Ketchup

No, I don’t mean this photo of me in college. Dude, I was smokin’. ;)

This is 1989, believe it or not. I went to school at a small mountain college in a small mountain town called Prescott, Arizona. Gorgeous country. It was also a very insular place. As I recall, the population was 10 – 20K at the time? It’s exploded since. I hear they even have a Wal-Mart. But the Sixties’ mindset migrated to Prescott decades late, and it stayed, and a lot of us were very laid back and yet passionate about the environment and peace and the whole shebang. Saw a lot of free love, too, man, and that was groovy.

Notice the lieutenant’s bars, though. I’m nothing if not loaded with contradictions! The bars were my father’s, who made captain in the U.S. Army, and I have a lot of respect for the kind of self-sacrifice and technological might, as you might guess from reading my books.

What the hell am I talking about?

Our little fashion chat got me thinking about microcosms, one of my favorite themes in the Plague trilogy. Even in this day of instant global media, the local community still reigns. People still think differently in every town, at every level, down to every little clique.

In no way do I dispute Thug Nasty’s assertion that the Gangsta Slop Look is totally passé for those on the cutting edge. I’m hardly the guy to tell you. I don’t get out much, and, when I do, it’s not to hit the night clubs or the street scene, let me tell you. Sushi and a movie with my wife, sans children, is sheer glory. Nor do I read magazines or watch TV. Also, we live in a fairly high-end town. We don’t see a lot of Slop, which is why that junior high kid last week really jumped out at me.

My father lives much further inland, though, in the San Joaquin Valley near Stockton, which is near Sacramento. The Gangsta Slop Look is huge there. The schools have buckled down with strict dress codes, but, once the bell rings, the pants slide down and the XXL football jerseys come out, bitch. I’m told that this style actually originated in prison, where belts are disallowed. It really is a gang thing. Tough guys looking like marshmallows?

In literally the reverse direction, when we drive to San Francisco, what you see is tattoos, lip studs, nose studs, gelled hair in odd lengths, and everyone dressed in tight black clothing. So is that the cutting edge? Beats the heck out of me. Every day I wear jeans and a t-shirt. The same t-shirts. My wardrobe is 20 t-shirts and 3 pairs of pants. Wow.

Here’s where I tread into dangerous territory! Don’t be alarmed.

I think there are other forms of fashion. Everyone wants to shock their parents. We all want independence as we come of age, even if it’s only cosmetic.

Again, I don’t get out much, but we do ski in Colorado regularly, and I’m here to tell you that it’s not a particularly colorful state, certainly not like here on the Pacific Rim. In Colorado, you got white people, you got Hispanic people, and the two don’t appear to mix much, especially up in the hills.

Diana and I were in downtown Denver for WorldCon this August, however, where we noticed a new trend (or a statistical anomaly). One day we broke from the convention just to get in a short walk and some food. In the space of a dozen blocks, on a Sunday afternoon in a non-crowded outdoor mall, we saw no less than eight separate pairs of mid-twenties white girls with mid-twenties black guys. The girls were invariably blonde, sometimes obviously dyed. All of the guys were clean cut — none of the Gangsta Slop here.

Maybe there was a White Girl Black Guy convention going on simultaneously with WorldCon? That seems unlikely. Diana and I thought we’d walked into a glitch in the Matrix when we kept encountering the same phenomenon.

My guess would be that shocking your friends and family by dating outside your race is a pretty hot thing in Denver right now, just as it was in California a couple decades ago. Maybe it’s everywhere in the metro scene across the country. In part, it must be a fashionable thing to do.

I don’t have a problem with it, btw, which you already know if you’ve read my stories. In fact, I’ve seen hate mail from rigid-minded folks who for example have gone so far as to call Plague Year “a steaming pile of liberal propaganda.” (Yeah, I memorized that one; I’m still very, very surprised; it’s just an end-of-the-world novel, dude!) I suppose it’s obvious that I’m a fifth-columnist pinko with an agenda since the two main heroes in the book are a genius Jew and a Hispanic, and one of the villains is a white U.S. senator.

Actually, moron, that’s just what the world is like. Not all of the good guys are squeaky clean Aryan Christians. This is especially obvious in the 21st Century Bay Area, but may be unclear wherever the author of that fine email lives.

Here’s a quick break-down of some of our married friends:

White woman, black man
Hispanic woman, white man
Chinese woman, white man
Japanese woman, Jewish man
Egyptian woman, Italian man

Those last two are especially exotic, aren’t they? Italy and Egypt are just across the Mediterranean from each other, but not exactly similar cultures. Boy, do those two have a story!

Having said this, however, I don’t see eight young biracial couples here in a month, much less one day — again with the caveat that I’m not exactly hanging around the scene. Maybe it’s the hot new national trend. Teens and young adults want to establish themselves as separate from their parents. That’s a good, healthy thing. It's just interesting to me how this manifests itself sometimes.

Who else has a fun or wild story?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Labels: Deep Thoughts With Jeff

So I've been eyebrow deep in Mind Plague again, which is a good thing, but today is an off day for me so I'm catching up on correspondence and errands. In the meantime, here’s something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest. That’s right! Because you demanded it. Sordid hot personal rants for the Internet!

Well, not really. But here is a Deep Thought With Jeff.

I’ve taken a bit of heat from some reviewers and fans for the Plague novels being “short” books. Generally this person will come on fairly strong about how they enjoyed the novel and say that it was a quick enjoyable read, but, well, maybe it was short...

To which I say bullshit. There’s no question that I’m not writing the gigantic 200K word door stoppers you find in epic fantasy, for example, but I take exception with the idea that my books are short.

Oo! A nerve! We’ve touched a nerve! :)

Plague Year is 100K words, which is slightly on the long side of average. It’s just that it was published in paperback and in the tiniest legible font known to mankind. The book clocks in at 304 pages total, including maps and blurbs and one ad in the back... but those are densely packed pages, folks, full of flavor and satisfaction. Mmm.

My contract for Plague War mandated an identical count of 100K words — yes, this stuff is in the legalese — but my editor and I fought for more after I found myself halfway through that word count but not halfway through the story. The scope of the sequel is even bigger than in the first book, with more POV characters and a larger background.

War clocked in at 115K words even after a brutal tightening-and-polish of the final manuscript. I figured the finished book would run at least 330 pages and show those short people a thing or two. But an interesting thing happened. When I received advance copies, I was flabbergasted to discover that War was exactly 304 pages, too!

What’s happening here? My editor tells me that books are printed in 16 page increments. More, they love ‘em thin. You get more books in a box that way, saving on warehousing and shipping costs, not to mention paper and binding costs. You also get more books on the shelves in less space. Welcome to the future!!!

I asked her, But what happened to the extra 15K words? Did you guy chop out a bunch of stuff without telling me?

Nope. If you examine War, you’ll find that its pages are even more densely packed than those of Year. They used the same tiny font, but with even narrower white margins on either side and several more lines from top to bottom. Shazam! Magic!

Here's more evidence that my books aren’t short. The gorgeous hard cover from Minotauro runs 320 pages, a nice, standard thickness for a book... and hard covers always have a lesser page count than paperbacks because, well, the pages are bigger! Even with a normal-sized font and normal spacing between the lines, those lovely big pages hold more text than a paperback page.

Also, the German paperback is 400 pages. Why? They’re not using the smallest typeface ever discovered by scientists. So in your face, short people!

(Have I unintentionally begun a flame war with individuals who are vertically challenged? Tune in next week...)

Labels: Deep Thoughts With Jeff, German edition PLAGUE YEAR, Plague War, Publishing, the writing life