This idea is just too hard to resist. I literally can’t help myself.

Tor.com has come up with a list of fantasy characters who they think would comprise a fictional, epic fantasy Avengers team. Naturally, I think they got it horribly wrong. And most of the commenters got it even more horribly wrong.

The spirit of the exercise is to assemble a team of individuals who represent the actual members of the Avengers from the movie. Tor.com, and the many commenters, picked too many characters who don’t actually have anything in common with the character they are supposed to correlate with. Just because you like Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, or the Malazan Book of the Fallen, or Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind, or whatever, doesn’t mean one of those characters belongs on the team. Plus, it ruins the exercise to list too many or too few members. That’s just dumb.

Of course, you can only pick characters from books you’ve read, so my list will have its own idiosyncrasies. Unlike Tor.com’s misnamed team, I’m actually going to limit my choices to epic fantasy—no modern fantasy, no games or movies, and no mythology.

So, here is my own personal list:

 The Epic Fantasy Avengers

Aragorn (The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien)

Aragorn is the perfect replacement for Captain America, the leader and patriotic super-soldier. He takes up the role with some reluctance, but he stands for what’s good and right in the world. Aragorn lacks the shield, but he has a sweet magic sword and he protects those in need. Tor.com’s choice was King Arthur, but as a historical figure, however epic he may be, he’s out of the running for me.

Dalinar Kholin (The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson)

For Iron Man, the armored, flying “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.” The problem with picking a replacement for Iron Man is the armor. Dalinar’s not a perfect fit, but he’s about as close as you’re going to get. He’s got a full suit of magically powered plate armor that’s virtually impenetrable and lets him make gigantic leaps. That’s kinda like flying, right? He’s also rich (uncle to the king) and philanthropic (he gives away his freaking Shardblade to a commoner!). There really was no other choice, here.

Logen Ninefingers (The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie)

He fills the Hulk’s spot. Logen’s not a scientist or even particularly smart, but he’s a somewhat normal, likeable guy who occasionally turns into an unstoppable killing machine. Perhaps the most obvious choice would have been Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, but unfortunately he’s not an epic fantasy character. Someone suggested Fezzik from The Princess Bride. Wha…? He’s big, sure, but he’s like a big fuzzy teddy bear. He’s about as far removed from a psychotic rampager as you can get. Sadly, it’s tough to find a good picture of Logen Ninefingers. He deserves a lot more attention. The picture here is decent, but I pictured Logen a lot bigger.

Perrin Aybara (The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan)

Thor, the demi-god with a magic hammer, was a tough one to replace. On the one hand, Thor’s role is essentially just a generic damage dealer, but on the other hand, he has some fairly specific traits, like the hammer. In the end, Perrin won out for me largely because of the magic hammer (as of Towers of Midnight, which I actually have yet to read) but also because of the strength and the beard. Perrin’s no demi-god, but he does have the whole ta’veren thing on his side. Another choice I considered was Conan the Barbarian. Alas, he lacks the magic. Conan is like anti-magic. I even temporarily considered Aragorn for this role, but I needed him more as a leader.

Vin (Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson)

Vin replaces Black Widow, the superspy assassin. When burning pewter, Vin is super strong and fast. Burning steel and pushing on a bunch of coins basically functions as a firearm. As with the others, Vin’s not a perfect fit, but epic fantasy has an unfortunate lack of femme fatale characters. But personally, I prefer a female character who can take out entire fortresses full of baddies without having to play the sex object. (Here’s a kick butt picture of Vin that was the wrong size for this post.)

Legolas (The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien)

He fills the role of Hawkeye, the specialist archer, and beats out Robin Hood because, well, Robin Hood isn’t magic. The only other super-archer I can think of would be Birgitte Silverbow from The Wheel of Time, but the obvious problem with her is gender. Sorry, Birgitte. There just aren’t that many awesome archers out there.

Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien)

Originally I was going to try not to pick two characters from the same book, but really, who better than Gandalf to play Nick Fury, the mentor, manipulator, and motivator behind the scenes? Besides, if any book deserves to get more than one character, it would be The Lord of the Rings. Nick Fury is actually a hard one to cast, since he has two incarnations in the comic books—the original white Fury and the more recent black Fury that was actually modeled after Samuel L. Jackson, who also plays him in the movie. Plus, Fury is more than just a mentor/leader—he’s a pretty hard-core gun-toting soldier. Picking Gandalf is kind of like splitting things 50/50. He’s basically a white Fury emphasizing the mentor/leader aspects of his character from the movie. This role has a few other serious contenders, prime among them Moiraine (wrong gender) and Allanon (not as likeable as Gandalf). If nothing else, Gandalf wins because of the whole smoking thing.

So there you go. Who would you pick? Did I miss anyone obvious?

Although I follow a number of authors and writing advice blogs online, I don’t really post much about it. Partly because I feel like I don’t have much to contribute beyond what others are already saying. There’s a lot of great material out there, stuff that new writers wouldn’t have had any access to just a few years ago.

But today I read something that really torched me, and I feel the need to share it.

Writing is a lonely business, and too much about the actual business of it is hidden and never talked about. When you become a writer, you blaze your own trail.  That’s one reason why all of this material online is so valuable. If you’re a writer and aren’t already reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog, you should be, particularly her weekly series called The Business Rusch.

http://kriswrites.livejournal.com

Rusch cuts deeply into topics of the business of publishing and writing, which is both rare and valuable. In particular, you should check out this piece she wrote on the state of royalty accounting in the publishing world. After posting it, her blog got hacked and so she distributed it to various other blogs to post instead. Here’s one of them:

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/05/2012/kriss-post-spread-the-word/

When I attended one of David Farland’s workshops in Salt Lake City last year, he had mentioned that there was some shady business going on and that many authors were suing publishing companies, particularly over some problems with ebook royalties. At the time, he said that he was not advising new authors to sign traditional publishing deals. I didn’t know exactly what the trouble was back then, and I wasn’t even close to worrying about actually getting published so I didn’t pursue it at all. But Rusch’s post illuminates what has been happening. Apparently, many publishers don’t track actual sales of ebooks and instead use some generic formula to arrive at a number that’s supposed to represent ebook sales. Wha….? Combine that with other shady stuff, and you have a very disturbed publishing industry.

Tread carefully, and educate yourself.

My wife, Missy, and I are fond of arguing about language. She’s an English major, and I’m a linguistics major, and we sometimes have vastly different ways of thinking about language. It’s a lot of fun. Our latest discussion was whether it’s more correct to say “another thing coming” or “another think coming.” Missy saw an ad using “another thing coming” and scoffed, which surprised me since I have never heard it said nor seen it spelled any other way. I immediately thought of the famous Judas Priest song, “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming,” and had to shake myself out of a nostalgic rock-and-roll daze to finish being outraged that I could possibly be in the wrong.

Unfortunately, rock stars don’t make for convincing grammatical authorities, and Missy quickly convinced me that “another think coming” makes a lot more sense. “If you think I like you, you’ve got another thing coming” really doesn’t make much sense. What thing? How can there be another thing if there wasn’t a first thing to begin with? Exactly what thing is coming, and what is it going to do? On the other hand, “If you think I like you, you’ve got another think coming” makes much more sense. It’s a bit odd-sounding grammatically, but there’s nothing wrong with it, and it actually means something. You’re thinking one thing now, but you’re wrong and you’ll soon be thinking something else.

Still, I wanted to find something authoritative, if possible. A quick internet search turned up a lot of pointless arguments from people who apparently don’t know what a dialect is, or if they do, they fail to realize that they speak one, too. Just because you and all your friends say it one way doesn’t make it universally accepted. (For my first piece of evidence I submit the word “irregardless.”) But I did find a few chunks of real information.

Prior Use in Literature

One of the best pieces of evidence we have is prior use in literature. I didn’t find anything crushingly authoritative, but there was a handy post on the English Stackexchange site that provided a search of Google’s NGrams database (which, if you aren’t aware, is a massive index of every word and phrase used in over 5 million books that Google has scanned). The results reveal the earliest usage of “another thing coming” to be from 16 December 1906:

“But if we did, then we have another thing coming, for this is the cry-baby talk I find in this morning’s (Dec. 16) editorial…”

I had to do a bit of my own searching to find the earliest usage of “another think coming,” but I found one from 1903:

“…and say, Mr. Editor, think we did not do justice to the occasion, and you got another think coming.”

It’s not very a well formed sentence, but the intent is pretty clear anyway. And here’s another example, from March 1906:

“May be you think your factory is not a school. If you do, you’ve got another think coming.”

Of course, just because these are the earliest examples I could find on Google NGrams doesn’t mean they’re actually the earliest examples of these phrases. There could easily be some publication that Google hasn’t indexed. There are two commonly cited newspapers used as evidence online (such as by Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder), but none of the citations I saw provided links to the originals. Apparently these two newspapers haven’t been scanned and indexed by Google yet. But I’ll thrown them in for the sake of completeness, since one of them dates from 1898.

“Another thing coming” was used in the New York newspaper The Syracuse Herald in August 1919:

“If you think the life of a movie star is all sunshine and flowers you’ve got another thing coming.”

“Another think coming” was apparently used in the local rival paper The Syracuse Standard years earlier in May 1898:

“Conroy lives in Troy and thinks he is a coming fighter. This gentleman has another think coming.”

Phonetic Likelihood

Another argument that makes “another think coming” seem even more plausible is the likelihood of misunderstanding it when spoken. When vocalizing “another think coming,” the two k sounds become merged, so it sounds more like “thingkumming.” Someone listening might easily think you’re saying “another thing coming” instead. It’s plausible that people hearing the original phrase misunderstood and then perpetuated their misunderstanding both vocally and in print.

It’s like the person I know who innocently used the phrase “6 months encounting” instead of “6 months and counting.” That person had obviously never seen the actual phrase in print and was simply attempting to type out phonetically what she’d heard her whole life. It also highlights the fact that idioms don’t have to be inherently meaningful. To this person, it didn’t matter that “encounting” isn’t a real word. It was just part of a phrase she knew. The phrase as a whole had meaning despite her lack of understanding about the individual words in it. This is actually a decent defense against the argument that “another think coming” must be correct because it makes more sense than “another thing coming.” Idioms don’t have to make inherent sense; they can still be meaningful when used as a whole unit. History and tradition make them meaningful.

But when you have a phrase that really does make sense pitted against one that doesn’t, I’ll vote for the one that does. Especially when…

The Dictionary Says So

Finally, it appears that both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster believe the correct usage is “another think coming.” Although I don’t have an OED of my own, a poster on Wordreference.com offered this quote from the dictionary:

think, n. 2b to have another think coming: to be greatly mistaken.
1937Amer. Speech XII. 317/1 Several different statements used for the same idea – that of some one’s making a mistake…[e.g.] you have another think coming.

Considering the OED’s reputation, I find it odd that their earliest example seems to come from 1937. It could be that the 1937 example is simply the clearest and most prominent one, not the earliest. I don’t know what criteria the OED uses in choosing examples. In any case, we also have “another think coming” used by Merriam Webster as an example of “think” used as a noun, which validates it in my mind.

think, noun
an act of thinking <has another think coming>

So there you have it. I don’t have anything bulletproof, but it appears that “another think coming” is the best bet. I shouldn’t have been surprised. My wife is almost always right about matters of usage and pronunciation. Apparently, I had another think coming.

I am working on the outline for my novel, and it’s coming along slowly but surely. I have an almost complete beat sheet. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s been a while since I posted anything about my writing, and I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m still working on something. I’ve joined an online writer’s group and submissions are due on the 5th, so I’m scrambling to get this outline ready to submit. From what I’ve heard, nobody has ever submitted an outline to the group before. I’ll be the first. Hopefully it’s not too boring.

Here’s a brief description of the book:

Hakka, a world-weary dwarf, is leaving his ancestral home to get away from their oppression and lies when he encounters a lost elf boy who needs help protecting a powerful artifact from an invading army. Hakka decides to protect the helpless boy, but a cruel and ambitious orc chieftan named Tegua wants the artifact too. Tegua is willing to kill anyone in his way, and if he succeeds, everyone Hakka loves will be destroyed by the coming invasion. To protect the boy and keep the artifact away from the invaders, Hakka must return back to the corrupt city that has already betrayed him or face the oncoming horde alone.

Well, I’d better get back to it.

This will be a relatively short one today, but it should be immensely interesting to aspiring writers, especially of the fantasy genre. Brandon Sanderson teaches a creative writing class at Brigham Young University. This isn’t the creative writing class you probably took in college where you spent a short while on various different formats like poetry, flash fiction, and short stories, all in the stuffy “literary fiction” genre so beloved of most college English professors. No, no. This is a class that actually teaches you to write a novel—but not just any novel: a genre novel that you might make money from. This is a class that teaches you a set of practical writing tools that you can use, adapt, or discard as needed to get real writing done. There is more real knowledge in the first 10 minutes of this class than I got from an entire semester’s worth of class time in my old creative writing class in college.

OK, enough gushing. The cool thing is that some students filmed this class and are now posting the entire thing online. You should check it out. I’ll embed the first one here, but you should probably go visit their website, Write About Dragons, if you want to get the rest of them in order.

It’s happening again. Last week I posted about Kevin J. Anderson’s experiment in cross-promotion, where he hired a musician to write an album full of progressive rock music based on Anderson’s fantasy novel Terra Incognita: The Edge of the World.

Yesterday I found out that Rush is finally releasing a new album called Clockwork Angels. And they’ve hired Kevin J. Anderson to help lyricist Neal Peart write a novel based on the album.

Clockwork Angels will be Rush’s first album in I think over five years . . . which is kind of an odd way to say it, I guess, since their last three albums have each been about five years apart. Rush is flush with cash, I imagine, so they’re in no hurry to get new albums out. But they’re also musicians and performers to the core of their being, and just can’t help writing new music. So now we have Clockwork Angels coming out.

What makes me excited about this album is that Rush is returning to their roots. Clockwork Angels is a concept album, something Rush hasn’t done for what, 35 years or so? Maybe more. [Edit: I looked it up. Rush has never produced a pure concept album. They have done many epic songs, but there were always shorter singles included with them on the albums. The last truly epic song they wrote was Cygus X-1 Book Two: Hemispheres, released in 1978. Their next two albums each had 10-minute songs, but I don't consider them epics.] The press release says: “Clockwork Angels chronicles a young man’s quest across a lavish and colorful world of steampunk and alchemy as he attempts to follow his dreams. The story features lost cities, pirates, anarchists, an exotic carnival, and a rigid Watchmaker.” Rush has explored epic fantasy (“The Necromancer”) and science fiction (2112) when both were in their infancy (or maybe teenage years—it’s just a metaphor, alright!), not to mention myth (Hemispheres). Steampunk is a relatively new development, and now Neal Peart is tackling that branch of speculative fiction.

The singles that have been released also show Rush finally innovating again musically. Their past two albums in particular have given me the impression that they were just phoning it in. The music possessed very little of the strange and interesting that were Rush’s hallmark and part of what put them in the genre of progressive rock. Over the years they slowly turned back to plain hard rock, until their last two albums, Snakes and Arrows and Vapor Trails, were very vanilla. Nothing to really interest those of us who swooned over masterful pieces like 2112, “La Villa Strangiato,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” and “The Camera Eye” back in the day.

I think the new era of internet distribution and the rise of the digital single as the driving force in musical sales has finally spurred Rush to rethink themselves and what they can do. They recorded and released two singles simultaneously (Caravan and BU2B) about a year ago, just because the could. There were no particular plans to make a whole album, let alone a concept album. They just had some creative ideas and put them out there. Then they went on tour, because that’s what Rush does, with just two new songs. And people flocked to see them live again, because that’s what Rush fans do.

And here we are a year or so later, and they’ve created an entire concept album that looks like it might reach the heights of 2112, at least musically and lyrically, if not in sheer popularity. I’m not sure who contacted whom first—Rush or Kevin J. Anderson—but it’s very cool to see this first-ever reversal: an album being turned into a work of literature instead of the other way around.

Dang. I might have to read that Terra Incognita series after all, just to see whether I should be dreading or longing for the Clockwork Angels novelization to come out.

Clockwork Angels (the album) comes out on June 12th. Here’s a teaser to whet your appetite:

For the amused and curious: watch the original.

The author Kevin J. Anderson has done an interesting experiment to help promote his latest series of fantasy novels: he’s collaborated with some musicians to produce an album full of music based on his novel. He and his writer wife Rebecca Moesta wrote the lyrics and the music was written by Erik Norlander, a keyboardist and composer who has worked with many progressive rock outfits over the years.

The books part of a trilogy called Terra Incognita, set in a sort of Age of Discovery type setting. The three books are The Edge of the World, The Map of All Things, and The Key to Creation.

The album is called Terra Incognita: Beyond the Horizon. It features an impressive array of musicians, including vocalists James LaBrie (Dream Theater), Michael Sadler (ex-Saga), John Payne (Asia Featuring John Payne), and Lana Lane (the Queen of Symphonic Rock). Performers include David Ragsdale (Kansas), Gary Wehrkamp (Shadow Gallery), Kurt Barabas (Amaran’s Plight), Chris Brown (Ghost Circus), Chris Quirarte (Prymary), and Mike Alvarez. There are a lot of big names in that list. You can find info about the album on the same page as the books via the link in the previous paragraph.

I first heard about this in a writing class where we were talking about marketing and promotion. This experiment is a good example of cross-promotion, where you try to catch people who might easily cross over into new markets. Kevin J. Anderson reasoned that many fantasy fans are also fans of progressive rock, which is true in my experience. It’s certainly true of me, and I was really intrigued by both the books and the album.

I haven’t read the books yet or listened to the whole album, but I’m not sure I ever will. I looked into them and didn’t see anything that excited me right off the bat. I listened to clips from the music tracks, and unfortunately it’s just not my thing. One of the difficulties of progressive rock is that it actually encompasses a very wide range of styles—that’s part of what makes it progressive. It’s been several months—heck, maybe a year—since I listened, but I seem to remember a lot of synthesizers, which almost always turns me off. But maybe that’s your thing; I’ll leave it up to you to investigate and decide. [Edit: I listened to the whole album on MOG the other day, and it confirmed my initial opinion. It's definitely not my thing. In fact, I found it quite awful, but that's my own bias speaking.]

I also looked at the book reviews on Amazon and checked out the reviews. What I saw was very surprising—the first book in the series has one of the worst ratings I’ve ever seen on Amazon.

Bear with me for a moment while I talk about Amazon ratings. In general, Amazon ratings follow a very standard curve. I’m just guessing here, but in my experience about 75% of the ratings are 5 stars, 10% are 4 stars, 5% are 3 stars, 1% or less are 2 stars, and about 10% are 1 stars. The average rating is generally about four stars. In other words, the rating system is basically worthless, since almost all products end up with the same distribution of stars and the same average score, within a very small range. (OK, I actually just looked this up to see if there was any legitimate information on this, and apparently I’m right, according to this scientific study.) There are only two times you can learn something useful from Amazon ratings. One is by reading the content of the reviews for trends—common complaints, information about features you wouldn’t otherwise know, and things like that. The other is when you find a statistical anomaly that actually has less than 75% of the ratings in the 5-star category. That’s when you know something probably sucks.

Pardon my little rant on Amazon, but it helps put the rating of these books into perspective. The Edge of the World, first book in the Terra Incognito series, has a mere 28% in the 5-star category. That’s practically unheard-of for a product on Amazon. To be fair, the average is still 3 1/2 stars, and there may be several good reasons for the odd distribution. First, there are only 25 total reviews, so the sample size is small. Second, Anderson is mainly known for his science fiction, and some of his SF fans may simply be biased against his fantasy work. There’s also the fact that Anderson has written over 100 novels, 47 of which have been on some kind of bestseller list, and has won numerous awards. So there is a chance these books actually are good, but I haven’t yet seen any direct evidence that is convincing enough to make me spend my money and my time on them.

So these last three long-winded paragraphs have just been my way of saying I’m not planning to read them despite the interesting cross-promotion.

It’s a great idea, though.

[Edit: I just found out that Kevin J. Anderson has been picked to write a novelization of Rush's new album Clockwork Angels. Read my blog post about it here.]

Today’s selection of notes from LTUE comes from the panel “How Roleplaying Can Help Your Writing.” The panelists were:

• Al Carlisle. Al is a professional psychologist who specializes in serial killers. I think someone misunderstood what type of roleplaying the panel was about when he got assigned to this panel!
• Adam Meyers. Adam is an actor who is starting his own gaming company. Their first product will be a supplement for Pathfinder. He also gave a presentation on historical weaponry on the first day of LTUE (it was a good one).
• Robert J. Defendi. Bob has written probably hundreds of gaming supplements as well as stories.
• Dan Willis. Dan is a novelist and I got the impression he wasn’t really into gaming.

Summary of how roleplaying can help your writing:

IT CAN’T.

Seriously, that’s about what the panel boiled down to. This one was kind of a dud. It’s also the last panel I attended and the last in my series of notes. Sorry to disappoint!