Last night I was eating dessert in a crowded hotel bar, and said something loud and angry about Jedi powers or some other weird thing. The guy I was with laughed and said, “in any other crowd, all the other tables would be giving you weird looks right now.” But this was the DragonCon crowd, and loud conversations about Jedi are the norm. That is why I’m so sad that DragonCon is ending for another year.

DragonCon has given me everything I’ve always wanted in a convention: awesome guests, big name stars, and enormous crowds of like-minded geeks. I’ve been able to meet other writers and editors, keep up important contacts, and make new ones. I’ve been able to meet tons of readers, both here and at the Decatur Book Festival, and give aspiring writers the kind of advice and encouragement I always loved getting when I was still struggling to get published. I’ve also been able to gawk at Jewel Staite, join the official Battlestar Galactica fan club, and admire the construction of more steampunk weaponry than I ever knew existed. DragonCon literally has it all.

My favorite costume of the con is a good representation of this: a fairy in a black vinyl body suit with bright blue wings, two steampunk pistols, and a pair of Baroness glasses. Rawr. It’s not based on anything, at least not as far as I can tell, it’s just an excited geek who loves fantasy and threw all her favorite things into one costume—they are fans of creators, but they are creators in their own right, doing what they love without any hesitation or embarrassment. Like my conversation about Jedi, they are normal here—not just normal, but amazing. For five days in Atlanta, DragonCon is the world as they, and I, wish it could be.

I am absolutely coming back next year. So say we all.

I need to tell you about the parade. When I heard there was a DragonCon costume parade I instantly thought of the old parades we used to do in elementary school on Halloween—a bunch of people in costumes shuffling through the school. Those parades were boring, and kind of weird and sad, and I figured this would be the same. I was incredibly wrong.

The DragonCon parade is a real parade. They shut down several city blocks, people line the streets long in advance just to get a good view, and there are literally hundreds of participants in costume. And these costumes are good—the costumes in the con itself range from embarrassing to awesome, but the parade is the pure cream of the crop, and anything they can do to make it even more awesome they will do. Dressing up as Aang is pretty cool, but dressing your van up in a giant fur Appa costume and sitting on top of it with a surfed Momo is way beyond cool and into amazing. This parade contained:

A giant Appa with Aang on top, led by a full water tribe of 30-something people and flanked by a squadron of fire nation warriors (some with real fire effects)

Virtually every superhero you can think of

Military personnel from BSG, Stargate, Aliens, and several more

More Halo warriors than appeared in the actual games

Even more Boba Fetts than that

Twenty or thirty ghostbusters, complete with not one, not two, but seven ghostbuster cars.

The full crews of every Star Trek show

More steampunk people, in wider variety, than almost any other show.

My personal favorite, the Lord Humongous with a fully re-created car (complete with prisoners tied to the front), an army of 30+ apocalyptic warriors, and Mad Max following behind in his souped up super-car.

A two-story, animatronic monster belching smoke while various witches and warlocks cast spells around it.

Two (I swear I’m not making this up) marching bands.

Notable dignitaries waving from the back of convertibles, including both Kevin Sorbo and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Dozens upon dozens of princesses and fairies and knights and Jedi and monsters and a zillion other things I forgot.

The thing that made this all work, that really changed it from something neat to something inspiring, was how grassroots it was. There was no corporate involvement here—no companies decided to throw a bunch of money at the con and put together a big showpiece for the parade, these were all just big fans who love what they do and do it for fun. A studio-produced ghostbuster car might have been more accurst, but it would never have been as cool, or as fun, as the things people made for themselves. DragonCon is the convention by and for the fans, and that is never more apparent than in the parade.

My son would love this so much.

Yesterday I waited in a 90-minute line to see Admiral Adama talk about when he thought he first got intimate with President Roslin. Then I walked through three hotel lobbies packed with more naked flesh than a beach in LA, and finished the day with a Magic tournament where everyone was drinking buckets—literal buckets—of rum.

I am at DragonCon.

DragonCon, for those who don’t know, is the party con of the geek calendar. You go to Worldcon to meet editors and agents and talk about writing; you go to ComicCon to see movie stars and exclusive previews of upcoming movies. You go to DragonCon to dress like Prostitute Batgirl and get drunk with a guy in a Predator costume. Needless to say, it’s the biggest con in the country.

I don’t want to undersell this thing—it’s a legitimate con for reasons other than partying, with the most impressive guest list I’ve ever seen, and an unprecedented access to those guests. I got to listen to Mike Mignola and his editor talk about horror comics, and then talk to them both afterward; the editor, Scott Allie, was gracious enough to sit down and talk to me for 10 or 15 minutes about the pros and cons of adapting books into graphic novels. There’s a giant autograph room featuring many of the BSG actors, most of the Star Trek actors (TNG and DS9), and half the Firefly actors, plus everyone from Lou Ferrigno to Barbara Eden, and most of them don’t have a line and you can walk right up and say hi to Data, for crying out loud. Data!

Whatever else it is, DragonCon is one very important, very amazing thing: it is the time when nerds rule the Earth. It’s the place where that weird guy from Accounting and that hot receptionist you’d never have guessed was a nerd can both dress up as Riku from Final Fantasy X. It’s five days when the middle of Atlanta is not just filled but literally taken over by people who love SF, fantasy, horror, anime, comics, movies, old TV shows, and everything else it isn’t “cool” to love at any other time of the year. Geeks are the people who keep the world running, and at DragonCon the world, for once, returns the favor.

It is, in short, the future.

One of the writing conventions I did this summer was just for teens, and one of the girls just stood in the lobby, staring around at all the other teen writers with a look of such transcendence on her face I thought she was going to float away. She turned to me and said, “This might be my favorite place in the world. I’m not the only weirdo one in the room.” As one who spent much of his youth being the weirdest one in the room, I knew exactly what she meant. We have chosen a subculture that is so easy to mock people do it accidentally even when they’re trying to be nice to us. DragonCon is proof that the stereotypes are wrong, that the world is even cooler than we think it is, and that our subculture won’t be sub for very much longer.

Tomorrow I leave for DragonCon, around 9:30 in the morning on Thursday. I’m driving to the airport with Peter, Brandon Sanderson’s assistant, and there we will meet Isaac, who did a lot of the art in Brandon’s new The Way of Kings. Isaac and I will be sharing a hotel room, by which I mean that he will spend the week decomposing in my hotel bathtub. It should be lots of fun for everyone who isn’t related to Isaac.

I don’t have a lot of specifics planned; this will be a “wander around and network” kind of event for me. One of my specific events, however, will be a panel at the Decatur Book Festival at 3:00 pm on Saturday.

One of my other main goals, as it always is when I travel, is to eat awesome food. Atlanta being home to some of the best southern food around, I’m going to be spoiled for choice. My only confirmed plan at this point is Gladys Knight’s fried chicken and waffles, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am. If you have any other awesome Atlanta food recommendations, let me know.

I read a lot of stuff, in a lot of different genres. The last three books I finished were Patient Zero (a hyper-violent paramilitary zombie novel), The Graveyard Book (a sweet and wacky urban fantasy middle grade novel) and Kitchen Confidential (a ribald behind-the-scenes restaurant memoir). When people ask what I read I usually say “books,” and leave it at that, because I honestly don’t know from one day to the next what kind of book is going to interest me, and I’ll pick something up and think it’s awesome and then something else will jump out and blindside me and I’ll to read that first. This is why I usually read four books at once.

The book I want to recommend to you today is a fantasy, by which I mean ‘epic fantasy,’ by which I mean ‘the future of epic fantasy.’ Remember how Robert Jordan came out twenty years ago and revolutionized the fantasy genre? If The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson doesn’t do the same, I will eat my hat. And I love my hat, so that is saying a lot.

Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way first–Brandon is a friend of mine, we are in the same writing group, we are in the same roleplaying group, and we record a podcast together every week. I am, in fact, in the interest of full disclosure, writing this while in his house, in my office in his basement (this is where I do most of my writing, for the simple fact that my children aren’t here). We are, in short, very good friends. Do not assume that I am going soft on his book for this reason–if I don’t like a book of Brandon’s, I will tell him so. I did not, for example, like the Alcatraz series, and quite honestly I was very worried about The Way of Kings as he ran it through our writing group: it has a high learning curve, a huge cast of characters, and a non-standard timeline. It is not entry-level fantasy.

But for an audience well-versed in the genre, it is the book you’ve been waiting for all your life.

The thing I like most about Brandon’s writing is that nothing is accidental or capricious. If he’s going to subvert a stereotype he does it for a reason–not just an “I’m an author I can do what I want” reason, but an in-story reason, a reason that will actually affect the characters and their goals and the way they live their lives. In Way of Kings, for example, he changed not just the magic level but the entire ecology of his world; this is not medieval Earth, this is all-new world with all-new cultures and people and weather and rules and everything else. And he’s not just doing it just for hell of it–he has a reason, like I said, and as you start to watch those reasons click together the book takes on a scope and dimension more worthy of any ‘epic’ story I’ve ever read before. Even when he does things I don’t yet understand (I still think the concept of the safehand, for example, is silly), I trust Brandon enough to know that it will eventually be important, and I will eventually love it. This is the man who wrote Mistborn, after all, which had the biggest, most satisfying series climax I have ever read. He knows what he’s doing, he knows how to do it, and The Way of Kings completely won me over.

The book comes out tomorrow, if you’re like most people, or tonight at midnight if you’re in a location lucky enough to have a midnight release. Run, don’t walk to your local bookstore. Buy this book. Take a day off work, and stock up on cheetos and chopsticks. Want to know what your grandchildren will hail as their generation’s Lord of the Rings? Then start reading now, because the future of fantasy has arrived.

The past few days I’ve given a post-writing review of what I did and how. Today I thought it might be more helpful to talk about my pre-writing process and how I get started.

The first thing I do is look at my outline, which in this case is pretty simple: a single sentence describing pinch 2 as “the posse attacks the necromancer in his lair, things go horribly wrong, and they get killed/captured.” With that in mind, I take stock of where the story is so far: I know who’s on the posse, I know who was kidnapped, and I know the necromancer’s capabilities. I also know what my complication is going to be that ruins the attack: Jacob, the wounded, overzealous brother, is going to come back at the wrong time. I like this because it will allow me to make the posse look competent: they can have the best plan in the world, a plan that would actually work if nothing went wrong, and then Jacob will ride in without knowing what’s going on, get himself in trouble, and the characters will have the choice of either following the plan and dooming Jacob, or ruining the plan and trying to rescue him.

I also at this point take a look at any themes or character arcs I need to satisfy, and this scene doesn’t really have anything out of the ordinary. Silas will be heroic as he tries to rescue his brother (a big step forward, since I made his last combat fairly unheroic), but he hasn’t yet come to terms with his powers and thus will refuse to use them. That will probably end up being a reason that the posse fails, and Silas will realize in his emotional climax that he has a responsibility (Spider-man style) to step up and use his powers when he can.

So: what is the posse’s plan? There are six of them: Silas, his father, an old man named Brother Creedy, Jacob’s friend Benjamin (the brother of Jacob’s girlfriend), and two other fathers with kidnapped daughters: Brother Sutton and Brother McKillop. Brother Sutton, I should point out, has been one Silas’s most vocal opponents. I want at least one to die, and I want it to be sad, but I’ve already killed Silas’s mother and I don’t really want to kill anyone else in his family. After them, the meanest one to kill would be Brother Sutton, because his daughter has already lost her beau to the necromancer, and losing her father as well will be pretty terrible. It sounds cruel, but I don’t like killing people unless it means something, and killing Brother Sutton will give me the biggest bang for my buck. I don’t think I want to kill anyone else, but I could be persuaded if I get into the thick of things and see a really good opportunity.

So anyway, back to the plan: I have six guys, and they need something brilliant. They are assaulting a necromancer’s “lair,” which in this case is essentially just a creepy farmhouse nestled into a forest; farther back in the forest is a half-cave, fire-circle kind of place where the necromancer does his rituals, but I don’t think we’ll need that place yet. The posse will attack in the dark, partly because that will make it easier to approach unseen and partly because that’s about when they’ll arrive at the necromancer’s place anyway. I’m going to put two men on covering fire, wielding long rifles and attacking from a distance; these will be Creedy and…Silas’s father, I think, because then when Jacob shows up he might leave his post to help his son, thus cutting their long-ranged support in half. That gives us four men to actually raid the farmhouse and rescue the girls: the two young men, Silas and Benjamin, and the two other fathers. This puts Brother Sutton in harm’s way so he can get killed (possibly right in front of his daughter), and of course Silas wouldn’t be in any other group because he needs to be in the thick of the action. They will approach under cover of darkness, not through the trees but out in the field, where the two long rifles can cover them. The two young men will be in charge of finding, untying, and/or carrying the captives, and the two older men will give them close support with shotguns and short rifles. They’ll get in, shoot any zombies who get in the way, find the girls, and get out. They’re not necessarily planning to kill Gideon, but Brother Sutton (my most fiery guy) is likely to put the mission at risk by seeking him out anyway.

This setting will give me plenty of great atmosphere–an old farmhouse in the middle of the night, maybe some very dim moonlight, some mist shrouding the forest to help make it even spookier when zombie loom up from between the trees. The insertion team (not a phrase I’ll actually use in a pioneer story, of course) will creep up slowly, their plan working smoothly, until suddenly they hear hoofbeats and see someone come riding into the kill zone–it’s Jacob, approaching directly from the road where it’s more dangerous, hoping to get there in time to help but instead destroying their element of surprise. The zombie will rise up around him, Silas will do his best to help, and the careful plan will fall into disarray as the team is quickly separated and reduced to running and hiding and trying to stay alive. The scene will end with at least one man dead, several of them wounded (possibly fled) and most of them captured.

So that’s the plan. Now I’ll write it and see if it actually works.

I had intended for the “traveling” section of the story to be a series of small vignettes, possibly showing the group tracking the necromancer through the wilderness, and focusing on the idea that nobody trusts Silas. Instead I found myself going a completely different direction in which Silas is trying to redeem himself and his brother, Jacob, is the one nobody trusts. It was unexpected, but much better.

Part of the change comes from my friend Eric, who remarked on my last post that I could solve some of my “too heroic too soon” problem by having Silas hulk out not because he wants to save people, but because he’s terrified of getting shot and wants to save himself. I thought it was an excellent suggestion, so I went back and edited a little bit–not much, maybe two paragraphs–to fit it in. In writing the sequence about how scared he is, I realized that Silas is not just scared of dying, he’s scared of divine judgment–he thinks his power is a mark of evil, after all, and is pretty sure that if he dies he’ll get sent straight to hell. So having him hulk out in the middle of the town social was not just a cowardly act, it was a big boost to the ongoing theme of redemption.

The more interesting development came from the brother, Jacob, who I had always intended to be part of the posse that hunts down the bad guy. But then I decided, while describing the final posse, that three members of Silas’s family (their father came too) was too much, so I had to decide who to drop, and I remembered that I’d given Jacob a light wound in the attack scene. What if I made that wound a bigger deal, and used it to keep Jacob out? Jacob did not like that one bit, and as soon as the posse left town he went and found his horse and followed them–these are the kinds of things that characters do when you give them good background and then just write to see where it takes you. The necromancer kidnapped Jacob’s sister and his girlfriend, and there was no way he was staying behind, busted arm or not. So I let him come along.

Then the posse came across a burned farm, not because they needed to but because I was brainstorming little events that could happen during the travel and that one stuck in my head. I started writing it out, exploring the options, and realized that I needed a reason for this to be bad: all of the people in the area were in town for the social, so there wouldn’t have been anybody at the farm, so where’s the tension? Well, what if someone stayed behind? I didn’t want to do a mother, since we’ve already had a mother in peril, and I didn’t want to do a daughter for the same reason, so I ended up with a little boy. What would be the most interesting way to use a little boy who got left behind? I could just kill him, and have the posse find him and swear vengeance, but we’ve already had that in this story, and I wanted something new. What if the necromancer brought the boy back to life? But no, that would instantly make the readers think about Silas’s mom coming back to life, and I really don’t want to deal with that–it’s a cool idea, but it’s not what this story is about. I eventually decided to make it more subtle: the boy isn’t physically harmed, just terrified to the point of incoherence, and that is in many ways much more frightening than just finding him there dead. We don’t know exactly what happened, but we know that the boy saw trouble and ran into the woods and spent the whole night seeing and imagining truly horrifying things. When the posse shows up in the morning, he’s so scared all he can do is shoot at them, without even knowing or caring who they are, just a pure, desperate bid for safety. Once the posse figured out what was going on, I found myself in a dilemma I hadn’t expected: what do we do with the boy?

Obviously we can’t leave him here, and obviously we can’t just send him back to town. Somebody has to take him, but who? I looked at my posse, and once again the answer was clear: it had to be Jacob. He was injured and he could barely ride, much less ride and shoot at the same time. It didn’t make sense to send anybody else…and Jacob, as you can imagine, was extremely upset about that. All of a sudden I found myself with a wonderful story I hadn’t ever expected. Jacob had already disobeyed orders once before, following the posse when he was told to stay home, so of course he was going to do it again. But next time he’d show up at exactly the wrong time, in exactly the wrong place, and his ineffectiveness would be a much bigger problem. This helped solve another problem I knew was coming, which was that the attack on the necromancer needed to have a really good reason for going horribly wrong; a lovesick cowboy, injured and unaccounted for and far too brave to cover his own stupidity, is exactly what I need to make sure the posse’s plan goes horribly awry. And the best part is, it will be something that goes wrong that isn’t Silas’s fault, setting him up for a better decision at the end when he decides that he’s a better person than he thinks he is and finally redeems himself.

I know I keep saying this, but the very best part of writing is when you think you know what’s going to happen next, and then you get surprised by something unexpected and awesome. I always plan my stories in advance, so I know what’s coming and how to get there, but then the writing process itself is full of little bits and pieces like this that help flesh it out and make it interesting and help make the story and the characters better than you could ever do on your own.

As you may or may not be aware, I’ve got a book coming out in about five weeks, and we’re already gearing up for the attack. My tour for this book will be both longer and more fractured than the last one, with more locations in more cities spread across a much longer period, giving me time to go home and be a father for a few days in between events. We’re also hitting a much wider variety of places, including a spearhead into the midwest, but at the expense of losing a few West Coast locations we hit before.

September
3-6: DragonCon
This isn’t technically a Mr. Monster event, but I’m including it for the sake of completeness (and because it will be my only foray to the Eastern states for the next several months). My only actual scheduled event is the Decatur Book Festival, unaffiliated with DragonCon, on Saturday the 4th.

18: Authorpalooza at the Orem Barnes & Noble
This will be a huge gathering of authors all gathered together in one place, and it’s going to be awesome. Mr. Monster won’t quite be out yet, but we’ll be taking orders and I’ll have an ARC to give away in a drawing.

23: MPIBA Trade Show
Kind of a mini-BEA in Denver, if you don’t know what this is you probably couldn’t get in anyway, since it’s exclusively for booksellers and librarians from a certain region. If this includes you, please come see me; if not, but you’re in Denver, I’ll be driving around trying to hit as many bookstores as I can to say hi and sign their stock. If you live in Denver and know any awesome places to eat, please let me know.

28: Mr. Monster Launches!
This book is awesome, guys, I’m totally serious. Much darker than the first, more emotional, and way more messed up. The launch party will be at Sam Weller in Salt Lake City, where we will have a reading, a signing, one or more giveaways, and goodness knows what else. I have a magician friend who says he can cut his own arm off on stage, and that sounds kind of eerily appropriate. More info (such as time and parking and whatnot) coming soon, but mark your calendars now. This is going to rock.

30: University Bookstore in Seattle
This was a great signing last time, and this time I hear it’s going to be even better. Reading, signing, Q&A; more info when I have it.

October
1: Powell’s in Beaverton, Oregon
This is one of my favorite bookstores, and they always pull in a big crowd. Reading, signing, Q&A; more info when I have it.

5: Orem Barnes & Noble
This is still tentative, but I’m really hoping we can work it out. Reading, signing, Q&A; more info when I have it.

7: Alpine School District Book Club
The Alpine School district in Utah Valley is holding a year-long book club for teachers, and their book for September is I Am Not a Serial Killer. I’ll be on hand on the 7th for the book discussion, a full Q&A, and anything else they want to throw at me–we’ll even have a bookseller on hand so you can pick up Mr. Monster (I’ll also be giving one copy away as a prize). If you teach in Alpine, please come!

8: GLIBA Trade Show
Just like the one in Denver, though this one’s in Detroit. If you can make it to the show, please come see me!

9: Mission Valley Borders in San Diego
This store really loved IANASK and asked me to come back for Mr. Monster, and they didn’t have to ask me twice. This will be an afternoon event at 2pm. Reading, signing, Q&A; more info when I have it.

10: Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego
Another one of my favorite bookstores, these guys do everything, and I’m really excited to be going back. Reading, signing, Q&A; more info when I have it.

13-17: Los Angeles
I don’t have confirmed dates or times from any LA bookstores yet, but sometime this week I’ll be signing at two or three stores in the area, possibly stretching as far south as Orange. Reading, signing, Q&A; more info when I have it.

20-23: Utah Humanities Book Festival
This is a week-long event in Salt Lake City, and I have at least one panel. I’ll give you more info when I have it.

23-27: Driving to Columbus, Ohio
World Fantasy is in Columbus, Ohio this year, and I’m going to drive there and hit as many bookstores as I can along the way. If you live in a major city somewhere along I-70, the odds are good we’ll have a signing near you. I’ll share all the info as soon as it’s final.

28-31: World Fantasy Convention
Nothing’s confirmed yet, but I hope to be on some panels and hit some local bookstores and, of course, we’ll have the big group signing at the convention itself.

November
1-6: Driving home to Utah
Just like the drive TO Columbus, I’m trying to line up signings on the way FROM Columbus. This should include, if all goes well, Chicago and other cities in the area. I’ll share all the info as soon as it’s final.

Saturday was the Writing for Charity event, and it went really well–attendance was up from last year, there were a ton of authors, and everyone had a good time. The silent auction was an especially big success, but what gratified me more than anything was the extensive work done behind the scenes to make the charity money stretch as far as it possibly could. The organizers, all of them 100% volunteer, did some pretty amazing stuff.

Here’s the deal: our goal was to give books to each and every student in at least five (ideally more) underprivileged Utah schools. We accomplished this by seeking out huge discounts, remaindered books, and other cheap sources, giving us an average book price of $2. That means that each attendee, all by him or herself, was able to provide books to an entire classroom of kids with their registration fee alone. Add in the silent auction and it gets awesome: lunch with Brandon Mull went for about $70–that’s another full classroom. Letting Shannon Hale brag about you went for $200, which is about three classrooms all by itself. Then factor in the huge amount of corporate and private donations and you really start to see what a community can do when it puts it mind to something. Smashburger donated several gift baskets, each with a $25 value, that typically went for around $16, which provides books for eight kids AND gives you an awesome lunch at a huge discount. It’s like we’re creating money and books out of thin air.

I’m pleased to report that the “Let Dan Wells kill you” auction was the big ticket item of the whole event, going for a final bid of $500 to a handsome young corpse named BC Woods. That’s pretty awesome in itself, but I happen to know that Woods emailed the auction organizers the night before the event and promised, in secret, that even if he got outbid he’d still pay $500 to the charity. That, in my estimation, is the height of class, and I feel truly awed to have people of such high caliber reading my books. BC Woods has earned himself an extra-special death, but the truth is, a man that awesome I would gladly kill for free.

The event itself was a huge success as well. We started with a massive author panel (MC’ed by me) in which we got wide-spectrum writing advice from somewhere between 20 and 30 incredible authors and illustrators. Then we broke into smaller groups based on genre, where aspiring writers could ask for specific advice on whatever questions they needed; I was in the “fantasy and science fiction” group, though I hope there were some fellow horror writers lumped in there, and it went really well. After lunch we broke down even further, which each author from the genre panel taking a few of the attendees into a back corner and draining their blood critiquing the first page of their novel. The fantasy/SF group was by far the biggest, so my group had, for example, nine people, and we didn’t have much time for everyone, but we still gave good advice and encouragement and I thought it went really well.

We also had an evening event focused more on entertainment and “personality” panels, instead of specifically writing advice, so that people who wanted to support the charity but weren’t themselves writers could still have an opportunity to participate.

It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to making the event even bigger and more amazing next year.

I’m on page 30, and about halfway through, so I think my estimate of 60 pages is going to be pretty accurate. My initial breakdown of those pages, however, was off. I thought that 30 would be the end of the necromancer attack, but some edits to the early pages (cutting out needless explanation, streamlining narrative, etc.) gave me some extra room, and fit the whole scene where they plan their posse into the vacated pages. Note that this was not my intention–I wasn’t trying to reach page 30 as a magical benchmark of some kind, it just happened to be where the scene ended. In writing that scene, however, I started to realize that I’m going to need more room than I expected to wrap this up–I need a final showdown, of course, and a scene where the posse is beaten and captured, and somewhere in the middle of those two I’m going to need the character climax where Silas comes to term with his superpower. What I wasn’t planning on, but I’m definitely going to need, as at least one small scene of travel, probably several micro-scenes showing different places and conversations and clues. I don’t want to just jump straight into the next fight scene–but I don’t want to drag this out any more than I have to, either. It’s a very hard balance to find.

My first instinct, of course, was to just lengthen the story and make it a novel or novella. Why not? Well, because I’m writing for a specific market and if I make this any longer it essentially won’t have a market at all. Maybe I’m overestimating the un-sell-ability of this story, but you’ve got to remember that horror and westerns are both at the bottom of their popularity sine waves right now. This story would make an awesome movie, but I simply don’t see a useful home for it as a novel: sure, you want to read it, but as a reader of my website you’re kind of a self-selecting niche market. My best bet is to write the story as planned, keep it short, hope the anthology wants it, and retain every conceivable right to republish it elsewhere in the same or other incarnations. If for some reason horror westerns about mutant pioneers become really popular, then boy, have I got a doozy all lined up and ready to go. Until then I’ll stay on target for 60 pages.

(Also: my natural tendency to complicate things, and my secret urge to turn this into a novel, almost got me to turn two other kids in the story into mutants, and form a team, and really turn this into an X-Men Mormons on the High Plains kind of thing, but I resisted. You should all be proud.)

So I know I need a section, maybe just five or six pages, of travel and reflection and interaction with the other men in the posse. I didn’t think I’d need it, but now that I’m here I can tell that I totally do. The scene I just finished was primarily social–it’s partly about Silas trying to reconcile his mother’s death, but it’s also about the townspeople trying to accept him as anything other than a monster. Neither group is fully convinced of his redeemability (because I need to save that for the end), which left us in a kind of grudging, temporary alliance in the face of a greater danger–they’ll work with him, and he’ll help, because the necromancer has their daughters and sisters kidnapped, but they’re not going to like it. A crucible like that (ie, put multiple characters in one place and turn up the heat) serves as a promise to the reader: I can’t set up all those conflicts without paying them off. I need to show that some of the people hate him, some of the people slowly come to trust him, and that Silas himself is too damaged by his earlier failure to effectively face the final battle. Travel scenes, even small ones, will develop those themes and allow me to pay them off in the big dramatic scenes that come later.

One thing I’ve really been concerned about, since the very first stages of outlining this story, is the exact moment when Silas learns what is ostensibly the crux of the story: the key realization that his powers are not a curse but a blessing from God. As you can see from my earlier blogs, I’ve never really been sure if that would work best in Plot Turn 2 or the Midpoint–both of which should be major decisions. As I was writing the midpoint just now, it turned into less of a “Silas” moment and more of a “townspeople” moment; the characters trying to convince him he wasn’t evil were also, and perhaps mostly, trying to convince the townspeople not to kill him outright. This gave their arguments a different focus that I hadn’t expected, but which worked very well, as it served mainly to flip the scales from “evil” to “not evil.” That leaves us the perfect opportunity in the final climax to tip him over from “not evil” to “good.” I should also point out that, despite my intentions, Silas’s potential love interest was not kidnapped, which means that she can’t deliver the inspiring speech in the climax. The good news is that the mean old biddy who hates Silas, Mollie Hammond, WAS kidnapped, and I can have her give the speech. It will be a very cool redemption of her character, and overall it will make the story stronger. I love it when little accidents like that crop up and turn out to be awesome.