So, it’s been a little while since I’ve updated the page, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy. Since the last times I was posting, I found myself getting involved in a lot of things that aren’t exactly blog related, but just seem to be a little more significant to what’s going on with my life right now.
First, I’ve been getting involved with Youtube. And I mean, a lot of Youtube. I don’t just mean watching it either. I’ve also been producing content as well. I’ve been doing, well, what you’d expect, and that’s Youtubing all about writing. Yes, I’ve been offering tips on how to become a writer. You can see one of those here:
I’ve also been producing content on politics, as you’d probably expect. Here’s one of my selections on the Kavanaugh hearings:
And then, of course, where would be without the constant bad humor of Duane?
The beauty of my channel is that it covers all sorts of thoughts on the spectrum. If you want to subscribe to my channel, just go here.
Speaking of Youtube, I’ve discovered it’s turning out to be a lot more interesting than anything that’s being produced on television. Over the Winter break, I found myself more interesting in Youtube content than anything that was on television. Never thought I’d say that before. The one problem with that is that you can easily be sucked into rabbit hole content. By which, I mean all sorts of conspiracy theories and ridiculous content that has no basis in reality whatsoever.
One of my favorite recent diversions has been all things ASMR. In case you’re not aware of what this is, it’s a technical term (you can look it up) for content that consists of people whispering and making sounds. It’s supposed to trigger responses from certain people, and it can be very soothing. I found it while looking for videos to help me sleep some time back, and now I’ve been down the rabbit hole numerous times and in various ways. Some better than others….
The content can be fun, interesting and sometimes just outright bizarre. In some cases, the content can be a bit risque.
Another diversion has been partisan types of behavior. Now, most people know I’m a bit of a fiscal conservative but politically I’m more of an anarchist. And I’m also an avid gamer. So, I found myself attracted to content that I thought was about removing political content in computer games, only to discover a whole new rabbit hole of rabid conservatives who hate anything that might be construed as liberal. And rather than be turned off by it, I’ve found myself completely fascinated by it. One of my favorites is a site called The Quartering, which is basically a game news site that tends to be geared against partisan behavior in gaming, but quite often goes off the deep end and becomes partisan in his own way, even though I don’t think he even realizes he’s doing it (or he’d deny it because he’s fallen into that grey area of where a partisan person thinks everyone who disagrees with him is partisan (although he’s usually a lot better than that and can put forth some fascinating content)). Here’s one of his recent ones. Again, it’s one of those things that is better to watch with an open mind.
One of the problems of a lot of this content (and the previous one is usually absent of this problem, which is why I watch it so often), is that the content creators often start to fall into dangerous territory that is quite negative, and quite often you don’t realize it’s gone there until it just has. An example: I was watching one feed of some guy that was railing against liberal women who hate men (which, for bizarre reasons I had been fine with up until that point), and then he started going off on George Soros and “their desire to control everything”, and you might just get the point that sometimes they go too far, and you have to stop watching videos from that sort of content creator.
But one of the more interesting fascinations I’ve had is with a whole movement I’d never heard of before that seems a lot more popular than I’d ever realized, and that’s the MGTOW movement. For several videos, I kept seeing those letters and had no idea what they meant. And then one content creator explained: Men Going Their Own Way. It appears that in this movement, men have gotten frustrated with women and their liberal ways, and their desires to control both men and their interactions with them, to the point of creating all sorts of horrible processes in the dating community. So, mean have just decided to give up on the whole thing and go their own way and ONLY date women not like that.
The videos I’ve seen from a lot of the guys tend to be really negative and angry. But what’s really caught my interest is the number of videos from women who have been responding to this, creating a whole bizarre conversation back and forth that just seems like bad French poetry. And then, recently, I’ve come across a lot of response videos from women who appear to actually support the movement, and that slowly led to the realization that it’s yet another ultra-conservative movement because the majority of these people tend to be right-wing, angry people who see the attempts by liberals to force social customs upon everyone else. Of course, I’m painting this with a very wide brush, so not everyone falls into just those categories, but enough do to make the movement very hard to watch without that constraint.
This caused me to find an off shoot of that movement that is basically a response to a lot of the parameters set in today’s dating society that seems more focused on science-based understanding, showing that both socially and biologically that women and men are on the same trajectories but with different time periods, based on a belief that both are approaching what’s called The Wall (women at a younger age and men at an age approaching the 40s). A good explanation of this comes from a video by a person who goes by the studio of Entrepreneurs in Cars.
Anyway, there are all sorts of rabbit holes you can find yourself going into with this type of stuff. Thankfully, I’m here for you doing that sort of work so you don’t have to. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
Years back when I was in the Army, a grizzled NCO pulled me aside one day and explained something to me. Now, if you’ve ever watched an old Clint Eastwood war movie, or one of the many like it, you’ve heard this story before, so I’m not telling you something you probably already shouldn’t know. But I’m going to tell the story regardless, and even though you’ve heard it before, I’m going to explain how hearing the story doesn’t mean anything until you’ve experienced it. Anyway, it goes like this:
Two new lieutenants or two new privates come into a unit for the first time. They’re fresh out of combat training and ready for their first assignment. Soldier A is gung-ho and looking for a fight. Soldier B is scared of his or her own shadow and looks like the one most likely to run from a fight. And then shit goes down for the first time and the whole unit is under fire. Soldier A marches into the theatre of battle looking ready for the fight, but when the first shot is fired, finds he or she can’t even move, freezes and basically fails everyone, including oneself. Soldier B, realizing that Soldier A is under fire and unable to move, jumps into the fight, drags Soldier A from the battle and fights back oncoming forces in the process. Soldier B proves to the be hero, and Soldier A has disappointed everyone.
Trial by fire we call it.
People often tell this story, thinking it is specifically about battle but fail to understand what it actually means. It means that everyone lives within their own narrative and tells their own stories. But until something happens that tests one’s own abilities and shows that person that everything you’ve prepared for doesn’t explain a current dilemma, and you have to develop a new narrative based on walking through fire, you don’t really know how you will ever handle the stress of having to pull yourself out on the other side. Will you honor yourself and others? Or will you fold and prove yourself to be a complete failure? You can tell yourself you’re going to do one or the other, but until you’re truly tested, you never know what you’re going to do to get to the other side.
I’ve been fortunate, or unfortunate, to have had that test come across me a few times in my life. And each time has helped me to build upon my beliefs of what I thought might happen. So far, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve not had an encounter turn out to be the opposite of what I hoped it would be. Sometimes, the outcome hasn’t emerged as best as it could have, but at the same time, I feel confident in the sense that I’ve not humiliated myself or brought dishonor upon anyone else in my care. Sometimes, that’s all you can hope for.
So, let’s talk about Brett Kavanaugh. A few days ago, he was undergoing his trial by fire as he was made to face a past accuser and to confront a hostile Senate that wasn’t about to let him just play legal games when answering their questions. Instead of just owning up to simple failings in his past by saying: “Yes, I drank a lot, and I made a lot of mistakes back then, but I’m trying to be a much better person these days. That’s all anyone can do.” he took the frat boy-no consequences approach and from what could be seen just bullshitted his way through the entire confirmation hearing, hoping that partisanship would keep him from having to take any responsibility.
And that hurt a lot.
As a veteran, my one thought watching this whole disaster on the screen was that I’d never be comfortable under fire with this guy backing me up. To be even more blunt, I wouldn’t be comfortable getting drunk with this guy in a bar. This is that guy that breaks a crime while drunk and then blames you, even though you were throwing up in the bathroom the entire time, telling the cops he only had two beers.
The trial by fire moment in this man’s life put him in front of the nation and asked him to make the right decisions. To quote the grail knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “He chose poorly.” While he may still get a chance to get on the Supreme Court because of partisanship alone, most cases of trial by fire only get one chance to get it right. In a combat unit, he’d be that one soldier relegated to holding up the rear until the colonel can transfer him out of the unit where his actions won’t threaten to get any other soldiers killed. You rarely get a second chance to prove you’re no longer a coward. That first time is all a group of soldiers will allow; they may never trust you again.
While even if he was denied the Supreme Court pick, he’s proven he doesn’t even deserve the lofty position he already has, but he’s life locked into that position as well, meaning that he snuck his way into the elite unit and there’s really no way to usher him out. He’s now like that brigadier general who got his position by doing administrative work his entire career and once discovered to be a complete failure at combat is now being sent to some office in a corner of the Pentagon where he can’t affect anyone again, at least until someone can convince him to retire.
But I fear we’ve not seen the last of him yet.
And that should frighten a lot of people because the only reason this guy will ever be allowed a second chance is to fulfill a quota of people who just want a slot filled by someone on their side. And even they know he’s a horrible pick for the position they’re going to pigeon him into.
And the sad part is that there are so many other better people who should have been considered and seriously vetted instead of him. But they probably won’t be, so we’ll be stuck with him for decades.
I don’t even think people realize the problem that exists today with media. It’s not that media is wrong, false or lying. It’s that it’s lazy. And yeah, I know a big reason behind it is the consolidation of media outlets to get rid of people and save money. So, the problem has emerged to the next logical step: Find media anywhere you can get it.
And tweets is where they’ve found it. Because, let’s face it: It’s easy, it’s free, and it requires absolutely no work to put together a story that consists of someone’s response on Twitter.
But let’s also face the fact that it’s not actually a story. It’s a reaction from someone to something. And most likely, it’s irrelevant to practically everything.
Let’s take the Tweeter-in-Chief that gets quoted on Twitter the most. Instead of paying attention to actual policies the president is enacting or proposing, we get knee-jerk reactions from him at 3am in the morning when he’s just watched Fox & Friends and wants to let the world know that we must stop illegal aliens from stealing the world’s toilet tissue. or whatever stupid idea the bottom of the barrel commentators on that show have proposed at whatever time they actually air.
But the media eats this stuff up and actually reports it as a legitimate news story.
When news is dull or boring, we suddenly start to see “news” whenever one of the Kardassians picks a fight on Twitter with Taylor Swift, or whatever other shenanigans occur during that news cycle. The “famous for being famous” celebrities plan these stories for maximum coverage, and our media, realizing they don’t have anywhere near the amount of coverage to fill a 24 hour news cycle, eats it right up, and suddenly a turf war between two aging rappers ends up being a leading story. So, instead of reporting on something legitimate, or important, like anything written by Nicholas Kristof, or Rebecca Solnit, we get nonstop nonsense about the Kardassian sisters or “news” about toddlers in beauty pageants.
This morning, I woke up to read a “news” story about a Tweet from the president saying how much he believes that….
Not a story. It’s a moment of thought about something that is not a story. A story would be something actually happened. Legislation got passed, someone died, someone was arrested, an accuser was heard and listened to, a country declared war against another, a country attacked another, etc. Someone’s thoughts on something, especially something that came as a reaction to hearing an actual news story IS NOT NEWS.
So please. Stop passing drivel off as news.
And people, stop listening to it. When you hear it, turn it off because you didn’t get news. And better, contact the news agency and complain. Otherwise, it’s ALL you’re ever going to see and hear.
Just saying. I’ll tweet it for you, if it might cause you to think of it as real news.
I was watching Vice News Tonight, and they were covering some of the Kavanaugh garbage that we’re seeing on a daily basis right now, and it just sickens me that we have a bunch of men in charge of our government who apparently don’t care one iota that they’re about to empower (with enormous power and responsibility) someone who may have tried to rape another woman. And even more allegations are starting to emerge. And they’re trying to railroad him into the position so fast that NO OTHER WOMAN can possibly come forward in time to stop it.
One thing that was interesting was that they brought on a woman who was literally halted from testifying during the Anita Hill hearings for Clarence Thomas who ALSO had a sexual harassment story about Clarence Thomas, but she was shunted away by the people who wanted him put into power until the hearings were over. They made sure that atrocity happened, and THOSE SAME PEOPLE ARE STILL IN POWER TODAY. They’re the same people trying to push through the current guy.
But you know what really got me? At the end of the whole segment, four or five other women were giving their own stories of when men attacked them sexually but they were also never believed when these things happened. And it got me to thinking: How many of these types of guys have I known my entire life? The cool guy in high school. The jock in college. That guy who got all the girls. And now the weird guy who no woman ever talked to but is now in an office establishment with all sorts of other women who are forced to be around him all day long. So many people, and so many stories, which could mean this happens all the time.
Because that’s what I’m getting from all of these stories. These incidents aren’t rare. They’re more the norm. And if you are brave enough to hold a conversation with a group of women and just let them start talking about it, what you’ll discover is that almost ALL of them have a similar story of when this happened to them. Not one or two out of a room of 50. But 49 or 50 of them all have a horrifying story of some guy that violated them in some way.
And this is what we should be facing.
But we won’t. We’ll shuffle it under the rug, pretend it only happens with really bad people who, oh I don’t know, must not go to church or something equally ridiculous. And it will continue happening because we choose to let it happen.
Like people shooting up schools with guns. Because we choose to let it happen.
We’re all responsible, but we will blame a boogeyman who doesn’t exist, or just might exist. But we’re all responsible. And we’re responsible because we don’t do anything about it but act shocked and surprised.
Right now. Instead of doing something about this, the people who CAN do something are saying: “This is just a political witch hunt. Get him in the office and the problem goes away.”
And that’s what’s probably going to happen.
Or, we’ll get brave this one time (honestly, I don’t believe that will happen), but we’ll do nothing about the larger problem because it’s too hard. It takes too much work. We can never solve this. Or whatever weak excuse we will give, including my favorite: “It’s not me, so I don’t see what trying to stop it will do because there’s no way to tell who is responsible.”
I already told you. WE are responsible.
And WE will do absolutely nothing.
Now, I’m going to go back to killing aliens in a video game because at least there the world makes a lot more sense.
One of my favorite shows from a few years back is one called Blindspot. It’s a somewhat ridiculous story with a premise that involves a woman with a body full of tattoos who was left unconscious in a body bag in the middle of Times Square. The police turn the woman over to the FBI who quickly discover that the woman is an ex-SEAL who was part of a secretive doomsday cult and that the tattoos all involve a secret conspiracy to, oh I don’t exactly remember, but it was pretty cataclysmic. The FBI task force that is chosen to work with her are all experts in their field, including a hotshot “the rules only apply to everyone but me” agent lead, a former CIA agent with milky ties to the agency still, a green FBI agent who may or may not have committed felonies to protect his brother, a nerdy tech wizard female who creates computer code in every language known to the computer industry, can pinpoint every source of dust from any location on the globe, plus all sorts of other tech wizardry that MIT would bow down to as far superior than anything that comes from their research labs, and then there’s the leadership that is changed daily as each new leader is discovered to be secretly plotting to steal the world’s cottage cheese (or whatever dastardly plot a particular tattoo highlighted that week). Anyway, in the first two seasons, it was a romp through tons of mysterious ridiculousness until we passed the “will they/won’t they” stage of the two main characters’ arc of romance to where they finally married.
Which brings us to Season 3. I originally dvr’d the third season, but started late because I didn’t subscribe to the cable service to dvr stuff until the fifth episode aired. So, I had it set to start recording from Episode 6 on, which is okay because these seasons have about twenty episodes to them. But it’s a show you don’t want to start in the middle of a season, so I waited until I could buy the first five episodes on iTunes, and then started to watch it.
I watched the first two episodes, and boy, were they doozies. And by “doozies”, I mean absolutely ridiculous in all ways. First, here’s where the story took us:
The male and female heroes are now married. They have a great romance until evil stormtroopers break into their house and shoot it up, but are quickly subdued by the hero team who were originally unarmed but get weapons from the bad guys (cause they’re just that good) and shoot lots of them (or just karate chop three or four at a time with really sweeping martial arts moves that even Bruce Lee was watching, thinking, “man, I gotta learn how to do that.” Anyway, they discover that a hitman has a hit out on Jane (her name is Jane Doe…yeah, not kidding…it’s what they named her when they found her body and for some reason she decided to just keep it, kind of like how I decided to keep the name Awesome Sauce cause everyone keeps calling me that). So, they decide they have to break up and move really far away from each other (like different continents) so this will somehow protect her if she goes somewhere that doesn’t have friends and witness protection programs. But then they figure out the bad guy doing this is dead but the contract is still active, but they can stop it by pretending to be dead so they can catch the guy who is paying the bounty. Yeah, it’s kind of complicated but it all ends in one episode.
They discover that a new set of tattoos has been put on Jane’s body that can only be seen by a piece of metal that looks like Batman’s batarang (or is it batamarang?). Then they discover it was put on her by none other than the bad guy from the previous seasons. He’s kind of mad, for reasons that really aren’t explained, but I predict we’ll get more explanation around Episode 11 or 12 in some kind of avant garde flashback. They do that a lot.
So, the couple comes back together and declares that they love each other, and as long as they’re honest with each other, nothing can come between them. Fast forward about twenty=eight seconds later and the male hero gets contacted by the bad guy who gives the next clue of the tattoos and hints that the male hero should never tell Jane. So he doesn’t. And then they get back together and re-emphasize about how this new honesty will definitely save their marriage. I won’t get into the simple fact that if he just would have said, “Oh, and by the way Jane, I’m getting instructions from your evil brother. Just telling you this cause we’re being honest to each other now. So, what you want to watch? Star Trek or Game of Thrones?”
Now, let’s get into the concept of this post “creating believable tension”. So, because this show is one of those that deals with conflicts of the moment, the plot goes something like this (from episode one to episode two): The bad brother has kidnapped the three main buddies of the hero and then sold them as slaves to Venezuela. Yeah, I wrote that with a straight face. So, ,they’re being kept in a prison cell in some deeply secret prison in Venezuela. And the bad guys tell the geek girl who was one of the captured, right after wheeling in a large bank sized safe: “You have one hour to open this safe, or I start killing your friends.” So, this geek girl who we just found out has been spending the last two years creating a Farmville app called Wizardville (or something like that) that she needs to crack this safe. In case you didn’t know it, because most of you are not computer programming experts, all computer programming experts are also experts in safe cracking, hacking of complex computer systems, satellite technicians, satellite reprogrammers (it’s just computer code, right?), experts in soil sample technology, aficianados of what type of dirt exists on the planet (including several variations of “dirt”), cell phone hacking, advanced surveillance systems, security camera technology and how to crack it, and so many other areas of technology that I’ve lost count, although advanced number theory is also one of our areas of expertise. So, she cracks the safe, and in it we find what on first glance appears to be advanced computer technology that I suspect just might be a 386 computer, or possibly a Pentium 1 (translation: from about 1989).
So, they have this highly “advanced” computer that she is then told she has one hour to hack or everyone else dies (one an hour). The one thing they forgot to include in the scene was an actual monitor, so as I’m watching this, I’m thinking: “You know, even though I’m a programmer and supposed to know how to hack any computer system on the planet, even I would have a hard time cracking this one without a freaking monitor.” Just saying. But somehow she does, and when the bad guys reappear, a monitor magically appears on the desk that wasn’t in the room a few moments before. So, then we get to watch the start up on the computer as her advanced hacking skills are shown, and we see what looks a little more complicated than “Hello, World” starting on the screen, except they were smart enough to program instead of “Hello, World!” something similar to:
/////// dsfljasfdasjf /////// areafigaglahodf
////// =Verifiable Office System ///////////
////// *********************** ///////////
////////// Super Secret CIA Files ////////////
////////// Do Not Release To Anyone Without Top Secret Clearance //////////
Yeah, something like that.
6. The secret code, it turns out, turns off a super spy satellite network that controls a missile defense system that protects the entire USA. We find out we have this system because of a raid on a super secret warehouse, operated by two geeks, a typical geek guy and a super hot, would never date me in a million years, type of woman, who I immediately suspected was a bad guy (and not just because she would never date me in a million years, although that probably helped me to realize I should suspect her). Surprisingly, she was bad, and she was selling the code to, (let’s see…what enemies can we possibly use? The Russians? Naw, they’re so 1990s. Arabic terrorists? No, we always blame them. Spent the last two seasons kind of doing that already. The Chinese? Good choice, but we want to market this series to the largest population market on the planet, so we’re going to pass on that one. Okay, the North Koreans, cause a country that can’t afford to supply its citizens with even dirt for toilet paper would be the obvious one to pay millions of dollars for a computer code to hack the US secret satellite network). Okay, so it’s the North Koreans. And to make it worse, it’s revealed in the same episode that the NK military isn’t building a nuclear weapon but has built tons of them, including missiles that can reach the US, AND they’ve been constantly launching them on an almost daily basis but our super secret shield has been knocking them out of the sky. You’d think Trump would bother to mention this every now and then. Thanks, Obama! Anyway, so because they have the code, they’re going to knock out our defense network and launch everything at California. Why? I’m guessing cause it’s the only place they could find on a map before they wrote this script. But fortunately, as the satellites are knocked out one by one (in a count down that has geek girl saying: “99…73…65…hurry guys…52…40…we’re running out of time!…23…Oh no, I forgot to feed my gold fish…12…7…2! We’re running out of time!” Meanwhile, we’re watching a gun fight and karate battle with the hero guy and Jane Doe facing off against a room full of ninjas (or ninjas on their day off and wearing their lounge clothing), before they knock out the last one, and jump over the table and hit the big button marked “STOP THE NUKES FROM LAUNCHING!!!” Okay, it wasn’t marked that, but it probably should have been.
Been working in IT forever, and geek girls don’t generally look like this
Those are mainly my biggest gripes with the episode, although I do have to point out one inconsistency because it just drove me nuts when it happened. The two heroes find the secret base in Venezuela (no, I don’t know how, unless there’s only one in Venezuela, or they did some kind of “we traced the signal of their Blipomatosphere and it was right at this location” that I just didn’t catch, but I’m not even worried about that. What did bother me is that they stole an enemy tank, drove it to the battle and saved the day. Even that wasn’t a problem for me, as problematic as that actually is. It’s when the hero said: “We won’t be able to go fast. Tanks don’t move fast.” And I realized right then and there not a single writer on their staff has ever been in , been near, been around, or watched a tank on television. Tanks aren’t slow. The reason people think tanks are slow is because in old movies where they saw them most often, the drivers went slow because it was filmed that way for dramatic effect. A tank is a super fast vehicle on the battle field, and I can tell you that infantry were quite often more scared of being run over at high speeds than they were from any guns from the tanks themselves. Hell, I can tell you a bunch of times where I almost got run over by tanks on my own side because they go so fast that you often don’t see them until they’re practically on top of you.
So, getting back to my point of this post. A huge problem of tension in fiction is making it believable. But at the same time, you have to make the scene strong enough that someone is going to want to keep reading.
I’m reminded of one of the stories often shared when someone starts out writing. In the early days of pulp fiction (not the movie, but the concept it’s based on), there was a period of serial fiction where a writer would produce a long story over a number of different issues of a magazine. To do this, he or she would create a cliffhanger. Those cliffhangers were designed to make you want to buy the next issue of the magazine and find out what happened as a result of the corner the author created. As a result, those cliffhangers would get more and more complicated (kind of like the detective fiction where the concept of the locked room came about…”how did the killer do it when the room was locked from the inside?”…similar concept. Any way, in order to keep selling these magazines, the audiences became more and more acclimated with the technique and demanded stronger and stronger cliffhangers. Which brings us to the story often told:
A writer created a cliffhanger where the protagonist was undergoing one hazard after another and then finally fell into a deadly pit that was more than 20 feet deep. The issue ended with “To be continue….” And people awaited the conclusion, wondering what great writing technique was going to be used to save this hero.
The next issue appeared. The author wrote something to the effect of: “Stuck in the pit, Dave (our hero) leaped out of it to safety. He then….”
As you might guess, readers were pretty pissed at the author for taking such a stupid short cut. Ever since then, it’s been referred to by a lot of names, but more often “The Writer’s Pit”, although I remember hearing it once recently and not a single person in the room had an idea what that name referred to. References tend to diminish in notoriety over time.
So, if you’re trying to build tension, it requires investing some time. The characters first off have to be believable. The days of superhero protagonists are not acceptable these days. Developing your character as a stereotype trope of Arnold Schwarzeneger might seem like a fun exercise, but people generally aren’t going to buy some of the very recent attempts at re-creating James Bond and giving him a different name, yet keep unbelievable attributes that people just don’t imagine one person being able to inhabit.
So, let’s look at a series like Blindspot. How would I have made it more believable?
The hero needs to be grounded in reality. He could be a great FBI agent, but he’s not some special forces/intelligence agent/brilliant tactician/martial arts dabbling/no faults whatsoever. One or a few of those qualities, and it’s more believable.
Eliminate all of the CIA agents on the team. It makes absolutely no sense.
Put about ten scientific experts on the team. One person can’t possibly know as much information as geek girl seems to know and be incredibly hot at the same time. Not saying hot women can’t be geek girls, but no one is as smart as this woman is made out to be.
Get actual computer experts to deal with some of the tech. Person of Interest and Mr. Robot do that really well. Emulate that example.
Understand international politics and international politics a lot better, or at least stop trying to fool your audience and believing your audience is composed of complete idiots. If that’s the case, I’ve been watching the wrong show for the last three years.
Stop with the characters lying to each other just to create drama. It serves no purpose. Right now (in episode 2) the male hero is lying to Jane Doe for absolutely no reason, and she just told him “Our relationship will last forever as long as we’re honest to each other”. His reply SHOULD HAVE been: “Wow, you’re right. By the way, your brother is starting to send me messages about your tattoos. I meant to tell you but we were so caught up in watching Game of Thrones that it totally threw my mind.”
Anyway, just my thoughts on how writing fiction can benefit from watching really bad fiction in what could otherwise be really awesome television.
There are a lot of writers out there who haven’t been that successful. Yet, they keep on plugging away, convinced that one day it’s all going to work out for them. I’m kind of in that same boat, but unlike the others who never had their chance, my chance came several times…and sort of fizzled away. Let me explain:
Years back, I was shopping my first book. I was in my early twenties, and I had written it while in the Army. It was a really good book called INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. And it was published. Not to great fanfare, but it was published.
So, I started shopping my second novel, LOSER (which would eventually become LEADER OF THE LOSERS). Nothing. Not even a whimper from anyone wanting to sell it. One editor pointed out that perhaps it was the depressing title. Publishers didn’t want to publish books with such a negative title. So, it sat there, forever.
Then I wrote my next novel, the infamous The Armageddon Project, which was a story that took place during the Cold War. Keep in mind, it was written during the Cold War. But at the time, the Cold War was ending, so I quickly rewrote it to match the new events taking place in the world (much of the action takes place in East Germany and Western Russia). And then those regions kept changing, so I kept rewriting it. At some point, the title changed to match the main character (known as “the Unicorn”), so the title became TO TOUCH THE UNICORN. And then a publisher told me that the title was too much like a fantasy novel, but the novel was corporate/government espionage. He also said that it was hard to figure out what exactly the main character’s job was. At the time, I had created the concept of an economic hit man, but the concept was completely unknown in the 1990s, so it just couldn’t catch on. Years later, after Germany and Russia have settled into the republics they are, the story changed massively and is now being rewritten for about the 90th time, and it now takes place in 1991 during the August coup in the former Soviet Union. It’s now called 72 HOURS IN AUGUST, but it’s on the back burner for a rewrite.
Anyway, somewhere around this time, I was starting to make a name for myself as a writer. I had been writing tons of short stories and they were published in a bunch of different magazines. At first, they were published in mostly literary magazines, but then the larger presses started picking them up, and several prominent magazine editors started recognizing my name from previous things I had written. Things were kind of going pretty nice for me back then.
And then one of my novels was bought for publishing by a prestigious book publisher. And then I got an agent who once represented one of the greatest science fiction writers in modern times before he passed away. All was looking great.
And then the publishing company folded. Overnight. Without a single warning.
My agent got into an accident and severely injured her head. She dropped out of the business for a while to recover, and when she did, she seriously didn’t even remember who I was. I gave up trying to re-establish our working relationship.
And then the Internet exploded. Amazon became the biggest thing in independent writing, and the industry changed overnight. If you weren’t already established, you were basically an unknown, and if you were an unknown, you had to now start building a social following in order to even sell a single book. Not being really good at social networking (just has never been my thing), my career kind of just fizzled and died. Sure, I sell a few books here and there, but I might sell more just standing on the corner and asking people to give me a buck for a hand written copy.
Fast-forward to today, and I’m the middle of writing an epic novel series that I suspect might not be read by more people than this blog post. I say this with trepidation because of the amount of time invested in this project. I’ve already spent seven years researching this thing, and I’m about to start putting actual physical work into writing it. Keep in mind that my last two projects took me each half a decade to produce, and my stuffed animals get more attention when they’re pulled over for drunk driving. My previous project took me six years to complete the first book (of a three book project). The research involved was extensive. It was called The Deck Const. Doesn’t matter what it was about because no one’s going to read it any way.
The project before that is probably the one piece of work of which I am most proud. When people talk about a crown achievement in one’s life, that book would probably be mine. It is a humorous novel that tells the story of the last hero of Troy who comes home to found a little civilization called America. It’s called THE AMERIAD, and it was so much work, and it involved so much research. But to someone reading it, one gets the sense that it’s a simple, fun story that seems very familiar. It’s told in Iliad/Odyssey format, and the main character is actually the translator who has interpreted this found epic in the only way the worst translator could possibly ever do. The book was so hard to write, especially in a way that made it feels so natural.
That’s the dilemma I find myself in as I finish up the last stages of research to begin constructing my Arthurian epic. And part of me wonders if my time might better be spent playing a video game instead.
The other night, I was watching a video of the singer Meatloaf and a rendition of “Paradise By the Dashboard Light”. This is a song he made famous with Ellen Foley, and in case you missed the 1970s and the next few decades after, it tells the story of a young couple who are on a date in the guy’s car, and he starts to get a bit randy. And then he tries to go all the way. When he tries, it goes into baseball metaphors, and then there’s a huge confrontational scene where she makes him pledge his love for her before they can “go any further”. It ends like most love stories do: They can’t stand each other and are stuck with each other for life. Okay, maybe not like all love stories, but you get the idea.
When this song was first released, Meatloaf was fresh from the oven at about 26 years old. At the time, he could kind of get away with being a teenager, as the song suggests. And she was pretty young, too. So, it made a lot of sense.
The song basically became a metaphor for that date that goes a bit too far (or the one that caused dating to turn into something much more significant). It’s a great song opera and tells an awesome story.
So, why am I talking about it?
Well, we’ve slow forwarded to many decades later, and Meatloaf is now 71 years old. And last night, I caught a remake of the song where he performs with Patti Russo, who is much younger. Personally, I think the original version is so much better as Ellen Foley really has a voice that just brings home that song while Patti Russo seems to be more of an accomplished singer but seems more focused on sounding good rather than being as gritty as the original singer.
But what really gets to me is the sort of criticism I sometimes have when an old band or singer continues to sing old songs that are more relevant to that performer being much younger. Like Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll”. When she first sang it, it was a great song, and I could see a young Joan Jett picking up a 17 year old kid in a bar. But now, with her being somewhat beyond Cougar-age, her cruising for 17 year old boys seems a bit out of place.
And that’s the sense I get when I think about Meatloaf on his sexual conquest of high school kids. It’s really hard to watch him sing this song, realizing that he’s been receiving Social Security for the last six years. But then, I sometimes have to remember that the point of the song sometimes gets lost on me, and that it’s really about an older person reminiscing about a date in a car when he was a young man. When I think of it that way, it’s fine. But when watching a video with a 71 year old guy and a woman who looks like she just got out high school (although, for the record, I’m pretty sure she’s at least in her twenties during that video), it probably doesn’t help that her “costume” in that video happens to be an attempt at a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit. That pretty much reminded me that it’s no longer a geriatric memory but some old guy with some very young girl. And that just makes it somewhat uncomfortable.
Some of you may find this relevant, and most of you probably won’t. It involves computer games, and more to the point, an MMO.
Recently, I’ve been playing Star Trek Online, which I’ve been playing off and on ever since it was first released back in 2010. Sometimes, it can drag on; other times, it can be just like being a part of the show itself.
So, a new update has occurred called Victory Is Life, which basically introduces the Jem’Hadar as a new character race (they were the bad guys of the Dominion from Deep Space 9). This new update is everything DS9, and a lot of the actors from DS9 are part of this update as well, providing their voices to their characters again.
Well, last night, I was playing through the new Jem”Hadar missions when I came across a mission called Quark’s Lucky Seven, which essentially is a Ferengi bank robbery type of story where you end up experiencing the story as the numerous Ferengi characters in the adventure.
At first, I thought this was going to be contrived and not worth it, but shortly into the story I realized that they had seriously upped the writing during this adventure. It was probably one of the best episodes the game has produced, and I would have to say one of the few stories I’ve played in this game that completely rivaled the best episodes of the show itself. There were twists and turns, surprises and just damn good writing and acting.
If they wrote episodes on this level throughout STO, it would probably be the most played game on the planet.
