As recounted in “Double-Secret Weapon,” the short story originally published in Baen’s Universe, here’s a portrait of the cast of the Digger Family Power Hour (often advertised as the Digger Family Amazing Power Hour even though the word “Amazing” never appeared on the actual show, only the advertising).
Click the pic to embiggen.
I’m hard at work on a new Extra for this week. It’s not turning out as well as I’d hoped, but they can’t all be perfect. This week, I guess you’ll have to settle for quantity rather than quality.
(ETA: and for clarity’s sake, I guess I should mention I mean “quantity of work,” not “quantity of finished product,” because it is still basically just a single graphic. But it took a ton of work to get there, much more than the “Digger blows up” graphic.
“Hello, Clay, I’m standing outside Eurobank in the heart of downtown, where all hell has just broken loose!”
The reporter is pretty and well-kept, a typical TV talking head, but there is nothing typical about the scene behind her. At least twenty police cars surround a building with gaping holes where huge glass windows used to be. Muzzle flashes strobe from the dark depths of the building; machine gun fire chews at the cruisers as cops huddle behind the vehicles for cover. A beam of red coherent light flashes into being, connects one of the cars to the bank for just an instant, and then the car explodes.
The reporter’s face wears a practiced look of Deep Concern, but the white knuckles gripping the microphone betray her true panic. “Twenty minutes ago, police units responded to a silent alarm here, where they found…”
She yelps as the ground belches under her feet, pitching her to the side. Pavement buckles and cracks, forming a raised line that extends toward the bank. Continue reading
I seem to be developing a new method of writing this story (new for me, not new as in nobody’s ever done it before). I have always been one to write drafts more or less straight through, beginning to end.
If I get stuck, I get stuck and try to find a way through. Sometimes it takes a week or even a month before I find an answer to the problem that allows me to start pushing forward again.
And I thought that was how I would approach this book (with all the fear of getting stuck and losing the momentum that killed the webcomic). Imagine my surprise when I found that I was working in a completely different way.
I had started to write a new draft of the story year before last, but stalled out after the first few chapters when I still couldn’t find a good hook to tie the entire story together. The first two drafts had several pieces that I thought worked well, but the story drifted. It was hard to follow and lacked dramatic tension. Still, I figured I would use those first three or four chapters basically verbatim, then write an entirely new story from scratch afterward.
But as I mentioned on fraziersbrain, I started using Freemind and yWriter 5 to work through the plotting. And what I’ve found in the outline process is that I’m actually reusing a lot of what I had before. The story is not going off in radical new directions, though there have been three major changes that I hope will tie everything together.
So I’m working through the old manuscript scene-by-scene, keeping what works and rewriting where necessary to fit the new plot. And where what I’m doing now means changes in planned later scenes, with yWriter I can write up those sections of scenes and have them ready for when I finally reach that part of the book.
On the other hand, the demands of weekly chapter publishing means that I am going back and polishing each scene before it drops onto the blog. So in a typical week, I will be doing the following: pushing forward on the draft manuscript scene-by-scene, updating the outline and notes for later scenes, prepping the draft scene for next week’s blog and doing a final polish pass on this week’s chapter. I’m writing in pieces, jumping backward and forward through the manuscript in a fashion completely unlike anything I’ve ever done before.
Wish me luck.
Chapter Two Coming Friday, August 6!
Click the pic to embiggen.
One thing I want to do here is not just feature my own fiction. If you’re reading Hero Go Home, then I figure you should be interested in other good writing along the same lines. So in that vein, let me suggest Masked, an anthology edited by Lou Anders. I haven’t read it yet, but I have read one of the stories–“Where Their Worm Dieth Not,” by James Maxey–which is one of the best superhero short stories I’ve ever read.
Frankly, you won’t go wrong reading anything Maxey’s done. He’s one of the few writers who blows me away every time. I haven’t read his entire Dragon Age series, but Bitterwood is excellent (now also available for the Kindle for only $2.99), and his short story, “The Final Flight of the Blue Bee,” was the one that convinced me to download the Kindle app for the PC. So if you haven’t read his stuff yet, look him up and see what you’re missing. His blog is also linked on my blogroll at the right.
Zann wasn’t looking forward at the time, so she never saw exactly what caused the accident on the overpass.
She was sitting next to Gary Peet, who was rattling on about the party he would throw after the game with Central Friday night, but out of the corner of her eye, she was watching Charlie Peters pretend not to flirt with Kim Yang in the back of the bus. He was in the aisle next to Kim and her boyfriend Dan, imitating Mr. Lopresti’s slump-shouldered shuffle. He glanced up at Zann for a moment, as if this show was more for her benefit than Kim’s.
And then the bus’s brakes locked up with this godawful loud squeal, and she was thrown sideways into Gary. Continue reading
(This is cross-posting to both They Stole Frazier’s Brain and Hero Go Home):
So just what can you expect now that I’m relaunching Hero Go Home?
Well, as long as I’m unemployed, expect a lot of content. I’m holding back right now, building up a reserve of things (and switching between projects means I’ve got a bunch of unfinished stuff floating around right now). And depending on what kind of job I get, that flow of content might not be greatly reduced (I applied for something very nice today that involves a lot of web work and a lot of content production, though not much creativity–it remains to be seen whether it will leave me too drained of enthusiasm to keep up with my own work, or leave me raring to go on stuff once I get home…assuming I get the job, of course, which is a long shot, but I really want this one).
So a typical week will look like this:
Tuesday: Classic Movie Review on examiner.com and a Hero Go Home Extra!
Wednesday: Big Game Wednesday on They Stole Frazier’s Brain
Thursday: Classic Movie Review on examiner.com
Friday: A new Hero Go Home chapter
Saturday: Out of the Vault on They Stole Frazier’s Brain (yes, it’s coming back)
plus a trickle of smaller posts and links to stuff I like, which will probably appear here. I don’t do a lot of that at Frazier’s Brain, because I’ve had this superstition about posting more than once per day, but I want people to visit Hero Go Home early and often, and one way to do that is to give them a steady flow of new stuff to see.
You may notice that Movie Monday is missing from this list. I actually want to start it up again as well, but I put a hell of a lot of time and work into those, and I don’t know if this new schedule would allow me to do it justice. If I have the time and start gaining traffic, I may take the plunge. I have all the Superman films gathering dust, just waiting for a mega-series.
Order Death Wave for Kindle! Other formats available at Smashwords!
