Now Blogging On TomNoir.com

As much as it surprises me, Google Analytics tells me that this blog still gets the occasional hit, which is very flattering. Old friends with RSS feed readers, I'm guessing. As much as I appreciate the continued interest, systemofabraun is no longer a going concern and I don't anticipate resurrecting it in the future.

Its not because I've lost interest in blogging. Far from it. It's just that I've decided to focus my efforts elsewhere. Exhibit A: TomNoir.com.

Not so much a writing blog, but I flatter myself that writers, especially SF writers, will still find a lot of interesting stuff there. I ponder at length linguistics, neurology, psychology, history and technology; generally it's all about exploring our relationship to the increasingly complex society we live in.

By most reasonable metrics, we now live in the future, at least as it was envisioned by SF writers of the last century. Technology is leaping ahead. Our social fabric and culture is transforming in ways that few people could have anticipated. And yet, we're still learning that there's a lot we don't know about ourselves.

That's where my interest lies these days. If it sounds interesting to you, come check it out.

Topics so far include

• Why the brain is not like a computer
• The real steam-punk computer
• Is txt-speak a dialect of English?
• When Bollywood meets David Fincher
• Why it's so hard to learn another language

Come say hi!

the future started yesterday

I know you probably hadn't noticed, but there's not so much going on around here. We had a few good times, sure. I annoyed a bunch of aspiring writers on Evil Editor's blog, started a flame war with a major science fiction author, and, most importantly, got published. Kind of a lot for a humble blog. I guess this writing this is serious business.

Sadly, for reasons too tedious to relate, it's become difficult-to-impossible for me to post using Blogger. So I think it's time to officially retire this blog.

I now hang my shingle up over at Tom Noir, which is the reincarnation of my original LiveJournal. There I tackle weighty subjects like culture, economics and technology. I'm not saying I have a lot of deep insights, but I do like to point at them and laugh.

I also do the occasional science fiction book or film review, which might be of more interest to some here.

And, yes, I'm still writing. Working on a longer project now. It's a slow process, but I'm gonna keep at it.

Anyhow, drop on by, say Hi. The water's warm and folks is friendly. I live in Florida, after all!

about me or, my Slim Shady

I suppose I should tell you a little about myself. Where to start?

Well, I was only thirteen when mom took me away from the commune. It was the middle of the night and she was shaking. We hitched rides from truckers all the way to Knoxville. Mom worked two jobs there, one as an IHOP waitress and one as a meter maid. I got a job running moonshine in a golf cart for a guy named Bill until Mom got run over by a lady trying to parallel park a Hummer. I was so mad that I covered the lady's lawn in moonshine and torched it. First the cops came after me, and then Bill, for taking his booze, so I hightailed it to California. There I got involved in a startup in Silicon Valley, ScrapHappy.com. We were gonna be the Amazon.com of plywood. Our shares split twice before the end.

I had been skimming money off the top until one of the partners caught me at it. Fortunately Bill showed up right at that moment and shot the guy, mistaking him for me. I escaped and spent a year wandering the country as a freelance sign painter - I hung a blank one round my neck and told folks I'd paint it for food. Eventually my restless feet took me back to the commune of my youth - but I found it had been taken over by a group of agri-terrorists who were growing stinky organic crops to overthrow the farming proletariat. After some small misunderstandings, I helped them setup a website and sell the stuff online, mostly to the French. Eventually we incorporated and then were bought out by a rival company. As one of V.P.'s I was paid millions to go quietly. I have since settled in Oregon and now am trying to breed an exciting new strain of red oranges.

FYI I've been MIA but I'll BRB ASAP

Guys, I'm sorry I haven't been around much, I really am!

Rather tragically, I do most of my blogging from work anymore. I've been MIA pretty much since they blocked Blogger on our network. At home I of course have a connection, but some health issues have been insuring that I don't leave my desk job and go straight home to get on yet another computer.

In spite of all that, I am trying to write. Go check out The Ghosts of Blackmoon Rift, my ongoing serial space opera, and let me know what you think. I've had a lot of fun working on it and in the future I plan to post some lessons I've learned from this process.

The number one great thing about it, I think, is that it's such a loose and unserious enterprise that I feel like I have a great deal of freedom to just try stuff and not worry about whether or not it's Art for the Ages (hint: no).

adventures in fiction

So I've been working on a little side projects, just for fun. I thought I'd share it with you.

This blog is the temporary home of the serial space-western, The Ghosts of Blackmoon Rift. That’s a little yarn I’m spinning in my spare time about a gang of misfits searching for an alien spacecraft in the uncharted badlands of a universe on the verge of destruction.

*deep breath*

My original idea was that I would have readers of my LiveJournal determine by vote the setting and plot of a short story, which I would then write. When the dust had settled, space opera was left standing. Specifically, a space opera set at the end of the universe. With free teleportation and a wild frontier that would do Davey Crockett proud. Oh, and there were multiple lead characters.

It was clear to me that this was not one single short story.

What started as an exercise in storytelling has since turned into an exercise in genre-bending. It’s science fiction, it’s a space opera, it’s a western. There may also be some romance, tragedy, gothic horror, you name it. I’m making it up as I go along, weaving a tale in short, serialized installments. The plan is to keep posting as long as people keep reading. Your feedback is appreciated!

agent orange

OK, I'm pretty sure everybody already knows about it at this point, but I have been really enjoying Nathan Bransford's blog. He's an agent who uses his real name, which is refreshing, but he's also as sharp and un-pretentious a peddler of literary fiction as you are ever likely to find. I'll own it, I guess, I tend to have literary aspirations even when I write genre (which is often). I mean, I love a good pulpy plot just as much as anyone but when I write just want to go deeper, you know?

At the same time, I find myself bored to tears by 90% of literary fiction and/or the authors of said fiction. I'm glad to learn from Bransford's blog that I'm not the only one. I had always worried that it was some deficiency of character that kept me from enjoying those tales of repressed individuals undergoing mid-life crises, all rendered in ornate prose. Mix in tedious familial relationships and vaguely opressive religion and you've got yourself a literary blockbuster, but not one I can stay awake through.

Anyways, Bransford did a great job of articulating what's missing from these stories - a plot. As he points out, even Lit Fic needs a plot. It just needs a different kind of plot. He divides plots into internal and external categories. Genre fiction, romance and thrillers of every stripe rely primarily on external plots - the characters are responding to pressures or forces in the physical world. The novel ends when the lovers are reconciled or the bomb is defused (or both, ideally!).

But Lit Fic needs a different kind of plot, an internal one. Note that an internal plot still has a conflict, a rising action and some ultimate resolution, but these happen within the hearts and minds of the main character or characters. There may be external events as well, in fact there almost certainly will be, but these only indirectly impact the plot. Actually, all the external events are ideally orchestrated to reveal the internal state of the character(s). The so called "pathetic fallacy" is the most obvious method of doing this - if Jack is depressed, make it rain. Hey, it's crude but effective.

There are lots of more subtle ways of working these things, though. It's easy to see how this kind of approach could go off the rails - a disconnect on either the author's end or the reader's could leave the latter totally in the dark about what's going on or wondering why the book ended before the hero made it home, or whatever. And of course if the reader simply doesn't care enough about the character to make the effort, the author's valiant efforts to communicate their dire and complicated inner turmoil will be stymied from the get-go.

In spite of all the ways that the internal plot or so called "literary" approach can go wrong, it's amazingly satisfying when it works. For that reason alone I think that one should always strive to have an interesting internal plot, even when a strong external plot is already the focus of the story. I believe it enriches the experience for the reader, elevating your gee-whiz-cool twist into something more meaningful and memorable. And sometimes, if you've got the right character, in the right story, you might not need the bells and whistles of that external plot at all. You might be able to directly open a window to another life, whether it be beautiful or terrible or sad, or all of the above. And that, my friends, is Literary Fiction.

am I the only one

Am I the only one who writes with Thesaurus.com open in another window? Actually my vocabulary is not too shabby, thanks to a love of reading that I've had from a very young age. Somehow, though, I'm always searching for that perfect word...

neglect

I've been neglecting you guys rather badly lately and I apologize! Blogger.com continues to be blocked at work, which makes commenting (and reading comments) on blogspot blogs impossible. Which is really half the fun, you know? But alas!

I've been debating for a while whether to link to my other blog - a LiveJournal that I've maintained for sometime. I think that some people have already found it, though, so why not? So there you go, a blog that I update more than once a month. I don't post about writing over there very much, though, since I don't think many of my readers/friends are interested.

The most recent thing I've read (besides a couple of non-fiction books on the Roman Empire, which I am slightly obsessed with) is Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes. In it, the author does something that has recently come to annoy me: throw me headlong into his kooky SF world without bothering to explain anything.

Maybe it's just getting older but I have less patience for puzzling out what the author is talking about anymore. It also seems a bit lazy to me to make the reader do ALL the work.

That being said, Lady of Mazes is a book where the effort is worth it. I think the author leaves us behind at first because the ideas in the book are so left-field that you really have to engage your entire right brain to catch up with him. Once you do, though, it's like "Ahhhhhhh!"

Anyways, like most Big Idea books this one gets a little silly and muddled towards the end. Still totally worth it, though, one of the best pure SF books I've read in a while.

the voice of reason

Before I get into it, it appears that Blogger is partially blocked at work. That is, I can read blogspots but I can't post or comment. This is very annoying. It may be temporary, as sometimes stuff gets blocked and then unblocked, but in the meantime, don't think I'm ignoring you.

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Somewhat on impulse tonight I purchased the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Well, my cousin Jo and I wanted to watch something funny and I had recently remembered how much I liked that movie. Very, very funny film.

Key quote:

Perry: If you look up 'idiot' in the dictionary, do you know what you'll find?
Harry: A picture of myself?
Perry: NO. The definition of the word 'idiot'. Which you ARE!

Anyways, apart from the witty repartee, the film is funny because it is narrated by slap-happy thief Harry, who in addition to his more ordinary duties as narrator interjects color commentary, rewinds, pauses, talks to the audience and offers criticism of the film itself. I love it.

And I realized that many of my favorite films feature a narrator, often one who is also the protagonist:

In Fight Club the narrator is our guide through his own strange fall from yuppy-dom and increasingly complicated relationship with the super-heated chunk of id that is Tyler Durden.

Last week I watched Thank You For Smoking, and sure enough, this brilliantly witty and sardonic film strings together its fabulous satire on smoking with the voice of the main character, the head lobbyist for Big Tobacco.

Amelie has a narrator, too, though it's not our heroine in this case. But since Amelie herself is quiet and shy, we need someone to walk us through her marvellous journey out of the shell she lives in.

Intrusive narrators have been out of vogue this century for novels and this is even more true for film. The theory is that hearing a helpful narrative voice takes the reader or viewer out of the moment. But like most things, this is only true when it's done badly. Good narration that really adds something besides a simple catalog of the events on screen feels very natural.

After all, there was a day not many millenia ago when a narrator was all one had, when that helpful voice WAS the story. I think that oral tradition of storytelling is still wired into our brains somehow: the voice speaking directly to us, sharing with us this fantastic thing that happened to them quite recently, and oh if only we were there. The power of this voice to amuse, to move and to engage us should not be underestimated.

paging Dr. Archer

Betsy over @ Sex Scenes at Starbucks keeps saying nice things about my story and making me blush. I especially like the idea of The Comfort of Mirrors as a "requested story". It makes me sound so professional. Actually, I just happened to have the idea for concurrently with her suggestion that I submit something. Things worked out happily, as you can see.

As noted below, please read it and let me know what you think. I like to think I can take just about any criticism since a) it's actually published and b) there's no possibility of changing it at this point.

You should read the rest of Electric Spec's current issue, too. It's a nice mix of sci-fi, fantasy with a little humor mixed in. I understand that big 'zines like F&SF get more Fantasy than they can handle and prefer SF. I wonder if that's true at ES.

I certainly find that my stories trend towards the fantastic rather than SF. Mirrors is easily the hardest SF I've ever written (I mean that in the "hard SF" kind of way, not as in "the most difficult") and it's not very. Really I just like writing stories that take reality as we know it and tweak one aspect of it slightly. Sometimes that lends itself to the SF metaphor, sometimes not.