I got one of those e-mail quizzes the other day, and one of the questions was to name my worst fear. I think I put something like “Never getting anywhere with writing”, but after reading this I’d have to amend that to read, “Finishing an entire work and having it be a total stinker”. Poor guy….
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I finished editing the baseball-centric story yesterday, and it weighs in at 8100 words (rounded up from something like 8089). I’d hoped to squeeze more out of it, but I just don’t know right now where to get it from. Maybe if I come back to it in a month or so I can get some more blood from that particular stone, but for now, that’s it. It’s longer than I’d hoped, obviously, but still my shortest story yet.
These are famous last words, but I’m expecting my “Snow White” story to come in at roughly the same length.
(Oh, and I’m also planning to post an entire story of mine here in the next few days, once I get it formatted. It’s one that’s made the circuit of markets and that I don’t plan to submit anywhere else. I know you’ll all just be thrilled, thrilled, thrilled. [Insert sound of crickets chirping here.])
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Courtesy Sean, long-time provider of nifty stuff, comes an entertaining (but involved) Geek Test. I scored 26% (plus some decimals), good for a rating of “Total Geek”. My suggested additions to the test were as follows:
–Bought widescreen video releases on VHS.
–Lectured people on why you did so.
–Know why the “Letters of Transit” make no sense.
–You know what “Plugh” or “Xyzzy” mean.
–You have ever been “in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”.
–You can name 3 film composers.
–You know who “Enoch Root” is.
–You know who “Gully Foyle” is.
–You know who “Hari Seldon” is.
–You know the significance of the date May 25, 1977.
There are others in Sean’s comments. Check it out.
(I still prefer, though, the One Question Geek Test: “Pronounce the word coax.”)
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Mt. Everest.
While I’m on the subject of stuff happening in May, there’s also the fiftieth anniversary of the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest. The image links a fascinating series of articles about the “roof of the world” and its allure. I love the composition of this image, with the swirling clouds in the foreground, shrouding the great mountain. Nifty.
(Another fine collection of Everest photos can be found here.)
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October tends to be my favorite month, because I always find its cooler weather refreshing after a hot summer, and that’s when baseball is reaching its climax and the NFL season is starting to form its storylines and the TV season is starting. But given the neat things that happen in May, I might have to reconsider:
A Skeptical Blog is a year old.
Kevin Drum had a wedding anniversary.
So did Greg. (Of course, Greg’s not particularly enjoying this particular May, but then, you know….)
(And, actually, so did I. But I don’t talk about myself here. Except when….um….move along, please….)
Matthew Yglesias had a birthday.
Wil Wheaton finished a book.
Each installment of the greatest film series ever came out in May.
And Old Slugworth‘s head exploded in May. (It hasn’t, yet. But it will, when he reads this. Heh heh heh….)
So, it looks like our fifth month — the “Lusty Month of May” — is good for a lot more than just leaving flowers on people’s doorsteps. Happy May!!
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Geek Eruption Elert! Warning!! Annoyed Star Wars Fan-boy Ranting Ahead! Go Back, Before It’s Too Late!!!
Still there? Don’t say I didn’t warn you….
OK. The good folks at AICN have launched something they’re calling “The Jedi Council” (first two installments here and here), in which AICN’s Moriarty, who on the AICN pecking-order is second only to Harry Knowles himself, is looking to continuously take the pulse of Star Wars fandom in the roughly two years remaining before the saga concludes with the release of Episode III.
Moriarty, though, is concerned: it seems to him that Star Wars fandom should be reaching its fever-pitch right about now, with the saga’s final filmed installment now entering production. But it’s not: Star Wars fandom is of mixed opinion now, with what appears to be a minority eagerly anticipating Episode III, and the remainder either ambivalent about the next installment or actually fearful, given what they perceive to be massive shortcomings in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. They have “lost faith”, a common description for their feeling which occurs just a few paragraphs in.
Somehow, I managed to read the articles, both of them, all the way through, even though by about halfway through the first one I wanted to reach through my modem and give Moriarty and his whiny cohorts the biggest dope-slaps of their lives.
I’m not going to embark on more passionate defense of TPM or AOTC. I’ve done all that before, in the articles linked in my sidebar and also back when SDB panned AOTC. That’s not what I’m after here, except to note that in a vast number of cases, when people have panned the two prequel Star Wars episodes, they’ve failed spectacularly to actually understand the plot or the story or what George Lucas appears to be attempting to do. Surely, when assessing a work of art, some attempt should be made to at least understand what the artist is trying to do. I really don’t have a problem with someone not liking the new Star Wars films, but the tone of the criticism leveled at Lucas seems to often take the tone of not merely disliking what Lucas has done, but of excoriating him for not doing what the fans wanted him to do.
I wish I could remember where I read this, but there was a positive review of TPM back when it came out that included what seemed to me very sage advice: “You probably need to see this movie twice: once to get over the movie that George Lucas didn’t make, and then once to appreciate the movie that he did make.” Another reviewer, this one for AICN (it wasn’t Moriarty or Harry or anyone I remember), also praised the movie and made a similar point: “Since Return of the Jedi in 1983, I’ve made Episode I in my mind a thousand times. Should I really blame Lucas when his version of Episode I isn’t the one I enacted all those times in my imagination?” (That’s a paraphrase. I’m not digging through AICN’s archives to find that article.)
There probably isn’t a movie at all that George Lucas could have made that would have withstood the weight of sixteen years’ worth of expectations. I would bet money that if he had made The Phantom Menace, exactly as is, in 1986 (three years after ROTJ) instead of waiting until 1999, the film would have been much more warmly received. Part of this is the expectations thing, but another part, I think, has as much to do with what else transpired in the film world in those sixteen years. For all the people Moriarty says have gone into filmmaking because of Star Wars, the fact is, those people have stayed in filmmaking because of all the other great films since then.
It’s as simple as this: tastes change, and they can change in a lot shorter time than sixteen years. That long wait for the new Star Wars movie seems kind of short now that it’s been over for four years, but when I think of just how my own tastes have changed in just the last ten years, I’m astounded: I hated Diet Pepsi in 1993, and now I drink it every day; ditto coffee; I hated horror in general and Stephen King in particular in 1993, where now I love both; I hated mushrooms on pizza, now I like them; et cetera. My fiction-reading in 1993 was almost exclusively epic fantasy; I now read very little epic fantasy and a lot more horror and science fiction. Music? I hated the French Impressionists then. My love of film music was dormant.
Star Wars fans of today are not the way they were back in 1977, or 1980, or 1983. They’ve been though too much: they’ve been through Pulp Fiction and Titanic and The Matrix and the arrival of anime. And they’ve been through the Age of Irony…which George Lucas doesn’t seem to have ever entered.
And there’s the rub, at least in part: where Star Wars fans still love the original trilogy, because it’s simply too iconic not to love it, their tastes in storytelling have been shaped by what’s happened since. But George Lucas’s own tastes in storytelling have not advanced. I suppose that could be taken as a failing on Lucas’s part, but I don’t, really. I’m more saddened that there seems to be less of a place for Lucas’s style of storytelling today than in the fact that Lucas is still telling these kinds of stories. Lucas has grown enormously in terms of his visual style — witness the duel between Anakin and Count Dooku, with its eerie closeups of their faces only illuminated by their flashing lightsaber blades — but his developing visual sense is still employed in telling the same kinds of stories. I like to think that the pendulum swings, and that these first three Episodes will eventually find their audience. It’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for it: my own musical hero, Hector Berlioz, had been dead eighty years or so before his music started to blossom in popularity (and in many ways it still has yet to do so in Berlioz’s own country).
So whenever I hear these fans griping like this, I think of that scene in The Breakfast Club when Principal Vernon is complaining to the janitor about today’s kids. “They’ve changed,” Vernon says, to which the janitor responds, “Bullshit. The kids haven’t changed, you have.” I don’t begrudge anyone that George Lucas’s current efforts don’t appeal to their current tastes. But I don’t get the anger.
I’ll continue this tomorrow or the next day. Damned people complaining about Star Wars…don’t they know that I have work to do?!
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Some statistical nonsense on my Short Fiction Reading Month: I started the actual reading a couple of days before May 13, but my first update post on the subject appeared on the 15th, so I’m calling that as my starting point. Thus, I will return to reading novels on June 15. And there was much rejoicing…or thudding of heads hitting their desks as their masters fall into deep slumber.
Anyway, as of today I have read 33 stories, by 20 different authors. Of those 33 stories, 9 are science fiction, 5 are “humor” (at least that’s what I’d call them), and the remainder are a mix of fantasy, dark fantasy, suspense, and outright horror.
This little project is turning out to be a blast. Everybody should read more short stories. As Stephen King says in the foreword to his latest collection, Everything’s Eventual: “For me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.” I absolutely plan to work more short-fiction reading into my regular reading regimen once the intensive-month is done.
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I think a neat horror story could be written on the premise of combining Mike Tyson’s and Michael Jackson’s genes into a single organism. But I’m sure as hell not going to be the one to write it.
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Since Memorial Day fell during my unplanned hiatus, I obviously didn’t write any kind of post honoring America’s fallen that day.
Memorial Day, for all its solemnity, has for me always been something of a distant holiday, because no one close to me has ever fallen in war, and in fact I have to look pretty far for relatives who have even served in wartime. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War I, but both had been dead for years when I was born. I know that an uncle of mine served during World War II, but I also know that he saw no action (not to belittle his service, but Memorial Day is generally set aside to remember those who paid the “last full price of devotion”). My father-in-law served in Viet Nam, but my own father did not (he had college deferments for the first half of the war, and was above draft age during the second). So there is little in my family history to personalize Memorial Day; for me, it really is a day to remember “all the men and women who have died in service to the United States”.
One personal remembrance, though, does creep up for me each Memorial Day. It has nothing at all to do with my family; in fact, I have no connection with the young man in question.
When I was in grade school, during the fall and spring, when the weather was nice, we would have gym class outdoors, at the athletic field. On good days we’d play softball or flag football or soccer; on not-so-good days we’d run around the quarter-mile track. But the walk to the athletic field involved crossing the street in front of the school and walking a tenth of a mile or so down the street, past the town cemetery. I remember that at the corner of the cemetery we past, behind the wrought-iron fence, the grave of a man named Larry Havers was visible. His stone was decorated with a photograph of him, in military uniform. I don’t recall what branch in which he served, nor do I recall his date-of-birth as given on the stone, but I do recall the year of his death: 1967. I even think the stone specified the specific battle in which he was killed in action, but I’m not sure about that, either.
That’s what I remember each Memorial Day: the grave of a man I never knew, who died four years before I was born in a place across the world to which I doubt I’ll ever go. And in the absence of anyone from my own family, Mr. Havers’s name will probably be the one I look for if I ever visit that memorial in Washington. I hope his family wouldn’t mind.