Searching Again

Posted on 24 March 2010

First: My next (and first content-ful) Firefly re-watch post is up at Tor.com.  Have a look.

So, I’ve been doing research for a book I want to write shortly, and I always find it a little funny, doing research for a narrative fiction, especially a fantasy.  I mean, OK, I know I’ve complained before about the guy who used “rapier” to describe every type of sword under the sun, but ya know what, dude was still published and I still bought his book.  Granted, I won’t buy any more of his books, but that is neither here nor there.  Anyway, so what I’ve been researching (in an almost literal sense), is Sun Tzu. I say in a literal sense cause this is hardly the first time I’ve read Sun Tzu.  I’ve owned a copy for some years now, and I find myself looking up passages here or there fairly often.  But tonight, I was actually sitting at my favorite bar, drinking some wine, and reading the the book and notating my own thoughts.  The point is that the book I want to write is going to have a bit of a “learning the Sun Tzu the hard way” feel to it, so I want to go through the thought process of the Sun Tzu and see if I can pull a plot out of it. That’s right, I am trying to pull a plot out of an instruction manual (for all intents and purposes).  Funny thing is, I think I can do it.  Granted, it will be a loose translation, not like each chapter is going to be a different stanza of the original, but I think I can, with some re-arranging and creative interpretation, take the Sun Tzu and develop a plot around it.  The chapter I am looking forward to the most?  Employing Fire.  Fire always makes everything better, right?  right.