M.J. Whitehead

I’m starting work on a serial fiction project that I will be posting for free through my website. It’s a superhero urban fantasy, and you’ll be able to find out a bit more when I push the redesign of the main mjwhitehead.com site through.

It might be a month or two before I’m ready to start launching, and from there I’ll probably sit back and see how I keep up with the project so that I can have a schedule ready before I start promoting it. I’ll post both on a seperate blog and as a podcast, once I’ve sorted out what I’m doing there.

The three main characters thus far are known as “Insight”, “Shorty”, and “Arsonist”. Those are their super-identities, of course. You’ll have to sit tight to see what they’re called when they’re hobnobbing with their business associates at Wayne Enterprises*, or slogging through journalistic obscurity at the Daily Planet*.

I’m also saving myself research and setting the serial in my current hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. Everyone who’s always wanted a story covering southern hemisphere superheroes, your prayers have been answered!

*These locations will not actually be in the story, sorry. Underpowered will be a completely original work of fiction, although as it’s set in the near future, the characters will certainly know of Batman and Superman and perhaps even other superheroes. I have definite plans to work in a character who either read a lot of comics or watched a lot of superhero series, so there should be some meta-humour for those that want it.

I’m in love with Changes at the moment. For those of you who, like me a few months ago, have not picked up the Dresden Files, you’re missing out. It’s contempory fantasy at its best, borrowing a little from other genres, going interesting places and inventing new rules to do it. It’s not particularly hard fantasy, although there is a little bit of rules-based magic going on, there’s no underlying explanation of the structure of magic or anything, it just happens.

Changes is a great example of how to keep a long series fresh. Jim changed things up with the typical life changes, family revelations, backstory reveals, and all those other tricks we use to keep people interested in a series.

Changes went a step further. It’s completely rebooted the series’ dynamic. As we find out on the first page, Harry is looking for a daughter he only just learned he has, and he goes through some tremendous losses in his attempt to make her safe. This is the kind of book we need more in fantasy- the plot-changing twists and turns follow their own theme. (the title telegraphs that there’s a theme behind the changes, but doesn’t give you a clue at all)

I’m not going to say we should all beat our characters up in exactly the way that Harry gets it in this book, but we should definitely consider having Huge Game Changers™ like this in the middle of a fantasy series. If the Dresden Files were a trilogy, this would be the second book that not only improved on the first one, but really kicked its ass.

If I can do half this well I’ll be gushing with pride.

So, today I added a new idea to my notes full of loose ideas. This document is really important to me because I have a tendancy to make light first drafts without enough complication, so it really helps to have a list of things I’ve been wanting to write a story about so I can look at it and ponder “what can I fit in there?” Usually I write stories first based on what is familiar to me about the story: is it a fantasy? What’s the main similarity here that I need to work off? Part of this probably comes from being a dedicated reader who goes over books again and again.

Having a list of loose ideas is great because stories aren’t just defined by what they’re similar to, they’re also defined by how they’re different. When I’m partway through a draft and realise my story is not complex enough, it usually means I’ve failed to distinguish it enough from its peers in my outlining process. ¹ Usually when I refer back to my cheat sheet to help me out with longer-form fiction², I’m looking for the strangest idea I can get that I can make fit comfortably into my story. While this might sound weird to those of you who read this but I assume it will be familiar to those involved in writing for any sort of fiction. When someone tells you about a book, or TV series, or movie, the format you’ll often use to sum up a piece of fiction is something along these lines: “It’s like Battlestar Galactica, only with zombie accountants instead of human-looking robots.” That is, you’re contrasting the familiar and the unfamiliar, and both need to be cool enough to catch your potential audience’s attention.

Today I added “the logic of increasing returns”. This seems obvious to me because it’s one of those little theories I’ve been really interested in for a while. For those who don’t know, the logic of increasing returns is simply this: In some markets where it is costly to switch products, a product doesn’t need to always be the best overall to sell the most. It simply needs to be the initial best product when demand increases, and then be sufficiently good to maintain its position as a standard. While that might not sound particularly cool on its own, it has great potential to become a conspiracy- what if the products we trust are out to get us? Are they spying on us through them? Are they ripping us off? Or is there something even more sinister about this monopoly? Corporations make excellent conspiracy fodder in urban fiction and science fiction, not because they’re all evil, but because they aren’t transparent. It’s credible for a corporation to not be trustworthy because it happens so often in the real world- without that transparency they often run out of check, accountable only to their investors, and even then it’s usually only in terms of whether they’re making enough money.

That said, I have no desire to write corporate dystopias. The a big draw of SF/F is escapism, and for many people the bad elements of corporate culture are exactly the things that most frustrate their lives. So my corporate villains tend, in my early fiction that I shall never release³, to be the least successful ones, because it makes for good escapism.

¹ Which is really easy for me to do as I tend to function as a discovery writer, figuring things out as I go and more and more of the pieces click into place. I’ve only actually started outlining since I got back into writing and started taking it seriously, and it has made a huge difference.
² When I write short stories I don’t need to complicate them any more as a short story tends to be about exploring a single concept, or in the slice of life genre, one facet of a single character or relationship between the two main characters.
³ I’m sorry, but even for free, nobody is that interested in stories that can be summed up in single clauses like “my take on elves”, that I wrote when I was in the early half of my teenage years.