I like pie.

In particular, I like key lime pie. There’s really nothing like a good slice of key lime pie. Don’t believe me? Have some! Try some! Key lime pie is delicious.

This is not to say that all key lime pie is good. In fact, the great majority of key lime pie is made from cheap artificial ingredients. More often than not, it’ll be colored radioactive green. This is a real pet peeve of mine. Do people think key lime pie is supposed to be radioactive green? Do the manufacturers of the pie just not care either way? Oh, well. Even if 90% of the key lime pie out there is crap, that means 10% is still scrumptious… you just need to know where to find it.

Naturally, there are many people out there who don’t like key lime pie. “I only like strawberry pie,” they say. Or, “I like all kinds of pie, but key lime pie, not so much.” Or, “You know, I don’t really like pie at all.” Maybe they’ve never had key lime pie. Or maybe they tried key lime pie and hated it — probably because they ordered the radioactive green crap that you get at Denny’s. Maybe they don’t know that there’s good key lime pie out there. But that’s okay! You can’t run around forcing people to try key lime pie. Key lime pie is delicious, but obviously it’s not for everybody.

Although most people have a live-and-let live attitude when it comes to pie, there are some notable exceptions. The most interesting case is blueberry pie. Certain fans of blueberry pie have decided that not only is their personal favorite the only pie worth eating — that’s not so unusual — but they’ve gone so far as to rename their favorite pie as “goodberry pie”. Notice how clever this is. The intrinsic superiority of goodberry pie is, shall we say, baked in to the name itself.

This branding effort has proved remarkably successful. Many pastry chefs and restaurants proudly proclaim that they only make goodberry pie — and is there any other kind of pie, really? The idea that everything other than goodberry pie isn’t worth eating has spawned an entire industry. Eminent university professors who teach Pie Analysis and Pie Creation, critics at the New York Times Pie Review and the London Review of Pie, they all treat goodberry pie as the only “serious” pie.

And this makes fans of goodberry pie perfectly happy. After all, part of the appeal of being a goodberry pie fan is being able to think of yourself as a goodberry pie fan: someone who is sophisticated enough to know that goodberry pie is the only pie worthy of mention. If you press a goodberry pie fan, they might sheepishly admit to eating key lime pie or strawberry pie, but only as a “guilty pleasure”. If you are a serious pie consumer, you are supposed to stick monogamously to goodberry pie and not pollute your palate with other, naughty kinds of pie. Goodberry pie is a harsh mistress.

All this chest-thumping over goodberry pie would be harmless, except that the goodberry marketing campaign has confused a lot of well-intentioned fans of other kinds of pie. After all, the word “good” is right there in the name of the pie! If key lime pie were any good, wouldn’t it be called “good lime pie” or something? Some fans and creators of key lime pie have absorbed this marketing message to such an alarming degree that they have developed a full-blown inferiority complex. “Most key lime pie is gross and nasty and radioactive green,” they say, correctly. “So how can we make ‘Goodberry Key Lime Pie’?”

But this is asking the wrong question! The right question is, “How can we make better key lime pie?” You can’t blame people for forgetting that like all other pies, 90% of goodberry pie is just awful — after all, the goodberry marketing industry exists to obscure this very point. But rather than bemoaning the fact that key lime pie is not goodberry pie, it would be better to spend our time examining the universal qualities that make all pies delicious. Fresh ingredients! Love and care! A thin, flaky crust! The very best goodberry pies have plenty to teach us, but the end goal is not to smush goodberry pie and key lime pie together: it’s to produce the very best key lime pie we can.

I like pie.

We interrupt our dissection of bad movies to bring you this announcement: I’ve been accepted to Viable Paradise! This is a fantastic opportunity to tap into the wisdom of some awesome, well-respected writers and editors in the SF field, and meet 23 other fresh new faces. So I am totally stoked. According to my careful study of the traffic on the Viable Paradise mailing list, the accepted exclamation of excitement over one’s acceptance is apparently, “squee!” However, cautious little ol’ me, I’m going to stick with the traditional exclamation of my people,^[1] “w00t!” That’s just how I roll.

1. By which I mean “video gamers” rather than “Jews”, of course. Are Ashkenazic Jews even allowed to have happy exclamations?

Lance Mannion, guest-blogging for Prof. Michael “Danger” Berube, has posted an interesting essay on tragic heros vs. flawed heros.^[1] Mannion’s distinction between “tragic” and merely “flawed” heroes is that tragic heroes have deep vices and can truly sin, while we know that flawed heroes are always “the good guys” no matter what they do. Tragic hero: Hamlet. Flawed hero: Jack Bauer.

For his part, Mannion regrets the loss of the tragic hero:

I think something important was lost when the tragic hero disappeared from our storytelling, and the rise of the “flawed” hero isn’t a real or satisfying replacement, especially since so many of the flaws are actually tricks to make us like and admire the hero all the more and forgive him whatever apparently bad things his job calls upon him to do.

Although I take his point, I think we need both kinds of heros, particularly since I find tragic heros to be less realistic than the flawed hero. The tragic hero’s epic vices inevitably bring his entire world crashing down around his ears. Thrilling to read about, sure. But realistic? Real life just doesn’t seem to have that kind of delicious symmetry. The real-life hero has ordinary flaws that sometimes interfere with his or her heroic goals, but often don’t impede those goals at all.

Of course, we can all come up with examples of real-life historical figures whose epic vices inevitably doomed everything they had worked for… but in most of those cases, the person in question has actually crossed the line and gone right over to villainy. For example, I’ve heard Richard Nixon described as a classic tragic hero, but based on my cursory readings of the guy’s real historical actions, color me skeptical on the “hero” part.

As for the disappearance of the tragic hero in modern literature, Mannion seems quite right, although I think we still have some remnants. Here are some examples off the top of my head:

• Morpheus in The Sandman. I just re-read The Kindly Ones and once again I found it breathtaking to see that sprawling series’s myriad plot threads gather together into their inevitable conclusion. Note that the conclusion would never have happened if any of those disconnected threads had gone differently. And Morpheus’s flaws were directly responsible for kicking off every one of them.

• William Munney in Unforgiven. At first glance, this might look like a standard grim-and-gritty western with your standard anti-hero — played by Clint Eastwood, even! But don’t be fooled — this is a story where everyone’s fundamental flaws, including Munney’s, inevitably lead to deeply tragic results all around. My only qualm about calling Munney a tragic hero is that Munney himself isn’t actually destroyed at the end; he doesn’t die, and he doesn’t remain a monster. If we believe the movie, he returned home and continued doing his best to be a decent father. Ideally, he would have rode off and drank himself to death instead of returning to his kids. But you can’t have everything.

• Darth Vader is a possibility. Yes, I know, I know the Joseph Campbell stuff was layered on with a thick trowel as an afterthought. And I know Lucas’s execution of the tale… leaves something to be desired. Still, we’ve got the elements, don’t we? Anakin’s epic flaws -> the destruction of interstellar democratic rule! No wait, actually that was Jar-Jar. Never mind.

• Someone in Mannion’s comments thread mentioned Vic Mackey from The Shield. The events of Season 5 are promising in this regard — finally Vic’s sins from the first episode are causing everything to start unravelling! But we won’t know for sure until the show wraps. For all we know, Vic will end up on a Caribbean beach under an assumed name, sipping Mai-Tais. Likewise for The Sopranos — Tony’s greed is epic, but we don’t know yet whether it’s sufficient to bring everything crashing down.

1. Props to Mr. Mannion for his title and intro. I loved the Spenser books when I first found them on my parents’ shelf. And I had forgotten about his Galahad quote. I wonder how I can work that one into casual conversation?

Good news / bad news. The good news was that I scored tickets last week to see a Margaret Atwood interview in the city. The bad news was that the interviewer chose to spend his time asking endless variations on, “What does it mean to you to be a Feminist Writer?” and “What does it mean to you to be a Canadian Writer?” God forbid he might have taken a few precious minutes away from compartmentalizing Atwood to, you know, talk about about her books.

Not that Atwood didn’t try her best to steer the interview back on track. First, she mentioned in passing that when her first novel came out way back in 1969, interviewers liked to pepper her with Caveman Era questions about being a Feminist Writer. (“Do you like men?” “Do men like you?”). We all chuckled at this, but the subtext went right over the interviewer’s head. So Atwood tried talking about movements in general: “It’s a mistake for a writer to be part of an ‘ism’, because eventually you’ll write something that makes the people in the ‘ism’ really upset.” No dice there, either. Finally, Atwood tried a bold gambit: short-circuiting the interviewer. Look, she said, “women deserve equal rights under the law and equal pay for equal work.” End of discussion. The whole evening had the polite tension of a bad date. Someone should have called out, “Dude! She’s just not that into you.”

To be fair, Atwood was a bit more responsive to the “Canadian Writer” line of questioning. One part that I remember — she was talking about how hard it is for Canadians to define their own identity, in large part due to the torrent of media coming from the United States. Apparently, some years ago a Canadian radio show solicited listeners to help complete the phrase, “As Canadian as … “, the equivalent of “As American as apple pie.”^[1] The winner of the contest was, “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”

If the interview had any real value, it was as meta-lesson: by putting up with incredibly boorish behavior without losing her temper, Atwood managed to personify the Canadian national character for nearly two hours. Believe me, it’s not just Atwood — it’s a Canadian phenomenon, and I have the data to prove it. See, years ago, I worked for a couple^[2] of weeks as a customer service rep, assisting a mostly Canadian customer base on the phone. Unfortunately for the Canadians, I was working for one of the Most Evil Software Corporations Ever, Computer Associates. If you work outside the IT industry, you might not even have heard of this particular evil software conglomerate, so I’ve included a handy ranking of software companies for your reference:

1. Google (by definition)
2. The Omni Group
3. Pixar                    ^
4. Flickr                   |
5. SGI                      |
                            |     
...                        GOOD 

...                        EVIL 
                            |
660. McAfee                 |
661. IBM Global Services    |
662. DoubleClick            v
663. ENCOM
664. Computer Associates
665. Diebold
666. those guys who create zombie networks 
     and rent them to the Russian mafia

Back in the day, Computer Associates had a small-business tax software product with a mostly Canadian customer base. Every tax season, Computer Associates mailed out floppies (yes, really) containing tax updates. This system was working fine until one day, the company got the bright idea to take everyone who had been receiving tax updates and force them into paying for an “upgrade program”. Oh, and they also “forgot” to tell all their customers about the changed policy.^[3]

So imagine you’re a Canadian small business owner around tax time. You’re waiting for your tax updates, and they’re not arriving. Finally, fighting a rising sense of panic, you call Computer Associates. After waiting on hold for anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours, you reach a cheerful customer service rep who informs you that you need to pay extra protection money if you want to be able to file your taxes on time this year. The difference in reactions was astonishing: nearly every Canadian said something like, “Oh, geez, that’s not so good,” while every USAian reacted by screaming. (Naturally, it was the screamers who got escalated up the chain and who got free updates.)

Where were we? Oh, right, Margaret Atwood. Well, she did the best she could under the circumstances, and I guess that’s that. I really should have gone up to her afterwards and asked her about this fascinating Canadian character trait, this preternatural calm that resists all provocation. I once asked a Canadian physics grad student about it, and he nodded and said that it was probably due to dealing with the Canadian government on the phone. That explanation seems too mundane; my theory is that it’s some sort of Canadian superpower, caused by increased radiation exposure near the polar regions. But really, it’s anyone’s guess.

1. Yes, yes, we all know that apple pie is really German.

2. As in “exactly two“.

3. This brings us to Goer’s Corollary to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by malice, when money is involved.”

Today our group had a lunchtime debate on the meaning of the word “couple”. Does it mean “two and only two”, or can it mean “three or four”? The debate spilled over into email, which is never a good sign. One coworker wrote:

The first link Ryan posted also explained the difference between saying “a couple of” vs. referring directly to a couple in the context of two people acting as a couple. “couple of” and “couple” have two different meanings. This is why English sucks.

Which is totally unfair. All languages have words that change meaning when the context changes. Most languages have words that change meaning when the grammar changes slightly. And some languages have words that change meaning with pitch — yikes!

Of course with the bait this obvious, it would have been silly for me to respond with a vigorous defense of the English language. Not to mention that I actually agree with my coworker’s conclusion, if not his reasoning. Fortunately, another coworker came up with an ironclad rebuttal:

Along the same lines you could claim that Perl sucks, which is
obviously wrong.

And Mike wins the thread! Personally, I’m in the camp that believes “a couple” means strictly “two”. Although I suppose it can mean “three” for very small values of three.

Thanks for seeing me. No, don’t get up. Oh, thanks, I’ve been good. How’s Linda doing? Awesome.

Heh, that’s what I like about you, man. Always down to business. Okay, here goes:

There’s this guy, see, and he plays in this tiny little club in Podunkville that nobody’s ever heard of. You can’t find it on any map, it’s totally underground. Now sure, there are a lot of bands that play this place, but they’re all just retreading old shit. You know, dinosaurs. But this guy? He’s different. He’s a beast. He’s the fucking King. Anyway, even though it’s a small place that no one’s ever heard of, the natives, like, worship him. It’s all, like, his own private little island. Know what I’m saying?

Now, what happens is, this sleazy producer hears about this place one day, you know the type — heh, right back atcha, man! — anyway, this really extra-sleazy producer type finds the place and brings his crew to check out the local talent. And this guy just blows ’em away. They can’t believe what they’re seeing. They’ve got to have him. So they bring him to the city…

How do they get him to the city? Oh, you know, the usual. Drugs, of course. And a hot chick. I’m thinking a Rachel McAdams type… well, anyway. That’s not so important.

The point is, they bring him to the city. And the sleazy producer was dead-on, the dude is a mega-star. No one’s ever seen anything this big before. But it’s not all wine and roses, you know what I’m saying? First off, the contract — well, you know how these things work. The guy is basically a slave. And he’s feeling trapped, you know, like he’s in a cage. He’s not the same artist he was before. He’s not the fucking King anymore. So what does he do?

He escapes his handlers! Breaks out! Goes on a fuckin’ rampage. Wrecks half the city!

What happens next? Well you know the rest. He takes on the city, the city destroys him. Fin. Tale as old as time.

Aha. Yeah. Well, okay, I hear that. No, I realize you’ve got a bunch of biopics coming up, but this isn’t really a — no, I understand. No, that’s cool, makes sense. I mean, I think it’s got some appeal in the tween market, but if you don’t think — yeah, okay. Hey, I just appreciate you hearing me out, you know what I’m saying? Thanks, you too. Let’s get lunch sometime soon. Excellent. Talk to you later. Give my best to Linda…

Wait, what’s that? Sorry, I didn’t catch that, say again?

Do I think there’s some way… to work in a monkey?

“I do have a cause, though. It’s obscenity. I’m for it.” – Tom Lehrer

I’ve been flipping through some of the fantasy novels from my youth, the big medieval fantasy paperweight novels — you know, those books. One interesting characteristic they share is that there is very little swearing. Oh, there’s indirect swearing. “Lord Kelvin muttered a vile oath” or “Kazragh the Bold cursed in impotent rage” or some such. But throughout the entire 5,000 page series, there’s not a “fuck” or “shit” to be found. Why is that? It’s not like this is protecting the delicate ears of our children. Explicit sex scenes? Check. Impalings? Check. Desanguinations, decapitations, massacres? Check, check, check. Foul language? Weirdly excised.

Science fiction does much better on this account. Yes, certain novels have experimented with silly made-up “futuristic” swear words^[1], but for the most part, science fiction has its act together. And of course, there are many fine counter-examples of medieval fantasy authors that use foul language and use it well, such as Glen Cook and Steven Brust. Still, a huge chunk of medieval fantasy simply has no swearing at all. Unfortunately, this has infected my writing style. I’ll start writing, “[Character X] cursed…” and then I’ll stop. Wait, wouldn’t it be better to write down what Character X actually said? Is there a good reason to be indirect here? Usually not.

Real medieval people (like real Old West people) no doubt swore a lot, maybe even more than we do. Now clearly, medieval fantasy characters should not think and act like 21st-century North Americans — for starters, they’re probably speaking a completely alien language. It’s just that in the author’s “translation” to Modern English, they ought to sound natural to us. Leaving out all the swear words is just as big a mistake as using stilted “high medieval” dialogue.

Anyway, the upshot is that I’m still confused about why medieval fantasy usually has explicit sex, always has very explicit violence, but tends to elide the coarse language. What is it about medieval fantasy that makes it different from other genres, such as science fiction, thrillers, mysteries, or even non-medieval fantasy?

1. You could always argue that the language has evolved, and words such as “frelling” are incredibly shocking to people in the 25th century or whatnot. However, I submit that the only reason you should inject new words into the language is to evoke a particular feeling in your 21st century reader, not your imaginary 25th century characters. And in this 21st century reader, “frelling” evokes the feeling that your tough-as-nails space mercenary is a wussie who wouldn’t survive a five minute stroll in downtown Los Altos.

So I didn’t quite make my NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words last month. But there are two pieces of good news. First, I learned that even if you don’t hit 50,000, you still get to go to the party at the end. Second, NaNoWriMo is not over for me — I’m adding another 50,000 words in December. And this time I have a coach, who is authorized to do everything up to and including taking away all World of Warcraft privileges if I don’t meet each weekly goal. Fear is a powerful motivator…

A little over a month ago, I mentioned offhandedly to M’ris that I had gotten sucked into NaNoWriMo this year. The point of NaNoWriMo is not to write the best possible 50,000 words in the month of November, it’s simply to bust through the 50,000 word barrier. Try as I might, I’ve never been able to come home from a day of writing and spend a few hours writing some more. So I’m hoping that NaNoWriMo will help me establish new writing habits and leverage the Magic of the Deadline. M’ris, of course, does not need such artificial aids to increase her word output — perish the thought! But she did helpfully suggest some light reading, and after incorporating her suggestions, the final reading list for the month included:

• Land of the Firebird by Suzanne Massie
• Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History by Charles J. Halperin
• The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture by James H. Billington
• The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen (outstanding)
• Medieval Swordsmanship: Illustrated Methods and Techniques by John Clements
• The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin by Adam Hochschild
• and for flavor, The Black Company by Glen Cook

Not to mention a re-read of nearly every book on fiction writing that I own, including titles by John Gardiner, Orson Scott Card, Melissa Scott, Stephen King, and Cory Doctorow (The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, a steal at $2.99 in the bargain bin). I skipped re-reading Ursula Le Guin (no time, sadly) and Norman Mailer (he was a gasbag the first time around, and seemed unlikely to improve with age).

The tricky part about this project is that while I know how to plan and write a large technical manual, writing a novel is quite different. For example, when writing a technical manual, you never discover halfway through that, “uh oh — the Session Tracking API wouldn’t really ever behave that way, would she?” Then again, engineers seem to enjoy changing the specifications mere days before Code Complete, so maybe technical writing really isn’t so different from fiction writing after all.

Needless to say, the tight deadline means cutting a few corners in the planning process. I suspect that failing to plan in fiction writing is roughly as successful a strategy as failing to plan in technical writing. As I said above, this is not going to be the best 50,000 words I could possibly write. On the other hand, this is not going to be a 50,000 word freewrite either. Wish me luck.

Recently I’ve been remiss in my postings, but never mind that. I return triumphant!

1. This year for Thanksgiving I made the turkey, the stuffing, Grandma Goer’s gravy, and a pumpkin pie. All from scratch. All delicious.^[1] With all due modesty, I rule.

2. The Why I Hate Aliens anthology is finally out!^[2] The WIHA anthology includes my short story “Watercooler“, plus fourteen other crackling good SF tales. Here’s what our editor Marissa Lingen had to say in the introduction:

   You would think it would be depressing to read well over a hundred stories about hating anything, aliens or not. Actually, it was heartening, because I learned something very important.

   Science fiction writers aren’t very good at just hating people.

   Which works out just fine with me — I never intended for this to be a bitter anthology, and I hope you don’t find it to be one. Instead, there’s a lot of frustration, a lot of self-discovery, and a few chuckles. There are even a few evil, exploitative aliens lurking around corners, shooting humans with Nerf guns or worse. You’ll find out about someone very much like Rush Limbaugh, and someone inspired by David Bowie, and someone frustrated by Jerry Garcia. There will be pheromones and experimental subjects and interspecies politics and really, really, really bad dates.

   But we, we as science fiction writers and fans, seem to have moved away from the view of aliens as beings with whom communication is impossible, leaving only mutual annihilation. We may get really mad at our aliens, but we have the chance to yell at them, to negotiate, to learn from them, and even to
   become like them.

   Enjoy yourself. I know I did.

   So there you have it, folks. For a mere $3.00, this beautiful 60,000 word PDF can be yours — just in time for the holidays. Go forth and read it. You’ll be glad you did.^[3]

Update 10-Dec-2003: Alert reader Luke Reeves has informed me that that our PDF distributor is using an SSL certificate signed by “SuperWebHost.com“… which is, shall we say, not a standard trusted authority. So if you try to buy the PDF, your browser will probably pop up a warning about this. Speaking personally, I’m not keen on purchasing from sites with certificates signed by unknown authorities. My editor has contacted our distributor, and we’ll see what they have to say about this. In the meantime, Luke has informed me that you can still purchase the eBook through PayPal. If you have a PayPal account already, I think that’s a fine way to go. Either way, my apologies for the confusion — and stay tuned for more information.

1. With the exception of the beta version of the pumpkin pie, which I managed to burn to a crisp. Fortunately, my lovely girlfriend managed to talk me down from this horrible experience over the phone. So I’m all better now, really.

2. Note that the “Aliens” in Why I Hate Aliens refers to creatures-from-outer-space, not immigrating-fellow-humans. If you’re looking for the latter stuff, you’ve come to the wrong place.

3. “But I’ve already read ‘Watercooler’,” I hear you cry. Sorry, that’s no excuse. Go read the Karina Summer-Smith’s “Marks of Ownership”, or “Sally and the Dead-Heads” by Timons Esaias. Right this minute. Go on, off you go!