Heat Wave: Dry Tinder

Posted by natechen on

Helix

The first thing I noticed about the room was how cluttered it was.

Now, it wasn’t a mess like my desk is. There was clearly some kind of a system at work in all the piles of newspapers, computer printouts, maps, sticky notes and sundry other office supplies that seemed to cover every available surface in the apartment’s main room. But whatever was going on there, it wasn’t something that was evident to the casual observer. It looked like a giant scrapbook had exploded in the middle of the room and someone had just shoved the resulting mess into piles.

The guy who had let us in looked more like a computer repairman than a scrapbooker, though. He was fingering the warrant Bob Sanders had given him suspiciously, like he thought it might be a fake. “Nice place you got here,” I said as I headed towards the back of the flat. “Anyone else home?”

“No, I live here alone. Can I ask what this is all about?”

“Relax Mr. Mosburger,” Sanders said, waving me on to check out the rest of the apartment, “we’re just here to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?” Mosburger demanded. “I haven’t done anything illegal!”

“Not exactly illegal, no. But you’ve purchased a considerable amount of fire suppressant chemicals in the last few days and the city is in the middle of a two month serial arson case,” Sanders said, clearly trying to sound reasonable. “You can understand why we might be interested in that, can’t you? Is there something we should know?”

When it comes to questioning people Sanders is pretty smooth, much better than I am. It’s one of the reasons why we’re on the same team. I tuned them out and focused on searching the kitchen. Nothing of interest there, and it didn’t look like any of the scrapbooking materials had migrated out this far. I checked out the window on the fire escape too, just to be thorough. As I suspected, there wasn’t anything out there either.

Mona Templeton was emerging from the bedroom door in the other corner of the main room as I stepped in from the kitchen. She gave a slight shake of her head to let me know she hadn’t found anything very interesting either, then went back to stand by the door with Jack Howell. I turned up my Sanders filter and began looking over Mosburger’s scrapbooking efforts.

It was pretty interesting, really, especially to someone like me who’s technically a part of the FBI. It looked like he had been collecting newspaper clippings on similar crimes from the local newspapers, the paper from the state capitol, plus a few local news feeds and local gossip. It’d be impressive, if it wasn’t so disturbing. I wondered exactly what he did with it all.

The largest stack of recent clippings looked like they all dealt with the string of arsons Sanders had mentioned. I picked up the top clipping only to find that it was taped to the next and the next. It looked like pushpins had been stuck through the paper in some places. There was a corkboard near the desk and I took the stack over to it. There were plenty of pushpins to stick through the holes, in fact more than was really needed just to hold the selection of clippings to the board. I realized as I pushed the pins in that they didn’t just hold the clippings up, if I were to fill in all the holes there would be a pin by the name and address of each of the arson victims.

“Hey Jack,” I called. “Come look at this.”

Mosburger noticed what I was looking at and his expression clouded up. “What are you doing?”

“Searching your apartment, like the warrant says,” I replied. Jack came over and peeked at the clippings. “Do you see what I see, Jack?”

“Looks like someone’s been admiring our arsonist’s handiwork,” Jack said. “Maybe even keeping a record of his own achievements.”

Mosburger grit his teeth. “That makes no sense. If I was your serial arsonist, why would you have come here because of my purchasing fire suppressants?”

“You need the one to make the other safe.” I tapped the name of the first victim in one of the articles. “Alexis Moreau says she saw someone matching your description lurking near her place three nights ago.”

“If she saw me at night what makes you so sure it was me?” Mosburger asked.

“We’re really not,” Sanders said. “But you were tentatively identified by a cop who responded to the fire at Peter Morrison’s. You shouldn’t have stopped by the convenience store just a block away, but pretending to be a journalist and asking a beat cop for details was really pushing it too far. Most of the boys on the beat know the reporters they’ll be dealing with. Not that checking out your phony name was that hard.”

“Believe it or not, that’s enough for a warrant, given how bad people want to catch our man right now,” Jack said. “And here we are. So, would you care to take another go at explaining all this?”

“And don’t tell us you’re writing a book. You wouldn’t believe how many times we hear that,” I added, still sifting through the piles of paper.

Mosburger sighed. “Fine. I’m not a journalist and I’m not writing a book. But I’m not the arsonist either. I bought the fire extinguishers because I’m worried that I might be the next person he targeted.”

“Alright,” Sanders said, carefully considering his words. We hear a lot of strange things when dealing with serial crimes, and someone getting the idea in their head that they’re the next victim is just as common as some of the other loopy things we hear, but it’s particularly tricky. The person could always be right. “Why don’t we head back to the office and you can tell us exactly why you think that-”

“No, no, no, don’t patronize me, Agent Sanders,” Mosburger said, clearly annoyed. “I know it doesn’t sound very plausible but-”

This time I cut him off, handing Sanders another collection of clippings. I saw his eyebrows rising as he looked at the headlines. “All right Mr. Mosburger, there’s no need to get upset,” I said. “If you want you can tell us here. Why do you think you’ll be the next victim?”

He was clearly a bit surprised at my attitude, although he was also trying to divide his attention between talking to me and watching one of his other miniature scrapbooks pass through the hands of the three others on my team.  His head swung between me and the rest like the weight on a clock. “I… uh, well, it’s kind of complicated.”

“I work for the FBI, buddy. Complicated is our everyday.”

Suddenly the others were forgotten and Mosburger’s attention was squarely on me. “Speaking of which, I can’t help but wonder why you guys are even working this case. Arson isn’t usually your beat, is it? Or do you think this is terrorism?”

“I hate to be cliché, but I’m asking the questions here,” I said. Then I gestured to the subject at hand, his news clippings of the arsons. “What do you see here that makes you think you’re the next victim?”

Mosburger sighed. “It starts with their names.”

“Their last names all start with the letter ‘M’. We noticed that,” I said. “But that’s an awfully vague connection, don’t you think?”

“Undoubtedly.” Mosburger collected some thumbtacks and began pushing them into the clippings I’d started on, using one color for each different kind of data. “But look at this: Paul Moreau was the first victim. He lived at 1457 Ferntress, and his house caught fire sometime around three in the afternoon two and a half weeks ago. Amelia Morgan lived in apartment 812 of her complex, the fire alarm there went off at 8:22, shortly after she left for work that morning. Similar patterns appear in the other three fires reported.”

I felt my brows creasing as I tried to work it out. Finally I shook my head and said, “OK, I give up. What patterns?”

Mosburger snorted and pointed to each piece of information again. “1457 Fentress. Paul Moreau’s initials are PM. That’s 2:57 PM in military time. If you give the fire about ten minutes to propagate after it was set, that would be about the time the arsonist touched it off. Amelia Morgan, apartment 812-”

“8:12 AM,” I finished, as realization dawned. “Peter Morrison of 1734 Rothman Lane, who’s house was seen burning at about a quarter to four in the afternoon. Pritchard Mosburger, in apartment 1322.”

As if by unspoken agreement, we both checked our watches. It was five minutes ‘til one. I grabbed the radio from my belt and called our backup squad downstairs. “Bergstrum, check for an open circuit. I repeat, check for an open circuit. Over.”

Mosburger did a double take, looking from me to the news clippings and back again. “Check for a what?”

There was a sudden flurry of activity as Jack, Mona and Sanders sprang into action, Jack and Sanders moving out into the hall together as Mona carefully closed the door behind them. “Wait,” Mosburger said, suddenly alarmed. “Where are they going?”

“To make sure our arsonist isn’t sneaking up on us,” Mona replied. “And if he’s coming up the stairs to torch your place it’d be a perfect time grab him.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Mosburger replied frantically, “that guy is not your usual kind of dangerous. I checked up on each of the arson sites. There’s no sign of what he’s been using to set the fires, right?”

“The police don’t know,” I confirmed. “I suppose you’ve figured that out, too?”

“I think I know,” he said, “but it’s hard to explain and they don’t really have time…”

My radio crackled again, cutting him off. “Bergstrum here. We got problems. Security footage shows a man none of the guards recognize coming in six minutes ago. Over.”

“Templeton,” Mona said, talking into her own radio. “What are the odds the building rent-a-cop just doesn’t recognize him? Over.”

“Kesselman,” a new voice answered. “Whatever the odds you were about to give, forget it. The stairwell door has been forced, someone went through it who doesn’t have a building key, same as in the last apartment arson. Over.”

“Snap decision, Mona.” I waved at the papers Mosburger had collected. “You’re the expert; do you think it’s worth saving?”

“No,” Mona replied instantly. “There’s nothing here he couldn’t put together later, and I’m more interested in talking more about–”

“Talk about it with him,” I said, grabbing Mosburger by the arm and hustling him towards the kitchen. “But do it later. For now, I think it’s time to abscond with the goods.”

“Wait,” Mosburger said. “Your guys in the hall–”

“Are doing their job,” I finished. “They know the risks and can do their jobs. You, on the other hand, are a complete novice who shows potential. If you’re still alive in eight hours maybe we’ll talk about getting you briefed on a few things. Maybe even offer you a job.”

There was a lot of clattering as we stumbled through the kitchen, Mosburger was clearly not good at multitasking. I would have preferred it if he had paid more attention to where he was going and less to telling me how to do my job, but that’s admittedly not the way the general public usually deals with law enforcement.

“Look, Agent… I didn’t get your name.”

“No,” I confirmed. “You did not. Can this wait?”

“Fine, be mysterious,” Mosburger said as I hustled him onto the fire escape. “But you don’t seem to realize that this arsonist isn’t setting chemical fires, he’s starting electrical fires.”

I stopped in the process of climbing out onto the fire escape myself, one foot on the windowsill. “To be perfectly honest, Mr. Mosburger, I’d love to hear how you arrived at that conclusion. But later. We’re pretty sure we know what this guy is doing, and electricity isn’t involved. What makes you they’re electrical fires, anyway?”

For a moment, in spite of the fact that we were thirteen floors of the ground with me halfway through a window and Mona two steps behind us, waiting for her turn, Mosburger managed to look and sound more like a surprised college professor than a man with a strange scrapbooking hobby.

“Do you even know what I do for a living?” He asked.

“No,” I said gamely, “that’s usually Sanders’ department.” I finished climbing out onto the fire escape and looked down. For most people that would be a problem, but I’ve always been pretty good with heights. It didn’t look like there was anyone down in the courtyard below at the moment, so I helped Mona through the window then said as an aside to Mosburger, “I’m usually the muscle.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow, distracted from his line of thought by the idea of a man of a standing no taller than five foot three and weighing maybe one thirty in wet clothes claiming to be muscle. Since my evil plan had succeeded and he had stopped talking I told Mona, “Take him down to the ground in one piece. We’ll try to–”

I’m not really sure what we were going to try and do but as it turns out it didn’t really matter. Gunshots from inside the apartment sent me scrabbling back through the window while Mona tried to convince a still-protesting Pritchard Mosburger down the fire escape.

Now when a guy has already essentially proven his ability to find patterns we’ve missed, you might think me stupid for ignoring what he’d been trying to tell me for the last several minutes. And you’d probably be right. But in this case, I had a unique perspective. I knew how our firebug was lighting things off; you might say that fire is something of a specialty of mine, just like patters were obviously one of Mosburger’s. You wouldn’t be a hundred percent accurate but it’s close enough for most purposes.

Sanders and Jack piled back into the main room, abandoning the hallway at the same time I was running in from the kitchen. Both men were sweating profusely and Jack’s gun was missing. A moment later a loud series of bangs started in the hallway.

“Cooked your gun?” I asked.

Jack nodded. “He’s three doors down the hall, thrown up a sheet hot enough that it causes blisters almost instantly.” He held up his red and swelling right hand to prove his point. “That guy has obviously been working his talent.”

“Did you get a good look at him?” I asked. Both Jack and Sanders shook their heads.

Sanders wiped the sweat out of his eyes on his shirt sleeve, then poked his head out the door. By the time he pulled it in again his dark skin was glistening again. “Hallway’s still clear. Call it, Helix, do you think you can stop him without burning the place down?”

“I dunno, Sanders. It’ll be a tossup at first.” I leaned my head against the wall and felt the heat on the other side. Lots of people say that heat rises, but I don’t suppose they’ve ever thought about where it rises from. After all, what goes up must come down, right? Modern science has a principle that explains why heat spreads out. The eggheads tell me it’s called entropy. But for every action there’s an opposite reaction, and I call that a heat sink.

Someone had built a real whopper of a sink out in the hall. The heat there was pooling deep and overflowing its banks in angry red waves, only to run back down into the sink time and again. I looked over at Sanders. “I haven’t seen a heat sink that good since my grandma was alive. I think I can eventually cut him out and take the heat, but I’ll have to get close and it’ll take time.”

“I don’t like that. It could go anywhere while you’re fighting over it.” Sanders glanced out the door again. “Can you use your fancy heat sense thingy to tell what part of the building he’s in?”

“No,” I said. “The air temperature in the building is too erratic for me to tell what’s him and what’s just a pocket of cool air caught in some kind of eddy.”

“Just heard from Kesselman,” Jack added, “he says the door to this floor has been melted shut.”

That wasn’t good. And not just because it meant Kesselman and the other half of our team couldn’t get to us. It meant our man could sink enough heat to melt a steel door, and that took serious talent.

“All right, boys, it’s time to start taking this seriously,” I said. “He’s a heat sink and a good one. Is the building evacuated?”

“No one’s sure,” Sanders answered, “but I’d say it’s as close as it’s gonna get. Bergstrum says the security guards think about half the people who live here are out.”

And it was the middle of the work day. The reasoning there was pretty obvious, odds were  everyone else was at work. “You want I should roll him up?”

Sanders frowned. I couldn’t rush him but it’s also against the rules for me to do anything without his okay, so I settled for tapping my foot impatiently. After a second he asked, “How do you think he’s planning to get out of here once the fire’s going?”

“If it was me, I’d just crush the sink down into as small a space as I could and melt back through the door.”

Jack took his turn looking out the door. “Better decide something soon. The paint’s melting off the walls out there. The part of the wall he’s pushing that sink through is gonna catch soon.”

“Alright, try it. But careful, huh? We don’t want any more property damage on our hands.” Sanders glanced a Jack. “While he’s busy with that we’ll try and secure this guy. Keep in mind that just because he doesn’t want to risk a gun in all that heat doesn’t mean he couldn’t carry a knife.”

“I dunno,” Jack said. “Even if we bag him, we don’t have the right containment for him here. Are you sure you can hold him that long?”

“No,” I said, “but I’d rather have him under wraps, no matter how poorly, than loose this chance to nail him. Are we good to go?”

“Ready,” Jack answered.

I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, stretching the fingers of my hands out and pushing down on the heat around me. A heat sink of my own formed and the temperature in the hallway began to drop slightly as the loose heat flowed into it. As it did I yelled down the hallway, “This is Special Agent Double Helix of the FBI. Release your heat sink and step into the hallway with your hands up or we will remove you from the building by force.”

No one answered, so I grit my teeth and started down the hallway. Like Jack had told me, there was an open door a little ways down with a sheet of visibly rippling air in front of it.

Almost immediately the heat sink started to push down the hall towards me. As the heat got less concentrated it got less intense, just like butter scraping across bread. That was a comfort. He was stretching the sink out instead of just pushing it down the hallway at me. It meant that he didn’t know how to build a heat sink that didn’t touch his body any better than I did. It would also make my work easier if the heat was spread out.

I deepened the heat sink in my hands. As I pushed a channel formed between my heat sink and his and the temperature between the two began to equalize, spreading the heat farther and reducing the overall temperature even more. I was about to push even harder, deepening my heat sink even further, when he seemed to realize what I was up to and jerked back. The equilibrium between us broke and, although I pushed as hard as I could, trying to crush down the heat gushing up, it wasn’t enough. It slipped free and all around me, the world turned red…

Next Chapter
Fiction Index

Project Sumter

Posted by natechen on

Starting on next Monday, October 1st, I’ll be posting weekly installments of the novel I’ve been working on for the past four or five months, so I suppose it’s time I talked about it some. So let’s start at the beginning: It’s called Heat Wave, and it’s the first of the Project Sumter files.

So what is Project Sumter?

Put simply, its the federal government’s talent management division. No, it’s not an agency for wannabe singers, actors and songwriters. It’s the semi-secret governmental organization dedicated to monitoring and enforcing the law among people with what we would call superpowers.

Its been a long time since the Project was inaugurated, longer still since the very first government sanctioned talent took to the field at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln. But in all that time its been a firm policy of the government to never coerce the talented people it knows of and to do their best to afford them all rights of normal citizens.

Unfortunately, sometimes Project Sumter finds itself confronted with people who are determined to flout the laws of the land using their talents as enablers. And when that happens, the Project’s own talented agents and their highly trained supervisors and support teams step to the forefront. This is their story.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of changes that an ambitious man with a lot of talent of the normal and unusual kinds might want to effect in modern society. A man with the vision, skills and organization to make things happen could go a long way. People might even rally behind him, rise up and try to effect their changes through force. Maybe because they think it’s their right, maybe because they think it’s the only way. This is their story as well.

Project Sumter, like most law enforcement agencies, has a very simple mission statement: Serve and Protect.

Revolution has a very simple objective as well: Change, whatever the cost.

Heat Wave is not the story of their struggle. No, that might be as inevitable as the Civil War that spawned Project Sumter, but the time for that struggle is not yet.

Before every conflict a breaking point is reached. Sometimes its the last straw on the camel’s back. Sometimes its the steady dripping of water that finally drives you insane. Sometimes it’s the slow charing that finally burns through a cord or burns down a fuse.

And then the heat is on for real.

Cool Things: Soon I Will Be Invincible

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Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible is an adventure novel of a different stripe. Once upon a time, comic books were considered a very lowbrow form of entertainment. Thin plots were often called “comic book plots” by literary, theater and movie critics.

However, comic books have tried their hardest to grow out of their stigma. To some extent, they have succeeded. Grossman’s book is one example of that success. The plot revolves around supervillain Dr. Impossible and the superheroes who try to catch and imprison him in the absence of his archrival, CoreFire.

Grossman takes great pains to sketch his characters are real, believable people rather than the cardboard cutouts that are so often associate with comic books, fairly or unfairly. The result is a superhero story with a great deal of believable characters, if not a whole lot of believable wardrobe. Not that that’s a pet peeve of mine or anything.*

Invincible focuses on two characters, Dr. Impossible, the “villain” and the “hero” Fatale, a part of the superhero alliance dedicated to brining the good doctor down. Both characters are more a ball of psychoses than functional humans but, as Grossman points out, the events that bring them their abilities almost demand that.

While Soon I Will Be Invincible makes great strides towards believable characters it does suffer some from its close attention to comic book tropes. For one thing, high magic, high technology and even stranger powers all exist together with little attempt at a rational for their existence or function. For the most part that’s forgivable, because all fantasy and sci-fi rationalizations eventually boil down to just so stories. As Ben Aaronovitch puts it, “pixie dust, or quantum entanglement, which is the same thing except with quantum in it.”

Perhaps a bigger difficulty is the constant intrusion of back story into the book. Modern comic books are frequently based on characters that have been around for four or five decades, if not more, with immense backstories that readers are often expected to be fairly familiar with. Grossman tries to duplicate that feel by building a great deal of backstory into even minor characters, unfortunately sometimes it makes the plot drag a bit.  Since the long life span of modern comic book characters is now one of the biggest barriers to entry into the medium, I’m not really sure why it would be something one would want to duplicate.

On the whole, though, Soon I Will Be Invincible does a great job of combining the fun of comic books with the realistic characters of hardcover fiction. Further, it has served for a sort of template for some of my own writing. And that makes it this weeks cool thing.

 

*Edna Mode fans unite!

Trial By Fire

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Sooner or later, life gets hard. It’s the way of the world. You can’t get out of it, and how you respond is part of what makes you who and what you are. It’s in the hardest times that you have to show what you’re made of. Perhaps for that reason more than any other, fiction focuses on times of conflict and difficulty in the lives of its characters.

The people you see in a story, the heroes and villains, the protagonists and antagonists, show you who and what you could be. In some ways, they are set to destroy one another. It’s that possibility that brings tension to the story, makes it gripping and makes you pay attention.

But at the same time, its very rare for destruction to be what people want. Once again, verisimilitude rears its head. Most people don’t want to be destroyers, they want to be creators. Unfortunately, both are a part of our nature. In the struggle of conflicting goals and ideas, either can result. A person can do a great deal of both in a single story, to say nothing of a full lifetime.

The result is a dynamic as familiar as story and song themselves. Sometimes, when people pass through conflict they find on the other side that the people they’ve struggled with have made them stronger and better. The book of Proverbs says, “As iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.” While they may not thank their adversary for the lessons they’ve learned, they are still the better for them.

Crucibles purify gold and men alike.

I have always been fascinated by the dynamic between protagonist and antagonist, and I’m far from the only one. Lots of people have tackled the issue. There’s even have a particular term for the relationship between people who don’t hate each other, but can’t help fighting from time to time: “frenimies”. (Also, marriage, although that implies a closer relationship.)

Next week I hope to kick off a story that examines exactly how people change during conflict. The struggles we work through are not just circumstances or unfortunate happenstance, they are a chance to grow. We may not like it or want it, but if we want to really become the people we’re meant to be, we’ll have to seek that growth.

Because when iron strikes iron, the sparks will fly. And if we’re unlucky enough, the sparks will catch, and the sharpening of iron can become a trial by fire. Whether we come out tempered or broken will depend on what we’re made of.

The Glory of Edits

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Ask any writer and they’ll tell you that a large percentage of what we do is actually editing. The exact ratio varies from writer to writer, but it’s always more than 50%, usually more than 75%. Editing is something that needs to happen in order for us to do our best work.

Think of a first draft as a kind of experiment. You come up with an idea and write it all out as fast as possible, sometimes going so far as to ignore basic things like spelling errors or blatantly bad grammar (I’m not one of those writers, I tend to be kind of compulsive about squishing the red squiggly lines, but perhaps you are.) Then you sit back and look at the actual text you have an compare it to the idea that inspired it. How’d that turn out for you?

If you’re anything like me, not too great. Unfortunately, that’s the way of the world. Somewhere between the primordial idea soup of your imagination and the harsh reality of solid state digital memory a lot of the vividness and life in your ideas has a tendency to bleed out.

Now sometimes you have very helpful aids to keep your writing on course. Some authors assemble photographs of celebrities who bear a resemblance to their characters, or keep actual objects they intend to write into their stories sitting on shelves in their rooms. Visiting locations and taking pictures of buildings or rooms is another big help.

But at some point writing is about your ability to put word to page and make others see what you thought. It doesn’t have to be a perfect copy, because you’re never going to get that. But a close approximation is always nice.

So you edit. Go over your writing carefully. If possible, get another set of eyes to look at it. Do everything you can to make sure the words you write and the ideas in mind match.

Editing is hard work, and sometimes it can seem to create as many problems as it solves. Finding the right pacing, the right words, the right sentence structure and the right flow of story can be daunting at times. Often, after looking over a first draft there can be an overwhelming compulsion to take the whole manuscript and throw it in the trashcan (or at least the digital recycling bin.)

Sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do. But often times, if you take the time, you’ll find that what you wind up with was worth the effort.

I hope that you’ll find the story I’ve been writing and editing at least makes a decent effort at finding the kind of writing that engages you. If you’re wondering exactly what kind of story it will be, well, be sure to come back next week! I’ll be writing about what inspired the story. Then, a week from next Monday, we’ll kick things off.

Cool Things: Chilling Stones

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Okay, this one doesn’t take up nearly as much head space as the last few weeks. Chilling rocks are pieces of carved stone, usually soapstone. They function in a fairly simple fashion. You put them in your freezer, then you put them in your drink. Your drink stays cold, but doesn’t taste nasty due to melting ice!

They average between ten and twenty dollars and can be found fairly easily from a variety of online retailers. Most of ’em look something like this:

So what’s so great about these babies?

The possibilities, my friend, the possibilities. Dropping ice down someone’s shirt used to be a simple, juvenile prank that left water all over the place and was a pain to clean up. Now you can just slip one of these babies down the shirt and once the show’s over pop it back in the freezer! No fuss, no mess, quality entertainment!

If that’s not sophisticated enough for you, you can take the whole mess and sit them in someone’s shoe for ten minutes or so, just before you leave the house. Dump ’em out just before you leave then enjoy a new variation on the classic hot-foot prank! Just be sure to wash those boys off before you put them back in the freezer. No telling where those shoes have been.

Most people know better than to go licking a flag pole in the middle of winter, but they’ll never see one of these rocks coming the first time around. Plus, there’s no standing around for fifteen minutes while someone heats up water to melt them off, just wait a few minutes and it should fall off on its own. Previous comments about washing the rocks applies to this stunt as well.

Of course, you can always use them for scotch “on the rocks” as well. But really, the strange appeal of chill rocks comes from their incredible versatility. Put your mind to it and I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with plenty of creative uses for your little portable chunks of winter.

Heroes and Villains

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So there are people we call heroes and people we call villians, and no matter how enlightened and insightful we claim to be, we can’t seem to get away from those labels. So how do we decide which is which?

In the old days, it was white hats and black hats. The good guys dressed so we could recognize them, they were polite to the ladies and they could always stand up to the bad guys no matter how bad the odds. The bad guys, on the other hand, were cowards and lechers. Their wardrobe was just as obvious.

It happened most in Westerns, when everyone wore hats. It worked in gangster movies for much the same reasons. Or look at that great of classic movies, Casablanca. Rick and Victor Lazlo are almost always shown in a white suit, while Major Strasser appears in the traditional black uniform.

But in no medium have heroes and villains been more clear cut than comic books. With every character wearing brilliantly colored costumes that make them easy to identify, villains and heroes were never so clear cut as in the golden age of comics.

Today, people have taken great pleasure in blurring the lines between heroes and villains. To an extent that’s a good thing, because it forwards verisimilitude, or how realistic fiction is. Realistic fiction is good fiction, because it’s more likely to last a long time.

For an example of this, look at Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (or Emma or Sense and Sensibility). In spite of the fact that few modern readers can sympathize with the lives of young daughters of English landed gentry, the books continue to resonate with readers and, in fact, be very funny. Why? Because Austen was an astute observer of human nature, and her larger than life characters reflect people we ourselves know.

However, her central characters are riddled with flaws – Mr. Darcy’s pride, Elizabeth Bennet’s snap judgements, Emma’s inability to understand the intentions of many of the people she meets. This doesn’t make them weaker characters, it makes them more believable ones.

The problem with modern fiction is that it has a tendency to go too far. Central characters in many stories are now self-centered anti-heroes, or cowards who stumble to heroism entirely by circumstance, deliberately shying away from the character traits that life and experience tell us makes people good for themselves and their communities. This is just as lacking in verisimilitude as the white hat-black hat attitude embodied in the old western.

All too often the attitudes that fiction show us make us more fragile and disconnected human beings. Maybe it’s time to push back. If you drop all that in the fire and cook it good, what comes out?

Care to have a look and see?

Make Work

Posted by natechen on

A huge part of writing is finding the time to sit down and write on a daily basis.

It’s harder than you think. Ever tried to keep a daily diary for any length of time? It’s really hard work. Of course, you can make excuses for yourself, because if you’re anything like me you probably have a very boring day to day existence.

Got up this morning, ate toast with peanut butter, got dressed, went to work. Yay.

See writing isn’t just sitting down and trying to find five hundred or so words* to say. You have to find five hundred or so interesting words to say. And then you may want to check to make sure they have great rhythm, sparkling wit and poetic overtones if you have any ambitions of standing out of the crowd.

Like any skill set, that doesn’t just happen. I’m sorry to say that it takes a lot of work, the kind of careful repetition and constant mistakes that you’ll only be willing to put up with if you’re really dedicated to the craft. It’s one of those things that prompt writers to smile tolerantly when people say they’ve decided to write a book. Those poor fools, we think, they have no idea what they’ve signed up for. I wonder if they’ll make it through?

It often feels like make work, because half the stuff you crank out you realize almost instantly will never be fit to be seen by others, unless, of course, you’re trying to convince them that everyone makes mistakes. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever tried any kind of serious writing, the kind that aspires to something besides a B+ in a college course you don’t really care about. It’s the kind of writing that, no matter how hard you go over it, will never yield value comparable to what you invested in it.

It’s a lot like athletics. No one cares how many times you post a four minute mile, that’s not a real achievement anymore. But unless you can do that, you’ll never get anywhere close to posting a time that counts in competitive cross-country running.

I want to assure you that I don’t view what I publish here as make work. I take everything I do here very seriously, just like an athlete in training. But just like an athlete, I’m not always going to be in top form. While I’ve got lead time and the power to edit my work, and I’m trying to keep ahead a few weeks and to allow for unexpected events, I’m pretty sure I’m still going to post some downright bad stuff from time to time.

Hopefully you’ll stick it out anyway. It’s not easy to write fiction that is both fun and thoughtful, but I want to do it well. Things kick off on October 1st, and I hope you’ll tune in and let me know how I’m doing.

 

*When I first wrote this sentence it said, “five hundred words or so” instead of “five hundred or so words”. Fortunately I caught and changed the wording in a clear example of the kind of exciting editorial decisions writers must make on a daily basis.

Cool Things: The Destroyermen

Posted by natechen on

Taylor Anderson‘s Destroyermen series is based on an interesting premise. In a freak accident during the Battle of the Java Sea at the opening of World War II a pair of US destroyers, built at the end of the first World War, flee Japanese forces and sail straight through a rip between worlds. They arrive in an Earth with talking cats and a late Renaissance level of technology. They go from obsolescence to cutting edge.

On the bright side, there are talking Velociraptors on top of the talking cats. And the raptors want to eat everyone. Okay, maybe that’s not a bright side. But at least it helps everyone get friendly fast enough.

Mayhem quickly ensues, providing plenty of humorous cross cultural moments, fast paced action sequences and thoughtful considerations of how the world might be different if one thing changed.

To be fair to both reader and author, Anderson is not a trained writer and, at times, it shows. He can be a little wordy and sometimes gets distracted from his plot while reveling in the details of developing technology or firearms use.

But for the most part the Destroyermen series delivers exactly what you would expect from a series with its premise – good action, fun characters and a healthy does of humor.

That’s not to say that the series has no depth. Quite the contrary. It has a very impressive amount of it. In particular the character of Chief Gunners Mate Dennis Silva is well explored and carefully developed. The world also shows a great deal of thought and consideration.

On top of that, if you’re one of those that likes a good long read, the series is already on its seventh book, and looks to have at least one or two more in it. Anderson shows a lot of talent in juggling an ever growing cast and giving everyone enough screen time.

If you enjoy light, fast paced and action packed reading, the Destroyermen series is well worth your checking out.

Echoes of Granduer

Posted by natechen on

I’ll admit that last week I may have made a poor analogy.

People aren’t metal, you can’t just beat the problems out of them. Life would be much easier if we could. All those incredibly detailed, well thought out schemes for perfecting society might actually have a chance of succeeding. We wonder, if it seems like fixing our problems should be so simple, why is actually doing it so difficult?

More than that, why do we even find ourselves wanting a fix in the first place?

Let me try a different example, one that I think is a little more suited than the metal smith analogy. Picture if you will, an ancient stone castle now abandoned to time. You’ve probably seen pictures of them in England or Europe. Fortunately, you don’t have to have visited them personally to appreciate this analogy, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to come up with it.

Now, there’s not doubting that these buildings are impressive in their own right. Their towers and walls fill us with a sense of the size and accomplishment that just building them must have been for men with only hand tools and human ingenuity.

However, for all the greatness that we see in these buildings, they are still obviously incomplete. The are lacking the rugs and tapestries that warmed the halls, the furniture that made them comfortable and, in many cases, they are even lacking important structural features like walls or a ceiling. They’re not complete, not what they once were.

We are a lot like those castles, I think.

We feel like we should be a great building, safe, comfortable and useful. We see what we once were, and we want to be that again. But the roof is missing, the walls are crumbling and the flagstones are damp and uncomfortable. Clearly, we think, some adjustments need to be made. So we bring in some new carpet and hang some new tapestries, maybe even try to rebuild the walls with whatever is on hand.

Yet, even with a decent understanding of what the castle might have looked like we’re likely to find that, after a few months exposed to the elements, our attempts at repair start to look shabby and moldy. Without the blueprints, without materials of the original quality, we’re not likely to get far.

The conflicts and struggles that come between people, the kinds of conflicts that a writer struggles to portray in a good story, come when people cannot agree what the castle once looked like, how to rebuild it and make it great. Given free will and the need for each person to make their own decisions, that kind of thing may be inevitable.

That doesn’t make it easy or pleasant. And the fire of conflict is, in some ways, much like the heat of the forge. As we struggle over the nature of our castles the petty furnishings we’ve put up burn away and leave only the enduring stone, and we find that, as often as not, we’re back where we started, wondering what it is that will truly endure.

When the heat is on, will what we’ve made really last?