Had the pleasure of being invited to sit down across the virtual desk that is Skype from Martin Aggett of Remix Fiction.
Very grateful to Martin for giving me the opportunity to discuss Brain Candy, LLC on his show.
Posts Tagged: fiction
26
Apr 10
My Super First Day
I can’t say for sure when my super first day was. I’ve probably had my super power – if you can call it that – all my life.
The day I saw “10191987″ spelled out in my bowl of Cheerios, however, was the day I knew I was different.
Okay, to be accurate, October 19, 1987 was the day I knew I was different. I saw “10191987″ about a week or so before Black Monday, but it wasn’t until the crash that I realized what it meant.
Other numbers followed. Could be dates, could be just numbers. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Always important. Never actionable.
11091989
5335
08021990
12251990
07252000
2
I’ve seen these numbers in rain drops on windows, in fields, in Christmas tree lights.
Once I figured out what I was seeing, I spent a lot of years trying to predict the importance of the numbers. I built spreadsheets and maps, read about numerology and cryptography, scoured every news source I could find. I never did come close to predicting anything.
After a while, I gave up. Too many possibilities, too many moving pieces.
And there’s the problem: I know ahead of time some key piece to a world-changing event, but I never know what the event will be. I can’t help avoid catastrophes; I can only verify my prediction after the fact. Hardly something to write home about.
I started ignoring the numbers. I avoided news in any format I could. No TV, no web, no print. I was happier living in ignorance and denial. Things got better for a while.
So, why I am writing about all of this now? Because recently I started seeing the same number, over and over: 10102010.
This is the first number that keeps repeating itself. I believe it’s important, perhaps the most important number I’ve ever seen. And I have no idea what’s going to happen on that date.
But maybe you do…
21
Jul 09
Analogs are Antiques
I’m supposed to be prepping for a mini road trip to San Diego in two days (making a return appearance at Comic-Con on behalf of Runes of Gallidon), but I can’t resist writing this before heading out of town.
I just cleaned out my RSS reader, twitter, and Friendfeed updates, and I was struck – once again – at the number of examples of how analog product is shifting towards a status of antiques. I define an analog offering as a physical object containing digitized or digitizable content (a book, a CD, a DVD, etc.).
24
Jun 09
Kenji Novel – The Struggle with POV
After reading several books, blogs, and online articles on the elusively challenging art that is called writing, I felt prepared enough to actually start writing my first novel. The ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for three years took on a substantive form – characters, dialogue, even a rough overview of the plot.
It’s a fantasy novel featuring Kenji, a young man recently cast out of a monastic school and finding his way in a world recently turned upside. It was going to be set in a semi-historical Japan shortly after the Onin War, but I ended up placing it in Runes of Gallidon, a user-generated collaborative online fantasy world I co-founded/created last year.
Months after starting the novel, I am still struggling with some fundamentals about how, exactly, to tell this story.
One of my early struggles was point of view. I initially settled on a close third person, single POV, and I wrote a few chapters in this format, focusing on the protagonist, Kenji.
Soon, however, I realized the limitations of this approach. Information shared with the reader must be limited to what the protagonist knows or experiences. Fine for certain types of works and stories but not a style that worked well for me as the story developed and deepened.
New characters sprang up, and I found myself wanting to write from their POV. Coming at a topic from multiple POV’s was very appealing, not least because it allowed characters to comment (perhaps silently) on each other.
Eventually, I switched from a single POV to a multiple POV. Suddenly, I went from trying to figure out what happened next to trying to figure out how to scope back the story so it could be told in under 100,000 words.
It’s amazing how much more easily the plotlines and other characters developed simply by changing the POV. It’s a bit more work, but the work is easier. And easier, in this case, means more fun.
