life imitates art

Sounds like someone's been reading Game Over.

Mathematician says Kansas voting machines need to be audited

WICHITA, Kan. —A Wichita State University mathematician said she has seen enough odd patterns in Kansas election results that she thinks it's time to check the accuracy of some voting machines.

Clarkson said an audit is important because of national concerns about the voting machines that thousands of Kansans use to cast their ballots each year. She added that she noticed some suspicious patterns after the November elections and wants to find out why.

But Beth Clarkson said government officials have been reluctant to provide her with the records she needs to conduct an audit.

The Lawrence Journal-World reported that Sedgwick County election officials refused to allow computer records to be part of any recount, instead telling Clarkson if she wanted them she would have to fight for them in court.

And as we all remember from high school, if you can't trust a mathematician, who can you trust? (Besides your car to the man who wears the star.)

Game Over review

It's always gratifying when something you've created causes someone to spontaneously semi-confess to past misdeeds. Chris O'Donnell writes:

I read it in two nights, so that probably tells you what you need to know. Scott doesn’t waste any words in the book. He jumps right into the plot and he keeps the plot accelerator floored for pretty much the entire book. I’m a little beyond the target age range of the book, but my enjoyment of it had nothing to do with the fact that a certain high school I attended had to spend a bunch of money on Apple II computers when the military base pulled the schools terminals because certain students, some of whom avoided punishment, had socially engineered a teacher account and engaged in some non-authorized exploration of the base mainframe file system. I may or may not have been involved.

Game Over: Birth of a Cover

So. I had a novel ready to go. Now came time for the part of the process that I am completely and totally unable to even fake: the cover.

Fortunately, I know Christopher Gugliotti and, far more important, he knows I have information on him which certain foreign governments would be very interested to learn about. Which means he's "happy" to make me some pretty covers. (For a fee, of course.)

I knew the rough elements I wanted on the cover, but there were so many, that I wasn't sure it'd work without being too busy—and the prevailing design trend in YA these days seems to lean more towards the minimalist side of things. What's more, to be effective, a cover really needs to be recognizable at thumbnail size, since that's how big (or, I suppose, how small) most people will first see it on Amazon.

So, with some trepidation, I start. I ask a photographer I know to snap a photo of a school crossing sign.

photo by Melissa Wiley

(Why are these adults going to a grade school? Why aren't kids shown on the sign? For saftey reasons? They're just silhouettes, for pete's sake. Are kids more difficult to properly silhouette than adults? And who are these adults? Are they teachers? Can we see some I.D.? Also, is the man carrying a purse? I make no judgments, I'm just asking.) 

Thusly armed, I proceed to use my advanced knowledge of composition to sketch out a rough design for Chris.

be awed. be very awed.

I sent both things to him and about five minutes later he replies, along with a note saying "something like this?"

Yes. Something very much like that.

Okay. So now let's add the text.

Hm. I love the yellow filter Chris put over the entire thing, but the title and name placement aren't really working. Let's nuke my original design and swap the text elements. And let's go with a font for the title that says "computer."

Way better. Not loving the plainness of the font for my name, though, even though I've noticed most YA books this year are using a sans serif font for their cover elements. Let's try the same font Chris used on my Uncivil War books.

Oh, I like that so much better. The drop shadow on the title makes a big difference. I think my name's still a tad large, though, and I don't feel like we need the Uncivil War bit—note my bold attempt at going minimalist—so let's take one more pass.

And we've got us a cover.

Game Over — a new YA novel

So I've got a new YA novel out.

As you might be able to guess from looking at the cover, it's called Game Over.

It's set in the middle of America in the middle of the previous decade. A group of friends, tired of being picked on, decide to fight back and, as will tend to happen, things get a little out of hand.

How out of hand? Well, here's how the novel opens:

The tanks rolled in just before dawn. 

People felt the rumbling from halfway across town—Ben said later that he fell out of bed, his room was shaking so much. Of course, Ben was known to exaggerate. 

Still, there was no need to exaggerate about this one—it was even more screwed up anything any of us could have imagined, and we had some great imaginations. Our little town, right in the middle of America, under siege. By our own army, sent in by our own government. Roads ripped up by tank treads, neighborhoods sealed off, electricity cut, phones tapped, bank accounts frozen, Green Berets sweeping through our backyards in the dark and a complete news blackout. 

All because of us: a bunch of computer geeks.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should back up and start at the beginning. The beginning of the story, way back in 2004. And the beginning of school. High school, that is. 

So...pretty much that out of hand. Which is to say, really very much so.

Why is it set in 2004? Well, because that's when I wrote it. It was the first novel I'd ever written. At that point, I'd been writing comic books professionally for about six years, and wanted to try prose. I'd written some short children's books during that time, and a series of vignettes the previous decade, and it made me curious to see if I had it in me to stretch out and tell a longer story. And when the idea to Game Over first occurred to me, it was clear it wasn't really a natural fit for the medium of comic books.

So one day I just started writing. And unlike (superhero) comics, which tend to have very definite pages counts you have to know ahead of time, before you've written the first word, with a novel you can pretty much let the story dictate how long it's going to be. So I just wrote and then I wrote and then I wrote some more. And about four months later I was surprised to realize I was on the second to last chapter and then I was done. And then what?

Well, then other projects came up, and I worked on them...and then I found myself going back to a full-time job as a staff editor and that was that for the next several years.

Until a year ago when I thought about Game Over again. I re-read it for the first time in a decade and decided that, yeah, I still liked it. So, knowing an outstanding cover artist, I got a cover for it, and had it proofread and sent it out into the world.

And here 'tis.

Tell your friends. Tell all your friends.

***

(PS: to those who understandably keep writing, asking about the next Uncivil War installment, this isn't it. But, yes, I do have the next volume in the works. I'll let you know the pub date as soon as possible.)