Further Reading: Ghost Targets

Isaiah 65:24

I will answer them before they even call to me. While they are still talking about their needs, I will go ahead and answer their prayers!

I'm just saying.

Further Reading: Ghost Targets

This article from Ars Technica talks about the personally-identifying information available in large corporate databases, the efforts these corporations make to conceal identities when they do share their (incredibly valuable) datasets to researchers, and the ineffectiveness of those efforts.

The article ends with a call-to-arms for legislation to handle these things, and preserve privacy, which seems to me like a strange cap on an article all about the futility of such efforts. People cling to that old idea, though.

Anyway, the part I find most fascinating (and the real focus of the article) is the remarkably simple process of correlating readily available information from vastly different datasets to create a useful connection. That's fundamental to Hathor, but for my novels I posited an imaginary, universal database architecture to make it happen. Turns out you can match spreadsheets against text lists and get the same effect today. That's impressive.

Project Report: Taming Fire (and The Dragonswarm)

This is one of those promised catch-up posts.

Taming Fire is easily my longest-running project. I've conceivably put more time (by which I mean both thinking about it and writing about it) into Sleeping Kings as a whole, but I've put more years into Taming Fire.

The summer before I went to college I was living in Little Rock with my parents, and they had a dinner party so we could all get to know some people from the new church, and in order to get out of socializing I spent the evening buried in my new scribblebook. That was my first scribblebook, and I filled its first pages with the story of a bright spring morning when the Dwarf chieftain's wife, Elsa, walked into her living room to find her toddler riding on the back of a baby dragon. And then, moment's later, the dragon's mama came looking for it.

That became the prologue to Taming Fire, a novel set in my fantasy world during a time known as the dragonswarm, when the long-dormant dragons and wyverns and sea serpents and all the Elder Wyrms all woke at once, to burn civilization to cinders and drive humanity back into the wilderness.

When I got to college, the story got its hero -- a young man who wanted nothing more in life than to be a soldier, who was recruited by a wizard who wanted to turn a swordsman into a wizard. Originally, the predominant theme of the novel was the important of cross-training.

Thankfully, it became its own story. It began with the story of Daven trying desperately to find his place in the world, as the wizard dragged him from a life of near slavery to a life of privilege where he was ridiculed and hated. He tried to learn the wizard's magic, tried to fight a dragon, tried to enlist in the army, and ultimately found his own destiny. And a hot chick, to boot.

Then the king went and ruined it, and the long-anticipated dragonswarm really got going, and the world fell into Chaos and it took Daven to save the day. The whole story, start to finish, came in around 180,000 words, but there's such a perfect breaking point in the middle that I've long since decided to make it two novels -- one the story of Daven's search for purpose, and the other the story of Daven's victory over the dragonswarm. I've made that decision (and it's easy enough to split the Word file into two Word files), but I haven't done any work on it yet.

I have done several rewrites on the text as a single volume -- one so significant that I rewrote the whole thing from scratch, to make the mood more grown-up and serious. Even so, I've come so far in my writing in the years since I did that last rewrite that the whole thing feels like rough draft.

There was also a planned sequel (which is now the third book in a trilogy), and I'd done an opening chapter for that, but never any more. I'd still like to get that tale told, though. So, yeah, it's been a while since I did anything with it, and I don't really plan to work on it soon, but I do consider Taming Fire (and the whole Dragonprince trilogy) an active project.

Status (Taming Fire): Rough Draft
Status (The Dragonswarm): Rough Draft
Status (The Long Road to Peace): Prewriting

Project Report: Ghost Targets: Restraint

There's not a lot I can say about the plot of Restraint without spoiling the ending of Gods Tomorrow (for the two people I know who I haven't made read it). However, by way of brief synopsis, Restraint picks up the Ghost Targets story three months after the events of Expectation. When new blackouts begin appearing in the Hathor database, Katie is forced to deal with an old nemesis to find out how to stop it. Along the way, she finds herself immersed in the shady world of private prisons, where exemption from Hathor monitoring leaves the world's worst offenders out of sight -- and their keepers unaccountable.

I've been working on Restraint for several months now -- since about three weeks after I completed Expectation. All my prewriting is done, including a scene-by-scene detailed outline, and I've got about 15,000 words into the actual novel.

In addition to the plot elements listed above, Restraint introduces us to another member of the Ghost Targets team: Phillips, whose name we heard mentioned in Gods Tomorrow. I've had a lot of fun developing Phillips's character and getting to see him behave badly on the page. That's really been the highlight of the novel so far.

I hope to have Restraint finished in time to start on Burn Jump for National Novel Writing Month, but I've got a busy fall coming up. Still, I'll keep you posted.

Status: Writing

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.