February 22, 2012
Mother, Crone, Maiden
Knowing the future is not about knowing the future.
February 15, 2012
Among the Silvering Herd
Protect what is yours or yield to loyalty and expectation.
February 1, 2012
Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz
In the war that never ends, dreaming the future is a mixed blessing.
January 25, 2012
The Situation
There was nothing as strange as what we endure now.
Now that you’ve had a chance to read the review, enjoy this excerpt from Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole, out now from Ace Books!:
Lieutenant Oscar Britton of the Supernatural Operations Corps has been trained to hunt down and take out people possessing magical powers. But when he starts manifesting powers of his own, the SOC revokes Oscar’s government agent status to declare him public enemy number one.
War is a tough thing to tell a story about. Like all extreme scenarios, it tends towards polarization. It’s either a glorious affair of flashing sabers and burnished medals a la Alexander Nevsky or it’s a meat grinder that chews up promising young men and turns them into shrieking red mist long before they can realize their potential (Platoon, All’s Quiet on the Western Front). Warfighters are either steel-eyed heroes (The Illiad) or adolescent killers (Generation Kill).
The tough truth? Wars are both glorious and horrible. The men and women who fight them are both heroes and villains, frequently at the same time. Military science fiction struggles just as mightily as literary fiction to wrap its arms around the complexity of what motivates people to step into what is arguably the most harrowing crucible a human can experience.
(Read Part I here.)
Do or Do Not. There is no Try.
One of my assignments when I was activated to respond to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster was to put worthy sailors in for awards. I had to write the citations for dozens of men and women of assorted ranks, all of whom had been pulled away from their civilian lives and cast into an uncertain and tough situation, and worked tirelessly in spite of it.
I wanted to do right by them (and I was the writer in the unit), so I labored long and hard, banging out a score of citations, eloquently (or so I thought) extolling their outstanding command presence, their devotion to duty, their tireless and herculean efforts.
A few months ago, I turned pro.
By “turned pro,” I mean that I got my novel picked up by one of the major publishing houses in a three-book deal.
I don’t want to overstate what that means. It’s the first step on a long road, and future sales and the conditions of the marketplace may consign me to the remainder rack quicker than you can say “Myke who?”
But it is, for me (and I suspect for most aspiring writers) the main line I sought to cross – making the majors, getting picked for the starting lineup.
Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.
There’s a lot of buzz lately about the phenomenon of “Young Adult” and “Middle Grade” audiences and their purchasing power. Fans of genre writing have watched writers like J.K. Rowling be propelled to superstardom supposedly via legions of adoring teen and pre-teen fans. Some of our dearest genre favorites, envelope-pushers like Paolo Bacigalupi and China Mieville have gotten in on the act to great acclaim.
Some hard core speculative fiction mavens turn their noses up at “kids stuff,” only to quietly insist on taking their own kids to the latest Pixar flick “you know, because they need adult supervision.”
What’s at the bottom of it? No one can deny that the so-called YA and MG audiences do demand special kinds of writing and are large enough of an audience to command serious attention from publishing houses. We asked two up and coming YA/MG genre writers, Greg Van Eekhout and Carrie Vaughn to discuss how they approach their audience.
