That’s the main reason I’m online when I write, because I need to look up words. Not, I want to make clear, to check Facebook.

Being a writer in the fantasy genre means I am faced with problems I suspect other authors do not wot of. Rare is the time when I need to look up a word for something I know nothing about. If I knew nothing about it, how would I know there was a word for it? And I have a modestly large vocabulary to begin with. So, by definition, looking up a word is a frustrating process. Because the only words I ever need to look up are words for things I know exist, but do not know the name of. For instance…

I wanted to describe a knight in the mostly knightly manner possible because, in this new draft of The Book (the last before I put it online, I totes promise) I wanted to emphasize the knightly nature of the knights. So I imagine an extremely knighty knight in my mind. I entreat you to do the same.

He is certainly wearing armor, this knight you and I are imagining, and it’s probably gleaming plate. The plate armor has all sorts of bits on it, including a little concave metal disk, hung off the right shoulder (the left shoulder is protected by the shield) by a chain, designed to catch an enemy’s lance and deflect it, so the questing knight doesn’t have his shoulder dislocated or his arm ripped off by an enemy lance. That bit is called a besague. This I need not look up, I just know this stuff.

I know the central piece of torso armor covering the chest is formally called a cuirass. I know this because I watch a lot of Gilbert & Sullivan. So mostly I’m covered when it comes to this stuff.

But this knight we’re imagining, he’s probably on a horse and that horse has…some kind of…cloth…thing. He’s covered in white cloth with green trim. The cloth hangs down all the way to the ground like…drapes. Like…horse drapes.

Horse Drapes. You try looking up fucking Horse Drapes on Google and see what you get. You’re not going to get whatever it is I’m talking about, I’ll tell you that for nothing. No, “Horse Curtains” doesn’t work either, don’t bother.

So I need to look up the word and this is not going to be a short trip, this is going to be a long goddamned expedition and I’m probably going to end up in Google Books for 3 hours reading out-of-print books written in the 1880s on jousting in the 14th century. That’s how I found out what you called a prostitute in Medieval times. Trull, by the way.

Seeking dictionary.com, I minimize Word and launch Chrome.

“Sorry,” the laptop says. “No internets.”

“What?”

“There’s no internet here.”

“There was internet here yesterday!”

“Well, whatever with yesterday,” the laptop says. “There’s no internet today.”

“Huh. Is there any network at all?”

“Nope. I can’t see any networks.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yeah it is.”

“Sounds like there’s something wrong.”

“I think there is something wrong.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What…what do you think is wrong?”

“I dunno. Seems like maybe you turned networking off.”

“I turned it off?”

“Maybe!”

“I didn’t even know you COULD turn it off!”

“Well you can!”

“Ok. So…can you turn it back on?”

“I dunno, lemme see….

…nope.”

“Shit.”

“Maybe you can turn it on!”

“Ok, what do I do?”

“Well, sometimes there’s like a button on the front of the laptop. Check that.”

“Ok, hang on. I’m checking…I’m looking…

…nope. No buttons of any kind.”

“Well, ok. Um…sometimes there’s a key? On the keyboard?”

“Ok, I’m looking…hey! There’s a little button here with, like, a radio tower and little transmission waves coming off it!”

“Press that!”

“OMG Internets!!”

“Yay!”

“Yay!”

*hifive*

Now I can update my Facebook page! I mean…look up Horse Drapes!

.

.

.

It’s called a “caparison,” by the way.

Prepare to have your mind…

You only need to watch the first two minutes. I do listen to lots of other music, but I also have a Roger Dean desktop background.

There may be some “Temp Love” going on here with the title.

Geoff likes it because in The Business, which is to say Hollywood, when an actor or director or very rarely a writer is bigger than the project he’s currently developing, the movie is referred to as “Untitled Will Smith Project.” In some cases, it’s known by that name for months after everyone knows the real title, because the real name is stupid, and Will Smith is obviously bigger than the movie.

It amuses Geoff to have an Untitled Matt Colville Project because my name is bigger than nothing and that’s the gag.

The subtitle is him quoting me in an IM discussion wherein I said…well, you can see what I said. I was casting about for Clever Names. I liked;

Deservedly Underrated

Because I thought it was a seemingly clever bit of nonsense. But I thought it was too cynical and he agreed.

I remembered Josh Friedman’s wildly popular blog, titled I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing. Probably given the quality of his content, any name would have been fine, but he picked that one because, he said, it was his favorite line of dialog.

I wondered “What is my favorite line of dialog?”

There are many contenders but the first one that struck me was one of the first lines in Deadwood.

“I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no living cocksucker.”

Obviously that’s too long a title, I thought “Flatter Than Hammered Shit” would be a good title, but Geoff persuaded me out of it because he felt it perhaps gave the wrong impression about the content of blog.

So it remains The Untitled Matt Colville Project which I, a non-ironic fan of The Alan Parson’s Project, kinda like.

But we’re open to suggestions.

The Lappy isn’t named yet. It should be. Windows annoyingly won’t let me give the Lappy a really long name like GSV The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival.  And unfortunately the Internet has yet to attempt the mammoth task of cataloging the names of all the Gods and Elementals in the Eternal Champion books. And clearly I’m not going to name it something obvious like Arioch or Xiombarg. So for now it’s Lappy.

Now, the process I do not love. It’s work. It can be a lot of work. Trying to work out Why Something Happens, or Why This Doesn’t Happen. I’ve never had writer’s block, but I have had Outlining Block where I’ve stared at the outline for an hour trying to figure out why the Hero wouldn’t just shoot the guy he would obviously fucking shoot.

This is something I can talk about for, literally, hours and that’s a good indication I should under no circumstance do so.

There was a point in the development of the book where everything at home became a distraction. Because I wrote at the same computer on which I watch TV and listen to music and surf the web and play games, all of these things made writing not impossible but very inefficient. Around the time I got really serious about the book, I bought a laptop.

I bought the laptop because I wanted to be able to take it somewhere, the library or a coffee shop, and work on the book. The point here wasn’t to work on the book “undisturbed,” but rather to have a specific place and time that I would come to associate with “writing.” I still checked my email, updated Facebook, but now these were little things that gave me a break from the intense experience of getting everything on the page. It took me months to finish the outline, but once I’d done it the book came very quickly.

It was not unusual, for instance, for me to be typing away at a high rate of speed, sitting forward in the wrought iron chair outside at Starbucks, with a look of something like hunger on my face. Certain chapters, once finished, would leave me in this kind of delirium where I felt like I had just been through what the main character had been through and I’d look around with what must have seemed an incredibly self-satisfied look on my face and everyone would be staring at me.

In other words, I had become the typical douchey writer tapping away on his laptop at Starbucks.

I did most of this during the Summer and there was a combination of the beautiful Southern California sunsets and the lovely warm weather that continued well after dark which meant I could write for hours, and did. Typically starting around 6pm and finishing around 10pm.

While writing I would often lose my sense of time. Hours would fly by. My heart rate would also rise dramatically and  sometimes I’d finish a chapter in cold sweat with my hands shaking.

“Man I’m an awesome writer!” I thought. Look at the emotional reaction, I’m having! This is so intense, surely it is a result of the profound insight I have into the human experience and the plausibility and rich emotions I’ve brought to the christ I think I’m having a heart attack I wonder how much caffeine is in this Frappacino doesn’t seem to be anything listed on the cup letmelookitupontheinternet. 90milligramspersevering6servingsinaventi

!^&%#(!^@%

One Venti Mocha Frap has as much caffeine as nine cans of Coke!? Who is the target market for this!? What demo has Starbucks identified who’d love to see through time and get heart palpitations but can’t get any good peyote?

Turns out my passion for writing was really just being addicted to caffeine and the sharp spike in productivity meant I had to spend more time on the back end editing to put verbs back in. And spaces. And, you know…vowels.

Caffeine is, as you probably know, an appetite suppressant but you don’t need to suppress your appetite when your caffeine delivery device also has 600 calories and a great deal of them from cream which is to say, fat. So the book was created through a strange ritual whereby I injected a double cheeseburger’s worth of fat and a 12-pack of coke’s worth of caffeine into my body. If the book takes off and I get to write sequels, I may die.

Eventually I switched to the low-cal version which only has 300 calories and things mellowed out a bit. I got a little less Coffee Writing done, but I enjoyed the mise-en-scène a lot more. I noticed the beautiful weather and amazing sunset more. I could see the Disneyland Fireworks every night and they were awesome.

I also noticed an abundance of really very attractive ladies who typically sat around reading and sipping coffee, some of whom were roughly my age!

It’s hard to chat someone up at a place you’ve picked explicitly to concentrate on writing. I wore headphones, for instance, broadcasting “leave me alone” so loudly that any homeless people who wandered by would just ignore me when panhandling. Unfortunately it also broadcast the same thing to the members of the fairer sex.

Occasionally I would write without the headphones on and in these times it wasn’t unusual for a woman to ask “what are you working on?”

I would smile and say I was working on a book, and this would produce a few minutes’ conversation in which I tried to be charming without actually talking about what I was writing because A: who gives a shit about what I’m writing and B: I could never find a way to say “I’m writing a fantasy novel” in a manner that didn’t sound like “I’m writing a fantasy novel.” I fantasized about putting on my comedic Cockney accent and saying “It’s got Orcs innnit!” but I’m not that brave.

Eventually, no matter how well the Chatting Up was going, I’d chicken out and get back to work. Maybe if I go back and start working on the sequel I’ll be more brave. “IT’S GOT ORCSES INNIT! LET’S HAVE A SHAG!”

Each time I would leave the house to go write, the Dog would complain that I was leaving her at home alone with the cats and each time I felt a little more guilty until eventually I gave in and took her with me. Other people did this, and I loved seeing their dogs lying at their feet, heads on their paws. I would say “Dee Oh Gee!” and they’d do that dog thing where they’d only move their eyes and their eyebrows would arch and I would sigh and get back to work.

Cookie isn’t one of those dogs. I mean, she can be, if we go for a run around the block first and she gets tired, but getting in the car just gets her wound up and she doesn’t unwind until we get home.

As soon as we got in the car, I regretted it. She freaks out in the car, don’t know why, I think she’s just really anxious to stick her head out the window but I’ve never been 100% sure she’s not going to leap out the window and so I don’t let her do it which is a kind of torture and I feel bad just writing about it.

As soon as we got to the Starbucks I…did the opposite of regretting it. Whatever that is. I deregretted it. I reversed my previously held position. Because man the women there loved my dog. Cookie is a Yorkshire Terrier and is therefore the least threatening dog imaginable without being a Chihuahua. She looks like a little teddy bear and in fact when you look up Yorkie breeders, their ads often say “genuine teddy-bear face.” Not entirely sure the breeders grasp the meaning of “genuine” but I doubt people buy from them because of their grammar.

Cookie loved the attention and I was happy to talk to people who love my dog and everything was going great. I set up my Lappy and wrapped the leash around the chair so Cookie had a little maximum radius within which she was free to caper.

There’s no real way for me to describe the typical Starbucks woman without sounding sexist, but the reality is, they’re almost exclusively beautiful which probably has more to do with Orange County than anything else. Many of them are very young and to my eye scantily clad, but all this does is make me want to read them a story and make sure they get into a good college. The women my age are almost all tanned and fit and look like they just got back from or are about to go for a run. I suspect there’s something going on here that I do not wot of. Some kind of cultural thing. The sample seems to be skewed.

I started writing and things were going well. I didn’t have my headphones in because I wanted to hear if Cookie started misbehaving somehow. A woman fitting the above description with the addition of long black hair pulled back in a pony tail fed through the back of her baseball cap, noticed my dog, and me writing and smiled. She reached down to pet Cookie, but Cookie did something I couldn’t see and she reached back.

“Does your dog bite?” She asked.

I smiled and shrugged and said “Zat ees nowt mai dawg.”

“What?” she said, frowning.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were making an Inspector Clouseau reference.”

“A who?”

I shook my head dismissively as if to suggest it was in no way important. “Indie band,” I said.

This resolved she bent down and petted the Cookie-dog.

It’s hard to describe the process as petting because I think implicit in the concept is that the petter is active and the pettee is passive. Whereas through this entire conversation Cookie has been STRAINING at her leash, bouncing up and down, making little “Urf! Urffle!” noises, her little black nose pointed at the woman across from me. It was to this the woman reacted earlier. The sheer eagerness.

I don’t know what it is about this dog. She loves everyone. Any time she sees another human of any stripe, she is desperate to lick their faces. It’s normally adorable but sometimes I think maybe she’s just insecure and desperate for approval. I have no idea where she could get that attitude from hem hem.

So the woman bends down and Cookie immediately tries to sort of hump her body over the lady’s hand. The woman laughs because this is so weird. I think she thinks my dog is attempting carnal relations with her wrist and she smiles in a kind of embarrassed manner.

“She wants you to pick her up,” I say. That’s what Cookie is trying to do, she’s trying to climb on the woman’s arm so she’ll be lifted up when the woman straightens up.

“Oh!” She said. She takes from my statement that I’m ok with this, and unhooks Cookie from her leash, lifting her up. This was, in retrospect, the critical moment that caused me to be kicked out of the Barnes & Noble a few breathless minutes later.

She’s now holding my dog at arms length and Cookie is kinda trying to swim through the air toward the woman in discreet lunges. The woman looks at me, smiling at my dog’s strange behavior.

“She wants to lick your nose.” I am, at this point, perhaps less than enthusiastic about this whole thing because I realize I’ve been reduced to a kind of Dog Translator. I just explicate everything my stupid dog is doing. I’ve become the voice of my dog’s Internal Monologue.

Now, this is not the first time this has happened to me. It’s not the fiftieth time this has happened to me. So I know what’s coming. Probably I should have warned the lady. She seemed nice.

I don’t know what it is about dogs in general or Yorkshire Terriers in particular, but when I tell someone “She just wants to lick your nose,” they always let her. It doesn’t matter how otherwise sanitary or dog-averse the person is, once Cookie’s little teddy-bear face is staring them down, they invariably lean forward and let Cookie lick their nose. It always happens.

“Ooaaugh!” she yelled, shocked, and covered up her face with her hands. She didn’t exactly drop Cookie, just let her fall into her lap. The woman shook her head once, violently, and made a kind of “shnrdrappt” sound with her nose as she blinked furiously and her eyes began to water.

Cookie spun around in the woman’s lap with her tongue lolling out, this look on her face like “Success! Where’s the next victim!?”

I know what she did. She did what she always does. I feel a little guilty because I wasn’t more specific when I said “she wants to lick your nose.”

She stuck her tongue up the woman’s nose. I can’t be certain, but I’d wager it was all the way up her nose. She doesn’t just stick it up there either, she worms it up there, slithering it up the nasal cavity until it feels like she’s tickling your brain.

Before you ask, the answer is; I have no idea. She’s always done this. Probably she did it to me when she was a puppy and enjoyed my squealing reaction and learned a bad lesson. It’s like she’s planting a flag when she does it. She only does it once, and then she’s done with you and wants to do it to someone else. Ah, youth.

The woman is laughing/crying and says something to the women seated next to her, her friend, “I don’t believe what that dog just did!!”

As she turns around to describe what happened, Cookie jumps off her lap and was now free and off her leash on the patio outside Barnes & Noble.

Cooke has always seen the leash as a kind of game. The rules are, I win if I keep her on it. She wins if she gets off it.

In this instance, she had clearly won and the reward was getting me to chase after her as she rocketed away. It’s amazing how fast those little legs can go.

Laptop forgotten, I immediately went after her. I’m in pretty good shape, but she outnumbers me in the leg department to the tune of 2. After about a minute I give up because, sure I could have kept running, but to what end?

She runs around the building once, staying mostly on the sidewalk and for this I am grateful. Eventually I wrapped back around to where we started and I thought she’d be Nose Spelunking with the other people on the patio but I instantly realized this was not the case when I saw a number of people inside the Barnes & Noble in various states of alarm and amusement.

She’s inside the book store.

Ok, well the good news is, I have her cornered and it’s not likely she’ll get back out. A little out of breath and trying not to show it, I calmly enter.

If you have a dog you probably can imagine what she was doing. She didn’t attack anyone or anything like that, she immediately began sniffing the floor intently, her long brown-haired body moving fluidly close to the ground like a Hippie Roomba.

She was smelling for other dogs, presumably, and this involves about a dozen rapid-fire *snifs* and then, since at this point her lungs are full, a rapid exhelation. Like this.

*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*PFHEW

Then repeat. It gives the impression of a very snooty dog because that big exhalation at the end sounds like a “Well, I never!” A kind of doggie indignation.

Pan the camera over to me and you see a guy who owns a dog desperately trying to own his dog without seeming like he owns that dog.

“Cookie!” I whisper. No good. She knows I’m there, she knows I know what she’s doing. She disnae care.

“Cookie come here!”

“PFHEW,” which is Dog for “Shan’t!”

It seems clear to me, in retrospect, that other people have brought their dogs in here and the guy who eventually asked me to leave had let OTHER people bring THEIR dogs in because eventually Cookie found the scent of another dog, and did what dogs do when that happens.

“Oh god,” I said. Now, I am a good doggy-daddy and so came prepared with two folded paper towels and two ziplock bags for just this emergency. But for some reason the people at the Barnes & Noble did not appreciate my foresight or her Genuine Teddy-bear Face because they reacted in a very alarmed manner as though dog pee was some kind of liquid Manhattan Project.

At this point, everyone in the store is watching including the people upstairs bending over the railing. Cookie having done her thing, she walks over to me and sits down proudly and waits to be picked up, which I do and, scolding her, almost run into the dude standing behind me.

“Sir I’m going to have to ask you and your dog to leave.”

I was a little taken aback by this for a couple of reasons. First, I was leaving anyway. Second, I’ve never had anyone talk to me like that before, I thought people only said things like that in the movies.

I resisted the urge to say “What dog?” It was the perfect moment for it and I could have deadpanned the shit out of it and Cookie was licking my face which would have made it extra perfect, but my heart wasn’t in it. The pee was the last straw and took the fight out of me.

I exited Stage Right and was happy to see my laptop was still outside and the pretty victim of Nasal Assault was gone, saving me some embarrassment.

I don’t go to that Starbucks anymore, I go to the one across the street from that one. They have free Wi-Fi and pumpkin scones.

I don’t take Cookie either. I’ve considered just taking a picture of her with the caption “MY DOG” to see if it gets the same response. Or I could take her and put a sign up on the table next to the Lappy reading “BEWARE OF TONGUE.”

I think that might send the wrong message though.

Also, Geoff added social networking buttons! It’s great having two people working on a site, stuff just suddenly appears by magic.

When I tell people this, the reactions vary wildly. Absolutely I get “well it’s about time,” as well as “I want to read it!” But equally absolutely, I get “why would you want to do that?” And “Well that was stupid.”

In many ways this experience is very like telling people I listen to Rush. You get the same spectrum and quality of response. And, like listening to Rush, I don’t think I could really enjoy the process if I didn’t completely understand and sympathize with all the responses. I think you either accept it all, the good and the bad, and just smile and shrug and say “what can you do?” Or you give up. And I’m not giving up.

Todd Rundgren, the brilliant record producer, tells the story of making Meatloaf’s album Bat Out Of Hell a hit. “There’s a badly kept secret in the industry,” he said. “You can take pretty much any competently-made record and turn it into a hit if you just gig long enough. You go out on the road and you play any venue you can get, all across the country and eventually you’ll get radio airplay and you’re on your way.”

Getting published as an author has a similar process. There are communities of aspiring authors, workshops, people who help each other out. There are publishers looking to promote their authors, authors looking to promote themselves, connect with their fans, and they need volunteers to help them. If you bust your ass, and participate in communities and volunteer to help bookstores organize stuff, your name gets out there and your work gets out there and if you gig long enough eventually the right people will look at your stuff. Then you’ve done your job and it’s time for the work to speak for itself.

But that’s a pain in the ass. It’s almost a full-time job and I have career as a game designer, but I still want the book to get out there. I want to attract the attention of an agent or editor, and this site is part of my strategy. Actually, it’s my whole strategy. It may seem underwhelming at the moment, but it’s early days yet. Stay tuned.

This Site

The goal of this site is to attract an editor or agent who understands what I’m trying to do, believes in the book and the series as much as I do, and wants to challenge me to help the book achieve its full potential.

My strategy for achieving that goal is to release the book online, chapter by chapter, and hopefully build an audience. Demonstrate that the novel has appeal and that I and the book are a low-risk, a good investment for a publisher.

Part of that strategy is a policy of Transparency which this post is the first part of. The site is a completely generic Wordpress install at the moment and while I’m happy with the layout of my other site, Squaremans, I don’t really have a clear idea yet what this site should look like. My webmaster, Geoff Chandler, and I have some ideas about ways to improve the experience of reading the book online, but we’re also both busy with other projects, so in the meantime, I blog thusly.

Because this site is simultaneously a site promoting my book, and me as an author, I intend to use it as a personal blog. Readers like connecting with their favorite authors and blogs are a great way to do that. Hence, on Squaremans, no stories about my cats. Here, cats all over the fucking place.

Finding an Agent or Editor

Probably my favorite novel of all time is Dune by Frank Herbert. Dune was first serialized in Analog, under the titanic editorship of John W. Campbell. Campbell had a colossal effect on SF, as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, which later became Analog, he was responsible for identifying and cultivating some of the biggest names in the genre.

He had a rule, “no aliens,” that had a huge impact on written SF. It’s the reason there are no aliens, for instance, in Dune. He thought aliens were cheap and the SF should be about people first and foremost. It’s hard to argue with that given the results.

He also had a colossal effect on Dune. In The Road To Dune you can read the letters between him and Frank Herbert. Dune features a protagonist who can see the future. Campbell didn’t believe in this. He didn’t think you could have real tension in a story where there was a predestined future and the protagonist could see it. He didn’t buy it, and he didn’t think readers would buy it.

Herbert didn’t tell Campbell to go screw, nor did he immediately redraft to change what Campbell didn’t like. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think Campbell wanted him to do either of those things either. Instead, Herbert defended his idea and through that process, rigorously defending his premise through the relentless onslaught of Campbell’s keen insight, he made the book better. He refined the ideas over and over until eventually Campbell had to sit back and say “Ok. You’ve convinced me. There’s nothing I can do to make this book any better, let’s go to press.”

That’s a fucking editor, yo.

As I look over my novel, I see all sorts of problems. You might as well. And, as a writer and editor in video games, I could attack it and try to get it into better shape but a lot of problems have more than one solution, and I do not know which one is best. There’s a vast gulf of experience separating editing dialog in video games from editing fiction at a Publishing house. I’m afraid, in other words, I might edit it in the wrong direction. I believe I have made the right choices as a writer, I have no such confidence in my ability as an editor of fiction.

So, perhaps unwisely, I’m going to release the book chapter by chapter here, for all to read, unedited, warts and all. The crudeness of the technique may turn some people off, and that’s entirely fair and a chance I’m willing to take. If you read the work as an editor, I think it’ll drive you crazy. If you approach it as a reader, I think you may find it a more enjoyable experience. I have friends of mine who’ve been editors in the gaming biz, but they would make choices similar to the ones I would make, and that’s obviously not what I’m looking for.

I’m not putting the book online, in other words, because I want someone to edit it, I’m putting it online because I want people to read it and if enough people do so and enjoy it, I may attract the right kind of editor and/or agent.

What’s it About?

It’s about a man who lead the typical Fantasy Hero life for a long time, and the damage that life did to him. A man who, when we meet him, is incapable of living up to the standards he sets for himself. It’s about the awful choices life forces us to make, and how difficult life can be to bear because of that. It’s about how for some people, before things can get better, they must first get worse. There’s a lot of action, some of it epic, a large cast of characters, and hopefully some little humor.

It’s short, compared to most fantasy novels these days, more akin to the typical fantasy novel from the 1980s when books were about 350 pages. There’s a lot of dialog, and it’s my hope it reads fast.

It’s the first book of what I intend to be a series, and the series is about camaraderie. All my favorite movies are about camaraderie, and I felt there was no point writing anything personal, anything that spoke to me, if I didn’t build it on a foundation of camaraderie.

But this first book lacks that element. It’s not about a group, it’s about one man. I rewound the series back to before the heroes get together to show the reader that you can have the bad-ass Fantasy Hero, but there is a price. The things that happen in this book give the rest of the series a much-needed sense of gravitas.

Many of my Beta Readers, specifically and exclusively the ones who are familiar with Dungeons & Dragons gave early feedback about the first few chapters of the book qua Gaming Novel. Given the nature of the work, this is perfectly reasonable and I cannot fault anyone who, at the opening, thinks they’re reading about someone’s RPG character. So far, no one who’s made it to the end, indeed no one who’s made it to the halfway point, has felt that way. There is an obvious similarity, but there are also critical differences, I hope.

That similarity is deliberate. One of my goals, and the reason I hope to find an editor who believes in the idea, is to take the tropes of Heroic Fantasy stories, and make them universal. The template here is Heroes which takes all the tropes from comic books, but makes them universal so they appeal to an incredibly wide audience.

If you’re a fan of comics watching Heroes, you can not only detect the cliches from comics, you can detect specific plots and powers. If you’re not a fan of comics, the show still works. Is a lot of fun, and was a huge hit. Company Man is one of the best episodes of television I’ve seen in recent years, but it was only possible because of the work the writers and producers lay down in the episodes leading up to it.

The Beta Reader Program

About 30 people have already read the book, either in whole or in part. Many are still reading and still giving feedback. I called these people Beta Readers, a term I thought I invented but which I’ve since seen elsewhere.

Some few of these readers were what I called Alpha Readers. People I trust who could read the thing and give me feedback and make sure I hadn’t disappeared up my own ass and wasn’t about to embarrass myself terribly. The Alpha Reader feedback necessitated a substantial redraft, and then it went to the Beta Readers.

It’s my intent, where possible, to put all the Alpha and Beta Reader feedback online, including the chapters I cut from the book because of that feedback, so you can see how people reacted to early drafts, and how that feedback shaped the current draft.

Not all the Beta Readers liked the book, though the overwhelming majority did. Even the negative feedback, even the extremely negative feedback made the book better, as I hope you’ll see. Many of my friends in the Gaming Industry are or have been editors. Key to the Beta Reader experience is, I think, being able to shut down that part of your brain, and come to the book as a reader. I had dinner last night with one of these friends who said “At first I couldn’t get through it. I just wanted to red-line the whole thing. So I put it down and then came back to it later and was able to switch that part of my brain off. Then I couldn’t put it down.”

That may seem like a cop out, but the reality is; this is the book unedited. No matter how many drafts I do, it will remain unedited until it’s in the hands of an editor at a publisher. The whole point of the Beta Reader Program and this site is to get the book in shape so an editor will pick it up and help it reach its full potential.

No matter how you approach it, if you give someone an early draft of a book and say “read this and give the author your feedback,” you’re going to get a different response than if they’d  just picked it up off the shelves. That’s the pitfall of the Beta Reader program. People can sometimes give you their honest opinion, but they can never give their unbiased opinion. I went out of my way to get the book into the hands of people who didn’t know me, using other friends as proxies and intermediaries, and get the book into the hands of people who did know me but didn’t know I wrote it. I am tricksy! Unquestionably the most negative feedback came from the people who know me, and knew I wrote it. I’m not sure that signifies though, even 30 Beta Readers is a microscopic sample size.

Stay Tuned!

That’s the scoop! At this point, there’s not even a way to contact me via the website, so we’ve obviously got a ways to go. You may also have noticed the book is not yet up here. And we need a way to clearly separate Blog content from Book content. And we need a nice layout and some pictures. Stay tuned!

Some of the stuff we’d like to do is give the readers the chance to write their own Cover Blurbs, those endorsements from writers and critics you see, and then give everyone the opportunity to vote the blurbs (even the negative ones!) up so the top three, say, appear on the front page. Encourage artistic types to contribute art and give users the ability to vote the art up or down, so the pieces people like most become the pieces used to illustrate the characters on the front page and in their bio sections. I want to give the readers a lot of power and I intend to give them free reign over most of this stuff.

I also want to give readers the opportunity to see the behind-the-scenes of the writing process. If you buy a book in a bookstore, you want the experience of curling up with it and become engrossed. But this isn’t that experience. People on the web, myself among them, want to know how things work, see the process. So while your average reader might not want to see the little man behind the curtain, you are not your average reader.

Stay Tuned!

I say this because, as a guy, going to the doctorb is notable. There’s a difference between men and women. At least one difference. Possibly more, but for the purposes of this post let’s stick with this one difference: guys don’t see doctorbs. Not as a rule.

Women see doctorbs. That’s the difference. A friend of mine said “I don’t understand why none of you guys ever go to the doctor!” She said “doctor” because she does not know the extra “b” is for “bargain.” I esplained.

“Larra,” I said, for such was her name, “you have to imagine what it’s like being a guy and 18,” which is when most of us learn this.

“First, there’s nothing wrong with you at 18. You feel great. You can do pretty much anything, for pretty much as long as you want, and then eat whatever you want or, alternatively, nothing for days and you don’t notice either way. Why on Earth would you go to a doctor?

“Also,” I said, because I really talk like this in person, “you’re going to live forever. You’re basically invincible and essentially immortal and you look at your Dad and he looks, you know…he looks like he’s been rode hard and put away wet, but there doesn’t appear to be anything critically malfunctioning. You look and your Grandpa and he’s active and happy, and then he drops dead unexpectedly and you look at your Dad and you both shrug and say ‘Huh.’” That “Huh” means “that was weird. Probably a freak occurrence. Million-to-one odds.”

The point is that guys tend not to teach their sons good habits when it comes to this stuff. We put off dealing with mortality as long as possible until going to the doctor scares the shit out of you because holy shit it’s been 30 years and God knows what kind of stuff is wrong you never knew about. Dad’s not fine, by the way, there’s all sorts of stuff that hurts that didn’t used to but he keeps his mouth shut because usually whatever it is just goes away. Usually.

To give you an example: I burst a blood vessel in my eye about 2 years ago. Never happened before, and if it’s never happened to you, let me explain. It doesn’t hurt. You don’t notice it, you can’t feel it, you have no nerves on the surface of your eye. But holy shit does it freak the people out who look at you. Which is a great way to freak YOU out. “Hey Matt, what’s the timeline like on the OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR EYE?”

“OH MY GOD I DON’T KNOW BUT HOLY SHIT IT MUST BE BAD! SOMEONE GIVE ME A MIRROR!”

Everyone sends me IM’s and emails to links explaining that I’m ok and it’s no big deal. My best friend who sat on the other side of the cubical wall gophered up to intone, insightfully:

“Yeah, but it never did that before, did it? You gotta wonder what’s different now?” He’s not saying that to freak me out…or rather, he’s not only saying that to freak me out, he’s saying that because that’s exactly how he thinks. How we all think. Stuff’s kinda, you know, winding down. But by God we’re not going to see a doctor! A woman would see a doctor. Really, she doesn’t have to “see a doctor” about a burst blood vessel, she only has to make a note to talk to the doctor about it the next time she sees him. This is an alien experience for a lot of us on the spear side.

The first time I saw Dr. Brunner, it’d been 25 years since the last time I saw a doctor and it took 3 hours for me to infodump on him everything I could remember that, had I been a woman…that’s right, I just said that…he’d have been getting all along. This is something called your “medical history” apparently.

So what’s the difference? As you probably know, the difference is: guys don’t have plumbing. Girls have plumbing and apparently they need to get their pipes rotated once a year or something. I cherish my ignorance on the subject.

The point is starting around, say, 12 years old, give or take, Mom takes you (and here I’ve switched who “you” is, so if you’re a guy don’t freak out) to the special girl doctor who doesn’t call himself a girl doctor because that would be silly and instead calls himself a…a gyroscope or something. A gyrodoctor. I’m sure that’s it.

Moms teach their daughters good habits, Dads teach their sons how to shoot guns. That’s literally true in my case, it’s not just a stereotype.

So my last visit to the esteemed Dr. Brunner, we talked about my weight. Which is high. Too high, and always higher than anyone guesses.

I exercise a lot. Like…a lot. But I’m not losing weight as fast as I’d like. So I do what I think you would probably do in my place, and I ask him to prescribe amphetamines.

He indicated that he didn’t think that was a good idea, and I forwarded the idea that maybe I should see a psychologist. At first he said “why do you think you need to see a psychologist?”

I said, “well, you know how, like…you, for instance, can see some food and, like…decide not to eat it?”

“Yyyyyes,” he said, exactly like that.

“Yeah. Yeah, I can’t do that.”

He agreed that I should see a shrink. He said he thought I’d do really well with Cognitive Therapy and I recognize there’s a problem and that’s a big part of making progress. And I’ve never been uptight about stuff like this. I’m open about whatever’s wrong or going on and I think that’s mostly because no one ever told me to be ashamed of whatever’s going wrong.

I should let you know now, we’ve still got a little ways before we get to the popcorn.

In the meantime, money being somewhat tight at the moment, I’m just trying to learn good habits.

For instance, somewhere in the last 20 years I accidentally taught myself that “hungry” is the state of not being full. It got to the point where, if I ever noticed I wasn’t full, I’d go eat something.

Discovering this about myself was step one, and step two is something I can only describe as a kind of Hunger Detox where I slowly rediscover what hunger really is. It’s tricky. But over the last two weeks I’ve gotten used to being neither hungry nor full and as a result I can go for a long time without eating. Without eating or feeling hungry or anything. Just…being normal.

Tonight, for instance, I IM’ed Austin, the aforementioned best friend, and said “I think it’s been about 24 hours since I’ve eaten anything.”

“You should fucking eat something dude.” You see why he’s my best friend.

“Well, I’m not sure I’m hungry.” This is literally true. “I can’t tell if I’m hungry-hungry or bored-hungry or just habit-hungry.”

Realizing there was no insight to offer on that, he said “holy shit this is the best Dwarf Fortress ever!”

I reasoned that if I were hungry-hungry, I’d know it, and so I should maybe eat something snacky to compensate. I have discovered that not all hunger requires a meal. And this is what snacks are for. Snacks used to be, not joking, the things that kept me full between meals.

I decide to have some popcorn. Ah-hah!

I bought some popcorn a few weeks ago, microwave popcorn, I think we all take that for granted, and I pulled it out to read the calories.

Now, even if the calories were clearly spelled out, I probably would have put the popcorn back down. But I confess I actually put it down because the popcorn confused me.

First, the calories are measured both Popped and Unpopped. Does this make sense to anyone? Why on earth would you want to know the caloric content of unpopped popcorn? The only possible reason someone could want to know that is if they plan on eating unpopped popcorn and that challenges my worldview.

It also measures calories in Servings. Two different measurements here. Servings popped, servings unpopped.  I am old enough to remember when a 12oz can of Coke was 2 servings, but I’ve gotten used to a  kind of sanity where “1 serving” is “one package” for anything that comes individually wrapped. Like popcorn. So one serving should be one bag.

One serving is not one bag. One serving is 3 ounces. 3 ounces of unpopped popcorn. How many ounces are in a serving? It doesn’t tell you. You can find out! But first you must convert ounces unpopped into cups of popped popcorn goddamn. I shit you not, you have to BOTH convert between popped and unpopped and ounces and cups. It’s a god-damned two dimensional matrix!

I give up and throw the popcorn away. I’ve probably burned more calories just thinking about how many calories are in the fucking popcorn than the popcorn has, but fuck it.

I have actual popcorn kernels, and vegetable oil. I look at the calories of that, and determine it’s way way lower than microwave popcorn and disnae require any maths.

I have never popped popcorn the, ah, natural way. Even before microwaves, we used Jiffy Pop which unlike a microwave was actually fun. I believe I understand the fundamentals however. I get a pan, I pour in the vegetable oil. I measure out some popcorn kernels into the pan, I turn the heat on medium, and I go watch Mythbusters.

If you are paying close attention, you may have noticed a critical missing element. Don’t shout it out! I’m keen to build suspense.

About 3 minutes in, I begin to hear popcorn popping. Success! Mmm…popcorn. It won’t have any butter, but that’s ok. As it turns out I won’t be having any popcorn. Jiffy Pop and microwaves both work essentially the same. Wait until there’s about 3 seconds between popping sounds, and you’re done. So I wait.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Everything is OBVIOUSLY working according to plan, requiring NO oversight on my part. There are some few of you reading this who know that while I am in some ways modestly bright, this is exactly the manner in which I am really stupid.

At roughly the five minute mark, no audible sign of the popcorn slowing, I realize something is wrong. But not with the popcorn, with the cats.

The cats are freaking out. They’re running around like it’s the goddamned catpocalypse. This is not a typical side-effect of popping popcorn. It is unusual for the cats to go screaming around at all. Often even when there are perfectly legitimate things to run around screaming about. Also, the dog is barking, at first I think at the cats.

She’s barking at me.

“Barky! Barky-bark!”

I sense something is wrong. I sense she’s trying to tell me something. She really does this.

“Cookie?”

“Barky!” *spin in circle*

“Cookie is something wrong?”

“Barky-bark!” *spin in circle*

I stand up. This is the universal Dog Sign for “We’re off! WOOO!”

Cookie sees the sign and immediately runs into the kitchen, because now we’re like hunters and the quarry is in the kitchen.

In the kitchen with the popcorn. The problem is in the kitchen with the popcorn. I begin to realize that there’s something wrong with the popcorn.

Ok, so the first thing I noticed was not the bedding of popcorn about 3 inches deep covering the floor. I can’t see the floor from my vantage point looking through the large window-like hole that allows someone in the living room to see into the kitchen. All I can see is the RAIN of popcorn, the constant fucking SHOWER of popcorn in the kitchen which continues unabated.

I failed to put the lid on the pan. I have inadvertently created what is effectively a kind of automated high-volume popcorn catapult currently sieging the entire kitchen en mass.

This is why the cats are freaking out. Their food dishes are in the kitchen which means it’s currently impossible for them to eat without being constantly pelted by popcorn raining from the heavens. I should say right now, everything’s fine. Brain is fine. No one appears injured.

I bring this up because while all the cats are running around, Brain chose this moment to leap up onto the room divider between the kitchen and living room, through the window/hole thing, and into the living room at such high velocity I did not at first recognize which cat it was.

His tail is on fire.

I’m not making this up.

Looking back, I have no idea how his tail could possibly have GOT on fire. Brian is tearing around the house, his claws are scrabbling on the hardwood floor, he’s making the biggest possible circuit he can, ears flattened against his head, just running as fast as his little kitty paws will take him, because he thinks he can run away from his own tail.

They say that, in a disaster, the people who make it, the people who survive, are the people who don’t freeze up. Who keep moving. Who keep thinking and trying to work their way out of the situation. I like to think I’m that guy. Certainly when the disaster is an earthquake, if keeping moving is the survival criteria, I’m going to be the most survingest motherfucker in California.

But I’m paralyzed. My brain is flooded with a cascade of conficting data and reason.

“Brain’s tail is on fire.”

“That’s bad!”

“Yeah. But how do I…how do I put it out?”

“Go chase after him!”

“Ok. Ok, yeah we could do that. What do you think would happen if I suddenly started tearing after the Brain?”

“Ahh…hang on…hang on.”

“Keep in mind, his tail is on fire.”

“Oh my god he’d just freak out more!”

“Yeah, so I shouldn’t chase after him. That would be stupid.”

“Well what’s the alternative?”

“Stand still?”

“Ok, well, that’s what we’re doing now isn’t it?”

“Mission accomplished!”

*high five*

This being really quite frighteningly close to my actual train of thought, I go investigate what was happening in the kitchen. Which is to say, I left the cat’s tail on fire. I’m normally a good kitty-daddy, please believe me.

So, the answer to your next question is…I don’t know. I don’t know how Brain’s tail got put out. It’s not on fire now. It was on fire. It was like someone stuck the goddamn Olympic Torch in my cat’s ass. But somehow, between then and dealing with the popcorn, the fire went out. Nearest I can tell, the other animals put it out. So, whatever else you may think, obviously my plan worked.

Dealing with the popcorn wasn’t really difficult, it’s just wading into the ankle-deep popcorn and turning the heat off. It was made more difficult by the fact that previously the cats were “OMG it’s raining popcorn” freaked out. Which is about a 6 on the scale of Cat Freakouts where fireworks is like a 9.

What’s a 10? Turns out a 10 is “HOLY SHIT BRAIN’S TAIL IS ON FIRE!!”

I have, I can show you, I have these large red scratches up my back and on my right shoulder. They are from the Pinky-cat. Because as I was trying to get to the popcorn and shut off the heat, she clawed her way up my back. Then, perched on my shoulder and kind of militantly purred the way only really freaked out cats can purr, I pulled her off my shoulder which caused the big red scratches there.

I turned off the heat. Considering how much popcorn is on the floor, and the countertops and on top of the fridge, and in the sink and behind the blender and inside the toaster, there’s an awful lot of popcorn kernels still in the pan.

It turns out, I put about 400 servings of popcorn in the pan. I think I figured “hey, no butter! I’m free to eat more without feeling guilty.”

And as it turned out, I do not feel guilty!

Wooo! Popcorn diet!

He's a Blackie Cat!

Four cats isn’t really four cats. If you have cats, you know this.

I go to Petsmart and the nice people there seem to enjoy chatting people up about their aminals. I try to remain coolly taciturn, but it’s hard when everyone in the store has brought their dogbeast with them. No one seems to bring catbeasts.

If you’re a sixty year old grandmother at PetSmart and this tallish, suntanned younger guy with great hair squeals “DOGGUMS!” You tend to smile proudly that someone is admiring your dog, albiet in a manner usually associated with 9 year old girls.

If, however, you’re a smoking-hot 20-something at Petsmart and this creepy, older, doughy white guy with great hair says “OMG Dee Oh Gee!” I think the situation is somewhat more complex.

Because the smoking-hot 20 something expects the attention. I mean she obviously expects the attention and certainly I wouldn’t normally mind giving it to her. At length. Several times a day with perhaps a 10 minute break now and then.

But she doesn’t expect me to ignore her and squeal quietly over her dog. Without fail the diabolically hot girl looks around. I don’t know why this is, because I am clearly reacting to a dog and she must know she has a dog with her, but I think she’s so used to being the center of attention that when someone of the otherwise appropriate sex seems not only to be ignoring her gender but her species as well, it’s disorientating. Maybe she’s not actually looking around, but turning her head left and right because she’s momentarily lost her balance and thinks it’s an inner ear thing.

I buy Feline Pine for litter and even though they sell it at PetSmart, the nice young ladies who scans my items are always astonished by it. They’ve never seen it before. The boxes are so light compared to clay litter they ask if the boxes are empty. Probably they’re being facetious. I started on the Feline Pine when one of my cats, Brain, was irradiated and became The Nuclear Cat for 12 days. But that’s another story.

They ask, they always ask, how many cats I have.

“I have four cats,” I say.

“That’s a lot of cats!” I usually get.

“Nah,” I say. And then explain Cat Math.

One cat is obviously one cat.

But two cats is really only a cat and a half. Cats are clean and lazy and mostly entertain themselves. Except for Blackitty, but that’s another story.

Three cats is basically 2 cats, and 4 cats is about 3 cats. Maybe less.

Dogs are different. It’s not clear to me that One Dog is even One Dog, I think One Dog is a dog and a half.

Two dogs is really three dogs, and three dogs is maybe 5.

The thing with dogs though is that once you get to around 5 dogs you get a Pack. I mean, technically one dog is a pack because you are the rest of the pack, but you only see dogs settle down mathematically once you hit 4 – 5 dogs in which case you’ve turned the Difficulty Level up high enough that you start to see some really sophisticated behavior from the Dog AI.

So now you know Cat Math and if someone says they have 4 cats you’ll know that’s not like saying they have 4 dogs. I can show you on your calculator where the C/D conversion button is, if you’d like.

The subject: “evil masterminds whose plans don’t actually amount to much.”

Thinking purely of the original three Star Wars movies, do we see the Empire do anything other than oppress the Rebellion? They blow up a planet to scare people who might be helping the Alliance. They kill members of the Alliance, people who help them.

But imagine there was no Rebel Alliance. What is the Empire’s plan? What do they want? As far as we call tell, apart from disbanding the galactic senate (which happens before the first movie) while leaving the planetary governors in charge, do they declare war on anyone? Commit genocide? Oppress any minorities or religious groups? I guess it’s illegal to be a Jedi. But do we see them take any action against anyone that isn’t a reaction to or attack against the Rebellion? Do they even talk about doing anything to anyone else? Who would they go to war WITH?

If you’re a hoopoople peddler in Mandanar Square selling your wares to the Blue Haffaneese, do you notice any difference in your day to day life?

Or, to put it another way; we know the Empire was evil. We know they were ruthless and willing to kill anyone to acheive their ends. Apart from “take over, crush the rebellion” what were those ends?

More to the point; why hasn’t it ever seemed strange to me