You may remember this post about the erstwhile Cool Publications well as it happens the former director of CP David Amerland popped by the blog and dropped me the following note.

I don’t often go looking for my name on the web but I did tonight and came across The Shade review. You’re so right every step of the way!!! We tried so hard to break the mould and in the end we ran out of money! The company folded.

We love books, given half a chance we’d do it on paper except the start-up costs are huge, it’s a closed boys-club and it’s ran by global conglomerates (like Viacom) who scam the authors in an entirely legit (but so short-sighted) way.

Cool Publications as a vision was conceived by the promise of Stephen King’s ‘Riding the Bullet’ back in 2000. If we had an acceptable delivery vehicle (and there were so many promising ones about) we might have made it. We put in as much effort into our books, in terms of editing and hard work as if they were going to be printed on paper…

I read your blog with interest. Sometimes I get so angry with publishers I think of towering pyres with them gracing the middle. Still, it’s market forces and well, we pick ourselves up and move on hoping the bruises will fade.

The crying shame of it is we attracted some incredible talent (we were careful to prune the dross) … And on the non-fiction side we took the digital envelope to the very limit providing powerfully compelling reasons for digital books. We had some success, it was too little, too late.

My partners have since gone into other areas (and some gone back to their day jobs), I am running a design house and occasionally dreaming what-if and some of the designers we had have stayed on and we now work for more soulless projects which actually pay.

So there we go, straight from the horse’s mouth.

What made me think to talk about this is that back in 2004 I downloaded and read an e-book by a guy called Sean Kennedy called The Scabbed Wings of Abaddon. At the time POD wasn’t quite in the hands of the author to the degree it is now. Lulu could have been a fly by night crackpot scheme and you couldn’t just swerve round a webring of POD critics to find free books like the ones reviewed by myself and Devon Kappa.

This was all mixed up with a frank hero worship of the ambitions of Rantmedia, an organisation that helped me shape my own political opinions. So I penned a 36 page review of Scabbed Wings that put my first feelings about the world of POD into words and really did reach me at a deeper level when I’d figured the only real option for me as a writer was to pen one painstakingly commercial undertaking after another and hope that one day an agent would bite.

And here I am today. I’m not going to deny that reading Scabbed Wings changed my view of what being an author could be about. The quote they’ve chosen for the cover really sums up how I felt about this direct grassroots approach to publishing. I would still rather re-read Scabbed Wings than anything I could buy from Amazon.com. This, of course, has been my whole philosophy of publication all along.

Apparently I will soon be receiving a print copy of Scabbed Wings to put on my shelf along with my copies of Darkling, Within:Confinement, Continuity Slip, Mordiscado etc. Let me be quite plain, these are the books I really consider to be my library. Everything else is just crap I bought in bookstores. If the books were readable at all then I think they’re more worthwhile than anything that you can buy in a bookstore.

I shall be looking forward to revisiting Scabbed Wings and will be re-reviewing it once I have done so. The context has changed now and I wonder how the work stands up in a new time, it’s only three years later but things have gone pop in the world of self-publishing. All I know right now is I’m looking forward to the experience of rediscovering one of the earliest examples of authorial control. It’s people like Sean Kennedy and his partner in crime James O’Brien who’ve pushed hard at this level and who, in ways none of us know, may have influenced us to build this mindset the POD community currently enjoy.

For that reason alone I continue to salute them.

iUniverse Reviews posts a run down on POD blogs at the moment and mentions the harsh but fair POD Critic. Not that I want to complain or anything but I feel a bit left out in the rain in this review as iUniverse Critic links on the left to just about all of my fellow critics but *sniff* not me.

He also mentions the possibility of a loosely affiliated critics web ring. Perusing my other blogging contacts (available on the right under Self Publishing/POD, hover over links for summary) I notice that actually a kind of de facto ring is emerging consisting of myself, POD Critic, PODlings, None May Say, POD People, Pub-ioneer and iUniverse Reviewer. Although we don’t all blog too often (or at least go patchy) if you had us all bookmarked you can rely on at least weekly picks appraised. Speaking personally, I haven’t got anything much to review at the moment although I am planning to cast an eye over Bruce Bethke’s cyberpunk in my next free minute which is scheduled for May 15th 2009 and will last from 17:42 until 17:43 (I keed).

All of these reviewers appear to be free and we’ve all been plugging away for a while now. I’m hoping that the ring of content will be enough for all interested parties however few those parties might be.

I’m just glad to note that my orginal concern, which was to provide a means for appraising POD titles before purchase, has not only been addressed but also diligently expanded upon. People can’t take a pop at Self Pub with impunity any more. Although POD Critic hasn’t had too much luck thus far there have been some good titles coming through on this blog, on None May Say and on Pub-ioneer at the very least.

Consolidation is always a good thing.

Radio 4 caught my ear this morning as the Today programme broadcast a very brief discussion between the presenter, the daughter of one Waugh and hence extended family member of other Waughs and Joe Hill, born Joseph Hillstrom King. The latter two are writers and the fact that Mr. Hill’s real surname is King should tell you which writer he’s started his career distancing himself from.

Joseph King, it seems, had something published at 12 in a local newspaper, read it over after the thrill of creation had passed and (as is usual) found out that it may have needed a little work (euphemism for that old Blackadder one liner: “I would like to change one small thing - the words”). He then realised that it was possibly a nepotistic act of publication. Unhappy with this he became Joe Hill and never mentioned pa again.

This lead to the presenter, used to dealing with the evasive and pernicious sophistry of the political, putting to Ms. Waugh the question of whether she had ever considered how much her name had helped her into print. I winced, dear reader. I could also feel Mr. King’s smugness at having avoided, thus far, the machinations of the nepotistic accusation coming right out of my car stereo.

His smugness could only have been greater had he decided to print several midlist titles before making the big reveal about his true identity. It seems a little much that everyone should know this worst-kept secret just as his novel hits the bookstores. I mean all props for getting the short story sales off his own back and all but as with many things in writing you gotta watch out for that first step. It’s a doozy.

Basically Joe King decided to keep the “Daddy” ace up his sleeve till he needed that boost and didn’t waste any of the rocket fuel on the first part of the ascent. Not that I’m saying selling any kind of writing is easy, god knows my pa found it hard enough to shift anything to Interzone back in the day. The jump from having a few magazine creds to that first novel is a hell of an experience, though. Basically it’s as if all your short credits are worth squat. This is why I’ve tended to eschew the whole short fiction market. It shrunk before I was old enough to write anything decent so it seemed a waste of time.

Being Joe King might have made even the short story market easy meat but the fact is pulling the nepotism card at such an early stage may well have tarnished its power to shift a novel. The minute there’s 100,000 words of King Jnr. prose sitting in B&N looking shiny its time for the mask to come off.

Frankly, I’d be more impressed if it turned out that Dan Brown was actually Cormac McCarthy’s son. Although such a concept may turn stomachs in most sectors of the writing world.

So, I felt it was a little unfair of the presenter to harry poor Ms. Waugh as if it was she alone who was making a writer’s career off the backs of a writing dynasty.

To borrow a poker analogy Joe King’s just held his pair of aces back through the flop and turn only pushing his winning hand with comparable betting strategy as we came down to the river. Of course in the long term the showdown of writing is about canon and no matter what fancy crap you pull in the early days if you can’t build a canon then it really doesn’t matter.

But they’re both playing the same game, ultimately. A game which leaves them living up or down to the reputations of their ancestors.

The presenter began the piece by stating that it was an “interesting question” whether a writer who was the child of an immensely successful other writer might feel that their parent’s reputation was a help or a hindrance. I’d have to counter that the more interesting question is how a writer is supposed to feel given that he is the child of a known face in the writing world who has never matched paychecks with King or reputations with any Waugh.

The bad news on that is that I really don’t know the answer…

Just a note to mourn the passing of some links from the side bar. I have, in the past, had occasion to visit blogs with ponderous links bars over half of the links in which were now expired. I have no wish to foist a similar resources list upon an unwilling reader and so to preserve freshness I have removed those who by announcement or a long spell of inactivity have ceased to be up to date or in production.

I shall be keeping an eye on these URLs and also will add more as and when necessary.

Bye bye Betterment Worker, bye bye POD-dy Mouth, bye bye Fantasy POD reviews and bye bye Gloomwing…

This article is one of a continuing series designed primarily to help aspiring authors get their word count up in response to those struggling during NaNoWriMo 2006. The articles outline a planning technique for any given novel which once completed aim to make it hard to stop writing the next necessary piece of information for the audience. The technique is based on structuring concepts and information and, as this is a blog, are to be read from the bottom up. They will later be collated into a single volume.

It’s a well worn trope of the acting world that it’s more fun to be cast as the villain than the hero. On the surface this is because of the supposed liberty evildoers enjoy and, in fact, this is about the only enjoyment one can really derive from playing the bad guy.

Once I played the villain in a piece where the villainy was a weakness of character and his supposed liberty the product of political red tape. Playing that villain was no fun. It did teach me something about villains. They’re pretty easy to write but hard to write well. Anyone can slap a waxed moustache on someone and get them to cackle away evilly and so on and so forth. This can be great fun and gets you writing away nicely for a while. Then comes the why.

Depending on your genre the matter of why a villain is being villainous is either tricky or downright byzantine in its logic. Its not just that a villain is the opponent of the protagonist, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be “evil” all the time. If you need them to be evil then you need them to have reasons to be so.

Let’s take the evil Darkling Stansted as an example. It’s all very well slapping him with that moniker and expecting him to be badly behaved. Maybe, in general terms he is. He, after all, mobilised an army to take over the magical kingdom of Harroo over half a century ago. His army overturned the ruling order and estabished a new dictatorship.

What then?

Well, fantasy authors often like to fall back on fear of prophecies. At the drop of a prediction the villains in fantasy become utterly ruthless and tyrannical. Often leading to the thought that if it weren’t for the prophecy maybe they’d have been a bit less uptight.

Insanity is another old favourite. If someone’s a nutter then it’s obvious that they’ll do any kind of evil in the cause of serving their own mania.

These ideas are what happens when an author suddenly realises that their villains are doing things for no sensibly good reason. Action thrillers with a political angle love the fact that information is such a valuable currency because they can have villains bumping people off because they “know too much”.

The fact is that you are going to have to find reasons for the villain to do what they need to do. If you can’t it is probably best not to have them do whatever it is you were planning.

If you are going to design a villain then they are probably going to exhibit one classic villain behaviour or another. But the assignation of these behaviours should not be arbitrary. You want to set up your villain to be in opposition to your protagonist. We’ve already gone into our protagonist in some detail so chalking up an opposition is a matter of details.

To briefly recap, Arturo Gatwick is a man of letters, an advertising executive who yearns for the fantastic but is forever crippled by his realisation that his family was mundane and never amounted to anything. When he discovers that his own grandpa was once a pretty big deal in a magical kingdom he is further hampered by questions relating to why grandpa didn’t make the grade and lost out to his evil counterpart. Will it be a case of like grandpa like Arty? Has two generations of Gatwick mundanity stripped out the old magic skills?

These are the concerns that we are dealing with in the book and if our villain is any kind of villain he will play upon those weaknesses. He will comment upon them.

Let’s get exercising. You can do this with your own hero and I will do it with Arturo. You need to write down the hero’s name and below that three (at least) central questions that our hero’s journey will address:

Arturo Gatwick:
1:Is Arturo really up to the task of becoming a magician like his grandpa or has he been steeped in mundanity too long?
2: Does it really matter if Arturo is capable of magic, he’s from the line of defeated magicians that Darkling expelled from Harroo, isn’t he genetically predisposed to get his butt kicked?
3: Even if he is neither too mundane nor too related to grandpa isn’t Darkling Stansted just too plain strong to be beaten by a first timer?

Next you want to pick out key concepts that these three or more questions represent. So in this case we can go:

Q1: mundanity, inexperience, novelty
Q2: family inheritance, self doubt, the past
Q3: strength, fear of darkness, fear of conflict

Now we have nine things that an opponent of Arturo could use to play on Arturo’s own doubts and fears. Of course Darkling’s going to use the lot but if you recall Darkling has an army of evil doers at his beck and call. The evil army are, by association, extensions of Darkling himself. Maybe we can make our message plainer by inventing an army that also reflects these concerns.

To do this we need to make our list of concerns go vertical:

mundanity
inexperience
novelty
family inheritance
self doubt
the past
strength
fear of darkness
fear of conflict

And under each word (or next to it, feel free, go wild!) we need to say what kind of villainous monster could invoke the concept in a negative way, thus:

Mundanity

A popular colour for mundanity is grey, so a grey thing, also mundanity is supposed to be boring and bored people sigh and fidget. They’re also quite lethargic. Couldn’t boredom seep out of them like a cloud of gas or a miasma? And if they catch you, once you’ve been paralysed by boredom they could eat you with giant mouths and vicious teeth. They don’t sound particularly intelligent, maybe they’re a naturally occurring creature used as biological warfare.

Inexperience

Well, any kind of creature could show up someone’s inexperience at dealing with them. It is important to make sure Arturo only escapes by the skin of his teeth a few times. If we want to drive the point home maybe we could have a named villain talk about Arturo’s inexperience and the expectation that he will not last long.

Novelty

Novelty is a kind of shiny, pretty, vacuous word. It talks about things being exciting and new, but novelty wears off. Maybe Darkling tries to bring Arturo over to the dark side with some kind of glamorous shapeshifting evil. Arturo must get past the novelty value to become a real magician.

Family inheritance

Well, we already have a need for a named villain, so Darkling and this right-hand imp could well discuss any reputed genetic disadvantage Arturo may have. Maybe all the villainous creatures capable of rational conversation could taunt Arturo’s ignominious family name. (Incidentally there’s not really an imp, I use the term in a general way).

Self doubt

I want to go super metaphorical here, I had originally thought of doppelgangers and stuff but we already have shape shifters so I thought we might get a bit abstract. I was thinking of creatures that are big spiny spider-like things made of distorting mirrors. Arturo looks into them and is sure he can’t win.

The past

The past is enough for a set of villains all by itself, but I think here we’re specifically looking at events from the past that grandfather Gatwick failed to overcome. Maybe, in particular Darkling’s right hand imp. It’s possible this character used to be a prisoner of the Gatwick family, thus accounting for his bitterness.

Strength

Every evil army needs its grunt troops. I’m thinking in this case we could be talking normal soldiers equipped with magical weapons provided by Darkling Stansted. This means they’re not so dumb as to be unable to converse and provide many conversational and interrogational possibilities.

Fear of darkness

An albino creature that can see in the dark, silent, rubbery, warm, implacable. We seem to have a fairly high-intelligence evil army here. Maybe we’re talking a gollum like creature here, even the grunts get spooked by the troglodyte killers. In a spin we could make them fairly cultured. Lot of time for philosophising in the dark, you know.

Fear of conflict

Essentially I think most of the villains in Harroo will have barks that are just slightly worse than their bites. This isn’t any illusion strategy, nothing so high minded. It’s just Arturo is constantly underestimating his own abilities.

And of course, the epitome of all of these features is Darkling Stansted himself. A cultured, cold, shapeshifting evil magician who implacably ranges his armies against the returning hero. Just as the hero underestimates himself Darkling underestimates his foe to a similar degree. In the end it is complacence that should set the stage for the final battle but Darkling himself should be no pushover.

You can look at a story two ways. It is the glorious triumph of the hero or the appalling tragedy of the villain. A fully rounded villain should have attractive qualities and a rational reason for acting in the way they do. In the end, though, they will lose the fight and die. So why? It has to be inevitable for some reason. The villain must, like a tragic hero, possess a fatal flaw, a straw to break the camel’s back.

Overconfidence is fine for allowing the hero to gain a face to face with their nemesis, although tedious speeches along the lines of “you did very well to get past the dark waters of s’plurg and the bestiary of my palace gardens…” are not advised. When it comes to the final fight though both combatants should know what’s at stake. Everything. Overconfidence no longer pays the price.

If we’re going to give Darkling something that’s going to tip the balance in favour of Arturo it has to be something only Arturo can bring to the party. Otherwise someone else might have done it before now. The easiest way around most of this is to make the Gatwick line capable of something no other magical lineage is capable of… so what went wrong for grandpa becomes the only question.

The obvious answer would be that Mel Gatwick was brought up in the magical tradition whereas Art has always had to do without. Maybe Mel just couldn’t think of a tactic that didn’t rely on magic battling. So if Darkling feeds off the magic of his own opponents to defeat them maybe Mel was a summoner. He summoned beasts to do his bidding but Darkling turned the beasts against him. (Maybe that’s how all these grey boredom monsters, albino cave dwellers and distorting mirror spiders came to Harroo in the first place.) However, if Art uses a relatively minor number of illusion spells to make it look like he’s summoning beasts when really they’re mirages maybe Darkling will fall for the illusion instead of turning that relatively minor power against Art. Then Art’s free to walk up to Darkling and pop him a good one in the nose.

Yeah, that kind of works. It works for satisfying story reasons as opposed to arbitrary tactical ones.

And that’s what you have to do. Turn your hero upside down, invert him, find the yang to go with the ying. In the end the conflict maybe resolved as the hero assimilates the yang into himself and the villain becomes redundant.

In the final planning tip we’re going to make a final basic plot plan for the Hero of Harroo (working title). After that writing tips will remain general while I collate the first tips into something resembling a coherent whole.

Happy writing.

My latest project has been specifically designed to be brain-crack of the highest order to the naturally analytic and those suffering from apophenia. Unfortunately I am one of these people so looking at my notes thus far makes my head spin. There’s not just writing here folks. There’s writing and some form of analysis that I can’t talk about too deeply without letting a certain feline out of a certain satchel.

Suffice to say this next project is going to be like freebasing Hexadecimal sudoku for interested parties.

I am also learning about changes in security best practice between Classic ASP and ASP 2.0… which is more interesting than it may sound. Have a good weekend if I don’t get back before.

I’ve been watching a number of movies recently that I’ve really enjoyed but had somehow escaped my attention for years. This is part of a move for myself and Mrs. Monkey to find stuff to watch that we can both enjoy. It also is part of my attempt to refocus my mind on sadly neglected performers.

The first, Jim Carrey, is not neglected so much as largely reviled as a serious performer. The fact is that he’s about three “serious” roles away from being a flat 50-50 great actor and great comic performer. On the latter particularly, I hear a lot of people saying they can’t stand him, I used to be one of them. When you’ve seen Carrey in The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine… and last night’s viewing choice The Majestic Carrey’s goofy is a lot easier to take. Not saying that watching Eternal Sunshine… will make Bruce Almighty seem like a good movie, but hey, you can’t have everything, right?

Similarly I watched the excellent Gods and Monsters where Ian McKellen pre-Gandalf, pre-Magneto is typically excellent. The surprise for many is that Brendan Fraser, my second neglected performer choice, keeps up with him. Again I think the reason many people think Fraser is “dumb” is because of picking movies like Monkey Bone and that hideous Bedazzled remake. It’s often forgotten that he’s not always being stupid and he can turn in a serious performance with gravitas somewhat beyond his years.

Versatility is not really admired in film entertainment or in the actors who act in them. It seems to have become synonymous with “confusing” or “hard to market”. The fact is you can’t sell George of the Jungle and Gods and Monsters to the same people. So the versatile actor never makes a deep impression. Selling Dumb and Dumber and Eternal Sunshine… to the same people is equally hard.

Not only are these performers not given the admiration I think they deserve but the two featured movies I saw are, in fact, unjustly neglected. The Majestic is a huge Capra-esque, gentle drama which unashamedly plunders corny plot devices to great emotional effect. This was a movie for performers who were really going to sell it and sell it they do. It’s a great film because as an audience member you can choose how involved to be in it. Either it’s a moving piece dealing with the impact of the McCarthy witch hunts and the loss of identity or its a piece of fluff about a man who loses his memory to find his convictions. I haven’t seen a movie that worked like that made in a long time.

Gods and Monsters is more demanding. Is it about an unusual relationship? Is it about self-destruction? Is it about the onset of madness? Is it about the director best remembered for his Universal monster movies? All of the above but you can find layers of meaning in every scene and intelligent commentary about all of the above in a movie that on the surface appears to be about an old gay man who wants something from his young, fit gardener. A movie which attempts to be artistic in matters of writing where the director takes an understated position are rare these days. Usually indie films of the past view years have been visual bludgeons, or afraid not to make characters and situations absurd or quirky.

Basically, it occurred to me that I’d kind of forgotten why I liked movies to start with watching these. Because I haven’t walked out of a cinema in years feeling like I felt after watching those movies.

That’s a sad state of affairs.

I’m finding myself in a really great position; novel 1st Draft finished and ready for revision, story submitted to paying market, second story receiving positive and useful feedback, and a whole new project still at the shiny novelty stage.

This project’s going to be something a little bit different for me and will either be a long running project filled with consternation and amusement or a bit of a damp squib. I’m going to write more soon but for the time being I’ll leave you with this enigmatic clue as to my intentions.

As a result I realise blog land is getting a little neglected. Rest assured things will pick up again and I still aim to put out bulletins twice weekly as life settles down after the move.

To give you an overview of the general energy levels post-move: Mrs Monkey and I spent yesterday watching Virgin On Demand television unaware that the PS2 resting atop the Virgin box would cause an overheating issue which lead to episodes of Supernatural dissolving into blocky chunks and tweeting irritably at us. We switched to Paramount and watched re-runs of South Park instead.

Give us a break, we’ve worked hard.

Ho hum.

Home BBand got fitted yesterday and I should have the wireless up tomorrow morning whilst Mrs. Monkey learns about grocery retail.

Today I have:

-completed Draft 1 of Starfall (hence the crappy past tense joke)
-checked up on how He Said, It Said is doing on Zoe, even though that’s academic now. It’s still not being reviewed although it has had one more read.
-completed another short which I have now subjected to the Zoe hammer which is tailored for submission to another paying online market. Spit and polish and I could be cruising for e-rejection slip number two.

So I’m kinda out of ideas and a bit taskless.

That’s unusual for me.

So after a rigorous *ahem* testing process I’ve tidied up my short story “He Said, It Said” and submitted it for consideration at Strange Horizons… maybe soon I will be able to frame my first e-rejection slip.

I have actually employed a rather risky move in my submission. I noted that SH submissions while tending towards the bizarre tend to be rather po-faced. A kind of literary fiction approach to SF concepts. I have chosen to try to mix it up a bit with a satirical piece that has a lot of bizarre humour.

Basically where SH usual throughput is hard hitting contemporary drama I am being something more offbeat. If there is one thing I can say about my writing it is that it is fun. What I guess I was trying to achieve was something a bit more fun.

Actually the piece is so fun that one of my critics kind of missed the part about it that’s deeply unpleasant. They also missed the fact that you’re kind of rooting for the Many Angled against humanity. I’m not sure that’s entirely within the spirit of Lovecraft but it is, at least, a newish spin on an old idea.

We’ll see how it plays to minds immeasurably superior to my own…