Templecon was Fun!

Mood:

Havin' fun playin wiv mah bruvva

I had a good time playing with my brother at Templecon, a large east coast Warmachine convention. I didn't win any prizes, because my style of play, which is to not commit fully until the enemy makes a mistake then pounce on him, really isn't as consistently effective as having an well thought-out plan.

And I still have that competitive edge that makes losing a too-personal experience for me. I get that uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, and the face-too-tight sensation when I watch my opponent really gain the upper hand in a match. Although after six months of play, this has eased off a bit. I doubt it will ever actually stop bothering me, but I think repeated defeat in public will continue to erode that humiliating feeling of utter failure when I am beaten.

The games had many interesting moments, the most visual of which is below. My Iron Lich Asphyxious (in black) fighting a Seraph (in blue and orange) on a tall rocky pinnacle. Asphyxious did not actually kill the Seraph; he severely hurt it and threw it off the tower. It was the Slayer jack (at bottom right) that struck the killing blow.



Outside of the game itself, I'm enjoying painting Warmachine models (you can see some on my website). It takes a bit less talent than I had originally feared. And it's a good rest when I'm brain-tired from writing.

Not Dead, Incapacitated, or Bored

January is usually that time of year when I attempt to withdraw from all human contact. After the relentless need to get stuff done before Christmas (several people didn't get presents who really deserved them, and for that my deepest apologies, and I'm running late on Ray Solberg's birthday), January is generally a time of staying in and feebly trying to catch up on correspondence. This year, I'm really sucking with the contacting people, so this post to reassure people that I am not dead, incapacitated, or bored.

I have so much stuff on my mental to-do list that I had to write it down in order to keep it straight. And nothing says "This will make a great blog post" like a list. The sad thing is that I'm probably reference this post as a to-do list for a couple of months. Here's what I have to do, as of 1/22/2008:

•  "Raw, New Things." This is my newsletter to the Esoteric Order of Dagon in which I review recent anthologies of Mythos short stories or novels. ~4,000 words. Done 1/24.

•  Tart up the Necromancer for Hire query letter. Which also includes a day trip to the library to find more literary agents who are amenable to fantasy submissions, as well as fantasy publishers who take unsolicited manuscripts.

•  Think up a better title (Are you there, Shakespeare? It's me, John) for the revision of "Sire" that I sweated over during most of January. Revise one more time and then send.

•  Complete and then revise collaborative story with David Conyers.

•  Revise "Death of the American Family Farm" and submit it to Space and Time magazine.

•  Write two stories for anthologies I've been invited into: A CSI Arkham story (and necessary research into police procedure and crime scene investigation), and one concerning anthropologists, and Greenland's Dorset culture.

•  Write story and submit it to Mythos Books' Cthulhu 2012 anthology.

•  Write questions to ask authors who were influenced by Robert Bloch, then write article on Robert Bloch's influence as a literary mentor.

•  I have not updated the Ultimate Hellblazer Index in six months.

•  Other stories that need to be written: "God of Chickens", "Almost Human", "Rather Short for an Angel", "A Certain Society of Concerned Citizens", "Captain Scar", "Beanie Babies", "Darwin's Cosh", "The Secret History of Earth", and "The Whiskey Tango File".

•  And at some point, I want to take six months and write a horror novel, Hag.

•  I owe a lot of people email.

My non-work, non-writing schedule for February looks like this:

Feb 1-3: Templecon. I spent the 26^th painting up my bane knights so my Warmachine forces will look good on the table. I will not have time to paint and assemble my harrower.

Feb 10: A "Write Your Own Valentine" get-together with the SouthShire Roundtable.

Feb 15-17: Boskone. To add insult to injury, I am not the Guest of Honor, although the mass slaying of peeps could possibly make up for this.

Feb 19-21 I am having my niece and nephew over during Winter break. This begs the question of how the hell am I going to keep them from being bored? I think I could park Redhead Reader in front of the bookshelf and she'd be happy, but doing that for three entire days would be irresponsible. Her brother, Redhead Runner, I have even less clue about.

So hello to all of you out there! I am not dead, incapacitated, or bored! I love you all and can I start referring to you as my fandom?

A Little Family Humor for You

There are people who say that New Englanders are a dour lot, but that's simply because outsiders don't understand "our" sense of humor. For example, my mother told me today what I'm supposed to put on my pie. Some people put a little blob of dough that looks like an apple or a blueberry, or whatever. Not my family.

If you have just made an apple pie, you put a big "T" on it, for "'Tis apple. If it's not, you mark it with a big "T". For "Tain't.

And so the long New England nights just fly.

Now I can improve my writing and annoy the cats at the same time...

It's one of those things I've heard people talking about for a while. When you're done with a story, read it aloud to yourself.

It works. If you stumble on a sentence, it probably needs to be rewritten.

Kinda wished I'd listened to this before I finished the novel. Ah well, there will be time to revise it again later.

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

It's 11/11, Armistice Day, or Veterans' Day, depending on your sense of history. So I present you with a poem by WWI soldier Wilfred Owens. To some, Dulce et Decormum Est is an old saw, something we studied in school. Personally, I've never been able to escape the hard imagery of the poem, the haunting despair, the vivid sense of the narrator's exhaustion, terror, endurance, and humanity in the face of the overwhelming.

Writing is memory, and there are something we need to remember, even if it's on a single day out of the year. World War One was an colossal, senseless mess in which some nineteen million soldiers were sent to their deaths for little or no gain, and perhaps ten million more civilians died. As an event, it overshadows the rest of the twentieth century. The Second World War and the Cold War, the two great conflicts that dominated world politics for the latter half of the twentieth century, both have their roots directly in the Great War.

Not that the author, Wilfred Owen can tell us this himself. He was killed a week before the war ended. It is said his mother received word just as the church bells rang out to celebrate the Armistice. Many poets died in the Great War, just as I must assume great politicians, scientists, surgeons, and inventors did. But we'll never know, because they died young.

On this Armistice Day, I reflect that should be more careful with peoples' lives.

Dulce et Decormum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Top 10 Great Things About World Fantasy Con 2007

World Fantasy Con was head-spinningly awesome. More writers and topics and editors and all-around delightful people than you could shake a wizard's wand at. I could go on to a hundred or more by being specific, but I'll just tease you with the top 10 great things about World Fantasy Con 2007:

10. Picking up a copy of Nick Mamatas’s Move Under Ground and then starting to set it back on the shelf, only to discover the author was standing behind me. I bought it, and he signed it. Nick remembered that I submitted “God of Chickens” to him without me having to prompt him, which I thought was pretty cool of him. Nick’s a neat guy to talk to.

9. The constant “Holy shit, Walter Jon Williams/ Charles Vess/ Kim Newman/ Lynn Abbey/ Tim Powers” moments as Walter Jon Williams/ Charles Vess/ Kim Newman/ Lynn Abbey/ Tim Powers and literally dozens of other familiar names walked by. It was extraordinarily difficult not to geek out at the parade of fantastic authors who have influenced, entertained and exhilarated me of the years, and I did not succeed every time. They were without exception polite, which cannot have been easy. I will try very hard to restrain my enthusiasm at the next convention, but at the same time, I want these people to know that their work is absolutely marvelous. I must find some balance.

8. William Jones. The man himself–he who bought my first story. We had a long conversation (long enough that the bookseller we were standing in front of shooed us away) about the publication process, what’s going on with Chaosium and Elder Signs Press, why short stories are a good thing, and what’s up next for us both. Awesome guy, and a very important conversation for me.

7. ST Joshi is a stunningly personable man. Those who have only read his commentaries simply cannot understand what an warm and delightful conversationalist he is.

6. The stories. When authors get together, they trade stories about writing and publishing. Like the one about the guy who got a rejection letter and posted a huge rant about it on his blog. A publisher who wanted to give him a three-book deal, looked him up, saw the rant, and decided he might be too difficult to work with. Note to self, be more polite when posting to blog.

5. F. Paul Wilson and Tom Monteleone’s stories. These guys are the veterans of the book trade, and they have a million and one stories, all of the fascinating. Any ending you can imagine to something that starts off with “So Peter Straub, Stephen King and I went out to find the sleeziest strip club in Ottowa” falls short of the actual story. I’m sorry, but it’s simply the truth.

4. Learning that Elizabeth Bear used to play in my CoC campaign! Yes, that Elizabeth Bear.

3. Gary Frank. The thing to do at a convention is to follow Gary around, because he goes some extremely interesting places. And while he does so, he talks a lot of sense about marketing yourself, convention etiquette, and generally how to work conventions to your advantage. Gary’s an old hand at cons, so his advice is useful and practical.

2. Wilum Pugmire. Wilum is so supportive and kind to this fledgling writer. He gave me at least two significant opportunities I would not have thought to take advantage of myself, and we indulged in some highly entertaining conversation. There's no one like Wilum. We've been corresponding for a year, and it was simply a joy to finally meet him.

1. Reading this from “Summation 2006: Horror Anthologies” by Ellen Datlow (p. lii-liii), in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 2007: "Arkham Tales, edited by William Jones (Chaosium), is, according to the editor’s introduction, the first anthology in which '. . . each story . . . is realized in Chaosium’s adaptation of the cosmic horror sub-genre.' In other words, if I understand correctly, each story is inspired directly by an actual aspect of the ‘Call of Cthulhu’ role-playing game published by Chaosium Press. Despite this, the stories do stand alone, and some do some nice riffs on the mythos, including those of C. J. Henderson, Brian M. Sammons, and John Goodrich.”

A Week of Ups and Downs

I want to start off with "It’s been a busy week" again, but I’ve said or thought it so many times that it’s become redundant. I doubt that I’m really going to have an easy week at any point in the next decade. I used to think that it would be cool if I had more projects demanding my attention than time. And what do you know, I’ve got it.

And I don’t think it’s a case of “be careful what you wish for”: It’s much better to have too much to do than too little. I can always (if I get my priorities straight) drop a project. And at the moment, the ideas for projects are coming faster than I can polish them into stories. I’ve got the outlines of five short stories in various stages between “completely in my head” and “halfway written”. And I’m revising my novel so I can show it to people when I go to World Fantasy Con. I’ve been planning a couple of novels in a couple of franchises that I’d like to take a crack at, in addition to mapping out my second solo effort.

But while I’m not going to fall back on the old standard and say that this week has been busy, I must admit it has been a full of emotional peaks and dips. I finished a very difficult essay and sent it off to the editor, who liked it (yay!). When I proposed the topic for my next essay, I found that it was already taken (boo!). My novel has been read by a professional that I like very much, and she likes my work (HUGE YAY!). I did not get into the Nyarlathotep anthology edited by Peter Worthy (booo!), but I did get into the Cross-Genre Cthulhu anthology (Yay!).

The positives of this week far outweigh the negatives. For example, on Wednesday, I gave blood and walked two miles home. However, I didn’t have to walk the additional mile and a half to pick up the car. And yet, I found myself feeling kind of down and listless as I came home from work today and sitting down to face work on the blogs. And it’s not just because I’m a pint low. I know myself enough to understand that no rejection is ever not going to affect me. It hurts that Peter didn’t think that my story was strong enough to be in the Nyarlathotep anthology. I’m sure that it will be an excellent anthology, and I’m definitely going to buy it when it comes out, but my initial reaction is rather different.

But I’m not going to rant and rave about it. While I’m not going to deny my hurt, neither am I going to wallow in it. I made a lot of progress toward my personal goals this week, and the rejection is just a temporary setback. If the story is as good as I think it is, it’s going to sell somewhere. It’s just a matter of finding the right fit at the right price. I’m aiming for better-paying markets than I was a year ago, so I’m going to have to accept that I’m going to get rejected more often. I just have to accept that there’s an appropriate mourning period when I get over myself, which will likely involve writing all my pain into a blog entry. And tomorrow, I’ll pick myself up and see what other venues are looking for my sort of story.

At the same time, I can’t rush it. I have missed what would have been a good opportunity because I was in too much of a rush to get a story published. I wanted to get it out there and read by someone–anyone–and I let it go to the first person that said yes. And that cost me the opportunity to sell it to a much more interesting venue that doesn’t take reprints.

Call it a learning experience.

Oh the Places I've Been

I see that my last entry was in July. It’s been a busy month and a half. So, what have I been doing instead of posting to my blog?

Let’s start with the first week of August. I took a lovely biplane ride with my in-laws. The Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome remains a great place, and as far as I can tell the only place locally, to get a biplane ride. The modern experience of flight really insulated the flier from the experience: the flier sits in a sealed cabin, and the heights and speeds involved are quickly so out of the normal human range that what you see is fairly abstract. In a biplane, with the wind in your hair, flight is very different. You can reach out and feel the air rushing past you, the overwhelming roar of the engine is less than ten feet in front of you. We couldn’t have been more then fifteen hundred feet in the air, and everything is still quite recognizable–houses, trees, cars, even people. And the Hudson River Valley is beautiful as it spreads out below you like a beautiful tapestry of trees.

This flight was rather different from the one I took two years ago. The pilot did a tight 360 on a wingtip. Last time, we circled rather lazily. The difference might have been that I tipped the pilot in advance this time.

Later, I went to Silent Hill with friends Shinankoku, Mrs. Shinankoku, and the Queen of Science. Oh it wasn’t quite what you’ve seen. But consider this, we went up Mount Equinox, and into the clouds. When we got to the top, it was every bit as foggy as the video games (the pictures are still in the camera), with thick tendrils of mist within ten feet of you, and absolutely no visibility past thirty feet. Seriously—you couldn’t even see across the parking lot. And it was quiet. No sound other than us and the chill, damp wind blowing through the scrubby pines. When we the last time you were somewhere that you were the only noise around? No music, no cars, just your footfalls, the sigh of the wind in the skeletal pines, and anything you say that isn’t immediately swallowed by the omnipresent mist.

Adding to the creepy was the fact that there is an abandoned hotel on the mountaintop. It’s sort of a cheesy 70's place, pre-fab, and clearly has seen better days. But it’s not altogether abandoned, apparently, because there was a light on in back. Sometimes you come across the tiny shards of a story. I always wonder about the rest it—where it started, and how it will change in the future.

Later, we went to a ProjektFest in New Haven. I can safely say that the Gothic Music festival is the loudest thing I have ever been to, and that includes sitting than six feet away from an airplane engine. And I saw perhaps the most exquisitely beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh. No, I don’t’ have any pictures of her. We got to see Voltaire and Niki Jane live (I want to learn to play the musical saw). Niki Jane was awesome, but Voltaire was definitely the highlight of the show, since he was funny, energetic, and with an excellent rapport with the audience. He and all of his band were dressed to the nines in some absolutely beautiful Edwardian outfits.

And really, I would think that was enough.

But it wasn’t. I also finished the first draft of my novel on the 11th.

Let me say that again, I FINISHED THE FIRST DRAFT OF MY FIRST SOLO NOVEL! And I did it because I worked hard for most of August, when I wasn’t flying, or visiting frighteningly quiet mountain tops, or having my ears assaulted by industrial music, and through the beginning of September. And if that weren’t enough, I spread my wings a little and redesigned the main page of qusoor.com.

Before September is over, I will have written an essay on William Peter Blatty’s comedies, and starting in October I’ll be revising the novel, hopefully so I can interest someone in it at World Fantasy Con, which is the first week of November. So the reason I haven’t been posting on my blog is because I’ve been working my frikkin’ tail off.

I Wasn’t Bitten by a Radioactive Novel When I Was a Kid

There are many ways to divide up heroes, just as there are many ways to divide up people. My most recent thought is to go back to the classics: the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Achillies (yes, I understand that he was nor invulnerable until Roman times–unfortunately, that spoils my analogy, therefore, I’m going to ignore it) had a skin that could not be hurt by any weapon. He was a real badass, one of the major players in the siege of Troy. The Iliad is primarily about him. Odysseus was known as the Sacker of Cities. He was eventually the man who won the city of Troy, not by force of arms, but by trickery. He later got his own poem, the Odyssey.

Now here’s the thing. Achillies is a hero with gifts. He didn’t arrange to be dipped in invulnerability serum; someone else did it for him. Thus people who are given special gifts are Achillean heroes. Whether Luke Skywalker, Neo, Gilgamesh, Anita Blake, Superman, Heracles, Hellboy, or Harry Potter, the Achillean hero got some cool mojo. They are set apart from other people by virtue of something they inherited, or were given as a child, or by happenstance. This gift allows them to perform feats beyond that of most individuals. Their stories are of individuals learning to use their specialness on order to right wrongs, or bringing order to the world, often in ways that they are uniquely suited to do. The task is appointed for them.

Odyssean heroes, on the other hand, are self-made. What sets them apart from other men is their drive, their intelligence, or their ability to endure. Examples include Batman, Frodo Baggins, Indiana Jones, Conan, Sam Spade, and Fallout’s Vault Dweller. The Odyessean hero is still special, but lacks a magical breastplate or special gift to distinguish them from the rest of humanity. They must rely on their own natural wit, intelligence, and whatever else they can come up with. Certainly Batman’s wealth as scion of Wayne Enterprises helps him out, but the Darknight Detective is best known as an investigator and a martial artist.

Now, I’m not going to say that one is bad and the other is good, although I tend to favor the Odyssean hero over the Achillean. Ultimately, it depends on how the hero is handled. Hellboy was born with abilities beyond that of ordinary mortals, but that’s not what his stories are about. Hellboy generally has fights with things, but that’s not how he triumphs. His major character arc has been his inner struggle, in which case, his supernatural gifts are actually against him. (See my next essay for more on this).

Gilgamesh, the original action hero, is another Achillean hero that I greatly love. For while half a god, Gilgamesh finds that being unchallenged in the world brings him no joy. It is only when the gods send Enkidu to be his near-equal and friend that Gilgamesh discovers the value of life. And that existential quest of love and loss is something that no amount of strength can help with.

However, I will say that there has been a lot of abuse of the Achillean hero in the past twenty years. I blame the countless imitators of Star Wars. From Neo to Anita Blake, people in stories have been given some pretty damn amazing things, just for being in the right place at the right time, being born of the correct parents, or boffing the correct combination of vampire, werewolf, and whatever other supernatural creature might be in the area. And sure, whatever, but what is the lesson there? That some people are better than others, and if you aren’t born special, then you never will be? What kind of message is that?

What really bothers me is that Achillean heroes don’t have to work for what they get. Batman had to bust his ass to become The Bat. He trained, he failed, he learned, he suffered, he overcame. Superman? He learned to fly one day. What does that teach us?

There seem to be a lot of people just waiting to hear that they are “The One”, secretly hoping that someday, someone will discover something special in them, that they are the last scion of Christ, or the King of Gondor and Arnor, lost all these years. That someone will come and sweep them away, and make their lives wonderful, rather than setting about doing so themselves.

The reason I like the Odyssean model better is that I don’t believe much comes to most people in this world without work. If I want opportunities, I’m going to have to make them. If I want to sell a novel, I’m going to have to sweat over the damn thing and produce it, and then sweat as I polish the shit out of it. Because if I wait for it to just happen, it’s just never going to.

It's 2007, and I’m not going to my 20th high school reunion

In a misguided fit of nostalgia, I joined classmates dot com last year. This was partially because one of my classmates, who I didn’t know particularly well, died in a snowmobile accident in my local county.

And so nostalgia reared its head. I signed up with classmates dot com, and viewed the profiles and a few pictures from people I hadn’t seen or heard from in nineteen years. I’ll point out here that I wasn’t your typical social outcast by the time I got to high school–I was voted ‘class individual’ by my graduating class. Or at least, one of four class individuals, which will tell the perceptive a great deal about the people I graduated with.

Anyway, I signed up with classmates dot com and checked out the other people who’d had fits of nostalgia. And I remember, very distinctly, running across someone and thinking “he learned how to use email?” That broke the nostalgia spell pretty well, especially as I remembered that I didn’t particularly like a lot of the people I graduated with.

Not that I hated them, but they are a total of four hundred people who are pretty much irrelevant to my life at this point in time. I don’t agonize about what I did in high school, nor am I tortured by the treatment I received. I break out the yearbook less than once every three years. High School is pretty much a non subject with me. I moved on. There were other things to do, other places to go and both were more interesting than Newington High.

Class of 1987. For the most part, I wish you well.