Year: 2016

            Kind of a goofy title.  Hopefully it’ll make sense in a few minutes.
            Hey, did you know today is the 50th anniversary of Star Trek?  Yep, the original series premiered fifty years ago today (tonight, really).  “The Man Trap,” the one with the salt vampire.

            May we always boldly go where no one has gone before…

            Anyway…

            If you follow me on Twitter, you know I often spend my weekends watching a half-dozen or so B- or openly awful movies while working on toy soldiers or tanks or something. And I often tweet out little bits of advice when I see a storytelling screw up that should’ve been easily avoided. They’re more frustrating in film, because it means someone had the screenplay sitting right there in front of them before this messed-up scene was put on film. And yet… they still put it on film.

            And sometimes the screw-ups are so bad, so overwhelming, that all I can do is drink…

            A recent awful film I saw hit on a really big problem I’ve seen a few people wrestle with. To be honest, I wrestled with it on my oft-mentioned book, The Suffering Map.  And when I realized what I’d been doing, not only did I feel like an idiot, but I realized that book might be salvageable someday after all.

            With a certain amount of rewrites.

            What am I talking about?

             A few weeks back I was watching a movie that was probably going for the idea of a goofy, somewhat inept hero with much more capable friends. Think of Jack Burton in Big Trouble In Little China or even, to a lesser extent, Shaun in Shaun of the Dead.  Alas, that’s a very tricky balance to pull off, and this writer/director didn’t have the skill or experience to do it.

            Meanwhile, the cute bartender (who liked him because… well, it was in the script, I guess) is well-trained with firearms, has a plan, stays calm under pressure… and keeps getting regulated to reaction shots and wide shots of the supporting character.  Except for one or two scenes, she’s almost a background character.

            And then, at the end, the hero sweeps her off her feet.  After the world’s been saved by someone else.  No, a third person altogether, not either one of them.

            That movie killed half a bottle of rum.  One of the big bottles.

            Anyway…

            Example two.

            In my early drafts of The Suffering Map, my main character, Rob, pretty much dominated the book.  There were some good supporting characters in Sondra, Miguel, Levi Gulliver and his ravens, and my villain, Bareback (a shameless Cenobite rip-off in those first three or four drafts), but Rob was easily 70-75% of the book.

            When I finally made a serious revision, one of the big changes was giving more time to Sondra. Really, the story involved her almost as much as Rob, and she had her own arc that I’d all but skimmed over because… well, he was my main character, right?

            By the next big revision (the last one) the novel was pretty much split clean between them.  But it still wasn’t quite right, and—as I’ve mentioned before—it was rejected a few times.  It was around this time that I finally trunked it.  Well, cyber-trunked it.

            Y’see, Timmy, both of these stories suffered from the same problem—not being aware of who should be the main character.  They’re not focusing on the heroic, active person—the person who’s actually making choices and doing things. And learning from those choices and changing because of them. What I came to realize was that Rob shouldn’t be the main character of The Suffering Map—Sondra should be.  She was more active, she was more interesting, and she had a serious arc.  Really, the book was her story.  Which I knew, but I was so stuck in the headspace of it being Rob’s story that I didn’t recognize the actual hero.

            The bad movie did the same thing.  It only took a few moments of mental re-plotting to see how much stronger and more entertaining the film would be if it had been focused on the bartender.  She was smart, clever, willing to take charge… all the stuff we want and need in a main character.

            Granted, it’s always possible to bend or break those rules, but—as I mentioned above—it’s not an easy thing to do, and probably not something to attempt without a lot of serious experience.

            I also think it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room.  In both of these examples, the better lead, the one shunted to the side, was a woman.  This isn’t always going to be the case, but I also didn’t want to gloss over it. 

            For me, it came down to The Suffering Map being my first all-out serious attempt at a novel.  I was worried I didn’t have the skill to pull off a female lead, and at the time I was right. But as I kept rewriting it over the years, and Sondra became a better character, I developed those skills. Alas, as I mentioned above, it still took me a while to get past the idea of “Rob is the main character.”

            In the bad movie… well, I don’t know what they were thinking.  I wasn’t there.  It’s possible, as I mentioned above, they went for a goofy hero with better sidekicks and really messed up the balance.  Or maybe they just planned on her as a love interest, put in a lot of character traits thinking it’d be cool to have a love interest who wasn’t just window dressing, and couldn’t register the fact that they’d made this supporting character into a far better protagonist than their lead. We’ll never know.  All I can say is that it was far from the movie’s only problem, and no one should ever watch it without a serious amount of alcohol on standby.

            But back to our topic…

            If I’m doing a story with a good-sized cast of characters, it may be worth taking a moment to look at the story from a few different points of view.  Maybe that clever thing I’m trying to do with my main character isn’t working.  Maybe she’s the main character.  Or that guy.  Or that person in the coat over there.  My goal as a writer should be to tell the most interesting story possible, and sometimes… that might not be the story I started with.

            Next time, I’d like to blather on a bit about where you’ve decided to write.

            Until then… go write.

            So, a month or so back I outlined a simple experiment to check some of the ongoing stories , articles, and rumors about Amazon reviews and who can post them.  It’s been a month, so I figured I could toss down a few lumps of data for your perusal.

            First off, the books I reviewed.  There’s a full list below.  I’ve included links to Amazon just to make it quick and simple for anyone to follow up on each review. There’s also a few letters by each name that cover a bunch of other variables.

t  = I follow the author on Twitter

T = We follow each other

F = Facebook friends/followers with said author

A = Amazon verified purchase

C = Control review. This should be rejected immediately, for reasons

            The dates I’m listing are the dates I wrote and submitted the review.  As mentioned in the earlier post, they all had at least twelve hours between them.  Most of them went up in minutes.  In a few cases cases, there was a delay of anywhere from hours to almost two days before the review actually posted on Amazon.  And yet… every one of them did go up.

            They’re roughly alphabetical, except in a few places where I had to swap out titles for one reason or another (a few books I’d planned to review for this didn’t actually come out yet…). That’s more a function of the original list I threw together, not anything else.  All of them are books I’ve read in the past year, more or less.

            I know originally I said I’d only do positive reviews.  After the second or third day, I decided to only do five star reviews (to smooth out one more variable).  Again, these are all honest reviews. I really, truly loved all of these books and I think you should read a bunch of them right now or at least put them on your Christmas list.  On a few, I mention that said book was maybe a 4.5, but I rounded up since Amazon doesn’t allow partial stars.  This also meant I had to switch out one or two books (because believe me… not everything I read is five-star-wonderful by a long shot).

            All the control books either have a blurb from me right on the cover or there on the Amazon page in the editorial/press material. The one exception is Kaiju Rising, an anthology I have a story in, where Amazon lists me as the sole author, and most of the editorial/press stuff mentions me as well.  On all those reviews (as you can see) I openly, blatantly stated my connection to the book, both for Amazon and also so it wouldn’t look like a cheap/bogus review that might reflect back on said author.
            If there’s some factor you can think of that I missed, please let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can include the next time around..

            Anyway, here’s the list of books/reviews…

1st Alight—Scott Sigler (T)

2nd Life Debt: Aftermath– Chuck Wendig (T)

3rd Anamnesis – Ellie Knapp (T, F, A)

4th Chapelwood—Cherie Priest (T)

5th Crooked—Austin Grossman (t)

6th The Crooked God Machine – Autumn Christian (T, A)

7th Creeping Stones— Cullen Bunn (T)

8th Experimental Film – Gemma Files (T)

9th Grave’s End—Sean Patrick Travers (T, A)

10th Head Full of Ghosts – Paul Tremblay (T)

11th Hoo-Doo Mountain Horror – Jonathan Moon (T, F, A)

12th Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse– Michelle Kilmer (T, A)

13th Made to Kill—Adam Christopher (T)

14th Ms Marvel: Generation Why—G. Willow Wilson (t, A)

15th Lois Lane: Fallout –Gwenda Bond (t)

16th One Dead, Two To Go—Elena Hartwell (T, F)

17th Panacea – F. Paul Wilson (T)

18th Perdition Score – Richard Kadrey (t)

19th Railroad! : Collection 3— Tonia Brown–  (T, A)

20th – Okay, I spent the day at the LACMA Guillermo del Toro exhibit and went out to dinner with friends.  Sue me.

21st Shoot This One – Javier Grillo-Marxuach (T, F, A)

22nd The Unnoticeables—Robert Brockway (T)

23rd Dark Ascension: A Generation V novel—ML Brennan (T)

24th The Water Knife–Paolo Bacigalupi (t)

25th Zero World – Jason Hough (T, A)

26th The Big Sheep—Robert Kroese (T, C)

27th Desert Bleeds Red—Jason Hornsby (F, C)

28th Impact Earth – Timothy Long (T, F, A, C)

29th  Kaiju Rising –assorted authors (T, C)

30th Phoenix: A Road Less Traveled novel—C. Dulaney (T, F, C)

31st The Voodoo Killings—Kristi Charish (T, F, C)

            Now, with those titles and dates in mind, here’s a few things that’ve happened already…

            First off, doing a review a day becomes oddly time-consuming. Especially trying to write an honest-I-read-this-review without giving away any spoilers.

            Also, I never knew this before, but… things people buy as gifts off your Amazon wish list do not count as verified purchases.  Yeah, I know—weird.  Creeping Stones and Experimental Film were birthday/Christmas gifts, yet neither reads as a verified purchase. I mention it just because I’m trying to put down all the info I can.  I’d guess it’s because even though the item was clearly bought for you, you’re not the one who purchased it. Something to work on, Amazon…

            And as of this writing, all thirty of them are still up.  It’s been six days since I reviewed The Voodoo Killings and over five weeks since I reviewed Alight. 

            We’ll check in on this experiment one more time in early October and see where things are at.

            Hey, everybody…

            Hope you’re enjoying your Labor Day, even if you’re not in southern Califonia.  And if you do happen to be a SoCal resident, I wanted to remind you that this coming Sunday, the 11th, is the second Sunday of the month—which means it’s time for Los Angeles Writer’s Coffeehouse. 

            We’re going to be at Dark Delicacies in Burbank from noon to three (as always).  It’s completely free and it’s open to everyone—writers of all ages and skill levels.  You can be just starting out, halfway through your first project, a seasoned pro, or a complete hack like me. 

            This time around we’re going to be talking about drafts and editing, and also about working with editors in general.  Please feel free to show up with your questions, your own thoughts, and your clever ideas and tips.

            I’m moderating, so it’ll be highly adequate, as always.

            Hope to see you there.

            Pop culture reference!  Hasn’t been one in ages.  This one’ll make sense in a few minutes.

            I wanted to take a moment to rant about one of my favorite topics—spelling.  Any of you longtime readers know how I feel about misspelled and misused words.  But this week I’d like to approach a specific facet of that problem.

            One thing I see a lot is folks who misuse compound words.  If, for some awful reason you don’t know, a compound word is when you mash two words together and create a new word. And much like the lions that merge into Voltron or the Combaticons combining into Bruticus, sometimes that word is greater than the sum of its parts.

            In fact… sometimes the word is very different from the sum of its parts.  For example, a kneecap is a floating bone in your leg that protects the hinge joint.  But a knee cap is a little hat you wear above your calf.  By extention, kneecapping is the brutal practice of breaking that bone, usually with a bullet, while knee capping is the weird and somewhat creepy habit of putting tiny headgear on other people’s joints.

            Or your own joints, I guess.

            But that almost makes it weirder.

            Want another one?  Whiplash is a condition caused by a sudden thrashing of the neck.  A whip lash can refer to either the leather straps of the whip or the whip’s actual strike.  Like in Pirates of the Carribean,when Davy Jones threatens Will Turner with five whip lashes.

            See the problem here?  The compound word and the phrase refer to two different things. And if my reader has even a faint grasp of vocabulary, they’re going to stumble over my un-compounded word and go back to read it again.  I might know what pissantmeans, but if I come across piss ant… well, is that one of the creepy crawlies from Chuck Wendig’s new book?

            Take a look at a few more of these and see if you stumble on any of them…

straitjacket vs. straight jacket

something vs. some thing

hardcore vs. hard core

breakneck vs. break neck

kingpin vs king pin

connectability vs connect ability

maybe vs. may be

lovesick vs. love sick

sometime vs. some time

            Did you feel it?  That little pause when you were reading?          How many of these did that to you? A few?  Some? If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve got a thing for writing, so maybe a lot of them.

            Y’see, Timmy, once I break the compound word apart, it’s… well, two words. And as long as those two words are spelled correctly… well, that’s all that matters, right?  Most people will get the general meaning from context.

           I think folks do this because they don’t know how to spell the compound word correctly and break it apart to “fix” it.  Maybe my spellchecker kept rejecting straightjacket but once I broke it into two words… oh, well that must be right now.  It’s one of those cases where I’ve assumed the machine is much smarter than I am.

            But that flow-break becomes even worse when people aren’t even using the right words.  I’ve seen people talk about mere cats in Africa and the turn styles in the New York subways.  My spellchecker will accept those, too, just like it will any other misused word.

            Hyphens don’t help the situation.  Most spellcheckers will accept a hyphenated word as correct if the two individual words are correct.  For example, mistake, missed-take, miss-steak, and mist-ache are all spelled correctly.

            The real problem here is that—like any spelling mistake—these sort of mess-ups will break the flow of my story.  If my reader spends just two seconds trying to figure out what liberated bricklayers have to do with an urban fantasy story, they’ve stopped reading in order to analyze.  And once they start analyzing… it’s hard to get them to stop.

            And yeah, a lot of folks will almost immediately figure out that when I said free masons I actually meant the Freemasons—that semi-secretive service organization that so many hack writers use as a fallback source for historical mystery (check out my new book, Paradox Bound, coming out next September). 

            But…

            That pause is still going to happen.  After three or four instances of breaking the flow like that, the reader’s going to set my book aside for something easier to understand.  Like an Overwatch hint guide. Or a rewatch of Stranger Things.

            I need to know how words work. Including compound words. Knowing the two halves doesn’t mean I know the whole, and vice-versa.  I have to know how words work. And what they mean.  And how to spell them.

            In closing, being able to proofread something is a skill every writer needs to develop.  But anyone can proof read… provided the proof is in a language they understand.

            Next time, I want to talk about that guy.  No, no,not him. The other guy.

            And I’ll probably have an update on the whole Amazon review thing, too.

            Until then, go write.