This week’s notes from my imaginary editor

Filed under Imaginary Editor

This may confuse you. It confused me. In your case, though, I may be able to clear things up by directing you here and here, where you’ll find that in my real world editor’s absence I’ve been taking feedback from my imaginary editor, instead.

This may not be less confusing. I can’t help you there.

I’ve got two big objections to my imaginary editor this week. Since it’s just you and me here, I’m going to share them.

First off, this week’s feedback isn’t constructive. In fact it crashes through the walls of constructive criticism and roars down the road through a cascade of nuns and orphans, only to plow into a ditch filled with kittens; then it explodes into a roiling, toxic cloud of what we have to call destructive criticism.

This may sound harsh.

Honestly, though, how am I supposed to improve my manuscript based on this kind of feedback? I’d have to travel back in time and make sure that human language was at the top of my to-do list before I even got out of the crib. And, you know, that’s pretty much how I think things went. I mean, my ‘first word’ was actually a complete sentence, which was “Get this stuff off of me!”.

So the utter brutality of this message is my first objection.

My second objection to this is that I have it on pretty good authority that it’s not even original. The story is that Harlan Ellison, at a writers’ workshop, once delivered this same bombshell to a writer who I’m pretty sure was not having the best day of his or her life just then.

So my imaginary editor cheats. Of course if you’re going to steal it’s good practice to steal from the best, and that would have to be Ellison. But it’s still stealing.

So I’m wondering whether I can leverage this plagiarism in some way. Risky, I know. But I’m starting to suspect that the history of publishing may be filled with these little stories of extortion, blackmail, and mayhem. There’s Christopher Marlowe, for example. There’s François Villon. And there’s my imaginary editor.

Times like these, I really wish I could have my real editor back. He seems like such a nice guy, especially now that I’ve seen the alternative.

Publishing? Not for the squeamish. Not for the weak. And apparently not for robots, either.

Ladies of Retropolis scramble for their rockets

Filed under Works in Progress

I’m probably winding down on my new Retropolitan character models, but these ladies just wouldn’t be put off. Wherever they’re headed they seem to be pleased that they’re on their way; my guess is, they’re scrambling for their rockets. You can tell by their aviator’s headgear.

Goggled female pilots were in a sad minority among my character models. There’s a pretty simple way in which I actually grow a cowl out of the male heads – but that same method doesn’t really work with my female heads. I could fix that, but it would be a long, painful process. So I fell back on a workaround that I’ve used just once before.

I was happy to do it: now I know these ladies will be fully equipped for their travels over the city. It’s a weight off my mind.

But like I said, I’m probably winding down now. There are a couple of other things that I really should be working on. But once I got on a roll with my characters I just couldn’t stop… until now. I think.

I guess we’ll just have to see.

More notes from my imaginary editor: There is a thing we call exposition

Filed under Imaginary Editor

So, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that I’ve been getting editor’s notes from the Bizzarro World, Mirror Universe evil twin of my actual editor. He’s tough, but he’s fair.

Or so I thought until this morning. We’re a little early in the week here because my imaginary editor is off to his own Bizzarro World version of Worldcon (which, this year, is really saying something). And I have to admit to a bit of surprise.

This is a terrible accusation to make against Chapter Three, a chapter I’ve known for quite a while now and which I feel privileged to call my friend. Chapter Three has never had a mean thing to say about anybody. And although it features a description of an inertrium warehouse, and has some things to say about architecture and the usefulness of decorative statues, I’m frankly puzzled as to why this Mirror Universe editor thinks it’s a non-stop festival of exposition*.

I’m starting to think he’s just got it in for me. But that sounds kind of paranoid, now that I’ve typed it, so maybe I’ll just go back and read that chapter again.

* Please don’t confuse this with the yearly Altoona Festival of Exposition, with which I am not affiliated and which, in any case, can’t be called non-stop because they take a break on Thursday night for the parade.

A Uchrony of Retropolitans; also, stupid morpher tricks

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

Okay, after my post the other day you may think that I’m spending all my time considering feedback from the Bizarro World version of my editor. Not true!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending much more of my time on the sort of thing we see here. I’ve been adding to my collection of persons from Retropolis by modeling new characters; I’ve also worked out some tricks that extend the use of older characters. And I’ve done a bunch of them! I left out the imaginary editor you saw in my earlier post because you’ve seen him already, and all that exposure tends to make him more demanding; while another character that I like very, very much doesn’t appear here because he constitutes a spoiler, sort of, and as a result I’m keeping him under wraps.

The tricks I mentioned each have to do with the use of morph targets. I use those already for facial expressions, and for parts of expressions, but the first new thing I thought of was to use morphs to combine two existing character heads into a new character. I’ve mixed, say, 40% of Character A with 60% of Character B to get a new head that looks different from either of its parents.

This is possible because all of my recent male heads share the same topology, while all of my recent female heads also share a common topology. (No… sadly, it’s not the same topology as the male heads.)

So I mix the same amounts of two characters, the same way, in every one of their facial variations, and hey presto, new character. I should have thought of this years ago. I’m sure other people have.

This worked really well, sometimes… though not always. Some of these characters have so much personality that they just keep looking like themselves. Still: very neat!

The second trick is even more useful. I do a lot of work on UV mapping on these heads, and although it’s always very similar it’s a thing that’s frustratingly incompatible between models. In addition I calculate vertex colors to accent the creases and hollows in the faces, and that takes about two hours every time I do it.

But I don’t have to! I mean, this was the really clever idea that I ought to have thought of a long, long time back: because I can also morph an old head completely into a new head. My UV mapping and vertex colors remain the same as they were in the earlier character.

I can’t even imagine how much time I’ve wasted by doing those steps manually for every head. It’s a lot of time.

I decided many years ago that a truly lazy person should be willing to work very hard, one time, in order to prevent hard work that has to be done over and over again. I have aspired to be that person. But I see I’m not quite there yet.

Truly, the Way of Laziness is a long and difficult path to master.

That’s a nice little simile you got there…

Filed under Imaginary Editor

Back when my agent was negotiating the contract for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, I was aware that my editor had a lot of projects on his plate; heck, even he was aware. It was him who told me.

Which is great, of course: you like to see good people working, after all. But it concerned me a little.

So I proposed a new clause for the contract: the Pierrot Clause. Any time I had to wait for feedback from my editor, he would be required to wear a Pierrot costume. All day. Every day.

Me, I thought this was genius. Who wouldn’t want to see people contractually compelled to wear costumes out of Commedia dell’arte? I mean, it’s literate and it’s ridiculous. Everybody wins!

Maybe Steven King could get the Pierrot Clause into his contracts. Sadly, I just don’t have the clout; I had to give it up. This is perhaps the biggest reason why I’d like to be a bestselling author. I’m convinced that the Pierrot Clause is a thing that’s meant to be.

So, maybe next time. In the meantime, though, and in the most polite way possible, I am waiting for feedback from my very busy editor, and I’ve decided that what we have right here is the next best thing. I will imagine him giving me feedback. In full color. As often as necessary. With ray guns.

I can’t wait to see what he has to tell me about exposition and passive constructions. Maybe next week!

Win a paperback copy of Matthew Hughes’ Devil or Angel & Other Stories

Filed under Found on the Web

Hey! From now through August 16th, you have a chance to win a paperback copy of Matthew Hughes’ collection Devil or Angel & Other Stories, which I mentioned just the other day. You know, the one with with a cover by me.

The promotion will run until August 16. To enter, click on the widget:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Devil or Angel and Other Stories

by Matthew Hughes

Giveaway ends August 16, 2015. See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Get Matthew Hughes’ Devil or Angel & Other Stories… with a cover by me

Filed under Works in Progress

I’m more pleased than a bucket full of grinnets to show you my cover for Matthew Hughes’ new collection Devil or Angel & Other Stories – which is now available in eBook and printed form at Amazon, at Hughes’ own Archonate Bookstore, and elsewhere.

You can get the book in epub or mobi format from The Archonate Bookstore, as well as the printed version. The mobi file is up at Amazon but the paperback version isn’t quite there yet.

I’ve been formatting Hughes’ self-published books for a couple of years now, but this is the first time I’ve also done the cover illustration for one.

This was a great one to do, too. Hughes’ work is often – though not always – humorous, as you may judge by the cover. Many of the stories in here remind me of those short, hilarious science fiction stories that Fredric Brown used to write; and since Hughes subtitles the anthology “Old Style Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales” I took that as permission to treat the cover a lot like some of the funnier covers for some of the funnier books that I used to harvest, on bicycle, from the used bookstores all over town during my peculiar childhood.

Now, you may know Hughes best for his Archonate novels (like Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and others) but only one of these selections has ties to the Archonate. The rest are stand-alone tales, many from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction or Asimov’s, and a few that were commissioned for anthologies like Old Mars or Songs of the Dying Earth.

And since you may think I’m prejudiced in favor of the book, don’t listen to me. Listen to Gardner Dozois:

If you like vivid adventure science fiction and fantasy, of the sort written by Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, and Roger Zelazny, you’ll like Matthew Hughes too.

… and John Joseph Adams:

Matthew Hughes writes contemporary science fiction and fantasy with a classic sensibility–driven by adventure and thrills, and chock full of sense of wonder.

But, seriously, listen to me anyway. It’s great stuff. Would I steer you wrong?

A flying scooter for the Retropolis Courier Service

Filed under Works in Progress

As always when my blog goes quiet, I’m doing stuff; stuff that I either can’t tell you about, or which I’m doing too much of to get around to telling you about it.

This is probably an example of that second case.

I mean, if it was the other one I couldn’t tell you, right?

Before I start wondering about that myself, then, here’s Grace Keaton on her aged but serviceable Aeroflite flying scooter; it’s a work vehicle, standard issue for couriers in the Retropolis Courier Service. Grace makes her deliveries on the notoriously dangerous Route X and she’s the longest-lasting (in fact, the only surviving) courier on that route.

Route X couriers make four times the wages of normal couriers and Grace works half days. That’s a comfortable living for a graduate student. Unless you weaken.

But somebody has to deliver along Route X. How else would the denizens of Retropolis’ Experimental Research District get their ‘mildly’ toxic chemicals, their suspiciously glowing minerals, or their generally illegal biological specimens?

I’ve meant for years to model a flying motorcycle. It’s just recently that I understood that a motorcycle isn’t really what you’d want: you need something much more like a Vespa. So this one’s about done (though it still needs a little trailer for those more cumbersome packages).

This week’s reading: “The Fold” & “The Library at Mount Char”

Filed under Reading / Watching / Consuming

The Fold
by Peter Clines

A few months ago I started to keep a running tally in my blog’s right sidebar. It lists the books I’ve just read. I don’t think I’ve ever commented on that in any of my posts, and I can only recall one time that I’ve written about one of those books since I started to list them.

But this week has been exceptional so far, starting with Peter Clines’ The Fold and continuing with Scott Hawkins’ debut novel The Library at Mount Char.

In The Fold, we follow an independent contractor who’s hired to analyze a secretive scientific project that’s built what its creators call “The Albuquerque Door”. The Door is the end result of their experiments in teleportation. Those experiments ground to a gruesome halt when an animal experiment went wrong; but the team recovered, changed the direction of their research, and now have what seems to be a completely functional and safe teleportation system. They just won’t tell anybody how it works.

Hence the independent audit of their program. Now, the first twist is going to be a pretty obvious one. You’ll have figured it out after the first chapter. The characters (who don’t have the advantage of knowing that they’re in a book) will take quite a bit longer to get there. Is that tedious? No, not at all, especially when it turns out that that twist isn’t what you thought it was, exactly, and – oh, look! – things just keep getting stranger until you (and those characters) find yourself someplace you never thought might exist. Once you’ve found it, you’ll want to get the heck out of there as quickly as you can. If you can. Because of what’s been waiting there.

The Library at Mount Char
by Scott Hawkins

Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char is a very different kind of book.

Twelve children were adopted, years ago, by someone they know only as Father. Father is a kind of head librarian in a library that has twelve catalogs, or fields of study. Each child is assigned to learn one of them. Father, as you might expect, has mastered them all.

The children are raised to adulthood and the mastery of their own catalogs before the story really begins: that is, when Father disappears.

If the library’s catalogs are out of the ordinary, they’re nothing compared to Father’s child-rearing technique. Discipline is harsh. Because one of his many talents is the ability to raise the dead, Father’s discipline can be fatal without being final: and so it is, very often, and in completely horrific ways.

As a result, most of the adults who were the children are not people you’d really like to know.

This book (which I think is remarkable) won’t be for everyone. There are really, really awful things in here, and quite a few of those things happen to the children.

But not only to the children. When Father vanishes we start to see that he had powerful enemies who aren’t any more human than he was, and at least one enemy who is much more human than he was. The entire world enters into a period of chaos and disaster as the survivors struggle to find Father or take his place. And that’s a challenge: one reason why it’s so hard to fill Father’s shoes is that he’s been wearing them for more than sixty thousand years.

While the central mystery may seem at first to be “Who and what is Father?” that’s not really what the book is about. It’s much more about revenge, and the cost of revenge to the avenger, and whether that cost is irreparable. Add a dash of “What does it mean to be (nearly) human?” and simmer gently over sacrifice, bravery, a surfeit of power, and all of the damage done. Enjoy till the finish. You’ll never think about the Sun in the same way again.

Also: lions. Just the most amazing lions.

Save 15% on T-Shirts from Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works, through June 21st

Filed under Works in Progress

Yep, it must be t-shirt season again, because through June 21st you can save 15 big old percentage points off the price of the t-shirts at Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works. That’s five more percentage points than ten!

So whether your taste runs to giant robots or to knotwork Cthulhu, I’ve got something, somewhere, to get you covered. And, yes: please do that. Think of the children!