Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Kitchen Witch with wings of red bell pepper and green onion stalks

I was thinking of painting something for Christmas, bright reds, something magical--and I hadn't had lunch yet.  So, I'm doodling with one of the panels I painted for Saltwater Witch chapter 8, and I came up with...Kitchen Witch - with wings of red bell pepper and green onion stalks.  A bit goofy, I know.

But, tell me, would you hang one in your kitchen? I printed a couple proofs and they came out nicely.  Should I have prints made for Christmas presents?

Click for the full view:

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P&G Hiring Elite Combat Forces for Marketing Positions?

Like everyone, we have a variety of dental care products in the house, including the one to the right, Crest Whitestrips, which are--as everyone probably knows--teeth whitening strips that fit on your teeth--basically you stick them on, let them sit there for a while, and then peel and toss. Bam. Whiter teeth.

They're neat, they do work well, and they fit, but what struck as a...little different was the Advanced SEAL with SEAL all in caps, and the three very succinct lines: Form fit. No slip. Clean removal.

And this started me thinking that if Navy SEALs did marketing, they'd jump on lines like these.  These are damn good lines: Form fit. No slip. Clean removal.  They apply to the SEALs themselves.  In fact, thinking further--perhaps a little too far, if you were charged with doing some subtle advertizing for Naval Special Warfare, wouldn't it be interesting to see if you could infiltrate the marketing departments of some of the world's top corporations and get them to sell your message? 

There's a book in there somewhere. Maybe a comedy...

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http://www.whitestrips.com/whitestrips-products/whitestrips-advanced-seal-details.jsp
http://www.seal.navy.mil/seal/

Does FREE work?

To narrow that down a bit, does the posting of stories, novels, and art for free downloading, reading, viewing, and even sharing, make any difference in print book sales, in attracting more traffic to an author's or illustrator's blog, in doing anything to help that artist's career?

I give away a lot.  I have a whole blog dedicated to some of my Creative Commons licensed content.  I post my art regularly here on theophrast.us, on Flickr, deviantArt, and other art forums and presentation sites.  I posted an SF novel Nanowhere almost four years ago under Creative Commons license.  I post 3 to 5 panels for my web comic Saltwater Witch every week. 

Free, all of it.  Free to download, to read, to share, some of it out there for years. 

Does it work, giving all of this away if you're just starting out?  (I know it works if you're an established author, celeb, marketing guru, so I don't need the Doctorow, Scalzi, Anderson, Godin, etc. cases). 

I'm curious to hear what other writers, illustrators, and readers think.  Maybe you can guess what I think by what's on my blog or the Saltwater Witch site.  I'm considering posting my entire novel Seaborn, which came out last July.  And I'm wondering about the effectiveness of free.  I completely get Tim O'Reilly's aphorism that the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.  Maybe my real question is does giving things away solve that problem?

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ChrisCommons
Saltwater Witch Web Comic.

To appease my wife...

I have agreed to get a show of hands and comments from those of you who know the origin of the "shocked and stunned" line in my previous post.  Apparently Alice thinks I'm insane to put it in italics, that I can only see the world through my infinite geek glasses--basically geeks as far as the eye can see, and theoretically geeky types--row upon row of us--going on forever. 

I say that many of you will know where "shocked and stunned" comes from, or a little closer: shawked and stooned.  If you Google the phrase you'll get 1.45 million results, but I'm looking for the particular movie I'm drawing it from, realizing that it's a popular phrase and may be in many movies.

Don't let me down...

First person POV and better dialogue

I write in 3rd and 1st primarily, and every once in a while I'll play with others.  I'm well into a novel, a little over 40k words, and it seems to me that my dialogue is just on, it's sharper, more meaningful.  It also occurred to me that it might have something to do with writing in first person.  My last two books have been in 3rd. 

There is the notion that it's easier to get into a character in 1st, easier to play the role, easier to feel what the character's feeling, easier to find the voice, but does this have a positive influence on the dialogue you write? 

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A question about reading and filtering

I'm just thinking at the keyboard, and I'll say it: I think one of the most gratifying things for a writer is a reader who understands your characters.

I've been thinking about how people read books, and how we, in some cases, see the words, the characters, tropes, through our SF lenses or through our medieval fantasy spectacles.  I think contemporary fantasy has had some trouble getting a footing--even with a third of the shelf space that now seems to be devoted to urban, contemporary fantasy, steampunk, and other forms of our genre that do not contain a single elf and aren't set in Medieval Europe (or similar world).

When I sent the first three chapters of Seaborn around to the workshop--at the time I was in the writing workshop Jeff Carver and Craig Shaw Gardner run every year here in Boston--nearly everyone thought it was SF.  And when I said, "no, I'm writing fantasy," they said, "look, here's a woman scuba diving--how can you have scuba gear in a fantasy novel?"

You can...

I think it just makes reading it a little harder, and don't expect everyone who browses the F&SF shelves to get what you're trying to do.

If you're using tropes--common themes--like vampires, summoning demons, pirates, dragons, witches lighting candles, sorcerers chanting--all of which I love BTW (everyone knows I have a total thing for witches and demons), you're writing with some cultural (or popular) momentum.  When you write about something a little off the genre map (in my case, humans who breathe underwater) or types and settings that just don't sit well with a lot of people, I think it makes everything--describing, categorizing, shelving, marketing your story, characters, and their motives that much more difficult.

Part of me wants to think that SF readers are happier--than fantasy readers--to accept something way off the mark, but I'm not sure about this.  And I'm even less sure about SF readers when they read fantasy.

What do you think?

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My characters are running across what used to be Illinois

I finished another chapter last night in my current novel length work.  This is an entirely new series for me, new characters, new story, new everything, and there's a lot more movement around the landscape than in my prior novels--more than I'm used to. 

Because of this, I'm using maps more than I've ever used them before.  (I certainly enjoy making maps, and I did draw a few for Seaborn and Saltwater Witch, but I didn't use real maps that often).

And there are a lot of cool mapping tools out--really built for finding your self on the map and getting directions, but they also work well for fictional landscapes and determining where your characters are in the world.

I primarily use Google maps with satellite imagery, but Microsoft's Live Search Maps (http://maps.live.com/) has a unique and extremely cool aerial photo display. I believe Microsoft paid to have low-flying aircraft take millions of images all over the country.  Wow!

Last night my main character and her accomplice hitched a ride across this section of the map:

Here's what the Live Search Maps' aerial view looks like:

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Blogging for four solid years

I started blogging in October of 2004 with something custom on an old web site, but quickly--a couple months later--jumped on a subscription to Typepad.  I've been here ever since.  (I actually kept an online daily journal of my son's premature birth and 2 1/2 month journey through the NICU at Valley Children's Hospital in 1996, but that wasn't quite blogging because there was no such thing as RSS).

What's weird is looking back and realizing I hadn't published a thing then...nothing, not one story.  But I was trying.  My first post was about a reject I'd just received from Strange Horizons.  I was finishing up the novel Nanowhere, which I eventually posted complete online. 

I've completed three more novels, and at least a dozen short stories since I started blogging.  One novel has been published, and a handful of shorts have appeared in various zines, mostly online.

Looking back gives me a sense of how much time it actually takes to get things from my head into print.  Years.  I started writing about Kassandra and the Seaborn in 2003! Juno Books picked it up in 2007, and it went on store shelves in July 2008.  I posted quite a bit about finding an agent and submitting manuscripts.  I have an agent now.  I used to post my rejects.  I have so many now, that I don't bother. 

I don't think my posting volume has changed, but I think the subjects have changed.  I used to post a lot more about Aritstotle and Aristotelian philosophy--a hobby of mine.  I certainly post a lot more art now than I did back then.  I've started another blog around a graphic novel project of mine, Saltwater Witch.

Wonder what this blog will look like in 2012?

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What's in your journal?

I love notebooks, and although I'm primarily a writer who works in a software app (Word or Bean), I write entire short stories and many novel scenes in long hand in my journal.  I love writing with a pen or pencil.  I've used a bunch of notebooks, but I always come back to Moleskine.  I went to the Thai place in Middleton today with Skott, and sketched another idea for the voices in her head problem (see here and here for more). 

Here's the latest page in my journal, on the right.  I try to take my journal everywhere I go--even to lunch, and I put everything into it, the silliest ideas to worldbuilding notes, to sketches, to real writing.

So, what do you put in your journal?  Do you even keep a journal? If so, do you have a preference for kind?  (I not only like Moleskines, but I like the ones with blank pages--not lined pages).

Voices in my head...

I've posted this on a couple art forums looking for answers: What's the best way to graphically handle voices inside someone's head?

There's an old king and queen inside my main character Kassandra's head.  They talk to her, advise her, and constantly bicker with each other.  These two ruled the Seaborn but there's a gap of a thousand years between their reigns, which also causes quite a bit of contention. 

The problem is that there can be a whole conversation going on inside her head with different characters, and she's alone in a room.  She talks to them--speaking aloud, they talk to her inside and only she can hear them.  (Isn't that the way it always is with voices in your head?)

I've thought of using different kinds of thought balloons for each voice, using different fonts, colors, and I've just started to re-work some of the panels with a small cameo to designate which character is doing the "thinking."

Here's an example:

Any thoughts?  Ha ha...no really.  Anyone have ideas on this, or preferences?

Some interesting ideas on thought balloons: http://webcomictriage.blogspot.com