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I have the flu.

How did I get it?  Possibly because it is the season for such things.  Possibly because it was sent as punishment for my vast and varied sins.  Or maybe it had something to do with that curiously-perfumed envelope Scott Lynch sent me.

Either way, I’m sick.  As such, productivity is limited, my eyes sear and my urine boils and sets my toilet ablaze (hence the inspiration for Black Halo’s cover art).  As a result, I have been watching a lot of shitty movies.  Because what else is Netflix for if not to see movies you’re embarrassed to be seen watching?  Tonight, I watched The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior, which as one of my Twitter buds puts is “the best prequel of a spinoff of a sequel of a remake ever.”  And that’s exactly what it is.

Also, it’s bad, don’t watch it.

It wasn’t until I watched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time that I truly began to feel pain, though.

For those of you who have not played the game: you are worse than Stalin.  There is no debate on this.  It is among the most fantastic games you will ever play, including some of the characterization and story that rivals a lot of novels I’ve read, let alone video games.  It is such a good game that, if you have not played it, you are objectively worse than a dictator who killed millions of his people and fed them to the rest of his people.  It is that good a game and you are that bad a person for not having played it.

Consequently, you’d think that it would make a pretty good movie.  I mean, if you cut out most of the puzzles, you’d pretty much have an awesome script.  It’d be great.

It was not.  The final sword fight takes place in a corner.  No.  That is not an exaggeration or a turn of phrase.  It is a corner.  About two feet by two feet.  And there is a fight going on in it.

But that’s besides the point.  This was a movie that was going to be hard to screw up.  You had an exotic setting, a plot pre-made and one of the most intriguing characters in video games history: a dashing young rogue who actually acts like a dashing young rogue–he abhors bloodshed, he has a hard time coming to grips with caring for people and he matures over the story.  But it wasn’t until I saw Jake Gyllenhaal’s take on the Prince–a violent, angry asshole who is hailed as a hero and a great savior despite slaughtering thousands and who is oh so easily flummoxed by the spunky heroine–that I realized something.

I miss Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Yes.  He was an actor born with a vast, barren wasteland where his charisma should be.  He was basically meat and anger.  That didn’t matter.  He did well with them and frequently used them to his advantage.  And to be honest, that’s why I miss him.  I miss having heroes who were lacking something.  I miss having an amoral sociopath in Conan.  I miss having an emotionless killbot in the Terminator.  I miss heroes who had to make up for something.

Because our current modern action heroes don’t really seem to have that problem.  They are witty, they are charismatic, they are ladies’ men, they are expert fighters, they are masters of disguise, they are brilliant tacticians.  They do not have traits, they have ingredients.  They are canned heroes.

And I do not like them.

Frequently it’s mentioned that a hero must have flaws.  A hero who is perfect is not relatable, after all.  And that’s true, but it’s not quite the whole story.  Adding a flaw for the sake of adding a flaw is just adding another ingredient to the can.  It’s not the flaw itself that makes the hero interesting, it’s how he deals with the flaw, how he overcomes (or fails to overcome) the flaw that gives him depth and thus makes us appreciate him more.

We didn’t like Jack Sparrow because he’s got loose morals.  We like him because that loose morality has resulted in complete obliviousness to anyone besides himself and his actions reflect that.

We didn’t like Jackie Chan’s heroes because they were weak and cowardly.  We liked them because he acted as they would have: trying to escape fighting and seeing what happened when that didn’t work.

We didn’t like Conan because he was aggressive and violent…well, we might have, but we liked him more because that aggression resulted in his distinctive personality that led him to punch a camel in the face for spitting at him.

Yes, a hero needs flaws.  But the work doesn’t end there.  Remember this when designing your characters: flaws shape their personality, which shapes their past, which shapes their personality.  The flaws have to be a part of them.  The flaws have to affect them.  The flaws have to shape them and, by shaping them, shape the story.

Otherwise, you get a big ol’ bowl of Jake Gyllenhaal.

And he’ll give you diarrhea.

Sam!  Where have you been!

Doin’ thangs.

Like what?

Well, I’ve got this pretty awesome interview with one of my best buddies Blake Barlton (actually, his name is Blake Charlton, author of the very cool Spellwright, but I kind of wanted to keep the alliteration rolling).  We talk about writing, fighting and grit on his blog here.

A writer on the verge, he calls me!  But on the verge of what?

Madness?

Probably.  And it probably doesn’t help that in a recent podcast on the Dragon Page, a friendly discussion about writing process swiftly degenerated into talk about cannibalism and eating delicious endangered species.  You can also hear that right here.

That sounds like a lot of stuff!

There’s more, in fact!  I just got the Galley Proofs back for Black Halo, so we are right on schedule!

What are Galley Proofs?

It is the last stage of editing.  Line editing is where the magic happens, where my editors and I come together and lock ourselves in a metaphorical sweat lodge for a few days while we work on things and try to keep the metaphorical towels about our waists from slipping.  After that comes copy editing, where my good friend Deanna Hoak goes line by line and finds logical inconsistencies, problems with word choice and questions my use of a man-eating hat (you’re going to love it when you see it).  Finally, comes Galley Proofs, my last chance to fix anything.  I can only fix 10% or I have to pay for it in BUTT…I mean blood…and money…butt money.

The title says “Fan Art.”

Yes, I actually got a cool piece of Tome fan art today by Sarah Elkins!  Want to see?

D’aww, look at little Gariath there, taking a moment to get all affectionate in between rampant bloodlusts.

Thanks, Sarah!  This one is going right up on the fridge!

Well, that about does it for me!  Any other questions?

Just one.

What’s that?

Do you think responding to the voices in your head by putting them in a different font type makes you any less crazy?

Look, I don’t want to have this argument with you.

Why not, Sam?

Yeah, Sam, why not?

Okay, thanks for reading!

If you were ever a human being, you probably had some difficulty in high school.  You might have been awkward, gangly, overweight, short, too tall, pimple-ridden, acne-scarred or your head was an unusual shape that might have resembled a thing that was kind of like what you saw in a sex ed class and even though you knew it was just an awkward growing phase everyone would keep saying you had a neckphallus and everyone said don’t let it get to you but then you went and wrote a book so you COULD PROVE THAT SHITTY JANIE SIMMONS WRONG, I HATE YOU SO MUCH, SIMMONS.

…anyway, you probably heard this phrase said of other, prettier people: “She’s lucky she’s got looks.”  You probably didn’t believe it.  I didn’t.  Until I played Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

Very, very loosely based on the Chinese classic Journey to the West, the game’s story follows Monkey and Trip, slave and captor respectively, as they escape from slavers and set out on a long and perilous journey across a nature-reclaimed post-apocalyptic America to return Trip home.  Terrorized by mechs, ancient weapons of the war that destroyed humanity, Monkey leaps, climbs and fights his way through the hauntingly beautiful landscape to return a captor who is slowly turning into a friend to all she has left in the world.

This game comes from Ninja Theory, the same team that brought you Heavenly Sword: the story of a kung-fu superwoman who kind of was like the female Kratos and that brought up some uncomfortable questions for you.  If you could fault anything about Heavenly Sword, be it its derivative gameplay or awkward controls, you certainly couldn’t fault its writing.  The dialogue was well-constructed, the delivery was fantastic and it’s probably the only game that actually put more than two and a half shits into facial expression.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West follows proudly in the footsteps of having exquisite characterization and amazing writing.  By novel standards, the story isn’t really complex.  By video game standards, though, it’s at least a step above most.  Where the game really shines, though, is the chemistry and growth between Monkey and Trip, thanks in no small part to the fantastic acting and delivery.  You either know you’re a writer or know you’ve got mental problems when you utter the words: “My God…that ellipse…so perfect.”  Both were confirmed to me when I began to nerd out over each piece of conversation they had.

Beyond that, I’m really impressed with the characters of Monkey and Trip.  Monkey is silent, grim and brutal, which is about as uncommon in video games as syphilis in Dresden, but what really seals his character is that he does so much while being silent and grim.  Unlike characters that are grim and somehow full of pithy remarks, he actually struggles with words and summarizing his feelings, so simply opts not to talk.

And while Trip is determined to reach her home again, she’s also (rightly) terrified of crossing a war-zone full of killer mechs with a man who threatened to snap her neck.  Occasionally, I have the vague feeling that a lot of writers are terrified to show women in anything that could be considered compromising.  They don’t want to show women as vulnerable, scared, angry or hateful because that’s just so unladylike (somehow, lusty never factors into those taboos).  And if we do get those, they always seem shoehorned into the generic Supercilious Badass Action Woman when the writers realize they’ve made a cliche instead of a character, rather than as a natural development of the character.  It is exceedingly refreshing to see the occasional script that realizes that women are actually also people and their character motives might be longer than “she’s a girl.”

Combined with the lush landscapes, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a positively gorgeous game that’s really fun to watch.

…and that’s it.

The gameplay is surprisingly boring.  For a dude who has the upper body of the simian he’s named after, Monkey’s platforming sections are amazingly dull.  The scenery glows and flashes against the landscape to indicate where handholds are and what you can climb and you can’t move until you’re at the very edge of that (if you’re even three feet off the ground, you still can’t move until you find the exact spot to hop off of).  Admittedly, this is a design choice: the developers valued the appearance more than the gameplay.  That’s fine.  I just don’t agree with it.  The rage inducing phenomenon to platformers known as the “is-that-a-ledge-or-isn’t-let’s-jump-and-find-out-oh-no-I-dropped-to-my-death” is pretty much the entire allure of it.  Without it, there’s no danger.

The combat is also pretty dull and repetitive.  You have light attack, heavy attack, shield, dodge, counter, sweep and everything else you’d expect to find in a shirtless action hero’s combat log, but you need only the light attack.  There’s no discernible difference between it and everything else and you can get by perfectly without anything else.  This is sadly rather common these days and, at the risk of appearing a total fanboy, is something that God of War routinely got right: if you put a combo in, that combo must do something.  Chekhov would be proud.

Mechs aren’t that varied and, frankly, that’s a pretty big disgrace.  Robots are like any other monster: full of possibility, don’t necessarily have to make a lot of sense and the quality of which are defined by how psychotic you can make them.  It’s pretty pathetic when your enemy variants are sword-bot, gun-bot, sword-gun-bot and dog-bot.

Ordinarily, I like to think I can value story over gameplay.  If it’s a little weak in the platforming or combat, I can still get into it if the characters drag me.  Enslaved tested me to unreasonable proportions, though.  If the cutscenes are far and away the best part of a game, you got issues, bud.

Recommended for English majors who are bad at Uncharted.

Let me tell you a story.  A story about a man named Patrick Rothfuss.

Born into poverty in South Korea as a poor Irish immigrant, Patty Fussy was a man who didn’t think much of himself.  Like many Irish immigrants in South Korea during the Cold War, he suspected his life was planned out in advance: he would live trying to please an angry aunt, he would fight in a war, he would die and a state-appointed minister would say “I never liked that guy” when he was lowered into the ground.

But Patty Fussy had another calling.  When he awoke to enlist, he found his face drowning in a sea of hair.  His eyes went wide at the marvels before him: beard dolphins capered and cavorted in his curly locks, the song of the beard whale reverberated into his very soul and David Attenborough was doing a documentary on the abyssal depths within.  So mad with wonder was he that he went on a rampage, feeding his beard the blood it needed to grow mightily.

Years later, Patty Fussy, now known as Patrick Rothfuss for legal reasons, still attempts to atone for his grievous sins.  Will he ever reach heaven?  Will he ever find the peace he seeks from the maddening howls of those souls now trapped within his beard like a hairy phylactery?

Who gives a crap.  Let’s talk about the chance to win some signed books.

If you’ve followed Patrick at all, you know he does some fantastic work for the Worldbuilders charity, helping to fight poverty across the globe.  While admittedly some of my story about him was embellished, I occasionally wonder if he does actually have some grievous sin to atone for, so involved in this charity is he.

This year, he’s got some fairly sexy signed books to give away for people who donate.  For every 10 dollars you donate, you can get a chance to win books by such magnificent authors as Diana Gabaldon, George R.R.  Martin, Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson or by such reprobates as Sam Sykes and Jim Butcher.

Being the lovely people you are, you don’t need a lot of reason to donate to charity in the time of year when your guilt is at its peak (as well it should be, you luxuriant peacock, you), but there’s nothing wrong with an added incentive, right?

All the details are right here in his blog post and in the previous one I linked.  If you’re looking for a charity or if you’re looking for some signed, often rare books, this is the place you go.

Please.  Make sure Patrick doesn’t wind up in hell.

Hey!

Huh?

Hey, Sam Sykes!

Whaaaaaaaat?

Where you been, man?!  We haven’t seen you in ages!  Your fish are dead and your lawn is overgrown and there’s this naked old lady on my front porch who keeps clawing at the door and crowing your name.

Crowing?

Yes.  You know how like when it’s a nice suburban summer’s day and the birds are singing and then, out of nowhere, you hear this grouse-like call of woe, like somewhere in the world there is a bird who sang a dirge just for you and if you listen hard enough it tells you when you’re going to die?

Well, obviously.

It was kind of like that.

Oh!  Well, anyway, I’ve been busy.

With what?

Admittedly, a lot of stuff I can’t really talk about right now.  While a lot of it is cool, there is some stuff that is less than cool that you don’t really need to know about.  Suffice to say, I’ve been sort of butt-deep in working on…things.

I emailed you, though!

I know and I’m sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you yet.  I will, in good (bad) time, of course, but your patience in the interim is so appreciated I will probably suffocate just thinking about it.

Anything new?

I don’t know if you saw, but we have the Black Halo cover out right now!

Admittedly, it’s probably a little shameful that I’m only bringing this up now long after most bloggers have sunk their teeth into it, but I felt it worth talking about, since it’s generated a complaint or two online in its time.

Was it my first choice?  Eh.  No.  I kind of wanted to use another character for it.

Do I like it?  Yes, actually.

Am I saying that only because of my publishers?  Actually, no, I’m not.  Interestingly enough, I am entitled to my own opinions.  I like it because I am not what you might call a particularly big cover connoisseur.  I appreciate covers that I enjoy, sure, but I don’t see it as a huge point of debate.  I prefer characters to landscapes or vague artsy descriptions.  You may not.  That’s fine.  I don’t blame you (publicly).

Is there in fact a scene in which a ship on fire starts sinking?  Well.

Well, okay, then.  Anything else new?

Yes, actually!  This Wednesday, I will be participating in a TWITTER CHAT.

How the hell does that work?

Presumably, you follow @sffwrtcht and ask them questions for them to relay to me about writing/craft/trilogies/my work/butt police/whateva.  The whole thing is going down this Wednesday, December 1st, at Nine (9 (nyne)) PM EST.  That’s Eastern Standard Time!

Oh, neat.  What else?

Did you see this fantastic review of Tome of the Undergates in Rob Will Review?  He’s actually become a reviewer I’ve started to follow a little more intensely lately, owing mostly to the sheer breadth of topics he can cover.  I very much like what he had to say about the book and very much like him as a person.

You should definitely read him if you don’t want to give me reason to launch your children out of catapults.

That’s it?

That’s not good enough for you?

Well…

Fine.  Here.  Have a picture of John Scalzi as a Walrus.

Good!  Hope to see you all in the Twitter Chat on WENDESDAY, NINE PM EST.

Anyone who’s bothered to talk to me beyond to know who I am and what I’m doing in their house knows I enjoy webcomics.  Anyone who’s ever read my Links page knows there is a comic out there that I absolutely adore.

The Meek

by Der-Shing Helmer

Above is the strip that essentially solidified the comic to me.  It’s the character that made this story one of humans trying to overcome themselves, it’s the part of the story that so eloquently illustrates a conflict with no clear resolution and it’s the moment that I said to myself: “You know, webcomics might actually be worth talking about.“

And from a writer’s perspective, they certainly are.  The challenges facing a writer of webcomics is not too unlike the challenges facing a novelist, save for one important fact: comic readers tend to be a lot less patient.  Every thing in a comic must catch the eye, must seize the attention and must work just so with the artwork.  It’s undoubtedly a very difficult process, but one worth reading about.  And to talk more about it, I asked Helmer if she might consider being interviewed.

…she said yes, by the way.

So, I thought about dancing around the subject, but I think I might just have to get it out of the way right now: I adore the character of Luca.  One usually doesn’t see such a complex character in true literature, let alone a fantasy comic.  And while none of your characters are what I might call ‘simple,’ I think he’s definitely one of the more difficult to understand.  Did you go into his character knowing he’d be difficult?  Or does his character just come naturally to you?

Luca isn’t as difficult for me to understand as some of my other characters. His role in the comic is to be a “bad guy,” but one that is still very relatable and human.  To get to the honest motivations behind his actions I decided to base a lot of the negative aspects of his personality on my own. The side effect of that is that it is sometimes difficult for me to hold him accountable for his actions… I care for the character very much, and there is a temptation to make the reader like him (and by extension, me), but some of the things he does and will do are inexcusable.  So yes, his character comes naturally, but he can be depressing to write for.

That question provides a nice segue into my next one: characterization can be a difficult thing to achieve in comics.  I think we novelists often take for granted the ability to go into a character’s head and sift about in them for a bit.  Comics tend to not have that advantage, as too much thought-bubbling usually leads to telegraphing a character’s motives.  How do you avoid this over-explaining?  How much is expression and physical portrayal through art and how much is dialogue?

 

In my head, I think of comics as art first and writing second. Not in terms of how well each carries the story, but in how the reader experiences it. With a book you are first sucked in by the language, but in comics you see the art and the acting of the characters on the page in that millisecond before you start to read. So I try to write my pages the same way; by having a general idea for the scene, acting it out (in real life and then via thumbnails), and then getting the dialogue to synch naturally with the expression. This usually also leads to an economy of explanation, since I’m naturally communicating on both the art level and the writing level. I’ve tried it the other way around, doing the writing first and then matching it to art, but it always loses something.

I try to avoid explicit “internal voice/ thinking” panels as well. I think of my comic almost as a real life experience, where you can pick up on cues and make assumptions, but have to read between the lines or explicitly ask if you want to know what a person is thinking.

 

I didn’t even think to ask if you prefer your comic to be labeled fantasy or not.  I certainly wouldn’t call it conventional fantasy; you’ve got elements of magic, spiritualism, otherworldly things riding side-by-side with guns, empire and national politics.  We occasionally talk about world-building on this blog and the question has come up of just how much of it should be available?  How much of your world do you make available through the comic and how much of a good world do you feel should be shown?

 

Again, I use a real world model for my world. Right now I bet you couldn’t tell me a great deal about the newest trends in women’s shoes. Or about the internal politics in the Vatican. Or the voting record of the senator from a state you don’t live in. There’s a lot of stuff in real life that you just don’t have to know unless you actively seek that information. I’m presenting my world that way as well, there is a lot of background development on my end, but I don’t think it’s necessary to give it to the reader all at once for no reason. If it comes up naturally in a conversation I don’t mind, but you won’t be seeing any exposition from me. And it has a bonus of creating a sense of anticipation, knowing that new clues to the world can be dropped in any panel.

But as you know I’m a nice guy, so I did make some non-spoiler information available in my “Meekipedia” for my most curious readers. Seems only fair, seeing how much I use Google to search for background information on my own environment.

 

 

On the subject of magic (which is also something we’ve talked about here), The Meek features, as I said, an element of magic that isn’t quite overwhelming and seems to have its own set of rules, yet retains its mystic quality.  How much thought went into the spirituality and mystical elements of the story?  Do you tend to know what you’re doing when it comes to them or is it more of a shoot-from-the-hip situation?

 

I have a few rules for the magic, though I’ll be honest and say that not every point is worked out. My main difficulty has been to figure out where to stop. If I solve some difficult situation with “magic,” will it be met with disbelief? Is there a point where it just becomes too much? I don’t really know the answers to these questions yet, since I haven’t tested them on readers. Time’s on my side though, after a few years of thinking about some of these things they still ring true to me. And I have a few more years to go before I even address those points in the comic, in case I change my mind.

 

Occasionally, amongst the webcomics crowd, there are murmurings of the difference between comedy and drama.  Some say you need to choose one and forsake the other, others say that’s disingenuous to the nature of a story.  Where do you fall?  Is it is as big a deal as people say?  Which do you find lends itself more to characterization?

 

I hate to be boring and get back to my party line, but I’m grounding my story in reality. My life is mostly boring, but there is also drama. And comedy. And horror (I found an ant crawling yesterday in a place no ant should be). It’s all part of living, and my story is about some people living and doing their thing. I think in a strip comic where the expectation is for humor this might be a harder question, but for a graphic novel like mine the answer is that they’re both important parts to the story.

 

Finally, are there any comic strips, graphic novels or (cough) regular novels that you’d attribute as inspiration to yourself or valuable knowledge for others?

 

My high school English teacher once told me “You sure do read a lot of crap,” and it’s sort of true, haha. My most favorite novels are genre works: Lawrence Block’s Scudder novels for crime and mystery, The Song of Ice and Fire series by Martin for that reality-based fantasy that I love, Zelazny for my sci-fi kick (which is actually relevant to the comic), and Stephen King for horror. They might not be high literature, but they are interesting! And my main goal is to make an interesting comic that can hold the reader’s attention, so I guess it works out.

And I’m a big fan of Bone by Jeff Smith, and Skydoll by Barbucci and Canepa. I think I learned 90% of what I know about comics from these two works alone.

As a parting shot, I really want to stress that you can’t write without reading, and you can’t make comics without reading comics. In that respect, everything I’ve ever read has taught me how to make a comic- either by teaching me examples of what to do or by teaching me what to avoid like the plague (I’m looking at you, Dean Koontz).  The themes from all my reading and observation that spoke to me the most are the ones that made it into my own work eventually. You have to really pay attention to what it is that you like though. I don’t think there’s a “right” way to do things, but there certainly is an honest one.

Thanks, Der-Shing!  And I wholeheartedly advise anyone interested in writing, novels or otherwise, to check out The Meek!

T-T-T-TusCon!

In hindsight, I should have been blogging about this much earlier, but I will be appearing at TusCon in…Tuscon!  The Hotel TusCon CityCenter, to be precise.  Did you know Jim “2fly” Butcher will be there, too?  Maybe he will sign my child for me!

Anyway, please come by and see me speak, if you’re in the neighborhood!  We’s gon’ be talkin’ ’bout all sorts o’ crazy crap: eBooks, publishing, genres and where I stole this child from.

Happy Veteran’s Day!

I almost regret talking about other stuff, since this is a topic that I feel is remarkably important.  It’s Veteran’s Day, as you well know, and it’s a time for honoring our servicemen and women.  If you so much as say “thanks,” “good job” or “come back alive,” you’ll have done good.  But this is one of those opportunities where you can do more.

War is…a difficult thing to understand.  I say that only because I can’t understand it.  I’ve never been in one.  But it’s everywhere and the men and women who come back from it don’t always have the means, the motive or the resources for dealing with what’s come back with them.  Not all of them want to be helped and you can’t do everything for them, but you can do something.

You can listen.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.  Sometimes they need more, but you can’t give it to them.  Giving what you can, though, is a good start, even if all you can is your time and an ear.  So if you have the opportunity to help a Veteran just by giving them the chance to talk to you, the chance to know that they don’t just give up their time and their health for our country, and maybe even the chance to tell them that there’s help for the stuff that follows them back home.

Do so.

Excerpts

I had a few up on the Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf and Floor-to-Ceiling Books.  We had to take them down due to some publisher considerations (we’re doing something cooler).  But do not fret, my lovelies.  I’ll undoubtedly get them to you.

Sam Sykes Tells You What to Think On Issues You Talk About

One-Star Amazon Ratings as a means of protesting a lack of viable eBook Format

If you’re curious about the book, read it yourself, dang it.  If you want to see something on Kindle, there’s a link on the book’s page to do such a thing.  Click it many times.

The Pedophile’s How-To Guide on Amazon

It’s an independent business.  It’s not censorship if they choose not to carry it.  Also: oh my God, really?

Gnomes

When the fuck did they go from woodland perverts to inventors, anyway?  What happened there?

Motives for Bloggers

Blog honestly for readers.  Blog often for publishers.  Blog wittily for yourself.  Blog fairly for authors.  Blog about your vast muscles and how you can lift a tire over your head for chicks.

What happened to Montel Williams?

I think he’s dead.

How was World Fantasy?

I can beat up both Blake Charlton and Peter V. Brett at the same time.

Has Sam Sykes ever gotten into a fist fight with girls?

Three of them.  All on my twitter.

Triceratops?

Graaaaaaaar!

A man waded into the water once.

It was a spontaneous thing to do that he had been planning for months.  It was the solution to all his problems.  Women loved spontaneity, as much as they loved planning and other things that the television had told him they loved.  Men respected spontaneity, they would clap his back and say “you crazy son of a bitch” in a way that meant good things instead of bad.  This was what people wanted him to do and he did so.

He waited patiently for someone to walk by and notice him.  A woman did, but did not.  He looked at her and said: “Do you see the craziness here?  I am a rather wild and spontaneous fellow and this is the sort of thing your kind likes.  I don’t like to say ‘your kind,’ since I don’t want to be with a woman who can be boiled down into a kind, but I kind of want to be the kind of woman who I can categorize from time to time in kind so that they’re easier to handle.  The thing is, I know that you’re supposed to be hard to handle and that’s the reward, but I’m desperately afraid of dying alone, being alone and being okay with being alone, so I kind of hope this will just go right so I don’t have to work so hard and so that I can rest easy knowing I’m going to die some day.  So maybe you could come into the water with me and you’ll ignore everything but that and this will work.”

But he said it with his eyes, like handsome men do, and he was not a handsome man so she kept walking.

He thought about walking after her and just saying these things with his mouth, but he remembered that he had always given up too soon on things.  He was a quitter.  When things got hard, he would quit them.  If he did that now, someone would see him and say: “Wasn’t that man being spontaneous a few moments ago?  Now he is just walking back and forth like an ordinary person on dry land.  Such a wishy washy state suggests a defect of the mind.  Officer?  Officer!  That man was being spontaneous a moment ago and now he is not.  I fear he might have a mental illness.  Yes, please put him on the watch list of sexual terrorists.  Yes, thank you.”

He was not a quitter.  Not when it counted.  Not when it came to standing in the water.  So he stood and waited a long time for someone to see how wacky this was.

And someone did and someone saw.  But they got it all wrong.

“The tide is rising,” they said.  “You’re going to find yourself without clean clothes.”

“I know,” he said.  “I won’t have any clean pants to wear to work tomorrow and they will likely fire me and I will have to leave my apartment because I am poor.  Then everyone will know I am poor because I will have become addicted to meth.  That is what poor people do and I will be one of them.  I dearly wish I wasn’t going to be addicted to meth.”

“You could move.  The tide hasn’t reached your pants yet since you rolled them up.”

“Well, no, because of that reason I already had an internal monologue above.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” they said.  This seemed to be leading toward an argument, so he just nodded politely and stared down at the rising water.

He did lose his job because he didn’t come into work the next day or the next.  How could he have, he asked himself?  His coworkers knew he was going to the beach.  He had told them.  And if he hadn’t, they would know.  Somehow, they would know and they would hate him for it because he had given them no reason to like him.  If only they had come here and seen what he had done, he would have had their respect.  Life was so unfair.

And the reason it was unfair was because a young lady got married the very next day on the beach.  He stared at the spot next to her adoringly and wished he was standing there.  He would have looked very nice in a suit.  Then he would have gone on his honeymoon and he would have had a good time and he would talk about being married and he would tell stories about being married and he would be married and he would be happy.  Not to that woman, though.  She was kind of fat.

Maybe a marriage wasn’t the best solution, he thought, because the very next week the Apocalypse happened.  He noted down that the Zoroastrians had it right.  Hadn’t he had a conversation about this last week with his coworkers?  He should have said something then, because they would have laughed and he wouldn’t have had to come out here to be spontaneous for three weeks.  Those crazy Zoroastrians.  “Man, he totally called it,” they would have said.  He couldn’t think much further than that because people were screaming and running away from the end of the world and no one even bothered to look at him.

Life continued to be unfair.  Eventually the ice caps melted and he drowned.

The end.  No moral.

I write fantasy.  I’m quite pleased writing fantasy.  It’s a vast field that thrives on experimentation and whose greatest stories are born with the phrases: “what if,” “wouldn’t it be cool,” and “how does that work?”  It is a genre which is based on the concept of doing whatever the hell you want to.  The exploration of the however, the whyever and the wherever the hell you want to is what makes the story fun enough to match the concept.

But for every “what if,” “wouldn’t it be cool,” and “how does that work,” we have another set of voices.  These ones say “been done,” “wouldn’t it be unrealistic,” and “it doesn’t work like that.”  They’re not exactly as loud as they used to be, to be sure, but they’re still there and they’re still noticeable.  Why?  Because it’s annoying and it’s wrong and it doesn’t really work that way anymore.

If you’re one of his many fans, you might have seen this post by Scott Westerfeld, author of Leviathan, in which he bites back against those who accuse steampunk of being ridiculous, unrealistic or whatever the current complaint lodged against them is.  In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve never really been all that into steampunk and my fancy of it tends to end at “oh, cool, zeppelins.”  But I think what Mr. Westerfeld is saying is something that applies to all of fantasy.

Why do we keep trying to put rules on this genre?  The fact that fantasy is more popular than ever and more diverse than ever is not a coincidence.  I’m sure there’s more than a few people who remember when the genre as a whole was stagnant, mostly because everything was an echo of Tolkien or another author.  We’ve moved far away from that, but have we moved far enough?  I mean, try to have a conversation with a fantasy fan that doesn’t involve the words “Tolkien” and “genius” in one way or another.  And once you’ve done that, see if the other guy doesn’t look a little more nervous at the mention of him.  We speak his name in hushed tones and it seems like he has to be included as an influence in just about everything as a matter of paying tribute.

We’ve come a long, long way from Lord of the Rings. It’s okay to like that book.  It’s okay to be influenced by that book.  But do we really need to speak of him as though he were a god instead of a dude who broke rules in the first place?

There are rules to writing, yes.  To writing. Not to writing fantasy.  And good writing frequently shatters those rules (though a knowledge of them is needed to break them in the first place).  When we put rules on writing fantasy, when we believe there are certain measures of a story that must be fulfilled or certain things that must happen or certain qualities a hero must have, it taints the creativity behind the story.  The author is no longer writing what they want to write, but writing what they think they ought to write, which is the sort of attitude that should remain in middle school.

I’m sure there are a few people that will interpret this as a total blaspheming to Tolkien, Howard, whoever.  I’m not saying what they did wasn’t important.  I’m not saying their quality has diminished over the years.  I’m not saying you can’t be influenced by their work.  I am saying we don’t have to feel constrained by their influence.  I am saying we don’t have to interpret their work as rules to be obeyed relentlessly.  I am saying that, if you want to write something that totally spits in their faces, you absolutely should.

I like to think I get more than a few aspiring or practicing authors here as traffic, people whom yet have not met me in person and thusly still think my advice is actually worthier than the rantings of a delusional madman (oh, you are in for a shock), so I hope to impart this bit of wisdom to you.

Maybe some people will hate you.  Maybe some people will hate your work, maybe some people will hate you for writing it.  You can’t give a crap about them any more than you can give a crap about WWTD.  You can’t please them.  You can’t please them, because they want someone you aren’t.  You can’t be that person, no matter how much tribute you pay or how many homages appear in your work.

You can only write for yourself.  Even the people who will love your work are secondary, because you can’t write for them, either.  And they don’t love your work because you wrote for them.  They love your work because they love your work. It’s one of the simplest and most beautiful truths of this business.  You can hope they enjoy it.  You can even make minor tweaks to make them enjoy it more.  But you can never do what another person did.  And you should never try to be anyone but yourself.

It’s a hard attitude to come by and, don’t let me fool you, I’m not at all impervious to a person hating my book.  But I am at peace with the fact that I write what I want to write, that I write as Sam Sykes, and that no one else can do what I can do.  I can’t do what Tolkien did, either.  Nor can I do what Westerfeld, Lynch, Scalzi, Abercrombie, Rothfuss, Mieville with a stupid accent, Priest, Resnick or Enus Schmidt does.

And because I can’t, we have a world where you have Westerfeld, Lynch, Scalzi, Abercrombie, Rothfuss, Mieville with a stupid accent, Priest, Resnick, Enus Schmidt and Sykes to read.

And that’s a pretty good place to be.