I love westerns. I love them dearly. Some of my favorite movies of all time are westerns, pointing specifically at The Searchers and the modern remake of 3:10 to Yuma, and then down among the “movies I love but aren’t top 10″ there are too many to list. There’s something very powerful to me about westerns, possibly because I grew up in the American West, but also because they are perfect venues for stories about morality. The Old West was a unique situation in world history, where modern, civilized people were thrown together in a barbaric and uncivilized place–the same open emptiness that gave them freedom also took them away from law and society, and the best Westerns deal with this contradiction head-on. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance presents Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne as opposite sides of this coin–one representing law and the other representing violence–and makes the very complex, even tragic point that while law may be better, it can’t exist without violence. Out on the plains and miles away from civilization you can have as many laws as you want, but they’re not going to matter unless your local police have more guns than your local criminals. This is true everywhere, and at the end of the day all law extends from the threat of violence, but westerns are an almost perfect venue for exploring that concept in detail. In a western the social pressures are different: people are good or bad not because society is forcing them to be, but because they are making the conscious choice to be so.

I love westerns so much that I am often tempted to write one, and in fact I have several westerns in the back of my mind, waiting for the day that I have enough time in my schedule to write something I probably won’t get a lot of money out of. Western movies are on the rise, but western books, as a market, are still incredibly hard to sell. When I contributed to the Monsters and Mormons anthology I wrote a western novella (albeit with zombies and superpowers), which was fun, but it didn’t really sate my appetite so much as whet it. I want to write more. But there’s another big reason I haven’t taken the plunge, much more important than the money, and it’s this: I don’t know how to properly portray the Indians.

Even that word is bad–Indians–but the trouble is that I don’t even have a really solid fix on a sensitive alternative. I’ve been told, by a Native American, that we should say “Native American” because “Indian” is insulting, but I’ve also been told, by a different man from a different tribe, that we should say “American Indian” because “Native” is insulting. My research online suggests that the second guy’s opinion is far less common, and “Native American” or just plain “Native” is the accepted terminology, but the mere fact that there’s a difference of opinion makes this a very hard question to answer. And this isn’t even the problem with writing a book–if I were to write one I would just use the specific tribal names and be done with it. The bigger problem is how to present them as characters and a culture. I don’t want to use the old excuse that “everyone thought of them as savages, so it’s okay to portray them that way,” but I also don’t want to get so involved with showing their side of things that it takes over the story, but I also don’t want to just ignore them. They were a huge part of life in the old west, and their story deserves to be told, but it deserves to be told properly, and I’m just very leery about my ability to do that.

Which brings us to the new Lone Ranger movie. The trailer looks cool–the ideal mix of action and justice and heroism that a Lone Ranger story should have–and, yes, it looks like the movie is making Tonto a bigger character and trying to make the two leads a little more equal than they have been in the past. But on the other hand, the movie trailer really screams “a bunch of white people made this movie without actually talking to anyone from the Native culture they’re attempting to portray.” Despite my complaints about not knowing much about Native American culture, I at least know enough to recognize that Tonto’s costume in the movie is a weird mish-mash of different tribes and some crazy made-up crap that looks good on camera. Tonto’s breastplate, for example, is clearly from a plains culture, but the headband is very southwest. The do-rag, of course, is pure Captain Jack Sparrow, and the bird on his head is classic “hollywood production designer” with no basis in any Native culture I’m familiar with. And, of course, Johnny Depp himself is not Native–he has said in interviews that “I guess I have some Native American [in me] somewhere down the line…Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian,” but that’s like hiring me to play a Norwegian guy: sure, my great-grandma was Norwegian, but that doesn’t mean I look, speak, or act Norwegian in any way, and have nothing to contribute to a Norwegian role that an actual Norwegian guy couldn’t do better. I suppose the point could be made that a modern Native American is so culturally removed from an 1860s-ish Native American that they wouldn’t really have anything to add in the role either, especially considering that Tonto isn’t based on an existing tribe anyway, but at that point you’re using the movie’s inaccuracy to justify its own inaccuracy, which is fairly useless ground to walk on.

I’ve written before about race-bending in movie casting, and my opinions of it are layered but generally very solidly on the “don’t do it” side. Last summer at Comic-Con I had a meeting with a big-name production company about a potential PARTIALS movie (and no, I can’t yet tell you who it was), and one of the biggest questions I asked them was if they were prepared to actually cast an Indian girl as Kira (not Native American, but actual Indian). It’s very important to me to get this right. One of the best movies I saw in 2012 was Argo, a based-on-real-life story about a CIA expert extracting hostages from Iran; it was excellent, and I loved every minute, and I think Ben Affleck deserves a Best Director Oscar for it, but Affleck also played the CIA guy, who in real life was Latino. The closing credits showed a fascinating slide show of side-by-side photos, comparing the movie characters and sets and images to their real-life counterparts, and I wanted to stand up and cheer for their amazing attention to detail…but then we got to the shot of the very white Ben Affleck, followed by a shot of the very Mexican Tony Mendez, and it felt jarring and wrong. Yes, Affleck did a good job in the role–his acting wasn’t as stellar as his directing, but it was good. But how cool would it have been to give that same role to a Mexican actor? Someone who’s sick of playing drug dealers on Breaking Bad, or gangsters in Southland, and would absolutely nail a role as a handsome, dashing, Mexican-American hero? And how cool would it have been–and this is the much bigger point for me–for a Latino kid or teen or even adult to be able to go to the theater and see this amazing movie and be presented with a hero who looks like them, someone they can identify with, someone who lets them see themselves in a leading role? I didn’t understand the real importance of this–of kids who want to see themselves as their heroes–until my daughters started asking me for more books and movies about girls. Growing up white and male I could always see myself as the heroes of my favorite stories, but it isn’t that easy for everyone else, and a movie like Argo, or PARTIALS, or even The Lone Ranger is an amazing chance to do that. I don’t believe that casting the wrong race is inherently evil, but I do think it’s a tragic missed opportunity. We should be going out of our way to find and create those opportunities, and then do the very best we can with them. And The Lone Ranger, instead of taking that opportunity, appears to have run the other direction.

I’m not saying the movie will be horrible, or even that the character of Tonto will be horrible–all I’ve seen is a two-minute trailer, and for all I know Tonto is presented as a culturally-empowering, three-dimensional hero. But I am saying that I doubt it greatly. I want to love this movie because I love westerns, and I want people to make more of them, and I love the things they can say about humanity and the exciting, iconic ways they can say them. But I have grave doubts about Tonto, and I wanted to put them out there.

As promised, the prototype is here! Anyone and everyone who’s interested in helping to playtest, dive in. I’ll use this page to guide the playtest (unless it gets unwieldy), so please leave your comments below, and be sure to let me know your name–I want to properly credit everyone for their contributions if this eventually gets published.

The file is here: Heist Game Prototype v1
All the instructions you need to prepare the prototype and play the game are right there in the file. Have fun!

Notes:

November 14, 2012: This is the first draft. The basic game is pretty smooth, but the advanced game needs a lot of work. Play the basic game first, see how it works, and then dive into the advanced game and tell me what you think. I know what I think the problems are, but I want to hear what you think they are.

I’ve been designing games since I was kid. The first one I can remember creating actual components for was a board-based wargame for my Battle Beasts; the rules are long gone, but I still have the board somewhere. I designed a massive game of Clue with dozens of rooms and characters and weapons (and motives and accomplices, etc.) which was specifically intended as a joke and was, as expected, completely unplayable. When I realized that the Reading merit badge for Boy Scouts had a requirement that could be filled by designing a game I created one based on Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently series–that was a weird one–and somehow I talked my sixth grade teacher into letting my final project on Central America be a board game about Manuel Noriega. I’ve designed roleplaying games and miniatures games and collectible card games and just about every kind of game you can imagine, all mostly just for fun and just for myself.

I consider game design to be very similar to fiction writing, at least in terms of why I do it and what I get out of it. Both are creative outlets that let me tell a story and craft an experience for my audience. If I can get you to feel something while reading my books or playing my games, I’ve done a good job; if I can get you to feel something specific, I’ve done a great job. Both have a bit of a puzzle-solving vibe to them, as you attempt to use a limited amount of resources in different permutations to create a desired outcome. My various notebooks and computers are as filled with notes for game ideas as they are for novel ideas. And most of them are just as untenable

One thing I eventually started doing was, instead of creating new games from scratch, just modifying the games I had. This is especially prevalent with games that didn’t work right to begin with, like Marvel Heroes, but sometimes I do it with games I love, like Hollywood Blockbuster, which had great gameplay but not nearly enough theme to go with it. I wrote all over my game pieces for that one, and in the process realized that it could be rethemed to make an awesome Star Trek game: instead of collecting actors and directors and effects and such to make a movie, you could collect captains and science officers and so on to complete missions in space. With that, the wheels were turning, and I drafted up long lists of crew members and ships and on and on until suddenly the idea crashed into another idea in my backlog of “use this someday” files, and I realized I had a much bigger opportunity here.

As it accrued new ideas, the game I was designing diverged massively from Hollywood Blockbuster, becoming different enough that I realized it was actually sell-able as its own game. It was also, in my opinion, good enough to actually sell, which is important. It was not, however, sell-able as a Star Trek game, because I didn’t want to mess with the licensing issues that would require, so I re-themed it once again into its current form: Heist, a game about crews of thieves and hackers and masterminds carrying out elaborate capers and cons. The basic mechanics are the same–you recruit specialists, form them into teams, and perform missions (now called jobs)–but the flavor was new and unique. I chose Heist movies as a theme partly because I love them, and partly because it’s not a theme I’ve ever seen in a game before, which struck me as a great opportunity. (There may well be other heist games out there, I just haven’t seen them.) As I transferred everything to the new theme I tweaked it here and there to make sure it felt right, so you were legitimately playing a heist story and not a Star Trek story in a costume, and then I was done, and it was pretty good, and…what now?

I’ll tell you what now: I don’t have the time or the resources for a what now. Producing games is very, very different from designing them, and while Kickstarter has made the idea a lot more approachable than it used to be, that’s still not very approachable. The sheer investment of time, not even counting the money, would carve months off my writing, and I have so much writing these days that I start to drown if I miss a week, let alone months. So once again, the idea was shelved. I had vague plans of someday writing a heist book just so I could sell the game as a tie-in, but if that ever happened it would be years in the future.

This is where AEG comes in, a game company I’m already a huge fan of (they publish Legend of the Five Rings, which you may have heard me proclaiming as my favorite roleplaying game ever). They had a massive booth at the Essen game fair, where I went two weeks ago with a friend, where they were debuting a new line of shared-world games that I’d heard a bit about, and was excited to try. The shared world is called Tempest, a kind of renaissance-era city-state in an imaginary (but non-fantasy) world, and they were using it to tie together a bunch of political and economic games. I was a cool idea, and I was excited to see if the games were as interesting as the concept behind them, so we hung around the booth and waited for an empty table and ran through a quick demo of both Courtier and Love Letter. They were so awesome I bought them both instantly, but more than that, the Tempest setting itself was great: it’s very character-based, full of plots and schemes and underhanded deals. And here’s the key: they were actively looking for new game ideas to expand it. My first thought was “My heist game would be a pretty good fit for this.” My second thought was a slightly more excited “that would actually work out great, because they’d take care of all the artwork and production and distribution and advertising that I don’t have time or experience to do.” My third thought was basically just “ohmygoshthiscouldactuallyworkIcouldpublishagamethiswouldbesoawesomeohmygosh.” The friend I was with was obviously thinking along the same lines, as the first thing he said when we walked away from the booth was “The Tempest world might be a really good fit for that game you were telling me about.” Yes. Yes it could.

AEG has a neat Tempest development site set up to work with prospective game designers, which I applied for, and when I got into that I used their submission system to pitch my heist game. This was pretty much exactly what it felt like back in the days before I published any books, sending out queries and desperately hoping somebody liked them enough to ask for more. A few days later AEG asked for more: they want a full prototype of my game, and think it would be a great fit for Tempest. But they were careful to say (and wise to say it) that I should playtest it and polish it and hone it to a killing edge before sending it in. “We’d rather have one great game than ten good ones,” the letter pointed out, which seems awesome to me. This is essentially the same thing as an editor saying “I loved your pitch for this book, please send me the full manuscript but make sure it’s as good as possible first.” So on the one hand I have to make it clear that I have not as yet sold anything, and this is basically just an editor reading a manuscript to see if they like it. On the other hand, as you aspiring writers out there can attest, getting an editor to request your full manuscript is a huge deal, and you get very excited, and you feel like jumping up and down and celebrating like a crazy person, never mind the fact that it doesn’t technically mean anything will ever happen and you’re still more likely to get rejected than sell the story. That’s where I am with this game design: it doesn’t really mean anything, but at the same time it means everything.

I’ve already had this game designed for months, like I said, so it was relatively easy for me to print it out and and play a few rounds with my family. My wife and two older kids loved the basic version, and I was delighted to see that the pacing held up and the game was fun to play. When we tried the advanced version it kind of fell apart, though, which sucks because that’s the version I was really excited about, but that’s what playtesting is for. So here’s what I’m going to do: once I get this prototype a little prettier (there’s a lot of post-printing work my kids and I had to do, that I can do a lot more simply digitally), I’m going to post it here in full and let anyone and everyone download it, print it out, and play it. I’ll keep a running commentary on the known issues and design goals, and as I get your feedback I’ll tweak the game and put out new versions. I want you to tear this game apart (lovingly) so we can make it as awesome as possible. That will take me a couple of days to set up, though, because as I mentioned, I have tons of writing to do and no time to waste. Contracts I’ve already signed come first, and Heist will remain, for now, an after-hours hobby.

But if we can make it as good as it is in my head, oh baby.

Let me tell you a story.

A little over a month ago, on September 9, my Mom emailed me a short, panicked message: “Call Me.” She couldn’t just call me herself, of course, since she lives in Utah and I live in Germany, an 8-hour difference, and her mid-afternoon email arrived long after I should have been in bed. But I’m never in bed when I’m supposed to be, so I was awake, and I gave her a call. The news was bad, but not really shattering: my Dad was sick, and had been for weeks, and now it was worse than ever and he refused to go to a doctor. This is not surprising, because Dad never goes to doctors when he can help it. There was a lot of “Oh, you know Dad,” and “It’s probably just his asthma,” and so on, but my Mom wasn’t mollified. She’s known this man for decades, and she can tell when he’s legitimately sick. He could barely walk without turning gray and gasping for air, and she was worried.

The next day Dad went to work, walked up the stairs to his office, and called the doctor. That’s how we knew it was serious–he called the doctor on his own, voluntarily. He went in and was almost immediately diagnosed with pneumonia, and “maybe a heart attack,” which is a weird thing to hear from a doctor. You want to know if it is or isn’t a heart attack, none of this “maybe” nonsense. The doctor did ever test he could think of, held Dad as long as he could without actually hospitalizing him, and made another appointment for the following day. Dad’s condition worsened, and when he went back in the next day the doctor did some more tests and sent him straight to the hospital; the pneumonia had now been upgraded to “double pneumonia,” which makes about as much sense as “maybe a heart attack,” but at least now the “maybe” had been downgraded to “probably not,” so that was something.

All through this, of course, my Mom would call me–or email me to call her–every day, because she needed someone to talk to. Of her three children, my sister lives in Ohio and has crippling health problems of her own, and my brother, the only one still left in Utah, has a panic disorder: not exactly the kind of person you can unload all your troubles on. She needed someone she could call and say “I think he’s really sick this time, and I don’t know what to do,” and getting those calls and knowing there was nothing I could do from the other side of the world was maddening.

Dad ended up on oxygen, three liters of pressure, which was low enough that he could leave the hospital and push around one of those little tanks of wheels. This was just in time for my grandparents’ 60th anniversary cruise, which is one of the more surreal parts of the story: in the middle of his mysterious “double pneumonia,” my Dad took off for a week long cruise to Mexico. This sounds luxurious, but in hindsight it may have been a lifesaver, because the move from Utah’s thin, high-elevation, full-of-smoke-from-forest-fires air down to Mexico’s warm, rich, humid air did wonders for his lungs. He could even walk around the boat a bit without the oxygen, which was a bigger deal than we realized.

(The cruise, by the way, was hilarious: it was my grandparents’ 60th anniversary, and my grandpa’s 80th birthday, so they’d invited all their children–my aunts and uncles–and bought the tickets a year in advance. Then my aunt broke her leg, and my dad got pneumonia, and my uncle had a cold, and in the end my 80-year-old grandpa and my Mom with MS were the healthiest people in the group.)

With two days left to go on the cruise, my Dad got suddenly worse–still healthy enough that he could fly home, but barely. Instead of three liters of oxygen and leisurely walks around the block, he was at ten liters of oxygen just to lie in bed doing nothing; fifteen if he had to get up to use the restroom. He was back in the hospital full time, but in a better one this time, and my complete inability to do anything about it was driving me up the wall. My mom would send out positive updates, assuring us all that everything was fine, but the situation only got worse. The doctors would try a sure-fire pneumonia cure and it would do nothing; they’d try another, and the same thing happened. On Sunday, October 7, his lungs failed completely. He required 60 liters of oxygen pressure just to live–the machine was literally breathing for him. He was rushed to the ICU, and my Mom put on her bravest face, but there’s only so many ways you can spin “his lungs have failed and nothing works and he’s getting worse faster than the hospital can keep up.” I decided to hell with the Atlantic ocean, I was going home, and I booked a flight for the next morning. I was home within 24 hours of hearing the news, and my sister soon after, and though none of us would say it out loud, we were all starting to wonder if this was it. If we were going home to help, or to say goodbye.

But a lot, it turns out, can happen in 24 hours. After days and weeks of diagnosing and treating and trying and failing, the doctors figured out what it was: Cryptogenic Organizing Pneumonitis, which is a fancy way of saying “there’s something growing in your lungs but we don’t know what and none of our medicines work on it.” Most pneumonia is bacterial, and the rest is viral, and all the drugs they use to treat it work on those two causes, but with COP the muck in your lungs is something else–I don’t know what, fungus maybe, or some kind of evil spirits. It’s very rare, and very dangerous, and it’s called “organizing” because it literally gets in and starts remodeling your lungs to suit its own purposes, none of which are breathing. But in every other way it looks and acts like normal pneumonia, so the only way to diagnose it is to try and fail with every other pneumonia in the book, and when none of them work you know it’s COP, and you know exactly how to treat it. This happened while I was in the air, and the doctors started him on prednisone, and by the time I landed and raced to the hospital he had turned a corner. He had gotten slightly–every so slightly–better, the first time in over a month that a change had been positive.

My sister finally made it (her flight itinerary on US Air involved not one but two broken planes, a full day of delays, and an overnight stay in Phoenix), and together we set about trying to help. I cleaned some of the house. My sister took our Mom shopping. We spent hours in the hospital talking to Dad–he rarely talked back, of course–and hours more hanging out with Mom, watching movies, doing laundry, doing whatever we could to make life easier, or better, or at the very least more normal. Inspired by Mary Robinette Kowal, who reads her manuscripts aloud as part of an editing pass, I read my latest manuscript to my Dad, who loved it. We watched him progress through various benchmarks of breathing ability–using less pressure, using different masks, taking longer walks, achieving higher levels of oxygen saturation. We became intimately familiar with the minutia of the equipment, and the nurses, and even the terminology.

The first day I arrived I talked to the doctor, who introduced COP to my Dad as “that long confusing word we talked about before.” I asked what the word was, and he asked if I had a medical background. “Not really,” I told him, “but I’ve published five medical thrillers,” which is only a slight exaggeration: the John Cleaver books are not overtly medical, but they are directly concerned with psychiatric evaluation and profiling; PARTIALS is at least one third medical thriller, with a very detailed study of virology, and THE HOLLOW CITY is set in a mental hospital with a plot centered around diagnosis, neural chemistry, and drug interactions. I didn’t mention BLACKER DARKNESS. The doctor was impressed enough that he started taking me much more seriously than the rest of the family, opening up about that their theories and treatments and even inviting me to their meetings. I had a front row seat to everything they thought and tried and did, and it was awesome. And every day, my Dad got a little bit better.

My last night in Utah was Sunday, October 14. He was on a canula now instead of a mask, and they were giving him 40% oxygen, and he was maintaining a steady 91% saturation rate. The feeding tube was gone, and he could have real food again. He was still in the ICU, but only because they were concerned that something COULD go wrong, because he’d been so bad for so long they didn’t dare believe that he was good again. I set up my laptop on the little rolling hospital table, and we watched THE AVENGERS and ate pumpkin pie. It was the most normal thing he’d done in over a month. The next day I flew home, and the day after that they moved him out of the ICU, and somehow, whether through prayers or miracles or drugs or sheer force of will his numbers went up. Instead of 91% saturation he was maintaining a strong 95%, and even when he got up to walk it didn’t drop below 90%. I suspect that the simple act of moving out of the ICU–the most tangible sign of progress yet–gave him a renewed vigor, and as he cheered up his body started fighting harder. This morning I had another message from my Mom, not urgent but jubilant, saying that he is probably going home tomorrow. You have to realize that this is amazing: even with the progress we’d seen the week before we expected him to be in the hospital at least another week; his improvement was steady, but it was slow. And then for some reason it wasn’t slow anymore. The doctor was almost in tears, and Mom said she could see him physically trying not to say “just one week ago we thought he was gone,” because everybody thought he was gone. In ten days he’d progressed from “alien monsters are eating your lungs and we can’t do anything about it” to “you’re great, we’ll send you home tomorrow.” It was shocking, but it was exactly the kind of shocking we love.

My Dad’s health isn’t perfect, and it might never be again. The disease had a whole month to remodel his lungs, and they never did figure out what was up with his heart. Life is crazy, and anything can happen, and if there’s one thing I learned from the doctors it was “Don’t make predictions because they’re almost always wrong.” I don’t know what will happen next, but my Dad’s alive, and breathing, and going home, and for now that’s the best news ever.

So apparently I’m blogging on Fridays now? Okay. Cool.

In this week’s episode of our pop culture podcast, Do I Dare To Eat A Peach?, my brother and I took a long (probably too long) look at the Bond movies, and specifically at the Bond theme songs. Our goal, inspired by a similar Tor.com article, was to determine which movie had the widest gap of quality between movie and song: a terrible song with an awesome movie, or vice versa. This was timed, in part, to get us ready for the release of the new Skyfall theme song by Adele, which came out last night. Obviously we haven’t seen the movie yet, so we can’t do our full quality differential analysis, but we can at least comment on the song.

That terrible, terrible song.

Adele, to be fair, is a fantastic choice for a Bond song. She’s got the kind of power in her voice that Shirley Bassey would be proud of, and her classic, old school sound is what made her famous in the first place. That’s part of what makes this song so disappointing. Admittedly, the song doesn’t really give her a lot to work with, but she still manages to sing it with as little personality as possible. If I hadn’t found the song on her personal YouTube channel I’d be convinced I’d accidentally stumbled onto the leaked demo version that’s been floating around, because there’s no way this feels like a polished version of a real performance.

The lyrics are the worst offender, so I’ll save those for last. First I want to complain about the way the music doesn’t build to anything. Yes, we get a full orchestra coming in on the chorus, but there’s no power behind it. It’s the most laid-back orchestral kick you’ve ever heard. Meanwhile, the verses themselves are as straightforward as they can possibly be, without anything interesting to distinguish them. Compare, for example, the first two verses of Goldeneye: the second one has a wonderful little high part behind it, almost like the music is sneaking around behind Tina Turner’s voice. It’s telling a story. It has personality. All Skyfall has is a nonchalant dedication to finishing the song without dropping the book it’s trying to balance on its head.

And now: the lyrics. The first stanza is actually pretty good:

This is the end.
Hold your breath and count to ten.
Feel the earth move, and then
Hear my heart burst again.

It’s determined to keep that rhyme going, but it does it smoothly, without cheating on its rhythm and always maintaining a standard flow of speech. That’s how a normal human would construct a sentence, which is more than a lot of songs can say. Then we get to the second stanza, where this all goes out the window and she really has to stretch to get the right syllables on the right beats:

For this is the end.
I’ve drowned and dreamed this moment
So overdue, I owe them
Swept away, I’m stolen.

Cheating on the rhythm? Check. That’s not how “moment” is pronounced, Adele. Cheating on the cadence of normal human speech? Check. I couldn’t even figure out how to punctuate the two middle lines. And we haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet, which is every time she says the word Skyfall:

Let the sky fall, when it crumbles
We will stand tall
Or face it all together
At skyfall.

Skyfall is where we start
A thousand miles and poles apart.

I was with you on that first instance, when you broke the word in half. “Let the sky fall” is a great apocalyptic line, and very fitting for a Bond song. The second instance, referring to the falling of the sky by the compound noun “skyfall,” is less forgivable, but it’s the name of the movie so I’ll let you get away with it. “Skyfall is where we start,” on the other hand, is just lazy writing. It doesn’t mean anything, and it’s a baldfaced attempt to cram in the title of the movie again, in case we forgot it. It’s verbal product placement, like including a line where she sings about how Coke is so refreshing. This seems like a weird thing to complain about after I’ve just praised the Goldeneye song, which uses the word “goldeneye” pretty constantly despite it never really meaning anything, but the difference is that Tina Turner sells it. She sings with attitude, and that covers a multitude of sins. Adele sounds like she’s sight-reading to see if the song’s in her range, and it never gets off the ground, and that makes every lyrical shortcut sound worse.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Bond songs traditionally use the movie’s title as a refrain, and there’s just not a lot you can do with “Skyfall.” They could have done better than the elementary-school rhyme “we will stand tall,” but even then, it’s not a lot to work with. Compare The World is Not Enough, which is at least a phrase, and which Shirley Manson followed up with some interesting new ideas (“But it is such a perfect place to start” is deviously fun). Compare Die Another Day, which Madonna uses as a mantra in the chorus and then augments with weird, disjointed phrases in the verses (mirrored by weird, disjointed tuning effects, which holds it all together). If you really want to feel depressed, compare Another Way to Die, the theme song from Quantum of Solace, where Jack White and Alicia Keys just threw the title out all together and wrote a brilliant song full of clever lyrics, impressionist imagery, and a perfect suggestion of Bond, without just beating it over the head by saying “Skyfall” a hundred times.

To it’s credit, Skyfall is not the worst Bond song ever. We’ll always have All Time High. But as awesome as it could have been to hear Adele go back to Bond’s Shirley Bassey roots and sing the hell out of some killer nightclub torch song, that’s not what we got. The lyricist phoned it in, the composer painted by numbers, and Adele acts like she doesn’t know the mic is turned on. A solid remix with some new arrangement and more personality could save this, but they’re touting it as the official movie version, so I doubt it will change.

I just hope the movie’s better. History has proven that bad Bond songs tend to be paired with bad Bond movies. I really want to like this one.

Since I haven’t blogged this week, and since I opened the can of worms on twitter/facebook, let’s talk about this: what will the name of the third Partials book be?

Obviously the short answer is “whatever I decide to name it, as approved by the Harper sales team,” but there are a lot of considerations to go through before we get there. And as part of those considerations, I get to talk about card games: one of my favorite card games is SET, which I was introduced to in college. You have a big deck of cards, and each card has an image with four traits: shape, number, color, and shading. You lay out a grid of three by four cards and then look for sets of three, with sets defined as “each trait must be the same across all cards, or different across all cards.” So, for example, a set could include three of one shape, or one each of all three shapes, but it can’t have one of one shape and two of the next. Each trait has to be all the same, or all different. This is a fantastic combination of “brain-burner puzzle game” and “quick filler game,” and I play it all the time. It’s one of the few games I brought with me to Germany. One of our favorite things to do in college was sit in a common area and start playing, and then watch as people stopped to watch. Most people would ask how to play, and that was cool, but the best thing was when people would stop, observe for a minute, and then figure it out all on their own and start collecting sets. That’s when we knew we’d met someone extra geeky/awesome.

So what does this have to do with book titles? The geeky/awesome ones have already figured it out. The titles (and covers) of a trilogy should follow the same rule of forming sets: every trait should ideally be either all the same or all different. (Within reason, of course; every rule has exceptions). The Bourne movies are a great example: the first is The Bourne Identity, and the second The Bourne Supremacy, so obviously the third has to be The Bourne [Something] as well. Calling the third one Ultimatum would have been dumb, because it wouldn’t feel like it fit, but calling it The Bourne Ultimatum was perfect.

(My first trilogy, you’ll note, did not follow this naming strategy at all, and that’s completely my fault and it’s always kind of bugged me. I Am not a Serial Killer and I Don’t Want to Kill You are both statements, they both start with I, they’re both denials, and then for some reason the one in the middle is nothing like them. This is because the original name for the third book was “Full of Holes,” which kept our set consistent, and by the time we decided to change it the second book was already in print. Alas. It doesn’t help that half the people I meet on book tours refer to the middle book as Mr. Murder instead of Mr. Monster. I still think Mr. Monster is a great name, but the fact that it breaks the set rules gets under my skin.)

So let’s take a look at the Partials series. We named the first one Partials because it’s an awesome name, and then for the second book I proposed two: “Fragments” and “Failsafe.” The sales team preferred the former, and it’s a great name so hooray, but it set us on a very specific path for book three: both titles have only one word, which are kind of sort of synonyms of each other, albeit with different connotations, and therefore the third one must follow the same format. The working title in my head for the past several months has been “Smithereens,” because it makes me laugh, but obviously we need something cooler than that. My two favorite runners-up have been “Splinters” and “Slivers,” and when I pitched the question on the Internet today those were definitely the most common suggestions, but neither of them really say what I want them to say. Also suggested, some in jest and some serious, were “Remnants,” “Shards,” “Pieces,” “Bits,” “Chunks,” “Ruins,” “Parts,” and “Dust.” I particularly like that last one (partly because it’s the name of my favorite X-Men character), but it a) isn’t plural, and is therefore different from our first two titles, and b) still doesn’t really say what I want it to say. I like “Remnants,” except then we have two titles that end with the same syllable, and that will bug me to death.

The hard part is not just choosing a cool synonym, but setting the right tone. “Partials” works for the first book because it conveys in one word not just the central science fictional element,but the attitude society has to that element. There are artificial people who are not “full” humans, and thus don’t deserve the same rights and considerations that we do. That arrogance is what ended the world and set up the whole series. Likewise, “Fragments” works for the second because it references not only their society (fragmented by war and dissidents) but the state of the characters (separated and alone) and the driving force of the plot (piecing together the answers to the first book’s questions). Both words mean “something that isn’t whole,” but they mean it in different ways.

What I’m really looking for with the third book is something with the right mix of hope and despair: pieces that are broken apart, but could maybe still be put together into something new and better. “Cells” has a great ring to it, implying both the building blocks of life and the semi-blind units of terrorism. “Bones” has a similar dichotomy, mixing life and death, but I’m not sold on either just yet. This will take some thinking.

And by all means, keep the suggestions pouring in. Just remember the rules of SET.

As I said on Monday, I’m writing a book called EXTREME MAKEOVER: APOCALYPSE EDITION. It’s about a health and beauty company that accidentally develops a cloning technology, and it’s equal parts awesome and bizarre; a very big departure, stylistically, from anything I’ve ever written before. I create a playlist for every book I write, and this time around we ended up with a lot more metal than you would expect a book about cosmetics and cloning to produce, but there you go. In case you want to listen along, here’s what I’m listening to while I write my new book:

1. Pepper, by the Butthole Surfers
This is the core song that helped define the sound of the entire list. I turned to this song first because of the lyric “You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes,” which takes on a pretty cool new dimension in a book about cloning, but as I listened to it again I really fell in love with the distorted guitar part, which has a strange, almost alien sound to it. It gave me the feeling of walking through a bazaar and seeing unfamiliar, unexplainable crap all over the place, and that kind of cultural discomfort is a big part of what I wanted the book to capture.

2. Sabotage, by The Beastie Boys
Yep, I had this on my last playlist as well. What can I say? It’s an awesome song. There’s a particular action scene in the book that I always imagine with this song in the background; I’ll tell you which one some other time.

3. Sweet Emotion, by Aerosmith
One of the central sequences of the book, kind of a massive tentpole that holds up an entire section, is a cosmetics product launch. This scene was incredibly fun to write because I worked for many years at a variety of health and beauty companies, as well as some other non-cosmetics companies, and I helped plan and carry out some product launches. It was a cool balancing act to dust off those marketing skills and write something that was not only a good story, but was also a good corporate event–the speeches, the look and feel, everything. This song gets mentioned as part of that product launch, though this may or may not survive to the published version, depending on copyright issues. I especially love the layers of irony from lyrics like “Talk about things and nobody cares/wearing out things that nobody wears” in context of a corporate beauty event.

4. Gorgeous, by theSTART
theSTART is not a famous band, but if you like awesome music you absolutely need to look them up. I originally had two of their songs on this list, “Gorgeous” and “Death via Satellite,” but when I winnowed the list down to just one song per artist I kept “Gorgeous” for the obvious connection to beauty. It’s a fast-paced–almost recklessly-paced–song about someone being so good looking you can’t help but go nuts over them, and that was a perfect fit for some of the earlier parts of the book.

5. King Nothing, by Metallica
I felt very strongly that I needed some Metallica on here, and for a long time I had “I Disappear” from the Mission Impossible soundtrack. Once I took the time to really look at the other options, though, “King Nothing” was the perfect song for the book because it’s about a man who thinks he has everything, but it all falls apart and he has no one to blame but himself. What better sentiment for a book about destroying the world?

6. Sell Out, by Halfcocked
Halfcocked is another lesser-known band, which is an absolute crime, and now they’ve broken up, which is worse. They wrote the kind of rock songs you didn’t think people wrote anymore, and just like with theSTART I had several of their songs on this list before finally forcing myself to streamline it to one. “Sell Out” is a slower song than the others on the list, which was important for a change of pace, and tells the story of a girl getting ready for a prom; it’s all about beauty, popularity, and self consciousness, which makes it a great fit for the book.

7. Growing Old is Getting Old, by the Silversun Pickups
Obviously my favorite band has to make the list somewhere, and this is my new favorite song of theirs. It starts off slow and gets guitar-warpingly weird by the end, which is a nice mirror of the book’s overall structure. Plus the title is fantastic, tying directly to one of the central questions of cloning: if we can just rebuild ourselves constantly, will we ever die? What does the world do when nobody ever gets old?

8. Busted, by Matchbox 20
Yes, I realize the incongruity of putting Matchbox 20 on a playlist full of hard rock and heavy metal, but it gets worse: I originally had three Matchbox 20 songs on here, and only cut one of them. It’s the only band for which I kept two songs, but they’re both too perfect to miss. “Busted,” for starters, is their heaviest rock song musically, and includes lyrics that speak so perfectly to the book. The chorus repeats the line “The people we become will never be the people who we are,” and then the final verse is about the literal end of the world–not just the end of the world, but the degradation of reality and sanity. And the singer just “sat on my back porch and watched it.” I love it. Fun trivia fact: A portion of this song was, in a very early draft, the epigram for I DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU: “Oh how I want you to know me/Oh how I want you to know me/Oh how I wish I was somebody else.”

9. You And I And I, by Matchbox 20
This is one of their live-only songs, which I got off of Napster way back in the day and have looked for an official version of it ever since. iTunes doesn’t have one, or I’d buy it immediately. First of all, it has that great title, and then thematically it’s a break-up song: it’s about the things that separate us, and the non-physical distances between people who are physically right next to each other.

10. The Sharpest Lives, by My Chemical Romance
Ha, another goth song. I don’t care what you think of me. I love MCR, and I love this song, and on the list it goes.

11. The Man Who Sold The World, the Nirvana Version
This song hits the same theme as “King Nothing,” but in a soft, almost dreamlike way, plus it has some of that “alien bazaar” feel that “Pepper” has. I especially like the idea that the world is already sold, but life goes on, either because nobody knows or because the full implications haven’t come to light yet. And yes, as much as I love David Bowie, the Nirvana version blows me away.

12. Fake Plastic Trees, by Radiohead
Another duplicate from my last playlist, but an absolutely perfect inclusion on this one. The idea of being artificial, of living a fake plastic life, is a huge part of what drew me to tell a story about the beauty industry in the first place.

13. Hey, by the Pixies
I don’t know what to tell you about this one, except that you need to listen to the Pixies. They were a proto-grunge band, the group that inspired Nirvana (and countless others), and “Hey” is my favorite of their songs. The sound of it, and the feel of it, are impossible to duplicate in any other song. If I were to organize this playlist into an actual album, to be listened to in a specific order, this would be the first.

14. Death Day, by Alien Ant Farm
I keep asking why this one’s on here–not because I don’t like it, but because it doesn’t fit the book as closely as the others–and yet I find myself completely unable to remove it from the list. It’s sad, which I love, and slow, which the list needs, and looking back on disaster, which…just seems to fit. There’s a lot that vibe on the playlist, really.

15. The World You Love, by Jimmy Eat World
“Don’t it feel like sunshine after all?/The world we love forever gone./We’re only just as happy as everyone else seems to think we are.” This is the song you listen to when the sun is shining, and maybe the top is down, and you’re just driving away after the end of the world. Or sailing, as the case may be.

I post a lot of weird not-really-hints about my current writing projects on Twitter and Facebook, but what, exactly, are my current writing projects? There are a ton, so buckle up.

1) Extreme Makeover: Apocalypse Edition
This is, without doubt, the biggest chunk of my time these days. It’s a modern-day science fiction novel, half about cloning and half about corporate and social satire. If you’ve come to any of my signings or events in the past year or so you’ve heard me talk about it. I’ve had to back-burner it twice due to commitments with the Partials series, and I have now a very brief window between finishing Partials #2 and starting Partials #3, so I’m trying to get it completely finished. It’s a weird, weird, awesome book, and I hope you all love it as much as I do, and I hope I can somehow manage to finish it on time.

By the way: I create playlists for every book I write, and the playlist for MAKEOVER is awesome. I don’t know what, if anything, this music will tell you about the book, but I’ll post it for you later this week with some added commentary.

2) I.E.Demon
This is a short story I’m working on for the “Books for Heroes” anthology, being prepared by George Scott of Peerless Book Store as a part of his Books for Heroes charity, which sends books to men and women in the armed forces. It’s a great cause, and I was delighted to be invited, but my ignorance of military life and terminology is showing. Every story in the anthology is a military thriller of some kind, and despite having zero military background I want to make sure I get the details right. I spent a lot of time getting the story more or less intact, then sent the manuscript to friends and friends-of-friends who’ve actually served in Afghanistan. Their notes, when they come in, will inform the next draft significantly, and then I’ll send the story to some non-military writer friends to refine it further.

3) Unnamed Short Story #1
I’m writing another short for the anothology “The Crimson Pact Volume 5,” the only requirement of which is “put some demons in it somewhere.” I haven’t written anything specific yet, but I want to do something related to I.E.Demon, and maybe expand that world a bit.

4) Unnamed Short Story #2
I have the opportunity to participate in another horror anthology, though this one is still kind of up in the air, so I won’t reveal any details. Suffice it to say that it won’t be about demons or military personnel.

5) Unnamed Novella
I just signed a contract to write a novella for a very cool, very specific venue, which unfortunately I’m under an NDA about so I can’t tell you anything. But it’s awesome, and I’m a big geek.

6) Partials #3
Last of all we come to this, the major project that serves as a deadline to everything else. I have to start outlining this in November, at the latest, and writing it in January, so any of this other stuff I can’t finish in time will get crushed under the mighty treads of the Partials world. Or more likely, I’ll end up writing and editing and polishing several different projects all at once. I’ve never had this much work at one time before, which is awesome but kind of terrifying, because I’m really, really concerned about getting it all done on time. I will, I’m just concerned about it. Who needs sleep anyway?

My family is very efficient with birthdays, holding three of our five children’s birthdays all within a three week span at the end of summer (and another one just a month later). (My 9yo is the only outlier, with a birthday in the Spring, and it drives him nuts to watch every kid but him get presents all at once.) Because two of those end-of-summer birthdays are girls, and because we live within a three-hour driving distance of approximately 5 million castles, we decided to celebrate with a trip to arguably the most famous castle in Europe: Neuschwanstein.

The odds are good you’ve seen this castle before, at least in pictures. If you haven’t it might still look familiar because the Disneyland castles are overtly based on it, and with good reason: it was specifically designed to look like an amped up, epic version of a “real” medieval castle. Neuschwanstein (which literally means “New Swan Stone” in German, but really means something like “the new castle built in the Swan region”) was built by King Ludwig II, often called Mad King Ludwig because he was forcibly deposed under accusation of insanity. The history of the castle is kind of wacky, but I’ll distill it down for you: this ridiculously picturesque part of southern Germany, right in the foothills of the Alps, was the home of the Swan Knights, and called the region Schwangau (literally: Swan Region. Not a very imaginative name, but there you go). The foothills of the Alps are pretty steep, really just a few hills and then bam, gigantic Alp mountains, and on one of the tallest hills they built a castle, called Hohenschwangau (High Swan Region) because it was way up on a hill. That castle eventually fell into disuse, probably because of the sheer difficulty of getting up and down the stupid hill, which had a great view and was amazingly defensible but was kind of far away from water and food and the people they were ostensibly supposed to protect. On a smaller hill below it, near two of the three lakes in the region, they built another castle called Schwanstein (Swan Stone).

Fast forward about 600 years, in the mid 1800s, when the various little kingdoms in the region have coalesced into a handful of larger ones, and Schwangau is now a part of Bavaria. King Maximilian II is supposed to live in Munich, the Bavarian seat of power, but he lives in Schwangau because come on, look at it, and his eldest son Ludwig had a perfect view out his window of the old Hohenschwangau ruins–except that somehow, in the intervening 600 years, the castles had switched names, so the “high” castle was now the low one, where Ludwig lived, and the ruins he became obsessed with were now called Schwanstein. When Maximilian died and Ludwig became King Ludwig II, one of his first orders of business was to tear down the Schwanstein ruins and build what he called “a real medieval castle,” which is a weird way of putting it because the castle he tore down already was medieval, and the one he built had running water and electricity. (This is, in its own way, another point of influence for Disney: a sanitization of the past to create a more easily-digestible version for modern audiences.) Ludwig was a wildly romantic person, obsessed with fairy tales and legends and larger-than-life drama (one of his best friends was Richard Wagner), and the castles he built were specifically designed to be fairy tales. For example: when the old Schwanstein was replaced with the New-Schwanstein (see where they got the name?), it contained an artificial cave accessed through a secret door off the king’s private chambers.

And then, of course, Ludwig was declared insane. And the thing is, he may or may not have actually been insane; eccentric, certainly, but nothing pathological. What really happened is that he was deposed by the kingdom’s other leaders, who were sick of him and wanted him out of the way. Why? The first impulse is to assume that he was wildly building castles and opera houses and goodness knows what else–which is true–and in doing so bankrupted the country–which is not. Everything he built, and there was a TON of it, he paid for out of pocket, without once touching the kingdom’s coffers. More likely he was demonized for suspicions of homosexuality, and this theory makes a little more sense because his journals, revealed after his death, show that he actually was a homosexual, so: suspicions confirmed. In life he was super bestest friends with Richard Wagner, who was openly and ecstatically bisexual, so of course that didn’t help Ludwig’s reputation, and then there was his suspicious refusal to get married, which set a lot of tongues a-wagging. What angered his advisors more than anything, however, was not his orientation or or his spending but his single-minded obsession with building more stuff; not because he couldn’t afford it, but because he ignored everything else during a pretty amazingly tumultuous period of German and European history (including, but not limited to, the dissolution of his kingdom as a sovereign nation–that’s kind of a big deal). He designed so many buildings that eventually his architects just gave up making them feasible because they knew he would never have the time or support to actually build them. Bavaria needed a leader, and instead they had a fanatical fairy-tale fanboy obsessed with dressing entire mountain ranges in medieval cosplay. He only lived in Neuschwanstein 170 days (the interior wasn’t even completed) before he was dragged away, incarcerated, and died under incredibly mysterious circumstances: maybe an assassination, or an escape attempt, or a psychotic break, or some combination of all three.

In the end, Neuschwanstein is a whole bunch of paradoxes all jumbled together: it’s a newer version of a castle that it isn’t actually named after. It’s a “real” medieval castle that isn’t remotely medieval, and which destroyed a real medieval one as part of its creation. It’s the proto-typical princess castle and yet never housed a princess. It’s a the dream home of a man who only barely lived in it. It was considered a money pit for decades, yet today it’s one of the most lucrative tourist attractions in the country. It stands now as an emblem of an age it never came from, an ideal so empty they didn’t even have to move anything when they built a giant gift shop inside of it.

One last thing I want to mention: in the photo at the top you can kind of see some weird stuff around the edges of the castle. That’s scaffolding, as the whole thing is currently being restored, piece by piece. This final photo is a view of the back side of the castle, looking up from the trail:

A few weeks ago I posted a formula on Facebook, calculating how many books you’ll read before you die. I’ve been getting some questions about it, so I thought I’d put it here so there’s a permanent link where people can find it. I heard this formula at the World Horror Convention in Brighton, England, from Scott Edelman, who got it from…I can never remember. He said it on a panel, and it’s haunted me ever since, and now it can haunt you.

I’ve simplified the formula a bit for maximum mathiness:
B = the number of books you read in a month
A = your current age
Y = your life expectancy
(Y-A)xBx12 = the number of books you’ll read before you die

So, for example, let’s say you’re me: I’m 35, I read about three books a month, and I’m from Utah (I currently live in Germany, but I just got here, so I’m going to use the Utah number). The American Human Development Project estimates the life expectancy of a Utahn at 80.1 years, which gives us:

(80.1-35)x3x12 = 1623.6 books

For worldwide life expectancy stats, based on country, use this table instead. I used the state-based one because I knew that Utah has a much higher life expectancy than the national average, which is 78.2 (and which drops all the way to 75.6 if you break it down by gender. Men always live noticeably shorter than women, on average). Using the worst possible estimate, 75.6, my number drops to 1461.6.

I was going to round 1623.6 down to 1623, because the thought of dying halfway through a book is pretty depressing, but the more I think about it, the thought of giving up before I reach the end is even more depressing, so I’ll leave the 0.6 on there. I will die with a book in my hand. But even this number isn’t super accurate, because today is not my birthday and I am not, therefore, exactly 35–I’m actually just a few days off of 35.5, which would give me (using the Utah data) 1605.6. I lost 17 books! Have I read those 17 books in the last six months? I’m not sure, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. Maybe my estimate of books per month is too high. If I drop it to two books per month my total becomes 1070.4. Ouch.

We could go on like this all day, tweaking the data, but consider two important things:
1) The number is not exact, and is not intended to be. The point is to give you a general idea of how many books you have left.
2) The only meaningful tweak you can make to the data is to read more books. Living healthier, moving to a country with a higher life expectancy; none of that will change the data as much as just reading one extra book per month.

Actually, consider one more important thing: the only possible reason for putting yourself through this grim mathematical ordeal is to scare yourself, not just into reading more books, but into reading good books. 1623.6 seems like a lot of books, and it’s certainly more than I have in my Goodreads library thus far, but…it’s finite. It seems obvious in hindsight, but I’d never really considered that there was an upper limit on my reading–I want to read everything. But unless I change my habits a bit I’ve only got 1623.6 books left. So yes, by all means, read more books and raise that number, but here’s the even bigger take-away for me: don’t waste any of those precious slots on lame books. Life is too short to force yourself to finish a book you don’t like. Whatever criteria you use, (I usually give a book two chapters before I give up, unless it’s been recommended by a trusted source), as soon as you know a book’s just not doing it for you, drop it and grab another one. Ever since I learned this formula I’ve been an aggressive book-dropper, and I’ve found that not only do I read a lot more, I enjoy the books I actually read a lot more than before. I’m reading more books, and better books, and a wider variety of books, because I’m always searching for my new favorite thing.

After all, if I still have more than half of my reading life ahead of me, the odds are good that my favorite book, and maybe my favorite genre, is something I haven’t even encountered yet.