David R Slayton

Jun262011

And Then All Fell Down: This Year’s Hawthorne Moon Sneak Peek

An assassination costs Tris Drayke a key pillar of support for his shaky rule and a member of his family. Things in the Winter Kingdoms are getting worse, An invasion force led by a Dark Summoner had landed, and Tris must forge new alliances to save his people, throne, and the lives of his friends, wife, and child.

Gail Martin’s Fallen Kings Cycle concludes with more ancient spirits, magic, and intrigue with the Dread. Just reading the excerpt she released on twitter (@gailmartin) tells me she’s upping the stakes. Evil has the good guys on the ropes, and things seem at their bleakest before the conclusion.

If you’re new to the series, you can catch up in time, as the Dread won’t be released until February.

And when you’re ready for a teaser, click below to hear Gail read from the first chapter:

You can download this excerpt here.

Here’s a video of Gail describing her sneak peek event, the Hawthorne Moon, and how you can find excerpts, giveaways, and other goodies:

Visit Gail at her site, http://www.ascendantkingdoms.com to get started.

Jun182011

Plot as Engine: By the Hammer of …

This post is going to be pretty spoiler-ridden regarding Thor comics over the last several years.

Let’s just skip the movie for a moment and talk about the revitalized Thor comic. J. Michael Straczynski brought Thor back a few years ago, deftly displaying that he gets what makes mythological characters tick.

After a few necessary developments to bring Asgard back from Ragnorak, and cleverly dropping it in my home state of Oklahoma, Straczynski got on with the nifty plot twists: Loki’s return, his clever means of getting the more dubious Asgardians back on their feet, and his manipulation of time and Thor to put Balder on the throne were great reading.

We’ve moved on to other writers (most notably the talented Kieron Gillen) and seen combat and horror as Marvel’s Siege crossover centered on Asgard. After Siege we had a great trip to hell and a battle for the dead Asgardians’ very souls. Then came the most recent volume, the Worldeaters, and I felt like the series lost some steam.
Odin’s return and his reclamation of the throne from Balder felt forced. The status quo was largely reset to how things were before Ragnorak, and yet some excellent new ground was cleared and seeds sown for fresh stories.

I’m still reading as Thor once again became Journey into Mystery, and back to loving the scale and scope of the stories, but let’s focus on the bad for a moment. To set up some conflict in the next crossover, Marvel needed Thor, Odin and Asgard in certain positions to race them towards the next big event. The result will no doubt be compelling, but for a moment, the hood came up and we saw the gears of the plot moving.

It happens often. Sometimes plot necessitates a loss of story. Characters make a decision that feels disingenuous or unnatural for them. I don’t mean an act that forces them to go against their nature, which can be an important moment in their development, I mean a choice freely made. When it happens you recognize that the writer is manipulating things to bring about a certain outcome. The best analogy I can think of is watching a play. Rather than having the curtain go down for the stage to be rearranged, you catch the stage workers in the act. They intrude into the scene and start moving furniture while the curtain is still up. Your focus shifts entirely to them. Plot is an essential mechanic. Even the most literary book needs motion, for something to happen, but at the same time, obvious rearrangement and changes for the sake of the plot can throw the reader out of the story. It takes a careful hand to shoehorn in a game changing plot event in so short a medium as comics.

Jun172011

Kevin Hearne: A Fresh Voice in Urban Fantasy

“And the druids, they were into sex and death in an interesting night-time telly sort of way.” – Eddie Izzard

Atticus O’Sullivan is youthful in more than looks. A bit of a tree hugger and susceptible to the sexual charms of various Irish deities, Atticus is livelier than many urban heroes. Yet he’s also ancient, an immortal druid operating in modern Arizona. His magic is subtler than many urban heroes, giving him strong limitations that make his battles of a less certain outcome.

Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles get off to a rousing start with the first two books, Hounded and Hexed. I’ve happily burned through both. The series gives us some of the genre’s exhausted elements: vampires and werewolves, but they play third string to his use of less common tropes and get blended into Atticus’s well-developed supporting cast.

Hearne puts fresh spins on witches and gods without making them seem silly, as often happens when you try to update a cliché. Some immortals are better at blending into the modern world than others, giving them a nice contrast to Atticus, who poses successfully as an early twenty-something.

Little missteps, like a werewolf surprised by Atticus’s nudity after shape-changing can get overlooked when Hearne uses the scene for effective comedy. The mix of serious with light-heartedness is probably my favorite element of the series. I know I’m in for a fun ride without the constant weight of dire consequences that looms over so much epic fantasy.

The stakes are very personal for Atticus: threats are aimed at him, not the world, and I actually like seeing things toned down from the epic threat level of so much fantasy, though I don’t doubt that the looming conflict with a certain thunder god in the third book, Hammered, will take things to a higher level.

May152011

Great Expectations – So that’s what the Fuss is about

My experiment with audiobooks is paying dividends. Having gone through Treasure Island, I’ve turned to another classic I’ve long meant to read, Great Expectations. I finally understand why they assigned it in high school. I wasn’t a great student, something I still regret, and when they put Dickens on the lesson plan, I never saw the value in reading it. Mrs. Clark, wherever you are, I apologize. Great Expectations was boring. Too many details, too little story. I thought of the narrative as too stuffy and read Terry Pratchett and Roger Zelazny instead.

I’ve since learned that Great Expectations was a newspaper serial, which changes my perspective quite a bit. Some of the repetitive details and phrasing, for example, makes better sense when you know that readers may have gone a month without fresh material. I still don’t find that Dickens to work well in large blocks, like the hundred page weekly readings assigned in sophomore English. Taking it chapter by chapter, or in hour long listenings, creates a different experience. I’m even finding it funny, and I never expected that.

May62011

Lad Lit with Arrows

When I was young, I read a lot of what I tend to call lad lit: books for boys that usually involve runaways and survival. I was never a boy scout, but a rural upbringing imparted a lot of the skills you might associate with them. I could make a fire, fish, nock a bow, and identify a number of edible things in the woods. In my too rare camping trips I tend to surprise my friends, who think of me as way too urban to set up a tent or own a gun. While I live an urban life, I sometimes itch for a bit more of the self-sufficiency those stories imparted.

John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series fully embraces the style of old-fashioned lad lit I grew up with. His main character, Will, gets out of tough scrapes with the use of his training and endless self-discipline. With the help of his friends, he performs feats of heroism often worthy of fully grown knights, and keeps to his principles while often making friends of his enemies. At its core, Flanagan’s narrative embraces the idea that Rangers are a mysterious, solitary bunch, needing years of practice to become good at their craft; and Will never fails to disappoint when given a choice between taking the easy route or keeping to his training. Will’s key relationship is with his mentor, the grim-faced Halt, and this relationship keenly affects both master and apprentice. While Will is the main character, he’s far from the only important one. Flanagan switches point of view often, sometimes too much.

Written for a young audience, the books are a quick read for adults, and I ripped through the first four fairly quickly. The first book is mostly set up, with Will entering Halt’s tutelage. The plot of the first book is a bit secondary to setting the stage for the series and introducing us to Will’s world. By book two things are ready to go and the next three books end on cliffhangers and can be read as one.
Like a good series for young adults, themes slowly advance towards the mature, but always with an old-fashioned morality that I found refreshing. Though I was ready for the shift to PG when it came, I didn’t mind spending time in a less complicated worldview. Flanagan’s is a low to no magic world. Men are knights and warriors while women are diplomats and princesses. I’m so used to the female action hero trope that it was a little refreshing to get a break from it, though I was glad the character of Evalyn showed resolve and courage at every turn instead of being portrayed as some kind of delicate flower. The Rangers succeed by guile and clever tactics in a neat display of brains over brawn. Flanagan thinks his battles through, and I saw some old tricks like the false retreat turned on their head.

If you’re looking for a good kid’s book with a strong, moral protagonist, I recommend the Ranger’s Apprentice series, and I’d like to find a series with as much heart written for girls if you can recommend one.

Apr272011

Giving It A Listen

Despite my literature degree, there are plenty of classics I’ve never read. Some of them were never assigned. Many weren’t considered important, or they simply weren’t part of the canon. Often I found the same works assigned over and over. I’ve read Hamlet and the Iliad more often than I care to contemplate, while less serious books were never placed on the reading list. Worse still, I was a horrible high school student, so I glossed over Dickens and other books I should have read twenty years ago.

We can add to this problem that there’s a simple truth that education isn’t what it used to be. Nothing makes this plainer than opening my aged copy of the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Printed in the 1940s, it’s listed as a book for boys. It’s a problem that’s getting worse, as some curricula have dropped novels altogether.

It cannot be said often enough that reading widens the mind, and that the best means of becoming a better writer is to read. But knowing there’s a gap in my knowledge and filling it are two very different things. Sitting down with a classic book for an evening never makes my list of top priorities, so I’ve taken to audio books to try and make up some ground.

David Cordingly’s many references to Treasure Island put it at the top of my list to see if I can listen to a book and still analyze it. As I listen to the adventures of Jim Hawkins, I’m immediately struck by Stevenson’s approach to his narrative. Treasure Island has many of the traits and techniques of a good, modern young adult novel. First, there’s always action. We spend little time in unnecessary detail and much of it following Jim’s fight for his life. We’re dropped into the sailing vernacular without a glossary or explanation of terms. Stevenson avoids a pedantic approach. He’s not telling us a story to teach us about pirates, but instead lets events take their course at a quick pace. Jim, as a character, grows from cowering at a single pirate to boldly telling a roomful of them how he’s foiled their plots.

One inconsistency in the book is a brief point of view shift about halfway through. Stevenson needed this shift in order to fill us in on plot details Hawkins isn’t present for, but it does break up the overall flow of the narrative in a jarring way.

Listening to a book is a very different experience for me, but I find it does wonders for helping to tune my ear to pace and dialogue. Whenever I think things are slowing down, Stevenson inserts a plot twist, a betrayal or reversal of fortune. Like any book written in another age, the language is different. The pirates patois is coupled with outdated phrasing that makes a reader blink; but in a way this adds to the exotic air of the story as we’re not only looking at another culture but into another time as well.

Apr262011

The Pitfall of History

Your town, your family, your country: these all have a greater history than you’re aware of, than you can be aware of. Even the most learned scholar couldn’t uncover it all. Even in America, where our cities are striplings compared those of Europe, there is a far deeper past than what we can unearth. We see it in snapshots and glimpses, bits, really. The larger portrait of the past is simply lost to us. The present occupies its space, bumps up against it, paves it over. Recovering the past might be possible, but at the loss of the present and the history we’re currently writing together.

After thinking a lot about backstories, I turned my attention to fantastic history: the background of the worlds we write in, and I find it a bigger pitfall than even character backstory. There is so much background to a place, so much a writer could convey about the kingdom or empire where events are occurring. How much should they bring into a story? What’s the cut-off point for history and tangents? When we work at the epic level, the massive cycle spanning continents, dynasties, and centuries, the danger widens. So often a series can spin out of control. We end up spending hundreds of pages with characters the readers aren’t as invested in, merely because we can; and this sort of over-writing can keep a new author from publishing.

Older fantasy, like Tolkien, reads a lot like good history. Events transpire in the present, but the ancient past lurks around every corner. At some point fantasy became more action oriented, and I think this is a positive change in the genre. When comparing a more detailed book, like Tolkien, with a more action-oriented one, say Mistborn, there’s no doubt which one is more concerned with telling an entertaining story. Not that Tolkien isn’t entertaining, or even a page-turner, but the writing style is so far apart that you can almost consider them different genres. Both stories rely on some very ancient history to drive them, but only one is invested in sharing more of that history than is necessary to resolve its plot.

Maybe it’s a bit mercenary, but it seems that a modern book requires authors to use only the most essential elements of their worlds. Side trips into unnecessary characters, detail, and history aren’t given much real estate in the current publishing market. Hook your readers, keep the tension high, and move the story along with every chapter or you risk losing them. I cannot say if this shift is good or bad, but it is more apparent as I read more current books.

When you’re writing fantasy, in a world of your own making, you can easily become entranced with your creation. Unlike the real world, where the full history of any place is denied to posterity, you have the opportunity to dig as far back as you want. Each forest and island opens itself to you, and it has a story to tell. This history enriches the fictional world, but not necessarily the story you’re telling. The art lies in knowing what to reveal and what to hide. Your characters may be hiking through a wood which was the site of a crucial battle three thousand years ago, but unless the spirits of the dead soldiers are going to menace your heroes, or their discarded gear and burial mounds are going to provide compelling atmosphere, there’s little point in bringing in that history.

The further I examine genre fiction, and fantasy specifically, the more I develop a philosophy of balance. For so many of the elements I’ve written about, there is a golden mean, a right amount. They give your story flavor and your world heft, but you never want to overdo them. History is the same sort of element. Keep refining your craft until you’ve learned the exact dose.

Apr132011

We All Come from Somewhere, but Does Anybody Care?

Each of us carries a backstory. We share the details of our pasts with others. They pay attention depending on their investment in us, or how well we tell it. Or they don’t. Someone who wasn’t there, who didn’t share the experience, simply cannot feel it the way we did. The inherent challenge in sharing our history is to make it exciting. You can probably recall a time when someone told you a boring anecdote. Maybe they included too much detail or unnecessary tangents.

Fictional characters are much the same way: their background informs and shapes them. It helps to establish who they are. Often a characters’ past includes vital information, but writers can err and include backstory in large boring lumps that readers don’t want or need.

Fictional characters aren’t real people. Their psychological composition just isn’t as complex, no matter how well we write them. Yet this isn’t a lack. It actually gives writers an advantage. We can determine which parts of the character’s background aren’t yawn-inducing and which are compelling enough to be worth sharing. We can tweak a characters’ background to make it serve the story, and we can learn what to tell the reader or what to leave out.

Any piece written in third person narrative is a recount of the characters’ past. The narrator is looking back on events and telling us what happened. To the reader this recap seems to happen in real time. A sense of immediacy is crucial to pace and keeping things in motion. Backstory is important, but it should never be more compelling than the main tale. If the past is so juicy that it must interrupt the present action, then you’re probably starting the story in the wrong place.

This is one of those areas where a writer must be honest with their self. Much like that tale you’ve told on every first date, it might not be that funny or interesting to the other party. Look at the level of backstory you’re including. If an objective reading tells you it’s essential, consider if it deserves to be center stage. If it bores you, keep it to a minimum.

Apr32011

“The Book I’m Not Reading is Riveting” – Patty Larkin

As I prepare for another move, it’s time once again to sort, pack, and hopefully reduce the library. It’s that last bit that’s hard. I own a lot of books. Two liberal arts degrees and a lifetime of reading adds up. I have antique reference books, highlighted textbooks, first edition Margaret Atwoods, tacky paperbacks, graphic novels, loose comics, and everything in between.

I have a whole shelf of loaners that need to get read and go home; and another of blank journals that I may never fill (having long ago succumbed to typing everything in). While it has been suggested that much of this content could be transferred to the Kindle, and my inner minimalist does like that idea, I struggle with disposing of books, particularly those I may never read.

Is there anything sadder than an unread book? Probably not for its author. Just writing two practice books I could not publish was a little heartbreaking. Publishing and having your book flop must be doubly so. This touches on why we write, or at least why I write: which is to share and connect. You do a very private body of work when writing, then share it with people in the hope they’ll read, enjoy, and respond by wanting more.

Even a textbook contributor wants her book read. Every review, negative or positive, must sting or lift, especially until you’re sure you have an audience. That makes every unread book on my shelf something of a promise: a commitment on my part to connect with that author. Dead or alive, they put something out there for me to read; and at some point I had a reason to read it. Maybe someone gifted it to me. Perhaps a professor was trying to instill some knowledge, or on a whim I thought the cover was well designed. So I’m packing up the unread books and bringing them along where they will rest on their shelf as I whittle down their numbers and they get replenished.

Apr22011

Green Shoots and Spring Fever

Winter in Colorado comes and goes. We get storms, but the mountains usually do a great job of walling the snow away from the city. When storms do scale the Rockies, they’re often gentle. I woke Monday to a slushy snowfall that gave the city a much needed bath and hopefully doused the fires that have been threatening so many homes out on the plains.

I usually disdain talking about the weather, but I was struck by the contrast of soft snow on budding trees and fresh shoots poking up through the blanketing white. I love the way snow quiets the city, muting the sounds of cars and traffic. I just wish it inspired me.

Spring is a strange, contrasting time for my writing. While everything around me is budding with life, I tend to find myself withdrawing, curling up inside and waiting to work. Fall inspires me the most, and there are long stretches in that season when

I can’t break away from the keyboard; but spring makes me contemplative, a little depressed, and I have to force a balance between breaks and productivity if I’m going to write a good book I can sell.

I have a deadline I’ve set myself. It’s an important component of the self-discipline I’m developing for the day when I am published and my deadlines come from without.

It helps to remember that forcing myself to write when I don’t really want to has produced some of my best work. I have to push myself to be engaged, and it often pays off. I’ve delivered a nice chunk of my work in progress to my critique group, and their feedback gives me something to chew through while I wait for inspiration to light.

I’ve often written about the need for continual improvement, but not enough on the topic of continual work. The comparison that stands the strongest as I look back on my thoughts on the topic is the gym: once you’re out of the habit, it’s hard to get back to doing it every day; but it’s important for your writing health. Just like muscles, your craft can atrophy. So keep to it, even if you’d rather stare out the window at the coming spring.

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