Bonus Burn II

Lots of Bonus Burns this week. School starts on Monday the 31st, so enjoy it while you can!

All I have to contribute at this particular moment is an RPGnet post asking people to contribute their gaming and roleplaying blogs. I noted the Burning Zeppelin Experience, even though it's only partly a gaming and roleplaying blog. If you have a blog and you want to sell it, or if you're looking for more neat gaming and roleplaying blogs to add to your feedcatcher, check it out.

Web Redirect Protocal Alpha

I hope you'll forgive the link post, but it's time. It's less a matter of laziness and more a matter of the internet (especially Twitter) turning up a huge wealth of nifty stuff over the last week, nifty stuff that I want to share with you, my devoted readers, before it all becomes obsolete:

• The World's first Muslim Superheroes to come to British television - a team of super-powered Muslims, with abilities tied to the 99 Attributes of God. Most importantly, these are superheroes tied to traits like Mercy. The show is intentionally aimed to counter the influence of violent radicals, spreading a message that while it's neat to be Muslim, it's also important to be accepting , peaceful, and cooperative. If it works, it'll be a testament to the power of fantasy.
• This was just cool and you should read it.
• And finally, a blog post about why it's often important to not explain everything about magic. For magic to be magical it needs to be, well, magical. Good article. Enjoy

And finally, for your viewing pleasure:

A list of fantasy covers, sorting the prevalence of diferent cover elements. The list (I'm not sure why the image insists on being so small!) includes dragons, swords, citadels, and meaningless blackness, among others.

I'm surprised that the chart does not include gratuitous leg, breast, and panty shots.

I'm also increasingly terrified that the process of getting A Knight of the Land published may lead me to kill all humans, which would be depressing.

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Remember that in addition to tweeting cool links and images in my presence, you can also get a picture or link tossed up on the Burning Zeppelin Experience by posting it in a comment, hoping it catches my eye, and waiting until I'm lazy/busy enough to do a lame internet post rather than a real post.

Till next time, have fun.

This, I've GOT to share.

Thanks, Scattercat!

Johnny Jordan <3<3

Found in the bathroom at the cafe where I do my lesson planning, written on the wall in black permanent marker:

"Your soul was made for eating," said Johnny Jordan at midnight. He'd lasted a long time without eating souls and he was very happy about himself. He was also stupid. Very, very stupid.

Johnny Jordan <3<3

I wish I had a digital camera so I could capture for you the true strangeness of this moment, but you will have to make do with my meagre efforts at reproduction.

Who is Johnny Jordan? The closest I could come was an English former professional soccer player named Johnny William Jordan, and I can't imagine that's who our enigmatic graffiti artist was talking about. English soccer players don't eat souls, right?

Right?

H.P. H.P. Hurray for Lovecraft Day!

According to Wikipedia (and blessed be its name), today is the birthday of the immortal (for "that is not dead which can eternal lie / and with strange eons even death may die") Howard Phillips Lovecraft. That makes today... Tentacle Day? Lovecraft Day? Extra-Galactic Horror and Hatefulness Day? The geeks of the world have not yet united behind a single vision of how to celebrate the life and works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, but I'm sure we will. Soon. The revolution is coming.

To do my part to spread the Lovecraft, here are a few links you might find titillating (or terrifying) (or both):

• A list of lovecraft quotes I found, just now, looking to confirm the exact wording of the "death may die" quote above.
• The Drabblecast's newest episode features some H.P. Lovecraft poetry and a Lovecraft-inspired story.
• A Pseudopod story from some weeks ago that pokes gentle (and loving, I'm sure) fun at Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth.
• To toot my own horn: a rather silly (musical) Burning Zeppelin post from quite a while ago, a Call of Cthulhu character posted on my blog as part of my (currently suspended) project to make a character for every game I own, and another blog post (I think) from Rabbit Hole Day 2007.

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Seriously, though, what is it about H.P. Lovecraft that we (ok, I) find so compelling?

The first is, simply, that Lovecraft is the father of a subgenre, and there's something kind of nifty about that. Despite never achieving much commercial success, despite honestly not being a very good writer, Lovecraft managed to touch a nerve. He tapped into something we thought we'd forgotten - some primal fear of the dark - and made art out of it.

But you know what? You've heard that already. If you're reading my blog, you know all about H.P. Lovecraft and how he came out of nowhere after his death and redefined horror and blah blah blah blah blah. You want to know what really inspires me about Lovecraft?

First of all, Lovecraft had balls. Huge writerly balls. Lovecraft made up words left and right, wrote the absurdly dense and flowery prose that he felt best served his fiction, and told stories that were far ahead of their time. As China Meiville said in a recent I Should Be Writing interview, (paraphrased) there's something to be said for tight, sparse prose, but there's also something to be said for lush, vicious, enticing prose that draws you in, sucks out your brain, and gives it back backwards.

Secondly, Lovecraft turned his life into art in a way that I admire. He was afraid of shellfish, so he wrote stories about tentacled horrors from beyond space and time. He loved Providence, Rhode Island, so he wrote stories in which the beauties of Providence were sufficient to draw the gods of earth from the rightful thrones to cavort among its steepled roofs. He was a vaguely racist, nativist, eurocentric weirdo, so he wrote... ok, let's leave that one alone. The fact remains, however, that Lovecraft wasn't afraid to mine every last thing in his life for inspiriation, and I like that.

So let's here it for Lovecraft! What the world needs now is Lovecraft! All you need is Lovecraft! Make Lovecraft, not war? Um...

Lovecraft,

Mark

Stuff It!

Most fantasy writers I know and know of have a love affair with stuff. Much like our love affair with invented vocabulary, I get the feeling that a lot of us know we shouldn't indulge, but we do it anyway. We build these fantastic worlds, and we want to show it all to you, not just the narrow corridor of the main characters' experiences and histories. So, we write extraneous stuff, appendices of history, pronunciation guides to our imaginary languages, huge, lovingly crafted maps, descriptions of noble houses and mercantile organizations and their intrigues. We don't want oto keep it to ourselves, we want to share it. We want to put it in the finished book. We want to send it to the publisher, so he can enjoy it, too.

In yesterday's Deep Genre post, contributor, writer, and former slush pile reader Madeline Robins gives us some bad news: slush readers don't like to recieve stuff with our fiction. No maps, no pronunciation guides, no appendices full of extensive historical details. In short, all the really awesome stuff that we loved creating but couldn't fit into the story... has to stay out of the story.

There are apparently two reasons for this. The first is that apparently including stuff in a manuscript you send to a publisher is just a newbie error. The second is that including all this stuff implies to the reader (in this case, a publisher) that you have neglected the story in favor of tons of abstract worldbuilding. While this might not be fair - in A Knight of the Land I wrote a significant chunk of a fantasy language, and while the story isn't perfect yet, I certainly didn't neglect it - it's important to remember that one of the businesses we writers are in is sales, and in sales, appearances matter.

Robins goes on to discuss what brought this up, a particularly frustrating fantasy series. Although basically a quality read, the maps and pronunciation guide were vague enough to be frustrating and specific and complex enough to be distracting, respectively. I can imagine how this would be a bad combination. Spending half your time peering at vague maps and trying to figure out where the characters are and the other half of your time flipping back and forth between the text and the pronunciation guide to figure out how you are supposed to say what you're reading is no way to enjoy a novel.

The take-home lesson seems to be:

• Don't include extraneous stuff in your submission to a publisher, even if it's stuff that you're sure the book will need when it's published.
• When the time comes (and may it come for all of us, amen and amen) for you to put stuff into a finished novel, make sure that the stuff is quality, that it is actually essential to the experience of reading, not just nifty stuff you want to add.

Otherwise, stuff it!

A Drabblepost

Last night, my friend Jon introduced me to yet another podcast - the Drabblecast - and today, I am introducing you to it. Or, perhaps, I'm introducing the Drabblecast to you. I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure which has more reality. Me, too, if it's any consolation.

The Drabblecast is good for fiction - 500 to 2k word short fiction, shorter flash-fiction, and 100-word drabble stories, to be specific - and good fiction at that. The Drabblecast is also good for news. Many casts include news items viewed through a hillariously sardonic speculative fiction lens; the one I just listened to explored the discovery of immortal and adolescent jellyfish. Finally, the Drabblecast is good for excellent production values. The narrator, Norm Sherman, has a wonderfully flexible voice and intonation and he peppers his stories with sound effects and music clips, producing a truly engaging listening experience. This means that even those of you who complain that years of headphones and boring professors have produced callouses on the parts of your brain that process auditory input - and therefore cannot listen to podcasts - have no excuse.

Anyway, I heard there was a cream for that.

Most importantly, however, the Drabblecast pays. 500 to 2k word stories will earn you 1.5 cents a word, which is definitely below the professional rate. It's also definitely money, though, so I can't really complain. A 2,000 word story will still earn you $30 and a moment of internet fame which could blossom into a following. Stories below 500 words will get you the dubious fame, but not the money. Such is life. The Drabblecast likes fantastic stories that are funny, weird, gross, and badass, but foul language and truly dark, heavy, and disturbing themes are frowned upon. Also, an "insider tip" (from the website):

"Luke likes pretentious stories that make him feel smart for understanding them. He is pretty lazy and good for nothing though so he probably won’t get around to reading your story and it will wind up with Kendall and Norm in the first round.

Kendall likes stories about poop, superheroes and vapid, saccharine relativist philosophies. He doesn’t like stories about vampires, pirates or ninjas. Send them anyways though, because he’s fun to piss off. Goofy stuff that doesn’t take itself seriously will make his day.

Norm likes stories with aliens fighting each other. He likes other stuff too though."

I think that does it for today. Listen to the Drabblecast (I already do). Send your stories to the Drabblecast (I will, soon). And remember, we all like stories with aliens fighting each other. And we like other stuff, too.