Meanwhile…

In general I feel pretty meh about the Oscars nowadays, but I thought I’d glance over them anyway. I don’t have much opinion on the performance nominations and what not. Since I have a terrible memory for this, I’ve got a list of the movies that came out last year and I’m comparing it to the nomination list. Prep yourself for some stream-of-consciousness style commentary.

Best Picture. Avatar will almost certainly win, though everyone but the voters will likely agree that it shouldn’t. Why is The Blind Side there? Haven’t we seen the “feel good high school football movie in which somebody overcomes great disadvantage” about a billion times already? District 9 and Up In the Air are good, but not Best Picture good. Out of the ones I’ve seen, I think I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds the most, but I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m cursing myself for not having seen A Serious Man. From what I’ve heard, Precious might actually be the one that deserves the prize.

I feel like if it hadn’t made a babillion dollars, Avatar wouldn’t be there, and Sherlock Holmes would have been able to take it’s rightful nomination.

If Avatar wins Best Art Direction I’ll be sorely disappointed. People have complained about the recycled script, but there was nothing remotely original about the art design. It didn’t deserve a nomination, much less a win.

Wait, why wasn’t Watchmen nominated for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)? Instead we get District 9, which devolved into a generic action movie in it’s 3rd act.

(Observation: There were a ton of documentaries about the environment in 2009.)

Damn, I didn’t get to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, either. Or The Fantastic Mr. Fox. A lot of stuff came and went during my insane busy season at work.

They should create a special Most Number of Heads Cut in Half Because Ninjas Don’t Fuck Around with that Neck Nonsense award for Ninja Assassin.

I also didn’t get to see The Imaginanium of Doctor Parnassus, an omission for which I should be beaten with reeds.

The Wife Awards: Jeff Bridges wins the Most Frequently Mentioned Person My Wife would Totally Do award, and (500) Days of Summer gets the Movie During Which Wife Most Frequently Glared at her Husband award.

And really, those are the ones that matter.

I attempted to watch Wings of Desire and failed utterly. I get it, it’s pretty and artful and life sucks. After an hour of nothing happening I gave up. Please don’t mistake me for someone with the attention span of a Michael Bay Transformers fan, or who doesn’t like “reading” at the movies. I’m a huge fan of Kurosawa, for example, and he doesn’t exactly have the most fast-paced movies. But you don’t need an hour to develop a character whose defining characteristic is that he’s bored.

On the plus side, now I get all those Sprockets jokes.

I watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle last night, and it was fantastic. Great story of a small-time hood in over his head in a town full of scumbags. Robert Mitchum and Peter both turn in excellent performances. Check it out. The film got a really nice Criterion edition just this past year.

And just to end on a down note, I checked out the first episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand on Starz. Wow was it bad. Probably one of the worst things I’ve seen on television. They essentially took everything that was good about HBO’s Rome, threw it out, then added in effects from 300 that they clearly didn’t have the budget to recreate. When the appearance of Lucy Lawless doesn’t persuade me to keep watching, you know you’ve got a problem.

So as I mentioned last time, I’ve started work on a new superhero story. This is a character I’ve had floating around for a while and I think I finally came up with a fun angle from which to tell his story. I like this beginning. Now that I reread that earlier post I see that apparently I had decided against trick arrows, but why the hell would I do that? When I sat down to write I immediately started coming up with ridiculous and fun trick arrows for him to employ.

Anyway, here are the first few hundred words of an as-yet-untitled Quivering Jack story.

Continue reading

Speaking of Every Day Fiction, they have recently added a podcast page for their stories. I have someone working on one of my stories even as you read this! So look for that sometime soon.

In the meantime, you can head here and listen to a couple of fellow Writer’s Inkers tales that have already been read.

Also, Stephanie had a fun zombie story go up over the weekend. Enjoy!

In writing news, I have been working on a new superhero story. I’m digging the beginning and may post an excerpt this week. It’s high time I wrote a story about a superhero who’s a bit of a jackass. I’m also drawing on some stories of friends’ experiences in Hollywood. Should be fun! It’s been way too long since I’ve actually finished something, so I really want this story to happen.

The second Every Day Fiction Anthology is out, featuring my story, “Apotheosis Cake,” as well as stories from Erin, Jens, Stephanie, KC, Gay, Frank, Kevin, and a whole slew of other great writers. You can order it directly from the good folks at EDF right here. It should be available at Amazon and other fine booksellers soon.

I unfortunately can’t make the official release party/reading in Canada (next weekend, I believe – if you’re in the Vancouver area you should check it out). But, I will be attempting to organize a local reading and signing, since there are several of us locally who have stories in the book. I didn’t get much response from the big booksellers last year, but I have found a local bookstore that might be amenable. Now that I have info on the book I’ll head over there sometime and see about scheduling an event.

I’ve always had a fascination with post-apocalyptic stories. People staggering amongst the ruins of our great civilization, scrounging to live, with a few  clinging to humanity as the rest of society regresses around them. Who doesn’t like a little Mad Max every now and then? One of the things that intrigues me most about the Terminator franchise isn’t the idea that soldiers are traveling through time to try and prevent the fall of mankind, but the fact that ultimately they fail.

I didn’t get a chance to see The Road, but I’m reading the book now and it is bogglingly good, one of those “why does anyone bother to continue writing in this subgenre after this” sort of books. (Though the fact that it’s listed as “literature” instead of “science fiction” is an example of arrogant genre-dismissive bullshit that I can’t stand.) For a fun exercise in seeing people entirely missing the point, take a gander at some of the negative reviews over at Amazon. I particularly enjoy the one that thinks the lack of punctuation was perhaps an accident.

I did get to see The Book of Eli on Monday. There were a few things that could have been improved, but overall I thought it was quite good. I’m kind of surprised at the overall negative reviews it’s gotten. Many immediately complain that they’re tired of apocalyptic movies, at which point I pretty much stop reading. Isn’t that your own fault for becoming a movie reviewer? Stop whinging about your comfy, trivial job.

Anyway, I am interested in the place of religion in these settings. Would people turn their backs on the old religions, since they appear to have failed? Would they cling to them, desperate for salvation? Would they invent new ones to try and explain the horrible events that took place?

The third option is a sticky wicket to me. We tend to think of religion as something that humans naturally develop per a basic need to explain the unknown, but I have to wonder if new religions would arise at all. In these scenarios, humans are barely surviving, primarily off the remnants of the dead, and a landscape so inhospitable makes long-term survival for the species unlikely. When would these people have the luxury of inventing new gods?

I probably shouldn’t do this, but an old friend from my halcyon X-Wing vs TIE Fighter days has posted a story I wrote way back in the day, entitled “Crystalline Flames.” As I recall, it was about a terrorist who falls in love.

I can bring myself only to skim it. This was written over ten years ago! I think this was written for the basic-level creative writing class at UNT, as I don’t remember it going through any sort of crit process.

A quick copy-paste into Word informs me that it’s a little over 6,000 words. Not exactly a quick casual read, but feel free to check it out and let me know if I should be embarrassed or not.

Scrolling through, I see a lot of “I” and cringe.

In the meantime, I think I’ve come up with a fun scenario for an Atlantis story. I’ve always struggled for an angle of attack on an Atlantis story, but I’ve come up with one I like and which suits my writing style well. I’ll be working on that tonight at the group write-in.

Woke up to a fresh new rejection today, this one to “The Organization,” a flash piece I wrote a while back. It’s a sort of romantic comedy/GIJoe-super-espionage parody piece. I like it, but I can see why they rejected it. If you’re not familiar with the sort of genre the piece is having fun with, it would seem like a lot is being left out. I suppose I could expand the story, really flesh out the universe and everything, but it seems like the people who would have fun reading this story might find that unnecessary and even tedious. Like sitting down to Get Smart but having to sit through twenty minutes of someone explaining to you what a spy is.

That’s part of the danger of writing genre I suppose, especially these days. We often rely heavily on what’s been written before, and simply stand on previous writers’ shoulders.

You can see that flaw really well in Cameron’s Avatar. All the characters and even the technology are derived from archetypes that are used all the time in science fiction. One glance at Sigourney Weaver’s character will tell you she’s the Compassionate But Stubborn Scientist that we’ve seen so many times before. Five seconds after he appears on screen, we understand that Giovanni Ribisi is the Greedy Corporate Guy. Then meet Hardass Military Dude. He’s got scars. Trust me when I say they do deep!

Similarly, most of the technology in the film we’ve seen in dozens of video games and even Cameron’s old movies. Those dropships and armored exoskeletons all look awfully familiar!

It’s all shorthand. The writer doesn’t have to spend much any time developing these personalities because we immediately know who they are, how they’re going to act, what their motivations are, etc. It’s just unfortunate when the writer doesn’t bother to take them further than the attributes and stats on the pre-generated character sheet (which Cameron, unfortunately, doesn’t do).

It is handy for some situations, though. In flash, for example, you don’t necessarily have space to do more with a character. So you can reassure the reader that this is Standard Security Guard Sleeping At His Post or Pseudo-Lesbian Who Doesn’t Shave And Wants To Save The Whales and move on. Nothing particularly lost. In parody and satire, you’re relying on those sorts of archetypes, even if it’s your job to show how they’re silly or shatter them. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was based purely on reversing the Blond Running From a Monster Does Something Stupid and Dies archetype.

Either way, if the audience doesn’t know the archetype, the effect is lost. So do I try to shop the story elsewhere, where the editors and audience will immediately recognize the genre parody, or do I try to expand the story and try to net a larger audience? Hurm.

(You can do it in comedy, too – one of my favorite running gags in Monty Python’s Flying Circus was that any time someone started to tell a “If I could walk that way…” joke they would be interrupted. We all know how that would have ended, so there’s no need to finish it – you can basically get two jokes with one stroke by interrupting them.)

Vacation, amIright? I spent the last couple of weeks wrangling in-laws and seeing friends I don’t see nearly enough and playing lots of Rock Band.

Yes, I created Virtuoso Of The Serious Combat on Rock Band, so if you’d like to get into a drum-off with the Iron Acrobat, match guitars with the Secret Earl that Grasps, or sing a duet with the Eighth Unspeakable Warden, this is something we can make happen.

Saw Up in the Air, which was excellent, but didn’t get to see Sherlock Holmes (don’t worry, I will). Drooled over Star Trek on Blu-Ray. Went to a hockey game. Tinkered on the cars a bit.

But last night before bed I felt the writing urge start to hit. Ideas percolated. That part of me that needs to write was letting me know it’s time to get back to work.

Goals for the year:

• Some rejection letters from pro markets. As Erin indicated a few weeks ago, our writing group has decided to focus on producing stories that might be publishable at the pro level. Having just received a loss at the latest Writers of the Future, I feel like I’m a step ahead on this one.
• More writing in general. I don’t feel I was particularly productive this past year, for whatever reason. I need to get back to pumping out lots of writing exercises, as that’s usually where I get my published flash pieces from. I want to keep up my goal of submitting at least one story a month somewhere. Since I set that goal late last year I’ve basically just been meeting the minimum, which really isn’t enough.
• Reading more. I am by no means a slow reader, but damn it takes me forever to get anything read nowadays. I need to make more time for that, because it’s an integral part of being a good writer.
• Finally finish revising several stories I’ve got gathering dust. I have a few stories that I’ve gotten great notes on from the writing group that are just sitting around. I need to finish revising them. In particular I want to finish my rewrite of my Dr. Strange-style urban fantasy, and decide what to do with my feature-length Chuck Chaykin story.

I don’t have too much to add to the chorus concerning James Cameron’s new movie, but I will say this – if you don’t see it at a digital theater and in 3D, you are doing yourself a grave disservice. The film is mind-staggeringly gorgeous. Why we even still have non-digital screens is beyond my comprehension, but there you go.

Happily, 3D has gotten much better since the last time I saw anything in the format, which is when I was like 9.