June 9, 2009 · 4:13 pm
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Last bit of updating

Hopefully after this I’ll keep the two blogs current

Monday, June 08, 2009

The Fighting Sullivans

If you’ve read this blog a while, you may remember I discussed last year how a story that’s timely for one era may become hopelessly dated the next. The Fighting Sullivans, which I watched this weekend, is a good example.
The 1944 movie is based on the real story of the five Sullivan brothers, who joined the Navy together after Pearl Harbor, served on the same ship and died together during a Naval battle.
The movie isn’t a combat film, but focuses on the Sullivans growing up, getting into the usual boyish hijinks, and having the youngest of them fall in love and marry. Then comes the war, then enlisting, then death. It struck me as a competent film (the kind of competence studio films had back then without even trying) but outside of the scenes back home after the boys die, not particularly memorable.
At the time it came out, however, the audiences were reduced to hysterics by the end of the film, according to Projections of War. Which is understandable: The war was still going on, plenty of them had lost someone or stood to lose someone or knew someone who’d lost someone, so for them it was far more intense. As the book points out, even the early scenes would have played completely differently given the audience awareness that the family’s happiness would come to an end before the credits rolled.
I don’t think it’s a movie for the ages, but I can see why it made a mark at the time.

2:05 PM
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Friday, June 05, 2009

The process story

The process story is usually bad journalism and I’ve come to think it may also be bad fiction-writing.

In journalism, it’s the kind of story that focuses on the bureaucratic process involved in what the council/committee/commission is doing, rather than the people involved or what the outcome means to your readers. For example, I read an article from nearby Panama City that reported the city commission wanted to revamp the city’s redevelopment agency so that the commission would have more control over it.
What does that mean to the reader?
Beats the hell out of me. That was pretty much the content of the story: No discussion of what the commission wanted to change, why it wanted changes and none whatsoever of what the change would mean to the public: Will some announced redevelopment project not get built? Would money be saved? Would it benefit the public or just allow the commissioners to micro-manage? All interesting questions, none of which were answered. Without answers, there was no point to the story and not much interest.
There are times a process story is needed: If you have to explain why government does X when everyone thinks it should do Y, that may require explaining the laws or regulations or court rulings that make X mandatory. But at least you’ve linked the process to something people care about (the reason the city cannot ban strip clubs completely is …) or to the people who are affected by it.
I think it was reading Laurell Hamilton that made me realize process can also be a problem in fiction. The last book I read by her was a hideously talky one in which the protagonists are engaging in negotiations with the representative of some uber-vampire. And the negotiations go on, and on, and on for most of the book (or so it seems in my memory) and ultimately they accomplish nothing except agreeing on terms for the big meeting.
That’s a committee meeting where absolutely nothing was decided, and nothing important was even discussed. I can think of other stories by other authors that have the same problem.
Again, there are exceptions; what Orson Scott Card calls “milieu stories,” where the focus isn’t so much on the characters or the plot but on the world itself and what it’s like. Bureaucracy—a pile of paperwork a cop has to fill out, endless performance reviews from some midlevel bureaucrat—may be a part of that.
But even there, it’s got to be limited. Someone (I forgot who) summed up a certain kind of bad literary novel as “My novel is boring—because life is boring!”
That is not an insight. It’s a mistake.

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Friday, June 05, 2009

Wincing

I began rereading Brain From Outer Space prior to the upcoming replotting. For the first few chapters, the plot holds up really well, but some of the scenes feel like they need tons of work. Too much exposition in several spots and there are several background details I’m not clear about, and need to be (what was Stalin’s New America project and was my protagonist’s brother involved?). And sometimes the dialog’s just not good enough to suit me.
I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect, but it’s at that point where all the imperfections just leap out at me.
In other news, Catastrophia turned down my Applied Science short story, which I half expected (I knew it was stretching the kind of stories they wanted, but I was hoping it wouldn’t stretch too far.
And I finished the first draft of I Think, Therefore I Die, though it’s going to need a lot of revision.
I read some more background for The Enemy Within, and watched a couple of movies: Invasion, a bad direct-to-video from the 1990s (and as it turned out, not really relevant to the book’s theme) and Invasion of the BodySnatchers from 1956. Having not seen it in several years, I’d forgotten how creepy and well done it was.

Friday, May 29, 2009

My new baby

Booted up my new iBook today. Regrettably, she doesn’t have Appleworks, just Word, and Word won’t read my Works files (which is absurd since Works can read Word just fine). Ergo, until the contents of my old hard drive are transferred over, I’ll have to convert anything I want to work on.

But I decided I was too impatient to wait for my friends to help with that, so I converted a couple of dozen files to Word (some personal, some writing) on the borrowed iMac I’ve been working on, then switched to the iBook.
I don’t regret it. She’s so much faster than her predecessor had been the past few months, plus I have iCalendar to map out my schedule again. I admit I managed without it, but it really does help organize and focus me.
And all the keys I had worn the letters off on my first laptop are now readable. Admittedly I touch type, but if for some reason I’m looking for a particular key (like for a shortcut) it’s very disorienting to see a half-dozen blank ones.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Why I hate Thursdays at work

We go to press Friday. I want to get as much stuff done Thursday as possible.
The invariable end result is that I stress out as I might before any impending deadline, but without the relief of being done for the week.
In other news, I didn’t snag the grant I applied for and the short story I’m working on this week—Bros Before Ho’s—looks worse than I thought it did. I don’t have as good a payoff as I did my first draft (which had other problems) and it’s getting perilously close to a polemic (I wrote it with a theme in mind, but I’m getting way too heavy handed).
But as I’ve observed before, nobody stays on a roll forever. A down week is inevitable sooner or later. Next week will be better, imshallah.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Random events

One of the problems with developing an alternate history is that there’s no automatic “If This, Then That” involved. Even if you set the cause, there’s a humongous range of possible effects.
To use an example from a history book I read a few years ago, suppose England doesn’t get involved in World War One. The war (the historian argued) would be yet another Franco-Prussian clash, ending with a German victory, rather than a War to End All Wars. As a result, America doesn’t see a need to get involved; there’s no Treaty of Versailles to shame and outrage the Germans; and Germany needn’t send Lenin to destabilize Russia. So there’s no USSR, no Third Reich, and no World War II.
All fine, and an interesting premise … but what next? What happens without the antiwar sentiment that dominated the 1920s? Where does Russia go without a Communist revolt? What happens in America if it remains isolationist without two World Wars to bring about the American century?
So many variables …
What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? is a question with smaller number of variables, but just as many options. Maybe JFK would have ended Vietnam, maybe he’d have continued; maybe he’d have finally acted on civil rights, maybe the Civil Rights Act would never have come about, or not for years.
With Brain From Outer Space, I’m assuming that the threat of alien invasion has forced America into an uneasy alliance with the Soviets. Isolationism is dead, though many people think the US should be dictating terms for its involvement rather than merely the first among equals.
My earlier drafts had the protagonists working for an Interpol-style international network fighting alien spies and pod people; I decided the US probably wouldn’t give up that much sovereignty and that they’re working for a government agency, the Technology and Science Commission.
None of this is how the world would have to be; I can think of logical, equally viable alternatives to every premise. The only real standards to go with are, is it plausible? Is it interesting? Does it work better than the alternatives?
And of course, the option to have people killed by the invasion is a wild card that I could play any way I liked. Since that feels too much like deus ex machina, I’m not using it a lot in the plot: Kerouac and Mao died young, which makes for interesting background detail, but doesn’t affect events of the story very much.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Week in review

•Finished David Halberstam’s The Fifties, which almost completes my background reading for Brain From Outer Space.•Finished a revised draft of Kernel of Truth; it works much better when I make one of the leads a selfish sleazebag. I think it’s close to a final draft.

•Finished Red Scare and Projections of War, which are background reading for The Enemy Within.

•Did a little work on an article, but not as much as I’d hoped.

•Thought of several movies I should cover, or at least check out, for The Enemy Within.

Not a stellar week, but that’s partly because there was so much research and so little output. It was necessary, I think, but it still feels frustrating.

Thursday, May 21, 2009 Thoughts on The Brain From Outer Space In my wartorn alternate timeline, a lot of people die young. What if some of them lived? What movies would James Dean be making in 1959? •Fifties conformity will not exist in the way it did in our timeline; will the Beats and the Brandos have anything to rebel against? Or will the war lead to the same protests with a slightly different slant? •Will their be rationing, or just Conserve Gas messages from the government? How bad is the black market? I do know that train travel is the norm—my characters are always taking trains rather than driving. •What sort of stores, bars, restaurants are found in Shield, the makeshift town where my protagonists are based? Just a government commissary? Or given that the war looks to run for years, will it have opened up to businesses? •Brown vs. Board of Education took place. But Eisenhower was too busy to send troops into Little Rock, so it hasn’t made much of a difference. •LBJ is going to run against President Nixon in 1960. One of my fictional senators is very pissed that he’s going to lose the nomination to a crass Texas bumpkin. Rewriting history is fun!

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