My writing style is usually influenced by whatever I’m reading at the moment. It so happens that someone gave me The Lost Symbol for Christmas. With that in mind, here’s a excerpt from my work in progress:

Client Operations Director Aloysius Wade opened the unmarked door to the company’s inner sanctum. The result of opening the door always took him by surprise. The outside of the door was plain, but surprisingly imposing at the end of a short, bare hallway. There was no secretary. Wade smiled to himself. Most people did not know that the tradition of having a secretary was an American invention of the early 20th century. Inside, the office of company CEO Erik Hansen was surprisingly sumptuous. Luscious maroon carpet harvested from dozens of Berbers covered the bare floor upon which Wade’s loafers tread lightly. Every inch of wall space was occupied by tall shelves of books ranging from All The President’s Men to The Tipping Point to The Prince, an Italian Renaissance-era treatise on how to effectively rule a dictatorship.

The room was dominated by a massive teak desk handcrafted from the wreck of a nineteenth-century clipper ship, the HMS Indomitable. CEO Hansen, a slim, spare man with the salty, patrician air of a yacht captain, surveyed his company from behind this desk as the captain of the Indomitable might once have surveyed the open sea. He was wearing his typical office attire, a Brooks Brothers navy blue blazer, tailored button-down Oxford shirt, and jeans. His gray hair always looked windblown despite careful styling. He smiled an easy smile, his shockingly warm yet sometimes icy blue eyes greeting his trusted friend. “Come on in, Wade.”

I hope I’ve gotten that out of my system now.

Here’s a bit of flash fiction I did for the Editor Unleashed Flash Fiction 40 contest. Clocking in at 449 words, it’s my shortest piece so far. If you like it, you get a say in the outcome of the contest, so on June 15, go sign up at the Editor Unleashed message board and vote for my story!

INBOX (1)

SENDER: Joseph

SUBJECT: Come back

Please come back, Philip. I don’t know where you’ve gone. I’m looking everywhere.

So my name is Philip, he thought. He didn’t know who Joseph was. He didn’t know much of anything else either. He pressed Delete.

He saw the city for the first time, unburdened by memories. Is this what being born is like? A hum began deep in his chest, a tune he had no words for. It swelled and burst into unashamed song. People all around stopped to listen. It was a beautiful day—his first day.

* * *

INBOX (1)

SENDER: Joseph

SUBJECT: Where are you?

I’m afraid I’ll never get you back. Please remember me and come home.

He poised his finger over the Reply button, but had no idea what to say, so he pressed Delete instead. Today was overcast, but a crowd was gathering in the square anyway. They were all he had, and they were waiting for him to sing. He put away the phone, and sang, and the coins pooled around his feet.

* * *

INBOX (0)

The emails had come with less frequency as the weeks passed. Joseph, whoever he was, was giving up the ghost.

That was fine with Philip. People came from all over the city to hear him sing. His agent took care of the money. Even the amnesia was fading. Not that he remembered anything; when asked about his past, he made something up.

At night, when he curled up in the tiny apartment, fending off the cold, when he thumped his arm to coax out a vein for the needle, he wished the lies were real.

* * *

He awoke. The twinge in his arm told him there was still a needle in it. It wasn’t the first time. He smelled alcohol. It was the kind they used in hospitals, not the kind you drank. A man in blue scrubs approached his bed.

“Good morning, Mr. Peters. Good to have you back with us.”

Peters? Was that his last name? He couldn’t remember ever using it. For the first time, he noticed the restraints tethering his arms, legs and forehead.

“How did I get here?”

“You came here yourself, three days ago. You’re past the worst of the detox.”

He didn’t remember any of this, and said so.

The blue man smiled. “You told us you might have some memory trouble. You left yourself a note.” He picked up a scrap of paper from the nightstand and held it out.

Welcome back, Philip.

-Joseph

He remembered everything.

I was so lonely, said Joseph in his head, and then Joseph was gone, leaving his memories behind, and there was only Philip, clean and whole.

I completely forgot to mention here that I relaunched the Copyhacker site a couple of weeks ago! From now on, I’ll use it for quick posts–news and such–and continue to use this one for essays, nonfiction or whatever else crosses my mind (I refuse to use the word “musings”).

I’ve also been outlining a novel for the last couple of weeks, and this morning I laid down the first words–a whopping 263 of them! Here’s a small, completely unedited sample:

As he approached the corner, his gait became jauntier, less purposeful. By the time he reached the crossing street, tapping out a text message with the fluidity of a native language, he was one of a crowd of hundreds, converging on the roped-off front door of the nearest club.

I plan on releasing companion stories to the novel as I go along, so watch Copyhacker for updates!

Some big news dropped yesterday in the e-reading world: Amazon acquired Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, the popular (and, dare I say, best) reading software for iPhone. I’ve used Stanza for months now and have read about half a dozen books and other works on it. I was as skeptical as everyone else about the ebook thing, but my iPhone is now my go-to reading platform. Stanza started out good and has only gotten better.

Big wins for Stanza: integration with several e-text sites via API, the ability to read just about any format you can throw at it, and ad hoc downloading of any file from a URL (you can also pull down a file from your hard drive by opening it in Stanza’s bare-bones desktop app). Obviously, it can’t read DRM-locked files, so all those books you bought for your Kindle are so much garbage to Stanza.

Not to be outdone, Amazon released its own reader for iPhone, named Kindle after its pricier hardware cousin.

Big wins for Kindle: access to the entire Kindle store (which I like), and syncability with your Kindle hardware (which I don’t have, but wish I did).

I love Stanza, but I did try Kindle, since 1) it’s free and 2) the real Kindle isn’t. I bought Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon on the Kindle store (you can’t do it from inside the Kindle app; you have to use the Web site) and got about five percent through the book before missing Stanza so badly I bought the non-DRM edition from Fictionwise (which you can do from inside Stanza on the iPhone).

So what is Amazon going to do with Stanza? Though there is precedent for Amazon offering DRM-free content, I can’t see them offering competitors’ titles for sale right alongside the Kindle Store, can you? I think the best we can hope for is a beefed-up Kindle app with some of Stanza’s sweet user interface features, like low-light mode, screen orientation control and the iPod-like book browser.

Those things are all wonderful, but for me, the discovery of new content right inside Stanza is key. I published stories to Feedbooks and Smashwords. All those Stanza users can find my stuff right on their iPhone, and I can find other independent writers to connect with and support.

The worst possible outcome would be the end of free (as in speech) titles in Stanza. I really hope Amazon isn’t just out to eliminate the little fish, throwing out the nascent indie fiction market with the bathwater.

I would love the best of both worlds: a reader that can read any file you own, in any format, in addition to the vast Kindle catalog. But I’m not holding my breath.

I’m hoping that Amazon is really interested in Stanza’s desktop app, and its sharing feature. I’d love an ebook answer to Delicious Library, or iTunes (Cory Doctorow’s on-point rant notwithstanding). I’d love to have a desktop application that organizes my content and can push it to my platform of choice, keeping my place in sync everywhere.

I’m looking in another direction for that, though.

So I was reading Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market the other night. The first third or so has interviews on different topics of interest to writers, which is great because I get to procrastinate shopping my story around while I read the interviews, instead of digging through the market listings. In one interview, Elizabeth Moon said she knew she was naturally a novel writer since she could never finish a short story. I wonder if I’m in the same boat. I finished one short story, but I did get a couple of comments from first readers that it read like a novel treatment — and it was a lot (30 years or so) to cram into 6000 words. The story I’m working on now just hit 4400 words and I realize I can’t wrap it up as a short story the way it exists now. So my options are three:

1. Forget about the length (and all hope of wrapping another finished product anytime soon) and make it a novel.

3. Finish the first draft as briefly as is feasible and fix it in rewrites.

Option 1 only makes sense if I’m going to give up on short stories, and it’s way too soon for that (after all, I did finish one). Besides, finishing a work of specific length is an important discipline, and I don’t think I can delay my gratification long enough to write a whole novel at this point. It felt too good to finish the first story. At under 500 words a day, it takes long enough just to do a short piece.

Option 3 seems practical, but what if this story doesn’t want to be short? The idea for it flowed out of a specific situation, and I have yet to come up with a resolution for said situation. There may not be one in ten thousand words or less. But you’ll notice I left out…

2. End it with a cliffhanger, and make it a sort of serial.

With this option I abandon any hope of marketing this particular story as is. But there are some things to like about option 2:

• Readers love serials. Get them hooked on the product and keep pushing. See also: TV and comics.

• The story would be (more or less) complete in itself while leading into a larger experience. This is kind of scary, not knowing where the whole thing is going (see also: X-Files), but I also have some ideas for tying it into the novel that’s sitting on my back burner.

• I get to build a universe as if I’m writing a novel, but do it a bit at a time (and hopefully not write myself into many corners).

• The more I study the short story, the more I realize how underrated it is. So no one buys them. Who cares? Novel sales are down too, with a lot of people citing the death of the American attention span. Well, a ten-page story requires much less commitment than a three-hundred-page novel. Maybe the time is ripe for the short story (or some version of it) to make a comeback–and if the old-guard publishing industry isn’t interested, well, they’re a topic for another post.

If I do this, don’t expect a logical order of progression. We aren’t talking linear like a TV show–we’ll all be turning over puzzle pieces one at a time and trying to figure out where they fit in the big picture. And hopefully there is a big picture.

So what do you think? Too ambitious, or a sneaky way of avoiding responsibility? Let’s save the story before it’s too late. Who’s with me?

…to be his friend on Facebook and Twitter.

What are you waiting for? Viva la revolucion!

(I seem to say this a lot, but thanks to Bryan for the killer logo.)

One of the writing projects I’ve been working on over the last few months is a 6000-word short story called Ends. I finally wrapped up the last edits and submitted it to a contest. It’s the first fiction of any real length that I can call a finished product. While I decide where to shop it next, I’m going to let you lot have at it. No one sells their first story anyway, right? So enjoy, everyone.

Grab the PDF, and an excerpt, from this page.

Happy reading!

Turns out my earlier post could have come out of a book. The Big Sort, a blog over at Slate, is all about the culture war as viewed through the political lens. You could call it Freakopolitics. The blog is a spinoff of a book by the same name, which I just added to my wish list.

This post in particular jibes with what I wrote two months ago.

College kids who join a conservative fraternity move to the right during their four years in college. Liberals from Boulder asked to discuss some issues of the day, such as global warming and gay marriage, are more liberal at the end of their discussion than before. Racists brought into a room to discuss race grow more intolerant.

The more you interact with people like you, and the less you interact with people not like you, the more polarized you become in your worldview. And thanks to the Internet, no matter who you are, there’s an echo chamber just for you.

And it’s killing us.

We transfer our hopes and dreams and identities onto “our” candidate, talk him up until he is larger than life, swallow all the marketing, and suddenly it’s Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader out there. Our side is the Rebellion and yours is the Empire. You’re a religious nut. I’m unpatriotic. That guy over there is a bigot. She’s a terrorist sympathizer. Get a life already. Go talk amongst yourselves instead of pointing fingers.

The truth is, despite all the hearts and flags and intangibles, the candidates are more alike than different when it comes to actual, hard, cold, boring policy. Most of the difference is imputed by us. Strip away all that and you have two great Americans, either of which I’ll be honored to call President.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a vote to cast.

For those of you who aren’t following along on Twitter, my first TVgasm recap is up. Much to my relief, I get to do a show that I love (House), something with a bit of brains, instead of some knockoff reality show that I’m not interested in. Don’t worry, it’ll still be a snarkfest.

Check out the recap here. It would seem I also picked up my first critic already, in the comments. Sweet. Now I just need my first rejection, and I’ll be a real live writer…

Yes, I’m pimping Copyblogger again, but I couldn’t resist this guest post from “Writer Dad” Sean Platt:

Are You a Writer?

Sean, you’re now on my RSS short list. I’ve wasted a lot of time over the last couple of years pussyfooting around wondering if I was good enough or “meant ” to be doing this. Thanks for the wake-up call.