The face that launched...

Here it is. Legitimacy finally has a cover. And it's everything I ever dared hope. It makes me rub my palms together and grin maniacally every time I see it.

The release is imminent. Stay tuned!

The Well-Read Planet: Yet Another Reason to Live on Mars

I’ve never wanted to live on Mars more than after coming home from my local “Friends of the Library” used book sale.

You’re forgiven if you don’t immediately see the connection.

You see, Mars’s day is just about forty minutes longer than Earth’s—a perfect length for me. Enough time to get everything I’d normally do in a day done, plus forty minutes extra to plop down and crack open a good book, or my Kindle. (Disclaimer: Don’t actually crack open an e-reader, no matter what the brand. You’ll probably be disappointed with the results.)

As if my to-do list and my to-read list weren’t already in enough conflict, the library was letting books go for pennies to the linear foot (or perhaps metric ton), and I couldn’t help but load up. But when am I going to find the time to read them all?

Any ideas? How do you make time to read?

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

OK, sports fans, we're getting down to it for Legitimacy. I don't dare announce a release date yet, but the editing process is going well. My editor is swamped, but we'll get it done...even it kills us. Not literally...well, perhaps.

Along the way, I've been finalizing the "back cover blurb" and would like to introduce a nearly finalized version for your consideration here:

At the end of the 21st century, the stories of two young men unfold on different worlds. On Earth, Teague Werres is born into a life sheltered from most technological progress—longevity treatments, space colonization, virtual reality—but his intelligence and ambition drive him to overcome his disadvantages. On Mars, Rob Heneghan plans to live a long, easy life, in the real world and in the virtual. He’s content just to have fun, just to get by—until a painful loss forces him to examine his life.

For all their differences, Teague and Rob have a secret in common: They both control NAIs, nearly sentient supercomputers, who are ready to do their bidding. Rob’s lives in a server room, but Teague’s trots by his side as a smart-mouthed robotic ring-tailed lemur.

A partnership that neither of them could have predicted lands Teague and Rob in league with the system’s most powerful people. Seemingly golden opportunities take them from urban Bangkok to Mars’s domed cities, and from quirky asteroid colonies to Earth’s most desperate refugee camps. But when their NAIs uncover evidence of a dangerous conspiracy, they begin to suspect—are they being used? As Teague and Rob edge closer to the disturbing truth about who really controls the world, each must decide how much to risk to do the right thing for himself…and for the human race.

What do you think? Does it grab you? Would you thumb through it? Would you read it? Would you buy it? Let me know in the comments or e-mail. And please, I beg you, be brutal...

The First Draft Fallacy

Hollywood perpetuates a great lie about writing, The First Draft Fallacy. It goes like this: Novelist bangs his/her head unproductively against an expensive laptop—or a secondhand typewriter, or a quill-strewn writing desk—dramatically for ninety minutes or so until the muse finally strikes. Smash cut: The remnants of a sleepless, sunless weekend, (stained coffee cups, half-eaten takeout, balled up pieces of paper, unanswered messages on phone, empty bottles) are strewn across the Writing Area. The camera pans to find Novelist sprawled on an unkempt bed. On the desk is a neatly stacked inch-and-a-half tall pile of paper. The top page is a neatly typed cover page clearly reading, “Notable Novel by Novelist.”

The next scene: A finished book, printed, copies stacked to bookstore rafters, lauded, toasted at parties, and solving all the pent-up conflict of the first ninety minutes.

Let me repeat: This is a lie. Writing novels is not like pressing the popcorn button on the microwave. And as such, documenting the actual life of a writer makes for relatively dry stuff for a movie, let alone a blog.

Case in point:

I recently completed my sixth revision to Legitimacy, a detailed process that left almost no sentence of a 260,000-word manuscript untouched. Since it reached its semi-final form, it’s had an edit by me, and then one by my lovely editor, Julie. Minor revisions, trimming, and correcting errors, both in the writing and the continuity. (And plenty of wailing, gnashing of teeth, killing of darlings, and questioning of life choices, usually ending with the admission that my editor was right all along.) I also went through a checklist of thirty to forty common mistakes I make, words used in weak writing, and style problems. For example, I reviewed every single one of the 3,000 to 4,000 instances of the word “was” and made sure each was really necessary.

After that, I began to listen to the manuscript read by an automatic reader. This helps to weed out missing words, odd phrasings, and gives me an idea if the writing flows naturally. Julie is rereading each chapter when I’m finished to review those changes. The book is now down to approximately 195,000 words. But this is not the end, not by a long shot.

Next we will read the manuscript out loud together, both following along with the text. Here we’ll smooth out the writing and correct as many errors as possible. (I’m lucky enough to have an editor who can do this with me in person. I pity any writer who does not.) If required, I will polish anything that still doesn’t quite meet the standard.

Then, at last, the manuscript will undergo a meticulous line edit. But we’re still not done…

The final step is formatting. The book has to be carefully formatted both for print and as an e-book. This is an arcane process involving dark magicks. We will not speak of this again.

In the midst of all this, I must also write several versions of the “back cover” blurb, hire an artist/designer to create the perfect cover, and devise a strategy to launch the book once it’s ready.

So perhaps Hollywood can be forgiven its dramatic license. I’d smash cut if I could, too. But fear not: Legitimacy is “almost done.”

Big News and an Update

First, the big news...

I'm doing my first ever, official public book signing  for Rhubarb tomorrow, Saturday October 6th, from 2 p.m.-5 p.m. at Hastings in Billings, Montana. I'll be up at the front of the book section of the store, near the cafe. So come on by, and bring a friend or two.

And now: the update.

I've been working hard on this, the sixth, and hopefully final, major revision of Legitimacy. And just this morning, I finished working on a chapter that represented the bulk of the significant changes. So yeah for me! I still have eleven chapters to get through, but I have this dream that I'll be able to get through them all before the end of October.

My biggest incentive is that November 1st is the start of NaNoWriMo 2012. I really want to participate this year, and I have a pretty good idea in mind already for a new book. But I also can't afford to lose this thread on Legitimacy. I'm going to sign up anyway, so that even if I can't start on the 1st, I might be able to catch up.

Anyway, that's all. Wish me luck, and hope to see you tomorrow.

My Weekend with Surrealist Painters

I had an odd convergence this weekend. I hadn't planned this, but I read a graphic novel and watched a movie that both dealt with roughly the same time, place and characters. Kiki  De Montparnasse is a fictionalized biographic graphic novel about a famous model and socialite in Paris in the 1920's, who was immortalized by the photographer Man Ray in his photo Le Violon D'Ingres. While Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, portrays a young screenwriter, played by Owen Wilson, who considers his impending marriage and a wishful career as a novelist while on vacation in Paris. In typical Woody Allen style, he gets swept off (in his imagination or not, it doesn't matter) to the Moveable Feast of an idealized1920's Paris.

I felt a little like Owen Wilson's character myself, unprepared, but pleasantly surprised to find myself spending the weekend with golden shadows and line drawings of Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, before a backdrop of surrealists, bohemians, all at the epicenter that was Paris of the time.

Now, I've never been to Paris, and I've never been particularly nostalgic about the time, but as a working writer I can't suppress my envy of those who got to experience such a nexus of creative energy. A nexus that treated literature and art as serious concrete things that had the power to shape the world. A nexus that dared itself to challenge convention, brave boundaries, and shatter norms in almost every medium.

Can I do as much in my basement office or in the various coffee shops of Billings, MT? There's only one way to find out. Who's with me?


 

Relatively Big Deal

This may not seem like a big deal to anyone else, but Splash, my recently-turned-twelve-year-old son, has learned how to play pinochle.

I didn't learn to play pinochle until my early twenties when it became clear that the best way to get to know, ingratiate, and interact with my future in-laws was to learn. Pinochle is like a private religion in my wife's family: the stuff of family newsletters, nicknames, and get-together rituals. But to an outsider like me who had only played card games that required no more skill or thought than Spoons or Slapjack, it was completely incomprehensible. If you've never played, here's the Wikipedia article...you'll see what I mean. And forget Hoyle. That guy has no idea what he's talking about. My in-laws play various pinochle variations depending on the number of available players, whims of the most vocal, and need for vengeance off of particular losses. And as if the game wasn't difficult enough, these cultists have made up their own system of coded bidding. But when you're in love, you do things like get baptized into The First Apostolic Church of Double Pinochle Reformed Central Iowa Synod, Montana Covenant. Motto: "Where a marriage is defined as a king and queen of the same suit, and if your spouse is on the other team, all bets are off."

And now, so many years later, just when I feel like I'm beginning to understand the game, I feel a swell of fatherly pride to see him play. And he's good. You better watch out Grandma. In a couple of years, you're going to have some real competition.