By mid-day Friday I had my bearings a lot better. We managed to locate some decent casino food–if your only experience with casinos is looking at the advertisements on billboards and the decadent meals there pictured, trust me, this is not as easy as it sounds–and set about hitting panels and trolling the dealer rooms in search of fun and enlightenment.

At this point, the memories of the weekend blur together. There were lots of parties–conversations with Mike Moscoe (a.k.a. Mike Shepherd), Brad Torgenson, Peter V. Brett, Brent Weeks, Eddie Schneider, Mur Lafferty, Kris Rusch, Alastair Mayer, Dean Wesley Smith, Philippa Ballentine, Gail Carriger, The Brothers Kollin, Robert J. Sawyer, David Brin, and far too many others to name (let alone remember!). Old friends and acquaintances caught up with, new friends made, and a lot of shop talk. The SFWA suite (and the other parties) are the functional equivalent of the office water cooler in this weird profession where our work is done almost entirely in isolation. The conversations were too numerous (and sometimes too bawdy) to recount here, but if you find yourself at a WorldCon and see a table peopled by any of these fine folks, I can’t recommend their company highly enough. Just be prepared to bring your scintillating banter and a willingness to listen.

It was a very interesting climate in which to do shop talk, too. The publishing industry is in the midst of some startling upheavals, and even in the small quarter of Science Fiction, the awareness of and attitude towards these upheavals varies widely, and that has a lot of interesting knock-on effects on the intra-culture politics and business climate. I’m not quite sure what to report about it–I’ll probably take another several weeks to digest it all. But as a pulse-of-the-industry measure, absolutely invaluable.

Three things of a professional nature leap to the front of my mind, though.

The first was the response to the sample copies I brought along and showed around. And Then She Was Gone and Predestination both drew a lot of raised eyebrows from book packagers and publishers I showed them to.

The second went, in the words of one publisher who looked at them: “These are some of the best packaged books I’ve seen in a long time. If they don’t sell, nothing will.” This was a pretty universal reaction, and a huge relief. It’s one thing when a little two-person team who’s been doing design work for upwards of a decade dips their toes into book packaging–it’s quite another to blow the socks off the pros whose pool you’re starting to swim in. This year has been a hell of a marathon for me so far, filled with a lot of frustration and professional growth–you can imagine the buoying this kind of reaction provides.

The third reaction, not quite as universal, was “Can I take this home to read?” We left a goodly number of copies in the hands of the interested–who knows, perhaps we’ll see a review or two come out of that. If nothing else, though, hopefully a handful of people will have some entertaining evenings.

This is not to toot my own horn so much as to keep all of you, who’ve been extremely helpful over the past few years, in the loop. But the good news didn’t stop there.

I also learned that I’ve made my professional pro-rate short fiction sale (this makes my sixth fiction sale over all), and it’s one of the stories that was sent out during the Asssmoving contest earlier this year. Makes me think I should resurrect the contest, maybe on a shorter time scale. I’m open to ideas.

Hmm…what else?

HUGE congrats are due to my friend Chris Garcia for his long-overdue Hugo win, and for an excellent acceptance speech.

On another note, the con organizers (John Lorentz and Ruth…gah, I can’t remember her last name) had the excellent notion to bring back what (I’ve heard) used to be a standard fixture at WorldCons: a panel called “The Killer B’s.” Basically, you stick David Brin, Gregory Benford, and David Bear on a panel together and get them talking shop. Since all of them are scientists, and all of them are working at the cutting edge of aerospace and/or genomics as well as being consistently long-term sellers in science fiction, and they all disagree on most of the interesting points, it’s a hell of a fun time. And, you’re also prone to learning a lot about things that haven’t hit the press yet. Lots of interesting near-term stuff coming in space travel, some of them from groups that made a big splash years ago and have been relatively quiet since. In space travel, as well as in publishing, it’s a very exciting time to be alive.

So, lessons learned for potential WorldCon goers:

It’s WAY too big to park in one bar. If you want to maximize your time, you have to party hop and stay mobile.

Stay hydrated. Particularly if you’re in a dry climate. Forgetting your electrolyte water is a quick way to exhaustion–keeping it on hand will keep you alert.

When you go to panels, take notes (or a recorder). The ones staffed by writers and editors tend to get facts coming fast and furious, and in times like this a lot of that information needs to be triaged. Things are changing, and nobody is exactly sure how.

I hit the ground back in the Bay Area reeling–a hell of an intense four days. And the autumn in front of me has taken on an even greater sense of urgency.

And it’s an ambitious schedule in front of me, which I’ll put dates to later, but here’s a smattering of what you can expect from me this fall:

Paperback releases of Free Will, Down From Ten, Sculpting God vol 1, A Ghostly Christmas Present, Silent Victor (Lantham 3), Throwing Lead (the long-anticipated “gun book), and either The Auto Motive or The Last Uploader (details forthcoming).

Ebook releases of all of the above, as well as some new short stories in ebook.

Wider distribution for the Predestination soundtrack.

And Then She Was Gone audiobook.

The reboot of the Free Will podcast.

And maybe, just maybe, a kickstater project for a very special hardback project.

On top of all of this, I picked up a lot of business stuff I have to get in line on the back end of this. Exciting times–I can’t wait. But oh boy, am I glad I got some solid sleep after I got home!

Anyway, sorry for the rambling post. It was that kind of experience. Huge thanks to everyone who made my first Worldcon a memorable one!

What a different experience from other cons, on many levels.

I set off with she-who-must-not-be-named in the new convertible for the four-hour drive. I had my doubts about making that long of a drive in a convertible–generally speaking, loud transportation wears you out more than quiet, and I was worried about arriving completely worn out.

I shouldn’t have worried. Good earplugs and good cruising music knocked the noise down to just-barely-louder-than-regular-car levels. We secured the cooler to the backs of the seats, where it acted as an extra windblocker, keeping things even quieter in there than normal.

Leaving in the morning also gave us a special treat–not a lot of traffic, and with the gorgeous weather and a new pocket camera we had a fun new road game to play: spot the exotics. In a convertible you can see the whole world, including all the other gorgeous sports cars on the road. There were a lot of them too. When we spotted one, whoever snapped its picture first got a point. Granted, as the driver I wasn’t exactly snapping championship photos, as I couldn’t check the viewfinder. I basically just pointed the camera in the general direction of a pretty car and hit the trigger. We had so much fun we forgot to tally the winner.

There was a bit of road construction near Truckee, but otherwise it was a gorgeous clear drive. I have to give a shout out to the engineers that built I-80. Not only was the road quality uncommonly good for California, the curves were all well-sloped and swooping. I discovered that the little roadster LOVES doing 90 on track-like mountain roads, and even then it kept sitting up and begging for more. By the time we got to Reno I was hopping for joy with fahrvegnugen

The rest of the day, alas, wasn’t nearly as nice. Worldcon is a different kind of con. Normally I’ll find the central bar, set up my laptop, and write a story. Interesting people come in and out, and I stop from time to time to have great conversations or to hit a panel I’m interested in.
That plan doesn’t work very well at a con with 4000 attendees strewn across two casinos and a convention center. I took the whole first day just getting my bearings, barely missing panels, barely missing friends.

On the upside, I did get to meet Robert J. Sawyer, who gave me shit for stealing his name (a gag which continued, to my delight, through the weekend, and which resulted in me meeting many more snarky and enjoyable people who were happy to let me pick their brains), and got to catch up with the Kollin brothers, who are always a fantastically entertaining pair.

At the end of the day, though, the fun didn’t make up for the disorientation. I wound up feeling exhausted, demoralized, disoriented, and outclassed.

I staggered to bed wondering if the trip had been worth it–the next two days, though, proved that it was worth every minute. Tales from day 2 will come your way tomorrow.

And if you’re wondering, yes, I can’t recommend road trips in convertibles highly enough, particularly when the destination is a WorldCon.

But I can’t put it of any longer—needs must, and I have to move on from Balticon to the next grand adventure, so I endeavor to finish this story.

Saturday began with an argument. The clock wanted to convince me that it was almost time for my first panel. I told it that it was full of shit and really needed to get a life. It countered by telling me I now had one minute less than I used to, so I’d better get my ass moving.

By moving, I mean that I needed to get showered and then contrive some way to dry off in the 80% humidity, then get into my semi-fancy duds (I actually tried to get into my fancy duds, but three seconds after I got into that monkey suit I found myself developing a seriously advanced case of heat exhaustion, so I immediately stripped and re-evaluated my options, settling on the disreputable getup I appeared in, with minor variations, all weekend, on the grounds that it was the only set of clothes I brought that was anywhere near livable in that god-awful swamp heat that east-coasters think of as “nice weather.”)

I actually managed to make it downstairs in time to grab something resembling breakfast (by which I mean a glass of iced tea and a handful of strawberries), before stumbling blindly into the Audio Masters Workshop scheduled for the purgatorially early hour of 9:00AM (which, for those of you keeping score at home, is 6:00 AM by my body clock, a time when I’m more normally deciding it might be a good time to wrap up my writing for the night and get some shut-eye before my regular noontime mixing appointment).

Nonetheless, under the guiding hand of Chooch Schubert and alongside the erudite John Taylor Williams, and the slightly insane but always entertaining Arioch Morningstar, we engaged in a mighty staggering jaunt through the world of audio tech and technique, much to the bafflement and occasional entertainment of the packed audience, many of whom seemed just as flummoxed by the earliness of the hour, low blood sugar, and the shocking lack of iced tea as I was (or perhaps I’m projecting).

Fortunately, I escaped with my skin—even took a chance to plug Brass Farthing, the fabulous mostly a-capella group headed by George Chlentzos, who plays Doug Reeves in The Antithesis Progression novels. I slipped away to the bar, where I acquired something approximating food (good food, if typically overpriced) and bumped into P.C. Haring, who was most kind in showing me around the hotel where I hadn’t quite got my bearings yet.

First stop: the Dragon Moon table to sign a few copies of The Podthology and harass Tee Morris, Pip Ballantine, P.G. Holyfield, Chris Lester, P.C. Haring, Michael Spence…actually, come to think of it, a good sized chunk of the universe started congregating there shortly before I arrived. There were the obligatory hat photos, book signings, and body part signings…ah memories…but I digress.

Enough of the universe was there, in fact (and, thanks to Senor Ubernemesis, stealing my hat), that I nearly ran late for my next panel, the one I’d been dreading. Ever since I’d seen it on the program, I was sure that I was walking into an ambush. Why would I think that? Well, the panel was called Is There Room In The Fridge, Hon?, and I was the only male on the panel.

Yeah. Kim the Comic Book Goddess, who put the panel together, obviously had it in for me. Revenge for the cliffhanger end of Predestination, no doubt. What else was I to do? I pulled my brim low over my eyes and girded up my silk brocade vest, put my cell phone on vibrate, and marched in there expecting the worst.

And it turned out to be a hell of a panel. Not revenge for Predestination, but quite the opposite—there were a lot of kind words for my particular efforts to subvert the Women In Refrigerators trope, and the conversation turned into a delightful talk about the different ways authors use characters as naked plot devices, and how sexuality plays into character development even in g-rated stories. When the audio comes up on the Balticon Podcast, I recommend it.

The remainder of my afternoon consisted mainly of sitting in the bar and having long involved debates over skepticism, economics, and the proper place of Tribbles in a kinky geek life—that last one got kinda messy. Don’t ask. Suffice it to say that I nearly missed the next panel, Chris Lester’s Metamor City Live show, during which I played Artax, sans accent.

In my defense, I actually did practice the accent on the plane between G-Rated Fight Club showings, but the moment I walked into the ninety-degree-plus media room all ability to do an accent left me. Did I mention that I have an uncomfortable relationship with heat?

The rest of the evening—and weekend, for that matter—is a hell of a blur. P.G. Holyfield, Nathan Lowell, and Patrick McLean’s hysterical launch party. A delightfully disreputable incident involving Mur Lafferty, Paulo Bagipliuci, Gail Carriger, a number of martinis, and passers by giving us dirty looks. I also engaged in a couple impromptu Leonard Cohen concerts—first in a round robin group setting with Kim Fortuner on piano, and then later on in a trio with Phil Rossi and Starla Huchton. In both cases, loads of fun, both for the singing itself and for the shocked looks on people’s faces who didn’t expext that a gruff looking hobbit could actually sing (they obviously haven’t seen the Rankin Bass production of The Hobbit).

Saturday and Sunday night, both nights, I snuck up on the sun from behind (and, really, if you *have* to interact directly with a gigantic fusion bomb, the best way is to sneak up on it from behind). Saturday, it was in the courtyard with a crowd of folks I’d barely met before, excepting Starla and Chooch. I don’t remember a lot of it, to be honest—jetlag has interesting effects on the brain, but there were a lot of wonderful songs, including a quite striking original composition by Starla.

Sunday, Chooch and Viv hosted a party in their room (and on their lawn, much to the chagrin of the neighbors). Like in Hotel California, some drank to remember and some drank to forget, but I smoked an excellent Rocky Patel with Sheila Dee while talking photography with Michelle Beckmeyer (who also stole my hat). I also discovered that I need to take out a restraining order against my evil laugh, which has developed a reputation of its own and became the subject of an interesting wager over the course of the party, somewhere between the cigars and the point just before dawn where I was talking about Stephen King with Paul Elard Cooley.

Also somewhere in the dark, there was a protracted debate involving Gail Carriger, Peter V. Brett, Kim Fortuner, and Paul Elard Cooley on the merits of historical fantasy and vintage Science Fiction with respect to feminism, but it was so rapid fire that I regret to report that it’s mostly a blur, and the witty ripostes must remain unrepeated and unattributed to protect the dignity of the participants (myself not least among them).

Monday’s harsh light found me stumbling my marginally-coherent way back to bed. The rest of Monday, well, that’s next week’s story.

Next time: The Voyage Home

At this point in the narrative, I’m forced to chose between one of two roads. I could go along the chronology, skipping the boring and blackmail-worthy parts along the way, or I could chose a theme and tell its story…or I could jump back and forth between each as my fancy strikes me.

Guess which one I’ve picked?

It wasn’t until my appearance on Litopia last December that I began to realize the Power of the Hat ™. First, there was the encounter I recounted last time with Kim the Comic Book Goddess (who insists she’d have recognized me without the hat, but I have my doubts). Then there was the fact that Scott Roche and Sidfawu accosted me based solely upon the Power of the Hat, and we wound up sitting in the bar for several hours on Friday night talking Down From Ten, writing, and what passes for politics in my demented corner of the universe.

But before all that boring stuff, you’ll want to hear The Good Parts.

Much to my surprise, I arrived in time for my appearance as a guest troublemaker…um…panelist on The Good Parts, during which time we talked with great seriousness and deliberation about the influence of Catholicism on Erotica, Erotica markets, why Erotica writers are more conservative than mainstream fiction writers, and why J. Daniel Sawyer can’t resist telling a bad Vatican joke whenever he gets the chance (ok, we didn’t talk about that, but I’m sure that’s what you’ll be wondering after you listen to the ‘cast). The terrifyingly intelligent Kathryn Lively of Logical Lust/Mundania Press joined me as a guest and mutual foil to Nobilis and Cynical Woman’s normal crosstalk. It was a lively session indeed (pun intended), but I did manage to escape with my politically-incorrect (from any point of view) skin intact to take refuge once again in the bar, where I was accosted by the aforementioned shady characters. Gail found me there, drowning my sorrows in iced tea and talking epistemology, and while she and I sat talking Mur Lafferty wandered by.

The host of I Should Be Writing and editor of Escape Pod — drawn by the power of the hat (okay, the fact that I had her favorite ever show guest on my arm probably didn’t hurt, but it’s my hat and I can fetishize it if I want). After a delightful introduction, Gail and Mur flitted off with the New Yorkers to talk shop, while Nathan Lowell and Scott Roche introduced me around.

And this, dear reader, is where the Hat shows its true power. I was shaking hands with…Mae Breakall, I think? I can’t remember who, honestly, because I heard behind me “Oh my god it’s Dan Sawyer!” I turned around just in time to catch a short grey-shirted bundle of energy running up to hug me to death. Once I was satisfied that death was not in the cards, I collected enough of my wits to introduce myself to, it turns out, Heather Welliver, whose voice (I’m proud to admit) stole my heart in the intro to Pieces, and who graciously appeared in Predestination as Shayna Takahashi, and who is every bit as fabulous in person as she is on pod.

My welcome the rest of the con was similarly warm (thankfully, not in the thermal sense – the air conditioner was a life saver) and shocking, but none of it was matched by the dirty, foul, evil prank played upon me by podfather Tee Morris, he of the shameless self-promotion. Tee, in what I can only assume was an attempt to keep me on my toes, put out a twitter bounty on my hat. Over the course of the con, a number of people hunted me down specifically to STEAL my hat.

Let me say that again.

THEY STOLE MY HAT.

And then forced me, when I had a camera handy, to take their picture while wearing it. Theft and extortion, all in one package. And I have only one thing to say about this:

Your ass is mine next Balticon, Ubernemesis!!!

And yes, I’ll be posting more pictures from the Great Hat Heist in coming blog post.

Believe it or not — this only covers up through Friday night. Saturday was a whole other adventures.

Next time: Ponfication, Panels, and Parties

I normally travel with carry-on baggage only, but it’s not because by the end of a plane ride there’s nothing that gives me greater relief from coach seat-cramp syndrome and DVT than sitting down in another small seat in a moving vehicle. Nor is it that the prospect of walking around an unfamiliar building filled with carousels from deSade’s worst dreams fills me with nauseating dread.

The reason is that if I’m traveling by air, I’m interested in getting where I’m going. Car trips are for taking in the scenery – plane trips are for getting somewhere as fast as possible. Airports, with a few exceptions, are incredibly dull places. Let me put it this way: When was the last time you fond a jacuzzi full of literary intelligentsia well-plied with alcohol in an airport? If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while, and when I’m traveling from home to a convention (two locations highly likely to involve the aforementioned flavor of decadence), there’s precious little an airport can offer that I find the slightest bit interesting (aside from, you know, the plane).

This time, however, I was going to a my first general interest science fiction con entirely as a pro (rather than as a part-time fan), so I thought it important to dress up. I brought a nice sport coat, a pullover or two, some mandarin-collar semi-formals, and threw a mess of more knock-around clothes in for good measure. This put me well over my bag limit, so I had to concede to the eventuality of baggage claim.

I should have brought scuba gear instead.

You see, the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is one long swamp stretching from southern New Jersey right down to the tip of Florida, and swamps are peculiar places. Where most land environments have an atmosphere of air with a little bit of water dissolved in it, the atmosphere in a swamps is basically an above-ground lake with a higher-than-average dissolved oxygen content. The reason H.P. Lovecraft set his stories on the East Coast is because it’s the only place in the U.S. outside of Bayou country where Cthulu could breathe above the ocean surface.

As such, the humidity content on Friday afternoon was such that I could have done far better with gills than I did with lungs, and walking out of the sliding doors at Dulles into the afternoon heat I felt rather like a cheerio left in the bowl overnight on the counter top as the milk curdled around me.

Fortunately, I had swimming alongside me the equally bedraggled Gail Carriger (whose book we found in the Dulles bookshop as well – no wonder she hit the bestseller list!). Despite Gail’s public reputation as a genteel woman of breeding, she gives me a run for my money in the obscenity department when dealing with suspiciously titled “customer service” reps at rental car agencies. At such times she is a veritable font of snark, which more than made up for the sanitized films on the flight. Between that and the silly sing-alongs on the Beltway, one couldn’t ask for a better traveling companion.

An hour and a bit later we rolled happily into the hotel parking lot, both changed clothes in situ in the cab of the teeny rental car, and strolled triumphantly through the gathering dusk to register as both hotel guests and program participants, meeting Kim The Comic Book Goddess on the way in. This was the first of many instances that night where I was identified primarily by my hat — bur more on that later.

Next Time: The Saga Of The Hat

I’ve often suspected that “JetBlue” is so named because of the color your legs turn in coach. Turns out that, like so many other things in the universe, I was completely wrong. They had more leg room than I’ve experienced on any flight in years – so much that I didn’t even get bruises on my knees from the seat in front. All this for the cheapest available tickets? Luxury, I say!

They also had personal televisions mounted in the back of each seat, ostensibly piping in Sat TV for our viewing pleasure. It was a special kind of SatTV, though, one designed to be suitable for children. Attempting to watch the G-rated cut of Fight Club was probably the most surreal experience of the entire weekend (which, in any weekend that contains people like Tee Morris, is saying a lot).

After an hour hop to Long Beach, we walked across the tarmac at the very retro 1940s airport to a trailer park masquerading as a passenger terminal. Once I had satisfied myself that I was not about to encounter dueling banjos and half-consumed kegs of Budweiser, I relaxed and took in the finer points of the architecture (what else does one do when waiting for airplanes?).

The Long Beach airport designers have put a lot of thought into constructing a homey space. Like my bedroom when I was seven, they hung model airplanes from the ceiling at just-over-collision-hazard-height. Also, in an attempt to maximize their budget while maintaining the homey feel, they had joined six mobile homes together, generating enough floorspace for everyone to stand around waiting for their planes in the finest possible Winnebago style.

The flight East proved equally roomy – hats off to JetBlue for the leg room. And the endless replays of G-rated Fight Club. Did you know that when Tyler Durden gets pissed off in kindergarten, he describes himself as “peeved”? Neither did I.

And now, I shall write a sentence that should never see the light of day: I am SO glad that I saw Die Hard 2. Looking out the plane window as we landed, I suddenly understood why a light afternoon sprinkle created a 40 minute landing delay: The ground crew naturally had to make sure the rainstorm wasn’t a terrorist plot. You never can be too careful (in fact, while I was in Baltimore the Insecurity threat level went from Lemon to Orange. They tell us if they make it all the way to Cherry, we get a free box of Fruit Loops. Me, I’m hoping the threat level makes it all the way up to Tangerine so that I can get a free pack of Starburst candies next time I fly).

Besides, no amount of G-rated Fight Club could prepare me for the experience of landing at Washington Dulles on a stormy afternoon. Exiting the gate and finding baggage claim was essentially a walking tour of one of the most expensive “things go boom” movies in history, and really, who needs a plot when you’re riding on an escalator that you personally watched Bruce Willis shred with an Uzi when you were in Jr. High?

Things were looking up…until we got outside.

Next time: Scuba Gear

This year, particularly the second half, has seen a lot of people turn very pessimistic about, well, everything. Yeah, the economy’s slowing down. Yeah, people like me are scrambling just to make ends meet – when money goes slow everywhere, it hits the arts hard. And yeah, some things just sucked. But you know what? Today’s “awful” is a hell of a lot better than “great” was when my grandparents were growing up. Despite environmental problems, terrorists, crooked investment bankers, and crookeder politicians (yes, in all parties), I’m living in a time when “five-percent unemployment” is really bad. When I was a kid in the early 80s, that would have been music to everyone’s ears. Ditto for crime, poverty, war casualty, plague death, and violence figures almost everywhere on Earth (though some of us are a lot luckier than others, through no merit of our own).

So, yeah, 2008 might have been a scary year. But as I look back at the global “Big Picture” there aren’t a lot of things that are truly scary in the long run – not like there were twenty, fifty, or eighty years ago – not to mention longer ago than that.

On a personal level, it’s been a mixed year, but as I was drawing up this list I can’t help but be staggered by how far the scales tip towards the wonderful. Click on the link to read my self-indulgent recap.

The Bad or Bittersweet

In May of 2001 I started preproduction on a film I’ve spent the intervening years working on. Hunting Kestral, a science fiction action film set in the universe of Antithesis, was officially retired from the active projects list. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, this project has to be the most important so far. I met people I still work with to this day, I learned the meat of the different trades I now call my career, and the process irrevocably altered the story and universe of Antithesis. Perhaps most importantly, I spent some of the most rewarding months of my life to that point in the company of actors who taught me far more about life than I ever thought I’d learn at the age of 24. Unfortunately, I had to admit that on this one I bit off way more than I can reasonably hope to finish chewing in the foreseeable future, so the dream of doing a professional level live-action independent film is something I have to set aside for now. I’m planning on a post-show article on it sometime in January.

My first website, Blenderwars, which had for years been a vibrant hobbyist community, finally died. It was a long time coming, but last May I finally gave in to the inevitable and pulled the plug. We were online from 1999 to 2008, hitting our peak of half a million page views per month in 2002. Some of the folks I met through there have gone on to work with me on various film projects, and have proved to be excellent people all the way down the line.

A lot of death touched my life this year, both first and second degree. I’d say I could have done without it, but the truth is that I’ve lived an unusually long time without someone close to me dying – I was expecting it sooner or later. Needless to say, I’d have preferred “later.”

My nonfiction publishing momentum slowed down in the second half of the year as a result of my podcasting endeavors.

The Unfinished
Filmed and have nearly finished (finally) a short film called “Lights Out” for Project Obsidian. Early 2009 will see its completion. Better late than never.

Began writing The Auto Motive, a steampunk young-adult urban fantasy novel. It’s got a ways to go, but it’s rocking.

Sculpting God: Bedtime Stories For Adults is half done – the final half will see the light of day in mid-2009.

The Good
Saw eight friends and acquaintances get book deals.

Made my first fiction sale: My steampunk story “Cold Duty” went simultaneously to Steampod and ClonePod and did very well among fans of both podcasts.

Finished and garnered publisher interest in book one of the Antithesis series. Plotted, outlined, and roughed out the remainder of the series.

Podcasted the first 15 episodes of the 27 episode audio version of Antithesis, Book 1: Predestination and Other Games of Chance with full cast, full production sound, and an original score.

Did my first professional publicity events.

Wrote a 6 hour miniseries for Canadian TV. The deal fell through, so the script is now in the process of novelization. The resulting novel, Down From Ten, is now 25% done.

Finished Season 2 of The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour. Recorded Season 3, and it is now half edited.

Garnered my first cover story in a magazine.

Interviewed (either for podcast or for publication) Michael ShermerM, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Pisani, Tee Morris, Richard Carrier, Philippa Ballantine, J.C. Hutchins, Seth Harwood, and Mur Lafferty.

Apologia, a show I participate in, got picked up for radio distribution.

Got to hang out at the Googleplex.

Technically this and the next item both belong in “unfinished,” but they’re here because they are undeniably good. First, I had great fun doing some very satisfying photo shoots with both new models and old, and made serious progress on bringing the long term Sophi and Logos projects together.

Hit BayCon and SteamCon with my friends, and got to moderate a few panels along the way.

Discovered Twitter.

So many other memorable moments of wonderfulness I can’t even begin to enumerate them.

Final word count for the year, including novels, short stories, screenplays, articles, and non-trivial blog posts: ~350,000

Parting Thoughts for 2008

From my very limited perspective on the world, I wouldn’t trade this year for any other. 2008 saw a lot of reconnection with old friends, strengthening of connections with new friends, and meeting more fascinating and decent people than I dare to count – some of them well on the way to becoming close friends. It’s been an emotionally intense year, much moreso than I expected. This time last year I said that 2007 was my best year so far, but I think 2008 surpassed it handsomely, despite the heartbreaks and hardships which I’m sure none of you want to read about here.

For all of you who’ve touched my life this year – friends, fans, colleagues, and fellow travelers – from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

The chapter ends, and always on a cliffhanger. There is only one question:
“What happens next?”

As for the steampunky goodness. Today, I’m watching The Brother’s Grimm .

I’m typing as I go along, but not posting until I’m done with the film. Overall, it’s a strange blend of the very good, the irritating, and the really dumb. Let’s start with the good:

The concept is very, very clever. The eponymous Brothers Grimm, hard pressed for cash, parlay their knowledge of Bavarian folklore into a career as ghostbusting con artists. This works pretty well until the Napoleonic army decides to co-opt their skills to eliminate superstition in a difficult-to-conquer village.

In the course of their adventures, where they encounter real enchantment, the story skillfully weaves together the grimmest of Grimm with very well-timed references to the rest of the mythological and medieval worlds. It’s not just Rapunzel here, it’s The Lady of Shallot . It’s the wicked queen from Snow White . It’s Jack in the Beanstalk and Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretal. It’s chalk full of echoes of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory. It’s Alice in Wonderland . There are shamanic rituals underlying it all – from licking the toad to participate in the wisdom of the forest spirits (originated because of the hallucinogenic excretions on the skins of some frogs), to the Corn King rituals, to the Sacred Kingship, to the Pied Piper. This movie is neck-deep in multiple layers of melded mythologies that marry magnificently, while still preserving the original notions that underlay them. The author of this screenplay didn’t just lift the surface of the old stories, he plumbed the guts of them, too.

In a lot of ways it’s a perfect monomythologist’s fable, beautifully rendered, and lots of fun. It *almost* gets to be a faerie tale in its own rite, but it falls short of other recent masterpieces like Pan’s Labrynth, in part because it doesn’t take the integrity of its own universe seriously.

Gilliam, naturally, makes amazing, glorious use of the grotesque – and like the old faerie stories, he takes the grotesque realities of the everyday and gives them the odd prod and twist here and there to bring out the inherent horror implicit in a world where life depends upon death to continue. Although Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro do give Gilliam a run for his money, I don’t think anybody does this better at the moment – certainly not Tim Burton, who currently is the only other serious contender for the directorial title of "Master of the Fantasy Macabre." Where Burton’s works are slick, well packaged angsty goth bullshit, Gilliam (and his latter-day acolytes Jackson and Del Toro) knows how to get at the heart of terror and darkness. He actually understands why the Romantics (like Shelley, Byron, and Poe) put terror on the same level as rapture in their reckoning of the sublime.

The bad:

As is probably to be expected with Gilliam, the film has its rather irritating and none-too-subtle subtext. His glory days of the Trilogy of Man (Time Bandits , Brazil, Baron Münchhausen ), and The Fisher King , seem forgotten here. He’s carried forward his reflexive anti-modernism, his concerns about the mechanized world draining people of humanity until they have to enter the land of magic in order to find their love of life once again. It’s an old trope, and one of the most effective ones out there. If you want to read up on some of its history, check out The Golden Bough on "The Sacred Kingship" (come to think about it, there’s a good Wikipedia article on the subject too). But where once his films were complicated, this one is pretty simplistic. The bad guys are the ones with machines, the fools are all skeptical thinkers, scientifically minded – and he lays it on pretty damn thick, to the point where just about any scene the skeptical general shows up, he’s torturing some poor sod with Rube Goldberg versions of kitchen appliances.

It’s not the attitude I object to – although I’m definitely a modernist, I enjoy quite a lot of art that turns on romanticism or critiquing modernity. It’s more that I know Gilliam to be capable of so much better. I’m thinking particularly of the battle at the end of Time Bandits here, where when the bandits bring war machines from all ages against Satan and then can’t make them work against him. When one complains "I can’t control them!" Satan replies "Of course not, you stupid man, I control them." The blend of camp humor and relentless critique of every sort of authority (parental, governmental, divine, infernal, military, social, intellectual) make that obvious, throwaway joke truly chilling.

Throughout The Brothers Grimm I found myself wishing for that old Gilliam, the one who really was a punk in the classical sense, pushing back against all prescriptions that oppress the soul of man rather than one who uses tropes he helped create in order to pick on obvious, boring kinds of authority and orthodoxy. In short, there’s nothing truly challenging in this film – it’s all attitude and no substance. More "steam" than "punk."

In the end, we have in The Brothers Grimm a simplistic, even dishonest, casting of the conflict between modernism and primitivism, and it fails to satisfy the itches it scratches.

The stupid:

There are a lot of little false steps here and there. For example, I know Steampunk works by melding modern sensibilities, but a 19th century German – even one from the city – would not vomit at the sight of a rabbit being skinned (though I have to give kudos to Gilliam for using a real rabbit). They wouldn’t panic at the sight of beetles. There’s a lot in this movie that they might plausibly have found offputting – but I’m sorry, those ain’t among them. Over and over again, the movie is put off-pace by little sour notes like these.

Overall impression:

Though the "punk" part of steampunk here is more juvenile than a lot of Gilliam’s previous work, the style is beautiful (as his work always is) and the story is engaging. The acting is wonderful – good enough to cover the deficiencies in the script and make for a fun evening. In many ways, this film is what Sleepy Hollow should have been – clever, engaging, full of fun culture references and with a proper understanding of its source mythology, rather than a thinly veiled Freudian/neopagan evangelism tract with nothing below its sexy surface. It also helps that the source material – the myths collected by The Brothers Grimm – honestly were pagan folklore from a superstitious world, rather than a satire making fun of superstition (as the original The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was). It’s the author in me – I hate remakes that plunder, rape, and pervert the original story to make a preachy point exactly contrary to the story they’re attempting to "present." Burton is worse at this than Disney. Gilliam has the decency to respect his source material, and the result is watchable fun with beatiful moments, but not his best work.

Next up on the Stempunk menu: The Japanese Anime film Steamboy

So, this week, in between evaluating the Trinity Indamixx (initial impressions – favorable but with caveats), which I’m blogging on right now using an external keyboard (I could seriously get addicted to this thing), I learn all about Steampunk Films!

But back to the steampunkiness. I really enjoyed Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Yeah, I know, I know. It’s preachy and shallow and far too didactic for anyone’s own good. You know what? So was Narnia, but most of the people that go around slagging Pullman off are Christians who are blind to how preachy and simplistic Narnia is, while they find Pullman’s universe frightening and subversive.

The fact is that the books were preachy, but they were hardly shallow. They were gloriously imaginative, and they were appropriately geared for preteens (which, if you don’t remember from the books you read as a kid, means heavy-handedness is important. This is a demographic that’s exploring big ideas in a big way, for the first time). Like the Narnia books, these stories deal with big ideas in a bold, almost tacky way. Unlike Narnia, Pullman waited to write his saga until he was a mature author, so his stories are better, his metaphors more sophisticated, and his style more consistent. The other thing that bears mentioning is that Materials is actually a fully developed fantasy, while Narnia is, by Lewis’ own admission, a hybrid of allegory and beast fable. Because of this, the worst of Materials compares well with the best of Narnia, from an adult perspective. From a child’s perspective, both are packed with wonder and terror and the glory of life in the finest coming-of-age tradition.

But I digress…

For the movie, they sanitized the idealogical content for mass audiences, but they did not neuter it. There’s still a goodly amount here to engender a lot of discussion. Visually, the film’s a stunner. Given the production team I should have expected that, but honestly I’m surprised. Steampunk in all the right ways, the world is gloriously visualized. The depth of the grandeur in the world really comes through. The adaptation is well-penned, the acting above par, and – best of all for my purposes – it’s deeply immersive. The particle physics, the alethiometer, the daemons, the bears, the dirigibles, the brass machinery, mostly plausibly rendered with just a touch of the fantastic. Also, for my purposes, it was a good place to start. It’s shot through with the steampunk ethos of individualism, distrust for authority, ubermenschen, and situational ethics.

It’s a damn shame that small minded bigoted activists like the ones at the American Family Association managed to propagandize this film out of business. It would have been great to see the rest of these films – now I daresay they will never be produced. More than that, watching these films next to the Narnia films would have given a lot of opportunity for children to explore the big questions both series raise in unique ways. And, where Materials is concerned, since the entire conceit of the story relies upon particle physics and string theory, it could be a great conversation starter for other big ideas full of wonder.

So, there we are. Steampunk education part 1 complete. Part two coming soon!

I will be on the following panels:

Engines of Empire: Real Science and Gadgets of Victorian Times – Saturday 1:30-2:30

and

Steampunk Multi-Media: Steamy film, photo, audio and more – Saturday 3-4

Come along, join the party – it promises to be a hell of a debut con!