The Pecman

You must be watching new episodes of the NBC series Heroes. They seem to be trying that gimmick right now. I think the reality is that there are pieces of the author in every character they create, good and bad. I think it takes some time and talent to delineate the characters and make them distinct from each other. And I think Krista above is correct: the villains rarely think of themselves as evil. I'm sure on some level Hitler thought he was a hero. People can justify anything if they work at it long enough (and are crazy enough to believe it). No question, though, the characters with flaws often wind up as the ones who are most memorable and most interesting. The first novel I wrote had no bona fide villains at all; the villains were circumstantial, and one of them got redeemed later on. The second one had three villains, one of whom we didn't know was a villain, but turned out to be a lying, manipulative weasel (loosely inspired by The Bad Seed). My new novel has a different structure -- three different sections, three different parts of the country. One villain for the first part, and a half-dozen major, memorable, historical villains for the end. So it runs the gamut for me. I think the key more than how you create dark villains is how they conflict with the heroes. I think a lot depends on whether your writing is more plot-driven or more character-driven, so I'm not sure there's a rule of thumb that will work for everybody and every story.

It's been a tough challenge, doing a time-travel story, because getting the little details is really tough. If I do a reference list for some kind of appendix at the end of the novel, I swear to god, it'll probably be three pages long. The period from 1864-1865 was a really messy time for history, and our main characters will get immersed in quite a few situations. Not the war per se, but... well, you'll see before too much longer. The good news is, I'm working on Chapter 9 right now, and with luck, I might have it done by Thanksgiving. This is a pivotal chapter, so get ready to hold on. Hey, if nothing else, there'll be a lot of sex and violence. (More than in the entire story up to this point, I believe.) Lotta twists, turns, and surprises, plus there's some payoffs for a few plot points established very early on in the story.

Hi, Dan. Naaaaa, those guys are crazy. The population numbers are fine to me. 10 billion plus on earth barely puts a dent in the livable space of the planet, provided we can get a handle on controlling the temperature, the weather, the food supply, pollution, and the polar ice caps. My two biggest beefs are with the year of the story (I seem to recall roughly 300 years from now), and the existence of deliberately-engineered gay clones. The esteemed SF writer David Gerrold -- who I consider a friend, albeit not a close one, just a couple of miles away from me in Northridge -- has a great theory about language and different eras in that 150 years is about the limit as far as changes in language can be tolerated. In other words, 300 years from now (or 300 years ago), the type of English spoken would be so convoluted as to be almost unintelligible. I know you toss in a few futuristic words once in awhile, but I think the reality is, it'd be a lot harder to understand. I think the story would be easier for me to accept if it were set only 100 years from now, which I think is feasible. (But I have the exact same problem with Star Trek.) The gay clones thing is harder to cover logically. I'm perfectly comfortable as a gay man, and can totally accept the existence of gay people in the future. But I'm not convinced that scientists and corporations would condone creating clones from scratch that were deliberately engineered to be gay, unless their main duties were sexual. To me, it's a little bit contrived (albeit entertaining). I mention these only as minor asides. So far, I'm enjoying the story very much, and we're recommending it highly to our readers over on Awesomedude.com. I was a huge SF fan in the 1970s, and you brought back some memories of The Mote in God's Eye and a few other classics; reading Dreams has inspired me to go and dust off some of my old collection and re-read some of them. Congrats on doing a terrific job!

Normally, I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I have to confess, their Verdana font, which designed for on-screen text (about 10 years ago), is a sans-serif typeface I find to be very readable. They did a good job on it. I agree with the comments above on not specifying a font for an online story, and just letting the reader use the defaults in their own browsers. I find this works very well with allowing readers to enlarge the font size to make it readable on their specific monitors, which is mandatory for this stuff. --Pecman

James, you sound like a guy I should be talking to. I'm actually about to post the first couple of my new Civil War-related gay story myself, just in the next day or two. I'm doing it as a time-travel thing, with a contemporary teen transported back in time to 1864, and falling in love. The War is only a minor background to the story, but since the plot goes from October of 1864 to April of 1865, I think you can get an idea of where it's headed. I've had to do far too much research to even feel remotely comfortable writing it, though I have no doubt I could desperately use some historical fact-checking in upcoming chapters. Some of the reference books that were most helpful to me were two different biographies on Sam Clemens (who figures prominantly in one chapter), the Time-Life Civil War 20-volume encyclopedia, and several works on Lincoln, including the recent best-seller April 1865, plus a biography on Jesse James (who was about 17 during this era). Again, I don't consider my novel to be historical fiction per se, since that's just a backdrop to what's basically an adventure/romance story (with some science fiction elements), but I did at least want to get a feel for what was accurate. Just trying to get all the little details right has been very intimidating. For example: how did people tie their shoes in 1864? (Shoelaces weren't invented 30 years later.) Did men's pants have zippers? (Nope -- not for at least 30-40 years.) How did they go to the bathroom? What kinds of guns were used in that era? Did people use knives and forks at dinner? And on and on and on. Then there's the detail of language, when certain expressions were invented, what curse words existed (and what didn't). It's been quite a challenge to work all this stuff out, and at the same time, try to find a way to make it all entertaining. But it's a complete departure from my first two novels, so I'm satisfied with at least trying to do something very different from what I've done before. There'll still be some romance (and, yeah, a little sex), but the story is threatening to become an epic, if I'm not careful. Very tough to maintain a balance on a story like this. The last thing I want to do is to come across like a history professor. I figure, just stir in enough vague historical facts to give it some verisimilitude, then move on and let the characters do their thing. --Pecman

I think you can't go wrong with a very simple formatting, one "BR" (hard return) between paragraphs, and one space between sentences. I agree that just a simple black font on a white or very light gray background works fine. I do recommend going +1 size larger than normal for body text, but that's only my preference, having a 1920x1200 monitor as my main computer monitor. My brother is a graphic artist, and he's often told me that most typesetting experts agree that serif fonts (Times Roman, etc.) work best for readability, but his preference is for sans-serif (Helvetica, etc.) for headlines. I personally don't think it matters much as long as what you do is consistent and readable. I do think it's nutty to throw six different typefaces and cascading stylesheets all over what should be a very simple page, when it comes to online fiction (or articles). Wikipedia is a model for a very clean, readable layout for online articles.

Hmmmm... I'd be curious as to how somebody on the street could tell the difference between a "real" human and a genetically-engineered one. I briefly worked on Alien Nation (the movie, not the TV show) back around 1989, and I remember there were all kinds of slurs people used against the good-guy aliens who were now living on the earth. But in that case, they had dots and splotches on their bald heads, which visibly distinguished them from humans. Maybe with the gen-eng'd people -- hey, there's a futuristic word, "Gen-N" -- there's a flaw in the process that makes them come out a little weird, like maybe all of them have very light eyes, almost white. Or maybe it's like the old 1960s TV show The Invaders, where the fake-humans have a bent little finger. If they have no distinguishing characteristics, then racism would be almost impossible to exist. Or maybe it's like the synthetic people in Blade Runner or Alien, where you can't really tell unless you look really, really closely. And then it's too late, because the synths try to kill you. Speaking of racism in SF, that was one element I really liked in the 2002 film version of Time Machine: a thousand (or more) years in the future, mankind had melded into a single race, where there was no such thing anymore as black, white, asian, or anything else. Everybody pretty much looked like Tiger Woods (as my longtime partner pointed out), a smorgasbord of everything (and not bad looking). The movie pretty much sucked, but that's a wonderful idea to mull over: a world where everybody is 100% equal, and no racial insults exist. --Pecman

I absolutely agree. As much as I love rock & pop music of the last 30 or 40 years, I can only listen to instrumentals when I write. My favorite at the moment is XM Satellite Radio's channel 71, "Watercolors" (same as "Smooth Jazz" in many North American cities.) The last thing I want to hear when I'm struggling to come up with a line of dialog is for some catchy song to start playing in my office and distracting me. I hate when that happens. --Pecman