The characters attempt to survive encounters with every undead horror imaginable from “the Un-die-ary of Anne Frank” to “To Kill A Mockingbird and Also Zombies” until finally the market is so saturated with zombie fiction that everyone kills themselves so they won’t have to be a survivor, living in a world where every fucking book, movie, comic and TV show is about the undead..

Unfortunately, before I could write the story down, it came true.

This got me thinking.  I could be one of those talent-less hacks!  Self-respect is great, but money is even better.  It was this revelation that put me on the path to failed novel #2, Moonlight: New Moon, (Book 1 of the Moonlight Saga).

Beauty Crane is a high school junior with a secret. Amen-othep, the boy she loves is not the high school senior/burn victim he appears to be, but is actually a 10,000-year-old undead mummy.  And her best friend, native american Sean Miles-O’Banyon, who is actually a leprechaun, has now professed his love for her.  Can she choose between these men before the readers realize the plot is non-existent?  Find out in: “The Moonlight Saga: Moonlight, New Moon”

Nobody is reading these sorts of novels with a critical eye, so I decided I could take my laziness to a new level.  Unfortunately doing a find and replace on a copy of Twilight where I wanted to change the occurrences of “marble” to “bandaged” overloaded my computer’s RAM and it caught fire. I barely made it out alive.  I took this as a sign.. but what do you think? Is there money or success to be had here?

Hopefully we will be able to do another giveaway sometime soon.

The first failed novel was a bit of medical “romance” (read: erotica) called “Doctor Romance: The Love Surgeon”, here is an excerpt (WARNING: NSFW):

“Please lie still while I am examining you,” Dr. Romance said to the attractive girl lying naked on his exam table.  The sight of her large and healthy-appearing mammaries causing an increase in blood flow to his erectile tissue.

Using the digits of his right hand to gently probe her body’s epidermis, he found that there were no lesions or contusions and that caused a flooding of his system by hormones, most dominantly oxytocin. 

“I want you now,” the girl said and Dr. Romance took this to mean that her body, and specifically her vaginal region, had been stimulated to the point where she desired that he should place his glans and penis body past her labia majora and into the vaginal cavity.

So as you can see, it was all very erotic but I had a feeling it was way above the average reader’s head.  What do you think?

B is for Baristas, yeah, making coffee is soooo cool

C is for Canadians, I hope they freeze to death

D is for Dan Brown, drafting diarrhea right and left

E is for Ed Hardy shirts and the tools who wear them out

F is for the Fox News folks, intelligent as trout

G is for the Golden Girls, cause most of them are dead

H is for the Human Race, a plague that is widespread

I is for the Immigrants, doesn’t matter where they’re from

J is for those Jerky kids, all tears and bubble gum

K is for the KKK, do I need to tell you why?

L is for that Lactose stuff, THAT I can’t abide

M is for Myself, that bastard man of hate

N is for old Nancy Grace, whose voice makes me irate

O is for the Orphans, and before you ask me why

P is for their parents, who were smart enough to die

Q is for Qwghlmians, they don’t bother to exist

R is for the Macho Man, Randy’s death just made me pissed

S is for the Syfy channel, “MultiHorse vs SuperDuck”

T is for the state of Texas, which is full of steer and suck

U is for the Uvula, what the fuck’s the deal with that?

V is for Van Halen, now as relevant as Ratt

W is for the Working Week, till Friday when I’m home

X is for the letter X, it tried to wreck this poem

Y is for Your Mom, the object of worldwide scorn

Z is for me giving up, I think I’ll go watch porn.

Happy Monday

Don’t forget to pick up a copy of my hilarious novel “Hawke’s Doom“, now available on paper or electricity

A massive, terror-inspiring monster who forces authors to copy and paste its name to avoid misspellings. One of the menagerie of horrors a reader will find in “Richard Partridge’s HAWKE’S DOOM”

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/48390-richard-partridge-s-hawke-s-doom

      With a grip like an iron vice he grasped a descending bear paw and stopped it, claws only inches away from their intended target.  His boot lanced out and, meeting animal muzzle, knocked a bear onto its back.  Another hand snaked out and caught the first bear’s throat.
“How are you doing that?” Helcena called out in astonishment.
“Apparently,” the man with no memory said, with smirk and a wink, “I’m totally frigging awesome!”

-Excerpt from Richard Partridge’s Hawke’s Doom

When I began work on Hawke’s Doom, the first thing I did was was make a list of all the genre tropes that I wanted to lampoon in the novel.  I wrote maybe four items before I got distracted and the list was quickly populated by the names of cartoon girls I fantasized about as an adolescent.

After shaking myself from that animated reverie, I glanced at the top of the list and decided to start from there and figure things out as I went along.  I’m now going to repeat that process with a series of short articles where I muse on the subject of those tropes and failings.  Starting now as I did then, with Mary Sue.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology (or the etymology) I have extracted the following from Wikipedia:

In fan fiction, a Mary Sue is an idealized character representing the author.

The term “Mary Sue” comes from the name of a character created by Paula Smith in 1973 for her parody story “A Trekkie’s Tale” published in her fanzine Menagerie #2. The story starred Lieutenant Mary Sue (“the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet — only fifteen and a half years old”), and satirized unrealistic Star Trek fan fiction. Such characters were generally original female adolescents who had romantic liaisons with established canonical adult characters, or in some cases were the younger relatives or protégées of those characters

Mary Sue (or Gary Stu as the male counterpart is occasional called) has appeared with greater frequency in succesful genre fiction over the last decade or two.  Authors like Terry Goodkind will use their Gary Stu to push their ideology.  Authors like Anne Bishop will use their avatar to live vicariously the empowered and glorious life they have always dreamed of. Even authors whose work I generally admire, like Patrick Rothfuss will simultaneously tickle the edges of Mary Sueism whilst trying to downplay it with the “unreliable narrator” trope.  And with the advent of self-publication, the speculative fiction ghetto has been overrun with a pandemic of Mary Sues.

I am not saying that Mary Sue fiction cannot be entertaining or even deep (as an exploration of the author’s psyche it can be immensely entertaining to jump into the head of someone else for the length of a novel.. especially if that author has unresolved sex issues to work through).  The fact remains, however, that it is a trope that can be very distracting and unpleasant to many readers and more often than not it is the primary reason I will put a book down forever.

The greatest enemy of the Mary Sue is him (or her) self.  The author’s vicarious exploits may appeal to a younger reader with little understanding of what lies beyond the institutions of youth, hence the success of the more simple character designs of young adult fiction and the popularity of works by Ayn Rand, but as an older reader dives into these works they find themselves either unable to identify with the protagonist or even worse, loathing them.  A person who is in his 30′s knows fairly well what they are capable of.  So in order to identify, a character should have similar limitations.

As a teenager I loved the Dark Elf books by R.A. Salvatore.  But I suspect that if I were to go back to them today I would find the unparalleled martial skill, enchanted accouterments  and absolute moral fortitude of Drizzt to be unpalatable due to their incredible impossibility.

To tackle this subject in Hawke’s Doom, I first created the character of Richard Partridge, the 14-year-old ward of the state who is the “author” of Hawke’s Doom.  His avatar in the fictional world he has created is Dick “Sharkbiter” Hawke, a strong, smart and extremely capable man who makes a huge mistake and uses his vast resources to fix his situation, something that the powerless Richard Partridge is himself unable to do.

To make this parody instead of parable, Dick Hawke is, of course, an extremely attractive super-scientist with a 16th degree black belt in karate and a time machine.  And while this may seem ridiculous and over-the-top, I would say he’s more believable of a character than Richard Rahl from Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series (who even in killing pacifists and kicking in the face of little girls is “showing moral clarity”).  And had I really wanted to tackle this concept only, I would have made sure that there was no hurdle too great for Hawke to conquer on his own (ala Bishop’s Black Jewels series, where the 4 protagonists are individually more powerful than every other character in the series combined), but since I wanted to squeeze at least a small amount of entertainment into Hawke’s Doom and to hit on quite a few other tropes, I didn’t.

And just because I am now writing on this subject, and just because I wrote the book, doesn’t mean that I have not been guilty of this transgression in the past.  Over ten years ago, I self-published a terrible novel called Lands Forsaken (that is thankfully out of print) featuring a Mary Sue character who followed a very similar path of turmoil and redemption and don’t think I didn’t use that novel as ammo for my cannon.  Writing is just one of my two big hobbies. I also do stand up comedy and laying my embarrassing past mistakes out for all to see has become rote by this point.  I still make mistakes, and will likely continue to do so until the day they put my brain into a robot body that doesn’t let me make mistakes.

There is room for Mary Sue fiction in the world. Not on my bookshelf, but certainly elsewhere.  Mary Sue seemed like a good place to start with Hawke’s Doom and I’d like to think it worked out.