SKULLDUGGERY (A Free, Serialized Novel by Tim Byrd)

Drogarth.

The name alone conjures dark images of spilling blood, of blackest magiks, of lawlessness and chaos. Throughout the kingdom children hear stories of this evil city and are told they must never go there — and they wish with all their hearts that one day they will. For children are the custodians of wishes, of dreams; they know in their hearts, in their souls, that only in the darkest of pits can the brightest adventures be found…

Years and years ago, when I had a bit more spring in my step and fewer callouses on my heart, I got out of a misguided stint in the U.S. Army and plopped down at a cheap portable typewriter to begin living the life I always intended to live, that of a dashing and prolific novelist.

I was living on savings, shacking up in Kassel, West Germany (there was still an East Germany then) with a wonderful girlfriend named Rike (whom I’d met the very day I’d arrived at my Army post), who was deep in her own university studies while I took the time to write.

It was a happy year. It was the most productive year of my life, too.

First, I wrote a short fantasy adventure novel called The Road to Adventure. It was sort of stock fantasy — knights and elves and hot pagan priestesses — mixed with sheer swashbuckling and quite a bit of eldritch horror. Took me just over a month to write, and I got it in the mail and started the next project.

The Road to Adventure damn near got published too. A senior editor at one of the big science fiction/fantasy publishers took a liking to it and went to bat for it with the editorial board. See, getting a book published isn’t just a matter of getting a “yes,” it’s a matter of getting a series of “yeses,” and if you get a “no” in that series, you’re screwed. According to the editor, I had the majority of folks wanting the book, but got two key noes; I was screwed. But hey, pretty good for the first shot.

Of course, that resolution took a while, during which I wrote my second book. This took a lot longer than a month. Whereas I’d written Road with a detailed outline, I started this one with a setting, a couple of character ideas, and the notion that I was gonna write a “hardboiled fantasy,” mixing standard sword and sorcery tropes with gritty crime fiction. And I had the title:

Skullduggery. A Tale of Thieves. (more…)

Published in: on March 3, 2010 at 9:45 am  Leave a Comment  
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The Economy of Friendship

And now, a nugget of gold from my oft cynical, but well-meaning, brain:

Time is the currency of relationship, but interest only accrues if you spend it.

Published in: on December 19, 2009 at 3:19 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Blood of Eden: “a very complex and sophisticated tale”

Recently, I posted about a screenplay that Steve Antczak and I wrote called Blood of Eden, which got fairly close to becoming a Die Hard movie.

In that post, I mentioned that the producer’s “coverage” (a detailed summary/review of the script for in-house use) had been leaked, but I wasn’t able to find it.

Thankfully, “belzecue” posted a comment to that entry, pointing to a copy of that coverage posted to a screenwriting news site.

Because the coverage is, naturally, full of spoilers, I don’t want to just dump it here or just post the URL, lest it ruin the reading of the actual full script for someone. It has a tricky twist or three I don’t want you to have spoiled.

So, I’m going to post a heavily redacted version first, editing out most of the plot details, but leaving in the writer’s general opinion of the story.

Then, after the jump, I’ll post the entire coverage, in the hopes that people won’t read it until they’ve read the actual script (you can find the link to it in the original entry). To make the read easier, I’m adding some paragraph breaks where there weren’t any, as the original uses huge blocks of text that won’t read well online.

EDITED, NON-SPOILERY VERSION

Title of Submission: Blood of Eden
Author: Tim Byrd & Steve Antczak
Date Covered: 9/2/99
Genre: Action Adventure

STORY
This screenplay’s story is a very complex and sophisticated tale, presenting its drama and tension in an undersea setting. While there are more and more space- and sea-oriented films these days, this screenplay stands out on the merits of its excellent writing and the incredibly detailed, yet believable, environment in which it takes place. I have some plausibility questions, but they are minor and can be easily addressed….

CHARACTER
While the characters’ main personalities and motivations are clear, I’d like to see them developed a bit more…In this story, it’s very refreshing to see all the bad guys (the ninja) referenced by name, rather than by Ninja #1, Ninja #2…it’s a nice thing to have the bad guys be real people names…

DIALOGUE
Dialogue in this screenplay is a mixed bag. Overall, it’s fine, and it’s especially refreshing to hear the Japanese bad guys using realistic dialogue. Unfortunately, this quickly unravels into typical American macho expletives. The contrast of Japanese thought and phrasing versus the language we are used to hearing is one of the points which made this screenplay unique. Also, some of the American dialogue is either weak (“then the bad guys struck”) or too obvious as exposition (Travis and Desmond comparing backgrounds). In an otherwise very fine screenplay, dialogue is an area that could use improvement.

THEME
“Blood of Eden” is more action-packed than theme-packed, but does touch on several interesting topics, including nationalism versus Pacific Rim countries, maternal and paternal instincts, heroism and honor.

WRITER’S STYLE
The writers do a stellar job of writing action, weaving a tense, sophisticated and compelling tale. Their descriptions of environment and physical action, in particular, are exemplary. All of the hand-to-hand scenes are vividly depicted. The descriptions of the Edensphere do a great job of making the complex “seeable.” Lots of the action and other descriptions are almost literary in their quality, such as the spattering of bullets, the rushing of walls of water, etc. The writers’ challenge is to bring the quality of their characterizations and dialogue up to par with the rest of the screenplay, but I’m sure they can do it.

STRUCTURE
The structure here provides a strong foundation for the story. All scenes are vital and either propel the action or impart necessary information…

SETTING ORIGINALITY
The writers have done a great job of imagining and describing an entire undersea environment and the rules for survival there. Edensphere’s location in the Pacific, however, is unclear. It’s not too far from San Francisco…but it’s clearly far enough north to be in frigid waters. From the “Northern Pacific” slug lines, I kept imaging someplace off the Alaska coast.

ENTERTAINMENT VALUE
This screenplay has great potential as a very entertaining and marketable commercial venture. It gets off to a good start, jumps into action very quickly and keeps the action going til the very end…

And now, the un-redacted version… (more…)

Published in: on December 5, 2009 at 10:36 am  Comments (1)  
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Blood of Eden

Many moons ago, I was friends with Shane Black (who makes an appearance on the acknowledgments page of my book). He’s the guy who wrote Lethal Weapon and spent a few years wrestling Joe Eszterhas for highest amount ever paid for a screenplay (Shane’s personal best was $4,000,000 for The Long Kiss Goodnight, which was then run through the mediocritizer by director Renny Harlin).

Shane also wrote and directed the INCREDIBLE Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which is oceans full of fun, and has great performances by Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, and Michelle Monaghan.

But I digress.

Seriously, we'll all be better off if you let Tim write the movie.

Seriously, we'll all be better off if you let Tim write the movie.

Shortly after Lethal Weapon 2 was released, I had what I figured was a great idea for a third movie in the series. I wrote a treatment, and Shane took a look. (more…)

Published in: on October 11, 2009 at 4:09 pm  Comments (5)  
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Memory Lane

Back in 2004, I started the first iteration of this blog on LiveJournal, but it didn’t last long because I felt like I was talking to myself and was disheartened.

This version has gone much better, and more readers visit all the time, but that earlier stuff has been languishing over there, orphaned and sad.

Recently, LiveJournal has been having serious problems, and WordPress established a simple tool for LJ bloggers to import all their entries to blogs over here. I just used it, then went through and deleted all the posts I felt were uninteresting even in a historical context, posts with dead links, that sort of thing.

So, if you’re interested in knowing where my head was back in February and March 2004, now you can find out.

Pretty exciting, huh?

Published in: on March 11, 2009 at 7:56 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Savage Tales

red_sonja_by_nebezial

Back in the day, I worked in the roleplaying game industry.

I’m not talking rpg video games, like World of Warcraft or Oblivion (more’s the pity, because the money would have been way better). No, I’m talking good old fashioned face-to-face, throwin’ dice, drinkin’ root beer and eatin’ Doritos roleplaying games. I got into them when I was a young teen, starting with the original Dungeons & Dragons and moving on to many others like Champions, Traveller, and Daredevils. In my twenties, here and there I’d manage to get some short-lived game together, a little James Bond or Ghostbusters here, a little Paranoia or Justice Inc there.

Then I happened across White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse one day (in which players assume the roles of lycanthropic ecoterrorists fighting demonic corporate forces to save the wilderness and the Earth itself). Werewolves have always been my favorite monster, I’m a devoted environmentalist, and the game is steeped in animistic spirituality which is my soul’s cup of tea…conceptually, it was a perfect storm for me. That led to scattered White Wolf gaming, which in time led to me actually working at the company. Which led to a bit of other rpg work, most notably for Feng Shui and its stillborn spinoff Pulp! (none of that work saw print, unfortunately, as Daedelus Games collapsed, though I did put some of it online…by the way, any Feng Shui players out there still have copies of my stuff? I lost it all in a hard drive crash).

These games get a bad rap from some people, and D & D is often cultural code for loser. But the fact of the matter is that many people who sneer at roleplayers spend their time watching crap like Desperate Housewives or American Idol, deadening their brains while the gamers hang out together and engage in an activity that has its roots in campfire storytelling and improv theater, an activity that’s inherently social and that exercises the mind.

But I digress. A few years ago, I managed to run a game for a group of friends who managed, more often than not, for a while, to actually get together regularly to play. The game was Shane Hensley’s great Savage Worlds. Ultimately, unfortunately, it’s really tough to keep a game going over time because people are, in groups, pretty unreliable, and entropy sets in till things just unravel.

One of the things I did, as things were unraveling, was to try to establish “pick up games” outside the continuing narrative of the main game, that we could play if someone in the group didn’t show up. That way, we’d still be playing something, the group would hold steady in its routine, and we could restart the main game “next” time…

For the pickup games, I decided to run short sword & sorcery adventures, focusing mainly on mood and action (as opposed to an involved narrative and character development), and in the spirit of Savage Worlds  I called them “Savage Tales.” And I wrote a short handbook describing the setting and telling the players how to design their characters for it.

Before the game evaporated for good, I think we actually played one such pickup game. Or maybe we just had an evening where we hung out and did the character creation. I can’t remember for sure. But I always liked the little handbook I put together, and the commentary within on the difference between epic fantasy (like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) and sword & sorcery (like Robert E. Howard’s Conan or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser):

If everyone can’t make it, we go to Europia. There, things are gonna be less epic saga, more survival skirmish. Conan could become a king in Europia, but Tolkien’d have his pipe crushed under some furred boot and be set to work the rest of his short life digging stones from cold earth.

There are no hobbity folk in Europia because they were eaten by snake-men aeons ago. The elves are mysterious and dark, and if you see one, it usually changes your life forever. The dwarves may exist or not, but grandpa says they eat human flesh. And the closest thing to an orc you’ve ever seen is that big ugly fucker down the bar you saw sodomizing an unconscious guardsman the other night…

Here’s the booklet. You might get a kick out of it. If you’re a gamer, you might even find something useful in it. But here it is.

SAVAGE TALES

Published in: on March 6, 2009 at 10:44 am  Comments (4)  
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Timformation

Tim Byrd

Tim Byrd

There are several ways to get all the Timformation you need. This site, www.tim-byrd.com, home of my blog Under An Outlaw Moon, is of course one of them.

Here are some others, and more will likely follow:

Tim on Facebook

Tim on MySpace

Tim on Twitter

Tim on Goodreads

Tim on Amazon

Feel free to contact me through any of these sites, or through a comment on the blog. I’m friendly and rarely bite, though I am very busy being a dad and a writer and may not always be as prompt in replying as I’d like.

Also, no, I won’t read your story, novel, idea, diary, outline, fortune, pie chart, autobiography, recipe, or the bumps on your head. I’m bogged down in research, way behind on personal reading, generally even more behind in my daily life, and have been strongly advised not to look at other’s unpublished work for several solid legal reasons.

I am going to try to share any and all wisdom I may gain as a professional writer through this site, though that wisdom is rather slim so far. The main advice I can give is this:

“Write it. Then send it out till someone buys it. Till they do, write something else and send it out. Repeat.”

It’s as easy as that. And as difficult.

[NOTE: This info is replicated for permament reference on its own page, accessible through the menu bar down the right side of this page.]

Published in: on February 9, 2009 at 9:51 am  Leave a Comment  
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FREE Short Story: “Dead Folks”

This story was my first professional sale, and it has a weird history.

It was accepted twice, but never published until now. First Ed Hall, then the editor of a visionary magazine-on-tape called Verb, wanted it to be in Verb’s first issue. We even did some studio time, recording me reading the story, which was thirsty work.

Then I got word that my favorite magazine, Pulphouse, wanted the story. To put things in context, Pulphouse was very well known in genre circles, and very respected. It’s the only magazine I’ve ever read that I liked nearly every story they published. Not only that, but they wanted to put my story in a special Harlan Ellison issue, and the idea of sharing pages with Harlan was intoxicating.

So, with Ed’s cheerful understanding, I pulled the story from Verb. They went on to have Ha Jin, Robert Olen Butler, and James Dickey in their first issue. They got coverage on All Things Considered on NPR.

Meanwhile, Pulphouse folded just before the issue that was supposed to feature my story.

The most public exposure the story ever got was thanks to children’s author and master storyteller Carmen Deedy, who loved it enough to read it out loud at a gathering or two. Oh, and Anne Rivers Siddons read and adored it, and gave me lots of encouragement.

I always planned to look for a new home for the tale, but never got around to it. Now, for the recession-appropriate price of free, you can download it to your magical computing box and read it to your heart’s content.

I’ve polished it very slightly,  mainly updating some cultural references, but it remains very much a product of the early eighties and a much younger writer. There’s some stuff in it about racists that seems kind of cartoonish these days (and I address that a bit in a new author’s note before the story). But mainly, it’s an odd bit of Southern magic realism owing more than a bit to Mark Twain and Stephen King.

Come on in, sit a while, and visit with the dead folks.

DEAD FOLKS

Published in: on January 9, 2009 at 4:23 pm  Comments (6)  
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“U-Turn”

I wrote my first book when I was about four or five. It was called The Blue Stallion (there was a black stallion, and a white stallion, so I figured, why not a blue one?), and was about five pages long. The stallion fought a mountain lion, and was victorious. I even illustrated it myself, showing a faith in my artistic ability that I lost not too long after that.

I always loved books, and always knew I wanted to write them. But I remember precisely when I consciously decided that it was going to be my job, not just one of the many varied and wondrous activities I was going to engage in while living my magnificent life (cowboy, spy, zoologist, astrophysicist, movie star…). I was in fourth grade, and I read Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Fog Horn” in an anthology. The story evoked such emotion, such a sense of deep eternal sadness, that it overwhelmed me. I’d always loved to read, and read damn near constantly, but that was the first time I truly grokked the true power of literature. And I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to it.

After that, I did, at least while growing up. I was always reading, but also always writing. I kept a bunch of stories going all at once, the same way I read, and as a result of both activities I actually managed to learn how to write. Then I grew up and started my lifetime of depressed procrastination. That’s another story though, and sad to say, I’m gonna put off writing it.

All this is preamble to a special holiday gift I’m gonna give you, which is a story I wrote in seventh grade, and is, far as I can tell, the earliest work of mine I still have on hand. I wrote it for a writing contest at a local college, and in the weeks leading up to the event, I boasted to everyone I could that I was going to win first place. I annoyed everyone with my arrogance so much I had them rooting for my downfall. Then the day came, and I won first place, which probably did not improve me as a human being, but did boost the ol’ ego (which actually needed the boost a great deal, confident as I was in my writing).

After this success, I had my first experience with an actual editor. I started writing a serialized space opera tale in the school newspaper, in which the heroes travelled the spaceways in a craft driven by a Bussard ramjet, named after Robert W. Bussard, the scientist who envisioned it. In spite of repeated protests from me, the editor changed it, every damn week, into a Buzzard ramjet, because, after all, Bussard wasn’t a word (and still isn’t, according to my spellcheck, which ironically doesn’t even offer up buzzard as a possible correction).

But I digress. Here, for your enjoyment or derision, is  a science fiction story by the thirteen year old me, uncorrected in any way despite many strong impulses. Merry Christmas. (more…)

Published in: on December 19, 2008 at 10:19 am  Leave a Comment  
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Part 5 of The Fall From Grace in Genesis: Wild Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Soul

And now, the belated final chapter, in which Cerberus the Outstanding Hamster ascends to Godhood, and Lucy finds her lost sandal. And I prattle some more about spiritual matters. (more…)

Published in: on October 26, 2008 at 11:52 am  Leave a Comment  
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Part 4 of The Fall From Grace in Genesis: Wild Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Soul

And here we come to Part 4…will the kids get out of the cave? Will Uncle Joe assuage Aunt Marie’s hurt feelings after his affair with Pastor Lewis? Most importantly, will Cerberus the Outstanding Hamster save the township of Williamswilliamsburgtonboro from the vicious onslaught of Republicans?

I don’t know. But there will be more spiritual stuff I wrote. (more…)

Published in: on October 23, 2008 at 11:30 am  Leave a Comment  
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Part 3 of The Fall From Grace in Genesis: Wild Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Soul

And now, Part 3 of that paper all about how we can all maybe be happy. Or maybe not. I’m not as optimistic as I was way back when I wrote this. Or even as I was last week. (more…)

Published in: on October 22, 2008 at 12:09 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Part 2 of The Fall From Grace in Genesis: Wild Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Soul

Here’s the second part of the old college paper I wrote that in many ways states my basic spiritual views. If you haven’t read the first part, it is at this link:

http://outlawmoon.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/the-fall-from-grace-in-genesis-wild-nature-civilization-and-the-ecological-soul

And now, part 2… (more…)

Published in: on October 21, 2008 at 12:21 pm  Leave a Comment  
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The Fall From Grace in Genesis: Wild Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Soul

Years ago, I wrote a paper in college that in most ways remains a manifesto of my spiritual beliefs. I’ve one battered print-out of it, and have long been meaning to transfer the text to a more permanent form, so it suddenly occurred to me that publishing it here serves that purpose and gives an intimate look into my mind to anyone curious enough to look in there. Here’s Part 1:

The Fall From Grace in Genesis:
Wild Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Soul (more…)

Published in: on October 20, 2008 at 10:18 am  Comments (14)  
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