Short post today, as I’m kicking away on day-job work (for those of you who saw my tweet last night — yes, I’m still working on the same thing). But! We’re closing in on the release of the second 47 Echo book, Supercritical, and of course I will be running contests and giving stuff away!

Stay tuned to the blog — I’ll make the formal announcement of Ye Olde Prize Contests a week from today, but there will be hints scattered in the entries between now and then.

Check the above-mentioned section of your local Craigslist, and I bet you’ll find something like the following (which I made up):

GHOST WRITER WANTED

I have an idea for a book, and I need a writer to write it for me. No credit will be given, but you will be compensated up to $500.

Ads like this make me giggle. First off, no writer who can actually write, regardless of their financial circumstances, would consider writing a whole book for someone else for such a small amount. I’d hope none of them would consider it at all, really, but I know that’s unfortunately not true. What I really find funny, though, is the assumption that all you need is the idea for a book — the whole writing thing is just some drudge work to outsource for a nominal fee.

So you had an idea. Congratulations. That means there’s electricity running to your brain. Ideas are worth exactly fuck all unless you do something to execute them. Having an idea doesn’t mean you have a book — it just means you had a random thought. But don’t expect any writer to come and do all the work while you snatch up all the credit and the profits — we have our own ideas, and the will and the means to execute them. Put together a pitch with the idea, then learn to write. Then you know that the end product is yours.

And writers — please don’t indulge these people. I know financial straits happen, but work for what you’re worth.

So, what’s the most insulting ad you’ve seen on Ye Olde Craigslist? Which ones made you laugh with their misguided ideas?

Hello, friend! Have you heard the Good News?

No, I didn’t just choose him randomly. Matthew wrote and directed a film (according to IMDB, in 2009) called Lunopolis, which has been sitting in my Netflix queue for a while and which I finally decided to put on while I was working last night. To say that it’s a low-budget film would be underexaggeration — but to say that it’s everything good sci-fi should be is, in my opinion, right on the money.

First off, it uses the science-fiction framework to talk about social issues — something sci-fi has been doing pretty much since its inception. It handles this in a unique way, though, tackling Scientology from a completely different standpoint than you might expect. Now, any film can take an issue and harp on it, but that’s not what’s happening here — there is a creative, entertaining story around the little bit (and I do mean little) of social commentary. It’s something I’ve always thought good sci-fi has been able to do — you can find the creator’s opinion on those larger issues if you want, or you can just sit back and be entertained by the story.

This film really hit all of the notes for me, and I was surprised to find out that there isn’t much information about it out there on the Interwebs. Perhaps now that it’s on Netflix Watch Instantly and (I believe) Hulu, more people will get eyes on it, because I truly believe it’s one of the better science-fiction movies I’ve seen in recent years. And it proves that telling a good story is paramount — no matter if your budget is $100 or $100 million.

So, anyone else seen this film? Anyone know anything more about it? Anyone surprised, as I was, that one of the best indie sci-fi movies ever came out of Louisiana?

Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to put in that amount of work if I had to work today. I try to get a bit done every night, but on weekends (especially long weekends), I know I don’t have to be up early the next day, and I can really hit a groove.

These are the kinds of nights where I feel like I could write novels for a living. And that would be great, if someone wanted to pay me for them. But these long-haul nights often turn out to be some of my best work, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I get to focus on nothing else but putting together a good story.

Or, who knows. Might be aliens.

When do you do your best work? What conditions do you consider ideal?

My senior picture from my high school yearbook. Voted "Most Likely To Join a Somali Pirate Crew, 1996."

(Note: No, I’m not going to link the old blogs. Some of them aren’t mine, and some of them are — but the content isn’t pertinent to this story, and it’s fun to keep them, mostly, in my own brain.)

It’s an odd thing about living in the future that you have the opportunity to see so much of your own history. Sure, people kept journals before blogging, but if that one notebook got lost or misplaced in a move… gone. Some of my blogs, though, have managed to stay up, and I get to take a glimpse back at who I used to be. Thankfully, I’m not that guy anymore — he was about 215 pounds, and at 5’6″, that isn’t a good thing. What’s really strange is the times I pop up as a sort of secondary character on my pal Nate’s blog, whether through direct mention or a comment here and there — it’s like being a guest star in a sitcom you don’t remember being in.

Or, perhaps, an extra in an indie film no one saw. Just sayin'.

I kind of wonder what it’s like for people even younger than me, who have had this kind of technology for more of their lives. I was born in 1978, and the first time I saw anything resembling the Internet was probably 1991 or 1992. What about someone born in 1992? They’d be 20 now, and have had the Internet pretty much their entire lives. What must their personal history be like?

I joke about time travel on this blog all the time, but the fact is… well, we already sort of have it. We have a window onto our own past unlike any people in history before us — we can archive our memories out into the cloud, and even make them public if we so choose (and most bloggers do). Is this a good thing? Or is it dangerous to outsource our memories to the Internet? As it’s Friday, why not start a debate in the comments?

(Oh, another note: The first picture is Blackbeard’s Flag at the North Carolina Museum of History. The second was taken by my good pal Christopher Gronlund when I lent him a copy of a film I was in as a younger man. You should definitely be reading Christopher’s blog, if you’re not already.)

Roosevelt is considering forming his own, manlier mountain.

I love the day before a three-day weekend almost more than I end up liking the weekend itself. There’s just so much possibility in a three-day weekend — I start thinking of all of the stuff I can get done, all of the nights I can stay up late and make up stories, put characters of my own making into awful situations and watch as they try to squirm their way back out. And I always end up getting more sleep on days off, which is a good thing.

Still, part of me is very tired lately, and is now currently lobbying the rest of me to actually take the weekend off. The problem is, though — and I realized this last night — I don’t know how to take time off from writing anymore. I didn’t blog yesterday, and I didn’t update the Twitter Novel Project (owing to a massive headache that started around midnight and finally started to disperse around six), but I still got some writing done. On a day that I was planning to just take off.

I suppose that’s a sign that I’m doing the right thing with my life — if even when I’m exhausted and not feeling well, it’s something I still want to do. And I know I’m lucky to have found something that I enjoy doing that much. Still, though… so very tired.

So, do any of you actually have President’s Day traditions? I’ve never actually met anyone who did, so if anyone out there does, feel free to share. Also, any day-off traditions? Anything you just feel the compulsion to do on a day you’re not working?

Now, it wasn’t a Motorola Micro-Tac or anything. It was a smaller phone with a slide-out keyboard, so it couldn’t have been any older than, say, six or seven years. And still, the words that popped into my head were that’s a really old phone. Six years ago, I looked essentially the same as I do now. I haven’t gotten really old in the interim. So why did I find myself wondering how this lady could survive in today’s world with such ancient technology? It wasn’t even a smartphone. It wasn’t even a Blackberry.

I read a theory that the only way most humans can deal with the huge ramp-up in technology over the past decade or so is to treat it as if it was a completely normal development — as if it’s no big deal. And that’s exactly what I think my brain was doing — it treats my iPhone 4 as something akin to the base level of normal technology, not as a fantastic device my puny brain couldn’t have conceived of ten years ago. My Kindle Fire is just a thing I read books on, not something that would have made someone my age in the 1970s shit himself with awe. And that’s our defense mechanism — greeting fantastic advances in technology with a halfhearted “meh.”

Ever catch yourself doing that? If you do, just think for a moment how far we’ve come just since you were a kid.

How many writer blogs have used an image exactly like this before?

When I was 12, the coolest thing in the world to have was a Starter jacket — and of course, my parents didn’t want to buy me one. I thank them for that now, because, seriously, look at these fucking things:

Puff Daddy wouldn't have even worn this crap.

But back in 1991, in Germany, these things were the shit. And like anyone who’s 12 and nerdy, I wanted desperately to fit in, and for that, I needed a Starter jacket. Never mind that I didn’t care about sports and knew nothing about any sports team, ever — I needed one of these things. Any one. So I saved up my allowance for a while (enough to get up to around $40) and made a deal with one of the richer kids in school to buy one he didn’t wear often — a Tennessee Volunteers jacket. Think the Celtics jacket above, but bright fucking orange. It was awful.

And, at the last minute, I backed out — no idea why. When we next went to Patch Barracks (an Army base where my dad was stationed at the time), I killed some time in the Thrift Store and ended up buying an old, old typewriter and about 20 Star Trek novels. I think I made the right choice there.

So what’s the moral? Be yourself? Go to what you know you want to do rather than what society says you should do? Possibly.

I think the moral is “Starter jackets from the early 90s were awful. I hope they never come back.”

We call him January.

How many of us know even a little about the Norse pantheon of gods? Those of us who have read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods are confident that we know at least a bit… but the truth is, everyone knows some of them. Today, for example — Friday, named for the Norse goddess Frigg, wife of Odin (we call him Wednesday), stepmother of Tyr (we call him Tuesday).

Or this month? It’s named for the old Roman purification ritual of Februa, which later became Lupercalia, which later became… Valentine’s Day.

The planets in our solar system? Roman gods. Our nearest neighbor, Mars, is the god of war.

So as I’ve been writing, I’ve had to reference the past without making everyone an expert on history. In the first chapter, Dane arrives at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. He knows the area is historically important for some reason, but he can’t remember why. I caught a little bit of flak for that — the Kennedy assassination is obviously a big thing. For us. Because it only happened about 48 years ago. But what about something that happened 131 years ago? If we traipsed onto a site of historical importance on the way to somewhere else, would we necessarily be aware what happened there in 1881?

Also, Dane’s kind of self-absorbed and a little bit stupid in ways. That doesn’t help.

But it’s something I’ve noticed the more I write — I have to be aware of things my characters are not necessarily aware of, things that might never be mentioned in the course of the story — because they’re important. They matter. Just like most of us might not be aware, really, that several days of the week were named for Norse gods.

Was there a point to all of this? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just Frigg’s Day, and that means I can go all nonlinear in anticipation of the weekend. Have a great weekend, folks!

One of the many replacements for my trusty Babylon 5 mug. It's... it's just not the same.

Still, there’s a process to making a proper cup of coffee. If you make it yourself, it’s easy enough to control, but what about if you’re out and about? What’s the best writer’s coffee you can buy on the open market?

I have my preferences, of course. When I lived in Tampa, FL, I found that the Cubans made a hell of a coffee. Not the cafe con leche, but just the little, nuclear-strength black coffee they made was outstanding. Also, Cafe du Monde in New Orleans makes a hell of a cup. Again, not the cafe au lait — just the black coffee. I’m not one to put much in my coffee, obviously — just a teaspoon or two of sugar, and I’m good to go.

Of course, when working as a writer, you can’t drink nothing but coffee. You need to space it out for maximum efficacy. And don’t do what I do sometimes (space it out with energy drinks), or you’ll end up an insane person who writes 300 or more words about coffee. I find that the good ol’ cheap case of water works well — for every mega-cup of coffee, down one 16.9 ounce bottle of water. Sure, you’re running to the bathroom all the time… but you’re properly caffeinated and hydrated, and ready to go out and create.

So what about you, folks? What’s the best coffee out there to buy by the cup? What about the stuff you make at home? What’s your favorite brand there?