I underestimate how much I love superheroes

The work I've done recently has really made me think about superheroes. I'm using that word extremely loosely. What I mean is characters with super powers. They don't have to be vigilantes or act particularly heroic.

I think the word typically evokes costumed heroes with super powers, but I'm mostly interested in the problems and issues of made-up powers.

Apparently I'm not the only one, because the extremely well done show Heroes has a bunch of powered individuals, none of whom is a traditional superhero. I guess they can get away with that since they have folks trying to save the world...it's not about vigilantism but about conflicts between various people with genetically-derived powers.

But they first thing they dropped were costumes, possibly the least sensible part of the traditional hero idea.

I've been wondering what it would be like to receive powers in a world that lacked the fictional universe of superheroes that American comic books provide. Even with that fictional model, I think anyone who received a sudden infusion of superness would think twice before acting as a vigilante. I expect folks would commonly use their powers for gain or to rescue people, but I can't see many folks skipping sleep like Spiderman habitually does to stop a jewel thief or whatnot.

On to a novel: Blood of Heroes

I had a goal this year of restarting work on a novel. I've decided that the project I'm going to do is a completion of my NaNoWriMo piece from a few years ago. Three years ago, actually. Time flies when you get old. It was 2004 that I wrote this.

The piece I wrote was called Modern Heroes. It was the required 50k words but I didn't finish all the scenes required for the outline I wrote. And I didn't really have a strong sense of how the ending was going to work. I felt like it was about 3/4 of a story. Not having a finished story from it has never set well with me. So I reviewed it about a week ago and decided that I would really enjoy finishing it.

But I felt like there have been a number of very visible superhero stories in recent years -- The Incredibles and Heroes, for example -- and so I wanted to come up with a mashup or a premise to add to it. What I had was a story that depended on the idea of superheroes as weirdness magnets: where one hero goes, others appear. So I have a powered guy who decides to flee the superperson-filled city for his small hometown...but by going there, he brings the weirdness with him.

I've complicated and added to that idea a lot in the past few days, and now I'm really excited about the project. Apparently I have a limitless capacity to enjoy super heroes. I was worried that it would feel like too much grunt work to go into this big mess that I wrote three years ago and try to finish it, but I don't feel that way at all.

I declare victory over October!

I'm declaring victory over October, as I wrote every day of that glorious month. To show for it, I have two very nearly finished drafts. Okay, that doesn't sound like much, but I've got two stories that are just about at the point where I'll ask others to read them. I still have some cleanup to do on one of them. Anyway, the point is that now they are real stories, as opposed to cryptic snatches of text and a gleam in my eye.

Halloween 2007

Lots of fun with costumes this year.



I was Dr. McNinja. (See other Dr. McNinjas in the Flickr Pool.









Lily was a princess, in a borrowed dress. How frugal!



Chloe was a Mutant Hermit Crab (created by Dr. McNinja, she says). Her costume involved the most work. I took some cloth, made a cone, stuffed it, rolled it up, then sewed it to a backback she had. Then I did soft-sculpture stitches to shape it a bit. It looks a bit more like a bread roll than anything else, but we had fun. Then we made sheet-foam claws. She had a pink outfit on at one point, and antenna eyes, but they wouldn't stay on.










Ethan did something neat: he decided to have a different costume as of Halloween afternoon, and made one from cardboard, to become Lincoln Man, who has Penny Powers and shoots pennies at people. This is a character he made up this week.

Troll story first draft nearing completion

It's 10/29/07, and so far I've worked on my stories every day this month. As a consequence, I get more done every time I sit down. At least, as long as I avoid the internet. ;)

I'm writing a few key glue scenes now for my "Elf and Troll" story. I used to laugh at the idea that titles would be difficult. Now it seems I can never come up with titles that I'm happy with for my stories. I'm having great fun with this one.

This one got started one morning at our church, when I had some time while the kids were in Sunday school. I had a notebook and I started jotting down a story. I finished most of the first half of this story that day, I think, in very early draft form anyway. But like a lot of stories, it didn't feel finished, and I ended up reworking and complicating it for a long time.

I think it's in pretty good shape now. But there's still work to be done. The stage I'm nearing is one where I'll have all the bits in pretty good order, but it will still need a lot of polishing. But that point where I feel like I have all the key story points told, and in the proper order, so that it's a full and complete story with no gaping holes....that's a key point. After a little polish, I can then start sending it out for review and get some feedback.

Meanwhile, I'm delaying reviewing my draft of "The Elf on Cotton Street" until I finish this "Elf and Troll" work. That's what makes sense to me.

Finished first typed draft, restarted work on "Elf and Troll"

So I finished the first typed draft of "Elf on Cotton Street" this weekend, which was a nice milestone. And I had to find something else to work on, because I want to let the draft sit for a while. So I went back to the story I'd dropped to work on this one. :)

I had an enjoyable session rereading what I'd written of "Elf and Troll", which will almost certainly have some other title before I'm done. Why are titles so hard for me? I look at Cory Doctorow's stories, and they often seem like they could have no other title. A story like his "I, Rowboat" seems like it could have been generated from that pun alone.

Anyway, I had become vague about what was left to do on "Elf and Troll" in the interim. Basically, it needs a few scenes in the middle. I wrote the beginning and the ending. :) Not sure that that's necessarily a good idea, given that the middle's often the hardest part, but it could be a way to combat the malaise of the complicated middle of a story. I mean, I'm probably more likely to come back and finish this one because there's just a little middle left to do.

I had a blast re-reading it, so that was a really good thing. I've seldom enjoyed reading my own writing quite so much as that. I realized later that I had a cup of coffee before I read it, so that has to factor into things. :)

Maker Faire Austin 2007...a few notes

We went to the Maker Faire yesterday. It was great -- one of the most enjoyable festival experiences I've had.

My favorite display was one involving magnetic fish in water. I can't remember the name of the device, and a quick web search isn't locating it. The fellow had created several gadgets, each of which involved a plexiglass cube filled with water, with a magnet floating in it; the magnet was nestled inside a sheet foam shape. The cube had coils of wire on every face, so that every vertex had wires on it. Each device had controls -- in two cases, the controls were game controllers with dual joysticks. By manipulating the joysticks, you could make the magnet quickly move to any point within the cube. This was done by energizing the coils with magnetic fields. It was marvelous. You could move the magnet around in 3d space effortlessly.

Pros of the fair:

• Most of the booths had an interactive component
• There wasn't a ton of stuff for sale
• The Maker schtick incorporates art and engineering and craft in a really empowering way.
• Kids were mostly kept entertained
• Fire displays at the Ring of Fire
  
• We actually modified some clothes to take home at the Swap-o-rama-rama.
• Lots of computer-manufacturing gizmos and rapid-prototyping gadgets. I love that stuff.
• Saw several people I knew while I was there.
• Art cars!
  

Cons:

• Tickets were $25. That's a lot of money to drop up front. With the kids, we paid $70 to get in the door. Now, once inside, we only spent money on food.
• Food was insanely expensive. Well, I guess no more expensive than ballpark food usually is. But I'm becoming curmudgeonly about this stuff. $5 for a taco, $3.50 for a drink is an expensive way to feed a family.

Order of the Stick knocks one out of the park

I have to say that The Order of the Stick has really grown far beyond its genre position as a role-playing-game webcomic. This episode proves it. I think you don't need to know much about the comic's backstory to get this one, and I hope that if you read it, it'll motivate you to go back to the beginning and read this one from the get-go.

Using D&D conventions, the author is able to riff on the afterlife -- an afterlife where one might be called back to regular corporeality by a resurrection spell at any time. So he's able to have a character converse with his dead parents. He's been doing that for several episodes. It's good stuff.

The two-minute version of The Order of the Stick? It's about a group of sword- and spell-wielding adventurers in a four-color version of a Dungeons and Dragons world...people for whom the rules of spell-casting and game combat are the physics of life. Its characters mock stereotypes while trying to save the world and cope with the widely varying personalities of their team. It's damn funny in each instance, but it also builds up over time.

Not breaking the chain yet

Still writing every day. Now it looks like I'll be finished with the first typed draft of "Elf on Cotton Street" within a couple of days. Apparently my longhand got bigger and looser as the draft got longer...and there was more stuff that now seems worth cutting. ;) Anyway, that means I can get to the next editing stage sooner.

I refer to "not breaking the chain" from an article about a tip from Jerry Seinfeld, about marking your calendar for every day that you stick with your goal, and thinking about it as a chain of days. I read it here, on LifeHacker, but I think this has been written about in a lot of different places.