Anyway, I’m still working on my top secret project I’m not allowed to talk about.  So why bring it up?  Because what’s the point of working on a top secret project if you can’t mention it?  This is probably why I’d be a lousy spy.  The details will remain undisclosed, but I’m optimistic at this stage that this could be awesome.  I could be wrong.  It’s happened once or twice before.

But while I have a free moment, I figured I’d drop by, confirm that I am still alive, and maybe share some random thoughts.  People do seem to like that sort of thing.  Maybe because as a sort of famous person, they’re under the illusion I have something interesting to say.  Or maybe we all have something interesting to say, and I just happen to be lucky enough to have an audience.

So I’ve been playing Skylanders on my Wii.  If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a video game with a gimmick.  You get a wireless “portal” device that connects to your system and when you put the Skylander figures onto the portal, they appear in your game as characters for you to control.  Think of it as Pokemon, but without having to capture the damn things and instead just going out and buying them.  It is a gimmick, and psychologically, it should be annoying that you’re basically paying to unlock things that are already in the game.  But it’s a tremendously charming game with a lot going for it.

For one thing, the game is a bit old school and aimed at a younger audience.  It’s not tremendously difficult and most of the levels are straightforward, even if there is a bit of puzzles here and there.  For some reason, Skylanders reminds me a lot of that old classic Gauntlet.  Only instead of running around in a dungeon with four characters to choose from, there are 32 different Skylanders (if you should happen to buy them all).

What elevates this beyond a gimmick for me is that the game is genuinely fun to play.  And each character has their own unique style.  They aren’t just interchangeable with different special effects.  Trigger Happy carries a pair of pistols that shoot gold coins and can spray the screen with a deadly barrage.  Meanwhile, Terrafin is a landshark who can swim through rock and punch the enemy with tremendous force.  The more you play the game, the more you unlock on the characters.  It’s all a very elaborate system of enticement, but so cleverly done that it seems rewarding rather than manipulative.

It’s the difference between a game with a gimmick and a gimmicky game.  Skylanders is certainly designed to sell collectible figures, but they went above and beyond to create a fun experience that continues to reward me.  If I were less secure, I might feel weird admitting how much I’m enjoying a game aimed at kids, but I’m a professional novelologist.  And I fear the day I can’t see the beauty of playing a game where I can be anything from a rock dinosaur to a cyber dragon to a very angry tree who spits out giant spiked acorns that he rolls over the forces of evil.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been enjoying Castle Empire Online, a free online game that’s about managing a small kingdom.  It’s a different animal than Skylanders, but fun.  Worth checking out, if you’re so inclined.  I play under the name EmperorMollusk.  Send me a friend request.  Maybe I’ll trade you some fish for coal.  (I’m always short on coal.)

But what about the real world?  What’s going on there?

How quaint of you to ask.

Got that secret project thing.  Hush hush.  But it’s coming along.

Working on Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest, my next manuscript (prob out in 2013).

Oh, and that Mack Megaton story…it’s still coming.  I promise.

Finally, I’d like to offer my thoughts on the topic of skepticism.  The problem with your average person’s view of skepticism is that it seems to mean “Non-Believer”.  When I say I’m skeptical of ghosts, for instance, it’s often assumed I don’t believe ghosts exist.  In point of fact, I am a genuine skeptic when it comes to the paranormal.  I remain unconvinced but open to it.

And, yes, I understand there there is “evidence” for the paranormal.  It’s just not very good evidence.  And it certainly isn’t very convincing evidence for any particular claim.  This isn’t to say that those claims are wrong.  It’s just that they remain so ill-defined as to honestly admit they are specious at best.  The difficulty I have with “the paranormal” is that no one who believes it genuinely seems to be investigating it in an open way.  Instead, they have their pet theory that they are trying to prove.  That’s just bad research.

For example, perhaps electronic voice phenomenon is a real thing, and we are managing to record the voices of invisible beings around us.  This could mean a hundred things though.  Perhaps there are alien entities from another dimension trying to make contact with us.  Perhaps mischievous imps are playing tricks on us.  Or perhaps they are psychic imprints created by the will of the living investigators.  When it comes to the paranormal, none of these explanations seems unreasonable to me.  Or they could all be wrong.

This is why I am skeptical.  Even if you capture a genuine EVP, it could be something we haven’t even thought of yet.  There are so many possibilities, the only genuinely honest thing to do is to record the result and keep investigating.

Inevitably, someone will tell me I am being too closed minded.  But it’s actually the opposite.  I’m so open minded about what it COULD be that I have a hard time just declaring what it is as if I actually knew.  The believer is often the one who seems closed minded to me, willing to stretch any and all evidence toward their pet theory, ignoring any possibility outside of that.

As an experiment, I suggest watching different ghost hunting shows.  What’s most surprising about the shows isn’t that they find “evidence”, but the type of “evidence” they find.  Each show tends to find the kind of ghosts they’re looking for, regardless of their location.  The less dangerous spirits of Ghost Hunters never seem to cross paths with the more terrifying specters of Ghost Adventures.  And the outright malevolent forces of Paranormal State never seem to show up in any episodes of Fact or Faked.

Skeptically, it could be argued that perhaps that’s the way the supernatural works.  Perhaps different facets of the paranormal respond to different people.  Perhaps my very skepticism is what prevents me from seeing any evidence for myself.  Or perhaps it’s all just our primitive imagination responding to spooky sounds and unfamiliar locations.  Or perhaps we’re all just brains floating in a giant shared simulation and some people have their experience settings dialed to monster.

That’s skepticism.  Far too extreme to be practical, of course.  But just want to put it out there.

My general rule is that if the evidence could just as easily apply to leprechauns, then I remain unconvinced.  Lights in the skies could be alien spaceships.  Or the fey folk playing tricks on us.  Until we actually have a flying saucer or a faerie in our possession, we can’t know for sure.

Although I do still believe that Bigfoot is just Chupacapbra in a suit.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Next topic:

Writing is weird.  I just noticed that five of my novels are available on Audible.com.  You’d think I’d be up-to-speed on this sort of thing, but I’m not very good at keeping track of it.  So I listened to samples of the books, and if there’s anything weirder than getting paid to make up stories, it’s hearing someone get paid to read the stories you make up. 

I’ll admit that I still get confused by this sometimes.  I am a professional writer, a novelologist.  When I sit down at my computer and write a scene where a robot detective punches a mutant in the face, I’m doing my job.  It’s how I pay my bills.   It’s what makes me semi-sorta-almost-famous-ish.  And it’s doubtful you would be reading this right now if I wasn’t a writer who managed to catch a lot of lucky breaks.

At times, it’s like being the guy who tastes ice cream for a living.  I’m sure it’s not always a great job.  I’m sure there are times he just doesn’t feel like tasting ice cream.  And, like any job, if you’re going to be good at it, you have to take it seriously.  But in a world where so many people have jobs because they NEED them, not because they WANT them, even a lousy day of tasting ice cream beats the hell out of most anything else.

Thanks for letting me be the ice cream guy, gang.

Next topic:

If there are two things I love in this universe, it’s robots and tentacle monsters.  My wife even bought me a T-shirt with a robot fighting a tentacle monster on it.  And it is awesome.

This is how I can tell how much I disliked the last Transformers film.  Because the new one might have a dinobot in it, and yet, I don’t care.  Yes, the live action Transformers film has done the impossible.  It’s made me apathetic about dinobots.  And that’s quite an accomplishment.

Speaking of robots fighting robots, have you seen the trailer for the new Hugh Jackman film Real Steel?  I have no idea what the plot is about.  All I know is that it’s something about giant boxing robots.  So that’s really all I need to know.

Of all my books, the one I’d most likely write a sequel to, given my druthers, would be The Automatic Detective.  I like the world, the characters, and, of course, our robotic protagonist Mack Megaton himself.  Not that I plan on writing a sequel to that anytime soon.  And when I do finally write a sequel to something, it’d probably be with something with Orbit.

Oh, yeah.  Just in case you haven’t heard, Divine Misfortune is out in mass market paperback.  If you were waiting for that, you should buy it.  And my new novel Chasing the Moon comes out at the end of May.  It’ll be hardcover, but if you don’t have the patience to wait for mass market, you should buy it.  You’ll be glad you did.

What’s Moon about?  It’s complicated.  The basic premise is that Diana ends up with an apartment of monster roommates.  Reality is an illusion.  Everything we believe is wrong, and that a vast and uncaring universe doesn’t make sense to anyone.  Not even monsters from beyond.

It’s a fun read.  Really.  I promise.  Odds are good that if you’ve read one or two of my previous books, you like what I write.  So I feel confident in saying you’ll probably like this one too.  It does have a tentacle monster eating the moon, and as previously established, tentacle monsters are wicked cool.

It’s also my eighth book.  And that’s weird.  Is it too soon to have a retrospective of my career at this point?  It still feels strange to even use the term career.  Yet novelology is my career, and it’s doing good by me so far.  I don’t know where I’ll be in five years.  Maybe I’ll still be plugging along in my obscure little corner of tentacle monsters and giant fightin’ robots.  Or maybe I’ll be an international sensation, beloved by millions, flying across the world in my private jet with my solid gold robot butlers.  Who knows?

All I can say is that I’m glad to be here.  And when you can say that, you’re ahead in the game.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s late, and I need to go to bed.  Catch you later, gang.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Onto the subject at hand…

Recently, I found myself in a short debate on the nature of villainy.  What makes an interesting villain?  What doesn’t?  Is a colorful villain the same as a more subtle villain?  Stuff like that.  Rather than repeat it all, I recommend you check out the comments on my Opinions Vary blog entry.  Some ideas are shared, and it makes some interesting reading.

Near the end of the exchange, I noticed something.  I’m a writer.  A needless observation since, if you’re visiting this website, you probably know me first and foremost as a writer.  Safe to say, if I wasn’t a writer, you wouldn’t give a damn about what random thoughts were crawling through my head at any moment, no matter how well-expressed.  So I am indeed a professional writer, and I have the check stubs to prove it.

But more than being a pro, I’m actually a writer.  I think about stories, about characters and plots and premises and everything that makes a story up.  If it’s a book, you know I’ve thought about the sentences, considered how they all fit together, about what they say and what they don’t say.  If I’m reading the book, I’m analyzing it (even against my will).  And if I’m writing it, I’m trying to make sure it does what I want.  Oddly, even when I’m not sure what I want it to say.

If it’s a movie, I do the same thing.  Except I’m not really concerned with cinematography or subtleties of direction that I’m sure are there but usually go unnoticed except for a feeling of something great when it’s there and something off when it’s not.

I can turn this off to some degree.  I saw Legion this weekend, and while there are many questionable plot choices, I also was willing to overlook it because there’s a fight between archangels that is totally badass, and really, that’s the whole reason I’m there.

I have a pet peeve of using the term “storyteller”.  It just seems pretentious.  I also hate the phrase “craft of writing”.  It just bugs me for some reason.  But I do believe storytelling is an art and that writing is a craft.  Though maybe I’d be more comfortable with “trade of writing” because I’m a tradesperson, really.  But instead of making houses, I make stories.  It takes some of the romanticism out of it, but if you ask me, that’s a good thing.  Because novelology isn’t glamourous.  It’s mostly sitting in front of a computer and typing.

Being a professional teller of stories, I still sometimes get confused about it.  Recently, at the DFWWW’s after-IHOP gathering, a rollicking conversation about Transformers 2 and racism erupted.  The conversation is far too complicated to get into now, but it was fantastic.  It was great because we were all discussing a movie about giant robots and racial perceptions far deeper than one movie about giant robots and about the nature of stories themselves.  One of the most memorable discussions I’ve had in a long time, and one not soon forgotten.

More than an interesting diversion though, this was me discussing storytelling with fellow storytellers.  Really not any different than a bunch of carpenters sitting around discussing hammers and nails.  It’s why I keep the receipts from my IHOP gatherings because it is a business expense.  My writing benefits immensely from these discussions.

People think writing is easy.  Heck, I think it’s easy.  It’s certainly not as hard as breaking your back for minimum wage.  Or manning the counter at McDonald’s.  Or any number of thankless jobs that demand so much and give back so little.  But writing isn’t easy.  You have to think about it.  And if you do a good job, most people aren’t even going to notice.  And if you do a bad job, many people aren’t going to notice either.  People really don’t care that much about stories.  They tend to take them at face value.

I’m often amazed at how often people talk about the story without ever thinking about the writer behind the pages.  That’s how it should be.  I think only bad fiction draws attention to the author, just as bad directing tends to be all about the camera movements and stylistic shots rather than what’s happening on the screen.

But I am a writer.  And I do care.  And I do think about it.  Just do me a favor.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

I’ve decided to be inspirational today because I love it when I hear that something I’ve written has given an aspiring writer hope.  If I can do that, then I figure that this isn’t a waste of time because, as I’ve pointed out before, I was an aspiring writer not so long ago.

What’s my inspirational message today?

You can be a professional writer.

Yes, you.

I say this without hesitation, without even knowing anything about you.  I say this not even knowing if you want to be a professional writer.  I say this assuming that many of you reading this are, in point of fact, very, very bad writers.  Most importantly, I say that because it’s true.

Anybody can be a professional writer.  It’s one of the great things about the job.  It’s why so many people want to do it.  Think about it.  How many aspiring football players do you meet?  Plumbers?  Astronauts?  Hairstylists?  Go go dancers?  That’s because these jobs take talent.  You have to be able to catch a ball to be a pro football player.  You have to not throw up in your spacesuit to be an astronaut.  Cutting hair may not be rocket science, but I’ll admit that I can’t figure it out.  Although in my defense, I haven’t actually tried.

Still, the thing about writing, even in comparison to so many other jobs in this world (including other artistic-type professions) is that talent is probably the least important part of the job.  There.  I said it.  And I don’t deny it.

Time for an aside.  I’m not implying that there aren’t many talented and wonderful writers out there.  Plenty of them.  And I’m not suggesting that bad writers get rewarded more consistently than good writers.  I’m just saying that writing is a pretty simple job.  All you really need to do is understand how a sentence works, and you’ve accomplished 90 percent of the job.  The other 10 percent can be a killer.  I’ll admit this.  But it isn’t really necessary to be a talented writer to be a professional writer.

I know this because I read a lot of really, really bad books.  Popular books by popular writers.  No, I’m not going to name names so don’t bother asking.  I also read a lot of good books.  And there is, as far as I’m concerned, little correlation between success and talent in any way, good or bad.

Of course, there are untalented folks in all fields of human endeavor.  I’m sure you can find a lazy astronaut, an unattractive soap opera star, a clumsy ballerina if you look hard enough.  But these are the exceptions, not the rule.

Writing fiction is probably the most subjective art form there is.  It may be the most abstract job there is.  (Okay, there’s ghost hunting, which involves pretending to see spirits in absurdly trivial events, but I’d rather not open that door again.)  For every fan who likes my books, there are probably dozens who don’t.  Maybe they don’t like the swearing in some of them.  Maybe they think my books are too short.  Maybe they prefer books about pirates.  There are a million reasons to like or dislike anything I (or anyone else) writes.

So my inspirational words to all aspiring writers who might be reading this is that anybody can become a professional novelologist.  They might not make a fortune.  They might not set the publishing world on fire.  But, with hard work, determination, and a whole hell of a lot of luck, any aspiring writer (who knows how a sentence work) can one day sell their novel.

So keep writing.  Keep submitting.  Do endeavor to improve your writing.  It might help.  It can’t hurt.  But always remember that you can do it. 

Probably.

Of course, none of this pep talk actually applies to me.  As we all know, I am a tremendously talented, charismatic individual destined for greatness.  My success was dictated by The Mighty Robot King himself (with a little backup from The Jade Panda Emperor thrown in for good measure).  But every rule has its exception.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee