Category Archives: Writing

My Next Novel

Writing, , ,

One of the more exciting aspects of being a novelist is that every now and then you actually get to sit down and write a novel. Imagine that. Well, I’ve been giving the prospect a lot of thought lately, and now I finally realize what is going to be the next novel.

The working title: Mapping the Silence of Dreams

Genre: Fantasy

Premise: The next realm of exploration is Mindspace after a discovery is made that links the dream world that everyone travels to when they fall asleep. All along we thought it was a realm that existed within each person’s mind, but now we know that everyone travels to this same place, yet are separated by their own barriers their minds construct to protect them. Well, now that we’ve begun to explore it, we start to realize there’s something else in Mindspace. Something alive. Something that’s been waiting. And it’s ready.

The novel is based on a short story I wrote years ago and stashed away in a drawer but always wanted to do more with. Well, now it gets its chance.

I begin writing it on Monday, which is the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), where the goal is to write a novel (50,000 words) in one month. Last year, I wrote Plato’s Perspective during the contest.

A few of my friends will be participating this year.

30,000 hits and no comments

Writing, , ,

I just noticed for the first time today that my blog now has 30,000 hits. That’s almost as much as a sex site gets in a whole three hours, and 29,732 more than Lindsay Lohan gets when she blogs about integrative calculus, so I found that to be seriously impressive. But what bothers me is that I have no comments. I get a few comments on facebook from time to time, but for some reason this widget doesn’t seem to import them anymore to my blog, which makes it seem like my blog has everything but tumbleweeds turning over and over again.

Yet, I get dozens of spam messages a day. So, somehow the spammers are finding my site and trying to get me to advertise their crap. But real people aren’t reading me. Or at least I can’t tell if they’re reading me because the only actual responses I get are spammers. And I’m convinced they’re not really reading me because when you get messages that hit my spam folder like: “I really like what you’ve done with your site, and I’m going to subscribe to your feed. Now, are you sure you understood Justin Bieber’s argument in his new single properly?”

Maybe I’m just wasting my time with this blog. I really don’t know. I know my stuffed animals read it, but they read everything I put in front of them, so I don’t even have to put it on the net for them to read what I have to write.

NaNoWriMo is starting again

Writing, , ,

For those of you who write, perhaps this is not news for you, but National Novel Writing Month is about to begin on November 1st. For those of you who don’t know what it is, this is a month where writers attempt to start and complete a novel. Last year, I spent my time writing Plato’s Perspective. It was a very rough draft, but it was interesting to churn that out in one month. I’m still working on it to this day, but it was definitely worth the effort and the time involved.

This means that this year I have to come up with a new novel idea that I will start writing on November 1st, which is less than a week away. To be honest, I didn’t realize a whole year had already gone by.

For me, this is a huge event. That’s because I’ve been a novelist for about as long as I’ve been an adult. I’ve never wanted to be anything else. I have a friend of mine who is a movie director who puts on all sorts of different hats to complete his projects, but as I keep telling him, that’s not my way. I’m a writer, and that’s all I’ve ever claimed to be. It’s all I ever plan to do as well.

Which brings all sorts of possibilities for the future because in 6 days I have to have an actual idea and start writing on it. I don’t even know what genre I want to cover, so this could be interesting.

“The Event” and “Chase” Leave a Lot to Be Desired

Television, Writing, , , , , , ,

I gave them both a try. I even continued watching both shows long after I thought they had seriously jumped sharks, shark tanks and the Atlantic Ocean. But nothing about these shows has caused me to think that they’re worth any further watching on my part. Last night’s airing of both is a good example.

The Event

The series started off with a bit of an overhyped dud and has managed to dog paddle its way through the rest of the season. In the very first episode, they presented us with “the event”, or at least what I think was supposed to be the event. A plane was hurtling towards the president, and then out of nowhere it vanished. The next week, the plane reappeared in the desert. Then secret police/military helicopters showed up and may have slaughtered everyone. And then the bodies woke up. And then the bodies were now all prisoners wondering what happened. My writing of this makes it sound a lot more exciting than it really was. To be honest, it’s been extremely boring, accented with huge moments that generally don’t make any sense. And I don’t mean “doesn’t make any sense in a LOST sort of way”. It’s more a “doesn’t make sense in a Cop Rock (remember that show?) sort of way”. Nothing the show has done has caused me to really think: “I can’t wait to see how they pull this off” or “I wonder what’s going to happen next.” Instead, it’s been more like “I really can’t wait until they go to a commercial so I can do something constructive like check email for a spam message I’m hoping to receive.”

Last night’s episode was par for the course. Let me explain. The main actor, who is Jason Ritter, the son of John Ritter, attempted to act his way out of a paper bag in which he showed his range of “I’m in a panic mode cause I’m looking for my girlfriend” and “I’m in anger mode because I’m looking for my girlfriend.” Unfortunately, in the previous episode, he found his girlfriend, so his acting range has no purpose right now, as “I found my girlfriend, so I’m now going to act all frantic for no reason is hopefully not going to be noticed by the audience.”

And that’s a huge part of the problem with the show right there. The acting is atrocious. And I mean ALL of the acting. At first, I thought it was because they had really bad actors, but there are some pretty decent actors here who are doing some seriously horrendous acting, which to me means their director sucks because even bad actors can’t act this badly. An example: One of the main recurring actors is D.B. Sweeney who has done some great things in the past. He was in a show with Terry O’Quinn, the bald guy who plays Locke in LOST, called Harsh Realms, where he played the buddy of the main character, and he was really good in this part. When I saw he was now in The Event, I was actually thinking, wow, they got a good actor, mainly because I was seeing a lot of bad acting. They’ve done nothing great with him, and as a matter of fact, his acting is pretty crappy in this show as well, which immediately tells me that the director seriously sucks.

Another example was the appearance of Paula Malcomson, who plays, well, to be honest, I haven’t a clue who she was playing because I was having a seriously hard time paying attention when she finally appeared. Malcomson is the actress who plays Amanda Graystone in Caprica, who probably has one of the most nuanced parts in television these days on that show. In The Event, they decided that because she was a “serious” actress, they were going to let her show her talents at being completely nuts and off the wall. She puts on a 40 or so second rant that was basically best described as “bad actress overacting”. I half expected the two other actors in the scene to respond with “Really?” because it was so over the top bad acting that I couldn’t imagine anyone else remaining in character for the rest of that scene. But fortunately, we was joined by Jason Ritter and the woman who plays the FBI agent, so the bad acting continued ensue and a good time was had by all.

Let’s move on with the story. In the last episode, they released the mysterious woman who won’t tell the president her secrets because of some strange terrorist demand that the government do so. So, she goes on the subway, drives around for a while and then ends up in a wannabe Starbucks, orders coffee, and then her fellow accomplice throws off a tracking device placed in her food (and now in her) by mixing a similar tracking device in the creamer of the coffee so that soon 50 something people are walking around with the tracking device. And then the good/bad guy working with her ends up beating up one of his fellow FBI agents, burying him in the trunk of his car and then radioing the bad guy holding everyone hostage that he needs to come in.

So, they all move in on a huge warehouse where the bad guy is holding out. Fortunately, the government just so happens to see the mysterious woman walk in through the front door of the warehouse with a CC camera at the last second before she disappears behind the door. So an FBI crack team of guys in military uniforms with FBI blazened on the back of their jackets rush into the building to catch the big bad, mean terrorist. I say this because this leads to a typical police raid drama that should have required the writers and director to have actually watched a typical police raid drama some time  in the past because it has to be the biggest joke of a raid I’ve ever seen. First off, it had to be the slowest raid physically possible. After the crack team breaks through the front door, they waddle forward in as slow a manner as physically possible so that we end up with at least two commercial breaks before they get about fifteen feet past the front door. Before they even get that fifteen feet in, the executives of the FBI then come crashing in behind them. You can tell the executives because they’re the ones that don’t wear any protective gear other than a flack vest, but all have three piece suits, minus the jacket, because somewhere in Hollywood land some informed them that cops look much cooler with the dress shirt, flack vest and hand gun attire than with full body armor and machine guns like the rest of the guys were wearing.

So, in all of this time they’re raiding, the bad guys get away by crawling into a hole in a drain that’s located in the room next to the one where the ten thousand crack soldiers are breaking into their warehouse. And then, and this was my favorite part of the episode, he activates some mysterious glowing bomb and the double agent guy from before decides to sacrifice his life (even though he can get away just by stepping into the drain opening about two feet away from him) because somewhere down the line he had to give up a girl he fell in love with because being an alien (did I mention he was one of the aliens?) he would never age, and well, we learned from watching years of Highlander that you just can’t do that to a woman. But back to the great moment of television history: The President of the United States is watching the invasion over the CC camera, which for some reason is relaying the image in full HD television, and focused directly on the door where the FBI agents busted in. And then, for no apparent reason, the CC camera switches to a full view of the warehouse, and we watch it implode on itself. And all I’m left wondering is: Who the hell switched the camera angle, how did he know to do it at that time, and where did that new image come from? Unfortunately, those questions won’t be answered by The Event because they were stupid mistakes in creating the show, not mysteries within the show itself.

When the episode ended, I was almost comatose and thankful it ended. And then I watched the lead-in for The Chase.

The Chase

One of the stupidest shows I’ve seen in years. It involves a female US Marshal who apprehends fugitives. For some reason, they’ve made her out to be a chance-taking, thrill-seeking agent who risks her life constantly. In the beginning of this episode, she gets angry at one of her agents who doesn’t risk his life jumping onto a boat that might have three armed fugitives on it. Her second in command plays the Will Riker character of her conscience, who tends to try to keep her grounded.

What bothers me about the show is that it takes every cliche of Hollywood and uses it as if it’s brand new. Last night, there were three separate dialogue moments where a character said something, and I responded out loud with exactly what was going to be the zinger of a response. And word for word, I was right each time. I’m not kidding either.

The villains are cartoonish and way over the top. I kind of wondered where they would even imagine such people really existed. Even the bar in Mos Eisley didn’t have a cesspool of villainy like the ones that occur in Chase. Sometimes, I find myself rooting for the bad guys, just in hopes that the death of the US Marshals on the show might cause the show to never appear again on network television.

Both shows have been picked up for finishing out their season, but I imagine that is only because NBC has nothing better planned. It has done everything possible to hype the crap out of The Event, but it’s really not worth the effort. The only thing going for it is that it comes on right after Chuck, which is a great television show, even when it’s not at its best. Unfortunately, everything following Chuck makes me realize how nice it is that I own books that I can read instead.

A Few Comments That Need To Be Said

Economics, Memoirs, Politics, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , ,

I thought I would take a moment and just make a few comments that need to be said. Unfortunately, only my stuffed animals read my blog. Well, my stuffed animals and my imaginary girlfriend…from Canada…and maybe that mysterious group of government assassins who have been trying to replace my nonfat milk with soy products, but you probably get the point.

1. If a news article is ever written about me that includes the phrase, “and police searched the wood chipper for signs of the body” then let’s just say that I’ve probably reached a saturation point of relevance and should immediately be put to sleep. Or if police were searching the wood chipper for signs of ME, then let’s just say that I’ve probably got worse problems than anything I might complain about on my blog.

2. I’m convinced Craigslist has no further relevance or importance now that they have removed the adult ads. I’m sorry, but it has no purpose any more. I attempted to put up a personal ad the other day, and it never showed up. The system said I did everything right, but it just never made it to the production side of the house. This has convinced me that all the site was ever really good for was advertising fake personal ads that were really a cover for underage girls selling sex to dirty old men and local law enforcement. Or it was local law enforcement trying to pretend to sell potential sex to dirty old men to put them in jail for wanting sex with underage girls. Or it was NBC trying to snare dirty old men trying to find sex with underage law enforcement officers, or something like that. Either way, underage girls were involved and so were dirty old men, so do the math, and you can probably figure it out. Let’s just shut down Craigslist for good. It doesn’t make sense any more.

3. No politicians are honest. At all. Oh, they talk a good game, but they’re really only interested in pretending to be something they’re not so they can get a job they probably don’t deserve. We should force them to create Craigslist ads instead, and then we can hire the underage girls to run our government. I’m just saying….

4. The “check engine soon” light on your car is a boldface liar. It doesn’t want you to check your engine. It wants you to bring your car back to the dealer so they can charge you $99 to tell you that they need to charge you $299 to replace a sensor that tells you to check your engine soon. What they’re really doing is replacing the light in the sensor so that it will go off two days after you leave the dealer’s shop. Mine did. And now it goes off for a week, goes on for a week, and then repeats the cycle. There’s nothing wrong with the engine, other than it has a faulty sensor that keeps telling me to check the engine soon. Or perhaps my engine is just lonely and wants friends. Maybe I should get a sensor that goes off whenever I’m in public that says “check duane soon…he needs friends”. And then people can pay me $99 for me to tell them they need to pay me $299 so that I’ll tell them to pay me $99 very soon.” I’m just saying….

5. The lives of celebrities aren’t important to the rest of us. It’s one thing to follow the news and be interested in celebrities. It’s another to have it thrown in our faces nonstop as if it’s important. I was tuning into the news the other day, and the point-counterpoint was all about Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I’m sorry, but there’s the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the election around the corner, and all sorts of actual news stories that are really news. We really don’t need too political partisans going back and forth about what kind of role model Lindsay Lohan is presenting for young girls who don’t even know who she is because she hasn’t been relevant in about a decade now. Same with Paris Hilton. Since her last actual television reality show, she hasn’t been relevant, significant or even interesting in a very long time now. The people who remember her are no longer capable of being influenced. The ones who are capable of being influenced really have never heard of her and probably think she’s some old woman who their parents might have found interesting. It’s amazing how socially irrelevant celebrities become in a few years.

6. The publishing industry sucks. No two ways about it. I get so discouraged trying to make it as a published novelist, only to find out that Snooki or Tyra Banks is being given a huge publishing contract to churn out drivel that my pack of monkeys (who write Shakespearean sonnets…remember them? The ones who if they write enough gibberish will eventually duplicate a Shakespearean sonnet) could have written just as well. Bah, I get so upset at this sort of thing.

I’m Suspecting Amazon Doesn’t Actually Understand Writing

Economics, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

For a bit of time now, Amazon has been trying to herald the move towards electronic books, essentially ushering in a new medium for which books will eventually become the primary method of production. The Kindle, which is not a new story, was supposed to be their attempt to usher in this new era, and so far, it is doing a pretty damn good job of leading the industry. Sure, the iPad is an attempt to steal back some of that thunder, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that right now Amazon is in the driving seat with the capability of calling a lot of future shots.

Which is why I found it shocking that Amazon released the following statement:

Generally speaking, writers have two options when they sit down to create a new piece that can be distributed through conventional channels. They can author a short, attention-grabbing magazine-length feature that doesn’t require the reader to invest more than a few minutes of their time, or they can craft a long, 50,000-plus word novel that is meant to be absorbed over multiple sittings.

Now, if you’ve never been a professional writer before, this may sound quite innocent, and maybe even informative, but if you have any knowledge of the publishing business, and I mean ANY, you know that there are far more than two options an author has when sitting down to write a new piece. Basically, Amazon is stating a writer can choose from a short story or a novel, and now they have somehow managed to invent something in between that.

Writers have been writing all sorts of variations of those two models for centuries. Publishers have been publishing variations of far beyond those two models for centuries as well. Just recently, the whole unmentionable (by me, mainly) epic of Twilight released a novella, which just so happens to be a book that is too small to be a 50,000 normal novel and too big to be a short story. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Yes, writers have been tackling this genre long before Amazon came onto the scene.

To me, it appears that Amazon is attempting to somehow create a new category to invent a brand new revenue stream, even though that category has existed long before Amazon became a web site, back in the days when an Amazon was often referred to women I dated who used to beat me up when I didn’t comform to their expectations (but that’s a completely different article, of course). We don’t need this new category, especially when Amazon already charges different prices for different books based on the expectations and demands of the specific publishers.

To indicate they are somehow inventing a brand new length of writing after 4000 years since the first human scribbled some carvings on a cave is somewhat insulting to the rest of us. It’s not like they need special programming to release an e-book that has fewer pages than a “normal” e-book. The whole announcement sounds like a non-announcement to me, but more of an attempt to remain in the news now that everyone and his brother is releasing an e-reader and selling it at Best Buy.

(sources: TMC Net, Amazon’s web site)

Humor Writing Gets Very Little Respect These Days

Uncategorized, Writing, , , ,

I’m a humor writer. Been one for a number of years now. Sometimes it involves fiction; other times it’s incorporated into non-fiction. Either way, it is something I enjoy doing.

What I have discovered is that no matter what genre or style I utilize it in, it rarely gets a lot of respect by anyone in those respective fields. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

First, as most people who attempt to write humor know, good humor is very difficult to write. You either know what you’re doing, or you don’t. Those who don’t know how to write good humor end up writing really bad humor, but think that they’re funny. Such writing is very difficult to read, and quite often these conversations go something like:

You: “Um, I really like what you did with this piece.”

Attempted Funny Person: “What did you find funny about the piece?”

You: “Um…” Which quite often is followed by you dropping one of those smoke pellets that were used in cartoons and really bad spy films, where you make your get-away, realizing that if you don’t disappear quickly you’re somehow going to have to answer that unanswerable question.

Which then leads to the mistake so many people make when they think that humor must be so easy to write, and anyone can do it, even though they personally can’t do it themselves. This culminates in the erroneous postulation that humor is never to be taken seriously, so therefore it is not important enough to be used by “real” writers.

And this is the problem I find myself in today. As a serious writer of fiction (when I fall into my self-important moods), I find that some of my best fiction has been the type that has been developed through humor. My latest novel is probably the best novel I have ever written, and it is a full-fledged story of humor, involving a Greek epic of ridiculous proportions. Having said that, I have also discovered that when I discuss this novel with other people, they don’t take it, or me, seriously. They hear the “humorous” parts and immediately fall into this belief that both me and the novel are not to be considered serious, as in writing and writers. The fact that it is some of my best writing ever does not seem to make a difference. The fact that it involves some of the strongest uses of metaphor and allusion that I have seen in most modern day novels does not seem to cause anyone to consider it seriously. To everyone who looks it over, it’s a 300 page joke that doesn’t deserve that much attention.

I’ve discovered this to be the case with most humor I write. And people don’t even seem to realize that much of the humor I put forth has very serious implications when dealing with important issues. It’s just a different aperature to observe such circumstances. But because it made someone laugh or smile, it’s not to be taken seriously.

 This happens with my nonfiction writing as well. In a recent article, I attempted to deal with the concepts of cults and religions by pretending to create my own cult. The responses I received were usually derision and not very serious themselves. The fact that seriously important issues were being broached in an absurd way should have given people a reason to think about their own normal concepts, but instead of doing so, they saw a “ha ha” moment, and nothing was seen as being in any way serious.

Sadly, most humor writers, especially ones who write so that issues can be approached from a different perspective, are rarely taken seriously, except by very few readers who seem to “get” it. It’s like a conversation I had about science fiction on television, in which I was trying to argue that some of the greatest drama of our time has been covered by the science fiction genre. A person responded to me with: “I prefer real dramas, like Gossip Girl, so I don’t have time for science fiction.” Unfortunately, she wasn’t joking.

I find that same sort of criticism with humor. And no matter how many times I try to joke about it, it still manages to bother me.

What is the future of the literary magazine?

Writing, , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been wondering this question for a bit of time now with the emergence of the Internet as the place where everything seems to be centered in writing these days. In the old days, to be a writer, you first finished your education (generally), then you started publishing in literary magazines, then to commercial, high paying magazines, and then you started to work your way into getting that novel published. Granted, some people took an easier path, but mostly this was the formula for success.

The Internet has kind of changed all of that. Now, anyone can claim to be a writer and try to make his or her way without any previous work. This has developed a whole sense of a lot of junk that has been thrown into the mix, making it almost impossible for a writer to get recognized and even worse, that much harder for a reader to figure out what is worth reading. Bookstores start to gravitate away from the old formula, and the next thing you know (or we currently know) bookstores only publish commercial fiction that is churned out by publishers who are only willing to invest in already established names or, even worse, celebrities who are now writing books. Like Nancy Grace’s new book. Or Glenn Beck’s. Or the autobiographies of unimportant important people which were really written by other people. This leads to events like Tyra Banks announcing she’s writing her new book Modelland, which really excited only about four people, all of them employed by Tyra Banks.

Which brings it back to me. It’s my blog, so why not?

At one point, I was actually making a name for myself in the literary magazine marketplace. Editors started to know me. Sometimes they even commented on my published work when they saw me in another magazine. It used to be a really close-knit community, and I was breaking into it.

And then I stopped writing for about a decade and a half due to a really strange relationship I had with a woman. It took me that long to realize I needed to get back to writing, and here I am. But no one remembers me any more, so it’s like I’m starting over again.

Recently, one of those editors contacted me and published one of my later pieces of work in his literary magazine, a science fiction one. A success. Yay. But it leaves me wondering if this old model of publishing is still viable today. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll include it on my vita like I normally would, but I wonder if the publication of this story in this ‘zine is really going to contribute to my eventual success. Oh don’t get me wrong. I’d still have it published there cause I like the editor and support his continued attempts to build an audience for what he does best. But I’m still wondering if there’s a career out there for me because there are so many writers these days, and basically you’re competing with anyone who has access to a computer today.

It makes me wonder if the age of being a writer is somewhat over, unless you already made it famous before or you’re some kind of marketing genius capable of making a name for yourself in the sea of endless writers.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nutcase Who Is Kind of Scary

Writing

I was out of the Army and spending a great deal of my time bar hopping for thrills. There really wasn’t anything else to do, and I no longer had any responsibilities, requirements or even a schedule. I had a job, but it was really unimportant and somewhat irrelevant to the grand scheme of things, so I started looking for bars to hang out for brunt of my free time in the evenings.

For me, this meant spending a lot of my time walking home drunk. Well, “drunk” is a mild way to put how I was most of those evenings. Let’s just say that I don’t remember a lot of what happened in between a few of those drinks and waking up the next morning. But showing up at a local bar the next evening told me that I must have had a great time the night before, because everyone in the bar was glad to see me again, talking about what fun we must have had the night before.

I’m a writer, so I chalk it up to one of those learning experiences you’re supposed to gather while working on the next all American novel. Only, 13 novels later, none of them really seem to have been all that American, or anything that would be considered “all American”. Years of experience has taught me that they’re just novels, and if people read them, then they were good novels, and sometimes you take what you can get.

But it was one of those evenings that I remember vividly because I remember talking to a woman I had been trying to get close to for some time at my neighborhood bar. You know the place. It was that bar where everyone came in, but no one knew who anyone was, although you came there so often that you kind of recognized everyone, even if you couldn’t place a name with a face. You’d nod at people, and they might nod back, but that was as close as it came to making a connection.

I knew the owner of the bar. He and I had been in the military together, studying Korean at the language school. This bar was actually located down the street from that post, and one day after he got out of the Army, he bought the bar where we used to go when we were still in the service. Army guys do that sort of crap. I never did, but I sure knew enough of them that did.

Anyway, my buddy was never at the bar but his wife was, and she always poured me a free drink or two because I had met her when she was just a waitress at this bar, before she married my friend. So we were old buddies, even though we really didn’t know each other that well. But she was the one trying to help me make some time with this one girl I was talking about, the one I said I’d been trying to connect with for weeks. Turns out she was a cop, and she was kind of strange, which always seemed to attract me to a woman. But I’m getting ahead of myself because, to be honest, this story isn’t about her. It’s about some guy that showed up one evening and started talking to me.

It was getting close to closing time, and this young guy was talking to me, and he was interested in the fact that the owner’s wife said I was a writer. He said he was an artist and that artists needed to stick together, or some kind of weird crap like that. I was drunk, so it made sense, so he and I were talking about art and all that. The facts kind of escape me, because to be honest, I doubt anything we were talking about was all that important in the first place.

So two a.m. came around, and the bar was closing, so for some reason this guy and I decided we still had so much to talk about, and we took our conversation to the street. We both lived in the area, and he said he wanted to show me his art work, so we walked towards his place.

And I should probably insert that in a lot of stories right after this moment it can go all sorts of directions, including some pretty shocking revelation that this is some kind of gay hook-up story, or whatever, but it’s not one of those. I don’t knoe if the guy was gay or not. I’m not, but it probably wouldn’t have stopped me from walking to the guy’s place anyway, just to see what it was the person wanted to show me. So I went, and it turned out he wanted to show me the sort of art that he does.

Turns out that his art consisted of large columns with pillows on top of them. No, I don’t know the significance of them either. Nor could I figure out what made it art, but his apartment was filled with these things. Must have been about forty or fifty columns with various pillows on top of them. They looked pretty dorky, to be honest. All I remember was how proud he was of his creation, and he wanted to show it to me.

I stood and stared, not really sure what to say, or even what to think. There were pillows on top of columns. and they were everywhere. To this day, I don’t know what they were supposed to convey, or even why it was an obsession. All I remember thinking was, I really needed to get out of that apartment. So I did. And I went home.

Never saw the guy again either. Or his form of art. But I never forg0t what he showed me, and I wonder if that’s the goal of the artist anway, to put forth a haunting image that endures forever, even if it is only seen by one person. If so, he was very successful and in a way that my own art has never achieved itself.

Some of the Best Writing on TV May Never Be Seen

Television, Writing, , , , , , , ,

It’s kind of funny, actually, but there is this bias against certain types of programming on television, specifically that of the science fiction and fantasy variety. But surprisingly, some of the best dramatic writing I’ve ever viewed has been from this genre, and unfortunately no one really seems to be watching it.

An example is the one that everyone talks about when it comes to science fiction, and that’s the rehash of Battlestar Galactica, which had to be one of the best dramas I’ve seen on television in ages. It was intense, well acted, and with plot twists that were so well constructed that it was shocking at how well it was carried out. Some other examples would be some pretty obscure titles, including one I was watching last night that was unbelievable for how well it was written, and that show is Doctor Who. Over the last few years I’ve kind of paid attention to this show, but always thought it was a bit too campy for me. I was watching the middle of the fourth season of the latest variation of this show, and out of nowhere the writing was just overwhelming. Some of the plots were just genius, and then the way they pulled the stories off was beyond anything I’ve seen in modern television. There was one episode that took place on a futuristic airliner (done to be much like the cabin of any airplane, but in space), and the character interaction was just off the charts. The plot seemed somewhat simple, but the story quickly went from a “what’s out there” to a Lord of the Flies segment of anarchy that I kept thinking they were going to somehow blow this great moment of television, but they never did. They did a really good job of maintaining the type of power they were going for, and it was like a seasoned director took a great screenplay and made it just right. You don’t see that very often.

Lately, we’ve seen some brilliant character-driven storylines on recent television shows like LOST, which has shocked so many people at how it did exactly what it set out to do. Yet, we’re still left with this sense that science fiction and fantasy is trash that really shouldn’t be paid attention to.

I had a conversation the other day with someone who told me that she only watches dramas, like Gossip Girl, because she likes shows that are a lot more realistic. I’ll not even comment further on that one, but I’m sure you get the idea. People are so convinced that it has to be a drama to be considered real, yet I can’t tell you how many of our dramas are some of the worst writing that has come along in ages. Sure, there are exceptions, but way too often we’re given trash and get so used to it that we give accolades to medium level stuff, as if it is brilliant. A couple of examples come to mind because I’ve been watching these shows and still can’t believe that people think these are the best we have to offer.

Breaking Bad. An okay show, but for some reason every review of this show acts as if it is the greatest television show ever. I’m deep into the second season of it, and it’s okay. It’s not great, but it’s okay. What I would like to comment about this show is something no one wants to admit: It’s basically Weeds with a much more serious story line. And Weeds does it so much better. Let’s look at that for a second.

Weeds has a woman who needs to make a lot of money because she lost her husband, so she goes into the marijuana dealing business. She has a bunch of wacky friends who hang around, and the show does everything possible to justify that this woman is doing a very bad thing but for the right reasons.

Breaking Bad has  a guy who needs to make a lot of money because he’s got cancer, so he goes into the meth dealing business. There are a bunch of somewhat wacky people who are part of his world (including a klepto sister in law and a DEA agent husband of the klepto who has all sorts of his own wacky drug-related adventures), and the show does everything possible to justify that this guy is doing a very bad thing but for the right reasons.

Both shows are essentially about the same thing, except unlike Weeds, people don’t generally consider meth to be as innocent as they do marijuana. So it has some problems there. All along, I watch Breaking Bad, waiting for the great moments everyone talks about, but I find myself thinking, “why should I care for this guy who is creating a product that is destroying the lives of so many so he can take care of his family?” It’s like the show Dexter, another “great” that people talk about. I watched all of three episodes before I thought, “I can’t root for this guy” and never watched it again. There’s a point where rooting for the underdog just doesn’t justify rooting for the criminally insane guy who considers himself above the law.

Other “great” shows: Rescue Me. I bought the first season and had a hard time getting through the first episode. Trite writing that tries too hard to play the 9/11 angle of brave firefighters. Let’s make them somewhat crazy, and everyone will root for them. Hasn’t worked so well for me so far.

Sadly enough, there aren’t enough ground-breaking shows out there, and the few that are just don’t seem to be that great themselves. Which is pretty sad because the really, really good shows don’t last very long.

Anyway, just a gripe that is slowly going off track now, so I’ll end there.