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Woot!

My friend Terri Garey has just been immortalized on local TV. If you like spooky mysteries with some romance for spice, check out Terri’s book Dead Girls Are Easy.

Read the news story or launch video.

I saw a few movies on my plane trips back and forth to Europe, most of them not that great, but better than staring at the back of the seat in front of me for 7-8 hours. There was one standout in the mix though, but it’s a character and not the movie as a whole that rises above the rest.

Julianne Moore’s character of FBI Agent Callie Ferris in the movie Next also starring Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel is this week’s Danger Gal Friday. The premise of the movie is interesting: Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage) can see two minutes into his own future. The FBI want his help any way they can get it to stop a nuclear bomb. Johnson is also after finding his dream woman Liz Cooper, the only events for which he’s ever seen more than two minutes into the future concern her.

The story is based on Philip K. Dick’s The Golden Man, probably the reason I enjoyed the premise. Like many of Dick’s stories though, the Hollywood version doesn’t resemble the original in much more than premise. This is also true of Next. While Cage stood out in his nifty quirkiness as usual, I was interested to know more backstory about Agent Ferris, Moore’s character, and less about Liz, Biel’s character. While Biel brought down the hysteria quotient familiar in many damsel characters, I just can’t see Biel in a role as someone needing to be rescued. She’s much more compelling as the rescuer.

So Moore’s character was the big standout for me in this movie. Ferris is the agent in charge of the operation to track down the bomb, she’s abrasive and speaks her mind yet no one denigrates her with feminine slurs so often used when a woman behaves that way. Instead, she says “Jump!” and all the other FBI agents (all male if I remember correctly) ask “How high?”

Moreover, Ferris is comfortable being in charge. I have to wonder if this character was originally written as male because refreshingly absent is all the cliched interpersonal conflicts used in movies when a woman is in charge. She’s also an expert shot and saves Cris Johnson’s life.

The Movie Critic Next Door sums up Moore’s character nicely:

Julianne Moore, though, is capable of being a very scary lady. She was certainly an excellent fanatic in Children of Men, and here she actually steps it up a notch. I don’t know her exact title, but she’s important. A few words into her cell, and teams are shutting down all communications within a two mile radius. A wave of her hand, and suddenly every lounger in sight is an agent hurrying over to her for instructions. It makes me wonder how many of those road workers that you see standing around are actually waiting for a signal from Julianne.

Though no one else really seems to belive her when she says what Cris can do, apparently even her boss is too afraid to say no to her, because she gets her way. With his (reluctant) help, she knows she can find that bomb before it goes off.

I hope Moore gets to show off her scary side more often.

If you’re going to practice your Jedi Mind Tricks, then you better have the appropriate attire.

You’ll be the best dressed at the next fandom gathering if you make your own Jedi robe.

A congrats shout-out to my friend and writing buddy Beth Andrews for getting a contract from Harlequin Superromance for her manuscript All or Nothing.

Way to go Beth!

The Sunday Book Review of the New York Times has an essay titled “Get With The Program” on software tools that novelists use when creating an opus. Many of them award winners, the authors interviewed use all sorts of software from Excel spreadsheets to Microsoft Project to a complex outlining program like Mindjet MindManager.

Obviously these authors are doing something right, but I know myself and understand that I often use technology and research to procrastinate writing. Not too long ago my friend Tawny Weber was lamenting at how writing is difficult like exercise is:

Both are hard to get started, but tend to feel pretty good once I’m in “the zone”

Both net killer results… if I just don’t give up

I have been known to use PowerPoint as a substitute for physical index cards, but I think I’ve narrowed my toolbox down to the following items:

• GMC charts: This chart is based on Debra Dixon’s Goal, Motivation and Conflict book.Take a look at the worksheet I created to outline my characters’ GMCs (Word, 60KB). I post them near my monitor so I can refer to them when needed. The worksheet is meant to be read both left-to-right and top-to-bottom and is grouped into an external and internal GMC. For example, External Primary Goal A relates directly to External Primary Motivation A and Primary Obstacle A. In other words, Fido wants the bone (primary goal A); he wants the bone because it’s yummy (primary motivation A); Sparky is his primary obstacle since he wants the bone too (primary obstacle A). I try to have multiple means, reasons and details to each section to layer the story.
• Scene Outline: This is a bulleted list of scenes loosely grouped into chapters. This linear map enables me to get an idea of the pacing of a story. I can see where my chapters might be short and can quickly ascertain whether that was intentional or if a particular area needs further work.
• Photos: See my Celebrities as Character Templates post for an explanation of how I envision my characters.
• General World-building Document: Because I write Science Fiction, I usually write up a 5-10 page overview document that outlines various important scientific details about the world I’ve created. If a particular topic requires more detail, then I write up a fact sheet that I can easily refer to later.
• Story Framework: This is a visual story model I cooked up as a combination of my favorite how-to-write books. Check it out here.

This week’s Danger Gal Friday post is dedicated to Parrish Plessis, the main character in Marianne de Pierres’ Nylon Angel series of books.

Reviewers have tagged Nylon Angel as a “fevered romp” and Parrish as a “kick-ass cyberpunk heroine” who is “a compelling blend of Mad Max and Dark Angel.” All of these aptly describe de Pierres’ Parrishverse, but what’s really exciting about this story for me is the mix of classic pulp fiction sensibilities with a character who is connected to the people around her. After all, who your friends are keep you alive in the Tert. Despite abuse in her childhood and more recently at the hands of Jamon Mondo, Parrish is an upbeat character always reaching for a utopian goal of freedom. So while the story itself is set in a dystopian future, Parrish remains a hopeful pragmatist.

Aside from this sunny disposition, Parrish is not a woman to be tangled with lightly. She’s a kick-ass heroine in that she subverts female stereotypes by (1) wanting to be in charge of her life and (2) getting the deadly skills necessary to make that happen in a dangerous place like the Tert. In fact, Parrish leaves the much safer world of her childhood for the Tert — she’d rather be in danger but be in charge of her own destiny, than safe and a sheep.

Back to those deadly skills of hers though. Parrish carries a reproduction Glock and like any girl she dresses fashionably, an ensemble even Molly Razorshades would be into:

The tank had specially worked compartments into which I slipped evil-long poison pins. Handy in a fight! Underneath the pants I wore a string that stretched like a cobweb, front and back. Garrotting wires wound into the web.

Like any proper cyberpunk heroine, Parrish has some factory upgrades with a compass implant and olfactory augmentations, but she relies mostly on her own physical abilities:

“Nearly two meters of well-honed skin. In hand-to-hand combat I can match anyone.”

I also like it when authors mix some Romance into their Science Fiction, and de Pierres does this with the relationship between Parrish and the enigmatic Loyl “Dark” Daac, supposed heir to a powerful old Tert family. In every Romance sparks fly in some way or another when the hero and heroine first meet, and Nylon Angel follows this convention in its own way:

For a few seconds the docile look dropped away. He eyed the pistol and my web and my flares. Then he stared intently into my face, like a psy-spook.

As he held out the back of his hand to return my greeting a strange heat burned through me, like swallowing a bucket of caffeine caps on a stinking hot day. Sweat broke over my skin in its wake. The pointy knives of adrenaline running down my backbone switch to hacking great axes.

The pacing in this novel is riotous and de Pierres’ Aussie voice stands out from the other novels I’ve read recently. I can’t wait to read the two follow-ups, Crash Deluxe and Code Noir. Parrish is the kind of character who stays with you, long after you’ve finished reading the story.

Awww, isn’t he cute?

It never ceases to amaze me how toy manufacturers can take a 33-foot long dinosaur seem cuddly-cute just by making it look more neotenous. Of course, Parasaurolophus was a plant eater:

Parasaurolophus is a hadrosaur (duckbilled dinosaur), part of a diverse family of Cretaceous dinosaurs known for their range of bizarre head adornments. This genus is known for its large, elaborate cranial crest, which at its largest forms a long curved tube projecting upwards and back from the skull. A similar crest is found on Charonosaurus from China, which may have been its closest relative. The crest has been much discussed by scientists; the consensus is that major functions included visual recognition of both species and gender, acoustic resonance, and thermoregulation. It is one of the rarer duckbills, known from only a handful of good specimens.

That doesn’t seem to matter on the cuteness scale.

I’ve been so remiss in posting lately, I figured I owed my readers and extra Danger Gal post. Or two.

Yeah, I know from that cover you’d never guess that Lady Jessica Trent is a bad-ass, but she is. I recently re-read Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels after seeing it mentioned time and again on the SBTB blog. I remembered liking this book, and upon re-reading it, I discovered that I didn’t just like it, I loved it. (Be warned that I give away a few of the best parts of the novel in this post, so if you haven’t read it there are spoilers ahead.)

You might not expect an early 19th Century Romance novel heroine to be a gun-toting Danger Gal, but as her brother’s manservant observes upon her arrival, Lady Jessica Trent most certainly is not a woman to be trifled with:

More important, in the practical Withers’ view, Miss Jessica had inherited her late father’s brains, physical agility, and courage. She could ride, fence, and shoot with the best of them. Actually, when it came to pistols, she was the best of the whole family, and that was saying something. . . Yet not a one of those fine fellows could outshoot Miss Jessica. She could pop the cork off a wine bottle at twenty paces—and Withers himself had seen her do it.

And later, when the novel’s hero-protagonist Dain ruins her reputation in society, she doesn’t sit around and nobly simper over her lost opportunities. Nope. Lady Jessica Trent shoots Dain and then sues him to within an inch of his life:

Then Dain saw her. She wore a dark red gown, buttoned up to the throat, and a black shawl draped like a mantilla over her head and shoulders. Her face was white and hard. She strode toward the large table, chin high, silver eyes flashing, and paused a few feet away. His heart crashed and thundered into a hectic gallop that made it impossible to breathe, let alone speak. Her glance flicked over his companions. “Go away,” she said in a low, hard voice.

The whores leapt from his lap, knocking over glasses in their haste. His friends bolted up from their places and backed away. A chair toppled and crashed to the floor unheeded.

Only Esmond kept his head. “Mademoiselle,” he began, his tones gentle, mollifying. She flung back the shawl and lifted her right hand. There was a pistol in it, the barrel aimed straight at Dain’s heart. “Go away,” she told Esmond.

Dain heard the click as she cocked the weapon and the scrape of a chair as Esmond rose. “Mademoiselle,” he tried again.

“Say your prayers, Dain,” she said.

His gaze lifted from the pistol to her glittering, furious eyes. “Jess,” he whispered. She pulled the trigger.

(more…)

“Look kids it’s Big Ben! Parliament!”

Above, Schloss Hohenschwangau, the original seat of King Ludwig II of Bavaria until he went off his rocker (”Crazy Ludwig”) and built Neuschwanstein.

Where have I been? Well, let’s see, I started out in Budapest and made my way east through Vienna, then to Salzburg and finally into Germany. I had a great time, got to tour the Hungarian Parliament, ate lots of wiener schnitzel and took in a Strauss orchestral concert, toured the salt mines just out side of Salzburg, and on my way to Germany stopped at Neuschwanstein Castle, the castle which Cinderella’s Castle is based on. That last stop is evidently a haven for American tourists, and sure enough we ran into someone from Philadelphia who was making the same trip in the opposite direction.

And did I mention that I came back with a whole lot of very dark European chocolate? YUM!