Writer's Grove

There’s a new video game out called Dante’s Inferno. It’s based on Dante’s epic vision o’ hell, changing a couple of plot elements but sticking with the nine levels and all the monsters, plus many of the shades mentioned in the poem. And check it out: my students seem mildly interested in actually reading it now.

Whoa.

I’m not the sorta dude who scoffs or sneers at anything that makes a kid pick up a classic, so I applaud EA for doing this and I’m actually somewhat tempted to try out the game; what I’m loving, though, is the fact that students were interested in a classic that’s not precisely easy reading. It’s COOL reading, no doubt, but neither is it simple stuff.

Here’s what happened: my spiffy Asst. Editor at Del Rey, Mike Braff, sent me a copy of the companion book, Dante’s Inferno (the complete text of the Longfellow translation) with screen shots of the game and how they developed it, etc. Here’s a link to the book. He signed it and I offered it to the kids as a giveaway in a drawing. I asked ’em to write their names on a scrap o’ paper if they wanted to go for it, and over half of them did. Think about it: teenagers interested in reading a classic on their own initiative? That’s…amazing! Hopeful! A new dawn, perhaps?

Now, if only they’d make games for other classics! How about The Great Gatsby? You have to save Gatsby and make Tom and Daisy pay for their carelessness! You can’t let the rich people get away with everything! Stop them! Run over Daisy with Gatsby’s car!

I think Robert E. Howard’s stories would adapt well to the video game milieu. You’re Conan the Barbarian, master thief and master, uh, barbarian. You try to steal stuff, and if you fail, just kill everything until you escape! Yeah! That’s entertainment!

Seriously, I’m grateful to EA for the Neato Idea. I hope it works out well for them, and I hope many young’uns will discover Dante as a result.

In days of yore (which is what people said before they said back in the day) I would try to buy something nice for my wife like a blouse or a dress or something else that is sold in a department store by exquisitely coiffed salespeople, and I would find myself befuddled. What size dress did she wear? Heck, what size jeans or shoes or anything? These things are mysteries to most men because women’s sizes are nothing like men’s. Completely flummoxed, I’d be reduced to buying flowers or something plain like that…and now, I realize, I was supposed to feel that way, and react precisely the way I did. The confusing conventions of women’s fashion are undoubtedly a conspiracy crafted by smug florists and saucy chocolatiers! They want clothiers to be intimidating to men so that they order giant bouquets and boxes of calories out of sheer embarrassment!

O, the ignominy! I see now how I’ve been manipulated all my life! How many times have I walked by a store, seen a mannequin modeling something I thought would look nice on my wife, and squashed the impulse to buy it for her because I was too embarrassed to take a guess at the right size?

You hear that, clothing retailers? Your bewildering sizing practices are stifling impulse buys. You’ve been steering us to smug florists for centuries. It’s all part of their master plan.

But now there’s this neato doohickey that frees men from the tyranny of flowers and chocolate and shiny rocks! It’s called the Guy’s Guide to the Right Size and it’s cheap! I got myself one and I’m kinda giddy with all the possibilities before me. I can now walk in anywhere—even the lingerie section (gasp!)—and buy some stuff that I’m sure will fit my wife and I’m also reasonably sure she’ll like, because her preferences are marked down in the guide. They have a guide for girls, too, so they can walk into the (far simpler) world of men’s fashion and get stuff their guys like. (The shadow conspiracy against men’s fashion is run by Home Depot. Girls who don’t know what to get their guys just buy them tools.)

Disclaimer: The amount of money/fame/swag I get for this is Diddly Squat. Diddly Squat has been proven to equal less than zero in clinical laboratory tests. I cannot tell you where those clinical labs are, because I know Diddly Squat about their names or locations.

Right. I’m off to begin the revolution against the Smug Florist Cartel. Join me!

Today I got the word on when my books will be coming out! I’ve known for a long time that they’d be out sometime in 2011, and I’ve known that they’d be published back-to-back-to-back (that’s b2b2b if you wanna use publishin’ jargon), but I didn’t know any more than that. Now I can give you a clearer picture:

Instead of an angel and a demon whispering advice in either ear, I want a mini-Spock talking to my left brain and a mini-Kirk talking to my right. Spock will give me the logical argument; Kirk will give me the emotional one. While they fight, I will most likely be destroyed by Klingons.

I’m into chapter three of Hammered now, expecting editorial notes on Hexed soon. I’m preoccupied with the magical nature of cold iron vs. regular iron, and drawing sketches of Asgard.

Oh, plus Hemingway and Modernist poetry. :)

I recently Tweeted about this, but it’s too cool to confine to 140 characters. I found the Hand Drawn Map Association! Check this one out, the Blue Plate Map!

It’s a great site to explore. Some of the maps suck a little bit, but every single one of them has more character than anything generated by a machine. You can have your cold, calculated, stunningly accurate GPS maps; I’ll take maps generated by someone else’s set of spatial relationships any day! The possibility that you might not reach your intended destination by following them is a large part of their beauty! Every hand-drawn map represents a paradigm shift and the opportunity to visit someone else’s head space for a while.

I’m going to submit my own map soon, and rather than populate the dangerous, unknown areas with illustrations of sea monsters, I will sketch caricatures of social conservatives.

Haven’t got myself an e-book reader yet. Don’t know that I will in the future, either; while I’ve embraced blogs and Twitter and all kinds of other Information Age goodies, I might be an old-fashioned curmudgeon about this particular invention. As this article suggests, there’s something sacred about a book. There’s a smell of paper, glue and ink that you’ll never get from an e-book reader, though that’s more of an olfactory delight than a sense of the sacred.

A good book will last you a lifetime if you take care of it. You’ll never have to throw it away for a newer model, update its operating system, charge its battery, or worry about what naughty chemicals inside it might be toxic. And with old school books, you also get to buy build-it-yourself bookshelves from Ikea and find out one little doodad is missing when you put it together, and no one should walk the earth without going through that at least once.

Leaping to this new technology will also mean leaving all the older books behind, something akin to shrugging at the burning of the Library at Alexandria and saying, “Oh well, that was all old stuff, anyway.” If it’s out of print, you won’t be able to get it on your e-book. I have an old copy of The I Inside by Alan Dean Foster. I read it again every couple of years, always enjoying the tale of Eric discovering he’s an alien construct. Won’t be able to geek out over gems like that on an e-book, unless publishers wish to go to the expense of paying for electronic rights for their back catalogs. (Methinks legal wars are a’brewin’ over that already.)

I think e-readers are an excellent idea for many, many people. My agent loves his; he uses his Kindle to read electronically submitted manuscripts, as many agents do, saving on paper, and I have to applaud that. But that’s work. I can’t see going to the beach with an e-reader and feeling relaxed. (Not that I regularly visit beaches in Arizona, but you know what I mean.) I imagine the risk of it getting damaged with either sand or water would be fairly high. And you’d probably have to worry about someone stealing it while you went for a swim—how is that relaxing? Nobody’s going to steal your $8 paperback.

Amazon CEO dude Jeff Bezos thinks books are going to go Permian and everyone will be buying electronic readers instead. I’m going to hope he’s wrong. I don’t want to be 70 and telling my grandkids in a cracked, wheezy voice, “I walked 10 miles in the snow uphill both ways, and I remember when books were made of trees!” —”Wow, grandpa, did you get high off the ink?” —”Eh? What?”

My publisher told me I should have a Twitter account, so now I do…you can follow me, if you wish (my username is KevinHearne) and smile in awe and wonder at my (very brief) flashes of profundity.

I also started up a Goodreads account because it looked kinda neato. Check it out, sign up, it’s fun.

boopers n. slippers that one wears about the house, often lined with lamb’s wool.

coolbox n. what everyone else calls an icebox.

breeze n. what everyone else calls a blizzard.

Miss Murphy n. the toilet

Today I sent my copy edited manuscript back to Del Rey. I think they’re going to start the whole typesetting process soon, and once they get that bound up, I’ll finally know how to answer the question my students keep asking me: “How many pages?”

Some of the copy edits I completely agreed with—most, actually! But there were some here and there that I asked them to leave alone, so we’ll see what shakes out down the road.

I’m at 4K on HAMMERED. Only 76K to go!

I’m copy editing HOUNDED now and it’s a hoot. I haven’t been critiqued on my writing in this manner in a long time. The editor has found several verbal tics of mine and I find it fascinating. I’m about 70 pages into it or so, and I’m hoping to get most of it finished this weekend.

I have other things to do, after all.

There’s a squirrel named Ratatosk that needs sorting out in HAMMERED.

There’s a map of Asgard to create, and research to conduct.

Plus, playoffs! Yeah!