Meanwhile…

Almost missed it, but Jens has an excellent essay on aeronautical raconteurs over at Every Day Weirdness.

I have made some headway on my space western. It still lacks a bit of a, what-you-callit, plot, but that’s never stopped anyone from writing a story before.

My mathematical pulp story not featuring Summer Glau has already been rejected! I have another place in mind, but they’re not open to submissions until March. I guess I’ll have to sit on it until then. It’s never fun to have a story you think is a lot of fun just sitting on the hard drive, wasting away. Oh well.

I’m looking forward to not administering the group prompt contest next month. It feels awkward writing on my own prompts for some reason, like I’m cheating. So next month I should get some more flash pieces done.

Wow. So lately the wife and I have been watching random episodes of “Law & Order.” It’s always interesting to study something that is so immensely successful. It’s somewhat painful, given that the shows we typically fall in love with so often get cancelled long before their time. But nonetheless, I think it’s valuable to study the types of storytelling that seem to garner such enormous audiences.

L&O seems to have a number of strengths:

• Simple  characters – They follow a pretty basic white-hat/black-hat pattern. The cops are righteous and honest. The prosecutors are determined and competent. (I won’t go into some rant about how completely unrealistic that is.) They do have to sometime make tough decisions, but the motives are always pure. It’s fascinating how long actors will stay on that show, some of them for over a decade, but at the same time they people they portray are pretty interchangeable. Also, if you are a female lawyer, you are hot.

• No story arcs – as far as I can tell, every episode is done-in-one, that is, the mystery is completed in one episode. L&O vets could probably point out exceptions, as I’m sure they’ve probably done two-parters before. You can pick any episode out of any season and watch it without worrying about some crucial plot point or character development. Because there isn’t any. (Come to think of it, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was much the same way, only occasionally referring to previous stories or featuring recurring characters, and often what seems like a dramatic character epiphany or growth was forgotten a week later.)

To me this is almost blasphemous. It’s a waste of the real strength of TV, the serial story. Shows like The Shield, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and Deep Space 9 took full advantage of the serial aspect of television. The actors grew into their characters. The characters could be given long-lasting changes to their motives and personality. The producers can introduce plot elements in a subtle fashion, planting seeds for future stories sometimes several seasons in advance. It requires committment, sure, but the payoff can be extraordinarily satisfying. Do you want to start watching mid-season? Of course not, but in this age of easily-accessable TV on DVD, there’s really no excuse not to be caught up.

Clearly, however, it has worked for L&O, so I’m probably just talking out of my ass.

• By extension of the previous two points, there’s this powerful revelation: you can start watching any given episode at any point and be caught up in five minutes or less. Missed the first half hour of the show? Who cares? You’ll be fine. Just wait a tic, and the DAs will summarize everything up to that point. It’s the ultimate in impulse television. By contrast, if you missed the first five minutes of an episode of Babylon 5, you could write off the rest of the season. And back then there was no DVD to run to.

None of this is meant as a slight – L&O and its various and sundry spin-offs is perfectly entertaining television. In fact, the little I’ve watched of SVU indicates that it actually does use the serial nature of television more to its advantage, with overarcing character development. And I have a great deal of respect for the writing pit crew, who must have a hell of a time coming up with a fresh mystery every week. I just thought it was interesting to note some of the facets of the show that I think contribute to their success.

I’m not sure what the lesson should be for prose writers, but there’s got to be one in there somewhere. And it’s probably depressing.

Just a couple of things I wanted to mention today:

OMG! The Book of Awesome Stuff has re-opened to submissions. If you are a writer and have a batshit-crazy story you don’t know what to do with, send it in! Stephanie and I both have weird stories accepted there. It should be an interesting anthology. A portion of the proceeds go to charity.

Speaking of Stephanie, she’s gone mad and started posting a writing prompt every day over at her site. They’re great prompts, and should provide some good starting points/inspiration if you ever want to knock out a piece of flash fiction or get yourself out of some writing funk.

And speaking of knocking out a piece of flash fiction, I wrote a little something today that I think is pretty funny. We’ll see if Every Day fiction thinks so! It’s the shortest (complete) thing I’ve ever written at only 140 words, but I think it works.

So the 2008 Academy Award nominations were released today.

Looking over the movies that came out this past year, it’s actually kind of a weird year.

There is some stuff I absolutely loved – Iron Man, Dark Knight, In Bruges, Wall-E, Tropic Thunder.

Some I thought were pretty good – Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Cloverfield, Run, Fatboy, Run, Speed Racer, The Incredible Hulk, Gran Torino, Frost/Nixon.

There are a few I wanted to see, but didn’t get around to – Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Synecdoche, New York, Burn After Reading.

There are probably some I just can’t think of at the moment that were decent but I may or may not ever see again.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull definitely marks the biggest disappointment of the year.

The one foreign film I managed to see this year, and probably the film that affected me most deeply, was 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days – which didn’t even get nominated for Best Foreign Film.

That’s the general trend, actually. Very few of the films I saw this year and thought were good were nominated for much of anything. Speed Racer didn’t get any technical nominations, which seems completely mad to me.

It just seems like a weak year to me. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Doubt, or Slumdog Millionaire, they look like perfectly fine movies. But I’m not getting a “holy crap these are going to blow me away” vibe from them or any of the other nominees. I dunno. The big daddy of them all, Benjamin Button, just doesn’t interest me. I get the concept and all, but the trailers just aren’t sucking me in.

Three really solid comic book movies (balanced out, sadly, by several not-so-solid comic book movies, but really who expected Punisher War Zone to be any good?) give me great hopes for the future of that genre, but other than that, 2008 didn’t really wow me for film. Then again, now that I’m looking over the 2007 list, it’s looking pretty good. It just seems like the diamonds that came out in 2007 were better than the diamonds of 2008.

And I still think the “Best Animated Feature” category is a joke.  There’s no reason Wall-E, for example, can’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with, say, Frost/Nixon. And Persepolis totally got robbed last year.

Ah well. Oscar rants there will be aplenty in the coming weeks, so I’ll end mine here.

It snuck up on a Saturday, so I didn’t notice it, but KC has an excellent poem up over at Every Day Poets. It’s about chemistry! As I recall, I was terrible at chemistry in high school, so, yeah, thanks for the horrid memories, KC.

By no means am I a poet. Maybe sometime I’ll dig up some of my old poetry and prove it.

In college I learned a great deal about poetry, much of which I’ve probably forgotten, and grew to appreciate the form in ways I hadn’t before. I have to credit a big portion of my getting into writing early in college was due to one of my teachers, poet John Poch. There’s an infectious love of language in poetry that can be inspirational, and it’s structured in a way that forces the brain to work in ways it normally doesn’t. If more writers read poetry, we’d probably have better prose works. I’m ashamed to say I’ve definitely lapsed in my poetry reading.

It’s kind of unfortunate that in school only the dusty old classics are typically taught. There’s so much great poetry written today, but none of it gets any acclaim. Like any art, it’s been refined and polished to such an extant that modern poetry bears little resemblance to the stuffy abstract constructs of old.

For the curious, my favorite poem is Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley. It’s always stuck with me for some reason.

Yesterday at the comic shop I witnessed a lady clearly out of her element try to convince the shop owner to pre-sell her a (2nd print) copy of the Obama Spider-Man issue. She worked at it for about an hour before he managed to convince her that if she just got there early enough on Wednesday she’d probably be able to get one. She’ll end up paying $20 or $30 for that issue, at least. In five years she’ll be lucky if it’s worth a quarter. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

At any rate, I thought I’d point out a few webcomics I read and enjoy. There are plenty more out there, and many that are probably better, but these are the ones I check out daily, or at least a couple times a week.

Starslip – formerly Starslip Crisis, this is currently my favorite series, about a warship that’s been converted to a museum. Kris Straub has recently undergone a massive art evolution. This is actually a good time to jump on, though I definitely recommend reading through the archives. I also get a daily laugh out of his indy comic parody, Chainsaw Suit.

Shortpacked! – a strip mostly about toys and toy collecting, which sounds very niche (and sometimes it is), but I think it’s actually pretty widely accessable. It’s in kind of a weird place right now, in the middle of a story arc, but it’s a solid series.

Theater Hopper – about movies! I recently helped Tom out with some copyediting on his Year 3 collection and had a blast with it.

Basic Instructions – absolutely love this strip, a 4-panel gag-a-panel series with a deeply snarky sense of humor. One of these days I want to get one of his Infini-Tees.

And of course, I read PvP, Penny Arcade, and XKCD. I don’t need to expand on those any.

Happy MLK, Jr Day everyone! I’m looking forward to watching the inauguration tomorrow, preferrably on HBO so we don’t have to listen to some 24-hour news jackasses talking over it the whole time.

I thought I’d play around with my fun space adventurer, Chuck Chaykin, again. (The original Chaykin sketch can be found here.)

There’s a long proud line of these sorts of characters. Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, Heath Huston. These characters and their stories are undeniably fun and some of the most endearing heroes in science fiction. They’re mercenary, but cuddly. They are simple to understand, with pretty clear motivations, but they’re also layered in a way that makes them complex and interesting despite that. They have a nobility about them that fans can innately sense. Above all, they are relatively ordinary people who have the capacity for greatness.

And they usually have some cool spaceships.

That’s basically what I’m aiming for with Mr. Chaykin and his cute telepathic comrade, Val. Set in a space western-style universe, they have adventures hunting down robot pirates and protecting small towns from tentacled bandits. I may sit down and write their first adventure together as my story for this year’s Writer’s Ink themed collection.

It’s an interesting puzzle to work out what words to use to describe Chaykin and Val’s mental conversations. Should I just replace every “said” with “thought” ? What happens then when they really just think something to themselves? Or should I simply establish that they’re conversing telepathically and then use standard dialogue tags (this is what I’m leaning toward)? It’s something I’ll have to work out. Anyone have any recommendations of books with lots of telepathic interaction?

So here’s another quick Chaykin sketch, in which our heroes find themselves in dire straights! Just a few hundred words.

Continue reading

Well, my crazy pulp story was generally well-received by the writing group. I’ve made some tweaks to it, and will start hunting for a home for it shortly. It’s been a while since I’ve submitted anything, which I think has contributed to my general sluggishness these last few months. I guess when the rejections are pouring in I feel more motivated.

But there is publishing news; out of the Writer’s Ink crew, two of us had stories go live today:

Erin’s “The Care and Feeding of your Sleeping Knight” is up at Every Day Fiction!

Stephanie’s “Brimstone and Liars” is up at The Rose and Thorn. That’s actually a reprint from EDF, so if you missed it before you have no excuse this time.

Well, this is the new site. No doubt you are blown away! Okay, probably not. Shiny new updates will be coming as soon as they are available, like some cool headers and links to resources and what not. But this will certainly do for now.

I’ll start posting some more actual content soon. This whole process has been rather tiring. I’m going to bed.

I’m looking to build myself a website, with a domain and original art and everything. It’ll probably look much the same as this, so don’t get too excited. I know next to nothing about this stuff, so we’ll see how it goes.

Still working on putting together an event for the Every Day Fiction anthology. Some places won’t call back, others don’t have the book in their system. It’s a whole thing. I fear our window of opportunity is closing.

I just wrote a new piece of flash fiction that I’ve submitted to the writing group for critique. With a little luck you’ll be seeing it somewhere soon. I think it’s a lot of fun, very pulpy. It’s set in the ’50s and involves tentacles, ray guns, and very large math equations. It originally featured Summer Glau as well, but as the time period became apparent, she had to go. The sacrifices we make for our craft, eh?

I’m not sure what to do with my Asta robot noir story. The more I think about the plot and the mystery, the more scenes I need to get it across, and the longer it gets. Sigh.