Project Report: King Jason's War

King Jason's War is one of the most complicated books I've ever written. It started its life with the title Majesty and was intended to depict, to a doubtful American audience, what we've all forgotten about the nature of kings and courts. That was never actually a story though, and every time I tried to put words on paper, it twisted away and became something different.

In the process of writing Taming Fire, though, I figured out what happened at Gath-upon-Brennes, and why it matters, and just sort of stumbled across a really amazing story. Majesty became King Jason's War, a novel about a nation torn by war, exhausted by occupation, and subjected by greedy politicians. It's also the story of a young man, honest and intelligent, walking into the bitter cynicism of life at court and rejecting it in favor of idealism and hope.

I started King Jason's War right after I finished my last major rewrite of Taming Fire (so, 2003). I wrote an opening scene, and then cut to a flash-forward (for no real reason) to set the stage for the novel, and ended up liking that so much that I built an almost Zelazny level corrupted chronology for my story. I outlined -- not in a plot synopsis, but in a two-column chart, and the pieces of the story were rigorously defined: alternating chronological backstory scenes of two thousand words each, and present-day vignettes of no more than 300 words that spliced together the ten-year story arc of the backstory and drove the whole thing toward its dramatic conclusion.

It worked, far better than I expected it to. I really thought the final novel would be a dry Rand-ish philosophical debate, but it's high adventure and court drama and romance and war. I was really amazed with what I came up with.

Long-time readers of my personal blog will know I finished King Jason's War in July of '07, the same month that I finished the first volume in the Sleeping Kings series. Like Josh's story, King Jason's War took me four years to write. I shared it with my dad and sisters at last year's Pogue Family Writer's Conference, and got some really great feedback at that time. I haven't done any work on it since, though -- mostly because Gods Tomorrow took over, and that series has been my focus ever since.

King Jason's War is currently in a rough draft form. It needs a major rewrite, particularly concerning the first sixty pages (which aren't really Jason's story at all, but that of the ill-fated Captain Tandon, who disappears completely for the rest of the book). It won't be a monumental task to rewrite those ten scenes from Jason's POV, and after that it's just a matter of cleaning up the wording a little bit for the rest of the book. It's maybe thirty hours of work, but there's a couple scenes that could prove trickier than expected and maybe double that estimate. Either way, I don't know when I'll get to it.

Status: Rewriting, rough draft

Project Report: MaskedFox.com

Ever since I started this blog, I've been working toward a professional website where I can display and promote these projects -- with a heavy emphasis on my books, of course.

I finally settled on a clear design a couple months ago, and I've been putting it together as I found the time. I'm now ready to call it done (in the sense that it's open to the public), although by its nature I'll be adding to it and editing it on a pretty regular basis.

You can check it out here:
www.MaskedFox.com

As I dove into the site design, it ultimately occurred to me that I'm not the only person in my social group with projects that could benefit from such a display, and it seemed like presenting a multi-faceted and talented creative team might offer more punch than just a website describing wonderful, magical me.

Thus was born the Masked Fox Team, which currently consists of my little sister, my much-talented friend Julie, and Toby and Kris. I haven't had a chance to work with them much yet so their presence on the website is pretty minimal so far, but we hope to beef that up in the next six months or so.

I've used the website as a one-stop personal profile (complete with resume, autobiography, writing credentials, and a link back to my blog), as a custom display site for my finished novels (something to share with editors and agents in my query letter), and as a general clearinghouse of all my assorted distractions.

As you may have seen (depending how many of those links you clicked on), the individual project pages all link back to this site, so I can use the simple Blogger interface to make news posts and quick status updates that will be accessible to anyone visiting my website. Since I just got that working, you can now expect a slew of project reports from my big ol' backlog of projects -- things like King Jason's War and Sleeping Kings: The Wolf (novels that I finished two years ago). Once those are out of the way, though, it should be back to business as usual. And, in case you were curious where all those old projects stood, now you'll know.

Status: In development

Further Reading: Ghost Targets

Via Digg, just read this article from the New York Times concerning the terrifying future of AI.

What threw me is the focus on lost jobs to robots. I can certainly understand an individual worrying about losing his job (especially if he's old, and it's a highly specialized job, and that's all he knows how to do), but what's the point of a society doing so?

This is something I've thought about a lot for the Ghost Targets series. In the books, I make casual reference to the twenty-hour work week, but the direction of the series is toward less and less, and that seems to me like the direction of the future, anyway. We develop better and better technology so that we can get more results from less effort. Ultimately, that should mean more and more free time. Ultimately, that should mean lives of leisure for most of the populace.

I realize that the people who lose jobs to robots won't be the CEOs and magnates of industry, but the poor and the scrabbling. Actually, that's been going on for most of a century now. I assume the concern of the scientists in this article is that it'll reach up into the middle class, too. But let's say that happens, let's say a significant portion of the lower and middle class are unemployed now, because their efforts aren't needed to make the things the corporations want to sell....

Those corporations still have to sell the things. With the help of computers they can make the things for cheaper (else why fire the people?), and the now the people in aggregate have less money to spend, so the things can and must cost less. You divide what work people are needed for across a much larger pool of available employees, and so the time-worked-per-person-per-day drops. You can inflate currency so people get paid the same for a twenty-hour work week, or you can drop prices of goods so that all these people getting paid half wages can still afford to buy them. Either way, people are working half as much and enjoying the exact same standard of living.

We did this already, when we went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, and then (to a lesser extent) when our production went from manufacturing- to service-based. Employ machines to increase leisure. It's why we made plows, it's why we made assembly lines, and it's why we made the assembly language. When I'm sitting at home and write a Python script to rename a bunch of computer files for me (a boring task) so that I can spend that time playing a video game, that's the point of it. We'll do that on a large scale, and next thing you know half of the world is entertainers, and the other half is audience, and everything else is an afterthought.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

Yesterday I submitted Gods Tomorrow with this as its introductory description of the book:

Gods Tomorrow is a 60,000-word sci-fi thriller set in a near-future where people have traded the concept of privacy for the convenience of total information awareness. It's like 1984, but happy.

Then today I was reading through Courtney's old blog posts and came across a link to this article, which puts forth the argument that justifies my "but happy." I recommend it. Especially for D--.

Project Report: The MaskedFox Memory Game

A couple months ago, Toby and I started talking about making a learning game for AB that would teach her how to use maps. That project (like so many of ours) fell apart when we ran into a need for 3D models, but while I was still thinking in terms of writing an educational game, we started playing a card-matching memory game with AB that was a lot of work to set up.

One day over lunch I talked with Toby about the possibility of writing a computerized version of the same game, and he had a working prototype of it for me by the next morning. I spent a couple days gathering some Creative Commons art and sound effects and then polishing the framework - and then parts of the next month tweaking settings here and there - but the whole project probably took less than a hundred hours of total programming time.

It's a fully functional Memory game (complete with a settings panel to let you tweak which card set you want to use, and how easy/difficult you want the game to be), with a surprisingly robust matching system that allows Flash Cards (that is, non-identical pairs) and easy importing of custom card sets.

I'm not completely done with it. Most notably, I'd like to add support for audio cards, with a simple interface to create new ones. Still, the whole game is there with this release, so I'm prepared to call it complete.

You can find the game (as well as installation instructions) on the website.

Status: Stable, v. 1.0