Marketing concerns and self publishing

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Spoiler Alert for ... a video game? Halo.

Some people may have noticed that I'm a little wierd. I'm also a bit of a nerd, as my DragonCon reports and my JMS blog of today might tell you.



However, I want to discuss a little bit about one of the most epic bits of science fiction storytelling I've seen outside of Baen publishing.



The Halo video game franchise.



Yup. Video games can have epic writing.



If most of you are thinking "Thanks. We've seen Super Mario Brothers, there is no writing," I respectfully suggest you get your head out of the 80s. And parts of the 90s.



I've only recently been brought back into the world of video games by my friend Jason. He started by giving me a video game called Halo. It was a "first person shooter," which I always figured was short for "a game with no plot, but you get to shoot up anyhthing that gets in your way, or blow them up if you have grenades."



Then I started playing it.



It had a story. It had supporting characters with personalities. It had witty chapter titles and sarcastic one-liners. It was a space-sprawling epic played out on something that resembled Larry Niven's Ringworld -- an artificially designed planet called Halo.



The premise was simple enough: alien jihadists called the Covenant have discovered humans, and they really, really don't like us. The game starts with the player's ship on the run from an alien armada, and runs into Halo, a world that turns out to be a sacred artifact to the jihadists. The player's character is a bioengineered super soldier called a Spartan-II, and wears a Mjolnir battle suit (yes, it's named after the hammer of Thor). The humans get the bright idea to take over Halo before the Covenant do -- this artificial ring world is a moon-sized weapon, after all.



And then, the humans wake something up. Not quite an eldritch horror from beyond time and space, but good enough for government work. Let's just say that they're called The Flood and leave it there. They have a tendency to devour, well, everything.



After waking up said horror, another side to this little war comes up. The artificial intelligence of the Halo ring discovers that, "Hmm, the Flood creatures have been let loose. We have to stop them."



It turns out that the eldritch horror isn't from beyond time and space, but from one hundred million years ago. The Halo rings were built to stop them. But, the people fighting the flood back then decided to hold on to a few samples for research, and so the species wouldn't die out (I always knew rabid environmentalists would be the ruin of us).



All goes perfectly well until the player discovers how the Halo rings kill the flood-- by erradicating all life bigger than a microbe. The flood starve. End of problem. When the Spartan-II and his sidekick object to this plan, the AI that has been chattering at you for a whole level of the game turns nasty.



Did I mention that the AI is insane?



Soon, the game becomes a four-sided battle. Alien jihadists are still trying to kill you. The flood are trying to kill everyone. And the AI that you've pissed off has his own army of flying, laser-wielding drones who are also out to kill you, the flood, the jihadists, and everything else in its way.



And that's just the first game.



The Halo universe is so dense in background and in story, they've written at least half a dozen novels worth of material, and they're making more.  Comic book and Star Trek favorite Peter David has written a comic book volume from the Halo-verse, as has William C. Dietz, another author with his own writing credits -- though the first author to be offered the job was Timothy Zahn.

SPOILER ALERT.

There might be one or two people upset by the end of Halo 3.  The third game sought to wipe out the Flood, end the war with the alien jihadists, and  finally end the threat of the Halo rings.   By and large, they succeeded.

However, the character you play, the Spartan-II, is last seen drifting in space in half a starship -- bad things happen when a wormhole closes and the ship is only halfway through it.

Since Halo 3, several Halo games have been released -- prequels, side-stories, and tales that never answered the simple question: Whatever happened to Master Chief, Spartan 117

Halo Fans will be happy to know that the trail for Halo 4 starts where Halo 3 leaves off.

Music to Write To: Winterborn, Cambreadth, and Over the Hills....

Sometimes your friends know best.



After months of doing non-fiction, "high-intellect" blog posts, some of my friends could see what it was doing to me better than I could. Let's just say that they could tell I was under a strain. Also, they found the posts boring.


So, time for something fun.

It's been a while since I posted on this blog, and I really think I should get back into the swing of posting whatever I like. Which include history, blowing stuff up on paper, and doing it to really cool music.

Here's some more stuff that I enjoy writing to.


"Winterborn," by the Cruxshadows. I never know what to do with this band. They are nominally "Goth,"  but they tend to use a lot of classical imagery. I first encountered from in a John Ringo novel called Ghost.(A book I will talk about at a later date, with a few cautionary notes ... it's not that bad, but there is one section that should carry a warning label)  I had no idea what the song was about, so I looked it up on YouTube. The title is taken from something that could be from the original Illiad -- that the bravest of those who died were born in winter.

In this case, the visuals are taken from the video game "Halo 2."




"March of Cambreadth," by Heath Alexander. I first discovered this song in a John Ringo novel called When the Devil Dances, a scifi military novel about a cannibalistic Mongol horde spreading through the galaxy, with only humans to stand in the way. While the author himself refers to it as carnography (which I can only presume means "carnage porn"), it's well designed, the characters fully developed, and there's enough scheming and political intrigue to fully screw up a war.... the images are from the tv show Babylong 5, which happens to also be a scifi war epic. I know this because I assembled the video myself.






"Over the Hills and Far Away."  It's an army song from the Napoleonic wars, and was first introduced to most people through the British tv movie series "Sharpe's Rifles." Richard Sharpe, the main character, was played by Sean Bean.... coincidentally the one who played Boromir in the video below.





"Over the Hills and Far Away," by Nightwish.  I found this one song while looking for the it's partner above. And, wow, was I in for a surprise.







And, a final one for today.  Remember all of those movie trailers, when you listen to the awesome soundtrack, and you expect to hear it in the movie... only to discover that it's not there, only in the trailer?

Odds are, it's Two Steps from Hell.

DragonCon 2010, Day 1 Report.

Dragoncon Report 2010, Day 1