All posts by Michael Jan Friedman

Spotlight on our Author Spotlights

Pangaea titlePart of the fun of running a Kickstarter campaign for our Pangaea anthology is writing Author Spotlights. I know, they sound like they’d be a chore. But they’re not. Really.

The reason is as I’m writing them, I’m also marveling at the talent we’ve assembled to explore Pangaea–a super-continent on which mankind lives and always has lived, according to our unique sci fi alternate reality. You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty good list.

Christian-Kane-The-Librarians-3_0Our first spotlight was on Geoffrey Thorne, a multi-talented fellow who was a successful actor before he became a TV writer and a damned good one. His current assignment is to co-produce The Librarians. Yeah, those Librarians. The man’s also got a voice like an angel, for what that’s worth.

Next we profiled Michael A. Burstein, who writes the kind of brilliant science fiction that Isaac Asimov would be proud of. Michael’s been nominated for so many Hugos and Nebulas, he’s lost count of them. Well, almost. And his story I Remember The Future is now an award-winning indie film.

BuffaloThen there’s Lawrence M. Schoen, a professor of psycholinguistics (yeah, that’s a thing, apparently) and one of the foremost Terran experts on the Klingon language. By the way, he’s also been nominated for a Nebula award for the third year in a row, which doesn’t happen too often these days.

Next up? Don’t tell anyone, but his initials just might be Paul Kupperberg. And he just might be the guy who (SPOILER ALERT) killed Archie. Or that might be a nasty rumor…Death of Archie variant

If you’re half as excited as I am to see what these guys are planning for Pangaea, head over to our Kickstarter website and see what the fuss is all about. You might even want to click on the Tuckerization reward that earns you the right to name a character in one of their stories.

If not, there are a whole bunch of other goodies you can wrangle. You know, like autographed books and such. Something for everyone.

Here’s the link so you can be part of the fun.

See you in Pangaea, all right?

I Am The Salamander is ready to slither

SALAMANDER_COVER2Don’t freak out.

Tim Cruz, I mean, not you. Tim is gradually turning into something he never would have imagined possible, something stupid and horrifying and, frankly, kind of disgusting. That’s why he keeps telling himself: Don’t freak out.

Tim is the protagonist of my newest work, a young adult adventure novel I call I Am The Salamander. Last year about this time, 121 wonderful people helped make this book possible via a hair-raising, white-knuckled, thrill-a-minute Kickstarter campaign. Now, thanks to them, I Am The Salamander is ready to go to market.

It is now available as an e-book through Crazy 8 Press, Amazon, and BN.com, and as a trade paperback through Amazon.

If you were one of the 121 stalwarts who supported this project, reach back over your shoulder and give yourself a pat. You done good. If you weren’t one of the 121, well…now’s your chance to see what all the hoopla was about.

Inspiration

Innovation_Inspiration_600_400_70_c1_center_center_0_0_1You know inspiration, right? It’s that thing you wait for patiently, hour after hour, hoping it’ll sit next to you and whisper sweet nothings and turn that blank screen into a bestseller. In the meantime, your keyboard grows cobwebs Shelob would be proud of.

Literally, inspiration means something that’s “breathed into” you, presumably from the lungs of a great and benevolent deity. No doubt, one who can’t wait to read your next book. And where are deities? Way up high. Mount Olympos. Asgard. Heaven. Something along those lines.
So, like lightning, inspiration strikes from above. Except…lightning doesn’t strike from above. At least, not the part that we can see. The whole lightning process starts when a negative charge builds up in a cloud. After a while, that charge descends from the cloud to the ground. But the visible part of a lightning bolt is the stream that goes from the ground, which is positively charged, back up to the cloud.
We can learn a lot from lightning.
If we sit and wait for inspiration to strike, we may be waiting a long time. Forever, maybe. Which is great, because that gives us an excuse. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to write. definitely not. We were just waiting for inspiration to hit.
The bitter truth is that you have to write without inspiration. Like lightning, you’ve got to start at ground-level and build something that’ll make the heavens sit up and take notice. Or maybe just get the attention of your readers.
I’ve written more than seventy books. You’d think it would be no problem for me to sit down and write. But I don’t always feel like writing. Sometimes I feel like taking a nap. Or kayaking. Or watch that TV show everybody’s clamoring about.
Still, I write.
Right now, I’m writing Lost Days, a Renaissance fantasy for reluctant readers that’s currently in the middle of a Kickstarter funding campaign. Sometimes I love writing it, and I can’t wait to sit down at my computer. Other times not so much.
I’m human, you know?
But the biggest difference between me and a lot of people who want to write–or want to be writers–is that they give in to the temptation to lead normal lives and back-burner that novel they were working on. And I don’t. They may have more talent than I do. A lot more maybe, who knows? Yet I’m the one with seventy-plus books under his belt.
So if you want to be a writer, I’m begging you–don’t wait for lightning to strike. Build it from the ground up. It’s harder that way, sure, but some day your readers will thank you for it.

Friedman’s Lost Days: A Recommended Kickstarter Staff Pick!

Lost Days CoverCongratulate Mike on his Staff Pick Kickstarter Campaign! Veteran author Michael Jan Friedman is writing a historical fantasy for reluctant readers based on the advent of the Gregorian Calendar in 1582.

“I know,” Friedman said. “Who in his right mind would want to write a book about a calendar? Especially one that’s been around for almost half a millennium?” Nonetheless, he insists, Lost Days is an exciting adventure, steeped in intrigue and the interplay of magical forces. As a history teacher, he is enthusiastic about what the book can mean to students for whom history is a turn-off.

“I’m talking in particular about kids who grew up in underprivileged circumstances,” he said, “kids who never got the chance to see history for the splendid and fascinating tapestry it is. These are the kids I see in my classroom every day. This book is for them.” Friedman said he hopes to capture the attention of these readers with “monsters and demons and blood and death, and magic, and courage, and crazy schemes, and even love. These are story elements that kids, any kids, can latch onto.”

Lost Days - Kickstarter campaign
He is financing the publication and distribution of Lost Days through a Kickstarter campaign. Anyone who wishes to back the project can do so at http://bit.ly/MJFlostdays.

Friedman is a co-founder of Crazy 8 Press, an indie publishing concern designed to address changes in the traditional book-publishing landscape. He can be reached at MichaelJanFriedman.net and Crazy 8 Press, as well as on Twitter @FriedmanMJ and on Facebook (Michael Jan Friedman).

Playing Favorites

SALAMANDER_COVERMy favorite book? Really?

I’ve written 72 of them, y’know. And that’s not counting comic books, TV scripts, etc. And you’re asking me to name my favorite?

Hmm…I’ve naturally got to consider my most recent novels, all of which bear the noble Crazy 8 Press insignia. After all, these are my purest visions, the tales closest to my heart.

For instance, Fight The Gods, the roller-coaster-ride of a New York City cop who finds out he’s not what he seems. At all. One reader described this novel as “Percy Jackson for adults.” Not a bad tag line, that.

And then there are the Aztlan stories, noir murder mysteries set in an alternate-reality, 21st-century Aztec Empire. As I often tell readers of these novellas, you’re gonna love Maxtla Colhua, Imperial Investigator. I do. (Then again, I invented him…)

Of course, no list of my favorite “kids” would be complete without I Am The Salamander, set to be released this fall, in which young cancer survivor Tim Cruz endures a metamorphosis even Kafka never dreamed of. You think it’d be nifty to have super-powers? Think again.

The Hammer and the Horn–a swords-and-sorcery adventure steeped in Norse mythology–would have to be up there too. It was, after all, the first book I ever sold, way back in the 1980s. And it paved the way for The Seekers and The Sword and The Fortress and The Fire, the rest of the Vidar Saga trilogy, all of which is being re-released here at Crazy 8 Press.

StarfleetyearoneBut my favorite? That might be Starfleet: Year One. And I’ll tell you why.

About fifteen years ago, then-Star Trek editor John Ordover asked me to write a serial that would appear in the back of every Trek novel for twelve consecutive months. I’d long been intrigued by an unexplored territory: the beginnings of Starfleet, 200 years before Captain Kirk, and the captains that would have been the first to boldly go.

I based my serial loosely on The Right Stuff, except the dividing line that ran through the first crop of Starfleet captains was whether they were a) pilots forged in the furnace of the Romulan War or b) scientists–”butterfly catchers” I called them. As we Trek historians know, Starfleet ended up drawing on the perspectives of both camps. But which of these captains-in-conflict would end up commanding the new, state-of-the-art Daedalus–the prize in their philosophical struggle?

I loved writing this story. I loved the characters. I loved the way it dovetailed with Trek continuity. I loved the way it advanced the greater epic. This, I thought at the time, was my best work.

Anyway, the serial was well-received. The plan, after a while, was to add a little more material and turn it into a freestanding novel called Starfleet: Year One, which would soon be followed by Years Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven. I was stoked.

Until I found myself sitting next to Rick Berman’s sister at a party. Her name was Judy, and she was a lovely woman whom I had met before. Rick, her brother, was Gene Roddenberry’s successor as honcho of the Trek franchise at Paramount. “Judy,” I said, “you’ve got to tell me about this fifth series that’s coming out. You know I won’t tell anyone.” Judy looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping and said beneath her breath, “Think two hundred years before Kirk.”

Which was pretty much what Starfleet: Year One was about.

In the days that followed, Paramount almost put the kibosh on the Starfleet: Year One book. The compromise we obtained was that it would come out, but there would be no Year Two, etc. And Year One would bear a disclaimer that it had nothing to do with the events depicted in Star Trek: Enterprise.

So all those captains I invented, painstakingly modeling their origins and personalities, carefully intertwining them with established Trek history? You’ll only see them in Starfleet: Year One.

On the other hand, as we know all too well, nothing in science fiction is defunct forever…

Redemption

2013-02-16 Mike & AaronEvery good story has it in some form or another. Characters you think can’t possibly be reclaimed, can’t possibly be brought back from the brink of the abyss, nonetheless find some measure of salvation from the burdens they’ve been carrying.

Burdens of guilt. Burdens of regret. Burdens they didn’t even know they were lugging around, sometimes. And when they’re relieved of those burdens at long last, we breathe a heartfelt sigh along with them.

Because we all have pasts. We all have memories of incidents we wish had turned out differently—and would have, perhaps, if we had made one choice rather than another. It hurts to know that we screwed up big-time at some point in our lives and now there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, we can do about it.

Except…sometimes we can do something about it. Sometimes we get a second chance to make things come out right. And sometimes, unfortunately, we only think we’ve got that chance.

Which is the crux of “The Seeming,” my contribution to our maddeningly imminent Crazy 8 Press anthology, Tales of the Crimson Keep.

It’s a wonderful place, by the way, this Crimson Keep. So big and complex and ever-changing that almost anything is possible in its shadowy precincts. So redemption is always just around the corner. Or not. Depends on how you look at it, when you look at it, and whether you’re even inclined to look in the first place.

I haven’t yet mentioned the protagonist in my Crimson Keep story. He’s…what can I say…a demon. More specifically, the most puissant demon-warlord Koliander the Undying, whom we met in “Demon Circle,” and who was eventually–

Hang on a second. Maybe you’re one of the two or three benighted souls who haven’t had the inestimable pleasure of reading “Demon Circle” yet. In that case, I’d better not say what happens to Koliander. The last thing I want to do is spoil it for you.

What I will say is that the most puissant demon-warlord Koliander the Undying needs some redeeming. Lots of redeeming. And salvation too, scads of it. I mean, he’s a demon, right? If you knew nothing else about him, you’d imagine there was plenty of room for redemption in his life, and in my story he gets the chance to grab him some.

Not that he’s actually looking for redemption. He’s looking for something quite different—or thinks he is. In fact, he doesn’t know a whole lot more about what’s going on in “The Seeming” than you do. Which, when you think about it, is precious little.

But you’ll find out everything about everything, or at least everything worth knowing about Koliander’s fate, in the Crazy 8 Press tome The Crimson Keep, on sale at better on-line retailers in both print and digital formats this coming August 1.

Redemption—unlike payback, it’s not a bitch. Except when it is.

Tales of the Crimson Keep will be available in digital and print formats on August 1.