It's not my fault.

Don't blame me for this week's entry being late. Blame Ryan Murphy. Him and Brad Falchuk are the ones at fault. You can also blame Alexandra Breckenridge.

Neither my wife or I have any family in town, so for Thanksgiving we have our own tradition. We prepare a huge pasta meal and invite over friends we have who are in a similar situation. On Thursday, one of them brought over the first season of American Horror Story. You should probably blame that friend, too.

On Sunday, we were sitting around the house about to go a little stir crazy, and my lady love suggests we pop it in and watch an episode or two. I was game, because I'd heard good things about the series on Fearnet, and had been careful to not read any spoilers. At around one thirty in the morning, I went to bed cursing and grumbling that we hadn't started two hours earlier, because then we would have been able to finish the series. As it was, I had to wait all day today before I was able to get back home after work and we could sit down and pop the last disk in. I wasn't disappointed in the ending.

If it's hard to write good horror, it's really hard to do it so that it comes across effectively on the screen. Now shrink that screen to the size of a TV, hide the body parts that give the folks at the FCC seizures, and realize that you have to appeal to not just your discriminating horror fan, but John Q. Average.

Now try and do it as a series, juggling characters, plot, and keeping things rolling at the same time that you maintain those senses of isolation, dread, and excitement. As I've said before, 'Good luck.'

AHS hits us where we're most vulnerable, where we need to be ourselves, in our loves, our hates, and all the nasty little bits that we keep hidden in our own heads. It takes the people we love, the sort of people we hate, and the people we can't get away from because either we're their parents or they're our parents. That person who lives next door, the one you'd like to bludgeon to death with a spoon? Yep, that one's there too.

It does have weak points. As I said, it's hard to do a series about horror, and a couple of times I thought that it was losing that sense of the strange that is really, really important. But is that it, my only complaint? Sitting right here, having just finished the series a little while ago? Yeah, it is.

It was also great to see a least one familiar face from an older, beloved series that was canceled way too soon.

Not bad for not giving away any real plot points, eh? Now let me get back to my own writing, now that I have something else to be envious of.

Roja, Mortal Kombat, and a genuine tragedy

This day started off on a bad note. The alarm went off, I hit the snooze, then said to myself, 'In ten more minutes I have to get up and get ready for work. That stinks.' It took me a long while to fall asleep last night, so I was already in bad shape. During those ten minutes, I lay there trying to build up the will to keep existing. Then I said, 'Hang on. I saw Skyfall with Claudia yesterday, and we saw it on Saturday.' Then I accused my alarm clock of being the male child of a female dog.

Part of the fun of writing is you're always exploring new ideas, places, and people. The downside of that is unless you already know everything, you need to do research to address your ignorance. Earlier today, I needed a name for a skin condition that would be a likely suspect for something in Roja, and browsing around, I thought of something I heard in the new Mortal Kombat trailer. (I'm a huge fan of the original movie, even though I only played the game a few times and got my backside handed to me) So I looked up Harlequin Ichthyosis.

I have learned so much over the years from writers who put little tidbits in their stories that were about something I had never heard of before. I need you to hear me say this next part in a grumpy old man voice, because it won't have the same impact if you don't. Back when I first started writing, if you needed to know something, you went to the library, and you hoped it wasn't something so exotic that the librarians wouldn't know what you were talking about. Today, we have Google, yet people on the whole don't seem to know much more than they did those few decades ago. I looked that skin condition up, and I got one of those shocks where my head is screaming, 'What the hell? How can something that disturbing exist and we don't regularly hear about it?' Babies get born with that condition, and life sucks from that point on. Usually, not for long.

Part of the way we deal with the world, is to build a picture of it in our heads. Let's say I have a brain saw, and I pull out your gray stuff and pop it into a scanner. A lot of the info that I read is going to be interconnected into an overall picture not of this world, but how you think this world is. Each brain world is going to be different. If you're a physicist, your world is made of atoms and quarks and semi-real strings, as opposed to a stockbroker, whose world only breaks down beyond physical matter when you think about it really hard, but that has this dynamic, chaotic system of how money works. If you believe in psychic powers, then some people show up too late to board planes doomed to crash in your world because on some level, they know what's going to happen. If you believe we went to the moon, then your world has a moon with leftover pieces of spacecraft on it. If not, it has governments that lie about those spacecraft.

This world building comes in handy for those of us who build new worlds all the time and then try to sell them. All we have to do is make worlds that you want to read about. Simple, right? I can hear Hollywood knocking on my door right now. Oh wait, that's my supervisor, wanting to know why I'm not at work. People are funny when it comes to what we like to experience, and what we want to know.

Does your world have babies that are born with skin that comes in plates, with weak gaps between them? Do those babies usually die of infection, or suffocate because that skin is too tight over their chest to let them breathe? Does your world only include women and men, and not people who are born with characteristics of both, or neither? Human beings are funny things, and the parts that make us up, physical, mental, and spiritual, fit together in all kinds of patterns. Is it possible for us to understand all those patterns? Maybe, maybe not. But we're aware of a hell of a lot more patterns today than we were yesterday.

Still mixing the patterns around. Still writing.

How to steal and be complimented on your theft

So today (Saturday) the internet is being a bit wonky. So I'm going to use this time to get this week's entry typed in a head of time. I'm clever like that.

A friend and I once got into a spirited discussion about fanfiction, which ended with an armistice rather than a real peace. We had started discussing Sherlock Holmes, and the story, 'The Seven Percent Solution' came up. This is a story not written by Doyle, but considered so good that it gets treated as cannon, meaning all the little details in it are considered just as true as those from the books that were written by him. That's when hostilities began.

There are a lot of created universes. Harry Potter, Holmes, Michael Moorcock's, Discworld, and yes, Twilight. They get a lot of fans reading them, and most people who read have enough imagination to take the stories and wonder what else could happen in this strange, exciting place. If the story really reaches out and grabs us, (and that's and individual response, so I'm not going to get into whether or not a universe has to be widely considered 'good' for this to apply) then it's fun to just daydream about what our life would be like if we lived there, too. This real world can sometimes suck, and a fantasy world only sucks in ways we can handle.

Is it wrong to imagine? Hell no. Everyone should do it. Imagine enough, and you might start to come up with a story of your own, something where the hero (gender neutral usage) finally takes care of that one twit in the story that you really hated. Since this is your version of the world, there's a place for you, too. You can be the hero's next door neighbor, his confidante, his backup, and you can be a hero too, when the main one is off doing something else. So far, so good.

Should you write all this down? Why not? It can be fun, and if you write other stuff, it can kick-start that part of your head if it ever gets sluggish. I've done this, and takes me in directions I might otherwise not go.

Then you decide to go out and make some money with this story. That's when I ask that you pause for a minute.

As I've said before, writing is work. You start with an idea, an image, a bit of dialogue, or something else that gets the brain juices flowing. Then you take that seed and plant it in the (hopefully) fertile soil of your perception of the world, either the real one, or the one you're thinking about. It takes root in your own concepts of how people talk, whether or not we landed on the moon, whether that shy guy at the back of the classroom is going to grow up to be the inventor of a faster than light drive or someone who collects other people's spleens, and whether or not something creeps out from under your bed while you're asleep. You start that seed growing, and you prune it when it goes in directions you don't want. Get your plant big enough, and you've got a story.

When someone writes fanfiction, they're starting with a big chunk of someone else's plant. Again, not a bad thing, but recognize where that part comes from. Assume there are no copyright issues. (BIG assumption. I know very little of that field, and I know enough to say that it can be really, really messy) This is a moral argument, not a legal one.

When you make a character, and you either put enough work into him or her to make a good one, and/or you get lucky and create something that pushes people's buttons in the way that they like them pressed, you've made something good. Holmes is the standard by which all other literary detectives are judged, and with all the movies and plays that have come out, we've seen multiple interpretations of the character. Then someone went and wrote, 'Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula.' I saw that title standing in line at the library when I was ten years old, and I've never been the same since.

So what do you do if you have an idea that was spawned in someone else's flowerbed? Grow it, of course. Let it grow as big and as beautiful as it can. Then step back and look at it, hard.

Is it good? More importantly, is it strong enough to survive on it's own? If not, keep it and enjoy it. If it is, take a cutting from the part that you made, transplant it, and see it it will grow. One of my major complaints about the 'I am Legend' movie, wasn't all the tweaking that they did with the setting, it the fact that both of the endings were completely contrary to the ones that Matheson wrote. If you're going to borrow that heavily from someone, do what George Romero is supposed to have done with Night Of The Living Dead. He got the idea, and the scares and suspense, of a lone house surrounded by undead from I am Legend, and built his own story around it. It's great to get seeds from other people's plants, just do your own growing. 

I've finally made a profile over at Fearnet. One of the bloggers that I follow, Drew Daywalt, had some trouble happen to him recently, and I tried to offer a bit of encouragement.

Still writing, although the fact that this isn't getting posted until Monday might seem to call that into question.

Oh what fun

  Just a normal update. I got through the first slog through Roja, where I needed to make sure all the chapters together. Now all I need to do is make sure that all the bits and pieces that make up the chapters do the same thing. Nothing much else has happened.

Oh, wait. Halloween.

Our neighborhood had a couple of other houses decorated, but most weren't. My idea to use chem lights in the balloons didn't work as well as I thought it would. When I tested them in the darkened garage, they looked fantastic, but my neighbor has a really powerful floodlight, which washed the glow out. Oh well. So I got Applebones put together, and my wife took a few pictures, then I parked myself out in front of the house and waited, sitting completely still.

Shortly before it got dark, the first batch of kids came up. They ooo and ah at me, but then go right to the door. As my wife opens it and begins letting them grab the candy, I turn and face them, but since they're all looking at Claudia, they don't notice. As the last one gets his loot, they all turn to go. That's when one of them notices I'm not in the same position that I was a minute ago. He stops to look, and everyone else does, too. When I reach out with my stick fingers that are a couple of feet long, the whole bunch of them shriek and run away as fast as they can. Not too bad of a beginning.

We got a decent amount of trick or treaters. Most of them in groups, and most with a parent or two along for the ride. One man saw me move when his son didn't, and he called the boy over to him so he walked within my reach. He laughed when I reached out and his son yelled. One mother screamed along with her kids, and when Claudia asked for them all to pose with me so she could get a couple of pictures, she put her children between herself and me. The next mother screamed when I moved the first time, and when her daughter looked away from the door to see what the fuss was, I extended a hand toward her, and she howled like she was being skinned alive.

We got one bunch of older boys who stopped by, three of them with hats on but otherwise without costumes. Claudia commented that they might be a bit old, but handed out some candy. As they walked off, they said 'Goodnight.' I waited until the door was shut, then I said, 'Goodnight.' One of them stopped walking and said, 'Who said that?' I didn't move or say a word.

One boy who came in with a group seemed to like my costume so much that he announced to me that he wasn't afraid. Then he poked me in the chest and tried to lift my mask to see if I was real. Maybe next time I should have makeup on under my mask.

Other than going to a friend's party on Saturday, that's pretty much the week. Verdict? Best Halloween that I've had in a long time. Can't wait for next year.

If could ask one thing of you folks, please get out and vote. People fought and died to give us that right.

Still writing.