A "Forceful" Take on Sean Williams

My third Tor.com post is up, Meet Sean Williams: A Force to Be Reckoned With (bad pun intended). Basically, it's a run down of a lot of his recent work, from Ace, Monkeybrain, and Pyr. Sean mentioned that next year marks his 20 year anniversary since he started writing seriously, his 10th year since he was able to support himself full time. And what's he got to show for it? Only 26 novels, 1 stand-alone novella, 5 short story collections, a few New York Times best sellers, and a buttload of awards.

Wearing My Other Hat Today

Illustrator E.M.Gist interviews Yours Truly on his blog, Day of the Dead, today. This is Lou-the-de facto-art director he's talking to, not Lou-the-editorial-director. So there's some pretty covers to look at, including one making its debut, and I say erudite things like:

The best piece of advice I can give is the best advice ever given me. The very wise Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications said, You should never judge an artist by the best piece in his/her portfolio. You should judge them by their worst, because if that’s what they hand in, you’re going to have to live with it. I think this is tremendous advice for art directors. For illustrators, I suppose it means you should identify the worst piece of art in your portfolio and get rid of it! In all seriousness, I see too many portfolios that include everything going back to college, too many roughs and early works. A portfolio should reflect where you are now, not where you were five or ten years ago. Best foot forward, and only that foot!

Incidentally, that's one of my favorite examples of Gist's work you see pictured above. It's from the soon-to-be-released, highly anticipated Escape From Hell!,from Hal Duncan and published by Monkeybrain Books.

Kirill Uncovered

What do you all make of this?



It's the first installment of online sci-fi drama, Kirill Uncovered.

Whereas Iron Man Was Right on the Money

I should put a ***spoiler warning*** at the start of this post, but really, I'm like the last person on earth to see Iron Man, so come on. But unlike Spider-Man 3, where I felt the that the movie was unfairly maligned, Iron Man was every bit as fantastically awesome as I had been told. Saw it last night, and I'm still buzzing.

Unlike The Dark Knight, which I thought was a film that transcended its genre (whatever that means) to invite comparisons to works like The French Connection, Silence of the Lambs and Heat, this is very much a "comic book movie" - and one of the best in the history of superhero films to date. Tony Stark shares some similarities with Bruce Wayne (both millionaire playboys with toys, both have snide butlers Alfred and the AI Jarvis, and both butlers even make quips about their employers' "subtle" taste in sports cars), but the films really have nothing in common beyond these superficials.

What Iron Man does have a lot in common with, oddly, is The Incredible Hulk. Now, I've only seen Hulk without sound - the woman in the seat in the aisle in front of me coming back from Calgary was watching it, while her husband/partner/boyfriend was watching Hancock - but I saw the whole film that way, and my screenwriting mentor Dan Deckeralways maintained that a good movie script could be understood sans sound anyway. So, Hulk without sound goes something like this: Bruce Banner on the run, captured by military. Experiments. Hulk gets loose. Bad guy gets formula. Bad guy becomes bigger, meaner Bad-Hulk. Military must rely on Hulk to stop Bad Hulk. And Iron Man (with or without sound), goes like this: Tony Stark captured, builds prototype suit, escapes, bad guy gets old suit and makes bigger, meaner Iron Man suit. Military/government agency must rely on Iron Man to stop Bad Iron Man.

Both films are pretty plot light. Both only have one fight between the good and bad guys. Both films have the protagonist mostly cleaning up their own mess (prompting me to wonder how the press knew so much about this Iron Man "superhero" at the end). In The Incredible Hulk's case, I was astounded at how long it took Hulk to appear, how little he did, and how Hulk and Bad Hulk only mixed it up once. I expected, at the least, for Hulk to get his ass kicked the first time, then have to go away and nurse his wounds, before coming back, Rocky-style, to tear Bad Hulk a new one.

But in the case of Iron Man, this simple, mostly "set up" plot is layered with incredible characters, fantastic (and snappy/fast!) dialog, and absolutely inspired casting. This film moves! I came out of it wanting to break the sound barrier myself, and told my wife it was the Best. Marvel. Film. Ever. After the andrenalin wore off, I'd have to say its nowhere near as narratively complex as either Spider-Man 2 or X-Men 2, and they are both probably superior stories. But this is about as much fun as you can have with a superhero movie that IS a superhero movie (see how I excepted Dark Knight?), and I just totally loved it. Can't wait for the sequel! Can't wait for the Avengers. Loved it.

(And that after the credit sequence? Awesome!)

Pyr's Submission Guidelines

They are online here, and say:

Pyr® publishes only science fiction and fantasy novels. We are not currently looking for short story collections, anthologies, novellas or nonfiction. We do not consider material under 80,000 words in length. We strongly prefer that you query first. The required method for having manuscripts considered for publication is through an established literary agent. Agents can be found in such literary guides as Literary Marketplace and The Writer's Market.

I repost them here because it keeps coming up. We don't consider anthology proposals, ever, no exceptions. I love anthologies, but I don't have a big enough list to publish more than the ones I do myself! And you gots to have an agent.

Podcast: SciFiDimensions and Me

John C. Snider interviews me for the SciFiDimensions Podcast. You can hear in streaming from his website, or you can search iTunes for "SciFiDimensions." I've not listened to it yet, so no idea how I come off, but it felt like a very thorough interview at the time. We talk about Fast Forward 2,Pyr, the art of John Picacio, and many more topics besides. He's a good interviewer, (and hit me with a curve ball out of the gate. Not that I'm saying that's a criteria for a good interview!) He also interviews Tim Lasuita, licensing director for Jack Lake Productions, a Canadian company involved in reprinting Classics Illustrated. Cool!

John also reviews Fast Forward 2 on his blog.

There’s no theme to the Fast Forward series, other than excellence in storytelling. The stories in FF2 cover the spectrum of sub-genres, from near-future parables to far-future space opera, from post-cyberpunk to hard SF; from cautionary tales a la The Twilight Zone to uplifting vignettes that affirm the best in human nature. With such a wide selection of styles and themes, it should come as no surprise that not every entry will appeal to every reader. At the very least, FF2 is like a Whitman Sampler; a little something for everyone, and if you find a story you like, it’ll be from a writer with plenty of other work you can chase down later.

Big Foot and Me

I'm back, sooner even than I expected to be, with another post at Tor.com.

This one is about my friend Eric Spitznagel, his Vanity Fair piece on Bigfoot, and the reaction it caused among cryptozoology enthusiasts.

Raise Shields!

Via Paul McAuley, a piece on Universe Today stating:

UK scientists working at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford and the universities of York and Strathclyde have tested a "mini-magnetosphere" enveloping a model spacecraft in the lab. It turns out that their prototype offers almost total protection against high energy solar particles.

Deflector shields are a reality. Awesome.

My First Tor.com Post is Up

Yup, today I begin blogging for Tor.com. My first post just went up a few minutes ago. Though I've been encouraged to promote Pyr authors and books as part of their very laudable aim to be "publisher neutral," with this first one I think I've found a niche area that is sufficiently conflict-of-interest free to suffice even if I weren't. And something I can really get into doing regularly.

No points to my regular readers for guessing what I'm on about.