A dialogue on dialogue
Discussion about dialogue with fellow writer Mary Cain
Robbie Taylor(.net)
Your awesome Tagline
My 3 year old requested this and can almost sing along. She’s so F-in’ metal!
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
(via dduane)
The Detectives - Dell #1219, May 1962
One of my favorite appearances… ;)
St. Patrick’s Day - a book about Ireland!
Well, at least a book that starts in Ireland and has a scene or two set there„,
WARP: When the alien Mlosh landed on earth in the 18th century, the human world warped around their presence. Now, some humans want them gone - and they are using the Mlosh’s own tools against them.
Bumblees are a myth
You can’t believe anything about them at all.
Warren Ellis' Notebook: Okay. Someone asked me how I feel about writing fiction in a world...
Okay. Someone asked me how I feel about writing fiction in a world that still needs actual activism and hands-on work to make life better. They said something similar to, “I get pulled away from writing fiction because I feel guilty for not making tangible benefit to the world. Isn’t fiction just escapism?”
But I also got the following message, which I’m filing some of the serial numbers off of, as it were:
“I just wanted to tell you something. When I was 18 years old, my life was a fucking mess. I worked at a store that sold comic books and one day I stumbled upon Spider and the filthy assistants. Your comic kept me from killing myself. There is a character limit here so I can’t say everything I want to but thank you. From the very deepest part of my heart.”
I post this not to self-aggrandise. It is not a unique message, for good or ill. I get them surprisingly regularly. Frankly, messages like that scare the hell out of me, because I’m not very smart and not a very clever writer and I fuck up all the time.
But fiction speaks to people. Even fiction like mine acts to tell someone, somewhere, that they’re not alone.
You want tangible, social benefits to writing fiction? There are people walking around today because other people wrote words that spoke to them. That’ll do.
And thank you.
For me, Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption gave me patience, something I needed then and still use today. Fiction teaches us life lessons in a fashion we accept more readily than lessons we are taught “from real life”.
(via wilwheaton)
I warned you!
SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO?!?
With apologies to National Lampoon - I will post this every hour if I don’t see some movement! I swear! Don’t test me!
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE (Book 1 of the Chelsea Perkins Trilogy): When your father shows up 12 years after abandoning you as a baby and tells you that he has something important for you to do, the last thing you expect to have to do is kill him. If you’re Chelsea Perkins, your day is only going to get stranger from there…
Amazon (Kindle) Barnes & Noble (Nook) Createspace (Print, small form factor) Lulu (Print, large form factor) Smashwords (Any ereader) Kobo (Kobo eReader)
WARP: When the alien Mlosh landed on earth in the 18th century, the human world warped around their presence. Now, some humans want them gone - and they are using the Mlosh’s own tools against them.
Amazon Barnes & Noble Smashwords iTunes Lulu Kobo
HOPE: What if you could have fame, fortune or love - but each was mutually exclusive? Johnny Crane is a young Texan living in New York City in the 1990’s, trying to break into the worlds of publishing and acting and trying to navigate the world of love without breaking his heart. But his walls are papered with rejection, and his loneliness is only eased by his best friend, a fellow Texan in the big city. He floats at the edge of success, but finds himself unable to land. When he is tempted with the culmination of each of his dreams, he sees no way to combine them. Can he hope to find a way, or must he choose?
Barnes & Noble (Nook) Amazon (Kindle) Smashwords (Any ereader) Lulu (print edition) Kobo
BEFORE/AFTER: A lottery winner, a divorcee and a conspiracy theorist awaken after the unexpected victory of John Kerry in the 2004 election to a world that has changed drastically. Together, they will fight to do what is right.
Amazon Barnes & Noble Smashwords Lulu
3rd M: The talk show of the 3rd Millennium! Meet aliens, matter transportation accidents, over-assertive clones and more in this sitcom pilot screenplay
Buy these books or the dog gets it!
With apologies to National Lampoon - I will post this every hour if I don’t see some movement! I swear! Don’t test me!
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE (Book 1 of the Chelsea Perkins Trilogy): When your father shows up 12 years after abandoning you as a baby and tells you that he has something important for you to do, the last thing you expect to have to do is kill him. If you’re Chelsea Perkins, your day is only going to get stranger from there…
Amazon (Kindle) Barnes & Noble (Nook) Createspace (Print, small form factor) Lulu (Print, large form factor) Smashwords (Any ereader) Kobo (Kobo eReader)
WARP: When the alien Mlosh landed on earth in the 18th century, the human world warped around their presence. Now, some humans want them gone - and they are using the Mlosh’s own tools against them.
Amazon Barnes & Noble Smashwords iTunes Lulu Kobo
HOPE: What if you could have fame, fortune or love - but each was mutually exclusive? Johnny Crane is a young Texan living in New York City in the 1990’s, trying to break into the worlds of publishing and acting and trying to navigate the world of love without breaking his heart. But his walls are papered with rejection, and his loneliness is only eased by his best friend, a fellow Texan in the big city. He floats at the edge of success, but finds himself unable to land. When he is tempted with the culmination of each of his dreams, he sees no way to combine them. Can he hope to find a way, or must he choose?
Barnes & Noble (Nook) Amazon (Kindle) Smashwords (Any ereader) Lulu (print edition) Kobo
BEFORE/AFTER: A lottery winner, a divorcee and a conspiracy theorist awaken after the unexpected victory of John Kerry in the 2004 election to a world that has changed drastically. Together, they will fight to do what is right.
Amazon Barnes & Noble Smashwords Lulu
3rd M: The talk show of the 3rd Millennium! Meet aliens, matter transportation accidents, over-assertive clones and more in this sitcom pilot screenplay
Changed plans
I had planned on releasing a new science fantasy novel this last week. It’s one I’ve been working on for some time, based largely on the universe I created for a role-playing game I’ve been playing since I was 12, Epilogue. Epilogue, as I played it, was a mixture of science fiction (it was set on an Alderson Disk a million years in the future) and fantasy (there was magic). The magic may have had a pseudo-scientific explanation, but it was still magic, and therefore not usually mixed with far-future adventures in space.
So, this novel is about a woman performing a mythical feat to speak to the gods for her dying people, and there are parts of it I really like - a really well-turned phrase or two, several of the characters - but the whole is just not working for me. As I work through this edit, there is less and less that interests me and makes me think of this as a story I want to tell. It’s discouraging.
I’m thinking about a more extensive rewrite than I was initially going to give it, so I’m moving it out of its place in my publishing order. That means that my next book up is going to be The Lascaux Nightmare (title may change), which will be coming out at the beginning of May. Summer should see the mainstream novel Chrysalis, about an evangelical Christian woman facing doubts about her faith and curiosity about atheism, and then the fall will be spent concentrating on getting out book 2 of the Chelsea Perkins Trilogy, The Ring Of Stones. At the end of the year, I’ll either release this book, tentatively titled Wall, or else I will release either a magical police procedural (The Res) or my neo-Nazi time-travel thriller (Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
There may be a few extra projects sprinkled here and there - I have an idea for an audiobook or two that I will be releasing on Podiobooks as I write them, and even though my Kickstarter didn’t fund, I’ll try to release the Today In Alternate History collection this year.
I’ll be busy. It would be nice if my books started selling well enough to where I could just write full-time - then I could get these out the door and maybe some more besides. (Hint, hint). I’ll have a new job probably this time next week, and I hope it doesn’t interfere with my schedule; we’ll see. In the meantime, hope y’all will take a look at what I’ve got going on, and tell your friends!
