THEN AGAIN

NaNoWriMo

2011-11-30T20:28:00.001-08:00

So, the reason I haven't posted much recently: I've been writing up a storm. Not that I've ever posted here regularly, mind you. That's just the current reason for my lack of posts.

I'm unreliably employed at the moment, y'see, and so I took the opportunity to try NaNoWriMo. I didn't mention it here because I didn't want to jinx it.

And I succeeded. 50,000 words in 1 month. Plus several hundred beforehand, too. Meaning I'm now at the halfway point of the novel I've been working on for years.

One more month. One more month of powering through another 50,000 words, and I should be done with the entire novel.

...And then, I'll start in on the editing. Or I'll let it sit for a while, maybe work on another project. I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it. For now: I'm halfway done with this damn thing! Woo!

T-Shirts.

2011-11-10T14:37:00.001-08:00

I was pretty surprised when I saw this T-shirt. I probably shouldn't have been. But I've been following this book series since 2004 and even THEN I was a latecomer, and I can't get used to it being this majorly popular TV show... Not that I don't love it, just sayin'.

"Damn It Feels Good to be a Lannister T-shirt"(If you don't get the reference, what are you doing here? Go watch and/or read "Game of Thrones" already.)

Fringe

2011-11-02T18:40:00.000-07:00

I've recently started watching this show. I expected it to mildly entertaining. It turned out to be much better than mildly entertaining.

For one, the character of Walter Bishop, played by John Noble (known best for playing Denethor in Lord of the Rings), is one of the best characters I've seen on television or film, thanks to a deft combination of excellent writing, direction, and acting.

For another, the show's mytharc actually reveals shit on a regular basis. Stuff happens on this show, and I'm not even all the way through season 1 yet. (Reviews seem to indicate that things only get better.)

So of course I end up reading this article last night. If you are too lazy to click that, the summary is: Fringe is in danger of cancellation. Again. Apparently it's been in danger of cancellation each season due to low ratings, despite superb writing. Maybe it's a false alarm, but still - I'm getting a little tired of excellent shows being cancelled early because they don't get an immediate audience. Especially shows that obviously play better on DVD than they do on television. (See: Angel, Firefly, Rome, Deadwood, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and the list goes on. Counterpoint: The Wire, and... uh, The Wire.)

Hopefully Fringe doesn't get the bite that so many others have had. It's gotten as far as season four at least...

New Blog Title #4

2011-09-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

...because it occurred to me that "Fairies, Sex and Spacemen" was a bit NSFW if it's up their in big bold letters.

So now it's the subtitle. Yeah, that'll do it.

And now I've titled the blog "Then Again", which is perfectly appropriate considering how often I rethink everything. Including the blog title. Which I may well change again, if I decide I don't like it. WHO CAN SAY.

The SCP Foundation

2011-09-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

Since about March, I have found myself involved in an online community again. It's a little website called the SCP Foundation". It's a primarily horror website, inspired by creepypasta and evolved into something new and different and entertaining. Maybe you've heard of it. If you haven't, maybe you should check it out. Go ahead. I'll wait.

While I'm at it, I'll mention my most popular contribution to the site so far: SCP-1000: Bigfoot. (I'm so proud.)

Jane C. Hines

2011-09-20T01:30:00.000-07:00

Here, on the blog of Jim C. Hines, you can find a truly excellent post about the difference being a man or woman makes, even when it shouldn't: Jane C. Hines

The sad thing is, I know a whole ton of people (mostly men) who would claim that this disparity simply does not exist, with many words and plenty of rancor.

Another Update

2011-09-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if I should be proud that I really do post in this blog regularly, or ashamed that no matter what I've tried, so far I've failed to post regularly. Seeing how old John Scalzi's blog is, and the fact that he's post almost every day, has reminded me that I need to post more often.

I'm between jobs at the moment, so I should really work out a system now, rather than waiting until I get full-time employment again. Sure, only a few people are reading this blog now, but once I get this current novel published, I might even go up to a few dozen, and what happens then? I'll be totally fucked, that's what will happen. (Or maybe nothing. You never know).

Maybe I should try posting every day (that I have Net access). Even if it's only one line. Why not, I suppose? It'll be good practice. I guess. Maybe. Maybe it'll just be a distraction from all the other shit that I need to be doing.

Now, let's see how long I can keep that up.

Another Reason to Like George R. R. Martin

2011-05-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

George R. R. Martin is having a good year. First, Game of Thrones is now airing as a(n apparently fantastic - I haven't been able to see it yet) HBO show. Second, he finally finished Dance With Dragons after six long years.

Now a clueless reviewer labels GoT as male fantasy, and Martin takes issue with this.

A choice quote:

if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?

In the light of certain sf/f authors identifying their stories as male-oriented - like George Lucas - it's great to see a major male fantasy author standing up for female fans and saying, fuck you, this isn't just for boys. Martin was already my favorite epic fantasy author - this only raises my esteem of him.

Read the whole thing here: "Boy Fiction?"

Gender Gym

2011-01-26T17:27:00.000-08:00

I've realized that so long as I'm working on a novel, I will never keep this bloody blog updated unless I write about what I'm writing about while I'm writing it. (That sentence got a little convoluted.)

I write for two consecutive hours every day; I also work full time. And then I have a happy, complicated love life that needs time devoted to it. I don't really have extra time to think up blog posts. But if I write about what I'm doing in my novel, well, then it sorta counts as brainstorming, doesn't it?

(First off, in these posts I'm going to call my novel Aether. That's not necessarily going to be the final title, but I need to pick something for now.)

What have I done recently?

I just changed my magic system. Again. This time, it's because several people whose opinions I trust have pointed out that my magic system is getting fairly unique. So I shouldn't just call everything 'magic'. Still, I think the word 'magic' is pretty descriptive, and if I call it the One Power or the Force or Mindcraft or something I'm going to feel a little pretentious, which isn't exactly what I want from this book. I'm still thinking about what changes to make.

I also gender-flipped a character several times. This is a character who I've gender-flipped before, but she keeps returning to her original female gender. Currently I think I've settled on making her a biological male who identifies as female. I think that's where she might stay. Though already I'm thinking about the possibilities of her as a biological female who identifies as male. Or someone who changes his/her gender every few years (magical character, so I can do that).

Usually I go the other direction on this gender flipping. When I first had the idea for this novel (farther back than I care to admit), most of the characters were male. Of course they were. Most sci-fi/fantasy works are populated almost entirely by straight white men. Because of this, I feel very conscious about the number of female, queer, and minority characters in what I write. There's little reason why a fantasy novel shouldn't pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors. So many of my characters started off as straight white males, and ended up queer, nonwhite, and/or female.

So why am I debating changing her gender to male? Well: I actually have too few male characters in charge of the Secret Magical Community. (She's one of them.) The male characters are mostly in the "Assimilationist" faction of the community, which means they're embracing American Christian attitudes, for better or for worse. That includes anti-queer attitudes, negative sexual beliefs, belief in a male-female Stay In The Kitchen hierarchy, plus other generally unpleasant but common things. While this doesn't make them the Bad Guys, it certainly doesn't put them on the side of our protagonists.

This is a problem, because with this setup, it can look like I (as the author) am trying to say:

A) Female leaders are incompetent, and female-led communities are doomed to failure, because in the story - well, let's just say a lot of Bad Things happen. Worse, the POV character that interacts with the community the most is male, which could make him seem like a Necessary Male Hero (here to save these womenfolk from themselves!).

B) Males are generally bad, sexist/homophobic people. More of a stretch, since I have male POV characters as well as female, and also I am male; however, 'male' is usually associated with 'straight', and the male POV characters as well as myself are pansexual.

C) Both. Females are incompetent leaders, and males are bad people. This may not initially make sense, but how many traditional conservative women have you heard say "all men are pigs"?

So the solution is easy: Make at least a couple of the community leaders male. Most of the community leader characters, however, need to be female for either some story reason or because I'm attached to the idea. The character in question has no reason to be either gender, though.

So why not make her male and be done with it? Possibly because she started out female, and I keep thinking of her like that. But more importantly, changing her to male doesn't actually make her any cooler (I have to admit that changing lots of my males to females did make their character concept cooler). In fact, I worry that she loses some 'cool' factor as a male. This isn't particularly logical, of course - it's solely based on personal preference. 'Cool' is a hard thing to quantify, so I may be thinking about this for a little while longer.

The Magicians

2010-06-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

I just finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman, the first book in some time that I've managed to finish in two days.

It's good. It's very good. I found the magic depiction fascinating and original, and certain scene setups and plot twists are extremely creative (the entrance exams, the foxes, the south pole, the beast/watcherwoman twist) It's also very flawed, and has those flaws which really stuck themselves in my face.

FYI I'm going to spoil some of the events of this book like hell from here on out, so better run if you don't like that.

In no particular order, here's the flaws (or semi-maybe-flaws?) and why they bothered me.

1) I'm not sure if this is really a flaw or a feature or both, but at times the author slips so far into the Harry Potter pastiche (first half of the book) and the Narnia pastiche (second half of the book) that he practically seems to be trying to rewrite those books but really hastily and not as well, though with some excellent ideas of his own and a shiny new adult tone. (By the way, what was up with the Gulliver's Travels bit with the centaurs near the end? Sheesh. No, I'm not talking about Lilliput, but rather the horse people.)

2) The narrator is:

a) a moron (not necessarily a bad thing)
b) really depressing to read about at times because he is CONSTANTLY depressed and only rarely happy. Some really great moments in the story are undercut by his detachment & complete lack of caring.
c) extremely distant and alienated from everything, including the frakking reader. Good luck trying to get emotionally attached to this mopey fucker.

3) The characters have depth, but not enough. They're sorta broad types; they seemed realistic enough but I only ever cared about them or their fates in brief moments.

4) This may just be me, but for a book as straightforward and explicit as this, what's up with the sex scenes? They're super overdescribed yet barely explain what's going on. This is perfectly excusable (and probably the right choice) for the first sex scene (with the foxes), but did the book really have to tiptoe around that aspect and not everything else?

5) All the characters feel disposable, but the female characters seem especially disposable. Of the major female characters (and hell, minor female characters who aren't teachers), Julia gets screwed over early in the book only to be thrown in later as a Replacement Goldfish for Our Hero's Love Interest Slot, Amanda gets eaten (first book death IIRC), Janet is treated as a 'slut' and therefore disliked, and Alice is alternately fascinating then boring when the author doesn't know what to do with her - ultimately a pretty banal and annoying he-cheats-she-cheats storyline gives the author an excuse to keep her quiet for a while until she dramatically incinerates herself (but she might be back in the next book anyway, says the author). Finally, 11th hour badass Fen is the only casualty besides Alice of the Climactic Battle (both female).

On the other hand, the guys get pretty screwed too, and while the females seem disposable... so do the males! It's still a bit disproportionate, though.

5a) Speaking of which, the stupid cheating storyline. This is at least partly a personal peeve; as a polyamorous person my immediate reaction is (oversimplified) "why can't you just all have sex and be fine with it?" And then, I'm bothered by that old trope that tells us that people lose their worth when they break relationship rules, so long as it's sex. (Breaking other relationship rules just makes you a jerk. But sexually cheat, in a story, and your worth as a human being skyrockets downwards.) But even beyond that, couldn't it have been slightly more complex and less mundane of a story choice than it was?

6) The magic. This is both a huge benefit and a flaw of the book. What we get is overall pretty fascinating. But the author seriously skims over the basic details in places while casting others. What does it feel like to cast a spell? We only rarely know. We just get a vague description of mechanics and a cool description of the effect.

7) The narrative pace. Dear God, could the author have skimmed any more? This with a character that's hard to get attached to in the first place. We get oceans of time skimmed over. Additionally, the structure jumps around like mad, and it's a bit jarring - did we really need to get "surprise, Fillory is real!" like 2/3 through the book?

8) Confusing cliffhanger endings that leave the reader confused. Yes, this happened several times. And not to nitpick, but I wish some of the dialogue tags had better clarity, at certain points I'm unsure who's talking (and they all sound the same anyway).

9) ~~Narnia~~ Fillory. Grossman's Hogwarts stand-in feels like it has real stakes, and the Wood (City, in this case) Between the Worlds drew my attention like a magnet. But the stakes of most things that happened in Fillory felt ... nonexistent. The best part is a conversation with a drunk bear, and that's only a side note.

...And I believe that closes out my first impressions.

All in all, a great book, if very flawed. I want to read the sequel, certainly.

Show Me This:

2010-05-27T03:50:00.000-07:00

Here is what I would absolutely love to see or read: A fantasy (or contemporary sci-fi) television show or book series with strong, realistic character focus, creative/surprising plot and action elements, female characters as good as male characters (and not just as interesting; they should be just as badass and plot-important as any of the male characters; if one character has to be Most Important, I'd prefer a female, just because you see that less often), a cast of characters who aren't all straight and/or white, multiple actively bisexual characters, and strong polyamory, queer, and sex-positive themes.

For the record, what I'm working on fits this description either perfectly or partially. (Specifically, the book fits all of it; the script I'm doing a little less so, but hey, I'm co-writing it.)

This is one reason I'm looking forward to the Game of Thrones TV show (and why I love the books); the book series fits all of the above except that the poly/queer themes are only minor (and thus sadly may not make it to the show), most of the characters are at least nominally white, and there's only one major actively bisexual character. But everything else fits - and this is all in SPITE of the extremely male-dominant anti-feminist pseudo-medieval setting. I don't favor epic fantasy, but I make an exception here.

(That might be misleading. I love the idea of epic fantasy, but since I want character focus and not setting focus, I usually end up disappointed by the genre. This includes The Lord of the Rings books; in the movies, you at least had the actors to convincingly emote. You don't get that in the books - not enough, anyway.)

If you know of a book or book series that fits all these criteria, point me the fuck to it. I don't think it exists. (I *know* there's no TV series that does.)

Which is, of course, why I have to write them.

Copyrighting Ideas

2010-03-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

A note on Repo Men vs Repo! The Genetic Opera:

Dear rabid fans of Repo! who are pissed off about Repo Men Stealing Repo!'s Idea:

That "stolen" idea was not original.

(Here's a recap for those who have no idea what I'm talking about.)

One of the writers of Repo! gives us a "history lesson" on his blog, demonstrating that Repo! was kicking around in some form or another all the way back to 1999. The implication is, of course, that since the idea for Repo Men was first made public in 2001, OMG THEY STOLE OUR IDEA!

Except... just a cursory Google search turns up the 1997 award-winning play "Harvest", whose central plot bears suspicious resemblances to the idea behind Repo!. And further, while I can't quote examples offhand, this whole organ-buying idea pops up a lot in cyberpunk. 1997 is before 1999. OMG plagiarism!

(There's also the mention on that blog post that the similarities became too much for the Repo! author to "bare" reading more when he found out that in both stories, the company the repo men works for turns on them when they go rogue. The funny thing is, I've only seen parts of Repo!, and I guessed on my own that this would happen once I knew the Repo Man himself was a character. It's that bloody obvious of a plot twist. Protagonist works for evil corporation and goes rogue, then they hunt him down. Gee, I've never seen that plot before!)

This is not to knock Repo! itself; as I mentioned earlier, I've only seen parts, but I can't dislike anything that has Anthony Stewart Head singing in it. The point is, all ideas have been done before, and this could just be bad timing.

I can see where the outrage is coming from, given the concept similarity and the oddly identical marketing campaigns, but still. At least wait until the actual film comes out, why don't ya?

And a final point: Shit like this happens all the time, just not usually to cult films - because most cult films have silly central ideas. No one's going to make anything that could be accused as a rip-off of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, because you can't do much else with that idea. Repo!, though, uses a pretty iconic idea with a clear real-world metaphor. A claim of coming up with something at the same time as someone else, though, isn't necessarily bullshit. Take the word of a script reader for it:

Like one time, I swear, I covered three different screenplays -- submitted from different parts of the country -- all of which had key scenes set at a southwestern rattlesnake farm. Why, you could go years without reading a good rattlesnake farm scene, and here I had three in one week. Needless to say, after that I became more sympathetic to claims of 'parallel development.'

And it's true. That's why, if you're writing a book or a script, you can never hope to coast along with a crap story and a great original idea. After all, won't they forgive the crap story for the original idea that they can't get anywhere else. No. Because that idea? Probably not as original as you think. So you better have a great execution, because that's what will make it or break it.

What triggered this post was an article on Tor about the subject here, a well-written article that nearly had me nodding in agreement by the end:

Let this be a warning to creative people everywhere: guard your creations well, but at the same time steel yourselves for the possibility of a Repo befalling you. You can copyright your stories, you can copyright your art, but you cannot copyright the beautiful ideas that give them their uniqueness and life. It is frightening and it is upsetting, but it is inescapable.

But wait. Would it really be such a great idea to copyright ideas? That would eliminate entire genres; the Tolkien estate could sue almost every epic fantasy writer ever into oblivion, and that's actually one of the better scenarios, since at least we'd still have Lord of the Rings. Very often, the first work in a genre is not that great. Plus, you'd simply have powerful corporations hire writers, however crappy, to come up with as many story ideas as possible and publish them as crappy short stories, claiming copyright based on that and suing the pants off of anyone else who comes up with a similar idea independently and makes something good with that. Now that's frightening and upsetting.

The Eye of the World, Part 3 of Oh Fuck This

2010-03-12T16:51:00.000-08:00

Recap: I'm an aspiring fantasy author, reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time for the first time.

Previously: Part 1, Part 2.

The Eye of the World, Chapter 2: Strangers

Back to Wheel of Time. A generic fantasy holiday is a-happenin', and there's a gleeman in town. Whatever that is.

~~Luke Skywalker~~ Rand continues to not develop a personality, while Mat cements his role as Trouble-making Best Friend by covering dogs in flour and letting them loose as a practical joke. Ghost dogs! It's pretty funny - or it would be, if we got to see Mat do this instead of hearing Mat and everyone else talk about it. Sorry, ghost dogs.

As peripheral characters pile up, so do the walking stereotypes. Just a couple are the Burly Fatherly Blacksmith and Mistress al'Vere, the Mom Woman, a woman whose single personality trait is that she's a Mom. To everyone. The Village Council (the male side, I think) holds a football huddle and discusses Mysterious Shit. Rand and Mat throw stones at a creepy raven, which dodges them. Creepily. How much do you wanna bet Creepy Raven belongs to the Nazgul?

And now, two Minor Characters! Lan is a badass ~~Ranger~~ Warden in a~~n elven~~ chameleon cloak and is definitely not supposed to be Aragorn. Moiraine is his boss, and may or may not be a stand-in for Gandalf. (Unless the 'gleeman' is Gandalf.) Her personality traits are twofold: looking pretty and acting cryptic. Oh, and acting slightly bitchy to the Women Council. We're reminded that the women in charge of this place are super bitchy, in case we forgot from the last chapter.

We get a mention of Trollocs, which appears to be a ... "brilliant" portmanteau of "trolls" and "orcs". Since these are clearly Always Evil Baddies, I'm gonna just take a wild leap now and guess that these are the guys who destroy Rand's Doomed Hometown. Unless people start talking about stormtrooper stand-ins between now and then.

Anyway, Moiraine, who is a Super Pretty Lady OMG, talks to Rand, Mat, and Other Boy Ewin (I can't tell yet whether he's worth explaining or not). While they ogle, she foreshadows that Something Terrible happened A Long Time Ago in Rand's Doomed Hometown. When they ask questions, she tells them that cryptic cryptic blah blah Wheel of Time blah blah cryptic blah. She gives the three Mysterious Coins of Mystery, which are also worth a lot.

We end the chapter with the peddler showing up in town, which is very exciting for the characters but not so much for us.

My Impressions:

Perhaps I'm being unfairly impatient, but Jordan's approach is formulaic to the point where it's frustrating me a little. Formula's not bad in itself, but execution of formula in a too-familiar way is.

Nothing in the story proper has surprised me yet, though Mat's gotten closest with his ghost dog stunt - offscreen, though. The prologue was a little melodramatic, sure, but I sure didn't expect Crazy Dude to immolate himself. Here's hoping things pick up before too long.

----

Okay. Despite my slightly more positive impressions of this chapter, I just couldn't find the will to keep going after this. I'm told that it gets better shortly after this chapter, so... Maybe I'll come back to you, Wheel of Time. But for now, I'm going to take a break and cleanse my palette with something by Neil Gaiman.

Morning Pages

2010-03-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, a dear friend/romantic partner of mine introduced me to the concept of "morning pages". Taken from the pages of the rather popular book The Artist's Way, the idea of morning pages is that you write three pages of whatever comes to mind, first thing in the morning, every day. You're not writing anything good, sensible, or even true; you're getting all the bits and pieces out of your head and onto paper.

When I first heard about this, I balked. Get up early? Voluntarily? Just to write? God save us all!

But then I did it. And it turned out very well. So well, in fact, that I haven't skipped a day since I started doing this months ago. I confess I've yet to read much more of The Artist's Way, but these Morning Pages have been immeasurably helpful to my writing. Many times - including the past two mornings - I've solved big problems in stories I've been working on, problems that would have ordinarily plagued me for months before resolution. So, suffice to say I'm a believer.

For the record, I write 3 pages or more, double-spaced, in a Word document. This is despite recommendations that these pages be written by hand. I have yet to find a reason why, though, besides a theory that writing the pages more slowly by hand makes you think about what you're saying more. However, for me, it's easier to take off my (powerful) internal censors when I type them out.

Rambling on Fantasy

2010-03-05T01:28:00.000-08:00

Because I am lazy, here's a blog post I wrote a while ago - October 2007, in fact - yet never finished:

--------------------------

'Burying reader under a dumpload of facts' (I think I stole that quote from someone, not sure who anymore) is the bane of sf/fantasy. One of the banes, anyway. It's a bit difficult to have an outsider's perspective when you're making up the world in your own head.

Then again, that doesn't take cliche into account. The Lord of the Rings Rip-Off No. [Insert Arbitrarily Large Number Here] may well count as being written with an 'outsider's perspective'. In fact, the parts of the regurgitated fantasy world the author invented themselves stick out because those are the only parts the author bothers to explain. Unfortunately, this can be extended to plot and character motivations just as much as setting...

And there's always things like vampires, where authors sometimes even start out by explaining which cliches are true, which are untrue, and which the narrator (read: author) thinks are utterly ridiculous (read: unkewl). (Vulnerability to garlic? Not in MY vampires!)

Annoying though this is, it does speak to a central problem of sf/fantasy, which, come to think of it, is merely an exaggerated version of the Setting Problem all stories have - how do you get all this info across to your reader without annoying them? Which is bad, which is good? Purely, I suppose, good info would be info relevant to the character, and bad info would be info relevant only to the author. But what about info irrelevant to the character, but relevant to the reader?

I guess that's why the Newbie Initiate character is so popular. Too bad they're usually boring as shit.

No Sex Scenes Yet

2010-03-05T00:08:00.000-08:00

Wait. Not NO sex scenes, just only one. Yes, I've only completely written one sex scene, so far, like, ever. And it was a horrible awkward thing - as in the sex, not the scene (I hope).

What's holding me back? Oh, heteronormative puritan sensibilities whispering in the back of my subconscious that I've struggled all my life to overcome. And sheer terror. The usual.

Ironic, then, that my blog title is currently "Fairies, Sex, and Spacemen." I'm good on the fairies and spacemen. The sex? We'll see.

Guilty Pleasures, Part 1 of Who Knows

2010-02-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

Background: As mentioned earlier, I'm an aspiring fantasy/sf author, who's managed to avoid (either accidentally or on purpose) many Great, or at least Popular, works of fantasy and sci-fi. So I'm making up for lost time, and posting recaps and reactions on this blog. I've already started on Wheel of Time, in the epic fantasy genre. But now I've gotten slightly bored of that (already!). For balance, in the contemporary/urban fantasy genre, I'm going with the famous-slash-infamous Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series.

What I know:

Anita Blake paved the way for stuff like the (excellent) show True Blood (and of course, the book series off which it is based).

Oh, and sex. Lots of sex. From what I hear, eventually Hamilton writes sex with the eagerness that Jordan writes descriptions. Which makes it a bit appropriate for this blog.

To sum up: This comic. (Alt link.)

So, without further adieu, let's get to the first book in the Anita Blake series: Guilty Pleasures.

Chapter 1

First off, the cover is ridiculous. But I know very well that's not the author's fault - authors don't get too much say in the covers they get.

Setting: Vampires and other supernatural beasties integrated into human society. Cue politics. And romance! But not yet, apparently. Anita Blake, professional zombie animator (!) doesn't like vampires; despite apparently being a vampire expert. So naturally a vampire has come to badger her for help. Anita snarks at Sleazy Vampire and kicks him out. Aaaaand the chapter is over, which throws me off for a second. I'm not used to books being short anymore.

Okay, so hang on a second. She's a professional zombie animator? That sounds pretty interesting. Why did I never hear about that angle before? She tells us she's off to raise someone from the dead to clarify an issue with his will. I'm interested.

Anita is pointlessly coy about whether she is or isn't human. Sleazy Vampire says she isn't, because she can see him move at super speed (I guess; it might just be an illusion) and jump out of the way; Anita has not a solitary thought on this. Why? Is she or isn't she?

This chapter isn't... amazing, but it's not bad either, and it has some pretty great lines. Sleazy Vampire wears Crayola green pants. "Surely vampires should have rich, melodious laughs." The opening lines - "Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died. His being dead didn't change that." - are a good hook.

Chapter 2

This chapter is even shorter, at a whopping 2.5 pages in mass market paper back. Anita lets herself get roped into ~~an upcoming plot contrivance~~ being the designated driver for a bachelorette party. It seems a little out of place, because I don't get the feeling that the author wants us to think that Anita is a wimpy pushover. It's odder how Anita switches from "I really really don't want to do this" to "eh, I guess it might be okay" in under two pages, with no reasons proffered in between. I guess Anita felt the Pull of the Plot.

Chapter 3

Anita and the Posse of Bachelorette make a surprise visit to the only vampire strip club In The World, because Anita's friends are total assholes who enjoy tormenting her. Or maybe Anita just never got around to telling them one of her central defining traits so far? Either way, Anita continues to be Pushover McPassive by going anyway instead of, um, bailing like you'd think someone who's terrified of vampires would. (I could understand if she had some motivation like being concerned about her friends, but we're never told anything like this.)

The club is called Guilty Pleasures, and it's run by a smarmy stereotype of "master vampire" Jean-Claude. He looks "like a vampire was supposed to look". Basically, a refugee from Anne Rice. Jean-Claude really really wants to "mesmerize" Anita with his Eyes of Supernatural Hypnosis, and Anita keeps resisting (which makes her, apparently, unique among humans). So... great, he's a would-be rapist? We get more Anita being terrified of vampires, standing up to vampires anyway, and the reader getting hints about something supernatural about her related to vampires. Hints that go insistently without clarification.

Also, Anita gives up her cross, and we learn obliquely that she's a devout Christian. Um. This doesn't really fit with the S&M orgies I hear come later in the books - or maybe I'm wrong to automatically assume "fundamentalist/conservative" when I hear Christian.

On her giving up her cross: This kind of reads like her going into a club full of would-be rapists, who especially want to rape her because she's hard to get, and she hands over her pepper spray. ...What?! If you think that's a stretch because the metaphor doesn't quite match up, let me point out that Anita, at this point in the story, kinda does view vampires on that level. Why doesn't she just leave?

Chapter 4

More hot strip club action, showcasing a striptease by a hot guy covered in vampire bite marks, and everyone in the club gets briefly hypnotized as part of a vampiric show. Except for Anita, whose Vague Supernatural Powers of Whatever (we still aren't told anything) protect her. Jean-Claude almost hypnotizes her anyway before she FINALLY bails. But not without more of his smarm!

Another thing I don't buy: The hot bitten guy is fed on by a vampire, and he enjoys it. Anita acts stunned - STUNNED! - about this - it's not that she's horrified, but genuinely astonished that such a thing could happen. Why? Do they not have Dracula or Anne Rice in this universe? Even if not, if the trope still holds true, how did she miss it if she's such an Expert on Vampires?

(The Rest of) My Impressions So Far

So far, Guilty Pleasures reads more like something I'd want to write than Eye of the World; it's not necessarily superior so much as it focuses more on character than ~~Scenery Porn~~ setting, meaning it automatically appeals to me more. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Anita has some relatively good characterization, though minor characters could use some work: Jean-Claude is a cliche (intentionally so), and while Sleazy Vampire Willie from the first chapter directly deconstructs a vampire cliche, he's still just a different kind of cliche in a vampire suit. Anita being interesting is all I need to keep reading, though. For now.

Next time: Chapter 5 and beyond!

The Eye of the World, Part 2 of Whatever

2010-02-09T14:57:00.000-08:00

Recap: I'm an aspiring fantasy author, reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time for the first time. How far will I get before I get sick of this format? Who can say!

Previously: Part 1.

Launching right in!

The Eye of the World, Chapter 1: An Empty Road

After an over-dramatic introduction ripped off of Lord of the Rings, we meet Our Hero, ~~Luke Skywalker~~ Rand al'Thor, who has a silly name and not much personality (yet?). His dad, Tam, is described as a matter-of-fact Casual Badass, but he doesn't actually do anything interesting this chapter. Boo. Neither does anyone else, though.

Rand is being stalked by ~~a Nazgul~~ a clearly supernatural rider dressed in black on a black horse who exudes (probably black) hatred of life and just so happens to look exactly like a Nazgul. He wants to shank Rand in the face, or so Rand senses through ~~the Force~~ either authorial contrivance or latent Magical Powers.

Rand has a penis, so if he DOES have magical powers, we'll have to deal with the Tainted Penis Magic from the prologue. $20 says he'll either be the destined Purifier of said Magic, or one of the Few who ends up being able to use it. I don't know yet if this is one of those No Sex Allowed fantasy stories (like Tolkien and NOT George R. R. Martin), but if it's not, I hope this comes into play somehow. I'm not holding my breath, though.

We're introduced to Rand's Quaint Hometown Village, which can't be long for this world. Calling it now: this village is wiped off the map before the first act is over. Possibly by orcs. Or stormtroopers. The village - Emond's Field - is populated by stereotypes: whiny husbands and bitchy domineering women who cook, clean, and have a monopoly over magic. I'm tired of them before they're done being introduced.

Plus there's some girl who makes Rand's penis feel funny (how old is he, anyway?), but we don't get to meet her. Also, a best friend who has Rand's dad's name but backwards. (Look, I know this is inspired by Lord of the Rings, but I don't recall having to roll my eyes every time Tolkien introduced and named a new character.)

My Impressions So Far:

My hope for originality in this story is fading fast, though Jordan throws in some good details here and there. I particularly liked several turns of phrase (for instance, describing the danger of wolves and bears, and the chill wind that would rather bear snow), but just as often the description is unnecessary or overwritten.

Characters are a bit flat so far, even Tam, who seemed promising when initially described. Rand isn't super exciting as a naive Farm Boy lacking in personal magnetism. I'm completely unimpressed with depiction #1986759 of Stereotypical Men and Women; I'm kind of relieved that Rand's dad is a widower so we aren't subjected to Jordan's vision of what his Poor Dead Mother was like. Yet.

There's a seriously annoying bit where Rand info-dumps the Mystical History of the World. People don't talk like that. They just don't. Lucky it only lasts a few sentences.

(Alright, this post still only covers one chapter. Maybe next post will be multi-chapter. Maybe.)

Next time: Chapter 2!

The Eye of the World, Part 1 of ?

2010-02-05T17:56:00.000-08:00

Quick recap: I'm an aspiring fantasy author, about to read Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time for the first time. The first part of it, at least. Let's see how far I get before I give up.

Wheel of time, turn, turn, turn. Show us the lesson that we should learn.

I run a risk by reading and analyzing this series. Why? Because Wheel of Time (WoT) has been around forever, and half the Internet already has an Opinion on it. I'm an Aspiring Fantasy Author. Either I dislike it, and alienate half my potential audience, or I like it, and alienate the other half. But hey, I've been called an enfant terrible by other writers before, so why stop now?

What I know about this series:

It's long.
Supposedly, it's a bit overwritten.
The main character has a silly last name (Rand al'Thor.)
It's long.
The main character is a Chosen One of some sort.
It's both well-loved and widely derided, possibly for the same reasons. Jordan is often mentioned in the same breath as Tolkien, though curiously not often in the same breath as George R. R. Martin, the so-called "American Tolkien" - except to contrast the two.
Robert Jordan died before the completion of the last massive book in this series, though he left copious notes to allow another author to finish it. Did I mention it's long?

So: On to the first book! (There's prequels, too, but I'm not going to bother with those right now.)

The Wheel of Time, Book One: The Eye of the World

Fair warning: I'm going to over-analyze this, because it's the opening. Suck it up.

Prologue: Dragonmount

Okay, the book title? Pretty damn cool, actually. The title to this prologue? Not so much. YMMV, of course.

Some crazy dude (Lews Therin) wanders through a palace, in the aftershocks of some mystical event - a 'mind twisting', which kills people, warps stone and marble and stuff, and ignores paintings and sculptures (for some reason). It's actually pretty cool, except...

Jordan doesn't seem to edit very much. For every good line, there's three mediocre lines. I've seen worse, but pretty good purple prose is still purple prose. As a writer who struggles with description now and then, this is something I'm sensitive to. Some of the prose is mystifying:

Broad black smears crossed the blistered paints and gilt of once-bright murals, soot overlaying crumbling friezes of men and animals, which seemed to have attempted to walk before the madness grew quiet.

The men and animals seemed to have attempted to walk...? Walk where? Seemed how? Attempted, but didn't succeed? We're never told. (For the record, though, I quite liked the first 2/3 of the sentence.)

Back in the palace, Crazy Dude wanders around looking for his (clearly dead) wife. Some Guy teleports in. "Lord of the Morning. I have come for you." DUN DUN DUNNNNNN. Crazy Dude calls Some Guy - in a dramatic whisper - "The Betrayer of Hope". DUN DUNNNNNNNN!

Some Guy works for ~~Satan~~ "Shai'tan". (Really?) Satan Guy is dressed in black and won't shut the fuck up with exposition (Nine Rods of Dominion! Gates of Paaran Disen! Some Other Capitalized Things!) and villain monologuing. Crazy Dude blissfully misses most of it, because he's so Crazy, until Satan Guy (Elan Morin) fixes the Crazy with some Satan-powered magic. Crazy Dude's skull is "a sphere of purest agony on the point of bursting." Which raises the question: Why bursting? Is bursting something that spheres of agony tend to do?

Turns out Crazy Dude accidentally caused the magical blow-up, because Shai'tan 'tainted' his magical power source in retaliation for some attack. Casualties: His lovely wife and tiny adorable wide-eyed children. Their adorable dead eyes ask WHY, Crazy Dude, WHY?

Crazy Dude is understandably upset about this, letting loose "a scream that came from his depths" (perhaps somewhere around the bladder, or the small intestine). Pausing only to treat us to Satan Guy and Crazy Dude taking mutual involuntary steps back from the other's dramatic gaze, Crazy Dude teleports away and immolates himself in a burst of melodrama so intense that it leaves a volcano in his place. THE DRAMA: IT IS VOLCANIC. Satan Guy is all "I'll get you next time, Gadget!"

Side note: The magic that's tainted is "the male half of the power that drove the universe." Oh great, the male/female 'divide' canonized as part of the cosmos. Sigh. Can I just tell you now how much I am not looking forward to seeing that elaborated on?

My Impressions So Far: Dialogue is not The Eye of the World's strong point; it's steeped in melodramatic exclamations and heavy-handed exposition. The plot seems interesting once you wade through the overwritten narrative - which seems to be a pastiche of Old Timey Writing. Character? Can't tell yet. I'll get back to you on that once actual characters show up.

As prologues go, this isn't too bad, and I'm not the biggest fan of prologues. It introduces a Big Story Problem, and starts in the middle of Horrible Things happening. I imagine this Tainted Penis Magic is important, and this is a better way to learn it than to be told that. Unfortunately, Jordan doesn't seem to have applied this principle to, well, anything else in the chapter.

Next time: Chapter 1!

A Question of Content

2010-02-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

(read: what the fuck am I supposed to talk about here)

I've spent the past few days trying to puzzle out a nagging question: I've had this blog since 2007, and in all that time I never figured out what to do with it.

My original idea was that I'd use the blog to bitch about my own writing, yet I've done that very little, possibly because bitching about one's own writing is only sometimes funny, and annoying in large doses.

The most fun I've had blogging in the past few years wasn't even done here, but rather on my mostly-otherwise-abandoned Livejournal, snarking about D&D monsters. Since these were also my most popular posts (my 'most' I mean 'only'), it follows that perhaps I would do well to snark some more.

I considered reading through - and snarking about - the Twilight book series, but Cleolinda Jones has done this already, and more hilariously than I could hope to live up to. Not only that, but since she wrote those many other people have jumped on that bandwagon. So, that's kinda "out".

Which brings me to a curious problem I have.

I haven't read enough.

In an earlier post, I typed up my creative influences; the fantasy/sci-fi works, anyway. The list is noticeably devoid of many - most - popular works in the field.

To sum up this problem:

I'm working on a contemporary/urban fantasy novel, yet in that genre the majority I've read was by Neil Gaiman. No Laurell K. Hamilton. No Jim Butcher.
I'm working on an epic fantasy novel, yet the majority I've read was by George R. R. Martin. No Robert Jordan. No Terry Brooks.
I'm working on the script for a science fiction television show pilot (in spaaaaaaaaace), yet I've mostly just seen Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars (not even a TV series). No Babylon 5. No Farscape.

Why have I not read these books (or watched these shows)? Oh, various reasons. Maybe I always planned to but never followed through. Or maybe I just didn't get around to them. Some of them I've been actively discouraged from reading - they may be popular, I'm told, but they're crap. (Like Twilight, or so I'm told.)

Yet, if I'm going to be a respectable aspiring speculative fiction writer, aren't I kind of obligated to read these? Eh? A bitter pill, perhaps...

But on the other hand, if I can read them and tear them apart (or praise them) on this blog, then maaaaaayyyyybe Robert Jordan's twenty-billion-word super-mega-opus starts to look a little better. And after all, I did promise "snark" in my new blog subtitle. (And then my snarky D&D posts may look a little less out of place, and I can bring them over here, in from the cold of LiveJournal. Or I can leave them there forever, like a gleefully bad parent. Either way.)

So, first on my list: Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time."

On the New Blog Title (For Now)

2010-02-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

"Fairies, Sex, and Spacemen."

Third blog title I've used so far. The first was the evocative "Goldfish and Needles" - I liked that one, but neither goldfish nor needles have appeared on this blog, nor are likely to appear in the future. The second was the humdrum but utilitarian "Jake Jesson's Blog".

I think I like this one.

I almost titled it "The Mystical Vagina of Time" after the title of a (sadly, fictional) book series referred to in this post by Jay Lake on the larval stages of the common American speculative fiction writer:

After re-reading volumes I through XVII of A Game of Throne-Captains of the Mystical Vagina of Time, the writer will exclaim, “I could do better than this! A monkey could do better than this!” Many amazing careers have been launched from this moment. It should be honored, much like any moment of conception, possibly by bunking out for a wet wipe and a smoke afterward.

As I am one of these aforementioned larval American speculative fiction writers, it seemed somehow appropriate - if a little obscure.

Then a friend suggested "Fairies and Spacemen", in reference to my current works-in-progress and my plans for this blog, in reference to the poem / song Daisies, Cats, and Spacemen. I wanted a third word; I put "Sex" in there as a joke, and thought "Hang on - that could work."

Possible downside: I may now be contractually obliged to mention "sex" in every post. Hm...

Speaking of which, next post: Blog content!

Influences

2010-01-29T16:59:00.000-08:00

As an Aspiring Writer, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to list as many influences as I could, and how exactly the works listed influenced me. And I was right! So here it is.

I limited things to sci-fi and fantasy for convenience's sake. I'm sure I've missed a few, but c'est la vie.

Narnia - The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe and the Magician's Nephew - the first fantasy books I ever read. TLTW&TW haunted my dreams - literally - after I read it and it mysteriously vanished (I think my dad threw it out).
The television show "Gargoyles" - a huge influence; to the point where I try to include gargoyles in stuff I write in the same way fans of Tolkien include elves. Shit happened in Gargoyles; characters changed and evolved, and there were consequences to actions that didn't go away by the end of the episode.
The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind & Oblivion, expansive video game worlds which I spent hours and hours in. A great deal of what I write was dreamt up by running around in these worlds. Since I played them before seeing LotR, they created my taste in fantasy settings: Weird (especially Morrowind) and deep and convoluted, and damned contradictory. (In so few fantasy worlds do I see historians contradicting each other as much as they do in the real world.)
Lord of the Rings - but the movies, not the books; it was the acting not the writing that convinced me the characters were real, and the imagery that sucked me in. I read the books after I'd seen the last movie. I thought they were well done (no shit) but they didn't have any of the impact on my psyche that the movies did.
The Star Wars universe - even more so than the actual movies, since I bought the visual dictionaries before I'd ever seen one of the movies. Oh and I saw The Phantom Menace before the original trilogy. Oops?
Neil Gaiman's work - American Gods, Stardust, Sandman, Neverwhere - Gaiman is probably still my favorite author. He writes people that I believe are real, and thus I believe his stories are real.
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett's Good Omens & Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy convinced me of how important humor is.
The Animorphs series - introduced me, along with Gargoyles, to the idea that even in a bizarre world, horrible things can and should happen to your characters. Is also the reason I go in for psychological realism so much. Animorphs was about the costs and morality of war - not bad for a young adult series about shape-shifting kids fighting alien mind-controlling slugs.
George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire - what singlehandedly convinced me to write epic fantasy myself. Amazingly written characters and plot. Also reinforced my conviction that consequences matter - in other words, yes, you should let your characters die.
Certain Choose Your Own Adventure books (an alien world in the center of the Earth, searching for Nessie, memorable deaths on the third planet from Altair)
Various Mythology works - Perseus slaying the Gorgon, the Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts...
The 1982 movie The Flight of Dragons - I think I only saw a couple scenes from this movie, and all I remember thinking was that the animation was lame, and how cool it was that the writers came up with 'scientific' explanations for the way the dragons worked.
Octavia Butler's work - Wild Seed, Xenogenesis (aka Lilith's Brood nowadays), Kindred - Wild Seed in particular struck me very hard and is one reason (besides Animorphs) that I love shapeshifters. And why great writing quality is important to me.
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game - this book had a dramatic effect on me as a kid, and reading Card's how-to-write-sci-fi-and-fantasy book is part of the reason I wanted to write sf/f.
Neon Genesis Evangelion - yup, an anime. Sci-fi. Weird shit and the best sixty seconds of a single frame with no dialogue I've ever seen.
Dragon Ball Z. There, I said it. One of the influences I'm a little less proud of, thanks to the crap writing. But great fight scenes. Though I never knew that sometimes thirty minutes could last literally several hours.
Various 90's superhero cartoon series (Batman, Superman, X-Men, Spiderman) and books about superheroes - not the comics; I almost never read actual comics as a kid.
Harry Potter - for all the reasons everyone else loved Harry Potter.
Larry Niven's Ringworld - I'd never before read 'adult' sci-fi in which I was SO engaged by the characters.
Jules Verne - ironically only a biography of Verne, since I couldn't get ahold of his actual books as a kid. But the ideas were very inspiring!
The Matrix - for the sheer joy of the visuals. I want to evoke that kind of imagery in what I write. I also liked the apparent plot depth of the first one. (I said "apparent".)
Battlestar Galactica - last on the list only because it's the only recent thing I 'consumed' that I've felt seriously influenced by. I loved the darkness, the complex characters, the gritty realism.

You'll notice the absence of all but two famous epic fantasy series (three if you count Narnia - plus of course the Odyssey), and not that many Great Works. Some would call this list of influences remarkably paltry - I mean, there's children's television shows and a young adult book series high up on there, not to mention video games! - but more on that in a future post.

On A Personal Note

2010-01-23T01:57:00.000-08:00

I just spent upwards of two hours manually deleting a whole ton of spam comments that built up mysteriously while I was off the Internet for the better part of last year.

Granted, I was also doing some other (more useful, less onerous) things at the time as well, but still. By the end I was doing it by rote and was astonished to discover that there was nothing left to delete. I thought something had gone wrong.

Oddly, the spam was mostly concentrated on certain posts. Posting On Sleep Deprivation had a little under a hundred comments sporting porn, herbal remedies, and mysterious messages in Russian. Meanwhile, my brief and inane post on Twitter generated nearly that amount in Japanese-language spam.

Why? Only the Blogger deities know. Though maybe if I spoke Russian or Japanese, I'd be closer to an answer.

On Blogging

2010-01-22T12:18:00.000-08:00

(Stream of consciousness warning.)

You'd think I'd be a good blog person. I love the Internet, and I love babbling to complete strangers in written form. Yet, every time I get really into continuously updating some form of blog or online journal, life explodes on me. Or even if it doesn't explode, something happens wherein I lose regular internet access, and I just let the blog slide.

That happened over much of this year, actually. Part of being a homeless couch surfer (that's me!): whoever you're "surfing couches" with had better have internet. My college has internet, but I'm usually there for, yanno, school. My schedule is crazy otherwise, between the two jobs that barely fund the gas it takes to drive all over creation to get there. (Okay, only one of the jobs literally barely covers the gas required to get there. The other is very part-time too, though.)

It got bad enough that I had to go on hiatus for the script reading internship I had, because it paid nothing and wasn't likely to go anywhere until I'd kept at it for years, yet consumed lots of time (to do it right, anyway). And I loved that internship, even with the overall awful scripts I read and critiqued with more thoroughness and love than the authors seemed to put into a single scene. It was fun. My bosses liked me and my coverage. And I hope to go back. Shame.

Well, I'm temporarily living with a close friend who just got Internet. Will these mean I try keeping my blog up again? We'll see.

Dungeons & Dragons: Satan's Game

2009-06-08T22:18:00.000-07:00

(If you don't get the title, look up Dead Alewives. Really.)

On my other blog, in the bowels of LiveJournal, I do a series of posts entitled "The Monsters of Dungeons and Dragons", in which I explain the monsters of Dungeons and Dragons. Since I started the series, a new edition of D&D has come out. I haven't got to that yet. I'm still in the letter "H" of the old Monster Manual! Maybe I'll never finish this, but who cares - it'll be fun while I still feel like it. ...Which I guess is sort of circular.

So far I had 15 parts, and now part 16 is online. A list of links for your convenience:

Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

And now... The Monsters of Dungeons and Dragons, Part XVI, from Gorgon to Half-Fiend. Read them if you're in the mood to be entertained by nerdy things!

(I'd post them here, but I don't know how to duplicate the LiveJournal-specific codes. Perhaps if I figure that out...)

Pants On Fire

2009-06-08T22:08:00.001-07:00

My computer breaking down was the start of a series of rather unfortunate events (apologies to Lemony Snicket). In summary, ...well, can the summary. Suffice to say that my lacking-in-paid-employment status is entering dangerous levels. Much of my time has been taken up with absolving this.
But no sirree, this blog is not here to whine. Well, not only here to whine. So expect more posts in the coming days!

EDIT: Or not. I lied.

How You Know That Something's Gone Terribly Wrong

2009-02-23T13:47:00.001-08:00

...When your laptop computer begins making funny scritchy noises, and a dainty ribbon of dusty smoke rises from the back vent.

I'm off to the Apple Store to get it looked at. Until then, posts shall be in short supply!

Oblivion

2009-02-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

I've been playing video games again a little bit lately. Well, one video game: Oblivion, being the fourth installment in the fantasy role-playing game series, "The Elder Scrolls".

I play video games, as most people do, for a variety of reasons. A less entertaining reason is that it's a stress reliever. A more entertaining reason is that I enjoy being in the role of someone who can accomplish spectacular things in other worlds, living through dramatic stories with no consequences to myself but emotional ones. I want to call lightning with the power of my mind, find ancient supernatural artifacts in underground caves, leap off mountains and survive. This is why I tend to play video games like "Oblivion".

"Oblivion", and the Elder Scrolls series in general, is a roleplaying game, and is somewhat unique in the video game world. The game starts you off as a forgotten prisoner in a dungeon; what you did to be put in the dungeon is never explained. As the game opens, the Emperor of the continent, voiced by Patrick Stewart, comes traipsing through your prison cell. His guards are very annoyed to see you there - apparently your cell houses a secret escape route from the city (if only you'd known!) and the Emperor is being chased by assassins. It looks like a bureaucratic mix-up stuck you in the middle of this - or maybe Destiny, because the Emperor recognizes your face. It seems he's seen you in his dreams. Before the next few hours are out, he'll be dead, and you'll be tasked with the mission of finding his illegitimate surviving heir and delivering to him a supernatural heirloom.

The story continues from there, of course, but if you just follow through that story and nothing else, you're missing the point. The world of "Oblivion" (and its predecessors "Morrowind" and "Daggerfall") is huge and open. It is over 16 square miles wide in 'real' absolute terms, with giant cities, small towns, open tracts of wilderness, rivers, mountains, swamps, forests, and people everywhere; that's not even counting the alien world of Oblivion (a combined metaphor for outer space and hell, believe it or not) which the player can venture to. It's a world to get lost in.

Sure, technology puts limits on the realism; some of the world is randomly generated, the people who populate the world have limited dialogue, and, well... you're playing a video game. It's as unrealistic on the edges as you would ultimately expect.

Still, "Oblivion" is powerful in that, within the loose bounds of the fantasy world provided, you can be anyone. You choose and design your own character, appearance, personality, skills and physical traits. It's easy to design a range of characters who do completely different things in this other world, live in different cities, befriend different people. This is the appeal of the role-playing game; god forbid I play a game like "World of Warcraft", in which the possibilities are truly infinite because you're surrounded by real people. It's this kind of thing that turns people into addicts, who sacrifice their outside social lives on the altar of a fantastic world where they can live lives they never could in the outside world.

Not I. There's an edge of frustration involved, and for me, it makes me want to write. A game like "Oblivion" has an inevitable story problem; it's sharply limited despite the openness of the world. There's only a few conversation options, and an ultimately finite number of unique stories you can experience in the world. Inevitably, most are predictable, and the ones that are surprising still amount to very very short stories once you subtract the amount of fighting and looting and exploring that you do to get from point A to point B. The beautiful world of the game triggers inspiration; walking down a woodland road in the rain holding an enchanted sword gives one a sense of possibility, a sense of wondering, for me, what this character that I have so carefully created might be doing or feeling walking down this road in another world. The game, good as it is, cannot but fall short of these speculations. It's from these frustrations that stories can be born.

So

2009-02-07T02:22:00.000-08:00

I just realized that my posts on Blogger for the last month of January totaled more than either of the past two years altogether. I didn't realize I'd been that bad with updates. On the other hand, now I feel a little more accomplished.

The 80's-90's Daycare Sexual Abuse Hysteria

2009-02-06T18:50:00.001-08:00

I have this tendency, a tendency in which I am certainly not alone in possessing, to become interested in completely random subjects and devote excessive periods to studying them. I find this tendency gets worse when I'm sick, as I am now.

Subject of the hour: the day care sex abuse hysteria from the late 1980's to early 1990's. This was a moral panic touched off by an increase in day care centers and parents becoming insecure about them. A mentally ill grandmother and a schizophrenic alcoholic brought up some rather crazed accusations involving quite spectacular stuff - orgies, torture, child pornography rings, secret hidden tunnels, livestock and pet butchery, blood drinking, feces eating, Satanic worship and rituals... some daycare providers were even had a Satanic power of flight. All of this (minus the flight, which was generally ignored) was held credible by people across the nation, law enforcement officials and courts who rigged or forced convictions, and of course parents who knew 'in their hearts' that this had been true all along.

Of course, it wasn't. Kids were bullied into confessing, the lives of those accused were completely ruined, and, more subtly, I suspect some actual abuse cases were pushed under the rug once they all got the taint of the hysteria. And now arrogant young folk like me look back on this and say, "What were they thinking?"

Moral panics. They're fascinating things, really.

This article from the New York Times gives an interesting take on the whole thing. A choice quote:

In the prototypical witch hunts in Europe and in the Massachusetts colony, the accused were often scapegoats for some calamity -- disease, bad harvests, the birth of a deformed child. In the witch hunts of the 80's, there was no such injury to be avenged or repaired. There was, however, a psychological need to be fulfilled. Our willingness to believe in ritual abuse was grounded in anxiety about putting children in day care at a time when mothers were entering the work force in unprecedented numbers. It was as though there were some dark, self-defeating relief in trading niggling everyday doubts about our children's care for our absolute worst fears -- for a story with monsters, not just human beings who didn't always treat our kids exactly as we would like; for a fate so horrific and bizarre that no parent, no matter how vigilant, could have ever prevented it.

Many of those of my generation (I'm 23) may look at this with bemusement, as something 'our parents' worried about, something irrelevant, even, if an era post-9/11. But then again, most of those who fell for this craze lived through or had parents who lived through at least one World War; we are all equally susceptible to this brand of madness, I suspect.

Though I have to admit, as a writer, my first thought isn't so much "What can I, or we as a society, do to stop something like this from happening again?" so much as "How can I use this in one of the stories I'm writing?" I take comfort in the fact that my immorality is a shared one.

2009-01-26T10:23:00.000-08:00

So, now I've got Twitter. I couldn't decide whether to sign up as "jakejesson" (so obvious!) or "redwinggreen7" (my old screenname - so awkward!), so I took a third option.

You can find me here: http://twitter.com/thedeadlymoose

Anyone else do le Twittre?

Update: I am now following Barack Obama, Neil Gaiman, and John Cleese. Of these Neil is by far the most interesting, as he appears to "tweet" constantly. Addict!

This... I ... Gwah?!

2009-01-20T03:09:00.000-08:00

I just watched the newest Battlestar Galactica episode, and can't post about it here because it would be an outrage to subject random unsuspecting people stumbling on this blog to such spoilers...

Luckily, that's what LiveJournal is for, with its "lj-cuts" and such.

So, thoughts after the jump (warning: emoticons!):

(Click here to jump to the post!)

But They Didn't Mean To

2009-01-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

(Warning: Analysis Post! If you don't like Reading Stuff (maybe Too Much) Into Things, then read no further!)

Open thread by Jennifer Kesler at the Hathor Legacy (or: "The Search For Good Female Characters"), asking the question: "Does intent matter?"

"Intent", in this case, refers to whether or not an author meant to stick elements that could be seen as racist/sexist/homophobic/etc into their work. (And if you've had any involvement in race/gender/queer/etc studies, such elements are more obvious, and if not, well, take my word - or Google's - word for it, they're common than you might think.) If the nonwhite people always die while the white people survive*, if women are all simpering weaklings next to male Adonises, if all protagonists ever are white males for no apparent reason, well, something might be off, some would say...

But wait! This is a book you like! Or a show you watch all the time! Racism? Sexism? You assholes! My show's/book's creator wouldn't entertain such a thing! In fact, he/she's a proud feminist, too!

There. You see? You were just talking about intent.

Yeah, that's how it goes. I've done it plenty myself, especially since certain shows I love can be particularly bad about this. (That's a post for another day, though.)

Kesler argues, in short:

...I believe a creator’s intent doesn’t matter. Sexism can occur without the presence of a sexist person, therefore we can talk about sexism without being asked to prove that the people behind the sexism are sexist.

My opinion, tangentially: I'd argue that always putting Straight White Males front and center is as much an artistic issue as it is a social one; I imagine (and Kesler acknowledges in her post) that many or most creators just do this because it doesn't occur to them to do otherwise - a lazy adherence to cliche more than anything else, and as such, something that ought not to be done so freakin' much.

Creator intent should matter to discussion in terms of the goal of pure social change; attacking a creator and branding them as 'racist' (or, I dunno, calling an avowed feminist creator a rapist) isn't gonna get them to listen to you. (This is certainly not Kesler's standpoint, but it's certainly out there.) In terms of pure analysis? It matters only a little, I suppose, and then only so much as you care about analyzing where the author is coming from as part of your critique. From an artistic standpoint, the same also holds true (though obviously with lower stakes, but more pertinent to the supposed point of my blog!).

* For your amusement value, also check out the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality over at TV Tropes. Sorted by age, sexual orientation, love interest (by genre), race, role, race, aesthetics, personality, flaws, 'virtues', species, and occupation! (Yes, I love my TV Tropes. Even if it does ruin your life.)

Dungeons and More Dungeons

2009-01-09T23:45:00.000-08:00

I like 4th Edition.

There. I said it.

But I don't JUST like it. In fact, I think it's my favorite D&D edition so far.

If this is a WoW clone, then bring on the WoW clones.

Making Friends In Fiction

2009-01-08T23:47:00.000-08:00

It may not surprise you to learn the following: people are more likely become friends with people they bump into often. Social psychology calls this propinquity, and it goes like this: if you're Bob's next door neighbor, and you pass each other all the time going in and out of the place, odds are you and Bob will become friends. If you and Bob have different schedules, it's less likely you'll become friends. If you and Bob live on different floors, but you both live near a stairway, you'll more likely become friends. You're more likely to stay friends if you're around each other more. Anyone who's moved has experienced the downside of this - that even if you're pretty close friends with someone, you may well fall out of touch if you don't easily run into each other often.

(A personal aside, for a moment: Of course, this has happened to me. I've just got off of Facebook (if you don't know what that is, type it in Google search or get off the Internet before you hurt yourself), after messaging a couple of relatively close friends from UC Berkeley, friends whom I have not spoken to in months. I graduated mere months ago; and already I've fallen out of touch with most of my friends there. Even those I was closest to - for the time being at least, I talk to them only sporadically.

Ah, guilt. It's so much fun.)

In fiction land, I rarely see this concept at work. Characters are more likely to become fast friends, and remain so barring a dramatic falling out) after bumping into each other once. This sounds perfectly logical - why wouldn't you want to be friends with someone you obviously get along with well? - but in Real Life, you may never really connect with that awesome person you met on the bus that one time, because even though you've got their phone number, you'll never run into them in your daily life.

It's an open question whether this is really a problem. For one fiction tends to depict the interesting rather than the everyday; 'propinquity' is firmly of the everyday. Becoming longtime friends with someone you hardly see happens in real life all the time; it's just that more of your friends than not will probably be people you run into all the time.

However, if/when this doesn't hold true for characters in fiction, I'm not sure anyone would notice. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this trope operating if I didn't watch so many sci-fi/fantasy ensemble shows, genres that aren't known for their psychological realism. In the TV series Angel, for instance - a series I love - sometimes you get the idea that Los Angeles is empty of all people except the main cast, demons/vampires/monsters, and victims. That goes for its parent show Buffy, too, depending on the season. These two shows are giants of the genre in the televised field.

So, how much should a fiction writer take propinquity into account? Is this the sort of thing that can safely - even happily - be ignored?

Existentialism, Dirt Cheap

2009-01-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

(I wrote this post on June 16, 2008, about six months ago. I just rediscovered it, and decided to put it up, before it gets any older. Oh, Blogger, saving all my drafts - I love you so!

WARNING: The following post may contain trace amounts of whining, and jobless-college-graduate angst. Read at your own risk.)

***

"Life. Don't talk to me about life."
- Marvin the Paranoid Android (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams)

"What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action."
- Søren Kierkegaard

What does one type about in a blog, eh? I've had a blog of some form or another for years now, yet I don't believe I've quite got the hang of it. I'm starting to believe that perhaps worrying about this is, in itself, part of Missing The Point.

So I am, indeed, going to talk about life. After all, is this not a hallmark of my fledgling generation - the habit of laying bare everything for the entire world to see?

I am a college graduate, less than a month out of one of the most prestigious universities in the nation (I'm still wondering how I managed to sneak in!), and like so many other recent college graduates, I have not yet found a job.

It's not as if I didn't anticipate this uncomfortable scenario. I'd long realized I wanted to "create" - to write, to create art, to work on films - and I figured yes, but twenty billion other people would like to do the same thing, and a good percentage of those probably are getting degrees as we speak. Somehow, through hubris or - "something", I felt I had to be "different".

I chose to take a "unique" route through college; I designed my own course of study. I studied psychology, literature, anthropology, social theory, art, writing, ethnic/gender/queer studies... etcetera, etcetera. This selection of classes was chosen with the goal of finding out as much about how the world works - what makes people tick. I figured that would be my "edge".

So did it work?

(I left off the post here, amusingly enough. Since writing this, I've gained an excellent internship, but still no paying job. So, uh, we'll see, eh?)

Terminator, Genre Movies, and "Standards"

2009-01-05T23:55:00.000-08:00

This may qualify as being a little late to the party (okay, it does qualify), but the hype machine behind the latest Terminator movie has been building, from action figures that spoil plot points to a shiny new movie trailer.

The first two Terminator films, particularly the second installment, are generally thought of as action films with brains behind them (okay, not as much the first one, though it's a solid film). I won't go into the plot behind them; in case you've been living under a rock for the past twenty-plus years, there's always Wikipedia. They're notable in particular for having one of the most well-drawn female characters this side of the science fiction ghetto, Sarah Connor. (Talk about a character arc, too - she goes from damsel-in-distress waitress to badass warrior hero in the space of two films. But I digress.)

After those two movies came Terminator 3, a 'meh' movie with some great action scenes, boring characters, mediocre writing, and the complete absence of the central character of the first two films, Sarah Connor. (She's killed off by cancer offscreen.)

After that came a still-running TV series, which, as if to thumb its nose at the mistakes of the third movie, calls itself "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles". Awkward name, but straight to the point, no? Ironically, recent episodes of the show have occasionally suffered from too much subtlety and experimental writing and a dearth of good action sequences. More on this in later posts, as I'm still following this show.

The newest Terminator movie, weirdly titled "Terminator: Salvation", is set in the post-apocalyptic future the first three movies lead up to. After the sheer disappointment of Terminator 3, exactly no one was interested. So the producers and director pulled what TV Tropes calls a "Cue Cullen", which is when the people involved in a blockbuster flick with bad buzz "bring out the one person that makes you go, 'Holy crap, this is going to be awesome.'" They cast Christian Bale, rare combination of Action Star and 'Real' Actor.

There was just one problem, which brings me to the point of this post, a problem I read all about in a months-old interview with pretentiously named director McG.

"Initially (Bale) told me to 'f**k right off.' He said it had to be about character, not explosions. He said, 'If you can get it too a place where it can be read on a stage like a play, with no action or special effects, then I'll do it.'

A few drafts later, Bale signed on.

I still have no idea whether or not "Terminator Salvation" will turn out to be either well-written or entertaining. Either way, this situation is an interesting sign of the times. Once upon a time, I hear tell, genre films only needed a cool idea and neat special effects (or the written equivalent, in plain ol' prose fiction land). That's still the case now, but standards are rising across the board - make no mistake, if Terminator Salvation is a success, it will be because people expect great things out of Bale, not because of the explosions in the trailers. I don't think it's a coincidence that two of the most popular sci-fi/action films of last year were Iron Man and The Dark Knight; Iron Man had a great director and a well-written and well-acted central character, and The Dark Knight... well, I hardly need to add to the critical gushing over that film, do I?

If this is becoming an era of higher standards for genre fiction, then I wholeheartedly embrace it. I love pretty special effects and spiffy fantastical ideas, but I love good plot, character and writing even more - and I hardly think I'm alone.

UPDATE: After watching Terminator Salvation, I have to wonder how bad McG's original drafts were if that was supposed to be a character-based script. I mean, I enjoyed the film on balance, but seriously.

On Wand Decay, Part Two

2009-01-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

I was running through my old blog posts, wondering why I don't update more (and resolving to do so, once again), and I realized that back in July, I missed a fascinating comment by one Luke Maciak of Terminally Incoherent. My original post was questioning why Magic Items Of Magicness never break down in stories in the fantasy genre. Luke's response merits its own (if very, very late) post.

Luke points out:

I'd imagine that in a world where magic would actually exist an enchanted sword would sometimes need maintenance or recasting of said enhancement - especially after heavy use.

Most RPG's both pen and paper or computer based do have some restrictions on magic items that zap things, or cast spells themselves. Wands and staves usually have "charges" and once you drain them you either have to wait till they recharge or the item is simply spent and must be re-enchanted or discarded.

Additive or buffing items (like the Mighty Sword of +1 Strength) usually never get depleted however. They probably should.

There's an interesting counterpoint for these statements: since magic is itself imaginary, why does it have to follow a particular set of rules? Who are we to say that magic power requires maintainable? Some would argue, further, that magic doesn't need to seem real in fantasy fiction - after all, isn't that missing the point?

To me, it's a question of believability. Magic isn't real, of course. If an author wants to go for believability, created a feeling of this-could-really-exist, then drawing real-world parallels is more important. So a magic sword running low on batteries, so to speak, can be more believable than a magic sword that never runs out of power. Everything in our world is governed by rules - magic should be the same, to a certain extent. (All fiction bends real-world rules to serve the plot, as necessary)

The importance of believability depends highly on the story; in epic fantasy (along the lines of Lord of the Rings) treating magic from a perspective of realism is a bad idea, but in contemporary fantasy this is more important.

Luke comments further:

As for cast spells many systems require skill checks before casting and have miscast effects which work similar to "fumble" rules for physical skill checks.

In most games I played the duration of spells that can be cast by PC's is strictly defined and the caster must periodically renew the spell to keep it in action.

Spell 'durations' are something familiar to anyone who's played a fantasy videogame or tabletop role-playing game; they exist because strict boundaries on character power are required to make the game fun. (Fumble rules - rules for what happens when someone screws up casting an in-game spell - are there primarily for entertainment value.) This is a principle generally ignored in fantasy fiction itself, though; usually the writers just "handwave" how the magic powers of magicalness actually work. If someone is unaffected by a spell, for instance, it's because he or she is "too powerful". If someone fails to accomplish something with magic, it's because they "weren't powerful" enough".

Certain fiction series attempt to establish "power levels" for characters, which are inevitably fudged or ignored soon afterwards. Notably, in books based on RPGs, rules for spells are generally ignored as convenient for the plot.

I've yet to see an effective set of (non-mystical) rules governing magic outside of fantasy games. The closest we get is the Midichlorian Explanation (also referred to as Doing In The Wizard - warning, clicking that link may ruin your life), where the question of Where Magic Comes From is answered using technobabble, science fiction style. All this usually does is annoy readers/viewers (see fan reaction to the new Star Wars movies explaining that the Force comes from "midichlorians"), and rarely affects how magic is used in the story anyway.

Doomy Doom Doom

2009-01-02T20:19:00.000-08:00

Now that we know, thanks to the Pope, that nontraditional sex - gay or non-procreative, for instance - is destroying mankind (and also the rain forests), David Isaak tells us all exactly how much ecological damage we can expect to do with the rampant non-procreative sex we all may or may not be having.

...On a completely unrelated note, I cannot stop listening to "Super Trouper" as sung by Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!, a film which I've not even seen completely. My family's been playing it in the background for the last few days, and... well, draw your own conclusions. (And now, thanks to Wikipedia, I now know more about 70's-80's "pop supergroups" than I ever expected to...)

It's 2009!

2009-01-01T20:06:00.000-08:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Boom De Yada, Boom De Yada

2008-11-03T19:41:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is Election Day, and also the close of the most intense, twisty, weird, entertaining and dreadful presidential campaigns... possibly ever. People are saying we're on the verge of a turning point in our history. Maybe we are, or maybe it's all hyperbole. But no matter what happens, remember this...

Not Schizophrenia At All

2008-07-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

I've spent the past few days alternately working on job hunting, and writing. I ended up writing three completely distinct opening chapters for three completely distinct novels. The word "schizophrenic" seems to be one that comes up a bit when I mention this. But as I mentioned in my last post, I am totally not schizophrenic.

Totally not. Not even a little.

Really.

Somehow, all three of these chapters ended up smack dab in the fantasy genre, more or less. Clearly I've been immersed in nerd culture for far too long. Or just the right amount of time, depending on your perspective.

I've got plenty of short story ideas that are perfectly Mainstream and Literary and have nothing to do with the fantasy genre, but somehow all my more novelistic ideas tend to be either fantasy, sci-fi, or a strange mix of the two. (Okay, not really so strange: it stopped being strange when Star Wars did it. But still, Star Wars never had elves, and it didn't have real honest to goodness dragons.) This may say something deep and insightful about my personality, or it may just be how my mental processes happen to be going at the time.

Just so long as I don't become one of those sf/f writers who uses the genre to disguise the fact that they had shitty plots and no real characters at all...

Anyway. Back to job-hunting.

Schizophrenia

2008-07-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, I was teaching a DeCal class at UC Berkeley on comics. (DeCal classes are student-run classes, one of the many unique features of UC Berkeley. Link!) It was the first lecture of the semester, which is always the most awkward because no one knows you and you don't know them, and half the people in there are ambivalent about showing up anyway and will probably drop the class by next session.

I gave a very rambly lecture on the history of comics. Somewhere in there I mixed up my topics; silver ages and bronze ages tend to twist your tongue when you aren't sleeping much. (Fact: UC college students never sleep much.) I looked across the classroom at confused faces.

"Sorry for the schizophrenic lecture," I said, or something about that. Then I ad-libbed a Humorous Joke to Defuse the Situation. "It's because I'm ... well ... schizophrenic," I deadpanned.

Silence. Students gave confused glances at each other while I blithely leaped to the next topic. I didn't even realize the significance of the confused glances until someone asked me after class: "Are you really schizophrenic?"

"No!" I replied, astonished.

"Because you said you were, and everyone thought you were serious..."

So let me just clarify: I am not schizophrenic. Schizophrenia, according to the infallible Wikipedia, is "a mental disorder characterized by abnormalities in the perception or expression of reality" which "most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction." While I'm sure that fits most people who might read blogs like this one (har, har), I've never experienced an auditory hallucination (that's like visual hallucination, but with your ears), my paranoid and bizarre delusions are confined to the imaginary people who live inside my head, and I prefer to think of my speech and thinking as not so much "disorganized" as "creatively reorganized".

I ... er, just thought I'd mention.

Was I supposed to be doing something? I can't remember. Uh-oh.

I Keep Wanting To Call It "The Axe"

2008-05-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Donald Westlake's The Ax, one of my many acquisitions from Berkeley's mah-vel-ous used book stores. The book's the kind of piece of work people describe as "hard-hitting"; it's about a guy who gets downsized right out the door from his company, can't get a new job, and finally finds his dream job after getting increasingly desparate over a couple years. The problem is that someone else already has his dream job. Our narrator decides that the solution is to kill that someone else - but first, he's got to kill the other people on the market for a job who have a better chance of getting his dream job than him.

It's a good book, very tightly plotted - in non-buzzword lingo, the story gets right to the point - and it really is difficult to stop reading once you've started. Unless you've got a repulsion for rooting for an effective serial killer. I did wonder why, on the Character side of things, would someone like this think to resort to killing. The fact that he kills is reasonable (as much as it can be) within the story's context, but it's not super clear what gave him that idea in the first place. It's not like crazy murderous ideas don't happen to Joe Average Ordinary Person, but we tend to bend under the iron hand of Social Tradition and put those naughty thoughts right out of our minds. Then again, worrying about this is kind of missing the point. The book's clearly in the realm of social satire, in all its bitter pointedness. The ending is rather surprising in that he neither gets caught nor 'redeemed' in the way these tales usually go. And being surprising is always a plus.

I've got a question, though: [SPOILER ALERT!] Would someone like this really THINK to resort to killing - and do it so well?

Square Peg, Meet Round Hole

2008-05-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

I hate academic writing. I loathe it. I'm in love with the colloquial. I like swearing for effect. That's a good way to get university teachers to hate you. Don't get me wrong - I love academic theory, and I'm a huge nerd. I just hate the writing. Why, oh why, must good theory be tainted by practices like using twenty billion words where one would suffice?

Of course, I also hate academic writing because I'm not very good at it. When I'm forced to do it enough, I find myself developing new and interesting writing problems to overcome. For example, a strong inclination towards the practice of utilizing an egregious number of unintelligibly lengthy phrases to - oh dear, there I go again. I meant to say, I find myself using too many words to explain things. Hell, I've done that on this very blog. I'm probably doing it now!

I just wrote two 30-page papers on a couple subjects I find fascinating: a senior thesis on nontraditional stories in contemporary graphic novels ('comics', if you will), and how queer sexuality is dealt with in fantasy fiction. I keep looking them over and thinking about how much more I'd like them if I'd written them as blog posts. True, there's no way I would've spent hours, days, weeks on research on a blog post, but still...

On a side note, I've discovered the Blogger saves all your drafts. All of them. Ever. Which means that I officially love Blogger, because I'm constantly doing about 500 things at once, and often can't just sit down and write a journal post all in one go. Problem solved! Maybe.

Now Anticipating Co-Writers' Block

2008-05-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

My sister text-messaged me a couple weeks ago with a message that said, basically, that "We need to get together sometime and right a book" about our childhood. (She meant "write", in case I needed to point that out.) This isn't a new idea; in fact, my brothers and sisters and I have been telling each other that for years now. Looking at the text message, I got the distinct feeling that the time, as they say, had come.

Pretentious? Presumptious? Everyone's had a childhood, right? Why is ours so book-worthy? Allow me to present a short version of the case, in bullet point form:

There are nine children in my family. (I'm the oldest.)
My father and mother were religious fundamentalists (well, are, though my mother's lightened up since then - I'm betting the bitter pill of getting an outside-of-religious-law divorce helped) who decided the best solution to the Dangers of the Heathen World was to ensure that we had as little contact as possible with it.
I was twelve before I met another human being close to my age. Before this, the number of children we'd previously met was four, not counting a couple cousins, who we saw about once a year.
Until I was twelve, none of us had a life outside our home. We were homeschooled, knew no outsiders, and weren't allowed into the front yard. (No fences to shield us from neighborly eyes.)
My father developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder over the course of the years, making our strange situation even stranger. We led a strange, ritualistic life within the four walls of our home - not counting the years we were homeless. One juicy detail: In the last years, our house itself was wired with cameras!
Everything, of course, went dramatically to shit, in the kind of story that sounds like you'd made it up If It Hadn't Really Happened. (Adding drama: the fact that most of this story takes place smack dab in the middle of Orange County, for an added dose of "It Could Happen Here"!)
More, uglier details that are a little too unpleasant for this particular blog post, but very dramatic nonetheless.
And, of course, there's the dramatic story of how we were introduced to The Outside World, and thereafter incorporated ourselves into it.

I've graduated from Berkeley this very week, and I'll be living down in Orange County again after two years, where the rest of my family still lives. Perfect timing. And, as for writing a book... hey, I'm already writing a book! I've taken writing workshops, I can edit, my style is marginally passable (read: no longer makes readers want to claw their eyes out).

I won't be writing it alone, though, even if I can form the skeleton of the book. The three oldest of our family were the most affected by it, so we'll write the majority of the book. And the rest of the family might contribute. (Not all of them are old enough to even remember the crazy years; I'm 23, and we're all two years apart - do the math.) We'll see how that goes!

An interesting thought: Since our names all begin with J, that could make an interesting "by" line: "J. Jesson, J. Jesson, and J. Jesson, with contributions by J. Jesson and J. Jesson. Special thanks to: J. Jesson, J. Jesson, J. Jesson, and J. Jesson." Of course, my mother's initials are C. Murphy, which screws the whole thing up, but what can ya do?

My current thorny questions number two:

1. Shall we use our real names? Or pseudonyms? (I plan to use my real name, but I'm not sure about everyone else involved.) If real names, then do we change the names of our brothers and sisters, particularly the ones not writing this or old enough to understand? (Using middle names would screw up the whole "J" theme.) What about - and here's a thorny question - our semi-estranged father?

and 2. What do we call the book?

Perhaps I should read other memoirs - I'm sure others of this kind exist - and see how they handle this...

Why Don't Wands Break Down?

2008-03-02T20:51:00.000-08:00

From the Turkey City Lexicon (an entertaining dictionary of writing terms which I've run into several times in the past, most recently via David Isaak's blog):

AM/FM
Engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic.

I'm pretty sure this bit of the lexicon refers to the habit of certain sci-fi books to feature Futuristic Technology that never fucks up, always acts perfectly. In essence, it's Magic.

But hey, why should Fucking Magic always work so perfectly, anyway? In fiction I've read, guns jam. Cars break down. Pipes get clogged, tires go flat, doors creak, metal rusts. But I can't remember the last time I read about a magic item suffering the effects of wear and tear. This is especially noticeable in Aar Pee Gees (role-playing games) that bother to implement the effects of slamming a sword into giant rats and creepy fucking monsters but work perfectly if you're using that sword to zap something with frost magic. Even if it's completely broken (unusable, in game terms). Magic mechanics are usually limited to 'mana' or 'magicka' bars; in other words, treating magic power like batteries. (Or, as in D&D, you get a limited number of 'spell slots'.)

Outside of the RPG world, in fiction, these limitations are usually ignored. Even the books based on D&D rarely if ever pay attention to 'spells per day'. (I admit I've not read many of these books, as they're often... well, terrible.)

In the world of books, the last time I remember seeing magic breakdown appear was the second Harry Potter book, where a character breaks his wand, and it spends the rest of the book making spells rebound, blowing bubbles and making someone barf slugs for a couple hours. But this wasn't wear and tear, note, it was the result of being snapped in half. I can't think of an instance where a wand stopped working because of, say, a faulty magic spark plug.

Now, sure, it would be a little silly if Sauron's One Ring ran out of battery power if worn too long, but what about the many, many modern fictive magic worlds that are less Epic and Mythic and more down-to-earth? Something to dump in the idea pool, at least...

A Minor Euphoria

2008-01-31T11:42:00.000-08:00

I just rewrote the first scene of the novel manuscript I’ve been working on for three and a half years now, not counting the last year and a half in which I barely touched it. (Stopped at page 130.) I’ve rewritten this scene a billion times, and never liked it. I’ve kept coming back to it, over and over, and it was always painful.

This time, though, it was a breeze. I mean, it just flew onto the page, and I’m completely happy with it. ‘Course, I may reread it tomorrow and hate it, but for now, I’m a little euphoric.

The difference, I think, is that I now “know” the character, after having the whole thing in the back of my mind for that break. Her character makes more sense to me. I have a basic idea of her history. To be honest that’s what I never bothered to do with her, through the two years I workshopped the manuscript – give her a life. She was based off of a strong idea I had of her in a moment of time, over halfway through the novel’s story. I figured rewinding her wouldn’t be a problem. It was.

How much does one need to know about their characters? Some people have recommended that you write little biographies, fill out forms with details. But those feel artificial and when I try them, they tend to come off as unreal. Or stuff that really doesn’t matter to the character. But then, knowing some of the most mundane details about a fictional (or real) person’s life can be terribly illuminating. So what do you need to know?

Some authors, I'm told, just stick a character into a scene and they click, click, click. They don’t know where these characters come from and don’t care. What’s up with that? What’s going on here?

An addendum: It occurs to me that through all the times I painfully rewrote this scene, I cared more about the situation than the character. Until now, when I found a lot of it was extraneous – the scene is now under 6 pages. (Some version pushed 20.) Was I just making her jump through hoops? Was that the problem?

New Characters

2008-01-25T23:29:00.000-08:00

The first scene you write with a new character (or, heaven forbid, new characters) is probably going to be shit. I never seem to realize that.

This Post Is Not As Long As The Last One (A Webcomic Primer, Part II)

2007-10-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

...but the title is.

Something I should have mentioned in the Webcomic Primer two posts ago were two specific, significant differences between print comics and webcomics.

One: "Infinite Canvas". It's said that the first thing done with a form of new media is try to approximate what is done in the old media. A good example would be the first Bibles, printed to look like handwritten manuscripts. Another good example would be the adherence of most webcomics to the page or strip format. After all, they don't need to fit on pages, or anything for that matter! The computer screen is an infinite canvas, and webcomics can be of any shape, size, or form. But old habits die hard. (If you want to see some good examples of 'infinite canvas', go check out the website of the man who coined the term, Scott McCloud.)

You wanna know the real reason webcomics look like "real" comics, though? Most webcomic authors really want to be published in print, eventually. You can tell because most of the popular webcomics are.

Two: Webcomics are typically published one page, one strip at a time. Some (who are crazy) have daily update schedules: readers get a page a day! More common is the Monday/Wednesday/Friday format. I'm not sure why that is, exactly; maybe the acronym works out better. (Those two "T" days and the two "S" days are excluded.) Other, lazier artists (like me) use a weekly update schedule. Again for unknown reasons, the day is usually Monday. (Like mine.)

And that's how Internet comics are different from comics in 'the real world'. If you want to learn how the rest of the Internet is different from 'the real world', I can't help you. Go watch this.

Oh, and yesterday was Monday. Go read my comic.

The Differences Between Boys and Girls

2007-10-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

Remember that one Jack Nicholson movie, "As Good As It Gets"? Nicholson plays an unpleasant yet very successful writer of romance novels, Melvin Udall. At one point in the movie, a receptionist asks him, "How do you write women so well?" He answers, "I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability."

I thought of that quote sitting in my Psychology of Emotion lecture today. (Background: I attend the University of California, Berkeley. This particular class is taught by the head of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, and relatively well-known emotion researcher - he has a Wikipedia page! - Dacher Keltner.)

As Keltner points out, in U.S. culture (and, in fact, most cultures) we have "clear, robust stereotypes about the emotion profiles of men and women." We think women work one way, and men another. Hence the receptionist's question to Melvin Udall. What ARE the differences between men and women?

Popular wisdom (in this case, popular wisdom gathered through scientific survey) has it that women express and experience all emotions more than men, except for anger, pride, and contempt (the antisocial/distancing emotions). In studies, women always report more intense experiences of (and feeling more) emotions, except for desire and lust, which men vastly report higher. In studies of embarrassment that my professor himself did, women reported being embarrassed at a far higher rate than men.

What does Science say about this?

Well, studies show no differences in the biological processes of emotion gender by gender. Men and women experience the same emotions in the same ways at the same level. However, big differences are seen in the labeling and expression of emotions. In other words, there aren't any physical differences in how men and women experience emotions - but we all really, really, believe there are.

(Here I should point out that there are ways to physically measure any basic emotion. They all have their own distinct physiological profiles. So yes, if any of you take a scientific study, feel an emotion, and lie about it - the researchers will know.)

Back to the embarrassment studies - when men displayed physiological signs of embarrassment, they would typically claim they felt amusement. There weren't any differences in behavior. However, there are differences in expression of emotions in other areas gender to gender; as one might expect, women tend to express emotions more. Women tend to smile and laugh more, and women are ten times - ten times! - more likely to actually cry in studies. Men, however, will do almost anything to fight crying, even though their bodies and brains are telling them to. (In other words, the physiological changes are there, but being actively suppressed on the surface, which isn't the only thing being measured in these studies.)

Women are also better at reading emotions than men - but barely. On a 100 point scale, women test at 78, men at 76. (Guesses in the classroom ranged from the 20s to 50s for men.)

Whose fault is this?

Studies point to parents. One fascinating experiment involved young parents being shown videos of an infant experiencing a startle reaction. If the parents are told that the infant is a boy, they claim that the "boy" is angry. Other parents, shown the same video, are told that the infant is a girl. They claim that the "girl" is afraid. (Note: The correct emotion, which is 'surprise', is determined by the researchers through position of facial muscles. "Anger" and "fear" are both incorrect, having different facial expression profiles.)

Studies show consistently that mothers talk far more with young girls about emotion than young boys. With young boys, mothers emphasize anger and physical activity. Analyses of U.S. parenting manuals show that they overall suggest that boys should be naturally "wild", while girls should be "more articulate and reasonable about emotions". All this may explain why, in the area of emotion disorder by gender, women are twice as likely to experience major episodes of depression, while men, with their stunted emotion vocabularies, are five times more likely to show antisocial behavior like violence, rage, acting out (and, incidentally, suffer from alcoholism).

So men and women feel the same, but act differently. Kinda differently.

What's up with that? And what does it mean for writing gendered characters? I'm pretty sure if you analyze most men and women in fiction, they'll kinda live by stereotypes that they're expected to. It's not exactly a secret that many writers stick firmly to stereotypes for characters of a different gender than themselves, for fear of 'getting it wrong'. But what about writers writing a character of their gender, and assuming they're 'getting it right' when they in fact, may not be? And what is getting it right? On one level, perception does create reality. So writing by gender stereotypes may have something to it, on some level...

How do you "write women"? How do you "write men"?

Something to think about.

A Webcomic Primer

2007-10-26T16:44:00.000-07:00

This was originally going to be a post about "character fission" (when one character unexpectedly becomes two in the middle of writing a story), but said character fission took place while I was writing the first chapter of my webcomic (which you can find here!) and I realized that someone reading this might not realize what a webcomic is. D'oh!

So, here goes. A webcomic is a comic. On the Web. Shocking, I know. Don't stop there, though - there are a few differences between comics on the Internets (yes, all the Internets) and comics in general. If you live in the United States, I wouldn't be surprised if, on hearing the word "comic", you think one of two things:

1) Newspaper funnies! Oh, that Garfield.

2) Grown men and women flying, punching things, and wearing their underwear on the outside.

While this publishing paradigm is changing in our modern era (google "graphic novels" if you're curious), newspaper funnies and superhero periodicals do still make up the majority of comics material today. Now, "funnies" you'll find in great abundance on the Internets, although the popular ones are often different in genre and style than what you'd expect in a newspaper. (I recommend Dinosaur Comics; no, it's not what you think.) But superheroes... well, I don't actually know of any superhero webcomics. I'm sure there's many out there (Google gives me 1,190,000 results for 'superhero webcomic'; although oddly enough, the top results are lists of superhero webcomics, not actual comics) but they are certainly in the minority. The point? The variety out there is mind-numbing in degree, with the qualifier that since anything can be 'published' on the Web, the literary and/or artistic value of the comic may also be mind-numbing, though not necessarily in degree. On the other hand, comic gems that would never be published in today's world of ever-stricter publishing genres can gain huge readerships. (Not to mention that some popular webcomics have been picked up for publishing based solely on large web presence.)

Point?

Webcomics. They're not what you expect. You should read them. I'll probably elaborate more later, but for now, I have more papers to write.

Go Sleep Yourself

2007-10-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to school, I've been pulling a lot of all-nighters recently. I've discovered that getting a little sleep is worse than getting no sleep at all. And after successfully pulling an all-nighter, I tend to have an increased creative drive. The problem is staying awake long enough to take advantage of it.

I should take a moment to note that this post is a result of a combination between sleep deprivation, thanks to a midterm yesterday, and procrastination, thanks to an essay I'm supposed to be writing. (Procrastination theory: when you're supposed to be doing something, you suddenly become very productive at doing almost anything else.)

CNN.com quotes studies confirming that sleep is essential for creativity. Apparently when you sleep, your memories are restructured, which enhances overall thinking power. I guess that one guy who hasn't slept in over thirty years is screwed. (Assuming that case isn't a fraud, of course.)

But many famous creative types were infamously horrible sleepers. Just ask the (now defunct) "Google Answers": Famous Four-Hour Sleepers. That includes Famous People from Thomas Edison to Napoleon Bonaparte. What's up, doc? Well, some of that can be chalked up to 'polyphasic sleep', or frequent cat-napping in lieu of one long sleep 'bout'. (Studies indicate, somewhat confirming my earlier observation, that taking 20-30 minute naps every four hours, making 2-3 hours of sleep total in a 24 hour period, lets a person mentally perform better than taking that 2-3 hours of sleep in one go.) Some of it can be chalked up to quirks in each person's unique physiology. But that's not all, apparently. The amusingly named "Sleep Review" magazine has an article up summarizing a variety of studies on the beneficial affects of sleep deprivation. Apparently the brain can temporarily compensate for lack of sleep by shifting the areas where thinking takes place. You get to keep your 'working memory'; the parts used in learning, reasoning, and comprehension. Abusing this physiological function is apparently what gives people like me the post-all-nighter temporary creative 'jolt'.

Unfortunately, 'temporary' is the key word there. The all-knowing Wikipedia has a short list of some of the entertaining effects of prolonged sleep deprivation. Highlights include depression, colorblindness, depersonalization, hallucinations, hernia, memory loss, psychosis, weight fluctuation and, uh, yawning. It can also make you act like you're drunk - for free. I have to admit I've personally experienced the majority of those effects (thankfully not including psychosis, although some friends of mine may disagree with me there).

God, all this typing about sleep. I just want to go to bed now...

Meme-ocalypse

2007-10-05T14:59:00.000-07:00

Responding to David Isaak's general blog challenge. Yes, just when I was talking about how Blogspot really isn't like LiveJournal at all, I run into a meme.

Now, apparently this isn't just any meme - it comes from a blogger with the rather iconic name of Fiction Bitch. Said Fiction Bitch (now, is this a bitch that writes about fiction, a bitch that writes fiction, or a bitch of fiction?) is apparently an Important Person, because she has been nominated for an award. And if there's one thing on the Internet I love, it's jumping on a bandwagon.

The meme is "Eight Things About Me." By the time it's reached David's blog, the criteria have mutated to "eight random facts/habits or embarrassing things" about oneself.

1. I have a blog.

2. As a child, I once wrote and drew a complete comic-book adaptation of The Hardy Boys Volume 2: "The House on a Cliff". The comic-book starred anthromorphized dinosaurs in a Looney Tunes-inspired style. Frank and Joe Hardy were bright green and yellow Stegosauruses. (Stegosauri?) Humorously Fat Best Friend Chet was a red Dimetrodon (actually a pelycosaur), and so on and so forth. I was well into an adaptation of Volume 3, "The Secret of the Old Mill", when I got distracted by drawing the dinosaurian/pelycosaurian stars in unintentional parodies of old Western TV shows.

3. Speaking of which, I'm teaching a class on creating comicbooks at my university for the third semester running. Here at the U.C. Berkeley, you don't even need to be a professor to teach classes, if you can find one who will sponsor whatever random crap you can come up with.

4. I regularly read more "great works" of literature when I was around nine than I do now. (Some of my favorites: Julius Ceaser, Silas Marner, The Prince and the Pauper, Great Expectations, Much Ado About Nothing.)

5. I run a lot. Everywhere. I look a little ridiculous sometimes. But I'm a terribly impatient person.

6. While most of my interests fall under the umbrella of the humanities and social sciences - which is code for 'artsy crap' - I absolutely love any science relating to animals (including extinct ones). At community college, I was the only Art major (ex-Art major now) enrolled in zoology class. And I aced the class, dammit.

7. Though I've written a wide variety of things, I've been mentally working on the same fictional universe since I was twelve. (I'm twenty-two.)

8. I love the comicbook medium, but I do not collect superhero comics, despite - or perhaps because of - having a terribly extensive knowledge of them. (Go ahead. Ask me who the three Robins were. If there's any birdwatchers reading this, the answer is not "American, European, and Australasian".) I'm not inclined to start, either - many if not most of the plots sound cooler in concept than in execution. The superhero comic is actually anti-character development - Superman can't grow and change as a person. This may not be a bad thing (the Greek gods never grew or changed as people either, and we're still reading stories about them) but there's such a glut of superhero stuff on the market that the whole thing just gets tiresome.

However, I will defend the medium itself to the death.

Posting On Sleep Deprivation: Probably Not As Interesting As Posting Drunk

2007-10-04T14:41:00.000-07:00

The book of the day is... Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"!

Why is this the book of the day? Because I just stayed up all night writing an essay on it. Yes, I'm a college student, for the... zero... people who read this and don't know me.

"Rose" is both super-pretentious and, um, anti-pretentious at the same time. On one hand, it's done by a semiotician, for crying out loud. The text bleeds intentional double, triple, even quadruple, meanings. Word gymnastics abound, along with references to every famous person in the time. On the other hand, Eco, in an afterword, admits that he wrote the whole thing for silly reasons, makes fun of people who read too many things into the text (both in the afterword and in the subtext of the text itself - ironic!) as well as crappy questions people ask him about the book, and at one point says "That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers." It's like he knew I was going to read this!

Well, I wrote an essay, not a term paper. Anyway.

I've come down on the side of liking the book. The chapter subtitles were enough to win me over alone. They're the only thing in the novel that comes to you courtesy of a different narrator, one with a very dry sense of humor. (I wanted to tell the actual narrator to shut up several times throughout, but he comes out okay overall, unlike, say, that douchebag from "The Rachel Papers".) The subtitles, which merely explain what happens in the chapter to follow, get funnier as worse things happen. A hundred pages in, the following...

COMPLINE
In which William and Adso enjoy the jolly hospitality of the abbot and the angry conversation of Jorge.

...gets a second look and a smirk. Another hundred in, and we get...

VESPERS
In which the abbot speaks again with the visitors, and William has some astounding ideas for deciphering the riddle of the labyrinth and succeeds in the most rational way. Then William and Adso eat cheese in batter.

...and I start to think, he's doing this on purpose, isn't he?

The subtitles continue to get more flippant, until the climactic chapter reads thus:

NIGHT
In which, if it were to summarize the prodigious revelations of which it speaks, the title would have to be as long as the chapter itself, contrary to usage.

In common parlance: I lol'ed.

Oh, and the sort-of-main-character, William of Baskerville (get it? Baskerville?), is a transparent Holmesian figure, right down to the getting high bits. And that is always a plus in my book. That, and the medieval sexual issues, although I mostly appreciated those because so many writers of this time period leave all that out.

Death of An Author

2007-09-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

According to Yahoo! News, where we all go for obituaries, Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series, has died. He was working on the final book of the series at the time, titled "A Memory of Light."

Eerily enough, only a few days ago I was discussing Jordan, and his plans to finish the Wheel of Time series, with the inestimable David Isaak. The reason "A Memory of Light" was intended to be the last book (even, according to the author, if it hit 2000 pages) of the series was because Jordan had fallen ill with amyloidosis. In an interview before his death, Jordan stated

"I'm getting out notes, so if the worst actually happens, someone could finish A Memory of Light and have it end the way I want it to end. But I hope to be around to actually finish it myself."

It says something about authors that they make plans like this. I mean, it's just a book, and they'll be dead. Why care? They won't be around to see it. But somehow, if I were in the middle of a millions-of-fans-style popular book series, and I found out I was terminally ill, I think I'd do the same thing.

It may sound cold for people to be worrying about the end of a book series, when a real human being has just died. But wouldn't many - if not most - authors take that as the ultimate compliment?

R.I.P. Robert Jordan, 1948-2007.

Hic Sunt Scriptores

2007-09-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

(Original title for this journal: "Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist".)

I've noticed that every time I visit a Blogspot website (er... blog) I end up reading about something literary, or if you prefer (which I do), "writerly". The writerly types, it seems, tend to migrate here. Far be it from them to dip their feet in with the huddled masses of Xanga, or in the dismal swamp (a real place, by the way) of a LiveJournal. There be dragons, and probably teenagers.

(To be fair, I'm judging from a rather limited pool, but I've never let that stop me from making wild assumptions before.)

I do, indeed, have a LiveJournal, but that mostly serves as a method of communicating with friends. So perhaps this blog, by its very existence, will remind me to Write More, because I now have a place to bitch about how badly it's going. Or maybe it won't. Time will tell.