Brand X

I have a blog where I actually post

2011-06-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

For those who check in on this blog just to find out what I'm up to lately, just lately I'm blogging quite a bit at No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?, a new blog for progressive discussion of gender issues facing men, without all that MRA nonsense one gets men anyone brings up the phrase "men's issues". There's a lot of great people blogging along with me, and you should check it out.

Post with nothing but a link

2011-05-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

This here fella makes a real good point about writers and booze and stuff and he seems to really have it all together, y'know? He's... like... got it figured out. Why yes, I believe I'll have another.

Joe Gillis died for your sins

2011-03-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

Created this image while mentally preparing for Script Frenzy. Larger version available here. I'm thinking of having this printed on a poster for the wall above my desk.

I have an IMDB page

2011-02-25T15:35:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted to this blog for two years, because I've been doing things either not related to screenwriting or, more often, not under the name Noah Brand.

But as of just lately, I have an IMDB page. A movie I wrote got shot. Damn thing may even get released. I'm as surprised as anyone. Which means this part of my life and my identity are coming to life again, to some extent.

So, as I'm prone to saying, we'll see what happens.

Are these the good times I've heard so much about?

2008-11-05T00:14:00.001-08:00

We did it.

Tonight, against all odds and most initial projections, against the predictions of everyone including my brother, who's a very shrewd guy, we pulled off the political feat of the century. Yes, I was moved to tears by Barack Obama's acceptance speech tonight. That doesn't prove much; I was drunk, and I get sentimental when I'm drunk. What will be remembered from this race is not Obama's stirring acceptance speech, it's not even McCain's surprisingly graceful concession speech. I think that in twenty years, when people try to talk about this election, the phrase they'll come back to is "We're voting for the nigger." It's ugly and embarrassing and emblematic of the political coalition Barack Obama has built out of nothing but dreams and truth and the hope for a better tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, tomorrow I will have lots of caveats and dire warnings about how bad everything's going to get. So will a lot of people, and that's valuable and good.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I am proud of my country.

Tonight, I know that we set up safeguards against bad government when we first designed this republic, and they don't work perfectly but they do work.

Tonight, I believe in democracy.

Tonight, I know that our system of government, flawed and crazy though it may be, works when we need it to. Our terrible governments, which come as they do to all nations, do not need to be gunned down in war or revolution. They are chased from office by the basic structure of our nation, by the common sense of its citizens, by the dreams we still share of an ideal we have never reached, but still strive for.

America fucks up, quite often and quite spectacularly. Nonetheless, some of us crazy bastards still believe in it. And after tonight, I don't feel I have to explain why.

Dire prophecies on a blasted heath can wait until morning. Tonight, at this hour, in this minute, and with this precise blood-alcohol content, America is the greatest fucking nation in history, and I feel humbly lucky to be one of its citizens and to have cast my vote in this election.

A Good Time To Be A Geek

2008-10-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

It's been an interesting summer, particularly if one is a geek, particularly if one is a comics geek who really loves movies.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK would be the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that IRON MAN came out. And IRON MAN would the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that THE DARK KNIGHT came out.

Enough has been written about these movies already, and I don't need to add more wank. I just want to point out that this autumn finds me coming off a summer where, whatever else has gone on, the comics movies I dreamed of as a boy have finally, after Christ knows how many half-assed false starts, come to life. And yes, I know that the half-assed false starts are necessary, they're what lays the groundwork for the great stuff. Just as BATMAN BEGINS had to spend much of the movie explaining how there can be a Batman, freeing up THE DARK KNIGHT to just be about Batman and his world. And that brings me to something else.

I recently saw a movie that won't be out until next year. A test screening for a much-anticipated geek film, one that many of my tribe have grave doubts about. Thing is, it's good. It's not perfect, but it's really, really good. It excited me, it moved me, it did what I wished to god it would do and pulled off things I didn't think were possible. Most of all, it does what its source did: it takes the visual and conceptual vocabulary of previous work in the genre, the tropes that the audience has been trained to accept, and uses them to tell a new kind of story that the tropes haven't been used to tell before.

That is one of the kinds of storytelling that I find most exciting. I hadn't dared hope that the movie would get it, would understand why it was important. I've been disappointed too many times--we all have. Instead, I see the movie version of this particular genre starting to take some of the steps that its antecedent did, and that's thrilling to me. I want more stories, I want different stories, I want ALL the stories, dammit.

I want to go into more detail about media feeding of geek desires, about the Drought and the Conquest and so on, but right now I haven't time, so I'll leave you, my (at this point only the) loyal readers, with this awesome reading of the current presidential campaign as mythology: the Obamadammerung,.

Rituals

2008-05-23T01:16:00.000-07:00

Writers will do damn near anything to avoid writing. Every group of professional and semi-pro writers I've ever known agrees that one vital professional skill must be learned: the knack of sitting down and actually writing instead of engaging in vigorous, busy, productive non-writing. It doesn't help that these days we all write on computers, and those computers are connected to the internet. To rephrase an old adage, writing provides a sense of self-satisfaction eventually, but smacking some guy around at length in a comment thread provides self-satisfaction now.

In the writer's conference on the WELL, we used to joke about "burly nurses", personal assistants we all wished we could afford who'd just hold us down in our chairs and stop us going around pretending to do other stuff. A joke, sure, but reread MISERY sometime. Paul Sheldon's trapped in an ungodly nightmare by a burly nurse who forces him to write, but he's also more productive than he's ever been and produces a novel that he genuinely loves and which makes him a ton of dough. Stephen King clearly understands the issue at hand.

Writers don't really know how writing works. We understand a lot of the craft, but there's always that step in the equation labeled "and then a miracle happens" and we hate thinking too much about that step. As I've said before, we're a superstitious and cowardly lot. One of the things we do, being superstitious and cowardly and needing to find a way to work anyway, is we build rituals. Little or big things we do to make that stupid miracle happen, to force our brains to acknowledge "This ain't clean-the-fridge time, this ain't catch-up-on-the-BBC time, this is writing time." Mine is smoking.

I have a small collection of decent but cheap pipes, some antiques, some just well broken in. I have a nice little antique pipe rack/humidor where my pipes are racked efficiently around a well-lined wooden box--I keep the box full of a special blend I get from the best tobacconist in Portland. It's a mix of two of their popular blends, my own special flavor that tastes a little different in each of five different pipes. I love the comforting physical ritual of filling and tamping the pipe, lighting a match or occasionally my Zippo pipe lighter, working the flame around the surface of the tobacco, retamping the layer of fine ash, and keeping the whole affair lit and gently burning (not too hot, but never quite going out) until I knock it clean at the end of a long, relaxing smoke.

Thing is, I only ever do that when I write. I don't smoke on breaks at day jobs, I don't smoke after meals or after sex or watching videos. If I've got my pipe lit, it means I'm writing. The relaxation helps me loosen up enough to let the words flow, but so does a shot of whisky, and I don't reserve whisky just for writing. A nice pipe of tobacco, however, is an unmistakable signal to my brain that we're not doing anything else right now, we're not reading humor columns or surfing for porn, we're not playing with the cats or following more than one Wikipedia link, we're writing. Stupid? Sure, but it works. Rather like a lot of human habits, really.

I know various creative types read this blog, writers and designers and artists and whatnot. I'm curious, what are your rituals? What do you do, if anything, that puts you in the zone when it comes to your creativity? Music, exercise, locale, tools, preambles, rewards, what do you use? Break your customary silence and comment; the results can only be interesting. Besides, writing a nice long comment's a good way to put off work.

Rory Root Died

2008-05-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

The world got a little crappier today. Rory Root died of complications from a hernia operation. For those who don't know, Rory ran Comic Relief, the best comics shop in the country. Nobody disputes that he was the heart and soul and brains of the store, built it from nothing and made it what it was.

I wandered into Comic Relief in 1989, at the age of twelve. I didn't leave for about six years. Like most adolescents, I didn't really have much money of my own, and in most comics shops I wouldn't have been able to enjoy much. Rory, however, insisted on a free-reading policy. New issues and trade paperbacks were out on the shelves to be enjoyed, and you could read all day without buying anything or having the staff give you so much as a cross look. That was my education.

I read Matt Wagner's Mage three or four times before I finally scraped together the money to buy it. I discovered Harvey Kurtzman because Betsy's Buddies had boobs on the cover. (That's a big deal when you're thirteen, okay?) It took me a long time to give manga a chance, but when I did it was because it was free to read and Rory recommended some.

I discovered Will Eisner in Comic Relief. I still remember reading The Building for the first time and being amazed that comics could do that.

I discovered EC Comics in Comic Relief. There were some really nice reprints coming out around that time, and I didn't even really know they were from the 50s, I just knew I'd never seen anything like them and I read them and reread them even when they gave me nightmares.

I discovered Alan Moore in Comic Relief. I read D.R. and Quinch and wondered what about the style seemed so similar to some of the other really cool stuff I'd read.

I actually met Jack Kirby in Comic Relief. First I just waited in line to shake his hand like everyone else, but then two hours later I came back and he was still there, chatting with Rory and a few diehard fans, telling stories from the 30s and answering geeky questions and refusing to say a bad word about anyone he'd ever worked with.

1989-1995 was a bad period in mainstream American comics, overhyped and underwritten superhero saturation fed by a hollow collector boom, in so many unopenable plastic bags that it's called the Mylar Age of Comics. If I'd been in any other comics store, I wouldn't have been able to read anything without paying for it, and if I did pay for something it would likely as not have been written by Rob fucking Liefeld or somebody. There'd have been nobody to push the good stuff from the small publishers, nobody to nurture an interest in comics as an artform rather than an investment, nobody to let a kid loose to explore all the worlds on all the pages.

Rory's dead and I should be writing about him, and I know this post is mostly about me. That's because I'm not qualified to write about Rory's life. He touched too many people, changed too many lives and fortunes, did too much for too long for an artform that everyone used to dismiss as irrelevant trash. All I can do is tell a little about how he touched my life, what his work and his store meant to me.

Without Rory Root, I wouldn't be anything like the man I am today. I wouldn't have the life I do, I wouldn't be the person I am. For good or ill, he changed my life irrevocably, just by running the best comic book store there ever was. And I'm far, far from unique in that, but it's what I have to remember him by.

Random video post

2008-05-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

Because this is awesome and deserves the hits.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo

May 8th Again

2008-05-08T00:05:00.000-07:00

Full update later. Much been going on. But it's officially the 8th now.

Script Frenzy check-in

2008-04-09T00:31:00.001-07:00

Seven or eight days in, 26 pages and counting. I've never produced this much script this fast in my life, including last year's Script Frenzy. Evidently the moral of the story is this: to get a story written fast, first carry it around for fourteen years. This may not work for all definitions of "fast".

Script Frenzy '08

2008-04-01T00:23:00.000-07:00

Last June, for Script Frenzy, I wrote an entire screenplay in a month only to find it came out short of the length requirement. I counted this as a partial victory and promptly lost the script in a hard drive crash because I'm dumb. Now, because I'm dumb and persistent, i.e. a writer, I'm doing it again. This year Script Frenzy is in April and the length requirement has changed from 20,000 words to 100 pages, which is a better measure for a script anyway.

I shouldn't have any trouble filling those pages, though filling them in time will be tricky. This time I've chosen a big old epic space opera that's been kicking around my head for years, an adaptation of a project I've tried before in a different form. It's an experiment with a structure I call the "long trailer", which I'll probably expound further on later in the month. For now, I'm having fun making up alien names that sound evocative of what I want them to mean without being too on-the-nose. Darth Vader, after all, is "Dark Father" via mangled German, and there was a time when Darth Vader was very cool indeed, before they changed his name to Little Orphan Ani.

The Justice League Administration

2008-03-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

So, as of this writing many people are pissed off at Hillary Clinton for taking yet another cheap shot at Barack Obama. They think that someone who acts like that shouldn't be president. Frankly, I'm inclined to agree--a candidate that devoted to personal destruction and winning at any cost is simply not who we need in the Oval Office, especially not right now.

I do, however, have a recurring political fantasy wherein she swallows her pride and accepts the vice-presidential slot. Yes, this would require both her and Obama getting past some things they've said, but they're adults, they can do that. I think that President Obama and Vice-President Clinton could do more for this country than any administration in decades.

"Wait, Noah," you say, "you'd really want her as the VP despite her track record of harsh statements, underhanded tricks, and general stubborn troublemaking?" No, I don't want her as VP despite those things. I think she'd make a good VP because of those things.

Let's look at Clinton's qualifications for a second. She's smart as hell, very hardworking, very capable, and has the best set of connections you could ask for. It's no secret that much of life and almost all of politics is about who you know, and the Clinton Rolodex is a treasure trove of the right people to call in any situation. And yes, like most Southern politicians, she's a streetfighter. She'll dig in, like she's doing in this nomination race, and fight you for every inch of ground, hit you with anything that comes to hand, and never give up while she's still breathing. Those are semi-admirable but not inspiring qualities in a leader, but they're incredibly useful qualities in a leader's capable assistant.

Obama, as I've said before, is the inspiring, visionary leader this country needs now. Clinton is treating this race as an old-fashioned delegate fight, while Obama's treating it as a referendum on his vision for America's future. This year, at this historical moment, Obama's right and Clinton's wrong. Old-fashioned ideas and solutions are not what we need to dig us out of the deep hole we're in; we need bold new ideas and a leader who can make us believe in them. However, actually getting those ideas implemented would go a lot better with some old-fashioned junkyard-dog tactics behind the scenes.

Every vice-president is different. Sometimes they're a quiet nonentity, sometimes they're the president's rival, sometimes they're the real power in the White House. If she could find the courage to take the job, Hillary Clinton could make the vice-presidency her own, make it the fiercely effective backup to President Obama's agenda. Let's face it, their agendas are largely pretty similar--if Hillary wants to see that agenda enacted, she could do it better from the smaller office. Let Obama stay out front and draw the fire, while she makes the calls and pushes through the legislation and sets up the meetings and kicks the necessary ass.

John Edwards has been talked about for the vice-presidency, of course, but I think we all know deep down that he was born for the job of United States Attorney General. Let the man do what he does best: unleash the power of the U.S. legal system on bastards who think they can get away with hurting people for money or ideology or power.

The image I keep coming back to is something Gail Simone once said: “When a giant robot attacks Metropolis, send Superman. ... When a car is hijacked by an escaped loony, turn on the bat signal, by all means. But if an ARMY shows up on your doorstep, that’s when you call in Wonder Woman." Wonder Woman is the only one of DC's major heroes whose entire raison d'etre is to be the perfect warrior for good, and like Hillary Clinton, she'll fight like hell to her last drop of blood and never give an inch.

So there's your metaphor. Obama is Superman, the inspiring leader whose charisma and power and vision set the standard. Clinton is Wonder Woman, not because of her gender but because of her skill set; she's the fighter. Edwards is Batman, the guy who gets the criminals no one else can catch. Cheesy? Maybe. But try believing in it for a second, see how it feels.

That combination of abilities in one administration could potentially achieve more good than anyone since Roosevelt. A new Marshall Plan for the Middle East, a revitalization of our currently-fucked economy, the reestablishment of America's role as a moral and political leader in world affairs. Maybe it wouldn't, of course, but we'd at least know we got the best possible people to try. Imagine it: Obama in the lead, changing the course of public opinion, leaping political divisions in a single bound, shrugging off right-wing attacks like bee stings. Clinton in the halls of power, getting the votes and making the threats, ensuring that the job gets done and done right. Edwards... well, personally I imagine Edwards appearing from the shadows in corporate boardrooms and whispering "Does the phrase war profiteering mean anything to you, Mr. Chairman?", but I may be overextending the metaphor an inch or two.

I don't know if Clinton has what it takes to accept second place; the very qualities that would make her so good at the job mean she's unlikely to take it. But it's been a long time since I've been able to dream of a really good American government, and for right now I'm going to continue to dream, and I'm not sorry.

Oh, and just as a geeky side note: in this metaphor, Bill Clinton is the Martian Manhunter.

Jesus H. Foglio

2008-03-21T01:26:00.000-07:00

Like all good Americans, I read Girl Genius regularly, and I buy the printed collections from time to time.

The art's always terrific, as one has come to expect, but today's page literally made me stop reading and say "Wow" with one panel.

(Cropped for clarity and size--composition slightly damaged in the process. Look at the original to get the full effect.)

Let's look at what exactly makes this panel so good, shall we? First and most obviously, there's a great visceral sense of movement; nothing here is static. Agatha is flying out of the panel at us, a classic old effect that works unless you overuse it, which Foglio doesn't. Those knives are flying in straight, hard lines with a great sense of velocity, so they look good and dangerous. (Yes, those are both effects Jack Kirby pioneered, so this panel is two-thirds Kirby. What comics art isn't two-thirds Kirby?) Von Zinzer is shoving Agatha hard, and his line is a solid diagonal, a well-rooted architectural support that lets us feel the force of his shove.

This leads me into the really remarkable thing about this panel, which is the lines. There are three characters in this panel: Agatha, Von Zinzer, and the not-a-kitchen as represented by the knives. All three are represented by totally different types of lines. The knives are all straight lines moving in one direction, and covered in pointy bits. Agatha is all curved lines (All together now, boys: "I'll say she is!" There, now it's out of your system.), not a straight line anywhere on her, forming a bow around the point where Von Zinzer's pushing her. And Von Zinzer is made of hard angles and blocks. Look at the man, he's built out of gray-and-black bricks. His shoulder looks like it was quarried.

The art on this comic is always terrific, but it doesn't often make me stop dead and stare like this did. When someone pulls that off, I like to take a moment to respect that level of accomplishment. The control of his medium Foglio's displaying here is genuinely breathtaking, and I think a little nerdy analysis only serves to highlight that.

Why is there no show called "I Love the 20s"?

2008-03-03T00:15:00.000-08:00

Via Journalista, I found these wonderful photos of a bar/club/speakeasy/hip joint in early 1920s Washington. It was called the Krazy Kat, after George Herriman's legendary creation, the ambiguously-gendered hero of a comic strip still studied today.

Apparently it was quite the hangout for flappers, artists, bohemians, homosexuals, and other such magnificent troublemakers. How can you tell it was cool?

Hint: if it's 1921 and a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a ball and chain is bringing you drinks in a fucking treehouse, that provides a working definition of cool.

Yes, I have an enormous weakness for the 1920s, when the concept of cool as we know it was invented. I make no apology, nor am I one of those sad Renaissance Fair folks who claim they'd prefer to actually live in an earlier era. I like indoor plumbing, decent heat, vaccinations, and liquor made by professionals instead of gangsters, but damn, sometimes it's a little tempting.

I once heard about a society in Los Angeles dedicated to note-for-note reenactments of late-70s early-80s punk shows. Expert reenactors play whatever musicians or notable celebrities were there, and the rest of the show fills up with fans who really want to have been at whatever Black Flag or Ramones show is being reenacted. Anyone wearing any clothing or accessory dating from even a day after the original show's date is barred at the door. The original set is performed precisely, including mistakes, breakdowns, and police interventions, including getting more reenactors to portray cops if necessary.

On the one hand, this seems like the world's sickest, saddest, most foredoomed attempt to vanish up one's own ass. On the other hand, let's face it, one of the defining attributes of punk culture is grouchy old bastards who tell anyone who'll listen that everything now is crap and you can't know anything unless you were there, man, really there, when it was all real, you know? You can only hear that so many times before you just get pissed at the one-way nature of time and decide that fine, you'll be there.

Moments pass. It's their nature. But the best ones linger in memory, and the biggest ones linger in cultural memory. It's natural to want to return to our best moments, and just as natural, though more frustrating, to want to return to moments we never had. So yes, there's a part of me that yearns for that strange, tentative late entry into the 20th century, after the Great War had blown everything up and those who remained had to put society together out of the old pieces and whatever new ones they could get away with making up.

And I want to drink illegal liquor in a treehouse. Because dude, fucking TREEHOUSE.

Boomer Validation Movies

2008-02-28T00:24:00.000-08:00

I’m far from the first person to observe that Baby Boomers are the most entitled generation in American history; it’s a commonplace observation. What’s really interesting, though, is that Baby Boomers have an entire subgenre of films devoted to telling them that they are good people.

What I call Boomer Validation films are movies, sometimes quite good movies, that are all about telling Baby Boomers that their particular generational angst du jour is valid and real and that they, the Boomers, are nonetheless pretty great individuals.

One of the first big landmarks in the genre is THE BIG CHILL, addressing that early-80s Boomer crisis of conscience: Weren’t we going to change the world? Why the fuck did I just vote for Reagan? Fortunately, the movie tells us that selling out doesn’t make you a bad person, you still listen to Motown so you’re cool.

CITY SLICKERS is another classic of the genre, here dealing with the male Boomer mid-life crisis. Validation is provided by surrogate father-figure Jack Palance and a realization of boyhood fantasies through a lens of American mythology.

FORREST GUMP is, of course, the most enormous and obvious example. Forrest, metaphorical representation of an entire generation, is responsible for basically every single cultural memory the generation retains. It’s like a narcissistic “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, only longer. Here, again, we see the singular importance of Baby Boomers reaffirmed, along with the vital fact that they are good.

AMERICAN BEAUTY is a wonderful film, but still falls into this subgenre. It, like CITY SLICKERS, is the fantasy version of the mid-life crisis. It tells Boomer men Your emotional reactions to middle age are totally valid, that guy your wife has the hots for is a complete tool, and that cockteasing little cheerleader really does want to sleep with you but you won’t indulge her because you’re just too good a man.

Perhaps my favorite, though, is SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the only movie I can think of whose central message is “I’m sorry, daddy, I tried to be good!” William Goldman said that the movie starts out saying “War is hell” and ends up saying “War is a neat learning experience for Matt Damon”, but I think he missed some of it. Context, for one thing. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN came out soon after Tom Brokaw’s big push to rename what was once called “the G.I. Generation”. That whole “Greatest Generation” hoopla, the campaign for a WWII veteran’s memorial, all of it was largely Baby Boomers canonizing their parent generation as saints. Whether they had a point or not, that’s the key to understanding Spielberg’s WWII opus: Ryan represents the Baby Boomers. He’s the one the whole war (in the context of the movie) is being fought for. All the sacrifice and blood and death we see in the characters is all so that he can live in a nice safe America and have a decent life. The movie is the long, graphic version of the speech Baby Boomers all heard from their dads when they were bad. In case it was too subtle, there’s a very good scene where this essential tradeoff is explained, and of course the scene where a dying Tom Hanks tells Ryan to “earn it.”

Well, okay, Platonic-ideal-of-citizen-soldier, how shall we, the Baby Boomers, earn it? What standard must we meet, and good lord, have we met it? Please, tell us, so that we can sleep ~~complacently~~ soundly at night.

“Am I a good man?” Ryan asks his wife. “Yes,” she replies.

And bam, a whole generation is validated like a parking stub.

This is far from a complete list. It’s just some of the big hits, and it’s overwhelmingly about male Boomer validation. If you think I’ve overlooked some good examples, or if you think I’m full of shit, let me know.

I love you... just kidding

2008-02-22T00:26:00.000-08:00

So Mighty God King had a very good recent post about romantic comedies, including the following point:

A fourth, rarely used option is to explicitly go with the fairytale aspect of romcoms and deliver the happy ending with a complete lack of irony; this is actually probably the hardest of the four to manage, partly because it’s almost a meta-answer that plays on audience expectations, and partly because you need total audience acceptance of your narrative, which means only a really strong screenplay can dare to pull it off. Think The Princess Bride or Enchanted or Love, Actually.

I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing. I agree with his point in terms of my own experience--I generally approach romantic comedies with a certain amount of ironic distance, unwilling to simply root for the lovers to get together and cheer them when they do. But I don't think that's necessarily how it has to be.

Let me give you an example. I recently saw a Japanese romantic comedy called TRAIN MAN: DENSHA OTOKO, and I loved it. Loved it. It's about this sad little geekboy who, totally by accident, starts talking to a woman for the first time in his life. Trying to seize the opportunity, he calls on the internet for help, and soon has a cheering section of various other misfits and weirdos, a geek chorus who offer contradictory advice and all the help they can muster. It's Cyrano meets the Global Frequency, and it's wonderful. You (or at least I) root for these people, wail at their reversals, and when a happy ending is finally attained, you feel the sense of vicarious emotional fulfillment that romantic movies are supposed to provide but never do.

For all that, I wouldn't say the screenplay's topnotch. It's uneven, drags in more than one place, has several scenes that strain credulity, and gets repetitious sometimes. But I think that what saves it is the lack of irony.

I've written before about how romantic comedies have gone downhill in their quest to become more harmless and fluffy, and I think we're overdue for another reinvention of the genre. We are tired of going along with the premise that Matthew McConaughey cannot get a girlfriend. We're tired of those posters where everyone's smirking at the audience, telling us "Dude, we're totally having love problems. It's, like, such a big deal, and we might wind up lonely. LOL." We're tired of movies, in short, where the stakes are nonexistent.

I'm reminded of an old Jon Carroll column in which he sings the praises of LAGAAN, just because he finds it so refreshing to see a movie that takes its own premise completely seriously. We want to see justice prevail and underdogs win, and dammit, we want to fall in love. Our real love lives have enough smug, ironic distance as it is; we don't need it in our fantasy. We don't want it in our fantasy; half the paperbacks sold in America are romance novels, not a genre noted for its postmodern self-awareness. (Indeed, one imagines a potential direct-to-DVD market feeding that same audience and their need for non-comedic tales of unironic love. Romnoncoms.)

So let's try that, people. Let's put the Tracy/Hepburn canon and WHEN HARRY MET SALLY to bed, and try writing romantic comedies from new premises, ones without the word "zany" anywhere in them.

Short Fiction Ahoy

2008-02-10T19:26:00.000-08:00

A small online zine called Freight Train was good enough to publish a short story of mine today. Go check it out.

Nobody Knows Anything, Provably

2008-02-07T23:31:00.000-08:00

Blogsurfing around, I came across this remarkable article from last year, describing in some detail a study that demonstrates quite clearly what those of us in creative fields have long suspected: hits are random. There is no model that can predict which artistic endeavors will become huge successes and which will vanish into obscurity. People like what's popular, which of course is a feedback loop, so something that starts doing well will likely start doing better, but what initially crosses that threshold of "popular" is determined more or less at random by the choices of relatively few individuals, and you can't predict who they are, either.

It's easy to see examples of this in our own lives, of course. The book you bought because you heard everyone was reading it, the TV show you watched because people you knew were talking about it, the film you saw just so you wouldn't be the only one who hadn't seen it... make your own list.

Man, you ever wish that scientific study would disprove your own grim cynicism for a change?

A new LOLcat joke, finally

2008-01-29T00:49:00.000-08:00

Sometimes one just has to link to something damn funny. Link courtesy of Mighty God King, naturally.

Barack Obama Deserves Your Vote

2008-01-22T01:58:00.000-08:00

Look, here's the thing. The 20th century was America's century, no argument. And we could've had a chance for the 21st as well. But then one election went wrong, and now the first decade of that century has been spent doing all the wrong things. Every bad policy of the past 150 years was put on fast-forward in a desperate attempt to prove that this time it'd work, they were right all along, dammit... and holy crap, has that not worked.

Now, eight years into the century, our economy is mortgaged to the hilt, our citizenry is impoverished, our infrastructure is wrecked, our system of government is severely damaged, our existing policies are all failures, our national unity is a dim memory, and our international standing is completely destroyed. If we're going to pull out of this tailspin, we need to start doing things VERY differently.

No, that's not an endorsement for Kucinich or Ron fucking Paul. This is not a time for feel-good protest votes. We need to get behind someone who can actually lead us out of the unbelievable shitstorm Bush has landed us in, and that means someone who can actually lead and do it in a new direction.

Which brings me to this:

If you don't have time to watch it, there's a partial transcript here.

I did not know Americans could still make speeches like that. I have not, in my lifetime, seen anyone unify straightforward statements with inspiring sentiments in that way. I have never been moved to tears by a political speech before. Christ on a bicycle, I don't recall ever seeing a major American politician explain the difference between the cartoon racism of the KKK and the ugly facts on the ground of institutional racism.

Watch the video, watch the crowd. (Especially watch the guy in the lower left corner. I love that guy.) They're ambivalent, even uncomfortable, about some of the things he's got to tell them. He doesn't even slow down. In other places, everyone flies onto their feet applauding, even the deacons who are trying to be all serious and solemn. Yes, it's a friendly crowd. Sure, he wouldn't get the same reaction from a bunch of country-club Republicans. But you can't tell me there's anyone outside Bush's fanatical 25% base that wouldn't get behind the vision of America being expressed in that speech.

That's what we need now, more than anything: a vision. A president with a clear idea of where we're going and why. A president who just by existing constitutes a firm statement that we are no longer doing things the same old way. Yes, that means I support him partly just because he's black. Symbolism matters.

I like Clinton okay, and I like Edwards quite a bit, but neither of them has that vision, that symbolism. I can't see either of them making that speech.

So yes, vote Obama in your primary and in November. We can't afford anything less.

And the next time you hear me stop to just plain endorsing a candidate like this, I'll owe you a beer.

On the dramatic use of profanity

2008-01-22T00:37:00.000-08:00

One of those frustratingly vague bits of screenwriting wisdom that gets passed along is that a story isn't complete until your protagonist has been "taken to the limit." This often gets interpreted as meaning one should heap misfortunes and injuries on your hero's head until their life resembles what moody 15-year-olds think their lives are like. You know the sort of last act I mean--a hero with three limbs cut off and two bullets in his lung, dragging himself by a gun with one round left towards a heroine whose parents just died of cancer the same day her boyfriend left her over the PTSD from her repressed molestation memory. Presumably, if taking one's protagonist to the limit is useful, that can't be what it means.

This occurred to me recently when I was talking with a writer friend about characterization, and I said that I'm a sucker for any scene where a character's internal monologue ends with "...because fuck you."

A few classic examples: "I could join with the father I've always dreamed of meeting and ascend to a position of power over the entire galaxy, but I'm not gonna. Because fuck you."

"If I fail to turn in my friend to the Nazis, I'll lose my cushy position and wind up in some Christ-awful Free French brigade without a hope in hell. But y'know what? Fuck you, Vichy."

"I'm losing my love, my lifestyle, and the dream I've clung to for years, giving it up for a goddamn copy job in Ohio. Incidentally, Norma, fuck you."

"My species is doomed, and the best I can do is a stupid, futile gesture that will, in the best-case scenario, save one Kryptonian. But fuck you, death."

One of my favorite characters is coming from the same place in her basic motivation: "On the one hand, I'm short and fat and have no training and am in college and have no right to be involved in saving the world every month. But then again, on the other hand, fuck you." I'm a sucker for heroes that don't ask anyone's permission to be heroes, but that's another rant.

Being what I am, once I found this phenomenon, I started rummaging around in Shakespeare for examples, where I discovered that the fuck-you moment isn't necessary for a good story. Shakespeare's stories are often tales of destiny and fate, where this kind of stark defiance is out of place. Even so, it's notable that Mercutio's best scene is his death, his last cry of "Fuck ALL of you!" Indeed, I realized that what makes Othello's tragedy so great is that his decision comes down to "I love you, I'll always love you, and I can't imagine my life without you. But fuck you." That's why it hurts so bad every time--we always want love to be the principle that he sticks to, and it always turns out to be pride.

So this is one meaning of "taking a character to the limit." Not to the limit of what's possible, but to the limit the character will go. To the limit where they dig in their heels and refuse to go any further. To where they turn back on the author and say "Fuck you."

Tintin Smashes The State

2007-12-04T01:58:00.001-08:00

The interesting thing about websurfing, at least for me, is how the process cannot be reconstructed. I couldn't tell you how exactly I happened across this remarkable publication, but there it is. Hergé's solid, iconic character designs swiped and traced to form a long, detailed narrative about an anarchist revolution that begins in London.

Take the time to read it. It's didactic and (in my opinion) charmingly naïve, but it has a certain fascination. For one thing, there are prominently-featured female characters, whose designs are mostly original, since the Tintin stories don't have any. Yes, okay, Bianca Castafiore, but that's about it. And she doesn't appear.

Easily my favorite line is "For god's sake, Captain, have some faith in your class!" Not because it's a great line, but because you literally couldn't formulate that thought in an American context.

Writing--Not For Wimps

2007-11-12T03:39:00.000-08:00

It's frustrating trying to maintain a blog about one's writing when the work one is doing is not something one can post about publicly.

Of course, that last sentence makes it sound like I'm scabbing. As all civilized people know, the WGA is presently on strike, and this year's TV season is already up shit creek. I couldn't support the strike more, of course. If I lived in L.A. like a sensible spec monkey, I'd be manning the picket lines in my favorite red shirt, never mind that I'm not a WGA member. Instead I try to stay abreast of where things stand and talk about it with my friends, shooting down the usual fallacies they've vaguely heard, like "Do they really need a union?" and "Don't screenwriters already make a ton of money?" Of course, shooting down the latter usually involves just pointing to my current financial situation. I'm working, all right, in the problematic writerly sense of the word, and it's even working for a real company, but that doesn't mean I've seen a nickel of actual currency yet.

Mind you, the work I'm doing is for overseas companies that are not part of the AMPTP, and are not covered by the strike. That's part of why I haven't seen that precious nickel yet, but that's another story.

Of course, I'm not a WGA member. I could, if the opportunity presented itself, write for NBC or Paramount or anyone. (Because, you know, they're just LINED up asking me to.) But there's two reasons I'm not even approaching struck companies with specs until the strike is over.

First, because violating a strike would forever preclude me from WGA membership. They keep track, you know.

Second, because I agree with the reasons for the strike. The studios are unquestionably trying to screw over the writers, and I have too much experience with being screwed over already. When I am a WGA member, I want some kind of residual deal that means I can eat and pay rent and see a doctor when I'm sick, and I refuse to consider that unreasonable.

Third, and the one that would matter if the first two reasons didn't exist, I'm nobody's fucking scab.

If you don't understand my third point, I would suggest that you study up on the history of labor relations in America. The libertarian-sounding bullshit we hear about the free market was trendy a hundred years ago, too, and it didn't work then either. Remember this: we've repeatedly field-tested whether large businesses will just plain kill people for money, and the answer is always yes.

So, yeah, I'm doing some work for some companies well outside the strike. Not anything you'd call big-time, but it's good, honest writing work, and I enjoy it. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I can't discuss it. Leaving the blog alone for days at a time can convey the impression that I'm not writing, when I often am, just not for up-front money and not in a way that I can talk about. Meantime, I'm still poking around for a day job to make ends meet. The nature of the beast is feast or famine, and while that sounds romantic (and honestly, it kinda is) the famine parts are a real bitch.

Also, of course, I'm once again deep into NaNoWriMo, and once again lagging behind in wordcount. This time around, I'm engaged in a prose exploration of the hidden worlds that hide just outside the blinders we set up for ourselves. That's the problem with being a writer; ask me what it's about, and I'm too likely to say "Well, it's an exploration of genre and how it often just consists of one set of surface trappings or another" instead of "It's about this girl who's part of a secret organization and how she finds out what's really going on in the world." Nevertheless, I ~~hack~~ push on through the word count, reaching for 50,000 by midnight on the 30th. We'll see if I make it.

And now, bad musical numbers!

2007-11-04T22:19:00.000-08:00

Not all of my readers will enjoy this post. Most people, presented with exceptionally bad and ill-conceived musical numbers from shows that were never produced, do not experience pleasure. There are, however, some out there who enjoy seeing the valiant attempts that reached for show-tune greatness, and wound up someplace else instead.

For those brave souls, courtesy of their gracious host, I present these three songs from the aborted Batman musical. They put me in mind of that Superman musical that exploded on contact with the stage back in the 60s, and which can still be found on video if you know where to look. They put me in mind of an exchange that I probably won't ever find a place to use:

"Is this the human emotion you call... joy?"

"No, that's the human emotion we call schadenfreude. But that was a good guess."

NaNoWriMo, Year Two

2007-11-03T05:24:00.000-07:00

I intend to tackle NaNoWriMo again this year, because I enjoyed it so much last time. This time I don't intend to ignore this blog for a month, though.

Unfortunately, I never quite finished last year's novel. Sure, I beat the word-count deadline, but I did it without finishing the actual story. And then once the deadline was past, and with nobody clamoring for this bizarre, self-indulgent time-travel novel, I didn't feel any strong sense of urgency to drag myself the rest of the way to the end. Exacerbating the problem was the necessity of killing one of my characters in a manner that I personally found quite emotionally painful. We all have our personal squicks, and this death, however required by the narrative, just stomped all over mine. Thus, I found reasons to put it off.

This year's NaNoWriMo snuck up on me while I was busy with other things, and soon I found myself in the awkward position of being about to start a timed-writing project without finishing the previous one. Being a manly, honorable sort, I felt that this was simply not on.

I have, on this basis, just now finished the godawful first draft of a novel entitled THE IMPRESARIOS, begun just under a year ago. It's now 242 pages of prose that need a serious rewrite at some point, but it is in fact done, and I can now start on this year's novel with a clear conscience.

Ah, crap, I'm already three days behind. Wish me luck.

A Somewhat Involved Hypothetical

2007-10-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

[An apology in advance. This post is going to be quite dense in cultural references, many of which are obscure or specialized. Few of them are explicated or linked. If any of my loyal readers can’t keep up, I apologize, and remind you that Google is your friend.]

The other day I was telling one of the various women in my life an old comic-book legend: the sad tale of Bill Gaines’ testimony before Congress.

A little background for those who have no idea who Bill Gaines might have been. His father, Max Gaines, may have invented the comic book, and certainly left his son the business when he croaked. Bill unwillingly found himself the owner and operator of Educational Comics and its line of poorly-selling titles. Changing the name to Entertaining Comics, he proceeded to turn it into the best comics publishing house in the known world. The EC line of horror and crime titles was head and shoulders above everything else being published in terms of pure quality.

I won’t bore my more comics-erudite readers with a full history, but I will take time to just show two images, both from the same era:

DC:

EC:

If you can’t see the difference in quality there, I just don’t know what to tell you.

So yeah, he was publishing the best comics in the world, and they also contained a lot of blood and murder and a searing subtextual critique of 1950s American culture. Towards the end, they started seriously taking on racism and anti-Semitism in angry, intense stories that did not conform to the new American model for dealing with such problems, i.e. pretend they don’t exist.

Everything in the last paragraph got him into big trouble. A wave of anti-comics hysteria swept the country. (How bad was it? PTAs held book burnings. Seriously.) So in 1954, Congress decided to hold hearings on the comic book problem. And Bill Gaines was called to testify. And he sucked. I’ve read the transcripts: when he’s reading his prepared statement at the beginning, he’s good, but then under questioning he becomes vague, confused, and frequently inappropriate.

Thing is, Bill was a fat fella. Not the sort of Hutt-like behemoth we’ve come to know today, but fat for the 50s. Back in the day, that meant they’d prescribe you some “diet pills”. That meant benzedrine, dexedrine… goddamn crystal meth for all I know. Which meant that in the morning, when he was scheduled to testify, Bill Gains was full of piss and vinegar and sweet legal speed. But then his testimony got moved to the afternoon. By which time he was crashing, hard.

Now, it’s a bit of comics-geek fanon that the wicked, oppressive Congress forced the Comics Code on our beloved medium, but it just ain’t so. Congress’s actual conclusion was something like “Maybe there’s a problem here, but it’s not the problem of the U.S. government, go away and stop bothering us.” No, the Code was created by the industry itself, and here’s one point on which I agree with Frank Miller: it was created specifically to drive EC Comics out of business.

I could go into why, but it would be tedious. Suffice to say that a lot of the Code’s provisions were designed specifically to make it impossible to publish EC’s best-selling titles, while preserving the stuff the rest of the industry was selling. That’s not what’s important.

What’s important is that the Comics Code turned an entire medium into shit for thirty years.

That’s one of those statements that’s unfair but not untrue. Yes, it wasn’t an entire medium, and sure, it wasn’t totally shit, and absolutely, it wasn’t really thirty years, and I’ll acknowledge, it wasn’t wholly the fault of the Code. And yet somehow, when you allow for all those points and factor them out, you’re still left with the fact that the Code turned an entire medium into shit for thirty years.

And this, at last, brings me to my point. Like many Americans since November 2000, I’ve thought a lot about alternate universes. Like many comics fans, I wonder what would have happened if the historical accidents that shaped my beloved comics had gone differently.

I’m not quite naïve enough to believe that Bill Gaines testifying in the morning would have somehow stopped the Code from taking hold, but let’s be dramatic. Let’s say that that one moment could have changed everything. It makes a better story that way. So now we’re in a world where there was no Comics Code, where everyone kept publishing whatever the hell they wanted. Dell kept cranking out licensed Disney titles, DC kept doing superheroes and Westerns, and yes, EC kept doing what they were doing. Of course, what they were doing was developing and exploring at high speed…

I was raised to believe, and I still believe, that quality is the only long-term investment. That means that EC Comics would have been the best investment on the comics-publishing scene. Yes, it’s possible they might have just flared and vanished, but then again it’s possible that they might have all turned into space werewolves and banded together to fight crime. Let’s play the odds and assume that good work pays off in the long run.

In our world, you say comics and people think superheroes. Even with the wonderful rise in other genres recently, that’s still what people think, and there’s a lot of justification for that. However, what if the best comics in the country were everything but superheroes? Would we see the single-genre domination of an entire medium that we see today? It seems unlikely, to say the least.

Let’s imagine a 1960s where EC is still publishing. I’m going to contend that comic book companies live and die by their editors; I think the evidence supports this hypothesis. In the 1960s, DC’s most notorious editor was Mort Weisinger, who was legendary for abusing his artists and writers, lying to them, and never letting them forget that what they were doing was disposable, infantile crap. (Stopped them asking for more money, you know.) He got the comics he asked for. Marvel’s editor in the same period was Stan Lee, who had a different plan. He created the Marvel Universe; not only a unified style but a unified, branded, interconnected set of titles. You couldn’t follow the Avengers without knowing what was going on with the X-Men, and vice versa. There were no Fantastic Four fans or Iron Man fans, there were only Marvel fans. It was, from a marketing perspective, genius. In our world, those two editors fought it out over the decade, and Stan Lee and Marvel won handily.

In this posited alternate history, however, there’s a third great editor working: Bill Gaines. And he’s not trying to compete on the same terms; he’s playing a whole different game. Weisinger and Lee were capturing the hearts of children. If you look at Gaines’s development as a publisher and editor, however, he was clearly moving towards capturing the minds of adults just as much, if not more. Not only his EC work, but his later work (more on that later) shows increasing sophistication and complexity. He wanted to make people think, make them question the assumptions they were fed by culture and society. If I suggest that this style might have found fertile ground in the 1960s, I trust no one will call me a madman.

This ties in to another issue. The lack of the Comics Code means that there’s thirty years, two entire generations, where “comic book” didn’t necessarily mean “pre-chewed pablum for children and the illiterate”. That is a significant change. Okay, yes, good work got published between 1954-84. Some of it within the Code, some of it without. The point is, anyone who says any good comics got published because of the Code has too different a definition of the word “good” for any meaningful communication to happen between us, I fear.

In our 1960s, the counterculture embraced comics to some extent. This was, to a large extent, because the page compositions of Steve Ditko and Jim Steranko look even better when you’re on acid. This led to the rise of underground comics, which faltered because Robert Crumb was great and a lot of his contemporaries were, um, not. Then Will Eisner came along after years of exile with A Contract With God and the notion that comics could speak to an adult audience, and from there things started to get really interesting. Successive waves of small independent publishers arose, one after the other, each offering their own interesting ideas. Most foundered on Sturgeon’s Law, but each wave left excellent work behind, like successive high tides leaving an accumulation of lovely driftwood at the dry-sand line. The good work remains, the other stuff is washed away by history.

However, in the alternate 1960s we’re considering, there was an entirely different form of comics to enjoy. There were comics that looked good even when you weren’t tripping, that talked about serious social issues without having to code them behind mutants, monsters, and the Martian Manhunter. Could we imagine that the beatniks who became the counterculture might have embraced these stories? I think we could. Hell, my father was a Merry Prankster; I’d take bets that his old buddies would have enjoyed EC comics, if they’d still been coming out by then. The Baby Boomers would have gotten the comics they wanted as rebellious young adults.

American consumer culture in the second half of the 20th century has been, to a great extent, based on what Baby Boomers wanted. When they were kids who needed driving to Little League, the station wagon was invented. When they were young adults trying to get laid, the muscle car and the make-out van appeared. When they were struggling young professionals, reliable economy cars took off. When they had kids of their own with Little League games, the SUV came into being. Need I point out that the same year Boomer men hit serious middle age, Viagra was developed? I can’t wait until they start dying of old age; I’m looking forward to a cure for death.

So if Baby Boomers were learning that comics were a versatile and powerful form of art, capable of telling stories that spoke to them, what would have happened? How many artists and writers of that generations might have at least flirted with working in the medium? How many would have gotten further, done good work? It’s safe to assume there’d be at least a few. Yes, in our timeline, there were a few. Some came in with the small waves of independent publishers. Some grew up obsessed with the question of whether Green Lantern could defeat Iron Man, and dedicated their adult lives to settling it. But in our alternate history, people who met neither of those prerequisites could have worked in the comic book form. I think we can agree that that’s a larger pool to draw from, and we’ve already established that there would be more stories for these people to write and draw than just Green Arrow.

So, in this hypothetical, we have more comics in more genres being worked on by more people. An educated comics fan would be forgiven for thinking that I’m positing a kind of utopia; to be a comics fan is to love a small, ghettoized, obscure artform in spite of all three adjectives. There’s something I haven’t brought up, though, and it’s something I bet some of you have already thought of. When it became clear that EC Comics was unable to continue publishing, Bill Gaines took one of his titles, a weird little thing created by writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman, and reinvented it as a black-and-white magazine, with magazine formatting and pricing, and Gaines taking editorial control from Kurtzman.

The magazine, of course, was Mad.

For those only familiar with its current, sad, post-Gaines incarnation, a reminder may be in order. It is no exaggeration to say that for two generations, Mad was America’s leading journal of media criticism. At a very early age, American kids learned that ads were bullshit, TV heroes were phonies, and movies were just selling you the same crap the ads were. Show me any influential writer or artist born between 1950 and 1980, and I’ll show you a former Mad reader.

So in our posited alternate universe, that didn’t happen.

I’ll make it worse than that: aside from being brilliantly subversive, Mad was funny as hell. The magazine had a rare and vital quality for a product marketed to children: it didn’t talk down to them, it treated them like smart people. If you were reading it in 1962 and didn’t know who Barry Goldwater was, it didn’t stop to explain it to you. It didn’t explain what the gay rights movement was in 1980, it didn’t explain the causes of the Gulf War in 1991, it just took these things as read; any sensible person would understand them, so keep up or get left behind. This is a common feature of truly great humor; done well, it initiates the audience into a secret Brotherhood of Cool just by virtue of following the references. Done badly, it’s Dennis Miller.

But annoying overanalysis aside, it really was funny. Funny enough, in fact, that it was a major influence on almost every American comedian still alive. To oversimplify it, no Mad means no Saturday Night Live and no The Simpsons. Now sit down for a minute and subtract from current American culture everything taken off, spun off, or ripped off from those two shows. Take your time; it’s a long list. And that’s still just a small subsection of the second- and third-order effects from Mad. The alternate history posited earlier requires deleting all of that, or modifying it beyond recognition.

Bill Gaines was in the right place at the right time twice in his career; doing quality comics in the early 50s, and then doing a marvelous magazine from 1955 until his death. Both times, he gave American culture something it wanted and responded to. It had to be twice, of course, because once he was in the right place at the wrong time: testifying in the afternoon instead of the morning. (Remember, that’s the hypothetical you agreed to 16 paragraphs ago.) Change that one bit of bad timing, and his first great hit could have continued. His work would still have had enormous and far-reaching influence, but not at all the same influence. American culture would not look like it does now, if EC Comics had lived and Mad been stillborn.

This is one of several big fat hypotheticals about comic book history that I frequently ponder, incidentally. The others are neither as big or as fat (they lack Bill Gaines, you know) and I’m not sure if I want to post them. In the meantime, please tell me which parts of this hypothetical you think are bullshit.

Have You Eaten Rice Today?

2007-10-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

Working on a long, ranty post that may be the start of a series, depending on how many of my readers I want to chase away with obscure hypotheticals.

In the meantime, go to Freerice.com, where you can have fun with a marvelous and educational vocabulary quiz that's good for two reasons. First, it respects your intelligence and doesn't dumb the quiz down unless you force it to. (The maximum vocabulary level is 50, and it's designed so you have to keep re-earning that level and can't just keep it, no matter how clever you are.) Second, and more importantly, every question you get right donates 10 grains of rice to combat world hunger. Sure, doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. Fast.

So yeah, go prove you know what "ogham" and "cuspidor" mean, and feel annoyed that they consider "snickersnee" a valid word. You get to reinforce your sense of superiority, and someone else gets to eat a meal today, and it's all done by the power of the internet. It's like a hypothetical win-win scenario in a class on 21st-century microeconomics.

I'm Gonna Live Forever

2007-10-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

So, as I’m about the last person to report, Stephen Fry has a blog. And, like most things Mr. Fry does, it’s superb. Well, so far. He’s got two posts up as of this writing. Thing is, the first one’s a long analysis of smartphones, and the second one’s an essay on fame that’s a whisker under nine thousand words long. If you convert that into normal blog-post units, it comes out to twenty or so.

I’ve just checked, and my undergraduate thesis is only slightly longer than Mr. Fry’s rant about fame. Not as well-written, either.

Thing is, for all its length and thoroughness, and for all that he acknowledges that he’s leaving out big parts of the experience, this superb essay betrays a certain myopia. Stephen Fry is deservedly famous in a visual medium, and that’s the perspective he brings. Much of the experience he describes relates to people recognizing one’s face. Thing is, there’s an entire category of fame he’s missed out on due to his curious decision to become famous for his terrific acting instead of his lovely directing or his intimidatingly-good writing.

This occurs to me, of course, because as I was reading his essay, I was asking myself how useful these ideas would be in the event that, knock wood, I achieve fame. I kept stumbling, however, on the fact that nothing I do will ever make me famous in that way. What Mr. Fry does not address is the scenario where one’s face is not famous, but one’s name is. This is the fame I can achieve, the fame achieved by most of the famous and semi-famous people I’ve known. It’s the fame of writers, artists, some directors, all the people too talented to not be famous but too damn homely to go in front of the cameras much.

Mr. Fry beautifully describes the approach, the oh-my-goodness-isn’t-that stare, where total strangers walk up to you, the relationship of luminary to fan already established. That’s its own thing, of course, but name-famous people rarely get it. The faces of the name-famous are safe, rarely attracting attention, but once people learn your name, the entire dynamic shifts. In an instant you go from being a nobody to being a somebody, and both parties have to readjust all their assumptions and behaviors.

I’ve heard about very famous writers who carry far more cash than most folks, just to avoid having to give people their credit card and turn a simple purchase into a whole fanwanking scene. My own father, miffed to find one of his books on a remainder table, was able to surreptitiously autograph the entire stack without being noticed, because while the whole store’s staff knew his name, his face was anonymous.

Even in comics, where certain folks are very famous on a limited scale, there’s an odd disconnect. One of the common things one hears at cons is “Huh, so that’s what Kurt Busiek/Matt Wagner/Joss Whedon looks like.” Every handshake at a con comes with a little flick of the eyes to the nametag, trying to find out whether this person is someone whose ass one should be kissing. Heck, I was once in my local comics shop, bitching about Brian Michael Bendis’s writing to some stranger, only to discover that he was, in fact, Brian Michael Bendis.

With the internet making more and more pictures of more and more people available, this effect is being mitigated a bit, but only a bit. We simply don’t go out of our way to memorize people’s faces unless we have to. We learn what actors and musicians look like because they spend hours in close-up on our screens, but even if we’ve seen photos of our literary heroes, we rarely connect them to the random guy in the supermarket. When one is a famous writer, one’s fame is a separate entity in certain respects. It’s something that arrives by mail, something that one is introduced by, but not necessarily a part of one’s day-to-day experience.

Stumptown Comics Fest is Awesome

2007-10-02T12:44:00.000-07:00

This is the post that should have gone up yesterday, but I was still too exhausted. I spent the weekend at the Stumptown Comics Fest shilling for Girl-Wonder.org, my current fandom hangout and a genuinely great community. I volunteered to help represent the gang at Stumptown, and man, am I glad I did.

(photo by Joshin Yamada)
This is what a feminist looks like: a pasty bald guy with a nice hat. Also two attractive young women named Rachel.

I’ve been to my share of comics conventions. Hell, I even worked a table once before. I thought I knew what to expect. Fellow geeks know the drill: morbidly obese completists, angry-looking trenchcoat guys, inappropriate cosplayers, hot goth girls with an entourage of drooling oglers, a few big-name pros looking like, as Neil Gaiman once put it, “a rotten log at a woodpecker convention”… all the maddening clichés and stereotypes of our beloved subculture.

Sadly, in this I was disappointed. The whole place was jam-packed with classy, tasteful people. Everyone seemed to have showered recently. The female-to-male ratio was pretty dang close to even. The pros were rested, friendly, and in several cases had the time to do detailed drawings for the Girl-Wonder convention sketchbook. (Including a Matt Wagner Wonder Woman that just blew me away… I’ll link to it when we’ve got it scanned.)

Most of all, people were enormously receptive to the message of Girl-Wonder.org, and not just because we were giving away free candy, though that probably helped. Online, in the more mainstream* comics fandom, we’ve found a lot of resistance. Apparently the notion that maybe comics would be better with less blatant sexism is somehow terrifying. At Stumptown, though, most everyone seemed receptive to the basic idea, and we had a lot of folks hang around our table just to chat and kick principles around. Quite a few parents saw our slogan “Because capes aren’t just for boys” and asked where they could find some good age-appropriate material for their daughters. Mostly we just directed them down the aisle to the Oni Press booth. That raises its own set of issues about how Marvel and DC don’t publish much that you can give to kids, but that’s another rant.

The entire thing was exhausting to an extent I couldn’t have expected, but it also felt wonderful. It’s very rare in life (well, my life) that one has an unalloyedly pleasant experience, but Stumptown easily qualified. No screwups, no disasters, no unpleasant surprises of any kind, just the single best time I’ve ever had at a comics convention. I heartily endorse this product or service.

*For those not up on the lingo, in comics “mainstream” means “a single subgenre, but only when produced by one of two publishers and involving one or more of a small number of specific characters”. It’s not the most intuitive definition in the world.

Caliban Would Totally Be an X-Man

2007-09-23T22:58:00.000-07:00

Again, writers on their own are dangerous, if by dangerous we mean dorky. Two or more writers alone together are dorky in ways Hollywood faux-nerds can only dream of.
So me and a writerly friend were chatting, and we got onto the subject of the Five Man Band. Unfortunately, we’re both completely gay for William Shakespeare, which is particularly odd in her case. Consequently, we began assembling Five Man Bands out of the characters in the Canon.

If you work with solely primary characters, protagonists:
Leader – Othello
Lancer – Hamlet
Big Guy – Macbeth
Smart Guy – Prospero
The Chick – Portia

If, on the other hand, we stick to the often more-interesting secondary characters, we get this:
Leader – Horatio
Lancer – Mercutio
Big Guy – Falstaff
Smart Guy – Jaques
The Chick – Beatrice (Yes, she’s technically a secondary. Also, you get a fun team dynamic where Mercutio’s always hitting on her and she’s always shooting him down amusingly.)

Then there’s what happens when Shakespeare’s villains form their own Five Man Band to fight back:
Leader – Iago
Lancer – Aaron
Big Guy – Caliban
Smart Guy – Richard III
The Chick – Lady Macbeth
(I know, Shylock’s not on the list. That’s because it’s my private belief that Shylock is like if Stan Gable sucked. Ask me about it sometime.)

This, of course, leads to the thought of the Shakespeare Universe, where all the characters run around fighting each other and teaming up and having adventures. Then, inevitably, we have the Crisis On Infinite Jest, the transdimensional crossover where the Shakespeare characters encounter their literary predecessors or historical counterparts. Romeo and Juliet run into a couple Italian kids. Richard III runs into the historical Richard Gloucester, and kills him in five seconds. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar runs into the historical Caesar and is killed by him. Caesar proceeds to run rampant through the Shakespeareverse until he’s finally slain in combat with Othello and Macbeth.

Don’t believe that literature and comics mix that easily? Try saying that after you’ve read Dostoyevsky Batman!

Noah Brand: Hard-Hitting Columnist

2007-09-11T00:16:00.000-07:00

I hang out a good deal at Girl-Wonder.org, where we have the best conversations about comics I've ever had online. A good friend of mine works at Dark Horse Comics and does a column called Inside Out. This week, I've done a guest column for her, in which I enumerate the virtues of Wonder Woman's old sidekick Etta Candy. Etta was an amazing character, especially for the 1940s, and I fantasize about one day doing a miniseries all about how cool she was. I'm sure that's exactly the kind of thing AOL-Time-Warner is eager to publish.

Breeding in Captivity

2007-09-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

Wow, just under three months since I updated. Now that’s just embarrassing.

For those who were curious about how Script Frenzy turned out, it was a little odd. The goal was a finished screenplay of 20,000 words, but I reached the end of my first draft a little short of the mark. I wasn’t sure whether to count that as a win or not; two days later it became moot when a hard drive crash destroyed the entire screenplay, along with all my other data, and I discovered I hadn’t backed up as well as I should have.

Various adventures since then, interviews and travel and exciting events, but that’s not what’s important. Writing for a nice little producer of animated shows, which is fun. The animated format’s new to me, but I enjoy learning new skills. I look forward to making various magnificently stupid rookie mistakes.

All my various personal news pales before this video, however.

Here’s the reasons you should click on that link.

1. It’s a video of an extremely cute baby animal.

2. Seriously, very very cute. No, cuter than that.

3. It’s proof that fossas can breed in captivity.

I have, thus far, spared my beloved blog fans my bizarre obsession with the fossa. This happy state could only last so long, alas. I have a fondness, in terms of animal cuteness, for predators. Of the various mammalian predators on Earth, the most awesome by far is the fossa. Before you ask, it’s pronounced foosa, because Malagasy is a rather odd language.

When the island of Madagascar split off from Africa 80 million years ago, it did so with no felines aboard. Thus, no lions or tigers evolved to fill the large-predator niche. Instead, native viverrids (the weasel-and-ferret family, and now you have a new Scrabble word) took up the task of evolving lean, fast muscles, retractable claws, and fangs that would make Nosferatu feel inadequate. An adult fossa can run vertically up a tree at full speed, twist its upper body completely around, leap 15 feet horizontally, and continue ascending without pausing for breath. It’s akin to a small tiger with a spine like a Slinky, only cuter.

Waaaaaay back in 2001, under my old name, I worked on a predator study in Madagascar and got to see a fossa up close. It remains one of the highlights of my life. If you read my site about the experience all the way through, you’ll notice that I point out some rather depressing things about the state of Madagascar’s ecosystem. In particular, the number of wild fossas still alive is, like my annual income, in the low four digits.

Fortunately, it turns out they can breed in captivity. There may soon come a day when the only fossas alive are in zoos. The world’s last quagga died in a zoo in 1883. With modern zookeeping methods, the same fate will not befall the fossa. Let us all take what moral comfort we can in that fact.

Movies Ate My Brain

2007-06-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

So the other day I had a nightmare. A trucker convoy on a half-forgotten highway, trying to make their destination, but every mile drawing them further into horror. A savage monster stalking the wooded hills around them, night driving with every shadow full of menace, pale cannibal children waiting for fresh prey. Doomed, damned truckers on a road to hell, unable to turn back or slow down.

Of course, the entire thing was full of dream logic. If you're on the road to unspeakable awfulness, the first thing an audience is gonna scream is "Take an exit, dumbass!" Nightmares don't work that way, of course; there's never anything you can do to avoid your terrible fate in dreams. Them's the rules.

Thing is, when I woke up, I immediately noticed that all my characters were stock horror movie types. I had the gruff-but-lovable trucker who's probably gonna die, the tough, mean trucker who's definitely gonna die but might sacrifice himself for the other characters, the goodhearted and basically innocent female trucker who's gonna live... you know these folks. Also, there was a basic and solid story structure, which I'm pretty sure my childhood nightmares lacked.

It was an interesting example of one of two things, your choice. On the one hand, perhaps I'm drawing archetypes from some kind of Jungian collective unconscious, using the people that are in movies because they're the most relatable and powerful characters for that kind of story. On the other hand, maybe I watch too many goddamn movies. Either way, there was one bit I liked; the truckers never see the monster in the hills, but they're able to deduce its presence from, among other things, finding the corpse of a grizzly bear that's been literally ripped to shreds. That's a good image, I think. Usually one uses a prey animal for that scene, ("I never seen any earthly creature do that to a cow." "I don't think this creature is from earth, Farmer Dan.") but it seems to me that having your monster kill the local apex predator is way scarier.

Script Frenzy update: 6,045 words. Fell behind due to day-to-day problems, but catching up fast. Well into act two and worrying about how much editing this thing's gonna need.

Today's excuse-to-drink link: Superman: The Musical: The TV Movie. I've seen bad musicals, I've seen bad Superman stories... it's sobering and a bit depressing how much bad crap I've seen, but this thing remains in a category by itself. It was broadcast once, and once only, but everything's immortal on the internet.

Don't leave writers alone too long

2007-06-06T03:21:00.000-07:00

I'm bored, and so I write a villanelle.
I think I do; I wonder if I can.
I fear I can't recall the structure well.

The task is daunting, scary, almost fell–
No Moore or Gaiman I; I'm barely Stan.
I'm bored, and so I write a villanelle.

If this is wrong, I trust that time will tell.
This line may be one that the rules ban.
I fear I can't recall the structure well.

Since boredom, never hardship, is my hell,
I press on nonetheless, like Superman.
I'm bored, and so I write a villanelle.

I think I've too few stanzas–that's just swell.
Forgotten fragments are my only plan.
I fear I can't recall the structure well.

Just four more lines, and then it's fare-thee-well.
At least I'm fairly sure that it will scan.
I'm bored, and so I write a villanelle.
I fear I can't recall the structure well.

The above is a good example of why it's a bad idea to leave writers to their own devices. Sooner or later we turn our powers to evil.

3,563 words on the Script Frenzy script so far. Still don't have a good title, which makes me jumpy.

Meaningful and useful link of the day: The incomparable Slacktivist on what verschärfte vernehmung means in German, and what it means in American politics. Contains useful points for talking to your right-wing friends.

Script Frenzy, day 2.5

2007-06-03T04:21:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was a kid, I've written best at night. Daytime seems to be too real, too full of an actual world filled with things happening and real people and so on. At night, everything is dark except for the little space I fill with light, and the world goes away. Without the real world there, I can enter the fictional one better, and get some work done therein. Also I can drink and smoke and ignore everyone without feeling like some kind of misanthropic reprobate, which helps.

1,436 words so far. Inciting incident nicely incited, hero's world thrown out of balance, shit and fan approaching each other at speed. There's a number of things that I'm aware I'll have to go back and fix later, but this kind of exercise is all about speed. Better character names and tighter dialogue are second-pass work. Right now I'm just trying to get the scenes down in a passable form; I'm on a downright stupidly tight deadline.

Today's spooky link: a surprisingly effective old five-page comic from a long-dead horror anthology title, courtesy of scans_daily: The Bad Boy

Script Frenzy is go!

2007-06-01T03:10:00.000-07:00

Having had such a nice time doing National Novel Writing Month last November, I've now embarked on Script Frenzy, the screenwriting equivalent. Between now and June 30, I'll be churning out an entire screenplay of no less than 20,000 words.

Rather than do what I did with NaNoWriMo and hide from my blog and from the world while I typed, I thought this time I'd keep my friends out there in internet-land up to date on every stage of my progress.

Tonight, for example, in the hours since midnight, I've done a complete outline on Scrivener's virtual corkboard, and actually written the first... 241 words of the script. Okay, that sounds like a slow start, but it doesn't count the outline.

Today's worrisomely-thought-provoking link: The Far Right's Coming Wave, from the always-thorough David Neiwert.

Not dead, just thirty

2007-05-08T00:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated this blog in months. There are several reasons for this, only a couple of which are interesting to whatever remains of my audience.

First, there was the embarrassing realization that I just can't continue BRAINS AND BLOOD. I apologize to its fans, but I simply couldn't sustain enough interest in the story to bring the prose up to a level I'm willing to post publicly. Anyone who wishes to continue it themself has my full blessing.

Second, there's the work I've been putting into getting ANN AND MARY into shape. I could bore you all with dry text and unreadable comic scripts, but it's a visual medium. Check out our three leads.

Third, I've been trying to get my life into better order as I approach my thirtieth birthday, which arrived a few minutes ago. One of my resolutions is to keep this blog updated better as I embark on another decade of adventure and mystery.

So, to close this entry for now, I apologize to all who hoped to see more of this blog and of zombie vs. vampire romance, I thank all those who will read it in the future nonetheless, and I encourage my readers to email me and ask where the new dirt is next time I let Brand X lie fallow for long.

Best idea I've heard all week

2007-02-24T15:01:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the delay on the next segment of Brains and Blood, but in the meantime, here's a really good idea from the folks over at Orcinus.

Liberal Pride Parades.

Big social events in cities across America, public get-togethers with hanging out, partying, slogans, street theater, and heaven knows what else, all in the atmosphere of courtesy, tolerance, and balls-out fun that we're so good at and authoritarians are so very, very bad at. Protests without anger. Parades without marching. Music, food, signage, maybe floats, maybe performances, but all reminding people of several salient facts:

1. We're liberals, and we're all over the place. We vote, we spend money, and unlike our current elected officials, we're not so scared by the right-wing boogeyman that we'll deny what we stand for.

2. We are totally more fun than those dour authoritarian jerks. "Republican party" is an oxymoron, and the folks on our side of the fence don't want sex banned.

3. We're actually right. We stand for freedom and justice in a way that the right wing just doesn't. We think you shouldn't lose your house if your kid gets sick. We believe in opportunity for everyone, not privilege for a few. We believe in things that most folks in this country actually want to get behind; let's make it publicly acceptable to do so.

The thing you notice when you examine the right-wing mindset in this country is that it defines itself almost entirely by what it is not. You listen to their radio, watch their news, and you'll hear very little about conservative plans, values, or agendas. Instead you'll hear endless railing against "the liberals", those nefarious America-haters who are crazy and extremist and love terrorism and blah blah blah. In other words, their agenda is entirely about us. In still other words, that means we have a lot of control over that agenda.

When you talk to a right-winger in this country, you notice something pretty immediately: they have absolutely no idea what liberalism is, how it works, or what it stands for. None. Not a clue. How would they have acquired such a clue, though? Where in their lives is a clear representation of what liberals are about? They get an imaginary cartoon version all the time, through every medium... can we blame them for believing it?

The number one thing that changes people's minds about the sin and evil of homosexuality is personal contact. The minute someone gets to know a homosexual as a person, all their stereotypes collapse, and they realize that if they can tolerate one gay person, they can tolerate 'em all. This same technique will work for us, for the crazy America-hating druggie terrorist-loving moonbat liberals. Let's network, let's party, and above all let's stop apologizing for what we believe. Ever.

An Official Decree

2007-02-16T00:13:00.000-08:00

On this site, I came across the idiotic spelling error "ad homonym".

I love it.

Thus, I hereby decree that all jackass right-wing commentators, including alleged comedians, who attempt to denigrate Barack Hussein Obama by emphasizing his middle name or mispronouncing his surname are engaged in argumentum ad homonym.

The term shall likewise apply to any arguments, past, present, or future, wherein someone is basing their premise on nothing more than a phonetic similarity. But right now I just want to see those right-wing crypto-bigot pricks sit on a neologism and rotate.

Let the word be spread throughout the land.

Edit: link fixed.

Scrivener: OMG

2007-02-14T02:22:00.000-08:00

So, after John Rogers' recommendation, I tried Scrivener, this writing software that supposedly works better for creative work than anything.

For once, the hype is correct. I didn't want to say anything until I'd tried it out on a couple different things, but boy howdy, this program is something else. Its screenwriting functionality isn't as good as Final Draft, but it's much better than conventional word processors, and the other features make it more than worth it.

What it does is deliver on the basic premise of OS X; you can just turn it on and it works fine right out of the box, but it also lets you go in and customize it and make it dance to your own tune. This damn program makes more things adjustable options than you'd believe. I turned its screenwriting functionality into comic-book scripting functionality with sheer force of will. Also it was easy.

Best of all, though, what Scrivener does is handle the whole project. Not just the document where the words are, but the entire concept-space that it occupies in a writer's head. With one click, you can shift back and forth between the part of the document you're working on, and the virtual corkboard where that section and all the other sections are laid out in order. Want to change the order? Drag and drop. Want to link a given section to another document, an image, or some other bit of research or information? Piece of cake. Want to check your visual reference for something before you describe it? It's right in the same document. Want to change which portions of this meta-document get exported to the version you're sending out? They're all optional.

There are features I'd like to see added to this program, lord knows. Exporting to PDF would be nice; everyone else does it. Auto-numbering of sections, chapters, whatever. (Unless that's an existing option I missed.) That being said, though, this is one hell of a program, especially for thirty-five bucks. It's so good that I'm going to pay it a compliment I pay to few bits of software, at least not without kicking and screaming first.

I'm gonna pay full price for it.

Brains and Blood, the Second Fragment

2007-02-13T01:16:00.000-08:00

Here it is, featuring backstory and a random tonal shift. If it looks kinda like a first draft, that's because it is. Think of this as getting fiction in its raw, natural, untainted form. Or don't; all the same to me. Enjoy!

The virus was the problem, naturally. It was believed to have nonterrestrial origin, for all the difference that made. Certainly it didn’t behave like any other virus. For one thing, its preferred environment wasn’t living beings, it was dead ones. Dead humans, specifically. What it did was keep human corpses intact from the ravages of decay, at least to a point. The other thing it did was make the corpses get to their feet, find any humans not infected with the virus, and eat them, beginning with their brain. Should the virus find itself in a suboptimal environment, i.e. a living human, it undertook to convert it into an optimal environment and then proceeded as normal. No proper research had ever been done on the virus, unfortunately. It was identified during the brief post-viral, pre-end-of-civilization period in 2012, but before more thorough work could be done on the subject, civilization came to an end. Zombies ate everyone, not to put too fine a point on it.

Vampires are, as anyone will tell you, astoundingly self-centered creatures. Consequently, they took the end of the world personally. There was, of course, the loss of their unique status as walking dead people, and the embarrassment of being supplanted by a vast and unstoppable army of smelly, uncouth, shambling cannibals who couldn’t even speak properly. Once the aesthetic and social affront was overcome, however, there were still more problems.

First, of course, was the issue that while vampires were quite immune to the zombie virus, they were still considered edible. Zombies lacked the astonishing powers most vampires enjoyed, but they were terribly strong and there were an awful lot of them. This proved to be one of the cases where the supernatural vampiric metabolism was more a liability than anything else, as they could suffer an enormous amount of dismemberment and consumption before they finally died. Not needing to breathe, vampires proved capable of maintaining a single scream of agony for upwards of two hours.

If all that weren’t enough, the end of the human race meant extinction for their traditional predators. Zombie blood, being quite dead, was unsuitable for vampiric consumption. Animal blood lacked essential nutrients. Over the relatively few weeks it took for the world’s entire human population to fall to the zombie onslaught, various vampiric responses to the crisis were attempted. Ignoring it as beneath them didn’t work. Killing all the zombies didn’t work, though it did thin the vampire population a bit. A last, desperate alliance with a group of humans barricaded on a military compound didn’t work, though it was impressively dramatic and moving before its inevitable bloody end.

The only plan that could be considered even a partial success was that of Gerhard Hallstrom (1304-2034), who happened, in 2012, to be in possession of a moderately impressive castle in the end of Germany no-one ever visits, which was situated on top of a wooded mountain ugly and imposing enough to keep tourists away. Aside from being miles from the nearest town, it had been designed at a time when the possibility of invincible Mongol hordes surging out of the East was a very real consideration. The ensuing centuries of additions, remodeling, and repurposing had done nothing to alter the fact that at its heart, the castle was an indestructible pile of granite designed to withstand anything up to and including the Last Trump. Said Trump having demonstrably sounded with the advent of the zombies, Hallstrom was naturally put in mind of his country place.

Initially he’d intended only to gather a few of his closest friends, but word has a way of getting out, particularly among those in fear of their lives. Soon the list of those invited or inviting themselves included literally dozens of hangers-on, kibitzers, and undead Dave-types. Hallstrom being almost legendarily polite, and with the zombie apocalypse and everything, he allowed these parvenus admission, though he realized it would necessitate expanding the support infrastructure he envisioned.

The support infrastructure consisted of enough healthy humans to withstand regular blood drawings and still remain viable enough to establish a solid breeding population after the zombies died of starvation. The long-term plan was for humans to reclaim their old place as masters of the globe, and vampires to reclaim their old place at the top of the food chain.

Over the next few years, roughly until 2022, a few more vampires flew in, all reporting that humans were extinct where they came from, all following the only remaining smell of fresh blood on the planet. After a while, new ones stopped showing up. Concurrently, enormous numbers of zombies, possibly following a similar sense, gathered around the castle. By 2030, the mountain was swarming with them. By 2050, the ground for half a mile in every direction was a twisting sea of semi-necrotic flesh.

Fortunately, as their needs had expanded, so too had their resources. Flying over the zombies to the ruined cities, the vampires had looted building equipment and books that helped them to fill the material needs of their humans, and the fine fabrics, antiques, and art they considered necessary to their own needs. The latter items had grown scarcer over time; the cities were still full of zombies, and as more vampires failed to return from these foraging raids, they were curtailed further and further. Finally, they were restricted only to vital infrastructural needs, and the vampires were forced to learn to make do with what they had. They had fired the last live round on June 10th, 2098, and since then had kept the vast mass of zombies partially at bay with a selection of old but very sturdy hand weapons. Vampiric flight, senses, and reflexes were more than a match for the groaning masses of brain-dead cold meat most of the time. Not all of the time, of course, but almost all.

Around the middle of the 22nd century, the castle’s inhabitants finally admitted that the zombies did not appear to be starving. By the time the drop of zombie blood came over the wall and into Richard’s brachial artery, there was a tacit acceptance among all the beings in the castle that they would never live anywhere else.

Brains and Blood, Fragment the First

2007-02-10T00:56:00.000-08:00

I've never been one to oppose the popular will or stand up to peer pressure, as my friends will tell you. When everyone else was jumping off a bridge, you'd better believe I jumped too. And not in that wussy Lost Boys oh-it's-okay-we-can-fly way, neither.

So when people tell me to write a story about vampires and zombies, who am I to argue? I'm doing it in prose, though; it's faster, and lets me serialize it in little bits and fragments, rather than disappearing for months and showing up with a random 120 pages of love, laughs, and assorted undead. This first bit is just a little trailer; more will be forthcoming.

If you don't like it, take it up with everyone who requested it.

A single drop of blood. Thrown from Von Kurten’s blade as it stuttered through three necks at once, it arced high in the air, a tiny free-falling sphere, rotten maroon in color. Higher and higher it flew, invisible against the black sky, above even the ancient and indestructible parapets of the last castle. Finally, gravity overtook the force of Von Kurten’s formidable followthrough, and the droplet started falling back to earth.

By now over the narrow, immaculately scrubbed courtyard, the droplet completed its parabolic journey by tapping gently and finally against the forearm of Richard, returning on shaky legs from his twice-weekly drawing. Richard had no last name, of course; surnames were more trouble than they were worth when it came to humans. They tended to encourage familial groupings and a redundant sense of identity. Each human having one unique name ensured they were all separate individuals and discouraged any larger sense of identity. The system had evolved to its present state through a great deal of trial and error, a ruthless best-practices regime that the lords hated almost as much as the humans, but it worked.

Richard wiped absently at his arm, vaguely thinking that it might be starting to rain. The droplet became a smear, a tapering trail like an exclamation point, ending at the still-sore puncture in Richard’s forearm. It was a small smear, and a smaller break in his pale skin, but of course both were still much, much larger than a virus.

Option Paralysis

2007-02-08T01:30:00.000-08:00

With a draft of my comic book done, and with additional material waiting on pages from my artist, I find myself at a bit of a loose end.

I didn't write anything yesterday, and if I go more than two days without writing, I start getting weird. For the sake of my friends and loved ones, I need to start something new, a good side project to fill in the gaps in my schedule over the coming weeks and months. The problem isn't that I haven't any ideas, of course. I've never met a writer who had any trouble getting ideas, though I'm sure they exist. (Where do I get my ideas, you ask? Why, I steal them, like everyone else. Jonathan Lethem does a wonderful analysis of the problem of originality. Go read it.) The problem is that tackling a new project is a big undertaking, and I'm not sure which of the ideas currently on the fire is the right one to start such a long journey with.

Right now, I could start a screenplay about a haunted house where time runs back on itself. Or I could get going on a monster movie set in the First World War which proves to be, like all WWI stories must be, an anti-war fable. Alternately, I could finally write that genre-bending kids' picture about the relationship between fiction and reality. Then, too, since yesterday, there's been a number of requests that I write a romantic comedy set in a world where vampires breed humans like cattle in the middle of a sea of zombies. I don't even know what form to do that one in.

Whatever choice I make, it's going to be a huge pain in my ass for an indefinite time to come. Therefore, I want someone else to blame for it.

So I ask you, my devoted fans (hey, allow a man his delusions), what should I write? How should I next damage my brain, my personal relationships, and quite likely my lungs and liver? Which of these projects is most likely to catapult me to fame and stardom and put me in a position where I'm too busy rewriting indefensible crap to ever have this problem again? I promise to bow to the will of the majority, while completely rejecting all specific suggestions for what to do with any of these projects.

Brains and Blood

2007-02-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

So I had this idea.

The zombie apocalypse finally comes, the dead rise, eat everyone, starting with their brains. This greatly worries the vampires, of course. They can't drink dead blood; they need living humans to survive. So a group of vampires retreats to some big fortified castle in Eastern Europe or someplace, with a good-size pool of human slaves, figuring they can repopulate the planet after all the humans are gone and the zombies starve to death.

150 years later, it turns out zombies don't starve.

Fortunately, vampires can fly, so they've been able to make supply runs to distant cities in the now entirely zombie-filled world, bringing back the things necessary to sustain human life and vampiric luxury. Naturally, whenever they're outside the castle, they're attacked by zombies wanting to eat their brains and flesh, but the vampires can kill them with their superhuman speed and strength. Well, usually, anyway. They used to hold them off with guns, but the ammo ran out 75 years ago.

Now, the castle and the tunnels beneath it are the only remaining stronghold of both humans and vampires. The tunnels have been expanded over the decades to meet the needs of a long-term holdout. The mountain that the castle sits on is now honeycombed with the tunnels where the humans live and breed and grow food. Outside the castle's impregnable walls, the mountain is a writhing sea of zombies, all drawn instinctively to the last source of fresh meat on earth.

The vampires, unaging, live in genteel squalor, surrounding themselves with the rotting remains of the finer things they once enjoyed, and surviving on strictly-rationed blood from the tightly-controlled population of humans. There are occasional birthday parties when a human turns 50; the aging human is turned over to the vampires to be murdered and drained completely dry, just like it used to be in the old days.

The humans survive underground, mostly just working to keep themselves alive. They're all anemic from the regular blood-drawings. They're bred to each other, in pairs selected by the vampires, around the age of 17. That way they get the maximum breeding out of each generation. Occasionally there's an attempted insurrection, often using the sun lamps they use to grow food in the tunnels. All the vampires have to do then is turn off the power to the tunnels, leaving the humans in suffocating darkness. Then it's just a matter of killing any humans who still have some smart ideas as they stumble in the dark. If you want a laugh, you let them hear you coming.

After an insurrection, the vampires always take a guy and crucify him upside-down in the central human area, with a saline drip in his thigh and a beer tap in his neck. Vampires will come and do shots from him while the humans watch. It generally takes one of these "examples" a week or so to die, through the record is twelve days.

Mostly, though, such attempts are rare, and getting rarer as even the stories of what the world used to be dwindle away. Most of all, the humans are aware that without the vampires' powers, the castle would fall to the zombies. Turns out life as a sustainable resource is slightly better than the alternative.

This damn setting came into my head almost full-blown, and was refined over half an hour of conversation with a friend. I can't really find a use for it. It's not only relentlessly grim and awful, it's insolubly so. The humans are miserable, the vampires are miserable... even the zombies are miserable. Everything's neatly balanced, though; any momentary reduction in misery for any of the groups will only increase the misery of all three groups permanently. It's a perfect system designed to produce a steady output of suffering until the end of time. There's no story you can tell with this setting that won't be a painfully unpleasant slog from a horrible beginning to an even more horrible ending.

So, I'm thinking romantic comedy.

I mean, really, it writes itself. You got yourself a couple attractive young teenagers, kinda pale from living underground and being permanently a quart low, but we can make that work. And the vampires have commanded them to breed with each other, right, but initially they dislike each other! But then at the end, they want to spend the rest of their lives together! Well, until they turn fifty, anyway.

Picture the trailer: "In a world that only wanted two things from them, they learned that what connects the brains and the blood... is the heart."

Ivins addendum

2007-02-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

Just found this today: a brief exploration of Texas laws regarding sodomy and dildos, with copious commentary from Molly Ivins. Not safe for work, the easily offended, or people who want to maintain their illusions that the Texas legislature can be considered sane by any normal definition. Watch and marvel.

Crap. Molly Ivins died.

2007-02-01T01:10:00.000-08:00

I was working on a political post, but it's gonna have to wait a couple days. Molly Ivins, one of the coolest and funniest political columnists of my lifetime, up and died at the ridiculously inadequate age of 62. I like the goodbye at Orcinus the best of the ones I've seen.

I don't know how much longer they'll be up, but go read her last few columns when you have a minute. They're not as funny as her old stuff, especially the stuff she wrote about the bizarre freak show that is Texas politics, but then again, lots of things have gotten less funny under this administration. She fought that and the other ugly effects of rampant far-right lunacy in this country, and now she won't get to see us finally finish them off and grind their legacies into dust. We can only hope that when next we have to face these same fascists, in whatever new hat they invent for themselves in ten or twenty or fifty years, we'll have a new Molly Ivins to remind us that good will always triumph, because evil is dumb.

Let us all mourn a writer who could make her point without having to misquote Mel Brooks.

Things That Came A While Ago

2007-01-26T02:28:00.000-08:00

Warren Ellis posted this, and I thought it was worth reposting. It's written by H.G. Wells, and like a lot of things during the 30s, it predicts a major war coming shortly. From there, it gets weird. Take some time, enjoy it.

When I first saw this, it was a very long time ago and I was a young, impressionable geek. Now I'm a less-young geek, and I find it immensely revealing. Basically, seeing this movie as an adult has helped me understand why geek culture is lousy with semi-autistic personalities who call themselves libertarians.

Since its accidental creation in the 20s, geek culture has always had more than its share of undersocialized freaks who can't comprehend how another human being could be more interesting than a shiny new gadget. The question that always bothered me is why that lack of empathy, less common as fandom's become less of an all-male enclave over the decades, so often took the poisonous form of pseudo-libertarianism. Why did we suffer so many years of "Oh, if only they'd stop feeding poor people and minorities we could mine the asteroid fields! 'Cause I'm sure that's an energy-efficient way to get iron... somehow..."?

The blame for this is often laid at the feet of Heinlein, and sure, some of it's his to bear. He certainly helped with the bizarre military fetishism one sees in lots of fandom, along with the aforementioned gadget thing. (The military tends to have, or at least to want, some really awesome gadgets.) In the main, though, I'm gonna go ahead and blame Ayn Rand.

I know, it's easy to blame Rand. Her books are simultaneously so laughably awful and so batshit insane that you just want to lock them in a room with the Left Behind series and let them fight it out. But in this case, we should set aside snark and think about how her books would have impacted the nerds of the time, raised on stuff like this.

Sure, there's the fact that in Randworld, people who can do math but have no social skills are virtual deities, sexual superheroes who rape the future with their mighty wills, but that's just gravy. The key thing was just that she wrote some stuff set in "the future" and worshipped an abstract Science as an all-powerful, all-giving god. That was all it took, the shibboleth that let her into "the literature of ideas", thereby ensuring her ideas would be accepted without being examined.

For the hardcore SF fan, particularly back in the day, books were a binary thing. There was fantasy/sci-fi, and then there was (shudder when you say it) mainstream fiction, generally agreed to be "all about adultery in Westchester County," as I heard quoted more than once. Once you were in, though, you were in. Ray Bradbury's still in, and if you can call most of his output over the last 50 years science fiction, I'd like some of what you're smoking.

Thus, while the "mainstream" world was off debating whether Rand's philosophy made a lick of sense, the geeks could discuss ideas the way they were comfortable with: by figuring out how the machines worked and ignoring the humans. Rand's lunacy fell on fertile soil, and was fertilized with ample Heinleinian bullshit (Heinlein also drew a direct connection between agreeing with his views and getting tons of sex), and poof, we got a couple generations of Larry Nivens telling us that pure capitalism was going to conquer space and save the future... any, uh, minute now... okay, wait, now. No, now... hang on, there's still some poor people and minorities stuck to it...

So yeah, I watch this gorgeous, crazy 1930s film, and I love the miniatures shots, and God help me, I'm such a sucker for that old futurist design, but I also can't help wincing every five minutes. Too many pasty con-goers over the years, all trying to persuade me that they're high-functioning sociopaths because they believe that's a good thing, all sure that science is a big stick that you hit things with until they're fixed, all certain in their hearts that they're the heroes of that movie.

Yo-ho-ho

2007-01-24T19:42:00.000-08:00

See, the interesting thing about writing a modern comic book is that you're structuring it for two different forms simultaneously. My current consuming spec project, for example, is planned as a five-issue miniseries, so of course the story has to be in five clearly distinct acts, each with its own internal structure, because people will be reading them individually, weeks and months apart. But of course once the poor single issues have strutted and fretted their hour upon the shelves, assuming they've sold decently, they get bound together into a trade paperback, which has to read well cover to cover with no breaks.

This leads to tradeoffs, obviously. To sell well as single issues, the story needs its essential selling points present in every issue; it's hard to convince people "No, no, buy this, I swear it gets better next month!", especially when you're not a recognized property. At the same time, though, one reads old superhero comics, where they were actually required to have a fight in every issue, and finds some very embarrassing shoehorned-in fights that have little or nothing to do with the story. Like everything else, then, this becomes matter of walking the fine line between unpleasant extremes.

Ah hell, you don't want to listen to me ramble about how hard my job is and how nobody understands me, you want to look at pirates.

Yes, playing cards were in common use by the early 18th century. No, I don't know why there's a monkey head on the right. This is, my artist assures me, practicing getting everyone's body language and expressions down. Between you, me, and the internet, I think he's just enjoying screwing around with these characters.

Ann Bonney can't hold her liquor. I swear, every sketch I receive, I get a little more afraid of Noah Harwood, the horrible old bastard sitting on the cannon. He'll be fun.

And now, for no reason, Mary Read gives us a lesson on how to fire a flintlock musket. Note barrel-length disclaimer in the middle, and the recurrence of the increasingly ominous monkey theme.

The frustration of doing a spec screenplay is that one is just floating off in artistic space, uncollaborated and alone. Eventually, if one's spec is smiled upon by an entire pantheon of intercessionary deities, one gets clear demonstrations, via the efforts of directors and actors and so on, that one's ideas are both sound and cool.

The nice thing about doing a spec comic book proposal is that one gets those demonstrations early, while still writing. When staring at the screen, trying to think of a reason I should bother writing about these stupid pirates and their stupid pirate problems, I can look over at a swelling file of artwork and go "Oh, right, that's a good reason."

Unutterable Geekery: A New Hope

2007-01-21T16:54:00.000-08:00

A couple years back, I was watching STAR WARS (Or, if you must, STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE) and several things became apparent to me. I've since explicated these revelations to a number of other people, and all of them have been persuaded. Now, to help ruin the childhoods of that many more people, I offer for posterity my proof that Princess Leia had sex with both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo after the battle of Yavin.

I realize that this is a controversial position, but I believe the evidence supports it. To prove it, I've provided screencaps (cropped down for size) of the relevant moments. They don't really capture the subtle interplay of body language going on, but they give some idea. For the full effect, watch the movie again. There, now you have an excuse.

So I'm watching the movie for the first time in years, and I realize something about Luke Skywalker. He's obviously a virgin. It's really not subtle at all. Even putting aside the fact that he's always dressed in white, he's got a virgin vibe that has people two star systems away going "I feel a great virgin in the Force..."

So okay, that's fine, he's a virgin; given where he grew up, it'd be surprising if he wasn't. Nothing wrong with that.

So Luke goes and blows up the Death Star, and comes back, shouts "Carrie!" and goes off with Leia, who's got her arms around him and Han.

Now, presumably they're heading off to a victory party with the other Rebels. Their air is celebratory, and c'mon, they just blew up the Death Star. It's Miller time. If you look close in that shot, you can see that Luke's virgin vibe is quite intact.

Then we cut (well, wipe) to the medal ceremony, and my jaw drops in astonishment.

Luke's virgin vibe is gone. His whole walk, his body language, have changed. Just to underline the point, look at them. Han... same outfit. Chewie... same outfit. Luke... suddenly no longer wearing white. That is not a coincidence.

So, fine, Luke got some at the victory party. Good for him. Probably plenty of nice Rebel girls there, I'm sure lots of people got lucky. But then he gets up to the front and he gives Leia this simpering puppy-dog smirk...

OH MY GOD. Skywalker, you dog. Wait, no, maybe this is just Luke being dorky, maybe he's smirking for no reason...

...nope. That's what we call a confirmatory smirk.

So, okay, Luke and Leia got it on. Only creepy if you know they're siblings, which they don't. (Indeed, when STAR WARS was first made, I don't think that was retconned in yet.) Really, it's quite natural that they'd do it, let's all take a deep breath and look at Han, who...

...is also smirking. Good lord. Surely that's just a friendly smile, right? Sure, they're friends.

Nope, that's kind of underlining it.

Leia's clearly more ambivalent about having slept with Han, but that is also a confirmation.

Now at this point, I'm reeling, I can't figure out what the hell happened. Then, after the shot of R2 being all shiny and repaired and everything, there's this inexplicable shot.

An entire shot of Princess Leia looking worried and embarrassed, stuck in there for no apparent reason. If she didn't sleep with Han and Luke, there's no explanation for this shot. Since we know she did, though, that embarrassed look tells me they don't know about each other. That look is her thinking "I'm a professional diplomat, my whole job is not to get into situations like this..."

Now, we can make any number of guesses as to what exactly happened. My own hunch is that Luke got insensibly drunk very quickly at the beginning of the party; he's probably got a low tolerance, and everyone would have been giving him drinks. Leia, disappointed that Luke is apparently off the menu for the evening, shrugs and gives in to Han's tipsy advances. They naturally go back to the Millennium Falcon for this, as Han's a guy who likes to work on his own turf. Afterwards, Han's sound asleep, and Leia wanders back to the dregs of the party, only to discover Luke's woken back up and is telling everyone how much he loves them, especially Leia. Being in an impaired decision-making condition herself, she figures "What the hell" and deflowers the farmboy. The next day, of course, she realizes that both encounters were ill-advised, and there are no repeat performances. Note, however, that at the beginning of Episode V, both Han and Luke believe that Leia secretly favors them over the other guy. No overt textual reason for this belief is given.

I am aware that this reading will be unwelcome to some people, but I maintain that it fits the facts better than the alternatives. Of alternative Star Wars readings, it's less speculative than this excellent one (thanks, John Rogers) and less crazy than this crazy one. I offer it to you in the spirit of fandom, and the belief that if I have to live with this crap in my head, everyone else should suffer with me.

Ganging agley

2006-12-19T23:59:00.000-08:00

I am notorious among my friends for not wanting to leave the house without redundant backup plans in case things spin out of control. This is not because I'm OCD and hyper-organized, mind you, it's just because in my experience, Plan A never, ever works.

So I thought I had the next few months neatly planned in terms of writing. Finish the novel, do a spec screenplay draft as fast as possible, edit the novel, etc. Then an email turns up in my inbox from some half-mental artist in New Zealand, and everything spins out of control.

See, some months back I'd randomly advertised on The Engine, Warren Ellis's awesome non-superhero comics forum, for an artist. I've had an idea kicking around my head for a while now, a historically-based pirate love story with a sad ending. Basically, think BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, but with pirates instead of cowboys and overt lesbianism instead of gay subtext. Seems to me like the kind of five-issue miniseries that collects nicely into a trade paperback. So, as one does, I advertise for an artist in a place where cool artists are found, in hopes of putting a little package together. But almost no one responds, and the ones that do aren't the match I'm looking for; matching an art style to a project is tricky, and if you don't believe me imagine Jack Kirby drawing EC Comics. (For my solely-cinematic readers, imagine the Wachowski Brothers directing a Preston Sturges script.)

So, okay, not everything comes together, I've got more ideas than I have time to write, and lots of other things to worry about. Then this guy writes me and I check out his samples and they're perfect. Exactly, and I mean spooky-ass chill-down-the-spine exactly what I was imagining this comic looking like.

I know, John Rogers gets to show a George Perez cover and everyone gets what that means. But you know what? Look at those eyes, look at the clinging to the mast, the smoke, the caption borders, the Scottish guy in the background. I will totally put my splash page up alongside Rogers' cover without shame.

This is one of the pencil sketches he's done, Photoshopped up for better contrast. The faces, the body language, the peg leg exactly two inches too short, just like I described it. Sad Mary Read on the left, pipe sagging as she looks at the soup.

Will this project come to fruition? Maybe, maybe not. If it doesn't, though, it won't be because the art's lacking. My first professional sale was in pirate comics, some years back. It was a shock to me when I first saw the pages, things I'd just made up in my head suddenly appearing in front of my eyes. It felt like magic, and I am pleased to discover that it still does.

A Winner Is Me!

2006-11-30T20:09:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the nerdy-ass post title, but I'm psyched. Yes, this has not been me ignoring my blog and not posting because I'm flaky, it's been me ignoring damn near everything and not posting because I've been writing 50,000 words of a novel. Turns out I'm only about two-thirds done with it, but that's fine by me. 50,000 isn't much of a novel anyway. I intend now to have the entire thing done by New Year's.

When I made my last post, over a month ago, my intent was to shake up my writing habits, and man did it ever work. The combination of a completely self-imposed deadline, the sense of community with thousands of other people (and a couple personal friends) doing the same thing, and the fact that I was working in prose all came together and led to success.

Now, the blog description says I write screenplays, and I do, but Jesus H. Christ fighting ninjas on Mars, did it feel good to write nothing but prose for a month. Part of the attraction, the mystique, and the fun of a screenplay is that it's such an insanely tightly-restricted form that it makes you work muscles in ridiculous places. To mangle Robert Frost's metaphor, it's like playing tennis with the net up, a tight three-piece suit on, barbed wire all around the edges of the court, and angry monkey hurling feces at you. If you can play tennis that way, it's safe to say you can play yourself some damn tennis. Screenplays are like writing 115 pages of consecutive villanelles.

But then there's prose. Prose, where a paragraph can go more than five lines. Prose, where scene breaks and act breaks happen where you think they should go, regardless of what page they're on. Prose, where going over 120 pages is a good thing. Prose, where you can take it as slow as you want, including setting up a sexual metaphor that you subvert one clause into the sentence. Prose, where you can use words just because they're beautiful, even if they're so obscure they'd start a fight at a Scrabble game.

More on my self-satisfied sense of accomplishment later. Right now I need to get away from the keyboard for a bit.

NaNoWriMo!

2006-10-23T23:30:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing quest to mess with myself, I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I haven't worked in prose for years, unless we count treatments, which I mostly don't. The purpose of a treatment is to get the story down in a plain and unadorned form, in such a way that it permits only one possible reading (and even that doesn't always work). Decently-written prose, on the other hand, does something else. It allows for more sprawling, more wordplay, totally different kinds of subtlety... it'll be a nice change after the enforced discipline of movie and comic book scripts.

Of course, by the very nature of the project, there's a whole different kind of enforced discipline. 50,000 words in 30 days is... well, plain crazy, frankly. But then, I've never been afraid of crazy. Just spiders with knives that steal my thoughts when I'm sleeping.

My novel is an adaptation of an idea I've been kicking around for a while, called "The Impresarios". At one point, I was thinking about it as a stage play, but there were issues with staging and performance rights (the story, by its very nature, contains snippets of existing popular works) that I never found good solutions to. The flexibility of prose means that I can go from one scene to another whenever and however I want, and rights only become an issue for me if I take it into my head to self-publish.

Basically, I feel like my existing writing pattern could use a thorough shaking-up, and I want to see what happens. Worst case scenario, I don't finish. Best case, I've got a first draft of what might be a decent novel. Either way, it'll be a nice change.

But speaking of politics...

2006-10-11T00:26:00.000-07:00

All right, that's an inaccurate post title. Because really, I'm not speaking of politics. Don't get me wrong, I like speaking of politics. I love arguing politics. Show me a guy who thinks the top income tax bracket ought to be lower, or that public schools should be funded by property taxes, or that television ought to be subject to content censorship, I'll argue with that guy all night. That's the rich and vibrant discourse of democracy; that's the whole point.

But you give me a guy who honestly thinks that the United States government ought to be in the business of torturing innocent people, that the United States president should have the power to, on his own authority and without any oversight, make American or foreign citizens simply disappear, vanish into a secret prison where they will never see the evidence against them and can be tortured or killed with no explanation necessary... I don't know how to talk to that guy. The first problem is, of course, that that isn't politics as I understand the term, that's whether you're still a goddamn human being or not. But more than that, where do you start arguing against that? What do you say? If someone doesn't understand why that is fundamentally anti-American, inhuman, and evil, how do you explain it? What terms can be used to bridge a gap that size and shape?

I suppose in some ways, I'm disturbed to discover that that gap exists between myself and so many of my countrymen. Because if the gap's there now, that necessarily implies that on some level, it always was.

It is never comfortable to learn that one has not been living in the world one thought one was.

The World's Latest Blog Post (Josh Friedman excepted)

2006-10-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

Blame Blogger (10%) and me (90%) for the lateness of this post; two previous versions were swallowed by software, the rest by the eternal inconveniences of real life.

So, as I was saying, there's a fundamental crossover that comics have dealt with a thousand times in a hundred (okay, a dozen) ways, and it sounds either weird or painfully obvious, depending on your take, when really it's neither.

Anyway, suppose Superman and Batman met.

To comics fans, this sounds too obvious to bear mentioning. To ordinary humans, it may sound odd. Both camps have a point, and both are wrong. Let's take a moment to review the characters. Superman, Kal-El, is not human, sent here from a dying world in a last desperate middle finger to death. He pretends to be Clark Kent, a human being, because what we wants more than anything is humanity, which will always be a bit beyond him. Bruce Wayne is a normal human, whose normal humanity was irrevocably destroyed when he was eight, and who has spent every waking moment since trying to become something other than human, seeking the invulnerable superhumanity that comes to Kal-El automatically.

Mark Waid characterized the distinction like this: "One, the zenith of human fortitude and ambition... the other the pinnacle of otherworldly power." Frank Miller, in a darker confrontation between the two heroes, had Batman narrating the difference thus: "Keep talking, Clark ... just like your parents taught you. My parents taught me a different lesson. Lying on this street, shaking in deep shock, dying for no reason at all, they taught me that the world only makes sense when you force it to."

The two superheroes inhabit Metropolis and Gotham City, respectively, which are both basically New York, but they represent the two faces of New York, which only touch in our own, inconveniently realistic, world. Superman lives in the glorious city of the future, the realization of the dreams of a suffering world, where industry and idealism meet in the glorious melting pot that is the collective dream of all those who seek to live on their own terms. Batman lives in a dark, decaying urban hell, the city as cancer, where greed and crime and corruption steal the hope from the lives of ordinary citizens. Again, far too many words for this space could be written about the similarities and differences between these two characters and their dozens of knockoffs, so for now let's take the following as given: Superman and Batman are fundamentally antithetical on about the same number of levels as they are fundamentally similar. Both are answers to different forms of the fundamental question of the superhero genre: "If you were able to do anything, would you choose to make the world a better place?"

So, given this fundamentally antithetical relationship, why have these two characters been hanging out together since 1940? In World's Finest Comics, as members of the JLA, and in a hundred other forms, they've been friends, allies, and frequently, as in the above-referenced "Dark Knight Returns" antagonists. This goes against much of the conventional wisdom about fiction. When two characters, and their associated themes, express two fundamentally different notions about the purpose and meaning of their associated stories, they don't meet. Humbert Humbert does not hang out with Anne of Green Gables (thank goodness) and Raskolnikov doesn't have to explain himself to Tom Ripley. And yet, there's 65 years of comics history demonstrating hybrid vigor in action.

Now, there has been talk of a Batman/Superman crossover movie. This makes sense; both characters have recently had their film franchises renewed with actually decent films, and it's not as though the idea's unprecedented. Kevin Smith's famously rejected SUPERMAN RETURNS script contains a brief appearance by Batman, predicated on the assumption that both coexist and know each other, and Andrew Kevin Walker's BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN script took the concept to its logical limit. I'm not in a position to say why neither of these screenplays was ever shot, but I don't think it's a bizarre notion to say that those in charge of writing the necessary checks didn't "get" the basic concept of the intrinsic crossover. Understandable; as observed above, it's a weird melding of dissimilarities, and perhaps more importantly, suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing.

Why do superhero movies tend to spend so much time on the hero's origin? Because they need to sell the audience on the notion of such a crazily, beautifully unrealistic thing as a superhero, and unless that sale is thoroughly and utterly closed, the audience isn't buying into your fiction, and you're boned.

And yet. And yet. For one thing, let's look at this photo for a second:

Now, I grew up with Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, and I've known them longer than I've known most of my human friends, so I can say with confidence that that IS Bruce and Clark. To a T. So there they are, large and life and twice as handsome, but it would kill us to put them in a movie together?

Let's look at another field test of this theory, shall we?

That’s the quick-and-dirty web version, those seeking a higher-quality version of the same fan film can look here. But never mind video quality, let’s cut to the chase; TELL me you wouldn’t watch that movie. Of course you would; it’s an alloy of pure cool with pure awesome.

There’s things I myself would love to do with such a movie, obviously; I think you could get a lot of mileage out of an opening montage comparing the two men’s childhoods. Clark at eight, beginning to realize that he’s not human, against Bruce at eight, having his humanity ripped from him in one horrible moment. Clark at sixteen, testing his powers in the privacy of horizon-stretching Kansas cornfields, against Bruce at sixteen, developing his skills in dangerous and secret places most people don’t know exist.

There’s a couple different ways you could structure it, of course. We won’t be happy if Superman and Batman don’t fight at some point, but given that they’re basically on the same side, we can’t just have them as implacable enemies, especially because we want to root for them both. We can start off with them as antagonists and have them end up as allies, but then we’re starting our movie with Superman fighting Batman, and where do we go from there? Do they end up fighting God? We can start them off as friends and have their basic differences force them to become enemies, but then one of them has to lose, and that’s to be avoided if possible. Sure, we can cast Batman as street-level fascism run amok, or cast Superman as authority from above stifling human potential, but turning one of our heroes into a villain seems like, at best, a limited strategy.

Perhaps, and with a nod to my slashfic-oriented readers out there, the most workable structure would be one analogous to a romance. Bats likes Supes, Bats dislikes Supes, Bats gets Supes back again. This allows for a great degree of freedom in contrasting their different worlds and philosophies, gives us our kickass fight between the heroes, and as long as we have a sufficiently terrifying threat at the end, they can reasonably overcome their differences and resume a friendship now more complex and uncertain. Certainly there’s room there to work with the basic concepts, no?

I’m aware that I’ve spent far too long on a profoundly fanboyish notion here, but forget the specifics for a moment and look at the deeper concepts involved. Genres can be bridged. Antithetical archetypes can be resolved if one focuses on both the similarities and the differences. We can, if we choose, stop painting only in primary colors and create new canvasses of purples and greens and shades as yet unused. There is good and useful and beautiful work yet to be done, and the audience is ready to see it.

Self-important ramblings on crossovers, part one

2006-09-12T01:36:00.000-07:00

To continue on the subject of crossovers, I'd like to start with examples from the history of comic books, because I have a vault full of comics and a brain similarly equipped. Also because comics started as, and in some ways still are, a small, sleazy, under-the-table no-rules-apply artform, which is where you often find the best experiments being run. (For more information, consult Gerard Jones' phenomenally good Men of Tomorrow)

The first major crossover in comics was the Justice Society of America, when National Periodical Publications decided that if their top heroes sold well individually, they ought to sell incredibly well if they all got together and hung out. This proved to be the case, as they tapped into a basic and fundamental vein of content in the fanboy mindset. However educated and sophisticated we become, some part of us always wonders what would happen if the character in our favorite fictions got to meet, fight, or replace each other. At the intellectual, classical level, this manifests as the now-traditional observation that if you swap Hamlet with Othello in each other's plays, both have a happy ending. (Also, Hamlet is fifteen minutes long. "Young prince, your uncle murdered me and married your mother!" "He WHAT?" *stabby stabby* "Okay, my uncle's dead and I'm king now. Anyone got a problem with that? Yeah, didn't think so.") At the fanboy level, it tends to manifest as eternal thrashes over whether Batman could beat up Captain America (no) or whether Green Lantern could beat the Silver Surfer (probably).

Crossovers continued in comics, in various incarnations, reaching one of their two apotheoses in the work of Mark Gruenwald, who approached the concept from the standpoint of the utter fanboy he always was. (And in this case, for once, I use the term fanboy with utmost respect. Mr. Gruenwald was the Bruce Lee of fanboys.) In the words of his colleague Mike Carlin, "[Mark] understood why separate comic book publishers legally needed to keep their individual universes completely apart and uncontaminated by the other ... it just bugged him. Because it would be cool if separate universes shared an 'Omniverse'." Omniverse was the title of the fanzine where Gruenwald first made his name, in which he sought to resolve and reconcile the separate continuities of the superhero universes he loved, a theme that continued in his long and memorable professional comics career. To return to Mr. Carlin's words, "Mark found a way for the young boy ... who merely wanted to get his heroes in one big pile ... to get what he wanted."

The second, and in my opinion greater, apotheosis of crossovers in comics came with the advent of the ever-spooky, ever-inimitable Alan Moore, whose first great impact on American comics came with his astounding run on the second-string horror title Swamp Thing, where he directly confronted the odd notion that the moody, atmospheric stories of the title character existed in the same world as the brightly colored adventures of the Justice League of America, the Justice Society's inheritors. To defer to Moore's own, superior words for a moment: "For those more familiar with conventional literature, try to imagine Dr. Frankenstein kidnapping one of the protagonists of Little Women for his medical experiments, only to find himself the subject to the scrutiny of a team-up between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. I'm sure that both the charms and the overwhelming absurdities of this approach will become immediately apparent..."

A look at Moore's later work reveals an ongoing fascination with those charms and absurdities as a recurring theme throughout his comics, reaching perhaps its finest expression in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain, Henry Jekyll, Hawley Griffin, and Captain Nemo are recruited by the British government to save England from equally literary evildoers. (Those who think they can judge the work by its disastrous film adaptation are quite simply wrong, and ought to read the comic.) I won't list everything Moore's done on this theme... that's someone's doctoral dissertation waiting to happen, and I don't want to steal their bibliography. Suffice to say that Moore has demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that breaking down the barriers between different works and genres of fiction can produce extraordinary and fascinating results.

So how come, in the more popular and influential realm of film, crossovers remain astonishingly rare? Sure, there's ALIEN VS. PREDATOR and FREDDY VS. JASON, but let's be frank here, that's like crossing 712 Elm Street over with 714 Elm Street. Freddy and Jason probably had adjacent tables at the Slasher Movie Fund-Raising Bake Sale.

Obviously, in a world where no narrative or genre restrictions apply, movies rapidly become upsetting. One imagines a film noir third-act twist: "Sorry, Mr. Spade, you may be the only one who knows I'm the killer, but as a police captain I've framed you for the crime!" "Too bad, captain, jail can't hold me because I'M A WIZARD!" I'd throw popcorn at the screen there, as would you and all right-minded people. But one can demolish any literary device with a reductio ad absurdum... decent art consists of walking the fine line between ad absurdum and ad nauseam.

Indeed, in film, wonderful results have often come from combining elements of disparate genres. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, SUNSET BOULEVARD... make your own list. But how come it's always just loose thematic elements? How come it's just combining a horror aesthetic with a Christmas story, or a Faulknerian American Gothic tone with a Hollywoood Glamour setting? Would audiences really revolt if Jack Skellington fought the Grinch? If a psychic detective discovered the murderer is an alien? If J. Jonah Jameson accused Spider-Man of being one of those dirty mutants, like the X-Men?

And there, inevitably, I've come back to comics. Hey, I gotta be me. I'd like to return to comics, crossovers, film, and an already-repeatedly-proposed sequel, but it's late and I have things to do. Hang in there for our next installment, which will be the world's finest blog post.

Blogger's block, by which I mean crossovers

2006-09-11T00:55:00.000-07:00

Been a frustrating month. Day jobs are thin on the ground, and possibly related to that, I've been hideously blocked creatively. Nothing getting written, so nothing to write about writing. Oh, I've got things I'm officially working on. Really cool things, in fact. But there's been a lot of time spent sitting and staring at a sentence with no idea what might come after it. It has been suggested that this is related to my being upset about being unemployed and broke... seems logical. Doesn't immediately help, though, and of course here's my lovely blog, a self-marketing tool, also lying fallow, and then I get to go off on a wonderful self-pity trip and blah blah blah.

But then I think "Hey, why let this get you down? You've been through rough patches before, and always come out stronger. You're Noah Brand, goddamnit! Sure, you can't find anything to say about being blocked and feeling crummy, but so what? It's a blog! Just find people who DO have something interesting and link to them!"

In that spirit, here's some of the things I find myself returning to again and again online. For right now, let's look at animations. First off this little Flash thing is possibly my favorite form of digital Prozac. If that doesn't cheer you up, I regret to inform you that you are probably dead. Sorry.

On a more sober note, this is the most beautiful thing I've seen anyone do on YouTube. Painfully obvious in concept, but there it is in execution and it's moving and wonderful. Also, for those who don't know me well, the Noah in the video is not me. I'm better-looking and he's smarter and cooler, obviously.

What really does it for me, though, the thing online that genuinely helps me get up and feel like a writer and a geek and a happy human being in those tough times when I'm saying "So... why don't I just become a drug dealer, again?" is the best AMV I've ever seen. For those in my weenchy little audience who are unfamiliar with AMVs, they're a pure-geek artform where you edit your favorite anime to go with your favorite songs. Most are awful, of course, but that's how art works. That one, though, really does something for me.

Watch it again. Break down what it's doing. It refuses to limit the sources it draws on, adhere to any kind of narrative, or stick to any theme other than WHEEEEMUSICDANCINGFUN, which is not exactly a theme as I understand the word. By drawing from, basically, everything, it becomes a bubblegum celebration of anime itself, or simply fiction itself.

Fiction does limit itself, of course. That's part of the point. What the Mamboleo video, which is sort of the happy girly version of this well-loved internet classic, does is posit a world where it's not. What if there were no narrative rules, no genre restrictions, what if anything could just happen at any moment? Obviously, this would produce a lot of unsatisfying art, sure. But is that ALL it would produce? If the characters from Sailor Moon danced with the ones from Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Optimus Prime fought Jackie Chan, and all the stories ran into each other and mixed and turned each other strange, might that not be at least moderately awesome?

Here we're into the dubious and fanficcy realm of the crossover. Turns out, on reflection, that I've got quite a bit to say about crossovers. I'll get into those more over the next couple days.

Hm. Note to self. When blocked in future, just start a blog post.

Two weeks in the Dark Ages

2006-08-11T05:14:00.000-07:00

Shortly after posting my last entry, my computer was brutally murdered by vampire ninjas, giving its life to protect me. It was the most noble thing I've ever seen, and still brings a tear to my eye.

Getting a new computer and salvaging my old data proved to be an adventure, and took some time. In the meantime, of course, I couldn't get much writing done, and got as weird as I always get when I can't write for a while. Before I could at least borrow a friend's machine for a little while, I was scrawling pages in my notoriously illegible handwriting, which always gives the impression that I'm unused to writing with a pen because they only let me have soft crayons up at The Home.

To celebrate the impossibly primitive conditions in which I was living, I finally mastered shaving with a straight razor. Once I figured out how to get a really good edge on the blade (hint: all the advice I found online about stropping was wrong wrong wrong), I discovered that I can get a closer and a faster shave this way than with an electric. More, I discovered that a straight razor forces even my ADD-afflicted self to work deliberately and with careful attention to each movement, lest my rare and valuable blood type wind up all over the sink. Especially when doing the back of my head. Then, too, it goes with my double-breasted jackets, my hat, and my pipe as part of my anachronistic lifestyle kit.

Sure, laugh at me. Come the collapse of industrial civilization and the Grim Meathook Future (not Warren's phrase, I know, but I like his explanation of it), I'll still be shaving neatly while all of you will grow big huge ugly caveman beards with raccoons hiding in them. Even the women.

Of course, if I really truly honest-to-gosh believed that that was going to happen, I'd be stockpiling rifles and ammunition like a sensible person. Admittedly, I would be doing that if I could afford it, but with the latest contract cancelled partway through, I'm paid off with enough to make my rent this month, and am gleefully back in the world of day jobs and specs. On this latter point, there is of course part of me tempted to go "Alas! I was a professional writer and now I am reduced to menial labor to support my art, just like every busboy with a band! Woe, woe is me to have fallen so!" There are a couple of reasons I'm not falling for that emo line, though.

Let's be frank, I've made a bunch of money so far this year as a writer. Enough that next April is going to be, hm, interesting. That's more than a lot of writers out there can say. That's more than some extremely successful writers have been able to say at various points in their careers.

There's a story Tim Powers told me once. It seems when Tim Powers was a young writer, he was friends with Phillip K. Dick, who by then was an old writer. And when it became clear that Powers was serious about writing for a living, Dick made him a gift of a bunch of original Phil Dick manuscripts. He told Powers that there's always reversals, hard times, and unpleasant surprises in a freelance writer's life, and made him promise that when he had to, he'd sell the manuscripts.

So yeah, I sold a couple things and was living high for a while, and now I'm back on specs until the next good break comes along. That's the nature of this job, and I knew it going in. John August is right, there's no such thing as "breaking in", there's just working. Sometimes you get paid up front, sometimes you get paid afterwards, sometimes you don't get paid. Nobody's a writer because they think it'll make them rich; you're a writer because you gotta do what you love.

Speaking of which, if by some chance a talented comic book artist should read this post, one of the spec things I'm doing is a return to the comics medium, which I haven't worked in for a few years. I miss it. Anyone wants to work with me on putting together a miniseries proposal for some of the wonderful comics publishers out there, get in touch.

Anyway, sincere apologies to my fan for not updating due to hardware problems. Back to work.

To reiterate a plug...

2006-07-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know I've said before that Pandora internet radio is awesome, but I did not, at that time, fully appreciate how awesome.

See, here's the thing. While waiting for word back on the paying project, I'm working up some character and story notes for what will probably end up as a spec. It's about thirteen-year-old kids, so I want to put myself in that mindset to get the characterization right. Checking my bank account, I note that I can't afford the massive amounts of drugs I'd need to induce the state of advanced psychosis we call puberty, so I figure I'll go for the cheap method: listen to the music that was playing the year I was 13 and hope trigger some flashbacks.

Now, of course, I don't own any of this music, because I was in junior high during a dark and ugly period in our nation's musical history. And I figure Pandora can't help, because they group music by style and common elements, not by year. But what the hell, I figure, it's faster than downloading a bunch of stuff. I create a new station on my Pandora page and give it two points of reference to start with: Paula Abdul and Bel Biv Devoe. (I repeat, a very sad era of music. I'm starting to think the reason I was miserable in junior high had less to do with puberty and family problems than I thought. It was just the radio.)

And presto, Pandora gets it. I've been getting nothing but godawful overproduced noise pollution, all within two years either side of my target year, a horrifying amount of it having those badly-rapped breakdowns that were obligatory for eight months or so. Sure enough, it's working. Parachute pants, fades, Bush sending troops into Iraq... it's all coming back to me.

We'll file this under "suffering for one's art."

Random note on moviegoing

2006-07-22T23:34:00.000-07:00

Everyone has their thing that they notice when they go to movies. Gun nerds notice when someone fires nine rounds from a Colt 1911, which holds no more than eight. Electricians notice when someone jerks four feet of slack wiring out of a wall to zap something with. It always takes you out of the film for a second and dents your suspension of disbelief. Of course, those of us who've studied film from a professional standpoint, we notice everything. Have to, really. Actors dissect every delivery, directors second-guess all the decisions that are invisible to everyone else, and writers break every scene down into its component parts and interrogate the parts at gunpoint.

This isn't unique to film, of course. Everyone working professionally with something does this. Chefs can't just sit down and enjoy a meal, psychologists can't take anyone at face value, and I can't count the novelists who've complained to me they can't just read a novel any more. The problem is consciousness, of course. We're too intensely, consciously aware of everything that's happening and why. We know how the magic tricks work. On balance, it's a good thing, but one can't help but miss the blissful ignorance that could, momentarily, believe the rabbit had really disappeared.

This brings me to my favorite moment at a movie theater. It happens every time, and I always love it. The lights go down, the trailers start, and I enjoy the hell out of 'em. I don't know as well how trailers work, so I can sit and enjoy being lied to that THE ANT BULLY is going to be worth watching. Several trailers go by, each doing its best to transport us into the experience of a different film, and then the little THX guy tells us how clever the sound is, and the feature starts.

And for a long, dizzy moment, I can't remember what film I'm there to see.

This happens every time. It's like the trailers reboot my brain, trying to involve me in a bunch of other stories, scribbling over whatever I had written on the movie section of my consciousness when I came in. Thus, that consciousness is effectively erased when the opening credits start, and I'm a blank slate.

It's like free fall. It's like being a child again. For a second, I have NO IDEA what might be coming next. When I finally recognize from the credits what movie it is, it's always a rush of discovery. "That's right!" my mind cries. "It's this one! I'm so excited about seeing this movie that I paid a bunch of money to sit in a dark room with a bunch of total strangers! Hot damn!"

It might say something about movies these days that that's usually the last time I'm surprised for the next couple hours, but I don't care. That moment, that instant of zen emptiness, of non-expectation, and the shock of recognition when it ends... best part of the experience. Maybe second-best if it's a theater that has real butter on the popcorn.

In which I blow my intellectual credibility

2006-07-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

A totally different thing learned from the back-to-back SABRINA viewing: watching Bogart and Ford play the same role served to utterly confirm a theory I've held for a while. If you were to digitally or magically (Clarke's Third Law, I know...) delete Harrison Ford from STAR WARS and replace him with Humphrey Bogart circa 1942, the result would be pure awesome. First, we know Bogart can play this character, because that's more or less what he did in CASABLANCA. Second, with Bogart in the cantina scene, nobody would be able to formulate the abstract concept that Greedo might've shot first. Bogie doesn't play that game. Third, well... just imagine Bogart doing all your favorite Han Solo lines and see how they sound. Hell, just imagine the word "hypershpashe."

If anyone ever asks you to define the difference between nerdy and geeky, show them the last post, followed by this one.

SABRINA vs. SABRINA

2006-07-15T03:55:00.000-07:00

I recently watched the two versions of SABRINA back to back. It was fascinating. Two versions of the same story, forty years apart. Snapshots from different eras in Hollywood history, like fossils from different layers. And what do you do with those? You use 'em to study evolution, of course!

Let's start with the posters:

Okay, those don't look anything like each other. Let's put aside the issue that the second one is, from a design perspective, nicer, and look at what's being said here. The first one deals with three stars, presented visually as coequal. Makes sense; you've got an aging box office ruler, the #1 official young hunk, and a stunning ingenue with screen charisma for weeks. Also they all have signed contracts and you don't have to massage anyone's ego more than necessary.

That second one, though... whoa. The younger brother's gone completely and the girl's turned into a ghost. And again, makes sense. You've got Greg Kinnear, Julia Ormond, and Indiana friggin' Jones in your movie... who are people coming to see? Of course, now we have the question of why they designed the cast that way; I think if I say that stars came to predominate during those forty years, nobody's going to burn me for heresy. No big surprise there. But there's something else going on with that poster; it gives the ending away.

I can't spoil the ending of this movie, so I'm not sorry. If you've seen those two posters, there's no spoiler possible. The first one sets up the situation; two men compete for the same girl. Fair enough. Good setup. The second one, however, tells you how it ends. Hmmm... which of these two very different brothers will get the beautiful girl? Could it possibly be the only one who's on the poster?

I'll return to the issue of endings in a minute, I just want to touch on a couple other points first. Firstly, comedy. Both movies are funny; good solid laughs, well-handled. On a superficial level, the second one's funnier, but I don't consider that any more significant the fact than that it's also on better film stock. Film technology and comedy writing are both fields that experienced significant technical advancement during those four decades. Is that cynical? Sure. It's also true. Comedy is as much science as it is art, and while Wilder and Einstein were geniuses, we just plain know more now.

However, there's significant changes that I think make the second film weaker, and I think those changes arise directly from those same technical advances. For one thing, everyone's character arc gets an ending tacked on in the 1995 version. EVERYONE'S. The younger brother turns out to be a business genius after all, so the company's in safe hands when the older brother goes off to Paris for love. Sabrina's father the chauffeur turns out to be independently wealthy and will be marrying the cook. Everything's neatly wrapped up and nobody will suffer from the lovers getting together. Problem is, who cares? Was there a big problem with people coming out of the original saying "Well, I'm glad those two wound up together, but what about his company? And what about her father?" I'm guessing not. We want them to get together, so let love triumph though the heavens fall. Love does not need to be harmless. Indeed, experience indicates that it generally is not.

Also, the final shots of each. When, exactly, was it decided that the very end of a romantic comedy needs to be romantic, but not comedic? Who was at that meeting? The 1995 version closes with our couple kissing on a bridge in Paris. The 1954 version closes with a single visual image, an umbrella hung on a passerby's coat, that gets a solid laugh and demonstrates a significant character change without anyone saying a word. Is anybody going to try and make the case that the former is stronger writing than the latter?

Speaking of the ending, I promised I'd return to it. The first one had a game go at setting up a serious question as to which brother would wind up with the girl. (Note I don't say which one she'd choose. She doesn't get to choose, just get chosen.) The second one barely makes a token effort. It's not just a matter of everyone knowing that Greg Kinnear does not beat Harrison Ford, it's a different attitude towards endings. A more cynical attitude, I'd say. Sure, the ending of every story is implied in its beginning, but it's not like Billy Wilder didn't know that. (Read rule 6 on that list. If it's not a near-religious revelation for you, well, you're smarter than me.)

Once upon a time, the manipulation of the audience was more concealed. The first movie makes us want, need, demand that Humphrey Bogart get the girl. At the end, when he does, we're thrilled. The second one says it knows we want Harrison Ford to get the girl, and reassures us that yes, that will happen. Consequently, all the potential obstacles to that happening feel like a kind of ritual. It reminded me of my Masonic initiation. It probably reminds Jews of Passover. A series of questions are asked, "What about his brother? What about the merger? What about her leaving the country?" but everyone knows the answers and it's understood that the questions are asked in the spirit of reaffirmation, strengthening what is already known.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems much, much weaker than the alternative. That entire approach to writing a story precludes from the outset any chance that the audience might ever say "Holy crap, did you just see that?" Am I the only one objecting to this? Are serious twists and surprises solely the domain of thrillers and adventure movies? I mean, yes, the biggest audiences watch movies to be reassured, to have their values and assumptions affirmed. That's fine, it's what stories do and always have done. But does it have to be every step of the way? Can't we have some tension, some unexpected turns, something that forces us to engage with the story instead of just watching it unfold? Doesn't that strengthen the eventual affirmation?

Could be I'm wrong. I'm starving out here in as-yet-unproduced indie script land, eating ramen and paying my cutoff notices instead of my bills, and other folks are... well, not.

But I can't shake the feeling that I'm right about this.

Fortunately, there is beer

2006-07-08T03:37:00.001-07:00

Fortunately, there is beer.

I say fortunately because earlier, we went and saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I enjoyed a great deal, despite the fact that the last third or so had ALL the main characters carrying the idiot ball. Afterwards, as a kind of counterpoint, we decided to watch THE PIRATE MOVIE on DVD.

Let's not get into why I own this movie on DVD; the phrase "ex-girlfriend with weird sense of humor" will be sufficient. Let us instead discuss its quality. I don't want you to think I'm someone who gets all upset just because I'm watching CENTER STAGE or something. I've seen a lot of bad movies. A LOT of bad movies. I grew up on Ed Wood and the Hammer Studios C-list, and then I lived through the irony years of the 90s. I know from cinematic crap.

So when I say that THE PIRATE MOVIE is probably the single worst film I've ever seen, I don't want you to think I'm exaggerating or trying to make myself sound cool or something. I'm a writer, after all. I can describe things. I can make the purely imaginary live for you more vividly than stuff that actually happened. This movie, however, is beyond my powers. It cripples me. It stops me. It breaks my descriptive abilities down and makes them cry. I'm reduced to sentence fragments like "cartoon fish wearing pants" and "why is there Indiana Jones in.... no..." and "if you're going to rewrite William Schwenk Gilbert you'd better be... agh!"

As coherently as possible, it's an update of The Pirates of Penzance, done in 1982, in Australia, on a shoestring budget, with multiple 80s soft-pop songs inserted. I could try to describe the 80s pop culture references, the attempts at slapstick, the choreography, the performances, the use of synthesizers, but that would be futile. I recognize the limits of language. If you could describe a movie perfectly, it wouldn't be a movie. They call that a novel.

Suffice to say that this movie is a breakthrough, a quantum leap in badness, a reverse apotheosis, the utter nadir of the filmmaking art. I've never seen anything like it, and I've looked. Fellow connoisseurs of the atrocious should absolutely not miss it. You will never see a worse movie.

Fortunately, I live in Portland. There is beer.

Whatever happened to that Brand guy?

2006-07-03T04:57:00.000-07:00

So, turns out I'm not dead after all.

I have no excuse for not updating this thing more lately; just a laxity I intend to correct. I've been working a lot, having various adventures, and none of it took so much time that I couldn't have talked about it here, or linked to assorted interesting stuff.

Take Pandora Internet Radio, for example. This is more or less my favorite new internet thing. There's a jillion places to get music for free over the net, but this one's smarter. They employ a staff of music nerds to listen to and catalog everything, and cross-reference it all by various factors. In other words, you tell it what you like, and it plays music you will like. As you listen, you can provide further feedback, making it even smarter. It requires no new software, it's got a vast library, and it's free, though an improved ad-free version can be purchased, of course. It's not intrusive, it's not buggy, and the interface is so simple and friendly it's barely there. I just open the page and immediately, my personalized station starts playing.

This is how people in the past believed computers would work. This is how the computers Star Trek and the Legion of Super-Heroes had worked. "Computer, find music similar to this." That's it, that's the whole process. No sorting, no research, no downloading and fiddling, no arguing with the device, it just does it. Of course, that's because actual humans have put in a lot of hours doing all that work for you, but I love the illusion. I love being momentarily freed from the frustrating fact that computers are idiots savant, capable only of a very limited range of tasks that have to be patiently explained to them. I love having one damn program that just does exactly what I want it to on the first try. Pandora creates the effect of being really into music, so you know all about the obscure bands that hit your personal cool buttons, without the necessity of being really into music.

Of course, being what I am, I'm just forcing it to play ska until it screams. I gotta be me.

Mind like a steel sieve

2006-06-11T04:28:00.001-07:00

Back after various travels on both business and family matters. Writing vigorously. Far, far too busy to do little things like, for example, update my blog like a civilized person.

Finally, though, a good excuse to update the blog instead of getting actual work done comes up. Like lots of folks, I have Attention Deficit Disorder, and since I can't afford medication and anyway don't like side effects, I just try and manage it instead of suppressing it. Mostly, that works fine. Not tonight, though.

See, the particular form of ADD I have involves problems with, among other things, information organization and retrieval. This became dramatically clear when I was being tested for it, and I discovered that information I'd been easily rattling off one minute before became impossible to summon to mind when I was asked to organize it differently in my head.

So tonight, with a good day's work on the current paid project put to bed, I'm sitting up late working on a spec project, and thinking of three interrelated bits that go towards the beginning of the story. In point of fact, though, I'm thinking of two of them, since the other one is somewhere in the pile of references and notions I have for this project, and I can't find it. Three days ago, I was juggling these ideas around, putting them in the right order, feeling very pleased with myself. Tonight, I'm poring fruitlessly through all the pages of notes I've made for this project, trying all the mnemonic tricks I know to summon to mind the last bit I need, and generally beating my head against the desk, the wall, and other portions of my head.

All is well, writing in general is going swimmingly, bills are mostly current, I've been exercising better lately, and in all but one respect I have no reason to feel like I'm the dumbest bastard alive. Unfortunately, I feel like the dumbest bastard alive nonetheless. Send lawyers, guns, money, and moral support. Going to be a tough night.

Even the orchestra was beautiful

2006-05-23T02:55:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted lately. Been busy, and haven't had a lot to say. Second draft of previous project currently on the back burner, with first draft of current project and SOME kind of draft of longstanding time-to-get-off-my-ass-and-write-this-thing project taking precedence, in that order.

But tonight, I was just musing on the good old days. The very recent good old days.

I remember, in 1995, there was an interesting conversation on the WELL (see links to the right) about half-decades. They're a better way of measuring eras than decades, really, unless you want to claim that 1940-45 was basically the same as 1945-50. The discussion was about, of the twenty half-decades of the 20th century, which was the coolest. Not the best or wisest or most memorable, just coolest. Perhaps predictably, the two big contenders were 1925-30 and 1965-70. Now, there's strong cases to be made for both of these. Cool as we know it was invented in the late 20s, (I can prove it; buy me a drink sometime and ask me) and of course the late 60s were when the Baby Boomers were young and horny and excited, and sex, having been discovered in the late 50s, finally caught on properly.

There was one post, though, in that old discussion, that I'm quoting without permission because I can't recall who said it, but it really stuck with me at the time. It was just "1995-2000. We can hope."

And in the end, I think you could make a very, very strong case that that's how it turned out. Think about it. We had one tiny war with ZERO combat casualties on our side and a strong international coalition. Culture pulled itself out of that godawful early-90s slump. Music got better, movies got better, and comic books went from complete crap to the vibrant and exciting artform we now enjoy. Unemployment dropped through the floor. The national budget got balanced for the first time in most people's memory. The internet went from a weird little cult full of people like me to the world-transforming technology all the futurists said it would be. The tech boom happened, and the air was full of New Economies and Long Booms and just plain damn hope.

Sure, we didn't recognize it at the time. We bitched about not getting everything we wanted, we predicted doom and despair, we went along with the pretense that anybody cared about a friggin' blowjob. People in Periclean Athens probably did the same thing. And I'm not making the case that it was utopia, by any means. But in retrospect, it was really, really cool.

I first realized how much I missed the 90s when I watched EMPIRE RECORDS a while back. Everyone's all having fun and standing up to The Man and saying "If you don't like your job just get another one" and solving all their problems with a big party. Sure, it's a slight little confection of a film, but what hit me about it was that you couldn't make that movie today. Cute silly little comedies get made now, but not with that sense of easy happiness where everything's basically okay and you just need to sort out your record store problems. Because everything's not basically okay now, and nobody would believe in a movie where it is. Instead we're finding out that all those things that always only happened in other countries really can happen here. We're learning how good we had it.

In a few years, maybe as few as ten, there's going to be movies made with the same structure as BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS or CABARET. Nostalgia pictures where the attractive young late-90s people cavort around and drop cute references to 28.8 modems and things. They live and love and have little dramas, and the tone is a sort of enjoyable melancholy because OH GOD THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT'S COMING.

That's assuming that in ten years there's enough of American society left to be making movies about itself.

A decade ago I wouldn't have needed that disclaimer.

Go me

2006-05-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

First draft is done.

The first draft of my first professional screenplay is finished. I just typed THE END. I don't care that it's not technically part of the correct format, I liked typing it.

It's not even all that late, even with the structural revisions that came up midway. There remain issues that have to be fixed; it's only a first draft. I won't get into the issues here. They're all fixable.

I'm awfully tired.

Going to bed now.

Blogging the open tabs in my brain

2006-05-06T02:30:00.000-07:00

I have now used (wretched) as a parenthetical line direction in every screenplay I've written. I kinda like it. It's evocative.

"I'm not strong enough" is the best line in THE INCREDIBLES. Easily.

There's a particular conversational tic coming up in the current screenplay that was starting to concern me a little. It keeps coming up, and it's not a thing I normally write, so it was starting to worry me. I just noticed that it results in a conversational style that reflects, on a microscale level, one of the major themes of the story. If anyone asks, I totally did that on purpose.

Sam Hamm's WATCHMEN script really blows. I mean, okay, I don't believe it's possible to write a two-hour WATCHMEN movie, so I can't be too hard on him, but that ending just eats it.

Why did Nehru jackets ever go out of style? Those rocked.

Am I worrying too much about the probable budgetary constraints on this movie? I mean, repeatedly, I've made a creative choice one way or the other based on what Gray Area can afford and what they can't. Am I being considerate and professional, or just hobbling the work prematurely? I mean, if the right people become interested, the budget could increase substantially. Will I wish then that I'd included more expensive scenes, especially if I have to write them in anyway because they're more visually exciting?

David Gonterman's Sailor Moon: American Kitsune really is the worst thing ever written in English, and it's a shame more people don't appreciate that.

This post has been brought to you by attention deficit disorder, helping people multitask without getting anything actually done since 1980.

Yo ho, a writer's life for me

2006-04-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

It's 5:30 in the morning, I'm hard at work, I'm experimenting with mixing scotch and coffee, I spilled hot ashes on my chest when I pulled off a turtleneck without first removing the pipe from my mouth, and I just mopped up a coffee spill with the first bit of disposable cloth that came to hand: a broken and discarded bra that was sticking out from under my bed.

This either gets me Real Writer cred, or Disgusting Bum cred.

Should I worry that much of the time, they're the same thing?

Two kinds of logic

2006-04-26T01:59:00.000-07:00

I've got a friend who's a transsexual psychic magician. Without getting too much into the history and experience involved, the short version is that she's damn near Lord Fanny.

We were talking about magic one time, and she said something that's stuck with me. The key to a magical worldview, in her terms, is being able to shift from causative logic to correlative logic. That stuck with me because it's a lot of what I do as a writer. Fiction, yes, has to work with causative logic a lot, Mike found the plans for Jolene's project which is based on the fact that Ira is sleeping with Kim, therefore Mike can blackmail Ira. But if that's all it does, it's pretty shallow and unsatisfying. Fiction also has to use correlative logic, Ira's betrayal of Jolene being analogous to Gerald's betrayal of Mike, without which fact Mike's actions don't mean anything.

Alan Moore is a notorious magician, and he's talked about how when you approach a project, even a historically-based project like his From Hell, from the appropriate angle, you find endless hidden connections between everything that happened. Not causative connections, but thematic ones, conceptual ones, echoes and shadows. On their simplest level, these connections manifest in the classic panel transitions in early Moore work like The Killing Joke and Watchmen, where two scenes separated in space and time mirror each other perfectly. The levels get rapidly more complex from there.

I could continue to cite examples, (my rant about why a lot of SF fans don't like Ray Bradbury, for example) but there's work to do, so I'll assume I've made my initial point. How this relates to my work, the alleged excuse for this blog, is that the nights when the writing goes hard, nothing clicks, and I wind up overcaffeinated at 5AM with very little accomplished, are the nights when my correlative-logic cylinders aren't firing.

Tonight, though, as I give one last polish to the revised and expanded treatment, now with more chocolatey flavor and twice the stain-fighting power, I'm properly able to link lines and characters and events in ways that don't make any left-brain sense but tie the damn thing together like a nervous system.

Even running way behind, with deadlines looming and bills coming due and my waistline stubbornly remaining at 38 despite my entreaties, I love this damn job.

Mocking Bush while it's still legal

2006-04-24T21:06:00.001-07:00

Having elementary-school kids write the speeches they wish President Bush would give: nice little classroom exercise.

Hiring a professional impressionist to actually give the speeches in Bush's voice and style: stroke of damn genius.

Go, enjoy the damn genius.

I am a nerd

2006-04-22T04:27:00.000-07:00

Ack, I've allowed a week to slip by without a blog entry. I blame the writing. Nothing like having to go back to a step you thought you were finished with. The good news, of course, is that it's an improvement. Stakes are higher, characters are richer, ending's better, and OH CRAP I'M NEVER GOING TO MAKE DEADLINE. I will, however, persevere.

In the meantime, allow me to regale you, my beloved readers, with what may be the nerdiest joke I've ever made. My friend the ever-inimitable Sylvia kvetched online that our dear alma mater had managed to get her thesis title wrong on their website, giving it as Bloody Poetry instead of The New Poetry. This, of course, led me to post the following hypothetical exchange.

"How's Bloody Poetry doing?"

"It's The New Poetry."

"Same thing."

"No, sir, it is not the same thing. If it were the same thing, then to say I like the new congress, which I do, would be the same as to say I enjoy bloody sex, which I don't!"

If you get this, you are a huge nerd. Award yourself as many points as you like, you shameful creature. If you don't get this, here's a version of its antecedent.

I have no life at ALL.

In which, for five minutes, I'm Grant Morrison

2006-04-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

I've been badly blocked for a few days on certain key structural issues that have arisen with the screenplay. The damn thing's too short, and several characters that looked fleshy enough in the treatment are proving unworkably thin and flat in the screenplay. So, no problem, that's the job, you fix it.

But how to fix it? I've been beating my head against that wall for most of this week. Hence the lack of posting here; "FUCK FUCK FUCK GODDAMNIT WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS CRAP" is not much of a post.

So earlier this morning, after a long night of energetically not getting anything done, I finally fell asleep. While asleep, I had a dream that incorporated elements from a few dozen things I'd been reading and fooling with instead of getting any work done. A couple of the characters from Locas were going to be fighting, which somehow segued into them both climbing an endless stack of academic detritus and leftover theses from Reed College, at the top of which was found props and photos from a small independent monster movie about a dog that's rebuilt into a super-soldier in a secret military project. This of course segued into that movie, wherein I was driving around in a white convertible trying to stop this secret military project, which task was eventually accomplished with the aid of an Ecstasy-like drug in the form of a pill the size and shape of a Milano cookie. With sprinkles. In the resultant sensually-enhanced state, I was able to defeat the bad guys and discover that the convertible could, in fact, be driven out of reality altogether, via a secret freeway exit in what looked like Northern California. This, in turn, led to a mental diagram of story structure as realized in a video game that looked like Tetris crossed with Space Invaders.

Upon awaking after a nice healthy three hours of sleep, I took another look at my story problems and realized that a certain subplot would flesh out the right characters, reinforce our themes, and greatly improve the emotional tone of the ending. Absolutely nothing in the new subplot has a damn thing to do with anything in the dream, but I have no doubt that the dream is what unlocked the writer's block and gave rise to the new idea.

This is what I'm talking about when I say writers don't know where the ideas come from. All we can do is dump stuff into the hopper and see what comes out.

So it's come to this

2006-04-07T22:45:00.001-07:00

The following paragraph appeared fully developed in my head the other night, and a couple friends have requested I post it to this blog. I'm not strong enough to say no.

For ten years, Lois Lane's hard drive gradually filled up with a small but very steady stream of stories involving a brilliant, sexy female reporter named Marlena Street, who invariably facilitates the relationship between Superman and Clark Kent. At its apex, the collection contained 481 uses of the sentence "Does he know that you're in love with him?" and 3,047 uses of the word "throbbing". All the stories were deleted in a single fit of revelation-induced shock and embarrassment one day. No other copies existed. Lois is very, very happy in her marriage, but sometimes she still misses the stories.

There, now when someone wonders what kind of writer I am, they can read my blog, and discover that I write flash fiction about slash fiction.

I'll be getting drunk if anyone needs me.

Will you be my pretend internet friend?

2006-04-03T04:36:00.000-07:00

Here's my concern, as posted about elsewhere.

My peak writing hours are generally around 11PM-4AM Pacific time. I've found that I write more and better when I have someone I can chat with in between sentences, preferably someone who's interested in writing. It's a way of managing my ADD; spend a few minutes banging out lines, then spend a few minutes bitching about scene transitions, asking someone which version of a joke is funnier, or bragging about a line or moment I'm proud of. Talking about what I'm doing also helps me do it better, as well as getting input from someone else who's interested in my job.

Of course, most people aren't much interested in my job, just as I'm not much interested in theirs, and most people have never really thought a lot about how scene transitions work or the proper conceptual structure of a punchline. No reason they should, really. This does mean that I have very few people I can talk to about my work, and most of those are asleep while I'm working, like decent god-fearing people everywhere.

So if there are any other professional or amateur writers or creative types out there who'd like a little water-cooler conversation and a sounding board for their own notions and frustrations, IM me. I'm drunknakednoah on AIM, and I'm usually up all night smoking and slowly going mad.

Adventures with the Angels

2006-04-02T01:58:00.000-08:00

As those who know me in meatspace are aware, I volunteer weekly with the Portland chapter of the Guardian Angels, and tonight I'm just back from a particularly rewarding patrol.

See, what we usually do is patrol around downtown, where the clubs, the bars, the homeless, the street kids around Pioneer Square, and the sketchy folks along the bus mall are. Thing is, police presence downtown is very strong, so any time there's a situation we need to intervene in, there's always a cop right behind us who could probably do the job better. Then, too, we keep hearing that we need to head out on the east side towards Gresham more, because that's where the real troublemakers are and the police ain't. (Non-Portlanders, just trust me, all this geography makes sense, but it isn't important.)

So we did, taking the MAX light rail line all the way out to 188th, with a long stop at 122nd, which everyone keeps telling us is a real trouble spot. And boy, did we find the sketchy folks. Tweekers, dealers, vatos, wannabes, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists. (If you don't know the quote, shame on you.) No actual trouble, but enough potential trouble to convince us we can do more good on that patrol route than just covering the blocks the cops already have covered.

Better still, the people out around that part of town were downright thrilled to see us out there. Even the cops, unlike the downtown cops, actually stopped to thank us for our help. We felt both useful and welcome, and it was great.

All that, though, wasn't the best part. The best part was the girls. Now, when representing the Angels, I do not mack, accept phone numbers, or flirt more than a polite minimum. But a gentleman can look, you know? And the girls around the clubs are just depressing. Universally bleach-blonde, wearing an average of half a pound of makeup each, all with these ridiculous fake tans (as though the sun's been out more than twice in the past five months), all drunk, all vacuous and shallow, mostly hideously scrawny, except when they bring their "fat friend" and get her to wear the exact same outfit as them (Curvier girls, stop falling for this! They are not on your side!), and just generally appallingly unpleasant human beings. We watch out for them like we watch out for everybody, but I swear, some nights it makes me want to give up heterosexuality as a bad idea. I suppose the club guys are probably just as bad, but I don't really check them out so much.

The east side girls, though, are humans. Actual humans presenting themselves in a real way, taking public transit instead of rented stretch Hummers, keeping the makeup to a minimum, being real people. Real people are so much more interesting than fake people, I swear. That's the real clincher for me with the east side MAX patrols: better scenery.

Incidentally, I'd like to encourage those reading this to contact your local chapter of the Guardian Angels and look into volunteering. It's fun, it's a great way to give back to your community, and you get free training in martial arts, conflict resolution, crisis management, CPR, and first aid. If your city doesn't have a chapter, the organization will send trained chapter organizers out to help you start one.

Five Fists of Science!

2006-03-29T02:24:00.000-08:00

Quick plug for someone else's comic, the upcoming Five Fists of Science. Read the preview at the link, then buy the comic.

Seriously, if you don't think that Nikola Tesla teaming up with Mark Twain to fight Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan is cool, I'm not sure we can be friends any more. That's the kind of concept that everyone's pretending SNAKES ON A PLANE is. That's cooler than Batman fighting Captain America on a pirate ship. Hell, I'll come right out and say it, it's cooler than zeppelins. And nothing's cooler than zeppelins.

Speaking of which, here's a line I need to get off my chest and will never be able to use:

Villain: "What do you mean 'gone too far'? I'm hardly the first person to interrogate my enemies by dipping parts of them in liquid nitrogen and then smashing them into chunks!"

Henchman: "I know, master, but using the chunks in margaritas..."

I don't know what this button does

2006-03-24T03:32:00.000-08:00

Good email from Mr. Producer today, regarding some questions about the first section of the screenplay and how things are going to develop. The best thing about intelligent questions is how answering them makes you clarify things in your head, make explicit the vague notions you've been kicking around, and often develop them better in the process.

One of his questions, however, was "How did you come up with this specific bit?" This is the kind of question that makes writers nervous. The truth is that no matter how much we analyze, structure and understand what we do, and screenwriters do this more than most just due to the nature of the medium, there's always a certain irreducible edge of the mystical about it.

I don't know where I got that bit. Some bits I steal from real life, some I steal from other writers, some I force into existence by simple brute effort, some I assemble out of whatever sense of craft I've managed to develop, but a surprising, and a worrying, amount of what I create just kind of appears. I've heard this from other writers, that a lot of what we make just materializes in our heads from nothing. It's doubly worrying because that's often the best stuff.

This worries us, or at least worries me, because if we don't know how it works, we don't know if it's going to keep working. Think of writers you've enjoyed; I bet there's at least one on your list who, at some point in their career, lost their mojo. Maybe all at once, maybe slowly, maybe even temporarily. Obviously, one doesn't want to name names, but I think we're all mature enough to acknowledge that the later works of Shakespeare are, by and large, nowhere near as good as his earlier stuff. That could happen to any of us. It could happen tomorrow. Man, do I ever not want that to happen.

That's why questions like "Where did this bit come from?" give me mild heebie-jeebies, because they try to pin down the mystical, and experience teaches us that the mystical doesn't respond well to being pinned down. Magic does not survive lab testing. If you wait up all night to see Santa, he doesn't come. And yes, we can quantify and practice our craft, we can establish the underlying principles we're using and strengthen them thereby, we can understand a lot of what we do. But not all of it. For all the skill and finesse and workmanship we can develop, there's still that weird supernatural aspect, and like the educated cavemen that we are, we're always a little scared of what we don't understand.

Writers are a superstitous and cowardly lot. Who can blame us?

John Wayne wouldn't approve

2006-03-23T01:05:00.000-08:00

I feel like a jerk doing two political posts in a row, I just couldn't resist talking about this. It reminds me why I love this loony-assed country so much.

Some South Dakota Sioux have remembered that their dumbass state legislature can't tell them what to do on their land.

The United States has always wrestled with questions of sovereignty; it's one of the reasons we're cool, and several of the reasons we're crazy. We have three coequal branches of government, a layer cake of local, state, and federal laws, and of course the very weird and tricky issue of Indian sovereignty, which is morally linked with that little genocide thing nobody likes to talk about.

Drive across the border from Utah into Nevada at any point, and the first two businesses you'll see will be a casino and a liquor store. Their customer base is not Nevadans, I'm guessing. The massive rise in gambling in this country has proven to be quite a windfall for areas that permit it, including reservations. I myself like to duck across my local state line around July 2nd or so and stock up on the really GOOD fireworks. I sometimes wonder if this doesn't give Americans a somewhat different view of the law than citizens in other countries. The law may be the absolute guide of behavior laid down by the people's representatives in government, but it's also observably inconsistent and circumnavigable. Maybe we take the law a little less seriously than most other places. Maybe that's even a good thing.

Also, call it knee-jerk liberalism, but I'm always tickled pink to see Indians telling the government to cram it.

Anyway, let's all raise a glass to standing up to The Man. Here's how to send a few bucks to this effort. Tell your friends.

Changing the color scheme

2006-03-21T01:31:00.000-08:00

This is the best animated GIF that ever there was.

This has sweet FA to do with screenwriting. You don't like it, get your own blog. Which you probably already have. You'll have to excuse me, I've just watched the Star Wars Holiday Special from 1977. Harvey Korman in blackface alien drag, and that's not the worst part. I'm a bit punchy, but this image has just renewed my faith in humanity.

Seems that this nice fellow went through Bush's approval rating state by state in the months since the 2004 election, color-coding states based on their relative approval vs. disapproval of Bush's competence, and showing the month-to-month progress.

You remember that feeling in November 2004? That sick, betrayed, punched-in-the-gut sensation that comes with the horrible impression that your fellow Americans are gullible, stupid, bigoted bastards?

Turns out they're not. We're a little slow on the uptake, maybe, but it turns out you can still only fool all of the people some of the time.

EDIT: Turns out that doesn't look so good in my Blogger layout, so if you missed the link at the beginning, the image under discussion is here.

Names have power

2006-03-16T22:10:00.000-08:00

I've been perpetrating a very mild fraud on readers of this blog, which I wish to come clean about now that it's entirely moot. My legal name was not Noah Brand until today. I spent this morning at the courthouse taking care of my name change hearing and the last paperwork, and I am now honest-to-gosh named Noah Brand. Really. I mean it this time.

Visiting courtrooms is always interesting for me. They carry such a weight of tradition, ritual, and seriousness, especially for a huge constitutional democracy fan like myself, but at the same time so much that's trivial and stupid goes on in them. This morning was an interesting example. There were about 20 of us there for name changes, which were scheduled at 8:45. Restraining order hearings were scheduled at 9:00, so things went briskly. The judge was perfectly nice, but I couldn't help contrasting my respect for the judicial system with the utterly perfunctory nature of the proceedings.

I was one of the last ones called, and I passed the time looking at the other people there and trying to guess why they wanted their names changed. Some, I figured, were getting married or divorced, mostly the women. Often, the name the judge called was the clue, as it was the old name. Several Asian people clearly were moving to something easier for Americans to pronounce, including one young lady I was seated next to, who was switching from Xin to Kriston. I didn't have the heart to tell her that was a very weird spelling of it.

My favorite was one slightly pudgy young fellow with his indie-issue hoodie, purple hair and a somewhat thin and scraggly beard. I was hoping he wasn't one of those neopagans who insist on being called Starchild Ravenwing, when the judge called him by the name he was changing, which turned out to be Elizabeth. I couldn't resist checking his posted form when I went to put mine up; he'd decided to go with Anthony, which I felt was a good choice.

It's interesting; I always find transsexuals tremendously life-affirming, the embodiment of negotiated committment values, people willing to risk a great deal and give up even more in the name of making their identity their own. On the other hand, I find otherkin annoying and faintly creepy, which makes me question why I'm totally down with gender dysphoria, but not with species dysphoria.

Enough rambling. Back to ~~practicing my new signature~~ work.

Blogging the beer and burgers

2006-03-12T21:58:00.000-08:00

Posting tonight from the Rose and Raindrop a lovely Portland restaurant with a bar that allows pipe smoking and has a beer list to make brave men weep. I’ve been here the last couple hours with Adam, my producer/brother who longtime readers of this blog (Hi, mom!) will remember. He’s in town for a few days to work on the script with me. Instead we’re working on developing the best possible pitch version of the story, so he can go impress his director and investor friends with how cool the idea is and how they ought to drop everything else in their lives and commit to working with Gray Area on this instead.

Incidentally, turns out the only thing better than the beer at the Rose and Raindrop is the burgers, and the only thing better than the burgers is the cornmeal-breaded catfish.

Why, yes, I’ve had a few beers. Why do you ask?

Work work work

2006-03-07T22:04:00.001-08:00

Boy, nothing motivates productivity like looking at your contract and noting the discrepancy between where one is supposed to be and where one actually is. The other problem with one's dream job, it turns out, is remembering that it's a job. No problem, I'm not all that behind, I just won't be leaving my room for a couple days.

And, speaking of things other than writing I've been doing today, rewatched SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and noted that Gene Kelly's skeleton is made entirely of Slinkies, and Donald O'Connor has no skeleton; he is composed of Silly Putty and elf magic.

Why yes, since you ask, I am heterosexual. Someone email me or something; I'm going to be in this room for a while.

Spec title poll

2006-03-07T00:48:00.000-08:00

Last week, I mentioned that I was looking for a better title for a romantic comedy spec about a guy's adventures with two women, and ensuing complications. Today, after a caffiene-fueled brainstorming session with Sylvia, including such suggestions as THE ATTRACTIVE YOUNG PEOPLE WHO HAVE SEX WITH EACH OTHER, and the somewhat punchier BIG GIANT SEX PILE, we've got it down to three contenders. I'd like to solicit the opinion of the internet, specifically the tiny corner of it that reads this blog, as to which one we ought to go with.

The three finalists are:

IT'S COMPLICATED

BEST LAID PLANS

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

I am aware that BEST LAID PLANS has already been a movie, but I figure if that didn't stop Crash, why let it stop us?

Living the pulp life

2006-03-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

Because it seemed like a good idea at the time, the Pentagon's begun working on cyborg sharks, presumably to replace the commando dolphins they lost last year.

First off, how do you work on a cyborg shark project without looking around and going "Crap, I'm a supervillain. How'd that happen?"

Secondly, you know that the cyborg sharks are going to go rogue and turn evil, and quite naturally the only force on earth that can oppose them will be the long-lost commando dolphins, ironically fighting to save the very society that tormented them and made them freaks. That's just what's going to happen, and we all know it.

I see this as a Pixar animated feature, kind of TERMINATOR meets FINDING NEMO. Crossover audience, loads of toys, probably several direct-to-video sequels.

In other words, while I'm busting my ass trying to write good movies, reality blithely continues to write terrible ones.

As you were.

Request for title input

2006-02-28T23:25:00.000-08:00

So, me and Sylvia have decided to enter our spec in the Nicholl Fellowship competition, once we determine the tricky issue of my eligibility. Obviously, prior to doing that, we want to make sure our spec is in such terrifyingly awesome shape that it inspires a near-religious wonder in all who view it. Unfortunately, I'm not that good, so instead I'm sitting around worrying about the title.

Inspired by a post over at one of the screenwriting blogs I read, I thought I'd throw the question of the title open to both readers of this blog.

The story is a romantic comedy about a young man who relocates to another coast and finds himself in love with two different women, only to learn that neither of them has a problem with being polyamorous. From there, things get complicated. The theme is based around our protagonist learning that the rules for life he's been trying to learn don't actually exist. The setting is contemporary American geek culture, because geeks haven't had a movie about us yet, and hey, we run shit.

The current title is THE SECRET MANUAL, after the hypothetical instruction book for life and love that the hero assumes must, on some level, exist. As a title, it's okay. However, I'm concerned that it's too oblique and sounds vaguely like some kind of spy thriller. Any other suggestions?

I love being sleep-deprived

2006-02-25T02:41:00.000-08:00

In my first post in this blog, I mentioned that this job didn't look to be easy. And hoo boy, it hasn't been, nor is it likely to become so. Which is fine; I actually love it when it's hard. When something's hard to do but you manage to do it anyway, you feel like friggin' Batman. The snag is that second step, managing to do it anyway. Mostly I find a way to pull it off to my own satisfaction, and that's cool. Some nights, though, it doesn't click. I'm getting the words down on paper, they make sense, they express the right things, they fit into the structure I've outlined, but they don't feel 100% right. And if there's one thing I believe about this job, it's that if you don't bring 100%, you might as well stay home. It's not exactly writer's block; I don't really get that much. I can always find words to type, that's easy, but that tricky sense of rightness, that state of existing completely in all the characters' heads simultaneously, that knowledge of exactly where things need to go, hearing the backbeat of emotional rhythm and just having to shake my ass to it... when that's not there it can be a real bitch.

I can imagine a day when, if I'm still doing this job, it could turn into just another grind, sitting down and hammering out the work while wishing I was doing something else. Right now I have very fresh memories of being in a place where I would have been thrilled, thrilled to get a nine-to-five OFFICE SPACE soul-killing cube monkey job, so long as it paid enough to cover my rent, and that helps a lot in getting my enthusiasm for writing going. I mean, I'm doing my dream job right now. That ain't so bad. Thing is, I've heard from many quarters that dream jobs have a way of turning into just plain jobs, not because the job changes but because you do. I can only hope that when I get to that point, I'll remember an hourly mantra of "I hate this fucking job" and that unmistakable feeling of figuring out the dates on which various utilities will be cut off, and having to seriously consider which ones I could do without for a few days.

Writing is much, much harder than the jobs I've been working for the past ten years or so, but I worked those jobs so that I could keep writing, and one day be doing the job I'm doing now. So as enjoyable as bitching and moaning is, I do try to keep it in some kind of personal context.

God laugh at America

2006-02-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

Tim Kreider, in his commentary to this week's cartoon says that Americans are the funniest fucking people in the world. He's right. Say what you will about this nation and its people, we can bring the funny like no one in the history of humanity. The latest proof? Ohio State Senator Robert Hagan. You try and make bigotry a wedge issue to get out the bigot vote in an election year, we're going to laugh at your ass, because this is goddamn America.

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee!
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

Smart people ROCK

2006-02-22T03:32:00.000-08:00

Here's why I love working with a producer who I genuinely respect.

There's a structural, even a conceptual issue with the story I'm working on. This is one of those things that, as mentioned in previous posts, becomes clear during the treatment phase. It's the kind of thing that, if handled wrong, could prevent an audience from buying into our fictional world, and if that happens everyone's boned. There are solutions, some of which I can come up with because, well, it's my job. I have no doubt that a solution will be found, and I'll write it, and if I do say it myself I'll probably do a decent job of it.

The point is that I sent my producer/brother a long, somewhat rambling email earlier detailing the outlne of the problem and some possible solutions thereto. He'll write back when he's had the time to review my points, think seriously about them, and propose his own solutions. And I know for a fact that those proposals will be coming from someone at least as smart and dedicated as I am.

I read screenwriter blogs, books, and message boards. I hear endless horror stories about money men who Just Don't Get It. And yes, my avaricious side hopes to one day be making the big Hollywood money that only comes from working with people you'd like to strangle. But for now, at this exact point in my career, such as it is, I have a producer who intends to support his family by doing his absolute best to make the most perfect possible movie, and who has the brains and training to make that happen.

Maybe that won't always be true, but right now, it is, and I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to thank him.

In which I am sappy

2006-02-22T02:04:00.000-08:00

I accepted a long time ago that I don't know what music causes a person to gain or lose cool points, so I just gave up and listened to whatever strikes my fancy. Which means I've got some Indigo Girls playing, and that lyric in "Least Complicated" just came up, "I sit two stories above the street/It's awful quiet here since love fell asleep" and I look sideways from my computer and my girlfriend's sleeping in my bed, face relaxed, unaware of me watching her, and I remember why there are sappy love songs in the first place. We all ought to have someone who just by existing reminds us why we do anything that we do.

That being said, I think I'm going to light up my pipe, which she hates. I'm only human, after all.

W.S. Gilbert: not a Republican

2006-02-21T02:48:00.000-08:00

Okay, random thought late on a worknight.

So I'm wandering from blog to blog between sentences, and I come across this post on a right-wing blog. Blah blah blah, Democratic party captured by hard left, yadda yadda. I'm having the same reaction you probably are, i.e. "I'm sorry, WHAT?" I sometimes wonder if there isn't some kind of weird quantum reality going on where a lot of Republicans are actually seeing an entirely different universe than the rest of us. But that's not the point.

The point is that the guy then goes into a parody of "Springtime for Hitler" from the musical version of THE PRODUCERS, all about the crazy commies taking over the formerly-reasonable Democratic party. And this brings me to something I've noticed across the board when it comes to political song and poem parodies. No, I'm not going to say that conservatives are intrinsically untalented or unfunny, because that isn't true, but it does seem to be true that THEY DON'T GRASP SCANSION.

I've seen parodies of this sort for years, as I think many of us have, and while I wish I could say that left-leaning parodies are all funnier or more biting or something, it just ain't so. However, they do scan correctly, by and large. Right-leaning ones never do. Never ever. Sometimes they rhyme, sometimes they can even be funny or telling, but they don't scan.

It's been my opinion for years that our political opinions usually have nothing to do with the "rational" reasons we tell ourselves. Something in us just picks a side and then starts inventing reasons that side's positions are right. Factual reality can help, but it's much less of a factor than we imagine. So now I'm wondering if the key difference, the little neurological quirk that makes us lean left or right, isn't somehow linked to the part of the brain that perceives scansion. Some odd genetic hookup like all calico cats being female or all latex-allergic people also being allergic to bananas.

There once was a man from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan
When informed it was so
He replied, "Yes, I know
But I always try to fit as many words on the last line as I possibly can."

Don't get the joke? You may be a Republican.

Comments and blogs, in that order

2006-02-17T01:27:00.000-08:00

I wondered for a bit why this blog was not getting any comments. At the very least, I'd expected my producer to post something to the effect of "Shut up about the scotch I PAID FOR and get back to work, you lazy prick." The obvious answer, of course, was that no one loves me and I will die alone in a ditch and the only ones to mourn will be the wild dogs who discover my corpse is too starved and plague-raddled to eat. Turns out I had the preferences on the damn thing set so that almost nobody was able to post. That should be fixed now. Feel free to tell me to get my shiftless ass back to work.

Tonight, I discovered that reading screenwriting blogs does not infallibly psyche me up to work. The problem is that these guys and gals are writers, meaning that when they post they tend to be charming and funny and so on. Going from that to a rather dark story involving a lot of emotional pain... not as easy as I thought. Still, I persevered, (not with the writing, with the reading blogs to avoid writing, naturally) and discovered this astonishingly good post about gender and writing by Denis McGrath. It contains a link to a book that is now on my must-get-around-to-intending-to-read list.

Water of life

2006-02-16T03:04:00.000-08:00

A word on the whisky I mentioned in the last post. I'm a single-malt man when economics allow, and like most such snobby dipsomaniacs I have a favorite. Me, Tim Powers, Phillip K. Dick, and Neil Gaiman think the best single-malt whisky in the world is Laphroaig. Smoked over peat fires from a species that grows on one island in the whole world, the tortured and distilled grains have learned the story of the peat, and it's a story that goes back before Jesus, before Mithra, when the oldest legends of mankind were the current hot gossip. They say you can taste "the body in the bog" in the aggressive earthiness of Laphroaig, and it's true. All those sacrifices who went willingly into the swamp with cords around their necks because they'd been assured it was the will of the gods... they're in the whisky, hidden under layers of time and earth and craft. The secret ingredient in Laphroaig is gullible Druids, and I can't recommend their flavor highly enough.

I'm having a glass as I write this post, and I'm reminded of A.E. Housman's famous quote: "And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man." For me, though, the profound experience of this whisky is less about God's creation than man's. To taste a really good single-malt is to interact with craft evolved to the level of high art. As Japan did with swords, obsessing unhealthily over every possible aspect of their creation, keeping only the best practices and never accepting less until they created metallurgical miracles unequaled and unrivaled anywhere on earth... so Scotland did with their whisky. This whisky tastes like centuries of evolution and improvement, like the firm statement that "good enough" is not good enough, like man's bloody-minded urge towards perfection. More than that, it tastes like hope. Hope that that urge is not in vain, that with enough work and practice and ruthless pruning of anything but the best, even a water-alcohol solution flavored with dirt and gullible Druids can be made perfect. How could a writer, hell, how could any artist or craftsman drink anything else?

I'm a little tipsy. I'm going to bed. Lot of work to do tomorrow.

I didn't even have to use my AK

2006-02-16T02:46:00.001-08:00

Boy, what a day.

First thing that happens is the mail comes, and with it my contract and my first paycheck. Also a bottle of 15-year-old Laphroaig, because my brother knows what motivates me to write. I sign and return the contract, open a new account to deposit the check in, and decant the scotch so it can breathe. Get some great work done on the treatment, digging up character subtext that will come in very handy later. Then I'm off for lunch and coffee with the inimitable Sylvia, to go through our spec and fix everything we noticed during last week's read-through. It's one of the most productive days I can remember, as we improve almost every section of the screenplay, including turning the worst scene into one of the best. Coming home, I note that this blog's attracted its first comment, and proceed to implement all the changes to the spec, arriving at a completed fifth draft in a couple hours of steady work, powered by one glass of scotch and one pipe of tobacco. Later in the evening, I finally get around to watching THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, and discover that you can put devil's food cake mix in a waffle iron and make devil's food waffles, which are the most awesome thing ever.

All in all, one of the nicest days I can remember in a long time.

Trying not to suck on purpose

2006-02-15T06:11:00.000-08:00

AAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!

Pounding diligently away at the treatment, fleshing out characters' internal states, I just caught myself typing this sentence:

"Both [characters] are aware of how painfully uninteresting their conversation is."

In other words, were this scene to somehow be miraculously shot in the form it's in now, I would be asking folks to pay MONEY to watch two people have a conversation so dull they're not even interested in it themselves.

Yes, there are excellent reasons in terms of characterization why these people would have a stilted, awkward conversation full of stock sentiments and vague banalities. So perhaps I'll get lucky and the audience will say to themselves, "Wow, I'm so bored I wish I was dead, but the emotional tone is very true to life."

I'm reminded of something that happened when I was watching FANTASTIC FOUR on DVD recently. (Not the legendary unreleased version, which was cracktastically awful, but the more recent one, which was just regular awful.) I'd been wandering in and out of the living room while I got a few things done, and the movie was more than half over, and there were bits of it I'd missed. So I asked my girlfriend, parked on the couch, "Has anything happened yet?" She replied that nothing had, and she'd let me know if anything did.

In the name of Not Being That Guy, I'm off to rework this scene.

Six-step program

2006-02-10T02:22:00.000-08:00

I'm a practitioner of the stepped approach to a screenplay that Robert McKee advocates in his brilliant-but-somehow-still-overrated Story, which is to say that first I work out the whole story on index cards, then I write a big fat treatment in which I figure out exactly what's happening, internally and externally, in each scene. I like this because it makes the actual writing of the screenplay much faster and easier. I already know everything that's happening in every scene, so I just have to fill in the words. The treatment is also when I can figure out scene transitions, internal logic, everyone's emotional arcs, and find any false notes.

Scott McCloud, in his justifiably famous Understanding Comics outlines a six-step theory of creativity, applicable across all artforms, that I will now misquote from my dubious memory.

1. Idea; the basic message or theme of the work. What the work is trying to "say".

2. Form; the form the work takes. A movie, a sculpture, a comic book, a dance, whatever.

3. Idiom; the conceptual vocabulary of the work. Its genre, influences, context, etc.

4. Structure; the... well, structure of the work. How it's arranged, paced, constructed, what have you.

5. Craft; the meat of the work. Making sure the dialogue's witty or the stitches are even or the hook is catchy or the prose flows smoothly. Doing a good job.

6. Surface; the most immediately noticeable parts of the work. Production values, flashy tricks, a shiny exterior. Important, yes, but only comes after all the other steps.

Most artists, McCloud argues, tend to learn their art from the outside in, first imitating the surface attributes of work they admire, then learning their craft, understanding the structure of their work, then learning to play with idiom, and finally asking themselves whether their art is ultimately about something they want to say through it, or about the art itself.

The first time I saw this theory, quite some time ago now, I immediately looked at step 4 and said "That's where I'm gonna have trouble." I knew this because I understood what McCloud meant by all the other steps, but structure was not something I'd ever thought about. I've spent a good deal of time in the years since deliberately studying, researching, and playing around with structure, and I think I've gotten a better handle on it than I otherwise would have. Let's hope so, anyway.

This ties in with the treatment issue because the treatment covers parts of both steps 4 and 5, as well as the blurry area where they cross over. Yes, in the treatment I'm working out how the characters change, whether their reactions feel emotionally true, making sure there's conflict in every scene, all that stuff. And that's great, but for me it's not the hard part. It's tactics, and that I can do. Structure is strategy. Ask any of the dozens of people who've kicked my ass at chess, strategy does not come easy to me. So the treatment is my weapon. By that time I've got the whole story laid out on index cards, and I've shuffled the cards into the best order I can, but it's in the treatment that I can really see how the scenes look next to each other. Here's where I find out if I've got any scene transitions that will give people whiplash. Here's where I find out whether my two funniest jokes are right next to each other in the middle, surrounded by a wasteland of suck. Here's where I make damn sure that I've got the emotional experience of watching the movie laid out properly.

Mankind first invented tools because we were soft and tiny and squishy and wanted to eat things that were hard and/or huge and/or sharp. Tools are what we use to overcome our weaknesses and succeed in our goals despite them. So I'm writing the heck out of this treatment because it makes the entire job easier, but mostly because it forces me to work hard at the part of the job I otherwise might do half-assedly. Whatever the final draft of this screenplay is like, it will have been written with my whole ass, thanks to the treatment step.

Also, the treatment's in my contract and I have a deadline. Which helps.

Feeling giddy

2006-02-05T20:57:00.000-08:00

It's official: Gray Area Films (the brand-new indie production company I work for) has another project for me after I finish this one. I'm going to be a professional writer for at least the next six months, and if my illustrious sibling can't scare up more projects during that time, I'll eat my hat.

I'm kidding. I would never hurt the hat.

And now, for no earthly reason, a picture of a baby fossa:

Yes, that's the cutest thing in the world. Also one of the deadliest. Learn more about my all-time favorite predator here.

Someone give Gray Area a few million bucks so I can set up a fossa preserve. My long-term plan is to clone the extinct giant fossa, domesticate them, and keep one on either side of my iron throne, trained to strike down my enemies. My power thus assured, I'll institute a series of careful reforms based on social and fiscal responsibility indexed to a sustainable 4% annual growth rate!

This post proves that when I start a blog to procrastinate, I really mean it.

Read-throughs rock

2006-02-04T23:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, read-through is done, and like a schmuck, I forgot to take any photos to post here. At the last minute, enough people showed up to apportion all the necessary parts. Beer was drunk, laughs were had, notes were made. Admittedly, I wasn't happy with how every line was read, but these folks were seeing these lines for the first time; actors try every line ten different ways for a reason. So that was fun. Best of all, all the subsequent suggestions were on relatively minor points, not "Nothing this character does makes any sense" or "The entire middle isn't funny at all."

Then again, true story from me and Sylvia's first screenplay, before this one. Four or five drafts in, after the read-through party, I'm doing another polish, and I come to a line where Character A is trying to tell Character B about the subterfuge being perpetrated on Character B. Is it at this point that I suddenly realize that, right there in the script, Character A has known about this for two or three weeks, has been seeing Character B on a near-daily basis during that time, and is only now trying to warn him about this. In other words, our entire second act was predicated on Character A being the biggest damn moron in the universe.

I know I'm not exactly William Goldman here, but I'm going to say with as much authority as I can muster that if your plot depends on one or more characters being so stupid they forget to breathe, your plot needs work.

The point of this anecdote is that we'd previously had a read-through with around twenty people laughing their asses off the whole way, and not one of them had pointed out that the middle of the film made no damn sense. Everybody missed it.

So, the lesson learned from that was that read-throughs are great, but apparently are not a substitute for hard work and thinking deeply about what you're writing.

That being said, back to work.

Filmmaking as crime family

2006-02-03T03:47:00.000-08:00

Full disclosure.

Once this blog gets a couple readers, some people may wonder why I got a writing assignment like this with no previous credits and a publication history thinner than Paris Hilton and at least as sketchy. The fact is that the production company in question is my half-brother's creation, and he knows that I can write well enough to provide him with what he needs, and that I'm broke enough to work for what he can afford.

Also he totally owes me for all those times in fifth grade when a friendly game of NES Ice Hockey ended in a fistfight. Which was, I swear, invariably his fault.

So I write, he puts together the talent, scares up the investors, gets everyone paid, and does whatever else it is that producers do. Who knows? Those guys with actual practical business skills, they're all crazy. Not like us artsy types.

Thus, even before I've made it to Hollywood, I'm benefiting from its second-oldest tradition: nepotism. Fine by me. If I'd taken this assignment away from some hard-working writer desperate for a break just because I happened to know a studio executive, I'd feel bad. But I didn't. My brother's been a producer since a couple weeks ago, when he decided to become one. In other words, the guy I know isn't a Hollywood Bigwig, he's just another young hungry guy who wants a break. The difference is he's making the break happen himself.

Terry Rossio, in my favorite screenwriting column ever, says that independent films should be called no-permission films, and I agree. Rather than waiting for some guy whose job depends on beating the box office take for BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE 2 to decide he likes our art, we're just gonna go ahead and do it without waiting for someone to say it's okay.

And really, not asking permission is Hollywood's oldest tradition. The reason the film industry is in L.A. is because Thomas Edison was a raging asshole. He took his patents very seriously, and very personally, and had a very broad view of which patents were his. Basically, if he could in any way justify dicking you over on a supposed patent infringement, you could expect to be dicked. Movies back then, just after the turn of the century, were a shady, cheap, fly-by-night kind of business, and they couldn't afford to keep paying Edison protection money. So they headed as far west as they could, out of range of Edison's lawyers and goon squad, so they could make movies without having to ask permission.

My brother's a producer because he says he is. I'm a professional writer because I'm being paid by a producer. The directors and musicians and people he's putting together are likewise mostly not recognized or lauded by the arbiters of their respective arts. But screw it, we didn't ask them.

A random note

2006-02-02T21:12:00.000-08:00

It's humbling to have to interrupt one's self-congratulatory monologue about plans to join the WGA and the necessity of getting a good agent to go mooch printer paper off a friend because you've just realized you can't afford to buy more.