Blather Options

G. Derek Adams6 Comments

I’ve been noodling over a couple of different blog topics, whilst digesting the mammoth pile of turkey and dressing that I’ve recently consumed. Which sounds the most interesting to you, oh wanderer of the Internet?

1. Why I kind of like that show Elementary, despite it being an empirically flawed premise for a show. [Sherlock Holmes in America?!? Blasphemery!]

2. I recently completed a re-read of the first book of the Wheel of Time series Eye of the World. This was a series I loved as a younger reader, but lost interest in as the years and volumes piled up. I’m re-reading the first book to help me decide whether it’s worth plowing back through now that the very last book is being released. There would be lots of navel-gazing, musing and a de facto review of the book. Who doesn’t love an article on story structure?

3. That show I’m directing at Town & Gown, Pippin.

4.  My nebulous new tabletop campaign, Ocean of Not [placeholder name.]

5. Lodestar.

6. Spell/Sword …you know, my book or whatever.

7. Potpourri. [You tell me what you’d like me to blather on about.]

Any of this sound remotely interesting or palatable?

Director’s Note

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[I know it’s been quiet here for the past few weeks. I’m hip-deep in a production of Pippin that I’m directing, plus holiday work volume, plus BLAH BLAH BLAH WRITE US A STORY ABOUT A GRYPHON. I should have some quiet time over Thanksgiving, I’ll try to be a better blog-content producer over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s my Director’s Note for the program of the show.]

The Players

This show is strange.

It’s one of my favorites, and every time I watch it I find another odd little quirk, or strange sequence of lines, or incongruous thematic element. This is the second time I’ve directed this show — and once again I’m left with a vague feeling of unease. Do I really know what this show is about? So many pieces that don’t fit, arcane and vivid.

I think this show is about magic.

The magic of youth. The magic of theatre.

The magic of choice. The magic of love.

And — bereft of descriptor — magic itself.

Who am I to parse the strange symbols and gestures of this incantation? Magic cannot be understood, that is its base element. A resistance to definition, to codification, and to the jaded understanding of maturity. Only the eyes of a child can glimpse the Leading Player’s riddle.

So, take your ease Ladies and Gentlemen. Become children with us tonight, and let us tell you a tale. The spell begins again.

G. Derek Adams
Director

Sora no Umi

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Before our world, there was Nothing.

seventypercentethanol:
dreams of the shore near another world (.)

And then Nothing thought.

It’s first sin.

It wanted to be more than it was. It wanted to know. It wanted to have.

Emptiness filled.

The water grew dark. Regret, fear, desire.  Seeds of our world.

All from Nothing. Thinking.

The Others were born, the Elder Gods. Then the Sun and Moon. Then their children, the brawling ones. Hantei and the rest. They shaped and formed our world, this Emerald Empire, this Rokugan.

The bones of our world, the secret in every drop of blood. The sin of Nothing. The filling of the empty, the darkening of the water.

Is this the secret to Shinsei’s path? To return to the serenity of the absolute, to be empty water once more?

Is it even possible? To live without regret. Or fear. Or desire?

A curious riddle.

This bears careful thought.

I hope my readers will forgive my small joke.

– Musings – Kitsune Miho

[With apologies to John Wick and Alderac Entertainment. I’m starting to do prep work for what could be my next long-running tabletop campaign. Returning to the hallowed system of yore, 1st Edition Legend of the Five Rings. I’m rereading a lot of the setting information for the first time in over a decade. Such a strange mashup of Eastern and Western mythology, neatly combining the Amaterasu myth with the Cronos/Zeus story.

And also forgive my crude use of Japanese. My only aide is Google Translate.]

A Sexy Open Letter to Sexy Adults Sending Sexy Emails

G. Derek Adams8 Comments

Seriously. Emails?

Fucking emails?

LITERALLY?

[And yes, I’m responding to the Petraeus Boondoggle.]

I want you to do me a favor. Stop writing your sexy email. Yes, I know you have it open in the next tab over — you’ve been marinating on it all day,  in between doing, you know actual work – grooming and squirming your mental eros into a nicely formatted 4000 word missive. Just stop, for like five seconds and do something for me.

I want you to look at the newspaper on your desk. Yes, I said the newspaper. I know you have a newspaper on your desk. You know how I know? It’ll become clear momentarily — for now just humor me. Okay, now look at the top of the newspaper. Do you see the date?

DOES IT SAY 1997?

What? It doesn’t? It says ‘2012’!?!

Well, heavens to Mergotroid! That’s a Flintstones reference, I’m trying to couch my humor in something you’ll understand, as clearly you have not been paying much attention to some major developments in technology, communication and internet horse-sense.

So before you press send on that Sexy Email — which you are probably sending while at work, on a computer owned and monitored by your soulless corporation of choice — I would like you to consider some Super Science Alternatives. [And one Classic.] All of these methods are much harder [if not impossible] to track, log and throw up on CNN for all of us to leer at.

SUPER SCIENCE ALTERNATIVE #1 : Google Chat

Or really any chat program ever existed. I mean, freaking Words With Friends has a chat feature — but I pick Google Chat because it has a handy ‘Go Off the Record’ option, that means the conversation will not be logged. Just think about it, you could have your sexy email time — like right away! All the time! It’s almost like there should be a word for this. Cyber-sexting? Inter-fucking? Come on, I’m trying to drag you people into the dial-up AOL era, get on board!

SUPER SCIENCE ALTERNATIVE #2 : Tumblr

Use this social network for what the kids use it for. Flirting and arranging hookups and fuck assignations. Here’s what you do — create an extra email account, then use that to create a tumblr profile. Have your paramour  do the same, and voila! Double bagged anonymity — with the added bonus of you can mark your blog as ‘Private’ and then send private messages to each other that are never published. If you start catching heat from the press — or you know, your wife or whatever — just delete the Tumblr profile and walk away.

JUST WALK AWAY.

And don’t be cute and make a tumblr name like penetraeus.tumblr.com — that’s just asking for trouble.

SUPER SCIENCE ALTERNATIVE #3:  Text Messages

I know you’re all thinking — but what about TIGER WOOOOODS?!?

Well, actually I congratulate you. Thank you for noticing something that happened in the world after the Olympics were in Atlanta.

Look, here’s the deal. As long as you have the good sense to delete the text messages saved in your phones regularly — most providers don’t log text communication more than 72 hours old. [If any nerds read this, check me  — this was with some very quick and dirty research into Text Message Subpeona laws. I wouldn’t want to lead these poor Sexy Emailers astray.]

And finally, the CLASSIC ALTERNATIVE: Write a letter.

Because, my reasonably sound suggestions aside, Sexy Emailers. Everything you write on the internet is there forever. If you type it on a computer, it is NEVER GONE.

NEVER. EVER. GONE.

I know you’re approaching your sex life with the same aplomb and discretion of a lemur discovering a pudding-dispensing Roomba — but please, as you slave over your Sexy Emails. Exercise a little common sense.

If you really want your written canoodling to go completely under the radar. Take a pen, write it on a sheet of physical paper and mail it to them.  They can destroy it after they read it, and your fierce passion can burn all the brighter in the flames of your words’ death.

So, short version:

STOP SENDING SEXY EMAILS. STOP IT RIGHT NOW.

 

 

Judge the Book by its Cover

G. Derek Adams3 Comments

I am beyond excited….and more than a little terrified. I actually have an artist working  on the cover art for Spell/Sword.

Cyberman – Mike Groves [poopbird]

I insist that you click on this super-rad Cyberman art and check out some other examples of his work. He’s got a lot of style-flexibility, but everything he does is interesting, distinctive and [as mentioned] on the north side of Rad. We had a great brainstorming session last week, and I should start seeing sketches in the next couple of weeks. I almost wrote ‘barnstorming’. I really want to have a barnstorming session in the immediate future.

Mike Groves – aka Poopbird – is a phenomenal artist, living in my hometown of Athens, GA. You should follow all of the links below and rub your grimy internet-hands all over his virtua-product. He is also an amazing tattoo artist, so if you need some ink (especially nerd-ink) he’s the man to call.

Poopbird.com

Tumblr.

Deviantart.

I can’t wait to see what he comes up with — even though the anxiety-engine in my head is already revving up.  Cover art means we’re getting closer and closer to the book being real, and launched into the world where everyone will hate it.

But at least the cover is going to be boss.

The Pitch

G. Derek Adams5 Comments

An act of salesmanship is never an act of truth.

That’s not to say that it is a falsehood, or a pure fabrication. Certainly there are many who call themselves salesmen that deal in outright deceit, but they’re just liars. Plain ordinary liars.

No, salesmanship is all about awareness. Complete knowledge of the product: it’s particulars, benefits, problems, logistics and idiosyncrasies  and your most reliable perception of the character of your customer. Everything you say, everything you withhold is an attempt to calmly weave the product into the customer’s needs and desires. You concentrate on what you know about the product, and carefully present only the parts that you intuit will be attractive to your mark. You are creating a narrative, a workaday tale — a story with purpose. To make the sale. To win.

This is antithetical to the creation of art. An act of art should always be an act of truth. Individual truth — the opening of the inner eye and allowing the energy of your private whirlwind to express into your medium:something. Anything. As long as it’s true. Or real. Or important.

I’m still a ways from publishing Spell/Sword — but I’m already thinking about how I am going to sell it. The plan remains to self-publish, then grassroots my ass up the zeitgeist to something more than a blip. Financially and culturally. So I need to be able to sell the book. To other artists, to family, to friends, to total strangers, to people who love fantasy, to people who hate it, to people who never read. But every time I approach the problem in my head, I feel this enormous lassitude. It feels wrong.

In my day job, I am a salesman. I’m extremely good at it. But the key seems to be my total lack of concern. Apathy towards the product, and disinterest in actually making the sale. It allows you to be dispassionate and objective — truly focused on reading the situation and the customer. But with the book, where I’m hopelessly invested in the product and emotionally overwraught in the sale – it’s much more difficult.

It doesn’t help that I’m specifically trying to find my own little niche in the genre. It feels cheap to say “Oh, it’s just like ‘X’ and nothing like ‘Y’, and if you like ‘Z’ then buy, buy, buy!” But when I try to pitch it on its own terms, it just sounds hollow and uninteresting.

There’s a guy, and he has a sword. And there’s a girl and she’s got magic. They don’t like each other, then some shit happens and then they do. Also: hi-jinks.

I could do a laundry list of the random things in the book.

Electric-Eel Powered Jukebox. Prescience. Dwarven ghosts. Lesbian bards. Sweaty wyverns. Hangovers. Friendship. Mailboxes. A devil-spawned assassin. Fairy tales. Horse euthanasia. Wizard duels. Mysterious backstories. Prophetic dreams. Cheese. Plot-holes. Garden plots. Sorcerer bondage. Magic swords. An ogre with red boots. A blue fish. A white bridge. A first kiss. A last breath. Hyper-intelligent frogs with steam-powered roller skates. Banter.

Okay, I wound up kind of liking that one.  But still, the problem remains. All that sounds fun, but I don’t know how convincing it is. Part of me wants to sell the book the same way that I wrote it. Honestly, with great love and with no artifice. Well, maybe a teensy bit of artifice.

This is important. This is true. This book is real. It matters. Or at the very least, I need it to matter.

So, yeah. Buy it or whatever.

Oh, my. This question is in bold. On WordPress, that’s like a Tumblr post dissing Doctor Who — it demands a response. What do you look for on the back of the book, or in a sales pitch for a book, when you’re considering reading something from an unknown author?

Space Invaders

G. Derek Adams5 Comments

Where do ideas come from?

Certainly they can be built inside the human mind, but at least in my experience, they often come from elsewhere. The ether, if you will. Often when thinking of a character name, or a detail I just make a space in my head and let the idea pop in. I have total faith in these moments, even though I couldn’t explain the rationale if I had a gun to my head.

Admittedly, this may just be a justification for an unwillingness to slog. An idea presents itself, complete and shiny — why go through all the work of outlines and planning and research, just tune in the radio station and let it blare.

But, I am intrigued with the physical precense of ideas — that they could have an origin…and a purpose. With the past few stories I’ve been working on, I’m rolling around the concept of an Evil Idea. A malevolent entity that travels in the heads of mortals, infecting them like a virus. As weird as that piece was, I guess ‘The Option’ is a good enough name for my Big Bad as any.

This is a bit of a re-tread of Inception’s philosophical themes, the power of an idea — the immortality of an idea.  Same goes for the V for Vendetta memes flooding the internet yesterday, you can’t kill an idea. People live and die for ideas, the course of entire civilizations turn on one or two great ideas.

That sounds like a great villain to me.

Is this too esoteric to support some fiction? Just too weird? Thoughts? Can’t you see that this question is in bold?!?!?

The Glory Road

G. Derek Adams2 Comments

“What did I want?
I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword,. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a like wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prestor John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Thoros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be–instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

Another master says it better than I ever could.