Posts tagged as “Dragon Writers”

Closing in on a first draft …

Published July 1, 2011 by centaur

Some strange device I saw at the Maker Faire

I'm getting close to a first draft of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. First book in a new series, and I'm having a blast writing steampunk. I've also written a story with the same characters, "Steampunk Fairy Chick", that I've submitted to an upcoming anthology. Very exciting! -the Centaur Pictured: a strange machine I saw at the Bay Area Maker Faire that looks vaguely steampunky, vaguely time-machiney.

Plotting from the bottom up

Published April 8, 2011 by centaur

Recently I was asked about how I plot books:

I was wondering if you could help me out a bit. I've always wanted to create my own comicbook from my own design and mind but I always, I mean ALWAYS have problems coming up with and sticking with a good plot. I can make the basis of the story, the characters, the world and different terms and creatures but I can never stick with a plot or make a good one that I know will drive the story. Could you give me any advice on these things or some pointers on how to make a really great story I could draw out? I'm so close to it blossoming I can taste it!

Great question! I'm not sure I'm the best person in the world to answer it - my first pointer to anyone on plot would be Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction - yes, I know, it's Ayn Rand, but if you're one of those idiots who can't see past your unjustified distaste for her political philosophy, well, then you deserve to miss out on her opinions in other areas which might prove of more value to you despite your disagreements - but I do think about plot quite a bit, so I'll give it a go. A lot of what I do is simply write cool scenes I enjoy ... and then think hard about who's the protagonist and what's their major conflict. Once you know, for example, the protagonist is a magic tattoo artist, that suggests she's going to be in conflict over some tattoo related thing - like someone skinning people who have tattoos. Once you know the conflict, then you can design the climax - well, your tattoo artist will eventually have to meet the evil skinning person, who will want to make her a victim. That basic strategy - write stuff that's fun, figure out who the protagonist really is, find what conflict they're embroiled in, design the final conflict, then work backwards from there - has worked very well for me. Why take this approach, rather than, say, starting with some theme and working back from there. Start with an abstract goal? Yuk! That might work for nonfiction but in fiction it's a recipe for heartless exercises in craft - and craft can't sell a story. The instant someone notices you're telling a story on skill alone, you're done. There are prominent authors I can't read anymore because I realized they had some point they were driving to and were using all of their craft to get me there ... even though there was no reason to go there in the first place. That might work in a movie with a lot of explosions, but it's not going to sustain a 300 page book. So. I need concrete events, realized situations with full-bodied characters where interesting things are happening. In short, I need to be entertained - in my writing most of all. That's why I start with "cool scenes" - I write to entertain myself first, so I have to write what I enjoy writing. But I want others to enjoy it too - someone once said the hallmark of a great writer is that they take what they find interesting and make it interesting to other people. To do that, to make my stories interesting to people not invested in my characters, I need to create a strong conflict that will engage. And to do so, I listen to the story. Whether the story features a tattoo artist accosted by a werewolf deep in the Lovecraftian underbelly of Atlanta - or that same tattoo artist and her adopted weretiger daughter out school shopping in the sun - those first key scenes of the story, those first inspirations, will tell you what belongs in the story. If the story begins with Dakota school shopping with Cinnamon, then some part of the story must hinge on Cinnamon and Dakota in a school - or that scene's got to go. If the story features a magic tattoo artist investigating magic graffiti, then some part of the story must hinge on our tattoo artist confronting the graffiti artist. And for the story to really be interesting, something important must be at stake - generally, life has to be on the line in the kind of melodramatic action adventures I write, but it can be more subtle if you're writing something more subtle. One famous way of looking at this idea is Chekov's Gun - "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." Ayn Rand's take on this is similar: you should decide on your theme (what your story is about), then your plot-theme (what type of events realize your theme), then your conflict (what is being fought over in the plot) then the plot itself (the actual sequence of events) which will then dictate the characters, scenes and settings in your story. I believe in the same causal structure, but prefer the opposite order. I let my subconscious play scenes out I find entertaining, and then let the characters and the situations tell me who they are, what conflicts they encounter, and what themes I should explore. You have to find your own way of doing things, of course; every writer is unique, and it's your unique story and vision that matter. Whatever you have to do - outline or no outline, start from the beginning or write backwards for the end - just do it. Just write, and eventually it will all sort itself out. -the Centaur

Jeremiah Willstone Is On The Air

Published March 23, 2011 by centaur

Somehow, after only 4 hours of sleep (AGAIN after trying hard to crash early and failing to take care of myself) and heavy rains on the way to Foothills College, I managed to stumble in to Ann Arbor's studio at KFJC at seven after ten and still made my reading time ten minutes later. I come on the air at about 25 minutes in to the audio archive, reading from JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE:

http://www.kfjc.org/broadcast_archives/archives/1103230653h_ann_arbor.mp3 Lightning gouged a chunk of the wainscoting an inch from Jeremiah Willstone’s head and she hurled herself back, bumping down the stairs on her tailcoat, firing both Kathodenstrahls again and again until the doorpanels were blasted into sparks and splinters. Her shoulders hit the landing hard enough to rattle her teeth, but Jeremiah didn’t lose her grip: she just kept both guns trained on the cracked door, watching foxfire shimmer off its hinges and knobs. The crackling green tracers crept around the frame, and with horror she realized the door was reinforced with iron bands. She’d intended to blast the thing apart and deny her enemy cover, but had just created more arrowholes for him-or-her to shoot from. As the foxfire dissipated, the crackling continued, and her eyes flicked aside to see sparks escaping the broken glass of her left Kathodenstrahl’s vacuum tubes. Its thermionics were shot, and she tossed it aside with a curse and checked the charge canister on her remaining gun. The little brass bead was hovering between three and four notches. Briefly she thought of swapping canisters, but a slight creak upstairs refocused her attention. No. You only need three shots. Keep them pinned, wait for reinforcements.

Get it now, before it disappears from the archive a couple of weeks from now. -the Centaur

Reading Jeremiah Willstone on Wednesday

Published March 22, 2011 by centaur

I am reading from JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE at 7:20am Wednesday morning on Ann Arbor's radio program Unbedtime Stories. A teaser:

Lightning gouged a chunk of the wainscoting an inch from Jeremiah Willstone’s head and she hurled herself back, bumping down the stairs on her tailcoat, firing both Kathodenstrahls again and again until the doorpanels were blasted into sparks and splinters. Her shoulders hit the landing hard enough to rattle her teeth, but Jeremiah didn’t lose her grip: she just kept both guns trained on the cracked door, watching foxfire shimmer off its hinges and knobs. The crackling green tracers crept around the frame, and with horror she realized the door was reinforced with iron bands. She’d intended to blast the thing apart and deny her enemy cover, but had just created more arrowholes for him-or-her to shoot from. As the foxfire dissipated, the crackling continued, and her eyes flicked aside to see sparks escaping the broken glass of her left Kathodenstrahl’s vacuum tubes. Its thermionics were shot, and she tossed it aside with a curse and checked the charge canister on her remaining gun. The little brass bead was hovering between three and four notches. Briefly she thought of swapping canisters, but a slight creak upstairs refocused her attention. No. You only need three shots. Keep them pinned, wait for reinforcements.

-the Centaur

Taking a Sabbath from Microsoft Word

Published February 6, 2011 by centaur

I'm not a very literal Christian, but I do believe that a lot of Christianity is good. But I don't think it's good because God says so - I think it's God said so because it's good for you. One example is the Sabbath. But what is a Sabbath? Going to church on Sunday, then sitting around reading psalms? No, a Sabbath is first and foremost a day of rest, and second a day of worship. And God doesn't ask us to observe it because he's needy for worship: he asks us to do it because we need time off. I'm not going to go into the Episcopal theology which suggests that Jesus doesn't care what day you take your Sabbath as long as you do take one - I'll let my fundamentalist and atheist friends thumbwrestle over that one. I'm just going to take it as a given that we need a day off. So ... what does the Sabbath have to do with Microsoft Word? In my personal life, I'm like a submarine: I disappear into whatever project I'm working on (see the bursty timing of my blogposts as evidence for this). And even though I usually have something on the order of four to six major projects going at once, I'm really only good at focusing on one of them at a time. My current project: revising my second novel BLOOD ROCK, which I've been doing since something like September, responding to hundreds of comments from my editor. I'm down to the wire now. The book is over 100 pages shorter and tighter after months of edits. I've gone from a HUGE list of TODO items that sprawled over two pages down to a short list of items I'd written on the back of a receipt. One of my last items is re-reviewing all the remaining Microsoft Word comments, which I've been doing over the last several days. But as I did so, I found that somehow I'd either lost my memory or Word had neglected to show a whole bunch of comments to me. Months ago, I went through the entire document in detail resolving differences and addressing comments before starting my big tightening edit, and yet there are real, material important comments I would remember if I'd seen them that only showed up in the last few days. Having observed Word's behavior looking for possible bugs, I'm guessing either it was collapsing comments when there were lots of edits on a page, or, more likely, this is a scrolling bug that caused some comments to appear "over the top of the page" and thus effectively become invisible. Another alternative is that it might have to do with the "ribbon" ... I recently switched from Word 2004 for Mac to Word 2011 and the interface for comments seems to have changed. A simple interface change; they happen. But that's not the point. My frustration is that even minor offhand comments from the editor can lead to big changes. If she asks me to delete something on page 204, I might just do it --- but if I don't agree, I generally think hard about whether I need it, whether it's important to me, and if so how to integrate it so deeply into the novel that it's inevitable --- ideally to the point where she'd tell me to put it back in if I took it out, though I don't know if I ever achieve that. :-) So now I have a whole load of comments that I'm essentially getting fresh. Worse, they're commenting on things in sections that I had previously reworked in response to the editor's written comments, sections where I didn't think there were major in-line comments. So I've spent a great deal of effort fixing things in response to the revision email, the suggested changes, and a long hallway conversation with the editor at Dragon*Con, but I'm now finding dozens of things, both little and great, that would have potentially changed what I would have done. So ... what does Microsoft Word have to do with the Sabbath? Well ... I am taking today off. :-) I have a great job at the Search Engine That Starts With a G, but it takes a lot of time - partly work, partly travel time, partly mental recuperation time. And I have a wife, and friends, and cats. By lugging my laptop to breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee, I can eke out 3-4 hours a night 3-4 days a week, but that's not enough, and generally need to work on my writings on the weekends. This gets especially intense when editing, because I can't futz around doing research reading or shift gears to another story if I'm stumped; I've got to keep my brain focused on the EDITING process. But my frustration reached its limit last night. I blew my stack and fired off a few frustrated emails to the editor, and decided to take today off. To use the Sabbath that God gave us. I don't have a link to the great sermon that Father Ken of Saint Stephens in the Field gave on the topic, but I do have a link to my atheist friend Jim Davies, who takes Saturdays completely off so he is free the rest of the week to pursue the top priority items on his nobility list. The theology is different - but the idea is the same. The point? The moment I decided to take the day off, I felt completely liberated. I'm going to do something fun like ride a bike or design a robot brain - or maybe visit a bookstore for something other than their wifi or coffee. Before writing this blog post, I spent the previous hour implementing "Hello World" in every language installed on my new Macbook Air as part of a project to crack my programming knuckles again (and oddly, the hardest language was Awk, which I actually use so much at the command line it's like a reflex. Weird). I've been wanting to do this for weeks, but I've spent it revising. Now instead, I've had a little fun. My batteries are already recharged. Maybe you're one of those people who find it easy to take time off. Good for you. If you're not, especially if you live in the Bay Area ... take a break. Maybe not even take a break from work; take a break from whatever you won't let yourself take a break from.

BLOOD ROCK now under 500 pages…

Published January 1, 2011 by centaur

Editing BLOOD ROCK in response to the notes from Bell Bridge Books is progressing. It's been quite the challenge, but I've preserved the bulk of the book and got it to under 500 pages. I'm going to try to get this editing pass (#2) done today, a third editing pass done next week, and send it to the editors the following week. -the Centaur UPDATE: BLOOD ROCK is now 488 pages (as my personal reading copies are formatted, which is probably about 400-450 pages of a normal novel), meaning I've successfully cut 100 pages from the novel. And, as I hoped, I JUST FINISHED THE SECOND REVISION. On to pass 3.

Criticism

Published December 6, 2010 by centaur

I had this thought after reading a long critical blogpost on a recent scifi novel: The longer, more detailed, and, especially, the more clever you make your negative criticism of something, the more I suspect that you're doing a hatchet job on a work that's actually good, but simply something you don't personally like ... and that you've lost the ability to tell the difference. -the Centaur

60,000 New Words

Published November 30, 2010 by centaur

Victory! 72,037 words, 60,164 of them new. Boo-yah! I leave you with this:

“Fair enough,” Jeremiah said. “Alright. We know where we’re going, and how we’re handling this. And we all know who we’re facing: the Baron Abinger, who handed us all our hats on his last encounter. Be on your guard.” She looked up at Lord Birmingham. “Sir, I have said what I need to say,” Jeremiah said. “I now place myself in your hands. This ship, and this mission, are yours. At your discretion, Godspeed.” Lord Birmingham straightened. “Thank you, Commander,” he said. “All you need do is let Lady Georgiana and I guide you through the dark heart of Georgia, and then the rest of this mission is yours.” “Then take us away, sir.”

Now I go take nap now. -the Centaur

Cracked 70,000 Words

Published November 30, 2010 by centaur

Just reached 70,000 total words in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE ... 58,735 total added during this month, so it looks good to hit 60,000 words tomorrow. Woohoo! As usual, Nano's raw rough-drafty stuff, but here's where we are in the story (suitably snipped and edited not to give too much away):

The engines of the Machine spun up with a terrific rising whine and discharged all at once, lightning in a bottle, illuminating the entire diving bell interior with a crackling foxfire glow. Even the handcuff that pinned her left hand to a support arch shimmered as the transelectric field rippled through it, but as she was grounded to the same pole it left her with little more than a shudder. As the Clockwork Time Machine rattled and clacked, ticked and swayed through the tunnels of possibility, Jeremiah hunched in a little ball by the pillar in her bloodied shift, her left hand high over her head, twisting uselessly in the cuff as two footmen stood over her, watching, their six-strings at the ready. It made her feel small and helpless, even though they’d made the mistake of cuffing her bad hand; but she hadn’t the heart to do her usual scheming for escape. She had to see this through.

-the Centaur

68,669 words … 56,755 of them new

Published November 29, 2010 by centaur

Two days of Nano left ... God willing, there's a good shot I'll make 70,000 total words, perhaps even 60,000 added words. Progress continues!

I Can’t Stop Writing

Published November 27, 2010 by centaur

[caption id="attachment_810" align="alignright" width="300" caption="At Work on the Clockwork Time Machine at Borders"]

[/caption]I've "won" National Novel Writing Month for 2010, but I just can't stop writing. I know I have bills to pay, books to edit, projects at work, and a massive cleaning project in my library ... but THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE has me right now and I can't stop. But ... really ... is that such a bad thing? Since I've "won", I've written 4200 more words, 2600 today alone. Fantastic! -the Centaur

Where is BLOOD ROCK?

Published November 27, 2010 by centaur

National Novel Writing Month Kickoff Card

A fan wrote:

I would like to purchase Blood Rock, but I have not been able to find it anywhere.... Can you direct me to a site which has it for sale? If it is in fact for sale? I am a little curious since your site says it is in Beta release, but the site has not been updated in several months, so I am unsure as to the status of the book.

Well, sorry about that ... Blogger changed their terms of service and the Dakota Frost site is frozen until I can fix it. The answer? BLOOD ROCK is in editing right now - the publisher wanted some big cuts, but I'm in the last throes of National Novel Writing Month right now and had to put BLOOD ROCK down while working on my new series. I'm picking up BLOOD ROCK December 1st and hope to have it to the publisher before the first of the year, so if all goes well it will be out in March. I'm well into the sequel to the sequel, LIQUID FIRE, which I hope will be out the following October. -Anthony

Viiiiictory … A New Series

Published November 27, 2010 by centaur

Once again, I have completed National Novel Writing Month! This year’s entry is the first in the Jeremiah Willstone series, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE:

On an alternate Earth, the feminist revolution started a century early, technological progress doubled ... and Mary Shelley's granddaughter Jeremiah Willstone is an adventurer defending the world in a flying airship! She's used to fighting off monsters with nothing more than goggles, an electric gun and the advice of a half-human computer, but what will she do when her own uncle changes the rules of the game ... with a Clockwork Time Machine?

I've posted a few snippets in this series ... let me see if I can find one which doesn't give any key plot elements away.

With Patrick’s blunderblast slung over her shoulder, Jeremiah whizzed through the streets on her autocycle, discharging its cylinder flat out, its teakettle scream and clanking frame adding another layer of mist and noise to the steam and bustle of Boston. Her legs were tensed, her knees bent against the pedals, half to jump the cycle over curbs, and half to keep the juddering vibration from the cobblestones of Beacon Hill from rattling her tailbone clean off. She squealed to a stop before the Moffat’s, pulled the cylinder and tossed it to a street urchin. “Top me off?” she asked, hopping off onto the sidewalk with a whirl and pulling her bag out of its basket in one smooth motion. “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said, taking the cycle. His eyes lighted on her vest, her denims—and on the big brass buttons on her lapels, a steering wheel, sword and airsail overlaid with a stylized V. “Are you an Expeditionary?” Jeremiah smiled. “Yes,” she said, ruffing his cap so that tufts of blond hair showed. “Maybe one day you’ll become one too. Polish the brasslite a bit and there’s a second shilling in it for you. Quick now; I won’t be long.” “Yes, ma’am,” he said, walking the cycle off. Jeremiah turned to the tottering three-story shop, glancing up at the enclosed balcony jutting out from the newer brick buildings around it. Beneath the balcony, carbide-etched into the thick window of carbonate glass, were the words: MOFFAT’S MECHANISMS & MYSTERIES Her mouth quirked; as usual, today she was in the market for a bit of both.

Unlike last year, I didn't have to write 38,000 words in only ten days. But I did do pretty well; I still have a few days of writing left and I'm going to try to push further on the story. [caption id="attachment_797" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Victory Point for Nanowrimo 2010"]

[/caption] Prevail, Victoriana! -the Centaur

One. Day. Ahead.

Published November 17, 2010 by centaur

At last, a day ahead on Nano ... 28580 words out of a needed 26666 ... even ahead of tomorrow, which needs 28333 ... excellent, it's all falling into place...

-the Centaur

“Then we shall follow,” Sir Alice said. “Commander Willstone!” “Yes, sir?” Jeremiah said, standing at attention. “It seems that Lord Christopherson has cracked the secret of travel to the past,” Sir Alice said, her own objections, once overcome, completely forgotten. “Outfit the Prince Edward with one of his own devices and hunt that blackguard down to the very ends of time,” she said. “I’ll see no-one destroy Victoriana on my watch, much less undo Liberation!” “Yes, sir!” Jeremiah said. “Prevail, Victoriana—” Lord Birmingham cleared his throat. “Sir Alice, might I remind you that the destination the Lady Georgiana has charted is over the dark heart of Georgia?”

Oh, the point … what Warren Ellis uses.

Published November 14, 2010 by centaur

books, montalbano, reflected books, and gabby

Oh, there was a reason I got on the Warren Ellis kick. He posted a note on what he uses to write. Maybe I'll me-too sometime and post a note on the tools I use, already having done the why and the how, but for now I wanted to focus on the following piece of wisdom from Warren Ellis which should be familiar to anyone who's ever worked on a Ph.D. thesis:

Back-ups. Oh, my god. Burning your stuff to CD or DVD is not good enough. Trust me on that. Things go wrong. Understand that Storage Will Always Fail. Always. I have a ruggedised, manly and capacious 32GB USB memory stick that can withstand fire, water, gunshots and the hairy arseteeth of Cthulhu itself — but my daughter decided she wanted to liberate one of my bags for her use, took the stick out of it and put it ’somewhere safe.’ It has never been seen again. Storage Will Always Fail. Dropbox is your friend. 2GB of storage for free, a frankly superb little piece of software that syncs your stuff off into the cloud as easily and simply and clearly as possible. I know writers, artists and tv producers who swear by Dropbox, and so do I. I have Dropbox on both computers. If you have a smart phone of the iOS or Android type, you can also have an Dropbox instance on your phone, a fact that’s saved my arse more than once. I also auto-sync Computer 1 hourly to Jungle Disk. Very cheap, very good. My media library lives on another storage service, Zumodrive, that lives both in the cloud and on my machine as a z:/ drive. (The Zumodrive application also lives on Computer 2.) Also, I do all mail through Gmail. Which means that a copy of every document I send off lives in the Gmail cloud. And every five minutes or so, a Western Digital 1TB MyBook copies everything on Computer 1’s desktop. Paranoid? Yes. Covered? Yes.

Got that, everyone? If you write, especially if you want to do it for a living, go do something like this. And for God's sake, please, keep a copy offsite. I know too many people who have lost their homes and their art or writing to fire. -the Centaur Pictured: Books, Montalbano, reflected books, and Gabby - a reminder to me that my library is a potential firetrap (God forbid!) and that I should be better at storing stuff offsite.

Station Ident … NOT

Published November 14, 2010 by centaur

This is not warrenellis.com. If it was, I would be more irritated, irritable ... and interesting.

(Also, Warren Ellis doesn't post me-too station idents because he's overslept for church after a long night writing. I don't think he does go to church, but if he did miss church because he'd spent a hard night writing, the minister would come to him, at the pub, when Warren Ellis was damn well ready - God being everywhere, of course, and it's the minister that would need him some Ellis. Me, I need me some God. Stupid earlybirds. Why doesn't anybody have proper Evensong anymore?) -the Centaur

Caught Up At Last

Published November 14, 2010 by centaur

33,569 words. 21,696 of them new. The goal for November 13: 21,666. I know technically it's November 14, but I'm going to bed now and have a full day ahead of me in which I only need to write the nominal 1,666 words, so I am officially caught up at this point. And as the graph shows, finally the rising tide of words completed has caught up with the solid line of words desired. Yaay! Here's a bit to tide you over: rough drafty stuff, as all Nano is, but it's getting the scene set down the way I want it:

Jeremiah stepped out into the street, taking in the smells and sounds of Boston: cold air, wafting soup, crackling leather, fragrant horses, whirring gears, walking feet. God, she loved this town. “Here you are, Commander,” a young girl said, walking her cycle up. “Thank you, dear,” Jeremiah said, pulling the boy’s two shillings out and adding a third for the girl. “Apportion it fairly among you.” “Yes, Ma’am,” she said—then gasped. “Oh my goodness!” And Jeremiah followed her gaze to see the Prince Edward shimmering into existence above them, a rope ladder tumbling down towards her. “All right!” she said, leaping up onto a horse-tie, then into the air to catch the ladder. Her weight brought it down, just slightly—taking tension in the rope, of course, not lowering the Prince Edward—and as she swung back she reached down towards the girl. “Heave it here!” “Are you all right, Ma’am?” she cried, even as she raised the cycle. “Never better!” she said, seizing the cycle with her free hand. Predictably the Edward didn’t wait, and in moments she was rising above the street, holding on to the ladder with one hand and the bike with the other, trusting the boomsman to keep her clear of the buildings as she ascended into one of those singular adventures that enlivened her life.

Off to bed. -the Centaur

Slowly Climbing The Hill

Published November 13, 2010 by centaur

Well, National Novel Writing Month is progressing slowly but surely so far; I'm behind, but not super behind, and most importantly, not falling further behind: and the daily deficit is keeping constant. Today I have some extra time, so I will try to get caught up completely. You can see how far I've gotten on the graph below: [caption id="attachment_734" align="alignright" width="450" caption="Progress on Nano So Far"]

[/caption] I'd say this is procrastination, but it really does help to know just how far behind I am, and how much I need to write each day to catch up. Plus, I can reuse this Excel graph next year (this is actually a slight refinement of last year's Nano graph for Liquid Fire). Also, to save time, for the first time I'm using WordPress's scheme for inserting and saving images, rather than my own. Downside: problems if I need to leave WordPress, but I'm a big boy now, and can write my own converter and URL rewriter if I need to. Upside: time, of course. Oh, I almost forgot ... the excerpt! Here's where we are now:

Without a second thought, Jeremiah decked the guard. One fist, one punch, flying out, clocking her jaw and laying her out, ten feet out on the tile. The gun spun away, impacted, fired, the deadly bullet shattering a storefront of glass. There were shouts, screams, and panic, but to Jeremiah’s delighted horror the crowd did not scatter like civilians. A dark-suited man saw the guard fall and came at Jeremiah; a frilly young girl in a beret saw the gun and dove for it. “Capital,” Jeremiah said, ducking one punch, blocking the other, popping the man on the jaw, then kneeing him in the groin when he didn’t fall. “Absolutely capital!” she said, kicking the gun away into the glass just as the bereted girl seized it. Jeremiah clamped both hands on the girl’s arms to neutralize her, lifted her up, and said, “I’m so proud of you!” before head-butting so hard her beret came off and she fell back in a sudden spray of hair, eyes rolling. “We should go,” Patrick said, shepherding Georgiana out of the darkened cave of the restaurant. “Did you see,” Jeremiah said, blocking another punch, kicking her new assailant in the gut, then decking a third man. “These people have spines!” “Very much so,” Georgiana said. “Good for them, but for us—” “Fear not!” Jeremiah said; there were no more instant heroes popping out of the crowd, but there were still the shouts and screams and now whistles blowing, so it was very definitely time to go. “Follow me, thataway!”

Onward! Wind up your braces, let's do this... -the Centaur

National Novel Writing Month Approaches Again

Published October 24, 2010 by centaur

Once again Nanowrimo approaches ... every November, a collection of insane people around the Earth get together to write 50,000 words of a new novel in 30 days. I usually tweak the rules and write 50,000 MORE words on top of some seed of a few thousand words I've already started. This year, I'm doing Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine, what I hope is a twist on the steampunk mythos:

Xenotaur on Nanowrimo.org Synopsis: Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine On an alternate Earth, the feminist revolution started a century early, technological progress doubled ... and Mary Shelley's granddaughter Jeremiah Willstone is an adventurer defending the world in a flying airship! She's used to fighting off monsters with nothing more than goggles, an electric gun and the advice of a half-human computer, but what will she do when her own uncle changes the rules of the game ... with a Clockwork Time Machine? Excerpt: Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine Lightning gouged a chunk of the wainscoting an inch from Jeremiah Willstone’s head and she hurled herself back, bumping down the stairs on her tailcoat, firing both Kathodenstrahls again and again until the doorpanels were blasted into sparks and splinters. Her shoulders hit the landing hard enough to rattle her teeth, but Jeremiah didn’t lose her grip: she just kept both guns trained on the cracked door, watching foxfire shimmer off its hinges and knobs. The crackling green tracers crept around the frame, and with horror she realized the door was reinforced with iron bands. She’d intended to blast the thing apart and deny her enemy cover, but had just created more arrowholes for him-or-her to shoot from. As the foxfire dissipated, the crackling continued, and her eyes flicked aside to see sparks escaping the broken glass of her left Kathodenstrahl’s vacuum tubes. Its thermionics were shot, and she tossed it aside with a curse and checked the charge canister on her remaining gun. The little brass bead was hovering between three and four notches. Briefly she thought of swapping canisters, but a slight creak upstairs refocused her attention. No. You only need three shots. Keep them pinned, wait for reinforcements.

Like last year, I donated to help keep Nanowrimo running, and if it's helped you you should think about it as well. If that's not in your budget, try setting up or joining a local Nanowrimo group. I participate in the South Bay Nanowrimo group, and I'm trying to organize one at the Search Engine That Starts With A G if I can get enough people to participate. Happy writing! -the Centaur

A noble failure

Published October 3, 2010 by centaur

Well, it was a noble failure, but a failure it was. I had indeed not overcome my food poisoning, not that I threw up or anything but I indeed got gurgly. During Page 7, I started having sleep microbursts during my crosshatching. And finally, as I was recovering from gurgle and looking at Page 8, I realized it was even more complicated than the previous page, and flipping through the remainder realized I needed to finish each page in ten to twenty minutes ... and I was taking forty five minutes per page. There was no way to make it.

So that was it. Took a brief nap, freshened up, and started packing it up. What a fantastic experience. I have a complete 24 page story roughed out, 7 inked pages, and a lot more learning under my belt. Two of the five people who were at our site look like they are going to finish. Oh well ... next year! Ad comika! -the Centaur