Genrely Speaking: Steampunk

Posted by natechen on

So it occurred to me in the middle of the string of steampunk spotlights I did over the last month that I never took the time to define what steampunk is. And for that matter, I throw around a lot of genre names without really saying what I think they are. This is significant, since genres, like most other non-scientific classifications schemes (and even some scientific classification schemes) are a bit vague and their definitions tend to vary from person to person.

A genre, for those who aren’t that familiar with the term, is a category of a work of fiction based on its style, form or content (according to Merriam-Websters.)

So, what are some hallmarks of the style, form and content of the steampunk genre?

1. A setting in the Victorian era, or a fictional world that mostly conforms to the social, political and economic realities of that era. In either case, an exception is made in the matter of technology. The works of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne are often used as an example. The British empire is an almost omnipresent force in steampunk novels, and very few things can replace it. It often serves as the driving force in science, exploration and economy, not to mention serving as an excellent source of political intrigue and social commentary. If Britain is not used as the setting or it’s foundation, expect to find the American West or some other frontier setting. Otherwise, you might be looking at a different genre. This idea is usually summarized with the question, “What if the future came early?”

2. An emphasis on science, progress and the resulting social and sometimes military conflict that these forces bring about. One of the biggest themes in steampunk is science. With all the change and turmoil during the Industrial Revolution, it often looked like science would swallow up everything that people had known before and leave behind a world of steam, gears and barely human creatures to oversee them (today this is known as the technological singularity and people are expecting to actually replace humanity, rather than diminish them). The benefits and drawbacks of technology will often be debated.

3. Social change. The Victorian era also saw the beginning of the labor movement and women’s rights. These themes are almost always worked into steampunk stories. And, of course, the British Empire offers a wealth of opportunities to examine the effects of empire. In some cases these things are integral to the story, in some cases they merely signify the era and in some cases these causes are actually advanced further than their historical benchmarks, to go with the theme of progress come early.

Are there drawbacks to this genre? Sure, all genres have their pros and cons. Many people think of the Victorian era as a time of great scientific progress, and it’s true that a lot of people were running around and writing down the things they saw and a lot of very useful machines were invented, but it’s also true that many of the ideas espoused in the Victorian era were flat out wrong. (Ether, to give just one example.) Yet steampunk rarely looks at what the Victorians got wrong.

Sometimes that can be retconned by taking more modern ideas and handing them to scientists who are beginning to uncover them, but that papers over the fact that science was hardly the simplistic, straightforward undertaking so many people, even today, depict it as. There were a lot of widely accepted “scientific” ideas that were flat out wrong, “theories” with no experimental support that were accepted just because they sounded right an fit the mood. Quacks exploited people with pseudoscientific medicines or treatments. Steampunk rarely tackles that particular dark side of science – it’s just not as sexy as Jekyll and Hyde or Frankenstein’s monster.

One thing that authors will probably find very appealing about steampunk is that literacy rates were fairly high in some parts of the world. The written word, we think, was valued. But if you look at the kind of writing that was being done… well, it wasn’t always that great. There was a kind of story called the penny dreadful, so named because they only cost a penny. And, as the name implies, they weren’t exactly great reading.

In short, while most people recognize that the Victorian era had its flaws, steampunk tends to idealize certain parts of it that were, in reality… less than ideal, just like all the other parts.

What are the strengths of steampunk? Steampunk is a very romantic genre. Exploration and greater understanding are incredibly powerful and captivating ideas, and steampunk puts these things at the front and center, giving the reader immediate and visceral buy-in.

Steampunk is also a great home for a large number of fun archetypes. The gentleman adventurer or scientist, or his distaff counterparts, the plucky heiress with something to prove (be it her scientific prowess, her adventuring acumen or just her general equality with men), the airship pirate, the mad scientist – the list goes on and on. It’s a lot of fun for writers and makes it a lot easier for readers to connect quickly with the characters.

Finally, there’s a great appeal to returning to what many view as a great era of history and throwing our own hurdles at them, asking ourselves how would these people have handled the problem? When that’s done right we have fiction at it’s best.

I’ve shared several steampunk tales I love, but to be honest I wouldn’t mind hearing about one or two more. Any recommendations?

A Day in the Life of an Indiana Meteorologist

Posted by natechen on

TO DO –

  • Wake up.
  • Check the radar reports.
  • Pencil “cold – mostly sunny” into draft of morning weather report.
  • Start the coffee.
  • Put miniature potted cactus out on back porch, so it can get some sun.
  • Breakfast.
  • Rescue potted cactus from unexpected rain shower. Too much water can make them swell up and burst!
  • Don heavy jacket, strap on galoshes and collect umbrella.
  • Drive to TV station.
  • Place dry galoshes and umbrella in locker.
  • Call Giuseppe Garfagnini, from the Parks and Recreation office, about that segment on fun things to do in warm weather. Suggest changing to a cold weather activity.
  • Give morning weather report – mostly cloudy, cold, small chance of rain.
  • Enjoy sunny weather on drive to local park.
  • Leave jacket in the car. It’s too warm for it.
  • Text wife, ask her to put the cactus back out on the back porch.
  • Roll up sleeves for segment with Giuseppe. Sweat through taping of segment.
  • Run back to car to grab spare umbrella to ward off sudden cloudburst. Let Giuseppe use it to get back to his car. There’s one in the locker at work.
  • Text wife, ask her to bring the cactus back in.
  • Receive reply from wife.
  • Remind her that the cactus cost twenty bucks, and you’d hate to see it wasted because of a little rain.
  • Receive reply from wife.
  • Remind her not to use that kind of language once the kids are home from school.
  • Drive back to TV station.
  • Lunch.
  • Check weather radar.
  • Give evening weather report – clear skies and cooling temperatures.
  • Drive home.
  • Receive phone call from wife, who says car battery died while picking kids up from school.
  • Point out that you just replaced that thing.
  • Say that yes, that doesn’t get the car started and you’ll be there soon.
  • Check radar reports.
  • Put cactus back out on the back porch, because some sun late in the evening is better than no sun at all.
  • Drive to local elementary school.
  • Spend fifteen minutes diagnosing problem with wife’s car.
  • Conclude that the car battery is dead.
  • Ignore “I told you so” look from wife by cleverly pointing out that the skies are clouding up and it looks like rain.
  • Discover that Giuseppe still has your spare umbrella.
  • Realize your usual umbrella and galoshes are still in the locker at work because you hadn’t needed them when you left.
  • Enjoy unseasonal thunderstorm complete with torrential rainfall.
  • Prepare to jump wife’s car in half inch of standing water.
  • Remember that prayer is an important part of a long and fulfilling life.
  • Jump start wife’s car.
  • Drive home, wet and cold.
  • Discover there is no warm dinner waiting for you because no one was there to cook it.
  • Eat cold cut sandwiches in gloomy silence.
  • See that clouds are breaking up!
  • Step out onto back porch and enjoy glorious sunset.
  • Bury miniature cactus.
  • Go to bed – tomorrow is another day!

Any semblance to people living or dead is strictly coincidental. Any semblance to real events is credited entirely due to the nature of Indiana weather.

Heat Wave: System Check

Posted by natechen on

Circuit

Here’s how to ruin a school system: Start by insisting that you want higher standards, and that to do this you want the best teachers possible. Then, hand over the task of finding and training good teachers to a panel of experts, let them organize and create a group of teachers devoted to increasing influence of teachers in the educational process. Allow them to extort money from all of the teachers in the system, which they can then turn around and “invest” into the political system, preferably in support of you, so you can help them “improve” the schools. Then, place more money and privileges in the hands of your cronies.

Allow this feedback loop to repeat until you enjoy total dominance of the political situation. Like all cogs in a machine, the schools that serve as your foundation of power will eventually wear down to nothing, the teachers will be instruments focused on ensuring your continued dominance and their continued easy life, and anyone who cares enough about the schools as schools to attempt reform will be jeered and persecuted until they quit assuming they are not outright fired.

The end result of this process is P.H.S. 44. It was originally an elementary school but was remodeled about twenty years ago and now serves as a high school. The facilities are old, the staff live in the suburbs with no idea what their students face day to day and no one really thinks much about the students who attend it. Certainly not their parents, either busy working two jobs apiece to make ends meet or looking to live off the dole for as long as possible. Assuming they aren’t stoned all the time.

Yet, grim a place as it is, the school is still the only shelter most of those kids have against an equally unfortunate neighborhood. Gangs, drugs and violent crime may seem like mundane problems to someone who can force electricity to do his bidding, but the fact is mundane problems can kill you just as well as exotic ones. And they’re more likely to do it, since there are more of them.

So, in short, if the Enchanter wanted to create a generation of instant orphans he couldn’t do much worse than burning their high school to the ground. They might even praise him for it.

But if the Enchanter could exploit the slipshod nature of the inner city schools to his own ends, so could I. In my case, starting with two magic words.

“No charge?” The secretary, or receptionist, or whatever politically correct thing he was, looked up from the papers I’d handed him.

“That’s right. It’s a factory recall for light sockets.” I tapped the small picture of the part in question, up in the top right hand corner of the page he was holding. “A bad batch of wiring makes them prone to sparking and starting fires. We’re going around and checking all the local schools to see if anything needs replaced.”

The secretary didn’t look like a very bright individual but he apparently paid enough attention to what was going on around him to figure out when things broke with routine because he gave me a hard look and said, “You’re not with the usual contractor, are you?”

“Hoffman Electronics was hired as a subcontractor on this job. If you want to know more than that, you’d have to talk to my boss yourself. Or your usual contractor  whichever you prefer. All I know is there are a lot of schools to cover, so if we weren’t here it’d be much less likely to the job’s finished before classes start next week.”

“Wouldn’t that be just perfect,” the man muttered, suggesting he found it the opposite. “Well, whatever. Are you going to need access to the whole building?”

I pretended to shuffle through my papers for a minute, making it look like I wasn’t sure. “Well, it looks like I’ll only need to check the larger rooms like the gymnasium and the cafeteria. Luckily the building got passed over in the last wave of remodeling, otherwise I’d probably have to check every light in all the hallways. Oh, and I’ll have to go on the roof, unless you can tell me the make of the light fixtures you have up there.”

He grimaced. “I didn’t even know we had lights on our roof.”

“It’s a safety requirement, I believe.” I flipped the papers flat onto my clipboard and smiled slightly. “Are there some keys I could borrow?”

The secretary apparently took my tone to be condescending because he looked a bit offended. “We only got one set, and they’re out already. But…”

He got up and walked around his desk and past me to lean out the door. “Hey, Izzy!”

There was a moment’s wait and I used the opportunity to work my way to one side, so I could see around my belligerent companion and down the hallway. Much to my surprise a young Hispanic woman stepped out of one of the classrooms down the hall from the offices we were in and waved. “Still here, Barry. What’s up?”

Barry waved her down the hall. Her shoulders slumped in resignation and she made the trudge over to us with the kind of resigned shuffle you only see in teens who have agreed to do something they’d really rather not, which was my first clue that I’d overestimated her age. The simple tank top, battered, undecorated jeans and grubby bandanna over her hair were more what you’d expect from a middle aged cleaning lady but her posture, attitude and wary-in-the-face-of-authority expression were pure teenager.

She was solidly built, perhaps a little squat, probably an athlete of some sort but with the kind of prominent cheekbones and fine features that her peers would kill for. The look Barry gave her as she walked over was somewhere between an impending sexual harassment lawsuit and a prelude to statutory charges, depending on how old Izzy actually was. Her reluctance to step over to the office was suddenly much clearer.

Many people in entrenched institutions can come to feel that they are entitled, not just to their position in that institution, but to the people they are in charge of. This can frequently lead to their overstepping themselves in very nasty ways. People will protest that this kind of thing is rare, but that’s small comfort to those who are taken advantage of.

I shoved those thoughts, and one or two bad memories that went along with them, to one side. The problem with personal experience is that you, personally, are a very small sample size. Many, if not the majority, of the things you’ll experience in your life are abnormal and thus a bad measuring stick for judging new things. I knew that Barry was more than likely a normal man in a normal job who had never developed the self-control necessary not to leer at any attractive woman he saw.

I also knew that the surveillance systems I was about to install around the school didn’t have to be removed immediately.

Secure in the knowledge that I could Big Brother the school’s secretary and, if need be, ruin his life so completely his grandchildren would feel it, I dismissed the matter from my mind. Arriving at that decision took no longer than it did for Izzy to walk the length of the hall and give Barry one of those pointed looks girls of her age are so very good at. Barry just jerked a thumb at me, his expression back to bored and apathetic. “This guy’s here to work on the lights. You and your dad will have to share the keys with him.”

With that helpful introduction out of the way, he turned around and went back to his desk. The girl rolled her eyes behind his back and waved for me to follow her out of the offices. In the back of my mind I wondered if there really was only one set of keys or if this was some sort of bizarre revenge for interrupting Barry’s work day. But there was nothing I could do about it either way so I obligingly trailed along a few paces behind, trying to get a feel for the building with my eyes while feeling out the girl with a few questions. “So, do you work here?”

She laughed and shook her head. “I could, couldn’t I? But not me, the system doesn’t really like hiring people who are under the age of eighteen.” Well, there was one question answered. “My papa is pastor of Diversy Street Evangelical, we rent the auditorium on Sunday to hold services. We volunteer to help clean the building, especially during the summers.”

I raised my eyebrows. “So this is your summer vacation?”

“No, that was last month. This is just filling time until classes start.” She shrugged. “There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.”

“True enough.” It did raise another interesting question, though. If there was a large group of these people here it could create difficulties. I was wearing a disguise, courtesy of the many talents of Simeon Delacroix, that involved a slight change to the shape of my nose, general darkening of my skin tone and wig of coarse black hair that made me look very different. But if I was seen by enough people it could still be a problem. “So how does this cleaning thing work? Do a bunch of you just swarm over the building on Saturdays?”

“During the school year, that’s what we usually do. But during the summer we’re a bit more relaxed. Like today, it’s just me, the middle sister,” she paused just long enough to wave to a similar looking girl around the age of twelve pushing a mop along a classroom further down the hall from where she started out, “and my papa. We’re mostly mopping the classroom floors.”

She led me into a classroom at the far end of the hall where a large man was unstacking desks and arranging them in rows. The faint smell of floor cleaner filled the air. “Hey papa, this guy needs to borrow the keys!”

The man placed a desk at the end of a remarkably neat row and straightened up. A good look was all I needed to be sure of one thing- the girl was in no danger from the school secretary. Barry would have to be an idiot to attract to attract this man’s wrath, and while Barry struck me as lazy he didn’t seem stupid.

The father was a huge man, not quite as tall as Heavy but just as, well, heavy. He was wearing a simple, sweat stained, red short sleeved shirt that let me see tattoos winding up his arms, the kind of markings that put one in mind of street gangs, and he had the weary look of a man who had been there and seen that. The hard look he gave me as he walked over warned me that, pastor or no, he hadn’t lost his street smarts. Or maybe that was just because I was standing near his daughter. I resisted the urge to inch away from her, it probably wouldn’t have helped matters.

The man held out his hand and I shook it, hoping I’d come back with all fingers. To my surprise, while he had a firm grip is wasn’t the kind of knuckle mashing vise you might expect from a man his size. “I’m pastor Manuel Rodriguez, I see you’ve met my daughter Isabel. You’re here to work on the building?”

“Not just yet,” I said. “I’m actually here to do an assessment, see how much needs to be done, the real work will probably be handled tomorrow or the day after.” I went on to give the whole song and dance about faulty lights and fire hazards again.

By the time I was done, Rodriguez was nodding thoughtfully. After another moment’s contemplation he said, “Well, I think we’ve got all the rooms we’ll need access to today unlocked already.” He fished a set of keys out of his pocket and handed them to me. “Take them for now, we’ll come find you when it’s time for us to lock up.”

I took the keys with a grateful smile, although I wasn’t really happy with the idea of someone walking in on me in the middle of my work, a little apprehension to keep you on your toes is never a bad thing. I’d just have to deal with it. “Sounds like a fair deal. Thanks, Mr. Rodriguez.”

The pastor smiled, and this time it reached his eyes. Maybe he wouldn’t be a problem after all.

——–

Of course, what I really wanted was to establish surveillance on the school building, and with the help of a very small earpiece and Grappler, back in the van, I was able to set up a couple of dozen tiny cameras throughout the building, inside and out. It took most of the day, but I got finished about an hour after Rodriguez and his daughters locked up their rooms and left. If the school secretary ever thought it strange that no one followed up the work order I was supposedly carrying out, it didn’t come up in the time we watched the school.

The day after I finished setting up my surveillance and settled in to watch, Project Sumter arrived and set up. I had expected them, although the device I had planted in their network to leech off their files had been found and deactivated the day before, while I was out playing electrician, so I had no notice they were coming. Still, it wasn’t surprising. I have only a partial understanding of how they work, but what I’ve seen tells me that, at the very least their superior manpower makes cracking cases as easy for them as it is for me.

Also, I had deliberately left some electronic footprints to point them here, and to a few other possible target schools nearby. I didn’t have the resources to cover everything, and it’s always nice to have a backup plan. Heavy and Grappler both pointed out to me that a backup plan that want’s to take the lot of us and throw us in jail is not exactly an optimal choice, but then, that’s life, isn’t it?

By the end of the day on Tuesday everyone but the Enchanter was gathered around the school. There was nothing left but the waiting.

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A Road Map (Six Months Forward, Six Months Back pt. 2)

Posted by natechen on

So as of the beginning of April, Heat Wave has been running for six months. Last week I mentioned some of the complications that fact is already causing me, some of the decisions that I’ll have to make sooner or later, and asked for some feedback in how you might like me to handle them.

This week let’s look forward past the end of Heat Wave. I’m not 100% sure, of this writing, when that will be, but I suspect it will be sometime in May or early June. What comes after Heat Wave?

Well, for starters I have the seed of a second Project Sumter novel in the works. Circuit and Helix haven’t really been working at cross-purposes in Heat Wave, they just don’t like each other very much (mutual respect aside). Also, Heat Wave is going to leave some major plot threads hanging that I don’t want to leave unresolved for too long. However, seven or eight months of one story is a long time. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it and I know I’ve enjoyed writing it, but I also have a lot of other ideas percolating on the back burner and I’d like to share them with you.

So, for a month or two after Heat Wave is finished I intend to post several short stories on Monday, instead of novel chapters. Some of these short stories may be too long for a single week (leaning more towards 6,000-8,000 words instead of the usual 2,000-4,000 words I aim for in the usual novel “chapter) and I’ll probably wind up splitting those into two weeks of content. I’m not sure exactly how many of these there will be, but I promise not to spend more than two months on them.

At least one, possibly two or three of these stories will be set in Project Sumter’s world and will explore what some of the characters are doing in the time after Heat Wave or the early chapters of the next book. A new character or two may make a first appearance in these stories as well. The others short stories, however many there winds up being, will be stories with new characters set in new worlds. Hopefully you’ll find those stories, characters and worlds just as interesting as Project Sumter has been for you. Unless you found that to be boring so far. In which case, nothing personal but why are you still here?

Why spend two months dividing my message? Why introduce a whole bunch of new concepts before going back to the tried and true?

Well, for one thing, I want to tell these stories. The drive to write is one of the most important aspects of a writer’s life and I’d be stupid not to go where it takes me. Another is, while I have plenty ideas for short stories, ideas suited to full length novels are a little more sparse on the ground – and not all of them are Sumter stories. In fact, a minority of them are.

I want to keep telling stories long after I run out of ideas for Circuit, Helix and their merry bands. I hope you’ll come along for the ride, and to do that there’s nothing better than whetting people’s interests ahead of time.

At the same time, I do want you to stick around and see how the second book turns out. So, after finishing with the short stories I’ll take one week to do a brief introduction, as I did with Heat Wave, and we’ll start with Water Fall sometime in late July or early August. It’s been six months of hard work, but I’ve enjoyed it. I hope you have, too.

Cool Things: Clockwork Century

Posted by natechen on

Our last episode of Steampunk Month (a spontaneously generated phenomenon now coming soon to headspace near you) is dedicated to Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series of novels. Like all steampunk novels, Priest’s story is set in a world with rather Victorian sensibilities and retro-futuristic technology. Like Whitechapel Gods, last week’s steampunk offering, the Clockwork Century takes place in a world that is pretty much like our own.

Unlike, Whitechapel Gods, the Clockwork Century focuses on events in North America. In the 1890s of this strange, parallel world the American Civil War (or War Between the States, or What Have You) continues to rage off and on through a series of armistices, truces and perpetual ill-will. Like all good sci-fi/fantasy authors, Priest doesn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to explain where the South is getting manpower from, or how a mostly agrarian economy managed to match an industrial powerhouse longer than a handful of years. I mean look, the British allied with the South, supplies, mercenaries, time to develop new technologies, Progress! Huzzah!

Not that the dynamics of a rapidly industrializing society at war are really what Clockwork Century is about. No, most of the action in the fist five novels or so (give or take the road trip aspects of Clementine and Dreadnaught and the jaunt to New Orleans in Ganymede) is centered on the west coast. Sure, the stories range far and wide, but everything actually hinges on the abandoned city of Seattle, in the territory of Washington (which, with the war still on back in the states, hasn’t had much luck in getting admitted to the Union.) There, way on the northern end of the West Coast, the aftereffects of Dr. Leviticus Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine are shaping up to redefine life as we know it. In a strange, subtle, very weird kind of way. You see, while I love a good steampunk story the Clockwork Century has one thing I really hate.

Zombies.

Or, if you’re a resident of Seattle or the surrounding area, rotters. Rotters is the name for people exposed to a strange gas that started leaking out of the ground after Dr. Blue’s test drive of the Boneshaker, who died and who haven’t quite stopped walking around yet. For reasons unknown, they bite people. Okay, honestly they bite people because that’s what zombies do, but if you think about it that only makes sense when we’re dealing with corpses animated by a malevolent force bent on killing, maiming and terrifying people. Rotters are not those kinds of zombies (that we know of.)

So normally I wouldn’t recommend a zombie story to you, just like I wouldn’t normally recommend Lovecraftian fiction to you. The Clockwork Century stands apart, however, because it gives its zombie narratives context and handles its characters with style.

The blight gas that creates rotters is the focus of much scrutiny to the scientists of the Clockwork Century. Deranged people with little sense and less restraint, known as chemists to most of the world, have discovered a way to distill blight gas into an addictive drug and are selling it for pleasure or as an alternative painkiller. It also turns you into a zombie if you take enough of it but, like all addictive drugs, that goes without saying. There is the interesting little problem of these particular zombies being able to reproduce by biting people.

And the fact that that makes no sense does not bug me. At all. >_<

BUT. By constraining the rotters to Seattle and a few other places where blight gas (or it’s distilled form) has been around more than is healthy Priest manages to avoid many of the annoying cliches of the zombie genre. There are still people in this world. Civilization carries on. In fact the old city of Seattle has sealed tunnels full of people (and empty of blight gas and rotters) working quietly to figure out what they’re going to do about their private little end of the world.

And the people in the North, the South, and the independent Republic of Texas (which apparently scrounged up enough good sense not to get involved in the war in this time line)? Well, they carry on, too. They just have to dodge the occasional zombie outbreak while they’re doing it. While an argument could be made that the Clockwork Century does not have the transportation infrastructure or population density to make a zombie apocalypse the danger it is to a modern world, I would tell people arguing such a thing to read at least up to Dreadnaught before making that judgement.

And now I’m going to stop talking about the zombie part of this series, because, while zombies are just a horrible train wreck of crap that has been foisted onto fiction to the detriment of us all, and while Priest does a halfway decent job managing not to make her zombies much more than set pieces and keeping the action focused elsewhere, the real charm of this series is not in the zombies or even the steampunkness, it’s in the way Priest handles the world as a whole.

When I talked about keeping the story in mind I mentioned Priest as a great example of juggling characters. Truly, the way she does it is a wonder. I can’t say too much about it, as the nature of some characters are spoilers, but suffice it to say that just because a character walks off the screen in one book and isn’t seen again in that title doesn’t mean they’re gone. In fact, minor characters frequently go on to sprout entire books of their own. Case in point: Book 5, The Inexplicables. Or, to give an even better example, the many trials and tribulations of Jeremiah Swakhammer. (Yes, he’s as awesome as the name implies.)

The sense you get is that the world itself is alive and growing, with a lot of small, mundane things happening off the screen that stack up and surprise us when the narrative takes us back to people we haven’t seen in a while. Sure, some of the things that are alive and growing their ranks are actually, technically undead but hey, that’s just the price you pay.

All in all, the Clockwork Century series is well titled. It doesn’t rest on the back of a character, it doesn’t focus on a particular conflict. It’s much more an adventure through a wild, unpredictable frontier. An Old West you’ve never seen before. A war that’s not in any history book. And yes, possibly the end of the world in slow, shambling motion. If you love world building or character driven fiction, it’s probably worth your time to check out.

A short story entitled Tanglefoot, set after Boneshaker, the first novel in the series, but containing no spoilers for that book or any other stories in the Clockwork Century, is available for free by following this link.

Heat Wave: Smoke Signals

Posted by natechen on

Helix

Now I know a little bit about electronics, what with all the time I’ve spent chasing Circuit over the past eight years, but that only goes up to a certain point. What I was looking at was totally beyond me, a mess of circuit boards, routing cables, dedicated processors and who knows what else that only made sense to people with years of study or experience in tinkering. I resisted the urge to poke at it mindlessly just to see if it would shoot off sparks or something.

“Tell me, Shelob,” I said, watching the pieces slowly disassembled before my eyes, “why are you tearing the building’s surveillance cameras apart?”

Watching our building security chief work is an education in and of itself. You wouldn’t think a thirty year old woman only a few inches taller than me, with mousy brown hair in a sloppy bun and librarian glasses would be an expert on electronic surveillance, but then you don’t expect superpowered men in suits, either. Deceptive appearances is one of our favorite ways of staying out of sight.

But what is really impressive is Shelob’s concentration. She barely spared enough brainpower to speak, mumbling along in a monotone as she continued to run strange, arcane diagnostics on her gear. “Got a problem with the audio/visual broadcast formatting in one of the cameras on the south side of the building. Not transmitting right.”

Normally, if something like that is broken, we let maintenance take care of it. But our cameras are a special breed. Typical cameras don’t broadcast at all, and if they did it certainly wouldn’t be in a format an antenna like Shelob could understand. People had worked on the problem before, but no one had come up with a solution that did anything other that give talents headaches until Shelob had a breakthrough in her junior year of college and started her own private security firm. A few years after that the Project had discovered her but failed to recruit her as an actual agent. Instead, she worked for us as a civilian contractor.

That has it’s pluses and minuses. On the plus side, she can dress down, makes a lot more than me in a year and gets guaranteed holidays. On the minus side, whenever anything breaks she’s pretty much the only person working here who knows how to fix it.

Shelob’s new security station was located on the top floor of the building, down the hall from the offices allocated for the important people and right next to the staff cafeteria, which shows that our management has it’s priorities straight. Stay near the food and the security officers and you’ll come out okay, especially since you keep your guards well fed. There were still stacks of chairs waiting to be set up in the cafeteria sitting in the hall so I snagged one and flipped it around, sitting with my legs straddling the back of the chair and watched her work.

“Shouldn’t you be on break or something?” She asked as I settled in.

“Oh, I am,” I said, resting my arms on the back of the chair. “But, the cafeteria and break rooms aren’t set up yet and there’s no way I’m staying at my desk. It’s like a war zone down there. What’s wrong with your cameras? Something jostled during the move?”

“Not the move,” Shelob mumbled, sticking some sort of a cable in her mouth to hold it while she typed on her laptop. “I’m guessing Broadband was in recently.”

I frowned. “Yeah, last week. How could that mess up your cameras?”

“Same talent, different senses.” Shelob paused for a moment, then grunted, pulled the cable out of her mouth and started reassembling the camera again. Her hands worked on autopilot and her attention returned from wherever it goes when she’s working on her gizmos. Her expression became more animated and there was actual, well, expression there. “See, it’s like this. In the old days Broadband would have been called an oracle, not an antenna. He hears transmissions and is best suited to things like intercepting cellphone signals or jamming shortwave radio. Me, I’d be called a visionary, because I see transmissions and can mimic a lot of line-of-sight communications like IR transmitters. I can do a lot of the jamming type stuff, too, but audio transmissions don’t make any sense to me.”

Situations like this are what the smile-and-nod routine were invented for. I didn’t understand half of that, but it probably wasn’t important at the moment. There was one thing that I was pretty sure of. “You and Broadband were lumped into the same category of talent because you can both serve as radio transmitters, but that ignores a lot of the nuance. Not the first time it’s happened.”

In fact, putting cold spikes and heat sinks aside, I could think of two other cases of two or more talents being combined under a new, broader definition in the time I’d been with the Project. The problem with that is, as Shelob pointed out to me, we loose a lot of the fine details that sometimes make all the difference. The result is that a lot of the field agents still use the old terminology while Records and most of the higher ups expect reports to use the newer names. And thus, the Federal Bureaucracy continues to produce confusion at a stunning pace. “Still, I don’t follow how that messes up your cameras.”

She pointed the cable at me like it was some kind of weapon. “It’s your stupid rules.”

“Sorry, we have a lot of those,” I said apologetically. “Any one in particular?”

“The one that says any piece of Project equipment modified by a talent for greater compatibility with their ability must be equally usable by any other Project personnel with the same talent.” Shelob snorted in disgust. “It’s probably a good idea for some talents. But it took four months for us to find a way to let Broadband tap into my CCTV rigs audio feeds. Time we both could have spent better on other things. And if he forgets to switch things back when he’s done it feels like I’m having epileptic fits – there’s stray signals all over the place! I wish he’d just stick to eavesdropping on cellphones.”

I suddenly had a very, very bad feeling. “This thing, when you switch up the cameras so Broadband can hear them. It looks a lot like a cellphone signal to you?”

“It’s complicated.” She thought about it for a minute, then shrugged. “Audio and visual information have different formatting, radically different if you want it to make sense to us. A lot of the specialty in my gear is in the coding. But yeah, when you switch the cameras over to their oracle settings it looks a lot like a cellphone signal.”

“So, why aren’t you simply going around and switching off all the cameras one at a time? When the camera that’s glitching is turned off you should stop seeing the weird signal, right?”

“If it was happening all the time, sure.” Shelob shook her head. “If only my life was so simple. The problem’s intermittent, I only see the stray signal every couple of hours.”

The bad feeling got even worse. I tipped my chair forward and leaned part way across Shelob’s desk. “Shelob, where’s the new evidence room?” The sudden change of subject threw her off for a second and she stared blankly. “Evidence room, Shelob. You should have a building plan around here somewhere, right?”

“Oh. Uh, yeah.” She fumbled through her desk for a second until she came up with a slim binder. As she flipped through it she said, “I know we put it in the basement again. It looks like you hang a right out the main elevator, take the second hall on the left and there you are.”

“On the south side of the building?”

Shelob checked the map again. “Yeah.”

“Great. Come on.” I jumped up out of my chair and started for the stairs.

“Where are we going?” Shelob asked, ducking out from behind her desk grabbing her now-repaired camera in one hand.

Hopefully I was wrong. But if I was right… “We’re going to fix your malfunction.”

——-

There it was, a big, ugly card with a lot of stuff sticking out of it nestled in among the various other cards, cables and mysterious little metal boxes that live on the inside of a computer. It could have been just about anything, as far as most people are concerned, but the fat little antenna that stuck out of one side confirmed my suspicions as to what it was. The guy in charge of the evidence room, who I didn’t recognize and who’s ID badge was sticking out of one pocket, making it impossible to just glance and get his name, scratched his head and said, “You know, I don’t think that’s supposed to be there.”

“I know it’s not,” I said, setting aside the piece of the computer case and turning to poke through the evidence boxes that were stacked along the walls, waiting to be sorted and stored. I found what I was looking for on the bottom of the stack, naturally. “Give me a hand with this.”

Shelob obligingly came over and helped me shift things around until I could get the box out and open it up. “This is the stuff from our raid on Circuit’s warehouse.” I fished out a flat metal box a little bigger than the strange gizmo in the computer. It had been cracked in half lengthwise along an invisible seam and the parts left in the evidence box. “This is what we thought was a cellphone signal booster, a ‘lucky find’ Circuit left behind in his hurry to leave. Forensics was going to strip down and analyze for us, hopefully sometime this quarter.”

“Oh.” Shelob glanced back over at the computer. “Except it wasn’t a lucky find, it was left there deliberately, so we’d bring it back here. And he installed it into our network when he raided the building.”

“And it’s probably been phoning out packages of data for him ever since,” I said, tossing the metal pieces back into the evidence box. “More than that, I’ll bet it’s how he located us in the first place.”

That got a wince from Shelob. “Meaning this location is probably compromised, too. We need to let Mike know, and I should probably get back to the security center.”

It took me a moment to realize that “Mike” meant Michael Voorman. I’d never heard anyone call him that before. In my confusion I almost let Shelob out the door before I could say, “Wait. I need you to find Agent Massif before you go.”

She skidded to a stop, one hand on the doorframe. “Which one is he? I don’t see all of you often enough to keep the names straight.”

“You know, the one who look like a blond version of Superman?”

“Oh, him?” Shelob let her eyes drift half closed for a second, blinking every few seconds. It was a little unsettling, but I knew it was just part of the gift. Evidence Guy didn’t seem to be taking it quite as well, but that’s the drawback of a desk job. When the office becomes the field, a lack of real world experience can hurt. After about twenty seconds of blinking, Shelob opened her eyes again and said, “He’s on the firing range.”

I shook my head. “If they’re pranking newbies by ‘accidentally’ shooting at him again I’m gonna have somebody’s hide.”

“Does it really matter if they can’t hurt him?” Shelob asked.

“Everyone makes mistakes.” I shooed her out the door. “You better get back to your desk before being AWOL becomes yours.”

She made a motion which I guess was supposed to be a salute but looked more like an attempt to shoo off flies and said, “Yes, sir!”

“And you.” I swiveled and to look at Evidence Guy. “Get Forensics on the phone, do whatever you have to do to drag them down here and look at that thing. I want to know how it works and what Circuit’s been doing with it, and I want to know by the end of the day, yesterday.”

He raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “And why am I doing this, again?”

His tone implied that I was the field agent, I should be taking care of this, but I was not in the mood. “Because it’s in your evidence room, and you boys are the ones who didn’t notice Circuit had stuck it there after his little visit.”

The look I got for that told me I’d made an enemy, and foresaw trouble of some sort arising from the evidence room somewhere down the line, but he picked up the phone and dialed Forensics, and at the moment that was all that mattered to me. The only thing I regretted was not asking Shelob where the firing range was before she left. I headed out the door to go find it.

Harriet Verger was a seasoned agent with twenty-two years of field experience. Each and every one of those years was on display for all to see in wrinkles that scratched at the corners of her eyes and streaks of dirty gray slashing through her black hair. She’s Aluchinskii Massif’s supervisor and she was with him on the firing range when I got there, probably because I’m not the only one who doesn’t think it’s funny to give people a heart attack as a way of proving that bullets don’t normally work on him. Over the years I’ve worked with her several times, both with Massif and before, and we have a decent working relationship.

While it’s not really kosher for a Senior Special Agent to hand out orders to someone who’s not on their team, Verger has strongly suggested things to me more than once and I’ve found that listening to those suggestions is usually a good idea. In fact, given that she was eligible and, in my opinion, more qualified, I’ve never been able to figure out why she didn’t get Voorman’s job when the post came open. My guess is politics or a burning desire to remain on the frontline, or some combination of both.

Of course, strong suggestions work both ways and Agent Verger got to hear a number of them as I hustled her and Al up to the large room where Herrera and the rest of my team were clustered around the desks. When we came through the door I was just finishing up.

“It’s also possible that the activities of talents involved in this case have been compromised.” I absently scanned the room as I spoke, but really there wasn’t any need to bother. My entire team was clumped up around Mosburger’s desk and there was a lot of chattering and hand waving going on. From the looks of things, I’d missed something while I was on break.

“I think Massif and I can adjust our activities to take that into account,” Verger said, thoughtfully worrying at the cuff of her sleeve. “We’ll have to be extra sneaky, since this is Circuit we’re talking about and I’ve read some of his file. But he’s only met Al the once, and I doubt he has a good read on what he can do yet.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, dragging my attention back to the matter at hand. “I’m sure you and Massif can work something out. I’m more worried about a pair of new talents we met this week. The names are Gearshift and Amplifier. I wouldn’t put it past Circuit to try something with them in an attempt to distract us. Or worse, pressure them into joining his organization somehow.”

“That would be a problem,” Massif said, absently rubbing the side of his face. “He already has at least one other talent working for him, I’d hate for him to get his hands on another.”

“Where do we find these people?” Verger asked.

“Not sure, but if I can get to my desk I can get that info from the files.”

I started threading my through the desks but I barely got ten feet before Jack looked up and waved to me. “Helix! Get over here. Mossman thinks he’s figured out where the Enchanter will go next.”

Suddenly I was by Mosburger’s desk with no really idea how I’d gotten there. Jack and Kesselman moved aside and let me into the circle. I realized Verger was still a step behind me when she spoke over my shoulder. “I don’t suppose I could leave Massif here to listen in?”

“You can both stay, if you want,” Herrera said from the far end of the desk. “This is as much a part of your case as ours.”

“I’d love to, but I’ve got a favor to do for Helix. A sort of quid pro quo. Are those files out on your desk?”

That last was to me but it took a minute for me to realize it. Then I fumbled my keys out of my pocket and handed them back to her, saying, “No, in the second drawer. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” From the sound of her voice she was already walking away.

I leaned forward to look at the stuff scattered on Mosburger’s desk. “Okay. Where is he?”

——-

Circuit

The institutional fire door slammed shut behind me, leaving me in a gloomy atrium. Narrow hallways, floored with cracked, yellowing tile stretched away on either side. A display case held sad relics of the past behind fogged panes of glass. Bolted to the front of the was a brass plaque that said “Public High School #44” in engraved letters.

To the left, a sign on the wall told me the office was to my left. I felt myself smirking ever so slightly. If this was really where the Enchanter wanted to make his biggest statement to date, then so be it. But it wouldn’t be the statement he was expecting.

I rolled my shoulder experimentally, working the muscle to loosen it and wincing in the process. After being in a sling for a few days it was good to have the use of the arm back, but things were definitely not back to normal. My left hand was still a little stiff, but in better shape than my shoulder. But all in all, for what was in store today, it should be more than enough. I turned to the left and headed to the office. There was work to do.

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Fiction Index

Editing and the Internet (Six Months Forward, Six Months Back pt 1)

Posted by natechen on

Hello, and welcome to Nate Chen Publications, home of the Project Sumter case files and, hopefully some day in the future, other stories. Six months ago I started this blog with the intent of serializing Heat Wave, the first novel dealing with Project Sumter and the talented individuals that work for (and against) that agency. This is the first in a pair of posts serving as a kind of review of how things are going, and what I’m thinking of doing for the next six months to a year.

When I originally started this blog it was with the intention to do exactly what I’m doing now: Write a story. Make it available to the world here. One day publish it in some format, probably as an eBook and probably independently. Huzzah business plan!

Now here I am, seven months into that plan and six months into the serialization, and I’ve run into an interesting quandary. I’ve managed to keep up with a fairly demanding schedule of three posts per week, amounting to 4,000+ words, and one of the ways I did that was by having a backlog of material to work with. Great so far, right? Except, while I had a backlog, I by no means had Heat Wave complete as I wanted it to appear. It’s been growing and evolving as time goes by, as stories have a tendency to do, and like all stories it’s probably going to need a little editing when its done. I’m not talking about simple GPS (grammar, punctuation and syntax) editing, I’m talking about some structural work and possibly the addition of a scene or two.

The problem: Heat Wave is already technically published here on this blog. How much tinkering is really kosher? While having new content would give people an incentive to pick up the published version of the story, do I really want to be that guy? On the other hand, marketing is a part of business, and I started this blog in the hope to use it to advance my writing career. I want to have Heat Wave finished in another two months or so, and I had originally hoped to have an eBook ready to publish on the one year anniversary.

To do that, I’ll need to figure things out soon. So I’m asking for the opinions of my readers. Would you rather see an eBook version of Heat Wave identical to what’s here, except for some basic GPS clean-up? Or would you rather see new scenes added and perhaps the order of some scenes adjusted to give the story better flow? Would you object to the eBook having a special goodie, like a short story that would only be published as part of the book? Or do you have no particular preference at all? I’d love to hear your comments.

Cool Things: Whitechapel Gods

Posted by natechen on

Steampunk runs a wide gamut of themes, usually drawing inspiration from the likes of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells along with the pulp fiction that was famous for it’s prolific nature and low quality in the Victorian era. In many ways it is a retro genre, as much about evoking the feel of those days than about trying to tell a particular brand of story. So steampunk has a tendency to wander far afield. Where fantasy, mystery and science fiction are usually thought of as mostly separate genres, steampunk has a tendency to mix all three liberally.

But there’s one other genre that frequently, but not always makes its way into steampunk stories: Horror.

Not just any horror, either, but horror based on the madness-exploring works of H.P. Lovecraft. One such book is S.M. Peters Whitechapel Gods.

Before we dive into that, a brief explanation of Lovecraftian fiction, also known as cosmic horror. Cosmic horror is designed to induce fear through the idea that humanity is in the grips of uncaring and impersonal forces beyond the ability of men to understand or have any lasting effect on. These forces are usually personified as old and powerful aliens from the depths of space (hence the term ‘cosmic’), the most well-known being Cthulhu. Any attempt to come to grips with these forces, and in many cases even just seeing them, drives people mad. They leave readers with the impression that, with the exception of a few well trained experts who can hold insanity at bay, if only for a time, humanity has no choice but to accept eventual destruction. Their only choice is whether they will approach it in ignorance or insanity.

Cosmic horror tends to be popular among geeks (but not this one) and scientists (they’re not the same thing), but doesn’t enjoy much acceptance in the mainstream, which already has newspapers and MSNBC presenting much the same themes.

So wait, if I don’t enjoy cosmic horror much, why am I recommending Whitechapel Gods to you?

Well, mostly because it manages to dodge most of the failings of the cosmic genre while reveling in the trappings. For those of you that have never heard of it, Whitechapel is a part of London (which means that, unlike the other two steampunk stories I’ve mentioned, this Victorian era fantasy actually takes place in Victorian London!) However, unlike the real Whitechapel, the Whitechapel created by Peters is totally cut off from the rest of London, and England as a whole. Within its walls, Baron Atlas Hume rules with the aid of his steam powered robotic enforces, the Boiler Men and his majordomo, John Scared.

In addition to being the ruler, Baron Hume is the high priest of a dark cult that worships the horrific cosmic beings Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock, and assists them in the Great Work that will ultimately Destroy The Earth (okay, that last part is never actually said anywhere, but it’s implied.) Each of these strange, mechanical “gods” claims a priesthood from among the general populace, known as Black Cloaks (for Mama Engine) and Gold Cloaks (for Grandfather Clock).

Oh, and there might be some normal people running around trying to overthrow the Baron and his gods and restore Whitechapel to London proper.

What sets Whitechapel Gods apart from most of cosmic fiction is that it makes humanity an active participant in the story and avoids sidelining its villains. One of the biggest problems of cosmic horror is the way it tries to present epic threats to the safety of humanity while the majority of humanity remains in ignorance of the threat. Cosmic horror implies that this makes humanity ignorant chumps, with the exception of the chosen handful who have the strength of will to look extinction in the face and realize they’re doomed.

On the other hand, in Whitechapel Gods humanity actively participates in either advancing or preventing the outcome of the story. First and foremost is Baron Hume, who lays the foundation for the altered Whitechapel of his own free will. Following in his footsteps come the armies of Cloaks who read his words and trust his gods. Behind them all lurks John Scared, who pursues his own twisted ends and opposing them is the very Crown of England and its agents, plus many of the common people of Whitechapel itself.

Since the typical Lovecraftian horror drives men insane just by being around, it’s really very hard to describe them in the pages of a book. Any title that tries and succeeds is likely to have a hard time finding a publisher. As a result, we tend to hear people talking about these things an awful lot, but they never do anything of note (except possibly being seen by one of the characters and thus driving them insane). There’s a whole lot of build up without a lot of payoff and the villains of cosmic horror wind up being not the entities the stories are about, but the humans who destroy themselves trying to understand them.

Whitechapel Gods presents us with entities that are much more active and thus, much more sinister. Just the presence of Mama Engine and Grandfather Clock causes a disease known as the clacks, a disease that slowly morphs parts of the victim’s body into machinery. Grandfather Clock can see through the faces of clocks and watches, and spies on the people of Whitechapel to keep them in line. Mama Engine will not let her priests die, no matter what happens to them. While not present in the way the other characters are, the cosmic horrors of Whitechapel Gods are just as present and just as horrible as the human villains of the book, putting them several steps ahead of most other Lovecraftian creatures.

Now if all there was to Whitechapel Gods were a great story of creepy aliens plotting to destroy the world from the heart of Victorian London I’m not sure the book would be worth recommending. But with the addition of a solidly written hero’s journey and a slew of surprising and well rendered human protagonists, Peters does an excellent job of giving you people to root for as well. With subtle questions about what it takes to be a leader in hard times woven throughout, the tale offers food for thought as well.

Many books show you humanity at its best. But if you like fiction that takes a stab at showing how humanity can show its best even in the face of things that should be beyond it, Whitechapel Gods is a title worth checking out.

Heat Wave: Final Connections

Posted by natechen on

Helix

“He mentioned two other families?” Cheryl asked.

“Yeah.” I was sticking to grunts as struggled to see around the two file boxes I carried stacked in my arms. They weren’t heavy, but two of them together was taller than a guy like me could see around. I was beginning to regret agreeing to help her carry them into the new Records office, whether it made for a good excuse to rehash last night’s discussion with Senator Dawson or not.

“That doesn’t mean she was an adoptee.” Mona had kept to a much more sensible one box, although she was tall enough to see over two. She set the files down on an open desk and leaned one elbow on them, assuming a thoughtful pose. “Her parents could have divorced and remarried. He could have simply been referring to the way the extended families of both parents treated her. There are-”

“A lot of other possible explanations,” I said, stubbing my toe on a desk and muttering something very unprofessional under my breath. “I get the picture. It’s something he said, is all, and it supports the idea that Teresa was the daughter of one of Lethal Injection’s victims.”

“Duly noted,” Cheryl said, taking one of the boxes off of the top of my stack and moving it over to one of the offices filing cabinets. “And you honestly think that the Senator was just worried about Teresa’s health?”

I put the other box down next to Mona’s and shrugged. “He didn’t ask about the case and seemed pretty confident that we had Herrera under surveillance already. I don’t see any other reason to talk to me in what he said.” I glanced up at my former analyst. “Do you?”

Mona sighed and shook her head. “For now it looks like we’ll just have to be content with knowing that the Senator looks after his own. I wish I could say that was news, but really I don’t think he could have gotten as far as he has if he didn’t.”

“Speaking of looking after your own.” I matched Mona’s leaning pose and gave her a sideways look. “Herrera somehow got directions to my workshop yesterday. You wouldn’t know how that happened, would you?”

“Me?” Mona jerked upright and failed to look innocent. “How many more boxes have we got out there, Cheryl?” She asked, making a beeline for the door.

“A dozen or so,” the red head answered, following Mona out the door. “Since when does Helix have a workshop?”

There wasn’t much to do but follow along behind the two women as they wound their way back down the hall, through the large open floor where most of us field agents would work, and out onto the loading dock. As we walked I felt obliged to point out, “I’ve had a workshop almost ever since I was posted to the Midwest about four years ago. As you might have already guessed from the fact that you’ve never heard of it until now, it’s not something I talk about much.”

“I’m not entirely sure why. He made me a great sofa.” Mona said.

“A sofa?” Cheryl sounded surprised and more than a little confused.

“Yeah.” I waved that away. “But it was originally supposed to be for your anniversary four months ago. That kind of thing takes time. And I could only afford it because Jack paid for the upholstery.”

“Of course.” Cheryl piled three boxes into my arms, maybe as some kind of punishment for confusing her because her face said she was still completely lost. “What’s the big deal about Mona mentioning your workshop to your boss? Teresa’s probably going to need to know where it is sooner or later.”

I shifted the boxes to one side, then the other, in an unsuccessful attempt to look Cheryl in the eye. Mona either realized what I was trying to do or just didn’t want me spilling potentially sensitive information all over the loading dock floor, because she grabbed the top box out of my arms and added it to the one she was already carrying. I nodded my thanks and managed to hook the other two boxes under my chin. “You see, the thing is, I go to my workshop to relax from, you know, work. Yes, by building sofas.”

“I have no idea what you just said, Helix,” Cheryl said.

For a moment I considered taking the boxes I was carrying and building a little fort under my desk with them. That way I could illustrate my point and maybe finally get some time to myself. Then Mona said, “He wants to get away from things from time to time, that’s all. And with a chronic case of foot in mouth, he’s always hated anything where he has to be subtle.” I sent a glare in Mona’s direction, nearly spilling my boxes on the floor as I did so. She ignored my fumbling and went on. “Bob and Michael have shoved him into the middle of this mess with the Senator and it’s got him all worked up in knots. I was hoping meeting Teresa on his home turf would help him relax and see the situation in a less adversarial light. It doesn’t look like it worked.”

“I am still here, you know,” I muttered.

“Okay, so you don’t like having your boss drop by on your day off,” Chery said. “No one would. Bill it as overtime.”

“I’m on salary. No overtime.”

“I could bake you some oatmeal cookies,” Mona said.

That was tempting… “No. I resist all attempts at casual bribery.”

“Blueberry muffins?”

“All serious bribery attempts will be given due consideration.” I balanced the boxes I was carrying on the edge of the desk, next to the last one I’d left there, and rubbed my hands together. “Do these muffins have nuts?”

Mona laughed. “Of course not.”

“Then we have a deal.” She piled her box on top of mine and we shook on it.

Cheryl shook her head, amused, and said, “You people are remarkably easy to please.”

“Sure,” I said with a grim smile. “All I want to know is what’s going on in my job, kick all the politicians out of it, have fewer criminals on the streets and figure out where Circuit is going to be tomorrow so I can arrest him and finally get a good night’s sleep.”

Mona lifted a can of caffeine and sugar, Pepsi brand, that I’d been drinking earlier off the desk and said, “It might help if you drank less of this stuff.”

“Yes, mother.” I took my soda back and finished it anyways. “Any word on how Circuit might have found our building and broken into it yet?”

“We’re still working on that,” Mona said, her brain visibly switching gears as her face went from amused, but slightly worried, to just plain worried in a heartbeat. I didn’t like to see that, but she had come a long way from when she first moved to field work and joined our team. She was plain worried all the time, then. “No leads so far, but we’ve ruled out pretty much any possible perpetrator besides Circuit, another branch of the government or someone we’ve never heard of.”

“Another branch of the government? Has that ever happened before?” I swiveled to look at Cheryl, who would be in the best position to know.

“Not that I’ve heard of. I’m sure if it was a serious possibility the matter would have moved out of our hands and up the chain of command.” She frowned. “Still, shouldn’t the fact that he managed to call us on the phone been a danger sign?”

“No, that number routes to us through City Hall.” Mona drummed her fingers on top of her box for a moment. “Maybe it’s time Bob and I went and had another talk with the Forensics people, see if we can come up with a way to check if he was tracing that call to us.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Well then I should probably lean on Mosburger, see if he can work out where Circuit’s going to pop up again any faster.”

“Go easy on him, Helix.” Mona’s scolded. “He’s still new at this. You need to give him time to get his bearings.”

“I’d love to, but he got stuck on this case before he had time to get them.” I shook my head and started for the door. “And we can’t afford to wait anymore. If I know Circuit, he’s got his next move planned out already.”

Circuit

“No, I don’t have any idea what our next move is. I will confess that the Enchanter’s ruthlessness and planning has exceeded my expectations entirely.” I leaned forward across my desk. “But I will not substitute haste for preparation, Davis. We will deal with the Enchanter, then we will focus on Chainfall. Not before.”

“Chainfall has nothing to do with it!” My chief technician braced his hands on my desk and leaned forward until we were almost nose to nose. “You’ve been saying that the Enchanter was a secondary concern for the last two months. Now, he’s suddenly the hottest thing since sliced bread. You underestimated him, Circuit, and yet the day after his biggest fire yet you were off who-knows-where, with your head stuck in the sand! You should be out there now, pounding the pavements to find this guy and leaving me to do my work. Or leaving the Enchanter to the Feds and focusing on the long term. Either way, I don’t need you looking over my shoulder!”

These loud fits of indignation are a semi-regular thing with Davis and I accept it as the price I must pay for his brilliance. And I don’t use the term lightly, Davis is a brilliant man. His understanding of modern day industrial processes is second to none. Unfortunately, he often thinks that his skill with production translates directly to skill in strategy, and that he is qualified to advise my decisions. This is manifestly untrue, particularly as regards the use of my talents.

Occasionally, it’s necessary to remind him of this. So I stood up, causing him to back up a step, and rested one hand on his shoulder, which caused him to flinch. “There are many things that I do which are not considered admirable, Davis. Micromanagement is not one of them. I assure you, when I no longer trust you with work I will not waste time looking over your shoulder, I will simply find someone who I can trust and replace you.” I stepped around the desk and leaned in close to him again. “That transfer is likely to be very disruptive. For both of us. I’d prefer to avoid it if I can.”

I had to give him credit, Davis paled slightly but otherwise didn’t react. “But we are both in luck right now, because I am certain you can do what I want today. And what I want is to test the prototypes you’ve been working on.”

“I only got the designs for the second thing you want two days ago,” he pointed out. “And you changed priorities on me, too, said you wanted it before the hydroelectric prototype.”

“So I did. But I still want to test them this afternoon, and I’m sure you’ll have them ready on time, just like always.” I gave him a pat on the back and walked him towards the door. “Now, if you would be so good as to get ready for todays tests, we can get back to Chainfall that much quicker.”

As soon as Davis left, his expression suggesting he was already wrestling with the details of getting his work out on time, I walked back to my desk. From his place standing just beside it, Simeon gave me a wry smile. “Do you want me to start looking for a replacement for Mr. Davis?”

“Not yet,” I said, sliding back into my chair and taking just a moment to appreciate it’s sculpted leather depths. You can only call yourself a man of intelligence and culture if you actually take the time to appreciate what the intelligence and culture of others creates. “If nothing else, Chainfall is too far into implementation to replace him now. Besides, he’s intelligent and hardworking, both of which I need, and while he can be grating he’s always delivered when we need him to.”

“Very good, sir.” Simeon pulled out his notebook as I woke up my computer. “Do we really have no next step for our enchanting little problem?”

Pulling up the periodic data dumps I was getting from Project Sumter was a fairly complicated task but I managed to spare a disapproving glance for Simeon’s pun. “I have a few theories, but actually following up on them is going to be difficult. It would be nice if Helix had cooperated with us. Unrestricted access to the progress of the investigation would probably give us several more leads to follow up on. Have you finished your analysis of the books?”

“There’s very little to them, sir.” A shrug was far below Simeon’s dignity, but he still managed to convey the impression that he found the stories to be so much twaddle. He stepped over to the office’s side table, where coffee and other refreshments were normally kept, and picked up the books in question. “Analyzing morality tales is not exactly what I was trained for, nor am I a psychologist, but I do have one or two ideas about how the Enchanter might be drawing from them.”

I started my computer on collecting and decrypting the various data packets that had piled up in various corners of the Internet over the last two days, then leaned back in my chair and said, “Go on.”

There was a moment’s hesitation as Simeon extracted a sheet of notebook paper half covered in elegant handwriting from one of the books. “First, the primary enemies of the Enchanter featured in the books were park rangers and taxicab drivers. That’s probably the meaning of his last message, the symbol of the park rangers was a silver hatchet. The Enchanter’s own power derived primarily from a powerful network of propaganda and slave labor provided by orphans.” I grimaced in distaste. If I had been in any way impressed with the Enchanter up until then the feeling was well and truly gone at that. “Since our Enchanter hasn’t been able to gather any allies of his own, in part because he ran into us, I surmise he is trying to undermine what he perceives as the power base of the state he detests.”

“So he attacks the firefighters first.” I steepled my fingers and tapped them lightly against my chin. “Yes, that makes a certain degree of sense. But why not the police first?”

“The biggest thing the rangers do as a group is fight a forest fire,” Simeon said. “Perhaps he thought that made firemen a more appropriate target.”

“So the a good symbolic match is important to him as well.” Symptom of a disturbed mind. But at least it was a potentially useful pattern. “Propaganda suggests the newspapers, or perhaps simply the spokespeople for government. Maybe even mean us, since we’ve seen to it that his attempts to make himself known have been suppressed. But orphans… that will be more of a problem. Not many of them in the U.S., far fewer in the city.”

“In the literal sense, perhaps.” Simeon set the books down on the desk and folded his hands behind his back. “But, given that there is no direct corollary between most of the stories and reality, it’s likely that the Enchanter will simply look for the next best thing. Perhaps he’ll try to recruit from street gangs. They’re young, functionally without parents and likely to be amenable to his wants.”

That made sense, at first, but the more I thought about it the less likely it seemed. “No, he’s not to that stage yet, don’t you see?” I drummed my fingers on my desk absently. “These arsons are all a kind of grandstanding, he’s putting himself on a stage, trying to make himself so big people can’t help but ignore him. Forming patterns, sending letters to the police and to us. He’s aiming to be noticed and if he stops to gather a cadre of others he’s going to have to share the stage. He doesn’t want to do that until he’s sure he owns it.”

Simeon frowned but nodded, conceding my point. “Then he’s likely to be planning another arson.”

“Yes, but one that fits with the stories.” I picked up the top book and flipped through it. “The Enchanter calls himself an anarchist but he’s proven willing enough to stick to a pattern once he’s decided on it.” I paused as one of the short story’s titles caught my eye. “The Orphan Exodus. What’s that?”

Simeon leaned forward slightly to look over my shoulder. “Ah, that is a story in which the Enchanter’s rival frees the exploited orphans, and sends them to be looked after by his followers.”

I closed the book with a decisive snap. “Of course. And the Enchanter is the opposite of the king. The system is the king in America, so the Enchanter will turn the tables. And then he’ll have his army, just like you said.”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

I turned back to the updates from my mole in Project Sumter. “I know his next move, now. Thank you, Simeon.”

“Of course.” His expression suggested he wasn’t sure why he was being thanked. “Then, I will page you when Mr. Davis is ready to test your new countermeasure for…” he hesitated, clearly uncertain. “Is this new countermeasure intended for the Enchanter or Agent Double Helix?”

Although mostly engrossed in sifting the data on my screen I still had enough presence to spare a smirk and ask, “Why can’t it be for both?”

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Fiction Index

Overdoing It

Posted by natechen on

One thing that authors rarely think about when writing a piece of fiction is how long they want their story to be. That’s a mistake.

Now on the face of it, that seems off. After all, a story should be allowed to grow to its full extent, shouldn’t it? Rather than worry about your short story’s word count or spending a lot of time stressing about how many pages your novel is, shouldn’t you be doing everything you can to make sure that your story is as strong and interesting as you can make it?

Of course you should! That’s why you need to do everything you can to keep your story from being too long.

You see, part of being an author is loving what you write. If you didn’t love it, there’s no way you’d spend hours and hours slaving over it, after all. And part of loving something is the ever-present temptation to indulge it. To talk about it constantly. To let it do whatever it wants, not whatever is best for it. In short, you can overdo it.

Have you ever met one of those people who only talks about one thing? Their job, their kids, their blog, their six-years-and-running D&D campaign? If you have, you know that even if that subject interests you at first, there’s only so long you can sit and listen to it before it becomes boring. Now, depending on how interested you are in that subject and how interesting the person telling you about it is, it might take you a while to reach the point where you’ve had enough, and it will definitely influence how likely you are to come back for more, but the key point here is you don’t ever want to let a story run so long that readers loose interest. Ask yourself how long you would let the premise of your story keep you attention, then, if your story looks like it’s going to run longer, find parts of it to cut.

You have to be ruthless about this, because even when you’re doing your best to write with the most elegance and the least waste possible, you’re likely to find yourself running much longer than you expected to. Both Heat Wave and my previous writing project (which I may talk about more in the future) have run away from me with surprising speed. Heat Wave is shaping up to be about 10,000 words longer than I originally expected it to be, and I’ve only included about 80-90% of the material I had originally hoped to use.

Now that doesn’t mean I’m scrapping all that. I talked about nonlinear writing a while back and one of the things I’ve discovered the more you do that kind of thing the more willing it makes you to take material originally intended for one story and transplant it into another. You may wind up writing whole scenes that contain great ideas or fantastic dialog but aren’t directly related to what goes on in your story.  Save them for another story with the same characters. Or even different characters.

Have background on your characters that the reader doesn’t need to know just yet? Hold on to it for a later story where it will immediately important. That will give it more impact, because your reader sees both actions in the past and their consequences in the present in the same story. That improves both your writing now, as it removes extraneous detail for you readers to keep track of, and gives you a leg up on future projects.

Finally, trimming all that extra stuff keeps you within the bounds of the Law of Conservation of Detail. We’re busy people, who only have so much time to keep track of things. Do your readers a favor and keep how much stuff they need to track to a minimum and they’ll love your writing for it. Your stories will be slimmer, trimmer and more memorable than if you just let them run all over the place, and the ideas you’ve had to cut will be glad to have more time and space to develop themselves more fully, too.

I know that this is a hard area for me to practice what I preach. I love the extra details, the hints at the bigger picture, the long running threads that only bear fruit with time. But sometimes serving your story’s best interests isn’t a whole lot of fun for you as an author.The results are well worth it, though.

P.S. – This is a link to a review of Under the Dome by Steven King, which illustrates what I’m talking about from the reader’s perspective. That review was posted after I wrote this post, and I didn’t want to try and kludge it in in some awkward way, so I’ve just appended it here.