Traveller's Tales

Just a quick update really, as it’s been a while and I’ve been busy as, um, a generally very busy thing, being exceptionally busy.  But of interest to the writerly:

An Interview: Fellow author Realm Lovejoy and I met via the twitter #amwriting tag-community (which, if you’re a writer using twitter, you should most certainly join!), and while she’s got some great art up at her site for her upcoming novel CLAN, she was also kind enough to give me an opportunity to run off at the mouth during an interview at her site, where she also put my lead antagonist, Paldor, together for the first time in a visual format.  The interview may be more of the usual Finch drivel, but her art isn’t, so go have a look!

Sherlock: I’ve finished reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for the first time, and oh man have I been missing out all these years.  Aside from the stories being individually quite good, the characterizations priceless and my own affinity for Holmes growing as I realize how utterly anti-social and unlikable he really is, I’ve found that Arthur Conan Doyle was, apprarently, as likable and forthright a gentleman as one could hope to be.  I can’t do ACD’s story justice here, but I’ll say that knowing the author of these famous and respected tales was humble, easy-going and generous definitely enhanced my own enjoyment of them.  If you’re not familiar, I urge you to learn more for yourself.

(I also have a personal theory now, that Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft were the bastard children of Edgar Allen Poe by different wives, but that’s a story for another day.)

Stormbringer:  Now that Sherlock’s on the “have-read” pile, Elric is next on the list.  I’ve already downed two of the seven prime Elric stories, and I’m finding myself enjoying them a lot more than I remembered I did the first time through, many years ago.  Full report when I’m done.

Scriptwriting: This is what I’ve been up to lately; while my super-agent Colleen goes through the latest version of the manuscript for The Grey Knight, I’ve been working on alternate media to tie into the novel’s backstory.  I’m really excited about the script, and while I can’t really go into detail quite yet, it’s turning into quite a serious live-action video production.  I’m very much looking forward to sharing the results with everyone when it’s finished.

That’s it for now; work on the sequel to The Grey Knight continues, but there’s a lot of forward momentum on Knight, and I’m enjoying the oblique approach to the fantasy world in my head, so while I’m still doing a lot of scenework on the sequel… I’m still having fun with Knight now, too.

Now that the edits are over — for now, at least! — I’m working on the second book again.  I’ve been doing what I always do when I’m working on a new story, which is writing all the cool scenes that come to me.  What eventually happens is I take those scenes, toss them back into the framework I created in the outline, and then stitch them together with all the other cool scenes until a novel happens (yeah, okay, it becomes a little more complicated than that at some point, but that’s the general idea).

(Tangent: new character alert, which means you should probably expect a new character interview in the next few days.)

(Second tangent: I once tried writing in linear fashion, beginning to end, but I just can’t do it — too many things pop into my head and need to get written; different scenes generate higher energy levels on different days, and while it’s all still forming I think it’s important to let the scene that’s screaming the loudest have the pen for the day.)

Anyway, the neat thing that happened today was that, for the very first time, I saw a scene from the third book.  The last book in the first part of the story; the end of the beginning, and I just saw how it ends.

It was awesome.

I have no idea if I can write it so it’s as awesome as I saw it, but when I saw it while I was sitting on the bus, stunned and watching it in my head as though it had been cast, filmed, produced and projected directly into my skull, I knew that’s how it had to go.  Because it was so totally awesome.

I’m excited because while the end of the overall story doesn’t come with the third book — this is a story of three threes, for reasons that become immensely clear — still, it represents a serious hard stop; the world changes viciously, violently and irrevocably at the end of the third book, and it’s a big enough leap, barrier, shift or evolution that it may almost feel like a new story when the second three kick in.  Anyway, while I always knew where things were heading, and what in general had to happen, the specifics were veiled to me.

Well, not after today they’re not.

Anyway, I love it when I see new pieces to the puzzle like that.  I know it’s going well when the scenes are revealed to me so clearly that all I have to do is sit my ass down and write as fast and as hard as I can before I forget what I just saw.  The psychotic break does all the hard creative work for me; all I have to do is take notes.

So while I’m not going to give in to the temptation of writing more of the third book, it really gives me another really cool thing to shoot for, you know?

Love this writing thing.

There was only ever really one Holmes, of course, but WordPress and LibraryThing were not playing nicely together for reasons entirely beyond my comprehension, and as a result the LibraryThing widget was yelling at me for trying to put two of it on a page (which I wasn’t).  Fidgeting around on the widgets screen seems to have fixed things, though, so with no more LibraryThing yelling, WordPress behaving and only One Holmes gracing the right-hand column, I feel confident in calling the disaster averted.

By the way, LibraryThing is a really, really cool thing.  Almost, but not quite, as cool as Holmes (and Conan Doyle, for that matter), but I’ll save both of those for later posts.

Also, I know about the pop-up.

I’ve got a post up on the LibraryThing message boards to suss it, as I already use their service and would like to use their widget, given I’ve already done the hard work of cataloging a tiny fraction of my library there.

In the meantime, click OK and ignore the second Sherlock Holmes.  We all know there’s only one.

I don’t have any writing or sales updates to provide, but I do have an awesome link from a colleague of mine — Niki Smith, a very talented artist also agented by Colleen Lindsay of FinePrint Literary Management, was looking for some practice concepts and materials to work on book covers.  After sending her entirely too much information, she’s done an execution which is totally nothing I would have considered doing, and also totally cool (hence the subject).

So stop gawking here; go read the article and check out the art.  Check out the rest of her site while you’re there, she does some great work.

I had no idea that the latest versions of WordPress were usable through my crummy little BlackBerry* (yes I have one, yes I hate having one, or at least one where people who are not my friends know its number, and no I can’t throw it into the East River without having to pay for a new one, so I may as well just get used to the leash instead of trying to gnaw it off).

So this means that, one, I have no more excuses for not making dumb entries here. Check.

And two, I’m betting that I can even use this little trick to get Real, Actual Writing (in the context of the novels, that is) done.

And yeah, it’s been since, what, July? For what it’s worth, that’s kind of how life in general feels right now: autopilot to survive the bullshit that seems to have suddenly become the norm and not the exception. Work-life is hugely imbalanced and weighing in at totally the wrong end of the scale, but for a wageslave like myself this isn’t a smart time to start getting overly precious about being overworked.

Anyway, done bitching. Here’s to using my new discovery for evil purposes!

* and no, the default browser can’t handle it. Thank you, copy and paste, and thank you Opera Mini.

Just watch.

This.

Nuff said.

I was originally going to write a morose post about losing a colleague to a competitor, but instead I’ll post something nifty and keen I found on the net.

Cool, eh?

I really do want to get the marketing stuff finished, but some weekends you owe it to yourself to slack a bit. Now, I didn’t totally slack — I got various errands done amidst recovering from some not-wellness or other — but for the most part, I slacked.

For what it’s worth, I slacked well. Me and my band of intrepid ne’er-do-wells (including my wife and several colleagues) spent some quality time in World of Warcraft, getting our first look at Hellfire Citadel’s Ramparts and kicking various arses along the way. We made it a point not to look up any online strategies for our first go-round, and though we did manage to die a couple of times as we learned the last two boss encounters, we tinkered with strategies and wound up victorious, demons and dragons alike dead at our feet.

Everyone needs to slack now and then. I’ll just have to steal some time from work to make up for the slacking this weekend!

(Sorry, no loot/victory shots this time, completely forgot, though we did Furbolg the place properly. Will get ‘em next time! Links to loot: Redjed, our warlock, got the Sorcerer’s Band; Sparklezook picked up her Tome of Arcane Brilliance 2, Ablepete got a lovely Garotte-String Necklace, and the rest of us scored some other various vendor trash.)

I don’t care if you hate foreign films, I don’t care if you can’t stand subtitles, I don’t care if you abhor violence, if you have no idea what Franco’s Spain is, or if you think fairy tales are stupid. In fact, I don’t even care what year you’re reading this. If you haven’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth, you need to, right now. It’s one of those rarest of movies, the kind that completely fulfills the promise of the medium: story, acting, cinematography, music, setting — all fitting together perfectly, all creating something more than film.

Seriously. Just go see it.