Cover of Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer

I’ll admit I’m a bit late to the party on this one.  The first Artemis Fowl book was published in 2001, when I was a bit older than the series’s target demographic, so it got past me until just now.  But I’m still #12 on the library waitlist for Game of Thrones, so I thought I’d give it a try.  And after reading it, I want to know why these books were marketed only to kids.  The subtext here is brilliant.

Artemis Fowl is a millionaire, a criminal mastermind, and twelve years old.  His dad has conveniently gone missing after an explosion on a Russian cargo ship and his mother has shut herself up in her room out of grief, so he can run around and do his moneymaking schemes without too much trouble.  His accomplices are Butler and his sister Juliet, the butler and maid of the Fowl estate.  And… and… the awesomeness of these characters… you simply have to read about them for yourself:

The Butlers had been serving the Fowls for centuries.  It had always been that way.  Indeed, there were several linguists of the opinion that this was how the common noun had originated.  The first record of this unusual arrangement was when Virgil Butler had been contracted as servant, bodyguard, and cook to Lord Hugo de Folé for one of the first great Norman crusades.

At the age of ten, Butler children were sent to a private training center in Israel, where they were taught the specialized skills needed to guard the latest in the Fowl line.  These skills included Cordon Bleu cooking, marksmanship, a customized blend of martial arts, emergency medicine, and information technology.  If, at the end of their training, there was not a Fowl to guard, then the Butlers were eagerly snapped up as bodyguards for various royal personages, generally in Monaco or Saudi Arabia.

The whole book reads like this.

Artemis’s latest scheme is to kidnap an officer of LEPrecon, the fairy police, and hold her ransom for quite a lot of money.  Of course, the situation devolves into a standoff in which Colfer has the chance to trot out heist movie tropes and play with them.  There’s a fairy sergeant with a cigar in his mouth, a dwarven convict who’s sent to work in a plea-bargaining deal, and the smartass techie who walks the fairies through Fowl Manor via his headset.  He’s a centaur.  He loves carrots.

There are, unfortunately, parts of the book that induce giggles for the wrong reasons.  Artemis has at his disposal the most cutting-edge of 2001 technology.  Near the beginning of the book, he steals some data from a fairy in Saigon and then e-mails it to himself.  One can only assume he was using a Hotmail account.

But seriously, just read it for the Butlers.  Go read it.

Eigengrau

The other day, I was on Wikipedia trying to look up the name of those sparkles that happen when you sneeze too hard (which happen to be phosphenes, by the way).  Then the magic of Wikipedia links happened, and check this out.  Eigengrau.  Also known as brain gray, it’s a shade of dark gray that the brain perceives when no light is entering the eyes.  Your nerve cells still fire at a baseline level even when they’re receiving no input.  Cool, huh?

Cover of Stealing Death

Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey

Well, it’s been said that you can learn how to become a better writer both by reading great books and awful ones.  Turns out that you can learn from reading books that are just sort of okay, too.

Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey was published in 2009 and is aimed at the YA market.  It’s got a neat premise: After a fire burns down his home, the Gwali, a sort of grim reaper/boogeyman, steals the souls of Kipp’s parents and puts them in a sack.  Kipp will go to incredible lengths to get that sack back.  It’s also refreshingly different that Carey decided to set this story in an African-like society.  (Although the girl on the front cover is quite clearly a white person with darkened skin.  But I digress.  That was the illustrator’s fault.)

I was disappointed to find that Carey took such a cool idea and made a mediocre story out of it.  There’s nothing at all wrong with this book.  But I got about twenty pages into it and wondered to myself why I didn’t care what happened next.  The answer: It’s only a made-up story.  Kipp isn’t real, so it doesn’t matter what happens to him.  When you’re writing fiction, this is a very bad sign indeed.

Carey tells us, outright, that Kipp is sad that his parents and little brother are dead.  Okay.  And he has a crush on his landlord’s daughter.  Okay, but where is the evidence for this?  Does he do anything to show that he’s sad?  No, he just sort of packs up his stuff and starts on his quest.  He’s okay, but he never makes that jump from “generic YA protagonist” to “person I care about desperately.”

I suppose the writing lesson to take away from this is that crafting a compelling story is hard work.

The Spirit Engine 2: Unexpectedly Awesome Videogame Music

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

I was listening to the Pandora radio the other day when all of a sudden a piece of videogame music came up on my list.  Intrigued, I had to go look it up.  I turns out that The Spirit Engine 2 is a pretty good freeware RPG, and judging by the YouTube comments, its ending credits are beloved by Nightwish fans.  Must be all that semi-Latin chanting.

Check it out!  http://youtu.be/y5fRCfgiH_g

Cannon Fodder is Coming … Eventually

Hello, everybody, and happy new year!

It’s 2012.  I’ve mentioned earlier that I was expecting Cannon Fodder, the book I’m working on right now, to come out in 2012.  I’m writing this post to explain that it might take longer than that, but I have a very good reason: I’m going to try to sell this one.

For the past … oh … many years, I’ve been sort of learning to write and sharing it with people.  If that short story about the mushroom alien was in sixth grade, that was 1999, so about thirteen years.  I’ve learned a lot from the experience, and I think it’s time to give it a shot.

That sort of thing takes a lot of time, no matter whether I try for traditional publishing or go Amanda Hocking style.  I’m going to run Cannon Fodder through critique group and get the thing seriously ironed out.  Then I’m going to go through the process of pitch to an agent, pitch to another agent, agent pitches to an editor, editor asks me to make revisions, editor go talks to a typesetter, which can take a couple of years.

But never fear!  There will still be regular updates on this blog, and I’ll let you know how it’s going.  Until then, I hope you all have a great year 2012.

Reasons to be Hopeful About the Future

It seems like everything on the news has been doom and gloom lately.  But there are a number of reasons to be encouraged:

  • The obesity levels in the United States have leveled off.  News here.  It looks like 33% obese and 33% overweight is about the limit of what desk jobs will do to the population.  We will never wind up looking like the people in Wall-E.

As a corollary to that,

  • We know so much more now than we used to.  Consider how inconceivable it would have been to get protein from vegetable sources in the 1950’s.  Tofu?  You must be a Communist!  And we are slowly, very slowly, beginning to understand that being overweight isn’t a failure of character, it’s a disease.  And we’re racing for a way to deal with it.
  • Population growth is slowing down.  Yes, by most accounts, we just hit the 7 billion mark.  But according to the United Nations, the rate of increase has been constantly declining since the 1960’s.  We still don’t what will happen in the future, but the total number of people could level off around the year 2100, and then slowly drop after that.
  • Violence is way down.  See the book by Stephen Pinker.
  • The United States has a tradition of peaceful protest as a method of first resort.  Yes, the Tea Party and Occupy movements have seen their share of arrests.  But think of what it could have been – riots – or the government could have quashed both movements before they even began.  You can go and tell everybody you think the national parks should be converted into casinos to raise revenue.  I’ll heartily disagree with you, but you can say it.

So happy Christmas, Hannukah, Festivus or what have you, everyone, and keep on trucking.

Traditional Publishing vs. Self-Publishing

Here’s a rather remarkable blog post by Nathan Bransford, who’s had experience as a publishing industry insider:

Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing: Which Way Will You Make More Money?

Bransford crunches some numbers and comes to the conclusion that unless you’re, say, Sue Grafton and you’re making a big splash in the print market, you’ll actually earn more money by self-publishing.  Whoa.  That means no querying to agents, no waiting for a publisher to pick up your work, no waiting two years to finally hit store shelves.  Instead, he says, put your best work up there on Amazon and then market the heck out of it.

Self-publishing used to be the last resort of people who wrote cruddy books.  But the whole industry is going through a sea change with the advent of e-readers and I don’t know where we’ll all wind up.  And I don’t know what I’d like to do with my next novel once I’m finished with it.  I write because I love to write, and I want to reach as many people as possible.  Money would be nice.  🙂

Cannon Fodder won’t be ready for at least another year and a half, anyway, so I think I’ll wait and see what the industry is like then.

(Mostly) Vegetarian Chili

Textured vegetable protein is wonderful stuff.  It looks like hell, but it’s got a lovely spongy texture, it’s full of protein, and it’s delicious.  It can be a bit hard to find, so try a store where most of the customers wear Birkenstocks.

  • 1 cup textured vegetable protein
  • a big glorp of barbecue sauce
  • 2 medium onions
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1 package of mushrooms
  • 1 jar of spaghetti sauce
  • 1 can black beans, 1 can cannellini beans
  • 2 teaspoons chicken bouillon paste (leave this out to make it vegetarian)

Right out of the package, TVP (textured vegetable protein) is dry and crunchy.  You’re going to want to soak it.  Mix the big glorp of barbecue sauce with a couple of cups of water, add the TVP, and throw in any other flavors you might like it to pick up.  Let soak while you’re preparing the rest of the chili.

Chop the onions, garlic, and mushrooms and sauté in some butter at the bottom of a big soup pot.  When they are starting to get tender, add the beans, spaghetti sauce, and chicken bouillon.  You’ll probably need to thin it out with a bit of water.  Dump in the BBQ-TVP.  Mix it all together, bring it to a boil, then cover and turn down the heat.  Let it simmer for a while for the flavors to mellow, about 15 minutes.

It’s good with cheese.

The Circus of Brass and Bone

An online serial novel by Abra Staffin-Wiebe.  This is a world where everything runs on a magical stuff called aether.  It powers the steamships, the city lamps, the walking elephant skeleton down at the circus.  Everything’s going fine – more or less – until a technician decides to light up down at the power plant…

The Circus of Brass and Bone is the story of survivors who are trying to pick up the pieces after a very big boom.  If you’re into post-apocalyptic steampunk (and who wouldn’t be?), check it out.

http://www.circusofbrassandbone.com/