Sense of Adventure

Holy carp! It’s dark out there, people.

I was driving north about half an hour ago after seeing Hellboy II with some friends (good movie, not great) when suddenly the streetlights went out. So did most others.

Some lights still remained on - generator-powered, I’m guessing. My part of town is really black.  Eerie.  Not so comfortable for a dude who writes lots of after-the-holocaust stories.

Biggest excitement hereabouts since the Great Bosque Fire of ‘03 (how time flies!) That one made the national news - my editor for the MechWarrior novel I was writing emailed to see if I was in danger.  I wasn’t, but indeed the fire was burning not more than a couple miles from where I live.

Not much happens here. Which, on the whole, is probably a good thing.

KRQE 13 News says much of Albuquerque is black. Apparently PNM believes there’s a hitch with electricity coming into town.  KRQE’s studio lights flickered but service quickly came back, which is odd if the whole city’s power is affected.

Radio stations were still broadcasting when I came in, so we don’t seem to be dealing with an EMP or anything. Plus, hey, my computer works!

No biggie. (Fingers crossed.)

As long as the battery holds. So sayonara for now…

Update, 11:43 PM:  Lights on.

So along about 20-25 minutes ago I was lighting the last, recalcitrant candle in my bedroom (and roundly cursing it, though not the dark) when with a plaintive sort of flicker light returned to Jupiter. Artificial light, anyway.

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… behold the Espresso Book Machine!

(Well, not literally: there’s no picture.)

Friends, I give you the future of publishing, dead-tree edition. Not necessarily this implementation; but here’s where it’s going.

By odd synchronicity I was discussing bind-on-demand, book-on-demand technology last night with some ASFS friends, in the hospital room where we visited one of our number who’s recovering (nicely, thank you) from knee-replacement surgery. Okay: I was ranting about it; it’s one of my hot buttons. I’m sure this comes as just a huge surprise to you.

I’m not sure why there’s still such resistance to reading on handheld devices, although one of the many great things about the Kindle is that it’s bringing a lot of readers around to e-reading.

For some reason a great many people get defensive at the notion of e-books, as if somehow they’ll snatch the dead-tree books out of their hands and off their bookshelves. How, exactly?

Look: I hugely prefer reading on my Palm TX Handheld. I love having, literally, a library of fiction and non-fiction books in my shirt pocket, especially waiting in long grocery-store lines. I love being able to search electronically, for, say, the introduction of a character who’s just been mentioned again without my retaining any idea in Hell who she is. I love, and make frequent use of the backlighting (lack of which is one of my several beefs against the Kindle.)

But look, kids: fond as I am of reading on my PDA, I’m also fond of money. So as a professional writer, I say: you only want old-school books you can hold in your hand? No problem! If you want them in Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets badly enough to pay for ‘em, I’d love to find a way to accommodate you. All I really care about is that, though my sins be scarlet, my books be read. And that I get paid for ‘em, of course.

And I think bind-on-demand technology, such as the Espresso, is how that’s going to work in the future.

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I just learned by email that Jack Speer died overnight.

Jack was a member of First Fandom - the pioneers! - a mainstay of the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society, and a friend. He and his wife Ruth, who survives him, played gracious hosts to many a pleasant pre-Bubonicon party.

Sad news. Fandom in general and our Albuquerque fannish family are diminished. Jack is missed.

My condolences to Ruth and the children.

(I note that his death is already mentioned in his Wikipedia entry, linked to above.)

Lately, thanks to the low company I keep (i.e., my fannish friends) (hey, their tastes are low enough they hang out with me) I’ve had a ditty stuck in my mind from an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that featured a Gamera movie:

Gamera is good to eat,
Gamera is full of meat!

Now while the first contention is at best unproven, the second is surely true. Yet I wonder how well advised one would be to sing that song in the actual presence of Gamera:

(thanks to: http://markvine.com/Photo_Kaiju.htm)

I mean, look at him. Looks a bit, well, cranky, doesn’t he? And never forget, he’s over 200 feet tall. Mightn’t singing such a song remind him that you yourself are full of meat, good to eat, and nicely bite-sized?

It’s important to think of these things. Yes? Yes?

===

On what I hope’s a more serious note, anyway, I have a plea for all my friends and readers who are also writers – I know some of you are lurking out there. Really.

Which is: how do you keep straight the proliferation of facts – well, facts within your ficton – which you generate in the course of writing a book? Your characters, primarily: their histories, their traits, their interactions, their loves and grudges and weird little habits?

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Almost everybody I’ve ever encountered who hasn’t run away fast enough has heard this tale. But these are the Interwebs (which, wise men tell us, are a series of tubes), and they open a whole world of people to me I’ve never met in person. Try to run away faster than light. Hah! Hah!

So now you’re stuck reading it. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts of how my career began?

When I was a lad there was a TV show called Mannix, which starred Mike Connors, mainly because the network suits thought no one would watch a series starring some Armenian guy named Krekor Ohanian. Imdb (“I am Vic M., and I admit that I have no power over the Internet Movie Database”) calls it, “One of the most violent detective series in TV history.” Wow. I don’t remember it being that cool.

But there must’ve been some reason I kept watching it. And it sure wasn’t the smart, well-crafted action writing. Because each and every week, at least once, we would see our hero, on foot, pursued by bad guys in a car through a parking garage or lot. And he would run right down the middle of the open lanes.

Every frickin’ week. It was even in the opening credits, if I recall correctly.

Leave aside the question of why the car didn’t go faster than he did - granted, this was the heyday of heavy Detroit iron, but it was also the heyday of great big studly six and eight-cylinder engines that sucked gas like an elephant at a Sahara stock tank (yes, if the Sahara had stock tanks. And elephants. And if they drank gasoline. It’s a metaphor, dammit!) I always reckoned, stripling though I was, that what I would do if I found myself in that position was, like, hide behind something heavy.

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… And it’s all good.

First, we got a review of the new Wild Cards book, Inside Straight, and it’s glowing. Thanks, FantasyBookSpot!

In other news, my pal Melinda has jpegs of her new cover for The Edge of Reason up at her blog. Complete with a nifty blurb from that dang American Tolkien dude. He’s everywhere these days!

Check it out. It does have a rather … best-sellerish … look to it, methinks.

Fingers crossed.

Also Steve (S.M.) Stirling’s got two books in the top five sellers for both Borders/Walden and Barnes & Noble/Dalton, one in hardcover, one soft.

And Los Alamos Boy Scientist Ian Tregillis (who looks like a very young Errol Flynn) (Okay, 14. But, I mean, Errol Flynn!) just sold the splendidly-named Milkweed Triptych to Tor. As the name indicates it’s a trilogy.

So things continue to shake, rattle, and roll here in the Science Fiction Capital of the Known Universe. Woo-hoo!

Happy Dia de los Muertos, everybody! Hope you enjoyed Halloween. I did. Went and watched movies with friends.

I’m sitting here wasting time online to start the day - need to cut back on that - and have the German Bomber Channel, in this case The History Channel, on as sort of electronic wallpaper. And on comes a commercial for “the new novel by George RR Martin - the American Tolkien - A Feast for Crows, now in paperback!”

How cool is that?

Of course it also speaks to the malaise afflicting Big House publishing: that authors whom everybody knows and whose books are most eagerly awaited get massive promotion spending, whereas unknowns get … dregs. Meaning these expert marketing departments are really good (actually, their track record calls even this into question) in selling something everybody already wants. As to developing new properties - new producers - well …

But that’s a rant for another time. It’s more fun right now to look at all the cool things going on for science fiction writers in New Mexico - SF Capital of the Known Universe! We got Steve Gould’s Jumper coming out in February, starring Samuel by God Jackson (and Hayden Christensen, so this could be a wash, granted.) At Pat Rogers’s and Scott Denning’s Halloween party Saturday night - the social event of the Millennium to date! - Steve “S. M.” Stirling told me he’d just got a big advance for his new Dies the Fire book.

Closer to home the new Wild Cards volume, Inside Straight appears January 22, 2008. I’m not in this one but I am in the next. And my longtime pal Melinda Snodgrass’s (overly) long-delayed The Edge of Reason should arrive May 13, 2008.

And the above are just things from my friends. Apologies to the NM SF authors I may have slighted through ignorance.

So some big things are moving out here in the high desert. Given all that and Scott Phillips’s recent triumph - alluded to in the previous post - I need to get whippin’ to do my part to add to the tectonics here quite soon …

Important Safety Tip: as has become customary here on Sense of Adventure, if you hover over(most) of the above links you should see a product mini-description from Amazon. If you feel moved to buy any of the books or movies so listed, and do so clicking through these links, you’ll be supporting me, this site, and of course, Emma Dog. (Had to get her in here somehow.)

Of course the original Allman Bros. quote is, “Dreams I’ll never see.”

And these, frankly, have a bit of ambivalence for me. Some parts I’d like to see. Others less.

I didn’t sleep too well last night, for no reason I can perceive; I kept waking up and staying awake, but not long enough to make it worthwhile to just say screw it and read or write. Just enough to cost me rest.

But in between I had a series of dreams I found pretty intriguing. I’ve had a lot of vivid and unusual dreams lately.

In this case, I dreamed I was involved in making a movie of The Cybernetic Shogun, little-known sequel to my Prometheus Award winning Cybernetic Samurai. It seemed to be the near-future. I relived various scenes and sections of the book - some that are authentically there, others that I never really wrote. But they seemed to fit.

Of course that may’ve just been dream logic. We all know how that song goes.

That’s the part, you likely figured out on your own (being the smart, perceptive people my bloggers readers naturally would be!), I hoped I would see.

Less so - much less so - were the dream segments in which I seemed actually to be living in the world of Cybernetic Shogun. How you like your fantasy now, monkey boy?

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Since I went ahead and posted about this on Freelancefolder.com, in a comment to a (useful) post called “7 Can’t-Miss Ways To Kick-Start The Writing Habit,” I figured I probably ought to talk about it here. It’s something I came up with 4-5 years ago.

It’s called Five Words. It’s a way of getting yourself started writing, and getting yourself into the habit of writing daily.

It’s what it sounds like: commit each and every day to sitting down and writing a minimum of five words.

They don’t have to be good words. They should be sensible and purposeful and bring you at least plausibly closer to your objective: “The End.” That means not just writing the same word five times - unless for some reason that’s actually called for - or five random words.

Once you do your Five Words, you are okay with yourself for today. That’s your pact with yourself. You don’t have to do more.

Of course, you can. Five Words is a minimum, not a maximum. Clearly, what you really want is to write more. With Five Words you’re trying to trick yourself into a state conducive to writing. You’re also trying to create a habit of going there daily.

There’s nothing magical about the number five. I snagged it because it strikes me as a solid sort of number. It’s enough to produce a decent sentence. The point is to set a goal so low it’s just near-impossible not to reach it.

Again, the keys are state and habit.

Five Words serves me, and various other people who’ve tried it, pretty well. You can apply it to endeavors other than writing: come up with some other simple quantum of any task, such that it’s more trouble to talk yourself out of doing it than just doing it.

One caveat: the Five Words technique may not help you produce as much as you want or need to. If it doesn’t there are other tricks to use - the post I linked to above offers some good ones. The first step toward producing enough every day is producing every day. “Five Words” is an easy way to build that fundamental habit.

Back in the early Oughts, when my ex and I split and my life - personal and professional - had hit bottom hard, one of the paths up I explored was investigation of Neurolinguistic Programming.

That led me to self-hypnosis. I even took a class at the (sadly) departed Sage Ways seminar center here in Burque.

I accepted there was much behind self-hypnosis immediately, because I recognized one fact right off: when I’m writing I tend to go into an unmistakable trance state. The deeper in I am, the better - and more, for want of a better word, ecstatic - the writing goes.

People have expressed much amazement at my ability to write seemingly anywhere: in airports, on trains, even at parties. Last night at the monthly ASFS meeting, which I attended in part because I’ve been so isolated of late and at risk of turning into a cheese - I startled club newcomer Gerald Weinberg, a writer and a really good guy, by writing enthusiastically on my notebook PC during the early part of the meeting.

It’s the trance, folks.

One thing I’ve tried to do with indifferent success has been learn how consistently to put myself deep into writing-trance. It’s never been reliable with me. And for a while I’ve had a hard time really, I guess, committing to it.

At this last Bubonicon, I was on a panel about how writers write. Somewhat to my surprise it was well-attended. Even more to my surprise it actually turned out to be interesting - to me, and on the evidence, both my fellow panelists (who included Betsy James and Walter Jon Williams; I’ve spaced out the others for the moment: sorry) and for the audience.

For my opening statement I sucked it up and took what I thought was the radical step of copping to the whole writer’s trance thing. I fully expected to get hit with Massive Skeptical Denial, both from the rest of the panel and the audience.

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