In an effort to keep everyone better apprised as to our whereabouts, let’s take a moment and see what the Crazy 8 staff has on tap in March.
Next week, on March 8, Peter David will be conducting a daylong online Master Seminar on Writing Great Characters. This is part of a series hosted by former Marvel and IDW editor Andy Schmidt and well worth your time and attention. As it says on the website, “Join Peter for an in-depth look at getting to the core of the character, creating interactions and conflicts between characters, how to put your characters in the driver’s seat and let them guide you, and of course, scripting techniques to bring the heart of your character onto the final printed page.”
Over the weekend of March 21-22, I’ll be speaking on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College at Diplocon. It’s a small but growing show, with an emphasis on gaming and Anime but bringing me down means they’re ready for some comic book and science fiction love.
We keep getting asked this question over and over again: “Why do you call yourself Crazy 8 Press when there are only seven of you?”
There’s a reason. And we’re actually kind of surprised a smart person like you hasn’t figured it out.
It’s you, silly.
You’re the eighth person. You, yes little ol’ you, are the reason we do all of this.
Yes, we enjoy writing and telling stories, but what good is a storyteller without an audience? We can make stories that span galaxies, bridge eons, but it’s nothing if we don’t touch someone’s heart with it.
You make it all possible. You give us feedback. You laugh. You cry. You argue. You get angry. And you give us money for what we do.
As authors, we are very lucky people. We have found that there’s someone out there who likes the way we think, who enjoys hearing what we have to say. All you ask from us is a simple request: Entertain me. Make me happy to spend time with you.
And we love you for it.
Yes, it’s not always the smoothest of romances. How could it be? Sometimes we get moody, sometimes we think you’ve forgotten us, sometimes you get abusive when you think we aren’t paying attention to what you want. But still we keep coming back for more. If it sounds a little co-dependent, well, maybe it is. But we do depend on you. Trust us, we’ve been around, the list of exes who’ve just used us and paid us to do quickie little– well, best not to dwell. We’re talking about you.
Sure, we’ll lie to you on occasion, but we’ll be mostly honest. We may trick you, but it’s only to delight you. And although there may be other readers who find us and fall hard for us, you’ll still be in our hearts.
So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for everything.
But we still can’t meet your parents next weekend. We told you we have to work. We’re on deadline, dammit.
Not so long ago one of my Friends (we’ll call her Amy), who had just read my contemporary fantasy novel Fight The Gods, pointed something out to me that I hadn’t really thought about: Fight The Gods is a romance.
Amy, you see, isn’t the world’s biggest fan of fantasy adventure. It was only because her fiance–we’ll call him Blair–dragged her to the Farpoint con in Timonium, Maryland that she saw Fight The Gods sitting on my table and got interested enough to secure a copy. Her hopes for it weren’t very high, I think. But she liked it. And she did so purely because she had discovered a thread that, for her, made the experience worthwhile. “It’s a romance,” she told Blair when she was done. Told him unequivocally, I might add, because Amy is pretty firm in her opinions.
To be honest, I had never thought of Fight The Gods in that light before. I was all focused on the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery, on the conflicts that shape him, on the deepening mystery, on the whiplash-inducing, roller coaster action of the plot. I wasn’t really thinking about true love.
But it happened. Pretty much the way real love does, now that I think about. It comes out of nowhere, when you least expect it.
Mind you, the protagonist’s girlfriend, a New York City cop, is no freakin’ Disney princess. She’s tough, no-nonsense, even caustic at times. But she’s deeply in love with our hero and he’s deeply in love with her. And if not for that love, there’s no adventure, no mystery, no self-discovery, no roller coaster.
Of course, all the good stories are romances. Not just in the modern boy-meets-girl (or some variation thereon) sense of the word, but in the original epic-striving-for-a-higher-ideal sense of the word. They involve putting someone or something on a plane higher than oneself.
Except Amy wasn’t talking about the latter meaning. She meant the hugging-and-kissing thing, the emotional attachment so intense that someone would risk everything–life and more–for his or her significant other. And in the case of Fight The Gods, she was absolutely right. It was a romance.
It was about a guy who loved high and far and a gal who returned that love, and the way in which they redeem each other across barriers mortals seldom cross. And in the end…well, in the end, you find out what the beginning was about. Because the end and the beginning of a book have a love affair all their own, now don’t they?
So…Fight The Gods? A love story. Go figure. It just goes to show: You Learn something new every day.
So far my novelist career has been comprised of outrageous science fiction adventures, a mix of screwball comedies and multi-dimensional chaos.
But within those pages … are love stories.
In my scifi backpacking comedy Finders Keepers, Donald and Danielle are newlyweds in Eternity, who, through bizarre machinations, accidentally knock a jar of the Universe’s DNA into the still for
ming Earth.
As these two characters fret about the disaster they’ve caused, they individually go to great lengths to protect the other. As Donald says at one point of Danielle, “She’s not just wife, she’s my girl.” But when he says those things … that’s really me talking about my own wife, Liz.
We’ve been together now for more than 13 years, and have two children together. Yes, she’s the mother of my children and indeed she is my wife. And she’s my girl.
Switching gears to my scifi adventure Crossline, our hero, space pilot Marcus Powell, is displaced into a modern-day, parallel Earth, desperately trying to get back home to his wife and daughter. When he laments his predicament — that he is responsible, at least in part, for his own misfortune — he’s expressing his innate desire to be reunited with his girls. Nothing else to him matters.
When I wrote Crossline, it was always me — as a husband and father — thinking about how I’d feel and act if I was ever separated from my family, and what I’d be willing to do to be reunited with them.
My novels have been described in many ways, but no matter what adjectives one might use, I know that in my writer’s heart, there are love stories within those pages.
Tomorrow morning, if the weather’s willing, most of Crazy 8 will be heading down to the annual Farpoint convention in Hunt Valley, MD. Here’s my schedule for the weekend—if you’re going, come find me!
Fri, 2/14/14
3pm Short Stories vs Novels, Chesapeake 1
4pm Building A Series, Chesapeake 1
[5pm I’ve Finished My First Draft, Now What?, Chesapeake 1]
6pm Playing in Someone Else’s Sandbox, Chesapeake 1
11pm Farpoint Book Fair, Dulaney Valley 1
Sat, 2/15/14
[10am Beating Writer’s Block, Chesapeake1]
Noon Building A Writing Career, Chesapeake 1
1pm Crazy 8 Press, Chesapeake 1
2pm Crazy 8 Press Autograph Table, Atrium Front
[3pm New Media Marketing, Ridgely 1]
[4pm The Heirs To Harry: Young Adult Science Fiction in Books & Film, Chesapeake 1]
Sun, 2/16/14
[10am How to Write for Different Media, Chesapeake 2]
11am Crowdfunding Your Project, Chesapeake 1
[Noon Orphan Black: Send in the Clones, Ridgely 1]
3pm Writing Humor, Chesapeake 1
[bracketed events are ones I’m not officially listed on but may crash anyway :)]
I love to read them. I love to hold them in my hands as their stories and mysteries unfold for me with the turn of every page. I love to own them and to see them on the shelves of my bookcases. I especially love old books, the older the better, especially surprising little tomes from the 19th and early-20th centuries, often found for a few dollars at tag sales and library sales, books with solid, tooled covers over thick, luxurious pages, and engravings protected by sheets of vellum that have survived the journeys through the decades, many inscribed to recipients long, long gone.
I love books for the stories they tell and the worlds they open to me. And I love the people who write the books that I love so much. Some, of course, more than others.
Take F. Scott Fitzgerald. I fell in love with his Great Gatsby the first time I read it in high school. I loved it for its passion, for its power, for its evocation of a lost era (I was, I think, born a nostalgic), and, mostly, for its prose. (Although as much as I loved the book, I couldn’t–at the time–quite wrap my brain around why Jay Gatsby had it so bad for Daisy Buchanan. I mean, let’s face it, Daisy was a vapid twit, a thoughtless rich girl who could easily fit into a contemporary reality show. The Real Housewives of East Egg, anybody? But, I guess what Emily Dickenson wrote is true: “The Heart wants what it wants – or else it does not care.”)
I’ve probably read and reread The Great Gatsby close to twenty times since then; it’s a book I go back to every year or two, particularly when looking for an infusion of inspiration. It’s the book that made me love “Literature” with the capital-L pretentiousness familiar to every college English Lit major. It’s the book that lead me to other books, by Fitzgerald and by his contemporaries and by those who inspired his generation of writers, as well as those inspired by them. Ernest Hemingway. William Faulkner. Sherwood Anderson. Norman Mailer. Graham Greene. J.D. Salinger. Gore Vidal. Joseph Heller. Pete Hamill. Michael Chabon. Philip Roth!
I’d always been a reader, but most of what I read up until then was fantasy and science fiction (and comic books)…which isn’t to take away from either genre. I believe great swaths of both can stand beside the best “Literature” has to offer, from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. And next to Fitzgerald my favorite author is Jack London, whose great adventure tales like The Call of the Wild and White Fang pale in comparison with the depth of character and richness of The Sea Wolf and his two breathlessly brilliant autobiographical novels, Martin Eden and John Barleycorn.
A good story is a good story. Donald Hamilton, author of the Matt Helm novels (27 of them–and a reported unpublished 28th–between 1960 and 1993), wasn’t trying to write literature; he was churning out pulp-inspired paperback originals to meet a specific market demand, but he was a hell of a storyteller and a balls-to-the-wall prose stylist. Elmore Leonard, who learned his craft toiling in the same paperback vineyards of the 1950s, was a similarly powerful writer whose work took decades to be accepted as “literature.” William Goldman, James Goldman, Frederick Exley, Rex Stout, Dennis Potter, Isaac Asimov, Ed McBain, Tom DeHaven, Damon Runyon, Madeleine L’Engel, Sidney Taylor, Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald…what difference does it make what genre they were writing in as long as their stories touched me, made me think, or made me cry? William Faulkner settled it once and for all in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “…The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”
So, yeah, I love books, both for their physical form and emotional content…and for the path they led me on that brought me to a place where now I get to write them as well.
