Nethermore

He’s been gone for a month. But I still can’t help but feel a great sense of loss in the wake of his passing. Even though I never met the man, Robert Jordan had a huge influence on my life during my teenage years. And to think, I came upon his books entirely by accident.

I was about fourteen. There on the lamp table in the living room of my best friend’s house was a copy of The Eye of the World in its first paperback printing (the one with the less-defined maps).

As you can imagine from reading my blog, I was originally drawn to the book by its beautiful cover and interior paintings. I remember the moment very distinctly, the feels, the smells. This may sound ridiculous, but deciding to pick up that book, to borrow it from my friend’s father, was a defining moment in my life.

All because of a beautiful cover. Okay, I guess it wasn’t just because of that–the tome’s width and heft were impressive. I’d been on a kick of reading thick fantasy novels for a year already, and I’d already gone through the Tad Williams’ books, and here was another book that looked like it would fill my hunger for thick fantasy.

And it did, every wit.

Two writers had a significant impact on the way I learned to write during that time of my life. Robert Jordan was one of these. When I was 18, I finished writing my first book and gave it to my father to read. He was the first one to point out all of the Jordan-isms I had used. It left me raising my eyebrows, having done this quite unintentionally. I spent the next little while trying not to write like him.

When I started working at the book store, I used our computer system (still sans internet) to find as many books as I could under Robert Jordan’s other pen names. A lot of my searching was fruitless, and I had to wait for the books to come out revealing that “Reagan O’Neal” and “Jackson O’Reilly” were actually pen names for Robert Jordan. And the bigger realization discovered in some encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy that Robert Jordan was really the pen name of James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

Gasp. It was like discovering that the man with fire-for-a-mouth that haunted Rand’s dreams wasn’t actually the Dark One.

I don’t know what ever happened to that first Eye of the World paperback that belonged to my friend’s dad. It was in my locker at school one day, and the next day it was gone. I don’t think he made me replace the book. Paperback books were transitory things to him. But to me . . . that book was like gold.

I read The Eye of the World in between classes at high school.

I read The Great Hunt while in line at Disneyland. The book’s there in every family picture of that trip, my nose in the book or my finger marking my place.

When my father barely slipped by the grasp of death in a terrible car accident, I stayed the evening by his bedside in the ER. The book I brought with me was the new Jordan paperback: The Dragon Reborn.

I had The Shadow Rising in my big hunting coat as Dad set me down at the bottom of a gulley and said he’d go to the top and flush the deer through. When the autumn sun rose high enough in the sky, I took the coat off, I sat on a sun-warmed rock, and I read.

I can go through my junior high, high school, and college years and remember what was going on in my life based on which Jordan book had come out at the time.

Coincidentally, I was thinking about RJ the day he died. I was on my way home from Idaho and had just pulled off the freeway into Provo. My thought was, “I need to check out RJ’s blog and see how he’s doing.”

I didn’t get around to that until the next day, when early that morning, a friend at work informed me of RJ’s death.

I’ll admit, I spent the day in a pseudo sense of mourning; it felt as if a friend had died.

And he really was a friend. I’d spent autumn afternoons in the mountains with him; I’d stood in line with him at Disneyland; he’d been there when my dad was in the emergency room at the hospital.

Goodbye, RJ. Thanks for all the good times.

Tomorrow, in honor of Robert Jordan, I’ll be doing a book cover countdown of the Twelve Best Wheel of Time Book Covers.

In a bold move today, Google Inc. of Mountain View, California acquired the Internet for 10.2 trillion dollars.

“It was the logical next step,” says Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “Our analysts began noticing the trend a few years back. We were buying all the companies that had anything to do with online interactions. At this rate, they said we’d have the whole Internet bought up by 2015. We decided to preempt the trend and save money in the long run.”

The Associated Press said:

Google Acquires The Internet
AP - 2 Hours Ago

In a move that stunned two nations, four blind mice, and a greased up deaf guy, Google has made a successful bid for The Internet. This monstrous deal for an undisclosed sum was inked at the estate of former Vice President Al Gore, where Mr. Gore formally handed it over.

When asked what Mr. Gore will do with the earnings, he said, “I’ve been wanting my own modest website for sometime now. Now I think it’s time to make a bid on whitehouse.gov.”

With a small portion of the money, he is backing a bill that would limit the amount of words politicians can speak in a day. “I’m concerned with Global Warming,” he said, “and I’d tell you why, but I’ve already reached my word quota.”

For more information on the Internet, its creation, and its creator, check out http://www.algorerules.com/internet/index.htm.

Picture by Kojiro.

We’ve seen the arrival of virtual worlds. The number of users in Second Life and World of Warcraft have exploded. Hundreds of thousands of dollars exchange hands on these services every day. And now the IRS wants their cut of it.

It’s not enough that, were one to cash out virtual dollars into real dollars, that the IRS will take a cut of that money. Now they may want to tax the virtual transactions themselves. So, for example, if you sell a bit of virtual property and make a profit in virtual dollars, then you would have to pay virtual taxes on that virtual profit.

Doesn’t sound fair to me. It’s a game! It’s played for fun! When did virtual reality become reality? When did taxing virtual assets become part of the game?

If virtual taxation comes into play, it appears that those assets will be taxed twice: once when the transaction takes place in the virtual world, and the second time when the player transfers virtual assets into real world assets.

I recently read an article about this over at Scientific American that addresses the issue of taxing in-game assets. Here are some of the things said by those they interviewed:

Game designer Sam Lewis said, “There’s just too much money floating around.” He did say, however, that he didn’t want the IRS knocking on anyone’s virtual door.

Dan Miller said, “I found that talking about this issue with some of the other economists on the committee, they are not really familiar with what a virtual economy is.” Did I mention that Dan Miller is the U.S. Congress’s senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee?

According to my brother, the interpretation of the quote above is this: “The sooner we can figure out what it is, the sooner we can tax it.”

Now, if there are that many people unaware of how these second worlds work, I’ll wager there are few people in the nation’s law-making bodies who know what they are talking about. This will inevitably lead to laws made by those who don’t understand what they’re doing.

I think it’s time that the virtual community send a virtual Smith to Washington. A virtual community should not be taxed without having had someone represent their case before lawmakers. Virtopia needs Senators and Congressmen.

And if they don’t get them? Well, I think they should form their own country and secede from the union; form their own constitution, elect their own president, and decide whether they want to be taxed or not.

Virtual nations. That’s a strange idea. Now that I mention it, it really scares me. What if a group of pedophiles or murderers decides to create their own virtual nation where they aren’t subject to the laws in which their computer resides. (This must be covered in a law somewhere–how else does the law convict these kind of people using the harddrives from their computers?)

So, on second thought, there really needs to be regulations on these things. But really, the taxation shouldn’t be inserted into a game, or else there will be people who form their own nations to avoid taxation. And forming online nations with their own laws just opens up a whole new can of worms.

But I think I’ll be fine with the virtual nations formed to avoid ridiculous taxes . . . so long as they don’t start enriching uranium.

Maybe you’ve read both Scalzi’s account of the Scalzi Award and Brandon’s as well. But there’s a story behind the award—a story rife with yellow bricks and peril.

It began on Wednesday night. Bryce Moore and I trekked through Downtown Disney looking for souvinirs—he for his son. I was looking for something for myself. Nothing jumped out at me.

But then a large yellow store arose from the mists of night and the smoke from the Disneyland fireworks: the Lego store. It loomed like, well, a giant brick with large, red, Lego doors to welcome us.

As we entered, a nine-year old boy sat outside the red doors, Legos scattered all over the cobblestones in front of him. I imagined him coming out of the store in a panic, unable to contain the pressure fueling his Lego fix. Without being able to make it back to his hotel room, he fell to the ground, ripping apart the Lego box, bricks flying everywhere. And now, on the ground, he could breathe easily as he furiously built a Lego Star Wars Jedi spaceship.

Little did I know that the boy would be me on Saturday night right after the Hugo Awards banquet.

Of all the things in the Lego store, the thing that sparked my curiosity was the big bins of bricks in the back. For around seven bucks, one could take a plastic cup and fill it with Legos from any of the bins. I made up my mind. I wanted Legos as a souvinir. And since the Hugos were given out at WorldCon, I thought it would be cool to make a rocket to take home as a remembrance of the Convention.

As the convention unfolded, it became apparent that Scalzi was the forerunner for the Campbell Award, and as a result, my friend Brandon Sanderson adopted him as his evil nemesis. When things went even slightly awry, the curse “Scalzi!” would echo down the hallways in the same intonations of the famous line: “Khan!”

The joke grew, and then I found myself one afternoon with friends Dan Wells and Janci Patterson, who both had expressed interest in going to the Lego store. Since Lego rockets were already on my mind, I brought up the idea of making an award for Brandon. We all thought it would be a great idea, and we planned on giving him the award—so long as Scalzi won.

Off to the Lego Store, and directly to the bins of bricks we went. After an hour of fiddling with bricks, and a few false starts—Dan and Janci were incredibly patient with me—we had a rocket. It should be mentioned that Dan did a great job of decorating the rocket with round pieces, and vents, and a Lego bush to act as a pilot. We pulled the thing apart, crammed it into the little bucket, and added pieces around it to fill it up and get our money’s worth of bricks.

Torn apart in a bucket with a taped-on top, the Scalzi award waited until Saturday when Dan Wells and Steve Diamond borrowed a Sharpie from the “When Did You Join Fandom?” wall and approached John Scalzi.

“Can you sign this?” asked Dan. “It’s a Lego.”

“Sure,” said Scalzi. He signed the brick and handed it back. “What’s it for?”

“I can’t tell you,” said Dan.

Scalzi looked confused. “Well, can you tell me later?”

“No.” Dan took back the Sharpie. “But maybe you’ll find out.”

Fast forward to Saturday night. Scalzi wins the Campbell Award. Our friend Bob Defendi screams “Scalziiii!” into the silence before Scalzi’s acceptance speech. The Hugos end. The group of us are walking back to the hotel with Brandon.

Dan looks at me. “Have you built the award?”

I blink. “It’s still in the bucket with all the other bricks we shoved in there.”

“You’d better hurry then,” he says.

I ran to the hotel, reverting back to past tense. The elevators had quite the wait. I found a stairwell that appeared to be for employees only because it was so narrow. Up to the seventh floor, and into the rooms I flew.

On the floor was the bucket of Legos. I tore off the lid and began madly building the rocket, wondering if I could make it exactly the same way I had back in the store a few days earlier. Just as in the movies, I got it done just as Brandon and the rest of the group arrived. (Thanks to Kimball on this one.)

Then we presented the award to Brandon. My only regret: I wish we had built a holder on it for Scalzibane.

So, that’s the story of the Scalzi Award. And at 6.95, I bet it cost a whole lot less than that Campbell Awards plaque.

One of the coolest things at the convention this year was to see how Pyr Books is coming along. I first heard about Pyr about a year ago at the World Fantasy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin. At the time, Pyr was basically a newborn by publisher standards, having just emerged from Prometheus as their science fiction and fantasy imprint.

Now, a year later, Pyr has published over twenty books, has snagged some of the biggest names in the genre, and printed some of the most beautiful books I’ve seen in a long time. This is a publisher to watch. For over a decade, Tor books has been the biggest name in the field—and how I love the books that Tor releases! However, it’s nice to see other publishers catching up with the same quality of stories and packaging. I think we’re hitting another boom in the genre, similar to what we saw in the early 90s—only with more enthusiasm and more originality.

Books to watch for from Pyr, and which are now on my reading list:

Infoquake by David Louis Edelman
The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams
River of Gods by Ian McDonald
Fast Future 1 edited by Lou Anders

These are a few that caught my eye immediately, but I must say that Pyr has more books that sound interesting to me than I have time to read. Take a look at who else they’re publishing!

Fiona Avery, Michael Moorcock, Storm Constantine, Mike Resnick, Joel Shepherd, and Robert Silverberg. This is just to name a few!

In addition to all this, I had a chance to talk to Lou Anders—Pyr’s editorial director—for a few brief minutes during his kaffeklatsch and in the hall later. And I must say that he is a stellar individual with a keen eye for a good story. He’s definitely taking Pyr in a great direction. He even mentioned my maps in his blog.

John Scalzi, winner of this year’s Campbell Award for best new writer, mentioned the Lego Scalzi award that me and a few friends put together for Brandon. More on this when Scalzi gets his version of the story up. It’s a long post, so here’s the quote here:

Meeting Brandon Sanderson and his sneaky friends who got me to sign a piece of LEGO (the explanation for that will come at a later point, when I get pictures).

There was quite the buzz about several other books—from Pyr and other publisher—that have come out this year, many of which I expect to see on the Hugo and World Fantasy ballots for next year’s cons:

Infoquake by David Louis Edelman
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
(Scott’s blog can be found at this link.)
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

More about the convention later.

It started sometime in February or March of 2005. Holly, Heather, Brandon and I went to dinner at Macaroni Grill and were waiting for our orders. We all pulled out the provided crayons and started doodling on the paper tablecloth. Holly and Heather were drawing trees with strange curlicues, Brandon sketched symbols from his then-forthcoming novel Elantris, and I roughed out a few faces like I normally do in my sketchbook.

Brandon looked over at what I was drawing and said, “Hey, those are nice. You want to do the maps for my next book?”

I read an early version of Mistborn: the Final Empire, made hundreds of sketches, and turned in the final versions of the maps, symbols, and tables sometime in December of 2005.

Today is the release date for Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. Although I saw a copy of the finished book a few weeks ago, Saturday I was able to go to Brandon’s book signing and get one of my own.

The symbols throughout the book are representations of the different Allomantic Metals. I went through probably a thousand little doodles before striking onto the look I was seeking for what I began calling the “Steel Alphabet.” I drew inspiration from some reference photos of old, bent-up, rusty nails.

Most of the book takes place in the city of Luthadel, so the map of the city became the more complex and detailed of the maps. I chose to keep the world map relatively simple, leaving only the major landmarks and border delineations so the reader has a sense of direction and place. You wouldn’t be able to navigate by the world map, but I hope you’d be able to use the map of Luthadel to find your way to any of major Canton’s or to Kredik Shaw . . . if you were crazy enough to actually want to visit it.

I’ve updated the gallery with much of the artwork that is used in the book (and photographed in the pictures above). I’ll add more to the Mistborn Gallery as the year progresses. For now, I hope you will enjoy Mistborn Gallery #1.

I’ve focused a lot on the interior artwork in this post. Stripped of all the artwork altogether (and even of its beautiful cover by Jon Foster) Mistborn the Final Empire is one of the best books of fantasy I have ever read. If you love fantasy and haven’t checked this one out, go take a look. I think you’ll be surprised.

Thanks to Brandon and to Tor Books for allowing me to do something I’ve long dreamed of doing!

Air conditioning stopped Sunday afternoon for no apparent reason other than it’s the only day I spend at home. Luckily the temperature has only been hovering just above 100 degrees. I’d hate to be without AC in Phoenix or Death Valley. I bet there are laws in Death Valley against not having air conditioning.

It makes me wonder about the rights a person has once he signs a contract to live somewhere. Seriously, this is the equivalent to leaving a dog in a locked car in hot weather. There are people—self-proclaimed vigilantes—who check parking lots to save aforementioned dogs from heat stroke.

Who goes around to the apartment buildings checking to see if the management is keeping the AC in tip-top condition?

That’s it. We live in a world where dogs have more protectors than do humans. I hear that there are crusades to save the monkeys, too. We’re becoming slaves to the animals.

What’s next? Planet of the Apes?

The busy week is over and the week of writing has begun! Later this evening, in addition to writing, I’ll be organizing notes for the next part of the book in a program called WhizFolders. I might even try a different (aka “full screen”) approach to word processing by using a simple program called Dark Room. Either way, expect a small update to the progress bar starting tomorrow.

In other news, my friends Brandon and Emily got married on Friday. Friends of the groom got swords! There I am in red on the far left of both of these pictures. Brandon named his swords after books he has written. Mine is called Mistborn, which, by the way, we saw copies of over the weekend. It’s a great book and looks beautiful, (in part because of the maps and interior artwork).

Sword Pictures, compliments of Red Aragorn’s Live Journal.

Swords Down
Swords Drawn

Went to the rodeo on Friday night and met a clown who came barrelling across the street just to get his picture taken with me. At first I thought, “Hey, maybe this is one of Stinky Hobo’s friends.” I mean, look at the picture . . . the guy even has his own blue Jikkom.

But it wasn’t a hobo. It was a clown. And evidently a famous clown.

His name is Lecile Harris, and among other things, he’s been a professional rodeo clown and on the show Hee Haw.

In other news, I’m back to writing this week. I finished Part One, and began Part Two. There will be three parts in the book, and I’m starting the longest of the three.

The last few weeks have been killer, to the point that I don’t think I’m going to make my July 31st deadline on finishing the book. But I’m not going to let that get me down (too much, anyway). I’m going to keep cranking away at the book and finish it soon, if not by July 31st.

Took a look at the stats for last week, and we had 200 unique visitors on Tuesday! The rest of the week was pretty strong as well. Thanks for coming by and taking a look at things.

By this weekend, I’m hoping to make some time to tweak the design and colors of the website. Things may look a little bit weird (ala I-15) as I try some new things.

In other news, I’m going to be pushing really hard to hit 100k by this time next week. I’ve been doing a significant amount of outlining for the book when I’ve been sitting places where I could do nothing else. By Monday next, I’m shooting to be completely done with Part One of Nethermore and have the beginning of Part Two started. Part One should clock in at about 75k words, and I think that Part Two will take me about 100k to get through. That leaves around 25k for the climax and epilogue, though I think I’ll go over that by just a little bit.

A few Miscellaneous Links:

For those of you who are interested in news in the Science Fiction and Fantasy community, check out Locus Magazine online. It’s the standard news magazine for the industry and always has interesting links.

If you’re a writer interested in sending your stories to publishers, check out Ralan’s Market Guide. This website is updated pretty often with amateur and professional publications that are looking for content.

For those who have never submitted a manuscript before—or if you would just like to review—Speculations has a terse little guide on how to format your manuscript before you send it somewhere.

Here’s to another good week!

—”Stewart”