The Four Writings I'm Most Proud Of

Decided to list the four completed works I've written that I'm the most proud of, in order of pride. Here goes, with spoilers contained therein...

The Skirmish at the Vale's Edge (BattleTech)

When I visited DragonCon in 2008, I found a booth for Catalyst Game Labs, the company that current produces the BattleTech game and licensed fiction, and figured this would be a good writing opportunity. However, I let the project sit by the wayside while I worked on other projects until spring/summer 2009. I decided then that I ought to have the story done by DragonCon 2009, so I could find the Catalyst people again and tell them I'd submitted something.

I purchased some BattleTech source-books online and went to work. I remember watching the BattleTech animated series when I was in elementary school (it was on UPN on Sunday mornings, before church), so I remembered the Clans. Given how new writers are encouraged to start out far away from the important characters from the books and games, I figured the Clan invasion of the Periphery was a good place to set a story.

The Clan Wolf conquest of Drask's Den reminded me a lot of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which I'd researched extensively for my Gates of Vasharia project, so I went to work. I like to think my future biographers will have a field day with all the inside jokes--there's a city on Drask's Den named Carrollton, after the town where The Griffin Daily News is printed, while the protagonist shares a surname with my coworker at the Griffin paper.

I finished the story over the summer of 2009 and ran it through my Kennesaw and Lawrenceville writing groups twice and ended up submitting it to BattleCorps, the online BattleTech fiction compendium, a few days before DragonCon. After some tinkering, it went up on http://www.battlecorps.com/ in early October 2009. Since it's an older story, it can probably be purchased for $2.00 or so.

Four cents per word is not considered a "pro rate" (that's $0.05/word plus), so I can't count this toward membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America. However, it still came out very lucrative for me and I intend to write more. The protagonist proved to be very popular with the BattleCorps denizens, so I think we'll be seeing him again.

Best of all, my story is now considered BattleTech canon.  For those of you who need some clarification, that means it is now considered as valid as any of the source-books, gaming manuals, or novels as far as the history of the BattleTech fictional universe is concerned.  I've made a mark, albeit a small one, on one of the biggest gaming franchises out there.

Lord of the Werewolves (Harry Potter fan-fiction)

Although this is fan-fiction and therefore I cannot make any money on it (unlike my original story, "I am the Wendigo," which we'll discuss later), I do like this one. But before I describe why, some background.

In 2008, I wrote a novel-length Harry Potter fan-fic entitled "The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince," which took place during the First War of the Dark Lord (in the timeline, the 1970s) and was about Snape.  More on that later.

In order to get ideas and share my own thoughts, I joined the FictionAlley web-site.  While I was there, I made the acquaintance of Kyli Ann Rasco, who was an active poster in the threads critical of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I did not agree with all criticisms of the last book, but one of the better arguments was that Lupin and Tonks were underused. All they did was get married, have a baby, and die (offscreen, no less), and Lupin acted like a total tool when he learned that Tonks was pregnant. Both of them could have done so much more--Tonks, a shape-shifter, could have been a hard-core Order of the Phoenix assassin, while Lupin, a werewolf, could have challenged the terrorist Fenrir Greyback for control of Britain's werewolf community.

Kyli and I started corresponding and so "Lord of the Werewolves" was born. We both came up with ideas, I wrote the chapters, and then sent them to Kyli for revision and approval.

I'm proud of this for several reasons. Firstly, it's probably one of the most character-centric things I've ever written.

Remus Lupin starts out the story the way he is in canon--a nice guy who doesn't have a lot of moral courage (werewolves are treated similarly to how those with AIDS were treated in the 1980s and he was so glad to have friends that he never stood up to them, even when they did bad things like bully the nerdy young Snape). However, there is a dark, violent side to his character (we see hints of it in the earlier books) that is unleashed when Tonks, injured in a battle with her mad aunt Bellatrix Lestrange, is denied medical treatment by prejudiced doctors and miscarries. After killing the two Healers, Lupin is forced to kneel before Fenrir Greyback to escape the vengeance of the wizarding legal system, now under the control of the Dark Lord.

Once he's realized how thoroughly he's screwed up, he begins planning something resembling Operation Valkyrie (the plot to overthrow Hitler)--he'll assassinate Fenrir Greyback, blame the Death Eaters, and turn the werewolves against the Dark Lord. In the meantime, as a rising star in Greyback's outfit, he becomes more assertive and aggressive, or as one of my readers described him, "darker and edgier." As another reader said, he ultimately "finds his backbone" and is able to stand up to both the Forces of Evil and the often-prejudiced Forces of Good.

I did not put as much thought into Tonks' characterization, but it's there. She starts out her usual spunky self, ends up in a very dark place as a result of her miscarriage and her husband's apparent abandonment, and pulls herself back together. She ends up using FiendFyre as a weapon of assassination, and is back to normal by the end of the story.

I also got to indulge my penchant for making truly awful puns. Here's a selection from a chapter taking place on Valentine's Day...

"Oh Merlin," Tonks said from underneath him. "Professor Lupin, I didn't think you still had it in you."

Lupin smiled.

"Well, you could say I was just hungry like the wolf."

Tonks giggled. That warmed Lupin's heart. He decided to keep the jokes rolling.


"Who knew Miss Tonks liked it on all fours?"

She laughed. "I admit, not my usual cup of tea. But damn."

"So nice, we did it twice."

Tonks laughed again.

The "hungry like the wolf" pun provoked much groaning from those who heard it. This selection also reflects character development on Lupin's part--in a chapter taking place during their honeymoon, it's Tonks who is the sexually-dominant one (due to being younger and much more energetic). However, in this one, some months after kneeling and swearing allegiance to Greyback, Lupin has shown himself much more willing to take charge, so to speak.

Here's the story, for those who want to read it:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4764695/1/Lord_of_the_Werewolves

I am the Wendigo (original)

I wrote this one when I was a senior at the University of Georgia. In December 2006, I sold it to the webzine Chimaera Serials and it went up in January of 2007. I was ultimately paid $20 for it, which is somewhere between $0.01 and $0.02 per word.

Chimaera Serials died later in 2007 and the web-site ultimately went down within the last year. Somebody has posted it on an Internet forum and let it sit there for years as a free "calling card" to give out to people. I had to take it down in order to self-publish it on Amazon and it's available here.

I think "I am the Wendigo" is probably the scariest thing I've ever written. I think that's something to be proud of.

The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter fan-fiction)

I started writing this one after reading Sindie's "The Moment It Began," which I found via some fan-art on DeviantArt.com. It started out as a one-shot in which the Death-Eater-to-be Mulciber attacks Lily, not Mary Macdonald (as was the case in the canon timeline), and Severus Snape unleashes the titular wrath. However, there were enough people who wanted more that I continued the story, to the point that when finished (it took all of 2008 to write), it was longer than the first three or four Harry Potter books combined.

One reason I'm proud of this is how popular it is. It's gotten over 250,000 hits, it's been included in over 40 fanfiction.net collections, and hundreds of fanfiction.net users have included it in their "favorite stories" list. This means there are hundreds if not thousands of people who will remember my name when, someday, they see my original novels for sale.

It's also my first finished novel and showed me how to avoid letting projects fall by the wayside--I had a large number of fans who read, wrote reviews, and were expecting more. When you have people waiting for your next chapter, it provides an extra push to write it. I've put this principle to good use with my original fiction, using my two writing groups.

Although character growth and development was not my original concern when writing the story, there was enough of it that one member of FictionAlley pointed it out, in a most unexpected place--the Marauders!

For the record, I don't like the Marauders. I think they were a bunch of thugs, with James Potter in particular being the Gryffindor equivalent of Draco Malfoy. Only Lupin gets any sympathy because he was less involved with their bad behavior and went along with it because he was desperate to have friends, not because he was truly a bully or sadist.

However, this member of FA (whose user-name I cannot remember) said I did a really good job depicting the transformation of the Marauders "from bullies into men of character." I believe Rowling's intent was to depict James as having abandoned his cruel ways as a youth to become a heroic fighter against Evil and although this isn't portrayed very well in the books, I figured I ought to include it in the story.

Of course, at one point in their school days, Snape gives him a good working-over with Sectumsempra in a midnight-mugging-gone-wrong.... :)

I did give Snape a character-arc too. He starts out as being concerned only about Lily and his own position in Slytherin (in that order) and his initial breach with the Death-Eaters-to-be was, like his canon break, the former taking precedence over the latter.

Once away from the bad influence of his evil friends, he slowly detoxes from their selfish and racist ways and, seeing his abusive Muggle father's treatment of his witch mother, firmly represses any controlling attitudes he has toward Lily (although he immediately backs down when she calls him on "I won't let you..." in the books, that attitude is still there). He ultimately grows to the point he protects James from Arnold Trigg, whom he had taught Dark Arts and who had gone progressively insane as a result of his fiancee's death at the hands of the Death Eaters.

Lily gets a character-arc too. In a snippet in Deathly Hallows, when she criticizes Snape for what Mulciber did to Mary, she focuses on the fact it was "Dark Magic" more than what Mulciber actually did. The events of the war push her to be more flexible and less moralistic. After all, I could argue aggression using "Light Magic" (James' bullying of Snape, seen in flashback in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix) is worse than self-defense using Dark Magic (Snape's retaliation using Sectumsempra).

I also tried to make Tobias Snape, Snape's abusive Muggle father, into a more complex character. Rather than making him an alcoholic vagrant, as is often done in Snape stories, I depicted him as a war veteran (the Suez Crisis and the Malayan Emergency, which would have taken place when he was a young man) self-medicating his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with alcohol and as a mill-worker whose livelihood is disappearing as British mills lose market share to cheaper foreign producers. He's also on some level insecure and frightened of his wife's supernatural powers, which explains why, when he's been drinking, he berates her and puts her down. He also has a secret love for musical theater.

(He's still a colossal jerk and I admit I teared up writing a scene depicting him drinking and ranting--it was that depressing.)

Here's the link if you want to read it:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4026081/1/The_Wrath_of_the_Half_Blood_Prince

Movie Review: "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (SPOILERS)

I don't like seeing movies by myself, so I did not see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when it was in theaters.

However, I also don't like to iron without something to distract me, and the trailer for Deathly Hallows reminded me I needed to see the film, so I rented it from the video store last Friday to watch.

Now it's time for my review...

Overall, I felt that a lot of important stuff got left out.  For example, Snape's confrontation with Harry after Harry unintentionally nearly killed Draco with Sectumsempra would have been good foreshadowing of the revelation that the "Half-Blood Prince" whose Potions book gave Harry such useful advice (and a very spiffy combat spell to boot) was the teenage Snape, who'd devised so many interesting Potions techniques.

Instead, the only foreshadowing we get is Snape healing Draco, which does help a little bit (he knows how to undo Sectumsempra) but the book's sequence--in which Snape uses Legilimency to interrogate Harry to find out how he knew the spell and makes a serious attempt retrieve the book once he realizes what it is--would have been so much better.

In the books, the Death Eater flight from Hogwarts was accompanied by a major battle instead of the Death Eaters, after Snape kills Dumbledore, quietly processing out of the building and blasting one person aside, with the only real mayhem being some deranged cackling and scenery-destruction from Bellatrix.

The fact that Slughorn is a Slytherin is left out, although his speech about how he was surprised that Lily Evans (Harry's future mother) was a Muggleborn does hint that.

Also, the fact it was Snape who told Voldemort of the prophecy predicting that Potter would be the one to kill him--the prophecy that led to the death of Harry's parents and Voldemort's first defeat--got left out.  Given how big a role that plays in Snape's own back-story and the Snape/Lily/James high-school drama, that definitely should have stayed there.

Keeping the material about the Gaunts (Voldemort's maternal family) and how Merope Gaunt ensnared the Muggle Tom Riddle Sr. would further flesh out Voldemort.  In the movies, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets includes the teen Voldemort's rant about "my filthy Muggle father" who he believes abandoned his witch mother, but that's it.

Some of the stuff could have been put in if they'd cut the random Death Eater attack at the Burrow that did not happen in the books, although it does help develop Harry/Ginny some more.  See below..

On the other hand, the movie's version of Harry/Ginny is superior to that of the book's.  Harry makes some comments about Ginny's personality that indicate interest on his part beyond simple physical attraction and Ginny effectively backs him up when he's trying to organize the Gryffindor Quidditch team.  When the Burrow battle comes, it shows the two of them fighting together well enough to fend off not only Fenrir Greyback but possibly even Bellatrix Lestrange herself!

(The last part is pushing it--Bellatrix defeated Aurors Nymphadora Tonks, Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody, and Kingsley Shacklebolt in succession in Book Five, so she'd wipe the floor with the two kids.  Perhaps she was waiting out in the reeds for bigger targets like Remus Lupin and Tonks to show up and then engage them.)

Plus there's no idiotic "break up with Ginny to protect her" like at the end of the book.  After all, as a Weasley, Ginny is a target anyway.  Although the film ends the morning after Dumbledore's death--which, IIRC, is before the breakup in the book--it seems that Harry and Ginny are still an item and will be for the foreseeable future.

The only part of it that seemed a bit odd was Ginny tying Harry's shoes for him in one scene.  I didn't get that.

Luna is the one who finds Harry after Draco paralyzes him and leaves him under the invisibility cloak instead of Tonks this time. Given how they dumped the "emo Tonks" plotline of the books, which the train scene is the first hint of, this isn't so bad. Luna seems to be the sort to wander around aimlessly for reasons known only to her, plus the exchange between the two of them when she heals Harry's broken nose was pretty funny.

Slughorn's recollection of Lily's gift to him was a nice touch.

Miscellaneous...

The depiction of Narcissa Malfoy as being an overweight middle-aged Cruella DeVille (complete with the multicolored hair) instead of the attractive blonde she was in the books wasn't as terrible as I expected, probably due to the actress's performance.  However, a glimpse of the wizard paper describing her and Draco leaving Lucius Malfoy's trial didn't ring true--however odious the three of them are, they love and are loyal to each other in the books.

Lupin and Tonks apparently are already a couple, although Tonks' hair is brown, which is problematic (it was only brown for most of the sixth book because she was depressed over Lupin pushing her away, which apparently did not happen in the film series).  This eliminates the scene in the books in which Tonks publically argues with Lupin about their relationship, which some think made Tonks come off an obsessive pest trying to badger the spineless Lupin into dating her.

(My impression was that he liked her too and was trying to push her away for her own safety--he's a werewolf--but not everyone agreed with me.)

I'd score it around 6 out of 10.

Productivity Update

I just added a new chapter to The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, which I had allowed to sit unupdated for nearly a month.  The lead-up to the great battle in Morocco in which Megatron attempts to free the Fallen from his tomb (under Jbel Toubkal, a mountain near Marrakesh) and Starscream makes his bid for power has begun...

Unfortunately, I'm rapidly approaching an impasse.  In the film, Sam, Mikaela, and Leo end up in Egypt when Jetfire creates a "space bridge" (some kind of wormhole) and takes them there.  Since I replaced the "wake up Jetfire in a museum" plot with the plot I remember from the original Transformers animated series (Starscream digs Jetfire out of a glacier), this isn't going to happen.

At present, my plan to get the kids to Morocco (to have them there for the final battle, like in the movie) involves them accidentally getting swept onto an American military aircraft that's headed there.  Thing is, unless the soldiers boarding the aircraft are in a VERY big hurry, they'd get noticed and put off the plane.  I'm disinclined to have them stow away, lest Sam get "Flanderized"* into someone mindlessly self-sacrificing to the point of being a suicidal idiot.

(*A TVTropes term in which one character trait gets amplified to a ridiculous degree.  It comes from Flanders turning more and more into a religious zealot to the exclusion of other traits in The Simpsons.  It could also be applied to Quagmire's sexual perversity, which was less pronounced earlier in Family Guy.)

After all, I already had him attempt to trade himself to the Decepticons for a kidnapped Mikaela, Mr. Banes, and Simmons, in a move that other characters and readers recognized was idiotic to an extreme.

Any ideas?  I've only got six chapters left and hopefully I'll be able to finish it before July.

Also, I posted an author's note in The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince that both provides a glimpse of what the Potterverse would look like 17 years after Voldemort's (permanent) defeat in that world's 1979 and linked back to this blog.  The note serves a dual purpose of expending my last ideas pertaining to that story and (hopefully) attracting more readers here, since this blog did not exist in 2008 when I wrote "Wrath."

My final piece of non-original work is another alternate version of the Draka timeline on my alternate-history forum.  In the novel Under the Yoke (second in the original trilogy), there's a scene where a Draka character states that if the Domination didn't have atomic weapons, the United States could have forced them out of Europe and Eastern China, which the Draka conquered in that timeline's version of WWII.

Thing is, the Draka's primary ability to threaten the North American mainland is via submarine and the Alliance for Democracy is dominated by the US, Britain, and Japan, all of whom have extensive naval-warfare experience.  The Alliance nuclear arsenal is also more powerful and more advanced than that of the Draka.

So, I figured in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Alliance could have launched a successful nuclear first-strike on the Domination, using their superiority in aircraft and ships to destroy the Draka sea-based nuclear deterrent before it could do significant damage.  It's improbable they could sell a "war to the death" to their electorates so soon after WWII, but driving the Draka back to their pre-war start lines with the aid of the still-not-entirely-enslaved populations of Eurasia would be an easier sell.

But after the war, with "frontline" Alliance states like Britain, India, and Japan taking worse nuclear damage than the US and the Domination truncated and with its ruling-class and slave-soldiery taking a severe beating, the Alliance might well weaken or even dissolve.  And the Draka, descended from history's losers, might well be inclined to revenge...

(Plus I'm thinking that post-Draka Europe might well be dominated by Communists and other extreme leftists and form a third power-bloc.  That'd be a real downer ending there--the rump Alliance and the resurgent Draka blast each other to bits and the world ends up going Red.)

Here's the link: Limited Alliance-Draka War.

I may update the timeline later tonight.  Right now, it's gotten 550+ hits on AH.com and considering how I've been posting blog posts there as well as on Facebook, I think I'm recruiting more and more of them as readers.

Now, as far as original fiction is concerned, I have submitted Chapter Five of Escape from the Wastelands to my Kennesaw writing group.  I have already tweaked it based on some comments received from two of my fellow writers.

Given my decision to get some serious intertextuality going with Beowulf, I think I might order a copy of the actual epic and see what I can glean from it.  Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos got a whole lot of critical acclaim through intertextuality with the Iliad and Shakespeare, so perhaps intertextuality with Beowulf will raise my planned post-apocalyptic-paperpack series to new levels of credibility (and hopefully, when the time comes, higher sales and movie deals).

I have also just gotten a rejection slip from Asimov's for my short story "Picking Up Plans in Palma," which takes place in my Afrikaner universe.  This rejection slip was rather different from older rejections I've gotten from that magazine.  It's still a form letter, but my name is handwritten into the salutation, editor Sheila Williams signed it herself, and the letter states that the story is "not quite right" but they'd like to see more fiction from me.

Considering how "Palma" is basically an alternate-history spy story with only vague science-fiction content (the "MacGuffin" of the story is plans for an orbiting battle-station and a character fears having an orbital projectile dropped on him), I think if I can get something as good as "Palma" that's more explicitly SF, I might have a good chance of selling it.

Awesome.

Productivity Update

So here's the latest productivity update...

The writing group I'm a member of in Lawrenceville met last Sunday and we discussed the second chapter of "Escape from the Wastelands."

I've made some revisions to it based on their suggestions, mostly to make it clearer that our hero Andrew Sutter, though an inexperienced youth at this point, still has the inner backbone that foreshadows how he will eventually become something resembling Stephen King's Gunslinger (this analogy is from my Kennesaw writing group).

My Kennesaw writing group will also meet this coming Saturday. I have already received some critiques from them via e-mail and made revisions to make the overall situation (the defeat of the village militia by the Flesh-Eating Legion of N'Mur) more threatening to the hero. 

This required rewriting a scene where he and another young man flee up an arroyo to escape an enemy flanking manuever.  Now the other young man is wounded, Andrew loses part of an ear to gunfire, and an enemy catches up with them, necessitating another fight scene.  Hopefully it will meet the approval of the other board members, two of whom have served in the military and thus know what they're talking about.

Further revisions to both chapters will be made in the coming days. I've got a bunch of chores to get too first, though.  If only clothes could iron themselves...

Also, I have completed all the remaining chapters of my last Harry Potter fan-fiction story "Lord of the Werewolves" and e-mailed them to my co-writer Kyli Ann Rasco, who lives in California. I posted the most recent chapter last night.  Hopefully we'll have the entire story posted by early next week.

Here's the actual story:

Lord of the Werewolves

As part of my earlier HP project "The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince," I joined the HP site FictionAlley to get ideas and discuss with like-minded people.

One thing I discovered is that a lot of HP fans really did not like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  One of their better arguments was the underuse of Lupin and Tonks.  All they did in the book was get married, have a baby, and die.  Die offscreen, no less.

There was a lot more potential to both characters than this.  Lupin was a werewolf but, unlike most of his fellows who swore allegiance to the werewolf terrorist Fenrir Greyback in revenge for poor treatment by wizarding society, still remained on the side of Good.  Tonks was an Auror (a fighter of evil wizards), a shape-shifter, and was kin to some of the ruling families on the side of Evil (her mother was the sister of Voldemort's lieutenant Bellatrix Lestrange and had been cast out of the family for marrying a wizard born to ordinary parents).

Plus the book made Lupin look like a complete weakling.  He bails on Tonks when she's pregnant, thinking their child would be better off without him, then goes back to her after being chewed out by Harry.  When you're 38 years old and your dead best friend's surly teenage son lectures you about morality and is right, you've got a problem.

So Kyli and I put our heads together and devised a story that would get more use out of the characters and avoid the excesses of canon (in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Tonks gets overcome with emotion after seeing a character refusing to abandon her fiancee after Greyback disfgures him and publically proclaims her love for Lupin, embarassing him, while I've already discussed DH).

When that is done, I'll finish up the "Revenge of the Fallen Reboot" and then no more fan-fiction.  All creative efforts will be devoted to "Escape from the Wastelands" and other original projects.