Fisking the Six Foot Blivet

So, Brian Niemeier found a new pinata and beat it around with a baseball bat.

Then Al grabbed the bat and beat it around some more.

[Cracks fingers]

My turn.

The blog is "Attack of the Six-Foot Tranny."

Yeah. This is going to be one of those days...

The title is

Horror Puppies Redux: Is Souldancer Really Horror Fandom’s New Favourite Novel?

Yes, as you can tell from the spelling, yes, this is a British Tranny who goes by the name "Doris."

Well, DragonCon has over 60,000 attendees. Voting was open to everybody. So unless you have a better sampling or method of statistical analysis, "Dori," I'm going to have to say yes.

A while back I made a post about how the Sad and Rabid Puppies campaigns have treated horror fiction.

Sigh. Of course you did.

I follow the bouncing link, and I get this.

Honor at Stake is very much what Stephen Jones would call “horror-lite”. It starts out as a vampire romance in the vein of Stephanie Meyer and Charlaine Harris, evolves into a humorous action-driven narrative in the tradition of Joss Whedon and Larry Correia, and ends up with hordes of vampires being dispatched with a consecrated fire hydrant. For all its jokes at the expense of sparkly vampires, the book remains far closer to Twilight than to, say, Salem’s Lot.

So if you follow the bouncing ball for a moment, Honor at Stake evolves into being like Joss and Larry, but is closer to Twilight than to Stephen King....

Just for the record, did anyone else notice that it just demeaned Larry Correia and Joss Whedon as being on par with Twilight?

I'm going to suggest that there are a few million Buffy fans out there who now want your head on a stick, "Doris." In fact, I hope you've transitioned already, otherwise there will be Whedon fans -- not fans of Larry, Whedon -- who will happily help you transition without anesthetic. And no, I'm not one of them. I'm just laughing at the image of the hordes of Joss fans carrying torches and pitchfolks.

The next comment about me is to cite a tweet.

Declan Finn replies that Brian Niemeier is his only competition in the category.

All of this strikes me as rather rude conduct. They hail the Dragon Awards as the true voice of fandom, and then dismiss four of the six horror nominees as undeserving of consideration. What could I infer from this behaviour, except that these people feel contempt for horror fans?

Hey, "Doris," you stupid git, maybe you should have read the blog post I made TWO WEEKS BEFORE THAT (and nearly THREE weeks before the hir statements) where I said that I DIDN'T KNOW ANY OF THE OTHER AUTHORS.  I didn't even know that they existed. 

Kinda hard for me to respect people who I don't even know exist, git. Perhaps you should do something strange, "Doris," and instead of stopping when you get your evidence for the narrative, you stop when there's nothing else to research. The way actual researchers do.

I'd thank "Doris" for reading my book, but I suspect I know which review s/he wrote.

Anyway, back to the original stupidity that started this mess.

I pointed out that when the pro-Puppy authors write something within the horror spectrum, they generally end up with the kind of work that editor and horror expert Stephen Jones associates with the term “horror-lite”

S/he goes on to diss urban fantasy....

Today we are living in a world that is ‘horror-lite’. This appalling appellation was coined by publishers to describe the type of fiction that is currently enjoying massive success under such genre categories as ‘paranormal romance’, ‘urban fantasy’, ‘literary mash-up’ or even ‘steampunk’. 

Okay, congrats, "Doris," you now have dissed urban fantasy.

You now have Jim Butcher's fans on your ass, and in a way that you will not enjoy, unless you like the idea of being beaten with hockey sticks and carved wizard's staffs. I suspect that's a fetish not even the internet likes that much.

For the record, you buggered swine, I was shooting for fantasy or paranormal. I hadn't really thought of my work as horror. In fact, again, HAD YOU DONE YOUR RESEARCH, you would have noted that I suggested Honor at Stake for military, YA, and best fantasy, with a question mark around horror.

But, no, "Doris," your transition must be transitioning from a male to the IQ of mayo.

...Am I being insulting? Well, hey, s/he said I'm insulting. S/he wants me to be insulting. I can do insulting.

S/he then goes on to cite, once again, a twitter conversation as PROOF that I'm insulting and dismissive of the horror genre.

Again, I was shooting for urban fantasy. My readers disagreed. Get over it, Boris.

Since then, Souldancer succeeded in winning the Dragon Award for horror, and the Puppysphere seems to be making a concerted effort to present Brian Niemeier as being the contemporary horror author

That's .... news to me. Boring here doesn't put any links in to cite as evidence, but right now, s/he can link to a list of websites, and I wouldn't trust it until I went through each link to see if they were even Puppy related.

(with honourable mention sometimes being given to Declan Finn).

How nice. Also news to me. Also without links or any other supporting evidence to back it up.

Around Halloween, the Castalia House blog ran a post called “SUPERVERSIVE and Horror Stories” in which Josh Young argues for the superiority of horror films with clear-cut heroes (such as Alien and The Evil Dead) over those which focus on college students being chopped up (such as Friday the 13th).

And somehow, Boris doesn't have anything to bitch about in that concept ... yet, anyway, I'm fisking as I go along.

Towards the end, he makes an abrupt change of subject from heroic horror films to heroic horror literature:

Abrupt? You realize that it's a Publisher blog, right? That they publish books? How did you NOT expect it to go to books?

but does he mention Robert E. Howard, whose sword-and-sorcery protagonists regularly faced Lovecraftian abominations? Does he acknowledge the writers who have shaped the occult detective genre, from H. and E. Heron through to Jim Butcher?

I find it interesting that Boring forgot in the previous blog that he's dismissed and disparaged urban fantasy, and he wants to kowtow to Butcher? Too late.

Does he namecheck anyone from the legion of authors, from Bram Stoker onwards, who have thrilled readers with tales of cross-wielding vampire hunters?

Nope, nope, and nope. It is Brian Niemeier who has the distinction of being the only writer mentioned in Young’s survey of horror.

No, of course he doesn't. You know why? Because if Boris here had read THE TITLE OF THE PIECE (which s/he did, it's cited three excerpts ago) it was "SUPERVERSIVE and Horror Stories." The term Superversive is not exactly in widespread use. Come to think of it, Brian is the only horror novelist I know who uses the term -- as evidenced by hanging out in the Superversive roundtable radio show.  Not even Butcher uses it.

I use it, but that's only if you count me as a horror novelist. Which I don't, but I'll take nominations in whatever genre I can get.

Now, the Dragon Awards claim to honour “the works that are genuinely most beloved by the core audience”, and this is a description that the Puppies have taken as gospel truth. 

And I'm sure that you believe that the Hugos really are the most prestigious SFF award, right, Boring?

But the obscure, self-published Souldancer is not beloved amongst horror fans. Evidence of this can be gleaned simply by registering at the horror forum of your choice and asking the members if they have ever heard of Brian Niemeier. Indeed, a search through Google (or Amazon, or Goodreads, or Twitter, or Reddit) will indicate that Souldancer has made almost no impact outside of Puppy circles.

That's it? That's the best shot at Souldancer? That he can't find it on Google. You know, even Ann Coulter uses Lexus/Nexus, and says what search terms she uses.

And internet Forums? Funny, I always heard that internet forums were a wretched hive of scum and villainy. That this creature relies on them only makes me feel more certain.

When I google Souldancer, the first thing I get is Brian's Amazon page. Then a bunch of companies that used the phrase. Next time I see Brian, I get the Goodreads page for Souldancer, with a 4.1 rating.

What happens when I Google "Doris V Sutherland" ... okay, fine. The Twitter page. File 770 (I'm shocked), the blog I'm fisking....the about page of the blog....

"A Troubled Dark Soul. A Tale of Doris V. Sutherland."

Oh... Oh Dear.

"Doris," I don't think you want to go to "What people can find on the Internet" for your argument. I really don't think you want to do that.

This is a point I made when I reported on the Dragon Awards at WWAC:

Yes, we have a link ... to something that Boris has written. Because citing evidence just boils down to footnoting your own opinion.

And WWAC is "Women Writing About Comics." Uh huh.

The link only boiled down to Dormamu here bitching that Souldancer only had 8 reviews at the time it won the Dragon.

Brian actually replied.

Boris characterized Brian's reply as

Niemeier then went on to claim that Souldancer outsold N. K. Jemisin’s  The Fifth Season, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel earlier this year:

Um ..... read it again. He MOVED MORE COPIES. This is in case this twit has trouble reading.

In fact, this twit has trouble reading A PHOTO S/HE HIGHLIGHTED

"Doris" thrashes around on the false premise for a while...false premise ... .. blah blah ... false premise ... false premise .... dares Brian to get more reviews ... Brian gets more reviews.... "Doris" dismisses reviews....

Okay, moving out of "reviews uber alles."

Nevertheless, the Puppies – or, more specifically, Niemeier and his immediate circle of friends – kept up the charade that the little-known Souldancer was the most popular horror novel published within the Dragons’ twelve-month eligibility period.

It got more votes at a Convention that boasts 60,000 members a year....

With voting open to everyone....

Free of charge ....

So, I gotta ask, how many friends do you think Brian has?

Niemeier’s blog post received replies comparing me variously to a spoilt child, a high school mean girl and a wiggling worm for venturing to suggest otherwise.

 If the size-15 shoe fits...

My personal favourite comment came from Niemeier himself; apparently channelling his inner Benjanun Sriduangkaew,

Benja-whatnow?

he felt it appropriate to threaten me with physical violence

And you somehow feel threatened, Lurch?

It’s not the easily excitable guys whose anger you should worry about. It’s the patient, reserved guys quietly sipping their drinks and reading Heinlein novels until they decide they’ve had enough of the loudmouths making a scene, take you out in the parking lot, and bust out your teeth.

Pardon me while I head desk for a bit.

Ahem...

"Doris." Bubbie. My extra-large jellyfish, my special snow flake, and other invertebrates .... it's a metaphor.

You know what a metaphor is, right?

Hell, this was an observation made by Isaac Asimov in the very first Black Widowers short story. Perhaps you heard it as "beware the wraith of a patient man"? No? Learn to read. 

One of Niemeier’s friends, a blogger named Alfred Genesson, made a post of his own attacking me. Here is his reply to my comment about Souldancer‘s lack of reviews online:

Oh, come on, now you're going after Al? Really? Dora the Tora cites an Injustice Gamer post.

Maybe some of us realize how active your type is at disemployment. Maybe we were busy reading books. At any rate, it’s not your crappy pastiche of urban fantasy, faerie tales, and WoD fanfic that you love.

And that's an attack?

Genesson starts his three-pronged rebuttal by suggesting, bizarrely, that people who give positive reviews to Souldancer are in danger of losing their jobs. He seems to expect us to believe that the legions of Souldancer fans have gathered into some kind of Fight Club-like underground subculture that dare not speak its name.

Bizarre?

The Wrights were uninvited from Cons they've gone to for years. 

Lou Antonelli had one of his short stories un-approved after he was told it was going to be published.

Alfred has other examples in his own dissection.

I await the part where this becomes "bizarre."

He then suggests that fans are too busy reading books to leave reviews, 

Alfred makes an effort to get reviews in, and sometimes the best he can do is a mini-review. I read more than 50 books a year, and I've only reviewed 57 books on Amazon in 6 years (2011-2016). And many of those are to books I either really, really loved, or books I desperately hated.

an argument which ignores the basic fact that fandom is built upon discussing media as well as consuming it:

Yes. Because we all know that all readers are obsessive fanboys who must do nothing but jabber about what they're reading online. There are no readers who are introverts, or people who would rather read than chat ....

Oh wait, what sounds like the very definition of a bookworm.

Seriously, what dungeon does this troll reside in?

a work that is not being discussed clearly has no fandom.

I haven't seen one discussion online about Honor at Stake, which has 53 reviews as of this moment. Is that a discussion because I have reviews, or do I not have a fan base because I have never been discussed on an internet forum, to my knowledge?

If you want to go by reviews, than Honor at Stake is better than Souldancer, five of Vox Day's books, six of John C Wright's books, and over 7 Timothy Zahn novels.

If you wish to make that assertion, please do so in front of their fans. I would love to see that reply. I'll view it from a safe distance.

But most interesting of all is his third assertion: that I prefer “crappy pastiche of urban fantasy, faerie tales, and World of Darkness fanfic”.

I don't even know what World of Darkness is, so, next.

This irrelevant ad hominem 

An ad hominem is a personal attack. It means "against the man."

.... And that joke is so easy in this case, "Doris," that I'm going to just let someone else fill in that particular blank.

(I was talking about whether a book is popular, rather than whether I personally like it)

Again, go argue with the 60,000 DragonCon attendees, and tell them how what they vote on isn't popular. Go ahead. Me and every statistician ever will sit back and laugh at you.

seems to be a response to my earlier comment that the Sad Puppies have shown little interest in horror fiction.

Alfred is a Rabid Puppy. Learn the difference between Puppies before you decide to kick them.

I would be a Rabid Puppy, but that would require that I care about the Hugos. At best, I'm just a troublemaking Puppy who will sit back and laugh as you make unforced errors throughout the process.

Genesson is trying to give the impression that he and the other Puppy supporters are actually hardened fans of the horror genre; 

I'm not.

Alfred isn't.

I'm trying to figure out if "Doris" is genuinely confused, or just a lying blivet.

but as he has no evidence to back up this claim,

He doesn't make this claim. In fact, he says exactly the opposite. I know you're British, but American English isn't that incomprehensible, is it?

he settles for simply impugning my own tastes.

 Puppies have been impugning the tastes of Puppy Kickers for years. This is new?

He has no idea where my tastes lie, of course, and so makes a wild stab-in-the-dark involving urban fantasy pastiche and World of Darkness fanfics

Stab-in-the-dark .... Is it really that hard? Might they include, I don't know ... something dark and depressing, where everyone dies?

You know, like George Martin?

(a description that, amusingly enough, is not too far from Declan Finn’s Puppy-approved Honor at Stake).

World of Darkness?  I say again ... what's that?

Alfred gives me a hint.

I don't recall a hate for Christianity being anywhere in his novels, nor an annoying and stupid clan warfare bit with drug and sex addled lower classes.  His vampires follow theological rules and are individuals, subject to a singular council, not part of WoD clan structures. Again, try harder.  

Wow.  WoD is anti-Christian, vampire clan warfare, drug abuse, sex addled, and class warfare?

"Doris"? If Alfred is even slightly accurate, you are apparently illiterate. In fact, I'd have to guess that you've dictated the entire blog post to someone who can tolerate listening to you.

Behind all of the bluster, Genesson’s post marks an attempt to frame the Puppies as the true custodians of horror fiction

Yes, yes, we know you want that job, "Doris."

I know that Doofus here likes to consider horror hir genre, hence the harping, but not only has Alfred said he's not the expert on all things horror, s/he/it has apparently not noticed that Puppies don't want to be custodians. We don't want to tell people what to read. All Puppies want people to read what they enjoy, and that's it, thank you.

The Puppy Kickers want to be the custodians. They are, after all, the "TruFans," the "Real Fans." They're pure fans. A master fandom, if you will.

with Brian Niemeier and (presumably) Declan Finn being the toasts of horror fandom. 

BWAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

Yeah. Sure.

As for those horror fans who do not read Niemeier or Finn, well, they are merely consumers of urban fantasy and other forms of horror-lite. As I have already shown, this is a complete reversal of the truth.

Actually, "Doris," you lying blivet, you're the only person who have used the phrase "horror-lite."

Niemeier himself has stated that his book won its Dragon Award due to voters who wanted to show their contempt for the Hugos.

Rabid Puppies voted as well. Vox Day voted for Brian Niemeier, and said "Sorry Declan." I presume a lot of Vox's fans followed.

If so, this is further evidence of a lack of votes from horror fans, who in my experience do not generally keep up with the Hugo Awards.

Because there is no overlap with scifi readers and horror writers? Horror writers are monomaniacs who cannot read anything else?

Again, "Doris," links. Stats. Proof. Evidence. Not whatever gets whispered in the echoes of your mind.

A number of my friends are indie horror writers,

And I'm sure that some of your best friends are conservatives, right?

and they pay little attention to the Hugos:

Well, Stephen King paid enough attention to the Hugos to declare that he didn't want to play with them. Are your indie writers less attentive and aware than King? Really?

they seem to view the award as being purely for science fiction,

Then why would King ever look at it in the first place?

Because, you know, his fans asked him.

I guess "Doris" isn't a real fan of horror, wouldn't s/he be aware of that? Come on, even I know that, and I'm not that big a fan of horror. Maybe "Doris" should get hir horror credentials renewed. Heh.

and consequently not their territory as writers or readers (by the same token, I’d imagine that the SF community generally does not look at the Bram Stoker Awards too closely).

I don't see why not. I mean, the Stoker awards have nominated or gone to mysteries like A Boy's Life, thrillers like Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, a fantasy like American Gods (which, oh, by the way, WON A HUGO).

... So maybe you should at least do a quick Wiki search? Like I just did?

Though, come to think of it, "attack of the 6 foot Tranny" does describe Buffalo Bill....

And if you are not paying attention to the Hugos, then you are unlikely to be aware of the Sad Puppies. I have sometimes mentioned the campaign to my friends in horror fandom, and none of them had heard of it.

You know, when Richard Nixon swept the election, nearly getting all 50 states, a New York Times reporter was confused, because, after all, no one she knew voted for him.

And no one "Doris" knows is aware of Puppies.

I guess no one "Doris" the Doofus knows has ever read Entertainment Weekly. Or Wired. Or File 770. Or NPR. Or the Atlantic. The Boston Globe. National Review. And this is just the first two pages of results upon googling Sad Puppies.

The notion that legions of horror fans (who care little about the Hugos) have suddenly become card-carrying supporters of the Puppy campaigns (which care little about horror) is simply not something that I can swallow.

..... Words cannot begin to describe how much I don't want to know what you will swallow, "Doris."

If you want to argue that Souldancer is a good novel, then go ahead. 

Funny, I thought that was part of winning the Dragon Award. The novel was so good, Brian's fans actually showed up and voted for it. You didn't vote. Therefore, you don't count in the Dragon Award.

If you want to argue that it deserves to be popular, and may someday be popular, then go ahead.

It already is. It was fans who got him a Dragon Award. At a convention with 60,000 con goers, minimum.

But you cannot argue, with any kind of intellectual honesty, that it is currently a popular novel amongst fans of the genre.

Actually, I can. It's popular enough to win a Dragon Award. I'll see my 60,000 con goers against your poor attempts at Googling any day of the week.

And you haven't proved otherwise, Doofus.

This claim will never escape Niemeier’s echo chamber: go around saying that Souldancer is horror fandom’s new favourite novel, and the first people to call you out will be horror fans.

Actually, the only one who seems to be calling him out is this bugger.

Incidentally, when I first reported on the Dragon Awards at WWAC, I received a reply from one of the non-Puppy nominees where she mentioned her “obscure indie published military sci fi book”. She has the right idea. She sees that there is no shame in being a little-league writer who does what they enjoy, who picks up a few fans along the way, and who may someday go on to bigger things.

There isn't...

...What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?

Brian Niemeier does not seem to realise this. For him, it is clearly not enough to have a small but loyal readership that has pushed him to the top of an online poll. He has to present himself as being fandom’s favourite horror writer – the “Dragon of Horror”, as he styles himself – even though he knows full well that this is simply not the truth.

It's called marketing. Only instead of "attack of the 6 ft tranny," he's marketing as the first guy to win the Dragon.

It's called a brand. It's how the free market works.

Perhaps you should look into that sometime.

"Doris" ends with a quote.

But if you’re an asshat, you will not be tolerated. Don’t be a dick. Because if you are, you’re going to get called out real quick.

Yeah. Sure. Except obviously, no one has called you out, douchy stalker boy. Now go take your size 20 stilleto heels, and go walk on a grate....

Watch as "Doris" takes that as a threat, too.

If the “Dragon of Horror” keeps things up, then this is a lesson he will soon learn the hard way.

Oh, look, stalkerish threats. Thankfully, s/he/it is far across the see, and is too cheap to pay for air fare. Though if this creature would like to stalk me ... well, I live near a police station, my neighborhood has clear lines of sight, and I'm relatively certain I can see this one coming.

And now, if you haven't already, you might want to try one of the nominated Best Horror novels for the Dragon last year, Honor at Stake, it's sequel Murphy's Law of Vampires, or perhaps one of the other books.

And if you've read them, a review would be nice.

 

Flashback Blog: So, you want to be a writer?

Originally posted five years ago, it was a filler post then. Apparently, it's a filler post now. Who knew?

With apologies to Doctor Who....


So, you want to be a writer?

Maybe not, but keep reading, you might be entertained.

The first rule that many people tell you in creative writing is “Write what you know.”

I'm going to tell you that this is the last thing you should do.

No one wants to read about your family drama. Do you think that Vince Flynn is actually a terrorist hunter? Or that Bob Kane dressed up as a giant bat? Or that Stephen King is a demonic clown?

Okay, demonic clown is redundant …

NOT me.

Saying “write what you know” is as ridiculous as suggesting that I am either: an athletic mercenary with enough weapons to take Latin America / a soccer-playing Vatican Secret Service agent / or a commando priest. [Edited: or a hot female Russian vampire]

I would recommend, generally, that you write what you read. Unfortunately, your writing will probably suck at first. Keep writing. It will still suck. Do it again. Repeat until you no longer suck. Trust me, I speak from experience. And from the experience of Timothy Zahn, John Ringo, and several other authors who discovered how to write the hard way –by writing.

That would lead to an obvious follow up: read.

Do I want a Hugo? #SadPuppies Again

This blog is going to wander a bit, but I ask that you stay with me.

As of this minute, I'm not doing too badly in the Sad Puppy nominations. Enough so that Vile 770 is really, really rooting for me.  Solely based on the premise that I will single-handedly destroy Sad Puppies just by being nominated. No, no joke.

So, great question, do I want a Hugo?

No idea.

Some people shoot for the moon, because why not?

I say that if you shoot for the moon, you're gonna run out of oxygen if you miss. Just ask any space mission.**


Author J. Michael Straczynski (and yes, I can spell that without looking up his name) grew up with the Hugo as a mark of good writing. The Hugos were everything good about science fiction. It was how he chose what to read growing up when he borrowed books from the pharmacy book rack (he always returned them without breaking the spine, so, it's really borrowing, not stealing). And when he got a Hugo, he was moved and surprised and in awe.

The only Hugo award winning novelists I've read in the last 15 years? JK Rowling and Neil Gaiman. That's it.

I grew up with Asimov and Neal Stephenson, These people don't rate.

Sure, I've read Hugo award winning novels.  Ender's Game and Hyperion, and Dune.  But lately? Those winners are not who I read on a regular basis.

For me, it's Weber and Ringo and Correia. They're people who have fun with powered armor and wrecking worlds. Mostly Baen authors.

And no novel from Baen will get another Hugo unless it's Lois Bujold. John Ringo doesn't want it. Kratman is more on the Rabid Puppy side. Correia doesn't want it. And no one has even discussed David Weber or Timothy Zahn, which is a crime in itself.

Then again, the people I admire also make money at writing. So I'll take that.

Without anyone I admire getting Hugos, I don't have the motivation of JMS.  So, solely on my own initiative, do I want the grand prize?

First of all, I think I'll be shocked and amazed if I get a Sad Puppy nomination. Delighted as Hell. Because on the one hand? The women in charge of Sad Puppies 4 want thousands of people involved in this. That's PR I can't buy ... okay, maybe I can buy it, but I couldn't afford it.

Also, it means that a sudden and violent wave of animosity will come down on me like the hand of Satan, and I'll take that press. After all, I am a Cis White Male with blond(ish) hair and blue eyes. I'm even Catholic, so Vile 770, the Guardian, and everyone else who want to lynch the big dogs will be able to go into Opus Dei conspiracy theories instead of evil Mormon comments.

Because, yes, I can see the CHORFs spinning Vatican conspiracy theories should I get a nomination. A Pius Man will suddenly be lambasted with negative reviews. I'll get a whole 15-seconds of fame, and I'll probably end up with the usual reputation of everyone else -- evil blah blah blah.

But as I've noted before, I'm a Conservative Catholic in New York City. For me, this is called Tuesday.

Nerd News roundup, Star Wars, Daredevil, Ants, Batman, and Puppies

Enough Sad Puppies for this minute. Well, at least the depressing parts.

Peter David has commented on the Hugos, and said, "Eh. Whatever."

You saw J. Michael Straczynski's comment the other day, which boiled down to "Either put up or shut up, Hugos."

Now, for a little bit of awesome.

First....

I've finished watching Daredevil. It is still awesome. Vincent D'Onofrio, when he's sane, can do whatever acting gig he wants. His Wilson Fisk was sympathetic and terrifying. Carlie Cox was suave and funny as Matt Murdock.  And Foggy Nelson nearly stole the series -- which is a toss-up between Foggy and Murdock's priest for who stole the most screen time.

And even though they didn't have the standard "after the credits" tag, they had one mid-season tag (the episode called simply "Stick"), hinting at a grander story arc here, probably involving the magical/ninja/Yakuza known as the Hand. It will be interesting to see what else pops up over the next three series Marvel has planned.

For the record, the best exchange? "You took Spanish in college just to get near that Greek Chick.  Whatever happened with her anyway?"   "Oh, it didn't go well."

I see this being very interesting in the long run. Though if there's another Daredevil series, they may or may not do Elektra, assuming that the Jennifer Garner role didn't blow it.

Did anything else happen this week?

Oh yeah, CUE THE MUSIC.  Star Wars has returned!



The force is strong with this family.  It looks very badass, from the crashed Star Destroyer in the desert to the tense (but not over the top) action and special effects. The X-Wings look like standard dogfighting photography.  And, if I'm reading their implications right, they're going to follow up on Leia as having the force.

The graphics look great. The production values and costumes look great. And is anyone else going to complain about grizzled Han Solo?

But I'm with the Novel Ninja, I want my Grand Admiral Thrawn (or Timothy Zahn's, depending)

Then we have: Even MORE Star Wars. For the record, this is a video game. Ignoring the people (who move a little awkwardly), I have problems telling this apart from live action.

A FANifesto

"We hear that you want to redefine fandom."

Apparently, it has become a thing out on the web to stigmatize anyone "normal."

"Normal" in this case is odd, because this version of normal casts so wide a net that, for the first time in my life, even I come under it.

Basically, if you are a straight white male who does not read "important" science fiction, by the "right" authors, you are not a true science fiction fan.

Oh reeeeeaaaally?

Wait for it ...

Wait for it ...

...

...

ARE YOU PEOPLE F***ING STUPID? WHAT SORT OF ABJECT F***ING MORON EVEN TRIES TO THINK LIKE THIS? ARE YOU BORN BRAIN DEAD, OR DID YOU HAVE TO BE DROPPED ON YOUR HEAD A MILLION TIMES TO BE SO DEVOID OF BRAIN ACTIVITY, AND YET STILL BE ABLE TO OPERATE A KEYBOARD?

*Pant* *Pant* *Pant* *Pant*

Ahem.

As I was saying, this is an idea that is devoid of serious content and thought. It makes one wonder what the author was smoking at the time that this particular proclamation was made.

Music, Lists, Arrow, and Agents of SHIELD

I've been doing a lot of writing lately, though not here.  I've got Codename: Unsub to work on (the sequel to Codename: Winterborn), A Pius Stand to finish when the beta readers get back, and I'm working on Murphy's Law of Vampires, while I'm waiting for Damnation to get back to me on Honor At Stakes.

To start with, there is the list of Arrow vs. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  And, damn, there were a lot of reasons.

There is also what we're not going to miss from the Star Wars expanded universe, courtesy of The Mouse.

You can check out any of my articles on The American Journal, if you feel like looking at me being cranky with the news, politics, politicians, life, that sort of thing, as I do my impersonation of a right-wing fringe lunatic.... or maybe just a lunatic.

If that's not enough, I've got a fun bit of music for you today.

Now, pardon me, I have to keep working. I hear that DC did something else stupid over the weekend that I have to rant and rage against.

DragonCon Report 1: Marketing Wins, Epic Fails, MacGyver, and Rocket City Rednecks

A casual Con-goer at DragonCon, dressed
in a Witchblade costume

Yup, I'm back from DragonCon.  This has possibly been one of the craziest I've ever been exposed to.  One panel said that the registration was up 30% this year, and another one mentioned that "We stopped selling tickets around 50,000 this year.  That's what we told the fire marshal. Shh."

Yes, "50,000" people spread over five hotels.  Did I ever mention I have a mild phobia of large groups of people?

Let me see, a few things worked, a few didn't.  You remember I had at least two evil plans for DragonCon.

One was an epic fail. I was going to give copies of It Was Only On Stun! to John Ringo, Timothy Zahn, and Peter David, and hope they liked it enough to give me a blurb.

John Ringo said that, since he tends to write in the voice of books he read, he was rereading his own books.

Timothy Zahn stated, before a room full of people, that he hasn't read fiction in ten years.

By that point, I didn't even bother with Peter David.

However, on the other hand, I was going to hand out flyers for the five free days I was giving out my book to Kindle users.  I had 500 flyers.  The free promo period ended last Thursday. I had 1304 people read the book. So, I guess that's a bit of a win.

Anyway, moving right along, we're going to start the first DragonCon report with something a little lazy -- to start with, I'm going to post a video of Richard Dean Anderson, better known as MacGyver, or as an officer from Stargate, the tv show.



Now, I found him a little boring, and if you folks agree, well, I'm going to try to make it up to you with a video of Travis Taylor (author, physicist, runs a show called Rocket City Rednecks) and John Ringo (author, author, and font of a lot of various and sundry knowledge),  Sadly, it's only ten minutes.  I couldn't get into this panel, since it was standing room only, and I didn't feel like being fit in with a shoehorn.

I actually thought it was kinda awesome, but I'm a nerd.



Be back tomorrow with more vids, and photos, and maybe some written reports.

I Have an Evil Plan, with Zahn, Ringo, and David.

Holidays are generally not great days for my blog traffic.  This upcoming labor day, that's a good thing, because I'm going to be at DragonCon.

Yes, DragonCon, in beautiful downtown Atlanta, Georgia.  You can check out their guest list here.

I intend to enjoy myself, and unleash my evil plan.

Okay, it's not necessarily evil, but it should be interesting.

For newcomers, It Was Only On Stun! is a murder mystery at a science fiction convention. And, since I've published this bloody book mostly through my own stubborn efforts, I'm going to try selling as much as possible, and one thing that would help would be blurbs from authors, giving me positive reviews. Really positive reviews.

In short, I hope to give a copy of my book to Peter David, Timothy Zahn, and John Ringo. Why these authors?  You mean aside from the fact that they are all kick-ass writers, and popular in the science fiction community?

Peter David and John Ringo have a similar sense of humor to mine ... or I developed my sense of humor by reading them, pick one.  I find Ringo inspiring, and David usually entertaining, when he's not putting his politics into it.

Timothy Zahn is "only" an amazing author, and most likely responsible for resurrecting Star Wars as a franchise (sadly, the book franchise might be the only reason Lucas felt comfortable trying the prequel trilogy.  Bonus: Zahn has gone everywhere that Lucas has, and has outperformed the little sot.)

Right now, my major hope for the convention is that I don't have security sicced on me for trying to hand an author a novel.  Signed, of course.

On the plus side, I know Peter David has out-and-out advocated this procedure, so I can at least tell him that I'm only following his own advice. 

On the other hand, if Zahn found it creepy, he could call the 501st Imperial Stormtrooper Legion (see my Sean Ryan Trailer.).

And John Ringo ... well, he's ex-82nd airborne, and legions of his fans are military vets. I really hope he doesn't mind. And that he likes the book.

It's going to be amusing.

Author Review: The Wrath of Zahn

Timothy Zahn will always be marked as the man who resurrected the Star Wars series from it's unholy grave. He wrote three books in the early 1990s, and the Star Wars book series was born.

Starting with Heir to the Empire, it was one of the few modern novels at the time I had encountered protagonists who thought. Not just a passing thought, covered in Italics, but whole paragraphs of tactical thought and maneuvering. And sometimes for entire pages. Shootouts in space and in infantry tactics had become chess games with lasers and missiles. And the antagonist of the piece was brilliant; the conversations between him and his side kick looked like Sherlock Holmes and Watson with a tactical manual.

 Though, to be honest, Zahn is the only person in the Star Wars world I'll read ever again.  There are only so many books about X-Wing pilots, and trashing the universe before it gets tiresome.  With Zahn, All of his books are well thought out, and no one is stupid. There are some cases you can probably say that everyone thinks too much, but a smart book is never a bad thing, as far as I'm concerned. Every time George Lucas entered into the world of Star Wars, Zahn followed, and improved it.

Zahn created a planet called Coruscant -- which appeared in the first "prequel" movie. Lucas made droids with little shields, Zahn came up with a way to out-maneuver them. Lucas went back in time, Zahn went back in time, and, while Zahn couldn't make Anakin Skywalker interesting, everyone else around him was.

And, in true George Lucas fashion, he took everything that Zahn created, and promptly ruined it ... read the most recent Star Wars novels, and you'll see why. Zahn and an author named Michael J. Stackpole had come up with a concept to expand the Star Wars novels into a kind of Next Generation series ...

It went ahead without Zahn.

Let's just say that there's a reason Zahn's latest Star Wars novel is set in the past, before the first and second movies.  I would rather read his take on the rise of the most brilliant tactical leader the bad guys ever had, than read one more petty, pedantic, grim novel set around Lucas's regular Star Wars novels.  It also includes the funniest group of rogue stormtroopers you've ever seen, and possibly the only ones who have the ability to shoot straight.

Spoiler Alert for ... a video game? Halo.

Some people may have noticed that I'm a little wierd. I'm also a bit of a nerd, as my DragonCon reports and my JMS blog of today might tell you.

However, I want to discuss a little bit about one of the most epic bits of science fiction storytelling I've seen outside of Baen publishing.

The Halo video game franchise.

Yup. Video games can have epic writing.

If most of you are thinking "Thanks. We've seen Super Mario Brothers, there is no writing," I respectfully suggest you get your head out of the 80s. And parts of the 90s.

I've only recently been brought back into the world of video games by my friend Jason. He started by giving me a video game called Halo. It was a "first person shooter," which I always figured was short for "a game with no plot, but you get to shoot up anyhthing that gets in your way, or blow them up if you have grenades."

Then I started playing it.

It had a story. It had supporting characters with personalities. It had witty chapter titles and sarcastic one-liners. It was a space-sprawling epic played out on something that resembled Larry Niven's Ringworld -- an artificially designed planet called Halo.

The premise was simple enough: alien jihadists called the Covenant have discovered humans, and they really, really don't like us. The game starts with the player's ship on the run from an alien armada, and runs into Halo, a world that turns out to be a sacred artifact to the jihadists. The player's character is a bioengineered super soldier called a Spartan-II, and wears a Mjolnir battle suit (yes, it's named after the hammer of Thor). The humans get the bright idea to take over Halo before the Covenant do -- this artificial ring world is a moon-sized weapon, after all.

And then, the humans wake something up. Not quite an eldritch horror from beyond time and space, but good enough for government work. Let's just say that they're called The Flood and leave it there. They have a tendency to devour, well, everything.

After waking up said horror, another side to this little war comes up. The artificial intelligence of the Halo ring discovers that, "Hmm, the Flood creatures have been let loose. We have to stop them."

It turns out that the eldritch horror isn't from beyond time and space, but from one hundred million years ago. The Halo rings were built to stop them. But, the people fighting the flood back then decided to hold on to a few samples for research, and so the species wouldn't die out (I always knew rabid environmentalists would be the ruin of us).

All goes perfectly well until the player discovers how the Halo rings kill the flood-- by erradicating all life bigger than a microbe. The flood starve. End of problem. When the Spartan-II and his sidekick object to this plan, the AI that has been chattering at you for a whole level of the game turns nasty.

Did I mention that the AI is insane?

Soon, the game becomes a four-sided battle. Alien jihadists are still trying to kill you. The flood are trying to kill everyone. And the AI that you've pissed off has his own army of flying, laser-wielding drones who are also out to kill you, the flood, the jihadists, and everything else in its way.

And that's just the first game.

The Halo universe is so dense in background and in story, they've written at least half a dozen novels worth of material, and they're making more.  Comic book and Star Trek favorite Peter David has written a comic book volume from the Halo-verse, as has William C. Dietz, another author with his own writing credits -- though the first author to be offered the job was Timothy Zahn.

SPOILER ALERT.

There might be one or two people upset by the end of Halo 3.  The third game sought to wipe out the Flood, end the war with the alien jihadists, and  finally end the threat of the Halo rings.   By and large, they succeeded.

However, the character you play, the Spartan-II, is last seen drifting in space in half a starship -- bad things happen when a wormhole closes and the ship is only halfway through it.
Since Halo 3, several Halo games have been released -- prequels, side-stories, and tales that never answered the simple question: Whatever happened to Master Chief, Spartan 117

Halo Fans will be happy to know that the trail for Halo 4 starts where Halo 3 leaves off.

Writer's Rules For Villains

Rules for Antagonists, Villains, etc.


A long while ago, a writer came up with a contest for Rules for Superheroes. It was cute, and genre-specific.

But I always like a smart enemy to go with my protagonists. Preferably, someone who thinks ahead.  So, I have Rules for Antagonists.  Be they killers in murder mysteries, archvillains in comic books, or your basic takeover the world types in science fiction and fantasy, this should be their playbook.


Rule #1: NEVER. TOUCH. THE GIRLFRIEND.  It only pisses them off.

Drazen's Corollary: While abducting the significant other / close relation of your archrival in order to lure him/her into your sinister trap, it will only serve to piss them off.  Your normally docile hero, who tends towards nonlethal force, will seriously consider thrashing you to within an inch of your life, and--if no sidekicks are there to enforce restraint--might go three inches beyond that.

Parker's Corollary on Drazen: If you MUST lure them anywhere, use the standard busload of children chosen at random--it will typically serve to get the required effect, especially with a note to the local media sources and/or police agencies.  Should you do this in a city with a high protagonist population (eg: Marvel's New York), be certain to request the hero of your choice: otherwise you get all of them.


Rule #2. Don't gloat. The amount of time it takes for you to boast, and threaten, and deliver your well-practiced maniacal laughter, someone you overlooked will have unplugged your weapon / unlocked the handcuffs on the prisoners / otherwise screwed up your plans.  Gloat after you've won. (Also: See rule 7)

Fletcher's Corollary: Overlook no one. Seriously, if you're going to take over the world / kill someone / unleash a diabolical scheme, no one is unimportant. Witnesses will provide evidence. Just because it's some nobody in the background asking questions doesn't mean there's no threat—people in the background tend to observe a lot.

Goldfinger's Corollary: Never use the line, "Because you are all about to die anyway, I will tell you all about my evil plan."  This includes all variations on this theme.


Rule #3: Avoid patterns. No matter how comfortable you are with a certain places / style / or MO, repeating it on a constant loop will only serve to have the authorities find you.



Rule #4: Wear gloves during your crimes. If possible, wear a full body suit to prevent fingerprints, hairs, or skin cells from being left behind.

Grissom's Corollary For Killers: This includes keeping souvenirs.



Rule #5: Don't let ideology govern your tactics. Just because your ideology says that your enemy is inferior doesn't make them stupid.

Tarkin's Corollary. Underestimating your enemies will get you killed.

Thrawn's Corollary on Tarkin: Underestimating your allies will also get you killed.


Rule #6: Suicide bombers have never won a war, or even a battle. It only wastes experienced soldiers. Even disposable foot soldiers are not infinite. Minions do not grow on trees.

Zahn's Corollary: Unless you have a cloning unit for disposable foot-soldiers.

Von Doom's (PhD) Corollary on Zahn:  Or you build your own.


Rule #7 (or Rule 2, Expanded): If you have a chance to remove the adversary from the playing field on a permanent basis, do so. Do not lecture them, explain your scheme, or toy with them. Shoot them in the head, and move on.

Stark's Corollary: Also, do not wound them so they can still be useful to you. If they can be useful to you, they can also hurt you.

Ming's Corollary on Stark: Your enemy can be useful to you – dead. Examples are usually better that way.



Rule #8: If you cannot see the hero, worry.

Murphy's Corollary: If you cannot see your adversary, s/he is behind you.



Rule #9: No self destruct mechanisms, unless they are password protected, and require the passwords of at least three of your closest allies.  And confirmed by you. Twice.



Rule #10: Plan ahead.  You have all the time in the world to unleash your deadly plot on the world, or execute your crime.  Take appropriate precautions, and don't assume that everything will go according to plan.  If your plan is perfect, you're missing something.  Murphy is always right.

Palpatine's Corollary: If you are going to invite your enemies to come into range of your ultimate weapon, make sure that it's finished first.



Rule #11: No time travel. You don't have enough aspirin in the world to deal with the headache it will cause.

Doctor's Corollary: Unless you have a blue box.
 

 
Rule #12: Whatever psychological problems you have, make sure that you utilize them well.

Wilson's Corollary: Don't suffer from madness.  Enjoy every minute of it.



Rule #13: When your adversary is incapacitated, on the floor, at your mercy, it is not the time to (a) exercise your creativity in designing Rube Goldberg-esque death traps (b) write your monologue or (c) start gloating.  The answer is (d) shoot them in the head and move on.

YouTube videos, and “So, you want to be a writer?” (Apologies to Dr. Who.)

Everyone here has been promised a video of the hour-long spotlight on J. Michael Straczynski, where JMS gets to talk for an hour about strange and various topics.

However, due to a massive lightning storm that interfered with my YouTube upload, followed by the inability of both YouTube and Facebook to accept any uploads, that particular post will be delayed.

So, a little filler while the various video websites get their act together. Now I get to regale you with tales of, um, hmm … Wait a moment, I can fake this one …

Yeah, nothing interesting is coming …

So, you want to be a writer?

Maybe not, but keep reading, you might be entertained.

The first rule that many people tell you in creative writing is “Write what you know.”

I'm going to tell you that this is the last thing you should do.

No one wants to read about your family drama. Do you think that Vince Flynn is actually a terrorist hunter? Or that Bob Kane dressed up as a giant bat? Or that Stephen King is a demonic clown?

Okay, demonic clown is redundant …

Saying “write what you know” is as ridiculous as suggesting that I am either: an athletic mercenary with enough weapons to take Latin America / a soccer-playing Vatican Secret Service agent / or a commando priest.

I would recommend, generally, that you write what you read. Unfortunately, your writing will probably suck at first. Keep writing. It will still suck. Do it again. Repeat until you no longer suck. Trust me, I speak from experience. And from the experience of Timothy Zahn, John Ringo, and several other authors who discovered how to write the hard way –by writing.

That would lead to an obvious follow up: read. No, Vince Flynn is not an assassin, nor am I any of the above.

However, we all do research.

For A Pius Man, I read easily a dozen books worth of material. We will not include all of the various and sundry newspaper articles and websites and lectures that I had to go through to collect information on weaponry that I've never held, and tactics I've never had drilled into me, and places I've never been. And we can ignore the fight scenes I had to rewrite after taking 18 months of self defense training.

Third: sure, you can use your own experience. If it's relevant, if it fits, if it's part of a character. If you're writing romantic elements, it might be nice if you've been in love. If you've fired a gun, describe its feel, its weight, the sound it makes when it fires. If you're a colorful personality who made homemade explosives for grammar school science projects, use it. I don't necessarily recommend testing out the Anarchist's Cookbook—merely reading it will suffice.

Experience is good. Relevant experience is better.

People talk to me. In my life, I have known seven rape victims. I once wrote a affidavit for a woman who was the plaything of a sexual sadist from age 8-22. I have dated a bisexual bipolar wiccan nymphomaniac (long story), a bi-Latina Catholic nymphomaniac (even longer story), and I have listened to more people with more kinks than I have ever wanted to learn about. I am a walking confessional and therapy couch rolled into one.

Would I put any of this into a novel? Very little. I have yet to write a graphic sex scene in any book. My only torture sequence involved our villain describing, in one paragraph, what he would be doing over the course of several hours. No details were present in any of them. The closest I have ever come to a sex scene was so vague, someone had to ask me to clarify the details. .

Though I do have at least one character who walks into a room, tries to read, and people confess everything in the universe to him …

Fourth: Don't go into writing unless you need to.

No one with an ounce of sense will go into professional writing unless there was nothing else for them.

I don't mean in terms of education, personal mental / physical / socio-economic limitations, or anything like that. I mean you are compelled to write professionally. You lay in bed in the middle of the night and keep a notebook close at hand so you can write down ideas before you forget them. Or you start writing a simple amusing fact and you suddenly fill the page with an outline for a novel. Writing is your drug. Your addiction. Your neurotic, uncontrollable compulsion. You would go insane otherwise … Or merely more insane.

Writing is not for the faint of heart. You are essentially playing chicken with your entire life. Even the publish on demand route is a crap-shoot. You may be picked up by someone bigger, you may not be. We hear the stories of those who have published online and have been chosen by Random House. I have trouble doing the math on how many others there are who don't go anywhere.

If you do have the occasion to fall into writing, if you have the compulsion to write every day, no matter what, then here's my last suggestion: Don't stop. If you need to write for a living, then do it. Write in your notebook during a lunch hour, write a page or two each day. Keep writing, and don't stop. Don't turn your back on your goal. Don't even blink. Blink, and you're dead.

Good luck.

THIS. IS. DRAGONCON.... 2009

These are notes compiled from my time at DragonCon, 2009, in Atlanta, GA.  Please forgive me if some of these are incomplete.

Day 1, Thursday, September 3rd

Arriving the day before the Convention started, we went to pick up the tickets we had purchased months ago. The line for pre-registration was …. first we went to one hotel, did a U-turn to get onto one line, which u-turned onto yet another line, and that was the line to get INTO the hotel, onto the line for the pre-registration room, where we got onto that line....

Yes, we went from a line, to get onto a line, to get onto a line, to get onto a line.

The preregistration line was was a serpentine deal across a ballroom about 30 yards long, roped off and packed. Organizers kept calling out names, because there was one person to deal with people in select alphabetical segments (Adams-Alabaster, Annoying-Bradbury, etc). It took two hours to get to the front of the line, where they had broken the line up into the segments per group—and we noticed they took 5-10 minutes per member. Later, they had tried to close the pre-registration line at 9 PM, with the room still full. The registrants refused to leave, and they didn’t close until 10:30 PM.



Day 2-- and now the Convention Starts.

10 AM: For the appearance of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (together for possibly the first time in years), the line into the Hyatt hotel wrapped AROUND the hotel. We asked, discovered that Nimoy-Shatner had been moved to the Marriott Marquis—the line we saw was for watching the reunion on remote large-screen TVs. It was originally placed opposite a Babylon 5 panel, but that panel had been moved to 4PM. Our last option was a panel called “Celluloid Heroes”



“Celluloid Heroes,” with Mike Mignola (Creator of Hellboy), Helen Slater (the original movie Supergirl ), Doug Jones (“Abe Sapien,” and Silver Surfer in the films), and Bruce Davison (Senator Kelly from the first two “X-Men” films).

Items of interest:

Mignola talked about how he wasn’t called to consult for the second Hellboy movie, which gave the director Guillermo Del Toro free reign, which is probably why it was so terrible. However, when Mignola looked at the finished product of Hellboy, he decided that those characters were more Del Toro's than his own. Also, the two of them had tried for eight hours to adapt a plot from the original Hellboy comic for the second film, and failed. Also noted was that Del Toro has a great way for getting around studio “suits”—film in Eastern Europe (aka the back end of Hell), where they would not go.

Apparently, Mignola was brought into Disney to do extra concept art for a movie that would become “Journey to Atlantis”. The artists at Disney are very cliquish, looking at Mignola like “what is HE doing here?” Apparently, the artists never talk to the screenwriters at idea meetings. Mignola, on the other hand, hadn't been informed about that policy, and when he went out to lunch with the writers and talked with them, they came back and they had a different film. He doesn’t know not to speak up. Also, when he first arrived, he had a thought of “Why is there a large poster of Hellboy on the wall?” After hearing about how the Disney artists admired his technique about different things, his first thought about one of the “techniques” was “I did it that way because I can't draw feet.”

Slater attended the High School for the Performing Arts (the “Fame” school), and auditioned for and won the role of Supergirl immediately after graduating. While on set, she performed a Shakespeare sonnet for Peter O’Toole, who was her co-star on the film. Being from New York, she talked with her hands gesturing. O’Toole asked her to hold two dandelions between her thumbs and forefingers and do it again. She learned how to put the poetry over the performance, or, as she put it, “getting the blonde out of her speech”. She would more recently play Clark’s Kryptonian mother on “Smallville.”

Now, originally, the primary villain from John Woo's Mission Impossible II was slated to be Wolverine in the X-Men films, but Woo kept him so long, Singer and company decided to go with an Aussie actor who was playing Curly in “Oklahoma” for the London stage, some guy named Hugh Jackman. They decided “hey we gotta keep an eye on him, he’s gonna go far.” Oh yes, and after shooting, the cast would apparently head to the bar, where Patrick Stewart taught everyone “photon torpedo” acting, moving as if hit, while the camera moved. “Position #7 [Pull to the right.]”

Jones, who also played the Silver Surfer in the second Fantastic 4 movie, is signed on to a Surfer 3-picture deal. The second movie has been written by J. Michael Straczynski.


Panel 2: The Star Trek authors cavalcade: with Peter David, Alan Dean Foster, Keith DeCandido.

When the panel started, there was a brief introduction of everyone except Peter David. He simplified it by asking “Is there anyone here who DOESN’T know who I am?” Answer: no.

Simon and Schuster: the people who bring you the Trek novels have been through a massive let-go of ST editors; they've cut two in the last year. In addition, the authors were told “no more multi-book story arcs”...and there are some who are thinking that this is the end of the Trek book franchise, since the contract is expiring soon.


Editors and Paramount have a great deal of power over the plots. One idiot named Richard Arnold once told Peter David that “there are no female Borg; we haven't seen them on the show, so they don't exist” (This was before the Borg Queen and Seven of Nine). As a result, Peter David's novel “Vendetta” originally came with a disclaimer that it was “not series cannon”. David's reply “So they assimilate everyone but the women? What are they, Hasidic Jews?”

An example of Editorial Power is the Death of Kathryn Janeway—yes, Voyager fans, she'd dead, get over it. It was an idea that was given to Peter David for the book “Before Dishonor.” It was not his idea, don't yell at him for it.

DeCandido had problems writing for Will Riker; According to Peter David, Jonathan Frakes told him that he played Riker as John Wayne. David then went on to discuss how he pictured his creation of Captain Mackenzie Calhoun as Mel Gibson as Braveheart ("I was a teenage warlord"), only without the death and dismemberment.

Alan Dean Foster talked about other projects like the novelization of the first Alien movie, where he could explain things that didn't make sense in the film. Peter David asked “Why did the escape pod only hold four people? Was this ship created by the people who built the Titanic?”

David continued with, “And another thing, I'm still waiting for someone to explain gravity on most of these ships. The only time I've ever seen it done was on Babylon 5, and they even made it a plot point in one story.”



Panel 3: Angel/Buffy guest stars: Kristy Swanson (KS, the original Buffy), Charisma Carpenter (CC), Julie Benz (JB), Felicia Day (FD. Creator of The Guild ).

Miscellaneous facts here and there: Tv sets have doctors to deal with pimples.

According to KS, the original Buffy movie was a Luke Perry vehicle. The soul patch in the move was a fake, and Swanson's cat one day licked it off and ate it.

Felicia Day reads romance novels,on kindle, just because the covers are embarrassing. Also reads JD Robb, which are mystery romances.

After a large round of applause upon her arrival, CC: “I come here for the ego boost.”


Q: “Ms. Carpenter, do you read the comics?”
A: “Well, I’m at DCon, so, yes, of course I do.”



Question on favorite character development:
A, Julie Benz: I was originally supposed to be vamp girl #1.... I got a name and a story arc, so, yay!
A, Charisma Carpenter: It was a little odd giving birth to a 6’2” African-American woman (Gina Torres).
FD: “Your vagina much be huge... on the show! On the show I mean!”
Charisma Carpenter laughs: “Yeah, Franken-pussy.”

Charisma Carpenter was recently filmed for Legend of the Seeker: The lead, Craig Horner, is a Buffy fan and geeked out on her.



Q: Charisma, did you like Buffy or Angel more...?
Charisma Carpenter: “Angel, of course, it had more of me!” [Done for the laugh, I think] “Buffy was fun though.”



Q: “So, Charisma, what did you think of the five seasons of Angel?”
A: “Well, first of all, I wasn’t in the last season; I was cut in season four... then the series got canceled... MUWHAHAHA. No, with the fourth season, it was really tough. I got pregnant, and things became strained with Joss (Whedon), and it reached a breaking point when I found out I would be fired FROM A REPORTER who called to ask about it. When I was approached about doing my cameo in Season 5, I told them, 'Don't kill me. I don't want to do this if you're just going to kill me... don't kill me...' and then I heard the plot of the episode and Damnit, they killed me. When I heard how I was going to buy it, I thought, 'Wow, that’s GOOD! Joss is still the master.' So, we're good now.”

Julie Benz will be in a new movie, a sequel to “Reservoir Dogs”, where her character wears 6-inch Louis Vuitton heels to crime scenes (Charisma Carpenter hugs her and says “I love you!”).



Q: What badass do you want to play next?
Charisma Carpenter: “I wanna play Julie! Or any Quentin Tarantino Heroine.” (Kill Bill’s Bride)
Q: No, I mean a real person.
Charisma Carpenter: “Julie is a real person!”
Julie Benz: No I’m not.
Charisma Carpenter: --Or I'd play Wonder Woman, but Joss isn’t involved with that anymore, so never mind.
Julie Benz: Well, as far as real people go, I was once mistaken for Kristy Swanson.
Kristy Swanson: You don’t look like me.

And, finally, one last exchange.



Charisma Carpenter: Julie bit me once.
Julie Benz: I liked it.
Charisma Carpenter: And then I hit you, and I liked it!


Panel 4: Apocalypse Rising Track,:the writers panel, starring John Ringo, SM Stirling, and Michael Z. Williamson.

When John Ringo's on a panel, by the way, expect to hear very little from anyone else. He doesn't seem to like the sound of his own voice, and though he came into the panel after driving 6 hours in 18, he still takes over

John Ringo: “I find it funny that this is a panel of disasters and someone just handed me a novelization of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen....

“Now, with Post Apocalyptic fiction, it's a way for a writer to make the world over in his own image, using the most unlikely hero—usually a version of themselves. In fact, the Western tradition has been scarred by it, with the Plague, which killed a third of Europe.

“Oh, and by the way, did anyone here see Cloverfield? I just wanted them all to die! Does anyone here known anyone as stupid as those people?

“One of the various problems with our modern world is that the Sun occasionally burbs. And that's fine if you're an ancient Roman, not so good for us. Right now, if we lost modern technology, it would be worse and more devastating than a nuclear war; with technology, we can support a planet of six billion people. If we lose modern technology, the planet has has a max capacity to support only 450-500 million people. Please realize that the “normal” world is not America, it's Darfur and Saudia Arabia.

“In 1869, there was the Carrington event, a solar storm that lasted for hours, hit the entire planet with a barrage of electromagnetic pulse. Now, it doesn't effect telegraphs. Us, not so lucky. Then again, in Tennesee, we can live off of squirrels--75 squirrels per person. And I live in Chattanooga, with the Tennessee Valley Authority. They'd have the power back up in two months.”

Miscellanous someone [most likely Stirling] “As for what's left afterwards... for example, archaeologists found a 3800-year-old clay tablet from town destroyed by Hammurabi. It had a stone letter in it. They were all excited and such, the first such letter they found of this kind.... what was on it? 'This is the third letter I have written regarding the silver you owe me…' The second one was 'You have not written me in the three years since your marriage…'

“And speaking of modern technology, Los Angeles.... You put a city in the desert? Really?”

Ringo: No I didn’t.

MZ Williamson [I think]: “As for after the fall, and what would be left, in my book, I had them retell Star Wars as their myth, only with the siege tower of doom instead of the Death Star, and they found a Star Trek Technical manual and decided to put it together themselves...after all, it had been done before.”

Stirling [I also think]: “James Clavell, the English author, was a POW in a Japanese camp in WW2, which he turned into his novel King Rat. After the war, he walked around the streets of London with two tins of sardines in his pockets because he had learned that he could survive on two tins and a pound of rice should everything fall apart.”

Ringo: by the way, for the record, the average lifespan of a lone wolf is about six months. Humans are also pack animals. Should the crap hit the fan, you can have all the food in the world, but that won't help if there are thirty people surrounding your house. Get friends.



Panel 5, 4PM. John Ringo reading

“Has anyone read Princess of Wands?” EVERY HAND shot up. “OK, then.” Working on the sequel for 18 months. Problems: Should he do it as one novel? Vignettes? What order should the vignettes be? And how do you top the last book?

Eventually, the reading was “Live Free or Die” (“no relation to the Bruce Willis movie”).
Premise of this book: a Libertarian with a napoleon complex becomes richest and most powerful man on Earth.
It starts with a statement of the real Scientific principle “Hm, that’s odd.”

And it leads into SkyWatch: watching the skies and the stars for things that can crash into the Earth and kill us. The joke is those that who can’t teach, go to SkyWatch.

And then they find a 10.4 KM concentric circle in space.

“Is this a joke?”
“It's from the Germans, they don’t have a sense of humor.”
“You do know what shape that's in, right?”
"Yeah, it’s a halo; maybe it’s Covenant. At the speed and angle, it won't hit us, but keep an eye on it, when it hits something, the explosion will be REALLY COOL."

Several weeks later: “Um, it's stopped.” Oh crap.

Cut to the White House Switchboard.

Operator: “White House Switchboard.”
Robotic voice: “WE ARE THE GLEEN. WE COME IN PEACE.”
Operator: “A prank call will only be wasting my time.”
Voice: WE. ARE. THE. GLEEN. IF YOU LOOK AT YOUR CALLER INFORMATION BOX, YOU WILL SEE THAT THIS CALL IS COMING FROM A SATELLITE. WE. ARE. USING. TO. RELAY. THE. SIGNAL. WE WILL CALL BACK IN 5 DAYS AND CALL AT NOON. GREENWICH. MEAN. TIME. PLEASE HAVE YOUR PRESIDENT CLEAR HIS SCHEDULE. HAVE. A. NICE. DAY.

Five days later, on a conference call with the G8 world leaders: “WE ARE THE GLEEN. WE COME IN PEACE. WE HAVE SENT YOU AN INTERSTELLAR GATE FOR YOUR USE TO COME INTO AND OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM. ANYONE CAN USE THE GATE AT ANY TIME AFTER YOU PAY THE OPERATING FEE. PLEASE DO NOT HAVE EXPLOSIONS WITHIN 300,000 KM OF THE GATE. THANK YOU. HAVE. A. NICE. DAY. ”

Now, to the hero—Vernon Taylor, or Taylor Vernon, no one can recall, not even Ringo. This Libertarian webcomic artist ran a SF site, which died after science fiction was superceded by events. One day, he discovered that the Gleen is addicted to maple syrup; he grabs a big rig full of 50 gallon drums of syrup, becomes their supplier, and is rich overnight.

The first story: “The Maple Syrup War”: Earth is too backwater for the Gleen to interfere, they don't have a world government body, no real political organization that the Gleen find acceptable, and that includes the UN. Every few years, the Rastor come, blow up Singapore and two other cities (because they were the brightest lit), and have tribute.

And then they take Hostages for maple syrup. Vernon sets up a transmission from his moon colony, relays it thru several satellites and Fox News. Green screen is set up behind him to add to the image of him being at home. “It may seem to you that we who collect the syrup are the servants of the people in the cities. To your collective mindset, you don't know this concept of freedom. Of individuality. Of liberty. The people in the cities... THEY ARE OUR ENEMIES. We WANT you to kill them. BLOW UP BOSTON. DESTROY NEW YORK. And please, PLEASE, NUKE DC! This is America. A place of FREEDOM. LIVE FREE OR—”
“We lost the first relay, swtiching to second.”
Picture behind him reverts to Mount Rushmore. “AND WE HAVE CGI AND GREEN SCREEN YOU ALIEN BASTARDS.”
“Lost the second one.”
“Cut.”
Afterwards, a CNN reporter says “We were hurt by what you said. You didn't mean the cities are you enemies.”
“Of course I did. They are. They're against everything we stand for. But I didn't want anyone to die.”
“Then why did you say that?”
“To quote the smartest rabbit I know, 'Please don’t throw me into that briar patch.'”



By the second vignette, Vernon has created a warship out of a 10km wide nickel asteroid, 9 trillion tons, armed with Archimedes mirrors; described as “insufficiently ambitious.”
An audience member hummed the Imperial Waltz, Ringo said “Exactly. In this, everyone's trying NOT to do the death star.”
And this armed asteroid is called Troy.



Panel 5: 
The league of redheaded stepchildren: Media tie-in authors Peter David, Timothy Zahn, Robert Greenberger, Catherine Asaro.

Most often line that they hear: “When are you going to write a REAL book? Not some Star Wars novel.” Tie-ins are a rung below SF/Fantasy.

When asked what projects he's turned down, Timothy Zahn turned down B5 —
PD: Don't worry, I did it.
TZ: Then I turned down a Halo novel.
PD: Don't worry, I did it.
TZ: I have objections to writing “Other people’s stories.”
PD: “Would you object to $100K for a screenplay?”
TZ: “Maybe, but that's weeks, a novel takes months.”
PD: “Not the way I write. I burn out keyboards. ”
TZ: My other problem with the Halo novel was that they wouldn't let me see their bible for the mythology.
PD: I didn't have a that problem. The Microsoft people were very supportive. When I was approached, I say “Yes, I love Halo,” and spend days doing research playing the game or reading strategy guides. When I handed in my outline, they said “Oh, you can't do that with this weapon, but you can with this, which is one that we haven't released yet.” But yeah, they were very supportive with me.
TZ. “Mom always liked you best.”
PD: “And is it any wonder? As for what I've turned down, I turned down writing the first Voyager novel; the show bible said Janeway was supposed to hold the ship together with willpower, spit and baling wire, between the Marquis and the starfleet crew members, the show ironed out all those rough edges.. And I turned down the novelization for Iron Man 2; Marvel was so paranoid, they insisted the writer do this with pen and paper. Then again, my theory is that if anyone asks if you can do something, then say yes! Then learn how.



Max Allan Collins wrote Road to Perdition, the novelization of movie based on his comic book. He put in background and stories that he couldn’t fit into comic. Publisher said take it out because “it wasn't in the movie.” The novelization ended up as 40k words. His revenge: he put the material into sequel.

On the Return of Swamp Thing: PD took old Alan Moore comics and rewrote the movie. Greenberger, working for DC at the time, said forget the movie, read the book.