m. c. de marco

Alas, I am not one of them this year — but that’s OK, because I never expected to be nominated in the first place; being nominated truly is its own honor. And alas, John is not one of them either (he was up for best novella for The God Engines). But believe me, the folks who won all deserve it.

The ceremony just ended, though I’ll admit I did not get up at 5 a.m. to watch it being liveblogged. Figured I’d save myself the suspense and either wake up to a nice surprise — or get the disappointment over with, feed the cat, and go back to bed. Regardless, the full list of winners can be found at Tor.com. Replicating it here to spread the word (below the cut).

My quickie, pre-coffee reactions: I’m really glad “Moon” beat out “District 9″ and “Avatar”. Extremely happy that Girl Genius won its category. I do wish my buddy Saladin Ahmed had won the Campbell, but I like Seanan McGuire too after reading her zombie apocalypse story (written as Mira Grant) Feed. Yay for Clarkesworld winning best semiprozine, but I’m a little biased there, since they bought my nominated story. (Kinda hoped Weird Tales would win, too — they’ve also bought one of my stories. And I’m featured in Locus this month, so I would’ve been happy if they’d won too. Are you detecting a theme here?) One big surprise in the Best Novel category — a tie! China Mieville and Paolo Bacigalupi both won. I like both books, so I’m very happy.

Your thoughts?

Best Fan Artist
Presented by Gina Goddard

• Brad W Foster (winner)
• Dave Howell
• Sue Mason
• Steve Stiles
• Taral Wayne

Best Fanzine
Presented by James Shields

• StarShipSofa edited by Tony C. Smith (winner)
• Argentus edited by Steven H. Silver
• Banana Wings edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer
• Challenger edited by Guy H. Lillian III
• Drink Tank edited by Christopher J Garcia, with guest editor James Bacon
• File 770 edited by Mike Glyer

Best Fan Writer
Presented by John Hertz

• Frederik Pohl (winner)
• Claire Brialey
• Christopher J Garcia
• James Nicoll
• Lloyd Penney

Best Semiprozine
Presented by Bruce Gillespie

• Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan (winner)
• Ansible edited by David Langford
• Interzone edited by Andy Cox
• Locus edited by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong, & Liza Groen Trombi
• Weird Tales edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal

Best Professional Artist
Presented by Nick Stathopoulos

• Shaun Tan (winner)
• Bob Eggleton
• Stephan Martiniere
• John Picacio
• Daniel Dos Santos

Best Editor, Short Form
Presented by Lucy Sussex

• Ellen Datlow (winner)
• Stanley Schmidt
• Jonathan Strahan
• Gordon Van Gelder
• Sheila Williams

Best Editor, Long Form
Presented by Robert Silverberg

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden (winner)
• Lou Anders
• Ginjer Buchanan
• Liz Gorinsky
• Juliet Ulman

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Presented by Paul Cornell

• Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars”, written by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; directed by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales) (winner)
• Doctor Who: “The Next Doctor”, written by Russell T Davies; directed by Andy Goddard (BBC Wales)
• Doctor Who: “Planet of the Dead”, written by Russell T Davies & Gareth Roberts; directed by James Strong (BBC Wales)
• Dollhouse: “Epitaph 1”, story by Joss Whedon; written by Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon; directed by David Solomon (Mutant Enemy)
• FlashForward: “No More Good Days” written by Brannon Braga & David S. Goyer; directed by David S. Goyer; based on the novel by Robert J. Sawyer (ABC)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Presented by George R. R. Martin

• Moon, screenplay by Nathan Parker; story by Duncan Jones; directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films) (winner)
• Avatar, screenplay and directed by James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox)
• District 9, acreenplay by Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell; directed by Neill Blomkamp (TriStar Pictures)
• Star Trek, screenplay by Robert Orci & Alex Kurtzman; directed by J.J. Abrams (Paramount)
• Up, screenplay by Bob Peterson & Pete Docter; story by Bob Peterson, Pete Docter, & Thomas McCarthy; directed by Bob Peterson & Pete Docter (Disney/Pixar)

Best Graphic Story
Presented by Shaun Tan

• Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment) (winner)
• Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Written by Neil Gaiman; Pencilled by Andy Kubert; Inked by Scott Williams (DC Comics)
• Captain Britain And MI13. Volume 3: Vampire State Written by Paul Cornell; Pencilled by Leonard Kirk with Mike Collins, Adrian Alphona and Ardian Syaf (Marvel Comics)
• Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages Written by Bill Willingham; Pencilled by Mark Buckingham; Art by Peter Gross & Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn; Colour by Lee Loughridge & Laura Allred; Letters by Todd Klein (Vertigo Comics)
• Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse Written and Illustrated by Howard Tayler

Best Related Book
Presented by Cheryl Morgan

• This Is Me, Jack Vance!(Or, More Properly, This is “I”) by Jack Vance (Subterranean Press) (winner)
• Canary Fever: Reviews by John Clute (Beccon)
• Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees by Michael Swanwick (Temporary Culture)
• The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction by Farah Mendlesohn (McFarland)
• On Joanna Russ edited by Farah Mendlesohn (Wesleyan)
• The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms by Helen Merrick (Aqueduct)

Best Short Story
Presented by Sean Williams

• “Bridesicle,” Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09) (winner)
• “The Bride of Frankenstein,” Mike Resnick (Asimov’s 12/09)
• “The Moment,” Lawrence M. Schoen (Footprints; Hadley Rille Books)
• “Non-Zero Probabilities,” N.K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld 9/09)
• “Spar,” Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)

Best Novelette
Presented by Terry Dowling

• “The Island,” Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos) (winner)
• “Eros, Philia, Agape,” Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09)
• “It Takes Two,” Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three; Night Shade Books)
• “One of Our Bastards is Missing,” Paul Cornell (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three; Solaris)
• “Overtime,” Charles Stross (Tor.com 12/09)
• “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Eugie Foster (Interzone 2/09)

Best Novella
Presented by Sean McMullen

• “Palimpsest,” Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit) (winner)
• “Act One,” Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09)
• The God Engines, John Scalzi (Subterranean)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon)
• “Vishnu at the Cat Circus,” Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days; Pyr, Gollancz)
• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Best Novel
Presented by Kim Stanley Robinson

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade) (tie winner)
• The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK) (tie winner)
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
• Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Presented by John Scalzi and Jay Lake

• Seanan McGuire (winner)
• Saladin Ahmed
• Gail Carriger
• Felix Gilman
• Lezli Robyn

Links to the stories/sites are included over at Tor.com.

There is some debate as to whether it was actually him. What do you think? George Lucas or a really good doppleganger?

Here’s another.

Okay, DragonCon is a blast. Internet connectivity sucks as usual with a convention this size, so updates will be brief.Yesterday, I am pretty sure that George Lucas was roaming the halls of the Marriott. He was standing next to Chad Vader, while wearing a Jar Jar tee shirt. I do have a picture and will try to post it tonight.

I also went to Mary Robinette Kowal’s reading as well. It was highly entertaining. If you ever have a chance to hear her read, take advantage of it.

As usual, the costumes here are fantastic. This con is as much for people watching as it is for everything else. More updates soon!

Because free is awesome, I wanted to share some free fiction links with you as I fly over the mid-Atlantic on my way down to DragonCon.

Clarkesworld Magazine just came out with a new issue on September 1st. Along with the beautiful cover, there are stories by Robert Reed and Stephen Gaskell. Non-fictions brought to you by Bill Spangler and Jeremy L.C. Jones. As always, you can hear me podcasting the first story of the month. The second audio will be ready for download on September 15th.

Also, John Joseph Adams is looking for braaaaaiiinnnnssss. The new website celebrating the The Living Dead 2 has eight stores in their entirety and are available both as regular web pages and in a downloadable ebook sampler (currently available in epub and pdf format, with additional formats forthcoming from the Baen Webscriptions store).

There will also be 36 different author interviews with the contributors. They’re scheduled to appear daily, starting on August 30th, with the final one scheduled to run on Oct. 4. And last, but not least, you can also read the introduction and the header notes to each story in the anthology. (Okay, maybe that IS least!)

The anthology all-new, original stories by zombie masters Robert Kirkman, Max Brooks, David Wellington, Brian Keene, Jonathan Maberry, Carrie Ryan, John Skipp, and Mira Grant, for a grand total of FORTY-FOUR STORIES. This includes a mix of originals (27) and reprints (17) (none of which have ever appeared in a zombie anthology before).

The free stories, which you can find here, are:
The Skull-Faced City — David Barr Kirtley
And the Next, and the Next — Genevieve Valentine
Flotsam & Jetsam — Carrie Ryan
Mouja — Matt London
Who We Used to Be — David Moody
The Days of Flaming Motorcycles — Catherynne M. Valente
Obedience — Brenna Yovanoff
Rural Dead — Bret Hammond

—

So now that I’ve totally worn that pimp hat (John has totally got to wash that thing now when he returns). I’m passing it along to you. We haven’t had a great pimp thread in awhile. So what do you have to show me? Feel free to pimp friends, media that you love, books you’ve read, anything, really. Just keep in mind that more than two links will probably put you into moderation. I will get you out of that prison, but it might be later in the day.

Pimp away!

While John prepares for the Hugo Awards ceremony this coming weekend in Australia, his filmcritic.com column discusses a very familiar question. Fans will eventually ask when their favorite book will be swept-up by Hollywood and made into a movie. Who doesn’t have a list in the back of their heads as to who will play John Perry or perhaps, Harry Creek? In a clever tie-in, John tackles the topic of movie – adaptation chances in relation to this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Novel.

As usual, comments are closed here. Click on the link above and add your two cents.

I’ll make a confession here: I was the only person in my class at my very-competitive college prep high school who did not take calculus. Which is a fact which bothered the calculus teachers immensely – the would come up to me and warn me I was throwing my life away, or at least my chances to attend a good college, by not taking the course. The irony of course is that I went on to write science fiction, a genre which benefits from a knowledge of calculus. The sound you hear is the teeth of those teachers, grinding away.

So it was with some considerable interest that I came to science writer Jennifer Ouellette’s new book The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. Like me, she was a math class refusnik; like me, she writes in a field where a knowledge of calculus comes in handy. How does she handle coming to calculus at a later point in her life? I’ll let her tell you.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE:

There’s an episode of the TV series House that opens with a group of students taking the AP calculus exam. A boy collapses and is rushed to the hospital. When Dr. House is told of the circumstances of the boy’s collapse, he quips, “That’s the way calculus presents.”

So calculus has a formidable reputation. I have always been among those non-mathematical sorts who viewed it with trepidation and preferred to keep a safe distance. And I’m not alone: a large chunk of the population finds math in general, and calculus in particular, intimidating and distasteful. I have friends who break into a cold sweat at the sight of a simple algebraic equation. The fact that math has its own language — a sort of symbolic secret code to which only a select few hold the key – only makes matters worse.

So I figured it was time someone wrote a book about calculus from that perspective, and who better to do so than a former math-phobic English major who went on to become a science writer specializing in physics? Most popular math books are written by people who already love the subject and are quite knowledgeable – i.e., actual mathematicians.

The problem is, they’re so familiar with the topic that they forget what it’s like to know nothing. The most basic concept can be a challenge for a rank beginner. For instance, how do you explain what a mathematical function is to someone who doesn’t “speak math”? I can parrot the technical definition. But that doesn’t mean I fully understand the concept. 

Of course, this meant I had to actually learn calculus before I could write about it coherently. When I started, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Calculus proved a little over my head. Fortunately, my Spousal Unit is a physicist at Caltech. He helped me find real-world examples of calculus, and gamely answered all my pesky “why is the sky blue?” questions.  The result is The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. It’s less about teaching the nuts and bolts of calculus and more about turning the world around you into your mathematical playground.

We learned to shoot craps in a Vegas casino to demonstrate the calculus of probability. We indulged in the rides at Disneyland, and I learned about freefall and parabolic curves, and how to apply vector calculus to Space Mountain. I went surfing in Hawaii to learn about sine waves and the Fourier transform, and our house-hunting expedition turned into a multivariable optimization problem.

I even chatted with an epidemiologist about how to use differential equations to analyze an outbreak of zombification. (Worse-case scenario: the zombies wipe us out in four days, unless we go all Zombieland on their undead butts and kill them as fast as possible. So now you know. Read the appendix and you’ll also know the derivation, and can impress your friends at parties.)

Writing the book also forced me to ask some deep questions about where my kneejerk rejection of equations originated. It would be easy to simply blame the patriarchy, but it’s far more complicated than that. It’s true that there is lingering gender bias about women in math – and lots of women have the horror stories to prove it – but my own negative reaction stemmed from a weird form of Imposter Syndrome.

Even though I’d done well in my math classes and earned top grades in high school, deep down I knew I was just memorizing patterns and didn’t really understand the subject deeply. I was terrified that my ignorance would be discovered and I would be publicly humiliated as an academic fraud. Even though this never transpired, that fear colored my attitude towards math for much of my adult life; I avoided it like the plague.

I talked to lots of very smart people with varying degrees of math-phobia, and they all had one thing in common: an early negative experience with math that shattered their confidence and instilled a deep-seated fear and dislike of numbers. As one woman memorably described her feelings: “My initial reaction to the word ‘calculus’ is not unlike a caveman throwing rocks at the moon in ignorance and fear resulting in blind rage. There is no such thing as ghosts creeping up behind me on the stairs, but there is such a thing as a polynomial monster, and it has hooked teeth and causes chronic yeast infections, I’m sure.”

The truth is, the Calculus Monster isn’t all that scary once you face it head-on. We all do some form of calculus all the time, without realizing it. A baseball outfielder has to estimate where the ball is likely to land after the batter gets a hit. Whether he knows it or not, his brain is calculating the trajectory of that ball, then sending a signal telling the outfielder where to place himself in order to make the catch. Lurking somewhere in that process is a calculus problem. Or two.

I think scientists have a valid point when they bemoan the fact that it’s socially acceptable in our culture to be utterly ignorant of math, whereas it is a shameful thing to be illiterate. We could all be just a little bit mathier. I hope my book will encourage others like me to give this much-maligned subject a second chance.

—-

The Calculus Diaries: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read more about the novel here. Follow Jennifer Oullette’s blog. Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter.

Paramourtal has been slightly delayed but should be out sometime this month, with my story still in it. I have seen the proofs and it’s looking good.

Saving the world. Paying the rent. Are these mutually incompatible activities? Laura Resnick ponders this very subject as she discusses Unsympathetic Magic, the latest installment of her fantasy series featuring the quirky character Esther Diamond. And while it might seem at first blush that one have to prioritize these desires (after all, if one does not save the world, paying the rent becomes a moot point), Resnick makes a good argument why both are important in the end.

LAURA RESNICK:

I love juxtaposition. I love the salty-and-sweet flavor of peanut brittle, and the sinus-clearing heat of a spicy curry accompanied by the creamy coolness of raita. I love the close-to-laughter close-to-tears experience of a well-acted Chekhov play, and the mingling of today’s grief with yesterday’s joys that you get from a good funeral eulogy.

I also like a healthy dose of comedy with my drama, and a generous helping of life-and-death stakes with my farce.

Hence the ethos of my Esther Diamond urban fantasy series, of which Unsympathetic Magic is the newest release. When the brilliant cover artist for this series, the award-winning Daniel Dos Santos finished this cover, he told me that coming up with images that have the right combination of menace and comedy is the big challenge of illustrating these books. (And he keeps getting it just right. So hats off to Dan!)

Esther Diamond is a struggling actress in New York City who gets involved in supernatural adventures along with her friend Dr. Maximillian Zadok, a 350 year old mage whose day job is protecting the Big Apple from Evil. They are assisted in their activities by Nelli, Max’s inconveniently-large canine familiar; and they’re occasionally dogged, thwarted, or beaten to the punch by Detective Connor Lopez, a skeptical cop who would be Esther’s boyfriend if he weren’t so concerned about his growing conviction that she’s a deranged felon.

Esther’s vocation as an actress is similar to mine as a writer; she loves it, it’s the work she was meant to do, and she is fiercely dedicated to it. Like writing, acting is a highly competitive profession, a very unstable way to make a living, and often doesn’t pay that well. Consequently, while fighting Evil and confronting the forces of darkness, Esther is also always looking for work, making sure she can pay her bills (no mean feat in Manhattan!), and vexed about any circumstances that interfere with her ability to earn income or pursue her career.

And that’s an example of the sort of juxtaposition that I’ve enjoyed playing with in this series: While confronting supernaturally powerful adversaries and their rapaciously murderous plans, Esther Diamond has to give equal attention to holding down paying jobs, covering her rent, and watching her budget. These constant obligations characterize life as I have always known it, and since I don’t believe these responsibilities will disappear for me if I wake up tomorrow to discover I’m being menaced by zombies and a voodoo curse, I don’t make them magically vanish for Esther, either.

Thus, Esther is working at three jobs throughout Unsympathetic Magic. Her “real” job is acting in a guest slot on The Dirty Thirty, a TV show about corrupt cops which is widely loathed by the NYPD—including Lopez, as well as the cops who arrest Esther for prostitution one night in Harlem. (There is, as she assures Lopez when she asks for his help, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she was assaulting strangers at midnight while dressed like a crack whore.) Her regular day job is working as a singing server at Bella Stella, a restaurant in Little Italy that featured prominently in her previous misadventure, Doppelgangster. And her other day job is teaching acting classes at the Livingston Foundation in Manhattan’s lovely old Mt. Morris Park neighborhood.

And while tracking down a mysterious sorcerer who’s using the dark side of voodoo magic to raise zombies, call up dark spirits, and terrorize Harlem by night, Esther makes sure she never misses a minute of work at any of her three jobs.

Pursuing her professional vocation, meeting her fiscal needs, and stomping Evil into the ground before it can swallow her city whole and cancel all auditions forever, in addition to trying to have a love life with her almost-would-be boyfriend (Detective Lopez), keeps Esther pretty busy.

Similarly, making sure that I find the comedy in stories about Evil, homicide, abduction, rapacious greed, and attempts to destroy the world as we know it keeps me pretty busy. The stakes in any story have to be high or there’s not much reason for a reader to get invested in it for 400+ pages; and in fantasy, the stakes are traditionally very high, i.e. the struggle between Good and Evil. So Esther Diamond’s action-packed adventures consist of fantasy drama with one more layer—the funny layer, the layer where absurdity is juxtaposed against menace, the mundane is juxtaposed against the earth-shattering, and the pettily irritating is juxtaposed against the truly terrifying.

Unsympathetic Magic attempts to bring together all of these elements and balance them against each other, while also adding a dash of sex appeal, some fun facts I’ll bet you never knew about traditional voodoo, and the dark stormy climax of a mid-August heat wave.

—-

Unsympathetic Magic: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Follow Laura Resnick’s news page. Laura Resnick on Facebook.

OK, I told myself I wasn’t going to use the AWESOMA POWAH of being a guestblogger at Whatever to promote myself. And I’m not! Really! But the mandate I got from John was to write about whatever I felt like writing about, and, well, if there’s one thing pro writers like to write about, it’s angst over The State of The Career. So.

The title of this post is an hyperbole. As n00b fantasy writers go, I’m doing pretty well — my sales are decent, I’ve gotten great reviews from all the major sites, and best of all, no one has come at me with a broken bottle at a convention or reading! (Seriously, ya’ll, I had a nightmare about that once.) But since book 2 of my Inheritance Trilogy* is going to be coming out in a couple of months, I’ve reached a new milestone in my development as a Jane Schmoe Neopro (gender-switching Tobias Buckell’s term, which he used for a great series of articles on being a new published writer). Namely, I’m having Secondbookophobia.

Secondbookophobia occurs when you’re a new author whose second book is about to come out. And of course, having heard all about the dreaded Second Book Syndrome — in which an author’s sophomore outing suffers from the pressure of deadlines and/or the need to save the best stuff for the third book of a trilogy — I’m terrified. Not because I think my second book falls prey to SBS; far from it. Beyond the fact that I worked my butt off to make it good, the Inheritance Trilogy isn’t one story; it’s actually three. Each book has a different protagonist, and each is pretty much complete in itself. The plot of book 2 has been firmly lodged in my head for years; I had plenty of time to write it. So the structure of the trilogy itself works in my favor here.

But this series structure, already a bit unusual for epic fantasy, is part of why I’m anxious, because I’m actually doing something more. See, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, book 1, was firmly epic fantasy. I’ve seen some readers quibble about this because it didn’t involve a quest, didn’t include a map, and didn’t have a male protagonist (seriously). But regardless of whether I followed the conventions of the genre, I designed the series to quite literally emulate an epic, modeling its cosmology after the operatic (and soap operatic) shenanigans of the Egyptian pantheon, the legendary bromance of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and so on. However, book 2 of the trilogy — while still sticking to the epic framework in most respects — is also very much an urban fantasy. It’s not just about the characters, but also about the city in which most of the story takes place.

In other words, I’m kinda… changing genres in the middle of a trilogy. Everybody freak out!

…Okay, gratuitous disco, sorry, couldn’t help myself. I’m having a moment, okay?

Here’s the thing. New authors are supposed to try and build an audience as soon as humanly possible, because it’s a lot easier to sell books when you’re a known than as an unknown, obviously. This is one reason why so many debut authors come out of the gate with trilogies — because a trilogy is a great way to build a new author’s audience quickly. Most trilogies are a single story stretched over three books, which makes it easy to hook the readers with the first book, as the conventional wisdom goes, keep them dangling with the second, and reel them in with the finale. But my Inheritance Trilogy is essentially three standalone books, so I’m trying to hook/dangle people without the aid of unresolved plot drama. And by changing genres midstream, it’s a given: I’m going to lose some readers. Will I gain enough new ones to make up the difference? I don’t know. But now you know the reason for my Secondbookophobia.

There’s no solution for this but to wait and see, of course. Book 3 is done and turned in, and I’m actually hard at work on a new project — more on this later — so I’m not exactly sitting around crying into my pear cider** about it. Just thought you guys might appreciate seeing what goes through the mind of a pro writer at times like this.

In the meantime — because okay, maybe I’ll do a leeeeetle promotion, just this once — I’ve posted the first chapter of The Broken Kingdoms (Inheritance Trilogy book 2) over at my website, for those who’d like to check it out. (Chapters 2 and 3 will be posted later.) And maybe you might want to preorder it. Or check out the first book, if you missed it, which just came out in audiobook format today. Or, y’know, something.

* Yes, yes, I know it’s the same name as Paolini’s once-trilogy-now-Cycle. No, really, no one’s ever pointed that out to me before. There are neither dragons nor farmboys in mine.

**I’m not usually one for product placement, but I tried one of these for the first time a few days ago, and it was magnificent. Light, crisp, and aromatic; highly recommended.

Movieguy @ Comment 79 wins it! I’ll send you an email to which you can reply with your home address for the books!

It was a really tough choice to pick the winner. Ultimately, Movieguy’s comment made me laugh as I thought about the famous scene between Jack and Rose on the ill-fated Titanic.

Honorable Mentions include:

Mordron: Put the money on the dresser….no don’t hand it to me…put it on the dresser.

Latasha Ewell: Well, it all started a few years ago… when he taped bacon on me.

SarahB: Youz want me tah do whut?! Dat’s it, whut kinda maguhzeen is dis?

Thank you to everyone for participating!

Monsters: you know, those big, hairy and scaly things with the claws and teeth and the overwhelming desire to do nasty bad things to you? But then there’s Harry Connolly. No, he’s not a monster (I mean, as far as we know), but he has definite ideas about monsters, and what they should be – and what they don’t have to be. Explains himself, and how his thoughts on the subject inform his latest novel, Game of Cages.

HARRY CONNOLLY:

In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll nobly attempts to define the monster. To paraphrase him (in a way that would certainly make him cringe): a monster is a threatening and impure creature that violates the natural order as it’s defined by contemporary science.

“Threatening” is pretty straightforward. “Impure,” though, is more complicated. Monsters can be mixtures of things that do not belong together: man and wolf, living and dead, animal and machine. They can be incomplete: a living hand, a bodiless ghost. They also be magnified in size, like a giant shark, or in number, like a swarm of rats.

(And so on. It’s an  interesting book with much to quibble over. I think of it often when I’m planning a new novel.)

And while I don’t write horror (my agent says so), I do write thrillers about extra-dimensional beings who make incursions into our world to feed and reproduce. That means I need a monster for each book–maybe more than one–and being me, I wanted them to be original.

Now for a short but important digression: One thing that bothers me about modern monsters in fiction (aside from seeing the same ones over and over) is the reliance on creative choices designed to work in movies. I’m talking mainly about huge claws and teeth, usually accompanied by animal growls.

There’s a good reason for this–the sight of a gigantic jaw full of long, sharp teeth (another example of magnification) evokes a powerful subconscious fear response. Unfortunately, filmmakers have been one-up each other for decades, finally creating monsters that verge on the  ridiculous.

But fiction isn’t an image medium, so why do so many books try to copy movie monsters?

Once again, I was defining myself by what I didn’t want to do.

I decided to make the monster beautiful rather than ugly, and to have it inspire love instead of fear. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (inspiration to so much modern contemporary fantasy) had already shown that frenzied, irrational love could be scary as hell in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the episode where Xander Harris casts the love spell. But in this case, I wanted to replace romantic love with the love between human and pet.

And here I must tread carefully. Our good host has (I’ve learned not to say owned) several pets and one recently passed away. I offered my sincere condolences, but to be honest, the love between a human and a pet is mysterious to me. I grew up surrounded by pets–dogs, cats, snakes, fish, hamsters, guinea pigs–but once I moved out on my own I realized that, whatever feeling people get by sharing their homes with an animal, I don’t share it.

Intellectually, I know the feeling exists. Emotionally, I don’t understand it and maybe never will. That’s not meant to be a criticism, implied or otherwise; it’s simply an acknowledgement of one of the ways I’m different from most people.

And that’s the idea behind Game of Cages: a creature that could force you to love it so much you’d sacrifice everything for it. You’d give up your job, your friends, your life, your children just to be near it and care for it. Instead of magnifying its size, or its teeth and claws, I magnified the emotional connections it created until they became irrational and destructive.

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Game of Cages: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel.Visit Harry Connolly’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Fiction can inspire those who read it to do new and even possibly noble things with their lives – but fiction can also be cathartic and transformative for the writer as well. While writing Children No More, author Mark Van Name discovered he wasn’t just trying to write an efficient page-turner, he was working on something that would make him confront parts of his own past… and work to change the future of some whose own pasts need healing.

MARK VAN NAME:

Novels begin for me like small leaks in a dam.  One idea shoots through, then another, then more and more, each one growing stronger until the dam vanishes beneath the water.  With Children No More, what came first was an image of my protagonist, Jon Moore, standing with a few other people, one of them a child, in front of a small army.  The child had until quite recently been a soldier. 

I knew I’d write the book the moment the image came to me. 

In addition to thinking about what would have brought Jon to that point, I also wanted to challenge myself to attempt things I hadn’t done in any previous books.  Other notions then rapidly added to the idea flood.

 Jon couldn’t fight safely with a child at his side, so I had to create a situation in which not fighting was better than fighting—even with armed soldiers threatening him and others dear to him. 

Jon is a classic American mono-myth character:  People ask for his help because of the skills he possesses and his willingness to use them, he deals with the problem at hand, and he leaves.  Leaving is vital, because the very traits, such as an aptitude for violence, that make characters such as Jon necessary also make them undesirable when the action is over.  When you work in conditions that are fundamentally horrific—think soldiers, cops, firefighters, relief workers, and many more—you pay dearly and are forever altered.  You witness things no one should have to see, PTSD settles into you like a black mist, and you never again fit into normal society as well as you once did. 

So of course I had to make Jon stay when the action was over. 

That decision immediately led to another problem:  How to sustain dramatic tension while writing about the post-action parts of the story.  The previous three novels in the series all had the reputation of being page-turners, and I wanted the same compelling reading experience in this one. 

Excellent.  Make him stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, and make the book a page-turner. 

About that time, I remembered that Jon had been trained as a child to fight and to kill, but I’d never told the story of those times, so I’d do that, too. 

Even better.  Make him stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, weave in a long story arc from a much earlier time, and make it a page-turner. 

As I was starting the book, my mind finally reminded me of something I’d managed up to this point in the process to ignore:  I had been trained as a child to fight and to kill. 

When I was ten, my most recent father died.  In an effort to give me some male influence, my mother signed me up for a youth group that trained boys to be soldiers.  Its intentions were good:  To use military conventions and structures to teach discipline, fitness, teamwork, and many other valuable lessons.  It accomplished many of those goals with me—but it also did many bad things.  Part of the problem was the time:  I joined in 1965, as the war in Viet Nam was gaining speed.  My first day, an active soldier on leave acted as our drill sergeant.  When he formed us up in ranks and started screaming at us, I began to cry.  He punched me so hard in the stomach that I fell and vomited.  He then ground my face into my own puke with his boot.  A few hours later, I saw my first–but not my last–necklace of human ears and learned the ethics of collecting them. 

I was a member for three years.  The first day wasn’t even in the top twenty worst days I had. 

The worst of those worst days was nothing, nothing at all, compared to what child soldiers around the world endure. 

Those years, though, gave me a strong understanding of their pain and a deep desire to help stop the practice of using children to fight wars. 

That desire led me to the last big idea of Children No More, one that hit me last February, when I was finishing the third draft of the book, about a month before I turned it in.  I was sitting at TEDactive, listening to people talking about changing the world, and I decided I wanted to do something concrete to aid child soldiers, something more than just write the book. 

After some research, I found a group, Falling Whistles, that was working to help rehabilitate and reintegrate child soldiers and other war-affected children, mostly in the Congo.  I partnered with them in a simple program:  I’m giving everything, including the advance, that I earn from sales of the hardback edition of the novel to them to help those kids.  So, when you buy the book, you’re not only getting a good read, you’re not only spending time on an important social topic, you’re also doing a good deed, because money is heading to those children. 

So, I had to make Jon stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, weave in a long story arc from a much earlier time, make the book a page-turner, and spend months dealing with a lot of shit from my past.  I feared that I might not have the skills to do all that, and I definitely didn’t want to spend that many months in those dark places in my head. 

If I succeeded, though, I could help child soldiers in the real world. 

With a payoff like that, I had to try.

—-

Children No More: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel.Visit Mark Van Name’s blog.

From John:

Today’s the first day of school for Athena — sixth grade this year — and normally I post a picture of her on the first day, so here you are:

Yes, she’s quite the fan of Gir and Invader Zim. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Today is also the day I’m off to Australia. I have 25 hours of plane rides awaiting me. Joy. Dear Australia: You better be AWESOME.