Two weeks in a row; I’d say that’s a record but I’m too busy crying into my beer.

So, what to say about this week? Let’s see…it’s been a fairly average one. The weather has cooled down, I haven’t done anything earth-shattering, domestic bliss continues to be blissful. There was some big-huge sports news for those of us who support the San Jose Sharks, but I already blabbered about that on the Twitters. But really, I think the most normal weeks are the ones that it’s most interesting to try to write about; after all, my whole job, in theory, is teasing hidden meaning out of the mundanities of life.

I suppose I could focus on the new barbecue grill we got (a Weber Smokey Joe, for those seeking stats or whatever barbecue people call them), and how relaxing and fun grilling dinner is, and how enjoyable it was to sit outside grilling and listening to the hockey game. I could probably also focus on how nice it is to have a partner who likes being a real grown-up with me and supports my writing habit. I could also talk about the sheer bliss of just living life, of making my own schedule for one weekend out of the past three months, of not really having anywhere I need to be or anything I need to do beyond the usual maintenance required of an adult life. I could do those things, but that would probably be navel-gazing.

So instead, he said whimsically, I’ll focus on that writing habit I was just talking about. I’ve been generally making my mid- and low-end word counts, with one or two days reaching the 1000 word mark. I know it sounds obvious, but the conscious decision to lower expectations in light of the other things going on in my life has been really valuable, and probably has actually led to 1000 word days more often than it as prevented them. As a general rule I find that if I really want to write more than 500 words, I will; and if real life gets in the way of doing so, it’s frustrating, but it doesn’t impart the sense of failure that it used to, which means I am less likely to fall into a creative funk and therefore less likely to have a chain of days where I don’t output any word count whatsoever. It’s been a vital part of my writing experience, and I am so grateful I weathered my initial storm of anxiety and decided on it. (Yes, I was anxious I’d be judged and my career would fail because I chose to work to a slightly lowered personal expectation. Life with anxiety is training for the three-hundred meter jumping to conclusions.)

What else? Oh, yes. If you, like me, have problems with an excess of feels; if you worry about the impact of your own art; or if you are just an overly decent human being; be careful about the Doctor Who episode “Vincent and the Doctor.” It’s a dangerous, heart-seeking missile, expertly designed to track down and destroy your tear ducts and sense of well-being. By which I mean it was a really lovely episode and I highly recommended it to anyone who can handle it at that precise moment.

Alright. Time for me to admit I’m out of things to blog about and go get about the business of cleaning up from dinner. Have a great weekend, everybody; I’ll see you next Thursday.

So, I have now officially been publicly attacked on Twitter for the first time. I think I’ve “arrived”? Anyway, I needed a space in which to think about it, so I’m blogging. This may be even more navel-gazing than some of my other posts, so please feel free to skip it; I won’t be offended.

Now, some ground rules for me:

• No revealing who did it. It is unfair to both of us professionally if I publicly shame them for something that should be between the two of us.
• No attacks; no statements of my superiority; no using my blog to get in the last word without technically engaging them.
• No swearing.

What’s this about? So, funny story…

You are probably all aware of today’s news item regarding Jason Collins. For those who aren’t, here’s an article. Read that before you start the next paragraph.

I’m firmly in support of Jason Collins doing this, no ifs, ands, or buts. Color barriers, gender barriers, and sexuality barriers are pointless, and somebody had to be the one to take the first step and come out; the assumption (as I understand it, via my interest in the You Can Play project) is that no-one has come out because everyone is scared to be the first. Hopefully this echoes throughout all of pro sports and throughout all other walks of life. That’s where I stand on it.

Unrelated to this (originally), I had a possible new Twitter friend recommended to me today, I assume because we both say a lot of things about writing. I thought, why not, and followed them, and they followed me back. OK. Sure. This is all good so far. Then I read their first tweets in my feed: a multi-tweet statement in which they say two key things:

I am writing this in between cleaning, taking walks, and watching Red Dwarf, so please pardon me if this is stilted.

Let’s start with life. Life is good. I have committed this week to a lighter diet of mostly fruits and vegetables, and it feels excellent. I am still meandering my way out of a higher-fat, higher-carb diet (there has been an illicit snack or two that I regret), but I know I need to forgive myself that early excess or this is all going to fall apart. Getting exercise back in is proving more challenging; despite the trip home being faster than ever I feel like I have substantially less time in my evenings, and it’s really dragging me down. I’m thinking of bribing myself with a “light” dessert in exchange for getting out and walking tonight. It’s not a sustainable exercise routine but it’ll start to get me in the habit.

Now then, writing. Today was two big things. The first is that I went back to Done with Mirrors again, and easily hit 1000 words of writing. It’s a really great feeling; something about that world and the Not Providence world both just drag words out of me with a minimum of effort and a maximum of gain. There’s something in that, on both counts. That said, I have a lot of other stories I’m looking forward to working on that are not set in either world; so, one thing at a time.

The second big thing was that I bit the bullet and asked a few people to beta-read for me. I was going down the list of who I wanted to ask, and I found myself getting scared by some options; not because I did not think they liked me, not because I did not think they were reliable, but because I was afraid that they would give me honest feedback.

You see the problem there, right? Well, so did I. Which is why I asked them. I figured, if I dodged every bit of honest feedback, I was never going to get anywhere with this writing thing. I asked them, and they accepted, and now they are and/or have been beta-reading for me.

I’m not expecting a ticker-tape parade over this; but with the anxiety problems I have, this is a big step for me. When I was in therapy for it (long story as to why I’m not anymore – money issues), they told me that I needed to find the things that made me anxious and make myself do them; fight through it and see the actual results of doing the things that scare me. So I went ahead and did it, and you know what? All the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive. There’s been some constructive criticism – there had better be, with me having just done the rough draft and two editing passes – but overall people have really liked it. And that is the best reward for my anxiety I could possibly ask for.

I’m having trouble concentrating here, so I’m going to go ahead and post this. I’ll make sure to let you know how the story editing and submission processes wind up going; for now, have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll post at you soon.

This is a hybrid question/rant. Both halves of this hybrid are entirely legitimate; I really do want answers to the question, and I really am annoyed by the thing I’m asking about. If you want to skip my thoughts and just answer, feel free; and if you want to just read me spewing hate-words into the webbertubes, that’s fine, too.

The question, about which I shall rant hereafter: Why does it seem like so many urban fantasy stories insist on main characters with earth-shaking levels of power, interacting with (or being) characters who occupy unique and/or crucial positions within the fantasy subculture or the fabric of reality, fighting battles with world-shattering stakes hanging in the balance?

I understand that it is a good idea (if not mandatory) that there be something unique about your protagonist, either in terms of their nature or in terms of their situation; if they are an un-special person to whom nothing special happens, then there is likely no conflict and therefore no story. However, it seems like urban fantasy writers in particular are copying a narrative template I last saw in the heady Dark Age of comic books: using high power levels and Big Important Words and high-end mythological beings in place of actual diligence and detail, and leaning on weird MacGuffins and strange loopholes to get the main character from one cosmologically important plot point to the next.

Let’s establish some terms, as I used to do in my graduate courses. What do I mean by “high power level,” in a genre where supernatural powers are par for the course? I’m glad you asked, Assumed Reader of Essays! “High power level” refers here to characters (or objects utilized by characters) with powers that are constantly useful, completely reliable, and capable of solving a wide variety of tasks both magical and mundane. Classic “high power” abilities include the ability to easily, even off-handedly, kill the average threats present in the fiction’s universe; resistance to physical and/or magical harm bordering on invincibility; unaided, high-speed travel through space or, God forbid, time;  the ability to raise the dead or undo apparently permanent damage; and the capacity for other significant, permanent alterations to reality. Bonus points if the powers in question can be activated with a second or less of warning (e.g., teleporting across the world with a snap of your fingers) or if they come with some weakness or limitation that does not appear to actually limit their use in any way (e.g., the power causes the user great pain, but not so great that they are reluctant to use it to solve any but the most trivial problems). In short, an “average” power level allows an urban fantasy character some amount of shortcuts around mundane problems; a “high” power level allows an urban fantasy character to ignore mundane problems and barely struggle with all but the most fantastic ones.

I also said some flippant things about Big Important Words, and that should be explained here as well. Fantasy, since the dawn of language, has loved to give characters, places, and things Names with Capital Letters, titles that convey mystery or importance. The Lady of the Lake, the City of Brass, the One Ring. Etc. Urban fantasy follows suit, giving us things like King Rat, the Black Friars, or the Room of Thirteen Doors. Both fantasy and its younger cousin also love made-up words for things: the various demon races in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Sandman Slim come to mind, or kything (admittedly based on an old Scottish word) in the A Wrinkle in Time series. Urban fantasy has a predilection fantasy doesn’t always share, however, for prescribing near- (or beyond-) deific uniqueness to characters, even beyond the whole Chosen One thing that has been popular for quite some time now (like all of it): I’m thinking more of Sandman Slim’s parentage in his novels, or the cosmogonic status of the Endless in The Sandman, or the strange propensity for “edgy” characters in urban fantasy to wind up meeting Jack the Ripper.

But wait, the Assumed Reader says; don’t many works you, Tyler, love feature some of these very things? The Doctor, with his Sontarans and Daleks and his ever-more-potent sonic screwdriver? The aforementioned Dream, he of the alternate dimension where he is god-king and the ability to appear almost anywhere he wants? Mike Carey’s Lucifer? Well…yes. They do have this stuff. But the way they handle it…well…

OK, let me give you an example of what I mean. A few years back, I read an urban fantasy novel that took place in an Otherworld version of a famous big city, where it’s always the middle of the night and all the monsters and miscreants like to hang out. Alright, so far so good; decent urban fantasy setting. Early on in the book, the main character figures out that someone is trying to kill him for investigating the things he is investigating; assassins from multiple timelines keep suddenly materializing in front of him. Sure, alright; again, a bit weird even for the genre, but go big or go home, I guess. As such, he hires three bodyguards. One I have forgotten entirely, except for the fact he is unkillable; the other is a pair of lovers, a mortal and a succubus, who are damned by definition but are so deeply in love that the good emotion keeps them out of Hell and damnation keeps them out of Heaven, so they, too, are immortal. Uh? The very first place they go to investigate anything, they get attacked by a bunch of wizards in three-piece suits, and the main character just hits the deck while the immortal bodyguards graphically murder all the minor antagonists (I hesitate to call them “bad guys”). Over the course of the book, the main character hangs out with a bartender who is occasionally possessed by an impressively Satanic rendition of Merlin, fights someone wielding a gun that speaks the Word of God backwards to erase its targets from existence, and discovers he is the son of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who has been unleashed into our world now and who becomes the antagonist for the entire series.

So what, you might say? So this: At no point does the main character resolve any conflict himself. Every conflict is presented in the same format: impossibly horrible, powerful, inexorable thing appears; main character tells us how screwed he is; some sort of deux ex machina, occasionally a literal one, steps up and fixes it, perhaps after the main character points out some mystical loophole in the problem that they can exploit, perhaps just via brute force and ignorance. And the characters are so flat they could get a job as a cardboard standee, with each of them having exactly as much personality as is lent to them by the archetype they embody and not a whit more. Even the main character, who is our first-person narrator to boot, is just a Central Casting noir detective with a quasi-tragic, quasi-mystical spin on his backstory that you just know will result in a pity party being thrown in the later books.

It’s the latter point that bothers me, and the point on which Doctor Who and The Sandman deviate from the cavalcade of sins I am mentioning here. These stories have shallow characterization and cliche plots, spiced up only by making everyone a godlike special snowflake and/or making sure the gore quotient is somewhere in the stratosphere. The stakes keep getting bigger, the amount of worlds and realities threatened larger, the consequences ever darker and dire; but these are tautological consequences, consequences that are only dire because we keep being told they’re dire, because the easiest way to make something look like a threat is to have it threaten everything. You don’t have to tell people how serious a threat to the world is, and you don’t have to work to make people worried about it.

And that is why this behavior among urban fantasy writers bothers me. Because it’s lazy. By going big, by going enormous and epic and scary, the writer can skimp on the harder parts of writing – character depth, relatable conflicts, emotionally moving…well…emotions. (Prose fail.) You can pave over your deficiencies by just having something else weird or gory or explosive happen and never have to go back to making your main character anything more than a cynical detective or a bewildered everyman; Chandler’s Law writ large. It’s the literary equivalent of a heavy metal garage band that covers up its lack of musical training by detonating explosives onstage, a loud distraction that will hit your primal side and draw attention away from the noisy deficiencies of the rest of the product.

The thing is, I can get behind that; not every single book needs to move me deeply. But I feel like urban fantasy in particular gets the lion’s share of this, and I don’t quite understand why, especially when there are plenty of examples of high-power characters in high-power settings who nevertheless are complex, conflicted, and interesting – the aforementioned Dream and the Doctor. I’m not quite certain why it is that urban fantasy falls victim to this so thoroughly (and I’ll admit, it’s even possible I’m wrong, and this is a problem across a wide swath of genres); is it just the easy access to godlike characters? What is it about urban fantasy that encourages fulfillment of a college-campus stereotype about speculative fiction? Is this actually an issue for anyone besides me? Am I just not OK with letting magic be…er…magical?

I don’t know, and it bothers me a lot. It’s to the point that I’m almost scared to write an action sequence, lest I be written off as yet more popcorn in a world overflowing with kernels. Luckily, and here is my conclusion, this gives me purpose: to recognize this apparent pitfall, and to avoid it; to keep the power levels of my settings low; to keep my characters deep; and to always remember that even if the rest of the world disagrees with me, the fact that I want to do those things in my stories is reason enough to do it.

Hi everybody! I’m not dead!

I have not made much writing progress this week. I took some time off from work, and with no deadlines looming, I decided to take some time off from writing as well. I miss it, honestly, but not enough to be writing again right now. I realize being out of practice is bad, but I plan to start up again tomorrow and honestly I’ve needed the extra decompression time and also the extra sleep.

I don’t like thinking of writing as a demand on my time, and most of the time, I don’t. However, just today, sitting around, taking time to just have a vacation and clean up around the house and play video games and eat homecooked food…it was bliss, I tell you. In a way, it was a great kick in the ass, in that I want to start writing full-time so I can be doing this all the time. Not the video games part; I have no illusions about having that much free time if writing is the only way I butter my bread. But the home cooking, the cleaning, the daily rituals and the being at home, free not to do whatever I want, but free to be doing things in my space, on my time. It sounds like heaven, honestly, and I pray I ever reach that goal.

Other than that…what do I have to say for this week? I spent a night out at a bar alone for the second time ever, which felt like a major accomplishment to me. Normally I get anxious about going places alone, and I was there to watch hockey, which I used to always think of as a group experience, something I’d get too stressed about if I were entirely alone; but for some reason, this was blissful, being in the crowd but not forced to participate in anything, able to just let myself be absorbed in the moment-to-moment of a hockey game and occasionally chat with the servers. It turns out I’m something of a regular at this place, which feels…good, actually. Like I’m a part of something bigger than myself, a club whose membership requirements are occasionally showing up and ordering something while I’m there. I found the outside world a lot less stressful, a lot less scary, a lot less uninviting than I am used to perceiving it as, which can only be good for me mentally. Plus, my Sharks won while I was watching, which was a great capper, a little bit of a reward at the end of stress-testing my emotions.

Reading has felt like a bit of a chore lately, which bothers me. The last two books I read were honest-to-God disappointments, and the latest one is kind of verbose, not in the Michael Chabon, thesaurus-flagellating way, but in the way where everything is explained to you, in detail, even if doing so interrupts the narrator in the middle of doing something you’d probably be much more interested in hearing about. I genuinely hate overexplaining; I would much rather be shown than told about back-story of the world. It’s fine if you’re taking me into a virtual world; I’ve read Snow Crash, I’ve seen every movie made since William Gibson figured out how to use a typewriter, I can deal with people jacking in and having an avatar and…I’m ranting, aren’t I? Okay. The bottom line is that it feels like a spoiler for your own book; like I had a chance to go sailing into uncharted waters and I was forced to instead take the guided tour. I’m going to try to stick with it and see if it gets better; it may be that once I understand a bit about the world he’s built he’ll leave me alone to play in it.

My final big piece of news is that the latest expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse arrived today, and I could not be happier. It actually showed up while I was at lunch, which allowed Sonya to play Father Christmas and show it to me as I came back in the door. I spent my afternoon unpacking, unwrapping, and carefully unsleeving everything I was sent, and making a mental note to hang the art prints I was given, and happily shuffling through everything I was sent and seeing the little hand-written scribble from Christopher thanking me for my order and generally being chuffed. I had a friend over, so I did not get to uncork the awesome until fairly recently; but hey, late nights playing Sentinels are what vacations are for.

Now then, recommendations. Let’s do this.

For your bookshelf: read all of The Unwritten you can get your hands on. It’s a comic book series about stories and the border between fiction and reality and the lengths bad men will go to in order to make a few edits to both.

For your eyes: I think I’ve recommended this before, but, watch Ink. It’s a great little indie film that is everything you could want from a low-budget urban-fantasy Labyrinth. Yeah, that got your attention, didn’t it?

For your ears: Another oldie, because I’ve been terrible about keeping up with music. Checking out Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-earth. Heavy metal about J.R.R. Tolkien. Do it. Now. Enrich your life.

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print, or something like that. Now, to go play more Sentinels. I might also wash some dishes in there, too. Maybe take a walk. Hey, after all, I am on vacation.