Runs in, finds a seat at the back, and hopes no one noticed

Okay, this is late, and it's short on top of that. The cool, insightful post that I had in mind is currently only half done, and I need to go to bed.

Roja is coming together. I can't tell you how cool that is.

The other day I got an e-mail from Grey Matters Press, letting me know that 'Dirty' passed the first culling to be in their Dark Visions anthology. When I read that, it was like getting a shot of adrenalin right in my heart, after someone left the hypo in the freezer overnight.

I asked for a Kindle for Christmas, if only so I can join the Brave New World of publishing and see what poor, innocent victims are available to flog my wares to. Now I just have to figure out how the blasted thing works.

Wow, this post isn't short. It's a severed stump.

Don't blame me, I was writing

Reacting, and preventing.

I had an idea for this week's post, a good one about a necessary quality of horror. I was going to make a few points, then complain about how hard I've been working on Roja.

But on Friday, a twenty year old boy in Connecticut killed twenty-seven people, including his own mother and twenty children. The police are working on trying to understand why he did it, but I'm not holding out hope for a reason that makes sense. Despite my odd interests, I think I can grasp the concepts of 'sane' and 'normal' that most people use when they get up out of bed in the morning and go through their day. I may not live there, but I can see it from my window.

The problem, as I posted not too long ago, is that people's hand-made realities don't include everything that everyone else's has. They can't. Your world may not contain a reason to go do what that boy did, and mine doesn't either. But I guarantee you, his did.

People are naturally wanting to do something to prevent this from ever happening again, and already some are calling for more gun control. After all, if the boy hadn't had guns, he couldn't have done it, right? Look up the news from China, about how they've started posting guards at schools because of recent attacks on kids over there. The same damn day of the attack in Connecticut, a man went after kids in a school in Henan province with a knife. Not too long ago, another man did the same thing with a machete. 'Doing something' about guns is an easy answer, and I'm sure the people of China have their easy answers, too.

How can we keep this craziness from ever happening again? We can't. Take away guns, cars, planes, and baseball bats, and the people who think they have a reason to hurt children will use sticks and stones. People have their own reasons to do everything, and we're pretty clever at finding ways around obstacles. We wouldn't have survived as a species if we weren't.

How can we decrease the chances of it, then? Well, I thought of a couple of ways, but you tell me how likely they are.

First, we mind each other's business. I pay attention to you, you pay attention to me. Instead of just waving to the old man across the street, you walk over and say hello some Saturday afternoon, and ask to meet all the people who live under his roof.

Quick note: You show up at my door and try that, and you'll be soaked with the garden hose before I throw a plugged in, frayed, extension cord at you.

The other option? Well, we listen. All of us, to all of us. We also sincerely, completely accept one another. You take the guy next to you at the bus stop, who likes to have sex with women's purses, as he is, and I listen to the woman in front of me in line at the DMV as she tells me what really bothers her, so that then she won't go home and cut herself under her clothes where it won't show. Would the boy in Connecticut have told his reasons to someone, if he knew in advance that they might listen? I don't know, because I don't even know his reasons. But the next one might.

Tonight, during a break from writing, I made my regular call to my daughter. I told her I loved her, and that she means the world to me. Please go do something similar.

Date night, Santa Claus, and truck owners without chainsaws

So my wife asked how the book was coming. After pondering for a good, solid metaphor, I asked her if she had ever heard of someone carving a statue from a tree trunk using a chainsaw. Because my wife is someone who can appreciate the level of skill required, she said yes, she had. Then I asked her to imagine if that person had been really inspired to create something, only to find his chainsaw was gone. Does he give up? Obviously not. He uses what tools he has, a pick up truck that can go a hundred miles an hour, and a buddy who's willing to drive it. He puts the tree trunk in the bed of the truck, hops in back with it, and has his friend take off down an asphalt road. By strategically leaning the trunk out and letting it rub on the asphalt, he slowly and laboriously grinds away anything that doesn't belong on his statue.

My wife gave me one of those looks.

Because I've been cooped up here in my study pretty much non-stop this month, she also took me out to the movies Saturday night for a date. Our local Alamo Drafthouse was having a graveyard shift double feature of 'Rare Exports' and 'Silent Night Deadly Night.' I hadn't seen either before, so at the very least I was expecting a bit of a treat.

Alamo Drafthouse is a fun place. They have good theaters, serve good food, and really do kick people out if they talk through the film or can't/won't control their children. They also make a point of having interesting pre-show entertainment up on the screen. Last night they showed bits of a Christmas themed 'Tales From the Crypt' episode, as well as a hilarious short from Yer Dead Productions titled 'Treevenge.' For this holiday-themed show, they also had a couple of audience participation games. My lady love declined to enter the eggnog chugging contest, (though she did initiate the cry of 'chug chug chug') but when they announced the 'wrapping competition' she went right up to the front of the theater. They gave her and another girl each a tee-shirt, and the one who wrapped theirs the fastest won. For extra points, my wife busted into some free-flow rapping, which got her an extra shirt of her choice. Then she gave them both to me. She always finds a way to make my life better.

Rare Exports is a fun movie from Finland about the real nature of the Santa Claus figure, and Silent Night, Deadly Night is a reliable 80's slasher flick that came out the same time as Nightmare on Elm Street. The former was a nicely original story that was almost, but not really, safe for kids to see. (Honestly, it would probably be considered safe for kids in Europe, where they seem to have a few less hangups) I initially wondered about the wisdom of showing Rare Exports first, since it looked to be the film with the higher production values. But it's definitely the 'softer' of the two movies, and seeing it after you've seen jolly old Saint Nick decapitate someone would be a bit of a let-down. It was a fun evening.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I need to get back into the bed of that pickup truck.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

When I can't write, I think about writing. I imagine myself talking to someone, anyone, who wants to know what it's like. I explain that I write in chunks, little scenes and bits of scenes. Those bits are like bricks, and I try to build a wall with them. Problem is, they're not all the same size, and they don't fit one right after the other. I don't always know how a story ends before I start writing it, but I usually know by the time I'm half-way done. That means I have a starting point, and an ending point. Then the story goes where ever it damn well pleases, never mind the fact that it's supposed to be headed toward the ending. I also write pieces that get put down in the middle, never mind where the beginning and end may be.

So I have a bunch of bricks spread out all over this big field, and I need to make a wall out of them. To do that, I make a map of where each of them is. Open Office has a spreadsheet function, and I've made one that's set up like a calender. Now I'm going through the draft that I have, and putting each important scene on the calender. You know how you say, 'The next Saturday, the family gathered again.' Well, I need to make sure that the next Saturday wasn't the very next day, and that one of the family members who gathers is still alive to show up. This will help me get a better grip on the whole book.

Claudia and I finished season one of 'Bedlam' this week. It's a series about the old Bethlam Royal Hospital being converted into an apartment building. Unfortunately, some of the prior tenants aren't quite as dead as they should be. (See? If they'd just had a spreadsheet, everything would have worked out fine) So far it's a good series, but it's also another reason to hate the Brits for only having six episodes to a season. In the last episode, you get the sense that things are just starting to heat up.

Kind of ironic that a post about keeping track of days is a day late, don't you think? Don't blame me, I was writing.

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.