Dog Days Indeed!

So I have a new dog and she thinks Fetch is a full contact sport.

Maybe that needs a little context.

I had an old dog. He died and because I prefer to write about fictional misery instead of my own, I didn't mention it in my blog. This was about two years ago, give or take.

Of course, I didn't mention much of anything in those two years because I was caring for an infant and vainly trying to keep the Donovan Schist series alive. I succeeded at one of those things and I'm pretty sure it was the more important one but frankly I don't feel very accomplished about it, though I'm told I should. And as is often the case when I am told, they are probably right.

Anyway, we were talking about dogs. Or more precisely, the new dog that earnestly believes she is a linebacker and that I have the ball which will win the game even though it is she in fact that has the ball in her jaws at the very moment she tackles me.

I've had dogs that made Fetch unpleasant before. I've gotten fingers gnashed and elbows nipped. But never have I had a dog who thinks the ball is a token which allows her to run back full-tilt and body-check me in the thigh or the stomach or--God forbid--another place entirely.

Now I am a reasonably fit guy. Or at least a guy that is fit enough to keep three small children out of traffic and away from matches. But when that slavering locomotive of a dog comes barreling towards me, I find that I must knuckle down, grit my teeth and use every ounce of muscle I have not to get bowled over. She's only sixty pounds, but it's sixty pounds with a considerable amount of velocity behind it, increasing the force considerably, which is really just a fancy physics way of saying it feels like I am in a Sumo match with a grizzly bear--and not one of those sleek Yellowstone jobs, either but a big fat Alaskan Kodiak right after the annual salmon buffet.

It's surprising I survive at all, but thankfully I live in Miami, a place Dante would've used for a tenth circle if he'd known about it. The dog generally overheats before she can finish me off.

Which should tell you how serious this has gotten: I am reduced to thanking the broiling summer, my hated nemesis, for delivery from her.

*****

This being a blog about writing (or my writing, anyway), an update is probably in order: as mentioned before, I have been doing some paternal stuff which has kept me fairly busy. But that has not kept me away from my computer. So let me say that I have been on a publishing hiatus but not a writing hiatus--there are about three and a half novels in the editing process which I hope to find a home for in the near future.

Puttin' on Scrubs...

Doing editorial surgery today. Maybe that sounds melodramatic, but it's exactly how I feel: excited and afraid. What I mean by 'editorial 'surgery' is the removal of a scene, the application of small connective-rewrites, then a 'scene graft' somewhere else. I've come to realize that in many ways, I prefer a full rewrite. With a full rewrite, the scene is guaranteed to mesh with the surrounding material. With editorial surgery, you have a quandary: it needs to mesh but the whole point of surgery is to preserve the scene the way it is. This creates a number of problems with continuity and flow--two of my guiding principles. The motive in this case is interesting. I teased a Big Reveal then followed it up with a really emotional scene--a sort of Big Reveal in terms of pathos if not plot. The two are mostly unrelated subplots, but when I looked back on them, it really feels like too much when taken in together. The new way will--I hope--keep the suspense up, the tedium down, and the story flowing.

Off to find out now...

All Saints Epilogue

Sorry about the late post yesterday--I'm had some technical problems, though like all technical problems, they could have been avoided with a little foresight.

At any rate, here's the final installment, the aftermath of the adventure you've followed the last couple weeks. I've always been fascinated by serialized fiction so I was glad to experiment with it. Not sure it's the right style for me--the more I write, the more I feel I'm a novelist. But it was fun. Hope you enjoyed it.

Happy All Saints Day and Thanks for reading,

Christopher Beats

Weekend & Story's End

We're coming up to the end now. As planned, there will be a final chapter posted tomorrow (probably early) and then an All-Saints Epilogue on Sunday.

I'm afraid I had to break with the lovely Daiza-Kalaena-Daiza-Kalaena symmetry, but the story structure has to serve the plot and the plot called for a long final confrontation--too long for a single chapter. If this had been a novel written without the kind of restraints I gave myself, I probably would've thrown in a "filler" scene with Ruadd and Kalaena between the two Daiza scenes. Maybe I'll add it later, but for now, it's all Daiza for the final two.

Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween!

Christopher Beats

Double the Story!

So I messed up and wrote an extra chapter (I discovered yesterday there were two Chapter Tens in my MS!). For the purposes of suspense and story structure, I didn't feel comfortable breaking it up and nesting its two parts in other chapters, so congratulations--you get two chapters today.

Enjoy them.

HallowThirteen Continues

We're on Week Two of the HallowThirteen short story. Part 8 is up and (hopefully) legible. This is always a busy time of year for me, but so far I'm keeping to the schedule.

Enjoy today's instalment and see you tomorrow!

Plans for the Weekend

Part 5 is up. It includes tree-climbing. You should check it out.

To be clear, I'm not letting a little thing like the 'weekend' put a crimp on Hallowthirteen! Part 6 will be up tomorrow. Probably quite early, as I have stuff to do that morning and did the polish today. You won't want to miss it--things're gettin' good now.

Expect a Sunday chapter as well, probably before noon (which is the de facto deadline I've given myself each day).

In the meantime, have a good weekend and enjoy Hallowthirteen!

Part 4 is Up

Enjoy!

Day 3 of Hallowthirteen

Well, let's hope the next few days go better than the last two. After getting mildly sick one night then missing another night's sleep entirely, I feel especially proud that I've gotten Parts Two & Three up on time. As to if they're any good, well, I'll let you make that determination.

I can tell this is going to be fun.

As always, Happy Hallowthirteen and thanks for reading!

HAPPY HALLOWTHIRTEEN!

It has begun...

I've posted the first little installment of "Benighted," my Hallowthirteen short story. You'll find it in the tab above. Click it. Click it now!

I've also posted a little bit of commentary, just some random thoughts that went through my head while I was editing this thing. I would like to keep that up for the whole event, but we'll see. For obvious reasons, the priority is the story itself. Everything else is frosting.

I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading,

Christopher Beats 10/19/2015

Tricks & Treats

It's that time of year: the sun is shifting, the leaves are falling, and Christopher Beats has changed his cover photo (quick shout-out to the very awesome Jamie Stone of Punksthetic Art).

Sorry for not updating. I've been working on a number of novels over the last few years, so don't think I've been idle. Unfortunately, in writing, effort often doesn't pay off for years, if at all.

Anyway, when the plastic jack'o'lanterns started going up, it occurred to me that I haven't written anything resembling horror in quite a while. In fact, I've been grinding away at edits and rewrites for so long, I've almost forgotten what it's like to produce something new.

This gave me an idea: why not let myself write a little story? Just for fun? And since it's just for fun, I'm not going to pitch it to anyone, I'm just going to post it here, piece by piece, for my readers. I've been writing in little snippets, trying to keep the scenes fairly neat. Each scene is approximately two pages long, a perfect daily blog post. And, it being Halloween, I'm shooting for exactly thirteen chapters so I can call this event: HALLOWTHIRTEEN!

(There will be a bonus chapter, or "All Saints Epilogue" to tie things up on November 1st).

HallowThirteen will start on the 19th and run to the 31st. See you there!

Gone Idle

Have you ever paused by a sunny window and gone idle?

Thought of a long-dead dog and warm, dirty days?
Of fun so hard there was black sand on the back of your neck?
Of snapping, playful jaws?
Of running and falling and laughing?

Have you ever blinked awake after five minutes and realized with sadness and joy that you had a happy childhood?

Happy New Year!

Let's just scoot right past the part about me neglecting my blog and give you an update.

I am hip-deep in prose, my friends, hip-deep. I assure you that my idleness on the Rumba is in no way indicative of literary turpitude. The opposite is true: I've been in literary frenzy, a jaundiced spider, all limbs and hunger, spinning verbal webs in hopes of catching a reader's attention six months from now. Or twelve, if I keep hitting bumps in the road.

And there have been bumps. I guess you could say I had writer's block--but I've never liked that term. I didn't have trouble with the writing part, it's just that what ended up on the page was shit. This inevitably turned to wallowing and then sniping at myself. Thankfully, I had a few short stories to edit and send out, so rather than flogging myself, I turned to those. Maybe I'll get a bite. I'll tell you if I do.

My main project, however, is a novel. And it is progressing. I tried to keep it small and contained, but as always, it keeps growing. A description would be difficult, since that inevitably leads to a comparison with other novels, which is really just a comparison with other authors, and that, to paraphrase the Desiderata, can only lead to vanity or bitterness

If a promo person put a gun to my head and demanded an answer, I guess I'd describe it as the love-child of Joss Whedon and Patrick O'Brien, with Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman for godparents.

Said fictitious publicist would probably pull the trigger at that, and rightly so.

Here's a little taste of what I've been working on (with certain names expunged to reduce the spoiler-effect):

           A shrill whistle cut him off. With deep water beneath them, Nauv was mustering all hands for the funeral. She looked half a corpse herself, though she still managed to stand straight and speak in a clear voice.

            Tybalt apparently accorded dead men the same respect as live women, for he wore his shore clothes now, the ones with delicate lace at the chin and wrists. Heelah had the same thought, donning a torc of silver for the occasion. It contrasted with her dark scales nicely. The rest of the crew did not change. Reynard wouldn't have had to anyway, given his preference for black.

            Yonn removed his hat and nudged Zalira to do the same. She pulled it off quickly, smiling with embarrassment. She still wasn't used to men's clothes or the etiquette that came with them, but thankfully, no one seemed to notice.

            After the usual platitudes were spoken, a few men came forward and said some nice things about -------, who was apparently an amiable drunk that had never picked a fight in his life. Mostly, though, the crew just shuffled awkwardly and tried not to look each other in the eye. When there was nothing left to say, Nauv commended his body to the deep and they dropped him in with a splash. As the black water swallowed him there were murmurs among the crew, hushed words that sounded like a prayer.

            Yonn glanced around quickly--the wizarding lords hated religion in all its forms--but at that moment the musketeers stepped to the side and discharged their guns with a roar.

            The smoke lingered in the air for a heartbeat then vanished.

            Nauv did not formally dismiss them; she just put on her hat and went back to the quarterdeck. No one commented on the captain's absence, but Zalira could see from their eyes that every jack there had noticed.

As you can tell, my priority right now is to work on additional fiction, so the blog is really just going to serve as a place for me to post the occasional update on progress. Hope you don't mind and even if you do, have a happy new year anyway.

-Christopher Beats

Another Monday

As you probably have noticed, these posts are getting kind of sporadic. I've started a new project and am putting most of my energy there. My goal is to have a finished MS off to a publisher in less than seven months. I've got a lot of responsibilities right now but still feel that I'll never transition to full-time unless I can get two novels done in a year.

Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I was driving down a moonlit highway the other day and my iPod decided "Ghostriders in the Sky" would be apropos. I always loved that song as a kid. When I learned to play the saxophone, I dug out a piano book shortly after and belted it out whenever I got the chance.

Of course, it's most potent when it's sung. The melody is great but the lyrics are downright awesome. The more I write, the more I find myself paying attention to lyrics and these are great lyrics. Songs are like haikus in that you must choose what absolutely matters instead of just cluttering up your art with everything that fits. You can see this in "Ghostriders"--they don't mention the usual cowboy getup or anything, but instead mention the sweat which makes their shirts stick to their backs, underscoring how this is difficult work.

I could go on, but it would be awful to spend more time talking about a song than it is long.

They've got a bunch of versions on Youtube. Go check some out.

update

Sorry about the lack of updates. In the universe of my mind, stars have spun wildly off-tilt and exploded, their scattered remains condensing into balls of rock and water, germinating on their thin surfaces the delicate business of empires and history, growing the love and hate and sacrifice that make a planet a world.

Also, I've been thinking about pirates and wizards...

One More Reason I'd Like a Time Machine

Fiction's been a comfort lately, probably because after the aliens have blasted Mount Rushmore or the zombies have begun their own movement (Occupy Everything), the politicians set aside their petty differences and actually do what they're supposed to. The country right now makes me think of Nietzsche: "Under peaceful conditions, a war-like man sets upon himself."

I had this professor in college that loved Nietzsche. She even handed out these three stapled pages of sayings, which has been why for the last ten years I have had a Nietzsche quote for everything.

Speaking of Nietzsche quotes, I happened to purchase a game this weekend, which I already own, except now it's an "enhanced edition." If you haven't already guessed from my mention of Nietzsche and enhanced edition, I refer to Baldur's Gate. I don't have a lot of time for games right now, but my better half is a huge Bioware fanatic and like all Bioware fans, she views Baldur's Gate as the Citizen Kane of video games, the platonic ideal of digital storytelling. Of course, maybe the real reason we bought it was because Steam was selling it for $5. You can't even go to a movie for $5 anymore.

Anyway, the shocking part of this tale is how much fun I had playing a game from last century.

Nostalgia is probably a big part of it. I have many fond memories of playing this game a decade ago with my brothers. When my wife and I got married, someone got us a laptop. Right after the operating system came Baldur's Gate, as if the machine would be a naked, empty husk without it.

I'm left wondering how much is nostalgia and how much is just plain quality. Graphics, while important, are still trumped by gameplay, storyline, and dialogue. It's a lot like black and white movies, actually. If a later viewer can get over their biases involving special effects and color, all kinds of stories open up to them.

So will colleges one day have courses with titles like "20th CENTURY COMPUTER GAME CLASSICS"? Will pretentious coeds in black turtlenecks argue about the symbolism of Bhaal over cups of bitter espresso?

All I can say is: God, I hope so.



EDITED 10-15:  Corrected "Baal" to "Bhaal." I guess the writers at Forgotten Realms didn't want the ancient Phoenicians to sue them for copyright infringement or something.

A Farewell to Donovan

Well, I officially got confirmation from Carina Press that the Magnocracy Series will not be continued.

If I felt more strongly about telling Donovan's stories, I would look for another publisher or even consider self-publishing. Problem is, the third novel starts a plot arc that would take multiple books to finish. I just can't embark on a project like that without some hope of payoff, so the third novel is getting shelved. Maybe one day I'll go back to the grime and the adventure, perhaps I might even tell Moira's story, but right now I have other worlds I'd like to visit, worlds that might reach a wider audience. Frankly, I thought Vacant Graves was a nice standalone, so I'd rather not mess it up by introducing a conflict I'm not going to resolve.

For those of you who read and enjoyed the Donovan books, I am sorry. Unfortunately, writing is a business and it was a product that just didn't sell. Hopefully you will enjoy my next project even more.


Thank you for reading,


Christopher Beats

Drinking in the drink

The light conditions weren't ideal but I couldn't pass up the chance to take this with my phone.





It's a manatee enjoying freshwater from a hose at the port in Canaveral. I've noticed they gravitate to where boats dock for the freshwater. I've even seen friendly boatowners actually use their hoses to "scratch" the manatees' backs as well.

"What?"

Mythical...Beavers?

As you can probably guess, I'm really into folklore, legends, and fantasy. I've always been a big fan of imagination, particularly mythic-level imagination. My bookshelf reflects this. I have a few books about animals and a lot of books about history, but there is an enormous section devoted to stuff that never really existed.

With the arrival of children, I looked at all my fantasy and folklore books with a new eye. I mean, if an alien visitor popped down and perused my library, he could be forgiven for thinking that dragons and manticores were real. It's not like this stuff comes with a disclaimer or something.

So I was naturally curious about how this would fit into raising a child. Being a parent means spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about things which you probably don't need to worry about. One of these things for me has been what will happen when a child who needs to be schooled in the Real World encounters the make-believe at such a young age. We had a few story books when I was little, but they were colorful, childish things that sat on the kids' shelf. My parent's bookshelf, meanwhile, was stocked with professional-looking natural history books and a row of staid encyclopedias. The was an inherent difference between childish imaginative stuff and adult reality.

Not so with my bookshelf, which has caused me to wonder if my kids will have trouble differentiating truth from fantasy. I suppose I could go out of my way to say "this is made-up" when we encounter this stuff in a story, but that gets kind of exhausting and, as a storyteller myself, I feel like it's a betrayal to interrupt the sacredness of a narrative to say the narrative is a lie. A preface or afterward to that effect is fine, mind you, but footnotes are for academic works, not stories.

At any rate, as it would happen, the eldest had already begun to pick up on real/make-believe divide without any comments from me. Unfortunately, he came to the wrong conclusion altogether.

We were walking around a lake the other day and came across a fallen tree. This initiated a discussion about beavers, an animal that appears in one of his favorite cartoons. To my complete surprise, the child interrupted the discussion by saying "But beavers aren't real."

Yankee readers may be a little perplexed by this statement, so I should clarify: this park was in Florida. I don't know if it's the weather or the alligators, but beavers don't like it here. Since the child had only seen beavers in a cartoon, he jumped to the weird but understandable conclusion that beavers were make-believe, same as dragons. Though his thesis was wrong, this was a really good moment for me because it reminded me that even young children have a pretty good B.S. sensor and cartoons, thankfully, push that sensor into red.

I tried of course to explain to him that beavers are real and that his father had, in fact, seen beavers before. He didn't seem convinced, though, so my wife has suggested we find a zoo and settle it that way (frankly people like us always look for a reason to go to the zoo).

My own encounter with beavers is an interesting story. I was in Alaska when I was 19 or so with my folks. The first time I saw a beaver lodge out the window of our rental, I demanded we pull over so I could see if there was a beaver around. My parents were floored. To them, beavers were nuisance critters. Why would anyone want to see them?

To a Florida boy, though, beavers are pretty strange. They may be rodents, but they're giant rodents. Giant aquatic rodents. Plus they build things. Giant aquatic rodents that build things! How could anyone not be excited by them?

My parents didn't pull over, but eventually we went hiking near a beaver lodge. I tiptoed off the path, got my camera out (these being the days when one's camera was not also a phone) and made my approach. I saw a widening wake in the water and....

PAT! PAT! PAT!

Nothing.

I looked around for a minute then went back to my mom on the trail and told her about the noise.

"They slap their tail on the water when there's a predator around," she said. "It's a signal to hide."

"There's a predator around?" I looked around excitedly.

"Yeah." She gave me a significant stare.

I must admit that it took me a minute to comprehend her.