Book Trailers from "The Strain"

In late March, I was covering the International Day at NE/Spruill Oaks Library and during some down time, I found a copy of the novel The Strain on one of the tables.

(It's written by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro and attempts to tackle vampirism from a scientific point of view.  Not going to go into detail for spoiler reasons, but it's both icky and very interesting.)

Here are a couple of book trailers.  Since Del Toro's got the cinema background (and presumably lots of money), they're very well-done book trailers.  From what I've heard from more established writers, book trailers aren't necessarily a good idea.

Here's the first trailer:



Here's the second trailer:



The trailers go into a little detail about how the vampires came to be ("dead man possessed by a disease") and how they operate (that nasty tongue thing), but they're not spoileriffic.

I haven't read more than the first 100 pages of the first novel, dribs and drabs of the second two, and the Wikipedia and TVTropes pages for the series, but they look really interesting. Once I finish with some of my library books, I'll request them.

The First Draft of "Battle for the Wastelands" Is Done

I took last Friday off in order to have a three-day weekend for writing, as was once suggested by my immediate superior at the Griffin Daily News.  I figured I'd just get a chapter or two done, and then I got ambitious.  I decided I was going to complete the first whole draft Battle for the Wastelands.

(I say "whole draft" because between my own tinkering and cycling it through writing groups, a lot of chapters, particularly the early ones, have changed a lot.)

Two chapters on Friday, two chapters on Saturday, and two chapters on Sunday.  The novel is now done, coming in at just over 102,000 words.

These last couple of days, I've left it alone.  I've heard suggestions to let a newly-completed manuscript "cool" for weeks, months, or even a year.  However, one of my writing groups has seen all but the last six incomplete chapters, so that really isn't an option.  The maximum word count is 10,000 words and the current word count for those last six is around 12,000.  I'm going to try to cut as much as possible without sacrificing action or character and if I can get it 10,000 or below, I'll bring it before the Lawrenceville group in one big block.  If not, two smaller blocks of three chapters each.  The entire manuscript will have been critiqued by them in either mid or late March, since the meetings are two weeks apart.

Once that's done and I make revisions based on group members' comments, I've got a few friends who have agreed to take a look at the entire package.  After they review it and I make further revisions, I'll bring it before the Kennesaw group as a whole package.  At this rate, that will probably be sometime over the summer.

My plan so far is to submit it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards when they open up again in early January.  If I'd rushed, I could have had it complete in time for this year's contest, but it would not be the best possible product.  Even if one is not the ultimate winner of the contest, one can still get a book deal out of it like my friend Alex Hughes, who was a semi-finalist, did.

However, DragonCon is a good place for networking and I did talk to a publisher last time that seemed interested in Battle.  "Placing" in ABNA is a good set of laurels to attach to a manuscript and worth waiting a few months for, but it's always good to have multiple options and the steampunk craze won't last forever.  Sometimes it's a good idea to strike while the iron is hot.

I'm told publishers prefer first-time writers' manuscripts be fewer than 100K words.  As far as people I know are concerned, James R. Tuck's Blood and Bullets is 81Kwords, while some unpublished novels from Matt Schafer are in the upper-80K to mid-90K range.

So that's my most recent productivity update.  I think my next projects will be to finish a new short story inverting TVTropes' "Doomed Home Town" trope for the next meeting of the Kennesaw group and work more on Escape from the Wastelands (the second book in the series).

My (First) MARTA Column

Now that Sunday alcohol sales (see my "Will to Power" post) is done with, I've been in need of a new topic to write column after column about.

And so I found it--the transportation one-percent tax, or as I've always called it, the TSPLOST.

(For those of you who aren't from Georgia, a Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax or SPLOST is a one-percent sales tax implemented for a limited time to pay for certain projects, like a new government building or a land-purchase.)

Here's my first column:

http://www.northfulton.com/Articles-c-2011-06-28-188000.114126-sub-Expansion-of-rail-beneficial-for-the-state.html

When I was in Griffin, I did some state-level stories about the passage of the TSPLOST, which took multiple legislative sessions, as well as the Atlanta-Macon passenger rail line that was on the unconstrained project list and was a topic of political debate in Griffin and Spalding County's local government.

However, Matt Schafer pointed out in a Facebook discussion that expanding MARTA northward would be more effective than the Atlanta-Macon line in getting commuters off the roads and after some thinking, I've come to believe he's correct.  The Atlanta-Macon line would take care of people commuting from the southside, but I think there are more commuters coming from the north.  Plus expanding the MARTA Red Line north would be within one county (Fulton) and not be so difficult politically, unlike a multi-county Atlanta-Macon line.

I concede MARTA does have some issues that would make suburbanites leery of it coming to their county, but I think that would be more applicable to Cobb and Gwinnett, which historically rejected MARTA, than to North Fulton, whose residents already pay the MARTA tax but have to drive down to North Springs to actually use the train.  Plus MARTA's own leadership wants their agency merged into a wider Metro Atlanta transit entity--an entity including the other counties' transit systems (like Cobb's bus line) might be more effective and more palatable to voters and taxpayers.

I've written a second column about the first wave of cuts to the unconstrained project list.  I'll post it here when it goes live, probably this coming Tuesday.

The voters will approve the regional sales tax in 2012, but the final project list must be completed by August 15 of this year.  I think I'll be flacking for rail expansion all summer long.

My "Will to Power" Post

I got a new newspaper job in mid-January, just in time for Sunday alcohol sales becoming a big issue in Georgia.  Many of my early columns dealt with the Sunday sales issue.

I ended up write a whole bunch of columns about Sunday alcohol sales, to the point I suspect my readers are sick and tired of hearing about the subject.  I think I'll content myself with writing columns about other relevant subjects until we get close to the fall vote in Johns Creek on whether to allow Sunday sales.

Here are the links, with some background material for each one:

This is a shock--I agree with Nathan Deal

This one was the first, around the time Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announced he would sign a bill allowing local communities to vote on Sunday sales.  I supported Karen Handel against Deal in the governor's race, so the fact I was willing to back Deal was pretty darn significant.  I also decided to engage opponents of Sunday sales--most of whom base their position on their religion--on their own ground, to prove drinking alcohol is not something unholy and it is not in Christians' best interest to support state establishment of religion.

Continuing Sunday alcohol ban bad for the state

In this one, I made an argument in favor of allowing Sunday alcohol sales on secular grounds--open government (when the Republican caucus tried to bury the bill), tax revenue, and the like.  I also used a quote from Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, whom I met at a Georgia Press Association function in the capital and asked about Sunday sales.

This one was the most popular in terms of Tweets and Facebook recommendations.

Both columns got me the attention of Georgians for Sunday Alcohol Sales, whose leaders asked for permission to send the columns to other newspapers in support of their cause.  I don't know if any of these ran in other newspapers, but Spalding County Commissioner Bob Gilreath did post my first column on his online newsletter/blog Griffin Journal.

Johns Creek can vote on Sunday sales this November

Eventually, thanks to Rich Sullivan and Georgians for Sunday Alcohol Sales, the Georgia House permitted a vote.  As I expected, the bill allowing Sunday sales passed.  Since the Senate had already passed it and Deal had promised to sign it, I figured it would be a done deal.

(That's not always a good idea, but this time it turned out all right.)

I shifted my focus to Johns Creek and why it would be a good idea to pass Sunday sales.

Sunday alcohol vote this year in residents' hands

The Johns Creek City Council discussed Sunday sales one evening but didn't take any action.  In response, I wrote the above column.

At the next meeting, the council members agreed to put Sunday alcohol sales on the ballot.  This led to the following column, the last I intend to write on the subject for awhile:

Johns Creek City Council's alcohol votes will benefit city

Hopefully the votes in Johns Creek and other communities and the events that follow will show that Sunday alcohol sales are not going to be destructive to the cities and counties that allow them and will not infringe on Christianity.

About the title of this post, it's an allusion to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche discussed the "will to power," which according to the Wikipedia entry on the topic was in part the will to achieve.  Although I have no way of knowing the impact my writing had in getting Sunday sales passed at the state level, I do have it on good authority that my column exhorting people to tell the city council they wanted the chance to vote on Sunday sales was pivotal in getting it voted on.

I think I've helped accomplish something, even if in the grand scheme of things it's not that big a deal.

If any of you want to Facebook-recommend the above articles, that 'd be nice, although they're a little out-of-date now.  Definitely visit them, to increase the number of hits on the company web-site that come from here.

My Column About Donald Trump...

Rather than write a column about local issues, I have decided to dip my toe in the 2012 presidential waters.

Here's a column about Donald Trump:

http://www.northfulton.com/Articles-c-2011-05-03-187113.114126-sub-Donald-Trump-not-a-good-Republican-candidate-for-2012.html

Hopefully this will be an attack on Trump from an unexpected direction.  I've heard Trump criticized on other grounds, like his divorce from his first wife, his tendency to attach "Trump" to everything (that he even jokes about), and his hair, and those attacks can be answered.

The eminent domain abuse criticism, although Michelle Malkin and John Stossel have engaged in it, has not to my knowledge hit the general public's radar yet.  However, those two wrote against Trump years ago and he was not a viable candidate then.  Trump's record is, in all likelihood, getting more attention right now than in the past.

Hopefully this foolishness can be nipped in the bud before Trump gets the Republican nomination (and is likely defeated in a landslide by Obama) or runs as an independent, which could lead to the vote being split and the Democrat winning again.

For the record, if Trump wins the Republican nomination, I'm voting Libertarian.  Even though the Libertarians won't win and I've been somewhat less hostile toward government spending in recent years, Trump's abuse of eminent domain is antithetical to everything any self-respecting conservative (or for that many, any self-respecting liberal) stands for.

Two Opinion Columns I've Written

I've recently gotten a new job in the northern suburbs of Metro Atlanta, working for a chain of weekly newspapers.  As part of my job responsibilities, I will be writing a column for my paper twice a month.

Here's the first column, written about how I interviewed Fulton County Commissioner Liz Hausmann and took the opportunity to examine a whole of Western fiction at a local library.

http://www.northfulton.com/Articles-c-2011-02-03-185706.114126-sub-Interview-leads-to-book-find-at-Spruill-Oaks-Library.html

Here's the second column, which I posted online today and will be published in print this week.  It's about Sunday alcohol sales in Georgia and why local communities should have the chance to vote on allowing them.

http://www.northfulton.com/Articles-c-2011-02-15-185882.114126-sub-This-is-a-shock-I-agree-with-Nathan-Deal.html

I'm pleased with this one, since it's gotten 26 Facebook recommendations in a few hours and has been tweeted five times (I've only tweeted it once, so that means four people like it enough to pass it along).

Especially spiffy is that I'm allowed to put my blog link at the end of each column.  I don't think the first column attracted many readers here, but the second one has attracted eight already and it's only been a few hours.