This week was much better than the last couple of weeks, so I think the slump is broken. Huzzah.
Due to my new scheduling approach, this was a no-Demand Media week except for a couple of article rewrites (there’s a bonus for completing enough articles per month, so doing them in the first three weeks avoids any Internet or other problems thwarting me). This worked much better than the first time I tried it last month, when having such a shift in my schedule left me managing my time poorly.
I didn’t make up on all the time I lost during my sluggish period, but I did well enough I should be able to catch up next month (I’ve been behind worse in the past and still made it up). And I’m pleased to report that as of today everything that I currently think is submittable is out: all the shorts I’m not working or reworking on, and both novels.
And I also have an And column out on why national security is the real nanny state.
•I finished End of the World on the Cutting Room Floor and submitted it. I must thank the member of my writing group who said I could trim a lot of the end. She was right.
•I submitted two more shorts that had returned earlier this month.
•I finished formatting four of my stories for Smashwords. I’d hoped to put them up for sale this week, but I need a little work on the cover (a graphic-designer friend of mine is going to help). More news as it develops.
•I tried an alternative tack on Mage’s Masquerade, reworking it with psi-powers rather than magic. The more limited options available to my characters seemed to jump-start the story, so I’ll either stick with it or tone down the magery level.
•I got a second draft of my Monster Earth II story, The Fox and the Hedgehog, and it’s definitely improved. However finding a way to stop my indestructible monster is still perplexing me—I can think of solutions, but they come off very deus ex.
•I finished the 16,000 words of Brain From Outer Space I wanted to get done this month.
•I finally got around to redrafting Fiddler’s Black and for the first time the monstrous Light-Eaters and their method of eating souls makes sense to me. Still a long way from good, but it’s progressing.
•And I put in three hours on the early 1920s fantasy novel I’m working on. The first chapter or two where I introduce the cast is good, but then I have to kick off the plot, so my creativity slowed down some. But this is a work-on-it-whenever kind of project so for now that’s good enough. We’ll see where it goes.
•Plus I did some advance work for a Raleigh Public Record story I’ll be covering next week.
And now it’s time to save all my work and kick back before bed. See you tomorrow, everyone.
Monthly Archives: May 2013
Ecce Links—behold the links
Right-wing pundit Erick Erickson proclaims female breadwinners are unnatural. As Echidne points out, he’s full of it: Very few animals stay home with babies while Daddy runs out to get food (lions, of course, stay home while the women do much of the hunting). And even in humans, mothers throughout history have done more than care for kids, whether it’s gathering food or working (as others have observed, the upper-class Victorian woman who stayed home and didn’t work was waited on by armies of maids, cooks and other women who did). But then, conservatives are usually dead wrong about what constitutes natural behavior.
•An Australian bishop brands abortion a much bigger issue than the church’s sex abuse. He also defends the church’s lack of action by explaining that if they’d been “gossips” they’d have found out what was going on much sooner.
•A woman in El Salvador has a nonviable baby. The pregnancy is killing the mother. But in El Salvador, they still won’t approve an abortion. Instead, the courts have generously allowed her a C-section.
•Tennessee Repub. Rep. Steven Fincher believes that it’s morally wrong for the government to give taxpayer money to feed the poor. However, collecting more than $3 million in taxpayer farm subsidies since 1999 and pushing for bigger subsidies is perfectly cool.
•Republicans are losing hope for a deficit-reduction deal with the White House. Which is good for us, unless you’re an austerian.
•The belief Obama is some sort of covert Muslim sympathizer refuses to die. Other rightbloggers explain how the Boston bombing clearly proves letting Mexicans into the country is bad.
•Just because some states have legalized pot doesn’t mean banks there want to do business with the growers.
•A student suggests that the University of Connecticutt has better things to do than pick a new logo for a sports team (for example,their treatment of women). This is transformed into “some feminist said the logo triggers rape.” Here’s a look at another school’s sex assault scandal—the scandal being the school didn’t do crap.
•Slacktivist pokes holes in yet another argument about how legal gay marriage will destroy Christianity.
•Bush administration torture-excuser John Yoo is horrified that the Boston bombing suspect was actually read his rights. Perhaps it will comfort him that said suspect’s requests for an attorney were ignored.
(One section removed at the request of someone involved in the incident).
•A woman in a homeless shelter gets a job, then gets fired when the boss learns she lives in a homeless shelter.
•People say alternatives to oil aren’t profitable enough to turn to. But here’s a look at how much the world subsidizes oil production.
•Robert Reich sounds off in a Facebook post about pols who assume that if we take money from the poor, they’ll work harder, but if we take money from the rich, they’ll get lazy. It’s all part of redefining poverty.
•Bank compensation for wrongful foreclosure average $300 to $5,000. And the checks are bouncing.
•How exactly do calls for civil disobedience work with gay marriage, when gay marriage doesn’t require most clergy or most people to do anything?
Filed under economics, Politics, Undead sexist cliches
Doc Savage: The fearsome czar of the Phantom City
After 10 months of writing Doc Savage, Lester Dent has a basic formula down pat. Someone shows up in New York seeking Doc’s help. The bad guy tries to capture them before they can reach Doc, or after they meet Doc but before giving him more than a cryptic message (occasionally they’ll try to take down Doc himself). It’s not a fixed set-in-stone formula—The Sargasso Ogre doesn’t follow it, for instance—and it’s a workable one.
Other details wear less well when reading regularly. I can understand Dent explaining Doc to us every time, but I have less patience for explaining Monk and Ham’s nicknames. That said, Dent does show flashes of style in his writing as he goes along. In the opening of The Czar of Fear, there’s a description of a young man sitting sideways on a diner stool so that he can watch the front door. He’s gulping down a sandwich without tasting it and swilling coffee with just as little interest. It captures how frightened he is of the Green Bell.
Czar (cover art by James Bama, all rights with current holder) actually has two parties heading to the Big Apple to see Doc. One is a trio from Prosper City which has been plunged into poverty by the mysterious Green Bell. A mix of labor agitation, threats and financial power have closed the town’s businesses, leaving everyone unemployed, and the trio want help. The other party is a businessman and agent of the Green Bell, who assumes Doc is a thug-for-hire he can easily put on his payroll. Any guesses which side Doc signs up with?
As my friend Ross says, this comes off as such a blatant Depression metaphor it would be interesting to know what readers made of it at the time. Doc saves the day at first not by busting up the hoods but buying the businesses (with a promise to sell them back), re-opening them and putting the town back to work. The villain, we eventually learn, plots to take over Prosper City’s business sector, then go national, paying for his purchases with the millions he made selling stock short in the stock market crash.
That said, this is a good one with Doc’s most comic-bookish villain to date (though of course comic book supervillains were more than five years in the future). It’s the first time he’s hunted by the cops (framed for murder by the Green Bell’s agents) and I suspect the last time he uses his finger-tip thimbles with the knockout drugs: They only appear briefly here and not at all in the next book.
This is also the first not to give equal roles to all five of Doc’s aides: Ham spends most of the book fighting off the murder charge in New York.
Speaking of which, The Phantom City is the first of a number of lost race stories in this series. A beautiful, exotic blonde woman seeks Doc’s help, pursued by a Middle Eastern crimelord convinced the title lost city holds fabulous wealth she can lead him to. The villains want Doc’s submarine, Helldiver (from The Polar Treasure) to reach the city by subterranean river. On arrival, Doc and co. face the usual thrills (killer ape men!) before settling the bad guys’ hash.
It’s not bad at all, but it’s not first-rate. The Lost Oasis had a Middle Eastern setting but it was a lot more entertaining.
The book does have two introductions of note, however. While in Arabia, Monk picks up a pet pig he nicknames Habeas Corpus to needle Ham (Ham’s nickname relates to being framed for stealing a ham during WW I). And instead of regular guns, Doc’s men are now armed with machine guns that shoot drug-laden mercy bullets—no killing, just unconsciousness. Makes me wonder if Dent dropped the finger-tip thimbles because these generate more action with just as little bloodshed.
Filed under Doc Savage, Reading
Writing links
A good look at how to get characters to act out of character: because they’re pushed to the limit, drunk, or hiding they’re real selves for instance.
•If you’re planning to write porn movies, this is probably not good news. Some banks don’t want your money.
•A writer discusses the detailed research she went through to write a drama set in Bolshevik Russia. I don’t usually go into as much detail for my own work (the historical detail isn’t the main selling point—and I find heavy “time dropping” annoying) but it’s still an interesting read. And if that’s not enough, here’s a support group for historical figures unfairly maligned in fiction. It’s hysterical.
•Amazon has a plan for writing fan-fic, getting paid for it and giving the rights holder some money too. Consumerist talks about it too.
•Dean Wesley Smith blogs about ghosting a novel in 10 days, charting his day-by-day progress. Interesting to see him do it starting from scratch though the blow-by-blow of the account isn’t exactly riveting (it’s like I imagine Tweeting about writing to be). In a related post, his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch uses him as an example of getting work done in small bursts of time. And I agree with her wholeheartedly about the importance of getting up and moving every hour or 30 minutes or whatever.
Of course, this also shows how what works for one person doesn’t work for everyone. Rausch and Smith structure their cooking plans to minimize the distraction from their writing; I love to cook, so I make sure and find time for it. Of course, I give up time for other stuff in return, but I think it’s a fair trade. And even when time is crunched, I’m unlikely to do much takeout; the gain in time for me isn’t worth the cost (for them, it’s obviously the other way around).
Filed under Writing
Writing what you know
It’s an old cliche that you should write what you know. And there’s also the old counter-cliche, that this is too damn limiting for a writer.
Although I do side more with the counter-cliche, knowing stuff can really help writing. It’s not so much a matter of confining yourself to your life experience as importing it to whatever you’re working on. Particularly details.
Case in point, the owl in the picture above (from a Mensa event last month). During the presentation by the Greenville Zoo, someone played a tape of owl calls and the bird responded. What was striking was that it didn’t flap its wings or start, it simply turned its head. Slowly. More like a machine than a startled living thing.
I didn’t know owls moved like that. If I ever have to use an owl in a story of mine, I’ll try to work that detail in, just because it’s neat.
Likewise, I was watching our garden last week and saw a honey bee come to rest on a clover blossom. Only it didn’t rest because the flower swayed from side to side under the weight of the bee. When the bee flew off with its pollen, the clover vibrated for a couple of seconds from the release before it came to rest.
I could do a story with someone sitting in the field, watching the bees, without mentioning that little detail. But it would be a better story if I threw it in.
The great animedirector Hayao Miyazaki made the same point in an interview: when one of his films required a snake fall out of the tree on someone, he had to go out, find a snake and let it fall. The animators were city kids and they’d never had the experience of seeing it happen.
In the same vein, back in biology class I had the privilege of watching a small constrictor (I’m inclined to say hog snake, but I can’t swear to it after so many years) attack a mouse. It’s the first time I’ve literally seen something move faster than the eye can see—a quick blur, then there’s just a snake coiled around the rodent.
In a novel I worked on back in the 1990s (regrettably never finished, despite consuming several years of work), I had a fight by moonlight. I went out to the neighborhood park under the full moon just to so I could gauge what you can see in that kind of light.
Little details probably won’t break or make a story, but they can’t but enhance it.
Snake hands
In Engine Summer, John Crowley’s narrator observes that snake hands—the parts or stories that branch off from the main body—are the most interesting part. Of course snakes don’t have hands, but stories don’t really branch if they’re told right—it’s all part of the same narrative.
This weekend has been a whole bunch of snake hands, which is why I didn’t post yesterday and didn’t get the couple of posts done I was planning for today (or pretty much everything else).
Saturday, after posting, TYG and I went out shopping, then to a continuation of the Hitchcock festival where we caught North by Northwest last week (this week Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window with a film-group dinner at a tapas bar in between).
Sunday would have been slower, but we’d been invited to brunch by recently engaged friends. So we got up early and rushed out to get some bicycling done. Unfortunately, we overdid it (I had a feeling we might be pushing it) which left me somewhat wiped the rest of the day.
Anyway after brunch we went car shopping. It was frustrating: Several hours but only one car driven (either the lot was closed or they didn’t have the car we wanted). By the time I got home, I was exhausted.
Today, we got up, took a walk,then I made the pear/butternut squash soup that I was too tired to make yesterday. Then out car shopping again. This again turned out much longer than anticipated—but that’s because we bought the car,so at least that’s taken care of.
So while my planned activities for today (lots of little stuff I wanted to catch up) got diverted by snake hands, it’s a good thing (our old car was close to dropping dead mid-trip). And we won’t have to do more car shopping.
On the down side, I have a feeling that getting the remaining details wrapped up (dropping off the old car we’re trading in, signing paperwork, taking it for a practice drive on quiet streets before I brave the freeway) will suck up a lot of work time tomorrow. Unfortunately, it needs to be done (I’ll have more on that topic tomorrow too). As I’ve said before, some weeks there are just too many giants with axes.
(Cover by Billy Graham, rights all belong to current holder).
Filed under Personal, Time management and goals
Allow me to introduce Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey
As I’m working my way through Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey books (to date from the first book, Whose Body?, through Lord Peter Views the Body), I thought I’d take a moment to give some background on him. Because they don’t make detectives like Wimsey any more.
The Golden Age of detective stories (generally considered the time between the two World Wars) was an age when British writers dominated and so did amateur detectives (Sherlock Holmes is often identified as the founder of the school, even though he was a professional PI). Cops were considered rather tacky and blue-collar and “amateur” in those days referred to doing something for love, not money—and was therefore assumed to be on a higher plane (EW Hornung’s 19th-century master thief, Raffles, is always referred to as an amateur even though he’s stealing to support himself). Murders frequently took place among the upper classes, often at country-house weekend parties (which I satirized in The Wodehouse Murder Case).
Many of these works vanished into obscurity; when Agatha Christie wrote about her Partners in Crime parody stories, she could barely remember some of the originals she’d been mocking. Wimsey survived.
As we learn over the course of the series, Lord Peter’s family are the Dukes of Denver, one of England’s wealthiest aristocratic families (at the time, a lot of aristocrats were going into commerce to make ends meet but the stereotype remained) though it’s his brother who has the title. A World War I veteran with some degree of shell-shock, he’d adopted his rather inane manner as a coping mechanism in the wake of the war. According to a biographical sketch by Sayers, his saving grace was when he wound up solving his first criminal case: Suddenly he had a focus for his first-rate mind and a way to make a difference in the world. He’s assisted in his work by Bunter, his aide (or “batman”) during the war and now his valet. Bunter has a keen mind of his own, a good deal of charm and a skill with photography which comes in handy (this is back when cameras and chemical film developing were a lot more demanding than they are now).
Surprisingly, Sayers isn’t terribly snobby about Peter’s aristocratic lineage (although as an Englishman of 55, I may just not register the snobbery), but she does present him in a very elitist way. Peter’s taste is superb: He collects rare books, wears the best tailored suits, and enjoys the best food—all of which he has the taste and discernment to appreciate. In one of the short stories, Peter’s triumph hinges on the fact his palate can identify any wine. A later novel compares his refined appreciation for music with the boors who only fake it. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Peter speaks disparagingly of someone who was turned down for the club because he smoked a strong cigar before sampling a superb port (thereby making it impossible to taste the wine properly).
The Golden Age had many flaws. As Raymond Chandler grumbled in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” the elaborately constructed plots often required people to act in batshit ways. And the aristocratic settings were light-years removed from reality or from the brutality and pain that murder brings. Nevertheless, Chandler’s hardboiled school of writing didn’t consign the Golden Age style to the trash heap. The best stories survived, and they have amateur detectives following in their wake today in countless stories.
Peter Wimsey isn’t for everyone. But then, he doesn’t try to be.
Filed under Reading
Movies, TV and Books
Courtesy of a Hitchcock film festival at the Carolina Theatre, TYG and I got to see NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) on the big screen. A classic thriller in which an unfortunate fluke leaves Cary Grant looking like the secret agent infiltrating James Mason’s spy ring, forcing Grant to go on the run until he can figure out what’s really happening. What’s striking rewatching this is how leisurely it is compared to so many modern movies—long scenes without rapid cuts, very little in physical action (Grant does not show hitherto untapped abilities to perform like James Bond) and a lack of constant danger, but without ever being boring. With Leo G. Carroll as a spymaster, Eva Marie Saint as a pretty stranger and Martin Landau as Mason’s lackey, this has multiple memorable moments including an encounter with a crop-duster, the finalé on Mt. Rushmore and Saul Bass’s striking opening credits. Deserves every bit of its rep. “The trouble with attractive women is that I have to pretend I have no interest in making love to them.”
LEVERAGE wrapped up its final season as Timothy Hutton and his crew continue bringing justice to those beyond the reach of the law by employing classic scams and cons against them. The finalé reveals why Hutton shifted his team to Portland and what happens to the team after everything wraps up. This was a fun series, and I’ll miss it. “Justice or order—one day you’re going to have to make a choice.”
ELEMENTARY gives us a second present-day Sherlock Holmes series; where the BBC version present Holmes at his coldest and most calculating, Johnny Lee Hooker’s Sherlock is a drug addict on a self-destructive spiral since the death of his beloved Irene Adler. Enter Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), an ex-surgeon turned “sober companion” for recovering addicts (by the end of the series, she’s graduated to apprentice detective). Further from Doyle than the BBC version, but very entertaining in its own right. “Over the course of my career, I’ve plotted at least seven murders that took place in crowded restaurants.”
BIG BANG THEORY‘s latest season doesn’t change much (despite Leonard and Penny now being a definite couple)—they’ve got a formula set and they follow it faithfully. Whether the humor makes up for the sexism is a matter of taste—I still watch, even though I’m wincing often enough at the sexism (both toward the women and toward Raj for being, in the eyes of the writer, suspiciously girly). “I’ll keep that in mind, unnamed crew member in a red shirt.”
LORD PETER VIEWS THE BODY was the first of Dorothy Sayers’ two short-story collections in the series, and I must say, she doesn’t have the knack she does with longer works. At short-length, Wimsey’s silly-ass babble and eccentricities dominate things to the point the plot is buried, and they aren’t entertaining enough in their own right to make the stories work. Disappointing.
As a fan of Patricia McKillip’s, I was equally disappointed in her third novel, STEPPING FROM THE SHADOWS (I should mention I liked her first and second). This is her only mainstream work and her poetic style feels decidedly “off” here; a bigger problem is that it’s a coming-of-age novel (following a nervous pre-teen all the way through to adulthood) and I rarely find those interesting. Nor did it help that most reviews and the back cover present it as a magical realist fantasy, when it’s a perfectly mundane books (the supernatural elements are metaphorical and imaginary) and I really hate that.
Redemption
Redemption is a powerful source for story material. The fallen hero who tries to stop her fall, the villain attempting to rise, the tyrant or fiend who sees the light. It’s also damn tricky.
Redemption actually involves several inter-related things: Can you earn forgiveness from someone you’ve wronged? Can you prove to society that you deserve to be forgiven? And can you truly become a better human being?
Case in point: It’s a tenet of Christianity (subject to multiple interpretations and sectarian disputes of course) that if you sincerely repent your sins and turn to Jesus, you’re saved. Which is unsettling: It’s nice to know I can’t do anything so horrible God won’t take me back, but if someone murdered my family, I’d probably hate the thought the killer can get into Heaven.
Salvation in this case doesn’t have anything to do with secular, society forgiveness. Being saved doesn’t and shouldn’t get you out of prison, or community service or whatever it is that you’ve done. God’s justice and our are separate things (even if we all agreed on what God’s justice was, or if it exists)
This leads us to Return of the Jedi. Orson Scott Card was quite PO’d that merely by saving Luke, Darth Veder gets to join Obiwan on the light side of the force. And Card has a point, particularly after seeing Anakin’s massive bloodshed in Ep3. On the other hand, if Vader had repented and turned to Jesus, Card would presumably have to concede that he gets a free pass (or doesn’t that hold in the LDS?).
My point is that for a redemption arc to work as drama, it can’t be too easy. Even in a Christian context, you need someone to seriously face up to the fact they’ve been a complete shit before they make the change. And then they have to prove it. Dramatically speaking, we need works as well as faith.
In a non-religious context, we have Thunderbolts #9 as an example (cover by Mark Bagley, all rights to current holder) Kurt Busiek looks back at the second Avengers team, which included former “evil mutants” Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch and ex-criminal Hawkeye. In the original stories, their transition to heroes was smooth; here Busiek shows the public much less willing to let them off the hook. Mark Waid’s Incorruptible series (covered in some of my book review posts) does a good job by taking Max Damage’s past crimes seriously: He has lots to atone for, and Waid doesn’t make it easy.
Long-running series pose their own problems. In comics, as several creators have said, redemption comes about simply because some characters have been around for years and in trying to find new angles, it’s natural to start seeing things from their sides. This can create an interesting development (Magneto’s off-and-on stints as hero, Catwoman’s moving from villain to anti-hero). But it’s to let past crimes slide (one Marvel editor suppposedly vetoed a Venom series on the grounds he was just too murderous).
In TV, charming, attractive actors can make it easy to see characters as more sympathetic than they are. Syler, the murderous power-stealer of Heroes‘ first season became implausibly sympathetic as the series went on; I can’t but suspect some of that was because pre-Spock Zachary Quinto had a female fan base.
Regina in Once Upon a Time frequently comes off as tragic. She’s lonely and desperate for love and Lana Parilla conveys her pain very well. That doesn’t change the fact she was a coldblooded killer who devastated a kingdom from her hatred for Snow White and near the end of this past season was willing to kill the entire cast provided she and her son could escape. She starts out the year trying to be good but when it turns out people still don’t trust her, she turns—and I can’t help feeling the show wants us to sympathize with her more than she deserves (after all she’s done, assuming she’s still a killer is hardly unreasonable).
Likewise, Vader’s turn to the light worked for me because it’s such a powerful dramatic moment. It might be a lot harder to buy if I’d read it on the printed page.
