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.
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?
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.
And this is it. The conclusion of “Interviewing Leather.” And I have to admit, I feel pretty good about it.
Todd Chapman, in the story, is writing an article called ‘Interviewing Leather.’ The subject of that article is the so-named supervillain Leather, who he has been hired to interview. But the novella/serial “Interviewing Leather,” by E. A. Burns, is about Todd Chapman, who finds himself stuck in a situation and learns a few things along the way.
In one sense, this is the end of that story. Todd Chapman isn’t the same person who drove up to Meridian City in part one. In another sense, this is the beginning of Chapman’s story, and I suspect somewhere along the line he’s going to show up again.
I like this ending. I like this story. I’m glad it came out the way it did. And I hope you like it too.
I have no idea what I’m going to do next week.
A bit late, but here’s the third part of “Homecoming,” here in The Home Front. This particular file got corrupted, so I didn’t have any choice but to rewrite about half of it, which put things off a bit. And here we are!
Of course, it occurs to me that Greg Fishbone, my former editor, children’s author, and man about town, might well have a copy of the file sitting on a zip disk somewhere. On the other hand, I think he has better ways to spend his time than coming up with my old crap for these purposes.
Anyway, here then is the third chapter in our story. I hope you like it. And yeah, I know full well there’ll be theories on what the All American Lad could have done differently. Just keep it to 1946 technology, if you will. ;)
As the title says, this is my entry to mckenzee’s Sinister Bedfellows: Anthology. The idea behind the book was simple enough. The prospective authors would go through the webcomic, find a strip that spoke to them, and write a short-short about it. mckenzee would then put them all together and self-publish through lulu.
It was fun, and I was happy to agree. I searched the strip, and found the exact one I would want to use.
Namely, this one:
Which would be great except Rob Callahan grabbed it before I could, which means I couldn’t write that story. I’m tempted to so anyway.
This is the actual story I contributed. It’s based on the strip from April 10, 2005. And it’s probably a better story than I would have written for the self-portrait strip. It is indeed a short-short, under a thousand words long, so it won’t take you long to get through it.
I’d encourage folks to have a look both at Sinister Bedfellows and the anthology. It’s a nice little book with some nice vignettes and short stories in it, and it’s a nice hook that’s a little more interesting than a simple print collection of the strips might be. And mckenzee’s eye and viewpoint (not always the same thing) are very cool.
So. Here’s my entry, preceded by the strip. Please enjoy!
Part thirteen of “Interviewing Leather.” This is, if anything, denouement and epilogue, and a chance for some voices on the other side of the fence to chime in on a few of the points Leather herself made. It also sets up the last part, which should come out next week. God knows what we’ll replace Leather with.
In the end, if there’s one thing that I think has come clear in this series, it’s that Leather isn’t quite as simple as she appears on the surface.
Regardless, when it’s over I’m going to miss Todd, Leather, Marco and the gang. We’ll have to see what comes next.
Enjoy!
Man, I love autumn. I just do, and you can’t stop me. And hand in hand with loving autumn please enjoy this myth. It comes to us from reader teckstphyle, who asks:
Why is there a disconnect between Art and Industry? Why can art not be “useful?” Why can’t industry “inspire?”
More correctly, why are few cases where they overlap the exception and not the rule?
It’s a good question, and one I’m happy to answer. It also leads us to our first myth callback, because we actually touched on this, at least briefly, back on July 9, when we answered the question Why can we walk past beautiful artwork without noticing it?.
The answer, as you’ll recall, involved a union dispute.
And that brings us to today’s myth.
A week and a half wait. And (with the possible exception of the Dynamo Girl leg) the most anticipated part of the interview so far. Part twelve of “Interviewing Leather.” It’s also four thousand words long.
I hope folks like it.
We also (finally) have some fan art to put up. The first comes from Brian Stinson, based on Katie Tandler’s art, and is called Leather the Series. Click on it to see it in full size — and you want to see it in full size:
The second is from old friend of the writing Tephlon, who — like quite a few of the readers — really enjoyed Leather’s Dynamo Girl turn. So here she is in all her lycra glory!
Beyond that, please enjoy! With luck we’ll be back on Tuesday next week, and things will be cheerfully normal.
And yes. That means this is not the last part.
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| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
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| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
