Can you do me a goodreads favor?

With your help my friends, I too can be a Dragon Ball Z character for
an obscure online list of books no one reads! This is your
mission, if you choose to accept it...

So the social networking site for book lovers called Goodreads has these lists for books (you may have seen them if you are on that site), and I'm tired of "Slipstream" being mediocre in all of them. Just in one, I would like to be higher, maybe even number one. So I picked out one that I think isn't going to step on any of my fellow author's toes (at least the ones with whom I regularly network).

HERE'S THE LINK TO THE LIST

It's pretty straight forward. "Best Science Fiction Books with Gay Main Characters." Like...the number one listing HAS ONLY 27 votes. I think I could totally own this list with a little help from my bloggy friends (that being you).

UPDATE: GUYS YOU GOT ME TO NUMBER 10!! Squeee.

Ahem...so here's the favor. And it's really simple. IF you have a goodreads account (just to make it clear, I'm not asking you to go and sign up for another social network)...could you please go to the link and just vote for my book. That's it. One little click. I'm currently ranked number 78 and the list really isn't all that long. I even provided the link and circled the button in blue and included a picture of what it looks like up top so you won't be confused.

And just maybe, by the end of the day, I won't be so mediocre in the listing. I might move up!

What I will do for you in return:
1) If you indicate that you would like me to bump your book up in a list, let me know in a comment and I'd be happy to cast my vote cause chances are, we aren't competing in this one. As far as I know, I follow 600 some odd blogs and no one has a gay main character in a sci-fi book. Only straight people write books and they only have straight protagonists pining for straight white men or a straight woman (here's looking at you, Alex ;)). There's nothing wrong with that. It's just my observation with some hyperbole thrown in for good measure. So Jordan (my protag) is kind of like spotting the Loch Ness monster.

What do I expect to accomplish by asking for this? Nothing. But I'll get to be a big pickle. And I shall be a pickle like no other pickle has ever been before!

But because you know my secret, you can always say...

Have a great Wednesday.

Hansel and Gretel as Witch Hunters sounds brilliant

A reinvention of the well-worn fairy tale has finally crossed the line into the guy territory of pure cheesy awesome-ness. This movie deserves to be in one of those theaters that serve brew along with French fries and hamburgers. Hansel and Gretel as Witch Hunters sounds brilliant. Let's hope that it crushes the awful slew of Snow White movies we've had in the last year. I only wish Hansel could put one in Kristen Stewart so I wouldn't have to see her in another movie.

And honestly, who could go wrong with casting the dude that played Hawkeye, the new Bourne Guy, and raced around with Tom Cruise in the latest Mission: Impossible movie? His career is exploding, and I don't really even know his name. I guess I should learn it.

Have a great Tuesday.

The Pros and Cons of Revolution's Pilot episode

Revolution hits next Monday on NBC, but you can watch the whole Pilot right here, right now (embedded in this post). I'm going to talk about the pilot episode, so here's your spoiler warning. :)

PRO and quite possible CON: I'm divided on how I feel about the "miracle exemption" employed for this series. I know, that sounds bizarre considering that I have no problem with the miracle exemption of Superman (that being that all of his powers emerge from being on a planet with a yellow sun). However, in the end, I think I liked that J.J. Abrams is taking a risk with a "Miracle Exemption" so strong, it can only be described as "physics has gone crazy." Once you swallow the fact that electricity doesn't work (nevermind the fact that electrical impulses fire constantly through the human brain and nervous system) then the world-building can begin.

THIS is the protagonist of the story. Her name is Charlie Matheson played
by Tracy Spiridakos. You don't meet her until 12 minutes into the pilot.

CON: It takes us a while to figure out who to root for. This pilot doesn't start out with a dream sequence per se, but it does introduce us to a scientifically-minded man named Matheson who has some inkling of what's about to happen in the world short of the blackout. Then the pilot advances 15 years to a post-apocalyptic world and this guy is still around, still healthy, and well respected. Okay...he must be the one I root for. Nope, they shoot him dead shortly after that. This smacks a little of a dream sequence in the "I just wasted 15 minutes of your life and now I'm introducing you to the real protagonist."

PRO: Bows. Taking a page from the Hunger Games, there are lots of fit young people shooting bows with deadly accuracy. It looks cool, and adds an athleticism that you just don't get with a pistol. However, in a country like the United States so overloaded with guns that you could probably stack them from the ground to the moon, you kind of have to wonder where all the guns went.

CON: Rape is how you find out who the bad men are. They wake up the girls in the middle of the night, try to rape them, and then get killed in a gruesome manner. I think "rape" is an overused theme in fiction and writers could stretch themselves a bit to find other more creative ways to show "I am an evil person."

Giancarlo Esposito, definitely one of my favorite actors today.

PRO: Giancarlo Esposito. This actor played "Gus" in "Breaking Bad" and boy did he ever do a great job. He's also the genie of the lamp in the show "Once Upon A Time" and I think the "Magic Mirror" as well. So aside from his career just exploding with fantastic jobs (as it should because the guy is one of the best actors around), he gives a chilling performance as the leader of the militia. Very non-stereotypical but definitely evil. And it doesn't involve even the hint of "rape". Rather, his most telling moment is when he admits to being a former insurance salesman. I always knew those guys were the devil.

PRO: The post-apocalyptic scenery. The ruins of Chicago are magnificent. The countryside is outstanding and completely overgrown. And the planes falling out of the sky and exploding before the title sequence will send shivers down your spine.

These guys think they have what it takes to bring in one guy who tends
bar. Think again, you guys are all toast.

PRO: Miles Matheson, the dead Matheson's brother, is a frickin' ninja. When you meet him, he's just some forty year-old dude tending bar. But the militia comes for him with guns, bows and arrows, knives, and about twenty incredibly fit men. This forty year old former marine KILLS THEM ALL. I'm not kidding. It's a blood bath. He leaves bodies strewn about like a Tony Jaa film. I was like...holy crap, this guy is a complete BADASS.

Miles Matheson killing everyone that came to "take him in." The
choreography in this fight was pretty incredible for a t.v. show.

So with more pros and cons, I think that J.J. Abrams may have a winner to replace "Fringe" which is signing off the air in the spring of 2013. If you've watched the pilot, what do you think? And do you intend to watch Revolution?

My thumb blotted out the planet Earth

Have a great weekend :)

Recognizing the signs of a brain aneurysm

I have a friend named Joe that I haven't seen in years. We don't keep in touch anymore. He moved on, and so did I. But I remember the day Joe's dad died of a brain aneurysm. He had been working and reported that he suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of his head. As if someone had struck him with a hammer. He made a phone call, got progressively worse within minutes of the event, and went unconscious soon after. He was dead in something like 25 minutes. It's that deadly, and that serious. Doctors reported that the vessel that burst near the back of his head caused blood to pool in the brain with such tremendous pressure, there was something like 400-pounds crushing his spinal column.

Well yesterday, I saw this happen to a woman with whom I work. It was morning, we were starting our meeting (it happens once a year and we had it at a local park), and this woman got up from her chair, staggered, and fell down next to a tree. I asked, "What's going on there?" And I was told she had a bad headache. Someone was looking in their purse for some Advil. I said, "headaches don't make people stagger like that. Where is it?" They said, "the back of her head." I said, "I think this is very serious." When I said that, the Manager in charge, dropped everything and acted upon it.

Someone went over, helped the lady to the car, and started driving her to the hospital. It got worse and worse and they called an ambulance. I found out later that day that she indeed had suffered a brain aneurysm. But because of swift thinking on everyone's part, and being in the heart of Salt Lake City where there are excellent medical facilities and some of the best neurosurgeons in the country, she has (I think) a good chance of beating this thing. At least I hope so.

My point in telling you this is not to scare you. But it is to tell you first-hand from someone that has now been around this thing twice, if you or someone you are watching complains of a sudden, severe headache that starts at the back of the head (like someone hit them with a hammer), and it's staggering, you need to drop everything RIGHT NOW. This is a life and death situation. Don't dismiss it. Don't go and grab some Advil or some Excedrin. And don't say, "this person must be faking this as a joke." You call 911 without hesitation.

Just as a disclaimer, I'm not a medical professional. I don't have medical training. But I know what I've seen, and I'm passing it on to you.

IWSG September edition

Today I wanted to talk about unwelcome comparisons that reduce your work and originality to a pile of crap.

Yesterday, I put up a picture of my character, Jordan, that I drew myself (completely from my imagination) and posted it online. I went for a walk with a lady that I know, and she asked to see it. When I showed her using my cell phone, the first words out of her mouth was, "I didn't think you could draw something like that." Followed quickly by, "It looks EXACTLY LIKE so-and-so."  Now "so-and-so" is a 35-year-old man that she works with that she thinks is hot. And although she may think he looks young, to me he looks 40.  Sorry Mr. so-and-so, you look forty. Things are a saggin'. Gravity (as we say in the physics world) is a relentless bitch. My character is 18-years-old. Ahem *hand on hip (yes I had attitude at that point.)

I was like, "What the f*ck? They don't look anything alike." At which point she was mortified that she'd insulted my picture because I wasn't on the same page as her, and I WAS PISSED OFF because she took something that I'd created and said it looked like something or someone it clearly wasn't.

Ladies, imagine making a dress and taking the time to make it look the best you could possibly do with your talent and then have someone come in and say, "OMG, I saw this same pattern in Doris' house down the street so you must have copied that. It looked great over there, and it looks great here." But you know that your friend is "mistaken" because it isn't the same pattern. They're totally different. The only thing that's the same is the fact that both are "dresses." And then an argument ensues because you are insulted.

For the nerdy guys...here's an example for you to help better explain. You spend all this time making a Magic: The Gathering Deck to play in a tournament, and then someone says, "Oh you copied that from some online forum. Tell me where it is so I can get the breakdown and copy it too. It plays great." And then you KINDLY explain to them that you stayed up all night play testing cards and these were the best combos that you could come up with.

It's insulting.

I had one book blogger say, "Michael Offutt's Slipstream is a knockoff of Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' and King did it better." I've read "The Dark Tower" and my book is NOTHING LIKE IT other than the fact that both have "towers" in them. If that's the case then how is "The Dark Tower" not a knock off of Tolkien? Tolkien had towers before King did. No one in my story is the man in black. No one is the Gunslinger. No one is Jake, the kid from earth.

My point is that there are clear knockoffs (and plenty of them out there), but it IS possible to have an original idea that hasn't been done yet (contrary to popular belief). I think it's bullshit that people say that. They say "There are no original ideas." Whatever. Just none you've ever heard, so you dismiss them as unoriginal. True, there will always be elements to a story that need to be borrowed from pop culture and lexicon. There's no getting away from language and images that all humans share. But I hate it when some person (and probably not all that well read) skims something probably not devoting too much time to it, doesn't wait for the climax for all things to be explained, and then dismisses it as a hackneyed copycat of something else.

My book has been called "weird" and "strange" and "bizarre" by reviewers. I take those as compliments, because it means that people who have absorbed what's going on in the story, and haven't been derailed by the occasional typo or misplaced/missing comma, will see that it's something they've never seen before. And I take pride in that, and yeah...it was really f*cking hard to sell. Publishers don't want weird. They don't want strange. They don't want different. That's because they don't know if it will sell and if people will even like it. People tend not to like "weird". They tend to not like stories that clash genres. Because "genres" are sacred to them. It's how you've been taught.

But I seriously have contempt for genres. And it shows in my writing.  I take young adults and make them have graphic sex, throw them into hard sci-fi with no promise of a romance, and do it all in third person omniscient. I'm okay with people staring at my baby and whispering words like "What the hell is that exactly? I've never seen anything like it. I don't know if it's beautiful or ugly or WTF is it? Is the author insane?" Yeah, I'm okay with that.

What I'm not okay with is comparing it to something that is out there as if I couldn't come up with an idea of my own and needed to rewrite someone else's plot. My co-workers say (as if they are thinking that this is a shoe-in) "Mike, rewrite Twilight." As if I'd even want to do that or even could. I can't write like that. And it's insulting for people to suggest that I should try. But I guess it's all about getting the snicker in on my behalf, or rather, snickering at me behind my back.

The few friends that I've had in my life said that I was born with an incredible imagination that blew their minds wide open whenever they sat down and talked to me about stories. My parents said I had an overactive imagination. Maybe that does NOTHING for stories in today's world where the demand is for two hot guys and a girl in a love triangle. But IT IS THE ONLY THING that I have that I truly call my own. And I will never ever rewrite someone else's story. That's just not how I roll.

So yeah, if you were to ask me, "Mike do you think you write original stories?" I would say, "Yes. I think my stories are fairly original. Maybe not 100%. But I think they're in the 80% range of things you've never seen before." Is that arrogant? No. It's just what I think. I may not be the greatest word smith, but I have a lot of ideas and always have had them even when I was little.

And here's where I say, you do too. Stop listening to the lies. Yes, there is such a thing as genius. It's rare, but some people have it. Some people can be brilliant. Some people can think of things no one else has thought of before. But there's some bizarre thing about our culture that almost shames smart people. Like, it's not okay to be smart (think of Rick Santorum calling Barack Obama a snob--a thing brought about because Obama is SMART). It's not okay to be brilliant. When you pop off with an idea that no one is heard of, there are all kinds of people just waiting to tear it down. I wish America would stop attacking smart people and start listening to them. Maybe we wouldn't be in such a mess.

There are lots of ideas in the independent presses that I've been reading that don't match up with anything I have read before or seen before from both men and women. Some are really brilliant.  Maybe these authors' babies got called ugly and weird too and agents didn't know what to do with them, so they got rejected. Yes, you CAN have an original idea and get absolutely no reward and no money for it. Just because someone has money does not make them smart. But don't allow people to belittle your project by saying that it's a knockoff of someone that made it big. That's just adding insult to injury. Stand up for yourself and tell those people to F*CK OFF.

You have my permission to be smart. And I'm not going to call you arrogant for doing that. I like smart people, especially if they are smarter than myself. Stop being ashamed of your intelligence.

*end rant

A little scene from Oculus

So, this Labor Day weekend, I sent off my completely finished sequel to Deron at Double Dragon, and he says he'll probably publish it about the same time my book was done last year (so spring of 2013). That's really cool. I have to say, this book took A LOT out of me. I've been fighting with it for over two years, had two extremely talented beta-readers go over it, had two editors go over it (and no Andrew, I'm sure there's a comma somewhere that's out of place, but I just don't care), and I went over it myself about a DOZEN times. You know, birthing a sequel is hard as sh*t. I don't know how some people seem to do it so easily.

Oculus is also bigger than Slipstream. It has more meat to it, and I introduce a wide variety of characters so that when I sink into the lowest levels of depravity (as I am prone to do), then I have lots of fictional people I can torture and make do deplorable things.

So for some reason, my "artistic" bug hit me this weekend. See, I used to fancy myself an artist, but I realized that I suck so I gave up on my dreams of doing it professionally years ago. But that doesn't stop me from dabbling with coloring pencil every now and then.

So I drew a scene from Oculus that stars Brianna (a mysterious Watcher character--yes that's a religious reference) and a more mature Jordan. The scene is provided for you as a reference to the picture that I drew:

They both picked up a radiation badge from the control room operator. Jordan knew him only as Harvey. Then she followed him into the room where she took a seat next to him in front of a bank of computer screens. Jordan waited for the go ahead and fired the synchrotron at a previously prepared ice sample and awaited the data.

“How do you prepare the samples?” she asked him.

“Dr. Wolfson had a bunch already completed,” he said. “But she did walk me through how to do it on my own. Basically, ice samples are decontaminated by three repeated washings in ultrapure water. The first step involves taking a sample from an ice core in cold storage and melting it at room temperature. Once that’s done, you gently agitate it for homogenization and then partition it into individual vials of polystyrene Coulter accuvettes, which have all been pre-cleaned using the ultrapure water I mentioned. Dr. Wolfson told me repeated checks showed the dust concentration difference between the first and the last aliquots is typically around the level of measurement-reproducibility. That is, the aliquots provided for the different analyses should be comparable.”

He paused, watching the screen, gaze flicking from one monitor to the next. “All right, there’s the fluoroscopic data we’ve been waiting for.” He gestured with his hand. “We are looking at the insoluble elemental composition of Antarctic dust, which appears to be composed of more aluminum, less silicon, and less potassium than the previous sample that I took from a different depth. The result suggests that either the characteristics of the dust source changed at some point in history, which could mean factors as simple as soil development, or that there was a change in the relative contributions of the overall varying sources.”

“Meaning that there was an environmental change.”

He nodded in agreement. “Exactly—it’s like a portrait of earth’s history captured in time—in a single drop of water.”

“How do you know all of this without looking it up or cross-referencing the fluoroscopic data with a chart?” Brianna asked.

He glanced at her. “Well, I memorized it before I met with Dr. Wolfson so that I’d have a better chance at getting the job. The data on known fluoroscopic rates is on the university website.”

“You memorized all of the numbers?”

He nodded. “I’m not lying. Honest.”

“All right, what’s this?” She pointed at a number on the screen.

“That,” Jordan said, looking at it, “is the numerical figure associated with the element neodymium. How did I miss that?” He scribbled down the details of the water sample on a notebook.

“Why is that significant?”

He swallowed, looking up at her. “I-It’s not! I-I mean it is, but it isn’t.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re lying to me.” “Honest, I’m not. I-I mean the finding is significant because none of the previous samples that I’ve examined showed even the slightest traces of Nd in them, but it’s in such microscopic amounts that it’s difficult to say how it got in the ice.”

I did the picture using coloring pencil and finished it in Adobe Photoshop. Basically, imagine yourself looking out at them through a computer screen (the words are printed on in front of Jordan). I aged him some from my other pic I did of him because he's now a college student. Brianna is a junior so I wanted her to look a little older. They say: "Neodymium Detected, Ice Core Sample 111, Origin Dome A: Antarctica.

Features I put in the picture:
1) Antarctica, because that's becoming increasingly important to the story.
2) The name of the particle collider, "C.H.E.S.S." is on the wall.
3) Jordan's red "Cornell Hockey" hat is a powerful symbol in the book, and he wears it everywhere. He plays hockey on the University team. Plus, I thought Jordan looks good in red so I put him in a red checkerboard shirt. Also red (blood) is another powerful symbol. Green was more important in the first book.

Anyway, sorry for the long post. If you like my drawing, you can Pin it or whatever. There's no fear of copyright since I own it, and I say you can use it. Have a great Tuesday.