There Is No Try

Oh, hey, this thing is still around.
Yes, I’ve been neglecting the place more than usual.
No, I don’t have a good reason for it.
Well, in theory I do, but in practice…
Given that it’s November, one might assume that I’ve been neglecting this blog because I’ve been busy working on my novel for National Novel Writing Month.
That’s not the case this year.  For one thing, November kind of managed to sneak up on me, so I wasn’t at all prepared to dive into writing a novel, as I hadn’t spent any time coming up with an idea for one.
However, I did start out the month deciding that I would take the diligence that I normally apply to novel writing and apply it to another project entirely.
That hasn’t really yielded any results.
I suppose that one could say that writing a novel has never really yielded any results either, but at least by the end of the month I had something to show for my efforts.
With this other project?  Not so much.
So what is this mysterious NaNoWriMo replacement, you didn’t ask, because you already got bored and have moved on to look at cat pictures or something?
Well, when I was working on the comic book birthday present for the (former) boss lady, in the interest of time – and laziness – there were some scenes that I cut from the final product, scenes that added to the narrative, but weren’t essential, and which would have required additional pages.
Additionally, in the pages that I did produce I introduced a character whose backstory is hinted at, but not told, and after it was all over I found myself thinking, “I kind of want to tell her story.”
And finally, the limited page count forced me to do a considerable amount of compression, which led to there being pages that were literally filled to overflowing with expository dialogue.
So with all of that in mind I thought, “I should expand this to tell the full story that I’d originally imagined, give the pages some breathing room, tell the backstories, eliminate some of the sillier, in-joke elements, and turn it into a proper comic book that’s available for all the world to see.  Or more likely, ignore, but still, it’d be out there in some fashion.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing all month?
Well, kind of.
In adapting the story for a wider audience, one of the things I need to do is redesign the main character, the one based on the (former) boss lady.
The reasons for this are twofold:

I have a lot of pictures of her to use as references, but not enough to cover the full gamut of expressions and poses, and given that I’m not great at extrapolating things like expressions from a reference image, I need to come up with my own character design to eliminate the need for photo references.

As part of the joke in the birthday gift comic, there are several instances in which the main character appears nude, but some element – someone’s elbow, a word balloon, etc. – obscures it, a la “Austin Powers.”  In the proper comic, those obstructions would be removed, and, given that there would be a wider audience (potentially), if I’m going to draw the main character nude without obstructions, I don’t feel comfortable having her look exactly like the (former) boss lady.

Beyond that, I wanted to try to develop a consistent, simple, and streamlined style for the art, and when I’m engaging in portraiture, the resulting image can be too heavily-influenced by the reference, which – as was the case with the birthday gift – results in inconsistent styles.
So that was the challenge:  coming up with a simplified, consistent style, and designing a character who looks enough like the (former) boss lady for it to be clear that she was the inspiration, but doesn’t look exactly like her, and to develop, for the first time in all the years that I’ve been drawing, a consistent style.
That’s the keep word:  try.
We remember what Yoda said about “try,” don’t we?
It hasn’t been going well.  All attempts at a character redesign have either looked too much like her or not enough like her, and, of course, there’s no consistency to the style.
It doesn’t help that I’m not sure exactly what style I’m shooting for.  On the one hand, I want something pretty simple and clean, but on the other, I don’t want it to look too cartoony.
So basically while I really like their styles, I don’t want to go for the full Bruce Timm or Darwyn Cooke route, thinking that maybe I’d try to compromise with something a little more like the style of Amanda Conner.
However, that doesn’t really suit the tone of the story, so I’ve found myself leaning more towards the style of Terry Dodson.  After all, as I’ve mentioned many times before, when I look at people I can see the “styles” of various comic book artists.  “He’s a Gil Kane,” I’ll say, or “She’s totally an Art Adams.”  The (former) boss lady is a total Dodson.
But then I think about some of the other works that have influenced the idea behind the character and the story, such as Fatale by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and I think that the noir style of Phillips might be a good fit as well.
And then I think about Brubaker’s latest – the advanced ads for which, by the way, were part of what pushed me to go ahead and try to do the birthday comic in the first place, as it appeared to be tapping a similar vein – Velvet, and the amazing work of Steve Epting…
So, yeah.  Even setting aside issues of talent and ability – which are significant issues – there’s the problem of just not being able to make up my mind.  It doesn’t help that for some reason my own style – or what passes for it – has kind of atrophied over the years as I’ve spent so much time drawing what I see rather than what I imagine, and for some reason the elements of it that show up in my sketches don’t really survive the process of inking and coloring.
In any case, that’s what I’ve been doing.  Or, you know, not doing, as Yoda would say.

To Live And Die In Fiction

While the actual story itself is extremely good, one of the most interesting aspects of From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, is the Appendix in which Moore provides an almost panel-by-panel list of extensive citations for the historical – and even some of the speculative – aspects of the story, creating an exhaustive bibliography of the the assorted texts on Jack the Ripper that served as his research material.  It provides a fascinating insight into the mind of a writer, and I have to say that I actually enjoy reading that even more than I enjoy reading the fruits of his research labor.
Similarly, there is an extra-textual aspect of Grant Morrison’s seminal work The Invisibles that, while not overshadowing the excellent story in the same way that Moore’s Appendix overshadows (in my mind, at least) the fiction, adds an extra level of fascination.
The character of King Mob was created by Morrison as a sort of fictional alter ego of the author himself.  Indeed, one of the aliases that KM is a writer by the name of Morrison.
At one point in the story very bad things happen to KM, and in a case of life imitating art, Morrison himself became deathly ill shortly thereafter, suffering injuries that served as an eerie parallel to the injuries that KM suffered (or believed he suffered – it’s complicated).
There are a lot of aspects of that I could get into, centering around the fact that Morrison is a practicing Chaos Magician, and on some of his musings about magic and fiction, but you’d be better served reading about it – and his near-fatal illness – in his own words in his book Supergods.
Besides, I do actually have a point that I want to get to, so we’ll need to move on, but I do first need to address the notion of the author self-insert or Mary Sue.
Many authors are guilty of the practice, though not always consciously, and it’s not always a bad thing, though, as with anything, your mileage may vary.
In Morrison’s case, it’s generally been a deliberate choice, and it relates to his ideas about magic and the creative process.  He’s described it as “putting on a fiction suit,” which allows him to interact with his own creation in a more meaningful way.
You are free, of course, to think that he’s a loon – and I don’t think you’d be far off the mark, but he is, at least, a talented loon – but for my part the idea has a certain resonance.
And though it’s been something of a widening gyre, that does bring us closer to my point.
In many of my shorter works of fiction – both written and unwritten – which do not focus on any of the large stable of other characters I’ve created, such as Fontaine, and which are generally more straightforward pieces of fiction rather than being of any specific genre such as Science Fiction or Fantasy, the protagonist has been a nameless man who bears a striking and not at all coincidental resemblance to the author.*
The circumstances of his life in each of the stories are such that there’s no real continuity to his fictional existence – in one story he’s an orphan, in another his parents are alive and well – there’s never been any doubt in my mind that these disparate stories are all focusing on the same person.
Which is to say, they’re all about me.  (That I’ve created worlds that are “all about me” should surprise exactly no one.)
While I’ve never exactly used m self-insert as a fiction suit, exactly, I have attempted to utilize this alter ego as a means of addressing certain real life concerns in an fictional setting.
Certainly that was the point of his most recent appearance in my 2012 NaNoWriMo novel, in which the similarities between the character and the author were not even thinly veiled, and he really was me in all but name.  (I never gave him a name in any of the stories, in part because I’m terrible at coming up with names, but also because I liked the challenge of writing about someone whose name you never learn.)
Which brings me to my point, finally.  I don’t think this counts as a spoiler, as it’s unlikely that anyone will ever read that particular story – having anyone read it was never the actual point of it, after all – but the thing is, in that story, I killed him.
Since that time, particularly after my recent re-reading of The Invisibles, I’ve found myself wondering what, if anything, happens when you commit fictional suicide.  Did some part of me die?  Does his death represent something larger?
We’re several months past the point of his death, and I’m still here, so I don’t think I’m likely to head into the kind of circumstances that Morrison found himself in when he brutally tortured King Mob.
Still.
That his death past unnoticed in either his world or this one, and that he died unnamed, unloved, and unmourned, leads me to wonder. 
Just wonder.

*If you’re among the statistically insignificant number of people who read it, you may also be a member of the even more statistically insignificant group of people who recall that I actually made a brief appearance in my first Fontaine novel.  That fictional me is different from the nameless version.

Still Alive

Yes, I'm still alive.
I've been busily working on my NaNoWriMo novel - which is to say that I've been spending my time alternately writing and trying to find anything I can do to avoid writing - which is why I've been neglecting this place even more than usual.
I should be finished on or about Thanksgiving, at which time irregular postings will appear at their irregularly-scheduled times...

NaNoWri…No?

November rapidly approaches, which means that National Novel Writing Month is almost upon us.
As it stands, I’ve yet to decide if I’m going to participate this year.
On the one hand, work has me pretty burned out, and the last thing I want to do when I get home is have to worry about hitting my daily quota of words, or to bother thinking about plot and characterization and whatnot.
Beyond that, my early morning rising, done in order to make time to work out and to avoid as much of the godawful Northern Virginia traffic that is the bane of my weekday existence as possible, means that I have only a very limited amount of useful consciousness when I get home.
On the other hand, there is the potential for relieving some amount of stress through the use of a creative outlet, and writing is supposed to be cathartic, so it could help me work through some of the…stuff that’s been on my mind of late.
I’m not really holding my breath on that last point, but even so, it is a consideration.
If I’m honest, I’d say that I’m leaning towards “Yes” on the question of whether or not I’ll participate, but I’m not ready to commit to that position just yet.
However, even if I do ultimately decide to participate, there’s another question that arises:  what should I write?
The obvious answer would be a third Fontaine novel that would follow the other two that I’ve written in my last two years of participating in NaNoWriMo, and I do have some ideas for that particular story.
However, I recently had an idea for a short story that, once I put more thought into it, I realized could be expanded out to become a NaNoWriMo novel, and the notion keeps kicking around in my head.
There are some compelling personal reasons to write that particular story (See:  stuff, working through), but while those reasons make writing it more compelling, they probably make reading it a less compelling proposition.
Of course, readability isn’t really much of a consideration, given the rather limited number of people who have any interest in reading anything I write.  Even so, some of the people who have read the previous Fontaine stories might have an interest in reading another.
The other sticking point is that there are certain plot elements to this non-Fontaine story that share some commonalities with the Fontaine story that I would write if I chose to go that route, so then it becomes a matter of asking what’s the point of writing a completely unrelated story that’s similar to the Fontaine story and not just writing the Fontaine story?  Of course, that comes dangerously close to asking what’s the point of writing anything at all, which is a question I’m not at all prepared to attempt to answer…
Still, the point of writing that other story, even with the similar – yet markedly different – plot elements is the exploration of certain thematic elements that would be pretty difficult, if not outright impossible, to properly explore in the context of a story about Fontaine.
So…?

Nothing Special

This picture is nothing special, really.  I mean, it's okay, but...so what?
However, the reason I've posted it is that it's the first time in the 17 years since she first popped into my mind, that I've been able to complete a halfway decent image of my character Sam, AKA Subject 76, who is the alien-human hybrid daughter of my character Fontaine:

Not perfect, but the best I've done so far.

Sam was a major part of my 2009 National Novel Writing Month novel, and was, naturally, a big part of this year's sequel.
Though she's only eleven years old, Sam matured at an accelerated rate (thanks to her alien heritage), and is a fully-mature adult, roughly equivalent to a human woman in her early twenties.
Sam has vast superhuman abilities, including superhuman strength and resistance to injury, some degree of telepathic abilities, telekinesis, and energy manipulation.
Her "hair" isn't really hair, but a collection of hair-like filaments of the internally-generated alien energy that serves as her power source.  When she's weakened, her hair loses body and volume, and if she's sufficiently weak, it disappears entirely.
Her name, given to her by her mother when she was born, as she came out with a full head of long, glowing "hair," and she demonstrated sufficient strength to shatter the bones in Fontaine's finger with a gentle squeeze, is actually Samson, which everyone agrees is a terrible name for her, but which she insisted upon keeping.
Since escaping from the government facility where she was born as part of a breeding program, Sam has been a wanted fugitive, living her life on the run, and occasionally trying - and usually failing - to develop something akin to a mother-daughter relationship with Fontaine.
Anyway, if you've read any of my Fontaine stories and wondered what Sam looks like in my head, wonder no more.

Black Friday Randomness

On Tuesday before I left work I employed the "hovering" tactic on my boss before I left, which entails just kind of hanging out until she tells me what I want to hear.  In this case it was, "You might as well just take tomorrow off."
So far, with both this boss and my former boss, I believe the "hovering" approach has had a 100% success rate in either getting me what I want, whether it's permission to leave early or to not come in to work on the day before a holiday.
So, having Wednesday off, and knowing that, while it would still be bad - the zombie hordes already began descending on any and all retail outlets last weekend - going out into the world would be less bothersome on Wednesday than it would be on Saturday, I went out to do my grocery and comic shopping.
At the comic shop one of the customers asked about Black Friday deals, and the guy working there told him that the shop would be e-mailing special Friday offers to customers that evening.
When it came time for me to pay for my stack, he said, "We have your e-mail on file, right?"  I said, "Probably, but it doesn't matter - I don't go anywhere on Black Friday."
In the alternative, I considered saying, "E...mail?" and looking completely bewildered.

****

While I don't - and didn't - go anywhere on Black Friday, I did look at some of the online deals.  For the most part I wasn't impressed.
I did, however, very briefly toy with the notion of buying the Acer Iconia from the Microsoft Store, which was selling it at a steep - $400 off - discount.
I have to admit that I was tempted, not because I really need it, or even want it all that much, but simply because, well, as a concept, at least, it's pretty cool.
Mostly it reminds me of the late, lamented Courier concept that Microsoft so cruelly and unwisely killed before it even got out of the gate.  Seriously, Microsoft, I would have thrown money at you if you'd actually made the thing:




Anyway, I soon decided against buying it, despite the coolness, because, as mentioned, I don't have any particular need for it, it's far too bulky, its battery life is pathetic, and it doesn't have an active digitizer, which means that I wouldn't be able to use it like a portable Cintiq, which is the main thing I want in a tablet.
My current Tablet PC can, in theory, behave in that fashion, but in practice, setting aside the fact that the N-Trig digitizer seldom works at all, it never offered pressure-sensitivity (even it claims to do so).
At some point in the new year, I will most likely pick up a Samsung Series 7 Slate, which has a Wacom digitizer (same company that makes the Cintiq), and Samsung has stated that they intend to make it upgradeable to Windows 8.  In fact, it's been used as the reference machine for the Developer Preview of the next version of Windows.

****

I probably really ought to be working on my novel if I want to achieve my goal of actually finishing the thing - as opposed to simply achieving the 50,000 word challenge, which I've already done - before NaNoWriMo draws to a close, but...ehh.
I also ought to be finishing up the Heroic Portraits order that my boss placed (it's essentially done; I'm making some decisions about whether or not I want to make some additions before sending her the proof), or working on the standing, "no rush, just in time for one of the holidays" order I have from someone else.
And today I just got a challenging request from my friend Jamie which I should probably start on, but...again, ehh.

...And Jon Maki As The Integration Manager

(Note:  For reasons that are, in many ways, beyond my understanding, my boss had to jump through a lot of hoops to get my promotion approved.)

Me:  (After signing the paperwork that made the promotion official)  You realize that now you and I actually have the same title?
Boss:  Yep.  You should ask for a raise.

****

My promotion was announced as part of a much larger organizational update that went out today.  Lost somewhere in the midst of the huge wall o' text outlining the new structure - you may recall that we just had a reorg in July - after a listing of the people who work for my boss (I was, once again, listed last), I got a single sentence that will likely escape most everyone's notice.  "Jon-Paul has been promoted to Integration Manager."
Ehh, it's more money, and a larger bonus - though I won't actually receive the larger bonus until 2013, as the previous rate was already locked in for the bonus I'll receive in 2012 - so I suppose I shouldn't complain.
Which doesn't mean that I won't complain, mind you, just that I shouldn't.
Text exchange with my boss after the e-mail went out:

Me:  "Jon-Paul has been promoted to afterthought."
Me:  One rung up from "footnote."  I'm going places!  My star is on the rise, baby!
Boss:  LOL oh shut up and be excited sarcasmo!

****

On a somewhat more personally satisfying note, I have, as mentioned, been participating in this year's National Novel Writing Month.  The challenge, as you may recall, is to write 50,000 words between November 1st and November 30th.  As of today I have over 38,000 words written.  I should easily hit 50,000 this weekend.
I won't stop at that point, but I did want to get the "challenge" aspect of it out of the way early on so that I could devote the rest of the month to completing the story, then going back and editing it - and my 2009 offering, to which this novel is the sequel - while I'm still in "writer mode," and then doing...something with it.  Submitting it somewhere, I suppose.  Presumably because I enjoy having my hopes shattered.
In any case, I suppose that I ought to get back to it.

Long Weekend

For no reason that I can determine, I woke up at around 2:30 this morning.
I stayed in bed for a while trying to get back to sleep before my bladder induced me to get up.  After attending to that, I got back into bed and spent some time lying in the dark before deciding to get up again and have a cigarette.
Once that was done, I did some meditation for about twenty minutes.
By that time it was around 3:30, which was only a half an hour earlier than I was planning to get up anyway, so I said, "Fuck it," got up, got dressed in my workout attire, and proceeded to engage in a workout that let me know in no uncertain terms that while I mostly feel okay, I'm still not 100% recovered from whatever illness struck me down on Monday.
Having an extra half hour to kill after finishing my exhausting workout, I sat down to watch the recorded episode of The Office before showering and getting on with my day.
While at work, my boss, in a post-staff meeting discussion, talked about some of her plans for our group, which included getting my co-worker promoted to the same level I just got promoted to, while providing some - frankly infuriating, though I won't get into that - details about the process of getting me promoted.
Her goal is for both of us to be Managers (my promotion will give me the title of "Manager," but I won't actually be managing anyone initially) and, eventually, have Analysts reporting to us.
My co-worker said, "I just want to manage projects.  Jon can manage the Analysts."
I said, "I just want to manage our internal processes."
The boss said, "You'll both shut the fuck up and do whatever I tell you to do."

****

As it was the Friday before Halloween, the office was going to be overrun by candy-seeking hordes of children at 2 PM.
Me:  By the way, I'm bailing before the kids show up.
Boss:  You and me both.

****

I decided to take Monday and Tuesday off, mostly just because, but in part because I want to stay up late on Monday and get a jump on National Novel Writing Month, and devote much of Tuesday to writing.
Because I'll be writing my latest novel, my updates here will either be even less frequent than they have been, or more frequent, in the form of excerpts from each day's writing.
Personally, I don't see any advantage to either option, so I'm not sure which one I'll opt for.

Yep, It's A Picture All Right

I drew a picture.
Of my character Fontaine.
Here it is:

I don't really have much more to say about it. It's fine, but nothing special. I figured I should do a picture of Fontaine, as I'll be writing about her again in a few months, assuming that my plan to participate in this year's National Novel Writing Month don't fall through.

A Self-Indulgent Walk Down Memory Lane

Now that I’ve posted the novel, I wanted to give a little background on its main character, Fontaine, as well as her world, and how she came about.
During my senior year in college I had been reading Heavy Metal magazine pretty regularly. For those of you who don’t know, Heavy Metal is a magazine that primarily publishes adult-oriented illustrated science fiction/fantasy stories, in addition to other types of stories. A lot of its content is culled from the underground comics scene and from European comics. At the same time, Penthouse magazine was coming out with its own line of adult comics (“Adult comics so good you’ll read them with both hands!”), featuring works by some of the leading talents in the comic mainstream who were taking advantage of the adult format to write and draw stories that the major comic companies wouldn’t touch.
(The quality of Penthouse Comics was hit or miss. Mostly miss.)
It’s no secret that I love comics, and that I’m kind of partial to porn, so it’s hardly surprising that it occurred to me that, as a hopeful creator, maybe I should jump on the bandwagon, as I figured it was a slightly-less competitive market than the mainstream comics or science fiction and fantasy markets, and that it would be as good a place as any to get my foot in the door.
After all, Neil Gaiman used to write for the UK version of Penthouse. Hell, Neil even wrote a Cherry story.
With that in mind, I came up with an idea for a character who would suit the tone and style of either Heavy Metal – which, while not actually being a “porn” comic featured a lot of sexual content – or the fledgling Penthouse Comics, which had content ranging from the serious to the silly, and I called her…Savage Scarlet.
(Yes, we’ll get to Fontaine)
Savage Scarlet was my idea for a sort of porn spoof of She-Hulk; she was a model who was granted superhuman strength – along with a superhuman physique (particularly in the boob department) – as the result of metabolic changes brought on through the overuse of assorted cosmetic products and procedures: breast implants, collagen and botox injections, liposuction, chemical peels, tanning beds, etc.



Artist's conception of the artist's conception of Savage Scarlet.

The idea was to engage in some mild satirical commentary on our image-obsessed society, and the depiction of women in comics (Image Comics was just coming to prominence at the time and was having a major impact on comics in general), and was intended to be rather light-hearted and more similar in tone to, say, Little Annie Fanny than something more hardcore, like Wendy Whitebread: Undercover Slut.
The only problem was that, beyond the basic idea for the character and some general ideas about what I wanted to do with her, I couldn’t really come up with any material for Savage Scarlet.
Still, I liked the idea of putting together some sort of adult-themed comic suitable for Heavy Metal.
Then one night I was watching TV and flipping back and forth between two low-budget science fiction movies. One was called Nemesis, and was about cyborgs living in some post-apocalyptic future, and the other was called Circuitry Man, which was set in another post-apocalyptic future.
What I found interesting about both of them was they were both rather sexually-charged, and they both prominently featured some ass-kicking women.
Circuitry Man in particular featured a woman who worked as a bodyguard, and there was one scene in which her sexual appetite got her into a spot of trouble. There was also a scene featuring a rival bodyguard, who, while riding in an elevator with her boss – also a woman – unzipped the fly of her male co-worker and reached in with her gloved hand.
Take those seemingly minor elements, the overall goal of creating something suitable for Heavy Metal, consider that at the time I was a walking idea factory, and throw in the fact that one of the comics I was reading at the time was Catwoman (with art by Jim Balent, who was actually pretty talented and had yet to go off to…err…follow his dream of producing a comic that “empowers women.”), and you had the seed of the idea that grew to become Fontaine.
These are the elements I was working with: women filling roles that were traditionally considered masculine roles (bodyguards, thieves, spies, crime bosses, adventurers), women who were as sexually active as any male filling those roles (James Bond, etc.) without being presented as or considered “sluts,” some sort of post-apocalyptic future, and gloves.
Yes, gloves. I originally envisioned a world in which essentially everything was a computer and special gloves served as the interface. Eventually I largely abandoned the notion.
Oh, and there was one other element I wanted to include: hot girl on girl action.
Lots of it.
Why? Well, if you have to ask the question, you’re never going to understand the answer.
So I gave some thought to how to explain the sexual dynamics of this world I was building, and thought, “What if men are in short supply?” That led me to come up with an explanation for the lack of men – a mysterious period in which birth rates dropped precipitously and in which the children that were born were overwhelmingly female, known as the “Generation Plague” – and how that might impact society. That led to a system of polygamy – one which was unlike polygamy as typically practiced – which led me to conclude that the complicated dynamics of this system would make family names problematic, which was resolved by assigning family numbers, which most people ignored for everything but official purposes, as the population of this new world was small enough that even relatively common first names were typically distinctive enough for most people’s purposes.
And that’s when the name “Fontaine” occurred to me.
As an aside, for me, the creative process seems to be a combination of following an initial idea to a logical conclusion and a kind of “revelation.” I usually don’t feel as though I’ve made up the details and histories of the worlds and people I create so much as I feel that these things are revealed to me.
(For the record, I don’t believe that there’s an external source for the ideas, but the manner in which I conceive of them simply feels like revelation.)
The oddest instance of this was the time I had a dream in which I was watching some movie on TV, and one of the stars – Pernell Roberts, of all people – actually stopped what he was doing, turned to look at me, and explicitly told me what to name a particular character whose name I’d been struggling to come up with.
As for all of the sex going on, the idea was that this was an extremely liberated society that had – partly out of necessity, partly out of a loss of the sense of the importance of history and tradition – abandoned a lot of the old ways of thinking and the mores of the past. However, there was also the idea of the more things change, the more things stay the same, and notions about gender constructs and roles and behaviors that shaped this new world. As women stepped up and started filling the roles that had previously been defined as male, there was an extent to which they started exhibiting the behaviors associated with those roles. It certainly wasn’t intended to be a treatise on gender politics, but there were some notions that I wanted to explore.
Further, some of the roles that women began to fill weren’t just the socially-acceptable roles of police officers, or politicians, or whatever, but also the roles that cater to the baser aspects of human nature. Thus you would have women becoming crime bosses, and pimps, and pushers, and thieves, and…well, you get the idea.
Anyway, once I had a name, I conceived of how she would look. Bearing in mind that this was well before the Matrix movies, I decided that in this sexually-charged world modesty would be a thing of the past – and the past was something most of the people in this world seldom thought about – and that in addition to a lot of exposed skin, what was (at that time) considered strictly fetish-wear would become the fashion. So I was picturing skintight latex.
I went to the old drawing board, grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil, and set to work, and for the first and only time in the history of ever, I actually hit the nail on the head the first time, drawing a picture of Fontaine that looked exactly as she looked in my head.
(That picture has been lost to the ages in the course of moving more than a half a dozen times.)
Having already decided to invert a lot of conventions, I decided to go a step further and make Fontaine something of an oddity in her sex-crazed world: she would have no particular sex drive of her own.
The notion suited her personality, and I thought it made for an interesting contrast. Fontaine was an exceptionally beautiful woman in a world filled with exceptionally beautiful women, and she would be the object of desire for virtually everyone she met, but wouldn’t feel any desire for them.
Toss in some aliens, and a sentient Internet – at the time, the World Wide Web was just beginning to achieve any sort of critical mass – and I had what I needed to write the script for my first Fontaine story. While darker and more action-oriented than Savage Scarlet, I wanted to keep the high sex content, and so the first story was kind of silly, focusing on Fontaine being hired to recover a group of teenage boys who’d been kidnapped and held as sex slaves by an especially libidinous woman.
So, with script in hand, I picked up some Bristol board, grabbed a pencil and a T-square, and set to work on laying out the panels for the first page.
Then it was on to drawing in the first panel on the page, a shot of the futuristic skyline of the New New York (this was before Futurama, too) with its massive towers reaching miles up into the sky.
And that’s when I discovered the problem.
For the life of me, I couldn’t draw that skyline. It just looked like crap. So I skipped it, and moved on to the next panel, in which I did a decent job of drawing a mostly-nude Fontaine getting dressed. But as for the details in the background? Yeah, not so much.
Most of my life I’d focused on drawing people, and I’d gotten pretty good at it. But things? Buildings, backgrounds, etc? I couldn’t do it.
I tried. I did everything I could to try to acquire and develop the skill, but it just wasn’t happening.
And so, like Savage Scarlet before her, Fontaine was eventually abandoned, along with my hopes of ever being an illustrator.
After some months, however, I decided that I liked Fontaine too much to let her rot in the dustbin of abandoned ideas, and decided that I would bring her over from the realm of illustrated storytelling and into straightforward prose.
I decided to make the sex a little less over-the-top, but it remained a major component.
Of course, as with all creative endeavors, I only worked on developing Fontaine in little bursts before deciding, “I suck, and shouldn’t bother,” and abandoning the whole thing before finally deciding, “Okay, maybe I don’t suck,” and starting the cycle again.
Around 1995 I wrote a short story which introduced a lot of elements of Fontaine’s history, showing some of the things that shaped her into the cold, amoral, adrenaline-addicted, irredeemable narcissist I love so well, and I submitted it for publication.
(I may still have that story on a CD somewhere, but for all intents and purposes, it, too, is lost to the ages.)
I didn’t do much with her again – other than drawing the occasional picture – until I was living in Tucson and wrote another short story, which, upon second and third reading, I decided wasn’t very good.
I then started on another short story, which started expanding and was threatening to become my first novel. Before I could finish it, I moved to Virginia, where I went a couple of weeks without my computer, and by the time I had my computer and could sit back down to write again I totally forgot where I was going with the story.
I looked through it while writing Blood Drift, and while I still liked a lot of what was there, I still didn’t know where I had been going with it, and since that time a lot more has been “revealed” to me, much of which contradicts what I’d written. Still, the basic core idea is interesting, and I may have to revisit it someday.
In the meantime, I’m still looking for more feedback on Blood Drift, and steeling myself for the inevitable wave of rejection slips that will follow if and when I submit the actual finished product for publication.
And that’s more than enough about that, I guess.
I’ll be back at some point with a shorter, more typical post.

Limited Time Only?

Hey, remember when I used to post entries here on a regular basis?
Yeah, I don’t either, but anyway, I’m back. Did you miss – ah, who am I kidding?
As noted in a previous entry – with swearing – and confirmed by the graphic on the right, I successfully met the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days for National Novel Writing Month.
Writing that, of course, is what ate up most of my time for the better part of the month of November.
So now that I’ve finished that (sort of; more on that in a bit), I can get back to posting my usual canny, incisive, and endlessly fascinating observations.
Or, you know, the usual boring crap.
Before I do, however, I’ve decided that I’m going to share the fruits of my not-quite a month’s worth of labor here for everyone to read.
What you’re going to read (or, more likely, aren’t going to bother reading) is a very rough, unedited first draft. It’s probably rife with typos and continuity errors, and I’m sure that there are places in in where I restate – incorrectly – something that I stated earlier. Also, there’s not much in the way of formatting, so it might not be the most readable document from that perspective.
(And it might be unreadable in general.)
When I hit the 50,000 word mark, I found that while the story as envisioned wasn’t complete, I was actually at a pretty good stopping point, so, given that I was feeling kind of burned out, and also given my general laziness, I decided that, having met the terms of the NaNoWriMo challenge, I would stop where I was. After all, what remained of the story could probably be easily expanded into a second novel of roughly the same length.
While there are a lot of stories still to be told about Fontaine and her world, it was my thought that, with the cliffhangerish ending, this particular novel would be the good start to a series, with the next book picking up where this one leaves off.
Of course, the question of what I’m going to do with the thing naturally arises. Unlike previous NaNoWriMo efforts, I feel pretty good about this one and actually think that it has a chance – however slim – of actually getting published. If I want to try to get it published, is it suitable, as I think it is, to be the start of a series? And if it’s not, should I then bring it to its original intended ending, tacking on another 20,000 words or so before attempting to publish it?
So that’s where you come in. I want feedback on it. Does it feel too incomplete, even as something with an intended sequel? Does it work as is? Does it suck huge donkey balls, leading you to conclude, as Dr. Zoidberg might say, that my writing is bad and I should feel bad?
Give me honest feedback. Forget that you like me, and tell me what you actually think. Or, in the alternative, forget that you don’t like me and tell me what you actually think.
So that’s the purpose of posting this raw, unedited copy here. I want to find out first of all if it’s suitable as is – with editing, of course – or if it needs more. Then I want to know if it’s something worth setting myself up for rejection over.
So, that’s why I’m posting it here.
If/when I decide to try to get it published, I’ll probably pull it down. And if/when I get enough rejection slips to decide that it’s not worth trying any further, I may self-publish via the Web (in which case I expect all of you to buy at least one copy, and I don’t want to hear any “But I already read it when it was free” nonsense. The same holds true if I get it published, by the way.)
In any case, here it is:


Blood Drift

And Now, A Profanity-Laden Celebratory Post

*Ahem*

50,527 muthafuckin' words with ten muthafuckin' days left in the month, muthafuckas!

Now, if only I were actually finished with the thing...

Something To Read

Normally I wouldn't be writing tonight - or posting a blog entry - as it's Riff Trax night, but Scott is sick, so my evening got freed up. I decided to take a break from writing anyway to kind of recharge the batteries - I'm up to over 45,000 words - and I thought that, since I don't really want to share any more chapters of Blood Drift until I'm actually finished writing it, I'd post this story, set in the world of Blood Drift, and featuring its main character, Fontaine.
I don't remember when I wrote it - I'm going to guess 2004 - but it serves as a pretty good introduction to Fontaine and her world, and features some characters and elements who appear in Blood Drift.
In any case, it's here to be read, if you're interested. If you like it, let me know. If you don't, keep it to yourself.
The Devil You Know

Taking A Break From Writing...To Do Some Writing

Blog? Bbbbbblllllllloooooogggggg. Hmmm....nope, I don't have one of those.
Oh, wait, yes I do.
I managed to get past 38,000 words in my novel last night, and the goal was to get to 40,000 by the end of the weekend, so it's looking like I'm in pretty good shape, so I thought I'd check in here, take a look around, and see how things are going.
*Crickets*
Yep, just how I left it.
Not much going on in my life besides work, sleep, and noveling. I'll be humble; I've pretty much been kicking ass on the novel-writing as far as the word count goes, at least. Ah, the advantages of not having a life.
Work has been, as it has a tendency to be, work. Nothing especially new or exciting going on there.
The problems that Munin had with Windows 7, I learned, were due to chipset drivers. Microsoft has since issued a hotfix for it, and that seems to have done the trick, at least as far as the USB external drive issue goes. I haven't tried using the wireless adapter to see if that problem was fixed, as I kind of like having the higher speeds of the powerline adapter.
Still, I would like to hook up the Blu-ray player and my media extender to the network via a powerline adapter, and so far I haven't found a place that sells individual adapters, just the two adapter sets, so I may end up going back to wireless on Munin.
We'll see.
And that's pretty much it.
Today is, of course, laundry day, and I do have to engage in some amount of writing to hit my word count target, so I guess I'll get back to it.

Another Taste Or Now I Made Myself Sad

I'm past the 23,000 word mark at this point, and thought I'd post another exceprt. You're not getting much of the actual story this way, but they say that something is better than nothing.
In any case, here's the first scene from Chapter Five:

Too Close For Comfort

Fontaine turned to look at Jennifer.
“What’s she doing here?”
“Nice to see you, too, mother,” Sam said.
Ignoring that, Fontaine pressed Jennifer for an answer. “Is she tied up in some scheme of yours? Did you bring her here as part of some sick little game?”
Jennifer shook her head. “I didn’t bring her here at all.” She turned to look at Sam. “She just showed up out of thin air. Scared the shit out of me, quite frankly. She’s even sneakier than you are.”
Fontaine’s brow furrowed, and her lips turned almost imperceptibly downward in a frown.
Turning away from Jennifer, she regarded her daughter. Though she was only eleven years old, her Llani physiology had caused her to mature much more rapidly than humans. In terms of physical and emotional development she was, effectively, only a few years younger than Fontaine herself.
Fontaine studied her daughter’s face, her impossibly, inhumanly beautiful face.
Memories that Fontaine fought to keep buried began clawing their way up to the surface. The pain, the degradation, and that one pure moment of happiness, that sense of joy and wonder that, at fifteen, Fontaine had already come to believe that she could never experience.
And then the loss, that horrible despair that followed when that moment, the source of that unexpected joy, was taken away from her.
Worse than the memories that seeing Sam brought to the surface was knowing that the joy she felt once lost could never be regained, that she couldn’t be the mother that Sam needed, that she couldn’t rebuild the connection that had formed when she first looked into those deep, searching black eyes, a connection that was shattered even more forcefully than the finger that Fontaine had held out for her daughter to clutch onto in those first instants of her life as Sam, already stronger than any human, squeezed with all of her might, by the government scientists who pulled Sam away from her.
Did Sam know how Fontaine fought to hold onto her, ignoring the pain in her broken finger? How Fontaine broke the fingers and noses and ribs of the nurses and doctors who tried to restrain her? How months later, after her release, Fontaine had tried to break into the facility and reclaim her child? That had been the only heist Fontaine never pulled off successfully: stealing back her daughter.
Fontaine stared into her daughter’s eyes and thought, “This is my daughter, my blood. I should embrace her. I should want to embrace her. I should want to take hold of her and never let go of her.”
Walking over to Sam, she held out her hand – her gloved hand – and brushed it lightly against her cheek, letting it drift into the cascading blue mane, feeling a slight electric tingle as she tried to tangle a lock of it about her fingers, but found that it was too ephemeral to hold, and it slipped from her grasp.
She continued the movement, finally settling on Sam’s ear, tracing its contours, following them up to its pointed tip.
Finally she said, “The ears are new.”
The slightest trace of a smile passed across Sam’s lips. “Yes. I like them.”
Withdrawing her hand, Fontaine stepped back. “They make you look more alien.”
“You don’t like them?”
Fontaine shrugged. “They don’t make sense. The Llani have rounded ears just like humans.”
“They add to the ‘scary alien’ mystique,” Sam said.
“is that what you want? To be a scary alien?”
It was Sam’s turn to shrug. “It’s what’s expected.”
Fontaine nodded, deciding to let the subject drop.
“You shouldn’t be here. You’re too close to the Heights. If you’re spotted, not even the most corrupt GU security officer would fail to report you, no matter how big the bribe.”
“I can take care of myself,” Sam said, with more than a trace of bitterness. “I always have.”
Fontaine’s brow furrowed. “Don’t start this again.”
“Start what? I’m simply stating a fact. I learned how to take care of myself very early on.”
“Don’t try making me feel guilty. You’re not as good at it as your aunt.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel anything, mother.” She paused, then added, “I spend enough of my time in the pursuit of lost causes; I don’t need to add another.”
Fontaine’s brow furrowed. “What do you want? I’ve had a very long day and would like to finish my business and go home.”
“It’s not what I want, it’s what Aunt Kelly wants.”
“Kelly?”
Sam nodded. “She’s very concerned about you. I don’t know the details, but she thinks you’re in some kind of danger. I should just tell her, ‘What else is new?’”
“You’ve talked to her?”
Sam shook her head. “No, but she’s been reaching out to me. I can’t pick up the specifics, but I’m getting a very clear sense that she’s worried about you and that she wants you to know it.”
“Is that all?”
“No. It was clear that she was reaching out to me for the purposes of luring me into a trap.”
“Kelly wouldn’t do that to you. She –“
“I know how she feels about me, mother. She’s always made her feelings perfectly clear. I know she would never betray me if she had any choice in the matter. Aunt Kelly always looks out for me as best she can.”
Fontaine said nothing.
“She does the same for you.”
“I know.”
“We don’t make it easy for her, do we? She loves us with all of her heart, even though we only bring her misery just by being who we are.” Sam’s brow furrowed like her mother’s. “I hate that I make her life so difficult.”
As Sam’s head slumped sadly, Jennifer caught Fontaine’s attention and began inclining her head towards Sam urgently. Fontaine furrowed her brow in confusion. Exasperated, Jennifer rolled her eyes, then mouthed the words “Hug her.”
Fontaine frowned.
Sighing, Jennifer stood up. “Well, I think I should make an appearance out there. I’ll leave you to your little family reunion.” She stood up and began moving towards the door. “Sam, it was lovely to see you. You know you’re always welcome here. After all, you’re my favorite human/Llani hybrid terrorist.” She blew a kiss. “Fontaine, darling, we’ll wrap up our little exchange once you’re through here.”
Once Jennifer had departed, Fontaine said, “Sam…you can’t blame yourself. I’ve made my choices, and I’m responsible for whatever consequences Kelly has to deal with when it comes to me. But you…it’s…”
She started to step forward and reach out her hand, then stopped.
“It’s not your fault,” she concluded, lamely.
Sighing, Sam lifted her head back up and looked at her mother. “I’m not sure that there’s anything else I can tell you about Aunt Kelly’s concerns. I suppose I should tell you to watch your back, but you always do that anyway. Just,” she shrugged, “watch it more closely.”
Fontaine nodded.
“I should go,” Sam said, and began moving towards the bathroom door.
“Wait.”
Sam opened the door and stepped inside, her eyes on the window. She stopped to pick up the manuscript from the counter. “Huh. So it was you that robbed the Governor. I guess I’m not surprised, but that’s pretty bold, even for you.”
Fontaine shrugged. “There’s a lot of money involved.”
“There always is.” Sam moved toward Fontaine and handed her the manuscript.
Accepting it, Fontaine opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it again and said, “Are you…are you getting enough to eat?”
Sam snorted. “Really? That’s what you want to ask me?”
“Well,” Fontaine said, awkwardly, “it’s important. You need to – “
“I get plenty to eat, mother.”
“You look a little thin,” Fontaine said, inwardly telling herself to either say something worthwhile or stop talking.
“I’m fine.”
Fontaine nodded. “Do you need any money? I just acquired a large stash of coins. I can port them over, if you – “
There was a whooshing sound and Sam held up her hand, displaying a small sack bulging with coins. “You mean these coins?”
Eyes wide, Fontaine responded, “Those would be the ones. Take them, if you need them.”
Sam nodded. “Thanks. Money always comes in handy. People are willing to deal with a scary, dangerous half-alien terrorist if she’s got enough money.”
“I’m sure.”
“Take care of yourself, mother,” Sam said as she moved towards the bathroom.
When she reached the door she stopped and turned back to face Fontaine. “Mother…I know that I was…that my conception.” She frowned. “I know that I wasn’t the result of an in vitro fertilization, that you were altered…I know I was conceived the old-fashioned way.”
Fontaine furrowed her brow. “Yes.”
Sam bit her lip and looked down, then looked back up. “Can you tell me anything about my father? I wasn’t able to find anything about him in the records I went through before I destroyed that lab.”
Shaking her head, Fontaine responded, “Nothing that would do you any good, or that you would want to hear.”
“Oh.” Her face softened, looking less like sculpted marble and more like flesh and blood. Tears welled in her black eyes. “Is it because of him? Is that why you don’t – why you can’t bear to look at me?” The tears began flowing down her cheeks. “Do I remind you of him?”
Fontaine moved quickly over to her daughter and reached up to take her face in both of her hands. “No.” She wiped away the tears with her thumbs. “No,” she said again. “You’re nothing like him. Nothing.”
Her brow furrowed once again, and after several seconds she said, “It’s not that I can’t stand to look at you. It’s that you’re just so beautiful. It’s like staring into the sun.”
Sam smiled weakly. “Mother…do you care about me? At all?”
Fontaine sighed. She pulled Sam forward and pressed her lips tightly against her forehead.
Pulling back, but keeping her grip on Sam’s face, she said, “When I was brought to that place they ran tests on me almost twenty-four hours a day, brought me before panels of shrinks and asked me the same questions over and over again. They threw around terms like ‘narcissism’ and ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ and ‘Attachment Disorder,’ and even the occasional ‘sociopath.’ They all concluded that I could never care about anyone but myself.”
Fontaine smiled. It was an unfamiliar movement and she wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. “Even if those things they said about me were true, even if I can’t care about anyone but myself, you’re my blood. You’re a part of me. “
Fontaine pulled her hands away. “Do you understand? You’re a part of me. When I look at you, I don’t see him, I see myself.”
Sam nodded.
Reaching out again to run her hand through the glowing blue insubstantial mass, Fontaine said, “You were born with this, you know. Full head of shimmering blue whatever-this-is. I held out my finger and you wrapped your tiny little fingers around it and squeezed.” Sam smiled. “Crushed the bones to powder, you little brat.”
Sam laughed.
“With all of that hair on your head and all of that strength, you reminded me of an old story I heard once. I said – “
“’She’s just like Samson. My little Samson.’ I know, mother. I remember.” Sam reached up to grab Fontaine’s hand. “In the ‘nursery’ – that’s what they called the place – they tried to give me all kinds of different names, but I wouldn’t respond to any of them. Do you know what my first words were?”
A look of pain flashed briefly across Fontaine’s face, and Sam realized what she had asked of her mother and regretted it. Still, she continued. “One of the nurses had taken to calling me Anna. ‘Anna, come sit with the other children.’ ‘Anna, put that down.’ ‘Anna, can’t you hear me?’ I looked up at her and said, ‘My name is Samson.’”
Fontaine’s face softened, the furrow disappearing from her brow. Holding back a laugh, she said, “It’s a terrible name.”
Sam smiled. “It really is. Why do you think I go by Sam?”
Sighing, Fontaine stepped back rested her hands briefly on Sam’s shoulders as if holding her in place to make one last appraisal of her. “Okay, get the hell out of here and find someplace safe.”
Nodding, Sam said, “I will. I just have to make one last stop before I leave the city. There’s someone I need to see.”
“Kelly?”
Sam shook her head.
“Oh,” Fontaine said.
“Yeah,” Sam said.
With that, she made her way into the bathroom and with an idle gesture caused the window to open.
As she was climbing out the window her mother called her name. She turned to look back.
“I like the ears.”
Smiling, Sam said, “Thanks,” then disappeared into the darkness.

Because No One Demanded It

I'm at close to 9,000 words on my National Novel Writing Month novel, Blood Drift.
Since I've been neglecting this blog in order to work on it, I thought I'd post the first chapter, for anyone interested.
It's a totally unedited and unformatted draft, so bear that in mind.
In any case. here's chapter one:


Some Things Never Change

As Kelly sat ignoring the meaningless words directed towards her, she reflected on the fact that some things never change.
Especially when those things involved the Feds.
This was true despite the fact that the term “Feds” was one that really no longer applied to the people whom it was used to describe. There was, after all, no longer a Federal government, at least, not one of the type that had existed when the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ancestor of the Global Bureau of Investigation, had still existed and the term “Feds” was first used to describe its agents.
The GBI was an office of the Department of Global Security, one of the offices of the Global Union, the confederation of nations that was a hodgepodge of legacy governmental systems that had arisen over the course of the past century. While the GBI had subsumed existing law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, Interpol, and the CIA, as well as the assorted militaries of the Global Union’s member nations, the average GBI Agent was indistinguishable from the Feds of America’s past.
As far as Kelly was concerned, at any rate.
This woman, she thought, as she turned her attention to Special Agent Nikki Chailyn Jenn, could easily have been a character in one of those ancient crime dramas Fontaine and I used to watch as kids, from her high and tight haircut to her humorless expression, her nondescript black suit, all the way down to her cheap shoes. It was more than her look, however; it was the attitude. The privileged demand for, in Kelly’s estimation, unearned respect, and the sneering air of smug superiority.
“Detective,” the Special Agent said, peering over her sunglasses as she slid them down her freckled nose, “are you even listening to me?”
Who even wears sunglasses these days? She can’t afford a glazing, or even photosensitive contacts? She concluded that it was an affectation, and realized, suddenly, that this was why the Feds of today were so indistinguishable from the Feds of the past; they couldn’t come up with any new ideas on how to look or act, so they stuck with what they thought worked. She suppressed a smirk at the thought, and responded, too sincerely, “Why, of course I’m listening, Special Agent Nikki.”
The Special Agent stiffened. “That’s Special Agent Jenn.”
“Of course it is,” she replied, smiling sweetly.
“Detective,” Kelly’s Captain said, with no trace of humor.
Kelly turned her glance in the Captain’s direction and found that her usual sympathetic expression was missing in action.
Apparently I’m meant to take this seriously.
“Sorry, Special Agent Jenn. You were saying?”
The Special Agent sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I was saying, Detective 34498,” emphasizing Kelly’s FIN - Family Identification Number - “that we at the GBI have serious concerns about what could be considered questionable ethical behavior on your part, and how those…behaviors reflect on you, your fellow officers, your superiors, and the entire NYPD.”
“I wasn’t aware that the GBI was concerned about the NYPD’s image,” Kelly said, flatly. “And as for my ‘questionable ethical behavior,’ I wish you would just come right out and say what you mean, because you know as well as I do that my record is above reproach. Furthermore, any ethical violations, real or perceived, of a member of the NYPD do not fall under the GBI’s rather expansive umbrella, and as such are no concern of yours. So let’s just dispense with this charade and put it on the table. This little visit doesn’t have a thing to do with anything I’ve done, it’s all about who I am, or more to the point, who I’m related to.”
Special Agent Jenn pushed her sunglasses up and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Fine, if that’s how you want to play it. What is the nature of your relationship with Subject 76 AKA Jessica 50154 AKA Samson?”
With that question she tapped the table with her gloved hand, and with a small beep a holographic image of a young woman with a square face, pointed ears, eyes that were completely black, and a thick mane of luminous blue hair appeared above the center of the table.
Kelly regarded the image, then turned to regard the Special Agent. “You know perfectly well what the nature of our relationship is.”
“Pretend that I don’t.”
With a sigh, Kelly responded, “She’s my niece.”
The Special Agent affected a look of surprise. “You, a decorated detective in the NYPD, are the aunt of a known terrorist and wanted fugitive?”
“She’s no terrorist. And as for being a fugitive, why not call a spade a spade and refer to her as missing property?”
“The Global Union does not consider her property. She is a sentient being with all of the rights and privileges afforded to any such being, whether human, Llani, or…a combination of the two.”
Before Kelly could respond, the Special Agent continued. “However, despite outward appearances Subject 76 - “
“Her name is Samson,” Kelly interjected. It was, Kelly thought, a ridiculous name, but it was the name she was given by her mother, and the name she had accepted, and, indeed, insisted on using.
“Subject 76, “ Special Agent Jenn continued, “despite her apparent maturity, is legally a minor, and is a ward of the state. We have a vested interest in locating her and ensuring her safety, as well as the safety of the public at large.”
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me, detective?”
“You aren’t the least bit concerned about Sam’s safety. If you were you wouldn’t be constantly feeding lies and distortions to your mouthpieces in the media that make her out to be some kind of dangerous monster.”
“Your niece may not be a monster,” Special Agent Jenn replied, making it clear that she, personally, did perceive Sam as a monster, “but there is no question that she is dangerous to herself and others. The…unique nature of her biology grants her abilities - potentially lethal abilities - well beyond those of more conventional humans or Llani. With proper guidance she could put those abilities to use to help every citizen.”
“You mean you would like to use her as a weapon. Like Tommy.”
“Subject 37, or ‘Tommy,’ is not a weapon. He is a responsible citizen who uses his abilities for the good of all people in the service of his government.”
Kelly snorted. “Well, he’s good PR, I’ll give you that much. Every time he rescues a kitten from a tree people forget about the illegal, unethical, and immoral experimentation that brought him into this world.”
“Are you suggesting that the world would be better without Tommy?”
After a pause, Kelly replied, “No. He actually is a good kid, despite your best efforts. But so is Sam, in her own way.”
“Your niece has many dangerous ideas.”
“Yes, like the idea that she has a right to be free, to not be poked and prodded and dissected in some secret lab. To not have to perform tasks that she finds morally abhorren.t”
Special Agent Jenn sighed heavily. “Do you know the current whereabouts of your niece?”
Without hesitation Kelly responded, “No, I don’t.”
“Are you able to contact her?”
“No.”
“When was the last time you were in contact with her?”
“About three months ago. She sent me a holomail.”
Captain Josie interjected, “Which Kelly reported to us, as she does every time Sam - Subject 76 - contacts her.”
Special Agent Jenn ignored the Captain.
“How do you arrange contact with her?”
“I don’t; she contacts me.”
“Would you be able to initiate contact with her.”
Kelly paused to think. “Maybe. She’s...her sensitivity…she would probably just know that I wanted to contact her.”
“Would she respond to this ‘knowledge’ by contacting you?”
Kelly shrugged, the armored epaulets on her shoulders nearly touching her ears as she did so. “She might.”
“Has she in the past?”
“Yes.”
“Then why do you say that she ‘might?’”
Sighing, Kelly responded, “Because unless I’m mistaken you’re hoping that I will project a desire to meet with her so that you can spring a trap. She would know that, too.”
Special Agent Jenn turned away from Kelly to look out the window of the conference room and into the precinct room, which was a buzz of activity, before speaking again.
“If you could convince her to meet with you for the purposes of ‘springing a trap,’ would you?”
Kelly bowed her head, then, weakly, responded, “If I was ordered to…yes.”
“Only if you were ordered to? In your previous contacts with her have you encouraged her to surrender to GBI custody?”
“No.”
“Despite the fact that she is a minor and a known terrorist?”
“She isn’t really either of those things. Sam was practically born an adult, and as for her supposed terrorism -“
“As a police officer you are sworn to uphold the law. Why haven’t you done so with Subject 76?”
“In this case, the law is - “ she stopped. “I do not believe that her interests would be served by turning herself in. Further, I know that I could never convince her of that even if I did believe it. Finally, I am neither physically nor emotionally capable of taking her into custody. And if she belongs in anyone’s ‘custody,’ she belongs with her family, which you people have made impossible.”
“With her family? With you, perhaps?”
“Yes.”
“You think that would be appropriate? Why?”
“She’s my niece. She’s family. She’s my blood.”
“But there is rather more to her blood than what your family has contributed, isn’t there? And why with you? Why not with her mother?”
Kelly found herself at a loss for words.
Turning back towards Kelly, Special Agent Jenn removed her sunglasses and said, “Regardless of the issue of blood, your family has no legal claim to Subject 76.”
Again, Kelly said nothing.
After a pause, Special Agent Jenn regarded both Kelly and Captain Josie.
“I find the fact that as a law enforcement officer you have flouted the law simply because you find it more convenient to do so than to perform your duties troubling at the very least. It is clear to me based on your behavior in this particular regard - in addition to other lapses in judgment - that you do not fully consider the consequences of your actions, or what they say about your character as an officer of the law. I freely admit that you have an otherwise exemplary record as a police officer, but, blood ties or not, you have responsibilities that outweigh any and all family obligations you may feel.”
“You are hereby ordered to ‘project’ a desire to meet with Subject 76. You will report any contact directly to me, and at a minimum you will encourage her to surrender to GBI custody. Any indication that you have disobeyed this directive will result in disciplinary action, and your meteoric rise within the ranks of the NYPD will come to a screeching halt, irrespective of your record and your commendations. Is that clear, detective?”
“Perfectly. Is that all?”
“No, detective, it is not. While we’re on the subject of family, I would like to discuss Subject 76’s biological mother: your sister, Fontaine.”

* * *

Standing in the washroom and looking at her still-red face in the mirror, Kelly took a deep breath and tried to regain her composure.
She had expected the questions about Sam - this wasn’t the first time some supercilious Fed had come around in an effort to track down her wayward niece. The questions about Fontaine, however, were a new development, and were much more troubling.
It was hardly a surprise that Fontaine was on the GBI’s radar - she had been since she was fourteen years old, after all - but as far as Kelly knew the official level of interest in her sister and her activities had been minimal at best.
Why are they so interested in her now?
Worse, Kelly had no pull whatsoever with the Feds, and, indeed, she herself had been on their radar since she was a teenager as well. While Kelly had never exerted her influence within the NYPD to intervene on Fontaine’s behalf - there had never been a need, honestly, as Fontaine was perfectly capable of handling herself - nor, she liked to believe, would she, as she was perfectly capable of separating her personal and professional lives, despite Special Agent Jenn’s accusations, the fact remained that even the top brass turned a blind eye when it came to Fontaine out of deference to Kelly.
Of course, Fontaine was a professional. She kept things quiet, and even if she attracted law enforcement attention the odds were against them ever finding anything they could use to make a case against her.
But that was at the local level. Global law enforcement agencies had considerably more resources and broader authority. At the very least, they could, Kelly reluctantly admitted to herself, trump up charges if they felt so inclined.
And it seemed, based on the exchange she’d just had with a representative of Global law enforcement, that they did feel so inclined.
“That stupid suit,” Kelly said aloud. “Dammit, Fontaine.”
Sighing, Kelly looked in the mirror more closely. Her short, blonde bob flowed around the edges of the navy blue headgear that framed her face. It was standard issue for beat cops, but was optional for detectives. She chose to wear it, and her modified dress uniform, simply because it was functional. The built-in communications disks that covered her ears, without interfering with her ability to hear, were much more functional than the standalone units that were available to plainclothes cops, and the light armor of the dress uniform worked just as well, if not better than, the separate body armor most detectives opted to wear, without being nearly as bulky.
Beyond that, for most of her life Kelly had never wanted to be anything other than a cop, and after putting on the blue for the first time she resolved that no matter where her career path took her, she would always display her profession with pride.
Stepping back from the sink, she regarded herself in the mirror. The navy blue of the headgear connected to the lighter blue of her skintight bodysuit at the collarbone. Her detective shield was displayed prominently on the hardened carbon fiber epaulets on her shoulders. Her one modification to the uniform was the blue skirt she wore over the bodysuit, which was a common and officially-sanctioned modification to the dress blues.
The material of the bodysuit could stop small caliber fire completely, while the distribution circuits woven into the material spread the force of impact throughout the entire bodysuit, making the shot feel like little more than a sharp sting. Heavier caliber fire would penetrate, but without sufficient force to cause mortal injury, and the material was insulated against electricity, though light-based weaponry such as lasers and other energy weapons remained deadly.
The material was based on the alien technology incorporated in the bodysuit Fontaine wore. The one that Special Agent Jenn kept pressing Kelly about.
Leaning forward, Kelly looked into her iron gray eyes in the mirror, their sharpness seeming incongruous with her otherwise soft features.
The color of her eyes was the only physical feature she had in common with her sister. As children, their father referred to them as “Night and Day,” commenting not only on their physical differences but also the stark contrast between their personalities.
Fontaine, the elder of the sisters by two years, stood several centimeters taller than Kelly, had a more athletic build, her features were considerably sharper, and her hair was jet black where Kelly’s was a golden blonde.
Both women were exceptionally beautiful, each in her own distinctive way. In a world in which beauty, thanks to technical advances that made cosmetic surgery possible at the cellular level, was the standard, and indeed, almost mundane, the two sisters stood apart from the masses.
Their mother, Genevieve, had been a successful model , and slightly less successful actress, in her youth before settling down with their father Georges and marrying into the family.
That was one other commonality between Kelly and Fontaine; they shared the same biological mother.
How important such blood ties were in the polygamous society that had developed after the Generation Plague and the war with the Llani tended to vary from family to family, though it wasn’t uncommon, as had been the case with Kelly and Fontaine, for siblings who shared both biological parents to form a closer bond than they did with their half-siblings.
The blood bond was the primary reason for their closeness, but not the only one, as most of their siblings were considerably older than either of them, and it held a special significance for them. While Kelly was reasonably close with her other nine siblings, Fontaine was the one she held closest to her heart.
Which was why she found virtually everything Fontaine did so maddening.
As for Fontaine, she rarely spoke to any of the other members of her family besides Kelly, but even with Kelly, the one person in the world to whom she was willing to display any vulnerability, or even visible, albeit nearly imperceptible, affection, Fontaine still maintained a safe, detached distance.
Kelly believed that her sister did this for the sake of her career, not wanting to entangle her younger sister in the seedier, illegal aspects of her life.
That’s what she told herself, at least.
Taking another breath, Kelly turned to leave the washroom and found Captain Josie standing in the doorway.
“What the hell was that, Captain? What does the GBI want with my sister? And why the hell didn’t you tell me what I was walking into?”
Captain Josie sighed and looked down at her feet, away from Kelly’s piercing stare. “Kelly…”
“I don’t think I want to hear it, sir.”
“I think you need to.” The Captain looked up and locked eyes with Kelly. “First of all, I have no idea what, exactly, they want with your sister, apart from the obvious.”
“The obvious?”
“Your sister is a thief who associates with known criminals. She’s believed to be connected with some of the largest heists in history, many of which involve travel across national borders, which makes them the GBI’s business. Furthermore, she’s stolen valuable and sensitive data and equipment from the government. Did it never occur to you that they would eventually decide to crack down on her?”
Kelly shook her head. “She’s believed to be involved in such thefts. There’s no proof. She doesn’t have a record. She’s never even so much as been brought in for questioning.”
“Kelly, come on.”
Kelly wasn’t budging. “There is no legitimate basis for any of the claims that have been made about Fontaine’s activities. She is a licensed private investigator and personal bodyguard.”
“She’s a mercenary and a thief.”
“Prove it.”
The Captain sighed. “Kelly, as the Special Agent pointed out, day in and day out she can be seen casually strolling along the walkways of the city wearing the same outfit she’s worn for the past three years as if she’s some ancient cartoon character, an outfit that is the property of the Global Union, which she stole from a research facility.”
“What research facility would that be? The completely secret one supported by illegally-redirected public funds that doesn’t officially exist? Much like the outfit she wears, which also doesn’t officially exist. There’s a reason she’s been wearing that outfit ‘day in and day out’ for three years without the Feds saying shit or making a move to arrest her: to do that they’d have to admit that it exists in the first place. Once they do that, people start asking questions about where it came from, and those questions ultimately lead to - “ Kelly caught herself.
“Lead to what?”
Shaking her head, Kelly said, “I can’t say.”
“I’m your Captain and your friend.”
“I know. That doesn’t change anything. I can’t say anything more.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Both.”
“Is this about your niece?”
Kelly said nothing.
“You mention things that don’t officially exist. Until your niece made it public, the lab where she was…” Captain Josie appeared to be searching for the right word.
“Born,” Kelly said, firmly.
“The lab where she was born wasn’t supposed to have existed either, and the Feds kept denying its existence even long after it went up in a ball of smoke, thanks to your niece who fire-bombed the place. Without the benefit of a bomb, I might add. That was another valid point that Fed geek made. Whether you like hearing it or not, or even if you choose not to believe it, Samson is dangerous.” She let that sink in, noting while her the fair skin of her cheeks flushed red with anger once again, Kelly said nothing.
“ It was only after they were able to introduce Tommy to the world, demonstrating what success they’d had with their experiments that they admitted that ‘mistakes were made in the pursuit of global security and the advancement of the human and Llani species’ that the breeding experiments had been going on at all. Even then, they still didn’t provide a lot of details and did their best to keep people from asking too many questions.”
“Yes. They were very good at keeping people quiet.”
“Including you?”
Kelly said nothing, but the Captain nodded in understanding.
“Fine, I’ll drop it.” She looked away. “But the fact remains that your sister is a thief. That’s hardly a secret. We followed the Feds’ lead and turned a blind eye to it, but I’m not so sure we can keep doing that.”
“There’s no proof. She doesn’t have a record.”
“Kelly, for god’s sake; she stole a fucking spaceship and took it on a joyride to the other side of the galaxy!”
“She was fourteen. That was a sealed juvenile record that has since been expunged per the terms of her deal with the Feds.”
“That’s not the point and you know it.”
“With all due respect, Captain, what is the point?”
“The point is that the odds are your sister is going down - for whatever reason - there’s nothing you can do to stop it or to protect her, and I don’t want to see the best damn cop I’ve ever known go down with her out of some misguided sense of loyalty to someone who wouldn’t know loyalty if it bit her on her perfect little ass.”
Under other circumstances Kelly might have chuckled at the comment about Fontaine’s ass. Everyone always raves about her ass, she thought bitterly.
“You don’t understand, Captain.”
“You’re right; I don’t. Your sister flagrantly breaks the law and pursues her own selfish interests without a thought to you or anyone else, but you would be perfectly willing to throw your career away for her.”
Kelly looked away.
“Honestly, Kelly; at your age you should be, at best, a rookie fresh out of the academy, but you’ve already got your gold shield, and if you would just step away from this you’d be in line for a promotion. You’re only twenty-four years old, for fuck’s sake! You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t piss it away for someone who would sell you out in a heartbeat.”
“You’re wrong, Captain. Fontaine…there’s more to her than you think.”
“There would have to be. “ Captain Josie reached over and put her hand on Kelly’s left arm. “You know, there are a lot of fucked-up families in this world. Hell, I thought mine was bad. Did you know that my older sister tried to set me on fire when we were kids? First and second-degree burns all along my left side. I had to go through umpteen cellular regenerations, and I still have some scars. Now she’s like my best friend.”
Kelly nodded. She’d heard this story many times before.
“But, I’m sorry kid, your family…hell, you’ve got a niece who’s half-alien and wanted by every law enforcement agency in the world, and even that’s not half as strange as your relationship with your sister.”
The Captain softened a little. “Just…just look out for yourself, okay? Don’t let your relationship with your sister cloud your judgment.”
With a nod, Kelly said, “I’ll do my best, but when it comes to my sister, my judgment is always clouded.”
“What kind of relationship do the two of you even have, anyway?”
Kelly opened her mouth to speak, then closed it and thought for a moment.
“It’s complicated,” she said, simply.

Frustration

Thanks to everyone - all one of you* - who suggested possible titles. I actually sought out assistance in the Comments over at Slacktivist and went with one of the suggestions from someone there: Blood Drift.
Even after switching to the different wireless adapter, Munin continued to exhibit the problems it had been having under Windows 7.
I decided that the thing to do was to restore it to factory condition, download a BIOS update that I didn't think to download before upgrading - and which wouldn't run under Windows 7 - and some firmware updates for the hard drive and DVD drive, then try a clean install of Windows 7.
During one of the brief periods in which I had Internet connectivity I found a newer driver for the built-in wireless adapter, but installing that didn't fix the problem.
That didn't really surprise me, as it was clear that the problem was bigger than just that one driver, as no USB device connected to the computer would work properly.
Attempting to copy files to an external hard drive, for example, would result in the transfer eventually stalling out and the hard drive light actually turning off. The drive would still appear to be accessible - I could explore it, but not actually open any files on it - but clearly wasn't working.
This was actually a major fly in the ointment, as I needed to back up my internal hard drive before doing the factory restore, which reformats the drive and erases everything on it.
After several vain attempts to get the files copied over to my external drive I finally hit upon an idea: download an .iso of some Linux distro, burn a CD, boot from that, and copy the files over to the external drive.
So I found some random distro, burned it to CD, booted...and found that it didn't have drivers for my display, so once it actually loaded up I couldn't see anything.
Undaunted (well, somewhat daunted), I found a distro of Ubuntu Linux, burned the .iso, booted from that, and success!
With that accomplished, I dug out my recovery CDs, booted up...and realized that I didn't actually need the CDs, as the recovery files are stored in a partition on the hard drive and I could have just hit F11 during bootup to run the recovery from there.
Worse, I completely forgot that the restore process actually gives you an opportunity to run a back-up before proceeding, so it's possible I could have skipped the whole Linux process (though I'm not 100% sure on that; choosing to "Backup Now" might have just booted me back into Windows, where the backing up wouldn't have worked, given the USB communications issues.)
After doing the factory restore I found that my BIOS was actually up to date anyway.
*Sigh*
It was very late by this time, though, so I waited until this morning to reinstall Windows 7.
This time around the problem with the wireless adapter appeared right away.
I didn't even bother trying to download the new driver.
Instead I opted to disable the adapter and pick up one of those power line networking kits.
It actually works pretty well. You hook one adapter up to the router, then plug it into the wall outlet. Then you take the other adapter, hook it up to the computer you want to add to the network, plug it into the wall outlet, and voila, the network signal is traveling through the electrical wiring in the house. So far with that method I'm able to network Munin without the problems I was having with the wireless adapter(s).
I may buy another adapter so that I can hook my Blu-ray player and media extender up to the network (it's faster than the wireless connection my media extender currently has, and the Blu-ray player doesn't have wireless).
So it took more than a week, but it seems that - knock on wood - I finally have Windows 7 running properly and can now actually enjoy some of the new features.
Apart from messing around with Windows 7 and doing the usual comic book and grocery shopping, in the late afternoon/early evening I decided to bail on any trick-or-treaters and see a movie. Unlike last year, when I bailed on them but left candy - which some little bastard promptly stole, apparently - this year I said, "Screw you, kids!' and left nothing.
The movie in question was Zombieland, which was freakin' hilarious.
I'm not sure how much posting I'll be doing for the next month, as I'll be working on the novel trying to churn out 50,000 words in 30 days.
This time around will be more of a challenge than the other two times, as I don't have as much free time as I did back then, what with the four days off (and having time to actually write while I was at work), and I really want to write something that's at least halfway decent this time around. Of course, that's what I wanted to do the other two times, and that really didn't work out, so I'm not terribly confident that this year will be different.
In any case, I'm not going to blog my chapters as I write them like I did the first time around, though, unless it turns out to be complete garbage (there's a better than average chance of that), I will probably share it in some fashion once I'm finished.

*I'm honestly not bitter about the lack of comments in the Comments. I'm a realist; I know how little traffic this blog gets and how little there is to actually comment on. Seriously, I'm not bitter. Well, not terribly bitter, at any rate. I mean, it does bother me a little when I explicitly ask for comments and don't get any (other than from Scott), but it's not like I expected any, so I guess it all works out.

A Request (That Will Go Largely Ignored)

I'm thinking about participating in National Novel Writing Month this year.
I have an overall plot (sort of), and a lot of particular scenes worked out, but the one thing I'm totally lacking is a title.
So I'm asking for some help with that.
I'm looking for something with a hard-boiled detective/crime noir feel.
The story is about my character Fontaine, an amoral, irredeemable thief and mercenary living in the future.
Fontaine's "world" is intended to be a blend of genres: crime fiction, action thriller, science fiction (with some comic book-y elements), etc.
The story will be largely character-driven, but in terms of the overall plot, Fontaine has something the government wants but can't just outright take (though they do try), so they're using her personal relationships - such as they are - against her to try to get it.
Vague, I know, but...
If it'll help, I have an unfinished Fontaine story (which I thought about retooling/rewriting for NaNoWriMo, but decided against it) that's titled "A Hard Rain."
That's the sort of thing I'm looking for in a title.
So leave your suggestions in the Comments.
(I know that, unless you're Scott or Stacy, you won't, but it's worth a shot...)
Oh, and if I do participate this year - I'm only about 90% sure that I'm going to - this blog will probably go silent for even longer stretches of time, but I'm sure the world will keep turning in its course.
I'm also not sure how/if I'll share what I write yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Lord, I Was Born A Rambling Blogger

Wednesday night Scott and I watched the Riff Trax versions of Spider-Man 2 and Star Wars Episode 1, both of which were extremely entertaining.
However, as a result, on Thursday night I had some recorded shows waiting to be watched on my DVR, and I also had My Name is Earl and The Office to watch, so most of my time was spent in front of the TV, which is why I didn’t post an entry.
Well, that and laziness. Been a lot of that going around lately.
On my drive home on Thursday it occurred to me that sometimes I wish it were possible for me to pull people over to the side of the road and – no, not beat them within inches of their lives – ask them what the hell they’re doing and why. I was particularly interested in doing this to someone who was driving in the lane next to me. If I could have done so, the conversation would have gone something like this:

“Who the fuck are you, and why have you pulled me over?”
“Calm down. My name is Jon and I just wanted to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Well, as we were driving along I noticed that you were, what, about fifteen car lengths behind the nearest car, right?”“Yeah, about that, I guess.”
“And you were probably going about five miles per hour under the speed limit?”
“Yeah.”
“And you were holding that speed pretty steadily, so clearly there was no immediate danger of you suddenly colliding with the car ahead of you.”“So?”
“Well, my question is, given all of that, why did you randomly slam on your brakes, nearly causing the car behind you to rear-end you?”

Of course, I can only speculate as to what the answer to that question would be, so I can’t provide an answer in my hypothetical conversation, but given how often I see this sort of thing happen, and generally in circumstances in which, unlike the situation on Thursday, I’m the person behind the inexplicable braker, I’m more than a little curious as to what the answer might be.
Any ideas out there as to why people just randomly slam on their brakes for no apparent reason?
I’d really like to know. Well, I’d really like for people to stop doing it, but barring that, I’d settle for understanding the reasoning behind it.
When I got home yesterday I immediately entered into a dialogue with my bed that resulted in the bed convincing me that I should climb into it and sleeping for two hours and waking up confused in darkness when, from my perspective, it had been bright and sunny just a few moments earlier.
Despite my rather lengthy nap earlier in the day I still ended up sleeping for nearly nine hours last night, waking up surprisingly late this morning.
As a result it took me until later in the day than usual to shower and dress and head out into the world to pick up some groceries, with said delay leading to an exponential increase in the number of children and old people I had to maneuver around in the grocery store.
In thinking about the whole National Novel Writing Month thing, I’ve found myself revisiting a very old story idea, grappling with some of the more problematic questions that had ultimately led me to abandon the idea, working out some possible answers to those questions, and coming up with a workable plot, complete with the requisite beginning, middle, and end.
However, that small victory isn’t quite encouraging enough to push me off the fence when it comes to deciding whether or not I’ll participate this year, given that the other problems of time and motivation are still in place.
So, for the time being I’m still in “we’ll see” mode.
In any case, this entry has been uneven and rambling enough that I should probably bring it to an end.
If I can build up the energy to work on and complete a picture, I’ll post the results later. If not, I won’t.