fiction Archives | Ian M Rountree

Genre Dodging (or) the Curse of the Self-Proclaimed Anything

March 12, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

One of the most insidious problems fiction has to deal with is the issue of Genre Dodging.

Simply put, Genre Dodging is what happens when authors ignore an element necessary for their stated genre to function. Like missing an opportunity for the first female victim in a horror movie to run in obviously the wrong direction.

When you remove a key element of a genre, even with good intention, the entire narrative suffers.

This happens all the time. We’ve got lots of examples. Whether it’s having vampires that can survive sunlight, or another form of applied phlebotinum – it breaks the rule of cool pretty thoroughly.

What you get, when you try to dodge your own genre too thoroughly, is something too far from the box. The quality of any genre-based work lies heavily on interpretation of that genre, not necessarily in making if better, worse, or pear-shaped.

I have to deal with this working on the Dowager Shadow.

When I built the world that the story takes place on, I very intentionally turned a few elements of the fantasy genre on their sides. I didn’t remove them (which is a key element in genre dodging), but I did twist them a bit. When you think fantasy, you’re liable to think warriors and magic users, dwarves and elves. If the book doesn’t have any of these, is it fantasy? Maybe. Or maybe it’s strategic. The trick is that those four things, while recognizable, are not pillars of the genre. Not all fantasy has elves. Not all fantasy has magic.

But all vampires ought to be unable to walk in the sunlight, right? And, while we’re at it, if science fiction doesn’t have awesome tech, is it actually science fiction or just fiction?

Where else does this apply?

Blogging? If you’re a blogger without comments on your site, are you just publishing?

Twitter? If you don’t discuss anything with anyone, or lock your tweets, what happens to the chances of gaining a following?

If you’re a business person, and don’t actively build your network and create relationships, where’s the longevity of your business?

Building a world – whether it’s fictional planets, a business community, or a personal network – requires addressing the pillars that hold up the kind of world you’re building needs to function as a well-oiled, recognizable machine.

Are you missing any key elements in a non-strategic way? You might be Genre Dodging. And it’s not usually a good thing.

Photo by Shane Adams.

The Future of Media – Dowager Shadow

February 21, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

I’m writing a novel. But it won’t be Tor, Orion, or Bantam Press publishing my work; it’ll be me.

Chris Brogan just dropped a perfect opportunity for me to hold myself to account here. You see, I’ve missed my deadline for having the promotional site for the book up. It was supposed to be finished on February 2nd, with some content available to act as a teaser for the actual volume coming in summer. Nearly a month late, I still have 10 hours of work to do on the promo site, and no time budgeted to it.

Before you finish reading this, jump out and read/ watch Chris’ video post, The Future of Media.

Back? Good. Now I’ll explain.

The Dowager Shadow, which I’ve spoken of before here, is a fantasy fiction parallax that has been where I’ve put most of my energy for the last four years. It started making its way from ongoing roleplay to novel with 2008’s National Novel Writing Month – my co-author Leila and I smashed the 50k word barrier easily, and immediately had what amounts to a full first volume of book.

Last year, I began publishing the novel as a serial – you can still read some of it on dowagershadow.com until I get the new site up, but I warn you, the manuscript has seen a lot of editing since then.

Here’s what you’ll see once the new site is actually up, and I’ve got the manuscript finished and produced:

The first volume will be available for purchase as an eBook, with built in interactivity like an appendix, maps, and other information.
In addition to each volume, there will be a few rounds of shorter stories available for free through Pay With a Tweet. This will take care of some of the promotion of the book.
Each subsequent volume will be released in two ways: stand-alone purchase, or bundled with the previous volumes, each of which will have been updated with information pertinent to the new volume.
There will be a print version, produced through a self-publisher, which can be ordered alongside the eBook. I’m aiming to have two production runs per year for the physical artifact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really no more work than this blog.

Building interactivity into a book is a very new media thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on all over the place. Usually, though, it’s products like Digging Into WordPress. However, given the success of products like DigWP, and the many thousands of well produced eBooks out there, I can’t help but see this kind of thing as the future of media.

We’re going far beyond the entrepreneurial journalism that blogging has been for the last decade, and moving into an era of entrepreneurial publishing of all flavours. That, I believe, is the future of media.

The Power of Immediate Collaboration

February 12, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

One of the things I love about the web is it’s asynchronicity.

I can send you an email, or address a tweet your way on Monday morning and, unless it’s something urgent, you can respond as late as you like – right through to happy hour the following Friday. Based entirely on our needs, we can schedule our interactions loosely, and have conversations over the course of days, weeks, or even months without losing the thread of things, because there is almost always a meta-data supplied history for everything we do.

We can even consume media asynchronously. Through Google Reader or Instapaper, I can gather up weeks of stories from my favorite blogs,

Another thing I love about the web is it’s immediacy.

If I need to listen real-time for something, I can set up a net of Google Alerts and have them delivered by RSS into my feed reader of choice. I can get the information I’m looking for on an as-indexed basis. I could also use other listening tools, if I needed to, to expand my ears and make myself into a super-hero quality observer. I’d never miss a thing.

I stopped actively checking my mail years ago – there’s an app for that. I also stopped worrying over content management and coding the text of each page on my site a long time ago – there’s a plethora of apps for that

Need a quick response? Find me on Twitter.

Want to host a distributed chat event? Again, see Twitter – this time just make a hashtag and let people come to you.

Need to edit a document at the same time as I do? Let’s share a Google Doc and work on it at the same time.

When it comes time to publish my book, I’ll barely need a publisher at all.

I also stopped relying on online chats and tools like IRC a while ago. Through tools available now on the web, I’ve almost entirely eliminated the need for destination-based communication in my work.

Recently, I also moved much of my collaborative writing into Google Docs specifically, and have completely abandoned the last remaining web chat I’ve been using for the last ten years. No more need of it. Sure, I’m losing some serendipity – the possibility that a new player might randomly stumble into a game I’m running – but I’m gaining curatorial control, synchronism, and the benefit of a closed platform for speed and focus. And when the aim is to pump out large volumes of high-quality writing in short periods of time, that’s a huge benefit.

How amazing is this: In less than three hours on a Google Doc, my writing cohort and I managed to churn out 3000 words of content between us. Single paragraphs, in cyclical production, with a fully functional back-channel right in the window with us, and the option of Skype if we wanted to really dive into the meta side of the work.

Two days’ worth of NaNoWriMo-class writing in just a few hours. Neither of us were tired, neither of us concerned with running out of data or inspiration. We only got through about a chapter and a half, after all, of plot. If we manage to keep working the plot hard enough for a few weeks, we may have a mini-novel to do something with. No planning, no strategy. Just the work, instant and simple reference, built-in editing, and some otherwise idle time.

Imagine what people working with intention might do?

Two people working on a book could churn out a manuscript (conceivably) in just a few weeks, working full-time. That’s with time to do research, collaborate on structure, set up a framework, and get all the facts checked at the same time.

However you need to work with someone remotely – whether in the same room or across the world – the web provides.

And the means are always improving, for everyone using them. Not just because of the advances in the tools themselves, but also because of the way people use them for increasingly ingenious things.

What do you do on the web with others that totally blows your mind?

The Horrible Trap of the Successful Writer.

December 22, 2009 by Ian 15 Comments

This post originated as a comment on Justin Kownacki’s post about Stephenie Meyer, Twilight and the Very Bleak Future of Culture. It got a bit bloated, so I thought I’d drop it here instead, because I feel the points are valid.

I’m frustrated that fame as a writer is so ephemeral. Seeing the “of the decade” lists come down, usually recalling only the last two years and claiming it represents the entire ten, is always a hassle for me – but there’s something to be said about Meyer’s fame.

Yes. Her books are formulaic. But they work; this means she’s either oblivious to her own skills as a businessperson, or is so masterful at marketing she ought to start a firm. Clearly, she has an understanding of the genre and how to communicate it the rest of us simply can’t grok. I don’t think you’re being elitist, I think people just lump “books” together and call it literature.

Is the Twilight series a set of decent fiction novels? Dunno, only watched the movies. As movie-fodder, they survive quite well, even if they do immediately suffer some problems I’ll riff on tomorrow.

Is it literature? Resounding no. Literature usually addresses cultural phenomenon, rather than becoming one. The problem Twilight is having is exactly what the Harry Potter series had; it’s a half-decent fiction series of semi-filling plane-ride worthy books idolized and beatified by its fan base.

That was the original comment I had intended to leave on Justin’s site. Courtesy got the better of me, as did a few ideas.

I watched New Moon last night for the first time, oddly before this riff began, and it made me a bit frustrated in and of itself. I’ve never read the Twilight books – I don’t intend to. Neither have I read Harry Potter, though I may eventually. Part of the reason for this is how I treat movies and books in general, and it’s part of why I was annoyed at New Moon not only as a movie, but as a potential book as well.

When authors publish their first works, a lot of it is tailored around being a possible stand-alone story. Even larger format works like the Wheel of Time, Harry Potter and, yes, Twilight, can and do stand aside as self-contained stories. They have to. What if you don’t earn out your advance? What if it doesn’t sell?

But then it does sell, and authors are left scrambling to make two, three, or ten more books work. What was geared to be a story now becomes a very strong prologue. This is especially annoying in trilogies, because the middle part – as New Moon is, as Matrix Reloaded was, as The Two Towers was – is pretty much guaranteed to be entirely filler. There’s no purpose, aside from levelling the page counts into acceptable levels, for most middle books. I’m aware I’m generalizing, but the looking at New Moon from the perspective of a writer expecting part three, it’s a lack-lustre long form prologue and build up to the final pages or scenes. It doesn’t help that the inevitable cliffhanger ruins any sense that there’s a proper ending.

This gets mitigated sometimes in longer running series. Wheel of Time, for example, famously steam rolls its page count on purpose. Robert Jordan was a hell of a writer, but even I gave up after nine books mostly because every book was just putting off the inevitable. When you can write an entire book explaining why the main character is slightly more or less happy on a day to day basis, you’ve got word-count gold. This is one of the reasons I love Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series so much; every one of the now ten books can be taken as a self-contained story within an overarching myth-arc.

What does any of this have to do with Stephanie Meyer? Simple: whether she knows it or not, she knows her business, which is selling books. The trouble with this is that the series she’s created have so effectively done their job that, in the absence of real commentary and lesson, the subject matter has become the substance, and the subject matter simply does not stand up under scrutiny.

The Cullens and their ilk are not vampires. I’m sorry, vampires do not sparkle. They can’t go out in the sunlight and just get prettier. Meyer’s interpretation of the entire genre worries me in part because I was a White Wolf geek back in the day, I come at gothic horror more from the realm of Poppy Z Brite rather than early Ann Rice like most people did. To say that seeing the vampire genre “warped” bothers me is a horrific understatement, but it’s the most adequate I can afford to make because, clearly, the books sell.

Anyone who wishes to get anywhere with words from their keyboards needs to respect it. Hate it all you want, but respect it.

As for culture? There will always be schism. If the meteoric rise of Stephanie Meyer can tell us anything, it’s how quickly superstar authors are forgotten. After all, the final Harry Potter book came out two years after Twilight was published. It broke swift-seller records. The movie isn’t even out yet. But who got on the list as author of the decade? Stephanie Meyer.

I have a lot of respect for anyone who can turn a dream into a book in three months, then go on to sell millions of copies globally. I can only hope that when my own efforts fruit, they’re so handsome.

But that doesn’t mean I have to force myself to think Fangirls and Fanboys are anything other than sheeple until they demonstrate some understanding of exactly why they like the object of their adoration just so much.

Is This The End of Prophecy?

December 18, 2009 by Ian 13 Comments

Whether you’re a proponent of a real-time web or a near-real-time web, one thing is for certain: we’re facing communication as it’s never been predicted.

A few things brought this thought on. Earlier today, I was listening to CC Chapman‘s stream-of-consciousness podcast, Managing the Grey (specifically the episodes on Moments and Buckets – you’ll get it if you hear them) after having had a conversation with someone about the state of the internet ant communication. I’ve also spent the last week reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which I’ve never read before despite its general acceptance as a seminar cyberpunk book. It’s also been a big week on the net, with Google releasing so many new toys and making an apparent bid on Yelp.

So this evening I’ve been poring over my library of assorted science fiction and so on, and it seems like that’s it: The very concept of total democratization by way of technology is incredibly rare. I know, a lot of you are going to tell me it’s not (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is on my christmas list, now) but this is an important thing. A lot of advancement lately has come at the inspiration of science fiction, yet the idea of social media, the creation of the meritocratic celebrity, and even the modulation of how we basically receive information, seems like a huge oversight.

When I look at the effect the internet has had on our culture from the perspective of a fiction author, I see a lot of things. How jacked in we are, even when we’re not tethered. The shift toward a gestalt state where many minds are fuelled by a singular, bottomless well of information best available to those who know the currents in the well. The falling principle of enforceable influence such as mass media once controlled. All of these things, taken together with a growing acceptance of the cloud, makes for some really interesting change. Clay Shirky said something to the effect that things only get socially interesting once they’ve gotten technologically boring. Absolute truth.

Being at the end of prophecy is a troubling prospect. Mayan calendars end in three years. I’m sure Nostradamus is just about out of quips by now. Where do we go from here? Science fiction writers are still, naturally, dreaming up new things, but most of what I’m seeing lately is either nothing but new toys, which will be developed eventually, or new approaches to old problems using previously invented new toys. It’s hard to find good examples of purely tangential thought that can still be accurately represented in digestable sociological terms.

But maybe that’s where the falling down is going on. Try explaining the Twitter phenomenon to anyone ten years ago; we were all still getting over email back then, much less instant messaging. Try explaining Google to the people building the infrastructure the internet itself relies upon during the time it was being built. Would they have understood? Do we understand now?

Frank Herbert wrote in the Dune series about the end of prophecy, and summarily concluded the series still in the thick of dealing with the fallout of the event itself. “You cannot see past a decision you do not understand” the books said many times. Perhaps that’s the crossroads we’re at now, the intersecting of technology, humans being, and the slow but sure changing of trajectory beyond which we simply can’t see.

The worst part of all this? Quantum physics demands that observing the state of minutiae is, itself, interference in the process the minutiae has undertaken. So not only are we unable to see past the crossroads, all purported prophecy is futile because it comes through the filter of our past experiences.