Lord and Lady Vexel were sitting by the fire one evening, relaxing after having just wrapping up their latest case which their Boswell, Jane Gray, insisted upon calling "The Escape of the Mad Boffins". Lady Vexel held her tea cup - Chamomile, one teaspoon honey - in one hand, the Journal of Applied Thaumaturgy in her lap, while Lord Vexel lazily scanned through the many copies of the Times that they had not had the chance to read for leisure while racing along the moors earlier in the week.
"Hogwash," Lord Vexel said, through his walrus mustache (it so needed to be trimmed, Lady Vexel thought, but her hints to that effect hadn't yet penetrated her husband's brain).
"What's that, Robert?" Lady Vexel said, looking up from her journal.
"All this society rubbish ... pure, unadulterated hogwash, the lot of it!"
"Oh?" Lady Vexel said, sipping at the still hot tea.
"Listen to this, Emily," Lord Vexel replied. "Daring Adventurer Wins New Beauty's Hand:
Wealthy Dame Theosophilia Von Trapp recently announced the betrothal of her beautiful daughter Moss to Capt. James De Woldt, after a daring race pit the decorated fighter ace against scion of society Sir Alan Pathe."
"Oh yes," Lady Vexel smiled, her eyes lighting up as she remembered the society gossip. "It was a truly romantic story. Moss was ... a wallflower, not truly hideous, mind you, but certainly very plain, and Dame Von Trapp despaired at ever finding a suitable match for her. In time, she finally summoned up her courage (and her carriage) and called our colleague Dr. Eigenstatd to their estates at ... um, Tor Trapp. For several weeks, he worked his magic upon the young girl: a nip here, a tuck there, a few strategically placed saline balloons, and by the time he was done, he'd positively transformed her. She was beautiful, and so ready for society."
"Soon Sir Pathe and the good Captain both fell under her spell, and things were coming to a head, especially since the Captain, while well-decorated, was certainly not the social catch that a peer of the realm would have been. However, I have been given to understand that Moss actually preferred the dashing captain, and rather shuddered at her mother's choice. So, before being locked into a marriage that she didn't want, young Moss came up with a most ingenius test - both of her prospective beaus were to start at the other end of the island and race to their home. The one who arrived first would be the one to receive her hand in marriage.
"The story was in the paper for several days - each day with the press eagerly following both men, through swamp and over mountain and across arid desert land. For a while, it looked like Sir Pathe would win out regardless, but on the last day he ran afoul of pygmy hairdressers and the good Captain was able to reach the doors of Tor Trapp first."
"Hah," barked Lord Vexel, who was rather more enamored with the values of his own class than Lady Vexel thought good for him, "it was just pure luck that this chappie won out."
"No, my dear husband," Lady Vexel said, her voice sweet with romance, "It was destiny, pure and simple."
"Destiny? Hogwash!"
"No dear. Surely it is obvious ..."
"Eh?"
"Oh, yes," Lady Vexel purred. "You see, if you build a better Moss Trapp, then De Woldt will always beat a Pathe to the Tor."
"Er ... um ... yes," Lord Vexel muttered. "Geoffrey, where is my brandy?!"
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Launching Kurt Cagle's Notebook
I've always written, but never really intended to be a writer. In fifth grade, our teacher would pass out spelling words to study for the week and we, her rambunctious students, were to use them in sentences to illustrate that we in fact knew what it was we were working with. A few weeks after receiving these, I got tired of writing seemingly disconnected sentences one numbered sentence after the next, and decided then and there to make use of each word in the context of a story, usually about a ten year old detective character that I had envisioned. My teacher was a little bewildered at first but decided that it wouldn't hurt, and over the course of the next year I ended up writing forty stories, including my magnum opus final story that spanned about ten pages ... each and every one of which including that week's spelling words. I was a strange kid, even then.
I wrote poetry in high school, and essays on trains that won the Illinois State Student Historical contest, and wrote tales from the world of Jorde. The latter was my first real taste of writing fantasy - I had finished the LotR series in 8th grade and had encountered the just published Dungeons and Dragons in the 9th, and so of course was primed. I started telling my youngest brother - at that time just entering elementary school - about the Lady Tanea, mage and healer, the charismatic Ren the Bard, the valiant and ultimately tragic knight Ten Aguar, and their adventures in the wilds of a world called Jorde, based on the Swedish word for Earth. A quarter century later, my brother has now written extensively for Wizards of the Coast, and I like to think I may have had something to do with that.
During my college years, I wrote fairly prolifically (most of the stories that are now extant on the web from me came from that period), and eventually ended up publishing and editing a small fantasy magazine called Arcane which actually saw three issues in print before we finally pulled the plug. It proved a useful experience in later years - I have spent far more time working for publishing companies of one stripe or another than I have for "formal" companies, and have been a managing editor for both magazines and, later, websites. Yet over the years I also transitioned away from writing fantasy and towards writing technical analysis or computer programming books, though the goal of getting a paperback series in print has always been one of my major ones.
Fast forward a quarter of a century. I'm establishing web policy with the W3C, helping to build the US National Archives electronic records archives, and have more than a dozen books in print ... and yet ... I still occasionally write fiction, and the storytelling urge is perhaps stronger in me today than it has been in years. I'm republishing a lot of my older work that has faded - sometimes chapters of incompleted stories that I still need to finish, sometimes existing shorter works - but am also going to start publishing my latest works here.
Why not write a book? I've already decided that I will, but it will likely be self-published. Why? Because the traditional book publishing infrastructure in this country is on its last legs, because there is very little "value-add" that I feel a traditional publisher can give me, and because my goal is not to become fabulously wealthy from my writing, but simply to have a vehicle where I CAN write and be published.
On the other hand, writing on the web has two advantages - it provides a ready made audience who will likely make their own comments, and in some respects it's far more likely to be read. This was one of those realizations that is far from obvious. A few years ago, unless I had a blockbuster, I might reach an audience of 10,000 or 20,000 fans if I was very lucky, over the brief shelf-like of the book. If I wasn't - the book might very well sit in limbo, waiting to be published, as likely to be cut as not if there was a long enough queue, or the market didn't look right, or the company in question suddenly found themselves well believe third quarter projections.
I'm far more likely to have people read it, far more likely to develop a fan base, if I publish it to the web. Some of my stories, have been read more than 100,000 times. Not all, by any means, and there are a few stories that have also disappeared into the sinkhole of time, but I believe that in this day and age, if you want to be read, then writing for the web is ultimately the best option.
So this is my home for experiments - chapters I'm working on, short stories, even character sketches and ideas. It'll be where I sell eBooks or physicals when I get that far. Feel free to comment - I can't know what people think unless I hear from them.
During my college years, I wrote fairly prolifically (most of the stories that are now extant on the web from me came from that period), and eventually ended up publishing and editing a small fantasy magazine called Arcane which actually saw three issues in print before we finally pulled the plug. It proved a useful experience in later years - I have spent far more time working for publishing companies of one stripe or another than I have for "formal" companies, and have been a managing editor for both magazines and, later, websites. Yet over the years I also transitioned away from writing fantasy and towards writing technical analysis or computer programming books, though the goal of getting a paperback series in print has always been one of my major ones.
Fast forward a quarter of a century. I'm establishing web policy with the W3C, helping to build the US National Archives electronic records archives, and have more than a dozen books in print ... and yet ... I still occasionally write fiction, and the storytelling urge is perhaps stronger in me today than it has been in years. I'm republishing a lot of my older work that has faded - sometimes chapters of incompleted stories that I still need to finish, sometimes existing shorter works - but am also going to start publishing my latest works here.
Why not write a book? I've already decided that I will, but it will likely be self-published. Why? Because the traditional book publishing infrastructure in this country is on its last legs, because there is very little "value-add" that I feel a traditional publisher can give me, and because my goal is not to become fabulously wealthy from my writing, but simply to have a vehicle where I CAN write and be published.
On the other hand, writing on the web has two advantages - it provides a ready made audience who will likely make their own comments, and in some respects it's far more likely to be read. This was one of those realizations that is far from obvious. A few years ago, unless I had a blockbuster, I might reach an audience of 10,000 or 20,000 fans if I was very lucky, over the brief shelf-like of the book. If I wasn't - the book might very well sit in limbo, waiting to be published, as likely to be cut as not if there was a long enough queue, or the market didn't look right, or the company in question suddenly found themselves well believe third quarter projections.
I'm far more likely to have people read it, far more likely to develop a fan base, if I publish it to the web. Some of my stories, have been read more than 100,000 times. Not all, by any means, and there are a few stories that have also disappeared into the sinkhole of time, but I believe that in this day and age, if you want to be read, then writing for the web is ultimately the best option.
So this is my home for experiments - chapters I'm working on, short stories, even character sketches and ideas. It'll be where I sell eBooks or physicals when I get that far. Feel free to comment - I can't know what people think unless I hear from them.
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