Happy Thanksgiving! I hope yours was wonderful, full of food, family, friends, and lots and lots of gratitude.

I love Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorite holidays, and it’s dreadfully underrated—unfortunately steamrolled by the commercial side of Christmas most years. I’m grateful that I was able to spend it with family this year. I got pretty sick last week, so I spent a good chunk of the holiday lying down and wishing I could breathe well enough to nap… It was still wonderful, in part because I was far enough past the infectious phase by Thanksgiving itself that I could still spend a little time with family. (And I got to laugh at my baby, who was surrounded by all sorts of delectable meals and was only interested in eating dinner rolls. Not even rolls covered in potatoes and gravy, or simple buttered rolls, just plain rolls.)

Gratitude is healing and helps to put things in perspective.

Anyway, I’ve got two chapters of The Failed Technomancer live, chapters 15 and 16. Will Kayla and 64Bit learn to work together? What plans does the mysterious camera-eyed rozie have for Cortex, and will he survive them? Guess you got to read to find out.

Discussions—Dragonsteel MiniCon 2023

Last week, I attended Dragonsteel MiniCon! (Only the first day of it.) I had a mixed experience. I think the biggest realization I had coming out of the conference was that I am past the point of fan convention panels being an excellent use of my time—almost everything I heard in the writer-oriented panels was advice I’d learned before and either adopted or found didn’t work for me. I did learn some new lessons, but I’m starting to experience diminishing returns. I need to find more technical or focused writer/author/publishing conferences, not just fan ones.

Got any suggestions? I’m all ears! (Eyes?…)

Anyway, don’t let my first paragraph mislead you. The conference was wonderful, obviously tailored for Brandon Sanderson fans to have an excellent time, and it delivered in that regard. I still enjoyed myself, especially with regards to connecting with old friends (like Colton over at Narrative Ink) and making new ones (like a writer named Skyler who is going to write the next big epic fantasy that, based on how I interpret his description, mashes Redwall and A Song of Ice and Fire; as a writer of epic muridae fantasy myself, I approve).

I do still have some things that I want to discuss about the various panels that I visited! My current plan is to do that one panel at a time, week by week, starting with the first panel I attended, Writing in Multiple Genres.

If I were to synthesize the big things I got out of the above panel, I’d give you these three points: (A) Read deeply in the genre you want to write in; (B) Develop a distinctive author voice and style, so that no matter what genre you write in your books are first your books; (C) Being familiar with genre conventions can provide you with useful tools, but ultimately genre is a marketing tool that doesn’t matter until after your book is written.

As far as (A) is concerned, this is a very common—yet critical—piece of writing advice that I hear all over the place. Always a good reminder, but also always no surprise.

(B) I find rather interesting, and as an author I want to put more work into myself in this area—to have my style, my unique invisible signature, be such that readers would follow me anywhere. I think that’s a mark of real talent and craft. Doing so won’t catch every reader, of course; but this makes me think of my music library. For almost every artist and band represented in my library, I only have one to three of their songs, and I’m really much more interested in those individual songs than I am in the artist. But for specific artists, I listen to nearly everything they’ve produced, and have way more than three songs on my list, because I like something about the artist enough that I will appreciate even the songs that fall outside my preferred genres. (Colm McGuinness is the top of my list in that regard, currently.) Authors that work that way for me include Brandon Sanderson and Orson Scott Card; after reading Codex Alera and The Aeronaut’s Windlass, I hoped that Jim Butcher would get on this shortlist, but I bounced right off Dresden.

If you have any artists on your “try everything” shortlist, I’m curious to hear who they are and why.

(C) is my attitude for just about every story I start writing. I just want to write the story that’s in my head, then I can figure out the marketing later. Some artists find success writing for the current market… I guess I’m in the crowd that needs to discover or create his market.

Discussions—Spider-Man: No Way Home

Have you seen Spider-Man: No Way Home? I saw it for the first time yesterday, and I was impressed. This movie received a ton of hype when it was first announced and for a while after release, which left me with a lot of high expectations, even around two years later. No movie can live up to those kinds of expectations, but this movie was so good that I enjoyed it anyway, which is pretty cool.

That’s not to say that No Way Home is a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination. I think the sum is greater than its parts, and its parts have a lot of weird irregularities here and there; Pitch Meeting‘s video does a pretty good job at pointing out more than a few. In particular, I felt that Dr. Strange’s characterization was wildly inconsistent throughout the film. But, again, the overall experience makes these little speed bumps meaningless to overall enjoyment.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to bring up No Way Home came from a crossroads between an existential feeling that I had while watching the movie and something discussed during the Dragonsteel Con panel Writing in Multiple Genres (brought up above).

First, for the existential feeling: there are so many Spider-Man movies! So many. For live-action, we had the Sam Ramey trilogy in the 2000s, then the Andrew Garfield duology (that got cancelled before it could become a trilogy), and now Tom Holland’s trilogy (not to mention multiple appearances in other Avengers movies), and that’s not considering the consistent creation of animated TV series, the Miles Morales animated movies, and the recent critically-acclaimed Sony video games. This is a glut of material that should leave us with a sick taste in our mouths at just the thought of more Spider-Man… but instead, everyone I know (who has an opinion) just wants more. What makes Spider-Man’s story so infinitely retellable, so much more so than other superheroes, the superhero genre as a whole, and so forth?

The second, making the intersection of concepts, this idea from the conference: Execution matters more than originality. That’s not to say that people don’t want new stories—I really believe they do—but people are generally more interested in a really well-done, familiar story than they are in a poorly done new story.

And that might be part of what makes the infinite Spider-Man content so consumable. This is not a perfect franchise by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think the overall quality manages to at least keep a head over most other oft-repeated tales in cinema. So that might help. But since Spider-Man has had a few stinkers, there must be something else, something more to the Spider-Man mythos that talks to something deep in people’s souls.

There’s a video essayist on YouTube (Schnee) who breaks down the “Spider-Man Formula” pretty well. I’m referring to a video titled Miguel’s DESTRUCTIVE Idea of “Spider-Man”. His focus is on the Into the Spiderverse movies more than anything else, but I think a lot of his analysis (which I’ll adopt into my points below) can be applied to just about any Spider-Man story—and it could be the key to understanding this… thing.

Spider-Man typically starts out as someone anyone could be. I don’t want to say an “everyman,” because I don’t think that trope feels universal anymore—a lot of people don’t feel like they can connect with the “everyman” the way the trope wants them to. But Spider-Man generally just starts out as a someone. Often a very smart someone, but someone with problems, commonly from a tough background, with enough normal problems in life to make them an interesting character even without the life-changing transformation to have super powers. I think this helps to make a good Spider-Man story grounded in a way that an alien from Krypton or a mega-rich orphan might struggle to achieve (despite the popularity of Superman and Batman and the genuinely wonderful things they stand for).

Speaking of someone anyone could be, Spider-Man typically begins immature and selfish, then learns the hard way to start looking beyond himself. This long-term transformation commonly begins with the death of a beloved family member (frequently Uncle Ben), and often is followed by a statement along the lines of “Power = Responsibility,” but there is enough variation that every spider-story can feel like a new idea within a comfortable archetype. (The Spiderverse films hit on this idea pretty hard, but it also comes up in No Way Home.)

Finally, the best Spider-Man stories I’m aware of focus heavily on Spider-Man’s increased focus on doing good for its own sake. Some Spider-Man stories show Spider-Man learning to do this in a healthy way, taking proper care of himself and his loved ones while constantly self-sacrificing to do the harder right, while others lean into Spider-Man being more of a mess driven by guilt, but still choosing to do what’s right because it’s right, even if he really ought to talk to a therapist in the meantime. Both types of stories are really powerful: The first provides something to strive for, something that may be more than just an ideal because we started by seeing Spider-Man as a selfish, immature kid who had to grow up and change into the hero he needed to be. The second provides catharsis, as many people don’t see themselves as the former (and most people aren’t, truthfully), but it’s good to see someone so empathetically flawed striving to do what’s right anyway.

There’s a lot of other story analyses about what makes Spider-Man click with so many people, but I know that, for me, I tend to find Spider-Man most memorable both when he’s learning the hard lessons and when he’s setting himself aside so he can serve the needs of others. Of course, good superhero action and web-slinging doesn’t hurt, but all of those would be hollow if the heart of the story didn’t have any substance.

And as an aside, with how often the Spider-Man story gets told and retold, and with how familiar it is to most people, Spider-Man is seeming to me more and more like a real modern fairy tail, one that will be picked up by everyone when the copyright expires and carried every single direction possible, never to die. (Makes me think of recent activity with Pinocchio and Winnie the Pooh…)

What do you think? Is Spider-Man overdone? Or is there something in the core of that story that has been polished through retellings into a timeless archetype?

Bloggyness Review—The Sunlit Man

B-Money Sandman has hit it out of the park with his Secret Projects Kickstarter. I recently finished The Sunlit Man, and it was the best of the bunch for me. I loved it.

I didn’t intend this to be a continuing theme throughout this blog post, but I think I need to say this again: execution is more important than originality. Which isn’t to say that Sanderson isn’t original—he oozes originality—but there’s a lot of tropes and themes in this story that are going to feel extremely familiar to many readers. If you love epic fantasy, and Westerns, and especially cosmere Sanderson (with the number of books in the cosmere, surely Sanderson has made his own mini-genre at this point), you’re going to be comfortably at home here. A new world, an intricate system of magic, a unique culture with specific rules that has to be navigated; the main character is a stranger who shows up, helps solve a town’s problems, then is forced to leave; interaction with other planets and some deep conversation on Investiture; these are things that many people will be familiar with, but that are executed in such a stylish and fun way that I almost couldn’t put this book down.

Read the summary to The Sunlit Man if you want to get an idea of the story. As for me, I went into the story blind, as with most of the Secret Projects, and I loved the experience. I read it to my wife, and she was brought to tears at multiple points in the story, and we both had moments of collective laughter and breath-holding. Coming out on the other side, I am very, very hopeful that we get another Nomad story from Sanderson in the future, and I’m very curious about the central role the Threnodites may play in the resolution of all things cosmere, but either way I’m excited to see the quality of storytelling on display here.

Writing Updates

I had to do a restart on The Precious Burden of Joy. Something wasn’t sitting right, so I went back to the drawing board, planned out each of the characters a lot more, and now I’m going to jump to much earlier in the story and start writing again. Because things are in such a flux I’ve got no word count this week, but will next week.

As a quick aside: how do you define literary fiction? I ask because this was one of the things discussed in panel at the mini-conference, and one writer defined literary fiction as “Entirely character-driven story; the genre ultimately is entirely interchangeable with any other genre because all that matters is the character’s internal state and growth,” with genre fiction being “Fiction where the setting is a character, making the genre non-interchangeable.” Having always looked down on “literary” fiction (I think it feels so snobby as a category, and with the attitudes I see surrounding it), I was surprised to find that, at least by these definitions, I might be accidentally making The Precious Burden of Joy upmarket fiction? My goal is to be very, very character driven in this story (“literary” fiction, by this definition), but still have the genre and world be critical (“genre” fiction), which is my understanding of what “upmarket” means. I dunno. I’m fully in the camp of “genre has no meaning beyond being a marketing tool,” so I don’t care where the book ultimately gets marketed (as long as it gets an audience), but these thoughts still feel strange nonetheless.

Send-Off

What story do you think you can enjoy endlessly without ever getting sick of it? Why? (For me, The Hobbit and The Princess Bride top my list.)