideas, bounce techniques off of readers and seek valuable feedback about WIP I’m working on.
2. Creative Juices – If I spend a little time kicking around an idea for a blog post and then write the blog post, the act of doing that gears my brain toward the writing process that jump starts me past the “cold page”.  I can usually go straight to the novel and crank out a few thousand words.
3. Helping Others – I love to help other writers.  I think that any kind of advice, however small or large, might help someone to carry on, to push the envelope, to write something spectacular.  If I have done that for you, then I feel fulfilled and complete as a writer… even more than selling a book.
4. Learning Curve – I have received some of the best advice from commenters, advice that is usually always to the point and powerful.  I am encouraged and helped by all of the comments that people make on this blog, even the comments that are not as favorable toward me or what I write.  It is only by learning from our mistakes and changing our game plan when we fail that we succeed.
5. Chronicle of Progress – I can look back on all the blog posts I have made in this 18 months or so that I have been writing this, and I can see where I have been and how much I have grown as a writer.  When I started this, I did not have an agent, had dabbled in self-publishing, and really didn’t know what I was doing.  Since then I have learned that blogging is a constant affair, to be nurtured and helped along by grit and determination…and by writing blog posts that people want to read without dipping into the shallow pool of rehashed content.

My main point of writing this blog post today is to review why I write the blog and also to ask my readers what they would like to see in regards to writing topics.  Are there any pressing questions that you have about writing that you would like me to research or to give advice about?  If so, please post below and I will get right to it.  I’ll also give you credit in the post and link back to your blog or website.

So fire away!

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I just finished reading The Man in the High Castle by the late Philip K. Dick, and if you like to read science fiction (or write it, like me) this book is for you.  For those of you not familiar with the novel, it is an alternate reality story set in a world where the Axis powers won WWII and an underground black market novel circulates this world chronicling the actual history (with some interesting changes).

First of all, this book is considered Dick’s masterpiece by many and there are many reasons why it reaches beyond the ordinary in storytelling.  Dick is a master of the philosophical epic, weaving deep thought and consideration of our current state of affairs with every word.  Great science fiction will use the genre to comment on the human condition, and if you are writing a science fiction novel you would be good to emulate these five techniques to greater enhance your efforts.  These are only suggestions, however, but they are fantastic examples of Philip K. Dick’s style.

1. Character-centric Diction - Dick’s characters are many, but not too many to confuse, and each of them speaking either English, German or Japanese as a first language.  The novel is told in third person, but each character is centered for their own scenes, and when they are we see sentences tailored for the character in the spotlight.  For example, when Dick writes about the Japanese trade missioner Nobosuke Tagomi his sentences are missing determiners and are very short and choppy.  When he is writing about the life of Frank Frink, the Jewish man in hiding, he uses Yiddish phrases now and again.  He uses German phrases and even entire sentences in German when writing about the Nazis who control the eastern seaboard of the U.S.  This creates a feel to the novel that really gives a sense of the culture behind each character.
   
2. Research - Of course, the novel was written in the early 1960′s, but Dick’s version of the world of “if” includes an Adolf Hitler who went mad from Syphilis, an assassination of FDR during his campaign that led to a prolonged Great Depression and a United States that never entered the war.  When this book was written, of course, these were postulations that seemed reasonable.  Recent evidence shows that Hitler was actually a virgin, that Roosevelt’s policies were not the most important factor to ending the Great Depression and that the United States would have entered the war for global economic reasons anyway.  This novel may seem dated by our standards today, but Dick had obviously done extensive historical research in order to accurately speculate what might happen if the Axis won the war.
3. The Story Isn’t the Story - The thing about this novel that is most striking is that it is not merely an alternate reality story, but like all great science fiction it is a commentary on the governmental systems and culture in which the novel was written.  When this novel was written, the threat of a totalitarian state much like what was the perception of the Soviet Union by the United States floated through everyone’s mind on a daily basis.  Another thought is that he was commenting on the idea that Britain was on the decline and the United States was on the rise as a super power, a reality that Britain did not want to face.  This leads to probably the biggest thematic element in the novel which is the questioning of reality versus truth.  This novel includes a counterfeiting ring that makes fake artifacts from before the war, a Jewish man who has changed his name and gone through extensive plastic surgery to hide from the Germans, and an author of a book that is an alternative history from their own which is actually our own history.  The point is that along with making a novel an exciting read, one must infuse that novel with some type of thematic element that gives that novel more weight as a piece of art that comments on something important.

One interesting tidbit about this novel that will blow your mind is that Dick uses the I, Ching throughout the novel to guide his characters.  They all seem to be drawn to it to help them make decisions, and even at the end when the author of the underground book asks “Why did I write this novel?” the I, Ching‘s consultation reveals Hexagram 61 which means “inner truth”, a theme that is found throughout the novel.

I’ll probably be digging in to one of Dick’s final novels, Radio Free Albemuth (In between writing my own sci-fi novel), but until then I suggest that if you write any type of genre, pick out a few books in that genre by great writers and find out what makes them tick, what makes them sing, and then try to do some of that yourself.

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