For Want of a Nail: Another ASOIAF Fan-Fic

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

This rhyme has been repeated for centuries as a lesson in the possible consequences of even the slightest bit of carelessness. And the writer on AH.com whose handle is TheScottishMongol has applied to the world of A Song of Ice and Fire with a fan-fic of the same name. 

Basically Catelyn Stark's horse loses a shoe on her way back to Winterfell from her visit to King's Landing and the resulting delay means she never encounters Tyrion Lannister at the inn. She never arrests him on suspicion of his involvement with the near-death of her son Bran and he makes his way to King's Landing, where he meets the new Hand of the King Ned Stark and discovers that Littlefinger has slyly accused him of involvement in the attack on Bran.

Now a man who's a great warrior but has little political savvy and a small man who casts a very large shadow are thrown together and some very interesting things result. These include a wonderful Crowning Moment of Awesome that I'll sum up in a few words--"Trial of Seven." Although the story misses some steps, it's a lot of fun and certainly worth a read.

If you liked this story, the second one is posted here.

Oops, I Did It Again

After a chat with a friend from my writing group at this year's AnachroCon, I went and changed The God of the Wet Wood back to The Thing in the Woods. Although the title is rather generic-sounding, there was the danger that due to the rapid growth of "monster erotica" (so much that I actually found a small press willing to publish it now), somebody would think a book combining "god" and "wet wood" was something rather raunchy and not, you know, the teen Lovecraftian horror novel that it actually is.

Oh well. My writing group is going to go over the whole manuscript tomorrow night and maybe they'll come up with some ideas for a better title. One group member suggested I call the novel "the rough beast" (an allusion to Yeats' "The Second Coming," my favorite poem), but the title doesn't really fit well with what the monster actually is.

One reason I picked The Thing in the Woods is that the phrase comes up in the text of the novel in a significant way (not going to say anything here due to spoilers). Any new title would need to be similarly relevant to the text.

My Friend Eli's Hilarious, Cynical Song

My friend Eli Banks posted this song he wrote in 2002 (when we were both juniors or seniors in high school, depending on which side of the summer it was) on Facebook. It goes to the tune of "My Favorite Things" and took 23 minutes for him to write:

People whose breath smells like ranch flavored Pringles
Speed limit drivers who use their turn signals
Geniuses, intellects, no one's a fool
These are the people I see at my school

Really fast walkers who know where they're going
People whose insight is constantly growing
Someone you couldn't refer to as "tool"
These are the people I see at my school

When I'm angry
When I'm hungry
When I feel irate
I simply start thinking of kids at my school
And then I start feeling great!

Good taste in music and beautiful fashion
Students who care who are learning with passion
Good human beings who follow the rules
These are the people I see at my school

Nobody drinks and nobody does drugs
Walk through the halls and start giving out hugs
Everyone's loving and everyone's cool
These are the people I see at my school!

When I'm angry
When I'm hungry
When I feel irate
I simply start thinking of kids at my school
And then I start feeling great!

For the record, this was written during his "glory days of sarcasm and bitterness." Those who didn't particularly enjoy high school or know people who didn't should get a kick out of this.

Something Awesome from Robert Howard's "Conan" Stories

Found this on TVTropes.  The site lists this under Badass Creed and said it's from Howard's Conan poem "The Road of Kings."


Gleaming shell of an outworn lie, fable of Right Divine
You gained your crowns by heritage, but Blood was the price of mine
The throne I won by blood and sweat, by Crom I will not sell
For promise of valleys filled with gold, or threat of the Halls of Hell!
When I was a fighting man, the kettle-drums they beat
The people scattered gold dust before my horse's feet
But now I am a great king; the people hound my track
With poison in my wine cup and daggers at my back.
What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?
I who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing.
Rush in and die, dogs — I was a man before I was a king!


This is awesome.  Very Nietzchean and Will-to-Power, which is appropriate considering how the film Conan the Barbarian began with Nietzche's "What does not kill us makes us stronger."

I need to work in an allusion to this in my "Wastelands" novels, for Grendel and ultimately for Andrew Sutter.

(Oops...was that a spoiler?)

I did ponder a sketch of Grendel ramming his foot down on one Merrill soldier while shooting another with his "Old World" rifle (a modern assault rifle, probably an AK-47 or an M-16) and title it "I Was A Man Before I Was A King."  When I was in Britain in 2006, I saw a Star Wars-related magazine cover depicting Vader bringing down his lightsaber on a Rebel Alliance soldier, so it would be in a similar style.  I could also do a similarly-themed sketch with Andrew doing the same to a Flesh-Eater.

I already have a sketch of Alonzo Merrill in my sketchbook, which I used to visualize him for Chapter Nine of Battle for the Wastelands when the character is introduced, so I've already got some "Wastelands" artwork.

However, until my "Wastelands" novels become popular, there's not much of a market or audience for that.  I suppose I could post it on DeviantArt, but that risks the ideas being stolen.

"Escape from the Wastelands" Concept Album

When I was a wee lad (okay, when I was in middle school), I liked the TV program The X-Files a lot.  At some point, I purchased a CD entitled Songs In The Key Of X: Music From And Inspired By The X-Files, which had some good songs on it like "Unmarked Helicopters" and various versions of the theme song.

More recently, a former member of the writing group that meets in Lawrenceville got me interested in the Stephen Lawhead's "King Raven" novels, which make the claim that the story of Robin Hood was inspired by Welsh guerrillas using the longbow to fight the invading Normans. 

("Robin Hood" is a corruption of "Rhi Bran y Hud," which means "King Raven the Sorcerer," a persona the dispossessed Welsh kinglet Bran adopts in his insurgency against the Normans.)

I actually purchased a couple of songs, "Black Arrows" and "Raven Dance," off the album King Raven Vols. 1-3, a CD inspired by the books.

I had a similar concept for my "Vasharia" novels and even drew up a list of songs dealing with certain concepts in the books.

Here're the songs I'd like to include:

*"The Hunter" by Iced Earth.  It illustrates the wrath and vindictiveness of anti-hero Patrick Rassam when it's unleashed.

*"Waiting for a Star to Fall" by Boy Meets Girl-Long ago, Patrick loved Eva Stuart, who later married his close friend Calvin Grenville.  Things get awkward later...

*"Hands to Heaven" by Breathe-Calvin later becomes Imperator after Patrick kills the previous incumbent after a betrayal and declares himself Imperator instead.  Cal has to leave Eva in Cados, the Imperial capital, to do battle with Patrick.

*"All Coming Back to Me Now" by Celine Dion and "The Search is Over" by Survivor.  These songs represt Patrick's reconciliation with his former concubine Adaena Talmai, whom he eventually marries.  "All Coming Back to Me Now" is Adaena's POV and "The Search is Over" is Patrick's.

Thing is, there are some themes in the Vasharia novels that I feel I could better develop when I have more life experience (marriage, for example) and, given how the series would likely be my magnum opus, I'd also like to improve my writing skills to write it the best it can be.  The Vasharia series is now on the back-burner while I focus on the Wastelands saga, which will be easier to write.

So I figured I ought to focus my musical inclinations on Escape from the Wastelands, the first book of the saga.  Cross-promoting the book with an accompanying "concept album" means more publicity and money, although securing the rights to all the songs could be difficult.  Songs in the Key of X has songs by R.E.M., Sheryl Crow, and the Foo Fighters, but the X-Files had resources I cannot match at this stage of my career.

The thing is, I haven't thought of any songs that would go on this hypothetical album.  I'd imagined the song "Hail to Odin" by the metal band Iron Fire playing during the final battle between protagonist Andrew Sutter and the warlord Grendel, but that takes place in the fourth planned book, not the one I'm working on now.  I'd also pondered "Sarah" by Jefferson Starship due to Andrew's twin sister being named Sarah, but including that would suggest Andrew has rather un-brotherly feelings for his sister, which is wrong, wrong, WRONG.

(If the song were titled "Cassie," that would work--Cassie is the name of Andrew's hometown girlfriend who, sadly to say, does not survive to see him return to throw down Grendel and his minions.)

I figure there'll be a lot of Norse-themed music, since Grendel's origins are in a Scandinavia-like land to the northwest and Andrew himself becomes the strong man who brings down the doom on the evil, much like the hero Beowulf or the protagonist of the Manowar song "King of Kings."

Some Thoughts on "Escape from the Wastelands"

Just purchased Dictionary of the American West from Amazon.com.  I think it will be quite helpful for the dialects and internal monologues of the characters from Escape from the Wastelands, which I have described as a "post-apocalyptic steampunk Western."

It might also be helpful for my short story "Old Daniels' Mine," a horror tale involving a group of gunslingers facing off against the survivors of a pre-human reptilian civilization in Nevada that will be part of the collection of short fiction I'm working on with Daverana Enterprises.  My friend Nick said the dialogue was very cliche, so throwing in some less-common Western lingo might help that out a bit.

Also started reading Boneshaker, a steampunk alternate-history novel.  That has already helped me out in the realism department--in the novel, the protagonist loads a Spencer rifle (one of the more common Civil War weapons) by filling the ammunition tube in the butt of the weapon with cartridges.  I had originally thought the tubes plugged directly into the back of the gun like a magazine, but that may not be the case.

I hope Boneshaker sells well.  Although the alternate-history aspect is very shaky--the Civil War somehow lasts for 18 years due to a combination of the Southern route of the trans-continental railroad being built, the British breaking the Union blockade, and the continued survival of Stonewall Jackson, never never the ludicrous strain this would have put on everybody's manpower and industry--it's still a steampunk novel.  The more successful the steampunk sub-genre is, the more likely I'll be able to sell the Wastelands novels and a steampunk air-pirate series inspired by the antics of my friends Jamie and Emily at the 2009 DragonCon that I'm worldbuilding for right now.

Also found this link the other day:

http://www.babycenter.com/0_baby-names-inspired-by-the-wild-west_10305371.bc

This will be helpful in naming characters, especially since I think I'm going to remove two of the weirder names, Karras Merrill and N'Mur.  Karras is especially glaring because his sister's name is Catalina.  I'll keep Grendel's name, but Grendel's name was self-chosen based on a salvaged partial copy of Beowulf rather than the name he was born with.

Also, one character's current name is Callie, but at least one member of my writing group got her confused with Cassie, the protagonist's lover.  I was originally going to change the name to Michelle, but I'll ramp up the Western vibe and name her Eudora.

Introducing...The Dragon

In the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf ,the titular hero's third and final enemy is a dragon, which he defeats at the cost of his own life.

Since I'm trying to tie in "Beowulf" with the sage of Andrew Sutter, whose tale will begin in Escape from the Wastelands and continue through several books, I needed three opponents for our hero. 

The first was the warlord Grendel who took his nom de guerre from a partial copy of "Beowulf" he found in a ruin.  The second, standing in for Grendel's mother, was a coalition of Grendel's sons waging an insurgency in their father's old homeland.

However, I hadn't fully nailed down the third opponent.  I mentioned several possibilities in an earlier blog entry, but I reviewed my "idea file" and those were for later stories that would cover the descendants of Andrew (or his sister Sarah).  I didn't have a third enemy for Andrew to die killing.

So I came up with a new one.  Decades after Andrew put down the revolt of Grendel's sons, long-sealed passes into the mountains north of the empire Grendel founded and Andrew took from him are blown open and new armies emerge from them to put an end to the post-apocalyptic technological renaissance that two generations of peace had brought about.

These armies are commanded, not by a human enemy, but an ancient artificially-intelligent war machine that had been dug up and managed to take control of the entire region and organize it into its own dominion.  Now, using ancient, forbidden weapons (possibly nukes?), it has blasted open the long-closed roads south and is moving out to rule the world.

The notion of an AI using armies of living soldiers is not entirely alien to speculative fiction.  The novel When Heaven Fell depicts most of the galaxy under the control of a cybernetic "Master Race" of AIs that entered the Milky Way 100,000 years ago and recruited armies from conquered species, including our own, to expand its control and eventually fight a new enemy that is strongly implied to have defeated them and has now coming calling.

Plus, if it turns out "the dragon" is really something resembling SkyNet, it could provide another hint as to just how a world technologically adept enough to build blacktop roads, use what I've hinted are M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles for war, and revive dinosaurs and create creatures that never existed (the "rippers" occasionally seen in the early chapters of Escape) using genetic technology could get knocked back to roughly (American) Civil War levels of technology.

(Imagine the Terminator universe if the Russian counterstrike on the US destroyed SkyNet's communications links outside its bunker.  Cut off from surviving human troops it can deceive or machine units under its direct control, it sits there waiting for centuries until somebody finds the bunker and, not knowing it's there, plugs it back in.)

Intertextuality and "Escape from the Wastelands"

Purchased Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition) from a local bookstore yesterday, probably the first new book I've purchased in years. 

(Thanks to Amazon.com's ZShops and Half.com, it's easy to find books I wanted used for much less.)

I intended to use it to add intertextuality to my novel Escape from the Wastelands, which will hopefully make it deeper and more financially successful.  Thus far, I've read read some of the introduction, but based on some passages quoted, I've already gotten some ideas for the early career of antagonist Grendel Black.

Grendel (the monster) is described as being a creautre from the moors.  Grendel Black's homeland is in the northwestern part of the world of Escape and I've given little thought to its geography other than making it somewhat similar to Scandinavia.  I think I'll add some moors there and make it so that he hid in the moors after his family was killed in a clan war.  In an Old World (pre-apocalyptic) ruin in the moors, he found a partial copy of Beowulf and, having read about the fell deeds of Grendel, took the name for himself.

(A member of the Lawrenceville writing group suggested this be a name he adopted for himself and this seemed like a sensible suggestion.)

The moors will also be Grendel's base for his early career as a mercenary and "regulator" (an Old West term for a hired gun cattle barons used to protect their herds), paralleling Grendel's raids on Heorot from the moors.

In the long run, the three-parted aspect of Beowulf can also provide a basis for the career of my protagonist, Andrew Sutter.  Andrew will first defeat Grendel himself (the planned first four books).  Then he will defeat an insurgency led by Grendel's sons in his old homeland (analogous to the Sunni Triangle in Iraq), with the land itself being an analogy for Grendel's mother.

The third foe, analogous to the dragon and like the dragon faced many years later, Andrew will beat but die in the process.  Not sure who that foe will be--I had pondered a cross-dimensional invasion (enemies more technologically advanced but significantly few in number--think the time-traveling South Africans of The Guns of the South, who aid the Confederacy but then betray it), one of Grendel's generals who had been turned into a vampire, or even a falling-out with the allies who helped make Andrew Emperor in Grendel's place.

(Considering how Beowulf ends on a rather ominious note--without Beowulf, the Geats have no king to protect them from their gathering enemies--the possibility of a renewed war and the fragile post-apocalyptic civilizational renaissance ending is nice and dark.)

I've been feeling a bit under the weather lately (had what might have been an attack of food poisoning early Wednesday morning), so I might sign off, lie down, and read more of Beowulf.  Then I'll have more of substance to add to this.

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

Here's the latest news on the creative front...

"Picking Up Plans in Palma" got rejected from Analog, although it was a personalized rejection letter signed by the editor.  I tinkered with it a bit more (mostly breaking up longer sentences into shorter, punchier ones) and then submitted it to Asimov's.  I don't think I'll hear from them for three months or so.

"Coil Gun" got rejected by Lightspeed, so I sent it to Clarkesworld.  I should hear back from them relatively soon.  Last time I checked, it was 37th in the queue.

"Melon Heads" got rejected by the Extreme Creatures anthology, so I sent it to GUD.  Not sure when I'll hear back from them.  Their way of paying their writers is weird, although it certainly gives the writers an incentive to promote the magazine (the writers get a cut of sales of the individual story, for example).

I've realized that I don't have any "ready to send" stories anymore.  All of mine are either sent somewhere or part of an anthology I'm working on with Daverana Enterprises, the parent company of the magazine that bought three of my stories (paying me for two) before it was shut down.

Time to crack my knuckles and work on some new short fiction (in addition to Escape from the Wastelands and my last fan-fiction, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Reboot").

I've got one completed first draft for my short story "Breeding Pair" (which takes place in the same universe as my story "Illegal Alien") and a bunch of old Critters critiques for it.  That's going to be an interesting one to bring to my writing groups, given that it has some risque content (one alien race abducts humans for a breeding program) and it depicts Jesus as having appeared to another alien race sometime after He appeared to our own.

(I got that concept from C.S. Lewis's essay "Religion and Rocketry," which I read in the book The World's Last Night: And Other Essays.  Lewis quotes "Christ in the Universe" by Alice Meynell, which is probably the only poem I like besides Yeats' "The Second Coming" and, if you want to call it a poem, "Beowulf.")

I've also got another WWIII story set in my Afrikaner universe, for which I've written perhaps three sentences.  It takes place the same night as "Coil Gun"--the opening nuclear exchange between the United States and the Afrikaner Confederation--and follows a squadron of spaceplanes engaging the Afrikaners' primary orbital battle-station.

I brought the second chapter of Escape from the Wastelands--which draft it is I cannot remember at this point--before my Lawrenceville writing group last Sunday.  They had some good comments, which I have not yet incorporated because I've had to finish the first draft of a new third chapter for the Kennesaw writing group.  That group meets this Saturday.

This could be an interesting meeting, considering how the third chapter exists solely because they did not think there was adequate characterization in the earlier chapters to make the first version of Chapter Three--in which several characters die--really affect the reader.