“There But For You Go I”.
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Sentential Links
Just a few, so as to feel like I actually got something accomplished….
:: Is it so much to ask that your summer series actually be over by Labor Day? (Sadly…yes, it is. Since new seasons don’t start until late September, that means that wrapping summer stuff up by Labor Day would mean networks have to fill three weeks with not much at all, when they’d much rather have their summer stuff amping up, hopefully increasing viewership and keeping eyes glued to ads for the new shows soon the debut or return. It’s maddening, but that’s the way it is.)
:: Also, he implies but doesn’t out and out say that I’m nuts if I think Harry Potter is a better fantasy series than A Song of Fire and Ice. (The ‘he’ is Lance Mannion’s son, who is frankly nuts if he doesn’t think that Harry Potter is superior to A Song of Ice and Fire, which I’ve made clear many times — including Lance’s own comments — that GRRM’s series is really an enormous mess whose success is due to the impressive nature of its scale (the vastness of the story and the details involved really are extremely impressive) and what I’m increasingly taking as our culture’s current fascination with stories of Awful People At Work And Play.)
:: Rodriquez is the sole custodian of his talent, and he is being reviled for the choices he has made about how to use that talent. I don’t imagine he could be held in lower regard, by just about anyone, but really what is he guilty of? It seems to me that he has been trying to take the maximum advantage of his already substantial abilities, and isn’t that what we expect from athletes? Hell, isn’t that what we expect from everyone? (This will be a placeholder until I address performance-enhancing drugs as part of Ask Me Anything. There’s a lot in Bill’s post that I agree with, though.)
:: Confusing process and result here is not a good thing. It confuses writers who are hungry to know what “being professional” means. The things Ms. Morton describes can lead to being a pro writer, but it’s not the only path, or a guaranteed one, not by a long shot. (This is not a criticism of John Scalzi by any means, but I am noticing that the more I beat my head against the wall of publishing, the less inclined I am to read the advice of those who have made it already. That could just be my innate pigheadedness, but there’s a line that Captain Picard has in the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’ve always liked: “If we’re going to be damned, let’s be damned for what we really are.”)
:: It’s now 13 years since my dad died, and he’s still in my dreams. (That’s where he really has to be, innit?)
More next week! And if you haven’t already, Ask Me Anything!. Seriously, folks, do you wanna see me beg?
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Sunset
‘Nuff said. Busy day, and busy week shaping up….
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Stick a fork in it!
At long last, after five months and eight days of wrestling with this story, the first draft of Princesses In Space II: Spacenado (not the actual title) is finished. And what a struggle this one was, at times. Wow, this was a tough book to do. I’m looking forward to editing, but I really need a bit of distance from this universe for a while, so the plan is to set it aside for my customary period of about three months. Unfortunately, that would put me into editing in November, which is NaNoWriMo, so instead I will not start editing until December 1.
I figure it should take me no more than two months, max, to go through the book, mark up the manuscript, and make the changes I decree necessary on the first time through, so my next goal is to have the manuscript into the hands of beta readers no later than Super Bowl Sunday, which is…the first Sunday in February. (I’m not looking it up right now.) What happens next? Well, obviously…another book! I think I’m going to take a whack at a notion I’ve had for a supernatural thriller for quite some time, and then, after that, give another shot at Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title), the fantasy epic I started but stalled on because I hadn’t given sufficient thought to the backstory. The thriller’s not-actual-title? I haven’t decided yet, but I will.
Why start something so soon? Well, here’s Stephen King, describing the output regimen of Anthony Trollope:
At the other end of the spectrum, there are writers like Anthony Trollope. He wrote humongous novels (Can You Forgive Her? is a fair enough example; for modern audiences it might be retitled, Can You Possibly Finish It?), and he pumped them out with amazing regularity. His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britain were Anthony Trollope’s invention); he wrote for two and a half hours each morning before leaving for work. The schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-page heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book.
Now, I’m not gonna start writing the next thing immediately, as in, right now, but I may well start later today. Why not? What else am I gonna be doing with my time? There are stories to be told, man! Zap! Pow!!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound….
:: If you go to the cemetery in Texas where Lee Harvey Oswald is buried, beneath a stone simply marked “Oswald”, you’ll see a similar stone right next to it, engraved “Nick Beef”. Just who is Nick Beef?
:: I saw this on Twitter yesterday. Some kid lost a part of a Lego toy, and wrote to Lego to ask for a replacement. Witness how Lego does customer service:
This originated on the @Fascinatingpics feed.
:: I’m on board with overalls, obviously, but this takes them just a bit too far for me.
More next week!
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Empty Chairs at Empty Tables (or writing desks)
Ask Me Anything: A reminder!
Don’t forget, folks — it’s Ask Me Anything! time! Just leave your questions, on anything you want me to babble about, whether serious or silly, in comments on this post. Or question me via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Flickr. But not MySpace. (Do I even still have a MySpace account? I have no idea…hmmmm….)
Ask Me Anything!
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Film Quote Friday: Apollo 13
I know, I haven’t done one of these in a ridiculously long time! But here’s something, a favorite moment from a movie that I think is starting to border on being criminally underrated: Apollo 13.
The story is well known by this point, I hope; the moment I’m quoting here isn’t one of the more famous moments, but it’s an excerpt, in the movie, of an interview astronaut Jim Lovell had given before the Apollo 13 mission ever blasted off. It’s the type of wonderful scene that may seem at first glance like a bit of filler, but it establishes so much about the character of Jim Lovell that it’s really indispensible. And as it comes later on in the film, after the mission has already been deeply imperiled, this scene partially serves to assure us that this mission is still in good hands, and that this guy will pay attention and find his way home. Here’s the speech that Lovell (Tom Hanks) gives:
Uh well, I’ll tell ya, I remember this one time – I’m in a Banshee at night in combat conditions, so there’s no running lights on the carrier. It was the Shrangri-La, and we were in the Sea of Japan and my radar had jammed, and my homing signal was gone, because somebody in Japan was actually using the same frequency. And so it was – it was leading me away from where I was supposed to be. And I’m lookin’ down at a big, black ocean, so I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit. All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can’t even tell now what my altitude is. I know I’m running out of fuel, so I’m thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I, I look down there, and then in the darkness there’s this uh, there’s this green trail. It’s like a long carpet that’s just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was – it was – it was leading me home. You know? If my cockpit lights hadn’t shorted out, there’s no way I’d ever been able to see that. So you never know…what…what events are to transpire to get you home.
Here’s how Hanks delivers it. I love his little conversational ah‘s and um‘s; most of all — and this is such a tiny detail to notice, but it’s just great — as he’s telling the story, he reveals what the ‘green carpet’ in the ocean was, and when says it, at the end of the sentence he says, “Right?” As if to lead us to the same conclusion he has reached.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll go ahead and repeat it: I really think that all the time corporate America spends in goofy meetings and seminars and “team-building events” to try and teach “teamwork” through fake activities could be better spent by simply putting all the workers in a room and screening this movie. I cannot think of a finer example of teamwork in a movie.
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Something for Thursday
Oops…how on Earth did I completely forget about last week’s installment? It just totally flew out of my mind, alas.
I’ve been listening a bit this week to John Williams’s amazing score to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the other classic score he wrote for a sci-fi film released in 1977. (If you don’t know by now what the other one was, I can’t help you.) Williams’s CE3K music is quite different, as it is mostly by turns either atonal, or haunting, or militaristic during the “Government agency” scenes. Only gradually does a lyricism emerge from the score, becoming stronger and stronger, beginning really with the introduction of the famous five-note “Communication with the aliens” theme. Gradually Williams stitches all of this together into an amazing tapestry of emotion that is one of his more overwhelming efforts.
This is a well-produced suite of tracks from the film, edited together very convincingly into a pretty nifty listening experience.
A few annotations:
0:01: The score opens with the swirling music that plays as the teevee reports of the disaster at Devil’s Tower appear, leading Roy Neary and Jillian Guiler to separately realize that their visions of some strange mountain are of a very real place.
1:30: Roy and Jillian drive cross-country into the Wyoming back woods to try and get closer to Devil’s Tower.
2:12: Roy and Jillian see Devil’s Tower, in person, for the first time. “I can’t believe it’s real!”
What follows is some suspenseful music as they continue driving into the back woods. At about 4:15, they drive past four ‘dead’ cows. Now they’re taken by the military and processed, with Neary being questioned by Lacombe and Loughlin.
6:40: The ‘conversation’ between the electronic music synthesizer and the mother ship.
10:52: The terribly sad scene where Roy thinks he’s going insane. “This means something…this is important.” (The subtext with Roy’s family is awfully troubling, really. His wife is completely justified in thinking that he’s utterly lost it, but of course, he hasn’t. Now, it’s never established at the end of the film how long he’s going to be off with the aliens, so I don’t completely buy into the notion that he’s ditching his family forever. But what does poor Ronnie Neary think when she reads the next day’s newspaper?)
13:25: The ‘returnees’ begin emerging from the Mother Ship, abductees who have been missing, in some cases, for decades (the pilots of Flight 19). Among them is little Barry Guiler, who is reunited with Jillian at the 15:14 mark.
15:35: Back to the beginning of the film. The mysterious crescendo ending in a smash as we open in the deserts of Mexico.
16:00: And back to the film’s finale, as the ETs come down from the Mother Ship and begin interacting with the people gathered at the Devil’s Tower landing site. Roy Neary is taken away to be prepared to join the astronauts who are being allowed to go. Note “When You Wish Upon a Star” at 17:03.
17:41: The ETs choose Roy Neary. More “When You Wish Upon a Star”. Neary looks back; Lacombe urges him to go. He meets Jillian’s eye, and then goes up on board.
19:00: The main ET greets Lacombe; they exchange the hand signals at 20:20. Here Williams starts letting the “Alien Communication” theme take over; where it was strange and haunting before, now it’s plaintive and beautiful.
21:05: All the aliens go back on board. The music begins to swirl as the Mother Ship prepares to depart. We arrive on a gorgeous chord of resolution that holds as little Barry Guiler says, ever so perfectly, “Bye.”
22:17: Oh, wow. End titles over what might be the most perfectly gorgeous finale of John Williams’s career. When he lets that Alien Communication theme peal forth, complete with bells, it is one of the greatest moments in the history of movie music.