Meanwhile…

Last night the pilot for the new HBO series, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” premiered. It looked like a fun, charming show, so we checked it out.

The series (based on a series of books) is about Precious Ramotswe, the first (and only) female private detective in Botswana. She’s a smart, charming woman with a great eye for detail and a consuming desire to help her fellow Batswana. She’s been through some pretty devastating personal tragedies, but pulled through them all with her pride and dignity intact.

In some ways, it’s pretty standard private detective stories – in the pilot, her cases include searching for a missing child, spying on a husband, and a fraud plot.

But there are a couple of differences that make the show a lot of fun to watch. First is Precious herself. She’s the polar opposite of the standard-issue hardboiled dick you usually see in mystery stories. She’s not going to be beating information out of informants. She’s polite and compassionate. Warm and empathetic. On top of that, she’s new to the detective game. She’s learned most of what she knows from a book. There are consequences of this – she makes a critical mistake on one of the cases and it blows up in her face.

The other big difference is the setting. Botswana isn’t some steel canyon of grungy high rises punctuated with elevated trains and smog. It’s a rural society. Technology is limited. But at the same time, Botswana is a prosperous place, and there’s definitely a feel that the standard of life isn’t bad. When someone says they’re happy, you can believe it. You don’t automatically assume the authorities are corrupt or potential war criminals.

The show has a lot of humor, but they don’t shy away from the harsh realities of Africa. There are several references to the AIDS epidemic scattered throughout the show, and you know the bad guys are really bad guys. Their mobsters don’t bust your kneecaps, they kidnap your kid and use his fingers for spell components.

So I definitely recommend the show. If you’ve got HBO, I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of chances to catch up before the second episode airs on Sunday.

Without paying attention I completely destroyed my theme.

I’ll try to get this all fixed.

Edit: buuuh, I don’t feel like dealing with this at the moment. I’ll just plug something in.

New edit: I’m kind of digging this look, and it’s a little easier for this web amateur to work with, so I may try this out for a while.

I have absolutely no opinion on Twilight either way, but I thought this kerfufle was pretty interesting. Evidently this lady, er, Lady Sybilla (cuz real names aren’t kewl?) wrote her own Twilight book.

I have no problem with fan fiction. As far as hobbies go, there are much worse. You should see how many hits Erin gets off her softcore clavicle porn (inside joke! inside joke!). Some people, like Jane Espenson or Peter David, even managed to segue from fan fic to successful writing careers. And I think there’s value in being able to write with character voices not your own (as you would have to if you were working for, say, a TV series).

But this Lady Sybilla decided to take it one staggering step forward and try to sell her fan fic. I don’t know the full story on her publisher, whether it’s just her or if it’s an actual publishing company full of people who have no idea how publishing or copyright law works.

This little gem came out of an earlier press release that seems to be gone now:

“When fictional characters become such an intricate part of the popular psyche, as is the case with the Twilight Saga, legal boundaries become blurred, and copyright laws become increasingly difficult to define. This is especially the case when actual cities like Forks and Volterra are used as the novel’s settings. Such settings are not copyrightable, as they are considered public domain. Similarly, the Quileute Nation is also not copyrightable, and neither are vampire or werewolf legends. Copyright laws protect writers from unauthorized reproductions of their work, but such reproductions only include verbatim copying. Characters are only copyrightable if their creator draws them or hires an artist to draw them. Stephenie Meyer herself borrowed a great deal from previous works dealing with these mythologies.”

I can’t even count how many ways that paragraph is ridiculous. And I’m far from being a copyright expert.

This particular sillyness aside, I have to wonder, with all the print-on-demand publishing that’s available now, and with the internet making it easier for people to successfully self publish, will we start seeing lots of this cropping up soon?

Mostly I’m just interested because I have a whole Trapper Keeper full of X-Wing vs TIE Fighter fan fic from about 12 years ago I’d love to make into an anthology. Someone let me know if that’s cool.

The good folks over at Every Day Fiction have created a new branch of their site, a blog for writers to write about writing. I offered up an article for today’s entry, so you can cruise over to there if you’d like.

http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/

If you have anything you’d like to say about writing, feel free to submit! They are voracious for content! And keep an eye on that space, I will likely have more to add there in the future.

KC has an interesting post up today about the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. If you haven’t been paying attention, the PI is the first (probably of many over the next couple of years) big newspaper to shut down. No more print edition. There’s still an online version, a bit scaled back, but all the important stuff is there. (Also – Post-Intelligencer? Coolest newspaper name ever.)

My first job in publishing was at a newspaper, the Denton Record-Chronicle. Not nearly as large or prestigious as the PI, sure, but still a paper that has been around for a century or so. I loved it. There was just something very romantic and cool about working for a newspaper. Like, Clark Kent works for a newspaper. Lois Lane works for a newspaper. How awesome is that? I wasn’t even a reporter, I just worked on the technical side of things, but it was hard not to get a little exciting walking through the newsroom. And if it weren’t for that job, I don’t know what I’d be doing today. The DR-C broke the useless retail cycle for me. Now if it had paid more than a useless retail job I’d still be there, but I digress.

Like KC says, I’m not going to miss the paper editions. Aside from glancing over a few stories in the break room while I’m waiting for the copier to work its magic, I rarely pick one up. But newspapers serve a vital purpose in actually reporting news. Over the past few years, more and more incidents like the recent Jon Stewart (heart!) vs Jim Cramer interview have clearly shown that television journalism is a ridiculous joke that only serves to mis-inform, entertain, and polarize people. If real news services disappear we’ll be headed more and more headlong into Idiocracy territory.

So while I don’t necessarily mourn the demise of the print newspaper, I do hope they can figure out a way to make it profitable and maintain a respectable level of news reporting.

I listened to an excellent interview of one of my favorite writers today, JM DeMatteis, over at Word Balloon. In it, DeMatteis brings up the fact that so many genre stories, be they sci fi space operas, comic books, sword and sorcerer fantasy, or whatever, almost always end up solving the big conflict with a big fight. No matter how bright the characters are or how smart the story, our heroes often solve their problems with violence, best intentions or not. DeMatteis wonders what sort of message we’re sending with that formula, and why does it always have to be that way? And he doesn’t really bring it up, but I have to wonder if that’s a part of why genre fiction tends to be looked down upon by our “high class” ivory-towered counterparts over in the literary world.

I think on a subconscious level I’ve understood that problem. In “Shades of Red,” for example, I end the story just before the last big fight with the last big bad. My reasoning was that it would be just one more action scene between a hero and a villain, and who needs one more of those? Don’t we know how those always end up? After all, if the hero loses, that’s probably the beginning of the story, not the end. And I think it worked. Most people I got feedback from seemed to agree.

In several of my other stories, I’ve tried to circumvent the big punch ending with some clever twist. In my math pulp story currently out for consideration, the hero defeats the big monster with (pseudo)science, no blood drawn. In my Sevastian Dusan story (which still needs heavy revision before I try to send it anywhere) the heroine finds what I would consider a pretty unconventional and nonviolent solution to a standard life-threatening scenario.

I love a good fight scene, but I think there’s a lot of truth to the dilemma DeMetteis presents. None of us wants to experience violence in real life, so why do we always make our heroes so good at dispensing pain and punishment? Is the only measure of heroism how hard a punch they can take?

It’s something to keep in mind, anyway. If you’ve got a smart character, don’t dumb them down just for a bang-up ending.

With that in mind, I worked a bit on a writing exercise tonight featuring Harry Webster, who I’ve written of once before (and who I planned to include in my Scarlet Ranger novel). Harry is a boy genius son of a genius inventor and adventurer. He’s sort of my homage to the old Johnny Quest (or even DC’s Champions of the Unknown)-style heroes that you don’t really see anymore (though the Venture Bros. cartoon is a fantastic parody of them). By 15 or so Harry invents his signature gadget, the Quantum Hopper, which allows him to shrink down to microscopic size and have all sorts of adventures in a tiny scale.

So here is young Harry at an earlier age, on what might be one of his first adventures.

The writing prompt: Write a story about…a playground monster.

This is just a bit of it. If I can finish and polish it up I may try submitting it somewhere.

Continue reading

If I ever get out of work today, I look forward to watching the second episode of Castle tonight. If you haven’t seen Castle, it’s a cop procedural starring Nathan Fillion. Fillion plays a mystery writer who tags along with a tough-as-nails police detective as she works her cases. The show really rides on Fillion’s charm and personality, and it seems as though the part was tailor made for him. It’s not going to change the face of television or anything, but it’s cute and there’s nothing else on Mondays anyway.

At any rate, it makes me think about how many times I’ve written stories just to play around with a character, fashioning stories around the protagonist. I would say that’s usually how I write. I’ll some up with what seems like a fun idea for a personality, then build a world necessary for that person to exist, and the story (I hope) falls into place after that. The character isn’t necessarily well developed at first, but there’s usually enough to get started. Once you’ve tossed them into a difficult situation, I have to hope that I’ve figured out how they’ll cope under pressure, and that along the way I can develop them into someone who is interesting not just to me, but the reader. The process probably isn’t unlike that of writing a part for a particular actor.

Unfortunately, it means I tend to have trouble coming up with good plots. Take “Apotheosis Cake,” (if you haven’t read it, cruise on over to the Publications page for a link) for example. I came up with what I thought was a pretty wonderful character in Jennifer, the narrator. She had a fun voice and an outlook on life that was both unique and instantly identifiable. The whole story hinges on her wit, and I think it mostly works. But since there’s not really much plot there, the story probably falls a little flat at the end. I’m still working on striking that balance.

It makes me wonder what it’s like for those writers lucky enough adapt a pre-established story for television or movie – they essentially get to write a story for their character for an actor.

This is just a long-winded way of saying to stay tuned for the 2018 release of Shades of Red, starring Summer Glau as the Scarlet Ranger.

Ally/Enemy Frank Byrns has a new story up over at Every Day Fiction, and it’s quite good! Check it out!

I’ve been in a bit of a writing funk, so I thought I’d put my mind toward a writing prompt. Virginia provided this gem for this month’s prompt contest:

Write a story poem or scene about someone discovering/becoming a superhero at the age of 32.

I thought this would be a fun opportunity to write a little bit about Astro Jack. I haven’t done much with Jack, but the basic concept behind him is that he’s basically the grandfather of the superheroic age in which all my other heroes live. He was the first big hero, the one who made it big and popular. Sort of the Superman of my ‘verse. Most of his adventures take place in the ’20s through the ’50s.

Aside from that basic concept, I haven’t really fleshed him out. So why not start now?

This is just a little bit, just a starting sketch. Maybe if I can get this blasted space western done I can move on to this afterward. Who is this Jack Martin, and what happened to him in the savage trenches of France?

Continue reading

So on Saturday a few of us went to see Watchmen. I went in cautiously optimistic, realizing that the project Snyder was attempting was nigh-impossible to pull off, but at the same time falling for the marketing campaign just a little. It’s hard not to.

If you’re not familiar with Watchmen, you should head down to your local library and check it out. It’s an astounding work of graphic storytelling. The story begins with what seems to be a simple murder, but events quickly spiral out of control, and soon a massive conspiracy reveals itself. Along the way, writer Alan Moore dissects the superhero – the effect of heroes on society, the psychological issues, and so on. It’s a book so layered you can read it multiple times and catch something new every time. And you’d probably still be missing things. If you’re not someone intimately familiar with the genre and its history, you’ll likely miss a lot of the subtext, but I wouldn’t consider that a big problem. The story works regardless.

There’s a huge cast. Watchmen covers not just the modern batch of heroes, but their predecessors as well, weaving a story that spans decades. I could keep gushing, but there are plenty of people who’ve already done that better than I could. You get the idea, though – it’s a big, complex, layered story with numerous subtleties. Hollywood has none too good a record with any of those attributes.

I’m still digesting the film, but here are my initial thoughts. I’ll avoid spoilers.

The film has a lot of really cool stuff going for it – the cast is, for the most part, fantastic. Billy Crudup nails the increasingly disconnected, creepy Dr. Manhattan. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is appropriately jackassian as the borderline psychotic Comedian. Patrick Wilson is solid as the geeky, soft-hearted Nite Owl. The real stand-out is Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach, who transformed into the disturbed detective in a performance that blew me away. I don’t think I can stress enough how awesome he was.

Visually, the film was extremely faithful to the book, from the dingy alleys and floating airships to Ozymandias’s massive Antarctic fortress of solitude and Nite Owl’s basement hideout. Snyder follows the book almost panel for panel in many scenes, which is kind of a shame. Comics and movies aren’t the same thing. Blocking your widescreen film into 9-panel pages of close-ups is a bit of a waste of potential. But the sets and effects are quite good. It was with bitterness that I noted the screen I saw it on lacked a digital projector.

Likewise, the dialogue is almost line-by-line the same. Some of the dated elements (such as insults) have been updated for the better. Unfortunately, there are some spots where the filmmakers had to plug in their own dialogue, and those patches stuck out painfully in one or two scenes.

Otherwise, the screenplay was pretty amazing. They managed to squeeze in everything they needed to, and the numerous flashbacks worked well. A lot of world-building background material was worked into a very well done opening credit sequence, allowing them to spend more time on the main plot. Major kudos for managing to fit such a complicated plot into a three-hour time frame. At the same time, most of the main characters are well developed. Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach are all explored almost exactly as they were in the book, with perfectly reasonable cuts for time. Sadly, though, Ozymandias, one of the most important characters in the story, gets severely short-changed on the development side. Other than a few monologues (at least one or two of which were not just badly-written add-ons by the filmmakers, but also contradicted some of the facts of the character and smacked of attempts to make the story “relevent” to modern political topics), Veidt is badly neglected.

Perhaps what bothers me the most about the film is the violence. The book has plenty of action and violence, sure, and plenty of blood. But the stylistic choices Snyder made for the action scenes is highly questionable. The gore factor was turned up quite a bit, for no other reason than shock value. One case in point – when Dan and Laurie are jumped by a gang of thugs, we see them gleefully handing out compound fractures, using men as human shields to protect against gun fire, and even stabbing them with their own knives. Not only does the extra gore not add anything to the story, it contradicts both of their personalities – Dan was always the one who wasn’t comfortable with excess brutality, and Laurie never cared for the life to begin with. In addition, it means some of Rorschach’s actions, which should be shocking, just don’t hit as hard as they should.

And on top of all that, Snyder apparently forgot that these people don’t have superpowers. They’re normal people. Yet in the film they have no trouble punching through walls, breaking bones, and tossing people across alleys. I assume it’s all in the name of “kewl” but it just doesn’t work for Watchmen.

All in all, it’s not terrible film. It has some big flaws, but I was entertained the whole way through. I look forward to seeing a longer cut later. If you haven’t read the book, you’ll probably have a lot more fun with it.

I’m still mulling over a pretty significant rewrite of the ending. I do think the slavish adherence to the comic’s framing robbed the film of some of the ending’s power.

Now if this same cast and crew (minus the ridiculous action scenes) had been tapped for a 12-hour HBO miniseries, it would have been solid gold. But as is, the filmmakers failed to convince me that this film should needed to be made.

I look forward to hearing other thoughts on the movie, so feel free to chime in. I’ve avoided official reviews up to this point, but I may peruse some to see what some of the pros though.