Future Haters

Someday I hope Eternal Knight is famous enough to garner its own haters.

You know, the crazy people who just love to rant. I think you have to be pretty successful to reach enough idiots to have an appreciable band of haters.

What made me think of this? A great blog post by my blog-friend Adam Heine. In it he talks about the racists who are freaking out about the fact that Rue is depicted as black in The Hunger Games movie. The haters went nuts! It ruined the movie for some of them.

One problem. Rue is black. It says so right in the novel.

Read Adam's post, and then read the article on Jezebel he linked to.

I know one rant I'll get (in my imaginary world where Eternal Knight is big enough to be noticed):

Matt Heppe copied Katniss when he created Hadde.

How close are they? Petite, black hair in a long braid, gray eyes, archer/hunter in a dying (Eternal Knight) / dystopian future (The Hunger Games) world.

Wow! What a ripoff! That Heppe is a @#$%^&* copycat.

Differences? Katniss has olive skin. Hadde's race isn't explicitly described, I attempted to hint at mixed white/Asian appearance. (I may have failed as one reader told me she thought Hadde was blonde.) And Hadde has tattoos on her cheeks.

Guilty? Nope. I wrote Eternal Knight long before I'd ever heard of The Hunger Games. I came up with Hadde more than ten years ago.

What I am more interested in is what led Suzanne Collins and I to create female heroines who could be twin sisters.

What inspired Hadde's appearance?

I imagined an older version of my daughter. 

Simple as that.

Put Up or Shut Up

Bah, I've been fibbing lately.

When people ask me how book two is coming along I've been telling them that I'm hard at work on it.

Not exactly true.

More like I've been hard at thinking about it. Thinking about it while playing computer games. Thinking about it while reading other books. Not actually writing. Eternally optimistic, I've been hoping for Eternal Knight to have a big breakthough. Something that would fire me up to work on book two.

But the big breakthrough hasn't occurred (yet). Good reviews, good feedback, 500+ sales, but not the BIG EVENT. Got bounced from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. Bah. I would have won if only blah, blah, blah....

I need to make my own breakthrough.

So time to stop fibbing. I'm either writing, or I'm not.

Here's the deal:

500 words per day, five days per week (Mon-Fri). If I miss a day I have to make it up on Saturday.

If I hit my daily goal I get to read for pleasure or play a computer game.

If I fall off the wagon I stop telling people that I'm writing. I tell them the truth.

What would that truth be?

I'm taking a break.

How long?

I don't know.

I'm not a writer if I'm not writing.