The Library of Dresan – Page 55 – Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis

TWELVE HOURS LATER

Published March 20, 2015 by centaur

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I'm super stoked to announce that Jeremiah Willstone, my favorite steampunk heroine and protagonist of my forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, will be appearing in two stories in the TWELVE HOURS LATER anthology!

Created by the wonderful folks at the Clockwork Alchemy writer's track, this anthology features twenty four short stories each focusing on a single hour of the day. My two stories are 3AM - "The Hour of the Wolf" - and 3PM - "The Time of Ghosts".

Here's a taste of what happened on Halloween of 1897 … at 3AM, the hour of the wolf:

Jeremiah Willstone ran full tilt down the alley, the clockwork wolf nipping at her heels.

Her weekend had started pleasantly enough: an evening’s liberty from the cloisters of Liberation Academy, a rattling ride into the city on a battered old mechanical caterpillar—and eluding the proctors for a walking tour of Edinburgh with a dish of an underclassman.

Late that night—or, more properly early Halloween morning—the couple had thrown themselves down on the lawn of the park, and his sweet-talk had promised far more than this ersatz picnic of woven candies and braided sweets; but before they’d found a better use for their Victoria blanket … Jeremiah’s eyes got them in trouble.

“Whatever is that?” she asked, sighting a glint running along the edge of the park.

“Just a rat,” Erskine said, proferring her another twisted cinnamon scone.

“Of brass?” Jeremiah asked, sitting up. “With glowing eyes, I note—”

Uh-oh! What have our heroes found? And what will happen later … at 3PM, the time of ghosts?

Half a mile under Edinburgh Castle, lost in a damp warren of ancient masonry lit only by his guttering candle, Navid Singhal-Croft, Dean of Applied Philosophy at Liberation Academy, wished he’d paid more attention to the ghost stories his cadets whispered about the tunnels.

Of course, that was his own fault: he led the college of sciences at the premiere military academy in the Liberated Territories of Victoriana, and he’d always thought it his duty to drum ghost stories out of the young men and women who were his charges, not to memorize them.

Now was the time, but where was the place? A scream echoed in the dark, very close—and eerily familiar. Shielding his candle with one hand, Navid ran through crumbling brick and flickering light, desperate to find his father before the “ghost” claimed another victim.

If he couldn’t rescue his father … Navid might never be born.

DUN DUN DUNNN! What's going to happen? You'll have to buy the anthology to find out!

Stay tuned to find out where to purchase it! I'm assuming that will be "everywhere".

Prevail, Victoriana!

-Anthony

Dakota Frost and the Copyedit of Doom

Published March 20, 2015 by centaur

At long last, LIQUID FIRE is on its way to production at Bell Bridge Books!

This was a particularly difficult copyedit - not because the copyeditor was demanding anything particularly weird, but because a misunderstanding on the style guide led to an edit with five thousand annotations.

At one point working with the PDF, I was zooming in the text 200% to try to see what the copyeditors did, and even when what they were suggesting was clear, the number of edits caused everything to jump around crazily.

Finally I had to ask Bell Bridge to send me a .DOC file, so I could use Microsoft Word's superior tools. I was quickly able to identify 2,500 of the edits as being completely correctable - ellipses and spellings and such - and started a style guide.

Many of the rest were simple things like the Oxford comma, which we had a style change on. Counting these took us down to about a thousand edits.

Most of those thousand were minor changes which I readily accepted. The copyeditors had different suggestions than me on things like the use of the colon, which I often accepted, and paragraph breaks, which I generally did not.

But there was one particular thing - a replacement of the colon with the dash in sentences that already had the dash, which irked me intuitively, and which also turned out to violate the very Chicago Manual of Style rule the CE was citing.

Because we'd gone back and forth on this so much, what I finally sent back to Bell Bridge was a document with 200 tracked changes - mostly, the copyeditor's comments with extensive responses from me on what CMOS rules I was citing.

(We also had changes to Cinnamon Frost's broken English, contributed by the linguist Keiko O'Leary who helped me develop Cinnamon's dialect; but these were largely nonproblematic).

Debra and the copyeditors accepted these with few changes - but still sent a document back with over forty comments. At this point, even if I didn't agree with them, I took the changes very seriously.

A lot of their remaining suggestions violated some of the "rules" that I write by. But those are not hard and fast rules - and the fact that Debra critiqued them told me that, regardless of my "rules", the particular text at hand simply wasn't doing the job.

I accepted most of these comments. I rejected a small handful of others. And in a few cases, I took Debra's suggestions and solved them a different way, with a larger rewrite which just made the whole problem she saw just go away.

The manuscript I sent back to them had 30 comments or changes. By my count, it was close to the 130th distinct numbered version of the LIQUID FIRE manuscript that I've worked on.

Debra accepted it and sent it on to production on Thursday.

That was a good day.

Now on to the edit of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE!

-the Centaur

Copyediting in Process

Published March 9, 2015 by centaur

Copyediting of LIQUID FIRE is in process. Please hang in there. That is all.

-the Centaur

P.S. Remember to breathe.

Oasis

Published March 3, 2015 by centaur

One of the roles conferences fulfill in my life is a chance to recharge. I'm driven to pursue writing, art, comics, software, entrepreneurship, publishing, movies - but I was raised to be responsible, so I have an equally demanding day job that pays the bills for all these activities until such time that they can pay for themselves.

Sometimes I describe this as having four jobs - my employment (search engines and robots), writing (primarily the Dakota Frost and Jeremiah Willstone series), comics (mostly related to 24 Hour Comic Day through Blitz Comics), and publishing (Thinking Ink Press, a new niche publisher trying to get awesome things into your hands).

Having four jobs means that you sometimes want to take a break.

That's really difficult if you don't have an excuse. There are literally hundreds of items on my to-do list that I could work on right now, all day and all night. If I finish one, a dozen more are clamoring for my attention - and that's not counting the time I want to spend with my wife, friends, and cats, or the time I need to spend on exercise, bills and laundry.

But a few oases exist.

Layovers in airports are one of those: I deliberately arrange for long layovers, because between plane flights you have nothing else to do other than grab a bite and a drink in an airport restaurant, chill out, and read something. True, I often work on writing during layovers, but it's big-picture stuff, researchy, looking at the picture on a scale larger than I normally do.

Conferences are even better. Whether it's GDC, AAAI, Dragon Con, Comic Con or Clockwork Alchemy, conferences are filled with new information, interesting books, even more interesting people, which spark my imagination - right at the time that I'm in an enforced multi-day or even week-long break from my schedule.

For a long time, conferences have been a great time to pull out the laptop and/or notebook to write or sketch. The idea for the Jeremiah Willstone series started after I saw some great steampunk costumes at Dragon Con; I sold the Dakota Frost series after Nancy Knight saw me writing at Dragon Con and pointed me to my editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books.

More recently, I've been adding to this the power of ruts. This is something that I need to expand at greater length, but suffice it to say I used to think I simply had to do something different every day, every week, every month. I used to keep lists of restaurants and tried to make sure that I never went to the same one two days in a row, trying new ones periodically.

But then I noticed that I really enjoyed certain things, but didn't always fully take advantage of them because of this strategy - great places to eat, cool coffee houses, and nice bookstores that I simply didn't visit often enough. Often, on top of this strategy, my schedule would change, making it hard to visit them - or worse, they'd go out of business, and those opportunities were lost.

So I've started cultivating habits - ruts - to do the things that I like. Not too frequently - you don't want to burn out on them - but if you do the same thing all the time, then you can be free to miss it any time. Even better, if you find a great thing that's efficient - like a place to eat near work, with a late night coffee house conducive to writing - take advantage of it regularly.

Because one day it may be gone.

At conferences, I employ this strategy with a series of life hacks - go to breakfast before the conference to up your energy level and organize your thoughts, pick the best breakfast place for writing and reading, break for lunch at 11:30 to 11:45 to miss the lunch rush, and also find the best place where there are no lines and concentration can be had.

At GDC, I've found a good set of hotels near the conference, a few good breakfast joints on the walk to the Moscone Center and a few places to eat slightly off the beaten path that are pretty empty just before noon - and I hit these places again and again, pulling out my notebook and tackling problems which are really big picture for me, mostly related to future game projects.

At Dragon Con I do similar things - hitting the Flying Biscuit breakfast joint that appears in Dakota Frost, getting coffee at the Starbucks in the Georgia Tech Bookstore, hitting the Willy's lunch counter that inspired the Jeremiah Willstone story "Steampunk Fairy Chick," et cetera, et cetera; and at each one I pull out the notebook and work on big picture story ideas.

These places are real oases for me: a break within a break, a special place set aside for thinking within a special time already set aside for recharging. Because of how human memory works, sometimes I can even pull out a notebook (or an older notebook), find my place from last year, and pick up where I left off, plotting my future in an oasis of creative contentment.

This, of course, is my strategy, that works for me - but it works so well, I encourage you to find a strategy that works for you too.

-the Centaur

Meanwhile, Back at GDC

Published March 2, 2015 by centaur

View from my hotel in San Francisco. It may seem strange to get a hotel for a conference in San Francisco when I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the truth is that I "live in the Bay Area" only by a generous border-case interpretation of "Bay Area" (we're literally on the last page of the 500-page Bay Area map book that I bought when i came out here). The trip from my house to the Moscone Center in the morning is two to two and a half hours - you could drive from Greenville, SC to Atlanta, Georgia in that time, so by that logic I should have commuted from home to Georgia Tech. So. Not. Going. To. Happen.

So why am I heading to the Moscone Center this week? The Game Developer's Conference, of course. At the request of my wife, I may not directly blog from wherever it is that I am, so I'll be posting with a delay about this conference. So far, I've attended the AI Game Programmer's Guild dinner Sunday night, which was a blast seeing old friends, meeting new ones, renewing friendships, and talking about the robot apocalypse and the future of artificial intelligence research. GDC is a blast even if you don't directly program games, because game developers are constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible - so I try not to miss it. I've been coming for roughly 15 years now - and already have close to 15 pages of notes. Good stuff.

One thing does occur to me, though, about games and "Gamer Gate." If you're into games, you may or may not have heard of the Gamer Gate controversy; some people claim it's about corruption in games journalism, while others openly state it's motivated by the invasion of gaming by so-called "social justice warriors" who are trying to destroy traditional male-oriented games in favor of thinly disguised social commentary. Still others suspect that the entire controversy is a manufactured excuse for misogynists to abuse women in games - and there's evidence that shows that at least some miscreants are doing just that.

But let's go back to the first reason, ethics in games journalism. I can't really speak to this from the inside, but in the circles in which I've been playing games for the past thirty-five years, no one cares about game reviews. Occasionally we use game magazines to find neat screenshots of new games, but, seriously - everything is word of mouth.

What about the second, the "invasion of social justice warriors?" I can speak about this: in the circles that I've traveled in the game industry in the past fifteen years, no one cares about this controversy. At GDC, women who speak about games are much more likely to be speaking about technical issues like constraint systems and procedural content generation than they are about social issues - and men are as likely as women to speak about women's issues or the treatment of other minorities.

These issues are important issues - but they're not big issues. Out of a hundred books in the conference bookstore, perhaps a dozen were on social issues, and only two of those dealt with women's culture or alternative culture. But traditional games are going strong - and are getting bigger and better and brighter and more vibrant as time goes along.

People like the games they like, and developers build them. No-one is threatened by the appearance of a game that breaks traditional stereotypes. No-one imagines that popular games that appeal to men are going to go away. All we really care about is make it fun, make it believable, finish it in a reasonable time and something approximating a reasonable budget.

Look, I get it: change is scary. And not just emotionally; these issues run deep. At a crowd simulation talk today, a researcher showed that you can mathematically measure a person's discomfort navigating in crowds - and showed a very realistic-looking behavior where a single character facing a phalanx of oncoming agents turned tail and ran away.

But this wasn't an act of fear; it was an act of avoidance. The appearance of an onrushing wall of people made that straightforward algorithm, designed to prove to the agent that it wouldn't run into trouble, choose a path that went the other way. An agent with more options to act might have chosen to lash out - to try to force a path.

But none of that was necessary. A slightly more sophisticated algorithm, based on study of actual human crowd behavior, showed that if an agent choose to boldly go forward into a space which slightly risked collisions, avoiding a bit harder if people got too close, worked just as well. It was easily able to wade through the phalanx - and the phalanx smoothly moved around it.

The point is that many humans don't want to run into things that are different. If the oncoming change is big enough, the simplest path may involve turning tail and running away - and if you don't want to run away, you might want to lash out. But it isn't necessary. Step forward with confidence moving towards the things that you want, and people will make space for you.

Yes, change is coming.

But change won't stop game developers from making games aimed at every demographic of fun. Chill out.

-the Centaur

P.S. Yes, it is a bit ridiculous to refer to a crowd avoidance algorithm that can mathematically prove that it avoids collision as "simple", and it's debatable whether that system, ORCA, which is based on linear programming over a simplification of velocity obstacles, is really "simpler" than the TTC force method based on combining goal acceleration with avoidance forces derived from a discomfort energy gradient defined within a velocity obstacle. For the sake of this anecdote, ORCA shows slightly "simpler" behavior than TTC, because ORCA's play-it-safe strategy causes it to avoid areas of velocity space that TTC will try, leading to slightly more "sophisticated" crowd behaviors emerging naturally in TTC based systems. Look up http://motion.cs.umn.edu/PowerLaw if you want more information - this is an anecdote tortured into an extended metaphor, not a tutorial.

Working Hard, Working Smart

Published March 1, 2015 by centaur

I had planned to post a bit about my work on the editing of LIQUID FIRE, but this image in my Google+ photo stream caught my eye first, so you get a bit of opinionating about work instead.

Previously, I've blogged about working just a little bit harder than you want to (here, and here), the gist being that you don't need to work yourself to death, but success often comes just after the point where you want to give up.

But how do you keep yourself working when you want to quit?

One trick I've used since my days interning with Yamaha at Japan is an afternoon walk. Working on a difficult problem often makes you want to quit, but a short stint out in the fresh air can clear the decks.

Other people use exercise for the same purpose, but that takes such a large chunk out of my day that I can't afford to do it - I work four jobs (at my employer, on writing, at a small press and on comics) and need to be working at work, damnit.

But work sometimes needs to bleed out of its confines. I've found that giving work a little bit extra - checking your calendar before you go to bed, making yourself available for videoconferences at odd hours for those overseas - really helps.

One way that helps is to read about work outside of work. What I do frequently pushes the boundaries of my knowledge, and naturally, you need to read up on things at work in order to make progress.

But you also know the general areas of your work, and can proactively read ahead in areas that you think you'll be working on. So I've been reading on programming languages and source control systems and artificial intelligence outside work.

Now, not everyone reads at lunch, dinner, coffee and just before bedtime - maybe that's just me - but after I committed to starting my lunch reading with a section of a book that helped at work, all of my work started going faster and faster.

Other tricks you can use are playing music, especially with noise canceling headphones so you can concentrate - I find lyric-free music helps, but your mileage may vary. (I often listen to horror movie music at work, so I know mileage varies).

Another thing you can do, schedule permitting, is taking a week out to sharpen the saw and eliminate blockers in your common tools so everything goes faster. I recently started documenting this when I did it and that helped too.

One more thing you can try is inverse procrastination - cheat on one project you really need to do by working on another project you really need to do. You use different resources on different projects, and switching gears can feel like taking a break.

Quitting time is another technique; I often make a reservation at a nice restaurant at the end of my workday, and use the promise of going out to dinner to both motivate me to work efficiently and as a reward for a job well done (I tell myself).

Some people use caffeine to power through this - and sometimes I even describe myself as a caffeine powered developer - but I've seen a developer stop in shock at their trembling hands, so beware stimulants. But at quitting time? That hits the spot.

Oh, and the last thing? Use a different channel. My wife is a painter … and listens to audiobooks ten to twelve hours a day. I'm a writer and programmer … so I doodle. Find a way to keep yourself engaged and going … just a little bit longer.

-the Centaur

I’m Not Dead

Published February 28, 2015 by centaur

Seems like I need to post these once in a while … I am, indeed, not dead.

Since finishing National Novel Writing Month last year, I've all but disappeared from this blog. Those who follow Dakota Frost on social media know at least part of the story: I've been working on LIQUID FIRE, Skindancer #3, and have just sent it off to copyedits after several rounds with my editor, Debra Dixon (who helped me make it a much better book).

That's not the only thing going on - I was also working on two stories for an unannounced project in the Jeremiah Willstone universe, desperately trying to finish a novella in the same universe, and working my ass off at the Search Engine That Starts with A G on a new project which I can't talk about at all other than that it's awesome.

Add to that working with Thinking Ink Press on the upcoming release of The Parent's Guide to Perthes, with the Write to the End group on various other projects, with my friend Nathan Vargas on his M-Theory system, and my wife on her art projects, and it's been a hell of a busy time.

But, yes, there were a few rounds of illness: more than one cold from air travel and food poisoning and some general bouts of the blehs - a week-long vacation is a GREAT time to catch up on that illness you've been putting off. A hell of a lot of that has been going around this year - I can think of a probably ten people who were out over the last few months.

I do worry about winter illnesses: my father used to get sick around the end of each year, and we thought it would eventually kill him. But it never did. And he stopped exercising from back pain, heart disease and long before the end. In contrast, I'm fine, healthy, exercising, recently taking in four hours of hiking with my wife in Monterey:

So, to recap: not dead, just busy.

-the Centaur

Viiiictory, Ten Times

Published November 26, 2014 by centaur

Yaay! Once again, I have completed National Novel Writing Month … this will be my 10th successful Nano. I've only been doing it 9 years, but this year, I started tackling Nano more often - in April and August. April was a success, but August I found I wanted to do more editing than writing, so I've officially succeed at Nano just 10 times out of the 11. November Nano 2014-11-26a.png

I'll let the August one slide, as it was really ambitious (and I also really try to reserve the time leading up to October for preparation for 24 Hour Comics Day) but when November rolls around, I get serious. This is the time all of my novels are born, and when I see a month start off with the kind of deficit you see above, I get cracking. November Nano 2014-11-26.png

I'm so serious about this, I take the whole week of Thanksgiving off every year just to work on this (something that is easier because my family is a rough plane ride back over Thanksgiving, and I see them every Christmas). But you know what? I want to enjoy my Thanksgiving … so I really poured on the juice near the end. Screenshot 2014-11-26 15.09.24.png

The National Novel Writing Month site has some awesome word tracking tools, but I often turn off the Internet during Nano, and so I have developed my own Excel spreadsheet specifically for this purpose, which shows me, graphically, how much I need to write to get on track. Cells turn from red to white as I successfully get ahead of the game, and so by the end I was pushing 3-4000 words a day, trying to finish early. And I did, yesterday afternoon, at Panera Bread near my house.

PHANTOM SILVER is one of the oddest books I've worked on yet. The plot has taken many strange twists and turns, including some that popped out of a deep harvest of some of the older material in my massive cuttings file. It's also turning into a deeply personal story, as my exploration of ghosts has led to an exploration of my characters' ghosts, and, by extension, since my characters are often based on me and my family … I am exploring the ghosts of my own friends and family as well.

This picture was taken standing quite close to my father's grave (not visible in the picture) and while my father won't picture in the story … I'm having fun exploring Dakota Frost's background, since she came from a (fictional) place in the South that is literally right up the street from where I grew up in real life. But, as fun as it is … I'm glad to be done with this chunk. Already (since yesterday) I've finished a first draft of a short story in the Jeremiah Willstone universe (due at the end of December, for a Clockwork Alchemy special anthology) and I look forward to diving back into the editing of LIQUID FIRE, which is going *very* well. Hopefully you'll see it soon. No excerpts on PHANTOM SILVER, though; there are too many horrible spoilers for other books. You'll have to wait on this one, and I know it will be a while, because SPECTRAL IRON and LIQUID FIRE and HEX CODE must come first; till next time. -the Centaur

Within Striking Distance

Published November 22, 2014 by centaur

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8 and a half days to go, 11K words remaining. Looks like we are going to do this… oh, an excerpt. Hard to summarize this one, there's so many spoilers for parts of books that aren't out yet:

“Most of the universe is made up of stuff that’s completely invisible,” Doug said. “Matter that we can’t see, holding the galaxies together; energy we can’t feel, pushing them apart. What if there’s a dark magic underpinning the world—undetectable, but influencing everything?”

Till next time.

-Anthony

P.S. DOORWAYS is still on sale. Go buy it lots.

DOORWAYS is on sale!

Published November 21, 2014 by centaur

DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME, the anthology I edited with Trisha Wooldridge, is now on sale for 99 cents on Kindle! What a deal! If you ever wanted to know what would happen if you got an extra hour in the day, now's your chance! And apparently this has done well enough for the anthology that it's bubbled up in the Kindle lists:

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Any day where something I wrote or edited is running neck and neck with Ray Bradbury is a good day.

-the Centaur

It’s Nano, and I’ve been busy…

Published November 19, 2014 by centaur

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… working on Dakota Frost #5: PHANTOM SILVER. What's this one about? Well, the first paragraph says it all:

“Tell me, Dakota Frost,” intoned the squat fae gargoyle, leaning forward, his wide stone face looming until his hooked nose took up nearly the whole of the Skype window on the screen of my shiny new MacBook Pro. “Have you ever thought of becoming an exorcist?”

As you can see, I've been busy catching up from a slow start:

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Between travel, food poisoning, and catchup on work and editing LIQUID FIRE, it took me until almost the 9th until I got on track, and even then I think it was the Night of Writing Dangerously that got me back on track.

More on that later. Caught up on my word count today, and am even a day ahead, but I gotta go to work.

-the Centaur

And we’re off!

Published November 1, 2014 by centaur

National Novel Writing Month is here again. For those who are just joining the party, it's a challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November - and it's also the event which finally broke through my creative barriers, helping me at last produce a complete publishable novel. I've done it eight times in the past:

2002: DELIVERANCE (Frontiersmanship series #1, as yet unpublished)
2007: FROST MOON (Dakota Frost series #1, published by Bell Bridge Books 2010)
2008: BLOOD ROCK (Dakota Frost series #2, published by Bell Bridge Books 2011)
2009: LIQUID FIRE (Dakota Frost series #3, forthcoming from Bell Bridge, 2014)
2010: JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (Jeremiah Willstone series #1, forthcoming from Bell Bridge est. 2014)
2011: HEX CODE (Cinnamon Frost series #1, manuscript in progress)
2012: MAROONED (Serendipity series #1, manuscript in progress)
2013: SPECTRAL IRON (Dakota Frost series #4 manuscript in progress, estimated submission 2014)

and now 2015: PHANTOM SILVER, which will be Dakota Frost #5. I'm planning on focusing on Dakota for a while now, trying to get books 4-6 to Debra (and my fans) so that they have six books in their hands, hopefully enough to tide them over while I get Cinnamon Frost, Jeremiah Willstone and Serendipity out the door.

I could say more about Nano, or do link salsa to the text above to provide references. But I'm not. I'm going to get back to writing; it's already 10pm on Saturday November 1, and I'm only about 500 words in, when I need almost 1700. Arr, back to work, ye scurvy writer dawgs! It's Nano time!

-the Centaur

Pictured: a creepy Halloween cat at a nearby hardware store, thematic because I'm shooting for a slightly creepier Dakota Frost tale this time around, focusing mostly on ghosts.

The IRONHAND Triathlon

Published October 4, 2014 by centaur

So, it's coming on like a freight train: the IRONHAND Triathlon, the new evolution of 24-Hour Comics Day that Nathan Vargas and I are hosting at the Alternative Press Expo October 4-5. Actually, it came on so fast, and I had to do so much to prepare for it, that when I had a little trouble finishing this blogpost, the actual event came up before I got back to it!

APE is held at Fort Mason this year, and they gave us a space in the back provided by ComicsPRO, the comics retailer's association. The tables were all right, but once Nathan, my partner in Blitz Comics, arrived and took a look at the scene, he put some thought into it and rearranged the space to make it more inviting.

The end result is that our yellow tables made an arrow pointing at the Blitz logo, and there was now a central entry space where Nathan could put information designed to guide creators to "drop in" at the event.

We had seven people signed up for the event, which we marked with nametags. Not all those people showed up, but many did, and we had a sizable table of people tackling at least one leg of the IRONHAND Triathlon.

The pure 24 Hour Comic Day experience is unbroken - 24 pages in 24 hours, with no preplanning or preparation. But Fort Mason closes at 7, so we had to break up the event into three shifts of 8 hours each, the first at Fort Mason and the two latter ones nearby. But once we split it up, we decided to evolve the event further, and to encourage everyone to just drop in and draw!

After some iterations on the signage, Nathan hit on "Creator's Drop In Area" and enough messaging so people knew how to use the space. At the end, we had artists dropping in to draw without us having to explain anything, and I got to kick back at our table and draw and shoot the breeze with Marco of ComicsPRO and with Nathan.

The event was a big success, and we then moved to the Sandbox Suites for the latter half of the event. We were a bit worried as we only had two people join for the overnight session (and one of those got lost in a bus snafu) but after a while we started to have more and more people drop in.

We had the place to ourselves, so creators spread out over a few different rooms. I think we succeeded in creating a creative oasis for our creators, as some who had left earlier made it a point to come back and join us.

More people joined in the IRONHAND Triathlon remotely, so Nathan is hard at work on the winners certificates, which will have laminated pieces added to them, one for each of the segments of the Triathlon they completed.

We're still chugging away, with Paxti's pizza about to arrive, so I think I'm going to close this blogpost and get back to it. I may not be doing 24 Hour Comic Day this time - I did it last week - but I want all of our creators to be happy. Excelsior! -Anthony

Eight Years Plus Four

Published September 19, 2014 by centaur

My wife and I just celebrated 8 years of marriage and 12 years together … we married on almost precisely the fourth anniversary of our first meeting, and it's been a lot of fun!

I can't tell you how blessed I feel to be married to a beautiful and talented artist. And one who puts up with me and my crazy shenanigans … and encourages them!

Thank God for our marriage; here's to another 8 times 12 years more …

-the Centaur

P.S. If you're reading this, Boobie … I love you!

Taking it Easy

Published August 28, 2014 by centaur

I am in Atlanta now. What am I doing? Well, tomorrow at Dragon Con, John Hartness has graciously let me crash his reading at 1pm on Friday in the Hyatt Roswell room; then I plan on attending the Bell Bridge Books spotlight on Saturday at 2:30pm at the Hyatt Embassy room, and Monday at 11:30a in the Westin Augusta III room I will be moderating a panel on Victorian Technology.

But for now? I'm hanging with friends in Atlanta. Taking it easy...

-the Centaur

Appearing at Dragon Con, Just a Little Bit

Published August 24, 2014 by centaur

I will be at Dragon Con this year, moderating a panel on Victorian Technology at Monday at 11:30am:

Technology of the Victorian era and how to exploit it in your stories or imagination!
We'll discuss what technology the Victorians actually used and how it changed their world. We'll also highlight inventions that should have changed the world but didn't!

Monday at 11:30a in Augusta III

Anthony Francis (Moderator), Jean Marie Ward, Stephanie Osborn, Shay Mohn, Stephen Chapman

As usual, I will probably appear at the Writer's Track, though those appearances are always fluid.

For the rest of the time, since I have no publications to announce at Dragon Con - my comics work being announced at Comic-Con and APE, and the work to do that is more than enough effort to consume all available time - I plan on enjoying the con, hanging out with friends, meeting up with the Dragon Writers, and remembering Ann Crispin.

More news as it happens, if it happens.

-Anthony

Resurrecting Fanu Fiku

Published August 1, 2014 by centaur

SO, I have this webcomic some of you may know about, f@nu fiku (that's Fanu Fiku, stylized with an @ sign, because aren't I oh so clever :-P). f@nu fiku is about Xiao Dreamweaver, a fifteen year old girl who can travel between all possible combinations of all possible realities … only she doesn't know it yet. What you may or may not know is that this webcomic is cursed.

Early on working on f@nu fiku, I broke my arm in a karate match, forcing me to use guest artists and rough notebook scans for several months. I blogged that extensively, but what I did NOT blog - because it was too disruptive - was the failure of the computer and theft of the notebooks on which I did f@nu fiku.

Back then, I produced f@nu fiku on this great Windows laptop, but eventually its cooling fan gave up the ghost, and I decided - purely as an experiment - to try out an old Macintosh laptop that I had gotten in a clearance sale, since I already used a Mac at work. Four days in to this new laptop, I attended an art show in San Francisco - and my car was broken into.

Many books were stolen. My personal laptop was stolen. One of my writing notebooks was stolen, including the one with the original outline of the Dakota Frost series. My f@nu fiku sketchbook - in which I created the pages - was stolen. None of this was ever returned, of course, but I retained all the data, I had all the scans, and in theory I could easily have resumed the comic.

Only one problem: the laptop was stolen before I realized I couldn't produce f@nu fiku on the Mac.

I edited f@nu fiku in Corel Painter (a creditable replacement for Adobe Photoshop) and lettered it in Xara (a powerful, but much easier to use version of Adobe Illustrator). Corel Painter exists for the Mac … but Xara does not. At the time, I was completely inexperienced at Adobe Illustrator, and found working on the comic extremely difficult.

What's worse, at the time the Mac's support for Python wasn't so hot. I wrote the f@nu fiku webcomic software myself, but found that it adapted poorly to the Macintosh, requiring a partial rewrite of the image processing layer. I eventually got the software running, but by this point FROST MOON was taking off, and without meaning to, I let f@nu fiku drop.

Fast forward more than half a decade. I'm more committed than ever to Dakota Frost, but I'm also more involved than ever with the comic community - with Blitz Comics on the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide, and with our umbrella organization, Thinking Ink Press. At Comic-Con, I got energized, and decided that I should resurrect f@nu fiku, perhaps even in print form.

At first it seemed impossible. Many originals were gone. Some of the completed art was corrupted. And all of the art was way, way too low resolution to be printed. It was depressing. And in truth, this is the real state I've been for the past few years on f@nu fiku: too depressed about it to come back to it, regardless of how much time I had. And I started to give up hope.

But it is a half a decade later, and I've learned to never give up hope. This was a hard won lesson: when I left the PhD program, I despaired of ever using my degree. Well, it took ten years, but eventually I returned to that work … and now, I'm using those skills more than ever. Over time, I've learned that the more patient and perseverant I become, the more I am rewarded.

So, when I started to lose hope … I really had just forgotten how paranoid I am about backups, and soon found the original scans AND backup copies of the completed art. And I had just forgotten how perseverant I have become, and how much I have changed my thinking about solving problems just like this one. And soon, after a little thought, I found a way to get high resolution images.

As before, I had a spare laptop lying around - this time a Windows 8 machine, that I'd tried as a replacement for the Mac (and quickly discarded for that purpose, though it isn't really bad). And IT will run Xara, and IT could load all my old f@nu fiku files. I don't know whether I'll try to save these as Illustrator files, now that I'm comfortable with it, but regardless, I now have a way.

I almost always find that if you think something's impossible, you're thinking about it the wrong way … and a solution awaits you nearby. I don't have to solve the nearly impossible problem of getting Xara to run on the Mac (I have tried virtual machines, but they were virtually impossible to use) but just the far simpler problem of using Xara on a PC to dump high-res images.

Now, I have almost 60 issues of f@nu fiku backlogged … more than a year's worth, almost ready to go. It will take me some time to get all of them beaten into shape, to rework the fanufiku.com site, to get set up on tapastic and get a posting schedule going. But it will be worth it: it will not only break this creative logjam, it will help me prepare for new comic projects, like Quarry.

So don't give up hope. It's just an excuse - just a way to give yourself license to wallow in self pity and to fall into inaction. Often enough, the files are saved on backup, the original scans are on disk, and there's a laptop laying around somewhere, waiting for the software to be installed on it that will give you the power to resurrect something you thought long dead.

You just have to have a little faith, and work a little harder.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the Windows laptop, with Page 1 of f@nu fiku successfully loaded in Xara.

Mission Accomplished, Part 1 of N

Published July 25, 2014 by centaur

A year ago Nathan said he wanted to be on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, and to shake the hand of Scott McCloud, creator of the 24-Hour Comics Day challenge. I told Nathan the first goal would happen but was ambitious, that it might take us a few years, but that he'd certainly meet Scott if he set his mind to it.

What neither I nor Nathan ever expected is that not only is Nathan going to be on a panel, not only did he meet Scott McCloud, we together gave Scott a signed copy of the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide. And not just any copy of the guide: Scott got the #1 of a limited print run of 100 done as a Comic-Con Preview Edition.

And we got to listen to a very nice talk by Scott too.

Nathan's appearing - along with Nate Gertler, Chris Brady, Jimmy Purcell, and Marco Devanzo on Friday at 5:15 in Room 18 to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of 24-Hour Comics Day. I'll be in the audience, and the two of us will have (roughly) fifty copies of the Guide which we plan to give to all the participants.

Excellent … it's all falling into place.

So … what should we put on the agenda to do next year?

-the Centaur

Pictured: From left to right: Nathan, Scott, and me. How am I taller than Scott? I always imagined him as ten feet tall..

My Presence at San Diego Comic-Con 2014

Published July 24, 2014 by centaur

The submarine surfaces, oh so briefly. So, between work, writing and life, things have been stacked up on me so much that not only do I have several half-finished blog posts begging me to finish them and put them up, but also I now find myself already a day into San Diego Comic-Con - and just now blogging about my presence at San Diego Comic-Con.

This year is the tenth anniversary of 24-Hour Comics Day, a challenge to create a 24 page comic in 24 hours, a challenge which me and my buddy Nathan Vargas have tackled a dozen times between the two of us (him seven, me five). It's a difficult challenge, and we failed the first few times, so we collected our advice on how to succeed in the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide.

Nathan worked with ComicsPRO to create a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of the event, and will be on the panel along with the creator of the annual event Nat Gertler and several other creators. But what's special is that we were already planning to update our Survival Guide for this year's 24HCD in October - and were able to put together a Preview Edition of the Guide.

Thanks to our friends at Thinking Ink Press, we have expanded our original 8-page guide into a 76 page booklet, with over a dozen chapters of tips and advice and interactive exercises. We'll be giving away signed copies of the Preview Edition of the Guide at the panel celebrating 24-Hour Comics Day, and also giving them away at various events or on the show floor.

The panel is at 5:15 on Friday at Room 18 at San Diego Comic-Con, and Nathan will be appearing with Nate Gertler, Chris Brady, Jimmy Purcell, and Marco Devanzo (with me in the audience). While Nat Gertler created the annual event, the actual 24-Hour Comic challenge was created by Scott McCloud, who will be appearing himself at Comic-Con, and whom I hope to meet.

Regardless, the official 24-Hour Comics Day is held the first week in October every year - this year, October 4. Nathan and I will be appearing at the Alternative Press Expo (APE) on the same weekend, hopefully with some 24HCD themed events, but will take the challenge at Mission Comics and Art in San Francisco which this year is holding 24HCD one week early.

So: that's what's going on. As many of you know, I have two novels sitting at the publisher - LIQUID FIRE and JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE - but Debra Dixon is still reviewing them, so I'm hacking away at Dakota Frost Book 4, SPECTRAL IRON, and blissing out on comics while I wait for the edits to land.

-the Centaur

Answer Them on the Field

Published June 22, 2014 by centaur

I'm not a big sports fan - my favorite "sports" to participate in are martial arts, my favorite sports to watch are sumo and baseball (though I can watch football with my family in a pinch), and of the real sports I've played, I prefer basketball - perhaps that's because it's the only sport in which I've scored an official goal.

My entire basketball career consisted of two seasons of grade school play, which I only dimly recall. I wasn't a dedicated player - I was in grade school, and hadn't yet learned the value of practice - and in official games I only got on court a handful of times. Actually, I only remember being on court once, but that one time, I got the ball, and took a shot.

I don't remember the outcome of that shot. We were playing, I got the ball, I was in position, I took the shot, the game continued, we all ran to the other side of the court. Reviewing that sequence of events later, it's clear what happened - if you know the rules of basketball - but at the time I didn't think about it. I was told later that I not only got the ball and took the shot, I scored a goal.

That amazes me to this day - I still don't quite believe it, and if one of my old grade school buddies told me that the onlookers were mistaken, I wouldn't be at all surprised. But the onlookers told me that I did score - and if it was my only shot in the only game I played in, I have the weird experience of my crappy basketball career having a field goal percentage of 100%.

But I did play other sports, notably soccer. So at some level I've got the tiniest sliver of interest in the game, which is perhaps why I picked up something from all the World Cup coverage going on - in particular, a story of a black athlete booed by fans in the stands, and his coach telling him to be strong, to show character, and as for the people who were his critics:

We will answer them on the field of play.

I love that sentiment. I took it to mean that there may be people who hate you for who you are, where you are from, or for other things about yourself you cannot change - but you should not answer those criticisms; instead you should focus on conducting yourself at the highest level in your chosen work, and let that performance speak for itself.

I did some digging, and apparently this is an old phrase - I found references to similar phraseology dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s (back when the word "soccer" was still remembered as a contraction of "AsSOCiation Football"). The closest I could find to an exact quote was the following news article, which is not from the same event, but had the same idea:

We have told the youngster to be strong because we know they (Bosso supporters) are going to boo him. I have told him that playing for Dynamos has always been associated with pressure. I have told him he will be against thousands of supporters and he cannot answer them all by reacting to what they will be saying from the stands. He should just answer them on the field of play. I have told him to be strong, to show character.

This matters for many reasons, but it's particularly relevant to me because of the ideas of people who I care about - some of whom are quite willing to critique others based on features they cannot change, and others of whom have called into question the whole project of focusing on people's important similarities, rather than their obvious differences.

Now, I could take on those criticisms directly, and one day I will - but for now, I'm not. I am willing to discuss ideas, but I don't want to dispute someone's ideas if I haven't taken the time to express the ideas I have of my own. Regardless of the merits of their position, clearly a person who says what they think is doing a better job of communicating than the one who doesn't.

It's hard even to write this article, because there are things I want to communicate that are based on ideas I have that themselves need so much explanation that it would derail everything I'm writing to express them. So I'm going to continue to do what I said I was going to do earlier: rather than arguing, I'm going to be strong, to show character, and express my own ideas clearly.

It's likely that I won't have a 100% field goal percentage in this endeavor. I'm not the Hemingway type, willing to throw 99 pages in the wastebasket to get to that one good page - you can't be a blogger with that attitude. Instead, I believe in working hard, trying frequently, getting your ideas out there, acknowledging your mistakes, learning from them, and moving forward.

As for my - as for our - critics, for the time being, we shall not even acknowledge them. That isn't to say that their criticism isn't important, nor is it even to imply that the criticism is wrong. It is instead to acknowledge that if someone has criticized your behavior, the answer is not to defend yourself - but to instead prove them wrong by example

We shall answer them on the field.

-the Centaur

Pictured: My good friend Nathan Vargas, showing us, his friends, a proof of his competence in his chosen field of play. This will all become much more clear later.