“Edit” is not synonymous with “fix”

Standard

I just saw the umpteenth iteration of “If only this had been edited!” which I’m not linking to because why and also because it’s always and everywhere. You can’t swing a dead pixel without hitting some forum comment lamenting that There Are Errors Where There Shouldn’t Be.

So.

The verb “edit,” when it’s applied to text, does not mean “fix.” I don’t care what the dictionary says, it doesn’t. It means “change.”

Obviously, yes, we hope the changes we make will be improvements. We’re trying to fix things when they’re broken, correct inconsistencies, smooth out sentence structures, fix verb tenses, switch out that off-key word with a clearer one, whatever. Edits are an attempt at improving things.

However, sometimes an edit creates a conflict with something else in the text. Sometimes it’s just a flat out error. What’s more, as a reader we can’t tell if an error was added in the first draft and missed in revisions or if it was added on the very last pass through.

Hey, mistakes happen, even when you edit.

Godzilla and Ruination Pron

Standard

Walking out of the latest version of GODZILLA, my son surprised me by saying it was one of his three favorite movies ever.

Now, when I was a kid, giant monster movies were my favorite thing in the whole wide world. I stayed in Saturday afternoons to watch all the giant monster movies, even the boring ones like Vs. The Sea Monster, the kiddie ones like Gamera Vs [Everything] and the shitty ones like Yonggary. I even sat through the musical number of Reptilicus. I didn’t know anyone else who liked them and I knew nothing about words like kaiju or whatever. I watched the movies. I watched the TV shows. I daydreamed about stomping through a city, smashing everything in sight.

But my kid has always had zero interest in this stuff. Does he care about a giant egg washing up on a beach, or miniature women who sing to colossal moths, or a burning flying saucer that turns out to be a spinning turtle? Hell no.

But he does love post-apocalyptic landscapes, and this was a movie for him.

Lots of people like looking at Ruination Pron. Me, too. The latest Godzilla movie is for us.

A lot has been made that the big G doesn’t show up until 60 minutes into the film (although you see glimpses in the first few minutes). What you do see is a lot of shit after it’s destroyed. Wrecked skyscrapers. Smashed cars. Collapsed towers. You even get glimpses of a Japanese town left to decay for 15 years. It’s like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game.

My kid… well, he’s kinda sensitive. Seeing a car with a smashed fender makes him sad. Throwing out socks, even if they have holes in them, is like a betrayal. So, when there’s a smashed cityscape on the screen, it really affects him.

That’s why this is the movie for him. Yeah, there are some monster fights, most of which are pushed to the end of the film. Yeah, there are people running around, stumbling into the monsters’ paths through sheer coincidence. Yeah, there are female characters to be: a) a source of manpain b) helper to the exposition character or c) human symbol of everything our fighting boys are risking their lives for. Yeah, the cinematography is gorgeous.

But the real appeal of the film is the ruination. Bring your favorite urban explorer.

Vacation (with pics)

Standard

Last week, we hopped a train down to San Jose to visit my wife’s uncle and visit him and his home city, Santa Cruz. It wasn’t long enough, and sleeping in coach on a train may be better than sleeping on a plane, but still: sleeping in a chair. (The train ride from Seattle to SJC was 24 hours, 20 minutes.)

So, it was not long enough. Few vacations ever are. However, my uncle has a beautiful little house with a pretty little garden (filled with drought-resistant plants, because California) and the beach was only literally a ten-minute walk away.

Pics behind the cut: Continue reading

AUDIOBOOKS!

Standard

Hey, guys. Child of Fire is listed as Audible’s “Hidden Gem of the Week” and is available for only $4 right now. If you’re an audiobook fan (or know one) this is your chance to pick up a copy.

Also, there’s an audio copy of King Khan available. I’m listening to the free sample right now, and I’m flummoxed that more people haven’t tried this book.

Anyway, normal internetting will resume, now that I’m back from VACATION! Pics to come.

Randomness for Mother’s Day

Standard

1) Map of boys names from around the world. I didn’t see one for girls.

2) Huge 3D printer built ten one-story buildings in one day out of construction waste and cement. The video is cool.

3) Sony wages a brutal 35 year war with record producer over their refusal to pay royalties.

4) New Zealand artists create 3D Sand pictures.

5) Movie Scripts Ranked by Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. Hey, the higher the reading level of the script, the more critically-lauded you’d expect it to be, right?

6) What are the most overrated and underrated movies?

7) How to tell if you’re reading a gothic, an infographic.

Cutting back on internet

Standard

I have a whole bunch of work ahead of me and last night my roommate got mad at me when I referred to her as “my roommate” instead of “my wife.” Anyway, it seems that this would be a good time to cut back on my internetting. It’s not going to be a full fast, as I sometimes do, but I will be cutting way back. As usual, I’ll be checking my email at least once a day.

Wish my luck for my book productivity, and if anyone remembers my roommate’s name, please drop me a line.

DC Comics is screwing up its movie franchises for no good reason

Standard

Who has asked me to chime in on the DC comics movies? Exactly no one, but it sometimes helps my creative process to talk about what other people ought to do, so here is the slate of movies DC should put into production, along with a little talk about why.

First: there are three ways to measure a comic book character: By how iconic they are, how powerful they are, and how much spandex they have.

Iconic is pretty obvious, I think. Does the general public, the folks who haven’t picked up a comic book since they were eight, recognize the character on sight? That’s a good thing, because you’re not going to make a successful movie if the only people who see it are comics nerds. If you’re going with a character who is not iconic, you’re going to need them to be intriguing at first glance (in the trailer).

Powerful is equally obvious. Superman is obviously the most powerful there is, but the more power they have, the bigger the threats need to be and the more removed it becomes from the casual moviegoer. Batman escaping from prison to deal with a nuke is a nice, low-level James-Bond type plot. Audiences connect better with that sort of story than “It will destroy the world!” type things.

Spandexy might not be terribly obvious, but I think it’s pretty clear. The more you show a superpowered person in comic book clothing, the harder it will be to sell that to general audiences. An iconic character counteracts this, because general audiences only recognize them by their duds, but for characters they haven’t heard of, a goofy spandex suit works against them. So, no one wants a Superman without his red and blues, but Animal Man can GTFO.

Marvel got around this by introducing a bunch of heroes without their spandex. Yeah, Spider-man wore them, but everyone recognizes Spider-man, but the X-Men got stuck into black leathers (because no one cares about Wolverine’s brown and yellow and Cyclop’s yellow trucks are laughable), the Hulk just wears purple pants, and Iron Man is wearing high-tech armor (painted like a sports car). The Iron Man thing worked really well, because he looks so much like spandex in the comics but in the movies he’s very much not. As for Captain America, his comic book suit was an object of derision in the movie.

So, I’m going to say that DC needs to go with some characters who are Iconic and some not, but the Iconic ones are the only ones we get spandex.

Okay, start with the obvious: Continue reading

Walk The Fire 2 Title Page

Standard

One of the perqs of the Walk The Fire 2 Kickstarter is a signed “title page” from each of the authors. It’s just a sheet of paper with the name of the story, my name, and my signature (in a font other than Comic Sans).

Anyway, my design sense is sort of crap, so I turned it over to the closest designer I know: my 12-year-old son. This is what he came up with:

The gray circle prints up lighter than it shows here, but that’s to its advantage.

The kid did a fine job, I think.

Cop Show vs Spy Show (Agents of SHIELD)

Standard

No, I’m not going to put the periods into SHIELD, because that’s too annoying. Does the FBI put periods in? They do not.

So, AoS seems to be two different shows: one covering the first two-thirds of the season and another for the rest. The early one was kind of a chore… a friendly chore and one I didn’t resent too much, a lot of shows need time to find their feet.

The second show, the one they’re wrapping up the season with, is actually good. File that under “unexpected.”

Here’s the thing: with these shows you can lay the emphasis on the characters, or on the shit the characters deal with. Obviously, in a perfect world both would be extraordinary, but this isn’t a perfect world (because we had that show, it was called LIFE and it was cancelled). So you either focus on the relationships and have pretty interesting plots or the outside threat with a mostly-interesting cast. Everyone in the whole world loved HOMICIDE: LIFE IN THE STREETS except me, because I was so very uninterested in the drama between the cops. I didn’t care if those guys bought a bar together. I didn’t care about that one guy’s marriage or the other one’s health. All that stuff made me bored and irritable.

On the other side is THE X-FILES, in which the two leads were boring cyphers (luckily played by actors with extra helpings of charisma) but the weirdness they investigated was usually pretty fresh.

Anyway, AGENTS OF SHIELD started off as the latter: They tried to give us characters that delighted us instead of ones we could really invest in. Fitz/Simmons were excitable science-loving nerds, May and Ward were badasses with mysterious pasts, Coulson was still trading on the appeal he’d earned in the movies, and Skye was the pretty, idealistic audience stand-in with a lot to learn.

Which was fine, but the show set itself up as though they were a team of cops in a world with superheroes, then didn’t deliver. The pilot was fine, if a little rough, but they lost track: They were seeking a piece of alien tech with alien germs on it. They were hunting a rogue agent with a cyborg eye. They were trying to understand why people kept dying near an outcast safety inspector.

It’s not that they were bad ideas: there was a pyrokinetic in there, a wacky gravity machine, a wacky freezing machine, an Asgardian weapon, a couple of renegade Asgardians, and most interesting of all: an enemy mastermind who called themselves The Clairvoyant. It’s a cool idea; how would you defeat an enemy that could see the future?

But none of it had any zip. There were set-pieces they’d obviously spent money to pull off, like the revolving room in the gravity episode, but I wanted Coulson to be the mild-mannered badass of his Marvel One-Shot short film.

I wanted to be surprised by the characters’ solutions to the problems they faced. I wanted to see Coulson analyze the situation so well that he was ahead of everyone, including me. What I didn’t want was to be just as knowledgeable about the next step the team needed to take as the team was. I didn’t want to feel dragged along.

If they’re chasing a villain who can make men do whatever she wants, the team should not be surprised that the cops setting up a perimeter around the villain’s location have already been turned. I wasn’t. Why am I more suspicious than the trained government agents? There’s no excuse for it except not putting the effort in.

Instead, they should have played out the big reveal that the cops had already been turned, then show Coulson defeating them or defusing them immediately, because [CLUE] made him realize they were not on his side. Unfortunately, that never happened. Coulson was never ahead of me, and that’s a problem.

Then there was The Big Twist, the tie-in with The Winter Soldier, which revealed that one of team had been a double-agent after all. Suddenly, the show stopped focusing outward and began to focus on the team. Ward’s betrayal is still playing out, and last week’s episode showed that the whole team has realized that he’s Hydra. It’s playing hell on the camaraderie that has been kind of dull all season, and it’s making for complicated relationships.

It’s funny; they could have done something like this with Skye straight from the start. Her goal in the pilot is to uncover secrets, and there she is in the heard of a secret government agency. What Skye wanted to do what exactly what Captain America did to defeat Hydra and SHIELD both; she’s a good guy.

And she could/should have been a much larger source of conflict, not because she’s a villain but because she is most definitely not. Instead, her desire for openness is played as naivete and she sheds it quickly, buying into the group culture. It’s a lost opportunity.

Still, the best moment in the whole season so far was when Skye calls Ward a Nazi because a) it was absolutely the right thing for her to say and b) it surprised me. Ward’s response–and his conflict between his loyalty to Garrett and his love for Skye–has brought his character to life.

Shit’s become fun.

Alongside that, SHIELD as an organization is 100% gone. The team has lost its plane, its funding, its backup, its computer/intelligence resources, and its official sanction. In fact, they’re wanted fugitives. Whatever they do next, it had better be clever. If Nick Fury or whoever swoops in and fixes things for them, I’m going to be seriously disappointed.

Story beats they should hit before the end of the season:

1) In the pilot, Skye wanted radical openness. Now she has it. How does she feel about that? How do any of them feel? Not just the loss of their organization and their identity as SHIELD agents, but the loss of power that comes from keeping information secret.

2) CA2:TWS made it a point that SHIELD and Hydra were more alike than the good guys would care to admit. Coulson and his team keep discovering that their organization was involved in shady things–the most recent was that they intensified Mr. Darkforce’s powers instead of weakening them. But at no point does he take responsibility for this, nor does he seem capable of concluding that maybe SHIELD had lost sight of its mission and is better off gutted.

About Those “Big Name” Writers…

Standard

Last Friday, a funny conversation popped up on Twitter. It started with Kameron Hurley, when she tweeted this:

Click through to read the whole thing, but there was also this:

I think it’s worth saying that science fiction and fantasy is a small, disparate field, even on the internet. Those writers whose names you see on popular blog posts or online articles, or who have award nominations, or several thousand Twitter followers? You might be surprised by how much they struggle getting their books out there. Getting noticed, convincing readers to try their work instead of that other author’s, racking up enough sales to keep going and maybe, just maybe someday earning enough that all those hours of writing pay off at something like minimum wage.

Sometimes I think of the internet as a huge cave complex with innumerable caverns. Where I am standing, it may seem crowded with people, and many of the voices I can hear seem so big they echo off the walls, but people just one cavern over have never heard of any of us and don’t care a whit for the drama that sucks up all of our time. And beyond that cavern is another and another, all filled with people that we can’t reach.

The U.S. has a celebrity culture, which seems to be spreading beyond our borders, that encourages folks to assume that “well-known” somehow means “powerful” or “successful.” I’m just saying it’s not so, not with writers. A footprint that might seem large to an individual is probably smaller than you think in real terms.

Anyway, Kameron Hurley has a cool series you should check out, and so does Tobias Buckell. If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, you should. That’s how Big Name Authors are made.