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.

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.

An interesting discussion on AbsoluteWrite turned into a fascinating bit of self-examination. The discussion was raised by a question: what is ‘too far in advance’ to plan for, when writing? Various and sundry answers rang out, all good ones, and the original poster had six novels planned out. That’s when I chimed in, mumbling about all those years of backstory work I’ve got and saying that six books felt fairly reasonable given my (admittedly focused) perspective.

One fellow then wondered aloud why anyone would want to plan anything like this that far in advance! Fair question, I thought, and without considering it too closely I answered, simply, ‘You say that as though I have a choice!’

Then James A. Ritchie, a fellow whose wit and wisdom I’ve come to enjoy, calls me out, and rightly so: You do have a choice, he asserts. And he’s right, of course. Or at least he is, normally. But I’m just not a normal guy, you know? Maybe I should explain.

I actually don’t have a choice but to write about this place. Rather, I had a choice, and I made it a long time ago. This world of mine is my personal obsession, and my choice was made for me when I decided I had a duty to it: to tell as many of its stories as I can before I dry up and blow away, before the conduit from the world inside my head to the real world is forever extinguished by my passing.

It’s more than a little weird to say that, I know. But my sense of duty is real, my need to share these stories is real, and I can honestly think of worse things to obsess about. Celebrities, for instance. Or where my next fix is coming from. Or peanut butter (hmm, peanut butter is borderline though… down with crunchy! Down I say!). And it’s not as though this obsession of mine runs, or ruins, my life: I have earned success in a professional field, a wonderful wife, great friends, fun pets, time for recreation and fun — all of which make me both happy and content.

I just happen to have a world in my head that I need to tell people about, too.

Now that’s not to say I won’t write anything else in between; there’s a screenplay demanding my attention, there’s some short stories I’d like to tinker with, and possibly some more stuff for game design that will need some dialogue. But none of those are novels. With novels, I don’t have a choice. It’s just something I have to do.

But that’s okay, because it’s who I am.

The new faces are at http://www.absolutewrite.com/ – an excellent writer’s resource/community I’ve somehow managed to miss entirely for years now, apparently. I’ve been a part of several communities over the years — misc.writing, for one, and Ravenscar Nights for another — but the web communities that popped up after m.w became unreadable and RN died off just didn’t seem to capture the mood I was looking for. Regardless, AW seems like a lovely place to hang your hat if you’re a writer of any stripe, so I’m going to hang there a bit. If you do the writing thing too, give it a go.

The new challenges are in this new media crap. I’ve got some great stuff to deliver storywise for the marketing push, but the trick is distribution — not just specifically distribution, but the actual path people will take between chunks of media — yes, it’s going to be what I call a ‘mongrel media’ production — it’s lots of chunks of various media instead of one consistent experience. Long story short, it’s really a lot more complex than I thought it was, and I thought it was complex. Right now it’s doing my head in. I’ll get through it, but the infinite variables are still throwing me for a loop, so I need to compartmentalize better and narrow each step down to its component parts. Big pictures are scary, you know?