Imaginary Friends

That I have eaten...no. Where was I? A red wheelbarrow? There are some great subjects that I've wanted to write brilliant, insightful posts about, but I just don't have the time or the will. Of course, if I had the will, I'd make the time. That was insightful. Anyway, given the choice of spending my few free hours writing blog posts or working on my book, I just have to choose the book. It's more fun. And it's freakin' awesome! Did I say that out loud? However, I've lined up an interview with another up-and-coming author. Look for it eventually, right here. Or up there. And thus concludes my self-righteous justification for not writing something better.

What's Charism? It's the original title of my work-in-progress. But what does it mean? It's a noun, meaning a God-given gift, basically. Pretty harmless, right? It seemed like such a perfect title for the book—since there are too many books called "Gifted" already. Problem is, it means something more specific to the only people who actually use it. Just Google Charism and see what comes up. And my book has nothing to do with religious orders. So why go back to it? Because I'm too stupid to think of a better one. Anyone remember The Qualia of Magic ? Yeah, that was before I removed all instances of the word "magic" from the book and realized that one silly bit of advice I'd read was right:  don't use Latin words in your title. (Charism is Greek in origin—through Latin. Dang! I could call it Kharis , going all the way back to the Greek root word, which means "favor.") At any rate, I can't for the life of me think of a title

The Hunger Games The story goes that the prophet Nathan came to King David and told him about two men from the same city. One was rich, and the other poor. The poor man had little except a lamb he had raised. He shared his food with the lamb, slept with it at night. It was more, even, than just a pet. He loved it like a child. One day, the rich man had a visitor for whom he wanted to prepare a feast. Instead of taking a lamb from his own large flock, he took the poor man's precious lamb, slaughtered it, cooked it, and fed it to his visitor. King David was outraged by the tale and swore that the poor man's loss would be repaid fourfold—and that the rich man would die. Nathan told him, " Thou art the man ." Nathan didn't walk up to the king and berate him for taking another man's wife. He didn't accuse him of murder for sending that man to his death in battle. He told a story, got David ticked off at the antagonist, and then in four words turned it ar

Hmm, how's that for a title? Seriously, sometimes they're one and the same. It's so hard to tell a good story, but I can't help but try. Fall in love with people no one else knows Cry about tragedies no one else sees It's a dream a world in your throat that you can't quite speak Feelings real as anything about phantoms hallucinations in the night It's only a story Write it down with just enough skill to make you think you can Just enough love to keep trying and nothing more Try And again Because you must It's your gift

Excuse me while I laugh. Okay, I'm back. So, three months ago—wait, let me check—holy cow, it was exactly  three months ago! I'm a man of my word! Anyway, back on August 12th, I announced I was virtually chucking my novel in the trash and rewriting the whole thing. I said " Give me three months from tomorrow ."  Well, I wrote the last sentence of that rewritten book on Saturday, November 13th. Finished? No! Not by a long shot. Well, it's a whole lot closer than it was before, but now I've essentially got another rough draft on my hands. I've gotta go through it again and tweak the emotional responses and speech of characters, work on setting (which I frequently forget about), get rid of repetition and redundancy (get it?), and pay a lot of attention to verb choice. And delete commas. They always creep in where they're not wanted. So what did I do with that three-month-long rewrite, aside from have a lot of fun? I got the story right. Everyt

Do you ever cheat on a book? You know what I mean, and it could be either a book you're reading or one you're writing. I'll confess that sometimes, if a book I'm reading doesn't quite intrigue me all the way through, I'll see a prettier one sitting on the shelf just waiting for some attention, and I'll pick it up without finishing the first. Usually, that's it for my relationship with the first book. If you go back to it, where do you start? You can't really start over, knowing that it didn't work out last time. You can't really pick it back up where you left off once you've lost your connection with that world. I guess if you wait enough years, you forget everything and can start back up like strangers. That's what I did with The Hobbit. I tried reading it in elementary or middle school, but it was just too—something. Wordy? Obtuse? Over my head? I read it a few years later and loved it. I cheated on Stranger in a Strange Land , an

Ever wondered what it's like to crash into a freeway overpass at high speed in a convertible? What would it be like? Would you survive and with what sort of injuries? What's in those yellow barrels, anyway? I wondered. Yeah, it's weird, but I have my reasons. I'm sure you can guess what they are. The yellow barrels you see in front of overpass supports and barriers, especially on the freeway, are impact attenuators . More specifically, they're called Fitch barriers, named for John Fitch, who invented them. There are other types of impact attenuator, but Fitch barriers are the simplest and probably the most effective. Each barrel in the line is filled with a progressively greater amount of sand or water. When a car hits the line of barrels, the sand/water is scattered in all directions, taking with it some of the car's momentum. Each barrel slows the car down a little more, as the amount of energy absorbed (and speed reduction) increases with the mass of sa

For the treasure of potential For the night we know will come Blessed and gifted Cursed and scorned Lead us far away from home Let our power tame our passion Hold its fire, quell its pain Send a hero Send us someone With a calming gentle rain May desire die like morning May its flame no longer burn Good around us Be inside us May our human evils learn May the blessings we are cursed with Never make our loved ones cry Blessed and gifted Shall we thank thee? Let us ask thee only—Why? (Does anyone understand what I'm saying?)

I recently downloaded The Rescues' first album, Crazy Ever After. I got one of their songs a few months ago, and it was good enough that I decided to see what else they'd done. That song, Break Me Out, is probably the most perfect rock song I've ever heard. I wasn't paying attention when I downloaded the album, however, and now I have three different versions of Break Me Out—the single released through iTunes plus two more from the first album. The funny thing is that as perfect as the iTunes single is, it took them three tries to get it like that. And that's just counting released versions. Version one is rather restrained. Break Me Out 2.0 (that's what it's called) hits you with a wall of sound on the first time through the chorus and tries out some different licks in the middle. The final version, which is on their new album, has different mixing for a cleaner sound, a faster tempo, and drives harder. But what makes it stand-out amazing is its story a

And now I reveal the working title of my next project, right after I say a few other things. I guess that makes it not really "now" so much as "pretty soon." Either way, I haven't really started working on that project except to think about it in spare moments. First came the premise, which started out as "unmanned" ground vehicles that are in reality driven by invisible people. It didn't take long to alter it to unseen people instead of invisible. I'd create a class of people willing to risk their lives and in all likelihood die for large sums of money on missions no human should be sent to complete. And no human would, except that these people are hidden inside these supposedly unmanned battle vehicles. There are a lot of details to work out, like how do they see, how do they get in without getting caught, who owns the vehicles, who sends them on missions, what sort of remote control and monitoring do they have? Those are fun problems to so

Here's the latest video I've cobbled together at work. (Including the music, if you can call it that.) The vehicle is driving really slow, but the supervised autonomy interface is the real star. It takes a 3D scan of the area, decides where it can and can't drive, and overlays what the vehicle senses and plans to do on top of the live video stream. The Velodyne laser sensor also lets it do untethered following of a vehicle, person, or anything highly reflective. (Oooh, shiny. Robot like shiny, follow shiny thing anywhere.) *ahem* Anyway, the red in the display are the areas the robot has decided it should NOT drive. The yellow line is where it intends to drive. The video display is pretty cool, because it gives you a nearly complete spherical view around the vehicle. The drivers in my next book will need something like that, and a sensor overlay could also be helpful to guide them to targets. Oh, and apologies for how manic the video is. The raw footage was really boring.

One of Google's cars, from a Times article So, I'm feeling slightly dismayed right now. I just read that Google's been working on autonomous cars . A couple things about that: 1)  They've been driving them in traffic on public roads. That's illegal under current law, even if you've "briefed local police" about your work. Sure, they have people behind the wheel, ready to take over when the cars screw up—and they do. No matter how awesome your database and software, the cars are still half-blind. (They use basically the same sensors we do at Autonomous Solutions , so I know how great the data is.) Wouldn't it be nice to have the weight of Google behind you when you want to try something like that? We couldn't even get insurance to drive our automated five-ton manually  on public roads because the insurers were too skittish. I wonder who's insuring Google's unmanned vehicles, and if they have any idea what to charge. 2)  Wouldn&#

Yeah, so I just wrote a post about how I love waiting. No reason I can't hate it, too. See, while it's nice to have something to look forward too, it's nicer to know what's coming. Also, there are certain things that are better had than waited for. Actually, probably lots of things. What I'm thinking of is something that I want very badly, but is very difficult to make happen. When and how it happens depends largely on me, and maybe that's the worst part. When I'm waiting for someone else, I don't feel any pressure, only anticipation. When I'm waiting for myself—well, it's harder to be patient. What's worse is that I don't like to be rushed. It's a vicious circle.

The free single of the week on iTunes is The Ballad of You and I . I really like it. Why? Because there are so many songs about attraction, lust, falling in love, and breaking up, and it's really nice to hear a song about STAYING in love. If I were to count the days of my life spent falling in or out of love and compare them to the years I've spent just BEING in love, the ratio would be miniscule. And I'm still young. Sure, emotional turmoil is fun once in awhile—that's why we have kids. The greatest satisfaction in my life comes from sharing it with someone I love deeply. This song comes closer to capturing that feeling than any other I've heard recently. And as for the title, it might not be technically correct right now, but it probably will be someday. People are getting into the habit of saying "you and I." If it keeps them from saying "me and you did something," it's well worth it. "The Ballad of I" is much less odious tha

You know what I've realized? I love waiting. Funny, isn't it? I always thought I hated it. I submitted my first novel to Tor's slushpile last year. I didn't expect much to come of it—it took me ten years to finish the first draft, and I was just learning how to really write a novel. I finished a few revisions, just enough that I wouldn't be embarrassed by the book, (even though I am now,) and I sent it off so I could start working on my next book. I guess over the course of a few months, however long it took them to respond, I got used to waiting. (The response came right when they said it would, to Tor's credit.) After getting the rejection, I felt kind of bad not having something to look forward to in the mail. I also entered a writing competition that gave me something else to wait for. I queried a few agents about my second book, and had a great time checking my email every day as the rejections trickled in. I'm in the middle of a major revision, bas

Okay, so I haven't seen the Jetsons in about twenty years. (Note to self: check Hulu and Netflix.) So I'm just going on ancient, dusty memories here, but it seems that modern life is lacking in a few amenities we were promised as kids by the glowing box. Yeah, we've got Roombas (and Scoobas and whatever they call those gutter-cleaning bots.) There's the  Robomow and  Automower  lines of aimlessly wandering mowers. Honda and other Japanese companies have some pretty cool androids, but who can afford one? Robots aside, where are the flying cars with big glass bubbles? (Edit: Here they are !) Where's the crazy architecture? I'm thinking about this because I spent the day working with an automated parking system. Boomerang  makes the hardware, and ASI has been doing the controls for their flat car-lifting AGV (or robot for short). My job is to drive it around and make sure everything works. I haven't crashed it, yet. (I heard they drove one into a pit whe

In my interview with myself, I made reference to Harris Burdick as one of my favorite authors. He's the mysterious author/illustrator in the book by Chris Van Allsburg, who as the story goes, gave a stack of illustrations with captions and titles to a publisher, along with a promise to provide the complete stories if the publisher was interested. The publisher was indeed interested, but could never again locate Harris Burdick. The Mysteries of Harris Burdick is simply a reproduction of those illustrations, each for a different story, and each with a compelling caption and title. The idea is that you supply the story yourself. It's an awesome concept, and Van Allsburg's, excuse me, Burdick's drawings are wonderful, of course. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Allen, introduced my class to them by forcing us to write some of the missing stories. I don't know what everyone else thought of the idea; I was too enthralled to notice. Never had I had so much fun doing schoo

...to disappear. It's a song. Go get it while it's free at iTunes . Then go ride your bike at night. (With lights of course.) Then come back and tell me if you love it as much as I do. Yes, that's an order, ensign!

I've had a run of good luck with winning contests and drawings on blogs lately. (I need to find someone giving away a publishing contract on a blog before my streak runs out.) The latest one was the first to give out an actual physical prize, and it's still going on if you want to enter. It's a blog tour promoting The Stone Traveler by Kathi Oram Peterson. This is the weekly prize. The grand prize is even better. The book is LDS YA fiction, so the nominal audience is pretty narrow. I haven't read the book yet, so I'm going to review the prize—because I've never done a review of any kind before, and everyone else is doing them, so they must be cool. Right? First, there's a cute toy jaguar and a necklace with a huge faux gemstone. They're quite nice. I don't wear jewelry or collect stuffed animals, but they were best part. Why? My seven-year-old daughter gasped when I gave her the stone necklace. I gave the jaguar to my four-year-old girl and she

I've got a special treat for my 12—No! 13! followers: an exclusive interview with an up-and-coming new author. Ben Spendlove (let's call him BS for short) is hard at work on a life-changing new book, but was kind enough to set aside a few minutes to answer our questions. Imaginary Friends blog (IF):  When did you start writing? BS:  When I was born. I just saved it all up in my infantile brain until I could actually hold a pencil and learned how to form letters round about kindergarten. Most of what I wrote mentally in those early days is only just coming out,  and that's why my writing is so fresh and original. Much of it doesn't even include actual words, so it looks like white space. But it's very meaningful white space. IF:  What was your favorite book as a child? BS: IF:  Very deep. What's your writing process like? BS:  It's exactly like eating pancakes with maple syrup. If you understand that, then you understand how I write. My process

I put this together from dozens of old DV tapes at work. Autonomous Solutions, Inc. started in 2000, and I joined in 2004. It's about the best tech writing job I can imagine, which is why I'm still here. Robots=cool. I'd make a blooper reel of all the times vehicles didn't do what we expected, but there's never a camera around when that happens and frankly, it doesn't happen very often.

There's was a piece on NPR's All Things Considered in which a writer was telling about a book he was ashamed to love (Kurt Cobain's journals). It sounded like part of a series, but I haven't heard any others since. Anyway, it got me thinking, and I couldn't think of a single book that I'm ashamed to love. The reason is simple, I think:  if I love it, I really think it's good and am therefore not ashamed to love it. It doesn't matter who it was written for, written by, or how it was written. If I like it, it's good. If it's not good, I don't like it. In other words, I define what's worthy by what I like, not by the expectations or opinions of other people. At least, that's how I am with books. Same goes for not liking something. I recently tried to read The Catcher in the Rye.  I say 'tried' because I couldn't finish it. Aside from the incessant profanity and annoying way the narrator rambles on and repeats himself, I j

Sat down, or rather sat up to write this morning. Got over 1000 words written by seven. Have to redo it all. Why? Well, I got really into describing what happened to the character a week earlier. It was pretty compelling. The poor guy went through a lot, and then I put him through another shocking realization right there in the scene I was writing. THEN when I finally got done with all that, I was ready to start on what I had intended the chapter to be about aaaaand I couldn't write anymore. Hit the wall. Train of thought crashed. Got that feeling where I knew I was on the wrong track and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't finish the chapter except by summarizing what I intended to write. My wife read what I'd spewed out, and agreed with me. She said the premise was fine, but the content was all wrong. But y'know? I really know that character a lot better now. I've got a backstory for him in my head, one that doesn't really need to be told because a si

Like I've said before, I really love the confluence of music and words. There's a song I recently discovered by a band called Jets Overhead that's just plain addictive, and I want to share the earworm joy. First, let me set the scene that I've been seeing in my head. In a sprawling abandoned factory complex, a group of people have gathered in the one building with electricity. It's dusk. An orange glow lines the skyline to the west, over a broad brown river. The factory site goes right up to the water, where a concrete dock juts out into the slow current. Behind the occupied building, a single mercury vapor floodlight casts a cold light into the deepening darkness. A person leaves the building, looking for two others who hide in the darkness. I Should Be Born by Jets Overhead The last verse especially reminds me of Leah and what she faces in that scene, which is the climax of the story. If you struggle in logic and feeling Generational gaps are revealing D

I started this blog with the idea that I'd post pieces of writing that weren't good enough to leave in a finished, publishable work—the proverbial darlings that writers kill. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It doesn't anymore. For one thing, I'm not sure I want y'all reading bad writing when I know its bad and have already surpassed and/or replaced it with something better. Kind of makes me look worse than I actually am. It's embarrassing. For another thing, I'd rather just write about what's on my mind. That's what I've actually been doing lately. I want to write about cool things that I discover while researching and thinking about my current and future projects. For example, I've been reading about witchcraft trials in the early 1300s and the great famine of 1315-16, and I'm wondering about how certain nobility who died in that year actually perished. I've been looking into epi-genetics, parasites, gene modification

I have a 98,000 word novel that took me a year to write: three months for the first draft plus nine months of revision. It's all about to become one of those proverbial darlings that I must kill. Only a handful of people have read it, and no one else ever will. Say your goodbyes! I'm holding the delete key to its head right now! Here it goes—BANG! It's dead! All that work, early mornings, late nights, hours pondering and agonizing and wracking my brains while staring at a blank screen—gone in the blink of an eye. Alas, poor book. I knew it well, Horatio. *sob* Whoa, I'll stop there. Honestly, I'm just trying to make myself feel sorry for myself. Starting an entire book over from the beginning seems like it ought to be a difficult thing to do. It should feel arduous, sacrificial or something besides exciting. But I'm just excited. I've got a book that still has a lot of things wrong with it, and I'm realizing new things all the time. This a chance

So it must be true. If you want to hear it for yourself, listen to this . You may be a genius, too. If you don't have the time or inclination to listen to the show, or you've just listened to it and missed the part where they said, "This conclusively proves that Ben is a genius," I'll explain myself. It's an interview with Malcolm Gladwell . His theory about genius is that it isn't so much a result of innate ability as a love of what one is doing. Let's pause and let that sink in. The more I've thought about that over the past week, the more I've come to believe that he's right. He cites a couple of examples for his theory, but most of my thinking about this has been more personal. I can relate to what he says about love. I love writing. I looove writing. When I'm not writing, I'm usually thinking about it. When I have setbacks, like my critique group says I've gotten something completely wrong in one chapter and I realize

I have suspected for several years now that chickens may be among the least intelligent organisms in creation, below paramecia and perhaps just above chalk dust. (Is chalk dust an organism?) Imagine my surprise when we went to the bird show at Hogle Zoo, and they had a "trained" chicken. I put that word in quotes because its routine wasn't terribly impressive. The show consisted mostly of parrots answering questions and various large raptors flying over the audience low enough to knock the top hats off the people wearing them—which was no one, fortunately. The chicken's trick was walking from one side of the stage to the other at apparently random times during the show. For the highlight of the performance, it "danced." I put that word in quotes because, well, it didn't exactly do the chicken dance, if you know what I mean. Basically, it just scratched around in the dirt. Pretty much like chickens normally do, except it did it at a certain time. Then t

So, I write a post entitled "Suicide," and then go two weeks without posting anything else. Oops. A little weird? And now for something completely different. I love to write about love. The romantic kind. I'm a hopeless romantic, and this sometimes annoys my wife. (We defy gender stereotypes in that regard.) She does usually like the way I handle romantic elements in my writing, though. Now, don't misunderstand what I mean when I say I'm a romantic. I'm not a flirt, player, Casanova, or anything else remotely like that. I think love should be like dutch oven cooking, not slapping a steak on an overly hot grill until the outside is seared and the inside is still raw. You've got to be patient with a dutch oven. Nah, forget it; dutch ovens are boring. Flames are fun. Sizzling is exciting. But you still have to just let it happen, not force it or even expect it. When I write a love story, (and I've written, like, three of them,) it takes the entir

I've written two novels. In both stories there are many ideas and themes that made their way in without my having to intentionally put them there. For instance, in each book, a central character is suicidal at the beginning. Furthermore, it’s part of the premise of a novel I’m planning. I write about things and people that reflect who I am and my experiences. Obviously, I’ve never committed suicide, nor have I known anyone who did. But I do have some personal experience in that area. After you’ve attempted suicide, it’s hard to admit to anyone, even yourself, that you felt those feelings, did those things. But I can never forget where I've been. It makes life that much more precious, even ten years later. In my writing, the suicidal characters are both female. (Maybe that’s a subconcious attempt to distance them from myself.) In Aersh , Tuatha is the embodiment of all my anger. She’s trapped in a bad situation with no out, and decides to strike out against her oppressor in

Outside the City of Smith, in the valley of buried furs, there's a small fiefdom known as Thistle Park. This domain is so named because of an abundance of birds, mostly the little black kind that make a shrill, annoying, single-note call and do such endearing things as building nests, hatching eggs, and letting their little ones fall to their deaths, all inside the exhaust vents of furnaces, thereby rendering said furnaces inoperable and causing their owners to have to saw the pipes in half to flush the rotted corpses of baby birds out into a bucket. Oh, my mistake. It's named for the chest-high thistles festooning the grounds. In the eastern estate of Thistle Park, where the thistles grow thickest and tallest, is a quaint, old Butler grain silo twenty feet across and about eight feet high at the wall. No grain has laden this structure for many years, and a small flock of odious birds have taken up residence within. They aren't the little black kind that make a shrill, anno

Clever title, no? Music breathes life into words. You can take a mediocre-to-bad poem, set it to a catchy tune, and it becomes profound and meaningful. Just look at the lyrics of your favorite song written down on paper without the music. Chances are they're pretty lame on their own. (There are exceptions, many of which were good poetry before they were songs.) Ha! I'd like to see Message in a Bottle written down in its entirety. "Message in a bottle, message in a bottle, message in a bottle..." With good music, if the lyrics are at all meaningful, it's a winner in my book. I listen to the words. I learn them. I sing along. If the song is in Spanish, I Google the lyrics and run them through the translator just so I know what the heck is so important that it should have such nice music with it. I do listen to the words. Every week iTunes has three free downloads, plus a music video. There's usually at least one that I'll like enough to download, and s

Actually, my wife had the dream. In it, Brian and Esha were walking down the sidewalk, discussing Esha's newfound abilities. They came across Alley, who was sitting on the sidewalk, telling fortunes--highly accurate fortunes--for a dollar each. My better half actually woke me up at about three in the morning to tell me that dream. Thanks, sweetie. So, guess how my book begins. (I'll give you a hint: it doesn't start with Leah writing a suicide note and walking to the river, and doesn't have Alley nearly getting creamed by a car.) Yes, I used a dream to start The Sense, and it wasn't even mine. Have you ever had a dream worth writing?

Dear Sixteen-Year-Old Self, Have you noticed that the idea that teenagers are brain-damaged is passing into the common consciousness? I'm talking about the notion that young adults can't judge risks, don't reason the same way adults do, and aren't capable of making big decisions like whom to marry. It's like you're not fully human, but in a stage of development between larva and adult, sort of a walking pupa. Teens are creatures to be protected and tolerated. You can't help the way you are; it's biological. In this view, when teenagers drive recklessly or take risks, it's because you're incapable of proper judgment. If you fall in love, it's hormonal. If you get upset about the environment or politics, it's just because you're trying to find your place in the world. You'll grow out of it. Teens always do. We were all idealistic and naive at that age. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm guilty, I confess, o

Writers don't have to worry about other people stealing their ideas. There are several reasons for this. First, an idea is such a tiny grain of a thing that by the time it's a book, it's like the author's severed hand, with his or her fingerprints all over it. Ugh. Like that last sentence. What I mean is, books are so personal, no one else can write my books. Even if we start with the exact same idea, the books will turn out completely unique. The second reason might only apply to me. My ideas all sound so stupid, no one would even want to steal them. And I'm talking about the really good ones that I actually get excited about. I have hundreds of weird ideas for stories, but in the last couple of years, I've only had four that I got excited about. The first one is the book I'm working on, plus vague ideas about two possible sequels. Then there's the brilliant idea that came to me at work a couple weeks ago. Wanna hear it? Invisible people driving cars.

When I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I had an imaginary friend named Exit. I named him after the glowing green signs. Exit was probably the first word I learned to recognize by sight, but other than that, I have no idea why I named him "Exit." Exit was a nice guy. He was a lot like me, in fact. Kind of quiet, unassuming, easy to get along with. Except, Exit didn't really have a face...or a body. That made him kind of boring to play with. It was always nice to know he was there, though. Aside from my sister's friends Junior and Cheepert, with whom I had a more casual acquaintance, that was about it for imaginary friends—until now. When I finished the first draft of my second novel, I found myself feeling sad and pathetic. Sure, it was nice to write the final words, but after closing my laptop and leaving for my day job, I realized two things: First, the book was finished. I couldn't wake up the next morning and think of new and interesting things to do