CCSD 15 Hall H Postmortem

So. I've reviewed what I could of the Hall H news and trailers that came out of Comic Con.

Star Wars wins. Hands down. The behind the scenes video was beautiful, even if it doesn't tease too much about the story (which may actually be for the best). That impromptu live concert for panel attendees also sounds (ha) incredible.

Batman V. Superman had a much stronger showing this time around. The shots of Bruce in Metropolis amidst the destruction were really compelling. Interesting to know he has at least one dead Robin under his belt. I doubt we'll see Tim or Dick due to the number of Justice Leaguers who will already be making cameos. Carrie Kelly is a possibility, just because of Snyder's hard-on for all things Frank Miller. Wonder Woman seems suitably bad-ass, and I am still very curious about those Superman soldiers. The Suicide Squad trailer had a cool aesthetic, but it came across as kind of soulless and dry. If there was ever a DC movie that needed some levity, it's this one, and they have the cast to exploit it.

The leaked Deadpool trailer on the other hand is looking pretty good. Almost a "here's how you should have done it" to Warner Bros. I think it does a good job of capturing the "I can't tell if this is just dumb, or so dumb it's smart" vibe of the comic character. Post PG-13 big brand superhero movies are also just a rich vein to tap; think Kick-Ass with a bigger following. Even if the thing is a bomb, I think Fox will be pleased with the opening weekend results. Almost guaranteed that critics won't get it, but a lack of artistic acclaim hasn't hurt Transformers or Fast and Furious. I was less wowed by their X-Men stuff, even though the last movie was arguably the best yet, and Wolverine 2 was better than Wolverine 1.

Weird that Marvel sat this one out. Despite their fairly big media push, I am not feeling the hype-train for Ant-Man like any of their recent films. A Comic Con nudge may have done it some good. Something to tease Doctor Strange and Ms. Marvel would have been nice too, but you can't always get what you want.

In terms of smaller stage stuff, ConMan is looking like a lot of fun. The Battleborn, Halo, and Assassin's Creed "play this game in real life"-style installations made me sad that I wasn't there.

That's my 2 cents, having not been there. People who attended, am I missing anything huge?

Rekindling Library Romance

Working at a bookstore killed my relationship with public libraries. Well, that and college libraries. Seeing fresh releases, and hearing all the positive buzz about big deal books fostered a compulsion called tsundoku; the acquisition of so many books that one has no hope of reading them all. (I do the same thing with PC games, as do many others; a practice my friend Jose suggests we call Steamdoku. I agree. Digression over!) College, in turn, made me associate libraries with doing research or serious work.

So I stopped checking out libraries. But is that really a problem? If I buy so many damn books, why would I go to a library ever again? Well, precisely because I have so little time to read any more. Stick with me.

When I broke up with libraries, I also let myself believe that their selections were hopelessly outdated. I pictured collections consisting of James Pattersons gone by two years and yellow paged paperbacks that have somehow held on since the sixties. Maybe I did it to help justify my buying compulsion. Or maybe that's an accurate assessment of the Pasadena Public Library. I don't know anymore, and it doesn't matter because the Burbank Public Library is freakin' awesome.

There was one category of bookstore purchases that were always out of my budget: audio books. Before you roll your eyes, or rail about how real authors must read on paper to keep notes, keep a couple things in mind. A) I have a full time job. B) working out feels like a waste of time. C) driving feels like a waste of time. Audio books help me fit more fiction into the cracks of my life.

Burbank has a ton titles in audio form. And lots of stuff by authors I would like to read, but never buy, or think to seek out when visiting a Barnes & Noble. This is the real benefit of libraries. Getting books for free is nice, but finding books you would never encounter under other circumstances is really what makes the difference.

Perusing the audio book selection reminded me that I love Joe Hill and I love William Gibson. From Hill, I picked up Heart-Shaped Box. It's a story about an aging rock star with a menagerie of messed up detritus who buys a ghost. It's my workout book, because it is brutal enough to distract me from the task at hand. I mean, this fucking guy. He knows how to hurt characters (and by extension, readers). People drone on and on about how mean GRRM and Joss Whedon and even Jim Butcher (really?) are to their characters because they kill people or beat them up. Bull. Shit. A quick death or cracked ribs are so much kinder than what you can do. Even maiming pales in comparison to the emotional trauma you can inflict with a single brutal line or revelation. That's something Hill borrows from dear old dad, but I greatly prefer his work. His stuff is also more concrete, pairing physical violence with psychological, or using one as a metaphor for the other. He has sharper, darker teeth, and his narratives feel more complete and cohesive. They may be more traditional, but I like his beginnings, middles, and most of all his endings.

On a related note, I finished up Locke & Key, and it is fantastic. I can't think of a comic book series that does a better job of capturing the angst that is 15-18 years old. The finale is great. Again, brutal. Again, fairly traditional, but it will make you genuinely sad, balancing very tender moments with some very sharp sticks, with great heroism interspersed (not so much with the laffs), and most importantly, you will have a sense of closure. Would love to read more short stories and side stories that leverage the universe's concepts, but happy to see Bode, Kinsey, and Tyler's tale come to a satisfying close.

Back to the bounties of the Burbank Public Library, I've picked up The Peripheral from William Gibson to listen to while driving. It's been a long time since I've read anything by him, so I forgot how much of an impression he made on my writing still. This book feels a little more accessible than the super-slangy cyberpunk of his Sprawl trilogy, but it still has that great environmental/conceptual mystery quality that typifies his work. You are thrust in a world, and by about midway through the book, you have a handle on the setting, but you still have to work out all the mysteries of the plot. I highly recommend it to Sci-Fi fans, and already gifted it to one person.

Very strong central premise about communicating between adjacent time streams, but it also focuses on post-humanity, and long-game evolution of telepresence technologies. Think Ghost in the Shell, dialed back a couple notches, with less emphasis on an ephemeral cyberworld, and a deeper examination of being able to inhabit other human bodies. There's also some stuff in their about drones and gaming. Very high concept cocaine.

The library also has a fairly extensive collections of movies, including some new releases you can rent for a dollar. Seeing how Blockbusters are a thing of the past and Redboxes are scratched to hell or have the wrong discs half the time, that's super convenient.

Moral of the story? Do yourself a solid and check out your local public library. You may be pleasantly surprised. If not, you will have restored an old librarian's faith in humanity.

Witching Hours

Finally beat The Witcher 2 last week. Twice, actually, exploring two different endings, which themselves were just two permutations stemming from a larger plot schism. I can't think of another time a game compelled me to play through alternate endings rather than just YouTubing them. After factoring in idle time, I think the game took me about 80 hours to complete. It was a genuine journey and I look forward to playing The Wild Hunt soon.

Due to it's high body count and sexually charged nature, the world of The Witcher will draw inevitable comparisons to Game of Thrones, but only because the latter has become such a presence in popular culture, so I will do my best to avoid that shorthand. Dark fantasy has been around for a long time, and this is a much more fantastic universe than GRRMs dragon-enhanced take on the War of the Roses. It has explosive D&D style magic, elves, dwarves, and even a few sci-fi flourishes. For example, the denizens of the world have a strong enough grasp on genetics to meddle with them.

You yourself play Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher, which is a mutant magi-swordsman bred for hunting monsters. He has white hair. He has cat eyes. He is an amnesiac. Despite those fan-fic grade cliches, the story itself is unexpected, filled with genuine moral dilemmas, twisting alliances, political intrigue, and ugly consequences.

Like Mass Effect 2, it refines a very messy first game, streamlining and speeding up stilted combat into more seamless, action-oriented gameplay. It retains the very interesting alchemy system, which rewards preparation for fighting specific monster types. Character customization is also considerably more coherent: instead of spending coins of different value on skills of different value, you have three primary skill trees and one training tree with slots for permanent stat bonuses.

There are lingering issues. It's a very buggy game. Invisible walls pop up due to messy in-game geometry. There are ways to unwittingly bug quests, even in the enhanced, de-bugged edition. It frequently crashed due to Steam sync, or faulty cut-scenes. I noticed that as my autosaves piled up indefinitely, the game took longer to load from the main menu, and by the end of the game, attempting to load a game from the pause menu was a guaranteed crash. You can also only change key-bindings via a pre-game launcher. I mean, really? The inventory can also be a chore to navigate, but that's due in part, to the massive amount of shit you accumulate.

It's the staggering amount of writing that impresses me. It took me 80 hours, and if I pursued the other plot chain, I'm sure it could bring the count to 100 unique hours of gameplay. There are fewer choices than Biowares offerings, but they matter more because they aren't mere opportunities to push around some arbitrary morality meter. CD Projekt Red did the fucking work. If you make one political alliance over another, your quest and the game world change accordingly and significantly. You won't learn everything you can about the characters on a single play through. Despite those divergences, the plotting is very tight. Your quest journal is actually recorded by your bard friend, Dandelion, and the entries are all witty. Conversational dialog is also pleasingly colorful.

So, this is the paragraph that caused a knockdown drag out between two couples of friends on facebook. It deals with sexism in games, so if you're burnt out on that topic, skip to the conclusion I guess, but I think it gets peoples' blood up because it taps into something deep seated and important. I'm a big fan of speculative fiction that includes sex, even if the inclusion only amounts to softcore bedroom scenes. I don't think that's a pleasure any guiltier than slaughtering digital men by the score. But a progressive world this is not. Hell, it is objectively misogynistic. Geralt philanders without consequence. Sex is a prize for saying the right thing in a single conversation chain, like a compressed dating sim. Almost all the women, including those milling about town, share the same top-heavy model in low-cut outfits. Far more troubling, is the fact that every major female character in the game is brutally victimized at some point. There are powerful women. Soldiers, sorceresses, and queens. But they all end up kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, raped, or killed. The only gay character and lesbian happen to be scheming villains. It's bad enough to make GoT appear enlightened. (Damn! I was doing so well, too.)

Doesn't feel great to admit I can forgive it those toxic politics, let alone hunger for another game that will feature the same. But I enjoy the successful blend of sword and sorcery combat. I get sucked into the mechanical ecosystem that requires crafting and alchemy. I am curious about where this world is going. And, not every game needs to forward a social agenda. That said, I think CD Projekt Red can do better with how it handles women. They are powerful characters, they influence the world, but they end  up being punished in ways that don't square with what happens to the straight men.

The Facebook duel was as follows. One side asserted that Dragon Age was vastly inferior to Witcher, while the other argued Dragon Age attempted something more ambitious by allowing players to customize the gender, sexual preference, and race of their main character, rather than locking players into a straight white male role. Both parties made some valid points, but passive aggression slid into ad hominems, and it was the kind of debate that was denied discourse from the start. Nobody won, and any kind of mixed judgment would look like indecisive platitudes. If I knew how to sort this shit out, we'd have peace in the Middle East and Gamergate would be a solved problem.

Here's what I took away, though, in the interest of  full disclosure: I have yet to play Dragon Age Inquisition. The last Bioware title I played was the underwhelming DA2. My issue with that game, and other recent offerings, is that those factors end up being almost purely cosmetic, save for who your character decides to bed. I can see how that is empowering; it's refreshing to have a black hero whose story isn't about being black. But in an RPG that promises to tackle complex issues like sexism and racism, I think those choices need to have a little more weight. Do they need the brutal sexual violence of the Witcher? Maybe not, but if your game is going to take on issues, it needs sharper teeth. While ambition is commendable, execution deserves credit where due. Straight White Cis Male Tale or not, (and you can make a case that it's not, since Witchers are pariahs), Geralt's tale, and it's impressive number of plot permutations, is a technically ambitious and impressively executed piece of literature.

Looking forward to getting lost in Gwent soon.

The Aging of Ultron

It's been like half a year since I last blogged about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), so we're due for more. This spring has an interesting pair of offerings, with Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Age of Ultron and Netflix’s relative dark horse, Daredevil. Now people are already hyping up for Civil War. Even as a self-professed Marvel zealot, I'm starting to experience some fatigue with their project, and I can't help but wonder how much longer less-dedicated audiences will last in Marvel's ambitious (read: insane) media campaign.

Of the two projects, I actually prefered Daredevil, which once again breaks new tonal ground for their shared-screen universe. Not terribly surprising, given my fondness for dark, vigilante-flavored brooding and hardcore violence.

Stellar fight choreography and production values are enough to carry the show. The corridor fight scene in episode two that pays homage to Old Boy is absolutely brilliant. The brutality has been dialed up to 11, and that does a lot to delineate the show from Marvel's tamer network offerings, or the fanciful CGI brawling of the Avengers et al. There are times where it feels excessive, and it pairs oddly with the show's prudishness. We can watch a man's head get pulped by a car door, but god forbid we see naked people. Admittedly, that is consistent with comic book ethos (and most of American entertainment) but disappointing for somebody who is hoping our society can get over its crippling fear of sex. Rosario Dawson is also excellent at being naked. I'm just putting that out there.

It's not without its faults. My buddy Brian Solloway pointed out the characters are quite weak in the first few episodes. Foggy is likable but initially very one-dimensional (even compared to Arrow's broadly drawn supporting cast) and Karen is even more straightforward and often downright annoying. Matt is a little more interesting, but kind of... under-developed. While the flashbacks do a good job of explaining why he loved his dad, his violent crusade to protect Hell's Kitchen is essentially presented as a cure for insomnia. He puts people in the hospital because he can, and it's cathartic. At best, he comes across as a high-functioning psychopath. That's an observation made about Batman all the time, and Daredevil's own writers have made the comparison, but there are meaningful distinctions. In particular, I would have liked to see is a deeper exploration of the dichotomy between his life as a lawyer and a vigilante. Something to suggest a more complex character arc to be had here.

Especially since the show's villain, Wilson Fisk, seems to have a much more realized and complex vision for the city. In the comics, Kingpin was a generic gangster, even by Marvel's mustache twirling standards, but Vincent D'Onofrio breathes nuanced, menacing life into him. He may be the best villain Marvel has put to screen yet, surpassing even Hiddleston's Loki, Redford's Alexander Pierce, and Spader's Ultron. He has this child-like vulnerability to him that pairs well with explosive rage, but its offset by calculated obsession and chilling megalomania. Each of his scenes are compelling, and unlike most TV villains, his character has a fully realized arc that runs parallel to the hero.

So I'm definitely on-board for season 2. My guess is Electra will make an appearance, but I am more interested to see how this will pair with Kristen Ritter's Alias show. That's a tough project. The show has to start with her as a has-been hero, and she hasn't appeared in the MCU to date. The trades have already talked about cross-overs that may segue into a Defenders series which...agh. You can only stretch this so far, guys. Consolidate a little.

I'm also very curious to see if it will feature Asa Butterfield's Spider-Man, who is also undoubtedly active in other neighborhoods of New York City, but my guess is that he will be largely relegated to the big screen. On that note, I'm disappointed that Sony and Marvel aren't taking Miles Morales or Spider-Gwen out for a big screen spin. Asa is great, and I think he will make a good Peter Parker, but we've seen that guy (and his origin story) twice now in the past 15 years. Age of Ultron had an opportunity to just introduce him with the stinger, and totally punted it. I mean, come on Joss. You don't need to actually show Spidey or have him talk; just a close up of a New York window suddenly "thwipped" with webbing. Let people know he's there, and already active. This fan-made thing goes above and beyond. Perfect execution.

On the whole, I enjoyed Ultron. This one felt more Whedony, which is what I wanted, but somehow it ended up on par with the first film for me. Big fights. Fun dialog interspersed. But we’ve seen that movie a couple times now. There is nothing that changes the status quo, compared to say, Winter Soldier, or even the battle of New York in the first Avengers. Nothing that expands the tonal range of the universe, compared to Guardians or Daredevil. I'm really mixed about how Hawkeye was handled too. I much prefer Clint as the fallible (failure-prone, even) Avenger. He does upstage Ultron by delivering the best speech in the movie, which does double-duty as a snarky meta-commentary of the MCU as a whole ("Look, none of this makes any sense...") and a truly awesome "it’s time to be a hero" speech. It also felt fairly in-sync with his comic persona.

As for the criticisms of how Joss handled Black Widow... I mean, Jesus Christ. Are we really arguing that Natasha having a love interest prevents her from being a strong character in her own right? Because that doesn't seem very feminist to me. Also, my word choice was deliberate: Banner is Natasha's love interest. She does all the brave stuff, courting him broad spectrum without seeming desperate. Meanwhile, he is timid and conflicted throughout. Her romantic interest doesn't diminish her stature on the team. And if you want a romantically aloof female character, look no further than Maria Hill. As a writer, it's really disheartening to see, because there really doesn't seem to be any winning where feminism is concerned. Only cannibalism.

That said, I don't think Whedon taking his ball and going home was the best play. I understand it. Death threats are appalling and nobody should have to put up with that kind of treatment. But quitting social media won't stop it. His reaction strikes me as very generational, which is weird to say about somebody whose writing has always been so hip and with it.

Personally, I don't think the "quiet place" he talks about is a thing anymore. For better or worse, Millenials have been groomed to crave constant contact and assessment, to ceaselessly produce content and respond to it. That interplay informs my writing process. Sure, it may be vain--toxic even--but that makes addressing that system more important. Admittedly, I know not of what I write. I don't have many readers (let alone legions of fans), and they are generally personal friends and family.

Getting back to the film, Spader has some fantastic lines and the perfect voice to deliver them. I think he would have shined even brighter with some more screen time but when you factor in all the big names in that cast, we get pretty well-acquainted with his genocidal tinhead. Aside from the creeping feeling of an aging brand, I think the biggest disappointment with the movie was Vision. There wasn't enough time to make him feel like something other than a literal deus ex machina. His power set could be described as "playing on godmode." Thanos ain't no thang with this dude around.

Even though I'm getting a little worn out by spectacle upon spectacle, I'm still gonna see Ant-Man, if only to hunt for traces of Edgar Wright's vision of the film. Expect more commentary then.

NOTE: (spoiler warning) my friend Kat Eason pointed out most of the criticisms about the handling of Black Widow related to her calling herself a monster because she was sterilized. I assumed that comment referred more to her being trained and forced to murder people at a young age, but the conversation could have been articulated more clearly. Given the envy she seemed to have for Clint's family, it's possible she felt broken, or monstrously disfigured. Or maybe it was just another way to relate to Banner. Given his socio-political track record, it's absurd to think Whedon believes that barren/sterilized women are monsters, but disappointing that he didn't consider how that conversation might come across.

Slow Going

Sorry for the long delay, though I'm relieved to see it was not as long as I feared. With any luck I won't have a month long posting drought this year. Consider it a late resolution. Anyway! Here are my thoughts on Patrick Rothfuss' The Slow Regard of Silent Things.

I loved The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear. Best contributions to classic fantasy literature in a long time. Beautiful prose, a tragic frame-narrative that makes you question the otherwise traditional hero's journey, and an incredible cast. It can be tropey. Cliched even at moments (eyes that shift color with emotion). Kvothe, with his limitless talents and quick wit has the godly tang of a Mary Sue. Though those things are part of the charm. It was tremendously refreshing to see the Old Ways done right, with a cunning new voice. Needless to say, waiting for The Doors of Stone has been agony.

Inevitably, people have been hounding and badgering Rothfuss to finish it, which is understandable, but also the wrong thing to do. As per Neil Gaiman, authors are not their audience's bitch. But I know that the impatience and harassment is coming from a place of lust, if not real love. So I can see why people would be disappointed by this quirky little novella about Auri, one of the oddest and most mysterious characters in the world, that doesn't really solve any of her mysteries, or drive much of the plot forward.

Rothfuss knew it too. He wrote an afterword that's longer than a couple of the novella's shorter chapters talking about how distraught he was over publishing it, knowing people would be angry, and acknowledging that it does not even fit the expected criteria of a story. It's a strange little addition; a sorry-not-sorry of literary afterwords with the ultimate take-away of, "I needed to write this, I think there are some people out there who needed to read it, starting with this one friend who I spoke with about it." It's a sentiment I heartily endorse.

But I was not one of those people. The story frustrated me. It's very short; reading material that should have been the matter of an afternoon, and it took me more than a month to get through it once I started reading it in earnest. I was anticipating learning about Auri's past. What made a presumably once-normal person into this strange creature who lives under The University and speaks in riddles with vaguely Carrolean words.

Nope.

Instead we get five days in Auri's curious life. She talks to objects as if they are people, attempts to move them around her underground world in accordance with some undefined personal sense of feng shui, and then imagines or senses the objects' reactions. There's no hint at what happened to her, assuming she wasn't a feral girl from the start who somehow taught herself how to speak and dress and learn something of social norms (what the proper soaps for kissing are). There is a vague teaser of what is to come; I suspect Kvothe may be using The Underthing as a refuge to continue combing the library for information even after he is expelled from The University.

There is no denying the feat of voice craft. Rothfuss clearly became Auri as he wrote, no-longer seeing words on the page, but The Underthing in all its dark, complex splendor. The core of her translates, but the answers behind her are intentionally ignored. It curbs hard away from explanations, save for declarative statements from Auri about what type of day it is, and how objects should be placed

The Underthing itself is also muddled. Despite the detailed descriptions of discrete regions, I found it impossible to link names to places, at least with any certainty, because of the ephemeral, abrupt way Auri moves through them. I might be alone in my confusion, as some meticulous soul actually managed to map it out, but I think that exercise was at cross purposes with the author's intentions. It's meant to be alive, and ambiguously magical, a character unto itself like the detritus around her. Clearly charted paths would pin it down.

It was the lack of dialog that killed me. He means it when he says slow and silent, folks. My work to date frequently strays into territory that looks more like screenplays or graphic novel scripts. When reading I reach for conversation like a thirsty man in the desert. Conversation develops characters. It is story that catalyzes plot.

There are also very few sequences where things other than Auri do something physically observable to the universe. A skunk bites her. Water flows and gears churn. Her alchemic lamp throws light across the wall. And that's almost entirely it. Rothfuss wrote in his afterword that the closest thing to an action scene is when Auri makes soap. I would argue the most action packed moment is actually when she almost loses the massive bronze gear, toward the middle of the book, but his point stands. She is alone in this world, and her activities would be mundane were they not governed by seemingly arbitrary eccentricity.The rest of the time, it's objects feeling things at her, or her projecting those emotions onto them.

A theme that keeps rearing its head is that it is wrong to want at the world. That you play the hand you are dealt, and you try to be a curator of what is good, but that expecting anything from the world, or even trying too to get what you want, is wrongheaded, if not evil. As I read that refrain, I couldn't help but wonder if this little novella Rothfuss' reaction to his fans' monumental, and incessant expectations.

I think there might be something more to glean from the novella. But the book wore me down early on, past the point of closer reading. After the halfway mark I was reading for a twist or a change in pace that never appeared. This may be one to revisit when I am older, and gods willing, more patient.

Omniscience & Joss

So after foisting countless novels and comic books on my friend Brian Solloway​, he responded by recommending something a little outside my comfort zone: Tai Pan. I'm a sci-fi and fantasy guy to a fault, so I have almost no experience with modern historical fiction (as opposed to stuff written in-period, and all of that was mostly via curriculum rather than pleasure.) That's really my only excuse for having missed James Clavell up until now. I tried to keep this review focused on style and free of spoilers, so you should be good to go even if you have yet to read the book.

In brief, the book is about Dirk Straun, an opium trader who becomes Tai-Pan, the supreme ruler of Hong Kong and head of the 'Nobel House,' which is essentially the middle-ground between a shipping empire and a Chinese dynasty. Dirk is a larger than life figure, a peerless sailor with all the ruthless cunning and fighting skills of a pirate king. He has a stronger sense of honor than his rivals, and everybody from the British Navy, but what really sets him apart is the fact that he has gone native. He has made a tremendous effort to learn Chinese culture, and picked up some invaluable tips about hygiene--like, you know wiping your ass--and concepts such as Face and Joss which were hugely important factors of Chinese culture.

The beginning of the book struck me as a bit of a whirlwind. You meet what feels like twenty characters in the first forty pages, and Clavell jumps from perspective to perspective quickly. True third-person omniscient is extremely difficult to write, and somewhat challenging to read as well, which probably explains why it's been recently replaced by rotating POV chapters. Even rarer is for third omniscient to play with true antagonists as well as the good guys. The only other book that I can think of which pulled it off was Dune, and those transitions were much more distinct in Herbert's writing. Here, in the course of a single conversation, we'll hear how three men are planning on shanking each other in the back, while the fourth is worried about parliament and a fifth is hung up on lady problems.

Acclimating took me some time, and doubling back to keep things straight; the exact mechanics of the British politics never became clear to me; Clavell doesn't do exposition. It's a great counterpoint for me, because all of my stuff still has the shine of YA exposition; here's how magic works, here's how the world works, etc. I think there is a happy medium to be had somewhere, and I'd do well to re-read Clavell when I'm trying to pare down the info dumps in my own work.

What won me over and made me love the book by the end was that it surprised me. Every time I had a prediction, the characters would subvert my expectations (and occasionally themselves), or Clavell would use some momentous event from History to ruin everybody's day (Malaria says "'Sup"). There were characters I initially dismissed as minor or supporting who ended up being fulcrums for the plot. There were a few times when this led to disappointment; as some eagerly anticipated scenes never came to pass, but on the whole, being surprised was far better.

This inherently unpredictable plot does a fantastic job of illustrating the concept of Joss, which Clavell introduces in the first couple pages as luck, God, and the Devil all mixed together. Fate is probably our closest cognate, though it is much more mercurial than that. Joss is not written ahead of time. It the force that plays dice with the universe, regardless of what gods or devils have in mind.

It's the perfect rebuttal to the most common complaint about historical fiction: history is boring because we know how it plays out. To that point, I plan on reading Clavell's Shogun on short order.

Trespassers, Part 1

This morning I finished the first third of my new book, Trespassers. It's already longer than The Harrowing, and I think it's better by a damn sight. It's 260-something pages of contemporary fantasy set in Los Angeles. Here's a proto-jacket blurb:

"For the last three years, Holden Lockheed has lived a life of utter seclusion. Working from home, eating delivery, and living on the internet. That abruptly ends when he receives a visit from The Pinstriped Man. The strange intruder gives him a stranger gift: each night, Holden must relive the day from the perspective of anybody he has seen that day. After seeing the world through the eyes of Lark Wallace, a fearless delivery girl, and Reza Khan, a brilliant fraud, the three of them are drawn into Los Angeles' supernatural underworld."

I'd say more, but seeing how it isn't even a completed story yet, I don't want to give away much. 

Even though I just finished writing it, some lines in chapter 1 are making me wince, and I know it will need some more revisions based on parts 2 and 3. It's also bloated with grammatical errors, (I'm really selling this! Can you tell I write marketing copy?). The take away being: you will have plenty of opportunities to read it later, when it is more complete. Do not feel like this is a one time offer; when I'm done, I will be asking/imploring/conscripting many of you to do your worst.

But if you're curious about what I've been working on for the last fifteen months, let me know and I will shoot you a copy.