A feast of flavors

How many Hannibal Lecters are there?

Well, that depends on how many you've gone out and met. The first one I met was a small man with six fingers on one hand. The second was a man with a subtle, sinister smile and who sometimes made a lisping, slurping noise when excited (and he looked a lot like Odin from the recent Thor movies). The third had darker hair, a much bolder voice and pronounced the first syllable in 'privacy' as in 'prim.' The fourth was a young man, and I followed him through the sort of childhood that would either make a sane person hope for the end of the world or drive them to nudge it along toward that end. The fifth I recently made the acquaintance of, and he's a quiet, cultured man who moves through his life with a slow, deliberate grace.

All of them are killers, and none of them would blink while they cut you open and browsed through your insides like a housewife at the local farmer's market.

Makes you wonder. There's only one source, regardless of the inspiration for that source. So where did they all come from? Why, from you and me of course. Let's take a moment and feel pride in our creations.

Why did Thomas Harris give the good doctor his initial traits, small, with slicked-back hair, limbs possessed of wiry strength? Well, Harris encountered a real-life killer who looks a bit like that, only at first he didn't understand the crimes the man had committed. I'm pulling this from Wikipedia, so there's likely a richer story behind it, but every good character has multiple roots, and you and I only have so much time here. Harris had a gut-level experience that was back-dated with the word KILLER in bright, bold letters, and he picked details from that experience with the intent of us putting our own KILLER stamps on his character, on his book. We were the target audience. I'd say the technique worked rather well, wouldn't you?

If we work chronologically, the next incarnation comes from Brian Cox working in front of a camera for the film Manhunter. He has a some of the physical traits, but we never see him kill anyone, despite all the backstory we're given about the bodies he's left in his wake. Instead, this Lecter is a button-pusher. He sends our hero running out of the room in a panic with a few well-placed points of conversation, and the tortured, murderous psychopath who slaughters whole families admires Doctor Lecter. These facts are presented to us to make us think, 'Christ, if this man can do all this while he's locked up, what would happen if he could get his hands on people?' What indeed.

Now we come to Mister Hopkin's portrayal. Yes, in a movie where you don't have a powerful actor there are some things that you can do to compensate for it, and hell no I'm not saying Cox's performance is sub-par, by any means. But Hopkin's Lecter has enough presence to blow all the other characters in Silence Of The Lambs out of the water. The accent he speaks with alone is just creepy, and the quiet monotone that it's delivered in makes me think of an audio recording of The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar I heard many years ago, the voice of the dead speaking to the living. See you soon, it whispers, at all of us.

Then there's that boy, that fine young Hannibal. (Nope. Couldn't resist) We see him portrayed with more than one actor's face, but there's only one that we associate with the cold dread that the name Hannibal inspires. Give me a contrary opinion if you want to, but that face is a little... Off. It's odd in the same way that Christopher Walken's is, handsome, but not something a lot of us would want to open our eyes to in the middle of the night. This Hannibal starts off his life a little better than most of us, which adds another dimension to the intelligent personae that's consistent through all the incarnations of our anti-hero. He gets dealt a bad hand of cards in his life, but presses on, though the part of that boy that might have once been able to laugh at himself seems to be missing. He wanders through life until he has a new family to replace the one that was killed, and for a moment maybe we get to believe that the rest of his life could have been lived 'normally.' He kills before the opportunity to avenge his little sister's death presents itself, but only after being insulted and bullied by someone bigger, stronger, and dumber than himself, and I think that qualifier is important. For all his skill and rage, this future icon is still a boy. We can enjoy stories about evil kids, but how many good or successful ones are there that don't have the child infected by some outside element, be it extra-terrestrial or supernatural. Innocence and childhood are intertwined icons, and if this handsome blond boy had begun his grown-up life already indulging his murderous urges, he would have lost our sympathy. As a character, Hannibal needs our empathy. This is one of the bigger challenges facing everyone who re-imagines him.

Of course we also have the latest and certainly not the least. In the TV series, Hannibal seems inhumanly poised and cultured, so much so that I think the only reason we can believe in him as a person is because we walked into this story already knowing the characters. Using my in-depth research techniques (browsing IMDB when I can't sleep) I discovered that Mads Mikkelson approached the role with a fresh perspective, playing this charming killer as if he was the devil. If you watch the series you'll see that the character does a good job in this role. He tempts, and it might even be said that he fulfills the traditional duties of the devil, dealing harshly with those who transgress. Though it might be more accurate to say that he does the work that we wish the devil would get around to, chopping up that asshole who cut us off on the highway and making that snooty clerk at the DMV regret being so rude. That's the key.

I'm not trying to just gush here about how engrossing Hannibal is as a fictional character, I do that in private. This is peeking into the whys and wherefors behind the fact that a lot of people (myself included) are willing to pay money to read and see this man's story. Hannibal is an anti-hero, like any other bad guy we root for. But the intensity of his actions make it hard to admit why we like him. I think a lot of us have moments where we would love do exactly what he does, kill some person in our lives who offends us (not hurts us, offends us) and express such pure contempt for that person that we eat them. I try to avoid getting too graphic here, but let me address an unspoken fact that would be a part of Hannibal's life if he existed in the real world: his digestion. We all know what goes up must come down, right? Well, what goes in must come out. Imagine all those faces of Doctor Lecter, each taking care of personal business, remembering their meals and remembering the preparation. These men would be smiling while they sat.

But we never see, or even hear about that. Why? Because while our egos would love to lead us on an exploration of alternative cuisine, those same egos don't want us within a thousand miles of all the complications. Lecter went to medical school. Look around, because it's not difficult to find horror stories about that experience. Have you ever smelled the insides of a mammal that's been opened up? How about had fluids from those insides splash over you, soaking down into your socks? Once the good doctor removed the delicacies he was after, there would have been a hundred and twenty more pounds of person to dispose of, minimum. That weight comes from bones, blood vessels, organs, and goopy stuff inside those organs. Yeah, the movies never show our well-mannered gentleman dealing with bowels.

By not showing that, it lets us gloss over the ugly bits of reality. We get the good without the bad. The gourmet meal without having to pay the bill or wash the dishes. Obvious, right? The trick is knowing which is which, what to serve and what to toss in the trash and hope our neighbor doesn't get nosy. If I had the secret to that, well for starters I'd be getting paid for these words you're reading. But I can at least recognize when someone gets it right, like with the good doctor. I can think about what I like and what buttons it pushes inside me. I can put all that in my own blender, hit puree and see what I end up with. Dinner is served.

By the way, I'm eating while I write this. Eating meat.

While I write.

My puzzle pieces are not your puzzle pieces, even though they look the same

Let me explain what I mean. I've used the analogy of building a brick wall to describe the process of writing a story before, but let's take the same process and use a different description. When I write, I want to have a cohesive whole when I'm done. I want something that my wife can hand to a co-worker and say, 'Read this.' When that stranger is done, they should have a clear picture in their heads. One image. People can interpret it in all the different ways that they want (and that's one of the ways you can tell the goods ones, in my opinion), but they will agree that they see the same thing.

The irony is, that one image is put together from hundreds of smaller images. In your average work of fiction, most of the major characters are assembled from traits lifted from parents, friends, and people who once sat next to the author on the bus. If a location like a park or a house only has a minor part in our story, we can import it from real life. If we're going to do something unwholesome with it, like have the little old lady character stop there to check her map and see a gaunt, withered woman walk toward her, dragging her long hair on the ground and leaving a wet, bloody trail, well then maybe we should make up our own location. Or pick a real one and modify it (change the little pieces that make up the big piece) so much that its unrecognizable.

Now if I take these pieces:

An old Twilight Zone episode, The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.

A sound bite from a segment of This American Life, describing how a family deals with a grandmother's progressing Alzheimer’s.

News story after news story about young, growing boys and girls walking away from their families and lives to join Islamic State.

My experience tonight walking the dog. Seeing darkened houses and empty streets. Everything was silent, except for the music coming from one house at the end of a cul de sac; a light, carefree tune from the forties. Something to dance to in a wholesome, innocent manner, imagining that all your troubles are over and that no new ones will ever arrive.

I can mix them up and around in my head and see how they might fit together. Does the grandmother listen to the music, or does she keep asking where her favorite grandson is? Are things as cozy and friendly on Maple Street as they seem, or has our grandmother started spilling some of the embarrassing secrets that she's collected over her long life?

Now, you and I both have that same set of pieces, but here's the trick. They won't fit together for you the same way that they will for me. I've given you a couple of examples of how they fit in my head, but how would you have assembled them on your own? What are the odds that you would have come up with those specific pairings? Even assuming you and I both write horror, if piece A fits with piece B for me, you'll put A with C, and I'll ask you where the hell you got that connection point on C because I didn't see it until you showed me. We're all our own machines, churning out our own results no matter if you input the same data into two of us, or two thousand.

Now this is not going to hold up as an excuse to plagiarize someone's finished product, believe me. There are the writer's equivalents of brush strokes, as well as people's ability to pick up the intent and the feeling of a piece of writing, good or bad. That's not even taking into account the patterns that any decent search program can find. Get your own pieces, and write your own puzzle.

That's what I'm going to do, get back to writing.

Everyone else

Man, look at this place. Where did all the dust come from? I need to have a word with the maid.

This is a story where nothing horrible happens. There are no monsters lurking under the bed or in the closet. All the children's imaginary friends are benign, and they don't really exist in the first place. The babysitter is a sweet girl who's saving money for college, and she's going to pledge to the best sorority on campus when she gets there. Daddy doesn't keep body parts in the secret freezer in the basement, and Mommy didn't accidentally run over a hobo while she was on her way back from visiting the young stud she's seeing on the side.

This is about all the people who are never going to be the main character in one of my stories, Stephen King's, the late Richard Matheson's, or the stories of anyone else who enjoys distributing cold shivers. When something is happening to whoever's in Hell House, Hill House, or the Overlook, nothing is happening to all the other people of the world, and that's how they like it. So let's spread some of our special kind of love their way, shall we? Otherwise their lives would be so boring.

Unless a story is set on a desert island or a different planet, it's likely to contain characters that are out of the range of action. The sweet old lady who lives one street over from the haunted house, the cop who used to patrol a certain area of town but who got promoted before all the children in that area learned that new song about the Donner Party, and the sorority sister (who once baby-sat to earn money for school) of the woman who's hearing voices in her head that tell her to add some rat poison to the cookies she's making for the PTO meeting. Now all these fine people are (probably) going to live happy, normal lives, but they're in our story. They're there because as unique as it would be to have a haunted house set in a huge, open space in the middle of a city, or a housewife who never spoke more than five words to anyone while she was in school, if your average reader learns about those things, their disbelief is going to get very heavy.

These people are going to take up space in our story anyway, so let's put them to work and make them earn their keep. I'm sure we can find something fun to do with them.

Now if we, the writers, do our job well, then our protagonist, which in this case will be a plucky older woman, will easily stand out from all these literary extras. She'll have lots of small attributes that combine to make an interesting whole, and make us connect to her. But we have a limited amount of clay to use in putting her together, because the polar opposite of that mute housewife, the little old woman who's been everything from a nuclear physicist to a decorated commando, is just ridiculous. If she's traveled during her life, she might be able to understand how a new immigrant would have a different sense of the way traffic laws work, but not if she's lived a life of near-isolation in a small town. If that part of her life is a key part of the plot, well then she can have a friend, someone that's traveled a bit, and who can point out that our hero doesn't know everything, despite all the self-confidence that she does.

Or maybe we've written ourselves into a corner. The words are pouring out hard and heavy, and before you know it, the little-old-lady Miss Marple clone that we've fallen in love with is on top of a fifteen story building with the door to the stairs blocked by generic slasher who's set his dog loose to play 'Fetch a piece of the sleuth.' What now? Well, maybe she's wearing a coat. It's summer, but the weather has taken an unexpected chill. Now she's so dedicated to solving the mystery of the missing golden crock pot, that she just ran out of her house that morning without thinking. Her first stop was to visit her friend who once was a long-distance runner, to ask how easy it would be to run three miles with a heavy crock pot on your back. Her friend is a practical sort of person, who loaned our absent-minded sleuth a jacket, the one she has on now as a ferocious chihuahua is bearing down on her. As Lullabelle is running up to eat our sweet little old lady, (it's my scenario, so I get to name the dog) our heroine has one of those moments where a person's brain moves faster than their consciousness can follow. She reaches into the pocket without knowing why, because the survival instinct in her has recognized the jacket she's wearing as the same one she's seen her friend in before, when that friend goes running. Our heroine's hand comes out clutching a can of pepper spray. Lullabelle gets a face-full, and while that doesn't end the peril it gives our heroine some breathing room. Plus, we've just avoided getting a reputation as a writer who snuffs little old ladies.

Now that's a good use for someone who would otherwise just drift along as part of the background noise, but it's also an obvious use. Often the best parts of a story are the ones that the readers fill in for themselves. Let's take another look at our heroine.

What's her outlook on life? Is she optimistic? Jaded? Does she believe in her local councilman but wouldn't trust the current president if he said the sun would rise tomorrow? This is part of all those quirks that make her distinctive. Now how do we convey those quirks? Well, we can spend two pages or more on an inner monologue and put our readers to sleep, or we can follow our heroine through her day. When she gets up in the morning one of the first things she does is get the paper. (Which is telling of itself. She has a computer, but still likes the ritual of reading her newspaper) Does she mumble something to herself about the paperboy because he threw it under her car? Does she find a hand-written note inside the paper, thanking her for recovering the paperboy's bicycle when it was stolen last week? Or is the paper right in front of her door, hand-placed there because the paperboy has learned the hard way that this little old lady is a former cop, when last month he offered to give her a special discount if she started paying cash and his parents got a visit from a patrolman.

Now take all that possibility, and multiply by however many minor characters your story will contain. The people don't even have to have to have active parts in the story. In the above example we showed what kind of person our heroine is by watching her do something completely normal, but it was something normal that she did in her own way. The paperboy himself never entered the picture.

There are no limits. All those neighbors, paperboys, and old friends? They're yours, so make them fit.

Now if you'll pardon me, I have some little old ladies to kill off.

Still writing.

No news like bad news

When you create horrible events and want your poor, unsuspecting reader to gasp and shudder, you need them to know the people who have all those terrible things happen to them. Watching 'Alien,' we cringe when the helmet is cut away and we still can't see John Hurt's face, and we squirm in our seats when that very Freudian alien pops out of his chest. Why? Because we've spent the last thirty or so minutes getting to know him. Yes, his best scenes come after the facehugger drops off. But by the time that 'leathery object' opens up, we at least have a good idea of whether or not Kane would be getting a Christmas card from us, and whether or not we could kill some time with him over a bottle of beer and a conversation about politics.

That's part of how we get involved in a story. Relating to characters, seeing and understanding how they relate to other characters. It's not the only way, just the most well-established. There are one-person plays, and movies and stories with only one character. But even most of those have phone calls or letters or whatever so that we know that our hero is not the last human on earth. Maybe one of the great masters can do it, but fortunately for me there aren't enough of them to give the rest of us regular competition.

That caring is important, because it's what keeps us reading the story or watching the film. It may or may not be set up as such, but the tale is a recording of that character. A slice of their life, and maybe the last one.

You can argue with me, but my humble opinion is that bad news connects us with characters like good news never will. Most of us achieve a kind of equilibrium in our lives, and if we're climbing whatever ladder we're on, we climb it one rung at a time, according to plan. To us, 'normal' is either continuity or slow progress. When we're introduced to Bob and his wife Jane, who are getting started building a life for themselves, we get to know them pretty quickly. New beginnings are a blank slate, one that we often read our on lives into.

In a book or a movie, when someone wins the lottery or has their rich uncle leave them millions, most of us scream 'plot device.' Now, everything is a plot device, because if it isn't, it gets edited out (or it should). But if our heroes move into the creepy mansion not because they inherited it, but because Dad lost his job or Mom is blacklisted for blowing the whistle on the local PTA's cocaine fundraiser, and it's the only place they can afford, then we understand that they're having hard times, and hard times are something we can all relate to. We can give a family who's in a middle of a run of bad luck some sympathy, because we hope that someone would give us a bit of sympathy when we find ourselves in that same situation. A person or family living high on the hog only makes most of us feel envious, which is why you don't see a lot of millionaire protagonists. I remember the hero in 'Bag of Bones' was worth quite a lot, but King is a lot better at this than most of us, and even he had to kill off the man's wife.

Maybe part of it is selfish, too. Empathizing for people in need makes us feel good about ourselves, but envy is a false comfort that only makes us colder. Everyone is a hero in their own mind, and the good guys don't wish a bus would run over their lucky neighbor. Only flesh and blood people do that.

This isn't strictly a random post. Some people that I'm close with decided to call it quits recently. Again, it's a bit selfish, but it seems there's a little less happiness in the world right now. Time moves on, and life changes. It doesn't ask how we feel about the changes, either.

Boy, sounds like the perfect set up for a horror movie, doesn't it? Maybe I'll write something and put one of the characters in a similar situation.

Voices in everyone's heads

You know, one of these days I'm going to reach the point where I never miss a scheduled update on this blog. Obviously, I'm not there yet.

Burnt Offerings Books declined on my story, but with kind words. Naturally, I sent them another story, just to teach them a lesson.

I'm at the point in 'In The Dark' where I'm looking at each character and seeing if they actually have a voice, or if they sound like some offstage player reading his lines while getting a massage. If I don't see their faces in my head when I read their words, I'm not done. This is one field where movies have an advantage. You can see each person speak and hear their real voice. I was about to say radio has it too, but the days of fiction being a regular feature on the airwaves are definitely receding. Of course, now we have podcasts, so the same lesson applies.

I have no way of testing this, but I think that everyone makes up their own voices when they read a story. We patch together a hodgepodge of TV actors, people we know or used to know, and voices of random strangers that talk on their phones in public. All those voices go into our heads, stored on the audio track of our lives. So when we need to hear Mack Bolan or Roland speak, we draw on that vast, randomly-organized data bank. What does that have to do with what I'm talking about? It means that no matter what I do, no one is going to hear the gruff, plainly-speaking sergeant of the guard in exactly the way that I imagine him. He'll be their big brother, the cop that pulled them over when they didn't see that new stop sign, or the drill instructor that they lived in fear of for three months. They take the bones and flesh them out all on their own.

So, I can slack off? Nope. I still need to tell them what type of person that sergeant is. Does he sound educated? Speak with an accent? Does he monologue because he loves the sound of his own voice, or because he has something he feels has to be said? Or does he only say five words in the whole story because he just doesn't talk much. I need to give my readers a full set of bones. Can you imagine a sergeant of the guard with one leg, only a few ribs, and half of a mustache? Well, I can, but not for this book.

Still writing.

Space

The final frontier.

Is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.

Okay, this one may ramble just a bit. I need to describe space to the readers of my second book in a few choice paragraphs, and I'd like your thoughts about my choices of words.

By the way, if you actually need me to give you the sources of those two quotes above, please turn in your sense of wonder, because you're not using it.

This is the first science fiction story that I have written, though if chance favors me it won't be the last. What usually comes out of my pen are horrific stories about people, ones like you and me. If they seem to have one or two traits that make them different, hopefully by the end of the story it's clear that those variations are rather tiny, and that those people aren't that different after all.

This book is also about a person, and I've already bent your ear about the work that's going in to make him someone we can cheer for. Now I need to focus on the environment. It doesn't have voice, I can't describe it so that you associate it with that one teacher who was kind to you grade school or that dog you were always terrified of, and it sure as hell isn't going to have a sudden epiphany and become our hero's sidekick. But it's a character too, and I need to make you believe it's real.

I've got a small advantage, of course, in that this one actually exists. Real people, ones like you and me, have flown up and met it face to face. We've loaned it tools and toys, and gotten some of them back with little notes describing it's likes and dislikes. It's all around us, and there's more of it than there is of us, our home, or anything else. Whatever isn't something else, is it. It's the default.

But, as we've said, this is fiction. Reality is there for us to use, and we NEED to be selective in what facts we use, dishing out the ones that support our narrow points of view and tucking all the others under a loose corner of the carpet somewhere. If we don't, all we'll have is an amateurish documentary and the story will sound like a Monty Python skit where a character from last week's show seems to walk onto the set by mistake. We decide the attitude of the universe and everything in it.

Space is not our friend in this tale. It wants to kill us, in very unpleasant ways. We haven't mastered it, and we know it. We can hold it back, keep it from taking our heat, our water, and our air, but only imperfectly. It can feel every strength of our defenses, and every flaw. It has killed men, families, and entire rocket ships. Not through any intent, but just by being what it is, and through the simplest and dumbest circumstances possible: human error.

You forgot to check that seal on your air tank? Or you didn't check it again after the valve contracted from the colder outside temperature? Oops. Maybe you should just sit down and think pleasant thoughts. Think that little light built onto your helmet is enough for you to find your way back to the hatch after you're done with your work outside? I hope you're right, because the ships are big, don't have outside lights, and there's no sun to show you which way is which. Did the person who put your suit together break up with their spouse the night before they punched in to work and installed all that insulation? Hope they kept their mind on their job, because when hypothermia starts to set in you may or may not notice. Are there any holes in the layer of material that keeps out all those really nasty cosmic rays? Let's not dwell on what would happen if there are. Do you know how dry the near-total vacuum of space is? Dry enough to leach water out of your skin, from your eyes, and every time you open your mouth. How much water is in your body? How much can you lose before things get unpleasant? No seal is perfect, after all.

You did check the line that keeps you attached to the ship, right? If it breaks, you'll drift away an inch at a time, for eternity.

Maybe that's how I need to describe it: death by default. A reader would throw the book away if I wasted their time by describing all those little details in every single scene that could have them, so when I spell them out once or twice the first few times and then mention that so and so 'went through the drill' a couple of times after that, it'll seem normal. A few more pages, and a reader might have forgotten about them altogether. Then when someone we like suddenly says, “Oh God, my lungs are burning,” we'll remember and (hopefully) say to ourselves, 'Oh shit, I forgot about that.'

That's the main thrust that I want, that it is a threat, and the second you forget that, you're the example they'll mention to the next guy. If I can do that, and include some point of view descriptions that show how all that nasty potential has shaped people's feelings about it, that might be enough. That might work.

Thanks. It really helps to use you as a sounding board to bounce these thoughts off of.

Now I just need to write it.

P.S. Happy Veteran's Day!

Why do we want characters to change?

So as I'm beating my head against the brick wall that has 'In the Dark' painted on it (graffiti style), I'm slowly getting a better grasp of my protagonist. The first drafting set the framework of the story, but when I wrote it I was thinking about dozens of books and short stories that had the tone I wanted to capture. Now I need to make changes so that I'm playing the notes to produce those tones myself.

One note I realized wasn't right was the fact that my hero, who is not all cuddly and nice to begin with, is the same person at the end of the book that he is at the beginning. A change must be made, but, since knowing the reason helps guide the action, why? Why can't we let our good guy just go through the action, fight the bad guy and win or lose the girl, and then come home and go to bed early so that tomorrow he's ready to do it all over again? Why do we need this person to grow?

In real life, our views on change are selective. If we get a raise, rock on. If we find out our job is moving to the far east without us, well, that stinks. Change can be good or bad, but unless it's the exact kind we're seeking, we tend to view it with distrust. It's a huge, lurking unknown, and I've covered how we feel about that a few times now.

But this is fiction, in print or on a screen. The rules are different, and this fiction has to show us either what we desire or what we fear. For most of us, our lives are filled with struggles. Sometimes we fight to achieve something, but way too often we have to fight to keep what we already have or just to get through the day. We get up, maybe have some coffee and spend a few minutes with our family or the internet, and then we're off to work. The next eight or more hours are spent loading boxes, smiling at customers as they chew us out because they have to read the manual to know how to program their DVR, or whatever needs to be done to pay the mortgage. It's a struggle.

So when John McClean or Douglas Quaid has to fight to try to save some idiot about to get himself killed or find a way to live through his wife betraying him, we empathize. Most of us don't risk getting shot at while we're on the clock (some do. Please don't forget that), but the fact that we both have a fight on our hands gives us something in common with these heroes. It makes them someone we could sit down and have a beer with at the end of the day.

Way back when, my Texas history teacher taught us that one of the characteristics of the people of Texas is our strong work ethic. I think the feeling is not quite as simple as that, and I also think the point is valid for a lot of people, not just those from my home state. We don't just believe that we should work, we believe that if we work hard we'll be rewarded, and not just with our $7.25 per hour. We have faith that if we consistently give our earnest effort, we'll achieve our dream.

Now wouldn't it be great if we could see an example of that play out, right in front of us? If we could see someone who we identify with confirm our deeply-held hope? We could just sit there and nod, saying to ourselves, 'Yep. That's how it should be.'

Let me clarify that this isn't a blank check for our ego. It's safe to say that a lot of us think it would be awfully nice to have a bunch of people that we find attractive at our beck and call. Maybe we'd treat them like a bunch of pampered princes(ses), or maybe we'd keep them in chains and rags because that's what we think they deserve. (I see a future blog post about this) As a fantasy, it's fairly common. Try to make it a reality, and brother you'll open enough cans of worms to fish up every critter in the sea. If our hero doesn't just get the girl at the end of the story, but gets five or six of them, we may cheer and applaud, but we'll also be envious, which would cut back our empathy for him.

Note that this is a cultural attitude mainly of those of us here in the U.S., and that our friends in other countries feel differently. The French in particular seem to be able to be a bit more honest.

Also note that even though I've spoken about a guy through this whole thing, the same principles apply to the heroines in 'chick flicks.' Hope knows no gender, it's just that the movies that try to speak to women directly tend to have less sidekicks and explosions than those aimed at men.

So we need struggle, and we need change. Can we cheer our alter ego saving the farm, getting the girl, or taking the gold-medal for one-armed kayaking? All three? Absolutely. Would we cheer if he loses his home, is asked to be the best man when the woman of his dreams marries his best friend, or succumbs to stage fright just as he's about to enter the kayaking contest? Not unless the denouement shows us that he's learned something about himself. Maybe some day I'll be able to wrap my head around the appeal that tragedies have for some people, but I can't remember the last one I saw or read, and I don't think I've ever seen one willingly.

Damn I can type a lot when I get going on a subject, can't I? Enough pondering for now. Time to write.

The principle of Newton's Cradle as applied to a kick in the head

You all know what I'm talking about, right? That cool desk top toy with four or five steel balls suspended in a frame. You lift one at either end and let it drop. When that ball hits the others the energy is transmitted right through them, and the one at the far end swings out, falls back, and so on back and forth.

Now we're going to get into a bit of a rant here, but that's okay because -

A: this is my blog, and I can do whatever I damn well feel like with it, and

B: this ties into writing. Everything ties into writing.

My wife, who busts her backside at anything and everything she does, got 'let go' from her job the other day. It seems she finished an assignment (not her first), and was told they didn't need her anymore.

I love my wife. Take that as fact. You may also take my statement that she is not the sort of person to be satisfied with 'just doing her job' as a fact. Once she gets her feet under her, which doesn't take very long, she ends up finding better, stronger, faster ways of doing the work. This is part of the reason that no matter what the explanation, I'm not on the side of the people who cut her loose. Just not going to happen.

Now we come back to writing. I've read a lot of books over the years. Some were good, some were bad, and some were so bad that the publisher should have been sued and forced to plant more trees to replace the paper that was wasted printing the books. One of the factors in the latter is that the stories feel like they're taking place on a stage somewhere in an abandoned theater, being played by people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. The characters have no real passion. They have no spark as individuals, and they don't have that interactive spark that could make us identify with them as a group. When one of them yells, their next door neighbor doesn't bang on the wall, call the police, or come over to see what's wrong because that neighbor is offstage taking a smoke break. When the plot, such as it is, lifts one of the balls in the Newton's cradle and lets it go, that ball smacks into the next one with a dull thunk. Nothing else happens. Energy is destroyed.

Now let's get a more passionate response in there. After I found out my best beloved was canned, I tried to emotionally support her as best I could, and then the next day I told one of my co-workers that if he didn't start looking behind him when he backed up in a forklift, I was going to turn his head all the way around so that he could do it automatically. There's a little more to the story than just that, of course, and I'll put in a disclaimer here that I might be stretching a truth to tell a good story, but you see my point. The energy of what happened to one ball gets transmitted to the next one, and then that ball passes it along to the next. Energy doesn't disappear.

So that's how we make our characters a little more lifelike, and how we vent to the whole world that our spouse was treated in a way that we do not approve of.

And I'll write with that in mind.

Done, with a couple of things

Okay, A-kon is water under the bridge. Wowza, that one was not easy. My lady love was in charge of the Artist Alley and all its inherent drama, so her number one minion, Alex, and I got to set up and run her booth. We had invaluable help from some friends, but even then it was work. The con was in a new hotel this year, and finding parking was a royal clusterfuck. We supposedly got the right to park at the hotel that we were staying at, but they didn't have enough parking for all the people they rented rooms to, so we ended up having to pay to park at the bigger hotel across the street, and walk over there each morning.

Since none of the usual distractions were available, I was able to catch up on some reading. I got through a couple of stories of the issue of Glimmer Train that I picked up a while back, as well as check out an old issue of Rue Morgue that's been collecting dust in a bag. I also was finally able to finish Lionel Shriver's 'We Need To Talk About Kevin.'

First, this is going to be a negative review. I really really doubt I'm ever going to read any of Mz. Shriver's (she changed her name) stories again. But it's the reason why I'm not going to that I think is important. This is a very well-written book, with solid, well-developed and mostly believable characters. Mz. Shriver has a lot of valid points to make, and she makes them with hard, solid truths.

But finishing that book was like using a dremel tool on my own teeth. A few months ago I read the preview on Amazon, and got intrigued by the concept. Having a Kindle means a bit of instant gratification is (nearly) always within reach, so a couple of clicks and a bit of money later, I had the book. Right when I started reading it, I got that old warning sign of 'just let me get through this one part and then it will get interesting.' Too many times I've pushed through a movie or story with that hope only to turn a page or come to a scene and there's THE END.

There was absolutely no joy in reading this book. It wasn't fun, it was work. Now, that could be because I just don't speak the same literary language as Mz. Shriver, because I picked up the book with my own feelings about the subject matter somehow already well-established in my own head, or because I don't agree with what the author was trying to say. But even if all of that were true, I can usually find some connection with a story. With this, there was nothing.

I went back and reread the post I put up when I was halfway done, and aside from the happiness of being finished, my feelings are exactly the same now as they were then. The characters are all well-established, but they're cartoons. The only parts of them that are believable are their negative traits. Let me be clear on that: I didn't like ANYONE in this book. If I wake up one morning and find myself living in the world of this book, I will steal a car, then go drive a hundred miles an hour on the wrong side of residential streets. I'll get away with it, too, because everyone in this world is fucking blind.

Still writing, and now I have another example of how I do not want my books to turn out.