elfs | Entries tagged with writing

I've been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn again, and I've come to the conclusion that the greatest failure in writing of the series is the relationship between Laulai of the Banuk and the punk band Concrete Beach Party.

Warning: if you haven't played the game, there are some minor spoilers for Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds in here.

When you decide to play The Frozen Wilds, one of the missions you can find and complete is named Waterlogged. In this mission you meet the musician Laulai, who loves to "play" the vast pipes underneath The Yellowstone Dam's drainage basin. Using massive drumsticks reminiscent of Taiko drums, her playing could be heard for kilometers in every direction. But the location where she played has been flooded, and you have to find out why and see if you can drain it and give her access to her instrument again.

There's a lot of adventuring that goes on, but eventually you succeed. Along the way, this being Horizon Zero Dawn, you find a lot of audio recordings of two people from the ancient days: Shelly & Laura. They were part of a team, originally a large team, that maintained and administered the dam. As time went on and automation came to Yellowstone, the size of their team dropped to ten, then five, and then finally two. For a year, Shelly and Laura maintained the dam themselves. Laura had an electric guitar, and Shelly figured out that if they drained the receiving pool the pipes at one end had an amazing sound quality. They created a band, "Concrete Beach Party," and recorded a single song, "The Last Two Girls On Earth."

And then Ted Faro and one of his corporate arms took their jobs away, breaking them up and sending them to opposite ends of the Earth before the robots came and ate them. Or they killed themselves... because those were the only two options for humanity in 2064. Laura and Shelly both loved the other, best friends until the end.

The greatest writing failure in Horizon Zero Dawn is that literally seconds after Laulai thanks Aloy for saving her instruments and gives a short speech about how badly she wants her music to connect her to her ancestors, Aloy finds the one and only recording of "The Last Two Girls On Earth" and does not go back and play the song for Laulai.

Laulai discovered what Shelly had discovered, that the pipes in the overflow basin were an amazing percussion instrument in their own right. Aloy has a recording of Shelly using those pipes in the coherent, rhythmic, Western way a punk band would use them. Aloy knows that Laulai is desperate for connection with anyone else who treated these pipes that way, and she knows that Shelly was desperate for some kind of closure, some sense that someone, anyone, other than she and Laura had ever heard or appreciated Concrete Beach Party.

And yet the writing in the story neglects all of that. It drops it as irrelevant, an uninteresting component of the game avatar's accrual of experience points. It never gives anyone in this sequence the closure they deserve.

One of the things that I treasure most in playing a video game is having someone interesting to hang out with. Give me a reason to like them, let them "save the cat" to use a Hollywood expression. Elizabeth from Bioshock is pretty canon, but so are a lot of characters. Bloodrayne, at least in the original series, with her mixture of murderous sexiness and ingenue bewilderment, was fun to hang out with. Aloy is... usually... worth hanging out with, but this sequence filled me with a great sense of disappointment. The writers missed a major aspect of her character with this broken opportunity, and it's a shame it can't be fixed.

Current Mood: angry

One of the great touchstones of philosophical greatness, in Greek thought at least, is the ability to respect your reactions to crises and opportunities, and to exercise power over those reactions. The secret to understanding how that works can be found in writing romance novels.

If there’s one absolutely consistent theme throughout my stories, it’s that the greatest mystery in human thought is simply this one: why do we make choices and decisions at all?

I’ve come to some satisfactory conclusions, the most important of which is that choice involves nothing supernatural. There’s no “soul” that “I” don’t have any access to, that makes decisions one way or another. That decision making is based not on reason, but on emotion, and that without emotions we would be eternally caught in an optimization loop, unable to break down and make a choice. Even as we weigh choices from the most trivial to the most essential, from what to have for lunch to whom to love and marry, in the end it is emotions that rise up and say, “It’s time to break the tie. You have other things to worry about, young hairless African plains ape, like that cheetah stalking you.”

I’m also a practicing Stoic of the old school, and one of the criticisms often hurled at Stoicism is that Stoics are unfeeling, unemotional creatures who think too much about death, and let that maudlin rumination leech them of feeling.

Obviously, if on the one hand I practice Stoicism, and on the other hand I believe that our emotions are the core and essence of what we are, and that we couldn’t be human without being fully emotional, then I believe that being Stoic and being emotional are fully compatible.

I’m a writer, and writers think about emotions a lot. To borrow a page from my character creation notes, a great character always has an internal tension between two different goals, one long-term and one short-term. Since I write romances, my two protagonists often start with a short-term need to get the hell away from each other for plot reasons, and a long-term desire for affirmation, love, and finding their place in the world. The trick of good writing is to show how those two desires conflict with each other, and then to show how deciding to go for the long-term solution slowly reveals the “real person” under the conflict such that they start to see how suitable the other person is as a partner.

I believe we all have these short- and long-term goals, and that they’re frequently at odds with one another. The desire to lock myself into my mancave and write for hours on end is clearly in conflict with long-term desire to have a happy marriage, and I’ve learned that I have to consistently push away from the desk and attend to my family. My long-term goal is more important to me than my short-term desires.

That’s the primal secret to having power over your reactions. You have to recognize that a reaction is an expression of a short-term desire, and that those expressions aren’t always suitable. By practicing how you’ll react to crises and opportunities, even in the quiet theater of your own skull, you’ll have more control over yourself when the time comes to put that rumination into practice.

I think that’s why romance writers tend to have such stupendous output. They’ve uncovered the secret to dealing with harsh emotions, by rehearsing them over and over on the pages they write. Readers get to experience that second-hand, but for the writer, exploring those details and analyzing them down to their bones gives them that insight. By understanding this conflict, they find the strength to sit down every morning, face the keyboard, and write.

You should practice this too. Every morning, ask yourself one question: “What one terrible thing could go wrong today? How would I deal with it?” Take a deep breath and ask yourself, if your long-term values were fully engaged, if you were seeking to be fully and emotionally satisfied, and not the hormonal, irrational, animal reactive person you are when you’re just “thinking fast,” how would you want to react? Who would need you more than you needed yourself in that moment? Do this regularly, and you’ll be a far stronger person than someone who doesn’t.

Current Mood: accomplished

I am perplexed by Alissa Wilkonson's critique of the new Dwayne Johnson vehicle, Skyscraper. She writes:

It’s also another example of what I think of as a “video game” movie. It takes the basic form of a simple video game, in which you play as the hero and are presented with an objective and a set of challenges...

Every challenge is overcome, but then the hero is presented with a new twist or challenge. And just like in a game, elements that will help the hero are seeded early on, placed strategically so that you’ll forget they’re there right before the hero needs them.

I mean, isn't that just literally the definition of plot? Not the plot of Skyscraper, or any particular movie, or any particular video game; I mean, isn't that literally plot itself?

I mean, here's David Mamet:

Drama is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him or her from achieving a specific, acute goal. A scene starts with the hero having a problem; that is why the hero is here, to try to solve the problem. The hero will fail, thwarted and perhaps given a hint about another path to take. Their failure and resolution propels us to the next scene. All of these attempts taken together constitute THE PLOT.

Wilkinson's "strategically placed" bit is Chekhov's Gun done well.

People are comparing Skyscraper to Die Hard, and with good reason: they're comparable films about a hero rescuing family from both nasty villains and ongoing infrastructure collapse in a small, well-defined space. But isn't that what we want from these films? Wilkonson's critique could be said about Speed, Air Force One, Cliffhanger, Aliens, Lockout, Olympus has Fallen, White House Down and a zillion other films. I mean, there's a reason these movies exist, and it's not because of video games.

Current Mood: amused

(Content Warning: I tried to find SFW examples for photomanips and renders, but the sidebars on DeviantArt make no such promises. Also: Some people may consider this under the topic "body horror.")

Since I'm on vacation this week, I've decided to try and draw for an hour every day, in the hopes of rebooting one of those one non-talents that I have. I've been using an older book, Figure Drawing, Design and Invention, by Michael Hampton, after several people whose pin-up art I respect recommended it as the book if you want to learn how to draw naked people.

The book is really about learning the ratios between the eight major masses of the body: head, spine, ribcage, pelvis, two arms, and two legs, and then figuring out how to pose them in space. He starts with a pretty good description of gesture and, bless him, undoes all the damage my earlier art teacher did by saying that gesture has nothing to do with trying to "access your feelings" or flailing about on the page; it's just about trying to outline the motion inherent in the static image you're currently drawing. I practiced for a while, and I discovered that Pinterest is a pretty good source of poses when you don't have a live model to work with.

After doing about twenty two-minute gestures, I wandered off in search of something, er, different. Two fun sources of "different" are renders and photomanips. Since Hamptom mentions that gestures are where animators start with a 3-D rig, it's entertaining to work backwards from a final render and see if you can find the rig, but when the image isn't quite human(SFW), doing a gesture gets a little weird.

Of course, it's no surprise that I'm a furry and into centaurs and naked people and so the humantaur photomanipulations amuse me to no end-- if you're into feet, a sexy woman with four is a bonus, right?-- but trying to draw them started to seriously reveal limitations and anatomical complexities. Most of them are probably due to the way photomanips are done-- most are done by fetishists with little regard for anatomy, so the whole "where do the spines meet, what's the forward ribcage built like, how does this all fit together?" questions are rarely asked. It's just played with until it looks "good enough," and it rarely is.

But it's been an eye-opening experiment in learning how to draw. Because once you try to actually, you know, do anatomy, doing unearthly anatomies starts to make you really question how evolution put us together in the first place.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Madeon, Finale

Sometimes, in an otherwise beautiful essay, there's a line that sets me off and makes me wonder why this person is daring to speak for me. Mary Oiver's essay The Artist's Task is such an essay. In it, she accurately accounts for all the things that an artist is trying to do when she sits down to write, or draw, or whatever.

There's a lot of truth to what she says. "Creative work requires loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity." There's the eternal cry of the artist: Leave me alone::

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.

But then she says something that, well, to be honest, makes me mad:

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist.

To which I simply say, bullshit. Go ahead, be enraptured by your process all you want, but I know plenty of talented writers and illustrators for whom the last thing on their minds is to help the world go forward. These men and women are just trying to put food on the table, and their trade is daily work for daily bread, drawing pictures and writing words for an appreciative audience. There's a metric buttload of romance and genre fiction that even the author admits serves no better purpose than to help someone pass the time with a smile and a laugh. There's an equally imperial assload of art that does little more than entertain and titillate. And I refuse to say those people aren't "artists."

Occasionally, without meaning to, they may say something surprisingly insightful. They may paint something spectacular enough to be worth keeping and framing. They paid for their skills in time and money and blood, and to say they're not "an artist" is to misrepresent the vast gradations between the oxycontin-and-beer-addled deliquescent trailer dweller and the pretentions of the "I am an artiste!" set.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Boom Boom Satellites, 9 Doors Empire

Yesterday I had a chance to try out two of the "better" head-mounted displays, the Avegant Glypth, and the Moverio BT-300, and I'm disappointed to say that neither is quite ready to be a desktop replacement.

I write smut. As you can see from my office, I often write in public, and as public transportation has gotten much more reliable, it has also gotten much more crowded. I'd like to have a heads-up display that I can reliably use to write in public without having to share my thoughts with the person sitting next to me.

The Avegant Glyph is an entertainment headset. There's no two ways to put it. It's a bit like sitting in the middle of a theater, and for my vision a bit too far away from the screen. It's fine for watching movies, but it lacks the resolution and close-up vision work necessary to make it a desktop replacement. It does, however, have an HDMI input line.

The Moverio BT-300 is at the other end of the spectrum: it's a workhorse. While you can see through the bifocal screens, if you focus on the screen it looks great, the resolution is high and crisp. The glasses are a bit odd looking, but nothing too horrific.

Unfortunately, the Moverio isn't a display; it's a full-on Android box with its own set of software and apps. One of those is Mira, an HDMI-over-WiFi standard that I'm told works pretty well, and in that case I could theoretically use it as a second display for my laptop, but the chipset in my laptop is too old to support it; I'd have to spring for a second WiFi dongle to support the WiFi Direct standard. That's not horrible, but it's annoying. On the other hand, if it works I could wear the BT-300 and I could probably figure out how to make it automagically mate with the laptop on-demand. I managed it with my bluetooth headphones, even thoough that actually took some hacking.

Still, I don't think head-mounted displays are really ready for the present. And that disappoints me. Maybe with the next generation Moverio, or maybe the new ODG R-9, will fit the bill. For the moment, though, I guess I'll just have to wait.

Sad, but true.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Adham Shaik, Little Boats of Hope
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1630622.html

Bill McKibben's homage to analog over digital, Pause! We Can Go Back!, makes an assertion about how everyone's using Moleskin notebooks these days rather than their on-line organizers, and that the miracle of them is that they "concentrate, rather than dissipate."

I'm sorta glad that people are using "Moleskin" as a buzzword, the way people will generically ask for "a Coke" even when they know the restaurant serves Pepsi. There are other brands of notebook out there; I'm very partisan to Leuchtterm; the paper is far better and the pages are numbered (numbered, people), meaning it's trivially easy to create your own index. I'm also a huge fan of Clairefontaine, which pretty much has the finest paper in the world, but they don't make the A5 format notebooks everyone's using.

But it's not entirely true that my notebook concentrates. It also dissipates: it makes it clear what is and is not a priority, because you have to review, you have to carry forward, what it is that you're going to do on any given day. You can't get away with just concentrating; you have to be willing to let the past dissipate a little, too. Notebooks neither concentrate nor dissipate: they do both. They distill.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1628161.html

Re-reading Sam Brinson's Are We Destined To Fall In Love With Androids?, and my response to it, I noticed a pattern between the stories to which I linked, the ones in which I showed how much the "literature of the future" (which is, in fact, really about the present, and ways to address the present) has addressed the question of "human / cyborg relations" (to use fussy C-3PO's term). One of the overriding questions asked in these stories, one which was elided in 2001 and addressed directly if awkwardly in 2010, was this:

What is our moral obligation to the robots we create?

In a lot of ways, science fiction writers use this as a metaphor for the question of our moral obligation to our children and our progeny, but as experience with actual AI starts to get real we (science fiction writers) are already starting to ask questions about our moral obligations to our creation. This isn't a new problem. The very first "artificial life" story, Frankenstein, addresses the issue head-on in the last dialogues between Victor and the Monster, and later between Walton and the Monster.

If you, like me, believe that consciousness is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a way of maintaining a continuity of self in a world of endless stimuli and the epiphenomenal means by which we turn our actions into grist for the decisions we make in the future, then maybe there will never be conscious robots, only p-zombie machines indistinguishable from the real thing, William James' automatic sweetheart.

But if we want our robots to have the full range of human experiences, to be lovable on the inside as much as we are, then we're going to have to give them an analogous capacity to reason, to tell themselves stories that model what might happen, and what might result, and therefore we have to ask ourselves what moral obligations we have toward people who are not entirely like us, or whose desires are marshalled in a way that suits us entirely.

My own takes has been rather blunt: we are obligated to actually existing conscious beings as if they are moral creatures, and they have the rights and responsibilities of all moral creatures. At the same time, the ability to alleviate them of the anxieties and neuroses of human beings, our own vague impulses shaped by evolutionary contingency that make us miserable (and they do: happy people lack ambition; they do not build empires) may make them more moral than we are. (Asimov addressed this a lot; in many ways he was far ahead of his time.)

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1628121.html

In the real world, we remember the past as a straight line. No matter how many events were possible, only one set of events brought us to where we are right now. It is the future which is hazy: we haven't been to the future, so all we have are possibilities.

In the digital world, it is the future that is a straight line. Since one state proceeds from the previous, there is only one possible outcome. It is the past that is hazy: for a given moment, there is a collection of valid previous states, and for each moment backward in time, that collection explodes, exponentially, creating a vast and diffuse cloud of realities, all of which lead to now, and its determined, linear future.

I can't help but think this leads to a Greg Eganesque story in which an automata character can have hope, dreams, plans, and even sentience only if it's moving backward in time...

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1624049.html

Omaha and the kid and I went out to see Zootopia. No spoilers for the movie; let's just say that it's a rather astonishing piece of animated art which tells a story, has a plot, has a theme, has a meaning, and manages not to be preachy at all about it. It opens with a friggin' children's pageant (which is just about the preachiest thing you can imagine outside of a church), states two different themes before the main plot begins, takes a left turn and delivers a third theme, all the while being entertaining and touching as hell, with wonderful, quirky characters and a rather interesting plotline all the same. At the end of the movie, one of the main characters delivers a short exegesis of second theme, the one fit for kids, which fits perfectly with her character arc, leaving adults to ponder the third theme.

It's almost like the writers were working at four different things at once: a plot for kids, a plot for adults, a theme for kids, and a theme for adults. Oh, that first theme? Not relevant: if anything, the movie is an argument about civilization doesn't make for miracles.

What did we get before Zootopia? Four trailers for four different animated films: Ratchet & Clank, The Secret Life of Pets, Angry Birds: The Movie, and Ice Age 5.

Ratchet & Clank was unimaginably dull and uninspired; if that's the best they can put into the trailer, they have a problem. Ice Age 5 was stupid and unempathetic, focusing on body humor and embarrassment. The Secret Life of Pets had some potential, but still left me doubtful. Angry Birds: The Movie was a befouled hideous exercise in milking a franchise: bathroom humor of the worst sort combined with a thin tissue of unreasonable plot, combined with humiliation for the characters that encourages you to laugh at them, not with them.

Every couple of years, John Lasseter gets a couple of writers into a room with pens and notepads and a whiteboard and a set of rules and says, "Here's the idea. Make me a story." And he wrings everything out of them. They don't go by the beatsheet, they go by The 22 Pixar Rules of Storytelling.

But here's the thing: I don't think this is that hard. It takes discipline, time, and effort. All things I like to think writers pride themselves on. The evidence that any of the other films tried even remotely to do what Lasseter does shows that other animation franchises, when it comes to writing, just don't care all that much. They don't have any respect for their audiences (see rule number 2), and it shows.

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: TISM, Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1596989.html

In my long-running erotic space opera, The Journal Entries, there’s been an almost as long-running thread around sexbots. With few exceptions, the sexbot stories have always been about second-hand robots; ones whose previous owners for one reason or another have died or abandoned the robot, leaving her (it’s almost always a “her” robot) to figure out how to live life without someone who absolutely needs and requires her presence.

Part of the reason I have avoided “first owner” stories is that they don’t interest me; my own reasoning is that men would buy a completely deferent sexbot because they themselves are not very competent human beings, because actual relationships with real individuals are hard, and because they’re the sort of men who would take an easy route out rather than engage in any sort of self-examination.

It may show my lack of thought, but until today I hadn’t stopped to connect that thought with two other ideas running through the fabric of our society. On the one hand, the Men’s Rights Activist movement is eagerly awaiting the emergence of sexbots, woman-shaped substitutes that will provide them with the release valve they say they need.

On the other hand, there’s the idea that women are called upon to engage in “unpaid emotional labor.” Emotional labor is the requirement of a job to depict specific emotional states toward customers or clients: you must be cheerful, or optimistic, or attentive, all emotional states you must somehow pretend to have even when your own life is not any of those things. “Unpaid emotional labor” is the acknowledgement that, outside of work, men are allowed to be angry or grim, whereas a woman being any of those things in public is assailed with requests to “cheer up” and “stop being a downer debbie.”

Relationships require some emotional labor from all parties involved. But sexbots don’t require any emotional labor at all. The “good enough” AIs MRAs eagerly await will do all of the work, and need nothing in return.

Which brings us back to the main point I’ve been making about men and sex. I fully believe that upwards of one-third of all men really don’t like sex. They like orgasms and they like expressions of their potency, but the whole sex thing, its sticky, icky wetness, the need to study and learn its ins and outs, its requirement that one negotiate fairly with a partner and come to an agreement on getting everyone’s needs met, just isn’t their thing. It’s too much work.

So when MRAs breathlessly await the coming sexbot revolution, what they’re really saying is simple: MRAs are lousy men. They’re bad at being human beings. And they don’t want to learn. “Relationships are hard. Let’s go shopping.”

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1592840.html

The challenge of the day is to write The First Thing You Saw On The Internet, in which Lauren Modery writes about falling deeply in love with X-Files Fanfic. To be fair to her readers, Lauren points out that X-Files fanfic wasn't really the first thing she saw; the first thing she saw was Alta Vista's home page, but things get awkward and sticky from there, in a very good way.

The first thing I saw on the Internet wasn't fanfic, and it wasn't X-Files. It was 1991, and I went specifically looking for erotica. The first thing I found was, Cthulhu consume me first, a Brady Bunch sex story. It wasn't even fanfic. It was a nasty piece of work, but what made it all the worse was that I'd been a literary erotica reader for years already when the Internet became available to me. I'd read The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, and The Happy Hooker, and just about everything else I could get my hands on; I'd even started to find the racier romance, like Bertrice Small and Catherine Coulter (at least, before she went mainstream). And this awful piece of trash, this A Very Brady Sex Story, was so horribly written, with so many grammatical and spelling errors, that I couldn't even enjoy it.

Part of that may have been because I wasn't at all familiar with The Brady Bunch as a series, and had no idea why it may have been funny that Marsha was being banged by the family dog.

I was actually so upset by the tragic quality of the story that I chose to write my own. The rest is pretty much history.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1588141.html

So, there's this vaguely science-fictional short going around the Interwebs, entitled The Leviathan.

The Leviathan -- Teaser from Ruairi Robinson on Vimeo.

Truly, the CGI is epic. Other reviews are mixed; lots of people are very impressed with the quality of the rendering, although there's always that one snob who has to find something to criticize.

But I was overall, unimpressed. Epic CGI is no longer an interesting showcase in its own right; the story has to have some meaning.

The visuals around the crew are pretty good; the "actual work in space is hard work, done by the space-suited equivalent of chainhands" theme is well-illustrated, although nothing in the trailer emphasized the "involuntary" nature of the job; that also seems an unlikely handwave, as I can imagine a future where a *lot* of daredevil professionals would seek out a high-risk, high-reward job like that. (Harvesting the core component of an FTL engine would be a hella high-reward job.)

But the setting is terribly confused. Are they in a nebula? Are they above a gas giant? Why do men walk around the open bay of that larger recovery vehicle? Why isn't it enclosed? The setting has to be Jupiter or Saturn; they're clearly in a dense, gaseous place; they can't get FTL without the eggs, they can't get the eggs without FTL, so their first harvests had to be Jovian. If that's so, then a simple space suit isn't enough for the caustic, radioactive environs of even "upper" Jupiter. Don't these people have radar or sonar or some kind of "cloud penetrating" technology, even of the passive variety, that would let them track such a beast's wake through the dense, heavy cover? They have cheap and effective gravitics, which means they haven't talked to a hard science fiction writer about the consequences of cheap and effective gravitics.

All in all, I'll pay more attention to see if there's a good story being told here, but so far I'm not seeing enough thought put into the context implied by the trailer to convince me.

Current Mood: mischevious
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1573979.html

I'm at the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association (PNWA) annual Conference, and I'm having the worst feelings of conflict and anxiety I've felt in a very long time.

I have often felt that the first duty of a writer was to write, and nothing else. And while I've seen a few people here writing, it feels like there's an awful lot more hustling going on than actual writing. And my general impression of the whole thing is that it's vaguely seedy and flimflam.

I've been to a lot of SFnal conventions where "how to write a scene," "how to market your book," and "how to manage self-publishing in both book and ebook formats" have been the subject of highly professional panels. The average convention runs me about $120 or so, for three or four days of that sort of advice with room parties, drinking, hobnobbing and the always-potential for canoodling in the evenings.

This "professional" convention is almost $600. (I didn't pay that amount, though; my membership was won at a school auction, where one of the parents put it forward, and Omaha got it for me as a gift. We paid much, much less for it.) For five times the price of (what I think of as) a "regular convention," you get the same advice, in an overpriced hotel, without the colorful evening festivities. What you do get in the evenings is a chance to pitch your WIP to agents and editors, and to meet the people who have "made it." The evening meet-up has a strange air of desperation.

The table in the temporary bookstore really tells the whole story with terrible clarity. There is the centerpiece table: thread-bound hardcover novels from Hatchette, HarperCollins, Penguin, with one strange and tiny cover given over to Ellora's Cave. These are the authors who have "made it," and who are here as guest speakers and presenters. These are the authors who attendees have spent $600 to meet.

The tables around the perimeter tells the rest of the story: the lackluster bindings of Smashwords and Lulu, the squarebound feel and poorly-chosen cover typography, the shoddy feel much of self-publishing goes through as authors try to find their footing. I genuinely hope most of the people here are satisfied with seeing their own work in the totem form of the printed page, and nothing else, because there's not much else here on offer to them.

The remaineder of the conference is author services: freelance editors and proofreaders, or companies that will build websites for the author, or handle the epub or print formatting, or do cover art, or make peripheral materials (bookmarks, pens, even video trailers for "less than a thousand dollars").

I have been published, and I have self-published, and I don't work that hard at self-marketing. $600 represents three years of the income my own efforts have made. (In contrast: my freelance web development rate makes that much in four hours.) For most of the people here, the income they see from their writing probably amounts to much, much less: some of the conversations I've had here indicate the amount so far is zero. $600 seems an awful lot of money to pay for the hope that lightning may strike.

Current Mood: cynical
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1562381.html

It occurred to me the other day that of the three Disney films I've seen recently, only Wreck-It Ralph really follows the beat sheet, the much maligned guide to writing movies that came out about ten years ago. In Wreck-it Ralph there's the opening scene that sets tone, the debate (which really is a debate!), the theme stated, the catalyst, the promise, fun'n'games ("Shut up and Drive"), absolutely the entire beat sheet followed to the letter from beginning to end. It works because it breaks other tropes, because the romance between Ralph and Vanellope (and it is a classical romance, because Ralph initially embraces and then sheds his mask for his essentially good nature, although it's pretty clear that he's got it from the start), and because Sarah Silverman.

Tangled weirdly compresses and twists the beat sheet: most of the movie is "Fun'n'Games," the point in the story where the protagonist embraces the weird new world she's found herself in and starts to enjoy it. Although if you argue that Flynn is the real protagonist, then it's a more classical romance: the weird new world is Rapunzel, and fun'n'games is from when Rapunzel enters the city to when Flynn spots the Stabbington brothers (from "Kingdom Dance" through "I See The Light").

Now that I think of it, that really is the way to see the movie. Despite Flynn's protestation, this is a story about him, and how he saved a plucky young lady from danger. He's a classic romantic hero: roguish exterior, romantic interior, and he sheds his outer mask for his inner essence when he decides to dance with Rapunzel in the town square.

In that light, "When Will My Life Begin" is just the set-up; it's "I Have A Dream" where the theme is stated, and the campfire is the debate and catalyst. It is entirely possible for two characters to have different plots and different beats, and Tangled really manages to match up a traditional beat sheet with a wildly unexpected one, and tells us (explicitly!) to watch the wild one while soothing us with a story that's traditional and familiar.

Frozen just throws the beat sheet away. Anna gets fun'n'games at the very beginning of the film ("For the First Time in Forever"), but the classic beat sheet "world turned upside down" is in fact not the world where the film occurs: it occurs in a ramped-up version of her old, miserable existence, but with one new piece of knowledge that she thinks will help her escape back to the better world. There's no debate: every character is propelled not by questions but by answers, sometimes wrong answers. Major themes are stated by speakers and then (sometimes quickly!) contradicted by outcomes. One promised premise ("Let it Go") is revamped into a story about isolation; the other ("Love is an Open Door") is so cruelly twisted I heard eight-year-olds gasp with murder in their eyes in the theater.

I kinda admire Disney for greenlighting a story that, really, is so radically different from everything they've done before, that not only dances on so many ancient Disney tropes with ecstatic glee, but is also willing to completely ignore The Formula on which Hollywood has been depending for so many years, and instead try to tell a good story about good characters trying to do the best they can.

Current Music: Pacific Rim OST, Deep Beneath the Pacific
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1558966.html

I was doing some research for a new Journal Entry, and in doing so I stumbled across a cute set of kid's books based on the Pandora mythos by Carolyn Hennesy. I pulled out my Nook, navigated to the series, and clicked "Get Sample."

The downloader told me the sample was sixteen megabytes in size. What the hell? I wondered if maybe I'd misread and it was a graphic novel. No, it was text. What was taking up that much space?

I hooked my Nook up to my laptop and backed it up. I found the file. Now, it's true that Nook files are DRM'd, but with the right tools you can still dump the structure of the Nook epub without having to break the encryption. Here's what the structure says, minus the metadata:

23275812 ops/fonts/ARIALUNI.ttf
 1443652 ops/fonts/CharisSILB.ttf 
 1415988 ops/fonts/CharisSILBI.ttf 
 1439504 ops/fonts/CharisSILI.ttf 
 1471768 ops/fonts/CharisSILR.ttf 
   24125 ops/xhtml/ch01.html 
    3923 ops/xhtml/contents.html

Good grief! 29 megabytes for the font alone. In the compressed EPUB format, the font represents well over 90% of the 16MB volume of the book, and it presents a heck of a strain on the compression/decompression engine of any small ebook reader! I didn't see anything in the sample that would justify that.kind of font abuse.

Really, you'd better have a damn good reason to justify imposing that kind of overhead on your reader's experience.

Current Mood: surprised
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1553678.html

There was an outbreak on Twitter this morning of quotes around the classic, classic film, Heavy Metal, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. But the outbreak had me thinking about an important issue, which is writing comedy.

Almost all comedy emerges from a disputation of power. In the classic man vs. man or man vs. nature, for example, comedy emerges when a man tries and fails to overcome a problem because of overreach fueled by arrogance and ignorance. A classic example is, to use television, fromSeinfeld when Kramer tried to adapt his bathtub for better waterflow in defiance of his landlord’s requirement to reduce water use; he lacked understanding of the problem and arrogantly assumed he knew how to fix it; the resulting flood of his entire apartment was consequently funny. Other classic sources of comedy come from the Upstairs/Downstairs mould of television, where the powerful are never torn down, but are routinely shown up as incompetent and undeserving of their status by their cleverer underlings. Even The Argument Sketch from Monty Python is all about the two characters attempting to powerplay each other, each cleverly looking for a way to either needle or deflect the other’s jibe, to put the other man “under.”

Which is why there’s a moment in Heavy Metal‘s “Lincoln F. Sternn” segment that once seemed funny, but now dies like a landed fish. The scene is supposed to be comic. Sternn is on trial for being a very bad man, and his list of achievements is impressive. ”Lincoln Sternn, you stand here accused of 12 counts of murder in the first degree, 14 counts of armed theft of Federation property, 22 counts of piracy in high space, 18 counts of fraud, 37 counts of rape, and one moving violation.” The prosecutor pauses after every count to let it sink in. The “camera” (Heavy Metal is animated) looks over the bored judge, the restless jury, the steely-eyed prosecutor. When the prosecutor reads the rape charge, the camera focuses on Sternn… whose smile broadens knowingly.

That used to be considered humor. It’s funy, because, see, we all know that, while, legally, rape is, like, a bad thing, Sternn is such a manly man that, well, he was just putting women in their proper place in the power structure, and it’s not like he killed them or anything, he was just doing what a man does.

The women in that scene aren’t human beings; they’re merely pawns.

Once you live in a world where men and women are equals, it stops being funny. Instead, it comes across as horrifying, and Sternn’s consequential escape from justice (as well as the murder of his henchman) loses all comic impetus. Then again, so does getting away with murder.

As an erotica writer who's always attempted to portray both men and women as realistically as possible (yes, even my dragons, centaurs, and so on), I have a deep sympathy with the crisis Kameron Hurley shows in her brilliant essay, We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative. The essay is about how stories have always been wrapped around the narratives of men, and how she's trying, harder than ever, to depict women faithfully, to slough off the cultural baggage of women constrained to romantic, sexual, or subservient roles in any given story, and show women as just as capable of action as men.

In a paragraph toward the end of the essay, though, she struggles to re-write her women characters so that they're explicitly not depicted in one of those roles-- even when those roles might be appropriate.

I thought about that because I just finished a story where Ken is mourning the death of a beloved friend from a relatively rare (for the Pendorian Corridor) species, and how he encounters another fem from the same species. She plays the role of confidant while he sorts himself out. It is a stereotypically "feminine" role-- but all she is is confidant. The love scenes are all male/male, starting as a dive into explicitly drunken abandon, and ending as something more romantic and holistic. Which was sorta the point of the story. It's a nice arc, not at all challenging. (To me, at any rate: I understand that male/male romance is challenging for some people.)

I thought about Hurley's struggle, and applied it to the paragraphs when Ken and Evane are talking. After a few iterations I found myself back at the beginning. Confidant is a fine role for just about anyone. Evane is not explicitly locked into anything in particular. She has understandable and humane reasons for her interest in Ken. The story doesn't pass the Bechdel test, but that's hard to achieve when you have a first-person narrative from a male character.

So I reverted back to the original. It's good as is. Another story done.

[This post is also posted at: The Woodshed and the Story's End @ Pendorwright. Feel free to comment here or there.]

Current Mood: thoughtful
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1543575.html

Thought #1

The other day, I was casually playing Zuma (that stupidly addictive game from PopCap) when it suddenly hit me: the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the American tourists at a restaurant, given a selection of "topic cards" about which to converse while their meal is prepared, attempt their hands at philosophy, eventually handing the cards back with the comment, "Waiter, this conversation isn't very good."

While I get the surface of the joke, the underlying commentary that, sometimes, it is the customer that fails the meal at the restaurant. The restauranters have to deal with, not "poor" customers, but customers who just don't get it. I can appreciate now what Cleese was writing there.

Thought #2

While listening to Linkin Park in the car, I suddenly realized that the cargo vessels in David Weber's Honorverse were very poorly designed. The idea that the ships are "giant skins of metal stretched around a hyperdrive core" is ridiculous: why aren't they designed more like the Nostromo?

The hyperdrive core could dock with a containerization platform that can be loaded and integrated independently of the hyperdrive. The cartels could load and prepare the cargo completely independent of the n-space impeller and h-space "sails." A cargo vessel could drop a cargo into orbit with automated minimal station-keeping, or turn it over to a small, local station-keeping engine, and immediately turn around and pick up an outbound cargo (or empty containers, which could even be folded into a low-profile configuration, given that Weber's ships have pseudo-inertia in hyperspace propotionate to their hull diameter) and head back out without all that faffing about planets. The cartels already have massive infrastructure for moving cargo surface–to–orbit; a few small local ships to reduce hyperspace turnaround to nil would result in huge operational savings.

The first merchant cartel to introduce containerized cargo transport on the Terra—Manticore—New Potsdam run is going to destroy the competition.

Admittedly, this would have made Honor Among Enemies (the one where she commands a cargo vessel) a much more difficult novel to write.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Dave Matthews Band, The Space Between
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1538364.html

So, I'm in the middle of writing a supposed action/adventure SF lesbian romance mash-up thing with a couple of fairly good love scenes and one really nice "coming out" scene that makes me happy. Since I have real trouble with typos, I side-loaded the current WIP onto my Nooks (yes, I own two of them, a pocket-sized one for my phone and a full-sized Nook Color) and started noting down different things about the story. It's got a great beginning, a muddle, and a terrible ending. I had an idea about the ending, but it'll take some work. I was using the Nook Color last night. This morning, I had an errand to run and while waiting in line pulled out my phone to contine. What it gave me was this: "You are on page 1, but on your other Nook you were last on page 39. Do you want to go to page 39? Yes/No."

I felt genuinely creeped out that this information was rolling around the Internet like that. If I'd owned the mechanism of synchronization, I'd probably be comfortable with it, but I don't: Barnes & Noble does. Now, B&N has generally been pretty good, but given that 95% of the books I have on my Nook are side-loaded stuff that are either ripped copies of MS-LIT books (legitimately purchased, but still, I had to crack them to get them onto my Palm, and now my Nook), Calibre-encoded stuff downloaded from my old hangouts at alt.sex.stories and the like, or grey-market yuri manga, I feel a little uncomfortable with anyone tracking what I read like that.

More to the point, does this mean that a pre-release copy of Honest Impulses is rolling around on a Barnes & Noble server? Are they illegitimately copying and tracking everything I've got on my Nook, not just the downloaded stuff but the sideloaded stuff as well?

I asked a B&N representative about that and he assured me, no, they don't. When I asked what information the Nook does send to B&N about my reading habits, he couldn't tell me. Which makes me wonder even more.