So. It’s all the fault of Gary Olson.

Gary, for those of you who don’t know the name, is perhaps the best of the old Superguy writers. His series were well done, with the appropriate blend of humor and pathos. And he managed to actually finish them. He finished Rad. He finished CalForce. He finished Radian and Shadebeam.

We all hated Gary.

Well, fourteen months ago, out of nowhere, Gary posted a new episode of Rad to Superguy. It was… well, all the years later that it’s actually been. Rad, a hero of the eighties — since that’s when Gary wrote Rad — returned to Earth to find things were different. He was older. Mighty Guy and Meltdown had had a kid.

At the time, I was tempted to do the same with my own series… though unlike Gary, I hadn’t finished my own series, Adjusted League Unimpeachable.

(It’s worth noting, at the time I wrote ALU, there hadn’t been any “Justice League” comic or cartoon that ended in ‘Unlimited.’ I don’t know if that ruins the already lame joke in the name, or if it actually makes it suck less. Either way, it hardly matters at this point.)

Now, I have a good writing life now. I have superhero stuff I can do. If I ever really, really have the urge to revisit the old Superguy stuff, I could post it in Mythic Heroes, right? I have Justice Wing beyond that. And plenty of non superhero things I really need to be writing.

And then, for the first time in fourteen months, Gary posted another Rad episode to Superguy.

God damn Gary Olson.

So now I had to write a Superguy post. Which I’ve done. And that ate into my time for writing something for today, so guess what you get?

This is a first episode post, so it’s possible you’ll be able to follow along. It’s also possible none of this will make any sense to you. That’s okay too.

Just understand. Superguy is, at its heart, a satire. As is this. A satire of superheroes, and of popular culture. And in this case, of a video game.

I’ll try to get a ‘notes’ comment in, though I drive to Ottawa tomorrow, so maybe not.

Regardless, please enjoy.

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Another fragment. Another incomplete story. Distinctive this time because A) I have absolutely no recollection of writing it (though it’s clearly something I wrote) and B) I have absolutely no idea where I was going with it. But it seems interesting to me.

In a way, it’s more stock than a lot of what I’ve written, particularly for fantasy. At the same time, there’s more of a horror dimension than a lot of my fantasy work.

It’s also distinctive because it’s one of the few stories to involve Fort Baxter, a fictional Maine town along the Canadian border, meant to be my home town of Fort Kent with serial numbers filed sort of off and a fresh coat of paint over it.

I think I probably wrote this while I was finishing up college. I was really into the idea of language critical theory/linguistic critical theory/the sign-significator-significated trichotomy for a while then. I’m a little surprised this isn’t more pretentious than it is as a result.

Apropos of nothing, the lead is named Karin MacDougal.  In 1997, a Karen McDougal became a somewhat more-famous-than-usual Playboy Playmate and then Playmate of the Year. From the tone of this piece, I believe it was written at least four and possibly more years before 1997, so despite the name, this is not an homage to a hot chick.

Also apropos of nothing, I used to make homemade hot cocoa like is described in here.

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It’s always interesting to go from “the plan” to the execution. Scenes you think will be long and drawn out turn out to be perfunctory. Scenes you figured wouldn’t go anywhere will recast your series in an entirely new light. The characters in your notes come to life and start making noises at you. Sometimes, you doubt your sanity.

Someone asked me the difference between Leather and Lady Velvet. Well, there are a few. For one, Lady Velvet started out wanting to be a villain.

But the major difference between the pair is something close to twenty years. There are times age doesn’t matter at all. I have a lot of friends who weren’t even alive when I was their age. They’re fun and funny and sometimes a lot smarter than I am.

And sometimes, it matters. More than you might like to admit, it matters.

We haven’t had a chance to see any more of the good old days just yet, but that’s on the horizon. For now, though — please enjoy today’s chapter of Vilify 5.

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When we go back to stuff I wrote in the past, moving forward, I think we’ll call it “From the Vault.” That’s the sort of thing we’ll do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on those Tuesdays and Thursdays we actually do something.

This is a fragment — an incomplete chapter one of a book never written, dating back to the early 90′s. As with pretty much every science fiction writer who was once twenty, this was the beginning of my dystopia novel. Back in the days when I figured I was going to graduate school as a matter of course, I had seriously considered Utopia and Dystopia as a concentration and field of study. I was considering that alongside 19th and 20th Century American Poetry, of course. It never entered my head to go for a Ph.D. in the Modern Superhero Story, which is a pity since that’s what I’d clearly be able to nail.

To that end, I started writing my dystopia. I called it America the Beautiful, because I was very, very earnest about it. This was going to be a call to arms — a warning for the ages that would rank with Brave New World and 1984.

You know. Just like all the other dystopias out there.

Well, I never got out of the first chapter. But rereading the first chapter I’m a little amazed — as unsubtle as the title was, the opening, the establishment of tone and character… it’s better than I expected when I went back to reread this. I’m actually moderately interested in what Thomas’s story would turn out to be.

Not that we’ll ever find out. At least, if I ever pick this up, it’ll be significantly different than whatever I intended fifteen years ago.

There is one thing I like in this, as well. To me, a good dystopia — I mean, a really good and scary one — had to be compelling. You had to get the sense that the people living in that society were perfectly content to live in that society. I didn’t believe 1984 would ever happen for the sheer fact that if the entire world was uncomfortable and unhappy, someone would do something about it in a power bid. Brave New World was far more likely, because as scary as that would was, you could believe the people living in it enjoyed themselves. And when people were happy, they weren’t rebelling against the social order.

Anyhow. Here it is. I hope you like it.

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It was a week of system issues and exhaustion, but that is done and now it’s Myth Time again, and with a little luck we’ll be on the full on normal schedule again starting this week. Starting off, we’re going back to Banter Latte pal CrazyDave, who asks us:

Why have people stopped wearing watches and started dragging mobiles out of their pocket to check the time?

It’s something lots of people do. I do it myself. But it’s not ubiquitous. Lots of wristwatches are still out there and still being checked. Which makes it interesting, because it’s one of those rare things: a behavior in transition.

Which gives us something to talk about.

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One of the interesting things about writing something like Justice Wing is the kind of story you get to write. It’s hard to convince a publisher to let you write a comic book about this guy who interviews a supervillain for a week, with very little in the way of action scenes, for example. Not if you’re not already Kurt Busiek, Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis.

And, in case you haven’t figured it out, I’m not any of those people. Nor do I have much hope of ever becoming any of them.

But, when you’re writing full on fiction, without pictures… you can write human stories about superhumans. For example, this one.

This story actually predates “Interviewing Leather” in short story form. This is an expansion of said short story, to better fit the mosaic novel style thing I seem to be building. And it follows out of last week’s prologue in ways that should be obvious.

This is a story about supervillains and superculture, sure. But it’s also a story about fans, cons, con culture, and whatever else seemed to fit. It tells a story (I hope) and sets up a few other stories (I hope), and I hope you like it.

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As promised, this is the first official Justice Wing post, appropriately named “Prologue.” It sets up a few things, gives you some better idea of who the players are and how long they’ve been at this, and… well, gives us something to go from.

Which is, in the end, what a prologue is supposed to do.

I hope you like it.

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And good morning… to you.

Today’s myth comes to us from “zeruslord” (who, I am given to understand, is Lord of Zerus, and there is no doubt one does not want to be on the bad side of the Lord of Zerus, so you’ll understand if I answer the request, I trust. Mythologists have to err on the side of caution where Locii are involved). And zeruslord asks:

why do humans have cities and suburbs? I’m mostly talking about the outermost suburbs, like how all of New Jersey is a suburb of New York, and people are commuting from Front Royal into DC, and Los Angeles exists at all. Why are people willing to drive for hours to get to their job? why don’t the jobs move out faster?

It is a good question, really. After all, cities were meant to centralize humanity, giving them greater access to work, goods and services. So, why would men, women and families intentionally go farther afield, sacrificing convenience and adding hours to their workday in the form of “the commute?” Why would they restrict their potential mass transit options to what is in their suburb (or to their car), despite the price of gasoline and maintenance and the environmental impact and all the rest? What, in the end, is the deal?

Well, you probably shouldn’t be surprised to learn it’s all thanks to a jurisdictional dispute. So let’s leap right into it, shall we?

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We’re continuing the monthly tradition by soliciting the myths you want to see written. It’s a lot like how on Mythbusters they solicit fan requests on the site, only on Mythbusters they solicit urban legends that the fans want to watch the team debunk while blowing things up and possibly being injured in the process, while here you come up with questions or aspects of day to day life you’d like to have explained in wholly unscientific and fantastic ways. Also, I have all my hair and don’t own a beret.

Now, understand — if your myth doesn’t get told within the span of the month, that doesn’t mean we throw the myth away. I’m still going back through all the myth calls to see what one to cover next in our little journeys through the lands of legend. But it’s still fun to see new and exciting myths being solicited. So get in on the fun!

Please. It’s lonely here without you.

Right, we’re going to call this week, excepting the end of “Interviewing Leather,” a vacation week. Which makes a little sense. I’ve done a lot of writing since June, and between that and the start of school, it’s probably at least a little lucky my brain hasn’t exploded from the heat.

Next week, we’ll launch back into things. Call it the new fall season, hot off the heels of a successful midseason replacement. However, I’m going to tweak things a little bit here and there, and this post will tell you exactly how I’m doing that.

First off, you’ll notice that posts now have tags underneath them (though I haven’t finished going through the archives and tagging things. I guess that’s what I’m doing for the rest of the week). At Wednesday’s suggestion, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.3, and I’m reorganizing the way I’m doing things. See, the category system is good for general things, but when you drill down to actual titles and storylines, you end up with way too many categories.

So, here’s how it’s going to go. I’ll continue to categorize things by general category. I’ll also tag them, and be pretty liberal with the tags. For serials and continuing stories, one of the tags will always be the title of the story — you can click on the tag and get links to all chapters of a given story.

As an example? I give you the Interviewing Leather page, automatically arranged by the eudaemons of network management and database schemae: http://banter-latte.annotations.com/tag/interviewing-leather/. It does about ten posts a page, so make use of the “previous entries” link at the bottom of the page to get the whole story.

At the same time, I’m going to be liberal about tagging — part of the point of the tags is the ability to make bizarre connections, and unlike Categories they’re very freeform. So you’ll see some tags like “coffee” show up, where I’d never do a category like that. Mostly I’ll try to have fun with it.

Secondly, we have our new Schedule of posts!

Why a new schedule? Because I was getting close to a brain hemorrhage before. The idea was I would do three major posts a week, before. Then, when I wasn’t looking, Leather and Chapman exploded.

So, here’s the schedule as it now stands:

Mondays will continue to be Myth days, and will return next week. As one of the two most popular things on here, it’s not about to go away. Besides, I like writing it.

Wednesdays are now going to be Justice Wing days. Yeah, the limited series did well so now we’re picking up a commitment. I have a master plan for it that I’d like to flesh out. There’s a number of longer stories I want to do, and some shorter ones, and “this” and “that.” My current plan is to take some of the longer stories I have planned in the pipeline — like The Death of Paragon and Crossing the Rubicon — and break them up into shorter “chapters” which themselves will then be broken up into weekly chunks about the size of the individual Leather posts. So, we might do a six part chapter of The Death of Paragon, then do a 1-3 part short story, then do a five part chapter of Crossing the Rubicon, then… well, you get the point. It’s an experiment. And by the end of it, I should have several books’ worth of stories actually more or less done.

As a side note, there are about three different plans being pursued right now for a dead trees version of “Interviewing Leather,” involving some nice value-adds. One of which actually involves an interested small press publishing company. Which blows my mind when you figure part one started with me saying “I have no idea where I could publish this.”

Fridays are now the Storytelling day. These are going to be short stories and multi-part serials in a variety of genres and fictional universes. For example, Homecoming will finish up on Fridays to begin with (under the Mythic Heroes tag, naturally). While there will be some superheroing, this is mostly going to be where science fiction, fantasy, horror, contemporary fiction, magic realism, surrealism — you know, stuff goes.

Weekends are going to be the new home for Protected Novel Chapters. It’s like a bonus premium you get in your cereal box. I can’t swear there will be a chapter every week — it’s actually significantly harder to write a chapter of Theftworld than it is to write a chapter of “Interviewing Leather” — but the whole point of this exercise was to get me to write a novel chapter a week, and I’m going to at least try to accomplish that.

There will also be the monthly Myth Calls on the first weekend of each month. Just because I enjoy those and people seem to like them.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are getting way scaled back. The idea originally was that these were random and optional, and we’re going back to that. No more continuing stories on those days, for example. If I decide to post more bits and pieces of my writing past, this is where it will go. Ditto poetry or vignettes that come to me. I may give Mason Kramer’s Kayble form a try one of these Tuesdays or Thursday, for example.

And there may be essays about writing, or about the backstory and/or structure of my other stories. Discussions of the myths or the like. Annotations and notes. Some of those — like this post — will be crossposted to Websnark because that’s the Nonfiction hangout. Though I’m not entirely sure anyone over there would be that interested in this stuff. Who can tell? Not me, that’s for sure.

Finally, I’m beginning to ponder merchandising. Beyond the potential Dead Tree Leather, mind. I’ve never been overly enamored of the Cafepress tee shirts but some of their other stuff is cool. Their coffee mugs are primo, for example. (I’ve had some of them for years, now.) If you have any thoughts on what you might want to see on a tchotchke, chime in in the comments if you will.

And finally, thank you for reading. Seriously. It makes all the difference in the world to have someone on the other side of these things.