Wildwood

"Sounds like a country song," Prue McKeel observes 60 pages into Wildwood.  "If country songs were really, really weird."

Wildwood is like American Gods for kids, in the forest.  We're back in the Old, Weird America with two kids having an adventure in a magical wilderness.  The wilderness is one part Uncle Remus, one part Narnia and one part Neverland, all of it deeply American and quirky.  We get talking animals, mailmen with rifles, conscript armies of coyotes, fox constables and a bereaved Dowager Governess bent on evening the score by human sacrifice.  It's like an epitome of alt-country in story form.

Like American Gods, Wildwood is completely driven by its milieu.  There are main characters, but they are broadly drawn.  There is a plot, but it's straightforward.  The two older kids wander around the forest looking for a kidnapped baby.  They go from one avenue of help to the next very linearly and without surprises.

To paraphrase another famous writer of genre fiction, the place is the thing.

Air: Oblivion

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Air: Oblivion


Genre: Steampunk, Fantasy, Middle Reader

Heaven Bound Bob squeezed, once, experimentally. The big wings flapped, slamming the burning platform with a gust of warm air.

"Hit works, Charlie!" Bob yelped with glee.

Charlie struggled with his harness.  Ollie was to have been the co-pilot, so he knew very well how to strap himself in.  It was new to Charlie, but the clockwork boy was figuring it out.  Good thing old Pondicherry made his unnatural son a quick study.

"Hold on!"  Ollie yelled.  He muttered some of his mumbo jumbo.  Bamf!  Bob smelled the sulphurous stink, and then Ollie was gone and in his place was a long brown snake.  Charlie snapped shut the last buckle and bent to scoop up the Herpetomancer.  Ollie, the snake, wrapped himself around Charlie's coppery neck and shoulders like a scarf.

"'Ere we go!" Bob yelled.

Whitehall yawned at Bob's feet.  The top of the Halls of Parliament looked like a jagged saw blade, and Big Ben looked like a bayonet or a Zulu spear.  Bob hesitated.  The wings'll work, Bob thought, they'll work.

Bob crouched to jump, but stalled.

Now it was more than just Bob's life at stake.  Bob squinted through the shreds of fog and smoke below and spotted the Queen's steam-carriage.  It puffed across Waterloo Bridge, placid beneath the rotors and wings and hot air balloons of the Progress Flotilla.  The Queen must see the fire that engulfed the London Eye, and the men mobilizing to fight it, but she couldn't know of the wicked plans of the Iron Cog.  She couldn't know anything about Gearsmith the Kobold, or the loup garou, or her own mechanical doppelganger, en route to replace her.

Smoke wrapped around the wings.  Bob coughed.  They had to save the Queen, but Bob hesitated.

Charlie twisted in his harness and looked back.  "Are you afraid the Articulated Gyroscopes won't work?"

In answer, Bob grinned and flapped the wings again.  "No such fing."  Bob was worried, though.  Bob didn't want to be a hero, didn't want the publicity.

Bob inched forward.  Charlie nearly dangled off into space.  They hit the apex of their rotation and smoke engulfed them.  Bob squinted through the smoke and tried to judge the timing.  The Queen drove surrounded by cavalrymen.  If I get there too soon, Bob thought, those lads'll take me for the threat and shoot me dead on sight.

The soles of Bob's boots were hot.  Flames licked up and around the platform.  Any longer, and the Flyer would combust.

Now or never.

Bob jumped, and threw the invention into gear.

In the rush of air and the speeding of earth below, Bob became free.  The aeronaut forgot the threat to Crown and Country, forgot all the peril and the shooting and the injured shoulder.  Bob became a bird.

One thing Bob didn't forget, never forgot, couldn't forget even in mid-air.  One thing Bob wasn't ready to reveal to anyone, including the Queen.  The secret was so important, Bob would almost prefer not to save the Queen if it meant revelation and discovery.

Bob's real name was Roberta.  Roberta Alice Micklemuch.  Heaven Bound Bob was a girl.

God's Blog

Very funny.  And reminiscent of some Story Monkeys calls.  Holmes is the one that wants the wildebeest bossed around by the duck.

Bramwell

Allow me to recommend a TV show: Bramwell.  A woman doctor starts the "Thrift", a health clinic and surgery for the poor, in London's East End in 1895.

It does the Victorian setting like no one but the BBC really can.  It has complex relationships, both continuing and contained within episodes.  And it does a wonderful job of giving its characters complex moral choices.  They act as best they can, but they choose among imperfect alternatives, and every gain comes at a real cost, every benefit with a serious risk.

We're streaming it on Netflix -- I don't know know how generally available the show is otherwise.

Steampunk Hits the Smithsonian

Steampunk is in its quintessence Victorian, and so is usually set in England or in pseudo-Englands.

But America had a Victorian Age, too.  What might American Steampunk look like?  The Smithsonian is now running an exhibit that might give us some hints.

Sympathy (2)

            “Charlie Pondicherry ain’t got no mum!”

            Charlie ducked, trying not to get hit by the rock this time.  There would be a rock.  There was always a rock.

            “What are you talking about, Skip?  Charlie Pondicherry ain’t even got a dad!  Charlie Pondicherry’s a toenail fungus, that’s why he’s always got that goop smeared on him!  Who ever heard of a fungus with a mum and dad?”

            Skip, Mickey and the Bruiser were their names.  Or maybe not their names, but that’s how Charlie knew them, anyway.  They followed Charlie down the Gullet like a bad smell.  Charlie was sure the three boys just hung around the alley, waiting for him to pass so they could get him.  At least that meant that the fact that he didn’t get out into the Gullet very much had a plus side to it.

            He hunched down lower over the basket of dirty laundry he was carrying.  Sooner or later, there would be a rock.

            “A fungus… ha, ha!  A fungus!”

            Whack!

            Ouch.  There was the rock.

*   *   *

The answer to yesterday's question is: as much as I can squeeze in.


Charlie suffers a big loss in chapter three of the book, and sets about actively trying to recover his loss (he's active).  He's a good kid, who chafes at being good and is a little bit naughty at the edges.  He doesn't show particular specialness in early chapters (he will in later chapters -- soon, but not before the inciting incident).  He's in danger early and often.  The story is told in the third person, but it's limited omniscient, and 100% close on Charlie at all times.  And, as we see in the new chapter one, Charlie's life is rough in some ways before the adventure even begins.


Above is the current draft page 1.  Charlie gets picked on.  To forecast the subject of future blogs, this scene (only part of which is excerpted above) is built around several uses of the Rule of Three.

Sympathy

It's important in writing almost any story that readers care about the protagonist.  You want readers to root for the protagonist as he sets about trying to achieve his objective, which they will only do if they care.

This is an issue I am wrestling with on my current (middle reader-oriented) project.  The Story Monkeys are having a hard time relating to my protagonist, whose name is Charlie.  Today I am going to write a new first chapter, to go in front of the old first chapter, the sole real purpose of which is to make the Story Monkeys (and other eventual readers) like Charlie.

What is my menu of options?  To make people like Charlie, I can:

• Make Charlie suffer.  We like the underdog, especially when his problem is one we can relate to.  He's unpopular, people pick on him, he's lonely, he's poor, his life's in danger.  Is he an orphan, hated by his step-parents?  Is he always in trouble at school?
• Make Charlie really skillful.  We admire people who are good at something that they do.  People will like Charlie more if he is an awesome ninja or a super-talented, say, Quidditch seeker.  
• Make Charlie funny.  We like funny people, like the kid who wants to be the school cartoonist.
• Get deep into Charlie's POV.  The better we understand what people are thinking, the more we care about them.  Focus on Charlie's hopes and his suffering.  It's no coincidence that so much middle reader fiction is written in first person, or sticks very closely to a very limited number of characters.
• Show Charlie being active.  You can't root for a couch potato.  A protagonist who gets out and after his objectives, or his Quest, early gets sympathy.
• Make Charlie nice.  Parents (and hopefully some kids) like nice guys, and want them to win.
• Make Charlie bad.  Many kids see themselves in naughty characters, and root for the naughty (not evil; naughty, i.e., mouthy, disrespectful, troubled kid, the kid with ants on his pants, not the future psychopath) character to succeed.  Combined with the preceding bullet, this may mean that there is a sweet spot to aim for, where your protagonist is a basically nice kid, with a frisson of bad attitude.

What will I do in this chapter?  You'll have to wait to read it and see.