Hell yeah! That’s what I felt like shouting every couple of pages while reading Scott Lynch’s follow-up to his tour-de-force debut novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I reviewed here. If you haven’t read the first one yet, skip this review and run out and buy the damned thing right now!
Red Seas picks up a little more than two years after the conclusion of Lies. We find our intrepid and ingenious thieves Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen scheming in the island city of Tal Verrar to rob the Sinspire, the most exclusive gambling house in the world. Cheating in the Sinspire carries a summary death sentence, a rule Locke and Jean flaunt with incredible abandon.
But the Bondmages of Karthain haven’t forgotten what Locke did to one of their own. There are traps, lies, schemes, and deceptions at every turn, and one false move, one misplaced lie, will mean the end for them both.
Oh, and there are pirates and sea battles, too. As I said, hell yeah!
I loved this book. Yes, Lynch writes long, but his books have a narrative velocity behind them that carries this weight easily (if not always elegantly). Lynch has also been criticized in some circles for his use of modern language and idioms in the speech of his characters and for having women in positions of power they wouldn’t “normally” have in a pre-industrial society (Lynch’s world seems to be somewhat equivalent to Europe in the 1700s).
I think those critics are missing the point. The use of modern idioms is deliberate and accomplishes Lynch’s goal of making Locke and Jean highly accessible characters, as well as creating laugh-out-loud dialog exchanges that wouldn’t be possible with a more formal, “period-centric” language. As for the role of women … it’s his damn world and he can do what he wants. Obviously the Sea of Brass civilizations evolved differently from our own. In that world it’s bad luck to sail a ship without a woman on board, preferably as an officer. That tradition evolved from something, even if Lynch doesn’t bother to explain what. Criticizing him for making his world “overly PC” is just a disingenuous argument that I can easily dismiss.
If you read The Lies of Locke Lamora and enjoyed it, you won’t be disappointed with the follow-up. Highly recommended.
Well, okay, not really. I was a clean freak before I was a writer. But not much before. Both seemed to have started uncoiling from my DNA at some point in high school. And now that I’m thinking about it, I guess I can’t say I was a clean freak first. They may have arrived at basically the same time.
I know what you’re thinking: Forbes, what the hell are you talking about? What do writing and cleaning have in common?
Answer: Absolutely nothing at all!
And that’s kind of the point. Here’s my (somewhat twisted) logic on this:
Writing a novel takes a long time. The core idea might be rattling around in your head for months or years before you start to write it down. Then there’s the time — again, at least several months — of figuring out the plot, characters, themes, etc. Then (for me) there’s writing an outline, and finally a draft of the book itself.
But even then you’re not done. You can tinker with it, rewrite, polish, rewrite again. If you’re lucky enough to have it accepted by a publisher, there are changes your editor will suggest (these are on top of the changes your agent has already probably suggested). You will have to review the copy-edited manuscript, and then the final proof copies. It will take literally years from the initial idea to the book reaching bookstore shelves.
So yeah, yeah, whatever, Forbes, you still haven’t explained how this ties to being a clean freak!
The gist of the above is that books take a long time to write, and if they never get published they never feel “done” even if you abandon them. That last, final step is hanging out there, forever incomplete.
But I can spend a couple of hours cleaning my house, and when I’m done it’s done! I have accomplished something, World! Hear me roar! I get a feeling of satisfaction and closure that for me is a pretty good payoff for a few hours spent vacuuming and dusting and mopping and scrubbing. It doesn’t hurt that I consider dust to be my arch-nemesis — I’ve been known to walk around with a Swiffer duster in one hand and my phone in the other, annihilating my enemies while chatting with my mom about her latest luncheon with the crazy Red Hat ladies.
So there you have it! The reason why writing has made me a clean freak!
TRON was a little-seen Disney movie from 1982 that starred Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner. Both were computer programmers who at one time worked for a big company called ENCOM. Bridge’s Flynn character had been forced out by greedy corporate baddies and now runs a video arcade.
As the company becomes more moustache-twirlingly evil, Boxleitner writes an infiltration program called Tron that he sends into ENCOM’s mainframe to discover the baddies’ nasty little secrets (no, it’s not gigs of porn — this was when porn was still printed in magazines!).
While attempting to hack the ENCOM mainframe, Bridges is digitized by a scanning laser and reconstituted into a virtual world where he has to find TRON and defeat the sinister Master Control Program.
Yeah, it sounds pretty hokey on the page, and it played sort of hokey as well, but there was something undeniably cool about TRON that elevated the whole above the sum of the parts. Bridges was great with what little material he had, and the whole idea that the programs have avatars that look like their human creators was a damned interesting concept (especially in 1982).
Oh, and the lightcycles that went fast as hell and could make 90 degree angle turns on a massive grid kicked all kinds of ass.
Anyway, there’s been talk about a sequel for years, and now it’s finally happening. TRON LEGACY arrives this December, and I for one cannot freaking wait.
The new improved lightcycle is pictured in the poster above.
I was on Twitter recently and said that I thought zombies worked better in movies or shorter works of fiction than they do in novels. To me, there doesn’t seem enough for zombies to do to have them be the bones of a story (ha ha!) that will carry on for a few hundred pages. My online Twitter friend @zombiejoe disagreed and thought there were some zombie-ish novels that were great. One he mentioned was Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. I recently reviewed Boneshaker and loved it, but I don’t consider it a zombie novel. It’s a steampunk book first and foremost — the zombies are part of the backdrop but not really a central part of the story (though they are an ongoing menace).
I realized I hadn’t really read much long-form zombie fiction. I bought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies at the beach last year and while I appreciated the idea of the mash-up, I just couldn’t get into it and put it down without finishing it.
I thought about it some more and perused my bookshelves and came to the conclusion that I have not read any zombie novels.
I really have nothing against zombies. I said to Zombiejoe that I thought they probably worked better in movies than they do on the page, but that may be coming from my own lack of exposure and inability to imagine a good zombie book than a failure of the zombie genre.
Zombieland Rule#1: Cardio
I love movies like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and 28 Days Later (and it’s sequel). I thought Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead was pretty killer, and I’d been prepared to despise it since the original was one of the seminal movies of my teen years. I guess I’ve always preferred to watch zombie mayhem than read about it.
So I’m going to ask for recommendations. What should I read? What are some good zombie novels out there that you think hold there own over a few hundred pages? I’m vaguely familiar with World War Z and a book called Xombies (though i guess barely aware would be more accurate). Tell me what you think are the books at the top of the genre (or sub-genre, or niche, or whatever) so I don’t have to do any work and figure it all out for myself. Use the comments here to let me know what you think are the best and why.
“If he wants the candy in the jar, you put the candy in the jar.” Oh, that is so, so wrong, but still hilariously right. The adrenalin scene is great, too. “I’m alive!”
I hadn’t even heard the title of this movie until I stumbled across the preview, but I like it a lot. This may be a case where I’ve just watched every funny scene in the film so I’ll be reading some reviews before deciding if this is worthy of theater viewing, but right now I’m hopeful.
You should at the very least get a good laugh out of the trailer. Enjoy.
First, thanks to all of you who commented and emailed me with your thoughts and concerns and suggestions for how to handle the bully situation with my son, Alex. Most of the suggestions boiled down to what I thought I would have to do anyway, which is stay the fuck out of it. Trying to inject myself into the situation, no matter how well-intentioned, will only make things worse.
I stopped by my ex’s house after work and talked to him a little more. He said the name calling has mostly gone away. He’s been ignoring them, which was going to be my advice to him (and thanks Katie and everyone else who offered this suggestion). I said to keep it up and not to respond no matter what they say. I also told him I wanted to know if it got worse, or escalated into hitting, but fortunately it doesn’t appear to be headed in that direction.
Again, thanks everyone for listening, and your suggestions. I will post updates on this subject from time to time as the situation warrants.
This is going to be a very personal post, so if you usually come here to read about my writing or the writing business this probably isn’t the post for you.
My son Alexander is a ten-year-old fifth grader. His birthday is in August, so he’s the youngest kid in his class. He’s very bright (in kindergarten he read through every book they had in the room, so the teachers got him second grade books to read, which he also ripped through), but like most boys his age doesn’t have a lot of motivation about school work. He’d rather zoom through it as fast as he can and go play. I’m okay with that because (a) I was that way when I was his age, and (b) I’m aware of it and make sure he gets his work done anyway.
His mom and I are divorced, and I have since remarried. My ex and I on friendly terms and have joint custody of Alex. She has him for a week, then I have him for a week, with the switch occurring on Sunday nights. He loves it, it works for us, and it’s been that way for four years now.
Alex just found out that his best friend AJ is going to move in June. His dad’s in the military and is being reassigned to Newport News, Virginia. I was getting ready to run him over to his mom’s house when AJ told him about the move. Alex was upset in the car, close to tears, and I felt really bad for him. I told him it was okay to be sad, and that I’d had one of my best friends move away when I was about his age so I completely understood how he felt.
He told me he wouldn’t have anyone to play with. I reminded him about his buddies Devon and Britton and Jack and David. His reply was that he never sees them. I knew he was down and sometimes a person just needs to wallow a bit in their despondency, so I didn’t remind him that the reason he doesn’t see them that often outside of school is that he’s always playing with AJ, and when AJ is no longer around he’ll have more time for the other boys. They don’t live in our development like AJ does, which means I’ll be driving him more, but none of them are far, so I’m okay with that.
Then I asked him a question and got a response that has haunted me since. I asked if there were other kids his age in the development that he saw on the bus or at school. He said there were a couple of other boys in the neighborhood but that they called him “retard” and “fag” and all manner of lovely names.
I was stunned. I asked him if this happened on the bus stop or on the bus. He said on the bus. I asked if he’d done or said anything to them, and he said no (and I believe him because I can usually tell when he’s lying or trying to be evasive).
I hate this. Hate hate hate it. Because there’s nothing I can do. I’m going to talk to him tonight and tell him to just ignore them and hope they leave him alone when they can’t get a rise out of him. But if he says anything to the bus driver that’ll be the same as throwing chum into shark-infested waters. Those two little assholes will be all over him, sensing that he’s “weak.”I’m hesitant to say anything to his teacher or principal for the same reason.
Anyone care to chime in with thoughts on this? Is there anything else I can do that won’t make things worse?
As I’ve talked about here and here and here, I write longish outlines for my novels. As I’ve been working my way through the outline for The Black Flame (the second volume in my YA series about a teenage girl involved with witches, demons, and immortal beings from the Garden of Eden), I realized another benefit of writing in such detail — it allows me to get the bulk of my research out of the way before I start writing.
There’s nothing that kills forward momentum in a writing project more absolutely than reaching a point where you say to yourself, “Well, hell, I need to go research the Black Plague/nuclear weaponry/wormholes/World War II submarines/state parks in Minnesota/how dirigibles work/whatever.” Everything grinds to a halt while you scamper off to do your research, and gaining that momentum back can sometimes be difficult, especially if it gets interrupted again by the need for more research into something else you didn’t realize you didn’t know when you started writing.
Some writers just put in placeholders that read along the lines of [research whatever/add shit here], and that’s fine, unless there are later plot points or character developments that hinge on what you need to research now. If that’s the case, you’ll end up with an increasingly note-riddled story with big chunks of potentially very important information missing. This can get really ugly, and makes the second drafts more work than they otherwise should be (or that I would like them to be).
I do my research during the outline phase. By writing the outline in such detail, I realize that, “Oh, yeah, I’d better get some info on djinns and machine pistols.” There’s no real momentum in an outline, so there’s nothing to break or interrupt. I expect the outline to be rather slow and tedious. I don’t mind stopping to go look stuff up. It means when I sit down to write the first draft that I can motor through it pretty quickly because all of the hard decisions and research have already been done. It also means that my first drafts are pretty clean, and don’t change a lot from first to final. (Note: there are always changes, whether brought about by me, suggestions from my agent, or my editor, but they usually aren’t of the “this whole section doesn’t work get rid of it” or “all of this needs to be rearranged” variety.)
I realize that there are writers who research big chunks of stuff before they ever start writing. Kat Richardson and Cherie Priest just embarked on a really interesting road trip that will help both of them with research on future projects. And that’s great, and definitely helps, and works for other writers. If you know your book is going to involve a character who’s a funeral director, go out and research the hell out of that business before you even get started. You’ll probably end up with more information than you’ll use, but that’s okay, and a perfectly valid way to operate.
There will still probably be stuff that crops up later that I didn’t expect, but the number of those pesky little incidents are definitely lessened compared to what would happen if I wrote shorter outlines or didn’t outline at all.
Charlie Stross is one of the smartest guys writing science fiction today (if you haven’t read any of his work, by all means run out and grab something! And please pay for it after you grab it.). He also writes a very interesting blog on which he discusses a fairly wide and eclectic variety of topics, from technology and politics to the craft of writing.
His recent few posts have been about the business side of writing. His latest post is about how books are sold. For anyone interested in how this works — what rights writers have, what rights they give up, and the details of an actual book contract with a publisher — should head on over and check it out.
Here is, for me, one of the key passages of his post that many people outside the biz simply don’t understand:
When you “sell your novel” to a major publisher (or even a small one), what you are actually selling is the right to reproduce the work in a variety of specified formats in the English language in certain designated territories for a specified duration. In return for signing the ten-to-fifteen page contract, you receive royalties, which may vary depending on the format and the volume of sales, usually based on the publisher’s net receipts from the work. You may also receive an advance against royalties: this is effectively a loan against the anticipated value of your future royalty earnings.
Note that sensible authors do not negotiate contracts themselves, unless they have a day job as an intellectual property lawyer; they go through a literary agent. Literary agents have a lot more experience of contractual negotiations in publishing than any author, usually have a contract lawyer on tap, and their relationship with the author is a symbiotic one: that is, they take a percentage of the author’s cut, so they have a vested interest in maximizing the author’s income. (SF author Tobias Buckell’s survey suggests that agented first novels receive advances that are on average nearly twice the size of unagented novels; the literary agent’s cut is typically 15%. This is one of the reasons why authors use agents.)
Hell yeah! That’s what I felt like shouting every couple of pages while reading Scott Lynch’s follow-up to his tour-de-force debut novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I reviewed here. If you haven’t read the first one yet, skip this review and run out and buy the damned thing right now!
