Our writing homework this week is to write a holiday-themed horror story. I’ve been struggling with this one for a week and was about to write a half-hearted piece about the abomination that is the Elf of the Shelf. In a weird little coincidence, teacher decided to write on the same subject this morning. Normally, I would be deterred, but in this case, I’ll try to turn adversity into opportunity. Or, it could just be that I didn’t care for the story I was working on in the first place. So, as I prepare to write the completely-different story, I’d like to pass along this little tidbit: I really don’t care for the holidays. I don’t care for the food, I don’t care for the forced travel, I don’t care for the gifts (giving or getting), and I really, really, really don’t like the obligatory everything. My time off is precious to me and having all manner of social requirements heaped on me wears me out. I enjoy seeing a few people, and even my family, but I don’t get any joy out of an obligation being discharged. “Relief?” Yes. A lot of relief, but it isn’t worth the stress that I get prior to it. So, yeah, “bah humbug” to me. I get it. I don’t begrudge anyone their holiday merriment. Just please be kind if my smile seems a bit forced and I excuse myself from the party early.
Category: Journal
Re-reading “Locke & Key”
I’m going to admit something right of the bat here: I don’t like scary stories. I don’t care for scary movies or books or comics or TV shows. It’s not because I find them “too scary.” I have the opposite problem: I don’t find them scary at all. This is due, in large part, to the fact that once you know it’s a “scary story,” there are very few surprises. Even the shock endings and “twists” are tropes by now. Or maybe that’s not it, maybe I’m just not wired to “get” these kinds of stories. The bottom line is that I’m not scared by scary stories. Or, rather, I wasn’t until I read Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s “Locke & Key.” I’ve never encountered such a finely-balanced story of this type. The setup ensures that the balance of power between the heroes and their antagonist shifts in unpredictable but nonetheless true-to-the-story ways. I won’t give anything away here, I’ve never had that “I can’t wait to see what happens next month” feeling from any book, not even “Sandman” at its peak. The pacing and the art are pitch perfect, and, well, just go read the books. I finally bought the last of the trade collections so I decided I’d re-read the whole story, start-to-finish. I wasn’t sure if a scary story would survive multiple readings since I already knew all the twists and the conclusion. I needn’t have worried. “Locke & Key” not only continues to work as a scary story, but the emotional arcs of the characters are even more touching the second time around. Knowing what’s going to happen, it’s a little easier to delve in to the setup and marvel at how shocking but inevitable the twists and turns are. The villain of the piece is a genuinely worthy opponent, one who deserves everything they achieve. There’s nothing remotely cardboard about any of the characters, but by having a bad guy who seems to have real agency, who has the ability to counter setbacks and come up with new plans, Hill created something approaching timelessness. The villain felt real, the heroes felt real, and the sacrifices and losses felt especially real the second time around. I am not sure I cried the first time I read “Locke & Key”, but I can assure you I did so tonight when I finished it for the second time. If you haven’t read it for yourself, I encourage you to do so. If you have read it, read it again…just have a tissue or two handy.
Avoiding work by writing about not avoiding work
Man, I’d forgotten how much writing on a schedule, as opposed to “whenever I feel like it” can take it out of a guy. In a previous life writing for magazines, the work was extremely spiky: Write twenty things in a week, then nothing for a month. Oddly enough, I find that easier than grinding out x number of words a day or week. There’s always a risk turning anything you enjoy into a job, or even treating it like one. My experience is that instead of loving your jobs (which is, presumably, the desired outcome), you wind up resenting or even hating the thing you enjoyed. Turning something you like to do into something you have to do isn’t always a good move. That said, sometimes it’s just a matter of self-discipline, isn’t it? I have no patience for people who say that working in any kind of steady fashion stifles their creativity. I say this as a person who’s said that from time to time but has come to recognize that it’s kind of a bullshit excuse. One of the key tricks to Getting Things Done is to do them when you don’t feel like it, and doing what you have to do to pay the bills that allow you to do the thing, or things, you love. Which is to say, time to close the blog and get back to work…
Because you demanded it! The Marxist in his most thrilling team up EVER!
I remember playing City of Heroes when it first came out. I’m not sure I’ve ever purchased a game which took me longer to get from “installation” to “playing.” That’s not because the learning curve was steep or the installation was buggy or there were a gazillion updates and configuration settings to apply. No, it took me forever to get into City of Heroes because the character generation was just that good. When it comes to superheroes, look is everything. The look is even more important than the powers. There a plenty of heroes who don’t even have powers but their look is so overwhelming that it doesn’t matter. If there’s one thing a superhero game absolutely, positively must have, it’s that ability to make your hero look exactly the way you want them to look. My favorite hero, the one I played the most, was a black man wearing camo pants, combat boots, a white t-shirt with a bomb on the front, gold sunglasses, and a red beret. The Marxist used to spout slightly-altered lines from The Communist Manifesto as he pummelled bad guys into submission. The game had the tools to let you create your vision of your hero and then execute them in a way that surpasses any game I’ve played to-date. Unfortunately, the rest of the game wasn’t up to snuff and I wound up cancelling my account. Maybe if I’d stuck with it I’d have found some content that interested me, but it had turned into an endless, repetative grind. Despite that, it remains a guilty pleasure in my memory. It delivered one of the best start-of-game experiences I’ve ever had. I took DC Universe Online out for a spin, but I just couldn’t get into it. Aside from the fact that the game felt as though it’d been developed for a console, it the character generation was just dreadful. It didn’t come close to the options available in CoH. Sure, you could set you exact muscle mass and alter your eyebrow angles, but in the end, you all pretty much looked the same. Bah. I bring this up because the estemeed Mr. Chuck Wendig provides some of the most evil (and evocative) fiction-writing prompts I’ve ever seen, and this week’s prompt has me cackling with delight. I’m not sure exactly where I’m going to go with it, but it’s an opportunity to bring The Marxist back to life. Thank you, Mr. Wendig. And the rest of you? You’ve been warned…
Recursive
I need to practice writing dialogue. My dialogue sounds like my internal monologue having an argument. I can’t read it without it sounding, in my head, like me talking to me. I need to make up silly voices for characters, just so I can think in those voices when they’re talking. But, if I get good at it, those silly voices will become a part of me. So it will still be me talking to me. Grrr….
Interstellar (with spoilers aplenty!)
Let’s talk about Interstellar. I’m going to talk about it as though everyone who is reading this has already seen it. If you haven’t seen it and are concerned spoilers, I advise you to stop reading now. I haven’t done a lot of film reviews, so I’ll tell you what. I’ll put my impressions at the top and then, at the bottom, below the dividing line, I’ll post the more blow-by-blow take. Now that we’re on the same page… …that was a really frustrating movie, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a bad film; instead it was a film that could have been one of the greats but lost its nerve at critical moments. It was a huge film full of Big Ideas, terrific performances, amazing visuals, and some of the hokiest sentimentality you’ll see all year. I really liked this movie when it was bleak. The fact that decisions had consequences and costs, and some of the decisions felt genuinely hard, was brilliant. The sense that they were losing a race against time permeated every frame of this film. The betrayals might have been a little telegraphed, but they felt honest. I do feel like Nolan cheated on some of the physics in order to set up some visuals and some plot points, and that was annoying because it was so tight in other ways. It always threatened to unravel with sentimentality, but it never quite did. The mere fact that it was so close was distracting. All in all, I liked it and I’d recommend it, warts and all. It’s a “thinky” movie and we don’t get enough of those from Hollywood. Here’s what I liked about it: It was emotionally very, very effective. They did some of the hard science well. The performances were uniformly outstanding. It looked spectacular and, for the most part, realistic. The robots. Despite the occasional mention of love as something that transcends dimension, they didn’t really lean on metaphysics. Speaking of love, none of the characters were romantically involved with each other. They made exploring the cosmos look cool. The scenes that starkly showed the passage of time were brutal. Here’s what I didn’t like about it: They did some of the hard science quite badly. It couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a feel good movie or a bleak one. It surely didn’t need a happy ending for Matthew McConaughey. The score got out of control sometimes. The dialogue. Everyone speaks like they’re lecturing the audience rather than talking to each other. I know one person who talks like that and I find an entire film full of them a little wearying. The ending didn’t work for me. HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! The films starts at a Frank Darabont pace. The unhurried first act may have made some people impatient (ok, it did), but, for my money, it set the stage appropriately. The Earth is dying of a slow apocalypse (a blight that affects all grain crops) and humanity has not only stopped exploring space, we’re denying we ever did. Former astronaut Matthew McConaughey (I’m going to use the actors’ names here) is now a farmer raising two kids by himself. His son is earthbound in every meaning of the word, while the daughter is bright and rebellious and quite obviously more-loved by her father. The haunting of the daughter’s room by the “ghost” is one of those things that probably would have worked better if we all weren’t so accustomed to how storytelling works. Even though there aren’t any explicit hints as to the ghost’s identity, most of us had a pretty good idea of who it was right from the beginning just because, in films like this, things tend to play out that way. The ghost pushes books out of her bookshelf and leaves Morse code or binary messages in the dust. One of the messages, a set of coordinates, sends McConaughey off to discover where NASA is hiding and operating in secret. As it turns out, NASA, led by the always-excellent Michael Caine, has plans to save humanity. It turns out that “someone” dropped a huge wormhole next to Saturn revealing a dozen potentially Earth-like worlds on the other side. Caine has two plans: Plan A is to build a giant ship to remove a fraction of Earth’s population through the wormhole to settle on one of the Earth-like worlds. This plan is contingent on Caine solving an equation that would provide enough power to get his huge ship off the ground. Plan B is the fallback. NASA would send a ship full of frozen embryos and a few people to thaw them. The downside of this plan, of course, is that it dooms every human on Earth. NASA has already sent individuals to each of the twelve potential new homes and have received positive reports from several of them. Caine persuades McConaughey to pilot a ship that will check up on these reports and proactively deliver some of the embryos as the same time. McConaughey bids his daughter, son, and father (did I mention his father was played by John Lithgow? I did not. He is, and he’s good, as you’d expect), but not without the daughter telling him that the “ghost” sent him a message to “stay.” McConaughey, along with scientist Anne Hathaway (Caine’s daughter), and a couple of redshirts make the two year journey to Saturn. I cannot emphasize enough how beautifully shot the space scenes are. The decision to make space silent and lonely works brilliantly. After the initial rush of liftoff, the crew quickly settle in to the boredom of two years in a tin can combined with the horror of knowing just how close they are to a void that would kill them in a heartbeat. They settle in for cold sleep and awaken near Saturn within eyeshot of the wormhole. For some reason, it’s at this point that the crew decide to let McConaughey know that two of the three worlds they’re planning to visit orbit a black hole. That was a little jarring when I first saw that film, and it seems even more inexplicable the more I think about it. On the plus side, it gives them an opportunity to dip their toes in the relativity pool and talk about time dilation. The passage…
Relapse
It’s chilly and dark and very, very quiet so I think I’ll just write about me for a bit. A few months back, I wrote about how the source of my chronic health concerns had been identified and that I was on the mend. In the (unseasonably) cold light of morning, I am forced to conclude that I was being a bit too optimistic. I’m not dying, at least, I’m not dying any more than the average person is on a daily basis. I am, however, growing discouraged. I’m not a winter person to begin with, and when you combine the longer nights with the constant discomfort and aesthetically unfortunate nature of my condition…I’m not going to lie. It gets me down sometimes. That said, I’ll be seeing a very good doctor in a couple of days and I am confident that we’ll be able to treat the symptoms aggressively even if we don’t move any closer to a resolution. I have family visiting soon. I can’t believe it’s been five years since I’ve spent any amount of time with them, although it may be that I’ll remember why I haven’t seen them once we’re in close quarters. I love this time of night. I love the quiet of it. I love that I can think and even concentrate without the constant interruptions and noise and people and noise and phones and noise and….you get the idea. I’ve had to work in shared workspace environments in the past. I can say with authority that “shared workspace” offices aren’t the way to go if you want to produce anything but stress. This time of night is nice. I ought to do this more often. -Ridley
Of Straw Men and Middlemen
I’ve been meaning to write something about Interstellar since seeing it on Saturday, but I feel like I need to see it again before committing to anything. It’s a complicated, frustrating movie, and it isn’t exactly the film I thought I was going to be seeing, so I’d like to see it again before committing to anything. I know I should let this go, but Mr. Scalzi posted three more tweets in defense of “middlemen” and they’ve been stuck in the forefront of my thoughts ever sense. Here’s what he had to say: My initial reaction was “Does the word ‘middleman’ even mean what I think it means? I’ve been terribly wrong about words I thought I knew, so I checked the ol’ dictionary and came up with this: “mid·dle·manˈmidlˌman/Submitnounnoun: middle-mana person who buys goods from producers and sells them to retailers or consumers. ”we aim to maintain value for money by cutting out the middleman and selling direct”” Ok, that’s pretty much exactly what I had been thinking. Anyone who adds value to the product is, by definition, not a “middleman.” The middleman doesn’t enter the equation until after whatever you’re selling has been proofed, edited, typset, etc. The book is finished by the time the middleman enters the equation. Now, I know approximately nothing about business of publishing.. I don’t know how cleanly you can make the distinction between “middleman” and “not-middleman.” I know that, in the music industry, when you talk about “middlemen,” you’re talking about the major labels, distributors, wholesalers, and your retailers like Peaches and Tower and most especially Wal-Mart. I’m guessing these aren’t the types of middlemen that Scalzi is defending. I think we’re just talking past each other. I think we’re just taking two different meanings of the word “middleman” and talking about two very different industries (as the discussion was originally about music). I hope that’s the case. He doesn’t seem like the sort to go off the handle when his fans are trying to say “I wish more of the purchase price went to the people who actually worked on the books you write.” OK, enough on this. I happen to love John Scalzi’s work (the first e-book I purchased was one of his), I love his tweets, and I love reading his blog. We differ on this issue and I could well be in the wrong. I just couldn’t get it out of my head until I put it down on something paper-ish.
In which I sound more flip on Twitter than I meant to
Earlier this afternoon, John Scalzi posted this on his Twitter feed: I agree wholeheartedly (I have paid for all of the music in my collection that wasn’t given to me as a gift) and responded with: @scalzi Would always prefer to buy, and if directly from the artist if possible. Hate paying toll to middlemen who abuse artists and fans. To which he responded: @MrRidleyKemp The “middlemen” I work with are people who do work I don’t want to do, better than I could. I want them paid, too. Ouch. Ok, it’s a fair enough comment because I didn’t specify that I wasn’t talking about publishing in general or him specifically there. I know approximately nothing about the publishing business. I know enough people working as writers and editors to know that publishing is really, really different than the music business. And the music business? I know something about that one. I worked in it, on the non-creative side, off and on for most of a decade. I have a reasonable handle on the economics of the business and I can say with some degree of authority that the middlemen absolutely abused their position for a very long time, taking advantage of both artists and fans alike. Back in ye olden times, in the days of recorded music before there was an internet, creating playable recordings of music and distributing them had a prohibitively high cost of entry. Only a few companies could do it economically. This meant that, for artists wanting to market their music, there were very few options available. It in no way resembled what we think of as a “market.” Similarly, these companies had a monopoly on selling these recordings. It was a non-competitive situation on both ends, and the companies milked the situation to an abusive degree. The price of the recordings,of course, was “whatever the market will bear”, but the cut that went to the artist was absurdly small because the artists had no choice but to enter into these one-sided deals. This generated ill-will among artists who rightly felt abused, and didn’t exactly make the fans happy since only a tiny portion of their purchase price was going to support the part of the whole supply chain they were wanting to support. Then the internet happened. Suddenly, the “production” and “distribution” costs went to a fraction of what they’d been. That part of the equation went from being a necessary evil to being something that could be bypassed completely (the fact that the music could also be illegally copied and shared at no cost and very little risk of retribution plays a part too, but that’s another story). It was now possible to make an album every bit as good, using the same personnel, the same producer, the same engineer, the same everything except for company that stamps out the plastic disks and the big box retailer racking them, and it could be sold at a larger profit to the people who made the music and a lower cost to the people who wanted to buy it. This is what I was trying to say in my 140 characters. I didn’t mean to belittle his choices, about which he knows approximately 10000000x more than I ever will. And I don’t want to cut out the editors, the agents, the managers, the typesetters, or any of the people involved in making a book better any more than I’d want to cut out anyone involved in making a record better. Hell, I don’t even want to cut out a middleman that the artist happens to like and wants to support. Like I said, I buy all of my music. But, given a choice, I’ll choose to purchase in whatever way most benefits the artists as opposed to, say, WEA and Wal-Mart.
Voting Because It Matters
The more local an election is, the greater importance of your vote. I know it’s much sexier to vote in state-wide or national elections. It’s easier to get worked up against the eternal struggle between Good and Evil, which is to say, Your Party versus the Other Party, as represented by two candidates on a national ballot. I get caught up in it as much as anyone. Unfortunately, your vote doesn’t really matter very much in a national election. It just doesn’t. Even in Wyoming, the state where individual votes have the greatest impact on an election (thanks, electoral college!), your vote is a literal drop in a bucket. Not only that, but the folks you’re voting for only represent you in the most abstract of senses. You are not at the top of their mind when they’re doing whatever Presidents or Senators do on a daily basis. There’s too many of “you” and too few of “them” for any sort of real representation to occur. At the other end of the spectrum, you have your local elections. Your city council members represent a few thousand people rather than tens of millions. The bond issues affect you and yours on a daily basis. The school board (you do elect your school board, don’t you?) makes decisions that can affect your children’s entire lives. These are very close, very immediate concerns. The best part is that your vote can actually make a difference in these elections. In a national election, coming within a few million votes is considered a close race, whereas a few hundred votes can produce a landslide in a local election. I won’t be writing about political things very often, but I’ll make an exception today. I urge you, if you haven’t already, please get out and vote today. It might actually make a difference.