Chris Howard's Writing Blog

Favorite or memorable teacher?

I don't know what made me think of this, but I've been traveling lately and when I travel I get more time to sit around and do my introverted thought games, gathering wool, and just wondering about things.  We traveled a lot growing up, and I went to four different high schools, two different middle schools, and I don't know remember how many grade schools--a lot of memorable ones, but one teacher stands out over the rest. 

I thought of my sixth grade teacher, Sister Sally.  It was a long time ago, so I'm sure I'm a little bit off, but picture Julie Andrews (Sound of Music) with a bit of the Flying Nun (Sally Field) flown in.  My sister Dia and I went to St. Monica's on Geary in San Francisco for two years, and my first year there my teacher was Sister Sally.   She wore light blue while all the older sterner nuns wore black.  She also put on a musical production every year--different year to year.  My sister's class, the year after me, did Music Man.  My year we did Fiddler on the Roof.  Picture me at eleven years old with a fake beard and big boots playing Tevye for a scene, singing as deeply as I could--Sunrise Sunset--to a girl in my class.  Just crazy.

So, now it's your turn, name one of your favorite or memorable K-12 teachers. 

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Memed...best SF movie scene

Carole McDonnell passed me the Best SF Movie scene meme...

There are some famous, favorite scenes already mentioned by Carole, Stacia, and others, great scenes from Gattaca, Blade Runner, Dune, Logan's Run.

So, I dug around for something not yet mentioned:

The Fifth Element, the scene in which Zorg (Gary Oldman) explains how the universe works, how things are to the priest Cornelius, and ends up having to be saved by his captive.

Here's the scene on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcNIWPkNzA

It would be difficult to tell you why I love The Fifth Element.  I know a lot of people hate it, put it down as one of the worst SF movies, but there's something about the mix of Gary Oldman, high-speed rocket taxi chases, operatic cut scenes with murder, countdown timers on explosives, good versus evil, the end of the world, and futuristic kitsch that works for me.

You're tagged:  Skott, Pam

Just another vigilante in the meme wars

I'm a level 1 vigilante on PMOG (Passively Multiplayer Online Game).  I've created one mission--setting out lightposts, and navigated through a pile of others.

http://pmog.com/users/the0phrastus

I've already earned some badges:

1. Indie, for players who go a 24 hour period without using Google
2. Torch, for players that visit 100 URLs over a 24 hour period
3. Fellow Traveller, for players who complete more than 8 missions

Find out more here: http://pmog.com/ and here

Body parts meme

I'm so close to completing The New Sirens--working title of the sequel to Seaborn, that I took time tonight to go back and look at notes from my writing/crit group for the early chapters.  One of the sentences called out as "nice" in chapter one is,

She kicked higher, pulling Shelly by the hand, one foot bounding off Ochleros' arm, up to his shoulder where she set her feet down and leaned an elbow against the sea-demon's ear.

Forget about the context, sea-demons, who Ochleros or Shelly is, or whether this sentence is really "nice," and focus on the hand, foot, arm, shoulder, feet, elbow, and ear.  That is a nice pile of body parts in one place, seven of them.  I didn't do this on purpose, it came out in the action.  She's in the water, kicking to a nice high, comfortable place--and as everyone knows, sea-demons just love to have their ears elbowed.    

Okay, it's meme time: 

How many body parts can you plausibly jam into a sentence without simply listing them?  Internal parts as well.  I for one would like to read a sentence with "lung," "earlobe," and "big toe" in it.

Not going to tag anyone.  I'm going to x-post.  Open to all.  Leave a sentence in a comment here, or post it on your blog, journal, or wherever you soapbox.

Book Link Widget builder v1

Super busy lately, but I did get to spend some time last weekend to put this together--and write two chapters, around 7k words!  Okay, so here's version 1 of the book link widget builder--generic version.  I made a Juno Books version here.  The idea is to get your readers, fans, friends, family, a good portion of the millions out there on the Web to post your link widget on their blogs, web pages, MySpaces, Facebook, etc., and make it easy for those who are looking for a good book to get yours.  That simple.

Here's an example with Tobias Buckell's, Ragamuffin, but it should work for any book.  Links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookSense and your publisher site.

Try it out!  Let me know what you think.

Want to create your own widget?  You can try it out here, but if you have a Web site and your hosting provider offers PHP, you can have complete control!  Bwah-ha-ha-ha!  </Diabolical Laughter>  Enough of that.  Here's the code if you want to host it, customize it, etc.  It's free under a Creative Commons BSD license, which means you can do pretty much anything with it.  Unzip the files and make sure the directory of writable.  There are still a few things to work out, some browser CSS differences.  Enjoy.  Email me if you have questions: chrishoward.author@gmail.com

bookWidget.zip

Here's what you get in the zip:

PHP files

index.php	Step 1 - add your book info
WidgetDisplay.php	Step 2 - Displays the widget
WidgetPublish.php	Step 3 - Publish your widget
WidgetHelp.php	Some really crappy help

Templates

GetWidget.txt	template for the "Get this Widget"
template.txt	Widget template

Images

amazon.jpg	a little Amazon.com logo
CoverImageHelp.jpg	Help stuff
ISBNHelp.jpg	Help Stuff
WidgetBack1.png	Widget background images
WidgetBack2.png	Customize these...
WidgetBack3.png
WidgetBack4.png
WidgetBack5.png

Top ten signs a book was written by me

Got this from Stacia Kane via Fangs Fur & Fey:

Top ten signs a book was written by me (Chris Howard).

1. Half the book takes place underwater
2. The other half is no more than three miles from the coast, on board a ship, close to the water, you get it.
3. There's at least one good line in ancient Greek ...têi kreagrai tôn orchipedôn helkoimên es abysson.
4. At least one of the families--the protag's or some other major characters'--is really messed up, capital D Dysfunctional. 
5. Someone commits suicide--usually for a cause.
6. There's a brutal internal struggle going on--I love plot lines around characters fighting themselves, fighting some change in themselves.
7. Female protag.  I haven't written a male protagonist in the last three novels.
8. Someone is brought back from the dead--sometimes many someones, sometimes many times, sometimes armies of them.
9. One of the characters is from the Azores. (I can't say why this is, some deep fascination with the islands, I'm thinking).
10. Aristotle is mentioned in a favorable light, if not all out gushed over.  "Greatest hacker who ever lived, man."

Pass it on: Skott, Craig, Jeff, Lee, Sonja, and Lee.

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Most unread books meme

Skott's passed it over to me, via gwynnega.  LibraryThing provides a list of the books most frequently tagged as "unread," and I'm supposed to mark the titles in the list in,

Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those you own but haven’t read yet.

LibraryThing provides a list of the books most frequently tagged as "unread," and I'm supposed to mark the titles in the list in,

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22 
One hundred years of solitude 
Wuthering Heights
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose **
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses 
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey  *** (many times)
Pride and prejudice *
Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The brothers Karamazov * (at least 3 times)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies 
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler’s wife
The Iliad *** (many times)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations 
American gods : a novel * (twice)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged *
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver 
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West …
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man 
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead *
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys : a novel
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels
Les misérables *** (many times)
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune *** (many times) 
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon 
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces –
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved : a novel
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Pu…
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas : a novel
The confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame *** (many times)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist ...
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance * 
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s rainbow
In cold blood : a true account ...
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers

Next up: Matt, Stacia and Paula (if you have time).

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rememble.com

Interesting...People who use rememble.com are Rememblers.  Rememble is,

a 'washing line' for your digital bits and pieces. Thread together texts, photos, videos, sounds, scribbles, scans, notes, tweets... so they're not drifting a digital wasteland.

Free sign-up (promised to be under a minute) and away you go, adding clips, video, audio, from your phone.  I'm kind of liking Nina the intern's idea of creating "a Souvenir Shelf timeline and took a picture of everything one-by-one before she threw it out and Remembled them all. Now her flat (and her head) is clear and her junk is virtual!" 

I'm a total packrat, never throw anything out, and keeping things virtually is very tempting.

via Amazon Web Services Blog

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The Rain in Maine...

...falls humanely in the drain.  Okay, so me and Alice and the kids drove around southern Maine for a few hours this afternoon.  Let me back up and say this all started on my birthday when Alice--kind and wonderful--gave me a zoom lens for my Nikon D40X.

 

We've been busy and haven't had time--until today--to run out to take a bunch of close-up shots of long range things--and the best place to go for that?  That's right.  We hit the road for Maine, which is like 8 miles away from us, so not really a journey, but more of a way to spend a few hours, catch an early dinner at Wild Willy's Hamburgers, one of the best hamburger places around, and cruise along the beautiful York coast, snapping photos.

Brenda's Bloomers (http://brendasbloomers.com)

Whaleback light...in the pouring rain:

Looks like a really bad dinghy, skiff and rowboat pile-up...

And here's the cause.  The light's always green!

Finally, some important information for those mooring (or planning to dive from the boats) in Kittery Harbor. Click any of the pics to see them larger.

It was the best of times...

No, that's it.  Best of times.  As far as technology and communication go, we live in a universe changing era.  A million examples of this, but let me give you one tiny detail that somehow makes all of this technology glow:  I got an email from Terry Martin, the managing editor of the new British quarterly magazine Murky Depths, thanking me for subscribing, telling me that issue 0 (promo) and issue 1 were in the mail and should be in my hands shortly.  And then to thank me for posting about MD here on the blog.   I paid for the one-year subscription with PayPal, which--of course--handled the conversion to British Pounds seamlessly.  I found out about Murky Depths from an article I read online at SFScope, to whose RSS feed I subscribe, and through my feed reader, Bloglines, I read articles when the reader tells me there's something new.

Trite tech commentary aside, the whole world really is right outside my door, on the other end of the Internet pipe, etc.  And with everything else going on here and around the world, I still wouldn't trade living in this time for any other.

So, go order that two pound Spanish Cheese Assortment from Amazon.com, have it delivered to your door, browse the art at the Met, and you better go pick up a sub to Murky Depths.

IF: Captain

Here's a quick sketch I did this afternoon of a mermaid guiding a sea captain through the storm.  Did this for Illustration Friday topic: captain.  It's a bit rough, but here you go.  Click the pic to see the detail/much larger version.

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Where do I think I will be in five years?

I posted my "Where will you be as an author in five years?" question here and on MySpace, and the first two comments on my blog on MySpace made me step back and take a second look at my own goals. 

The first comment from Lorraine C. Ladish was more along the lines of my own response, a general view of the future with some details sprinkled in, but then WriterGal76 commented with twelve very specific goals, including, "submit a book-length collection to the Yale Series of Younger Poets" and "teach a college course in poetics or literary novels/analysis and any other aspect or form of creative writing."

So, I went back and rewrote my follow-up post to be somewhere between Lorraine's and WriterGal76's level of specificity.

I'll start by saying that the one thing I don't see me having more of in the next five years is time.  Always need more time.

I know I can complete at least one novel a year for I don't know how many years.  I have enough ideas, outlined novels, first three chapters of stories to last me a decade.  I come up with several story ideas worth pursuing every year, so I'm set for a long long while.  Again, it's that time thing that will always get in the way.   

I've created a few fiction writing lessons for my own kids called Saturday Morning Writing Club, but teaching or participating on the panel side of a writing workshop would be something new and fun.

I will continue to go to conventions, even more than I do now.  I can't see myself ever missing Boskone or Readercon unless something more urgent comes up, but I'd like to take in more cons, world and regionals.  I don't know how things might change.  I mean, right now, I'm like, OMG!--no way, there's Elizabeth Bear!  Okay, I don't say OMG, but it is really cool to see authors walking around, talking to fans, talking about their experiences.

I would love to win an award, say a Hugo.  Just one, thank you.

I will continue to draw and paint, and I'm going to work on a graphic novel or three over the next five years.  Has to happen.

Movies?  Yes, lots of them, my stories turned into screenplays and big screen productions, red carpets, tuxedos...Really, I'd be overjoyed to get an option or two in the next five.

I want to see my novels translated and published all over the world.

I've made one novel, Nanowhere--a YA thriller, available for free reading and downloading (CC licensed), and I can see myself doing it again.  I've already written a short story that I plan to post for free when my novel Seaborn is released sometime in 2008.  Also planning a short graphic version of the story.

There's my list. Where's yours?

www.lorrainecladish.com
http://www.myspace.com/writergal76
http://www.myspace.com/the0phrastus
http://www.elizabethbear.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award

Your writing future

Writers look into your futurescopes and tell me what you see? 

Where do you see yourself in five years?  Another two, three, four novels completed, a whole new series, short stories, anthologies, awards, movie options or whole movies made from your stories and premiered by then?  Do you see yourself entering new genres or focusing only on one?  Agent changes, publisher changes? Any unexpected turns in your writing career? 

Where will you be as an author in five years?

I have to think about this myself.  I'll follow up with a post on where I think I'm going.

breastsummer

This week's theme at Wordsmith.org A.Word.A.Day is red-herring words, and today's word is:

breastsummer

It's not a word with which I'm familiar, and my first impression was that it was going to be something sunnier, more uplifting, maybe even with a nice tan. 

breastsummer (BRES-sum-uhr, BREST-, BRES-e-muhr) noun; A horizontal beam supporting a wall over a large opening, such as a shop window.

A bit of a let down, really.

_COMIX - or what do you listen to when you write?

I listen to music when I write, or when I sit and think and plot, and I even posted about how that sort of happened.  Music used to be a distraction.  I couldn't have it playing while writing.  Somewhere along the way that changed, and I now jack into my iPod all the time.

This is the playlist I used while writing and editing my novel Captive Ocean, which has been renamed Seaborn.  The post title is how it appears on my iPod, Captive Ocean MIX = COMIX with an underscore so it sorts to the top.

It's an eclectic set.  Someone give me some stats on the possibility of Enya being in the same playlist as Angelspit.  Anyone? Some of the tracks have an oceany mood, some are actually about the ocean, and most of the others have something to do with the mood of a particular chapter, the struggles of a particular character, a turn in the plot.  Some just sound to me like the action at a particular part of the story.

Yes, I'm a total Dandy's fan--and yes I totally dig Birthday Massacre.  I have Nothing and Nowhere, Violet, and I'm going to get Walking with Strangers in September.  (Half the tracks off Violet have this very eerie underwater feeling).

The fourth track, Beethoven Opus 130 second movement, is the actual piece of music that Corina (main character) is playing in her head in chapter 3, the one she calls the AYBP, Alan Yeater Breakup Presto.  She's a music composition major in college.

From Charlaine Harris' writing FAQ:

I’ve never understood why anyone would want to know, but an astonishing number of people do. I listen to movie soundtracks, mostly historical epics like "Last of the Mohicans," "Troy," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." I also listen to bagpipe music. And Yo-Yo Ma. Make of this what you will.

From Karen Miller's interview with Lois McMaster Bujold:

Like many other writers, I sometimes find that music supplies inspiration for work in progress, either triggering ideas, or coming along to support them. At one time or another all sorts of music has worked this way for me -- instrumental, classical, rock, folk -- an old Steeleye Span song, "King Henry and the Grisley Ghost", updated to SFnal terms, once supplied a character and entire subplot for a novella.

_COMIX:

Track - Artist, Album/CD

The Sea, - Morcheeba, Big Calm
The Dream - The Birthday Massacre, Violet
Mohammed - The Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia
Presto (Opus 130 second movement) - Beethoven - The Yale Quartet, The complete masterworks, Beethoven Disc 34
Ana - Pixies, Bossanova
I Was Never Young - Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins Disc 1
Zombie - The Cranberries
Philosophia - The Guggenheim Grotto, Philosophia
Get Off - The Dandy Warhols, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia
Boadicea - Enya, The Celts
Combat Baby - Metric, Old World Underground
True Affection - The Blow, True Affection
Stars - Lacuna Coil, Halflife
ocean - Collide, Chasing the Ghost
Is She Weird - Pixies, Bossanova
Precious Things - Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes
Hidden Spaces - The Morning After Girls, Prelude EPs 1 & 2
Saltbreakers - Laura Veirs & Saltbreakers, Saltbreakers
Gentleman - Prototypes, Prototypes
Cannonball - The Breeders
Dangerous Type - The Cars, Candy-O
I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper - Erika Eigen, A Clockwork Orange, Soundtrack
The Dandy Warhols T.V. Theme Song - The Dandy Warhols, Dandys Rule OK?
Cloudburst on Shingle Street - Thomas Dolby, The Golden Age of Wireless
What Are You Afraid Of - West Indian Girl, West Indian Girl
All They Ever Do Is Talk - Earlimart, Treble & Tremble
Captain - Ween, Quebec
Stupid Girl - Garbage, Garbage
Make You Sin - Angelspit, Krankhaus
Inside - Moby, Play
Après Moi - Regina Spektor, Begin to Hope
Ocean Night Song - Laura Veirs & Saltbreakers, Saltbreakers
Under the Stairs - The Birthday Massacre, Nothing and Nowhere
Sour Girl - Stone Temple Pilots, No. 4
Believe E.S.P. - Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity
Dig For Fire - Pixies, Bossanova
Keep Hope Alive - The Crystal Method, Vegas
Only Shallow - My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
The Iron Sea - Keane, Under the Iron Sea
24 - Jem, Finally Woken
Happy Birthday - The Birthday Massacre, Violet
My Lover's Gone - Dido, No Angel
Three Friends - Gentle Giant, Three Friends

Main Jane

I don't usually go for the what-are-you? quizzes, but come on, I had to find out which Plain Jane I am.

Which PLAIN Jane Are You? Main Jane

As the leader of the pack, you are always looking out for your friends and working to make your group pretty tight knit.

Take This Quiz

Niki at Night

Because no blog is complete without cat pictures.  Here's our cat, Niki, who for most of her two years has been an indoor cat.  Lately her inner lioness has taken over and she wants out most of the time, day or night.  (Click the pics to see them larger).

Do I even know eight people?

Sorry I didn't get to this earlier, Lee, but it took me this long to come up with something remotely clever (could also be really lame).  Lee tagged me a few days ago with an eight random things about me meme.  Wait a minute.  Do I even know eight people?

So, here are the rules:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their 8 things and post these rules.
3. At the end choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.

Here goes.  Eight random things about me.  (Click the pics to see them a bit larger)

1. Here's my motto:

2. Here's my dog, Penny, tearing sh*t up (Half Jack Russell-half Australian Herder. She has one blue eye, one brown eye, and scares the F out of coyotes.  Really).

3. Here's a face I wish I could make, but don't have enough guitar strings to pull it off.

Here's my favorite house on earth--but it's really close to the ocean (Right at the end of Atlantic Avenue in North Hampton).

I love cities

I love going places (Pic I took in Rhodes)

Here's my love Alice (with Chloe hopping into the pic behind us and Christopher on the camera)

Here's my vehicle--a 2003 Honda Element  (Cthulhu himself taking the shot).  Yes, I was driving an Element in the States back when people stopped in the middle of the street with clear WTF looks on their faces.  I had a someone ask me--while I was pumping gas at the station--if it was an electric car.

Okay, now the hard part.  Who to tag...

Skott, Jeff, Amy, Con, Neil, Dave, Jeff, Craig

LibraryThing

I signed up a year ago or so, but I've just started using it again, hitting the "Add to LibraryThing" whenever I'm at Amazon.com.

I've put in 150 books so far, and it's relatively painless with some LibraryThing's add tools.

http://www.librarything.com

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

It's International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.  Almost forgot.  Here you go: 

Always Becoming (Short story, originally published The Harrow--and still online there).  Here's the podcast of Always Becoming (17 MB).

Nanowhere, YA SF thriller.

Books are the future

I'm an author looking for agent representation.  Books are certainly part of my future.  I keep writing them at any rate.  I can also draw and paint, and thought it would be cool to make some library posters. I'm thinking of adding "Read them now" on the lower left.  Even better, help me come up with something catchier than "Books are the Future."  Here are couple more I came up with:

Belligerent: This is a library.  Read a book or get out!
Fanciful: A library is an empire of books in which every librarian wears a crown--and occasionally engages in territorial expansion.
Tolkienesque: It's a dangerous business reading a book. You open the cover, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Pythonesque:  It's the Librarian!  (Like "It's the Bishop!")

UPDATE: A couple requests for posters and a slogan change.  What do you think?

(If you are a librarian or someone in the book trade and you want poster sized versions of this, let me know: chrishoward.author@gmail.com).

Title: Librarian of the Future  (Click to see a larger version in a popup window).

On sort of a side note, I looked at my web site stats this morning and they doubled over the last couple days thanks to Lou Anders of Pyr linking back to my fictitious SF Romance imprint post. 

I began this piece last weekend, and finished it this afternoon.  A little quick with the pens, but I'm happy with it.  It's titled "Librarian of the Future" but following the increase in traffic to my blog, I'm so tempted to change it to "In the future all librarian androids will look like Lou Anders." (Say that nine times fast). 

If I had to put a caption on it:  "You're looking for Scalzi's nineteen volume OMW saga?  Follow me."

My Photo Album

Starting something new.  In between all the other junk I post, I'm going to post a pic from an ever growing number of digital images I've taken on vacations, business trips, and in my own backyard.  (Click to see the larger version of the image)

Kouros head 
Archaeological Museum of Corinth
CJH - October 2001

This is one of the pieces stolen from the Archaeological Museum of Corinth in 1990 and returned in 2001.  I believe the nose was broken in the theft because there's an older pic on the museum site with the nose intact.  Sad.

I took this one during a trip my father and I took to Greece and Turkey in 2001.  You want to know where I go for inspiration?  I can look at this shot for an hour.  The rings of hair, lips, carved in stone...theoeidês.  Simply amazing.

This was the inspiration for my Kassandra close-up:

I'm a monster

Found this one on Andrew Wheeler's blog, who saw it on Gwenda Bond's blog...I'm sure it keeps going.  I just can't follow the chain.

Get Your Monster Name