It is finished. It is glorious.

masseffecttrilogy

Before Christmas, I knew three things about the Mass Effect series:

  1. It was science fiction.
  2. It starred Commander Shepard, who could be a dude or lady, depending on your preference.
  3. The Internet hated the end.

That was enough for me, though, so I let my daughter know I was interested and she passed that information on to the proper authorities. Lo and behold, Christmas morning, my very own copy of the Mass Effect Trilogy for PS3.

masseffect

Mass Effect is a sprawling science fiction epic. Games like this can be a little daunting for me. So many options! In fact, so many SECRET options. In the main menu, before you even start the game, is an innocuous little option called ENTER CUSTOM ID. This looked like a name change option to me, and I’m not really into renaming my characters. Shepard was cool with me. Skip it! Let’s go! Turns out that ENTER CUSTOM ID option is loaded with choices, from gender to character class to backstory. It’s fantastic stuff, but it was invisible, at least to me. So my Shepard was stock out the box – a male soldier born on Earth who was the sole survivor of some mission gone horribly awry. Mass Effect is an old game (time moves faster now, deal with it). The menus and controls felt clunky, and it didn’t autosave the way I expect a game to autosave. As a privileged and entitled gamer of the year 2013, I expect to die and pop right back up damn near where I fell. Mass Effect says nerts to all that and sends you back to a frustratingly distant point in the past. I learned to save often. The graphics were impressive enough for me, but I’m pretty much impressed with anything that looks better than my old Atari 2600.

Hell, you are no doubt thinking. What a crappy game. Why did you keep playing it? Well, I’ll tell you. While it might be a bit poor in controls and graphics and menu clarity, this game is rich as hell in story and character. In some games, the cutscenes are little payoffs or rewards for completing a level or defeating a boss. In Mass Effect, the cutscenes are the game. The choices you make in conversation, the relationships you develop with other characters, the characters who live and die as a result of those choices – that’s Mass Effect, and that’s what makes it incredibly immersive and affecting. I won’t remember what gun or armor I had equipped to Commander Shepard in any given firefight, but I will always remember having to choose to leave one of my soldiers behind to get the rest to safety. I will always remember choosing whether to let the last survivor of an ancient race live or die. I will always remember the life and death argument I had with Urdnot Wrex.

urdnotwrex

And I would get to continue remembering those things as I started Mass Effect 2, because each game in the series allows you to import saves from the previous one.

All the choices my Commander Shepard made – life or death, good or ill – followed me from Mass Effect into Mass Effect 2.

masseffect2

Mass Effect 2 felt much more like a modern game. The controls were different, but my frustration with the change was just that – I got used to the new button configuration in no time, and certainly preferred it. Mass Effect 2 autosaved the way my entitled and lazy soul expected, so there was no more “I have to go all the way back WHERE?! Done!” business. The structure felt both more open and more constrained. In Mass Effect, I could (and did) race through the main plot, leaving side missions to rot on the vine while I cruised from A to B. In Mass Effect 2, while that is still an option, everyone in the game makes it very clear that it is not a wise option. As my chore list grew longer and longer, I grew more and more frustrated with the grind of it all.

Guess what redeemed it.

That’s right – the characters. Every mission began with a groan and ended with a grin. Each apparently bland mission I’d be sent to complete would crackle with characterization. By the time I was ready for the terrifying final mission of Mass Effect 2, I knew each member of my crew in a way I knew only a couple in Mass Effect. I cared about them because I had worked alongside them to exorcise some demon from their past. As I made more life-or-death choices and sent them on suicide missions in the game’s Thrilling Conclusion(tm), I was genuinely worried for them. I wanted them all to come back safely.

They didn’t.

And I was heartbroken. Genuinely heartbroken.

Because I knew my choices would continue to haunt me in Mass Effect 3, and the characters I lost on that final mission would not play any role in that game. I would feel their loss. I just knew it. I didn’t know it would affect an entire race, though.

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 carried over most of the gameplay elements of Mass Effect 2, with a couple of tweaks here and there. At first the urgency of the impending threat to Earth didn’t gel well with the Galactic Errand Boy structure of the game, but once I accepted that the Thrilling Conclusion(tm) would wait until I got there, I settled down and got to work. There are chore lists long enough to choke a Reaper, but the little character moments carry them along once again. Differently, this time, though, because rather than getting to know my new crew, I was treated to moments with members of my old one.

That treat was noticeably absent on one very important mission, and before I realized it, I was making genocidal decisions because I missed a woman who died on my final Mass Effect 2 mission. Every argument the members of her race made to me, I rejected. “You’re not her. What do you know? In fact, your very presence here offends me, because I’m sure if I hadn’t let her die, she’d be here in your place.” I didn’t think it, but I felt it. And before I knew it, it was too late. I’d doomed them all.

talilegion

Mass Effect 3’s ending has driven the entire Internet insane, it seems. Coming to it a bit late, I experienced only the Extended Cut ending, which I hear fixes some of the problems gamers had with the original ending. I had no issue with the ending. It felt satisfying to me, and it gave me a sense of closure. If you didn’t like it, feel no obligation to convince me to hate it. All opinions are held. As for me and my Shepard, we learned to love an unlovable crew of misfits, we met a sketchy alien we wouldn’t trust with our laundry and learned to trust him with our lives, we prevented almost as many genocides as we caused and we went out like Big Damn Heroes. And we are probably going to do it all over again very soon.

The house I grew up in is gone.

My grandfather was born in a small farmhouse in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in 1913. Sixty-three years later, my parents brought me home from the hospital to the same house. My grandfather retired to Ft. Myers, Florida, but left a small camper that he and my grandmother stayed in when they visited. Grandpa was a small man, but he lit up a room with his smile. He didn’t hand out approval easily, but when he did it hit like a wave. He was wiry and weathered the way you imagine old New Englanders; Robert Frost and E. E. Cummings, rugged and righteous, wise and wise-ass. I looked forward to those visits every summer. When Grandpa was there, we never watched TV. We worked hard outside all day; he always looked the place up and down when he arrived, sighed with his whole body, then went into the garage and got his old tools and got to work. I followed him around, learning things about plants that my father either didn’t know or didn’t care to teach me. We stayed up late and drank lemonade and played dice and caught fireflies. My sister told me that while she was dating her husband, she pointed at my grandfather and said, “Watch that man. He’ll teach you everything you need to know.” I could have told him that.

stonewall

The house sat at the base of Mount Everett, and that mountain was my playground. My brothers were older and knew more of it than I did, but I spent my childhood climbing giant rocks and trees and swimming in a winding brook in my very own Terabithia. Years later, I proposed to my wife on that mountain. It wasn’t elaborate. It probably didn’t give her much of a story. But I couldn’t think of a better place to ask someone to spend the rest of her life with me than the magical kingdom where I’d faced and overcome so many dangers. I knocked myself unconscious one winter sledding head first down the narrow trail where the woods met the mountain. I remember seeing my friends running away before things went black; I assume they came back, possibly with an adult.

Sleepovers at my house meant sleeping bags in the barn, late-night games of flashlight tag in the corn field, and even later-night terrified sprints to the house to sleep on the dining room floor. One summer my friends and I found dirty magazines in the hay loft. It was very exciting and dramatic. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably a couple months of tantalizing guilt and pre-adolescent confusion, we nobly set them out in the rain. It’s easy to roll my eyes now, but in that moment we were purified.

We fed our wood stove all winter to heat the house, and that meant splitting firewood during the fall to stock the shed. We’d set the splitter up across the street and fill pickup truck after pickup truck in the crisp fall air, and while I’m sure I complained plenty, I never felt closer to my family. My brothers and sisters were teenagers and at least nine years older, but on those weekends we were together, doing honest work and banking our survival. Getting up first on a New England February morning and starting the fire with wood from the back of the shed – that was love.

saddleback

I left for college in 1994. I came back during breaks, and much as I wanted to play the “college guy” part, nothing felt better than curling up under my old blanket on my bed next to the chimney. I sat in my room during winter breaks and wrote terrible poetry and felt very Thomas Pynchon, but I had seen Paris (Ohio), so how were they gonna keep me down on the farm? I came home on breaks less and less as college went on, and finally I graduated and rented an apartment just outside Dayton. I was a Midwesterner.

My mother died in 2005, 10 years after my grandfather. My father sold the house while she was in the hospital. My father, the self-appointed minister, the arbiter of all things holy, the man who taught me that the road to God was narrow and ran right through his backyard, unmade my connection to family, to history, to beautiful dreams and knuckle-scraping reality. The house that passed from generation to generation didn’t make it to mine.

I haven’t spoken to him since.

I hear the house looks lovely these days. The barn fell down before my mother died, and the old garage and driveway are gone. I hear there’s a nice circular drive. I don’t know if the new owner tore it down and rebuilt or just remodeled the old house. I don’t know which I’d prefer. I’ve said for years that I don’t care who owns it as long as it’s loved. I’m such a liar.

I won’t belabor the metaphor. I have some things to set out in the rain.

The Rebirth of Slick

August 21, 2011 — Leave a comment

Damn. This place has collected dust.

An absence like this calls for an introduction. Because you’re not who you were last time we talked. And I’m not who I was last time I blinked.

My name is Dave. I’m a writer. I don’t write the stuff I want to write, but I write the stuff that helps pay the bills. And that’s been cool for a while.

I don’t think that’s cool anymore.

Allow me an aside. Or a flashback. Or a derail. Call it what you want. I think when I pull it back around, you’ll know me a little. And you’ll get where I’m planning to take this blog. And you’ll be safely on your way to the exits, if you like.

cardasimovbradburybible

I grew up in Berkshire County, the tree-covered edge of Massachusetts that borders New York. Suburbia was a rumor. Our trips to the grocery store were straight out of Oregon Trail. I spent grade school in a little two-room basement of a Baptist church, taught by my mother and a rotation of intrepid souls. You could call it a home school and I wouldn’t fault you. We didn’t, but what did we know? We were home schooled.

Some days, my mom would stay late at school to grade papers. I walked into town to wait for her at the public library. Yes, I was 10. Yes, the library was about two miles away. You didn’t believe me when I said I grew up in the sticks, huh? Believe it. That library – the Lee Library if you’re scoring at home (or even if you’re alone) – was where I met Ray BradburyIsaac Asimov, and Orson Scott Card. You would have picked classic literature when you were 10? Shut up. This ain’t your story.

Don’t think I just dropped that “Baptist” thing in there for nothing. I was raised so Baptist my parents wouldn’t admit they were Baptist. I come from the “We believe the Bible” school of Protestantism, the kind that thinks academics are snooty troublemakers and other denominations are probably Satanists. They’ve stared secular skepticism right in the eye and returned it tenfold. Rick Perry would have been very popular in the crowd I grew up in.

The_Stand_Cover_gve

So there I was. 10 years old. Nose buried in the Bible every Sunday and inEnder’s Game every afternoon. It wasn’t long before Ender’s Game turned into The Stand. I asked for a copy for Christmas when I was 12. My dad flew off the handle, and there I was, cognitive dissonance all over my face. I knew The Stand was just a story, but here were my parents treating it like it was much, much more. The way they treated the Bible.

That’s when it all unraveled.

I tried to hold it together. I spent my summers during high school as a counselor at a Protestant camp. I went to a Baptist college, where I studied English literature and tried not to get expelled for skipping chapel and listening to unwholesome music. I prayed and cried and begged, but I felt like I could see the wires. The illusion was shattered. I clung to the traditions I grew up in because they were my culture. They mattered to me because they mattered to the people I loved. But they were just stories. And the people I loved didn’t love my stories. And so I didn’t want to love theirs.

And we’re back.

I’m not 12 anymore. Hell, I’m not 30 anymore. And those stories that I shunned for being nothing but stories still tickle the back of my brain. As a child, my world was undone when I recognized that the stories my parents loved were just as untrue as the stories I loved. As an avid reader and storyteller, I couldn’t accept the illusion. But stories only truly exist in the space between the teller and the listener. If the listener is cynical, the teller can’t get a word in. If the listener is gullible, any story will do. But if the story is good and the listener is engaged, whether or not the story is true couldn’t be less relevant.

I’m wrestling with what story is. And what a storyteller is. And what kind of storyteller I can be. I can’t be an honest broker unless I take some stabs at the stories I was told in my formative years. What those stories mean to me, and what that means to me as a storyteller – well, stick around. I’ve got more stories to tell.

icon_star_fullicon_star_fullicon_star_fullicon_star_none

 

 

Get Will Smith’s agent on the phone. It’s only a matter of time before the hell-on-Earth creatures that populate Henders Island in Warren Fahy’s Fragment are staring at you from the side of your popcorn bucket.

fragmentFragment seems to beg you to compare it to Jurassic Park, and such a comparison is deserved as long as we’re talking about the movie rather than the novel. This time, instead of man’s scientific meddling, it’s his innate curiosity that starts all the trouble. The crew of the Trident are circling the globe looking for adventure as part of the reality show Sea Life (think MTV meets Discovery Channel) when they receive a distress call from the unexplored, mysterious Henders Island. When they arrive, they are swiftly all but wiped out by the island’s extremely predatory wildlife.

Henders, it turns out, is so remote and it broke off the pan-global land mass so early that its evolution took a left turn way before it got to Albuquerque. Every single living thing on the island, from the largest creature to the tiniest plant, is predatory from the second it leaves the womb. Everything eats everything, and everything from the island is superior to everything not from the island – in other words, if anything native to Henders Island gets off Henders Island, life as we know it would be obliterated. So it falls to a team of scientists, including Nell Duckworth, survivor of the original Sea Life expedition; Geoffrey Binswanger, charming, open-minded, out-of-the-box thinker; and Thatcher Redmond, moustache-twirling scientist with a theory to protect and a book to sell, to investigate the island’s ecosystem and see if anything can be safely preserved. That is, before the military decide to sterilize the island to prevent it from being used as a weapon.

Fragment is a great summer read, but it feels like it could have simply been a screenplay. The adventure plays out exactly as it might on the big screen, which is exciting, and the monsters that populate the island are terrifying and seem plausible, though unlikely – the best kind of alien. But Fahy rarely takes advantage of the space a novel provides for deep character moments. There are mostly oohs and aahs, followed by running and screaming. The twist that comes near the end of the novel, which I will not spoil here, is unexpected and shows that the author has thought through his fascinating setting, but by the time it arrives, the break-neck pace is being driven by other forces, and any new developments have to grab onto something and hold on tight.

(Originally published on Static Multimedia)

icon_star_fullicon_star_fullicon_star_fullicon_star_full

 

The Warded Man will make you afraid of the dark.

the-warded-man-coverPeter V. Brett’s low fantasy novel, which he wrote on his smart phone during his hour-long daily subway commute, rests on a simple premise: when it gets dark, demons come out, and whatever humans make during the day, they destroy. Legends tell that humans once knew how to fight the demons, but all that remains of whatever magic they used are the wards carved into the buildings to keep the demons away. Most people live in small towns, and any that are more than a day’s journey from the few remaining cities must fend for themselves. The men who brave the night to deliver supplies and messages to the hamlets are few and far between. When a Messenger named Ragen comes to tiny Tibbet’s Brook, the lure of the larger world that he represents is too powerful for a young man named Arlen to resist.

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces discusses the archetypal hero’s journey, showing that nearly every story has the same basic structure of departure, initiation, and return. The Warded Man reminds us that, in the right hands, this structure does not have to be a crutch. Where other fantasy heroes glide through Campbell’s hero journey, Arlen fights for every inch. No one wakes him in the middle of the night to tell him that, hey, you’re actually very special and if you don’t mind, we’d like to make you king of everything; oh, and here’s this magic sword. Arlen makes his way by risking his life fighting the wind, rock, fire, and sand demons through trial and error, and by paying his dues through devoted study and lengthy apprenticeships. By the time he returns from his journey, hooded and nameless, we believe his transformation because he fought for it piece by piece.

Brett weaves Arlen’s story together with those of his two other protagonists, the beautiful healer Leesha and the crippled bard Rojer, allowing each to grow and struggle through their own journeys. Parental issues abound. Arlen believes his father placed his own safety before his mother’s, which led him to risk the night and run away from home. Leesha suffers her mother’s scorn at every turn and suffers the rest of the town’s scorn because of her fiance’s bragging, but she finds peace learning from the old crone who gathers herbs at the edge of town. Rojer’s mother was killed by demons before his eyes, and every father figure he finds dies a horrible death, but his musical skills are second to none, soothing even the demons. Each protagonist must find ways to deal with both the external demons that stalk the night and the ones that ride with them during the day.

By the time the three come together, each has begun to realize the power of his or her class (and let’s face it, these are role-playing game classes – another case of Brett making powerful use of a standing convention), and they are ready to put them to use in battle against the demons. The Warded Man is the first novel in a planned trilogy (though Brett hints there could be more). As the borders of the protagonists’ world expand beyond the restrictions of daylight, the journey of these powerful but damaged characters promises to become even more exciting. There are hints of even more powerful demons awaiting them, but as anyone knows who’s ever gone dungeon crawling, either on paper or on a computer, a warrior, healer, and enchanter make excellent company.

(Originally published on Static Multimedia)

Five Years

August 30, 2010 — Leave a comment

I have Ruffles and Coke. With ice. Mom would get it.

The talking heads on the news keep telling me that this is the fifth anniversary of Katrina, but to me, they’re burying the lead. Katrina was background noise five years ago. The real story was in the bed in the hospital room where my mother lay dying.

My mother was a tiny woman with hidden strength. And I’m not talking about that wispy emotional strength everyone attributes to their mothers. She had that, too, but Mom was just plain tough. She had polio and spent years of her childhood at the roller rink, crying her way through lap after lap as she stretched her Achilles’ tendons. She had metal rods in her legs, but she never used a cane; hardly even limped.

erinandmom

Barely out of her teens, she lost all her teeth in a car accident when her mouth collided with the steering wheel. She chewed peanuts with her gums to toughen them up for the dentures she would wear the rest of her life. Five sons who towered over her not-quite-five-foot frame each foolishly tested her will at some point in our teens; I don’t think any of us did it twice.

So when I walked into her hospital room five years ago and saw her lying there connected to tubes and wires, I was shaken to see her looking so frail. The cancer we thought they had cut out of her uterus had made its way to her lungs, and then to her brain. She smiled weakly and mumbled something at me; everyone else in the room acted like she had jumped up and hugged me. Once I got over the initial shock, I settled in with my brother and sisters for the long wait. A table with a few chairs stood in the corner, and my sister had piled it high with snacks, including Mom’s cure for everything from the common cold to a broken heart, Ruffles and Coke. With ice. The only thing missing from Mom’s “Had a Bad Day, Kid?” sampler platter was a jigsaw puzzle, and I think we’d have set one up if there had been room.

The long night became a long day, which became another long night and longer day, and eventually somebody cracked and turned on the TV. Hurricane Katrina. It just didn’t sink in. We were busy watching every single ragged breath Mom took. Those breaths got more and more ragged, and one evening my sister, a nurse who knows a thing or three about this sort of thing, called us around Mom’s bed. We cried and prayed and sang and hugged her and did all the things you do when it’s time. We waited for her last breath to come. And waited. And waited.

She just kept taking them. Because Mom was just plain tough, her body didn’t get the hint that she was about to die. I think my sister felt a little foolish for telling us it was time, but I think she was right. Mom was different after that night. Her doctor told us that her body might take days or weeks to catch up to … he didn’t say soul. I filled that in myself. So I went back to Chicago. Early the next week, I got the call.

Mom died August 30, 2005. She was the strongest person I have ever known, and while I’ve come to recognize her failings more and more in the years since she died, I am proud to be her son. She never quit giving. She loved unconditionally. And she was damn near unsinkable. Sometimes I worry I don’t live up to the example she set. Well, ok, every minute of every day I am absolutely convinced that I don’t live up to the example she set. But I can try again today.

After Ruffles and a Coke. With ice. Mom, I hope one day I get it.

You Are What You Eat

January 2, 2010 — Leave a comment

My wife is there. She doesn’t eat meat. She’s not afraid to call herself a vegetarian. She’s probably going to be vegan before long. I’m not there, but it’s not out of any particular love of the taste of meat. Oh, sure, I love that I can swing through Wendy’s and eat something filling in like 10 seconds, but that’s not really about meat, that’s about the lure of convenience and deep-fat fryers. I was pretty consistent for two, nearly three months, but as the holidays approached, my resolve receded. Thanksgiving dinner. Christmas dinner. Turkey. Ham. These things are important. Not to me, of course, but to our hosts. Think how people will feel, I said to my patient wife, if we turn our noses up at their food. We’ll be awful, awful people.

Of course, we didn’t go to the usual family gathering for Thanksgiving, but I still insisted on making a turkey. We had Christmas dinner at home, and I made ham. My wife made a vegetarian lasagna for the big family gathering, and it disappeared before I could blink. No one would have noticed if I didn’t eat the ham. But I did.
You and meCareful readers who are smarter than I am already know what I just figured out. Food isn’t fuel. Food is folklore. Food is collective unconscious, tribal, bone deep. Food intertwines us. To withdraw from those traditions, to push away from the table, is to unhook myself from my background. And that terrifies me. It reeks of betrayal. Because these things are important. Not the food, but what the food represents.

Of course, there are plenty of cultures steeped in vegetarianism. Not mine, though. And that’s the disconnect I need to pull together. As an American descended mostly from western Europeans, my vegetarianism seems ruthlessly efficient, calculating, cold. It’s good for me, it’s good for the environment, it’s good for avoiding the disgusting, soulless, assembly-line meat plants, but it’s not guttural. It’s not primal. It’s got no barbaric yawp. Feeding my daughter this food is indoctrination, not initiation.

I’m on a quest now to find and experience traditional western vegetarian food. If you’ve got suggestions, send them my way. If I come up empty, I might have to start my own. At least I’ll know what came (or didn’t come, as it may be) before.

More to come. You have been warned.

In 1996, I couldn’t have written this.

Well, sure, I could have gone to the computer lab. But in my room? Nope. Not on a keyboard. I didn’t own a computer.

It sounds insane now. I’m not sure I believe it myself. But I just didn’t need one. Then my roommate took a year off to pay his student loans down (insanity, I was sure at the time – ah, hindsight), and when he returned, he was packing a high tech, state of the art, bad ass Pentium. Thing cost him three grand, easy, but it was worth it. I bet it had 12 MB of RAM. We were living off campus, far from the loving embrace of the computer lab, so I just had to get me one of what he had. So I dragged my girlfriend (now my ever patient wife) off to Best Buy and I got me a computerator.

It’s all been downhill from there.
Dangerous VisionsBacking up slightly. The summer before my roommate came back from his factory exile, I lived in a dump with a bunch of idiots I hated. I owned a guitar and a notebook and enough clothes to get me through a week. I spent my free time at a used bookstore I found about 20 minutes away with a killer musty basement full of old science fiction. I snagged copies of The Hugo WinnersDangerous VisionsAgain, Dangerous Visions – brain warping stuff, and all kinds of awesome. I read those books, I played my guitar, and I wrote stories in my notebook. That, as I understood it, was the good life.
mtgThe summer after college, I got a factory job unloading trucks for a furniture store. Naturally, when the local comic book store put a Help Wanted sign in the window, I jumped at it. It was there that I learned the unending joys of Magic: the Gathering, a brilliant little game that conspired with my employee discount to own my very soul. That summer, I wrote a lot less in my notebook, and I played a lot less guitar.

Around 2000, the group of fun-loving nerds I played Magic with discovered EverQuest. Since I owned a computer, I was in like Flynn. Though I did hold out for a while. I even got some free cards from my friend who was too busy playing EverQuest on the store computer to ring me up. His dismissive hand wave was my tournament sideboard. But eventually, I rolled up an Erudite Wizard and the rest, as someone probably said once, is history. I didn’t know where my notebook was, and I’m pretty sure my guitar had a couple broken strings.

everquest

In 2001, my daughter was born. I sold off my Magic collection to buy diapers and formula, but my EverQuest addiction lingered. After all, I needed that computer for theoretically useful things that I never actually used it for, and since it was there, who was I not to kite wyverns in Cobalt Scar? I didn’t give up EverQuest for another year, but I’ve been over all that.

Here’s my point. I swear.

October was National Get Rid of Useless Crap Month. I like doing that. I make scapegoats out of innocent clutter because it’s easier than dealing with the real issue. I find causes to champion that don’t get at the heart of what’s important to me. I fight other people’s battles. So, here’s hoping, I’m taking one last swing at the right target.

The Internet owns my ass.

I’m going back to my notebook. I’m going back to my guitar. Obviously, I’m not going to cut off my digital nose to spite my face. There are too many useful things online, and too many relationships I can’t maintain any other way. But this place is getting to me. I’m getting the Fear. And 99% of the Internet is waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in my eye.
FearAndLoathingNational Get Rid of Useless Crap Month wasn’t all desperate casting about for something to blame. I’m happy I cut out cable last month, since watching TV keeps me from my notebook. I’m happy I gave up meat for the past two months, since that taught me some valuable lessons and some delicious recipes. I’m not giving up meat for good, though. That’s not my fight.

My fight is with words. My fight is with Willa Cather’s words, and William Faulkner’s words, and Ernest Hemingway’s words, and E.E. Cummings’ words, and T.S. Eliot’s words, and, forgive my damnable arrogance, my words. In the long long ago – in the before time – my idea of a perfect day was a long walk in the snow followed by a double date with Michael Stipe and Sherwood Anderson. Cool? Hell no. Better than Facebook? For me.

I ate meat.

See, I put that right up front because if I didn’t, I’d feel like I was trying to hide it. Now, the backfill.
He's a hockey player. He's tough.About a month ago, I cracked a tooth. It was a back molar, and it was my own fault. Several (and I mean several) years ago, I had a root canal done on this tooth, but between sessions, I got a job offer out of state. I jumped at it and took my temporary cap halfway across the country. I’ve been to the dentist since. I have a wonderful, kind dentist who’s not into passing judgment. I could have had him take care of this tooth. I didn’t. So it broke, and I sheepishly called my wonderful, kind dentist for help. He was optimistic at first, but the more he looked at it (and drilled into it, the bast- wonderfully kind man), the more I could tell he thought the tooth was a lost cause. Still, he referred me to a periodontist for “crown lengthening,” which is Dentist for “paring back your gums so we can attach a crown to the nub of tooth that’s left.” The periodontist decided that was nuts, so he, as is the fashion with dentists, immediately started jabbing things into my mouth. An hour later, I was minus one back top molar.

For the last couple days, I’ve been a miserable cuss in every sense. I had to bite down to keep the gauze on the untooth, which wouldn’t freaking stop bleeding. I couldn’t chew anything hard, and I wasn’t allowed to have any hot liquids. This left me with roughly ice cream. If I were 10, I’d be in heaven. I’m not 10. Since dentists terrify me, I didn’t eat anything before my appointment, so my body was getting really pissed at me around 8pm last night. My wife was awesome and bought me a burrito, but my body was still in “Dude, you haven’t eaten jack in over two days. Protein! Now!” mode, so today at lunch, I hit Wendy’s for chicken nuggets. They were a’ight.
Holy shit, Dorothy!I don’t feel terrible about this. I don’t consider this THE END of my meatless experiment. Honestly, I totally figured I’d eat meat before now. I’d be more worried if I were “sneaking” meat, which I’ve had plenty of chances to do. I don’t want it like I thought I would. I figured after the initial rush of Life Changing Decision(tm), I’d be looking for chances to get the wife and kid out of the house so I could down aWindows 7 Whopper. That didn’t happen. I know, I’m as shocked as you are. If I eat cheap fast food chicken every time I go two days without eating, I guess I’m comfortable with that.  My goal was never to attain moral superiority. It was just to acknowledge the consequences of my decisions. Hence, my little confession. Meantime, I found an awesome recipe for vegetarian lasagna I want to try once I can chew a little better.

As for writing, NaNoWriMo kicked off this week, and I got off to a very respectable start. Through Tuesday, I had 4,320 words, which is just 680 words off pace. Of course, now it’s Friday and I still have 4,320 words, which is about 4,000 words off pace. Now that I’m back on my feet and nearly able to chew (and consume hot liquids – do dentists not understand that people need coffee?), I’m going to try to make a dent in that this weekend. 3,000 words a day would put me right back on target, so that’s what I’m shooting for, but there are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.

So, how’s NaNo going for you?

7th Son: Descent

October 24, 2009 — Leave a comment

You never should have gotten a chance to read 7th Son: Descent.
7SD_cover_RGBIt should be sitting at the bottom of a publisher’s slush pile, or in its author’s desk drawer, or in a recycling bin covered in children’s crayon drawings. J.C. Hutchins‘s sprawling epic of human cloning, international espionage, underage assassinations, and long dark twilights of the soul was simply too long to be published. It was rejected. Repeatedly. For me, for you, that would be it. Game over, man. Game over.

Lucky for you, this is a love story.

Podcasting was a fairly new idea in 2005. Podcasting a book was an even newer one. Serialized fiction, though, was a very old idea. Rather than let his story die, Hutchins decided to chop it into three “books,” record the first one, and release it in weekly episodes, hoping for enough positive feedback to justify recording the others. (History has a way of repeating itself – we’ll get to that later.)

The first episode of 7th Son: Descent dropped in February 2006. I wasn’t the only one who was floored. The story was compelling, the production was crisp, and the audience was geeked. By the time the trilogy wrapped in December 2007, we knew we were in on the ground floor of something special.

Don’t feel bad. There’s a new ground floor.

On October 27, 7th Son: Descent will be in a bookstore near you. St. Martin’s is taking a similar approach to the one Hutchins took back in 2005. The publication of books 2 and 3 depends on the reception Descent receives. Here’s where you come in.

Check out the promo. Take the story for a test drive. You can listen to the book (Hutchins is releasing the newly-published version as we speak, and there’s still a link to the old, not-quite-how-it-happened-anymore version) or you can read it (either as a pdf or in blog form at Boing Boing). You can listen to the prequel short stories that give you a taste of each protagonist’s life before the events of the novel. However you choose to sample it, I have a feeling you’ll be hooked. If you are, you’ll probably want to read the sequels.

Only one way to make that happen.

Edit: You can sample an even bigger chunk. Hutch has posted a pdf of the first 10 (count ‘em, 10!) chapters of the novel on his site.

Download: 7thSonDescent_Promo_01.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d01cd8e31d7c85af89b&c_id=1798659