This is important.

This happens to me a lot, and I have learned to accept it. Someone said this better than I was able, this someone being fellow writer-in-waiting, Kat Howard.

The patronage model of artistic endeavor has periodically come up for me, oh, since I first considered the idea of being paid to tell stories; I used to joke, in my most rejection-spackled, miserable moments, that I should email Bill Gates and ask him to pay me to write. And Ms. Palmer's success has me thinking maybe we're coming up on a resurgence of the patronage model, as Ms. Howard suggests: that maybe technologies like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and PayPal and PayPal-like systems will allow for fans to actually directly pay artists. Not merely on a piece-by-piece basis—not $10 for a book, $30 for an art print, $20 for a movie, but to actually create, via donations, a fiscal support network for the creators they love.

Now, the patronage model has its problems; as is often stated, controlling an artist's purse strings also meant that sometimes the artist could be turned into their patron's catspaw. I can imagine, say, my doctor being annoyed that the story he helped pay me to write says something negative about Kaiser Permanente; or the Senator who put a thousand dollars in my pocket wanting me to not deconstruct Washington politics quite so scathingly. And of course, there is the simple fact that Amanda Palmer made that nineteen grand partially because she is Amanda Palmer, and did put out that amazing, Ben Folds-produced album; without the fame she has from the album that has earned her nothing, it's likely her followers on Twitter would not be so numerous and therefore that the people watching her attempts to earn her rent would not have enough people among them who can afford to help.

Of these two issues, the former is the less immediate. The trouble with the patronage model stemmed, to my mind, from a distribution of wealth: using social media as one's personal Lorenzo di Medici, one obviates some or all of the possible political leverage those donations provide. Now at that point the donors could start arguing, against what Neil Gaiman has said, that the artists now really do owe them something; but the hope is that the money would make the artist produce more of the work they want to produce, resulting in higher quality, tighter production schedules, etc. However, possible influence, still a major flaw in the plan.

The latter issue is one I've been discussing lately, and it ties into something I really can't address in this same blog post: the fate of current media and the possible death of the publisher. As it stands, I think that Amanda Palmer (and my favorite example, Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible project) are examples of how I expect to start seeing networks, record labels, and marketing firms to be used: as springboards for one's own self-published career. The album and subsequent campaign and touring gave Amanda Palmer the fame to make money off Twitter; Mutant Enemy's network productions put Joss's name on the map boldly enough to get the DVD sales Dr. Horrible needed.

I really think we are coming up on a dismantling and/or rewiring of the current system; on an era of creator-owned content, of greater cultural cross-pollination, of a new publishing and a new journalism. I'm just trying to figure out what shape it'll take; and perhaps more importantly, how to cash in and become ultra-mega-famous, so I can laugh at all you plebeians from my throne of money.

amazonfail: Just to get this out of the way...

I am quite well aware of the amazonfail phenomenon. And of course I have an opinion about it.

For those who are not aware of the situation, what is absolutely known is that Amazon.com, at first slowly and then in a torrent over Easter weekend, removed a multitude of LGBT and abuse-survival books from their rankings. Here are a handful of links: the story at Wikipedia's Amazon.com entry; the blog entry by Mark Probst (an author whose book was de-ranked in the process of this) that Wikipedia claims first brought this into the public eye; the Publisher's Weekly article wherein Amazon blames the situation on a glitch; and a Theory proposed via LiveJournal that makes a fair amount of sense (though the writer could perhaps have been less arrogant about it). The other links I have seen have been histrionic or condescending, depending on the side they take, so I would rather not debut them here (because avoiding bias in a discussion about bias is going to be oh-so-easy to do...).

My personal feeling on the matter is this: Somehow, somewhere, Amazon screwed up. The "Bantown" LJ theory seems plausible, as does some sort of poorly-chosen set of criteria for flagging books as "adult" (akin to when LiveJournal banned a bunch of non-erotic communities a while back). We can argue about Amazon's culpability until the sun goes down, but they definitely made some sort of mistake somewhere, in addition to the even worse mistake of sending what seems like a form letter to Probst instead of really investigating the problem.

Unfortunately, Amazon's mistake hit two of the Internet's major ammo dumps: the LGBT community, and abuse survivors. These are groups who have legitimate grievances as regards their overall treatment, and whom I would never want to see treated as anything but human beings, but which, as a result of their experiences, are liable to react badly and to trigger others not in those groups into temper loss.

So, Amazon screwed up, somehow; and then the Internet opened up a fresh box of berserk rage, and started attacking/boycotting/deriding Amazon. Whatever Amazon did at that point was going to be moot; until they find the actual culprits behind this problem (whether human beings or lines of code), present unassailable evidence that these are the actual culprits and not scapegoats, and find a way to both reverse the problem and take action against those culprits, they will be bearing a massive black eye.

And in the meantime, the attacks against Amazon will get more unreasonable, spurred by corporate stupidity as Amazon flails to mend the gaping hole in its PR; the boycotts will spread, to the point where many accounts lost during this period will never come back; sales may dip, leading to damage to publishers and writers, or sales may barely be affected, leading to a dismissal of a very important group of voices as just more screaming on the Internet. All sides of all debates will think the other sides are even dumber than before, and we will slouch on without any real progress being made. This is how Internet drama goes, with a wide array of rapid coverage forcing people to respond to breaking news before they themselves are certain of what's going on.

In the end, I can only say this: keep buying books, from wherever you think best. And if you have some data to add to this discussion, please, don't hesitate.

Twilight, again. Yes, really.

I'm going to do that annoying thing bloggers do, and say something we're all thinking. In response to these rumors ricocheting around the Internet (notably this io9 article) that Twilight fans are attacking people who express their dislike of the book...I'm calling half-truth, half-bullshit.

On the truth side, people really are that unstable. People get assaulted over sports games; it's not unreasonable to think books would get a similar treatment. People find some strange things to fill the vacuums in their lives, and really, who is more likely to feel empty and rudderless than teenagers, who make up the bulk of this book's target audience? I had serious temper problems in high school, and I personally know, off the top of my head, four people who self-injured on a pretty regular basis for a good chunk of their high school careers. It's not hard to believe that they might both find solace in a book and react violently to those who tell them their chosen anchor is somehow lacking.

On the bird-food side, though, we are talking about teenagers. Teenagers (really, a lot of people, but especially teenagers) deal with their feelings of confusion and chaos by seeking attention. There are plenty of ways to do this (professionals call it "acting out"), but when the Internet gives you a nice shield of anonymity, why not seek some attention via the good old-fashioned method of becoming a victim?

This is not to say that people, kids included, have not gotten punched or whacked with books or otherwise assaulted over this. But I suspect that less than half of the more extreme stories are actually true, or are only based on a true incident with far less dire consequences; I particularly find the signal rocket story to be a bit more than credible, if only because it sounds like a scene from Cliffhanger. If I'm wrong (and please tell me if you have actual corroboration on these events, other than io9 and the Twilight Sucks forums), I apologize, and my heart goes out to the kids who have gotten abused like this.

A note here, though: people getting assaulted over a book is not new. People on Yahoo Answers are getting that (first response to the OP, you are welcome for me rending my IQ by tracking that down for you). I'm not blaming teenagers for being upset about being attacked or exaggerating what happened to them—that kind of insanity is part of being sixteen—but I am blaming people who are acting like this is somehow worse or more newsworthy than any of the other beliefs people get burned, beaten, shot, etc. for on a regular basis. People will get violent over stupid things; Twilight is only unique in that enough people hate it to make the stupidity seem more evident.

And in case you were wondering, I don't hate Twilight. Hating something requires it be capable of raising an emotional reaction.

NaNoWriMo Killed Bambi's Mom

It's November, which, for those of you who pay attention to such things, mean it is National Novel Writing Month. Those of you who pay attention to such things may have also noticed that this is the first mention I have made of NaNoWriMo, five days into it, and that I do not appear to have conceptual lava boiling up out of my head. This is because I am not participating in National Novel Writing Month. And now, unbidden, I will tell you why: because I do not think it is a good idea.

Now, hands off the keyboard; don't get me wrong. I think that NaNoWriMo is a fascinating exercise, and I can imagine that it dragged many people off the couch and away from their fan forum of choice to discover that they have at the very least a power to commit to something large and difficult, and maybe even that they have a bright creative spark within themselves. I participated last year and had the privilege of crossing the finish line; if it were not for NaNoWriMo I may never have written "Somewhere in Barstow", currently ensconced on my Selected Writings page and being considered for rewriting into something larger. However, having crossed the finish line, I do not think I will cross it again.

The majority of the reason is personal, to do with the somewhat fragile and dare I say it fickle nature of my creative process. When I did NaNoWriMo my words flew fast and loose; I spent the majority of the month ahead of schedule and I finished with days to spare. I seem to recall drinking fairly heavily. Then I recall one of the deepest, nastiest, most bleak stretches of cement-gray writer's block I have ever experienced. I don't think I met my writing goals for two months after I finished NaNoWriMo; if I hadn't moved out of the apartment I'd been living in and shaken up my life a bit I am not sure I would have written again until November and despair struck me over the head. I'm not saying NaNoWriMo killed my ability to write, but I am saying that it put me in entirely the wrong headspace for my regular writing.

And this, you see, is what I consider the NaNoWriMo curse: it strongly values quantity. Writing a book for NaNoWriMo requires 1,667 words (you'll wind up with change on that schedule) a day, which is only 300 words shy of what Stephen King expects of himself daily. You may have heard of Stephen King--the man who is a multi-bestseller and who has the fortune to write as a career? The man who thus has 16 or so hours in a day to devote to writing? You see where I'm going, math-wise.

That this is an enormous task is not my point--I think accomplishing something slightly insane in one's life is a perfectly fine goal, and I applaud it as a form of creative, well, recreation. My problem is that there are plenty of people who think that these 50,000 word projects make them novelists, a thought process that is in no way dissuaded by offers, some of them perpetrated with the help of the NaNoWriMo staffers, to print up bound copies of these books. Though the mission statement suggests that this is meant to be a fun challenge, when you get into the process it is easy to believe that what you are doing is writing a serious book.

A serious book, for most people, does not take a month. And a serious book is, with rare exceptions, more than 50,000 words long. Period.

I think NaNoWriMo is a great game and a fascinating creative exercise; and I think it can even be a good launchpad, if you are aware it is a launchpad. But I do not think it is a good tool for a career writer, as it encourages a way of writing that, for most people, is not going to be useful.

I know that sounds elitist, but writing is a skill; unfortunately, creativity and taste are both highly subjective, so it is hard for me to quantify my argument more than I already have. Think of writing like exercise: running that hot for that long will leave you too exhausted to do it again the next day. Jog a little. Walk sometimes. Stop to have some water. Don't expect writing to happen every day, and certainly don't expect it to happen in such large increments. If you do, in the long run, I suspect you will be disappointed.

All that said, I reiterate, NaNoWriMo is great fun; I salute those making the journey this year, and if you've never tried your hand at writing, give it a try. But if you try to tell me this makes you a novelist, I am not responsible for my actions.

The Middle and the End of it

Unless I'm mistaken, this is Banned Books Week. It is entirely possible I'm mistaken, as a week that takes place during "the last week in September" is frustratingly ambiguous as to when it should occur, so it's entirely possible I'm nine days late rather than two. Nevertheless, I have a few brief things to say.

One: I am a rabid free speech advocate. For all the terrible music I hear, for all the insipid speeches that get drooled all over the press, for all the pundits to the extreme right that make me want to tear my hair out, I love the First Amendment. I think that its exceptions as concepts are solid, though I do not always agree with the phrasing--because I think giving anyone more than the barest inch of latitude as far as declaring what is and is not harmful speech is asking for trouble. I defend the right to free speech of those I don't agree with, and hope they will defend mine. That is probably not the end of my statements on free speech, but it is definitely the end for now.

Two: If you're American, be proud--for all we've seen books challenged there has yet to be an official, government-enforced, nationwide ban (though the Post Office's issues with Ulysses come close).

Three: A sticky corollary to one: I don't think the ability to challenge books should exist.

That is not to say that I think parents should not have the right to restrict what their child reads, especially while young. In an ideal world, I do think parents should be allowed to see school reading lists and discuss the material with the teachers, and that books checked out from the school library should be cleared with parents before the student is allowed to get their hands on them. I also think that this level of interference should end at middle or high school when children are starting to become adults and we want to encourage independence, but that's an entirely different issue. But children, like adults, are individuals, and I don't think anyone but the child and the parents should be deciding what is and is not appropriate for the people around them, of any age; and I do not think the government should be doing our parenting for us. Naturally, I understand certain exceptions must be made--but when it comes to free speech I am the closest I get to radical.

So, in short, I do not think the banning of media of any form should be allowed, in any secular institution. It is a system that allows one person's opinion to interfere with mine, and is thus a system that, ultimately, puts one person's views about another. And much as part of me wants to silence some of the major public voices in this country, I don't like the concessions I'd have to make to do that.

There you go. Politics. Maybe next time we'll pretend this is a science blog.

By "Content-Rich" We Mean "Total Failure"; or, the issue of Truth in Biography

Saturday morning early, and a cup of coffee in my hand. Last night was the press and heat and crush of two good friends' rehearsal dinner, and today is the calm in the center of the storm before tomorrow's full-fledged ritual experience. And also, I have a post for you.

Like many people who fight for the title of "author", I subscribe to Publisher's Lunch. Some mornings it's just another piece of mail in my inbox, sad to say, and sometimes I just browse for a couple seconds to see if they've added California to their health care plan; but a few mornings ago, I received this, and immediately wished I had said it--if perhaps with a bit more flair.

Journalist Malcolm Knox--who uncovered the lies in Norma Khouri's book--worked with Sudanese refugee and one-time boy soldier Cola Bilkuei on his book COLA'S JOURNEY and was asked to verify the book's accuracy. (Just published in Australia, it is not available elsewhere for now.)

"So what are we left with? Aside from boy soldiers, a priest and a lawyer who knew Cola in Africa, we have the assurances of the Australian government, which gave Cola his first passport and checked on him through cousins who already lived here....

"Ultimately, though, between what could be verified and what lies on the pages of Cola's book, there will always remain a margin where we must simply take his word. Some will ask why any author's word should be trusted. My answer is that if we take such a hard line, we will deprive ourselves of all oral history, of every story that is one person's recollection.

"If we did that, winnowing history to what is documented on official records, swathes of human experience would be lost. What we must do is check what can be checked, then extrapolate from it."

So, I worked in a bookstore during the Oprah-fueled popularity of A Million Little Pieces. For those of you who weren't following, it was lauded as an amazing and disturbing little book, dealing with a man's recovery from multiple addictions. I have not read it, I cannot say anything else authoritatively. Oprah loved the book, and had James Frey on her show to promote it--when it was added to her Book Club it received the expected upsurge of rabid purchasing fever.

Then it came out that James Frey had made some bits of it up.

At this point it devolves into rumors and sound bites--I can't know for certain what is true, and my time in college keeps me from really wanting to stick my neck out on a spurious source. All I know is that the outrage became ridiculous--I remember being nearly slapped in the face with a copy of A Million Little Pieces by a woman shrieking at me, insulting my intellect and chanting "This is not a memoir!" with a variety of different enunciations.

And again, I leap to the defense of a book I haven't read and don't really plan on reading when I say: Please.

It seems certain at this late stage that James Frey embellished. But before we knew that everyone was talking about how vivid and brutal his prose was. And now, it turns out, some of it was fictional. So what?

He was an inspiration to addicts to get off drugs. That's truly wonderful. But I know people who have drawn inspiration from, among other things--Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which I pray was fictional in places); the poetry of Emily Dickinson (hypnogogic even when you understand it); Tim Powers' Last Call (urban fantasy); and any one of a dozen classic and canonical texts. If someone falls back into their old ways because an author made part of their book up, how fragile was their inspiration in the first place?

I am primarily a reader of fiction--I break into little internal wars whenever I try to read nonfiction--so perhaps that is why I am having trouble understanding. But what does the grounding in total fact have to do with anything? Why is this applied to books but not to biographical films, which certainly dramatize aspects of the story (see: the presentation of John Nash's condition in A Beautiful Mind; the final scene of Man On The Moon)? Is this an outgrowth of the constant geek tap-dance of reality and physics equations that marks our tearing down of whichever Star Trek iteration we hated? Are we just a culture so divorced from the written word that we have to fact-check everything?

I for one go with what Mr. Knox had the courage to say there, but I take it one step further. Our oldest and most primal stories do not speak to a truth that can be checked; there aren't any footnotes for cosmogony. In an autobiography, you should be concerned about speaking truthfully--but you should be just as concerned about speaking deeply. Frey's story, from my encounters with it, touches the deeper truths of addiction and recovery--and gives us some ghastly little scares to boot; similarly, the story of a boy soldier has a right to focus a little more on the tragedy than on the minutiae. Journalism is, of course, a different animal--but that, like so many things, is for another post.

Resting on My Laurels

The latest submission call has been answered, and the next one has a head start that I'd disbelieve if the story length weren't so minuscule; so tonight, I honestly have very little to think about it, narratively speaking. Instead, I'm wondering about Standard Manuscript Format.

Everyone who's submitted to a magazine has encountered this concept; a set of rules and regulations that govern how you present your story. Most magazines, even most online magazines, follow this rule. And to a certain degree, it confuses me.

Disclaimer: This is not a rant against the "hoops" of publishing. While I'd prefer it if a bit more pap were caught by the standardization nets I understand that the rules of the publishing industry exist for much the same reasons rules of etiquette exist: to ensure everyone is (theoretically) working off the same base assumptions. I even understand it more than social etiquette, because publishers, unlike most conversationalists, are risking a great deal of money on the endeavor, and it pays to have some methods of filtering out flukes, flakes, and the other detritus that tends to coalesce around the edges of the population that terms itself "writers". What makes me wonder isn't the hoops themselves; what makes me wonder is that the hoops regarding Standard Manuscript Format seem so strangely backward.

Google "Standard Manuscript Format". Most of the top hits will use some variation on this sentence: "Standard Manuscript Format is meant to make your manuscript look like it was typed on a typewriter".

Obvious Question Time: Why?

I understand wanting standardization, and the double-spacing and wide margins makes perfect sense, as, after an explanation, does the use of underlines rather than italics; but it strikes me that, barring nostalgia, Times New Roman is a far less eye-tearing font than Courier, and it comes loaded standard on nearly every word processing program you will find on a modern machine. Why on Earth don't we use that instead? Is it because print magazine editors are concerned about excluding those who still use typewriters, and online magazine editors want to emulate print magazines so as to avoid an (understandably problematic) cultural divide? Is it just moribundity at work?

I'm not ranting; I'm asking. I'm thinking that perhaps in all this, there is some aspect of the typesetting and printing world that I am not understanding here; that there is some way in which what we are doing is making life easier for the editors, who are in turn working to make life easier for the typesetters, who are in turn making mechanized life easier for the printing presses themselves.

Can you enlighten me? If so, please do. I'm terribly intrigued by this mystery.

"He Sighed Annoyingly": the Problem with Vanity Presses

I try not to be one of those people who peppers his blog with links to other people in lieu of content--it's an easy trap to fall into, and as much as I love writing I do not labor under the delusion that my commentary on someone else's blog/tweet/fan-fic/cat macro/animutation is actually important to anything that exists outside my ears. But then, there are things like this.

(For those keeping score at home, I received a rejection letter the day before I received this link. Let's count our blessings that I was in a good mood.)

If I had seen that link two weeks ago, I could have posted it and spared you all the trouble of my essay on urban fantasy and the definition of "epic". Books like The Shadow God (which retails, by the by, for more than most normal hardbacks) are the problem with my genre, and the reason that I have no problem with considering myself a "struggling author". Without pressure, a diamond is a lump of coal, a bicep never gets larger, and a waffle languishes as a blob of water and flour; likewise, without pressure, a person writing on a level that makes R.A. Salvatore look like a literary messiah becomes a Published Author (pronounced with your best mangled French accent) and doesn't bother to figure out that lungs can't fill with innovation.

I could, if I wanted to go a little bit into debt, easily get Done with Mirrors published; or, for that matter, the original, cartoonish version of Ether Street, or God forbid all 60,000 brain-mincing words of The Lay of Quinn (don't ask). I'm very grateful, and not just fiscally, that I haven't done this. I've grown as a writer in the past 5 years, let alone the past 10, 15, 20...and while there are all those obvious concerns of selling out and dumbing down that plague the artistic mind, I'd rather become a published author because someone with the power to do that decided I should, not because I paid $1000 to some guy who bought a printing press off Craigslist.

Certainly, there are documents better thrown out into the world via vanity presses--things that won't target a large audience or that are too short or unusual for most large presses to deign to vet them, for instance--and certainly there are authors who want to go that route, and I won't blame them for it (though I will also be very wary of reading their work). Certainly, also, what I'm saying sounds an awful lot like "selling out" to the way things are done now and ignoring possible innovations in publishing procedure or copyright law. I'm not saying that vanity presses are, across the board, of the devil (though the author of The Shadow God certainly seems to wish they were), or that those who choose to publish via vanity presses, the Web, or under Creative Commons licenses or what-have-you are somehow less "real" than authors who sign the standard deals with their publishing companies and agencies What I am saying is, I feel like the challenges of getting something published and publicized and into the hands and brains of those who would be your readership are potentially as much a valuable part of a writer's process as they are the enemy of creativity; and I think that The Shadow God, along with a few others I could name, are perfect examples of what can go wrong when that hurdle is removed.

That's Not Epic; Or, Why I Don't Like to Admit to My Genre

So, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, as many of my readers might know, recently posted this magnificent denigration of the Anita Blake series. Without getting into the meat of the article, he summarizes several events in the series, and frankly, stripped of whatever talent for prose Laurell K. Hamilton may have, the sheer silliness of the series is laid bare. These elements are one tip of the many-peaked iceberg of what I hate in urban fantasy as a genre, and why I am so reluctant to use that term to describe my writing, however apt it might be.

There is a tendency in all fantasy, urban or not*, which I have been aware of and had trouble articulating for years. I think the most basic, raw way I can describe it is the tendency to believe that, narratively, "bigger is better"; a conflation of "epic" and "overpowered", and also of "many plot elements" and "good plot". I've seen it at its worst in gaming (even--perhaps especially--in professionally written materials), and I don't understand it.

To address the issue of "epic": I have often heard things defined as "epic" which seem to me to just be silly, masturbatory power fantasies. Take, for example, The Elric Saga—a series which, I will allow, I very much enjoyed, but which is guilty of this very thing. At several points in the series, Elric is faced with monsters/sorcery/gods/whatever that are beyond the capability of he and his allies to defeat, a fact which is usually hammered into the reader's perception via the bathetically horrible death of one of said allies (who, seriously, should all wear red shirts and talk in bad accents, because if their enemies don't kill them, Elric does). Even Elric's supposed impossibly powerful black sword, Stormbringer, can't defeat these foes, though in some cases (I'll note the lizardmen in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate) it does some half-assed sort of damage to them. When Elric does defeat his Unstoppable Horror of the Day, it is never through some ingenious plan on his part, or some noble sacrifice—he always summons Gadonkadonk, Lord of Tree Sloths or Maguffinator the Scuzz Elemental, and they swoop down/up/through the scene and (sometimes after expounding on how much Elric owes them) take care of whatever the problem is.

This isn't interesting. This stirs my blood about as effectively as a swizzle stick. Elric never seems challenged, and he never seems interesting—he always faces impossible odds, and then after some flailing and struggling that is there basically to pad the word count, just calls up today's deux ex machina.

This is exactly my problem with what a lot of people call "an epic story". When all odds the heroes face are impossible, "impossible" loses meaning as a word; when the world seems to be ending every day, saving the world takes on all the savor of punching a time clock at a gym (something which happens in the Buffyverse all the time, but Whedon and his staff have the courtesy to comment on that narratively).

To me, an epic story should include high stakes, but those stakes need not always include the world, and they need not always involve foes who can explode mountains with their mind or shrug off tactical nuclear weapons or what-have-you. While these ideas might make great action movies (and I emphasize might), they make for piss-poor storytelling. The best stories—even the best true epics—involve threats to at most a region (Hrothgar's kingdom in Beowulf), which, granted, was probably the scope of the world to those authors; usually, the stakes are high, but only, or mostly from the perspective of those struggling to attain them (The Odyssey). And while those threats may be supernaturally powerful, or at least very powerful in comparison to the heroes, the heroes rarely attain their victory by just buying a bigger gun—even the world's favorite action heroes tend to win through a combination of firepower and ingenuity (look at the Terminator movies—the first two. Or Die Hard).

A similar issue plagues stories that are just, to use a description which was unfortunately applied to something I wrote, "a grab-bag of magical touchstones"; or, to be more specific, stories which cram in a bunch of plot elements and expect the narrative to somehow mash them up into something fascinating and riveting. Tell me, which of these pieces of vampire fiction would you rather read:

• A story wherein a journalist is bitten by a vampire and tries to control his degeneration into a monster, while dealing with a group of AIDS and cancer patients who want the physical stasis vampirism offers and are seeking a way to "cure" the infected/afflicted portion of the human population through transformation into vampires, ignoring the fact that becoming a vampire brings one's predatory instincts to the fore; or
• A story wherein a man can, thanks to being half-fairy before he was bitten by a vampire, choose to access his new powers whenever the sun sets, but must contend with a nonspecific risk of fully degenerating into a vampire every time he does so, based on a variety of factors; while he faces this problem, he finds himself set against a group of vampire bite victims who can, thanks to their experiences, literally sniff out vampires through the dead blood in their veins, and who want to perform an ancient ritual to transform the moon into a second sun so that vampires will be driven off the planet, too fanatic to care about the damage this will do to the earth.

Yes, that second plot is far, far dumber than the first one, and is absolutely a straw man argument on my part; but this is what most fantasy and urban fantasy books look like to me. For a classic example, check out the Nightside books by Simon R. Green, which include such great scenes as the battle wherein the most fearsome wizards in all of the Nightside face the main character and two men who cannot die, and are then killed to a man by one of those two immortals and the other's demonic girlfriend, before said girlfriend teleports the main characters to a bar run by the descendant of Merlin so they can talk to him about the whereabouts of Lilith, Adam's first wife…

No, there is not much else to the book. This is how the plot of Hex and the City progresses. I guess in theory the main character winds up struggling a little with the discovery he's not wholly human, but it lasts a page and previous to that, he shows about as much humanity and depth as Jason Voorhees. And the Nightside series is middle of the road for urban fantasy—many of the classic, constantly-cited works of urban fantasy have problems like this. You also see the issue in many well-known video games, movies, TV shows, and anime series—a climactic battle in which one character is exploding the other character's head repeatedly, only to have their head reform before they charge in with their overpowered magic item they got because of some nonspecific destiny and cut off one of the eight arms of the villain's true form. There's no life, no conflict, no character development—or when there is, it's so over the top and loaded with pathos that it's about as riveting as an actor on a blank stage clawing at his face and screaming "NOT THE BEES!"

But then, there's the Silent Hill series of video games. There's Tim Powers, whose novels, while they might sometimes involve the fate of the world on some metaphysical level, are usually about the struggle between two characters with the magic just serving as its backdrop. And there's Joss Whedon, who, while he ends the world eight or nine times in the course of eight years, manages to work that level of constant drama into the characters' personalities, and uses it as a springboard for a commentary on the human condition—two words absent from many fantasy authors' lexicons.

This, I think, is my biggest problem with the bloated excuses for "epics" and the overly crowded narrative landscapes: all too often, it seems like these authors are waving brightly-colored flags to distract from the fact that their stories aren't saying much. Their characters don't grow or change; any internal conflict they go through is flat and two-dimensional, sometimes no more than a throwaway line like "I was disgusted". These stories wind up being the literary equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, without the special effects budget necessary to make the lack of substance interesting to watch. This is why, despite its aforementioned failures, I love the Elric Saga and will defend Moorcock's writing: while sometimes he's hyperbolic, and some of the notes on his narrative instrument are out of tune, the man does give us a little bit of insight into Elric's struggle, and that combined with some strong prose brings the story out of the swamp that mires so many fantasy series. The Song of Ice and Fire, which I have mentioned here before, is so amazing partially because it is about nothing but people (some would argue too many people, but that's a different discussion), with the magic, as I will harp so many times, serving to add a bit of a creepy sheen and a few narrative curveballs to the story.

The world has urban fantasy that does what I would like it to do, it's just not what the world tends to think of when it thinks of "urban fantasy". And that is why, for right now, I am reluctant to admit to my genre. I don't think I'll necessarily revolutionize urban fantasy; I'm not even sure I'll move urban fantasy ten degrees clockwise from where it is right now. But right now, I am working on a synopsis for Done with Mirrors, and my number one hurdle is: "How do I not make this book like every other urban fantasy book I have ever read?" And in that, at least, I have a clear guide, formed though it is from research into the genre's failings. Watch my plot elements. Watch my power level. Don't put the world in peril again. And always, always ask myself this question: how does this forward the internal arc of my characters?

*It is, to my mind, worse in urban fantasy, because the silliness is rendered more blatant when the world surrounding the writing is comparatively normal.