The Right-Wing Pundit Political Thriller Fad

Some articles on and reviews of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window mention that before Beck, Bill O'Reilly wrote a political thriller of his own. In the last few days, I've noticed political thrillers by Oliver North and Ralph Reed in the remainder piles at my local Barnes & Noble. It hit me that right-wing political thrillers by Fox News pundits have become the latest fad. They're bestsellers, of course, with the Conservative Book Club playing the role of the Church of Scientology (which bought most of the copies of L. Ron Hubbard's later books) by gaming the sales figures. I acknowledged this in one of my short stories intended for print publication: a publisher complains about right-wing pundits jumping on the political thriller bandwagon when their left-wing counterparts have enough sense not to join them. These thrillers have two things in common: 1) they're ghostwritten 2) they're badly ghostwritten. This fad runs the risk of ruining the political thriller subgenre forever. But will these guys realize that writing stories is best left to real storytellers? I think not. Meanwhile, I'll go back to writing mine...

Panic Time, AugNoWriMo 2010 Edition

It's that time of the WriMo again: Panic Time! As I'm currently under 10,000 words this AugNoWriMo, I'd better start panicking if I want to win my first AugNo. Will the third time be the charm? Only if I get off my butt, stop procrastinating, and start writing!

Currently, my word count is 8,234, and that's including the AugNo Anthology short story I've submitted. Getting to 50,000 might require a 10K day or two, but who knows...

Spanner: Morality Is Not the Point

Lately I've been paying too much attention to a site called Television Tropes & Idioms and listing the tropes relevant to Spanner in a Microsoft Word document. When I got to Character Alignment, I realized, for the first time since I started my first preliminary work on this story in 1992, that in a story about a revolution sparked by a monkeywrencher against an oppressive technocracy, morality is not the point. In most stories, the vertical axis on the alignment chart (good vs. evil) is the focus, and most writers (and moralists) conflate "order" with "good" and likewise "chaos" with "evil" (hence the trope Anarchy Is Chaos and its twin, Democracy Is Bad, which Spanner puts in the mouths of Lawful Evil villains but utterly rejects). Spanner is about freedom, not morality.

AugNoWriMo: The Muse Gets Off Her Duff Again

Once again, it took me until the middle of the month to really get started. No problem, really; I'll still win AugNoWriMo. After all, I won JulNoWriMo the same way, almost. But the key turned out to be, once again, a completely different story. It was the short story I want to submit to this year's AugNo Anthology. I wrote it in two hours and edited it in two hours on Monday (the 16th). Yeah, that did the trick.

Future Shock

Remember future shock? It's the shock that overcomes you when you can't handle what you perceive as too much change in too little time. The term was coined by futurist Alvin Toffler, and it's the subject of the book that made him famous. If anything, the speed of change has accelerated since the book came out in 1970, and the shock registered by those who can't handle it has become more extreme, to the point of madness. The ultimate expression of that madness is 9/11 — so far. But far more people have come to adapt to the accelerating rate of change; some of us can even be said to surf evolution. The 21st-century world we live in today was nothing but science fiction in the 20th century.

In this entry, I'll be dealing with fiction as well as society. We tell ourselves who we are through the stories we tell.

Spanner: When Power Corrupts

Lord Acton famously said: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Sure, he was writing to a bishop about the then new Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, but it applies to any organization. If someone gains too much power, they are bound to become corrupt. The famous Peter Principle explains why: In any hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. The mechanism is groupthink, or collective narcissism resulting from the leader's delusion that the fact that he is in power makes everything right and his increasing intolerance for negative feedback.

Spanner: With Great Power...

Last entry, I brought up one of the major themes of Spanner: the never-ending conflict between those who try to raise ordinary people to their level and those merely content to oppress them. That's the basic conflict, and I'll write a few more things about it later in this post. The theme I'm concerned with, though, is closely related and should be familiar:

With great power comes great responsibility.

Spanner: Why These Big Family Things? There's A Theme In It.

That last entry was me going too far. I do that sometimes. Much of Spanner is all about either the characters or their author going too far. But the whole Wold Newton Universe thing? You know the old Arab proverb warning against letting the camel stick its nose into your tent...

Anyway, there's a purpose behind that "Grail Family", "Wold Newton Family", and "House of Dracula" stuff. Margaret Starbird introduced it and Laurence Gardner (who included the genealogy of the House of Dracula in his Realm of the Ring Lords) echoed it. It's contained in the Hebrew words anakim and anawim.

Spanner and the Incident at Wold Newton

On December 13, 1795, a meteor fell near the village of Wold Newton in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, England. According to the late Philip José Farmer, science fiction author (of Riverworld fame) and genealogist, these people were nearby at the time:

• John Clayton, third Duke of Greystoke, and his wife Alicia (né Rutherford), sister of...
• George Edward Rutherford, eleventh Baron Tennington, and his wife, Elizabeth Cavendish;
• Honoré Delargardie and his wife, Philippa Drummond;
• Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet;
• Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel) and his second wife, Alice Clarke Raffles;
• Sir Hugh Drummond (Philippa's brother) and his wife, Georgia Dewhurst;
• Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife, Violet Clarke Raffles (Alice's sister);
• Sebastian Noel, a friend and student of Dr. Holmes; and
• four coachmen: Louis Lupin, Albert Lecoq, Arthur Blake, and Simon MacNichols.

The radiation from the meteor mutated these people, who became the ancestors of several of the greatest heroes in literature and pop culture. Farmer focuses in particular on three of them: Sherlock Holmes, descendant of Siger, and two Greystoke scions: John Clayton-Wilder, the eighth Duke of Greystoke, better known under the name Tarzan; and Dr. James Clayton "Doc" Wilder, Jr., whose adventures were fictionalized first as "Doc Ardan" (in French) and then, more famously, as Doc Savage.

Project Notebook Search #1

Now that I'm writing Spanner (and its side stories), it's past time for me to start searching the nearly two decades' worth of notes I wrote into fourteen Project Notebooks. I'll start by delving into the massive Notebook #13. I called it "The Production Notebook", but by the time I switched to #14 in 2007 (after I'd already started NaNoWriMo and shortly before I switched my attention to the Spanner prequel Bad Company), I'd failed yet again to teach myself how to draw comics, like a New Year's resolution that fails over and over but continues to haunt you. Anyway, I'm gleaning from the notes in Project Notebook #13. (Note: If my Project Notebook entries resemble blog posts like in this very blog, consider the Notebooks the private-journal predecessor to "Spanner's World".)