Cheeseburger Gothic

Does anyone besides Dr Yobbo and me recognise this stand out bit of Australiana? I’m wondering how long it will take Prof Boylan to figure it out.

Todays Blunty is only moderately related, but close enough is good enough.

Nothing, normally. Unless I’m writing the books of course. Although my next series has already been sold, and as usual it’s been sold in a lot of 3 titles, it’s not a trilogy. What my US publishers wanted, and Australian publishers went along with, was a story world. A narrative universe in which the arcs of the various characters can play themselves out.
Of course both the AoT and Disappearance trilogies are story worlds. But they are first and foremost trilogies.
I very quickly realized in Weapons of Choice that I couldn’t do a whole alternate World War II in just three books. Looking back on it now what I should’ve done was aimed for something like the longform series that SM Stirling did with his Emberverse novels, or if you want to go to the gold standard, like George R R Martin has done with the Game of Thrones franchise.
Yes, yes, I know, he said throwing up his hands, nobody wants another Wheel of Time. Least of all me. I get bored after a couple of books, whether I’m writing them or reading them. But I do wish sometimes that I had the luxury of developing characters at the slow, measured pace those guys take. Their characters evolve over years. Mine tend to leapfrog. Sometimes dying in the attempt. Let’s pause for a moment to remember poor Dan Black. As soon as he took up with Julia Duffy he never had a chance.
I took a lot of shit for what happened in between books, of course. And I totally understand peoples disgruntlement. But although there’s a lot about the Axis of Time series I would change if I went back as an older, gnarlier writer, rethinking Dan’s fate would not be one of them. Julia was the more important character, which is why she’s back for the e-book series, and once I’d worked out my issues with their relationship, I was keen to get on with seeing how she coped after that relationship was brought to an abrupt end.
Ideally, all of this should have happened in ‘real-time’. But it was impossible to play out their relationship and the world war at the same rate. I ended up facing a similar issue in the Disappearance series. With Sofia.
Caution for US readers who have not caught up, spoilers ahoy.
I knew from the first time we met Sofia in the opening pages of After America that we would be staying with her until the bitter end. But that raised the problem of timing. She is still quite young at the start of AA, and has to grow up in a hurry not just over the 2 or 3 months covered in that novel, but the year and a half, give or take, between the massacre at the Homestead and the massacre at Fort Hood.
Some of this was supposed to take place in After America, but her POV chapters were cut because all of my editors agreed they detracted from the focus on Miguel’s storyline. They were totally right, and yet I still feel a real opportunity to develop her as one of the main storytellers was lost. By the time we catch up with her in Angels, we know that the long trek out of Texas has pressed all of the softness and youth out of her, because her thoughts continually tell us that. But in writing the golden rule is to show not tell, and unfortunately most of the trek took place off the page.
I’ve written 6 of these books now, and I’m only just beginning to understand the pace and rhythm of truly long arc narratives. The main thing I have learned? A 600,000 word trilogy isn’t actually long enough to do the characters justice, especially not if they have a lot of growing up to do.
I think Caitlin and to a lesser extent Kipper work best in this regard, although Kipper was largely a finished project by the end of AA. As much as Caitlin is a deeply unpopular character with a lot of male readers, she is the protagonist I am most happy with. Possibly because we see most of the development on the page, not off it. Sure, she marries and has a kid between Without Warning and After America, but those things don’t change the nature of her being. It’s the reaction to that change in circumstance, a reaction we mostly see on the page, that allows us to understand her much better by the end of the series than we do at the start.
I’m gathering these thoughts here in one place today mostly as a reminder to myself while I work through the opening chapters of the new series to give everybody time to grow up on the page.

At the Instrument.

I think I can post this one without having to worry about giving away too many spoilers to those US readers who are still a few chapters from the end of Angels.
I get asked sometimes whether I know how a series is going to end before I’ve written it. Mostly, yes I do. At least in very broadbrush terms. With one or 2 exceptions I knew who was going to live, who was going to die, who was going to win, and who was going to lose in the Disappearance novels before I wrote them.
There was one big exception, however.

Here’s where it gets kind of spoileriffic if you haven’t finished Angels. Look away now.

Kipper was supposed to die. A tragic, moving, epic, senseless but kind of meaningful death. At the hands, or trigger finger, of Sofia Pieraro. Originally, and I do mean originally, like all the way back in Without Warning, I planned for Sofia to travel to Texas to take out Blackstone in revenge for the killing of her family. And of course we pretty much got that journey in the Angels.
What we didn’t get was Kipper’s journey to Texas. Some local readers, and more US readers who’ve just finished the book, might recall Kipper talking about the need to confront Blackstone face-to-face, early in Angels. Jed tries to talk him out of it. Barbara tries to talk him out of it and in the end it’s not necessary, because… well, if you’ve read the book you know why.
Why didn’t Kipper end up in Texas?
Because you don’t just move the president all the way across the country, especially a ravaged post-apocalyptic country, without good reason. And you don’t do it without a huge amount of faffing around on the page. That sounds odd, I know, but you can’t have a character as important to that in one place, and then suddenly pop up somewhere else, without 3 or 4 chapters of supporting detail.
It became obvious somewhere around about pork chop night that Kip simply wasn’t going to make it to the Lone Star State. By then it was also obvious to me that in one way it didn’t matter. Jed Culver had become a much more important character at that point because he was much more interesting. Kipper is a bit of a Boy Scout. Jed is not. He’s one of my favorite kinds of characters. Doing the wrong thing for the right reason.

So, how was Kipper going to die? Out in public, shaking Blackstone’s hand, after forcing him in private to resign. I intended for him to get in the way of Sofia’s shot at the tyrant. I liked the imagery of their blood mingling as both men died.
But in the end of course, it didn’t happen.

To mark the publication of the US edition, I guess we should throw open the comments so you can kick in with your own opinions about whether or not I should have stuck with my original plan. Or indeed, whether you had an even better ending worked out yourself.

When you have a regular column, or blog that for the most part relies on the news for its content you have to be ready for one of those days that gives you nothing. Yesterday was such a day, forcing me to dip into my bottom drawer full of stand by topics, ready to go.

I chose one of my faves, but no sooner had I posted it than three great news stories broke.

Typically, it involved cats.

Treacherous little fuckers.

I’m on a small but nasty deadline this week, getting my first AoT ebook together for the editor. It’s going well, the words flowing, but I’ve noticed a real difference between this set of characters and my Disappearance crew.

The Wave guys are funnier.

Milosz is fucking laff riot, and Jules and Caitlin both have very distinct senses of black humour. But nobody in AoT is very funny. I wondered if it might have been an effect of Axis being my first genre work, when I was more worried about getting it right than tweaking it for the lulz, but no. I’m well settled into genre mode now and it’s just the characters. Harry is about the funniest of them all, and even dour do-gooding President Kipper is funnier than him.

I have no idea why.

There. I said it. Although I doubt I’d be the first. This was the awesomest explodifest I’ve seen since that last one I took Thomas to which I’ve forgotten about now.

Splosions 11/10

Soundtrack (All ACDC all the time) 11/10

Blonde hottie. (11/10)

Alien bad guys 10/10 (A lower mark because they were a bit too human for my taste, and sort of look like extras from Halo).

Dialogue and character development 10/10. Again, a lower mark because traditionally dialogue and character development should play no part in this sort of film, but I suppose now the Academy will FINALLY recognise top shelf cinema when it’s turkey slapping them in the face with a bit of dialogue and character development in between the splosions.

I am impatiently awaiting the sequels.

Seemed wrong that her birthday tea party should be confined to the arse end of an unrelated comment thread.

I’m heading out the door in a couple of minutes to pick up Thomas from his school holiday rugby camp. As always with school hols I go into them thinking, ‘This is gonna be great. The kids are older now. They’ll look after themselves. I’ll get my work done. Even some exercise…’
Bzzzt.
Wrong answer.

It never works out that way. I can do some reading and some blogging, but sustained writing is a no go. There’s too many disruptions.

I got to thinking on this while trying to plot a path to the far flung rugby fields this morning. When you work for yourself people often ask ‘How do you avoid distraction?’
I think what they actually mean is how do you avoid disruption. Mostly, you don’t.
It was kind of a revelation. One of things things that seems so obvious when the lightbulb goes on. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that working on your own and working in your office are not just different, there’s these fundamentally opposite polarities involved.

Allow me to explain, while I wait for the clock to tick down to my departure time.
When I go pick up Thomas in a minute it will disrupt my work day. By the time I’ve driven out to the edge of the city, picked and his mate up, got them back back, fed them, and split ‘em up, that’s an asteroid crater in my work day. It’s unavoidable. The challenge is to work around it. Get stuff done in the morning. get stuff done in the arvo. Let go of any frustration in between. It could be worse.

Distraction however, is avoidable. Distraction is stuff like this. Or twitter. Or faffing about jumping from online tech site to another. In an office I imagine distraction is like a productivity cancer. It could eat your entire day if you let it. Emails, phone calls, pop in visits to your desk. A long line of people long to steal five minutes here, ten minutes there. I dont suffer any of that shit at home because I can unplug and turn it all off. And of course, most of the time anyway, I’m here on my lonesome. Alternately I’d guess that major disruptions like cross city rugby runs in the middle of the work day, are not aregular part of  office life.

Just a thought.

Now I gotta go.

A tip o’ the propeller beanie to Prof Orin who generously talked me thru some issues associated with today’s blog, a longer, thinkier, geekier Blunty than usual, about the fan hate for the ending of Mass Effect 3. Or that’s the jump off point anway. I riffed onto a wider discussion about digital authorship and creativity in general.

Good comments so far.

This’ll really clear out the numpties from News Ltd.

At the Instrument.