Adam Bender is an award-winning journalist and author of speculative fiction that explores modern-day societal fears with a mix of action, romance and humor.
Bender's latest novel is Utopia PR, a speculative satire about a public-relations specialist who struggles to find work-life balance while managing crisis after crisis for a dystopian American president. It won the 2021 IndieReader Discovery Award for Humor.
Previously, Bender wrote The Wanderer and the New West, a near-future western about a rogue vigilante who seeks redemption in a lawless America that fully protects the rights of armed citizens to stand their ground. Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018, the novel also won gold for Dystopia in the 2018 Readers’ Favorite Awards and best Western Fiction in the 2018 National Indie Excellence Awards.
Bender authored We, The Watched and Divided We Fall in a dystopian series about an amnesiac who struggles to conform in a surveillance society where the government keeps a Watched list of its own citizens. Also, Bender has published several short stories.
In his day job as a journalist, Bender covers telecom and internet regulation for Communications Daily. He has won awards for his reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
Bender lives in Philadelphia with his wife Mallika and son Rishi. He’s usually a rather modest and amiable fellow.
Learn more about the author at WatchAdam.blog and join The Underground email newsletter for news and info on Adam Bender's latest projects. Follow him on Facebook (wethewatched) and @WatchAdam on Instagram.
On Monday I typed those two words that are the goal post for any author writing a novel: The End.
Yes, that’s right. I have finished my second novel, Divided We Fall. As I mentioned last month, there is still some polishing to do, but I think it’s in good shape. I’m shooting to enter the novel in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) contest, which begins accepting submissions next week. After that, I will begin to circulate the novel around the publishing world. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a release date at this point because it all depends on if it’s accepted by a publisher. I’m open to self-publishing (as I did for my previous novel, We, The Watched), but I’m going to hold off until I get more feedback from agents and publishers.
For now, here’s my current tagline for Divided We Fall:
A revolutionary and a government agent try to mend their fractured nation and reconcile a broken romance.
For more updates, please keep checking back here and also my official Facebook page. Now, back to writing…
It’s been a while since I talked about Divided We Fall, the sequel to my novel We, The Watched. In fact, it’s been a while since I updated this blog. Sorry about that, guys. The good news is that the lack of posts is due to my focusing on writing the book–which is what you would want me to doing, anyway, right?
The new novel is going well and according to my outline I’m finally getting close to finishing! I know basically how the story is going to end and how the characters are going to get there. I estimate there are just a few chapters left to write. After that, I plan to go back over the novel and flesh out a few of the subplots where necessary. Then the editing process begins. I’m the kind of author who does a lot of editing while I’m writing, so I don’t expect to find the novel in complete disarray. However, when you’re writing in long form it’s absolutely imperative to comb through the whole thing from cover to cover. This ensures that everything is consistent, there are no plot holes, and you didn’t forget to tie up any loose ends (unless, of course, that was your intention all along).
I may have mentioned this before, but a writing program called Scrivener (released last month on Windows) has been absolutely key to my progress on this book. This is a much more complicated tale to tell than We, The Watched. Divided We Fall is told through two points of view and across two time periods. There’s a lot of action. It’s also a love story. And boy is it epic.
You might expect some serious space rock from a band called The Asteroid Shop. Song titles like “Planetary” seem to confirm the suspicion that you’re in for the kind of shoe-gazing guitar rock that might soundtrack a zero-gravity flight into the great unknown.
But band leader Eric Brendo (interviewed on this blog here) brings an earthy road-weariness to his baritone vocals and guitar work on this Austin, Texas band’s self-titled debut. While the album opens in space with the thundering “Destroyer,” by the second half The Asteroid Shop has landed in the dusty desert of the American West. A lot of bands pick one sound and stick with it, so it’s refreshing to hear this band unplug the guitars and bring in instrumentation more common to the folk and country genres. The result is some real winners like the folksy “Ashes” and lovelorn “Silver Lane.”
Under the stars...
Not every song works and the album drags somewhat in the middle. The lyrics are unlikely to stick in one’s head and Brendo’s vocals are a little rough around the edges. The instrumentals are what’s compelling here. Atmosphere may be one the album’s greatest strengths, whether in the thundering bass of opener “Destroyer” or the shimmering guitar and synths of “Dandelion.” They’re also not afraid to surprise with a quick tempo change, as they do to great effect with the groovy ’60s organ jam in the otherwise sleepy “Planetary.” While not all the songs engage the listener, this is a promising album by a band that knows how to set a mood.
I’ve been following the DC Comics reboot with a lot of interest. I’ve always been a comic book fan but for the last several years have felt a bit left behind. Too many conflicts in the so-called “continuity” had made it hard for even a fan to explain what was happening. Some heroes had died and come back, others gone evil and back. Or both, in the case of Green Lantern.
So I’m glad they’ve decided to start fresh and renumber every comic back to #1. I know some people out there are miffed at the lost history, but I personally was getting tired of having to go to Wikipedia every time a comic referenced a mysterious super vortex first seen in issue 367. I was also getting sick of all the crises constantly afflicting the DC universe. Seriously, they had a “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” an “Infinite Crisis” and a “Final Crisis,” and the last two happened in the span of a few years. I don’t care about earth-shattering events; I just want to read a good story!
Swamp Thing #1: Better than you might think!
And good stories they are. DC so far has only released about 14 of the planned 52 books labeled #1 this month, but there have already been some winners. I’ve read five of them — Justice League, Action Comics (Superman), Detective Comics (Batman), Swamp Thing and Batgirl. Justice League is a great introduction to the DC Universe and has more action than a Michael Bay picture (in a good way). If you’re looking for something a a little darker and more sophisticated, check out Detective Comics, which is a classic Joker story with a twist, or Swamp Thing, a devilish tale of horror (environmental horror?)
Action Comics reminded me of old-school 1940s Superman, but didn’t wow me as much as the others (though I guess some might find it interesting seeing Superman in jeans and a T-shirt). But then, I’ve always been more of a Batman fan. The Batgirl book has strong writing, but feels very much like the first in a larger story arc. Oddly, it also seems to require some knowledge of the character’s past.
The thing I think is really going to boost sales at DC Comics isn’t the narrative reboot, though. It’s digital comics.
Have you heard about this yet? You can now buy digital versions of all of the new comics, the day they are released, and read them on your PC, smartphone or tablet.
This addresses two of the main reasons I stopped buying actual issues of comic books:
I had to make special trips every time I wanted to go to a comic book store. The two shops I know of in Washington, DC are in Georgetown (which takes a Metro ride and a bus transfer to get to), and Union Station (which also requires a $2 Metro ride)
I have very little space to store comic books.
Digital solves both of these problems. I can buy a comic with a mouse click or a tap on my phone’s touch screen, and they’re all stored online so I don’t have to buy an entire filing cabinet. The price per comic feels a little steep since it’s the same as what you’d pay for a print edition, but damn if it isn’t convenient. Longtime comics fans might scoff at the idea, but I am sure it’s going to bring in a lot of people like me who were having trouble keeping up.
What do you think of the DC reboot? Does digital distribution make the difference? Please leave a comment below!
Story-driven video games can be as engaging as a novel or film. But unlike those other mediums, games require some level of interaction with the player. The point of a game isn’t to watch but to participate. But achieving the right balance can be difficult.
Giving the player a choice of what to say during characters’ conversation is one of the most basic ways to involve the player. But different games handle this in different ways. A game like Final Fantasy XIII pretty much bars players from having any role in the conversation, forcing them to sit back and watch. (Arguably, even FFXIII’s gameplay forces the player to sit back and watch, but that’s for another article.)
Other games occasionally pause the conversation to give players an option of what to say. In Fallout 3, players are presented with options that are fully written sentences. In other words, you say what you see. This is an approach that has been used in countless RPGs. It’s a proven winner, but not the most interesting. The biggest downside is that it pretty much forces players to think before every little thing they say. I hope this doesn’t sound cynical, but people don’t do that in real life.
Fallout 3: What you see is what you say
To address that weakness, Mass Effect goes for a more emotion-based approach. Like Fallout, this sci-fi RPG presents players with a choice of responses. But the replies only give a vague idea of what the protagonist will say. If you select “You’re crazy,” Shepard (the hero) won’t say those words exactly (he has a little more tact than that), but he certainly will get the message across.
Mass Effect provides the gist of what Shepard will say
L.A. Noire takes the concept a step further, and perhaps too far. When you are interviewing a person of interest in connection to a crime, you are always presented with the same three choices after the POI gives an answer: You can guess he is telling the truth, you can doubt the veracity of his response, or you can accuse him of lying. This simplified approach sounds good on paper, but in practice isn’t always intuitive. What do you do, for example, when the suspect seems to be telling you only half the truth? Sometimes selecting truth encourages the POI to tell you more. Other people need a little threatening, and “Doubt” is the right way to get him talking.
L.A. Noire: Truth, Doubt or Lie?
Maybe it’s just because I’m a reporter, but interviewing isn’t so black and white. When I’m talking to a source, it’s not like my only three options are to agree with her answers, tell her that I don’t believe her or outright accuse her of lying. What about asking the question again but in a different, more roundabout way? Why can’t I “doubt” an answer without accusing the person of wasting my time (a quick way to end a conversation)? Perhaps if L.A. Noire gave a little better idea of what hero cop Cole Phelps was going to say next, I might choose the right response more often. Game critic Chris Kohler seems to agree in his review for Wired.com’s Game|Life column.
If you were to ask me, the Mass Effect method to conversation is the winner. It engages players in conversation and encourages gut-level responses so that players to make choices based on their own personalities rather than what they think the game wants them to say.
Agree or disagree? Let me know what you think in the comments section!
