Blurb

It only takes a few people to start a global war for power:  a criminal mastermind who develops inhuman abilities, an alcoholic who transforms into a monster, a spirit who can possess any human and a mysterious serial killer who steals people’s energy.

What? – Supernatural thriller. Contains intense violence and dark elements.

Who? – Recommended for mature readers.

How? – Give me tough advice. I can take anything!

What’s it like? – Nothing else, at least nothing I’ve ever read.

It looks like Slicehost went down for a few hours and we went offline from about 4-7 am EST.  I apologize.

Today we received our five-thousandth comment.  Incidentally, today we also received our fifteen-thousandth piece of spam.  According to Google Analytics, we’ve only had 65 Russian readers but somehow about a third of our spam is in Russian.  Assuming that all of the Russian-language spam came from a Russian user, that would be an impressive 75 messages per user.

If you find it tricky to code tables in HTML, I highly recommend Tablemaker.  You give it the data you’d like in the table and it gives you the appropriate HTML.  Neat.  Your table might look something like this break-down of our user statistics for the past year.

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It will probably be a few days until I get around to doing regular updates.

1. In February, we set a new personal record for new visitors.  (We had around 10,000 for the month).
2. Today, we reached 75,000 total visitors.
3. On Centsports.com, I am putting my $4.75 on Arizona to beat the Steelers today.  I fully expect to lose (defense wins championships), but I am fully buying into the much-hyped Arizona miracle.

Our overriding goal is to provide a friendly and professional meeting place for aspiring authors.  Please keep that in mind!

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Fevered rumors occasionally surface that Marvel and/or DC have copyrighted the word “superhero” and plan to sue anyone that uses them.  That’s obviously bunk.  However, a more credible blogger claims that Marvel and DC have jointly trademarked the term superhero and are the only ones that can use it when naming a comic book.  It is true that they have the trademark, but there is virtually no chance that it would hold up in court. (Whether or not your publisher is actually willing to risk a case is another question, though… it’s cheaper to come up with a new title than go to court).

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Superhero Nation is slightly eccentric and wacky, so I kind of want an eye-catching cover that conveys that.  Here are a few of my latest ideas for our first cover.

1.  This cover shows a desk with a careful array of US presidential bobbleheads.  (It’s Agent Orange’s desk, so this should look a bit wacky).  At the front of the desk would be bobbleheads of Agent Black, Agent Orange and their boss.  In the background, we’d place a motivational poster for humorous flavor.  (Maybe “Human Resources:  Killer Service Every Time.”)

ALTERNATIVE:  The desk still has presidential bobbleheads, but the bobbleheads of the cast are gone.  Agent Orange is behind the desk in a surly boss pose and Agent Black is staring at him dumbfounded.  As before, there’s a motivational poster for humor.  (Hat-tip to Brett).

2.  Agent Black is getting chewed out in an over-the-top manner by Agent Orange.  I’d probably frame it like a scene between Peter Parker and JJ Jameson.  I’m relying on the “what the hell?” factor of having a mutant alligator as the boss to make this eye-catching and appealing.  I’d probably give Agent Orange a business prop like a wacky chart or graph in lieu of the motivational poster.

3.    Agent Black is in a mock Rambo pose, ineptly wielding a machine gun on a firing range.  All of his bullets are wildly off his target.  (The bulletholes may spell out the Superhero Nation logo).  Agent Orange is looking on exasperatedly with a hand on his forehead.  He’s shaking his head.  This is probably better-suited for the second issue than the first.

My goal is to provide high-quality writing advice for adults and young adults.  Here are a few ground rules.

1.  No R-rated sexual content.

Anything more sexually graphic or creepier than a James Bond movie is probably not a great fit for this website–for one thing, about half of our readers are younger than 18 and many of the rest are teachers.

2. No gratuitous self-promotion.

I’d love to see your website, but contribute something first.  For example, if you’d like to link to your site, connect it in some way to previous comments or the article itself.  If you’d like to market yourself without contributing something, please go somewhere else, okay?

3. Don’t give too much information.

In particular, please don’t ever post your phone number or address on an open forum, especially if you’re younger than 18.  It is not the best way to convince a professional to reach you.  Personally, when I see someone post a business proposal with a phone number in an open forum, I’m more likely to think “Good God, what’s he thinking?” than “Wow, he’s really making himself accessible!”

4. No fan-fiction. 

Is your main goal as a writer to have a good time?  If so, serious reviews listing 25+ possible revisions for a chapter would probably be more emotionally overwhelming than fun.  If not, I think you’d give yourself a better chance to develop writing skills by building your own stories/premises/characters/settings from scratch rather than starting with a story somebody else has already written.  For fan-fiction reviews, I’d recommend fanfiction.net instead.  Yes, the reviews will generally be as useless as “this’s really good!!!” or “this sux!!!” , but that’d only be a problem if you wanted to become a professional author.

5. Be friendly and professional.

A professional demeanor and friendly attitude are extremely helpful. Probably more than raw talent, actually.

Thanks!

This is the inked version of the second page of our comic. On page 1, we just establish that someone’s trying to kill the main character.

I like our artist a lot, but I’m a bit concerned that his depiction of the bystander might be a bit, umm, insensitive to black people.  Yeah.  We’re probably going to have to cut those lips by a third or so and shrink the nose a bit to make them look more realistic.  It would probably be best to clear up these cultural issues sooner rather than later.  Aside from that, I think it’s generally well-inked.  I especially appreciate some of the stylistic notes like the squirrel falling out of the tree in the bottom panel.

In the final version, the bystander will be thinking “Should have bought a Honda.”

If you have any tips or comments, I’d love to hear them.  What do you think?

I’m very close to sending out feelers on a nonfiction manuscript about how to write superhero stories.  I have one main problem, though.  My target audience is young (10-20 years old) and my writing style is not naturally breezy or accessible.  Ahem.  I’m a political scientist/journalist by training.

So I have a writing exercise/contest for you. Take any one of our articles and rewrite it so that a typical thirteen-year-old would find it authoritative, fun and easy to read.  I have a few stylistic suggestions.

1. Fragmented sentences are OK, but I recommend against run-ons.
2. Keep the words as simple as possible.
3. It must be fun!

We’d appreciate your help greatly.  Depending on how good the entries are, we may also give Amazon gift-cards or a free, signed copy to show our appreciation. Thanks!

Finals ended today, so we will resume lengthy reviews on Saturday night.  Thanks for being patient.

I got an e-mail about an annual conference at the Naval Academy and now all of my Google ads are from test-prep companies.  “Do you want to get into Annapolis?”  No!

Let’s see if this works…
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It’s almost the end of the semester, so our staff will be writing considerably less here over the next 10 days or so.  Thanks for your patience!

OK.  We’re writing a rough draft of Superhero Nation for National Novel Writing Month.  If you’d like to beta-review our novel synopsis, we’d really appreciate that.  If you’ve already left an email or comment asking to be a beta-reviewer, we have also e-mailed this synopsis to you.

If you’re not sure what to write about, here are a few sample questions that may help you do a beta-review.

• What do you think about the characters?  How might we make them more interesting, likable and/or dramatic?
• Is the plot coherent?  How might we make it smoother?
• What are some ways we could draw the plot out without making it feel padded?

UPDATE: I’ve made a diagram showing plot-links between the characters.

National Novel Writing Month starts in two days.  We’re going to finish our first novel manuscript.  We need beta-reviewers.

What this would entail: We’ll give you our novel’s outline, 2-3 pages describing what we envision happening throughout the book.  Over the course of the month, we will write chapters to bring that synopsis to life.  We’d like you to read these chapters and offer advice.  That might look like any or all of the following.

1. Suggest where we might go from there.  Do you have any ideas about what the next few chapters might look like?
2. Mention any glaring weaknesses in our story, characters, dialogue, plot, etc.
3. Suggest any possible improvements.

So, what’s in it for you?

1. Authorial networking. On any given day, I get between 30 and 40 manuscripts, comments and emails.  That’s on top of my writing, studying and thesis research.   So my time is really stretched.  However, if you help beta-review our work, I will assuredly make time for you.
2. Altruism. We really need the help.
3. Marketing. Your publisher may ask you to get other authors to review your work so that you can place favorable blurbs on the inside cover.  I’m not very fond of tying my credibility to other people’s work, but I’ll make an exception for a skilled author that has helped me in the past.

If you’re interested, please either leave a comment or e-mail us at bmckenzie05–at–gmail–dot–com.

If only I had realized that before picking it as the topic for a research paper.

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I went to a pub tonight and ordered a glass of wine instead of a Sprite or Guinness.  According to the menu, my wine was supposed to taste of “notes of white and black pepper with a forward fruit.”  Hmm, not quite.  It tasted more like someone stabbed my tongue with a cattle prod.  I ended up getting a Sprite and a Coors to wash the taste away.  Blerk.  I’m going Guinness next time.

Today we reached 100,000 pageviews.  With ten weeks left in the year, we should be able to clear 150,000 by New Year’s.  Thanks for coming!

I found this Halo quote on TV Tropes.

Cortana: Just one question: what if you miss?

Master Chief:  I won’t.

The dialogue needs more flair.  If I wrote a similar conversation between two Superhero Nation characters, it might look something like this.

We did some calculations on the back of a napkin and concluded that the author of Things White People Like received an advance of 2.33 cents per hit.  Assuming that our advance earned us the same amount of money per hit, our projected pay per hour of website work has doubled to $1.75 over the past three months.   At this rate, we might reach minimum wage by the time I have my degree.  [JACOB ADDS:  Barely.  Won’t your parents be so proud?]

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In the next 2-3 weeks, we’ll clear 100,000 pageviews for the year and should clear 125,000 before the year is over.  When we set our New Year’s Resolution, we were hoping for 50,000.  Thanks for your traffic.

Hello, commenters!  We’ve added a new widget to help you figure out if we’ve responded to your comments yet.  It’s near the top of the sidebar, right below our list of superhero writing articles.

In case you’re interested.  We use this data to help us determine which site-edits are effective.

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I took the online Jeopardy test tonight.  I think I did well enough to get a call back for auditions.

I hate ancient philosophy.  I find it interesting that the only endeavor in which the ancients are generally taught to undergraduates is philosophy.  In 2000 years, I hope that students (to the extent that we have students in 2000 years) learn more about us than the inconsequential quibblings of our philosophers.

We’ve started using Share This on about 20 of our most popular articles.  Hopefully it should be easier to share our sage insights with the unenlightened masses now.