“Science fiction, when it is good, is a wholly valid attempt at restoring a mythical element, with its adventures and tragedies, its meditations on man’s errors and man’s fate. For true tragedy is an essential component or outcome of myth.”
— Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill
My friend John Lundwall has a couple of animated lectures posted on-line that deal with the astronomy and cosmology encoded in the mythology of oral societies. The lectures cover some of the same ground as John’s forthcoming book on the subject, which I am presently enjoying.
I shared one of these on Facebook the other day, but they’re both so good, I want to put them here.
Really, this should be interesting to anyone who rides through the cosmos on Spaceship Earth. Those of you who write science fiction and fantasy, game, or otherwise engage in detailed world-building… take special note.
Every con starts like this. Every con ends like this, too. In between, the rooms fill up with people, stories, and performances.
My performances started on Thursday with a brilliant and ambitious but ill-starred presentation on steampunk and audiobooks with performer / producer Deren Hansen and Orrin Porter Rockwell. We’ll bring it back again — maybe at LTUE in February.
In the afternoon I crossed the street and talked with James Wymore, Bob Defendi and others about the changing face of fantasy literature and film, specifically around the question of whether it was becoming more of an adult genre. The answer is no, of course: Tolkien wrote serious literature for adults. I’m not sure all the audience members came expecting a discussion of the Hays Code and the film The Night of the Hunter, but hey, conventions are potluck, and there’s always something to surprise.
In the afternoon I joined a Koffee Klatch with James Batchelor, David J. West, and Scott Taylor, hanging out with and meeting new readers. Afterwards, I lingered to watch West, Carter Reid, and Daniel Blatt talk about mythology and monster. Dan is, among various other things that make for an interesting calico of a person, a PhD in mythology, and his opening gambit was to quote Beowulf in the original Saxon. I, for one, was hooked.
On Friday Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury and I started our three-round writers’ workshop. I had the pleasure of reading 15 20-page stories or story beginning, and then talking through them with the authors. I met many new friends this way, and rounded up with a few old ones, like Vince and Deena Campanile.
In the afternoon, I joined James Wymore, Jason King, and Tom Durham in a round of Choose Your Own Apocalypse. I played Enraged Deity, and chose to be Ur-Nagoth, the Eternal Bowel Worm. In the end, after edging out the Faberge Egg of Darkness (suicide-inducing artifact of Rasputin, forged from the souls of five children, lightning, and sadness), I was defeated by an apocalypse of wizards who caused inanimate objects to come to life and attack. Yeah, you heard right — I lost to Fantasia.
Friday night I went to filk. Following two other performers, I played a set of five songs to an audience including many friends, such as Deanna Holland, Bear Putnam, and Kathy Mar. My set was: My Old West Country Home, The Weak Things of the Earth, The Life of Sidney Reilly, Snow Faeries Don’t Wear Pants, and Down by the Waters of Sebus.
On Saturday I finished up with the writers workshop, sat on a panel about Utah Fantasy Writers with Lisa Mangum, and finished up the day with a tag-team Jeopardy and book signing event. My Jeopardy stint put me up against Larry Correia, Graham Bradley, and Carter Reid. I came in third by correctly answering two questions (my answers were “Krull” and “42”).
On Sunday I wound up shop in the dealers room, said farewells, and headed home. Other standouts I may not have mentioned include my dealer room table fellows Sarah E. Seeley, S.A. Butler, Nathan Shumate, James Batchelor, David J. West, and Graham Bradley; Kevin Anderson and Peter J. Wacks (very interesting discussions, and Great Things in the works); and meeting Peter S. Beagle, who was a gracious and charming man, exactly the sort of person you would imagine as the author of his books.
And the last thing I have to share is the sketch page of my copy of Nathan Shumate’s book Ethnic Albanians Need Not Apply. Yes, that’s a picture of me riding Larry Correia. And yes, that’s Larry’s own signature beside the picture, with his own bonus cartoon and commentary. I know amazing people.
Team
Look for me today at 1:00 in Deer Valley I and II at Westercon, talking with Deren Hansen about Orrin Porter Rockwell, Steampunk, and the making of audiobooks.
Then I shuffle across the street to Fantasycon. At 3:00 I’ll talk with the gentlemen of Dungeoncrawlers Radio about The Geek Revolution.
At 4:00, I’ll join James Wymore and others for a discussion about From Disney Princesses to A Game of Thrones: How Fantasy has Grown Up.
At 5:30 I’ll be back at Westercon in the Boardroom, for a bring-your-own-drink koffee klatsch with David J. West, Scott Taylor, and whoever else shows up.
Tonight: filking at Westercon!
At all other times and in the interstices, I’ll be in the Dealer Room, under the big turquoise banner.
The Mahaelian Kingdom of Avidar, ruled by her mind-dominating and omnipresent king, emerged victor from a war five hundred years ago against the pale, inhuman, magic-Singing Elvayn. Since the war, Mahaelian Silencers have kept the slave class of Elvayn in check by muting each Elvayn child at birth; now the king works on his Far Continent Project, aiming to relocate the Elvayn to a land far from the Kingdom.
Or so he says. But after Blade Knight High General Brice Serholm witnesses dozens of his men swallowed into a hole in the air summoned by a primitive shaman, and the king’s First Advisor Del’Ahrid receives a mysterious nighttime messenger, signs begin to appear that the king and his schemes are not all that he says.
In his debut heroic fantasy novel, Betrayal’s Shadow, Dave de Burgh gives us a complicated world tangled in ancient wars, dark sorcery, simmering racial tensions, magical subterfuge, oppressive religious hierarchy, politics so brutal they verge on totalitarian, ambivalent and terrifying monarchs, and epic Volkswanderung, packaged with all the élan of a Robert E. Howard novel about crusaders. If you liked The Malazan Book of the Fallen, check this one out.
(Updated December 3, 2015, with the new cover. Congrats, Dave!)
I tend to think that a creative person is a creative person, whatever the medium. Here’s something I did recently, in the medium of PVC pipe. Meet Son of Water Cage.
Here it is as its skeleton is beginning to come together. I built the original Water Cage a few years ago in Idaho, where I had the advantage of two hoses in the backyard… i.e., more water pressure. Here, with my single hose, I wanted to get a similar experience.
So the answer was less pipe. Water Cage had four pipes rising vertically, and I gave Son of Water Cage only two. It sways a bit in a strong breeze, but is stable (like a New York City skyscraper, ha!).
And here it is in action, upon the Famous Lawn. Holes drilled into the inward-facing sides of the pipe, irregular and pointing at different angles, fill the space inside with many little jets of water and leave space to run through.
My neighbor squinted at me the other day and said “I imagine you’re the kind of guy that has a surprisingly diverse range of friends.”
I had never thought about it, but it turns out he’s right. I count among my good friends poets, ghost hunters, deer hunters, feminists, nurses and doctors, veterans, deputy sheriffs, theologians, spelunkers, agricultural scientists, trappers, painters, entrepreneurs, Scrabble players, chefs, composers, deadbeats, gardeners, sculptors, mystics, mechanics, mathematicians, hospital and university administrators, lawyers, heretics, middle managers, novelists, editors, publishers, conservatives and progressives, statists and libertarians, junkies, clerics, politicians, teachers, 
subversives, filmmakers, board gamers, video gamers, MBAs, moral majoritarians, libertines, classicists, autodidacts, fishermen, critics, band leaders, photographers, dancers, farmers, handymen, engineers, hackers, exercise freaks, punk rockers, dentists, inventors, executives, ukelele players, wealth managers, depressives, athletes, coaches, finance geeks, cartoonists, firearms instructors, secret agents (maybe), and even cat owners, to name a few.
Probably you all do, too. I hope so. These people have all enriched my life. One of my aspirations is at the end of my life to have a list of such descriptors as long as the one above that would all apply to me.
This came up in conversation because last week I was at Paracon West, a paranormal convention held in Salt Lake City and in part organized by my friend Russ Cook. Which is to say, I was hanging out with some of the ghost hunters. I’m posting late because I’ve been busy with work since the con, but here are a few photos. You can see my booth (staffed by novelist S.A. Butler in the photo), next to the Zombie Nation table (inimitable Kelli and Carter Reid, presiding). Craig Nybo, who himself probably accounts for ten of my above categories, warms up on bass for our event — he and Carter and I staged an interactive rock opera about zombies. It was short, ragged at the edges, and well-received. I don’t have any photos because I was playing guitar the entire time, but with a little luck I’ll be able to photograph the event in the future. We’re hoping to do it again for SLC ComicCon in a couple of months.
One more photo. One of the psychics at the con (yep), found himself the repeated victim of practical jokes played by the ghosts (I swear). Here is his table, levitated up by poltergeists on top of another table. This is what you missed — if you like ghost stories, jokes, and rock and roll, think about coming to Paracon West 2.
I have this friend, Danyelle Leafty. You should go check out what she writes in her blog, ’cause she’s interesting. You might even read some of the books she’s written, which are middle grade fantasies, generally with fairy-tale themes or backgrounds. She tweets: @DanyelleLeafty. And Danyelle invited me do participate in this bloghop. Thanks, Danyelle!
A bloghop is a chain of interconnected posts across different blogs. The bloghop comes with an explanatory quote:
We writers share these things, but informally during workshops and at conferences (and, for a handful of established writers, in printed interviews), but not so much through our open-forum blogs. With the hashtag #MyWritingProcess, you can learn how writers all over the world answer the same four questions. How long it takes one to write a novel, why romance is a fitting genre for another, how one’s playlist grows as the draft grows, why one’s poems are often sparked by distress over news headlines or oddball facts learned on Facebook…
And it comes with questions:
1) What am I working on?
Well, lots of stuff. Probably too much. The thing I need to produce imminently is All Along the Watchtower, which is Rock Band Fights Evil #8. The band finally gets to Chicago (their destination in #1, remember?), and it ain’t the Chicago they remembered. I initially thought I’d call it Sweet Home Chicago, but the title was a bit on the noise and the tower theme became… prominent. Twitch has changed; Jim is enthroned; and Crow Jane has joined the band. Eddie comes face to face with his past, while Mike and Chuy remain entangled in theirs. Can Eddie fulfill his divine commission and carry forward the errand of Heaven?
Also queued up:
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Good question. Here’s some stuff to look for in my writing:
3) Why do I write what I do?
I don’t write literary because literary is boring. Stuff should be happening, characters should struggle. Lengthy sentences and complex metaphors are not interesting. At the same time, I don’t write straight pulp because fiction must do more than just entertain to be worth reading. Fiction must challenge the heart, tickle the brain, and enrich the soul. I write speculative fiction because I want to be able to hold a funhouse mirror up to the world itself, as another tool in the activity of holding a mirror up to the human heart.
4) How does my writing process work?
In my experience, you get one thing free, a feather from heaven. An idea, a character, maybe even just a sentence. The rest of it you have to work out. My process start with sitting down to a blank place and trying to drag out of that single feather all the goodness I can. I do this by asking myself explicit questions: Why is this interesting? What does this character want? Who will try to stop him? Who else cares about this objective? How will he accomplish this goal? And so on.
From there I go to outlining. My first outline is a list of characters and subplots, with notes about the key moments in each subplot. My second is an outline by chapter, with key plot and subplot events identified, as well as notes about pacing, genre, tension, etc.
Then I write.
With that, I pass on the baton to three other writer friends of mine:
James Wymore writes fiction. He’s also an acquisitions editor at Curiosity Quills, and a frequent guest in the Wasatch Front convention scene, which he’s associated (in my mind, at least) with semi-improvised mass audience participation games (like Choose-Your-Own-Apocalypse, in which space aliens, zombies, and robots fight it out in the audience and on the stand for the right to terminate the human race). Find James’s blog here. Recent books include Exacting Essence and Salvation. Follow James on Twitter: @JamesWymore.
S.A. Butler happens to be my sister. That’s not why I like her books — I like them because she’ll cheerfully take on a damaged genre like vampire romance, and fix it, by getting it back to its roots in violence, danger, and the possible end of the world. Her debut is Sonya Fletcher: Monster Hunter, a tale of the daughter of Death rallying monsters (including, yes, vampires) and monster hunters in an effort to fend off an apocalypse of her own making. Ms. Butler blogs (here), and you can (and should) follow her on Twitter: @S_A_Butler.
James Batchelor (Twitter: @jamesmbatchelor) writes complicated dynastic yarns about crusaders: sort of a George R.R. Martin, without magic, and with a heart. His first is The Knights Dawning. He publishes through Pendant Publishing, which hosts his blog as well as a bookshop.
Please check them all out.
My friend James Wymore has a new book out. It’s called Exacting Essence, and it’s a YA adventure-horror tale in which James tackles the most evil force the universe has ever known.
That’s right: clowns.
To celebrate Exacting Essence, James, and his work, I invited him over here and asked him three question.
Q: You’re all over the map in speculative fiction — steampunk, epic fantasy, YA thrillers. If you could narrow down the James Wymore brand to three words, what would those words be?
JW: Setting has meaning!
Q: You write, you promote, you edit, you publish, you’re the Energizer Bunny of the Utah writing scene. What do you do to replenish your energy when it runs low?
JW: Writing IS how I replenish my energy. It’s my escape.
Q: Seriously, isn’t it hard to be so handsome?
JW: Well, I’ve found tall men are ALL handsome, so it was just luck. When I am fending off the “many” admirers, I just remind myself how difficult it must be for them to endure this chiseled visage. Wait, that was my wonderful friend, Fiction, once again gracing my psyche.
* * *
There’ll be a Facebook release party for Exacting Essence this Saturday. And don’t forget to find and follow James on Twitter: @JamesWymore.
From the time I read Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum, when I was in high school, I’ve wanted to write a novel about Assassins and Knights Templar. It would have been, I think, a story about two men who hated each other, but came to discover their respective codes and loyalties and the unforgiving terrain in which they found themselves stranded, gave them more in common than they had to separate them.
Well, I will not be writing that novel now, or at least, not imminently. James Batchelor has beaten me to it.
The Knights Dawning follows an ensemble cast of warriors, saracens and crusaders alike, with a special emphasis on the chivalrous fighters of the Dawning family, half-Saxon, half-Norman, mixed in their loyalties, conflicted in their aims, and spotted in their successes on the battlefields of life, love, and war.
I’ve had The Knights Dawning in my Kindle library for months, but this week I finally met James Batchelor. We had a good long chat about the business of bookselling, the craft of writing, the changing terrain of publishing, and historical fiction. Like me, Batchelor is not a writer content with generic fantasy settings. He’s also no more content with a story that is mere adventure than he is with a story that has no adventure.
I predict that The Knights Dawning and its two sequels will someday end up with a big name publisher. In the meantime, you can catch the stories as e-books, and if you pigeonhole James at one of the Wasatch Front conventions, make him talk to you about history.
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