Month: May 2003

I’m not sure yet, but I may have actually managed to write a genuine short story. I wrapped up the first draft my baseball-centered story this morning, and while I’m not sure yet, I think it may be the shortest thing I’ve done yet (except for “The City of Dead Works”, which exists in the archives here — see “Notable Dispatches” at left). Last night I was thinking about how to make the transition into the story’s ending, when I realized that a transition wasn’t actually necessary. I just went right into the ending, then and there. I can’t do a word-count until I actually type the thing — I do all first drafts in longhand, remember — but I’m very sure it’s my new record for shortness. I’m expecting a word-count of around 7000 words. For me, that’s brevity.

(A secondary hope of mine as I spend a month reading short fiction, as opposed to novels, is that I’ll finally recalibrate myself so as to actually be able to tell a story in less than 10,000 words.)

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Send Greg some good cheer. He got some bad news this week. (Of course, being from Indy, I’m still not letting him off the hook for sending all that crappy weather here a few days ago.)

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“Short Fiction Reading Month” is off to a good start. Here are the initial results, from the last couple of days.

First, two stories from the current issue of Realms of Fantasy: “The Man Who Did Nothing”, by Karen Traviss, and “Alephestra” by Bruce Holland Rogers. RoF has been one of my favorite magazines for years (despite my track record of failure in actually selling stories to them). The magazine is obviously focused on fantasy, but their range is broad within that spectrum: not only is there adventure-oriented, imaginary world fantasy, but they also do a lot of urban fantasy, “mythic” fantasy, and occasionally they do downright horror. These two stories were both excellent. “The Man Who Did Nothing” is about the old axiom that “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” In this tale, the administrator of an apartment bloc comes into some difficulty when the people living in his neighborhood become convinced that the new neighbor is, in fact, the Anti-Christ. Rogers’s “Alephestra” is a different story, inspired by astrology and Roman myth. Rogers spins a very brief tale about a Greek deity named Alephestra (whom I am pretty sure is not an actual Greek mythic figure, but a concoction of Rogers’s, but I’m not entirely sure on this point). Alephestra is the second moon that Earth once had, but she incurs the wrath of Jupiter, who throws her from the sky. What she becomes after that is unexpected and haunting. (Rogers is known to me as the writer of a very remarkable story from a few years back, “The Dead Boy At Your Window”.)

And yesterday I dipped into Neil Gaiman’s short-fiction anthology, Smoke and Mirrors. The book contains a grab-bag of differing styles and formats, of which I took advantage. First I read the hundred-word “Nicholas Was…”, which is a dark Christmas story; then I read a story-poem called “Bay Wolf”, which is an odd combination of Beowulf and BayWatch (and it actually works, somehow); and finally there is “Snow, Glass, Apples” which may be the darkest telling of the “Snow White” story I’ve ever encountered. I’ve always found something pretty compelling about the story of Snow White, and I have my own spin on the tale that I’m planning to write when I finish the current baseball story. Gaiman’s version is, well, pure Gaiman: it’s exactly what I would expect of a Neil Gaiman-“Snow White” story.

Further updates as stories warrant.

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(Warning: Spoilers herein for last night’s episode of The West Wing.)

Well, no one can accuse Aaron Sorkin of not going out with a bang. Wow. I wonder if, when he decided that he would be leaving, if he said something like, “I gotta leave a good mess for the new writers to clean up…so I’ll leave President Bartlet’s daughter in the clutches of unknown kidnappers, and I’ll leave the Presidency itself in the clutches of the Republican Speaker of the House! Mwooo-hooo-hoo-hahahahaha!!!” While I’m sorry to see Sorkin go, I’m actually thinking that things can be OK with new writers on board, as long as they’re good ones. A lot of folks are saying that the show is doomed and won’t be worth watching anymore, but I’m not willing to go that far. Executive Producer John Wells is still on board, and he’s had pretty good results with keeping ER consistent over the years (despite a lull a few years back), and while I’m not a Third Watch viewer, that show’s stuck around for long enough to indicate that it’s doing something right.*

While I’m on the subject of The West Wing, I’ve seen the comment on a number of message boards and such this morning that of course the Republican Speaker is a big, uncaring, mean guy because that’s the only kind of Republican Aaron Sorkin is capable of writing. And I’m thinking, what show are these people watching? Because they clearly missed the character of Ainsley Hayes over the previous two seasons, who was anything but an uncaring, meanie, evil Republican. Ditto Joe Quincy, the Republican lawyer played by Matthew Perry who appeared in two episodes just a couple of weeks ago. And ditto that Republican lawyer who Donna dated early in the third season. And ditto several Republican congressmen and other characters who have shown up on the show over its run. There have been some meanie Republicans, but there have also been some myopic and dorky Democrats on the show. Nobody ever mentions them, however.

A recurring motif of Sorkin’s, in the course of The West Wing, is that the people who oppose us frequently don’t equal the mental image we concoct of them for the sake of political convenience. The idea that The West Wing depicts a world where Democrats are always good and Republicans are always evil simply doesn’t hold up to any actual scrutiny of the show. It’s a complaint of convenience, not of reality.

(And speaking specifically of John Goodman’s Speaker of the House last night, no, he doesn’t come off as being particularly warm and friendly. But then, he’s on screen for something like four minutes; and considering the viewpoint of his character, his lack of warmth is understandable. Here’s a guy who is being forced to forsake his own political career by temporarily assuming the office of the Presidency, and he’s assuming that office on the behalf of a President he’s just spent five years of his life opposing at every turn, and he has to do it in front of the very White House staff he’s spent that five years attacking and being attacked by. I would have found it utterly false if he’d been portrayed in any light other than the light in which he was shown last night.)

*Speaking of Third Watch, how many regular characters exist on this show? I’m asking because the show’s been around for three or four years now, and yet it seems like every time I see a preview for it, the announcer is saying “This week, one of their own will die…” They should have run out of regulars to kill off by now, shouldn’t they?

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Just in case you missed it on WWDN, here is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read: Ten Reasons to Hate Star Trek.

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On the movie-going experience: I still love sitting in a darkened theater, munching incredibly fattening popcorn and washing it down with at least 56 ounces of sugary soda (my favorite theater chain in Buffalo has switched from Pepsi products to Coke, which means I have to drink regular Coke because I think Diet Coke is gross, while Diet Pepsi is my favorite carbonated beverage of all time). I love seeing movies an that huge screen, which is the way they’re intended to be seen, after all.

But theaters seem to be actively trying to encourage people to wait for the video.

First of all, theaters are never warm enough anymore. I know, it’s expensive to heat a bunch of cavernous rooms, especially on a Monday when there just aren’t enough bodies present to help bring the temperature up, but sheesh. When I step out into 55-degree air after the show, I should not feel like I’m warming up.

Second: this crap before the movie has got to go. Previews used to be fun, but now there are too damned many of them. Four is about my limit before I start getting impatient; the other day when I saw X2 I counted twice that many. And previews are all the same now: a shot or two of “normal life”, followed by a shot or two of what happens to disrupt “normal life”, than a lot of frenetic crap with the volume rising through it all. Then, just as the trailer becomes deafening, the sound cuts out long enough to show the advertised film’s lead actor uttering some kind of clever line, and then there’s one final burst of deafening stuff before the tagline, title and release date are flashed on the screen. If you’re going to make me sit through eight previews, at least make them somewhat different.

And ads before movies are getting annoying. I can deal with the one for Fandango.com, because that’s actually a movie-related service that’s relevant to the product at hand. But as much as I find smoking a disgusting habit, and as supportive I am of the efforts to make smoking illegal everywhere except Kalispell, Montana, I really don’t want to endure an anti-smoking propaganda ad before a movie in a cold-ass theater.

Oh, to return to previews for just a minute: just show the previews for movies that are coming out in the next year or so, thank you very much. Don’t show me previews for what’s actually playing just down the hall at the same multiplex. Believe me, I know what’s out now. And for the love of GOD, don’t show me previews for movies that were out six months ago, and are now coming out on DVD. BlockBuster can handle that. I can get through the movie-going experience just fine without being told when Die Another Day is coming to DVD.

All this pre-movie stuff has the effect of requiring me to set aside at least three hours to see a two-hour movie, and that’s not including drive time. The other day I left the house at noon to do the following: Stop at Office-Max to make one hundred copies of a sales letter; Stop at the post office to mail out three short stories; See X2. All three stops, and my home, are within five miles of one another. I got back to the house just before 5:00, and I didn’t stand on line more than five minutes at the post office or at Office Max.

The other effect of all this extra crap before the movie is even worse: it means that invariably, my bladder is reaching capacity just as the film is moving into its third act. I don’t think I need to say anything more than that.

As for the theaters themselves: I love Regal Cinemas, with the huge seats and the stadium seating. That rules. And it’s nice that the door to the auditorium is located down this little hall and around a corner, so when someone enters or leaves during the show the light from the hallway doesn’t spill into the theater. But the presence of knobs and tension-bars, and the requisite loud clanking noise that goes along with them whenever the door is opened or closed, has got to go. And for God’s sake, drop that white-shirt, black bow tie and burgundy vest outfit for the employees. Yeah, a perky high-school or college-aged girl looks cute as hell in that uniform, but nobody else does. Especially the guys. You could put Brad Pitt in one of those uniforms, and he’s going to look vaguely like Ralph Wiggum.

But hey, the floors aren’t quite as sticky and nasty as they used to be.

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X2. Wow.

(For a spoiler-free review, go check out this one, by the Saruman to my Gandalf. I have no compunctions about discussing spoilers when I do reviews here. You all know the drill.)

In a lot of ways I’m still a comic-book geek at heart, despite the fact that I am no longer a regular reader of the medium. Even though I have no idea what’s going on with Marvel Comics these days (How many Spiderman titles are there, anyway? What’s with all these “Ultimate” lines of classic Marvel characters? ), I remember with fondness the years I spent following all the events in the Marvel Universe. I never tried much to get into the DC Universe, even when they decided to blow it all up and start over in the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths series. Marvel was my thing, and while Spiderman was my favorite, I also faithfully followed the adventures of the team of mutants created by Professor Charles Xavier.

So, I’m pretty much the intended audience of the X-Men movies.

I liked the first one, but I found it too short when it came out three years ago. Entire bits of plot exposition were omitted, and the characters were drawn in something like shorthand. The film started with a lot of the X-Men mythology already in place, which disappointed me a bit; one of the charms of my favorite comic-book movies has been the visualization of the character origins. Yeah, the last forty-five minutes or so of Superman is kind of pedestrian, but all the stuff leading up to that is so good that I’m OK with coasting the last act of the film. Ditto Spiderman, with its wonderful first two-thirds and nearly disastrous conclusion. This may be why I’ve never totally warmed to the Batman movies; the one that comes closest to really addressing the formative experiences of Bruce Wayne happens to be my favorite of the series, Batman Forever (the third one, when Val Kilmer played the Caped Crusader). But still, X-Men was still very good, even if I believed at the time (and still do) that if only they’d fleshed out their story a bit more with an addition half-hour or so, it could very well have been the best comic-book movie ever made.

Well, I guess the powers-that-be liked what they saw in that first movie, because in the sequel, X2 (lame title, that), the budget appears to have been expanded and the reins loosened. The result is, for me, the second-best comic-book movie I’ve ever seen. This movie is just pure, comic-book fun from the first scene to the last. I felt like I was actually reading one of those old Chris Claremont issues of The Uncanny X-Men.

In fact, if there’s a problem with this movie, that might be it. I suspect that someone who doesn’t know the X-Men from the Power Pack (look them up yourself, I’m not explaining them!) might have some problems following what goes on here. But then, maybe not. I really can’t say, but the movie does assume familiarity with the first movie, and when the characters made passing references to those events, I fondly recalled the helpful little corner-boxes in the pages of the comic when someone would refer to a past happening, like if the current issue was #231, the box would read “That happened in #217. -Ed.” The X-Men comics told stand-alone stories with less frequency than just about any other series that I could recall; instead, every story would usually end up playing some role in continuity somewhere, even if you couldn’t initially tell how. Some reviews of this film that I’ve seen complain that the film spends too much time setting up the inevitable X3, and while I can see the complaint, I also think this is one of those “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature” moments. Anyone familiar with the comics knows that setting up future events is always a big part of what’s going on, what with the always-shadowy origin of Wolverine (which I’m not sure was ever revealed in its entirety), the constant arrival of new and young mutants on the scene, the constant escape of some villains and the deaths of others, and the film’s very last shot.

(You can tell who read the comic and who didn’t just by observing their reaction to this shot. The ones who read the comic are the ones going, “Oh, WOW! How soon ’til the next movie! Holy crap!!”, while the ones who didn’t read the comic are going, “Gee, what’s that thing? Huh? What’s going on?”)

So, while I can see that people unfamiliar to the X-Men mythos might have trouble grokking what’s going on, well…I also have to note that I’m not one of them, and I write reviews based on my experience in a movie, not in terms of someone else. (Which is probably why I can get so very long-winded.)

I won’t go into separate praisings of all the actors, because the afore-mentioned, above-linked Demon From DC pretty much nails all that. I will note that Hugh Jackman can have the Wolverine part until he no longer wants it; Famke Jannsen is wondrous as Jean Grey; and that I actually liked Nightcrawler, for once. (He was never my favorite X-Man, but this film pushed me quite a ways toward his corner.) I found Storm a bit lame in the first movie, but here, she was awesome. She was probably the X-Man most short-changed by the first film’s lack of running-time. And I’m not sure which great actor I am more jealous of: Christopher Lee (who gets to play the villains in the LOTR and Star Wars movies), or Ian McKellen (who is Gandalf in LOTR and Magneto here).

A few final, random musings on X2:

:: When I stopped reading the comics (when I went off to college, and money for things like comics became a memory as distant as the dinosaurs), Magneto had actually “rehabilitated” and taken Professor X’s place as the head of the Xavier School. So, I’m having a little trouble recalibrating for “evil” Magneto.

:: But then, I love how this film brought up an old plot-device that Chris Claremont often used in the comics: forcing the X-Men to team up with one of their usual enemies to combat a far worse one. The blurring of the lines between the good guys and the bad guys was a staple of the comics.

:: OK, time to admit a little ignorance…I never read anything featuring Lady Deathstrike. I get that she’s a “follow-up” project to Wolverine, so she has the same adamantium skeleton and claws like his, but where did she get the same healing ability? That’s Wolverine’s actual mutant-power; everything else of his is “man-made”. Does the fact that she has the same power mean that mutant powers can be replicated?

:: Magneto’s escape may be the best bad-guy-escaping-the-inescapable-prison scene ever.

:: Bring on Dark Phoenix and the Hellfire Club for the third movie.

:: Cyclops could use something to do next time.

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Novel Editing Update:

As of this morning, I am a little more than one-fourth of the way through the book. I have excised just under 3,300 words. That seems a little low, considering my goal is to get rid of a total of around 19,000; but I haven’t hit the longest chapters yet.

Editing, thus far, seems to be a combination of ruthlessness (“Must….cut….more….words!”) and annoyance (“My God, did I really write that?! Why would I ever write that?! It’s incomprehensible crap!”). Of course, it always seems this way when I’m editing my own short fiction, but the effect is startlingly magnified on a project of this scope.

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The definition of foul play: While Cat Number One is doing its business in the litter box (we have the covered litter box, which is much better for odor-control), Cat Number Two lurks inches away from the opening, waiting to pounce at the first sign that Cat Number One is finished.

I doubt very much that any cat lover ever forgets, in the back of their minds, that cats really are evil. But we love ’em anyway. ‘Tis a cross to bear.

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There will be another day for the citizens of Stuckeyville.

NBC has renewed Ed, one of my favorite shows despite some recent hiccups with the writing. (Remember: It’s always the writing.) Interestingly, they are returning the show to its 8:00 pm Wednesday time slot, despite the fact that it actually performed better, ratings-wise, on Fridays at 9:00. But I’ll take it.

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