A vacation is a fragile thing

At some point today, I realized that I was no longer on vacation. We're in Portland, OR, and had decided to run a few shopping errands impossible to do in our small-town home. Traffic was terrible, the parking spaces were all too small, and we were lost and never exactly found what we were looking for, despite hours of driving around.

Suddenly, all the fun had been sucked out of life. Bleh. Tomorrow we return home, and I am slightly bummed. I'll know better next time.

Good news though. Just got an email from an editor that a story of mine is being bought for an upcoming anthology. I don't know the name of the anthology off the top of my head, but it's inspired by the Evil Overlord List, I wrote the story of a guy assigned to repair the heating and air-conditioning system for an Evil Overlord, and what he finds in those overly-large ducts...

Meanwhile, a creepy little self-portrait of Chris and I standing in the entry-hall of the Flavel House in Astoria. There are mirrors hung across from each other on the walls, and they create a nifty infinity effect.

Kindergarten Herbie

Here's Herbie in front of the Kintergarten Cop school, and strange crossover if there ever was one. This is located only a few blocks from the "Goonies House," but to be honest, I don't know the movie well enough to know which of the houses it was.

We had a great time in Astoria, and plan to go back. Perhaps we'll make an intentional round of the movie locations. I just spotted the list on-line, and discovered that we did to go a couple of Goonies locations today, quite by accident, the old County Jail, and the Flavel House (a huge Victorian built by a sea captain), which we toured this morning. I'll post some cool shots of the Flavel house later.

I'm still catching up on Astoria here, but right now, we're in the western suburbs of Portland, about to make the rounds of some of the large chain bookstores to sign stock. Will stay here until Sunday I think.

Seaside

Signed stock today at the Seaside Fred Meyers. Both Scion of the Serpent and Heritic of Set in stock. Then went to the waterfront. Lots of galleries, including Ernst & Ernst, which had some wonderful space art by Frank Hetick.
My favorite piece was this one, a new angle on popular subject, Saturn. Unfortunately, the web doesn't do it justice, but have a look anyway.

Tomorrow, we hope to visit the Captain George Flavel House. Don't be suprised if some fictional version of this house shows up in some future novel.

By the way. more Astoria movies I didn't know about, Free Willy and the Ring 2.


uh.


You knew they made Goonies here, right?

Goonie Getaway

For probably a year and a half now, I've been promising Chris a get-away. ANY kind of get-away.

Deadlines, misadventure and disaster have gotten in the way. I've canceled out repeatatedly, and Chris has gone on a couple trips without me. Well, this morning I turned in the (hopefully) last rewrite on MechWarrior Dark Age, Trial by Chaos, and we jumped in Herbie and got the heck out of the figurative Dodge.

Somehow we ended up in Astoria, Oregon. I'm not sure how we picked Astoria. It was not too far, not too close, not someplace we've spent time in before, and some place that looked vaguely interesting. So far, it's great.

The Elliott Hotel is a restored downtown hotel, and we've got a gorgeous suite here. There's a rooftop garden with a view of the famous (more on this later) bridge, and a nice wine bar in the basement. Two bookstores within a block, and what seems to be half-a-dozen good places to eat. What more do you need?

Astoria is best known to the outside world for its appearance in various movies, most infamously, the Steven Spielberg movie, Goonies. But the Governator was here to do Kindergarten Cop, and even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 did some shooting here. My favorite Astoria film, though, is Short Circuit, where robot Johnny Five was chased across the bridge and skydived to safety.

It's unfortunate that's all people know about Astoria through. It's a nice little town, and we're having a great time just based on its own merits.

Oh, cool moment of the day. We stopped in at a Fred Meyer department store in Tillimook to see if they had my new book, Heretic of Set, which is officially out today. I didn't see the book in the sf/fantasy section, but a jobber was there putting out books. I flagged her down to ask if she'd done the science fiction section.

"No," she said, "but I have these." I looked down, and she had six copies of Heretic in her hand! We had a nice conversation, and I think it was as cool for her as it was for me. I signed the books before leaving the store. Of course we'll be hitting stores in the Astoria area, and on the way home, we'll head back through Portland and Salem, hitting bookstores and signing stock as we go.

www.yorkwriters.com

Given that between us Chris and I have three web pages and two blogs, none of which have easy-to-remember URLs, we decided that we needed a easy access-point on the web, one that could go on business card, Herbie's licence plate frame *, etc. So here it is:

www.yorkwriters.com

There isn't much there at the moment other than some introductory text and links back to our blogs, but you might want to bookmark it anyway, as it will serve as the hub of our little web of -- well -- web. Impressive bunch of book covers there too, if I say so myself.

* Yes, Herbie's new licence plate will be "NEW LUV," given that he's a "Love Bug" and unlike the original Herbie, a new Beetle. Given that Chris writes (along with lots of other stuff) romance, this is appropriate. To this, we plan to add a licence plate frame that says, "Love to Read?" and then "www.YorkWriters.com." Herbie gets so much attention everywhere he goes, we might as well put those eyeballs to work for us.

Herbie Trivia Fact: The real Herbie's license plate number is California OFP 857.

Lost Outpost

I got some fan-email the other day on a project I did a long time ago, a computer game from Sierra called "Outpost 2." The fan said some nice things, and asked why I didn't have anything about the game on my websites.

Well, it certainly isn't because I'm ashamed of the project. In fact, I remember it very fondly for a number of reasons.

Frankly, it's great that, after all these years, I still get fan-mail off Outpost 2. It was a great experience for me, I learned a lot about writing in the process, made some money, got a free trip to WorldCon, and I'm pretty pleased with how it all turned out. On top of that, some people actually took notice of my work and liked it. It is, in fact, my "lost" first published novel! So, by (somewhat) popular demand, let's revisit Outpost 2.

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for Eugene, Oregon, circa 1996 or so...

Outpost 2 wasn't my first contact with the game company Dynamix (by then a division of Sierra On-line). I'd first done freelance work for them shortly after moving to Eugene. Nothing exciting. I wrote internal documentation for several of the game development tools they were using at the time. I did several manuals, and was told with great enthusiasm that there would be plenty more work for me.

Then the phone didn't ring. I sat around, decided I'd screwed it up in some way, and felt sorry for myself. I really didn't have a great load of confidence in my abilities in those days. In retrospect, I think it likely had more to do with the Sierra take-over than me. Jeff Tunnell, who brought me into Dynamix, had been moved from his seat in charge of Dynamix into his own off-site production house. I don't know what the politics of this were, but there had to be some. Possibly I was just lost in the shuffle (I certainly didn't make myself hard to miss in those days), or possibly I was "tainted" by contact with the "old regime." These things happen in business. In any case, I didn't expect to work for them again.

Then, some time later, after Dynamix had moved from its old offices in downtown Eugene to a new "high-tech" park near the University of Oregon, I heard they were looking for a writer with science-fiction background to do some work on a strategy game. I stuck my foot in the door, and soon found myself working on a project, a turn-based strategy game called "Missionforce Cyberstorm."

Let me just say that, despite the lame title, Missionforce Cyberstorm was a great game. As I said, it was turn-based strategy, based on a hex grid. You fielded a team of giant robots called "Hercs," piloted by "meat" androids called "Bioderms." You may recognize this as an offshoot of the first-person robot simulator "StarSiege/EarthSiege" franchise, ironically a poor-man's version of the "BattleTech/MechWarrior" franchise that I'm writing novels for now.

The interface was clever, attractive, and easy to use. By the standards of the time, the graphics and sounds were pretty good, and it had an excellent sound-track. It was one of the first games to offer network/internet multiplayer (something I sadly never got to try). At times, it was actually boxed with TWO fully functional CD-ROMs, so you could give one to a friend for network play, and that play was great fun.

In terms of anything word-based though, starting with the name, it sucked. A lot of the terminology and naming just seemed to be somebody jamming words together because they sounded "kewl." As such, I was brought in at the last-minute to overhaul some of the on-line help (also an innovation at the time) and text support files. My most visible contributions to the game are the Bioderm profiles, in which I attempted to do a little world-building and give the game a believable context. I think it made things a little bit better, but I'll state right-out that the reasons this game was good had little to do with me.

I hoped the phone would ring again soon, as at that point the EarthSiege franchise was an ongoing thing, but it didn't. I can't feel too bad, as some of that work went to my friend Dave Bischoff, an accomplished sf writer with over 50 books to his credit. (Dave later farmed out some of this work to me when he got busy, and so I have some uncredited contributions in StarSiege, a game that, to this day, I've never seen or played!)

Finally though, I heard they were looking for a "real" hard science-fiction writer for a project. And again, I put my foot in the door. I didn't have a lot of publication credits at this point, but I'd sold to Analog magazine, by God, so my hard-sf credentials were solid if not massive.

I'd heard of the original Outpost, a popular space colony simulation game from several years earlier. Imagine a crude (in terms of technology and execution) yet sophisticated (in terms of scientific detail and accuracy) version of SimCity set on another planet, and you have Outpost.

But attempts to create a sequel had hit the rocks. At one time, both late-astronomer Carl Sagan and sf-writer Gentry Lee were attached the project, but despite pouring a lot of money down a hole, a marketable product never emerged.

In desperation, the whole project was purged and started from a clean slate. The mandate was that absolute scientific accuracy was not the object -- good gameplay was. Warcraft was the hot new game at the time, so it became a real-time strategy/combat game in that mold. Brought in to head the project were Patrick Cook and Alan McPheeters, two guys who were (I think, for-sure Patrick, anyway) at that point best known for successful sports games. (One of my most vivid memories of my first visit to Patrick's office was his foam-rubber "cheese-head" hat!)

Also enter, little old me. After Sagan and Lee, I had some big shoes to fill. But I was eager, a team-player, and ready to go. Somehow, I got the job.

This is running on much longer than I planned, so I'll break this now and continue later with another installment of the story. Stay tuned.

The Heretic is coming!

...to a bookstore near you. My local independent bookstore called last week, asking me to come and sign copies of "Heretic of Set," the second book in my "Age of Conan" trilogy. Experience has shown this means that the distributors have them, but it will likely be at least a week or two (longer in some cases) before Amazon and major chain book stores get them.

There's a lesson for you. If you're really eager to get a new book by a favorite author, you may do better to order it through a good, local, indie bookstore than waiting for it to show up at a major chain. (Not all indies are good, and not all good book stores are indie, I know that, but that's why you need to get out there, find a good one, and develop a relationship.) You get your book quicker, and support diversity in booksellers too.

Hey, that reminds me: it's not too early to order that "Scion of the Serpent" book too! :)

Assorted Small News

Just got my rewrite notes for the upcoming MechWarrior Dark Age novel, Trial by Chaos. I've barely had a chance to look at them, but it doesn't look bad. I may be busy for a while until I get it turned around. Publication date on this one is rushing up.

My wife, Chris, has turned in a proposal for a second Alias novel. Fingers crossed.

There's been some discussion of my Age of Conan novels on the forums at the official Conan site, so I decided to jump in with both feet. Check it out.

I should be appearing at the Orycon science fiction convention, Portland, OR, early November. Though I'm currently trying to get the attention of someone in programming, as they've put me on ONE panel. Is it about writing, Conan, MechWarrior, or anything like that? It's on STRESS! Actually, it sounds like it could be an interesting panel, but since I'm doing only one convention this year, I'd like to have a little bigger presence. Hopefully I can at least get in on Chris' signing so people can get the new Conan books signed.

The Cover I Can't Show You

This is the cover for my upcoming MechWarrior Dark Age novel Trial by Chaos that will be released next year. Unfortunately, I can't let you see it.

The cover art (which is quite nice, by the way) depicts a new unit in the MechWarrior miniatures game which will be released at about the same time as the book, and the nice folks at WizKids don't want to spoil the surprise for dedicated game players.

So it's all classified. The art. The cover. I suspect I'm not even supposed to tell you what the unit is called, or what kind of unit it is, so I'm not going to.

Nyah, nyah!

New Love (Bug)

This news is several weeks old, but I haven't gotten around to posting it here. We mourn the passing of an old and faithful family member, and welcome a new one.

R.I.P. "The Tick"
Back at the end of July, I had an accident in our beloved 2001 TDI New Beetle, "The Tick." I lost a tire and spun out of control at highway speed, smashing backwards into a guard rail. It was a close thing, but the car was totaled. Fortunately, I was not. Thanks to those crafty VW engineers and a side-impact airbag, I walked away with nothing but a few aches and pains from the impact.

This was a great car. The turbo-diesel motor had plenty of pep, and delivered between 40-50MPG depending on the kind of driving we were doing. The roomy interior made it one of the few cars I can comfortably get my 6' 6" frame into (yes, all those New Beetle "The Arch" commericials are true). It was smooth and fun to drive, and as a said, the crash protection was outstanding.

When we learned that the car was going to be totaled, we didn't hesitate for a moment, and started searching for another TDI New Beetle. Unfortunately, it was between model years, and with fuel prices being what they are these days, a TDI New Beetle was hard to find.

But not impossible...

Introducing, "Herbie, the New Love Bug"
I phoned around and located a TDI Beetle at a dealer about 60 miles from us, DeLon Volkswagen in Salem, OR. The car was a TDI, and had several options that had become near-necessities after "The Tick" had spoiled us with them for a while, such as the sun-roof and heated leather seats. It also had some other goodies like a 5-disk CD changer plus an in-dash single-disk MP3 player. So far, perfect. It also came equipped with the Electronic Stabilization Program, which might help save it from just the sort of thing that killed the poor Tick.

So far, so good. With cars so scarce, we didn't expect a choice of color, but I had to ask. "It's white," the salesman said, "with a black interior." There was a hesitation. "There is one thing that is unusual about the car. " More hesitation. "It has the Herbie kit."

Sure enough, the car had been created as part of the promotional tie-in with the 2005 film, Herbie, Fully Loaded. Well, you can see the picture.

Okay, if there are two people in the world wacky enough to drive around a Herbie every day, it's Chris and I. Chris says it's like being in parade with only one car in it. It is not a car you can go unnoticed in. People stop in their tracks. Kids point and make their parents watch as we drive by. People pull up next to you on the freeway and gawk. Everyone talks to you in parking lots.

It's fun, but you can't go unnoticed, and we feel compelled to maintain certain standards of behavior driving the car. No screaming or flipping people off in traffic. No cutting people off (unless the villains deserve it, of course!). You must always be considerate. It's a lot of pressure.

On the other hand, people are (usually) considerate to Herbie too. They seem to take extra care not to bump him in parking lots. They let him into bumper-to-bumper traffic. Kids always, always smile at you. It's a fair trade.

We're getting custom plates for the car. "HERBIE" was taken, unfortunately, but we're getting our second choice: "NEW LUV." The original Herbie the Love Bug was an original Beetle, so obviously this is a "New Love Bug." It's more than appropriate that Chris, a romance writer, is now the owner of a "Love Bug." It should get some attention parked outside her book signings. Hey, it's our car!

Appropriate. Ironic. Iconic. All of the above.

You know, you don't choose Herbie--

Herbie chooses you!

Puzzling out reviews

One of the more interesting and controversial features of Amazon (copied by other bookselling sites as well, but most significant on Amazon) is the ability of readers to post reviews of books they have (supposedly) read.

There have been many horror stories, of course, of trolls posting sham negative reviews, of stalker/"fans" obsessively slamming certain author's books, and even of low-life-types who post reviews that are thinly disguised ads for their own books. There are reviews that express a reader's anger at something besides the book itself: the publisher, or the editor, or some political leaning different than their own. Some just seem to be listening to the angry voices in their head.

Of course, the truth is like the disclaimer on those web polls, "this is not a scientific survey." A huge number of positive or negative reviews may say something about a book, but neither will insure that your opinion will go along with the pack. Not that the reviews are useless, but they're most useful when you read skeptically, looking for the poster's real agenda before taking their opinions over seriously.

Trouble for some authors is, people are lazy. They don't read any of the reviews. They look at the "rated three stars out of five based on six reviews." Thing is, with a low number of reviews like that, it only takes one crank giving you a one-star review to really throw off your curve. If you get they guy with the voices in his head that day, you're SOL.

Some of my writer friends say I shouldn't look at them at all, and they have some valid points. The commericial importance of these reviews is dubious (though I think there is some), and a writer can't let a bruised ego stop them from writing. But I'd rather know that not know, and at least be able to try to deal with a nightmare review if it comes my way. Generally, I find the posititive reviews to be encouraging, and I'm able to ignore or dismiss most of the negative ones (and sometimes even learn something from them).

But speaking personally, the Amazon reviews have been pretty kind to me. Looking at Amazon USA, my novels average a solid four-and-a-half stars.

Anthologies with my work do a little poorer, but the worst-ranked one is three-stars. That one has a one star-review, a two star, and two four-star reviews. The one-star guy just diagrees with the premise of the book (in a way I can't totally disagree with, but I wasn't the editor), and the two-star guy doesn't even realize that it's an anthology, repeatedly calling it a "novel."

Still, not much to complain about.

But it gets more complicated when you can't even understand the review. I'm speaking of the German release of my MechWarrior novel, "Fortress of Lies." I'm very excited about this book, as it's my first foreign translation of a novel (assuming you don't count the novel-length fiction that I wrote for the Sierra PC game "Outpost 2"). I also have a lot of German ancestry on my father's side, so it's kind of nice to appear there.

Well, there's a review there now. Click the link there if you want to read it yourself. If you can read it yourself.

I can't.

Okay, I admit to taking two years of German in high-school. But I didn't do that great the first year, and nearly flunked out the second year due to the deadly combination of my poor study habits and girlfriend problems (don't ask). What I did retain from all that consists of a few words and stock-phrases. But this review is well beyond my poor abilities.

I can read the stars, of course. Three of them. Not that bad really, but one hopes for better.

I could blame the translator of course (a cop-out, and an unfair one, but usually a safe bit of denial for the author), but I don't think that works in this case. See, I pasted the text into Yahoo's "Babblefish" translator program, to get some idea of what the review said. Machine translation is a very inexact business, but it's better than nothing (and better than my grasp of German). At least some of it is understandable. But some of it comes out like this:

"But in addition far down more. It is at the beginning of surely unusual to read itself in in the MW:DA universe above all, if one, as I, over one decade Classic BattleTech read."

But I can puzzle out enough to know that the reader seems to object to the books supposed similarity to a classic BattleTech novel. There seems to be an implication there that I copied it. Fact is, it was published here a decade ago, maybe longer, and I've never even heard of it, much less read it. It's possible that the main connection the reader sees is in that it has father-son issues between characters (well, it's uncle-nephew-cousin issues in the case of my novel).

If so, that's annoying, as at least half the novels ever written come down, on some level, to father-son issues (or at least parent-child issues). Of course, it could also be that they're saying the writing sucks. Hard to be sure.

Why is this so annoying? It is a three-star review, after all, which isn't that bad. It isn't as though I attach huge importance to these reviews. I generally enjoy the good ones, and ignore the bad ones. It isn't as though I intend to prepare a rebuttal for the review. It's ultimately one person's opinion, and you can't write a rebuttal to that.

I guess, finally, that it is because I can't understand it well enough to know how to respond to it.
It's not knowing exactly how I failed to satisfy the reader. It's not being able to prepare a defense of the book (valid or not) in the court of my own head.

Damn. There go those voices again...

A Message from Der Governator

Warning, very silly content ahead. Sometimes, my hobby of collecting and customizing 1/6th action figures, my deranged imagination, and the kind of waking fever-dream that comes from too long under deadline, converge in front of my digital camera. Then things like this happen (Site also contains cover thumbnails and information links for most of my writing published in book form). Feel free to pass this link along.

The Multiplex Archive
http://www.sff.net/people/j-steven-york/

New Books in Stores

The first book of my Age of Conan trilogy, Scion of the Serpent, is now appearing in stores. I didn't expect it until the official release date of the 27th, but my local bookstore called me last Monday and asked me to come and sign copies, so they're out there in the distribution system, even if your local store doesn't have them yet. Amazon (see link above) was still showing it as coming soon, but hopefully that will change shortly.

(Update September 28th, 2005. This book now shows as available on Amazon.com.)

The German translation of my first MechWarrior book, Fortesss of Lies, known there as Festung der Lügen is also out. The first link will take you to the English edition on Amazon USA, the second to the German edition on Amazon.de. Amazon.de also has the English version, if any readers in Germany want it instead (or in addition to).

Chris' Alias book done

Chris' upcoming novel based on the Alias TV series is finished, done, and accepted. The subject (an attack on the nation's oil supply) is more timely than ever. I believe it will be out in March.

Where's Steve?

It's not that I've been neglecting my blog, really. It's just that, as I said when I created this thing, deadlines have been a big part of my life for a long time. In fact, I've spent well over the last year under constantant, unrelenting, deadline pressure, and it's only been getting more intense the last six months.

Well, the good news (for me, anyway) is that I just turned in my upcoming MechWarrior novel, "Trial by Chaos." I still have a final rewrite to do on that book, but I can't start that until I get notes from my editor (in the next day or two probably). But I'm sitting here, for the first time in what seems like forever, with nothing scheduled that I have to do.

Not that I have nothing to do. There's tons of long-delayed work around the house, cleaning, redecorating, remodeling, repairs. I've got my own books to work on (and though I have another MechWarrior novel under contract after this one, I don't think I have to start it for a while yet). I've got a year's worth of recreating to do.

But for the moment, I'm enjoying doing just nothing except what I want to. Right now, I want to enter something in my blog.

Done.