Author: John Brown

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    Iron Man, Military Insect Spies

    ByJohn Brown

    Iron Man was wonderful, every bit of what the trailers promised–adventure, humor, and a huge dose of gosh-wow. Of course, the idea of military exoskeletons are not new. It’s been in science fiction for a long time. More recently, Dan Brown used the idea in his thriller Act of War. In fact, if you think about it, it becomes clear that airplanes, ships, and tanks are all exoskeletons. So this is all old hat. But when did we ever need a brand-spanking new idea to have a wonderful and new story? What’s important is what the do with the idea–the characters, problem, plot, and setting. And Iron Man does a wonderful job of imagining new twists on all these parts of story.

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    In other news, it appears the future is not so far away. The military is going to be using robot bugs for recon.

    British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

    Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.

    Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets.

    Then they would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers’ hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.

    I’m all for saving lives and projecting power while we’re doing it. And robo spies are just cool. Except, of course, when they’re used against you…

    Humm, zing!

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    Workshop: The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories

    ByJohn Brown

    Where: Salt Lake City at CONduit 

    Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008

    Time: 2 PM – 4 PM

    I had tons of great feedback from the last workshop. It seemed to be helpful to quite a few people. There are a number of other good workshops for writers going on before and after mine that you’ll want to look into as well.

    For more information go to the CONduit website.

  • Trusting the writing process

    ByJohn Brown

    I’ve experienced yet again the miracle of manure, of starting from scratch, and following the zing.

    This last week I’ve been rewriting a beginning to a novel. It’s a bit tricky because I can’t just rewrite it without constraint. Such a rewrite would cause massive changes to everything else in the book. In fact, a complete, unfettered rewrite of a beginning might end up requiring a totally different book. But Tor bought the book in hand. Besides, I don’t have time for a total rewrite even if they did want one. So the new beginning had to fit into the rest of the current story.

    At three different spots where this beginning needed significant changes I have had to write a pile of cow crap because it’s all I had in me at the time. I knew I couldn’t use those plops when I finished them. But there they were.

    The problem was compounded by my reading the recent Time article about Stephenie Meyer and starting to listen to Empire by Card. I have a weakness for comparing myself to others, and this time the comparison yeilded some depressing results.

    Then I asked myself what wasn’t working and how I might meet the goals of those scenes a bit better. I followed my heart. But in all three cases I had to stop trying to use the brilliant words I had written originally. Not the cow crap revision, but the original stuff.

    I’m not talking about the general prescription that we writers need to “murder our darlings” because the darlings are usually bad writing. I find general prescriptions to be wrong much of the time and that one in particular to make no sense at all.

    In this case one of the things I had to jettison was a beginning segment that had compelled 90% of the readers who glanced at it to read more. A beginning page that snagged agents and editors. A beginning page I still loved, even after reading it as many times as I had.

    But it just wouldn’t fit, couldn’t fit with the new structure. When I tried to hang onto it, I wrote crap. Which was fine. There was some good stuff in the crap. But I eventually had to trust myself and come up with something else completely.

    And while I don’t know if it’s going to suck readers in like the original, I think it’s pretty dang good. Back before Card’s boot camp I would have never made it to this point. I would have given up. But this is just the process for me now. It took some time to learn and trust it. But now I know that while sometimes I can write hot. There’s no reason to despair if I don’t. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I get to the good stuff.

    As for Meyer and Card, well, it’s not my goal to be a one-trick pony, now, is it. 🙂

  • Stephenie Meyer, Envy, & Zing

    ByJohn Brown

    If were smart and didn’t compare myself to other writers, then I wouldn’t care that Meyer is a true overnight success, I wouldn’t be green with envy, I certainly wouldn’t be thinking that I should write YA romance.

    His eyes were smoldering…

    She couldn’t look away from his smoldering eyes…

    His yellow smoldering eyes were upon her…

    Alas, imperfect man that I am.

    Time has written an interesting article about the Meyer phenom. Of the many fine tidbits, I wanted to highlight one comparing Meyer with Rowling.

    But as artists, they couldn’t be more different. Rowling pieces her books together meticulously, detail by detail. Meyer floods the page like a severed artery. She never uses a sentence when she can use a whole paragraph. Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense–they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. (Which she’ll readily grant: “I don’t think I’m a writer; I think I’m a storyteller,” Meyer says. “The words aren’t always perfect.”)

    I’m not a writer, she says.

    I’m a storyteller.

    There are volumes in that one paragraph. Meyer knows exactly why the vast majority of us fiction readers read. And it ain’t for style.

    Here’s an even more interesting video clip of Meyer talking about how she came up with her novel. Notice how this woman follows the zing. Notice how she makes time (novel completed in three months). And look at her success. A lesson to all of us wanting to tell great stories.

    …His red eyes were smoldering, and her brown eyes were smoldering, and together they were all smoldering…