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Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Word Count

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jantar_Mantar_-_Laghu_samrat_yantra.JPG
…when we sit down to write a book

OK I admit it, I put the Harry Potter reference in the title as link bait. Well almost. Take a look at the word counts for each of the Harry Potter books:

  • The Philosopher’s Stone – 76,944
  • The Chamber of Secrets – 85,141
  • The Prisoner of Azkaban – 107,253
  • The Goblet of Fire – 190,637
  • The Order of the Phoenix – 257,045
  • The Half-Blood Prince – 168,923
  • The Deathly Hallows – 198,227
    (source)

That’s a lot of words, and it illustrates the mountain an author contemplates when we sit down to write a book. Until recently, the length of The Prisoner of Azkaban was pretty much industry standard — 100K words is an economic sweetspot for printing and distribution. Lengths seem to be drifting down of late, because there’s no economy of scale for ebooks.

Who knows? Perhaps we’ll one day return to the sanity of the 35K-word 1970s pulp?

But thirty-five thousand words is still a lot of words!

So it’s natural to look at the project, divide target word count by available days and use that as a measure of progress.

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The Paranormal on British TV: The BBC’s The Ωmega Factor

The Paranormal on British TV: The BBC’s The Ωmega Factor

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The Omega Factor DVD

Starring James Hazeldine and Louise Jameson
(1979. 10 episodes, 3 disks, 510 minutes)

Saturday night at the 2016 Windy City Pulp and Paper Show back in April, I had dinner with John O’Neill and several others, including Arin Komins and her husband Rich Warren. During our discussions about Blake’s Seven and The Sandbaggers, Arin mentioned another BBC program, The Ωmega Factor. Her description sounded fascinating, so I bought it on Sunday from a dealer.

The Ωmega Factor is a British series about the limitless potential of the human mind and this theme is explored through various paranormal abilities. The show stars James Hazeldine (1947-2002) as journalist and psychic investigator Tom Crane; Louise Jameson, as psychic investigator Dr. Anne Reynolds; and John Carlisle as psychiatrist Roy Martindale. Crane and Reynolds report to Martindale who directly supervises Department 7, a secret British government group that explores psychic phenomenon mostly for use by the military.

Mind control, poltergeists, possession, witches, experimental devices, haunted houses and out-of-body experiences are a few of the paranormal subjects discussed in the ten episodes that were produced. Here’s a look at each one.

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Bookburners Season 2 Launches with “Creepy Town”

Bookburners Season 2 Launches with “Creepy Town”

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Bookburners Season 2
Bookburners Season 2 launches today, June 22, 2016, at SerialBox.com.

I have been to creepy towns in the American north east. Once, while lost in central Massachusetts, I stopped at a convenience store for directions. The woman within who gave me the directions I needed was eerily nice; the stock on the shelves of the convenience store held products with labels that looked older than I was. On a trip in upstate New York, I stopped at a post office; the misty morning combined with the general disrepair of the sidewalks and exterior of the building had my companions looking out the windows to be ready when the zombies arrived. Thankfully, neither of those creepy towns had anything on “Creepy Town,” the first episode in Season 2 of Bookburners.

Short recap: Bookburners is the first serial from Serial Box Publishing, a company dedicated to producing prose fiction that feels like the best modern serial storytelling—meaning, the stories feel like really excellent television shows. Each serial has a writing team that works together to create the season, and each episode is written by a member of that team and released on Wednesday mornings for your reading pleasure. I’ve read mine via phone, tablet, and listened to the audio versions (included in the per-episode or season-pass cost) while I’m out on a run. And “Creepy Town” makes truly excellent inspiration for running.

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OMG They Found It! Osprey’s The Catalaunian Fields AD451

OMG They Found It! Osprey’s The Catalaunian Fields AD451

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Osprey Catalaunian FieldsIt’s the one thousand, five hundred and fifty sixth anniversary of the Battle of the  Catalaunian Fields, otherwise known as the Battle of Chalons!

Not heard of it?

AD451. Just as the Roman Empire fades into the Dark Ages. At the Catalaunian Fields near Chalons, a grudging alliance of Romans and Germannic tribes confronts Attila the Hun’s confederation of Huns and yet more Germannic tribes.

Hundreds of thousands of warriors grind through a Ragnarok-grade battle on the scale of Waterloo but fought with cold steel… a battle so murderous that, in the morning, nobody much feels like doing any more fighting.

I’m fascinated by this forgotten battle — I’m even writing a YA Historical series that will put the hero in the midst of the mayhem — so I was overjoyed to receive a review copy of Osprey’s new book, The Catalaunian Fields AD451. Imagine, then, how I felt when, I discovered the chapter called, “The Battlefield Today.”

What? OMG they found it!

The location of this battle has been hotly debated for centuries. Now here’s an Osprey book casually pinpointing the battlefield and using it as the basis for its maps and diagrams!

And it’s convincing.

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DC’s Continuing Rebirth

DC’s Continuing Rebirth

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Green Lanterns - Rebirth (2016) 001-002Rebirth still sounds a bit weird to say, like I’m saying DC was born in Kenya or something. In reality, I’m continuing from my last post which started my look at DC Rebirth, what I’m referring to as a corrective reboot.

To recap: DC seems to be explaining the discrepancies of the last 5 years (called the New 52) by saying that there’s a plot afoot and everyone in the DCU got their memory reprogrammed. This is comic books, so I’m ok with suspending belief over that one, because I’m intrigued as to who would be powerful enough to fiddle with the memory of everyone in the DCU and why they would do it.

So in the last two weeks, DC has unfolded more of Rebirth through a series of one-shot issues designed to propel readers back into the regular monthlies, some of which have already started under their “rebirth” banners. Here are the seven one-shots:

Batman Rebirth: Bruce gets a new helper. I don’t know yet if he’s a sidekick or not. That will roll out in the coming weeks. The fact that this new hero is a black guy certainly helps with diversity of voices DC will have to tell stories.

I liked the thematic concern too. This issue was about what superheroes do and why they keep going on when villains keep returning, changed, grown, more powerful. These are central questions to the central conceit of the superhero. I liked the hopeful answer.

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And In The Centre Ring: Mongo the Magnificent!

And In The Centre Ring: Mongo the Magnificent!

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Chesbro Horseman EdenI haven’t heard much about George C. Chesbro lately, and I don’t think it’s entirely because he died in 2008. Chesbro was one of those writers who are somehow just a little bit too extreme – in one way or another – to become widely popular. The people who like Chesbro’s stuff really like it, and the ones who don’t, are often left a little perplexed.

Take his most well-known, and certainly his most popular character. Robert Frederickson is a dwarf, with a genius-level IQ, a black belt in Karate, and a PhD in criminology. He’s also a retired circus headliner who went by the name “Mongo the Magnificent.” He got bored just being a college professor, so he became a licensed private investigator. Somehow, the cases he gets all seem to skew into the weird end of the spectrum. Go figure.

So, what was too much for you? The dwarf? The IQ? The PhD? The PI license? If your reaction to Mongo’s description is “oh come on! Really?” you might want to look at some of Chesbro’s other work. But if your reaction is more like mine was back in the day, “oh, this I gotta see,” then you might really enjoy a walk down Mongo’s dark streets. This is hard-boiled, even noir crime fiction the like of which you’ve never seen.

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Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

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However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
It's like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock
It’s like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock

HP Lovecraft is a bit like Bill Haley; he arguably created his own genre, but few people now consume his work for simple pleasure.

Just as modern people typically discover Rock and Roll through [your favourite band here], they come to the Cthulhu Mythos through Charles Stross’s Laundry Files(*), through the madness of the Cthulhu Fluxx cardgame, or through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu.

Kids…? Well my daughter (8) has a plush Cthulhu who spends most of his time in the naughty corner for trying to eat the faces of the other toys.

Nobody, typically, just happens to pick up an HP Lovecraft book. If they do, they probably bounce. Let’s just say that speculative fiction has produced better stylists and that “of his time” is proving to be less and less able to explain away his racism.

However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre. He pretty much nailed Cosmic Horror, and though we have chipped off racist carbuncles, all the tropes still bear his mason’s mark.

This means that Lovecraft’s Mythos serves the the same function in the Geek community as the Classical world served amongst educated Victorians. They would remark on somebody being “Hector-like”, we joke that our  pasta bake “turned into a Shoggoth”.

This creates the interesting problem that the our shared subculture leans heavily on a set of texts that are increasingly unreadable for both literary and ethical reasons!

The answer, of course, is to retell the stories in other media, which is where books like Charles Cutting’s graphic novel Kadath come in.

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Logical Swords & Sorcery: The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague de Camp

Logical Swords & Sorcery: The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague de Camp

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oie_1461552JKlZM7ZLLyon Sprague de Camp’s first published story was “The Isolinguals” in 1937. During the 1930s and 40s he became a significant author, writing dozens of stories and numerous novels. His time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall (1939) is considered a classic and is still read today. Alongside such genre standard bearers as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, he is considered one of the authors responsible for bringing greater sophistication to science fiction. He was the fourth Grand Master as chosen by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1979, and in 1984 he was given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. His 1996 autobiography, Time and Chance, won a Hugo Award. In his lifetime he was well-regarded and successful.

To call de Camp a polarizing figure is an understatement. His control over Robert E. Howard’s Conan character for so many years, his ham-fisted editing of Howard’s stories, his ruthless strangling of any effort to get pure, unadulterated Conan into print, raised the ire of readers. For an incredibly detailed history of de Camp’s relationship with REH’s work and legacy, I highly recommend tracking down Morgan Holmes’ 16-part series, “The de Camp Controversy.”

De Camp first encountered the character of Conan when his friend Fletcher Pratt tossed him a copy of Conan the Conqueror. According to Lin Carter, de Camp “yielded helplessly to Howard’s gusto and driving narrative energies.” In 1951 de Camp decided to try his own hand at Howardian swords & sorcery and wrote The Tritonian Ring. He sold it to the clunkily-titled magazine Two Complete Science-Adventure Books. 

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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Nine – “The Golden Flask”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Nine – “The Golden Flask”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on June 15, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for reprinting these early articles so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for nearly 6 years and 270 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

golden flaskRomer_-_Mystery“The Golden Flask” was the eighth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu. First published in The Story-Teller in May 1913, it later comprised Chapters 21-23 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for North American publication). Rohmer added brief linking material to the start of this episode for its book publication in an effort to tie the story closer together with its immediate predecessor. “The Golden Flask” is unique in not being centered upon Dr. Petrie’s infatuation with Karamaneh, but rather upon our heroes’ obsession with bringing Dr. Fu-Manchu to justice.

The story harks back to “The Zayat Kiss” in being set in motion with Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie correctly identifying Henry Stradwick, Lord Southery as the next target of assassination, but being too late to prevent his death. Lord Southery’s physician, Sir Frank Narcombe believes the peer to have expired from heart failure. Oddly, Smith states that neither he nor Petrie represents the official police. A reason for this blatant deception is never given and must be concluded as an error on Rohmer’s part. Reference is made to both Smith and Petrie possessing a supernatural ability to detect Fu-Manchu’s presence at the scene of Lord Southery’s death despite the absence of any clues pointing to foul play. When Petrie describes Smith as looking like “a man consumed by a burning fever,” the reader is completely willing to suspend disbelief and go along with Rohmer’s frenzied paranoia. It is the same mania that captivated Petrie (and, by extension, the reader) at the start of “The Zayat Kiss.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Mysteries at Hallmark

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Mysteries at Hallmark

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My wife and I enjoy watching murder mystery movies on Hallmark. More accurately, the Hallmark Movies and Mystery Channel (HMMC). Many of them had previously run on the Hallmark Channel that most folks are more familiar with. My previous cable provider didn’t provide HMMC at the tier I purchased, and many of my friends don’t have it either. It’s out there, but it’s not a low-tier feature in many systems.

Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of viewing for mystery fans. They air reruns of shows such as Hart to Hart, Matlock, Diagnosis Murder, Murder She Wrote and Perry Mason. And a staple of the schedule is Columbo. I haven’t seen every episode, but I’ve seen many of them several times and I never get tired of watching Peter Falk do his thing. “Uh, say, just one more thing…”

I also like a couple of old Hallmark franchises that have come to rest at HMMC.

Most folks knew Kellie Martin first as cute little Beckie (Becca) Thatcher in Life Goes On (a poignant, well done series) and later on as nurse Lucy Knight in ER. But from 2003 through 2007, she made eleven Mystery Woman movies for Hallmark. She played bookstore owner Samantha Kinsey, who constantly found herself involved in murders (that’s going to be a common theme in this post).

HMMC_KEllieMartin

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