Specnology

History and Convergent Books

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

2011 was an interestingly synchronicitous year for me, reading-wise. As a general rule, I read a handful of historical sci-fi and fantasy books each year, and when I read non-fiction, there's a pretty good chance it'll be historical in nature too*. Normally the books I pick up don't coincide as much as 2011's did, though, and they usually don't get me thinking on a meta-level afterwards.

What started me off was watching Anonymous almost immediately after reading Ink and Steel by Elizabeth Bear. They both deal with the conspiracies and politics around the throne of Elizabeth I, and both place Shakespeare's plays at the center of the story—with reinterpretations of what that role really was. Anonymous states that Shakespeare's plays were written by the Earl of Oxford as a statement against the party line, and that Shakespeare was the front for the operation. Ink and Steel, on the other hand, has Shakespeare writing his own plays, with the help of a couple nobles versed in magic, and Kit Marlowe, who's living in Faerie instead of being dead. The plays are written in support of the party line (or at least the "good" politics), and the Earl of Oxford is part of the faction intent on bringing James I to power in England. Both stories state the Earl is Elizabeth's bastard.

I admit to knowing nothing about Elizabethan court politics prior to Ink and Steel, so don't know if Bear's portrayal is accurate or not—or even if we know enough about the people involved to have a good picture of what sides they were on. Having read it first, though, I accepted the factions as historical fact, which made seeing Anonymous, which had largely the same cast of characters but in different political roles, a little jarring. Why would so-and-so be saying that? Isn't he for Elizabeth? After a while, though, I gave up trying to make sense of it all and assumed the politics in Anonymous were as made up as the supposed Shakespeare conspiracy. After all, the screenwriters couldn't even be bothered to place the plays in the right order.**

I had a related experience with The Hammer and the Cross, a history of the Vikings from the first historical records to the point at which everyone seems to have settled down, become Christian, and stopped raiding other countries. In this case, I'd read an article earlier in the year about how some of those Viking men who'd been buried with swords and armor and gold were actually women. Unfortunately, The Hammer and the Cross was written before we knew that, so while part of me took the facts at face value and wanted to believe them all, because if it's in a book it must be true, part of me knew there were facts missing and kept adding "and also women" during the battle accounts.

I'm writing this post as an educated adult who's fairly up on her (Western) history and so tends to pick up historical fiction and non-fiction already knowing the general facts. This means that I'll notice basic errors, like epic fantasy hay bales, but when writers make more obscure mistakes, I'm with the majority in assuming there was no mistake at all. That in itself is an argument for accuracy of research, no? I read to learn, and I don't want to learn the wrong things. It distorts my perception of the world. That doesn't mean I'm not for taking creative liberties with facts if that's what the story demands, but I'd like the writer to be upfront about it in a foreword, afterword, or in the way they present the information in-text. The writers of Anonymous, I feel, were not upfront about their changes at all. I'd be less critical of the film if they had been.

I've talked before about how we approach history. Our past defines us and guides our actions whether we want it to or not, and I think understanding how history interacts with the present and how different cultures worked and were interconnected strengthens our view of the world. Not to get too self-helpy on you. But it's one of the reasons I think historical fiction, SFF or otherwise, is important, because it takes historical fact and makes it come alive. And *points to previous paragraph* why I think historical accuracy is important too.

That brings me to the last coincidental pair of books from last year. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis, is a time travel story about a historian stranded in the 1300s valiantly recording her experiences and getting caught up in the lives around her. It's about people and crises and life. Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn, is a first-contact story, about an alien ship that crashes in the medieval Black Forest, and the locals who help them survive and who initiate cultural exchange. It has a lot of interesting things to say about the intersection of science and religion, as well as what makes a "person", and the Black Forest setting feels as real as Willis's Oxford.

I find it interesting that two books set during the same time period, both well-researched, well-written, and critically acclaimed, can have such vastly different feels. Willis' Middle Ages are raw where Flynn's are a little idealized, because that's their stories require.The same goes for Anonymous and Ink and Steel, or any group of books set during whatever time period. History's surprisingly fluid, not just because the archeological record can be interpreted multiple ways or because established facts are sometimes not established at all, but because we impose biases on it, rework it to make a point, and promote some facts over others to influence reality. I love that about it, especially when it results in historical fiction, and especially because comparing different takes on the same history is fun for me.

A good writer will make the reader believe that they're truly taking part in the Middle Ages, or Elizabethan England, or eighteenth-century China, or wherever, and that's important and good, but it's also no substitute for primary documents and historical non-fiction. Fiction is lies, after all, even if it's one lie couched in a lot of fact. I get a lot of my history from novels and movies, and from comparing different fictions, but I keep a saltshaker handy, read informed reviews, and look stuff up if it tickles my interest. It's a good way to read, I think. And a pretty decent way to travel through time.

* Or neuroscience.
** I read Marvel: 1602 after seeing Anonymous and was pleased to see the politics were still there, but that Marvel characters had replaced the courtiers. I liked that--although I would've liked Shakespeare to cameo.
*** Neither is Marvel: 1602 but I hope that's obvious.

Great Superhero Read - Marvel: 1602

2012-01-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

As always, here be spoilers.

I asked for Marvel: 1602 for my birthday last year, knowing only the hook: Marvel-verse heroes in Elizabethan England, instead of the present day. Also Neil Gaiman. Knowing Gaiman, I expected the layered, beautiful, intelligent story, but I didn't expect it to be integrated into the modern-day Marvel canon. I thought it would be much more of a fanfic/what-if situation.

The story starts by establishing characters, setting, and the threat that must be stopped, and as the book goes on we meet more characters and get further twists. It's a great all-round read, with requisite superhero power usage and intrigue that kept me flipping pages, but one of the things I liked best was turning a page and going, "Hey, it's that guy! I know that guy!" followed by either "Of course that's what he'd be doing" or "That was an interesting career switch. Huh. Wonder why?"* I really liked how Gaiman wove so many of the Marvel standbys into the story and made it seem right, and how well he made the characters fit into the time period. How well some of the characters fit without needing to be changed.

If you've been following this superhero project of mine, you probably know that I mainly know the Marvel-verse from the movies and internet-fed geek osmosis. This still means that I know the basic situations the characters find themselves in, I know some of the relationships the characters have to each other, I know how the characters relate to their world. (I think. Hopefully.) So it was interesting to see all that being rewritten and how Gaiman handles all the origin stories in a world where technological explanations won't fly. Of course he'd use magic and/or the arcane and instead, because what are superpowers but magic anyway? Plus Elizabethans had a healthy belief in magic already, or some of them did if John Dee is anything to go by. Using magic grounds the characters in their new world.

Gaiman handles the impact of superpowers on seventeenth-century Europe very well all round, but I'd expect nothing less. I'm thinking mostly about the Inquisition going after the witchbreed here, and the fear James I instills in just about everyone with powers. It felt very believable to me while I was reading and, I'll admit, generated more of a sense of wonder than the Spider-Man omnibus did. That was straight-up action. This is shiny, with an open-ended feel not only because not all the Marvel characters appeared in 1602 but also because in the end, the characters have the whole future ahead of them. Anything could happen!

When I said the superpowers in 1602 were caused by magic, I actually lied. The characters approach the powers as having magical origins and the way the powers are described reinforces the idea, but they actually result from the universe trying to reset the Earth after one Steve Rogers is thrown back in time. Therefore, the superpowers are caused by quantum, as Terry Pratchett would say. Which is essentially magic anyway, due to Clarke's Third Law and most people not understanding higher physics. And of course, the introduction of future!Captain America means that Marvel: 1602 isn't just a rewriting, it's a parallel universe.

To sum up: Marvel: 1602 is pitch-perfect on characterization, setting, and story, and hits every note I didn't know I wanted from a reworking of the Marvel canon. There are hidden levels you can peal the story apart to find, and more going on than you actually get to see on the page. And I desperately want a sequel, or prequel, or something to I can see more of everyone's adventures. (Alas, I will probably not get it, even if I somehow manage to buy/inherit Marvel.) I could probably reread the book and pick up on things I didn't catch the first time round, and that's always a sign of quality fiction for me. I wholeheartedly recommend you read this, if you're anywhere near the "target audience" of comic fans, alternate history fans, and Gaiman nerds.

* There were also "oh!" moments pertaining to people's powers, people's relationships, and what America means.

Computing, Holographs, and Medicine - A Science Round-Up

2012-01-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've done a science round-up, which means there's an awful lot of links in this post. Hopefully you're all nerdy enough about science to think that's a bonus.

Most of the cool scientific advances since my last post have been technological. We can produce microscopically thin circuit boards out of graphene, which means smaller computers and hopefully greater processing power. Those computerized glasses might become a reality—not that it matters, because there are LED contact lenses in the works. There's also conductive ink now, which promises to do some very cool things.

There are robots swimming across the Pacific and self-assembling 3D objects that come in a number of shapes, not just one at a time. Holographic TV and movies might become a reality soon too, which would be awesome. We've seen it in enough science fiction, it's time it actually happens. Plus it'll get rid of that 3D headache problem!

A group of scientists has recently managed to create an invisibility cloak that also hides objects from time. Granted, it's not even close to being a piece of fabric yet, and probably never will be, but the potential for hiding things in plain sight like that … wow. It's even cooler than macroscopic quantum entanglement or self-cleaning fabric, though that's pretty cool as well.

What else have I come across? The fact that memory comes in packets is intriguing, and makes me wonder how that knowledge is going to impact psychology. I don't know enough about neuropsych and neuroscience to be able to hazard a guess at what that might be, though, but I feel like I should use it in a story at some point. The idea has potential.

And speaking of human biology, we may actually have a functional antiviral now! And io9 has a list of modern medical technologies that we're going to think are barbaric in the future. I'd like to see stories about people looking back at modern medicine with horror, or time travellers doing the same, or, better yet, people proposing technologies that'll surpass what's on that list. In fiction or reality, I don't care.

I think I'll end today on an anthropological note. There's now evidence that humans left Africa over 100,000 years ago, Which is about 30,000 years before anyone thought they had. This means rethinking ancient human cultures and migration patterns, and possibly other artifacts that don't quite fit where they've been placed at the moment. Me? I'll leave that to the scientists and get on with thinking of the hows and whys of that migration, and any human dramas that might make a good tale.

New Year and Sundry

2012-01-01T07:30:00.000-08:00

So it's 2012 and I feel like I should probably start blogging again. Or at least update this thing and let everyone know I'm still alive.* 2011 was a year. Some good, some bad, all kind of merging into normality. I suspect 2012 will be the same, and I've learned my lesson about hoping to finish writing projects. It never happens, and whenever I think I'm done, I manage to set myself back a good couple years. It's like I'm Sisyphus or one of those math problem snails (A snail is climbing a window. Every day it climbs three inches, and every night it slides back two inches. If the window is three feet tall, how long until the snail reaches the top of the glass?). In other words, if you ask about my novel, I will probably hit you.

Anyway, last year I listed my favourite books of the year—as in "what I read", not "what came out" like most lists seem to be. Pleasingly, I pretty much matched my "new to me" numbers, with 55 books read in 2010 and 54 in 2011, re-read two books each year, and finished two previously started books. I figure I'm pretty close, especially since I'm pretty sure 2011's books were thicker on average. And I did slightly better at getting non-genre fiction into my diet! One book in 2010 vs. three in 2011**. Also eight non-fiction books in 2011 vs. six in 2010.

Here's my best of the year, for what they're worth:

Best Urban Fantasy: Midnight Riot tied with Of Blood and Honey
Best Non-Urban Fantasy: The Girl with Glass Feet
Best Superhero Novel: Wild Cards I
Best Science Fiction: The Passage, closely followed by book #54, Eifelheim
Best Non-Genre Adult Fiction: Cloud Atlas
Best YA: The Clockwork Giant
Best Non-Fiction: The Hammer and the Cross

If you're curious about why I picked those particular books, ask in the comments. If I give each of them a mini-review right now, this post will never end. If you want to know what else I read, the list is here.

As for blogging plans for the new year, I don't really have any except that I'm going to do my best to get a post up every week. I want to continue talking about and reviewing superhero fiction of varying types, since I've read more superhero novels, acquired more graphic novels, and had a backlog of superhero film media to begin with. Plus, y'know, superheroes are awesome. I've also been archiving interesting science, so expect a post on that in the near future. Beyond that … I don't really want to talk about my process and progress with my writing, because that just gets me bummed, but other than that, I'm pretty open to suggestions. Note that I do not and will probably never have a Life to discuss here.

* I am.
** Yes, it's still pathetic. SFF is too distracting.

On Not Blogging

2011-11-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been blogging lately. To be honest, I've fallen out of interest with it, at least for the moment. It helps that I don't have much to say. I'm not experienced enough as a writer to really have anything new or interesting or helpful to say about the writing process. I'm not up to or interested in reviewing all the books I read, not even when they're superhero-related. I don't even have the sort of life that makes for good blog memoir. I wake up, I mess around on the web, I write, I go to work, I come home, I sleep. I see friends outside of work maybe once a fortnight, if I'm lucky.

I'm also having a hard time finding my place within the writing community. Part of me knows that I'm making progress as a writer and that I have enough knowledge of or instinct for the writing basics to be beyond the general advice that most people disseminate. She knows I can do this. But another part of me second-guesses everything, takes note of all the writing advice and points out all the places in my manuscript where I'm not following the rules, says that I work too slowly, that I'll never stand a chance if I can't push out a quality finished book every year. She also says that wanting to break rules out of confidence you're beyond them is the first sign of an overly ambitious, ultimately failed writer. A third part of me insists that I have to be aware of all the industry workings Right Now even though I don't have a finished manuscript and so don't need to know how to query agents, select a publishing house, read a contract, manage a career, or conduct myself appropriately during reading. She's working with Part Two, and Part One is desperately trying to get them to shut up already.

It's not going so well. Two and Three aren't really interested in rational arguments.

So yes, I'm distancing myself from the internet. I'd love to pay more than cursory attention to the writing blogs I follow, and comment, add to the discussion, and play the part of the Writer that's expected of me. (Who expects that? Part Three.) But I can't, and I'm sorry if dropping off the radar looks like I'm ignoring you. I'm not. I'm just trying to deprive Two and Three of ammunition, and not say anything I'll regret later. I may have said too much already.

The thing is, not blogging is oddly liberating. I stopped posting to a schedule to free myself, and not posting at all frees me further. I don't have to worry about whether my ideas are good enough for a blog post, or articulated properly, and I have more time and more space just to be myself and to focus on what I want to do. Yes, blogging is/was largely a Part Three thing.

To the people who I know are going to say, "Don't give up!", I'm not. I'm still planning to be a writer, to be traditionally published, and, if I'm lucky, write a Hugo-winning NYT bestseller*. I just can't do everything that I feel the industry wants me to do and be happy while doing it. To anyone wanting to say, "But you need to blog and network and attend conventions!", no, I don't. I am so not ready as a writer to do that. To do so is hubris. Feel free to say other positive things at me, though, like "You're awesome!" and "Here are blog ideas!" Part One needs those pretty badly right now.

*might as well dream big

Changing Forms

2011-10-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

I was up at my parents' last week, doing general visitery things and being a good daughter. And as happens when I'm home, I got to talking writing with Dad. He's about the only person I feel able to talk over my frustrations with, both about my own writing and about the industry in general. (After all, if you talk about frustrations on the internet, the internet will jump on your head and maybe tell prospective agents on you.) One of the things that came out of our discussions was that my frustrations over my novel not being the novel I want it to be, no matter how hard I try, could be because the novel was in the wrong form and/or not playing to my strengths.

This appears to actually have been the case, because I've shifted the form slightly and am writing again, finally. More on that at the end. I realized something else, though—I see a lot of writing blogs talk about style and structure, about how to write what sells, and about how to fix problems with the plot, with characters, with description, with mechanics. I see blogs talking about how to get out of writer's block by starting something new, having zombies attack the main character, or about how writer's block doesn't really exist and have you seen their post about fixing plot problems? I don't see many, if any, posts about solving problems by stepping back and asking yourself if the story's being told the right way, if it has the right narrative form or point-of-view. Those sorts of problems probably happen less than the other reasons for block, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

I'm not going to talk about that process of stepping back. Hopefully you already know how to do that. Nor am I going to talk about point-of-view (POV) shifts, because there are plenty of other people talking about those. So that leaves me to list narrative forms, in the hopes that they'll spark a revelation in at least one blocked writer. This is probably not a complete list. Feel free to add to it.

traditional narrative - a single narrator in any POV, telling a story; may focus on a character, a group of characters, a society, an age, a civilization…. The possibilities are, as with any of these forms, unlimited.
reflective narrative - technically falls under "traditional narrative", but enough of a shift that I'm giving it its own bullet; the narrator speaks from a point after the book ends, shedding wisdom and insight on events in their past.
multiple narrative - any story with two or more narrators, describing events from multiple points of view or telling interweaving/parallel stories; often gives the story a broader scope.
nonlinear narrative - a story that jumps between different points in time.
frame story - a story that's given a context for being told—a series of discovered letters, an interview, a person editing a manuscript, etc.; will most likely have two narrators, one with much less prominence than the other.
epistolary novel/diary - a story told through letters, diary entries, email, etc.; can be told by one or more people.
script - a story told through dialogue and physical actions, rather than prose.
visual narrative - a story told through pictures (photos, film, drawings, etc.), rather than or alongside prose.
verse novel - a story told through poetry, rather than prose.

Of course, these forms can be combined. I'd say graphic novels and comics are a blend of script and visual narrative, for instance. Reflective narratives can easily show up in any of the other forms. Scripts can be frame stories or nonlinear. You don't need to stick to just one, either, if mixing them up works better.

I can't tell you if you're blocked because you've using the wrong narrative form or if you're blocked because of something else. Obviously. You need to step back from the thick of the story and work that out yourself. But don't think, like I did, that the first form you choose is the only form the story can take. Be flexible. Try out other forms, if they strike your interest.

For the record, I'm switching my novel from a dual narrative to a frame story that drops one of the narrators and adds in another as the "framer". It'll require a whole lot more new writing, but I think it'll be a better book for it, in the end. It's so good to have the words flowing again.

Year of the Superhero - After the Golden Age

2011-10-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

After the Golden Age is … I'm still trying to decide as I write this, unfortunately. I think the cover copy did it a disservice, in that it seemed to promise me one book when I got another. The plot summary is neat—accountant daughter of famous superheroes must help take down supervillain—but it got me expecting a cutthroat story about assembling evidence and a lot of time in the courtroom, when the story itself is more about personal journey, family, and acceptance of one's lot in life. Which is not a bad story, at all. It just wasn't what I was expecting.

After the Golden Age is set in a fairly typical superhero world. Commerce City could stand in for just about anywhere. It has superheroes—the four members of the Olympiad, as well as a handful of teamless heroes. The Olympiad works out of a command centre at the top of a skyscraper, mounts patrols, checks the police scanner, and responds to supervillain-type threats, which annoys the police. There's also a supervillain, the Destructor, who's been a thorn in everyone's side for a generation and has crazy, mad scientist schemes that are "bound to work this time!" even if he works in an escape plan anyway. There do not appear to be superheroes elsewhere, and the reasons for powers existing in Commerce City isn't explained until near the end of the book.

But that's all background. Celia West, main character, accountant, and daughter of half the Olympiad, is more interesting. She has issues centering around how disappointed her parents were that she didn't inherit powers, and she's trying to make up for a mistake in her past. It's not going so well, and when she starts helping with Destructor's trial, it only gets worse. She also gets kidnapped enough that she reads hostage video scripts sarcastically and is pretty good at sizing up bad guys. As the story progresses, she starts taking a more active role in her life and the mystery (because there's always a mystery, we'll get back to that), and learns that heroism isn't just about powers and costumes. All the same, I can't help feeling that she could've been better realized, that we could've seen more of her personality outside of her reactions to events.

Like I said, I'd expected a cutthroat trial story, with Celia tracking down evidence in death-defying ways, and that wasn't what I got. The trial takes up maybe half the novel, at most, and we don't see very much of it, or of people putting together evidence. (They're trying to get the Destructor for tax fraud, not property destruction, murder, and the other things he's guilty of.) The story's about Celia coming to terms with herself, and the central mystery involves who's behind the current crime spree, since the Destructor's under way too much security to mastermind it himself. Or is he? As Celia's tracking down evidence against the Destructor, she starts uncovering hints that there's maybe more to the kidnappings, the Destructor, and superpowers than everyone suspects. As mysteries go, it's a fairly predictable one. I caught a lot of the clues before I think I was meant to, and anticipated a lot of, but not all, the twists. It also has an urban fantasy vibe, which isn't surprising considering that's where Vaughn got her start.

There are some moments surrounding superpowers and superheroes that I found interesting. The Olympiad and Destructor are still effective in their hero/villain roles once their identities are revealed, for instance, and welcome the publicity even. There are some sweet moments in which Spark, Celia's mother, cooks food with her bare hands and such-like. There are some not-so-sweet flashbacks where Celia's dad tries to test her for powers. There's mention of the consequences of telepathy. And, so far uniquely in my quest for superhero knowledge, the accident that caused the powers is also responsible for the protectiveness the heroes feel for the city. When they say they "have to" do their job, they mean it.

Ultimately, this isn't a particularly memorable story. Sure, I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't take anyway anything new from it. Everything superhero-wise (which is why I read the book) appears elsewhere—the nature of heroism, the growing-up narrative, the realistic examination of heroes and their powers—and I don't think After the Golden Age does those any better than the other stories. It was definitely an enjoyable read and a good story, but it kind of pales in comparison to some of the other books I've read this year. Oh well, on to the next book…

Thoughts about History

2011-09-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about stories and history and life the other day, about the sorts of books I read and how I feel when I read them, and about the local history I know and share, and I realized something. For me, there are two types of history. Maybe this is normal, but it's not, but I think it's interesting enough to merit a blog post all the same.

The main type of history is, of course, world history, all the facts and stories we've gathered about the span of human existence. It's epic and complicated, fantastic and scary, repeating and fascinating. It's sometimes hard to separate facts from fictions or synthesize what actually happened from all the varying reports. Most importantly, the people who populate this kind of history don't feel like people. I can read about Sumerians, Romans, Ming Chinese, Elizabethans, 19th-Century Americans, and men in WWII trenches, and unless I'm reading firsthand accounts, nobody feels real even though I know they were. There's an aura of fiction to this kind of history, and one I'd imagine historians and historical novelists have to push past at every turn.

And then there's the history of the places I know intimately, the stories about specific events and people who shaped the parts of my province I know best. While there's still a slight sense that the events aren't real, it's still a lot more grounded. I can point to landmarks or stand on hillsides and say, "This is where such-and-such happened" or "So-and-so could've been here then". I took a walking tour of historic Vancouver a couple weeks ago and had a strong feeling of "yes, this happened" because I could see the streets, knew the buildings, and, importantly, knew that the people being talked about were the same rough-and-ready types who had first colonized the area I grew up in. When I think about this type of history, I have a sense of ownership, that this is my history and something to be proud of.

This divide between world history and local history parallels my reasons for reading histories and historical novels. Most historical fiction I read or want to read, I choose because I want to know what life was like in a certain place at a certain time. The biographies and histories I choose are picked for the same sorts of reasons. I want to expand my knowledge base and find things out. But the novels, bios, and histories I've read about British Columbia—the gold rush, the ranchers, the loggers, and so on—I read because I know the basic stories and want to see how they're realized on the page. I use those books more like a time machine than an archive, and when I'm reading them, there's a deeper sense of "this could have happened" than I get with other historical fiction. I also get the time machine effect through firsthand accounts, as I alluded earlier.

I imagine this is probably a pretty common thing. History's always more immediate when you can see where it happened, or when you can see artifacts. The sense I got of European history, and the ancient world, while I was touring Europe so many years ago was incredible. And of course, local history often has a folklore quality to it. We tend to mythologize important people and events, and tell our children about them at a young age. The biggest hero of the area I grew up was a guy named Billy Barker, who found a motherlode that spurred a gold rush that built a city and drew ranchers into the area. Without him, the town I grew up wouldn't have been founded. There were other rushes, and other miners in the area first, but he's the guy everyone's heard about. I also learned the mythology of the fur trade, the Northwest Passage, and Canada's explorers.

At what point does local history become the more global "characters-not-people" history? How long does it have to be before the cultural memories fade? How much area can be called local? (My schoolbooks mythologized the colonization and exploration of the whole country, but the only bits at felt real are the bits that happened to BC.) Is this mythologizing of history what created the world's myths? I don't know. I don't even know if there's a single answer. But it's something interesting to think about, isn't it?

Year of the Superhero - Captain America

2011-09-13T07:30:00.000-07:00

If you've been following this series, you'll know that Marvel movies make me grin like an idiot. Captain America was no exception. It was fun and exciting and a little bit cheeky, and I barely have any quibbles at all.

(Yes, I know Captain America came out weeks ago and I watched it opening week. I just didn't feel a blog post about it till now. On the upside, this means I don't have to worry as much about spoilers as usual.*)

I went into the film knowing the basics of the character through fandom osmosis and the theatrical trailers. Captain America is a whole-hearted boy scout type named Steve Rogers, who gets enhanced through "scientific" means to become a super-soldier. He has a sidekick named Bucky, and together they fight Nazis. Then Cap, as he's affectionately known, gets frozen, then thawed out later to lead to the Avengers. The trailers also told me there'd be a British love interest and Hugo Weaving delightfully chewing the scenery. I expected Hollywood gun fights and superhero quips, and I got that—but the film was more serious than I'd expected too, and there were some twists and turns in the origin story that I hadn't anticipated.

The film starts with a modern-day scene in the arctic, the discovery of a downed plane, and a suspiciously familiar shield (if you've seen Iron Man 2 and the Captain America trailers). We skip back to 1941 and go through Cap's entire origin story until he crashes the plane. The movie ends with Steve Rogers waking up in a hospital bed and discovering that he's not in ~~Kansas~~ the 1940s anymore. Normally I don't have much patience with frame stories like this, because I feel the frame is generally unnecessary, but in this case I like it. That first scene sets up a mystery and a sense of anticipation that lurks in the background for the rest of the film, and the final scene establishes more or less where the Marvel movie-verse is going to go next. Take those scenes out, and you're left with a run-of-the-mill origin story with a definite conclusion that necessitates a lot of explanation when The Avengers comes out. I'd have less patience with a "yeah, so we found him and unthawed him" scene in Avengers than I generally do with frame stories.

The origin story itself is pretty standard. Steve Rogers tries and fails multiple times to enlist, is taken under the wing of a scientist and brought into a super-soldier program, and proves himself and is rewarded with enhancement. He metaphorically stumbles around a while trying to find something useful to do, then becomes a badass hero who destroys Nazi facilities with a crack team of soldiers. He finally ends up in a one-to-one fight with his nemesis, the Red Skull.

With the WWII setting, the story could've gone a couple ways I'm glad it didn't. It could've been a really gritty war movie, full of dirt and blood and bodies, and make a statement about how awful war is and how comrades become family, etc. Or it could've been a goofy action film à la Indiana Jones, with campy Nazis who never seem to come close to committing actual atrocities and are basically a tame threat.

What we got instead was a war movie that pays tribute to how hard and gritty and bleak the war was at times without really getting into it, and a bunch of Nazis that, while kind of goofy looking and ineffectual in the Hollywood way of not hitting targets, did pose a fairly big threat to our protagonists. Their retro-futuristic energy weapons were a large part of that. If they'd just been guys in weird outfits…

I really liked the retro-futuristic look of the technology. I know that a lot of what I saw in terms of transformation chambers, secret labs, planes, and energy cannons didn't actually exist back then, but it all looked like it could have. I had a bit harder time accepting that with the level of technology displayed in 1941, we haven't come further than the technology seen in Iron Man, though. I mean, there's a proto-type flying car in Captain America! Even if it failed in the film, if Howard Stark could do that then, why does his son only have cars on the market in our universe? Or should I accept that the holograms and AI in Iron Man are in some way the outcome of things Stark Sr. was dreaming up back in the day? I think I'll take that option…

I nearly bounced in my seat and squeed when the cosmic cube showed up near the beginning. I didn't because I was with people who hadn't seen Thor** and didn't want to spoil them. Or scare them. I get the impression that the cube wasn't initially linked to Thor and Asgard in the comics, that maybe it still isn't, but I think it's a stroke of genius that it is in the films. It ties the continuity together, and has implications for The Avengers. I enjoyed the demonstrations of just what the cube's power could do, and I thought everything the Nazis did with it was twice as terrible because they were perverting a holy/alien artifact. Which ties into the Nazi-occult thing, too.

Individual character time… I liked Cap. I was a little worried going in because I thought he'd be either really naive or too much like a boy scout, but my fears were unfounded. He was a solid, nice, likable guy, but he didn't come off as a caricature. He was a person, a person with his head on straight, and a person who grew up over the course of the film.

The supporting cast all delivered good performances as well. I'm a little in love with Howard Stark, who has incredible flair and does crazy things like his son does. I'm definitely in the faction who wants him to get his own film. Peggy Carter, the love interest, was good as well. I was glad to see that she got to be active and badass, but wanted to see more of that. It felt like she was sidelined by the men a lot, and yes, I know that's realistic to the era, but … *sigh* I also thought the romance aspects were a little heavy-handed at times, but believable 90% of the time.

I liked Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull too. He played up the sinister, creepy madness of the character, ending up slightly on the Indiana Jones side of the war movie equation, which is where a villain like him needed to be, I think. This is a comic book movie. The baddies are allowed to be a little unbelievable and cartoonish at times. But damn, he was creepy, and he pulled off the infodump scenes pretty well to boot. My only quibble with Weaving is that he had the worst German accent of any of the German characters. It wobbled. It occasionally went a bit Aussie. The vowels were slightly off most of the time. You'd think an actor of his caliber could do better, especially since he must've had a vocal coach.

But apart from the Peggy and Red Skull quibbles, this was a solid, enjoyable film. I think my favourite Marvel characters are still Iron Man and Spider-man, but Cap is fun and I'm looking forward to seeing him again in The Avengers next summer. I've got a good sense of his character and background now, and see some possibilities for how he'll interact with the rest of the team.

* Not that I ever avoid spoilers, really, but I worry whenever I put them in.
** Yes, I know. I plan to fix this soon.

Friday Science Linkage!

2011-09-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

(a.k.a. Anassa is too tired to think of a better title.)

I have another post up at Science in My Fiction today, this time on mountains, volcanoes, and solar system geology. I highly recommend it, since I'm totally not biased or anything, and then coming back because I've been archiving interesting science articles again.

One group of mad scientists has recently created bullet-proof human skin, from spider goats. I'm now envisioning soldiers, stuntmen, and superheroes with this stuff grafted onto their bodies, and will applaud any burn victim who opts for this treatment.

Another group of scientists have come up with brain-mimicking computer chips. Robot uprising and singularity ahoy?

Yet another group of scientists have developed a chemical to make organs transparent. It's being described as a major medical advance, and I agree.

And on a societal front, we have research on hyenas that ties complex societies to intelligence and evidence that Homo erectus could sail, because we've found their tools on Crete. And the discovery that dolphins don't whistle, but actually have "vocal chords" thrills me to no end.

As does this video, actually. This could seriously revolutionize agriculture, if it takes off.

And on a more generically inspirational note for genre writers, here's a lecture about unintended consequences of inventions and actions. Everything we do as a society, and everything we create is going to do things we don't want it to, for good and for bad, and really great sci-fi gets that. So watch, and write! (And comment?)

Show Me The Funny!

2011-09-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I hit a wall with my writing, and at about the same time I hit a wall with my reading too. This prompted a weekend full of existential angst; the fortunately infrequent desire to throw a book across the room; and a couple realizations concerning my personality which I'm going to try to remember during the next hitting-of-wall.

Basically, the realizations boil down to "I like funny, entertaining stories." It's what I love to read and what I love to write. I've gotten too caught up in what online writer culture seems to be telling me I should enjoy, and stopped paying attention to myself. I'd been trying to write intellectual, intelligent stories with underlying metaphors, and reading a bunch of the same, and wondering why I was getting frustrated. Telling those kinds of stories isn't fun for me, and I'm a great believer in having jobs that are fun.

Cue the existential angst. And then the realization that I should just stop trying to go that route. It's funny or bust, baby.

To this end, I have three projects I'm poking at the moment: a short story based on "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"; the urban fantasy series I've been mulling for a while; and a story set in my superhero 'verse, with a character who's only mentioned in passing. Not sure if any are going to pan out, but I'm hoping they all do. My superhero WIP is currently in limbo. My ~~dad~~ primary beta is seeing how much, if anything, is salvageable, because I'm 90% convinced there are too many flaws to fix as it stands.

I want to read more funny stories, too. I want to stop picking up the award winners, the up-and-coming authors, the postmodern metafiction, the dystopias and apocalypses, the boundary-pushing short stories. More often than not I find them a slog to get through, if they even interest me enough to try the first page. And I want to stop feeling like I'm a bad person for disliking those kinds of stories, because so many people seem to love them to pieces…

So one of my reading goals from here on out is to read more funny books, because if I'm going to write comedy, I have to know what everyone else is doing. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of it, especially not at the short story level. Here's what I know:

A large portion of urban fantasy has a snarky, silly vibe to it, my faves being Gail Carriger, Seanan McGuire, and Ben Aaronovitch.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels have a fantastic sense of irony.
Terry Pratchett writes satire like nobody else.
Except possibly Douglas Adams.
Jasper Fforde writes the most amazingly cracked-out stories imaginable.
Piers Anthony has his Xanth novels.
There's a handful of other comic fantasy writers, such as Lawrence Watt-Evans, Tom Holt, Esther Friesner, Eoin Colfer, and Diana Wynne Jones.
I hear John Scalzi's science fiction is pretty funny and plan to borrow his books from a co-worker at some point.
I've seen Robert Asprin's name floated around.
A lot of superhero stories have a campy, comedic tone to them, which is one of the reasons I like them so much.

I'm looking for suggestions, because I've read all the authors listed except for Scalzi and Asprin, and I know I don't know every book out there. I'm especially looking for urban fantasy and short stories, if anyone knows any? Please? I want to get a feel for who and what is being published, and who's publishing them. My poisoned pigeon story needs to go somewhere, after all.

Originality Is a Lie

2011-08-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday someone told me there was never anything new on TV and justified the statement by listing shows similar to or which may have influenced a show which shall remain nameless, but which is currently airing and which I'm enjoying. I both agree and don't agree with their statement, but refrained from saying anything to their face about it. I save my best arguments for the blogosphere. Aren't you lucky?

You see, there are only so many stories out there. Every show is going to fit into one of those basic plots. And TVTropes has pretty much proven that there is no truly original idea. Somebody will have used that character, that situation, that trait before you, and hundreds of people will use it after you. It is impossible to be truly unique, especially since art is never created in a vacuum. Also, if you look through TVTropes for any length of time, you realize that some of these ideas go back to the start of recorded history, and probably further back than that. They've obviously stuck around because they strike a chord with people. Why shouldn't we expect people to still use the ideas today? They've been proven to work.

Like I said, though, I do agree with the "nothing new" statement to a degree. There are an awful lot of crime dramas, and a fair number of legal dramas and medical dramas, on air right now—enough that my reaction to green-lit show announcements is occasionally "oh no, not another one". Even sci-fi/fantasy shows seem to be borrowing from those subsets (Torchwood, Eureka, Alphas, Warehouse 13, Supernatural, Haven, and the upcoming Grimm). Would it hurt the networks, or the cable channels, to give us more shows without an episodic mystery underpinning? And networks do have a habit of copying from each other, which is why we have so many crime-medical-legal dramas, and why there's about to be a show about 1960s stewardesses after the success of a show about 1960s advertising executives.

However, I don't write off shows (or films, or books) because I've seen the core plot, or tropes, or formula before. I expect them. I expect that the first film about any given superhero will be an origin story. I except that any team of crime solvers will have a comic relief character, a strict boss, a tough-but-fair type, and a hero. I expect sitcoms to be about slightly dysfunctional groups of people stuck living or working together. I write off shows for lack of originality, or rather, I watch shows that display originality. Supernatural's kind of like Buffy and kind of like X-Files and kind of like horror movies, but it's also about family and "home", and it has different takes on monsters and an interesting take on religion. Bones is kind of like CSI with more skeletons, but it's focused on the lab people, not the detectives. Basically, I want to see people take the tropes and plots we've seen again and again, and do something different.

Interestingly, I've seen this "nothing new" argument leveled at TV and movies far more often than I've seen it leveled at books, though the backlash against repetitive stories occurs with both. I know from #ufchat on Twitter (admittedly a very small sample) that people get tired of the same mysteries with the same romances and same monsters. Anything different gets praised or at least mentioned. The publishing industry and reviewers will quite often point out the "different" parts of stories, as will I at my dayjob—and negative reviews are frequently "it's just like X". This happens again and again in film and TV reviews too.

I'm not sure which of my conclusions is more accurate. Does the ratio of books to shows lower the proportion of negative to positive feedback for books vs. TV? Or are readers less vocal about their dislikes compared to watchers? Are there fewer book reviewers compared to TV reviewers? Is it a mix of all these?

I'd like to see less backlash against "unoriginal" work, period. Everyone inspires everyone else and everything gets reused. We need to accept that and appreciate the ways creators do new things with old material—because, voice of experience here, that's really hard.

A Musical Interlude

2011-08-19T15:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not up to doing an awesome written post today, or a mediocre one even, so instead I'm embedding some awesome music videos. Listen to the first three, watch the last two, and have a great weekend!

And for the visuals as well:

Year of the Superhero - Our Gods Wear Spandex

2011-08-15T04:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not just reading superhero fiction and watching superhero movies this year. Admittedly, that's the bulk of my research*, but when I come across a non-fiction work that interests me, I'll pick it up. Case in point: Our Gods Wear Spandex by Christopher Knowles.

Knowles' thesis is that superheroes are now what gods were then. They're fantastically powerful, they save us in times of peril**, and they are "worshipped" by their fans. He gives a lot of information about comic book history and the parallels and influences withs gods, mysticism, and the occult that crop up within it. I buy the thesis, because yeah, I see the parallels, and I think I've run into this idea before. I don't always buy that the support evidence supports the thesis, though, and there were some moments where my Inner Feminist™and Slightly Outer Fangirl™ went rawr. So I'm kind of conflicted about whether I liked the book or not.

The book starts with chronologies of super-beings and evolved humans, detectives, and religious and occult groups (Masons, Rosicrucians, spiritualists, etc.), all of which served as prototypes in some way or other for important comic book tropes. We wouldn't have had Batman without Sherlock Holmes, and wouldn't have had the Asian Guru of All Power and Wisdom™without the Victorian New Agers. There's also biographies of important Victorians and Edwardians involved in the occult (Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) with relevant links to comics.

Then Knowles starts charting the history of the pulps and then comic books, pointing to the first characters who could be called 'super' and noting the prototypes for later, actual superheroes. He mentions the strange and surreal plots, mystic elements, actual appearances by gods, and more that I've already sadly forgotten, and does a pretty good job of tying it back into the chronologies I just mentioned. The rest of the book is basically Knowles leading us from the Golden Age through to 2007, when the book was published, with discussions of landmark works and creators. He mentions occult and religious influences whenever applicable: Horus links to the Falcon, Superman gets his power from the sun like Ra, Wonder Woman is an Amazon, and Batman, Wolverine, and Hellboy conform to what Knowles calls the Golem Archetype.

Unfortunately, there are problems with the text. Most importantly from a scholarly standpoint, Knowles seems to be trying too hard to prove his thesis. A lot of the links with the occult he lists are credible and work in his favour, but others seem to be pushing the connection with the occult a little far. Knowles mentions creators with interests in myths and magic and says that they deliberately put occult themes in their work, whereas I'm more willing to believe that those themes slipped in subliminally or in a kind of "oh crap, how do we explain this?" manner. (I don't deny there was an influence, though.) And he also says things like "Superhero Name was also the nickname of So-And-So Unrelated Creator", which I see as trivia and coincidence and not supporting anything. A lot of Knowles' arguments are based on his own research and opinions, by the way. He rarely quotes another scholarly source and I don't think he ever provides counter-arguments.

The next problem I have is with the book's reading of female heroes. Knowles took a moment in the history of occultism chapter to talk about initiation rituals involving bondage. When he gets to the chapter on female superheroes, he makes a point of mentioning their revealing outfits and how erotic it is to see them get tied up all the time, and links this back to those bondage rituals. Can't a girl get tied up without connotations? I've seen readings of Wonder Woman that have her as a feminist icon until the 60s and 70s tamed her. Knowles has the opposite reading, that she wasn't a proper female role model until she left her powers and lived as a human. The same kind of reading is placed on other female heroes, notably Elektra, who he tears apart for being masculine, dominant, and assertive. Oh, and of course there are a couple mentions that most comics fans are male, with the implication that the female fans don't really count because they're an extreme minority. Feminist SMASH!

Last problem: The Slightly Outer Fangirl™. She was happy to see Knowles say things like, "fans identify with Spider-Man because he's like them—scrawny, nerdy, socially awkward, and dealing with bullies all the time"***, largely because that's why she identifies with Spider-Man. She was slightly unhappy that he seems to think that socially awkward is the only way for a comics fan to be. And then (for a relative meaning of then, because I think this happened first) he says that cosplayers are acting out of the same impulse as Ancient Greeks**** when they dressed up as gods, i.e. that cosplayers are worshipping the characters they dress as; and that cosplay comes from comics fandom. One, I think "honouring" or "sharing love" are better verbs than "worshipping". Two, I always thought cosplay started in, or at least became a Thing in, Japan because of manga—which do count comic books, in a way, but Knowles never mentions them. Three, cosplay's evolved way past superhero costumes, and I'm pretty sure it had done so long before 2007. Do we then say that people who dress as Link, the Doctor, Susan Sto-Helit, or Severus Snape worship those characters? I suspect Knowles would say, "But they're superheroes, see, look look, totally counts!"

The fact that Knowles stretches credibility with a few of his occult link-ins stretches the credibility of all the links for me. If he can't be bothered to try to appear unbiased and/or scholarly about his thesis, then I'm inclined to see that as him pushing an opinion rather than presenting an argument. And if he's going to impose his (older) (male) viewpoint on comics and fandom, I'm going to question his opinions, being, as I am, younger and female.

All that aside, the bulk of Our Gods Wear Spandex is interesting and informative, and can be read as an overview or a launching point for further research. (It's not exhaustive and not meant to be.) Knowles has a number of intriguing ideas and makes a number of connections that I hadn't thought of. I see the history of comics more clearly now, will be reading them with a more informed eye, and don't regret reading the book. At the same time, though, I am approaching the information Knowles lays out with a skeptical eye because a scholar to my standards he is not. I advise anyone picking this book up to do the same.

* I love that I get to call it that.
** Superheroes get more popular during times of national crisis like war.
*** I paraphrase. The book is no longer on me.
**** I think it was the Greeks?

Links and Science!

2011-08-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that I didn't blog this week. That's because every time I sat down to start a post, the post I promised Science in My Fiction was more demanding than anything I had planned. It's on the science in Cowboys and Aliens, or more specifically, the lack of thought-out science. It's up now, which I hope will make up somewhat for the lack of posts, and allow me to write a post or two for next week. Go read it!

And since we're talking science today, here are some links I've collected lately:

Dolphins are the first mammals to sense electricity.

Glimpses of Roman culture, via Pompeii. If you're a Pompeii nut, you've probably heard most or all of this. If you're not, read on!

Map of all the water in the solar system.

Electronic ~~circuits~~ skin

And more links, this time with a comic book theme!

First Avengers concept art

Timeline of the Marvel movieverse

What comics could learn from superhero movies

How much does it cost to run a science lab?

Fiction and Zombies and Mash-ups, Oh My!

2011-07-29T14:24:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to get annoyed by the word mash-up. It's being used too widely and at the expense of other, better descriptors. It's become a buzzword, which means that it's nearly meaningless.

I wouldn't have this problem if the connotations of mash-up were more positive. For me, mash-up means "goofy, silly, poorly thought-out, capitalizing on a trend". The first use of mash-up I ran into was in reference to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—"a Jane Austen-zombie mash-up". I liked PP+Z. It had a good hook, and pretty decent execution. But then everyone jumped on the bandwagon and within months we were inundated with titles. Some of those books, or at least the hooks that pitched them, sounded dubious. "How," I asked myself, "is Little Women improved with werewolves, or Huck Finn with zombies?" The reviews I've read seem to confirm this.*

So mash-up went from describing a blend of apparently incompatible ideas to describing a blend of apparently incompatible ideas that doesn't succeed. The core meaning's still there, of course, but when a good mash-up shows up or a book/movie/game/show is pitched as one, I think people are more likely to write it off. "It's a mash-up," they say, "so it can't be any good, really." (Possibly this is what I'm doing with Little Women and Werewolves, et al.)

And now on to what sparked this post: I've seen Cowboys and Aliens described as a mash-up, and I don't think it is. Cowboys and aliens are not incompatible ideas the way the way regency romance and the living dead are. It's fairly easy to imagine cowboys and aliens interacting, after all, whereas a large part of the hook for PP+Z was how they were going to pull it off. If Cowboys and Aliens is a mash-up, so is Midsummer Night's Dream, which is essentially a romantic comedy with fairies. If Dream were a movie today, yes, I'd go watch it because hey, fairies, but I'd go in expecting it to be kind of bad and the fairies to be not entirely necessary to the story. I'm certainly going to go into Cowboys and Aliens expecting to be entertained, but nothing more—not because it's a Hollywood summer blockbuster, but because it's been pitched as a mash-up.

So what are the other, better descriptors I mentioned? How can we describe fiction that blends ideas without resorting to the shorthand du jour? Option one is to pitch it as X meets Y—the OK Corral meets Independence Day, romantic comedy meets English folklore. Option two is to form a compound noun—alien invasion western, fantasy romcom. I'll also throw out blend, mix, and combination as possibilities. Firefly is not a cowboys-space mash-up, it's a show about the Old West in space, or a space western. Calling it a mash-up would do it a disservice, and the same goes for a lot of the other work that's getting labelled as such. I think more people would pick up those books or watch those movies if mash-up never featured in the blurbs.

My suggestion, then: If we're going to use mash-up to describe anything, let's use it for the creative works with apparently incompatible ideas—Julius Caesar and unicorns, to throw an idea out there, or Adam and Eve and pirates. Anything we can imagine scenarios for, and anything that can be described without using mash-up should be. The word is perfectly functional, but the more functions we give it, the more it's used when it doesn't have to be, the less it's going to mean, and what use is a descriptive word without meaning?

Interested in mash-ups? The Qwillery has a thorough list of them.

* True story: I work at a bookstore and we can't move Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for anything.

Year of the Superhero - Green Lantern

2011-07-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

During university, a couple friends and I often found ourselves doing a late night study-and-chat session in the dorm lounge, with bad sci-fi films in the background. One night, I called every single plot point in the movie within a minute of it happening. "The mom's going to disappear." "The dad's possessed." "That teacher isn't going to believe those kids." "It's going to rain in 5, 4, 3…." "He's going to drop that flashlight."

Green Lantern was kind of like that. The film felt predictable, like the writers had listed every important action/superhero trope and written the script to fit them all, but their hearts weren't in it. They were basically following a formula. Hal doubts himself; Hal is presented with opportunity to stop doubting himself. Hal gets snapped at by love interest; Hal saves love interest; love interest falls for Hal. So on, so forth. Jami Gold has done a great deconstruction of the flaws of the film, with bonus! writing! instruction!, here and here. Go read her posts 'cause otherwise I'd be repeating everything here.

Since Green Lantern wasn't a good movie, it would be easy to write off Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern Corps, and all the space-cop hijinks that surely appear in the comics. After all, if the movie sucks, the 'verse must suck, right? But that would be too easy, and doing the character, etc., a disservice. The Green Lantern has a fanbase, so the comic has to be good. Unfortunately, I only have the movie to go on at the moment, so I'm sure I'll be missing out on complexities and nuances. If you're a Green Lantern fan and reading this, feel free to chip in in the comments.

Hal Jordan: Has the potential to be an interesting character. Depending on the writing, he'll either be a Tony Stark-like playboy without the mad science, or an American son doing good in the world, along the lines of Superman. I'm not sure I'd be sold on either interpretation—if I want a kooky playboy, I'll probably pick Tony—but they could both be cool and complex enough to carry a series and capture fans.

The ring and lantern: An interesting idea, though the 'power of will' stuff feels like the product of a late-night brainstorming session with alcohol. I like that the ring chooses its wearer. I like that the ring isn't limitless and occasionally needs to be recharged. I like that the ring functions as a communication and warning device (I'd wondered how Hal was going to know about extraterrestrial crime). And I really, really like that you can basically do anything, create anything, if your will is strong enough. ~~They could've had more fun with that in the film.~~

The Green Lantern Corps: Again, interesting. Lots of potential. As I understand it, the comics don't always follow Hal (or the other human Lanterns), so we can meet an infinite number of characters, with infinite body shapes, infinite personalities, who'll solve problems in ways that Hal wouldn't think of. And the team dynamics! And of course, because there are so many alien races, from so many sectors, and they fight crime, that means all kinds of crimes, on all kinds of worlds! (I'm probably over-thinking this and the comics won't be nearly as cool as my imagination. C'est la vie.)

Sinestro: Again, potential. He's arguably the most complex character in the film. He's got a stern, warrior spirit. He's a good leader. He wants to be the best he can be, and to fight as well as he can, and if that means wearing the yellow ring instead of his green one, so be it. Which means he's weak and doubts himself, if only a little. I often favour villains over heroes, and Sinestro's another example of that. I want to know more about him, because his backstory and POV are bound to be really cool.

Hector Hammond: The other candidate for most complex character in the film, though a poor one because he's largely shown as "wimpy scientist". However, he does have daddy issues and a crush, and could redeem himself if he really wanted. It's a shame that he was so flat and had so little screen time in the movie, because he could've been a pretty great villain in his own right, instead of a mild threat leading up to the big showdown. I found it interesting that he'd known Hal for a long time, as kind of friends with him. In most canons, that personal connection would set up a major enemy, not a minor one.

Parallax: He has an interesting origin story, but as an ex-immortal alien I'd expect him to be more powerful and harder to defeat. All he seems capable of is sucking yellow skeletons out of people, roaring, and the occasional bout of mind control. I think Green Lantern might've been better as a trilogy, with the Parallax line spread out. Film 1: Hal defeats Hector. Film 2: Hal defeats a bunch of fear-controlled people, aware of Parallax as puppet master. Film 3: Hal defeats Parallax. Or perhaps that would be the three acts of the film, and we could skip the origin story? Anyway, yeah, Parallax is cool. I could certainly see more of him.

The other elements of the film—the love interest, the military—are too flat and basic for me to get much out of them. I like that the love interest was skilled in a couple areas, all typically male, but at the same time, that struck me as both "Eh, really? You're trying too hard, writers and "Does doing man things make her hotter, guys?" She seemed smart and sensible, at least, so that's points in her favour.

Even though I've said most of the main elements are interesting and have potential, I'm not sure I'll go further into the 'verse. If I come across something, yeah, I might pick it up and take a look, but I won't seek it out. There's something about superpowered space cops that doesn't "fit" for me. I have a suspicion that the comics will be pretty flat, pretty black-and-white, and fairly formulaic. And anything with "cops" has connotations of Law and Order and CSI, for me—very serious, not a lot of humor. Part of the appeal of superheroes for me is the camp, the quips, and so on.

All that aside, I am glad I watched the film and got introduced to the characters and their powers. More to think about. Maybe I am writing the 'verse off too soon, maybe I'm not. Like I said, if I see something, I'll take a look. Maybe that'll change my mind.

I Am a Big Fat NERD

2011-07-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

I've seen Green Lantern and will be writing a post on it, but not yet. Not today. Instead, I'm doing an Awesome Science post, because I haven't done one in a while and I didn't want to spam my Twitter feed last night. So here are some links that've caught my eye lately:

All non-African humans are part Neanderthal. I can't describe how happy this makes me, on several levels. First off, we have definite proof of interbreeding now. I was always kind of in favour of that theory, and the periodic announcements of "maybe we did interbreed" got me pretty excited too. Nothing compared to this, though. And then of course we have the feat by which we got this proof—comparing modern human genomes to DNA derived from 50,000-year-old bones. Science is amazing.

A gorgeous Bornean rainbow toad, thought to be extinct.

An electron microscope photo of a hydrothermal worm. Warning: clicking will give you nightmares.

Three-billion-year-old life in the Great Lakes. Except I'm not totally convinced the microbes date that far back. Couldn't they have evolved from aerobic to anaerobic as they discovered a new environment?

Microscopic food photography.

A short documentary on karakuri, also known as traditional Japanese ~~robots~~ automatons. Very lovely. I want my future to have robots like these.

Karakuri from Matthew Allard on Vimeo.

Have you heard of any neat science lately? Share it in the comments!

Rewrites: Practice is Helpful

2011-07-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

I took French and German in high school. The languages themselves have a pretty low role in my daily life—I don't read foreign news, I don't speak the languages at work, I don't write in them, etc. But studying those languages taught me things that I apply to my writing. I learned about cases, idioms, and translation, and how people of other cultures think, which I don't think anyone will deny is helpful to a writer. But I also learned something even more awesome. I learned how to rewrite sentences.

If you've ever studied a language, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, well: when you're learning grammar in a formalized, school-type setting, you "get" to write sentences, paragraphs, letters, essays, recipes, and all kinds of texts that demonstrate or drill in the lesson of the day. In German, for example, any verbs in a subordinate clause and any verbs after a modal (e.g., can, will, ought, must) get shunted to the end of the clause, so you get stuff like "I want to the store go" and "because I short am". Because this is slightly tricky for English speakers, I was assigned a lot of practice paragraphs, which I often got to make up based on a prompt.

… Unfortunately, I didn't always have the vocabulary to deal with the topic. I was prone to thinky-thoughts and metaphors and convoluted sentences even then, and it's hard to convey those when you only know how to find tourist attractions and buy food. Even looking words up didn't always help, so I was forced to stop and think about what I was writing. Specifically, I thought, "Is there a simpler way to say this?"

There usually was. Sometimes there was a simpler word I could use. I could split the idea into multiple clauses. I could use multiple sentences. In really terrible cases, where I'd written myself into a corner because no language is designed to convey the images in my mind perfectly and I'm a fan of hugely complicated sentences, I'd have to restart entirely. I maintain that this process—recognizing a problem with my writing, identifying the problem, trying various solutions until one of them worked, repeating the steps—helped me become a better writer, long before I knew that writing was something I wanted to do.

Examples!

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Let's assume that we can't use 'lazy'. It has the wrong connotation, or the narrator/POV doesn't have the concept, or something. What else can we use, then? Alternate words might be 'sleepy', 'tired', or 'bored'. Not quite the meaning, but they get the job done. We could also use a phrase, such as "the dog who didn't want to do anything" or "the dog who didn't like working".

This is the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This sentence is very hard to follow. Too many clauses. We need to break it up a little.

That cow with the crumpled horn tossed the dog, who'd worried the cat. The cat had killed the rat that had eaten Jack's cheese.

Not the best solution, but again, it gets the job done and we can worry about smoothing things out later. However, I'd prefer to show the sequence of events in order, more gradually, as happens in the original rhyme. That way we can space out the events and maybe elaborate on them a little as we go.

One day, in the house he had built for himself at the edge of the forest, Jack made cheese. He hung it from the rafters in a bag of cheesecloth, and left to gather wood. As soon as he'd gone, a rat scurried up the drainpipe, through a gap in the wall that Jack didn't know about, and was soon nibbling at the edges of the cheese. Jack's cat, Mr. Mouser, saw this and …

We could string that out even further, if we wanted, and turn it into a full-fledged adult plot or at least several paragraphs, rather than the text of a picture book. I'll leave that to you, though.

She gave her book to the girl, and she liked it.

Ambiguous! Who is "she" in the second half of the sentence?

She gave her book to the girl, who liked it.
She gave her book to the girl, which made her happy.

Er… we still have ambiguity in the second example. Trying again:

It made her happy to give her book to the girl.

Yeah, now we have a sentence starting with 'it' but at least we know who's happy.

After a long day of work, in which I will walk around and climb ladders and organize shelves and help customers and clean and put out stock, I will travel approximately 30 minutes via public transit and foot in order to watch the final, ultimate, very last Harry Potter film at midnight, with friends, who'll be holding our place in line from at least dinner time, and it's the only thing I'm going to think about all day.

Agh, another long and convoluted sentence! This one has the problem of too much information, along with being maybe a little hard to follow, so what are we going to do this time? Take out the needless and redundant stuff.

I'm going to the last Harry Potter film tonight, with friends. I'm excited!

Of course, these sentences were deliberately found/written as easy examples. The sentences I come up with in my writing are generally worse and require more trying and more thinking before I find a workable solution. But y'know, that's okay, because the more I rewrite sentences and the more terrible examples I fix, the better I'll be at rewriting in the future. It's all about the practice!

So here's a challenge for you: Find a text—a blog post, a news article, a book, an email, whatever—and rewrite it. If it's badly written, make it well-written. If it's well-written, make it terrible. If it's one genre, make it another. Adopt a different writer's style. Make it your own style. If it's past tense, make it present. If it's first-person, make it third. The goal is to rewrite the work in some form, for the experience and the practice. I bet it'll be eye-opening, because it is for me.

Characters From Life

2011-07-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I noticed that I've begun picking minor characters almost exclusively from people I meet at work. Sort of noticed, anyway. Re-noticed. I've been characterizing from life for years, but it wasn't till yesterday that I sat up and said, "Hey, yeah, that is what I'm doing." And I'm sure in a year or two I'll have the same moment all over again.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not stealing peoples' identities wholesale*, but I'm taking personality types, behaviours, and ways of speaking, and giving them to my characters. A walk-on character, one who only appears for a scene, who maybe gets a single line, gets one trait to distinguish them. The more they're around, the more I borrow from my customers. I've yet to take anything from people I commute with, largely because I don't see enough repeat faces and buses aren't the most social of situations. People don't talk to strangers or move around much on buses, so it's harder to people-watch.

It's highly recommended by People In The Know for writers to people-watch. It helps with dialogue, characterization, voice, and all kinds of things. So if you're a writer, you probably do this already. Maybe, if you're like me, you watched people long before you became a writer. Maybe it was the reason you became a writer, or one of the reasons. A fascination with people and what makes them tick is certainly a factor in the stories I tell.

One of the reasons I lift personality traits rather than personalities is because that's simply easier. A minor character doesn't need to have the same weight as my protagonist, whether on the page or in my mind. When I'm reading, I barely pick up on the personalities of walk-on parts, because what they say or do is generally more important to the story than their appearance, and I'm sensitive to that knowledge when I'm writing.

The other reason I only lift traits is because I'm worried about someone I know reading the book and recognizing themselves. Call me paranoid but I'd rather not be sued for defamation of character, or anything else. Then again, lifting a specific, uncommon trait could still bring down a lawsuit, but so far, I haven't had a minor character demand anything more than a generic trait of a demographic. A high-powered businesswoman who snaps at store clerks who ask her to get off the phone is a completely different animal from the woman who comes every few weeks to talk to me about vampire novels, because we've established that I know more than my coworkers on the subject.

Watching people also means less research for me in other areas. I've met people who conform to stereotypes, people who don't conform, and people who only conform until you get to know them. When I'm creating characters I don't have to work at avoiding stereotypes as much as a result, and can create deeper, more layered people. I can base my characters on people I've encountered instead of starting from scratch—and yes, that includes main characters. Of course, I still have to make sure that unwanted stereotypes haven't crept in, because that's the 21st-Century responsible thing to do, but again, I have a knowledge base that includes non-stereotypes so there's less research needed.

I'm not a Person In The Know by any reckoning, but I do recommend that if you write, you should make a habit of noting what people around you do. It is helpful, if only because it makes populating scenes a lot easier. Need someone to bump into the protagonist on a crowded street? Need a redshirt? Need an amusing byplay to lighten the mood? You'll have a list of people and situations you can stick in, and won't have to dredge your mind. And of course I recommend going for generic traits or people who don't really know you, over specific traits and people who do, but bear in mind that I'm biased because that's what I do.

Where do you get your characters from? Do you people-watch? Do you share my paranoia?

* that I'm aware of

Year of the Superhero - Ironman

2011-06-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

Most superheroes are presented as physical weaklings who become strong, and often American stereotypes to boot. They gain powers, they gain a motive, they fight bad guys, they get a costume, they fight bad guys, roll credits. Tony Stark, on the other hand … well, we can't deny he's an American stereotype, but he's about as far from the squeaky-cleanness of Clark Kent as it's possible to get. He's a hard-drinking, hard-partying, irresponsible, womanizing weapons manufacturer. He should be unlikeable. He shouldn't be someone we look up to. And yet…

I think it was a smart decision to humble Tony at the very start of the film. Afghani insurgents blow him up and capture him for nefarious purposes, and thus allow Tony to see his all-American Patriotic Weapons in enemy hands. That would break most people, and depending on how you read the film it may break Tony too. Suddenly Tony's brought down to the level of the common man and given a choice—give in to the insurgents' demands, or invent something that would allow him to escape. And that's where we see his strength. Tony Stark presents as a playboy, but he's got principles that he stands by, and he stands up to authority, both classic superhero traits. (Of course, Tony stands up to positive authority too….)

Some superheroes fight individual villains with individual motives—the Green Goblin wants Spider-Man humbled and killed, Kraven wants to prove his prowess as a hunter, Doc Oc wants to continue his experiments and get revenge. Some superheroes fight individual villains with larger, more widespread motives—the Joker wants ultimate control of Gotham's underworld, Loki wants control of Asgard and to prove his worth, Lex Luthor wants money. And then some superheroes fight individual villains who are representative of larger forces, and that's Ironman, at least in the first movie. He's a weapons manufacturer who fights terrorism and a corporate American who fights corporate America. In this era of wars and politics and Americans shouting their own praises and a lot of the world (Americans included) upset with the wars, politics, and shouting, Tony Stark is somebody we can get behind.

Of course, that's not the only reason why I like Tony Stark. I also like him for his crazy, manic Tony Stark logic (Insurgents still have my weapons, so I'm going to build a supersonic metal suit with an EMP and a flamethrower), his ability to fast-talk everyone around him, and the chemistry he has with Pepper Potts. More on that in a sec. Also, since I might as well admit to being occasionally shallow, Robert Downey Junior takes off his shirt a couple times.

Earlier this week I had a conversation on Twitter with @AmaliaTd and @SuSmithJosephy about superheroines as treated by Hollywood, specifically the fact that no matter how awesome they are in print, they're weakened on film and turned into damsels in distress more often than not. Ironman's the rare beast where strong women get to be secondary characters and do stuff in their own right. Pepper Potts, Tony's personal assistant, while admittedly the only woman in most of the film, gets things done, outmaneuvers Tony on several occasions, doesn't take his BS, deals out snark of her own, and has an important role in the climax. In a sense you could say she saves Tony's life. And then Tony doesn't win her heart at the end, not quite. Admirable, in a Hollywood film. I seem to remember the same strong women thing going on in Ironman 2, but since I've still only seen it once, I'll hold off on commenting.

Ironman also feels like the most science fictional superhero 'verse I've encountered so far. Most superhero worlds have some aspect of science fiction to them (mostly mutated DNA and advanced technology), but Ironman takes things a step further. Tony Stark's a genius inventor, after all. He has a robotic house, several lab robots, several Ironman suits, holographic blueprint programs, and of course, he also as the arc reactors. A lot of the stuff is, if not possible today, nearly possible, and that manages to make the film simultaneously "gosh wow cool future!" and grounded in reality. I've seen similar technology on Youtube.

(Yes, I know that Tony Stark's world is also the world of the X-Men, Spider-Man, Thor, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four, all of which definitely have science fiction elements, but somehow, even with the Marvel Studios continuity, Tony's Malibu home seems more advanced and real than anywhere else except maybe Asgard.)

I'm not as hooked on Ironman/Tony Stark as a character as I am some of the other Marvel characters—I'm not very likely to pick up an Ironman anthology this year—but I've yet to watch the film without getting a splitting grin within a couple minutes. And I have hopes that the humor, pacing, and characterization in Ironman find their way to The Avengers, because they'd make that movie awesome. Since Joss Whedon's helming, I may actually get my wish. Also, I really do need to acquire Ironman 2….

Tolkien and Me

2011-06-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

The first novel I remember being read as a bedtime story was The Hobbit.

The first novel I remember reading was The Hobbit. I finished it, then turned back to "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit." I still have that edition. It's well-worn.

The Lord of the Rings was also a bedtime story. I can still remember the tune Dad sang for Tom Bombadil's song, though I think the elvish songs were read as poetry. I'm not sure I understand everything in the book, but I certainly enjoyed it.

I have an unused Tolkien diary from 1995 illustrated and signed by John Howe. That isn't as impressive as it sounds. Howe went to high school with my dad.

Dad had a bunch of Tolkien art that used to be calendars back in the 1970s. Some of the images were as I pictured the scenes. Many weren't. I'm not a fan of the Hildebrandts. I'm only somewhat a fan of Nasmith.

I have seen the Bass-Rankin Hobbit twice.

One summer—I think I was twelve—my family roadtripped across the Prairies to rendezvous with family in Winnipeg. As one does when one is a writer, Dad scheduled readings in bookstores in most of the cities en route. In the McNally-Robinson in Saskatoon, I found a fairly cheap boxed set of The Lord of the Rings, and begged money off my mom to buy it. Guess what I read for the rest of the trip?

In grade ten, I spent a glorious lunch period clustered around a table in the library, debating with the other kids who ate lunch in the library which hobbit in that promotional photo was Frodo. I'm pretty sure I was arguing for Dominic Monaghan. Several subsequent lunch hours were spent talking Tolkien.

In December 2001, my whole family drove into town to see Fellowship of the Ring in the big, fancy, first-run theatre. (I say big and fancy because it had carpet and five screens, and because we'd recently moved from a different town, which had a single-screen, second-run theatre. Ah, city living!) Even Mom and my sister enjoyed it, though neither of them were big fans of the book and Mom kept asking who the people were. We repeated this ceremony for the next two films.

The first half of my first year of university coincided with the hyping up of Return of the King. I spent much more time online looking at production diaries and movie rumors than I probably should've, and also managed to discover internet fandom at the same time, though I didn't realize it was a Big Thing until several years later. To prepare for Return of the King, I also rewatched the other two films and reread the novels, on top of my assigned reading list. It's entirely possible my roommate thought I was insane.

I own the theatrical editions. I own the extended editions. I have watched each at least twice, including all the extras. I'm slightly ashamed to say I've only listened to the actor commentaries, and not the post-production and art design ones. The extended editions are by far the best, and I agree with many fans that what Peter Jackson changed in The Two Towers was upsetting, disappointing, and unnecessary. I have seen at least three documentaries on Tolkien and his works, and one documentary on John Howe.

To date, I have made three abortive attempts to read The Silmarillion.

I need to reread The Hobbit before the movie comes out. I should probably also reread LOTR because it's been a few years.

And none of that, not as a kind of weird little girl and not as a bigger teenage fan, not as an adult who's been tracking The Hobbit's progress via the internet, has excited me as much as this photo:

(Entertainment Weekly)

We have a Bilbo! Yay! This movie cannot get here fast enough.

Things What I've Been Doing

2011-06-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

I know I've been absent a bit lately, both here and on Twitter. (Okay, fine, one "missed day" of blogging isn't exactly absent, but it feels like it to me.) My excuse? I've been busy, and I haven't had a lot of ideas for blog posts. I should probably do another Year of the Superhero post soon—either for Green Lantern, when I see it, or something I've previously seen.

What I have been busy with? Well, in the last few weeks I have…

Seen X-Men: First Class. It was fun, and gave some interesting backstory to the previous movies, and showed a whole other side of Professor X. I don't regret watching it by any means, but neither do I feel the urge to blog about it at length. There isn't much in it, thematically or character-wise, that didn't crop up in the original trilogy.
Seen Wicked, which was also fun and which I also didn't regret seeing, but I'd been expecting something more, based on the fandom. I thought the book was kind of meh when I read it a few years ago, but it tells a better story and you get a better sense of the characters. The musical felt like they'd condensed the plot down to the bare minimum and lost a lot of the characterization at the same time. I'm not sure I would've followed the musical well if I didn't already know the story. Also, perhaps I'm spoiled because I grew up with Rogers and Hammerstein, Disney, and various other "classic" musicals, but I was expecting more to be going on with the minor characters than there was. More story.
Edited for money. Twice! Dad had a manuscript of poems that needed to be … typeset … I think it was, but the publisher didn't have time to copyedit, so guess who got to do that? It was always amaze me, I think, that experienced writers can still make simple punctuation errors. Also, a family friend puts together the company magazine each year, and in the name of nepotism, I do most of the line-editing. We're right in the thick of things now, which is why I have…
Not done a lot of writing. Also, I'm stuck. If anyone has suggestions for what a young man would do to a friend he's mad at, because the friend put him in a very uncomfortable situation by promising it wouldn't be uncomfortable? He's not the sort for lots of physical violence (he might punch the guy once), but everything else I can think of is coded as female or childish. Sigh.
Watched episodes of House and Sanctuary. Since editing mode generally means I'm not in writing mode, and since I've had a blargh over the weekend, I've been watching TV by computer until I'm wound down enough after work to sleep. Not much to say on this point beyond that, except that watching House while eating isn't an inspired idea.
Unpacked boxes. Turns out that 6 years is about how long my parents are willing to store their kids' stuff. A couple weeks ago Dad drove 10 boxes down to me, and I've been picking away at them, getting everything sorted out. This has been an exercise in both Mess (piles of packing paper everywhere) and Nostalgia ("Hey, forgot I had that!"). A lot of this stuff is going to be boxed back up, but I need to see what all I have before that happens. Hence the continuing piles of paper and the stacks of empty boxes.
Read my 24th book of the year. Just wanted to say that. Also, acquired two more, because my bookshelves aren't quite overflowing yet.
Gained a backlog of blogposts. If you've posted in the last couple weeks, I probably haven't read it yet. I'm working through the list, though.

So that's been my life. What's new with yours? Anything exciting?

Accuracy and Continuity

2011-06-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a book right now. (I know, this isn't news.) It's hard sci-fi, but the sort I like, which means the scientific details and speculation don't revolve around computers and spaceships. I'm enjoying it. It's fun. I may have stayed up too late last night to keep reading. However, there's one minor aspect of the story that bugs me whenever it shows up, and which pulls me out of the story as a result.

Let's say you've got an alien. It's humanoid, but because of the shape of its vocal tract, it can't produce one of the sounds found in English. You make a point of telling your readers this, with demonstrations. Yet a couple chapters further on, you have dialogue in which this alien is producing that sound, and you introduce an alien character whose name, in her own language (i.e., not English), has the sound as well. Um. I know linguistics isn't the author's speciality, but really, a little bit of thought on the part of the author or their editor should have caught that.

This is why accuracy and continuity (and research) are good things.* I'm willing to forgive a lot of things as a reader, and I'm willing to forgive this in the long run because it's a minor detail and I'm liking the book, but huge errors and glaring lacks of research are never fun. I don't like dropping out of the story like that. I expect authors to know at least as much as I do, especially since they research and all. I'd imagine I'm not alone in this—which is why writers should research and check for continuity even for small things. I would've caught the speech sound thing, so why couldn't they?**

I know facts get missed, research gets dropped due to time constraints, and authors think, "Nobody'll notice!" when in fact, someone always does. I am as guilty of that as the next writer, and am sure I'll be getting all sorts of … interesting fanmail when I'm finally published. If I want to be absolutely perfect on every front, I will never finish researching, let alone writing. At some point I'll have to start fudging things. (Let's not get into my angst over that, except to say yes, I'm angsting, and there's an interview I need to do that I'm terrified about.) But I still maintain that small details aren't hard to verify, and large details should be verified as much as possible—but who wants interesting fanmail?

* Not to say that the author in question didn't do research because man, did he!
** There are some who'd say I have high expectations. Me? High expectations? Never! Perish the thought.

A Sense of Place

2011-06-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

I wrote this post for two reasons. I went home last week*, and I've been reading. Home's kind of a fluid concept, you see. It's my apartment, my neighbourhood, my city, my home region, and my parents' house, which is what I mean in this case. My family's moved six times that I remember, though the last two houses I haven't lived in as much as visited occasionally. I'm most strongly bonded to the Cariboo, because that's where I spent the greater part of my childhood. It's cattle country, forest country, gold rush country, small-town Canada. I could wax poetic, but I won't unless I'm begged to in the comments. Point is, when I'm asked where I'm from, I don't say "Vancouver" and I don't say "Keremeos", I say "Williams Lake" because that's where I graduated from, and when I'm seized with homesickness or want to show off my roots to my friends, I pull up pictures of grasslands, snow, fir and spruce forests, and rodeos.

How does this tie into reading? "Home" is a setting. It's important to every character. And the location they're in now is also important, but in a slightly different way. "Home" shapes a person, defines their values and outlook and attitudes. The current setting may do the same, especially if it doubles as "home", but it provides a lot more too—dangers, hangouts, classes, ambience. You know, those background things that contribute to the story.

I could veer off now and talk about how where a character's from shapes who they are and how they'll approach the current setting and situation, but that's a big and messy topic. Maybe I'll tackle it later, maybe I won't. Instead, I want to talk about the three degrees of setting that I've noticed: background, descriptive, and realized.

Background setting is the sort you barely notice. Sometimes it's a sign that a writer isn't trying or is just starting out. Sometimes it's not something that's necessary to the scene/chapter/book. For instance, "I turned left into an alley" may not need a lot of description because most people have seen an alley before. Same with "We landed at JFK, found our luggage, and hailed a taxi" and "My jerk of an ex was at the laundromat when I got there." The crowds at the airport and the color of the walls would slow the transition down, and the smell of soap may not even register to someone focussed on another person.

Setting becomes a kind of shorthand in those instances, and that's cool. But when a writer says, "This book is set in New York" but doesn't give any sort of local flavor, doesn't recognize that the city has a culture (or twenty), that's also background setting. At a story level, merely giving a nod to setting isn't good. Readers can't picture everything, and if a setting just gets lip service, there's a good chance the writer didn't research—which means there'll be mistakes. Imagine a NYC where everyone drives everywhere, has the same accent, has the same fashion sense, is middle-class, and can afford a large apartment… Yeah.

Descriptive setting is one level above that, and is, at least in the sorts of books I read, the most common. There's a sentence or two about every location, and information about the larger setting (city, country, era) worked in in small chunks. I get a sense that the writer's done the research, and I have enough info to picture a scene in my head. I also get character information out of the descriptions—how someone decorates their apartment or describes a setting tells volumes.

On the scene level, we're talking about things like "The kitchen was bright and sunny. Two green enamel pots sat on the wood-burning stove, and a pie was cooling on the lace-trimmed window ledge." and "Rain poured down on the city of Ithyra, funneling off the photovoltaic roofs and forcing the cars to ground level. The climate controller was unaccountably offline and nobody knew why." These kinds of descriptions set the mood for the scene, and prime readers for what's coming. You wouldn't expect the kitchen scene to include ninjas or gun battles, and you wouldn't expect a heartwarming story in the Intrepid British Youngster vein to take place in Ithyra.**

On a book level, all those smaller descriptions add up to say, "This book is set in Place and Time and the writer knows what they're doing. They've even done research and stuff. Can't you picture this place?" but that's about as far as they go. Books where descriptive setting is the upper limit are great fun. They're interesting and educational. You can't entirely drop the plot into a different setting and have it work. But at the same time, descriptive setting books don't transport me.

Realized setting transports me. It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things, unfortunately, but basically, all the descriptive setting stuff blends with the story and the characters and the dialogue to give the reader a sense of actually being in Place and Time. It's inconceivable that the story could be anywhere else. It takes an incredible amount of work to pull off, but it's so very, very worth it. I'm talking about books like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray, and Tolkien (to name some well-known examples), which leave me in a puddle of writerly goo gibbering about wanting to write like that when I grow up. And I do want to, really, that would be fantastic—but I'm not there yet, so I'm forgoing examples. To give some would probably mean writing an entire book anyway, due to the nature to realized settings, and … yeah, working on that. Someday.

Note that I'm not talking only about fiction, though that's where setting's most obvious. I've read memoirs and event histories where descriptive setting is all that's needed, and I've read memoirs and event histories where I'm in that place while the action is happening. It's pretty cool, getting a sense of what it was like living there and then. And I've also read non-fiction that's about facts and arguments rather than stories (a socioeconomic book comes to mind), and setting doesn't factor into those much at all. It all depends on subject matter and context—but if you're telling a story and you're not doing anything with setting, you should get on that. It's important.

* Hence the lack of posts, if anyone was wondering.
** Though more power to you if you pull that off. Intrepid Youngster sci-fi would rock.

Year of the Superhero - Amazing Spider-Man

2011-06-06T15:05:00.001-07:00

A couple weeks ago I signed a copy of Amazing Spider-Man Volume 2 out of the public library. Reading it was an interesting experience. I’m mainly familiar with superheroes through movies, after all, with a smattering of TV shows and fanworks filling in gaps. This means that Tobey Maguire’s Spiderman is the baseline for my understanding of the character, and that I’ve always accepted the sequence of events in the movies as the way those events happened in the comics. So yeah, the comics opened my eyes.

A few things struck me right off. Where I jumped into the story in Vol. 2, Spider-Man had already been around for a while, and his powers, hangups, origins, and several major recurring villains had already been established—so I don’t know for sure how close the film stuck to the canon origin story. I can tell you that while the Green Goblin’s origins translate to the silver screen well, they appear much, much later in the comics than his introduction as a villain. I was almost done with the omnibus (so, about 2-3 years into the run) when I learned them. Doc Oc’s origins appear to be in Vol. 1, as do the Sandman’s. Venom and the Hobgoblin don’t feature this early in the comic canon, so I can’t comment there.

Everyone’s character, just about, is recognizable between the comics and the films, the exceptions being Harry Osborne, who’s introduced in the comics as a jerk and a bully; Gwen Stacy, who wants to like Peter but keeps getting mad over accidental brushoffs; and Mary Jane Watson, who the comics have a classic 60s party girl who says things like ‘groovy’ and ‘daddy-o’ and the films have as a determined yet vulnerable girl from an abusive home. Are the film characterizations from one of the Spider-Man reboots? Or are they unique to the movies?

I mentioned in my discussion of the Spiderman movies that one of the things I like best about Spider-Man is how he never seems to catch a break. That’s in the comics too, of course. It’s too intrinsic to his character not to be. But comic-Peter seems to have it rougher, in that there’s more time to spend on his lack of money and social problems, and easier, in that film-Peter always seems to need money while comic-Peter only needs to worry about funds when it’s important to the plot, and never seems to need to scrounge for cash for his web slingers, tracking devices, or costume materials. For that matter, the bad guys rarely worry about money in either medium, even when the plot involves a heist. However, that’s kind of expected of comic book baddies, I think. It’s certainly part of the quirky charm of the medium.

Speaking of quirky charms, I want to talk about the dialogue for a sec, the witty banter especially. There’s an awful lot of it. It can go on for pages at a time and generally includes bad puns—and yet it gets across a fair bit of characterization all the same. There’s a sense of bravado in Spider-Man’s quips, as though it’s his defense mechanism and if he stops quipping, he won’t be able to enter a fight or handle himself while he’s in one. There are enough ‘hey, that gadget was expensive!” lines from him to reenforce his poverty. We also get a sense of his intelligence, through some of the things he references. The villains’ quips tend to be a bit more bombastic and grandstanding—”Now I have you! You won’t get away! Today, I finally defeat Spider-Man!”—but still, there’s enough variation between the different villains to get a sense of their character. (I’m ignoring the dated language, since that’s not relevant to the plot of the comics at all, but it certainly lends something to the reading experience as well.)

I talked to a comic-reading friend when I was just about done the omnibus and mentioned how the quips, while cool, where kind of wearing. She said, “You know there’s so many of them between Stan Lee had to hit a certain word count to get cheaper shipping, right?” Funny how a small thing like that can have such a big influence on how people perceive superhero universes, isn’t it? I can’t imagine a world where no superhero has a witty comeback and no villain monologues.

I also noticed during my reading of the comics that they are an incredibly male medium, or at least they were during the 60s when these issues were first printed. On one side, there are the fights and explosions and action. On another, there are Peter Parker’s girl problems and string of girlfriends/love interests. On a third, there’s his general geekiness which I imagine was designed to make him an everyman, and which probably had an effect on why geeks in particular like comics and superheroes. There’s also a fair bit of morality slathered throughout the comics—Peter’s the man of the house and it’s his duty to care for his elderly aunt; he’s a good boy so calls home when he’s running late; he knows how to treat a lady—and a fair bit of ribbing and self-referential moments from Stan Lee and the other creators.* Stuff like, “In case you were worried this wasn’t a Spider-Man comic after all” and “Chee! Why do they always have to shoot at me?” I see that as a guy-to-guy thing, not a guy-to-girl or girl-to-girl.

I’d also imagine that if a woman’d written Spider-Man in this era, there’d be a lot more empowered female characters and fewer female stereotypes. Of the three young women/girlfriends we meet during Vol. 2, one is a secretary, one is a wealthy college girl and model, and one is an aspiring actress. Betty-the-secretary and Gwen-the-student both seem to define themselves in relationship to the men around them. Mary Jane was only introduced in the last couple issues of the volume, so I can’t say if she’s the same, but my guess is she is. There are notably no female villains, nor are there female henchmen. The only other major recurring woman in Spider-Man is Aunt May, who’s frail and needing care, and is otherwise a pretty standard mother-figure. She often comes across as clingy, to the point of delusion at a few points. How can she not see that her college-aged nephew doesn’t need to be coddled as if he were six? But hey, her interactions with Peter provide him with some good angst, so I’m willing to go with it.

One last thing: the formulaic structures of these comics is deceptive. I tend to think of superhero comics as consisting of “bad guy shows up, hero fights him, hero loses, hero rallies, hero wins” and being stand-alones. You can pick up any issue and nothing would’ve changed from the last time you did. And this is partly true, at least with Spider-Man. You’ll get that formula, guaranteed. But there’s also other stuff going on, that’s set up issues before it goes anywhere, or which continues over several issues. For instance, in Vol. 2, which is about 20 issues, Peter’s relationship with Betty falls apart as she starts seeing someone else; he pines for Betty then gets a new girlfriend; Aunt May falls ill but Peter doesn’t find out for several issues; we meet Mary Jane months before Peter does, in teasing glimpses; and characters who turn out be connected initially seem not to be. It’s pretty cool, really, and speaks to a greater amount of planning than I’d given Stan and co. credit for. I should’ve expected this. I knew about the plot arcs going in and any writer worth their salt is going to build a world that allows for a lot of complexity, including relationships that can come out of the woodwork to spice up the story and multi-issue threads to keep readers coming back. It’s one thing to know this; it’s another to see it.

Reading these issues of Amazing Spider-Man has left me with a new appreciation of the movies (what changed, what stayed the same) and a desire to read a more modern comic omnibus, probably Marvel but not more Spider-Man. I want to see how things changed as the second and third generations of comic book writers rose through the ranks. How do they handle the plot arcs differently? Are the issues less episodic than they were? What are people doing these days to make the witty banter less campy? Perhaps DC’s announcement to restart all their series at #1 will be an opportunity to see that. Jumping in at the start of a reboot sounds infinitely easier than jumping in partway through an established series. I hate playing catchup when I don’t have to.

Thoughts, anyone? Suggestions?

* Yes, this is a polygon.

Animal Culture

2011-05-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Wednesday I mentioned that I chose to do non-dayjob work rather than write a blog post. Most of that day was devoted to researching and writing this article, now up at Science In My Fiction. I'm always fascinated by how similar animals are to us, especially when it's something to do with intelligence. I hope you have as much fun reading the post as I had writing it.

(Also, here's a video I didn't include in the post, but which is relevant to it.)

Yes, We Have No Bananas

2011-05-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, I do. They're tasty, especially in oatmeal or dipped in cocoa. But I don't have a blog post today. Not a proper, think-ful one, at any rate. I chose to do some non-dayjob work for other people, and may yet do some writing for myself. I didn't want to spend time coming up with, then writing, a blog post on top of everything. I'm actually considering doing that, period—write first, blog when I feel like it. Thoughts? I'd likely blog once a week anyway.

Here's a taste of one of those non-dayjob work projects, my next Science In My Fiction article, coming Friday:

Updatery

2011-05-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

I had the idea today to post about how musical harmony is like writing. There's the plot/melody, but the other notes (characters, setting, theme, rhythm, tone, etc.) shore up the piece to create a greater whole. And then I realized that last sentence was my entire thesis, and someone had probably waxed poetic on the subject already, there being only so many metaphors for writing…

I'd love to spend time pondering the universe and coming up with a different subject, but honestly, I don't have the time today. I'm writing this in the wee hours of the morning, even, as I'm getting up early to catch a matinee of POTC4, and I know I won't have a) time to write a long post before I leave and b) a brain with which to write anything. So instead, I'm just going to say, "Going on blog holiday. Be back Wednesday!" and hope nobody kills me for it. You're all nice people, right? You understand that these things happen?

That said, if anyone has questions or topics for me, things you want to know, comment away! I won't guarantee I'll talk about everything or answer any question—"What's your address?" is kind of stalkerish—but I'll answer anything I can. Goodness knows I spend too much time thinking of blog topics these days…

Year of the Superhero - Masked

2011-05-21T00:01:00.000-07:00

Masked is a collection of superhero fiction, mainly by people who write comic books. It's got everything—powered heroes, unpowered heroes, young heroes, old heroes, heroes branded as villains, villains branded as heroes, climactic battles, internal battles, crazy inventions, postmodern deconstruction, straight-up entertainment. Granted, not all of that's in the same story, but it's all in the book. Some of the stories I liked less than others, but in a short story collection, that's always the case.

Most reviews of anthologies do mini-reviews of each story. I'm not, and since this isn't exactly a review, I feel justified in doing so. Instead, I've got some general thoughts I want to share.

Many stories in this book are set in worlds with a plethora of superpowered people. The existence of the powers may or may not be explained, but superheroes and supervillains are everywhere. I saw this in Soon I Will Be Invincible too, and it's an allusion to the comic book universes of Marvel and DC, where people get powers all the time through a variety of methods, and have done so for years. The Wild Cards universe is another example of this. There's often a lot of mad science in these worlds—death rays, killer robots, secret lairs with bubbling chemistry sets. It's good fun, though the over-the-top nature of these worlds can get a little wearing.* Do writers choose those worlds because that's what we're conditioned to think of, after 70-odd years of comic book history? Do they choose them to comment on that 70-year-old tradition? Do they feel that's the only way to get a bunch of superpowered characters?

The stories without whole social classes of heroes and villains tend to give people powers through medical experiments. There's one case of mystical energy, and another case of teenage black belt. For all my complaining in the previous paragraph, I liked these stories least. Fun and compelling they were, yes, but at the same time, I felt the writers were trying too hard and missing the mark on superheroes. So … apparently I need those crazy universes to feel at home?

I enjoyed the deconstruction in this anthology, as well. The writers aren't afraid to play with the nastier sides of superheroism or have bad guys for protagonists. One of the stories breaks the fourth wall. Several stories deal with various aspects of retirement. And there seems to be more of an attempt to make the characters into real people rather than leaving them as archetypes, even when the archetypes are being played off, for the sake of the story. There's one story with a reporter girlfriend as a side character, and she acts like a Reporter Girlfriend, but feels real all the same.

The main thing I remember, several weeks after closing the book for the last time, is the way a lot of the stories clicked with me. For me, this is what superhero prose should be like. The stories are, by and large, not about superheroes and not about defeating a villain. They're about people who are people first, heroes second, and if a villain is defeated, the battle sums up the other, equally important struggles that have run the course of the story. That's what I'm trying to do with my novel (please may it work) and I'll likely be mentioning Masked as a read-alike, unless I find something better.

So my verdict? Really good anthology, with great stories. Definitely read it, if you're into superheroes, but don't be like me and blitz the book in a week. It's to be sipped between other stories, not gulped.

* Note: I am reading an omnibus of Amazing Spider-Man issues right now, and this is affecting my judgement on these matters. The pulpiness of those is really wearing at times.

When Research Isn't Needed

2011-05-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

A lot of research goes into a novel. Especially a genre novel, where the world-building's important. There's the big issues, like the where and when of the setting, the backstory, the characters' jobs, but there's a lot of little things too. For my WIP, I've looked up everything from ion drives, hydroponics, and electrocution, to feng shui, Chinese universities, and the scenery along the I5. There's more research to be done, too, mainly in the realms of Mandarin profanity, Tesla coils, and police procedure. Sometimes it seems like the research will never end, so when my revisions reached the first camping scene yesterday and I didn't have to check on how to pitch a tent, I was shocked. Something I knew already? Amazing!

Now that I think about it, there's a lot I don't have to look up. I read enough science articles online to invent the technology I'm using without more than a Google search or two. I know what lightning looks like. I know Pacific Northwest beaches and forests. I know the local streets well enough to drive them, and well enough to know which areas my hero's most likely to find bad things to happen to him in. I know enough police procedure to fudge things. I can cook basic meals. It turned out I barely needed to research ion drives at all.

I'm betting every writer has portions of their books they haven't had to research, either because they've read the info for something unrelated, because it's part of their daily life, or because they've deliberately included something they know about in the setting or story. And I think every writer should try to remember the things they do know, when the research gets them down. We know a lot more than we think we do, and we need all the encouragement we can get!

Songs for Inspiration

2011-05-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

One of the fastest, easiest ways for cheer me up is to play me music. My favourite songs and artists never fail me, especially if the songs are danceable and singable. I have not one, but two iTunes playlists—one full of danceable songs, and one full of songs that say, "Yes, you can write a good book. You can do this." And I thought I'd share that one, or as much of it as I can find on Youtube, because I'm not the only person who ever needs to hear that message. Hope this brightens your Monday!

And yes, I did create a Youtube account just for this playlist, but I've been wanting a professional account for a while. Drop by and say hello!

Year of the Superhero - Thor

2011-05-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

When I went to see Thor on Wednesday night, it was the first time since Iron Man that I'd sat down to a superhero movie without awareness of the canon. Okay, so I know the Norse myths, but the comics play with those a little so they don't really count. Not knowing the canon makes for a different viewing experience, but it doesn't make for a worse one. There's simply a lot more, "Oh, that's cool. I see what they did there."

Thor isn't a typical superhero movie, and yet it is. It's an origin story in that we see Thor learn his lesson and become a hero, but we don't see him struggling with his powers or technology the way Spider-Man, to pick a random example, does. He starts with movie with his powers. We get to see how awesome those powers are, and how impetuous he is when he has them. And then he loses them and is sent to Earth, and that's where the origin story begins.

However, the origin story is basically a side plot, which I think is really cool. The main plot, or perhaps the frame story, is about an impending war between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants of Jotunheim. There are political bargains and backstabbings and outright lies, mostly from Loki, as is expected if you know your mythology. Even the event that shapes Thor into a true hero is a ploy to prevent Thor from messing with Loki's plans. And having the almost-war as the center of the story means that when Thor saves the world, he's not saving Earth so much as he's saving Jotunheim.

One of the problems with adapting Thor (and yes, I'm cadging this from the internet at large), is that the comic canon is … kind of loopy. Thor apparently speaks in aggramatical Ye Olde English all the time. One of the other problems is that Thor is a Norse god, who's magical, but the Marvel universe is largely science fictional. How do you reconcile magic and sci-fi, and explain Thor's language at the same time? Branagh's solution is brilliant in its simplicity.

First, don't take Thor seriously but play it straight. This makes for realistic humor and a genuinely charismatic Thor, rather than a pompous or omnipotent one. Second, invoke Clarke's third law on screen: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I'm not sure if the comic does this too, but it's brilliant. Thor is an alien who was worshiped by medieval Scandinavians, and his people use advanced technology that's never fully explained. Bifrost, the rainbow bridge connecting the worlds, is a wormhole generator. The 'world tree' is a series of connected wormholes, rather than an actual tree. This sits well with my "it's a metaphor" approach to most mythologies. This also lets Thor get away with using big words and outdated mannerisms: he's grown up in a Viking-based alien culture. Of course he'll be a little weird.

Like I said, Thor's a charmer. I buy the character as Hemsworth portrays him—hotheaded, gentlemanly, a little egotistical. Sounds like the Thor of myth, as I read him there. He's totally the sort to decide that the best way to get rid of anger is to hit things with a hammer, which of course is his preferred fighting technique. I also buy the other Asgardian characters as they're portrayed. Loki is a great two-faced character—kind, concerned, and honest one moment, and mischievous and selfish the next. He's like that in the myths as well. And Sif, the Norse warrior goddess? If you're going to write a badass woman in armor, Sif would be a good model. She's a dominant woman who's good with a sword and knows it, but is so utterly a warrior that none of the main cast, including Thor and the all-male Warriors Three, appear to even think of her as attractive, though she is. Go equality! I would also watch the heck of out of a Sif movie.

Speaking of women, we need to talk Jane for a second. I understand she was a nurse in the comics? I approve of Branagh's decision to make her an astrophysicist, though I've some quibbles there. 1) Not to slag on female astrophysicists or anything, but I found Jane non-geeky enough to be slightly unbelievable. 2) What the heck is her research, anyway, that she's trying to find aurora in New Mexico? Minor quibbles, though, because hey, you kind of have to go with the flow, with Hollywood. Overall, though, I really liked Jane. She was a believable person. She's wrestling with physical attraction to Thor and what to do about it, rather than falling in love at first sight. She's not deliberately imperiled by the bad guys. She's smart and keeps her head in crises. She's helping Thor as much because she likes him as because she wants her research back. And Thor's relationship with her is the same—tentative attraction, but most camaraderie and respect. Again, go equality and empowerment! It's nice seeing women who aren't helpless.

So yes, I liked Thor, and I'm interested in seeing how he fits into the Avengers next summer. I predict personality clashes galore, but that's okay. They're fun. I don't think Thor's my favourite superhero ever, but like all Marvel heroes I've encountered, I'll gladly dip toes into his fandom.

Danger! Danger!

2011-05-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

A lot of urban fantasy imperils protagonists through violence. A vampire jumps them in the safety of their own home. A mastermind traps them in a cage with a werewolf just before the full moon. Someone at an "animal" research facility takes potshots as they're trying to gather incriminating evidence. They run into a blood bank heist only to discover it's demons, not vampires. The looming threat of the book, what's worked towards and is resolved in the climax, is also often violent—serial murders, hostages, kidnappings, curses, summonings.

Not that I'm complaining, exactly. Violence in plots means lots of action, lots of sleuthing, lots of heart-in-throat reading when we're not sure of a fight's outcome. It's fun. It's exciting. It's … easy and predictable. At least the way I'm thinking this week, it is.

See, there are ways to imperil, or at least stress out, protagonists that don't involve crime show-esque plot points, and I think those ways can be just as exciting and tense if done well. (Just like how fights can be boring if done poorly.) At the very least, looking further than crime-of-the-week ideas will spice up stories and make them fresher for readers. Of course, a number of these are going to be background to the crime of the week and won't constitute plot points on their own, but they'll add to the ambience and definitely make things harder for the protagonist.

natural disasters - We've seen a number in the news lately. Earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods, fires. Imagine having to cross the city but being unable to because of cracked asphalt and fallen buildings. Imagine learning about a clue-heavy office moments before its contents are strewn across three states. Imagine having constant smoke or ash in your lungs as you're trying to track a demon, not to mention lowered visibility. Imagine losing everything in a flood, tornado, or earthquake, but still getting up, leaving the Red Cross shelter, and finding the vampire. Imagine being in the Red Cross shelter with a vampire, or being contacted by the ghost of a disaster victim.
diseases - This can be something as mild as "MC has to solve the case—with food poisoning!", as dramatic as "MC has to solve the case—with cancer! or AIDS!", or as modern as, "MC has to solve a case in a city panicking over an epidemic." Everyone remember the swine flu and SARS scares? How everyone was worrying, and wearing masks on the streets, and causing vaccine shortages, and trapped in airports? (Or so the news had us believe.) If the disease is scary enough, a protagonist worrying whether they have it over the course of the novel, or a protagonist trying to avoid contracting it, could be very potent. Heck, it could be a magical disease and finding the cure could be the climax.
culture shock - People travel a lot these days, for work, for pleasure, for necessity. As a result, we occasionally find ourselves in communities that are vastly different from our own. A small town girl comes to the big city and struggles with the crowds and anonymity. A woman from Boston finds herself in Austin, surrounded by cowboys, rednecks, and Southern belles. A working class ex-con working as a bounty hunter has to find a renegade professor and spend time at a university. A young man from Mumbai moves to Berlin, or Chicago, or Johannesburg. A couple vacationing in Cancun get caught up in a plot to wake the Mayan gods, and are hit by how different life is outside of the tourist areas. You get the idea. It's scary, being out of place like that, not understanding the customs or the language.
racism - Also an unfortunately reality. I'd love to live in a world without stereotypes, where anyone of any culture and skin color could go anywhere and not have to worry about their safety, about attracting verbal abuse, about bias, about feeling second-class. But I don't. I can't speak from experience so much—I've felt sexism, not racism—but I know that hispanics, blacks, Jews, semitic Muslims, Chinese, Japanese, and other South-East Asians are all stereotyped in Western culture, as are a number of European nationalities. Germans are uptight and anal, for instance. The French are fond of sex and wine. Brits have bad teeth and can't cook. According to an Asian friend, there are some places in my own city where you don't want to go, if you've got brown skin and epicanthic folds—and this is Vancouver, where people of Asian decent outnumber Caucasians, and some Chinese families have been here for four or five generations. I don't think enough protagonists have to fight against racist attitudes. They should. We're all about reality in our fiction, right? (See also: sexism, able-ism, homophobia.)
debt - UF protagonists are perennially broke, or so the trope goes. Often the reasons given revolve around living expenses, weapons purchases, and home repairs. While those aren't bad reasons, the protagonists tend to accept them as facts of life. They're minor stressors, not major ones. But debt can be a major stressor. If you're fighting demons on a regular basis, you're going to have medical bills unless you know a guy or have magical healing powers. You've withdrawn nearly everything from your bank account to pay an informant or ransom a client, turn your back for five minutes in your own home, and wham, the money's gone! Your account could be frozen or depleted because of identity theft, which will also force you to wait for new credit cards. Your home could be slated for foreclosure.
relationship problems - I'm not going to delve into this one, because so much urban fantasy already uses this. Controlling boyfriends, controlling girlfriends, prolonged break-ups, divorces, stalker exes, interfering emotional hangups, jealousy… It's all there, and all wonderfully stressful.
relatives - This one's not quite done so much, apart from the 'nagging parents' trope and the 'living up to expectations' trope. Also the 'sibling in danger' trope. But what about a protagonist with a chronically ill parent? A senile grandparent who lives with her? A brother who may have gotten a succubus pregnant? A mentally-challenged sister? An orphaned, preteen half-sibling? Any of these would take time and energy to look after, and because of proximity to the protagonist, they'd also be targets for the bad guys.

Have I missed anything? I'm sure I have. Tell me in the comments?

More Research Pics

2011-05-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about setting your novel where you live, is that you get excuses to play tourist and/or run around doing silly things with a camera. I do this occasionally, as it gets me out of my basement lair and does something constructive at the same time. Most of my jaunts are to take pictures of houses and street signs so I have references for the neighbourhoods I'm using without calling up Google Earth all the time, but sometimes I do funner things. I've yet to climb to the top of a really high building and look down, but I did manage to check one thing off my list last week—the local Chinese garden. I even took the tour!

Why the Chinese garden, you ask? Because I'm writing a heavily Chinese world and wanted to make sure my ideas about the aesthetics were accurate. They were, kind of, and they were kind of not. I've got some cool ideas to play with now, mostly in the realms of symbology and rock sculptures. Did you know that in China, bats are lucky? Brings a whole new meaning to Batman.

Anyway, photos!

From the paid-for Chinese garden to the free Chinese garden. Circular doorways force people to go through one at a time. Also, they balance the square doorways elsewhere.

There are four elements in a Ming Dynasty garden: water, plants, stone, and buildings. The architecture's there to symbolize the harmony of and place of man in nature.

Water-worn stones are important, and highly prized. They show different images depending on light and angle, and are meant to be contemplated year round.

The patterns and colors of the stone 'tiles' are part of the ying and yang aspects of feng shui. There must always be balance between shadow and light. Notice the dappled pattern of plant shadows as well.

There are no screws in this roof. It's all mortice and tenon. Also, camphor wood! Natural bug repellant!

And no Ming garden is complete without a pine tree of longevity.

So that was my trip. I took more photos than this, of course, but they're largely boring or blurry. Plus I didn't want this post to get too image-heavy. Hope you enjoyed it!

Year of the Superhero - Megamind

2011-05-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

What do you get when you mix the Hollywood trend towards animated films that aren't solely for kids, the Hollywood trend to have at least 3 superhero movies a year, and the cultural trend to be as postmodern and self-referential as possible?

Megamind. The story of a conniving blue-skinned alien who gets his kicks out of being a supervillain—until he defeats his archnemesis and gains ultimate control over Metro City. Turns out that ultimate control is kind of boring, so Megamind creates a superhero to balance the power vacuum, at which point Things Go Wrong. There is, naturally, a Sassy Reporter Girlfriend as well.

SPOILERS BELOW

I'm not generally a fan of Will Ferrell movies. His humor tends to fall flat for me, and a number of the plots tend to be … juvenile, let us say. So when I heard he was going to be voicing a supervillain 'hero', I was nervous. Was this going to be another instance of him overacting? Was there going to be a plot, or just superpowered hijinks for two hours? I'd nearly resolved not to go, and then I saw the trailers.

Turns out that Megamind is not only story about a supervillain, and not only a Shrek-like send-up of superhero films, but it's also a commentary on what it means to be a villain and a hero, and a story of redemption. There's a clear message that "There's good in all of us."

Let's dissect it, shall we?

Megamind and Metro Man are sent to Earth by alien parents from planets that are being destroyed. Metro Man ends up in a wealthy, all-American family. Megamind ends up raised by convicts. They wind up in the same school, where Metro Man bullies Megamind and Their Rivalry Is Born™. Megamind turns to a life of crime because so many other avenues are closed to him because his creativity gets him into trouble and nobody cares for his skin color.

So far, so standard, except notice that Megamind is not only a geek, but he's also a person of color? It's easy to say, "Yes, I get it, Hollywood. He's a bad guy because he isn't white, and he's kind of weird to boot." But then Megamind has a change of heart, and he gets the girl, and at the end of the film, he's kind of a hero. It's a message of hope, and a surprisingly enlightened character arc. The dark-skinned weirdo can be a good person, accepted into society? Who knew?!

The Rivalry™ is very much a game for our villain and hero. It's sparring matches, competition, a challenge. When Megamind defeats Metro Man, he's excited, yes, but there's also a big undertone of "That actually worked? I actually won? How is that possible?" It's bittersweet. Megamind goes on his crime spree anyway, but it quickly gets boring. He realizes that the fights were never about control, they were about competition, and he needs someone to compete with again. Unfortunately, he ends up giving powers to a schlub, and the second act of the film kicks off.

So, this schlub? He reacts to superpowers in a pretty realistic manner. His 'space parents', Megamind and Minion the sidekick, train him up, drill him on justice, and give him a snazzy costume, and he's cool with that because he's so in awe of having superpowers and being someone for the first time in his life. But then he realizes that it's so much easier to have fame and wealth if you steal it. Yep, he turns into a supervillain himself, right on the eve of the unveiling Megamind's planned for him. This leads to a genuinely nerve-wracking climactic fight scene, even if kooky weapons and kid-targetted hijinks show up as well. Titan, the superhero-villain, is just too powerful, and too corrupted by that power. Also, he's decided it's his right to have Sassy Reporter Girlfriend Roxie as his girlfriend, when Megamind's genuinely in love with her. One more reason for Megamind to defeat him.

It is real love, by the way, between Roxie and Megamind, not the bog-standard lust-as-love, we're-adding-a-girl-because-we-need-a-love-interest Hollywood model. They flirt. They commiserate. They like the same things. They have great conversations. They share a sense of humor. They team up to 'take down' Megamind. They're cute, and we get to watch them fall in love on screen. And then Roxie finds out that the guy she's hooked up with is really Megamind in disguise, and there's a horrible break-up which reinforces Megamind's opinion of himself as the hard-done-by geek/villain who will never get the girl. Luckily, Roxie sees the light during the climax and ends up fighting alongside Megamind, rather than playing damsel-in-distress the whole time. Girl power is go! Contrast this with Lois Lane, who may be tough but stays on the edges of fights, and who's more in like or lust with Superman than she's in love with him, in most forms of canon.

It's also notable that Metro Man is not the antagonist, the way Captain Hammer is Doctor Horrible's. The antagonist of the story is … Megamind's hubris, I guess, and to an extent his lack of confidence. Metro Man's there to be a foil, to be the nominal superhero in a story about villains, and to make a comment about power and fame not being everything—also a cool, positive thing for a Hollywood film to be saying.

Megamind's a surprisingly intelligent superhero film, in other words, right up there with The Incredibles. It has a lot to say about heroism, surface judgements, and human nature. It has positive messages that hit adults as well as kids. It's smart, funny, and original. Obviously, I really liked it, and I'm betting most superhero fans will too.

Fictional Vacation Homes

2011-05-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

One argument against fantasy and science fiction is that they're escapist. They have no real bearing on reality. They don't teach us anything. The characters are stereotypes and caricatures, and the only sci-fi/fantasy readers are emotionally stunted adults, or children. Of course, this is all patently false, except for the escapism claim. There's much more to science fiction and fantasy than the alternate worlds and the sensawunda, but it's a draw for many people, myself include. When I want to enjoy myself, when I want my reading experience to maximize on the fun, I'll pick up a genre novel.

So it should surprise no one that the day of the Canadian election, I picked up Masked. I'm enjoy it quite a bit. For whole chunks of my day, I don't have to be in a world where the Progressive Conservatives are in power again!

But I'm not here to talk about Masked today, since that's a future Year of the Superhero post. Instead, I wanted to list a couple other of my favourite worlds. I'm not sure I'd want to live in very many of them, because there are downsides to most of them, but I certainly love visiting them in my head.

the Wormhole Nexus (Lois McMaster Bujold) - Since Miles Vorkosigan spends most of the series away from his home planet, Barrayar, I'm fingering the whole slice of the galaxy. Every setting is vivid, real, and well thought-out, and I enjoy the whole lot of them. I think of all the planets in the Nexus, I'd want to live on Bujold's future Earth the most. They seem to have things figured out best, and they seem not to have major environmental issues to contend with, unlike Beta Colony or Jackson's Whole.
Middle Earth, especially Hobbiton (J.R.R. Tolkien) - Mostly because Tolkien designed it largely as a utopia. Every race seems to live in harmony with itself and others, apart from the orcs and goblins, who also keep to themselves unless harassed or assembled into armies by Dark Lords. Everyone seems to have their place in society. Nearly everyone seems to like their place. And while the elves have a beautiful, poetic, elegant culture, I think I'd want to live in the Shire. Why? They're fond of eating, drinking, parties, and comfort. They like mushrooms. They go around barefoot. They tolerate eccentricity and bold women. Sounds good to me!
San Francisco/Summerlands (Seanan McGuire) - I know I keep bringing McGuire up but I really am enamoured of the world she's created. I only know the basics of the lore surrounding the fae, and I've never been to 'Cisco, but I'm perfectly willing to believe that the two can co-exist. Each part of the world feels real (or surreal, depending), and internally consistent, and best of all, it's getting bigger every book! I probably wouldn't mind living in San Francisco some day, but due to the large number of Things That Can Kill You in the fae parts of the city, I think I'll pass on knowing whether it's there or not. Even if that means I can't visit Shadowed Hills, which sounds incredible.
Fictional Britain (too many authors to name) - I have a Thing for British novelists, British genre novelists especially. They all seem to have this particular way of speaking, a lovely, evocative way of describing everything, and a fabulous wit. British novels also have a phenomenal love of the country that can't not be picked up by the reader. Everything they write seems so steeped in the culture, compared to many of the novels coming out of North America. Some writers who've helped create Fictional Britain for me include: Geoffrey Chaucer, Neil Gaiman, Jane Austen, Susanna Clarke, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, William Shakespeare, Arthur Ransom, Douglas Adams, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Ariana Franklin, Diana Wynne Jones, and the non-Brits O.R. Melling, Gail Carriger, and Neal Stephenson.
Discworld (Terry Pratchett) - Because how can I not mention Discworld? It's as vast and fully realized as the other worlds I've mentioned, and fun. By Io, and Anoia, and Om, and the rest of the Discworld pantheons, it's fun. Genius satire, one could even say. I'd like to travel it, if I had the chance, though knowing how narritivium works, I'd probably arrive in Ankh Morpork and end up staying there. Pratchett's also contributed greatly to Fictional Britain, but since his stories aren't really set in Britain proper and Discworld deserved its own bullet, I didn't mention him above.
Breakersverse - Which really needs a better name but I haven't come up with one yet. This is the world of my WIP and the host of sequels I mentioned in my previous post. One of the reasons I have so many sequels and scenes and characters I want to include is that I'll drop into this world during downtime—I'm on a bus, I'm walking to the grocery store, it's a slow night at work, etc. I've met several superheroes who are only passing references in Resisting Capacity this way. I've been to cities that my hero will probably never get to. I've travelled in time. And even though it's my world, I keep learning new things about it. How cool is that? (Okay, really, who thought I wouldn't mention my creation here?)

Anyway, I've talked enough about where I go when I want to escape reality for a while. Where are your favourite vacation spots, and why them?

Sequelitis

2011-05-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Anassa, and I have benign sequelitis. I'm taking this as a good sign—I won't run out of ideas, and my WIP's world is rich enough to have multiple stories in it. Just yesterday I came up with a scene for Book 3, which will be added to the ongoing list of scenarios, plot points, hijinks, twists, and character interactions. At this point, I need to write at least four books, maybe five, to deal with them all. (Book Four will be especially fun.) I have two other series I'd like to write, one that I briefly started on last year, and one that I think about with trepidation because of how much research is going to be involved.

I suspect a lot of writers, or at least a lot of genre writers, have some form of sequelitis. After all, so many genre novels are parts of series. Benign sequelitis, like I have, has got to be the best kind, for the reasons I mentioned, and because it keeps any sequels fresh and exciting. But there's also

induced sequelitis — Publisher: Your book's selling great! Can we have three more by Christmas? Hollywood has an epidemic of this at the moment.
malignant sequelitis — Writer: I'm writing urban fantasy, therefore I must create series. Often leads to overstuffed worlds or writer's block.
galloping sequelitis — Writer: I have such a following for my book, I really owe everyone a sequel. Christopher Tolkien and Brian Herbert have had this, I think, with a milder form of induced sequelitis as well.

And yes, you can argue that I'm biased towards the benign form because I've seen too many books (and films) produced by induced, malignant, and galloping strains of sequelitis that have been subpar or rushed. I'm sure a writer who really knows their game can craft excellent demanded sequels and not fall into the trap of repetition. I'm sure I've read some of those books. Can I name them after being up till 3 last night? Nope. Not the writers' fault, though. Totally mine.

But really, I think that's the cure, that's how to turn the negative forms of sequelitis back into the benign one—step back, think, take your time, look at good sequels and ask what they did differently from bad sequels. One of the big reasons I see at work for people stopping series is that the books "got to be all the same," and of course, it's common knowledge that when Hollywood makes a sequel, it's not going to be as good.* Lack of audience interest can never be a good thing.

Bear in mind that this is merely the opinion of an unpublished, unsequelled writer who hasn't had time to read as widely as someone twice her age. I could be entirely wrong about all of this. I certainly don't have medical training, so I may have misdiagnosed the types, or missed a type entirely. But I've enough of an ego to say, "I think I'm right." I think that a lot of writers want to write sequels, for various reasons, and I think a lot of those times, those reasons don't exactly help the story they want to tell.

Thoughts?

* With several exceptions, of course.

The Art of Saying Without Saying

2011-04-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

The most important thing I took away from my semantics course in university was the concept of implicature. It blew my mind in a "of course, of course, so true" way when I learned about it, and it's stuck with me enough that it gets heavily used in my writing. This isn't to say that writers who don't take semantics classes don't know and don't use implicature, because they do. It's an incredibly handy writing tool. Just saying that's where I first picked it up.

Enough rambling. What is implicature? It's suggestion. Saying things without saying them. Speaking between the lines. For instance, if I say, "I ate some of the cake", I mean that there's still cake left. That's implicature. If I say, "I ate some cake", there could be some left, or there could not be. That's not implicature, that's just words. Implicature is also highly contextual. If I'm asked, "Did you eat the cake?" and I answer, "I ate some cake", suddenly the sentence I just said wasn't implicature, is. I'm saying, "I didn't eat the whole cake".

There are a number of different kinds of implicature, all explained in the link above, but I want to talk about the ones that stem from violating conversational rules, because they're the coolest—and not just because they let writers slip more information into scenes than the words themselves convey.

There are four Gricean maxims that govern conversation. A guy called Paul Grice discovered them, hence the name. The maxims are (shamelessly copy-pasted from Wikipedia because while I remember the concept, I've forgotten the terms):

1. The Maxim of Quality- Be truthful. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The point of conversations is to convey information. If you lie, this falls apart.

2. The Maxim of Quantity- Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

If you ramble or over-explain, the important information (if there was any) will get lost in the TMI. Also, people might punch you if you're always providing more information than required.

3. The Maxim of Relation - Be relevant.

Tangents, not a good thing. If someone asks you about your family, talk about your family, not dinosaurs, model trains, or your fear of flying.

4. The Maxim of Manner - Be Clear. Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.

If you utilize an overabundance of lexemes and morphemes to convey an elementary concept, you're doing it wrong. It's much easier to have a conversation when people know what you're saying. Ambiguity is also bad because it's so often highly confusing.

Now, we assume the cooperative principle ("Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."), and Grice's maxims, are always in effect, because they so very often are. This means that if you're Luna Lovegood and have a habit of saying random things when people talk to you, they're going to assume what you're saying is relevant, even when it doesn't sound that way. Implicature's going to come into effect.

Violating the Maxim of Quality - Savvy writer 1: "Do you think authors bashing authors is a good idea?" Savvy writer 2: "Of course! What could go wrong?"
Implication - Writer 2 is being sarcastic. (But both speakers must know about author-bashing scandals and the speed of information flow online for it to work.)

Violating the Maxim of Quantity - "Do you like this book?" "It's incredible! Fantastic! Unputdownable! It changed my life! So inspiring!"
Implication - This is a really good book.

Violating the Maxim of Relation - "Do you like this book?" "I barely slept last night."

Implication - Speaker 2 loved the book so much they stayed up all night reading.

Violating the Maxim of Manner - "Where's the nearest good bookstore?" "There isn't one."

Implication - Either there isn't a nearby bookstore, or the nearest bookstore sucks. Possibly not the best example I could come up with, because Speaker 1 will likely have to ask for clarification, but hopefully you get the idea.

Of course, these are only four examples. Implicatures and maxim violations are all over the place, and I'm betting you use them every day. Pay attention. Look at how they work. And then, if you're a writer, use them. Like I said above, they're great ways to slip in information through subtext. Implicatures are also good ways to convey characterization, because the way characters respond in conversations can say a lot about them. Think of Luna Lovegood. Think of the man who shouts obscenities when you say hello to him. Think of the mother who responds to "I'm hungry" with "You're looking heavier these days".

Above all, remember that everything your characters say has to be relevant, and that first person narration counts as one long conversation. "They" say not to use more words than you need to, and implicature is one of the reasons why.

In Which Anassa Shows Off

2011-04-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

Kevin Hearne, author of Hounded which is on my TBR list for looking awesome, is holding an ARC giveaway. To be eligible to win, one must create a nerdscape or beerscape, photoshop it, and comment on the giveaway post with a link to it. Giveaway ends April 30, so there's still time for entering. A nerdscape is a photo of a book, action figure, and junk food—easy enough, although I really only have one action figure to my name and the only junk in the house right now is Easter chocolate.

Without further ado, I give you "Assimilating to L-Space":

Yes, that is a nearly complete Terry Pratchett collection! I believe all I'm missing are Dark Side of the Sun, Carpet People, Interesting Times, and I Shall Wear Midnight. I'm not trying to acquire all the spin-offs like Folklore of Discworld and Nanny Ogg's Cookbook. When I have all the novels, I'll be happy. (This photo also contains the Hogfather and Color of Magic DVDs, a book of Discworld trivia, and a book of literary analysis of the Discworld books, which I recommend. Also Argonath bookends, a Cyberman, and a Jayne hat, because I can.) I am waiting impatiently for the DVD of Going Postal to get a North American release, because I'm not letting myself watch it until I own it.

So, Kevin Hearne, there you go. There's my entry.

If you've been following The Plumbing Saga on Twitter, you'll know that I finally got to move into my living room/bedroom last week. If you haven't been following the Saga, all you need to know is: pipe burst, carpet went squish, month-long repair process, awesome landlords. Because I'm excited to have my main bookcase back, I took a photo:

From the top, we see my sweaters, my urban fantasy, my other fantasy and science fiction, and my non-SFF (including a nearly complete Vorkosigan Saga and a half-complete Gaiman collection, since I'm missing the graphic novels). Then there's Pratchett, my non-fiction, my antique books, and my epic poetry. We do not see the other bookshelf, which lives in my 'office' and contains three TBR shelves, and two shelves of reference material, including eight dictionaries in four languages, four grammar books for three languages, and my complete Shakespeare and Chaucer.

I'm going to need a new bookcase soon…

Since I've spent this entire post bragging, I'm totally cool if you want to brag back at me in the comments. What do you collect? What awesome things have happened to you lately?

Year of the Superhero - X-Men Trilogy

2011-04-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple weeks, I've rewatched the X-Men trilogy. Not the Wolverine movie, which I've heard is horrible and am therefore avoiding. I like Hugh Jackman, but I don't like him that much. All three movies have been fun and gave me lots of action scenes, mutant powers, and, erm, Hugh Jackman—but they're flawed, too, especially with regards to pacing. Like many adaptations with huge fan followings, the X-Men films try to stick as much canon, wow factor, and fan service into the story as possible, to the detriment of the plot. I don't mind too much because I don't watch summer blockbuster movies expecting Oscar-worthy performances and fabulous scripts. I expect Oscar-worthy special effects and sound editing, if anything, and X-Men does deliver that.

First of all, the superpowers. Might as well get that out of the way first, right? One of the things that draws me to the X-Men is the incredible range of powers that seem to be possible. As long as I don't think how they're possible in some cases, I'm good. (Perhaps it's like in Wild Cards, where the powers are psi-based?) The sheer range of powers intrigues me. There are people who can manipulate elements, people who can control objects, people who read minds, people whose appearances have changed, people who heal quickly or teleport, people who do combinations of all these things. It's easy to imagine yourself as a mutant. What power would you get?

Of course, there are downsides to mutation. There's the gay rights and anti-anti-Semitism parallels, of course, since mutants are feared, persecuted, and second-class citizens. They play up the anti-Semitic stuff in the movies, though I don't know if that's the same in the comics. Magneto's a Holocaust survivor regardless of medium, however. But the powers themselves can provide downsides, like with Cyclops, who can't open his eyes without blasting everything to pieces, unless he has his glasses. In other superhero canons, superpowers cause angst of the 'oh, if only I could tell my loved ones' variety, and the occasional accident. The powers in X-Men seem more realistic, or at least more thought-out, because they're so often a double-edged sword.

Quick aside: When I originally watched the first X-Men film, I didn't understand why it started in Auschwitz. I was even dense enough not to realize that the screaming Jewish boy was Ian McKellan. But now that I'm older and aware of the anti-anti-Semitic messages of X-Men, it makes sense. Starting in 1940s Poland sets the stage for not only the one movie, but the whole series.

Another thing that makes X-Men, or at least the films, feel more realistic to me is the exploration of the world. The first movie's about people trying to thwart a terrorist threat. The second's about the same people trying to stop a military operation to destroy mutantkind entirely. The third's about the fallout from a 'mutant cure' announcement. Whereas Batman Begins touched on issues of politics and policing, and the Spider-Man trilogy is about Peter Parker fighting bad guys with media persecution, X-Men actually goes for political plot lines and a more international scope. Notably, there are Canadians, Brits, and Germans as well as Americans in the X-Men team.

I noticed something else for the first time during this rewatch. One level the films are about mutants as a whole, illustrated by the ensemble cast and the 'few fighting for the rights of many' plots, true. But on another level, they're about Wolverine and his quest for identity. He's the rough, wild man who's brought to Xavier's school with no memories, and who's set on the path to find them. He falls in love. He saves Rogue at the end of the first movie. He finds out his origins in X2, and then refuses to learn details. He goes off alone to find Jean in the third film, wanting to save her. For someone who's verging on anti-hero at the start of the trilogy, he certainly ends up rescuing people and acting heroic a lot. And yes, I realize that the films have to have a more concrete protagonist even with an obviously ensemble cast and they picked Wolverine because hey, Hugh Jackman. I just find it interesting that he's got a trilogy-long arc, instead of being dropped after the first movie in favor of a different protagonist*.

I mentioned in my opening that the in-jokes and references to X-Men canon kind of detract from the plot. There wasn't much reason to insert Angel into the third film, for instance, and it kind of amused me that although Kitty Pride was in the other two films, she suddenly became a main character in X-Men: The Last Stand. But seeing those characters—and Beast, and Nightcrawler—was fun, and the scriptwriters did a good job of working the new characters and the fan service fighting into the plot without making the movie too clunky. Kudos to them for that. I also enjoyed seeing the Easter egg-type references, with Hank McCoy and Moira McTaggert appearing on TV screens, and birth names of mutants appearing on a government database. So really, not complaining too much. The fan service works for fans, because we kind of expect that it's going to be there (and Wolverine fighting people's fun). I can't comment on whether it works for non-fans.

You'll notice a trend as this series of posts continues. I'm much more a Marvel girl than I am a DC girl. I prefer Spider-Man, X-Men, Ironman, even the Fantastic Four to a degree, to Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Marvel's more grey and complex, I think, and as I've mentioned here and in the Spider-Man review, there's a greater air of realism. And, as with Spider-Man, I'm going to be tracking down X-Men comics at some point too. They look to be even more fun than the movies.

* As I would expect Hollywood to do.

Criticism, Expectations, and Assumptions

2011-04-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

In my quest for new and interesting things to read and watch, I come across negative reviews. We all do, yes? And I've noticed a tendency—a lot of negative reviewers dislike the book/movie/show because it doesn't meet their mistaken expectations. One of the greatest doozies I've seen recently, for example, was a negative review of The Diary of Anne Frank, annoyed because Anne hadn't had the decently to write at an adult level and talk about the conditions in concentration camps. Yes, really. I also saw a review of a different book saying, "I read this because I liked the movie, and this is nothing like the movie, so it sucks".

I see this a lot in SF movie reviews as well, that reviewers will go into the theatre and complain about all the action when they expect a deep, meaningful story, or they'll go in expecting an action flick and get said deep, meaningful story, and they'll tear the movie apart because they'd come primed for the wrong thing. Green Hornet, for instance, was an action flick that was criticized for its action. Inception was criticized for being too thinky. This happens a lot with blockbusters, and nearly as frequently with adaptations.

Of course, the adaptation thing is a little different, because the whole fandom-comparison thing gets factored in. It's only a little different, though, because when you translate stories between media, things will change. They have to. Complaints I've seen: Scott Pilgrim, Watchmen, Lord of the Rings. I'm still annoyed with Jackson's changes made to Two Towers, but I also understand that they do make for a better story, as a whole. We saw a similar sort of complaint with the Ginia Bellafonte Game of Thrones article. And what's up with non-SFF fans reviewing SFF all the time? Of course they're not going to "get" it.

So why can't we appreciate stories for what they are, rather than what we expect them to be? We should, right? It's unfair to creators, unfair to our fellow consumers, unfair to ourselves, to criticize a book for not being what we wanted. Is a fluffy urban fantasy any better or worse than a hard-boiled, dark one? Is an intellectual heist film any better or worse than an action heist? Is Agatha Christie better than Dan Brown? They have different audiences, or the same audiences in different moods, and different tropes and scenarios to play with, based on genre and audience expectations.

Arguments can be made, of course, based on literary grades of writing quality, based on the emotions evoked, based on acting quality, but the fact stands that movies, books, TV shows, and video games are entirely different animals from each other, and every subgenre or sub-subgenre is a different animal as well. Equating apples to oranges to mangoes doesn't work. They're not the same thing. You wouldn't put them in the same salads. So why pick up a bestselling novel and then complain that it doesn't compare to Dickens? Are we really expecting the same kind of descriptive social commentary from Jonathan Kellerman and Stieg Larsson? Not to mention that they're mysteries and Dickens, as a rule, isn't?

Sigh. I wish we were better at recognizing biases and filtering them out in public fora. We'd get a consistently better level of reviewing and more reviewer honestly, which has to be a good thing. This isn't to say that negative reviews shouldn't exist. I want to know if a book's writer can't keep their tenses straight and has no idea about plot. I want to know if the actors are pretending to be cardboard. But I don't want to know that Charlaine Harris's novels suck because they're not as dark and disturbing as Anne Rice's or Stephen King's. That's not real criticism and shouldn't be treated as such.

Another blog award!

2011-04-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

I have a second blog award! Thanks, Annikka, for honoring me!

The rules for this award are:

Thank and link to the person who nominated me.
Share seven random facts about myself.
Pass the award along to 15 new-found blogging buddies.
Contact those buddies to congratulate them.

I've already thanked Annikka, but since she'd be one of my 15 blogging buddies, I want to say a little more. Annikka's awesome. She's dedicated and creative. She writes fantastic blog posts. She has an incredible level of perseverance which I envy her for. If you haven't checked out her blog, at the very least, do so.

So, my seven random facts…

I've never broken a bone, though I have some interesting and embarrassing scars.
For instance, there's a 3/4-inch long scar on my right knee from where I accidentally inserted a metal strip into my flesh.
I will wear a Jayne Hat on non-fandom occasions, in the hopes that a fellow Browncoat will recognize it. This hasn't happened yet.
My parents gave me an Easter basket on Saturday. I haven't finished it off yet. This counts as restraint.
I can produce nearly all the sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Five (or is it six?) generations back in my family tree, there are Trolls.
I am two degrees from Peter Jackson, and therefore probably six degrees from most of Hollywood.

And my 15 bloggers… Well, okay, 9, and that's scraping. Apparently I don't know people online either?

Hannah - One of my trusted beta readers. She blogs about music, faith, sci-fi, and writing, and the interplay between the four. I love reading her posts.
Jami - Jami writes a lot of helpful posts about writing mechanics and basics like characterization, and the comments always have great discussions.
Brooke - A fellow geek, which is always good. :) Brooke's posted on everything from the Hero's Journey to word choices to queries and revisions. Lots of helpful posts I'll be revisiting.
Reece - Reece is fairly new to blogging, but he's already got an archive of interesting, writing-tip kinds of posts. I'm looking forward to seeing what else he has up his sleeve.
Scooter - I indirectly met Scooter through #UFchat. She's another wonderful person with a lot of neat posts on her blog and is currently doing a series on psychopaths. How can I say no?
Gypsy - She hasn't posted in a while, but her archived posts are a fountain of information. She's a big fan of fairy tales, and it shows.
Ovid - And now we get to blogs written by people I don't actually know. Ovid retells mythology and other classic stories in colloquial, profanity-laced free verse, and is absolutely brilliant.
Geoffrey Chaucer - Another pen name, though he'll deny it. Chaucer ~~parodies~~ comments on pop culture from a 14th-century viewpoint, complete with historically accurate spelling. I don't drink anything when I'm reading his posts.
Wendell Howe - A temporal anthropologist from the 27th-century. He travels to various locations during the 1800s, and posts about his discoveries and encounters. There's a lot of cool history on his blog, but his Twitter was a lot more.

So go, give their blogs a read! And thanks again, Annikka!

Writing Pet Peeves

2011-04-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

I'm passionate about writing and language. Yes, I know. Shocking, isn't it? And like anyone with passions (or anyone, in general), I have pet peeves. I'm going to steer clear of the trope peeves today, because who wants to read a post about slapdash endings, Mary Sues, love interests who're too obviously a match, "As you know, Bob", and side plots that are tangential at best? Instead I'm going to talk about my grammar peeves because they're obviously more exciting.

Pet grammar peeve #1*: Absence of serial commas. High school English taught me that it's "apples, oranges, and pears", not "apples, oranges and pears", and so my first instinct on seeing the latter is to assume a typo. But it's not a typo because some style guides recommend dropping the second comma, and the number of commas is arbitrary anyway. Doesn't stop me twitching.

Pet grammar peeve #2: Double prepositions. You know, "out of", "off of", "out from", and so on. As far as I'm concerned, those strings can be reworded more succinctly. There's no difference between saying "he came out of the building" and "he left the building", or between "the cat jumped off of the table" and "the cat jumped off the table"—barring dialect and connotations, of course. I know there are situations where "out of" works better than "left" or "from". I've written some, even. But I try to use the minimal number of prepositions and I wish others would too.

Pet grammar peeve #3: Verbs with unnecessary prepositions. Some languages, like German, create a whole new meaning when they stick a preposition onto a verb. Not so, English. What function, exactly, do the prepositions do in the following: stand up, wake up, fall down, climb up? When do you ever stand down from a chair? When I think of climbing and jumping, I think of an upwards motion more often than not, and when I think of falling, I normally think of a downwards movement. Is it even possible to wake down or wake over? When the meaning of the preposition is obvious from context or encoded in the verb, it grates on me to have the preposition there anyway.

Pet grammar peeve #4: Inconsistency. Plot hole inconsistency bugs me, yes, but I'm talking about grammar inconsistency here. This is the overly anal part of me talking, I know, but why write one list with a serial comma and one list without? Or put punctuation inside end quotes only 70% of the time? Or type -- for two-thirds of the novel, then switch to — for the last third? It strikes me as lazy editing, somehow.

I blame a couple things for these peeves. There's my perfectionism, for one thing. My complete language nerdery. The insane number of English classes that drilled grammar rules instead of more advanced writing lessons. The fact that I've edited books and other publications enough to see these things repeated ad nauseum. But I'm aware that hitting people isn't cool, especially in public and especially over something as trivial as grammar, so all you're going to notice is a twitch, and I try to be nice when covering documents in red ink. I'm actually less restrained, but only slightly, with some of my other peeves—like why, exactly, everyone has to stand three stops before they need to get off the bus? When they know everyone else is leaving at the stop as well? It just makes the aisles more crowded, making leaving take longer! Aarggh!

What usage issues peeve you? What other things do, dare I ask?

* I call it Alfred.**
** No, not really.

Girl, Geek, but Not a Girl Geek

2011-04-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

So, the big thing today in my internet circles in the New York Times' article on the HBO Game of Thrones series. According to it, women are only interested in fantasy for the sex, and HBO had to add sexual plot lines to woo viewers. Um. No. There's an excellent rebuttal over at Geeks with Curves, which says everything I want to on the subject, only better. There's also an article about Game of Thrones that gets it right, or at least right-er because there's more to viewing habits than just "strong women characters". I love strong women, but I'll watch or read things without strong women if I'm promised superheroes, space ships, gun fights, sword fights, aliens, explosions, really awesome scenery, allegories, intrigue, and/or popcorn. I suspect I'm not alone.

You'll have noticed, of course, that most things on that list, with the exceptions of scenery, allegories, and popcorn, are stereotypically male things. Girls are supposed to like romance, male eye candy, frills, flowers, baking, fabric arts, and children, leaving everything else to men. Lots do. I do. I too got all gooey at the end of Pride and Prejudice and through most of Julie and Julia. I am inordinately fond of musicals. I did ballet. I can bake cakes and cookies and enjoy doing so. One of my favourite tops is pink; the other has flowers. But that's not all I am. Not by a long shot. I like a lot of guy stuff too (see the list above). I hate skirts, make-up, and styling my hair. I get as excited over pictures of swords as I do pictures of kittens, and I watch crime shows for the science and dead bodies more than I watch for the shipping—though if Booth and Brennan, and Castle and Beckett don't get together eventually, I'll scream.

In short, I'm a geek. Does my sex determine what parts of geekdom I enjoy? No. Does my gender? Well, culturally yes. I might've gotten into gaming if the guys playing Magic in the school library thought girls could play too, for instance. Then again, when I hinted, at the age of 5, about Nintendo, my parents said no, we'd rather you read books, and that played a part too. Of course, these days I thank them for that. But, point is, being female doesn't mean liking only feminine things. Many women like fewer girl things than I do (and many like more, including the girl I went to District 9 with). It should be culturally acceptable to stand up in a pink floral dress, with cleavage, and say, "That alien invasion was awesome, I want to dissect something, and I'm signing up for broadsword lessons."

Luckily, we're getting there. The movement for strong female characters is part of that, as that's a way to prove to men (and women) that women don't have to like only girl things, that they don't have to be passive and shallow, and that they can be just as active and masculine as men, should they choose. There's a whole anti-'girl gamer' movement too, where women who game are trying to make headway against the stereotypes of 'girl gamers are less good', 'girl gamers are hot', and 'girl gamers like pink, frilly characters'. Because of my tastes, I occasionally end up in aisles or theatres with a heavy male presence, and though I'm looked askance at sometimes, and though I think a guy once left the SF aisle just because I entered it, I've never felt unwelcome and nobody's pulled chauvinist crap with me because of it. There've been guys who've been pleasantly surprised to see my reviews littering the shelves of the SF section at work.

However, as the NYT article that started this post proves, female geeks haven't made it quite yet. The writers says she doesn't know anyone who'd pick The Hobbit over Lorrie Moore, which is all well and good, and it's already been pointed out that she could've gone looking for female Game of Thrones fans. Perhaps she didn't look because it didn't occur to her that such people could exist? She wouldn't be alone in that. Lots of people are surprised by geek women, especially, I think, scientist and engineer women, and that needs to change. We're just as smart and just as normal as men. We deserve the same recognition and ubiquity.

I may be a girl. I may be a geek. But I won't answer to 'girl geek' happily at all. I'm just a geek, thank you.

Year of the Superhero - Ghosts of Manhattan

2011-04-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

George Mann's Ghosts of Manhattan is billed as a steampunk superhero novel, which is how it found its way onto my reading list. I like steampunk. I like superheroes. A mix of the two sounded great! And then I cracked the book open last week to discover that not only is there a steampunk superhero, but he's a steampunk Batman. He shares the attitude, the protectiveness, part of a costume, the secret identity type, the propensity for wanton destruction and weaponry. The story itself revolves around mobsters and staged murders and a mysterious mob boss, and features a straight-cop detective along with the Ghost. It's fun, it's full of action, it reads quickly. So, y'know, all good there.

Unfortunately, I've got more quibbles for this book than I have for others. Mostly this is a factor of my reading tastes, I think. I'm used to stories that have a bit more than just the action plot, be it social commentary, character development, side plots, or whatever. I'm especially used to steampunk novels (Dream of Perpetual Motion, Boneshaker, Difference Engine) that have strong social undertones, rather than the muted commentary Ghosts of Manhattan does. The former have a lot to say about how technology's altering society for the worse. Ghosts of Manhattan talks about organized crime and people drifting through life without a purpose, which strikes me as a 1920s thing rather than a steampunk thing. The rich of New York were constantly partying in our reality too.

Anyway, we're not talking about steampunk here, we're talking about superheroes. (Though can I say, the steampunk weapons, devices, and vehicles in Ghosts? Awesome.) The Ghost has the hard-boiled, cynical vigilante thing down, though it's never quite explained why he feels the need to do dress up and fight people. Yes, protect the city. Yes, organized crime is bad. Yes, traumatized WWI vet. But I feel there should be something a little more. However, he's very good at getting the job done and the backstory would probably weigh the book down a little, so I'm not quibbling a lot. Also not quibbling about the random mystical stuff that crops up here and there, because I'm not sure it would be steampunk without at least a little random mystical stuff.

I had a tough time enjoying the characters too, but again that's my fault, not George Mann's. Mann's characters are fully realized, if a little devoid of probably-unnecessary backstory. I just like a little more snark in my MCs, and the book before Ghosts was Cloud Atlas, one of those books that's so good it's guaranteed to spoil whatever comes after it.

So: cool hero, cool story, cool inventions. I read the book quickly, or at least it felt like I did. If you like action stories, you'll like this. The fights are fantastic! Ghosts is a little weak on the mystery elements—the clues come a little too conveniently for my liking—but I did think I had the villain pegged several times when it was somebody else entirely. It's largely a story of archetypes, on one level, which works because so many superheroes and villains are archetypes. The Ghost feels like he could've come from any of the early comic books, and that's certainly a good thing.

I know I've complained about Ghosts here, but I definitely enjoyed reading it and don't regret the time it took me to do so. It's certainly not a bad novel. If you're interested in reading it, do so. If you're not, well, don't.

Robert Munsch, Fantasy Author

2011-04-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

I was shelving books at work the other day when I realized who my first fantasy author love was. I generally credit Tolkien as my first exposure to fantasy, followed by Douglas Adams for science fiction, but that's actually not true. My first fantasy writer, that I remember at least, is a guy named Robert Munsch. He's Canadian and has been going strong since the 1980s. In fact, he was going so strong back then that's he's one of the icons of my generation, and the generation after mine, at least in Canada. I can't speak for his icon status for the kids growing up now, however.

Robert Munsch writes picture books with a bent for audience participation. There are actions. There are sound effects. There are absolutely ludicrous scenarios. And many of the books currently branded as "Classic Munsch" explore fantasy, sci-fi, and the power of imagination. They paint pictures of worlds where it's possible to live in subway stations, or be fathered by giants, or find small children in deep pits in sandboxes, or in sock drawers. Children fly airplanes and drive fire trucks. I couldn't get enough of them … and I may still sneak in a couple pages when I'm supposed to be working.

An incomplete list of his books:

Mud Puddle - Every time a girl goes outside, a giant mud puddle jumps out of where it's hiding and attacks her.
The Paper Bag Princess - A princess travels to a dragon's cave, outwits the dragon, and rescues her prince, after a fashion.
David's Father - The new kid in school has a dad who uses a shovel for a spoon and has giant furniture. (He's adopted.)
50 Below Zero - A boy's father is a chronic sleepwalker, which isn't really a good thing in the middle of Canadian winters. Luckily, hypothermia isn't a problem and the dad thaws quickly.
Purple, Green, and Yellow - Brigid likes coloring herself with markers. One day, she colors so much of herself that the only way to get rid of the colors is to take a pill that makes her invisible.
A Promise is a Promise - An Inuit girl trades her siblings to a sea monster in return for going free.
Jonathan Cleaned Up—And Then He Heard a Sound - A boy discovers that the reason people keep rushing through his living room is because his house has been rezoned as a subway station.
Alligator Baby - A family's new baby ends up swapped for an alligator at the hospital.

Now, these books aren't high literature. The language is simple and sound effects often span a page. But y'know, they're aimed at 3-6 year olds, and they work just fine. A lot of the stories are surprisingly complex, too, and good launch points for discussions. Munsch writes a lot of non-SF books as well, which are just as good, and are about things every kid dreams about or can understand (Thomas's Snowsuit, I Have To Pee!, Pigs, The Fire Station, Stephanie's Ponytail). They're fun, and the simple languages means kids can read the books themselves, and I definitely recommend Munsch to parents looking to entertain their toddlers and kindergarteners. Especially if said parents are geeks and/or attempting to instill feminist/egalitarian outlooks. There are a lot of girls, doing a lot of awesome things.

Do you have favourite picture book writers? Who was your first introduction to fantasy?

Superhero Round-Up

2011-04-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

I know I probably shouldn't do two superhero posts in a week, because predictability and ruts are bad things, but I had to get up early to let in the guy who's currently sanding drywall mud off my walls* so I can't quite brain enough to write an essay this morning. Luckily, some awesome superhero-related stuff has shown up on the internet lately, so I can spam you with it. Bwahahaha! *cough*

First of all, everyone needs to read this essay on why Dr. Horrible as a retelling of Spider-Man. It's about a thousand times better than my post on Dr. Horrible (or, for that matter, Spider-Man), and is pretty much genius.

Second, clips from Thor!

And footage from Green Lantern, courtesy of WonderCon!

Now, I was going to watch these movies anyway. I know nothing about Green Lantern at all, except that there's a ring and lots of different races, and well, Kenneth Branagh plus Norse mythology plus Marvel superheroes is bound to be epic. But seeing the new footage of both films makes me want to see them more. Especially the stuff from Green Lantern, because it looks like it'll be more than an origin story—there'll be bits of space opera in there too. The CGI looks decent. I hope it holds up on the big screen.

Green Lantern and Thor are definitely the superhero movies I want to see most this summer. I'll be going to Captain America too because, like Green Lantern, I know next to nothing about it. (It's set in World War Two and the guy has a famous shield that's cameoed in Iron Man II.) X-Men: First Class I'm waiting on more footage and trailers before making up my mind. On one hand, it looks reasonably forgettable. On the other, it features new heroes and looks better than Wolverine, at least. Also, James McAvoy is in it. But there are so many other films coming out, I don't know whether I want to shell out for this one too.

Anyone have other superhero stuff they want to share? Which superhero movies are you looking forward to this summer?

* long story

Mental Yoga for Writers

2011-04-06T14:28:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last couple days rewriting rewrites. Last week I wrote a new first chapter, but the final scene was incredibly weak and I ended up cutting it. But I couldn't end the chapter on the previous scene because I hadn't introduced enough of the themes, arcs, tension, what-have-you, and there was no way I could without adding a new scene. So now the chapter ends on a note of "something's wrong here" rather than "I have to take a shower", which … yeah. You see why I had to write a new scene.

The very first draft of this novel started with my hero lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. My villain was a beat cop who was randomly pulled out of crowd control to assist on a case. There was a third narrator, who managed to talk for a whole third of the book without contributing to the story at all.

My next bit of rewriting is to fix Chapter 3, which was Chapter 1 before Chapter 1 got more interesting. There are five, maybe six, things that I want to get into the chapter, and I'm currently playing with their order to find the maximum awesome. Specifically, when do I want the doom-y email to show up? At the very beginning to set the panicking off immediately? In the middle, as one more straw on the camel? At the end, as a cliffhanger? I've already dropped two of the my favourite, long-standing scenes because they don't work anymore.

I think a lot of beginner writers, or at least I get this impression from other peoples' blog posts and a smattering of personal experience, get caught up with their original ideas for stories and can't see their options, even when they're pointed out. I'm guilty of this. I insisted for three drafts that I couldn't start with a fight scene because the fight scene wasn't part of the story, when actually, the fight scene is definitely part of the story and I was being stupid not to include it.

The initial vision of the story is sacred and immutable, you see, and writers can be possessive and defensive when you attack it, but I don't think that's the whole reason for why people refuse to change their stories for the better. I think a lot of people just can't see how a tweak or a twist or a deletion could improve the story. They don't have practice being flexible.

Flexibility: the ability to change tack quickly; the ability to consider multiple perspectives and options; the ability to brainstorm; the ability to say, "I'll try it"; an important skill in a writer's toolbag of tricks. An important skill in anyone's bag, actually. Rigidity gets us nowhere in the end.

It can be hard to learn flexibility, true, and the lessons usually come through errors. I got most of my lessons early, from my parents' gentle "What if you did this?" corrections and from extracurricular drama-type programs. When you're given an ice cream scoop and asked, "What else is this?" or when your set breaks five minutes before a performance or when a cast member quits, you learn to improvise pretty fast. I'd imagine the experiences of raising or teaching children are good for flexibility too, as are … well, most jobs, actually. It boils down to practice.

When you're stuck on a scene or you're getting feedback that something's not working, step back and ask yourself three questions. "Why isn't it working?" "Why can't I change this?" "What if this happened instead?" And then follow those trains of thought where they lead. Write them down if you have to. Brainstorm. Do a mindmap. Weigh your options. Your story will be better for it (and if you, then you will. Practice and all that, right?)

Year of the Superhero - Batman Begins

2011-04-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

I have a number of fuzzy memories of Batman. I know I've seen Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, and the greater part of Batman Returns, but besides the characters, I can't tell you anything except that I thought they were fun but really kind of cheesy. I also remember watching episodes of the 1990s cartoon after school, but the only images left are of Batman jumping off buildings. A lot of my knowledge of Batman and Arkham and Gotham comes from cultural osmosis.

So Batman Begins is not my first encounter with the character, but it's the first major one, the one that's going to be 'my' Batman, in a way. A confession: I watched it for the first time last week. It didn't interest me when it was in theatres, you see, at least not enough to drive into town alone to watch it. I found it interesting, and fun, and true to what I know of Batman, but I'm not sure how much enjoyment I'd have gotten if I knew nothing about Batman at all. (Luckily, I think just about everyone knows a little about Batman these days.)

I enjoyed the mountaintop ninjutsu training. Don't know whether the comic book Batman is a ninja or just really good at martial arts, but hey, never passing up ninjas in a movie, and it totally makes sense for him to know that stuff. I felt all the training, and the montage of Bruce's criminal activities, went on a little long. 'Twas cool and everything, but when I'm tempted to fast forward…. I liked that we got the background of why Bruce went to those lengths (Falcone, the murder of his parents' killer), because it grounded everything a little, and because I didn't know about those aspects of Bruce's past. I knew his parents were dead and therefore his motive, but… yeah.

I also really liked the action scenes in Gotham. Gotham would not be Gotham without an excessive amount of grit, and Batman would not be Batman if he didn't wantonly destroy public property in the pursuit of justice. I commend Nolan for making that level of destruction fit the mood of the scene, and not make it silly and pulling the audience out of the story. Would have been easy to do, I think. Batman would also not be Batman without his toys, and so the scenes with Morgan Freeman (!) were a lot of fun as well. Especially the bit with the Batmobile.

I haven't talked about the post-ninjas story yet, and I should. I'm probably in the minority, but I didn't mind that Scarecrow, Ra's Al Ghul, Carmine Falcone, and corrupt cops were all part of it. It worked for me. Double-crossing, secret agendas, and alliances between criminals make for good story and good tension. I also thought the twist on the poisoned water supply trope was nicely done, though flashing between the action in the aftermath and the guys watching the water pressure was a bit much. Did we really need them to tell us the stakes when we already knew them? Ah well. Minor quibble.

Other things I enjoyed: Setting up the Batcave, Alfred, the understated Bruce-Rachel dynamic, Rachel herself, Gordon the long-suffering good cop, the way the cops treated the idea of a vigilante, the score, the little nods to reality in the problems with the masks and the need for a grappler gun, the bit about the Joker at the end.

Batman Begins is an odd movie, though. Lots of great stuff in it, but it felt almost like two short films tied together. We see Bruce Wayne learn to fight and get his morals on. Then we see him donning the cape and fighting crime. The two aren't linked together very well narratively. I don't get much sense of ongoing character development. Bruce mentally becomes Batman during the climax of the ninja sequence, and then we get a standard Batman-fights-bad-guys story. He doesn't change that much between returning to Gotham and the end credits. What does change, we're told by Al Ghul, instead of being allowed to see for ourselves.

Overall, though, it's an enjoyable movie, better than the average superhero film, and could be watched just for the fight scenes because they deliver, they really do. I'm glad I saw it, whereas I kind of felt Batman Forever was a waste of my time. (I gather that's normal, though.) And now that I've seen Batman Begins, I can now let myself see The Dark Knight. I put that off because I wanted to watch the movies in sequence, and because I took Heath Ledger's death really hard.

I am SO in!

2011-04-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

Good news, guys. I'm finally able to quit my job and write full-time! A distant cousin in Libya passed away a while ago and the legalities of the estate have just been finalized. I'm due for a bank transfer of $3.7 million pretty soon, which is going to help, let me tell you. No, don't worry, I'm not going to move into a mansion or find new friends or anything, and the money I need to send my cousin's executor's pretty reasonable, when you consider the political situation in Libya right now.

Anyway, here's the plan for when I get the money:

Write full-time, obviously
Help my parents pay off debt
Buy a lot of merchandise from ThinkGeek
Go to more cons
Possibly bribe an agent
Hire a scriptwriter to turn the WIP into a movie or a TV show, I'm not picky
Help Annikka get to Texas
Fund a couple projects my friends are working on
Buy lots and lots of books
Travel the world

Yeah, I know, not the most exciting stuff in the world, but hey, I'm not an overly exciting gal. What would you do with the money, though?

ETA: Yes, this is indeed an April Fool's joke. Hopefully that was obvious from the start? My job is far too awesome to quit even with that kind of financial windfall. I don't have any relatives in Africa. I'd be more fulfilled getting an agent honestly than through a bribe. Plus, y'know, I recognize spam when I see it.

However, the note about Annikka needing to get to Texas is entirely true. She really does need to get down there, ASAP, and doesn't have the cash to make it happen. But she's selling stories and has a Paypal donation button, so you can help her. Please do.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Future!

2011-03-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

We have powerful handheld computers that let us access a global information database, find our exact coordinates, translate languages in real-time, and make video calls to the other side of the world. We've taken photos of every planet in the solar system, many at close range—including Mercury from orbit. Heck, we've taken photos of planets that aren't even in our solar system! We can transmute elements and create antimatter. We're closing in on the technology to get us to Mars and beyond, and may be able to clone extinct species in the near future.

And yet, if you're anything like me, this is commonplace. We read a news article or hear something from a friend, and our first reaction is, "Oh, that's nice" or "Oh, that's cool" rather than "We can do that? Seriously?" There's so much futuristic stuff in our lives that it's normal. If that's not the definition of the future, what is?

Fortunately, there's still pioneering technology and ahead-of-the-curve science that can wow us, if we let it. Stuff that might be everywhere in ten, twenty, thirty years. Stuff that's inspiring to look at, to think about, to watch. Here are some of my recent faves. What are yours?

What Makes a Strong Woman?

2011-03-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

In the internet circles I travel in, it's hard to avoid running into feminist discussions, reviews of books with strong female characters, critiques of mass media's portrayal of women primarily as sex objects, so on, so forth. And while I'm a feminist, I'm not a Feminist, and so don't tend to enter in the discussion. I'm not confident enough in my knowledge of feminist politics, feminist history, and the current discussions of feminism online to do so. I'm always afraid that something I say will be a) stupid b) unhelpful c) coming back to haunt me when I'm published.

But. I really enjoy books and movies with strong women, and I enjoy writing strong women, and I've wanted to write this post for a while. Today feels like the day to do it. Nothing to do with internet circles. Just my mood.

The way I see it, there are two types of female characters. There's the woman who's written to a stereotype and/or a male fantasy, who's defined on some level by men, and there's the woman who's written without being defined and without being a stereotype, and who therefore comes across as an actual person. And Stereotype Woman comes in two types. She's either an actual stereotype, such as the nosy neighbour, the unsatisfied wife, the ditz, or the whore, or she's dressed in leather and spandex, given weapons and weapons training, and pointed at bad guys. There seems to be a subset of humanity who believes that a physically tough, highly sexualized woman in bondage gear is strong without needing motives, backstory, or a personality. Which is not to say that those kinds of women aren't occasionally fun to watch or read, but I wouldn't call them strong the way I'd call the Real Women strong.

The qualities that make a strong woman are hard to pin down. I'd say "All strong women are confident in themselves and dominant in relationships", the way a lot of urban fantasy heroines are, except I've seen female characters who are submissive, who lack confidence, who I wouldn't call weak. Most of those women are trying to get out of their situations, which I think is what makes them strong. Of course, both these types, and many more, are found in reality, so why not put them in fiction? Is a woman who takes matters into her own hands the only kind of strong?

Maybe, for one definition of the word. A woman who doesn't cave under pressure, who fights back and takes names, is the kind of "strong woman" we generally think of. I like these women. They're all kinds of awesome. But there's another definition of "strong" that also applies, and that's "well-crafted". Writers can easily create* realistic-feeling women who don't fight. A housewife who's not confined by cleaning, cooking, and children, who has hobbies, a social life, and political opinions, who's content to be background to her husband because she's an introvert and being dominant doesn't work for her. Or a cashier at the supermarket who has a horrible boss and hates her job, but still goes to work because her diabetes meds and student loans don't pay for themselves. They're strong too, just not the same kind of badass as the woman with the samurai sword who knows them.

Now, obviously writers can't develop every single woman in a story into a Real Woman. The minor characters who only get a scene or a passing mention don't need to be fleshed out to the same degree and can certainly be stereotypes or described in a phrase. Large amounts of detail for all characters is overwhelming and detracts from the protagonist's awesomeness. But, in my opinion, if a female character has more than a couple lines, or appears in several scenes, or has some affect on the plot, she should be a Real Woman.

Crap, you're thinking, I've got Stereotype Women all over this story! Breathe. That's fixable. Did you notice how I took common character types (the housewife, the bitter cashier) and added details? You simply need to give the stereotypes a background, or hobbies, or tastes, or any combination thereof, and you'll be better off than you were. I generally do this by taking a character type and adding in a couple unexpected but not-implausible details. A cat lady could be a former spy. A typical ditz-shopper type could be gay, or have a soft spot for alien invasion flicks, or be a hard-nosed reporter playing dumb for a scoop. The trophy wife may have married for money, but she's using it to save the Amazon rainforest and rehabilitate animals, not to increase her chest size or have a room full of shoes. … Suddenly they're a lot more real, no?

So watch for strong women, in books, movies, television, and reality. Celebrate them, because they're needed. And when you're writing, if you're a writer, try to put as many in as possible, and always ask, "Can I make this character female? Can I make her real, not a stereotype?" Because the answer's "Yes" more often than you think.

* Well, for a certain definition of 'easy'.

Guilty Pleasures and Being Yourself

2011-03-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows that I delight in being a bad influence. Ice cream for breakfast? A new outfit you can't quite afford? A story you don't think you can write? I say go for it! I've introduced people to Firefly, Discworld, Neil Gaiman, Supernatural, and Doctor Who with wild success, and they even thank me! This is awesome.

You see, a large part of my life philosophy is to live for the moment and do what I want, when I want. Within reason, of course. I'm not binging or spending $500 on clothes in a day or anything. But little things, I'm fine with, and I have absolutely no shame*. I bought the X-Men movies a couple days ago, partly because of the Year of the Superhero project and partly because I enjoyed all three a lot. I don't care who sees me reading YA or graphic novels on the bus. I have worn a Jayne Hat in public. I like Lady Gaga. I think more people should be proud of what they like and take criticism of their tastes lightly. It's certainly made me happier.

Giving in to your desires is a good thing, in my books. You get in touch with yourself, you have fun, you relax, you release your inner child. Adults are supposed to be mature, busy, and responsible, and I'm all for that, too, but really, we can't be serious people 24-7. It's boring and stifling and stressful. We need to recharge, and what better way than to do something you want to and know you shouldn't, or something that embarrasses you. You don't have to do it in public if you don't want. I'm not going to treat the world to my lip-synched dances to ABBA. I have respect for my fellow humans.

This goes for writing as well. Paranormal YA may be hot these days and women's lit may be more socially acceptable, but if you really want to write horror-comedies, then do so and don't force yourself into a genre you don't enjoy. If you want to write a book with a half-centaur, half-mermaid pirate airship captain, go for it, especially if you're more excited about that book than the one you're working on.*** You never know what'll happen, and you'll be truer to yourself.

So next time you catch yourself saying, "No, I can't do that", say, "Yes, I can, why not?" and then don't answer the question. Play on that swing set. Buy that action figure. Attend that convention. Write that book. Enjoy yourself. Have fun.

*Actually, that's not true. I downplay my fannishness for my parents and I can't quite justify buying geeky tees because I can't wear them to work.**
** I'm totally buying a bunch for my book tours, though.
*** Except if Important People are expecting the one you're working on soon. Then start outlining the centaur-mermaid-pirate world and work on it next.

Year of the Superhero - Spider-Man Trilogy

2011-03-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

When I started this series, I mentioned that superheroes tend to make me grin like an idiot. I first noticed this watching Peter Parker test out his powers and learn to be a superhero. He's so clumsy and dorky and good-hearted! He can't catch a break! He shoots webs out of his wrists! The second and third Spider-Man movies don't inspire quite as much glee, but they're still enjoyable. You can't watch them as serious fiction and sometimes you have to ignore bad writing and plot holes, but they're Hollywood summer action blockbusters. If you're entering the theatre expecting Oscar material, you're going to be disappointed.

The Spider-Man franchise hooks me for several reasons. First, there's Peter Parker, who's the most average of all the heroes I've encountered. He's constantly short for cash. He's trying to work his way through school. Everyone sees a geek when he's not in costume. He has girl troubles and job troubles. I identify with him far more than I identify with gods-on-Earth like Clark Kent or high-powered business people like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark.

Second, there's a larger-than-life quality that at the same time seems highly real, as if it were real life polished, not real life exaggerated. I know this is not true (A man with intelligent robotic arms fused to his back? A man who can turn into sand?), and that Spider-Man has the same shiny, bright, unrealistic world as a lot of the comic franchises, but somehow it doesn't feel like it. I don't even think I suspend less disbelief for Spider-Man than I do for any of the other heroes I've discussed so far (or will discuss in the future). Perhaps it's that Spider-Man doesn't take itself seriously, where some other franchises do? I don't know.

My final reason for loving the series goes back to the first, in a way. I've never felt the stories to be about a superhero. They're about a guy who happens to be a superhero. There's little sense of "Look at me. Aren't I awesome? My CGI team rocks!"* There's a whole lot of "My life SUCKS. It would suck considerably less if I wasn't a superhero, but what can you do?" Peter even tries to quit. It doesn't work out. The movies are about Peter's life and Peter's problems, and how Spider-Man complicates them. Peter's life rarely intrudes into Spider-Man's in the same way.

Detailing these points has made me realize two things.

The first superhero comic I pick up this year will likely be an Ultimate Spider-Man (if it's not Bendis's Powers).
The stuff I love about the Spider-Man films has found its way into my WIP. In a general sense, of course. It's about a guy who happens to be a superhero, and he's kind of a dork, and it's realistic but with kooky details.

Tobey Maguire will always be my Spider-Man, I think, even when I read the comics. He was my first encounter with the character, after all, and I've watched the movies enough times to ingrain him in my memory. But that won't stop me from watching next summer's reboot, just to see what they do with the story and if Garfield's any good in the role. And, like I just mentioned, it won't stop me from picking up the comics, either. The movies as a gateway? Wasn't that the plan?

* Except when applied to the villains. They love their grand-standing, those villains.

Guest Post and WIP Update!

2011-03-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not putting up a long post here today because all of you should be heading over to Science In My Fiction to read the post I've put up there. It's on symbiosis and parasitism, and will hopefully generate SF plot bunnies. Go on, read it, comment. Shoo!

And fine, if you want to stay here, I'll write a little more. A WIP update, maybe? Because I don't consider it long enough or interesting enough for a full post? Right then.

If you've been following the progress of my novel, you'll know that I keep having epiphanies about things that need to be fixed. I'm about to start the next round of implementation today, having written an admittedly somewhat bad denouement to tie up loose ends. I'm not too worried about the badness of it, since the stuff I'm adding on this pass is going to change things at the end anyway.

This pass is going to focus on Will, the protagonist, and his half of the narration. Will could stand to be stressed out a little more and his first chapter could use a bit more action and personal background, so I'm going to be beating him up again (or for the first time), giving him something to fail to accomplish in Chapter 1, and then [redacted for spoilers] which will result in lost sleep, hard questions, and possibly concerned relatives. The [redacted for spoilers] will also complicate the villain's half of the narration, which is a bonus. I'm excited to get started on this.

After that, Will's story should be "done" barring the next round of betaing, and I'll be switching my focus to the oh-so-fun-to-write villain. I need to give him a b-plot, which I haven't completely figured out yet, and I need to throw more wrenches into his arc than just the [redacted for spoilers]. One of the reasons I'm leaving him for last is because I have to figure this stuff out. Also, while I like writing in his voice, his thought processes scare me sometimes and it's a constant struggle to get him to describe anything. "What does the room you're in look like, Dan?" "It's a room." "What's in it?" "Chairs and a table." "Right then…"

So that's pretty much where things stand with the WIP. I'm going to stop writing here and start writing over there. And you're all going to read my guest post, yes?

Flog Your Blog!

2011-03-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

This "meme" was started by Shannon Mayer on Wednesday, and I commented which means I have to pass it on. So I am. Strictly copy-pasting with a few changed words. I'm totally not being lazy today, really. Er…

This is your opportunity to FLOG YOUR BLOG! I thought it would be nice if my followers had a chance to show off what their own blog was about and gain some new followers through my blog here.

When you make a comment, don’t just put in your link, tell us a little bit about your blog. Do you write mostly book reviews? Talk about writing angst? Discuss current events? What’s your own writing genre? Are your published? This will help people decide if they want to follow you.

To be completely clear, this is not a contest, you won’t win anything by making a comment, but I am hoping that you will gain some new followers (me too) by participating in the FLOG YOUR BLOG throw down. The only rules are-

1. You must be following this blog, Specnology to make a comment and . . .
2. You must do this on your blog too in order to give your followers a chance to gain new people.

My hope is that more people will not only get active here by commenting and participating but that my followers will get the same thing on their blogs. I think this sounds like a good idea, let’s see how it works.

Urban Fantasy and Exaggeration

2011-03-16T15:28:00.000-07:00

As everyone who follows this blog probably knows by now, I'm big into urban fantasy, both as a writer and reader. This means that I come across, and read, a whole lot of blog posts and internet articles about urban fantasy every week, as well as participating in #ufchat on Twitter. And I've noticed something. A lot of these sources exaggerate.

I know exaggeration generally occurs as a rhetorical device and is being used to highlight certain aspects of the genre. Thing is, this highlighting is frequently in a "my UF doesn't do that" or "we've moved past that as a genre" or "let's tone things down" vein, and I'm not sure it's entirely accurate in that regard. In fact, I think it may perpetuate myths and misunderstandings, and possibly turn people away who'd otherwise read the books in question. (I'm guilty of this highlighting too, by the way.)

I'm not exceptionally well-read in UF, admittedly. There are too many novels for me to even have read half of them. But I'd like to think I'm reasonably versed in what's going on in the genre, and I have to say, I've yet to see some of the heroines people discuss like they're everywhere. You know—the red-headed stick figure in leather, corset, and heels, wielding a longsword or high-calibre weapon without a realistic muscle or body mass. The busty bombshell who shags anyone with a six-pack and a Clint Eastwood voice. The woman who whines about how she's got it so hard when she breaks a nail in the middle of a case and wouldn't you know it but everyone's out of fake nails, not to mention her favourite color of nail polish.

Of course, there are protagonists who fit parts of these stereotypes, but in all the cases I've seen, it's just one part of their character and it comes from either a part of the world-building or in the character's backstory. Maybe they need to wear leather because that's the only thing tough enough to not fall off in a fight. Maybe they sleep around because they've got deep-seated issues about their body and the nature of sex. Maybe the girl with the broken nail is a beauty pageant contestant trying to find out who's been slipping vampire serum to the competition.

Okay, maybe that last one's stretching it.

I also don't see a lot of the broad-chested, sexist, quasi-abusive he-men who are supposed to run rampant through urban fantasies, or the highly-formulaic plots, or the excessively whiny vegan vamps. They're there, to a degree, but the exaggerations … well, exaggerate the character traits, and formulaic plots? UF is by and large a mystery genre. There's only so much you can do with "crime happens, someone goes to solve it, various bad things happen, clues appear, mystery solved". Even still, there's an awful lot of potential even in a single world. The series I follow, which, okay, most are only 4-6 books right now, haven't been played out yet, and the worlds are actually expanding.

These exaggerations of characters and tropes don't just come from haters, though there are certainly people who look down on urban fantasy and play things up to point out flaws. Writers and readers say these sorts of things all the time. "More real vamps!" they say. "More realistic characters!" they say. "More creative plots!" they say. If anyone's reading books with fake vamps and shallow characters and hackneyed plots, they're, I'm sorry to say, not looking hard enough. Not really looking that hard at all. As far as I can tell, good urban fantasy, with rounded, realistic characters, good romances, good mysteries, and complicated, layered worlds is all over the place. By exaggerating the genre, not that that's always a bad thing, we're making people think that it doesn't. Ourselves included.

Another short post

2011-03-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

I don't have the motivation to write a long post today. I'd really rather be writing, because I'm on a roll. I'm basically rewriting the ending of the WIP, you see. Same scenes, same general ending, but the words and setting are going to be vastly different. I want to see how far I can get before I have to head to work. I'm on the third scene from the end, by current count.

So, in lieu of something smart and witty and poignant and topical, here are two Doctor Who fanvids that tickle my fancy.

Quick Update

2011-03-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

I know it's not Friday. I know I didn't post on Friday. I didn't have the time or the energy. You see, I went home to help my parents in the final couple days of packing for a move, which meant limited net access, limited sleep, and a huge amount of stress. And Friday was my Get Back To The City In Time For Work day, which meant limited net access and a slightly smaller amount of stress. I got to work with 10 minutes to spare.

Three thoughts:

1. Possibly I need to travel long distances without internet more often, because I wrote about five pages of new text for the WIP while in transit. (I don't drive.)

2. My dad has an incredibly awesome personal library. I'm jealous.

3. If you're into urban fantasy and haven't read the October Daye series, stop what you're doing, buy all four books, and read them now. They're a perfect blend of mystery, fantasy, and humor, about a half-fae PI-cum-knight in San Francisco, who keeps getting pulled into Faerie to find its criminals for them. I read the fourth and latest book on my trip, while not writing or packing, and made the mistake of reading the sample from book five. Mistake, I say, because I want that book yesterday! And I have to wait September. I swear, the books keep getting better, and they were good to start with.

Year of the Superhero - Soon I Will Be Invincible

2011-03-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible is set in a comic book universe. People fall into radioactive vats or get caught in experimental explosions on a regular basis, gaining superpowers which they use for good or evil. There are several alien species, some at war with each other, some interbreeding with humans or living on Earth. There are fairies and magical artifacts, robots and cyborgs. Mad science works. The laws of physics can be defied. And yet in some key ways this isn't a comic book universe, because its inhabitants are normal, three-dimensional people, with hang-ups and flaws and boring dayjobs and backgrounds and history. The book was pitched to me as a realistic superhero novel, and it doesn't disappoint.

The book has two narrators. Doctor Impossible, an aging evil supergenius and former science nerd, is our anti-hero, breaking out of jail to enact yet another master plan to control the world. Fatale, a unique state-of-the-art cyborg, is our heroine, newly drafted into the New Champions to help find CoreFire, the universe's Superman equivalent, and stop Doctor Impossible, who's suspected to have had a hand in the disappearance. The New Champions comprise the rest of the main cast, and we get to know selected other heros and villains throughout the story, largely in flashbacks. Doctor Impossible spends a lot of time reminiscing about the good old days, when you could build a death ray, exchange banter, and escape to rule another day. (These days, it's death ray, banter, jail sentence.)

Grossman's gift, at least with this book, is the level of realism he introduces to the characters, which keeps the story from flying off the rails due to the nature of the universe. Doctor Impossible has a recognizable need to be noticed, and an equally recognizable desire to prove everyone who said he was a loser wrong. He discusses the effects of Malign Hypercognition Disorder, how you kind of fall into become a villain, why you keep going back for more. There are bits I think Grossman glosses over with Impossible, but if he hadn't glossed, Impossible wouldn't have been a recognizable archetype.

Fatale, now… She's flailing and floundering and out of place in the world, and out of place in her body because so much of it's robotic. She's the most average of any of the characters, and new to her powers, so we get an outsider's view of the heroes and villains and the lifestyle both of those hold. And Fatale's description of her inner workings, what it feels like to have a metallic, robotic body, are fantastic. There's no way you can experience that with her, in a different medium.

The characters and world come together to create a fantastic story, which on one level is a recognizable comic/movie plot, and on another is a critique and satire on heroes and villains, on motives, on humanity, and on comic books themselves. A lot of satires seem to get bogged down in hammering their points home, to the detriment of the plot and action, but this one doesn't. It is a fantastic larger-than-life tale even if you ignore the subtext and messages. I have a couple quibbles about time spans and a somewhat over-transparent clue, but they're minor (and possibly due to my copy being an ARC). It's still a great read, and I suspect the Grossman's realism elements are going to influence my own.

Public Opinion About Writing (As Seen By Me)

2011-03-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not know, I work in a bookstore. I am paid to tell people what to read, and I'm paid to organize things. It's a dream come true, really. It's also a good job for an aspiring author because it forces me to keep up on trends, forces me to know about genres I don't read, and forces me to get good at pitching and identifying markets and hooks. It's also taught me a few things about public perception of the publishing process. None of this is exactly news, if you're into the online writing community, but I'm going to blog about it anyway, just 'cause.

(Before I continue, I want to make it clear that this post has nothing to do with specific customers, just The Public as kind of a collective organism. Every single customer is awesome—except when they're absolute jerks and steal things. This is especially true if my bosses are reading this, or any of my customers. If they are, hello and welcome!)

Opinion #1: Paperbacks are released shortly after hardcovers are, if not at the same time or even beforehand.

That one seems to be pretty common. There's a lot of shock when I say, "No, they haven't released the paperback yet, that book only came out Tuesday/last week/a month ago/at Christmas. You're going to be waiting about a year." And yes, I'm aware of the exceptions and add them into my spiel as necessary.

Opinion #2: All bookstores carry board games.

The national chains do, yes. They also carry chocolates, cooking implements, and toy animals. We are an indie and carry none of these things. I have yet to see an indie that does (unless they, say, specialize in kids books or cookbooks or something).

Opinion #3: I, as a bookseller, have read every book in the store.

There are at least 500,000 titles in my store. To read them all, I'd need to read a book a minute for an entire year, not breaking to work or eat or sleep. And that's not including new stock.

Opinion #4: Bookstores have paper bags, not plastic ones.

Do any bookstores have paper bags these days? The ones here don't, that I've seen. Not even the other indies.

Opinion #5: It takes months, not years, to get a book published.

This one shows up in two forms. There's the "I just finished the Cussler/Kellerman/Patterson/Roberts that came out two days ago. How long until the next one?" form, and the "Oh, you're a writer? When will I be able to buy your book?" form. For both, I explain that there are multiple editors involved, and revisions, and then they've got to print copies, and box them, and ship them for the same date. For the latter, I add that I don't have an agent yet, let alone a book deal. That's at least a year away, right there.

Opinion #6: Agents and the traditional press are evil.

This comes from a couple people who know I want to get published. They helpfully inform me that I'm better off self-publishing because the traditional process is out to fleece me of the money I'm due. I've tried to explain that no, it's not like that, and no, agents are actually looking out for my interests, and no, self-publishing isn't going to work because I'm not good enough at promoting myself to make money that way, and yes, I've looked into ebooks and web-based options and I'm not particularly interested at this time. This does not seem to have changed their opinions.

Opinion #7: All bookstores have an ebook line.

As far as I can tell, the only stores with ebook lines are ones with enough money to develop one. Especially when e-readers are involved. We're an indie. As much as we'd like to, we don't have that kind of money. Maybe if the people asking for ebooks bought paper books from us instead of leaving?

Opinion #8: We are affiliated with the national chains.

Nope. They don't even seem to be trying to put us out of business.

Opinion #9: People aren't reading these days.

Nope. They are. Trust me. Paper books, even!

Now, before you get indignant and tell me that I'm wrong, note that:

I am one person, working in one store, in one neighbourhood, in one city.
This is Canada, not the US or another continent.

That said, I like hearing others' experiences and encounters and opinions. What other publishing-related attitudes have you encountered among the reading public? What opinions did you have, that were corrected once you started writing?

A Horrific Realization

2011-03-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

I like to think of myself as not being a noob writer, even though technically I am one. A lot of the writing advice I see aimed at new writers doesn't apply to me. Stuff like, "make sure you have a plot," "create a flawed protagonist," "spelling and punctuations are your friends", "don't qualify your dialogue with adjectives," "revise, several times." I follow those rules naturally. On encountering a new piece of advice, my normal reaction is, "People do that?"

But at the same time, there are problems with the WIP. I know this. I've known about most of them for a while, and I more or less know how to fix them. A couple of problems have really come to light in the last couple days, though, via email correspondence with Hannah Bowman, who's getting a shout-out because she's awesome. One problem is impossibly thorny and will take time and patience and a certain amount of blood and tears to correct.* The other is a case of me not following one of the noob rules.

Yes, I have started my manuscript in the wrong place. In my defense, there is a decent case to be argued for starting where I did.** But it's not working, and the first chapter's a little slow. However, if I rewind the clock about 12 hours, we get a fight scene and an unconscious protagonist and bad guys and cool technology. It's also, in a sense, the inciting incident.

So why didn't I start there in the first place? Because I'm too clever for my own good, sometimes. You see, I knew I needed a hook, and I figured, "Hey, if I start after that big fight scene, and only allude back to it, and there are strange things happening that may have to do with this fight we don't really know about, that would make a great hook! People would have to keep reading to find out what the heck is going on! And I can do a big reveal in Chapter 3!"***

Yeah…. Turns out, average reader reaction is more towards the "stop reading" end of the spectrum. I'm going to have to find a way to work in the fight without wrecking the revelation scene in Chapter 3, because the hero's friend need to know stuff, but I can't just retell the opening, and I can't really summarize everything because the friends have to chew out the hero at just about every step. They will not stay quiet long enough to let him finish. Sigh.

Fortunately, I have two new scenes to write near the end, and another scene to "accept changes" on, before I have to restart the story. I guess we'll see if the fight scene works or not after that.

Oh, and this post? Is not a flat-out supporting of the advice to "start in the right place". Go ahead and start in the wrong place. Several times. But be prepared to start in the right spot after people tell you it's not working. This way, you'll be able to identify what the "wrong place" feels like and hopefully not do it again.

* We're not going to talk about this one because it's better communicated through babble and hand-waving than actual prose.
** Also in my defense, the very first opening I wrote was terrible.
*** Chapter 3 being the hero's second chapter.

50 Rules to Follow If I End Up In an Urban Fantasy Novel

2011-03-02T13:21:00.000-08:00

This is inspired by The 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army. If for some reason you have not read that list, go and do that now. Do not drink or eat while doing so. Then come back and read this homage.

I will not ask paranormal detectives or supernatural cops if vampires or werewolves are better in bed.
I will not ask anyone if vampires or werewolves are better in bed.
Especially if they're vampires or werewolves.
I will not ask vampire hunters if they have a Mr. Pointy.
I will not conjure demons to do my food runs for me.
I will not pay delivery people in fairy gold.
Love potions never end well.
I will not ask fairies if they know Legolas.
I will not ask fairies if they know Frodo.
I will not ask fairies if they know Tinkerbell.
I will not ask fairies if they know Spock.
Fairies are not aliens. Even if they come from another dimension.
"Hot enough for ya?" is not a good conversation opener with demons.
I will not explain Twilight to a vampire.
I will not explain Twilight to a werewolf.
Explaining any other paranormal book or show to the undead will just give them ideas. Don't do it.
I will not pray to any gods. They tend to be creatively literal when answering.
I will not take the names of gods in vain. Many gods have power over lightning and I like my body uncharred.
I will not mention leather pants in the vicinity of a dedicated bounty hunter.
I will not wear leather pants for any reason.
I will not tell female bounty hunters, police officers, private detectives, or anyone else who may encounter the undead on a daily basis, that they would look better in heels.
Axes are not for chopping vegetables.
Neither are swords, hunting knives, throwing knives, or any other blade weapon.
That's probably not V8 in the fridge.
Witches and wizards are sick of Harry Potter jokes.
Broomsticks are not romantic presents. Neither are sunblock, shaving cream, razors, embalming fluid, formaldehyde, garlic, Holy water, religious symbols, mirrors, or medical thread.
If I see something unfamiliar and mobile, I will not poke it with a stick.
Unless I know what I'm doing.
And have the appropriate weapon handy.
If I have to explain the unexplainable, it's a gas leak.
Ghosts do not act like Casper.
I will not assume the moaning, dirty people dressed in rags are alive just because they're moving.
I will not assume anything is alive just because it's moving.
Decapitation is always a solution when battling monsters.
Unless it's a hydra.
I will keep sharp, pointy objects on me at all times.
I will keep peace offerings on me at all times.
Especially when crossing bridges.
I will not whistle after dark. Nor will I attempt to summon Bloody Mary.
I will not use anyone's emergency battle salt or defensive garlic as seasoning.
I will not address any supernatural law enforcement professional as "babe", "hot stuff", "Great and Powerful Master", "Wonder Woman", "Superman," "Wizzard", or "Your Highness". The correct forms of address are "sir," "ma'am," "detective," "officer", and "Mr./Ms. ___."
Just because a car has an anti-damage spell does not mean I can take it on a wild joyride through the city.
Even if it's my car.
I will not rub oil lamps in the hopes that a genie will appear.
I will not make crank calls about monsters or the undead in the hopes that the hot detective shows up to deal with it. Similarly, I will not make crank calls about dragons for the firemen.
If someone offers me free spells, enchanted objects, granted wishes, the best sex I've ever had, prophecies of my future, or magic beans, I will say no, even if it's really tempting and even if I know how to get out of the ensuing situation.
I will assume there is a Dark Lord even if I see no evidence supporting their existence. There is always a Dark Lord.
If a book is giving off vibes, bound in chains, screaming, or appears to be bound in skin or written in blood, I will not open it.
I will not panic, not even if there is an apocalypse or a million undead on my doorstep. Panic does not solve anything.
I will try to get out of the novel as soon as possible, if not earlier. And then I will kill the author with my novel-acquired skills.

Feel free to add your own in the comments. Hope you liked!

Year of the Superhero - Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

2011-02-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

In a long line of superhero films that deconstruct and comment on superheroism comes Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. The protagonist is a supervillain. A geeky, sweet, kind of awkward supervillain named Billy, who has the same idea a lot of people do—that the world would be a better place if we were in charge. Billy lives in a world where superheroes and supervillains are common enough that people recognize their names on the street. His nemesis is Captain Hammer, whose muscles are only matched by the size of his ego. Hammer's a sadistic bully who uses his status as superhero to get away with some pretty horrible things, including stealing Billy's crush away from him. Of course, we only see him through Billy eyes, which are probably skewed, but still.

There've been other supervillain-as-protagonist stories, including Despicable Me and Megamind, and as far as I can tell, Soon I Will Be Invincible. I'll be talking about these later, but Dr. Horrible's the only one to cast the superhero as a bully. Antagonist and thorn in the side, sure, that goes for most stories, but a bully? A guy who gets his kicks from making other people hurt? I'd say "only Joss Whedon" but I'm not convinced his mind's that unique. (The ending's pure Whedon, though.) It's also interesting to note that civilian blindness to Hammer's actions can be read as a metaphor for civilian blindness to the actions of governments and corporations, who say one thing and do another all the time—or at least that's how I see it. Billy refers to Hammer as a "corporate tool", after all.

Enough about the hero. Let's talk villains! I've already mentioned a lot of what makes Billy particularly endearing. He's trying so hard to succeed, and he has a lot of false starts, and there's a girl he can't get the courage to talk to… Billy's speciality is ray guns and building things. I like all supervillains, but mad scientists are more fun for me than any of the superpowered villains I've met*. There's something about their drive and the way they think that speaks to me. Possibly this says things about my own personality, I don't know. Let's just say I really, really like Billy and move on…

There are superpowers in this world. Moist, Billy's henchmen/friend, makes things damp, but so quickly it can't just be sweat. We don't know how common powers are, because we only get glimpses of the Evil League of Evil and never see another superhero. We don't even know for sure if Hammer has powers. He could just be naturally strong. (I'm leaning towards powers, though.) Mad science, however, is totally possible.

Other bits of deconstruction: Billy knows he shouldn't monologue during the climax, but he can't help himself**. There's a superhero, Johnny Snow, who keeps asking Billy to be his nemesis. The henchmen have a union. Hammer has a fan club. There is singing. Singing. And it works. ~~Nobody has a cape.~~

For me, Dr. Horrible ties with Firefly for Best Whedon Show. (Sorry Buffy and Angel. You're #2, promise.) There's evident delight in the world and the story, and a perfect balance of light and dark overtones, and it's really hard to decide between supervillains and space cowboys. I mean, how can you? So if you're reading this as a review rather than a commentary on the super-world, take note that I'm not unbiased.*** And if you haven't seen Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog yet, what's keeping you? Go watch it right now!

* Except for my supervillain, because he's mine. Mwahaha.
** I think there's a fairly long tradition of villains knowing not to do this, actually.
*** I've also seen the stage musical. Just sayin'.

I Live! (Maybe)

2011-02-25T13:47:00.001-08:00

I’m back in the world of regular chances to be online now, though I have to start the dayjob in about half an hour (and am running on short sleep) so today’s post is going to be on the short side. Regular service will return on Monday, likely with some kind of superhero. I was listening to podcasts during my “holiday” at my parents and was reminded of a couple movies I’ve seen and forgotten about. I’m going to have to do a rewatch of them before blogging about those, though. It’s been too long to remember anything accurately, and I was too new to superheroes at the time to have picked up on a lot.

Anyway, I spent an hour this morning talking with Dad about the WIP. Dad being a smart guy who understands narrative flow and troubleshooting and the problems inherent in writing groups who shoot down manuscripts. We came up with several ideas for how to fix The WIP, one of which is going to be finicky and involve a lot of tweaking, one of which turns it from a novel into a novella*, and one of which mashes the planned plot of Book 2 into Book 1, which will be a lot of writing but might actually go quickly because I’m not dealing with the same material over and over and over and over and….

I don’t know which to choose. I’m likely going to try them all, to a point. There are beta-made cuts that I need to deal with before I have the book in a form I can use as a launch point. I need to write a new denouement. I need to give the antagonist more of a back story. I may need to write a new first chapter. There are some other issues. And I’m not saying this so you can give me your opinion, though if you want to, I won’t and can’t stop you. I just have to say this to somebody, and I figure the occasional WIP-blog is okay.

In other news, I think I may have come up with a good title for the WIP, instead of the mediocre, kind of vague one I have now, and I’m hauling a bunch of my books home so my parents don’t have to move them. They’re going to be handy writing resources, or they’d better be because I swear they weigh about six tonnes.

* I pointed out that novellas are a hard sell. He said try it anyway.

Short Update-y Post

2011-02-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

I am woefully behind. Perhaps I exaggerate, but that's what it feels like. I owe someone story feedback. I've barely read or watched anything new for my Year of the Superhero series. There are over 70 books on my to-read shelves. There are some embarrassingly unanswered emails. I haven't done much revision this week. Aagh! If only there were more hours in a day. If only I could get by with little sleep on a regular basis.

All this to say that:

If I owe you something, I'm sorry, and it should be arriving within the next few days.
There are too many books in this world.
The next couple days are going to put me further behind, as I'm going home to help my parents pack for a move. I will have internet connectivity, but who knows how much time I'll have to be online.
Because Friday is my travel-back-to-City day, I don't know how intelligent or long my Friday post will be.

I'm going to make this an open post, in a sense. Anything you feel like saying (unless it's rude or spiteful), go ahead and say it.

UF as a Window into Society

2011-02-21T14:03:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been reading a cultural history of the Great Depression*. I won't go into details, as they're likely to bore you, but the thesis of the book—the whole concept of cultural history, actually—has opened my eyes. See, cultural historians examine books, art, movies, songs, and other products of human culture, to get a sense of the era, or civilization, or subculture, or what-have-you, and it's been interesting to see how the songs I know, the movies I've heard of but haven't seen, the books, and the photos all express the same dynamics, the same attitudes, the same conflicts.

Can you guess where I'm going with this?

Okay, maybe not. I've been thinking, this last day or so: What can we learn about our culture, or what would future historians see, by examining urban fantasy?

Disclaimer: I am not a historian. I have not taken a single post-secondary history class. Nor am I an expert on urban fantasy. I am bound to miss things, and probably going to get things wrong. This is entirely my own opinion and observations. If you must yell at me over anything in this post, please do so nicely. I'm not intending to step on toes or anything. Etc. etc. etc.

Urban fantasy frequently features loners, love triangles, noir settings, monsters, law enforcement professionals, and strong women even with male main characters. The triangles, the noir, the monsters, the women (often with phallic symbols)—those're all about sex. The culture of the early 2000s likes sex. This shouldn't surprise anyone. But also:

loners and noir - The City isolates people, forms them into nations of one, cuts them off from others. We can't live without the City, but we can't really live with it, either.
noir - We live in dark, depressing times, folks. There's a lot of fear and worry out there. One thing I've learned from Dancing in the Dark is that noir sprang up as a reaction to the Great Depression, with a dash of 1920s disenchantment. Instead of focussing on the grittiness of the rural poor, some writers focussed on the grittiness of the city, looking at the downtrodden there. (For downtrodden, substitute monsters?)
monsters - These represent various human minorities—ethnicities, women, the poor, LGBT. We're a much more integrated, global, holistic society these days, and more aware of other cultures and subcultues. It makes sense that our fiction reflects that.
strong women - Women may not be completely equal with men in reality, but they're much more equal than they have been in eras past. They're allowed to be strong, independent leaders, among many other things. So why not put strong women in fiction? Especially when it's noir fiction, which (I get the impression) typically features strong, alpha males? However, the fact that so many of these women appear with phallic symbols in tow means that women are still trying for equality for men, in a way. You need … certain bits of anatomy to qualify for higher wages, in many places. To pick one of many possible examples.
love triangles - Let's set aside the romantic entanglement part of love triangles, since that's been a tried and true narrative device since mythology, and look at the other aspects of the geometry. Frequently it's women who choose the men, and there's often sexual tension, even sex, with both partners. Is this evidence of changing attitudes to romance and relationships? A celebration of femalehood and sexuality? Both? Neither?
law enforcement - It's possible this reflects the growing police-state nature of parts of the Western world. I think it's far more likely law enforcement tends to show up in UF a lot because detectives and bounty hunters and vigilantes tend to have easier access to mysteries than the rest of us. The noir mysteries also play a part, I'd imagine.

The fact that we're couching all this social commentary in terms of fantasy likely indicates that there's a desire to get away from the world while reading the stories, though because of the social commentary in the stories, we don't want to get too far. We like being grounded, but we also like fun.

The chicks-with-leather type of urban fantasy isn't the only kind out there, however. There's also the mythic fantasy vein, where there's a quest of some kind through our world and maybe through a form of Faerie as well, and the Hero's Journey is adhered too, and there's beauty and magic. I don't know much about what's new in mythic fantasy, or what the writers I know of are doing differently than they were before. I think there's more technology and technological fae creeping in, but that's simply realism. We're a more technological society. If the hero didn't have a cell phone and an internet connection, s/he wouldn't be believable.

I'd delve into details here, examining specific books or series, but I think it's too soon. Which books are going to stand the test of time and be known in 20 years? In 50? What are people going to remember once UF has faded as a genre? How representative of society are individual books or series, anyway? How can I be sure enough of you have read the books I have? And do I have the right to get into that level of detail and examination when, as I've noted, I don't actually have any history credentials?

I'll leave the detail work for coming generations, then, and throw this idea of cultural history out to you, readers, as food for thought. Have I missed anything? Are there other interpretations? Anything you want to add?

* It's research, okay?

Real-Time Translation and Talking Dolphins

2011-02-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

It's obviously been a while since I've done anything with my archive of interesting science links. I know this because the first link on the list today dates from October. October! A quarter of a year away! But my list is finally long enough for a decent-length post, so here goes.

It is now possible to transmitting sound through space. Conventional wisdom says sound can't move through a vacuum because sound needs to be carried through air (or something else that vibrates). This holds for the breakthrough, actually. They're not using sound waves, exactly. They're getting the sound to vibrates a piezoelectric crystal, which sends out an electrical signal, which hits another crystal, which turns the electricity back into sound. Electricity can travel through a vacuum, you see.

This reminds me of the interplanetary internet idea that was floating around a few years ago—fast, almost real-time information transfer via relay stations set up throughout the solar system. We could conceivably do something similar with these crystals, set up a satellite phone between us and Jupiter or enable space stations or spaceships to talk to each other. Or, if we start looking for electrical signals coming from space, maybe we'll finally make contact with aliens! Of course, I don't know enough space science or electro-physics to say if interstellar dust or asteroids or solar flares will change the quality of the signal, but it's certainly a cool thought, no?

Getting a little gory for a second, researchers at McMaster University* have found a way to turn skin into blood. You stick skin cells into a chemical bath and voilà! Well, I imagine it's quite a bit more complicated than that, but still…. Once it's perfected a little better, this may be a way to get around the pesky stem cell debates, and if the blood is compatible with humans (unknown at date of original link), it might simplify blood transfusions. We wouldn't need as many donors to give blood, if they were willing to donate a bit of skin instead.

And back to our irregular broadcast: We have a universal translator! It's not without flaws, because it relies on 1) people being able to speak clearly and 2) Google Translate correctly identifying the words they're saying, but! Universal translator! The ability to go to any country I want, without speaking the language, and be understood! No phrasebooks!** There's also an iPhone app that translates Spanish-English texts in real time! Is that not awesome?

A while ago, the internet was buzzing about apparent evidence for precognition. A psychologist had run tests that seemed to prove that if you primed people on words after testing them on words, they'd still do better on the words you primed them on. It's compelling evidence and I'm half-inclined to believe it without further study, but it's only one researcher, after all. Let's see this replicated! Author Peter Watts has a fantastic analysis of the whole thing, and the controversy, and since he's got a science background, I direct you there.

Finally (and this one's new), we've come up with a rudimentary dolphin-human language! A series of whistles that humans can make, and dolphins can make, that code to various pool-side objects (ball, baton, fish, person…). Dolphins are actually using it to talk to us! I'd really like to see this developed to the point where it is a real language, or at least a functional pidgin, with verbs and determiners and adjectives and the whole deal. Think of what dolphins could teach us! Think of what we could learn about their minds, their culture, their own language! I've enjoyed the idea of talking dolphins in science fiction, but usually they've been altered to have human voice boxes/vocal tracts or they've got some kind of machine that translates thoughts.*** I'm surprised the idea of creating a hybrid language hasn't come up before. (I'm also starting to wonder if this new language will reveal that dolphins actually are from another planet. But I'm not holding out hope.)

Any cool science you've seen lately?

* Canada represent!
** I'd probably still buy one.
*** Actually, I'm not sure of this last one, but I swear I've seen it somewhere that isn't Up!

Reason #352 Why I'm a Writer

2011-02-16T08:30:00.000-08:00

I love language. I love the way words sound and how the sounds differ between accents. I love how the same word can mean five different things depending on which century it's used in, and how it can mean five other things depending on modern-day context. I love how languages borrow from each other, how sounds and meanings change during the borrowing. I love how there are more than enough languages in the world to cover every possible permutation of syntax and meaning and structure. I love the arcane system that is punctuation.

See also: the linguistics degree; my collection of dictionaries, English, translation, foreign-language, etymological, and obsolete; the fact that receiving the Chicago Manual of Style for my birthday several years ago had me actually jumping up and down and squealing; the biology grades which were half-memorization, half-figuring-out-the-Greek-and-Latin-affixes; the fact that I drop words like "truncate" and "collude" and "indefatigably" in everyday conversations and think nothing of it.

This is all to say that playing with language is what I do. I'm a natural punster. I make up words. I make up concepts. I make up sentences and paragraphs and stories. It's fun. It's addictive. Especially the bit about the stories, and especially when something I say or write causes spit takes or brain breakage. I delight in linking concepts that you wouldn't think could be linked, like the simile I came up with yesterday: The dust swirled up behind him like a cartoon coyote chasing a roadrunner. Sadly, it didn't fit the scene and the the coyote himself never swirls, but it's a great image, isn't it?

There's something magical about being able to take words, single words with only an handful of meanings, and stringing them together into a phrase or a sentence that pops, and then taking those sentences and forming paragraphs with a rhythm and flow and a sense of person, and then taking those paragraphs and creating the spell that is Story. There are approximately 48 sounds in the English language, represented by 26 letters of an alphabet that's been passed down and adapted for 4000 years, and using them, I'm able to elicit emotions and conjure images and tell the stories of people who may or may not exist. Anything I can imagine, is possible, and anything I want to say, I can.

And that is why I am a writer. How could I not be?

Year of the Superhero - Heroes

2011-02-14T14:19:00.000-08:00

I haven't watched all of Heroes. Let's get that out of the way right now. I've seen the first season, about 80% of the second, and the first half (or so) of the third. I stopped watching because the story grew too complicated and because my favourite characters were being written out of character. It ceased to be worth my time. (I chose to write instead.) I've seen enough of the show to talk about it, just not the whole run.

I enjoyed Heroes, especially the first season. I loved the way it was laid out like a comic book, with all the interconnecting threads and stories. I liked the X-Men-like nature of the show, with people freaking out over their powers and using them opportunistically, with the powers being somehow genetic, with everyone banding together by the end to stop a nuclear explosion. I liked the moral greyness and the sense of this being our world, with our problems, and the characters being real people. The writers did a great job of integrating superpowers into this universe. I can almost believe the Heroes world is our own.

A large part of what made the first season for me was how every member of the ensemble (or the powered members, anyway) was going through a different version of an origin story, including several characters who came into their powers already aware of comic books and fandom at large. I liked that a number of them weren't in it for the superheroism and the saving of the world, but were petty and selfish and occasionally confused. See: realism, greyness.

The show started delving into more of the world, and more politics, in later seasons. We find out more about the previous generation of 'heroes' and the Company they founded to protect/hide people with powers. We find out about a virus that can give people powers and how a strain of the virus could cause a pandemic. We meet some of the more psychopathic and dangerous people the Company's captured as everyone trying to a) escape from them or b) recapture them. Several of the characters begin to go dark or grey. One of them does so while desperately trying to find a way to induce powers in normal humans. It's compelling stuff, good television, all of that—for the most part.

Like any fan, I have my quibbles, my opinions on how the show should've gone, what the characters should've done and changed into. I had problems with the fact that time travel, in the form of geeky Hiro and tortured Peter, was used to further the plot, to give hints and threats and clues, in the later seasons as it was in the first. One season, it's cool. Two seasons or more, it feels like the writers have a formula. I feel cheated. The same goes for the "save the world" plot lines, which, while cool, was done in season two as well. And then season three almost went soap opera in a few of the story lines and had characters who seemed to be there more for "aww, that's sweet" moments and dramatic tension, then to have a bearing on the plot. Claire's birth mother, for instance, and Daphne, the reformed thief who falls in love with Matt.

I digress. I have a suspicion that Heroes would have been more interesting for me if I'd had a good grounding in comic book tropes. I'm betting the writers used, twisted, or flat out sent them up a lot of the time. But it was still a good show, still portrayed a wide range of people and motives and situations, still had interesting things to say about superpowers and what getting them can do to a person. It wasn't black and white. There was no Justice as an ideal. Nobody really went out of their way to make random acts of kindness or save random citizens except when they had a more selfish goal in mind. (It was kind of an all or nothing show. Either they save the whole world, or they don't save anyone.) Possibly I'd have liked to see more altruism, but I'm not sure the show would've suited it.

I think the popularity of Heroes came from the fact that it was the first live-action, people-get-powers show on a major network, and the fact that it came out around the time when people were looking for complex plots, shows with clues and mysteries to figure out, and season-long, even series-long plot arcs. I think its legacy is still a little up in the air. Other networks are doing the people-become-superheroes thing right now, with No Ordinary Family on ABC being initially billed as a new Heroes and The Cape borrowing the comic-book layout and references. I haven't seen enough of either to comment on the plot arcs, but my guess is The Cape has that as well, as will some of the shows that are currently in production. Heroes certainly cemented the idea of 'real people, real problems, now with superpowers!" versus the "he's a superhero, watch him go!" that tends to come out of comic book adaptations, and perhaps that's the legacy in the long run. We like our fantasy these days to have its feet on the ground.

Urban Fantasy at the Movies

2011-02-11T13:20:00.000-08:00

I was flipping through my urban fantasy collection the other day, trying to see how Published People Did Things, and I realized something I kind of already knew.

There are some awesome urban fantasy stories. And they have awesome protagonists. In fact, they are so awesome I want to see them on screen.

I'm not just talking about the chicks-with-weapons urban fantasy, though admittedly those were the ones I was looking through. The slow, quasi-epic quests of self that crop up in Gaiman and de Lint's work (among others) would make great movies, and I'm betting that paranormal romance (which I, er, don't read) could be a big hit as well, given that para-rom plots are frequently chicks-with-weapons stories but with more sexing.

No, really, I think urban fantasy adaptations should be the Next Big Thing. Here's why:

Hollywood thinks men go to movies for hot women, fight scenes, monsters, blood, big weapons, and explosions.
Vampires and werewolves are in at the moment.
Hollywood is running out of superheroes. They'll need to replace them with something.
As @ElenaLikesBooks pointed out, YA urban fantasies are already being adapted. She mentioned Cassandra Clare. I countered with Melissa Marr. Sarah Rees Brennan's been optioned. And then of course there's already Stephenie Meyer and L.J. Smith.*
Urban fantasy's already popular at the box office (and on TV). Underworld, Supernatural, Being Human, True Blood, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Harry Potter, Enchanted, Sanctuary, Hellboy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel: The Series, Highlander, Warehouse 13, Haven….
We haven't had a good quest fantasy since Return of the King, unless I'm not remembering something.
Slower-paced, indie-style films are becoming more popular. UF quest novels would work well in this mode, I think. They'd do well as mini-series too, I'd imagine.
Urban fantasy is hot and a number of adult authors, not just Charlaine Harris, have massive followings. Laurell K. Hamilton, anyone?

On the downside, Tanya Huff's and Jim Butcher's urban fantasies have already made it to television, only to be cancelled. But that was a few years ago. There's hope!

Of the urban fantasies I know and love, I think Mike Carey's dark, ghost-infested London, Lilith Saintcrow's demon-rich American desert, and Seanan McGuire's quirky, fae San Francisco have potential. Neil Gaiman's American Gods would make a great mini-series. I worry a little that Hollywood would cheapen the stories, make them shallower and more formulaic, which is what I think happened with the Huff and Butcher adaptations, but shows like Supernatural, Lost, and Fringe prove that dark, complex shows with season-long (or longer) story arcs can and do work for the viewing public.

Which urban fantasies would you like to see on film?

* I should also credit Elena with the superhero analogy.

The Different Kinds of Humor

2011-02-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when I'm stumped for a blog post, I stand in front of my bookshelves and open my mind. Inspiration usually hits within a couple minutes. Today's inspiration is twofold: I really need to rearrange the sections to incorporate the twenty-odd books I've stacked horizontally, and most of the books I own are funny. So is most of my DVD collection, for that matter. I don't know why this surprised me, really. I've known for years that humor, especially irony and deadpan wit, will hook me pretty consistently.

So my first thought upon re-realizing that I love funny things was that I'd talk about how to write humor. Then I realized that would require a lot more time and energy than I have to spend today, that I'm not exactly qualified to lay down the law on what's funny, and that I'd probably end up writing about how I write humor and who wants to read about that? Really? There's enough self-aggrandizement on this blog already. But one thing I can talk about is the kinds of humor, and what I've noticed about them when it comes to writing (and reading), so that's what I'm going to do.

First off, there's wordplay. This includes puns, spoonerisms, malapropisms, deliberate Freudian slips, deliberate misquoting, and, for ease of paragraphing, one-liners and other amusing turns of phrase. Wordplay's very common in British humor (Oscar Wilde, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Terry Pratchett, William Shakespeare), and crops up pretty frequently in geek culture (Big Bang Theory), but it's not limited to those instances. Wordplay's fairly simple, after all. Change a sound or two, identify a homophone, and you're all set. One-liners are a little harder, but again, most people have an ear for the snappy comeback at least sometimes.

I find that puns are best used sparingly, because the novelty of them is a large part of their appeal. Spoonerisms and malapropisms are much the same, though I can't think offhand of a book where they're used in the narration. I've only ever encountered them as characterization—Shakespeare's Constable Dogberry, Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop. Quips are found all over. Urban fantasy is rife with them. So is Wilde. So are romantic comedies, sitcoms, and just about anything with a bitter, snarky narrator.

Non sequitur. Comments (or actions) that, because of their irrelevancy to what precedes them, are funny. Monty Python does this a lot ("And now for something completely different"; "Penguins come from the antarctic." "Burma!"). Rickrolling's a more modern form. Terry Pratchett* writes brilliant, meandering conversations that use non sequitur. Again, this tends to be used infrequently because too much exposure can spoil it.

About equal to puns and non sequitur in terms of usage frequency is slapstick, though I'm going to extend the "violence and schadenfreude as humor" definition to include toilet humor, because they seem to go hand in hand these days. The Three Stooges and Warner Brothers cartoons were my introduction to this sort of humor, but I'm also seeing it in low-brow comedies and cartoons aimed at adults such as Family Guy. Why do I say slapstick should only be used occasionally? The Three Stooges. You laugh the first time Larry takes a pratfall, and maybe you laugh the second time, but by the fifth time he's hit by the same board, it's getting old. Perhaps that's just me, though. Moving on…

Situation comedy. This actually takes some skill, I think, because you've got to create a scenario, or characters, or in the case of, say, Lois McMaster Bujold or Terry Pratchett, an entire world that allows for humorous situations. TV and film sitcoms are so frequent they barely bear mentioning, and they tend to be fairly formulaic too. Book-form sitcoms, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more varied and a lot more drawn out. Bujold spends chapters setting Miles Vorkosigan up, just by having him be himself in the world he lives in. Pratchett will drop hints in the first chapter for something that happens in the climax, and you'll write it off as a simple pun. Tom Holt, another comic fantasy writer, favours characters who are in over their heads from page one, and no matter what they do, they just make things worse for themselves.

And of course, you can have sitcom moments in a non-sitcom text, though you've got to be careful that doing so won't break the reader's engagement. A spy, running for his life, who finds himself working for the enemy by accident? Sure! A spy, hiding as an actor who plays spies? Gimme! A spy who, in the middle of a car chase, has a five-minute phone call with his girlfriend because of a misunderstanding? You'd better have set things up so we know we're in a humorous novel, not a hard-boiled one.

And lastly, we hit my favourite kind of humor: irony. There's something of the schadenfreudic in situational and dramatic irony, when a character expects one thing and we know they're getting another, or when we know something's going to backfire. I love the relationship between what we know, and what the characters know, especially when the writer plays with tropes. And then there's sarcasm, which ties into my one-liner comments above. I'm not going to comment much on irony. I've spent too long blogging today and isn't that ironic, considering this was supposed to be an off-the-cuff post? And I also find it easy to write, and I'm sure this skews my perception of how much effort most people put into writing irony.

Wordplay, slapstick, situational comedy, and irony are the nuts and bolts of humor, but a skilled writer won't use them for humor's sake alone. If you combine them into a nuts-and-bolts salad (yes, I know) or, rather, a nuts-and-bolts salad dressing to sprinkle over the plot salad (okay, okay, fine, I'll stop), then you'll end up with fluffy entertainment or satire or parody or comic relief, all of which are valid and necessary in literature. But if you use too many humorous devices, you run the risk of overdoing things. Of saturating the salad and making it unedible, if you will. (Sorry, I lied. Metaphor finished now.)

What's your favorite kind of humor? Did I miss anything?

* This will probably not be the last time I mention him. Sorry.
** Told you we weren't done with him.
*** I may be misquoting.

Knowing What You Write

2011-02-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

"Write what you know." It's one of the major commandments of writing. Every writer knows it. Everyone offering writing advice seems to spout it at some point. And y'know, it is important. When a writer knows what they're talking about, their work has this air of authenticity to it. It's got more emotional punch. And in fiction (and memoir), you need that punch and authenticity, or the story's likely be be "only okay" and not "great".

Unfortunately, the idea(s) behind "write what you know" have lost something in the transition to four monosyllabic words that will stick in people's heads, and this means that there are multiple interpretations for what those words actually mean. The more common interpretations I've come across are:

"Only write about things you've personally experienced or already know about." This tends to be the first-encounter, gut reaction type interpretation. It's easily proven wrong. Science fiction and fantasy authors cannot be writing only about what they know, or else there's some massive conspiracy to keep all the magic and futuristic technology a secret from the global population. People who write murder mysteries can't all be encountering dead bodies or tracking criminals. You get the idea.
"Write about real human experience and emotion." Good. If you can get at the real heart of a situation, the real heart of your characters' response to the conflict, then you're getting somewhere. Heartstrings will be tugged. Tears will be jerked. Pages will be turned. Emotions are important.
Stephen King's advice to never use a word you find in a thesaurus probably counts as "write what you know" as well. You have to know the words you're using. You have to know how to construct phrases and sentences and paragraphs and scenes. You have to know the mechanics. (Patricia C. Wrede has recently finished a blog series on just this. Marvelous read.)

There's a fourth interpretation that pops up occasionally and which I think, personally, is what "write what you know" is really trying to get at. "Do your research." You can have the mechanics perfected. You can describe pain and fear and desperation perfectly. But your story's still going to be flat and unconvincing if you don't have your facts straight. Hollywood sci-fi is marvelous at getting facts wrong.

Yes, personal experience and knowledge is going to be part of this. When humans write about other humans, there's going to be carry-over of actions, habits, emotions, personalities, politics, opinions, fears, etc., etc. And writers, I've noticed, tend to be some of the most voracious consumers of trivia and knowledge out there. That's going to feature in their writing too. Do I really need to know when and why turquoise paint appeared on Coast Salish and Haida totem poles? No, but I do, and it might be important someday.* And I know what it feels like to stand on a Pacific beach, at the top of a mountain, in the middle of a river, on a savannah**, on a boat, and on a sand dune. Funnily enough, there's a Pacific beach in the WIP…

But the research can't end there. Because characters and writers are generally separate people (memoir being the main exception), characters do things and see things that their writers aren't familiar with, and which their writers are liable to get wrong if they don't double-check things. In the past few months, I've read books set in 1920s New York slums, a POW camp on a volcanic planet, Highgate Cemetery, a London archive, and 12th-century Europe. I've read about pimps and junkies, witches, aliens, knights and princesses, and superheroes. The characters and settings have all felt real, because the authors took the time to read books, interview people, visit the settings, and learn new skills. Of course, they've also felt real because the authors took their personal experience with emotion and extrapolated what it would feel like to be Character X in Location Y, but. My point is. They did research. They made sure they knew what they were writing about, so that they could write what they knew. And it showed.

Of course, it's easy to get bogged down in research and never get anywhere close to finishing the story. That hasn't happened with my WIP, but I've certainly gotten sidetracked slightly. There was one delightful evening spent reading up on alternatives to rockets for space flight… I can see myself getting sucked into research at some point, though. There's so much to know! So many details! And how many are too many? I want to be as authentic as possible, after all. But I also know that I only have to know enough to make everything seem real and believable, and not cheese anyone off. I don't need to know what every species of seaweed in my Pacific beach setting is called. Nobody even looks at the seaweed. It's not pivotal to the story. We don't even need to know it's there. But I do need to find someone I can run a handful of Mandarin phrases by, because I know someone's going to call me on it if I don't.

What does "write what you know" mean to you? Do you agree with my take on it? Have you ever gotten sucked into too much research?

* Writers also like to share. Turquoise paint only showed up post-contact, because Europeans supplied the native peoples with the ingredients for the paint. Similarly, the golden age of mask and pole carving was also post-contact, because of how easy it became to get iron tools. Now you know.
** Not in Africa, though, more's the pity.

Writing Update, or Why I Woke At Noon

2011-02-04T12:57:00.000-08:00

I've gotten some good writing done in the last couple days. I don't know exactly how much because I'm not tracking word count, but my guess is about 2000 to 2500 words. It may not sound like a lot, but for me during revisions, it is. Unfortunately, a side effect of making progress seems to be staying up until ungodly hours of the morning. Ungodly even for me, who normally goes to bed around two. I'm a little behind on sleep right now and as a result don't have the brain to write an intelligent post, so you won't be getting one today. Sorry.

In the Last Few Days I've Written or Fixed:

Hero meeting a new friend
Hero beating himself up for lying to the police for the second time
Hero getting chewed out for being an idiot (a.k.a. introducing a character)
Hero being beat up
Hero chewing himself out for running away after being beat up
Hero getting to know his new friend a little better

Everything includes foreshadowing, either for my hero's story arc or the mystery arc. I think I'm doing pretty well, all considered. The next scene I have to look at, more to "accept changes" than fix things, involves my hero being chewed out by a different person for being an idiot . (In the course of the novel, I think he gets chewed out and/or yelled at about eight times.)

What've you been writing lately?

Grammar's Changed a Lot in 80 Years

2011-02-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

When I was sixteen, I acquired A Dictionary of Correct English, by M. Alderton Pink, M.A.*, a grammar and usage guide published in 1934. I'm no longer sure how exactly I got the book, but the fact remains that when I was seventeen, I read it cover to cover during school time, for fun. No, I'm not actually insane. I'm just a really, really big dork sometimes.

I remember one of things that struck me while reading this book was how much certain usage rules had changed in the nearly 70 years since the book was published. Oh, a lot had stayed the same—there are only so many things you can do with periods and commas—but the changes? They are fantastic, I tell you. Fantastic and hilarious!

(In case anyone's using this post for serious research, I'd like to mention that this book was printed in England, for what appear to be English businessmen. Also, it has been "revised and enlarged", to quote the title page, which makes me wonder when the first publication of it was. All I know is this is the second edition.)

Here are some of the highlights:

"The acceptation of a particular word or phrase is its particular sense, its generally accepted meaning"
It's accessory, acowstic (not acoostic), applicable, conversant, difthong and diftheria, exquisite, impious, irrefutable, irrevocable, and peremptory. (Bold signifies stress.)
You don't admit to something, you admit of it. Similarly, you're supposed to aim at everything; only Americans aim to. Also you connive at; are enamoured of, not with; infringe, not infringe on; infuse into; instill into; are oblivious of; permeate through, but never just permeate; substitute for; and replace by.
Business English was annoying complicated even back then, and the writer advises against it.
Some people were erroneously pronouncing cinema with a k, deficit with a stressed second syllable, flassid for flaksid (flaccid, in case you didn't catch that), gibberish with a soft g, trait with a final t (like the BBC), and valet without a t.
"We may say that a house consists of three reception rooms, five bedrooms, etc., or that it comprises those rooms, but not that it is comprised of the rooms."
It is possible to turn up one's nose at various colloquial meanings for words, and various pronunciations, while at the same time saying that "Language is Always Changing".
Facilitate should not have a human subject.
The author predicted that the pronunciation of garage that rhymes with carriage would become the standard.
Hectic applies only to fever or flushed cheeks. It does not mean "exciting, wild, hurried".
Individual should never be synonymous with person (a shady individual is wrong).
The section on the correct form for letters take up five pages. Obscurity takes up six. Paragraphing takes eight. Correct pronunciation of surnames takes up two and a bit pages, with two columns and smaller font. Forms of address for dignitaries and nobles is one page of equally small font. The publisher's list of other helpful books for people in trades and offices takes up thirty-two pages.
"The title Esq. ought strictly to be confined to graduates of universities, Members of the House of Commons, private gentlemen, and the members of certain professions."**
This fairly stodgy book nevertheless clarifies the pronunciation of orgy and seraglio (which is apparently serahlyo, in case you were wondering).
Prepositions can end sentences. "The fact is that those who try to insist on the avoidance of the final preposition have not considered English idiom sufficiently carefully."
This fairly stodgy author nevertheless has a bit of wit to him, at least on the subject of strings of prepositions. In fact, he's positively snarky at one point.
"We may say—I will prevent him from doing this, or, I will prevent his doing this; but not—I will prevent him doing this."
"…ordinary sentences dealing with matters of fact can be punctuated strictly according to rule. But the need for latitude arises when the writing is of an abstract or imaginative character." "Never put a stop*** at any place in a sentence unless a pause would be required in the reading." (Italics original. Asterisks, not so much.)
Transpire means "become known", not "happen".
Wrath has the same vowel as broad.

Anything in quotes is taken directly from the book, unless it's a definition.

Like I said, it's both interesting and amusing to see what's changed over time. I imagine Mr. Alderton Pink, M.A. turning in his grave at every 'mispronunciation' that's now standard. Of course, I know that I'm used to North American English and he's writing from the perspective of British English, so there are bound to be differences just from that. Any British English speakers who'd like to weigh in on whether these rules have held up over time? Anyone have crazy and/or outdated usage rules to share? Anyone have a favourite rule from the list?

* I could not have made that name up.

** I will be signing my name with Esq. from now on.

*** He means any punctuation mark.

Year of the Superhero - Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

2011-01-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be trying something a little different in this post, to see how it flies. I'm not going to be writing a separate review portion. It's all about the analysis! But some review-like bits are sure to sneak in anyway. Also spoilers.

This is not a superhero novel, but it is a novel about superheroes. It's about two Jewish cousins in 1930s New York who get into the comic book business with The Escapist. It's also about Josef Kavalier, a young man trained in stage magic, escapism, and the visual arts, who flees Czechoslovakia just before the Nazis disallow visas entirely, and who desperately wants to get his younger brother out behind him. It's about getting out of the life you have, and it's about golems, those larger-than-life, immensely strong, man-made creatures that take on a life of their own.

The glory of the novel is not in the story itself, which is fantastic and includes all sorts of insights into the early days of comic books and 1930s New York and human nature and life, but in the way Chabon blends escapism and the mythology of the golem into The Escapist and its creators. Not only is superhero fiction escapist for readers, but on a level it's escapist for its creators as well. The Escapist is full of retellings and offshoots of the lives of Joe and his cousin Sam, with a fair bit of revenge fantasy thrown in for good measure. A second comic line that appears later in the story is basically a love story to a woman Joe meets, who's drawn with more ample assets than she actually has. And then there's the golem angle, which I think deserves its own paragraph.

Golems, for those of you not in the know, are creatures from Jewish mythology, who are created out of clay by rabbis who control them through directions written down and placed inside the golem's head. They're immensely strong and single-minded, and pretty much unstoppable. The Golem of Prague, which features strongly in the first section of the book, is created to project the Jewish population from genocide, and does so by killing lots and lots of gentiles. Chabon casts superheroes as a kind of golem—see my initial definition in paragraph one—and I think he's right, at least when it comes to the very first heroes. You make this being out of clay, trying to get it human-shaped and mostly succeeding, and you want it to become a force for good, but life's never really like that and once the golem/hero exists, you basically lose control of it but maybe not before its power has corrupted you a little. And still people look up to it and say, "Yeah, let's be like that."

Chabon did a lot of research into the Golden Age comic book industry, and a lot about 1930s-1950s New York, for this book. That's obvious. There's this air of realism to the novel, that this stuff actually happened and these were real people and so on. I don't know how much of that reality, and how many of the facts in Kavalier and Clay, are actually real. I suspect a lot is, but I also wouldn't be surprised if Chabon used a bit of artistic license when dealing with certain elements of the comic book industry that would go against his plan for the story. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on the era. I don't know what these elements might be. Still, Chabon gives a fabulous behind-the-scenes look into comic production—pulling stories from life, meeting deadlines, getting a team together because you can't draw, ink, and color all on your own—and the greater repercussions of writing comics. Everything from radio dramas and high sales to lawsuits and complaints about violence and degraded morals show up at some point.

Like I said, this isn't a superhero novel. At no point does anyone display superpowers or gain superpowers or face a supervillain alone on a dark rooftop. But the themes and the topic and the narrative combine to say some very interesting, very powerful things about superheroes all the same. I highly recommend this to everyone. It's a great read.

As will be standard for the Year of the Superhero series, comments and questions are welcome. And if you like/love/hate the new format for this series, let me know!

Mummies in a Guest Post

2011-01-28T10:14:00.000-08:00

I have a guest post over at Science in My Fiction again today. As usual, this means I'm not going to write a big, involved post here as well. One's enough.

Today's post is all about the mummies that get less press than the Egyptian ones. There're a lot of them! And most of them I knew about before researching the article, too! Mummies are one of the reasons I think the librarians I grew up with thought I was a little strange. (You should thank me for not including the rather graphic images of the Franklin Expedition, or linking to the Youtube video here.)

Vampires and Superheroes

2011-01-26T14:03:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday's #UFChat was a Q&A with Dr. Rebecca Housel, writer of, among other things, True Blood and Philosophy and X-Men and Philosophy. As always in a Twitter chat, there were more questions posed that could be answered, because Twitter chats move fast. One of the questions that got more or less skipped was intriguing, but not really answerable in the 140 characters that Twitter allows. It made me sit up and go, "Hmm."

What is the relationship between vamps and superheros?

Like I said, intriguing. Also fraught and complicated. I'm not Dr. Housel, but I'm going to see if I can't unpack this a little.

First off, on the more obvious level, both vampires and superheroes have superhuman abilities. They're fast and agile, long-lived, occasionally psychic, and have strange weaknesses like glowing rocks and garlic. They also tend to be wealthy, and snappy dressers. Now, you might say that vampires actually have more in common with supervillains than they do with superheroes. I'll get to that in a sec. But there is actually a trope in urban fantasy that support the superhero comparison.

The good vamp trope features a vampire as either the protagonist, one of the protagonist's sidekicks, or the love interest. This vampire is often alienated from their fellow bloodsuckers, usually because of moral code differences (i.e., this vamp has one). Quite often these differences surface as, among other things, a refusal to drink human blood—or a refusal to kill humans, if human blood is the only option for vamps within the world. The good vamp generally works alongside humans, despite the vampire inability to play well with others, and hunts other vampires or supernatural creatures. They use their vampire powers to do this. It's pretty easy to draw parallels here with superheroes who occasionally brood about how being superhuman is a bad thing, and whose sense of ethics compels them to promote justice.

Now, vampires as supervillains … yes, this too. Vampires scheme. They have plans within plans within plans, and they also have Plan B's and C's. They live in the dark. They wear black. They consort with all kinds of evil-doers. They hold humans in thrall to do their bidding. They may come off as pillar of the community types, who exist only to serve the public good, but that's just to hide their real agenda. They're big fans of political power. They're wealthy. They're snappy dressers. They frequently have Old World accents. They have fantastic powers that let them tear someone's throat out before that someone can blink. The good guys tend to have it out for them. Sound like a supervillain to you?

Moving away from character traits and story roles, and into the realm of pop culture, how do vampires compare to superheroes? Vampires get books and TV shows and the occasional movie and comic*. Superheroes get comic books and movies and the occasional TV show and novel. They're both crowd-pleasers, to the tune of millions of dollars. Vampires draw more of the fantasy crowd, I think, while superheroes seem to attract more science fiction people. And folks like me who're into both genres have been known to go for both. Some people say vampires and superheroes are done, over, finished, but superhero movies continue to be popular and so do novels with vampires in them. Sure, fewer people seem to be rushing out to buy comics than back in the 1940s, but all in all, I'd say, in pop culture, vampires and superheroes are more or less equal.

It's when you get archetypes, metaphors, and zeitgeist that differences start popping up. Superheroes are people we look up to, people who've become more than human, protectors and enforcers and frequently fronts for social messages like Don't Steal and Terrorism Is Bad. The heyday of comics ran from the Depression through three Western wars**. The heyday of comic book movies corresponds to a Western war in the Middle East and continuing fear of terrorism.

Vampires, on the other hand, are generally anti-heroes or full-out villains. We can admire some of their qualities, but when you get down to it, they're generally violent and manipulative and ruthless. Batman's the only superhero I can think of who exhibits similar traits. Vampires have always kind of been there, but it wasn't until Interview with the Vampire back in '76 that the good vamp trope came to prominence.*** And then the '80s hit, with their truly scary vampire cinema—the '80s, of course, being the decade of expense, materialism, and really loud fashion that followed the Vietnam War. Watchmen came out, questioning and deconstructing superheroes. Pop culture got a lot sexier.*** Correlation? Likely.

Vampires are often taken to represent sex, resurrection, our darker urges, fear of the dark, etc. etc. They're a way of talking about all that stuff without actually talking about it. They're our id, our primal urges, our animalistic selves. What do superheroes stand in for? Hopes and dreams? Justice and ethics? The super-ego, which encompasses conscience and perfection, among other things? They sound pretty opposite to me, on this level.

So yes, lots of similarities, a fair number of differences, and an interesting correlation between what was happening in the world, and what was popular in the media. Of course either vampires or superheroes have ever died off completely—or even a little bit—so there will be rebuttals and you're welcome to put those in the comments. I love discussion! Are vampires today's superheroes? No, but some of them come close. Are they our anti-heroes? Quite likely. Do I want to see a superhero-vampire face-off now? Heck yes!

* Buffy and Angel, for instance
** If you count the cold one
*** I think. Pretty sure, anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Year of the Superhero - Green Hornet

2011-01-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

Review

Michel Gondry's trying to do several things at once in Green Hornet. There's the bromance comedy aspect, with Britt and Kato becoming friends and enacting wacky, alcohol-fueled, reasonably illegal hijinks. There's the superhero aspect, with Britt and Kato going out in costumes stopping criminals and saving people. (I'll get into the superhero aspect further down the page. Some interesting things are happening with it.) There's a serious aspect too, about integrity and legacies and power. Sadly, the mashup of all these elements means there's not enough time in the film to make it solidly one or the other, and so the movie's getting panned by most reviewers.

While I can see what the reviewers are getting at about the plot and the writing, I don't think the acting's terrible and the 3D? Whoever says the 3D is terrible must have had different glasses than I did. I thought it was plenty crisp, and since it was used for depth and to highlight certain, important elements of some scenes, rather than only the odd "flying object" gag, I was pleased with it.

Back to the acting… I think Seth Rogan (playing Britt) was well cast, although Jay Chou (playing Kato) had a better sense of comic timing. Rogan's great at playing the typical bromance lead, with the drinking, and the girls, and the stupidity. Chou is all about the small movements and the beats, which lets him largely upstage his costar. The rest of the cast holds their own nicely, though I wonder what some of them were doing in the film. Surely their talents qualified them for bigger things?

The acting's the main thing that sold the story for me. If the acting had been poorer, the movie would've fallen to pieces. As it is Green Hornet is not a great movie. I can't really even call it a good one. But it's entertaining enough and I've seen way worse films, so I'll give it 3/5.

About the Superheroes

beware: spoilers below

Green Hornet is a self-aware superhero film. It's not the first that's blatantly referred to the tropes—I'd say any superhero movie made in the last ten years qualifies, at the very least—but it goes further, somehow. This is a clever directing decision on Gondry's part, and I think it stems from the premise of the story. A playboy deciding to fight crime by posing as a criminal? How do you update that for the modern age? Easy. You make the would-be hero aware of the dangers inherent in being a hero.

Of course, that opens up a whole can of worms. If you're aware of comics and comic book films, then you're going to be aware of the cool guns and weapons and costumes and naming conventions that come with the role of superhero. If you're aware of them and have money to throw around, why not have stuff that's just as good? And that's exactly what Britt does. I get the sense that he wouldn't have the cool toys if he didn't know that heroes were expected to have them.

Another aspect of the superhero send-up nature of this movie is that Kato is the trained fighter and the true brains behind the operation, and yet he's nominally the sidekick. There's even something that's being called "Kato vision" by reviewers that could be construed as an actual superpower. Kato shows up at the last moment to rescue Britt on several occasions, after Britt gets himself into trouble. This is something I can see Batman doing for Robin or Iron Man doing for War Machine. Kato also states outright at one point that Britt is less able to do hero stuff than Kato is. And there's a riff on sidekick names.

And now it's time to cover Chudnovsky, the villain of the piece. Chudnovsky is an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. He wants to control all crime in LA, but he constantly worries that he's past his prime, no longer threatening enough to keep his empire going. I haven't run across this motivation for a villain before. Usually they're drunk with power and craving more, or have a vendetta, or are being evil because they can, and that's as deep into their psyche as we ever get. Chudnovsky acts like he's got something to prove and as a result comes across as more realistic than most superhero movie villains I've come across. Most of them have a level of glitz, y'know? And then Chudnovsky decides to rebrand himself as Bloodnovsky and buy into a certain level of the expected glitz, and it flops because he just doesn't get it. I feel for the guy.

Like I said in the review portion, this isn't the greatest superhero film of all time. Not in the slightest. But it's certainly not the worst, either. (Hello, Electra.) It's best viewed not how it's being sold, as a bromance/action/comedy, but as a send-up of superhero flicks. The director and writers and actors are aware that they're making a slightly offbeat, cheeseball movie with superheroes in, and they're playing to that while playing it straight at the same time.

That said, you can safely wait for the DVD. Save your money for Thor or Captain America.

Writing Motifs

2011-01-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

Hannah Bowman recently challenged me (sort of) to talk about motifs that crop up in my fiction. Unfortunately, I haven't written as much fiction as she has, which makes it harder for me to pinpoint what continually shows up in my stories. I can pinpoint one major motif, which isn't quite as specific as Hannah's, but I'm going to run with it.

The theme is transformation. The process of change, whether it's physical or mental or spiritual or social, fascinates me. How do we deal with change in ourselves? How do we deal with change in others? How are we spurred to change? Getting at the root of those questions drives both my reading and my writing. My plot bunnies frequently have transformation in them as well. I think I was fated to write urban fantasy as a result of this. There's so much potential in the genre to talk about change and how it affects people.

There's also the cousin theme of self-discovery. Every time we have to face change, face difference, and deal with it, we learn more about our selves. And of course, there's the age-old story of the person discovering their destiny, and the equally old story of the person have their dreams realized. I've always wanted to know what Cinderella felt like after the wedding and how she dealt with being a princess.*

The first fiction I wrote was for school. When I was seven, I wrote a story about an artificial boy who needed to get a glass ball from a lake so that he could become real. Yes, I was shamelessly plagiarizing Pinocchio, and I knew it even then. Another story I remember writing, at fifteen, was about Miranda (from The Tempest) and her experiences after leaving the island with Ferdinand. I've forgotten just about everything else I wrote, though I do remember a writing assignment from grade seven that would probably qualify. We were given a set of drawings by Chris van Allsburg and told to write stories about them.

The first stories I wrote after high school were fanfiction, and because I was pretty raw as a writer and still figuring out a lot of things, they're really kind of horrible and embarrassing. But the fandoms I wrote in all had magic, superpowers, magical superpowers, and supernatural creatures.** The stories I wrote were split between ones where someone became supernatural/magical, and ones where someone had to face a truth and grow up. Sometimes it was the same person, in one story.

Then we get to The WIP and the other ideas I've had over the last few years. The WIP is essentially a superhero origin story. There's the gnostic urban fantasy that I've got knocking around in my head, which has a lot of physical transformation in it and a whole lot of social turmoil. There's the "UFO over 1750s London" idea, the "ghost detective" idea, the "theory of relativity a century sooner" idea***, the "first contact" idea, the "quasi-Matrix" idea, the other "first contact" idea….

As for small, more specific motifs, I don't think I'll be able to pinpoint any until I've written more. Although The WIP and the gnostic UF both feature forcefields, and I suspect geeky self-awareness will be a recurring feature too.

Are there any motifs in your stories?

* I haven't watched the Disney sequels. I imagine my own ideas play out better.
** No, I'm not telling you what they are.
*** Anyone want that one? The amount of research required for it scares me.