Tag: writing

An Empty Internet Gesture

G. Derek Adams5 Comments
Artist - Senor Salme
Artist – Senor Salme

Hello.

We haven’t spoken for years, probably not since college. Easily a decade. We were not particularly close, just in each others social circle. And now, of course,  we are friends on Facebook.

I’m sure that, at most, I am a minor figure within your mental life. A blip on Facebook, just as you are to me. I’m sure you’ve seen my various status updates, the occasional rant or blog post. Or maybe not, you may have a lot more friends than I, so my thoughts are rarely noticed by you as you peruse the Internet Agora.

But I’ve been noticing your posts. More and more. They unsettle and confuse me. They make me realize how little I knew you in the past, and how little understanding I have of the person you are in the present. I am left with small crumbs of data – trying to extrapolate the person that writes the things that you do.

The person that I knew did not speak with such surety, such bone-certainty, such pure and righteous fervor. Did you believe these things when I first knew you? Are they beliefs that you have discovered as you have aged?

I have a belief of my own. A credo of sorts.

Do not argue with people, unless you have something to gain from it.

People with passionate beliefs are not going to abandon them due to a well-turned phrase or a cunning allusion. I can bring every drop of eloquence, and emotion, and craft that I possess; and at the end of the argument nothing has changed. I believe as I do, and you believe as you do. Most arguments – online most prominently – are simply exercises in each party shouting their beliefs louder and louder until everyone walks away in disgust. Points are tallied, victories are claimed, and nothing has changed. I believe as I do, and you believe as you do.

Since there is nothing to gain, there is no purpose in engaging in an argument.

So when people share their beliefs I listen and move on. They share them with cruelty, with derision, with simple faith, with arcane reason, with the tongues of angels, with the acumen of used car salesmen. I listen and move on. At least that is what I consider to be the course of wisdom.

I have nothing to gain, so there is no reason to argue.

If someone continues to display behavior or rhetoric that I find unpalatable, I simply choose to stop listening. Unfriend, unfollow, block — all terms for the act of ceasing to heed. I’ve done it in the past without a second thought. But with your words I find myself reluctant to do so.  You have become a  canker sore in my online consumption.

There is a temerity in certainty. There is an offense in self-righteousness. There is an arrogance in your words.  And that is what galls me.

That your view is the only rational one, that the whole world is crumbling and only you can see it. That people who disagree with you are fools. Uneducated fools who make their own choices based on fear or ignorance or blind sin. If only they will listen, if only they will listen to the good sense that you humbly proffer.

You pick apart the words and thoughts and decisions of those who disagree with a manic glee and a permanent eye-roll. You are so happy to be right, holding each gem of your triumph high for all to see.

You take a very complicated issue and make it very, very simple. And not out of a sense of nobility, or a desire to correct the ills of the world. You just want to be right.

You need to be right.

At least that’s what I believe is the root of this. I’m a cynic. I am far too conversant with the human compulsion towards supremacy, that lizard-brain requirement to be right, right, right. To tear out the eyes of any who are wrong. The holy fire that fills our brains when we are just – smiting the blasphemers and bringing order to the universe. The smug confidence, the knowledge that the other tribe is comprised of simpletons and degenerates.

It’s an old flame in the human mind. The Other Tribe is Evil.

So, why am I writing this to you?

I do not name you, nor address the specific issue that fills me with distaste.  As stated, there is nothing to gain from an argument, so I have no wish to engage in one.

I just want to know…what exactly? I want to know how you can be so sure. What do you gain? Do you truly believe that speaking the way that you do will change the hearts and minds of those who read? Is your belief so pure that you feel that you must speak out?

If this issue is truly important to you, why do you choose this method to promote it?  Surely derision, arrogance, and wrath are not the most effective ways to share your thoughts?

What do you gain?

I am afraid that I know the answer. But I want to be wrong. I want to discover that you truly do not intend these words to filled with bile, that you truly care so deeply about this issue that your passion outpaces your reason.

But I don’t think that’s it.

I think you are empty and sad.

And that is not the fate I would wish for the person I knew long ago.

I don’t understand, and I don’t agree, and I fear that you are living a life of paranoia and don’t even know it. But I will listen, I will keep listening as long as I can and I will not argue.

To the person who I fear you are, I want to say this. Shut up. Shut the fuck up.

To the person who I thought you were long ago, I want to say this.

Goodbye.

Deadline Magic

G. Derek Adams3 Comments

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Running against the clock always galvanizes me. Just the idea that the entry window for the Amazon contest might close before I get done editing, is pushing me to untold heights of GONZO EDITING.

“Oh, I really like this section. Too bad it’s boring.” CUT.

“You know, my Beta Readers were right, this chapter has all the exposition and it’s buried 50 pages in.” CHAPTER MOVE.

“Why’s Jonas so freaking emo in Chapter One?” INSERT JOKES.

“Huh, I never did really explain why Cotton hates wild mages so much.” BACKSTORY INFUSION ACTIVATE.

“Hmm, these two chapters are kinda thin now that they’ve been trimmed.” CHAPTER FUSION DANCE.

It’s liberating, at the very least. Only a couple more days of anxiety about it, before I have to bite the bullet and send my entry to Amazon. All of these changes needed to happen, nothing like a little bit of panic to spur me to make them.

Blech. This is why I like theatre. There’s a built in deadline:Opening Night. You can work and agonize on a novel FOR ALL OF TIME.

Spell/Sword in 300 Words or Less

G. Derek Adams12 Comments

[ I’m entering into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, for my chance at fortune and glory. I’m frantically making some reckless edits to the manuscript and getting it ready to upload, but the hardest part has been the 300 word Pitch that I have to include.  I gave up trying to write a respectable pitch a few hours ago, what do you think of this one? Comments and suggestions are very much solicited, but on the hustle people! I’ve got to get this thing submitted before the entry window closes. Would you want to read this book if you read the description below on Amazon.com?]

Two lonely kids learn that they can be friends. That they are better together than apart. Isn’t that what all great tales are really about?

Oh, you need some sizzle do you?

There are wizards in this book. And a witch. And swords. And a minotaur, and frogs on roller skates, and bad dwarven singing. And a dinosaur. And a girl and a boy. Loss and death and sorrow and joy. A couple of kick-ass fight scenes and some witty banter.

What, you need more than that? That’s all fourteen-year-old-me would have needed.spellsword

An airship explodes. A giant robot disrupts the sale of a garish urn. The concept of a box social is thoroughly interrogated.

The Magic Wild burns and the White Sword bites and the Gray Witch laughs.

An assassin. A seer. A knight. A squire. A coward. A girl with the power of sun and winter and death held lightly in her hands.

An improbable mailbox. Poor dental hygiene. Hangovers.

And friendship. That’s what it’s really about.

Rime is the girl, a wild mage. She can bend the very fabric of reality, but at a cost – a cost to her health and her sanity. Her power is unstoppable but it leaves her empty, weak, and often unconscious.  Jonas is the boy, a squire on the run – running away from the shadow of murder. They travel together to find the one person that can save Rime from the wild magic, from the inexorable madness and death that comes to those who are born to ignore the rules of the universe. The Gray Witch of the Wheelbrake Marsh, a creature out of a fairy tale.

The anti-epic fantasy, the nascent genre of Swordpunk: Fantasy Action A La Carte. Earnestly written in the shadow of Lieber and Moorcock.

[It’s actually only 299 words, so if you see where I can squeeze in one more, I’d love to hear it.]

Moving Chapters

G. Derek Adams2 Comments

Moving chapters all at once is TERRIFYING. 

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Catbus laughs at your Editing Anxiety.

Just that moment when you’ve cut one chapter, and it’s hanging in word processing limbo before you paste it into its new location — WHAT IF. What if someone bumps your hand and it vanishes forever?

Coupled with the terror of change — the TERROR OF CHANGING THINGS.

No wonder writers drink.

Ramble Roses

G. Derek Adams3 Comments

Editing on Spell/Sword continues this week. I’ve stalled long enough, picking at the edges, making the easy fixes. Time to get in there — not with the fire and sword — but with the spade and the watering can. I will be cutting a few sections – mainly when I combine two chapters into one.  I come to raise Caesar, not to bury him. Time to make the good stuff — GOODER.

Most of my problems are with the first eight chapters. The story doesn’t really settle into a groove,

Artist Unknown
Artist Unknown

and “become good” until a third of the way through the book.  That’s, you know, kind of a problem.

The first chapters aren’t bad, per se. Just a little unfocused. I need to clarify the positive, and beat back the connective tissue. It had to be there to get me far enough into the book to know what it was about, but now it disgusts me. DISGUST.

Now that I’m getting closer to actually publishing the thing, I find myself worrying about the classical forms. Stupid, I know, for a book that heavily features wyverns. All of the great tales are a circle, the heroes return to the beginning with the Elixir and the world is made anew.  The full arc of Spell/Sword is a tragedy of course, but this first episode is tangentially heroic. Or faux-heroic?

Ha, do I even know anymore?

It’s a story about two people, two kids. Two people that are doing pretty shit-tastically on their own. They meet, become friends, and learn that together they can incrementally reduce their level of life pooch-screwing.

In classical terms: No Big Whoop.

Two characters, incomplete.  Then two characters, complete.

With no romance.  Moirails, to use the excellent term that Homestuck provided.

Blah, blah — time to get to it.

Instead of Writing

G. Derek Adams4 Comments

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I made this! Deal with it. I dream of the day when readers anxiously wait for my next book, they check my blog, nut in GRRM NFL-fixation style I only post the current model I’m building. “Damn, Book Six is taking forever! But that Zaku is kind of sweet…”

Seven Cups of Tea

G. Derek Adams1 Comment

The small inn at the base of Mt. Kyojin is known for three things.

The first is for the excellent saki that the owner, Erojin, brews in thick, oak casks passed down for nine generations in his family. This first thing is known because Erojin repeats this often to all of his guests.

The second is that it is the final inn on the Imperial Road that leads to Kori Horudo, ancestral keep of the Matsu family. This second thing is known because travelers that pass it by on their way to the keep face several hours of cold, dangerous climbing up the rough hewn passes that protect it, covered in snow except for the deepest part of summer.

The third is that the spring water found in a nearby cleft of rock is unparalleled for the making of tea. This third thing is known only by true students and masters of the tea ceremony. Erojin’s grandfather built a special structure around the spring, and took great care in preparing a perfect setup for the brewing and preparation of tea. The water flows hot from the spring in the central pool, a stone table encircles it like a ring – and cunning hooks hang at even intervals, allowing kettles to be hung.

It is said that a cup of tea prepared at this spring is a kiss from the Fortunes themselves — and not to be missed if a Tea Master is available and willing to perform a ceremony.

So it was, when six travelers on their way to Kori Horudo ate their quiet meals in the common room of the inn. When a seventh traveler invited them all to join her in a cup of tea, none could bring themselves to reject so polite and fortunate an invitation.

The hot water of rushed into the dark green kettle, and the quick hands of the seventh traveler pulled it free of the spring never minding the heat. She moved her hands in calm patterns, adding a pinch of powder, a fall of leaves –– her hands and eyes focused and sure, a dance. The six guests felt their souls fill with peace as they watched the serene preparation of the tea.

At last the dance was done, and the seventh traveler placed the lid on the kettle with a quiet clink. Then she looked up at the six samurai and smiled. Her face was plain, with a sharp chin — but the easy warmth of her smile was beauty enough. Her kimono was of good material, but showed signs of much wear and travel. On her right breast was carefully stitched the mon of the Fox Clan.

“And now the waiting. For even we must bear the quiet wind of Time, and fill the interval between the leaves and the tea. Hot water will do its work, no doubt.”She bowed her head respectfully to the others. ” Please forgive me, in my haste to begin the preparation of the tea, I have neglected to introduce myself. I am Kitsune Miho, a scholar. Would you honor me with your own names as we wait for the tea to become tea — and perhaps tell us a little of what has brought you to the little corner of the world?”

The Lines

G. Derek Adams1 Comment

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“Sit down, Lucas.”

The young boy took his place at the keys of the grand piano. He set his fingers carefully in the proper positions, the polished bone cool to the touch.

“Now play.” The madman leered. ” Play the lines, the lines of light in the dark. Play them. Play them well, and play them now.”

Lucas Grahd tried not to think of the blood that oozed down his shoulder from the thin puncture. He tried not to think of the dried blood on his knuckles, a friend’s blood. He tried and failed, but his eyes stayed dry and his fingers steady.

“Play them now,” the masked man howled. “The lines, connect the lines!”

Lucas could feel every whorl of his fingertips, as he touched the first key.